We failed, you & I, to care for plants we potted at the start of summer—lamb’s ear & lavender, one for each pocket. You told me you loved to stroke the soft fur of the hedgenettle & the smell of your hands upon pinching a switch of lavender & I said I loved our hands together, futuring something into soil.

Then we failed in miniature each day, forgetting the attention required for something gentle to thrive, until, too late, we realized that they were barely holding on; that—whether wither or rot—something had soured as we went about separate summers; that we could not now feed them all at once without drowning; that every living thing wants for water, care, hands, and to be thought of every day.

---

Dr. Tonee Mae Moll is a queer & trans writer & educator in Baltimore. Her debut memoir, Out of Step, won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, and was featured that year on the American Library Association’s annual list of notable LGBTQ+ books. Her latest poetry collection, You Cannot Save Here, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Tonee Mae’s poetry has also received the Adele V. Holden award for creative excellence and the Bill Knott Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for the Baker Award, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. 

They say it can’t be,
but it is, perfect.

What they don’t know
is that clocks

circle the drain
like pasta water,

unasked questions
we both know

answers for. After
some time we

actually did become
psychic—I know

another life flickers
somewhere in your

mind, yet you come
home to guess at

The Price Is Right.
It says I have

seen what God does
and the endoscopy,

and I could not
find another crevice

through which to
love you—whatever

hasn’t been said
is whispered

over and again
as we hang

in the blackness
of the in-between

dotted with blue,
white, and red giants.

---

Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. You can find out more at: https://sandramarchetti.net/

It’s not about who made the mistake
with the wrong address in the GPS getting
us to Brooklyn an hour late, is it?

It’s about your retirement and our finances,
and a 20-something living in our house
without employment but with a car payment.

It’s about the four scrapings the dermatologist did
this summer to determine if I have another
basal cell carcinoma.

It’s about the arthritis that’s making my fingers achy
and your neck pain from past injuries stealing
your sleep and making you cranky.

It’s about the rising prices on the three bedroom houses
with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains we’ve been dreaming
about since ‘19.

It’s about Sandy who we visited Wednesday at the assisted living
facility and her forgetting the names of her grandchildren
because of that nefarious bitch, Dementia.

Getting off the elevator to see her, we were hit with the thick odor
of overripe flesh, like forgotten Georgia peaches adrift on scorched
Southern grass in August.

She was lining the hallway of patients in front of the nurse’s station,
a parade of motionless commuters waiting for a train never coming,
together simmering

in a fragrant stew of steaming blankness, backs to the wall,
heads lolling forward onto their avian chests.
But I digress.

Arguing about who did what is a distraction, yes? Blaming
and projecting emotions like anger are easier to manage
than our current circumstances.

If we end up like this, let’s promise to go to the home together
and sit next to each other touching elbows in our matching
sweatpants with elastic bands as I misdirect

your attention again by shouting Look at that! While giggling
and pointing to the left in order to snatch another fry from your
unbreakable plate and you happily letting me do it.

---

Maureen Martinez (she/her) is an emerging writer working as a counselor at an all-boys, Catholic high school in New York City for over 20 years.  Her poetry and non-fiction are published or forthcoming in Meniscus, Folly Journal, Gramercy Review, Washington Square Review, The Listening Eye, Boudin, Artemis, Bar Bar and others.

that’s a euphemism—yes, i have cavities,
but it means i am bullet train, bound
for collision. i am jar of marbles broken
across a concrete floor. i am the rise
of the seas. what i lack in control i make up
for in firepower and i should not be given
an excuse to start shooting. i am landslide
tornado earthquake wildfire, ready to raise
hell, ask questions later. i put the disorder
in bpd and my nightmares like to remind me.
i close my eyes, see incisor pop softly out
of gumline. run tongue through bloody
mouth, lose teeth like i used to cut corn
off the cob. same time tomorrow night.

---

nat raum is the poet laureate of the void; their corporeal form lives in Baltimore. They’re the author of this book will not save you, random access memory, fruits of the valley, and many others. Find them online at natraum.com or astral projecting inside a Royal Farms.

