"This Time, Time Is the Esophagus Full of a Dark Light" and "Shed" by Adam Edelman

This Time, Time Is the Esophagus Full of a Dark Light

I believe in irreparable misplacement
and the eternal presence of unnecessary wires.

A seven-season show about a rotting tree stump.

I want to be so versatile, strangers invite me
into their kitchen. Make me new
with all the usual accouterments, the gorgeous machine sulks.  

As I step into the hollow of expensive permanence,
my mind clears and glitters like a pool; love and time
throw down a rope and say climb.  

I give you the remembrance of secret places, the green animal
of sleet falling up through a midnight’s untraceable gloom.

Why does stuff happen? I feel the shifting immense
gyres, their influence on the maze of leaky branches,

first gulp of hot noodle soup. I know there’s an afterlife
because I was there during the feast of particulars
sipping afternoon whisky, I know not a lot 

else: a lighthouse is in operation, people
are transmitters, there’s a beaming tree

in a crater on the moon.

Shed

I uncovered a burgundy folder
marked Big Hurry behind a false panel
in the armoire. When I opened it up,
you guessed the contents correctly
from across the room. I laid the folder
on the nightstand and started reading
the newsfeed. Momentum was building
for a rail strike when suddenly
a business card slipped from the folder
and came to a rest on the carpet beside
the bed. On the back of the card facing
the ceiling was written the words false
positives lightly in pencil, in quotation
marks, with aggressive cursive handwriting.
I’d had just about enough of these hidden
messages from nowhere. I went downstairs
to consult with a gallon of milk. 115 Z6
CSI—I found this written on the cap’s
underside when I went to pour a glass.
Sunny September morning, feeling terrible,
I decided to go back to bed, but couldn’t
bring myself to climb back up the steps.
Some close friends stopped by thankfully,
but didn’t stick around long; they
had the wrong house. I puzzled
about what to do next. An Astro van
backfired as it scurried up the avenue.
The driver’s seat was unoccupied.
The license plate read, shed.
I’d been recently inspired to build
a shed, but had yet to start drawing
up plans. I’m content, for now,
to imagine myself lying on the metal
floor of the just completed shed,
just staring at the ceiling as the light
scribbles fade into the ridges’
plush textures and something else
that wounds even deeper than that
from inner cracks down the drain
or wherever one might still grow
unrecoverable.

-

Adam Edelman’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Fugue, Forklift, Ohio, decomP, Bridge, DeLuge, Barnhouse, and The Raw Art Review. His chapbook, 'It's Becoming A Lot More Difficult to Feel Unchanged' won the 2020 UnCollected Press Chapbook Prize. He holds an MFA in poetry from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He teaches at Berea College.

"Twee and Cringe" and "Why Does Sweater" by Emily Bark Brown

Twee and Cringe

i was told i was smart so often as a child i grew to believe it

and i could hide faults on my thinking 

emotionally flayed

the radiator sounded like breathing

beneath zoe’s heated blanket

i couldn’t get over motion smoothing

my voice modulated

i didn’t subject the room

snow on the ground

snowflake patterning on k’s car windows

i avoided love all weekend

Why Does Sweater

make you think of a garment and not a person trapped in heat?

something about me is so connecticut

sustained attention 

photo angelic

love does have a shadow

-

Emily Bark Brown is a poet from Alabama. Along with Zoe Tuck they edit Hot Pink Magazine at hotpinkmag.com.

