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Gaffes Will Be The Glory To err is human, to something is divine. I could Google it. But I have a problem with the whole setup. Pit human against divine, it’s obvious: humans lose every time. But where it goes from there—I’ve had enough. The planet would be better without us. Machines can do everything better than humans. Humans are only special in how much we suck. What happened? Why do so many of us hate us enough to believe the world would be better human free? Is being human not enough to console us in our relentless flaws? To err is human? More like to self-loathe is human. Can I plead for healing without accusations of centering humanness, species ranking and whatever else? It’s no wonder we are marching dead on into division, destruction, dystopia. Do we really see no flaws in our plot to mechanize all the things? It’s a plan humans came up with, after all. But mistakes are not gnats to be blotted out. They keep it real. They mean we’re not machines. They give us so many chances to forgive ourselves. To try again. For a species not so contorted with distress, that would be balm. And You Are Free You are not on the runway to the alien faux-oasis architected by dispassionate forces that see the humanity of humanity as the final obstacle. But show your smile to the stranger, offer your hand to a human dying alone, round your arms around one you love, squeeze and you are free. You are not reducible to anything monetizable, you are not shedding data like dandruff. Get close to your fellow humans and you are free. Breathe with no barriers and you are free. It is not (yet) as they say: you are free. When We Have To Calculate Age Age is to object like river is to rock. Age is to time like face is to clock. Age is to goal like rubber is to road. Age is to knowledge like bow is to bowed. Age is to child like penny is to wish. Age is to adult like water is to fish. Age is to habit like lightning is to sand. Age is to perception like marching is to band. Age is to number like raindrop is to ocean. Age is to wisdom like gravity is to motion. Age is to pain like hurt is to rage. Age is to history like age is to age. Age is to dreams like burglar is to theft. Age is to dreams like weaver is to weft. Age is impossible to the very new like age is impossible to all it’s happening to. The Great Glass Party We all want to be surrounded by ravishing. But we are alive in the magic of this world, which is whenever the castle, however the hill. It is time to celebrate that everything is connected. Everything that is still here, everything that is not, whatever the marring, whichever the color, matter matters matter. Life used to be the kind of uncertain that made the alive curious. Paint is real, trees are real, lies are real, singing is real, assault is real, love is real, cats are real, the truth is real, rain is real, bombs are real, hope is, too. Everything was always glass. Time Never Tells The flame from the lavender candle I light for my evening prayers reflects on my window pane in the exact spot where the bare tree is and I get dizzy with awe? horror? panic? at this Moses moment (I get a Moses moment?), which reminds me of the time, a week after I fled thirteen hundred miles from my home state, when a fat-ass fog rolled in and I could see three inches in front of me and I thought it was the rapture and I had been left behind. We don’t have fog where I’m from. Also, I’ve been left out my whole life. Back to my burning-bush moment: I had been praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, praying for a spouse, for good friends, for life purpose, for answers,--a life I could remain present for and then everything stopped--paused, they said--and I was told I had to do what my anxiety but not my soul wanted to do (stay the fuck home and away from everyone) and, for the last half hour, I’ve stared out my window at the tree that never bears leaves and is not actually semi on fire searching for the mute button--Zoom is different every login, right?-- so the construction at the elementary school where all the neighbor kids would be in the Time Before would stop triggering the tinnitus I got from coming up to fast from a wreck dive with my dad in Mexico yesterday, or, no, it was last year or, Jesus, it wasn’t even last decade but the decade before that, when things were definitely not perfect but I was still as-only-the-young-can-be certain that, one day, they would be. Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse writer from Colorado who believes that freedom of expression is necessary for a society that is not only safe but flourishing. She helps her readers feel seen in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun and, increasingly, less captured media outlets. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

I watched you digging in the doorway piling sod at the rim of the hole until it sat like a small hill in the space between our bedroom and the corridor you turned and spoke across the distance but the pit swallowed your voice we hollowed the earth like this nightly at each of our thresholds bolstering our membranes with liquor and dressing our lips with mourning gowns so many hours spent kneeling beside it tossing our futures in like offerings (Grave, you swallowed them like spit) so bleak we were in your presence and indifference that we failed to see the blooming our gifts had made: the pungent green rising from the depths of our composted hopes. Had we only known the spectacular flame a billion burning dreams can be, or take into account the afterwards: a spring rain mixing with ash and turning to ink.

