i say nothing to the man crouched
in the hallway or to the woman sitting
on the stairs because i am not supposed
to – they are not there. you are not
supposed to talk to people who are
not there. you are not supposed to see
people who are not there. and the
little boy at the quarry where i go
sometimes to think and throw rocks
has been dead for 50 year, says he can
hold his breath a lot longer than me,
dares me to jump in and i pretend i don’t
hear him because that is what i’m
supposed to do. and he is more insistent
every time i go back, until he is telling me
one day, he will just push me in. sink or swim.
and he laughs and grins an evil little boy grin
and i get on my bike and pedal home in
the dark, careful of cars. no one moves
in the cemetery as i fly by, as still as
their graves; you’d think their bones ached,
from all that time in one place.  i keep moving,
it’s what i’m supposed to do. i ignore the drunk
man asking me for a loose cigarette outside
the bodega just like i ignore the old lady
shuffling about on the sidewalk, looking
up one end of the street, then the other,
back and forth, like she’s lost because
there’s nowhere she actually needs to be,
right now. she’s dead. she can go wherever
the hell she wants. i think maybe i should
tell her this, but when i look back again
she’s gone. i shrug. the man asking for
cigarettes spits at my feet and picks up
a butt from a crack in the pavement, asks
me for a light which i don’t have either.
he looks at me funny. asks what’s wrong
with me. i see ghosts. they see me back.
i’m not supposed to talk about it.

---

It looks like you’re on your own tonight. You’re back Home. Your mother shed your old cocoon the moment you left all those months ago. A collage of songs you used to love and the smells of fabric softener from your old clothes waft into your room from the vent. You arrive hungry, with a heartache. Marooned on the ship inside an impossible bottle. This happens every time.

The scabs char over your skin when you redecorate the eggshell walls for the fifth day in a row. You rearrange the inside of your catacomb with papier-mâché. No matter how vibrant, the sun bleaches the colors to sepia toned smears and shrivels the room like a raisin. The shiny has-beens that trickle from your bedroom blinds, broken glass tinsels, are everywhere but you can’t bring yourself to touch them.

It isn’t any different outside, either. The sky is severed into perfect rectangle’d spaces. You can see their weight drooping like pregnant bellies above you. You don’t go outside. Not when you’re Home. Not that you could face the front door laced with rusted barbed wire, dicing you on the spot. Not that Home was the first place you’d ever thought to leave whole. Home, with its fishing pole reeling you back to its tower.

Let your eyes roll along the pavement as dead leaves spill onto the front yard like loaded dice. You learned at Home, you could never really save anything. Or spare the grater from itching your brain. The afternoons abandoned your hill faster than you could savor the night. Staying awake driving absently like an ant marching a muddy maze, trying to salvage lost time. Fry your eyes with neon light hypnosis, drug store popsicles, and marijuana. You don’t have to remember any of it. Not that anyone would notice. 

You eat everything in sight without putting anything in your mouth. Fingers twitch in fear like a metronome tick. Your muscles scream and your belly wheezes, gasping the debris. Something brays behind your ear; makes you want to leave. Not that you could help it or stop the tension in your shoulders when a laughter from the kitchen light sneers at your back. You feel tense, guilty even, and toss your body on the bed like a spineless book in your room of molding walls and wet linen you so desperately tried to conceal. At this point you realize you weren’t really any different when you left; you mummified everything you could touch. Home hid inside your new closet with all your dusty trophies and broken windpipes. Home followed. Home taunted, and you could do nothing about it.

But it looks like you’re on your own tonight. Looks like you’re making churches out of toothpicks, stuffing tombstones in shoe boxes. The last place of you outlined in chalk, rolled into a stick of incense, burning for hours.

I’m engaged in a battle in a comments donnybrook over the Runaways movie. Despite Lita Ford having a few hits, she’ll forever be known as the chick who did “Close my Eyes Forever” with Ozzy Osbourne, growling in a smoky cave or some shit while Ozzy looks like a drag queen in the video. Aside from the obvious killers of “Bad Reputation” and “Do You Want to Touch Me” and being the blueprint for woman-fronted punk rock, Joan Jett produced the lone Germs record, and that alone makes her cool as fuck. There’s also beefing over Iron Maiden, who sound like an army of balloon animals trotting over a hill while cartoon ducks fly pink and purple bomber planes while their whack mascot Eddie roams around dressed like a pirate to me. Black Sabbath prayed to goat heads laying in pentagrams made of salt. Judas Priest still rips as Rob Halford sports leather fuck me suits while screaming about banging dudes. For my dollar, Heavy Metal is supposed to be scary, not cheerful. This is music nerd 101: argue about opinions and facts that no one else except the dorks in the dispute care about – the shit that women purr over, you know. 

