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A VISITATION There will be a fire. Our books will burn, our walls will press their temples back against the barrel of the world. Volumes we didn’t know we owned will be ground into the wet woodgrain’s rough edges in the shape of a black horse, brass-plated balances uncovered at an unimpressive yard sale, catalogues of seals and stars, of names saved up, sloughed off and fallen out of use. BEETS Come in the kitchen and we’ll make you something, sharpen our knives, fix you something to eat, sever the stems on the tops of the beets, tidy the house when there’s company coming, plump up the pillows, smooth down the sheets, print the floors with the clean wet of our feet, the sauce on the stovetop boiled down to nothing, potatoskins turned to mud at our feet, pink caked in our nails from the flesh of the beets. FOR HANK, ON HIS DEPARTURE Everything is just as you left it. Your sister misses you. She’s still eating your food. There’s sunshine on the bed. Last night your nemesis the possum walked by your window ledge. We’ll keep an eye out for him. The days go by without much incident, much as you’d like them. No one sleeps on my feet or licks my plate at breakfast. Your toy mice are still lost behind the couch under a thin dust of your fur. I’ll leave them there.

Poor poets who can’t afford food feast on metaphors. I’ve replaced my desires with the best finely ground espresso- nonstop hot black caffeine shots. I feel edgy about this addiction, but surely everyone can see how much I pine for you. Your Latino lips dripped gold like the filter- “mi amor, have you had your coffee?” I’ve been watching Cinema Paradiso again, drowning in my own nostalgia. Looking at you so far away inside this broken photo frame- you won’t stop staring back at me for being a fool. When love gets too much, I cover it with hard winter snow. It melted like I did when you whispered in my ear, you wanted me to stay. Damien Posterino (he/him) is a Melbourne-born, London-based poet who recently spent 18 months writing in Mexico. He explores characters, conversations, and capturing moments in time. His work can be seen in over 30 different publications including A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Roi Fainéant Press, Fish Barrel Review, and The Madrigal. You can find him on Twitter @damienposterino

I think of the night I decided I couldn’t wait to not be thirteen anymore. It wasn’t a far drive; I only lived a few blocks up the street. Earlier that day, I had walked down to babysit but it was dark now so the mom told the dad to drive me home. He was a quiet man and in the loud silence of that summer night, the only conversation in the car was the one in my head. I heard the car sounds: key turning, engine starting, the click of our seatbelts. The radio came on with Wilson Phillips' hit that summer of 1990, telling me to Hold On for one more day. The air in the car smelled of leather interior, cologne, and beer with a hint of chewing gum mint. The blast of air conditioning made me shiver as goosebumps dotted up my arms and legs. I felt the leather passenger seat sticking to my thighs as I tried in vain to tug my shorts closer to my knees. I didn’t know what to do with my hands - I folded them in my lap, then twisted my hair around my fingers, cracked my knuckles, and picked at my cuticles. Finally, I folded my hands back in my lap, looked at the clock and then out the window. The dad stared straight ahead as he slowly drove us up the street away from his patch of the earth, where he was growing brats he hated, to mine, where I was growing boobs I hated. In the rearview mirror, I caught a glimpse of a shadow of the child I used to be. She still needs a babysitter herself, I thought. Out the window, I saw my thirteen-year-old face reflected back: freckled, pimpled and bony. I tucked my hair self-consciously behind my too-big ears and shifted my gaze away from myself. I felt like something in the middle of emerging, not who I was anymore but not yet who I would be, stuck in a body that was becoming a stranger. In that car, on that night, in those agonizing moments, I was frozen in a space that seemed like it would never end. But I knew better. So did Carnie Wilson, who insisted from the radio that things were gonna change. I’d lived long enough to realize that last year I was 12 and next year I would be 14. I didn’t know how much better it might be than this, but I couldn't bear to think it could be worse. At least I wouldn’t be in this car anymore and thirteen would be in the rear view. Someday I would be someone to whom this man had something to say and I would have something to say back. At the end of that drive, I would be home. It wasn’t a far drive. I couldn’t wait to not be thirteen anymore. Beth Mulcahy is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has appeared in various journals. Her writing bridges gaps between generations and self, hurt and healing.Beth lives in Ohio with her husband and two children and works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. Her latest publications can be found here:https://linktr.ee/mulcahea.

A Manual on How Best To Love Me 1. Know that I will never get tired of looking at pictures of cute animals, or petting dogs. So if you’re in search of a good date idea, you can’t go wrong with a dog park. 2. If I become petrified with a small decision, the choice between reading a fiction or nonfiction book next, how to word the email I am trying to write, what colour shirt to buy my dad for Christmas, please, treat me with the tenderness of a first kiss. I know it’s silly. Listen to my pros and cons list anyway, and 3. when I do make the decision, act as though I was running out of breath and offered air or water to breathe, and I chose the air. 4. There will be days when I want to write in the margins and across the lines, instead of on them. When I want to summersault down the middle of the road at midnight, eat chocolate before breakfast, make random sound effects, or dance naked in the wilderness, just because I can. And all I can tell you for these days is this: let me. 5. There will be days when I won’t quite be able to tell if this life is real. Where I’ll stare into the mirror unsure that I am the one looking back at me, or colour over my tattoos just to see them remain when I wash off the rest. I will convince myself that I was meant to live where they drive on the left side of the road, and that’s why everything feels just a little bit off. On these days I need to be taken outside, a forest is best. I need to lay my body down on the soil, feel the Earth press into my back like a lover that has gone too long without my touch. Ground myself there amid the pine trees and sounds of the wind. 6. When I start staying up until even the teenage girls have stopped whispering, ended the late night phone calls with their high school sweethearts, it means: Either I am too excited about life to bother with sleep, collecting a bouquet of every minute I can pick from the field of silence where the rest of the world sleeps. Minutes filled with poems to write, books to read, trips to plan, ideas on how to touch happiness. Or I am too afraid of my loneliness and insecurities, and the thoughts that will slow dance into my head while I lay in the distraction-free desert I call a bed. My least favourite love song set on repeat, singing does anyone miss me when I’m not there? am I desirable or just available? are the small details of my day worthy of being heard? what is the point? of anything? You can usually tell the difference based on how much of that time I spend scrolling through Instagram. If it is the latter, do not try to fix my sadness. Call me into it instead, remind me I need to sit with it. 7. I’ve spent enough time searching for myself along the palm lines of the hands of men to learn that I cannot escape myself in their arms. To learn that I do not want to escape myself. But sometimes I will forget this. So if you catch me trying to read the wrong map to find my way back to myself, please just nudge me towards the right one instead. A hot shower. A fire to watch. A quiet place to sit. A thought to meditate on. 8. Do not be delicate in the way that you love me. Even though my last lover left me crumbled in a ball on the floor, like every love letter I’ve ever tried to write myself. Even though sometimes I stop myself from reaching out to someone just to prove to myself that I don’t need them. Even though Even though Love me with the ferocity of the sun burning our entangled limbs from 150 million kilometers away anyway. 9. Love me for my mistakes. For the fact that I keep trying, keep vowing I will apply again. I will love again. I will plant more trees today than I did yesterday. For the ways I let myself grow, by pruning thorns off my rose bushes that I didn’t always know needed pruning, by listening – and I mean really listening – to what other people have to say, to what I have to feel. Love me because I try to make this life feel limitless, but also like something I can hold in the palm of my hand. Love me for the ways that I love myself. Love me despite the ways that I don’t. Do You Believe in Angels? In feathered robes and twig woven crowns. Do you believe in other worlds? Where the sun rises in the west, oceans make you dry, and grass grows shorter? Do you believe we can change, sprout ourselves to flourish? I don’t know the colour of rain. Flashy lustrous hues, illusion of the eye, uncovered veil in the sky. But I know the colour of laughter. Sound born of joy, museum exhibit of connection. I believe in hearts that skip a beat on the playground, humming of Strawberry Shortcake or Cinderella dressed in yella. I believe in sex. The bending of spacetime, two bodies transcending the laws of sensation, become one. Do you believe in second chances, still two bases from home? In running? Even when the path curves like the moon, circling us back around? I don’t know if we’ve been here before. Before the trees were taller than waves and the soil breathed life, before our sun was compressed by Angels, when caribou gathered in the undergrowth, grew under the ancient satellite that cloaked our world in gift wrap of the Gods. Do you believe in God? Holy Mother Sister Lover Fighter. Do you believe we can choose? Would you choose this wild world? Untamed thunder. Messy, ink-stained, stumbled word love letter of trying, written for a spellbinding force, written by another. We couldn’t have just happened to land here. It’s Here Music vibrates through my veins, keeps me warm in my light flowing dress this midsummer night, hours past the sun wandering away. In the mess tent, my friends tremble with energy I’ve only seen here, among people who wake each morning at the birds’ first song. Who plant trees all day in the heat, just to bring that same fire to the dancefloor until the sun arrives again. Glistening skin and swaying limbs move together in rhythm, spin, twirl, and glide around each other, merge into a single mass, shifting with time, balancing in this moment. I flow into the crowd, feel its pulse echo through my body, feel my pulse echo through the room, let go of the concept of me, release into something more, become part of us. I pause all thoughts, let my soul guide my motions, until a force I cannot see pulls me away. I step into the night, stand under the stars twinkling in rhythm with the lights inside, the colours on the dance floor the same dappled greys and deep blues as the ones above. Arms surround me, and with my best friend I look - in at the people we love, up at whatever the universe holds. She points at the sky and whispers we don’t need to look for what’s out there because we already have it right here. It’s right here. Caitlin (she/her) is a poet, tree planter, traveller, animal lover, and rock climber. She has a degree in mathematics, and lives in Canada. Other work can be found in Anti-Heroin Chic, Gnashing Teeth, The Ice Lolly Review, and Global Poemic.

