ISSUE 24 - DECEMBER 2021

CONTENTS

May Swenson: “Force can’t make a poem for me. I am an old poet now. My first book was published over thirty years ago, and recognition came late. This makes no difference to the quality of the work, or to how long it will last. But, for me quantity diminishes with age, with increasing complexities of daily life, decreasing energies both physical and mental. Yes, one becomes wiser, but that’s not good for making poetry. Knowing, seeing through everything, produces the cynic, the intellectualizer. The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivete, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness is necessary to the making of a poem, and if this ceases to happen often in the poet, s/he either produces less often or tries to force. Still I visualize a break-through in these, my late years, a lucky (and magical) period of peace, simplicity, ideal inner and outer weather, a clean slate away from petty obligations and complications, a surge of power and self-belief, a sudden ability to make use of my hoard of experiences in the creation of a great poem. I visualize this ecstasy.”

Minnie Bruce Pratt: “Poems can help us want to stay alive.”

Carolyn Gage: on Lotte Laserstein, with a wonderful selection of paintings.

Leonor Fini, Self-Portrait (1941)

ISSUE 24 - DECEMBER 2021 - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

ANNE MYLES Fever KIM HUNTER Two poems SCARLETT PETERSON Sestina for my father and his five (living) children YASHA DE LA LUNA Have you made your silly little deal with God today? ROBIN REAGLER Bending Civil Twilight ANNIE CHRISTAIN Solomonic Markings of the Fallen: Match.com KAY ZEISS ode to trillium MELISSA BAŁUT FONDAKOWSKI Homosyllogism TINA CARLSON Obsidian REBECCA MORTON The Layaway Drawer DANIELLE LEMAY Mother-in-law C. ELIOT MULLINS Letter to my 14-year-old self KELLIE TOYAMA Variant; Hey Adora LIZ AHL A Nest in the Palm of Your Hand

PAMELA HOBART CARTER Martina McGowan (2021) LEONOR FINI Self-Portrait (1941) LOUISE CATHERINE BRESLAU The Toilette (Madeleine Zillhardt) (1898) LUIGI LUCIONI Paul Cadmus (1928) PAMELA HOBART CARTER Robin Becker (2021) MARINA TSVETAEVA (1892-1941) BERENICE ABBOTT Portrait of Djuna Barnes (1926) MARIE LAURENCIN Woman with Dove (1919) PAMELA HOBART CARTER Sharon Rizk (2021) HELENE SCHJERFBECK (1862-1946) Self-Portrait HARRIET HOSMER Oenone (1855) ÉLISABETH LOUISE VIGÉE LE BRUN Self-Portrait (1790) PAUL NADAR Liane de Pougy (1869-1950) PAMELA HOBART CARTER Ann Tweedy (2021)

Anne Myles

Fever

I recall of it her bedroom piled with books

under the slanted roof, flannel sheets fuzzed

with dog hair, smelling of her hairy dogs,

and the comforter I pulled up, shivering.

Below, she was playing cards with her old friends

but I knew she held on to the thought of me

like keys inside a pocket you can’t stop touching.

Their voices drifted up. The whole house hummed

with secrecy, that I was there, her cherished one.

How many years I’d shaken with pure longing 

just to be beheld, to come inside, to stay.

Sooner than I expected the friends were gone;

she drew me a hot bath, and my fever broke,

and the night was still and just the two of us,

and I slept curled by her warm back and thighs.

How many years, so I can barely now remember 

what fever feels like. Waiting for what might come

and what I can’t imagine coming back again.

Alone, I press my hand to my own forehead, call

some faceless vast beloved to behold me now—

some tenderness without a name to rise

and hold me precious in this house of flesh.

---

Anne Myles’s poetry has appeared in the North American Review, Split Rock Review, Whale Road Review, Lavender Review, Early American Literature, and other journals. A recent transplant to Greensboro, NC, she is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Northern Iowa and in 2021 received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Pamela Hobart Carter, Martina McGowan

Pamela Hobart Carter Martina McGowan (2021) 

sketched during The Collectibles: Lesbian Poet Trading Cards Live Reading & Open Mic

Kim Hunter

The Oldest County Fair in Illinois

Watermelon candy lips laugh  

against the corner of my breath 

as teenager sunshine  

splashes across us. 

