Alex Russell

THree PoeMs

October 11th

I spent my formative years without a
friend group that felt like me and you can tell
I missed out when I try to forge one now.
They had a head start, I think to myself
as I try to think of anything else
(in vain, again, of course). I’ve been on the
defensive ever since I’ve been any
thing at all, and my people would accept
me as I come, I know that, but they want
me to come as it. They don’t want to see
how the self gets made, nobody wants to
help you dismantle falsehoods enough to
see what’s been starving under your armour.
I know if I get it wrong I’ve failed,
even if it’s on the way to something.
Every time I try to find people who
see me enough to not deem me hiding
someone tries to fuck me. I know it’s not
their fault, but I wish I knew how to say
“Please understand, I am a child here.
I’m scared and want to know myself like you.
I’ve been hurt like this while I live a lie,
please don’t make me start real life like it too.”

you write “NOT AT THIS ADDRESS” on the envelope

leave it on the counter
for about seventeen days or so
waiting to take it to the post box
grow sick of seeing it
then recycle it

you know you won’t open
the tupperware left
at least three weeks so long
but save it a while longer
in case you wash it up later
before throwing it out
because you didn’t

sometimes
when you wish people were dead
they already are

Every Nature Poet Is A Huge Nerd

the most exciting thing that doesn’t involve anything actually thrilling is to go into nature and be still enough that it stops being afraid of you
every time a squirrel comes near me i feel accepted
the birds that fly away when i approach are starting to come up to me
it is so beautiful to be loved by things that have been taught to fear outsiders
it is so beautiful to be kind enough to become an insider
it is so beautiful to be kind
it is so kind to be beautiful
it does not matter what you look like when you are being beautiful
i am covered in glitter
and when i cry with happiness
i don't wipe away the tears
because i like the warmth
i text my friends in the underbrush and also the overbrush
i tell them i love them while rabbits come close
everything is wonderful when i let it be
everything is wonderful when i make it

Alex Russell

Alex Russell is a youth worker and poet who is working on being the happiest they've ever been. It's going well.

Starting www.placeholderpress.co.uk really helped.

Twitter: @alexrussellisok

hannah lamb-vines

“Three Poems”

cctv

who watched us kiss

in line for dim sum

at the farmers market

bites of ocean

baked pork buns

mouthmelt

hot coffee, half and

half blueberry donut

sticky rich cake

dystopic

i lust the drone

that hovered

over the marina

gazing

at your arms

around my goose bumps

my short skirt

short sleeves

on the rocks

            wavelapped

you showed me

yesterday, a room expanding

and asked me to be

present

in the moment

elsewhere, genocide

grading papers

sipping milk or soda

a city flapping on the byway

fish and urine sharing scents

the squirrel, fattened without fear

there are worse

words to use

thought crime

if i split myself

open like a fig

expose my inflorescence——

                        unpresent

i live

on someone else's screen

sex is not   a   lobotomy

unmade decision, i want to be

erased     a number of mistakes

misnamed   a dream with cops

cars   cuffs        clicking

violent vibrations in    the

morning after & after      and

all of these mistakes i keep

making my bed  my mind up i

keep         cracking&wagging

where

was i?

this is adrienne rich      in my

mouth   making  you taste bad

& i'm not   like      other girls

might be          evil to assume

sinful to assume     everything

evolutionary    is    everything

identity              having    it all

to assume        anything   evil

soursmell  of  youinthemorning

after  & after all these mistakes

hannah lamb-vines

‬is a writer in the united states of america‭. ‬if you type her name into the search bar at www.google.com you may find a list of‭ ‬her publications‭. ‬she wrote these poems in san francisco‭, ‬california‭, ‬in 2019‭.

