Category: Issue 1: Make Us Feel
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Blush
Shannon Poggi Blushing has never particularly enthralled me. I’ve found that most people blush like a kettle’s boil, the color careening down their neck like a hot rash. I’m no different. I often find that I color myself more with sheer embarrassment. I had never seen blush bloom before. I’ve seen it spackle or spot,…
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Lipstick
Shannon Poggi Your lipstick Stains RorschachsOn my skinOn my mugs and my glassesI try to make sense of themPorous butterflies or orchidsI like that you always leave a bitOf yourself with me Shannon Poggi is a writer and illustrator who has been previously published in the House of Long Shadows magazine, Chartium magazine, FERAL: A Journal of…
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Vietnam
Thomas J. Langan Tom, Tom, Tom, and Thomas,that’s how the family tree goes.My grandfather’s eighteenth birthday,humid and bullet-riddled,smelled of gunpowder and tobacco smoke. He would’ve mocked poetry,and hated hippies,though he spent Walden-timeamong the slender firs and red maples,scanning for bucks and turkeys.The tree stand, throne of hardness,bore witness to stillness on duskyNovember mornings.He’d hidden in…
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Grief Together
Bella Racinez A quiet Christmas for the house up the streetA daughter lost in NovemberA father lost in DecemberCold weather, cold feelingsA stone world crumbling down around them Two together, far too soonMore so for one than the otherSuffering solitudeLeading to suffering together TogetherEvents brought loved ones togetherBetter a wedding than a funeralWill the next…
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Basketball Night
Joanne Wilkinson My daughter has become a basketball fan at her school, which means that two or three nights a week I drive there well after dark to pick her up. Tonight is a warmish night in late February, and as I exit the highway, the familiar streets around me steeped in decades of overlapping…
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Crossing the Street
Joanne Wilkinson My mother’s hands were so swollenat the endthat they had to cut her rings off(that’s what they tell me).The tacky Holly Hobbie ring I bought herat the end of second gradeand her wedding ring.They were buried with herand later, when I was thirty-five,her diamond came to me.I look at my hands sometimes–long fingers,…
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Shut Up
Tara Byrnes Shut up. Seriously. Shut up. You cried because they left?You asked for too much.Their boundaries. Not yours.Independence is knowing your place. Those two screamed in your face?You spoke the truth they tried to hide.Say yes, don’t argue, obey.The choice of justice will never be yours. Shaken up because he hit you?You need to…
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Gone
Jen McClanaghan Not for a single dayI don’t think of you. If it’s cloud or shampoo,if rain washes us away. Even bleach can fail,even water, at times, deceives us. One neighbor mowssquares insidesquares. If like a barn dance. On the other side of us,when every bed sinks with breathing,the click of a hundred LEDs,a beat…
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Dating By Luminescence
Jen McClanaghan You’ve entered my bloodat Fox Run and Mariomi.Entered as billions of meteors depositingsilver. You are metamorphic.You are rock unageing like the granitewe climbed before we were born.You were asleep in dust but stillyou found a way in, standing in meupright like grassbefore the flood. Jen McClanaghan’s work has appeared in The New Yorker,…
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Stuck In Nostalgia
Audrey Martin I reach out for memoriesLike a fly soaring towards sticky paperSenselesslyUncontrollablyI gravitate towards a past not fixed. Some thoughts become evanescentStaying hidden in the cove of my chestWhile others stay seen and feltSeeping out from my marrow. The mornings embracing the silent sunDancing with my own silhouette againstA yellowed wall orSwinging on clothes…
Feel Literary Magazine 