Poetry

by Adrian Dallas Frandle Pelly Benassi There were so many omens. First, there was the circle of ravens hovering over the roof of my morning coffee. Then, on the way to the bank, two hawks separately riding the gyres. A blue truck bannering, “Jesus the living Bread.” Red shoes on an old man. Three atms, all broken. Amongst the signs, I waded through La Mer by Debussy, awash in a painted memory of the sea. Awoke to a dream of driving through fog. Later on, the bat weaved a suns

by Tristan Richards NASA We do not text often, but sometimes, you ask me, Did you hear about the bank robbery? The shooting? The girl who disappeared? Your hand-me-down fear shows up in so many places that sometimes I forget it is not mine. My fear is more buzzing than distant, close enough to touch instead of living on the nightly news. This is not to say that my fear is not momentous enough to flash across a tv screen, but when you stare as hard as I do, eventually everythi

by Ariel Clark-Semyck Benjamin DeYoung a woman plays her father on tv. a woman in a hawaiian shirt gets pied in the face to orchestral music. a woman puts on clown makeup & lets a hen walk across her chest while she does a back-bend. a woman sips chicken broth sadly while her husband holds the spoon. a woman wearing a silk-robe cries with her mother who is also wearing a silk-robe. a woman dresses up as an angel in a negligee & hands out shiny insults. a woman walks into a ph

by Olumide Manuel Pinakeen Bhatt this year, my hypocrisy grows. you cannot imagine the weight of lies i’m comfortable with. at dawn, I call them hopes. at dusk, they become jokes. dull knives of comedy, shelved in my chest. it becomes a little hard to laugh like i used to, yet I can’t unlearn my addiction to the passivation of casualties. it is a survival tool. it is what I teach my students. it is what I will preach tomorrow — you will be okay. everything will be fine. Olumi

by L Scully Adam Neumann I I slip and stumble– I did not inherit hills. You are surefooted. II I ask my question: what’s your favorite kind of sheep? You say, the absent. III You lose your blue coat in the cupboard full of hers; we look everywhere. L Scully (they/them) is a trans writer and double Capricorn currently based in the ether. Their work has appeared widely in print and online and can be found in Jellyfish Review, Hobart, and Wales Art Review, among others. Their de

by Omodero David Oghenekaro Alessio Soggetti Oftentimes I don’t get enough of the magic, swift in its momentary appearing, in the bright little things I behold. Above me on this blessed morning, the slumbering sky opens its mouth, yawning into the dreams of men, breathing upon the silence that hangs untainted — a dizzying enchantment of nature. Oftentimes I am more alive in my loneliness than I am in the company of friends. All my life I’ve sought for a love as sonorous as th

by Nicole Rollender Divyansh Dwivedi My son says his body’s full of honey, jarred, electric bees — You’ve asked me, have you ever heard a death rattle — I’ve asked back if it’s possible to drown inside yourself, without sighing — I learned to pray anywhere you can name home or falling leaves or falling — My son, who wouldn’t drink my milk, smelled of wet petals — I buried longing within my pelvis, yet the wide sky opening in my chest — He asks: How long before I burst open

by HLR The New York Public Library The grotesque irony of realising that you do indeed need to be hospitalised for your own safety and that of others even though the psych ward is a horrible place to be and you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy and you generally end up being discharged from hospital in a worse state than you were in when you arrived and you do everything in your power to avoid hospitalisation at all costs but today is a reallybad day and you’ve had a reall

by Bex Hainsworth Junel Mujar to decay. A verb that rhymes with death. French is the language of everything I have lost. A childhood spent wandering the beach roads of Audinghen, picking up concrete nouns like potatoes, lifting their amber weight to the sun, feeling the lumps of their strange letters. Two decades later, they are a vinegary web of earth, an orchard rotting. I didn’t know this tongue was only temporary. My mouth is parched, fluency curled back like a sc

by Michael Emmanuel Ian Parker a. i assure my lover I’ll divorce my sob stories. i flourish in the failure of this promise. every window i open leads into an alley growing wild with weed, with the teeth of the hurt. in my grandfather’s teenage diary are flash stories of people who left: the high school teacher who taught him to spell heavy, the trader across the street who showed him a war could fit into your pockets, the first woman he hurt. i tap him at night and angle the

