"Western Suite for Trading Fours with Some Semblance of Something Having Happened Before" and "Western Suite for a Book Beginning Massed Disguise and Ending Adages" by Kyle Harvey

Western Suite for Trading Fours with Some Semblance of Something Having Happened Before

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four.”—John Cage

Under the impression 
that some kind 
of tuning was going on
the audience continued 
their small talk
and in the process
the history of art happened—
if you have to ask 
you'll never know
some semblance 
of something 
having happened before:
a musty accordion in Miami
a wadded-up newspaper 
stuffed into a speaker
Howlin’ Wolf in Memphis, 1951
there’s no doubt about it
about any of that anyway 
saying one thing
but saying something else 
with the same words
the impracticality of conversation 
no real idea of what to expect
stopped short of
some loose furl of
some lost future of
polyphonic spores
the software of your heart
wear it in your sleep
hit the snooze for your part in it
a few atmospheres up your sleeve

warm sympathies without melodies
a lack of closeness, and yet
closer together

Western Suite for a Book Beginning Massed Disguise and Ending Adages

for Clark Coolidge

The so
below

so what?

So so sailor
so many salads
not always so
sometimes
you might say

so that being said
it’s so

did you hear about so and so
my hair got long
and on and on?

So if
so what?

So it goes

such a gift
such death
such living that goes on

-

Kyle Harvey is a poet, filmmaker, and musician. He is the author of Cosmographies (Cuneiform Press, 2022), as well as the editor of Coolidge & Cherkovski: In Conversation and Neeli Cherkovski's forthcoming Selected Poems 1959-2022. A finalist for the Colorado Book Award and winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, his work has appeared in A Dozen Nothing, American Life in Poetry, Entropy, Heavy Feather Review, Pilgrimage, SHAMPOO, Think Journal, The Wallace Stevens Journal and elsewhere. He lives in Fruita, Colorado, where he manages Lithic Bookstore and designs books for Lithic Press. Read more at: https://kyleharveypoet.com/.

3 Poems by Maxwell Rabb

Washed Muscular Vision

High antic living room
tensile currents make blobs

sharp dances
within my breathing wall
machine unbuttoned into poor grams–

these tweaking gears
figurined on the edge
of kilned steel–

High red heat keeps breathing
the carpet smells

Here, i am the lifting lilac—
where are daydreams well-painted.

held by firm fingers,
cracked shrubs
peonies of the living room

yell of pungent stains on the white carpet—
bleached and bleached

to feel the light burst on the head
our little corners of the house

muscle fiber vacuum
memorized movements
devoted to pristine pulses

cleaned to terse pieces
––a crazed geometry––
a massive voice

tumbles in a kitchen dance

this difficult lightning
a moving metal livewire–

i let loose a musculating fire
and by the button, a pristine metal
forms an ingot––devoted

the lucid glass eye
no material for the house–

Kinetic Lawn

inaudible morning–
my brutal old vision

soft grass combed
flat in late June.

a chance
of residual rain–

one day the house
is set ablaze and

undetected broadcasts
minted cancerous a decade later–

there is a moment to fall unconscious,
to wake up where there is no furniture left–

from the plunged fire,

half-burnt–

kept asleep,
soiled by mud
and prickles.

to dust the kitchen of corrosive hours
fresh tiles peeled beneath them, a mosaic

of lesions.

but the lawn
in pristine condition,

a wilted bone of a loud house
symmetrically refining
loose materials

sifting through decorative furniture

the fake lawns

in the thick tunes,
a metallic odor is formed
by rusted pipes.

Racket Movement, In Silence

Like toxins to the city
the reaper, brutish, circles under a steel sun–

i raid cabinetry for painted plates
cut inaccurate flood paintings,

a mechanic to piece it all together–

placed above the racket,
a chorus of splattered
conversations
latticed behind a screen door–

i exit the streets––
listen to scalding riddles

the sun is melted down sand
and under the steel fire

i collect a routine loop
jokes, inclined

malodor–– the molecular shard
seared into cement

i have lived this morning before

an interstice of softer shards
stone vein

my body
harder to move
chiseling
a glass mechanic
fragiled by fake games

Or swarmed by the bustle.

