'understand that you make me pyrophoric' — poetry by Juliet Kahn

Summer Break

understand that you make me
pyrophoric. you crack peaches open
with your bare hands and
make me a beggar bride, wet-eyed seabird,
someone who picks the scab. you put
a summer thunderstorm under my tongue
and wander off. what i’m saying is,
you make me a complete fucking idiot.
so here’s my proposal:
i make you a crushed calliope, a sore
in salt, a fixated weirdo.
i make you howl for more
like you didn’t just have some.
i cram your spine so full of july it goes slack.
and in the end, once we’ve
sizzled into two black filaments,
we call it even
and wait for the leaves to turn.

---

Juliet Kahn is a writer and editor living in Boston, MA . Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gather, and Uncanny Magazine, among other outlets.

'Let us darken your blood' — poetry by jessamyn duckwall

Emmenagogue

to be held—to be held down by cold
air. light the candle, huddle.
to feel more solid than I really am.
full. burgeoning like a winter
bloom, freakish.

to find a smooth skipping stone
in the belly. to quench thirst
rain-sharp and sudden.
to bring the blood down pungent
yarrow

---

The nettles open their mouths to sing:

No need to wait for spring to heave one’s
great green body to the air. Our forked

roots rend the thawing earth, searching. We know
many forms of divination. We hear the birds,

the language of their flight-patterns.
The augury of redness, that quick dose

of pain. Snow, we drink its wide white field.
We tuck its sharpness in our hollows,

prepare for rain. Sigh down, sister. Bring us
your hitching breaths, gardens

of numbness. Let us darken your blood,
rest heavy in the cellar of the stomach.

Cut away the dead stems.
Make room in the mouth for the clearing.


*Note: This poem takes its title from a line of Sappho

---

jessamyn duckwall is a full-time poet and part-time sorcerer from rural Oregon. Their writing often incorporates aspects of plant sentience, folk herbalism, and traditional and found forms of divination. They are a 2025 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and they hold an MFA in poetry from Portland State University. Their work has appeared in Pile Press, Radar Poetry, Josephine Quarterly, and other publications. 

'dark in the blonde sea' — poetry by Heather Truett

I am pelican mouthed

barely balancing above the sea, alone in the flocked feathers of gray. How old
am I really? Ancient and also fifteen, leggy in a linen dress, back pressed,
brick wall, alone in the group, dark in the blonde sea, but someone saw
me. Middle aged, still desperate to be seen, flip flops coated in sand
and feathers painted in memory like oil. Wash me. Please. Peel the
seaweed strands from behind my knees and pluck seashells off
my collarbone. I am skeletal and sinking, invisible in the beam
of your lighthouse. I am embarrassed in my need, like always,
fifteen, body curled closed, pelican beak, the nature of
nostalgia, the girl always bobbing alone, shivering
foam of a beach day tumble from dune to grass
to white sand flowing need
to fly.

---

Heather Truett holds an MFA from the University of Memphis and is doing PhD work at FSU. Her debut novel, KISS AND REPEAT, was released from Macmillan in 2021. She has work in Hunger Mountain, Whale Road Review, and Appalachian Review. Heather serves as editor-in-chief for the Southeast Review. Find out more at www.heathertruett.com.

'blood ripple shimmer' — poetry by Savannah Manhattan

Polymorph Perverse

Possessed, I am a shining sedition of flesh

Spokes of a wheel engineered to an amphibious hub

The living, craving star, radiant in six directions

Open to every abundance since the first creature crawled from the trenches

I am Mobius strip of milky body and sbozzare excavated with gradina

Trailing strings of titian and mazarine LED in negative space

In your cube of lust you are Metatron how you pierce with slow, deliberate hands

The artist continues on under a sextet candelabra as the blind sense colors and shapes

With many teeth on the chattering windows, my rain courses down

You hold your heliotrope over my hungry mouth

Our shivering breath in the sable

It mixes

It’s frantic

but why not defined

Consider my answer when my lips wrap around your earlobe like a stygian staircase

Consider my love at your feet and yours at mine

Intertwining parabolas coaxed into insanity

Why does the world test its lovers?

You are a whisper that twisted me

A scream that changed me forever

You keep libraries of secrets between us that swell the Euphrates of my chest and belly

I will crest when clouds render into neon and zap the lower buildings to make us curious again

When our needs fuse and transform telepathic and hivemind

When memories hold color without leeching my own

I will crest when I shake from the magnetic fields of inner childhood

When we find the leylines among our barren stones

---

A Studio Sometime Last Night

A war helmet sits on a Wurlitzer
A Klimt rests weary on its side
A butter-yellow metronome idles
A clock breaks at 11:35
A black chandelier intertwines with moose antlers
An inverted Volkswagen emblem foils a rusty pitchfork
A vaudeville clown figurine befriends a skeletal bird oddity
A lone baby grand reflects the dust of ages
An inflatable dominatrix pig holds a giant cigar
A plague doctor waves the American flag
Six guitars wait for the band to come
A caricature of Eisenhower watches a whittled ballerina
Men are in the stairs
Women are along the walls
They wait for the band to come

---

Savannah Manhattan is a trans author and poet in Los Angeles. She has two published poetry collections, short stories in national anthologies, and poems in various lit magazines. She also loves studying the occult and architecture. 

'flesh fever our bed' — poetry by Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

Ascension. My body

Note: This is a Cento poem created from “July 1936” of Anais Nin’s Fire: Journals 1934-1937

Dizzy on emotion,
burning sensual fire,

his kiss, sparks awe,
and possession, Our bodies

a communion. He breathes,
tender, outpour of depth,

his skin burns a soft kiss,
we vibrate, lie like flowing

dream, soft honey, hungry
for his caress, his eyes a drug,

we awake in touch coming
hymns for my lover, for each

other, I love the face, pure
head taking me, his Finger

trembles, tossing stockings,
underwear, I feel open—

the delicacy, shutters,
my body, Ascension

the thirst in my wildly
sensitive lips. He aroused

ecstasy, the poetry
of sex, my opening swells

a magnet yearned, flashes
dream of his beautiful brown

flesh fever our bed, heat,
eat me desire, wanting him—

we come in a frenzy
of kissing.

---

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press, Between the Spine from Picture Show Press, Speaking con su Sombra with Alegría Publishing, La Belle Ajar & We Are the Ones Possessed from CLASH Books and his 6th poetry collection La Lengua Inside Me with FlowerSong Press won Honorable Mention in The Juan Felipe Herrera Best Book Award - One Author- Bilingual in The 2024 Int'l Latino Book Awards. Adrian lives with his wife in Los Angeles with their adorably spoiled cat Woody Gold.

'blue hands wrapped with rosary' — poetry by Bernadette McComish

Some Spots You Can’t Remove

Your tape recorded voice
reading Virginia Wolfe,

your stiff
blue hands wrapped with rosary.

I’d like to believe death was your plan
all along. To take it too far,

kill the inner King, usurp a nation, be reborn
a better Queen.

But there was no salvation,
just your old bedroom

with a broken stereo
and a bloody dagger that could never

get clean. I found your spirit
in a cauldron, stuck

between your old life
and your new grim.

I’d like to free you from the murdered
you left like pictures

in a forgotten place.
Which painted devil holds

your hand in eternity?
When you ask him to wash

what’s invisible, do you show
the inside of your arm, spread

your toes, or go
mad?

---

Born in a blizzard with the gift of premonition, Bernadette McComish is an educator, producer, and a poetry oracle. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Press, The Cortland Review, Slipstream, Peregrine, For Women Who Roar, Flypaper Magazine, Waxing and Waning, Indolent Books, and Rising Phoenix, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for the C.D. Wright Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the New Millennium Writings 41st Poetry Prize, and won the 2022 Kali Moksha Prize in Poetry. Her chapbooks include The Book of Johns (Dancing Girl Press, 2018) and Florence Nightingale’s Lost Log (Lily Poetry Review, 2021). Her debut full-length, Prophets of Los Angeles, was published by The Los Angeles Press in 2023.

