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

by Jane Zwart

My dad complains that it is the same monsters
again and again. Almost everything, he says,
looks like an animal or a man. A dragon is a lizard,
a zombie the smear left of homo erectus.

There is so little in horror we cannot trace back
to an ordinary beast: shark, snake, doberman, bear.
Occasionally, the predator is mostly mouth,
of course, carnivorousness where speech should be,

rows of teeth at the opening of a tube that both
suctions and screams. But the best monsters
either look like us or like the dark churn
of something more gray than age or smoke or ash.

The best monsters: like us or like a sky hungrier
than a mouth. My dad is not complaining, really,
about our shallow imaginations, about the sameness
of the creatures we conjure to scare ourselves.

His grievance is with humankind: we are voracious;
thus most of our monsters think us meat.
We are voracious; thus the unthinking thing: it swallows
us up in an unbeing even less fitful than death.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. She frequently publishes book reviews and, with Timothy Liu, is co-editor of book reviews for Plume. She is on Twitter and Instagram @_janezwart_. Her website is janezwart.com.

by Rebecca Connors

Take that bag –
that 20 pounds of nightmare –
& empty it under the cover of night
while beetles & bats cling to hair or
imaginary numbers.
Release octaves
of hoarded photos, borrowed t-shirts, love
letters with abandoned addresses.
What happened before
is irretrievable. Drink whiskey till
amber-eyed, dare to throw china dishes
against the wall – a startled cat, fragmented
forget-me-nots, nicked wallpaper –
until the fever falls, my fingers cooled.
I’m moon hungry. I am the key of G.
I am years distant
in another constellation & I still can’t forget
all the times bed-rocked or land-locked.
I want to pound my knuckles raw,
my voice inside me tea-kettling.
I want the past to know my evidence,
see the way to resolution.
Tenacious like a city racoon
chittering underneath an open window &
scrambling through mistakes –
How can I accept all my
bents & burdens?
Drink up honeysuckle. Rest my head
against the world.
Know my home and know I am home:
parched grass, nightbirds
the delicate scream of dogwood petals.
 

Rebecca Connors (she/her) is the author of the chapbook, Split Map (Minerva Rising Press, 2019). Her poems can be found in DIALOGIST, Glass Poetry Journal, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She is the co-founder of the virtual literary arts space, The Notebooks Collective, and earned her MFA from the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. She lives in Boston with her family and two cats. Follow her on Twitter @aprilist, Instagram @aprilistwrites or visit her site at aprilist.com.