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1

Ariba, I have failed you again. I have
placed a box fan in front of a cattle fan
and called it ambition. I sent my resume
to the paltry gods and it contained 
a typo, a misplaced “y” or “i” and now
I must cleanse my relevant experience
at the river of the many-headed girlboss.
I asked a career coach 
for a smoke. Ariba, with your four-step approval
process, your sacred ladder, and me,
a mere renter comprised
of trustworthiness scores. I live in terror
of your guided buying,
as it should be.

2

Ariba, you must understand that I lived for years
in a tempest of misremembered Morse code. They refer
to it as the ancient ‘90s. Your origins lie
in a hush of patents, but my eyes
still sting with since-dead neon. I remember
the sign of the hatchery, a cracking egg.
I remember the flamingos, so many, and a wildfire’s worth
of green gas station dinosaurs. A teapot atop
a building. A water tower of painted bees. A green screen
computer with a single blinking cursor. Heretical
childhood. Modus operandi: Midwestern. O Ariba,
we are but public four-year arts majors with flapping fruit bats
for memories. Deliver us from our contract requests,
our blanket orders, too.
We ask this of you, not God.

3

Ariba, an office door slams in the afternoon
light and I cry. If the employee of the month called
eternal suffering a pain point, 
middle management may learn to practice
active listening. List the ailments: 
your upskilled heart, your quiet
quitting soul, your obsession with how even a pandemic
could not finally slow the grind. Label your faults
as a series of rooms: infinite rooms, rooms
for growth, outreach, engagement, and quality assurance.
The Voynich manuscript is now understood 
by no one but Ariba, we know you as a precision 
of timestamped pleas. 

4

Ariba, I wake in the night to pain
everywhere. I think I hear the Earth trying
to dislodge from its orbit. I will not stop
thinking of you, force of habit, fever dream
of process improvement. Ariba, I once ran
from you and saw perfectly rusted mopeds
flit down a gade in Copenhagen. I tasted the crisp 
stars against glow-in-the-dark velvet. 
I understood metaphysics. I had never been
so alarmingly sober. I returned home
to an eviction notice. Ariba, are you 
animal, lamentation, or dream? I am  
but a child at your feet.

Katie Berger is the author of two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press and several other essays, stories, and poems. She hold an MFA from the University of Alabama and works at the University of Nebraska at Omaha as a project coordinator.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

they’ve got me running in circles again,
spinning round the old mouse wheel, 
lunging for scraps 
and we retire at 70 now
with no time left at all
and it feels as if
the world has spun
completely out of control.
little houses for millions of dollars,
fortune-busting interminable educations
that lead to no jobs,
to mcdonalds and fat-choked arteries
because the rent is due this week.

i sit here and read 
the job postings on the internet,
all the digital madness,
all the arcane terminology and technology
that no one could possibly understand
(or would ever want to were they sane),
and reflect on what it must have
been like
to live like a real living being
in a jungle or a forest
all those millions
of years ago,
to do things that made sense,
to hunt when hungry
and sleep when tired,
and to die when the time came
instead of being stretched thin
to such obscene degrees.

and we jump through these hoops
because we don’t know
what else to do,
we are scared
and don’t know
any way out,
some of us drink
and some of us turn to stone
and some of us have families
and some of us go mad
and learn to love what tortures us.
they throw us crumbs
to pay the utility bills
and we keep churning along,
day after day after day
until in a heartbeat
20 years have gone by
and the muscles and joints are aching
and the mind is fading
and the rest is crying right along.

and cnn blares in the background
and traffic lights go green and red
and the holidays come and go,
the endless cacophony of a few
billion choking throats,
religion and money and passion
and sex,
the computers blink and run
interference
for the suits
with their fat fingers
in the cookie jars
and it just seems to 
get worse and worse
with each passing year.

the freeways are jammed,
the buildings are bursting,
the fields are burned,
there is no room for love,
there is no room for grace or simplicity,
there is only this
diabolical fear of starving
that keeps us chasing carrots,
this fear of drowning
that keeps us afloat.

Scott Taylor hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications; his debut novel Chasing Your Tail has recently been released with Silver Bow Publishing, and his novellas “Freak” and “Ernie and the Golden Egg” are slated for inclusion in an upcoming anthology with Running Wild Press. He graduated from Cornell University and was also a computer programmer in a past life.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I hadn’t thought “oh
I am living through an apocalypse”
until
these scorching summers,
savoring every birdsong
as if it is my last.

Dyani Sabin is a queer author of speculative fiction, poetry, and science journalism. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Enchanted Conversations, Reckoning, Vastarien, as well as National Geographic, The Washington Post, and Popular Science. You can find her haunting a cornfield, chasing ghosts on the endangered species list, or at dyanisabin.com.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Tell me a bedtime story in which I don’t float away this time. Kiss my stained glass lips and let me be young again. Don’t say that the crow will gnaw off my kite strings, that God will pump me full of helium. Tell me a story that anchors me to the roots of your laughter, to the doorknob of your attic. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending. I promise not to cry when the monsters creep out of my lungs, or scream when the climax is empty. I just want to imagine myself tethered to your vocal cords, entwined in your thick arteries like a tender knot. Only then can I fall asleep nestled safely in machinery. Only then can I wake up in the morning, and look at the milky sky with a jitter of hope. 

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, Ghost Parachute, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Gone Lawn, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. You can find her on Twitter @ezhang77.

Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Funny how
it was in the hospital waiting room –
the stiff seat cushions, white lights, and
September’s Women’s Health magazine –
where, despite the nurse at reception, 
I first felt like a real person.

We’ve given so much up already
and we keeping handing out more:
innocence and virginity,
bravery and youth,
teeth and hair.

These poems are lists of my grievances.
I don’t want to have been beautiful
only when in a hospital gown – or in memoriam.
We both know the gay bar is the only place
where it’s hot to have your ass out –
even for me.

Do me a favor,
tell me how beautiful I am,
in this moment, in this light, 
in this ignorance.

Funny how wounding it is
to become sick. There’s no way to recover
from something like that. I presented a piece of myself
as if I was presenting a pearl.

How funny.

Patrick Schiefen (he/him) is a United States writer who currently lives and writes in Argentina. His experiences as a nomadic LGBTQ+ artist informs his writing as much as music, politics, and art. His work has appeared in High Shelf Press, Ample Remains, From Whispers to Roars, Literary Shanghai, and elsewhere.

Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson