Kai Pretto

Last Poem for James

In an old knapsack I found
the first polaroid—you, shirtless with poetry scrawled
across your rib cage; me, smiling
with jasmine and daisies in my hair.
This is when we climbed trees and rode bicycles
and you juggled in the park.
When you left me old baseballs,
scraps of Margaret Atwood poems
kissing the seams.

We got in my beat up Chrysler and drove
across the country. We held each other
in front of burning farm houses,
helpless and overcome.

In our first house you brought me
twelve loaves of bread you pulled
from the dumpster on the corner.
You said: This is how I love you,
and littered our tables with found objects—
broken bottle caps and milk jugs and pieces of sheet metal
you wanted so desperately to make into art.
But you were no artist, and I was too frantic to see it,
so they just collected, bit by bit,
until we had nowhere to eat.

The roses were dead.
I put on my winter boots and stood
on the front walk. We screamed and screamed
about anarchy and broken bicycles
until the neighbors eventually grew tired and ignored us.

The snow piled up on the plum tree
and I knew you had to leave.

We were only mouthing words at each other, then,
silences we could fill with good intentions.
We were crafting spells without knowing

what they could do—without the proper incantations,
proper spell books.

We conjured ghosts.

---

Kai Pretto is an emerging genderqueer poet who lives in the wilds of Western Massachusetts. Their poetry vacillates between the deeply surreal and the uncomfortably grounded. They value a quirky sense of humor, thunderstorms, and good boots. They have poetry forthcoming in The Shore.

Catherine Weiss

Cutting Cards

there, in the shag-carpeted room above the garage,
drunk on warm sprite and the promise of thirteen,
we agree to play strip poker with the boys.

they outnumber us 2 to 1. this statistic plants sea-urchins
in the tide pool of my belly, each what-if bursting
with prickly, alien anticipation.

we agree to play as a team—
i refuse to strip & Grace doesn’t know the rules,
so i become the brain; she becomes the body.
this is the dichotomy of girl-hood, the familiar parsing
of ourselves to earn a seat at the table.

i am still hazy on the distinction
of being wanted vs. welcomed.
i do not yet know where i fit;
who i should pretend to be.

as the game grinds on, the boys grow bashful,
avert their eyes from Grace & her underwear.
i diligently study the flop, the turn, the river,
but all attention in the room
is focusing, blue-hot & brittle,
two inches above Grace's belly button.

she crosses her freckled arms & i do not look at her face.
there's something here i want for myself:
to press a finger-pad to this stovetop surface,
not despite the danger but because of it.

this is the moment i decide i too must yield
my layers until i am the one thing
in the room so desirable
everyone knows to look away.

---

Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist from Maine. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, perhappened, Birdcoat, Bodega, Counterclock, petrichor, HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Flypaper Lit. Catherine is the author of WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS and GRIEFCAKE. www.catherineweiss.com.

RC deWinter

fishing gear

if i thought
those gears in your heart
would ever shift
from neutral to forward
i would wait

but time grows short
the shadow of winter
stretches across my landscape
and those gears
have rusted in place

one last time i turn
but you are looking
in another direction
across an endless desert
of dead women

those sands stretch
across the landscape of your life
in the sculpted curves
of the cold flesh of memory
you prefer to living breathing warmth

i turn again and take myself
to the deserted winter dock
unpack my gear
and stand staring into
the steelgray sea

i have no wish to die unloved
so costumed in mackinaw
against the coming weather
i cast my net
into the receding tide

---

RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times/2017), The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Anthology (River Bend Bookshop Press, 12/2021) in print: Gargoyle Magazine, Genre Urban Arts, the minnesota review, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, The Ogham Stone, Variant Literature, York Literary Review among others & in many online publications.

@RCdeWinter

Emmy White

Fire

The masses
Did not want us,
Walls built higher
Than the stars themselves.

I saved flame for them,
Cartilage spilled
Across baking
Bricks.

I burnt
Populaces,
Matted shrubs,
Leaves, smouldered,
Fear ablaze against oak.

I want to see the impressions,
The marks of my avenge,
Bleached softly, carved,
A city soiled.
Eternal:

If your village
Does not want me,
I will burn it to the ground.

---

Emmy White is a creative writing graduate and news writing intern from Sydney, Australia. Her work has been published in Offspring Magazine, Fauxmoir magazine, ByMePoetry's 'Poetica II', and Train River Publishing's Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Winter 2020, and Spring 2021 anthologies. You can follow Emmy on instagram at @poeticallyordinary.

