by DeeSoul Carson
DeeSoul Carson (He/They) is a Black queer poet, performer, and educator from San Diego, CA. A The Watering Hole Writing Workshop Fellow, his work has been featured by Button Poetry, Write About Now Poetry, The Adroit Journal, & elsewhere. He graduated with a degree in Cultural/Social Psychology and a minor in Creative Writing from Stanford University and is a Writer in the Public Schools Fellow in the NYU MFA program. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com
by LM Brimmer
O, my therapist, wants me to talk about anything other than work
So I describe the photo’s silvering: its fingered edges,
Feathered. Describe the city, a porous pond, the floating duck.
O insists it’s just projection, a protective coat and marks my missives
Generic, or worse—tedious. When I say that everyone who tries
To read me misses the point, this is what I mean. My mother was alive.
I press the couch cushion into another dampened isthmus—
One fewer bird—denting the shell with both thumbs. The cracked window
Is a recurrent cuticle, with a delicate net screen. Looking out, I wonder why
Stop to admire a stoic sky? I want to forget her palm, the counting.
O chides the camera back into the darkroom of my pocket.
& I hear her cry out, fly.
LM Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MNHS Press 2019), their writing has appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, and elsewhere. A 2022 poet-in-residence with Writing The Land, a project of Nature Culture, they attend the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.
by tova greene
tova greene (they/them) is a non-binary, queer, jewish poet who recently graduated with a BA from sarah lawrence college in yonkers, new york. they are the author of the collection lilac on the damned’s breath (bottlecap press, 2022). after interning with the poetry society of new york, they were invited back as the program coordinator in may 2022; they are currently producing the new york city poetry festival. their work has been featured in eunoia review, midway journal, and others. for inquiries, please reach out to tova@poetrysocietyny.org. for more information, please see https://linktr.ee/tovagreene.
by Tamara J. Madison
Today between meetings and greetings,
snail mails, emails, texts, messages,
essay grades, caffeine breaks, and so on,
in the mirky waters of the
relentless tasks of the
workday, I wrote
a love poem,
let it sneak up on me,
drop from my ear lobe,
slip down my collar,
roll over my shoulder,
spread itself wide to drip
the curve of my spine,
lick my fingertips. I
left them keys sticky.
Yes, I did; yes,
I did.
Tamara J. Madison is a writer/poet. Her work has been produced, and published in various albums, journals, and anthologies. She is the host of BREAKDOWN: The Poet & The Poems, a conversation series on YouTube. Her recent poetry collection Threed, This Road Not Damascus was published by Trio House Press.
by Mariah M
Mariah M (they/she) is a non-binary Black woman, poet and cultural organizer based in Greensboro. They are an Emergent Poet Fellow of the National Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary (c. 2017) and a Watering Hole Fellow (c. 2017, 2019). Mariah is Lightsower for SaltWater Sojourn, a Blackqueer-autonomous radical artist collective based in the South. She can be found binging anime, in a book, or being social on social media @mariahm_ink cause we’re still in a pandemic.
by Raymond Gibson
in the golden light of a late
afternoon you regard
mastery a stalemate between
learning and forgetting
that lost knowledge can’t be
recognized or found
and everything fades as
breath would upon a mirror
Raymond Gibson earned his MFA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University. He published two chapbooks with Glass Lyre Press and a microchapbook with Ghost City Press. His recent work appeared in Terse, Moist, Tiny Wren Lit, and Antipoetry. He lives in his hometown of Hollywood, FL.
[Content warning: suicide]
There are suicide flowers along the Hamilton-Brantford Rail Trail tonight: a
lattice of pastel pinks and yellows encircling the sidebars of the bridge
overlooking the highway.
How strange, lifeless flowers tasked with protecting the living.
My first thought is who would try jumping from this height in the first
place. I know enough about falling to know that this distance won’t quite
cut it — but then of course I know enough about falling to understand that
sometimes you try anyway — and so my second thought is
why.
