Issue 23

Needle-shaped crystals of golden rutile
protrude from ocean-coloured quartz.
Its Technicolor shards tell me that my life
means nothing in the face of a mineral
that has crossed a rushing sea of time
to arrive smooth and sharp all at once
in my small, leathery hands by the foamy water
as I call to you, hoping you’ll see
the shimmering, yet painfully irregular, polygon
that rests in my hands like a
Sleeping child. What more could I want than a
strange thing in my palms
that reminds me of my woefully insignificant state
among stars hanging over me
in the freezing heat? This quartz with a rutile stake
through its heart tells me you
won’t come. I’ve called out to the sunless sea
the void that fills the space between
the grainy sand and whatever heaven we came from.
The crystals tell me I’ll never be home
and that I’ve been playing God by yelling your name
from the microscopic beige that fills the space
between my toes. But as I dip my feet into the water
and accept the stippled sea spray
and wade through the same clever colour as the shape
I hold tenderly, I thank it for its advice
and drop it into the sea. I sit down, float through debris,
and as my toes are eaten by tiny sharp-toothed fish,
tell the stars
I’ve returned home.

CA Russegger is a Filipino writer whose work doesn’t appear anywhere much, but who loves history, literature, and dogs.

in the consequence of creation,
it’s a tuesday morning in my bed.
the windows shield cold weather
slights, curtains hung-tight-and-shut.

in my head,
this is a consequence of mayhem.
that the lesser powers crash against
each other, wielding the sort of chaos

that creates its own pretense.
in my bed, it’s a tuesday morning
like the tuesday morning before,
ages quietly passed like the breaching

of waves on a crag-lined shore.
in the consequence of creation,
starlight is buried in the dust
of our bones. like the tired,

creaking bone-dead stardust
i am a tired, creaking bone-wrenched
nerve-wracked star, in the consequence
of its conception.

it’s a tuesday morning like the ones
before. curtains shield the consequence
of a cold, unfolding youth collapsed inwards
of its quick, unyielding consciousness.

Grace Anderson is a freshman at University of Minnesota, Morris. They write to conceptualize interpretations of the world and their place in it, and can otherwise be found delving into fiber arts and reading fiction.

I could never figure out
the cheap trick all magicians know
where a ball hides under
one cup (of three), and when he
lifts it, bam, it’s disappeared beneath
the next one over, he reveals.

But the bugs are getting smarter,
as the spider in my kitchen
most particularly stowed inside
the heaviest cup I own
is — presto! — nowhere to be found
(I guess my house is his stage now).

Sydney Sackett is a Maryland-based freelance editor, artist, author, and D&D enthusiast when she’s not working on her latest manuscript, combining her passions for fiction and theatre. Her previous poetry publications can be found in literary journal MONO. and Frostburg State University’s Bittersweet anthology.

A girl
walks towards
the light
and disappears
into a cypress—
do you see
how this is a metaphor
for the apocalypse?
I still highlight
the word grief
in every poem I read.
It is something I cannot unsee:
the colour of a body wrung of joy
like the blue black colouration
of a protein test.
Again, tonight
I search the sky
and name the bleakest
star after me.
It is what I do
to keep hope alive:
call myself a thing capable of light.
call myself a thing incapable of light.

Ibe Obasiota Maryhilda Ben is a Nigerian. She has won the Bloomsday Poetry Prize 2020 and The African Writers’ Trust Prize 2018. Her works have appeared on Brittle Paper, Kreative Diadem, Poetry Column and elsewhere. She writes from Calabar, Nigeria. Follow her on twitter @obasiotaibe.

”Since last September, contractors have been painstakingly demolishing the old Princeton Hospital to make room for a 280-unit development of rental apartments”

– Anne Levin

Picture sex as life and death
sentence. A dance where the self
is unclear. An eye for something
else. Here, Men are born of ink
and anatomy. Bodies pass
into hands looking for something
to hold on to. I call this place home
before. Maybe, if I can return
to a liminal space between birth
and memory, there is still some peace
to be made with something beautiful,
whole, and free, but not quite me.

Someday, this deadname revealed
as both prison and investment,
I will come to understand why
you speak for me before
I have voice: to provide something
to outgrow and remember outgrowing.
Like all mothers, fathers, and doctors,
you must teach me to live and to die.

Kylan Tatum is a writer from Plainsboro, NJ. He is a first-year college student at Harvard University. His work is forthcoming in Polyphony Lit and has been recognized by the Center for Fiction’s National Criminal and Social Justice Contest, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.