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Gabrielle Tola, artistically known as NeptuneMuse, is an Ecuadorian-Egyptian 22-year old singer-songwriter, poet, astrologer, creative director, music producer, and first-generation college graduate with a B.A in Creative Writing. Gaby dedicates herself to world-building her sonic and visual dreamscape through her music/music videos, writing, communal dreaming, and pleasure activism. She strives to heal and uplift queer bipoc through artistic expression from her infatuation with astrology, romance, and magic. You can find traces of all she loves and creates on https://gabrielletola.wixsite.com/mysite or as @neptunemuse on all social media and music streaming platforms + Bandcamp. Gaby is based on Seminole/Miccosukee land, and her work has been featured on various platforms such as VoyageMIA, the Ithacan, the Pandemic Post, and O’Miami’s anthology, Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering.

On Wednesdays I get angry,
and on Thursdays I make pots,
and then I am no longer angry.

When I’m angry I blast Buddy Holly—
but I keep the windows up.
And then I think it’s so funny, you know,
that I’m listening to Weezer,
and I’m reminded of how much I miss Joseph,
and then I am no longer angry.

Chloe drapes heating pads over me
and Lauryn goes to the store for cake
when I say I have a sweet tooth
but my back is aching bad.

I tell Jenna I feel crazy
and she says,
Do you want me to tell you
about a time I did something so crazy?

I stand at the window and I eat mint Milanos
and I watch a couple kiss goodbye.
They are my age and I wish I wanted to roll my eyes
but I see him tip her chin up with his finger
and I exhale.

My parking’s getting worse but
I’m getting better at not feeling
like I need to drive everyone home all the time.

Muddie keeps spare contacts on my sink and goes home in my jeans,
and my eyelids flutter shut when they hum in the mornings.

I’ve been thinking about the man in the hat
at the Vietnamese restaurant.
He was sitting alone and his smile was so warm
and I’ve been thinking about how often
I discount men in hats.

If I step outside I can hear the kids at recess, and the sun smells so good,
and we always find enough chairs for all the friends at the dinner table.
I really don’t listen to Weezer all that much.

Gina brings muffins from work and burns them twice in my oven.
The people at the film shop know my name.
My cousin cries when I take her to the airport.

I think my heart could burst open at the nothing of it all.

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Crystal is a recent graduate from UNC-Chapel Hill who currently lives is Durham, NC. She works at a Montessori school and a camera shop.  Crystal is a potter, a film photographer, and of course, a poet.

i didn’t cry about the breakup
instead, i mashed finality between my teeth,
tender skins of soft peas,
digested the remains reverently.
but every night i fell asleep, a skinned
animal, cold and alone
awakening in the same dirty pajamas, wounded.
but the sun still bled through those blinds like a threat
and the world demanded an answer
so i started speaking about myself in third person
she’ll open her petals in a few months,
backbending into newness like a professional
but today, she really wishes she had just fucking cried about it.

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strega clare manning is a baltimore based poet that spends time playing with her two cats, toffee and oreo. when she’s not forcing those two to cuddle with her, she’s hanging out with her partner, attending yoga class, and writing. she’s been a poet for years, and loves talking about her writing process and mental health journey on her substack, stingingsentences.substack.com and instagram, @stregaclare.

Nanako, the art of punching soft metal
to create decorative domes, roughly

translates to “fish roe.”

Something in the meaning is left out, an absence
like the difference between challah and brioche,

or my cousin Jenny’s egg bread,
which we made to raise good thoughts

for her liver transplant.

Absent one liver, my aunt was scattered
in the channel between England and France,

the wind so high, the ashes blew back
into the faces of her family, which is funny

now in retrospect.

Sometimes things mark us
and we don’t even know,

like the way I always forget my freckles
until that one sun-soaked day in summer

when they are born.

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Megan Savage is a multi-genre writer living in Portland, Oregon with a beloved dog, Fig. Recent work can be found in Sixth Finch; the Routledge anthology, Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Re-Imaginings; Hunger Mountain; and FE Magazine from Fonograf Editions. She holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University and teaches at Portland Community College, where she helps coordinate the Carolyn Moore House, the first and only writing residency housed at a community college.

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Almah LaVon is a Pittsburgh-based writer and mixed media mail artist. She is at work on her first book and you can read more of her work at AlmahLaVonRice.com.

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This poem previously appeared in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.

sitting on the toilet while she pets the right side
of my head like I am an animal, hers to keep,
smooths back my hair, giggles quietly, “soft hair…”
I am not allowed to close my eyes or eat up
these few seconds how I wish,
we are friends we must only be friends now,
I would have let out the whimper
in my gut and my throat, for how long, the years
I’ve wanted her to touch me, would have
taken her hand and put her fingers in my mouth
one by one, still unwashed after using the bathroom,
the smooth of her airport manicure,
caressed the sparkling blue with my tongue,
and looked at her to say choose me,
this is what everything looks like.

---

Jules Hostetter is a 22 year old poet from Pennsylvania. She loves the ocean, roller skating, and listening to music.

we lurked like wolves, our bodies velveting with night—our skin soft with peach fuzz all over whirling with goosebumps, our tangerinesoaked clothes fused. we were hungry, rubbing our ribs until we whimpered & plunged our hands, like shovels, into winedrunk dirt. deep purple grains sifted under the pink moon until we reached a warm pool of water, the kind fisted out of shallowgouged beachsand. our hands shimmered a white glow as we gently scooped it out, & it wet our throats with sludge—good, finally something to eat. we took turns, as our hands glowed bright like large lantern light, & we could finally feel the dewed grass cutting into our calves.

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tommy blake (ze/he/they) has several chapbooks, notably Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen (fifth wheel press, 2022); lacuna (Kith Books, 2022); and space cowboy on a little, uh, space exploration? (Bottlecap Press, 2023). ze’s full length poetry collections, NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL HORROR! and So, Who’s Courage?, are forthcoming in 2023 with Gutslut Press and Bullshit Lit., respectively.

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This poem previously appeared in PRINT//AFTER: transience, transference, transfusions, & transmutations.

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Miriam is a Swedish American MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. Their work has appeared in Stone Journal, Ariadne Magazine, Voicemail Poems and elsewhere. They live in Moscow, Idaho.

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This poem previously appeared in Stone Poetry Quarterly.

this house swells. abundant with the
sweetness of kids. on damp days

we miss our mothers & lack fruit.
i love you with indica,

with gluttony, suspending us
on the sunday couch.

still, that tropic
of rot: we bitter our lips

& sicken of each other.
sedated by loneliness

we’re all fucking sad in our own rooms.
psychoanalyse.

make love
to mediocre people. emerge

to rewind the battered
love stories of our parents in the kitchen light.

delight in the everyday grief
that we are so close. know

that we will lift the wax off
the pretty hours of school,

the pretty drugs,
pretty cheap rent,

the washing machine
being loaded right outside my bedroom door.

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Haro Lee lives in South Korea with her grandmother. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Zone 3 Press, The Offing, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Epiphany Magazine’s Breakout 8 Writers Prize. You can find her @pilnyeosdaughter.