110 – November 2021

by Lucas Peel

The Billboard on Exit 51 Says

we are all gods children

left in a parked car with the windows up

and i think about summer and the wet air

breathing fog onto the windshield and

fireflies losing themselves in a sticky

sundown and like this we are all ending.

every year, the sugarcane burns

my throat, hoarse and buggy sky,

parents scolding skinned knees and

broken curfews and the cool glass of

sweet tea sweating a halo into the

checkered tablecloth. when i was young

enough to know god i went down

to the seawall and fed the manatees

with a garden hose and every year since

the water rises and they do not return.

i like to think that somewhere else,

our grandparents once again sit down

for tea with a smiling child and speak

of the saltsky or newly-formed laugh lines

emerging on the canyons of our faces.

and perhaps they tell us that everything

beautiful belongs in the sea, or alive

in a star on the shelf of a cluttered sky,

stillbodied and unstuck like a trembling

clothesline or nestled palm cupped

to catch the wind as it whistles by. and

we too will one day need a change of

scenery, crawl along the interstate

with everything we have left to love

and nothing else, a speckled night

shooting across the tapestry of sky. say

hello. say you will remember, you will

speak us into another brief and beautiful

existence.

Lucas Peel is a negligent plant father, scoliosistic long bean, and food-motivated nocturne. His mercury is perpetually in gatorade. You can find his work on a handful of shelves on his mother's dresser and also forthcoming in the iPhone 7 Notes app. We do not know what he's yelling about.

by Tano Rubio

Passing Through,

“A forest ranger had found them eating deer meat and arrested them.
They did not want to tell him that the deer was dead when found.”
-Reies López Tijerina

I can’t help but count the dead
white-tailed deer collecting along the side

of the highway on the way to my parents’
house for Thanksgiving dinner

Imagining the night walk & sudden fury,
having to dash across la tierra,

a once uncharted expanse of brown & pine & layered
silhouettes of black, which have paled

& reanimated into this An interrupted instinct,
so flat and open, flayed by the prospect

of unlimited mobility Por los anglos, the interstate
is a manifestation of the prosperity

of a unified people Sketched in 1956, lines
pump traffic as veins,

restoring a gutted geography,
strung together

by the undying thread of collective pride
In a blur, there is nothing

but carnage collecting maggots Hungry,
I feast & squirm

around a table, where warmth escapes
around corners of white

paper napkins stretched across steamy meats
& wilted greens

Tano Rubio is a writer & teacher from East Tennessee. You can find Tano Rubio on Instagram, @tanorubio_ and on the Podcast, A Little Bit Queerky, @alilqueerky.

by Sarah Cavar

Around midnight

the bar closed like a hand round a shatter of glass. That is, the night bled on the bar, the bar sucked blue-black blood down its carpet, which everybody said was the only thing the place left dry. This one, this particular bar, took an especially tight grip, sucking the stars out of the sky, digesting, not spitting them up but stomaching them, a swarm of bees in a juicethick hive. Today the night was a woman, or was believed to be a woman, which is all any woman is, really. She wore her hair in soft black curls and if you squinted the oil on her face looked like a glaze, like stardust, like the night, unwilling fully to submit to the grasp of its venue, left a trace of itself on her skin. Her figure was an hourglass, but only because of the fist at her waist. Her hair fell long only because night, too, fell. When she opened her mouth pints of oiled stardust bled from the cracks in her lips, which were, if one looked closely enough, constellations.

Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press and founding editor of swallow::tale press. Author of three chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press), THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), and OUT OF MIND & INTO BODY (Ethel Press, forthcoming 2022), they have also had work in Bitch Magazine, Electric Literature, The Offing, Luna Luna Magazine, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Cavar lives online at www.cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.

by Sarah Cavar

You made a face at the bottom of the... - m4m

I was a brunch and book club kind of guy, you made a mean plate of Dino nuggies. You emphasized the mean part, because, you said, you were “kind of an asshole,” but I was willing to take the risk for someone who was also pro-nuggets-for-brunch. A good man might be hard to find, but a lad unafraid of 10:30am nuggets? That’s a real catch. That’s what I thought, at least, until our first brunch together. You ready for the mean nuggets, you asked me. I said, am I ever! And so you brought out a sizzling platter of chicken so enticing I struggled to breathe. I know it looks bad, you said. Even gross, on its face, you said. And indeed, when I bent over the platter of nuggets I was surprised to discover the sinister mask underneath.