2 Poems by Justin Lacour

Dear Naomi,

The woman who sells bootlegs never has a copy of Marat/Sade. I’d press the issue, but then I would be the asshole. People here crave a bete noire like Theresa of Avila pictured a tiny Christ living in her heart. Usually, I’m happy to oblige. Daddy said you don’t get to pick your penance, just like you don’t get to pick your nickname, which sounds stupid, but it’s his laconic code for “things don’t get any better from here.” The self-pity is bottomless. I spent a quarter-hour staring at my reflection in the coffee like some character from beatnik mythology. The voice on the radio says this is Water Music by Handel as opposed to Water Music by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, I guess, and the stick figures in the restroom will turn absolutely carnal by midday. This is the third poem I’ve read this morning where I’ve found the alcoholism insincere. If I read stuff like this when I was young, I would have been afraid to ever fall in love. It’s all backyards and tearful birds and phony salvation. I wish you best of luck in your art. I aspire to be the Olive Garden of Letters, where the portions are so overwhelming, the low quality is beside the point. Please keep writing. You’re the only person that I miss. I can see the last pay phone on Williams Blvd. from here. One day, I’ll light a candle there in memory of our conversations.

Dear Naomi

It’s not Mardi Gras where you live and probably too cold for parades anyhow. I’m up to it with pacification disguised as noblesse oblige, though maybe I’m looking at it wrong, maybe every year the streets fill with fulmination and portent, and I just miss it. I’m far from the brightest and the best. In the new photos of you by the bead curtain, your house looks ghostly, by which I mean, it feels like there’s someone else with you in the photo who doesn’t make their presence known. It’s as if the image of you now is superimposed on the image I had of you then, plus all the times I must have missed, yet, on the surface, the picture looks uncrowded. It speaks to your elegance, a burden you wield well. Someone at work said prima nocte is all made up. Is that true? That sounds like something you would know. We had an early and intense spring, but now the cold’s returned. When it gets dark, I like to imagine I’m wounded and a little edgy out on the streets of large rodents and bicycle thieves, serving some obscure principle that, if it has a face, keeps it hid behind layers of transparency, and any residual nobility comes from never knowing if you’re actually being noble. Your letters give me a spit of land to stand on. Thank you. There’s no cheering section out here for the ruminative soul; you’re right to stay away. I should be more hard-boiled by these little life lessons. I shouldn’t be afraid to stop writing.
-
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Susan / The Journal, New Orleans Review (Web Features), and other journals.

"iii" by Lora Kinkade

i snagged

the neck i wreckt

the ringer at the crease

a wrinkle timed

immaculately full spine lurch

the 13 pointed teeth gleams

my image like the dart

of crick-hid scales

u knew well

to straighten the teeth

but couldn’t wait to jingle

the coin icy in yr

swollen palm the fat

kernals of corn

the minty floss threaded

blanket stitch n the smell of

winterfresh & blood

u knew better

but yr voice won’t topple the

babbling motor

they touch your arm without asking

call you sugar

yr jaw sore from the clench
-
Lora Kinkade is a queer, rural poet and farmer living in Freestone, California. She received her B.A. of Creative Writing, Poetry from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was a founding member of the Omni Writing Collective. Her most recent publications include The Bombay Gin, Matchbox Magazine, and The Red Wheelbarrow.

2 Poems by Kolby Harvey

THE GENDER OF MY UNBORN CHILD IS REVEALED TO ME IN A DREAM —I TELL YOU, IT’S WHAT CAME OUT OF THE BALLOON!

person showing their hands with assorted-color inside room
man holding three leaves
multicolored floral flag
woman holding printed orange paper
person walking on wooden bridge near pine trees during daytime
green and white mountain at daytime
dessert mountain
brown tabby cat
two vultures
woman in multicolored skirt with bunch of keys
unknown person standing outdoors
black Pontiac Firebird
brown and beige gothic structural building

black sedan
field of trees

AT LAST THE ALGORITHMS PRODUCE A WORKING DEFINITION OF FAGGOTRY, CANDYLAND SNAKES GORGED ON THE STRANGLED (WHOLE) BODIES OF BIRDS

seascape photography of sea under half-moon
greeting cards on brown surface
man hugging other man's back
two humans standing in front of white curtain
people wearing makeup and masks
selective photo of flag
multicolored wooden closed door
man and woman standing near gray metal fence
two sitting men watching from smartphone
man giving rose to another man
multicolored textile
couple standing near floating shelf
assorted-color glass decor
two women sitting at the back of the car
two man's hands wearing gold-colored wedding rings
two men near body of water
two boys looking at sky
man wearing white button-up dress shirt near white petaled flower tree
unknown person lying outdoors
dog covered by blanket
clear glass cup filled with brown liquid
woman raising listen up politicians sign on road
woman holding Jesus Had 2 Dads sign on sidewalk
black metal chandelier turned on
people standing on road while watching traditional dance at daytime
people under white canopy
man smoking near green leaf plant
woman blowing
silhouette of person near window glass
woman wearing off-shoulder crop top standing beside sunflowers
woman raising her right hand
person wearing bee costume
person coated with gold-colored liquid, posing
eyeglasses with black frames on white fabric
gray cave rail station
woman holding artificial flowers
man wearing black skirt walking beside plants
two gold-colored rings on paper
-
Kolby Harvey is a gay space pilgrim who likes Queer Theory and video games. In 2018, he was awarded the University of Colorado’s first creative doctorate in Intermedia Art, Writing & Performance. His chapbook, The Mothercake Cycle, is forthcoming from Dream Pop Press. You can find more of his work in Birkensnake, American Book Review, DREGINALD, Aspasiology, and The Thought Erotic.

"seam" and "sometimes I move the way sex is supposed to feel" by Peach Kander

seam

an edge shaped
asks be where

the deer who are not afraid to cross
begin to eat, shimmy their heads
strands of hair coming loose

my hunger nymphomatic
I wander the cobbled halls, in wool robes
the crown of my head clean

a reluctant mother
this voice a cypher
of yarn knotted in its bag

the shimmer tells you
more than its casing

in a dream
where your brother dies
the sister you never knew you had
is unreachable

no, your uncle is the dead one
and it’s a forest

the end of fall, and you
spend hours turning over leaves
to find the slug
who is your family

the sister is your aunt
who died from a hole
in her heart
when your mother was a child

the veins are seams opening
I step out of my skin
a metamorphosis in reverse

it’s summer
a body sends a record of feeling
from a distance

you accept it
as a form of defeat
the notes ornaments melting

I pull the petals off
all of them, all at once
they’re tongues
rolled around my fingers

you could be the bulb
it just burns itself to wire

curl back to the deer
your face tucked into a doe’s

sometimes I move the way sex is supposed to feel

all my joints
properly oiled
in heat
post work post
stretch mid st
rut pre prance
air on the other side
of the subway
is just different
that way
my slutty summer
playlist
filtered through
faulty headphones
pausing
at random
like can
you have
a slut
ty summer
if you
re not ac
tu a lly
fuck ing?
well it’s more
an existential
openness
to the possibility
Summer’s
voice cuts out
after ‘I feel’
and I think
there’s the problem
touching my
self every day
for years
like a tree
falling
-
Peach Kander is a queer poet and current MFA candidate in poetry at NYU. Current projects include an (auto)biography set in a dystopian North Pole and a translation of Georges Hugnet's 'Childhoods'. Sometimes they go to karaoke to sing classic pop songs in the style of Bob Dylan. Poems can be found in Peach Mag, dirt child, vol. 1, and Fugue, and other creative property can be found in the Sephora archives.

"First Dad: A Decrepit Ghazal" and "Descort for a Blank Face" by Jerrod Schwarz

First Dad: A Decrepit Ghazal

A wonderful poet could transmute a father
out of recycled cork: squeaky, wine-scented embrace.

A good poet could arrange popsicle sticks
into an ambulance shape and sacrifice the embers.

Brand new poets could at least regurgitate
a birthday cake, ferment it, and imbibe.

All I want is an email with the history
of my family’s disease emergences.

