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I was preparing for talk about the weather, small town updates, I miss you too’s while following ghosts around grey-clad slabs of Melbourne instead, your faces were Russian dolls tapped together afloat like rubbery armbands in the black pool of the family leather couch. A roly-poly stare of a wobbly screen. I did not expect you to update me on memory tests in James’, sudden sick leave early-onset cognitive decline. The fall of an angel was an upheld hand that fell flat to my hip. All the heat in the world could not have mustered up energy to speak of the rush of a smacked face when hit by an open over door I watched his temples glisten like dewy honey I’m not going anywhere, girl later that evening, enfolding myself in a full bottle of Oyster Bay they didn’t hear my small whimpers through the night I willed a way to go home. Áine Rose is an artist and poet from Donegal, Ireland. She has a bachelor’s degree in Speech & Language Therapy from Trinity College, Dublin (2017) and a postgraduate fine-art degree from the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Clare (2021). She has been awarded the Emerging Artist Bursary Award from Arts & Health funded by Irish Health Service & Irish Arts Council (2022). Her work has appeared in Morning Fruit, Icarus, A New Ulster & Irish Arts Review.

The cut lines my wrist like a port-wine stain; turning into bluets with the warring sun. The kitchen tile clings to my skin with the force of a thousand men. I spread my legs like butter for the officer who feeds me pancakes at 5am to keep me from coding. He fans my skirt out; peacocking, if you will. A broken tooth is my bargaining chip. Daddy says I mustn’t talk to strangers, except for those he brings to my bedroom door. I find their fingernails, upturned, in my cereal, and I tell Daddy nevermore. Cherry Earnshaw is a writer who lives underground.

I wear my sin like a sinner does, like I was born to it. I was never cast out, because I was never in the garden to begin with; I never repented my Original Sin. I saw Lucifer’s lipsticked grin and I told him, give me more. I told him, let’s have fun. Bite the apple. Kiss the snake. Signed my name in blood, sold my soul without a second glance. Mummy’s crying for you, he crooned, she’ll pray for you every night. But no number of prayers can save the damned, and I’ve damned myself willingly. There’s no me without him, anymore — we dance to the infernal percussion of crackling hellfire, and we kiss like the Ouroboros swallows his tail, no end and no beginning. When the Judgment comes, I’ll burn brighter than any of Heaven’s angels — me and my kin, carrying marks upon our skin, and they’ll call us monsters and predators. (They already do.) And we’ll set this world ablaze with our love, scorching the earth until all that’s left is children of fire and vengeance. As we paint the streets with furious music, we’ll chant in unison: We just wanted to be. A word from the author: An experimental endeavour into religious imagery surrounding LGBT+ themes. My mother is a devout Christian, and arguments with the Sunday school teachers were ubiquitous throughout my childhood.

1972 Did you know that in the summer of 1972 I ran the merry-go-round in Springbank Park and am really not too sure how I did not run it right into the ground or maybe even up on its side and roll it into the river, with its grinding gears and pounding eight-track, the thing relentlessly whirling, gyrating from early morning to the dark of night when I switched on the lights and if you came with your young daughter just before I started to roll the tarps down, for sure I would let you ride for free, there would be just the two of you in the twilight damp, you and she would be haloed there on your horses, high in the merry-go-round air, and me, resting there on the guardrail chains below you, every fourteen seconds, waving back. Poem about my concrete apartment building facing the one my wife now lives in and how we periodically meet in the expanse of parking lot between us to exchange boxes, as if they were prisoners. Boxes which soon emptied out onto counters, creating mounds of things which were then ignored and almost thrown out until I found it--what I had thought was a simple key ring made from one of our dead niece’s memorial wrist bands but, when I looked, discovered my wife had looped the band through my wedding ring and, in this way, returned the ring to me. Hard that it was almost an afterthought, without mention, just left there in the bottom of a box, no envelope, nothing from her hand to mine. The ring and the wrist band still are, and may always remain, intertwined like this-- two tragedies, one more than the other but, in the meantime, no warning to be aware, as put back together as you thought you were, that there was still one thing left to break you, hidden in a box. A note from the author: A handful of my recent work. Started writing back in the late eighties, had work in such journals as University of Windsor Review, Dandelion, The Antigonish Review, and others. A hiatus followed while raising two families, with work in recent years in Sledgehammer Lit, Synaeresis, High Shelf Press and Cathexis Northwest Press. Winner of the Antler River Poetry contest in 2020 and 2022.

three blocks I said I wanted to get away So you drove me Right into The lake You said we could go camping But we never did So I wrote 100 love poems And played in the dirt And flirted with the current How many times will we walk this circle How many times will I walk The three blocks to your apartment the first day of june (2022) An anxious achiness in my arms A longing in my teeth My fingers graze my scalp Trying to set the feeling loose I got home From my grandmother’s funeral A package Waiting for me in my apartment building’s stairwell My new ring Crafted by My ex lover’s ex lover The irony of it makes me smirk My secret Returning to Chicago Feels very unsophisticated today Staring at the green and orange 7 eleven sign Sometimes I romanticize these things But today, I take it at face value The old woman in the Thai restaurant smiles at me It’s getting hard to imagine a life Where I am Living for anyone other than myself bones playing you over and over in my head soaking up your voice notes like the sun this summer I want to tell you everything we met and switched places this sad song that sad song make me a song out of this thick hot air everybody’s looking for it but they can’t find it because we have it now am I you or are you me? I want to touch all your muscles and all your bones Morgan St Laurent is an American / Canadian poet and model. Her work focuses on the documentation of mundane life & human emotions. She currently lives in Chicago.

Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay Courtenay Schembri Gray is a writer from the North of England. She is 1/4 Maltese, and happened to find herself hit by a car when she was eleven. You’ll find her work in an array of journals such as A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Misery Tourism, Expat Press, Rejection Letters, Hobart, Bath Flash Fiction, and many more. She will often post on her blog: www.courtenayscorner.com Twitter: @courtenaywrites Instagram: @courtenaywrites

Traces The moon is a burnt orange goddess traversing the quay. Beads of rain arrive as shooting stars down a misty window on the starboard side, blurring city lights and memories old and new. Gold flecks adorn a velvet ceiling and silver candelabras stand to attention on circular tables, arms taut. The dance floor is a terpsichorean collage of sequins and twirls ─ your graceful steps an untethered voyage to a warmer place and time, like an Arctic Tern chasing the sun to the end of the earth; each summer an invitation to begin anew. Rebirth is running half-way to Athens, or letting go of the past in the divine heights of Bhutan. At the end of the Camino de Santiago trail, a pilgrim glimpses the boundless Atlantic, and sees traces of herself. Moments A lone paperbark on Noble Street weeps. Weary branches clutch the frayed rope of June’s dearest swing, flailing listless in the barely-there breeze. The picket fence is turning to ash — scene of longing and long goodbyes, where you said every death is the end of an untold story. Since you left, moments lie dormant. They stir on the wings of mundane cues like running through Hyde Park as swans convene in the autumn fog. I dreamt you planted a lemon tree beside a monument to the dead. I prefer the one where you tend flowers on the porch while bees mingle in the midday sun, and the village it takes to raise a child binds you — breaking any fall. David J. Kennedy is a poet and non-fiction writer from Sydney, Australia. Themes of aging, wonder, and mortality feature prominently in his writing, and he has work published, or forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Jupiter Review, Words & Whispers, and Boats Against The Current Poetry Magazine. Twitter: @DavidJKennedy_

I want to be a person who calls to the ocean Howls at it, really And hears a roar in response A crest, an invitation to dive into a riptide And be rebirthed with a tail of rainbowed silver to tease the moon and gills for breath I want to swallow thunder And spit typhoons so gently To toss the ships that crowd my whales steal their songs With drunken all-you-can-eat norovirus Have a tea party with a stonefish and when I come to surface Once every couple of years caught in some fishing net They’ll cut me loose And say, “Don’t touch her. It’s bad luck to trap an old Brooklyn mermaid.” Anne Perez is a lifelong New Yorker who explores the extraordinary of the ordinary through fiction and sporadic blogging. Recent fiction has been published in Lamplight, The Northwest Review, and Canned Magazine. She can usually be found blathering on Twitter @MrsFringe

When I think of you I am afraid I think of you Kinder than you were. What about you did I invent? Remembering you wrong feels like some kind of murder. Remembering you at all feels like I could never kick you out properly. You’re like a housecat, like some kind of mould- like asbestos in a character property, like a goddamn ghost. If you came back tomorrow you'd know the key is still in the hollowed out bit of the porch. I don't have a welcome mat to put it under, because that'd be too obvious. You are still welcome because I want to know how you are doing. This is what they call morbid curiosity. We may as well be dead, and this may as well be some kind of afterlife. But I don't know which afterlife and I don't know what that says about the both of us. Perhaps because we aren't religious. Perhaps because we're still alive. Perhaps this all means less than I think it does. My dishes and glasses out on the rack tell you I live alone. I ask about you but I don't know how to stop talking about myself. I want you to know how much better I am than I used to be. But that won't make us friends again. It won't do anything but remind you why you left if I keep being myself. Still, I might as well give you this memory of me- all grown up, all grown out. I can't remember how you knew me. I can't remember if you even actually liked me at all. All I can remember is the glare of the sun in the summer, the endless heat, the woods- in the winter, your bare hands, my pink gloves. I think you might have even been embarrassed by me, but I really don't know. I doubt you remember the gloves. Finally. I feel the need to say I'm sorry to you. I don't know what I'm sorry for. You were, I think, my first failure. My first ex-something. I keep bringing you out of the floorboards to say goodbye. You haven't seen my floorboards because I've redone my room since you saw it, but this photocopy persists. You are saying something kind in the kind of tone that made me wonder if you meant it. Just because we're not still friends doesn't mean you didn't mean it. Dear photocopy. Did you mean it? RJ Danvers is a British, queer, and transgender poet that started writing poetry in 2019. Their work is inspired mainly by Richard Siken and their experiences with intersectional queer identity- as w a love for ambiguous metaphors. You can find them at @rjdanvers on Twitter and @r.j.danvers on Instagram.

