This, Our Vigil

There is only so much warmth
I can still offer you, only so many
saplings that will survive this winter
uncovered. I sketch deer when they sleep

in the snow, those dark eyes
begging: the only way they know
how to pray, to ask forgiveness.
I sketch them with flowers pouring

from their mouths, name them for great-aunts
who died before I could know them
as anything other than ghosts in hallways,
still drifting between rooms.

You do not feel the weight
of this house, or understand why I creak,
sometimes, under all of it. We do not sleep
until we know the sun has not abandoned us.

She will not leave us to all this shivering.
She will not leave us to all this bone.

 

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she also serves as an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from Exist Otherwise, The Santa Clara Review, The Shore, One Art, and others.

Portent:

The sin of mistrust, coupled with lust, birthing twin totalities, clash, burning the seas, rendering the skies torn asunder, the chasms maw now widens, in between what once was the thin membrane separating the natural order, pastpresentfuture, living as well as the dead, promises between you and I now dissipate

 

Zachary Zolty is a Masters of religion student who is interested in activism and study of the Church fathers. He is fond of coffee and writing poetry.

planetary cereal milk woman

she had every constellation in her thread sewn hair
glowing cold spoon silver swirl bakken bulb embers
twas she who became my open osmosis window
she winter galloped dying stars back into lighthouses
she carried milk diamonds in my bowled chest
she ate away the soggy bottom dipper dreams of dental decay days
twas she who held my moon heart in her glass palms
when darkness bared its fangs at my doorstep
she was always there to catch me in blank paper space
she binocular watched over me
hurling bird songs through the residual air
passing chocolate poems through the zero-gravity day
and placing galaxy roses on my brick weeping willow pillow
she was in every perpetual pendulum quantum dream
every hunger games nightmare
she teddy hugged me as i faced body pain everywhere
she became my cheerio oxygen tank
in every astrophysical dimension
and
i needed her to swim through each Rubiks cube
i needed her to swim beyond this thimbled time
i needed her
and she saw no one else
no one else but me
in her umbrella capped universe

 

Jazz Marie Kaur whose pen name is (Vevna Forrow) is a queer poet, host of the Hummingbird Blink: Nectar Poetry podcast on Spotify featuring poets from around the world primarily from the Instagram (IG) community. She is a visual designer, creator and editor of Dipity Literary Magazine, plus self-taught cartoonist. Forrow is the author of the Jazzy Hummingbird Project, Galactic Birdbrain and Colibri Kingdom. Her spoken word artistry name is The Moon Kingseas on music streaming platforms. Work of hers appears in the Lothlorien Journal, Kindergarten Mag, and diaCRITICS - DVAN (forthcoming). Visit vevnaforrow.com and @vevna.forrow.ink on IG.

Tulpa

When the dreams I kept dying in

carried over into waking life, your tulpa

had me believing in you, sleepwalking, talking

backwards in circles until your face was stuck that way—

a leering smear suggesting a pathology we had to end.

That was always the burden of the dreams: to choose

which of us would die and who would do it.

We created the wraith wishing other realities

into existence, imagining this one would be any different.

Meanwhile, the three of us wondered how many more

legs you could remove before it killed me.

 

Jimmy Huff is a writer and musician from the Missouri Ozarks, USA. His stories, poems, and essays have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best-of nominations and appear or are forthcoming in *82 Review, Third Flatiron Anthologies, The Cabinet of Heed, and many other stellar places.

