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I bet I'll forget the clammy shirt collar, sheepskin lined coat and brown angola school jumper, uncle-close to my skin in the September sun. The swapped knee socks that offer brief relief to my weary, stinging soles. The male jogger lunging in jest, almost toppling my heavy load. The cherry red hatchback stopping eight miles in and two men offering a ride to me, a trembling twelve year old who forgot her busfare. I remember thinking when I reach home, eat and rest I bet I'll forget.

She’s the only thing left in the freezer, a chicken, hard as a rock. He calls her Chick-la as an endearment. His ex disappeared one fine evening last week like ice melting in spring, and left a cold puddle on the tiled kitchen floor. Brrr… she was cold, he thinks, she was cold-hearted. He rubs his hands together. They were together for three years and sixteen days. He only knows the number of days because she told him, just before she left. Typical of her, to count days, and yet it was her directness he’d always most admired. Shilly-shallying was his personal talent, as she so often told him. He should have asked her to marry him, he considers. Is that what he did wrong? Underneath that no-nonsense exterior did she secretly long for flowers and heart-shaped chocolates? She might have warmed to him, looked at him differently, had he come home with a dozen red roses held behind his back. “Honey, I’m home!” he might have said and she would have turned from the kitchen sink, and her heart would have jumped and her wide smile at seeing the roses might have made him human, a loved man. But too late now. Chick-la looks at him, or maybe stares at him, he can’t be sure. She’s wrapped in cellophane and has a sell-by date of ten days from now. “Red or white, Chick-La?” He opens a bottle of red wine. “Italian or Indian?” He takes a jar of pesto sauce out of the cupboard. He lays the table with the white tablecloth still stained from the New Year’s Eve dinner. A couple of old bread crumbs are still clinging to the cotton. That night’s argument still not forgotten, he sets the table with two plates, two knives, two forks and two wine glasses which he fills to the brim. “Cheers!” he says and some of the wine spills as he raises the glass to his lips. Clumsy, that’s what she always called him. Chick-la says nothing. She sits on the chair across the table, thawing, slowly but surely becoming softer, fuller and fleshier, white as sorrow. Everything she kept inside oozes from the pores of her skin, a puddle forms. Then something tumbles inside him like great blocks of ice, and he wonders where his ex is now. He keeps looking at the chicken, dazed, filled with terrible disbelief. Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer based in Cyprus.

Midnight Apple Picking In the harsh despondency of night, When tears have dived into their sepulchers And the mists, heavy with every defeat Have exited the scene, leaving The thick black, which has coated The red apples hung aloft like lost dreams Waiting to be plucked. The floor is coated with the corpses of Eve’s first sin And memories, long anchored, rise like Cumbersome whales of deep-tide sadness For air, For the fresh breath of surface tranquility. This year of grief, of fresh pink screams Has shotgunned through the fragile cadences of hope. But here in the midst of the midnight hour With my girlfriend and dog, I catch The apples doused silver by the moon – Samurai sword sliced in half, expertly With clinical precision With my bucket, frightened I’ll do a Newton and know the concussion of stars. In these moments I know love. Its fragile body of flame Still burns in the dark of the deepest winter And even though the hole left by your premature departure Can never be filled with the notes of soft tears, I hold the hand of childhood promises made flesh Thinking on the always uncertain future. For Amelia Let sorrows ripe and devouring depart with the sun descending below the pigeon smudged rooftops and the children weary, red coated by evening fall, are catapulted through joy’s essence; tumid with the moon’s nameless desires. Lying upon the newly sprung grass of spring, Amelia sits upon my back, and with fake anger I cry ‘I’m not a chair’ but with a disconcerting honesty she looks at me and demands, ‘well what are you then?’ I am silenced; the philosophies collected in my now faltering youth sink into nothingness, and I can only shrug and say simply, ‘I don’t know’, like a teacher she nods sagely and without being told I get onto my hands and knees; she climbs onto my back and we begin to traverse the front garden unexplored during this day of beers and babies and petty parental judgements. She clings to my collar and for the first time in months I reach an equilibrium denied me in the waged hours which dictate even the days unbound by their measurements of worth. As we sojourn across natures domesticated self, the adults drink and talk wearily of joys passed or passing. We find a worm, fat and half sunken into the black earth. We stare and watch, as you wonder in your fractured tongue where it is going, and why it lives in the world below our feet. I tell you that’s its home, it is where it is supposed to be, and without acknowledgment you get off my back, imitate my pose; fixated by its slow movements. I think of Coleridge holding his child in his frosted midnight and try to capture this moment, this wonder seen through the eyes of a child, not burdened by mortality or the price of beer. David Hay is an English Teacher in the Northwest of England. He has written poetry and prose since the age of 18 when he discovered Virginia Woolf's The Waves and the poetry of John Keats. These and other artists encouraged him to seek his own poetic voice. He has currently been accepted for publication in Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader, Versification, The Babel Tower Notice Board, The Stone of Madness Press, The Fortnightly Review, The Lake, Selcouth Station, GreenInk Poetry, Dodging the Rain, Seventh Quarry and Expat-Press. His debut publication is the Brexit-inspired prose-poem Doctor Lazarus published by Alien Buddha Press 2021.