I read somewhere that part of what makes us human is our ability to laugh and to love music. I don’t know if that’s bullshit or not, but I like that way it sounds. Banjo twangs and trap beats act as the heartbeat to my existence. I think about music constantly, so why wouldn’t that assessment make sense? The obsession creeps into my everyday life in multiple forms like when I buy bootleg Tribe Called Quest shirts off Instagram, or my best friend and I walk into the bar, he grabs the first round, and I load the jukebox with music that’s objectively good vs. what a drunk dude from the suburbs wants to hear, because some people live their lives putting Sublime’s 40oz to Freedom on repeat.  If you don’t do this, you will wind up hearing Crazytown’s “Butterfly.”

I ain’t about that life.

Being a music nerd is a life sentence, it’s an obsession of wanting to know how the Beastie Boys put together Paul’s Boutique, getting into heated debates about how Aerosmith wrote better music while all geeked out on the shit; that James Brown is better than Elvis, how by Low End Theory, Phife could tangle with Q-Tip as a true competitor, and dropping the knowledge that no matter how much labor you might put into it, a playlist will never be a mixtape. 

Some of my favorite memories are going with my friends to a record store, browsing the stacks, checking out what was hocked in the used bin, hoping to find that holy grail copy of Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs or an O.G. copy of the Misfits’ Walk Among Us. Nag Champa floated in the air, purging the smell of day shift weed smoked. We had four different record stores in my area on the south side of Chicago. Each store had a different vibe, a different flow, you had to know how the stores worked, how to be cool under the judgy eyes of the clerks. The experience is what matters in music appreciation, we celebrate the journey. Record stores still exist, but so does Amazon. You can find whatever you want with a click. Knowing that Space Lord Bezos will have your copy of Parliament Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain delivered to your door is convenient, but it does take the fun out of the search. 

I’m caught in that generation of folks who can adapt to technology, but remember when call waiting was the new thing. With evolutions happening by the minute, there’s a pang of regret, lost in the forgetfulness of touchstones that we once loved, but have faded into memories. Sadly,  many times they’re the things we don’t immediately think of when someone brings up, “remember back in 1996 when the Fugees The Score record dropped?”

I’m 40 now. I remember Pearl Jam and Digable Planets being new sounds. I remember when we cared about the radio. My kids care about YouTube. 

A mixtape was an act of love, a symbol that they gave the utmost fuck about you. You gotta understand, we didn’t have Facebook groups. There were no hashtags. You either liked someone’s shirt at a concert, in a smokey late-night diner or met in the halls of your school. The communal bonding experience of discovering the other freak who liked early Ministry or the deep cuts of KRS-One wasn’t exactly like knowing who raced home to watch TRL. The mixtape generation was from the mid-1980s when black cassettes became affordable, all the way until we saw the rise of the iPod in the mid-to-late 2000s. 

A playlist has its place. A playlist has a purpose. When Spotify shows me playlists, many times, they’re outstanding, and when I’m driving, poking my finger at the screen, they’re just what I need – accessibility. There are benefits to utilizing the technology of ease that a playlist offers. If you want to hear an algorithm-driven mix of the best punk from the Midwest, it exists, the same goes if you’re dying to dive into Dolly Parton’s B-sides. 

A playlist is not a love letter, a dare, or a wish in audio format. It’s copy and pasting. Mixtapes aren’t a collection of songs. They’re an introduction to who you are. Makeups, breakups, and make outs happened from these pieces of alchemy. Friendships were formed and allies were cemented. When you made a mixtape, you had to own all of the music you wanted to feature, or you at least had to have a dual tape deck to dub a side of the cassette that someone might have made for you. Unlike a playlist where one can be complied, the songs juked around, a mixtape, was an order, a flow, a collection of music you NEEDED someone to hear, if as an act of friendship, “check out these bands, I think you’ll love them” but as an extension of the self. 

