A huge breast glowing in the sky
appears to me as I near home,
a mirage of fiery, fleshy orange
on a Monday in December.

I have no poet’s praise for it,
only a woman’s astonishment
at a monstrous bitch of a moon,
a crone’s breast bared to the sky.

Joan Barasovska lives in Orange County, North Carolina. She cohosts a poetry series at the independent bookstore Flyleaf Books and serves on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. For thirty years, Joan has been an academic therapist in private practice. Her poems have appeared in Kakalak, San Pedro River Review, Flying South, Madness Muse Press, Red Fez, Speckled Trout Review, and Main Street Rag. In 2020 Joan was nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018)was her first book of poetry; Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022) is her second. Orange Tulips is forthcoming later this year from RedHawk Publications.

We are bigger when we’re born,
but the past is not a prologue.

When we first get into the world,
every last thing is otherworldly.

Makes you wonder where we came from.

But then, maybe before we get to the middle of our allotted time,
with our hair in knots and the wash on our hip,

and a permanent ache in our joints, this all becomes it all:
it’s our kids turn to momentarily wild-eye the world.

Makes us begrudge where we are.

We get to the point where our future 
is present, where we can see the future 

as forming and reforming 
(washing and rewashing) the past.

And yet, we cannot help but grieve.

Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse writer from Colorado who believes that freedom of expression is necessary for a society that is not only safe but flourishing. She helps her readers feel seen in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun and, increasingly, less captured media outlets. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

The ocean is a seed 
on a low, coughing land
and what does that mean 
what does that mean
for us who are the salt
of the earth?

I know what it means
for those who are the light – 
show the way, not yourself – 
but do those 
who are the salt 
preserve or dissolve?




____

Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse writer from Colorado who believes that freedom of expression is necessary for a society that is not only safe but flourishing. She helps her readers feel seen in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun and, increasingly, less captured media outlets. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

I am doing the post-holiday dishes at my mother’s.
Antique crystal, water tepid, not hot, Ivory soap, 
and even though the champagne glasses, alas,
were not based on Marie Antoinette’s bosom (I’d liked 

that story, and she did commission milk cups inspired by 
her left) they are breasts in my hands today, the day you
meet the oncologist. They are warm, soapy, valued, fragile.
My clumsy hand flexing inside the bowl could shatter them. 

Christmas Eve, when I heard it had spread from your gone
breast to the other, lymph, and liver, the choir’s glad tidings 
of great joy, pine scent, broke my brain. Pure beauty starved 
me, making me crave more descants, imagining your kind heart

despairing at the prospect of darkness and silence, missing 
midnight masses. Later, I hear that your son wonders 
why the Chemo Princess gets all the attention. Teenagers 
can be as toxic as any drug dripping through a port-a-cath. 

I help with the research from three time zones away, learn
magic words, pertuzumab, trastuzumab. Pray. If I daydream, 
will I miss a fact that could help prolong a life? Can words,
can the word, work? As I close the file I’ve named for you, 

the computer tells me “Word is saving Anna.” 

Tina Kelley’s Rise Wildly appeared in 2020 from CavanKerry Press, joining Abloom & Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, a Washington State Book Award winner. She co-authored Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway from High School to College to Career and Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope and reported for a decade for The New York Times. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.

I march now, dodging turds
pushing out sighs into the wind.
I head for the rocks, three men squatting on Top Field
without purpose. No-one has ever questioned them.
For a moment, the irony of newly fertilised earth
slows me down
then I spot wheeling birds over a dry spot, snort at their misfortune 
not to be seagulls circling hot chips.
Round the edges where Sunday brambles caught the little one
sunk in their claws because he’s The Late, The Last
I step it up a gear, try to outpace birthdays which make good jokes
head for the spire, where the field turns itself towards the squatters
leads bored dog walkers and sweaty women to the view. 

I perch on the right-hand man. Wonder
who would see if I rolled down the field like a kid
a pig in shit.
For a while I study my own eye-floaters, try to recall
when I first started nudging my specs away to read at night.
I caw back when a crow mocks me.
Back past the pond
teasing for something to break its surface
I toss in stone after stone after stone, rage at the wild-eyed scarecrow
but miss
wait for the church spire to pick me off like an olive.

Marie Little lives near fields with her husband, sons and a daft cat. She writes in the shed with buckets of tea. Marie has work featured in: Ink Sweat and Tears, Cool Rock Repository and The Cannon’s Mouth. She/Her. She is on Twitter @jamsaucer.   

Another lonesome today– 	I shut the door 	to my bedroom. Pop in 	my earbuds– 
bits 	    of beat		of water.	Raindrops knock 		like unexpected guests. 

