Archives

& now I’m google searching something like

good songs to recommend for someone trying to kick

 

heroin & clearing the oldest iPhone I have, deleting

my past life photo by photo, stopping at the one you sent me

 

when you had your first baby & I was at the Kimmel

listening to a live jazz band with Alex, & your son,

 

he was all tubes & wrinkled, so I kept the picture

to myself. he will be three in April & it feels like he should be

 

younger. the internet keeps recommending the same song,

some same stale drama, so I play it once, again,

 

but it’s all puppets

with their strings visible, like,

 

we’re on two street & you’re

pulling on my pocket & you’re asking

 

for the flask & I don’t even remember telling you

that I brought one.

 

my dad’s dad hated the mummers.

he called them feather merchants.

 

everything feels like giving up.

let’s steal a rifle & pick off the next

 

& then the next planet’s moons one by one

until we’re even, until it’s simple or simple again.

 

I really thought we had a chance this time.

I just had that feeling—you know?

---

Kimberly Ann Southwick is from Cherry Hill, New Jersey and currently an Assistant Professor at Jacksonville State University. She is the founder and Editor in Chief of the literary journal Gigantic Sequins. Her full-length poetry collection, Orchid Alpha, is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press. Find her on twitter tweeting about being a Philadelphia Eagles fan: @kimannjosouth.

I wanted to grieve

but the garden

was in such a good mood

and the bubbly

blue sky

kept calling C’mon! C’mon!

and I swear

the wind lifted me

like a toddler

onto the burning back

of the sun

galloping in such

a wild and

unbroken way

that not once

did I think of

my mother’s ashes.

---

Andy Macera has received awards from Plainsongs, Mad Poets Review and Philadelphia Poets. His work has also appeared in Pearl, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Drunk Monkeys, Gyroscope Review, Straight Forward, Sierra Nevada Review, Old Red Kimono, Passager and other journals. He has lived in West Chester, Pennsylvania since 1998.

i wish the world would stop for me.

in its tracks, never felt such weight

gracefully crumble onto its palms.

 

i’ve added a couple of pounds

since i started walking the hypotenuse,

driving my life with triangular wheels.

what can i say—i came out of the womb horizontal.

 

how to lessen the weight?

starve yourself of these earthly pleasures.

shelter a cocoon and live and laugh all you want,

but wait until the world doesn’t glare anymore,

 

then the roads are open to rapture.

run as you will—lose more weight,

but swallow that impossible feeling.

it will be weightless gain.

full, impossible to hate again.

i swear i don’t miss the empty well,

where every sip of water is an echo in a spacious cave.

 

to be perfect is to cut skin and bone

and i no longer have to do so.

i am ever-molding surface no more.

my thinning love rhymes with pounds and mounds

and one day i’ll be loved and give love,

but still wonder if the jawline is sharp enough to cut.

 

when there is a way to measure how heavy,

learn to step down from the scale

and keep your worth (or weight) inside you.

after all, even a word sounding as nasty as rapture can mean bliss.

---

王潇 / Evan Wang is a 15-year-old poet from King of Prussia whose work has appeared in Juste Milieu, Bleeding Soul Poetry, The National Poetry Quarterly, etc. He is the recipient of the Youth Appreciation Award and a featured artist in the Our America Now festival. Evan is spellbound by the catharsis of the moving language and worships the pens of Savannah Brown and Ocean Vuong.

how, at the trolley stop, we all have a common mountain.

morning like a tall pine the day starts with, strong and silent;

 

how heavy scarves and hats and gloves sleep

on our bones. that the silver tracks pull around the last stop,

 

by a wash-and-fold where something is always moving,

soap and water hiding the colors of soaked clothes.

 

how standing here is so easily understood: the patience

or impatience, the idleness of hands. how it’s acceptable

 

just to know you’re in the place where something happens,

where the route ends and then again, begins. it’s possible

 

to ride with spare coins, barely treasure, the range of it

like peaks and valleys: to creek or city, to streets and homes.

 

how the waiting here is a good thing, how everyone rushes

just to be in this, this very, this very happening place.

---

Rachel Betesh is a nurse and a gardener who writes poems – at a wooden desk in a 112-year-old house, with the window open. Her poetry has been featured in The New Yorker, long-listed for the 2022 emerging poet prize at Palette Poetry, and is forthcoming in Brink magazine. She rides the #13 trolley through Philadelphia.

You take Street Road back to the world,

pine needles fall nearby.

These places still exist, revisited

like a box of wilted baby pictures in a storage locker.

