POLYPHARMACY I read these poems and they are about things; this is exhausting for me. Finally: I find a man willing to shine a blinding light into each one of my eyes for hours on end— all day—and into the night, if I give him an advance.
Z.H. Gill (he/him) works in the movie business.
I get a sunburn at your funeral.
My mother slathers me with cheap
aloe, sticky and dyed green.
I bought an aloe plant cause I liked the way
it felt when I pressed leaves
between fingers
and you told me aloe is for grief.
I look it up after in the book you left behind
soothing burnt, aching shoulders
with vermouth from the family fridge.
Page 30: bitterness and grief in floral language
Break off a piece and squeeze until it bursts
It tastes like shower cleaner and acid reflux
the sound of my own voice in a snowstorm
a shot of rubbing alcohol
a still green banana
that time you ate brie and yelled at me when you felt sick—
----------How could you let me-----do this to myself?
Vanessa R. Bradley (she/her) loves fantasy novels and writes a lot of poetry about dirt, divorce, and discovering queerness. She lives in Epekwitk (PEI) with her wife, where she is working on a collection of poetry about the meaning of flowers. You can find her on Instagram @v.r.bradley and on Twitter @vanessarbradley.
If We Are All Just God in Drag
After Baba Ram Dass
Then I will paint my lips with your poetry,
batting eyes at the singularity of a millenia–
This shade always looks so good on you.
Pluck stars from the sky and sew into the fabric
of a time when I last felt this beautiful.
You know, it’s breathtaking.
I can hum a tune that will set even the
most doubtful tongue aflame.
Sit trembling in this blessed creation.
I, who speaks truth into life,
who molds the earth within my hands.
No golden idol can outshine this glory.
Our becoming is the most tender act,
watch curve and angle bless the ground you walk.
Remember when everything was beautiful?
Carson Elliot (they/them) is a nonbinary poet and educator living in Nashville, TN after spending many years in the quiet corners of Northeast Ohio. Their work focuses on the intersections of transness, spirituality, the natural world, and questions of becoming. Their work can be found in publications such as Samfiftyfour, Pile Press, Third Iris, Fifth Wheel Press, and New Note Poetry. Carson lives with their cat, Toast. Instagram: @heyitscarsonk
—This time,—————————–
as a lullaby.—
I do not dare open my eyes—
as I kiss———————————-
you though who am I——–
if I take not this opportunity —————-
to see–
when there are only ———
so many moments left
to look? Four months ago —————
on the air mattress —–
wedged with my back——————————
to your sister—
Whom I love———————
so well ———-
I still fear
the power of will —————–
who could understand
the power of will ————————-
we grow ——-
in distance
as you grow taller?———————–
I want you to get ——
everything you want——————————
to know what would have happened
if I had never met you———————————————–
would I still be a metaphor———————-
of space? Had I been a girl for nothing
but delusions that can allude —————————–
to me you do not cry but say –
“the way you portray the human ——————-
body is beautiful”
no, I am no longer artwork only——–
a self-portrait.– ————————————-
I am the ghost——————–
to whom you gave a body
of mist
I paint a picture of mythic mornings ———————
when water smokes with fog————
I could melt into ———————————–
gentle as my eyes —————
are tired when———–
you grow
taller will you still be able to ————
hear me when I weep?–
I do not know—————————–
if I want you to I do ————-
not know
how to ask you ——————
to listen——–
To the day that is new ——————
with future———————-
days are new and mornings————
are warmer when I find myself
waking with you safe ——————————
inside my stomach.–
Basil Crane (They/He) is a trans, Jewish poet born in Los Angeles and raised not far outside Philadelphia in a house in the woods. They are currently focusing on surviving their last years of high school and hope to study writing in higher education. This is their first publication.
Soon
— When I was little my Da was still in the Navy. I would often miss him and sit on my mum’s lap and cry, “When is he coming home?” She would tell me gently, trying to ease my heart, “soon”. I would always ask how long “soon” was, but was always told: “It is soon”.
—-In my mind the word “soon” sounded like the sun as it was setting, orange and yellow mixing in the sky and extinguished on the horizon. It seemed like “soon” would only be a day.As I grew older I realized “soon” was much longer. I learned that “soon” is what adults say when they do not have an answer. I began to believe that “soon” did not exist. Now that I am older I realize “soon” is so much longer. “Soon” can be months. It can be years, but it never feels “soon”.”Soon” is always an uncertainty, never a promise.
