Two Poems

my first pastoral

There is no crisis averted
that it even existed means

of its gradual and unavoidable
magnetic yank towards encounter

which god knows what then happens
resultant confetti covers, confettis the room

space will be trod and left clumpy
to be torn among the amongst

down there here dire agon and ever anon
to be shorn free of illusion

is of course never any sort of—
the Letter which is inviting you out

(because there is some marker
demystifying your station)

it got lost on the way,
respond accordingly

I’m at a loss but
the newly silent scene

blanketed in it
basking in it this lost sense that

we will always and because of this
the feeling starts to coil around mid-air

the frayed Cable then wrapped itself for delivery
to any unintrusive presence

which turned out controlling.
anything lounging just waits

for its chance to assert on
its specialized scenario—

to be specialized and wonder why
one has dumped all their eggs

to sit waiting in the vestibule
only let further in by external interest

locked from one’s purpose or
maybe just maybe it’s not meant

many just so many hacks circling
kicking up great clouds of dust

to obscure with a coughing fit
that which we look for

under the latticing of
the trees’ general (dwindling) protection

that let in conspicuously encouraging rays
–seeing great things is not enough

there’s a walk away and off into
which takes a bit to stagger into

but once youre there
so excited because curtains

finally match the drapes
the silence of them

the rustle of them
business isn’t so important as advertised

I make a fiction to see if
well if it becomes as it’s supposed to

and if not we’ll walk away and off into
the ever-wetter wilds

Populist arthouse

Immediacy is a soup
I was being funny but it was just mean
Preclusive slurping a tad humbled
but still happy like an old shirt
Newness swayed in the gusts
Guston, everyone likes him these days
Shingles hammered back in
Stink of mildew and days
Sometimes... It’s nice

Driving uphill behind a bus and a contractor’s truck that looks like a municipal vehicle which drags a bed that holds a chained down minibulldozer

On the path
With the wrong acoustics, all chords are illegible
Shut that window. Inhale a little
Speaking precludes any motion
Gettimg myself into trouble
Any hierarchy is arranged
A gust a pause blowing onto the scene
Poetry is a urinal
Arrangement is a urinal

∩

Corey Qureshi is the author of four chapbooks of poetry. He runs the webpage/reading series/publisher BOXX Press. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children, where he works as a baker. @q_boxo

Four Poems

from storm still

Attempts / The Storm (Maudlin)

Obviously the world is failing:

Obviously democracy is mediocre men in pools of shit, colliding, smudging shit on everybody’s heads:

Obviously the brambleberries picked along the riverside were falsely placed to navigate our day-blind carrying on instead:

Obviously the ankles that were growing in the place of palms:

Obviously the lowers that were sprouting from the crevices:

Obviously the buboes in the unthought reckoning of pits:

Obviously I widened as a fox that clenches teeth at birds:

Obviously beneath our heads the crinkling of a burning book:

Obviously beside our heads a storm sends thunder through our ears:

The third? The fourth? A hand? A lightning? Then a cold surrounding air—

What’s the point if yellow lowers grew where ankles used to be?

And if the cat sits on your head? And if the cat sits on your head?

And if you’ve folded up the loads of laundry left beside your bed?

And if it were for nothing, and for nothing you went on instead?

Attempts / The Storm (A Whisper)

Resist the will to disappear.

The trees are green.
The trees are green.

Resist the will to disappear
in order to appearance.

Attempts / The Storm (Flies)

There didn’t used to be flies.

There were always flies.

There were always flies.
There were always waters.

A ship was made of wood: a plank
was good enough: I

carried I across the lake; across
the sea; across the channel;

while, storm-still, bilge, its pulsing
world, became the mind,
defiled.

There were never flies.
There were never waters.

A ship was not a word: A gesture,
good enough: How

often could I—
could I—carry on?

How often
could this couldness carry on?

How soft is fleece
that softens in the sun?

How many times
can I get up? How many

times can I go on?

How many times the spilling on the
ache and you ache through them.

Spilling out and out and ache and
you and ache in falling do we?

Go? And do we go? And do we
all go with them? Do we are we going

on and on about this aching? Is our
quaking blatant disregard for your

confessed outbreaking?

Well?

Requiem, still

1

Holding off the end of day, I wake into the night.

2

I wake into the stillness of my sight.

3

The stillness of my sight looks upward, feels you looking down;

4

The night’s unmasking burrows into frown.

5

Still as stillness; stillness as again;

6

the body’s body fading; the fading body’s end;

7

the end of minerality, marauded or marooned;

8

we set forth for the frown of all-too-soon.

9

Still as windswept grasses; still as then;

10

still as night’s unmasking; day’s upend;

11

still as meekness; shaking; still as death;

12

still as lightning’s lightening intent.

∩

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn. Recent work can be found at mercury firs, Black Sun Lit, Conjunctions and elsewhere.

Two Poems

ARS POETICA

I remember when it was acceptable for men to hide behind the veil of Isis
and name the indefinite stream
that brings down the print of a single blue sandal each day
before it’s corrupted by further clarification
or the affirming care I’m rummaging around for in here.

I’m honestly proud of everything I do
no matter what. Working out is happiness. Every collaboration
is blessed that brands have the trust in me to deliver.

Devastated like me by my ineptitude, clarity lays itself down
next to us, opening its cells to all manner of fluids.
Have some contaminated leeks, someone actually wearing argyle:

everything else is dead to me, only love can misbehave.

THE STAR

I’m already losing my voice, my inner voice.
Like Chagall I was touched by something
I felt happened — that’s Abel, he wants to sit outside,
not hear more of my pensive music — inching it forward
thanks to my power element. I’m having to deal with this
but I can’t be here after mall hours
watching through contact colored lenses

the point within which something
less than something, a shadow, stops you

but like I promised, I’ll be almost here for you
though going by really quickly.

∩

Tamas Panitz is the author of several poetry books, most recently The Mollusc (Copenhagen: 2025) and Lazy River (Creative Writing Department: 2024). @tamaspanitz.

Four Poems

A NEIGHBOR DRUMMING

A neighbor            drumming is a lover
or a likeness           a glossary
of the hard consonants keeping time

I too repeat myself        but don’t change

Replace my syllable with a snare
I am describing to no one the sound of

rain fall           footfall           a far off war

PAULINE OLIVEROS

Music of an other kind
                                            Pauline Oliveros

has heron wings
& whale teeth

A female animal lesbian for the revolution

                                            Place me in a cistern
Play an accordion             underneath the world
Watch it decay

Write your decibels onto a “pillar”

           Names I slowly say
           into the room

becoming not names becoming earth names

ROTARY TELEPHONE TURNED

Rotary telephone turned
weepy microphone

Favorite object to speak into amid
a war

Sound is in me
muscles loud static

Rip into my heart
a bloody tape deck of syllables

Wind it back
& run it through
the delay delay delay
signal path
to clear the present

When will things
improve

When will
when will

CLASSICAL

Classical record on the other room’s record player
with bells to ring over a bathtub floating big
dead bells

My first poem
was a tape I found
under my sister’s bed

Box of magnetic tapes Writing

Silence I spoke into the microphone
like the child I was

The poem answered decades later
Listen what lost

∩

Nathan Shipley is a poet currently in Santa Cruz, CA. He does work for Insert Press and publishes SUDS, an audiozine for poetry and sound. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in GROTTO, Recenter Press Journal, and Opt West.

Three Poems

from Vespers

THE GREATEST PHOTO IN AMERICA

is of little death and repeat, of
LED light-shift in the Taurus t-
square stellium, the pull of which
did disrupt that hour of phlox-color

over the couch, the lamps, edging
color wildflower on the heel, the self-
administering mirrors of purple
subulata, immaculata, I mean

my poise to the shade, so vivid
the bones in contort, so vivid
and windowless the scene. Unceded
inner sub-drop room, in-sync

for a change. Look:
the fore- and background remain
beautiful. The in completeness
is there. Meaning, the whole-of-the-record

the crisis and agony; the floret
of water, misting. The glisten of
everyone there, in complete. Along-
side the phrase I require clearer seeing.

PHILIA

Humor as rest as respite in
terms to excite a laugh

convulsively. A defeat of reason
in sub-zero climes, or in our here’s

oh, the many topics to consider
but we’ll riff on the conjoining of care

and play I have read your SOS
In our field, we urge towards

affirming care care care, plus
the body in deliberation, morally so

plus reasoning to & from particulars (i.e
should it matter I’m getting played?). Upshot

being – bit farfetched – that the cold will not
worry us too much, that due to

protectiveness & nurture-dom
to clean the sink is a lightness, as is

the wipe-down of fridge, ignoring the invite
stuck there. Are you coming to play?

For I am so far away. It is cold where I am
It is hot in the photographs that flitter & glitch

It’s such a chaos, a dream-ed role pattern split like grace

So, we tend towards play, or we tend
to our brattish ways, saying

I didn’t do ANYTHING I was told to
We tend towards the taking of care, & I

will divert from the bruise in my life, that
threatens to be apparent when thinking of it

LUDUS

In this early-though-enduring theme, I’ll
say that animals don’t tell their lives
as stories; no rain or blinding wit
no house ablaze, or god in the sky. No, a dog
would add, if you are inefficient at
correcting course, then stay where you are
amid non-production. Some-one will build
you a dungeon in the off-hours
Someone will design the civic ruins
as you gesture to sites of attention:
Devour me here, redeem me, rear me.
Plato points to the firmament, upward
as if commuting air or an idea.
With a punch aforethought, you’ll do the same
You’ll think (to yourself), stay where you are. The future
is mere breathed into existence. You’ll think, yes
I do enjoy jetplay, the tiny eruptions of the garden pool
as it rains rains rains. Paradoxically and posture
-wise, I only escape in one direction.
In this repertoire the mind extends.

∩

Jane Lewty is the author of two poetry collections, In One Form To Find Another (CSU Poetry Center, 2017) and Bravura Cool (1913 Press, 2013). She teaches art history and creative writing in Baltimore.

Two Poems

One With Which I Open

Where my rage is listening
At the shoreline its form takes
The shape of an obvious fate
Hands plunged into the silt
Of the future retrospective
Alchemy, “me,” vomiting on a hill
Top heavy with shame in sunset’s
Righteous light, finding it honest
To cross with desire
My amplitude undoes the borders’
Haptic feedback through which I
Double, like being seen at a distance
I like being watched in this form
The only one with which I open
My own mouth to spit in it
And empty the first person
Trespassing in the dream of
My body going no place with a name

from The Streamers

//

There’s a problem with the stream
I mean my system’s problem is that
It’s both mimetic of its form and not
Allowed the means to strategically combat
Its meaning, reliant on the conditional
If it continues, the poem will not be
A science glittering in the dark
Cultivated style matching its shadow
Architecture I assembled against expression
Unwillingness to speak in the dopaminergic
Cloud signals flooding content at will
Analgesia formed in the hours whiled
Even prior to the drive they shape
Making the tongue hang limp
In the already insufficient mouth
Which I excuse myself with, sorry chat
Just one sec I’ll be back
Through light-by-light scattering

//

I woke at the break of dawn
And pressed play, a fleeting thing
A thread of time-bound light
Drained of a parallel inner life
The birds are singing falsely in
The eclipsed sky, signals out of time
An apparition, a ring, for what
Reason does the moon have at all
To make demands on me, move
Against inertia and with the tide
Rising steadily in cadence with
New opportunities for
Mental health app developers
Blink once for yes, twice for
Auto-erotic electrical pulsing
As stochastic interval
As formally undone property
Of the body stained by longing
In the temporal lobe, assume me
To be piecewise polynomial
Globally smooth, I guess, mostly just
Hanging out, as planes circle over
Gliding under trochaic night

//

Still, if not for you, I would give up
The essence of description, leaves
Trembling in the digital wind
Alike in kind and same as the price
Of real wind, it’s simple economics
That the unending flow of the words
Long to graft onto, a subject
Aches to mirror unnoticed
In the city we do it all the time
Simulated or otherwise, aimlessly I
Mimic the expression of your private
Sensations, progenitive POV we’re
Exhausting the limits of prose
To run ads where I’m wearing
Solitude as an outmoded form
Of dress nostalgia wrapped itself in
Sweating through the anachronism
To linger as a thumbnail
Replayable when the narrative needs
To link revenue with form
Between where the video ends
And criticism begins
Today I’m going live at 7 PM
Just for you, it’s all because of you, I must
Thank you for the Twitch Prime subscription

//

A weakness is a poetics.
This is the self-governing glow I now undress in,
illuminated in the Commons
the body can take anything
inside itself, though I’m too shy
to admit the lengths
I’ve gone to for my research
monograph, an auto-ethnography
of quivering at the psychic root
system, reviewed by esteemed peers
whose jaws soften at the sight
of phase changes, the pressure altering
method April bends the air
and my arms with, lying prone and
desalinated in my view count

But having been nowhere for so long
retreading the illegible buffering sunlight,
being rendered future continuous, I will be
waiting my only hours to begin the first line

∩

Daniel Baker is a poet from San Francisco. He is the author of The Streamers (forthcoming from Spiral Editions) and the co-editor of Topos Press. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Baffler, Annulet, Denver Quarterly, Works & Days, and other publications. He lives in New York.

