by Elisabeth Horan

The true me is a purple skin flaw
boiling kitchen of saws and bones
beg it beg it to reconsider

Set in stone this bitch rarely
gives in to sensible pressure.
Look at the pomegranate bruises
potato eye damages

Stewed tomatoes for an ass
mangled carrot becomes a nose –
hungry boys think they want it
starving girls love to hate it

Stuck, in middle – so full and sick
this black belly of the beastial

No idea whose
tight skin is splitting,
cinching up the belt to slice
in halves… poor-pear-mistake,

Rotting Cabbage Borscht
makes sauce for older men
mountains of white cocaine,
hotel rooms she once frequented

Eats dicks, snorts their wallets
runs farfaraway
gnaws upon the ribs of newborn children
so young & underdone

You knew her. You once knew her.
Consummate it now, horridly:
eggz n semen never die like this –

Goat carcass collector asking for
some woman; she is beyond alive
digging up tired souls
in your backyard; hidden graveyard

Under children’s swings – you want some supper
you are so hungry… for parts, for meat.

Wanting to love her goes so wrong.
She does not know
who this is
who is talking.

Elisabeth Horan is a poet/momma/flower/animal from Vermont caring for all creatures…and writing her heart out. She has books at Fly on the Wall, Twist in Time, Cephalo, Broken Spine Arts, Fahmidan, and others…. Elisabeth is proud to exist as the Founding Editor at Animal Heart Press. She has two precious sons… Breathe the air. Feel the love. Let’s be kind and cherish one another. Friends pickles horses rivers cookies sleep sex, mexican food and sunsets. Elisabeth is @ehoranpoet on Twitter and Instagram & her website is ehoranpoet.net.

by Zachary Daniel

I am pulling the sled deeper
into a country I was assured
was wholly free of antecedents.

Across the border the moon has built
its palaces of light and the birds, everywhere,
turn iron and plunge from the sky.

Bees float on in the absence of any nest.
Ants rummage through wallets
fallen open in the grass.

A stream is dragging its trout
backwards through its silvery gears.
Shadows scurry under the objects that cast them.

Every farmhouse is a paper cutout
behind which a single man
can be found sleeping at his post.

Weathervanes waggle in the unknown air.
A banker’s face turns red in the struggle
to pull his vault around in a bindle.

Even the stars in this country
prove unnameable, fastening
“Be Back Soon” signs in the open air.

When the townsfolk go to bed
they unzip a seam behind an ear
and hot air escapes from their flesh.

Rocks materialize into position,
cracking their knuckles.
The soil sits there surreptitiously.

By now I have ditched the sled
to crawl on hand and knee
into the tiny department store labeled “Heaven”.

Zachary Daniel works as a gardener in Cave Hill Cemetery. He lives with his wife and cat in Louisville, Kentucky. He has poems published or forthcoming at The Pierian, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere on the internet.

by Robert Carr

Tangled in blankets, you no longer rest, are no longer
here—corpse, without itch or pinched nerve.
A broken wing hand, featherless, hangs slack from
the mattress edge. I prepare for adoration,
pull down our porcelain basin, soak goat soap in body-
warm water, squeeze a sea sponge the shape of a lung.

I pull back the Navajo pattern, stroke wooly hairs,
tuck graying sheets to the side, survey your still-
holding flesh, its length, toes snowcapped and cragged.

Eagles circle a landscape of male, no carrion crow
perched atop branching ribs. I clean your chill legs,
hope for pink blooms, a sunrise to petal, stormed
hair at your groins. Soaked shallows, veined rivers
left dry, creped thigh, the pool of a navel, cattail
marsh in a pit of raised arms where I dare to sip.

The porcelain basin clouds with false promises—
who to go first, who to follow. Kneeling at the foot
of our bed, I look beyond hanging fruit to the sink
of a belly, those mountain range ribs, distant caves.

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books, and two full-length collections published by 3: A Taos Press – The Unbuttoned Eye and The Heavy of Human Clouds. His poetry appears in many journals and magazines including the Greensboro Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Forthcoming collections include Phallus Sprouting Leaves, winner of the 2024 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series, Seven Kitchens Press; and Blue Memento, from Lily Poetry Review Books. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org You can find him on Facebook @robert.carr.1238 and Instagram @robertcarrpoetry.

by David Hanlon

Obligation: an ocean bubbling & boiling in a kettle.
I make trillions of cups of tea from it,
spend my life boiling & pouring & containing,
then slump & cancel all my plans for the following day.
Spend the evening scrolling the evening
for messages, for contact: my inbox full
of junk with no delete forever button,
the earth a period on a map of our solar system,
my heart: flat as the surface of a map, empty as outer space.

I fold it into an envelope, into the shape of
this yellow horned poppy in my garden:
the one I watch grow & grow &
grow until I taste my own tea, until I remember
that sunlight & rain are love in different forms,
until my hands rest like two seals on a shore,
their nearby ocean my cup of tea: mollified,
& in my summered chest a letter,
a message blooming.

David Hanlon is a poet from Cardiff, Wales. You can find his work in many magazines and journals, including Rust & Moth, The Lumiere Review & trampset. His first full-length collection Dawn’s Incision is available from Icefloe Press. You can follow him on twitter @davidhanlon13 & Instagram @hanlon6944.

by Puneet Dutt

“Insects in this photo are simply trying to navigate.”—After a photo by David McNew

On the drive home, my son asks
about the word, forever—

could I define it? I cast around,
like how did the housefly arrive—

the one that can’t be caught.
The one for days, smacks

abdomen against hot bulbs,
convinced of fickle suns.

Always, I scramble,
my tongue full of beans, spilled.

Has anything lived forever?
Surely pyramids in their smug

assurances come close enough—
ginkgos and horseshoe crabs,

metazoan taxons assigned
to bioluminescence. Amazing

we say, for acing a century.
Then my son offers this

apologia: Until the end of your life,
and when you’re with god.

But what of Dolania americana?
An aunt in palliative care

with a note to pull the plug—
yet, no one has the heart

—inside the bedside table,
above which fresh flowers

arrive with each new visitor.
There she sits, bearing the brunt

of time opening buds.
Our children across her eyes, dart.

We hold her hand. Like, what else
is there to do? As long as we move

the speed of light continues
to deceive us.

Dutt’s The Better Monsters was a Finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her most recent chapbook was Longlisted for the 2020 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest, selected by Carl Phillips. Her website is puneetdutt.com and she is on Twitter @Puneet_Dutt and Instagram @puneetdutt.