a high humidity journal of poetry
by Anna Harvey
Christmas, and I drip out of a borrowed raincoat
Glasses speckling tidal spray
I am hungover, and the walk is entirely failing
to blow the cobwebs away
The day is an unfinished line
unravelling itself into the horizon
I am a thread loose of its spool
I want to be a whole shell – want to
unfurl myself onto the sand: widen,
be as big as the great grey skies
reflected in the sea;
which only throws
my own roar
back at me
____
Dr. Anna Harvey is a medical doctor in Cumbria, England.
by Constance Hansen
I have abandoned the desire to learn the name of the woman floating in my childhood bathtub. The first time I asked, she stepped out of her polka dot dress and into a cloak of clamshells and kelp. The second time, she just stood there dripping saltwater on the bathmat. The third time, her index finger rose to her lips in warning gesture. I ran into my brother’s room to swipe a soft pack of Marlboro Reds in offering, but when I returned, she was gone. I wonder after her no more or less often than cathedral pigeons shitting down a fractal staircase marvel at the vanishing miracle of math. ____
Constance Hansen is an editorial assistant at Poetry Northwest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at Harvard Review Online and EcoTheo Review. She was a finalist for the 2021 Fugue Poetry Contest. Constance holds degrees from Middlebury College (BA Religion), The University of Washington (MFA Poetry), and Seattle University (Masters in Teaching). She lives in Seattle with her partner and young daughters.
by Constance Hansen
At the edge of the mistaken lake. Meet me at the edge of the woods, where water only laps rocks in the wind, which, too, is moon-ruled. Meet me under the towering firs, where girls hung used tampons by the tails, like mice on a haunted Christmas tree. The sisters were weird. They’d been saving their fetid darlings in film canisters and ornamented a wintering rhododendron with contagious magic because they favored the boy who slept inside the window it scratched. How do I know this is a confessional poem? Because I was there. Meet me at the edge of memory & fantasy, of childhood & adulthood, of attraction & repulsion. Meet me in the middle of the lake that GPS led the car deep into. Meet me in a faith such as that, however terminal, however misplaced. Like the moon, we float on water; we’re always new again. ____
Constance Hansen is an editorial assistant at Poetry Northwest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at Harvard Review Online and EcoTheo Review. She was a finalist for the 2021 Fugue Poetry Contest. Constance holds degrees from Middlebury College (BA Religion), The University of Washington (MFA Poetry), and Seattle University (Masters in Teaching). She lives in Seattle with her partner and young daughters.
by Cyndie Randall Look down. See me on the subway platform. Say hello. Pick me up, undress me, put me in your mouth. I taste good and it's surprising, like peaches and summer in your childhood swing. Tuck me between lip and gum. Say hold on, we're going for a ride. Feel young again. Climb aboard the electric flash. Pucker your face and suck more me out of me. Bob your head and whistle. Whisper I'm glad I found you. Tell me I'll always be with you. Swallow. Miss me. Tongue the raw of your cheek. ____
Cyndie Randall’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, DIAGRAM, Crab Creek Review, Longleaf Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Pithead Chapel, The Pinch, and others. She works as a therapist in a small town near Lake Michigan and is also a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine. Find her on Twitter @CyndieRandall or at cyndierandall.com.
by Beth Gordon
praise all future near misses:
meteor shower: study group: windshield crack: sparrow bones: smoke detector: detonator: backyard
swimming pool:
flying tire: funhouse gunshot:
starlight earthquake:
frog invasion: flood plain
wasp nest: manhole cover:
local time of error: praise:
praise the preacher on endless loop:
praise all neighbors with ambrosia salad: praise the china plate:
recite her morning: cricket chatter: cricket light pole: cricket
hop scotch: cricket cabaret: praise her handprint: hold her
raindrops: lemon snail: mud pond sailboat: hermit crab: jump
the sidewalk: jump the mousetrap:
praise the lonely dog/ praise the broken chain:
____
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been published in Passages North, EcoTheo Review, SWWIM, Into the Void, Pidgeonholes, Barren, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is the author of two published chapbooks and her full-length collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, is forthcoming in 2021. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press.
by Beth Gordon
The easy bake oven covered in soot. Battery-powered and uninformed. What can be wound can be rewound and finger printed. Please place this doll into the crib (exactly) as you did your child. Ignore the police officers who dial back your thermostat: they are sweating and homesick for mother’s icebox lemon pie. Do not memorize badge numbers. Gather her seahorse her comb her shoestrings her unflustered purple bear. Howl. Coyotes and neighborhood dogs will arrive and dig holes to the moon. Bury broken radio parts that will never be unburied. Translate all transmissions. ____
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been published in Passages North, EcoTheo Review, SWWIM, Into the Void, Pidgeonholes, Barren, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is the author of two published chapbooks and her full-length collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, is forthcoming in 2021. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press.
by Elly McCarthy
my recursive heart, tethered to the tides and what will and what does—she pleads for milk, for all the wrong things to soothe the rash crawling up her spine like ambitious bougainvilleas as we cycle in and out of hibernation strung unknowingly along, a line of ducklings anchored to their mother I hypothesize about whether we can survive another winter when they keep on arriving in absence of blatant rotting, we are still intent on carrying out the process of dying and I wonder where all the spiders are right now eyes hungry for tessellations, sensical sequences amidst the clouded afternoons I can’t help but to love the existence of patterns and be forcibly bound to their iron heart sharp edges surprising, welcoming I urge her not to call these parts ugly to let them live another cycle unnamed not ready to part, yet constantly on the precipice ____
Elly McCarthy currently lives in Chicago and spends as much time near the lake as possible. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Raven’s Perch and Hooligan Magazine’s Spilled Ink, among others. You can find her on Twitter at @naturallog_
by C.T. Salazar earth @ your lips earth saying I was a good son and look where it got me look hard but in the dark it’s impossible to know what flag what fog + what face you’ll face thankfully the dirt is always warm look @ me holding the heat like terracotta it looks like weeping how the angel must hide his face in his hands a posture the artist mistook for grief but grief is most visible in the jaw winging pain only the shoulders can carry tend earth and it blooms up your name in your mother’s voice how you thought an angel must sound all this trumpet vine who else would say your name yes reason enough to acre the aching ____
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He’s the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, forthcoming from Acre Books in 2022. He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.
by C.T. Salazar
you’re still here opal in the creek begging
by and by I reach across (to
/
almost touch you)
here’s history but bear with me, it’s bloody God said
be light + the crocus the honeysuckle the callalily we
used our hands for the worst of it we fell into a pile
of brown leaves that was mostly moths + collected
rainwater in copper-bottomed pots this
isn’t the history I mentioned this
is rain washing into the radio, a voice hitting static
like birds flying into laundry I put my ear
to your chest clouds
like rams you undo the evening
with your hands alone you don’t have to apologize
+ light wept down I know even if you stay,
a lonely pink sky would wound us so
____
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He’s the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, forthcoming from Acre Books in 2022. He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.
by Laura Passin
A hummingbird hangs like a drone,
tries to sip nectar from my breasts.
My father told me he and my mother,
three marriages ago, camped in this same park,
breathing each other inside the thin sky.
Sometimes you are the flower.
Sometimes you are the elegy yourself.
Sometimes you are the elsewhere,
the seas, ineluctably rising.
____
Laura Passin is the author of Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe Press). She earned her PhD in English Literature at Northwestern and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Toast, Rolling Stone, Electric Literature, and Best New Poets. Laura lives in Denver with too many pets.
Moist Poetry Journal 