Two Poems

The I Am Not a Robot

from The Poets

I am an admin named Lewis obvi
I am a shadow, dust-encrusted, head-to-toe
I am thinner than your “average” samurai
I do what my life coach tells me

I have left my body-of-work to a shell company
I am a coterie, lawyer-trustees, et al.
I am at once a minimum of 7 memories
I am a sentence without a clause

I am a *Leo from South Shore, Massachusetts
I cosplay as someone who could give good advice
I am a sad boi whose mom and dad divorced :(
I am just not a fan of Duran Duran

I am a Trekkie AND a Patriot
I am on a dating site called Dr. Jekyll
I write, and drink, and walk, and say, okay
I am allowed to continue vanishing

 for Etel Adnan

Down in My Notes

There’s a line I keep writing
down in my notes

night after night-ing
down in my notes

in the room where I wrote
down in my notes

sleepwalking the stairs
down in my notes

right through the front door
down in my notes

I waltz around town
down in my notes

and the surrounding countryside
down in my notes

to the end of the dock
down in my notes

into the deep
down in my notes

∩

Matthew Klane’s books of poetry include Of the Day (Publication Studio 2025), Hist (w/ James Belflower, Calamari 2022), Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flimb Press 2016), Che (Stockport Flats 2013), and B (Stockport Flats 2008). An e-book My is online at FENCE. His debut record, Too Little Too Late, was released in January 2025.

One Poem

WALK IT OFF

Do you remember when you said
I galloped, the geese finally
crowed hello? The lights went out,
if only as some signal that

 the idea is all the rage––a moment
of decision that has already
happened, so what, flung as I am,
there’s nothing lighter than a little

 light following us in return.
And when that ends, yes and no,
there we go again, sappy
at the moment when the sun

 falls right in front of you for
feigning the romance with anything
but. Forgive the mind that takes
between the first days

 and the last, the upright wish
to continuously scribble
in the margins,
and to remember there’s nowhere

            to be, plus the spider
in your hair, the names
we put on these in the winters
even when we don’t feel

 like it. What’s protecting the
community is all over the news
if you just look for it,
out there, growing at our expanse.

 Time picks a cluster, doesn’t it,
before wandering off
again, flicked out of range,
no longer a charming hush

 that waits out tomorrow.
And while you’re all here,
spread out
in the clarity of the next thing

 before we know it, let’s agree
this togetherness
is really something,
unlike anything

we’ll experience in the daylight
ever again.
It even includes my ex-
brother-in-law

who, I don’t know,
I see as someone who now walks
everywhere. A gollum
numbed in a hoodie,

 the bodies he’s re-
worked all around this town.
I follow my grandmother
endlessly and not enough, but

brothers are like humps
of graying snow melt outside
the Investment Center,
where who needs a chainsaw

when the day now means
forever, where creation
is so un-
assisted in its need for perfection.

 Otherwise, as indifferent
as a weather report
for some city,
far away from your home.

&

This morning, 3am, rot stomach,
a burnt gut wake up,
but just before in a dream,
a childhood friend

became strangely
affectionate—some sign
he’ll die soon?
Getting out of bed

 to read headlines of doom
in the other room, nauseated,
please no vomiting
before class

or long walk
in the rain.
This spare bedroom that feels
still foreign, a space

I wake in
and forget where I am,
I, who never go into strangers’
apartments these days.

But there were years,
almost every weekend,
that I’d end up in some not me
decorated place—this person

knows that person, and so
we’d end up in a surprisingly
elegant living room or a dump
with the scent of sweet

ripe leftovers
from months ago.
I wonder how these echoes
are mine,

 how they sound to other people
shared halfway through
a Tuesday morning
of the best slate gray sky,

not just more minimal
flattened surfaces or
this new era
that resembles a drug deal

gone bad.
Tonight, when you come home,
I’ll tell you that the lone pretzel
that survived the last forest fire

is only four hundred dollars.
And when you say,
what about the golden beaver
with the dead-eyed stare,

the one that I’d spend thousands
to save like a little rat
under the weather,
a toothy bird motioning

for more heavy rain? I’ll say,
I’d do anything for you
except just before tax season.
That’s just too much

to ask, you know?
Maybe a flight out west
for no reason, instead.
Maybe see where Cormac McCarthy

did the unspeakable,
but our focus, of course,
on the diners
and mesas, some border

experience, some broader take
we inch closer
by calling our own.
The weeks go by,

and thankfully we stay put,
eat bucatini
and anchovy lemon salad,
sending our mothers

these recipes
so they save
all their money and health
by doing the same.

&

Maybe the more intimate side,
all that work unaware,
is what we’re always after.
Like it’s funny how the one-inch

 darkness within some Baltic
ivy freaks me out,
Clive Barker’s Nightbreed,
a maw

of hell and humor,
some kingdom
that I belong to
better than I know:

two pigeons
up all night, making a nest
for a pregnant cat.
Such are the miracles, the milestones,

of being together
and then not.
So, as my friend, speak
slower and less often

than just about anyone else.
Be what’s in the room
when there’s nothing
attached

but the weight of wondering,
the patterns of natural gusts
just there.
Sometimes,

this is all it takes
to stay within
the wander,
the blue gone

 from the early
evening, ourselves gone
into the flush
of some other interior.

&

 If you set me aside
just for a moment
I’ll find a way
to survive

the upcoming evolution
intact.
Or if nothing that massive
maybe just a light

struggle
with myself or
some 24-hour zoo
where the midnight screeching

is its own kind
of forgiveness,
and all the other enclosures
are reserved only

for YOU
& YOU &
YOU & YOU.
But what really kills me

about this place
are the facts:
the neighbors
down the street that serve

saltwater
in the shape of the kitchen
we once called
home

or the aftershave
of slums
where I soaked
into the winding

gravel roads
nitpicking
one eviction
after another, asking,

who started this
more gently
than before, who
protects the flower bed

from all the rage,
the retained
for all the real
estate, some new river

not only a river
asking be become
more of home.
A right of change, renamed,

 in this way thinking
shelves
the head.
Let’s not say

I never tried
hard enough. Let’s say
you’ll be home soon,
withholding my unanswered

emails, my Wednesdays
left open not looking
for the hours of Autozone
but tomorrow I’ll behave,

for practice and delight,
for all the flung language
of people, the something
we are made of, the let

wandering that becomes us
as we find ourselves today.
Today, I’m being called
by the similar

and estranged at once.
The afternoon before
I thought about this future
afternoon, was still me, wasn’t it?

As I found it
I was moved.
And if the world begins
and ends

 by how we are taken in,
I promise you more gorgons less
sideburns, a love of nothingness
in between.

∩

Jordan Stempleman has published nine collections of poetry, including Cover Songs, Wallop, and No, Not Today. His forthcoming poetry collection, Spilt, won the 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press. Stempleman is an editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. From 2011 to 2025, he curated the A Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri, and is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute.

One Poem

POEM BY KAFKA

I have recovered informal pleasure
Struck as I was
By high-toned fantasy
A lumpish way of saying
The party foods were small and savory
The impeccable servants
Romping dogs
Constant martinis being suzzled
While I admired my escape
In my teens I was a terrible flower
To circulate without an excuse
Obtruding strangers
And even in absence that thin time
Of day where a party fits in
Dogs and children demanding
A little something after
The question is how to give up
The frazzling of oneself
Escape our thirties and forties
On a silver tray
In a closet lined with lace
The silent butler crosses a hall
Toward its own disposal
Less needed than a cigarette
Even in love I used to wonder
If they could act a scene without
To me the most notable thing
About the 20th century
A dip that started as a groundswell
And became a spread
Then toothpicks came into their own
You wore something off the shoulder
Pale and blue
Life slid like a meatball down the front
Of your décolletage
Leaving a hideous indelible stain
I have a dustpan and a whisk for a broom
I have a mandoline
It is hardly essential
I have always needed more than I have
You may be more provident
The table was chock full of ready-mades
We had only to dunk
And various condiments appeal to you
Friends would never admit
The greater the crush the less they will be noticed
People don’t go to the dip
It has to come to them
Get yourself a good walnut to crack
A small drawer stuffed with scraps
Spare some knives to avoid a death
Of the host in the instant of a herd
Remember the written word?
It has not died
Tell the people when the party will be over
I suppose we could feed them caviar
As this is probably a sad party
And everything eaten by the fingers
Down to the bone
In what used to be ashtrays
Your best-bought friends
Scatter the napkins which will be stuffed
Absurdly into pockets
In some bright color
I allow about three per person
And guests never seem to be without
Your assortment could surely feature
Bread and butter
A universal dunk
Who has time to be this desirable
Wanted and gross
You can buy a party
You can go out
Gussied up and ornamented
Take it on the bun
Taste around until you find
Well my world is not like that
My children have been placated
With sandwiches which seemed festive
And without much damage
How many hands can you count on
Overcrowded as teenagers
Crammed in the corner and dripping
Water down your back
Your tulips thoroughly trampled
You are not the only one
Formally determined
By a written invitation
A fear of frying
Bird and beast
Crimson menace
No party of mine

∩

Stella Corso wrote the poetry collections Green Knife and Tantrum along with several chapbooks including the people were lovely, but I was not. She currently teaches in the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University and co-hosts The Ritter podcast.

One Poem

Tabulation

from Tabloid Facts in A History of Rome and Floyd County by George Macruder Battey Jr. (1922)

Did you know that—John Hume brought
the first bath-tub in Rome, from Charleston,
about 1850? Daniel R. Mitchell owned the first piano?
Coosa Old Town was an Indian village on the Coosa
River near Rome, South Rome side, and was
destroyed on or about Oct. 17, 1793, by Gen. John
Sevier, ancestor of numerous Romans? An erratic
character known to the Cherokee Indians as the
“Widow Fool” operated a ferry in 1819 at the forks
of the Oostanaula and Hightower (Etowah) Rivers?
Miss Eliza Frances Andrews, botanist, has had
her habitat in Rome since 1911? Major Ridge’s ferry,
opposite his home on the Oostanaula, was seized in
1835 by a white man named Garrett, who claimed
that Ridge would not run it or let anybody else
run it? Father Ryan, Indiana poet, once visited Rome to
see about the Kane property in New York, and was the
guest of Mrs. Mary Adkins, mother of Wm. H. Adkins?
Thos. A. Wheat, of Ridge Valley, loaded the first ten-inch
Mortar cartridge fired at Fort Sumter in 1861? The Santa
Ana silver service, captured by Houston at the Battle of
San Jacinto, was once the property of Henry Pope at Pope’s
Ferry? Heavy guns furnished the Cherokee Artillery
by the Nobles were captured by Gen. Sherman at Resaca?
Rome once had thirteen whiskey saloons? Before
Barney Swimmer and Terrapin, Cherokees were
hung on Broad Street for robbing and murdering Ezekiel
Blatchford (or Braselton), of Hall County, a land
seeker, in 1837, they were allowed to take a last swim
under guard at the forks of the Etowah and the Oostanaula?
Are you saying you didn’t know, you didn’t know, how could you
have known? Each glint in river water? How will you atone?
At knowing’s nexus while lives are breaking in the dam?

