Lightning Rod My sister is lightning rod. She detects electricity in the atmosphere before blue-white bolts strike in her neighborhood. Might be a curse of some kind. Her leg tingles with sour current, she, pushing up from the sofa, her bed, flinching and biting her teeth as if it’s the first time. This will never go away. It might get worse and she will have to bite down on a nail. She’s suffered all her life, not a martyr, not the results of the theory of self-fulfilling pr

Found the Moon in a puddle all by itself without a sky it had those sad cat eyes like a young Cybill Shepard Mix our atoms mesh our ashes and spread us in the ocean we once crawled out from Found the Moon in terrible shape while all the stars went to a private party it had its mouth all slack like a hobo fresh out of wine Merge our atoms meld our ashes and spread us across the ocean we once crawled out from Christian Garduno is the recipient of the 2019 national Willie Morris

Fruits of the Tree Waiting. Waiting alone. For just a few fruits to fall into my barren lap, with the deadness and promise of once ripe fruit. Too afraid to climb upon the daunting bushy green height once more. The same height that many want to reach the top of. Looking helplessly at the air above me, I still taste blood -in my mouth- -nursing a wound- from an old fall in pursuit of fruit. Under(stand)ing Shiksha Dheda is a South African of Indian descent. She uses writing to

Michelle Moloney King {she/her} is an experimental poet, visual poet, editor of Beir Bua Journal and Press and a primary school teacher. A mother and living with her family in Co. Tipperary, Ireland with a degree in computer science, post grad in education & is Master Hypnotherapist, Moloney King is interested in family life in flux, the plurality of time, and the surreal-absurdism of life.Pushcart Nominee 2021. Visual Artists Ireland member. Published in M58, 3AM Magazine, B

Michelle Moloney King {she/her} is an experimental poet, visual poet, editor of Beir Bua Journal and Press and a primary school teacher. A mother and living with her family in Co. Tipperary, Ireland with a degree in computer science, post grad in education & is Master Hypnotherapist, Moloney King is interested in family life in flux, the plurality of time, and the surreal-absurdism of life.Pushcart Nominee 2021. Visual Artists Ireland member. Published in M58, 3AM Magazine, B

Don’t speak again (the wind comes calling) blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow blow bl

Sadie Maskery (she/her) lives in Scotland by the sea. Her writing can be found in various places online and in print. She is on Twitter as @saccharinequeen where she describes herself, optimistically, as 'functioning adequately'.

Green-gray dominates. Pale blues bleed into sunset pinks. Misty mornings in a Wes Anderson setting. Out there, a wound of the mind gapes. A giant slumbers. Out of focus expansion. The heart pumps. The eyes see. The mind possesses no answers. Lost whimsy trembles in the haze. “If only,” it whispers. “If only.” Solid ground is less than sturdy in this place of dreams. A cough. A sputter. Nature’s way of saying never. Echoes. Sleeping kings are no longer for us. Ian Brunner i

Textbook I came home one day to find you reading a book that was written about me. It was written by some doctors who have never met me, and it attempted to explain why I am the way I am. It had an ugly cover. By the look on your face, I could tell that it didn’t help you to see me like that spread across the pages / dismembered into chapters / chunks of me dissected into symptoms / boiled down to alarming statistics / my soul turned into science by strangers. You’d made note

It takes an inordinate amount of effort to grow cells. Tiny building blocks of life that squirm and writhe, thirsty for nutrients and attention. But the cells I grow are made to be destroyed. Once they’re viable, in a placid pink solution, I will inject them with a toxin. Then I’ll watch the blood sport like a Roman emperor at an amphitheatre, and see which ones survive. These cells originally came from a neurology patient in the seventies. It’s bizarre to think that after de