It Only Ever Echoes Back

Each night, twelve-year-old me calls current me on the landline that’s been unplugged since I don't know when, and some nights I let it ring and ring while other nights I slowly answer, hold my breath against the receiver, and slowly hang it back up, and still some nights I get some courage, reach out my voice, but it only ever echoes back, and when I don’t speak, he fills the void with questions I can’t—or don’t—answer, though most are silly (asking if I ever made it to the majors), others less so (wondering if I ever told mom what I did that summer or if I still love the people I once loved), and sometimes he asks if I’m happy even if I don’t know how to begin to explain, but I wouldn’t call what this is talking—it’s more one voice, then the other, then silence—and when I speak, my old voice repeats, and when I don’t, my young voice haunts the line even if I’m not sure he hears me exhaling on this side, and I think about how I haven't been twelve for so long or if anyone else hears us, though I tell no one about these calls since I can’t tell if—like some old trope—they’re coming from inside the house (or whatever that metaphorically means), but I still wonder where else they would be coming from and where else I should be now and where else I had been then and who else I was, am, or will be, and when I try to call back deep in desperate hours of late nights to try to get through, all I ever get is a dial tone so loud it starts to sound like my own scream.

 

Aaron Sandberg has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s, No Contact, Alien Magazine, The Shore, The Offing, Sporklet, Right Hand Pointing, Halfway Down the Stairs, Crow & Cross Keys, Burningword Journal, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his poetry posts—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.

Much After the Fact

To the best of their knowledge,
boiling the witch alive was the
worst option. This they knew
only in retrospect, as the Dark
seeped from the swamp into
the groundwater and up into
the skeletal limbs of the birches
permanently encircling the village
until their pale bark turned gray
and animals began to disappear—
first wildfowl, then pets, beasts
of burden. Now the ice has returned
and helplessly the local folk hold
their hands to the ashen sky and cry
“What can we do to make this better?”
Sometimes as the wind howls
its response through wooden chimes
outside the jail house you can hear
the Dark whispering under its breath:
try, try, try.

 

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, North American Review, The Southern Review, Fence, and Atlanta Review among others. He publishes Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.

My man is a prayer

My tongue, a boat to heaven
Curled up in the night sky of my mouth
I speak of him and take flight
A gondola from here to thereafter
Wet flesh becomes a vehicle to divinity
A miracle performed in darkness, I speak in hymn
I scribe his favourite things in journals,
I chant them to the blue,
I watch the stars eat them and
grow brighter
My lover is the question and the answer
Eyes speckled as the pages of a holy book,
He is the window to God
The stained glass, glittering and gorgeous,
Shining violet light across my neck:
He blooms.

 

Ani Bachan is a Toronto-based midwifery student and occasional writer. She has been previously published in Inlandia’s Online Journal, The Showbear Family Circus, and F3LL Magazine.

Aunt Sadie’s Ghosts

She scribbles cryptic messages
in fading window frost;
composes abstract poetry
on the Ouija board
every Saturday night –
Aunt Sadie, all glassy-eyed,
fingers hovering over the planchette,
puts on an ethereal show
while ardent admirers
sip peach tea in the parlor
and spin tales on the front porch.

A coastal Carolina tradition:
entertaining guests with departed souls
and disembodied artistes –
if only they knew the secrets
Sadie keeps in the root cellar,
where she accumulates talent
posthumously, a ghostly
gifted entourage of candidates
still eager to perform,
loitering amidst the bones
of past auditions.

 

Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment editor with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his bachelor’s in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Publication credits include Tiferet, Zillah, The Ugly Tree, Modern Drunkard Magazine, Red Owl, Jones Av., Main Street Rag, Space & Time, Mythic Delirium and Weird Tales. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. Visit www.leeclarkzumpe.com.

Henri

The clattering of rain
is a sort of pagan baptism, the way
the glass shudders and shatters
beneath its weight.

(I am on the roof, it says.
I am on your back, it says.
I am gnawing your bones for decades
until just hair and teeth remain, it says.)

The saints of the sky. The heresy
of hurricane. The power shutting off.
The path we walk, flashlights lit,
searching for life again as the storm
howls hymns through our gutters.
Oh, how I long for approval
in the windless eye of God.

(Where is the significance, it says.
Where is the meaning, it says.
Where is the flood meant to carry
that which is long submerged, it says.)

