SUSAN / THE JOURNAL

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PULP / Molly Zhu

    While you were shopping for blueberries at your neighborhood green market, and the delivery truck double parked for the umpteenth time on the gum-freckled street, they said Andromeda was only lightyears away and plunging straight towards us. The feeling is humanly-imminent: to have a memory for holding the futures of all the lint colonies on earth, and the shoe-flys, and ripped dollar bills, the rivers that crease your face over time and the frizzy hairs, the people you loved who could never love you back, the number of days you tried making the shampoo last, the packages meant for you that would never pass your door, the apologies you crafted— as a knife carves into soap—left for tomorrow, tomorrow when an egg is cracked open without a gilded yolk, the feeling of loneliness in a world that buzzes like a never-ending hive…                                          our destiny is to marry into a jumble of stardust                                          twinkling with the celestial milk from a mother                                          we’ll never know—when the sun                                          swallows the earth and fate twists her neck,                                          I will (of course) be enjoying the blueberries with you,                                          sitting on a sun-stained park bench                                          somewhere simple,                                          as the sky splits apart                                          and melts like bronzed sugar                                          over our lips.           ⁂ Molly is a new poet and she lives in Brooklyn, New York. For her day job, she is a corporate attorney and in her free time, she loves thinking about words and reading and eating. She has previously published in the Rising Phoenix Review, the Ghost City Press, and the Bombay Review among others. Her work is forthcoming in the Wilderness House Literary Review. You can find her on instagram at: @mlz316.

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A CRACK IN THE LEVEE / Eva Miller

The first time I lost everything was in August of 2005. Rushing waters carried our antique oak door into the sea, snatched the yellow buds of the angel’s trumpet, stole the old off-white siding and took the happiness of my family with it. We never dared to go back, to touch the fingers of the cold corpse of a house we once called home, to walk through the tattered door frame like we were once again cradling a newborn child with eyes that reflected the waters brewing on the cracked kitchen tiles. My memories have failed me. The calendar in my mind was torn from the wall of a room in that house. Pictures and news headlines and half-torn letters of sympathy from forgotten family members are stuck together with damp pieces of tape. The newborn is swaddled in kelp. He is breathing salt water, and crying for his mother. Sometimes, I think I can feel the ocean creeping up the back of my neck. The violent tides clean the marrow of my bones and fill my arteries with pieces of memories that cannot be remembered. I can hear the screeching trumpets and heavy footsteps on uneven pavement. When I open my eyes, I see the lid of my above ground tomb. I scratch and I claw and I try to escape, but I never get free. Instead, my incessant knocking has put a crack in the levee. ⁂ Eva Miller is a Creative Writing student at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. They were born and partly raised in New Orleans before moving to Birmingham, Alabama after Katrina. 

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Grocery shopping in a Baltimore bodega / Emily McDonald

When I first moved here I would dream of apples, ones so big and so unmarred that you could taste the pesticides. But in this city all the fruit I can afford is rotting, flecked with wormholes like spiders’ eyes. The produce aisle’s dusted with flies. But, god, I still try. I cut the soft, white, fuzzy bits off strawberries, pretend that screw-cap wine tastes something like champagne, and that I am still able to seduce myself. As if. We’re too familiar. The marriage has long gone dry. I’m too repulsed, I’m too repulsed by those peculiar, unsociable mannerisms, the ones that come from years

of living on your own: I reuse day- old coffee grids, choke down the earthy sludge

to stave off headaches. Leave bloodstained curls of floss to fester on my sink. I pluck stray hairs for fun. Just once, I’d like to surprise myself in a good way—a no-occasion, plastic-wrapped bouquet of gas station roses. Or bingo. Snake eyes. Strike. ⁂ Emily McDonald is a writer and English teacher from Maryland. Her poetry has recently appeared in Eunoia Review.

