3 Poems by Benjamin Niespodziany

Extinct Swamp Light

A woman sells watermelons to veterans without mouths. She leaves the library and sleeps in her car. Not far away, a coyote prays beside a dying man, both so patient not to howl. The plague doctor’s eyes are canine, reptilian. She loans him her skull for a wholesale price. She lights a candle that laughs at her squirm. The pier here is what we fear the most.

Sexually Transmitted Spinach, or Awaiting Rabies on Ice

There was a traffic jam on the way to the landfill. A hill of bad batteries. Body cast bathing. When I wake, my last name is embroidered in the pillow on your therapy couch. All who sat collapsed into gardens like dying inside the diner. In your cavern of standards, the toothless horse exhales. Customs becomes a cough. An old pierogi in a Polish gut. A cold war formed between the two four star hotels. Years later, a clown buys a high chair and a space heater and eats a deer. The feathers were everywhere. One hundred husbands who want my blue shoes. Maroon moon rocks consumed by rude gods. A stick bug eats a pill bug as the slug watches from the tree. I fire an entire town. They love me. They’re free. Martha’s stars apologize for missing the rain. I open the world’s first book and look away. Many of my best friends rap against the clocktower’s window. I boil my compass and call my mom.

Worm

The wormhole in my skull is aging in reverse. It’s the pacing of the wolf that attracts the famished. Packrat is the Latin term for hurried unlearning. In this globe of grown poster children, skimming for fish in the dirt is a present.

-

Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based writer and circus enthusiast. A former Olive Garden waiter, his debut collection of poetry was released last November through Okay Donkey and his debut novella, Cardboard Clouds, is out now with X-R-A-Y.

"true or false, more or less" and "tonight i'll settle for anything" by BEE LB

true or false, more or less

can’t be a false spring because the equinox already came. so what do you call this? sun rising at seven parting clouds just in time for it to set. i’m hiding from the watercolor of it all and what’s new. my brother got covid in the quarantine facility. in the quarantine facility, they assign you bunkies. when his bunkie was diagnosed he was separated from the rest of them housed in the quarantine facility, but he didn’t get moved to the covid ward for two days while they waited for him to test positive. it’s spring! it’s raining! the birds are chirping through it! he doesn’t mind, he’s asymptomatic. i told him I told you so when he told me he’s positive. he thought you couldn’t get it without symptoms. he doesn’t believe me despite or because of my status as immunocompromised. i’m the only person i know who hasn’t gotten it. as far as i know. i’m still waiting for the trees to put out buds. i can’t remember if the grass is still dead. the birds won’t stop chirping til they go to sleep for the night. at seven, i want to go to sleep. i want to start the day. i want to write but i trace circles all over the page instead. my brother asked me to buy seven books from one of the quarantine facility’s approved distributors and one book of mazes. mazes? i ask. like tracing your pencil to get out of them? like working the labyrinth backwards? with no eraser? yeah, mazes. and suduko, he says, using the mispronunciation our mother gave us as kids. my credit card bill keeps climbing. only one of the distributors doesn’t upcharge. his last set of books was marked delivered a week ago and he still hasn’t gotten them. the letters we write are scanned in and re-printed. think of all the wasted paper. when we were kids, he climbed trees. i watched, too scared to fall.

tonight i’ll settle for anything

bleached my roots in the hopes of unearthing a new person— missed a spot, now i’m still me. don’t talk to me unless you’ve had an identity crisis over a broken tiara. shattered glass. ripped clothes. wasted money. i’m kidding! talk to me no matter what i say, i’m begging. my therapist tried to find a way to ask gently if isolation was worse than enduring presence and failed. at being gentle about it, I mean. it’s okay! we don’t all get what we aim for. i’m living alone and paying the price. my credit cards are racking up debt but it’s fine. i found another card that offers no interest for a year, and i can just keep going like this. did i tell you my answer? to my therapist, i mean. isolation is better than presence but loneliness is worse than anything. don’t talk to me unless you know what i mean (unless you’re asking me to explain it because you want to know, to have a reason to talk to me, that’s fine). i’m surely not the loneliest person in the world but i have not touched another body since the new year started, and isn’t that saying something? that means something tonight, while i’m writing, but after today “since the new year” could mean anything. don’t you just love the ability to be vague? to be interpreted not only by what you mean, what you’ve said, but also based on the position (in time, in place, in mind) of the reader? assuming there is a reader other than myself, which i do. assume, i mean. i have a big ego and a small sense of self. even smaller place in the world. i’m delicate. i’m fragile. i once balked at being called transparent and my partner didn’t trust me for days. i’d rather be beveled. or frosted. etched, even-tempered. anything but transparent. i want to choose what of me can be seen.

