The guy drinking Seven Tails on the rocks scoops a lemon from his glass and lets the flea live.
What else is mercy but a way of wedging between worlds—the invitational body first
submerged, then lifted and let through, D’Angelo on in the background the whole time singing
Lord knows how far that I and I will fall behind. And Jesus Christ, he says next—not D’Angelo.
Not Jesus (at present he is nowhere to be found). But the guy with the Seven Tails—a nickname
which, when repeated enough, becomes biblical, whips you beastly into, yes the past, but also the
multiverse of all the pain you’ve ever caused. It isn’t saying sorry that’s hard. It’s knowing it
isn’t enough. Jesus Christ, a six-hour flight, says Seven Tails. And I think about Jesus learning
of air travel. How much faster he could’ve got home or at least somewhere he belonged. And I
don’t mean in the footprint of God. It’s not the flea’s salvation either. Poor guy, wings stripped,
slipping aimless now in a desert of marble. Maybe this wasn’t about mercy at all.

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen is the author of Light Waves (Terrapin Books). A MacDowell fellow, Chen has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Chapbook Prize, and a semi-finalist for Tomaz Salamun Chapbook Prize by Factory Hollow Press, among others. Her work has twice received Pushcart and best-of-the-net nominations and has been published or is forthcoming in Bear Review, PANK, Hanging Loose, NoDear and elsewhere. She lives in New York. www.kirstenshuyingchen.com 

I would like to have six days back,
one for each decade, as a minimum,
for not having to think about holding
myself inward, moving one leg sideways,
obscuring the steatopygous view,
a few days I could move without thinking,

like before I was six months old,
when my pediatrician said I was too
fat and told my mother to give me only
skimmed milk. Mom could make a meal
for four out of one can of Campbell’s soup
with water; I taught myself to bake

cookies and cakes so that some days
when there was no other consolation
I could have something sweet.
Now what would be sweeter is a day
without clenching, without waiting for
the blow to fall, like when my 90-pound

grandmother tried using a French
word for it, as if someone who sat around
and read so much wouldn’t know
what the word avoirdupois means
or how much scorn can be heaped
on one person before each evening, adding up

to at least six days’ full, no matter how
much yo-yo dieting, how much angling
my shoulders and knees out of the picture,
contracting my thighs and tilting my hips
to squash between armrests, how much
pulling myself together every day.

As a lifelong dieter and food lover, one of Jeanne Griggs’ favorite experiences on a trip to Norway was being asked if she would like caviar for lunch and replying that she’d already had some at breakfast. A traveler, reader, writer, ailurophile, and violinist, Jeanne plays with the Knox County Symphony and the Celtic Fiddlers. She directed the writing center at Kenyon College from 1991–2022. Jeanne earned her BA at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and her doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her volume of poetry, published by Broadstone Books in 2021, is titled Postcard Poems.

The courtyard, cool, the menu en español
we, a gringa and me, her sullen mate,
both barely awake. The huevos, Oaxacan,
a cold dish my wife begins to eat
with all of her appetites intact
until she sees the bits of chilies
have legs, her plate seems to crawl
with chilies that have legs.

We look to the kitchen, aghast,
and then to the local folks at nearby tables
who eat without reservation. I look back
at the menu and read, chapulines
check my pocket dictionary:
grasshoppers! and I, who’d not
eaten the flesh of an animal
since 1972, take to the plate,
and eat every one. The crunch
satisfies a forty-year craving
for the gnawing of bones,
for the tasting of organ meat, for the rending
of limbs.

Deb leaves hungry and my
lust for flesh is not yet sated.
We wander to the market
and find plates of the critters
in great heaps. I buy two scoops
for a few pesos and find
the hoary hunter in me is roused.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, The Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritualwell, One Art, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by Sheila-Na-Gig.

More at www.dickwestheimer.com.

so, I’m spinning around the room
circling my kitchen island
like Billy Collins searching for the perfect metaphor
like a shark in quest of cheese
covering my plates with crackers and cocktail onions
marinated mushrooms, their little heads popping up
one eyed olives winking red
prosciutto flopped over like it only just realized
you can’t be in shape with all that fat
smoked salami smirking
at how carefully it’s preserved

grab the glass and take a big swig
company is coming and the mood needs to build
the words need to flow, language like lava
sweeping the entire village in its hot wake
even though you threw a sacrifice of rum
which reminds you of the bottle you dropped last night, red sidling
into all the cracks, it took hours to clean that up
and still you have your doubts
something surely must be lurking in the corners
like a stale cocktail peanut crouching under the stove

the fire goddess said it wasn’t enough, it will never be enough
no matter how high you pile the plates, something always comes up short
carrying the guests down the lazy river
where everyone is laughing and everything is all right
where everyone always comes up cold in the end
shivering in their damp clothes, rushing hard for their cars
leaving you alone in the kitchen
where mountains of plates totter, like Vesuvius on the make

hands red, the victim of a thousand pyroclastic flows
parties that ran just a little bit late
like a bargirl who let her cigarette burn down too low
you scrub at your silverware, wondering
what ever was the point in the first place, why
you throw your heart on the altar, just
to find it tossed back at the end of the night
only picked at, never devoured
so sigh and scrape it into yesterday’s trash
with the rinds and the plastic
all your dirty, broken treats

