Words for the various levels of hell.
Words for the forest, the trails worn against it.
To name such places was to name limbo,
the way shot through with longing and starlight.
Each journey begins with loss
though when young we were taught to call it setting.
Then, to list it with other devices.
To touch it and put it down when we’re done.
On the floor, a mess of needles and soil.
Under the moss, rocks and water.
In the corners our forms moved
against each other, if movement was right
for the chosen word.
It’s important to write the ending first.
Not that you met someone else
but that frost is an alternate ending for night.
They called it the end but this was a circle.
Wasn’t the beginning a forest?
Wasn’t it dark?
In the underbrush branches shuddered.
Birds called how they do
when animals move through the distance below them.

*

Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (2022) and Folklore of Lunenburg County (2024), both published by Gaspereau Press. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, The Cortland Review, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.

Some edible heiress, lapsing as hot
wax, her lavender bones
spooning with glacial, inconsiderate drape:
encased, transparent, opaque, and primmed.
Yet the I slithers inside the skeletal drift,
imagining fresh, glowing aspirations
like the pricking wound of embarrassment:
ah, beauty dissimilar, slinky in dissent,
a revoked invitation. She is far and unfair,
a petulance enviable for its mobbish acquiescence.
Ghost, Euridice, what of his singing rocks
assembling the staircase to the basement?
I’ve heard of them, but did you?

*

Annie Goold is from a small farm in rural Illinois. She graduated from Cornell University in 2017 with an MFA in poetry. She is currently pursuing an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Eastern Illinois University. She lives and writes in Champaign, Illinois.

“[Women] already make all the people […] You make all the humans. That’s a big fucking deal.”
Joe Rogan, Strange Times Netflix Special

Year one would be mostly medical:
midwives, doctors, hospitals, NICUs.

The diaper industry would take a hit.
All uteruses in quiet agreement.

The second fallout: downsizing daycare.
The silent shockwave of kindergarten.

1.5 million kindergarten teachers in the US
set up to enjoy a solid extended vacation.

Let’s set the record straight:
there is no miracle rib.

Babies grow in utero
and burst out of vaginas.

What happens when the government can no longer
procure babies from female bodies?

An IRB would frown upon growing
Homo sapiens in petri dishes.

Historically, power belongs to the oppressor.
Religion: a primer in female suppression.

Maybe, like Mary, we should all aspire
to parthenogenesis. Virgin birth.

No earthly penis is worthy of uterine holiness.
The sacrosanct womb holds no place for patriarchy.

*

Angel James is an easily distracted creative person from a sleepy, rural river town in Central Pennsylvania. She earned her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in English and a graduate certificate in Institutional Research and Assessment. Angel’s first book of poetry, Becoming Friends With Chaos, a collection of works inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, was released in 2022. You can learn more about her at angeljamescreates.com. 

You can look God straight in the eye
It’s not fun

but don’t flatter yourself, it’s not a challenge. It’s outside of what is restricted
It’s outside of what is forbidden to you. And it’s outside of all that hates you

You bring your slack jaw to it

The Eucharist was insisted upon
Christ and man provoke each other now

(Christ the provocateur)
(Emily the provocateur)

That is the Christ-Man’s perpetual
motion machine

And I haven’t even decided yet
I’m just looking. I’m trying to think

Christ Pantocrator looked at me from the Eucharist
Yet I willed it

But we knew each other. And there was a stress on nothing. Which I resent
And I had to carry that home with me

I have inherited a pallor, a gait, a watchful eye
Not a brilliant eye

*

Emily Tristan Jones was raised in the subarctic and prairies. Her poems have been in Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, and several other journals. Her first book of poetry, Buttercup, will be published by Verge Books (Chicago, 2024). She is an alumna of the University of Chicago, Banff Centre, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Montreal where she edits Columba. 