-

BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Roanoke Review, and Figure 1, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co.

"interspecies domestic life" and "relations of" by Austin Miles

interspecies domestic life

a rock stands accidentally:
i’m in a room w/ u
chairs, a rock
soil
we get
in each
other’s way
deliciously

relations of

i am only a
thing made
of u —
in apt. depths
urinating

later we wash dishes

-

Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook Perfect Garbage Forever (Bottlecap Press) and has poems published in Tyger Quarterly, Clade Song, Cobra Milk, and elsewhere.

"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.

"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.

"You Can Have Any Tattoo You Want, As Long As It's a Tiki" by A. Pennington-Flax

It was gang of four
then it was the smoking popes
it was the one song by frightened rabbit
that I can't bring myself to listen to
(but will not stop singing)

It was someone else who said
"you don't understand how I love you"
when I had contingency plans,
before right and left hand
went separate ways

I was too busy building a reputation
to know what it meant

-

A. Pennington-Flax lives, works, and occasionally reads poetry in front of people in central Illinois.

"chicken alanine" and "reddened monkeys-in-a-barrel" by Vanessa Couto Johnson

chicken alanine

Life is other people
entwined too much

in table hockey,
double-fisting sticks,

a leg to mouth.
I’d pick with you

the bouquet of sporks
we synthesized

beside the wire.

reddened monkeys-in-a-barrel

So much generic brand
diaper

needed among
undigested hendiadys
that chain without fiber:

I mean we all have
clucked rhetorics
when our bottoms felt lumped, cloudy.

Let that tell a joke.

In all truth, the unit repeats
an enormous model of compatible
until plot lost.

-

Vanessa Couto Johnson (she/they) is the author of the full-length poetry books Pungent dins concentric (Tolsun Books, 2018) and forthcoming pH of Au (Parlor Press, Free Verse Editions Series 2022), as well as three poetry chapbooks. Most recently, Vanessa's poems have appeared in Pine Hills Review, streetcake, Scrawl Place, Star 82 Review, and Superstition Review. A Brazilian born in Texas (dual citizen), VCJ has taught at Texas State University since 2014.

"Sun Dogs" and "Forcing Consciousness I Slide Between" by Margaret Saigh

Sun Dogs

One knows the future is a myth that is always happening
a murder case reaching national news
circumstances we don’t tend to picture
lopped heads of the parasitic and the cruel
served on beds of parsley
it’s not realistic
to be happy every moment of your life
a couple of quick tips on
the battery of ourselves
the dislocated jaw of every girl I ever was
was once a girl once had
trace the path back home
but home’s a minuscule shoe
kiss mwah fucker
as you sullied your mind, the future happened
I was performing tricks along the fence
we watch while the city was bombed

Forcing Consciousness I Slide Between

Consider

all the things I have done wrong

my inadequacy and laziness, how rapidly I fall prey

to the algorithm, how easily I envy friends. To sculpt a body

is one manner of speaking. Channeled energy

beaming towards a useless solution. Light, a sudden death.

Hatred corroded in the open destination of the knife

Will you adopt my baby? Last month was a woman

calling me a bitch. Today is a thigh muscle

lapsing in a comma of cellulite, the clay predominant soil

of warm afternoons melding into solidity

plunging fingers into pussy

the hair in your eyes

-

Margaret Saigh is a writer, dancer, and educator. She is the author of the chapbook CROSSED IN THE DARKER LIGHT OF TERROR (dancing girl press 2022), a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the creator of circlet, a virtual poetry workshop and reading space. Her poems are forthcoming in giallo lit, A Velvet Giant, and Redactions.

"quick life" by Livio Farallo

shrink like a
raining cloud.
my heart between ribs of
sky and earth
squeezed hard
as the ocean’s
bottom by countless
tons of its pressing hands.
the world fallen
elsewhere is
unnamed, but battles
back, climbs trees,
coughs to the grave.
hands hold my
head. yours,
slapping the face
of wind like
midwestern straw,
and then from under a
chicken, soft as the
the young girl’s hand,
a story is taken away:
a child cooks into
adulthood, shrinking
down to nothingness.

i can’t read the passage in this light,
can’t taste the salted memory of meat.
an ice shaving glaciates
on my tongue.
these cliffs hurry by.
this
sorrow
is
incorrect.

-

Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream Magazine and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Blue Collar Review, Scud, Helix, Biscuit Hill, Beatnik Cowboy, Rattle, Spillway, Spelunker Flophouse, and others.