Bad romance Did she seduce me or did I use her it was hard to say in the throes of our romance to blame her would be unfair after all I picked her from the shelf {and not just once} but what did she expect whispering French words that tasted of long summer evenings beguiling me with foreign scents and full-bodied promises but I was no innocent it was all on my terms from my own amusement or worse in self-pity and so we’d continue around in senseless circles blaming each other Vino and I The pinch I sat on my bed eating toast and drinking tea like a Lord I scrolled freely and breathed deeply but there was a pinch – you might call it that thing that doesn’t allow you to be to relax you see we mothers need time to process recalibrate circle back on all our wrongdoings some call it self-care others survival but that pinch it stings and squeezes whispers “don’t leave us” {I almost wondered if they carried a voodoo doll of me to their grandmother’s and poked me so I couldn’t forget} that pinch is the price it is needing time to eat toast and drink tea but missing them sorely as soon as they leave An aspiring poet from Northern Ireland who dreams of being paid to write poetry from the comfort of her bed. Thankfully, though unpaid, she derives so much comfort from poetry that even if she is never published, she feels a little warmer inside. Mum of two, writing on a variety of subject matters and in a variety of forms, depending on the mood of the day.

Silver unthreatening 6:50 am. this was london. I was 22 – working 12 hour shifts out near chelsea, just down around this new estate by the river. I was there every morning by 6: 45, and the world had the cold tang of cheap apple juice from out of a fridge when you've just woken up and you're thirsty. the grass all as silver- unthreatening as spoons in a drying rack stacked by the sink. I love frosted mornings – loved them then and still love them: the silence of leaves and the eiderdown softness of breezes. one bird in a tree somewhere – a sparrow or some other golfball- sized feather of brown. a heartbeat of motion and shiny-eyed caution, core comfort in bare wood like bone. Bukowski look, I admit it's a weird one and agree he’s despicable – but that doesn't mean there's nothing in the poems and the form of poems. when I read them (which I still do, I can admit, occasionally) I think of nothing else and that is rare – in poetry – to not be reminded. each line means itself, like pencils on a notebook. no self-conscious artistry. no world in conversation. and I'm sorry – I know that it's not any longer fashionable, but that still has value, whatever else it does. and he wasn't a homophobe and wasn't a racist – in the 50s being only misogynist? fucking progressive. but even then – the line lands with such force. it did when I was 15 and it does now as well. the line the line the line. like a corner turned by a beach when the tide swings unexpectedly, turning sand- banks into pooling. With my girlfriend, driving to the Ballymount Asia Food Market, southside of Dublin and just at the N7 junction, two weeks before Chinese New Year from the roadmap, the roundabouts roll off the road, regular as buds on a hedge-stalk. and the road is all dry and all shut dusty offices. the stamped ends of cigarettes. glass that nobody picks up. it's one of those parts of all cities we're in – those that branch from the main roads to places that nobody visits. the occasional magpie – airports and generator stations. a dog going hungry someone drove out and left here. I've been here at some time in each city I've been to – roads ugly as knots from the trunk of a manicured oak. and we turn, see the light brightly red out of windows. and a series of paper lamps, statues of animals up as a called celebration. not to advertise; shoppers here know where it is – it's just what they come here expecting. I love coming toward all this colour from shadowish night-time – a bumblebee walks the inside of a flower. a flame crawls its way over coal. DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and seven times for the Pushcart Prize. He has released two collections, "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016) and "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019). His third collection, "Noble Rot" is scheduled for release in April 2022.

The neighbour’s cat licks its lips, and mimics a human hello In our bottom of the bag road We are people who see, but are not seen Aerials create shadows, wingless birds, too high to focus on, now they are full stops, scavenging for sentence ends Last summer’s hanging baskets, Shed crisps of leafy dandruff in winter‘s breath, family pictures fade, And curl up on dusty sills Soon we will join them, to sit as pictures on sills And fade like sentence ends, Scavenging memories in the suns of spring spirits that lick forgotten lips, can only mimic a human hello Gavin Turner has been writing poetry and fiction in secret for several years. He lives and works in North West England with his family.

