Poetry

Nardine Taleb

body of a whale

I admit that I’m sorry for not acknowledging you at the grocery store, Omar. 
You stand at the same cash register, your accent 
an incision in the Midwestern chatter. We don’t greet each other. 
We don’t say hello or even salam, silence a testimony 
that I am closer to you just by way of how we got here. 
I see my father in you — in your skin, quick hands, foreignness, knock-
off white Adidas shoes. My mother, is there 
in your polite smile, your lowered gaze, your in-
ability to fully twist into the syntax of this country. 
Your gaze, avoiding, I 
set The New Yorker on your counter, the hair products 
to dampen the curls. This is how I twisted: I couldn’t find 
the fava beans my mother wanted to make an Egyptian breakfast, or perhaps 
I chose not to look for fear I would also have to get the kumin.  
You say, straight face, Want bag?
Omar, I am a white man in the body of an Arab girl.
I am a white girl in the body of an Arab girl. 
I am an Arab girl in the body of a white man in the body
of a white girl in the body of america, america with the body
of a whale, america with the body of a refugee, america with the body of
an Arab girl, stepping into a room full of wide eyes and blackholes. It is hard
to see the world without america in my body. I want a day 
where I’m not written off by curious eyes. 
Now you give me a receipt and so simply you’re tugging on history.
I promise I’ll tell you right, yes, I’ll take a bag,
I’ll take this whale headed nowhere, nowhere 
still being somewhere to belong to, still ahead of us, some kind of ocean.

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer, speech therapist, and Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Yes Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Knight’s Library Magazine, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Emerging Literary Journal, and others. She was a Brooklyn Poets fellow in Fall of 2020. You can find her at the following social media platforms: Twitter: @nardineta / IG: @nardineta

Buffy Shutt

Preserved

Mama puts the two girls, born fourteen months apart
in a cradle, blankets them in an embroidered heirloom.

 The girls grow smaller. Stiller.
Swaddled, they try out their fingertips.  

A boy is born. He walks interestingly
all over Mama.
She walks around him. 

The girls turn a greenish color,
olives. Using tongs, Mama puts them on a dish, 
then in a jar, paraffins it closed.
They can no longer see each other. 
Their tongues peek out like tiny pimentos. 

Everyone is relieved.
The olive dish is popped into the dishwasher.
The jar set aside; the air is lighter. 

Years later the girls pry open the paraffin.
Shimmy out, they sit (unseen)
six weeks (unshriveling) on the counter
and then they slip into the sink,
past the rubber splash guard, down the drain, 
out the pipes, and in that last push 
before the recycling plant 
they spring loose.

Buffy Shutt lives in Los Angeles where she writes poetry and short fiction. A former marketing executive for movies and documentaries, Buffy now writes and collaborates full time. A two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Lumina, River Heron Review, Dodging the Rain, Split Lip Magazine, Wales Haiku, Reflex Press, Anthropocene, What Rough Beast. She was awarded the Cobalt Review’s prize for their baseball issue. She can be reached at Buffy@shuttjones.com or @buffyshutt.

Trapper Markelz

Marlborough

On a stiff day in January, I passed
two crosses flanking a telephone pole. 
I asked my friend Dan, “Hey, did you see
those crosses?” He offered a tight-lipped nod,
“Yeah, this is where racers come to die.”

They get drunk and argue over attraction, 
or color, or a birthplace, and settle the score,
with western type draw, and the guns are souped
cubic centimeters and the bullets are PSI powered
corner friction down the lightless path 

of a commercial park. While Dan is talking, 
we pass a collection of pink and white carnations
coveting a trinity of melted candles. At the center
stands a photo of a young boy, the name Cicero
scrawled on rain stained paper in purple marker. 

I catch his smile as we speed past. He’ll now live 
in that photo forever, holding his dog, baring teeth,
wearing a tie and fine church clothes, trapped 
like a fly that drops onto amber hoping for sweet 
sweet honey, but enters an infinite prison instead. 

Trapper Markelz is a husband, father of four, poet, musician, and cyclist, who writes from Boston, Massachusetts. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals Baltimore Review, Stillwater Review, and others. You can learn more about Trapper at trappermarkelz.com.

Hunter Burke

Hedonophobia

He is making a meal

of your molars and God, it is good.

His teeth clamp down on your lower lip.

Movement within: mountain 

spring, riptide, a storm without 

an eye.

Pressed flat against the bathroom wall, 

you let him travel down your labyrinthine back. 

You never asked to be a maze. You never asked to be solved. 

But you are the first one he laid eyes on tonight as you stood across the bar, stirring 

your cherry vodka sour with a straw, 

unable to shake 

the scent of rabbit fur 

from your clothing. 

And maybe it’s the promise 

of morning that tugs at your car keys 

and leads you home. Or maybe it’s pressing your head 

to the inside of an umbrella so that you can feel the rain 

without getting wet. But his tongue slipping 

through your fog-filled throat

is enough of an answer to scrape 

him from your skin. 

Let him be a wound. 

Let him scab. 

Pick at him. 

Bleed. 

Taste the copper and shudder.

I Wish I Knew the Ending (Reprise)

This is the part in our musical 

when the audience leaves, wondering why they spent 

a hundred dollars to watch two boys eating each other. 

You’d think I’d be used to the taste 

of fake blood—corn syrup and red dye fucking 

inside a clam shell. 

The song is loud, guitar riffs and wailing 

vocals, a drum solo that breaks every velvet 

lined seat and leaves the audience flat on their asses. 

The few who stay will hear 

a reprise underscored by violin, maybe a harp 

or two if we’re feeling generous. 

The lyrics stay 

the same, but I’m kissing 

you now, your fake blood dry 

on my lips, our stuffed-stocking intestines 

tangled at center stage. 

There’s a spotlight 

on us, and the ones who stay will swear 

it was all real: the blood, the tears, the mutual disembowelment 

beneath an LED moon shining at half-mast. 

But you and I know better, baby. 

We do this shit eight times a week. 

Sometimes I wish 

it was real, that the knife 

didn’t run away into its handle every time. 

Maybe on closing night 

they’ll all stay, and we can stop 

singing the same shitty songs. 

Kiss me, baby. I think that’s our cue.

Hunter Burke is a queer poet and performer originally from Friendswood, Texas. His work has been previously published in Impossible Archetype, The Beacon, and on poets.org. He was the recipient of the 2019 William C. Weathers Memorial Prize for Poetry. Hunter currently lives in New York City and can be reached at h.emmett456@gmail.com or on Instagram using @hemmett__

Matthew J. Andrews

Self Portrait with Asphyxiation

My son reaches inside of me,
deep into the cavern of my stomach,
and unravels the darkness,
the rotten pieces left neglected. 
We thread them, bind them together
until they resemble a sturdy rope,
wrap them around our necks
like wayward umbilical cords.
As we begin to choke together,
there’s this voice, this tender whisper
from behind, reminding me I can stop 
this, that it doesn’t have to be
any longer like it was for me
when I dug my hands into the flesh
of my father, that I am capable
of cutting myself open and draining
the collected refuse into the gutter
without the aid of unfinished fingers,
that these hands can still be tools for breath 
if only I make the choice to raise them up
like balloons when the string is cut,
to untie the knot at his neck
and let myself go free.

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, Red Rock Review, Sojourners, Amethyst Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Deep Wild Journal, among others. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com or on Twitter @2glassandrews.

Olivia Ivings

Chattahoochee

I think back to that day at the river, 
your hand shaped like a nautilus shell 
as you passed an I.O.U. to the kid 
who sold bud as you stood over the rat snake. 

The mackerel-blue paper slipped 
between fingers. A cicada’s armor
couldn’t keep us from the subpoena under
the dock where we found the farmer 
blanketed in seaweed, protected 
from the mortification of small-town divorce.

So much had been lost in translation.
The haze of Tuesday court sessions hovered,
then dissipated. It’s engraved in a wrinkle. 

I wish it could be lost the way we’re lost 
from God. If all his thoughts fell into the river, 
a diver would set them on the bank—we’d enjoy Life 
with Lucy because the sun-glare would bridge gaps, 
creating something like constancy.

Olivia Ivings is an MFA student at the University of Florida, where she works as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Her work has previously appeared in Poet Lore and Shrew Literary Zine.

Emory Bartholet

Meditation on the Weather, Yours and Mine

I’m afraid I will ask you to unbreak glass, 
like this is a thing you can do, like I can justify myself 
to ribbons that might tie your hands to the floor
while they beat and grow—your loyalty 
promised to things we walk on. 

Instead of speaking out loud, I shut my eyes.
I think, I could pray to Saint Jude,
then remember that she is not a god, rather, 
the friend of my enemy. I once thought, 
I could be friends with my enemy’s friend. 
I will not be fooled twice.

Someone posts a video of the weather to Facebook, and for a moment, 
I am a child in the wilds, all snow boots and wet hair. 
Nothing feels more free than my own blood 
beating in my fists—and the moment is over.

And the moment is over.
And the moment is over again. 
And the moment is over four times. 

And the moment is over one more time 
(for good measure). 

And I am mopping the floor with blood—
yours or mine? 

And there is still glass on the floor. 

Emory Bartholet (they/them) is an AmeriCorps member currently serving at a nonprofit in Maryland. Should all go according to plan, they will begin pursuit of a Masters of Social Work in the fall of 2021. Emory's poetry has previously appeared in Third Point Press, Half-Mystic, Inklette, Counterclock, and Rascal, among other publications (although much of that poetry was published under a deadname).

Allisa Cherry

Without Any Warning

I think of my father’s black eyes,
vessels broken

and the sick olive green of his skin
turning sallow

in the days that followed the fight
on the basement stairs 

where a bare bulb lit
my brother’s ascent,

his fists flying, his mouth spitting sparks
as he rose.

How many nights before, my father
paced a rut through time,  

watching for my brother’s headlights
to swing into the driveway. 

How my brother once let me sleep
against his ribcage  

the night the planets all lined up
and I thought 

we were going to die.
Without any warning, 

the compression of love and history
in those landed blows,

the old man’s joints slowing,
how he pulled

his punches and allowed my brother
to rise and win, 

how my brother’s friends watched 
from his bedroom door, 

the blown glass bong upended,
the Crown Royale sack 

of D&D dice dropped and scattered
like bright jewels

across the unfinished floor.
And the next morning

how they proceeded to love one another again, 
sheepishly at first

with swollen jaws and bruised knuckles,
how a light poured

through a fist sized hole in the drywall
and illuminated our mother

as she told us we must tell the neighbors
my father fell

carrying the baby on his shoulders,
that his hands 

reached up and instinctively protected
the baby when he fell. 

Allisa Cherry was born and raised in the rural southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to Portland, OR where she works as a writing tutor and small-scale urban farmer and has recently completed an MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Her work has received Pushcart Prize nominations from San Pedro River Review and High Desert Journal and is forthcoming in Westchester Review and Tar River Poetry. You can reach her for conversation regarding her work at asauraan@gmail.com or on Instagram @allisacherry.