I heart you. I lung, liver and lymph you. I tongue tendon.
Meet me at the bald spot of the day, in your quietest shoes.
Meet me under cover of night, features shadowed with eerie Frenchness.

How cool is the room inside my room: breath of dark.
In a skirt, I’m a skirt of steak; known not for my flavor
but for my tenderness.

You hunger, hunt, an evil so complex it can drive a car.

I leave to where there are no roads, but you are
God’s awful silence over corn. In cow eyes, in audio of rain.

---

Cassandra Coale is a student at Kenyon College and an astrologer. She likes to walk at night. 

---

Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary femme of color whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people.  Most recently, their work has been published by or is forthcoming with Giovanni’s Room anthology queerbook, Apiary Magazine, MICA’s Full Bleed, Seven CirclePress, and Midway; you can find all published work at http://alisonlubar.com/.

the plums were as big and dry as baseballs i waited weeks
for them to ripen all they did was rot
to relieve my guilt at their compost funeral i said
look at these atrocities
they were meant to be worm food

slowly eating yogurt in the kitchen haunted
by ghosts of rotting plums, i check my reflection
in my spoon and whisper to myself
you are a sprouting potato
an untouchable anemic potato rotting
like a baseball plum

---

Shayna is a poet and Yiddish enthusiast and is the author of hungry, a chapbook in the making. She is deeply indebted to the members of the Anarchist Poetry Collective, without whom none of her recent poems would exist.

---

Fox Auslander is a nonbinary poet based in Philadelphia. They are one of two co-editors at Delicate Friend, an assistant poetry editor at Alien Magazine, and probably happy. You can find their recent work in perhappened, Prismatica Magazine, and Eunoia Review, or on Twitter @circumgender.

---

This poem previously appeared in perhappened.

I carried a dead bird into my house
to please my mother who was on the phone
believing the “dove” might just be sleeping,
stunned by the cold that took over Texas.
It was Ash Wednesday. She’s not a Catholic,
but she’ll take what she can get gladly–
so it was a sign, and I found it all
contagious: her believing, that maybe
life. I let myself hope for miracles,
picked up the bird, wrapped it up in red,
placed it perched in a basket near the heat
and waited. That’s what she told me to do.
Half an hour. An hour. Are you sure
it hasn’t moved? No ma’am. Yes, I washed my hands.

---

Riley Rennhack (she/her) lives in rural Texas with an old dog and a mule. Her students at the local high school call her “Miss R” and they’d be shocked to know she writes poems. 

so many of my experiences
were about waiting

patience learned through
routine fasting, a child’s
rumbling stomach no match
for the joy of victory, the
joy of making my parents
proud. one day a
week, the first thing that
enters my body
must be holy. and then––years
of waiting to turn
into something
golden. in the dream my head
would leave the pillow
and my hair would have
no static. I’d awaken from
a restful, pleasant sleep a
beautiful girl, my teeth
lined up all perfectly straight.
in the dream you
sent me letters and time
passed slowly but in a good
way, like honey dripping
sweet, fat drops.

the flight is delayed, the suitcase
overweight. I push the red
button and it flags me
for a search. I wait
to be called and once they
zip me open
it’s rough. I take offense
to the way my shampoo
is jostled, and I feel
embarrassed to be a person
who requires socks
and underwear to live. silent,
I practice fasting from
words. and I can tell that
the bottles have not been
properly re-shut and I
know when I arrive that
everything I own will
bear remnants of a
stranger’s touch, every single
one of my clothes wet,
sticky and ruined.

