Then come take a seat with me, for I, too, am articulate in the dialect of grief
Abduljalal Musa Aliyu is a school teacher and poet. He writes from Zaria, Nigeria. He has a chapbook, Encyclopaedia of Dolour (Chestnut Review, 2024). His work appears in Chestnut Review, Brittle Paper, Ninshar Arts, 3 of Cups anthology and elsewhere. He is the third prize winner of the inaugural Writing Ukraine Prize and PIN’s 2020 Poetically Written Prose contest. He rants on Twitter @AbduljalaalMusa.
It starts with wondering which bridges would need crossing and which direction the river curved, which four roads you would need to get there when, in fact, it is the same road with four different names.
The road at the end of your street takes you to the far side of the city, beyond where the stalled train stops you, beyond the smokestack shadow and the swinging cranes above.
When you have reached the place you set out for, you realize you can just stay on that same road and drive, drive out toward all the other towns and cities, if you don’t stop, if your car has gas, if you have the time, if you are unbounded.
Brian Baker (he/him) is a London, Ontario poet who began writing back in the late eighties, publishing in such literary print journals as the University of Windsor Review, Dandelion, and The Antigonish Review.
But how to explain to you the phantoms that motivate a hunger like mine? Once I had a hankering for honey so strong I ate nothing without it for a week. Our honey jar was old, the golden insides turned cold—in some places, crystalized. You told me to just buy another jar, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the effort, the bees, all those trips back and forth to the hive. To not attempt to use it up seemed, to me, a cruelty. The night before you finally admitted there was someone else, I was contentedly working my way through the same old jar. It was late and I was tired and there were no clean knives left to scoop out the dregs, so I used a fork. When you caught me in the dim of the kitchen, I had already excavated down to the bottommost layer, where there was a surprise pocket of soft remains, a place where the crystals hadn’t yet hardened. I was only trying to salvage the last of that smoothness. Still it kept slipping through the tines.
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Passages North, Arts & Letters, and Cincinnati Review‘s miCRo series, among others. In 2022, her collection was a runner-up for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Alyson teaches and edits in New Jersey. Find her @swellspoken and at alysondutemple.com.
my body, your body, our bodies, bodies, fading in and out and in and out until suddenly we are both nothing, nothing but whispers that echo like leaves beneath our feet, nothing but whispers like the creaking of a tree on a hill, nothing but whispers like i love you to people we will never hold again
i am in and out and in and out of love with you, with me, with your body as we tumble into bed, with my hair as i will it to grow every day, with the growing comfort of us, i love you like i love the sun after an especially cold winter, the way the sun can take away all the darkness that festers inside me, i wonder if we would fall in love again if given a chance, i wonder if we were meant to be or if we were a mistake i learned to love, i have made so many mistakes and i have never learned how to love any of them and still i wonder if you love me the same way i loved the girl i used to be
i don’t think this is a love poem, i am so scared, scared that if your eyes ever set upon this, scared that if you ever heard these words, these whispers, the faint murmuring of my voice, you would think that i don’t love you, that i don’t love you with my whole heart, when the truth is my body is made of love for you, but this isn’t a love poem, it’s an outpouring, a river from my fingertips, from my mouth, a form of love that i just don’t know how to give
time let us grow up, grow close, shed our skin for new bodies, sometimes i wonder how you can love me after everything i’ve done, after everyone i’ve been, how many people have you loved by loving me, will you continue to love me if i continue to fade, will you love me if i fade in and out and in and out, i am not a ghost but i am scared that someday i might disappear, fade away until i am only a memory of someone you could have loved
Josafina Garcia is a writer, photographer, and zinester just trying to figure things out. She graduated from Northern Kentucky University in 2023 with a degree in Integrative Studies. Her future is unknown, but she is ready to head down whatever path lies ahead.
Come here. Among the elbows of deciduous trees and lighthouse beacons of fireflies. I want you close enough to feel the tightrope tension when I say nothing with a full mouth. My throat dissolves each I love you thatpromises to earthquake my roots before it hits the pink of my tongue.
So stay there. Between mountains and the possibility we might not survive you. It’s too expensive to bury the codependency and broken vows hidden in the basement. Consider the black and blue of falling for someone who can love you out loud.
James Roach (they/he) is a queer/trans poet who currently resides in Olympia, Washington.
