Veera Laitinen

Breathy Song

How she lured me in, I still don’t know. But she did, and on Friday mornings I would find strings of her golden hair all over my sheets. A part of me wanted to collect them until I had a lock of her to weave into a plait but that was the sick part of me my therapist had told me to ignore.

We had an agreement: she would only stay at mine on Thursday nights. One of seven a week. I would count to 14.3 per cent of her life, and it was a deal I gladly signed. A sort of Faustian bargain.

We met at a bar. I was with a few of my friends. We drank local craft beer and marvelled at the fact the 90s had come back that summer.

‘Shame they’re wrecking this place,’ one said with a cigarette in her hand. ‘Just when it was about to get really good.’

She wasn’t wrong. Year by year, the little outdoor club by the seaside with a wooden structure resembling a bar had gained more attention among us who had fallen somewhere in between Generation Z and Millennials, got high after work, and enjoyed aggressive techno music a bit too much for it to be an innocent interest.

My head sizzled from the nightless night and lukewarm beer when my eyes turned to the terrace and its carnival lights where she stood.

She wasn’t striking, exactly. Pretty, for sure, blonde and tall as most Finnish people were, but not astonishing. Drunk and bored, I decided to follow when she made her way to the bar.

She ordered a glass of white wine and sipped it carefully. The lights freckled her face.

‘I like your dress.’

I didn’t, really, but it slipped out of my mouth.

She smiled. ‘You look great, too.’

She was a business student just about to graduate and she liked art. I told her I wanted to become a writer. She told me she read Louise Glück and that’s when she had my heart, and when I later asked her out behind the big willow where we had just kissed, she said yes.

We went on a picnic. She brought a sketchbook. I brought brie and fig marmalade and gingerbread biscuits, but she was vegan, so she only had the jam and the biscuits.

She lived in the eastern part of town. What was she doing there? People our age didn’t usually live there. She said she owned an apartment there; it had always been her dream to buy one before turning 25.

‘You have your own apartment?’ I asked, impressed. ‘How did you manage that?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend and I bought it together a year ago.’

I guess all good things have a catch.

 

We squeezed a whole summer in six days. One day a week for six weeks.

Day one: the picnic. The sketchbook. She drew with colour and showed me her drawings; a lighthouse in a paradise; a kaleidoscope; a tree arising from water with its branches curving around itself.

Day two: a jazz club, the only one I knew. I wore my heaviest boots, and she a pair of heeled sandals. Her legs were long and warm under my hand.

Day three: it rained, so we went to a café. I brought her a poem I had written about her; the paper was soggy, the letters smudged. It was a short one but felt heavy in my pocket. My fingers shook when I gave it to her. Could she carry its weight?

Six dates in she agreed to stay the night. I panicked because I hadn’t expected it. I had thought shooting my shot would always return like a boomerang. I hadn’t changed into my nice sheets, there were at least two dead plants lying around, and there was a bowl dirty and smelly from curry in the sink.

When she stepped in, I asked her about her boyfriend, mostly to distract her from the mess. She told me what I already knew: they had made an agreement. It wasn’t an open relationship because he couldn’t date others, but she was allowed to explore. Only women, though.

‘How long have you had this… agreement in place?’ I asked. Six months, she said.

She was surprised, I think, by the art on my walls. We chatted and drank tea and swam in the anticipation that built up in the air until she couldn’t take it anymore. She was sweet as an angel, but angels don’t kiss the way she did. It was me, though, who told her to strip down, climb onto the bed, spread her legs, and keep her eyes open.

 

In early October the maple outside turned red. I changed my major. And minor. My academic advisor hated me for it. No more physics for you, huh? No, I’ll do future research, instead. And I’d like to switch my minor from nuclear safety to art.

I stuck with art for the first period. Then I changed it to the history of film.

She drew pictures of herself, always naked, and slowly started tracing my body down on paper, too. She was curvy and tall and magnificent; I was small and square and strong. I hung the pictures on my walls, and I think that’s how she knew.

We all have a type. I had always been drawn to the artistic kind. Later, I realised that was why she had caught my eye in the beginning; her fingers had been covered in paint.

I grew addicted to her skin. Sometimes, when she was asleep, I wondered about the boyfriend. Did he know where I lived? What did he look like? What did he do?

In November, she pointed out that I had no sofa. I had built a reading nook in the corner out of a mattress and a blanket. It was the first time she told me she didn’t like my home.

She showed me pictures of her home. Their home. I saw no colour.

 

That autumn Grandma smiled more than before.

Grandfather had died a few years earlier. Towards the end he had always leaned on Grandma when walking, one tree keeping the other one upright, and after he passed Grandma cried for a month. Then she decided it was time to leave cold and ancient Lapland and move to Helsinki. She drove the car herself, all 12 hours, only stopping once. It was the last ride she would make on her own.

In a way she came alive as if Grandfather’s spirit had melted into her, a beautiful spiral of two very different souls. Grandma learned to laugh again; she sounded like a windchime. She still wore her wedding ring and talked to Grandfather when she was alone. I heard her through her front door.

She believed in angels. Later in life I would, too – but when she died, I found it easier to just say goodbye.

