poetry

a plant does not have thefunctional capacity toknowingly self-destruct; their chloroplasts do not choosewhether to accept the sunlightfrom which they photosynthesize— the sun, simply, says, “i love you,”and the plant says, “thank you,”and they continue on with their days. the plant does not apologizefor the support it accepts. itbreathes in, breathes out, and gives what […]

when the world said sink I sankI am in this way ordinaryI put pasta in the water watch it bloatevery time I think I’m new the old comes back like a stray I once fedimagine a well-read strange man I never get tired of my same storyI’ve tidied up my roomand left my inbox openin case he […]

Dreaming of Alaskan Islands we wound up in Dubuquewhere hills of inedible corn stretch into our vast American nothing. In sunlight and my day dress,I am your favorite burdenbuckled sweetly into the passenger seat,Our hands sticky as you pull yours away to make a left-hand turn. There are no canyons here. Still,I am probably luckyeach day […]

high water i think i’ll live forever because that’s what sharks do. i wanna dive into myself like an ocean bleeding out on the shore, splitting sand down into sand. i wannamiss class because i’m waiting for the bus with youon it, the morning shape of your face all ears & rosyeyelids. how much i’ve forgotten. it’s […]

I wish I were deadis a perfect example of subjunctive mood.What most people don’t realizeis how to conjugate the bodyto expose how it feels to hold onto improper objects. Psychologists call thisintrojection. To engage with a man, I must deny any sign I want to touch him. If I were to tell the truth,I would explain fewer peopleknow […]

on the drive back home      i ask if the moon is following us      an eyelash on my cheek my mother      tells me to make a wish      the moon isn’t following us      we’re circling around it      at five i drank tea from a saucer so      i don’t stay up at night      my palms orange henna an […]

Lucas Peel is a big mouth moonlighting as an adult.  He is a negligent plant father and can also have a little salami as a treat.  His work is forthcoming in the next software update of the iPhone 7 notes app.  Lucas lives in Honolulu, Hawaii and sometimes tweets @lookchrlz.  We don’t know what he […]

The worst part of the video:The wasp laying eggs inside the caterpillar. A small thing, aDefenseless thing, limbless,And a sharpness on top of it–Its beating wings, itstwitching abdomen, the footage playingDouble time,As to show the process quicker,As to not bore the viewerWith a death as slow as this. In my dream you came out of […]

                                    (after Taylor Swift) This week my whole body has rejected reality, an apocalypsewithin an apocalypse, and I know better than to ask for help. I lived so long walling myself in with cassette tapes, frightenedof the madwoman beneath my own skin. I don’t think I know what crazy means anymore but certainly you know […]

& on Saturday, before we squished plums in our fists and rubbed the color on our mouths—as if we could afford to replace our hunger with a bruised beauty—and took pictures of ourselves with so much flash our mouths looked like flowers in the parched desert of our bodies, we walked to Chinnamma’s home that smelled like girls and sweat. She […]

Having stripped off the skirt and the jewelryand wiped off the lipstick amidst the beard, eyes and body cleansed of all adornmentsfussed over and fought for against stubborn family elders, yet fawned over by kind friends,I dip my fresh old self into the warm still water over and over for the attendant’s amen,and when they […]

yellow balloons           heavenly release opening chair scene of juno pomegranate peel        post-smoke spit  i’m bleeding out, my legslowerbackintestines twinge, cramp and i can’t stand laugh breathe and i sob into the boiling shower floor.  hip throb. my wrists, ankles, knees, stiff fingers, spinal cord             coated, ember-encased. needled skin, set aflame, tamped out in bath water—a relit […]

Jabulile Mickle-Molefe is a writer and diviner whose work is often rooted in music, myths, or philosophy. Their work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, petrichor journal, and Triangle House Review and is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review. Find them on twitter at @jmicklemolefe.

