Everything, Poetry, Prose

SAND CRAWLERS PT. 1 by DANI PLANER

figure 1: and you were talking about fucking on the beach (about having sex on the beach) and i was reading everything you said choking on sandwiches constantly choking on things going down the wrong way and coming up as something more filled with feelings than i meant to ever really feel and you were […]

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Everything, Poetry, Prose

NORTHWEST PASSAGE by NATASHA BURGE

Concertina clavicles, you shrug and knitting needles escape flesh. Much genuflecting will follow. Alight, we shuck oysters and lick pearls. This is making love. This is the Northwest Passage. This is the loose thread that preludes hallucination. Imprisoned in nomenclature, you are unbridled and scathing. I wait for the word. One word and the sea […]

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Everything, Poetry

MOOD: ANXIOUS by DANIELLE CORCIONE

mood: anxious mood: waiting for your friend at the bus station mood: wandering aimlessly while eating a Cliff bar mood: “are you looking for Transit or Rail?” mood: soldiers in camouflage hovering mood: that aren’t traveling mood: getting too hot from wearing a jacket you don’t want to take off and lose mood: afraid of […]

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Everything, Poetry

NOTES ON TENDERNESS by KIKI NICOLE

i. & i once knew a Truthi swallowed it whole after we fuckedhow it crept thru on the down low,real slick,thick & heavy & embarrassing.love looked at me & exhaledgushed a song out of their mouth all“didn’t u like it?”i wanted to say it was all i had to live on.instead i lingered in the […]

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Everything, Poetry

GOD GIVES AN ELEGY by DIANA KHONG

my white willow name is doctor, creatorof cold sheets, levee raiser as i kisscheek & child, i am softer in my ownhands, but hard as light parsed through a man’s lens      to empty cement giants and husk men      i have left retrograding, i am sorryunder my heel: rainwater, my toe: typhooni am all weight, all heat — […]

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Everything, Poetry

& SO I CLIMBED by EKİN AYDOĞDU

& so i climbed the fig tree in my grandparent’s backyard, so i sat there the entire summer of  my sixteenth year, ate nothing but figs –                unripe, overripe, hard, soft, juicy,                sweet, sticky, cracked open like my       […]

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Everything, Poetry

BLUE SHIRT MAN by URVI KUMBHAT

Raindrops gathered on my nose like a piercing. It was that just awake, yawning Delhi rain Leaving me not quite wet not quite dry I am quite honestly lost in these gullies Rain has that faraway look in my eye quality— It scoops out my soul and scatters it in the dirt. Swanky house Block […]

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Everything, Poetry

DUST BOWL by STEVEN CHUNG

I travel westward to reach earlier time zones. Cross a line and I am an hour younger, though my body doesn’t know it. I will extend my life this way: by crossing borders. My ancestors did the same because they knew that the only hometown is the skin,

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Everything, Poetry

ENTOMOLOGY by IAN HILL

A blush of night-bloom. That exquisite last word. In the type of family that could afford To fall apart, a young girl grows More hands than things to cling to. She’s Just thumbnail innocence, motel white Wallpaper thighs and perforated silence In glitter flecked too-open hands.

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Everything, Poetry

COGNITIVE BEHAVIOUR THERAPY (CBT) by SAMANTHA CHEH

I sometimes wonder how, when I am not paying attention, from behind me, like a cinematic ghost, you creep back into the creases of my skin, where the sister-parts of my arms meet, the length of them seeming to break in two. Stiff like joss sticks burning down to ash, propped up in bricks laid […]

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Everything, Poetry

THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH AND OTHER NICETIES” by ALISON GRAHAM

I was the fishes’ lungs, the earrings                                                                                            1 on your daughter and polyphonic you were checking the time. – a hell of a way to go, uprooting leg hair                                                                                                3 and the picnic plate tongued by flies. When the news called me exceptional they spoke into a microphone of me: the […]