 

She came with me to visit my grandparents’ grave. They slept next to one another, and I lit candles for them. I knew they were breathing the same soil below my feet.

‘Funny, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘how you can be bound to someone even after death.’

She kissed me, hard, right in front of my grandparents. They must have turned in their graves.

 

I inherited Grandma’s wedding ring and an envelope full of Grandfather’s pictures. Why, I wasn’t sure, but I placed them in my box of treasures right next to a bag of weed.

One Tuesday night someone knocked on my door. I smelled her perfume before I saw her, and she jumped at me, all arms and hair, and clung onto me like a sailor clings to a ship’s mast in a storm.

She had fought with her boyfriend. The boy, the male, the thief, the stupid reptile, the mosquito I couldn’t shake off my skin, always hearing his unfamiliar voice in my ear, a small shrill, a shrill, a shrimp, a mouldy shrimp, I bet he smelled like one, too –

She shook me and I dropped back to then and there. She stayed for the night and the next one, too, and then Thursday came and she stayed over again because that was my night, and I wasn’t going to let that go.

In the morning she was gone and next to me was an envelope.

 

I didn’t see her for weeks after that. I changed my minor to psychology. ‘How does love work?’ I asked the lecturer, and she told me not to worry my young mind with questions too big. My academic advisor shook his head, took off his glasses, and told me to stick with this one. ‘Sometimes commitment is key.’

I’d started wearing my grandma’s ring. She had worn it for 65 years. Sixty-five years of marriage. Sixty-five years of commitment. Until death do us apart, I would whisper to myself.

In January my mother said I had my grandma’s eyes.

By then I knew where my girl had gone – back to her hometown for Christmas. She had stayed there for a month. I’m sorry for not saying anything, she told me over the phone the day before she returned, I needed space.

‘From me?’

‘From everyone.’

 

In the envelope I found the drawing she’d shown me on our first date – the lonely tree. The lake was serene, but I wasn’t fooled by it. She told me there was a tree like that in New Zealand, that she would like to go one day, would I go with her?

‘Anytime,’ I said thinking to myself anytime, my lovely, anywhere with you, my love.

Next month she went to Paris with her boyfriend and came back with a new dress and sunglasses too big for her face. I made fun of her, but she got annoyed and left. That’s when I first felt like I had just lost something precious.

I spent the night going through my grandfather’s pictures. He’d been handsome, I realised. He had been engaged before meeting my grandma and I tried to find the first fiancée’s face in the photos but all I found was Grandfather’s face over and over again stretching over time. But some of the photos were sharp from the corners. Someone had cut them out of the picture. There he stood fresh out of medical school all alone like the tree in the lake.

 

She moved away. I had never known heartache before, and I enjoyed it. My therapist said it was okay but after a few months she got worried – I told her no writer would ever reject the pain that transforms into great art.

My girl moved to Stockholm. The man – the boy, the reptile, a thing – had been offered a job there. There were no goodbyes but two weeks later I received a letter.

The paper was expensive; I could tell even though it was creased. She told me about her job in a big bank and teased me by describing the pencil skirts she wore, knowing I could never forget the million-dollar curve of her hips. My walls were filled with her by then.

You’re a writer, she wrote.
So, write to me.
I will stay here for some time but once I’m settled, I’ll come over every other week. I’ll bring you the best fig jam I can find.
Give me a sprinkle of magic in my life. Secrets are always more beautiful when put on paper.

She had written her new address below. I wrote back the same day.

I told her I had cried that day. For what, I couldn’t remember, but I had felt the urge to look into a mirror whilst crying and there it had been: my grandma. She lived in my eyes, and it scared me, but I felt honoured, too.

She wrote back a week later. She had drawn a bunch of postcards of Stockholm. The places she’d picked were all narrow streets and snapshots of parks, all vague and anonymous, you could find them in any city.

A few letters later I cut my hair off. Eight inches of dark strings swam in my sink like veins. I ran my hands through my head. Sometimes you can feel your pulse through your skull. The power of human heart is something sacred.

You cut your hair?
Your hair always felt so soft in my fingers.

In my next letter I didn’t mention my new tattoo. It was a gingerbread cookie with her initials on my neck, like a lock. It was tiny and cheesy, but it lifted me up.

She wrote:

Monogamy is a weird concept, isn’t it? We are suddenly tied to one person. We only kiss them, only have sex with them, only hold hands with them. But humans are given two hands. I don’t like mine empty.

I wrote a poem called ‘A Pair of Hands’. It stretched across a whole page as tall as her. Nights became difficult. My therapist told me to go see a doctor and he wrote me a prescription for sleeping pills – and antidepressants.

‘But I’m not depressed,’ I told the doctor.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ he said.

At home I took off all my rings apart from Grandma’s. It fit me and left no trace of green. I took a pink pill and slept through the night.

 

There are some things I haven’t told you.

There was this one night in November. Another night of gingerbread and jam and fruit. I fed her a fresh fig. She bit down to it and licked her lips the way she did after going down on me.

‘Figs actually aren’t vegetarian,’ I said.

She tensed, asked what I meant.

