And Lot's wife did look back....and I love her for that, because it was so human. - Kurt Vonnegut

What do you remember?

the stench of burning hair

a chlorine yellow haze

disobedience of the screen door

slam of my backward glance

Stand closer listen

to the rasp of my breath

as I become salt taste

the mineral of my fingertips

crystals sharp on your tongue

It’s not too late to turn back

watch me bid farewell

to my daughters

their bright bodies twisting

in the eucalyptus

I am here with the linens still damp

my palms frayed lace deadly

as an apricot kernel unblinking

as a lamp post

writing about you

with my eyelashes watching

as you disappear

across a blazing horizon

What do you remember?

Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn. The author of Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, (Write Bloody Press, 2023) her work appears in New York Quarterly, Solstice Magazine, The Maine Review, CALYX Press, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 poetry recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest, and the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is currently at work on her second collection of poetry, exploring female identity and artistic endeavor.

In this basil
I am Judas—
don't mean to wake you
when I talk about you,
carsick by your side.
Last year, a single year. While night, while
my husband worried all for nothing,
you were there and drove
that winter—rigid, escalating to a streak.
Parked it beneath my horse-
print scarf
and their unfixed postures,
none of whom were just yet grief.
None I recognised
as manic. I bathed
in those days like a thrush in marbles.
Could not walk
up the stairs like that, recall the room
that had the basil, or where I'd left
what you would bring me, anyway—storch
of sadness. You occur to me like a clave
does to a clave. Is this question, or desire:
what heart will lisp through my hands—
whose face between these night-lose
thirds? Fake, but with such true intention.
Isn't that enough?
You have spooned me like a pear
in spring, haven’t you?—you have! If I had an ear
like a magpie in the mist
of my husband's mouth, I'd tell this London
artist that no one, up to this hour,
from the moment he had sketched me,
had called
me Jonah, Giona, or Jojo, when
it is, in fact, late, I am weary—August is over
and looking for me, all that dead
bread in the toaster is burning again.

Slowly to my courage,
I climb the duckboards
like a deer into a late October
tree. Or a hand across the black
of an electric piano. Slouch
myself over a shrivelled pint.
Honey, the birds are building barns.
Honey, if I had nothing else,
I'd eat the grain from the paper
of the first year of our marriage.
I am always elsewhere when you call,
moving there, airy supplement for
airy supplement—I am cableless.
Walletless by the riverbank across you,
empty socks beneath the bed, and
I cannot what I cannot.
What if I did? Bring you coffee
tomorrow and all of our—
what if all of our
hydrangeas turned blue?

Nadine Hitchiner is a German poet and author of Practising Ascending (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2023 ) and the chapbook Bruises, Birthmarks & Other Calamities (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2021). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2023 Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has been published in Bending Genres, The Lumiere Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. She lives in her hometown with her husband and their dog. 

W and his daddy issues ended two affairs
I enjoyed that winter the crows left
butterscotch wrappers and ribbed condoms
on my back stoop both officers used
to enter me
into a database
tracking men who told
when asked top or bottom
age weight race height build hung
algorithms and servers humming
deep in the mountains I cruised
before the internet acronyms fell
like Baghdad and my missionary
was accomplished by Sunday brunch

My husbands Bo and Tom don’t see me
in the backyard. They’re busy
plating endive-bedded broccoli rabe
sprinkled with red pepper and something soyish
per the photos in our Loverboys group text.
Tom used to love us with buttered medium rares—
our Y2K riverfront condo era, Bo always shaking
vodka martinis opaque enough to hide
the future from our marathon-trained hearts.
Had you asked me to predict this
present domesticity, I would’ve
turned the other cheek—
as in my ass, lubed
and playing peekaboo
in the Pipeline’s crowded basement
as wild as the world that said I shouldn’t be
myself or marry a man, let alone two,
our guest fourth driving in tomorrow
for his monthly long weekend
of me watching, mostly.
They don’t see me
watching them swirl glasses of red wine,
delaying my reentry to the new queer geometry
of our house—I’m the oldest square
in our comfortable sphere and I wish
I were still a circle jerk superstar.
I wish we still lived in that condo
where the maintenance man serviced
residents in the freight elevator. I wish
they didn’t look so happy without me—
Tom kissing Bo after they toast
to what I’m not sure I want to
know anymore. Every Friday
it’s my turn to mow.

