MADELINE CRAWFORD
Lupa my lupa
it’s from the river
I lap up that eternal water
I paddle as the dog I’d become
there the twins
who found their virgin mother’s nipples dry
revere my breast
cry lupa my lupa
ask where do wolves live
I show them my nest
these baby heads
impressed
order me
with my lupa paws
to build a city
where there is a difference
between branch and limb
Madeline Crawford lives, teaches Latin, and writes in London. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Die Quieter Please, mnemotope, Paloma Magazine, dadaku, The Mantelpiece, and Vast Chasm, among others. She has worked as a reader and editorial assistant for A Public Space. She went to Hunter College and received her MA in Classics from University College London.
BROOKE SPALDING
A CALLBACK.
A brine in glass and metal scoot, an anonymous cast as rubber ducks posed next to a sign reserved. Preserved pimento bubbling apart in the bathtub, two currents warm down the drain, remember. I remember the midwest pause, it shows an inability spreading. Member of genius, elaborate.
PECULIAR, MISSOURI
Scene 1: FARMER pulls his TRUCK over on a farm road, the scrape of gravel on a turned wheel sounds
FARMER turns to HORSE who is sitting passenger
HORSE
Do you tell your friends I’m a good kisser?
FARMER
Errrr
HORSE straddles FARMER, her back pressed against the steering wheel of his TRUCK
FARMER leans in and HORSE tries to accept his tongue, FARMER’S braces feel hard against HORSE’S mouth
Scene 2: FARMER drops HORSE off in the southernmost part of the field, drives away in his TRUCK
HORSE starts her long walk back with three adderall pressed into the mud of her front right hoof
Brooke Spalding is a writer from Kansas City, Missouri. She is considered “Missouri hot” which makes the midwest her final resting place. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Always Crashing, phoebe, and Tampa Review, among others.
CLAIRE SOSIENSKI SMITH
MY BAD HABIT
I will never leave the party
I am in your garden
watering the gardenias
you thought were gypsophila
I am on your roof
replacing the loose tiles
washing your bedroom window
nodding emphatic to show my
pleasant demeanour, the ripeness
of my upbringing
my mouth is full of shells
I am bleeding your radiators
organising your junk mail
by grammatical accuracy
picking hair out the
bathroom sink
you say get out of my
bathroom I need to take a shower
I say
if I was your cat I
would never kick
litter out of my tray
Claire Sosienski Smith is based in SE London and a part of Resonance Poetry Collective, a queer-led collective that hosts free workshops and open mics. Their work has most recently been published in eff-able and 14 poems.
CHLOÊ LANGFORD
(transcendental authority)
the lord is giving time to his creature
definition before and after
two things compared to each other
before the flood loaded with life
the lord is reaching out downloading
the holy spirit into adam’s finger
adam is discerning the abasement
of free will the freedom of some profanity
barbarity he’s making up the world of turmoil
michaelangelo’s high definition muscular angels
in a way he’s casting off a snake and that's intentional
crescendo of negative emotions fear agony death ankles
knees the folded up arm that he gave to christ
michelangelo he’s gna play with the detail
building down and layering the accumulation
of soil restored put together; its becoming more
crowded pagan nero his head split like an egg
zygote face dragged across the frame tapestries
tapestries are no rugs fine art that rustles
painted in Rome and shipped to Brussels
twisted snail torn slain swan the world
laid out like a wrinkled carpet rivers
and towers of muscles pouring down
curtains pinned he peers down upon
us his brother biting his elbow behind
even pinky fingers uncannily ripped
by horsetail brushes moses parting
the sea shiny black helmets emerging
from the floods like beatle’s shells
or blood grapes and beneath jesus
a bearded man holds the shrunken skin
of a man his face crumpled sinking beneath
clouds and at their feet the baby curled up
with the softest goat known eyes turned up
mouths hung open under angels with hands
and arms folded in paper poses and papillon
wings flooded folded the eyes on that guy
the most beautiful jewels and gems are hidden
continuity columns of ham ok lots of people
are leaving broken scars left on the body
he did that in a year and a half the body
is where we saw it this is the memorial
tomb the hall of maps his virtues wisdom
helmet wise and faithful lebanese canadian
italian half jewish tour guide and a sea
of clear plastic chairs the perspective is radial
Notes
1. (transcendental authority) includes quotes from Ribal, a tour guide working at the Vatican in July 2025.