-

Maxwell Rabb is the author of the chapbook Faster, the Whirl Wheel (Greying Ghost, Forthcoming 2023). He lives in New York City, leaving his heart in New Orleans and Atlanta. His poems have appeared in the Action Books Blog, Tagvverk, Mercury Firs, and Apogee, among others. He completed his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He co-edits GROTTO. 

"The Predator" and "The Past is the Future is the Present is" by Jon Doughboy

The Predator

You’re the Predator swinging through trees and over buildings and across planets and time in search of a thrill, a kill, a sense of meaning, and you set your little triangle of red dots on a mammoth except the mammoths are extinct and even if some scientists in a lab are trying to revive them you don’t have the patience, the hunt is on, the hunt is always on and the great rotating saucer you call home is really just a trophy case skipping across countless skies and it calls you, it’s hungry, must be fed, filled, so you’re hunting now on Hollywood sets and through tropical jungles and viewers’ minds and coke sweat 80s LA saying “over here” like Mac in a menacing whisper and laughing deep and loud like Jesse “The Body” Ventura except his body was blown apart and the prop team was blown apart as our lives are blown apart, blowing apart, but yes, he went on to govern those ten thousand lakes still in another sense he’s dead, you’re dead, we’re dead, dying forever towards deadness, and in another sense we’re jittery prey, running and fleeing and hiding and still in one more, a thousand more senses, we’re up there with you, swinging from tree to tree, hunting ourselves, our many messy selves, and hunting for the Other, some beautiful, perfect, sensitive Other, aiming our little triangle of red dots of hope and need and fear into the vast jungle of human night, searching for our next kill.

The Past is the Future is the Present is

The past is prologue but is this book any good? and the past isn’t even the past and the past is what we’re doomed doomed to and the past is a foreign country and we don’t speak the language and some goon at customs stole our passports while the future, well, the future is now and trans and female and people are warring with sticks and stones and the icebergs have melted and the polar bears have sunk and the futurists are unemployed and futurism is long dead and the ecomodernists are hooking their hearts up to modular reactors and the degrowthers are getting their tubes tied and our big debts are coming due and posterity’s condescension is of course enormous, these little futurinos running around throwing their pasts to the dogs and pretending to pull rabbits and theories and systems and ideas and modes of communication out of hats ex nihilo but I pay neither and none any mind, no siree, because I’m here now, being here now, in the now, baby, I’ve got a Roth IRA fattening up in micro increments and 20/10 vision, piercing the veil of time with my baby-blue Paul Newman eyes, just watching the river flow and the ships come in with Bob and Otis—quick now, now, now, now, or you’ll miss it. 

-

Jon Doughboy is a lowly clerk at Bartleby & Co. Prefer not to with him @doughboywrites.

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.

"Frank" by Ruby Rorty

I have acquired a watchdog. I call him Frank after an extremely punctual former acquaintance. All day, Frank sits at my feet and ticks.

Frank was designed by a famous German clockmaker, but he was birthed by a bitch. He illustrates to us what it means to be alive and also a machine.

I love Frank. He shits, eats, sleeps, and wags at perfectly regular intervals - something I can only aspire to. Frank is never late, although due to his good fortune, Frank belongs to a species that never set out to regulate the fourth dimension. Dog time has no rules, just food and shits and sleeps and wags.

“Frank,” I say to Frank, frankly. “Frank, you’re the only dog I know with four legs and two hands!”

-

Ruby Rorty is a writer and researcher in Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in hex literary, Gone Lawn, and EcoTheo, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as well as the Best of the Net and Best Microfiction anthologies.