Hailing from the farmland valleys of west Appalachia, Ben Kline (he/him/his) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of Sagittarius A*, Dead Uncles, and the forthcoming It Was Never Supposed to Be, Ben is a storyteller, poet and Madonna megafan. His work appears in Poet Lore, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, MAYDAY, Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Gordon Square Review, POETRY, South Carolina Review and many other publications. Learn more about his work at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/. 

Half my bad childhood racial memories happened

at middle-school dances. The blond boy who snatched

the fresh Malcolm X hat off my head, threw it down

into a dancefloor mess of fruit punch & gritty footprints,

& told me you’re not black—stop pretending. (Entire careers

made of upholding that line when we refuse to run patrol

for them.) At another dance, I was ringed by leering

white faces that belted out, It don’t matter if you’re black

or white. I wasn’t sure what those faces meant, but I knew

they meant to hurt. I’ve never held that lyric against Michael

Jackson. I do find, though, listening to his old albums,

those Jackson 5 records with cuts like “Never Can Say

Goodbye,” has gotten hard. These days I know how that story

ends: the descent into dysmorphic madness, the predatory

doors bolted and shut behind boys, one stolen childhood

thieving another. My better angels think it’s wrong

to separate the art from the artist. I hated learning

Pound in school when we all knew he was a Fascist

& anti-Semite. He should have stayed locked

in the gorilla cage of his hate. But then I admit Miles Davis

has lodged brass notes irrevocably under my fifth rib,

and some of those notes he bent while blacking & bluing

Cicely Tyson. (Cicely goddamn Tyson . . .) & on the night MJ

died, I danced to his music in a circle of dancers until my shirt

was sweat-stuck to my chest, until I stank with grief.

I didn’t know then all that disgusts me now —the doors,

the boys—but the hard truth is: if the King of Pop died today,

I don’t think I could stop myself from letting hips sway

to music that, especially in the writhing all-night body rock

of a house party but even in my mother’s halting soprano,

pushes past joy to abandon. These moral currents cut the other

way too: the blond boy who snatched the “X” hat off my head,

when a young man, walked into a gas-station store to find a woman

being beaten by her boyfriend, & when the blond boy went to stop

him, the boyfriend ignited a lighter & touched it to the boy’s shirt,

which burned until it curled into a sneer & then stuck to his white skin.

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (2011), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, PoetrySociety.org and The Progressive. Outside of publishing poems, Pollock performs his work widely, from the Dodge Poetry Festival to libraries and art centers; he curated the Rye Poetry Path, a public poetry installation in Rye, NY; and he serves on the editorial board at Slapering Hol Press and on the board of Tiger Bark Press. Pollock currently directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College, where he edits the literary journal Inkwell. 

South:

weight, action, extreme, following

North* +

toiling, disclosing, flooding (salvation)

West* harvesting, words, stimulating

East*

Issuing, thunder, stirring up, pivoting

They have no idea where you came from -

*The Three-Year-Old Pu Yi Became China’s Last Emperor. Invaders came

RIVERTOWN

*The Japanese bombed Rivertown in 1939. Mom was born in a cave

RIVERTOWN

*The World Continued in Manmade Revolutions… Wars of Words & Dust

RIVERTOWN

Shao Wei came to the United States in 1996 and was raised near the Yangtze River in China. She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and an M.F.A from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. She earned her Ph.D. in CW from UT Dallas in 2015. Her accolades include a 2002 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, etc. She authorizes the poetry collection Pulling a Dragon’s Teeth and Homeland (Chinese version).

I could declare myself a Lady Lazarus like Plath

or a Jesus resurrected from the tomb. I am 

the Easter miracle, indeed. There is no doubting

Thomas here—I could’ve punished myself

more. I could’ve surrendered. My life expected

to stop that summer—the long walks, 

not eating, taking new pills—I would stop

to smell the white blossoms on that tree 

next to the blue house, a smell to say 

I’d won today, a little battle of not 

slitting my wrist, a little battle of sitting 

on my hands instead. I circled the neighborhood,

watching the white families play outside

with their white children. I let myself sweat, 

fingers dripping with my inner salt. 

