No matter how much you beat it, the heart is a dog. It will lick any man who looks on with adoration. I know because it’s inevitable. I too have beaten myself at the threshold of desire and have tried dragging this body back. But look, here I am, naked knees grazing the floor of yet another room. He says, You look like my childhood friend, by which he means I could be loved if I were someone else. Oh, trust me, I know, like a new dog in the family
after the first one has died.
Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer Indian poet with a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Lucknow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Frontier Poetry, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Fourteen Poems, The Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Foglifter Press, Diode Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, he lives in his hometown of Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, where he teaches English to high schoolers.
I’m curious why you have binoculars hanging from your neck on a faux pearl string. I kind of hope you’re not looking past the swelling dawn to watch tenants in the student building across the street eat dry cornflakes with their fingers, a buffering screen in front of them. Not that I know anything, but if you wait until dark, you might be able to see into their half-furnished, unintentionally ascetic living rooms even without the binoculars, provided the blinds aren’t drawn, though it seems like they always are.
I’ve lived in three apartment buildings and have known exactly none of my neighbors. Sometimes, as I’m locking my front door, I hope one of them will pass in the hallway just so I can see what they look like. I hear their music, their breakups, their snoring, but I don’t know their names, their faces. Sometimes, as I babysit my boiling pasta, I hear footsteps outside, and I run to the peephole for a glimpse. I never see anything but the beige wall and stained carpet, and my water boils over.
I think what I’m trying to say is the binoculars might not be enough. You may have to enter the building and sit in the hallway, waiting for someone, anyone, to emerge. They have to appear at some point, don’t they? If you give me some signal, look at me looking at you for long enough, I can take the elevator downstairs and let you in, and together, we can find out who lives beside me. Just give me a sign.
E.C. Gannon’s work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Assignment Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Olit, and elsewhere. Raised in New Hampshire, she holds a degree from Florida State University and is pursuing another at the University of New Mexico.
there are no worries on the beach; we can flaunt our near-naked forms, as we build derelict sandcastles that we pretend will last forever on a shore lit by our ancestors’ sun; we can find this ancient comfort, this primal escape, only here, now
it is as if we’re reminded by the vastness of the ocean how frail and powerless we are, so we set aside our conflicts, instead choosing to navel-gaze and sunbathe and permit ourselves to forget the two degree goal, less than two minutes to midnight,
the world is so fucked; sometimes i just want — need — a cigarette an indulgence concealed by a sea breeze; we can linger until each dune takes on meaning, shaped by wind, insects, you, you from weeks ago, us from years ago, us here now
FelixGrygorcewicz (he/him/his) is an experimental writer, mostly of fiction, though he dabbles in poetry and non-fiction. He has worked in education for over 10 years on the East and West coasts of the U.S. and is currently residing in the middle of the country where he teaches. He is often inspired by nature and people.
“The SAP Ariba spend management solution portfolio is empowering companies to move faster and spend better. The solutions connect millions of trading partners worldwide to SAP Business Network to enable direct, intelligent connections that redefine how organizations communicate and get work done.” – SAP Ariba website.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to rot. I want to decompose. I want the furnace of my crumbling organs to burn so hot that it kills the grass above my grave.
Then I want it to grow back, slowly, around the edges.
Until tender shoots nestle against the downy pelt of a rabbit. Until velvet lips of a deer tear me out by my roots. Until the water in my stalks dissolve into its bloodstream and I spill through the chambers of its heart.
Thrumming as my petals unfurl and face the summer sun. Thrumming with wild, vibrating insects harvesting the pollen from my buds, dripping, sticky and viscous, down waxen walls.
Not the moldering sleep of the dead, but the explosive cacophony of an afterlife.
Laura Marden (she/her) is a speculative and weird fiction writer. Her work has been published in The Chamber Magazine, Creepy Podcast, and The Q&A Queerzine. Her short story “Until Prophecy’s End” can be found in the Seers and Sybils anthology from Brigids Gate Press. This is her first published poem. She lives in Maryland with her family and finds that the best time to write is when they’re all asleep.
I’ve always loved the way the witch alders, studding the bypass shoulders by the airport, grow red in the fall, their scarlet tentacles the shade of afternoon. It’s too bad they belong to you.
The black gum trees across from the police station crawl like wooly tarantula legs into the pale sky, but I rarely see them now, the way I don’t see the fog-breathed gas station beer cave, the red sushi sign.
I have the grocery store that never had your pretzels, the car wash with the spidering palm tree logo, the small manmade lake near the gas company that in late fall collects ducks like misshapen stars.
I can’t go to the bigger hardware store, the one cottoned with spring flowers on the sidewalk next to the Italian place. You could be there, although you weren’t one for fixing things.
I gave up the library; you gave me the new liquor store. I know you shop at the supermarket lined with evergreens; you may as well live there, so I never go. Instead I watch the sunrise, knowing the sunset will become yours.
Devon Neal (he/him) is a Kentucky-based poet whose work has appeared in many publications, including HAD, Livina Press, The Storms, and The Bombay Lit Mag, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He currently lives in Bardstown, KY with his wife and three children.
Vast 