"We All Want to Be Remembered as Worthwhile" and "The Only Ontologies I Remember are the Ones in Which We Lose Everything" by Lucas Peel

We All Want to Be Remembered as Worthwhile

Though history can be a fickle scorekeeper.
A general recounting: first there was tree
and then feather and ever since screaming.
We could name the sound but then it would belong
to us. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Who’s counting? I remember, along the way,
stonelung, snakesong: red touches yellow,
you’re a dead fellow. May we all be happy Jacks.
Deadly greens. An eclipse of grasshoppers.
May all that we build be asbestos-free but equally
flame-retardant. Early Renaissance painters
discovered that painting faces with a green 
undercoat gave them a more realistic hue.
The only suitable exit strategies are faith
or hoarding. In this future the horizon will be
remembered as a patina of stars. Appliance
graveyard. The cost of convenience is polystyrene,
chronic gout, pale complexion, loss of teeth.
There is much that we do not know about forever
chemicals. Like how to alchemize history 
from poison and apology. If green pigments
are not sealed with a binding agent, they will
slowly leach a dose of concentrated arsenic
gas throughout their lifetime.
Are we running low on ears? Here, take this:
My blue, chunky flowers. Mailman’s 
unsatisfactory news. All distance is marred by
greenery. Pantone’s toxic cocktail.
How are we to see if not by overcoming
blindness? If you as me, the greatest tragedy
is that we still dance to a song but no one
can remember what it means. If you were to
believe the television, it is that all the world’s 
windows are broken, and thus useless
for self-reflection. Lightfast, this stubborn
opacity. We speculate more than we believe.
We convince ourselves that this is not prayer
painting the canopy of our skulls. Let us not 
curse the trees for their obstruction. One day
we will write about the forest. 
Let it be, again, soon.

The Only Ontologies I Remember are the Ones in Which We Lose Everything

Let me speak to the Meaning Police.
Big light ball:  Eureka! Closed loop.
A thousand tiny suns. We must get
the externalities under control.
On the Nth morning, we let there be
an understanding of light.
How generous. Semantics;
our silken co-conspirators.
We missed the Words Convention.
Let the sentences run on so long
I forgot what it means.  Hbu?
Any seedlings sprout between your teeth?
Fresh carcass splayed like a tumor
on the mind’s interstate? A murder
of Myna birds and their wicked crow
hop. Proclivity for roadkill.
Sinister, how to add weight
via wet blanket. Warm embrace.
All endings result in arbitration.
Ask a phoenix: featherfriend,
pigeon baby. History undervalues
the importance of tiny hands,
views from high places. The impact
velocity of various forms of currency. 
Daily we manufacture small miracles,
shrink-wrap every slain sun
for ease of transport. We are quick
to refer to the onion by its dirt
rather than its tenderness.
No one like a sweet stink; angel.
Their arrogant glow. Bitter leaf.
Tail-eater. All futures are dependent
on access to protein. We mortgage
our children for refractive surfaces.
Our most sacred geometry is presence,
not pattern. The extant politics
of a shorebreak: for a moment,
the earth will not be lonely.
For a long time it will be.

-

Lucas Peel is a big dumb baldie. He is sorry for everything.

"fantasies about cowboys" and "that's the thing about queerness and sinkholes" by Lemmy Ya'akova

fantasies about cowboys

the meal of cruelty this jury has
served me. this horse, horned for ready 

me in this arena. has the world made
me imposter? has it taken my property

of grace? it’s fine if this is my canvas—i will
paint it hunting lung in my denial of their feast.

that’s the thing about queerness and sinkholes

they forgive. they give.
the things inside bend
toward the light or learn
to live without it,
drink from many lakes.
a sinkhole half a world away
revealed heaven on earth.
it has been drinking, they say,
from rivers between the beds
of rock, soaking up slivers of sun
coming through the fractured
surface. the irony of heaven
underground, hidden
is not lost on me.

-

Lemmy Ya'akova is an advocate for y2k low culture, a film photographer, a popcorn enthusiast and a cat parent to their son, Moose. Their work is forthcoming in SAND Journal and Sobotka Lit Mag and can be found in Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Hooligan Magazine and more. You can keep up with their jokes on twitter @lem_jamin, their life on instagram @ashkenazi_yew and read their work here: https://linktr.ee/lem_jamin.