—-“Soon” can be a lifetime.
Quinn Ponds‘ education and career are in psychology, but she has always held a passion for writing short stories and poetry. There is certainly something to be noted about using psychology in writing fiction! One of her humorous poems about tacos has been published in The PHiX- Phoenix Magazine, and a short fiction piece titled “The Humid Hours” can be found in The Dark Sire Literary Journal. Her cat-themed flash fiction “Baby’s Breath” is in Literally Stories, July 27th, 2022 and her latest published story, “Gather the Darkness” can be enjoyed at Everyday Fiction, December 21st, 2022.
The barrel organist
Your hand is detached from your body and yet you are already holding it upside down there are dancers in the courtyard who are dancing now to the sound of an accordion there is also a singer who sings to the sound of a barrel organ a song that speaks of a river that once flowed to the north of the country silence yet is biting me like the head of a dog that would be biting a single leg there you have no more feet and to the sound of the barrel organ the singer has kept his voice floating in the air has kept his voice trailing in the air and yet he has no more voice and yet you have no more voice neither there are the dancers they’re dancing in the courtyard and the dancers turn and their feet raise the dust veracity can never be put off as they say in a Russian song that you’ve been trying to sing now and then so now you’ve been carrying at arm’s length what’s left of you it means nothing words make no sense at all anymore to you a madman has just eaten a dog and the dog has also eaten the madman so there is no one left around there’s a gentleman who’s been licking the arm of a lady very conscientiously and the lady is so happy that she pisses on herself out of sheer joy there is a madman who’s been keeping his mouth always open for a while and his head always open too so we can see his brain but it is not you neither who’s been dancing in the courtyard to the sound of the accordion it is not a madman who’s been dancing neither there is no more barrel organ there are only madmen who now sing and dance in the empty and barbaric courtyard of my insomnia I’ve raised my head and I’ve seen my father hung on a tree on the back of a scribbled drawing and it’s not you who’s been dancing and it’s not you who’s been singing too and the sound of the barrel organ is not the one we’ve been thinking about at all though oh I love you you my beautiful barbarian singer sing us a song about the war a song about death now a thousand years old and I am only seventeen years old myself and seventeen is a beautiful day to die and I am fifty four years old myself and fifty four is a beautiful day to die too there is a thread that connects these seventeen and fifty four years together this thread is so tenuous and so invisible and so strong that it weaves within space two distinct realities that would never run into each others otherwise but I am fifty four years old but I am seventeen years old there are so many dead people breathing among the rising dust of their moving feet and dancing to the sound of the barrel organ a crow has come to eat my corn so I leave some to it every day on my window sill and also gray mice have invaded my place and want to eat nothing else but peanuts and I watch the mice eat their peanuts and I love the mice and I love the crow and I love the skeletons and I love the barrel organ in fact the only thing I don’t love, is myself.
On all fours
You walk on your hands like a madman like a child or like a headless animal which is the same thing you lick a small green insect crushed on the ground on your way to feed yourself a bit you stop for a moment and scratch your ear with your hind paw you are a little lost this morning because you have nowhere else to go and the sky has become covered with small holes through which the rain passes to fall and the rain is all red like blood and it’s your own blood that covers your face and you lick your blood to wipe your eyes then again you walk on the hands like a child like a madman or like a headless animal which is the same thing you cry sometimes you laugh sometimes too your face covered with blood is still very very red because the rain is really pouring down your face is almost made of rain now you take a short break for a brief instant and you jerk off a little to relax from all your emotions you thus ejaculate out of yourself your sick thoughts then once again here you are walking on your hands you are walking on dead people like a child like a madman or like a headless animal which is the same thing you arrive in a cemetery it’s overflowing with corpses putrefied people who sometimes talk with each other but without using intelligible words you sit in a corner with your back pressed against the tumbstone and you always keep repeating the same things only for you to hear as if to reassure yourself sometimes also with that obsession for staying clean that characterizes you you conscientiously remove your the hair of your ass using only your teeth in front of the mirror of your madness you think of your parents lost a long time ago just before dawn you have painted a picture on a piece of wood and on this same painting you painted a child walking on all fours a child or a madman or a headless animal which is the same thing the animal or the madman has started to devour the child it has been carrying on its back but no no it is not you it can not be you, that he’s devouring like this with full teeth.
Ivan de Monbrison is a schizoid writer from France born in 1969 and affected by various types of mental disorders, he has published some poems in the past, he’s mostly an autodidact.
