Seeing It // Thomas Osatchoff

stacking boxes again
this realization the burning
bush this moment this you me
tried tiny bathroom
on the second level
looking out the barred square window
at someone in the empty green lot
lighting a fire like one minute
to make it betweenesses

---

Thomas Osatchoff, together with family, is building a self-sustaining home near a waterfall. Recent work has appeared in New Note Poetry, Letters Journal, L=Y=R=A, Red Coyote, Thin Air, and elsewhere

The Ritual of Killing the Crab // Ruby Marguerite

I buy a crab-stuffed pretzel after therapy. A treat after an hour of crying. I don’t know the name of the man who runs the pretzel store, but he remembers everything about me. He asks how the job hunt is going. I give him a noncommittal answer. This was the question I was fearing, a reminder of failure. But he doesn’t know that, he wants only to make idle conversation while the pretzels cook, rolling slowly through the oven on their metal racks.

In my room, I tear open the cavity that he’s filled with crab. I dig into it with the other bready limbs I’ve ripped off in an animalistic haze, scooping out the crab dip methodically. My ancestors ate food like this. Tearing bread, fruit, meat open. This is the ritual, sitting in my two-bedroom apartment, fighting off the apex predator—my cat—who wants to taste the seafood. Eventually, I submit and give her a piece, and in this way, too, we are both connected to our ancestors. The ritual of sharing the spoils of the hunt.

I am the creature form of ancient souls. I can taste the bloodshed of loss, victory, and food. This is a gift, to be handed a crab dip pretzel in exchange for four pieces of green paper. It is a gift to make conversation with the man who crafts it.

Yet we are both so removed from our food, from our conversation.

I wish to cut into something. I wish to crush the crab with a heavy stone as it scuttles sideways away from me. To feel the grit and shards and juice and blood. To taste the stone and sinew.

***

Growing up, my family was vegan. I never found it strange when I was small. I never knew the taste of meat, dairy, egg. I’ve heard you can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Yet still, I loved watching my mother prepare a pomegranate. She would plunge it into our mottled stone bowl—the one with the cracks—filled with water. I watched as bubbles rose from the submerged fruit, spilling out in columns. She tore the thing apart with her fingers, familiar and soft to me, and the cracking red skin echoed in our chipped kitchen.

When she’d finished, she’d fill little teacups with seeds so red I would’ve thought she named them after me. And I would take the little cups and methodically pick out one seed at a time. Tearing the juicy flesh off the hard white bone with my front teeth. Seeing myself a wolf, deep in the woods up the mountain where they used to live, finally, finally eating after a long hunt.

And lastly, I would crush the pomegranate bone between my molars. Savoring the feel of the shatter. Praising the animal inside me.

---

Ruby Marguerite is, and always has been, a lover of stories. She is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work focuses on family, heritage, and the meaning of being human.

I Lied When I Said That I Missed You // Eleanor Claire

what I meant was that I miss
myself; I miss my youth and the way
that each day somehow stretched out
to hold unending time – or did it unfold
so slowly because each second felt
drenched in cruciation, unmoored and
delicate, I was always so close to the
edge, flirting with the ravine beneath me
and I was always waiting to claim
my inevitable end; perhaps I do not
miss the pain itself, but the way
each moment felt sacred, like I
could taste my own desperation, like
I needed some sudden shock to rewire
my breaking body

and yes, I have come to love this
peace I now hold, but sometimes
I wish I could return to those days,
all flashing lights and thunderstorms,
my chest breaking open with each
sunrise, fists for hands and a mouth
full of broken glass, and sometimes
I want to relive that burning,
that eternal fury, I wish
I could dig my nails in, hold
viciously onto that girl so fervently
chasing her own destruction

and yes, I love this life that I have
built, slow mornings and love that keeps
me warm, but a thrum beneath my
breastbone may always sing
for the chaos that I learned to call
home, for that eternal yearning
for something, anything to burn
away that restless energy
that waits in my bones, curdling
and rotting until I am only
caffeine and consequences, crossed
out letters to my own self
and it feels as if breaking this
tie is like losing the last strand
I have to my own mind, to
being nineteen and reckless, afraid
of everything and nothing all at
once, and I never want to
let her go

