In this café-like hell, my torture is to have my wings and bones sun-dried and grinded into murk of a powder then stirred with a great dash of bile in the coffee syphon.
Then I will be a cup of coffee worth twenty-four hours of man-made time—maybe even longer if I were to spill and stain a paper.
Maybe the day God sends His angels to close up shop or to call me up is the day where brewing comes to a stop.
Harley R. Noire (any pronouns) is the nom de plume of a writer based in Indonesia. They can be found lurking on Twitter/Instagram with the handle @mortalpoems.
It was supposed to be cold. People had worn long coats and scarves and stockings and had complained in the morning about the frost. They had cursed, or they had marveled at the shapes their breath made in the air and, regardless, the half-tamed wind carried their curses and marvellings out away and over the city. Sometimes they died from it, and sometimes they wrapped their arms around each other and carried on with trying to love.
But now it rained, endless and muggy and yellow-gray. It wasn’t cold, because there was no place to get cold. The clouds slept overhead, static, and they hoarded complaints and joy. If they had moved, fragments of sky would have made people a little colder just to see, like ice splinters in the eyes and heart.
They didn’t move. Nobody knew if they could be moved, or possibly nobody asked. Things were wet.
Things were always wet. Things were the miserable wet of old buildings and stairwells. The damp stuck to shoes and jackets and long, dark hair, and, in a room that would have been sunnier in a film, it slipped into the dreams of a girl.
She had her television on, playing static; it was the way she made herself sleep. There was a special static channel which cost a lot. It played through her earbuds while she slept and the ceiling reflected its furious starlight. She dreamed of rivers. The rain and static slipped together in her head, and sounded like falling.
She woke up shivering and had no idea why.
hannah is submitting this piece here so she can get it published, out from under her nails, and start working on more stuff. she doesn’t have much to show off right now.
I’m always itchy when the eyes are watching. They peer at me through curtain folds, peek out from underneath rugs, ogle me from out of the backpacks of passersby on the sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch them leering. The bigger ones are easy to find. I often miss the smaller ones. Just one blink – theirs or mine – and they’re gone. Poof. Blinking out from another little niche. I don’t need to see them to feel them, though. My fingernails slowly dig bloody crevices along my arms, my legs, my stomach, my ribs. Methodically, I scratch all around my body, addicted and disgusted by the painful relief it grants me. When my skin becomes too raw and the stinging pain overcomes any sense of satisfaction, I slap and pull at it instead. Pinching fingerfuls of flesh at a time, I yank it back and forth in a mockery of the itching I desire.
At night, my dreams are plagued with images of ripping my skin clean off of the tendon and muscle it protectively envelops. Sharp-toothed, lipless grins join the watchful eyes. Slavering tongues reach out for a taste. In my nightmares, the eyes and mouths don’t disappear. Insatiable, they multiply, until they’re all my world consists of: them, their hunger, and the pain. If I’m lucky, I wake up.
Otherwise, I go to town ripping apart the rest of my body, feeding myself piece by piece to my demanding audience. It only ends when I’ve nothing left to offer.
Eventually, the eyes will wander away. One by one, they will peter out of my presence. Perhaps they go to feast off some other pour soul. The itching will gradually subside. Soap and water always sting but ointment and salve will bring cooling peace. I will be able to go about my day again, at least until the next time, when my skin is pink and sensitive and fresh for destruction. Relief will come. Right now, I’m still carving tracks into my body. For I’m always itchy when the eyes are watching.
August Blaine Centauri, @hemlockrocksandsocks on insta, is a trickster in a human’s body. Thon is a proud weirdo. In thon spare time, Blaine practices piano, lifts weights, and spars in Muay Thai.
On our worst days, I try not to look at her. Not of fears, not of shame. Not of her gorgeousness, if am not mistaken. Maybe out of love, or out of curiosity about what I feel deep in my shin
But when I do out of courage, out of pain, and view straight into her visage. I see lies, I feel tied to the Beauty in disguise.
Though am wrong, yet She seems to be the norm, an addiction with many thorns.
I bleed, with an ashen face, as it plays In the languid of her glow.
In a saner clime, all seem to bear an aura that smells like faded frankincense.
