i would rather not wake with arms of glue and legs of blue numb, drowsy, reaching for hairy chest and crusted eyelashes, swishing my palms across empty sheets
i will pick him up, drive him to his places. he will not know mine, nor will he ask if i changed something about my hair. i did, it’s a half-inch shorter
we will trudge down concrete sidewalks window shopping with empty wallets. i will stop in front of panes of shiny glass. voice quivering, i will say: look at all the diamonds
Orly Berkowitz-Henkin is a senior at Haverford College studying religion and creative writing. She is from Brooklyn, New York and is pursuing a Masters in Social Work. She loves writing, dogs, knitting, and going to the movies.
they said my great-grandmother taught herself to read by whispering hymns backward into a jar. kept snakes in the stove, sucked pennies clean for luck. the men said she was feeble. the women said, nervous.
i chew the same rhythm into my sleeves. rub the fabric raw until my hands forget the weight of being witnessed. this is how i pray, in repetition, in retreat, in the hum behind electric things.
in my uncle’s trailer there’s a buck head nailed to the fridge and a child’s drawing of a sun with no face. my cousin says i blink wrong, like a deer deciding whether to bolt.
my mother once locked me in a linen closet because i wouldn’t stop spinning. said she couldn’t take it anymore, the noise, the flapping, the bright click of me not being like the rest of them.
when i came out, i spoke in color for three straight days. she burned my drawings in a metal bowl and told god to come collect me if he had the stomach for it.
they call it a spectrum but in this house it’s a curse, a bloodline of girls who look away when spoken to, who name their toys after latin verbs, who learn affection by studying taxidermy.
the living room smells like mildew and lilac. granny’s perfume still haunts the upholstery. they say she went silent for twenty years and came back speaking perfect French. i understand. sometimes you have to leave language just to survive it.
i sit on the porch and stim with a pop tab and a dead wasp. my cousin’s boy says i’m touched by something evil. i tell him so was christ.
Carrie Farrar is a poet and musician whose work explores neurodivergence, memory, and the quiet intersections between survival and grace. Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Flare Magazine, and The Art of Autism, among others. Blending lyrical precision with emotional candor, she writes to make sense of a world that often misunderstands difference. Her poem “I Am the Twitch in the Family Line” reflects her recurring themes of inherited pain, resilience, and the beauty of the mind’s odd wiring. She lives in California, where she continues to write toward empathy and light.
The young man at the next table is evangelizing to another young man. He is arguing we might live in a simulation. Something about light not behaving intuitively. He’s on to Lazarus and The Screwtape Letters now.
And I didn’t bring my headphones.
Outside, I watch boys hang loose as marionettes on a dying earth beneath a dying sun. And I worry about war and fundamentalism. I’m sick of dialectic dialogue.
The young man has moved on to talking about Fight Club (which is something you’re not supposed to talk about), misquoting the book and film, talking about a purposeless struggle.
And I marvel at a belief system cobbled together hodge-podge from religious texts and pop culture. Probably not so unlike my own.
Of course you are here. I don’t have my headphones to block you out.
Well, you aren’t here-here (I mean, could you imagine?), but you’re here the way I don’t notice my legs until they ache, or my stomach until I am hungry, or my heart until it’s breaking.
You are hiding in every poem I write and every story I tell, every journal entry and not far from every thought. (God, now he’s talking about love and his divorce and I feel pangs of sympathy and guilt.)
He says to the other young man: Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this.
But the questions are all rhetorical, simply there to further his points.
I sip the weakest tea I’ve ever had and it hurts my stomach as bad as the sympathy and guilt, but the barista said she’d try better if I wanted a refill and I’m trying not to be rude.
And of course you are here.
Textured tile covers the face of the coffee bar and it looks inside out the longer you stare at it, like an idea, like a simulation of a coffee bar.
And there is a father playing Go Fish with his daughter trying to ignore the young man talking now about the difference between the sexes and how dating is really like sales if you think about it.
And of course you are here.
Matthew Roy (he/him) lives in the American Midwest. He’s moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a small apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He’s writing more. He’s making changes. He’s querying his first novel and banging away at his second. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, Haven Spec, IllumenMagazine, PenumbricSpeculativeFiction Mag, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Space & Time Magazine, The Sprawl Mag, star*line, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, untethered magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, among others.
