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
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.
Ghost in the Train Car
I.
Can I be nothing? Who would love
nothing? Who would lose them-
selves on purpose.
II.
I was born.
Who could be anything.
I was born.
One thing?
I was born:
III.
an intentional ghost.
In the train car (cool, stainless steel) café (
smells of amaretto) watching (first date) while
you fall in love with the boy.
I militant eavesdrop. I drink your giggle.
I cool stainless steel. I amaretto.
Who would cry at a stranger’s confession.
IV.
I could be the train car?
I could be the boy?
V.
I could be less ?lonely?
Who could be stranger.
Who would be weird/wired
wrong. I am not
right?
I could be a person?
I could be alright ./?
VI.
Espresso old-fashioned. Third wave
coffee. Coffee
can be anything. In the train car
with the jitters. I’m orange peel,
bitters.
I could be less bitter. I could perform
better.
VII.
I am more nerves than person.
Lose the plural & I am bold. I am all nerve.
I could be pluraled?
Volatile—every time you speak you strike
me. Who could be
softer./harder. Who could be happy.
VIII.
Outside, the rain, the grey.
The light couldn’t be softer. It is just right.
Outside, the boy lights the girl
’s cigarette. I could be them.
It is all a great performance.
(all gender is.)
IX.
I could be the lighter?
I could be lighter?
I could be the light ?
(I could be the boy?)
-
Camille Ferguson is a queer poet from Ohio. Their work has been published in Flypaper Lit, Zone 3, Passages North, and Door Is A Jar, among others. Camille was a 2022 Best of the Net finalist and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can follow Camille on Twitter @camferg1.
In My Spare Time
I attach fins to roses. I set them off to swim but they usually sink. Soon I’ll have created a
continent of plant matter. It will be mine. I will let everyone live on it, then it will be
ours. I want an ours, an us. The roses keep drowning. They are a part of the us too, the
part that always seems to be there, holding up everything else without a breath.
The Table
acts like a tree but he’s not
one. The table is a table.
The table only thinks he is a tree.
When it’s cold the table invites squirrels over for cocoa.
I think the table keeps the squirrels
inside of him. I think the table does not like being alone.
The table is perhaps a tree, undercover indoors.
It all means nothing except that life is living where it can’t
go on. The squirrels have been dead for a long time.
The tree encourages them to dance
with his branches. The tree feels less a tree
without his squirrels. The tree is becoming a table. By morning,
I’ve chopped him up and thrown him to the woods. Inside,
I get on my hands and knees to hear a squirrel chattering in my ribcage.
-
Evan Williams is a Chicago-based writer. His work is in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Joyland and other spots. He wrote the chapbook Claustrophobia, Surprise! (HAD Chaps), and co-founded the prose poetry journal Obliterat.
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.
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.
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.
TO SAY ANYTHING TO ANYONE
When faced with overwhelming
calamity or tenderness, the man said
oh, wow. I loved the man for this.
It wasn’t even morning & yet
I myself was faced with something,
an understanding perhaps,
of the way stacking works.
I should’ve told the man this,
but I didn’t. I was too overwhelmed
to say anything to anyone, except.
THE TREES ARE FULL OF CONSEQUENCE
See, me, standing beneath
what light makes it through,
wound without wound.
I am kidding.
I am impossible without
a wall that is cool
to the touch, a window
that looks out over various
griefs. See, you, sitting
in the kind of dark
that only wants you to know
how a decision gets made.
THE PLUM
Because of the sweetness of a plum I shall be taking the afternoon.
I will take the afternoon to the lake, & I will teach the afternoon how
to swim. The afternoon will be invigorated by this new possibility, &
will move through the water for hours & hours, which mean nothing
to the afternoon, the lake, or the plum. When the afternoon looks to
the shore for me, I will be there. Why would I abandon it? I am not a
person who is convinced of the ways of the world. I am like a
pebble, in that way.
-
Dalton Day is a preschool teacher and the author of Exit, Pursued and Spooky Action at a Distance. He can be found at tinyghosthands.com.
The Dog That Resides Above Me Knows How to Cry When it’s Quiet
In the morning, I’ll paint
the very top
of a lighthouse. It will take me
all day. I’ll arrive
home late. The lake
this time of year. It’s why
they call it a mirror.
Space Off
To pause the opera
he bow ties bow
ties. He tries
on wine thumbs.
The man’s helmet
looks like a spelling bee.
His daughter wants to be an explorer.
She knows the desert is not dead.
-
Benjamin Niespodziany's work has appeared in Fence, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, and others. Along with being featured in the Wigleaf Top 50, his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. His chapbook The Northerners (2021) was released through above/ground press and his chapbook Pickpocket the Big Top (2022) was released through Dark Hour Books.
Knight in an Old-Fashioned Book
I am actually very apprehensive about
getting on the horse.
Eaten by a Tiger
I am actually really enjoying getting
acquainted on a personal level.
The Sharks Smell Blood
I am actually not the chum I am
the captain’s beautiful son.
-
Evan Nicholls is a poet and collage artist from Virginia. His chapbook of poems and collages, Holy Smokes, is available from Ghost City Press. Find more of his work at enicholls.com.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
Petunia is a pretty name for a human
and an ugly sheath for a sword
You can’t always trust people with plants
but you can never trust a person with none
Pollinating myself with my left hand
is hard but I desperately
want to impress the
next bee that comes by
-
Nolan Parker is a a gender-fluid writer living in the Pacific Northwest and is a Master of Library and Information Science candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their work has appeared in Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Hex Enduction Quarterly, and elsewhere.