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my sorta friends eat

by Thais Benoit

my sorta friends eat tiny
multicolored pills and keep them in
plastic containers with
too many lids

this is new york city
where arguing works

i supply a jumbled list of uncategorized answers
i sit with them
cross-legged, on the floor and
sort them into piles,

crushed seashells in my pockets
and orange marigolds in my hair

i beckon a tickle
deep in her throat
i am arachne,
she is afraid of animals

i am part of a generation of people who pay their bills
with borrowed money
bending time
i dig deep enough

america is dying, and
georgia o’keeffe is boring.
i am singing with grain stuck
between my front teeth,
you’re still parading
the importance of
your skin and whom
you miss at the moment

The Dance

by Kimberly Tan

Inspired by Cavafy’s “Gray”

I watch the couple on the floor
and I cannot help but recall
the waltz we danced ourselves – so smooth; it must have been fifty years ago…

For two years we were pressed against one another
your body leading me; your hand holding mine and your leg brushing past.
Then he left, I believe to the city,
to work there, and I went somewhere else.

The waltz – when I do dance – is now a stumble;
I cannot follow as easily and I cannot move with another.

Dear Music, play and bring back the rhythm in my feet.
And, Music, play so that he can hear you and come back to me,
this partner of mine, so that we can dance the waltz together again.

As Long As the Ground Below Me Is Soft

by Carabella Sands

Replace the rag in my mouth with syrup from the tree you water with gold. The one you won’t share fruit from. The one you water with gold. I cut out my own teeth to taste it. To taste syrup and grow new teeth. To turn my mouth metal. My face metal. I want to be one of the sap statues crying in your garden. Kiss me then. Tell me I’m the most beautiful statue you have ever seen.

Face the Mirror

by Carissa Pignatelli

Take a look in the mirror,
at your own blue eyes,
Since they’re the exact
same color as mine
You can say that you miss me
And how much you care
But mirrors don’t react
They just reflect what’s there…

If you don’t like your mirror
And the image it shows
Maybe it’s time
to let the past go
Take your mistakes
Don’t make them again
And don’t test people
Especially your friends
Don’t take love for granted
And Don’t be a sheep
And don’t ever make promises
That you can’t keep
Do the right thing just because
It’s the right thing to do
And remember, that bad decisions
Don’t effect just you

You’re broken to me
And I’m beyond repair
And I can’t fix
What’s no longer there

If you find me again
You can watch if you must
But you lost all my love
My respect and my trust.

Take a look in the mirror,
at your bloodshot eyes
The ones that you said
Were the same color as mine
You may very well miss me
You may truly care
But your mirror won’t react
It just reflects what’s there…

I won’t look back now
There’s nothing left here
And you can thank the man,
That stares back in the mirror

Hand As Golden Shovel

by Caits Meissner

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted. — Joy Harjo

Laid down once
to study the
ant’s colony, the tiny world
so easily crushed beneath my foot was
brimming with perfect
community and
the trail carrying a leaf so big we
couldn’t believe it, we were
in awe, and I even—I’d say, a kind of happy
to discover that life came in
this size, at this scale, that
maybe there was so much more to the world
than our rusty swing set, and then
you covered the hole with your finger, we
did, I mean, because I didn’t stop you, we took
in one second, an entire empire and it
didn’t cross our mind again, for
dinner was plated with meat we took for granted

Caits Meissner is a D.I.Y.-spirited, poly-creative writer, artist and cultural worker, and the author of the illustrated hybrid poetry book Let It Die Hungry (The Operating System, 2016). She currently serves as the Prison and Justice Writing Program Director at PEN America.

sweat spot

by Meg Pendoley

love is pussy on a hot stone stoop
pussy is hot is patient
can wait
this one out
resilient pussy
today is
bring your dyke to work day
and you’re late
hot skin hot lip
of the railing
on my back
last week at the nice beach
nice ladies
called the cops on my chest
and he came
sand spraying
no I don’t think this is funny
no sir I don’t think this is a joke
just that it’s absurd
to be this body
in front of an angry man
with so much power
and so much dust
on his patent leather boots
nice boots
now
here
South Philly presses right up to me
waiting patient on the stoop
part of the neighborhood knows
so shuffles up
barrel chested
in some places you can step
out the door and already be
in the street
like this
sweat spot on a hot stone stoop
waiting for someone
to fill me
or feed me
something sweet
quick burst
through afternoon laze
like so sweaty your skin is mirraging
away from you
already done already
on the way home

Meg Pendoley is a restless Sagittarius living in Philadelphia and thinking about alternative archives / slutty queer futures. Meg’s work has appeared in Tin House’s Open Bar, Apiary Magazine, Bedfellows, and Deluge (Radioactive Moat).

Surface

by Michael Heyman

“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”

            –Oscar Wilde

Today I’m going to dive into the deepest sea

Wearing my orange floaties.

Don’t worry.

I’ll bob back up

a wave’s whim,

staying on the surface

 another glint of sun

   another scudding froth.

Down below,

  fathoms from the light

   The cold juts jaws,

Darkness bleaches meat and bone,

Creatures telegraph lost luminescent tongues.

Stares the huge, unblinking eye

  or the fleshy blank, where one may have been.

None of that for me—

I don’t need the unmentionable thumblings under me.

My eyes will keep their distance, will not,

  pressed between a mile’s water-weight

  and the rocky floor, like a flounder’s, migrate.

I’ll stay here on the surface

  blowing bubbles in sunfish streaks

Or skimming along,

  limbs spread wide.

There is enough surface tension

   to keep afloat forever.

Michael Heyman is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense, poetry, and children’s literature. He teaches arthropodiatry and other literary and performative arts at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He once played badminton with The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense. His poems and stories for children and adults can be found in the journals Poetry International, Solstice, and FUSION; and in the books The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories, The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories, and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse.

VISITATIONS

by Naila Francis

When the lights dim above the dinner
table, a flickering warmth, and the white butterfly
claps its wings against my streaked window pane,
willful heft of air — what news do you bring?
Have you tapered into luster, lute of open
sky? Was the crossing safe? Midwifed?
Tranquil? A pinprick snatch of time?

I am standing at the ivory gate, seduced
by this trackless night, its cryptic
grief-scraped dream.
Everything lives on, a world
around my treble mouth, collapsing
on its tears.

You lived in peace and will go
in peace. That was what you said.
But what of us pilgrims, pinned to all
this lovely peril, span of tangled lives?

I want to praise your boundlessness,
its migratory gold. Believe when the body
is broken, death is a starlit strut
that lifts the spirit home.
Is that where you are, sending postcards
on such fragile wings, even the bluebird
that hopped across my path, each
sudden sway of light?
Every one
signed, love
is the only
news.

Naila Francis is a writer, wedding officiant, death midwife and ardent joy enthusiast. She lives in Philadelphia.