& sea water became everything                we pulled it from ground             
we materialized it from air                                    we got salt caked in our
eyebrows                                   & harsh winds ripped at our hair                           & our steel    oh     our steel shone so correct             these swords 
drawing blood           on summer days    til the grass choked with the stuff                               that goo             get into it         We slipped & fell on it    for it          we 
forgot who we were within it        our hands   stained red                      
then washed pink & brown by the ocean we lived nowhere near         but that stole up to clean us anyway    thank you ocean      thank you sea                   thank you disney megacorporation      for the grift       		        of piracy          
& all its lessons       the salt & the blood         mainly             lay me down beneath it all        salt &      wave &        boisterous sun      let the sleep 
that takes me                  be a kind one    let the water lap my face 			                                                
                          like a good dog 	come running        



____

Alyssandra Tobin is the author of PUT EYES ON ME NOT LIKE A CURSE, forthcoming from Quarterly West in 2022. Her poetry appears in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, Grist, and elsewhere. 

toward the rose
worthy still when its petals are tired, 
toward burgundy thread,
dust blush on your cheeks.

Toward frilly things—
femme froth and butch bloom, 
rose gold cuticle,
pale palm of foot.

Decay is another way
to unfold. At the bottom
of the pond I still desired.






——

Meredith Arena (she/they) is a queer writer originally from New York City. She moved to Seattle in 2011 and learned how to drive in 2015. She is an interdisciplinary teaching artist, facilitator and organizer. She served as an editor on the journal Lunch Ticket for two years. Her work can be found in various journals including Longleaf Review, Entropy, Lunch Ticket, Peatsmoke, Blood Orange Review, and forthcoming in Poetry NW. She was the 2021 Erin Donovan fellow in poetry at Mineral School in Washington. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.

Diaphanous and hardworking.
Sometimes folded over at the edges.
Tucked and sewn in small stitches.
Transparent and larger than the body.
From behind black windows
a fog has settled on these roads.
It lifts before I am ready. I wait
at the window. They crest the hill.
Don’t tell me you can’t see them.




____

Liane Tyrrel is a visual artist and poet. Her poems have been included or are forthcoming in: The Shore, EcoTheo Review and JMWW among others. Her prose poem “Spontaneous Combustion” was nominated for Best Short Fictions 2021. She lives and walks with her dog in the woods and fields of NH. https://www.lianetyrrel.com/

for Agnes Martin


I walk the planes of this last town, symmetrical, enclosed.

When she quit the city
to break from her constant hysteria, she promised herself the apology

of firmness. And she repeated it. Had to
separate the voices. Though she couldn’t

recover, she could hold her flush from its strata and heaving

             and flat-manner a composure, put the question
             of being in the right order.

She fit to a square within
mottled adobe. Bright and wide, the light. She lived

a long time in the unmarked eternity. What drifted easy
in the mind. She listened, then drew a light line

through a bland center, a line which looked like nothing but was
an actual place, the warmth of her hand and also a surrender.

Bio: Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poet Lore, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com

I want to fill

                           all our coffee mugs

                                                      with rain water

and leave them

                           around the house.

                                                      (This is a metaphor

for how I love.)

SG Huerta is a Chicano poet from Dallas. They are pursuing their
MFA at Texas State University where they serve as the nonfiction
editor for Porter House Review. SG is the author of the chapbook The
Things We Bring with Us: Travel Poems (Headmistress Press, 2021).
Their work has appeared in Infrarrealista Review, Variant Lit, and
others. They live in Texas with their partner and two cats. Find them
at sghuertawriting.com or on Twitter @sg_poetry

Thanks to all who participated in the first Moist Poetry Journal Full Moon Haiku Contest! Moist received SO MANY beautiful haiku entries in the last twenty four hours. It was not at all easy to choose three favorites! Thank you for all the wonderful reading and the moon magic during last night’s Super Moon, Blood Moon, Full Moon in Scorpio, and Lunar Eclipse. Please enjoy the three haiku selected by EIC Han VanderHart–winners received a small cash prize for chapbooks or other poet needs!

C.T. Salazar

moon shines (
all the blackberries
shine back)





Michael Metivier

oh porcupine moon
falling from tallest trees and
into them again





Susan Monroe

A cold pale plate thrown,
Slow motion, into the dark.
Mantic moon of spring.

