June, It’s hard to tell you just because I wrote about you
doesn’t mean I love you—in fact, it might mean the opposite—
but I let you go on believing fate is red-handed, crimson-nailed and raking
down your back—but we won’t
mention time, won’t mention
how you arrive on my doorstep at 2 AM like clockwork,
double-fisting a bottle of Jack and a small Coca-Cola,
how my mouth is a cherry I drop into your burn
to sweeten the bite of you. June,
you twist the stems of me in your mouth,
a Celtic lover’s knot, maraschino for marriage; wrapped taut ‘round your finger,
I always let you upstairs, June. Even when
I have to drink heavy, gulp quick
to be able to swallow you down.
Tonight it’s 2 AM again and I drank only
in anticipation of your drunk. Tonight you hang me from the ceiling,
shibari chandelier,
kiss my elbows,
balm my ropeburn with your mouth.
I wonder when you’ll realize
I’m vacant-hearted,
fecund but foreclosed, June,
wonder when you’ll notice I’m marked uninhabitable, that you’re squatting
in a molding room
built to be demolished.
Maybe you do know
and just don’t have the time
to mind.
My frown deepens the slant and tilt of the floors. One day, June,
we could both fall
into the apartment below.
You’ve got vomit on your leather pants. You’re
barely standing, so I help you undress, wash
the acrid from your hair in the bath.
You can’t stand so we lay
on top of each other and swim like skin
could be a life raft.
Nausea is the knowledge that you won’t remember me
wrapping my arms tight around you like some sculpted pillar in Rome
while it burns itself down. Strong, palatial, June, you
could hold up the whole world, Atlas style,
hunched in hubris.
But your steel gaze and steel-toed boots fail to fool
the stagnant grief playing aubades in your middle. June,
I know you’ve lost things so dire you can’t bear
to hold them on your tongue
to flick their fleeting from your lips, to gulp down another loss
all over again. Memory’s gonna kill you, June,
but you’re sure giving it a leg up.
Arms behind my back, you kiss me and say I’m not allowed
to touch you, and I obey, let you
do your worst. Gaping from lack,
you fall on your knees minutes later
and kiss each of my thighs, your six-foot frame suddenly too small
to stare up, meet my gaze.
You can’t even fake it, June,
being in control. I can’t even fake it—
I love you like a garden, like planting only perennials.
Like knowing every brightest bl0om,
come cold, will die.
June, if your sorrow was a building, it’d be on a hundred acres of land.
Madness so deep it could build its own moat.
You keep sailing and swirling
into me, June, ceaseless as tide, as if moons and Manhattan
were enough to write a love story
that doesn’t end ten chapters too soon.
It’s hard not to notice
you don’t mind the lie of a future.
You want me to write your fate so badly,
but if I did I’d write me out of it—
you’d have a better chance at more chapters with someone
penless. Penniless I
don’t know why you think
your redemption bats my eyelashes. Seven dollars in my bra
and you know me, June, I’ll buy a book
before food. We laid in bed all winter and fed each other spoonfuls
of peanut butter, globs of
We could disappear and no one would even
come looking, come and look, it’s our love
in the shape of a spider’s web
in the ceiling corner. The capture and crawl, the hopeless sprawl—
I can’t wait to love you when your hair goes silver as that silk.
But I remind you, June:
You’ve got to want to get to greying.
Once, you laid your wine-dark waves on my typewriter
your curls tangling in the metal keys.
Once you wanted to be less dead, thought ink for blood
was a lover’s exchange. Binging on bartered bruises,
now we moan on stolen time. You don’t think we’re meant to live very long,
and I am porcelain with the terror
of starting to believe you.
Another night with you on my steps—
your ghosts playing in your eyes like pupils were palms, reading
futures, reaching into an abyss
and expecting velvet—
I am no chaise longue for your pretty parlor’d rest.
