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Ovum | Rose Cobb

In the garden tonight, I cut free the growth points
of this years tomato crop, hoping to ripen their stubborn green fists.
Embryonic and deviant, fruits crouch like villains in the understory.

These dear girls, waxing metastatic
in their spring green, their chaste abundance.
I work against a metaphor for womanhood but fail.

I imagine the ovaries of my mother, grandmother.
Picture the rosary, unspooled,
a clutch of frogspawn in the cold fist of memory.

Seeds form in their jelly, a wet rope wrung
by the savory jazz of death.
Fecundity waits, bated. Dense and wicked as a black hole.

I picture the packed brown scales of milkweed roe,
wedded in silk to the air. Picture the monarchs,
their keenness of instinct.

I was, for a time, the last good kick
of a wintering cricket. The last whole note.
I was the strong brown river, packed with turtles.

Before, I willed God to remake me
and was made in the image of my mother.
Winter women– the tart irony of January’s desolation; its rare, intimate heat.

Winter women, an animal truth. I was made in the image of a liver.
A cervix. A brain. But tonight, in my hand, we are the earth’s brief fruit.
Evergreen and everlasting. My mother, her life burrowed in me like a seed.

Her laughter in my mouth.

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Cyster | Dana Murphy

I’ve returned to the university hospital
an ellipsis long used to periods as
a doctor has finally listened to me,
has acknowledged that
this kernel inside rubbed-raw flesh,
smooth as a tapioca pearl
when quiet
but the reason I can no longer ride
a bike, this glitch of being sentimentally
active, which became infected, then refused to heal,
this underground node,
a frozen bulb never to flower,
has become a companion to my every move.

My doctorate is only real
because my doctor is also a young woman,
our appointment a mirror
to gaze upon ourselves,
to drink in deeply
the birth control pills she takes back-to-back
to refuse periods because
she’s not courting pregnancy.
And while my flow is already a capillary-thin whisper
of its former self, benumbed by the pill,
her words bloom smiles in my cells
at the promise of one month lapping into the next.
When I open my legs
to the stirrups, it takes her all of two seconds to say,
Yeah, we gotta take care of that.

I am ready for the surgery that
three other doctors refused to approve.
The anesthesia is running
smooth as a bath.
My doctor asks me to count back from 10,
her fingers stroking the top of my right hand, 9,
like the delphiniums I saw for the first time, 8,
having missed the peonies, 7,
like the bride and her bridesmaids floating
through the arboretum . . .

DANA MURPHY lives in California. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in carte blanche magazine, The 2River View, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. In 2024–25, she is a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

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single-use | Sara Lynn Eastler

the equinox has peeled back snow from the roadside,
a layer of plastic wrap whose shine gives

way to beer cans crushed and cigarettes stubbed
beneath winter’s sparkling wrappings.

i bend with gloved hand and deposit refuse
into a yellow plastic bag, the only one

our waste center allows.
it’s best not to imagine how one shoe runs out

on its mate, how a fast food wrapper insulates
itself on a back country ditch, an individual

flosser, or condom stripped from skin.
while gathering the litter others fling

from their windows, intentional exorcisms
of a single-use society, i think of my sister—

how the blunt force of law bruised
her in the gutters no one could see, subordinated

her body to a single-use, a throw-away woman
whose womb became so toxic she collapsed

in the parking lot with fever, with cramps that crumpled
her onto herself and septicemia coursing

through her veins before a hospital would care
for her. her body was too compromised to cure.

in the clinic when i peel the white coverlet
from her face to ask what i can do, she keens.

i’m barren now, too contaminated
to carry life.

SARA LYNN EASTLER lives in Midcoast Maine where she dutifully serves her feline overlord and a flock of treat-loving chickens. She is a recovering biochemist, freelance contributor to the Southern Review of Books, and MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte. Her work can be found in Stanza, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Voices of Decolonization.

