IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A nearly invisible girl (drawn in black and white) sits on a set of three steps (blue) next to an open umbrella (purple with a flower pattern). There is a bird made of flower petals at the bottom of the picture. Up above, a flock of pale pink birds flies, and a pair of bright pink and blue clouds gives the message "this way" and "that way." The clouds drop blue, teal, and green raindrops and are decorated with brown shapes that resemble flying creatures.

ISSUE 74
CONTENTS

MAY 2021

Nicholas Alti
Arden Levine
Hannah Karpinski
Cynthia Bargar
Enikő Vághy
Michael J. Carter
Amy Poague
Kelly Fordon
Isaura Ren
Willa Carroll

CONTRIBUTORS

Nicholas Alti

WORDS LIKE HALLELUJAH

we can talk all day of failure & pain
I have never been strong

sometimes, I am not all dead

let me recommend you words
like hallelujah

words you might treble toward heaven
to raise your own body from the water

I’m trying to show you how to have
nothing left & manage to hide it

the body I live in is still water & arsenic

I believe in things like shallow lakes

I can’t breathe without singing
arrows straight into the ground

to dislodge a tangle of roots
concealing an ossified hymnal

or otherwise a weapon which fires sonatas

or, otherwise, I am a sad little hurting boy
inhabiting hospitals far too often

three tongues in a small mouth with sharp teeth;
swordfish pierced into a whale carcass sinking;
your last few photographs in the bonfire;

the lake at night when you look instead at the stars—
let me rephrase: you can hear me pleading

& mistake it for song

& I find myself shadow, I find myself

creeping down bodies like ivy
to touch the cold dirt & consider my brevity

Arden Levine

BEARING

She had a dream: the baby was coming
much too soon. On hands and knees
thinking nothing

would survive this, she also thought: if this
were the last moment, how could she
part from her life and leave behind

her books? Her waking self thinks: Strange
to be less concerned with dying and never
meeting her child. She pulls a book off the shelf,

reads aloud the words “water”, “fear”, and “almost”
when they appear, words agitating
for attention, wailing and terrified, God help me.

Hannah Karpinski

NOTHING COMES CLOSE

that summer exploded onto our lives
in a shower of colour and flesh

slim limbs in all directions, we moved
like we could lap the season twice

every day we put on our little tops
turned sunward like lizards and stretched—

our four long girl legs carried us across
the city, where men walked into traffic

as we passed. together we had so much
hair, and all these teeth

they said we couldn’t look more gorgeous
unless laid out on the floor. sun drunk and tumbling

down the sidewalk, we were always
on our way elsewhere—only pausing

to squat in a bush or reach up
for mulberries, purpling our fingers

and sucking the pulp off. daylight
threw itself on us, splaying across

the floor to the horizon. cicadas screamed
in every tree. you are every memory

backlit by lilac, iris, aster, there you are
grabbing my arm and throwing your head

back in laughter, and while I don’t get
your jokes they are never the point

I’d give my best tooth to go home with you
once more through the stomach dark

night, where nothing can touch us, where
we are the thing that lurks

Cynthia Bargar

HALDOL

Haldol snakes in my bed, tongue depressor
taped to the rusted metal headboard.

…to keep you from swallowing your tongue,
middle of the night, midst of a seizure…

Like Louie, the Boston Terrier with seizures.
My uncle left him with us in Providence
when he took off for Phoenix.

Like Louie, mouth frother, shatterer of flimsy
tongue depressors. Baffled. Rigid.
I blink. I twitch.

Enikő Vághy

THE BODY IS A HOUSE OF MEMORY

Sometimes I feel you looking
through me, the open window
of my face a frame for whatever
occurs inside. People stare at me,

a heartbeat thuds in my cheeks.
I shiver like a curtain giving away
the child it hides. You have your games,
the thought of you running in and out

of me as if I am just rooms. When you
got here I stood silent, my eyes flickering
into glaring. Every memory comes a hand
jiggling a knob. I remember your fist tight

that first meeting. I loosened, opened each door
for you. You took the darkest corners for yourself,
let all the images happen.

Michael J. Carter

COACH

One
He said the Italian horn charm
that Carrie wore was a sign
of the devil. He refused
to let his son play D&D
with us because it was a form
of Satanic worship. But, that
did not stop him
from sticking his hands
down the backs
of our swimming suits
and pulling us
onto his lap.

Two
With a look
of disappointment
he said
you’ve finally
lost all your
baby fat.