Chloê Langford is an artist who works with writing, performance and video games. They live in Berlin, Germany. They are a part of the experimental video game collective Fantasia Malware.
RAJA'A KHALID
Scenes from a Red Cutting Room Floor
scene 1, yoga
black stone floor / black sun eclipse / you pick a spot at the back / crimson bleed, you go deep / pigeon, forehead to the mat / Childish Gambino’s Redbone on speakers fades to / D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s Really Love / Is there anyone else? you’d asked / You’re crazy, her reply / her lie / welcome to practice, sixty minutes, Soul Power / praise the black sun / as scorpion / lizard / cobra / Fever by the Cramps blends into jungle sounds / on your back, shavasana, you are spent / by this life, by this class
scene 3, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love
slow motion Maggie Cheung / up / down / those stairs / moving like a snake / you take / all that you can, and / pull out a cigarette / to make your own silver ghosts / like Tony / someday you too will whisper / your secret into a tree / but for now you watch / the stroke of a finger on an arm / aura / dress / room / if only they had been in the mood for love / letters / they could have told each other their story / at the close they never see / each other again / you press your lips to the bark and whisper / look at me / never again
scene 4, Athens
Exarcheia square / pool of vermillion leaks onto the street / from a neon light / stabbing this electric night / broken hearted / you ask a girl with a teardrop tattoo / if she has some hash while anarchists gather contraband cigarettes into a pile / and set the whole lot on fire / speech / applause / old Greek ladies salvage packs of cigarettes from the heap of ash / you smoke / rising sun will be / blood / tears / you close red eyes, say no more fears
scene 6, nightclub
set up like a cave / long shadows spill into the scarlet / dance and / glittering at their throats pieces of colorful rocks / made of glass / all pass / as the real thing / you hold your arms up high / sweat on your back / icy trickle now and watch the girl dancing in the middle / for she is one of a kind / maroon dress looks white in the warm light of the club and you see the dark smudge on her eye / birthmark / a crimson island on half her face and realize you have never seen anyone so perfect
scene 8, Chinese restaurant
walls of cadmium red / golden paper lanterns overhead / father and son at a table alone / you and the girl watch the boy trace the shapes / dragon / pig / rat / on the paper mat / little baby finger knocks over the glass of raspberry juice / like blood / white table cloth / carnage / an unholy mess / white paper napkins lie pink / shaken like pieces of a life gone sullied and then comes the slap / baby cheek / pink / shaken wet like a piece of a life gone sullied / and the boy runs out into the rain screaming for a mother that won’t ever come back
Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born, Dubai-raised (and based) artist and writer with an MFA in Art from Cornell University. She has been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and the Pushcart Prize (2025) and her stories appear or are forthcoming in Vestoj, HAD, Maudlin House, SAND, KHÔRA, Baffling Magazine, Yalobusha Review, River Styx, Strange Horizons and elsewhere.
MIRA CAMERON
My first few weeks in Massachusetts I was lonely so got way too high and walked around.
Or should I say remembering.
Splayed out subjectivity
worthy of reinvention.
Worthy of the event,
the power of love. Transformation
and little miracles keeping vampires from the door.
There is an animal here,
a thick wave its own echo
wet with rain, sweet evening
Crazy Bitch
coo “baby girl”
Legacy babbles different stretches of life.
I trust the profane, need the everyday.
It brings me to
believing.
