FRANCES OJEDA-DIAZ
rapture baiting
skin soft,
petal's touch
& hornet’s love
find me on all fours
jugular spewing
in come
the solar rays
to which i turn
a blind eye
am i the director of your fantasy?
my god sits
by my side,
whispering promises
of kissing time
craving trace minerals
only volcanoes
can provide
Frances Ojeda-Diaz is a Xicano writer from the land of many waters (Walawalałáma territory).
BRENDAN JOYCE
Little Window
Five summers out from the collapse
of the wage I pull quarters from couch
cushions like crabs from their cage. I know there’s only
an inch of dusk left before I have to start counting.
Dearest de-arrest, distressed assets arsoned,
darling, even the sunset knows the name
of what’s crashing
Everything everywhere belonging to everyone
not having come to pass, whose body
is this then that cannot make itself again?
When we wanted everything, we wanted
everything to be night; the river’s mechanical
curves, the lake’s illegal color, all of the
bleached concrete and molten asphalt
and rotting doubles. But the sun slathers
itself across modern luxury icicle housing
and miles of drone footage.
Knife music! Counterfeit sky!
We wanted everything to be night,
They gave us Night alright!
Our enemies and our friends and our families
and our curses and our embarrassing grudges
and our impossible crushes and our discerning taste
— collapsed into the wage. The yolk slithering
across the city. Flattened into the spreadsheet of the
sky’s cartoon ledger. Whistling the tune of
collateralized debt obligation. Hunted for sport
in credit default swap Walmart parking lot. Lines of credit
unspool across midwinter paydays.
Even the screen of the sky flickers with the
ambitions of mid-level b2b marketers.
If the wage relation were an abandoned
Cleveland movie theatre the marquee
would read: Now Playing Mass
Unemployment, One Night Only!
Make a computer do that.
Again! What criss-crossed this world
thrice to become my toaster?
It slices! It dices! It’s hegemonic!
They’re slurping up something worse
just outside your field of vision.
The congealed form of the whatever,
fermented in the sludge of whatever,
I carry it with me, in the soles of my shoes,
you carry it with you.
Brendan Joyce is a poet.
OLIVIA BRASH
A Shabbos Prayer for Kathy Acker
She is a slow mover and walker, a Rubicon Jeep. Something like one of those monster pickup trucks, with the huge tires, and never anything in their truck beds. The season is changing so it is time to let the garlic sleep under the ground. Garlic, rosemary, fennel. White vervain. These are the plants with which I adorn myself. Those hands which light our purple candle, its two wicks, with the blessing, with a red plastic lighter. With my family a match is used. Holding the bird in my lap, his hands unsteady and his legs wriggling like two slender fishes. My head underwater. My whole life in weather. Reading I say the words in my head so they fill it up, each one a word-shaped bubble. Rosemary, salt. Pouring water with a pitcher onto each of my hands. Water from an orange cooler into a paper cup onto my hands. Leaned my head out the window until I was folded around its corner at the waist. Green journal. A black journal. A red one, left overnight in my tent, leather cover bent up. Folding my left arm around it to hide the things I’m writing about everyone else in the room. Silence at the candles, the dinner we made at the center of the table. A movement, dancing. Contact is dancing, I know that but I forget it sometimes. Down the center of the road with the sun setting over the cow pasture. In Warner and sun is coming through the window in a square on the floor which is watery. The movement a prayer. To put it in my language. The la’s and the clicks of tongues. Body on body, I wandered over and folded myself against the far wall, in a triangle of darkness in the corner. I watched the dancing and I laughed and laughed. Ending my body folded around Annika’s body, my head in the reflective space between her neck and her shoulder. The quietness of a big building and the humming under it. I sat on my bed and listened and noted the way the guitars pan across the mix and how the reverb is subtly changed on the second chorus. I am learning to hear production in the underneaths of sounds. Asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’zivanu l’hadik ner... The big underlands, the networks of storm drains, drainage tiles, sewer pipes under the ground. My whole self held in the wet dirt of the earth. Dirt was up my arms and crawling on the sides of my face. Alive with compost, with decay and with breath. A mushroom grows in the center of the log. The song Lili and I were singing in our beds at night, like summer camp. She is someone that I do not know yet. She is someone who will hold all the parts of my life in one glance. She is someone I will fold my skin around like a new suit. And she will not be separate from me. He will not be either. Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam... A prayer is a long road with soybeans growing on either side. The road is made of gravel. I felt Annabel’s shoulder blade kiss on my back. Say I’m grateful for you every time and hold both of your hands. The chocolate chips I left in that bed and Emma was making jokes that I pooped my pants. The same song over and over, this life which I hand over. The plane was humming and I tried so hard to see people on those empty streets from up above. Two wolves frozen in movement. Nonmovement. If we could see the northern lights from here I would hold them while we all watched. The cat takes up the whole of my two arms. I drove the car with my mother until we started to scream at each other and I had to stop and get out. I didn’t do anything wrong though. A water cup full on the table. The dishes done and the sink is empty. We watched the sun set all in one place and in it the whole time and in the twilight their dances looked like the night moving. Waded out into shallow water. Jumped in so fast and shivered all the way back up to the car. Red clover for tea. Dried fennel and herbs over the kitchen. I mixed the flakes of butter into the batter with my hands. Eliana’s eyes got all bugged out whenever she really started to dance. Rocks her body back and forth like a big hand is holding it and shaking it back and forth. Marriage— what do we think about that, anyway? Quietness and a library computer. A book returns when it is raining. Contact with a body I do not know on a gray day and the huffing, the snurfling like two big dogs, the laughs. And thank you for dancing with me. I was a writer in the swamp, the peat up to my legs. I was harvesting mushrooms and Queen Anne’s lace with pink scissors. I chopped the clean stems. I listened to the sound coming through the wind. And he was saying, You idiot. Life has handed you this purple car and you must drive it.