I I think the rooms in my books were amusing moments after I rang it to their ears that there is still a sea of words to stack to the available few spaces. I never fed it's hyena's belly about when I got sick, few months ago that always appear like I was just divorced from the beds that hosted me some few days after I chased life till death made a wink at me. I hung unto my neck what was dragged unto me, neglecting the joy in each day to pace along with time. My bright soul was the opposite of my log of a body, dead and boring couldn't fathom it anymore, I see it needed to get it freedom believing soaring for just a time to the skies is better than treading the path of my body that still lay in the pond of the dark. II I couldn't discern the dream, feeling I was in my pool of my slumber or blindfold that sheathed my eyes till a day, two, and three later when I couldn't carry my legs to call on the doctors for help. I could see my soul looming above my head as my armature body was moved around on a chair fixed on wheels. I was awakened by the fourth pierce of the needle fixed into my pale skin, I felt in me after hours of seeing it retire, the beautiful sunset with my eyes immersed in waters compounded by its lids, it perceives like I'm seeing the last of this red view, for the final time. III Each night I expended with moments then, accounts for 2020 days and more of my ex boring existence, I never believed I labeled best in the past diaries of my life. A pull to the future, I couldn't help but snip your tense line of rules alongside mine I already tore as I fell myself trapped by the walls of bliss, now and then, A decade and more. I find it amusing to see myself in an earth made of y'all peak, shattering heap streak of yours, again, again and again, till I can't await the sun dawn on tomorrow, to demolish the records I carved with my own hands, from my past, for myself, again and again. Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi is a Nigerian-based writer, poet, orator, and veterinary student University of Ibadan. He has been trying to pursue his passion for writing by writing multiple genres. He resides presently in Ibadan, Nigeria where He enjoys reading and writing indoors. He has his works published in magazines and issues outside Nigeria.

My Darling i woke up this forenoon as every thought of you walls around me i turn to the side of the bed in search the sweet wet bouquet of your essence to me, you are that first lotus flower the first that the creator behold and echoed; it is beautiful, the creation you saw the first sunrise of the earth the first night of creation you experienced and the colourless universe had seen it even the silence of the heart you existed my darling i woke up this forenoon the thought of has transcended the rooms the bedroom is echoing loneliness as i had hoped to be with you sooner you who has become like lettuce to me let these moments be memorable as i dance on this floor of echoing loneliness Perhaps Someday, I Will Find A Word To Mourn My Dead Ones' Death. That of my father's disappearance in my hometown like the widow's last coins lost. Maybe I should coin out a word, or I am yet to learn a metaphor with which I would mourn him better after the many years of his name that danced in the East-wind silently as a forgotten song. Or maybe, I should birth for him a lexicon from where his voice, that which went silent in the year 2013, will come back and retell the stories of his life as a father. It is just like what looks as outside his, but what it is, is that which is called brotherly hatred in the care-given undertone and my father walked into the obliviousness of the world; no return as what we used to know him for. Or should I forget about her, she whom I find comfort in her eyes, her voice and her love for an offspring echoes; Janet. She was love in everything she did till that fateful morning when the day became darkened, eyes red as it rained rivers as if, if I cry oceans, maybe the dead will be brought back to life again. She laid down on that bed, pointing to these pictures of Christ Jesus on the walls healing the sick, and she whispered to me; "Son, know thy God and creator, for it is as a duty even as you are becoming a father after your siblings". It was as with a voice muffled in pain in an emptied room she murmured those words to my ears; "Son, go to the school, get your result and return so we could discuss the future". But I came back meeting with a white casket, people gathered in tears and they all echoed in unison, here comes her son who will decide where his mother's remains shall be laid to rest out of this troubled world. This was how I lost my parents when they were yet to tell me about the future, of how to become a man. And the ocean emptied on the rooftop of my grandfather without a remnant. Perhaps, someday I would find a metaphor to carve out their space in the tablet of time and memory. John Chinaka Onyeche "Rememberajc" (he/his) is the author of; (Echoes Across The Atlantic), a husband, father and poet from Nigeria. He writes from the city of Port Harcourt Rivers State, Nigeria. He is currently a student of History and Diplomatic Studies at Ignatius Ajuru University Of Education Port Harcourt Rivers State. John Chinaka can be reached through the following means: Rememberajc.wordpress.com Facebook.com/jehovahisgood Twitter.com/apostlejohnchin Apostlejohnchinaka@gmail.com https://linktr.ee/Rememberajc