I wanted to prove to them I was sick, 

but I wasn’t lazy. It’s hard work being 

sick and harder getting better. At home, 

the grapes I shifted around the bowl received 

my most gentle hand. Time doesn’t heal 

all wounds. Time is the wound. Behind a rock, 

three days would drive anyone mad. I still

don’t know the name of that tree. 

Fact: almost all hookups happen while watching The Office

Willingly? I’ve only made out with one dog

The universe brought us together on a summer night outside one of the shittiest bars known to man

Can I show you something? There’s no nudity in it

There are two wild turkeys in the Planet Fitness parking lot

The animal hospital is next to the roast beef sandwich shop

You’d think considering everything that happens at Hogwarts over the course of those seven years they would’ve closed the place down?

After he yelled in my face, he bought me a leather jacket, then a painting

Be grateful, get to know your ribcage

I used to call him beefcake

Fact: All honey has been in the belly of a bee

Fact: This time last year, I was masturbating while staying on an Amish farm

As naturally as he came into my thoughts

Like how a dark lord trapped in a freakin’ diary possesses a little girl, who then unleashes a deadly snake that roams the school through the plumbing and can kill anyone simply by looking directly into their eyes, not even after that?

That’s how unnaturally he will leave

L’s allergies: raw fruit, grass, trees, shellfish, peanuts

Do you know what it’s like to fuck a millionaire at midnight in his outdoor hot tub, moon peeking through the pergola?

Start thinking about struts, alignments, and plugs

By bus, New York City is only 5 hours from here 

No worries! I spoke your name into the room and there you were

I want intimacy like knowing your next dentist appointment

Sometimes words are just pretty

Sometimes almonds, horsehair

I perform survivor for the funders

Got a covid test and a pregnancy test going all at once 

I’m their girl for the dying flowers

Say: profundamente

It’s October 10th at 12:30 PM

I make myself look alone so they find me at the bar—reading a book, sipping gin

A regulated nervous system is a sexy nervous system

Every Property Brothers episode where the worst thing that could happen happens 

The millionaire said he wanted to put a rich baby in me

So they took down a load bearing wall and put a support beam in the ceiling  

Maybe I’m the blonde girl I was drowning in my dream, her hands identical to mine 

I almost sucked your dick near a pile of manure

At the bar, the drunk girl asks what happened to you? and I say everything 

I held her head underwater

J’s allergies: grass, down, dust, cats, mango skin, detergents, sensitive to canned foods

After he yelled in my face, he bought me another leather jacket

I bet Jesus fucked 

The condoms come in from Amazon, so I distribute them to all my purses

Anxiety attack near the gemstones at the Museum of Natural History

Say: I lost you and I did not die

I am the girl who brings the sandwich and then floats in the background unnoticed 

I almost sucked your dick at the museum

Contact-free delivery means no one will see you again

Sensitive to “Life on Mars” and the smell of cooked meat on my sweater

On planes, I like to watch what other people are watching on their screens

Can I show you something? There’s no nudity in it

Objects in mirror are sadder than they appear

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for TheBest of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.

we the fine-feathered-

dinosaurs who comet has come

straight down to blast 

in the very long jugular

as though cosmic consciously thought  

are heaping

the sky turns uterine 

the rain a kind of breeding 

with clear ends in sight 

terracotta waters so broad 

the breath is gone

vertebrae petrified 

because i am dead i cannot say

because i am dead i turn my head 

and see brother floating beside 

hands a strand of black hair 

a benevolence

jaw & hips broke open

India Lena González is a poet, editor, and artist. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University (BA) and received her MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. While at NYU she served as a writing instructor for undergraduates and received a Writers in the Public Schools fellowship enabling her to teach literature to middle school students via Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her work is published in American Chordata, The Brooklyn Review, Lampblack, PANK, Pigeon Pages, and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, India is also a professionally trained dancer, choreographer, and actor. fox woman get out! is her debut poetry collection. She lives in Harlem. 

In tune with the trees’ fated shiver, get sad

and try again, coughing up nostalgic sands as brass

melodies imitate a barbed wire memorial for the rain

to polish at which point you ask for directions

get lost in a city’s identical awnings renting your brain.