I do not trust myself  to be loved by a stranger, so I pose in lingerie for my close friends and wait for one of them to fall for it. Jo tells me i’m on queen shit and Ryan says that I’m iconic and someone inquires where I found my lime green lace. And I am full until the fizzing returnsin my belly, and reminds me what a […]

Em Norton is a poet from Toronto. You can find Em on Twitter @_emnorton and read more at patreon.com/emnortonwrites.

                        After Frank O’Hara is even better than making vegan pumpkin pie like I did last Novemberor filling my stomach with stone fruit samples at the embarcadero Saturday market partly because in your 19 year old you’re like raw almondspartly because of my affection for you, partly because of your affection for the jetboilpartly because of […]

When they cleared out my gutI couldn’t do anything. I was staring at the ceiling blowing kisses. The ceiling ran away. My arms fell off in a very sexy way.It doesn’t matter. My legs  are the only part of methat I want to survive. Maybe that wasn’t direct enough. I am dying very soon. Even looking like […]

I sat and there a scatter         of bushes, earth & one         purple flower fled       like jazz notes, the station he listened to & something his fatherused to listen to, pre & post a lotof things. One night I asked if it hurt, his father & the silence& he said no, nothing ever        only hurts.        We continued to […]

after Michael Garrigan Sometimes I thinkwe went therein a dream (together still) lodgedinside the sleepingbody of the boy I used to be. Jory Mickelson is the queer, nonbinary author of WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their publications […]

Mara Beneway is a poet, illustrator, and educator from New York. Her work has appeared in the Bread Loaf Journal and Gandy Dancer. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Florida.

I have told you this before.There are no beginningsto be found here. Here,there are only reflectionsof birdsong in passing wind,only layers of ash in place ofsky. Should your body unravel,it will do so in layers.Be sure to catch the bonesas they fall. Stop waiting for signs.That is to say, stop listeningfor blood. You must understandthat […]

            for Ryan Home in timeto watch a drunksun stumbling. It flashes its pink ass & jetslike little crucifixescross the sky: I know such audacity, the needto burn & then beburnished, the urge to vanish: I’ve drivenoff the road with darkintent. It’s just my hands that spared me.It’s scary, being so closeto the mirror you […]

her home-bleached hair, the strong smallness of her,the slippage of her soft walk in the rain,today this girl reminded me of you—the thrumming weight of how I wounded yousomehow inside the curve her shoulders made.I watched her blue shoes stir up limpid poolsof cloud-water, and my expired want  for you mixed itself in, gasping and soaked.last […]

I ain’t the good kind of Asian. I’m the onewho disappoints you. I see it in your eyes when we go out for sushi and I forget what nigiri is. I feel it across your tattoos I’ll kiss someday:  koi fish samurai and fisherman’s wiveswide-eyed cats with claws outstretched characters faded indecipherable, strewn like wreckageacross your […]

next thought—isolation is a beautiful syringe. next thought—when i went to Chicago that summer i took the train.  Illinois is a whole lot of nothing. neutered landscapes in a lilting breeze. grain silos round as asses.  Midwestern topographies are bargain-bin paintings everyone wants hung in their bathroom, which is to say  something, probably. maybe i like to be […]

To Illness, With Love i am sorry that i broke you or used you to break myself i amsorry for the commotion that followed i amsorry about the quotidian pain like a skipping record i amsorry for the pills thrown in a blender to help us i amsorry for waving your laundry in the faces […]

do you want to see a magic trick?would you like to try swallowing me whole?have you ever peeled open a tangerine?it’s like that, only you keep going, until there’s nothing leftbut infernos, do you see?can i ask you one more question?will you still kiss me when i look different?will you? will you? will you? how […]

The arch of the sky keeps pulling; no forecast of rain;Over us clouds undeveloped into silk chaining east to west. Above the tedious skyline the early sun brings colorsbrings news of a warm day. But we’ve become too lazy to imagine better days than this,both you and I, perched on the park bench,watching the brittle shadow […]