Terry Dawson

The Silver Dollar (Clinton, AZ 1971)

our first-ever ghost town but my hitchhiking buddy and I hadn’t received
a formal invitation but neither had the diamondbacks

painted boards on the boarded-up buildings warned of their ubiquitous presence
not anxious to make their acquaintance after hours of thumbing rides in the desert sun,

we're content to simply slum in the converted yellow school bus
“Grab a bunk,” invite the owners so I lend them my Blues Harp for the party

it echoes down the desolate street like a banshee
as our hippie hosts make their way to the only event in town--

one to which we along with the rattlers hadn't been asked to join
in the town's defunct and grubby saloon, The Silver Dollar

still, this Wild West icon charmed me when we shuffled past
the levered barroom doors creaking in the breeze beckoned

the draw to saunter through proved strong (spurs jangling in my beguiled mind)
but we, no more than ghosts, mere strangers in town, had no reason not to leave

to shake this mountain hamlet’s dust from our boots – to move on and hit trail east
to get back from whence we’d come: a college a seven-state tail-race away

“Some spring break eh?” I lamented, recounting the week “Wyatt” announced my jokester
roommate, “your new nickname, pard; best get used to it.”

---

Terry Dawson's book, "the after: poems only a planet could love" ( Poets Choice) came out in the spring of 2022. His poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in numerous publications -- in 2022: The Austin American Statesman, the Bangalore Review, Eco-Theo, Unlimited Literature and is forthcoming in Equinox 2023 He won a Wingless Dreamer Anthology prize, second place in the Christina Surgeyevna competition and was a finalist in both the Chase Going Woodhouse and Julia Darling poetry contests.

Ann Pedone

12:02

It’s taken me a really long
time to come to terms with the
fact that
the gender of my
anger is still
anyone’s best guess

For example

There’s the lemon candy I got at
Safeway that I was fully expecting
to be sweet, but then turned out
not to be sweet at all

The three people
ahead of me in line
who, one after the
other, all shouted

Art in the Age of the Metaverse!

The text I got
from Elaine of a
photo she
took of my ex-boyfriend
buying a twelve pack of

BOUNTY

This body is my lake

Was the only response I
could come up with

Sometimes I think my problem
The reason why I have so little
understanding of my

SELF

is that I text too much

I really should give it up

Just like people give up Jesus or soda
or game shows

I have never seen this sort of sex
part before. Could you please tell me
what this is, and exactly how it works?
What are you saying? You want
me to push here??

I mean, just the other day
true story
I stood right here in
this very bathroom
directly under this very
fluorescent light
and promised myself that I
was going to stop texting

And masturbating so much

And always writing about my cunt

And telling everyone I know that I
remember exactly what my mother and
father looked like naked

Like, I really should just clean
up my act, right?
Be more like Mary
Oliver or one of
those, I
mean, look at how many books
she sold and
even though I’ve
never read any of her stuff, but

I’m pretty sure there’s not
a single clitoris

anywhere

And then the right

I need to stop bleaching my hair!
I need to renew my subscription to the New York
Review of Books!
I need to finally make that trip to Istanbul!

Then the light started
to flicker and I got really scared

Had this panicked idea that
something
really ugly was about to come
up out of the drain

So I quickly put the
phone back in my pocket

Washed my hands
with hot
water and soap
Got into bed

Lodged the phone securely under
my left ear

and went back to sleep

---

Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring, 2023 Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (2022, Press 53), as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, 2River, Barrow Street, and New York Quarterly. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared as Best American Poetry’s “Pick of the Week”.

Kathryn Kimball

On the Airplaine

In front of me
in the gap between the seats
I saw a woman whose head
rested on a man's suit jacket.

I saw the woman's head turn
now in profile
with a large tear
coursing down her cheek.

I saw the man
adjust his seat,
pull out a white handkerchief
and dab a now contorted face.

I wondered, engrossed
in the drama that I knew
happens in the cracks,
what sadness had caused the tear

and if that hand
with its spotless linen
could help beyond
the present sorrow.

---

Kathryn Kimball grew up in the South, attended college in the West, and raised a family in the Northeast. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and an MFA in Poetry. For many years, she taught nineteenth-century British literature. Her work has appeared in Transference, Plume, The Galway Review, and elsewhere. Finishing Line Press published Crossings, a chapbook of poems, in 2021. A practitioner of yoga for twenty-five years, she lives with her husband in New York City.

Monique Reneé Harris

Cocoa

My friend knows I love creating digital graphic images of broken mannequins. As a Black woman with a disability, I love taking these images of broken bodies and finding beauty in them. So when my friend saw a group of junk art mannequins on display at a closed gas station, he photographed them and sent me the pictures. I superimposed the split head of a robot onto the scarred head of a wig mannequin, creating a steampunk image of beauty and modernity.

Monique Reneé Harris was born as an African American woman with spastic cerebral palsy. Her artwork has been featured in Pentimento Magazine, Penumbra Online, Aji Magazine, Hey, I’m Alive Magazine, The Raw Art Review, Defunkt Magazine, Spoonie Press Literary Journal, and her poetry-art book Strength and Tragedy: The Mystery of the Blue Lady. She lives in Emeryville, California.

Ryan Buynak

I Know how to Friday Night!

Listening to a Miles Davis record
and reading Rolling Stone magazine;
I know how to Friday night!

All those "old" people
who used to come in
to Alice's Tea Cup...
I'm their age now.

I found a receipt
from that time,
from the post office
on the Upper East Side.

Scratching my beard,
I craft this poem
in the kitchen,
without a fresh batch
of bullshit to inspire.