"Hot Couch" by Brett Belcastro

I was completely lost!
The weirdos following me with cameras—
they broke up,
and then I could only talk to phone scammers.

Something they learned is that I’m not a good cook—
I may not want much for myself
but I want a meal,
and I can no longer eat glitter!

I had spent everything on porch-bomb traps,
and all the drones would deliver were bombs
and 3d printers to print bombs
which exploded as soon as I’d print them, of course.
that was sort of embarrassing

But at least with their cameras
they would catch the moment that I,
waking up on a too-hot couch
in their unfinished basement
worked up the courage to cut through that haze
and rasp: “I’ve had enough. Come to my porch
and I promise, no more bombs. All I want
is for us to gather and show some love.”
That was in the golden age of YouTube,
don’t ask me when. Probably 2008.
It gave me chills.

-

Brett Belcastro lives with his partner and an enormous wolf-dog. His work has appeared in the Cobalt Review, Platform Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.

"holding a grudge for years bc i’m wifey" by Meagan Dermody

for k, part 1

I know we are situated in this hour
stretching in all directions to every hour
at each moment        I see us
and do not grieve like a dog I want you to fix
your attention here on me which is too much 
I am not careful and I cannot suffer getting
what I ask for I am growing 
a little fungus of revenge 
and cannot wait to eat it 
and let it rock through me and send me swaying
out there to where I cannot speak
or even salivate   like a dog in high desert sun
I am dry and soft and slow
you are giving me freckles you’re burning me

-

Meagan Dermody is a Southern transplant writing poetry in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in zines including Emily Taylor Center's FEMINIST FRIGHT FEST 2021 zine and RABBIT, as well as literary magazines like PWATEM and Awkward Mermaid. A third-year MFA student at the University of Kansas, Meagan's work engages with trauma, ecosomatics, and the divine/grotesque/divine. She prides herself on being fun at parties and in the line at the grocery store, and is working hard to keep her aloe plant alive.

"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.

3 Poems by Ben Still

Lump Sum
Ocala, Florida, United States, 1982

fifteen horse
killings ordered

in from out of town
the specialists favoring

two strands of wire
clipped and a wall socket

an untimeliness
taken to be colic

or accidental knock-knee
the vet will take care of

a stable can                 be burned
to the ground

a dad never asks              his daughter
can you forgive me

Fuselage #3 (creation)
Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico, United States, 1945

absent            fuel tank
accidental          blaze
abandoned         mammal
                            detonation

the coal mine      its own canary

*

a thousand
obviousnesses

come down kilotons
scorching the earth

searing a permanent
crime scene

*

in the beginning we were
suspended in a jar

sought after for years
in one war or another

grew up to speak
yellowcake the atom

grasped at mastered
and split at its middle

our moral afflictions 
physical by dint by virtue

pounding on the table
red knuckle

an imprint etched in light  
all across the city

red carpet // purple dogheart
Argonne, France, 1918

lore abiding a lost leg
a pigeon conscripted
with one eye, decorated

at the awards for animal bravery

for a flight through trees
and friendly fire, she is
forestworthy, seen off by the general 

we dreamed up tractable war
games, rescue dogs 

words
to make
a man
a mess

military parade
pantomimic
our upstart
police horse

*

taxidermy our conduct 
closed at the limits of life underfed
the meaning we’re starving for

our likeness will be known
by the light that peels our lids back

pet photo ops, we are developing
the film, keeping up with the history
we know what’s coming and deserve it

-
Ben Still is a PhD candidate at New York University, a 2019 UnionDocs fellow, and a founding editor of the collage journal ctrl + v. He has directed, produced, and edited films for the Visible Poetry Project. His poetry has appeared in Virga Magazine, Salamander Magazine, and GASHER Journal.