∩

Alicia Wright is the author of You’re Called By The Same Sound (Thirdhand Books) and A Coin, A Moth, A Literary Journal (DoubleCross Press), both forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Iowa City, where she serves as editor of Annulet, publisher of Annulet Editions, and host of the poetry reading series Normie Creep in the Sacred Grove. She works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review.

One Poem

The Angriest Dog in the World

Forgot to lock front door—again. Left car keys in an old coat. Dropped mail down recycling chute. Carved the wrong turkey. Stepped in chewing gum. Flossed too hard. Neglected to cancel online therapy session. Broke handle off ceramic mug. Spilled chili oil on carpet. Cut hand trying to open package of batteries. Checked autorenew by mistake. Cordless mouse stopped clicking.

Lightbulb dimming. Ants around the bed. Bird shit on bedroom window. Arugula turned black. Neighbor took up flute. Dryer malfunctioning. Torn Achilles tendon. Umbrella in fragments. Reprimanded on work slack. Pothos looks a little wilty. Bumped head. “Delivered” yet gone missing. Train not running after 9pm on weekends. Card cancelled due to suspicious activity.

Stolen bike tire. Stolen bike seat. Smudged earwax on brand new book page. Hole in sock. Sink clogged with coconut oil. Unknown blot on camera lens. Last page on calendar. Kicked a dead rat. Ate a bad orange. Bit the dust. Bought the farm. Passed over for second interview. Empty ice tray. Decapitated by collapsing scaffold. Street debris flung in eye.

Missing tomatoes from the market. Discovered wire-tapping. Gangstalking. Skull crunched by bear. Surf trip cancelled. Unflattering profile in regional magazine. Ingrown hair. Leaky transmission. Toenail broke off. Ass carbuncle. Ran the corner too quickly. Credit score dropped seven points. Stepmom’s fish died. Salmon patties freezer burned. Got lost on the trail when supposed to be leading.

Wolves chewed legs off. Beanie in puddle. Neglected to attach email attachment. Ear infection. Last match. Chapped lips. Ghosted when they joined the ashram. Allergic reaction to date’s cat. Bloody cuticles—can’t stop biting. Flu after flu shot. Rank sink sponge. Left eye stopped working. Brains hanging out. Crushed by falling deck chair. Scared of my own shadow.

Claustrophobic episode at the planetarium. Vertigo at the skating rink. Suicidal ideation in the hall of miniatures. Pee shy. Unshakeable halitosis. Ash on slacks. Bad trip sitter. Not streaming in my country. Sibling says she hates me. Worryingly high cortisol. Soy sensitivity. Friend break up. Text left as read. Letter from the tax service. Low balance notice. Chased by irate uber driver.

Boss calling for the third time. Recycling can overflowing again. Record scratched. Misread invoice. Illegible PDF. Beaten in a van. Author bio filled with typos. Child screaming on the bus. 101.3 fever. Right ear swollen. Failed state. Lapsed loan payment. Joke ignored at happy hour. Pen leaked. Monitor flickering. Trapped in tanning booth. Tongue lobbed off with katana.

Botched fraud. Fell into bottomless pit. Fell into pit of snakes. Fell into pit of syringes. Jaw ripped off by torture device. Flattened by zamboni. Spaghettified in a black hole. Boiled in a geyser. Little scratch on eyeglass lens. Eyebrows shaved off while sleeping. Xbox run over by dad’s lawnmower. Hoodie bleached at laundromat. Revenge porn racket—again. Slapdash enema. Memecoin crash. Foot run over by cab.

Bad kisser on third date. Dirty bomb terrorist attack. Lost in the woods until starvation. Caught jumping turnstiles. Caught drinking on the job. Late for important work meeting. Disregarded final exam. Sold shares too soon. Shot to death. Burned to death. Slipped on ice. Overcharged at the bodega. Quiz timed out. Frayed cord. Grey pube. Butt dial. Pecker turning blue. Bacne.

Promotion overlooked. Raise denied. Claim denied. Groped by assistant manager. Knifed in the back. Overdosed dying patient with liquid morphine. Fender bender—again. Underwhelming birthday. Invisible paper cut. All limbs amputated. Kept in a bag. Lived in a bucket. Wore a curtain. Entire family exploded in front of me. Self-immolated to protest government corruption but no one “got it”.

Forgot PIN. Grass stains. End of foil roll. End of deadline extension. Cessation of benefits. Curtain rod keeps falling. Adblocker blocked. Union busted. Crabs. Loose tooth. Hanging on by a thread. Stripped screw. Assembly instructions not included. Tickets sold out. Reassigned to the nosebleed section. Stuffed in the back of the plane like a sardine. Projectile baby vomit. Bet on wrong horse.

Kicked in the face by soccer player. Torn crotch in jeans. Grease splotch on cashmere sweater. Discovered adoption papers. Banned from the casino. Tied up and stabbed with hot pokers. Damned to hell by street preacher. Scammed by one-armed locksmith—again. CTE after years of professional play. Bluff called. Mind blanked. Nurse talked so quietly had to ask “what” three times.

Behavioral center burned. Christmas market arsoned. Conveniently-located ATM molotoved. Second favorite essayist cancelled. Another legacy sequel. Screenplay draft rotting on shelf. Didn’t mean to buy lowfat. Overlooked for prize nomination. Absent from guest list. Castrated by the pope in a nightmare. Sliced like a ham. Slapped in a daydream. Punched in kidney by parkour artist.

Blast waves—again. Cooking rut. Collapsed lung. First round in the negative. Mangled tennis racket. Ossified pinky. Endless leg cramp. Spasms. Sneezing fits. Little blood in cough. Jumped the curb. Curbstomped. Dragged into the sewers. Allergic to stone fruit. Out of paperclips. One-ply toilet paper. Ice sculpture melted before finishing. Rube Goldberg machine lacking one crucial domino.

∩

Barrett White edited Tagvverk. Frantic Gesture, a new publishing project, will debut this year.

One Poem

the shit eaters

“a mess of cockroaches that shun the light” “or the dreaded moth” an enclosure and spurge laurel, which may be the wrong plant, but Daphne is a suggestive name
nonetheless, a stuffed cavity: “strange animals appear” then whirring clouds   

and a housefly comes to eat my shit
and to eat my stomach and to eat me all over

I hear Franco Battiato
in her chewing and flying

I can watch her work me into the Chicago river
they will never find me there and never find my gold molar there

I grow into “a hot afternoon, a foamy wave or a scent of lilac,” a thing that sleeps in your long dark hair, a twilit head at the edge of a field, a head in a round attic window, a sea snail, a boy who heaves under a mound of turquoise beads;

“There is the time of the speaking body and the time of writing . . .”; there is the nurse who says that I have a bladder infection; there is the phone call two days later telling me I don’t have an infection and there is my penis still hurts—it’s one process; there is the flight from history into an uneconomic memory, aestheticizing wood smoke and a brown glove and a blue hand and a clearing that was over the road and also thirty-five years ago and just as it is now, in the sky and light making me expel my insides like a flower does or a gentle sea-thing that’s doing its soft fucking or soft eating like the gray midday light bewitching the clearing and the shed full of tools, the windows of which were installed sometime in the first decades of the twentieth century, beehives,

but fogged glass frames the vines and leaves

a nail head &
morning glories: pearly gates and heavenly blue

I see them in turned-purple and turned-red blackberry bushes full of moths
that I have just recalled while swallowing a capsule
an extra cube of space

another full room: a snail’s motherly folds

∩

Philip Sorenson is the author of three full-length collections: Of Embodies (Rescue Press, 2012), Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018), and Work Is Hard Vore (Schism Neuronics, 2020). He lives and teaches in Chicago. 

Editor’s Note: One Year

Friends,

Community Mausoleum is one year old today. I don’t know what to do about it other can keep going, but I’m writing to say thanks and to think for a minute on the occassion. You can read about that below if you want. Or stop here. Thanks. It’s stupid to throw yourself a birthday, but I really believe in being embarrassed.

When I started this project last year I only knew that I wanted to start a press. I knew that I wanted, and saw there was a need (I know, I know, define “need”—read the first Editor’s Note for that), for yet another disaffected and idealistic fool to decide to start publishing yet more writing that would never be published through the otherwise established and respectable channels of literary publication and distribution. I wanted to make a living in death, which is to say a defined area of small press activity, focused and serious in effluvial spite of the known non-ROI, and I was curious about whether a network could form in the multi-bodied orbit of emergent and conflicting thought-feelings I was having about time and money vis-a-vis literary production, encapsulated best in a single syllable I still can’t find a convincing way around: Doom. I was and am that fool.

In those first days I felt a lot and knew a whole lot less. Still, in spite of knowing, and knowing better, feelings are what define and continue to guide this project’s procession. If certain aspects have seemed unseemly or less than legible that may be because feelings, real as they are to us, the ones who feel them, are also, in my own experiences at least, hardly ever seemly and barely even legible. Is this an apology? No, sorry.

What I knew I felt then and still feel today is that literature and literary-cultural production, at least in the small corners of these ideas where I find myself lucky enough to work and get to exist, did not have to feel the reductive ways it so often can, did not have to be as hopeless in the ways it so often is. Even in our liveliest and most inviting sub-corners, down the reverberant if narrow halls of independent small press. It did not have to be so boring, did not have to be a race, did not have to be so special, did not have to be correct, did not have to be a job. Each person who realizes this is the last person to realize it. But I am noticing now and might be becoming more adept at understanding as I age into deeper states of befuddlement how feeling and being are such dear cohabitants, becoming virtually identical states. We already know the stakes in this negative economy. We can calculate all the probabilities. We can all bet on the futures. What if we embrace the doom?

As best as I can still articulate, the thinking-feeling-being-doing of Community Mausoleum and Coma is an ongoing experiment: To find possibility in entertaining both of literature and its production’s (are they friends?) dual and dueling impulses to hurry and go slow. To balance opposing instincts of urgency and deliberation, rejecting the idea that any of us need to rush this shit while simultaneously finding ways to be quicker and more ablaze than the better-regarded and -resourced channels can ever afford to be. It is also an experiment with money, stemming from an ambient sense (which may just be informed by my own personal experiences with literary projects and institutions, and should thus be regarded as a matter of thoroughly subjective opinion; though if you feel me feel free to holler) that money usually finds ways of limiting the prospects of an idea before it expands anything truly worthwhile. Perhaps too simply, Coma wants writing that wants to be written. It does not want writing that wants to be paid for. I remain curious about where this petulance and its attendant questions can lead, because, just in case you’re asking or thinking about it now, no, writing in this context is not work. That’s what makes it interesting. The press on the other hand pays royalties to its authors because Community Mausoleum titles are made objects—not data hosted on a server where I purchase space once a year using a debit card linked to my bank account which is periodically replenished through a variety of part-time editing and adjunct teaching jobs. Community Mausoleum books have a cover price because they cost money to print. When a book is sold, half the cover price goes to its author and half goes back to the press’s print budget for future books. There is no other overhead. That’s econo-nomics. Just in case you were wondering.

