I must have swallowed up your skull seven or more times now but again, you mount. Again! You headless horseman! You same-sex lace limbed mate! You mate me writhing, raptorial, cannibal. You’ve watched me rip hummingbirds apart at their ruby throats with such quaint affection. Now, you let me pluck away your legs. O my spindly thing! O acephalous Anne! Wanton Marie! You know they say I am three times as fertile with brain in my belly. You know it is not nearly enough to be eaten. Go on, my dearest animal, try again.
By Alissa Nalewajko
Biography:
Alissa Nalewajko is a student at Princeton University studying creative writing. She’s from Boise, Idaho and loves to explore themes of persona and surrealism through her work. She has been previously published in Zeniada magazine.
in a hundred years there will be paintings and prints and sculptures of us wearing masks in our fear in our sorrow in our strength and i hope ascent from our current condition they will be shown in the guggenheim the louvre the reina sofia the tate modern and the met and all the places we pray it won’t penetrate they will rewrite history books ad speak of our sickness as we have of the bubonic plague or cholera one day my great great great grandchildren will ride the subway and as the train emerges from the tunnel over the williamsburg bridge they will see doctors and nurses and people who look like them wearing masks graffitied on the sides of buildings the train moving so fast the cables of the bridge will make the pain of the people appear as a flip book that no one would think to make anymore
By Nicole Amador
Biography
Nicole Amador is a poet, artist, educator, and mother who is proud to be an Italian girl from Brooklyn. She currently works with the National Association on Mental Illness (NAMI), on providing education and support for peers as well as their families. She loves yoga, rap music, and her calico cat Shelby. She can be found at www.nicoleamador.com and on Instagram @lightthroughashatteredwindow.
My husband takes me to the arboretum on Sundays. I squeeze ethyl acetate onto a bed of plaster in the bottom of a jar labeled “POISON” and we spend the next three hours chasing twin cobalt dragonflies. At home, he pins the wings at the kitchen table.
My husband scales limestone – a spider-limbed daddy long leg on the wall in demi plié. I get bored watching, run miles down the hill and hike them back. We drive to town for lunch and sit by the water. He licks the salt from my forehead with a wet tongue.
My husband wears my bras to parties – tobacco brown, bruise purple – and lets the lace show on each shoulder where his jacket slips. We smoke out the car window. He takes me home and fucks me – wraps mandible around throat, burrows between each toe.
My husband paints his nails, won’t let me do it for him. Calls wearing my clothing. Pierces his right nostril and wears the dried blood. My husband, the entomologist, teaches locusts and wasps at the university. Fathers three children and does it right: mountain way, soil-up.
My husband jokes about cannibalizing the teller at the bank. Takes the vacuum cleaner apart and puts it back together. Lets the yard grow wild so the bees swarm in summer. Sometimes, I lose him in the tall grass. He has room in his jaw for wisdom teeth. I shave his mole in the shower, clip a skin tag.
My husband marries me after six years of dating. He wears mountaineer’s glasses to the ceremony, turns his eyes into mirrors. We marry. We honeymoon. He eats near-raw steak each night of the trip and skims me the cognac sauce. We bite at one another. It’s funny: the day we met, he ate a spider out of my hand.
By Alissa Nalewajko
Biography:
Alissa Nalewajko is a student at Princeton University studying creative writing. She’s from Boise, Idaho and loves to explore themes of persona and surrealism through her work. She has been previously published in Zeniada magazine.
When we met, I said I loved raspberries the most, so you brought me tender handfuls in open palms, crimson running along river-creases in your skin, dripping down channels on your wrists. You offered me home cupped in woven fingers, and I could almost see it: a meadow of cotton lilac and blue-green grass, peach trees in a grove only we know how to find, sun-splattered freckles because I refuse to wear a hat, because I refuse to hide― but I have lied about other things, too, like loving the sea, or being able to whistle, or knowing the names of constellations.
If I string the truth from this reluctant pit of emetophobic stomach I could still lie again and confess I love city streets in rust-colored snow and aching cold exhaust but I am trying to be honest, so I will give you this alone: I am searching for the center of eternity. Sometimes, I think it is burning you from the inside of your ribcage, molten and heavy and staining like cigarette smoke or red wine, skin feverish―sweating blood like a crown of pomegranate sap as you tell me about paradise, as you board a barge going someplace far away.
By Ashley Kim
Biography:
Ashley Kim is a 17-year-old high school senior from Southern California. Her work has been published in Overachiever and is forthcoming in The Bookends Review and Detester. She has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and Visions of Unity. Soli Deo gloria.
your head is a house of broken glasses// mirrored thoughts take turns to smirk at themselves// they be like i see your nakedness// i see how your tardy hands handle the rusted hope you inherited
the day you discovered// that the body you’ve found yourself isn’t what you wish for// that in this universe freedom is only felt when you pour yourself into a poem// you say// come watch me set aflame the things that lounge
beneath my skin// blunt desires paint your breath rainbow// every night the stars in your sky collide// forming the un-towelled ocean I see in your eyes// how do you feel when you begin to fight against the belief that molded you// how do
you tell yourself that this new you is a nightmare to mother// every night you unwrap this part of yourself from your wardrobe// you savor the taste of being prodigal// you say if tonight becomes your last// let me die in this skin
By Joshua Effiong
Biography
Joshua Effiong [He] is a Nigerian writer and a lover of literature. His works has appeared in Eboquills, Kalahari Review & Shallow Tales Review. He is an author of a poetry chapbook Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed. When he is not writing, he is reading, watching movies and listening to music. An undergraduate of Science Laboratory Technology. He lives in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. And here he writes from. You can find him on Instagram @josh.effiong and twitter @JoshEffiong
to the West Lake. Cherry trees are in full bloom. Two magpies reunite. When one lands on a branch, pink petals fly. In the distance, in the mist, still water reflects an arched bridge, several trees, and a pavilion along a dike. Faraway islands where hermits reside hide in clouds.
