Larissa Melo Pienkowski is a queer Brazilian-Polish-American poet, YA fiction writer, and editor living in Boston, MA. Above all, though, she is a xingona malcriada, mulher atrevida, and an unapologetic Masshole. She earned a BSW in social work from Simmons University and is currently working on her master’s in publishing from Emerson College. Wherever the two subjects intersect is where she wants to be. (ig) @mulherchingona
Hayley Brooks is a poet based in St Paul, Minnesota who received her B.A. in English writing from Goshen College. Her poetry focuses on reframing trauma and shifting from body/soul dichotomies to body- and gynocentric narratives. She has previous work published in Lavender Review, The Mennonite, Our Stories Untold and Lipstick Party Magazine. Visit hayleyjbrooks.comfor more of her work.
Maria Berardi’s work has appeared in local and national magazines and online (13 Magazine, Voca Femina, Mothering, The Opiate, getborn and most recently Twyckenham Notes). Berardi’s first collection, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and is currently at work on a a collection called Pagan. Berardi lives in the Front Range foothills west of Denver at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level .
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Alyssa Hatmaker is a freelance games journalist who's working on a young adult horror novel in her elusive and flighty spare time. Her articles have been published at Destructoid, PC Gamer, Unwinnable, Rely on Horror, and elsewhere. When she's not writing about games or humans and their monsters, she's usually holed up in her kitchen baking with magick. You can follow her on Twitter @lyssness or visit her portfolio at amhatmaker.com.
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BY MEHRNOOSH TORBATNEJAD
Carmen Sandiego Reacts to the Travel Ban
No different than how she has always traveled,
knows to make a human less human
you call them by a thing that doesn't exist, so
she’s never in a space long enough to be deemed alien;
makes a game from the escape—
the elegant taunting of claiming your city her name
though elsewhere she was born; a turf intruder
with no passport, why apply for one if possession
only calcifies borders, if papers are the breadcrumb
trail always to capture; so instead she enters with the tip
of her color shadow, loots your country of everything
she doesn’t need; see, this is not about thievery,
this is the joy of reclaiming, the thrill of ripping smiles
from paintings, pocketing the heat from flames,
keys and music notes, what good is a native’s job
when you can take the recipes and controls;
you would think she, like the rest, was a holy grail,
the way patrollers lust after her with handcuffs and rope
when she retreats, off to Afghanistan or Iran, Mexico
and Morocco; tell me which one of you would even
reach for a map if it weren’t to chase her,
which one of you would mark a globe if not for the names
of do-not-fly lists; she knew long ago the rights
you inscribed do not include her, that immunity
is a delusion, so she alters her tone when you tap
her telephones, and gloats elusive when she doesn’t sound
metal detectors; so, call her villain, call her enemy
when this body is the one you cannot occupy;
call her criminal, call her spy, call her mastermind
when she outwits your agencies, and know
we are willing to forgive her felonies, knowing
what you call illegal is the act of fleeing an oppressor,
knowing what you call most wanted
is a pseudonym for unwanted;
so, a runaway sneering at despots for hobby
is the reprisal the rest of us have waited for,
so we marvel at the abduction of headwaters,
let her take the rivers, the ceilings and columns,
let her steal everything beneath the wide brim
of what was taken and renamed;
we pardon her; we know what it’s like
to hide but leave a trickling trace of what’s been sown,
we know the blood that she bleeds, she makes sure
to wear visible neck to toe like a trench coat
Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad was born and raised in New York. Her poetry has appeared in The Missing Slate, Passages North, HEArt Journal Online, Pinch Journal, and is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly. She is the poetry editor for Noble / Gas Qtrly, and a Best of the Net, Pushchart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. She currently lives in New York where she practices matrimonial law.
BY VALORIE K. RUIZ
Tracing the Path of the Moon
An owl’s wingspan can stretch up to five feet.
When I see the streak of tierra
over the park across the street
at just past midnight
I don’t question it.
But as the minutes
slide into grains of sand
and the cigarette caves to ash
I begin to wonder.
Maybe I’m reading too much
in the shadows between the trees
maybe age is stealing sight from my eyes
maybe it’s all tricks played by amber lights.
The cigarette tames me, keeping me outdoors long
enough for the shadow to return.
A five-foot-wide paint stroke along the sky
traces circles over my head.
When I hear the final hoot as the owl
dances beneath a hidden moon
I laugh.
