"I'd Feel More Like a Child If My Mother Were More Like a Mushroom" by Sara McNally

The neighbor’s porch light blinks on then off and
I cradle the space between me and my birth.
I don’t feel born. My mother, a silhouette.
Nothing I do can rectify that—oh well, oh well—

Daydreaming again of trees so green, foxes slinking
through hills—I am trying to look desire in the eye.
What I want in this morning light: a cherry red as blood
and halved. I want to pop the pit out with my thumb

like removing an eye from a socket. I want to wreck
a thing and stand over it. I want no one to see me
wanting anything. I keep rewatching this timelapse
where a whole forest gets overtaken by fungi,

plant matter broken down into black gunk like
oil slicks on the ocean. Amongst the rot, green
sprouts push through wet earth to sun themselves.
I love the fungi and their mycelia, their communication

net sending messages underground. A mushroom
is a romantic being. A mushroom knows its mother
and its mother and its mother—oh how
the ground aches beneath me.

I keep daydreaming of having a mother
somehow different. I need everything burnt
down and built back up. I can’t say that to
anyone. It’s all an ache in my pink mouth.
-
Sara McNally is a poet and artist living in Chicago. They have been an editor for Columbia Poetry Review and have also been published in Gulf Stream, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Sobotka Literary Magazine.

3 Poems by Chad Morgan

Nocturne in My Favorite Coat

Meanwhile, the moon’s bone white 
& waxing crescent—my God, it’s winking 
isn’t it? I do that too
on less moderate nights than this
& when my legs are bare 
against the encroaching
dimmet. I’m just 
cleaned up for work 
in the meantime. 
You laugh but you know 
I mean it. I laugh because  
I’m hardly joking:
in all my daydreams I am that lawless 
& gaudy, arriving everywhere feeling armed
& rich. Winking too. Just like the moon
I phase. Am full. Am winking. 
Am thumbnail, naturally. 
& so modern. 
When I put my legs up 
& dissociate there’s nothing
like it. The moon wishes.
I put on lipstick when I want 
to smoke a cigarette. Wink
if I want to. Really living.             
When the bills come due I’ll get ornery 
& radical. It’s not enough 
that I log on every day
& consume consume consume. 
It’s embarrassing.
How much I like buying things.
But who doesn’t want.
It’s midnight & I need 
more cigarettes so I wear my long coat
to the bodega. It’s my favorite. I flirt 
with the guy behind the counter
who’s too underpaid to notice.
He hasn’t got time for my nonsense.
I get it. On the street no one but the moon
can tell I’m just going home to smoke 
& put my legs up. At least I hope I look mysterious—
walking so fast & with such purpose
my coat billowing.

It Could Happen to You

The city is discouraging enough without the heatwaves
& parking tickets. Will you ever make it. Will you ever 
find work. What are the chances someone here  

has a gun. What are your roommates saying when 
you aren’t home. Do you care. Are you taking more 
than your share from the community garden. Has anyone 

noticed. Are your brothers safe. Will you die in a mass 
shooting. Does your shrink talk about you in the hypothetical 
to her friends. Would it bother you. Are you fooling

anyone. Suppressing the prickly suspicion that dreams 
are not of this time you go after them. Grind. Exfoliate. 
Pumice flaws from your skin until you are flawless. 

At least visibly. Floss, non-colloquially. Pay the parking 
tickets. Collect vinyl, like everyone is. Clean your toilet. 
Change your sheets. Console a friend whose dog 

has just died. Publish, but you are not fulfilled. Then, in a park 
pigeons scattered by children ruin a picture you’re trying to take 
of the sunset for a poet you follow on Twitter 

who is just as lonely as you are lonely. You’re mad at first, 
but after all, it is only a picture, just a sunset, & the children 
don’t know what they’ve done, nor the spooked pigeons.

Abeyance

Who knows what else we did.
Cleared inboxes, hung new curtains.
I in my smoke-blue apartment washed 
my face & contemplated empire. Still life 
with bad news & hair dye. Self portrait  
with mugwort & thistle. It was hard 
to make any progress. I ran the tap & wept
for my people. History rolled up
in the blunt or sneering in the doorway. 
Sanctimonious as an ex. Calling me
yellow. I was shrugged shoulders & cigarette ash 
flicked at the fireplace. (No fire.) Limpid 
nonchalance. You weren’t supposed to pay
attention. That was one of the rules.