The magic about a mixtape was that if the recipient was into Nirvana but only knew the big radio bands, this is where your deep music nerd knowledge cemented everything. My move was giving something a little familiar, so what you’d share could be a bridge into the possible. The sonic roux was there, so my spice was dropping tracks like “Waiting Room” by Fugazi, “Here Comes Your Man” by The Pixies, a little Naked Raygun, Melvins, the Misfits, Sonic Youth, The Jesus Lizard (admittedly a deep cut pick, but there had to be chaotic balance). 

But then, there were complicated layers from here on out. What if that Nirvana tape was for a girl, and she liked how thoughtful you were, and then you started making out with her on the regular? The rules changed. The mixtape acted as a continual barometer of season, emotional state, and mood. What if you discovered that she loved dancier stuff? Then you had to take stock of what you had that you could swing to – maybe Michael Jackson, Boney M, Prince, or Justin Timberlake? Maybe she loved techno, or disco, you had to find out how to make it work – you had to dig. What if you were bummed out and wanted to share how you felt without saying it, a tokenized “this is my mood” in hopes someone would get the drift when you were categorizing a successive string of bummer songs in a row, Robert Smith and the Cure be damned?

There was the tracklist and potential artwork, which had to say, “no, I’m not a fucking psycho” without serial killer scrawl and potentially weird drawings. Some folks went to levels of crafting full-blown folk art pieces by cutting up magazines for their tracklists.

And when you finally handed the goods over, you had to wait. You were dying to know if they liked the tape. Did they love it all? Maybe a few songs. Some people put it right on in the car while others let the collection fester, depending on the relationship. I did want to know if you liked Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” on my 80’s dance party mix. What if the recipient took the tapes, knowing that they didn’t give a fuck about them, they were humoring you? Talk about hell. I’ve heard such threats issued during a breakup, “I never even listened to those stupid cds you made me!” and for a dork who can catalog Pearl Jam’s drummers or the nine members of Wu-Tang, that hurts like being told you’ve got a small dick. 

The idea of a mixtape endures is that it’s a thunderbolt in the night, banged loudly by Joe Strummer screaming, “what are we gonna do now?” That moment shared was a whisper no one else could hear, even if we cranked the volume on a broken stereo. In an era with so many things built for ease of use, comfort, and disposal, taking the time seems quaint but also emotionally necessary when the little things really do matter. 

Robert Dean is a working class writer, raconteur, and enlightened dumbass. You can read his work in places like Austin American-Statesman, MIC, Fatherly, and Consequence of Sound. His first collection of poems, Snakes in the Garden is dropping this fall from Madness Heart Press.

We had a secret wedding

I crossed my legs towards yours

And you, yours, towards me

and we created a space between

the church, the steeple

I will sit like this till my kneecaps burn

Because at age thirteen I read an article about body language

And thought, this is my chance

If you tuck your hair behind one ear

you’re pulling back a curtain

only for them

available and private

How could anyone not pick up on this

closed to the person on your left

open to the person on your right

safely concealed by your clamped thighs

hands tip-toeing towards each other

eyes straight ahead

every thread of the couch fabric a small fence to climb

We could find a celebrant – no – let’s just do it right here – barely moving – yes

First we breathe in, and sigh our vows on the exhale

but that’s too loud

next we silently mouth them

but that’s too loud

finally we let our facial expressions do the talking

blink twice for “I do”

while our friends surround us in this darkened lounge

watching the new season premiere of The Sopranos

and my eyelids crash together

hard as a car door slammed shut in anger

and I can’t tell if you did blink

or if it was light from the television twitching on your face

This is why you must be careful with your body language

The power didn’t always exist

when I first tried to communicate through the various foldings of myself

tonight the power came all at once

and it’s too much

I didn’t mean to get married

inside our mirrored legs

no longer a church

but a rockpool when the tide’s out

and now

I have so much paperwork

---

Laura Vincent (Ngāti Māhanga) is a writer from rural New Zealand. She has a thirteen year old food blog called hungryandfrozen.com, and her poetry and fiction has appeared in Entropy, Peach Magazine, The Spinoff, and the International Institute of Modern Letters journal Turbine|Kapohau.  