Mira Cameron is a girl helping create, maybe anarchy, or a phantasia, or a group of trans people holding hands. She is playing in warm dirt and feeding as many as she can. Her debut collection, Praying for Dykes, is forthcoming with DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, and she is the co-EIC of Imposter Review.
ELIZABETH HALL
HOLETARIAT
Virgo, my rising sun moon. I’m perfect
save my skrimpy intestines, sleepy
anus. Left unaddressed
is a problem.
One strong hole,
all I need.
Colon shiny as a glass eye.
125 liters of triple-filtered water,
pumped clean through me.
An observation tube, please.
I want to watch myself leak
the synergistic power of water,
nozzle of traditional knowledge.
Ancestral to us all.
$150 for 60 minutes. Cash
app for wild bark
aids: magnolia,
buckthorn, slippery elm.
A promise: my body,
pure lily status.
A deep ache, deep
inside. A small cost
to rouse my rectum,
make her behave, unlock
my potential. Good girl.
Now slaked. Free
from rangy desire, red
dye 40, any lingering
debris of dreams.
Now I’m easy.
Light. The go-to destination
on the westside.
BIRDWATCHING
Pussy, protein goals,
Tom Petty song,
scroll on.
God please let me
get into birdwatching,
baking bread on Sunday
afternoons, farmer’s
market hauls splayed
on a rough cloth.
A shaft of sun sets
the plums ablaze.
Crushed fennel
seeds in my palm.
Almost enough.
Of course, the finches
in the yard fascinate.
Crayon red plumage,
and fast. 40 miles per hour,
clean above the palm line.
Crease of pink
on the horizon.
Eight seconds,
then I’m off,
looking for another
bright thing
to take flight.
Elizabeth Hall is the author of Season of the Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books) and I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
SIOFRA THOMAS
DOG POSE, JULY
that summer,
may : september
lazy ‘s a teenager
recidivist syntax
on full display, i lay
myself in long lines
on your – birthday card,
for no reason other than because i can.
over the shoreline
a glutton’s curve
hangs ungraded
but you
little want-for-nothing,
you get pissed on and sneer
shine impossible in midas robes.
i cock a mongrel tongue
to the quick of it,
mollusced
methinks
c’mon, take this arsehole
out for a walk...
siofra thomas is a poet and a translator.
STEPHANIE YUE DUHEM
May You Live in Interesting Times
And the monkey’s paw curls
around mine.
I’m another monkey
pretender.
I’m a cloth mother
an LLM brain.
Monkeys paw me for love
but I only give them language.
Maneki-Neko
How to beckon the good:
Play Top 40 on the road.
Sing along.
Replace song
lyrics with “meow.” Beget
luck and money, little cat.
Stephanie Yue Duhem is a poet and essayist in Austin. Her debut poetry collection, CATACLYSM MOVES ME I REGRET TO SAY, is now available from House of Vlad Press.
LEONORA DORA DONOVAN
The Pussy Gazette
Fourth floor suite in the downtown area. The doors, encrusted staccato marrow, and, inside them, bushed freely, all sorts creep crannies as each many planes for potential growth (like cells put away into slutty little dishes). The carpets are here sewn with ingrown legs and they are thorny soft like you wouldn’t believe. And, anyways, they’ve been stained with any new fluids of all kinds, developed and pumped around like water for those who drink it. The Pussy Gazette operates a slick, sickening suck void long for their way to get off here. For letting go, gender-antagonistic restrooms inspect genitals for their own inconclusive pleasure. No sooner are you in the room than a craned camera clamps down on whatever you’ve got on offer, like a kiss through a rubberized camera, like a kiss you’d give the world, like a sexuated goose chase for the fuck of it. And sometimes some articles do still flow through here from the press to paper-flavored condoms that you can read while you fuck, the story revealed and disappearing per gyration per attempt to tantalize the reader.