"Amor Fati Baby" and "Miss Universe Last Place" by PJ Lombardo

Amor Fati Baby

Hell-bent devoted the ass
of my sun
Gazes deadly off your
silhouette

Hips loop muscular atmosphere
Like saltwater through a sunfish lung

Your kamikazee shoulders twinned upright
Gymnasium paradise forever

Leveled by timeless prayer
Roofs run with the magma of fate

Bewitched precise i scrap bread towards
Your deathless mallards

whenever you beckon, whatever you’re like

Miss Universe Last Place

I welcome my abdominis to the knife
I welcome my abdominis to the softness of your knife

Languishing in the berried
Lazarette

Ghost-riding under
Irreversible eye

Heartburn purples your arrival
Upon me

Every ape’s a wind-up doll

Winding down

infinity

& i am the grandson of the eschat
bleating your face All Alone

-

PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he worked as a publishing assistant for Action Books. Currently, he co-edits GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. His work can be found in mercury firs, Works & Days, Lana Turner Journal and the Brooklyn Rail.

From "The Drums of Dracula" by Tamas Panitz

Both the young and the old have a tendency to squander their time
on facsimile prints as far as life as a museum is concerned. One gains nothing,
and in fact things may worsen, contribute to fortunate or unfortunate
snowball effects such as regular life is noted to attract. Even nothing
enjoys the syncopation of seasons now and then. I know you’re thinking
people don’t just wake up and start bending things, doing this and that
until it forms a positive or negative chain… as if the world’s attitude were one’s
personal responsibility –– turn that fucking music down –– but you know, then one
just does it, like that, and you’re slipping along the curve of a banana and slowly passing
away from land, from admiration or admonishment; learning to activate charcoal; to open
and close doors with your mind. This is all very
interesting thank you for coming to talk to us. Cue
locking of doors. My friends, I am happy to say that today
is the anniversary of a promise made to a certain Medjool date
whose merciless pit aided me in killing my wife, a leopardess
with whom I’d lived pleasantly enough but in constant fear
her finer feelings would be overwhelmed by rage. Look how
the towels around us are jumping down like cats. Rage belongs
to the feline and the aquatic creature, the Sun & Neptune.
I wrote this speech while driving like shit.

Around the clock, mutual benefit is a fleeting mystery, though it arrives
just as we forget our earlier suffering in the shape of a dissolving name
whispered to deaf ears across the shuffleboard, that it might rise
and spread over us unfettered by recognition and grow dark in the sky
like the supposed dark desires that men have, that might come again,
the name of such a man must be a quorum, a commencement
into the forgiving of people’s hearts, and also because with a face like this,
you’ll be looking back upon a remembered face. Your Ace of Spades
turned to the sun, your Ace of Clubs spinning erratically beneath your hand
gun. It’s time to expand in curlicue fashion per teacher
guidance, causing anxiety with noisemakers and visions. The moon is maroon,
looks like.

*

Despite the years of having long greasy hair, some random man
is already approaching me from the street, mulch spills
from the flowerbed as I step back
upon insurance for missing letters, at the mercy of duplicates and extras.
Something gradual has made its way back to adolescence after
being completely forgotten, as if it were the imagination of its old self
flashing for this moment across a vacuum such as the French
describe mirrors America is still too young to know.
Such distinctions as America could be happening.
Meanwhile here on earth the lining to the lamp is wearing thin.
Winds arise spontaneously on the surface of the lake,
where everyone has gathered to see the Rose of the Lakefront.
These grapes ain’t free. Neither is salting my pussy for the weekend.
I feel so misunderstood! But it’s just not the day anyone expected
jokes languished, no one checked anyone out even when offered: freedom
itself faltered under a malignant glaze. We felt the presence
of cloying atmospheres such as those that hug the underside of other dimensions.

Bound by a silk too fine to be seen and annoyingly wet, the morning approached
our mental space with a feeling like no I don’t think I can cum again tonight.
The floating lamp that glares through me has settled on the face of your bust
or tubs and is blasting me away. So long to renovations or revelations.