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In my cup, / Patrick Redmond

a shape, a slurred embryo draws its limbs forward to hear & then lets go of my lips once the succulents on the window have names of children. I hear your pulse through your forehead. I hear a swift axe & its speech tussled by wind. Your hair is the only evidence you ran smoldering against the buildings we were looking up at. Usually these senses are reversed beneath a skyline. The hands are held as saltwater spilled on severed gums. Our callous scrapes across my leg—we can’t kiss yet. Whatever had been scraped out from the mouth holds down the bridge. My wine spills, welters the puzzle piece, making the dog’s head impossible to fit on the child’s body mid-flight to the ocean. The movement becomes the subject.           As a priest hanged in a bag.           A watch burned on a stove. ⁂ Patrick Redmond teaches composition and creative writing at CUNY. Recent writing is forthcoming or is featured in The Columbia Review, The Hunger Journal, Silver Pinions, Bomb Cyclone, Prelude, and elsewhere.

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I AM / Renea Di Bella

I am a firecracker// a static shock// the chime of an antique clock breaking through the quiet of a clear, pink dawn// I am unexpected// a jolt// I defy labels// definitions// binaries// I am fluid// I live in the kind of grey area that makes most people uncomfortable// that’s where I thrive// I am hard for people to understand// and therefore, sometimes hard to take// but if you let me in I will blow your world wide open// I will push you passed your comfort zone, into dimensions you never expected// I’ll have you questioning things you never thought you would’ve questioned// this who I am// a little bit of a troublemaker// like a spark that lights a fuse// I am a call from the universe// that nothing is absolute except that we are all connected// and those connections are all that really matters// I am not everyone’s cup of tea// I am not for the weak at heart// I am who I am// I am//

I am// I am. ⁂ Renea Di Bella (she/they) is a queer, gender fluid, poet, blogger, and suicide survivor. They have a BA in Secondary Education and an M.A. in Curriculum and instruction. They were born and raised in Michigan and have been writing poetry since they were old enough to hold a pen. Their poetry is a reflection of their lifelong journeys with mental health, sexuality, gender, and identity.

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TWO POEMS / Rachel Hinton

HOSPICE PLASTICS What were we doing when the supplies came into our house, enteral feeding protocol, ostomies, the spirometer she breathed in each day for duty, security pole and bathroom grab bar, holder for cane, each with its suitable bearing, a toilet with arms, a bath bench, the real material? First I avoided it, then I stared straight at it, I wrote a message from the nurse, Debbie Dill. My sister yelled DEBBIE DILL, DIAPERS. It was good to take things too far. I tell you it’s unnerving when the natural world makes a mistake. A big bald cow came around the corner for hay. A bird flew at my head during dinner. None of this was supposed to happen. I have no thank yous for the commode that could not accommodate, the grab bar that could not be held. We kept stepping on hazards. Please, it wasn’t clean, I mean they could have been clearer about my dead. ENMESHMENT A small section of      follicles swept to the side like water      I may have thought once  this was something my mother       did not mean to do but I think she meant     to make whorls of my hair with her fingerprint        she was trying  to make small art        out of small art I knew myself most     when she embezzled  from my own     neck made of birds twigs that snap to        pull into their  place a small      moonup-to-the-porch face Nothing is sliding yet our house has not begun its peachy slip    in my cheek the peachlike function the neck back to the moon where     porch-high a relative river fell in hoops      This is the best way to do hair  These are the thick loops for     crimping out into a lion Can I just cancel and wipe hair down Can I just be one thing for once I want to think why I remember  my face the moon    It’s making an earnest circuit around the tree    It’s laughing outside The hair is too dry and forkfuls       I am too shy for this region of hair       which makes  life around it    The porch light and  through it a ribbon       of hair, abeyance ⁂ Rachel Hinton's poems are forthcoming in The Hunger and Salamander, and her debut poetry collection, Hospice Plastics, will be published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in 2021. She is originally from Vermont and now lives in Chicago, where she works as an editor and teacher. 

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CHONDRITE SÉANCE / James Yeary

Imagining someone unlike myself awakening musical unities The wine-dark sea holds the stars in its cup These single-point constellations the last sailors shed of individuation transfigured in the fog of sea·map·sky the drumming is incomprehensible commanding while side-stepping the private as nerves muscle their way into hammers the word slinks from its brief biography. We wear the hole in the light as our badge sight returned one hundred twenty years it climbs my face, looking for the name. Kudos searing to the throat on its own now I know what everyone else knows The thighs are wise to what the thyroid is doing Telemachus disappears into her command a vent of cortisol burns my eyebrows every void with their identity. ⁂ James Yeary is interested in the mitigation of personality for the sake of Martian influence. His most recent chapbook is Hawai’i (violaceous euphoRia, 2019). He has taught collaborative writing as an art practice in the classroom, at the museum, and on the street.