_{A Dedication to Violence, or The Chirps of a Swallow at My Window}

Mockingbird, take me away like a child chasing nightmares on the backs of sickened wings. Let me cling to the feathers and drift away from this haunted house of constraint 
under the shadow of a crooked cross. 

Let me spear the night sky 
with wishes for a better tomorrow 
instead of a name etched in electric regret.

It’s intoxicating to feel free 
like something that can hop off and fly to anywhere 
at a moment’s notice. 

The shackles of life lie at my feet and I wonder what a bird song 

---

_{Here comes the rain.}

It was raining in New Orleans. We listened to a Vivaldi record of the Four Seasons acquired when someone’s grandpa passed away. 

We drank beer with the windows open and wondered what life would bring. 

Across the city, streets filled with water, and gutters overflowed. Trash clung against the iron in the drains while we listened to dead musicians play a dead man’s songs. 

We looked out toward a saturated city and took in the humid air. We were happy to not be anywhere else. 

---

Robert Dean is a working class writer, raconteur, and enlightened dumbass. You can read his work in places like Austin American-Statesman, MIC, Fatherly, and Consequence of Sound. His first collection of poems, Snakes in the Garden is dropping this fall from Madness Heart Press.

we ride skateboards on the edge of the

street, one sneaker afraid to leave

the pavement. all summer, we move through

the triptych:

me, legs sprawled on the carpet

as we go between your sister’s room—which had

the AC, the next size up for your gauges, hair dye—

your bedroom—where I would draw or write and you

would play Resident Evil, mad each time the

president’s daughter was killed—and sitting on the edge

of your tub, cold bath water against our scalps,

one hand cradling the neck like a child,

the other holding the shower head, purple swirling;

you, laying on the grass, singing into

the bright blue sky. maybe it was a song we loved,

or maybe a song from theater camp. who can remember why

when the lyrics are burned there forever. picking grass

to make it whistle—something your brother taught you—

or snapping the rubber bracelets on our wrists until

they broke. I pulled a black one apart and a boy we were

with turned pale. we laugh, knowing we had no interest

in these acts yet, but it was fun to see them squirm;

us, standing in your garage, humidity palpable. maybe

you were smoking a snuck cigarette or burning something

with your father’s lighter. my heart pumped, afraid of getting

caught—in awe your mother never noticed. talking about

how funny it was that mean kids with malice on their lips

could not get between us, with lies or truths. why did they want

so badly to break our world in two?

and just then, the sky opened up, water spilling on the

street. without a second though, we ran out—

barefoot on the cool concrete—screaming songs we knew

too well. We are young and we don’t care—

thick hair in ropes down our backs, my dress soaked through,

your shorts turned blue to black, our legs speckled with

mud from the road. we dance until we’re called in

by your mother, who throws us towels and a dirty look.

any time a summer storm moves in,

and the thick air breaks to a breeze,

I feel that relief—that awestruck joy—

brought about by thunder

and a little spark

between the trees.

---

Maura Lee Bee (she/they) is a queer, LatinX writer based out of New York City. You can find her writing in YES Poetry, Ghost City Press, Breadcrumbs, and more. She’s a previous Pushcart (2019) and Best of the Net (2020) nominee. Her first book “Peter & the Concrete Jungle” was published in 2017. When she isn’t busy dismantling an otherwise oppressive system, she enjoys reading books, baking pies, and meeting new dogs.

_{“And Then the Floods Came”}

Face masks are required for entry to

most places now. The world is ending

and we’re busy watching scary movies

on your couch, trying to be oblivious to

the worsening situation outside.

The pandemic isn’t getting better. Have you

checked the numbers lately? Have you

checked the news? It’s not good.

It sounds like the apocalypse is

in your backyard, dancing around your

fire pit that’s overgrown with grass.

Looking through the window in your kitchen

above the sink that doesn’t have curtains,

waiting for us to fall asleep so it can

take us and make us pay 

for our happiness.

I’m holding onto you

at the end of days,

looking for a way

to keep you near me

even as the sky falls.

---

_{“I Want to Give You Flowers”}

Every flowers second of every day flowers

I want to flowers give you flowers.

You are flowers beautiful like flowers.

You bloom flowers bright and free like

flowers. I need you flowers

in my life like flowers.

I don’t flowers pretend to know flowers

everything you are flowers on the

inside but I’m flowers trying my best

flowers to let you know flowers that

you are gorgeous flowers and I will

spend flowers the rest of my flowers

days letting you flowers know just

how flowers amazing you are flowers.

