Tag: SUMMER RIOT

“108 degrees, honey” by Thanh Bui

MPJ2 Comments 
there will still be humans, my lover says 
though we might not be included in that.
our kind isn’t just going to die out immediately,
to which i envision the skin of the ones who’ll 
live. visit a Titanic museum—to predict which 
persons will survive, you’d need to know their 
statuses. an iceberg does not discriminate, nor do 
fires, but people? we aren’t natural. did you know 
the world is running out of sand? we’re not even 
wealthy enough to know what to hoard, to hide. 
for now, i can get water whenever, i am rich with 
someone else’s thirst. our guide this summer 
was from Quảng Trị, & didn’t know of electricity 
until 2004. while he used candles, i moused 
computers, i watched tv. during covid, i witnessed 
my relatives pray for the vaccine already in my body 
waters away. watching is another kind of pain. 
that’s why they use it as torture, too. what’s as 
un-human as having no power to change what’s 
in front of you? bó tay as it all sinks. is it a good 
thing i don’t know what species we’ve lost? which 
cats are the last of their kind? my phone keeps 
turning off, says it’s too hot to function. the summer 
construction workers have a tip: turning off the AC 
in their homes an hour+ before work helps them 
acclimate to the heat. elsewhere, they’ve invented more 
ways to survive. but we are a country of litigators.

Thanh Bui was born in Gò Vấp and raised in Dorchester & Alief, and is a writer & actor based out of Austin, Texas. She loves constantly.

“Natural History Museum” by Pam Yve Simon

MPJ 
Posing for a selfie in the museum,
you pulled me in close for a kiss.
Motion sensors disengaged, alarmed wire quieted,
the security guard on a lunch break. 
All at once, our love 
became visible and accessible. 
For that one moment, 
I didn’t feel like a relic
of myself.

Pam Yve Simon (she/her) believes in love and art. Her poetry and photography have appeared in print and online publications, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Stanchion, Northern Otter Journal, FERAL, and The Daily Drunk’s Marvelous Verses anthology. Say hi via Bluesky Social @PamYve

“wonder-struck” by Bridget Gordon

MPJ 
you will, at times
find yourself in defiance 
accidental or no
of grand celestial plans

regimes will rise to meet you 
vast empires of ruin
will array themselves 
against you

all because you had the nerve 
the absolute fucking gall
to exist where you might 
be seen

do not, under any circumstances
seek to return yourself 
to the false safety
of despair

instead
know that there are meadows 
waiting for us
that smell of apples and wildflowers

and soon, us
captured as we are by wanting 
like fireflies in the night
in the hands of the wonder-struck

Bridget Gordon (she/her, fae/faer) is a queer trans woman and emerging poet based in Chicago. A former MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she tried faer hand at sports journalism before settling into short-form writing about queer longing, identity, and liminality. Fae lives with her husband, metamour, cats, and a growing TBR pile.

“poem for drinking down that gin and kerosene” by nat raum

MPJ 
my firespit slicks bridges
for miles, i swear to you—

i am through with structures
that seek only to support

their kin. if my refusal
to go on like this forever

means i must build a town
of my own edifices, so be it.

i want baby blue and cotton
candy pink banners strung

up between the bank
and the fire station. i want

no cops, including the ones
in your head. in chemistry

class, we mixed metals
with bunsen burner flames,

made a rainbow of elements.
may copper and rubidium

ions decide to salt the surface
of this planet, cause a flurry

of proud flames when
the first molotov cocktail hits

the spans. i am past renewal,
past peaceful assimilation;

we must destroy to rebuild 
a world that could hold us.

nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of the abyss is staring back, random access memory, camera indomita, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.

“Prepping” by Matthew Murrey

MPJ 
I’ve done some: a little extra 
food and toilet paper socked away,
and cash in case cards won’t work. 

Better is the idea of cultivating 
being a neighbor—pitching in 
for the broken or the broke. 

She knows first aid. They raise bees. 
He is an expert at cultivating  
beans, greens, and fruit in the yard.

Of course I’ve considered guns, what 
country do you think I’m from? But bullets 
go only one way—no going back. Better

is the suggestion to pay attention 
to right now, the handbasket, and make it 
artful, sweet, and inviting all the way to hell.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in One, Anthropocene, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for more than 20 years, and lives in Urbana, IL with his partner.

