by Rachelle Boyson

Displacement is the capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present, i.e., things that are either not here or are not here now.
– Displacement (linguistics) Wikipedia page

I am reminded of displacement each time we speak
of the dead. Each time I speak of my inherited salt
and pepper shakers, or the sculptor’s forever-unfinished
sculpture, or the bear I wear around my pulse,
I am reminded that this grief makes me human.
What would it be to be like the lions, the sparrows, the banana slugs—
to have anything out of sight or in another time be locked
out of our mouths? How would we know then, of the dead?
You leave the room to make a cup of tea, you drop
dead on your way to work. My tongue would lose you
entirely. I could not explain any difference, could not
truly trust any difference, until I saw your body
reappear in the doorway, hands cradling
my yellow mug, steam caressing your face,
your voice leaning in to offer, Here.

Rachelle Boyson is a Bay Area-based poet who uses both a scientific and an artistic approach to language in her writing. Rachelle’s work has appeared in ROPES Literary Journal, FeelsZine, and is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic. She can be found on Instagram @rachellesierra37.

by Matthew King

The salmon circle in their pen, the seals outside it,
one obsessed with finding a way out, the other in.
There’s nothing these salmon would know as food to see it
in open seas where there are no pellets but the seals,
their hearts set on the salmon, have known them from the start.

The salmon can’t consider what the seals are to them.
There is only one thing they know and know they know it
(in peril they’ll learn too late what it was they knew best):
a way must be got to the other side of the fence;
by the contour they know they’re confined and will be caught.

They feel caught in their flesh already. They’ll be eaten
either way, before or after death—they don’t know that.
They don’t know what it is to die and won’t avoid it.
They know: to get away, to not be caught. They can’t know
the seals are caught outside, caught for good, they got away—

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called “the country north of Belleville”, where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com. He is on twitter/x: @cincinnatus_c_.

by Zoe Davis

I watch as they throw babies

Into swimming pools on Facebook reels

How quickly they turn

And bob

Cork bodies

Buoyant youth determined

Bald-pated grizzle

It’s for their own good

That they learn

To float

To stargaze

The sky is just a different mobile

Placid water cot

Love has built walls around

They giggle

Swim back to the arms

That threw them in.

Zoe Davis is an emerging writer from Sheffield, England. A quality engineer in advanced manufacturing by day, she spends her evenings and weekends writing poetry and prose, and especially enjoys exploring the interaction between the fantastical and the mundane, with a deeply personal edge to her work. You can find her words both published and forthcoming in publications such as: Acropolis Journal, Strix, Illumen Magazine, Full House Literary and Broken Antler. You can also follow her on X @MeanerHarker where she’s always happy to have a virtual coffee and a chat.

by Han VanderHart

I circle the cemetery
to both schools, and back
say good morning
to the dead
lodestone among us:
silent, unsoliciting, present
hawks and pines
have entered my life before
as deep image
but now it is the night train
and its whistle
dream where I am lost
in a large station
train running beside me
on the way to work
and the dead
and their headstones
by the gas station
and the train
and the way
we are all travelling
circling the cemetery
in the winter sunlight
children in the back seat
fingerprinting the windows
living and tired
and needing
to lay their heads
on my chest
in the evening,
the light short
and the dark early

Han VanderHart is a genderqueer writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry podcast and co-edits the poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey. SM: @hanvanderhart.bsky.social

by C. C. Rayne

I have no one to hold
when I die, so I want
to hold myself,

hand in the hand of
my endless lover,
sometime child,
often sculptor.

This life has been
a possession
in that I owned it and
in that I was a body
and I often felt that
I possessed myself, naught but
a ghost, I possessed myself,

through my limbs and
between throat and hipbone
lived not a me but a myself,
and I was witness.

And younger, I felt
that death would fit best
if I was one of two skeletons,
those pictures they found
from Rome of two people,
all bone intertwined side to side.

But now, I face that I will die alone,
which is true, but not alone
for I am a body and
I am myself holding myself,
will be holding myself,
like a lover lowering down
the dear first corpse,
then carrying down their own.

C. C. Rayne (@cc_rayne) is a writer, actor, and creator from the East Coast of the USA. C. C.’s work tends to blend the magical with the mundane, and the silly with the strange. C. C’s stories can be read in such places as The Deeps, The Razor, HAD, Sublunary Review, and Demons & Death Drops: An Anthology of Queer Performance Horror. C. C.’s poetry can be read in Rough Cut Press, Soft Star Magazine, Eye to the Telescope, and moth eaten mag.