"Blazed Poem #4" by Basil Payne

Sometimes I worry that the sun is gone,
whipping my head towards the window

to check for light,

Fear like the smell of chopped garlic
that won’t leave the sliver of moon

underneath my nails.

In about two-billion years, it’ll start to
die, eat itself up from the inside out.

We all know that.

But I’m scared the billions will pass
when my back is turned, a simple fatal

oversight.

So I always have to check. I’m scared of
dying without changing my name to

what it should be

or before I can see an emperor penguin
dance for the first time or last before

their extinction.

At 23, time slips past me and takes
the sun with it. I wish the sun would make

more iron for my blood

Or at the very least take that shit back to
where it came from. My life is a blink but

when I’m high

It’s a millenia. Too many blinks and I’ll
never see the sun again.

---

Basil Payne (they/them) is a queer poet-artist living in Logan, Utah. Their work can be found in Sugar House Review, Sink Hollow, Oyster River Pages, Sheepshead Review, Progenitor, The Southern Quill, and occasionally Utah State University's Projects Gallery.

"Never Nothing" by Basil Payne

Sometimes in my nightmares I’m God,
not the regal haloed man
or an omnipotent beast,
just me in a robe.
Never by choice, I’m exalted
by a passerby angel
or I’ve found that God retired
and I’m the closest option.

As god, my first action is to cry.
My hands, still small, shake
but carry the weight of life.
I can never find my siblings,
who the angels say
God never created.

My second action as god is run
through the blue storm I brewed
and search, tear up
the building blocks of a world I created
Prayers pile up in my holy email inbox
but I can’t get back to my computer.
The terror of responding wrong.

My third action as god is curl
in on myself and become smaller.
My siblings never existed
nor anyone else I loved.
Bit-by-bit, pieces of life fade away,
opaque then transparent then translucent then gone.
Nobody screams when they fade,
I’m the last speck of color they see.

And I’m left all alone again
when I wake crying.

---

Basil Payne (they/them) is a queer poet-artist living in Logan, Utah. Their work can be found in Sugar House Review, Sink Hollow, Oyster River Pages, Sheepshead Review, Progenitor, The Southern Quill, and occasionally Utah State University's Projects Gallery.

"The Plan" by Roger D'Agostin

I saw it when I was seven, when Joe Mitchell pushed me in the pool and laughed and
slapped his wet swim trunks until his hands turned red.
Not at first. After I sank, after Joe poked me with the skimming net.
There’s no light. People say that happens. It's not true. I did leave my body, though. I
watched Mrs. Mitchell turn me on my stomach and smack my back while my head hung over the pool filter and stared into the tangle of hair and bugs and leaves.
I saw everything.

***

At the trial, the lawyer told my mom if I crap not to change my diaper. But I didn’t go.
Even when Mrs. Mitchell said she hadn’t been drinking, and she checked for a pulse and
performed CPR.
It doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be me again. The only body part I can really
control is my right hand. But not my arm so I can’t scratch my nose. Or lift a spoon to eat
cereal.

***

Dad used to tell Mom the Lord works in mysterious ways. Mom would shake her head.
But it's true. When Mrs. Mitchell pounded my back I felt like I could walk right into that
tangled mess and begin to make sense of it all. But I didn’t have time. I rejoined my body. It's
like going down a water slide except there's no water which I now think is so ironic.

***

Mondays are bath days at the care center. Lately I’ve been the last one. That's good,
because the nurse isn't careful and I fall and see all this hair in the drain.

When it happened again and my hand landed over the drain I grabbed it. I held it the whole week until Saturday morning when Mom visited. She uncrinkled my fist and tiny white puffs of mold had blossomed like clouds. She screamed when she saw that paradise. Then she ran into the hallway to find Dad, so he could see too.

---

Roger D'Agostin is a writer living in Connecticut.

"Progress" by Arianna Smith

The skyscrapers pierced the close clouds; their reflections glittered on the surface of the bay.
“I don’t know anything about San Francisco,” the woman said. Her voice traveled on the water.
The guy pocketed his phone, and his face went dark. “You can learn.”
“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “SoCal will always be home.”
"Not for me.” His laugh was warm, even on this cold, damp night.
Your home is beautiful, she'd said at dusk, a year ago, up in that apartment on the fourteenth floor above downtown L.A.

It’s not home. It's just a rental for work, he’d murmured against her bare shoulder later, at dawn. “The place where I stay here is more beautiful,” he added now.
"You don't call that place home, either.”
"I would if you lived in it.”
She didn't blush at his words. Apparently she’d grown immune to the awkwardness of his raw honesty. The sole of her sneaker squealed against the dock railing. “If that's how you feel, then come back and live with me in Long Beach.” He turned his head toward her. The skyline was mirrored in the lenses of his glasses. His voice was low but warm this time. “Perhaps.”
She reached out to him and squeezed his hand.

"Body Pool" by Sam Spring

She was a drunk
As was I — what a life.
I would recommend the high road
If I could ever have found it.
Instead, my parents found us,
Drunk and dazed in a pool
Of our own bodies on their porch,
The morning light just
Coming on in the East.
They were mortified.
We were silly.
And we never spoke about it
Directly.
The memory blurring like
Landscapes on a train —
The shame, the guilt, that sinking feeling
And the whole world spun on.

