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Oliver Brooks
Tammi with an I
Joanna Fuhrman
Why Are There So Few Cacti in Movies About LA?
Cheap Therapy
Carolyn Gevinski
Umbrella
Brooke Hoppstock-Mattson
In exile
Aditi Jamkhande
Five Years Of Waking Up With A Snake On the Doorknob
Michael Kareff
Cleaning Up
Mark de Klerk
Dreams of an African silkworm
Debosree Manna
meanwhile, the city continues with its abstractions.
Lindsay McLeod
Featherweight
Beth Sherman
The woman with no face goes butterfly hunting
Tammi with an I
One of my students tells me of her good friend Tammi,
spelled with an “I,” who rescued an injured white ibis
from the center of a busy Florida roadway. She wrapped
the limp bird in a spare towel to shuttle it to her car,
only to be speared in the eye by its long, slender beak
when she tried to lift it. Yet still she drove, one eye open,
all the way to the avian sanctuary 40 minutes away
so that the bird’s wing—which dangled off-kilter
like a bath cloth hung from an untidy towel rack—
could be reset and bandaged before tending to herself.
After the infection cleared, while she wore a patch
and waited for a prosthetic to be crafted, she began
calling herself just Tam, or Tammi-without-an-I
on her Starbucks cups and online usernames, because
what else does the strange laughter of birds teach us
if not to have a sense of humor? I picture this girl,
Tammi-without-an-I, as the sort who is a warrior
in the yellow light of hurricanes, a steady medic
in the battlefield of extinctions. Being a martyr is easy
when the cause is righteous, says my favorite poet.
Still, I let myself be surprised that so much love exists.
Oliver Brooks (he/they) is a poet and MFA student at Florida State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, New Delta Review, Cream City Review, Variant Literature, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. He serves as poetry editor for the Southeast Review.
Why Are There So Few Cacti in Movies About LA?
I walk around and see succulents
in every shape and shade of green:
twelve-foot cacti that look like
they jumped out of a Loony Tunes desert.
ones that resemble squiggly-haired
aloe plants or sage-colored phalluses with tongues
sticking out like the Rolling Stones logo.
I pass bushes full
of drooping birds of paradise, a fat rabbit
in a cage, orange trees with oversized green globes.
On Waterloo, I snap a picture
of a discarded terrarium
with a little sand and
a limestone Mayan lintel inside.
It’s funny that the verb is still snap,
since now almost all of our photographs
are created by our silent cells.
At the Sunset Boulevard farmers’ market,
a woman in a lavender hijab selling hipster baseball caps
borrows a generator from the grain free nan vendor
so I can charge my phone.
We talk about cheap airfare.
I tell her stay in another state
if she wants to visit New York.
Cheap Therapy
Breathe in warbler songs.
Breathe out subway growling.
Leave a fuchsia lip print on the border
between the living and the dead.
Skinny-dip in iced gin.
Listen to the listless.
Unfriend your frenemy.
Replace your heart with a child’s drawing of a heart.
Build a snowman out of your ex’s snowjob.
String a tightrope between your hope and your fear.
Make someone else walk across it.
Start a mental collection of other people’s physical collections.
Give away your middle name.
Say welcome to the elk sleeping on your chest.
Say goodbye to the person you almost were.
Replace the lightbulb with the moon.
Be kind to your inner child as she tries
to understand mortgage rates.
Sweep the dust bunnies off your bunny figurine.
Temper the intemperate.
Practice forming and unforming your ugliest frown.
Punch a self-portrait-shaped hole
in the space-time continuum.
Pet the cat that escaped from last night’s dream.
Kiss the forehead of your pet peeve.
Trade in your trademarked catchphrase.
Spread dark chocolate on the void.
Sleep.
Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press) and To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021). In 2022, she became a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press.
Umbrella
A woman with dead eyes, dressed in the same uniform of stringless blue scrubs, shuffles across the linoleum. She doesn’t see me.
Are you okay? asks a voice. I glance up at the boy who uses it. He wears the same smock, but they must not have had a size large enough for him, because his chestnut belly sticks out like Winnie the Pooh.
I shrug.
How old are you? He sizes me up.
I’m twenty-three, twenty-four soon.
Oh! You’re old!
I might’ve laughed at that, before.
Do you ever get angry? he asks.
Not so much, mostly just sad.
I wish I was more like you, the boy frowns. I get angry. He shuffles away.
A nurse comes over and pierces the soft flesh of my elbow, drawing ruby. I close my eyes.
You’re done. They fly open again. He stares at me funny. You’re allowed to move.
Oh!
I wander.
There is a small bookshelf in the “TV room,” which is really the hallway, and everything else. All is blue here; windowless.
