Error Messages Arrive in Batches

Neither prayers nor breadcrumbs can smooth scars.
Neither wasps nor tear gas can build your house.
Neither blue light nor breath can fill your lungs.

I read page after page of plague,
the catalog of horrors:
You will not come back as yourself if they have
dropped you into dark where imprecise machines
force oxygen into your lungs, your blood.
No one stopped the whips in unclean hands;
no one took the guns from unclean hands;
no one tore down the butcher-hooks
or solved the knots that grew from trees.

I know the air itself
can lie, and will.
I pray without my hands.
I pray no prayer.
I touch no others’ hands, nor
my own face. The birds-beak masks will protect
no more than etiquette or peace extended to a uniform.

No thing protects you from
what blood of your blood carried into you, or the air, from
your own skin, from bloodlines running
backwards from invaders, colonizers, viruses, or sin,
from their arrivals and their rapes.

The nosegay in my pocket only marks me
as the next machine to kill or die.
The sanitizer for my hands I carry everywhere only marks me
as the next machine to try to live, or not to kill.

They will wind me in a miles-long scarf,
suspend my cocooned, birthless body from a tree
and let the careless sky erase my words,
though wind will turn what once was me—
revolution after revolution—
I will never find the wings to fly toward.
Confession is a razor across gut strings—
music for no one but crows.

By Devon Miller-Duggan

Biography

Devon Miller-Duggan has published poems in Rattle, Margie, The Antioch Review, Gargoyle, Massachusetts Review, and Spillway. She teaches Poetry Writing at the University of Delaware. Her books include Pinning the Bird to the Wall (Tres Chicas Books, 2008), Alphabet Year, (Wipf & Stock, 2017), The Slow Salute, Lithic Press Chapbook Competition Winner, 2018). She also directs the Poets’ Corner Reading Series, a joint project of the English Dept. of UD and St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in which poets read (mostly) their favorite poems by other poets—a cross between Poetry Outreach and Story Hour for grown-ups

Seething Brains

Blue bird, bamboo, bubbling brook.
Fill your chest with scents of wood.
Sunset, soft light, tender night.
Sleep tight—
Something’s not right.
What if—
Something’s not right.
Think.
Think pleasant thoughts.
Thoughts.
Too deep in your thoughts.
Sink.
Sink down in this muddy pond.
Fill your chest with muddy air.
Bubbling.
Bamboo boat made of bamboo shoots.
Float.
Where to—
To the fall.
Fall and you will fall asleep.
Sleepless, long day, endless noon.
Noontime white and blinding.
Firing, burning, burnt.
I’m freezing.
My hair wet and heavy.
Tangled with seaweeds.
Sea waves wreck my bamboo boat made of
Bamboo shoots that fall apart.
Let them fall.
What if—
Let them fall.
Moonshine, sea salt, shimmering sand.
This silence’s heavenly.
Until—

By Rose Ruixi Zhang

Biography

Rose Ruixi Zhang was born and raised in China. She came to the US to study Shakespearean tragedy and psychoanalysis at a women’s college in Massachusetts. She has worked as a librarian, a psychology researcher, and an English teacher. She prefers to write in English, her second language, even though sometimes it takes her two hours to compose one good sentence.

Colors on a Quiet Georgia Street

In Memory of Ahmaud Arbery

A red lynching was held in white daylight.
Absent rope, truant aid. A blue flag waved

above a battle prolonged for eons. Two assailants
exhibited prominent proof of chalky privilege

while boasting blatant fear for Black pigment. The
pavement matched Ahmaud’s skin before his t-shirt

was soaked scarlet. Three silver bullets cancelled his
bloodline, spawning blaring screams of justice across the

world, because a Black boy in a colorless t-shirt jogged
down a quiet Georgia street.

By Isaiah Kye Diaz-Mays

Biography

Isaiah Diaz-Mays is a writer currently enrolled at Dartmouth College with aspirations to be a poet, novelist and screenwriter. Born and raised in Hudson County, New Jersey, his inspirations are James Baldwin, Terrance Hayes, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.

Elegy

Deadest friend, you are the Huge Feeling.