Olivia Brash is a writer and audio engineer living in Chicago. They studied at Oberlin College.
SCOUT FALLER
pastorale
there are no hunters
here, no deer. the eye
avoiding capture gives over
to pure object, a tree igniting
out of season, transmission
hovering over property lines.
once a troubadour this
song becomes a
resonance past. her hair was important.
i bothered the hills with it. now i gather
residuals without address i am not
thoughtless, i am evading
employment like a woman’s “important”
vacation, sunstruck in dolores.
Scout Faller is a Pushcart-nominated poet and recipient of the Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship for Communist Women Who Smoke. They have been published in Antiphony, Grotto, and Noir Sauna, and Peel Lit. They are rarely bored.
KYLA-YẾN HUỲNH GIFFIN
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese American diaspora writer whose work revolves around themes of dreaming, fantasizing, and futurizing, and focuses on topics of diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories. Kyla-Yến’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in The Offing, Oroboro, fifth wheel press, Vănguard, and other publications. They are a Press Editor for Half Mystic Press, a Co-Coordinator for Sundress Publications’ Poets in Pajamas reading series, and an Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. They have also been awarded residencies, workshops, and/or fellowships from Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Seventh Wave, Abode Press, and more. You can visit Kyla-Yến's author page at www.kylayenhuynhgiffin.com, and find them on Instagram @yenshrine.
SYD BREWSTER
SWEAT
I am the worst hotel maid in Amerika
Yes, that’s me. I sniff your sheets, flick
your dirty undies underneath the bed
I do what I want.
And in my home, I don’t bother to clean
after he leaves, and
I’m not quick to shower or wash or change
Things between me and that man,
became clear. It was lust, until it wasn’t
I wanted love, but the bed stains said
It was just sweat.
A Dead Body Gets Stiff
Leave it off the hook. Let the phone spirals
hang down in the way, just
how did the wires get so tangled?
That space between the wall and the table
that suspended in air feeling
you don’t know your own mind
she gives me light, she gives me a lift
that’s what you say about her, and
i won’t kick up dust about it
let it wash over me with sternness
two weeks later I’m still sat in my kitchen nook,
there, just
waiting. There in that corner of the room
my impatience grew
then dissipated
soared then
flattened
Syd Brewster is a Black American writer based in the Hudson Valley. Her writing has been featured in Sink Hollow, God’s Cruel Joke, and The Table Review. You can find her at sydbrewster.com and on Instagram @sydbrews
GRAY AGPALO
Newborn
upon taciturn dawn
a collapsed sassafras
divided the driveway
inconveniencing us
our machines our
appointments and money
our grave tradition
is an obsequious tome
in reading it I became
a student of refusal
if upon getting born
we are told to root
for a certain death
we ought to choose wisely
a corrective officer’s salary
cushy without succor
is blown up
on the back of a bus
my hapless eye squints
to mimic the jail windows
tracking the isomorphism
between suffering
as the state is wont to do
⥀
capital probes the perpetual
question of love’s enoughness
romantics obscure both
its frailty and lack’s affluence
such that love yields liberally
to be clear
I’m less hater qua hater
more like living & paying
rent & looking around
in the end love is meritocracy
like the beached anglerfish
is perverted aberration
or pure complaint
revealing the brute base
dying in broad daylight
of course we have the work
of ontological rehab
cut out for each other
when the World rots
I pray for death
to sick nettling
factions to diagnosis
and cure to annihilation
of invasive species
those magnificent survivalists
⥁
an oceanic feeling
will protygynously persist
wide-eyed wrasses turning
wordlessly to reinvent
sex change ovum
for encrypted sperm
transsexualling into what
exactly? I don’t know
is desire a question
about completion?