I do not know
how to tell you that when I say
I miss you, what I mean is that
I miss myself

---

Eleanor Claire is a writer and artist from South Florida who has been previously published in Verity La, The Cape Rock, In Parenthesis, Paragon Journal, Plainsongs Magazine, and others. IG: @e.escalatedquickly, @eliot_ekphrastic

She Wolfs // Sandra Kolankiewicz

In my sister’s current job, she pours her
love down the drain. She asks questions, is told
lies, smiles back. She regularly distributes
to the unappreciative who just
expect, kinder than I who think at least
thank you is due. In foreign countries, she
buys cans of tuna to feed the stray cats,
though the women bang their pot lids at her.
She waves to them, smiles even in her sleep,
never learned to cook, lost her hair in
menopause, uses a cane for mushroom
hunting even when on wet days the tip
sinks in with the weight of her limp till she’s
bound to fall on the soft ground, lying in
wet leaves and giggling like a girl. We had
the same parents, but she favors neither,
someone’s crazy aunt, the one that’s really
adopted. Hand me a jar of that stuff
you’re always eating, I say, which she does,
right away. To me it tastes bad. She wolfs.

---

Sandra Kolankiewicz is the author of Even the Cracks, Turning Inside Out, Lost in Transitions, and The Way You Will Go.

Oxnard // Lillian Lippold

A hybrid-genre contemplation about returning to one's hometown

I’m sitting on an abandoned play structure in Oxnard. Nothing is difficult when we are together, so here, things look strange. We haven’t been like this in a while. I’m obsessed with taking pictures on disposable film. You’ve got a new cell phone. There’s a car in the parking lot, fifteen feet from me, but I’m not expecting trouble because that isn’t you, Oxnard, is it? The view from here is astounding. I’ve got chills. The Ventura city lights on the mountain are pretty gorgeous now that I look at them.

I swear I’m with you though, Oxnard, my vantage point, growing up, falling down, metaphor. It has been difficult getting by without your emptiness to companion me.

This is the set for enough horror movies, me and the car and the undeveloped camera to protect me, so I face the parking lot, never avoiding the fact that I could be killed if someone tried. I’m hoping the New Year will be kind enough for me to survive it, but then again, I haven’t been sleeping, so how good has it been really? You tell me I look for omens far too often, and I do.

The car has a headlight out, and I’m raising my eyes to check on it every few seconds while listening to the same song again about a river I’ve never seen. No US state looks the same as the next of them. Would someone know to look for me if I left right now for Alabama, told no one, just caught a Greyhound with the 200 dollars I’ve got and no phone charger? There’s a couple, emerging from the car watching me, who’s had some deep conversation. Obviously, it’s not the first because during that, their right headlight went out.

My coffee’s getting colder, and my dad only eats meat and blueberries these days. Oxnard. Sour blueberries, a taste like the lake water from the little pond in the house where I grew up second. I’m getting better at fueling my body, not good enough, but this city-town is beautiful, beautiful and distracting. I’m trying to be more in the where that I am in. No one knows truly how much I love being in associated place, my body in my body in my shoes.

Anyway, Ventura is beautiful, and Oxnard is probably much more than a metaphor if I ever took the time to know it correctly or learn to drive. The drought-resistant trees are still green despite the desert, and I find myself surprised that so many people own raincoats here. It is uncharacteristically cold for the season.

My hands are freezing. The people in the car have climbed together into the backseat. I just felt a patch of warm in the air, drifting through me, but I’m not sure where it’s come from. They’re having sex, that couple in their car with the missing headlight. I know what car sex looks like. The last time someone fucked me in a car, she parked outside the fire-station-turned-speakeasy across two streets from my too-crowded, wealth-infested college dorm, and I fingered her below me until 3 in the morning. I’m nearly positive she faked it. She must’ve been at least a foot too tall for the backseat. Then, when we found ourselves watching Rent in her New Jersey basement bedroom weeks later, she didn’t want it anymore.