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PLANT ME IN THE RIVER / Taeyeon Han

My eyes fell in love first, then my nose, enchanted by old lemon roses, fell second and harder. My heart beat black mullets and crooked teeth (erythrocytes) flowing freely and coagulating with maggots at the same time. Vessels broke in the soil of love. I would let my antibodies fill glasses of champagne for you, but you wouldn’t water my leaves, notice my green, or see the bouquet of thorns that prickled my scalp and sent blood down the slope of my nose each time I fell. ⁂ Taeyeon Han is a student in California. You can find his work on loose-leaf paper and on the Notes app.

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CORE PARTY / Sica

one of my cats always sits on the edge of the tub when I’m in the bathroom and it makes me feel safe and protected while I lay on the floor of the shower, with the water turned up a little too hot, and think about phasing through the bottom of the tub, like clipping through a wall in a video game, water and all just falling through every possible layer below until I reach the center of the earth and discover something really weird like it’s filled with other naked people floating through everything or maybe all of the run on sentences ever written in the history of written language or maybe nothing at all... ⁂ Sica is a poet and writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sadly you can read more at sicahi.tumblr.com/ or follow them at twitter.com/seakuh

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TWO POEMS / Justin Rigamonti

STOICISM So many false starts, false sparks, flames that just wouldn’t take. All around me, wet wood leapt into orange infatuation, but not my little wick. Flintless, curious, alien. Cinders from a distant sun. Once, at eighteen, I showed my mom a yearbook glimpse of Shaun’s   frost-blonde eyebrows like a sleepy cigarette leaned out for a light. Oh Justin, she said, you can do better than that. But no, I never could do better than love. Solitude is different, the placid thump of one heart, a single drum drum- circle, and soon enough, it almost feels like music, almost warm enough to hold you in its sound. PENTECOST Let there be light and there was light— one of those big beeswax candles, they smell so good. And god said let’s smoke this joint, Galactic Animal, and we did smoke it and my body unfolded below me like a trapeze artist, like a generous noodle of slack, and the animal climbed around me and held my limbs the way a doctor would, more firmly than you’d think, and I wondered who taught him how to hold a man as though his touch could heal, but those were my feet being tenderized, those were my lips making almost foreign sounds, saying, Tongue of fire, holy finger, heal the man I love. ⁂ Justin Rigamonti teaches writing at Portland Community College and serves as the Managing Editor of Fonograf Editions. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, and Zócalo Public Square.

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STITCH, BACKSTITCH, STITCH / Becca Yenser

I sew masks to cover the faces of people I don’t know. I sew masks using the CDC recommended pattern. I sew masks but I only have two prints I bought from JoAnn’s last year. I sew masks but my needle bends, so I replace it. I sew masks for nurses. For senior aide staff. For New Yorkers. For the Navajo Nation. I sew masks to the music of Wilco. Neko Case. King Princess. I sew masks as we break up. I sew masks when I hear my dad has cancer. I sew masks as our family dog dies. I sew masks through the downpour. Through the sunstroke weather. Through the haze of pollen. My dead dog visits me. I try to find the heartbeat stitch but this model is too cheap to have it. I sew masks for my immuno-compromised neighbors. For my aunts. My parents. My ex-boyfriend. Andrew Cuomo holds up a mask mailed to him by a farmer in Kansas. My hands sew the mask without me. Like running in a dream when you can’t feel your legs. The rhythm of the stitches are like drums in a Sting song. Upon the fields of barley. I sew masks then watch videos of people dying on ventilators. I don’t always sew masks. Sometimes I sit outside and watch the robins fight mid-air, my cat running hip-deep through the tall grass to reach them. Sometimes she brings me dead birds, but sometimes they fly away. ⁂ Becca Yenser was born in Iowa and raised in Oregon. They earned an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University, where they were a Fellow in Fiction. They are the author of the poetry chapbook, “Too High and Too Blue In New Mexico” (Dancing Girl Press, 2018). Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Madcap Review, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Fanzine, and many others. They live in Wichita, Kansas with their cat, N.J.