Instant humidity	    wet with Summer 		sprinkle swamps 	up lush heat.
A budding greenhouse. 	Lightning becomes strobe, animating 	my simple 	
silhouettes into domestic discotheque. 	Walls extend outward, room 	 unrooming

inciting my body 	to multiply  		into my plural versions. 	Condensation collects 
on skin like clothing. 		Crackling tremors prism 		rainbow light across 

my unsealed 		ceiling, bursted.	 Strikes of beat bring feet to movement, splashing 
inhibition. Sound 	tracks, syncing. 	Heartbeats. 		Every pulse, blades of grass 

sprout 		through the brown 	carpet, now indistinguishable 	from the Earth– 
I feel a lighter lonesome. This today 		I’ve opened 	a door toward impossibility to stasis.	 

My various versions collect 	like condensation 	in praise 	dance for our empress of 
monsoon. 	We blur into bits. 		We quench	 	everything, cloudburst 
tongues 	licking 		perspiration 		precipitation. 		Abrupt transitions 

us back into me 	& the choreography 	of quiet.	Grass 	recedes, still glistening 
petrichor’s fragrance, sly 		wet testament 			to liquid metamorphosis– 



___

Aerik Francis (they/them/he/him) is a Queer Black & Latinx poet based in Denver, Colorado, USA. They are a Canto Mundo poetry fellow and a The Watering Hole fellow. They are also a poetry reader for Underblong poetry journal. They have poetry published widely, links of which may be found at linktr.ee/Aerik . Find them on IG/TW @phaentompoet

We kick a heart into the snow with our winter boots

Drop our wet things to the floor, 

             climb the stairs in our underwear
 

From the window, two question marks, each 

asking the other. 		        We kiss, a symmetry 

of imperfection, a shape no math


             could predict. We sleep and listen 

to the radiator tend our shirts and socks. Listen 


to see if the form we made  		holds through the night

In the morning we go back and pierce it clear through

with an arrow where it swells the most




____

Jeffrey Hermann‘s poetry and prose has appeared in Hobart, Palette Poetry, trampset, Juked, Kissing Dynamite, The Shore, and other publications. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure

her head held 
static, like a sparrow-
hawk steadies its body 
while its eye 
is stapled to the sky behind it
     as it emerges
from its fur ruff
like roasted fowl 
rising from a crammed platter 
of trimmings
     so still, slicked lips through 
powdered visage, 
fresh gullshit 
on sun-parched paving, 
she speaks 

until the clamour of injury, 
panic and breath like thin tins, 
too shallow
to confine
the nearest thing, 
or softest substitute 
     all I can locate -
not a canteen, 
but its ancient box, 
softly faded 
from petrel, fuzzy 
and comforting 
     highlighting 
its tarnishing 
treasure

I tip, 
then shake, 
onto the floor, 
fallen fish 
with an eternal 
one-eyed view of the fire
     slide, hollow, under the child’s 
floundering head, as I challenge her 
through clown’s lips 
to push my hand 
with her belly 
     like it’s the most natural thing in the world




____

Alex Innocent is a poet from Yorkshire, who chooses to live in Norwich. ‘Moist’ is one of her favourite words. Among her other favourite things are caffeine, prime numbers, and writing short third person biographies.

“…the homosexual was now a species.” — Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I

you did, at least after 
you
                  learned of my want 
                           of a different 
                           species—
a few aberrant 
forms away 

           from a coveting, 
           that does not abandon me 
           even after my wrist is 
                                slapped
                                raw until I start 
                                             to smart,
as if boys 
could ever know penance 
when raised on 
misunderstanding

such that they latch onto
everything: 
                 the breast, 
                 the schoolyard, 
                 the promise of
                                        forgiveness. 
                                 
Yet you forgave me,
but I wondered for what: 

                         your same
                         wanting found 
                         in my mouth 
                         you did not expect 
                         to encounter there,
                         your conclusion that I am
                         my wanting, 
                         only my wanting. 



____

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020). [travisclau.com]

The sidewalk wears a sunset
of rot. Brittle wrought iron,
sloughing oxidation and peeling
paint hems lapping seams.
The reservoir is crimped
secure. Signs warn us
not to trespass, water only
wet for our eyes. Wary
fingertips page parched foxtail
split ends, how many bodies
one handful can rip, barbs drawn
down into useless blades,
hay and seeds crush unsaid
into roughage. Silence inflates
lungs with sticky humidity. Doves flee
our sleeves, slipping through
the barricade, their last
great trick, drowning
in water that isn’t ours. Still,
ducks splash down, perfect
skipped stones, while we
examine our hands close,
to check for blood and rust.



____

Andrea Krause (she/her) lives in Portland, Oregon. She introverts inconspicuously on Twitter at @PNWPoetryFog. In the summer, you can find her resting in a hammock between giants.