by Hayley Russell Behind the old house stood the tree where endings went to rest, its branches curled like open hands, offering and releasing in the same breath. Each fall, I traced the edges of every leaf, memorizing the slow surrender, green to gold, gold to rust, rust to the soft crumble of becoming earth again. It taught me more than anyone ever managed about the art of leaving: that release is…
by Ophelia Knight I / have come to a halt / here the men are thin with yearning / not the kind that you remember the kind that lingers in bones when they are no more / dust in wooden boxes plated in faux silver 6 days I have walked…
by Samuel Goldsmith my mind is listed as two beds two baths but calling that closet a bed is a stretch even when i spend all night there. the square footage includes the basement place to store spores and incomplete ideas dreams and goals sans posts the only quarter of the abode in constant use where the crass cut-grass smell of power can be found. not near enough to nip…
by Hayley Russell You walk through rooms as if stepping into old paragraphs, edges curling, floorboards breathing cold against your feet, wallpaper lifting at the seams like peeling time, colors fading into the bruised yellow of a memory you never wanted to inherit. Every chair remembers who once sat in it. Every door still holds the shape of how…
by Ophelia Knight In every ghetto there is a being nicknamed SEXY ________ @ 8:30am they rise mixing Florida water and watching as the rhinestones fall from thrifted applebottom jeans they have grandmothers that kneel in church pews & call on their singular version of Jehovah taking baths in milk clouded with lavender bubble bath tendrils of kanekalon dyed…
by Michael Cooney We talked of a single bird, so early that only the shape of her face was visible to my fingers.Not one, but several, were calling. The darkness was too brief.The glass of water was untouched beside the bed.Did we sleep at all on solstice night? Later, hours later,…
by Samuel Goldsmith Best stuff wads of cotton isolation into syncopated caverns so the sound of honey can’t drip through and glue together memories. Such sweet mortar to lick a pyramid a monument for mourn. Mummified remains of muses who once clasped voices like hands. Those without ears can’t yearn for songs past. Instead they hear the lullaby of fear the sound…
by Hayley Russell I come from the hush of cold mornings, the kind where silence grows like frost along the edges of windows thin, breakable, waiting for light. My mother’s voice cracked open rooms, a stormfront gathering in the doorframe, yet she’d pause, let the hinges breathe, and show me how to listen for smaller truths: the house exhaling after…
by Anna Elizabeth These foothills are too steep For someone like me to climb. And so I lock the doors, And I throw the key away. Let the world spin Without me for a while. Let me cower Under these sheets. Let me learn to breathe When I am suffocating. Exile me to lands Where the speechless speak. Maybe then, I…
by Carmella T. Penny He looks like trees in wintertime; cold and tall, slim— and hard. He smells like leaves and winter pine, spicy, crisp-clean backyard. He sounds like caves at twilight time, rumbling deep, soft— and dark. He feels like breeze, the fresh sublime; light hugs, Fall gray— but scarred.