'a paradise called Loneliness' — poetry by Adam Jon Miller

Opposite of Loneliness

---

Darkest Dark

---

Adam Jon Miller's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Louisville Review, Yalobusha Review, Chiron Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, The William & Mary Review, OxMag, BRAWL, Hood of Bone Review, Ink & Marrow, Folklore Review, shoegaze literary, Yīn Literary, and elsewhere. A selection of Adam's work has been translated into Chinese. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Adam is an Associate Poetry Editor at Thimble Literary Magazine. Visit him at www.adamjonmiller.com. Follow him @im.adam.miller.

'Tell me I taste like hunger' — poetry by Jennifer Molnar

I need you the way venom needs a wound

to enter the body and render
the recipient stunned—to die twice

pierced by the sting of that love
letter’s savage chemistry—demanding

surrender so absolute it no longer
permits breath: ruthless and cruelly

molecular. My mouth deadly on yours.

---

To seduce me

Tell me what you’ll do as the world ends. Tell me I’m on your list of regrets. Exhale so I can feel your breath settle on my skin like a wayward prayer. Point out the hummingbird nest in the lilacs. Describe your first kiss, then your last. Ask me how I got this scar. Bring me a handful of spent petals you stole from a hurricane. Drink this elixir and don’t ask questions. Wake me as sunrise stains the low sky like the spirit streaming through a cathedral. Kneel and light a votive in the grotto with my name in your mouth. Snuff out the match between your fingers. Bless me with the ashes. Peel an orange before I can ask. Name each phase of the moon. Peel an orange before I know I want an orange. Convert to the religion of our existence under the clearest night sky pricked with the burned-out love letters of a trillion dying stars. Peel an orange and let me watch. Let me watch you. Ask me if I saw the moon last night. Ask me if I’m still hungry. Look at me. Tell me I taste like oranges. Tell me I taste like the moon. Tell me I’m your holy communion. Promise to haunt me. Tell me I taste like hunger. Look at me as the world ends. Say all of this reminds me of you.

---

Jennifer Molnar the author of the chapbook Occam's Razor, and her work has appeared in New South, Hawai'i Review, So to Speak, Best New Poets, Duende, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from George Mason University and resides in New York.

'I prayed to be released from my longing' — poetry by Michelle Reale

The Bride Wore Headlights

I prayed to be released from my longing. Hope had no feathers. It was a scrawny bird beast that squawked and told me not to bother. But, still. All the groomsmen had their tuxedos dyed to match their moods. I stood back, waiting for the signal to toddle down the proverbial aisle, which was the way I did everything. I adjusted my headlights because my friends said that I needed to see where I was going. The harsh lights glinted off the gold lamé that every uninvited guest, all of them anxious, seemed to be wearing. Upstaging me or smiting at me, it seemed to be the same. When the groom entered, though not necessarily my groom, he kept a disrespectful distance from me. I smelled the particular tang of juniper berries wafting around his person. He carried a staff in his hand, proudly, perhaps to beat me with. I’ve endured worse. The magistrate was magisterial in his heavy velvet robes. The groom approached him and they shook hands the old familiar way that enemies sometimes do. I stood in place like a sentry. The wilted tulle of my dress hung with sad, but not bitter dejection. It was not white. I waited. The strobe of the lights shone ahead, and though I waited with a gentle thrum in my chest, no one called my name.

---

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry collections , including the upcoming Let It Be Extravagant  (Bordighera Press).

She teaches poetry in Arcadia University's low residency MFA program.

'Resurrection dance, a prelude' — poetry by V.C. Myers

A Furious Loom

Lost in a wilderness unfelt, an empty bed devours light. We sing, relinquished. I dissonance, uncharted. A cracked riverbed, this drought of trust, this heaving doubt. Dryrot, this festering bile. I'll think of you on the way down. Accusations need a scapegoat. Intentional, this nightmare. A speck of blood on the gallows. A shovel of cemetery dirt. Evidence of culpability. I stand accused. I stand. Skeletons hang on a clothesline. Resurrection dance, a prelude. A Pandora's box of possibility, boundless seas of infinity. Destruction knows not when. Cocoon this bitter end. Circling a burning field, worry not about consequence. Pain makes us beautiful. Pain makes us real. Love leaves us curled into a weeping ball in someone else's dream. A figment. Love is nothing if not nothing. In darkness, we crawl, we claw. Ever reaching for a home. Ever reaching for another. Ever reaching for the stars. Ever reaching with empty hands. Between two filthy lips. A taste of wickedness. You envy it. Such mercurial flavor before harbingers of famine arise. Doves red with innocent blood. A grasping of thorns. Crossroads. Crossbow. Crossbones. A purge. Raven wings rise from my shoulder blades, an arch of ebony feathers. Talons claw from my fingertips. I cannot fly, but burrow. Miles deep underground. The earthy smell of peat in my nostrils, a bite of bog on my tongue. Let the sun burn out above me. I need no light in the grave I've dug.

---

V.C. Myers is the author of Ophelia (Femme Salvé Books, 2023) and Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019). She has been an editor and reader for Sarabande Books, Barren Magazine, Ice Floe Press, and Frontier Poetry. Her work appears in ekphrastic exhibits and journals worldwide, including EPOCH, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and Bombay Gin.

'It is noon and the sun is ill' — poetry by Raquel Dionísio Abrantes

Lessons in Violence in the Schoolyard

I made you a braid
when a boy chewed your chosen
flower. At seven, bruised
knees were a girl’s
duty. You knew him
whose tongue — once patient
like a mother’s love —
became forked. But I made
you a rowan wreath.

---

(your God is dressed in indigo)

1. It is noon and the sun is ill.

I sip my coffee.

