at the window aching for outside sick friends online getting sicker purple heart emoji exhaustion burning up the body dawn i give dad the bitter salad left on my plate handled everyday made smooth grief december rain i’m missing so much of myself About the author:
Sol Howard is a chronically ill trans writer. They have been bedbound with severe ME/CFS for two years. They have plans for lots of novels and short stories about queer people surviving and thriving, but due to illness they currently struggle to write anything else than short form poetry.
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You lie there, caressing the minuscule dark particles of my brain the reminder that you were once here a constant murmur in my ear Your sweet voice — echoing enticing me to live better to endeavour love and hope once again Your image severing my lust for life with a strewn icicle like the ones that hang lightly from the roof of the veranda hoping one will fall and slice through me as I slam the door harder and harder each time to lie by your side, frozen in time with larvae from the blowfly seems all but a dream to me one I fantasise about daily I would have the larvae devour my flesh consenting the soil to make love with my ossein, the thought of our carcasses inflating reminds me of that summer, the summer we rented a bouncy castle in the shape of a cat for your birthday together we shall bloat and collapse, allowing our love of creatures to bounce and feast upon us Mites Carpet Beetles Skipper Flies Ants Reminiscing that time I gifted you an ant farm after your first transplant About the author:
My name is Hannah Myers. I am originally from British Columbia and grew up in Glasgow. I am studying for an MA in creative writing at UCC. I adore writing poetry, game narrative, flash, scripts and ‘dirty rap’. Authors I am interested in and influenced by are Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Raold Dahl and Sylvia Plath. I Know Of A Boy i know a boy. raised & bred in a land defined as "abject infertility" by his dead father's friends & frenemies. yeah. i know of a boy whose hind skin always kisses the earthen-chilled floor every night. inside his father's, now his, paradise– the hut. tilted. half covered with dried palm fronds. the other half lost to the ferocious & unconcerned wind. he barely sleeps in the long & crawling nights. yet wakes to the first cock-a-doodle-doo of his old mama's cock & set out for the farm. shrithing all alone like a lost black bird navigating the cloudy sky. when nature calls & illness strikes him with a big cudgel. who is he to lie back without mustering the minuscule strength in his wretched body & set out for the farm again? lest he be screwed by ulcer-causing hunger till he draws his last breath. like it did his father. Au revoir As A Metaphor For Forever sitting all alone. on this old squeaking bench. outside my father's house. with my back leaning with comfort on this chilly wall. & eyes fixing the moonlit sky. romancing the warm company of the beautiful stars. the thoughts of the last time we met meander through my mind. we sat on this same old bench. not minding the blistering cold. or the chirping of hundreds of crickets. or the hooting owls in a stone throw from us. you submitted your head on my shoulder & i had my hands curled around you like a blanket. my booming MP3 player playing ed sheeran's Perfect. you gazed at me from the corner of your eyes. your alluring eyeballs radiated into mine. & said "i will always be here for you…" & climaxed it with "au revoir" & a kiss planted on my forehead. hands of time ticking at light's speed. it's been years within a twinkle of eyes. yet still no words. i scourge & scourge every nook & cranny. alas "au revoir" is a metaphor for "forever". so much for "i will always be here for you". wish i could run into the speed force & go back to that night to stop you from finish articulating the statement. or cease the ticking hands of time. it's same sky i look at now. yet the stars are out of place without you around. About the author:
Olayioye Keji Akintunde, studies Pharm.D at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. His writing explores the self,contradiction and contemporary realities. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming on Inertia Teens, Spillwords, Nnọkọ Stories and elsewhere. Besides Pharmacy & Poetry, he's intrigued by good & soul-reaching music. He's nicknamed Catechol. He tweets @Catechol01, & is @Catechol1 on IG. She was in a hospital bed calm and still, propped up, thin bones against fat pillows hair brushed sleek, like Lauren Bacall. One eye, the right one, clamped shut. I was thirteen. I kissed her goodbye those versions of us, finished. And now, some thirty-odd years later my eye, my right eye, by rights, is clamping itself the same way, firmly shut, as if to say Business hours strictly over. And I can tell you now, that shut is a lot better than skewed, prism, doubled or idly wandering (my only other options). Sometimes you glimpse your worst possibility, then it simply tiptoes along like a restless child in the night, climbing into your bed to sleep on your back, and when it does, you’re calm, because what else can you do? About the author:
Marie-Louise received her MFA from MMU in 2020 after a brain tumour diagnosis in 2018. She was a winner in the Poetry News' "Lesser Loss" competition and her poems can be found in Stand, Agenda, Acumen, Portland Review, Poetry Magazine and the competition anthologies for the Bridport, Bedford, Live Canon and Ginkgo On solo strolls through the suburbs of Bethesda, I can’t help but notice a newly hatched dragon has attached himself to my right trouser leg. He’s light, not quite three pounds, and his claws aren’t too sharp when he grips around my calf for a ride. He will dash into the shrubs if we ever see a fox, then scurry with a huff, to latch back on. I’ve never seen him fully, just his scaly golden tail when it drapes over the ankle of my boot. And sometimes I’ll get a whiff of butane, like a lighter not quite catching when he’s practicing his flames. The neighbors never see him, or at least pretend they don’t. But babies in strollers sit bolt upright and point. I think children, like dogs, sniff out illness, they can find what’s not quite right. But I’ve no idea how long he’ll stay or how big he’ll get. About the author:
Marie-Louise received her MFA from MMU in 2020 after a brain tumour diagnosis in 2018. She was a winner in the Poetry News' "Lesser Loss" competition and her poems can be found in Stand, Agenda, Acumen, Portland Review, Poetry Magazine and the competition anthologies for the Bridport, Bedford, Live Canon and Ginkgo AONB prizes. Originally from London she lives in the USA with her young family. |
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