Oxnard, the queers have a problem accepting lovers when they’re easy, when you’re not ducking down below the cop-lit windows, pressed together, cheeks and sweat, blending into each other like this, this, this is what our elders fought for, our bad behavior and worse sex in the back of a car and then our silence when we finally find ourselves alone, in bed together with a safely locked door.

I’ve lost the story here. I tend to when sex is involved. There aren’t swings on this playset, which child-me would’ve thought stupid. I write with a wrecking ball and a wide lens nowadays, in three different notebooks for two stupid hours because I can’t say what I mean. I write the way my elders taught me, deathful without absence, opening beyond and beyond still, a wit that crackles into the Pacific.

The car is pulling away now, rocking up and over the speed bump, and I am wishing I gave a little witnessing wave for the sake of good neighborship, a proof that sex doesn’t just tumble off into the abyss once you’ve finished him off. The writer keeps the score. My bluntness is no mistake. It’s been bred into me like a racehorse who’s always willing to say a bit more than that which should be properly allowed.

Attention is difficult for me because I see well and without a quiet enough place to pick the important things and live with them. I miss my own warm body next to yours, you who holds my hips gentle like the violin bows they’ve become. The drought-resistant tree next to me looks like an angel if I glance up too quickly. The car is gone, thank god, because a mother and a son have just walked by me, and I already didn’t know what to say to them.

---

Lillian G Lippold (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer obsessed with Place and queer utopia. Minnesota-born and SoCal grown, they've been published in many university pubs and other mags. They definitely love you, too.

Horizon Saber // Anna Idelevich

The saber is melting in spite of January with raindrops over the grass.
A solid horizon hung like a fish, driving me crazy.
Cold in December, dry up, but flared up with the fire of love,
dancing bud catches the rain and knows that there is no death.
It melts with moisture on the tongue and the gums are his bed.
Probably there is no beach, probably there is only one blizzard in my head. Probably it’s time for me to sleep, but whispers that there is no death,
still sings the words again, wiping his nose first:
Everything you do, makes me crazy ’bout you.
Nothing that tenderness hangs, I’m only here until seven.
Everything you do, makes me crazy ‘bout you.
I am a molten sapphire, a souvenir not found.

---

Anna Idelevich: Anna’s poems were featured in Louisville Review, BlazeVOX, The Racket, New Contrast, Zoetic Press, and Shoreline of Infinity among others.

Buttons I Keep // Laine Derr

I still have
glimpses of her –
mouth wiped
on a soiled sleeve,
snow falling
on a February day,
trees etched
on a blouse of blue

buttons
I keep
like a lost
eye – a jar
next to a jar
filled w/ white.

---

Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Chapter House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Laine lives in a landscape, free and quiet.

Today // Kory Vance

we grow old between two bosoms like vines
climbing through crumbling bricks
and mortar to salt the earth
with rubble

i wrote that when i was twenty
or maybe twenty-one

they were the first good lines i ever composed;
the rest of the poem
sucked

today, i am twenty-nine,
alone, and living
in a van

today, i tried to impress strange women on
tinder with facts about
hummingbirds

it did not work

today, i am unemployed for the sake of bitter rest, sat at
a bar drinking my savings, considering the chattering
through my spine that might happen
if i place a blue lily in someone's
hair, the woman who is still
my secret

today i am very aware of how vulnerable
my wafer heart has become
to falling in love

this time, i should not
run

as i have done so many times across state lines
or over oceans in search of gold
from a different
dandelion

but i still see the rubble with a crystal ball eye
i do remember a childhood
fighting back the vines
from green beans

today, i wonder about a life lived alone hovering
on aladdin’s flying carpet
just watching, just
watching

as the little humans clean their water, and cure the illnesses,
and find love, and reduce carbon, and eliminate
borders, and tell the truth, and stop death,
and then the sun
still flares

our god can’t stop it and my gin and tonic
disintegrates the paper straw

and mom and dad are still so sad
that i drink alcohol

---

Kory Vance is a poet and his career can be followed on Instagram @strength_and_poetry.