Leonora Dora Donovan is a decadent transsexual. You can find her work in emails to her friends.
SOPHIE APPEL
ALWAYS THE DEVIL
waves’ll throw me back against
grating black rocks
in the ocean
when it’s out of your hands he said it not me
Anything but dreamless I think what the fuck?
Bones on bones are a result from the wearing down of cartilage
I watch rhythm become padding,
Everyone else gets to be visible
climbing a vine recounting unmanageable or otherwise
scenes cascading God grant me the serenity
Hold on dear brother, it’ll change everything
I myself am down bathed in a pit of blue water
where my stomach fell
Departure is out of the question and there’s no gauntlet my hands are
Fisting the honey jar shoveling handfuls into our mouths midday or at night
Focus varies greatly when sending out line and pulling back nothing
Crooked and deploying stories to every one like crazy
The year of values is upon me shortly or else
Hiding is a punishment meant for nobody
RESTORATION
I can’t get enough
controlling my beloved whenever
I’m obsessed with unforgivable men
On the year of war we turn
from the steel mill and drive to the beach
I make plans and god accepts
An ache pulls toward beginning each time
we’re drinking from shells or cups
Possessed by the hard part, being living
Convinced of my diligence, I tell you
lazy is spelled like gambling
We make a grotto filled with soup and the moon
our ragu behind us now
To leave it in the room and not bring it home
I needed to be here tonight
Calling an open line to ask for council,
overindulge is spilled like weather
Sophie Appel is a poet, curator, and historical map archivist based in Los Angeles. Her work has been published through SPECTRA, Dunce Codex, Car Crash Collective/ Metalabel, Bruiser Mag, & more. Her debut collection of poetry, The World’s Largest Cherry Pie was published by Dream Boy Book Club. She tends to Melrose Botanical Garden in its various forms and iterations and is the host of Spit in the Ocean on Lower Grand Radio.
NORA ROSE TOMAS
MY SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL BLIND SPOTS ALSO SERVE AS A BIKINI COVER UP
I am beautiful in the way all girls are beautiful
in that there is something insane about it
I get ready in the morning and I put on
my good body
I earned it
I was born and dedicated
to the cause of
my deconstruction
my parted
existence
pleases
endlessly
how angry
can you be
at a lawless
hand
a
freed mouth
women
are
easiest
to love
in
pieces
Nora Rose Tomas is a queer writer living in Brooklyn, and she has an MFA in nonfiction writing. Her work has been longlisted for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and nominated for Best of Net and Best Small Fictions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Review, Epiphany, Taco Bell Quarterly, Post 45, Brooklyn Poets, and The Colorado Review, among others. You can find her at norarosetomas.com or on Instagram @dr_sappho.
NOAH TRUONG
Persistent Desire
The first time we met, I barely carved out a path to you. Too many greedy butches besieged the way. I competed against a soft blonde, each of us trying to cover the other’s voice to ask you out. i’m going there. i’ll be there at 9. will you come ? where r u headed to ? can I get your number ? will you take mine ? It felt like falling back in a teenage boyish girl body, pulling a face on the bench of a track field blurred by the voracious stomping of a group of boys in sneakers and track shorts. Their temples drenching their wild eyes like those of domesticated horses. Lust. Envy. Hate. Lust. Envy. Hate. Each one of them debating which of these three corridors of madness can best carry them to the finish line. (but the butch seemed nice as far as I can remember, evthg cool).
I never meant to be on the race. I skipped as far as the information session. You were fresh blood, a dancer, American, assertive. A mesmerizing lesbian. I’d rather just go home and watch Daria for the 12th time.
Daria likes to lose. She dismisses winning before the race even occurs. She shrugs it away and finds herself a team of like-minded weirdos who will sign up for chess.
I am Daria. A thorough, content loser. I do not race for the shiniest cup or the highest rank of the team. I lose with the inner grace of the surrendered. My retreat feels like chivalry. There is discreet greatness in caring for the smaller feats.
