Peggy Heitmann

THERE’S FINE AND THEN THERE IS PARTIALLY FINE

After my breast amputation,
after the taking of the diseased flesh,

I am fine. That is what my male doctor told me,
You will be fine.

Though I wanted to snark,
And which testicle would you like to lose?

I refrained. So I will tell you,
though it was never the point,

I am fine.
Except

Except when I stand behind my husband,
and feel the hollow depression where my breast once lived.

Now bulldozer scooped away,
never-again to press my flesh into his

and feel my nipple graze
the open plane of his back.

Catherine Rockwood

ONE HAND UNDER HER SWEATER SHE REMEMBERS

When I was nursing I would hold my breasts
between feedings, to weigh them. What was left,
and would it be enough: would flesh and gland
thresh and refill, pouring into my hands
their steady ounces? Who cared for the curve,
or loveliness. Our word then was serve.

Mitali Khanna Sharma

PROLONGED GRIEF DISORDER

If they ask:
I sweat my history like my faith, cloaked
saints in strange forms
they cross, they rood, they clay their pots
across forever —

(They are always naming these boats of kin).

There is so much God
And I am so tired.
I breathe in so many hollowed (or is it hallowed?) places
Trees, minarets, hoods of saints, the abdomen of the moth, Saint Louis, Missouri, and its
big canoes
And I am so tired.
And after the vaccine, my arms were so tired.
And when our daughter cries, I will be so tired.
There are so many histories, so many strange forms
I fill in the night.

And if they ask:
in your arms, I can be so tired and still
fed by the anointing:
your humpbacked song, your body of the veil,
the moths, the worms, and the left
breast,
swollen, resting, and feeding, still:

M.A. Hoak

CHIARI CONSTELLATION

three ghostly fingers
hurtling
down your throat

a corkscrew
tunneling through
the place
where your spine
greets your skull

the sky sliding
beneath your feet

the fundament
failing
to hold

and the high-pitched,
incessant shriek

of a
glass harp

between
your lobes

Erin Mizrahi

I’VE ALWAYS AND BY ALWAYS I MEAN SINCE 2018 BELIEVED MY MIDDLE AGE WOULD BE SPENT EXPLORING PSYCHEDELICS

Is this a cry for help / I don’t think so / I’m living in blue / but also green / but so much blue you’ve never seen so many shades of blue / there is vibration everywhere / build new institutions / don’t call them institutions / call them macaroons / call them abundance / set them in the mountains or near water so things can breathe and grow there / enmesh possibility but also manifest because you need to manifest so you don’t float off shouting possibilities / with hearts in your eyes and nothing in your stomach but memory / is this what regret looks like? / hey, take off your mask / I want to see if we’re connecting / I mean dancing / I mean what can we unearth together if we try / we can dig but not in a phallic way / like in a labyrinthine way into ourselves / and we could eat color because it is delicious and loud and surprisingly harmonic / what does my aura taste like / I’ve always wanted to know / you want to know why I’m like this? / it isn’t trauma / ok it’s probably trauma but I’ve put it on a plant-based diet and it no longer growls at me / it eats pulled taffy, chamomiles and date honey / I was frightened to see how its skin cleared up / meanwhile I’m just over here rolling around in retinol like it could save me from myself / the moon and I are friends / right now they’re super skinny and I’m a bit jealous / I watch their phases and remember to be kind to myself / I probably shouldn’t generalize / we’re all trying to escape something.

Janell Turley

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 4

Artist statement:

These are a part of a figure drawing series I am layering over photos taken with my Hawkeye Brownie and Holga cameras. Exploring bodies and space and memory, I often think about where I am now and how I remember existing in different spaces I've inhabited. Living in my body means experiencing layers of visual and physical memory, these images explore how those intersect and feel.

Nweke Benard Okechukwu

MONOLOGUE AS A BUTTERFINGER

i’m in touch with God, but the voice of prayers
is losing to the credibility gap.

everything i crave is shapeshifting
into partiality as if God runs my system
of government—a kind of favouritism where you

must have a brother who knows the health
commissioner who knows the doctor to

administer amphetamine to the patients.
a girl is rupturing in the theatre, & i knell to

inform God, but she quickly loses air—
body-stiffed already.

so tell me, how do you reconcile tragedy out
of God’s hands with dead faith?

useless telling me i’m downtrodden. no doubt.
otherwise, i would have plucked sweet

promenades as much as i grow grave flowers.
poor tithes prevent salvation, the priest says.

& i have nothing except this heart shifting to the abdomen.

so tell me, what other perfection’s needed to
stifle a teenager at moribundity?

God, i’m trying healing every means;
become awaken dogs to count the rosary

at the velocity of running rats.
what more to this body not to crawl into Your

mercy, into Your palms.
or am i too butterfingered to grace

that what i offer as prayers are mere mawkish monologue
spinning weird unicorn my head inside?

Richelle Slota

LETTER TO THIS WICKED CULTURE THAT LIES TO ITSELF THROUGH ME

Her new vagina, $20,000, Canadian.
She proudly shows us selfies
at transgender support group.

In life, we all get looks.
I get looks,
about my wild hair, the sudden

appearance of my own
surgical scars.
Wouldn’t you like to know.

Never about the secret
female in my brain
hiding in the open.

Never about my silent body
sleepwalking through life
inside a bag of boy clothes,

boy behaviors forced on me
by this wicked culture
that lies to itself through me.