But I’m still crying, still a mess, still remembering that I’m the reason she died in a wheelchair. How, when I was still small enough to be carried, she slipped and broke her hip while holding me. Everyone is whispering amen and I am all blasphemy, a faith tied only to soil. The preacher speaks about ascension, but I’m grounded, can’t stop staring at her hands. How they look like they could reach out. How they must have held me so tight when she hit the asphalt.
Kimberly Wolf is a poet and parent selling books in Texas. She is often dreaming of a mountain.
I stood at the edge of my life to inspect if there is a new way to begin,
but all I found was the same familiar silence swallowing me whole.
My ears were bleeding white, I ran out of my body and slid into a coffee shop.
There is no sane way to escape
the body. The boy behind the counter offered me his teeth and wanted my name in return.
A boy has no name today, stranger— I’ll carry your name as mine today.
A cup of hot coffee on the table, and in it, the art of a cat letting off an atomic bomb.
I tug at my shirt, and I am the cat. I tug at my fur and I am the bomb.
What is there to do now? Why is the jukebox playing the same song
over and over, and over, and
Animashaun Ameen is a poet and essayist. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander Magazine, Foglifter, Lolwe, Third Estate Magazine, Roadrunner Review, and elsewhere, and he is the author of Calling a Spade (forthcoming). He lives and writes from Lagos, Nigeria. An oddball. A butterfly.
some days I start to think I’m done with the whole lot of it but then again there are so many stories I haven’t heard yet
and I find myself standing in bar bathrooms and grocery store lines thinking maybe I still need more time
more time to hold hands for hours on a futon in a tiny apartment tangled up so long we become one limb
more time to dance in the headlights of your car by the river on a fake spring night then swing in the park until we forget what it’s like to worry about taxes or to-do lists
more time to plunge off a waterfall cliff to wait for the sun to warm the mulch underneath our bare feet
so much more time to see all the versions of myself I will one day be becoming
Katie Holtmeyer lives, writes, and teaches in Missouri. She is a pushcart-nominated poet, and her work has appeared in 3 Moon Magazine, Words & Whispers, Stanchion Zine, The Shore, and Jupiter Review, among others. Her debut collection, She Asked Me Where, is forthcoming with Unsolicited Press in early 2024.
We agreed on Halloween cookies and mint chocolate chip ice-cream
for dessert, but I ran back to the freezer when your next text said you liked Neapolitan
too. We ate brown Japanese curry from a cube and threw out a backyard blanket
beneath the salt-speck stars and you leaned over to poke my face with a blade of grass
and closed your eyes to laugh when I told you I once slept on a hard hospital floor,
how the doctor opened the door on my foot. We were so close, I could feel our lives
folding together like curry in the pot then into your spoon, its taste salty and so fat
with the future I forgot about the ice-cream and cookies in your fridge, or the red wine
on the counter, or the ribbons of air floating with your breath wrapped in mine. There was so much
I missed, too busy watching the glint of stars pressed to our skin in this lifetime
of sky, and what were we but two little bits of taste on its tongue.
Josiah Nelson is an MFA in Writing student and sessional lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in San Antonio Review, Arboreal Literary Magazine, spring magazine, FracturedLit, and The Rumpus. He likes thrift stores, slow cinema, and cardigans. He lives in Saskatoon.
The aisle offers all manner of masculine trophy / each package a beast / mounted and glaring. Each package / a sphinx speaking riddles in a language / my parents refused to teach me and / surely I’m confusing onlookers with my confusion, / so I grab one like its contraband and pay / with a wad of singles and an apology, / like it’s a crime to self-actualize / and I’m compelled to confess / to the cashier: I’m buying these boxers for myself. And she says nothing / because the trans / action is obvious.
I lock the door, blind the windows / leaving only the mirror / and my reflection as witness. / Girly boy hips wrapped in / sapphire, reserved for royalty. / I peacock ’round the privacy of my room, half-feathered / and pale as the moon. Fresh / waistband kissing the hard-earned peach fuzz / below my navel and / blush at the gesture. I make / a stage of the floor tiles, spinning / theatricals under fluorescent light buzzing / like a crowd cheering encore! / Encore! / Nobody gave me permission / to perform, I did that all myself. I wrote the role / and cast myself to act; such is / the nature of becoming.
James Ambrose is an agender poet and writer of all things weird, queer, and macabre. He is a professional college drop-out and can be found roaming the valleys of Virginia. This is his first publication, with more forthcoming. Find him on Twitter @caninebrainz.