Turn my table over, I welcome it –– the delights of reaching home in a casserole
only to find my door is locked. Some puzzles will never be solved
in time, and timeliness is of the essence, otherwise the puzzle
just disappears, though nothing can kill the love of the chase.
Have yourself a nice leathery glass of milk. You have to trust your tastes
but it’s not obvious why. You look into the stars and feel nothing.
This wine doesn’t taste frosty enough.

*

We can get away from the dogs in tandem, press me to your hands
and I’ll explore you with my body. Some think me too vigorous,
but most dominate the experience before I get my chance
insisting on a precise remake of some earlier event
despite even the best of things coming up short.
However, on the other end of one’s personal disappointment
we know there’s pleasure, so it’s tolerable to keep going,
and as for the remake of this so-called poem
I guess you saw the real thing once and I’m picking up on it
or there’s no way we could have received this information.

Tell me now if I can’t eat citrus at night.
In the lack of visibility that dwells beneath the surface of the lake
did you say the bean-light is for me? I should move my crabs?
If the monorail stopped many years ago, how can you explain this stain?
The Merkavah? The hulkster, Hulk Hogan? Trying to bro-down?
One’s questions grow wings and bump through the door, lost in the kvass
and the rolling of the hills.
In the grey paper light sharp toothed families harken to the bird’s junk.
Out here it’s nouns at retail. Fried thumbs. Carpet. Reflections.
You can buy what you please, but it’s mostly made of wood shavings and centrifugal force.
Tell me the difference between a nipple and a hemorrhoid. I eagerly await

the clarifying stage, the vermillion ropes and their silver soaps. The path of guacamole,
of the wasp.
Smoking shoes litter the stage, and one sheds a blue tear that’s never to escape.
Its branches spend the night aloft. Fans spin but no toothpaste comes out.
Big government is stalled over personal rights, mood rings, pleasure retreat,
over Persian rugs, the pleasures above, yellow and white gold,
yellow and white corn, all are willing participants. A sour gatorade without
the glass, please. It’s Wakanda’s night out. A shrimp caught in a shirt cuff, sounds like.
Around here that’s news. Don’t say anything about the origin of the weird air.
You and your book recommendations. Cancel the plans to catch up over bacalao;
let’s link up and have barbacoa. When I’m stuck I drink lemon juice ––
yes, even at night –– like slipping through a crack down the middle of the door.

-

Tamas Panitz is the author of several poetry books, most recently Vesuvio with Joel Newberger and Losarc Raal (New Books: 2023); and The Country Passing By (Model City 2022). Other books include Conversazione, interviews with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia: 2022), and The Selected Poems of Charles Tomás; trans. w/Carlos Lara (Schism: 2022). He now co-edits the journal NEW, which he co-founded. He is also the author of a pornographic novella, Mercury in Lemonade (New Smut Series: 2023). His paintings and stray poems can be found on instagram, @tamaspanitz.

"Demon Hour in the Financial District" by Scout Faller

your little ass
is haunted—the angel 

of affordable housing
couldn’t seduce me—

historians will note the soil was
discouraging, like blondie i’m blowing

the lights out and heading to
your city in a dead man’s jacket

it’s canvas, do you see
how i’ve complicated

it spatially, the appearance of
buildings where there aren’t any 

it’s complicated 
relationally, we used to be 

a site of harbor but like gaga 
i don’t wanna 

be friends, a mirror of high
rises scrambles my mouth, 

you’ve found someone new 
because investment

precipitates a return, she’s 
like a weathervane

signaling cloudlessness
in her calf muscles saying to make

a transfer you’ll
need a sealed envelope 

of meaning, crying
is the environ of the street

your words cut light 
like cubic zirconia

& i am brittle
when you consider me

-

Scout Faller (they/them) has poetry published in HAD, Hot Pink Mag, and Bullshit Lit. They work at the California Institute of Integral Studies and live in San Francisco. You can find them on instagram at boredgeoisie__.

