ALOCASIA

There is a forest between my lover 
and my love. Two years ago, 
when my then-lover wanted the
trappings of Christmas, I bought 
him a dozen blue roses and watched 
them turn to sand in my apartment. 
Now, when my love asks for Noel, 
I give concession; we deck our railings 
in strings of secondhand light; 
I drive to the hardware store and 
pick up a star pine. Not a true pine,
but a delicate tropical conifer that sheds 
its needles like a Charlie Brown tree. 
After New Year passes, the star pine 
lives on its own bookshelf upstairs, 
a difficult pet that needs nightly mist, 
indirect sunlight, temperance in all things. 
By July it seems to be dying. I tried too hard, 
moving it from shelf to porch, front yard to 
back, looking for perfect conditions, when 
what it needed was a sure place. I return it, 
slumping, to the bookshelf. You can 
euthanize a plant, I know, but I don’t. 
I talk to it, say I hope it will stay for 
another winter with us. If it dies, 
we will bury it in our garden.
If it lives, we will give it a name.

Originally published in DEAR Poetry Journal.

 

Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer writer, editor, and critic. Their books include a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press 2024), and 2 solo full-length poetry collections, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There and The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2023 and 2026). Wallace is also the cofounder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE, which has authored 3 full-length poetry collections to date, 2 of which are forthcoming from Palimpsest Press: ZZOO and DETOURISM. More: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca. Photo by Mark Laliberte.

 

Let’s be pothos,
planted together
with deep roots in
night-dark soil,
cozy in our
terracotta,
our curling tendrils
entangled.

Two vines, in a 
sunbeam; two vines
holding hands from
the deepest root
to the youngest leaf.

 

Kit Steitz is a queer, non-binary poet from Columbia, Missouri or they could be a pothos named pathos, there’s really no way to tell. They most enjoy writing poems while fending off slobbering, overgrown puppies and geriatric cats. Their work has appeared in The Ivy Review, Moist Poetry Journal, the lickity~split, and JAKE.  You can find their neurospicy-fueled ramblings at @kitikins.bsky.social.

 

You go outside and the trees don’t know
You’re black. The lilacs will chatter and break
Themselves real bloom, real boon,
No matter your gender. You matter.
Who in you is most material, so
You matter. Your afro gone touch the sky.
Come up from the ground looking extra fly,
Come up from the ground looking extra, fly,
I will touch the sky. I—open my mouth,
And my whole life falls out.

Originally published at Poets.org.

 

Rickey Laurentiis (b. 1989, February 7) was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. Their writing has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017),  Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded them a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, they traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laurentiis received a MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where they were a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where they read literature and queer theory. They are the trans author of Death of the First Idea, forthcoming in 2025 from Knopfs, and Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. Boy with Thorn was also named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry book by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. 

 

perfect plants

and today! i choose to 
return to earth’s soft muscle 
bend deep, hold warm wetness hereafter 
the boi i knew before rigid gender 
shook the firmament, rewrote holy 
heavens into what could be extracted,
before wretched steel of self rendered 
a body hollow, collapsed categories 
pulled me down, pra(e)yed to a godlessness 
unordained. 
                                 today! 
                                 i praise the creatures that live
                                 undefined—i plunge my fingers 
into the sweet sex of hibiscus 
the tender touch of tomato plants 
the gentle kiss of soil on jiggling ass 
cheeks & thighs, root out relation
small majesties manifest
coming into veritable fruition 
i don’t explain, instead i wipe eyes 
enveloped in lustful microspores 
say look!  bits of me disperse 
                                 everywhere 

 

After

“And when the earth defends you, you become its lover.”
—Here and Elsewhere (1976) 

Sun-spilled. Filled with so much song, even the cicadas paused their chirping to hear the melody of a new world overflow. These songs were how we kept our memories alive, embarrassing as some may have been. Nobody wanted to recall the seed patents, the plastics littering poorly maintained roads, how an extra dollar could afford you another day’s survival. The babies, brown and plentiful, couldn’t remember a time when the earth wasn’t their playground, when the sky burned crimson, when the saguros collapsed from exhaustion. They thought our generation strange: the way we still flinched at the sound of thunder, reminiscent of the bombs and shrapnel launched in the name of progress. How we sometimes ate until our bellies hurt, or searched for our car keys, now obsolete. Occasionally, an elder would pass a body of water and weep, the memory of drought so deeply embedded in their soul. Sometimes, hope is more painful than enduring: but now that we’ve survived, we live our lives at a ship’s helm of our own beginning.

And in the After, folks would tell us this interruption was as short as a hare’s tail, when it really came down to brass tacks. A minor tear in time’s good dress. A terrible dream unraveled by weavers in search of the cross stitch. The storytellers wanted to rewrite the whole endeavor as a trickster’s parable, but the ones who survived held their memories in dog-eared pages. Collapsed, oil-slicked. Grandmother undid her braid and soaked up all that grease, clipping the ends as a testament to what we were leaving behind. Sent the prayer floating down the river, a funeral pyre. We only cut our hair when we are in mourning. So the morning came, illuminated . We watched how beautiful a thing could become when it is returned to origin – again cell, again egg, again portal. Again, lover, palms berry-stained, grasping the future with both hands. 

Eventually, America became an afterthought, easily mistaken for the rush of wind that picked up pollen and carried it to other lands. We became other lands, buoyed by our ancestor’s insurgence – how they greened, cracked, crumbled whatever asphalt tried to silence their transformation. Our gritos & gumbo ya yas filling the night sky instead of exhaust. They knew, without a doubt, that even when habitats crumble, some brave creature comes to nest in the ashes.

We met at the crossroads, throwing seeds instead of salt. Let us bloom here, a green insurrection. At the edge of a new world, a figure waits at the mouth of the moon, hips rocking like boats on brackish water. Saddling dusk, she dreams of semi-aquatic guppies inching towards the bowl’s inverted rim. 

 

Ashia Ajani is a sun shower, an overripe nectarine, a carnivorous plant, a glass bead. They are the author of one poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023) and a forthcoming collection of lyric essays, Tending the Vines (Timber Press, TBA). Her writing is a kaleidoscope of her work as an eco-griot & abolitionist.

 

dad, my love for you could be
a potted orchid: chipped bark, 
climate control, delicate
watering preferences. like other 
growers, i’d order my life 
around rare, uncertain 

flowerings. or is it
better anchored in a terra cotta 
pot emitting more sturdy 
greenery? silver inch or spider 
plant or something tropical whose name 
will never stick on my tongue—
even a cactus in coarse desert soil,
unable to bear abundance.

Originally published in The San Diego Poetry Annual.

 

Ann Tweedy was born and grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts but has spent most of her adult life living in various parts of the West Coast and, more recently, the Midwest. She currently lives in Vermillion, South Dakota, which locals affectionately refer to as “the Miami of South Dakota.” Her poetry explores family and personal relationships, nature, social justice and race, and bisexuality and queerness. Ann’s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016.  It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award.  Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word 2020).  Earlier this year, A Registry of Survival was featured in the Wardrobe section of The Sundress Blog. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and five Best of the Net Awards.  A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. Read more about her at anntweedy.com.

 

most evenings find mummy pacing down cooling 
paths in a blaze of blossoms. nothing that lived in
guyana can be nursed here, so instead her resistance
is found in the bud of hydrangeas, gladiolas, and a love
of hummingbirds. the most common of flowers
will be tended – during the summer she glories in the
rightness of blooming, dedicating hours to pulling 
errant weeds that choke the root.

even in winter she is pledged to nursing life 
in the bitterest of Maryland snow, think on the four lime trees
sheltering in our house, by the dining table, forcing
my blustering father to cower at least for a short while 
in its branches, neighbors come by to exclaim 
at the impossible orchard reared among wood planked walls. 

my mummy the stubborn farmer, laughing proudly 
by its fruit. requests for advice returned with exacting 
directions on wind, sun, and timing, yet when my sister 
and I hear her, what we think of are two little girls 
reared less gently then this – her a young lonely mother
with sometimes brutal hands, but here I am 
crying at the lesson of her bowed back in the garden,
hands dug into a mire of dirt, stubbornly 
willing love into life. 

Originally published in let the dead in (Alan Squire Publishing).

 

Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores how Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Diode Journal of Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem a Day, Poet Lore, Plume, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy. Her full length collection let the dead in was released by Alan Squire Publishing (March 2022). A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida is a Best of the Net Finalist. She lives online at saidaagostini.com. 

 

When my aunt died, the neighbors knocked on her coffin to complain about the state of her lawn—or rather, lack of lawn. A natural-born biologist, her yard was the only untamed space on the block, a refuge for the birds and the bees, though it was far from the modern definition of sexy. The overgrown bushes put 70s porn stars to shame. Vines slipped through foundational cracks, urging the house to just let down her walls. Buds peeped through bathroom windows, dandelion-wishing for a show. 

We lower her coffin,
fill in the pit with Walmart-brand dirt. 
Even the roses are fake.  

Originally published in Gone Lawn.

 

Kristin Gustafson is a poet and editor from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She is one of Literary Cleveland’s 2023-2024 Breakthrough Writing Residents and is working on her first full-length poetry collection about mental illness and pop culture. Her work has appeared in HAD, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, BULLSHIT LIT, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. You can watch her scream into the void on Twitter/X/Elon’s hellscape @KristinTheRed or post the occasional dog or horse picture on Instagram @KristinGustafsonE.

 

flowers on lockjaw

overflow amorphous :: us ourselves :: let the flowers do the talking :: 
concentric syllables :: head tethered petals endlessly feeling :: strength :: 
we will pretend our tongue is a flag :: scream and scream :: windswept independence :: 
face to fabric :: tattered appendage ::

plucking :: whiplash :: withhold holes in :: visible history and decipher time :: 
a mirror image is not my image :: that one in the window :: arches :: 
the story of materials though materials :: give life :: take life :: solace upon falling :: 
blooming resilience with abnormality twisted in :: pollinating cages :: flailing by garden standards :: 
crash landing :: laughing parallel :: laughing our heads :: loose ::

toothed loosening enters text between atoms :: welcome cavity :: dropping people as they lean in :: 
vestigial beginnings :: truth in ventricles :: intoxicated by blood as :: 
a mixture of oxygen and plasma and ancestry :: all pouring out :: mixed where it tumbles :: 
slippery :: filling bed frames :: articulate mattress :: togetherness feels better :: coming in dust :: 
constellation adornments of stories :: claims to unrelenting sanctuary :: 
passing on place-based reconciliation ::

for us it takes time to remember the order of things ongoing :: this sky sleeps in the daytime :: 
the shapes of birds :: embedded ellipsoids torn into embellishment :: layers of feathers :: 
all softness :: no contrast :: flying :: flies into my mouth :: 
chemical premonition of the eggshell body and greedy maladapted puppetry :: 
what knowing means and shells scatter :: delicate ::

 

tracing leaves

tracing leaves :: searching for alternating wind dependent pathways :: 
repeat to rely on shapeshifting :: keeping traces of otherness :: restore units of freshwater :: 
traced in spigots of illegible lettering :: traces of leaves against the sky :: roots in asphalt :: 
for space above us as so below us :: leaves rustle :: drugged ::

medicinal ambiguity :: leaving traces of a metallic tang in our spit :: 
and tongues that lick like leaves against water :: linguistic droplets on a plastic :: 
cut against assimilated flavors of sustenance ::  trace the membrane of the wrapping :: 
leaving :: letters left unsaid in savory enslavement :: 
leaving the atmosphere when it is too dark to sleep alone or together :: traces flattened :: 
silhouette across a ceiling :: negative space to remember the sky :: 

shattered shards of stars smiling on roofs :: remembering leaves dissecting memories ::  
leaving seasonal :: supple nostalgia :: a hurried home hungry history :: 
holding up lessons from an older ozone layer :: lullaby traces the sound of an opening lock :: 
leaving leaves me wondering what it would have been like if I stayed :: 
who is you that is I :: how am I ? :: you are leaving :: but it was me :: 

motives tracing the outline of self against curtains :: window equals world :: 
we are jumping the window and :: listening to the sounds of an alter :: change implodes ::

wind tracing panes of glass :: leaving some skeleton again :: run wild on fossils :: traces of wild animal :: scattering gasoline :: pent up kinesis :: on traces of footprints :: of wheels tracing pavement :: 
lines lead leaves in a flight spiral :: falling :: to decompose failing to :: release the bodies at :: 
the right time writhing :: windswept leaves :: traces against a streetlight stencil :: 
beams across traces :: telltale signs of rain ::

 

Ursula Zia is a Pakistani-American artist and writer living nomadically. They were born in Atlanta, GA, and grew up in Burlington, VT. Their work combines subjects of biophilia, diaspora, and lullaby to guide a collective imagination through an inconstant landscape of text and image. Their work has been displayed in ArtsWorcester, the Hawthorne Review and the Other Half. They are currently in progress publishing a manuscript titled A Collective Coined as a Singular Entity, and several other chapbooks.