A stop sign town beneath, 

breathing as steadily as a city without 

someplace to be. 

The trailer park. The ruins of houses. 

The bridge that clatters until your heart  

falls to the tracks below. 

The Ferris Wheel halts, rocking. 

On the edge of this world that built us, 

where no one, and everyone can see, 

we hover,  

afraid to look down.

---

Winter Prairie Elegy

On the side of the road,  

moon-illuminated gravel turning 

beneath these feet that can’t  

find balance, I stumble.  

Vomit. 

Tears.  

Blood. 

On hands and knees I retch into the blades 

of brown grass, frozen into dirty sentinels.

Somewhere, a coyote. Somewhere, a semi growls. 

If words were this night they would howl. 

You are gone.

 

A snow crystal lands on my eyelash. 

A monster of geometry, pointing in all directions at once. 

---

Kim Hunter is a queer poet obsessed with small town details juxtaposed with modern sensibilities and ideals. Her work has appeared in Sow’s Ear, HLFQ, Crab Fat Magazine, Blue Heron Review, GRAVEL, and others. When not writing, teaching, rocking the office fantastic, or parenting a half-wolverine child, she is likely voraciously seeking...something. She is currently reclaiming the adjectives men have often ascribed to her, including relentless, bawdy, and terrifying.

Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini, Self-Portrait (1941)

Scarlett Peterson

Sestina for my father and his five (living) children

Tonight I light a candle for my father’s

living children, all of us born red,

owning nothing, no home or land 

to return to. We learned hound-love, 

the sharpening of tooth and talon

so as to be ready; this brute wisdom

his only legacy, this brute wisdom

our inheritance. Our father

whose absence is a piercing-talon

in the palm, whose red blood

pounds through us, hounding

our bodies. Whose hands land

on me in dreams, landless

worlds which lack the wisdom

of safety, the half-hound

sleeping at my feet. Our father

who named me for the color red

and his favorite cigar. A talon

in the throat with each signing, a talon-tipped

memory of the shared name which lands

on every important page. Red

like a country folding in on itself. Sophia (wisdom),

my youngest sister, born last to our father.

Connor, his first son named for the hound— 

small-framed—I  watched the hound

whither when my father stole him, talon-thin

from his mother. Our selfish father,

who named his second daughter Tara for holy land 

perhaps already bearing the wisdom

that he’d live a life unpredictable, violent-red.

My name-sake: that violence, that regret-red

double-syllable of failure. His lost hound,

all of his lost children, no wisdom,

nothing passed on to the second-son, Talon,

who looks so much like him. No knowledge of the land

any of us live on, our never-gone, unforgettable father.

Always keeping us at a red distance, one talon

always hound-scent near us, no safety in any land,

we bear the pressing wisdom of our come-back-and-find-you father.

link to video 

---

Scarlett Peterson is poet, essayist, and lesbian. She is currently working on her PhD at Georgia State University. She received her MFA at Georgia College. Her work can be found in Moon City Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Peculiar, Pidgeonholes, Gargoyle Magazine, Ponder Review, Madcap Review, Counterclock Journal, The Shore, Poetry Online, Skink Beat Review,  Eunoia Review, Josephine Quarterly, and more. 

Louise Catherine Breslau

Louise Catherine Breslau, The Toilette (Madeleine Zillhardt) (1898)

Yasha de la Luna

Have you made your silly little deal with God today? 

I called her down in a dream—Old Aphrodite—

she looked at me with a tender pity,


raising my chin to meet her gaze, stroking my 

cheek with her thumb—she had her eyes— 

asking, “What is it now? What wacky wish 

is your wacky little heart wanting now most?” 

And there are a million things I want more than 

there is water in the sea but I know I have a 

desire that outpaces my little animal heart and 

thinking about her, it is so effortless to be so 

soft and so lovely. I’ve been clenching my jaw 

so long and with such pressure that it 

must always be moments from popping


right off at its hinges; in her arms, I notice


how I’ve been tensing every single muscle in my 

wacky little body for so incomprehensibly long. 

“I want my hand in hers, to kiss her, to fuck her, 

to fall asleep with her. I want to be close to her. 

