I like to think an oversized floral print
will make me a better person but it would
only confuse and destroy the others. Lady
bear, no one really gets to get the moon.
Like all of us, the tides are faking it,
drowning piles of embossed party invitations
in dismal dishwater. Seeking the ecstatic
pinprick that leads to the most meaningful
bloodletting of our lives. My jaw-drop pores
exude an envious bouquet. I spy the monster
snuffling beneath your chair and I want it
under mine. My stiletto is stuck in this
blood spatter pattern so they wind the crime
scene tape around me like one boss anklet.

---

Nicole Steinberg is the author of Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017) and Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013), as well as various chapbooks, most recently Fat Dreams (Barrelhouse, 2018). She is also the editor of a literary anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011), and her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Flavorwire, Bitch, and Hyperallergic. She is the 2021–2022 Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and she can be found online at nicolesteinberg.net or @nicolebrett.

---

This poem previously appeared in Ilk.

after Gabrielle Calvocoressi

get our hands featured on instagram. point
out public poems by the skyline. see the sun
break through the lattices on the bridge. miss
you. want to wait for the coffee to cool with
you. fold up the grounds and filter paper. walk
the bags to the compost bin with you. see the
water clear of flotsam pass with you. savour
every complex mouthful with you. see the
autumn colours fall on brownstone with you.
see the webs and skeletons stretch across your
neighbourhood with you. follow the streets
to those citibike racks and cycle around the
park with you. miss you. want to watch the
blue of day break onto a scene from Pohang
with you. wonder why the characters draw
you in the way that they do. feel the couch
get warmer with you. feel the weekend
stretch into itself with you. i’ll be back
again soon with you.

---

Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor, and graduate student at Yale University. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated in Cambridge, England. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and creative expression. He has recently been moved by the writing of Maria Hummel, Li-Young Lee, and Lucille Clifton. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.

Offer me nothing
& I greedily take
nothing & make
it into everything

What I mean is, give
me your empty hand
so I can show you
how to hold me

What I mean is, take
my words & wrap
them around you
like a blanket

What I mean is, don’t
misunderstand, don’t
forget how quiet &
long I’ve loved you

---

Marisa Siegel holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019) and her debut poetry chapbook, Fixed Stars, is out now from Burrow Press. She is senior acquiring editor for trade at Northwestern University Press, and editor-at-large for The Rumpus. Find her on Twitter at @marisasaystweet and on Instagram at @marisaemily.

Once we sought to remember past continents
through dream revelation, to trace the routes we took

back to the shores where we were birthed.
Now we know no country but each other.

Dispersed across the ambient of the world,
we are all each other’s dream daughters,

all each other’s past, present, and future.
We are the fruit fallen in the shadow

of the non-fruiting tree. In this nation
of darkwaters there is only us:

no frontier, no chartered passage, no borderlands.
We bow our heads as we pass beneath each other’s auspices.

We are an odd sort of commonwealth, charting poetics
and labor economies. Power cuts out across the dampened city.

In the dark, we dream daughters like the moonflower
blooming, just once, in an Englewood alley.

In the twilight desert, we dream of bougainvillea
blushing on the boundary wall old as Independence.

The people of this city suffer an infestation of History,
for which wound and cure are the same.

After the good doctors cannot cure us,
we seek out the less-good doctors.

We are the rafts built from ancient doors
to which we long ago lost the keys.

No language but communion.
No passports but the sea.

---

Malvika Jolly (b. 1993, Rouen) is a writer and translator. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Liminal Transit Review, MIZNA, Poetry Online, Poetry Northwest, Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc, and Voicemail Poems. Her essays, interviews, and criticism is featured or forthcoming in Chicago magazine, The Margins, and South Side Weekly, where she is a regular contributor focusing on local culture and community history. She curates the New Third World, a monthly poetry reading series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement.

---

This poem previously appeared in Violet Indigo Blue, Etc.

everyone is getting married & i wonder if i am dancing okay. are my feet too far apart? i am having trouble staying warm. once i wanted to be the greatest & now i just want to pay rent on time.

i bet on losing dandelions. i have nightmares about the dead bird in your driveway. this month i’m haunted by tangible things: virgin mary taped in the window of an abandoned house. overgrown bougainvillea & light pink stucco. fresh oranges spilled on faded linoleum. the bee sting on your thigh. the grand piano broken in the alleyway. blue flamed incinerators at the county landfill. the tower in a tarot spread. the candle burning upside down. all these pillars of light.