"Farmers market in the uncanny valley" by Claire Rychlewski

On this spinning meat locker
it’s nearly scientifically impossible to find a perfectly ripe peach

Touching them makes it worse
Squeezing the sugar around to clot
underneath its skin
Leaving bruises whose shadows grow tall
after the assault

Do you remember the age of fresh fruit?
I don’t, I just remember being young
or the idea of it
I was a peach

then I was something else entirely

-

Claire Rychlewski is a writer living in Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Portland Review, blush lit, witch craft magazine and LIGEIA Magazine, among others. She is currently serving as editor of prose for SARKA. Her chapbook, BORN TO ROT, was published in 2022 by Bottlecap Press. 

"In the Shadow of the Castle Walls, Wherever Those Walls Were" and "If Saving Us Meant Parting Ways with Mercy" by Jeremiah Moriarty

In the Shadow of the Castle Walls, Wherever Those Walls Were

inevitably there are   two of me 
and they take different roads     to the bone

stones            are a religion            a condition
                 of a childhood                spent in contrition

there’s a rock being pulled across a tomb            and
          a rock            being brought towards the womb and            a rock

that once sat              on her third finger               secret queendoms—
a woman            used to live here

    she pushed her lover off the parapet

If Saving Us Meant Parting Ways with Mercy

you—
you
         would have to
amputate
the part of you   not yet
    chalice       filigreed in muck
pick a villain and       make of them
   dark lord
      bad guy factory               sip of
      ratafia       you—
watching smoke
fudge the horizon   cities we never
     tasted 

       all of us     heat-feast
prairie bleeding      an empire 
baked
        atlantis the sequel       and you
you—
you         would have to       
      whisper reasons               

       over your             
    deathly tools                 the only clean things left                          

        and choose one

-

Jeremiah Moriarty is a writer from Minnesota. His poems and stories have appeared in The Rumpus, No Tokens, Catapult, Breakwater Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. He tweets @horse_updates.

"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.

"Free Pretzels" and "Mysterious Refrigerator" by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo

Free Pretzels

a man excuses himself from the intimacy

of spending seconds in my space

space is relative this high and

pressure is cabinated

we are explaining ourselves

formally and boxlike

and my hat has a bill that cages

my sightline like a hand arced

for cover. i have paid for access

to a rectangle of space. i tilt

my rectangle backwards

parallelogramlike

i am in control

of whether this man may relieve

himself in an irregular shape

of a room. whoosh

fluids go somewhere no one

knows (our pilot incidentally 

late a tiny god called forth

to hurtle people, dogs

through space as fast as

possible commercially

full throttle navigation

button activation

peering down at blips

in the abyss below

cranking levers backwards

halting bodies and metal

from motion)

objects in mirror 

are really really close

Mysterious Refrigerator

someone is sneaking into my basement 

and turning off my heat. the heat becomes

cold. i am a person predisposed

to coldness. i shake with it. 

a lover buys me slippers.

upon being plugged in they glow

supernaturally warm. this is the sort

of supernatural phenomenon in which 

I am interested. albert camus 

said something about autumn.

how it is “a second spring

when every leaf is a flower.”

i learned this quote from a leaflet

sent to me in the mail. it is possible

this quote has been misattributed

or even manufactured. it might be

supernatural. flowers and leaves 

seem to fulfill different roles. 

just because i happen 

to be cold i am not

preparing to fall down. collapse

is not always imminent. obviously.

i am uninterested in heroic journeys

or what it means to fly overhead.

who is tunneling into my basement? 

flowers in ice water

they say, live to bloom 

longer

-

Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she has recently written about deer, hand models, and trees. She is the author of the chapbook "DUH" (Bullshit Lit), and her work appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Barrelhouse Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and Bedfellows Magazine, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught. 

"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.