Alone Together // Steve Gerson

Act 1 Some Guy

The Hole, Greenwich Village coffee house, folk music venue, underground, private, personal, pure escape. I'd go there, 1964, my pre-hippie days, maybe before I even knew what a hippie was, but I was sure on the path to hippiedom, trying to be cool, or at least out there, somewhere, remote, aloof, odd. I'd walk to The Hole and smell the java, as deep dark as an orc's home in a primeval forest, the underbrush dense with my caffeinated dreams. I’d hear the music drifting from the door like a mystic’s incantation, enticing me to solace.

"How many?" The hostess at the door asked, her hair plaited and dangling over her left shoulder, her right cheek decorated with a hand-painted sunflower, she standing there in her mini dress, all legs and allure. I was in love.

"One, just me," of course, alone, again. "Unless you'd like to spend the rest of your life with me," I said with what I hoped was a cool, new, never-heard-before come on.

Act 2 Shirl

I hate this place. Dreary music, too much smoke in the air, coffee fumes, yuck. And loner losers. That's all we ever get in The Hole, dud dudes who listen to downer music, folk songs about depression, though I do dig Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and, man, to hear Townes Van Zandt singing "Marie," well God damn. When he croons with that Marlboro voice all soaked in bourbon, saying, "maybe me and Marie could find a burned out van and do a little settlin' down," that hits you, man. You can feel his pain. I’d get it on with him, but he's always in some kind of world all to himself up there on the stage, the smoke from his ciggie swirling around his head like a curtain, him alone in a fog, part smoke, part dope, part isolato. Still, one kickin’ dude. I hope he makes it big in the business. Still, I can’t believe I left South Carolina for this, standing in the cold, warming my hands with lukewarm wishes.

Act 3 Townes

"Hey, Bob, you got a D string? I damn busted mine, and I'm 'bout to go on in 5 minutes."

"Sure 'nough, Townes," he said, reaching into his guitar case. "Take this," so I did, spooled the string through the 4 hole, tightened it a few twists, and asked Bob to give me a low E to tune.

"Alrighty Dighty. I'm set. Thanks, my man," and I shined my Nocona boots on the back of my jeans, tilted my Stetson down low on my head, and hit the stage, looking left to see if Shirl was still at the door.

Applause

“Howdy, brothers and sisters. Great seeing you tonight. I brought my best friend,” I said, patting my guitar on its pickguard, “‘cuz I sure as hell got no one else.”

Polite laughter

“Any requests?” I asked, hoping no one would suggest a song.

“Can you play your Shrimp song, dude?”

Oh no, not him again. The same lame guy who comes here every week, sitting by himself over by the dying Ficus tree. Always asks me to sing the dumbest song I ever wrote.

“You got it, my man,” and I set off, strumming my chords, hearing myself sing, “Goodbye mama shrimp, papa shake my hand. Here comes the shrimper for to take me to Louisian.’” And the crowd howls, no telling why, ‘cuz, come on, it’s a song about some poor baby shrimp getting caught and heading for the shrimp boil. Damn, poor little sucker, all alone in the turgid surf of the Gulf of Mexico.

Epilogue The Hole

It sagged a bit. That’s what you get when a roof leaks and pipes burst from time to time, streaming green gunk down the walls like lichen on the dark sides of dying trees.

The Hole was north of Houston, south of Bleeker, brownstones lined like tombstones, like shark’s teeth, like druid’s talons stained in blood. Pitiful trees fought for life in cobbled streets, each tree getting at least 2 feet of dirt to struggle in.

To the left of The Hole was an empty lot, strangling weeds growing next to broken bottles and used syringes. To the right was a dilapidated flop house for hobos and has-beens, most of the second-floor windows broken out, a few light bulbs flickering dimly, dots and dashes for hope.

To enter The Hole, you had to walk/trip down one and a half flights of broken cement, each step darkening, one of the light bulbs burned out, one light bulb flickering semaphores, dots/dashes.

People lined up outside The Hole, individuals, no twosome lovers, no groups of groupies, loners seeking music to steal their souls.

---

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Vermilion, In Parentheses, and more, plus his chapbooks, Once Planed Straight; Viral; and the soon to be published, The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety from Spartan Press.