The day leant its full weight on my back, Grated shins, black with dust from the mine, Lifting heavy, flopping soles homewards to where she was waving marigolds, Dripping dishwater tears The evening news had travelled faster than my dragged-up feet could slope, Up from the timbers, that Smashed under the weight of the world Trickling through seams of clay and sod, Along the telephone wires Where weary starlings whispered, Disaster, death, who? She was waving marigolds on a Sunday, step scrubbed, scraped clean of mud and dust Fire burning and kettle hissing, gently splotching on, I saw this from the cobbled corner I dreaded to turn Potato pie and strong tea, double helping For the new man of the house, So many boys ate well On our street that night On the kitchen table, I placed the pit boots, That didn’t fit me yet Soon they would return, Deep into northern soil Digging fuel for our fires, Amongst the ashes of our fathers A word from the author: This is a poem that came out of some previously submitted 'Petites'. The inspiration from this piece comes from the Pretoria pit disaster, very near to where I grew up. Gavin Turner is a poet and writer of short fiction. He lives and works in Wigan, England. When not writing he enjoys spending time with his family and taking walks with his dog.

Tufts of grass glow golden in morning light, sun bringing sustenance to my skin, sunburnt and chapped from yesterday. I live here now, on this hillside— stag my neighbor, stream our life source. If I could choose this every day, I would: to be surrounded, to sit in the good & the hard, and to survive it. I pen this poem with one glove off & one on, watching a line of nine pelicans fly parallel to the horizon. The sun finally crests the peak behind me— I turn my face toward the warmth, eyelashes emboldened by heat. Now, I think I will wake them. Taylor is an artist and poet living in Berkeley. This piece came forth from the tender bud of a morning during a trip backpacking California's Lost Coast last June. Much of Taylor's poetry stems from experiences in and among the wild. She can be found at www.taylorstoneman.com

To put some more fun in your life, pet a dog, take a walk. Let your skin fall to the floor. Eat your young. Take what is yours and let no man stand in your way. Watch the leaves turn. Lay in bed for days. Webs grow on you, You are gone. Drink tea. Fun! Ly Faulk has been obsessed with reading and writing for as long as they could read and write.

