Amy Miller

AT THE PHLEBOTOMIST’S

She pushes and prods and strangles
but can’t find a vein. Says sorry
and threads a butterfly needle
into the back of my hand. She has never
hurt me. She says at the penitentiary
she always had this problem, their
collapses and tracks. She asks, do I know
the one place you can always find one?
I say between the toes; I’ve seen this
in the movies. She says no, it’s right here.
She slashes her fingers across
the delicate inside of my wrist.

Kate LaDew

BUT THEY ARE KIND AND SWEET

thumb and index finger on either side of my chin
pinky raised as if holding a glass
and this they will like
I don’t ask who THEY is, what THIS is,
why THEY will LIKE THIS
not destined to become a detective
be suspicious of the beautiful,
they want for nothing and ask for everything,
but this girl with these eyes
fingers squeezing down to the bone
they’ll see the hope and choose her anyway
said like a curse

Sydney Vance

NASHVILLE

Is this the right color to wear when you seduce
your own body? Nothing / tastes like wine anymore

& wine tastes like nothing / like in bed with
the lights off, never on. / I pout & I push & I

pucker this hollow away, for now. Cherries with
no pit / no bitter, / tasteless. But in some after-dark

sequence of garage light he pulls a lock of curled hair
from behind my ear / asks if it’s natural because it’s

so perfect. Isn’t. & he continues to kiss me
anyway & suddenly everywhere is right here. Suddenly

I am insomniac / deserved / melted into some kind of
watery medium & paint-stroked onto every body.

How to remember this, / tasting the moment he leaves
like the moment he came? Turn to the bathroom mirror

after & try to grab the face you see, the one he maybe never
did. I am okay in this hollow, in the taste &

touch of half-desire / half-fraudulence / full-skin
I do not intend to shed, not / ever.

The night was hot. / & summer is almost over.

Catherine Carson

WHY I BROUGHT THE WASHCLOTH TO MY LIPS AND SWALLOWED ALL THE WATER

When I turned eleven,
the doctor said, Let’s take a peek
and lowered my briefs to my thighs.
His fingers pressed into soft flesh
and I wondered how it would feel
to be touched by someone I loved.
Would I open my eyes?
The doctor’s dark stubble
would be sharp on my cheek.
White paper collapsed beneath me.
White squares divided the white ceiling,
marked by black spots. I could punch a hole
through one of those squares. I could
crush it in my fist. It would feel like a dry sponge,
and when I opened my hand, it would be a dented ball,
the shape of this urgency.
My mom raised an eyebrow,
focused on the doctor’s working hand.
I locked onto her face, but she didn’t look back.
In the car, she warned,
Don’t ever let a man force himself on top of you.
As if opening knees to soft, heavy bellies
weren’t already on my mind.
Before the next exam, I wrapped a
rough, white washcloth around my finger.
This time, I would be clean.
Scalding water needling my shoulders,
I washed myself once and then
washed myself again, ready to
offer up my body, shiny and pink,
confident then in the language of touch.

Rebecca Connors

NO ADMISSION

No one wants me here, & yet I can’t stop coming. This is me
in grade school, in high school. I am exposed heart, raw

& craving. What people see, inside of me, such vulnerability
is vulgar. In college, I am endless ringing, please-call-me-back

voicemails. What did I know of caller id? Red-cheeked *69.
What did I know of the danger of inserting myself

into the pack? After so much wanting, I am easy-pickings.
At the bars, one kiss at the end of the night?

I would pity me now, would want to go back & disconnect
the phone. But it’s too late to stop me.

Persistent as sap, determined that this time with this person,
it will work. Like that one night, he & I were drunk

on new-found interest & then I wake up in his bed
to PJ Harvey screaming on the stereo. He storms around

the room, saying he feels my walls closing in on him.
But how can he be sure? Maybe he knew what he was in for

from the scent of my skin, from how I fit just right,
from how I stare too brightly for any beginning.

Renata Solimini

PASSAGE TO THE BEYOND

Mixed media piece by Renata Solomini — (2018) Acrylic, oil and collage on canvas 70x70 cm
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This multicolored mixed media piece shows a road through stylized orange or purple hills and purple, crimson, or green geometric cubes placed behind them like mountains. The road is gray and outlined in foreign writing; it winds toward the purple-gray eye. The very background shows a blurred black tower or tree and several stylized representations of the night sky with moon. The tower sits on green foothills.