"Sprig" by Cameron Lovejoy

Sprig

Who owns the snow? A dozen sown corpses
underwater falling slow, slowly down
below the bowel. Here and there a whale
fall. The head aches. A hagfish. These hatreds
are the hardest things to be trashed, you know.

Jung’s shadow. I am stuck between a rock
and a harpoon. Little blood in the mold.

By saunas of nausea a sodden ghost
grips a sprig, a flick of green in the mist.

The/rap/its said many times over—mine

said this: tell me, what sign posts do you sea
on this terrain you said needs retrain-ing?

Crack open the door, throw slats in the wound.

Talking—the bloomiest lobotomies.

-

Cameron Lovejoy is the editor and publisher at Tilted House, a small press in New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Xavier Review, North Dakota Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere.

"Nausea" and "Demonstrations of Humanity Ensue" by Bee Morris

Nausea

An object, location, or idea is not an object, location, or idea. It is the self’s latest extension into
real meaning. We were all, just prior to ourselves, entering the world through a wholeness of
bodies. I said to myself, “Now this is it.” Myself replied, “It always has been.” In this order, I
was in love with the reputation of joy, then with the representation of joy, then with joy itself.
“Art is a lonely faith,” I said to the mirror. Then it dawned on me that this world is none of my
business.

Demonstrations of Humanity Ensue

Light and shadow are the only intelligent beings in this world. Do you remember when you were
dreaming of unstained glass and retired altars? How the present congregation then became a
surreal object? We are distancing now from the narrative, forming a moat around conscious
thought— the organs of our hearts taken out and dissected, one by one.

-

Bee Morris is the author of Alive on Planet Earth, released as part of Ghost City Press's 2021 Summer Series. Their recent work appears or is forthcoming in Wax Nine, Poet Lore, Underblong, Hobart, and elsewhere. Bee also runs the newsletter Blackout Fascinations: blackout.substack.com.

"I disobey" and "I forgot the time" by Nicodemus Nicoludis

I disobey 

the wind 

when examining 

this interglacial verse

and the way 

I am 

in truth 

so human 

set to hum 

my palinodes 

like a riverbed 

Gigantic 

I am not going 

to call this 

resistance 

but maybe the actual 

slipping into 

darkness like 

the cigarettes 

the men outside 

the deli smoke 

between pulls 

from a bottle 

of mamajuana

But I am only just 

reading into this 

radiance as the 

defiant soliloquy 

made exactly 

as it should be 

alone and quiet 

lasting only 

for the last 

of us who 

will cash our 

paychecks for 

a view of the 

stars uncostly 

and totalitarian

I forgot the time 

I needed to be

at work 

while making coffee

It’s early

enough to know 

that without asking

the Earth keeps

breaking into

smaller parts

I name the morning

consumption

Or the unbearable

call to be productive

I just want to think 

about us in bed 

as we roll closer 

into each other 

and I see the scar 

on my knee

from falling 

on rocks at the beach 

trying to be brave 

for my brother

as he walked 

the tide pools

for the first time

after moving

from Pittsburgh

to New Hampshire

I wonder

were they 

always this

purposeful? 

We never found

a lobster

Never understood 

how lungs work 

Do we just

keep going?

Should I keep going?

I don’t think

that’s philosophy 

Can I slow down 

for a moment now?

See life for

its exchanges

The fission of

wage-time 

free-time 

time-to-destination

labor-time

divided by 

value-time

We get closer

to a revolution 

when we start thinking

about time

as pleasure not

commodity

Its value a temporal 

ghost haunting life until

we stop time

as material 

and bring it back 

from its exchange 

That is to say

from the time

it takes for you 

to read this poem

I will have made

approximately $ .50

-

Nicodemus Nicoludis is a poet, adjunct professor and the managing editor of Archway Editions. He is the author of the chapbook Natural History (rot house books, 2018) and his work appears in Potluck Mag, Small Orange, Maudlin House, Chronogram, Reality Hands, Burning House Press and elsewhere.