Just 3 jobs,
plus literature—
which isn't a job,
but a lifestyle
(or just a life,
but not just)—
and 3 calls,
plus gorgeous.

On the back of the receipt,
there is a note that just says
"The Yankees beat the Mariners,"
a complete unknown.

In the light,
I can see a series
of indentions on the paper,
as if I wrote on another
piece of paper
on top of this one.

This says
"I commute downtown,
juicin' it."

It's been years since
I woke up
and just laid in bed.
Maybe tomorrow I will try this.

It’s the new one
with boygenius on the cover;
I know how to Friday night!

---

Ryan Buynak has been described as "the most prolific poet you've never heard of." He is a pugilist, punching poetry into existence as a battle against death. He has a baker's dozen books under his belt, and that is why he walks funny. He is also the host of a fun, unique music podcast called Bothering the Band, in which he asks famous and emerging musicians super silly questions. You can find him by simply searching for Coyote Blood...

Mickey Revenaugh

Animales

For the two years before our mother’s death, we took turns caring for her, camped out one by one, two weeks at a time in the old house where we grew up. 

On my shifts, animals came. 

Perhaps they were summoned by the ghosts of all the pets buried in the back yard. The grizzled mutt called Puppy til the day he died at 15, the cat named Dog abandoned to Mom’s care when I went off to college. The canines and felines, hamsters and fish and a budgie or two. Star, Pickles, Entelechy, interred in graves marked by children, destined to get lost in the underworld and therefore return, unbidden and shifting in form.

First there were the rats. Still on East Coast time, I would awake in the predawn dark in the room that I once shared with my older sister – barely 8 x 10, how did we manage it? – and hear them in the walls, under the floor. Skittering joyfully, aimlessly, back and forth. Rat Olympics. 

As long as they stay on their side, I thought. And then I watched one run across the kitchen floor at 2am, ferrying a pecan from last year’s harvested stash.

I called the rat guy, who shrugged as he plugged a few holes, put out some traps and installed a paper plate on the utility line running across the backyard into the kitchen. “They’re very acrobatic in this neighborhood,” he said.

Then the birds came. Great flocks of parakeets rumored to have bred and multiplied from pet store purchases regretted and set free. Some days at dawn their song from the eucalyptus treetops was terrifying in its synchronized screech.

There were dogs on multiple occasions. The mother-and-son chihuahua pair that appeared on the back walk one morning and stayed until my older sister took her shift and sent them on to a good home with a single mom and multiple kids, all packed into a station wagon like we’d once been. The lost Lab who nestled on the front porch eating the kibble I raced over to 7-Eleven to buy when he first appeared, served in the 20-year-abandoned dog bowl recovered from under the sink. “Bagel used to like that one when he and your sister came to visit from up north,” mom said. One day a couple with a leash appeared at the end of the walk and the lost Lab was found, or at least reclaimed. I left the bowl out there for another few days just in case.

And then there was that 5am when the setting full moon filled the yard with pale light. I set up my office at the kitchen table right next to the screened window, my view the narrow corridor of dirt with combover crabgrass between the neighbor’s cinderblock wall and our siding. I sensed movement and turned to see a white creature moving close to the ground, slow and relentless, past my lookout. Shaped like a reptile with pointed snout, long narrow body, slowly switching tail: An albino alligator strayed from some primordial swamp beneath the sump pump? But no, there was fur, ruffling ever so slightly in the pre-dawn breeze. It moved silently past me, never looking anywhere but ahead, and disappeared into the darkness between the tumbledown side stairs and the gate, overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle, a tunnel for storing the rubbish bins between curbside pickups. The last I saw was the tip of white tail, marking time like a ghostly metronome.

I hesitated just long enough before opening the side door and peering through the gate that whatever it was had long disappeared.

“I don’t know, maybe a possum?” my brother said later. He still lived in this town but over where the new houses are, where there’s the occasional deer and plenty of snakes, all easily identified and avoided. 

“Seeing an opossum is a sign that you’re a survivor,” our mother called from her bed in the other room. She’d been exploring her indigenous roots since retirement, and only gave up her volunteer guide gig in the Native American room at the local museum when she broke her hip last year. “They eat rats.”

---

Mickey Revenaugh holds a dual-genre (fiction/non-fiction) MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in Vice, Cleaver, Chautauqua, and Catapult, among others. She has been a semi-finalist for the American Short Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Penelope Niven Award at the Center for Women Writers. Ms. Revenaugh lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Online: www.mickeyrevenaugh.com, @mickeyrevenaugh

David Guiden

Charging a Permanently Dead Battery

One percent
Been at one percent for the past twelve thousand fifty-three and a quarter days
A video will kill the phone and there are no more chargers left on this planet
A picture will have to do

This thing atop my strained neck that has matter but never mattered is quickly exhausting its last
breath
Thoughts will soon be laid to rest, feet under
Lord knows they’ve been overworked
Unsolved feelings will be released into sky like balloons for whatever occasion those rubber bags
trapping helium decided to dap the clouds for
This little mind of mine sky-dived for the last time on this trampoline called 1988 until after this

I had hoped that my third new iPhone of the year would have given me enough life to capture the
final countdown and the beginning of a life you can’t see
Happily ever after
In the words of Andre Three stacks what does forever ever forever ever look like
on that side

Here comes the spinning wheel of-

Can you do me favor? Swipe down and refresh this page. Did my life get uploaded or am I
already a distant memory in this algorithm?