NU

(2018) acrylic and ink on board 20x30 cm
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The image is surrounded by a red picture frame. Inside the frame, whitewashing incompletely covers a black background. Sinuous gray shapes outlined with text like writing dance across the foreground along with red, blue, black, and teal strands of text like writing. The red frame immediately surrounding the picture is outlined by similar marks in white.

SECRET WRITING

(2018) acrylic and ink on canvas 60x50 cm
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image shows similar shapes in dark gray, white, blue, teal, and yellow on an orange-red background, The gray pupil of an eye is drawn into the oval loop of one shape. Another loop contains a tiny crescent moon.

Artist statement:

The body is the temple of the alternate fight or the balance of opposite and complementary inner energies reciprocally containing the nucleus of the other. I externally express this process through the potency of signs and colors.

Ace Boggess

TALKING ABOUT IT

Those who love you don’t want to hear about the stink
like a cattle barn, the feel of other men’s knuckles
against your cheekbones like numbing needles the size of hammers.
They want your silence, your tongue severed in penance;

you’d rather say the words aloud
so the graveyard you sleep in seems less ominous.

Quiet bullies you with barbaric fists of insincerity.
You grasp for a song you want to sing,
the one you thought was yours,
but can’t name the tune or spit a second line:

what’s left as memory crushes your insides first,
leaves skin like a wet shirt in the wind.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FUGUE

Childhood was a grasshopper that jumped
Into my palm. Day and night braided into my hair
That grew past my waist. Years away from bleeding
In my grandmother’s bathroom, I bit into a sugar cookie.
My baby teeth tumbled out. I remember my grandmother
Not in body or face, but as the blood-tinged bite mark on that
Pink sugar cookie. What an ugly thing you are now, she’d said.
Making the hollow in my mouth an unpretty hole.

My mouth held open into an unpretty hole. I took my childhood
Like a grasshopper in my palm, plucked each leg and wing gently. I left
My grandmother’s lawn, her dirt sidewalk, littered with legless green bodies,
Now my kin, that could not move or fly.

My kin that could not move or fly, but hungry
For anything that was not loneliness. A hunger
that multiplied under any boy’s gaze. I needed
To become solidified, taken from a liquid state. He found me like that,
Decorated with makeup like camouflage, in a small skirt. He took it
As an indication. I was not ready. I’d just turned 15. I thought the heavy boots
I wore could ground me, the lashes and red lips. Both were left in a bag

With the rest of my stuff, on the side of a road. He took some girl in the car that was me.

Also, some girl in the car, that was me. He picked me up on the side of the road down
From my parents’ house and I never came back. I put myself on a shelf there—my old girl’s room—
For safe-keeping, a body I could borrow later. The memory of myself was a grasshopper
That jumped into my palm. Day and night braided into my hair, unnoticed in body or face,
Even with the blood-tinged bite mark I wore, his own pink sugar cookie. What an ugly
Thing you are now, I’d say in the mirror; my mouth an unpretty hole he took as kin
Into which he could move in and fly. I was not ready. In my mind, I’d just turned 15. I fall asleep
Growling, hungry, no gaze on me now.

Juliet Cook and j/j hastain

FRANKENSTEIN’S WIFE WEARING TORN LINGERIE

When I'm dead, the creation
of my art won't exist anymore.
Grey fragments will exist from my cremation,
but what if nobody wants to save them?

What if I'm not even wanted
by the ants and instead
become a hungry ghoul
during a time of year that never
ends. Beelzebub rises me up,

sinks me down into a bowl of vomit,
stirs me with a knife,
frosts me on top of inedible cake
and I don’t stop eating
myself like the bride and groom
who married in spite of broken spoons
hurling themselves across rooms.

Who married in spite of time telling itself
lies about every cup size.
Egg cups filled with small lunatics
scrambling out of cracked urns,
seeking a new shell. Casing death's
asylum for the best whore on the block.

You know what they say about whore's breath
trapped in hoarfrost. It is not a green light
turning disco ball colors
while we wait to hit the gas.
I always hit the brakes

when old cobwebs get lodged in my throat
and I can't tell if it's a choking hazard or else
another sign from a dying pussy.
Poor thing. She always seems to be dying.