Two, Version Two
He said, you’ve lost
your baby fat.
For years, I told
this story with
the punchline:
But I never had
any real baby fat.
Because I wanted
him to be mistaken
to have not seen me
but that’s not
what he wanted.
He meant to hurt me.
He meant to say,
you are no longer
attractive to me,
you are too old
for me to see you.

Three
We adored and worshipped
and followed him.
And when we were thirteen
something changed. We
developed a pact: if any of us
were alone with him
one of the others
would step in
intercede like a saint,
our prayers answered.
We would sacrifice anything
for him, put ourselves
on the line. We knew
just what to do.

Four
When I asked my mom
if she saw, and if she did,
why didn’t she step in.
She said, Well, what
do you say in that situation?
What was I supposed
to say?
Answering both of my questions.

Amy Poague

PULLING YOURSELF TOGETHER IS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC

Reconstituting the curling memory of my smallest, youngest hands
can feel like a connect-the-dots-with-a-real-pencil problem--

yet a friend describes a healer
using energetic stitches, sewing up her own facial wound

with invisibly wending love.
The concern I have:

the world would like me pulled together,
provides only suture thread.

This enfleshment-of-all-others requests a smile--or else--
but my lips are already loosening to fragments

inside the paint-by-numbers of their tremble.

Kelly Fordon

AFTER SAPPHO

Speaking of desire, what shall I call
the drumming of my heart? Sweet,
racing violets. Dream dialogue
with blossoms. Artemis holding
a goblet filled with the finest sand.
The honored child, the winged lady,
the sweet-smelling grass, I’ve never
seen them. The road has loosened
my skin like a cloak, and all the gods
in my head lament this poverty
of song, trapped as they are
in their separate dungeons. When
I feed them, they sometimes say,
You shall know love, but not until
your tongue sheds its bitter robe.

Isaura Ren

SELF TO SELF, TEN YEARS ON

Are you
still. Are you okay
with this. Are your parents.
Did you leave. Have you loved
and who. When did you know
that you were. How
do I know if I am.

Willa Carroll

SCORE FOR THE BODY AS CLOSE ENCOUNTER

Issue 74 Contributors

From rural Michigan, Nicholas Alti is an optimistic depressive with trigeminal neuralgia, no known future career paths, and a modest criminal record. Recent poems live at Grimoire, FRiGG, Into the Void, DREGINALD, and Always Crashing. He is an assistant editor with Black Warrior Review, an MFA Candidate at UA, and grateful for your reading.

Cynthia Bargar’s poems have appeared in LUMINA, Comstock Review, Gargoyle, Driftwood Press, Sonic Boom, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Poems2Go, among other journals. Her debut collection, Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room, is forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books in 2022. She is Managing Editor of Pangyrus LitMag and lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus (The Word Works). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, Narrative, The Slowdown, Tin House, and elsewhere. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she was the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize. Her poetry video and multimedia work has been featured in Interim, Narrative Outloud, TriQuarterly, Writers Resist, and other venues. She earned her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in New York City. Find her on the internet at www.willacarroll.com.

Michael J. Carter is a poet and clinical social worker. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, he holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MSW from Smith. Poems of his have appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts Magazine, Western Humanities Review, among many others. He lives with his two hounds and spends his time swimming and knitting.

Kelly Fordon is an award-winning writer and teacher from Michigan. She has published a novel in stories, Garden for the Blind, (Wayne State University Press, 2015) a poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, (Kattywompus Press, 2019) and a short story collection, I Have the Answer (WSUP 2020), which was named a 2020 Kirkus Review Indie Next Summer Read. Find her on the internet at www.kellyfordon.com.

Hannah Karpinski is a queer writer based in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal. Her work has appeared in Bad Nudes, Lemon Hound, and Ghost City Press, among others.

In 2020-21 Arden Levine’s poems appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Cream City Review, SWWIM, Zone 3, and the anthology Dead of Winter (Milk & Cake Press). Her work has also been featured in AGNI Online, The Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and NPR’s Radiolab. Arden’s chapbook, Ladies’ Abecedary, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions.

Amy Poague lives in Iowa and holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in SWWIM Every Day, Figure 1, The Indianapolis Review, Riggwelter Press, Kissing Dynamite, Juke Joint, The Mantle, and others. She can be found at amypoague.wordpress.com and on Twitter @PoagueAmy.

Isaura Ren (they/she) comes to you in living color. They are the founding editor of perhappened and the author of INTERLUCENT (2020). Yell at them (nicely) on Twitter @isaurarenwrites.

Enikő Vághy is a poet whose work has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets College Prize in the graduate division. She is a PhD student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. You can find her on Instagram @perspeheni88.

ISSUE 74CONTENTS