The Mirage
Juanito screamed in the rain
and drank from the sky trying to
figure where he went wrong and
lost his way. He met a beautiful
maiden, they ate rabbit and quail,
soon she led him up a steep trail.
Billy The Kid
We could see the white butts of antelope
across from the Kid’s grave, we’d turn south
to the Pecos River to fish, swim, and party
I almost died twice there, once by drowning,
I dove in and hit a boulder under the surface,
my dad rescued my knocked-out carcass before
the river swallowed me whole; years later in
The back of a pickup partying, parked in yucca,
mesquite, and creosote bush chaparral, a rhumba
of tangled rattlesnakes attacked from the brush
People leaped out and ran like jackrabbits with
coyotes in hot pursuit, now days after so much
graffiti and desecration to Billy the Kid’s tomb-
stone, authorities have put a cage around it
Folks say Billy was so dangerous, even his
ghost might escape, the red caliche dirt roads have
hills of petrified wood, crumbling adobe churches
with faded white crosses and plastic flowers in
the church yard, tumbleweeds blown against graves.
Catfish McDaris has been in many magazines, books, and broadsides. He’s a 30-year small press and 3-year Army artillery veteran, from Albuquerque and Milwaukee. Currently Cat’s selling wigs in a dangerous neighborhood in Milwaukee.
The Performance
I have been enamored lately by the concept of messy, bloody, cathartic, altering the fundamentals of our societal responses to the constant bile-rising of glamorization and the need to perform sexuality, nonchalance, purity, a gold standard picture of a horrid, mangled creature draped in her own characters, choking on forced importance. She screams as everyone captures her slow death on video. Her sisters look on with pity and smugness and a bit of simmering jealousy, as though this will save them from a similar fate; if they escape visibly unscathed they still have not won. These women have become masters of compartmentalisation, as all women must be, slipping into routine numbness to block out the binging and purging on every false escape that appears in sterile media giving us new idols. She is broken down and sobbing hysterically on the floor. It is the greatest performance of her life because she only gets to have one before she is shoved behind biting remarks, cursing that her emotions seem to envelop her rather than cursing that she must carry these burdens at all. She is scratching and clawing at her skin as if to dredge herself out of the euphoric manipulation that is false womanhood. Her sisters are mourning the loss. She dies, finally, not with a guttural scream, but with a deep breath and quiet resignation. Her sisters exchange calm looks before descending upon her corpse with vulturous frenzy, dressing themselves in her memory to be her activist and champion, while she has already been sold and forgotten to make way for the next performance, to be a sacrifice satisfying the screeching ache of defeat we’ve felt since we were girls. Her red lipstick is smeared but in the way that makes her look thoroughly kissed, not the way that lipstick actually smudges, and her mascara is running down her face in her tears like she put them there to drop on cue. She screams and cries and her sisters applaud, her sisters are paralyzed as they fantasize about being in her position. Her perfect curls are held in her hands as she rips them out of her head. We continue to cheer and she lets her lungs fill with her own spit as her moaning is swallowed by the awe of her beauty as she falls apart. We clap and laugh and make knowing eyes at each other. We are so proud of being able to stay afloat. This, unfortunately, does not save us from the same fate. We sit, and feel, until we too are screaming.
Haven Nasif (she/her) is a queer poet native to Boulder, Colorado, currently living in Eugene and studying both English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. She has had work published in Portland’s Spit Poet Zine and often shares her writing through her Instagram, haven.nasif.
In Defense of Early 2000s Pop-punk Songs with Needlessly Long, Self indulgent Titles.
1.
There is a sound which when
fused to last night’s last light
will scrub the patina away leaving
a palimpsest for your auguries, a place
you will scribble your initials into.
There is a sound that overtakes
the buzzing of headphones. It is a violin
string leashed to the drill bit lodged in the throat. It is
ripped from the larynx, swaying— a pendulum—
an inverted metronome.
2.
They Say All Roads Lead to Rome, but I’ve Been Walking a While and the Roads Have Only Led Me to You
is the actual title of a song I wrote in high school.
3.
There is a sound that waits
in a guitar case
in a room a thousand miles away. This sound is
unburnished, unfinished, waiting for its number;
its number is the chorus. It goes like this:
the mirror that grew out of the mud
looked at the sky and asked “are you so blue
because it is my favorite color, or is it my favorite color
because you are so blue?”
4.