On May 1, 2024, I was wondering two things. The first was if I could publish my friend Eric’s chapbook Icewalker & Dirtworm. The second was if I could publish one thing at Coma every week for a year. In the days since, Community Mausoleum has produced three chapbooks—Icewalker & Dirtworm by Eric Wallgren, Important Groups by Hilary Plum, and demonstration forest by Kelly Clare—and one site-specific performance-text zine thingy tied to a public reading called “Find Your Ontological Center” which occurred in a Cleveland parking lot a week ago. On May 1, 2025, I am not wondering but can tell you with certainty that this summer the press will release its first full-length collection, a perfect-bound book of poetry with a spine called Study for Swimming Hole by Maxwell Gontarek. More books are planned, and they’ll be announced soon. Coma remains ever-open. Send some work if you haven’t yet. Look out for replies if you have. Be in touch if you want to. None of this is required. None of it is going anywhere. You can read all 54 of Coma’s year-one publications on the website: Poems, stories, essays, and reviews of small press books by Austin Miles, Eric Wallgren, Joshua Wilkerson, Jon Conley, Jenkin Benson, Christian Wessels, TR Brady, Walt Hunter, Brianna Di Monda, Henry Goldkamp, Joe Hall, Ben Roylance, Delilah McCrae, John Trefry, Evan Williams, Sarah Edwards, Glenn Bach, Carrie George, Matt Hart, Brandan Griffin, Philip Harris, Umang Kalra, Alex Benedict, Maxwell Gontarek, Alyssa Perry, Conor Bracken, Nick Greer, Olga Mikolaivna, Zoe Darsee, Emiliano Gomez, Kelly Clare, Cameron Mcleod Martin, L Scully, Andrew Judson Stoughton, Alex Tretbar, Angelo Maneage, Rob McLennan, Miri Karraker, Eric Tyler Benick, Alexandra Salata, Madeleine Schmidt, Calean Ernest, Zach Savich, Yuyi Chen, Tom Branfoot, Dominic Dulin, Ann Pedone, Jon Woodward, Daisuke Shen, Nate Logan, Jace Brittain, PJ Lombardo, Sam Heaps, and J. Arthur Boyle, in chronological order.

There are better ways to end whatever this note has been, but in the spirit of the above assemblage, and feelings, and the vague warmth with which we now turn toward our doom, I’ll just say thank you, friends. It’s been a sheer and staggeringly brilliant delight to get to work on this stuff over the past year, to collaborate and connect during our bravest moments of these increasingly bravery-requiring times. It is heartening to see so many other new publishing projects and experiments continuing to emerge alongside, to read them and to know them and you, and it is exciting to think about where we are all headed, what’s being dreamed and what’s getting better, despite.

So here’s to the next year, then another and another, whenever that is. Let’s go together. Not too fast. I’ll hurry if you will. See you there. No rush.

Time is on your side.

Zach Peckham
May 1, 2025

∩

Two Poems

FISTULA

Squint suns flanged alien while I
fucked ruminant and
asked
several small incidence panes
the names of here nor neither—
the blueth be it,
isolate, and isotopic (here / there
gradations sprung unlovely
from clavicles (sprained) and
misnomer tapes played repeating in the atrium:)
or actually none of that,
rather sculltrap and shits
forcefeeding a plea-deal
while I salute my psychosis,
a deluge of crasseries,
and pluck sweet-laced loosies
from the Yemenis’ counter
sundered
by the Multiracial Fascist Alliance
and Mayor Eric Adams’ Oath
to Another Tuesday Beating
our shit cute violent
so my wife starts talking
soft at my kidneys
and we rut,
beseech this epidermis
as we all must,
in the dapple dopplered and spurting
that I suck gracious
to repeat titrations and translate
thrummingly the good stuff (A, B)
through the Godhead cunningly
to liquidate in equal measure
all trials of the Hopeless:
“no-scoped bitch your stupid”
brains are leaking bloody runnels
from your stomach teletubby-style
with just a bathmat hammer
and free stitches in the clink—
I don’t eat meat,
what the fuck do you think this is?—
I wreathe leaves for gentle babes
around your ears again,
come again,
no I said come again,
it’s the thing with the soft gun again
where I want to love you
with heme stinking and
riots’ flourish thralling all of us
to the Act,
the one gift,
cloacal
in its allness,
miniscule
in total import,
and yet

ABECEDARIAN

They are really going to do it:
float a sanitized cop in the fountain,
a daily brigade of septuagenerians
demanding access nay obligation
to obliterate indiscriminately, while
our hands are pity flowers
(essentially ticklish)
and The Suzerain of Abortive Principles
wiretapped my gasleak to frack it
but I’m absent for my own delusion,
holding pickets outside a longshore warehouse
preaching solidarity to Irish-Americans
who bought white at the price of cop
and don’t intend to sell low,
so I’m kind of just whining
“COME ON GUYS DON’T SHIP IT”
with importuning charisma,
feeling consolidation in my absence of nouns,
screening the Icon in tertiary vision—
one cold finger of autumn enclosure
as the atomic clock rolls over (back into October)—
and the Lebanese eat death named Israeli Litigation
they’ve claimed as an indigenous dish (est. 1948)
and the hole gets so big
you can’t even see it:
a wound that swallows
whole bodies’
further expansion
into nothing
like edges
of All That Is.
I cut children’s starshapes into my cheek fat;
floss shrapnel through complexions of
red vapor screaming turgid syllables
of SUBJECT - VERB - OBJECT
in a lesson of conceptual grammar
to the future radiologists of Midwood
who vote red and don’t fuck
but now perceive grammar as bones
of all perception—the individual subject,
the verb of its enaction, the object
of its ire—
My phylogeny reeks
without shame
You misunderstand this directive
towards order (that’s imperative)
Alkalophiles crust on a sea vent
Archaea arrange so slowly—
I thought that they were Us
could save Us in heat—
the smallest forms
eating blast refuse
in Georgia, Peru,
Bengal and Mariana
East Nunavut
East Palestine
West Bank beneath
a dozer
stroking homes
with pneumatics
fire freely
at whoever
enjoys new weathers
fresh to the 21st century
as it settles in its cast—
Slag
hardening first at its edges
condensing in the Center (
really Old Prussia )
salivates
gleeing from Sheol
where machines
w/ 4th-grade grammar
recognize the face
of anyone
from here
to Berlin (1848)
Nakba, Balzac, children
named Cate after monarchs
yet-living, ruling near the century
of Anglo whim and
the exculpatory playdate
filled with rifles in Negev.
My friends are all indicted.
The park is half a home
Outside 100 Centre
I feel good
There’s asbestos in the air
As Progressives convert
Prison
to
a Multi-story Prison
I think we’re getting ready to die
Still pointless, just not
To the one for whom it isn’t
Long may their recalcitrance serve them
Forever may it stick into their heart
I don’t know anymore
I feel kinship with mice
They come sleep in my hair
Scream treehouse lazy aleatorics
Scream pencils cutting
phonics in the stink
(It’s the only thing that feels good anymore)
(ever has)
Except that’s Not True–
boxes open,
cardboard or not.
Eat raw ventricle
when self crawls
out to lap at
that kind of time
in which the loom passes—
Point it then—
Aim—
And eat—

∩

J. Arthur Boyle is pleasant, co-editor of The Amenia Free Review, and adjunct at CUNY. Various works are in or coming from The Chicago Review, CRB, Fence, Spectra, Verso... Please see jarthurboyle.com.

One Essay

On Either Side

My uncle R finally succeeded in killing himself this past Tuesday. 

My uncle R leaves behind three emotionally battered ex-wives. At least four biological children, suffering and starved and scrawny. One neglected so far that the boy was admitted to the hospital to bleed through his pores like Christ in Gethsemane. He will leave behind these children’s children, impoverished and estranged. I don’t know how many there are. My uncle R will be cremated, not because this is the conclusion he desired for his remains, but because it will help the family save $6,000. Between the credit card debt and the car debt and the condo share he has not sold since his first marriage, there is nothing to leave the boys to help them in caring for their father’s ever-continuing line. My uncle R will leave behind eleven to thirteen former stepchildren who will not come to the funeral. Who will not miss him at all. Who might not even be told until years later of his passing, and then they might just sigh gratefully, thinking of the years of terror he inflicted on them in their home. 

He dies in a plush armchair in the “family home,” my grandparents’ home, which has been refinanced again, and again, when the business is doing poor, when there is another mouth to feed. The home which always has a child, or grandchild, or family, or three, living in the basement or the office or the spare room. Out front is a wishing well. On the first-floor wall is a collage of photos of children all related by blood. Abused children. I am among them.  

When my uncle R finally reaches the end of his dying in his mother and father’s plush armchair, he will suddenly beg for life, experiencing withdrawal, saying he was wrong and maybe he is ready to be helped. And my aunt and mother will pin him down, will tell him: No, you belong in heaven now.

When my uncle R finally dies, due to complications from Crohn’s disease, due to the long abuse of opioid painkillers, due to despair, due to starvation—which is also my preferred form of suicide—his body will rest for hours, face uncovered, eyes unclosed, in the plush armchair next to the juicer where my grandmother peels carrots and pineapples. She has subsisted on them for fifty-odd years. She will wander in and out of the room, her skeleton under her paper-thin skin peeking through. He will rest in the plush armchair where as a child I used to read Joseph Smith’s Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, and also Robin McKinley’s Beauty and the Beast, and also Bukowski’s Love Is a Dog from Hell. Where I would sit and for days on end watch Glen Beck and reruns of Glen Beck and more Glen Beck, melting into the cracks of the sofa. When my uncle R finally dies it will be in the same chair my grandfather passed in, less than a year before. Both of them now in the next life. These punishing patriarchs, ruling over generations of suffering from the heavens. They are secure in their righteousness, at their place at Christ’s feet. 

My mother has asked if I would like to see a photo of my uncle R’s dead body. 

I tell her I would not. 

There is something I would like to say to my mother about the respect offered in bearing witness. About retreat. About, I don’t know. I increasingly know so little. 

My uncle R’s face was gaunt throughout his life. Long with high cheekbones and concave sides, as early as adolescence. After his first marriage to his second-cousin C he developed Crohn’s disease, and this physical affliction and the pain it caused him served as an excuse for my uncle’s escalating abuse against C and their three sons, a cycle which lasted a little over a decade.

My grandparents had seven children, and after my mother gave birth to me halfway through high school, her brothers would sometimes care for me. And, after R was married, C would often care for me. Or, share space with me. My understanding of the word care is not one I associate with this room. I remember C on my grandparents’ green wraparound sofa nursing a child with another on her lap. She must have been very young, with a round face that should have smiled. Pale skin and curly black hair which stood out in a home full of sandy blonde and beige. I remember feeling an affinity for her. She was also quiet and misplaced. I felt myself then to be half child, half grown, and I felt her to be half grown, half child.

When she and my uncle R divorced, the family would condemn her. Her sins. The pain she inflicted on her line. 

She will not go to the funeral. She will not speak to anyone who reminds her of that family home.

I keep thinking about her face on the green sofa. The way she would look over her left shoulder, down the home’s long hallways with either longing or fear. I remember many afternoons of watching her watching.

My uncle was once sent into “treatment” by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—of which all my relatives (except one uncle on my father’s side) are still stalwart members—not for his drug addiction, but for his porn addiction. 

In my years of watching porn, I tell myself at first I am only doing research. It’s true that very rarely do the images and sounds I consume on the internet provoke any arousal in me. However, this “research” into power, into degradation, into the vast depravity of the human condition, has been wearing on my soul. 

“Don’t worry sweety, I’ll be here while your father fucks you,” is a recommended video. Montage of teens who love it rough. I discover a channel devoted to women in Mormon garments who are forced by their bishop or another priesthood holder to perform sexual acts they have never dreamt of. In the chapel. In a baptismal font.

I admit that after seeing women in dog cones drink piss, or allowing their assholes to serve as cigar stands, I feel these videos and images of women in holy garments embroidered with blessings to be the final perversion that sullies all ties to my youth. In childhood I believed there was a sacredness to submission to the spirit. That as a vessel which the spirit inhabited I was beautiful. That when I love a mortal and allow her or him habitation within my body, when I surrender to them and their desires, I am made perfect by my love, that I in turn am made love. And I believe love is divine.

