Robin Gow
i never meant to leave orbit like this

with my rocket stages drifting
like pool floaties around the surface.
everything smells like chlorine
this morning so i don’t drink any water.
if you repeat to yourself too many times
“this is okay this is okay” it will start to
get worse. or maybe i am just saying it wrong.
i don’t think i should pray
god already knows what i want &
what i want is to find a twenty-dollar bill
in the grass this morning. i know i won’t find it
& i know he’s keeping it for himself
to buy a case of beer at the end of the week.
i left my favorite salt
in the cabinet down below. is there salt
in space? we will see. i am tasting
everything rock i can find in the hopes that
one will come up sharp & brine-y.
earth is in a fish bowl of its own fear.
looking down i see everyone’s faces
all warped in the glass. “i will get
what i want,” is a harsher way to say
“i will be okay.” i don’t believe in either
but my grandmother did believe she would get
what she wanted. she yelled into phones
until the phones turned back into
swans’ necks or deer carcasses. she was
powerful which is also to say she was
privileged & white & took her teeth out
for them to talk on their own.
i will miss hymnals back on earth.
i enjoyed opening them & smelling
old mouths & old songs. the thing about
drifting in space is it’s a lot like
trying to sink to the bottom of a swimming pool.
pressing the air from your lungs.
all the cool kids are eating cheese fries
& daring each other to kiss while
water sits above you like a big brother.
what will i do with myself
she/he is a mess. looking up
potential apartment on gas planets.
praying to tooth brushes. where will she be
in eight years? probably not
on solid ground or maybe i should trust
my own fingers. no, they look like worms.
how do you know you are made of water?
i could be made of well positioned balloons
or scheme of good mice. well, there is no such thing
as good mice. they are all plotting something.
i will miss myself dearly. he was bold
& he was trying to make a name for himself
out of bones in a skunk cabbage field.
where are the snakes right now?
i need to consult one.

—Submitted on 05/13/2020

Robin Gow is the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books, 2020) and Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Their poetry has appeared in Poetry, New Delta Review, Washington Square, The Tiny, About Place Journal, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including The Impossible Beast: Queer Erotic Poems (Damaged Goods Press, 2020), edited by Caseyrenée Lopez and Willie Weaver. They hold an MFA from Adelphi University and live in eastern Pennsylvania.

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Quintin Collins
Generation Snowflake

this is how they like us
when we float
down from the sky
when they can catch us
in their palms let the heat
melt us to water
cold a concession to enjoy
our presence they tolerate
only if we leave
our ice if we lie
on the pavement
do not obstruct their view
do not gather into banks
on their roads do not travel
sideways they like us
predictable light malleable
if they can gather
several of us packed together
into a ball they can throw
for fun when they like us
when we only powder
their christmas when we do not blizzard
or lake effectdo not accumulate
more than an inchdo not grow
into a bomb cyclonedo not rush
upon them as an avalanche
they like when they can carve us
with skis and snowboards
when they don’t have to bend
their backs to shovel us
off their propertythis is how they like us

—Submitted on 05/11/2020

Quintin Collins is the author of The Dandelion Speaks of Survival, forthcoming from Cherry Castle Publishing in 2021. His poems have appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Glass Poetry Press, Poems2go, Transition Magazine, Ghost City Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living (Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2020), edited by Keno Evol. Collins is assistant director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College in Newton, Mass. Twitter @qcollinswriter.

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Claire Bateman
sFSTG

Spontaneous facial self-touch gestures (sFSTG) are performed manifold every day by every human being, primarily in stressful situations.
—NIH

“Don’t touch your face,” warn public officials seconds before touching their faces.
—Washington Post 3/05/2020

But even in utero, that most sequestered space,
they seek each other out, the hands and face,
availing as our merest human art:
to touch the face as though to soothe the heart.

