& i believe / that when we die we die / so let me love you tonight / let me love you tonight
~ the drums, “book of revelation”

my sister once told me, “it’s a beautiful feeling
to wake up next to someone you love every
morning. i know that you don’t know that feeling,
but…” she didn’t know that i do know that
feeling ~ i wake up beside myself all the time,
all the pieces of me that are oh messy & oh lov
able, the cake of last night’s makeup, the gelatin
of a gender wobbling towards womanhood. . . .
alone & in-love, i stumble then rise on each
awkward morning, 13 mirrors standing guard round
the side of my bed ~ model # gbnnx0600022.
i have coffee with my transfemininity, make
small talk about the wrongs & rights of my body,
the weather as unpredictable as anything else. i
know what it is to sit with love, let it bubble up
& blow around. some mornings i wake up &
there’s a bird in the tree outside my window ~
that is love as well.

---

Marzi Margo is a person who writes and resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Ver book Emoji Revival is forthcoming from Be About It Press. Ve tweets about gender and Animal Crossing @wigglytuff_pink.

In the center of a suburb, on a street with a French name,
surrounded by McMansions housing blondes,
sits the alligator mound like a beast in a Victorian zoo
we can climb it like a foam-covered sculpture in the mall

mound,
if formal, burial mound—
but no stretch of our language will say cemetery,
or sacred.

There were once hundreds of mounds on this part of the world:
a doctor in my home town built a mansion on one
I was whisked past a mound in rush hour traffic
on the way to a music lesson
I jogged past one in the park I spent summers in

Poor God—we’re always shoveling words into their mouth
god said go to war, god said go west, build a starbucks,
god said it is sinful to be poor, to be ugly, to be fat

when any God worth their salt would say nothing,
or if feeling loquacious, they would say—
wrapping their mouth around our strange language—
listen, or even better, be still.

---

Abigail Goodhart received their MFA at Western Michigan University. They have published poems in Atlanta Review, Passages North, and Sugar House Review. They live in Columbus, Ohio.

by Brian Duran-Fuentes

I am sorry I was so late to dinner tonight.

They ran out of Topo Chico. Forever.

The line at check-out stretched past the cleaning aisle.

No one knew their place in line nor the time of day.

The lady behind me could not find a basket,

So she held all 10 of her bags of jasmine rice

In a desperate embrace; a trail of grain

Ran all the way the freezer section. Unnoticed.

I eavesdropped while I waited

On a conversation about how baby carrots aren’t real;

They are just ugly carrots, cut to shape in a factory.

The line was being held back by a man who bought a melon

Seemingly undiscovered by modern science.

It was black with a tinge of blue.

They had to bring in the big books from the back of the store.

There were no codes to price the item,

No unspoken names for God,

No worse end than the one that never comes.

The shopper in front of me

Made sure to place a grocery lane divider as soon as he could,

To separate himself and his beer from the world,

If only for another paycheck.

By the time I got out, the sun was setting,

And the sky burned orange and pink, like children’s cereal.

I wish you had been there to see it.

i see it from my bed/ long-snake-moan of a whore in exile/ cold light of small hours behind/ a wall of letters beating as moths/ and men/ do/ before sunlight smashes its curled toes into/ alarm clocks/ not many know this but/ windowpanes and/ expatriates contain miles of silences/ each morning i put on sadness like a sweater/ and try to write it all down/ now i am weeping/ never mind/ how to post/

---

K.S. (they/them) is an aspiring writer from South Asia. They primarily write poetry and have had work published with The Daily Drunk, The Sparrow’s Trombone, and Koening. Additionally, they have more work forthcoming with Warning Lines, Sledgehammer, Gutslut Press, and Inksounds. 

imagine sweet alyssum

blanketing the ground^[1]

the heaven-scented blooms like

clouds to the cicadas^[2]

you move from forest’s edge to

cross the meadow, creep^[3]

with footsteps slight & nearly

still while wind glides through^[4]

the field to make these petals

sway^[5]

---

^[1] where you grip gravel / drip out rubies / face crammed in the shattered earth / face crammed in a pillow / here where everything will spark / you drip with turpentine / heat-veined autonomic being / here a mouth singed / opened wide / still cannot gasp /

^[2] crawling over skin with twiggy legs / each stamping down a diagram of shame / its scrawled dimensions / feeling like dried aster down a shirt / an empty bottle / man’s breath in an ear / you think of how small you could shrink / how little stays yours through this swarm /

^[3] & slink & call this your escaping episode / a space between missed calls & texts / not opening the blinds / one image of fatigue’s your finger clawing / double bass strings / here see the bone worn with abrasion / here see a body filed down /

^[4] the quarries mined for sertraline / fluoxetine / citalopram / the quarries mined to pave a synapse / pair the thirsted nerves uprooted / twisted into knotted braids / your knotted hands when trying a half dosage / how each rock drops / lands back at the start /

^[5] against your skin & offer palimpsest / which tears itself again / anointed in this frenzy / here with no bridge left to cross / here where everything repeats /

CD Eskilson is a trans poet and editor from Los Angeles. Their work
appears or is forthcoming in Hobart, Pleiades, Cosmonauts Avenue, minnesota
review, and they are a 2021 Best of the Net nominee. CD is poetry editor
for Exposition Review. They are an MFA candidate at the University of
Arkansas.

