Tell your dog, I bite. Tell your Jesus I too have a blood-wet diaper and a tendency to fall in love with stray women at art galleries. I got a hair net for my halo. A bag for my jokes. A side kick who smirks and slaps himself in time to a vicious disco beat our punk drummer makes. Tell…
Sestina After DSM-5 Criteria for Gender Dysphoria It all starts with desire. A burgeoning conviction. Taking what is typical and splitting it in two, lapping up what drips between the experienced and the marked. At birth we come out marked. Screaming with a desire to connect, we emerge between the cause and the conviction. Each breath informs the two and…
I am not a merry chaser—I know there is more than one roadrunner darting mountains in wasteland sand. But you had me at I want to be elusive; two cannot run together but here is a burning slice of sun for you to hurdle. And your love set me airborne, a rocket depositing Wile E. Coyote in empty sky, hands…
how we can slice a human mind in two while the skull is intact. lying in the most conspicuous places, white crime usually dresses in business suits and we mistake them for flesh and blood men. as though words create new realities, Zelenskyy, I have my popcorn ready to hear you wax eloquent. i witness you running with adrenaline chiseling…
“Pencils come from Pennsylvania.” Blossom Dearie Rotring A drafting pencil never gets dull, But it’s never that sharp, either. Blackwing Many men claim to have God’s pencil Some have his eraser. Others believe God’s pencil has no eraser. Still others believe there is no God So not even an eraser. Not even the small dried out kind That smears and…
“Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.” -Che Guevara That summer a walrus was euthanized in Norway, later they built her a statue along the harbor: a marble fallen martyr. Her given-name, Freya, Old Norse for “Noble Lady,” goddess namesake of love and beauty; of war and death. The dangerously…
Julia Ludewig is a learner, teacher, and traveler with hearts on two continents. She teaches German and Environmental Humanities at a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania. In both her academic and her poetic life, writing is her way of thinking with a keyboard. When she is not writing, she dabbles in Salsa and Bachata dancing. She is oddly infatuated with…
Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). Daniel serves as Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University as well as an editor for The Laurel Review. Daniel’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Diagram, Grist, Interim, Lana Turner, & The Spectacle, among other places. Find him at danielbiegleson.com
I like you like mischief, an ‘i before e’ moment, the movement of my heart butterflying, battered, flayed and wired up to monitors and X-rays. When you asked me what’s at stake here, I only heard cake, or was it betrayal, the way daylight holds failure in stasis between aphasia and sainthood? The weather is taking a break, is breaking…
but my Sunday School teacher says nix, He’s eternal in Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God, or was that on, so I say Yes ma’am, but He’s still dead —that’s when she told me to leave the classroom so I did but after class I came back to her all alone behind her desk, her face buried…