Advice Don’t be stupid he said to her and I saw the cannonball leave him and hit her splintering her sternum and entering the cavern where she stored them all like a clown car full of pain that never unloaded to show off how much it could carry. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to keep it that she could let it pass through and exit out her back leaving a circular blast hole of blown away skin and that it wouldn’t even be a ball anymore when it flew out but four and twenty blackbirds escaping, leaving her weightless. Instead, I filled her coffee even though she had not asked. Chicago Let’s go to Chicago and stay in a hotel where we can see the lake from our room, and do nothing except walk up Michigan and back down Wabash picking out people to practice on. There will be a business student from Columbia turning up her collar in the wind and a fast-moving doctor biking home from Rush. He’ll have a wife at home but will come back here later after the kids are in bed to that weird dirty space that the Tribune forced Macy’s to clean up in the tunnel under the street to meet his former nurse who quit three months ago to get her master’s degree but instead watches cooking shows all day and lives off her dead mother’s money wishing she were in Italy Madagascar Mexico City anywhere but Chicago where everyone can see her.

For Stewart Nestled in the coves of Paris, with amaretto biscuits and an egg cup of espresso, I listen for your call. As the daylight calms, tempering into a blue lull, I tap my foot to the buckling of the sea — honeydew moon. O’ Paris, with your hourglass, lead me to my odyssey. Shipwrecked in your hollowed out torso, starry eyed. Astride in front of the mirror, you flexed your muscles. They bobbed playfully like large pearls on a silver spoon. How long can a memory last? Will I remember the subtle inflections of your candour? Maybe, however slowly. Your decadence colours the Seine —as tart as a strawberry. O’ honey, we had a blast.

I taste of salt. salt of the ocean and salt of your palm. you move your thumb back and forth / back and forth across my back / across my back I carry the worry of water that rolled me back and forth against flanks of sand and a bed of stones so that I may carry yours. I know your blistered soul. I see where you go when you turn out your light. I know your keys / your leather wallet / loose coins / the many man-things on your nightstand. I am volcanic — your flare, your flash. when you wake, you summon my heat and spring creeps closer. daphne blooms. a phoebe sings her name. the shadow of a wasp outside your window treads across the sunlit blinds, builds its paper house. Liane St. Laurent is an old dog learning new tricks. She has washed dishes, driven horse-drawn carriages, picked apples, taught English and is currently an IT professional. Recent work appears online and in print in The Banyan Review, The Penmen Review, Sidereal Magazine, The Poets’ Touchstone, among others. Liane lives in New Hampshire with her husband, their two dogs, and an array of woodland creatures. Catch her online at lianestlaurent.com or connect on Twitter @lianestlaurent.

