• Poems

    Sarah Gokhale: “Britney”

    Sarah Gokhale

    Britney

    I’m on Zoom with my manager, Stephen, at 7 A.M. giving my three weeks notice because my coworker sexually harassed our other coworker and our organization took the harasser’s side, but I’m distracted because Sasha keeps FaceTiming me to tell me that Britney Spears just got arrested for a DUI and I’d so much rather dissect that situation than this one, but I can’t bail so I have to act serious and calm while I explain to Stephen that the disgust he feels in our harasser coworker’s presence is very importantly not the same feeling as the actual fear for my bodily safety and autonomy I feel around him and after my second time trying to explain this to Stephen I hang up and call Sasha about Britney and then I gawk at Twitter pictures of Connor Storrie and Francois Arnaud from the GLAAD awards last night in my car without air conditioning while I wait for my burrito to be ready at the taco truck where a likely undocumented dude backs up straight into my car and we don’t know how to solve the problem because he doesn’t have insurance and I don’t know where my insurance card is, and my Spanish is at its worst when I’m on ketamine, which I only did this early in the morning because I just quit my job because my friend got raped, and those things make me feel stressed, and nobody at the taco truck speaks English, but it’s fine because the dude who ran into me gives me a $100 bill and we fist bump and call it even.

     

    Sarah Gokhale is a producer from Orange County, California. Her favorite condiments are Trader Joe’s jalapeno sauce and burrata. Her Mexican street dog’s favorite condiment is cream cheese. Her favorite soccer player is Rose Lavelle. She thinks Electrolit is better than Gatorade. Her favorite American cities are NYC, Albuquerque, and Philly. https://twobrainsonecell.substack.com/.

  • Poems

    Jimmy Pappas: “What I Learned in Vietnam”

    Jimmy Pappas

    What I Learned in Vietnam

    That it’s always best to avoid hand-to-hand combat.
    That the black market is a great place to go shopping.
    That a flush toilet deserves to be called a throne.
    That tear gas has earned its name.
    That rats can grow to the size of a small dog.
    That some soldiers get their kicks by taking pictures of mutilated bodies.
    That marijuana can be laced with opium to make it addictive.
    That morphine users on the street keep a dog nearby for serum.
    That prostitutes can be just as worthy of love as any other person.
    That it’s always nice to be called Number One.
    That bigotry exists everywhere in the world.
    That you should always accept food from someone who can’t afford to give it to you.
    That chopsticks are used to push rice into your mouth.
    That human beings get swept away by forces beyond their control.
    That we must keep relearning how people are always the same, only their culture is different.
    That, in general, soldiers on all sides try to do their job right.
    That, in general, civilians go to a war zone to make money.
    That cigarette, beer, and weapons manufacturers make a fortune on war.
    That wars must be separated from the soldiers who fight them.
    That men fight in a war because they love it.
    That every father is proud of his son going off to war.
    That soldiers who return home from a war zone suffer from terminal ennui.
    That human beings can live through the most devastating of injuries.
    That saving the life of every soldier wounded in combat may not be the best idea.
    That only a small percentage of personnel involved in a war are combat soldiers.
    That war goes unnoticed without cameras to film it.
    That freedom is an illusion I never want to live without.
    That once you enter a war, it will never leave you.

     

    Jimmy Pappas won the Rattle Chapbook Contest with Falling off the Empire State Building and the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story.” His nominations include two for the Pushcart Prize, one for the Best of the Net, and two for a Touchstone award. He moderates a weekly, themed Zoom event called “A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends.”

  • Poems

    AP Ritchey: “A Reunion”

    AP Ritchey

    A Reunion

    Despite no running water,
    a crib without a mattress,
    and drugs visible on the coffee table,
    the caseworker,
    following court orders,
    reunited the family.

    She signed where indicated.
    Initialed the margin.
    Drove home
    with the radio off.

    That night,
    drying dishes,
    she stared past
    her reflection
    in the kitchen window
    at the empty playpen behind her,
    the dark television
    no longer showing cartoons,
    and the unopened boxes of
    mac and cheese
    stacked on the counter,
    and stood there
    long after.