There are pastel blue post-it notes scattered around the flowers, their paper
shells glossed with plastic tape to stave off the rain that has seeped through
the cracks and dissolved their writings anyway: half-washed out helpline
numbers, sharpie hearts smeared from the wet sorrow of a lonesome sky. I
can barely read most of them —
and my third thought is of how many people have stood on this ledge,
watching two rivers of white and red stream towards and away and felt a
longing so complete it swallows the heart, or if it is only me, perched on this
windswept steel ribbon of night, hands gripping the flowering metal in fear
of losing my balance while the part of me that is tired whispers
what if you did
and there is one blue sticky note that has not yet fallen prey to the rain. In
letters as deep as the night:
not a bad life, just a bad day.
What a small, feeble attempt. Petals fighting asphalt. Plastic fighting rain. A
single railing decorated in a highway of metal and night — and my last
thought is if it would make a difference. To the lonesome heart, unfurling
itself along the bridge at twilight, and to that I reply
yes, yes it would, yes.
Lisa Shen is a Chinese-Canadian writer and spoken word artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her work centers on gender-based violence and disability rights. Lisa was the first place winner of the 2021 Mississauga Poetry Slam, and a Speaker at the TEDx McMasterU 2022 conference. She is also the winner of the May Open Drawer Poetry Contest by Britta Badour. She has performed at several arts festivals, including the JAYU Human Rights Film Festival and Humainologie Short Story Festival. As a passionate teacher, Lisa has created and instructed debate classes for youth. She is passionate about bringing the joys of spoken word into classrooms through workshops and showcases.
by Loisa Fenichell
your own limbic structure sits
in the corner of a darkening room.
You have not been asked to leave.
You are not celebrating anything.
The cat’s eyes observe your stillness
while outside snow falls onto
the balcony, jaggedly as bits of bad breath.
You are exactly like the rest of them –
you hold within you no museums.
You have teeth and probably some cavities
and you have been injured. You adore
being loved against the backdrop of a slow song.
The music is comprised of quick beats
like a light switch that has just been flipped on.
No light switches have been flipped on.
There has been the lighting of candles
as though preparing for a hurricane.
The snow continues to fall. People move
and mill about you like water in a bath.
It would be lovely to take a bath.
You hoist yourself from your corner.
You are not stuck. You remind yourself
of gratitude when you enter the bathroom
and there is no line to wait on
and you have not had to dress for a funeral.
Many days pass and every day it is as though
the funeral has occurred yesterday. In the bathroom,
you wash your hands. You splash your face.
You use that same water to swirl
it about the inside of your mouth,
your cheeks puffed out. There are worse things
than to feel like a hideous woman.
Outside, the sky is bloated, soaked in night.
You want to remember everybody – everybody
you have ever loved. You want to be gracious.
You have grieved enough, enough.
Of course, you want to be loved – you are
not ready. You are not ready to die alone.
Kaydance Rice is a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan and is currently attending Interlochen Arts Academy. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Élan Magazine, The Ice Lolly Review, Cargoes, and the Interlochen Review. In her free time, Kaydance can be found rambling about existentialism, playing the viola, and spending time with her plants.
by Madeleine K. Corley
I read someone found 4,000 year old yeast
and with it, made a loaf of bread. You can’t deny
this proves time travel is real.
So soon, when it might be
June, I will forget
to flip the calendar marking ONE YEAR
UNTIL OUR WEDDING!!! circled in Sharpie.
The end of a sentence cosplays a question,
a rule I can break into tradition like bread
yeast rising from a dormant sleep. Yes,
fermentation is a kind of time travel,
crumbs finding my mouth a manifestation
of what others knead. It has been thirty years
since my parents got married,
brought back a bottle of wine
from their honeymoon in France. Over dinner,
they pour my empty glass full
of Rothschild. I sip and fill myself
with time. This time
I remember you spilled wine
across our counter, quickly
gathered kitchen towels only for me
to ask you to wait, to watch, look
how the marble can’t turn red without us.
Madeleine Corley (she/her) is a writer by internal monologue and 1/4th of The Newsledder. Her work has been featured in HAD, Folio, Olney, Moist, among others. Check her out at madelinksi.com or on Twitter @madelinksi. One day she’d like to own a Mystery Machine.
