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South Temple Pedestrian Underpass | Jamie L. Smith

South Temple Pedestrian Underpass

Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

-Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Some nights the south side access is open,
the north blocked,

so, I linger, half-trapped in the passage, wait
for traffic overhead

to rattle me back to subway platforms past.
By now

my kid could’ve been
older than the four boys scootering loops

and whooping
down the length of the tunnel—Hey, lady,

watch this! For a few minutes
I clap for them as they spin,

cringe when they skid along the concrete floor,
before I resurface

and they stay
howling underground.

Jamie L. Smith

Jamie L. Smith is the author of "The Flightless Years", forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (November 2024). Her chapbook "Mythology Lessons" was winner of the Tusculum Review's 2020 Nonfiction Prize and is listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. Her poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, and anthologies by Indi(e) Blue, Allegory Ridge, and Beyond Queer Words. Please visit jlsmithwriter.com for more information.

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After the reception & The Tranquility of Tin Openers | Christian Ward

After the Reception

After the reception, everything
was a Mylar balloon. You could pop
the trees and watch them whizz
around the sky like unleashed kites.
Or send a mean neighbour
to Mongolia. The houses bounced
with their hidden joy. Everyone
content with their antigravity.
I could've let go to follow the currents.
Hang with peace signs of migrating
geese. I rooted myself in you, instead.
How things have changed,
tethering us away from
what grounded us to begin with.

The Tranquility of Tin Openers

You sleep warming
the right month on your skin.

The bath is a hot spring,
you gargle with milk from a forgiving moon.

You mukbang photo dumps of spring,
ravenously feast on autumnal screensavers.

Balanced books make the houseplants
sigh in contentment. You starve unpaid bills.

Your phone is always
as calm as a Buddha.

Colleagues think of you
as a wound that always heals quickly.

Every Christmas is an ice-cream cake
of happiness,

people gather grins like snow.
You are content to let them melt.

You always get cards folded
into swan eggs. They always remember you.

Once, you buried a tin opener
in the garden to see what might fly.

Christian Ward

Longlisted for the 2023 National Poetry Competition, Christian Ward's poetry has recently appeared in Acumen, Dream Catcher, Free the Verse, Loch Raven Review, The Shore and The Westchester Review. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize and won the 2023 Cathalbui Poetry Competition.

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The Folly of a Thoughtful Amnesiac & Hear Me Roar | Chelsea Logan

The Folly of a Thoughtful Amnesiac

Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete fell off. Who was left?

-unknown

I woke up with new memories
in my fingertips, a need
to Good Will Hunting this problem
again. I draw the sharpness
of your jaw to solve
for each nerve ending that won’t
forget. There’s a scientist

in me that wants an empty room
save two metal chairs
and some ceiling tiles, to sit
across from you asking
the same question on a loop
until it catches. Tell me
what it’ll be like. Are you looking
inside me or did you sew
those sparkles in your eyes? I’m buckling

before the white board.
I’ve got flowers in my hair.
I’ve had different DNA
since that night our feet
touched in the pool, but
can you speak
into this recording device?
A good scientist must have good tools.
You say you’ve already answered
but I can’t
or won’t remember.

Hear Me Roar

We know what we want:
bang for our buck,
melt in our mouths
and so on. The fingers
fumble for the pill case.
They have eyes. Modern
women are puzzles
made from the shapes.
When they go low, we go
high, burning up our fuse
out there alone. And so on.
The fingers find the smallest
one, but size doesn’t always
matter. Nothing matters
when time can stop
and start like this. It’s late
but there’s always tomorrow.
The fingers remember tomorrow,
the elephant never forgets -
that’s what the big one’s for.
All halcyon days, yada yada
until the regret
steals in.

Chelsea Logan

Chelsea Logan lives in Nashville, TN. Her work has most recently appeared in The Paper Dragon, PIF Magazine, The Dead Mule School, MockingHeart review, and several anthologies.