    AP Ritchey’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Zodiac Review, Rat Bag Lit, After/Thought, SciFi Shorts, and Typishly, among others.

  • Poems

    Charlotte Poitras: “Gunshot”

    Charlotte Poitras

    Gunshot

    You dragged your own lightning to prison
    because you believed
    it deserved punishment
    instead of healing.

    They released it
    the next morning.

    I once offered you a blanket
    so you could sleep.
    You folded it away.

    The fire rummaged through its own house first
    but never managed to inhale it.

    It had already devoured yours
    and still wanted more.

    A Molotov cocktail
    ate through your insides
    ten metal carcasses per night.
    Your flesh blackened
    from the inside out.

    Fire-breather,
    you aimed your torch at her
    dazzled the ones who came
    seeking blindness.
    The light was so violent
    the alarm never rang.

    “The embers will exhaust themselves.”

    My charred fingers
    dialed three numbers
    hoping the ringing in my ears
    would dissolve into:

    “He’s holding the match
    but hasn’t struck it yet.
    We can’t stop him.”

    I testified
    right hand raised
    about the ember inside you
    the one that threatens to swallow everything,
    the forest fire
    tearing our roots from the soil.

    They let you burn.

    I cried
    Fire. Fire.

    No one attended
    my cremation.

    A straw fire dies on its own
    once you find
    a brick hearth
    to cradle your heat.

    Flame,
    you do not extinguish.

    And I warm myself
    by remembering
    I tried
    to smother the disaster,

    But no water
    would flow.

     

    Charlotte Poitras is a queer neurodivergent artist-entrepreneur based in Montréal. Her practice is autobiographical or documentary, spanning literature, theatre, visual arts, and audiovisual work, with over one hundred publications. Her mission is to listen to the world and transmit the murmurs that society has failed to hear.

  • Poems

    B Wagner: “Just Passing”

    B Wagner

    Just Passing

    As a child with pet hamsters
    I learned the basics needs for a decent life.
    Clean water, fresh food,
    A safe place to sleep
    (Away from your excretions).
    A roof overhead.
    A few scraps of felt for softer nests would be nice.
    A feeling of being cared for.
    Not essential.

    I knew in my bones when that first one died.
    I didn’t need to check the rise and fall of its little ribs.
    Its head lolled, rolled backward
    At an impossible angle.

    Today I passed a man lying on the ground,
    Surrounded by plastic bags, his feet dirty.
    I can’t be certain if his chest moved.
    But the position of the head seemed ok.
    I walked on.

     

    B Wagner is a research physician developing drugs to fight AIDS, cancer, and severe autoimmune diseases. She has worked as an infectious disease doctor, treating patients with HIV/AIDS. My work explores themes of nature, healthcare, and the early death of her wife. Publications include The Scarred Tree, and in several anthologies, including The National Library of Poets.

  • Poems

    Howie Good: “Maggots”

    Howie Good

    Maggots

    Men at the highest levels of government
    whose diseased brains breed maggots
    eagerly plot the next round of war. History knows
    of things we refuse to acknowledge,
    the gratuitous collapse of civilizations,
    the corpses of children buried under the rubble.
    Any hill town or industrial city can be
    rechristened with bombs.

    Howie Good is a widely published but little-known poet whose new poetry collection is True Crime from Berlin-based Sacred Parasite Press.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “Fitting”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    Fitting

    The day of the air raids
    everyone around me placed an index finger
    on their lips
    don’t make a sound
    press into that corner
    pretend you are not there
    how much I wished I were
    the mouse
    slipping into dark cracks
    vanishing toward nothing
    but I survived that day.
    I grew larger and larger
    until my narratives
    could no longer fit into holes.
    Sometimes I still try to squeeze into cracks
    only to pull my sunken parts back out.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “A Letter from Rojava”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time
    —Elie Wiesel

    A Letter from Rojava

    Dear World,

    If you sell me to a museum,
    kindly place my severed parts
    behind glass.
    Annotate the mushroom cloud
    hovering over my history.
    Display the knife
    lodged in a sliced land.
    Hang my grief
    along the walls.
    Play my exiled songs loud
    until the space turns indigo.
    Show that these bones
    are not composed of myth.
    But do not place “was”
    after “this genocide.”
    There is no space for “was”
    in the grammar
    of a million mourning hearts.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “Aftermath”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    Aftermath

    Each time he finishes spraying,
    picking, or pruning,
    he gazes out over the vineyard
    as if the buried might rise again.