---

David Guiden (He/Him/His) is an award-winning actor and writer based out of Chicago. Born and raised in Muncie, IN, he graduated with a BFA in Acting at Ball State University. His first-ever pieces were published in Passenger’s Journal in September 2022. Writing keeps him sane and constantly curious about how to function in this truly insane world. Catch him on Instagram @dlguiden

Linda Petrucelli

A Scent of Apples

I’m not afraid, only as expectant as snow in the air. 

“Come as soon as you can.”

I drive in low gear, skidding along the icy roads and turn up their driveway.

The first death I witnessed was my mother’s.  We assumed she’d be fine, even after the doctor said he’d need to remove another blockage and resection her colon. But after they wheeled her from recovery, mummy-like on the gurney, she never regained consciousness. For weeks, she lolled in her hospital bed, limbs ragdoll limp, eyes slit open, unseeing. Something went wrong on the operating table, but none of the doctors would say.

It is both suffocatingly hot and freezing inside the 1980 log home Don built with his own two hands. “I’m glad you’re here.” His wife embraces me.

I walk into the living room and stand next to his hospice-issued metal bed. Never say How are you? to a dying individual. It’s insensitive. Say It’s good to see you. Can I hold your hand? Is it all right to kiss you?

“Don, I’m here now—with Harriet.” I lay my palm on top of his hand.

Floating inside my nostrils, a feather of a smell. Don’s breath, still warm. He pants, and pushes a minuscule cloud from his mouth. I imagine the molecules of vapor waltzing as they leave his lips. Satellites of wonder. A cidery smell. Circling.

“Hyperalimentation,” the surgeon told us. “We’ll need a machine to help her eat and that will feed her nutrition through a tube we’ll put in her neck.” Within a week, she contracted an infection, an outcome from being on the feeding machine that the doctor had warned us about. The following day the infection turned deadly and the doctor told us that they would need to flood Mother’s system with antibiotics, despite the fact that she was allergic to penicillin. The day after that, she was placed on a ventilator.

In 1966 Yoko Ono balanced a Granny Smith atop a plexiglass stand in a London gallery. Art goers watched the apple age over time—wrinkle and weep at its ends—and smelled the acidy, tart, smell of things mistakenly kept in cages. It is not yet Don's smell.

His breath—like apples on the edge of fermentation. 

Outside the living room’s picture window, a thick crust of ice paralyzes a weeping cherry tree, its branches caught in the act of pointing to the snowy earth. The front door opens and with the shrieking wind come Don’s children.

The emotionless son never takes off his coat, says a few words and leaves quickly. The angry daughter resists Harriet’s hug, talks about her father in the past tense. 

How much can Don hear? I lean over him. Watch his chest move and his eyelids flicker.

My father finally intervened and asked the doctor to silence the wheezing ventilator. We kept vigil around her hospital bed, expecting death to immediately claim her. Her skin turned pale and sagged from her face, but she continued to breathe on her own, for a full ten minutes.

Molly, Don’s cat who’s run away, reappears. Yowls on the doorstep. Harriet says it’s a sign. The cat knows it’s almost time. And Harriet lets her in.  But the orange tabby doesn’t go to Don. Fleeing the inexpressible inhabiting the house, the cat shoots down the stone steps where Don keeps his workshop. 

On the wall above the basement steps hangs a weathered street sign. Intercourse, PA. Their secret on display. Don and Harriet had a never-mind-what-the-children-say second marriage. They used to meet in a Boyertown Park and neck in Don’s pickup. They told me the street sign was a real antique, the first time I came to their house for a neighborly dinner and they quietly explained how long Don had left to live. 

“Mother’s breathing began to slow, the time between her inhalations, lengthening. My father brought his forehead close, whispered in her ear, held her hand.

Then something happened to her. 

A pulling away and a lifting up from her face and body. Like heat waves.

I saw it. 

The aroma of apples seeps into me. Don reaches out his hand and then, exhausted by the effort, relaxes back into the pillow. Harriet climbs onto the hand-crank hospital bed, covering him with her body. 

Love and death are surely the closest any of us get to God. 

The grandfather clock sounds the time, but there is no time. There is nothing in the dark room except the cold and warmth alternating in layers, and the smell of apples, ripe, and bursting with the yeasty odor of something about to change.

---

Linda Petrucelli’s essays have been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. She’s lived and worked in Hawaii for the last twenty years. Her portfolio of publications is online at https://lindapetrucelli.com

Emma Winsor Wood

The Thrill of the Chase

I have always loved it. 

In preschool, I publicly proclaimed my love for John Waterfall before he’d said a word to me. 

