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"houseplant tooth transplant" by shaoni rakshit

3/21/2020

 
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​something happened to me / the swiss knife chipped off a strand of my tooth / now i miss zero point zero zero one percent of enamel / nobody notices it is gone / my tongue laps the cliff of my incisor for the downward jag / is this not how damage works / nursing what is not with you / yet we all go –
 
swimming in cesspools of lachrymation / so much of salt would look like white sand / i have not been to a beach in a loop of weeks / my skin verbosely dilates like a profane sore / there is so much of my body / if he started kissing me it would never end / play with my hair / play with the dead / it makes me –
 
wonder about desire / how it devours its own skin / leaves a festering cavity / but make a habit out of something it becomes a chore / you brush your teeth / spit lust into the sink / turn off the tap / zip up your pants / you end up no better than the parasite wildflowers / in nondescript backyards / someone deigns to water you / lustily lick each molecule / that seeps through your fissured tooth

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Shaoni is a Literature student based in India, who likes most plants and animals, and dislikes most people. An avid enthusiast of eclectic playlists, she also enjoys being in the wrong place at the right time. For more, you can find her on Instagram at @shaonirak.

art by alice mao

3/21/2020

 

Alice Mao is an emerging artist in the greater Seattle area. Her work explores identity, anxiety, and digital distortion. More can be found on her instagram, @alicemaoart. 

"china texas" by isaura ren

2/25/2020

 
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​crowbar trail mix batteries flashlight.
water, water everywhere—you know the rest.
 
for some godforsaken reason, or perhaps none at all,
it's 90 fucking degrees. (fahrenheit.
this is america, after all.)
 
the air is still, save for static
between our bodies. strands of hair
bridge the gap, cling together. the ends tangle.
 
billboard evangelists beam down
benignly from their roosts,
smiles weathered, worn.
 
the heavens have opened and shut.
their deluge was rapturous, so naturally
we were left behind.
 
car engine cicadas pop radio.
 
here, at priceline 103
beside our lady of sorrows,
we sit in your sedan and pray for deliverance.
 
(the national guard turned us back
like we have somewhere else to go,
 
two college queers with ten bucks total.)
 
here, you tell me your parents are stuck,
water halfway up their driveway,
road an unnavigable river.
 
we're worse off, i don't say.
"isn't that awful," i say instead, pressing on the wound,
preoccupied with pain other than my own.
 
for once, you don't cry. you don't even answer.
(it wasn't a question anyway.)
 
here, i am alive, vibrating with
anger fear agitation hostility boredom,
and i don't look at you but i hope you are too.
 
we're seconds from either killing or
kissing each other. i can't decide
which would be worse.
 
i'm ready for an end, one way or another.
 
floodwaters ebb, but
dams can't hold forever.
 
we don't know much yet--
we haven't even had real girlfriends.
we're majoring in language left unspoken,
 
and from it, we divine two truths:
 
something will give.
it will be us.

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Isaura Ren is an aspiring writer and student of the craft. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has dabbled in the rural South. Her passions include language learning, cultural geography, and daydreaming about backpacking through Central Asia. She is likely up to no good. This is her first published work.

"more (a haibun)" by julia gerhardt

2/18/2020

 
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grandma—you live in your Obsession perfume bottle, i talk to it every day, telling you how good you smell, that i long for your root beer kisses that stay sticky on my cheek, that you are magic. 
grandma—you live in your flannel & it goes unwashed for too long, but if i can call you mom
on accident again and go without socks in the house, i promise to clean it.  grandma—you live in my rosary beads, that i never hold loose, & i beg you every day for something that i cannot control without being soothed— 
                                                                    say Julie one more time…
spoon feed me sweet truths
catch the word more on my lip
trying to slip out

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Julia Gerhardt is a writer from Los Angeles, now living in Baltimore.  She was nominated for the Best Microfiction Anthology 2020 and Best Small Fictions Anthology 2020. She has previously been published in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Umbrella Factory, The Airgonaut, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cease, Cows, Literary Orphans, Rogue Agent, Flash Fiction Magazine, Monkeybicycle, and others.  Her work is forthcoming in the Eastern Iowa Review, Fresh Ink Magazine, Moonpark Review, Okay Donkey, and Club Plum.  She is currently working on her first novel.  You can find her at https://juliagerhardtwriter.wordpress.com/

"library customer service or: in preference of the unruly" by benjamin niespodziany

2/9/2020

 
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For me, if you breathe
please and thank you, I will fall asleep.
 
If you frolic obnoxious, if you drop kick
books at me, if you spill coffee
 
on my boss's vest, yes, I will
kiss your boots.
 
The courteous patron
becomes the forgotten.
                       
It's the headache, the crass handful
the staff member remembers mid-dinner.
 
It's you in the crewneck
with the faded alumni card.
 
It's you in the crewneck
with a stack of back catalogs
 
hiding your face. I'm holding
your hand as you stab my side. 
 
I bleed out and check out
your books. You drum your fingers
 
on my forehead. I return to you
your card and remind you of due dates.
 
My brain is a name tag. You remove it
through my nostrils. I cry such
 
rainful joy as I waive late
fees and hate to clock out.

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Benjamin Niespodziany is a Pushcart Prize nominee with work in Fairy Tale Review, Paper Darts, Cheap Pop, and various others. He runs the multimedia art blog [neonpajamas] and works nights in a library. 

art by kristin lafollette

2/9/2020

 
Sugar in Water
Display of Dinosaurs
Sleep on the Floor, Part 2
Sleep on the Floor, Part 3
Sleep on the Floor, Part 4

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Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer. She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the Art Editor at Mud Season Review. You can visit her on Twitter at @k_lafollette03 or on her website at kristinlafollette.com.  

