Everything

I’m not touching anythingI’m not breakingit’s no trouble at allI believe my fingers are thickeningat the tips like buds breakingopen I don’t even knowif it’s enough if it’s brokenor if it’s broken enoughwhen I touch somethingI’m not waiting for it to breakor disregarding it when it’s brokenhonestly I don’t even knowwhat it means to be […]

GOOD THING THERE’S A BURNOUT WEBINARA patron came in with a macheteGOOD THING I HAVE VOCATIONAL AWEMy new boss wants to rearrange everyone’s workstationsGOOD THING THERE’S A BURNOUT WEBINARSomeone dropped a pound of weed in the book-dropGOOD THING I HAVE VOCATIONAL AWEThere’s a class of 30 children shrieking in the libraryGOOD THING THERE’S A BURNOUT […]

It was an all hour war until it wasn’t. JD Vance’s face caved in on itself.People were walking on his nose.Straddling his lips like a slide,making cracks about his listless impotence.Someone sat on his earlobe like a couchthen read him critical race theoryand tickled him until he cried.The rest was crude and we moved awayfrom […]

Z. T. Corley is a Tennessee-based poet who recently graduated from Austin Peay State University with her B.A. in English. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Roanoke Review, Red Mud Review, Revolute, Outskirts, January House Literary Journal, and Hum. She is currently working on a poetry collection while serving as a reader for […]

5×5 board hand-drawn at the dinner tableOn the back of a restaurant postcardThe free space is the war in UkraineEnding in the wrong direction.The remaining 24 squares we divide into 3 categories:Communal, national, global. Communal is the most chipper:Sadie gets great sex, but also a UTIHospital clogs get big in BrooklynA mutual friend goes baldHopefully […]

Priyanuj Mazumdar is a writer, editor, and educator from northeast India whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Los Angeles Review, Allium, NonBinary Review, Harbor Review, BULL, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Minnesota Humanities Center, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Nadine B. Andreas Endowment. He was shortlisted […]

I don’t want to kill myselfI just want to move to New YorkThe evening skyline where I currently liveresembles a serrated stake knifefar too muchAnd it tempts meI take it upon myselfand walk back homewith the bosom of a Luzonbleeding-heart doveall casual-like too,arms a-swinging, whistlingthe radiodown the hillThe melody distracts mefrom the thought thatit’d be […]

here a view of the sea:achy blue, w/ fresh mist knit into your hair like wool. the surfers snip lithe lines,taut watercolor cheer. she eyes the pleasantries.  i have been deeply depressedbut start to see her as she is: segmented & all one, at peacew/ her ever changing roar. did you ever think you could […]

After Dan Pagis, for Joel Beinin נכתב באפר על קיר הממ״דאחרי דן פגיס, בשביל ג’ואל בייניןאני הדודסודום חטפה את הילד(ה) של אחיאני עומד מול אדוני עם תוכניתוואומר מסרב אני ל i the unclesodom swallowed the child of my brotheri stand before godwith his plan and i say i refuse to Eli N. (They/them) is a teacher based in Nevada. Their writing […]

I don’t remember the actual event but Ido remember it was aroundthe time I was feeling slightly suicidal andyou were watching House MDand laughing at whatever misadventurethose phony doctors were on and youlooked at me and diagnosed me withcavernous sinus thrombosis whichyou calmly explained as a blood clotat the base of my skull and I […]

David Lee Roth is still alive. So, not him.Misshapen strawberries—          ones like clumps of mud and small fists of children and the knot           that erupted on my forehead when my baby sitter’s son hit me with a rock.Every dead bartender.Love letters I’ve written then torn into pieces.Sea foam that collects rogue kelp branches and shattered flecks […]

i am tired of writing about youinstead of writing back. but my fear andhope fight like werewolves, each howling to the same moon, afraid to brave thewoods alone. for the woods i grew up in were unreliable. they transformed under the afternoonthunderstorms into mud hills, coated withslick leaves until the dead of january. they hummed […]

I’ve known them all—the scum that cakesthe innards of the leaking soda machine,the sticky residue of a removed name tagon a soft gray sweater, the foul stenchof a dead mutt crushed on the shoulderof Highway 370, the dried mud trappedin the tiny lines and crosses on the bottomof my purple running shoes, the dead wormsthat […]

Pennsylvania transforms at night, morphing into something that makes your heart lodge into your throat. You are seventeen. You are driving down Route 3, bleeding all over your beautiful leather seats, chewing away at your cuticles. Pennsylvania is something different at night. You miss this place that you’ve never even left yet. You are seventeen […]

no one warns the girl her body is a hauntedhouse, the blood a tenant. it returns in floodsas she takes a scalpel to the dollhouse, slicingthrough the wallpapered silence, the tiny chairsoverturned like accidented bugs. there’s a sentimentalityto this collapse, like untying a green ribbon fromyour throat & finding nothing underneath buta repetition of what […]

It lives in my bedroom’s nest of drywall.In my headphones, flowering through Nirvana. Even in sleep, I hear it: the unforgiving slapof my mother’s slippers striking the kitchen tile. Her gentle voice was no match—syrup-thick, too gentle for eachcrack of lightning. An artificial incantation. It makes me want to tear the book splayed spine-open on […]

He parts her open clean, as if a prize—not tenderly, but with a butcher’s grip.She stills beneath the furnace of his eyes. Each tendon splits, each seam of muscle cries.The silence gnawed away by calloused slip.He parts her open clean, as if a prize. His hands don’t ask, they enter, then they slice.They paint her […]

          So done says Godno more miraclestoo tired to turn water into wineto multiply a few measly fishto feed five thousanddid you think it all was easythat I simply sat on my gilded thronewatching Breaking Bad, or blissfullysurveyed the breathtaking worldI created in only six daysalthough I admit I was a bit hastymade a few mistakes, […]

Lavanya Arora (they/he) is an independent researcher and writer from Uttarakhand, currently residing in Bengaluru, India. Their literary work has found a home in Frontier Poetry, Thimble Literary, Same Faces Collective, Soft Union, and elsewhere. Will they ever finish editing their first book-length manuscript? Only time will tell.

Caroline Chou (she/her) is an Asian-American writer and university student based in Washington, DC. A Best of the Net Nominee, her work can be found in Rising Phoenix Review, The Aurora Journal, and elsewhere. In her free time, she fills playlists with film scores and bedroom pop.

Virginia Kane is a poet and essayist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, them., and on the Ours Poetica web series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she works at one store that sells new books and one store that sells used books.

Jenna Lyons wears a white button-down openalmost to her navel, a black blazer, and blue jeans.I double-sided tape my borrowed shirt along my chest,attempt to slick my bangs into her signature bun.Between applying red lipstick without linerand the twentieth bobby pin, doubt steps in, butwhen I step back, my full-length mirror is a door.When I […]