Pelvis I’m wiping Mrs. Carleton’s backside when she tells me she has a secret. ‘You won’t believe it,’ she says. I help her to stand, then flush the loo. Every part of Mrs. Carleton is failing. I imagine her bones – her hips and pelvis, all those joints that keep a person together – crumbling to nothing, and I suppose it won’t be long until she’s just that: nothing. I place her with care in her ergonomic armchair. Before I started this job, I thought only pens were ergonomic. Turns out lots of things are ergonomic. The walls of her living room are cream coloured. There are framed pictures of her family on the cabinet, and on the mantlepiece above the electric fire. I wonder how often they visit her; I’ve never seen them, but I suppose they know when I’m here, when to avoid me. I wouldn’t want to walk in on someone wiping Mum’s arse. ‘Sit down a minute,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to rush off straight away.’ I can hear the cistern filling up in the loo. I’m sure it’s faulty. I take a seat on the settee. ‘You’ve heard of Elvis?’ ‘Elvis Presley? Yeah, course.’ ‘He’s my baby daddy.’ I hadn’t expected a phrase like ‘baby daddy’ to come out of Mrs. Carlton’s mouth. A lively smile across her face. ‘My son Jeremy. Conceived, Las Vegas, Nevada.’ She breaks into one of her coughing fits. I’m up, trying to help her, but there’s not much I can do. I fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. She leaves it on the coffee table by her ergonomic armchair. ‘I’ve told him to come around tomorrow morning, about eight, so you can make up your mind.’ ‘Make up my mind?’ ‘About the resemblance,’ she says, her voice croaky. ‘He was very handsome.’ I take off my Sketchers and slump in front of the tele. I watch the regional news. More heatwave coverage, an item about our bid to be named the next city of culture, then sports. Popping holes into the lid of my microwavable lasagne, I wonder if I should say something to my manager about Mrs. Carleton. And say what? That she was pulling my leg? She got a bit confused and thought she’d laid Elvis? Brushing my teeth later on, her lively smile comes back to me. I imagine her laughing at me now, alone in her creamy living room, surrounded by pictures of family she rarely sees. Jeremy is there when I arrive. He stands when I come in. Jeremy is tall, dark, and - there’s no better word for it - handsome. I say good morning to mother and son, feeling terribly formal, old-fashioned, and stilted. I don’t look at her in case she’s smiling at me. In the back of my mind, I try to work out the age gap between Jeremy and me. ‘I’m the son.’ He shakes my hand. ‘Thanks for all this.’ ‘Oh, really,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing.’ ‘It is her job, don’t feel too sorry for her.’ We ignore her comment. I wonder if this eye contact between us – Jeremy and me – means anything. His suit is black. He’s an executive? Taking care of business. ‘I don’t know how you can wear something like that in this heat,’ I say. ‘Scorcher, isn’t it?’ When I say nothing else, Jeremy says he must be going, and before I know it, he’s out the door. ‘He stayed to see you. I told him you were very beautiful and I’m not sure he believed me, so I told him to see for himself this morning.’ ‘You’re right,’ I say, almost to myself, feeling heady. ‘He does have a look of Elvis.’ Tupelo There is Tupelo, Mississippi. But there is another Tupelo, somewhere in the Pacific ocean. On the second Tupelo, it’s Elvis’ sixty-fifth birthday. He lies back in his deck chair, on the beach, and buries his toes into the warm sand. This Tupelo sun sets, so does the sun over Tupelo, Mississippi. They’re red and round and have a pleasing curve to them, he thinks, as his mind wanders from the island to linger over the ocean. He shuts those tired eyes, lolls his head onto its side, so it touches the chair’s soft material, and he slowly brings to mind that teenage truck, which served him well on the interstate – which interstate? Decades gone. He feels well beaten, and now well rested. He gets up and crosses Tupelo. In the house on the west side of the island, he finds a white Gibson with a faux-marble scratchboard. He pulls the instrument down from the wall. It’s heavy. In a brief moment of panic, he wonders if he’ll remember the chords. The Unexploded Bomb Since the age of eleven, I have listened to Hancock’s Half Hour before bed. It’s reached the point where