From the sidewalk, my son and I watched the car in the opposite lane slow and execute a three-point turn, evoking a distant memory of high school driver’s Ed. It had just gotten dark and somehow there was no one else on this stretch of 30th street which lay above a canyon and connected two trendy neighborhoods. The car rolled past us and parked inside the pylons which defined the bike lane. We watched, confused. A woman got out. I couldn’t see much in the hazy streetlight. She was maybe my son’s age, twenty-something, with dark hair and dark clothing. She came toward us, her eyes fixed downward. We looked down. At our feet, in the bike lane, lay a large raccoon. Motionless. No blood but surely dead. Its belly distended enough that I thought it could be a pregnant mother. She approached without words, her eyes fixed on the creature. I couldn’t tell if she registered our presence. “It’s dead,” I said as she got within social distance length. She made no response, walked to the creature, and touched it lightly with her foot. “Can we resuscitate it?” she said, her shaky words floating into the canyon. “It’s dead,” I said again. No cars passed and I looked at my son, his face still and fixed on the woman. She toed the raccoon again and repeated her question. “It sucks, but it wasn’t your fault, it’s very dark here,” my son said. Once more, she pushed at the animal, “Can we resuscitate it?” The pain of the last two years reverberated in her words. The lives lost, the constant fear, the times I would see my son and wonder if it was safe to hug him. Our country torn apart, its racist underbelly spilling its guts in plain sight. I imagined that the raccoon in the giving of its life could take it all. But the woman just stood, more pain piled on. I wanted to give her a hug. I worried she would bend down and try to revive the dead being. “Please,” I said, “it’s terrible, but best to leave alone.” She looked at me for the first time, her face blank. Then she turned and walked toward her car. “Are you okay to drive? Are you close to home?” I said to her back. My son and I looked at one another, unsure. She drove off. The dead raccoon lay at our feet. We continued walking over the canyon, the sound of an owl in the background. This experience happened during the omicron surge in January. Francois writes in hope of understanding himself and others better. You can find more of his writing at francoisbereaud.com

Harris was a bare patch in the middle of bigger patch of prairie, but folks were proud of being respectable, hard-working Christians. Great-grandma Ellis grew up there, taught in a one-room schoolhouse back when the west had more territories than states. “We had a black doctor,” she told me once. “Real fine black doctor. ‘Course nobody went to him anymore once we got a white doctor.” I think of him now and then, a real fine black doctor, hurriedly packing up his wagon under the moonlight, a bleak dark figure swallowed whole by the bleaker, darker prairie.

4:00 a.m. again (3-21-22) and no sleep I tried forest sounds including a stream and an owl. I tried happy tv traveling, remodeling other animals in their habitat. I tried counting breaths and soft music. I tried acupressure and the mantra “be here now” I tried silence and the static was deafening Pills aren’t working. My reoccurring depression blossoms in a toxic reality. I tuned into WW3 thinking avoiding it was not working and that didn’t work either. Over 3 million refugees from Ukraine have run for their lives. My heart races for them as my body slowly disintegrates and the world as we know it explodes and burns. Annihilation a possibility. Night is too dark for sleep In 2020 Belinda began an online show called GAS: Poetry, Art & Music which features interviews, readings, performances and art show in a video format available free at http://youtube.com/BelindaSubraman An online journal by the same name is here: https://gaspoertyartandmusic.blogspot.com/

