You’re like a paragraph in a book, he says, folding a dollar bill into an origami ring at the bar, and I’m not sure if it’s an insult. He slips the ring onto my forefinger: don’t get too excited. Should I apologize to you or myself or the woman who loved him before? I stay for the story. He is the only one who can make me laugh during an argument. We huddle in the doorway of the pub, passing the vape back and forth in the cold. He mocks my rotating flavors: watermelon, mango, strawberry. I tell himI miss my cigarettes but really, it’s just autumn again. Puff, puff.  I’m rotting from the inside. Downing pills with an Old Fashioned. My heart is episodic, my brain one chemical imbalance after another. This unfurling is not what I wanted. He’s the head rush from the first good drag. The first sip of coffee to cure a hangover. I’m living at the bottom of the bottle and it’s beautiful here, all glass and no windows. Who is there left to quit for? The bodies in the lake, one of them mine. The bodies in his pool, all of them my lovers. I slaughter them to the gods of my wanting. I like the way he talks to his cats. Throws one over a shoulder and coos. I ache for this rough with my soft. A 4am kiss, a purpling bruise on my bicep. All those late night drives, always to him. We’re at the bar again. I’m nursing an unwanted Tito’s shot as he ignores me for a man with a matching DUI. He only notices when I storm away. Follows as I’m trying to hide so I give him a hard time because how dare he watch me bleed. Scar, I love you. He says my childhood nickname like he can hardly lift it. I’ve forgotten how it feels to be seen and still wanted. I can outrun anything, even love. I can shoehorn any ending I want, even with my heart in his chokehold. In this version, I fish my lovers’ bodies out of the pool for one last dance before burial. I lay my vapes on their graves instead of flowers.

---

Scarlett Hume’s work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she’s usually people watching from a window seat or trying to memorize the sky. 

Double-check you have not morphed into wax.
Are the appendages protruding from the trunk
of your body still soft skin, or have you hardened
your armor like they taught you in eighth grade
when a car flattened your cat at your Christmas party?
You cried. You watched as he twitched
and his insides squelched onto the pavement,
and when he became still, his body stiffened.
Still, with tears, you hauled him home. It was hard.
They said “you’re ruining the party with your moping,” so you
plopped by the Christmas tree. It was hard, was it hard
to wake up this morning and find your skin had not
hardened like exoskeleton? You are still soft. Still tender.
It was tenth grade when your grandfather requested you
be pallbearer at grandma’s funeral. You couldn’t
bear it, the weight, the load. The corpse, it was
caked in makeup to mask the blemishes from
Her accident. She was not herself. You grasped
her hand—it was hard. It was like wax,
and when you squeezed her hand farewell,
you left an indentation. That was hard. To see
a hand that was no longer her hand. Remember
if you wake up and don’t feel human, check your hands.
Knead the flesh of your palm. If it morphs to hand again,
you are still alive. You are still alive. Still, you are alive.
You are you, and you are alive! You are alive! You are
soft. Still human. Still tender. Still raw. Still. You are
not twitching. Not wax. It is hard to love because
someday love goes stiff. And you must convince yourself
to lift love from the pavement, to love even when the soft
animal of love’s body hardens, and you cringe when the
coffin contacts the ground. And you feel numb, too soft. When
it’s all too much, let the softness of your body convince you.
You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re alive.

---

Kenny Mitchell (he/him) is a fiction writer and poet from Nebraska. He is an MFA student studying fiction writing at Indiana University, where he teaches and serves as the fiction editor for Indiana Review. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the (currently on hiatus, but slowly revamping) magazine and reading series Do Geese See God?  His fiction and poetry appear in HAD, The Good Life Review, The Airgonaut, and elsewhere. In his free time, he’s still trying to figure out where Waldo is.

---

This poem previously appeared in the print magazine The Carillon.

When the blues find where I’ve been hiding,
They pile on like puppies—
so damn excited to see me.

These days, I’m into cats, brother.
You know, maybe one will rub up against me,
once in awhile, or meow enough
until I give it what it wants—
usually my food and then, my appetite.

But the dogs, man…
they just don’t stop—
yipping, nipping, slobbering—
all fucking over me,
and then I’m down for the
three-to-five-day count.

I try to rationalize—“They’re just puppies. They’ll get bored and go away.”
I try stoicism—“I can’t get bothered by the uncontrollable.”
I try booze—the puppies just lap that shit up.

But they always sniff me out!
After a few days enjoying the sunshine,
I guess my contented stink gives me away,
‘cause the cute, fucking, little, tail-waggers
always, always fucking find me,
the little shitheads.

First rule of depression:
We don’t talk about depression.

I wonder if Paper Street Soap Co.
makes Existential Stench—
extended release version, of course—
its scent so cloying and heavy, it’ll
hide my temporary joy.