 

Noelle McManus is a writer, poet, linguist, and lapsed Catholic from Long Island, New York. Their writing has been featured in publications such as Vagabond City Press, LIBER: A Feminist Review, The Women’s Review of Books, Cathexis Northwest Press, and more. You can find more of their work at noellemcmanus.com, or follow them on Instagram @n.o.e.lle.

Headache

the smoke put a hammer in my head.
the smoke
from the fire
from the town
next
door.
the fire that didn't kill anyone
this
time.
the smoke was full of hammers
and my head took one for
keep
sake.
my head is amphibious that way.
always sluicing on up to things
better left outdoors.
outdoors, air burns
and burns like a girl at the edge
of the dance floor.
ask
me.
ash
me.
as we walk to school, she coughs,
my daughter. the smoke put a hammer
in her lungs. the hammers claw and claw
at the nails and the doors come
un
done.
everywhere is
outdoors, and now
even the night is
bright as
sun.

 

Corinna Schulenburg (she/her) is a queer trans artist/activist committed to ensemble practice and transformative justice. She’s a mother, a playwright, a poet, and a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble. Poems in: Arachne Press, Beaver Magazine, Capsule Stories, Lost Pilots, Long Con, LUPERCALIA Press, miniskirt magazine, Moist, Moonflake Press, Moss Puppy, Oroboro, Okay Donkey, SHIFT, The Shore, The Westchester Review, and more. 

a slow pull in the universe

Today I decided my life was beyond my body,
began the idea on that side of a clearing
where snow pads and ice pace ground
in a certain weakness
where one wants to stay seated in a dream
that they are no longer a part of. The truth?
The magician's secret is purely magic. It's the moment
where you are uncertain if it's actually snowing
outside, then you decide its earth confetti and a just
wind. And that window glass acts more like
a hull breaching through waves. Your head bobs on top
the shoreline. A buoy and its small soft gulls. That people
know far more about loss than they
do about love. And that their bodies will never
admit to this. I’ve watched a body refract a moment.
The visuals are too overwhelming. There’s
a side on a train where everyone is standing. And no one gets off.
Like how satisfaction wants to fall through a roof. As a woman,
I fantasize about its collateral damage.
How I’ve only held hands
in this life. I’ve seen diplomacy
in the small mirror next to my bed,
shrieking. Tried to tuck it back in. That earth’s
perpetual wetness brings forth a pattern.
That art is a chosen war to vindicate it.

 


Allie McKean is currently a queer poet in the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst. Her work draws on surrealism and lyric to explore how language and time work in tandem in locating the proximities between imagination, dreams, memories, and reality. She is a big fan of mallards, a rich dark green (see this specific hex code: #2C522E), and black coffee.

Angel Collectors

“No, no, it is the three strange angels,
Admit them, admit them, ”
— D.H. Lawrence, Song of a Man Who Has Come Through

The angel collectors wait where stairways cheat.
Steps rise almost to a door then twists down
following voices you can’t hear. You’ll see
them some nights, flipping through stars. They’re around
at times you ignore, sighing. They repeat
unsayable names, hoping that their sound
calls angels. Collectors play, but they cheat
each raise. Almost twisting doors, they fall down.

Some angels enjoy the stairway game—
able to hide when they want and get caught
in time. Eternity’s always the same
and paths leading nowhere, or staying sought
diverts them. They’ll toy with stars, play with rain
and steal haloes. People are jokes
they forgot after Eden. Cute angels leap through frames,
tossing terror, lightly, at those untaught
humans dancing up strange stairways. That game
stays new. Hiding is fun. They won’t stay caught.

 

Mark J. Mitchell was born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. His latest poetry collection, Roshi San Francisco, was just published by Norfolk Publishing. Starting from Tu Fu was recently published by Encircle Publications. A new collection, Something to Be and a novel are forthcoming. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, he’s looking for work again. He has published 2 novels and three chapbooks and four full length collections so far. His first chapbook won the Negative Capability Award. A meager online presence can be found at facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter. A primitive web site now exists: mark-j-mitchell.square.site I sometimes tweet @MarkJMitchellSF.