Melt the gold between your palms and smear it on everything you love: your hips, your lips, the soles of your feet.
This month I am sick of sand and sun and callouses; in my dreams I am new skin, tender and thin. The fluttering of my heartbeat rises in every place my angles meet, and anyone could see how desperate they blush to be touched.
A fist I took once to make me ice has instead made me fire, reduced cinder, liquid in the rains, the shade of dried blood.
I bite the open hand, climb the fence instead of going though, lie on my back and close my eyes to imagine it differently. I cannot be made into granite no matter how long I stand still; the bees and blooms crawl up my knees and drape me in honey too heavy to bear, too sweet to eat.
Melt the gold between your fingers and press it to everything you hate: the curve of your stomach, the length of your throat, the lines time has carved onto your face.
I breathe in black and blue until the bruises bloom and then wilt, the fat sunrise rests its face against the ocean, tired too, in a better world the dawn remakes me, new.
A.M. Kennedy is a writer and painter from Tampa. She specializes in precariously stacking books and half-finished tea mugs. She has been previously published in 3Elements Review,Popshot Magazine, and The Burningword.
I could paint some surreal image of this room—how the sun latches to my back on the walk inside, how I screw it into the lamp and how it sprouts the seeds I scattered across the floor. I could say it stays there and keeps this room warm. I could say it lives there until the ceiling tiles part to reveal the moon. I suppose this naked gap could allow for fog to pile on top of us, for us to shape it into Queen and Queen costumes, able to play dress-up again. Perhaps crickets could come next, the rub of their thighs to replace the hum of machines. But this all would be dishonest. There is really a dresser with photos, there is a bible stuffed with letters, sometimes there are visitors who know my name. There is the sharing of memories and alcohol and alcohol. There is a wooden box with a keyhole. In the corner is a window with the shade always drawn and a bed that seems to grow larger but never wide enough for me to lay against her.
Alison Hazle is a poet/writer and art school survivor. She plans to pursue an MFA somewhere far away from Baltimore.
What am I if I am not a girl? The pulpy body of a dead sea mollusk, dissolving? Am I crunchy? The shell it left behind, rotted in, shouldering deception? What if I am made from other shells, who were made from mother shells, who were stepped on so often that the gravity of their woman bones collapsed in, made dust of themselves beneath the boot of a man I have never met but can feel still in the tips of my hairs anytime someone asks me what I am?
Micaela Walley is a graduate from the University of South Alabama. Her work can be found in Oracle Fine Arts Review, Occulum, and ENTROPY. She currently lives in Hanover, Maryland with her best friend—Chunky, the cat.
Abuelita wraps me up in tamalitos, so warm, But she cools me down with Fresa Tropical, ah Canciones de mariachi cry in the background, and we Dance like we’re wearing clothes made of cucarachas Executing imprecise movements like forced twitches Fixating, fixating, fixating, on las guitarras Gently strummed, unlike the singers’ vocal chords Harsh, hoarse, heartfelt vibrations that tingle my eardrum I’ve never seen tears fall in tune to a beat like this before Just watch my mother’s head sway back and forth Knowingly imitating the tapping of the performers’ feet Like her body embodies the songs of melancholic mariachi Musical notes invading her bloodstream, her lagrimas shine Nosotros – felices en nuestras vidas sencillas Oblivious to our nearing flight departure Persistently ignoring the dates on the calendar Questioning what life could have felt like before this Repressing the thoughts of once existing outside of this Sin mi país bellísimo, sin mi país, sin mi This is my people’s holy land, but it doesn’t feel mine Unfathomable experience of being both free and shackled Vulnerable with no country, vulnerable within it Withholding parts of my soul, trapped in two places Xenophobes in two nations targeting parts of me, I’m just Yearning for my country to be mine.
Emely Rodriguez is a Latina writer from the D.C. / M.D. area. She is in her first year of the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore, focusing on poetry. Her work has been published in 45th Parallel,The Voices Project, and Welter Magazine.