On a Sunday, you take Broad to Vine to I-95

and you take the exit to Pain and Mercy

and go to the places that kill you.

It all stands before you confident as ghosts.

320 Pine Court is still there and you drive slowly

and out of the passenger side window you see yourself

sprinting out the door

and you see yourself

walking behind Holly

over the pine needles

to the bus stop and the third grade

and your Oldsmobile is not where mom parked it

and a steakhouse replaces the woods you rode your bicycle through

and a wrought-iron gate keeps Street Road from Beech Court

and you want to call Kourtney Melendez and tell her she was the best friend you ever had

but you know that Cyprus and Spruce and Willow

are not to be revisited today.

---

Greg Probst is a teacher, writer, and filmmaker. He is the recipient of the Pam Perkins-Frederick Memorial Scholarship for the Marriage of Art and Poetry and the Dr. Allen Hoey Memorial Scholarship for Short Fiction. His writing has been featured in The Centurion, The Temple News, Hyphen, Rathalla Review, and through the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia. Probst is currently pursuing an MFA degree at Drexel University where he will be teaching first-year composition and creative writing.

Deliciously dark confession

booths and big lightless

pupils with golden

grapes and dead guy

in a glass box. Everyone

so so still. So silent.

Backs of their heads

devotional. Guy restocks

the votives. Clink,

clink, the color glass.

---

Mary Zhou (they/she) is an artist based in Philadelphia. Their poetry is also forthcoming in Oversound and Philadelphia Poet Laureate Trapeta B. Mayson’s Healing Verse Poetry Line. Poetry, both read and written, has carried them through the last two years. You can find them online at marzhou.com.

To read ’69 Mustang by Joshua Barnes, click HERE.

---

Joshua Barnes was born and raised in Boyne City, Michigan, and is now a Philadelphia transplant with a career as a Nurse Manager. His poetry has previously appeared in Kairos Literary Magazine, The Bloom, and has been featured on the Lake County Arts Council website. He’s been a devoted comic book nerd since he was ten. When not writing or working, he can be found reading poetry and horror fiction, perfecting his handstands, or binge-watching Drag Race.

Dominicano soy!
Dominicano soy!
Dominicano soy
in a city of cold.

‘toy cruz’ao
in my heart.
My body, made of bark,
and hair of mango fibers
is rooted to the orderly lines
painted on perfect concrete.

Mi sangre de zapote
doesn’t move with
easy mountain river speed, here
in the
fluorescent white
banks of
fluoride streams.

No puedo bailar
como los arboles de palma en la brisa,
because in the mirror
I see a rigid oak tree
wearing a stiff shirt with tight collar—pero

Dominicano soy!
in the choking alleys
of montaña tall skyscrapers.

Dominicano soy!
barred outside the wide
finca de arroz bright
fashion avenues and high
art boutiques and white
spaces.

Dominican soy!
morenito con sol
in the cold.

Dominicano soy!
while American.

---

Michael Angelo Abreu is a leaf. He takes frequent walks through the Wissahickon woods, musing about life and its many particulars, such as love, happiness, suffering, and spiritual growth. These kaleidoscope ideas find themselves splashed across his poetry. Through his exploration of writing, he seeks not only to further develop his voice but also to obtain a deeper understanding of who or what he is.

In school we learned that there are four types of sentences

classified by their purpose:

To tell, to command, to exclaim, to ask.

I decided that I would not make demands of the world—

even my statements lacked the confidence of a real person.

Even they were a kind of asking.

 

There’s always one crayon that won’t fit back in the box.

I learned to take up the least amount of space,

saving room for the others.

I wanted to erase myself like a misspelled word

rubbing the paper so hard it tears

leaving nothing behind but pink crumbs.

 

The teacher wanted our best work for the authors’ tea,

but I knew my writing was asking too much.

So I wrote a new story, one that was a little charming,

a little funny, but not a lot of anything.

I used as few words as possible

to shorten the length of my voice against the gnawing silence.

 

In my retelling, I stand as tall as an exclamation mark.

I look you all in the eyes and I ask you—

no, I command you

to place your hands on my shoulders, gently, and tell me that one day

I will learn to use my voice to put out fires,

and also, to start them.

---

Sarah Mills is a former English teacher who now works as a freelance writer and editor. Originally from Delaware, she received her bachelor’s degree in English Education from the University of Delaware and her master’s in Literacy and TESOL from Wilmington University. Her poetry has appeared in Glass Mountain. She is currently writing a YA novel. You can visit her at sarahmillswrites.com.