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The Wholeness of Broken Things & What Hungers Do We Shed? | Nwodo Divine

The Wholeness of Broken Things

This debris catches the afternoon sun,
cleft rainbows stitching the air with
a montage of violence redeemed.
We built our castle not out of forgetting,
but from the thresholds
of what we can’t erase.
The battlements, the drawbridge,
precarious over a moat of memory,
always opalescent,
always a hair’s breadth from shattering.

Is this resilience,
or a morbid fascination with the scars?
A child cradled by broken glass,
lulled by the wind whistling
through its fractured concerto.
We are not unbroken,
that much is clear.
But in the cracks,
our light finds purchase,
determined to rise from the wreckage.

They say time heals all wounds.
We scoff. Time rearranges the furniture,
pushes the debris to the corners,
but the floorboards still groan
with the weight of what happened.
And perhaps this is the new strength,
not the absence of scars,
but the way they refract the light.
We are a medley
of what has broken us,
each piece a facet
catching a different glint of the sun.
We are not whole, but we are whole enough.

And at night, when the moon
flows through the smashed panes,
we hear not shattering,
but a song both mournful and hopeful,
sung in the language of broken glass.

What Hungers Do We Shed?

First, there was this green hunger,
a slow scratch against leaf skin.
I watched it inch across the rosebush,
leaving behind a glistening trail.

It wasn't beauty, but an urgent,
focused kind of consumption.
Every day, a little thicker, a little wider.
It built itself a prison, a silken shroud spun
in the crook of a thorny branch.

For weeks, it was nothing
but a suspended knot,
a question mark dangling in the breeze.
Then, silence.
No rustle, no green pulse against the web.
I almost forgot about it,
about that single-minded hunger.

But then a split, a tear in the silk,
and out crawled something tentative,
something with wings the colour of bruised fruit.
It clung to the empty chrysalis,
testing its new legs,
its new ability to rise.
It pumped its wings, hesitant at first,
then with increasing urgency.

And then, it lifted,
and for a moment, it hung suspended,
wobbling, unsure. But then,
it caught a current, a breath of wind,
and it was gone.

I don't know where it went,
this thing that used to be a relentless green hunger.
Maybe to the hibiscus bush by the fence,
maybe high above the rooftops where the hawks circle.
All I know is that it left behind an empty shell
and a question:
what hungers do we shed, what wings do we take flight with?

Nwodo Divine

Nwodo Divine is a Nigerian writer, researcher, and teacher. His works have appeared in Akpata Magazine, Poetry column, and a host of others. He tweets @chukwudivine_

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The Last Leaf & Postpartum | Bethany Jarmul

The Last Leaf

I’m hiding
from my kids, searching
for solitude. Outside,
a single sepia leaf hangs
on an oak tree limb,

swaying back-and-forth,
back-and-forth in the wind,
like a park swing dismount.
This leaf survived
gales that downed power lines.

It survived snow—enough
for the neighbor kids to build
a seven-foot snowman.
This month, the new leaf-buds
have been birthed on branches,

yet the leaf hangs,
like the last baby tooth rotting
in a lipstick-adorned mouth.
Will I want to hang on,
when my life’s stem grows

weak? Surely, I’d like to sway
with the breeze, feel
the rain on my wrinkled skin,
listen to silence punctuated
by the crickets and creek.

Now, a school bus, heavy
with children, rushes past.
The leaf, torn from its lifeline,
wafts to the ground and lands

on the cracked concrete.

Postpartum

After a rain,
droplets hang
from every branch,

round bellies
pregnant with
energy, purple

with possibility.
Gravity is a sage
midwife, offering

massages and chants,
warm rags and prayers.
Finally, the mothers

release,
splatter into dozens
of fluid offspring—

no longer
existing

as themselves.

Bethany Jarmul

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks and one poetry collection. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, Salamander, and One Art. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.

