Fifteen years ago, we were like this:

 

We held hands slowly on our way to the sunken movie theater

and I watched you through fractions of light, 

thinking there is nothing more our patch of love could teach us now.

We were inseparable, bound likes veins under the skin.

 

The undoing comes quietly: the handholding ebbs,

we bounce like endless particles without a solution.

And we go round and round, until a child

spins our fragments into a perfect rose-gold circle.

Yet, the deep wounds are waiting to speak misery.

 

Now, we seal our regret into long-knotted memories.

You sit at the kitchen table for two

and I honk the horn from the side of the road,

waiting for our son to appear.

I imagine letting go of the familiar things,

collecting the missing pieces which have been found.

---

 

I exist far too often in public

to make you proud.

 

One of you is more fantasy

than ash and no one knows who.

 

You persist through my favorite words,

yellowed stationary and collapsing ink.

 

I do not know

if you ever existed.

 

How your feet padded across the cold stone

whether flowers bloomed in your window.

 

Your parchment feels like some ancient owl

with no nest left behind.

 

Where did your attic go and

how did it crumble?

 

I hope it went as you may have lived—

wooden beams, then a passing sigh.

 

Heard like air moving

sometimes a whistle, but mostly

not there at all.

---

AVA SERRA is a queer woman who strives to highlight underrepresented identities in her art. Aside from her writing projects, she recently completed her degree in Environmental Science at Northwestern University. Since her introduction to poetry in 2016, her work has been featured in Nailed, Northwestern University’s French & Italian publication Rosa La Rose, POSTSCRIPT (2018 & 2019), Sonder Midwest Review, and Lavender Review. She has also received an honorable mention and performed as a finalist in the 2018 and 2019 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards in Chicago, where she dwells and frequently performs. More information about Ava and her work can be found via her website (avaserra.com) or her Facebook page (@avajserra).

after E. E. Cummings’s “[i like my body when it is with your]”

 

i like my mind when it is with your

mind. it is so quite a new thing.

ideas better and imagination more.

i like your neocortex. i like how it thinks,

i like its hmms. i like to follow the twists

of your thought and its tangents, and the reflective

-self-aware ness and which I will

again and again and again

consider, i like considering this and that of your brain,

i like, slowly probing the, shocking synapses

of your electric neurons, and what-is-it comes

over parting hemispheres…And amygdalae big love-crumbs,

 

and possibly i like the thrill

of with me you quite so smart

---

FLOYD CHEUNG is author of the chapbook Jazz at Manzanar (Finishing Line Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in qarrtsiluni, Rhino, and other journals. He teaches in the Department of English and American Studies Program at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

SINGLE 

I locked my mouth like the doors of your eyes

Globes full of museums with hollow hallways

Which pocket holds my key?

Which page can cut the deepest?

Break the backspace

Present presents with lessons wrapped in aluminum foil

How do you do it?

Scream for my silence in silence?

Shape the subject into you?

I’ll tell you how I did it

It was not on purpose

Do you feel me running down your hand

Because of how you gripped me?

Every crevice of me leaking?

There’s too much of you

No dictionary has me

Slam the book

Slam yourself inside

I’ll make room

I didn’t notice I let go

I’ve been nurtured into slippery

Cultivated into clumsy

When I said you weren’t bothering me

I didn’t mean it

Each time

And when you insinuated I was made just for you

I wished I were a rib

Replace your question marks with God

Replace your ignorance with facts

Let go of my hand to put yours on the clutch

Reverse me back to the only corner with no webs

Erase the games of tic tac toe on my skin

With your tongue

Undress me to my skeleton

Taste me then kiss me

I use your hair to clean my fingers

Because it feels good

Because I want to feel the residue of your brain under these nails

Then flick them away like the nuisance you are

I love the new haircut

I love the temple

But that is all

We’re the pink spit from brushed teeth

Is it the paste and blood

Because I brushed too hard

Or is it the paste and Koolaid

The cherry kind we breathed as kids

But now doesn’t taste the same

But now taste like required insulin

Disgusting

Won’t you discuss me one more time

Say those words we’ve all heard before

Say it like you mean it

Say it like a song

Say it like we’re single

---

HOME 

Home is where the sound of sirens are lullabies. Where single moms dream when they blink. Where the candles smell like the places we’ve never been. Where the grass on the other side is as green as money. Home sparkles with resilience. Home has tears that could quench thirst. Sometimes our smiles are tired from being bent but we smile anyway. Home is where neighbors offer you mangos from their trees. Where Grandma plants her own collard greens. Where aunties and uncles smoke blunts and black & milds while playing cards. Where there are t-shirts and towels dancing in the wind, waiting to be dry. Where a surplus of men roam the streets and fatherless children sleep untucked in bed. Home is where your mom approves your sleepover with your cousin just for y’all to laugh until Auntie yells for y’all to go to bed. Home is where the pastors are loud and the choirs are louder. But who one can hear us? Who will listen? Home is where the clouds slow down prayers. Where the people are darker from flying too close to the sun. Home is a whisper of water touching the seeds who can make it out. Home is a 9 to 5. A 7 to 3. An 11 to 7. A clock in and a clock out and a clock broken. Home is a bowl of dirt and glitter. Home is a rearview mirror glistening with neighbors, aunties, uncles, cousins, play-cousins, friends, classmates, moms all waving and watching your journey on the yellow brick road.

---

CHOYA is an adjunct professor at Adelphi University with a B.A. in Mass Communications and M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Rigorous Magazine, midnight & indigo, Her Campus, The Crow’s Nest, NNB News and elsewhere. She’s a proud Floridian who lives happily on Long Island in New York.

I’m beginning to think it’s not the French

donning funeral black, but the tourists,

temporary Hemingways. We’re the ones

sulking on park benches outside Notre Dame,

clutching notebooks, ink pens, watercolor

visions of the Seine at dusk. Paris blushes

crepe as lovers’ tongues waltz to a violin

Sinatra on Pont de Sully. We feverishly write

down the image. Finally, good material. Spectators,

we observe the city of love with no one to hold us

back at the hostel. And so we sip red wine bought

from a peddler, drunk on the idea that we must suffer

for divine inspiration. Years from now, failed novels later,

we will swear to God the gargoyles were laughing at us.

---

ANISSA LYNNE JOHNSON is a writer and motivational speaker from Gladstone, MI. She is currently an MA candidate at Northern Michigan University. Her work often centers on grief and healing, hope and faith, and the little moments that pave the large world we live in. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tiny Seed Journal and Haunted Waters Press. When she isn’t traveling the world or writing, she can be found at home with her husband and eleven plant children.

 

You and I spilled 

chemicals in the darkroom,

the wall gave us electric shocks.

 

1970’s hippie school: two

12-year-olds of opposite genders

with unsupervised lab access.

 

We poured stop bath into plastic tubs,

watched the images 

bloom in black and white,

their buds opened wide.

 

Usually we handled chemicals

like responsible adults: 

disposed of toxic waste 

down the sink drain,

washed our hands afterwards.

 

One day, in a hurry,

we spilled tub after tub

onto the cement floor: 

 

chemicals sloshed against

the dangling wires and

created a series of shocks

that reverberated through our bodies.

 

We did our best to clean up

before the teachers could find us

and revoke our darkroom privileges.

 

You and I made it back to class,

the teachers hadn’t even 

noticed we were gone.

 

They gave us unlimited freedom

while they sat in the corner,

chain-smoked filtered cigarettes,

and told us never to start

or we’d end up just like them.

 

So I hope it wasn’t you, but 

someone else with your name:

that young man on the internet

 

framed for murder, found 

not guilty due to insanity, 

confined to the state hospital;

 

exonerated 20 years later

on the basis of new evidence,

but Google doesn’t lie, and besides,

 

who else could it possibly be?

---

LEAH MUELLER is an indie writer and spoken word performer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of three chapbooks and five books. Her most recent book, Misguided Behavior, Tales of Poor Life Choices was published in September, 2019 by Czykmate Press. Her new chapbook, Death and Heartbreak (Weasel Press) is forthcoming in October, 2019. Leah’s work appears in Blunderbuss, The Spectacle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and other publications. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest.

 

It’s humid in this field surrounded by miles

of nothing but you and I and grasshoppers. The hot wetness

sticks under my armpits and on the dip of my back.

 

I would prefer your hand

on the dip of my back.

 

There are no-see-ums in my brain

and under my eyes and when I cry

they get so fat on the salt, a testament

to how much I love you, or maybe

to my fucked mental health.

 

Either way, their girth hurts.

 

I lay pressed daisies in your palm

that only opens when I tug on your fingers

and you hold them in the same way a kind mother

holds a frog her son proudly brought in the house

which is to say you don’t—you let them rest

in your hand as a way of placating me until I leave.

 

When I’m alone, I crouch in the field

with the grasshoppers and pray

for a taste of their mastery of leaping

effortlessly away from what causes them pain.

---

EMILY is currently an undergraduate senior at Saint Leo University in St. Leo, Florida, where she is studying English with a specialization in creative writing. Her work has been published in The Dandelion Review, Sandhill Review‘s 2017, 2018, and 2019 issues, and is forthcoming in The Dollhouse. When not writing she can be found cuddling with her five cats and/or devouring frozen pizza.