Volume 13 Published in 2023
Featured
Are your friends writers as well? (is poetry all you talk about?) / Define friendship (my IG friends are closer to me than God)
“My uncle drinks, my mother worries. They put me in the middle, use me as a topicof conversation when things get dull. They send me letters and out-of-print copies of their favorite books with thoughtful inscriptions.”
“Every day, people came in and pawned a piece of their lives to keep living. Sometimes they bought it back. Sometimes they didn’t. But I always saw them again.”
“My grandma calls it / your bloom. Once I saw a used pad / on the bathroom floor, and the stain / did kind of look like a flower.
“That’s when Nadine started to act as though she were built superior, even though she didn’t have the widest hips, hadn’t even shown that much before he was born, her stomach more of a suggestion than an assertion of pregnancy.”
“Form 4: Self-Care Checklist
Instructions: as a new mom it is very important for you to take self-care seriously. Please mark each form of self-care you participate in. Please see footnotes for extra detail:”
“I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery / searching for markers in the fog with my new family”
“‘You don’t have to say anything.’ The blue heron is picking its way through the shallows, and they watch him finding his food. Charles said, ‘There was one time I had to kill a man with a knife.’”
“…you think about how the prettiest girl in your Catholic middle school / compared the bodies of girls who touched the bodies of boys to the body of Bathsheba.”
“…you never see kids using food stamps? Are we not rich enough for you with our brown hands gripping colorful paper that is not quite money...”
“ Like the sun, God / follows him home. Like the moon, he never marries. Chooses to adopt. / His father calls with bad news. The phone a brick in his hand.”
“The closer you get, the more the emptiness emerges. What is keeping it all together? she wonders. And Who decides where it all goes? And What’s a girl gotta do to get off this shithole rock?”
“Nell gurgled around the thing in her mouth. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ Dr. K said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ Dr. K positioned the tool near Nell’s eye. It gleamed like a horrible tooth. One last time, Nell tried to speak, not with words but with movement.”
“So she tried to chalk the hairs up to the Philz Coffee barista that he raved about at the new location near his office. But Kristy couldn’t stop seeing Carrie Bradshaw as the barista.”
“I have a dream where I let someone in; I allow him to trace my lips with his tongue, salvage my exposed flesh, offering up my throat, my cheek, every vulnerable square inch my body possesses.
“At night, when she is sleeping in the bed beside me, I pretend to sleep. When she wakes, it takes her a while to realize her lips and nose are gone.”
“worms inch
his nostrils and build
homes eggs hatch behind
glass eyes mother tells
me to pull the meat
off the bones it’ll
freeze well i puke”
“That’s the face of someone with a broken heart. One teenager peeks over her shoulder at the women behind her. But she can’t be heartbroken, the teenager says, pointing towards the stage. Look at the way she glows.”
“They avoid the family-friendly path, brush past the hikers beware sign and into the tallgrass Fire Loop where anything can happen from the waist down.”
“You decided at the age of nine when your mom left your dad in Chicago and moved back in with her parents in Hawaii, giving you a dozen chicks in his place, that if you couldn’t do this you had no business eating meat, or raising animals, and should probably leave the island altogether.”
“May 6, 1942, Richard wrote Toto, ‘I can’t tell you anything about our movements or what we are doing, but I can tell you that it looks like we are going to be in the thick of things before long.’”
“Sadie despised being alone, but she also despised most people, and thus led a life of conflict. When the pandemic came and everything locked down and locked out, this conflict bloomed.”
“I never learned the value of letting decay and active rest refine me. Instead, I gathered perfection around me like a shield. It protected me, and trapped me in.”
“ I do appreciate things that scare me a little, I suppose, though not necessarily reptiles. I wonder if that’s why I’m still seeing Lena and Janice, my long-time girlfriend who is also still married, though separated, doesn’t know about it.”
“Since you’ve gone, I’ve watched rerun clips / of SNL, Norm McDonald as Burt Reynolds on Jeopardy, /young Will Ferrell bland as Trebek—I laughed, maybe”
“‘Violet does not compliment my personality, we both know this,’ I say. Selina looks down at her nails on the counter, they are long and silver, obviously fake.”
“Close ups of the court, / our sneakers against the asphalt, / your fingertips stagnant.”
“You pull into the last parking spot. You notice you parked a little crooked and want to reverse to straighten up, but there’s a white car with tinted windows behind you.”
“We are sharing the big bathtub / of life, tan toes and blonde hair / snaking down the drain, pulling / at the pipework.”