sunflowers get planted
to absorb nuclear fallout
of course the job calls
for their destruction
the complete pre-colony
is now pure fantasy
yes I root
for the World’s rot
slow the omniscient fern
blinks sporadic clocks
Gray Agpalo is a writer. They are Communications Editor of Apogee Journal and a member of the collective, Sick in Quarters. He lives in Philadelphia.
BRAD LIENING
Your good time is already ruined
By global economics you don’t understand
Whatever chemicals tumbling forever through your bloodstream
Trash blowing across the tarmac
Then the beaches
Then directly into your face
People everywhere not like rats lice or other vermin
Just people in flip-flops and t-shirts
Suggesting they love America and death
Without really knowing
What either of those things could possibly be
The sun doesn’t set so much as disappear
A book not read so much as redacted
Brad Liening is a poet living in Minneapolis, MN, and at bradliening.blogspot.com.
MARISSA YANG BERTUCCI
PISS POEM
I’m back from BeingLovedWell, USA wearing two more coats of paint. Bumping into walls, trying to echolocate with only this pissant heart and its sundry hungers as a compass. Dykes know how to piss, so the honey bucket at Dolores looks respectable even at six. Sometimes
I run the scenario all the way back to the Castro where Pam put her hands underneath my polite panties, shocked in the elastic. I was so young as to be almost translucent, figured okay... A distance from it, my tendresse was lost trash beyond the moon. I who have danced on tables to be closer to the divine light of god. I could take a mass shooter in an ordinary tussle. Sat on the grass,
I observe all versions of the same outfit. Can’t even catch my own eye at this velocity. At the bar, you bring my leg onto your lap. I drink your usual drink. You take the drink I don’t like. When you come over to kiss me from your short vacation in the bathroom, it makes so much sense. You spirit me as if Cinderella to the donut shop OPEN LATE. A simple glaze, hot from dip, tears apart between us. Painterly steam transmits at the open gash. We could take a mass shooter, I think. You’re laid out just a little differently than me, your pelvic bone sharp against two fingers rinsed clean of their icing.
You’re on my cupid’s bow in the morning’s anterior heat. I am allowed to wash my face but I go fast, getting away with something. What is that sound? How could a mouse squeal so loud, and what on earth could be so sexy at this hour? Garbage truck’s hard labor of gears. Show me a quiet effort and I show you a mommy issue. How come all the soap you got is dusty, what do you actually use day to day, huh? You tell me I smell good. I just smell like you before.
Marissa Yang Bertucci is a Korean dyke writer, printmaker, and public school mental health worker. They were a recent BIPOC artist-in-residence at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. They are from the Bay Area and currently live on Kalapuya land in Portland, OR. @marissayangbertucci
NAA ASHELEY ASHITEY
I who have never relied on substances stronger than Wellbutrin to get me to catch the 7:27am bus
The light hasn’t necessarily turned off,
but I can see how muted it becomes after a few puffs.
I can no longer see the
single line across your sclera
that always held that
blueish-lilac hue.
The red blood vessels in the inner corner of your eyes,
or maybe they’re called arteries,
you’ll have to excuse me,
I struggle with anatomy,
blend nicely with the pinkish red of what was
once the whites of your eyes.
I know they say this state brings euphoria,
even calm for some,
but selfishly,
I feel as if I have been robbed.
I no longer have a galaxy to admire,
to lose myself within.
Neither do you though.
I too think you see what it steals from you,
what she makes you
put away.
Hiding is never the solution
it makes itself out to be.
To be a stranger in your body
never really solves our problems.
Is it wrong for me to say
That I wish I could go up and tell you that a
white to red formed by a
self-made ocean may may be crushing,
but it at least ensures that the
lilac is watered and visible.
Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey (She/Her/Hers) is a Chicago-born writer and an MD-PhD Student at UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is interested in the intersection between scientific research, medicine and the humanities. Her works have been published or forthcoming in Hobart, The Brussels Review, JAKE, Abstract, The Inflectionist Review, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, and more. More at NaaAshitey.com
Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social
JESSLYN WHITTELL
Dear Psyche
this year, let’s not vote for love.
Let’s rub ourselves into sand against each other.
Let’s be mountains and speak with mountain voices,
or scones passed on the table.