I want to not have a single worry that maybe 

I’m asking too much of her. I want to lounge 

in her arms and I want her hands to trace the 

silly little noisy animal of my ribcage, for her to 

feel my silly little heartbeat and the silly little 

contractions of my lungs, to know me.” 

Aphrodite was quiet, but she craned her head 

down, down, down her hair showering


all atop me, and placed her forehead to mine. 

Perhaps I could cry. “What a lovely, 

wacky little wish you ask of me.” 

link to video 

---

Yasha de la Luna (she/her) is a poet, artist, actor, director, singer-songwriter, archivist, fencer, Pushcart Prize nominee, and all-around general enthusiast. You can find her work in Fjords Review and South Florida Poetry Journal. Follow her on social media @weirdtwink.

Luigi Lucioni

Luigi Lucioni, Paul Cadmus (1928)

Robin Reagler

Bending Civil Twilight

These days last forever.

I wear long sleeves because 

of the message tattooed

on my arms saying how it feels 

to face the limitations of being

this way. As the sun vanishes, 

stars tell their stories across

the retinal sky. Who is to blame

for the hell of secrecy. Who

is manipulated in each moment

by the perplexity of love.

Our story is our story. I touch 

the throat of the elegant 

planetary weather and this, our

two bodies flashing into one.

Here is how I imagine it,

this way, this way and that.

link to video 

---

Robin Reagler is the winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Diaz, and the UK's Best Book Award. Her publications are Night Is The Anyway (Lily Poetry, forthcoming 2022), Into The The (Backlash, 2021), Teeth & Teeth (Headmistress, 2018), and Dear Red Airplane (Seven Kitchens, 2011, 2018). She led Writers in the Schools (WITS) for 25 years and is currently a professor at Houston Community College. 

Pamela Hobart Carter, Robin Becker

Pamela Hobart Carter Robin Becker (2021) 

sketched during The Collectibles: Lesbian Poet Trading Cards Live Reading & Open Mic

Annie Christain

Solomonic Markings of the Fallen: Match.com

Won't you kill me just a little more / Oh so kill me just a little. / Free the beast inside of me. 

“Can’t Stop.” Dave Matthews Band 

I saw you and remembered the heaviness of wings, the war-sword flames of current. You got me living in the now, the one where my hands cupping your face is the end. Something like family.

This isn’t Manga, but in a way it is. The female destroyer keeps cornering me in the wedding bus, taking out her failed love affair on me. When you touch me, you’re touching the Solomonic markings she left, 

just so you know.

From the beginning we gave them administrative permissions, but I like a challenge. 

To glitch the system, I tried using a random coordinates generator, but it only sent me to abandoned bags of piss. I held one bag up, so proud. Sometimes my discernment is off. Sometimes the male destroyer masks himself as the female destroyer, and that’s not even the half of it. You don’t know the trouble I’m in. 

Are we going to save this planet or live out on the Pleiades? was not a rhetorical question, but the right answer is something only my angel body knows, so what I mean is Let’s fuck. I’ve been holding my knife and fork upright for days. You think you can hurt me, and that’s hilarious. 

That’s not an indentation of my body on the mattress; that’s where I exploded the parasites out of my body in my sleep. For the past two years I’ve been making nothing but daring moves, frustrating the governing body and emboldening The Elect, but I get so lonely. 

The female destroyer and the male destroyer are only sentient within the parameters the AI set up for them, so when I sculpt my energy signature onto your skin into the form of your angel body, your pleasure-centers riot out something like dark energy. I know because it makes up 68% of all the energy in the room, but no one can put what happens between us into words or even concepts. 

With all that interference our GPS signal is lost, and those two destroyers lose their shit because our light is what keeps their avatars from having to be plugged into the wall for power. 

My breasts pressed against your breasts while they can’t watch. That alone makes me come. Hard. 

We have to meet each other. 

---

Annie Christain is a professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill and a former artist resident of the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, Prelude, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She was a first-place winner of the Driftwood Press In-House Poem Contest and received the grand prize of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Her books include Tall As You Are Tall Between Them (C&R Press 2016) and The Vanguards of Holography (Headmistress Press 2021), selected for Sappho’s Prize in Poetry. 

Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

Kay Zeiss

ode to trillium

trace these ribbons, leading us to a

remembrance of Spring; take me to the bold ones

I want to feel her velvet furrowed petals

lick my cheek, wet with dew

lay me down in the moss so I can see her rightly

imbued by her essence & knighted by her white swords of three

undoing myself; leave me

meadow-nestled for an entire eternity

link to video 

---

Kay Zeiss is a friend-shaped queer therapist turned organic farmer. When they’re not tending to chickens and bees, Kay is probably writing poetry or dancing with their cat-kids (Frenchington and Gramps). Kay has facilitated writing groups at the VA and is in the process of applying for an MFA. You’ll find their work as the featured poet in issue 7 of peculiar journal. Hailing from Chicagoland, Kay now lives in the Pacific Northwest climbing big mountains to hang with tiny flowers.

Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott, Portrait of Djuna Barnes (1926)

Melissa Bałut Fondakowski

Homosyllogism

1. 

She is her hair.

Her hair is in my mouth.

Therefore, she is in my mouth.

2.

I desire her.

She does not stop me.

Therefore, she desires me.

3.

All girls have crushes.

She and I are both girls.

Therefore, she crushes me.

link to video 

---

Melissa Bałut Fondakowski is a professional non-profit consultant, editor and writer. She is the author of Out, a novel, and What are you Waiting For? Seven Steps to Help You Write and Publish Your Book Now, an Amazon eBook. Recent work has appeared in San Francisco Magazine and GIA Reader. She writes regularly at Unfit to Print.

Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin, Woman with Dove (1919)

Tina Carlson

Obsidian

I once was a daughter but now am glass,

was bridle, bark, bound child after

dark. I once was a daughter until I fell.

I swallowed a stone, became squall, a squint

an empty place that held your hands.

Now see the sky through silicone and ash. 

I once was volcano and so were you, 

sisters of violence and magma and mud.

Miasma, you blew the homes down: wolf, 

pig, fire, dirt. You once lived in pink

like a myth, or a missive: I visited when I could.

I once was hospital, a howl, hoarder. Once

a beetle, begging bowl, star losing light. Because

I knew you, your speed and spread, I climbed out 

of my mother’s mouth and sang in the silt. 

Know me as bird, blown open too fast.

---

Tina Carlson is a queer poet living in New Mexico. She is the author of two previously published collections of poetry: Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM Press, 2017) and, We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press), a collaboration with 2 other NM poets. A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery is forthcoming in spring 2023 from UNM Press. 

Pamela Hobart Carter, Sharon Rizk

Pamela Hobart Carter Sharon Rizk (2021) 

sketched during The Collectibles: Lesbian Poet Trading Cards Live Reading & Open Mic

Rebecca Morton

The Layaway Drawer

A clutch of waitresses zigzagged their way across 

Cracker Barrel after my grandmother chucked 

the bread basket’s contents onto the floor. 

Everything is cold! Her criticism, same one 

as years before when she stacked my grandfather’s

bleached and ironed handkerchiefs 

on the front stoop, rekeyed the locks. I never 

waitressed but I manned our town’s jewelry store, 

an education in the layaway drawer as ladies 

came to peek at their treasures, Don’t tell 

my husband. By fall, they’d all be looped 

in yellow gold and peridot. By fall, 

the sweetgum trees’ spiked pods blanketed 

the under-canopy. As a kid I’d climb the stone-

sharp arcing limbs to collect cicada shells, 

then sink those hooked and hollow claws 

into my cousin’s perfect curls (curls all the boys 

would pull). While she writhed I skipped away 

delighted. The inside thing with still-wet 

wings and oil-slick eyes clicking its song. 

---

Rebecca Morton’s work appears in Sugar House Review, RHINO, TriQuarterly, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, Pacifica Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and holds an MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University. Rebecca lives in Chicago with her wife and children.

Helene Schjerfbeck

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) Self-Portrait

Danielle Lemay

Mother-in-law

We drove 1000 miles to a huge house

in which we were not permitted to sleep. 

I thought if she saw the face of love, she 

might change her mind. My partner and I slept 

in their driveway on an air mattress, 

lodged in the bed of our pickup truck. 

Should I piss on the lawn? My father-in-law 

slipped us a key to use the bathroom. 

