by Tiffany Jimenez

It was lunchtime at work
and I was missing you.
Less than an ounce of breastmilk released
though I was swollen with what I’d thought was at least one bottle’s worth built up.
I cried a little
and compared myself to my friends
who had milk to spare
after weaning their littles off of them.
Their breasts larger-and-smaller than mine.
I cried some more when I thought about the night before:
How you kept pinching me with your fat fingers and how I’d screamed!
In the tiny privacy room,
I pinch and punch and twist and massage
hoping there’s more inside of me because I could’ve sworn there was.

Tiffany Jimenez is from Oakland, California. She earned her BA in Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz, and her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California. Other than being an ardent supporter of the imagination and the art of storytelling, she writes a lot, laughs a lot, startles easily, and loves potatoes. She is on Twitter @tiffunnyj and her website is tiffanyjimenez.com.

by Celeste Schueler

CW: Medical imagery.

Body overcome with labor.
Did I dream of an open wound
the night before?
Dreamt you were holding my hand
yet my hands were numb.
I could not hold them.

I did not feel my belly being cut open
down to the uterus
but the scar is under my sagging.

It was a rush, the feeling of my body being pulled
apart to birth daughters.
Flower petals being dropped to the floor and
I pull the dead leaves off the houseplant.

Dust fills the void. Dust fills me.
Will you cleanse me?
Will you still hold my hands even though
I am numb?

A damp yes leaves your lips and we
circle them in the NICU.
Babies hooked to machines like batteries
we need to power and she lays so still
under the lights. I held one eight hours later
weeping into her tiny face.
Her tiny face struggled to breathe and I felt it in
my lungs.

Her home next to my heart her home
in our hands.
These hands numb from giving and receiving.

Celeste Schueler is a poet, feminist, and mother of twins. She has her BA in English and MFA in creative writing from Mississippi University for Women. She has been published in DeSoto Magazine, Feral Journal, Spoonie Press, and in an anthology by Wingless Dreamer. Celeste Schueler taught creative writing at Western Oklahoma State College while in rural Oklahoma. A native of Mississippi, she now resides in the Pacific Northwest. Social Media — Twitter: @CelestePoetProf, Instagram: @celeste.schueler

by James Diaz

We pull into the motel
it is fall here in the south
and I am so small

we are in-between,
you know what I mean?

Pops is newly clean
fresh out of rehab
and momma, well,
momma is momma –
a dark cloud settling over us all

the place has roaches and it’s a game you see
I count em
then I run around the parking lot chasing leaves
as they scatter down
in darkest wind

people are sat up on crates
by doorways
lit by sadness and television
and not a one smiles at me
but I know it all so well by now

how happiness is dangerous to people like us
I turn around and my folks have the worry on their faces
what comes next?
I’m too young to know
but not too young to care

I don’t want to go inside just yet
because out here anything can happen
but in there –
oh, I know it all so well.

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2016), All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha, 2021), and Motel Prayers (Alien Buddha, 2022). They are the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their most recent work can be found in Wrongdoing Mag, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Sugar House Review. Instagram: @jamesdiazpoet.

by Z.H. Gill

Mild and cool’s enough for me. I didn’t know you from across the room. Each night my mother listened to whalesong on 8-track tape. The day shakes. The evening ticks. Sitting in pews in churches I don’t belong to. Each night my mother read aloud from whatever it was she was reading at the time: Danielle Steele, Michael Crichton, Sir Walter Scott, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, Kamala Das, Jane Smiley. Held the receiver up so you could hear. My mother’s voice you said was impish. I loved you both the same. (Not in form, but in strength.) At parties I’d glide in alone. There were women in the bathroom—talking, maybe crying, I don’t know—but I could hear them, I felt bad about it. My mother showed me how to send flowers through the computer. My father slipped away. My brother met me at the parties. He said to me: Z, you don’t know how to drink a drink, but disappeared before he would explain. (He found a bathroom, I’m certain of it.) You met him once; he made you laugh, before offending you. We used to swim in the ravine—the locals knew to stay away instinctively. We read in diners. The evening sky had forsaken us. My mother wrote but half her letters were lost. I never sang in the shower. We left our friends without saying good-bye. (Your friends, you would have said.) I drew the Tower, I drew the Two of Swords. The day quit while it was ahead, and the evening simply stopped. You drew the Hanging Man, you drew the Four of Wands. I stopped looking out the window. You give up half yourself, my mother said to me, ominously but not humorlessly. Look at your brother, she said, He’s just too much of one thing. I sat in church sucking on activated charcoal. Prolonged eye-contact during the sermon. For better or worse, you gave me my dogmas. I loved you both the same. I’ll be joining you soon. Soon.

Z.H. Gill works in the motion pictures. His writings have appeared in trampset, HAD, and Triangle House. Find them, and more, at linktr.ee/zhgill and on Twitter @blckpllplsrbch.

by Mandy McHugh

The ghosts I made are loud and lost
but rarely lonely.
Holding the past,
I keep them
in my presence
slick and dripping
in a sheen of sweat-laced regrets.
I wear them around my neck
like the pearls I never owned
or the silk noose
of his tie.
I take them black
in my coffee,
neat in my whiskey,
but heavy in my crown—
the obsidian weight drowning
out their whispers.
Please,
they say.
Please,
I agree,
counting the stones again.

Mandy McHugh is an author from Upstate NY. Her debut novel, Chloe Cates Is Missing, was one of Popsugar’s Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2022. Her sophomore thriller, It Takes Monsters, is forthcoming in October 2023. When she isn’t writing, Mandy enjoys running, car karaoke, and experimenting with various recipes with her two children. You can find Mandy on Twitter (@WriterACMcHugh), TikTok (@authormandymchugh), and IG (@acmchughwriter), as well as her website, mandymchugh.com