June, I am all pincushion,
jabbed and jutting, more needle-sharp,
I am a thing of discomfort, disquiet, and still
you choose my doorstep. You don’t remember how you got here, you never do,
but you remember the three trains and where to turn
to bang on my broken door.
I picture all the boroughs strung together by corset strings, subway lines
tightening in long black ribbon,
bringing you to me blackout
but safe, always repeating my name.
Your marble chest in a ripped shirt
spinning in your boots, beautiful as any of Saturn’s revolving moons.
June, you’re incandescent.
In the desolate decay of January’s insistent ivory sky,
it is just another grey almost-dawn
that I helped you up the stairs and into bed.
You thought it was yours, back home. You confused me for your mother.
I tuck the sheets around you like Moses
in a basket, safely down a river
of blue sheets,
and kiss your forehead,
and I bring a blanket to the couch. I tiptoe in
even though you’re out colder than vodka on ice in a chilled glass, and
put two fingers under your nose, June,
to make sure you’re still breathing
every few hours.
And when you’re gone in the morning
and back just shy of dawn, gin and vomit on your breath,
I’ll let you up again.
Your fleeting heaven, my only moon—
I’m a Valentine past my February
but you are always June.
Leia K. Bradley (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer and performance artist, editor at Moot Point Magazine, and an MFA Poetry candi- date at Columbia University, where she also was awarded the Undergraduate Writing Teaching Fellowship for 2023- 24. She has work in Poetry Project, Aurore, Wrongdoing Magazine, Ghost City Press, Tarot Literary, Versifica- tion, and more, with her poem “Settle(d)” chosen as the Editor’s Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine’s 2022 Pride issue. She can be found dancing through can- dlelit speakeasies or climbing barefoot up a magnolia tree with a tattered copy of Stone Butch Blues tucked into her dress. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley.
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Leia K. Bradley is our featured contributor in Vol.1. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.
Tethered | Jasmine Duong
JASMINE DUONG was born a middle child in Rosemead California to a loving family of 5. She is currently in college at Cal State University of Long Beach. She has not had a lot of exhibition experience, but that does not mean life experience. Nothing stops her from trying to spread her art to the world.
STATEMENT: When we are awake, where do our emotions go? Do the dreams that bring us the utmost happiness or conjure up our utmost terrors hold a droplet of truth? In the darkness our feelings condense to create shapes and forms of color to dance in the wonderful world of our consciousness. To me building worlds, landscapes, poems, and all in all making art is building a place where our emotions can reside. Where it can be encapsulated and held to be steeped in, or coaxed out in the stories long forgotten by the day to day life. What is life if not with the things we can experience and feel, but can not see. The bubbles of given definition that include love, pressure, connection, and etc. I mean what is love? Is it the aura our minds swim in or is it hormones that course through our veins? What is addiction? Is it the little voice that calls to us for the sake of happiness or the urge we get that drives us into deep delirium? I create homes for the invisible clouds that blind, guide, torment, and bind us to live in.
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Jasmine Duong is featured in Vol.2. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.
sampling | BEE LB
what solution do you want to end on? what resolution
are you set on? how far exactly does your sight extend?
no, this is not an interrogation. there are other venues
to approach that. this remains something like an examination.
a determination of the prognosis. tell me, do you still shy away
from treatment? does it bring to mind anything new?
where do you move from there? trace a map for me to follow.
this questionnaire will stick between your teeth, keep floss
or a toothpick close at hand. what was the last moment
you can remember the exact timing of? how far have you gone
from it? tell me what it is you’re trying to forget, and why
it was the first thing that came to mind. do you trust anyone
to protect yourself? have you realized i’m not up to the task?
you’ve spent years chasing anything that could name you
worthy. isn’t it time to give your splints a rest?
BEE LB is a living poet, or at least the facsimile one; a porcelain pierrot with a painted face. they collect champagne bottles, portraits of strange women, and diagnoses. they’ve been published in G*Mob, MOODY, Landfill, and The Racket, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co and at twinbrights on ig.