---

Sarah Sophia Yanni’s writing has appeared in Feelings, DREGINALD, Maudlin House, Full Stop, and Metatron Press’ #MicroMeta Series, among others. She is the author of the chapbook ternura / tenderness (Bottlecap Press) and serves as Assistant Editor of The Quarterless Review. A gemini and daughter of immigrants, she lives and works in Los Angeles.

sometimes, you see that i am not shallow puddles / i am swerving / fast-moving exits / bravery through books and bottles / you hold the baggage that is this hurt in your hands / while i twist off the top / dim the light / imagine i am as bright as your illusion of me / do a little work here / i think / “do i sacrifice the hardness of a moment for the softness of now?” / pause / your core / camping out in the dark / i get to know you / with each convulsion / “and, if so, what does that say about me?” / a cliché that occurs like clockwork / you knead into my sheets / my notebook / my bed / solemnly swear that you are up to no good / and I believe you / still, you whisper, “meet me” / but the train is slow-moving / no, not here / banging my head against the brick / it’s too much to carry / i know / all in my head / oh, my darling / this is me in water / my anti-manic pixie dream girl / siren song / you send waves / i lay atop rocks / we both hurt / no, not here / in these moments / i am not less because i need more / each time enchantress creature / or / most of all / when my body trembles like tides / no, not here / hardening my hope / i will not be metamorphosed into rock / we are world builders / you work with your hands and I, with my words / you frolic / freckle fields for days / under-think with your heart / refuse to be still / through currents / i have revised you / i have watched you sink / what i mean is / that sinking feeling / insist that you love to swim / drip sweat onto my cheek / only to retire when they wear me too thin / or too heavy / the weight of it all / i, too / salt my food before i taste it / i, too / pour salt in old wounds / the sound of stinging is no joke / oh, my darling / penance lives within these pressure points / a mediocre medley / that we all sing or singe / where we’re not here / no / “we’re lost and gone forever” / dreadful sorry that for me, there is no memory too messy to keep / keepsakes are what the sea breaks against / whether they are buried / is all in how they’re built

---

Alicia Turner holds an MA in English and is a grant writer/storyteller from West Virginia. She can mostly be found writing confessional, conversational poetry in an over-priced apartment somewhere in WV. Her poem, ‘The Anxiety (A),’ was published in CTD’s ‘Pen-2-Paper’ project and her piece on “flux,” or change, was published by Four Lines (4lines) and shared across multiple media platforms. She has forthcoming publications.

I haven’t really
taken any notice.

Finches, cardinals,
blue jays, titmouse,
nuthatches, crows,
yellow grosbeaks,

I said titmouse…
um, some woodpeckers.
I have sparrows
nesting in the planters…

What else:
hawks,
but they don’t come to the feeders,
red-tail hawks,

warblers…
though I couldn’t
tell you what they look like.
You should be calling Becky.

---

Chelsea Harlan is a poet from Appalachian Virginia. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Sixth Finch, CutBank, Southwest Review, The Greensboro Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She lives in the Blue Ridge.

A beautiful sound: citrus season.

I’ve never lived anywhere. A hammock part in the shade,

     part in the sun. We should move without reason

     to a place with warm rain, midday. A loan with bees in

the lantanas and surprising places: screens, kettles, or dirty cups.

Listen, a beautiful sound: citrus season.

We will grow full under the lemon tree, breakfast and black coffee, ease in

to our days. How could I be loyal to one thing, if I’ve never lived anywhere,

     part in the sun. So let’s move without reason,

    See, look, there a soft color to be gathered, deepened

like emerald green and khalo blue, freeing us from fading eyes and

what a beautiful sound, citrus season.

We’ll fill up a bedroom with scrap paintings and linen, trustees in

lemons, the twist in our martinez, sitting in our kitchen garden dusted in rain and thunder,

     part in the sun. We should move without reason

     because what are we to do? Here, bodies are beaten

legs are crocked and old. Our mothers’ ghosts dancing where we cannot go.

What if we wake up alone? Filled up with a future awaiting…

for a beautiful sound, citrus season.

---

Zinnia Smith has been published with TSR: The Southampton Review, East, and Peach Mag, among others. She won Fugue’s 2018 writing contest in prose, and was nominated for Sundress’s Best of the Net in 2019. She is currently at work on a haunted house novel.

---

Marcela Huerta is a Chilean poet and the author of Tropico (Metatron Press, 2017). Her work can be seen in Leste, CV2, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at https://marcelahuerta.com/