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I’d Be the Fish & Living the Dream | John Hennessy

I'd Be the Fish

What would satisfy, he asks, and I can hardly say.
Her story, I’m the fish swimming through it
from line to line. But the terrain’s too dry, no way
to brook this drought. City-planner, then, she drew it

near floodplains, I’m irrigation from the Nile,
canals that fill Venice’s green lagoon.
Let her be bank and island, from marble tile
to god’s-eye atrium. I’ll flow and drone,

a constant murmur.  Nah, you’re a racket, horn
and whistle, thorn and thistle. Fish? A shark
at best, three sets of teeth, and nothing born
above or below survives your ocean’s dark—

better admit it now. Expect nothing, accept
less. Swim uncertainty, dorsal fixed, tail flexed.

He sounds so sure. Socratic? Delphic. Stark.

Living the Dream

I reminded myself early in the day,
Don’t forget your passport. So of course
I’m at the airport without my passport.

Less than two hours until the flight left
and it was international, so I was already
an hour late. Luckily, my son

was dropping me off. He could help me
with my phone, which was frozen, stuck on
an app, an image of a red album cover. Spotify.

I was deep into trying to call my father,
good in a crisis, someone I could rely on
to bring my passport. They’d get me out of this

red album cover anxiety, this disaster. The plane
would leave without me. But no, they’d help. I gave
my son the phone, practiced my father’s instructions.

But nothing would work. I couldn’t even connect
the phone call to my father. A voice came over
my own intercom. Voice interrupting. Asking me

what would happen if I missed this plane. What
would happen? I would have to stay, or find another
flight. And what luck to be both father and son.

John Hennessy

John Hennessy is the author of three collections, Coney Island Pilgrims, Bridge and Tunnel, and Exit Garden State (forthcoming from Lost Horse Press). With Ostap Kin he is the translator of A New Orthography (Lost Horse Press), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, 2021, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond  (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature). Set Change, Yuri Andrukhovych’s selected poems, is forthcoming (NYRB/Poets Series).

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Black Annis | Bex Hainsworth

Black Annis

Not a witch, but a woman, just like your mothers.
The world was too loud, too bright, with the stench

of muck and mutton. My senses turned inward
like wheel spokes. I crept to the cave for silence,

for safety. It was my ark, whale belly. In the dark,
my skin shone like a salamander, veins branching

beneath lids and wrists: the blue face was always a myth.
The oak, however, did stand sentry, roots curving

into a portal. It sieved the wind from my sanctuary
and spun the rain into lace. At midnight, I would climb

the boughs, comforted by the creek, the soft bellowing
of stags, and my reflection mooning the sky.

Later, village children threw rocks at my walls,
chanting unfamiliar names. I shrunk to cave-tail,

rubbing at my conker-heart hair with stubby nails.
They started hanging sage above their doors, building

their windows small. I became hag-seed, warning,
bedtime story. Their nightmares kept the world away.

I lived quiet years, then died moss-swaddled beneath a bat-
draped canopy: they were always dressed for mourning.

Returning myself to the earth, I fed flies and foxes,
left behind enough legend, enough terror,

that no one dares disturb my immortal bones.

Bex Hainsworth

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, and Nimrod. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.

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Morning Attire & Suffering and Echo | Todd Dillard

Mourning Attire

I clamp the helmet to my suit's collar.
My breath draws a white curtain
across the helmet's glass.
My fingers wriggle into rubber gloves—
everything is impossible now
to pick up: my children's toys,
my ringing phone.
I stamp my feet into thick
boots meant to be air
tight for the moonscape
of the ocean floor.
The oxygen tank is full,
the weight of it all
something some say
will go away
if I let myself sink.
It's a sunny day on my front porch.
Tulips bob and still like fish
in a poisoned aquarium.
The mailman gives me my mail,
and I press my palms onto condolences
like prayer. Night falls
the way depths rise
to greet you. I keep trying
the line, tugging it, letting you know
it’s time to pull me up.
Why won’t you pull me up.