-

Chad Morgan's poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Court Green, Hobart, and elsewhere. He has studied at Indiana University and Columbia College and lives in Chicago.

"bound up in earthly musings (against the world)" and "the ineffable tourniquet" by Evan Fusco

bound up in earthly musings (against the world)

there is a man wearing a mask, quite unreal
quite ethereal and quite radiating, beautiful denial of a face
i see him flying away as if from something homogenous and
there is the dog

groupings of seething and ride now for this

seedlings are springing from the dirt
dirt is displacing and i see real growth
deathly murmurings traversing great
mountains in the tilled earth

could i know?
can’t i know?
impossible feelings embedding
the mere possibility of possibility is in question

generating furrows and word combinations like [perfect
words will] somehow excavate(ing) a feeling that is easier denied
a life much sadder lies out across fields of sentences and impossible
grammatics; a whole mountain range of godforsaken whispers
and screams that sustain
but can what was said ever be written;
is the written always said?

it feels like these two modes are so goddamn antithetical
like there is what one wishes to enunciate
and there is what one can physically expel
from themselves as if like an abscess from the
body that accumulates around and you can’t quite
get a grip on your physical location anymore, [a general
abscession of the mode]

but there is a sign for route 66 that you can

see, possibly? a knowing in the seen, but still mirage

there is a word floating over your
shoulder and the nevada air feels stale,
and the air is still in chicago, but you could have sworn
in your heart of hearts that LA was in the periphery

and there are still seedlings
growing, but they stay seedlings
and you stand by the old river and there is a sun
and a moon at the same

time, why? why?
who is that over in the desert

there is a man wearing a mask made of bandages and frills
he (the sky and the man and the unknowing) is watching ever so
delicately over the seedlings
there is something ethereal about that and he is down in the dirt

and that is beautiful, and you are still scared, not because of him
or the seedling, but cause of all the signs of emptiness that kept cropping

up and you remember the loneliness and then the man is gone

and there are only
trees

there could only ever be
trees.

the ineffable tourniquet

thinking is coextensive with writing and nothing is quite
solidified in the mindspace and i wonder what

would be born from the white space between the words
like a guitar that won’t quite twang
or a body that doesn’t know how to weep
or a chair that just won’t sit

                        it’s a gross cloud that sits over this session
                     even though the session singer lost their voice
                      i expected some sweet song to be borne on the air
                        and i can’t be too sure that there isn’t, but i

                        sure can’t hear it, like there is a blockage
                         denying certain vibrational frequencies
                        certain textures that i want so desperately 
                                                                      to find

I couldn’t quite tell ya where these meanderings
are going mostly cause of the underneath hole that seems to 
have opened up swallowing god and writing

one time a man interrupted my conversation to tell me that my
writing had this quality of conveying the ineffable, which
by definition is impossible, but I still think about that

it’s like an itch at the back of my neck, telling you
about all the stuff that hovers just out of sight
always desiring, always desiring and yearning to be talked
but like the negative spirit it can only speak at the impossible frequency
that none of us, let alone me, can quite grasp and i think about
that kind of indescribable loneliness that comes from the lack
when one knows they can have no name and could never be written about

-

Evan Fusco is a producer of texts in all forms that they can be assume to become. Currently, their work circles around ways in which meaning is produced through participatory acts of reading and interpretation. They have a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Expanded Media from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Printmedia department. Currently they are working on a book about margins and marginalia as a constructive space for alternative modes of reading and have forthcoming essay in the artist Caitlin McCann’s In a Car, On a Road, Going to a Place and Other Form’s Counter-Signals 4: Identity is the Crisis.

"MK Ultralight Beam" by Selena Cotte

I stopped listening to anything but rap music,
all the rest reminds me of people I once knew 
in Florida, and then I start ruminating on the words
You don’t want to get caught up with a girl like me. 

There are steps between, of course, but this is always 
point Z, and then I can’t cool down. Sometimes 
I start panicking about things that I’ve heard people say before, like 
No one will care if you do not write, and I wish I could collage memories 

in any kind of tangible way that felt as good as 
the imagination itself. This is why we need limitations, by the way, 
because absolute freedom never feels as good as you think it will. 
The more power we have, the less we know what to do with it

or maybe that’s how I’ve learned to justify the paralysis.
I think I stopped playing Animal Crossing 
because the abilities they gave me felt too unnatural
and I fear a future with holodecks and seamless terraforming

because structure should be gatekept.
Leave the world building to Walt Disney,
Jesus Christ and his creators too. 
Not everyone is qualified to lead a cult

but we’re all building our own in Minecraft. 
Yes, I want to be one of the greats
like Kanye West before me.
I am a God and I fear him too.