---

Sam Spring is a 28-year-old nomadic writer working to save up for a van. He dropped out of SMC to sell bongs online and is the lead singer of the band ‘Tennis Club’ with their music being streamed over 7,000,000 times. Sam bounces around the West, staying with lovers and friends. He has work appearing in Passengers Journal, The Wisconsin Review, and Denver Quarterly, among others. Find his writing, music, and art here —> www.samspring.me

"The World at Large" by Sam Spring

The tin crimped flowerbed
Raised up off the tired
Fading brick floor
Held so gently the pink
And red geraniums
That bobbed in the
Sweet afternoon breeze.
The jasmine died weeks ago
But even the sight of
The brown leaves,
Far out of season,
Still held the ghost
Of that feeling
The smell painted on my brain.
Within the redwood fence line,
Atop the lazily-bricked patio floor.

---

Sam Spring is a 28-year-old nomadic writer working to save up for a van. He dropped out of SMC to sell bongs online and is the lead singer of the band ‘Tennis Club’ with their music being streamed over 7,000,000 times. Sam bounces around the West, staying with lovers and friends. He has work appearing in Passengers Journal, The Wisconsin Review, and Denver Quarterly, among others. Find his writing, music, and art here —> www.samspring.me

"Poor Thing" by Abbie Langmead

One year since pity moved
into the present tense, and my mother
into the past. I don’t lie when people ask
the natural questions of family life, until
the awkward question of how long is broached.

When am I allowed to live again?
Reanimated after falling
into the river, nothing more
than a childlike memory
that gets reconstructed day
by day as I relearn how to speak.

Frankenstein was always about a child
and her mother. The irresponsible
science was just a ploy to get men
to care the slightest bit about
a creation myth that wasn’t made
from their rib. I know that,

but they didn’t. The others in that house
wet with rain instead of sick,
although both stick to the skin
and linger longer than they’re welcome.
I don’t know if Shelley would’ve
Understood me. I don’t think she and I
would get along in the slightest,
two stubborn women butting heads
while both claim to be revolutionary.
Reminds me of my mother, or hers.

At the Tower Records on Dawson Street
I told a friend I thought it was a terrible movie—
that I felt like womanhood was more than
being a baby and getting your brains fucked into you
by Mark Ruffalo. I’m sorting out
what the word “woman” means, or if I am one,
but there has to be more to life, isn’t there?

She disagreed with me,
not about the definition of womanhood,
but about what the film meant, and what regaining
things after you’d lost them looked like.
What is the shape of all of this being, and what
do we make space for?

One year into resurrection
and I don’t know if I believe in it at all—
this world where there’s no number to call
when things get screwy, no one to return to
when your mind is stuck in the black and white.
something monstrous happened. I am still
remembering what it’s like to watch love decay.

I don’t know how to accept these pithy sympathies.
These are the facts of a life reborn,
in a place where she’d never been,
and where nobody knows who I was
when she was still here.

---

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.

"A Theology Lesson on Sherman Street" by Abbie Langmead

On the way to synagogue one day my dad told me about Hell
And Heaven, or at least what he believes of it.
The story went a little something like this:

We don’t know anything for certain.
I won’t guarantee you an afterlife
When I’m gone. But the only after
Life I’ve ever heard are people talking
About you, remembering you.

If someone thinks of you and the times
Where you hurt them, they’ll place you
In Hell, in this immobile ash of sin.

Heaven is the kindness you give someone
That lasts forever. That is afterlife, no,
That is immortality.

I didn’t tell him that on that same strip of road
My mother and I also talked about an afterlife.
When she talked about legacy, she said:

If people remember your father,
They will know he was a good man.

If.

My father is soft-spoken and godly,
Although he’d hate both those characterizations.
I mean that I think that people will put him
In Heaven when the time comes.
I know that I will.

And that will be all I have,
Because despite all the scriptures and Talmud
He reads, he too doesn’t believe
In hauntings. He’s promised me that
Any psychic or medium who claims
To have a message from him will be a liar.
He can’t tell me that they’re all liars, Just like he can’t say whether Heaven and Hell
Are real, or just metaphors like he likes to say.

But he won’t say anything after he’s gone,
He doesn’t believe in mediums now and refuses
To let me get wrapped up in the foolish nonsense
That my mother and grandmother adore.
Anyone who speaks for him is a fraud

That’s for certain.

---

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.

"Voyage" by Ellie Snyder

In February error sank me
to the depths of my bedroom.
Not to surface again till June.
Vainly I managed to take care
of my face but let my body parch.
Went silent till I could call myself healed,
no longer riddled with cracks.
Didn’t have the lacquer and gold to join them.
A fresh spring of fear welled up from my gut
and through them like dark tea,
filling the room. I quailed and choked.
Hinged everything on the acts just after waking.
Threw many days away.
The tea cooled, bittered.
Then slowly some crude caulk
began to stop the ever-running.
Slowly the waters ran off my vessel.
A day dispatched me without pain.
The hatch opened to broad sunlight
and a trembling reunion with core self,
with my breasts and friends and cackle.

---

Montanan poet Ellie Snyder writes and manages social media for a global nonprofit and is passionate about literature, fashion and music. Find her work in Pangyrus, Magpie Zine, Pinky, The Headlight Review and elsewhere, and find her fitchecks on Instagram @elliegsnyder.

"Moonshot" by Scott Burwash

Two seasons have passed since I last saw you,
alone in the fen with your antlers and bare expressions.
They tell me that I will get better in time,
but I spend most days folding paper cranes to no end.
The thing I never said to you lives under my tongue,
pregnant with guilt and hoping for absolution.
If you flew to my open window tonight
I would ask you to stay with me until the rain comes back.
Do you still have the pressed flowers that my grandpa
gave you or did they spill onto the floor like everything else?

Covering my eyes now.

Waiting for everything to still.

---

Scott Burwash (he/him) is a writer of poetry and prose with previous work appearing in Apeiron Review, Eclectica Magazine, and Dark Harbor Magazine. You can find him on Instagram and Bluesky (@scottburwash).