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BEE LB is a returning poet with multiple works in both Vol.1 and Vol.2. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.
Grateful | Maria McLeod
After surgery, I woke with a welt
on my left earlobe, a deep purple
pool of blood that stayed for a week
until it began to dissipate
and my body did its good work
of calling it back.
I assume that’s where the ventilator strap
had cut across my ear, an accidental interruption
of my body’s normal ebb and flow.
My thighs and crotch were stained orange,
having been doused with an antiseptic
wash, like I was wearing see-through
cycling shorts. I was missing my first inch of pubic hair
by way of a tidy, horizontal shave. Who did that,
I wondered? Grateful. I’d been fixed,
spayed, neutered, saved.
My throat hurt from breathing
through a tube. My diaphragm was sore,
from forcing such deep breaths against
the effort to expand my insides, to form
an internal operating theatre, a cavern
where once was a womb. Water, I drank so much
water, for two weeks straight,
and coughed and coughed mucus
that I thought may never abate.
My belly was bruised by one of the surgical team
who’d taken hold of my fat and pulled
while another filled my abdomen
with gas to create a cavity
where they’d insert the tools — the camera
and all the slicing and dicing devices.
And what was found there? Blood —
old, brown blood, extra thick and sticky
procreative blood that had fastened my uterus
and tubes and ovaries to the back wall
of my body cavity above my sacrum, blood
acting as an adhesive akin to superglue
my surgeon said. And this is why
after years of trying, and even after
taking a concoction of fertility drugs
that made me weird and weepy,
I could never conceive.
Such menacing blood
isn’t meant to enter the abdomen
where it can wreak no end of havoc.
Instead, it’s intended to coat
the inner uterine walls, shed
and spread anew each month,
so that an egg could attach. Yet,
all those menstruating years, I endured the pain
doctors dismissed, when, had one cared
to take a closer look, I might have been cured.
But, yes, I am grateful
to finally have this medical mystery
solved, post-menopause, age 56.
The ovary that had been my doc’s main cancer concern
had shriveled up, a brown knot.
A week post hysterectomy, I learned I did not
have ovarian cancer, no cancer
detected anywhere in or near my defunct
reproductive parts. Sweet relief.
Twelve months earlier,
a surgeon had cut cancer
out of my breast. I’d been radiated
and prescribed a difficult drug. I’d gone
on a special diet and I’d taken up running.
I found I could go faster and farther
if I thought about things that made me mad,
angry. Now, I swim laps and cycle. I do crunches
and planks. I use the rowing machine
and the assault bike in an attempt to sweat
the awfulness out of me.
I do squats and lift weights and
run around and around the lake, the track, out
my front door, uphill and down.
Just look out your window
as you’re driving down the street,
or the next time you enter a gym,
that woman, in the midst of such fury,
she’s me, being grateful.
Maria McLeod is the author of “Mother Want,” winner of WaterSedge Chapbook Contest 2021 and, “Skin. Hair. Bones.,” published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. She’s been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and has won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize. Her writing has been featured in several leading literary journals as well as part of Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Podcast. Find her on Instagram @mariapoempics and on Twitter/X @maria_mcleod
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Untitled | Belden Carlson
BELDEN CARLSON is a NYC and CDMX-based photographer, originally from California. Her work has been published in print & online, and exhibited around the world. She’s available for travel, commercial & editorial assignment and for portrait sessions in New York & Mexico City. Learn more at https://www.beldencarlson.com/
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Belden Carlson is our Featured Artist in Vol.2. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.
tonight I watched a luna moth emerge | Logan Elizabeth Craig
tonight I watched a luna moth emerge
from her cocoon her whole body
an achy joint I felt each thread-legged
step to the flatbed of a philodendron
leaf and waited for a honeyed hour
as her wings unfurled into paper-thin
velvet and how it must have hurt how
I must have forgotten how it felt to grow
my own bones to know that marrow-deep
pain could promise something good.