A poet from Utah who is widely respected for her book about grief and heaven and the socialist underpinnings of Joseph Smith’s city planning visits Philadelphia to read. 

On the internet I DM her and ask for an ARC of her book. I say I was born in Provo and have since left the church. I say I am fascinated by the premise of her collection. There has been a persistent growth of “good Mormons,” my phrase, in the cultural sphere. A tolerance of aberrant hateful beliefs marketed as civil. It frightens me.

When the poet sends the PDF to me it is with a small note that says she is still a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but she hopes I find something to enjoy in the book anyway. I read it in one afternoon after a day of drinking wine and complaining about politics with the Adorno scholar. After fucking him on his sofa. After leaving him tipsy and mangled. 

The poet’s work is brilliant and visceral. She makes me ache and I cry in a cemetary while my dog watches the life crawling amongst the green grass. While the dead lie beneath us. And do not rise. And, I believe, will not rise. 

My mother and her five remaining siblings pose at the funeral with arms around one another, smiling. The Mormon funerals I have seen are joyful, are a space to rejoice in the spirit free of suffering and temptation, returned to the heavenly mother and father. 

In Lee Chang Dong’s film Secret Sunshine, a woman’s child is murdered and the murderer finds God. In the film he smiles at the grieving mother. At peace. He is not punished with her pain. He is set loose from the chains of guilt and shame by his newly found savior. There is no justice. 

When the mother of the murdered child meets with the murderer, he gives her a placid eerily calm stare. 

I have seen my cousins bear children through C-Section, one right after the other, and their eyes during the procedure are similarly vacant. One of my cousin’s in particular strikes me, her face devoid of feeling and porcelain, her bright red hair in one perfect braid. It is this space of half death and calm that I have sought through starvation and sex and drinking. Suicide always on the tip of the tongue in pursuit of this absent stare. This nothingness I see in so many of my female relatives. A sedated stupor. 

I think maybe my Uncle R will not be missed, not because he was a monster but because the systems within which he exists are incapable of missing him. When you dehumanize half of your population so exquisitely, you say life is not valuable at all, no, not yours either. And when you call someone a monster, it is only because that is what you believe of yourself.

I can easily imagine my uncle at the end of his life, after his move to Arizona in order to stay closer to his second wife, who was able to manage some level of financial security and order despite his abuse. I can imagine him at his job at Kinkos, or watching porn in the shared bathroom, in his lonely apartment, cock in hand standing in the kitchen. Leaning too deep into his physical and emotional pain—thinking only of himself—and praying to Jesus. Secure in the atonement. 

Perhaps towards the end my uncle found true peace in his confidence in forgiveness. A peace that none of his wives or children or grandchildren will ever be able to feel. 

The thief has autonomy. Those who are robbed merely own the discontent of the ruined. Who are robbed both of their love, and their ability to be loved. Who are robbed, most critically, of their faith. 

After the death I go to dinner with a man who has been lashing me since I was nineteen. This night he beats me and bites me in the Sonder, then whips me with a belt, and mocks me for how weak I have become when I do not allow myself to scream, but whimper. How interested in self-preservation I’ve become, when I sniff, blistering from the impacts. 

I attended my grandfather’s funeral service over livestream while participating in a Zoom meeting for unionizing higher-ed faculty in the greater Philadelphia area. The attendance at the funeral was much sparser than the attendance of the meeting. Only his and my blood, and mostly under twenty. There was my grandmother, my mother and all six of her siblings, two of their spouses, and an overwhelming sprawl of my grandfather’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A battalion of steady saints. 

I miss my Uncle R’s funeral’s livestream by miscalculating the time difference between my home of Philadelphia and the Lord’s Chosen People’s home of Provo, UT. But I read his obituary, which my grandmother—mostly lost in early Alzheimer’s—drafted, and which I can see my mother edited because the syntax is hers. In both my grandfather and my uncle’s obituaries most of the narrative is spent in youth, then in anticipation of the second coming. Finally their bodies will be whole. Finally they will meet with their maker and feel the peace that has been denied them on this earth. 

How though, I wonder, can a god grant a man peace? It is audacious to claim his power is one of calm when all that god hath wrought on this earth is to make something once strange and beautiful, even in its sharp sadistic pains, more like hell. When, in our own attempts to make ourselves more like gods, we do so by making this world even more of a hell. 

Who invented forgiveness, do you think?

It sounds like gaslighting to me.  

The first woman who calls my ex’s behavior abuse is almost fifteen years older than me. She is sitting with me in a Lyft after a work event, and she tells me about her interactions with the man I love, loved, love, loved—the tense should be either past or present, but instead this is a strange hybrid state. It is over, it is not over. 

This woman tells me her story about this man I love/loved and says, I’d never been gaslit before, I did not understand what was happening. And this is the first time someone has used this word with me, about him. I am confident when I say, Yes. I feel relief, and from then on the story will begin to make some sense. I say, Yes, that’s it. 

Yes, gaslighting, Merriam-Webster’s most popular word of 2022, is overused and misunderstood. But it does something terrifying to you, this tearing away of your reality. And we only have our reality once. Our perceptions once. This experience with abuse has shifted all my life. I am still torn away from each hour. I am sealing my understanding of them to the wall of my consciousness like rolling wallpaper along muggy glue. Like licking an envelope. Sometimes it sticks.

I watch my uterine lining fall off my cervix through an ultrasound. This growth and shedding has been happening since I was ten, but I have never witnessed it before. The fertility doctor is tracking my cycles as I anticipate creating a new life, and through this tracking I see my cervix for the first time, the lining that expands and even changes textures throughout the month. I am introduced to my ovaries, full of black spots I am informed are not cancers but follicles. We watch as one self-selects through the month and grows to 22mm, enough to dwarf its companions. I feel like a chicken. We see the swollen luteal phase, and push against the uterus in my stomach to hold it still while we observe. In black and white on this screen I learn things about my body that I have not known for the thirty years I have been made of it. I am, for the first time, witnessing the truth of who I have been. The mechanics of what my childhood religion, my former god, my family, believe I was made for. 

For most of my adult life I did not want to have children. Before I understood sex or gender I understood I did not like the way my cunt dictated my identity. My personality and aspirations consigned to devotion and birthing. But after living with and helping raise my ex’s son, I felt devoured with longing for motherhood. In couple’s therapy my ex would attack me, “You do not want to be _____’s stepmother, you want to be his mother.” And he was not wrong, though I would deny it. I wanted to keep his son safe, and I wanted to witness his daily transformations. I adored the way he was like my ex, awed but afraid of the ways he was like his mother, my ex’s ex-wife, and unendingly curious about the ways he was separate from both of them and becoming more so every hour. 

Caretaking as an adult, rather than as a child, offered pleasure too. Long walks around the neighborhood became new again. Evenings became a sacred place to provide safety for the purposeful family.

The fertility doctor tells me it is important to have a small invasive procedure to be sure my fallopian tubes are working. Through a catheter she inserts saline into my uterus and I am allowed to see the cavity, the tubes flushed and healthy. The assistant, who is slowly coming around to me, and who has touched my genitals with more consistency and care than any lover this month, says my ultrasound is “textbook.” The doctor and the aid use the word, beautiful, a descriptor I am dangerously vulnerable to. 

The fertility doctor’s aid warns me not to go down any kind of online rabbit hole about this procedure, and I know, because I have, that this is because the fertility doctor has a malpractice claim against her. In July 2023 a woman sat down with this doctor for a standard saline sonogram, and the doctor inserted trichloroacetic acid instead of salt water through the catheter in her cervix. In the articles and interviews the woman describes the burning pain. She may never be capable of having children. 

The fertility doctor’s assistant looks up at me from between my stirupped feet and asks if I am in pain. She asks if I can believe it will pass. I look into her blue eyes set in soft cheeks, and say I am confident it will all be fine. There is so much we are asked to believe in that we cannot see, but there must be a limit at some point? There can only be so much that we convince ourselves of? But she is not lying, not in the larger sense. It will all pass, and no doubt too soon. 

The musician and I have not been sleeping. We are intent on devouring one another. As we roll around one another's bodies, hands against flanks against skull against cheeks and backs, I am always on the verge of cumming but cannot cross, and so scream. He will finish with frustration then fuck me with his fingers or metal or his tongue, and then will find his way in again, and I will croon and groan. 

It is 5 a.m. though, and after a night of this, he is exhausted. He holds my body, kissing with eyes closed the side of my left breast. I am still masturbating. I am fevered. He says he only needs a minute, his big thumb tucked between two of my low ribs. I am grinding myself to the point of nonexistence. I am going to break. When I fear I cannot take it anymore I imagine a man at the foot of the bed, observing the musician who is holding my chest. I imagine him telling us both a narrative about what is happening. Making meaning of the interaction. Leaning into his observations would allow me release.

This morning I cum to a porn video called “Fuck me Daddy,” which is as disappointing as its name. It is no better than the sex I have, even, much worse. I like to watch with the sound off, so I cannot even hear the word which the algorithm correctly guessed I would be drawn to. Mostly missionary. A small riding crop playing on the woman’s pussy, but there are no wounds. There is no true submission. I give as good as I take, I know what this looks like from both ends.

After the funeral for my uncle my biological family plays cards in the room where he died. They send me photos of this too. My grandmother made up so she looks 55 in a maxi dress and green eyeshadow. My younger brother, 6’3” and muscular, his arm around his second wife, laughing. My uncle ___ and his second wife. My Uncle ___, with his secret smile which conceals his bunker and his gold bars and his violent misogyny. His wife, that old beauty pageant star. 

A child from my oldest Aunt’s second marriage is sitting on a soft armchair. When this husband passed, this child’s mother took selfies, smiling genuine and embracing the casket. I suppose the girl isn’t a child now though, she is a young adult, and she looks a little like me, huddled in a black hoodie on a soft armchair, the one where both my grandfather and uncle spent the last minutes of their life, and those after they had moved on. Their ghosts given, but their heads still cradled by the green fabric. 

On my third night of my first writing residency in rural Virginia, I sat in a plush chair and drank through a six pack, one beer after the other, while the moon shone on the green grass and the deer outside my window, and I listened to Mormon hymns so soft I could also hear the avant garde composer at his piano in the studio next to me. Here I read through the CES Letters, a document written by a former member of the church which “debunks” the entire premise of the faith.

It is written by an entitled white man who is enraged over his loss of uniqueness. His special place in god’s empire. His planet in the next life. But, it is also compellingly thorough and wrenching. It is a story of betrayal and heartbreak to which the church has never responded. And were they to do so, I am almost certain the writer would dive back into the warm embrace of that security. I know most of the contents. The falsified sequence of events. The illogic. The racism. The subjugation. The gender essentialism. The rape after rape after rape by church leaders. The sinister origins of polygamy. But it is hard to see it written so plainly by a man who is begging to still, somehow, believe. 

…Obviously, I’m a disaffected member who lost his testimony so it’s no secret which side I’m on at the moment. All this information is a result of over a year of intense research and an absolute rabid obsession with Joseph Smith and Church history. With this said, I’d be pretty arrogant and ignorant to say that I have all the information and that you don’t have answers. Like you, I put my pants on one leg at a time and I see through a glass darkly. You may have new information and/or a new perspective that I may not have heard or considered before. This is why I’m genuinely interested in what your answers and thoughts are to these issues.

Excerpt from letter to the former CES director by Jeremy T Runnells

While I read the letter I think of tales of Joseph Smith’s schmoozy charisma which led to follower after follower. Which led to books and funds and the laying on of hands and stones erected in the honor of the God you cannot help but believe he has found, here, in the Americas.

As I think of these stories I sometimes see my ex’s face, his easy arms and fingers. The way he is tossed around in a room from conversation to conversation. 

A “loser,” my friends call him now. A sad man. A famous novelist calls him a villain. 