This winter we staggered in the snow, more than ever,
and when it melted there was mist – hard as a wall.

On weekends we commuted the smokiest rooms –
leaving without our coats.

You here the way in which a headless deer
can still stare,

in which zero is also a number,
in which, when you are alone, you are with yourself –

wrong – when you are alone there is nothing to you
but the people who know you are alive.

To know you were alive is worse than to know
you are now dead. Any boy who wouldn’t kiss you I hate

and I long to tell you, as if it is something I am longing
to be told, that I knew you.

That everyone who did not love us was wrong.

By Cass Coale

Biography

I’m a student at Kenyon College and an Associate with the Kenyon Review. My poems have been featured in Voicemail Poems and the Glass Kite Anthology.

the spaces between knuckles and thighs

it’s summer and you’re bored so you suggest we skinny dip in the neighbor’s pool.
you jump the fence like you’ve done it a million times, and perhaps you have,
and i swing myself over but my hair snags on the rotting wood fence.
you motion impatiently so i crimson and tug myself free.
leaves long, half-dyed strands streaming like spider banners in the july wind.
the pool sign says keep out but you’ve been barging into places you shouldn’t have
been since we were kids and so you sweep everything off in one motion and dive in.
suddenly, i feel as dizzy as when you snuck us into your mother’s wine cabinet when you were ten.
you tug at the hem of my sleeve with waterlogged fingers, so i pull it off to reveal another layer.
then another. then another, like a russian doll, until i’m left
with skirt and tights pooled around my feet and shivering in lingerie.
you ask me how i survive in this heat, and i feel goosebumps inching up my arms.
i sweep my hair to the front, shiver again when the breeze hits the exposed nape of my neck.
cover myself with my hands as i inch first the lace socks, then the shoes
down my heels and test the waters.
you stare at my naked collarbone until i submerge myself.
your hands work beneath the water,
spinning a tale, until i feel your fingertips brush against my stomach.
it’s no time to be thinking about it surrounded by chlorine and half-dead dragonflies,
but i want something more and i’m not really sure what it is,
because i want to always count my blessings and you give me everything.
pressed up against the brick school wall when everyone’s gone, behind the old pizzeria.
throats exposed and vulnerable and hands around wrists and lips and breath
so glorious and addicting others just might call it religion.
sometimes the moon brings high tides and you kiss me so hard on the beach,
we leave imprints in the sand.
what else is there to want?
perhaps to hold hands; maybe a head on a shoulder—
but how embarrassingly juvenile.

By Kristine Ma

Biography

Kristine Ma is an Asian-American writer and high school junior hailing from Michigan. She received three national gold medals and several other recognitions from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Additionally, her poetry has been recognized by the Young Poets Network and appears in The Hunger and Bridge: The Bluffton University Literary Journal, among others. When she isn’t writing, she can be found playing piano and oboe, watching anime, and dreaming.

the circle

Damp moss under my heels, hands wet and muddy
Sturdy rocks guiding me safely through each step, each leap
Riveting conversations with the trees;
some you have to go up high to talk to
other stories stay rooted to the Earth
Just be kind and ask for consent first.
I know all the pebbles along the trails and in the rivers,
the rapids sing to me as they wash over wounds, healing.
Drink from her and you will know the Truth
A mirror she gives you, you may be confused
Look deeper, she tells you, it’s an inward journey
Feel connected to the Life that surrounds you
Dancing in the rain, heart racing up the mountain
Listen to the sorrows, the triumph, the legacy
Watch the branches in the wind, the clouds rolling over hills
The stars at night, and the silent rise of the morning
and know that you are part of all of this.

By Reanna Holmes

Biography

Reanna is a 23 year old Service Coordinator with their Master’s in Social Work. They have been writing casually since they were in middle school to express themselves emotionally and spiritually. Their passions lie in social justice, decolonization, environmental healing, radical love and change, and queer community. Reanna identifies themselves as a “jack of all trades, master of none” and dabbles in dance, painting/visual art, drag, poetry, music, urban exploring, and more. In their free time they enjoy being in nature and spending time with their partner and furry companions.