"It's All Around Germantown" by Keegan Cook Finberg

Rustic weathered chestnut and cream
Brownchickenbrowncow
He passed me in the intersection 
and said “hey” I returned the “hey”
and kept walking.

high volume of criminal activity
almond milk a dollar cheaper
non residents slipping in,
me, working weekends.
-
Keegan Cook Finberg is a poet and a scholar of literature. Her poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, Prelude Magazine, Rove, Two Serious Ladies, Bone Bouquet and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in Textual Practice and Canada and Beyond, and her public scholarship has appeared in Jacket2, The Rumpus, The Believerand Southern Indiana Review.

3 Poems by Kelly Dolejsi

The Lost Jockey

He wrote rattleboned, he wrote after soup,
he wrote in his banker’s suit and turpentine
that we are capable of liking what we like,
spilling out of bed each day like chocolate milk
or pipes or lenticular clouds or madonnas
and the others, the incapables, sleeping
and not liking to sleep but also he put them
in the dainty branches, a see-through forest
of glass trees, glass squirrels, a collector’s
dream, somebody’s dream. On his horse
in his gray stripes and painted-on hat he wrote
prose to unborn granddaughters, post-scripts
to Mary the blue sea slug, Chris her brother,
every shard in the whole trampled scene.

The Commuter

Thoughts continue toward yesterday,
always giving way to sameness as gnats 
do, as newly cut blades of front lawns. 
Again, I wonder how to head home when 
home multiplies, when I scatter my wish 
on too many stars. I head home. It is night, 
and so warm I could sleep on a branch. 
I listen to steady light rain on the shell
of a wandering turtle that every few years
I return to the creek. I feel both ankles
in the familiar broken ice at the bottom, 
and hear another girl breathing next to me 
in the snow. I gallop away, sure that I’m a horse 
and that I’ll never think about this day again. 

Vigilance

Midnight, children quiet as painting
of saints in a long hallway that no one
has ever entered. Midnight, our bed
like a long gray whale, its belly pressed
like one tine of a rake into the zen garden
of the seafloor. Midnight, your hand
on my leg like a major seventh minus
the third and the fifth. Midnight, is this
what it’s like to be immortal? Thing after
indigestible thing, each one praying
silently and yet I hear them all. Midnight,
and yet day comes — I wake to see a deer
in the backyard, and I wonder how what
we grow could possibly keep him alive.
-
Kelly Dolejsi’s work has been published in many literary journals, including Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, Broken Ribbon, The Hunger, West Texas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Junto, Gravel, Dirty Paws, The Hungry Chimera, Joey and the Black Boots, and The Disconnect. Her poem “Loyalty” was nominated for the Best of the Net, and her contribution to September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, her chapbook, That Second Starling, was published by Desert Willow Press in 2018.

"I Know How to Buy Draino Like I Know To Always Carry Tissues" by Alain Ginsberg

Mom cries in the car / makes a flood out of a leaking faucet / clogs the faucet
with my hair /
my mom buys draino a lot

mom seeps down the throat of herself
trying to work / correctly / looking for the manual
to turn off all of these damaged pipes

when I came out to mom it was in the car
and the rain seeped in through a hole in the window or
the momentum of a turn whipped / one of her tears
across my face so it would make me cry too / or, clog my mouth
with hair, fill my drainthroat with paper mache,
make my mother buy draino again

and there has always been something viscous filming the back
of my throat / watching the pipes dry up / watching the grime
strip itself down the whole of me / sit passenger seat confessional
and look for salvation / to run like water

I live in cars full of tears or / the heat of a chassis feels
like the heart beat of my family or /
I cry the most in the car / when I’m asleep / when the motion
takes me and drains my bones of water.

