Mark Gurarie

“DID STAND-UP FOR THE FIRST TIME”, “dRESSING NEOLIBERAL THIS CHRISTMAS”

DID STAND-UP FOR THE FIRST TIME

The underdog in me is a complete             bullshitter       don’t listen,      
but listen. What can I swipe for you:    this crowded C train?    Two?
Surely not all of New York      pop. 44 million           where the rich too
become meat.     Comedy is people—I exclaim too late—people     
and there are casualties.      12:42 AM and in this joke the eagles are
clinging to their sticks              and there are cops wearing bad-pants     
to the touristy stand-up show.              The one about the sad ham in
the rain    walks into a barn     doesn’t land.           Workshop or kill.

DRESSING NEOLIBERAL THIS CHRISTMAS

Grasping for straws to throw    over the counter    in a poem
about the endangered giraffe     I’m all chin    all hold-over 
oversharing in what      by all accounts     is an aftermath.
Look at me     I’m the last dried rose petal     on the table-cloth:
the crumb     and the shadow of the crumb     and god the horrible calm
of the fascism sometimes.   10:13.     Another dead girl at the border,
and brunch is better than a personality.   I am not going to your 5k. 
Too early in the day     for your shit-post about cleaner streets, Satan.    I’m dead.      

Mark Gurarie

Mark Gurarie is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Everybody's Automat (The Operating System, 2016), and his poems and prose have appeared in Sink Review, Public Pool, Everyday Genius, Ghost City, The Culture Crush, Publishers Weekly and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the New School, which, in 2012 published Pop :: Song, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of its Chapbook Competition. A freelance writer and adjunct professor, he splits time between Florence, MA and Brooklyn, NY, and plays bass guitar in New York-based indie rock band, Galapagos Now!.

Twitter: @chewspoppers

Matt Mitchell

TWO POEMS

I NEVER KEPT A DOLLAR PAST SUNSET

As a boy, I stole buffalo nickels from my grandmother’s top drawer
& put them in a muriel cigar box & buried it

under the thick mud bank protecting the creek behind her house.
After she died, I drank the water from my cupped hands, while mucus drained

down Keith Richards’ throat after doing a line of coke cut with his father’s ashes.
The things that made us will always find a way to crawl back into our grieving mouths.

There is a corner of a road where daffodils bloom like wildfire at the peak of spring,
through Ohio snow, & the head cheerleader of my high school wrapped her car

around a tree protecting the perennials back in ’06. Every March, her mother steals
the bulbs from the earth & stuffs them behind the doorbell of her house.

This isn’t to say everything we lose will eventually find its way back to us;
this is just to say I still taste flecks of copper when I swallow.

EAST COAST PSALM FOR A GOODBYE

on the edge of cape cod, my mother & i spread my grandmother’s
ashes, & said farewell to the wall of her embers dancing in the boston air
above the atlantic ocean. on the one-year anniversary my grandmother’s death,
my mother carries me to the rim of the cuyahoga river, holds my body in-between
her teeth. she throws me into the water, through the bed of ash, & wonders why i can’t swim.

**Author’s Note: This is an excerpt from a poem forthcoming in Half Mystic Journal in 2020.**

Matt Mitchell

Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His words can be found now, or very soon, in venues like BARNHOUSE, NPR, Gordon Square Review, Frontier Poetry, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. He’d love to talk to you about basketball.

Twitter: @matt_mitchell48

Gabrielle Grace Hogan

“omniscience as a mirror”

in the art museum, my favorite exhibit is the furniture,
art that was built only for function,
& most of all, the mirrors.
what flamboyant arrogance to have mirrors in an art museum.
still, i pass through them, or seek to, in my own cockedsure way—

the bees loose in my gut rustle at the thought
of staring long enough into this mirror that someone
will stare back—they try to convince me that nobody’s there,
but i know they’re wrong—the fingerprints are proof enough,
from a hand that once wasn’t decaying.