by Ashish Kumar Singh rayen lazghab When we were making out, he asked for my name and the promise of anonymity seemed to dissolve like a deer’s eye in the car’s headlight. Outside, the night tried to seep through the glass, its wet muzzle pressed tight against the windows. I remember what my mother once told me about safety, she said do not let yourself be recognized, if there’s fire, be the smoke . So instead I tell him that my name is so common I could be anyone’s son or lo

by Elizabeth Loudon Marc-Olivier Jodoin We recommend arriving well in advance of your appointed hour, for you will need time to accustom yourself to the smell. The bear does not know that he smells, nor can he help it, but the reek of the shaded forest where he made his small fortune digging up the remains of bishops and kings from old mud is a shock, you will not be able to disguise your expression of disgust, you will lift your hand to cover your mouth and it is best that t

by Paul Chuks Gary Scott Man is a yes between two genitals. One body said yes to another & I was born. A cluster of eumelanin strands gather for a hair that serve as mattress for gravity & other things that burn overhead. society calls me black but melanin goodness is what I call myself. Here, I am several simultaneous voices away from grief; one ricochets back to me at the cry for help; others stay for protest. Some days, I am blacker than night, I could nestle in my shad

by Noreen Ocampo Kev Bation a tabby cat tries to swallow my knuckles. my first love drives me in his car. I hear I’m supposed to die at a place called Chicken Heaven. my teeth fall out. I tell a joke about acid reflux. the cat never explains the desperation to consume me. I fail multiple-choice tests. I’m always in high school. I sit at the back of the second violin section & the cellists begin to wear their cello cases, the black material conforming perfectly to their musica

by Mollie O’Leary Harlie Raethel Dad almost died before mom decided to divorce him, the clot clogged somewhere in the calf, an incomplete passage to the heart. She prepared his syringes as he lay bedridden, her hands precise, barely leaving a bruise, knowing already the force required for a body to bend, to buckle. She was an understudy to all things breakable; her marriage an apprenticeship in shatter , in fracture . His almost-death only weeks before she slipped in the kitc

by Julie Weiss Ivan Aleksic Even though the camera won’t be turned on, apply a tinge of lipstick before your class: bombshell pink or scarlet work best. When he joins Zoom, sing a sweet note into your good morning spiel and smile as if sashaying down a catwalk. Just because he’s married with kids doesn’t mean head tilt and hip sway aren’t boxes on his mental checklist of requirements for a good teacher. Ask her to tell you about her family, the easiest and most enjoyable top

by Ruby Dunn Immo Wegmann For Catherine T AND THE KITCHEN IS FOR ROMANCE // AND even after everything, I find my muscle memory still betrays me; That half-beat breath before I let the gate swing to, because in that moment I still half expect to wait for you. How long must we keep loving the old things that we know? Five years gone, since I left my parents’ house - and I can still take the stairs two at a time when the lights are off, because they used to be mine. Just like I’

by Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi Thomas Griesbeck for Deborah Yakubu “& you sister of my country burning & i am sorry & i am sorry & i am so sorry” — Othuke Umukoro quell the flames. rewrite the violence in crimson. there’s no sweet synonym for lynching. no metaphor adhesive enough to gather grey ash into brittle white bones. girl a crushed petal. arsoned garden. black girl flayed. noir dreams writhing. papers reading like a dystopian novel. eunice slain. bridget beheaded. names of girl

by Hassan A. Usman Kenrick Mills When we learn to spell joy , we lose our lips — our tongues perforated by grief. They said home is a place for merriment, but our meals poison the hand that made them. My mother applies a thick blush on her chin to withhold her cascading tears, yet is called tears of joy. This is the house that produced an album of my first cry, this bungalow, a nightingale; its strongest pillar, my father’s voice. It’s questioning how a bird sings, but spread

by Christtie Jay Dami Akinbode Mother, I can not call because the darkness that has befallen is brutal. Yesterday, walking my bicycle to work I almost lost an eye weighed by how hard it is not to throw a stone at the man you love when he says no to you collecting his coat and breathing in his hair every morning. Now, crouched over a coffee cup I am losing my breath chewing my tongue, trying to remember never to call for help because at this age, goodbye shouldn’t be a dress t