I can only sleep if I’ve listened to an episode. I have a playlist of the stories that send me to sleep the fastest. I have another playlist that seems to encourage dreaming. I see sometimes on social media that lucid dreaming, that sort of thing, is popular. I don’t go in for all that. If I find myself in Hancock’s flat, I stay perfectly still. I have no control over my movement, and I simply exist in his world for the night. The half-hour stretches to morning. I use ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’ most often. This is the first episode I heard on cassette, aged eleven, just before Dad went away. It’s the one I return to on Sunday nights, when Monday looms. This is going through my head as we leave the taxi. I pay the driver, then follow Felicity to her front door. Felicity says she’ll send me the money for her half of the taxi, but I tell her don’t worry about it, just buy me a drink next time. ‘So, there’ll be a next time?’ She shows me into her home, a terrace house ten minutes from Market Street. ‘Drink?’ She boils the kettle. Her kitchen has just about enough room for said kettle, a fridge, and four hobs. She pours milk first, which is the way I make my tea at home. ‘Sugar?’ No, thanks. She hands me a TARDIS mug. It has an awkward novelty handle. We sit in the living room. The house is how I’d imagined it when she’d described it at the pub. We stay on the sofa a while, fumbling, breaking the tension that’s been building for the last two weeks. Felicity leads me upstairs to her bedroom, where the fumbling develops. Afterward, we’re lying next to each other in her box room. There’s barely enough space for the two of us. I tell her I’ve missed my bus. ‘Stay,’ she says. We talk but eventually it’s time for bed; Felicity has work in the morning, and so do I. ‘You’ve got to be up early for that bus.’ So, she turns off the bedside lamp and we try to sleep. I should be content; the pub was fun, the conversation flowed, she invited me back and gave me tea in a TARDIS mug. But, of course, I can’t sleep. I lie awake. My coat is downstairs in the hall – there’s no way I could creep out of the bedroom and get my earphones from my coat pocket, connect them to my phone, and listen to ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’ or ‘The Unexploded Bomb’ without her noticing. I turn over and face the wall. It’s past midnight. I imagine the whole street asleep except me. ‘You awake?’ Her voice is startling, I thought she was dead to the world. Felicity turns. ‘There’s something you should know.’ My heart beats faster in anticipation. ‘I can trust you, can’t I?’ It’s such a direct question, I’m stunned. I want to say, of course, because I mean it, I do – and she can. Of course. ‘There’s something I do to get to sleep that’s a bit weird,’ she goes on, in darkness. ‘You know Dad’s Army?’ I make an affirmative hum. ‘I watch an episode before bed, have done since I was a kid. I’ve got them on my iPad. Even when I was a student, coming in after a night out, I’d put one on. Then, out like a light.’ There’s a pause. That’s not weird, I say. I’ve done something similar before to get to sleep. ‘Really? Can I turn on the light?’ I sit myself up against the headboard with Felicity. She gets her iPad from the bedside table, finds one of her favourite episodes to show me. We spend the next half-hour in bed with Captain Mainwaring, Pike, Frazer, Lance Corporal Jones, Wilson, and the rest. When it’s over, she puts the iPad back in its place, and switches off the light. Before I know it, sunlight is shining through the curtains and Felicity’s alarm is going off, waking us both. We have a quick breakfast. I spill milk over my top, the same top I wore last night, and she helps me clean myself, so I look acceptable for the bus. ‘Good as new,’ she says, smiling, hitting my chest with a damp tea towel. ‘Now, on your way. I’ll see you soon.’ When? ‘Whenever.’ And again, before I know it, I’m kneeling by my son’s bed, years later, telling him there’s nothing in his room to be scared of. Even with the landing light on, he feels uneasy and unable to sleep. Do you have to go? ‘I have to go to bed too, believe it or not,’ I say. But this won’t persuade him to sleep. His pale face is deadly serious. Talk to me. Tell me something. So, I cross my legs (my legs make a cracking sound) and think of a story to send him to sleep. ‘Here’s a story.’ I tell him about the vicar we had to tea, back when people had vicars round for tea, and how we went into the basement to find him a drink, because we had a basement when I was a child and kept bottles of wine there, and we found an unexploded bomb from the war. A bomb! I don’t know how, but I’m making him laugh with funny voices, gesticulations, and when the story’s up, he’s happy for me to leave him. I go downstairs. Felicity’s watching the news, which has just started, but she flicks off the TV when I come into the room, and we go to bed.