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STATE BIRD / Carrie MacLeod

because we were small we felt old in his hands a typewritten cell a graft of narcotic he maybe had to be shed he maybe has his legs & i am ruined by this effect no soft bear to bear love wandering suburbia mauling trash cans housewives hissing their kitchen terrariums my food is dead don’t touch it bear be not there i frame dead ducks a basic brown every dog every day she buys three apples & peels them to be sure they are not gold then feeds them to her dog a pine sword tail wrapped brown to fill her closet was he militant a bear of bordering languish no patio set photo bear bomb catastrophe in serial lives & if there’s any truth to the lie that we’re all neighbors maybe he’ll stun our brains into becoming so ⁂ Carrie MacLeod is a disabled poet/musician from Trenton, New Jersey. She lives in Portland, Maine with her teenage daughters.

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BLUE AND GREEN SHOULD NEVER BE SEEN / Alicia Byrne Keane

On Mondays and Tuesdays the world is a clasp I frequent the same rooms I did when I was 19 But talk to no one; my steps have an underwater Elasticity and I think about my mother’s story of An itchy green dress trapping the angled points Of elbows. A Tuesday is a kind of incandescent Elbow where all of the group chats are quiet, so There are less last minute gutterings of the old Sparkle-feeling, the stilled tree trunks in a park Floodlit near the Phibsborough crossroads when You walk a friend home, the polaroid, the pear’s Crescent-bite, the homemade zine gathering the Lunglike dark of coffee stains at the bottom of A bag. The possible, and the fizz, and the feeling Your anger is justified when back then I didn’t Know anything yet and should have just shut up, Like a Tuesday, like a shining juncture. Verbena Tea stills me, and valerian tincture, the sense of A chlorophyll tang, expanding. Some mice sleep Curled beneath my flesh, waiting for the lit box Of catastrophe, for plump extraction, for iodine- Bordered construction sites. I’m sick or sick of Everything, and the distinction becomes some Sort of a leaf, something with veins that radiate. ⁂ Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Dublin, Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, The Cardiff Review, and Entropy.

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TWO POEMS / Briauna Taylor

    spring as a nameless DM from a past love eager I plucked every single petal off you                     one single rose blooming early on the bush with my fingernail I made half moons in your flesh and used them like chalk to draw a door on the other side I have been building fantasy around human form and I cultivate closure for the memory of our los angeles apartment a youthful deity covered in plaster and dust here we will stand             forever all our lesser loves tethered to the curb like pewter swap meet angels and I believe a notification could contain the same power as mouthless kisses this modern apology                                          I really did love you once a single eyelash fluttering on the pavement bipolar pronounced pandemic when drinking does nothing for this stinging head and foul mad mouth I eat dried mango and sing loudly at my damask curtains remorse is the only bed I can't bury It hangs around this house winged and hungry for the repair of          unfamiliar illumination ⁂ Briauna Taylor is a poet, and seeker of magik living in Portland Oregon. Her background focuses on performing arts and spoken word through youth outreach non-profits, such as Youth Speaks and Get Lit-Words Ignite. She is the facilitator of the ‘Mind & Mouth’ youth poetry programming and open mic series at local non-profit Marrow. Her practice and personal mission aim to inspire emotional authenticity, navigation of trauma and grief and the exploration of the ethereal self. Her self published book of poems "Nightwell" came out in the summer of 2019 in conjunction with the Independent Publishing Resource Centers certificate program in poetry.

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NIGHT SHADES / Marie Landau

unblushingly I lie settle hips like signals to a dream perching on an edge of night gimme sleep or at least rest half of you gone before I close my eyes bolts of yellow strike the lids when I was a kid I wondered is this what nothing looks like a spectrum of colors against the dark all neon and sundry sun shining against sleep edging out a cloud whose soul was battered by wind something needs fixing what you do to me when your mouth says yes and your body dissolves we passed a coyote in the dark after you asked should we watch for deer yes the black dispatch of night the animals wrenching their omens yellow eyes like lit wicks seeing night the way I saw nothing rings of light unchained open, eyes, open like pearls crowning from an oyster ⁂ Marie Landau lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in Spry, SOFTBLOW, District Lit, Powder Keg, Litbreak, and elsewhere.