Truly Not Yours,
Richelle

Angel Rosen

THE KILNING

I inherited this gene,
the one that causes me to flicker.
The one that designates that
I remain absent of flowers,
the one that does not let me
live reduced. All roads,
paved or dangerous, lead
only to excision. I was picked
out of a pamphlet of panthers
someone’s lazily thumbing over—
I was given a carnation and
a bilateral collapse. The woman
is so good at thickening, stir,
but not too much. You should
be able to go home soon.
It’s in the brochure, your anatomy,
you should be able to
go home soon.
Hospital’s all sorted, the orderlies
intermittently responding
to my demands. The woman
is so good at thickening, stir,
but not too much. If anyone handsome
took a break from encouraging me
long enough to be sure-footed,
maybe we could do the Charleston.
This body’s a fanfare. It’s an excuse.
Flamboyant, the sons I could have,
if God gave me a kiln
and any pressure.

Rogan Kelly

STOLE SALT FROM THE GRAVY YOU BORROWED

We were bright and new like an Early Girl tomato. You put me to
work at once and I liked it; the honey-do, the honey bee. We
bought fuses together; didn’t fit the fixture. The wild length of you
held the rickety ladder. I climbed your top step. Fell hard like all
that. At the hardware store, with the dickhead behind the counter,
you proved the better boy. Sweet but impatient, always in a hurry
for the next best thing. And yet, when you cook, and damn do you
cook, all slow simmer and salt, you only ask for me to be at your
table, at the steady-ready, to have it hot and heavy and on your
time. I feel seen in your hands.

Kristin LaFollette

I PURSUED THE INTERNSHIP

because I wanted to be a surgeon.

At first, neurosurgery.
Then, orthopedics.

My father brought
a box of sawbones
home from work
and I used them to
study articulations &

imagine the synovial fluid
and pads of fibrocartilage
surrounding bones like
scaphoid, clavicle, and jaw—

            I wanted to be a surgeon but there
            was no remedy for what had been
            done and what had been left undone.

In between injury and surgery, my father’s
own body required all the time and skill
& so I dug a hole, wrapped everything in
butcher paper and buried it, heaped shovelfuls
of cool soil on top until there was only tendon

bound to tissue bound to tendon—

I read that rabbit keepers
used to deal with this kind of thing,
the tearing and separating of filaments
from repetitive motion, always-warm hands
red and sharp from lesion without collagen synthesis.

I asked myself if I could maintain slow and quiet
precision with scalpel or hemostat, but I didn’t
even have the resilient and capable hands of the
rabbit keeper.

As the rotations began, as I moved from classroom to
clinic to hospital, I couldn’t begin to know what my
body would do, wounded flesh exposed to all that air,

tension and arrhythmia like heavy rain,

too wet and too loud to ignore—

Issue 95 Contributors

Peggy Heitmann has published poems in Words & Whispers, The Curator, and Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, among others. She considers herself both word & visual artist. Before she retired, Peggy worked in the human services field with mental health clients, homeless men, and adults with autism. Peggy lives in Raleigh, NC with her husband and their two cats.

M.A. Hoak is a neurodiverse, chronically-ill, domestic violence survivor. She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry can be found in Saw Palm, The Rumpus, Blanket Sea and Culturework Magazine.

Rogan Kelly is the author of the chapbook Demolition in the Tropics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). His work has appeared in New Orleans Review, The Penn Review, Plume, RHINO, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Night Heron Barks and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon.

Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer and serves as the Art Editor at Mud Season Review. She is the author of Hematology (winner of the 2021 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize) and Body Parts (winner of the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Contest). She received her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University and is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana. Learn more about her work at kristinlafollette.com.

Erin Mizrahi (she/they) is a writer, collaborator, artist and co-founder of Cobra Milk, a multimedia literary and arts journal. A Pushcart nominee and recipient of fellowships from Asylum Arts and the Institute for Jewish Creativity, they hold a PhD in Comparative Literature, Media and Culture. Their writing has appeared in Maudlin House, Ginger Zine, GASHER Journal and elsewhere. twitter @erinmizrahi // instagram @wildsojourn

Nweke Benard Okechukwu (he/him) is a Nigerian poet from Ebonyi State. He's the award winner of the 2022 Neptune Prime poetry prize. A Mass Communication student at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. His works have appeared and or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Querencia Press LLC 2022 anthology, Ballast Journal, Mad Swirl, Threposs 2022 anthology, Kalahari Review, World Voices Magazine, Eboquils, & elsewhere. Twitter: @romeobenokechukwu.

Catherine Rockwood is a poet and independent scholar based in Massachusetts. Poems in or forthcoming from The Ilanot Review, Moist Poetry Journal, Contrary Magazine, Reckoning Magazine, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, is available from the Ethel Zine Press.

Angel Rosen (she/her) is a queer, neurodivergent poet who spends her free time reading, writing and watching documentaries. She is the author of two poetry collections, Aurelia and Blake. Angel's writing tends to focus on the themes of otherness and taking up space. Find more of Angel's work at angelrosen.com.

Mitali Khanna Sharma (she/her) is a Punjabi-American interdisciplinary writer and editor, multi-media artist, and sporadic agroecologist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, Five:2:One, Wordgathering, Cc: Zine, Cobra Milk, A Velvet Giant, and elsewhere. She is currently editing Şerābi, a zine-anthology on religion, culture, and nationalism in South/west Asia and advising a student journal at the University of Michigan. Explore more of her practice at mitalikhannasharma.com or on Instagram, @mitalikhannasharma.

Richelle Slota (formerly Richard) is a transgender woman who writes novels, non-fiction, plays and poetry. Her novel, Stray Son, and a non-fiction book, Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories from Nigeria, were published recently. She lives in San Francisco. Her short play, We All Walk in Shoes Too Small was produced at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London.

Janell Turley (she/her) is a lesbian ex mormon interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Moving through figure drawing, sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking, Janell's work often explores bodies, queer identity, and creation as connection to self.

ISSUE 95CONTENTS