2. At the end of the road, your God is dressed in indigo.

3. I go to the brown lands to find my grandmother.

4. The robin hums perched on a witch’s head.

5. I descend to the underworld.

Hades is kind.

6. It is Thursday. You come back

as a brume. I am a haunted house.

---

Raquel Dionísio Abrantes is a Portuguese poet. She has a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in Cinema from Universidade da Beira Interior. Raquel gave a Master Class in Writing of Scripts about Narrative Structure. Her writing has been published by literary journals and magazines.

'every moon rolling fat through the night' — poetry by Zann Carter

Paper Body

Skin once. Like once vellum was.

When my body becomes paper,
containment of self (a vaporous thing) is nearly impossible
and my place in the world becomes questionable.

Paper knees crackle and fold and tear
I can’t go anywhere

without falling apart.

I can hardly believe I still hold this teacup.
A poem on my wrist keeps the parchment hand attached.

Ink sutures.

This paper head won’t hold
the weight of consciousness,
let alone support the arc of a long thought.

Gnat-thoughts dance gibberish around my sad old eyes.

blinkblinkblink

lizard brain vellum paper skin of a calf tissue
dictionary disbound torn words paper whisper wind

gonegonegone

In the paper body I cannot even say,
“I am here.”

—after the imagined sculpture “Embodiment Simulacrum”, handmade paper, vellum, ink, cotton thread, torn, stitched, folded, 14” (from work in progress Oracular & Ekphrastic Poems: Imagined Art)

---

somnambulist, water, waking

i was hunger and anxiety, a production in silk,
wasps, and doomed
aspirations, sleepwalking drunk

on the rogue whiskey of men
who dissolved the sugar of me
and left

my bones on fire
inside, skin so tender
a glance gave me hives.

i wished on all first stars
and every moon rolling fat through the night
for waves to take it all

as water always will
the itch the sea the salt
the saving.

---

Zann Carter writes poetry and short fiction in Terre Haute, IN. and then works with fiber arts to get out of her head and back into the body. She co-hosts a monthly open reading now in its 17th year and has created workshops focused on navigating a path through grief with expressive art. Her work has been published in SageWoman, Witches & Pagans, Misfit Magazine, Dream Pop Journal,  Atlas and Alice, and  Driftwood Press and the anthology Erase the Patriarchy from University of Hell Press. Her always-under-construction website: zanncarter.com

'I have been monstrously good' — erasures by Lauren Davis

Author’s note: These poems are erasures of the letters of Anne Sexton. I have not altered words or word order, but I have modified capitalization and punctuation of the original texts.

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1977.

March 13, 1957

Darling—

I adore you all over
the page, all over the lonely
house. Your face haunts
the still made bed.

I know the void and loss
of you. Find the sharp way—
possess me. Whatever it is,
it is like starting over.

Do you remember how
to reach the begging me
in a more delicate way?
I want to be only ghost

and witch. How fleeting
it is—doves cooing in
the pine. Spring will come.
You will come home, too.

Anne

---

November 2, [1948]

Dear—

I have been monstrously good.
Then the rains came.

Plenty of drinking, and I gave myself
a very nice burn. I did not sleep

at all on Friday night. Saturday night
I wore my satin dress. My heart’s desire

is that the worst is over.
Thank God for now.

Very much love,

Anne

---

May 8, 1963

Dear—

If I were to listen to God,
I would be tempered a bit.
That’s the whole trouble.

So far I have not succumbed.
It can be a lonely road. All these
idle thoughts, all this is wrong.

Writing a poem, each word
ripped out. The wrong
things start to happen.

A new kind of orthodoxy—
the only way—to go back
to your desk.

With my best wishes.

---

Lauren Davis is the author of the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed poetry collection When I Drowned, and three chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter and elsewhere.

'The light slices the mouth' — poetry by Aakriti Kuntal

---

Murky

God elopes, deer on a fervid tail
A conch ripped, shells in my mouth
Small peanuts are plucked by the grandmother’s nails
Soundboards stocked with a sharp, fang-like dissonance
Rain slaps my face
My nose grows molecular
God, did you pinch my very tongue and scream?  
Are you standing, all lather,
in grandma’s petticoat?
Are you the rain?    
The marble floor?
My balcony is a ball of black seeds.

---

split

Orange wrappers. Foil of light. I fish my hand into the cool sigh of a water tank. I wish to elope into the dusk’s quartet. What roams in the blinking eye of the water trunk? The stomach moans and my mouth grows into a rectangle –-a square—an oval gesture. Memory drops from the ocean of the body and wriggles in the trough. I stare at my own face. What roams?— All thick and blurred in the light of the water. My face swims along the comb of waves. I stare at myself and wonder how true this construct is. I swish my hand, and my long face comes apart.

---

“,”

The light slices the mouth.
Absence fills—cold climate of the body.

Snow— porous sheet. You enter
and leave while my arms

Spin and spin. The days are growing around
my clamp ears. Whirl. Cotton mass.

These days, the skies are punctured.
Nothing grows here. I wake and wake

to the barrenness of my own naked body.
Between my fingers, the sun shreds

the dotted skin. Sleep, you too betray.
Grow around the chin and

gnaw with your new mouth. Everything wants
to claim the syllable of the body.

The pills pop and pop. There is no stopping this
withdrawal of blood.

There is no pausing this curtain of paleness.
I grow around my slime body

and fall further into a comma.

---

Aakriti Kuntal is a poet, writer, and visual artist from India whose work has been published in various literary journals, including Panoply, Icefloe Press, The Night Heron Barks, and The Hindu. She is the author of 'God, am I your eyelid?' from Sigilist Press, USA. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017, shortlisted for the RL Poetry Award 2018, and nominated for the Best of the Net.