Foxes run borders
of vision. Draping
moss and calling
birds—it was long
before I felt
the cold depress
my dress & through thread
paired ivories. What it was
I was thinking I hadn’t
said, the feeling
again come over
me. Dreams of
children every night, looking
like you we
sang the Kyrie & luciferous
corners echoed
woozy. All our prayers
to a god unearthed.
A god who is & is & is.
Nothing more.

*

J.J. Starr-McClain is a poet and writer in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended the New York University creative writing program and has received support from Wesleyan University and the Community of Writers. Her work can also be found in The Common, Cosmonauts Ave, Juked, The Journal, and elsewhere.

you’ve been dead and here I am still trying
to fix you, waking in the morning with a cure
in my mind — for the cancer, yes,
and all the old ills, too, all the things you never
reconciled. I want to lock you in a padded room
called health. I, too, want to draw your body
into some other rubric. My daughter refuses to sleep
alone. I am thinking of having another baby.
Perhaps the next one won’t enter the world
on the heels of so much death. So what if they do?
Isn’t that always how it happens? If not your death
someone else’s. I don’t know when it happened,
Mother, but somewhere in the day, a knot blooms
in my throat, and I realize I’ve barely been breathing.
Suddenly and for no reason, I’m gasping for the air
that presents itself freely to me. These strange things
that come upon us when we were so careful to resolve
our grief. All the while, robins in the long grass
pulling worms, red brush strokes
of cardinals flitting branch to feeder to branch.
Even the one who’s lost half his beak
manages to carry blonde seed
to his beloved when the snow falls.

*

J.J. Starr-McClain is a poet and writer in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended the New York University creative writing program and has received support from Wesleyan University and the Community of Writers. Her work can also be found in The Common, Cosmonauts Ave, Juked, The Journal, and elsewhere.

In the stained glass factory, the glazier pinned the violet upon the crucible
with purple and gold, set upon the metal frame.
She dabs molten glass into the lapis lazuli not by choice but necessity,
as hotness melts the ultramarine, the plus ultra.

The sea of the sky beacons, broken by the rising sun.
The great-granddaughter of the glazier does not remember the waves
of the Hudson River, only the echoes of failed pronouncements at Ellis Island
reverberating years later, as she frames the drone frequenting the low skyline.

In the intimacy of disparate parts, the girl whispers into the ears
of the passerby, fractals of true artistry which went beyond the intensity
thought possible in photographs, as centuries pass upon the metamorphic
bedrock filled with towers of Babel made of glass and steel.

The lore of fables which once bound rapt audiences now long forgotten:
on the New York City subway, the girl studies photos of sights she beheld,
the smell of unwashed bodies and marijuana in refashioned vintage 7 trains.
She thinks of how she is the last of her tribe.

Memories of her lineage hug her legs like cold air when the train door opens,
fickle like the red twin trees in her night lamp, or memories
of downing defrosted frozen fruits, its sugar already gone.
In a lab of molten glass, her fingers burn like Prometheus.

Gatsby’s junkyard once shown proud with the Unisphere
now a swamp for Canada geese and mallard ducks.
The girl walks, as steam rises to occlude sight
with fog the color of mist in the grass.

At home, the girl recounted the sun in its octagonal beauty,
the life beneath the stillness of the turquoise green pond.
Mama laughs before turning down the lights and kissing the girl
on her head of hair, wishing her a kaleidoscope of sweet dreams.

*

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (forthcoming, BlazeVox) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the Women in Translation project at the University of Wisconsin. Her reviews and interviews of emerging and established voices are published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Laurel Review, EcoTheo Review, Rain Taxi, New World Writing, Hong Kong Review of Books and Tupelo Quarterly, where she is Managing Editor.

This morning a man was struck by a train.
Attention passengers: because there is a man

struck at Fifth Avenue, all trains are running local at this time.
Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

“I wonder” becomes a cloud—a thought bubble—
Anna Karenina’s one wild leap.

Yesterday I captured the full moon above Royal Queen
in the cloudless dark sky with a quick snip double take.

I was walking and thinking to myself, There is no art here.
Or “Western” art, anyway. My last trip was to see KUSAMA:

at the Botanical Garden with you. Along
with you-know-who, who turned cray cray.

Relationships—like clouds—are fickle,
receding like snow on a glistening day.

Preoccupations sprout anew in the silvery sheen
on the octagonal walk, patches of light dimmed.

Planes take off low from the JFK, and at Mets Willets
this morning, the Chinese wore Canada Goose parkas

as we shove our tough love to pack the train because
every single one of the multi-colored pack of us

feel it, this intimacy
caused by grave injury.

Step all the way in, passengers in the front section,
the conductor yelled. I have no need to cower

because I will not be beaten here. I look out the train windows
and absorb the sky I never have time for,

until I learned there is the sublime in the acre where we live
if only we looked deeply.

Step all the way in the rear section, he calls again.
In the nameless middle, my back leaning on

not the door you’re thinking of—
the door between cars—

as I regret not having gone on the other train.
Yes, “Next Train: Local”

during rush hours meant train delays.
There is so much information I must hold—

There are only so many people this train can hold.
Let it go so the other can come in.

The beauty of the street scenes dappled with the vigor
of the working class, whose pay will be docked for lateness.

At 74th and Broadway, Corporate America
more omnipresent than Mister Omicron:

We the huddled masses yearning to get to work on time,
pushed left and right.

There is another train three minutes behind this one.
When you said you’re going to be on

Colored People Time, I feel that’s because you have worked hard
for White people to finally trust you, two decades later.

You stood up for me with the debacle of my supervisor
having me pour her water, again and again.

Back then when you asked me if she treated me badly,
all I know is to hide my tears inside my pockets.

I have left early to have time for myself, and now this.
I would be lying if I say I never thought of leaving

the legacy of exclusion and broken promises behind.
Back then, all we could do was eat, shit, and money.

Deposit and spend money in takeout places where we die.
We must get it done, the Cantonese nonchalance

at throwing away food versus the black-hearted
food poisoning of Fujianese greed.

Grandpa Pindar sent me a picture of his canal, the Gowanus,
the tug boat shining in the moonlight.

He tells me the coal tar sitting at its bottom calls out to him
like a Siren to a sick dog.

I love the Gowanus through him.
I love how the world doesn’t know of the luster

in the river’s metallic sheen
in the moonlight as he stands alone in the dark

or our rabid desire for victory,
before the Roman candle explodes,

or how dear they are, how dear you are to me.
I was so worried sick, I didn’t complain at all this morning.

Let this train leave the station!
Leave us space to trample with our own shoes our little mad hopes.

I’m at a decent Rubenesque rotundity for a super-sized nation—
too large to change the course of my path at Flushing Main.

We’re old pals now, dead and sick people that cause train delays.
Someone got hit by the 1 last week when my friend and I went up 125th

where we took in the gentrification and the way
the unseemly above-ground subway tracks resisted change.

The neighborhood resists change, through eminent domain,
like the interior garden in Skyview, away from the factories.

At half capacity now: Attention passengers
there is another train two minutes behind this one.

The conductor forgot in our prime we’re asking for plus,
we’re asking for now. We’re asking for before.

I have no idea who did the urban planning
that extends beyond Times Square to Hudson Yards.

You see how that blood flows in me,
the blood that thinks that it feeds the center of the universe.

After Grand Central, the next stop will be 34th Street.
Take the train right behind this one.

We arrive at Bryant Park where the passenger was struck
and my mind went first to the water fountain,

how I must hold it with my quivering hands
for the motion sensor

take in my humanity to fill it to the brim,
before turning on the water boiler,

so the steel underneath doesn’t burn
the way memories never quite fade,

the way the scorch
of the burn remains.

I can still see the look on the supervisor’s face
who found herself done in by an unwelcome surprise,

because Master passed through the JFK, not Ellis Island.
They have forgotten to tell her that on my 18th birthday,

I took this train to join
Master’s tribe of one.

I wonder where God went, all these years, when she absconded
with money in the middle of the night.

Boo hoo, crybaby, God might say,
you never told Mama as she held you

how you wanted Sodom to burn as Carthage burned
the way for years your skin burned so and cannot stand the touch of fabric.

Just how much proof is needed to change the way she was offered twice as much as you?
How could that ever be okay, even as another test of faith?

You tell me to keep our mouths shut
and let them laugh.

I flip through photos I’ve sent you and I see how the evergreen
emborders the Thinker with a snowy cap,

the rage for perfection, not just an immigrant thing,
but driven by the phobia of being praised insincerely.

Master tells me: it is never about falsifying time sheets,
it is about the deep hurt

from rumors that reverberate in caverns,
stinging the ears of its hearers like bees.

When the Academy talks of Communism as panacea, I see
the dilapidation: tree-stripped barks, cauldrons of dog soup.

We are all servile to the system:
When someone dies, my friend and I pantomime

a cut on the throat and laugh heartily:
We are still here.

The aggressor taunting the solicitors yesterday
gave a bright boy a word of advice:

You know how you can best help the poor?
To not become one of them.

Before he fled, he asked money from everyone but me
and the boy with the pimples on his forehead.

Standing waiting for the 1 the day before with Mama,
I told her at least I didn’t get shoved towards the track.

Yet, Mama said.

*

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (forthcoming, BlazeVox) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the Women in Translation project at the University of Wisconsin. Her reviews and interviews of emerging and established voices are published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Laurel Review, EcoTheo Review, Rain Taxi, New World Writing, Hong Kong Review of Books and Tupelo Quarterly, where she is Managing Editor.

I once kept a notebook with all the plays, all
Coach’s sayings and what they really meant.
“You’re the best practice player we’ve ever had,”
A flush of pride before I realized what that said.
So I studied reflex. Measured glint. Another coach,
one I loved like a father, gave me a book
on the Winner’s Edge, how to train your brain
for Success. Of course I read it cover
to cover, took notes. I learned the killer instinct
was unlearnable, winners eat winning
for breakfast, to win is to fly, winners keep that certain
flint of barbaric grace, one win is worth two deaths,
winning sets the doves free, a winner’s eye contains
rare air and blue sky, winners never cheat or they
always cheat but they always win, winning is brain
food, winning is god’s favorite food, winning is
the music that plays at good weddings, to practice
winning is to win your dreams, winners are giants,
winners are passionate roman-nosed hotties, to win
is to give yourself a red-blooded rose, winning is
a skin, winning is Mt. Rushmore, winning is colonizing,
winning is cave man, there’s no pit a winner can’t
rise from, winning is a mask, winning is a domino
for more winning, winning is a band-aid, winning
is the always green grass, cool air off the water,
winners wear dark sunglasses, winners roll over
losers, stick an “L” on their foreheads, keep on
rolling as the faces of the losers become dirt,
become the ground we stand on.

*

Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently the novel-in-prose-poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021), which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

translated by the author and George Franklin

*

Ximena Gómez’s poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including
Álastor, Círculo de Poesía, Nueva York Poetry Review, El Golem, Nagari, Hypermedia, World
Literature Today, Matter, Cagibi, Interim, Nashville Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Laurel
Review, and The Wild Word, and she was a finalist for Best of the Net in 2018. She is the author
of the poetry collections, Habitación con moscas (Madrid: Ediciones Torremozas,
2016), Cuando llegue la sequía (Ediciones Torremozas, 2021), the dual language poetry
collection Último día / Last Day (Katakana Editores, 2019) and a new dual-language collection
in collaboration with George Franklin, Conversaciones sobre agua/Conversations About Water
(Katakana Editores, 2023). She translated into Spanish Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl
Dreaming (Penguin Random House Group, 2021), the bilingual poetry collection Among the
Ruins / Entre las ruinas by George Franklin (Katakana Editores, 2018), and was a contributing
translator to 32 Poems/32 Poemas of Hyam Plutzik (Suburbano Ediciones, 2021).