Logan Elizabeth Craig (she/they) is a future therapist training in Chattanooga, TN. Most of her poetry can be found in screenshots she’s sent in her friends’ group chats, but a few can also be found in miniskirt mag, the lickety~split, and Sonder Travel Magazine. Find them oc- casionally on instagram and twitter: @loganelizabethc.
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Logan Elizabeth Craig was published in Vol.1. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.
In Van Gogh’s Dining Room | Tatiana Shpakow
In Van Gogh’s Dining Room,
I take my first antidepressant.
I go through the spleen, digging through the heart
of the kitchen, and set the table for the start of
the morning––a winter-wilted sunflower, an ear
steak, a tube of yellow paint, the color of
what my insides should be.
I stop when I realize I’ve cut
through the rib cage completely,
digging through the back,
emptying a bottle of blue entirely.
This is not my first little death or little life,
each pill the color of ego that ends outside old churches,
those daily pallet cleansers of anesthetic benders,
and women I never spoke to but
wrote poetry about.
My brother comes at half past 7 and asks what I do for the day
when I stay in this yellow-painted house. I tell him I’m on the
phone to avoid showing bloodshot––I want to tell him
about my newest attempt by talking about
my dead friends, my alive friends, and all
the people I don’t know yet. I tell him I‘ll never meet
anyone again.
Until now, I thought I was bound
to be a different nose, a cauliflower ear, a simple madness,
but he frowns, hands outstretched in praise like he’s calming
a rabid dog, and offers me green.
In Van Gogh’s dining room,
I take my first antidepressant.
For the first time in 20 years,
It’s all yellow.
Tatiana Shpakow is an anthropology student from Albuquerque, New Mexico, currently attending Kenyon College in Ohio. Her work discusses the navigation of het- eronormativity in love, the struggle to find identity as Queer, mental health, and the social sciences. Her cre- ative work has appeared or is forthcoming in HIKA, the interlochen review, and elsewhere. She has also received the 2020 Michigan State New York Life Award from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
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Tatiana Shpako was published in Vol.1. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.
June, Where Did You Put The Time? | Leia K. Bradley
June, It’s hard to tell you just because I wrote about you
doesn’t mean I love you—in fact, it might mean the opposite—
but I let you go on believing fate is red-handed, crimson-nailed and raking
down your back—but we won’t
mention time, won’t mention
how you arrive on my doorstep at 2 AM like clockwork,
double-fisting a bottle of Jack and a small Coca-Cola,
how my mouth is a cherry I drop into your burn
to sweeten the bite of you. June,
you twist the stems of me in your mouth,
a Celtic lover’s knot, maraschino for marriage; wrapped taut ‘round your finger,
I always let you upstairs, June. Even when
I have to drink heavy, gulp quick
to be able to swallow you down.
Tonight it’s 2 AM again and I drank only
in anticipation of your drunk. Tonight you hang me from the ceiling,
shibari chandelier,
kiss my elbows,
balm my ropeburn with your mouth.
I wonder when you’ll realize
I’m vacant-hearted,
fecund but foreclosed, June,
wonder when you’ll notice I’m marked uninhabitable, that you’re squatting
in a molding room
built to be demolished.
Maybe you do know
and just don’t have the time
to mind.
My frown deepens the slant and tilt of the floors. One day, June,
we could both fall
into the apartment below.
You’ve got vomit on your leather pants. You’re
barely standing, so I help you undress, wash
the acrid from your hair in the bath.
You can’t stand so we lay
on top of each other and swim like skin
could be a life raft.
Nausea is the knowledge that you won’t remember me
wrapping my arms tight around you like some sculpted pillar in Rome
while it burns itself down. Strong, palatial, June, you
could hold up the whole world, Atlas style,
hunched in hubris.
But your steel gaze and steel-toed boots fail to fool
the stagnant grief playing aubades in your middle. June,
I know you’ve lost things so dire you can’t bear
to hold them on your tongue
to flick their fleeting from your lips, to gulp down another loss
all over again. Memory’s gonna kill you, June,
but you’re sure giving it a leg up.
