Issue 34

I Am No Lion But

By Jordan Kappler

I want to tell you what it is like to love a coward,
then you hung up when I started calling.
I twist in on myself like a wounded bird,
falling backwards into my duvet
as if high from the nest.
Six months since April and I’m
still dying on your doorstep,
an afterthought, a bad dream
blurring at the edges.

I want to show you what it is like to love a coward,
but you turned away from me in the hall,
drifting silently into a sea of passersby,
the perfect version of yourself,
impregnable, unreadable,
enamored with your own shadow.

Does the lifeless greyscale suit you?
Would you like to take it out to dinner,
tell it about yourself in between
sips of cider in some grimy dive-bar,
the haze of dusk still on your clothes, in your hair?

You could compliment yourself in the mirror,
turn your neck side to side,
admire the view of your broad-shouldered back
and never call your mother,
then lament her lack of love.

Your shadow can hold you on the cab ride back,
resting its head on your shoulder,
silent, obedient, needing nothing but your company.
You will stumble into bed and wonder if you dreamed it,
the echo of loneliness in your apartment,
the cold pillow next to you.
Your declaration of love is a scream
sent straight into the void.

One day, you will wonder what it was like to be loved
and you will think I still nurse the shame,
that I am a bird clenched between your teeth,
prickled by your indifference.
But I no longer wait for the next time you will want me,
I no longer search for broken things to fix.

Jordan Kappler is a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon majoring in English. She hopes to go into the publishing industry after graduating and strives to uplift minority voices. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, she believes that writing material for queer audiences is crucial to make space for minority experiences. In her free time, she likes to play guitar, write, and wander around Portland in search of the perfect boba tea.

Beachy Vibes

By Grace Huang

My name is Grace Huang, and I am an artist whose favorite medium is watercolor/guache. One of my favorite pieces, “Beach Vibes,” captures the serene and relaxing atmosphere of a beach getaway. Creating art has always been a source of happiness for me, and I love infusing my work with the peaceful, happy vibes that I hope others can feel when they view my paintings.

Forgotten Dogs

By Ellie Simmons

if you set me loose in the country like a moving family’s dog
where would i go?
to the bed twice my age
in the copper clay-brick house?
to the summit or the valley
where the stars know my name?
to the pipe across the creek
that saw me stand at its mouth
and sing?
but the bed was my parents’
and the wild was the bears’
and the hallowed pipe
overgrown and echoing
belongs to the singing girl
at the end of the tunnel.
they say the forgotten dog
will always come back home.
i can only hope
i skip beds, wilds, and pipes
and run to you.

Ellie Simmons is a student and author based in an Atlanta, Georgia suburb. When not writing, she coaches youth rock climbing. Her work is either published or forthcoming in Frighten the Horses, COOP, and Genrepunk Magazine.

A Handful of Flying Shrapnel

By Elizabeth Imaji Ekawu

At the cusp of dawn, the sermon was:
gone is the year of dead dreams & earthing of love & losses.
I’d like to agree but the news keeps breaking:
a bullet hugs a school boy & froze his body.

10 school buses have been hijacked by terrorists.
a mother wanders into a bomb to save her daughter
from dying before adulthood. In all of these,
a handful of flying shrapnel lays my faith to rest.

The story goes: grief didn’t allow the world to be still––
a move that altered the revolution of origin.
Lads, teens, youths & adults: age groups that fell off,
leaving elegies in our mouth. We left them flowers

on their tombs, hopeful of growth,
of a transition from unconsciousness to undeath.
You know I have gone through turbulence to be here
in the manner dust curdles my body to lay claim on me.

Aphthous ulcers: the wounds I had from the live coal
grave times placed in my mouth.
I sing of my dead dreams, still.
I speak of my struggles, a drowning into the night

& reawakening into longing for light.
Survival is not always street matter but I slanged it
the street way. I say: the year showed its rough phases
& I rugged through it, mindful of the life-ending signs.

Elizabeth Imaji Ekawu, a budding writer and artiste is a member of Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation, Abuja. She is the winner of Uzo-Udegbunam Poetry Prize. She has won twice at Hadiza Ibrahim Aliyu Schools Festival, Spoken Word category. Say hello on Instagram @elizabeth.maji

Lights

By Divya Venkat Sridhar

are the blood of the evening.
In the sky, a child pokes a pencil through dark paper
and the wounds singe my eyes.
The window is a yawning mouth
and the breeze its soft tongue.
Sunlight and its rusting frame
cast a jail cell on the ceiling.
A purple glow sits on the tree.
Its branch is seared in half
from the blinking red needle of an aeroplane.
The yellows and oranges move quickly,
bend like a leaf into water.
Fluorescent bulbs hem
the seams of northern california
like ants burrowing on the hills.
In the sky, a cigarette dusts its ash
and breaks into sparkling bubbles of soap.
The moon blinks at them,
bleeding into the dark
like a swollen tooth
in a tired smile.

Divya Venkat Sridhar (she/her) is an Indian poet living in Switzerland. Her work has been published by the Poetry Society, Rattle Magazine, Zindabad Zine, and more. She was also a 2023 winner of the Guernsey International Poetry Competition. When she isn’t writing, you’ll find her making pasta, playing the saxophone, or singing the La La Land soundtrack (terribly).

because i am in a room, i don’t belong

By Michelle Li

(after Ocean Vuong, Daniel Liu, and Patricia Lockwood)

,I tilt my head back against the sound. There’s a line I read in a poem that I often repeat to myself now: the most beautiful part of your body is where it is heading. I hold it like water, as if once I squeeze too hard, it will break. Back in rural Texas, behind a front porch in the middle of the Bible Belt, is a house; its rickety foundation with watered-down wood soft enough to bend, its daffodils perched by the windowsill withering in the sun’s stubborn cradle, curling into their bodies like rollie pollies; it is only early February, the month when the weather has an attitude that won’t go away, temper scaring away birdsong. I try to live largely, try to live like a wildly brilliant animal, yet so much for my efforts, because here we all are, stuck on an enormous flatland between two bodies of saltwater, trying out each day of the new year before deciding which one to die on. You are no better than me. I am no better than Claire from across the street. I entered this world with my sadness, I’ll take it with me when I leave. On our living days, we are realtors in our own homes, showing our bodies around space and time before picking some punctum to wallow in; I’ll never admit any of my flaws to my doctor, when he asks how much sleep do you average per night?, I tell him eight hours, which is excluding the time when I sit by my bedside, knees dangling from the edge, blue seeping into my joints, running lines from Ocean Vuong’s book over and over again in my mouth so my tongue can sandpaper the words into perfection and spit them out in syllables again when I need it. I’ll let you guess how long that takes. In Texas, I imagine nothing is happy. They call you fat or gawky or pretty and roll it up like a joint stuffed with insult, well, I figured I’d light it with burning eyes and smoke it, then leave at the first crack of eighteen. The future is parading itself in front of me, a red carpet, and now I am in my twenties, washing after a party I can barely remember just to feel clean. I scrubbed and scrubbed just to see how hollow I was inside, opening flesh to inspect my bones of sadness and calcium, reminding myself of my mother’s words, we are what we eat, thinking that I must have drank too much milk when I was younger. It is the first time I feel close to death, seen enough of a sliver of him to feel afraid; mother says anything can cause death if you are not careful; cover your drinks, cover your eyes, girls, live on to try out every day of the year before choosing your death date. The air here is so thin and sharp and keeps you in exquisite pain. There are flowers by the windowsill (old habits die hard) that open their red throats like tiger lilies ready to speak. Beneath the queer retreat of silken sound, the distant cacophony of doors slamming, liquor hangs in the air and my roommate has written up another list of boys she’d like to kiss, her downpour smile sharp, legs curled up against her body like an apologetica. She asked me why I was looking so blue, I told her I had written out an elegy for her. She doesn’t know what this is about (but finds it funny), and I don’t either: I can say confusion is the best quality we have, so hold on to it when you wake by the darker side of the pool shivering in the summer ode of petrichor and pondering the first time you realized you were alive, your knees giving out beneath your butterfly form when you walk because you don’t watch where you’re heading, tripping into the chlorine water before you’ve decided on a date to die, and all you hear is a murky vodka-soaked cry above from some nearby partygoer on land, you are still too young to try death on like a drug, body in the shape of a child falling off a first bike with rusting handlebars, so you pop your head above the water, the taste of hair plastered in your mouth. Remember all the kissing, all the young death flashing through your head like it’s your last day alive and the animators are frantically filling up the screentime of your life. I’ve taken you forward to where I ended up, let me take you back, back to biting off pieces of laughter like mint chewing gum, back to when we took the form of bodies that were none the wiser. I’m putting it all away: homecoming, the snuffing of a last cigarette, mourning. I think so greatly, so far ahead, beyond the starlings above, high and fevered, that nothing matters, not even the fact that I still don’t belong here—the rest is a dream.

Michelle Li has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, The Waltham Forest Poetry Contest, published or forthcoming in Blue Marble, Masque and Spectacle, and Lumina Journal among others. She is an alumnus of the 92Y Young Writer’s Workshop and will be attending the Kenyon Review Workshop; you can find her on the board of the Incandescent Review, Pen and Quill magazine, and the Malu Zine. She’ll read practically anything, the more absurd and emotional the work, the better, and plays both violin and piano. She has an unhealthy obsession with Rachmaninoff, morally grey characters, and Sylvia Plath.