Issue 6 – Jul 23

We open on a colorless, colorful expanse. Something like a void perhaps, in the way it hangs onto emptiness and fullness at once. The stars are a long ways away, leaving the space feeling freeingly private.

Death hides in airport bathrooms
where corporate men masturbate to lives
they’ve never lived. Please stranger
take a load off. Make yourself at home.

An old self
once watched a how-to video
for bearded dragon care
out of bored curiosity.

Her wife asked decades after fever took
her sight if she feels bitter to be blind.

I talk my way into my lover’s dreams.

Was that the right turn? she demands as I read her to sleep.
‘Where are we turning?’ I whisper, ‘I’ll follow.’

The insight of information consumes my trembling naked body, and so I want to explore my many faces without any forced commitments, because change is inevitable.

hot right now. on screens everywhere. my face having sex without my body.
my boyfriend’s choking eye-for-an-eye gains in popularity.

I was in the hungry push
of a kiss when it happened
a bench beneath us
my face sheltered in her hands the same way
that you hold me, base of palm against jaw against rib

when i’m sad i think
about the first time we kissed
and i don’t mean the peck
on the lips
on the floor of the club
i mean the one behind closed doors

Finish your glass of water.
The belt comes off, then
the bra. You will begin
to sweat, saliva will pool
on your tongue like
a baptism.

I want a poem that reassembles the body
I want to feel an overload of metaphors
running from eyes to tongue to fingers,
later, have your coarse voice roll them up
midair,

Her hand ached, inexorably and wildly.. but the pain did not press, but as if the AMC dips by itself, like an egg laid by a bird …

Nyx is playing with a lighter
another is sitting
on her phone. You are
in the corner letting

guests lay on your legs.

I’m sorry I feel so much
and have no sense to feel
with. I lie
on the floor of a furnished
room. Seems
like an awful thing to do.

damn genesis: shake it from the trees
why reach for the hand fully formed in the sea-foam
meet this rollicking sacrament
where it pours into our bones?

The moon sticks out
like a sore thumb,
a heavy-hammered
lunar bruise
no stranger
to rusty nail gun punches.

I was a single grain of salt stuck to the tip of sea’s tongue. I stung at all eyes, spasmed every throat, tried my best to strip all skin of death but only recalled their wounds. In my next,

What is that I hear?
Is it coming from you, dear?
Is it the voice
That screams for nights without me?

These woods are no longer mine,
No longer silent.

Mad attendants of
White,
Milk,
Ivory
Crowd near.

The virus hangs its microbial haze over the city. This pandemic-paused world   — three-months thick and the weather reports only gloomy future forecasts. Even the moon is coughing, struggling to shine through the oppressive atmospheric pressure.