My grandma wears hearing aids and still hears music in everything. That’s why she calls my poems
songs. is a poem I will probably never finish because how could it ever be good enough?
5.
There is a sound which is a hollywood
promise in monochrome halted
on a film of silver dust.
The daguerreotype recalls
each eyelash, the quiver in the shoulder blade,
the contour of the hip
which is the mercurial vapor— which is the building
across from mine where the indigo weds
the sun-drenched gray panels and vaulted ceiling—
which is the burning iodide amber, a perfect asphalt etching.
6.
There’s a reason Chuck Taylors have been in style for over a century, and it isn’t baseball, basketball, or James Dean.
Is the actual title of a song I wrote in college.
7.
Cassettes rattle when the tape has to be reeled
back into place. The rattle is a sad
song that you’ve quilted to happy
memories. So the minor chords are
anchors, and the anchors are
floating up;
it is a bleak but urgent hope to feel what you’ve felt
before again;
it is a chase;
it is as close as you will ever get
again.
Gage Anderson (he/him) was born in Centennial, Colorado and garnered a love of storytelling from the age of ten. He graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle. His poems have appeared in Capillaries Journal, Bricolage, AU Speculative Fiction Journal, Twenty Bellows Online Journal and “We Are the West: A Colorado Anthology.” Gage believes that poetry is the closest he has ever come (or ever will come) to performing real magic; still, insists on calling himself a magician.
https://www.instagram.com/ganderson2275/
Swing Set
I. Yellow
Ten little fingers clutch like honey in my hair and pull at freckles
golden as the mustard seeds that loiter in the brine
she pours into her cup. Each little burst her lips pucker
like a slit accepting a pearly button.
A slash of sun on the sidewalk
baking the dandelion chalk outline and hollowed out footprints
where I had held my feet still
carving a name, a year.
Under her nails the same neon color
the same sweetly acidic smell.
On my neck her breath is sticky, heavy with vinegar
and sugar and spit. The crease of her jeans, grass dyed and gaping
reveal knees prickled with little ghost pins
that someone will have to teach her how to shave.
Smaller but the same shape, her hands wrap around chains
with a yolky rubber coat. Her Barbie sneakers
tied with two fraying bunny ears
pump up dirt at her back and she moves
back and forth.
I cannot care for her.
II. Green
Salty whisps rest on her temple, turning dark as she floats.
She is whiter and cooler in places she presses
otherwise blushing red bubbling.
Lids flip up, marshmallow green
swimming through frog eye salad.
She whines that the water is too hot for her
and someone will need to adjust the tap.
There is not enough space for both of us.
Sideways brings a surge, her hand at my face
pushing my eyelids down and in.
Her hands catch on mine like her Pikachu kite
trembling between tree branches. Winter at our necks
she pulls, snagging leaves, hair.
At our feet, the drain is shrinking green brown silver.
Her toes dipped blue
pale as she pushes, pink as she curls back.
A gurgling suck, then swaying silence.
She untangles, flatter but not by much
leaving fuzzy outlines on the fraying mat.
Pages nest facedown
peppered with sweating hollows like her neck’s center.
She wants me to read it to her
as if we don’t both know it by heart.
Without the blanket of steam legs are static,
arms slick and bumpy. Bone cradles bone
both grow colder in the damp quiet.
I cannot care for her.
III. Red
On her lap, a shiny overgrown beetle
balanced between chin and thigh, wobbling as her ankle rotates.
Our feet crisscrossed red and pale
cracked open lobsters in the grass, glistening with butter.
A sidewalk sloping upward boasts spray paint stickers
words she knows but doesn’t yet dare to say,
but will need to be told to stop saying.
A lowercase z, her body hunkers over the wall
cement oozing between brick, dirt oozing between toes.
We squint, searching for the rusty crawdads
clawed into a kelpy ponytail like her hands
weaving my own into river currents.
Like a hawk above a burrow
she sights glistening red and follows,
helmet at her hip.
She runs along the ditch, growing smaller.
Someone will measure her height
in gentle pencil marks on a closet door.
Her hair is long, before she took her scissors to it
and sprinkled it over the red stone patio for nests,
feeling like Laura Ingalls. I bury my face in the grass
sharp against my nose and eyes.
I will not care for her.
Sophie Gullett (she/they) currently lives in Denver, CO where she works as an educational researcher and amateur sewist. She has previously been published in The Broken City, The Raw Art Review, and Colorado’s Best Emerging Poets.
south broadway press 