Suffering and Echo

After, there was marvel attached to the sadness,
like a child who rolls the perfect cigarette
or the catfish sliced open tail to gill
and in its entrails a sapphire amulet—

I knew her suffering had, finally, ended.
But the shape of her suffering remained
pressed into me. A little hollow.
The hours pooled there, blue like a blue

mountain, something to fill the empty rooms.
I took walks. Bought records. Buried birds
who struck the windows,
certain there would be more air.

There would always be more air.
And even if her suffering had become my suffering,
didn’t that mean I could sing into it
and what sound returned—didn’t it mean

she was calling me? She was
calling me. She was calling
me. She was calling me.
She was calling

Todd Dillard

Todd Dillard's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. His debut collection Ways We Vanish (Okay Donkey Press) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. His chapbook Ragnorak at the Father-Daughter Dance is forthcoming from Variant Literature. He's a Poetry Editor at the Boiler.

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Half abecedarian for an ESOL class | Sayantani Roy

Half abecedarian for an ESOL class

So what if I were to decide to speak with a cat in the throat?
-Caroline Bergvall

Afghani is a currency, and injera a type of bread
before you teach them, learn their words
curl them in your tongue to feel the
desperate tangle—only naked force will
expel the cat in the throat—a struggle as
futile as snow battling warm asphalt.
Gato makes his place in the sacred grotto—
hellion or a fierce protector, nursing
idioms you try to bury under stale
jargon & kitsch—wants to hide the last
mementos from the language of no return.

Sayantani Roy

Sayantani Roy grew up in small-town India and writes from the Seattle area. She has placed work in Contemporary Haibun Online, Ekphrastic Review, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, Panoplyzine, TIMBER, and elsewhere. This season, she is participating as a mentee in the AWP mentorship program. Say hello on Instagram @sayan_tani_r.

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Hillbilly Hot Tub | Emily Marinelli

Hillbilly Hot Tub

Excerpt from Comfort Sequels: The Psychology of Movie Sequels from the 80s and 90s.

Deena and I have beach tote bags stuffed with beer, towels, pool noodles, and sunglasses, like we are going to float on the river instead of a hot tub in West Tulsa in autumn. I watch her olive skin rounding into half moons around the bottom of her one-piece purple swimsuit, fat and muscle bubbling out into little moon slices from under the spandex. It makes me feel less self conscious as my baby fat moves into curves underneath my bikini. My boobs have only recently moved from gymnast flat to sixth-grade-dance padded bra, and I’m not sure what to do with them yet.

Her two huge shepherd mutts bark at us, herding us toward the hillbilly hot tub across the yard.

“Hurry up, bitch,” she laughs at me for having shorter legs than hers. I am always following her. It also takes me longer to climb the ladder over and into the water of the second-hand tub. Found at a junkyard, the tub miraculously works, and the water jets pop on, rippling water reflected by moonlight. A makeshift privacy fence covers the whole thing, and it’s quiet back here. Just me and Deena.

Even though we are both twelve years old, this isn’t our first alcohol rodeo. She pops open a can of Bud Light using her index finger as the opener, chipped black-fingernail polish flaking as the tab cracks.

“Cheers,” we tap our cans together and she undoes her high bun. Long, thick, dark brown hair shakes out over her shoulders.

I try not to notice how her curls glow in the light. I try not to notice my swimsuit feeling good between my legs or my head feeling looser from the beer. I look around to make sure we are really alone. We are. It’s safe to be ourselves.

Clueless had just come out in theaters, and we talk about what characters we would be in the movie.

“You’re totally Cher and I’m Dionne, obvi, cuz I’m your BFF,” I say to her. But secretly I know that I’m really the uncool Tai, trying to roll with the homies and destined to fall in love with a loser skateboarder.

“As if!” she says back and we both laugh.