Flying west as the sun sets It’s like we’re trying to catch the last bit of light Before the night rolls in, Vainly attempting to remain in that twilight haze Where everything looks so strange and beautiful —perfectly preserved, frozen in time— Before the darkness swallows it all And hours later, When the sun rises once more, We bear witness to the shifts and changes. Is that what we were doing Those last few months? Chasing the last streaks of orange before they faded into black, Trying to stave off the inevitable? Or did we really give it a shot To change and mend and fix the cracks in the foundation? Or was it just time to let nature take its course, To let dusk bleed into night so dark Even the shining stars were swallowed whole? I don’t know anymore. I’m just sitting here In this void Where I can barely see the outlines of my fingers and legs to know I am in fact alive, Despite how oppressive this night is, how it Crushes my breath from my lungs And leaves me with stinging eyes And sticky cheeks And a throat raw from screaming a voice I no longer have left. I like to think I’d give anything to see those last rays of orange light again, To feel the smallest warmth on my skin from those few tendrils of the dying sun, But I wouldn’t. Because knowing what comes next —isolation— It’s a pain I don’t think I’ll ever have the strength to bear again. Besides… Daybreak will come at some point, Meaning I’ll shift and change too Though how remains a mystery. It’s only a matter of time. “What are you?” is a question Saroya gets asked constantly since she's ethnically ambiguous, and wears the occasional wig, whether it be black, gray, or green (like a mermaid). She is a biracial, bisexual feminist born and bred in the golden state of California who writes about the challenges of identity. Follow her on twitter @SRWhatley and find her poetry and collages on IG at @saroya_creates.

I didn’t notice the bullet holes right away. They had hit the faux wood paneling in what the lawyer called his conference room, just another office he rented in the brutalist-style building near the courthouse in the Justice Center. The area was all built in the 60s, of poured concrete and bars on the windows. The central atrium in the lawyer’s office complex held a lone beach palm that had yellowed and was straggling toward the sunlight. Street parking only. Outside was parched landscaping dotted with litter. Even in winter, the rains didn’t soak into the dirt, and there were endless arguments among the tenants as to who was or wasn’t paying their fair share of the water bill. The way the lawyer talked about it, I thought the holes in the office wall were important. But I couldn’t see these scars when I first entered the room. They blended right in. I kept looking around trying to find them while he gave me what he called a “reality check.” Court calendars were crowded, judges were tired, nobody told the truth. My retainer would only go so far. Then he came over to my chair, held out his hand, took me to the wall, and pointed t the bullet holes. Clean edges, bullets still in the wall. He said he wasn’t targeted. It was a random shooting, the kind that just happened. A lot of offices around the Justice Center had bullet holes. He hadn’t bothered to fill his in. “Plead guilty,” he said as we both looked at the wall.

North Fork of the Skykomish She stands in the hurry of the river. Sunlight bends among Sitka spruce. Memories loll in shady places and beneath stones, nudging her. Summer pales. A crispness threads the air. Golds and reds and muddy greens. The voice of the river is strong, bright and lifts her out of the present that has shredded her as grief will. Her feet grow numb and she hopes that will spread, up to legs and arms and head, through muscle and bone. Far off, ravens screech, jagged, reckless cries. She imagines them taking her into the sky, even just in dream or momentary lapse. It’s all bewildering, loss and the unsparing tick of time. Thursday Night One clap of thunder at the foodbank last night and several downpours which made everything miserable though people were thrilled to find garlic and loaded up, more than they should have. But who am I to say that’s enough, though you have to, so there’s some left for others. You can say this in a kindly tone. I don’t know why I was concerned about people not having enough to eat as a child except – Catholic. I made up lists of food as if they somehow, miraculously, would be delivered to the hungry – 16 loaves of bread, 8 steaks, 30 boxes of Cheerios, all random which was the point and though I’m no cook or even one to care much about food, here I am bagging produce and making small talk about romaine lettuce and dragon fruit and helping people figure out how many oranges you get for two households of 7 and 5 respectively, which is difficult because my math skills are crap. Fall gently Fall gently as liquid into sleep and carnival, pink speckled rocks anchor the shore, dust in the air settles in the fiddle of a broken hour, the trick of a minute and a half with sorrow goes the whale song, like fate and furious fortune, no ending, nothing hanging from the bridge Scientific Curiosity I am hope-broke, tasting smoke, watching the waters recede, the stranding, birds’ eggs, pale and fissured, crescendos of glaciers. I am sorrow-choked, witnessing oil coiled on the sea surface, blackened wings in a clotted glut, dead fish like a pack of cards scattered on the crusted beach. I am hollowed and stormed and scooped out. So breathless is the echo of fallen trees, so suffocating the crawl of relentless heat, wavery, as if spirits were rising to admonish us. I am stalled and bewildered at the end of a fractured year where time melds with chaos and questions wrap around us like strangler figs. What are we but poachers on this ailing earth, taking, with and without guilt, the crumbs of our appetites dusting every dark crevice, every flat gold plain. Winter’s Reach As the wind illuminates the vigorous hills, pine and fir slip from shadows, a lick of sunlight crests the snow-dusted horizon where morning falls to the thickness of mid-day, where the thrust of a day pales to dusk in strings of gold and violet, linked by birds swimming from tree to tree with tender pause. How it all folds into night, an absence and a starry weight. Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason,was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner and has been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize .

I cannot hold this muscle, this lashed-out grit turned limp. It tastes of metal and Vienna sausages straight from the can. Straight down the middle, the heart of the matter, what matter? Hold your tongue for me, like mine, and pinch the penny between your thumb and forefinger. Spin it on the kitchen table between the neighbor’s dog and my grandmother’s dead cat. Heads, cut your losses. Tails, well, the sky is incapable of such untruths. Does the violet sky lose when the sun dips underwater, taking all light with it? I wonder if pennies absorb the light they reflect. If they fish strings of it from boiling water to toss at the refrigerator door, see what sticks. The sun hides in my pocket while the violet sky wonders if it should have been a bird. Or a fish. Something with wings, fins, some way to direct the falling stars upwards, back into the sky, away from the gravel crunching under my feet.

“Emotional Regulation” CW: Suicidal Ideation My boyfriend thinks I have issues with “emotional regulation.” “Yelling…” he says, “I can’t be with someone who yells.” I try not to. Just how I try every day not to cry. I read somewhere that tears are at the root of rage. Call it Despair. Poets know the rhythm of its knocking. Abundance of dishes, stillness, burning braid on candle, sulking. When I get cold in the bath, I wish over bubbles that I have on a sweater— a real killer of a top, puffed up sleeves, a graphic of Columbo investigating a case, smoking a joint. I don’t end up killing myself because I can laugh. May 4 It’s my birthday I have a hollow gut and the desire to get my hands dirty then wash them clean while Annette Hanshaw’s unforgiving “That’s all!” at the end of Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home echoes in my head and I’ll walk to lunch with a craving for a cheeseburger (hold the cheese) because I know what I like but the barista at the café won’t look me in the eye for more than a second I’m unlike her with the pointless part about the (no-cheese) that’s my intrinsic futility speaking— still, I wouldn’t mind reclining on the tangerine to the far left and considering the employees’ inevitable sneers maybe I’m the one pursuing a disconnect: out of habit bringing to mind M. after asking if he’d come in he said no he would wait outside Eva Swiecki is a writer and editor from Chicago. Her work has been published in High Shelf Press, Lammergeier Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @ESwiecki.

A fool, I contemplate tomorrow’s fate. For future truth, I truly yearn to know. I think, What if? And next, I speculate, What then? Imagining: Why? and How so? By thinking through each possibility, Child’s play thereby extends my youth anew. As in: When I grow up, What will I be? Where shall I live? To Whom shall I be true? Perhaps, it is a foolish errand run As Culture pulls at me in different ways. To be responsible is not so fun. The choice is this: Remain a child who plays. I find the love of self is not mature, Which leaves adulthood more or less unsure. Stephanie Howe Sullivan is an emerging poet in the MFA in Creative Writing in Poetry Program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, where she lives. She is a retired lawyer, seeking the better part of the fine art of living in pursuit of her passions—poetry being chief among them. Follow her at stephaniehowesullivan.com, on IG & Twitter @howeloween, and on FB @Stephanie Howe Sullivan Poetry & Prose.