‘They’re pollinated by fig wasps,’ I told her. ‘And they are often trapped inside. They die and rot in there. With each fig we eat dead insects.’

She dumped the bowl of figs into the bin. ‘I’m vegan, you idiot,’ she yelled at me. ‘How could you only tell me now?’ She stormed out but came back half an hour later to make me apologise.

Another time I caught her at a club, and I knew I wasn’t meant to see her there. I don’t remember much but what I do remember is her standing by the bar wearing a red dress and talking to a woman with hair like hers. Moments later they kissed, softly, and I thought to myself good, at least she doesn’t kiss her the way she kisses me.

She didn’t see me. I went to the opposite side, ordered a shot of tequila with no salt or lime, and left. I never told her.

And there was this one night just before she moved to Stockholm. She was asleep by my side breathing lightly. It was a sort of song that would follow me for years, and I was dreaming of that tree of hers, a willow, New Zealand. I walked into the lake – the water only came up to my knees – and made my way towards the tree. A goldfish circled around it. It didn’t seem lost. It kept creeping closer to the tree before withdrawing again, finding a distance, and I sighed of relief.

 

Nine years later I was in a restaurant, one of those fancy ones with one wall completely made of glass. I wore my heaviest boots, since my publisher had told me to wear whatever I wanted. Helsinki looked different through the eyes of a writer. I’m an author now, I thought to myself. It had a weird but enchanting ring to it.

We had booked a section of the restaurant and I drank champagne with my guests until I needed to use the restroom. ‘Excuse me,’ I told everyone. One of the toilets on the women’s side was taken, so I picked another one.

Washing my hands, I heard the sounds from the taken loo. The zipper of a handbag, the click of lipstick, a spray of perfume. She was touching up her makeup in the booth. As one does, I thought, and left.

I curved around the corner and bumped into a man. Tall, blonde, handsome. He wore a suit like mine and as I apologised, he glanced at my shaved head and Grandma’s ring and the tattoos on my neck, and his eyes fixed on one.

Do you know how one recognises a person they’ve never met? Either you have seen pictures of them online, maybe on Facebook through common friends, or they have distinct features you’ve heard of, or they give you the eyes – a signal that they have recognised you first, and you instantly know. Call it a gut feeling, call it magic, call it faith. I call it bad luck.

He let out an animal-like sound as he stared at the little gingerbread tattoo on my neck with the letter inside of it, knowingly. He had grey eyes like my grandfather’s and I was almost pulled apart by his weight.

He was still staring at me when he called his wife’s name – ‘Honey, hurry, the kids are waiting back home, the taxi is outside.’ As he called for her, he nudged me towards my little book launch party. I went through every bad name I had called him in my mind during the one year of my time with his girl and realised he must have done the same. A lender and a borrower.

The door behind me opened. I didn’t turn around to see what she looked like. Did she still use the coral blush? Was she wearing the green dress? Was he able to see the subtle changes she made; the little secrets hidden in her drawings?

I wanted her to know I kept each of her letters.

Veera Laitinen’s journey in writing kicked off in her homeland, Finland. Both her poetry and prose drew inspiration from the abundance of southern forests and the rough scenery of Lapland, and to this day she finds her creativity from the outdoors. Today, Veera’s focus is on exploring the characters of her stories and finding complex and humane dynamics between anonymous people.

Apart from being a writer, Veera is a mathematics student and philosophy enthusiast. She enjoys running, especially when the weather gets colder.

Zoe Canner

perpetual cling

here's to being told you're lying when
you're not. i've never been interested

in a casual life, my mom a whistling
beetle, my dad a bunny, my mom a

worker bee, my dad the honey. i can't
find my legs &my face filled with

beets in too-white rooms. i am my
mother's little soldier. the pied piper

was never a man. i contort my body,
ear to the tarmac other one aiming for

my heart. my hands fluttering about
to protect my eyes. reprimanding

myself for all that i don't do every
day. always too cowardly. always i

should've been faster, less hesitant,
more altruistic. i am distracted with

the living as is custom. i am burnt
golden raisin challah toast. enter into

my nose &clothes. burnt. homogeny
sounds too much like hegemony.

certainty is never just around the
corner. sometimes this woman is

nothing like a woman &still a woman.
i am so bad at quitting. i never say it.

i say hiatus or another opportunity
that i couldn't pass up.
but usually i

just don't show up. don't call back.
don't email. don't email back.

whenever i curse someone who runs
a stop sign &they see me, i

immediately worry that i will be the
last straw that causes them to kill

themselves. my dad's been dead
longer than any of my romantic

relationships or tank tops or careers.
my eyesight is so bad the screensaver

on the computer at the library twenty
feet away from me looks like

advertisements for pornography
&then i see it is just romance novels.

just. my thumb is not a finger. my
thumb feels so different from my

other feelings. so loud. time creeps
&marches &slips &dances &ticks

&drips &lies. time lies. &as my dad
always said, wait wait wait wait i

can't hear you without my glasses
.