All I want is for poetry and God and my wife
and my children to not be enough.

I need to need a spell, an ancient altar
where I burn something precious for his real face:

something like my own fingers, something
like a family dog, someone like you reading this,
and something like whatever it takes

Descort for a Blank Face

About one in fifty people have aphantasia:
they cannot conjure
imagery in their minds. If you think
they operate at a deficit,
you have probably never seen
the embalmed hands
of someone who made you laugh
and cry. (only one of my fourth-grade classmates
came to the viewing, so I
tried to make her laugh before
sitting in the bathroom for an hour

and every other week Facebook suggests
I add her
as a friend but I won’t
because if she had aphantasia
I curse-cured it, a blood letting
in the curled shape of dad’s thumbs. If I
kept you from a life
of perfect knowledge, I am sorry
Stephanie.
If your brain
is a paint bucket now,
upending and clogging your spine,
I am picking dried acrylics out of my
vertebrae, too.)
-
Jerrod Schwarz teaches creative writing at the University of Tampa and STEM programs at the Glazer Children's Museum. His poetry has appeared in print/online journals such as PANK, Entropy, Opossum, The Fem, Inklette, and many more. Most recently, his erasure poetry was highlighted on New Republic and Poetry Foundation. His first chapbook was published by Rinky Dink Press in 2016. He lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife and twin daughters.

"Palm Sunday" and "Ikaria Dreaming" by Margarita Serafimova

Κυριακή των Βαΐων
(Palm Sunday)

The southern sea was storming,
a point beyond the compass.
The ground I stood on surged.

Ikaria Dreaming

I remembered how you want me.
A golden raven took off the road.
-
Margarita Serafimova was shortlisted for the Montreal Prize 2017, Summer Literary Seminars 2018 and Hammond House Prize 2018; longlisted for the Christopher Smart Prize 2019, Erbacce Prize 2018 and Red Wheelbarrow Prize 2018; nominated for Best of the Net 2018. She has three collections in Bulgarian. Her work appears in Agenda Poetry, London Grip, Waxwing, Trafika Europe, A-Minor, Poetry South, Nixes Mate, Journal, Orbis, Minor Literatures, Writing Disorder, Chronogram, Noble/ Gas, Origins, glitterMOB, etc. Visit her page here.

"dead phillip society" and "soliloquy in the siege of sevastopol" by AJ Urquidi

dead phillip society

dread mutations melt the ur-conscience 
tableau skedaddling do not go grendel
on that good coconut my demons 

                        overcrowd the foot locker audition 
for space beside my toughest grenades 
the local mall’s games are impounded 

                        a thousand shelves collapsed upon 
a gravitational pulse what of the salesboy 
who more than once talked me out of evil 

within i’ll never guess his trade-in value 
sliming a path back through organic gardena 
                        touch toes to the count of an off clock 

never met a sexual lexicon he didn’t dislike
chastity tube slung over a shoulder
                        we should get down to bass tracks 

                        find this slippy fish i never looked 
good on this world they’ll say i said 
brooch on a bikini model scarlet anaconda

                        for a sleeve here lies the failed decoder
they’ll scat before my tomb he lived life 
as a subreddit but in death remains a meme

soliloquy in the siege of sevastopol

when one is sure of being followed
pleasure incises veins of fear
the moth in flight somehow stomped

intention lurks in ramification’s thresher
styrofoam plate beside spillway moon
prides itself on being the better moon

where threaded ducks juke in threnody
with a zipper stuck these taut summer nights
i work snoring through revisionist tasks

to self-actualize with verve my most vivid
nightmare nothing to be done with beasts
who bite skin sisyphean fools not to finish

such nocturnal projects the pigeon in flight
still thrown below truck chassis fiberglass
forces a better climax than forged fantasies

too drawn out and dour to avoid boredom
of chore screen door can’t stop a blade
determined i pray my vacant ribcage might
-
Based in Southern California, AJ Urquidi is an ace poet and editor whose writing has been featured in Dream Pop Press, Faultline, Posit, convergence, and DUM DUM Zine. A past winner of the Gerald Locklin Writing Prize, AJ co-founded the experimental online journal indicia and edits copy for LA Review of Books and EMBER.