—Submitted on 05/07/2020

Claire Bateman is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Scape (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2016). Wonders of the Invisible World! is forthcoming from 42 Miles Press and Wolfson Press. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Paris Review, Mudlark, and other journals. Also a visual artist, Bateman lives in South Carolina.

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Kendra Leonard
Tell Us What You’re Doing We Want to Know How You’re Coping with the Pandemic

I
singing at home
alone
to the dog
to the peonies—
soft pink face-surrounding cloud touching whole-engulfing—
I saw
in
someone else’s camera

II
how cherished curbs are now:
they are the site of interaction excitement transfer

the places where food and medicines
and books
sit
in focus
on the edge of concrete
plump with fulfillment

becoming damp
in the humidity

the gently sweating singer at the party—
on the stage, waiting for you to come closer
listen

III
strum and pick—
fingers on a pillow—

light, light
longer

haven’t you written some songs by now?
baked all the breads of the world?
braided them all into a challah of sound?

the kitchen is empty and dark

—Submitted on 05/06/2020

Kendra Leonard is the author of Making Mythology (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Pussy Magic, Gingerbread House,Lily Poetry Review, Snapdragon Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, and other journals. Leonard is a librettist based in Texas.

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Lisa Schapiro Flynn
Afterimage, April 2020

In memory of Gregg

Even now, I want
to text your empty number, not
convinced the light
of your phone
won’t reach you.
All week, I wait
to learn it’s a mistake,
sip dusky reds,
toast you until drained.
I hold my thumb down
on a Live-Photo:
Queens biergarten,
a long twilight table,
you,
an arm around your rescued dog.
You chuckle like you’re

(please)

you laugh like
you’re still here.

—Submitted on 05/05/2020

Lisa Schapiro Flynn‘s poems have appeared in The Tishman Review, Radar Poetry, The Crab Creek Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, 13th Moon, and other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from Emerson College.

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J.D. Isip
Carmelitos Ever After

Every night, every time the bank account is empty,
it calls to me, its many voices who lived and died there
in the cold concrete tombs, lined with the finest
layaway treasures of Welfare Queens and Ghetto Kings
forever fanning themselves on the porch
calling innumerable children
back to the fold

Can you believe anyone ever wanted to live in the projects?
It broke ground in 1939, fifty acres, 67 buildings
with thick cement walls in case Long Beach became
the next Pearl Harbor which never happened
but we sent our Japanese to the camps anyway.

Come home, little children! Come home! The chorus:
Mother May Bell Moses, selling Styrofoam cups of frozen
Kool-Aid, her twin girls glaring down at you if you ain’t
got a dime you ain’t gonna get what they have, a drink
in the SoCal sun, a line of barefoot hoodrats
bouncing from foot to foot, double-dutching
in place, still there, Come home!

Carmelitos Housing Development—lovers of the poor—
offered mostly black families, and us,
shelter with indoor toilets and bathtubs
hard-won luxuries lauded by the NAACP as a win
for poor souls looking for a better life

I dream myself the first ghetto mutant, a telekinetic, able
to burn it all down, hands outstretched blasting those walls
lifting the May Twins into the stratosphere, creating a vortex
to swallow the hood up whole, every last dealer, boombox,
the bread man selling diabetes pies for twice their worth,
“This is not the promised land!” I say, every time I wake up
and find it part of me.

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

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Suzanne Verrall
Doomsday

while the people were indoors
avoiding contagion
a kangaroo hopped
through the empty city streets
dolphins re-entered
the clearing river waters and
two giant pandas
mated

how quickly it all goes
to pot I thought
pouring boiling water
on my two-minute noodles
and how easily
it would never strike midnight
with no one around
to wind the clock

—Submitted on 05/05/2020

Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her flash fiction, essays and poetry appear in Atlas and Alice, Flash Frontier, Archer Magazine, Lip Magazine, Poetry NZ Yearbook, and other journals. Online at suzanneverrall.com.