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TWO POEMS / Carolyn Supinka

FIELD GUIDE FOR F FORM is what you do and feel inside. The form of an organ, its soft machine. FURTHER is also located inside. Equal to the distance between now and later. FAINT is the way the world works in reverse at dawn. The stars grow faint and then finally disappear in the light. The waves, once faint snakes of white, grow in clarity. And the birds burst into song from a place that is the opposite of faint, a place where there was no song at all. We say “grow” faint like absence is something large and getting larger, which it is. FACT is that which is undeniably felt. A fact is also the hand that pushes you against the wall. Less fact are the words said which you cannot remember. Even less fact are the words you wanted to say but didn’t, which you do remember. Fact: how you love the term in fact, which acts as a sieve of experience. Example: You had thought things were fine, but in fact, they were not. FINE: can be something in the way of flour, powder. Fine is a relative term. Fine is dependent on how fine things were before. The movement of wheat to flour means that flour is fine,as compared to wheat. You might not call a pile of rocks fine, but what if the rocks once composed solid cliffs, worn down by explosions and the ocean? What if waves wore and tumbled the cliffs into the pile of rocks at your feet? It might then be fair to call the rocks fine. FIELD is located in the sense of an expanse. A field of study is the space in which the subject of study exists. A subject might spend its days wandering around its field. Fields might exist inside the field where the subject tends its beautiful crops. The fields in the field could yield good harvest, or none. The subject might one day, upon walking in its field, discover the boundaries of its field. There might be another field out there the subject might realize, other than the one in which I’ve lived. The subject of the field might leave the field, hop over the fence, and wander away. This has never happened, but it could. ** MYTHS ABOUT THE BODY The body is a walnut. Not the shell, not the meat. Both. The hinges of the body creak when they fly open in the night. Grass creeps over the body’s train tracks. The body is never poisoned by the water. The body is a perpetual sunset. The body is civil twilight. The body is high noon. The body makes mistakes. Makes many. Nobody ever catches the body, or makes the body sorry. The body protects the world from evil by holding all the evil behind the body’s lips, where it swarms like bees. The body is a bee. The body’s lips drip with gobs of molten honey and fire. The body’s memory is a lost city. “Let’s never find that city”, says the body. The body has seven snakes to do the body’s bidding. Nothing runs in the body’s family. The body lives next to a river. It’s the same river that ran next to the body’s mother’s house and the body’s mother’s mother’s house. In some myths, the dancing in the body never stops. In other myths, time is a field for the body to lie down in. There are three main obstacles that the body must overcome. In some myths, the three obstacles are the same obstacle that must happen three times. In most myths, the body loses everything. In some myths, the body has a garden. In some myths, the body has none. ⁂ Carolyn Supinka is the author of the chapbook Stray Gods (2016, Finishing Line Press) and is a writer and visual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. Her work has been most recently published in The Sonora Review, Peach Mag, and The Recluse, and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Heavy Feather Review, and The Shore.

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FEED THE BITE / Brian Stephen Ellis

The 1st thing they teach you, about what to do when a human being bites you, is to not follow your instinct. When another person sinks their teeth into, say, your arm your instinct will be to pull away. To jerk the arm back and in doing so, lose a lot of flesh. It seems strange that our instincts would be wrong on this, that human evolution has delinquent standard operating procedure when it comes to bite attack. You would think natural selection would have accounted for this, but even that ancient and advanced technology fight or flight sometimes contains errors. The best possible scenario if you ever find yourself being gnawed upon by another, is to take your free hand, if you have one, and place it gently but securely upon the back of the head. In the same place you would cradle a newborn, and then, commit a maneuver that is often referred to as feeding the bite. This requires moving towards the damage when everything is telling you to pull away. You will move towards the injury. Turn your body into a harness, contort around the violence, push forward until you find the back wall of pain, wait until the jawbone releases and then, let go. ⁂ Brian Stephen Ellis is a writer and a special education therapist. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is called Often Go Awry. He lives in Portland, Ore.