---

Rachel Tanner is a writer from Alabama whose work has recently appeared in Saw Palm, Wine Cellar Press, and elsewhere. She has a monthly video game poetry/prose column in Videodame and her chapbook “Heal My Way Home” (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) is available on Amazon. She tweets @rickit.

_Pain

Pain in another’s heart is imagined 

but never experienced the same. 

Empathetic souls imagine 

how they would feel to identify.  

Others contend their pain is superior  

but yours is nothing serious. 

Religion declares your pain is penance;

enduring it the key to salvation. 

Hatred promotes this pain, 

your kind should suffer for existing. 

Love cares 

Love reaches out 

Love would take your place. 

---

_{Middle School Parking Lot} 

A sea of black with yellow waves, 

Shines with wetness 

Under glaring halogen lights.

Stepping off the sidewalk, 

Approaching the White Buick.

Pellets of Ice Melt: 

Sodium, Magnesium,

Calcium Chloride broken 

in chunks at my feet  

Pine cones and maple leaves, 

Grass clippings from Fall mowers

Blown together in hay colored islands.

A teacher lost a red pen, 

A seventh-graders’ bottle of 
Peach nail polish

Orphaned carelessly,

Fallen from an open backpack.

---

John Homan is a poet and percussionist from Bend, Oregon. He is a graduate of Indiana University. His work has appeared in Chiron Review, Former Cactus, and Misfit Magazine among others. He is an ESL tutor in a middle school, happy to have given up 20 years of corporate customer service. He lives with his wife and two cats in Elkhart, Indiana. 
Twitter handle @john_homan. John’s Website is: https://about.me/john_homan

you dress for work in straight skirt

& paisley blouse. It’s camouflage, like a turtle 

buried on the beach, how lost you were, newly left. 

As your teen daughter, I determined not to follow you,

wore men’s clothes. Why? Women are weak, get forgotten.

You & I, we spun alone, separate eggs tossed in ocean tides.

When we were sea turtles doesn’t sound as pretty 

as when we were sparrows, but turtles have no vocal chords

& in that tract house set on sand & termites, it fit: we burst 

out of egg casings, unable to talk. The new world

with no instructions. Where was the ocean.

Your denial was as seamless as the leathery eggs:

If we tried to say we loved each other, we groaned 

& screamed, big sounds from the archelon carapaces 

we hid in, or dove deep to the ocean floor, benthic.

Years & years later we did say it, despite all, at a holiday event 

where rum made emotions flow, but still I was glad we both fled 

after, as our strangely hinged togetherness could have sent 

us back into a hiding in our nests buried in the beach.

Then who knows if we would emerge under the moon, or 

maybe be unfound, not knowing differently. 

---

Lynn Finger’s (she/her) poetry has appeared in Ekphrastic Review, 8Poems, Perhappened, Twin Pies, Kissing Dynamite, Book of Matches and Drunk Monkeys. Lynn is an editor at Harpy Hybrid Review and works with a group that mentors writers in prison. Follow Lynn on Twitter @sweetfirefly2.

Lord, will those eyes become blinding? 

Will those hands become terrifying fire? 

Will that warm face become cosmic mystery again? 

We were ready to run away to new land

Our boats were rocking in the waves

Our nets were miraculous for catching fish

We have left behind the graves and those

scowling that we find some wives already. 

We were ready to take his hands and not 

shrink back at the gaping holes

To sit beside him once again beneath 

the trees he cursed in hunger pains

And hear his parables by the fire.

But instead he leaves us again. 

Rays of light shining around him 

Not yet a ghost, too real to be a ghost

And the clouds open like floodgates of legend

And the oceans and wilderness 

and gardens and cities of a new creation  

Peek through his open hands. 

But all we can see is the crease of his smile

The tangle of his hair, the sand on his feet

The cut of his robes, the scars on his skin 

the body we used to bump into, break 

bread with, lean against as we couldn’t help

but fall asleep that fateful night

he needed us the most. 

His eyes close as he embraces the sun. 

And though the awe will last us the rest of our lives

And though this holy spirit he speaks of breathes 

And though death has been so conquered 

that we would go to such adventures laughing—

For a second, we cannot help but want 

One more day. 

---