Teddy L Friedline

ONOMANCY

For Iskandar Haggarty

---

you know as well as I do / friend  /

that names are aspirational / I mean

look at the name I chose for myself /

a step away from divine / little gift from god

minorly wealthy / and then light, of course,

a saint’s name / which is a better

aspiration than hay field / all my parents

wanted for me was allergies / was jumping

between rounded bales / but you / look

what your parents wanted / for you / o defender

o hearty protector / o my dear victorious friend

look how you have made good on the promise

your parents made in your name / o woolen coat /

o broad shoulder easy posture / how you prevail

without intending / your earthy feet settling

me out of the sky / your laugh like a volleyball

shoved under the surface of a pool / o heritage

o noble o proud man / named for a great in a turn 

of language / how you lounge with the sun 

in your face / propped up on your palms / sentinel /

---

Teddy L. Friedline (they/he) is a transmasc gay writer. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hood of Bone Review, DEAR Poetry Journal, the lickety~split, and elsewhere. Starting this fall he will be an MFA candidate at Chatham University. You can find them on Instagram and on Twitter, both @jadeitebttrdish.

Samuel Prince

GRAZING HORSE CONFESSIONAL

---

What I meant when I said clemency was that untold moment 

when the tawny horse loped across the pasture to sniffle 

at my fascination. I never thought I’d be so wistful 

for the near-expired past this fast. The sleekest contact: 

stroking the ice-cone muzzle, shammy cloth nostrils. 

I speak less of what I could be, more of what I’d once been, 

how I’d lived milksoppy, strained in a deliberately confined 

way, gotten sore and tired, blinkered and saddled 

with unshakeable qualms. Flies sparkled in the mane. 

I couldn’t even make a mess in a coherent way; couldn’t tell 

dandelions from desiccated teasel in the cidery light, 

but to hear that baritone crunch as it gnashed at the grass 

was enough for a brief détente. Observing the moment 

– such an extravagance. I adjusted too quickly to the dark. 

When I said nature, what I meant was some fragile mammals. 

---

Samuel Prince's debut collection, Ulterior Atmospheres, was published in 2020 by Live Canon. His work has recently appeared in Acumen, The Broken Spine, Pedestal and Spelt. He lives in Norfolk (UK). More information can be found at www.samuelprince.co.uk.

Paul Festa

THE GENIUS OF KOMEDA

---

It resolves into the last wholly romantic period 

before James, six weeks 

at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony 

in the scorched hills overlooking Temecula: 

rattlesnakes, blackened chaparral, kerosene lamps and a wood stove, 

chaotic LA weekends and, 

thudding fluently out of the old Remington Noiseless, 

the unfinishable novel that decades later still sprawls 

asymptotically 

toward its climax in the burning oak. 

Out of reverence, I never touched 

the mahogany Steinway in my cabin, which 

the caretaker told me 

Rachmaninov had practiced on when he was in the area. A few years 

after my residency, the piano burned 

along with the rest of the colony. 

Kerosene lamps, I thought, 

but arson was suspected. 

James wanted a fireplace and I vetoed it. 

I’d just read that woodstoves produced 

more airborne carcinogens in London 

than auto traffic. Amid the city’s 

newly risen smokestacks, Blake gave the world 

six thousand years before fire 

would consume all of Creation, 

yielding holiness and infinitude 

where now reign corruption and transiency. 

“This will come to pass,” Blake writes, 

“by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” 

Fire spreads among the senses 

the way it spreads through the world. 

I adhere to descriptions of death by fire—

war and Holocaust, 9/11, Wolf Hall, Australia and California, 

the boy at Short Mountain who incinerated himself 

in a cave. We romanticize fire reflexively, 

involuntarily, just as we are hypnotized by it, 

like that Komeda song where she sings

Fire, fire, fire, fire

Fire, fire, fire, fire

Fire, fire, fi-yer

Fire, fire, fi-yer

Fire, fire, fire, fire…

---

Paul Festa’s essays, criticism, and poetry appear in numerous publications and anthologies, including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Daily Beast, Salon, HuffPost Opinions, Beyond Words Magazine, three editions of the Best Sex Writing series, and Nerve: The First Ten Years. Paul teaches fiction writing, poetry, and modern Italian history, among other subjects, at Bard College Berlin, and has won awards and fellowships including several residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.

Molly Sturdevant

Generalized Anxiety Works Quietly While I Try to Sign a Form

---

for a fundraiser, in a weirdly warm spring,

they tell me how the kids are going to sell snacks.

But really it’s us. There’s stuff I have to fill out

in the registration tent when I notice, 

the big maple’s not healthy. 

From the top down, there’s an early withering,

abscised green leaves with black dots.

What if it all blows away. 

What if someone steals the petty cash. 

When is it all due. When will it be delivered. 

The other parents understand but I don’t.

I see that I cannot sell snacks I am sorry.

Other adults knew where to sign.

Is there a book about it? Is there fungus in the pith? 

What if I die from the top down. 

Would anyone clip my kid’s toenails, 

turn the heat down at night, 

smell the things shoved to back of the fridge

before serving? I filled out the wrong lines.

I wrote the wrong year. How come there’s never money? 

Now they’re all walking like it’s nothing, talking. 

I’m burning up. I think the maple won’t make it. 

Take my coat. Does anyone see that tree, 

it’s what we need, I said, I need a new form, 

a blank line, a better pen, a fresh start. 