Twitter: @embarrassed4evr

James Rosser

“Taking 500,000 Photographs of a Dogwood Tree”

The hospital bed is stuck in an uncomfortable position
where it leans down instead of up, wracking the lumbar,
spreading ribs flat, and coating the bark in pondscum.
Here lies pollen blown over the trailer, skimming water
like oil, clustered like a powdered lotus, sheer as cheddar
muslin. The wind tore the whole fucking tree up and out
of the dirt. I’m as mad as sumac on the skin; even the geese
keep away. I got thousands of bad angles loaded on my Gmail,
and dozens of polaroids littered at my feet like Mamaw’s
dementia. When the light combs through the pine straw
and catches all these cankers just right, I can hear the tree
wheeze like paper wind chimes. Here’s another: here’s me
laid out on these boughs sogged across the muddy banks.
Here’s Papaw strumming his guitar like he ain’t died. Here’s
the mailman come again. Here's me– Here’s the lake–
it’s muddy as hell, catfish water, the water that kills copperheads
with duck boots, and the sky’s never been more clear. A sky
like good meth, a sky like Papa’s up counting rice again,
so we all play vampires or IRS. Here’s all the painted turtles
scraping the wet branches trying to scramble up and catch
the sun in their turtle-shell, a stumbling chalice full of light
teetering on the great wooden snakes, dripping with moss
and dead rings. You gotta watch the collar rot, the eat up
and spit out of the Crown Canker, the bisecting girdle
that strips the skin: so many scars, it looks like a column
of pennies with the bank paper torn to let some slip out.
Ain’t no process to preserving a life stripped away.
Ain’t no point in counting the rings of a dying mother,
stooped over nothing, just a bad back, just a rod here,
five or six epidurals, the fear of burning nerves right out
of her spine. The dogwood blooms droop like sleeping
children over the water, and the twigs droop like it hurts
to carry them. The roots of the trunk spread out like Papa
when he walked too drunk. It’s branches as spindly and knobby
at his twiggy arms gorged on bursitis. Liver stuck out
like the front of an 85’ Silverado. Legs like Marlboro 100s
but this one woman– she takes photos at funerals and shows them
to the family, so there’s Papa all folded up like a paper plane
that didn’t fly far enough. Polaroids ain’t useful. This is no time
to be useful. This is time to sing badly in the woods and scare
deer. This time the tree dies. This time, when Sister Nunez lays
hands on Kimball’s skinless legs, he wakes up and screams.
Right now, this tree is in the cloud, and every roll in its belly,
every elbow on every arm lifts up these forests of fingers
peeling off like stolen cars. They call them leaves because
you haven’t left yet. When you do, you find them. My pictures
are stacking up like crackers on a cheese plate, something
for me to choke on later, after they’ve sat on the table a while.
Across the gravel is the sumac and the poison sumac and the
kudzu. Across the lake is pine trees. Across my heart, the pictures
are going into the computer, and I’m gonna compile them into one
tree froze in this desperate moment. Not twenty feet away,
unripe persimmons hang where I can reach them. A numb mouth
could do me some good. My dry tongue stuck to my dry cheek,
let’s peel off the dead skin and write prayers, because this is
the collar rot to hang in the Louvre, collar rot to be welded
together in front of Fernbank. This is the fall of a redacted summer,
where the leaves all come down at once and we’re left raking
it over. In my room, behind my ugly metal bookshelf Papa made
when he worked at Hon, is an old portrait of some white lady
I don’t know. I remember painting the laundry room, before
I lived here and there being candles all over the place.
The lake catches sunlight all weird. Its surface is like a tarp
shiny in the wrong places. This tree is a winch dragging
me up like a lakebed. The swamp downhill is a cistern
full of undrinkable water. In the hills is a water tower,
and I don’t know if its full or not. I can’t stand a dead
tree. Or a dead metaphor, like that one about holes
nailed into a door frame when you lie. All the Flemish
still lifes look like they were painted in my old barn.
The one they tore down after we lost the house.
Every dogwood tree I’ve hung around winds up sideways.
I hate how much people love the symmetry you find
in a lake shining some fallen thing back. Like a birdworn
branch is more beautiful when the cheapest sky there is
paints some shimmering shade of it. I want the whole thing
on camera. Now I’m taking video. No tripod but I combed
the grass apart so it can watch me dance like an Apostolic.
Gnats in my belly, I eat good. Petals of a dogwood bitter
in my mouth like strong tea. And the leaves, my goodness
the leaves. Far too early in summer for leaves this color.

