Coming Out

child; you’ve bathed in the wrong place
again. unlearned all of your mother’s prayers.
what a beautiful place you set on fire—child;

called yourself a faggot. a naked
lover. a shrew. and you wonder why no man
could ever tame you? look,
at what obnoxious flame you’ve
become. look, at what took you by the wrist
and murdered your father’s mouth. we brought you
to be baptized and you stained everything white
with your blood. castrated yourself. called it

coming out,

called it queer. child,
who did not ask permission to leave the table; or
to come back inside; or to eat the forbidden fruit
who swallowed soap bars for speaking
out of turn. who did not learn her lesson.
ate a peanut butter sandwich and then
asked for more.

child of better days. of the swinging branch.
of tight collar and crooked nose. of the windowless
birthday party no one came to. child;
who grew up too long ago. who
vowed to be untouched and fruitless. who broke
her mother’s last good
heart. who threw up a garden
and was called too sick to go out.
who threw up a garden and was left at home
to clean up the evil mess.

By Spencer Wollan

Biography:

spencer wollan is a 17 year old who resides deep in southern california. spencer has an insatiable love for creating and sharing art, and has been published before in GERM Magazine and Words Dance.

Self Portrait: Revisited

i.
My birth was like this:
first love, then breath.

(Thought did not occur to me
until the second time I broke my own heart.)

ii.
Leaving is the name you give to the baby girl
you will train to disappear.

You forget her at bus stops, in locked cars,
the front hall, your second wedding,
when she’s eight, nine, ten, and comes home
crying, when she’s fourteen, fifteen, sixteen
and comes home heartbroken, when she’s
nineteen and doesn’t come home.

You say: Call sometimes . You say:
Stay longer. You say: We want to
see your dumb face.

She smiles. She laughs. She calls you
a jerk and keeps laughing.
Everyone is laughing. Why is everyone
laughing? Nothing here is funny.

iii.
First. people lied. they said if she Spoke
to them about her Pain. they would LISTEN.

she knows it’s A lie. (she Types out the word
/people/ But it ends up please like she
is Never not Thinking about LONGING)

next – she Tried to speak – Next – you taught
her to turn her Sadness into LAUGHTER –

So it would Be easier to swallow. but now.
her pain never feels like Enough. LOVE

yourself they told her – and then – she
Remembered her heart had been LOST –

By Samantha Brynn

Biography:

Always too soft and always looking for a fight, Samantha Brynn is a sarcastic New Yorker who cares too much about people she thinks she knows. She likes pretending to be other people on stages and in general. She is not the monster under your bed. She is not a black cat at your door. She is not a ghost, but a person. Honestly.

Word on the Street is

Preacher guy on the street,
damned huckster
speaking on behalf of
omnipotence; strange, isn’t it?
goddamn his hollow words
and plastic biblical images
the flowers of his vocabulary
bear no fruit

Still, they listen,
crowded around his soapbox pulpit,
to his sermon on the concrete.
They shiver and coo
as he summons threats of retribution
from the mythos of his paycheck,
worth less than the lumber on
Jesus’ shoulders, or the
pebbles in his sandals.

Until preacher guy treads asphalt
on naked feet and grizzled rags
when he finally stops telling me
I’m wrong,
once he stops picking his teeth
with thorns from his lord’s crown,
only then will I listen with the crowd.

But today
I smirk and undress his words
strip them naked of their chilling
connotations,
as if to bottle the wind I
freshly picked from the curves of his sails
and release it—
in hopes that the breeze
carries away the fiction
from his

Mind,
Tongue,
and Ego.

By Dave Santone

Biography:

My name is Dave Santone; I’m a 30-year-old aspiring writer/psychology student hailing from Philadelphia, PA. I’ve spent my whole life in this city and my work mostly reflects the personal and social struggles of living in a major urban area, with a specific focus on how city life affects the human condition. I use my work to highlight urban issues such as poverty, gentrification and classism, and often delve into psychological pitfalls such as depersonalization and solitude.

When We Talk About the Holocaust Too Much

The past tense of “have” is “ache.”
Used in a sentence: “I have a people,
we are strong;” becomes “there is an ache where family
should be.”

The limitation in the combinations of words becomes
a symbol of language’s failings:
in the communication of
magnitude nothing we could say
will ever be big
enough. There will never
be enough words
for six million, the closest we have is
“Never again.”