I’m begging this city, the giant dead
astronauts sleeping off its coast,
their fingers peeling into the tides,
waterfalls discoed over their stony flanks--
Psyche, does this rash look normal to you?
Do you want to push me into the cold bathroom tile and smooch?
How tall are you? I bet tall, I bet taller than me.
Tunneling with hydraulic needs,
I spoon the coastline, a whiff of limestone in my face
a plea in 10000 years to be quarried.
With long-suffering heat, I affix the curls to my hair,
my singeing lash upturned to the seasonless
interrogations of renter’s insurance, so like love.
I’m drying up for you, my tongue is poured out
is already clinging pouty and molten
to the lack of you.
A flinch of burning air divides us
some slight and efficient
conclusion I cannot make,
pang of hair bell-rung
in the smoke-orange light, fear
as close-fit doubling of better
sensation—listen, what if we fuck
until I remember the planet
exists? Even the curt ground has nothing to do
but root for you with rearing legs.
Psyche, let’s not flourish and say we did,
let’s wetland together, birding in flight,
take an egret’s egress into egregious.
I want to accidentally clip your teeth with mine,
discover all your edges.
Won’t you inquire politely after my internal organs
strung together with industrial whining?
Hurry, I’ll be a weather event by morning,
or a patch of grass so sweet you’ll smell your steps
leaking into condensation.
Jesslyn Whittell (she/her) is a poet and contingent academic based in Los Angeles. Other recent poems are in or forthcoming from Peel Lit, Action, Spectacle, The Indiana Review, and The Georgia Review. She can be found online @lofi__loaf
MYKYTA RYZHYKH
He
he couldn’t open his eyes
he couldn’t move
he was me if it’s not you
he dreamed about mercury
he played the music of silence
he drank sandy dead time
he rode on a black cart
he doesn’t know what’s happening
he found himself deep underground
he found himself alone
he spent his whole life alone
he was born alone
he didn’t have time to say goodbye
he wasn’t going to say goodbye
he doesn’t know anyone he could say goodbye to
he didn’t believe in anything and nothing has changed
he remembers that life is a streak of bad luck
he remembers that a person is a black square
he remembers that he doesn’t remember anything
he sleeps like he’s alive pretending to still breathe
i buried my childhood in the cemetery
today the letters fell into a notebook with the rain
hello bird take this glass on my palms
i’m ready
he’s ready
Author from Ukraine, now living in Tromsø, Norway. Nominated for Pushcart Prize 2023, 2024. Published many times in literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal and many others
S. SMITH
Straight Time
Neural pathways light up
Like the Nile delta from space,
A reedy voice suddenly mourning time
Lost to fantasy, fascist and alien
And when I (do not) desire, I lose too
I am people who fall off buildings
I am women in desert cities
I am the human in the loop—minute, eternal, endless
“Inhale the letters that hum,” I murmur to myself
Bare legs roughed up by oak-dappled light
Adjusting my spine between wooden slats
Semiconscious in the park
S. Smith is a transsexual writer living in North Carolina. They have been published in Imposter, Transfix, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram: @scorpionfossil.
JESSIE MCCARTY
Grift, Shovel, Identify
I was an impenetrable system
of canals. I was a lawless romantic
in de-escalation. I was a phantom
boom disseminating matter from
Midwestern plumbing systems
under a deep, sleek, sneatcha.
I saw it, mid-city queerness
lár na cathrach aisteach,
as it was bubbling up from
nothing, o cuinne to corner.
Jessie McCarty (b. 1997) is an Irish-American writer and information professional. Their full-length debut, Pretty Punks, is forthcoming with Magra Books in December 2025 (edited by Sean Pessin & Paul Vangelisti).
ARTHUR BOYLE
NINE BY NINE
Heaven cooks novenas freely in its kitchen:
a thicket studding currants
in the nine unleavened rings;
feeding
each other from each other
with the promise of a triumph
of the long unbidden summer
and a hummer in the graces
You n me babe––Terror the Divine,
chlorides sheltered heartside
and a scheme of inexactitude––
long across the country, a marriage in every state
Analog maps of numbers and flaunting
in the poolside manner of the criminal
Forgive me this the culmination
of all our love trajectory,
a labor unfulfilled
Forgive my long unwanting
Or that's not really right
The apposites of apices'
death to restart feeding
in a quatrain's notion
of completion,
a rectilinearity
bent into a circle
J. Arthur Boyle is pleasant, co-editor of The Amenia Free Review, and adjunct at CUNY. Work is in or coming from Annulet, Bruiser, the CRB, The Chicago Review, Community Mausoleum, Fence, GROTTO, Verso, and other lovely places.
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.