Zoe Canner's writing has appeared in The Laurel Review, Maudlin House, Occulum, Pouch, Matter, High Shelf Press, SUSAN / The Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance. zoecanner.com

Jonathan Manning

Two Kings

I watch two kings fuck
on a canopy bed,
fingers fat with rings,
frothing through heavy
robes, still muscled
from the poachers hanged
this morning—something
my medieval self might enjoy.
“For the animals,” I might
whisper, masked, & yank
the death lever.

Their highness invite me
to play heir birth, act as stirrups
to deliver the double prince
of all-male blood. By the end,
despite no body, there is new breath
in the room. “We will lose you,”
they say, collapsed on a pile of furs,
indistinguishable—only their crowns
piercing the mass. 

Before there were two-way mirrors
there were portraits with trick
eyes through which we servants
could spot the blood pudge
peeking over kings’ belts,
dreaming downfall. 
I know the corridors & even
some dungeons. I know when
I don’t eat.

Outside, the calamity in the esplanade
might be some holyday cavalcade
a moving life I’ve only observed, 
& so, to it in absence only
could I ever be—

unless I slid down the ivy,
casualty my slippers in escape
(just an hour or two) to hear
my singing voice clear,
choral and directionless
from somewhere behind the float,
happy at my untrained yodle’s
cracks and warble.

We’d make it to the water’s edge
where the papier mache melts
off the machines which we bury
in the sand as guarantees the future
will have a legend to dig up,
to bury something bigger
than each other’s bodies. 

In the bedchamber the royal mound
heaves slow & huge. There are no
windows to let anything out, only
a flue for the smoke of the fire—
the only other moving thing
in the room. I feel the keyholes,
the paintings, the false panels’ 
pulse bulge in anticipation.
Could there not be a dagger
in a room so decorated? 
Could my hands be enough?

Jonathan is a poet in Los Angeles, and makes his living as a comic book editor. He is grateful for your time and readership.

Amie Zimmerman

Untitled XI

you said, sculptor that you are, what
would happen so and so

selfish sex can be the only contract

I wanted you to tell me what you wanted
then I knew I didn’t want it after all

do I lie? or
do I lie?

rose haze
the accident of age

to know the truth before it is plain
stiff marble

new—reliable only in newness

pattern completed, replication
the sick source of all desire

Amie Zimmerman is from Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in West Branch, The Iowa Review, the tiny, Guesthouse, and Bennington Review, among others. She is author of four chapbooks, including Compliance (Essay Press 2018) and, with artist Samantha Wall, the collaboration 31 Days/The Self (Ursus Americanus 2021). Amie lives in upstate New York, where she works as a hairstylist, union organizer, and PhD student.

stephanie roberts

Not Dead in a Ditch

you came home bull
urgent
i silk perfume
and natural disaster.
i sleep poorly without anchor
every brush of wind wakes.
now you are
taurus (as i said)
and the almost moon lays
light across you.
in an unwanted way
i spot
the shadow
of my fingers against
the shoulder of your
resistance.
i watch
the dark figure curl
uncurl
you don’t notice
because the moon never called your blood
with remembering.
every shush of wind
shakes me when you’re gone
your absence
one loss
too many.
i waited without calling
the police
i headless memory
already forgiving yourforgetting
your notresponding yournever
understanding
the anything of
absence.

stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen's University Press, June 2020) an A.M. Klein Poetry Prize finalist. Winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press) and a 2021 Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient, her work has been featured in POETRY, Shenandoah, Crannóg Magazine, New York Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. She was born in Panama, grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and lives in Québec. www.oceansandfire.com. Instagram: ringtales

Jillian B. Briglia

The Fall of 1987
Ann Arbor, MI

An empire of aphids,
Dead yellow, and blight:
That was the season
Of smoke, lab rats, and swollen
Leaf piles, of the girl limp in the liver-colored river,

Her wet pearlish socks;
Of shame; of Seventeen, and
Plaid fads, drug gigs,
And lonely heart calls. Stomach acid nights
Rinsed against teeth like mouthwash.
The Huron ran sick with desire,
For Ypsilanti boys, ice blue pitchers,
Hot fudge, the flowered cross on
Shaky Jake’s guitar case.

One afternoon I saw
What a man did to a woman.
I re-did my face under the bleachers,
Peach Schnapps in throat;
I like how it burned,

And how when I stopped talking,
I disappeared.

Jillian B. Briglia is a writer from Portland, OR living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the Blue Monday Review, Driftwood Press, Mangoprism, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.

Danley Romero

Destination Wedding

Before my mother died she told me mermaids were real. We were staring at the ocean and she said if I’d hold my ear against a seashell, I would hear them breathing. The shell was tiny and round and a line in the center curled and rose into the smallest mountain I’d ever seen. If I pressed hard with my thumb, I thought it might break and fall apart.

The crows watched me place a shell on my mother’s grave a week before my wedding. I have found shells in crows’ nests, which seems to mean the ocean is everywhere and nowhere at once, that it doesn’t have a home, or that its home is wherever it is brought by any force that can carry a piece of it. A puddle of gasoline in the parking lot reminded me that there is color, and that almost anything can go up in flames when it’s hot enough. Even parking lots. Water was flowing inside of me—I imagined it progressing forward in the hollow centers of my bones, or gushing slowly through spongy marrow. I wasn’t sure how many ways it could move around inside of me. I couldn’t feel much.