    Before resettlement,
    my dad drove a shovel truck
    the engine’s growl
    tearing through the grey air
    along mountain slopes.
    He carved roads
    that sometimes led
    to the darkest destinations.
    On his way to work,
    he’d pass bodies in uniform –
    piles of them
    and had to bury them,
    war after war
    after war.
    Now, forty summers on,
    dad stands among the vines,
    listening for voices
    we can never hear.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sarwa Azeez: “Outliving the Day”

    Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

    Sarwa Azeez

    Outliving the Day

    Some days stretch so far
    I feel I have outlived
    a clock bloated with revolutions and genocides.

    My insomnia stands like a mountain
    from which killed dreams
    bleed into the sky.
    I keep counting
    until minutes turn to ghosts,
    until my back becomes a mother’s back,
    bent around her child,
    limbs loose and pendulous,
    head fallen backward
    under the weight of war.
    Which world
    has he crossed into now
    whether he is sheltered,
    given food and toys,
    or told, once again,
    he does not belong
    to this life.

     

    Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.

  • Poems

    Sam Aureli: “Heard from the Pew”

    Sam Aureli

    Heard from the Pew

    They told us what to fear, starting with music—how certain sounds could slip into the body, loosen it, make it forget itself. Burn the records. Bury them. Keep your hips still, spine straight, as if God listened to only one tempo, one clean and obedient noise. We nodded because nodding was easier than asking why joy always needed supervision. They told us Jesus turned water into grape juice, said it plainly, without smiling, as if weddings were solemn affairs and no one there would notice what was missing. They told us God chose nations the way we chose teams, and everyone knew which flag He waved. Jesus would vote like us, and I pictured Him stitched into red, white, and blue, the gospel folded small enough to carry into a booth. They spoke often about money—give it freely, it would wait for us later, stored somewhere clean and bright, while someone else always seemed well-fed, well-dressed, blessed in ways that looked like comfort. Suffering, they promised, was temporary; endure enough of it and reward would come, and then, without pausing, prosperity too, obedience working like a transaction, blessings falling on the faithful like manna. Prayer, they explained, worked best when you were emptied out, when pain pressed you thin enough to be useful, while doubt was weight you carried alone, proof you hadn’t tried hard enough. They sang after that, the organ swelling, voices rising around us, sure and loud, and we stood because everyone stood, knees locking, breath held, while I turned their words over in my hands like something misshapen, unfamiliar, wondering when faith became a test you were already failing, and whether it was ever meant to feel this tight around the chest.

     

    Sam Aureli is a design and construction professional, originally from Italy, now calling the Boston area home. A first-generation college graduate, he’s spent decades immersed in concrete and steel. Poetry is what truly feeds his soul these days. His work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, West Trade Review, Chestnut Review, and other literary journals. Sam was also the Grand Prize Winner in The October Project’s 2025 Poetry Contest, a Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review 2025 International Poetry Competition, and a finalist in the Good Life Poetry HoneyBee Prize.

  • Poems

    B Wagner: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

    B Wagner

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

    Come sit by the fire, Madiba,
    May I call you that?
    Warm your tired noble bones.

    Twenty years in prison
    isolated, shackled, cracking rocks
    on that barren island.
    You forgave.

    Freed, with you, we walked in sunshine.
    We swayed and sang.
    In vivid tribal robes, we danced
    wove threads of hope.
    You forgave.

    Our brothers disappeared.
    Then tossed back broken.
    You forgave.

    But sir, you asked so much.

    In crowded, airless courtrooms,
    men still in uniform, eyes unfocused,
    spat confessions of brutality
    punctuated by mothers’ raw wails.
    Smelt their indifference.

    My eyes now stitched wide open,
    I ache for revenge,
    for blood.

    Tendrils of fog float
    down from the Dragon Mountains.
    The fire crackles.
    You hold my hand.

    My child, what else could I have done?

     

    B Wagner was born in South Africa, and although she left when she was young, she has visited many times. She once shook Desmond Tutu’s hand. SHe worked briefly at the Baragwnath hospital in the Sweto Township. Steve Beko and others didn’t make it back even to the hospital and were chucked dead.  She would like to be on the side that this committee was “a good thing”. Sadly for her, it did little to mend wounds, and the men who committed this horror got off scot free.

  • Poems

    Howie Good: “The Killers”

    Howie Good

    The Killers

    Jesus appears at my bedside one morning. I’m still bleary-eyed from sleep. He shows me the holes in his hands and feet and the wound in his side. Back when I was teaching at the University of North Dakota, a student of mine had had both hands blown off in the mountain jungles of Guatemala while serving in the U.S. Special Forces. “Follow the blood trail,” Jesus tells me, “then come back and I’ll love you forever.” The best I can do is promise to try. It’s the end of the so-called “American century.” Conscienceless killers disguised as police are prowling factories and airports and schools for new victims, and all with the sanction of a government of liars and thieves. The lamp beside the golden door has gone out. My grandparents were poor Jews from the shtetl – in current parlance, “garbage people” from “shithole countries.” And just look at me. My face, with its hollows and raised patches, its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a map, sort of, a map of a country I no longer recognize.

     

    Howie Good, a professor emeritus, has written and edited textbooks on media ethics.

  • Poems

    Amanda Swenson “How We Forget”

    Amanda Swenson

    How We Forget

    It is snowing outside again, and I think of eating candy cigarettes with a boy at the top of the jungle gym slide. I had forgotten my gloves, and my hands were stiff and cold. A beaming red at the joints.

    Too many boys, too many memories. I don’t remember his name, but this boy told me he wanted to fall in love. I just wanted to chew on my candy cigarette.

    He touched my thigh, under my scrap jeans.

    This boy was like so many other boys attempting to fumble and grapple toward his own knowledge and understanding of the world. A nod, a no.

    In the cold, forlorn winters in North Dakota, whispers and gossip shrink over those white, salted streets until nary a person didn’t know a name, form an opinion, or lean over a table and say with bated breath, “Did you know…?” Over quiet dinners, in gentle homes, across roads with sweet, serene smiles those harsh words drove stakes and deaths into realities.

    The boy’s home was a beautiful home with white carpets, a piano, and a fridge full of food that rich people eat. I had never seen such food. Food like avocados and mangoes and quinoa. Words like “organic.” Words I would mispronounce time and time again.

    I knew that boy wanted to fuck me. Like all those boys did. He took my hand and smiled. He swallowed hard, his throat muscle flexing, and then he grinned.

    I always turned away from those boys and closed my eyes. How hard it was becoming each time with each different boy, the world pressing harder upon me. In my fantasies, my life was colorful and beautiful and not tainted by the grey landscape I just couldn’t run away from.

     

    Amanda Swenson is a horse girl.

  • Poems

    Ryan McCarty “Because The News Was Already Saying No Foul Play Before Anybody Thought To Call Trey Reed’s Mom”

    Ryan McCarty

    Because The News Was Already Saying No Foul Play Before Anybody Thought To Call Trey Reed’s Mom