Julia Watson earned her MFA from North Carolina State University. She’s the Writer Liaison from Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things and a Poetry Editor at Chaotic Merge. In 2021, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in the NC State Poetry Contest and Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize. She won the 2018 Sassaman Award for Outstanding Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her works have been published or are forthcoming in The Shore, The Hellebore, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, among other journals. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina with her grumpy dogs. You can read more of her work at juliawatsonwriter.com.

when we stopped
suddenly
in a snowglobe of potpourri

we, the world, paused
to breathe
it wasnt goldenrod or the asters,
no flowers in the desertlookin forest

i looked down

you sniffed the handful of dirt in my hand
it was the most beautiful scent i ever smelled.

paradise is a
sunny rock

selenite, heaped
i made a snow angel
with sand
and we all picked
sage
wild and fragrant
shimmering
artemisian

hours later
im sobbing on a sunny bluff
for the first time in weeks
from chariot’s speaker
bjork reminds me to open up
my mouth as the sun sets on the water

mostly we cry for each other
everyone, i mean,
we cry in awe and i cried in terror
or maybe its just fear
(not terror)
to live now, in the place im in, i am an alien
to the land
im trying to untangle the histories i was never told

by Stephanie Lane Sutton

I greet the sun squinting in the morning as my dog squats 

on a leash & it is not the first wince of the day: again, woke

in a room splayed open by light, gazed toward a dream, 

half-remembered. In another room, I stretch my fat 

against muscle & bone & hope my abdomen 

will ache like a faultline ripped open by friction

by this time tomorrow & by this time tomorrow

I will have lived another day between two boulders 

smashing together, my head being squished 

like the object of some child’s play in perspective.

By now you are the cliff I throw myself from. 

Arrival is obliteration. You, a fisherman, hook

snared in my lips you refuse to tug. Wither my flesh

to froth on the waves that claim my body, lap by lap. 

            Like ghosts, the crests

            dissolve into sand, dividing

            the sky from the land. 

---

Stephanie Lane Sutton was born in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in in
The Adroit Journal, Anmly Lit, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Rhino
Poetry, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. Her micro-chapbook, ‘Shiny
Insect Sex,’ is part of the Bull City Press Inch Series. She received a
creative writing MFA from the University of Miami, where she was the
managing editor of Sinking City. You can find her doing live interactive
writing on Twitch as @AthenaSleepsIn.

3.

concrete: “characterized by or belonging to immediate experience

of actual things or events.”

hi, i’m concrete.  sorry.    i’m a-concrete.   i’m ali-concrete.  okay,

i’m alicia, i’m mattress top.      i’m matter, this matters-matters,

i’m watching a film of a film,   and i’m the conman

conning you out of knowing what you want when you want it.

sorry-   let me turn myself into concrete,   let me-   concentrate.

con-concrete   control myself-   let me start over:

2.

i’m in the front seat when i should be in the back.
i’m living on purpose. i’m living despite my-concrete.

my friend tells me my hair matches the stop light

and keeps on driving.

my eyes are traffic lights and the traffic.

i lick the liquor store off of my lips and thank god,

for the first time in five years,

that i am broken.

i tell my friend that he needs to break, he says “you break it, you buy it”

and i break like a habit, like an inconvenience, i can cheat my way out of anything, make room in store aisles, in line, always cheat myself, walking inside the con-con   convenience store,   i overhear someone say that

“they don’t like the dark – no one does.”

1.

and, suddenly, i’m sitting in the dark, on screen, listening to my boyfriend fuck his girlfriend, and the girlfriend isn’t me, and i should be okay with sharing, really, sharing space, but the space is so limited, (con-con-con convenience (convenience stores, under microscope, open 24-hours, (don’t look at me, i’m not here, (sheets cover me like convenience, (co-ins, i’ll pay with this body (pardon my concrete, concrete, con-contradiction, (i’m asking you to keep the change. 

0.

hi, a confession,   i’m changing my tone,    pressing hands in wet concrete, and everyone i love turns into concrete, and

(why do they have to do that?

(what-why do I have to mold them, walking contradictions

(and am left to conserve nothing but concrete and concrete

and concrete into concrete into concrete,

(and sink into cheap wine and time,

(and i close my eyes for a moment, like a restless driver, in the wrong lane, (carving out time for them to carve into me?

(i can’t say my name but i can spell it in concrete.

the word ‘I’ bonds this body to itself and hardens over time.

talking feels a lot like listening. and listening  feels a lot like learning. and learning feels a lot like concrete that I can’t push through unless i’m already sunk-                                                                                                        sorry.  

---

Alicia Turner holds an MA in English and is a grant writer & storyteller. She can be found writing confessional, conversational poetry in an over-priced apartment somewhere in WV. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Four Lines (4lines), CTD’s ‘Pen-2-Paper’ project, FreezeRay Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, Luna Luna, Defunkt Magazine, époque press, Space City Underground Magazine, The Daily Drunk, Sybil Journal, ExPat Press, Rejection Letters Press, Screen Door Review, J Journal Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, among others.