The day before my wedding there was a moment when I thought my continence was giving out. I imagined opening up like a badly ruptured street, sewage spewing in spurts and streams into the air and a general state of panic. “Tomorrow will be awful,” I told my husband-to-be, Jackson, who thought I said this because some of my family were still homophobic, maybe always would be. How could I know? I just didn’t want to break in front of everyone. I didn’t want them to think, This checks out, that he’d fall apart like this and come spewing out all over us, all over the world around us, all over our sensibilities. He exists this way inside himself. Wretched man. I hate upsetting anyone.

I took a breath and decided I’d ask Jackson at midnight if he would walk with me to the ocean, but when midnight came and I opened my eyes he was sleeping. I swam alone and was fine. My continence was fine. I started thinking it might have all been because I was so tired, or a little nervous for tomorrow, or maybe I caught a bug and it passed in record time, I slept it off that quickly. I congratulated myself and then sank and opened my mouth for saltwater and maybe a fish to rush in, but there were no fish and the waves just rocked me gently. The waves, the wind—I listened to them that night, accompanied by the rhythms in the foreground: my footsteps when I walked watching the moon on the water, the pulse in my ears, sometimes ringing through my whole head.

My grandmother brought her best friend, who didn’t have an invitation, to the island and to the ceremony. This woman had curly hair that moved a lot and fell in the way of her eyes, sometimes down to her lips and into her mouth. The tips were pink, as if they’d been dyed that way, and it was as beautiful as it was flawed, but it was lipstick and unintentional, and then there was the blush in her hair, too. When the wind blew I was worried she’d fall over, or that so much of her would blow away in a fine powder that all that would be left would be a skeleton, or not even that, just drops of water, hovering in place slightly apart from each other.

She said, “It’s so sorry for you, you’re handsome!” She grabbed my hand. “Are you lonely?” She lives on the side of a mountain and has all her life. In her parents’ home (they are dead, buried in the side of a different mountain) she taught herself to read stories forward and then backward, and then to burn the books and never think of them again. Anytime she mentioned this, which she did, surprisingly, on several different occasions I had witnessed, it was with her chin high in the air, proud but also defensive about it. When she was younger she would hike up the mountain and then roll back down a ways. Hike up, roll down. Sometimes for hours. People thought someone was beating her, she was so constantly cut and bruised. But it was just the path, the body, and forward momentum leaving injuries. And that’s how it is sometimes. Maybe even how it often is.

My grandmother joined her rolling, once, and told me about it. She said the mountain felt like it might simply stop existing beneath her, as her body rolled and each inch of her felt and then did not feel and then felt again the mountain, aching. It was unnerving. She said the ground hurt but at least there was ground, that she was more terrified of it opening up and swallowing her than anything else, in the moments when her arm went from being pinned beneath her chest to waving the sky goodbye to crashing down again, smack. Sometimes she catches herself walking lightly, not wanting to give too much of her weight to anything, ever. This is one of the few insights I had into my grandmother and the way her mind worked, which might be to say one of the few insights into her spirit, the core of her, her soul; though of course it might not be and it’s all confusing to me.

Are you lonely?

Her eyes, framed black by thick mascara and partly covered by the ringlets of her hair, were green, and I wanted to say, Yes.

“That’s why you won’t make children? You’re lonely?”

After, I looked at Belinda, who I knew was a friend of Jackson. I looked at her close-cropped dust of hair, sparkling gold in the sunlight, her scalp. A tattoo on her face was just a little star hanging there, weightless in her sky-skin. She had three scars near her wrist, a dangly earring that was a marble glued to a Cheeto glued to an acorn and another that was a toy ballerina glued to an acorn, and one of her fingernails was gone. It just wasn’t there.

I turned to my husband—my husband!—and felt low fires inside of my chest, burning big parts of me away, shedding them as ash and soot.

“What’s wrong?” he asked me.

“She means nothing to me,” I whispered. He wrapped an arm around my waist and held me against him. I felt him breathing. I knew he understood what I was telling him. That these people had histories that became a part of who we, me and Jackson, are, that people were not isolated things but liquid colors in a bucket that learn to blend together as they are sloshed around, that I would never see him fully because I did not know this woman, Belinda, with all of her stories and colors and the intersections of her and him, and this might be the only intersection between the three of us and if she ever dies—she appeared to be holy; I would not have doubted it if someone told me she would live forever and ever and outlive the worms inside the deadest, most ultimate animal, the one whose eyes some highest imaginable power would stare into, whispering that they were sorry, that it was never worth it and they were so sorry for the act of creation, that really everything was inevitable but they were sorry, anyway, but if she did die—I would maybe not even feel it, and they would be so thoroughly blended, Belinda and Jackson, that any chance to pull his colors apart and separate them from hers, to see Jackson as he is and Jackson as he is purely, without the added shades of Belinda or his mother or the woman who put an apple sauce on his plate in grade school, that opportunity would vanish as surely as if it had never existed. And maybe it never did exist, and she was just a gap between myself and Jackson, and that meant there were little gaps between us everywhere.