You flew back.
I did not think of you then, except as: « far away ».You came back in the last days of June. Exactly 57 weeks later. I didn’t count: Google Photos says so. It was Paris “Pride des banlieues”. I extended you an invitation to partake in the party. Queer hospitality. I thought so little of me at the time I was surprised to see you cross a lawn to meet us. Do you know of the days when the tiniest kindness robs you of your composure? I hid in any friend’s lap. Sunbeams scared me away.
We hadn’t had a chance to talk before. Then we did. You grew up with English and bits of Tagalog. You liked poetry. I told you my dad was born in Manilla. You wanted to know about the lesbian authors I liked, and when I listed them, I kind of remembered my voice used to be firm.
Note: when having faced violence, one is always keen to enumerate all that one has learned “from” it. It goes like: look, had I not suffered this, perhaps I would not have understood [replace with whatever bullshit]. I do not share this opinion. I was scared. I wish I could have had a chat with you without peeking behind my back.
I said: “we will not have sex”. Later: we had sex. You asked me why I changed my mind. I said I could only mean “yes” after having said “no”.
I enjoyed it. You flew back. I did not think of you then, except as: “at a distance”.
June. 57 weeks later. I didn’t need counting. By then, I could call it a pattern. One of the hardest years of my life had passed. I somehow felt better than ever.
This is not contradictory. When you face violence in an intimate context, leaving is liberation. No matter the cost, the ordeal, the side damages: you can only win and get better. I got better. I was hurt. I was betrayed.
Just a little before you came were the nights that heard me say out loud to the grey wave unwrapping under the handle of my bike: “smile because it’s over”.
We both altered our plans to meet. It was a matter of three text messages, 7 words each top.
I usually resent people who aren’t texters. I get angry at them at a distance but I submit to it. I do worse out of shame. All the feelings I have, my thoughts, my bad jokes. I shave them off.
See 4.
We fucked (for details, see 19).
You were sweet.
I topped (like I do). I kept asking if you were okay. Afterwards, we spoke about the Joan Nestle’s butch femme anthology Persistent Desire. You said (your whole light brown nudity still exposed at arm’s reach): “use me, as I want to be used.” You aimed to brush shame out of me like trimmed hair on the shoulders of a young butch. Or a weary trans man.
Your moaning disheveled me. You trembled when you came.
See 1.
I met up again with you the next day with the phlegm of a hard-discount buy. Just happy to be here. No hard feelings if you go for the first-range brands or call it quit. A counterfeit bag with attitude. I got surprised every time you reached to touch me.
We fucked again.
You didn’t text. So I didn’t.
See 4.
You were leaving the next day.
See 3. See 24. See 15.
I cancelled the plan to meet you.
See 2. 9. See 13.
You cried.
I’m sorry. I was scared. For a moment, I forgot within each of us queers, there is a child that once walked up to the classroom stage and raised their finger to claim: I am worthy of love. I forgot we have all been a solo demonstrator in a packed, endless corridor of enemies.
I see you now. You tucked your tenderness beneath the razor-sharp line of your undercut. You sharpened a round yearning. Your sturdiness is a desire to be held.
See 10.
Come back next year. I’ll call you spring. I’ll call you summer.
---------------
Noah Truong was born and lives in Paris. He is the author of two poetry collections: Manual pour changer de corps (Cambourakis, Paris, 2024) and Et Pourtant (Paulette Editrice, Lausanne, 2025). His works have been translated into English, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Czech.
STELLA ANN-HARRIS
A weaning
Conversion pilled by lexapro
Apparently I am not even
A lesbian anymore.
Fantasies of furred
Arms, syled restraint
Call like a netted fig.
Wise Eliza says regression:
Formative sexual agreements
Stakeless entering
Wake up in an armpit
Feel like a king.