Isaacoed Buchi Jamie is a writer and the winner of the 2022 Libretto African Anthology Prize (LAAP) award, whose literary works have appeared on many websites. Twitter: https://twitter.com/Isaacoedjamie
Midwestern flower beds are almost as soft as seawater, but only if you ignore the fear of drying out. They are much softer still than the aquarium stares of frightened children behind cold, fingerprint-smudged walls. A tiger shark drags her clumsy fins between daffodils, daisies, and chrysanthemum stems, miles away from her former glass castle. Faint stripes caress yellow petals and waxy leaves as she wiggles and waddles through soft, damp, seed-speckled soil. Am I going in the right direction? Her milky stomach squishes ladybugs and larvae into fertilizer beneath a salmon sunset. Swords for teeth slice vegetation all along the way, like a worm eating tunnels below the garden. Should I just turn back? She breaches, her tiny scales nicking and cutting peonies and poppies on her way upward. Is the safety of home worth my suffocation? The zig and zag of her mouth opens to make room for a beehive hanging from a spindly sapling once held up by strings like tuna nets. Or will that only show everyone that I have failed on my journey? The tiger shark falls back to the flower bed. The pungent honeycombs sink into shards of splintering pearls and snow-capped Himalayas. What if I don’t find what I’m looking for? Yellow sugar, a slower molasses, drips down the predator’s pink gums as her sandpaper body flops back onto the mud and mulch of the garden. Do I even know what I’m looking for? The shark’s dorsal fin sinks into soil like a trowel. Suspended,upside-down, her tail swishes back and forth through the air. What if I die here? Breadwinning bees return to their sticky home stuck between jaws, spikes going unnoticed, new decor mounted on the walls of the queen’s quarters. Will it always feel this hard? Paths of drool and honey roll down the snout of the shark and pool on the ground where crushed buttercups soak up their last rays of sun and sweetener. The salmon sky turns from goldfish to royal gramma and fades into orca’s eye. Is this really where I’m meant to be? Daybreak yellow honey becomes gooey almond crust along the shark’s jowls. Is it like this for everyone?
—if she just keeps moving her tail, the sky looks every bit as wide as water—honey tastes every bit as rusty and salty as the blood of a reckless seagull—a forget-me-not feels every bit as fragile as a ripple interrupted by a wave.
Haley Byer is a lesbian poet from Ohio. She received her BFA in creative writing and sociology from Bowling Green State University. Her work has been published in Prairie Margins and Bandit Fiction.
I remember the first time I held a sewing needle, so long in my tiny palm. Closing my hand around it, its pinch forcing my fingers to spring open. Mother’s fear when she saw I bled gold, not scarlet. How she sent me away, as the law mandated, ignoring her own inevitable loneliness.
I remember my first apprenticeship with the seamstress in a village far away. How she rapped my knuckles with a ruler for not threading correctly. My concentration on the needle’s eye, poking out my tongue, squinting with one eye of my own. My triumph when I threaded a hundred needles in a row.
I remember the stories the apprentices shared in whispers Of a prince who treated his own like rubbish. Who claimed the entire world lived at his feet. Whose sister, the princess, had not been seen in years.
I remember the prince’s first visit, my gaze going to the stitches on his shoulders. His lofty demands for garments finer than any in all the kingdoms. Staying up day and night to design and cut, to baste and scrutinize. The prince’s disbelief when he came for his fitting.
I remember the first time I stepped inside the castle, trying not to gawk. Spending my days determined to find the princess, and her terror when I finally did. Ignoring the stench in the windowless room. Fighting for weeks to gain her trust.
I remember drawing blood in front of the princess. Her gasps pressed back with a hand, her question of why I’d come. Telling her my calling was to fight the injustice she endured And that I would do so with needle and thread, not sword and politics.
I remember my needle flying as I gathered information, Listening to accusations behind fans and bound by seamstress’s tape. Learning how the women tolerated the worst against themselves Because the prince threatened to poison their families against them.
I remember letting a stray thought unspool aloud When the right people came for measurements and fittings. Raising my eyebrows in innocence at the hints of what I’d heard, Narrowing my eyes in revenge at what I knew to be true.
I remember the prince boasting of my talents. Even for one of the gold-blooded, he said, I could behave in a “seemly” manner. I bowed my head to pretend to be demure Even as his sister began holding her head high for her true place in the castle.
I remember the day the princess knelt to be crowned. How she rose with pride, smoothed the front of her elaborate gown. The finest stitches I ever produced clothing her in power and glory. As her brother lay in tatters in the dungeon below.
I remember extracting a promise from the queen, That the gold-blooded would no longer be ostracized And would find their place in society Just as she had finally found hers.
I remember the grateful nod she gave, The announcement in open court that the gold-blooded would now serve as royal tailors. The way I closed my palm around a needle once again, Drawing a drop of golden blood, my quest realized flowing into my hand.
The sound of your heart like a boombox to my ears, I am pressing myself further into your skin, eyes closing. Your scent overtakes my senses.
Don’t move, please. I am trying to melt myself into you.
Pulp Fiction Breakfast
A hand squeezed orange found on a countertop. Next to it, a kitchen knife of sizable proportions.
(Out of focus, in background)
The motion of two blurred individuals, (like looking at two flies walking across a window in the morning, with your eyes half open).
Motion intensifies gradually. Then violently. A splatter of blood, an inhale.
A door slams.
The Sound of a body dropping heavy on the floor and a ray of sunshine washing over it. The dust settles.
Then, quiet.
The orange is still there, pulp everywhere. Used up, violently discarded, it lays
next to a kitchen knife of sizable proportions.
Like honey
I close my eyes and I fall, in slow motion. The nothingness inside myself is thick, like honey, and sickly sweet too. The only way to survive the quicksand is to let it drown you.
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES
When I opened my eyes, You were there, The lights gathering around you Like a neon halo
I blinked, and blinked again, thinking I’d Imagined you, that there was no way you’d come All this way for… me? But There you were; Sitting sideways on a small, uncomfortable, hospital chair Crooked glasses sitting pretty on the tall bridge of your nose, Fingers delicately turning the pages of a book.
Even now I think about it. How my emotions went into overdrive and I cried so hard the nurses wanted to sedate me.
Even now I think about it. Think about how i left the hospital as a duffle bag of human pieces, And you drove me home and put the parts back together. No instructions needed. All done by heart.
I want you to know I remember all of it. I want you to know that I know We’ve left each other in every known way since then But I remember what you did for me then.
I remember the night you became my fluorescent angel.
Bouquet of memories
Do you ever feel like you’re Withering away, like an old bouquet of flowers left up on a shelf to dry? A token of a forgotten celebration, It’s soft petals turning rigid, and then crumbling slowly becoming dust. Their remains leaving a dull ache, like a bruise, on your stomach, reminding you of how you, too, will age and fade; crumble, Die. The only proof of the bouquet’s beauty is now stored solely in old, sepia-toned memories. Nothing palpable. Nothing real. Not anymore. Did it ever even exist anyway? Why mourn the death of a bouquet, anyway? Weren’t the flowers dead to begin with, anyway?
Musings
The coldness of heartbreak seems to have made a house of my bones.
cliché
laying on the roof like a sunbathing tourist on a chaise-longue a white silhouette staring at the blackness of space thinking of how pretty the stars are and how they’ve been dead for centuries and how she read somewhere that beauty and decay are intertwined and how summer makes everything slow down, fills your lungs with warm air
melancholia settles into your skin.
symbolist poets associated summer with the rotting of flesh and suffocation.
symbolists and their macabre interpretations everything is suffocating
loneliness is the innate state of the universe
summer is suffocating because it makes you aware of how alone you are and how alone everything is and has been and will be
forever
and beyond that.
Static
I feel like im being slowly sandpapered away. Scraped at the edges until i slowly become smaller, less defined. TV static for skin, and eyes, and mind. A monochromatic buzz of a person. “Who am I?” has not been the question for some time now. Now it’s just: “Am I?” Do I exist to anyone else than myself? I don’t know. I hardly think I exist even to myself, nowadays
Pomegranate
Your mother breaks open the pomegranate, with her calloused hands and rotten flesh spills out, falling onto the tablecloth, brown-red stains spreading slowly, like a fresh wound, mocking you.
Blood blooms on white, a spreading fire. Fury roots itself in the pit of your stomach, like a fishhook through the mouth. If you are to become a tragedy, let it be violent.
Looking up into the blinding light of the sun You refuse to be the lamb. The sneering Gods crave flesh and blood, and they shall have plenty.
Is anyone listening?
It’s been a while since I thought about you and didn’t cry. I press my cheek into the damp earth and close my eyes, as the sun shines above. Nature soothes me like a mother.
The quiet is so loud it feels like drowning. In my bad ear, I can hear blood rushing through me. Hello? …Anyone?