"Three Animals" by Henry Goldkamp

1

I have an extra shoulder blade. Some call it a “wing.”
Exactly 50% of angels have this defect.

I like it when I catch God looking.
He looks away.

2

I have a missing stomach. Some call it a “miracle.”
About 95% of these particular surgeries are successful.

Eating solids and drinking liquids with a lover like you is easy.
We dine. We dash. All done.

3

I have an optional hair. Some call it “rat tail.”
What’s a buncha fly-eyed zeroes like them gonna do about it?

I mind my business.
Shit.

-

Henry Goldkamp rehearses his poetics out of a small garage in New Orleans. His poetry appears most recently in Narrative, Indiana Review, the minnesota review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, and Best New Poets 2021. His public art projects have been covered by NPR and Time, and he reads poems for Tilted House, The Adroit Journal, and Bayou. More and more at henrygoldkamp.com.

"City of Confusion" by Peter Leight

All day long the dark part of our city is lightening at the same time as the light part of our city is darkening—the walls are creamy and lumpy, like tapioca, and every door is a double door, as in a restaurant, swinging one way then swinging back like the kind of interpretation that depends on what you think:  we’re not even sure where we’ve been. There are chairs in the middle of the sidewalk where you don’t usually find furniture—when you sit down you don’t even know what you need to get up for, is it time?   All day long the lights are bright then go out altogether, and we look at each other the way you look at something in the lost and found, something that belongs to you if you can only find it.  It’s true, we often mix up the fight and flight signals, covering our teeth and uncovering our thighs, swerving or veering unnecessarily, turning to the side or turning around—everybody says you need to remember where you haven’t been.  Narrow homes appear on wide streets and wide homes on narrow streets, like a kind of mirroring—it’s dark where it is light, as if there’s a dark source inside a light source we don’t even know where we are when we’re right here!  People ask you where you’ve been when they don’t even know where they’ve been!  Of course, it is easier when everybody is close together, walking around together, checking on each other or holding onto each other, like a microphone that picks up everything, I’m not even sure what this is an example of. 

-

Peter Leight lives in Amherst, MA. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New World, Tupelo Quarterly, and other magazines.

"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.

"Breakfast of a Lush" and "Cocaine Breakfast" by G.L. Ford

Breakfast of a Lush

We arrived, strong of back and weak-willed,
took our places and prayed for death.
I looked around and thought, Me
and my hobo socks are going north,
take the revolver along.
But there was smoking to be done,
though the harvest had been poor,
and once you know there’s that much sky
it’s hard to get away from it.
Evening was always a maudlin affair,
polite as a heatless match and just as colorful,
a time to caress old grievances,
craft fine and useless scandals,
gaze at the dishes, risk sitting down.
My job was to make sleep difficult.
No one ever mentioned if it worked.
But every time it bothered coming
we’d ravish the flimsy dawn.

Cocaine Breakfast

Your mouth of hair,
your eye of dandelion stems,
your brain of gleaming whirlygig shit—
I don’t love anything near you.
I want to break my heart with a violin,
but this isn’t music, and you know it.

What tempers you?
Does your hand, any hand, remind you of anything?
I’d call it catalepsy, but it’s just your stare,
so lay off the halleluiahs.
It’s like replacing a lost tooth with one that won’t stop growing,
so you learn to gnaw.

Right now I doubt you’ve ever seen morning.
Your tongue’s a crumpled wire.
Your gums are pristine ash.
You giggle very well
and have a daunting vocabulary.
You have no smell.

I know you have pockets,
full of the usual keepsakes,
but I’m in no mood for that ritual right now.
If you need it, the window opens,
there’s plenty of air if you think you want it,
we’re five flights up and it’s easy to get down.

-

G. L. Ford lives and works in Victoria, Texas. He is the author of Sans, a book of poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). He helped edit the "6x6" poetry periodical from 2000 to 2017, and formerly wrote a column for the free paper New York Nights.

"Sex Toys" and "Sex Toys 2: Isle of the Dad" by Peter Milne Greiner

Sex Toys

In a special treasure
chest the false
phalluses and false
orifices and the ceremony’s
unguents and the ceremony’s vestments
suggest and even verge on a kind
of homunculus
A shadow or better 
yet a hologram
of a shadow
Like light or better
yet the proxy poverty of light
or better yet the illusion
of light it doesn’t need 
me to be alive
It fucks and is fucked in the effigy
in the rough and it is I who am in fact its
rough rough
reanimated
goose outline
skulking across
the moonlit
foothill
in fruitful search of the one
who made most
of me
Who made me these concealed
objects here
Who pursues me through
the shadowy and desolate
keyhole
to the land where I was born
fissures and recesses fitted like fine
masonry into the cliffaces 
and whose ruined edifice disguise
comes to face me in all its brutalism
all its balance and from the putlogs and transoms of its scaffolding
shrouds billowing
and whose upwelling of closure has an analogue
in me I know all too familiarly is obscure
Who nears me now
Toward the pool in current gushing as the saying goes
preparing its deposit of closure
its depository of closure
its haunt
its autohaunt
its supercomplex
its ultimate
self-effacing 
irreversible 
encryption