Summer again like a switchblade in my throat. We were girls then, gamboling in glades thick  and honey-sweet with clover. All of it belonged to us: the dusky purple scent of the tobacco fields,  the cicadas buzzing in the chest-high grass, the sleepless meadows only our feet tread.  We rinse the lake water from our hair and dream long […]

maybe death isn’t deep and wet and cloying like / a well maybe death is /a shallowing a / drying up / think of the pond that forms / in the valleyfrom snowmelt in the spring think of how / it shrinks with each hot /summer day by august / it’s gone maybe our lives […]

tell me it was gentle,             like when my mother brushedthe hair from my forehead and said,                         if God wanted you to fly, He would have calledyou Icarus                                                 and with her feverish           fingertips                                                running through my roots I asked,                                                         do you want to be                                             Daedalus?  [name added to “when I transition” list: Icarus]  —  I wanted to give […]

This is what is most familiar: Lemon-sucked lips kept still on skin.Fingers, long and knuckled, sweeping across a scar fainter than summer.The back and forth motion of keeping ourselves whole. How your smile,all honeyed and good, makes a hymn from its own ridges. You like to pick atyour palms like insects suck at bone. Your […]

and suddenly I’m a moth serenading the stunned lightbulb. O winged glass, through your whorl of God’s deftness, from a corner of this midnightforest, do you see my broken nose, its septum tottering from indecision? How it spills blood like a waterfallforking gravity. When my uncle was depressed, I blamed it on his innate goodness. […]

My mother remembers teaching herselfhow to draw stars on a foggy windowwhen she was five, fifty-five years ago.Most of us look to the sky for release. My neighbor, at dinner, proposes thatwe are but molecules. That perhaps ouruniverse exists as one fabric weavedinto a shirt and our beyond just wool. Many places are full of […]

i want to devourmy loneliness& throw it upon the page.you told me oncepoems need each otherthe way humans do. that night,the moon was so brightit wrote your shapeon the sidewalk. you had eyesas wide as mercury& i rememberfalling into you,letting your handsclose around melike an atmosphere. in the morning,was the sun.in the morning,you kissed mein […]

Cockroaches / getting pregnant / never having children / menstrual cups / hanging upwithout saying I love you seconds before someone dies / my dad crashing on his way topick me up from the station / my train crashing, blood and bones and tangled hair lefton the tracks / sloths and their strange hands / […]

we still believed in hot lemon water in the morning, still believed in the miracle of breaking out into a dance anywhere, never quieting down, the rookie optimism that our best parts would remain the same no matter where or who we shared them with. now every summer something like grief tears inside our bellies, […]

Today you will reorder yesterday for the sake oftomorrow. Something will bubble and froth behindyour left ear leaving behind a sensation like whenyou first bite into a perfect and juicy apple. I havean eye and a tongue and a soul for juice and so feelbold about this assertion. Even when we are apartmy mind fills […]

HornyTopNow proposes a sexorcism            in your DMs when he writes: let me fuck the hell out of you He must think his penis is God’s            gift if he can save you from damnation, but you don’t believe him.            You’re atheist & to you, angels are just            a slutty Halloween costume. If there is a devil, […]

after “Poem After Reading the Chapter in Stephen King’s It Where the Word ‘Kike’ Appears Six Times” by Hannah Cohen, “gelato” by Matt Mitchell, & “in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say” by Danez Smith the adriatic sea is a body of water, so etymologically i am born from pockets of salt / […]

“why am I growing out of myself” and the opening songis a gunshot wound that never closes up and inside exists a portal to thirteen where the slashed armstill bleeds black, drips until tar becomes speed bump but we have already tripped over the casualties ofgrowing up too fast and there are no longer picnics […]

you tell me ice wants to be warm. a television screen, spastic with tiny spines,warm from my fingerprint smeared across its face. i do this to you, but i am not pricked. before work, a bundle of coriander stripped by the night’s wind on the porch-step.once, when little, i constructed a fence from the broken […]

Suddenly / late summer / shirtless in the loft / he watches me / surmount the top rung / Soft timothy exhaling June / The twine breaks / spreading blue / purple florets on which we lie / about men / the Virgin / glistening skin / senators and welfare / other things we cannot […]