And yet, we have forgotten to mourn,
our fixation isn’t fashionable, the world is tired of
our uncaged grief. It is so big, it has been
for so long.

Language fails us further, or we fail it
in our refusal to speak.
We have learned to button our lips, to
keep silent until the executioner forgets
that we escaped the chopping block. We tried
rallying cries, those never
worked, even our prayers for peace
must be recited quiet in our temples.

Behind what bars
do you lock yourself
if you are afraid of your own trembling cry,
a never-ending wail?

We promise to remember when
our shirts were embroidered with stars, we
tuck our stars today under our collars, we
insist that shame and survival are two sides
of the same dangerous coin. This insistence
is quiet, this existence is similarly so.

Like students bent over grammar books,
we recite conjugations to ourselves. This is
a new tongue, unfamiliar vocabulary: I live,
you live, we live, he lives, she lives, they live, a miracle
we can still say these words.

Previously published with Poetica Magazine’s Spring 2016 Issue.

By Allya Yourish

Biography:

Allya Yourish is a student at New College of Florida, where she studies Art History and Literature. She won first place in the 2015 Rutstein Essay Competition and third place in PoetryLife’s 2015 College Division contest. A former Tumbleweed at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France, she now lives in Paris. She is a full time nanny and a part time coffee addict and can usually be found jotting inspiration down in a small pink Moleskine.

From The Edge of Nowhere

1.
Ophelia predicted this, born out
of an uprooted flower bed,
girl of the moon daisies, girl the
storms emulate on rainy apocalyptic
days, I am a dull, worn urn, my
pictures fading, the tempest unhinged
& saltwater soaked on cloudy
afternoons when little girls ask, are
our tears built from the ocean or is
the ocean built from our tears?

2.
Why am I a stone wall lately, why do I
look at crypts and think: self-projection,
why do I look at stars and see dead
beings somehow still bloated with light,
somehow still existing, still being,
still carrying on, (why carry on when
your world is only darkness?).

3.
She misses blueberry pancakes &
baking cookies in her grandma’s kitchen
& the old tree house where she played
pirates with her brothers & that
top-of-the-Ferris-Wheel rush.

4.
Q: Do you ever miss something you’ve never
even known?

A: I miss a childhood I’ll never have.

5.
When she hears the word ‘sweetheart’
she’ll flinch like a bug with it’s wings
cut off and she’ll feel it all over again: his
slimy hands running up her thighs, his
fist against her mouth, drowning,
drowning, drowning.

6.
Where are these blissful gardens the lore
speaks of and where can we find them?
Where can we build a castle out of
these black bricks of void?

By Jupiter Reed

Biography:

Jupiter Reed is a young published poet and writer whose been spellbound by the fairytale world of fictional realities since she was a little girl. She would kill for chocolate, is a huge admirer of Sylvia Plath’s worth and writing to her is a form of self-medicating. Her poetry book, “Wrecking Rainbows” is now available on Amazon & Barnes & Noble! In the future, she aspires to ground herself more firmly into the starry and cavernous depths of the writing world.

THE BODY MADE INTO AN EMERGENCY

A fault line widens at your back,
the body made into an emergency.

Somewhere the night is fracturing
with dirt under the nails.

Recovery looks like orange peels
in a kitchen sink.
Sometimes it looks like static,
red & unraveling

By Ana Carrizo

Biography:

Ana Carrizo is a 25-year-old writer living in Texas. Her works are a personal way of healing and learning to grow. She loves carrying orange peels in her pockets and buying used poetry books. You can read more of her poetry on tumblr (@elvedon).

Conversation with my Crazy

Here is the choice, she says, learn
to leave her or learn to love her.

She is done being my dirty secret.
She means – I only whisper
to her in the gaps of the night
when no one else is listening.
She means – we only go out
to get lost, to find bars built
for tequila and forgetting.

She says she wasn’t made for silence.
She says I never hold her without shame.

I say – wait. I say – we got a good thing going
and she says no. She says real lovers don’t
sneak around with blood on their hands.

(and then she is done, and then she burns my body down)

By Emma Tranter

Biography:

Emma Tranter is 20 years old and lives in Wales where she studies literature and spends a lot of time talking to the moon. She lives for lavender baths, fairy lights, and red velvet cake. You can find her at fairytalephoenix.tumblr.com, where she writes about survival, sadness and the sea.’