It was the brightness of it I saw first, red and yellow radiating stripes, forming and dissolving in front of my eyes as we galloped towards the sea. Always towards the push and the pull and the sparkle of the sea then. That was where Karol wanted to go, and where he wanted to go I went. Except that day. I pulled on his reins and we turned to the east, towards the colours and the billowing of the canvas and, as we got nearer, the sound of it. It was a kind of trumpeting that swelled and spiralled. I had never heard the like. We watched from two fields away but we saw no animals, just heard their calls as doors opened and closed in the ring of caravans that surrounded the Big Top and people in overalls moved back and forth, as purposeful and mysterious as the ants back home in the farmyard after rain. Karol lifted his nose, twitched his nostrils, snorted, his hot breath condensing in the cool of the morning. ‘Maybe there are horses in there too, boy,’ I said into the velvet of his ears. Maybe, I thought to myself, there are elephants and tigers too. Maybe there are painted clowns and men who can tie themselves in knots and featherweight women who can swing high in that Big Top. But I cast the maybes away, turned the big horse round and headed for home. I could smell the bacon from outside the house. Mother didn’t turn when I came in, just tightened her back. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said, though I wasn’t. ‘We saw the circus. In Mr. White’s field.’ She muttered something. Stupid girl, it sounded like, or maybe it was stupid man. ‘Eat,’ she said, waving her spatula at the bread. Focussed on the frying, for the men. I was supposed to have had my breakfast before they came in from the fields. To leave the space for them. ‘Please could I go to– ’ I started. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just eat.’ I knew there was no point in asking again. I went to Mr. White’s field, on my own, on foot, after dark. I crouched under a tree and watched the people queuing at the gate. I watched them all go in. I listened as the Big Top swelled with a drum-roll and the roaring of the big cats and the cheering of the people. I listened till it was done and I kept on listening after that, my chest so full I thought I would burst. That night I dreamt of a circus parade coming through our town. I dreamt that I was in the parade, high on an elephant’s back, waving to the crowds, and that even my mother was there, smiling at me. Next morning as we rode out I told Karol, as I told him all my secrets. I told him we could turn and gallop to the east and join the circus. But he just whinnied and kept on track for the sea and I knew then that it was silly to think that a circus would take a cart-horse, never mind a farm girl like me. Cath Barton is an English writer living in Wales. She is the author of three novellas: The Plankton Collector (2018, New Welsh Review), Inthe Sweep of the Bay (2020, Louise Walters Books) shortlisted for Best Novella in the Saboteur Awards 2021, and Between the Virgin and the Sea (forthcoming, Novella Express, Leamington Books). Her short stories are published in The Lonely Crowd, Strix and a number of anthologies. Cath is also active in the online flash fiction community. https://cathbarton.com@CathBarton1

My palms sweat on the bottle of Bacardi, But it’s claustrophobia of my phone, Not the temperature of the room That my fingers cry for and from. No celebratory sips will be had at home, Because I spent last night in too many beds Nothing became of my pillow-wallowing, The honeyed-eyed dream-hopping, But that’s the fucking problem. My chest caves in at the checkout. An emerald rectangle incoming, Vicious in its flatness, its caution. The same lukewarm rejection text, But this time from a girl, someone Who knows my mania intimately— Not just because we share private parts Shaved into something soft and sortable, Diagnoses overwriting school history, But even the same lovers we scorched With aloofness, then a petulant, biting need, Swapping exes’ exes, a couple of “ironic Tic-Tac-hoes” Lowercase in all but loneliness, insomni-addic crushing. I busted it, faltered at the fault lines, Underlined my cheeks and care in red, Slipped it under my tongue like the runny