'dancing in pleather dress' — poetry by Jill Khoury

scream fest

like lamb legs i am detached from smooth proper willing
what a blessing before a current ebbs because it has been
over-salted / dancing in pleather dress / ease the sharpest knife
out of nowhere / an agitation
rises out of faith repealed
years ago / it takes a minute
to catch up in bare feet /
the worst is to be buried whole
and unremembered /
the day’s wear
dials me down

---

Jill Khoury (she/her) is a queer, disabled poet and a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow. She has taught poetry in high school, university, and enrichment settings. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and edits Rogue Agent, a journal of embodied poetry and art. Her poems have appeared in numerous venues, including Copper Nickel, Bone Bouquet, Dream Pop, CALYX, and The Poetry Foundation’s Poem-A-Day. Winner of the Gatewood Prize, her second full-length collection earthwork is available from Switchback Books. Connect with her at jillkhoury.com.

'I will give you horses' — poetry by Johannes Göransson

TWO POEMS FOR OTHELLO

1.

My son asks me if I have ever been black.
Asks me if I have ever been homeless. Asks me if I have ever
seen god’s face. Was it surrounded by butterflies?
Was it ugly? Were the teeth made of gold or silver?
My son asks me If I have ever been to Los Angeles.
Asks me if it was made of silver. If it was built by angels.
Asks me if angels have teeth. Asks me if they whisper to me
at night. If they smash mirrors at night. If they can
have babies at night. My son asks me if angels
are black. Asks me if I have ever dug a grave. If I dug it
with a silver spoon. Asks me if I have ever been poisoned.
If he has ever been poisoned. If he can have babies.
Asks me who drives by our house each night
in a loud car, its headlights flooding his room.
My son asks me if he can eat roses.
My son asks me if I would eat roses for him.
Asks me if I will ever leave him. Asks me about his
biological mother. Is she poisoned? Is she alive? Does she
live inside a car? Does she walk around with a revolver
in her suitcase. Is she lonely? Is she safe? Is she angry?
My son asks me about my heart. Does it ever break?
Does it ever drown in fury? Does it ever want to
destroy itself? Asks me if his biological mother is furious.
Does she watch TV? Does it burn her eyes? Does she live
on blood? Will she consume me with her fury?
Is she black? My son asks me if I have been to the desert.
Was it very warm? Will I ever go there? Will my biological
mother be there? Will she consume me?
Will she bring a revolver in her suitcase? Will you drive
her in car? My sons asks me if I have ever ridden
on a horse? Was I scared? Was the horse?
My son asks me if I have ever stolen money from kings.
Asks me if I have ever hit a television screen with
a hammer. Was it made of silver or gold?
Asks me why I have a silver ring on my finger.
Asks me what a spine is. Asks me about his dreams.
Who the person walking through the desert?
Why is she surrounded by birds? Do crows live
in the desert? My son asks me about horses. What is a
stampede, he asks. What kind of teeth do they have?
How do they sleep? Are their shadows made of gold?
Do their branches break if you step on them?
My son asks if the snow can cover up the night. Asks me
if horses can survive in snow. Asks me about his breastcage.
Asks me about his spine. Asks me about the hooves
of horses. Asks me about photographs of horses.
Biological horses. Asks me about stampedes. Asks me
about horses. Asks me about the slaughter of cattle.
Asks me if I will ever leave him.
Asks me about horses. Asks me when I will die.
When will you die? Will you die in a car? Will you die
in a hotel room? Will you be alone? Will I give him
my money? Will I give him my little black book of poems.

2.

