Issue #85
G.A. Moon
nostalgia
in my mother tongue // ulan means rainfall // umbrella lines
spin a nightdream of // crooked cobweb stairs // craned legs
on benches // lola, mother, cousin speaking longwind words
dip pandesal // speckle-dirty cups // cream & coffee powder
i’m sugardrunk on sweet bread & inky nectar // nightcrawls
up creaky stairs // black door into bedroom // plucked hands
swim in the dark pool // window curtains // street light shine
dust cover on dresser-drawer top // stray coin // blurry photo
holy items: prayer cards, rosary, & statue of the virgin mary
sleepwalk into furnace melt // till mother love run cheap fan
green blade buzz & hum inside a skeleton // gather child me
scalp on her white lap dress // soft shadow eyelid // gaze the
dresser photo // fogfuzz gone // little ghost & umbrella // her
soft sung hums // native mouth // nightspun fingers twirl my
child hair // until i fall into hushed summer sleep
Born in Manila, Philippines, G.A. Moon is a musician, poet, and professional copywriter. When he’s not penning words, you’ll find him immersed in the strange, embracing all things a little eerie and wonderfully weird. Or hiking with his dogs.
Adrianna Gordey
Catastrophizing Cannibals
After Paige Lewis’ “Diorama of Ghosts”
thoughts eat each other, bloody their jaws
on my marshmallow emotions
Aren’t you built tougher?
i tumbled head-first down the stairs
as a toddler, a tornado of toes &
fingers & fear mom paid the doctor
the two teeth that the wood sawed
from my skull i’m still healing
But didn’t your teeth grow back?
the knowledge they could break
splintered my self-esteem
Do you see a therapist?
biweekly i bargain with telehealth, but
they don’t accept teeth
Where are your baby teeth?
like all my best parts, they were auctioned
off, storage war style listen to them rattle
in lab coat pockets, enamel tumbleweeds:
proof the world wounds
Do you miss them?
i yearn for the yolk of time where nature
nurtured, where thoughts didn’t hyperbolize
into doomsday declarations when i was whole
Adrianna Gordey (she/her) is a writer based in Kansas. When she isn’t writing, Adrianna can be found daydreaming about the Atlantic ocean and assembling overly ambitious Halloween costumes. Her work has appeared in Passengers Journal, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram @by_adrianna_gordey.
Maya Slocum
Story of a girl
Viscosity matters
when it comes to meat sauce.
Don’t give me that thinned-out,
slurp-it-down, slips off the plate stuff.
I want it with heft, dragging down pasta
like mud that sucks at my legs
when I wander the creek bed
out back, low tide.
I panic when I turn back and see my dog stuck
in that creek, belly-deep and panting.
Out of the muck, his tongue flecked
with black bits, dead fish decomposing
on my skin, we flop down on the marsh grass
and think about baths. Think about food
and our favorite dinners.
When my family makes jiaozi,
that means it’s okay to slurp.
Hunched over our bowls, suctioning
dinner upwards before it slips from our
chopsticks and plops down into soy sauce +
sriracha + sesame oil, our faces
are speckled with jiaozi-bath freckles.
Little pork and scallion filled
pouches slide down our throats
“like goldfish” dad says.
He takes me out on the water
and teaches me to pull lobster pots,
the rope splattering my stomach
with algae and fish gunk, criss-crossing
my body. My childhood lays patchwork
on the ocean, clipped from newspapers
and slapped haphazardly on a piece
of paper stained with slime.
Flip-flopping on the dock, harbor-caught
scup that my cousins reel in
spray me with blood and shit as I pull out
the hooks. “Come ’ere fish fish
pretty little fishy fish” Noah sings out,
bare feet bumping on the wood
with a back-beat.
I have an uncle I could mention
but I won’t. I only want the good stuff,
that mud, that muck, that slip-slap-smack
that coats my mind like
nostalgia. My memory, olfactory
and tactile, lays tacky on my hands
with the residue.
Maya Slocum is a New-England based writer, dancer, and ocean lover. She sees her poetry as an extension of her lived experience, and often draws on her relationships with humans, movement, and the natural world as starting points for her work.
Vanessa Y. Niu
America is also skin
A: America is also skin.
A: I inhabit these streets, this town, like a body.
A: I inhabit its cycles, my heart, its burning and reach for the sun like the tires of a bicycle mulling the ground.
A: I inhabit the tongues and the thousands of names in them.
A: I inhabit the names dissipating in courtrooms that perpetrate the innocent as criminals for their celebration of survival. Xin to sin.
A: I inhabit the limbs formed by wind and exhaust fumes. The way they carve themselves into the land so history may remember they, too, were always there.