I clog the faucets of my homes with hair
and buy draino and sleep in the warmest places
to pretend that I am still worthy of being held.
-
Alain Ginsberg is an agender writer and performer from Baltimore City whose work focuses on narratives of gender, sexuality, and mental health and the ways in which trauma informs, or skews them. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming on Shabby Doll House, Rogue Agent, decomP, and elsewhere. Outside of writing they tour the country performing in concerts, slams, living rooms, and caverns. They are a taurus. 
facebook.com/ginsbergbutnotginsberg
twitter.com/anotherginsberg
anotherginsberg.bandcamp.com

"Real Life with Science" by C.J. Miles

I have loved so many things my heart needs a nap.
Are you now or have you ever been aroused
By a Coldstone Creamery?
I Google Earth-ed Google Earth. 
My computer had a nervous breakdown.
I told it I understood in the present tense.
See, the bus I'm on can't go under 50 mph
Or it'll explode. Kaboom is a noise
I never want to hear. It sounds
Exactly as it’s spelled. That’s science,
Like taking a mosquito fossilized
In that yellow goo and making a
Lizard older than Jesus that can blind
Newman before eating him whole.
If we ever get off this bus I’m going
To dirty talk my dirty talk. I’m going
To make a sandwich and eat
All of it, even the crusts.
I love what comes from us.
Being tied up can be fun unless tar
Is being poured down your throat
Or Donald Trump tweets
The nuclear codes. We have to stay
A whisper, they're videotaping us,
They being the moon and the flag
We stuck on there, so we have to hush
The vowels of our mid-moans,
Even in the dark, even when we reach
The tip of the highway and there’s
Nothing left but what follows
Kaboom, the longest description
Of what comes from the meeting of lips.
-
C.J. Miles lives in Iowa with his wife. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Forage, Moonglasses Magazine, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and Jazz Cigarette, among others.

"Washington" by Ivan Doerschuk

it was cold come morning
along Raging River
when I came up off the ground
me and the dog
we walked up the hill
and through the meadows
looking for you
but we could not find
the way
it was in
the sun-streaked current
that I saw
that I knew
what had once passed
before your eyes
and it was more
than any ledger in stone
could tell
• •
*for Nicholas Ridout

-
Ivan Doerschuk wrote this poem. This piece is part of a larger collection that was written during a period of itinerant travel in the Pacific Northwest during the summer of 2015. This poem in particular was written after attempting to find the grave of a friend on his family's property outside of Issaquah, Washington.

"Non Pearl Body" and "Quilting" by Nathan Wade Carter

Non Pearl Body

God’s eyes are yellow.

I peer into them
in my celestial bed.

The color of god.
Heaven is yellow.

The stars spell things
whether we want them to or not.

Whether they mean to or not.
Whether it matters or not.

Words mean things.
I didn’t think I’d need to say this.

This very long tunnel.
An electric light every so often.

This underground bend
through the mountain.

My eyes get used to this dim.

I have yet
to connect

enough dots
to make a picture.

I stay in bed for days
boring a hole in this spot.

I am surrounding
my foreign body in nacre,

making my own iridescent mother
and being her.

I have this hard object
within my soft tissue.

My mantle has made something
valuable.

My immune response
is beautiful.

-

Quilting

A tectonic inch
My oceans jostled
A cup of water
On a bumped table
An earthly hiccup
Waves pull away
To rush in
Cities reclaimed
I am a new landscape
After fishing the lake dry
After wearing holes
These knees
After spitting
This wind
I sit in a puddle
And pretend I am
A gold fish
All forget and yellow
I use the last pencil
Down to its ferrule
Which holds a finished eraser
One cannot erase what
One cannot record
I survive
A quilt
Warming
Assembled well
Even I say thank you
But there’s a gap
An ocean
I worry
I broke
Without noticing
I am built different
Too many years of feeling I need to be
Fucked or never loved
A sand castle erected so proud
So bound to fall down

I will not sleep with you
I will not live with you
I will not have sex
I don’t want to

-

Nathan Wade Carter is a queer, grey-a poet, musician, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry can and will be found in Heavy Feather Review, Horse Less Press, Souvenir, Powder Keg Magazine, The Fem, and others. He is editor and founder of SUSAN / The Journal. He writes and performs songs under the name Purrbot. He is recording a new album called DNR. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.