In middle school (pre-email), I spent days drafting the perfect letter to mail—with a stamp and everything—to M., the tannest, richest, most popular girl in our grade. In it, I confessed how much I wanted to be friends with her and asked if we could maybe “have a playdate.” She took me aside in homeroom after she received it: “I got your letter. It was real good. And, yeah, we should hang out sometime.” We never did. But at least I had tried, would never have to wonder what if. 

In high school, after being twice rejected, I asked out the boy who ‘took’ me to prom. Third time’s the charm.

In college, at the tailgate for the Harvard/Yale football game, I ran into an old fling—we drunk-flirted, and eventually I asked if I could kiss him. “That would be so nice,” he said, “but actually I’m dating someone right now.” Oh well.

After college, at a holiday party, I somehow persuaded a man—a real man, he was eight years older than I was at the time—to give me, well, not his number, but his email address. The next day, finally pressing “send” on a carefully-crafted message asking him out for a drink, I could feel my heart beating into the soles of my feet. 

In grad school, I pursued a few men, who did not become my husband, while the man who would pursued me—but passively enough I could feel it had been my decision to date him when I finally capitulated. A few months later, I proposed.  

Growing up, I had elaborate daydreams in which my latest crush wooed and pursued me—and yet, even then, being pursued turned me off. I wanted to be the one in control, the one holding the reins. The subject, not the object. 

Whenever I’m called upon to give love-life advice, I always say something that amounts to—just say it, don’t beat around the bush, you’ll never know if you don’t ask. In theory, it is this final point—you’ll never know if you don’t ask—that historically prompted me to act (or text). I am always looking back and tormenting myself with what if? 

In practice, it is the physical thrill that brought me back, again and again: the sudden throb of pride in my own daring followed by a nervous shiver then the constant thrum of anticipation—a tingling that keeps me awake late and gets me up early, that makes the day newer, better than the one before, crisp as a sheet of shiny, blank fax paper. What will the answer be? The mind holds the question in one corner while going about its daily chores made undaily by its secret presence. That pleasurable pain of not-yet--knowing, of living in the space between yes and no, your question waiting, aquiver, in space. 

---

Emma Winsor Wood is the author of the poetry collection The Real World (BlazeVOX books, 2022) and the translator of A Failed Performance (Plays Inverse, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Fence, jubilat, DIAGRAM, The Colorado Review, and BOAAT, among others. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of California Santa Cruz.

Katie DeBonville

Lines

After my third drink I decide I will sleep with you if you ask.

My first two drinks are glasses of red wine, probably Malbec or Syrah, which are my go-to choices. They are comfortable yet sophisticated, known entities, perfect for a winter evening of conversation and catching up, which you and I meet to do a few times a year. 

My third drink – the one that leads to my undeclared declaration – is bourbon, which you order for me when I tell you I’ve never tried it.

Initially, I demur. A sip of your bourbon is fine, I don’t need another drink, I have to work in the morning and you have to drive home. Somehow, while I am outlining all my reasons for not trying bourbon, my own glass arrives at the bar. I don’t recall your ordering it when our server places it in front of me. It is decorated with a black cherry speared on a red plastic toothpick, and it – and you – dares me to take it on.

Challenge accepted.

There is, I find, a familiar quality to this libation, even though it is a new addition to my drink repertoire. No – that’s not entirely true. The liquor is foreign, so I sip cautiously while you talk – about your job, your children, your theories on everything from politics to literature to music. I sip and listen and conclude that you are what is familiar, and I know I will forever associate this taste with you, and so, by the transitive property of alcohol – if there is such a thing – bourbon, too, is familiar. 

That is when I decide that, should you ask, I will sleep with you – you who are simultaneously safe and dangerous, you who for years has made me laugh, you who flirts back with me as we debate and banter and teeter on the edge of an invisible line that we do not dare to cross.

This game we play – is it fun for you? I wonder but I don’t ask; I just assume it is, otherwise you wouldn’t keep engaging. It is for me. You look at me in a way that no one else does, in a way that would probably make me turn away if it were someone else, but it’s you, and so instead I’m pulled in. That safety and danger I mentioned? Both vie for my attention, attention I’m more than happy to give. You silently dare me to keep talking – that’s the danger – while you keep listening, and that’s the safety. The more I say, the less dangerous you seem, the more danger we could get into together. 

This is what I am thinking as I sip the bourbon.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the fireplace, and in the instant I don’t recognize myself in the crowd at the bar. The woman I see is attractive, worldly, with wavy hair just messy enough to look effortlessly good. Her blush is enhanced by the fire and the bourbon, her blue eyes – my blue eyes – by the grey of her cashmere sweater. I am surprised, happily so, to see that I look the way I feel. Confident. Carefree. Charming.

And you? You look charmed. I have seen this look on your face before. I like it. I like knowing that at this very moment, I am the reason it is there. 

You keep talking, and I ask you if you are happy. When you tell me you are, I believe you, because I’m happy too. You and I, we fulfill some need for each other. Maybe I remind you that you are still attractive, still exciting, still interesting. Maybe I represent a life that you don’t really want – not for more than a few hours at a bar every few months – but like knowing you could still have, if you so chose. Maybe I know this because that’s exactly what you do for me. 