A: I inhabit the branches rattling a plastic bag caught on the cypress and the old man from whose basket it escaped from, my wrists and these chains.
A: I inhabit the old tenement, I am in the hollow kitchens by way of flames, flickering on the gas stove. The whisper and cracking of life that evades the condemnation of the sociologist, my ribcage.
A: I inhabit the roar, the anarchy of the cherry blossoms blooming two weeks too early. The overripe girls who scream because they have no other words, my throat.
A: I inhabit the rain that washes it all away. Knowing the dissenting voices to the truth we live, my conscience.
A: I inhabit a conscience.
A: I inhabit this life and all the others that electrify a pulse in this body.
A: I, too, inhabit America, like a body.
Vanessa Y. Niu is a writer and classical singer who lives in New York City. She was the runner-up for the 2024 New York State Youth Poet Laureate and her work has been recognized by the Kennedy Center, Teen Vogue, the Guggenheim, NYFW, and Frontier Poetry.
Kip Knott
Nightly News
The sun bleeds out
along the horizon’s razor edge.
Bats rip the skin of the pond
for quick sips of water.
Feeding fish slice through
moonlight and limbs.
Fireflies ignite between
bloated and bursting cattails.
As I turn for home,
tree frogs sizzle
the dead, brittle willow
to life.
The Insomniac at Dawn
An incomplete mo-
on shines through
the bathroom window
like a shard
of the mir-
ror
I broke this morning
when I didn't see
myself staring back.
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Benjamin Schmitt
Samson
Samson was strong in his weaknesses
lust and rage
slept with prostitutes
fell in love with women
who didn’t seem to care
one left him
so he tied torches to three hundred foxes
set them loose
and burned the Philistine crops
This makes me wonder if Samson
was also weak in his strengths
we imagine an eighties Schwarzenegger
kicking down doors
but maybe it was more like a seventies Woody Allen
some skinny eggplant of a man
slaughtering thousands with a donkey’s jawbone
this combination of strong weakness
and weak strength
sent his heart like a blade
through the bodies of so many Philistines
because the culture of the glorified deceit
could not resist the man
who only found courage in his vices
Once Samson killed a lion
later saw the carcass
filled with bees and honey
and I wonder if he gazed upon himself then
bright soul buzzing
surrounded by ragged bones
so he made up a riddle and a bet
to share his insight with the world
out of the eater came forth meat
out of the strong came forth sweetness
thirty guys there were
if he won they would give him thirty garments
if they won thirty garments would be theirs
These guys must have been idiots
because when they answered the riddle correctly
Samson knew that his betrothed
had told them the secret
so he went off and did the most Scarface thing ever
murdering thirty Philistines
and taking their clothes
handing them over to his interlocutors
bloodstains creating maps of righteous rage
on the fabric
When Samson was finally captured
some of the relatives of those
he had slain probably jeered him
but even with him chained up
his eyes gouged out
having lost it all between Delilah’s breasts
the Philistines still hadn’t figured out the riddle
Samson’s broken body was his strength
and their deaths were the sweet honey
inside his maddened skull
as the stones he pulled fell down upon them
Benjamin Schmitt is the author of four books, most recently The Saints of Capitalism. His poems have appeared in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Seattle with his wife and children
Carlo Rey Lacsamana
desire / nearness
Your breath is the sea
that cradles
the sky of my thirst
the smell of your skin
is a boat
on which
I return home
our mouths two travelers
burning a map
together
wanting to be lost
in their own way
in their own time
my fingers know
by heart
every byway
and hiding place
of your body
there is no landscape
as astounding
as your nearness
no desire
as breathtaking
as your coming
Carlo Rey Lacsamana is a Filipino writer living and working in the Tuscan town of Lucca, Italy. His works have appeared in Esquire Magazine, The Citron Review, Mediterranean Poetry (Stockholm), Amsterdam Quarterly, Lumpen Journal (London), The Berlin Literary Review, The Wild Word, and in other numerous magazines. Follow him on Instagram @carlo_rey_lacsamana
Courtney Hitson
A river thinks out loud
In a dream, I’m a vein
safe in a giraffe’s neck, offering blood
ripened with oxygen.
But it’s a struggle to sleep and I melt
awake, again. A boy plays fetch
with his shadow, skips stones
against my skin, to taunt
his silhouette. Lately, when the sun
scans estuary to estuary,
his gaze has intensified,
a concerned citizen, ablaze.
My silt still glitters with bone-bits,
I’m still ruddy in places
with salmon, but as more life
leaves me, I resurrect into empty air. Think
of the loved ones that see themselves
when they look at you. What happens to them
if there’s always less of you to see?
Courtney Hitson currently teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including Wisconsin Review, Emerge, DMQ Review, and others.