I slip my fingers through blades of grass, tether to the world. I’ve never truly learned to grieve, and I’ve never had much faith, but perhaps this is enough.
If there’s anything out there, and if it’s where you are, I hope it feels like this. Quiet, and soft, and green.
I hope it’s peaceful.
Ghost
It comes in flashes now. Stop-motion frames, one following another endlessly. Snap. Snap. Snap.
Your father’s face staring back at you, and you can hear him laughing, you can smell the tobacco on his skin. Dreaming of him, night after night after night. Laying in bed, trying to forget the way the wind whispered to you on that day in May.
If you close your eyes and feel the breeze fly through the blades of grass. If you breathe in the smell of blooming lilac, you can almost pretend it’s not him under that dirt.
Pretend like the drying flowers and the burned out candles and the blinding white stone are not real.
Pretend like the bags under your eyes aren’t filled with ghosts of your past.
How it all goes by…
Sometimes, grief knocks into me with the force and speed of a freight train. Other times, it rises like the tide, slow and steady, conversing with the Moon. Most days, it’s a breeze, a slight, continuous movement of air throughout your body. Something you feel, but aren’t aware of unless you take a moment to think about it. On worse days, it’s a dam breaking. It’s very difficult to patch the whole thing back up.
Some days, I cling to it. It’s all I have left.
23 y/o writer just trying her best. @oreiadae – Twitter
If I were to get a tattoo, it would be of your smile on the face of a wild salmon. Some caricature of its flushed body, plucky eyeballs, and your jutting Cupid’s bow tugged upwards. I want to stitch you into my skin. But that image is too intricate for this morning. This morning is for poking at your mushrooms and watching the sunlight transform our bed into something noble. The sun rises, and with it do the stripes on your arm. Shadow-sun-shadow-sun. One minute my bite mark burns orange, the next it’s faded; this old epidermis, this decaying fungi.
Amelia is a college student majoring English. She loves A24 horror films, fantasy novels, and dissecting characters on the Personality Database.
The new threshold is the space from your forearm and shoulder to mine It is the size of the casual intimacy in a small discovered thing You tell me the end of a whodunnit without spoiling it somehow I sink into the uncomfortable temerity of loving someone for the first time The humming, the infernal humming between us, as we sing softly
Vale is a monster-loving, ADHD-managing, hubris-wrestling non-binary theatre practitioner and scholar. twitter: @evillittlevale IG: @evillittlepoet
One: My emotions are enormous and I’m on the brink of a collapse.
I’ve seen six cars pull u-turns today,
Most of them were trying to catch a parking spot,
But it still felt dangerous and chaotic.
The grass under a street lamp was wet
and it looked like someone had spilled
a million little diamond shards
on the lush green carpet of nature.
I just want to curl up under a bush, while ten thousand years pass me by,
And cry.
Will the future ever be clear?
Two: You can’t pay me to not isolate.
Cover yourself and hide within the caverns of your mind.
Surround yourself with dirt and peel away the walls.
“No one comes around here anymore,” the judge says to the security guard as he’s locking up just past midnight.
This town doesn’t feel the same with all the doors locked and no good-mornings, or good-nights.
I can’t remember my last good night,
But
Secretly…
I fucking love this,
And could nurse the fear forever.
Three: It’s time to give up, I’m surrounded.
The tv blares in the background and I scroll through insta, tweet-sphere, and the book of faces faster than I can understand what I’m seeing.
But I’m still sitting here cold, isolated, and lonely.
For a society with constant online engagement, and information & connectivity at the punch of a button, why do I feel like no one knows me.
Someone,
Call me!
I need to explore my dreams, and vent my disturbances.
My brain does somersaults when I try to explain that we are more connected than ever, thanks to the interwebs.
But are we really connecting?
How did my last promotion make me feel?
What was my biggest dream last year?
Who is my secret crush,
and who am I fucking?
Either no one cares, or society has crumbled…
crumbled into us all being alone, ghosts passing through each other with mild formalities and forgotten sneers,
smiles plastered on our billboard-like faces.
Mental and physical loneliness, a real pain tbh.
I may just die without anyone ever really knowing me.
Just like in all my past lives.
Timothy Arliss OBrien is an artist in music composition and writing. He hosts the podcast The Poet Heroic and has created and published several zines of poetry. www.timothyarlissobrien.com
Unstamatic 