Anthropoetics

human centred poetry for a human centred planet

In The Clouds It Feels Like Dying

baseball

[What is the matter with you? Will you just say anything?]

The Fruit Picker Basket, Being Too Heavy for the Child to Use, and Beginning to Rust

Flight

Naturalism

A Hymn for the Anthropocene

Degrowth, a poem

want poem

My Birth

Negative Fish Light

An Alien Experiences Harmattan for the First Time

The Observatory

In silence with open mouths

Will you go where the river goes

Winter for instance

im sorry.

WET SPECIMEN: LOT’S WIFE

WET SPECIMEN: ODE TO FETAL DEER

WET SPECIMEN: MECONIUM ILEUS

WhatsApp Suite

apocalypso 2012

ad nauseam

smut (fungus)

On Reading, or Decay

Amen Break

There’s a small town in Switzerland where I buried your name under my tongue.

for mother (Earth)

God Ballad

scratch your back with a toothless comb

WIN ME A BANANA AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

WHERE I GO WHEN I DAYDREAM

CAKE & SODA

In Praise of Estate Planning

Exhibition of a Dying City

Canine

FOOT IN MOUTH

GOOD FRIDAY

Normal Human Lifetime

Family Resemblance

Defenestration

san martian anthropoetics

The Reliquary

Tony

LISTENING IN MANY PUBLICS

afterparty

'what hath god wrought?'

Victoria Mbabazi

In The Clouds It Feels Like Dying

Em you flew to Atlanta yesterday your plane
was swallowed up by a storm cloud did you make it
the same thing happened to me the day before
a cloud swallowed me up and spit me out I was working
at the hot air balloon restaurant the one Adina keeps asking us to go to
Elise and I were on salad duty when I fell out the sky
could you believe there was another restaurant under it the same chain even
they were so happy to see us they’re short staffed I said I can help
in a couple hours if you let me get my leg and arms looked at first
I think I broke a few limbs on the way down they gave me a thirty minute break just
enough time to get looked at and be told I’d probably never be able to help with anything
ever again anyways today I’m flying to New York I don’t know
if I will make it the announcer talks in English before he talks in French
and I think you’d believe French is a beautiful language
if you didn’t hear it in a quebecois accent
but you know it’s all dark outside and
I’m wondering if Jean Jacket is hiding in any of the clouds
in the sky and not worrying about dying like that
because I’m too autistic to look anybody directly in the eye anyway
I’m thinking about how anxiety inducing it is to fly and how lucky
I would be to throw up or be swallowed before the worst thing that could happen on a
plane can happen and I’m thinking how nobody wants you to say I’m going to kill myself
when you’re upset and how I haven’t had a smoke in three days and how if I don’t get to
say I’m going to kill myself when I feel like killing myself I’m going to kill myself
but you see it’s still dark outside and yesterday I went to Williams
and Nayana didn’t like her salad but Camryn helped her eat it and Amyrah liked her
perogies and she let me eat them and Elise had soup and a sandwich and she was good
to eat it by herself see I’ll be on the plane for the next hour or so see I can’t believe I’m
even sitting here because yesterday Nayana and Amyrah begged me to remember my
passport and I couldn’t stop thinking of their big sister eyes
and how their hair is parted exactly the same in the middle and how I wouldn’t see them
in awhile and how not seeing everyone for awhile makes my eyes well up a little but
yesterday me and you were saying god did not intend for us to fly and we were right as
we are right about everything I can’t believe the truth can betray us
that I’m hundreds of feet off the ground
and you know it’s still dark outside I hope
when I land the sky is pink I’ll tell you all about it
when I land I’ll tell you all I made it

Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines. “Chapbook” is available with Anstruther Press and “FLIP” is available with Knife Fork Book. Their full length collection “The Siren In the Twelfth House” is coming out in Fall 2024 with Palimpsest Press. They’re currently Canadian in Brooklyn, New York.

Samia Saliba

baseball

aside from fox mulder, i have never loved a man
who loves baseball. documents call this an un-
american activity. when i was 4 my dad and i
started watching baseball movies out of curiosity
for american masculinity or maybe just because
we liked to see the ball go far. i am unlike a dog
in that i do not like to chase a moving target. i
prefer to be very still. baseball is statistically
the only sport a ghost can play. i love the idea
of hitting a ball with a stick but i’m caught up
on the execution. mulder believes only aliens
can love baseball like baseball loves america.
if the ball moves very fast, does america become
the dog? if the dog barks very fast, does america
become the ball?

Samia Saliba (she/her) is calling on you to join the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and all oppressed peoples globally, from wherever you are, in whatever material way you can. To learn from Palestinian resistance the everyday practice of refusal. She is writing from somewhere in Los Angeles, where she is a PhD student in American Studies & Ethnicity. Her poems appear in Apogee, AAWW, Mizna, and elsewhere, and her debut chapbook is forthcoming with Game Over Books in 2025. Find her on twitter @sa_miathrmoplis.

Bailey Cohen-Vera

[What is the matter with you? Will you just say anything?]

What is the matter with you? Will you just say anything? Date anyone? Nobody cares that your mother is Latina—not as much as you do, that’s for sure. I wish I could tell you that you’re a man. Half the time I’m living, I’m on the most delicate concoction of caffeine and weed you could possibly imagine, and during the other half I’m either sleeping or feeling guilty about it. I knew instantly that you were a bad person. I hate that you got mad at me for thinking that right away, because I was right, and when you got mad at me it made me doubt myself. I hate doubting myself. I wish you would demonstratably show that you care about me missing you. When you don’t, it hurts my feelings, because we had sex. I won’t be haunted by you. Have you ever done anything that was just a little bit homosexual? I love you so much it hurts my brain and aches my heart. I don’t have any questions you can answer. I wish you acted like you did the first night we met. You’re my enemy. I meant everything I ever said to you. Do you want to stop not-being-friends for an evening so we can watch The Godfather II? I’m never joking unless I’m lying, and even then there’s a chance I’m telling at least a little bit of the truth. I want to be more alone each day. I would do anything for you, do you know that I mean that? Thanks for inviting me to the poetry reading even though I sent you my resume on hinge dot com. Thanks for being my only work friend. Fuck you. On principle. There’s no way I’m ever paying you back for that salad you bought me. I owe you a ton. What do you think you’ll want your wife to say when you inevitably realize you miss her? I’m mad at my parents and all my siblings are children. You’re kind but you don’t understand me. When you wear sweaters, it makes you seem like a normal person. I wish I could meet your daughter without your baby daddy hate-crimeing me. I can’t come to the show tonight! I’m busy performing an archival deconstruction of the nuclear family unit. I deserve an apology. I’m really happy for you. It’s like, super cool you’re 5’9″. You should see a girl like me in heels. People think I’m dramatic, but I’m just made up of every little thing anyone’s ever said to me. At the end of the world, there will still be roaches left to carry the last letter I write from my body to yours. You can’t hurt me. I know what real love is.

Bailey Cohen-Vera is a poet and jiujiteiro living in Brooklyn, NY.

Willow James Claire

The Fruit Picker Basket, Being Too Heavy for the Child to Use, and Beginning to Rust

It’s amazing, what the mind can carry, that the hands can’t. How the violet streak of glitter across
her collarbone tasted; the sound of the engine as the man I’d trusted pressed my head harder
against the hot hood. I’d love to buy the synthetic nostalgia fascism sells, that I belong in this
country. But I don’t. Still I wish for my childhood again, fresh juice in the morning, my father
loading his pistols with inviting eyes. Still in conversation–in memory thin as snow which melts
before it hits the ground–my tongue takes as only English can lessen attention to a point. By
summer, 42 states will attempt to legislate the people I love out of existence, and I’d like to be
able to at least cry be able to cry about it, though the weeping would change nothing. Meanwhile
the dawn’s clouds goosewing over the smog as I take my stupid little walk for my stupid little
mental health. Phoenix, Arizona: there are so many ice cream shops. And so much to regret. The
last time I saw the sea, I shrank from its coldness while the love of my life danced in its salt-spun
foam. Is attention, then, another cruelty? No wonder God never proved himself to me: I talk
about tenderness, but I can never unlearn how to clean a gun. Fingers slow, delicate. Gentle as a
duckling. Not only capable of a few pounds of pressure in the trigger finger, but used to it,
missing the power of its threat like an old friend. This isn’t witness, that radical act; rather
something more pathetic, wheedling At least I’m trying to learn. When my community
remembers how to build a guillotine, I won’t ask whether I’m worthy of absolution or
defenestration. Anymore, I only try to remember that when my mother asked me to bring her
fruit for breakfast, it was never the tool which brought the oranges down from the flowering tree.
It was my hands.

Willow James Claire (James O’Leary) is a trans poet from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for the Best New Poets, Best of the Net, & Pushcart Prize anthologies, & has appeared in such journals as Frontier, Protean, Booth, Foglifter, & more. Willow holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and currently serves as a poetry reader for ANMLY.

Eros Livieratos

Flight

I can feel the train in my chest
before the sound hits and in moments
my body will move mechanically:
subsumed by bodies, acting as one.
What’s a soul to a body that’s left
itself? The boy in this shell stared
down a gun a handful of times. Now
that boy is a body in The United States
of America where he is taxed and pays
and pays and pays and pays and pays.
Christ is hands to my thighs,
such a martyr. The hanged man
lacks. Every Sunday I look out
into suburban sprawl, the kept
lawns and wonder what hell
I have made for hands who
used to smoke backwoods
in the back of a getaway
car with backpacks filled
with paper gold. Oh God.
So what? My mother says
When my body outpours
the trauma. It’s called
living. Locked jaw.
I was kicked in the head
by a boy with a diamond
on his cheekbone. Now
he is weeping. Eternally,
because I said so.
Isn’t he gorgeous?

Naturalism

We wandered alone through
a backyard garden where milk
thistle and cabbage bloomed against
rosebushes and honeysuckle. You were
barefoot and I was a shotgun blast, violent
my movements clunky and consuming. We
made a mess of the strawberries, toes sloshed pink.
Your father was a lotus, a murderer in red, white, and blue.
When he’d talk about his gun, you found
solace in sunflowers.

Erythrocytes in swarm, trample—an internal orgy of
serenity. Your mother would make strawberry jam
We’d smear toast, permanently affixed to a back porch
overlooking loving lobotomized cattle and photosynthesizing florals.

A Hymn for the Anthropocene

Something about the mashing of bones something about the gnarling of rotting teeth something
about the way you looked at me something about the ice beneath my feet something about being
holy something about killing something about crows something about hostile architecture something
about rainforests something about technology something about being something about subsisting
something about entangled wires like ivy something about IV drips something about veins
something about the foliage of the body something about roots sprawling outward something about
the stems growing from my pores something about the body something about image something
about deconstructing my cells something about makeup something about breasts something about
gender something about the size of my something about palms something about limpwrists
something about muscles something about masculinity something about I’m tired

Something about restarting something about Sisyphus something about boulders something about
calloused hands something about the tearing of muscles something about hypertrophy something
about cells something about atoms something about minutiae something about language something
about symbols something about the roadways of the brain something about the languid movements
of the body something about small tragedies something about dichotomy something about love in
cities something about “the grind” something about the scam of existing something about toppling
systems something about capitalism something about my old landlord something about every
landlord something about the city as economy something about the city as a rotted ecology
something about roots something about lush greens and dirt something about my mother’s home

Something about nature something about cosmos something about the poet’s moon something
about entropy something about cycles something about the sexual attraction I have towards
imminent heat death something about the filthy horns of an elderly ram something about
Copernicus’ execution something about the tragedy of Turing something about what’s next
something about the transhuman something about the other something about the tidal wave
something about evolution something about the Anthropocene something about the time I thought
there was a future something about a hanging something about factions something about progress
something about the complete lack of something about being something about subsisting something
about deconstructing

Something about rebuilding something about community something about cherub moments
something about precocious hands something about soft hands in dirt something about equilibrium
something about tangled vines something about the whisper of hair something about the body
something about the body something about the body something about the body learning about
something where holiness has been replaced with the glow of our bodies something about a
loneliness smothered something about being something about time something about this time
something about being grounded in time something about the page something about the body
something about its always about the body something about a vanishing act something about
ceasing to be something about endings something about goodbyes something about—

Eros Livieratos (He/They) is a Greek-Belizean writer & artist whose work focuses on the intersection of identity, aesthetics, and capital in the Anthropocene. Eros has published poetry, fiction, non-fiction, comics, photography, and film score work. They can usually be found making harsh noise & screaming in your local basement.

Nicodemus Nicoludis

Degrowth, a poem

In a moment
I am dressed up
like a poet.
And I am dreaming
of staying awake
for days to work
on memory–
making maps of forests–
performing brute labor
in the underbrush.
Atmospheric,
the flower fields
slant up
slightly coasting across
an evening sky,
a fictitious wobbling
of tectonic plates and
granite boulders.
It is uneasy, moving
underwater this way.
I call out, Virgil,
can I plough
your fields?
Perform a poem
in perfect rhythm
behind a goat
or sheep,
lounging in the afterglow
of my own selfish
creation–
I understand
his hesitancy
to reveal the secret
of pastoral laziness.
Soon, I will find
the time
to really look
at mirrors.
I think
they call that
scrying, concentrating
on the dying
ethereal, the total
weight of
just what, so far,
has been lost.
Now, I am growing
my capacity for
transformation–
I feel the thrust
of importance
but here I am
with a computer
hoping
it’ll take me
somewhere
farther than God
or Congress.
Is mysticism
the belief in
our own capacity
for change–
how do we know
how much other
people think
about us or
each other?

Where is the middle
in the theory
of middle,
the passageway
to getting into
the underground
of my
or your heart?
I read
about Enlightenment
and wanted
to flog the modernity
out of me–
lash every
gestic impulse out–
revert to a
little frog–
a little drop of water
feeding a plant
hiding in the desert.
Shouldn’t we all
want to halve
everything–

call the world
our semi-globe?
When spring begins,
we bring in
Abundance–
we guide
the stream
downhill in
expectation
of falling water
twice-washing
the spittle plains.
I call out
to Hilda–
find God
is lush
nourishment–
the sooty soil
springing
forward
with crocus.

We will pray now:

Lay down

our bodies

heavy in

endless toil.

Endless capacity
for the plastic world;
my lungs heave
in and out
on the dance floor
and I’m
thinking about
calling in sick
to work
for the rest
of the week.
Then I can
really get
to the pit
of it;
the hapless feeling
of closing
your hands
and eyes
and looking
for light.

The time to brave the sea.
The time to brave the unfaithful sea.
The time to brave the unfaithful sea and the setting stars
marking the lowest horizon,
the strap of shipping lanes
holding the Great Atlantic
sargassum belt–
When it rains
I will stay indoors
all day
conserving what
little output I spew
for the humble saints
of quiet comforts–

linoleum, clean sheets, delivery food, a white candle from the grocery store, e-tip
gloves, high capacity magazines, battery packs, etc.

Being born, we were
coughed up into circulation.
Beginning each day,
all my language
comes crusading
back into my throat–
eyeing the eye between
here and the never-wild–
a poultice of finely
mixed solace,
of dry meadows,
blooming nowtopias
spontaneously grafting
free will onto
the side of a highway
cloverleaf.

We must tell the truth that not everything can grow in every place.
Hold the very power
of the wooded seascape;
the dunes that curling up
toward the houses
perched closer
to the aluminum tide,
lunar sparkling
ax-like over waves,
crests pumping
toward shore–
the memory of God is found in seaberries,
and I hear in the midnight wind a rustling
for the heavenly substance of moonlight.

The whole world is becoming
like the bottom of the ocean:
full and living
in the satisfaction
of existing.

Little worms borrowing down into the sand;
a whale carcass feast; a pitch-black serenade
of harmonious communion. The vision skews,
a volcanic vent erupts; the shrimp and mussels
laugh in the ripple-stillness consuming all sides
of our political alignments; the crabs don’t care
about work so why do you?

We will pray now:

Lay down

our bodies

heavy in

endless toil.

linoleum, clean sheets, delivery food, a white candle from the grocery store, e-tip
gloves, high capacity magazines, battery packs, etc.

The whole world is becoming
like the bottom of the ocean:
full and living
in the satisfaction
of existing.

Nicodemus Nicoludis is poet, the managing editor of Archway Editions, and a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work has appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Nat Brut, the anthology Works & Days 2 published by beautiful days press, and elsewhere. His first book, MULTICENE, is coming out this fall from Arteidolia Press.

Erika Walsh

want poem

some girls want a pile

of skulls …….. to lick pink salt from …… not

me i want …… to sleep in a big bed

in a guest room ……. in a house that can’t

be mine ……. a house i lived in

in a dream once ….. in the dream

it was my father’s house ….. i wanted

to be woken ….. up but no one

woke me ……. up

on the window-

sill : crosses the color of red esophageal

crosses …. death-crosses you can hook

a hand through …. or a finger ….. i meditate

on the bed i start to feel the remnants

of hoof bones in my …….. bent hands ……

we were once two

fawny deer ….. and plus one of us

was jesus ….. the other was jesus’s

twin ……. and so we did things twinned ……. like brothers

prismatic in our boyhood

this poem is like

making death-noise …….. ?

bird falls in luv with eighty-foot-tall

statue ….. would be a good name

for a head-

line from the year twenty

thirty-five

i want to write clickbait

for the future

i only walk from one corner …… to the other

taping post-its

to the slots of blue mailboxes

the post-its say

…… im rly lonly …….

the tape between them

and the boxes is translucent so the blue boxes make

the tape look …… itself ……. blue

i am bored of this poem ……. it is easy to tame ………

the deer have princess

built in them ….. i’m jealous ………

i want to have princess ……

i have only

death-princess …..

i have only …… little red fangs

and a red eye …… over my breast bone ….. which i reveal and blink twice

slowly ….. when i feel a little

frisky …………..

i want this poem to be a plastic bag

on a thrift shop wall

filled with rubber toys ….. and plastic toys …..

and toys that make noises i like ….. and that roll ……

i want this poem to be death-certain …. and droll …..

i want this poem to put the evil eye

on a country

i want it to peel

in one swoop ….. a green

apple

i want you to be in this poem

and me …..

i want this poem to be like my mom

My Birth

Before I was born, I was pure energy. I was not yet a baby. At the hospital, my mother asked the gynecologist to blow on her nails. They had been painted blue, not pink. Pink would be too saccharine. My mother had her headphones on when I was being born. They were connected to her Walkman. Inside the Walkman was a disc. I so wanted the disc to be gold. I was pure energy. I was almost a baby. The disc spun and played the album Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette. There was a cacophony inside of me. A cacophony is like a lot of sleeping bees just waking up. Some of the sleeping bees were wearing little sleeping hats. In Crown Heights, when I walked over towards the yellow light down tree-lined streets, it was 3 pm. The bees all slept. 3 pm was the time that I felt most alive. I was born at 5. During the two hours prior to my birth, I was hurriedly knitting a scarf for my mother. When I came out, it was so ghostly pale, she almost didn’t see it. How did you knit this scarf? She asked. You were pure energy. Not even a baby. I pressed my cheek to her chest. My mother said, You will comfort me. I wanted to comfort her. I felt like a cacophony. She wrapped the scarf around herself and wrapped the scarf around me. The gynecologist said, Well I guess I’ll just leave. The windows in the hospital looked like they’d never break.

Erika is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Alabama and co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant, a genreless literary journal. Erika’s creative writing has been featured in Hotel Amerika, Booth, Poetry Online, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy of the Arts and Art Farm Nebraska, as well as a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. Find more here.

Rafiat Lamidi

Negative Fish Light

At the falling of the first light, the dogs slept through the warmth. We thought it was the end of the world, and felt a great sense of relief when it ended. When the celestial blade cast its shadow upon earth, it was the first mark of change. Then the lights fell with the weight of an eyelash. It was the first sign of many that something beautiful was about to break. Many falling lights later, we would stare at the sun all day and it would stare back. Like a cut fish.

An Alien Experiences Harmattan for the First Time

The cold is a mighty body of work
Every waking day is the day of the sun
Morning scrambles the brain
And I experience a ceiling
It is not the sky, it is a wall falling down
The air hits the bones, bird-speed
The day wears like a heavy garb, a dust of rain
The earth melts into parts
My heart, a thundering beast in a cage of air
Yellow mist floating around me
I remember that I am still alive
I go outside to see the sky
The world is orange
And I want to swallow its nothingness
I want to swallow the sky
I want to wallow in the clouds
Yet the limelight is waning
I need to return to where I came from

The Observatory

The earth is a blue dome of water decorated with speckles of green dust. Tonight, we will float across Saturn rings for a million years. In a second, a human eye will behold us as definite, light. In another billion years, we will settle on Jupiter’s moon and wonder whether they finally understand the universe. What makes that body made of sand and air, metals and flesh intertwined with electricity willing to transcend itself. When we fall into earth on meteors, they wish for something mere and ordinary. Then they look up into the sky, eyes welling with tears, fingers pointing towards the horizon. And they give us the names of gods. But it is there, in their bodies, where all the secret lies. They travel into space to reach what lies beneath their bones.

Rafiat Lamidi is a lover of art, a poet and photographer who resides in Nigeria. Her works have been recently published in Olney Magazine, Lucent Dreaming, Lolwe, Isele Magazine and The Blood Beats Series. She is a shortlisted candidate for Awele Creative Writing Trust. Her twitter is @rauvsbunny.

Ty Zhang

In silence with open mouths

Before I met you,
Hope was a well of rare water
Soothing to the touch—
A balm mixed by the earth.
It cleansed wounds,
Had vital interactions with blood.

II.
Now, my hope has run dry.
Distant, abandoned, overgrown—
People seldom go there now
Except the young to fuck
And the old to die
In silence with open mouths.

III.

You and I, we’ve turned our lives
Into an earthwork, an edifice,
A midden, a mound.
Something a visitor can one day
Stand before and say,
“This has all so clearly eroded,
But, oh, can’t you imagine
What all it used to be?”

IV.

I fear the most valuable thing
We ever taught each other
Was how to wring new miseries
Out of the same old pain.
Yes, we were so good at it.

Before I met you,
Hope was a well of rare water
Soothing to the touch—
A balm mixed by the earth.
It cleansed wounds,
Had vital interactions with blood.

II.
Now, my hope has run dry.
Distant, abandoned, overgrown—
People seldom go there now
Except the young to fuck
And the old to die
In silence with open mouths.

III.

IV.

I fear the most valuable thing
We ever taught each other
Was how to wring new miseries
Out of the same old pain.
Yes, we were so good at it.

Will you go where the river goes

Do you really believe
that suffering together
is better than suffering alone?
Be careful; pain is dense, but not heavy.
Indeed, embers fly as well as birds.
Only eyes and skin know the difference.
The valleys are old, but woe is older.
Even flowers fret, because they know
there is a gamble in every seed.
After all, when you touch me,
I get the sense that what we are doing
is a very ancient thing.
Temptation flows as well as water.
Even so, where you lead, I will follow.
Will you go where the river goes?

Winter for instance

Have I lived despite you
or because of you?
Honestly, it’s hard to tell.
Take winter for instance.
When it’s here, it’s a terror;
when it’s not, it’s a dream.

Imagine summer now,
and all the skin we’ll show.
Do you think it’ll have a price?
The cost of living is pain,
but I don’t need to tell you,
you whose bread is pain.

They say hatred can’t sustain
the way love can, but
I take that as a challenge
and evidently, so do you.
There’s nothing you can’t do,
it’s true, if not outdo me.

So we’ll share every meal
and squander every revelation,
teeth grit each night and day.
We may as well last, since
what’s the worst a year reveals
except that another might follow?

Have I lived despite you
or because of you?
Honestly, it’s hard to tell.
Take winter for instance.
When it’s here, it’s a terror;
when it’s not, it’s a dream.

Imagine summer now,
and all the skin we’ll show.
Do you think it’ll have a price?
The cost of living is pain,
but I don’t need to tell you,
you whose bread is pain.

They say hatred can’t sustain
the way love can, but
I take that as a challenge
and evidently, so do you.
There’s nothing you can’t do,
it’s true, if not outdo me.

So we’ll share every meal
and squander every revelation,
teeth grit each night and day.
We may as well last, since
what’s the worst a year reveals
except that another might follow?

Ty Zhang is a Thai-Chinese-American law student, writer, and political organizer based in Ohio. He writes in a range of mediums including poetry, prose, and screenplay. He is an alumnus of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and was a finalist in the Boston Screenplay Awards. He is on Twitter at @khanombang and on Substack at samsaradays.substack.com.

audrey robinovitz

im sorry.

earlier today many of my followers reported me engaging in behavior that does not represent me as a person. i said rashly that vanilla-centric perfume was a homosocial tool for regressive female competition and is less a reflection of what men like to smell on women and more a reflection of what girls like to smell on each other. i want to say in light of this remark that not only is this still true but that furthermore the gourmand industrial complex retains a fetishistic obsession with neotenous scent profiles and real men will always be more attracted to a bad bitch reeking of incense than a woman trying to smell like a fifteen year old girl. this isn’t to say that vanilla is a poor supporting or even central note (see eau duelle for a sophisticated vanilla scent) or even that i think intentionally childish and sweet scent profiles are bad (i love pacifica island vanilla as much as the next manic pixie dream girl wannabe. this is however to say that the fantasy of men drooling over vanilla perfume is less about what scents men actually like unprompted and more about two people jointly participating in a gender-based fantasy of power and opposition. vanilla perfume is to women like big muscles are to men: sexual dimorphism to excess each sex says will attract the other and really just uses as an excuse to attract their friends. something like annabel’s birthday cake was clearly made to participate in a joint fantasy of girlhood with feminist undertones – and i have no problem with that. i don’t think smelling sweet is bad, but i do think demanding these simplistic profiles of increasingly niche and

audrey robinovitz can be found at @foldyrhands and audreyrobinovitz.cargo.site.

Abigail Raley

WET SPECIMEN: LOT’S WIFE

“As CF is caused by a faulty gene that controls the movement of chloride and water into and out of cells, people with CF often sweat more than people without the condition, and this sweat contains high levels of chloride, which can crystallise into salt visibly on the skin.”- The Cystic Fibrosis Trust

“but his wife looked back from him, and she became a pillar of salt” – Genesis 19

It is 1981, and love is a thing with fists. Love comes with cousins and
knuckles pounding thin the back’s sinew, purpling all the way down
to the ribs, newly budded breasts inside their pink bikini pressing hard
and hot into the pavement. The sun is as bright as it ever was, always
threatening its crest. It doesn’t matter. Her gaunt skin is paling the light.
Her world is already initiating its end, even in the summer’s gentle tides.
God is floating across the heavy chalice of her throat like a high, bright
balloon. She lifts her head from the concrete, observes the pool, its
chlorinated water, blue and still like an un-polluted lake, dizzy with
its flashing heat. She turns her head up, into the light of love’s bright
aperture. The fists remain. They steady spread their task. The sludge
vomits up. It is thick and sentient, an algal slug permitted entrance to
her fibroid’s vast garden. God, too, is a beast. She spits, gags,
musters onto the manufactured shore. Sweat stinging her lips: the end
of her life asking who turned back and when?

WET SPECIMEN: ODE TO FETAL DEER

Your small body, culled beneath the jar’s
collapsed glass womb. Your brine mine, too.

Your spots the shade of my pale thin. Skin chilly
with the round cold drip of saline. How you

sleep: like me, in the colliding world. The
formaldehyde biome beetle-less. Beloved,

show me your stale serenity, how the light
penetrates the body’s scrim, illuminating its

massive, incandescent vesicle. Combustible
sterility, your retained face haunts its facile

cabinet. The heavy metal door. Child, tell
me more of why it reads: DANGER!

Your small body, culled beneath the jar’s
collapsed glass womb. Your brine mine, too.

Your spots the shade of my pale thin. Skin chilly
with the round cold drip of saline. How you

sleep: like me, in the colliding world. The
formaldehyde biome beetle-less. Beloved,

show me your stale serenity, how the light
penetrates the body’s scrim, illuminating its

massive, incandescent vesicle. Combustible
sterility, your retained face haunts its facile

cabinet. The heavy metal door. Child, tell
me more of why it reads: DANGER!

WET SPECIMEN: MECONIUM ILEUS

meconium: Greek, meaning poppy

ileus: Greek, meaning twisted

meconium ileus: a thickening of the bowel, causing digestive issues, most often seen in patients with cystic fibrosis

meconium: Greek, meaning poppy

ileus: Greek, meaning twisted

meconium ileus: a thickening of the bowel, causing digestive issues, most often seen in patients with cystic fibrosis

Tell me I was beautiful, that I was a poppy in the field and
the field was full of air and the air was clean and dreadful
and large. Tell me I was large, tell me I was large and
consumed and pummeling the ground. Tell me the ground

was laced with minerals that made me clean and new,
that I was as old and warm as the earth. Tell me that I
endured the pounding and the warming and the fire. Tell me I
endured the cutting open and the stitching together, that I never

left the earth. Tell me that I didn’t know what this thing was, that
I couldn’t shit and it was not because I was sick, but because
I was a flower twisting crooked, upward. Tell me, my love, of
my dream. Tell me of the dream where my sickness is a bud

in a vast garden. Tell me I was a whole vegetable, a plump
fruit holding the pain down, keeping it my body’s hostage.

Abigail Raley (she/they) is a queer poet from Kentucky. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana.

Vriddhi Vinay

WhatsApp Suite

I. Glory be to the WhatsApp group chat

Veena auntie led last prayer in four attachments. Gita auntie splayed her palms a begging book flat to the sky and caught a boon from the nothing, blue lake of echoes. The topic for tonight is me, may we hang our heads in grief. But I am busy again as child small enough to eat an earth as big as Bangalore and be swaddled in twin Barbie sheets. Here I live forever in the phones of the men who’d grab tea on the veranda and can be found in the wakes left of their motorbikes. Eternal outhouse of memory blinking back LED tears in the bed of my palm. Final catalog of WhatsApp texts from your grandma before she passed and the birth of a child. Gay son. Suicidal daughter. Same creature as one, killed in chain mail herbal medicine. Embarrassment, born as the daughter of men who conspire with other husbands of their infidelities for an encrypted mistress. If they speak ill of me here, just know they would weep like a song over my grave. We pray we are less than one sentence, two check marks of confirmation – correction – away from humiliation then the shame. We pray our loved ones behave. We pray for a moon, a sliver as slight as the one that means a message undisturbed.

II. You have: 12 missed calls while you part your mouth for some cock

Did you check the time when you were last called a good girl? After three voicemails from your mother? Parting your lips in threads of spit to uncover a noir, wet pit. The key’s port home too is a dark, slick mouth of salvation. On the other end, I see someone’s hand reaching for my hair and another pulling. Where do I send my condolences for making you dirty? Never trust the tears of an unruly woman or polite neighbors, for they all lie to me about our twisted fate and dull their knives for the chime of weddings. We are a tangle of limbs as needy as sweat, beading on our backs like a shimmer, like all the gold in my mother’s closet, like the sound it makes when I play with them, like the laughter of a child.

III. Attachment: little girl that lives in me in khaki grain and pigtail braids bumbling on the vinyl floors like a scar

I said when I was born shame and exhibitionism were lovers in the way of spirit-science and constellation-born folklore. Stargazing where the fabric of darkness showed dots of light from loosened weaving. Shame and exhibitionism danced in a way that knit limbs and fed adrenaline. Shame mothered exhibitionism one day too much and exhibitionism ate shame as a star. In one white streak across the sky fading like a dupatta, we see shame fall.

Then, I will return home and we can play slick and dirty and panting in the mess we whined making.

If you compacted years into the twin-sized bed sheets, we’d be the same distance as the men who’d try to crawl into my bed at night. We’d be the same distance as the dark port of mouth. As dark as a bed of polluted stars. And oh my god, as you too hide how much you like all the wet stains, can’t you see another one fall?

Then, I will return home and we can play slick and dirty and panting in the mess we whined making.

IV. Attachment: May 7, 2000. Print scans of baby photos from Trillium Health Partners Mississauga Hospital and Toronto, Ontario.

I said when I was born I remembered it as primordial goo / sloshing spherical to sphere between my mother’s belly / shackled my little arms tight in my own blubber casing / like a mummy or in prayer / releasing me cold and flailing into this world soggy and sliding out from the thick velvet of her underbelly / I always knew pain because I was born crying / I slid out from the world

coated a midnight with no stars vacuumed tight into a bright nothing / Amma, dear amma / the first clipping is when I knew I didn’t need her to become just like her / it was as exhausting a day / as when amma was unborn in paati’s stomach / in Tumakuru when my paati fell off a bike / and watched / a wake of dust kicked around her bruised ankles / as she watches my grandfather shrink smaller and smaller / a neck never turned back to see what weight could have dared left his back end / conspiring then older and a baby begged being held / I was in her arms then as frail as an obtuse legume boiled to a mush and face twisted in a wail like a pinch / I remember the sweat on her nose dangled from the little ball / her arms as small as mine / her eyes as big / and I’d never remember her this young again ✔✔

Vriddhi Vinay (they/she) is a South Indian Philadelphia-based writer, poet, researcher, art reviewer, and poetic anthropologist. A December 2022 Temple University graduate, Vriddhi uses their multidisciplinary background to write about anti-colonial art, South Asian feminism, and sexuality. They love to explore the intersection of sexual reclamation, radical survivorship, community between brown women, queerness, and memory. The ethos of their art writing surrounds highlighting braveness, archive-keeping, and subversion in artistic works. Their work has appeared in Artblog Philadelphia, MUNDI Global Academic Journal, Kweli Journal, Tilted House, Cosmonauts Avenue, Apiary Magazine, and The Inklette Magazine. Find them at vriddhivinay.wordpress.com to read more of their work.

Norah Brady

apocalypso 2012

In the fifth grade the world ended at the playground. After, we went to be ghosts
on the swings, reminding each other that we were dead, but solid, which must
be what death is like, and the death was true because every one of us knew
we were. When we were all of the same mind, the world got very small, too small
to be warm enough and we all went somewhere else. It wasn’t far away,
and it wasn’t where we were supposed to go when we died.

The world works because we’re breathing air into it, the universe expands
because we pulled it over our heads all at the same time, green and blue and red.
If the ground shimmers it’s not heat it’s all of our legs wading through the same
river. The river is from a song we heard when the world hadn’t ended yet.

Norah Brady is a moon enthusiast, haunted house, and mountain poet. She was a runner-up for Youth Poet Laureate of Boston in 2020. Her poetry and short fiction can be found in Blue Marble Review, Dishsoap Quarterly, COUNTERCLOCK and Kissing Dynamite.

Daphne Fauber

ad nauseam

a glitzy new pick-up truck rolls coal
forming fourth of july cracks and haze
each revolution blowing smoke upwards
a middle finger saluting the red and blue
bruises of compromise and chemotherapy

two students blow smoke in my face
laughing as the weight hangs in the air
their cigarettes clutched tightly as if
they could keep from burning away

somewhere hungry coals from a campfire
glide on the dry drought air away from
empty beer cans and into ancient trees

our consuming caveman instinct towards
innovative forms of violence and ash

a glitzy new pick-up truck rolls coal
forming fourth of july cracks and haze
each revolution blowing smoke upwards
a middle finger saluting the red and blue
bruises of compromise and chemotherapy

two students blow smoke in my face
laughing as the weight hangs in the air
their cigarettes clutched tightly as if
they could keep from burning away

somewhere hungry coals from a campfire
glide on the dry drought air away from
empty beer cans and into ancient trees

our consuming caveman instinct towards
innovative forms of violence and ash

smut (fungus)

Organs swell to meet you (pathogenic hypertrophy)
engorged by your promise (fungal transmission)
of a delectable stiff rod (makomotake stems)
tender in the mouth (edible delicacy)
and stripped of its seed (flowers wither)

Daphne Fauber (she/her) is a queer writer, artist, and microbiologist based out of West Lafayette, Indiana. She can be found on Instagram at @daphne.writes, Chill Subs at Daphne Fauber, or at her website http://www.dank.pizza.

evelyn bauer

On Reading, or Decay

Beyond the poorly rendered water, wildly viscous,
dearest friends provide quaint fellowship over too-large
sips of vermouth, faintly whispering under porous skies.
Watch as men & more quiver before extravagant fountains,
a hatching pupa nestled by precious metals. Here:
a freshly made launchpad greatly overgrown
with deposits of flint, foul with smoke or smog. newborn
thickets bramble onward & onward into the distance, offset
by some mirage &/or whatever bubbled up from
the ocean yesterday. I spoke to some old man last night,
watched him scrabble around with a variety of watercolor
brushes before we stopped and sat between
two pieces of conflicting signage, we spoke longingly of
watching the tide & waves & crabs on the cape,
so enthralled that, to me, the moonlit parking lot
seemed to sway in similar motion.

Every morning the sound of a vacuum tears through
any hope of organic slumber, whoever lives upstairs
seems to have a vested interest in disruption & aggravation,
something I tend to respect. Springtime rose-vines put on a
display, arching toward the sun as if magnetic, or maybe it’s
something about the mycelium almost imperceptibly below us.
Fickle winds blow back and forth over our grey city,
blowing wild mustard away from some rodent’s mastication,
all these years of humidity and the overbearing sun warping
cement inwardly, away from prying eyes. Dozens of trucks
filled with activated charcoal take turns dumping it into the
city’s gaping maw, praying that this load might finally stem
whatever poison lies within. Years of fences enveloped every
last patch of grass, leaving nothing but laminated red wood
and the glitter of
silver.
I sit on my back porch and sip
espresso with the camera on.

Some cities feel desperate, like they’re sucking the last
bit of marrow from a discarded tibia, the causal factors
of scavenger-condos feeding off perceived culture
a million dead caterpillars squished underfoot make
dinner dates awkward
the buildings flutter not in response to some tectonic
movements, rather they shake and grow with
every missed mortgage payment. To live here is to
grow accustomed to missing a molar or having a canine
plated silver & watching the endless scroll unfurl
closed off no hope of being an empath these days.
It’s strange to think of how our ancestors crawled ever upwards
over whatever ancient ice floe fizzled out & melted over this continent,
all progress seems to have been
capped by ever new
& improved steel torture
I can do nothing about this but distract myself
by mixing overly fragrant bourbon with lemon & honey,
noticing the ever-present smell of wormwood.

Past the horizon: factories forge flimsy metalwork for a variety of European airlines, all of which promise to fly over luscious emerald grass dotted with pristine blue lakes like antique paisley markers. I walk up and down streets, peering into the sanitized glass storefronts that spread like some sort of plague, all at once merging and separating in front of my eyes, which makes me feel as if I’m a first-time mescaline-afflicted-fauna, a very lost fallow deer experiencing hallucinations in front of a fixtured mansion gate. Well, to the victor goes the spoils: parsnips, turnips, various other root vegetables and a once-wooded whip-or-will habitat, as well as a massive marble kitchen counter & a cobblestone inscribed with your name on a main
thoroughfare or by a park bench, guaranteed

& now I find myself inside one of these stores, purchasing various leather goods (boots, jackets, shoes, & more) as well as various herbs and ointments that claim to do wonders for a torn meniscus, later I’ll slather them up and down my legs and arms before suckling on my now-oily finger. The pain doesn’t go away. take a look at this packed train carriage on an overnight journey cross-continent, catering included (cubes of various white meats, wilted leaves, a single Coca-Cola, one piece of stale bread, untoasted, & four slices of orange cheese).

Will the wonders of the Anthropocene ever cease to amaze? (Plastic, granulated sugar, oil, fake fuzzy moustaches, glasses, surgical procedures, firearms, aluminum cans, cubicles, conveniences, & even more) It seems there is nothing that will sate people like us, not various adventures, nautical or not, not the various spirits (either alcoholic or supernatural), & not the collection of swords, guns, & fists that brutally stained this fountain with blood.

It’s a sunny day now, & I’m laying on
a small patch of grass in the city center,
staring up at years of expressive,
curved, architecture &
hundreds of
claustrophobic skyscrapers.

Amen Break

When I was younger I took a spoon into the back yard and used it to sift through the clay and loam and silt, separating each into perfect categories. I would put spoonfuls of dirt into my mouth and organize it by texture before spitting it out into three different piles.

Pray through spittle and salt water.
Straight from the spout.
Bitterness is an acquired taste

Pray through
spittle and salt water.
Straight from the
spout.
Bitterness is an
acquired taste

Pray through spittle and salt water.
Straight from the spout.
Bitterness is an acquired taste

Pray through
spittle and salt water.
Straight from the
spout.
Bitterness is an
acquired taste

Have you ever thought about
reaching your hand deep
into the pit of your stomach
and starting to pull and pull
until
you take whatever feeling that
lives there out, into the world,
into the bright sunlight,
bearing it so all could see?

If I were you— I would
swallow it down again.

evelyn bauer is a best-of-the-net nominated writer and (normal) bookseller living on stolen land in so-called ‘New England.’ She is often found reading books, petting cats, and listening to experimental music. You can find some of her other work at evelynbauerpoet.com, and her poetry has been published in such mags as Stone of Madness, fifth wheel, Moist Poetry Journal, and Heavy Feather Review. Peruse her twitter at @neo_cubist

Maggie Farren

There’s a small town in Switzerland where I buried your name under my tongue.

We were running into the lake at night,
or where we approximated it to be.
We were running into the dark mouth
that the sky and earth opened up for us.
The small pebbles dug into our heels so we tried
to float but the water wanted nothing to hold so it
shook us in its freezing fist until we couldn’t feel
much of anything at all.

We were standing on the shore shaking
water from our hair like dogs after a storm.
We were standing like no one had ever stood
here before—like the grass was tasting the word
‘Man’ on its tongues for the first time. We were
towel-less, we were shivering, we were watching
the stars poke holes in the sky.

We were dressing each other with soft words like
sweaters and woolen socks. We were in love with
everything we could see—which was nothing concrete
at all. In the small clicks of light you are only two
cupped hands and a mouth and I am Promethian.
The gods are waiting.

Maggie Farren is a writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She recently graduated from Boston University with a Master’s in English. Her work has been featured in The Allegheny Review, The Beacon, The Back Bay Review, on poets.org, and by Pen & Anvil Press.

Jessica Hsu

for mother (Earth)

framed in a picture you and I
of this world honey blessed
blood must run thicker than
half-uttered apologies hoard
in our museums memories
for our entertainment as if
by carving the word eternity
in my desiccated name found
desperate for nourishment in
agony imagination is the only
solution you laminate this lost
story with spurned grief I begin
from your body we nearly forget
stamped on legal documents
we mutter equivalent syllables
in a home holding canyons &
after a bridge built too quickly
to forgive. but just today I finally
understood how much I wished
to refuse when you told me to
care of our reality now with
feeble attempts to see change

next to school two of hundreds
deer kneel languid & still
rivers we cry out ignoring the
riches in all the relics embalmed
from regret harvesting numbers
minced to feed our every want
in chests of anointed species
from the wails of chosen sentinels
observing swollen cats full with
child we capture science for a
photo for the curious we find
remembering tolls as tedious
how different we see warnings
when dust slips into our lungs
taking breaths that condemn
gifts like consolation prizes
we did not desire anymore
(when seeing the two deer)
to make art with clean soil
just lie still in seats mercurial
depleted shellfish reason why
we so close to ceasing must

stay

Jessica Hsu is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, with work forthcoming in The Ignatian and Star 82 Review. Outside of writing, they’re busy attempting to keep their aloe plants alive.

Dominic Leonard

God Ballad

for C

GOD of out-of-office response
GOD as the folly of form
GOD as half-rhymed nonchalance
GOD as electrical storm

GOD of cheap wine and cheaper pathos
GOD as the trill ecstatic
GOD of Augustan tracts on bathos
GOD locked in the viscount’s attic

GOD of whatever GOD gave to El Greco
GOD of the perishing flora
GOD of doggerel and the darkling echo
of GOD and anaphora

GOD of sad dads and GOD of rot
GOD of just passing through
GOD of doing even half of what
you said to GOD you’d do

GOD of out-of-office response
GOD as the folly of form
GOD as half-rhymed nonchalance
GOD as electrical storm

GOD of cheap wine and cheaper pathos
GOD as the trill ecstatic
GOD of Augustan tracts on bathos
GOD locked in the viscount’s attic

GOD of whatever GOD gave to El Greco
GOD of the perishing flora
GOD of doggerel and the darkling echo
of GOD and anaphora

GOD of sad dads and GOD of rot
GOD of just passing through
GOD of doing even half of what
you said to GOD you’d do

Dominic Leonard was born in West Yorkshire. His work can be found in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, the TLS and elsewhere. His pamphlets, “love, bring myself” and “Dirt,” are published with Broken Sleep. In 2019 he received an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2022 he won the Oxford Poetry Prize.

Fatima Zahra

scratch your back with a toothless comb

i sit at wood polish docks
at 5 in the morning & christen myself
human for another day. pale grey-blues peek from
the candy green water – science project
whales in shrink wrap. red bows on my counter.
no whale come inland but mine says my dad. he chews dried
jerky of animals he can’t pronounce. he is proud of knowing where
your brother rests so i ask him if he’s scheduling a family reunion
on the sea bed there are so many bodies you can’t tell
which one you are. on the sea bed men are rumoured to have loved each other
for the first time.
next to grandad’s grave we drink salt water and each other’s silences.
your brother has been dead for fifty days and he has never told me so i ask him what
his name is and he tells me he doesn’t know. i start digging the ground with my ribs
to bury his name. you swim next to me so we form our own triangle and sob
within it’s boundaries. let’s drown
together and call this the new bermuda

Fatima Zahra (She/Her) is a writer from India. She loves basil seeds and debating. You can find some of her work in anamorphoseis magazine, the noctivagant magazine, ilinx lit mag, and others.

Amy Jannotti

WIN ME A BANANA AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

the world is dying a heat death & i wanna lick my silly lil custard cone & string from the neck upside down. like a carnival toy, or the playboy bunny. to asphyxiate, but erotically. to kill, or be deprived of air. how can we ghost with no breeze. i’m researching the aesthetic history of Sprite cans because i cannot believe the sense memory of a color or font. i’m feeling unfavorable in my transite skin: avant-garde, or even ugly. i wanna be demolished but the smile’s sewn in. the world is dying, yet i sustain my rat sounds, & what i mean by that is: there are giant fixtures on the ceiling that look like fiberglass balloons. what i mean is: my prize is fragile. what will bounce my echo back.

WHERE I GO WHEN I DAYDREAM

take the eden pill! the dreamfield’s made of drugs.
there was a mountain range but i deep-throated it;
turned myself

snowcap fog et cetera! i have become the kind of ice that melts!
stand too close to (me) the camera so i can see all

ur sweatdripped pores. it’s classic language of foreign cinema!
some kind of commentary on how ugly Man™ is

(in opposition to the natural world)!
this could be heaven except the mist has blotted out
the sun.

i will not apologize for eating the landscape:
not when i look so much like a glass
of spilled milk.

take the eden pill! the dreamfield’s made of drugs.
there was a mountain range but i deep-throated it;
turned myself

snowcap fog et cetera! i have become the kind of ice that melts!
stand too close to (me) the camera so i can see all

ur sweatdripped pores. it’s classic language of foreign cinema!
some kind of commentary on how ugly Man™ is

(in opposition to the natural world)!
this could be heaven except the mist has blotted out
the sun.

i will not apologize for eating the landscape:
not when i look so much like a glass
of spilled milk.

CAKE & SODA

is it product placement: baby limbs on the table. how i’ve centered myself in the frame. is it cloying sentiment pastelled with ribbon, seating all of us together like this. our colas line up brand-side out. i can’t help but read sadness where the dark circles of our eyes turn down. weren’t we a family once; now sideways & spilling. now red & solo. the presents idle (unopened) just out of view, as if the idea, not the content, matters. i don’t think who i am matters much either, if you dress me up. it’s hard not to notice when one child is held fast like no one could survive their slipping, but the other is barely propped up. too many split atoms make a family go nuclear. what if love were an octopus that never ran out of arms. what if i swelled to the size where i could, if i wanted, swallow the whole cake in one bite, but – in my grace – i shared it. what if, in the afterlife, we’re made of the same stuff as balloon.

Amy Jannotti (she/her) is a pile of dust in a trenchcoat living & writing in Philadelphia. She is the author of 3 chapbooks (most recently, ANGELS & INSECTS ARE CREATURE WITH WINGS from Kith Books). Her poems can be found in Olney Magazine, Black Stone / White Stone, Non.Plus Lit, & elsewhere. She tweets @cursetheground.

Andrea Krause

In Praise of Estate Planning

Mortal people, they’ve procured deeds
to cemetery plots, decided where dirt will
come to know them. The contract reads logical
& certain, signed off with detachment. Orderly
into plastic sheet protectors, punched holes
reinforced in a binder. I recall how important
it felt to slip middle school manuscripts
into those shiny capsules. They belong to the earth
and they can prove it. Common soil, acquired
in a consistently cringe peninsula state & I think of
those blank lots a lot, like ceramic tiles, 2-foot
x 2-foot mega squares, mass produced
headstones, pebbly beige surfaces, separated by
a quarter-inch of sandy grout. A man-made sea
of graves, plowed into the land of That State Man
doing disasters ad nauseam. & god only knows
the fate of the entire region, give it 50 years—
we’ll keep chasing capitalism
sirens into the rising Gulf & Atlantic,
industrialize our existence bone by bone,
marked down like estate sale seconds. Watch
nature serge her ragged hems like a professional
seamstress; zip up golf courses & graveyards
into steam & brine teeth. How will they mark
the spot where the sunshine state was lost.
My parents will also be Atlantis.

Andrea Krause (she/her) lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published/forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The Inflectionist Review, Many Nice Donkeys, HAD, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter at @PNWPoetryFog and at andreakrausewrites.com.

DeeSoul Carson

Exhibition of a Dying City

In consideration of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”

1. Bird on Money, Jean-Michel Basquiat

a blackbird, maybe
a raven
or
a crow
or

something slightly less ominous
flies past the little
red
sign of the greenwood
liquor

store, settling on a forgotten franklin.
i watch from my window
as its kin
descend
on the green note,

worthless
as far as they are concerned,
& they are not.
as we trek in all directions
through
this godless city, the bird
glides
back over the waves of the ice-bath river,
back to its snow-dusted nest
where the green
eventually makes sense,

& dreams, as we do, of death

1. Bird on Money, Jean-Michel Basquiat

a blackbird, maybe
a raven
or
a crow
or

something slightly less ominous
flies past the little
red
sign of the greenwood
liquor

store, settling on a forgotten franklin.
i watch from my window
as its kin
descend
on the green note,

& dreams, as we do, of death

Back home, as the day crawls closer to its end,
what seems like all the crows in Southeast swarm
around the Westfield Plaza Bonita Mall, hundreds
of the damned things staking their claim. They look
like something out of a horror movie,
how they all change direction simultaneously,
wordless, the same coiling movement, the wind’s
tar, pulsating heartbeat. I often wonder how arrogant
we are to consider ourselves God’s most beloved creatures.
Turtles are born with armor & live up to 200 years.
Birds are born with wings to soar & escape.
What do we have, but flesh & war & allergies
to peanuts? No, the animals are so loved,
they’ve never heard of God in the first place.

3. Die Orden der Nacht, Anselm Kiefer

man lies centered in the blooming
death,
a city absent
of
petals,

unsure if he is
dying
or trying to be.
the dirt is cracked
& resentful,

though maybe it has always been.
i am sure
it was
beautiful
here once,

before the sunflowers drooped
black
like
the earth’s swollen eyes,
before there
was ever a human

to speak of. how lucky
we’d be, to arrive
at the world’s
end & say
look! see what
we’ve done!

even death wants nothing of us

3. Die Orden der Nacht, Anselm Kiefer

man lies centered in the blooming
death,
a city absent
of
petals,

unsure if he is
dying
or trying to be.
the dirt is cracked
& resentful,

though maybe it has always been.
i am sure
it was
beautiful
here once,

before the sunflowers drooped
black
like
the earth’s swollen eyes,
before there
was ever a human

to speak of. how lucky
we’d be, to arrive
at the world’s
end & say
look! see what
we’ve done!

even death wants nothing of us

I didn’t know wildfire could do that.
My friends and I woke to a choking sepia sky
as the smoke drifted, settling on anything & everything
in the Bay like fine dust. We drove to a lighthouse
standing guard on the rocky coast, watching
for the ghosts of ships long departed.
If it was the end of the world, we didn’t care.
I told myself this would make for a great story
I’d never tell my kids someday. How the flames
licked the sky red in one direction & the ocean
threatened to devour us in the other. How if either
had their way – if the sea swallowed us whole,
if the blaze left the West Coast smoldering –
they’d have been justified.

5. The Enclave, Richard Mosse

there is a war happening
someplace
the trees grow pink, far
from everything we’ve learned
to love.

the water, when found,
shimmers like
tomorrow, either the one
you’ve dreamed of
or the one not
promised.

this is how they hide
the massacre
from us –behind lavender,
far beneath the crimson
& ivory &
sapphire.

when you ask for the dead,
the soldiers will tell
you,
instead, how sweet the air was,
how every burrowed bullet
was just a seed

finding fresh soil, how peaceful
the bombs looked
as they dropped, like freedom
finding itself again
in a new
country

& the country being laid to rest

5. The Enclave, Richard Mosse

there is a war happening
someplace
the trees grow pink, far
from everything we’ve learned
to love.

the water, when found,
shimmers like
tomorrow, either the one
you’ve dreamed of
or the one not
promised.

this is how they hide
the massacre
from us –behind lavender,
far beneath the crimson
& ivory &
sapphire.

when you ask for the dead,
the soldiers will tell
you,
instead, how sweet the air was,
how every burrowed bullet
was just a seed

finding fresh soil, how peaceful
the bombs looked
as they dropped, like freedom
finding itself again
in a new
country

& the country being laid to rest

If you ask me my thoughts on war,
I will always tell you it is terrible,
and that is true. It is also true I often
do not have to think of war, nor bombs,
nor the rubble left in their wake.
If I could trade my brown for yours,
I still could not stop the world from hating
us both, and for that, I am sorry.
I am still searching for something
more potent than a sorry to offer.
If I thought it would help, I’d ask my God
to try again. Maybe he already has.
If there’s a version of me that’s survived,
I pray it was worth it in the end.

DeeSoul Carson (He/They) is a poet and educator from San Diego, CA, currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work is featured or forthcoming in Voicemail Poems, Muzzle Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Offing, & elsewhere. A Stanford Univerity alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and New York University, where he is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com.

Christina Hennemann

Canine

The male gorilla has much larger canines than
the female. Not merely functional teeth for
tearing, but a threatening gesture. Cuspids, eye
teeth, vampire fangs seem fitting for a blood-
thirsty animal. That’s how I caught you,
roaming the beach, canine teeth glimmering
under the silver sky. I recognised myself
in your grin. Remember how we both bared
our fangs, prowled on quiet paws, ready
to lunge at any moment? What you gave me
wasn’t mash and butter, its substance sinews
and meat and salt. It hit me right to the bone
and marrow, sharp and leaving a bite on my neck—
a birthmark.

Christina Hennemann is a poet and prose writer based in Ireland. Her debut poetry pamphlet was published by Sunday Mornings at the River in 2022. She won the Luain Press Poetry Competition, was shortlisted in the Anthology Poetry Award and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. Her work appears in The Moth, fifth wheel, Ink Sweat & Tears, Moria, National Poetry Month Canada, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a full-length poetry collection. www.christinahennemann.com.

Carson Jordan

FOOT IN MOUTH

all I want to be is
full of ease
loose and defiant
no shortage of
piss and vinegar
pink energizer bunny
social butterfly

but in my leisure
daffodil is insult
I’m all washed up
wifed up wiped out
and he’s lost his patience
with my malaise
I won’t buy blinds
my brass tacks are dependent
on my need to see my neighbor’s
and my wave back body
bad bad girl

it’s Grecian pot scene
I’m on the bed, in despair
everything that annoys me
I do too
have I lost my edge
wearing my sunscreen
and not going anywhere
I’m my closet’s
Sunday Driver

how come it’s not interesting
to be sorry
how come it’s gauche
to mourn the party

my negative capability
is I can’t blame being a cunt
on being a drunk
my redemption arc
is almost as boring
as my blessed fall
time is long
life is round
but thank god
I’m lucid

all I want to be is
full of ease
loose and defiant
no shortage of
piss and vinegar
pink energizer bunny
social butterfly

it’s Grecian pot scene
I’m on the bed, in despair
everything that annoys me
I do too
have I lost my edge
wearing my sunscreen
and not going anywhere
I’m my closet’s
Sunday Driver

how come it’s not interesting
to be sorry
how come it’s gauche
to mourn the party

my negative capability
is I can’t blame being a cunt
on being a drunk
my redemption arc
is almost as boring
as my blessed fall
time is long
life is round
but thank god
I’m lucid

GOOD FRIDAY

it took so much loss
to find standing room in peace
freed myself from
starting shit again
life is turbulent enough
you know,
I am
Doll parts

I love the word several
several years of partying
several playmates left
several times a villain
several pounds of flesh

do you remember when Snooki
cried wolf on the beach
“I’m a fucking
good person”
I’ll save the water works
for another day

do you like my body?
do you want some money?
I can make it hard for anyone
I can suck
all the air out of a room
but can we talk about feeling good

can we talk about it
can we talk about me

on the trail there’s a sign
temple of love
ruin garden
outlaw,
church is everywhere

This poem previously appears in dreamboybookclub‘s Series 3.

Carson Jordan is a poet and clown living in Brooklyn, NY. Her first chapbook, GOOD FOR HER, was released by Dirt Child Press in April of 2022. You can find her work in Peach Mag, Pan Pan Press, bedfellows magazine, The Quartless Review, Bruiser Mag, April April, dream boy book club, and Wax9.

Rachel Linton

Normal Human Lifetime

Short-period is what the astronomical bodies call
seventy-five to seventy-nine years. For anyone else, that length
of time would mean we weren’t friends anymore, but for
Halley’s Comet, I’ll make an exception. In with it and out with it,
said Mark Twain. Once in a normal human lifetime, unless,
like Mr. Twain, you have truly exceptional timing.

I don’t. I have an appointment with Halley’s Comet in mid-2061,
the furthest thing out on my Google Calendar. I haven’t invited anyone
else. It’s hard to make plans that far out. My father
turned sixty-eight yesterday. I called him from my apartment
in Chicago, our connection going in and out as he drove through
the California mountains. Over the phone he said,
twenty-one years left. His father died at eighty-nine; my vote for
an even hundred was brushed off. But I’m twenty-six.
Twenty-one years is almost as long as I’ve been on this planet;
too far away to have feelings about quite yet.

I will be sixty-four when I meet the comet. It last came by
eleven years before I was born. I look a lot like my mom,
so maybe it will recognize me. Last summer she and I
watched the eclipse from the driveway of the apartment building,
laughing, taking bad iPhone photos of the moon, coming in and out
to get dessert while we waited for totality. She will be ninety-six.
It might be a long shot (her mom died at eighty-three) but I’m
voting for one-hundred. I’m voting to stand in the driveway together
and stare up at the only galactic traveler who bothers
with a timescale we can comprehend. I’m voting we drive out
to the desert to get the full brightness, gleaming in the wash
of stars, calling upward to the heavens hello,
friend, it’s been a while, do you
remember me?

Family Resemblance

When I say I have a twin, people always ask
if we look alike. We look related,
I reply, and I pull up a picture
on my phone and hand it over.
They study us for a minute, the tiny faces
on the screen, a photo from somewhere
in Alaska—matching jackets, matching grins.
Oh yes, they say, passing the phone back,
You do look alike. Our eyes are
different colors, but our faces—
they’re mostly shaped the same.
We could probably trade: cheekbones,
jawbones, ribs. The femurs would be
the wrong size (too short on me,
too long on him.)

Now they’re saying that in a cave
in Russia there’s a family of Neanderthals—
the first family they’ve found,
all together. They knew, somehow: DNA,
maybe, but I like to think they just
looked alike, tangled together,
exchangeable cheekbones,
exchangeable ribs.

I like to think that’s the way
it always is for family—that there’s
something there, a kinship
deeper than skin, deeper
than death. That someone
could see us in 54,000 years
and still say, brother
when all that’s left
are our bones.

Rachel Linton is a playwright, poet, and law student at the University of Chicago. Her poetry has previously appeared in Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, The Sunlight Press, and Strange Horizons, among others. You can find her online at rachellinton.com.

David Joez Villaverde

Defenestration

There is nothing new to say. Poetry must quail before history. Kettled in the cloister, I catch myself nodding absent-mindedly. We workshop sincerity, cosplaying praxis, or we workshop praxis, cosplaying sincerity. I am learning to retcon the lyric, make my arguments unseen. On campus, a famous bard has married his pupil. He asks that we don’t speak his name. He hands out free books. Reading becomes an act of complicity. By night, he edits his entry in our book of dreams. We dream of laving in fame, its absolution. We dream of stagecoaches, bullseyes, the imprimatur of banks and supermarkets. We polish our words like coins or bayonets, imagining the plume of fire trailing an outbound missile.

Outside: precarity blossoms like a bloodstain, blight claims the shade we once slumbered beneath. The marble pediment dissolves in the rain. A murmuration throbs though dusk. Starlings alight atop the crumbling statuary, indifferent to our absence. Even gods must die. For the future to be born, we must become the past. All of us. Everyone. Everything. The life I’ve sought out is hurtling away from me. I have been tasked with finding meaning in this. Putting it to words. Something to comfort, something to hold. I know these words will not hold you. We ask too much of words. Or I do. I ask of them what hands refuse. What gods refuse. I am asking you, please. Please do more

t
h
a
n

m
e

t
h
a
n

m
e

David Joez Villaverde has recently received his MFA from the University of Michigan where he was a Helen Zell Fellow. He has received recognition from CantoMundo, The American Academy of Poets, Black Warrior Review, and Best New Poets among others. Recently his work has appeared in The Rumpus, Diode, Thrush, and Frontier Poetry. He lives in Detroit and can be found at schadenfreudeanslip.com

SG Huerta

san martian anthropoetics

the deer here know more than i could hope to. their awareness of danger sharper.
their steps more certain. i want to know how they love. it’s not a question
of if. i imagine a mother warning her fawn away from the murky
river when the sun pervades every inch of earth mid-july.
i imagine i’d be a shitty deer. i imagine my instincts
inaccurate regardless of species. i envy them.
what i’d do to stand in front of a moving
metal death trap but somehow
still survive. immortalize
me on a shitty bic
lighter from
7-11.

SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer. They are the Poetry Editor of Abode Press, a new intersectional Texan press. SG is also the author of two chapbooks, The Things We Bring with Us (Headmistress Press) and Last Stop (Defunkt Magazine). Their work has appeared in The Offing, Split Lip Magazine, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. Find them tweeting @sg_poetry or at sghuertawriting.com

Rose du Charme

The Reliquary

I don’t know if Saint Fiacre was immortalized against will but I do
know that his arm is still outstretched. Encased and displayed
in the MET’s collection under the pretense of protection. Sacrifice for
sacrament leaves the body torn apart. The casket open and empty.
Patrons pass by like moths set on something brighter. I linger.
What is he reaching for? I am reaching for my garden.
I have buried an extra rib for safe keeping and
at night I dream about digging it up, ripping out the
daffodils and daisies – building a boy from bone.
That is not how the myth goes. Is it?
I have not read the Bible in years. I have not been
that small girl in her Sunday clothes, ever. I remember
staring at the stained glass. Sitting in the pew and
praying for a new name – opening my same brown eyes.

Rose du Charme is a poet from Long Island, New York. They have been published in HIKA Magazine. You can find them in Washington Square Park writing poems for strangers on their typewriter or email them at rose.k.du.charme@gmail.com.

Gráinne Condron

Tony

After ‘Artificial Intelligence for Dummies’, ‘Klara and the Sun’, and a ‘Parent’s Guide to High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder’.

Thursday / an Ishiguro sort of morning
adorned with – not dressed // my name could be Klara maybe even Emily.

Nothing much goes on these days
but i like the haze of the house blare of news in the background grip of sleep at midday
and when mum talks about work i’m really proud.

I’ve discovered if I time it right
I get to see the big machine that cleans the Cul-de-sac
I don’t know what they’re called
but that’s not important because i like the way it dances in a clean-cut U.

I’ve called it Tony because that seems like a good name for a good thing
and last night Mum told me that Tony is being taught how to talk – to be a big brave boy.

But the best part of my Tony is brushes at the front
round bristle spin scrub nook and cranny touch every piece of moss and every little bit of gravel with
gentle swaying baleen that i think would tickle.

Thursday. And not Klara or even Emily!
but the child with small head all seedy oil one spot flatter and greasier than the rest terrified of the
shower even though her name is Flora.

If they can teach a machine to talk maybe they could have taught me
bitta magic in those stars after all bit more than numbers.

And if Tony is alive
they are humming softly glowing lovely profession

gladly –
having no thoughts whatsoever
and no notion of a name.

Thursday / an Ishiguro sort of morning
adorned with – not dressed // my name could be Klara maybe even Emily.

Nothing much goes on these days
but i like the haze of the house blare of news in the background grip of sleep at midday
and when mum talks about work i’m really proud.

I’ve called it Tony because that seems like a good name for a good thing
and last night Mum told me that Tony is being taught how to talk – to be a big brave boy.

Thursday. And not Klara or even Emily!
but the child with small head all seedy oil one spot flatter and greasier than the rest terrified of the
shower even though her name is Flora.

If they can teach a machine to talk maybe they could have taught me
bitta magic in those stars after all bit more than numbers.

And if Tony is alive
they are humming softly glowing lovely profession

gladly –
having no thoughts whatsoever
and no notion of a name.

Gráinne Condron is a poet and writer based in Dublin. Her work has been published under the Belonging Project, HEBE Poetry, and the Brendan Kennelly Cup. She attended the Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2023 as a Young Writer Delegate. Her work traverses topics from climate anxiety to childhood and queer joy.

Jay Ritchie

LISTENING IN MANY PUBLICS

grooves in the cold, wet grass
made by a swinging gate
I thought about early textiles,

the materialization of social order
Fake flowers Real feelings

Become It’s work
When the motion
means to leave with oneness

“Your most opposite person your greatest teacher.”

I also heard
night wind knocked out the power in regions
not far from here, though far-sounding,
regions that voted differently

The trees are not metaphorical.
They are not what you lack
or the lack you desire

a heron alights on a small mound of earth
protruding from the confluence of rivers
initiating a subtle change in behaviour

To break the pattern first you must accept it:
Say, “Hello pattern,”

Today I saw the Coca-Cola truck again

Discover nothing & remember

There are also changes
There is hope these changes
I approach the corner building ready to ascend

What is positioned directly opposite you now?

& what is just to your side, prepared to alter
the angle of approach?

There is resolve window sashes the stone
that keeps the weight of the building from collapsing
onto the windows

A weight that lifts itself.

The line is the surface
& it is the bottom Below that opens onto heaven

of culture nested inside tragedy,
comprehensible or rationalized only through
grief for what was lost & is longed for
via the signifiers of loss & what you would
be if not for

Experience mediated by how to convey it

grooves in the cold, wet grass
made by a swinging gate
I thought about early textiles,

the materialization of social order
Fake flowers Real feelings

Become It’s work
When the motion
means to leave with oneness

“Your most opposite person your greatest teacher.”

I also heard
night wind knocked out the power in regions
not far from here, though far-sounding,
regions that voted differently

The trees are not metaphorical.
They are not what you lack
or the lack you desire

a heron alights on a small mound of earth
protruding from the confluence of rivers
initiating a subtle change in behaviour

To break the pattern first you must accept it:
Say, “Hello pattern,”

Today I saw the Coca-Cola truck again

Discover nothing & remember

There are also changes
There is hope these changes
I approach the corner building ready to ascend

What is positioned directly opposite you now?

& what is just to your side, prepared to alter
the angle of approach?

There is resolve window sashes the stone
that keeps the weight of the building from collapsing
onto the windows

A weight that lifts itself.

The line is the surface
& it is the bottom Below that opens onto heaven

of culture nested inside tragedy,
comprehensible or rationalized only through
grief for what was lost & is longed for
via the signifiers of loss & what you would
be if not for

Experience mediated by how to convey it

Jay Ritchie is the author of the poetry collection Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books, 2017). He has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst where he won the Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry, the Skolfield/Goeckel Award for Poetry, and the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at McGill University, where his dissertation examines intermedial poetics in the context of deindustrialization and digitality. His poetry manuscript Collective Reciprocity was a finalist for Wendy’s Subway 2021 Open Reading Book Prize, judged by John Keene, and will be published with Invisible Publishing in 2024.

Phoebe Kalid

afterparty

a kaleidoscopic blur in the upstairs bathroom
smears her lipstick on the crisp plane of your collar
murmuring so sexy

tonight so self-indulgent-saprophyte
sucking on the bloated bulk of Good Old Times

meanwhile you are thinking about foxes proper ones

spanning the steppes making happy little parabolas
all over the arctic and yet you have not seen a fox
in a very long time or if you have

it has always been dead like how once driving on the M25
you saw what could have been

a fox cub smeared against the asphalt
so you spent the rest of the trip scrolling through
high-res stock images of roadkill on the internet

the blackened tongues whipped back
like business ties the pink pageantry of guts
spewed from gaping paunches the lucky few
who could have just been sleeping
(still smiling
still orange)
spanning continents for squirrels/birds/
the soggy vestiges of abandoned happy

meals masters of earth’s magnetic field half-starved
and torch-eyed in the dark funk of waste bins

between you and me i find it

so fucking stupid how they never see
the cars coming but then again
neither did we

a kaleidoscopic blur in the upstairs bathroom
smears her lipstick on the crisp plane of your collar
murmuring so sexy

tonight so self-indulgent-saprophyte
sucking on the bloated bulk of Good Old Times

meanwhile you are thinking about foxes proper ones

spanning the steppes making happy little parabolas
all over the arctic and yet you have not seen a fox
in a very long time or if you have

it has always been dead like how once driving on the M25
you saw what could have been

a fox cub smeared against the asphalt
so you spent the rest of the trip scrolling through
high-res stock images of roadkill on the internet

meals masters of earth’s magnetic field half-starved
and torch-eyed in the dark funk of waste bins

between you and me i find it

so fucking stupid how they never see
the cars coming but then again
neither did we

‘what hath god wrought?’

– the first telegram sent by Samuel Morse to mark the opening of the
Baltimore–Washington telegraph line in 1844. The phrase had been
chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of Morse’s close friend and
patron.

– the first telegram sent by Samuel Morse to mark the opening of the Baltimore–Washington telegraph line in 1844. The phrase had been chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of Morse’s close friend and patron.

said girl to machine seventeen surrounded
with the word of christ safe in her sleeve

approximately 40 miles away in an old railway station
the question rattled in its cage and everybody screamed

they were so excited there was so much stuff left

to invent like digital clocks air fryers
app-controlled vibrators trout fish flip flops

the girl in my phone tells me babe remember
your steps!!! your breakfast!!! and i think
fuck she’s so right my steps my breakfast

yesterday i trapped a really big grief in my yoga mat
and now i’m scared it’s laid eggs or grown bigger than me

if we cut the world open there’d be wires instead of roots
fluorescent tubes diffusion panels crazy to think
there used to be butterflies snow so sharp it stung

and silence true silence a silence so thick

you could wring it into your mouth and drink
now everything hums forever and the blocks
in our pockets keep telling us to kill ourselves

and when i think Tomorrow i’m really thinking
Yesterday for example one day
my friends and i visit hope’s house
we have a big party and in the morning
i make us all breakfast and god comes

downstairs in his pajamas and says ummm the future
ended 179 years ago what are you guys still doing here

said girl to machine seventeen surrounded
with the word of christ safe in her sleeve

approximately 40 miles away in an old railway station
the question rattled in its cage and everybody screamed

they were so excited there was so much stuff left

to invent like digital clocks air fryers
app-controlled vibrators trout fish flip flops

the girl in my phone tells me babe remember
your steps!!! your breakfast!!! and i think
fuck she’s so right my steps my breakfast

yesterday i trapped a really big grief in my yoga mat
and now i’m scared it’s laid eggs or grown bigger than me

if we cut the world open there’d be wires instead of roots
fluorescent tubes diffusion panels crazy to think
there used to be butterflies snow so sharp it stung

and silence true silence a silence so thick

you could wring it into your mouth and drink
now everything hums forever and the blocks
in our pockets keep telling us to kill ourselves

and when i think Tomorrow i’m really thinking
Yesterday for example one day
my friends and i visit hope’s house
we have a big party and in the morning
i make us all breakfast and god comes

downstairs in his pajamas and says ummm the future
ended 179 years ago what are you guys still doing here

Phoebe Kalid is a writer and poet from London, England. She holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham. Currently, she is writing her first novel.

Again?

in print

Editor’s Note: This folio is being published during an intensified period of active genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonial settlement (in the most violent sense possible) by israel towards Palestine and its people. VIBE and everything it does will always be in fervent support of Palestine, its freedom, and its people. Violent industrially-facilitated genocide is one of the most prescient consequences and features of the Anthropocene, and thus it must form a central ideological and contextual fixture within any attempt at a poetry of the Anthropocene.

Palestine is not only a litmus test of integrity and moral clarity, it is one of bravery and strength: the consequences faced by the people of Palestine for simply existing in their home range from death and dispossession (at exceedingly young ages) to a life of physical and personal precarity, the complete absence of safety and security, and the continued, sustained trauma of witnessing the death of your loved ones and your community at the hand of, essentially, the whole world. At this time, I hope you will join me in engaging actively and seriously with Palestine’s struggle and the demands and efforts of its people. As the Palestinian people do everything they can to fight for their liberation, it is our moral duty to do the same in support of them.

Thank you for reading. Free Palestine and free Kashmir.

Anthropoetics

Anthropoetics

human centred poetry for a human centred planet

human centred poetry for a human centred planet

In The Clouds It Feels Like Dying

baseball

[What is the matter with you? Will you just say anything?]

The Fruit Picker Basket, Being Too Heavy for the Child to Use, and Beginning to Rust

Flight

Naturalism

A Hymn for the Anthropocene

Degrowth, a poem

want poem

My Birth

Negative Fish Light

An Alien Experiences Harmattan for the First Time

The Observatory

In silence with open mouths

Will you go where the river goes

Winter for instance

im sorry.

WET SPECIMEN: LOT’S WIFE

WET SPECIMEN: ODE TO FETAL DEER

WET SPECIMEN: MECONIUM ILEUS

WhatsApp Suite

apocalypso 2012

ad nauseam

smut (fungus)

On Reading, or Decay

Amen Break

There’s a small town in Switzerland where I buried your name under my tongue.

for mother (Earth)

God Ballad

scratch your back with a toothless comb

WIN ME A BANANA AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

WHERE I GO WHEN I DAYDREAM

CAKE & SODA

In Praise of Estate Planning

Exhibition of a Dying City

Canine

FOOT IN MOUTH

GOOD FRIDAY

Normal Human Lifetime

Family Resemblance

Defenestration

san martian anthropoetics

The Reliquary

Tony

LISTENING IN MANY PUBLICS

afterparty

'what hath god wrought?'

Victoria Mbabazi

Victoria Mbabazi

In The Clouds It Feels Like Dying

Samia Saliba

Samia Saliba

baseball

Bailey Cohen-Vera

Bailey Cohen-Vera

[What is the matter with you? Will you just say anything?]

Willow James Claire​

Willow James Claire​

The Fruit Picker Basket, Being Too Heavy for the Child to Use, and Beginning to Rust​

Eros Livieratos

Eros Livieratos

Flight

Flight

Naturalism

A Hymn for the Anthropocene

A Hymn for the Anthropocene

Nicodemus Nicoludis

Nicodemus Nicoludis

Degrowth, a poem

Degrowth, a poem

Erika Walsh

Erika Walsh

want poem

want poem

My Birth

Rafiat Lamidi

Willow James Claire

Willow James Claire

The Fruit Picker Basket, Being Too Heavy for the Child to Use, and Beginning to Rust