Then after that rain and the rain and rain with rain in it

raining the rain and the rain’s sibling the rain, I verify

my skin waiting for sheets of air or stale echoes,

the junctions the poem needed to free all threads

of resentment and desire. Time then held tight in the

shopping bags singing the future’s toothbrush into being

from muscles of commerce, the ghosts that wait along its river

aren’t even real, no time to stop and talk, this territory of bad still

sounds an empty room, air in the can, the clock the tree’s poetic

rot as a joke I don’t get, please tell it again.

Sit and think of violent movies your mother

would like, a rearranged scale to climb the blasted

scaffolding how voice folds and devours its tent

collapsing in rain and the mud groans ancient.

How you could just take it and reserve a table for poetry,

hold music on hold while the stroller wheel’s grocery

discovers nothing’s adjective nothing

facing down as dark water sunk the sensuous edges of a missile,

know that skin. Yeah, I still don’t want a country though

and its identities, its births breathing all documents

to hamburger horizons and national sunglasses

a slow limp across a parking lot as energy drinks

investigate the limb’s motion. Really, I’m a coupon

open book percentage on the picnic table

and the self-flagellating storms invent excuses

to mispronounce the applause across the river’s electrified

debris, that border will fuck with you, that muscle will be weak

about halfway across and then what, whose helicopter is that

blaring in the teeth’s imbalanced sleep when dawn’s rushes

come in the window they’re all left waiting for you, gardens

of violence beckon a summertime stroll, the blood visible

and then just a flower.

Tony Iantosca is a writer, poet and educator living in Brooklyn. His previous books include Naked Forest Spaces (Third Floor Apartment Press); Shut up, Leaves (United Artists Books); and To the Attic (Spuyten-Duyvil Publishing). Recent poems can be found in a Perimeter, a Glimpse of, Periodicities, and Second Factory, among others. Recent articles, essays and reviews can be found in Radical Philosophy Review, Im@go: a Journal of the Social Imaginary, Situations: a Journal of the Radical Imagination, and Tripwire.

all these aspen leaves burnt marigold.

the green of spruce a blush so blue

you’d call me greedy any day but this one,

which was heaven-sent if heaven were

a mirror & also horribly sad sometimes

& we named the space between trees

& she had horses, star-maned, tail held high.

i was higher than any home, un-hopeless

for six hours, drunk on gathering & grace.

mercy may have a hold on me, it was easy

to imagine. this could be like home.

you do not have to be good / at tests

to get someone to love you. see?

there’s always something left unsaid

& mostly it’s at present. watch me say:

i am not hungry.

Kristin Lueke is a Chicana poet living in northern New Mexico. She is the author of the chapbook (in)different math, published by Dancing Girl Press. Her work's appeared in HAD, the Acentos Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Hooligan Magazine, the Santa Fe Reporter and elsewhere.  

to my loving feeling lay your red

hand on me as i go you scorch

my tongue on the way back

down my throat. my burning feelings

you leave

you leave

an aftertaste like sale after sweat. i wince

at the affection i crave. i hold[ ] feelings

for you in.

does a gorge

echo if the [ ]

leave an echo if the empty

leave an echo if the empty

leave an echo if the soft part of a rock

is the only place

that feels its? i don’t know how to tell love

from [ ] after the first night you fall

asleep holding me i don’t fall asleep

i don’t fall [ ]

i lay my hand on yours you twitch

my fingertips burn in the morning we are the same but

i feel [ ] different

to my wanting feelings if i press my palm

on this hollowed

feeling , on your hand, can it fill me

will these [ ] feeling learn to feed me enough?

even if i don’t

know how to open for love i can find [ ]

can i find

a way to receive it just enough a way in

in case of emergency

do not break glass shell that holds me in

to my empty [ ]

to my empty feeling if i swallow a marble

will the glass make a sound against

the gorge of my gut

gorge [ ] my gut

will i burn

if i fill my mouth with memories

with [ ]

will i lay into love later will i learn to love you out loud eventually

do i have [ ]

do i have to melt

my shell to let these burning feelings in

to let

[

​Emma Sheinbaum is an essayist, poet, and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant, a genreless literary journal. Find her publications, full bio, writing recognition, and contact form here.