15.2 / FALL / WINTER 2020

The day does not end and so the ghosts come out in daylight nothing supernatural about them, just a part of the landscape where the herons pick their twig feet up and place them down where the albino reindeer is perpetually catching up to the herd and shadows rest in sunsets for hours staging mosquito

One As usual, only my father can save me from Mr. Samuel Tremlett. This is barely a dream. Or rather, Mr. Tremlett’s stifling lounge room was enough of a dream the first time: the Looney Tunes cartoons on his shelves (video cassettes still in their packaging); the folding laminate table where he takes his meals.

  The day you died, I was riding in the car, clutching fragments of my girlhood.   Mama told me how the freshwater swallowed the pink out of your skin, dulled your ocean eyes   & bloated lips, decayed before they could ripen.

  I. Taste buds grow all over the mouth. Especially on the tongue, but also the gums, inside sinuses. Babies have them on the insides of their cheeks. This means, that when you have had your tongue excised you can still taste fresh tortillas coagulating between lip and gum. II.

  Shell Candy as Misplaced Woman   say you are the seashell of a roudoudou, hot fruity syrup molding to your curve like a dress you hate to wear. say you look beautiful but feel hollow, left to help harden what lies on your growth, confused with the taste of caramel or fresh crushed strawberries.

                                              _________ Tasia Trevino is a writer and musician from California’s Central Coast. Recent work has appeared in Fence, the Account, Prelude, and Yalobusha Review.  She is currently writing a novel. More at tasiatrevino.com.

The first and last Korean swear word I learned was “shibal.” I was fifteen, my parents and I were watching a movie in the living room, and the main actor said it three times in a row as he teetered over the open window he was about to jump out of.

mister first   “In the molested rocks the shell of virgins, The frank closed pearl, the sea-girls’ lineaments” —Dylan Thomas “I make this in a warring absence”   fresh snowed ground skin smooth first footfall doesn’t blemish it it will snow again bedsheets taught across the plume of blood won’t stain as they can be

From AND YET — coming from [PANK] Books Spring 2021 I don’t fear sex. Or love. Not exactly.

  my speech has been dragged through the mud bashed up a brick wall, and watched itself tumble into a katrillion pieces my speech has been scalded and plucked nip-tucked and given no pardons my speech has longed for thunder to strike it it has whimpered in the school bathroom it has sealed itself up

  If I could call you back from the far shore of the darkness, I wouldn’t.  I would let the ocean have its say with you—you who woke, each morning, cradling your shadow like an instrument in its locked, black case—and had to let our mad hands open it to the immensities.

                                                                                      __________ Jordan E. Franklin is a Black poet from Brooklyn, NY.

I get fired by text when I am almost sober again.  The animals that were, in my intoxicated gaze, leaning from the shapes on the ceiling begin to solidify into their everyday plaster swirls, the crack in the seam at the top of the wall no longer an opening to a miniature cartoon world.

                                    __________ Jake Bailey is a schiZotypal experientialist with published or forthcoming work in The American Journal of Poetry, Constellations, Cream City Review, EcoTheo Review, Hunger Mountain, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, Palette Poetry, Passages North, Storm Cellar, TAB:

                                                                                  __________ Jack Giaour lives near Boston, Massachusetts, where he makes his money as a

My first hamster ate its babies the first night in our house. From the cage I peeled blue membrane, blubbery—that was the year of the drowned child from church, whose parents insisted open casket to show last & finally what they’d made. My mother taught him. My sister, roundfaced, befriended his great dane.

  I wanted a mohawk. He said, “You can cut your hair that way. But you’ll also need an apartment downtown.” A semi-famous mountaineer invited me to go climbing. It was a technical ascent of a massive granite slab. I ran home to ask my dad if I could go.

When my mom tells me this, I’m seventeen and impatient and yessing her for the car keys.

Nieta Heaven             after “Pocha Heaven” by Sara Borjas In Nieta Heaven, no one goes hungry because there is always some rice on the stove that perpetually refills itself so abuelita doesn’t have to break her relaxing to get up to feed everyone who walks in.

    SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE THOMAS FIRE WITH DISPLACED LAUGH TRACK I wake with my mother in her bed, she’s already smoking and watching the news. The Thomas fire undresses mountains to the south. California closes its eyes in a bowl of smoke.

I object to the way Albrecht Dürer rendered the vagina in a drawing of a woman in the British library I wasn’t supposed to be photographing but did photograph, if only so I could show what he did, and what I did not like about it.

Monostich On the Cusp of 40.   I’m a Terry McMillian character live & in charge of my own damn(ed) life. I loathe men then clamor after their body parts regional accents blue collar swag. No, I am not the bitch to play with.

  There is something so silent about air slinging through a world, something so heavy. Like uranium. Then at 11:02am, the sky turns bright. There is a silent click, a sudden cry, the sound of teeth clenching tight. We see her falling, with teeth bared wide, lungs shattered into frames.

Dream Disaster #1   Hunting for moods Is trending in a dark spectrum Coal and pesticides Were the last thing They had too much Time to decide So picked everything Deliveries Mon-Fri made the streets unbearable She put on sheer netting over her custom black latex He picked up his small dog and put it

I  know  a  place  where  I  can  spread  myself  out  and  be  enough  to  fill  a  room                         It goes without saying My British English troubles my American English I pause before I say words like be-u- tea-ful Confused by how I learned to