SIXTY-SEVEN STORKS Sixty-seven storks came before you were born, the cigognes of Aubonne. One nested on our roof. My name's 23, she said. She was huge, six feet or more from tail to beak, wing to wing. Her feathers were white that contained every colour. Her wing tips were ink black like the mother of all birds. She cocked her head to speak, a clash, crack and clattering of the long red swords - her beak. in a mix of machine gun and morse, she said she'd bring a boy in winter, now she didn't stay in Africa, but in the full landfills of Spain. The boy will have red plumage, with dots on a face of frost. Our own faces were touching, me stretched out the skylight with 23's bill poking in scouring for moles and voles. I’m not even peckish, she said, reading my mind, your lizards are to die for/ He'll be soft and so strong and not often wrong. She retreated her beak. a soft touch of wing on bill to say her goodbye – but stopped as coolly as she flies and said - oh, by the nests, later there will be a girl, dogged and half horse, half human. This time she did retreat – gracefully of course – but not before one last clonk: I'll carry them always over rising seas and wild forests to find heaven in the too-hot human hell. Notes: cigonne is French for stork. Aubonne is a village in western Switzerland. FOUND She allowed me to go, but I never arrived. I had fire in my belly, I went door to door, to every club in the city. And I found my heart spilled. On the night I was killed. I was found naked – in just a teddy boy coat – in the meeting house lane. They came in fours or fives, the blue girls, and stared and shrugged. On the morning I was found. Propped up, among the dock leaves lining the cobble stones, I watched them prod and photo me. Saw them look past me. On the morning, I was found. I’m shining in the sun. Before – I’d hide in the flat or, if she sent me out, I’d blink and squint, and girls would heckle at my shorts and freckles. In the summer, she prowled. “Party boy found dead” – “Nude and assaulted”. No one saw, no one spotted. Y-cut, waked, satin cushion, in my only suit in a pine coffin. Only magpies mourning. When I was fed, to the ground. MURDER OF CROWS Black-suited, black-hatted men, coat tails flapping, on all-black bikes – no helmets, gears, gear, lanes. Septuagenarians, they sweep along country roads like old crows. At dusk they silhouette the sky – riding, roding woodcocks. Now, as elastane peacocks preen, those cocks and crows are dodos. ENOUGH I am enough. I am as eyeless as a cave tetra. But I am enough. I sprout cactus glochidia. My arms are rail tracks of harm. I creep day to day through my one life. I am enough. I swallow eights pills a day. They pump volts through me. I flinch and squirm though an infinite sea of inflating universes. I am not enough.

On the Stones of the Temple Floors Incantations are Written There comes a time when most people start walking back, walking back to wherever it is they came from, trying to find the place where they were known. No one speaks of poetry or money or of left turns in front of trucks or the judgments of the courts or your second divorce, they speak of how shy you were when you were nine, or how the grade one teacher lived to be one-hundred and about the record-setting heat of the seventeenth of September and it is like walking towards the east and into the rising sun - just like walking into the old and empty cathedrals of Europe and being the first to arrive and it smells like a long time and the air tastes like many centuries but it is empty, no one is there, and pray for her, pray for her if you pray, and pray for me too, pray for me. Sweet love, these murmurs say, I have done no harm. My Next Ex-Girlfriend is Really Good Looking I told my parents, before I’d introduced her to them, that my next ex-girlfriend was really good-looking. Pre-Covid we’d sit on the deck and have a glass and she’d smoke Purple Kush and we’d look up and count meteors and satellites and the sisters in the Pleiades and look for anything interesting. When the International Space Sation goes over it’s quite a sight. Those days are gone. I miss the nights, not the person. I did not see any UFOs. She was a believer, but in and of itself that's nothing, I know tons of people who believe, like the guys that I work with, and the one doesn't even believe in wind chill. He does believe in ghosts. His wife says that one night he sat up in bed and talked steadily but incoherently for ten minutes and she couldn't wake him up. It scared her. Finally, he lay back down and she was able to wake him up. He told her he'd talked to his dead mother the whole time, he'd woken up and there she was. He had tears in eyes when his wife told me the story. My next ex-girlfriend is going to be really good looking, and it would be nice if she lived somewhere warm, but if there’s rough water on the coast of that tranquil place, we’ll be ok to spend the day alone and the light will last us like the light on midsummer’s eve, past the anger of that passing storm, and when I tell the story of that day, I’ll speak about speaking about ghosts. Go Ahead and Ask Me People ask what happened. I tell them she’s in the women’s prison, in Banning, California, or that she married a wealthy doctor. I say that she dresses well these days, and she’s active in Republican fund-raising circles. I tell them that she got back together with her high-school boyfriend, and that just last week she asked to borrow three-hundred dollars. She said it was for cocaine, for him. She’d pay me back when she could. I tell them that I have not seen her for years, but her son still calls me and he’s doing alright. He never speaks of her. I tell them that I saw she’d been promoted. She’s one rung below the C-Suite now. She seems to be doing well. I tell them I heard she’d found, and lost, Jesus, and I think she’s living with her mother again. I tell them that she’s driving truck. She’s quit drinking. She’s crafting candles from beeswax. She’s selling them online. She has at least three cats. She says she’s done with men. So, people ask me what happened, and I tell them I don’t know.