You name is already in it. You already own it.
You are already biological in it. Your spine is in it.
Your mother is biological in it. If I die in the desert
you can put my spine in it. If I die in a car accident
I will give you horses. Hundreds of horses. Biological
horses. Horses that stampede through the desert
for you. Horses that are angels in the desert
for you. Horses that are biological on television
for you. Horses that are slaughtered with silver
hammers for you. Horses that are mirrors
in Los Angeles for you. Horses that are dripping
poison from their spines for you. Horses that are poisonous
for you. Horses that are cars for you. Horse that are angels
made of shattered mirrors for you. For you will travel
into the biology of angels. You will hear them
whisper about the car that floods your bedroom
with light every night. The loud car. The biological
car. When I die I will come back as a biological
horse for you. I will come back with my spine for you.
I will come back as a mother. I will come back
with arms made of gold and a spine made of silver.
I will steal from kings. I will memorize your names.
I will bury your horses in roses. I will bury you mother
in snow. I will wake up every night and flood
your room with light. With darkness. With crows.
With crows I will sing for you about silver.
I will sing for you about gold. I will rub out the light.
I will carry a pistol in my suitcase. I will walk
around town in the snow. I will bury the kings.
I will steal their horses for you. But we will never
find your biological mother. We will be biological
in the desert. We will be mothers in the streets.
But will your biological mother ever find us?
Will she carry a gun in her suitcase? Will she
be riding a silver horse? Will she be surrounded
by crows? Will she be enveloped in angels?
Will we see her on TV when our eyes burn?
Will we see her in ambulances that flood
your room with lights and noise? Will she steal
my little black book of poems? Will the poems
be biological? Will the book be made of horses?
Will we bury her in roses? Will she bury us
in snow? Will the poems be furious? Will your
mother be black? Will she be furious? Will you
be scared? Will she whisper my poems for you?

---

Johannes Göransson is the author of ten books of poetry and criticism – including The New Quarantine (2023) and Summer (2022) – and is the translator of several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Eva Kristina Olsson, Ann Jäderlund, Helena Boberg and Kim Yideum. His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and broad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Poetry Magazine, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). His is a professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and – together with Joyelle McSweeney, Paul Cunningham and Katherine Hedeen – edits Action Books.

'Darling, clean up your heart' — poetry by Lavinia Liang

Days at Sea

Sometimes folks will ask me, How did you get here? and whatever they mean, career or location or otherwise, and however I answer, I always think: I must have closed my eyes. I don’t remember yellow trees or sky-colored waves passing by. Did I take a plane, train, car, road? I don’t know, I do things just for the feeling. Go ahead and close my heart. The only true answer to How did I get here? is: by myself.

---

Darling, Clean Up Your Heart

Ma called me back and told me to pull my heart back—to retract it—better yet, compress it, forward and back, to rein in my heart—but my limited grasp of the language heard, Darling, clean up your heart. She was right, she always is, I’m only alright at handling my needs like light on flowing water—I give up when I shouldn’t, I keep going when I should stop. I knew I had to shou my xin because I’ve seen better hearts before. Once I saw slight beauty and great truth at the dinner table, how my cousin and his wife spoke to the whole party while speaking only to each other. The conversation turned to me at some point that night and I knew even then I had to shou my xin, knew I wasn’t the star of the show, but a repository for mutually unsaid things, no-man’s land on which to safely tread, needed whenever lovers love nearby. But still, I basked in it, happy to take it for granted, leaping at the possibility to have my own orbit, my unyielding my only my unclean heart.

---

Lavinia Liang is a writer and attorney. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, TIME, the Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI, and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram @lavinianshores.