Their house helper, exiled from the Philippines, 

gave us each a towel: for you to keep. 

link to video 

---

Danielle Lemay is a scientist and poet. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 and has appeared or is forthcoming in Limp Wrist Magazine, New Verse News, California Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, ONE ART, and elsewhere. She lives in central California with her wife, two children, and six chickens.

Harriet Hosmer

Harriet Hosmer, Oenone (1855)

C. Eliot Mullins

Letter to my 14-year-old self

Check this out. 

You’re going to marry a chick, a woman, a queer, a sometimes-she/sometimes-they butch babelicious. 

I can see your confusion.  I can see your fear.

This is your pep talk.  Don’t look away from your life.

You are waiting for you.

Your life is waiting for you. 

You’ll get married in a long blue dress showing more skin than you’re comfortable with. But you’ll be comfortable. 

You’ll call yourself beautiful. I notice you are looking at your hands. You don’t believe it. You are crafting the story where you are not beautiful. When the boys do what they will do, you are still beautiful. Your life is still waiting. And you are definitely 100% without a doubt marrying her. 

link to video 

---

C. Eliot Mullins (she/her) is an adjunct instructor, mental health therapist, friend of cats, lifelong Pacific Northwesterner, extreme introvert, and an increasingly fearless lesbian poet. This is her first published poem.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait (1790)

Kellie Toyama

Variant

I’ve always been here

on the pages buried under white-out and expensive ink,

at least when not torn out entirely.

(Isn’t it sad how I had to go to a private library to learn about myself? 

Storybook tales too faded in my living relative’s minds—

they’d barely been alive before they were colonized). 

I’m so lucky that I like to read, and have the mind

to lift the white veil they tossed on my head as an infant, 

and see without clouded separation.

---

Hey Adora

There was never a gracious, all-relieving exhale 

No big kiss from her on the Ferris wheel 

My blanket twisted into a shawl of guilt sewed to my shoulders

And I was too old at eighteen

Now I’ll just have to reinvent time and space

With my friends de-petrifying in the pews behind me

And it’s a little exciting, running like this

Getting to cut little slices of heaven from a stolen loaf of bread

I am almost sad for those who’ll never know

How sweet air tastes after you pry a fist from your neck

And how celebratory it all is 

When you find you can make family out of fabric, not blood

---

Kellie Toyama is an Okinawan poet, graphic designer, and movie buff from Hawaii. With a BA in English, she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Cinema Studies and can be tipped on Venmo: @kxllie.

Paul Nadar

Paul Nadar, Liane de Pougy (1869-1950)

Liz Ahl

A Nest in the Palm of Your Hand

In this photograph, your grubby gloves removed,

abandoned handless on the stoop, a brief interruption

of your gardening, which I always admire for its rough and tumble,

how the labor of it leaves you be-twigged in the hair, dirt-smudged, 

bramble-slashed, but in this moment, you pause, shed the gloves 

of roughness to knock at the sliding glass door, 

where you have brought to show me what you found:

an empty nest small enough to sit comfortably in the palm of your hand,

which you offer up first to me, then to the camera I point,

strange, artful bowl, adorned with a puff of something white, 

as if the builder decorated the nest with a piece of cloud,

a finishing touch, a flourish, a fancy.

We’re pretty sure this empty means finished, means hatched, 

not plundered; it’s late enough in the season, we imagine, though really 

we know nothing but to notice and to show, notice and show, 

the fragments and questions and nods and mysteries

the world offers us, and also from time to time 

to show one another ourselves, to notice one another, 

to offer in our upturned palms some new piece, 

stray syllable of a word we’re still practicing, or some other tender, 

partly built thing. Something fragile and lasting.

Something that looks entirely improvised but isn’t.

Small miracle of grass and dust.

link to video 

---

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017) as well as several chapbooks including A Thirst That's Partly Mine, which won the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in New Verse News, Limp Wrist, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Able Muse, West Trestle Review, and Quartet Literary Journal. She lives in New Hampshire.

Pamela Hobart Carter, Ann Tweedy

Pamela Hobart Carter Ann Tweedy (2021) 

sketched during The Collectibles: Lesbian Poet Trading Cards Live Reading & Open Mic