The drinks are gone. In a few moments we will be as well. I will sleep with you if you ask, but you don’t. I’m not disappointed. Maybe I’m even relieved. 

We embrace and go out into the cold, you to your car and your children and your wife, me to my apartment and my writing, neither one of us looking back, both of us happy, both of us knowing that the line we once again didn’t cross is still very much there. 

---

Katie DeBonville is a writer and professional arts fundraiser who lives in Boston. Her works have been published in The LifeWrite Project’s The Corona Silver Linings Anthology, The Stonecoast Review, and Sad Girls Club literary blog. Katie is a January 2023 graduate of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. In addition to writing, her interests include going to concerts, reading, and spending time with friends.

Cassidy Fesmire

A Satin Covered Stomach

The bed beneath our bodies is begging
for the sheets back you cannot stop
pulling the sliver of satin shoved between your teeth
and I am much too awake to pretend I do not feel my spine
bending into the divorced wood of your parent’s bed frame

it is weird you love the past like
you are not alive in the present

I could remove every splinter and burn all the
sheets and the mattress still would only hold
you leaving me with nothing but the memory of
satin sheets I gave you when you told me your

mom never liked a bed not dressed in cotton
waiting for heavy hands to take her into
subjectivity she is a bed bred in violence
painted in poppies praying no one begins to
see the chilling internality you started
cutting holes in our sheets now poppies of cotton
cover the floor as the seeds slide across my toes

I feel it now what once was a flower sewn into
bedsheets is now the devil which sustains me I
take every flower every missing shoe on the
street every animal every piece of trash every
pothole and shove them all between my teeth
and tell you I finally swallowed our satin sheets.

---

Cassidy Fesmire is an undergraduate English writing major at Lipscomb University. Cassidy finds herself deeply concerned with the human experience and wishes to communicate her own lived experiences in a way that helps her audience feel less alone inside their souls. Cassidy craves to influence and impact the lives of those who are fighting the battles she continues to face each day, for she never was afforded the chance to find community inside her sufferings.

Fletch Fletcher

Confession #8

I chant Fuck Depression!
And I almost think I could.

It’s just the two of us alone in this bed
sharing skin beneath a dirty, black sheet.

Its hands touch me in all my most sensitive places,
wrapping me in itself like it needs me,

and I beg it love me
even as it whispers, hot and breathy, in my ear:

I won’t.
No one ever will.

---

Fletch Fletcher is a science teacher, a poet, a brother, a friend, and an observer of how all people connect to everything around them. He is the author of Existing Science (Assure Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Confessional (Finishing Line Press, 2023).

Zhi Dong

Express 2

Express 2

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Zhi Dong, an artist from China, graduated from the Oil Painting Department of China Academy of Art in 2017. She now studies Bildende Kunst of the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany. She is passionate about painting and creating, and is concerned with social issues. She had short internships in art museums and an elementary school and worked in related professions. https://www.instagram.com/dongzhi20/

William Fillmore

Dummy: Unloved and useless I sit rejected for all time.

My work is nostalgic for something lost and fantastic. I revere the traditions of object making and wallow in my passion for satirical confrontation. I make objects that satisfy both the haunting surrealistic inspiration of my boyhood spent watching cartoons and reading comic books and the optimistically fatalism of my present state of being as an artist and educator. My work sarcastically pushes back at the boundaries and pressures that I endure as a participant in and observer of American Culture.  

I made this work as a vigil to all of those times in my life where I failed not on accident but because I was a failure. In those moments I felt rejected not from society but from myself. In meditating on these experiences and in creating this sculpture, I found compassion for myself in those low moments, and for those around me when they are suffering from life.

---

William Fillmore is a surrealistic sculptor living in working in the Hudson Valley of New York. Working in multiple sculptural disciplines from ceramics, cast metal, and fabricated steel, William’s sculptural works feature the pain and beauty found in memories forgotten and discarded.

J.M.Wong

Holiday

The sea was steady and peaceful. I hate it.

Her moaning and his deep grunts created a beat for the tuneless top line of the squeaking bed. I tried to concentrate on the sound of lapping waves oozing onto the beach, but they faded into murmurs, overwhelmed by the slapping sound of two bodies colliding with one another.

The slapping and moaning stopped. He asked me whether I was alright. 

‘I’m fine.’

He leaned forward and his lips closed into mine.

I turned my head away from him and looked out of the window.

The slapping sound didn’t continue, nor did the moaning.

‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

***

I lay there on the king-size hotel bed with him and her. One of his arms wrapped around me; the other wrapped around her. 

I looked out of the window. The quietness of the dark sea bothered me. 

I lifted his arm off me and slid out of bed. 

I opened the door towards the balcony and walked out of the room. 

The waves slithered snake-like, whispering sweet nothings that failed to ease the rumbling inside my head.

‘Are you okay?’ I heard his voice. 

I inhaled a lungful of salt-laced air.