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Hasnain Ali Syed
Brown

I am not just brown

I am where
The glow of melanin meets
The shine of pearl white
An intersection of culture
An unparalleled sight

I have a history of resilience
But don’t mistake me for weak
I have scared off your soldiery
Toppled Kingdoms, so to speak

My valor knows no boundaries
Undaunted is my audacity
I am not just bodily strong
I’ll win you with my sagacity

If you happen to keep the view
That you can easily take me down
Then I am sorry, you are misguided
I think you’ve never fought a Brown

We’ve been kings, we’ve been soldiers
We’ve been refugees with no means
But what we have never been is desolate
It is just not present in our genes

You can close the doors of opportunities
Right in our faces in hour of need
But remember there is an Omnipotent
And He won’t care for color or creed

He is benevolent for all his Creation,
He is the one who made me Brown
So I embrace it like a Gift from Him
And wear it proudly like a crown

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

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J.D. Isip
Archangel

for Pete

The best of us had gorgeous golden hair, impish dimples,
soft, enormous wings, and kind eyes, left his Daddy’s
church in middle Tennessee to be the youngest pastor
with a podcast, hipster band, sun-touched skin peaking
out from his chest tight pearl snap, three snaps undone,

Let the mutants sit right next to the righteous, preached
for all of us to let up a little, even when they lost the baby
he kept smiling, tears dripping from his boyish cheeks
to a tiny soul patch, the beginning of what would be
a full goatee, a beard, a total transformation

Came with no warning, the techno-organic infection already
cording his pink skin into a hue more blue and metallic,
reading about his own life falling apart, the divorce, losing
the boys except on weekends, turned his eyes red at the corners
and then red altogether, seeing the world for the first time

Like most of us always saw it, on fire with shame and hatred,
emails and handwritten letters heavy with stones and curses,
all his supple feathers strewn behind him, limbs once lithe
and nimble drag him through a town he created, a steeple
at its center, a long line of trucks and mini-vans rolling into

Sunday morning worship months later, most of us stopped
going, felt the threat of damnation and Apocalypse acutely,
as if letting our guard down welcomed this destruction,
as if we maybe always believed the wild-eyed First Purifier
who correlated our genes and lives to hurricanes and tornadoes

But I only saw one mutant do that and he called himself
Archangel, spread his new wings armed with sharp feathers,
thwip, thwip, the tongues of each accuser nailed by tiny knives,
stayed by their own awe, every new generation of judges
stands before the camera crews, swears, “We never saw it coming.”

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

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Isabel Duque
Ticking Time Bomb

Tick,
Treading on a snake that is already broken,
The feeling of withdraw.
The chaos normal, consumption normal, with all
The clamor, cacophony, teeth.
Bang.

A Dream vision peppered with Death,
Clinical isolation, and chained feet. Rattle.

The humbling warmth of a cup full, the intoxicating crevices of a lover,
The cracking of a spine, the uninhibited cackle of a dear friend, the
Light streaming in through dressed branches from a lapis lazuli afternoon.
Hiss.

The eye knows where the sun dances,
And the moon bathes naked.
The hand tinkers away at wood, gathers herbs and grain, and makes bellies full.
The mind swirls in the ebbs of canyons,
Looking for a desert flower, when it really hungers for
A supple horizon, that simply recedes.
Thump, thump, thump.

Ah, the Heart.
It is relentless in its ache,
With its bloody chambers, its avenues a raging river,
Expanding,
Contracting,
Wearing down stone. Gushing wild, raving mad and all-pervading.
Piercing and permeating Mundis. Reaching.
Until—
Stillness, silence.

Tock, rustle, whisper,
The shedding of Matter,
Inhabiting the lightness of a new skin,
The bounce of every scale reverberating during the dance
Across the warm, rust colored Earth.
The wind cleanses the taut, long body,
The birth of being.
Aum.

—Submitted on 05/05/2020

Isabel Duque writes: Daughter of Little Havana, trying to bewitch with letters, pictures, music and movement. Always seeking rhythm, ritual and the heart’s fire.

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