“Summer Light with Migraine” by Donna Vorreyer

MPJ 
a horseshoe shovel

Something precious, pink shimmer of quartz in rough earth—
precious glimmerseed of memory. No lie, things have been rough.
Pink-cheeked fever, clustered stab of pain. But I’ve found here, in
shimmer and dirt, a slow sifting of time, a stalled second-hand, the quartz
of a Swiss watch stymied. When I close my eyes, I imagine a mound of
quartz where the garbage lies, where even trash cans shimmer
in the right light. How lucky to have known love, its gardens of pink,
rough caresses. Such delicate firmness. Both common and precious,
earth that blooms diamonds, stays fertile, alway growing something.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) & A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and co-edits of the online journal Asterales.

“We may think Bede” by Catherine Rockwood

MPJ1 Comment 
did or could not say what true speed was1  
without impossible foreknowledge of 
jet-bombers, lasers, a crouched F1 car.
But this morning two sparring sparrows flashed
past my dull head into a wet azalea
and in that wing-touched moment of departure
my soul spoke, Oh.

1 Viz. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.13 “The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter…”

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine. Two chapbooks of their poetry, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion and And We Are Far From Shore, are available from The Ethel Zine Press. A third chapbook, Dogwitch, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press.

“Midrash on Judges 15:4” by Reyzl Grace

MPJ 
I don’t know why I always imagined
the fields in dusk—the little flame-
tailed foxes dragging their torches
behind. Do you think, as they rushed from their doors,
the Philistines saw how beautiful it was?

It must have been: the purple twilight
crushed against the grain like the velvet
of a noblewoman in adultery, her robe slumped
to a mosaic floor; the breeze slipping
through the guard hairs of the foxes like a quiet kiss.

God, how we love what is in pain—how it reminds
us of youth. You know that the sun was created
setting on a Tuesday? I think Samson
knew . . . but where was I? Yes,
looking out on the fields, on stalks become candles, 

on foxes, coats rusting in the gloom 
against the golden crop. The rabbis
hunt every letter of Torah
for sport, shoot each with a thousand arrows,
yet the Talmud glosses this only once,

when R. Bar Abba tells us the fox
was a symbol of renegation—the only creature
that runs in reverse. But don’t we all?
Don’t we run from the Ark and the Tabernacle 
still turning toward them, enraptured? Yes.

We are on fire, but still must breathe—
little kits gulping air
as we twist and writhe around each other.
In a moment, all will be desolation and burnt
hair, but for now, it is lights gay

as summer bonfires, bobbing up
and down the rows of the vineyards and the oliveyards,
the rigid ranks of wheat and barley,
the tangled foxes snarling as they spin
and snap like firecrackers. How I wish

I could make you see it as I did—a child
who had lost nothing, felt nothing,
never asked what happened to the foxes. 
Sometimes I wish I had never asked.
Sometimes I think that the rabbis were wise.

Reyzl Grace (reyzlgrace.com / @reyzlgrace) is a poet/librarian with work in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other magazines, as well as an editor for Psaltery & Lyre. She lives in Minneapolis with her novelist girlfriend, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her girlfriend.)

“Once, Offhandedly, An Ex-Boyfriend Said He Hoped I Could Find Someone Who’d Be OK With Me Working on Sundays.” by Megan McDermott

MPJ 
after Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond, 1785

I teach you to look head-on at those looking at you, to not, in returning 

gazes, drop your palette or your work. Surely men will look at you 

with hopes of causing pause, so wear your daring dresses and your hats 

with feathers and look at them right back, with a look that tells everything: 

there is no me without this canvas or those who will learn over my shoulder.

Megan McDermott is the author of Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems and chapbooks Woman as Communion and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including Amsterdam Review, the Maine Review, the Christian Century, and more. She is an Episcopal priest in Massachusetts.

“Apocalypse Love Poem” by Wendy Wisner

MPJ 
This week, as I watched the sky turn ash orange,
saw the air quality ticker go red, purple, maroon,

glimpsed two construction workers exchanging soft blue masks 
under the dusky morning moon,

witnessed my children sink into the couch—
“Not this again!” my son raged, hazel eyes hot with tears—

I wondered if I’d loved enough, risked enough for this earth, 
which is clearly raging back at us all,

how my son would sit under the desk during remote learning,
fists red as beets, biting his nails till they bled.

Last night, I dreamt again about losing my kids in a surge 
of stormy black water, the levees failing again, again.

I dreamt and dreamt until I had to push myself out of the dream 
so I could walk through the dense summer morning

with you, the two of us catching our breaths 
as the sky swelled, finally, with rain—

oh the blue blue sky in all its merciful radiance.

Wendy Wisner is the author of three books of poems, most recently The New Life (Cornerstone Press/University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point). Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, The Washington Post, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere.