Jozie Konczal

When I Play “All Too Well” in the Car in Autumn, I Can Pretend You Are Alive

even I must forfeit every new note

written since the rain brought the spring

petals to their knees, even

if it means never ending autumn, forever

watching as the leaves outside our classroom

window carry their own caskets

to their graves. If I’m quick enough to start

it over, shoot the arrow back to the incomplete

C chord before the action falls, I can save myself

the trouble of building a bridge over

the bathtub I dreamt you into and can’t swim

my way out of. I can tread water for those

five shared minutes. Inside “All Too Well” you

and I watch trees turn their pages as though

from a great distance in the safe arms

of denial. We are both sick with nostalgia

for a time we thought we hated: stretched

afternoons, the long retired train tracks that

broke their promise to deliver us. In those

minutes I pretend you opened the seven years

of letters I keep sending about all the ways

the sun has found to kiss the skyline

and seal the day away. Without interrupting,

perhaps you admire how I roll the joints

now, or we talk about quitting.

The road speeds by and we remain

inside. The trees let go and I don’t

resent them for it. The sun can sleep

free from fear, by which I mean,

it wakes again tomorrow.

Jozie Konczal reads and writes from Alexandria, Virginia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Besides poetry, she feels passionate about music, nature, and the protection of the world and its people. Jozie works as a freelance writer and as a staff member for Cleaver, a literary magazine based in Philadelphia. She considers herself to be an amateur yogi and an experienced napper. You can find her on Twitter @joziekonczal, and Instagram @yunganxietyoffical. To read more of her work, visit her website at joziekonczal.squarespace.com/publications.

Savannah Slone

evergreen / estrogen

stuck on time lapse

wreckage suffocation, time

stamp.

my baby’s first home

a cut out biohazard

the walking wilted

our body, a peony

sterile lining

tampon string stark

against tan inner

thigh

re-gardening

our spare cosmos

mouth prayers an insignificance

salt crash

cleansed clean

undressing the sea

tongue to tongue

vertebrae urgency

marrying reactivity to

the naked dismal

an ivy virus, fingers

around my throat

& what is medicine

to a riptide

this preemptive womblessness

a bell jara red light

Savannah Slone is a queer, bipolar, and disabled writer, editor, and English professor who currently dwells in the Pacific Northwest. She is the editor-in-chief of Homology Lit, as well as the author of An Exhalation of Dead Things (CLASH Books, 2021), Hearing the Underwater (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and This Body is My Own (Ghost City Press, 2019). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She enjoys reading, knitting, hiking, and discussing intersectional feminism. You can read more of her work at www.savannahslonewriter.com.

Luisa Muradyan

Imagine

You are floating in space

and not in that Sandra Bullock

and George Clooney looking

galactically sexy way

but in that my grandmother

disappeared when I was a child

and I pretended she was

abducted by aliens way

Imagine that science experiment

you did in seventh grade

when the teacher kept adding

pennies into a glass of water

and no matter how much grief

you poured into your body

the surface wouldn’t break.

Imagine your grandmother waits for you

in the field of the dead.

You are wearing your purple

dress, she is wearing her purple dress,

the field is wearing its lavender dress.

Imagine being sad only some of the time.

In the spaceship when they took her

they did not call her Jew,

only human

and that fantasy brings you comfort.

Luisa Muradyan is originally from the Ukraine and received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press), which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. She was the editor-in-chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2016-2018 and the recipient of the 2016 Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and nonbinary authors from the former Soviet Union. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Poetry International, the Threepenny Review, Pleiades, and Jewish Currents, among others.

Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Ninth Letter, Cosmonauts Avenue, Longleaf Review, AAWW’s The Margins, Kweli, The Hellebore, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University. She is an alumna of Tin House Workshops and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, and a reader at Tinderbox Poetry.