 

It’s Not Who You Are But Where You Are

A sycamore dominates  Its limbs crown                    the canopy—it’s hard straight top—its trunk
thick and round as three barrels  The forest                    slopes south— and south the forest slides
into pine—but here sycamores hold the forest          with its champion thickness—the thickness
furrowed with a mind that wishes for swifts   —wishes for time to spread nutlets across earth—
soft and dark—pioneering—following the sun—  west as west can grow— leave the rest behind 
A tree moves one sapling at a time—the forest                scurrying along by the roots—the young
sycamore just a bit further west toward the sun—        the pioneer sycamore–-whose top crowns
the forest canopy before the forest slopes south    into pine—but here sycamores hold the forest
with its champion thickness furrowed with a mind     for swifts that no longer come and wishes
to leave behind the pines—the old forest                      thinning or thickening or rotting with vine
and undergrowth—westward seeking—seeking             clarity— seeking the end of the question —bending like a bridge—ever asking—never answered

 

That Time I Exchanged Minds with a Bull Bay Magnolia

We exchanged minds / a bull bay / and I—for an hour / Them—diamond-bright /  high and beaming above / my house  I could hear growing / at the tips—whose root / mind touched my own / and sang to me a lullaby / The pine at the far end / of the lot sang its own/ song—its horn reverberating / through soil back to me and up / through my trunk and branches / My fibrous thoughts doubled / and doubled back upon / and layered in resin that lows / the eyes— and pulls the fragrances / through my waxy ends / stretching— stretching— stretched / I saw through all green reaches / that touched my roots—so all / at once my mind spread / A sanctuary—that opened me / into time— my mind appearing / in bush and limb and wild / onion—and holly’s waxy face / Of my body—I could not see it / Instead— I sang with other trumpets / in town— elm and oak and pine— / the wind urging more— more / when it blew against me  My / home remained flat and still— / a small break in the forest / mind— and when they returned me / to the inside of me and my / little home—I cried

 

Cassandra Whitaker (she/they) is a trans writer living in rural Virginia. Whit’s work has been
published in Michigan Quarterly Review, beestung, Conjunctions, Lambda Literary Review, The Mississippi Review, and other places. Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf is forthcoming from Jackleg Press in 2025. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Wolfs-den.page.

 

There’s a line of great big redwoods behind my tiny house in Portland that I think of as my grandfathers, and when the wind blows really hard as it does more and more often in the age of climate crisis branches, big branches, are prone to crack off and fall (in fact an entire tree broke in half and fell into the church parking lot behind me this winter, I see the three-story tall stump out my window every morning when I eat oatmeal, it has birds in it, and is growing new branches), and one of these redwoods spreads right above the skylight in the little loft where I sleep every night and so really it’s just a matter of time until one of the branches falls on the roof of my house in a storm and maybe it cracks the glass and maybe the cracked glass and the cracked branches will fall into the house and onto me soon, I don’t know, although I can tell you the storms are thrilling and I lay in bed and smile like a wizened ship’s captain as the wind buffets my house about, but what I do know is that the last time we were in the redwoods in California it was me and my parents – I had rented a van and driven there to camp with them, an echo of the trip we used to take every summer when we were kids, there were a whole bunch of families and children running around then but this summer it was just my parents (who still go every year for their anniversary, it will be their 50th when they go next year) and me, not yet out to them as a queerdo, but (I would later learn) giving it away to them loudly with my rented van and my overalls and my extremely short new hair – my mom still won’t stop talking about how surprised she is at the short showers I take these days when I took such long ones as a kid, and well, I don’t know what to tell you mom, there’s a lot of unnecessary labor I’ve given up on these days – but they were so happy and so proud to see me and so relaxed in that specific way they are when they’re camping in the redwoods, and so there I was in the redwoods with my parents and they took me on the walk we used to go on as kids, the walk that takes you to the very old trees, I mean they are some of the oldest redwoods that there are which makes them some of the oldest trees that there are and they’re just right there next to this state park campsite that I didn’t exactly take for granted as a kid, I mean I knew it was extremely special, but it was also a part of my normal life and it’s not now and often I won’t go with my parents on the summer trip because they don’t seem to mind breathing wildfire smoke and there’s usually wildfire smoke and I mind it a lot in both my mind and my lungs, but it wasn’t smoky this year and so I rented the van and came to the redwoods and I went with my parents on the walk on the way to the old trees in my overalls and my short short hair, and at one point they stopped, my 80 year old dad who still hikes every day and my 74 year old mom whose hair literally still isn’t gray, they stopped, and they pointed to a certain tree, and they said, “This is the tree that we want you to sprinkle our ashes under when we die” – and I nodded, and I looked down (sorel, sword ferns) and I looked up, and remembered the very old trees are so tall that the forest where they live contains three separate biomes, and there are creatures (flying squirrels, salamanders) that live in the upper story that we will never see in the understory and right then I felt very glad to know that there is room in the trees for the skylight and the wind and the smoke and the van and my hair and my parents and their ashes, all at once.

 

AJ O’Reilly (they/them) is a nonbinary writer, performer, and walk-taker living in Portland, OR. They hold a BA and an MA, and so far their work appears or is forthcoming in HAD and Door Is A Jar. Right now—like really right now, no matter what time it is where you are reading this—they are listening to The Mountain Goats.