Poetry

#finalpoems / [?]

Gay

I’m as gay as cranberries, apples and limes
Fresh fruit like peaches in the check-out line
Pink lemonade and pecans and cheese
Fresh pineapples loaded with seeds

Roses and mildew and cows in the field
Gerbils and oxen and the summer yield
Apricots, lemons, blueberries, figs
Hubcaps and lightpoles and music and twigs

Dimly lit beer gardens where we dine
Where patrons smoke and caterpillars climb
Where icy lakes freeze with violet snow
And bicyclists sing wherever they go

The reaper with his sickle
The count eating a pickle
The castle in the hills
Telephones, books, windowsills

Octagon houses swaddled in night
Big leaping rainbows across the bight
And sheep and mist and herbs and shrooms
Bones rattling in sealed tombs

Courage and fear and voluptuousness
Going to sleep, giving a kiss
Running a race all the way to the moon
Dying in droves, shining the spoon

Opening your heart to a friend who cares
Stomping bugs that leap through the air
Cities with lots of bright lights
Visions of paradise on hot summer nights

Friends and music and beer and clothes
Finches and hewels and eagles and crows
Pink and black and purple between
Taking a hike, eating a bean

The seasons as they turn and shrink
Early-risers begging for a drink
Goats with five eyes and oceans with feelings
Hallowed thurifiers and dirty dealings

Cocaine posing as salt
Natural disasters, the San Andreas Fault
Quantum theory, the girl with the pen
All of the numbers—even ten

Life behind my eyes, fading and gone
Ocean breezes and singing along
The winding road, crooked and free
And all the branches on all the trees.

Alex Witonsky is a writer from Smithtown, New York. You can find a story of his at GravelMag.com. He likes mushrooms especially.

#finalpoems / [?]

Tuning

Every time I step on that
old floor you half-way fixed,
my big toe finds the bent nail
not quite hammered in
And I think of cursing you
but of course I don’t.
Can’t take the bad karma
at this stage of life.

So I smile
remembering your moxie
and your half-baked skills
and the family you have to support
and I think I’ll put a rug there,
to cover the hazard, but I don’t.
Can’t find one to spare.

And I think of my half-baked compassion
and how I’ll get from here to anywhere
and I think of my first hero
Bodhi Dharma, crossing continents
to carry a message of import,
waiting years to be heard,
then saying, there’s nowhere to go.

“To dwell in the three realms
is to dwell in a burning house.
To have a body is to suffer.”
To step on a bent nail barely counts
unless it helps me remember
what really matters. We’re here, then not.

quote from The Zen Teachings of Bodhi Dharma, translated by Red Pine, p 5.

Mary Newell lives in the lower Hudson Valley. Her chapbook, TILT/ HOVER/ VEER is forthcoming from Codhill Press in January 2019. Her poems were published in BlazeVox, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Spoon River Poetry Review, Hopper Literary Magazine, Earth’s Daughters, Written River, About Place, etc. She has also written reviews and essays, including “Shades of Melancholy: Darker Moods in Dickinson’s Poetry” in Melancholia: Hinge as Innominate Limina, by Will Alexander, Heller Levinson, and Mary Newell. Dr. Newell (MA Columbia, BA Berkeley) received a doctorate from Fordham University in American Literature and the Environment. She has taught literature and writing at Fordham University, West Point, and other colleges. Website: https://manitoulive.wixsite.com/maryn

#finalpoems / [?]

we were told an end was never really an end.
that time is an infinite line whose wingspan embraces before and after and everything in between.
i always walked this line like a tightrope,
hopeful
but
never really quite certain of where i’d end up.

death skinned her knee on the sidewalk today.
i gave her some antiseptic and a bandage.
i asked her what she was doing in my neighborhood. she said she’s taking people home.
she said mother earth is in hospice.
it’s better this way.

death knocked on my door.
she’d bled through the first bandage.
i gave her another.
i asked her if it will hurt.
she said we would not feel.
she said our bodies will know what to do.
she said our eyes will close to this lifetime and open again in another.

death sat down at my kitchen table.
i poured her a cup of tea.
i asked her where we will go
and what will we become.
she said we will transcend into omniscience.
that our existence will be everything and nothing all at once.
she said we will be liberated of earthly limitations.
that we’d dissolve into the sands of time and exist behind the barricades of an hourglass.
she said once the sands have run through
and after our souls have become weary
that we would be scattered into the sky
swaddled in darkness and
christened by light.

hannah whalen was born in a small town in sacramento, california in august of 1999. in her spare time she enjoys writing poetry and prose pieces, creating art, thrifting and up-cycling clothing, spending time with friends and family and playing with animals. she is currently in her second year at portland state university pursuing a degree in social sciences.

#finalpoems / [?]

Contemporaries

I am at this moment a fly in amber honey slow in the hot car
humidity as breathing through mittens
or clenched fists
or arms held high to protect
or burying your face in your pillow each night
counting slowly to seven

inhale one two three four exhale count to eight.

As a child I pressed my hands to the space between eyelid and temple when faced with something frightening, blinders.

When they bulldozed it all to the ground I sat facing it and cried.
Mine and Danny’s names scratched into the concrete at the base and now that’s all that’s left of that life: the nursery gone, the house, the home, the neighbor boy who hid in tall grasses crashed his car on the road I drive daily.

Our flag has garroted itself in the breeze and now from the pole at the edge of our garage only the red and white are visible; in a moment I’ll leave the car lift it from its mount wind the tail over and complete the task that’s started, brace to fold it shut before even a corner dips to touch the ground.

Jill Bergantz Carley is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet living in rural Northern California.  Her work is forthcoming from OPOSSUM, Silver Needle Press, Collective Unrest, and elsewhere this spring.  She lives online at jillbergantzcarley.com.

#finalpoems / [?]

On Love and Loving

I have never loved, well not in the way
I should have. Not in the way that on my
death bed, memories of the one I loved
will fill my mind, visions of his face
clouding my already dim eyes, as I whisper
heart felt words of what he meant to me
and how my life was made that much better
by loving him and being loved by him.

Tears of loss will rain from my eyes as they
closed to blackness, the memories of him left there,
lingering above my death bed. I would have liked
that, liked to experience the kind of love that
follows you almost into death.

Antoinette is not ready for the end of the world (at least not yet).

#finalpoems / [?]

The forgotten crumbs
of your devoured childhood
didn’t know what to do
so, lonely & scared,
they dressed up as ghosts.

Your ghost crumbs
haunt you regularly,
   .   seven days a week
   .      .   (Monday through Munday),
like frisbees & Nerf footballs
stuck in the rain gutters
of your mind,

begging you
to come outside
& save them/play with them
before it’s too late,

if it isn’t already.

Homeless is a shithead laureate / crap artist who publishes poems and hangs “art” on the streets & in the subways of NYC. The streets & subways of NYC both hate his poems & art & have begged him to stop but Homeless refuses because he has “nothing better to do” with his time. He has two books forthcoming—“Ghost Crumbs,” a collection of poetry (University of Hell Press), & “This Hasn’t Been a Very Magical Journey So Far,” a novel (Expat Press). If you’d like to reach him, you can find Homeless nestled on the virtual streets of obscurity at…
https://www.instagram.com/xoxohomeless/
https://twitter.com/xoxoHomeless

#finalpoems / [?]

How The World Will End

First the short-sighted will kill
all the coral. The far-sighted will leap
to their deaths, evading the inevitable blaze. The far-sided
will thank the Electoral college. The fire will spread
to the top floor. The truthers will inexorably
find evidence. The birthers will fear the end
of Western culture. The pro-lifers will bomb
the right-to-lifers. The embryos
will defrost. The scientists will drop
their papers, say “according to
my calculations” and be laughed
off the planet. The terrorists won’t win
this time. The blind will sniff out
the CBD-dusted mice for your emotional
support anaconda. The therapy
seeing-eye dogs will blow whistles
nobody hears. The NSA will know nothing
beyond your relationship status. Starbucks will
cancel Christmas and new years. Even the deaf will call
themselves DJs. Even the numb will feel
the room getting hotter. The dumb will post
what they can’t say. The mediums will set
their intentions and charge you
for mantras. ™ will stand
for transcendental meditation. The East will open
a social media follower factory. The West will cleanse
with Ayuhuasca diets. The President will
stop surprising you. Businesses will all become
subscription services, personally tailored to your
needs, including the newspapers. Individual will replace
indivisible in the Pledge of Allegiance,
and Myers-Briggs behaviorism will replace God.
The truth will be something you embalm
to your Pinterest board. The billionaires will sell real
estate on Mars. Your property will be
waterfront. The lost souls
will belong to the white men and the lost voices
to whomever’s left. The lost boys
will be boys and women be girls and
everyone in between clutch their bladders.
The millennial boys will cliffnote abridged
visions of Peter Pan and girls Cinderella
on their phones. The contractors
will replace buildings with brandings.
The contracts will be signed in crude oil.
The will will not account for Bitcoin.
The student loan bubble will burst.
The teachers will run out
of food stamps. The administrators will pay
lip service to diversity. The government will sell
assault rifles which will be America’s most effective
gun control movement. The filing cabinet
will replace the donkey. The nurses will prescribe
lip balm. Your insurance will cover
your mouth with a handkerchief
and meurchloroform. The doctors will tell you
nothing is wrong.