'am I the lonely wicked one' — poetry by Lindsay Lusby

Self-Portrait as Skirtful of Hell

Never. Never. Not my real wife.
She’s my real witch, my fork, my mare,
my mother of tears, my skirtful of hell…
—Anne Sexton, “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts”

am I the lonely wicked one / my mouthful of cicadas / jewel-green wings thrumming / constant

though sometimes / the song still rises & falls like / heatwaves like dreamwaves / my pocketful of

acorns & milk teeth / my handful of antler velvet & moss / not some flightless nymph / I am a

plague of wingbeats / always flickering in rooms with no / wind no windows / my eyeful of kudzu

vine & pokeberry / my earful of don’t go & stay / & more & more & more / I am a fever of never / good

enough heart humming / dripping & sticky with bees / my lapful of lanternflies / speckled skirt

trembling / ash- gray & flash of / red underwing smoldering / catching like live embers / then we

all go up

---

Daughter as Omen, as Nightjar

When my father asks me to call
more often, I rattle & rasp

like a rapid knocking against pine bark,
against the dark glass of windows

I mistake for the moth-feathered sky.
I don’t have a pretty song to sing.

I am a gaping mouth tucked
in the undergrowth—

a bird-shaped fragment of night,
a night-shaped hunger that sleeps

all day beneath the mayapples—
fern-owl, dew-hawk, briar-thrush.

When my father asks me to visit
more often, I come gliding above

the moonlit nettles, follow the ghost
of his voice floating low to the ground,

half-here half-gone like mist. I move
silently through the deep-green air

until morning creeps in at the edges.
When my father says he’s ready

to die, I know he’s already turning out
the lights, one by one—those night-

blooming bellflowers blinking closed.
But, little deathwish, I keep showing up,

churring from the tangled hedge out front
& he opens the door & he lets me in.

---

Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. The author of two previous chapbooks, her poems have appeared most recently in Booth, Coffin Bell, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, and Puerto del Sol. She is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry. With Amber Taliancich, she co-founded and runs Perilune Editing. 

'flowers of hell, bonded in glitter' — poetry by Katie Doherty

Slice

A slice of you, in two
I cannot bear the fractured play of the undying pasture of your youth.

Dependence and diplomacy are falling, ranges of tangible feelings.
Corpse bright,
corpse light – a tinge of the edge of madness.

In the flight of the moon,
the green tides grow, and I fade into
the night.

---

Copper Flavoured

Copper flavoured beetroot,
ground born and tattered in the wind,
fly-by fresh natives coagulate in June.

Fortuitous flatlands carry their seeds,
the wine tastes like butter – forgone and foreseen.

Flagellation feeds into the corners of the mind,
hung dry and fostered into congenital species.

The fires burn in times where mob rules,
seize the flowers of hell, bonded in glitter
and soaked in blood.

---

Katie Doherty is an editor, curator and writer based in London. She founded the Black Flowers Arts Journal in 2020 and has worked in underground publishing since 2006. Her work has been published by Black Flowers Press, A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal, East London Press, Tangerine Press, Paper and Ink, Resurrection Magazine, Analog Submission Press and Between Shadows Press.

Website: www.blackflowers.online

Instagram: @kissofthevelvetwhip

'it is the scent of death and it is a wolfish girl' — poetry by Lena Kinder

pray ; wish

---

wolfish

---

Lena Kinder has an MA in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Hollins University. Her works can be found in or forthcoming from Wigleaf, Salt Hill, Pinch, Flash Frog, and more. She is the editor-in-chief of Folklore Review. You can find more on about Lena at https://lenakinder.squarespace.com/

'plotting like a diabolical orchid' — poetry by Laura Cronk

USING UP THE BOYS

the boys weren’t promising
weren’t courtly didn’t clean up well

their lithe nonchalance at halftime
was unsustainable in any official capacity

when they were with us
they were too embarrassed to get the door

too uncertain to pay a compliment
or smooth our hair with elegant calloused hands

we lived in the country where mixed messages
bottlenecked between front cortex and bright nerves