I want to see what words it holds, but an old man is sitting in front of it and I don’t wish to disturb him. He has warm cheeks like Santa Claus and biting blue eyes. The back of his bicep reads BROOKLYN in teal ink.
Oh dear! He shouts to no one in particular. August! Get in here. Another deputy of the Starship has arrived!
He introduces himself as Gideon.
So what got you in here?
I tell him. It’s the first time I’ve said the “s” word.
You’ve got some demons in your head girl! Gideon whistles through his whiskers.
Just then, a girl, something like a willow branch, darts in front of me.
You’re new, she growls like a kitten. There are stripes of acne across her forehead. She’s young. Probably younger than the angry boy. I want to go home, says the girl.
Isn’t that nice, Gideon muses, to have a home worth missing. He nudges me and lowers his voice. That poor boy over there, he murmurs, the angry one. He don’t.
Is the boy angry? I ask myself. Or is he just an umbrella?
Carolyn Gevinski’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lavender Review, Out Magazine, GLAMOUR, El País, and Al Jazeera. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where she currently works as a fellow on their postgraduate investigative team. She lives in New York City.
In exile
We swam in the lake almost daily–
baptism was something we had yet to question.
As far as we were concerned, ritualistic submersion
functioned the same no matter what was in your heart.
Weaned on thunderstorms and harsh winters,
the chill of spring-fed blue blessed us in our ignorance.
In the glacial troughs we floated untethered.
Steelhead passed below us, tracing the sand;
there was so much we didn’t understand.
About each other, about this place. We lived
upon the strata of context no one passed down to us;
the sedimentary layers, still open to interpretation.
We loved each other in the present tense.
We rarely stopped to wonder where the water
had come from. Elsewhere, vapor is pulled
up and westward from inland crops
before returning to earth. As rain, it seeps
through roads and land in some contaminated march
towards a body to bless fish in flame retardants.
What is the meaning of forever in a body that dies?
Many of the lake-fish were spawned in far-off
cement pits where they don’t know the meaning of prey.
Most of the fish weren’t safe to eat. We ate them anyway:
the smell of lake was thick as we chewed.
Glints of afternoon sun passed between our eyes
like a thousand vibrating roe, orange and promising more.
Brooke is a graduate student of environmental geochemistry living in Vancouver, Canada. Her poetry has been published in Tiger Moth Review, Deep Overstock, Willows Wept Review, and elsewhere. She works alongside the faithful devotion of her ginger cat and the ardent avoidance of her black cat.
Five Years Of Waking Up With A Snake On the Doorknob
Four fingers, you punch
the bulletin board with music,
sanding it smooth. You heard your first record
decades before me so I could feel them too.
I begged for those scratchy vocals
to be etched in my CDs, but you said
they reminded you too much
of Colorado Lake,
where a rattlesnake drowned
and kept on rattling.
With three breaths,
you fished out its corpse,
hung it from a nail
till it stilled.
You never told me
how it shook, how the water pounded
on your head as you tried to surface.
How you floated facedown,
feet far from the ground.
I asked why it repulsed you to no response
Two hands raised, you tore and tore
until all you had was shed skin
you wished you could wear.
I wonder if you’d believe that
it stuck and spread
to me and my walls. Sometimes
when I tap them the scales retreat
into my palms. You’ve seen me
bring them to my lips. Tell them
they’ve scared bears before.
But now I tell them they scare you.
As well as that one melody
you hummed on the shores
to muffle the pounding of the lake
and forget about the shore
how I avoid surfing disasters
as I step into the ocean it cascades over
rolls continuously while holding my heart against
the sand. I whisper carefully
my lips expelling each bubble without
it ever breaking the surface. I explain
the way I make three servings of rice
every Friday. when the weekend comes
reality will hit and I will be choking down
grains and telling myself they can’t starve.
it doesn’t cease. so I tell the sea about the things
I would do to not eat rice every Saturday
and Sunday. things my wife thought I
would be reborn as a dung beetle if I
did. then I tell it about my life as a dung
beetle. I would enjoy it. I would roll and roll
till i’ve rolled myself over and find myself
watching the stars. I wouldn’t flail my tiny legs.
and so the ocean releases me and I stand up
and inhale a million bubbles at once
Aditi Jamkhande is a writer from New England who enjoys books and long walks. Her work can be seen in Cerasus Poetry Magazine.