So he kept his arm around me a little while and it was a quiet pressure inside a loud, loud feeling that would dull, I knew, but maybe never fade away completely.

Later that night I was in the ocean again. Jackson had fallen asleep even though we were married now. How could he sleep? There was chocolate spread deep into the corners of his mouth. I wanted to suck it out but instead I went swimming.

For a second in the weird light in the water beneath the moon my eyebrows rose up high. I thought my arm was scaly. I might have heard my mother speaking into my ears but I wasn’t certain I remembered her voice. Her voice is a gap. “They step into water looking like you or me, and once they get wet—bam. Mermaid.” I remember her sipping her martini, wide-brimmed hat tipped over her square shades, but not the qualities of her voice, not the pitch and tone. “It’s really dramatic!” she said.

The next day most everyone was gone. His parents kissed us goodbye, my dad had already left, saying he needed to get back, not getting breakfast with us first, and the sun was burning, as it always burned, silently. A wind picked up and died down, then did it again.

“Can we stay here forever?” I asked Jackson, thinking about the island, the ocean, the everyone-is-gone of it now, in the aftermath of our ceremony. Or maybe I said, “Can this not change?” He put his arm around me, kissed the side of my head. He said, “You and me, you and me!” He was a hype man, almost by profession.

On the plane a week later I watched the water until we were inside a cloud, and then I watched the clouds. When we were coming out of them I looked at Jackson sleeping, and at our hands and arms. I imagined scales there. I could almost feel the way the waves must have felt the moonlight, all alone. I realized for years I had been hearing the moon asking too many questions, and no one was answering, not even I was—I might have been the most reluctant to answer, actually—and I opened up my mouth because it felt like there was cold air rushing into my face, like someone had opened the plane windows going this high, this fast. I wondered if I had ever been calm in my entire life. Inside my body molecules were breaking themselves over and over, and I was breaking them, and they were reforming, and I was rebuilding them, and I breathed out someone’s dead mother, but I could not ever breathe out mine. That would scatter me across the whole world and I would never find myself. And that must be how rainclouds feel, I thought, and then I watched the ocean below us through a patch of clear sky and everything was muted, all the colors, they were all so muted.

I looked at Jackson and thought, When he sleeps, he means it.

He really does.

Danley Romero is a writer and cellist living in Southwest Louisiana, and a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire’s MFA writing program. He is interested in exploring queerness, surrealism, and musicality of thought and language through short forms. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review and The Massachusetts Review.

Re: Covid-19

We’ll be back.

We’re currently on hiatus due to the impending doom. If you submitted a while ago and still haven’t heard anything, it’s because we’ve decided to hold off on reviewing submissions for now—sorry about that. You can send us stuff to look at later if you’d like; as always, please let us know if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere. If we miss the boat on a piece, it may make us sad, but at least you won’t be sad too. Don’t let us ruin your apocalypse!!

With love,
Irene and Matthew

Madi Mordaunt

Medal of Freedom

You know what? Fine. Medal of Freedom to:

My perfect cat Blue Ivy
When you turn the pillow over and it’s fluffy and cool
Sleeping in
Nightly prayers for the end of humanity
That toilet paper my grandma used to get that was like wiping your ass with a cloud
The sweet release of



Madi Mordaunt was published in their high school's literary magazine and hometown newspaper, but it was so long ago they no longer remember the names of the publications. They're a preschool teacher and a poet who pays close attention to politics, loves knitting, painting, cooking, gardening, and their cat Blue Ivy. Madi is also a storytelling RPG designer and adept at boiling down difficult conversations into easy-to-understand metaphors. Email them about it: madisonmordaunt@gmail.com.

Rebecca Jamieson

What We Say When We Say Nothing

The soldier sits beside me at dinner. He is tall and blonde. His knee keeps brushing mine under the table. The muscles in his thighs are visible through his khaki pants. When he looks at me, he has his sister’s eyes. I can’t keep his gaze too long; something will explode. The ghosts hang in the room, but we do not invite them to sit down. His skin glows with a subtle light. If I touched him, would the light shine through my hand? Later, I see the picture of him holding the gun. It is so large it covers half his body. I study every inch: the boots, the goggles, the dusty camo. The gun held ready. In the dim room, my own face reflected in the glass.



Rebecca Jamieson is the author of the poetry chapbook 
The Body of All Things, published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including Calyx, Hunger Mountain, Lion’s Roar, The Offing, Rattle, and Stirring. A longtime student of meditation, Rebecca is the founder of Contemplate Create, where she teaches Mindful Writing classes in person and online. Rebecca has also taught with Write Around Portland, a nonprofit that offers writing workshops for marginalized communities. She is currently the Teaching Fellow at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is pursuing an MFA in Writing & Publishing.

Cole Miller

double milligram

like Jennifer Connelly at the end of the last century
the rich balm of clonazepam
double milligram

applesauce quality to the femoral
creep down the carotid like a velvet spider
I can bowl a perfect game
along the posterior tibial artery
my footsteps go feline

my offer won’t wait

it’s only love

Cole Miller lives in Old Town, Portland, Oregon. He is fourteen credits shy of his BFA degree in creative writing from Portland State University. His work enjoys publication in these periodicals of note: Pathos, Crush, and American Junkie. He enjoys Earl Grey tea and writing in twelve point Georgia font. Message him at mil28@pdx.edu for poetry, prose and stand up material.

