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This poem previously appeared in Frontier Poetry.

Once, there was a girl who became
woman too fast, went peroxide blonde
in a kitchen sink, kissed lipstick red
across the collarbones of every man
in Los Angeles. No one ever asked
for this: draft of the script
where Norma Jean undoes herself, ear
pressed to the phone, listening for a sign.
Enter the smiling mortician & how
can you cut into something silk-woven,
so soft to the touch? We all wanted our own slice
of flesh, amber bottle of barbiturates. Not
your baby, but everybody’s. The whole world’s girl,
dead & dead & dead again. It’s all makebelieve,
isn’t it? Dream a little dream of me.
The Brentwood house burns, the Birthday Dress
is torn, & the Director says victim—
says you were bleach in high heels,
a nothing in black-and-white. Oh, please
don’t go—we’ll eat you up,
we love you so.

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Lauren Milici is a Jersey-born, Florida-raised poet and writer based in the Midwest. When she isn’t crafting sad poems about sex, she’s either writing or shouting into the void about film, TV, and all things pop culture. She is the author of Sad Sexy Catholic from CLASH Books.

When we find the porpoise, I have so much to tell you. How animals are queer. How for me, sex is everything. And how the details, like whales dying with genitals extending into the great blue sea, will be of use to you in the future. My scientist, my party-goer. I hear now that kids aren’t having sex. I get it, the apocalypse is slower than expected, dull even. Still, on the last day of the year we meander the mating grounds for harbor seals and sea birds, a place that life thrashes. We are a part of it. Then, out in the open, a body. The head and tail intact, the skin the texture of wet rubber, the midsection red and bright. The color of inside; pink meat, only a gleam of ribcage flashing white in the sun. There are no flies, no smell. We pry its mouth open with a piece of driftwood. There is a tongue, soft rows of perfectly neat teeth. Half the skull is visible, bulbous. We circle and circle. It is the last day of December, the sun is setting, we are alone on the beach with the smallest cetacean at our feet. I want this creature to tell you everything that I can’t; how one day I will be dead, and I hope that you have lived a joyous life of thrashing.

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Kelly Gray’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Witness Magazine, Lake Effect, Southern Humanities Review, Permafrost, trampset, and Rust & Moth, among other places. She writes about what she knows or is trying to know; parenting, eco-grief and resiliency, relationships to self and others, and rural life. You can find more of her work and books at writekgray.com. 

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This poem previously appeared in Passages North.

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Cooper Wilhelm is a poet and card reader based in Brooklyn. He is the author of three books of poetry, the longest of which is called DUMBHEART/STUPIDFACE, and also hosts Witchhassle, a podcast about the occult with a fixation on labor. More at CooperWilhelm.com.

your love is like a…
nevermind, i am trying to not get full off similes.
i am throwing away the need to get all poetic
and just trying to stand with both feet inside of my body.
easier said than done, but when i look at you,
i want to say what i mean.

no more metaphors either. i don’t have time,
i am busy kneading dough and listening to fresh gossip.
i’m rolling my eyes at sonnets and turning on the rice cooker,
i’m wiping down the counters and memorizing all the familiar sounds:
kids laughing in the street, your tired voice on the phone,
the hum of the gas stove and the flick of the light switch.
i love it all: how the day ends
and i decide to let another one begin.

if you told me this is what my future would be like
when i was 20, i would’ve gotten on a train and waved
dramatically out the window like carmen jones.
all respect to dorothy dandridge,
but thank god i no longer call a screaming fight an honest bouquet
or whatever i was calling love,
back when i wouldn’t have recognized it
even if it was making soup for me in my kitchen.

now i am turning 30 and aware
of how everything is neither gorgeous or horrifying
but simply is in its being. a sky is just a sky.
a rose is just a rose that i am giving to you
because i wanted to think of you
looking at them on your dresser,
and thinking of me, too.

okay, okay, one more poem before we turn the lights off:
brenda, this morning i woke up
with the pale sun whispering through the window
and the night sky of your cowlicks in my mouth.
when you roll over, your pillow reddened cheek
makes me want to go deep into the woods
and build you another house to grow in.

your slowly opening eyes are sweeter than honeycomb.
your quiet good morning sounds like no one who ever lived.

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Levi Cain is a gay Black non-binary writer from Boston, MA. Their writing has been published in Arsenal Pulp’s “Queer Little Monsters” anthology, SAND Journal, Room Magazine, Shenandoah Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, dogteeth., was published by Ursus Americanus Press in 2020. You can keep up with their work at levicain.wordpress.com.

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Meghann Boltz is the author of the chapbooks Cautionary Tale (b l u s h lit, 2021) and rebel/bonde (Bottlecap Press 2018). You can find her on ig @meghann___boltz.

I answer the phone.
I make telemarketers reconsider
Their career choice.

I put one foot in front
Of the other. I make
Grown men cry.

Nothing seems to defeat
Me. Though I know the proverbial shoe
Will drop one day.

In the meantime I stay barefoot:
can’t be too careful

Who prophesized this world in which I reside?
Not me.

I wanted something different for myself.

Like your voice on the other end of the telephone.
& all the time in the world in which to answer.

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Connie Johnson is a Los Angeles, CA-based writer. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Iconoclast, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Jerry Jazz Musician, Mudfish and Exit 13.

It’s the barn.
It’s the dark.
It’s the latent heat
of wood, summers gone
encoded in cellulose
stacked and bunched.
It’s the horses shifting,
the horses breathing at night.
It’s night and breath.
It’s memory and breath,
remembered sweat
in the dark of the barn,
safe and dry—figment
of sweet hay like memory
just beyond recall.
It’s the ark of the barn.
It’s the horses, the horses
in dark sanctuary.
It’s the latent heat
of wood, of spectral
bodies of horses.
It’s fungible history
whickering
in numberless splinters
that hold the dark fast.
It’s the horses steadily
breathing
even now.

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Cleveland Wall is a poet, teaching artist, and librarian. She is the author of Let X=X and many homemade chapbooks and zines. She performs with interactive poetry troupe No River Twice & with musical combo The Starry Eyes and hosts an experiential poetry series called Poetry Lab at the Ice House in Bethlehem, PA. She is falling deeply in love with antiproductivity. 

My mother hides her accent
each time someone asks why she is here,
and what made her leave paradise.

To Americans, paradise is anything
you cannot buy
in the supermarket.

For many of us,
our hometowns are lovers
you find by accident, who do not understand

how heavy their hands get. Whose love is missed
only because of how good they crash
the green innocence of unripe coconuts
against a wall to provide
the backs of our throats with a cool stickiness.

… and all my mother can say
about being in this country is,
I have raised my children here.
I am the reason she bleaches her speech.

Her face bloats any time I speak our language. Smirks
proudly at how quick I change it
for family who think
education is linked solely to the mouth.

We dodge our tongues like
our first lover’s homes.
Fly far from it in hopes that it will not claim
our throats like phlegm
that drags after the suck of unripe fruit.

We try to escape our speech
like it never filled our bellies
with plantain, like it never taught us
how to crust a wound with the sun.

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Híl Davis is a first generation Costa Rican American from Staten Island, New York. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University. Her work has been featured in Callaloo, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is currently based in Seattle, WA (Duwamish Land), where she lives with her family.

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This poem previously appeared in Cordella Magazine.