Here we are among snow
and ash. Cracked from saw or
harsh November winds. We
are wood always moving. Bit
of flesh from birch, oak, cedar.
Stacked for burning. Once I was
home to a little ant, he swallowed
my bones. Built a little city. More
crawled in. They made me warm
in winter. Little curling
creatures. I said, soak more
from soil, make each splinter
firmer. My god we grow. Leaves
arrived fat, cradling bubbling
dew. I tell you I know what it is
to be a universe. Tonight leaves
turning ash first reach for sky then
they fall and they fall. To be
turned into nothing.

---

Oisín Rowe (they/them) is a trans and disabled writer, editor, and poet. Their work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Flare Magazine, Black Fox Literary Review, and elsewhere. You can find links and more at www.oisinrowe.com

---

This poem previously appeared in perhappened.

On PCH
somewhere
Malibu—
going north not
quite yet at
Point Dume,
two biker boys,
not quite men,
stopped at
a red light.

Underneath hiero-
glyphic hand signs
a single red rose
in hand
outstretched.
Electricity wrinkled
between them,
All-American
rose received,
ugly-beautiful
bag scene.

This scene
was recalled to me
like a home-movie
dancing on the TV.

---

MATTIE K. LAGAN is a poet and visual artist. She received a degree in Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of California Santa Cruz. She is from Salinas, California.

Talking shit, like you know about cracked knuckles and flamin hots with pickle juice. Or the broken heat lamps on the El, or getting high off a lakefront. Yesterday, I counted every duck at the lake and called them my woes. By hook by crook by crooked alderman, you learn that the trap that stays shut is the trap that starves.

No one will beat or bite this place out of me. Not by the skin of their enameled teeth. Not by the potholes on every major street. Not by the 312. Not by the school closures. Not by the crack of a July thunder. Like being at The Taste and getting flooded by rain. All that muddy. All that moist. Like when you were little and other kids hit you, and your mom said to hit ‘em back.

---

Ola Faleti is the author of fiction chapbook Soft & Solid and an artist and arts educator based in Chicago, Illinois. Her writing has appeared in Unwoven, TriQuarterly, Jet Fuel Review, and elsewhere. She runs Spare Jar Consulting, a grant writing and creative facilitation business, and teaches with the Chicago Poetry Center. Ola’s favorite number is nine. She believes there’s no such thing as too many flowers.

The music in Stacy’s wasn’t much better than
where we planned to meet up, but us dolls
settle and stayed. Anywhere to get inside,
Melrose District streets cooking even in the night.
Our butch bought me Lemon Drop shots
the whole night. I cackle like hot crackled lightning,
for once I’m not frightened: she passes her
cigarettes and I leave coffee colored lipstick on it.
My vision smears stage lights the same way, an
allegory to the space I fill, the mark I leave—not being
questioned. Indulgence like floral tights ripped
on my ass and I don’t cover it. I’m hot anyway. Indulgence
like us dolls talking hookups and chisme; laughing
loud like the rough pop-house DJ mix and we’re all
talking just loud enough to be fully heard by one another.

“I’ve only seen you date girls you dyke.”
“Boys are like cigarettes and chocolate to me.”

I never leave—can’t leave—the house without
a gallon-sized Ziploc full of paper cranes.
That’s what happens

the third, the eightieth time they say your prayer
is just a siren sounding, distant, from the valley—hear

my desperation almost
far enough away to be confused
with birdsong?

Still. I think I believe

in this human work: the nightly rediscovery
of a sleep position, the bruises’
unfurling before they heal.

My hands, for instance, continue to inhabit
my hair, which continues sprouting
though I hack

off the ends. Off the hangnails, off
the deadened skin around my blisters,
off the heads

of my enemies, the daffodils readying
themselves for rebirth by, first, dying.
I left my doors ajar and heard the flowers

crumple willingly to the dirt.
Ought I to go
so whispering? Or else, by never asking,

am I going now.

---

Nain Christopherson (she/her) lives, writes, and teaches high school English in Salt Lake City, where she also co-edits The Garlic Press. Her work has been featured in SUNHOUSE, The Shore, Scribendi, and The Exponent II, and was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s 2023 Award for New Poets.