Kevin Bertolero

It’s not in what you do, more in what you say

I think of eating soft serve with guiltless boys at the Dairy Queen off Route 11. We consider dissociation, our mothers, the times we were almost hit by cars. My legs unstick from the vinyl booth when we stand to leave, an un-suctioning of thighs. We are sweaty boys with backpacks, with cans of Mucho Mango Arizona warm from the mid-day sun. We ride our fixed-gear bikes to Rushton Falls and look at the limestone steps leading down to the river, the sugar house not far on the other side. I say GOODBYE! To Canton as we pass the sign that wishes us back. We are interested boys with a love for cinema, and in the second-run theater we watch Purple Noon (1960). Peter tells us of the heat down in Dallas, his last family vacation, what our bodies would look like in that kind of daylight. I felt like Alain Delon, he says. It was my own Italian summer. We would have to swim in that dry heat, he explains, in the stylized pools with chlorine perfumed skin. There’s nothing quite like it. I think of a time when queer boys our age would listen to Rachmaninoff and stay inside. Today, we sing Mac DeMarco lyrics as we wander through some phantom orchard. A few more months and this field will be alive, then dead again. We kick at the dry soil.

Kevin Bertolero is the founding editor of Ghost City Press. His work was long-listed for the 2018 Peach Gold Prize and his poems and essays have been published in Maudlin House, PNK PRL, Reality Beach, OUT/CAST, Tenderness Lit, Sea Foam Mag, and elsewhere. He tweets @KevinBertolero.

Ariel Kusby

The Rose Spinster

They say if you nestle your nose in one, you’ll smell a man’s body odor, see a face contract within the tiny bud. Avoid that street, mothers say, and if you can’t, always cross to the other side. A witch, the townsfolk warn, lives in that house. She grows her garden from the blood of men and houses their souls in the flowers. You may be curious to see for yourself, but any girl who sniffs a peony will end up pregnant.  

Little Sally is new to town, moved in with her daddy after mummy fell down a well. She has never seen a garden like this one, each flower so distinct, like a fingerprint or a face. She lingers, picks petals, and brings them home, where she secretly rubs them along her lips and thighs.

Sally’s daddy doesn’t know who to blame, embarrassed by his daughter’s body. She and mummy had not talked about these matters. Nature shouldn’t work this way, he thinks, running with an axe. New eggs don’t grow inside tender yolks.

Spring is always violent, the rose spinster thinks, watching new buds ravage their green husks. She sprinkles the soil with her own womb-juice from the quarter-moon. A man lies unconscious in her garden, knocked out by the heat and his own despair. The rose vines he’d hacked look barely touched. She moves a canopy over him, rousing him.

Some say she is young, but has a face like the skin of an unwashed turnip, unnatural pink and white like her garden, her eyes a dangerous red. Others say she is old and mute, cut out her tongue after a lover jilted her, so she could never again confess her love and be left heartbroken.



When Little Sally gives birth, the roots come out first. A mix of mud and blood, the rose spinster yanks the slippery threads out of Sally, who howls with pain as thorns catch in her womb. When the flower is born they plant it firmly in the backyard. The rose spinster asks Sally and her daddy to live with her in the cottage, an offer they accept, for they have fallen quite in love with her. The rose spinster then took the man to her pink sheets, where he blossomed, but only in the way a human body can.

Ariel Kusby is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in Entropy, Bone Bouquet, Pith, 1001 Journal, Adolescent, SUSAN / The Journal, and Hunger Mountain, amongst others. Ariel works as a bookseller in the children’s room at Powell’s City of Books, and is the managing editor for Deep Overstock: the National Booksellers’ Journal. Visit her at arielkusby.com.

Lindsay Costello

My mother points to Orion’s belt

In bare feet she circled the neighborhood, just wasting gas,
Gasped at the same constellations.
The air swamp-heavy, oozing gelatin,
Seeping warmth edged in wet,

A blue funerary shroud draped over the sky.
Concrete fringed with shadow.
Vining and tangling,
I was all caught in it.

Moon phases explained her man’s mood or a cat scratching.
She knew cycles, the death of a star,
Compatibility.
Luck or good fortune.

I think the stars are little slits in a jar lid,
Not selves, but non-selves.
Gashes of untamed sun,
Like wind through a crack under the door.

At the edge of the neighborhood, a construction zone of
Right angles and spikes turned stone.
The forest died, and a mythic horde of animals crept
Into the braided light.

Lindsay Costello is a multimedia artist, poet, and art writer from Portland, Oregon. She received her B.F.A. in Textiles from the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2017. She has published two poetry chapbooks, So What if I’m Unfolding? in 2017 and Bloomswelling in 2018, and her critical writing can be read at 60 Inch Center and Art Practical. She works in arts administration for a museum, volunteers as a Visual Arts Editor for Inklette Magazine and as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Digging Press, and is the founder of soft surface, a digital poetry journal, residency, and bookshop.