Sex Toys 2: Isle of the Dad

Reviling as I did my own visibility
I searched for the good caves and found them adequately
near to the only thing I reviled more and in
them I found and took up my position
The mouths of these good caves faced north
I erected my bergfrieds upon their outlying heaths
when there were as there were then mists at the edges of the known planet
I built a beautiful surveillance
satellite and placed it at a great distance from the mouths
as I understood them to be different from outer space and I advanced
my thanks to it in murmurs
Thank you Cordycep for that is the name I gave my satellite
Thank you I repeated each night when as Spica sank below the horizon
Cordycep spirited down to me as through a taproot 
in what one might say absolute or terminal resolution and granularity
stories of clear coasts
indifferent isthmuses
tiny islands off the coasts of other tiny islands 
palpably remote
stories of abusive and unspeakable
unassailable 
tranquility and grace
There is no I in sleep but there is an eel the satellite said
There is no black hole at the center 
of my attention
gobbling up prized assets
No feeling of anticipation crawls out
of my woodwork like a form of exhaust
but if as with Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead
the cliffs’ orifices are optimized by masonry
and mystery is better bereft of floorplan
the satellite said
I suggest you listen closely to me
I’m repeating repeating and repeating repeating myself 
and I must be heard each time
I speak only once
fall silent
and speak again
Closely
Listen closely
Closely
Closely

-

Peter Milne Greiner is a queer poet and science fiction writer. His first book, Lost City Hydrothermal Field, was published by The Operating System. A hybrid genre collection, Lost City Hydrothermal Field brings together poems, science fiction short stories, and essays. Greiner's work has appeared in Vice, Fence, Berfrois, TAGVVERK, Dark Mountain, and many other platforms off and online. He teaches high school English in NYC. Visit pmggoestospace.com for all the things.

"Segment in Stained Glass" and "Criminal Minds Song #2, What Happens in Mecklinberg..." by frankie bb

Segment in Stained Glass

Sheryl tells me hummingbirds
fight over red syrup
meant to taste like nectar, and love
playing in the rain.

In a prism of artichokes discussing the possibility
of guardian angles and arranged marriage.

Olivia says the elk’s bugling is like the opening of a giant metal door. Soon she will leave us
for a better job. A job where she teaches people to feed one another.

A certain percentage of plants are killed every year by the weight of the fruit they bear.
It’s been weeks since I’ve called my mother. Craig counts disingenuous smiles and chases
30-foot waves in the hurricane.

I’m talking on my back. I’m talking to the little brown mice scrambling above my dreaming and wading through the expensive sectors of my cupboards. They eat my bread. They eat my mug wort. I admire them and maybe everyone else wants a tail too.

An abandoned tomatillo home is fragile and empty, like a lantern of lace. My only pet goldfish jumped out of the bowl and died. That’s a lie, it wasn’t a bowl, it was an opaque green bucket. I’m sorry blub. I call my mother.

A beaver builds a dam in a river or a kitchen.
There is always a flood coming.

The night before you get on top of me
you smoke delicately naming facts I won’t check
apparently when an owl flies, its wings are silent
regardless of the destination or the prey.

Criminal Minds Song #2, What Happens in Mecklinberg…

I’m not proud of surviving.
Children never pay for torture.
Where is the toothpaste going with you?
Doors open and doors close.
Inside the monkey is a ringing,
an indistinct song masquerading as police radio chatter.
The real rage is just a hobby.
My face like a question mark, next to a face like a question mark.
No abnormalities, a.k.a. no mystery men.
Today 19 strangers came into my room chanting,
“tonight it will rain, tonight you’ll be lured out.”
Did you see what I did? I mocked the broken window.
Volunteer for negative feelings, surrogacy is an honorable calling.
Screaming always follows the whip cracking,
but the sirens
can split.
A decoy lights a church candle and goes, “oop!”
A bookshelf hides a secret
a hallway leading to secrets of perfect hair.
Albert Einstein swung by and stayed close,
but he doesn’t understand anything.
Severed sirens sing along sing along sing,
staring into space and touching arms.
I’m sorry I smell like saliva. I’m sorry for syncopating
but the house is creaking hard, shh…
…I’m a doll in another person’s house.
Cheryl is not your mother. Cheryl is extraordinarily lucky.