‘I’m fine. It’s just a bit stuffy in there.’

He came to my side, the heat of his naked body radiating against my shoulder.

‘Just go back to bed. I will be there in a minute.’

I kept my eyes straight toward the dark and quiet sea.

He refused to leave me alone.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked again.

‘I’m fine. Don’t worry.’

His legs and bare feet stayed put, shivering through the tickles of the breeze.

I leaned forward against the railings of the balcony. He stepped towards me and gripped my shoulder with his huge hand, his fingers biting into my skin.

 I pushed his hand away and rubbed at the reddened spot that bore the shape of his fingers. 

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to do it.’ 

I finally looked up and into his almond-coloured eyes where only the reflection of my face was seen among them, and no one else…I sighed. 

‘Okay…Let’s go to bed.’ 

An expression of relief spread across his face after I said that.

I walked back to the bed where he climbed in and she was sound asleep, wheezing.

It’s too quiet.

***

I could hear the whistle and pop of the radiator. The shuffling sound of someone’s feet. The occasional murmur drifted from somewhere up ahead. And that was it. The room we were in had too much space and few sounds to fill it. So, I picked up my AirPods and my phone from the bedside table. 

I opened the Apple Music app and my fingers tapped on the keyboard: O-R-C-H-E-S-T-R-A  (space) P-L-A-Y-L-I-S-T 

I pressed the play button. The words Jenkins’ Concerto Grosso for Strings “Palladio” appeared on the screen, and the deep, syncopated sound of a cello flooded my ears.  

The violas weaved their way in, quicker in tempo, when I slid the key card from the bedside table into my trousers’ pocket and headed towards my shoes.

‘Why are you not coming to bed?’ he said.

I turned up the volume so that the harsh, high-pitched sound of the violins coming in could be more audible.

‘Just wanna go out for a walk. Don’t worry. Just go back to sleep.’ 

I saw his lips moving but the sound they made was indistinguishable from the music, so his words faded into the dim light of the room. 

‘I’m fine. Don’t worry.’ 

I opened the door and left. 

***

An intense tune was playing as I marched down the stairs. Each of my steps was accompanied by a short and clean glide of the bow across the strings of a cello. I felt like I was part of Scottie’s nightmare in Vertigo, confused by the red flashing lights and my mind falling into the huge black-and-white vortex. I reached the hotel lobby right when the orchestral piece ended with a wistful violin solo.

There was no one in the lobby except an old lady in a formal dress, laying on a sofa, fast asleep.

I sat down on an armchair next to the hotel’s restaurant where he had made another reservation for a table of three. A memory floating to the surface of my head as airy notes blew out of a flute. Cécile Chaminade's Flute Concertino in D major, Op. 107 was the name shown on the screen.

Three of us, putting down our utensils simultaneously and directing our heads towards the orange sky, had discussed what we thought of the clouds during dinner. The shape, the animals or the objects they resembled. Three of us, doing something that was supposed to stay between the two of us, him and me.

‘There you are.’ A male voice slipped through the flute's brief absence and the violins' soft plucking in the background. 

An old man in his black suit kissed the old lady on her forehead to wake her up. He extended both of his arms, pulling her up gently from the sofa. And the two of them, clinging closely to one another, paced towards the hotel’s exit where a taxi was waiting for them. I kept my gaze on the old couple, the tenderness of the tune in my ears echoing the beautiful scene. The sound of the flute was like a bird tweeting, in a rather excitable staccato, until it got interrupted by a loud buzz and a WhatsApp audio call request from him. 

I heard footsteps above me and looked up to find him coming down the stairs.

It’s too quiet here.

I quickly moved my thumb from right to left to stop my phone from buzzing and to allow the music to resume. Then, I stood up and moved towards the exit of the hotel. 

***

There were no city noises. No engine sounds of cars zooming by. No police sirens chasing after. No pop music blasting in nightclubs and pubs. No chattering, shouting and gagging sounds of drunken people. Just me…and him, who came running after me, on the vast empty brick road next to a calm sea.

The words William Tell: Overture popped on my mobile screen. A minor key melody wormed its way into my head as I paced along the brick road. 

The first movement of the piece was in a moderate tempo, with the cellos delivering the top line and the basses echoing the melody like its shadow. The third time the basses joined in was the moment he caught up with me. I kept my head down and walked on, watching his shadow follow me. 

The timpani would occasionally arise, sounding like a thunder rumble, and whenever they did, I halted my footsteps for a second and glanced back at him. And afterwards, I would continue to walk again. 

The opening bars of the second movement floated up into the hushed air. Like flies buzzing in my ear, disappearing when I tried to hit them and reappearing when I thought they were gone. 

‘It’s like a dream come true for me. To have both of you in my arms.’ he spoke to break the awkward silence between us. ‘My two girls…’ 

The timpani chimed in when he said,  ‘My two girls’. It sounded like a dog’s growl. There was a gradual increase in the loudness and intensity that was supported by bass drums, bassoons, trombones and horns as he continued to speak. 

‘That’s what I’ve always wanted,’ he said.

