Olivia Rose

Ars Poetica

In the beginning, my mother and the gap
between her teeth. Fit two quarters.
I followed her: the secret house, the deep window
we watched into h***.
 
There every gesture formless,
a bitch returning to crate.
 
You are what you eat: I and my mother
ripped up bible pages and drank
them down like cyanide.
 
She says my first word
was juice. Say grape, say American communion
nightly before entering my toddler bed
and lying til the distant T.V. died.
 
I begged for divinity and called it Jesus.
Inside the prayer, I find the firmament
of fear. I carry

my machete, my hammer. I swing.

Olivia Rose was born and raised in San Jose. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at San Jose State University, where she earned the Alan Soldofsky Award for Outstanding MFA Thesis and served as Reed Magazine’s Senior Poetry Editor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Red Coyote, The Ear, Westwind, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.

Genevieve Sarnak

Chokehold

The first time you wrap your hands around my throat,
you teach me how to surrender fully—tap, tap, tap
—just in case our lines become a tangle
and trap us beneath sinew and lust. This threat
to the ordinary is terrifying, so we learn how to map
our numbness instead: avoid the moat between us, wrangle
voids with practiced care, the words left unsaid.
I learned to crave the breathless pain, pulled the thread
of your love with eager anticipation of the struggle,
the pleasure of being crushed hard enough to crack—tap,
tap, tap—like egg oozing out of its shell. I played your pet,
fed on vagueness and the saccharine words you dangled
in front of me, always a careless afterthought.
 
The thing is, I’m tired of being silent.
Fed up with strangling myself to let you breathe.
So take your hands off my neck, my love. I won’t relent
this time. Your hold on me is over: I won’t grieve.

Genevieve Sarnak is a writer, librarian, and teacher who lives in Western, MA. Her writing primarily explores themes of identity, resilience, and resistance in the search for belonging. When not working on her novel, Genevieve spends her time teaching creative writing, walking with an audiobook, and collecting all the stickers.

Basil Wilcox

It Is Common for Birds Raising Young Together to Have Almost the Same Plumage

And I start wearing her clothes a week after
taking care of the cats together.
Molt my button-downs for the wraparound dress,
flowers around my neck.
My hair lightens to almost the same blonde,
I thrift boots with a heel nearly identical
and I like this.
 
I don’t get the comment from my friends that
I am perfectly androgynous
much anymore.
 
But I pour the cat his food in the morning.
I look at my chest and something that has gathered there
is unwinding.
My chest looks like
her chest,
where the cat will rest his head tonight.
 
Lately, I am masculine
the way a goose is masculine,
and I like this.

Basil Wilcox is a queer poet living in Ypsilanti, MI, with their partner and four cats who run the place. They hold degrees from the University of Michigan and Florida Atlantic University. Their work often explores the quiet tensions of memory, identity, and belonging.

Melisa Wrex

Plastic

Among the packet of meaningful and meaningless things
your mother relinquished to me:
military records,
unsent letters meant for an older version of myself,
your most recent driver’s license—issued 2/13/92, and
issued three months later, your Death Certificate.
 
All of the above, just paper and plastic.
Experts agree; plastic is the unhealthier of the two.
 
I count myself as an expert
with a decades-long resumé built on revisiting
the packet of meaningful and meaningless things.
 
Plastic inflicts the most harm.
Specifically, the plastic preserving your last portrait
(courtesy of the North Carolina DMV).
The plastic that gets to hold your jubilant face
with its wild mustache.
 
Simultaneously, I am jealous of and grateful for
this chemical cocktail.
Certain to endure for a millennium
(experts agree),
available any time I choose to expose myself to harm
by revisiting the packet
of meaningful and meaningless things.

Melisa Wrex lives in the Adirondack Park of upstate New York with her husband where they enjoy seasonal porch visits from the neighborhood woodchuck. She writes infrequently, which could be blamed on her day job but to be completely honest, she’s just a procrastinator.

Donald Patten

Mask Gleaners

The COVID Nightmare

Donald Patten is an artist and cartoonist from Belfast, Maine. He creates oil paintings, illustrations, ceramics and graphic novels. His art has been exhibited in galleries throughout Maine. To view his online portfolio, visit @donald.patten on Instagram.