You need to notice that tree. Even our own 

lungs’ capillaries look 

like blossoming branches 

of mature oaks, yet, 

O— the expirations, the fungus, 

the annoying balmy rain-snow, 

the dried-up pens

---

Molly Sturdevant is a copy editor and writer, whose prose and poems have appeared in Orion Magazine, The Dark Mountain Project, The Nashville Review, Little Patuxent Review, Poetry Northwest, Newfound, About Place Journal, x-r-a-y LitMag, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel based on research in trade-union archives. She lives in the Midwest.

Kate Miano

THE AIR IS PINK IN FLORIDA

---

Took a picture to show you the palm trees

filtered fuchsia in the evening heat.

Drinking alone, I'm outside the reception.

Give me a minute, 

I was supposed to marry someone too.

Lightning strikes and I watch smoking.

I think I’m starting to find a way out:

I’ll cry to my brother and he’ll listen,

the story becomes a hurt I can stand

the telling illuminates new angles 

like the crystals

my mother gave me for peace. 

I’ll forget the sound; his voice

crunching over me 

when I would warm and expand.

But I won’t tell you about any of this.

I’ll go up to my knees in turquoise waves,

exfoliate my feet in the sand.

My future sister will crack jokes

and I’ll salsa with my aunt.

I’ll tell you about all of that

and the sun slipping into the gulf, staining air

and sea and me scarlet

when I get home. 

---

Kate Miano is a writer based in New York. She has poetry published in Overheard Lit, Goat's Milk Magazine, and Fish Barrel Review, among others. She has work forthcoming in december magazine and Schuylkill Valley Journal. She is also a contributing writer at Thank You Very Much! She can be found on Instagram: @kate.c0m, Twitter: @_katemiano and by the water.

Edward D Miller

TANKA

---

before the bombast 

beyond the bluff of blurred edges 

the osprey’s chirrup

the whistle of blue lyme grass

the far sideswipes the close-by.

---

Edward D. Miller is a queer writer and educator. He works at the City University of New York. He has written "The Rock in the Middle of the Road" and "The Moment and the Sequence." He lives with his husband and a Chihuahua.

Charles Weld

DAY LABOR

---

June through August when I was nineteen and twenty,

I unloaded boxcars on a siding along the Genesee

River. Stacks of bagged lime, silica sand, 

and cement—each fifty-pounder grabbed by hand,

slid onto a knee, and horsed over to a pallet 

outside the door where a forklift had dropped it.

The agency I worked for paired kids 

like me with middle-aged men on the skids

who cashed and drank their paychecks at a bar

downstairs from the office. In the stale boxcar

air, sweat darkened their pants like pee, 

dripping from cuffs, and smelling like cheap Chablis. 

Bricks were the hardest to unload. With steel tongs,

we picked up ten at a time, but if the grip was wrong, 

they crashed in a pile on and around your feet.

One older guy began to cry, loose bricks and the heat 

that morning, making defeat, I think, feel complete.

---

Charles Weld’s poems have been collected in two chapbooks. A collection, Seringo, will be published later this year by Kelsay Books. He’s worked as an administrator for a non-profit agency that provides treatment for youth experiencing mental health challenges, and lives in upstate New York.

Anna Kushner

OSSUARY

---

In Havana, families unearth their dead, 

Taking their bones, after a few years, to a smaller container, 

then placing it in a niche, shoulder to shoulder with the bones of others. 

Everything else disintegrates.

My father tells me about the practice 

and does not find it odd or alarming 

when he recalls the family trips to the graveyard

to complete this necessary task of transference, 

when he recalls seeing his grandparents and other relatives reduced thus. 

In Miami, months and months into a pandemic that so many say has ended, 

after this virus has claimed 1 million dead, 

plus another I-don’t-know-how-many dead

from ancillary causes such as loneliness, grief, 

depression exacerbated by isolation

—I count my mother among this last group—

I sit with a friend to discuss the practice of disinterment.

I show him pictures of my paternal grandmother’s ossuary in Havana, 

a rectangular plaque small enough to frame, 

the size of a fire-proof box you’d use to store your passport 

and other important documents, 

like a naturalization certificate if you were born in a country like Cuba 

but now reside in the U.S. 

We wonder about burial shrouds 

and whether these disintegrate at the same rate as everything else, 

whether these are even used anymore, 

would you take it home and keep it if it’s all that is left 

besides the bones when the time comes? 

A week later, I visit my mother’s grave and think 

I am relieved I do not have to move or touch her bones, 

although the thought of never touching her again at all

is another kind of pain. 

---

Anna Kushner has published her poetry, essays, fiction, and creative nonfiction in The Acentos Review, Asymptote Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ep;phany, Newtown Literary, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has also published several book-length translations from Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

Angel Rosen

TARNISHED

---

I feel split,

dummy cracked open,

egg with runny yolk,

blotted hurriedly with

napkins, staining everything in

dandelion hues

before Church, of all things,

taking communion all-yellowed,

giving tithe all-yellowed

almost gold but never quite,

tarnishing the state of my affairs,

giving into a silver savior,

basking in my whereabouts,

falling from heaven or roof

into a pile of daffodils

just as yellow as me.

---

Angel Rosen (she/her) is a lesbian, poet, grief expert, a chronically online millennial and neurodivergent human being. She loves lemonade, The Dresden Dolls and sharing anecdotes. Her work can be found at angelrosen.com. You can find her on social media at @Axiopoeticus.