Long Road Home

how it feels to be touched,
dawn morning & awful april snow,
i hold out & out &
out, your fingers like a broken
rune, unintelligible glyph,
i can’t read you

‘it doesn’t have to hurt’
this is what i was told, evening
like spoiled plums, your face
healing from another ugly
altercation with a barfly’s
heavy fist, grinning like
a grim reaper

as if i wasn’t there,
hopelessly vigilante,
heart sluggish & making thuds
like a wrist watch

i have become grateful
for nights, backseat of cars,
the wide
imperfect moon
making it look
like you’ve got something
worth living for

you’re pressing your hand
against my face & sighing,
the rain making me feel
like cracked tarmac,
filling every scarred path
with that look you give me
when you think i’m
not looking, when i’m
trying not to look

By Emma Bosacki

Biography:

Emma Bosacki is a poet and storyteller living in Toronto, Ontario. A soon to be student at Queen’s University, she is studying a degree in both English and Classics. Her inspiration comes from other Canadian writers such as Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, and Timothy Findley. She lives with her girlfriend and two cats.

Fish

I don’t want to go out because
going out means leaving my house
and leaving my house means
the earthquakes come.
Meeting people’s eyes causes
natural disasters and I still
haven’t rebuilt myself since
the last cyclone in my rib cage.
It tore the wallpaper off the walls
and left a museum inside my
stomach. Who wants to go
through these remnants, 
leave their fingerprints in my dust?
No, it is better to keep behind
closed doors. Don’t disturb
the silence. My last conversation
turned my mouth into a riverbed
bled dry. The fish here are
dead. Silver scales coat every
surface; they rot, here, they decay. 
You can smell it in the air:
the drought, the lightning,
the summer storms. It takes
everything out of
everything. I am
parched.

By Martina Dominique Dansereau

Biography:

Martina Dominique Dansereau is a disabled, non-binary lesbian writer and artist whose work centres on trauma and marginalisation, particularly through personal experiences with violence, disability, mental illness, gender, and LGBT issues. When not entrenched in academia or creating art, xe enjoys reading books with xyr snakes, who often fall asleep between the pages. You can find xem on Twitter and Instagram @herpetologics.

Civil Disobedience

The Skid Row boys arrive at 2am

dressed in all black,
stomachs like canyons,
hearts full of fire.

They drive up in their mothers’ beat-up sedans,
photographs of their younger siblings scotch-taped
to the dashboards, cellphones on vibrate, headlights low,
all the extra seats pushed down to make room

for the produce they will take
away in garbage bags,
pound after pound
till the whole car overflows with crisp bell-peppers,
ripe apples, steak only a day older than stores need them to be.
Tired of food pantries that give out only loaf after loaf of bread,
the Skid Row boys take matters into their own hands–

grocery stores throw
15 billion dollars of food
into their dumpsters,

so it is to the dumpsters they go with battle cries
in their mouths, pick locks, climb fences, ignore police
sirens to storm the alleys full of trash like Bastille boys
stormed the jail, like French students on the dawn

of revolution, to find
something, anything
to save their families

from starvation. The law means nothing if the law won’t
keep them fed, and food means nothing if it wastes.
The Skid Row boys know hunger, how it sweeps like an angel
through their streets, carries off the homeless by their belt loops,

makes the best weep,
how they’ve all wept so many
times. But no more.

Tomorrow there will be full bellies, for tonight there is
disobedience.

By Mica K

Biography:

Mica K is a twenty year old Virginia kid who gets sentimental about constellations, sunrises, hot tea, and good poetry. They were more than likely born with a book in their hand and a poem in their mouth. They currently study English and Creative Writing at university.

Starving In The Land of Privilege

There was a time when I didn’t know
I was privileged, and that might
have been when I walked forty blocks
in the New Orleans heat to apply for food stamps
when I was in my early 20s, and should have been
shopping for a rich white husband
to sequester me in an air conditioned mansion instead.
I was heckled the entire way by men
who stood on the perimeters of sidewalks
and offered to give me money for blow jobs
or just stared at my breasts for a few minutes
while making comments about how high they bounced.
I swiveled my entire body and averted my eyes
so I could no longer see how they looked at me,
with the same expression on their faces
as my own, when I stared at cheesecake
and boiled crab in the restaurant windows of the Quarter.
I hustled past them on my way to my waitress jobs
while wearing my unpressed white shirt and black pants
and carrying a folded apron underneath one of my arms,
always running a bit late because I hated to work.
I was fired almost weekly by managers
who thought I was too slow, or too friendly
or not friendly enough, or my shoes were the wrong color,
or I didn’t wear a bra and hair spray, or I wouldn’t
have sex with them, and then money disappeared from the till,
so I must have been the one who stole it.
I never stole anything, but I should have,
because at least I would have had the satisfaction
of knowing that I stuck it to them
and got away with a small chunk of the spoils,
but the truth is that I was laboring away
in an honest, though deeply resentful manner
carefully balancing platters of fried seafood
and gumbo and omelets and etouffee
on the ends of both of my bony forearms,
trying to make people smile so they would
give me a dollar, and not complain to the manager instead.
They complained anyway, because I didn’t refill their water glasses
often enough, or I forgot their basket of rolls
or one of their meals didn’t emerge from the kitchen
in a timely manner, or they were overcharged
by fifty cents, and they would draw huge lines
through the tip area on their credit card receipts
or write fat, bulging zeroes with slashes through them
or leave quarters for me in puddles of spilled beer.
They’d tell the manager they were never coming back again,
as if they’d ever had plans to do so in the first place,
and they weren’t just going to go back home to their jobs
at oil refineries in Texas, or insurance offices in Omaha,
or wherever the hell they came from.
So I’d be out of a job again, and the next thing I knew
I was pleading for cash with some caseworker
who hated her job, but at least she had one
and she could stare across her desk at me
as if I was leprosy on a plate.
So now I am given to understand
that I was white and privileged the entire time,
and I just didn’t realize that obvious fact-
and therefore should tread lightly around the egos
of everyone who didn’t have my opportunities
and the sad truth is: I empathize deeply
with everyone who finds herself on the bottom,
regardless of the reason for her unfair placement
on the most rickety rungs of the economic ladder,
scrounging for the tiniest, moldiest crumbs
of the fat slices of cake the rich are devouring.
Just don’t tell me that it was easy for me,
because you think I had it slightly better than you did,
because I’m not buying your story
and I can’t afford the interest payments.
The same enemy has both of our heads
on a serving dish, with apples stuffed in our mouths
and steam pouring out from underneath the lid,
and if you are unable to see this,
then we have nothing to talk about
and I am just going back to the carnival routine,
and absolutely nothing will change for either of us.

By Leah Mueller

Biography:

Leah Mueller has been writing for as long as she can remember. Her contest-winning chapbook Queen of Dorksville was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in October, 2012. She was also one of the 2012 winners in the Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest, sponsored annually by Winning Writers. Her work has appeared recently in Cultured Vultures (as Poem of the Week), Silver Birch Press, Bop Dead City, Writing Raw, Dirty Chai, Five 2 One, Quail Bell, Talking Soup, and the Rain, Party, and Disaster Society. She will be featured this fall in Origins Journal. Leah resides in the rain-drenched Pacific Northwest, where she broods, dances, and practices yoga.