By Ling Ge
Biography
Ling Ge is a Pushcart nominee who studies creative writing and works as a statistician in Toronto, Canada. In her literary work, she uses a combination of Eastern and Western styles. Her work has appeared in the Spadina Literary Review. Her tanka will appear in Ribbons.
Freddie As his voice gained its growl, he wished for a couch, clambering for clout, because as a child, Freddie ate reluctantly, cereal with powdered milk, praying it into peppered eggs, sizzling bacon, hotcakes with heated syrup, stones of resentment lined his shoes and gave his walk an unsteady sway,
For the love of money People can’t even walk the street Because they never know who in the world they’re gonna beat
Gold grilled OG supreme, pandered the respect that eludes, the respect he needs, In lieu of loyalty to beating the block, With a heart of hesitation, with eyes cast down, the latest pair of Jordan’s gleamed on OG supreme, he remembered his mom stumbling through the door, asking who the food was for, as she whispered, “it’s just enough for me”,
For the love of money People can’t even walk the street Because they never know who in the world they’re gonna beat
Clasping the leashes of his bookbag, A glimmering gold chain glistening before him, His manhood at stake, his father absent, His inconsolable conscience riled, He smiles, he daps his new leader, He will eat tonight.
For the love of money People can’t even walk the street Because they never know who in the world they’re gonna beat
By Deaundra Jackson
Biography
Atlanta is the phoenix that lives in her. She is uncompromising about living a life that advocates for a greater quality of life for those who’ve been systemically abandoned. She worked for three years at the Georgia State Capitol determined to understand political underpinnings. Her hometown of Atlanta is number one in income inequality in America and she refuses to turn a blind eye to the disparities in social mobility. Writing was always her avocation, but while in The Politics of Black Poetry class, she was reassured that she wasn’t limited to becoming a public servant by running for office, she could illuminate the trauma of her community by cultivating her gift of writing.
Octopi have three hearts A cardiac cacophony, syncopated with a rhythm unlike our own. A circulatory system interdependent on three different ways to love.
Some days, I think the only way to survive in the world with all its sharp corners and its betrayals — round and slippery as marbles and as treacherous in the dark — is to become an octopus.
To learn to love in many different ways, loves as tangled as mangrove roots and loves as straight and true as redwoods, loves that are small and full of the future as seedlings.
Loves that are an a vein to yesterday, loves that are an artery to tomorrow, loves that are a fleeting heartbeat in time,
gone in the next rush of blood and yet the deepest core of life.
The only way to live, I know now, is to learn to accept and relish the climbing vine of my heart —
To cease detangling every creeper and every capillary and instead water the flowers that are so ready to grow
By Jane Elizabeth Yarnell
Biography
Jane Yarnell is in her third year of a degree studying Sustainability and Biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She has previously been published in Acumen, the Eunoia Review, and a few other places around the internet.
When she said there is nothing left ― I am gone like a father, false like a specter ― maybe you cannot help but wonder if she was even here, ― or if you built her out of Jenga block bones buried in a meadow of lavender and carnation that does not exist. But look at the grocery list taped to the fridge, and dig through the rubbish bin if you must ― there is her name in the address line of The New Yorker, and in crossword puzzles of shredded signatures. Do you remember the bookstore (the one with overpriced coffee, you know the one) and how she tested every marker color by writing her name? ― leaving traces of something a little less than fingerprints. Or the back of your senior yearbook, from which she whispers ― I was here (and she still is, on the paper, at least, but dust is dead skin and you haven’t got the willpower to sweep). Now these scraps are precious to us, bits of a lover I said goodbye to long before you did. She did. These ― wrinkled receipts, nails in the wall, eraser shavings, socks without partners, calculator histories, a dog that keeps barking, an orchid on the windowsill I am not used to watering, the brightness of the sun on the wall facing the fire escape window ― the one she used to sit by to watch every setting sun.
By Ashley Kim
Biography:
Ashley Kim is a 17-year-old high school senior from Southern California. Her work has been published in Overachiever and is forthcoming in The Bookends Review and Detester. She has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and Visions of Unity. Soli Deo gloria.
pray in body languages: O Lord, why do you watch beautiful things
levitate into chaos? Why do you place so much power
in the hands of grief? & what is it with your mercy
that Samsons the sons of men, yet endureth forever?
By Flourish Joshua
Biography
Flourish Joshua is a (performance) poet from Nigeria, a NaiWA poetry scholar, 2nd place winner of the 7th Ngozi Agbo Prize for Essay, finalist of the 2021 NO CONTACT Poetry Prize, Managing Editor at NRB, Interviews Editor at Eremite Poetry, Poetry Editor at LERIMS, Associate Poetry Editor at miniskirt magazine & Poetry Reader at Bluebird Review. He is published (or forthcoming) on London Grip Poetry, miniskirt magazine, East French Press, Olongo Africa, Ghost City Review, Brittle Paper, Blue Marble Review, Bluebird Review, No Contact, and elsewhere. Instagram: @therealflourishjoshua | Twitter: @fjspeaks