Crap! Here they come, the adorable little bastards.
Shoving their tongues up my nose, in my mouth,
and one—I’m sure his name is Cletus—
is so glad to see me, he’s going to pee on me, gah!

Get away from me you goddamn mutts!

---

David J. Schast is a poet and retired professional oboist who has returned to poetry after decades immersed in a wide range of creative and non-creative pursuits. Drawing on a full life shaped by music, composition, and fine woodworking, his writing reflects a deep engagement with rhythm, structure, and voice—infused with the clarity and complexity of lived experience.

---

RJ Equality Ingram works as a bookseller & necromancer for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. Their debut collection of poetry The Autobiography of Nancy Drew was published by White Stag in 2024. RJ holds a BFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University & two MFAs in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California. Recent work can be found in issues ofGarlic Press, Deep Overstock, Phoebe Journal, Miniskirt Magazine & The Citron Review among others. RJ & their husband live next to a cemetery in Portland, Oregon with their two cats Twyla & Senator Padme Amidala. 

They call one bulldagger.
I heard them say she spreads women’s legs that’s all

she does, but I know her. She builds
entire worlds where their mouths cannot go,

their eyes cannot perceive.
What they wonder is who she fucks

and how they are going to have more children
in the world, and there is more to loving a woman.

I know because I hold them two inside.
An elder called the bisexual one greedy,

and we all laughed at her small imagination.
Her hands mortared me together.

Them two made me part of a house
to hold back the winds and water for a century,

keep them safe whether hurricane
or one of them come knocking at their door,

and because the family loves a corpse,
we will be cremated into ash and return as blocks

calling out for a love like theirs to hold.
The only thing that hears

them two sex are concrete and coal fly,
and neither one will tell.

---

Marlanda Dekine is a spoken word poet from Georgetown, South Carolina. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Georgetown County Libraries and the first Individual Artist Fellow for Spoken Word/Slam Poetry from the South Carolina Arts Commission. Her work has been widely performed and published.

I want to be: a good boy, your domesticated coyote.

My tongue’s handwriting is the shape of your body
unshaved and without a shower.

They need us to feel disgusted
with ourselves, so you commit

to my appetite unreserved.
You become tender only while listening to crust

punk and letting my fingers impersonate what I really want.
The moon is a cuck watching our disentanglement.

I can’t remember if I slept but the birds are our mothers
waking us up. You make my coffee like a prayer,

so I call you a saint right before we kiss.
It is time to creep into something

other than each other, but you don’t need a leash
to take me on a walk. You’re five feet taller than me

when I’m on all fours. You fear a million fears about me,
but only a handful are true.

---

Mary Violet is an interdisciplinary poet residing in Philadelphia. They completed their B.A. in Poetry in the desert. In 2020 they started an ongoing project, Warped Cherub, which focuses on the intersection of fashion and poetry by means of recycling both tangible and verbal expressions. You can find their latest poetry, sometimes wearable or typewritten, on instagram @warpedcherub. 

I’m on the floor again, and that isn’t a metaphor for rock bottom. My new therapist asked me how I did it. How I managed to keep myself safe all these years. For the first time in over a decade, I was honest: I don’t remember. The meds are working, too, I think. Though after they unfurl my patterns, my dreams of precision, all the rot turns to tremors in my hands. It feels like the world ended when we were fourteen, and after years of dodging the undead on bare feet, I finally found my way to cold water and clean shoes. So after the session, I went out and bought stamps. I was thinking of the last time you and I shared a meal. How we cried in the rollercoaster line at Busch Gardens because we were hot and hungry and couldn’t fit ourselves to girlhood. How you said that Tampa will never be home because we wear fewer clothes here and our sweat smells different here. That night we tossed curse words across the dinner table and stuffed our mouths sour with lettuce. —By now you must know that I’ve broken my promise: I’m dealing with men so I don’t have to deal with myself. I’m thinking of one who lives on the west end of the city. He makes odd music, and I pretend that its subversion is what inspires me. He calls me the poet of silence and hair—you’ll be proud to know our love never reached flesh. Thank God it stopped at the bones. I hope you’ve kept your promise. And I hope your thyroid is better. Tabitha, if I could carry it all, I would.

---

Meghan B. Malachi is a Bronx-born, Chicago-based poet. She is an Associate Editor at RHINO and the Creative Director of Indigo Sessions. Meghan is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor’s Prize Contest and runner-up of the 2024 Princemere Poetry Contest. Her work is published or forthcoming in Quarterly West, NewCity, Juked, NECTAR Poetry, Writers With Attitude, and boats against the current. Her first chapbook, The Autodidact, was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press.