Christine Reilly lives in New York, New York. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College’s Writers Village and Gotham Writers Workshop. Her first novel, Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday, was published in 2016 by Touchstone and is the recipient of a Kirkus Star. She had published poetry and short stories in The Adirondack Journal, Barely South Review, and over fifty other journals. Follow her on Twitter @reillypoet.

#finalpoems / [?]

I Wake Up Knowing My Father is Dead

I either remember too much or too little, forget
loved ones’ birthdays, but recall every word said in anger,
call them up at will. You distrust me, as you should,
the way I’ll use what you’ve said when needed. A friend
once said that everything is grist for the mill, and I think
of this when I draft & save, or submit, send some missive
into the ether, something they didn’t mean to tell me;
I hesitate, my finger over the “Enter” button, but always

push it, finally. For the absolute nothing I’ll take
to the grave: for what the coffee grounds spilled
in gravy represent. The waiting feels endless. Geese
fly overhead tonight, in the half-dark, announced
by their honking; the woods have remembered you
ever since the first time you stepped in them.*

*As fitting for a final poem, the closing lines are not mine. Thanks to @DothTheDoth for these enigmatic final words.

C. Kubasta’s most recent book of poetry is Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press). Find her at www.ckubasta.com and @CKubastathePoet

#finalpoems / [?]

panic-room

there is no reality
within the realms of the panic-room, the shock of a dangerous
excitement purges the coursing fear and
i am whole.
an emergency (manic depression is the constant notion of a home invasion).
holding onto my true love – my madness, a
weapon behind ornamental
gates (crimson with rust), clinging to traces of prison-earth,
illuminated highways lulling me to sleep, i dream of
the moon gliding on the surface of water.

Grace Alice Evans is an emerging poet based in Staffordshire, UK. She is currently studying a BA (Hons) in English and Creative Writing at Staffordshire University, and have been previously published in Inside the Bell Jar, the HCE Review, and the Period. Zine.

#finalpoems / [?]

My Lion, My Sky

Beautiful, golden lion! Like a brick of gold, a forest sunset, desert, a whisper of caramel across the horizon. Her mane mussed by the wind, it carries the scent of woman and man and neither and all. Deep sad eyes, red orange jigsawed masculinity, after all pink was once for boys. He is plain cougar fur; he matches the cubs, the pack. A broom in his hand, a strained smile in his teeth. But wait! Now he is a blue jay, delicate summer days for one more week, a blend with a vibrant cloud and the promise of rain. In his feathers snow, a wind, a sunny hail. Black eyes without pupils survey us, interrogating who, what are you on the inside? Which? You must know! What is it, they cry, we need to tell them apart! You may fly in exactly one half of the sky.

I am the wing of the jay, a snake’s scales, the mane of the lion. My mane shall be womanly, its coarse hair the mark of my soft beauty. The fur of a lizard, the white fox spines, the leaping snail. The earth within me soars above the sky. Find my sky. I stretch my wings out to touch the infinite beauty of my possibility, freedom, endless, myself, all.

But I’m in captivity. The atmosphere closes around me, dribbling laughter. Bars extend down to the core of the earth and they tug at me, they approach, they reach out to squeeze me, and they dance in grotesque shapes. I huddle towards my wall, my back, my floor― I can’t breathe, I can’t stand, the world tilts, my cage is a circle. The circumference of this perfectly spherical prison revolves as I turn to gage my surroundings: the code rewrites itself to counter each thought that enters my mind, morphing and adapting to each desperate, half-formed thought that emerges to the surface of my mind. What irony gender cannot do the same!

The spherical cell has no air, it is white but it has no color, the only gravity I know is the denseness of the world; my prison. I am powerless to stop the oppressive nothingness that engulfs me in its grasp. There it eliminates my functionality, mystifies my close relations, and most likely invigorates the power-holders who amplify the insidiousness of the prison that parasitizes my community. We are confined in a sphere of shame and silence.

My sobs are the air, oppressive nothingness my everything. Do I constitute me? My body is not me. I can make it an imitation, but never a perfect comfortability.

To all my elders, siblings, and unborn future, I salute you. To those of us successful and educated, disenfranchised, persecuted, incarcerated, stripped of health care, homeless, in poverty, imprisoned in Chechen concentration camps, murdered, and silenced, to the future generation of Queer and trans warriors, I salute you.

My sky is an entrance wound, my lion a suicide statistic.

I am nothing. I am all.

Magdalena Smith is a 16-year-old writer, queer theorist, and activist. She is the Founder and Executive Director of SAPPHX, a youth-driven non-governmental organization working to ban LGBTQ+ conversion therapy in all 50 US states. She is a United Nations Youth Delegate and ardent political science, gender studies, and LGBTQ+ history nerd living in Ithaca, New York.

#finalpoems / [?]

I Didn’t Mean for You

I didn’t mean for it to happen.