Pat Ashinze

Lofty Drift

nothing makes
a man look stupid
like misery
and failure.
And love.

i tell you, dear reader -
not because i have drank sour wines;
not because i have seen the sky bleed;
not because my memories have grown
grey beards and have become arthritic;
i tell you this to show you the vanity
behind having an human existence.

the mind of every man is full of grief:
sorrows that sting like desert arachnids and
hurt like the jests of blasphemous demons.
we hide our pains behind our teeth everyday,
praying in sad notes for death to run away,
waiting for God to show his face in the clouds.

if you see a man crying, run!
his soul is filled with shadows.
his memories are naked and wet.
run before his misery spreads and
makes you a city beneath the earth.

happiness requires sacrifice.
it is the reward for hearts
that have chosen to ignore pain
and learnt to live in a world
filled with dangling windows,
punctured destinies, broken stories,
desolate cities and empty rooms.
happiness is not for cowards.
be illumined.

Pat Ashinze is an hybrid of two major Nigerian tribes: Igbo and Yoruba. Writing, to him is the only way he can talk without being interrupted.

He is fluid in his writings, revolving within the axial stream of poetry, prose and what have you.

His works have appeared in The Pangolin Review, Dissident Voice, Vox Poetica, Academy of Heart and Mind, Writers Newsletter, Tuck Magazine, I am Not a Silent Poet, Communicators League, and Motivating Africa amongst several others.

Nathan Wade Carter

Pit

it turns out even progressive straight white cis men are still likely to scoop your pit out of your fruit / suck on it / and spit it onto the asphalt

turns out they are still uncomfortable with queers and people of color

hired for the cred but fired for being what we are / using language and space different / we have had to

my udder is dry / my eggs born without shells / my existence still called into question

you distant unfortunate sameness / you drop of toxic patriarchy poisoning the water / you oil spill of good intentions / but don’t worry / you hire the people who clean the birds for the cameras

we are too lost and you know what / this mistake will come back around whether soon or soon enough

you don’t believe women or queers or beautiful brown people or people of different startlingly sparkling abilities

and equality feels like oppression to you because you’ve never felt the heavy cold hole it bores into you

I’m sorry I’m not ending more positively but until I see a hopeful turn I will steel myself to the gale / after all we were born in this


Nathan Wade Carter (he/him) is a queer, grey-a, non-binary poet, musician, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His chapbook is ROYGBIV (Ursus Americanus Press 2017). His poetry can be found in Hobart, Fugue, Gramma Poetry, Poor Claudia, The Fem, and others. He is the editor and founder of SUSAN / The Journal. He writes and performs songs under the name Purrbot. He co-facilitates the generative writing salon Creation Island with Zulema Renee Summerfield. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.

Sarah Sophia Yanni

insecurity, amalgamated

inadequacy is a leech / impossible to remove completely / in, through, my blood

my therapist used to fall asleep while I spoke to her / strands of stringy brown hair cascading across her wrinkled face / head bobbing slightly before it returned to its neutral position of pseudo-listening / attentive, polite / thank you for coming see you next week / $150

I apologize for taking up space / for speaking too much / the words I craft are mostly bullshit / I don’t want to be horrifically un-self aware / we all know that person

a constant drip of memory / loss of place / mom and dad are immigrants, they worked hard to achieve something / a dream, a job, a position, an existence / legitimacy / a purpose to justify uprooting / hours sifting paperwork / the residue of guilt festers

what am I even doing / writing? spoiled / I should learn arabic

two years after he hurt me / I received a text message / a curated apology / a curated list of reasons why and how, a curated list of solutions / therapy, a historical investigation / making amends / getting better, working through it

I’m so ill-equipped for confrontation / gentle, nice / I should have yelled / with time, I grow smaller 

Sarah Sophia Yanni is a half Egyptian & half Mexican writer in Los Angeles. She is the author of ternura / tenderness (poetry chapbook, Bottlecap Press) and is currently pursuing an MFA from the CalArts School of Critical Studies. Find her at www.sarahsophiayanni.com.

Eva Bertoglio

Reality is a WOLF

A

plant will break the surface of the earth, and

grow until it is grown

will grow until

heartbroken

grow until

decaying


be not fashioned according to

what is the good and acceptable 


freely indulge in the

god of pleasure

We must

           be like the world; we must  be different from the

world




Since          man lives in a sinful

world, sin

is likely God

all-seeing, all-knowing

all-powerful

Sin must be enjoyable or

it is a source of grief

Worldliness

is enmity

by virtue of

two masters

love for the world

love

of

evil

it is easy to 

sin easy as

darkness


False

reality another

gospel

truth

is heresy

False

prophets 

are wolves

grievous wolves

Remember this

reality is a wolf


Now,  let us be

the lost the fallen

and

bury the dead

or fail as

I do




unbearable because


a clock

suddenly stopped

the clock would have

only one tick— 

We

are a vapor

gone tomorrow



Eva Bertoglio brings jars of alternative milk to brunch, is an aficionado of the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and is an amateur student of black holes. Her work can be found in 50 Haikus, Oregon's Best Emerging Poets, My Scorpio Best Friend, and the chapbook First Winter of Persephone. She lives in Portland, OR.