i want to be soaked in blue. i want to give closure a shape. i want all the car alarms to stop. i want to think of god & not feel sick.

in a different poem i make my bed each morning & show up everywhere on time. i don’t ignore phone calls. i don’t forget to lock the front door. i remember the names of all the planets, even the dead ones. i am good at saying no.

in a different poem we’re back at the best western in flagstaff. the moonlight forgives us for skipping breakfast & crashing the car in the forest. the chemtrails are fading lilac. our shadows bleed together. our bodies read the dark. it’s almost halloween.

i dream of our rough hands meeting. i dream of your heartbeat over mine. the psych quiz i found on twitter tells me my life trap is abandonment. i am trying to unlearn the curve of your shoulders i am trying to unlearn––i am not here to show you anything. i will not make ugly things gentle.

i will not fill your eye sockets with flowers i will not fill your eye sockets with flowers i will not fill

---

maxana quinn is a poet and photographer in tempe, arizona. her latest obsession is watching sylvaniandrama on tiktok.

---

Basia Wilson is a poet. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University. In addition to working as an independent bookseller, she is associate poetry editor at Platform Review. Basia enjoys baking, gardening and laughing at the neighborhood blue jays in South Jersey, where she lives. Her latest work is forthcoming from bedfellows magazine.

James Harden is a Sixer!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it was trade deadline day
the rumors were swirling
and the beard is growing
and you said it was happening
but I wasn’t sure–it was confusing
like being hit on the head
And I was in such a hurry
but traffic was acting exactly
like sports talk radio
and suddenly I receive a text
JAMES HARDEN IS A SIXER!
there is no ring in Houston
there is no chip in Brooklyn
I have left many jobs
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually asked to be traded
oh James Harden we love you get up

---

Gina Myers is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including most recently Some of the Times, published by Barrelhouse Books in 2020. She lives in Philadelphia where she co-edits the tiny with Emma Brown Sanders.

purple because it is blue and red
put together and blue is sad
but blue is also expansive
and everywhere. especially when i
look up. and it is freeing then, looking
up and sometimes, even, looking
across the ocean. red because.
because sometimes i be mad and sometimes
i be in love.
so in love that i’ve lost all fear
of annihilation and now all i can think
about is dying in the best ways:
like laughing, with my friends, not caring
who i am today. laughing because
i have the time to. and am not stretching
or reaching or racing or grasping or weighing down
my patience, or capacity for care,
with capitalism. and there is no chain
from some imaginary above yanking
me away from being here,
in this coffee shop
with my friends,
grinding. broke girl purples
because today i am sitting in my sovereignty
cultivating the land of my life
which i’m finding to be fertile ground
and despite not having coin to keep me afloat
i am still somehow walking on water. despite
not having a nest egg
i still have a home. purple because
sometimes i get bruised, but i’m never used up,
even though my skin is brown, purple
because slavery is a nightmare i’m waking up from
and supremacy can’t enter the gates of our relation
so this is everyone’s kingdom. the kingdom of those I love.
broke girl because of how often i let my heart break
from all its bursting. broke girl because
these cracks and holes and chunks missing in me
been letting in the light.

---

Melissa Ferrer & (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, educator, organizer and friend living in Kansas City, MO. She lives chanting hallelujah into the liminal spaces of life. She is a Poetry MFA Candidate at Randolph College. Her work can be found in Fahmidan Journal, ZinDaily, Zoetic Press and elsewhere. She was long listed for the 2021 Palette Poetry Emerging Poet Prize. She is a lover of Asian dramas, rapture, and you. Find out more: www.melissaferrerand.com

The nurse asks me about risk factors and
I don’t tell her that sometimes love is shaped
like fingers folded into fists that feel
like the brink between pinch and seized piston

So instead I say

I was born during the plague
under the sign of the pig
which makes me young enough
for panic to have never kissed me like that

but old enough to worry constantly
every time my body is gifted and split
and I call it safer but I cannot pretend
I don’t know men unwound down to bone

I know it’s better now, but I describe why
I can barely afford sex that doesn’t kill me
how we are tender and raw, tendon and maw
and the terror of asking feels half new to me.

I’m sorry—I tell her—I’m not usually this optimistic.

---

Anthony Moll is a queer poet, essayist and educator. They are the author of Out of Step: A Memoir, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Anthony is a PhD candidate in English, and they hold an MFA in creative writing & publishing arts from University of Baltimore. Their forthcoming collection of poems, You Cannot Save Here, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. It will be available in September 2022 from Washington Writers Publishing House.