There’s no need to question.
This message clear as the constellations I craft stories for.
All of these obsidian glimpsed futures are waiting
for nothing more than the illusion of time to bring them full circle.
Fluorescence
Your eyelids flicker and I watch you lift, drift
on a sea carved by the corners of your mind.
The hum of your breath buzzes into a lantern,
a lit firefly flashing it’s gleam
against your parted smile. These new moon nights
I’m tempted to trap the floating radiance
in a jar carved from lightning by pixie hands. I think,
perhaps I could drape it around my neck, wear your fire
as a beam to navigate my way across thunderclap waves:
a storm raging nowhere but the waters
of my own mind. Instead I’m locked in the charm of its hover.
I’d much rather trace the spirals of your floating Sun.
Watch the firefly that needs no external light.
Remedy for Codepency
/the first time i orgasmed/ with you my stained glass eyes shattered/ beneath your sol-bright gaze/ breaking me into a puddle/ of mosaic geometrics unable to be puzzle-pieced/ back into the mural i resiliently crafted/ i spilled honey/ luring the residents of the anthill beyond the swell of your home/ begging the Mother Queen with her millions of eggs/ to gift me her unborn/ swallowing their potential/ anendorfic treatment to remove this lovesickness/ this oxytocin bond/ sometimes too much/
Primitive Wings
The dragonfly enters my room
Glass wings prism moonlight
Across my eyes and I’m shifting between
Recognition and the unknown of his flutter
The dragonfly whispers orders to remain still
He is the snake doctor who’ll stitch together
My endings to each new beginning
I am a rag muñeca waiting to be quilted together
The dragonfly is holed away in my mind
Lodged in the corners where he breathes
Fires to keep himself warm
Where he lives still—
Flapping memories into blank pages
Valorie K. Ruiz is a Xicana writer fascinated by language and the magic it evokes. She currently
lives in San Diego, and she is assistant flash fiction editor for Homology Lit.
Quinn Lui is a Chinese-Canadian student and writer attending the University of Toronto. At this very moment, they are probably loitering in a bookstore, spending too much money on bubble tea, or listening to their plants converse with the moon. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in L'Éphémère Review, Synaesthesia Magazine, Occulum, TERSE Journal, and others. You can find them @flowercryptid on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.
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Vanessa Maki is a queer writer,artist & other things. She’s full of black girl magic & has no apologizes for that. Her work has appeared in various places like Entropy, Rising Phoenix Press, Sad Girl Review & others. She is also forthcoming in a variety of places. She’s founder/EIC of rose quartz journal, interview editor for Tiny Flames Press, columnist for terse journal & regular contributor for Vessel Press. She enjoys self publishing chapbooks. Her experimental chapbook “social media isn’t what’s killed me” will be released by Vessel Press in 2019. Follow her twitter & visit her site.
Ann V. DeVilbiss has had work in BOAAT, Crab Orchard Review, The Maine Review, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2017 Betty Gabehart Prize in poetry and an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. She lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.
Stephanie Tom is a Chinese-American poet and a rising freshman at Cornell University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, the Blueshift Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other places. In addition, she has previously been recognized by the national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the International Torrance Legacy Creativity Awards, and the international Save the Earth Poetry Contest.
Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. He was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in over 100 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, and South Dakota Review. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His second, Father Me Again, is available from Spartan Press.
Kailey Tedesco's books She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publications) and These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press) are both forthcoming. She is the editor-in-chief of a Rag Queen Periodical and a performing member of the NYC Poetry Brothel. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can find her poetry featured or forthcoming in Prelude, Prick of the Spindle, Bellevue Literary Review, Vanilla Sex Magazine, and more. For more information, please visit kaileytedesco.com.
Nicole Yurcaba, an Instructor of English at Bridgewater College, is an amalgam of otherness: a poet, an essayist, a goth (yes, with a lowercase “g,” a Ukrainian-American. In an effort to dispel negative stereotypes of goths and other subculture members, Yurcaba’s poetry often focuses on subculture aesthetic, Slavic mythology and culture, death positive aesthetics, and landscapes. Her poems have appeared in such places as The Atlanta Review, Chariton Review, West Trade Review, The Lindenwood Review, Artemis, and many other online and print journals.
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Ronnie Pope is currently based in the strange land of Wales, UK.
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Talulah Brown graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelor of arts in May 2018, and is from Los Angeles, California but currently lives in New York.
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