KATARZYNA STEFANICKA

once they were touched 

hand-crafted

squeezed in the margins

rubbed into the folds

in the middle

spaced with silence

dressed-up at tails-end

withstanding

pressures of life on paper

---

KATARZYNA STEFANICKA is a psychologist with an interest in psychoanalysis and writing. Most recently she published with Rue Scribe. She lives, works and writes in London.

KINSHUK GUPTA

You should be able to pinpoint it: abdomen, upper half,

left side, a hand’s breadth from the last floating rib.

Compare it with ballpoint’s prick or knife’s stab—

we were taught in medical school. That winter when the sun

bleached, and roads jacketed in snow, I saw a grainy green

chameleon on a branch, his beaded eyes peeling away

excuses that kept me spooning Plath’s tulips. Leaving me

hungry for whistling Malabar thrush. Hungry for donuts

dunked in sugar syrup—sweet at first, then tart on tongue.

Hungry for wind saturated with salt. Your bent knees were peaks, and

my body moored into your valley; borrowed the orchestra of your breaths—

in and out, in and out,                              long and loud gasp.            

That winter I feared greasy, five-toed depression. Its coiled tail.

Its pale, flaking skin. That winter when I asked my father to

drive me to the therapist, he told me: Bear, Bear like a man.

That winter, dread spread in mom’s eyes, when I rode shotgun in the car.

Friends wishing—Go to God. Begging in scented temples,

my prayers hissing in ears like clumsy bells. That winter I fell upon

dreams, changing colours—gunmetal sky, burgundy bruises,

pea-soup fog. That winter the psychiatrist said: Your disease is fictional.

Depression is alive only in black and white. That winter I kept

searching for lithe silhouettes as reptile’s eyes scanned my body.

That winter I wished for wicker coracle of sleep. Dreamt of eyes

hidden in whopping cyclones. Woke up to eyes beaded in jet-black sky,

craving sleep again. Like a prisoner pardoned for a crime

he didn’t commit. That winter before the chameleon cracked

whip of tongue, I learnt that pain is only pain with a name;

searched for sounds in the language sheltered in my bones.

It is unholy to think that the war is over when guns

stop shooting. When he rolled back his tongue to swallow me,

I kept running and running and running

                                                                from the pistol of his eyes.

---

KINSHUK GUPTA uses the scalpel of his pen to write about his experiences as an undergraduate medical student. He was longlisted for the People Need Change Poetry Contest (2020), The Poetry Society, UK. His haiku have been nominated for the Touchstone Awards and the Red Moon Anthology. His work can be read or forthcoming in The Hindu, The Hindu Business Line, Modern Haiku, Haiku Foundation, Contemporary Haibun Online, among others. He currently works as the Poetry Editor at Jaggery Lit and an Associate Editor at Usawa Literary Review.

Emerson Kurdi

Bow under the crosstie ropes securing your horse

to the ground. Bend over your grooming bag,

finger over the warm, bruised apple,

the harsh seamed plastic hoof pick,

prickly sugar crystals from jostled cubes,

the bumpy-bottomed curry comb – to agitate dust

from his back – and select the horsehair brush,

wood worn by drops.

Stroke the dust, hay, and sleep

from where they have settled on his curves,

sweep from the withers, with the grain, quick-wristed

towards his rump. Careful, the leather and shit

scented dust congeals in your snot and tears –

I remember once,

asking politely for his foot

by squeezing his fetlock bump

and lifting – wielding the pick against my hand

like tugging a nail with a hammer claw,

coaxing mush and rock from his shoe

to free him of pain and the potential to slip, accidentally

hacking at his frog, sending his pointed toe towards mine

in protest, like a spade piercing soft loam.

Despite his repeated abuse – you’ll blame yourself –

heave the pad and saddle over his shoulder,

horse-left, your right, echoing cavalry tradition:

mounting left to protect him from the sword.

Wiggle the horn to kiss the smallest hairs

of his coarse mane, clip girth and pull deep

upward – Once, I forgot to watch 

the glint in his eye while squeezing

his barrel and buckling, unaware

of how fast his thick neck could carry

his teeth to my arm – he never breaks skin, though.

In the final act of this tenuous dance, unravel the bridle

strings, flick reigns over neck and split his bite

at the tooth-gap with your thumb, funnel the bit

between his velveteen lips. Listen to him crunch,

watch his round jaw muscle pulse, urge perked ears

and forelock through the browband, eye-to-eye.

---

EMERSON KURDI is a graduate student at Texas Tech University, concentrating in Creative Writing. If he has a weekend to spare, you could find him hiking in the New Mexican wilderness with his wife and dogs, or pretending to like craft beer with his friends on a restaurant patio. You can find other poems written by Emerson at The Dillydoun Review.

Amy Liu

On a Queens balcony, grandmother makes a woman of me: she

unbraids my hair and presses my hands into a pot of loess;

from this, we come forth. Nüwa molded men from this yellow

earth; she held up the heavens         and I turn to      the pale clouds,

searching for meaning. I daydream not of Nüwa’s

            smelted stones and sculptor’s fingers but of        the pale boy

at the corner store          who taught me his disjointed tale of women

and painted in black and blue,           of the way his

hands carved into me                 and wrote their own chapter.

Grandmother says that all stories of men and boys begin with

the cleavage of their rough bodies from iron mud that runs red

the moment they are born,

that we write the endings to the tragedies they mistakenly

begin. Nüwa drained the surging floods and

quilted back together an azure sky; it is

us women who heal these earthen wounds, granddaughter.

I let loess fall from my fingertips beneath

the afternoon sun and wonder if

an epilogue awaits me;                                       I close my eyes

            and behind the raven lashes inherited from         grandmother

is Nüwa,           marked in beautiful lines,           forging strength.

That night, I ink my own womanhood onto yellowed paper,

press it to my steadfast heart, and exhale into Nüwa’s reborn sky.

---

AMY LIU is a high school student and an aspiring writer. She has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, among others. She is an editor at her school newspaper and enjoys playing the piano and baking in her spare time.

---

—after ‘Canto XIV’ by Robert Rauschenberg

You can try to brush the fire away,

but it’s no use when your hands

are blood and the blood

is gasoline. You grew up

confident; it was only when

your eyes sprouted that you started

to stumble. You grew up unaware

of the desolate field,

littered with black forms like tissue paper,

although it’s surrounded you

all your life. Your blindness

was an accessory, kissed

by street parades and cinema love.

Once you glimpsed the field, you could not return

to those safer places without seeing

yellow stalks bursting up through

dancers’ sneakers, staining those tongues

with pinpricks of red. Or desire

like the burning

bush the grass is watered with,

or musculature waiting, like wheat,

to be blighted.

You grew up unaware

that you live in an inverted forest of headstones,

and once you learned, they became

permanently saturated. You grew up

thinking the worst river

you could cross was the one you

cross alone, but it is so much

worse to wade through

the body of boiling blood

with others by your side,

loving and wasting and melting into the current.

You will never stop seeing your companions

evaporating from bar corners

and wingback chairs,

you will never forget the field

and its growth

and the way it contaminates

every small thing.

You wonder how you could ignore

a space so substantial,

but you know that you grew up blind

because nobody could explain

the vastness of the field

or the way your heart would break

finding empty footprints

in the soil.

---

RYAN E MOORE is a poet and writer, as well as a student at the Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada. When not writing, they enjoy trying new foods and spending time with their dog, Libby. Their work has previously appeared in the Body Without Organs journal.

---

When you ask me what I am afraid of
I hold out my hands.

You see, I am a body of cut lines
and gravel burn,

twice-read birthday cards, deleted emails,
gutter crawl.

I am unfiltered blood,
a collection of half-healed wounds,

a slick bathroom floor,
the predictable slipping hazard.

This body is taking up space;
it is guilt,

an empty womb that prompts your mouth,
a refusal that breeds the backhand,

a metal baseball bat hidden beneath the bed.
She is primed to crack bone,

is designed to dismember joints,
forged to wound.

This body is a dragging limb,
a nervous stagger,

dramatic slipped footing,
a body of impulse.

I am the burn of tobacco against a jacket lapel,
the smell of lampblack

and crows’ nests,
the poem I never wrote you,

a heart line fading
from the skin.

---

JESSICA SABO is a poet and former ballerina whose work focuses on the intersection of eating disorders and trauma. Her poems have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Rogue Agent Journal, and Coffin Bell Journal, among others. Jessica’s work has been anthologized with ChannelMarker Literary Journal and Adelaide Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming with Damaged Goods Press. In 2020, Jessica was named a finalist for the Adelaide Literary Award in Poetry and was a semi-finalist for a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship. She currently lives in Orlando with her wife and two senior rescue dogs.