The plan was so simple
after the sickness;
succeed at schooling
with something in science.
Find a job that decided you
deserve to stay alive.
Do that.

Everything else I hoped
would spill around the sides like slow-pour sand.
Love as vase filler
as tissue paper
as bubble wrap
as Easter basket confetti.
Everything else I hoped
would come in hour-glass time.

I didn’t mean for it to be a kind of grace.

Alison Gerhard is a researcher and disability activist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in inorganic chemistry. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Wordgathering, Rat’s Ass Review, and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit.

#finalpoems / [?]

be how we used to

All I can get now is through blurry,
all I can get now is through fragments.
Little pieces of you, the earth we rested
on, and the air we held inside ourselves
to feed our laughter.

Open windows and celluloid carnations, lips
against glass, and your voice travelling just to
reach me, just to pierce right through me,
carving at my heart.

All your old names and all your new names written
all over me in dark-blue ink. Ink melting, ink crushing,
ink in the confinements of my mind, hidden in a pocket
between my ribs and my beating lungs.

Lovely disappointment, lovely misfortune, how I’d love
to rest between you, but I can’t afford it. I need to learn how
to dance around you. Dance like I did before, with the same
carelessness that used to take over me in nights when everything
was uncontaminated from guilt or pressure. Just pleasure in
the pain of knowing no future.

All your golden curls, green eyes, and pink nipples
buried, bruised, bleeding, turning sandy gold-brown.
All your black curly hair and deep-brown skin
turning yellow, orange, red.

They’ve made a canyon out of you.
Water running through you, wind shaving off your skin.

Memories eroding, rotting in your mind.
Bodies weakening, dying. Flesh giving into decay.
Walking in the dark.

Words that once hurt me will always come back to me,
but let us pretend it’s all forgotten, and we will rest for now.

Let us dive into milky water and wait just like we used to.
Wash my back like you used to, comb my hair
like you used to, be how we used to.

Andrés Hernández is a student of Translation and Interpretation at the Autonomous University of Baja California. His work has appeared in Boston Accent, Forklift Ohio, Pornceptual, and several other publications. He recently presented his first collection of poems, Terapia (2017), at the Northern Literature Festival (FELINO) in Tijuana, Mexico.

#finalpoems / [?]

dirge

we would have flowers at the grave stone of our relationship
if we cut the chord
the coroner would find the cause of death
it would be you who killed us

our memories would get put in the coffin
they would be left there
to slowly waste away
then the grieving process would set in

i would try to move on
or pretend to
then you would settle in someone else’s arms
someone who ain’t me
then i would beat my heart into a coma
hoping it would never wake up

we would have flowers at the grave stone of our relationship
if we cut the chord
the coroner would find the cause of death
it would be you who killed us

Vanessa Maki is a writer (& other things) who is queer & full of black girl magic. She’s been published in Enclave, Faded Out, Rag Queen Periodical, Occulum, Five:2:One Magazine, SYS, horny poetry review, sublet press, Entropy, Susan/The Journal & is forthcoming in Sorority Mansion among others. She is founder/editor of yell/shout/scream & rose quartz journal. Twitter: ahumantornado.

#finalpoems / [?]

first and last party i will ever throw

here we are: pirouetting at the start
of the end, lionhearted and roaring,
giddy on the rosemary-infused vodka
of our blood, tiptoeing a cotton-candy
horizon, about to — but first, let’s party!
let’s pop! champagne, hopscotch
on tightrope, skinny dip in the punch
bowl of god’s sky, pucker up and kiss
quietly. then loudly. let’s freeze laughs
into a popsicle, suck hard at this party,
giggle about our brutal youth, & ballet
on a peach bellybutton. let’s trampoline
& land softly, eat yoghurt off nose-
tips, bury tongues in our fondue. let’s
forget gravity & dive upward. let’s forget
to land. here i am – a piñata spinning,
slowly, full of candy, ready to be split
open. please, don’t hit me, yet.
please let me spin awhile. please,
let me have more time
at this party.

Kit Lea Cheang is an undergraduate at Yale University. Her fiction has been featured in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and is forthcoming in Curating Alexandria. Born and raised in Singapore, Kit Lea is an editor at the Yale Daily News and performs with spoken word group Jook Songs.

#finalpoems / [?]

Red Light

The grave diggers of Cypress Hill are seated
at the right hand of the foreman,
coffee breaking the native tongue,
flag July mourning what is to come-
carbon and bronze put back to earth,
solemn jokes shared by all; told by none.

John Macdonald has been writing poetry for the last four years. Prior work has been published in Chronogram and Belleville Park Pages. He has worked for the last 18 years as an operations manager for a large communications company in Manhattan. He currently divides his time between Forest Hills, the East Village, and Williamsburg.