Sometimes I’m shopping online, which is something I love to do, shop online, as every store is a new puzzle to solve, like, which clothes would I buy if I shopped here, and sometimes I end up buying the clothes, so I guess you could say it’s very meta and works on a few levels, and I stumble across something that I didn’t know I needed, like, say, a black bardot crop top, and it’s like suddenly I’m meeting the lord Jesus Christ or found the path to Enlightenment because I feel, out of nowhere, absolutely convinced that this is the one clothing item I have always been missing, like since infancy or conception, and that having this thing, wearing it but really just the owning it, the possessing it, will finally Change My Life in the ways I’ve been waiting for it to change, and it’s like I enter a fugue, I short circuit, I hit “purchase” and there I am, sort of shocked, addled, kind of post-coital, like exhausted but satisfied but not totally satisfied, and if I’ve ordered, say, a pair of bright pink palazzo pants that I know will need tailoring and I know I will never tend to, I feel itchy, and blue, and a little dumb, maybe, or sexless and vast like the last woman on Earth, and I start wondering after creepy stuff, like regarding my personality and whether I am worthy of love despite all the raisins in my bed, and I open another website and hope I don’t get struck by a thunderbolt of object fancy but sometimes I do, sometimes it happens, I hit “purchase” and the cycle repeats itself, and has been, really, repeating itself for some years, you should see my dresser, the drawers don’t close, they’re all overstuffed with shit, with pink and sateen fabrics that I don’t wear or know what to do with, that I drape around my hips like a hand, like a gift, and I know, at least at home in the mirror, alone among my things, objects too precious for this city with its leers and grime and violence and dripping virulent ugly, that I am beautiful, a Chaos void spotlit in pink, singing my body’s sweeping arias.
Sam Regal is a playwright, poet, performer, and recent transplant from Brooklyn to Athens, Georgia. Her translation of Yao Feng’s One Love Only Until Death was published in 2017 by Vagabond Press, and her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sum, The Wild World, NoD Magazine, Lucent Dreaming, and elsewhere. A former resident at TENT within the Yiddish Book Center, Sam was awarded the Colie Hoffman Prize in Poetry in 2017. She earned her M.F.A. from Hunter College and now studies within the Creative Writing Ph.D. Program at the University of Georgia.
Scott Laudati lives in NYC with boxer, Satine. His writing has appeared in The Stockholm Review, The Columbia Journal, and many others. Visit him on Twitter or Instagram @Scott Laudati
By discussing our mutual hurt we could ground ourselves in a
shared reality. Through our conversation something might solidify.
As a solid, it could be located and placed elsewhere.
I didn’t think it through.
I’d had the experience of telling a friend. Someone who’d been
through similar shit, also lived to tell the tale. We had a feeling
about each other, before either of us said a thing. It would happen
this way, again and again, with other people I would come to know.
But the first time I told her, I felt sucked out, 2-D, hysterically on
the verge of hyperventilating, hallucinating, as we stood outside
the bar. I was back to feeling unreal in my own body.
I don’t discount this telling’s necessity.
It was a quest to know, thus doomed to come at a cost.
The box with Pandora’s warning. I kept paying for more.
I wanted to meet someone who had also seen his face. Heard him
speak. Could recite back the twisted things he’d said and done — I had
no doubt he was a repeat offender, and relied on rehearsed technique.
I found one victim I could talk to — not part of the family tree.
A single woman, young, like me.
She took on a life in my mind. I would imagine meeting her
in a café. Small talk, small flurry of female compliments,
then down to business. I would lean forward, and with trembling
righteousness, speak the words: He raped me.
She would pause — then shift in her chair as she steadied
her attack. She’d smirk, get angry, then laugh in
my face. He raped me, too… And I liked it…
Get over it, she added, her face turning to stone.
It wasn’t such a big deal.
It was similar to what happened when I had to
imagine for therapeutic purposes my present-day
self going back in time to comfort and advise the
teenage self. The younger self would always win, would
praise him, and together they would laugh as he threw me
down the stairs, against the wall. My teenage self was
full of mirth. Cruel and bubbly when she said take it.
This violence I imagined came from within
came from the him in me and also came from me.
In Real Life — I never met her. Chatted on the Internet
in a twenty-minute burst that scared us both
that we would come to regret. Scared of him, scared of each
other, scared of repercussions for sort of speaking aloud.
It was clear we lived under the same gag order.
“I just want to stay completely out of this, out of his life.”
“I had the most bizarre dreams last night. Yes, seems it’s best
to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Agreed!”
“Stay safe and warm.”
“You, too.”
*
Sure — go ahead and ask. But not every question has an answer you will like.
If you know too much, you will lose your mind.
Clare Needham is the author of the novella Bad Books, published by Ploughshares Solos in 2015. Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Catapult, Bodega Magazine, Fiction Attic Press, and Armchair/Shotgun. She has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
to commit murder, slice a dog in half, reassure its trembling
fur, its anxious eyes that I will do it clean, by running a
sharp knife fast along its length. Though each time I trembled
with the dog, said do not be afraid
for us both.
Instead I now find the dog in two pieces
split in half but still alive, and it is my task
to glue her back. I take my time, I do it
almost perfect. The dog is healed, is whole, yet
I haven’t aligned her right, one back leg
is too high; she limps slightly, moves
— haltingly —
away.
Clare Needham is the author of the novella Bad Books, published by Ploughshares Solos in 2015. Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Catapult, Bodega Magazine, Fiction Attic Press, and Armchair/Shotgun. She has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