It’s Not My Fault If It Lives Inside Of Me

my little sister tells my mother she’s worried about me,
this is an abrupt change from her daily topic: Pokémon.
but big sis is keeping the door closed for twelve hours straight
and she doesn’t think this is a good sign,
thinks this isn’t just closure.
says I sleep too much,
says there’s probably an animal living somewhere inside of me.
Like maybe a sloth,
or a koala,
the furry friend that you’d point at and ‘awww’ at the zoo.
send your best friend its sleepy GIF,
when it can’t keep eyes open long enough to even eat.
I’m not all human, she decides.
and frankly, I don’t argue.
I think she’s right.
but depression isn’t a beast as cute as the ones she listed,
isn’t something I want her to know I cuddle up to each night,
and morning,
and at 3 pm when I shouldn’t be taking naps,
should be with the people,
should be buying groceries that aren’t just avocados and wine.
but the bag boy never judges me,
only smiles and says, “have a good day!”
I try. I keep trying.
my little sister tells my mother she should take me to a veterinary.
no, not a doctor.
get me to a vet, STAT!
treat the creature lurking inside,
the one that turns my skin sallow
turns me dark circles,
turns me vitamin deficient,
Netflix dependent.
part of me wants to take that vet appointment,
let her think I’m part sloth.
I like that story much better.

By Ari Eastman

Biography:

Ari Eastman is a spoken word poet, writer, and YouTuber who will tell you random facts about sharks (if you’re into that kind of thing). She is also the author of two collections of poetry. She strongly believes in balancing the feels and the funnies. And is always down to split a cup of frozen yogurt. Just don’t make fun of her for still liking gummy bears. Her poem is titled: It’s Not My Fault If It Lives Inside Of Me

elegy for a child bride

i.

three pre-dawn bathers see her first on the ghat
arms stretched out towards the river, eyes closed, a single
gold bangle sheened red on her left arm.

she could be sleeping; but she
is not.

ii.

in the days to come, she wanders in many forms many shapes
into my night dreams. but always, her eyes are wide, crimson-clinging-lashes
there is nothing in them – no tenderness, no abhorrence
and no pain.

my mother tells me horror stories of girls younger than i
who bathe in gasoline then swallow fire. they burn their histories from their bodies
and carry their unshed nightmares into the afterlife.

iii.

ten houses down the road, a young man will leave
come tomorrow morning, just to be sure.

the cops think she took a knife to herself, and no one
disagrees. i think tomorrow a girl whose name i cannot know
will give herself to the sea. maybe the same evening
another will bleed out over her mother-in-law’s floor
and give bitter thanks for it.

iv.

in the evening the temple doors part and someone
kills a goat on the steps; blood on water on stone, it feels
much the same.

they carry her ashes to the ganga, the river, fractious,
already brimming with ghosts of girls who
died fast and young like flies. their mothers lament
by the river, not just for their daughters, but for
all the ghosts to come.

By Lakshmi Mitra

Previously published in cahoodaloodaling’s Trigger Warning issue.

Biography:

Lakshmi Mitra is a 19 year old college student living in Kolkata who occasionally frustrates herself into a bout of writing. When not doing so, she can be found reading, studying, craving sleep, and complaining. She is mostly polite, a lousy conversationalist, and doesn’t like sudden movements. Therefore, it comes as a great surprise to her that her cats still don’t like her. She blogs at thiswinterheart.tumblr.com

Ariadne

Prayer is a simple artform:

i. Invent perfection. The woman
who can do no wrong. Teach her
to fall in love, eyes wide shut.

ii. Promise her the world,
the world for her horse. Cripple
her. Love her, strings tightly
attached.

iii. You cannot live
and live up to the image
of perfection. Living
is a mistake, is the promise
of fault.

Leave her be. String up
black sails to your ship
and remember the promise
of her, the one that led you
to freedom.

iv. Never let anyone
forget that she was perfection
that the gods forced you
to give up.

By Rishika Aggarwal

Rishika Aggarwal is a 22 year old poet from India, currently studying for her Master’s degree in English Literature. She’s been reading for as long as she can remember, and dreaming of being a writer for about as long. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Rising Phoenix Review, Sapphic Swan, Vagabond City Lit, and Pankhearst’s Deranged anthology. She is also the author of the chapbook #FDD017 (Golden), which you can find here. You’ll be able to find her (and more of her work) at rishwrites.tumblr.com