She is spirited, they say, a kind word for difficult. She is easily frustrated and prone to tantrums. Her preschool teacher once commented to me that “T is so funny, I always hear her growling under her breath.” It wasn’t funny to me. I knew this to be something that she would do to help calm herself in public spaces so that she wouldn’t blow a gasket. The teacher had no idea what an impressive tactic this was. As a child I was nothing like my daughter. I was a pleaser. She is a fighter, and she taught me how to be a fighter as well. To fight for her. ** The table in the conference room at Mason Middle School is made of blonde wood and is at least 12 feet long. It fills the entire room window to doors. I am the first one to arrive at the meeting because I am a punctual person and this is my job. I go to meetings about my child. Lots of meetings. I am rarely organized but always punctual. And since I am the first to arrive, I have my pick of where to sit. I want to sit at the head of the table on either end. The power position. I know from experience they will want me seated in the middle. I know because they have moved me there before. “Here you go, Mom. Why don’t you sit here in the center so we can all see you.” Which doesn’t make any sense because they can all see me perfectly fine. In the early years when I first started going to meetings, I was green and naive. When they called me “Mom” I thought it was endearing and friendly. I thought they want to help my child, they want her to thrive, they want her to blossom. It took me until the middle school years to figure out that by using the term “Mom” instead of calling me by my name they were keeping me in my place. I wanted to be liked. I wanted my daughter to be liked. Being liked served no one. ** The reason for this meeting is to discuss the results of a test that was administered to T to measure her cognitive abilities and intellectual abilities. The name of the test is The Woodcock-Johnson test. This is not a joke. It is also not a joke that the school principal’s name is Dick Seamen. After the hour long pelting of information that leaves me feeling drained and emotional, the school psychologist asks: “Does “Mom” have any questions or thoughts?” I have only one question for the group. One I don’t verbalize. “Did Mr. Seamen ever think of going by the name Richard on the days he delivers the results of a test named Woodcock-Johnson”? Instead, I respond, “No questions.” A word from the author: I am the mom, and this piece is about some comic relief while trying to navigate an otherwise treacherous educational system

After the third interruption, I lost my train of thought again. “It must have been a lie,” my mother quipped. Why the hell would I lie about this? And who came up with that stupid saying in the first place? (I do a quick Google check) Apparently, everyone’s uncle, bubbe, and mother, that’s who. “Ma, you know I hate when you say that! It's because you interrupted me again. Do you want to know what happened at the appointment or not?” “Jesus Maura, relax, it’s just an expression,” my mother said and rolled her eyes. “Just stop, ok?” “I’ll try, honey.” “The doctor ordered an MRI to confirm….” “Did you go to Dr. Gilbert, like Auntie Helen recommended?” “Yes, I did. The doctor is concerned….” “Did you remember to park a block away on Elm, so you wouldn’t have to pay for parking? The parking is very expensive. When your father was sick, I racked up a hundred and fifty dollars in parking fees in just the first week, until Auntie Helen told me about that shopping store lot. She was a savior!” “Yeah, Ma, I did. Listen, if you don’t want to hear what the doctor said, I will just go home. Bob wants to get over to his parents’ place by three o’clock anyway.” “NO! Don’t leave, Maura. I’m listening.” “They also scheduled a biopsy, but they wanted the MRI results beforehand, to see if there is anything else concerning.” “Concerning? What do you mean anything else concerning, Maura?” “Ma…” “But they haven’t even tested anything yet….” “Ma, let me finish. He said…” “You need a second opinion,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “The doctor said that he’s looking for signs of…there was a word he used, something about the liver. Jesus, Ma! I forget what I was saying!” “Well then,” she said as she pulled me into her arms, “it must have been a lie.”

Chicken Plant The line chief brags of smelling girls on the rag Thursday he says he dreams of eating me I don’t tell him my dream— hooks rip his neck as he swings toward me handling the blade Grief Daddy built biceps working for US Steel smelting iron in heat that humbled men Now I could break his arm brittle as kindling over my knee He used to let me walk up his body balancing my hands on his fingertips till I flew from his shoulders They began to sag after Mama fell no moon out and died while he slept Daddy saved the hair from her brush wrapped in Kleenex and stored in a wooden box beside their bed Every night he rubs strands against his cheek Mama’s Rug Is An Elegy I Cannot Write Lush red wool bordering blue hydrangeas her rug unfurls at night By morning loose strands scatter I weave into a mourning shawl pray for her return Chella Courington (she/her) is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She was raised in the Appalachian south and now lives in California with another writer and two feline boys. Her recent microchaps of poetry are Good Trouble, Origami Poems Project; Hell Hath, Maverick Duck Press; and Lynette’s War, Ghost City Press.