    I don’t usually like to talk to you,
    but America, I can’t live with it. I’m sick
    like the sweat of the trash
    can left lidded up. I’m sick
    of the rotten things under, making
    the stench. I’m sick of knowing it
    might be some bodies. But good
    god, even worse, I can’t take the boldness –
    the bravado it takes to hang folks out to die
    then it’s all just a shrug and a nothing to see
    here, when you know we can’t not look
    because the bloated eyes
    are staring at us. The lids are half
    dropped like the flags after one
    fascist fetches what he’s been selling
    but nothing comes down for us
    except some bad news knocking at the door.
    Dozens and hundreds and thousands of us
    tap out and say no more
    and the knee stays right there. And we say it wasn’t me
    who took the hostages, and the soldier
    and the senator and the donor say but you keep taking
    more and more breaths so here come more bombs.
    And my neighbor is crying
    because she doesn’t know
    where her son’s been taken or if the faces
    under the masks were smiling, but she suspects
    she knows. And another neighbor can’t figure out
    how to carry enough in her two small arms
    while the landlord’s dragging her niece’s bed
    down the driveway and there are books
    with butterflies on them flying down the block
    and the sanitation department’s asking
    for a forwarding address
    to send her a fine for all this litter along the curb.
    And my daughter is watching.
    She keeps getting pamphlets to submit her work
    for the Celebrating Our Differences youth art show
    but she can’t figure out how to draw
    the empty sound of the classroom
    every time a friend see their father’s ghost
    waiting at the door next to me at parent pick up.
    And that’s the difference
    I can’t take anymore, America, you just gotta be fair.
    You gotta kill everyone and be done – me, the other
    teachers, the veterans waiting for mercy
    on the offramp, the customers with stuffed bags
    who round up for kids healthcare, the old men
    ringing bells for change, school kids waving
    off the flies from a grandmother looking
    for a home that’s long gone, construction workers
    staring down mandatory hour reduction still
    filling in the ground with steaming tar that they know
    will never stay in place, the EMT who still considers
    giving mouth to mouth if there’s any hope
    it will bring just one of us gasping
    back to our bodies and a chance to live
    the good life, anyone who’s trying to live
    the good life, just smoke us all – every last singer
    and sharer and gardener and seat giver upper
    on the bus – every last breathing one of us.
    Burn us up and seed the hole opening in the sky overhead.
    Find out how you like living with yourself,
    while we take a break, waiting as the clouds
    go dark over our memory, getting ready to rain
    down on you, then grow up like a billion weeds
    going to seed and you’ll never clear us away.

     

    Ryan McCarty is a writer, teacher, and community do-what-he-can. His writing has been published recently in The Ann Arbor Observer, Coal City Review, Collateral, Dunes Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Left Voice, MQR Online, One Art, and Writers Resist, but it almost always appears first on the bus between home and work.

  • Poems

    Two poems by Brendan Dawson

    Brendan Dawson

    What Leaders Wonder

    His knee strikes the dangerous ground with an inch of cratered sand around the cap
    Helmut brass shimmers brighter than all others beaming upward at arms distance

    His command to gather the Stripes skips down the chain with reticent vigor
    And the Stripes arrive forming a wagon wheel around him

    Dirt and sweat clot on dry canvas as hope evaporates on rifles’ ends
    His hand motion clears the sand table of what just happened

    His single finger extends to pen the plan on which this victory depends
    To regain favor, he scratches and scatters with blood in mud

    Then with punctuating fists, audacity and tenacity, brave and bold
    He orders another attack, Straight down the middle!

    The Stripes stare a tunnel of open eyes and closed mouths detouring words
    A pause for perception, a rest of reflection, a call for collection, a time of thought

    Fissured throats clear a flattering call for imagination
    Silence stretches seconds as intuition shifts in smoke

    Not to reconsider but to limit any further response
    His order is clear and concise, What don’t you understand?

    All Stripes rise to attention and groom their disciplined hesitation
    To go straight in for a grateful nation that will not remember

    Later, at a lull in the gun blasts, he wonders what leaders do
    What are the Stripes thinking? and Why do they go?

    Bruised Fruit

    No one knows, but I’m as bruised as a pretty piece of fruit. That shining one hung on the shelf with a tempting appearance of having it all together. The one that everyone saw distinguished with displayed decor on stippled skin. So fine on the vine but too firm to the touch and rough scented enough to upturn noses and depart emptied hands. Under my packaging, I’ve collected layers of damaged pulp that you will not believe. I was better than others at holding it in but punished for doing the same. I hid the evidence of pokes and squeezes without any indication of the unspoken. And over time, I softened my rind and fooled those fools that missed my bruises. They weighed me against myself, and I faded in short time compared with others’ true beauty. They took me home where I didn’t pass the test of knives applied or survive the slices of side or the spoons’ scooped at my core. I’m tossed aside, disgusted with disregard, discarded here alone, peeled, and frail. The air has blended the bruise lines across my fruit and exposed the lies held inside. Nothing that was me remains about what I truly am now. A bruised piece of fruit.

     

    Brendan Dawson is an American-born poet and writer based in Italy. Brendan writes from his observations while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time serving in the military and journey as an expat.