I asked you about the novel you were reading and realized too late I was flirting, despite wearing an oversized nautical sweater and a fanny pack designed to carry a child around my postpartum fat.
You were playing Pavement but didn’t know the band, and I forgave that, looking in your pretty face as you said witchy playlist, feeling that sense of undeniable possibility, and underneath, the scintillating savor of my own internalized shame.
It’s what we all dream of, right? Witchiness, which means taking ourselves to the forest to dance naked away from laundry and picking up countless old socks and half-full Coke cans— in other words, away from men.
I’m sorry for my fantasies of a wife, girlfriend, women, when I outlive my husband, sorry for breaking the illusion when he came in with his beard and his requests, his sense the world was made for him, and asked to use your restroom, to which you said no.
Harriet Weaver is a Los Angeles–based writer with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Yale University, where she studied with Harold Bloom. She was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books journal PubLab and has poetry forthcoming from Roanoke Review. In her previous career as actor and producer, Harriet studied under Wynn Handman and brought shows to Broadway with Blue Spruce Productions. She was an instructor of poetry and composition at UC Irvine. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wexford, Pennsylvania, and lives in LA with her husband and toddler.
my mother’s family is from the hills of tennessee—or maybe bluegrass kentucky, i never really knew. she always talked about grandma’s house—another thing i didn’t know—and how the family would gather there
so i guess that’s why we’re in some state where the grass flows like water and my voice sounds so out of place. everyone’s eyes are red rimmed and don’t look directly at me, while my mother sits on the far end of a rotted pew bench and smirks at fake pleas to god and prayers to save grandmama’s soul—
skeleton heads and taxidermy line the walls of my cousin’s uncle’s grandpa’s double wide. they pass clear punch in solo cups while we sit with wood panelled walls to our backs.
my mother laughs with coyotes and wraps snakes around her wrists. even her own family is afraid of her predator’s gaze—i puff my chest out with pride: become animal.
some boy who is related to me by blood or skin or spit pokes at a dark mound marring this southern dirt. he tells me it’s dead. i tell him we all are.
i pick up the carcass and eat it— picking my teeth with the bones
Emma Townsend is a two-time children’s book author and published poet. She recently graduated from Purdue University and is now completing her Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Emma loves poetry that connects with one’s past and typically alludes to her own life experiences in her work.
Texas women love and curse with a fatal bless your heart. Sun-burned plains enclose them, their multi-colored bodies corralled
in branded jeans. Tender cuts on man-sized platters piled high to heaven with heaping sides of disrespect, they live to be consumed and then discarded
like Porsha Ngumezi. Doctors wouldn’t scrape her womb and she bled out, screaming, young and Black. No charity for her, she left this world in Houston
just like Josseli Barnica, who died while Catholic and brown. The green card in her purse meant life but not liberty because heartbeats from a dying fetus mean a one-way
trip to glory. Nevaeh Crain, pretty white girl with a butterfly tattoo in a sundown town, could tell you that, if sepsis hadn’t starved the pink from all her organs.
Meanwhile hypocrites under Hippocratic oath cull women’s bones to pick their teeth in self-congratulation because in Texas, praise Jesus, the right to life abides.
M. M. Adjarian has published her work in TheBaltimore Review, Verdad, South 85, The Missing Slate, Pif Magazine, Gravel, Glint, Grub Street, Crack the Spine, Poetry Flash, and Poetry Quarterly and is currently at work on her first poetry collection and a family memoir titled This Life That Binds. She lives in Austin.
If ever someone attempted to strike fear into your heart, I sense disappointment would follow. The traces you leave behind prove your valor: back torn open, wings emerging. You fly toward a setting sun, an aroma crisp and bitterly sweet in your wake. Though men may try questioning you as they quake in your presence, you remain untouchable. The sweetness of cherry couldn’t satisfy you; you sought the tangy taste of acid and reminded the woman following behind you, waiting to do life’s most vulnerable deed, that she, too, could know what it means to be invincible, if only she lifted the bacteria-laden stick sitting atop the aluminum dispenser, if only she took a risk and raised each tiny organism you left behind to her lips.