Cleaning Up
It felt like spiders
Carefully crawling
Up our downspout
They crept in
Slowly, and softly,
And then all at once
And I am doing the dishes
The day after
Our dinner party
I’m a detective
Placing piecemeal
Plates on the counter
Investigating
How dinner
Went so wrong
And why I never
Called an exterminator
Or admitted
We had a problem
That tiptoed inside
In the middle of the night
Maybe I mistook
Those little bugs
For butterflies
Michael Kareff is a writer, lawyer, and former high school English teacher. His work explores queerness, memory, and the natural world. He lives in the Washington, DC area. Instagram: @michaelkareffpoetry
Dreams of an African silkworm
In the dark, we wait alone–
no fewer stars in our universe,
yet dawn seems out of reach.
Yesterday, sunshine at our backs,
we spun our new homes–
silk shadows where once we feasted.
Today, we see no light nor day–
we dream of crinkled wings unfurling,
kaleidoscopic colours transcending.
But tomorrow, high above the fynbos flowers,
we will chase butterflies,
and know that we too belong in paradise.
Mark de Klerk is a dual British and South African citizen currently living in Cape Town. He is a husband and father of three adopted daughters who provide much of the inspiration for his writing. He has pieces published or forthcoming in Prosetrics, Blithe Spirit, AVBOB Poetry, Little Old Lady Comedy and Kudu Journal.
meanwhile, the city continues with its abstractions.
there will be the sound of flights, cafes with neon lights,
and occasionally
you might find yourself sitting there conversing over a failed relationship.
there will be too much to worry about-
cannibal government, your ageing parents, climate and jobs.
you would cry supposing that it will miraculously lead your way through everything. but you are too old for that and you realise it somehow.
the city again races past you.
and quite often, you wonder about the probabilities of your existence. like that one day when you were walking a quick way for the grocery store and the speeding scooter for a minute inch missed you; a probable accident in a busy network of connections.
what could have saved you or rather,
have you already learned
to
save yourself?
Debosree Manna has recently completed her Masters in English. Two of her poems were published in an anthology of poetry, The Romantic Breeze. She loves to engage with spaces. In between life and living, there’s a lot of mishap, accidents and procrastination and that’s where she negotiates with words, poetry.
Featherweight
The blood coats my hands again
sticky like pomegranate juice.
I wonder casually in its examination
if survival has always been this way
having reached these lands so far
from the Priest’s songs and yet,
I hear whispered warnings from Anubis
the way my heart grows heavy with this.
Lindsay McLeod’s writing has won a few awards and been published all over the place, most recently in THE HUMAN WRITERS, MENISCUS, EPHEMERAL ELEGIES, TIPTON POETRY, BOOK of MATCHES, SNAKESKIN, PULSEBEAT and THE MARTELLO. Lindsay lives with his cattle dog, down the Port in South Australia.
The woman with no face goes butterfly hunting
The woman with no face goes butterfly hunting in a sea of dead grass – seared blades, muddy vegetation, an angry brown smear where the sky should have been. She’s brought her shimmery, green net, which once reminded her of fireflies, the way they blink and fade. She won’t harm the butterflies, won’t pin them under glass like her father and grandfather did. She only wants to get close to their delicate antennae, thin as a whisper, their transparent wings. She longs for an impossible burst of color to remind her of what used to be. Although she lacks eyes, she can still make out gold russet streaks in the darkness, distant fireworks. She wishes she had something to entice a butterfly – honey or a rose – but flowers disappeared long ago and the bees were poisoned in their hives. Nothing grows in sunbaked grass, not even weeds. The woman with no face lacks eyes to see a butterfly but she hopes if she stands very still she might feel one fluttering near her lashes, might hear the faint rustling of nonexistent wind. She believes insects will survive on earth no matter what and hopes that means butterflies, not just crawling bugs like roaches and earwigs. When she still had a face and a butterfly flitted by, she would smile and watch, then forget all about it, immersed in the next pretty thing. It is night now. It is always night and butterflies might be sleeping, hiding in the tall, dead grass. She’s used up her wishes, but if there was one more left, she would . . . Ah, you’re thinking she would wish to see again, to watch a butterfly one more time, its orange/yellow/black patterns, how it flies to keep warm. You’re thinking this is an eco-story about a post-human dystopia where nature has been degraded into an unrecognizable wasteland. (Or, in non-academic terms, how people f******ked everything up). Perhaps you’re wondering how this world came to be. Nuclear warfare? Virus? A final climate disaster? You’re wondering if the narrator did the right thing by inserting their own voice into the piece – breaking the storyline, disrupting the mood. You’re thinking after you finish reading, you’ll pay some bills or go out for tacos or maybe find a field and search for butterflies yourself. Luck favors the diligent. Those butterflies – still here.
Beth Sherman has had more than 200 stories published in literary journals, including Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and Smokelong Quarterly. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and Best Small Fictions 2025. She’s also a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached on social media @bsherm36.