Sometimes I cannot stop myself from thinking about words and 
ideas and new ways to complicate what was already complicated 
but I’m terrified of the marketing.
I could never be Don Draper.

I’m too contemporary, too big city abstract & stupid. 
And what a joke it all is. I love a good joke but not at this cost.
I hate the politics of it too. What happened to a good
ol’ fashioned eccentric? What about the supposed

bastions of free speech?
And my biggest hope of survival is to lean on my father? Insane. 
I should re-read The Bell Jar or Ariel. I should read more in general and delete 
Reddit off my phone.

-

Selena Cotte is a poet, journalist & shapeshifter living in Chicago by way of Orlando. Her poems are published or forthcoming in journals such as Peach Mag, HAD, Sad Girl Review, 3 Moon Magazine & others. She can be found online @selenacotte, wherever you think that may work.

Excerpt from "American Girl Doll" by Naomi Washer

America, I used to sit in my bedroom in the suburbs in high school listening to Allen Ginsberg’s “America” set to “Closing Time” by Tom Waits. I listened over and over as the music swelled and I felt an uprising in my chest, America. Do you know how lonely it is to feel an uprising in your chest in the suburbs, America? This was my poetry. It was the late 90s and the start of a new millennium—we didn’t want to hear any female voices yet, we weren’t uncovering the roots of our devastation. America, I am grown up now, cooking a 1950s recipe for Mexican Chicken, can you imagine how truly Mexican that recipe could be? America, I barely speak Spanish. America, I thought my heritage was Irish but it’s actually Scottish. America, white people in my generation don’t know a thing about their heritage but love to claim whatever could be theirs. America, I thought I was Russian-Romanian but my people are from Warsaw. We’re from a place near Loch Lomond, a place close to home. America, do you know that Poland tried to erase its devastation of its own Jews? America, I am troubled, and so are you. America, I had been in college for two months when the first black president was elected. Everyone ran drunken screaming happy through the streets. America, I used to call myself a-political, can you imagine? America, I was on a school trip in France when Bush declared war. It was the middle of the night in Paris, we were 12 year-old kids, we woke up to watch the speech on TV. France didn’t want to get involved in this mess, America. Can you blame them? It was confusing for us. We were 12 year-old kids watching our country declare war, far away from our families in America. But then we realized this meant the airports might close; we might not be able to get back home to you, America. That was confusing for us. We didn’t know how to feel about that, America. There were rumblings before we left for France. Most families didn’t let their kids go, America, but not my parents. My parents weren’t afraid, America, they wanted me to experience Real Culture, and Real Culture, America, always skirts the edge of danger. 
//
America, the whole idea of war didn’t seem like a very good idea. It wasn’t the best idea you’d ever had, America, but it is the idea you always seem most famous for.
//
America, the first bar I ever went to underage was McSorley’s. I was 18, they served only “light and dark beer,” I didn’t know which one I liked or how to order, it was Valentine’s Day in the East Village, I was sitting in McSorley’s, this formerly “Men Only” pub, do you know what that meant to me, America? To be sitting in McSorley’s when outside it was indeed New York and beautifully snowing? America, I bought my copy of A Coney Island of the Mind from a bookseller hidden in a corner of Boston. I read “I Am Waiting” sitting on a bench next to a homeless man while a white man dressed in Revolutionary garb led a tour of schoolchildren through the city. America, my favorite Girl Doll was Molly. She had long brown hair and glasses. She read books and she looked like me. My grandmother made us matching smock dresses. America, do you know how much cigarettes cost these days? Do you know there are people my age who can afford to feed themselves but never bother learning to cook? What would you say about this, America? America, I have lived in San Francisco, do you know what your children live like on those streets? Do you know how many still seek in California the American Dream? The American Dream in California is a multi-million dollar apartment with flimsy walls, America, it’s a shared front lawn the size of a stamp filled with brands of imported cactus.

America, I was born in the South and raised in New England, don’t know where I should be.
-
Naomi Washer is the author of Phantoms (dancing girl press, 2019) and the translator from the Spanish of Sebastián Jiménez Galindo’s Experimental Gardening Manual: create your own habitat in thirty-something simple steps(Toad Press, 2019). Other work has appeared in Court Green, Pithead Chapel, Asymptote, Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, and other journals. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Studio Faire and Chateau d’Orquevaux in France, and Columbia College Chicago where she earned her MFA in Nonfiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by The Guild Literary Complex. She lives in Chicago where she is the editor and publisher of Ghost Proposal.

"Every other summer our house would get hit by a tornado" by Joshua Bohnsack

Every other summer our house would get hit by a tornado
That would dip into the valley of my parents’ backyard.
The first time my sister was paranoid because she lived through one
But I shrugged it off until the closed windows swoll and the plate flew out of the closed
     microwave.
& it opened us up to what can go wrong in our world as the dog was sucked up from the deck
     and I watched it through my basement window and told my little brothers, Don’t look out
     there.
Their swing set was wrapped back to a tree and the trampoline floated down the
Mississippi
& it might still be there
I don’t know.

& they kept hitting.

& I went to Ireland
& didn’t hear from my family
But saw the pictures.
My mom wrote me
She had a bad feeling
& moved my records from her den the day before
The basketball hoop would have splintered the vinyl
Where it landed through the window
& I would have never came back.
-
Joshua Bohnsack is an MFA student at Northwestern University, a reader for TriQuarterly, and the managing editor for Curbside Splendor Publishing. He is the author of Shift Drink (Spork Press, forthcoming 2018) and Burnt Sienna (Throwback Books 2017). His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and others. He ran an ice cream shop in rural Illinois until he moved to Chicago. @joshuabohnsack

"Prayer Peaches" by Matthew DeMarco

     after Plath

All day walking in Austin, then peaches,
ice-dewed in a silver bucket.

Their flesh was sealed but soaked—
dense-haired, close-mouthed Ziploc,

unpierced. They sat piled across the street
beside a flushed and beaming persistent woman

who waved one wandlike arc of hand
toward the six of us, insistent.

Purple magic marker on the ramshackle
cardstock sign: FREE PEACHES! FREE PRAYERS!

There are peaches when it is hot
in Austin, preciously secured in private,

cold buckets, secret sweetness behind their seals
across the street. The woman wanted

to pray for us, I wanted a peach, and Erik
wanted to bow his dry sober shut mouth

in humble silence while her hand acquired
the whispered drying saltwater of his skin.

They were already bathed. So easy to slide sharp
flat tooth into fruit, render askew

ropes of slippery tissue from the waxy rind
of peel. So easy, with a blessing and sticky lips,

as sand salamander streaks congealed down my wrist,
to pitch a pernicious pit into the gutter of the bridge.

Pray the nectar that remained in ribbony veins
on the stubborn hard stone would secrete a scent

to provoke, at least, one in the millions
of the city’s nightly bats.
-
Matthew DeMarco is a writer, editor, and educator living in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. He is a recipient of the Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize, for which his work has appeared on Poets.org. His poems can also be found in Opossum and Columbia Poetry Review. Drop him a line at matthewpauldemarco@gmail.com.

"...and we won't give it a name-" by Dana Jerman

after Alan Watts

It begins how it begins-

your voice a broken gong.

A shuttle in the rotations of laughter.

An unhurried bliss- not even as cocksure
as the notion that poetry can't change
your life unless you read it.

Alone goes the magnificent candor
of that which is fathomed and not
fathomed.

Roads lost to the restless
evening and you- horseless
and no night class-
head too filled with your own spine.
A leaping rope.
A woven hookshot.
Each vertebrae a stanza too lonely. Too true.

Loose, see.
Sky, diamonds, city lights
to rearrange all your tonight faces.

Noir say noir.
Broken gong, say heart.
Blight's beauty song.

Rock and rhyme in the modern wilderness.

Vice and rage- a nowhere kind of freedom.
Strategy troubled by its own unwritten erotic.

Begin here.
-
A native of Western Pennsylvania, musician and writer Dana Jerman has been published multiple times in print in the US and abroad. By way of an artist statement, Dana likes to use writing as a way of re-appropriating memories to create an alternate history or a loose space for magic featuring primarily a configuration of the varied voices of spectators. Mostly though, she writes about love. Her chapbooks include Sins in Good Taste featuring poetry and drawing from Back To Print Publishing. And the self-published Briefly, The Heart. You can see more of her literature and photography on her blog, updated monthly: BLASTFORTUNE.com.