by Shannon Hearn
Shannon Hearn is currently a PhD candidate at Binghamton University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming with 3:AM Magazine, Big Lucks, cream city review, Juked, Fugue, Heavy Feather Review, and others. She received her MFA in poetry from Queens College, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner Coleman.
by Ash Good
Ash Good is a queer & non-binary poet, designer & activist. They are co-founding editor at First Matter Press (a 501c3 nonprofit), curator of Bloom open mic & a reader for Frontier Poetry magazine. Ash is the author of four collections of poetry & their work most recently appears in The Timberline Review, Not Very Quiet & Rise Up Review. They live in Portland, Oregon. www.ashgood.com
by Jane Cope
My job is to light a fire. The suns
of my dreams have told me my job
is to light a fire every night
and I have taken it to heart.
I keep the bass line thumping,
I keep my tongue my wick to
the flame
I’ve lit birthday candles and tea lights
smoke grills and semaphores
trash cans and sanitariums
I’ve burned down the bank
so we might conceive of relations
outside of finance. I’ve mapped
exit plans and escape routes.
The suns tell me to lay low,
to keep my belly to the grass.
I turn the key
to start
Jane Cope is a poet and translator based in Chicago. Their work has appeared in publications by PilotPress London, Hooligan Magazine, Best Buds! Journal, and Upstairs at Duroc. They also host occasional online community writing workshops and artist meetups. Find them on twitter @gouinasserie and on instagram @kitchencobweb
by Shea Foreman
Out to douse the pool lights.
Already I feel the moonburn I’ll wake with.
For moonburn,
the dried heads of sunflowers.
Rub. Waning, then waxing.
Little siskins fall out
and help to peck the
relax deeper.
Done right,
next time you’ll be a bear
of freshwater pearls.
You lumber, you growler,
scratch on the deck.
The whole of the duck migrationers
are in the pool.
They dip & dab for the strands
of notes falling off your pearl itch.
In webbed clef.
They can have a little more time.
As long as their quacks
don’t shine in anyone’s eyes.
And they put the waterwings back.
Since the Duck Stamp is coming.
And the nocturne the moon meows
comforts on her widow’s walk the marsh.
Shea Foreman is a motelier from Kitty Hawk, NC & author of The Big
(Killyhonk Press, 2016), a collection of marine pieces. In between duties
at the family business, he writes his poems & rides his bicycle & fashions
figures out of string.
by Kate Levin
Let the phone ring—ignore
the dishes in the sink, the dust
swept underneath the rug—
because here are your legs
wrapped around my legs,
here is the curtain of white light
that fills your collarbones, washes
your face like a stone. Your body
against my body on this specific
planet, in this exact rotation
of its axial tilt, is an impossible
equation—stunning in its waning,
fragile like the bird I found
so lovingly unfolded by the ants
on the porch, until just the bones
were left, the bones and my voice
asking Where, asking stupidly,
as if there could be any answer:
Where, where did you come from?
Kate Levin received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Her poems have been featured in Suspect Press and University of Northern Colorado’s publication The Crucible. She is the first-place finalist of the 2016 Rosenberry Writer Awards in poetry and the winner of the Rosenberry Prize for her poem, “When Mourning Comes.” She is the author of her self-published poetry chapbook, Letters to the Wind.
by Donora Shaw
after Skyrim; for Molly Brodak
In the game he resurrects a creature,
walrus-like, that comes
galumphing after him
in the way I feel
I am kept, in the way
I admired your precise grace
like the end of a crystal snapped
off in a wound. Something is
growing inside me because I asked.
I wonder what you never
asked for. Off camera
the child’s laughter like Satan’s bells,
like fruit.
Donora Shaw (née Hillard) is the author of the poetry book Jeff Bridges (with illustrations by Goodloe Byron; Cobalt Press, 2016) and several other works of poetry and theory. Shaw’s poems have been recognized by the Poetry Foundation, Poets House, and The Pushcart Prize, and her work appears in Hint Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company), Pedagogy, Women in Clothes (Penguin Random House), and other anthologies and journals as well as on CNN, MSNBC, and WBEZ Chicago (NPR). She lives in her home state of Pennsylvania with her husband and family and recently gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Merrin.
by Pendambaye Z. Smith
Pendambaye Z. Smith is a Black poet/scientist who is invested in the ways Black women sustain themselves in the midst of antiblackness. She has attended The Watering Hole Writing retreat and is a forthcoming Cave Canem and Pink Door Writing retreat fellow. You can find her work forthcoming or published at Rattle, Interim Poetics, and Root Work Journal. Penda is a 2nd Year MFA student at Louisiana State University and coffee helps her to survive in this world. She really loves coffee.
by Sage Agee
Hey, so
I think I might be dying.
Or already dead.
I’m not sure what the difference
is because my head
is a ‘94 fleetwood hearse of detachment, driving
forward to an end date
on my to-do list,
toward the ceremony
of the doing and the done and the left
unfinished, you know?
This world is a cracked
urn anyway, ashes waiting to spill.
I am excited to die.
You probably think that’s your fault,
some nature vs. nurture complex (I know) you
are the type to write eulogies
of viral Facebook posts.
You might die first.
Might already be dead.
This message
could be the last of us—
whatever we ever were.
Parent-child “it’s complicated,”
maybe you are the reason
I want to die.
You already resurrect my deadname
every christmas.
Casket of straightened hair,
shaved legs, she/her pronouns
at my funeral, will you tell the room
my life was just a phase?
Sage Agee is a queer, nonbinary poet and parent living in rural Oregon. Ze is currently inspired by the works of Billy-Ray Belcourt and the unbelievable evolution of their brand new baby, Otto. Their work has appeared in Goats Milk Magazine, Warning Lines Mag and is forthcoming in Honeyfire Lit, Sledgehammer Lit, TheTideRises, and Impossible Archetype. Zeir poetry has also been nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net Award.
by Tobi Kassim
Every time we cross paths long membranes
Weaken. Porous windows, vision merges
After our eyelids rub. Darker sense but
I recognized you still. After you shaved
Your head your name was ashes.
We scooped cinders of a flagging fire
From the pit and spread black dust around
The roots of a garden thronged with nightshades
And squash. The coal you smeared said how the dead
still feed on our spent embers. Weak renewal
glistened in the dark like an earring, the moon.
Your hair still surges back lighter. I ran
Ahead of myself to thank you for that hug,
You opened me out of myself, the gates
To the garden, our blurry kingdoms, black
Anthers in our yellow blossoms, pincers
For night’s blue powder, first and last light sifted
Like flour, coated the line between seeing
And being as one. You particulate, you
color in a cloud. Ether, I’m sensitive.
seep through me like sleep.
Tobi Kassim was born in Nigeria and currently lives in New Haven. His poems have appeared in The Volta, the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and The Brooklyn Review.