We talk about what we want to buy at Suncoast Records and Hot Topic at Woodland Hills Mall and make a plan to go next week. I have my eye on flowery Doc Martens I could never afford, and I want the new Skee-Lo album even though he’s probably a one-hit wonder. Deena says she wants that one T-shirt from The Crow because she’s in love with Brandon Lee. She will likely steal a peace sign choker from Claire’s, and I will be stressed out the whole time that we’ll get caught. But I’m not gonna think about that right now, in this hot tub, in this moonlight.

“Truth or dare?” she asks.

“Truth,” I say, and she rolls her chestnut eyes. She knows I always pick truth because I’m afraid of whatever dare she’ll make me do.

“Okay, truth. Have you ever French kissed someone?” Her dimples pop out as she smiles at me. Whew, that’s easy.

“Yes, you know I have, bitch,” I say and laugh, my cheeks turning a deep rose.

“Truth or dare?” I ask, and in a twist of events, she picks truth.

“Okay, what base have you been to?” I finish off the crappy beer, and she hands me another, like clockwork.

“Second rounding into third.”

She looks away, then dips her whole body under the water. I wait. Finally, she emerges and is quiet as she wrings out water from her hair like Grandma squeeze-dries towels. The night is completely ours except for the cicada orchestra playing several notes over and over and the occasional deep, groveling barks from the German shepherds. Light drops of sweat wet my face. I’m hoping she will say more about third base, or any base really, but she doesn’t. She just looks at me and says, “Truth or dare?”

Maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s Deena and the dance we do each time we see each other before we can start making out, but this time I tell her, “I’ll take dare.”

With a sly smile, she swims over to the tote bag and pulls out two pairs of sunglasses. She puts on one and hands me the other.

“Wear these,” she tells me. Ridiculous because it’s nighttime but, of course, I put them on. I wait. This can’t be the whole dare, I think. This is too easy.

“Now, when you wear these, you will do as I say.” So that’s it. I’m her puppet. The sunglasses are pulling the strings. OMG, hot.

“Put one hand on your hip.”

I nervous laugh. “Okay.”

“Put the other hand on your shoulder.”

“Are we playing Simon Says now?”

She splashes me. I move my hands to block the chlorinated water from slapping my face.

She floats closer.

“Stay in the position I told you to.” Her voice is soft like a whisper. OMG, very hot.

I put my hands back to my shoulder and hip. I’m at her whim. Her hand goes to my hair and pulls a fine, thin strand back behind my ear. One finger traces the line of my cheekbone. The sunglasses stay on. She straddles me, her inner thighs wrapped around my middle. She kisses me.

Now we have graduated from Clueless and are the girls from Foxfire. She’s the fearless girl gang leader Legs and I’m Maddy, the brown-haired basic girl. Legs makes Maddy do adventurous things, pushes her out of her comfort zone, gets her into trouble rebelling against authority, because fuck authority.

Forgetting the sunglasses game for a moment, my hands climb to her back and dig into the straps of her bathing suit. In a quick motion, she jerks my arms back in place and her tongue goes deeper into my mouth. I’m willing Deena to keep kissing me for hours, to do things to me. Maybe if I keep imagining it, it will happen.

But it doesn’t. Deena’s neon waterproof Swatch scratches me and snaps me back into the night. She checks the time.

“Shit, we should go in. The movie’s gonna start soon.” Her words barely register in my daze of water heat, crisp air, and fire inside.

“You’re gonna love Dream a Little Dream 2,” she says and pulls away from me.

Fuck. The bubble between us bursts, but I can’t say anything. I’m not even supposed to clock this as actually happening. We are living in a secret, sexy dream. A secret we share only with the night and the hot tub and the dogs lying nearby, who lift their heads occasionally to bark at passing pickup trucks.

Emily Marinelli

Emily Marinelli is a genderqueer psychotherapist and professor. They are a writer on Film Obsessive and host the Twin Peaks Tattoo Podcast. Their book Comfort Sequels: The Psychology of Movie Sequels from the 80s and 90s is a sneaky memoir, celebrating unloved sequels from childhood. Find her @emsmarinelli and emsmarinelli.com.

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