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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.

"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. 

"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.

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. 

2 poems by ferin a-w

11/6/2018

 

PART I: MAKING UP

We carried our poverty on our rib cages,
          nicotine stained fingertips,
          grizzled dreams,
          and in our veins--
                     thick
          with the abandon of what was,
and the romantics that could be.
 
Our connections to each other
were ultimately built upon our
                                                               lack of connections
to the people
that culture told us would
care the most.
 
So we shoveled our histories
into compartmentalized valves;
hoping that
t i m e and pressure
might condense them into
something more
manageable.
 
And then:
                      rebuilt
with our only tools,
                      a FORTRESS
to withstand the blows
of those who told us
we were not enough.
 
What we failed to realize
is that you cannot build a barricade
                                                                  | To keep out
an enemy that is settled in your
           gut.

PART II: MAKING DO

Sometimes I remember
he carried that ankle bracelet with more care
than his child,
            wrapping it tenderly,
                    bathing it with a soft,   wet,    sponge.
 
            And in the early morning,
on our family outing to the alley,
behind the grey building,
where he peed in a cup,
to prove his worth--
            we would cross our fingers for him.
                           For his son.
                       For ourselves.
 
And in the afternoon
we would park-hop with the baby,
playing P-I-G or H-O-R-S-E,
            swinging
on creaky play-sets,
            until the sun rested its brow
                       on the mountain’s ragged edge.
 
We would part
            when the messy family car
                       pulled out of the parking lot,
leaving me behind to
prove my worth--
 
It still amazes me
how many
different varieties of grease
can coat your soles
after a night of work.
 
How slick it makes each step
 
            ​as you walk home along the highway.

Ferin A-w is a queer human who has too many houseplants, bakes for a living, and loves kitschy, retro video games.  She graduated from Quest University Canada in 2015, where she studied arts for social change.  She has been writing in secret for years, but hopes to share more and more as she grows as a human being.

hiraeth by jessica clem

11/5/2018

 
Here, we laid to rest the bones
Of my grandmother’s house
In the country dirt
Velvety with worms.

As we light the wooden foundation,
I realize
​In the blink of an adult eye,
A year disappears.
That’s why as children,
We can’t understand the value
Of staring contests.

Fighting the humidity
The fire climbs eagerly
Pulling itself along the peeling roof with blue-tipped fingers
Hungry for asbestos
Watching below, I remember:

Coffee, splashed with milk
Armed to the teeth with sugar
Marching across my mouth at the breakfast table
While she fanned a grease fire
Toward the open screen door.

Later, while searching for soda pop
In the back of the dusty pantry,
My cousins and I shrieked
Over the gams of a passing daddy long-leg.

Her nearby barn had a steeple
On top, a cloudy glass ball
She said it wards off lightning, 
But I know the truth.
There is magic in this place.

As the flames engulf the porch,
I can hear screams inside
The living room several Christmases ago
Tearing of wrapping paper, siren-bright.
Bodies everywhere
Flopped across pillows, swollen with ham and potatoes.

Now the house dissolves like a sandcastle,
On the beach of this bucolic landscape
As the moonless tide of prairie grasses
Sweeps it out to sea.

Here, we laid to rest the bones
Of my grandmother’s house
But in restless peace I find longing,
An ache for a home where magic from the sky
​Finds new passage underground.

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Jessica Clem is a writer based in Minneapolis, MN. She holds a B.A. in English and a M.S. in Urban Studies, and works as a content strategist for a marketing agency. In her free time she can be found hogging all the good books at the library, running the local trails, and speed reading horror stories. Speaking of horror stories, you can read her bloody wonderful story, "Slits," in the horror anthology Down with the Fallen from Franklin/Kerr Press. 

2 poems by mari santa cruz

10/23/2018

 

</3

​tired muscle
fractured memory
let me soak
in the uncertainty
of corrupted data
let me exist
within the gap between
reality and projection

i had so much to say but my lungs were empty

​my lacrimal sac drained into the walls of my heart in a dream.
tears leaked and bloated the muscle to the point of near explosion.
the next morning I woke up with a faint sensation
of having survived drowning,
a twisted tongue,
and the trace of a sour half smile still warm on my face.

Mari Santa Cruz is a bilingual peruvian writer. Her poems have appeared in Yes Poetry and Vagabond City Lit. She is also a co-founder of La Liga Zine (September 2015). You can find her on twitter: @mediasdekirby.
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