Pussy as whatever
Pussy as comfort object
Holding myself sweetly
Under the covers before bed.
Eyes closed
I’m princess Jasmine
Hands tied sand pours
Suddenly I am kidnapped
By a pair of giant tits
Who take me between them
To the woods
Gingham curtain white bows
All the while I am sucking.
Afterwards pray:
No more hunger
On earth, health
Of the home,
Big naturals,
A good heart.
Sprawl my guts
Then gird them
Like a suburban lawn:
I am a family woman too.
Mom asks what I am
Thinking about.
She’s got a screw
In her foot
And a screw in her knee.
Imagining myself replying
Oh being filled
And thrown away.
Long nights we feed the baby
Potato chips.
I fancy myself more elegant,
Like a fruit
But then again
I am screwless.
Stella-Ann Harris is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her work can be found in Air/Light, The Portland Review, and elsewhere.
JANNAT ALAM
failure girl monitoring override
guess what, i know
maiden dissection obstetric age
hang on, it seems like a waste
to smile so naturally
models solve colonies
exhaustion becomes a lullaby
who on earth created this kind of superclass
half-life functional override
i disperse once more
pulled from a claw-machine
is that enough? shut the hell up
i didn’t read the error script
there’s no way of knowing what’s behind
the words that’s been said, is there?
Jannat Alam is based in San Bernardino County. She edits Reap Thrill.
EVIE RECKENDREES
taste like warm milk
wet cement drops
from scaffolding
uncertainty, into certainty made
by our hands dunking into it
laughing at dogs
make offerings to the river
speaking to the river
only living by the river —
by the river and
you say you have
never seen me
happier than this
down
f
wow - this merging is so difficult,
yet,
growing out of my fingers is touch
growing out of my thoughts is God
when does food turn into bait?
is your blood food or bait in this case meaning our case meaning ==
(thoughts i had)
we’re seen by each other, smelled by each other
through our pants (sometimes), fabrics
touched each other,
i love to speak in absolutes but no one can stand them
this state (of mind) loves a prefix
give me a word
give me two, actually
you say we can do magic
as a couple
one plus one equals three
on video call, i say something about being desire-driven,
you laugh,
i stood in the library garden, thought
i’m lucky enough to have
(you)
day in bed, not doing what i know i have
to
do a little too much
yet, river carries time
you get up with me, bring me water,
to make
trains to paris, flights to lisbon,
same sea that looks different
another one
i let you have a sip,
make an offering again to the river,
make an offering again to God,
again,
be impassable, this time //
after i wish i could fuck you
in a form that is not dictated by nature
or sexuality
let our bodies become untrue
with salt and oil
with baths and
hunger gives space
gives space to the real
to derangement
sense that somewhere in there
surpass capture
kneel down again
before that record player turned altar and
speak your spells,
making more life with you
i say i couldn’t open up much more than this
i want to carve those words into my body,
birch tree in garden / birch tree in heart -/- knife /-/
and we have nowhere else to start
Evie Reckendrees is a poet, writer & performance artist. She is writing about, and engaging with, desire, suffering, and God. She lives between Germany and the Atlantic shoreline(s).
IDA BAKHTIARY-RAHIMI
brown jouissance
i cud watch the presidential debate / or i cud get laid / see i can be soft and sharp like a / seared tongue on the edge of ur teeth / like u i keel at the sight of cute things / peer out from the casket of my desires / this wanting has to go somewhere / and i cud never hold it in my mouth long enough / see i came of age with a nostalgia so primal / i yearned for a place that no longer existed / like u i thought i wanted to die / walked in the middle of the street at night / this wanting has to go somewhere / and i cud never hold it in my mouth / long enough / see we were never asked for what we wanted / tucked it between oblivion and tomorrow / like u i wake up in this violent country / this wanting has somewhere to go / and i cud go on but ill / stop
THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH
I had a godless childhood
still do
To hear that even the stars
are dead was enough
to prove how lonely it feels:
you, a random point pulsing
through the timeline of infinite
grief, all of us scattered
They say that we’re all made
of stardust But leave out
the explosions
the matter that was destroyed
under these laws of physics
And still no clue how to make a
life
I DONT WANT UR MONEY
lets just care for each other
said no doctor
lawyer
politician
consultant
president
monarch
dictator
colonizer
cop
ever
When i told my friends i wanted
to be an artist
they said
why dont you want to get
married?