the plaque reads that this dresser is made from mahogany, ebony,
oak, mirrored glass, gilded bronze, leather, & brass. the plaque reads
that the dresser is french, from 1805. i think about her, some beautiful
french duchess who was born, lived, & died long before i was an embryo.
she leaned forward once, touched the cloud of her neck,

fixed dust fuzz from the glass between her forefinger & thumb
& flung it as far from her as she could. i am in danger of falling in love
with her—what else is new when it comes to me & imaginary women?
no one would be surprised if i died here, waiting to be kissed by a spirit.
it’s very me. i read a vice headline once

inside an underground women’s mud wrestling ring in chicago
& laughed at how unironically i would enjoy watching.
i won’t tell my duchess this, partly because there is too much context
that i can’t give her, but also so she will not realize just how vulgar i can get.
she deserves better than me, mud-caked & baggy-eyed,

but i don’t want her to know that.
i—wing of ceiling fan, supple jellyfish, waveform—shake
when i pull her from the mirror, bring her into this world
like a ring loosed from the thumb. we will nestle
against the museum’s one monet, pretend to listen to frank ocean,

& maybe, once or even twice, laugh. i’ll tell her they call me
a jawline prophecy, that’s what i’ll tell her, that everyone says
i have a jaw that could cut glass, sexy, right?, & she won’t understand
because she only speaks french.
& she’ll turn to the painting, as is the custom in a museum,

& its colors—aquatic greens, damp reds, a purplish-blue so fine
you could smear it, & i will, to make the painting an imitation
of its old self—call that a remix. o damp lamplight
leaking from the ceiling, pray for me, i need a tether stronger
than the nipple hardening in the mouth.

my duchess, you have to go back! don’t try to stay
because the longer i sit here, the less in love with you i will be,
that is purely scientific.
she guides herself back through the frame with little goodbye.
she does not try to stay.

the mirror is now just a mirror, the mirror
is not a portal, the mirror is a reflective surface,
i am looking into the mirror & see only the dust
floating between my face & my other face.
i am looking into the mirror & see only myself.

Gabrielle Grace Hogan

Gabrielle Grace Hogan is a poet from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work can be found in Sonora Review, Lavender Review, Ghost City Review, Arcturus, and others. She is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Texas in Austin. She gets sad sometimes, but that's okay.

Twitter: @gabrielleghogan

Mel Mogollon

“Abue:”

My little cube of rhythm
Gliding light of sound
Attitude with jet black hair
You
My baby
My love 
My                                           time machine

You delicious smoothie of
Lipstick                       and hoops

Are you a little bird now ?
They keep coming by the window 

There gOes my baby / she is trying Death On

            i’M Sorry, I should lower my tone    

This isn’t part of the song but you need to know: her boobs were fake

The way people lay in their beds is the exACT way they will lay in their coffins
did you know ?

That bitch was made of steel 
I cannot believe                  life                   took her                     the way it did

I was in a Fall Out Boy sweatshirt when I opened her coffin

AND THE PRIEST CRIED OUT 

hey !                we don’t do that herE ! 
but Priest ? this is MY BITCH ! 

I gave my grandmother back to the place that makes knots in my throat
I’d slit my feet open each morning on glass
The drunks would hang out at the school playground at night

I bled everywhere I walked for 6 years
My grandmother bandaged my feet      With words like                      show me where you stepped           

And go out at dusk, when the moon came out    With her sharpest heel and  see          target               shoot                        with  Aim so seasoned  
it knew exactly where to go
Her name meant daybreak / The first appearance of light in the sky before the sun
she taught me to be fearless like thAT

She said, 
I was not allowed to tell her I loved her
so I slept next to her every night instead

My grandmother begged me to kill her everyday
to open a window and push her out

I am still trying to figure out how

Mel Mogollon

Mel loves Rhianna.

Twitter: @melmogz

S. Yarberry

“The Cave”

Inside the cave is a cavern and soon
the cavern becomes cavernous, carnivorous. Someone
points. Cranium, says crane. A bird unbends its neck
from its white ovaled torso. Squawks. Flies and flies, forever,
off into the pale, pale, pale...
Inside the cave, the word of it, we get “turned-on,”
we blush, we try to crawl inside each others’ bodies.
We sit like this until one of us disappears.

S. Yarberry

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, Tin House, Indiana Review, The Offing, Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, Sixth Finch, miscellaneous zines, among others. Their other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. S. has a MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis where they now hold the Junior Teaching Fellowship in Poetry—they currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle.

Twitter: @syarberry1