gel tabs, Sunshine side-up with slush stashed up my nose, Pretending I’m prepared for the strange weather. Ha-ha-haing my advances, you wore a halo But it warbled under the steam of your brow. I wanted in on your heatwave, a cap for the storm But when we baby-stepped into the midnight shower, Fingers lily-locked, you were waving me away with a smile. I wandered down a gravel road, feeling every pinch of the earth, Each breathy gust of Mother Nature slamming into my breastbone. It’s bare-tooth anger that carried me along, that self-same shame, The velocity of my inaction, my miscalculation of a girl’s affection That only ached to ensnare and ingest the contents of my purse. La-La-Lipstick, melting chocolates, Oriental coins, and smelling salts— They all hold more promise than a same-sex, revenge-bound relapse. I knew that in the moment, but fixated upon the car Carrying a curlicue cheater into your driveway I’d cut his break lines before I begrudged you Instead, I admired the smoothness of your budding horns, The silverthorne-sharp sparkle in your creeping simper. Forever, I’ll recall the blinding pale pink of your hips, Crossed legs tapered into a V, nothing short of a Venus de Urbino in denim cut-offs and the throes of an Ativan Diet since the car accident no one died but a rutting wolf. These things happen, So said the paramedic The blood splatters on your bathroom tiles Looked more art-novena than ominous, A Rorschach test for star-crossed lovers It can’t be helped, So says my psychiatrist What I remember most is the roughness of your blankets, How closely we swaddled ourselves Apart, two Calla petals, Lethal only to those with claws My vines tickling the back of your neck The dewy tenderness of your brush-off Then the black of the dirt. Paige Johnson is editor-in-chief of Outcast Press, a transgressive fiction outlet with the short story collection In Filth It Shall Be Found out now and her debut, drug- and love-fueled poetry collection, '21 & Over, on the way. Find her at @KettyKat8 on Twitter, @OutcastPress on Instagram.

the history of our school is a history of love of lovers lowered through the night on ropes through dormitory windows swarming up drainpipes onto chaste dormitory landings to their partners in misfortune and young grief sometimes surprised sometimes cast out the history of our school reveals itself in necessary lies since the good of the school comes first even when the fault is great we make this a part of our life for who would live without rules in a world that hangs on structure where transgression and disaster are forever carved in stone one and the same the history of our school is about the naming of names the playing of roles the wearing of masks the love in the sip of a drink the scandal of teacher with student the student dead in his room the breaker of rules invited to leave the slick deceiver doing alright while student life runs on through the gamut and the gauntlet sing we joyful music at commencement time why did one work so grudgingly and with such bad grace let the gates be thrown aside for the student sufficiently polished to pass the bar of admission to rise and fall in earnest w v sutra composes his poetry on a horse farm in East Tennessee. His work has appeared in a number online journals and on his website, wvsutra.com

Oh, I tried to tell it slant but I guess I didn't tell it slant enough. Like any of the old fuckers I thought I was slippery and ambiguous and ambivalent. Like, when I truly loved someone you couldn't tell if I loved them or not. And when I was a kid and I rode my bike past Emily's house and-- what-- dreamed she'd look out of her window or something, my prepared statement was that I was going to the In and Out to buy some bubble gum. Has this son of a bitch ever hooked up with anyone ever? When I went back to school I had to trudge through three feet of snow on top of a dicey freeze ten blocks from the bus to Cafe Ventana where the barista and I always talked straight and without affect and then my aspect was impassive as I raised my hand in class without cease to ask outrageous and what I thought were brilliant questions but none of it profited at all because the damn cabal refused to let me in because of all my past sins against the academy.