and i said
my parents had to escape death to
find each other and even that was
not enough of a reason to call this
living
and they said
lollll but you would have such
cute little brown bab–
and ive been running through
space-time ever since
Ida Bakhtiary-Rahimi is a queer, Iranian American writer and artist. Ida’s work was selected for the 2024-2025 Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program and is the recipient of fellowships from VONA and the Somerville Arts Council. Ida works and studies in the English Dept. at Tufts University.
NATHAN MUKA
The hardest part is finding someone to play with
finally, charming comments
draw forward a set of unfamiliar teeth
a code cracks and a strategy emerges:
I’ll make me happy with your happy
it’s not long before a proven tactic stales
and takes reminding that theres a reward
in what happens next
a new thing is really the same thing,
though theres amphetamines
in the cornucopia of fresh tries
playing wide instead of tall
you become vulnerable
to a diversity of forces
I’m never any good at long games
but I don’t mind losing
if it’s interesting
Nathan Muka lives in Brooklyn, New York with a small, dog-like entity named Lily. He likes short walks with a distinct endpoint and really sour lemonade.
SAFI ALSEBAI
This fear feels anachronistic
“NO WORD FROM YOU FEELING LONESOME
KINDLY CABLE WHETHER ANYTHING NEW AUF
WIEDERSEHEN MAX”
—Max Horkheimer to Theodor Adorno
15 March 1960
All that is description
A genealogy of jilted subject-object relations goes
something like:
the sublime, the alienated, the uncanny
Relations of: property, domestication
The one who all they did was palm
escapes years later into a horizon of puniness
leaves no address no account no number I have
to find those too find like meaning like puns
Is the curriculum of
laugher canned, uncanny, or cannibal?
V-effect
Ferric or ferrous juice of life on tap from a samovar
Irony
Prague spring saltwater
The sublime, the alienated, the uncanny, the ambiguous
the grotesque
Property, domestication, failure, mystery
Give me a break:
remain in touch, which
sounds after all
like a threat from some modernist
The flute, the bat, how ungallant
The sublime, the alienated, the uncanny, the ambiguous,
the grotesque, the abject, the ambivalent, the pathetic
Property, domestication, failure, mystery,
collapse, optimism, inimitability?
What to do with modernism at the end of the world?
The only gift is that
my throat is sore anyway
Otherwise I would be gelastic
It’s what we’ve been taught to be
Safi Alsebai is a writer from Arkansas, where he also studies medicine.
JAMES MILANESI
my thumb in my makeshift gloryhole
all this silver in my mouth, we lay
talking of how we became our own parents
left to tame wild accusations
of parasitic tendencies in my sweat soaked bed
my heart orbits the front door
trying to get back to you
thumb in my makeshift glory hole
till then.
here’s a concave mold where skin stains the earth
poor little God! wrapped guilty in a stitched blanket of past lovers
there was a shooting in the park—someone recorded it
blood like grease coated over a frying sidewalk
i ask why more of late,
why being early feels pretentious and sad?
here’s the poisoned peace; here we can rot in harmony
poor little Me! my friends searching for their shadow
earmuffed and bandaged; big eyed smiling
you say something when I ask why you’re leaving
my mind permeates the room
trying to find you
James Milanesi is a Philadelphian poet who is retroactively late for work. He is the curator and founder of Poet’s Row. His latest chapbook, Momentary Sweetheart, is published with Bottlecap Press.