by mic jones

art by by Rachel Rava

a pronoun can be an emergency
exit a map an experiment
in emancipation like fire
embalming coordinates

let’s make new names what would the world feel
like if gender was understood
the way we understand
a name:
singular
subject to change
sounding different
depending on
through whom
the sound is made

amid mountain ranges
screamed like names
our genders’ echo
sublime as the valley
amplifying bodiless-ness
&

 By Brent Schaeffer 

art curtesy of The University of Chicago on Unsplash

When we got off the train in Paris it was late.
Gare Du Nord looked like a Monet: black
and gray with strokes of gloss. We were lost.
Athena and I slipped into backpacker backpacks and set out
across the city. I had to piss. Like ugly Americans
we stopped at McDonald’s, my ankles killing me,
… We were broke. We took another train north,
hoping it’d be cheaper than Paris. It was.
We got a room for a week—fucked and ate kebabs
from a taco truck thing—just like L.A.—
but colder and somehow romantic.

By Christopher Smith

photo by Ekaterina Astakhova on Pexels 

Wade far enough into the valley, the sun marks banker’s hours.
I sit some shade of darkness two-thirds of every day.

The figure I relate to in the Phaethon myth: that downy little greenhorn
presses Phaethon to prove he’s the chariot’s child.

Who can buy even their own fables about their father?
Portraits of him waving down a sunbeam. Personal olios

of corporate fishing retreats, wood block watchtowers, the empty chair
at back of the theatre.

By Anders Howerton

photo by Colin Remas Brown on flickr

“Vulnerability. The ideal state of a painter. You have to cultivate it.”
– Francesco Clemente

The light has shifted since. It isn’t rushing through the glass
the way it did the day you swirled the cayenne like tiny flames
in the lemon-filled honey jar. It circumvents me now
with its set of parallelograms,

kicks pebbles down my avalanche back.
You are no longer you but a ferryman instead, taking your time
to deliver me at the edge of the blazed bird sanctuary,

By Savannah Slone

photo by Ivan Babydov on Pexels

we were all born during the slow 


fast shift of all things, oil on 


canvas     no time stamp,


among stained glass and wildlife and 


a sea of velvet earlobes and disco glitter


pageantry     while language swelled 


into watercolor during telomere 


replication and 


extreme weather turned our


nothings into artifacts of survival or 


remembrance and colors disappeared 


underwater,

By Christina M Scott

photo by Engin Akyur on Pexels

At night, she feels for the invisible restraints clutching her throat.
Bound by circumstance, she’s unable to freely breathe.
Coveting the blade in her hands,
Death is her fateful companion.
Everyone dies alone.
Forgotten memories of better moments dance at the edge of her mind.
Guilt has set up home here in her thoughts,
Has taken up so so  much space, with no intent to leave.
Inescapable shock paralyzes and pervades her fleshy shell to
Just below her rib-cage,