Alternate Endings

By Mara Lovelock

᠅

Everyone has that point–

a moment when their branch

went one way

not the other

Perhaps a decade

pain averted

seven scars

and countless procedures

erased

burden to a family not yet known

undone

I don’t need

an alternate ending

to know

what didn’t kill me

didn’t make me stronger

it broke me apart

First a blow

like an axe

to a log

then

a carving knife

whittled away

until

I was a toothpick–

the frame

that buckles precariously

under this messy and glorious

lean-to of life–

the only possible one

᠅

Mara Lovelock (she/her) is an emerging poet whose work explores trauma, illness, bisexuality, nature, and motherhood. She facilitates a community mindfulness and meditation group and is at work on a memoir-in-poems manuscript. Her work has appeared in Gnashing Teeth Publishing’s Poem of the Day and is forthcoming in Stanchion’s Elegant Variations and Third Moon Press's anthology The Museum of Human Hearts. Originally from East Tennessee, she lives in Santa Clara, CA with her husband and 4-year-old son. IG: @maralovelockpoetry

Here where we still exist

By Allie Olvera

᠅

In the basement of my mother’s house
lives a generation of baby teeth.
Sets that once grew in her body, too,
back when we were hers.

The old bits of us live jumbled inside an Altoids tin;
bleeding molars we twisted out before they were ready,
then tucked sweetly under pillows.
I don’t know where my sisters end and I begin.

Waves tear at the sandcastle.
Relationships sour,
memories tarnish,
but our enamel sits unchanged.

These teeth will go must go somewhere
when she dies and the house is sold.
Time turned me into a
burden for a family not yet known.

᠅

Allie Olvera is a writer and educator living in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her writing has appeared in Trash Cat Lit and other publications. Find more at allieolvera.com. @allie.olvera

grey for flowers

 By Erin Shields

᠅

in my dream i was a
scholarship girl wearing
a perfume of tulip smoke
and pale glories and heart.
i drank boiling coffee
and thick grace and
liquid inspiration from a
thermos of moroccan pink.

out in the garden was a
circle of tea lights and a comb.
why a comb? i kept thinking this.

time turned me into a
house of hydrangea wearing
a heather hued honour ribbon
and velvet confetti and a bird —
a pulse that i could touch.
i soon lost interest in the comb
and in questions and, for the first
time, i dreamt without wanting.

᠅

Erin Shields is a poet on the mountain. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at West Virginia University, where she also teaches first-year composition. Her poetry lives in The Hemlock Journal, Tough Poets Review, The Michigan City Review of Books, and others. @erinlshields

Soot Years

By India Moore

᠅

There’s nobody around for miles
except the red mud writhing out back,

the live oak where the sparrow once sang
and my love pressed into my side body

Holding me with practiced tenderness
snaggletoothed charmer, angel reading

three books in one sitting
I want to tell her of the years before,

the long, dense ones that were blue
as the sea and tasted of soot

the years spent hoping for what I wanted
and getting nothing in return

when loneliness was not an ache
but a pulse that I could touch

because it lived between my bones.

If you want it, you have to ask for it she says

And it’s true, so I tell her what I want

and she gives it back to me achingly

for hours, for miles
there is no one but us

᠅

India Moore is a lesbian poet, fiction writer, and fibre arts enthusiast from the South. She writes stories of Black girlhood, family, grief and love. India lives in Chicago and calls North Carolina home. @india.anyai

Welcome Home

By Meagan Cumbie

᠅

So you’re a hitchhiker on the side of the road asking for help,
So you climb into the first truck that stops and slam the door.
So there’s a man and his wife,
And she’s beautiful,
And he’s not special but he’s telling all the jokes,
Asking where you want to go.
And you keep looking in the mirror,
And you know you shouldn’t want it but you want him to look too,
Because you don’t feel very beautiful and you think it would help,
So you pull into a rest stop and the sun goes down.
So she’s snoring and you can’t sleep,
So you walk into the bathroom and there’s nobody around for miles,
And you sit down but nothing comes out,
So you unlock the door and turn around.
and he’s in the bathroom too.
So you’re bent over in the dumpster waiting for the next moment,
When his hands are on you and it doesn’t feel good,
Doesn’t feel the way you thought it would.
So you run outside and keep running,
Until the sun comes back out,
And you put your hand back up.

Anodyne

By Michelle Levy Schulz

᠅

23rd Street’s Crow
is majestic even in repose.
Larger than a chicken
bent over in the dumpster
with ebony feathers fluffed.

Hallucination of what the crow could tell me.
Other thoughts are like confetti or
fake food flying into the audience
the shingle at the back of their tongues
finding damage in the plastic artifice.

I’ve seen him before
over the awning of a taco store.
When I stopped then
in admiration
a cocked eye clocked me looking.

᠅

Michelle Levy Schulz is a poet and a writer living in a tall tower in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She likes to make eye contact with hawks if they swoop by when she is at her desk looking out the window. Her work has appeared in BlazeVox, EOAGH, Poets for Living Waters, Reflections on Little Eagle Creek, and SRPR Spoon River Poetry Review. Some of her poems are published under Myl Schulz because naming and identity are complicated.

Passover Redux

By Kyle Hunter

᠅

At bible study, the kids are deciding
which of them would die
if there was another passover,
and whether step-siblings count,
and how they might pray
that someone else’s puppy
was the first in the litter, and how
the only way not to die
would be to kill,
and whether that is the way of God
or of the whole world, and how hard
they think it would be
to get that kind of blood
off their hands and clothes,
and whether the shingle at the back
of their tongues tastes like knowledge
and pride, and whether that
knowledge and pride are the type
that condemn or redeem.

᠅

Kyle Hunter is a poet and managing editor of the literary journal the 50. His poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, DASH, So It Goes, Rockvale Review, New Verse News, Rat's Ass Review, and elsewhere. His poem "Peach Tree on Winfield" was nominated for the Best of the Net prize by Flying Island.