Arms behind my back, you kiss me and say I’m not allowed
to touch you, and I obey, let you
do your worst. Gaping from lack,
you fall on your knees minutes later
and kiss each of my thighs, your six-foot frame suddenly too small
to stare up, meet my gaze.
You can’t even fake it, June,
being in control. I can’t even fake it—
I love you like a garden, like planting only perennials.
Like knowing every brightest bl0om,
come cold, will die.
June, if your sorrow was a building, it’d be on a hundred acres of land.
Madness so deep it could build its own moat.
You keep sailing and swirling
into me, June, ceaseless as tide, as if moons and Manhattan
were enough to write a love story
that doesn’t end ten chapters too soon.
It’s hard not to notice
you don’t mind the lie of a future.
You want me to write your fate so badly,
but if I did I’d write me out of it—
you’d have a better chance at more chapters with someone
penless. Penniless I
don’t know why you think
your redemption bats my eyelashes. Seven dollars in my bra
and you know me, June, I’ll buy a book
before food. We laid in bed all winter and fed each other spoonfuls
of peanut butter, globs of
We could disappear and no one would even
come looking, come and look, it’s our love
in the shape of a spider’s web
in the ceiling corner. The capture and crawl, the hopeless sprawl—
I can’t wait to love you when your hair goes silver as that silk.
But I remind you, June:
You’ve got to want to get to greying.
Once, you laid your wine-dark waves on my typewriter
your curls tangling in the metal keys.
Once you wanted to be less dead, thought ink for blood
was a lover’s exchange. Binging on bartered bruises,
now we moan on stolen time. You don’t think we’re meant to live very long,
and I am porcelain with the terror
of starting to believe you.
Another night with you on my steps—
your ghosts playing in your eyes like pupils were palms, reading
futures, reaching into an abyss
and expecting velvet—
I am no chaise longue for your pretty parlor’d rest.
June, I am all pincushion,
jabbed and jutting, more needle-sharp,
I am a thing of discomfort, disquiet, and still
you choose my doorstep. You don’t remember how you got here, you never do,
but you remember the three trains and where to turn
to bang on my broken door.
I picture all the boroughs strung together by corset strings, subway lines
tightening in long black ribbon,
bringing you to me blackout
but safe, always repeating my name.
Your marble chest in a ripped shirt
spinning in your boots, beautiful as any of Saturn’s revolving moons.
June, you’re incandescent.
In the desolate decay of January’s insistent ivory sky,
it is just another grey almost-dawn
that I helped you up the stairs and into bed.
You thought it was yours, back home. You confused me for your mother.
I tuck the sheets around you like Moses
in a basket, safely down a river
of blue sheets,
and kiss your forehead,
and I bring a blanket to the couch. I tiptoe in
even though you’re out colder than vodka on ice in a chilled glass, and
put two fingers under your nose, June,
to make sure you’re still breathing
every few hours.
And when you’re gone in the morning
and back just shy of dawn, gin and vomit on your breath,
I’ll let you up again.
Your fleeting heaven, my only moon—
I’m a Valentine past my February
but you are always June.
Leia K. Bradley (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer and performance artist, editor at Moot Point Magazine, and an MFA Poetry candi- date at Columbia University, where she also was awarded the Undergraduate Writing Teaching Fellowship for 2023- 24. She has work in Poetry Project, Aurore, Wrongdoing Magazine, Ghost City Press, Tarot Literary, Versifica- tion, and more, with her poem “Settle(d)” chosen as the Editor’s Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine’s 2022 Pride issue. She can be found dancing through can- dlelit speakeasies or climbing barefoot up a magnolia tree with a tattered copy of Stone Butch Blues tucked into her dress. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley.
Love it?
Leia K. Bradley is our featured contributor in Vol.1. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.