"strange" by ikem ukeka

2/5/2020

 
to live in the diaspora
is to return to your homeland and appear as a stranger while there a stranger approached me and spoke some english that was broken carried by pidgin – i received only a few pieces.
 
half at peace and half uneased.
i’m nigerian: i could regurgitate a reply in my stale, remnant accent from childhood
i’m american: he’d smell the tainted accent and perceive how rotten it is.
 
to live in the diaspora
is to be in your homeland and appear as a stranger while here strangers approach me to question where i’m from because of the lingo spoken with my people – igbo.
 
half at peace and half uneased
 
i’m nigerian : i’m american

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Ikem “Na-Chi” Ukeka is a Physical Therapy doctoral candidate at Midwestern University. He dabbles in different forms of poetry, from hip-hop to spoken word. Some of his poems have been published by Fathom, Poached Hare, & Barren. In addition, he is the author of the chapbook, “y. Solo” (LuLu Press, 2017), which is available as a hardcopy and digitally via major e-book distributors. You can follow him on Twitter @Ikem_NaChi.  

2 poems by tam(sin) blaxter

2/4/2020

 

AN INCANTATION TO MAKE AN EMAIL ARRIVE

​Say you are hot water
running rills of warmth
across my stomach

 
Say this room is earth under a tree
this room is bare, aching earth this
room is my open palms

 
Say you are a tangerine
whose skin
falls away like foil or a winter coat
 
Say I expect nothing of you
I am not waiting ⁠— I’m up to my elbows
​already in tomorrow — I am not waiting ⁠— 

A CHARM TO REPAIR A BROKEN PHONE

​The real trick is to realise that
whatever the fault (glass spidered,
waterlogged circuitry, sniping texts and
friends’ voices slipping to sugary nothing), it resides
 
in you first and foremost. The phone
itself is nothing. The phone itself
is your clenching heart.             In the grey morning
⁠— the sky yellow as  orangejuice
with streetlight light, flu-pallid with dawn⁠ — 

go out into the garden. Dig into

mouthmoist loam. You’ll find
three egg-shaped stones
an arm’s length deep. Place your phone
with them and cover it over. Mark the
spot.
 
Return on whim           one evening in spring
​before its bulb
splits, sprouts.

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Tam(sin) Blaxter is a historical linguist and poet based in Cambridge, UK. Her work has recently appeared in Tears in the Fence, DREGINALD and Pamenar Online Magazine, among other places, and her chapbook after the great death is published with 845 Press. Find her online at www.icge.co.uk and (inconsistently) on Twitter @what_really_no.

"we do not own the stars" by christine sloan stoddard

2/1/2020

 

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Christine Sloan Stoddard is a Salvadoran-American author and interdisciplinary artist who lives in Brooklyn. Her books include Force Fed, Desert Fox by the Sea, Belladonna Magic, Water for the Cactus Woman, and other titles. She co-edited Her Plumage: An Anthology of Women's Writings by Quail Bell Magazine for Quail Bell, the art and literary journal she founded. In 2019, she became the first-ever artist-in-residence at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and earned her MFA from The City College of New York in Manhattan. Later that year, Christine became the artist-in-residence at Heartshare Human Services of New York, where she leads art workshops for adults with disabilities and creates artwork for display. Continuing in the direction of her poetry films like Jaguar in the Cotton Field, Done, and Marine Encounters, Christine has been selected to collaborate with poet Teri Elam for the 2020 Visible Poetry Project. 2020 will mark the release of Christine's books Naomi & the Reckoning (Finishing Line Press) and Heaven Is A Photograph (CLASH Books). Also working in theater, Christine will next appear in Melanie Marie Goodreaux's "The White Blacks" at Theater for the New City in the East Village, February 27-March 15.

2 poems by kailey tedesco

1/30/2020

 

MATERIALIZATION

This is the drink of a cardboard uncle gummed up with ambrosia. This is the drink of myself, a condemned mansion with hedge-maze arteries & I am flocculent with cabbage roses. Do you remember shooting my old blood between the eyes like a rabid dog? It is wrong to believe the bread is Christ & eat it anyways, so I shrike it to the bottom of the pew & tip the table once a week. There I come blooming from your nostrils in clumps of atom-less peonies & yet you’ll still cluck your tongue at the snap of my toe. ​

PSYCHOMETRY

Back barn, wooded over & zapper-lit. A piece of top-skull, curved. A tiny moon or enlarged fingernail. Hands placed around it, finger bones feeling the hollow of their ancestor. Hair still mossed to the head, stubborn against plucking. A prayer. And then another prayer. And then a question. To what lock does she belong? In the aftermath, the death-mess keeps its chosen pronouns. She-bones, their-bones. Re-forms a whole identity. Something to feed. Tea sloshes around the bowl & the aftertaste of calcium & dust delivers us to the old bride. 

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Kailey Tedesco is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing) and Lizzie, Speak (winner of White Stag Publishing's 2018 MS contest). Her newest collection, FOREVERHAUS, will be released from White Stag in 2020. She is a senior editor for Luna Luna Magazine, and she teaches an ongoing course on the witch in literature at Moravian College. You can find her work featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, Bone Bouquet Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and more. For further information, please follow @kaileytedesco. 
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