I filled out forms and got the summer job
spending hours at the register studying them

plotting like a diabolical orchid
to drink their sadness

lap it from cheek hollows
sip from clavicles

drink like a cut flower
waist deep in freshwater

---

THERE HE IS, LOUNGING IN MY CHEST

thirsty though rainwet
forever no age
gorgeous
in menswear designed
for the end of the world
pale blue sequined shirt
navy high waisted
sequined pants-
as GQ said, how else are
we supposed to live?
how could I have been
so tranquilized?
when the devil himself
was there all along
pushing his hair back
to make real eye contact

---

Laura Cronk, is a poet and essayist and is the author of two books from Persea Books: Ghost Hour (2020) and Having Been an Accomplice (2012), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.  Her poems, essays and interviews have appeared in anthologies and publications including the Best American Poetry series, the Academy of American Poets, Big Other, The Bennington Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Curator, Iterant, Lit Hub, The Literary Review,  Public Seminar, and WSQ. She was the founding poetry editor for The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food and is currently an associate editor with Tupelo Quarterly. For many years she curated the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar. She has presented panels on reframing the writers' workshop and the ethics of writing nonfiction. In her teaching practice, she is especially interested in collaborative pedagogical methods. Her work supporting writers at The New School has included programming The Summer Writers Colony, the Writing & Democracy Honors Program, and the BA in Creative Writing. She is a member of the feminist writing collective The Matrix.

---

'even in wilds, it sins' — poetry by Ann DeVilbiss

Dreams Inside the Glass Case

As I heal, leisure falls around me like a dawn-gray glove.

My nails grow long and indolent, clicking along the nightstand

when I reach for water, any water. I drift out on pills

forget-me-not blue, temper their chalk with candied jellies

feeling how I imagine the rich do: cared for without apology.

The bed is a tomb where I pray for the lazarus day to

come quickly, flat on my back under cotton shrouds, pain

the little dog nipping at my heels. A certain kind of woman

is allowed to rest so I don her mask. When I slip under

a technicolor parade of gems moving through the dark.

---

Palm Oasis

Because I fear the mountain

I climb it, braced and trembling.

In every direction the rock pushing

slant from earth, spiked land laden

with cholla, creosote, joshua trees

keeping watch for fire and rain alike.

My steps press the dust, among

the millions of visitors, of years.

Life retreats behind dead growth when

season is harsh. No shade, no succor

ranges grazing the sun like hard knuckles

until day’s leave when the dusklight slips

into the oasis how an unzipped dress

falls from the shoulders of a beauty,

quiet pierced by revved engines because

this is America; even in wilds, it sins.

What sweetness in its sour belly,

these lands kept separate, for now.

Shriveled pomegranates rattle in wind

bells of the underworld.

How did I luck into so much

here at the end of everything.

---

Ann DeVilbiss (she/her) has work published or forthcoming in Appalachian Review, Columbia Journal, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her little book of spell poems, The Red Chorus, is available from White Stag Publishing. A founding member of the Sublimity City Poetry Collective, she lives and works in Louisville.

'I birth my own being' — poetry by Nichole Turnbloom

Pheromone

It is (you, I want) a mystery you maintain

distraction or eccentricities (to suffer) an assay

to distinguish between substance and absence,

a figure of imagination (in myself I am) your figure of speech.

A lion waiting (aware of this): all must come to the watering hole,

patience is not a virtue, it is a necessary pawn,

when one surrenders, the throat grows soft--

the wind carries the scent of Circe.

Note: Italics in parentheticals are Sappho fragment 26 as translated by Anne Carson

---

Eros shook my mind

Apricot blooms burst
into a perfume piquant
with the possibility
of our
convergence. 

Hungry (for battle)
I hear the conch shell’s
ballads of life
in love
with itself.

Dying to live,
falling to awaken 
your breath
moves
mountains.

I birth my own being.

Note: The title is Sappho fragment 47 as translated by Anne Carson.

---

Nichole Turnbloom has MFA in poetry and completed additional training through the institute for Poetic Medicine.You can read her work in Acumen, Journal of Westbrae Literary Group, The Branches, Spillwords, and is forthcoming in IWWG’s 2025 Anthology Write Forward among various other venues.