No one calls him Daddy. No one says, Your fallen god. 

And now too I see my uncle R. I see a life spent looking for validation from a con-man—and I am afraid we are not so different, he and I. 

Why do we believe these men? 

At a bar with the musician I say I have sometimes been shocked this summer, after the University of the Arts, the university I was teaching at, was closed with only a week’s notice—the students and faculty and staff, some who had given their lives to the institution, bereft and financially ruined and unmoored—by the amount of interfacing I am expected to do with people who say things that are baldly untrue without any self-consciousness. 

There are two shapes to this, surely. There are the straight-faced and sinister lies of the old university administrators, and then there are the somehow less flimsy and more frightening lies of the civil servants. I am shocked how much people want to believe the most confident of those working on “my” team, who, while often competent, are also often wrong. Are also those least likely to have true heartfelt investment, and instead use tragedy as a means to propel their image and power for the sake of ego. I try to only say the things I know for certain. I am widely regarded to be none too bright. 

I wonder if my uncle tried, the way I try, to live honestly, and I wonder if we both have failed in this attempt. I wonder if he is just a classic Narcissist, the way my aunt says he is.

Every person I sleep with now has a rash of unwieldy BPD exes, and I purse my lips with nauseating shame. These words the internet encourages me to embrace as the single answer to all of my most nuanced relational pains. All of my faults. I am a disordered person attracted to disordered persons.

Joseph Smith tarred and feathered and grinning with a woman on each arm. 

Jesus Christ walking on water.

What if we want to believe in the narcissist, the gaslighter, the father, the god, the abuser, not because we believe he is better than us, but because he reminds us of ourselves, and because he is content in himself? How many lives can be ruined in desiring to prove oneself enough? In looking for the relief that might come from just, for once, someone stroking your cheek and telling you, yes. Better then truly to turn to the original form of goodness. To God himself.

It cannot be that simple, can it? 

The musician is wondering how he might bring me more pleasure, and I have yet to tell him it is a very simple phrase found in pornography all the time. It is really, one very simple adjective or descriptor he need use only sparingly at a critical moment. The key is not in the bend of his fingers or the force of the impact or discovering the right toy, it is only he needs to tell me a story about myself with so much sincerity that I can believe in it. He just needs to convince me I am, not even good, but maybe just for the moment, good enough. 

The musician kisses my left breast half between sleep, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, and he lets me run my fingers through his hair. Brown, straight, receding. There is something to his face that reminds me of my mother’s side of the family. The side where there are monsters. 

As a child we would visit Palmyra, New York to see the place where Joseph Smith was raised and met his angels. The angels Smith would use to threaten that first fourteen-year-old girl with a fiery sword if she did not spread her legs. I once prayed in that Sacred Grove. 

My ex once had a union conversation with a man at the Fox school of business, who, it came out in conversation, had recently left the Mormon church. My ex told the man his partner was also an exmo. The man in business told my ex to be careful. They’re crazy, he said. The women. They don’t know how to be human. They’re just raised to be bred.

My ex had that suspicious glint in his eye when he said it. Like he too knew I did not know how to be anything but bred. 

I am lying back, my feet in stirrups, and again the doctor’s assistant asks if I am in any pain.

I am thinking of the children singing at my grandfather’s funeral last year. The five of them laughing next to the corpse. I am thinking of walking barefoot through the grass in Virginia and watching the moon like I am a trope. Weeping. My head flush with We Thank Thee Oh God for a Prophet. The joy I once felt at the Temple. Yes, the peace I once felt there.

I think of the photo of my uncle’s corpse, which my mother sent me despite my insistence I had seen dead bodies (I have), I had seen starved bodies before (I have), and I did not need to see his. But I think it is the first time I have actually been able to tolerate the sight of him in years. Lying on his side on the armchair. Hands curled to protect his face. The skin pulled back against his skull, the bones of the wrists and forearms. Light from the kitchen which will haunt the nightmares of those he claimed to love until they too are given this final rest. His pain continues in the lives and blood of those he leaves behind, but at least he is gone. My mother and aunt sat vigil with the body for six hours, waiting for the coroner. Again, the eyes unclosed. 

I tell the fertility doctor’s assistant that perhaps I am actually in great pain. That maybe what I said earlier about being okay was false. The contractions have been likened to early labor as my cervix pulses around the foreign objects. The doctor’s assistant promises it will pass. I say, When? And she says, Soon. And, even as I am trying to be optimistic here, I hate her for being able to tell a lie so easy. That stories come readily to her lips. Can she truly know?

After the procedure the musician closes his eyes on my chest. I drink Cherry Blossom La Croix, which I say tastes like Japan and that sweet pink bubblegum children’s medicine. I am trying not to move and disturb him. Someone will tell me in a writing group to make a shape particulate, but I am not ashamed to say that, despite my age and experience, I know nothing. I do not understand the words that are said to me. To make a shape particulate? I cannot parse. I cannot spin the words and eject them. I cannot translate. I am increasingly limited. I am told that in order to stop a genocide I must support the administration which commits a genocide. I am told by the doctor’s assistant that there is nothing to worry about, as long as I do no research on the internet. My donor tells me he will be receptive to being contacted later in life, as if he knows the man he will be. 

In the book of Helaman the Lord tells Nephi that he will be bestowed with a special priesthood power that belongs to no other man, in order to move the wicked populations of the Americas to righteousness. My mother tells me she will not send the photo. My uncle tells his wife he will never hurt her again, he tells his second wife he will never hurt her again, he tells his third. He tells my mother he is ready to die as he lashes against her constraining limbs. He tells himself.

The doctor’s assistant warns me that the pain will pass. That all of this is temporary. 

I cannot make abuse have any meaning. A salt upon our limited lives. Six years ago I would stack and sculpt words with intention and care. I would look at them and they would reflect back to me something I could believe in. I would say the Cherry Blossom La Croix tastes like Japan. I would say two days ago my uncle R finally died.

But what even does that mean? It means I am requiring faith of my own memories. I am requiring you to have faith in me walking you back to Takadanobaba. 

I cannot make that ask of you and I cannot live if I cannot. 

The pain makes itself so hard that it breaks, and beneath is hot pleasure. I thought it was like lava—dangerous, but it is more like a bubblegum ball, fresh. 

When the pain is like this, split and surrendered to the sides of living, it can be too easy to tell others that it was never your whole world. Even that it was never real at all.

∩

Sam Heaps is a labor organizer. Their novella The Living god is forthcoming from Sarka in October 2025, and their memoir Proximity was released through Clash Books in 2023. They teach writing at Temple University and call Philadelphia home. 

Four Poems

Waiting

Inside this cloud of mirrors every jealous face reverses

Scalding stars recite
aristocratic oaths
to many eyes, pressed of sand
belonging to my children
who harbor restless poemprints
like a hornet’s nest
or an ill forecast Are you bored
by the wilting of the sour snare
how it sinks into the walls
or trickles down your holographic throat
There are hurricanes today
Hurricanes frolick today earlier
than the doomcallers
call doom I am going
to another planet My children
will ramble on a backwards century
their heads reversed with animalic envy

I Love the Blues

She leans on a bunk lightpole
and links to passing eyes like What
do you need?

Millions of blue bodies
bent with poppy seeds
bend like poppy stems
as a light rain sways

She scans passerbys for runny bruises
for loose bluejean pockets
When she tongues their bruises

and their pockets
she pinches their cheeks
she slips them the blues
and strangles them mute for the rest of their lives

with polyrhythms
reptilian

and she peels open her umbrella’s face
rotund and round as an opiated planet’s
or the rectum of a giant
who sprays numbers
through his mildewed saxophone

just the way
senators spray
numbers at families
through their pixelated barrels

Astounded Choreography Thrashes the Bedroom a Body Contorted by Laughter at its Spine’s Summit

after Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

Termites congeal in one sadean chorus

a wheel of blue aggressions

With parasitic intent

economies teeter and

claw smiling tears

into the glowing

pockets of clay

out which animals bleed

I caught laryngitis

in the crib watching clockdials

turn against

one another as

a sadean chorus might

approach their curtain’s call

Some swear death’s

blue crash is

sealed final and exclusive and for good

but termites and i know that

that’s not true

When the blue crash

picks your fat from its teeth

there’s only more

laryngitis yes that’s yet another

only unutterable strut

Forever?

Through furthest reach
Utterest yes & you & I
pantomime togetherness

Epitaph heartbeat
Quilted endless

If you hear the beetle’s ring
It is my rot arisen
bladed & green

& if you catch
that futile exhaust
gasping off this bus’ back

It’s my forever suit unfurled
Inside some sunny lawn’s

grip
Curdled with fables
& deathless in surrender

∩

PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. He earned an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Currently, he co-edits GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. HATE, DANCE, his chapbook, was recently released by Bottlecap Press. Read his work in Works & Days, The Quarterless Review, SARKA, Spectra Poets, the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere.

Three Poems

from Telling of the Bees (Poems After the Museum of Jurassic Technology)

Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian (1990)

Sewing needle, human hair.

noncuration i (2024)

Mixed media.

.........chair tangle
mirrorblank
sewnneedle
dry point diamond tip
microscopicshards slides
dunbellmould
modest olive mount
dowelpiece
hathook
coathook
atticmold jar
paints uncanned
waxstainlift
summer felts
lithograph of
rustwept nails
banknote intaglio
hungdoorless hinges

Piercing Devil (2015) 

Blind emboss, unlocked lead type.

The narrow beam names
Massively incongruous
touch of meloncholy
meat, lead, nose leaves,
fore finger care, God
send thee with
echo-wave solids,
each shoulder:
a hare.

∩

Jace Brittain is the author of the novel Sorcererer (Schism). Their writing and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Annulet, Propagule, ANMLY, Grotto Journal, Puerto del Sol, Dream Pop Journal, and others. With the poet and book artist Rachel Zavecz, they run the small press Carrion Bloom Books.

Five Poems

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT

A short history.

Maggie was throwing a pot in the driveway.

Nate had it all in translation.

You don’t believe in that and the neighbor’s dachshund sprints across the cul-de-sac and a plant falls off the porch.

The gist of it is, well, dubious at best.

No one saws beautiful women in half anymore.

My car navigation is also not working.

I don’t want to be the imposter in the temple.

Friends catch up over a x-ray of a foot. They zoom in because gory details are honest. Whose foot is never clear, that’s the worst part.

Most of the good themes have already been taken.

It’s nice work if you can get it.

Looking at the big picture, I mean.

We sort of wave hands in agreement.

Lines snake at the walking museum.

Maybe a little too much walking if I’m being honest.

What I meant when I said this song is dedicated to the one I love, versus you, lying on a beach towel, the moon in your arms.

I met you because of the algorithm.

Baby, the algorithm.

MY LUCK RUNS NORTH

They’re going to have to hose the blood off the gym walls.

Which is another way of saying, we’ve neglected our waking lives to what end we don’t even have a handle on.

Our reservation is honored and after the bread arrives, we dance, sitting down after taking the temperature of fellow diners.

Eat your heart out, Meredith Monk.

I used to be funny and you’re still.

COUPLES SKATE

Sincere techno leaks from the bakery.

And so early in the morning!

Betwixt commitment and buying a leaf blower is the state I am in.

Carmen was kicking the tires, really giving them a good wallop.

“Nearby, the sea shone or something” (Shanna Compton).

Couples skate will literally bring us closer together.

IT MEANS COBWEB IN CZECH

New problem is a paint you’re considering.

What I said about no stakes in a bad essay.

There’s an ice cube shape for most occasions.

Dig, if you will, the picture of a cat in 3D glasses.

Years later, someone knocks at the door with a big surprise.

HEART RATE CENTO PART 2
after Danika Stegeman

As usual, I have given you a piece of my heart.

“Yvette said that if the astronaut Gus Grissom hadn’t died on the ground in the Apollo fire, he would probably have died on the moon of a heart attack,” Charlotte told Constance.