James Rosser

James Rosser is a fry cook at cedartown Captain D's. They love to talk poetry and videogames, especially at the same time.

Twitter: JLR_III

Tyler Barton

“Midtown”

The poet mopped the floor with us. The poet opened up like a cornered sky and fell on us. The poet felled us. The lights flickered. No drinks were ordered. Nobody rose for the pisser. The poet, a warned-about force, put everything internal up for sale—for free, on the front porch of their voice—and we carried all that we could handle home. For days we walked slower for how the poet had made us feel about trees. We just had to touch every trunk, rub the leaves, smell our hands, and then compose dark, sloppy emails about how it all felt—emails we then sent to the poet, who never responded, but did post online that they were not in a good place, mentally, and then apologized for transgressions no one in the poet’s life remembered.

            A picture of our sorry faces was taken for the paper, and the headline said: THE TOPS OF THESE PEOPLE’S HEADS HAVE BEEN TAKEN OFF BY A POET, and of course we read the article, shared it, clipped it out, pinned it up at work, and watched it watch us wither, all the while turning over the article’s pull-quote: “I think a poem is a dig site. I’m talking archeological. There’s some shit down there,” the poet said. “And I just want one other thing on the record. I’m sorry I couldn’t get through the book-signing without crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

            We promised our loved ones—though later, of course, we failed—that we would never forget how the poet had trounced us. The night of the reading we’d eaten dinner early, or out, or alone as usual, just to be on time for our trouncing. After all, we had come to be trounced, and we had been, had been hurt good and well, had been dunked on, had, with poems, been mopped.

            We didn’t know when to clap, and then—we didn’t know when to stop.

            Our hands still sting from the applause.

Tyler Barton

Tyler Barton is a cofounder of FEAR NO LIT, home of the Submerging Writer Fellowship and Page Match. His chapbook of flash fiction, The Quiet Part Loud, was published in 2019 by Split Lip Press. He lives in Lancaster, PA, which some people call Amish Country.

Twitter: goftyler

Persephone Erin Hudson

“THE CHORUS OF COAL-MINERS”

[The words of the chorus echo, as if they are crawling from a hole so deep the idea of depth loses all coherency. Here is the Underworld Of All Things, terrorformed by the mangled hands of those frozen in childhood by a thick film of soot and ash. The Chorus Of The Coal-Miners sings to each other, speaking echoes to the endless, endless dark, for no traveler will ever hear them.]

where are you
brother
sister
sibling
i am here
            i hear
i am
            hear you
                        i am                                                                            
     here

once we were children
once were we children
                        once we were suffocated to life in a blanket of black dust
            once upon a time
(i cant i dont)
an elsewhere and an elsewhen
(no else nothing else neverwhere and neverwhen,
            nothing but a coldly Dark)
Once there was sunlight and once there was
            A mineshaft that swallowed us whole,
from womb to open throat
i know there was a cradle and there was warmth,
i remember the swaddle of blankets
            a bed of soft and not of rock
                        once there was

Persephone Erin Hudson

Persephone Erin Hudson is a multimedia weird-fiction/horror author, performer, and girl-himbo auteur. She is the author of the theater/poetry anthology "Bird Brains Puts The Dog To Sleep, & Other Memories", as well as the serialized prosetry horror-farce "Deerly Beloved", both available as digital books on Gumroad.

May the children escape into the warm sun, and the Overseers' suffocate in their collapsed mine-shafts.

Author pic is from "Shipwreck" by Warren Ellis, Phil Hester, and Eric Gapstur.

Twitter: @plaguing_possum