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.

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.

Sitting on the rooftop ledges,
The golden dawn lighting up the hedges.
A vantage point, a bird’s eye view,
Woe is over: through and through.

Take a step, with feet on air
Hover a while, maybe stay there.
A glance around, endless bliss.
Everything in order, nothing amiss.

In the wake of rain, comes break of day,
When the clouds frolic and do ballet,
Order and chaos intertwined:
The symmetry of nature, perfectly defined.

A rude awakening, back at school:
History class is nothing but cruel.
A fickle world, easily undone.
Back to the real world: not nearly as fun.

 

Alex Blickhan is a high school junior, interested in chess, unicycling, anime, and dogs. He is an aspiring decathlete, engineer, and poet.

after Aimee Nezhukumatathil
SUWANEE, GEORGIA

 

My mother harvests yard-long beans, their tails a bracelet on her wrist. I pour plasticky water into the dusty, dusty dirt & make mud pies. I am a cooking show host. I am eight & want to bike around the cul-de-sac with my neighbor-friends, but my knees are still red-cratered from the last time. I am eight, my brother is new, & we puff our faces into full moons for every picture until our mother cries no, no, no. I am eight & I belt “Heartbreak Hotel” to our Thanksgiving casseroles. I’ll be a pop sensation if the cooking show doesn’t work out. I am eight & I squeeze my mother’s pear lotion into the bath mats & scrunch my toes & dance until the silky green disappears. I never see her nose wrinkle. Sometimes I steal into the dark of her purse & find sugared mango ribbons, tough & expired, meaning a squirrel’s desperate paws, meaning a prize saved for winter. A sweet reminder of home, I think—she pokes at the determined puffing of my cheek & says, No, no, can’t you save one for me?

 

 

Noreen Ocampo (she/her) is a Filipina American writer and poet based in Atlanta. Her work appears in Taco Bell Quarterly, Hobart, and HAD, among others, and she studies at Emory University. Say hello on Twitter @maybenoreen!