“It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.”

She was sure a heart of gold must beat beneath that ugly sweater.

When the governor’s heart fails / the state bird falls from its branch

A song rings false / when the heart’s / not “in it”

“Besides, uh, I don’t believe in quantum physics when it comes to matters of the heart.”

My heart…was in my throat.

Your bullet is very close to my heart.

My heart is made of gravy.

I cannot live without my heart or my liver, also.

Let’s treat it more like being sworn in and not / like a drug deal of the heart.

Her answer was this: “You must bury it at a crossroads, of course, with a little stake driven through its heart.”

You are going to have your bloody, beating heart ripped out, but you are going to have to stand in line, in the hot sun, for hours, waiting your turn.

There are more major things than minor things overall, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them.

Sources in order of appearance:

Mary Ruefle, “The Heart, What Is It?”; Joy Williams, “Summer”; James Tate, “The Motorcyclists”; Michael Earl Craig, “Diana”; Silver Jews, “Pretty Eyes”; Sara Nicholson, “The Art of Symmetry”; Bull Durham; Mystery Science Theater 3000, “Mitchell”; Chelsey Minnis, “VIPs”; Pavement, “AT&T”; Amanda Nadelberg (Best American Poetry Blog); The New Pornographers, “Another Drug Deal of the Heart”; Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos; Louis Jenkins, “Regret”; Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Major and Minor”

∩

Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, 2024) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He lives in Indiana.

One Story

Certain Days Can Never Be Recovered

Some of us are here because we don’t have a choice. Others of us are here because we want to be. And I’m definitely one of those two. Maybe even both, but I haven’t figured that part out yet and don’t know how.

200 feet underground the eels are writhing, never-ending loops of black, waiting for us in their vats. The elevator can fit two people at a time so me and Meira get inside the cage. The metal groans as Meira pushes the button dangling by her head, lowering us down into the depths.

“What did you do yesterday?” Meira wants to know. She is small in her silver suit. Big eyes and lots of hair, wadded up into a bun.

“Same thing you were doing, probably.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

I’m not looking at her but I can feel her smiling at me. The walls around us are a mosaic of purple and blue and white, the black light making the limestone come alive. It used to feel like something. The first time I came down here, years ago, I felt like maybe if I only saw this for the rest of my life that things could turn out okay. Now I can’t think of a worse place to be.

“Anyway,” Meira says. The elevator travels fast after the first 10 feet or so, and yet she doesn’t bother holding onto any of the handles. She’s even rocking back and forth on her heels, like she’s so relaxed she could start whistling even as we barrel down past the walls, all the colors melting into each other. “I’m wondering what you guys do for fun. After work and all of that.”

“You could talk to Darren if you want to have fun. Or Ada.”

“But I want to talk to you.”

I don’t know how to respond to that and don’t have to because as soon as she’s finished we’re at the bottom. The gates of the cage unlock and I lift the deadbolt. Around us is now the sound of dull sloshing, hollow and everywhere, inescapable.

I want to tell her to stop talking to me but instead I choose to ignore it, focus on the work. Meira’s footsteps are wet and stick to the ground behind me as we enter the Glacier.

The live map is waiting for us to make sense of it, help it do its job. I open the Glacier’s Head, tapping through the different vats lighting up its brain. “Group A and Z are ready to harvest. Group B needs 3 ml dopamine, Group D needs 2 ml domperidone.” I squint, swiping over to the tanks, where the newborns are. “We need to adjust the heat in the tank for Group C. And Group F…”

“I completed the light therapy earlier today.”

“You’re not supposed to do that. You have to follow the schedule.”

“I could tell they needed it.”

Meira smells like cloves, the scent permeating even through the suit. I try to stay calm, look away as I talk, but I can feel my arms shaking.

“You try to work outside of schedule one more time and I’ll make sure upstairs hears about it.”

“And what would they do to punish me? Send me to work down here?” She’s smug. Smiling because she knows I know she’s right.

“Just stay here and for the love of God don’t do anything stupid.”

I climb into a cart and it shuttles me through the maze of eels. The biggest ones gape at me, snapping at me through the glass. They’re the ones that fight the hardest when we pull them out, ten feet of flesh slapping against our bodies as we move them through the Glacier’s Digestive Tract. One of them follows me with its cloudy, blank eyes. A huge wave of electricity courses through the tank, and the cave is awash with light before it’s swallowed up through the wires.

Finally I reach the tanks located near the back. This is the sick group, the ones Ada’s been working with the past week. They don’t seem to be capable of producing anything. Don’t respond to treatment, either. Ada gets attached to the young ones especially. We’ve tried to take over for her, but she won’t let us. Sometimes, even after work hours she’ll come down here to talk to them. She doesn’t say as much but I can hear her, shuffling back into bed early in the morning right before our shifts start.

Around twenty babies are in there, shining like miniature ribbons made of glass ribbons. A couple of days ago we thought maybe we’d have to recycle them, tell the host’s families we’d have to start over. Little sores had started growing along their tails, like flecks of white mold. But now they’re all gone. They’re healthy, drawing toward my hand like magnets as I drop some pellets in the tank for them. They float for a second and I watch them sink before the eels devour them in an instant.

I think about what to say to Meira as I make my way back to the Glacier. Above me the white bones of the cave drip with water, plinking down into the cart. I think of frogs and rain in the springtime. Rainboots. Things like that. They’re nice enough images, but I can’t feel anything toward them, like they’re just scenes from someone else’s life. I look at my hands, want to look at my own skin. But I don’t see anything besides white gloves.

When I get back to the Glacier, Meira is playing with something inside of her hands. Knotting and unknotting, working quickly, but whatever it is I can’t see it. The sleeves of her suit are rolled up and I can see that there are burns stamped all over her forearms, welts shining like glazed fruit. She sees me looking, smiles.

“Guess which hand,” she says, closing them into fists.

I point to the right one.

She opens them. Meira’s skin is soft, her palm lines as deep as rivers. It might just be a trick of the lenses, but for some reason I can swear they’re glowing, mimicking the wet colors of the limestone.

“Nothing here,” she says, pulling her hands away from me. A familiar static forms in my head as she leans back in her chair, a live map of the babies I left pulled up in front of her. They carry on inside the water, endlessly circling the same four walls. In the cool glow of the screen she moves forward, extending a finger. Her hands are shaking, I realize, as she arches over their figures, tracing them. “Gotcha,” she whispers, then swallows, goes quiet.

*

There are two dreams that I have. The first is of me in a field with a bunch of other kids, holding a huge kite that joins with hundreds of other kites gathered in the air, butterflies and smiley faces and blue flowers. There’s a hand on my shoulder and I know its touch, but when I look up, I can’t make out her face. The second one is a conversation.

“You should know that the procedure’s changed in recent years,” the doctor says. Pink walls, pink uniform, pink little pills I swallow on command before I’m shuttered back off into my room, to have a light shined in my face.

How long have I been here? I ask when we line up for meds or when people came into my room, first a question then shouting.

That’s not important, everyone replies. What’s important is that you get better.

The brochure in my hand is for a version of therapy that involves electric shocks, sent up to your brain. For those who are unresponsive to “regular treatment”. I hand it back to her.

“I already said I’m not interested.”

She smiles, but I can tell there’s something underneath it, frustration and anger that I won’t just shut up and do what she tells me to.

“You’re considered one of the most eligible sub— patients that we have here. One of the ones for whom we consider this could be the most beneficial. And it’s all free.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Ely,” the doctor says, but her voice is different now. I feel something wet beneath my feet and see water seeping up from the floor, steadily climbing. When I look back toward the doctor her eyes are a milky white. Someone pounds violently at the door.

“Open it,” she commands. But the door swings open before I get there, a bouquet of eel heads bulging past, one after another, until I’m suffocating.

“You look like shit,” Darren says in the canteen. I woke up late, which I hate doing. You miss out on the good proteinkits and don’t have any time to yourself. The rest of the day is the same three people, the same eels. When I walked into the canteen earlier, Darren was just staring at the wall, proteinkit untouched before him. But I didn’t say anything about that, did I?

“I’m fine,” I say. I try to eat some of my proteinkit but it’s this muted yellow paste today. A smooth round shape sits in the middle, jiggles when I touch it. It won’t go down my throat and I know from past experiences I shouldn’t force it. He’s been here for longer than I have, Darren. Pretends to respect me but I know he’s just waiting for the right time. An image comes into my head of Darren gleefully harvesting diseased eels with a hammer, spreading their slime all over his arms and face as a trophy. I think we have a lot in common, Darren said the first time he ever saw me. We’ve both been through shit no one else has. I don’t want to know what he meant by that.

“I was reading through the notes for this week,” Darren says. “We got a new arrival scheduled for tomorrow. You see that?”

I blink. I tap into the Glacier’s Head, scan the schedule. But there’s nothing particularly exciting, just regular maintenance stuff and one or two harvests. I see the new arrival scheduled for tomorrow and zoom in, confused. Normally there’s only two of us, max, assigned to a tank, if the host is someone really important. Even then we’ve all been down here long enough to handle it ourselves. But for some reason, all four of us are assigned to this tank. I scroll through the notes but there’s nothing there about who the host is. It doesn’t even say their sizes. It makes me tired just looking at it.

I blink out of the Head. Darren’s got his hand on his knee, looking into my face as if he’s expecting me to explain. “Weird.”

He shrugs, goes back to picking around at his proteinkit. “You think it has anything to do with that Meira girl?” he asks, frowning. “She’s not like us, man.”

“I guess not.” I think about her intensity, trying so hard to get close to me. Almost demanding to be let in.

“I mean, how many years has it been since they added another person down here? Why now, all of the sudden? We don’t need her help. The three of us are just fine.”

He stops eating. A recycler wheels up, an old model that’s almost dead, lifting its arms to collect Darren’s proteinkit. Darren kicks it away. It lands in the corner, sparks emitting from its metal frame.

Darren places an arm on his thigh, leans in close.

“She’s sexy though. Yeah, I know you think so too. Don’t lie. Listen, if you don’t have dibs, maybe I could…”

“Ada’s having trouble with one of the eels in Group C,” a voice says and Darren pulls away. It’s Meira, standing by the door. Her voice is even, but as she looks at Darren I see a film of disgust forming on her face. “He won’t eat his pellets.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Darren says, and his body relaxes next to me a little but not enough. I push him away and he relents.

“I’ll come,” I say. I can feel Darren’s eyes on my back as Meira and I walk out of the canteen, until we hit the corner. Something moves in my vision and I see it’s Meira’s hands moving again, fingers twitching at her sides as we move past the Glacier, white and tomb-like and asleep until one of us walks in. We get into a cart.

“What are you doing?” I ask Meira.

“I’m counting out meters for sonnets,” she mumbles. She sees that I’m still confused and adds, “I memorized some, a while ago…” She stops talking. A deep rose color builds in her face and I realize I think that Meira is very pretty.

We get to Group C quickly. As we step out of the cart, I can smell there is something wrong. One of the eels is outside of the tank. Ada’s sitting on the ground, back against the glass, clutching an enormous eel to her chest. It isn’t resisting at all, coiled up around Ada’s body so that Ada looks like she’s floating inside of a black pool. As Meira and I get closer it ducks its face into Ada’s armpit, as if hiding from us.

“Shhh,” Ada says, petting its side, but it stays hidden. She looks up at us, annoyed. “What is it?”

“Meira told me that he wasn’t eating his pellets.”

“He’s doing fine,” Ada whines, and I know she’s lying. “He’s eating fine. Meira, why’d you tell him?”

Meira crouches down. It makes me confused, their closeness—like she already trusts her. She’s holding something in her hand, but they’re not pellets. She shakes the pink stuff around, places one on Ada’s leg. “Come on out, buddy,” she says. “I have something for you.”

A face, small and ugly as hell, ducks out. Tentatively, the eel’s head ducks down and begins to eat them up.