Alicia Swain is a feminist poet and author living in Richmond, VA. Her debut poetry collection, Steel Slides and Yellow Walls, releases in August of 2025 with Belle Isle Books. Her work appears in publications such as The Vehicle, Half and One, and The Closed Eye Open. She can be found on her website at aliciaswain.com, on Bluesky as aliciamswain.bsky.social, and on Instagram as @aliciamswain.
Because only a woman could endure such atrocities to her crust, gutted inside out for the pleasure of man and still be expected to make him breakfast in the morning.
Only a woman could be told her rotting flesh is a result of her own flow and ebb, that her salty waves are self-inflicted, too sensitive, too soft, too easy to get a rise out of.
But it isn’t her fault that her body rejects your half-hearted apologies, your paper straws dumped in her stomach, a manufactured “forgive me” while you pump her lungs with smoke.
She begged you to stop, sent you letters of warning. Flames filled your cities, winds ripped your homes from their foundations. She fought so hard that her skin cracked and she almost swallowed you whole. And it still wasn’t enough.
Of course Nature is a Mother, because only a woman could lose the right to her own body and then be condemned for giving birth to the apocalypse.
Makayla Edwards is a creative nonfiction writer and occasional poet. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Creative Writing at Ball State University, where she also received her B.A. in English Studies. She is also an intern for the literary journal River Teeth where she helps manage social media and reads for their daughter magazine Beautiful Things (you should totally check them out). Makayla’s work has been featured in Ball State University’s Odyssey and The Digital Literature Review, as well as her childhood closet wall. In her free time, she enjoys half-finishing crosswords and shamelessly reading romance novels.
I touch the earth and find the ash of my mother’s hair, her breath curling into smoke, into a hymn she will never sing. The fire eats through my hands as if it knows my name as if it has waited for this moment to make a feast of my body. Everywhere I go, the animals keep my secrets. The birds stitch my grief into their wings, carrying pieces of what I can no longer hold. The snakes coil my sorrow underground, burying what I’ve begged to forget. Last night, the moon burned itself into the river, and I was there to watch it drown. Everything goes this way: the air, the body, the prayer we refuse to finish. The water cannot spit me out. It holds me as it holds the ghost of rain, turning my name into something heavy, something that sinks. I asked the water to name me, but all it gave back was silence, its voice caught in the belly of a fish long dead, long forgiven. The fire grows a mouth, and it sings my body into a psalm of smoke. I am nothing but what I’ve lost: a garden of teeth and a heart beating against the blackened wood. To live is to be buried in parts, to call each death by a different name. Here is the fire. Here is the water. Here, where the earth learns how to swallow me whole. This is what I know of living: the birds mourn another loss, the snakes keep their prayers, and the river, even in its rage, cradles me like something it forgot to destroy.
Oladosu Michael Emerald is the author of Every Little Thing That Moves and the art editor at Surging Tide. He is a digital/musical/visual artist, an actor, a photographer, and an athlete. He teaches art at the Arnheim Art Gallery to kids and adults, is an Art Instructor at the Anasa Collection Art Gallery and a volunteer art instructor at Status Dignus Child Rescue Home and Ibeere Otun Initiative, as well as a Pioneer Fellow of the Muktar Aliyu Art Residency. He is winner of the GPC poetry contest and the Spring contest, and second-runner-up in the Fireflies poetry contest. He tweets @garricologist and @garrycologist on Instagram.
The week I resigned myself to break up with him, I had to wait until Thursday to tell him in person. There seemed to be an inordinate number of deer carcasses along roadsides that week, one especially haunting, its ribcage visible, most of the flesh having been consumed by vultures. The red sinews of each meat-lined rib were seering, vibrant against the dreary wet winter afternoon. I slowed the car as I passed, mesmerized, torso aching in response: a world in which people slow down to stare at a creature splayed open, exposed, one second living, the next devoured.
Nicole Wilson is the author of the collection Supper & Repair Kit (The Lettered Streets Press) and is a graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Columbia College Chicago.
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