3 Poems by Isabel Bezerra Balée

bodies full of womxn

so many womxn
toss their bodies
across floodplains

to kneel
at the foot
of the bank

all the womxn
who died in me
can tie a knot
underwater
& paint with fire

how we live together
in one room
with one
hammock

speaking
to our deceased
in animal tongues

expressing nothing more
than a need for rest

dipsea

staring into

discrete, euclidean

rays

on the cliff

facing west -

when someone dies

strangers park their capital

on panoramic highway

faceless / defacing

the upper crown

of the oldest tree

predating

borders between

here & other -

below, perennial streams

flow through gullies,

our corneas

divide the sempervirens

a passing

embodiment

of the costal

situation

to swallow

vast blue

is an act of refusal,

a kind of lawlessness

in pillform

the tallest tree

the spectacle

i.

i’m trying to draw a face
eclipsed by a screen
& the screen is touching me
in a sexual way
there are no bodies
or masters
only an immense
accumulation
ofmuted faces.

ii.

tired of being scared
to wake up in the world,
a trader joe’s parking lot

i cry & consume
5 vegan cookies in a row

everything that was directly lived
has moved away into representation.

my body doesn’t look how it should
in the dystopian mirror

i am grotesque

my mind doesn’t sound
like language

the mechanical force
of crashing waves fracturing
the rock into increasingly
smaller fragments.

iii.

in the feed-form
i must be unconscious
of targeted advertisements -

blocking what i don’t want to see
manufactures a different version
of the same tangible world

replaced by a selection of images.

at work i’m copied in an email -
consider saying white identity
instead of white nationalism -

i need to identify
the root cause
of fighting with strangers
but i’m lost at sea
in the panic attack
one last
torrential downpour
until i come up
like a fish
leave me alone
please come back

describe these conditions
using the most specific
terms possible

there is no being
without being-with

the only path to liberation
is revolution

iv.

browsing 41 pages
of sneakers
designed for over-pronation,
a gaslighting term
which also seeks to
exceptionalize
the body

only serves
the production.

ever since i purchased
the 32nd shoe

i’ve had a lot to say

& the heat
has made us all
incandescent:

why all this pain,
how are others
complicit?

instead of touching the screen
let the screen do the touching

i swear

it changes everything.

v.

connected or removed
from all these people
who look familiar,

is dating science
also a construct?

it’s bad
so it must be
but i forgive you.

can a person
be overwrought

or is that
reserved
for aesthetics?

i keep ruining
what i meant,

every generation
thinks it’s the last one

oblivious to all
surrounding events

we could leave
this art object

at any time

don’t think about it too much
-
Isabel Bezerra Balée was born & raised in New Orleans and has roots in Northern Brazil. Her poetry has appeared recently in Elderly, Littletell, and Anomaly! She writes in an ambiguous genre, about a multitude of subjects, at: ibalee.tumblr.com. Links to poems can also be found there. She lives in Oakland, CA.

"No Tomatoes" and "Thinking of You" by Carol Ellis

No Tomatoes

Rainfall and I am outside
in rain with rain as rain

apologies to everyone
to myself with wet hands

thank what air to look like that
I grow and comb my hair today.

Thinking of You

If you could run down to the corner store
for a pound of hamburger

don’t wear green socks,
makes your ankles look like small lawns

with only room for one chair
a small table that holds the entire point of a moment     

that sits and drinks iced tea outside or if this is winter    
constant hot tea helps

or let’s face it, coffee is the strong answer
to the start of any day, the list continues,

late at night in a room when it’s too dark to sleep
might as well wake up

besides the electricity is being turned off today
they told me why

and you’ve returned with hamburger
but I’ve become a vegetarian

just in the time you were at the store
so take it, it’s for you.
-
Carol Ellis was born in Detroit, Michigan and lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She is the author of two chapbooks: HELLO (Two Plum Press, forthcoming 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems and essays are or will be published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015 she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings.