15.1 / SPRING / SUMMER 2020

  The women here don’t speak. They had their vocal cords cut from their throats, at birth, by The Man With No Thumbs. “Don’t worry,” the nurses say to soothe the weeping mothers. “He knows what it means to lose something sacred.” The mothers’ cries are the stuff of silent horror flicks—violence without repercussion.

  The defensive beauty of the desert At dawn hadn’t unnerved us, but It was all a bit much By midday. Barrel cacti shadowless With their honeybee buds. Torches Of ocotillo, ruby tips ragged As bitten fingernails stretching Toward an indifferent sun.

Adelaide My body is building another body and I grip the train pole to forget for a minute how I’m leaving my other life. My shored-up, shipwrecked body is calling it quits: here is where we stop, say we’ve had enough of this flopping, gasping stomachfish, enough of the empty sweetness sleep’s become.

Even When the Death is Brutal, a Sloth Will Smile As it Dies on picture day in first grade, a boy tells me i am always smiling, i hide my face ashamed of exposing the feigning for joy that lies in the teeth my father says look like a rabbit’s, when he laughs nothing could

The Mandarin Duck in Central Park The ice expands, the water shrinks in the shadow of the Plaza Hotel. The dazzling drake, a vagrant showboat of gemstone colors, holds his purple mohawk high. Native mallards and wood ducks circle him.

  If you dream of an elevator going sideways on a rusty cable this means you are working against yourself. If it crashes and you survive you will be blessed with a clairvoyant gift that only works in the state of Utah every other Monday.

________ Moira Zerbe is 22-years-old, and has been writing (angsty) poetry for over a decade. She sees writing as an emotional outlet and a way to bond and connect with people she loves. One of her favorite ways to spend a weekend is getting together with her friends to share writings, drinks, and food.

          Rukhsar Palla received her M.F.A in Fiction from Emerson College. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, vocalizing some of the experiences of Pakistani Muslims globally. Her poems have been published in The Cape Rock, Straight Forward Poetry, and other literary journals.

                              ________ Vinitia Swonger’s career as a videographer influences her writing, which often seeks to explore visual meaning. A communitarian, she runs mixed-genre and poetry groups. Vinitia sings with an improv group, writing and performing songs on the spot.

                                            ________ shy watson wrote Cheap Yellow (CCM 2018) & co-founded blush lit. follow @localsingle69 on twitter for updates as well as links to other published work.

I am learning how to linger in bars. Alone, rehearsing the names of red wines – Temp – rrrah – ni – yo                   and Coat – du – Rhône – my mouth slowing as a way to honor how these varietals have aged.

The eating of raw flesh; follows sparagmos We power-walked through a graveyard to get to Copenhagen’s best beef tartare. Late July, the loitering light smooth-talked the headstones, the marble tombs, the grass tamped down over Kierkegaard’s grave. Katerina’s legs. Pillars of cypresses. I know—so many lovers gone to seed, so much highfaluting light.

Mouth Ghazal @ Patrick Split-lip sizzle of eating your heart whole, god, the gate of my red mouth. I pled for fist-kiss on my chest, trailer-park-wall-hole we left, your bled mouth.

In Which I Try To Use My Mother, Several White Men, and Two Puerto Ricans to Try to Understand “Unincorporated Territory”   To name is to make known                                         to point is to point out  ,  as my mother would say            ,       ¡ punto,   period !                                as Hector Lavoe-Wittgenstein would say,       everything has its end      

After Orpheus doubted and turned his head, consigning his wife Eurydice to the underworld, the story leaves her behind But I hear she wept on the shore of the Styx I hear Persephone came to comfort her and wrapped her arm around Eurydice, told a bad joke to make her laugh In time, they learned

Omnipotence Inside you hides another person, an illusion, an inhuman casualty of cloud. Aching for accident he tries to punch you in the face. Still no fucking stars. Touch the touchscreen, Tinker Bell. I want a mattress made of doilies. I want a tulip chair and a rainbow tilting slightly to the left.

When I was born, Earth held me in her mouth then promptly spat me out. I saw my first map of the world six years later. I remember the cartographer’s straight lines through Africa and I wondered if he could be trusted.

  His ass had that half corkscrew of hell bent. The body before the body. I would say it happened in slow motion, but it was all hyper- speed, a line of paper dolls connected at the wrist and foot.

VIRTUAL Life was small, but no part of knowing this was easy. America said that simply living in a place could make you more important—your life could get bigger. There were many words for brave, but almost none of them were positive. Everyone wanted to be rich. Everyone wanted to die old.

If you didn’t see the man in the centre of an empty room sitting on the wooden planks, it doesn’t matter. We saw him with his ojotas in front, his chest bare his back hunched into a question mark.

As I age, the absence of my lovers becomes industrial, an Amazon warehouse, but rather than letting you imagine the teeming underpaid, the buckets of dildos and immersion blenders, let the warehouse be empty and throbbing with cost.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”— Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) And we sat in rapturous exhaustion on the spinning stools in the diner at Woolworth’s—every store had one— attending to the mystery of donuts.

She was young when she said it but she was in a clear state of mind then. She knew what she wanted and what she didn’t want. Those things were solid in her early. She knew what she wanted to become and how to get there.

Even When the Death is Brutal, a Sloth Will Smile As it Dies on picture day in first grade, a boy tells me i am always smiling, i hide my face ashamed of exposing the feigning for joy that lies in the teeth my father says look like a rabbit’s, when he laughs nothing could

Every Sunday morning, I’d lose my father. Mother could be found with a mild frog in her throat, pulling out a smoke before reaching for the fridge door to make her usual: scrambled eggs and bacon.

I woke up to the sound of angry gulls and the glitter of uneven sunlight dancing against the pink roof.

The chime on the bodega’s door startled Roy, who looked up and saw his geometry teacher. And a pack of smokes, Miss Vivian said. Roy watched the man behind the counter wrap two large bottles of King Cobra for her. They were much larger than anything his father drank while watching Sunday football.

Subject Position In other words, what is it like to be you? he asks— so I tell him it’s like riding in a jet in a snow storm sucking on a bitter orange spritz—like feeding one thousand black rabbits a bag of deli chips— it’s like all the roads in Europe are honest-to-God this thick

This is Government Housing, 1990s Spaceships blast canker-soar lasers—a Hasidic jazz fusion—on TV downstairs. The kids live with their mother, her partner, and two more couples in their Section 8 apartments. I remember my sister being quiet, being in daycare. Great Grandma says, they’ll cut off your legs, over Genesis funk.

I am sending you this letter in response to what you asked me the other day after finding me in your rib cage. At the time, I wasn’t able to answer your question, because, as you probably noticed, I no longer have a mouth.

A. calls from afar, and I emphasize over the phone. We speak the way we speak over the phone: a question, hello, how are you, I miss you, goodbye. We hang up and time extends as I newly reside in my own space.