The tempo of the music was picking up.

‘To be in a polyamorous relationship,’ he said.

The growls eventually turned into barks.

I climbed up a concrete ledge along the road when the violins frantically sawed away at their strings, sounding like nails screeching on a chalkboard.

‘I was scared you wouldn’t accept this part of me so I lied and didn’t tell you about her...and the other girls.’ he said.

The sound of the drums was thumping. The bass was pounding. A volcano had erupted and a storm had churned through my ears as I looked down at him and grinned.

‘It’s fine.’

He appeared so tiny and fragile from this new perspective. Perhaps, this was how he viewed me all along. From high above there, looking down at me, this tiny, fragile girl whom he could easily manipulate and persuade.

He didn’t respond right away. He looked up at me with sorrowful eyes and was in omniscient silence for a certain amount of time during which the third movement of the piece crept in. It opened with a slow but cheerful melody played by a flute and later supported by clarinets and bassoons. It sounded as if rain was softly tap-dancing on the roof of a garden shed which inspired me to skip backwards on the concrete ledge. My heart synchronised with the steady and peaceful sea for the first time since arriving there. It’s fine…it’s fine…I’m fine…

‘You have been so calm since this afternoon.’ He finally found his voice back when I reached the end of the concrete ledge.  ‘And she was such a drama queen, crying and complaining.’

The trumpets announced their entrance after he uttered the term, ‘drama queen’. The tempo of the music accelerated again as it moved towards the last movement of the piece.

 A familiar tune rushed into my ears. A tune constantly playing during horse races.

‘But now you are the one being so dramatic!’ He raised his voice a bit. ‘Coming out here in the middle of the night. Refusing to go back…’

The rhythmic beating of the timpani reverberated in my ears after he had uttered the word ‘dramatic’, signalling the start of the horse race.

‘Why? I thought you were okay with this, okay with her being here with us!’ His voice winded through the percussion.

The lower strings and the timpani played in unison, urging my heartbeat to catch up with the horses running through my brain.

‘She said she could leave if you feel uncomfortable. She said she could take a taxi. She said…’

The sounds of a horse galloping intensified by the clashing of the cymbals whenever he repeated ‘She said’.  And 8 times that the cymbals had clashed against each other…

‘Stop being passive-aggressive! I’m tired and cold!’ he said. ‘You agreed to it! And that’s why she came!’

‘I agreed because…’

The music was reaching its climax…William Tell: Overture was near its end! 

‘Because of what?’ he asked.

The finishing line was right before the horses’ eyes! 

‘BECAUSE- ’All of a sudden, ‘Biu…’, my AirPods ran out of battery, cutting the final, defiant chord.

‘Please…I don’t want to lose you…’ I heard his soft mumble.

My shoulders slumped and I exhaled a long breath before I outstretched my arms, wrapping both of them around his waist and leaning my head against his chest. The rapid pounding of a heartbeat. Sounding like two mallets hitting either side of a bass drum. The scene where he and I were embracing tightly under snow last December rushed in, reminding me how I fell for him in the first place.

‘It’s fine. Let’s go back.’

***

‘How are you feeling? Do you want me to leave? I can leave.’ I heard her voice the moment I stepped into the room.

‘It’s fine. Please stay. It’s too late to leave now.’ I answered. The tone of my voice was like the sea, steady and peaceful.

***

I was back on the bed with him…and her. 

He turned towards me, wrapping both arms around me, pulling me close against his chest, as if I would slip away from his grasp at any moment.

‘Don’t leave me.’ he whispered into my ears. 

‘I can’t.’

I shut my eyes, clinging onto both of his arms, imagining that only he and I were on that bed, no one else, and she was never there. 

The sea remained steady and peaceful. I’m fine…I’m fine…I’m fine…

---

J.M.Wong is a writer from Hong Kong currently based in the UK, with a M.A. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her works were published in The Brooklyn Review and the Hong Kong Writer's Circle Anthology; and she won the Most Creative Award for Hong Kong Top Story 2021. She also self-published a fantasy novel called 'Under Her Cursed Scythe" in 2018. Her social media handle: @j.m.wong (Instagram)

Liz Darrell

Long Live the Queens

“Pulling from the experiences I’ve gathered in my nigh quarter century spent alive, I aim to investigate the worlds within and around me through camp, sarcasm, and humor. For “Long Live The Queens," that meant taking a critical look at how many of history's icons and heros are illustrated and remembered, versus how queer icons are. The piece is a retelling of Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.” The original painting is a highly dramatized depiction of Napoleon crossing through the Great St Bernard Pass. In this piece, Napoleon is replaced with RuPaul Andre Charles. RuPaul can be credited with popularizing drag queens and drag culture and being a key player in establishing it as it is today.”

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Liz Darrell a multidisciplinary artist born and based in New York City. A lot of the darkness faced throughout life targets the deepest parts of ourselves, and to her, many of the deepest parts of herself are bound to her childhood. So, she’s become interested in exploring adult concepts through a playful lens. Instagram: @lizdarrellart website: lizdarrellart.com