We open with a stationary shot of me in my office, a pride flag on the wall behind me. An offscreen bonfire flickers in my eyes, and the savvy viewer will read this as a symbol of both passion and hunger, and before they can ask where it comes from I begin to speak:

“I’m a therapist and community organizer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is my audition video for Survivor in the form of a poem, and my name is Isaiah Moses Newman…”

and the savvy viewer will recall, here, that Moses once came upon a field that held a bush that burned and would not die, and if they are Jewish they may also know that he answered the blaze by shouting hineni, which can translate to “here I am,” but also “witness me here, having survived all that has tried to kill me.”

A drumbeat begins in the background as I describe the tear-stained and sleepless nights of my adolescence, and then on screen a picture flashes: me and the friends I called family at age 19, huddled in down jackets like penguins, and there is a conspicuous silhouette carved out of the center of the picture, but I do not name him, or describe the way his loss shattered us.

Instead, the picture vanishes, and I explain that I have spent the past year obsessing over a reality TV show in which found families tear each other apart for false promises of survival, and it has felt familiar.

I do not say that I lost someone the same way as the silhouette in October, because the law prevents me from speaking their name. I do not describe how badly I want to believe that we can save people, and how I have failed. Instead, I speak of the many ways I have tried to stop the world from burning even when it seems impossible,

and then we pan to the fourth wall, which is not a wall at all but a curtain of air that opens onto a field containing a bonfire, and a long tracking shot follows me as I walk through it,

and I stop next to the inferno and my ribs glow through my shirt like coals and we zoom out to see that the bonfire was actually the burning bush the whole time, limbs outstretched and skeletal, and I reach my arms up to the sky and my fingertips light like candlewicks, and the glow spreads from my ribs to my heart, and the savvy viewer will see how I burn and burn and do not die,

and then I shout of how the world seems always to be inventing new ways to break the people and communities I love, but my heart burns with the flame of survival and I am a therapist to keep as many of us alive and singing as I can, and I am an organizer because we deserve a world that can hear our songs,

and I will win Survivor if you put me on the show because I know what it takes to keep the torch of belief alive in the face of all that would drown it.

So hineni, CBS. Here I am. Come and find me.

---

Isaiah Newman (they/he) is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker living in the Boston area and organizing in solidarity with the people of Palestine. They write both fiction and poetry, and their work has appeared in Joyland, Waxwing, ANMLY, and Diode Poetry Journal, among others. You can find them on Instagram @thegreatskittishbakeoff or at isaiahnewman.com.

In August it’s hard not to want –
everything heavy with it – ginkgo fruit
rots on sidewalks, sweat falls down spines,
the whole beast city breathes in smog and breathes out
low clouds dropping lightning. Confused,
a little, reading subway signs
for revelation, it all comes up

wonder – which pre-historic lizard
dragged itself up into daylight just
so you could buy Calvin Klein underwear
and forget to call your mom on purpose?
Who’s your manager, Saint Sebastian?
Maimonides? What day of the week
is it? How did you get this number?

Rumi, I told you to stop calling
my motel. I need to be alone
for a long time, ride the empty train
over the bridge back and forth, commune
with Whitman above the East River.
Where else do you go to ask when summer
cherry pit spits questions into your lap?

Whose ghost do I see on street corners?
When does the weight lift? What do I do
with this little bit of time I’ve caught
to live inside? What do I do now
I want to eat every apple, seed
stem core? Who belongs, who decides?
Does want end with get? And if not –

---

Birch Wiley is a transsexual poet living in New York. Birch’s work can be found in Union Spring Literary Review and is forthcoming in Pleiades and Querencia Quarterly, among others. Their debut collection, Mythweaver, will be published by new words {press} in summer 2025. You can learn more about them at linktr.ee/birchwiley.

We learned to love the birds.
The backyard bird
with her black cap and white cheeks.
The flicker so flirty
in his polka dot dress and red scarf.
The bus-stop-bird
who mocked us each morning
with a mixtape of songs
by someone else.

We learned to love the bones.
The mismatched shingles
on the mansard roof
and the pumpkin-colored door.
The wrought iron staircase and
windflower wallpaper–
the backdrop
for crushed velvet dresses
and top hats.

We learned to love the pool.
The feeling of lungs
so full of breath
we learned to live underwater.
Our fins unfurled and settled
at the bottom of the ceramic basin.
The sub-aquatic sounds,
muted and muddy,
but unmistakably mermaid.

We learned to love through
frayed feathers and
stone skin and
saltwater dreams.
We learned to love through
all the silly seriousness
of being immortal teens.

---

Colette Love Hilliard is a writer and teacher from St. Louis, MO. She is the proud recipient of half a skull from HAD, and her work has appeared in The Indianapolis Review, Sky Island Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, and elsewhere. Among other things, a photo of her dog can be found at colettelh.com.