 Our swollen summer issue HAZE features more poetry than any of our other seasonal issues. We had to expand this issue to accommodate all of the gorgeous work we received. TRIGGER WARNINGS: blood, death, birth, explosions, bugs, loss, spit, mention of sex, needles. they're all falling in pieces. prose by kelsey fuson Birthday When Floating Girl was born, her Down Mother did a headstand and let her pop out on her own, her anti-gravity doing all the work. Floating Girl came out screaming, as all babies do. No one else was in the room to grab her as she rose. The placenta stretched out, six feet, seven feet, eight, stopped just before she hit the roof. She screamed some more. She reached for her Down Mother, covered in blood and amniotic fluid. Down Mother was too tired to grab the placenta, instead let her legs fall back down onto the bed, splatter shades of red on the tarp she’d laid out. The placenta jerked Floating Girl down, just slightly, just enough that her Down Mother could see her face for the first time, wrinkled and wet, with her Gone Father’s nose and her Down Mother’s high brow. Down Mother held her arm out, cupped her hand so that when she squinted, it looked like Floating Girl’s face was in her palm. A drop of blood fell from Floating Girl, off her nose, landing on the tip of Down Mother’s tongue as she opened her mouth to yawn. * New Sky The sky explodes the day I get fired. Birds and airplanes are falling all over the place, weather balloons, hot air balloons, balloons from a birthday party that slipped out of the hand of the now- six-year-old and floated away before she could catch them. They’re all falling in pieces. The explosion cooks most of the birds so we squat on the lawn and gnaw on the geese that landed in the neighbor’s yard, swallow hard tendon and bits of feathers melted to the flesh, suck the marrow from tiny bones as boiled blood drips down our chins. I have a job interview in a few hours, but first we make love under the smoke where the sky used to be. You light a bonfire and we stand downwind of it, inhale the new sky into our lungs. What’s another thing that kills us? Kelsey Fuson is an amateur author who lives and works in Greenville, South Carolina. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in LandLocked Magazine, perhappened magazine, Strukturriss, and CLOVES Literary. we were always transplants. poetry by tierra deacon Even Grafting Couldn't Bind Us Together Parasitic, infectious species, fighting for dominance regardless of terrain. Wrapping tendrils around one another's hearts, regurgitating nutrients back and forth. We were always transplants. No matter how far our offshoots stretched out, we couldn’t dive deep enough into foreign dirt, to stake a claim. My roots withered first, retracting, pinning for the soft, soil I had once known, and you, who I’d seen grown through cracks in the pavement, were overwatered, overfed. Your roots recoiled in sunlight. The kind that hit just at the right moments. Disappointed, they couldn’t find enough grime or decay to sift through. We were not designed to be plotted in the same pot.
in all time and no time. poetry by joanna c. valente Your death is a mystery to me still and all death is ultimately the only thing we can’t possibly know alive. Your father texted me and for a moment I thought it was you. You came back for me even if undead in a text message through this other body that helped give you life. I want to believe you are giving me a sign to tell me it’s all okay, that you’re still inside me alive, translucent curtains between us obscuring a silvering lake, a unicorn reborn inside another unicorn in all time and no time. And you were right: the men in your family die young and you weren’t the exception I hoped for. You are someone I love. Loved, will love. Time is incongruous. You’re laughing and smoking a cigarette, not your last-- both of us know the twisted, cosmic joke in all of this: these flowers on my night stand are not the same flowers you once admired.
they will find another way in, i'm sure. poetry by alayne ballantine Ants - Part One and Two Ants have worked their way into my mouth and woved themselves between my teeth. They have invaded my eye sockets and are traipsing across my skull. They are burrowed in the blankets of my reality. Forever in my frame of mind. We both crawl across the earth biting out in our desperation. The corpses of a thousand tiny ants rests upon my soul I stamped them out and sealed their doorway They will find another way in, I’m sure. They are bugs, just like me. But we cannot coexist For they march across my eyelids Creating earthquakes in my dreams. I sealed their fate With wax and lye- just like mine Now I pick their crumpled bodies out of my hair. And laugh as I brush their mangled forms off of my skin, Knowing we are the same, That I will be their match someday. If not already…
poetry by joshua t. james July-Dried Pens The cookie man, soft and sugar Creeps down Bacon Street Salting wounds Trimming fat Filthy rat, but with perfect teeth Dirty boy, dirty boy Pretty girl, (pretty) girl Candlelight checking out Double-checked greased hinges Swing open to wet nests, little bird Awful man, shortbread sweets Balcony prick with the tasty treats We got our bellies full now Bouncing along the old fat road We all ate good tonight Thank you
intimate moments of quiet. photographs by cecilia mignon 
Mignon's work pauses for intimate moments of quiet, using instant film to capture delicate light and shape. They create compositions of photographs using solvent transfer, cyanotype, and mixed media to create poetic space and foggy dreamlike landscape
bask in patience... photographs by lauren.napier 
 A lack of transparency. An inversion cloud that hovers around Salt Lake City in the distance. The fog upon the haunted rock. A dress hanging in the window of an obscured scene. A Brno steeple hovering in the dawn. Woods obscured at dusk. Sometimes the moment with the camera allows me to bask in patience….seeing my subject clearer. And sometimes questions lie in the captured clouds.
wilderness as... poetry by kara dorris
half a year wasted... poetry by amanda maynard .it's rude to spit. - summer thrusts its burning hands down my throat and I gag on the hot sulfur taste of half a year wasted
...one of her last teeth... poetry by marc isaac potter Back Fence Happiness I want happy: Strawberries and raspberries Over the back fence. Erin smiles, brushing some earth From the fruit, for chewing She retains Strong crushing gums. One of her last teeth Falls out into her hand And she laughs, winces, Then cries, fluttering. Her fence neighbor Mathilda The woman who wants happiness, Offers to pay for the artificial teeth. Erin, like a humpback whale A puppy, or a college quarterback Who runs 99 yards for the win, Realizes she is loved.
like a lover, like a tomb. poetry by leslie long UNTITLED 1 sometimes i imagine it differently. shedding the sweetness like skin. crawling through your window quiet, quiet, the moon round & white & so heavy. sometimes i imagine it like this. tasting your fear, gulping it down like breath, crisp like water, like apples against my teeth. breaking your body beneath me, ribcage soft as wet clay. your bones so brittle, so dirty, so fragile like the whole of you. yes, i would say, yes, this is the only pleasure your body has ever given me. * UNTITLED 2 sometimes i hold my grief in the palm of my hand, like a bird, collect it like fallen petals from a flower. & sometimes my grief holds me like an ocean, like a lover, like a tomb.
...something sweet and sick. poetry by priya ele Sweet I want to gorge on warm even though I know it will taste like something sweet and sick I want to press handfuls of fire down my throat and into my stomach let my breath sift like ash I think I want to burn watch dust curl off my top lip feel my ribcage unwind and pull towards something cooler a symphony of movement and sculpture under my skin It’ll peel back and then turn from soft to black and chalky Maybe I'll be able to write with the charred tips of my fingers Last month you held me like I was smoldering I had a dream where I turned my head because I saw you in the corner of my eye The sun was too bright and I had to squint against the haze It smelled like sunscreen and sugar cubes melted together on the sidewalk And when I moved my neck I felt something crush me and then release The pain of it was like dried syrup on my tongue something sweet pressed between lips to lick off of hands I kept looking for you to find you I never did I imagine the ash will taste sweet too when it's all that's left Maybe you'd scoop it your hands were always soft Maybe you'd let it work into your palms and under your nails maybe even before it all goes cold
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