“You’re not supposed to feed them anything but pellets. It can mess up the transference process,” I say as Meira dusts her palms off on her suit legs.

“Ada’s been submitting falsified reports for two months now,” Meira says. I feel something cold shoot down my spine. Ada’s not paying attention, her black hair covering her face as she leans over, coochie-cooing at the eel as it wriggles around in her lap. “And you were the one who signed off on all of them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble. And then, childishly, “None of your business anyway.”

“I think you both are doing the right thing,” she says. She pulls out more of the pink flakes and upon looking closer I see they’re brine shrimp. The eel jumps out of Ada’s lap, mouth gaping at the shrimp. Ada squeals as Meira lets them go, falling like blossom petals onto the floor. “I wouldn’t want any of Edgar Convington's memories either. The guy who killed his kid, right?”

“Ethics aren’t part of this job,” I say, on autopilot all of a sudden. “Thinking about them will only make it harder.”

“You care, though.”

Before I can say anything, though, there’s a shriek from the floor. Ada is laughing as the eel rolls around on its back, back and forth, coiling up to form a curly que, circling around her head.

“I taught him some tricks,” she says. She puts a hand underneath of the eel’s chin, starts scratching. “Come on, Edgar, up!”

The eel starts swaying its neck in the air, like a snake. Meira’s laughing. From the ceiling the stalactites drip water down into the floor.

Meira is pretty. That’s a fact. But the rest of her, I’m not sure I like at all.

*

The kite I’m holding is shaped like an enormous octopus. It has large purple and white tentacles that flutter behind its head, way up in the sky. The sun inserts itself directly into the middle of its head, so that there’s a huge light-shaped brain in the middle. I have no shoes on, just trailing around my kite in bare feet. Someone comes up behind me and I turn around, but inside of her face is the doctor’s face. When I turn back to the sky, the sky is alive with eels, black squiggles in the air.

Ever since the incident with Ada I start watching them in the canteen. Darren and I are more likely to be eating by ourselves, taking our breaks only when we absolutely need to or else risk collapsing. But Meira and Ada take their breaks together, at 2 PM every day.

I finish administering the dopamine to Group B and follow behind them into the canteen, taking my time selecting my proteinkit, listening to them.

“I’ve always loved eels,” Ada is saying. “All marine creatures, really. I think they’re awesome.”

Ada waves her hands around, talking about eels and anglerfish and shrimp, her eyes shining as she talks about the different eels’ personalities. I try not to indulge her in these conversations. I figure it’ll only make things harder if I feed into it. But Meira eats it all up. Bits of protein get smeared on Ada’s face as she talks and eats at the same time. A piece of her hair catches on her lip and Meira leans over to pull it away.

“I mean, I don’t like the job. Because of the stuff we have to do to them,” Ada says. She frowns. “But if I just got to hang out with them forever I’d be super happy.”

“What was your job before you got here?” Meira asks.

Ada’s face caves. Inside of the void, Ada is trying to search for an answer. The more she thinks she starts clenching up, her body burrowing into itself. Where’s the answer? There has to be one, I know she’s thinking. What was I doing…

“Come on, Ada, you can tell me,” Meira says, reaching out to hold her hand, but Ada just keeps staring at the table. I can’t take it anymore and walk over, making a big deal of slamming the proteinkit on the table. Neither of them bother looking at me.

“Ada, you were a veterinarian. Remember?” I say, keeping my voice calm.

Ada blinks. A smoothness comes over her features but there’s some hollowness there, pressing up against her skull. She shakes her head, suddenly closed off.

“I think it’s time for my shift. I’ll talk to you later, guys,” she says. Before she leaves she gently passes her kit down to the recycler, gives it a kiss on the top of its head.

It’s not like it knows what a kiss means, it’s not like it understands the sentiment, I want to say. Just give up. I turn back to Meira, one eyebrow raised as she waits for me to speak.

“It’s cruel,” I say.

“What’s cruel? I was just making conversation.” She shrugs.

“Stop.”

“So it wasn’t true. Being a veterinarian.”

“She can’t handle it. Look, I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to do but just leave Ada out of it.”

Meira shrugs again. “She could’ve gotten there. She was getting close. You can, too. With or without the eels.”

The static gets greedy inside my head, spreading over my thoughts.

“Maybe you just don’t want to,” she calls behind me, even though I’m running now, trying not to hear her. The sound of her voice echoes through the caves, mixing with a hundred eels going against their nature, doing all that humans want them to do.

*

This is what happens in the rest of the first dream. “You’re one of the most eligible subjects here,” the doctor says. “Ely, are you listening to me?”

Outside of the window there are blossoms on the trees, clotting with rain and falling down onto the ground in clumps. Below patients roam around the enclosed lawn, and the grass does feel good underneath your toes even when you know it’s fake. They even let you take your socks off during outside time.

The doctor finishes the yogurt that’s been sitting on her desk for an hour now, sucking on the spoon with lipstick-stained teeth. She pats her lips, then starts talking again. “Ely, you don’t have any family members waiting for you, do you? This hospital is quite an expensive stay.”

I’ve been hospitalized for four months. I fill out the forms right. I am not feeling suicidal, I am not having thoughts of hurting myself or others, I have a plan in place for ways to stay healthy upon release. But they won’t let me out. People come and go but I stay right here.

“What are you trying to say?” I finally ask.

She smiles. “You have the opportunity to be a part of a very exciting experiment. It could help us cure a myriad of different diseases. Depression, that’s one of them. But most importantly, it could—if it works—even cure dementia,” she says, and waits.

“I don’t have dementia,” I say.

She smiles again. Wan, cold, unfeeling. “Yes, I know that. I also know that you’re unable to pay for your stay here, correct?”

            On her desk, there’s a plaque that reads MARTHA KÖNING, DIRECTOR OF PRISM HEALTH.

“Luckily, we offer a work program available for those who are unable to afford their hospital visits. All we need is your memories, and only for a short time. You get them back unscathed after your work with us is complete.”

The patients outside on the lawn are now gathering up, lining up in the courtyard to go back inside. There’s a bald man with a bad sense of temper and a scar on his head, always looks like he’s mad at someone. Then a smaller woman with long black hair, so shy she starts crying when we line up for lunch. The only time she opens up is when she talks about animals. She’s like a child.

I want to be a veterinarian when I grow up, she said the other day, despite the fact she’s 30, despite the fact that growing up has already occurred: and you’re living in hell, honey, there are no dreams left for you out there. We were walking around the gym, a huge space filled with old, flat footballs and worn yoga mats. Besides us, the bald, angry guy was the only other patient in the room. It seemed that this had been happening a lot recently, the three of us getting grouped together, though I didn’t know why. Near the entrance, nurses observed us and jotted things down in their notepads from where they sat. What do you want to be when you grow up?

What do I want to be? Tell me, Ada, how do I find out?

“Sure,” I hear myself say. “Out of curiosity, how am I going to get them back though? My memories?”

“Oh, easily. Or maybe a little hard.” Director Köning smiles. There’s a fish tank behind her, with a couple of baby tadpoles in it, it looks like; long ones that shine underneath the light. She grabs some flakes from her desk and shakes them into their tank. “Tell me,” she says, and then here they come, the bouquet of eel heads blossoming out of the door, coming to swallow me whole. “How do you feel about seafood?”

*

The next day Darren, Ada, and Meira are all down in the cave below me. The Glacier murmurs as we gather inside, and we watch different parts of its brain flicker on.

The eels are assigned to three people. Like everything else down here they’re writhing, neverending lines that won’t go quiet. They look like they’re in pain, they look like they have no souls: just beasts like the rest of us are beasts. But oiled and scaled and with eyes that want you just as empty as they are.

Most of all, these ones in particular are enormous. Beside me, Ada gasps.

“How the fuck did they get so big?”

Twenty feet, maybe even larger. And instead of the normal clouded, blue eyes, these ones can see—their pupils dilate as electricity courses around them from the other groups. The Brain lights up our names, traveling behind the respective eel. The nervous-seeming one flitting toward the top is Ada’s. Darren’s lurks below, coiling around itself, weary and dangerous.

Mine is surprising. Flat-faced, like both of the others, spotted, but it looks lonelier. It keeps getting close to Darren’s before it pushes it away. It floats up to where Ada’s is, but she’s too anxious to pay attention. It can’t seem to understand that aloneness is its only option. It goes back and forth, over and over again, hoping that someone will let it in.

            Ten years pass by so quickly, down here in the dark. And Meira is the light that will set us all free.

            She’s turned around. Is she ashamed? Is she sorry for us? In her own way, I guess she was trying to avoid the inevitable. If only we could remember before this part, we could be free, but at the end of the day she has her job and we have ours. I’d like to admit this much: It feels nice to look at you, Meira, think maybe you liked me, even if I know you’re only doing this to relieve yourself of some of the grief. I watch her slowly pull up the schedules, brushing her tears away. And now we begin the slow process of transference with someone who we knew, one day would come.

I close my eyes, close out the condensation and dark to search again for the warm sun and the hand that knew me, cradling my shoulder. Soon, perhaps, I’ll know the rest of the day, surrounding the kite in the sky. The woman’s face is inside of it, that large and increasingly sad eel, flitting from one part of the tank into the other. But even when I go inside, digest its flesh, I know that something will still be missing. No one will be there as I knew them. I open my eyes again and see the eel is staring straight at me with something like pity; the knowledge that both of us will soon be swallowed up by the great mirage of time.

∩

Daisuke Shen is the author of the short story collection Vague Predictions and Prophecies (CLASH Books, 2024), and the novella Funeral (with Vi Khi Nao, KERNPUNKT Press, 2023). They live in New York City.

from I’m I’m

If the rules say “Say
I’m I’m twice” do you

do that, do you say
I’m I’m twice? Rules can’t

tell people not to say
what can’t be said clearly

and expect them to obey;

obedience isn’t just careful tread,
expectation isn’t just careful tread.

I’m following one rule (the
one rule that encompasses the

others), therefore I’m following all
the rules. The one says

incompleteness is it. Just say
tautology after tautology until context

comes true around you. Just
put “The End” at the

end (where it stands in
for the incompleteness) and be

done with it. Whatever. “Whatever
I can’t speak about, I

can’t speak about.” That’s okay,
this isn’t speech. The End.

I’m I’m. It’s not something.
I’m saying it too clearly.

I wield the flashlight of
consciousness, illuminating the beam of

consciousness shining forth. The visual
analogy’s bad because the brain’s

using words to resemble it,
not unlike how like I’m

I’m isn’t to the swan,
spotlit (or not) in silhouette.

What would it mean that
love is far from mind

if incompleteness were everywhere and
mind were contained inside it,

a wasp rasping around inside
the inside of a balloon?

I’m I’m. Mind seems to
know words in order, or

to know words in order
to know words in order.

This is going in circles;
you want what you have

named love to encircle you
in ceaseless animal parade fashion;

there is no end of
circling, circumambulating, the end; always

the bluebird isn’t truly blue;
the shipworm (which is not

a worm) outlasts the age
of ships; everything gets named

away in one punishing push;
the creation, betrayed, presses on;

you never give my name;

love persists within a lack
of love, bound up in

a real and solid world
in a perfectly transparent language;

one goes way out of
one’s way, yes spouting commonplaces

but what else is it
for, the going out of

one’s way? But I watched
you, I wanted you! Why

did that happen? A commonplace
happened, and all creation went

way out of our way;

I’m I’m is a chapbook from The Economy Press.

∩

Jon Woodward’s books include Rain, Uncanny Valley and The Amber in Ambrose. He is the author of the chapbooks I’m I’m, POOLGOER and SPELEOGRAPHER, and a collection of translations of Brazilian poet Nicolas Behr entitled mirror-city, all published by The Economy Press. A handful of web projects and videogame-adjacent prototypes can be found on his website, jonwoodward.net. He lives in the Boston area with his wife Sam, and works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.