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strangers on twitter like to tell me i should pray more. | Caroline Wolff

so blessed be the YouTube tutorial
on how to turn your empty pill bottles
into a string of fairy lights.

blessed be the chatty four-way FaceTime call
between college kids who just so happen
to be prepping their injections.

blessed be the friends who don’t
question me when I cancel plans.
blessed be the friends who cancel plans.

blessed be those who know not all
spoons are for food or tea or cough syrup.
blessed be the spoons.

blessed be every soul who knew better than
to mistake my small stature for a permission slip,
my small voice for a dismissal bell.

blessed be the librarian
who never tried to convince me
to read more uplifting books.

blessed be the ex-lovers
who kept my specialty formula
stocked in their mini-fridges.

blessed be the grandmother who researched
adult diapers and sent me screenshots, lest
my browser history falls on judgmental eyes.

blessed be my sister, pausing
the tour to ask the wedding
planner about accessibility.

blessed be my mother, printing off another
article while the self-proclaimed soothsayers
hung up their scrubs and forgot about me.

blessed be the room-for-one turned penthouse suite,
the visitors’ passes, three butts to one cot,
wheelchair races, and board games unfolded over bedspreads.

blessed be the drumbeat in my throat, the hands
raising tinker bell solo cups like champagne goblets,
laughter choking out the machines I don’t need to tell me

I’m still living
blessed be everything
that shows me I’m still living.

blessed be the hands that healed me,
not one of them gloved,
not one of them gripping a tool,

every one of them holding another.

CAROLINE WOLFF is a queer and disabled poet and essayist from San Antonio, Texas, USA. Her work has been featured in Skyline and The Trinity Review, and is forthcoming in SICK, The Fruitslice, and The Marbled Sigh. She is a freelance arts & culture journalist at San Antonio Current and a poetry acquisitions editor at West Trade Review. When she isn’t writing, you can find her devouring a novel, doing pilates, or snuggling with her tuxedo cat. To follow Caroline on her writing journey, visit her Instagram page: @carolinemariewrites.

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Wait | Dameien Nathaniel

I keep the sad in my feet,
in the body part furthest from my heart,
the body part which is always cold–

I’m told I have bad circulation
and a high red blood cell count
that stops the blood from flowing
as quickly as it should,

so I wear grippy hospital socks,
even when I’m not in the hospital,
and wrap my feet in a separate blanket
from the rest of my body,
hoping for some kind of warmth.

I try friction and hot chocolate,
but nothing thaws this sad.

I keep the sad in my feet
because my brain floats above my head
and the weight of the sad
keeps me grounded.

So when the hospital calls my name for review,
I have something to tether me to the sticky,
just waxed floors as I follow the crisis nurse to a private room.

Private here means so that we won’t be overheard,
but also so that the nurse can keep an eye on me.

They don’t keep pens or cords in the private room.
I’m told to remove my shoelaces.
She asks if I am wearing a belt.

She takes my hoodie and reveals the
badly-taped gauze on my arms.
She takes note of my medications,
Takes vitals and has me rate my physical pain
before starting her questionnaire:

She asks me if I’ve been feeling hopeless,
if I’ve been feeling sad,
and she scribbles down every word of my answer
as I tell her I don’t feel sad,
I am holding the sad.

As I change into a new pair of grippy socks
I look for it, but you can’t see the sad,
you can only see feet,
just like you can’t see me there,
floating, just above my head,
using the sad like a weight for
my balloon brain. She tells me I am
disconnected from reality,

that I’m not feeling right,
and that I’ll have to stay the night.
In the morning they’ll review my medications
and try to find something that brings me back.

She doesn’t specify if she means back from balloon
or back from this ledge,
but she tells me she’ll help me.
She doesn’t say it reassuringly,
she says it because she has to.

And as she walks me from the
always open-doored bathroom
to the always open-doored bedroom,
she doesn’t offer me a second blanket.

DAMEIEN NATHANIEL is a queer, trans, autistic poet from the Northeast U.S.. They recently completed their MFA in poetry from Arcadia University, with their work centering around themes of trauma, loss, mental health, and queer identity. Dameien can be found performing at open mics and slams throughout New England and on Instagram @SpasmOfFeelings.

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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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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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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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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.

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