Rushda Rafeek

MUSLIM CONQUEST OF PERSONHOOD IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY, II

A vein brutally spews its upteenth sin. At this hour, the astronomer climbs down his gaudy dome
of dhikr. I water wounds for poems. Tickle at the navel of some electric delight where my whole
body drowns in mughal mosaics. To join the moths gifting a palmed moon. This sharbat tongue
pulled out from old fatima’s hand. To illustrate your snake-filled breath and dumbelek drums. O,
Bukhara, where were you when I licked down the throat of rose fields? Women like us borne
with daughters entering their death hive. The odalik eaten as kashmiri pulao. Our stigmata
knitted against all that is black mood when the bijou insects fuck us giddy, slowly slipping into
constellations. Blink the discursive inducements. Say a shallow prayer thereafter. To call me the
dancer’s camphor. Your hell doll habibti. Your soothing balm begum brunette. Your malicious
ouled nayl cosmopolis. Your femme empire drugged nymphic, as though coiling her own
beggary at the desert.

Brian Baumgart

SELF-PORTRAIT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

I drink bleach from printer paper, cook dinner
for six when it’s only my own open mouth
blocked with stone fists. Teeth swim
in grit, the ashes of a burning pine lightening
my beard to a softer grey. Growing older

blesses us
with dirty microwaves
and the ability to not
care, even a bit

if ancient crusts rain leftover dust
onto Salisbury steak.

A student once told me the best tool to kill
zombies is paper. Just

she said

tear out the next page
and you’re free. She’s young
enough to brush the ashes away, leave
the printer well-fed, cook only
for herself with, perhaps, just a little left
for later, just in case she’s not ready
to remove the undead.

And I’ll pretend that’s the case, that it’s not time
to relegate someone like me—but, of course, not me—
to a single page torn from their own story.

I practice lighting matches with my thumbnail,
practice blowing away the flame. I douse the ember.
Repeat. Pretend I’m ready. Pretend the fire arrives.

Issue 46 Contributors

Brian Baumgart is the author of Rules for Loving Right, released from Sweet Publications in 2017, and his writing has appeared in or forthcoming in a number of journals, including South Dakota Review, Cleaver, Whale Road Review, and Big Muddy. He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at North Hennepin Community College, near Minneapolis, and is 2018 Artist-in-Residence at University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek Ecological Science Reserve. He holds an MFA from Minnesota State University-Mankato. For more, visit him on the internet at: https://briandbaumgart.wixsite.com/website.

Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison.

Catherine Carson’s poetry has been published in Gravel and Referentials Magazine, and featured on the literary podcast The Drunken Odyssey with John King. Her fiction is included in the anthology Condoms and Hot Tubs Don’t Mix (Beating Windward Press, 2018). She lives and teaches in Orlando, FL and knits all the time.

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Rebecca Connors’ poems can be found in DIALOGIST, Menacing Hedge, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She lives with her family in Boston, where she is currently an MFA candidate at the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College. Her first chapbook will be published Spring 2019 by Minerva Rising Press. Follow her on Twitter @aprilist or visit her site at aprilist.com.

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j hopes to make the god/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon.

Kate LaDew s a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.

Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Permafrost, Rogue Agent, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She works as the publications manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry of editor of the NPR listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.

Rushda Rafeek is currently based in Sri Lanka. Among the works published are nominations for the Pushcart Prize, finalist of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize (2017) and winner of the Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Contest (2018).

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer from Houston. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Collagist, [PANK], Verse Daily, The Texas Review, Catapult, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Her new collection of poems, Nightbloom & Cenote (St. Julian Press, May 2018), was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky.

Renata Solimini studied the basics of traditional painting and calligraphy in China. She graduated with a thesis on ancient writings (Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphic and Sumerian cuneiform) in 1995. These studies have significantly influenced her artistic pathway. Her art has been focused mainly on the Eye, the Woman, on the theme of the Fish and the Sea World, as ancestral symbol of the origin of life, and recently to asemic writing, developing her own “secret writing” style.

Sydney Vance resides just outside of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In the spring of 2017, she received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from The University of Central Oklahoma where she also served as the Senior Editor of Poetry for The New Plains Review. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Words Dance, Josephine Quarterly, SHANTIH, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Redivider, among others.

ISSUE 46CONTENTS