Songbird, tiniest crab 
on my fingertip, tussled 
and tossed and flip-belly 
horseshoe. At the periphery 
of the golf course, a blue 
butterfly dips in and out 
of cattails. She burns 
borders tender, 
moves clear through: 
dusting everything, trailing 
life. She slurps everyone up. 
Soft body against the sea
-rusted private property 
sign, the men in cargos 
riding plastic white 
cars on the greens, 
wielding metal rods. 
The armored check point 
I mean entry gate, angry red 
stop sign, cop pacing 
this stretch of sand
back and forth, back 
and forth, smiling 
at the bodies of animals 
in linen on lounge chairs 
who paid good money 
to be here, laminated 
flags on each car. 
Last week, I’m told 
Bradley Cooper ran 
these backroads shirtless. 
Oh, aching world. All I want 
to do is touch you, for everyone 
to touch you equally, equitably. 
Rising tide-bodies, shore 
covered in coins: pink 
and yellow iridescents, 
deflated balloon heads tongued 
by each communal wave: 
congrats, grad! and one bright 
nylon star come down 
from the heavens to glint 
among human feet, burning 
on this land.

Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their poetry has appeared in museum galleries, on the radio, on the streets of small towns, in community farm newsletters, and other strange and wonderful places. Z’s work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been featured or is forthcoming in RHINO, Muzzle, VIDA, Southeast Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University and co-managing editor for the environmental writing journal, Flyway.

I saw him from across the way, 
across the green-lawn,
slightly tilted above the groves 
of the older and young men alike,
all bare, with their dangling arms and legs 
and groins, and just beyond 
the chlorinated pools and misting hot-tub,
it was him standing this near and far 
away — I wanted to touch his left cheek
of his handsome face but he wasn’t handsome
any longer. It’s not age that aged him,
nor the sweltering desert heat at 110 degrees,
but the length of both of his arms tracked 
down along the way, raked confusingly 
down the middle where the drugs entered.
I traced my finger down that flesh 
once and kissed it, and kissed 
him, and imagined a world silent 
and in a vineyard without danger.
Instead, he smiles at me, inviting me in,
and I understand, I do — I could suffer 
for it — the harm we were once both in.
I wasn’t driven to throw the iron 
of my warm pelvis onto him, or kiss him, 
or touch him anymore. I wanted to ask
Are you okay? And I failed.
I clutched my hand over the back
of his hand with eros and kept it there,
silently, for all the seconds of the earth
and pulled back. I pulled away as if
saying I no longer wish for harm
and I lost someone at that moment
of the last hour of the last evening
by saying my first farewell.

Anthony Aguero is a queer writer in Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared, or will appear, in the Carve Magazine, Rhino Poetry, 14 Poems, Redivider Journal, Maudlin House, and others. He has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and has his first forthcoming collection of poetry, Burnt Spoon Burnt Honey, with Flower Song Press.

That summer the sand was thick with jellyfish corpses / giving everybody
a view of ghostly cogs & wheels / like the expensive watch my cousin wants
us to covet / also / nothing like a ticking watch/  we approached the confession	
booth of salt water with murder in our hearts / knives in hand / everyone
fears tongues or teeth. The untethered sun / the storm-thick sky / even God wants
every living thing to kill or be killed.  We wanted night-vision goggles/ some  
broken metal detectors / mothers & toddlers in a mid-morning cathartic
ritual: seaweed / sea turtles/ driftwood / a song to infuse the usual narrative.
The waves retreated into their own unspoken souls/ we wandered / we waited for 
the jellyfish to rot / to melt in a mass of unimaginable existence/ it
was the only way summer could end / our plastic shovels busy with the 
necessary destruction of castles / with the proper burial of the guilty
and innocent without discrimination / their tentacles/ their faces / especially.







(Golden Shovel inspired by True Detective, Season 1, Episode 5)

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been widely published and nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two previous chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, was published in 2021(Kelsay Books).  Her third chapbook, The Water Cycle, is being published by Variant Lit in January 2022. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books.

are full of seed, sprouts and leaves and rain
 
I wear this irksome suit of flesh & yet
the fields
 
are scented, sweet with dirt and singing
 
I watch my days fall and die like embers & yet
the fields
 
are tangled with grasses and asters
 
I smile a cruel curve, a drawn bow & yet
the fields
 
are recycling the soft wreckage of harvest
 
I hate like a god hates when it is forgotten & yet
the fields
 
are still in love with green
 

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Cherry Tree, Salamander, Harpur Palate, and other journals. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago where she serves as an associate editor for Rhino Poetry and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.