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Everything, Poetry

DISAPPEARING IN BEACON HILL by cj west

You are a hitchhiker’s brainwash, a negative gasmask, a pair of waiting hands vacant everywhere You are a hoarder of ridges, a concave risk, heartsick and craving bludgeon exchange in a room of soundless piano keys, pushed in. Lonely carnivore, with a dirty forehead a mouth of murder. You beautiful handsaw, ripping my roots to […]

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Everything, Poetry

BODY SAY WHAT IT FEELS LIKE by cj west

being touched in a charged body by      accident bounces bones enough to shed dead skinand leave flesh behind to finagle steady breath without a frame      of mind barely attached to a torso danglingout of the car window even if hanging on means swallowing      the one-winged mosquitos or pounding a steak until the vesselsrun dry and deformed or become […]

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Everything, Poetry

SPLATTER by cj west

—– cj west is a 20 yr old junior at Emerson College, where they created a major in Performance Poetry. They don’t care what your parents think of her tattoos. Their favorite things are: cats, bread, and women. Two they’re allergic to, one is out to get them. If they can’t change the world they […]

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Everything, Poetry

MISDIAL TONE by cj west

hi you might like the way the moon looks will you go outside and see for yourself put the phone down first open the door then close it take however long you need to make up your mind if you don’t come back before time runs out i won’t blame you doesn’t it look like […]

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Everything, Poetry

COVET by LAUREN MILICI

you kept my amethyst in your jacket / so I put a new piece of citrine in your palm / we sit at the bar & talk about cemeteries / tell me about your father again / talk about New York / that one time you were onstage dripping with blood & your best friend […]

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Everything, Poetry

QUEER (IN RETROSPECT) by AUDREY T. CARROL

15 and she invited me to sleep over at her place minimal adult supervision hours one and two dedicated to mocking a children’s movie because we were not children she let me test drive her violin, first string instrument I ever touched, told me my instinct by way of heritage

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Everything, Poetry

NO MANUAL FOR THE QUEER GIRL by DORA LEVY

my dear [ ], a.c. said that fragments are good things to inhabit, so i love you?/ i don’t know what this feeling is, because the last time i had a crush, i wrote songs for someone else in a way of disguising who it was for. (my first published work is really for you.) […]

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Everything, Poetry

GATHER AROUND OBSESSION by JESSIE JANESHEK

the wooden bridge stretching              over black cacti.   Remember calves breaking                  as fast as you can.   What do you tell                                  your body paraded?   That you’re not satisfied until you’re sick in the dark

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Everything, Poetry, Prose

PICK ME UP by KAYLI SCHOLZ

These knees, will be the pick-me-up when you fall on them. Knees, that you fell upon, crabby and rude in your A,B,C baby swing. You marveled at your mother in her cocktail gown, the shape of her shoes out of your reach. You lay there like a splinter until she picked you up. On your knees, struggling to see. Hide-and-seek […]

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Everything, Poetry

BURNING ANIMALS by ELIZABETH BREDER

Tied up in bedsheets, drooling kerosene— This slump is a slow burning fire. Death by boredom or starvation, or By the constriction of your own hands Around the sprig of your throat. Will you stumble, sleepwalking From the burning room or paint a portrait In ash on the mattress? I get up to put a […]

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Everything, Poetry

CRY WOLF by M. MILLER

judge, let it be known, it is so rare a girl cries wolf. the trial is so familiar, so familiar, so familiar (i am so tired) i could script it. ‘promising future’ and ‘boy of strong character’ and ‘first-time offence’. they report his swim times whilst she drowns

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Everything, Poetry

HOOFBEATS by FISAYO ADEYEYE

It’s the talons stabbed and spread through the nervous system that keep the mouse twitching and give it the performance of life. A boy reads the forest floor: A bouquet. A pitying. He reads the horizon: an unkindness.

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Everything, Poetry

GOOD HAIR by JASMINE COMBS

Parts of me are burning in dad’s ashtray. Tuffs of coiled hair engulfed in flame. Clink of hot-comb against stove. Crackle of fire against pomade. The house is smoky with the burning of my hair the flattening into submission the taming of the wild black the Saturday ritual.

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