-

frankie bb is a map of eyes that have yet to assemble into a crowd, a jaw bone that dislikes being called "mandible" and prefers "crescent catcher." A guilty harvester who believes milk is best served wild. Words in and forthcoming: No Contact Mag (as frankie bruno), The Lickety-Split, Club Plum Literary Journal, and Maudlin House.

"for s" and "count with me until i feel whole again" by Madeline Langan

for s 

you’re older than me,
but it doesn’t matter.
that tree you just put your cigarette out on
is older than any of us combined - 

that’s how you start wildfires,
you know:
taking ravenous girls with
hands scorned, ruddish
to streets that look the same 

so, tell me:
- how
i’m supposed to find myself
when you live in the sidewalk
(swear to god,
i’ve been here
with you -
asphalt planes collapsing
into one endless street.
rowsandrowsandrows of housesbarsrestaurants.
hey, 
i think we know this one)
- when 
i’m dizzy
and cold
and wandering around roebling
and everything is spinning
(you, in the sidewalk,
are spinning too)
do i stumble around,
throw up in the trash can
that looks like the one
you held me next to?
or should i just go
straight for the ground.

someonewillholdbackmyhair
someonewill -

count with me until i feel whole again

flugelhorns will not announce
that i’ve arrived
here to -

drop my bag on the doorstep
(so heavy
may as well be
sopping wet) 

hey,
i’m so sorry i just -
it’s my fingers they
fell off -
no don’t look.
it’s like that time i
got on your bed with the dirty socks and
i know you saw and
didn’t say anything and
i’m saying now that
i guess i
want you to
just look at me,
not my fingers,
the way you ignored my
dirty socks and
told me i
was pretty instead

-

Madeline Langan is an undergraduate architecture and creative writing student at Pratt Institute, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in Pratt's literary magazine, The Prattler. She can also be found modeling tiny houses, rereading Wuthering Heights, watering her plants, and on instagram @maddie.langan.

"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.

"Sonnet" and "Storm Door" by William Repass

Sonnet

13. The audience tenses like a spring, in a panic threatening to trample itself.
1. Contain myself? Suppose I lost the key.
2. A thought bubble drowsy with algebraic equations.
4. Frozen mid-swivel in the chair, the cartoonist regards the pencil with envy.
8. Mr. Spring and Mr. Slinky, they despise each other.
5. Cracked my funny bone bungling the slapstick routine.
6. She customizes her gas mask with mother of pearl buttons.
8. The café a gather point for exemplary goatees.
9. Grown from the smear in a petri dish, a devil tests negative.
9 ½. In conclusion,
10. the devil is in the conclusion.
I defrost my limbs and deliquesce (11. & 12.)
VII. My demons soak in the clawfoot tub.
3. The sign on my temple reads out of order.
13. I carve the alarm clock out of deep freeze.
14. The last cigarette in the carton dreams up a firing squad.
14. A scribble of scalp clogs the keyhole.

Storm Door

Ear: Pardon? I was lost in a maze of distraction.
Gnats: The peanut gallery ain’t what it used to be.
Ear: Louder, gentlemen! Screech your tires of commerce.
Gnats: We finance your latest time-wasting gizmo.
Ear: Primed to plant your fleur-de-lis in figment?
Gnats: Plans hinge on the swung outward storm door.
Ear: Ahem, I’m tapping my proverbial feet.
Noon: I’m stuck! Snagged my lapel clearing the horizon. 
Gnats: Already too late. You overshot our paygrade. 
Noon: Don’t sell out before I get there, sparky.
Gnats: Heard the one about the fly and the ointment?
Ear: Yes, though I’ve never seen it performed live.
Gnats: To all that, tedium is to be preferred.
Gnu: From primordial tedium I come bearing… the tail.
Tail: I, metronome against the gnat argosy.
Noon: Where a tale goes, the head trails after.
Ear: I fear you’ve opened up a Cannes of wyrms.
Gnu: Gnomes in the Metro strike for recognition.
Nous: What in the name of gas is leaking here?
Ear: Axis of amber and gnat argosy in cahoots.
Guess: Storm door’s unhinged – wax lunacy hemorrhage.
Noon: Viscous lunch hour traffic. No one’s coming.
No one: Nothing less than total refund, buster.
Gneiss: What irritant abrades your tranquility?
No one: Gnats! Up and sapped the gears of gnosis.

-

William Repass lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Word For / Word, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Threadcount, and elsewhere. His critical writing may be found at Full Stop, Colorado Review, and Slant Magazine.