Kathryn Leonard-Peck writes poetry, plays, short stories, and novels. She also paints. She graduated from Dartmouth College and Columbia Law School, and is an attorney. She currently lives on a farm on Martha’s Vineyard with her family. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals. She was the second place winner for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing (MVICW) Vineyard Writers Fellowship, and was accepted to the Aspen Autumn Words juried workshop program.

how bright my face shines

I keep my body
hungry to test

pain’s proximity
oranges remind me

of dried bitters
in whiskey not you

a little bit of magic exists
everyday think of the blue

liquid that turns dull clothes
whiter and brighter

a chemical romance
I wonder about absorption

love has unblinded me
to the many ways holding

brings joy how I prefer
a cigarette over a vape

your mouth held many
silences so that you didn’t

have to become a liar
there are many ways to kill

a cat has nine lives
I want to see a pink flamingo

for real not the décor lighting
before I die let me tell you

there is no substitute
for experience except

experience and even god
cannot stop time

from turning so I teach
myself to mimic the rain

relish the pain
repurpose like Marie Kondo

I get the flu from eating an orange
is just another memory now

of where we met so I peel it
dry it grind it mix it

with milk into a glow mask

January

Sifting through grey days in a shoebox
room overlooking the Hudson
and helicopters flying to and fro over it
carrying people obsessed with aerial view
some days it’s the delicious call of pork tacos
on 42^nd street, and on others it’s the 99 cent
pizza slices down at 9^th street that pull me out
of my bed and winter misery.

Turning the page of The Crying Book and disembarking
at 14^th street only to find that I have layered all  wrong
again     find myself walking to 16^th and 5^th to my favorite café
creamy spinach quiches and potato burekas on display
outside               hats flying, dead leaves dancing in circles
levitating            marrying the smoke from kebabs sizzling
in halal carts at street corners

hands become ice from collecting the 8 PM rain                craving
for the warmth of a mocha cappuccino from the little patisserie
in East Village   the familiar attendant at the register smiles puts in a free
chocolate glazed donut in my bag            Enjoy! And I start to
think of the promise of summer as I bite into this kindness.

Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer, currently matriculating her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, New York. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Lunch Ticket, Evocations Review, Vagabond City, The Remnant Archive, Pile Press, SLAB and elsewhere. When not cooking poems, she is found reading war histories or experimenting with different kinds of curries. You can get in touch with her @beingadtastic

Out of temper, stirred
to a mantra of degrees
I repeat to keep myself
awake in the kitchen, where
I might be blistering
tomatoes or toasting bread
in the rich kind of fat
for a midnight snack,
chocolate reaches a point
where I can only feel
the weight of it on my lip.
Sometimes your body
against mine passes through
this moment, stirred
down and sprawling.

Vanessa Young is a poet, cooking instructor, and the founder of Thirsty Radish (https://www.thirstyradish.com/), where she shares recipes and inspires a creative approach to life in and out of the kitchen. Her poetry has appeared in Chronogram, Juked, The Monarch Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

I usually just eat it like this. Kiwis with their skin on             seeds in spices turned black the squash
splitting its hairs from inside out just right there on the plate in its skin I usually eat it like that.
Usually the skin and all I’ll just eat it like that when we wake up. Raw franks             the real snappy
ones or the Vermont beef ones             the beef in Vermont ones like that with the skin on too. I liked
when you ate things just like that after we’d fallen asleep and woken up because you weren’t
afraid             dirty hairy sweet potato skins or morning acids acrid on shriveled green
whatever’s pink and gone sour             deadened legumes             lime halves in quiet disarray
whatever’s separated from that which lies underneath it             whatever’s separated from that
which cooks right there next to it

anything that grows the way grass does             that floats down brooks.

Ginger with its skin on downstairs             ginger with its skin on raw             the cooked the rotten. I
usually just eat it like that in a little fur coat that is             there’s no need to undress yet             I just
eat that on top of some rice             I just eat that with rice. Everything’s been left dirty enough to
eat             passed round the city like this on hands wheels laps crates pillows             been left clean
enough to lack             in tins of oil or tight plastic

I just eat it with my hands in front of the fridge light like that like a bear by a river or at a cafe for
sixteen fifty downtown like that like a girl.

Who am I my tail is melting in a sour broth             my morning stomach on two tortillas. You fried
me up with two eggs             flu eggs             you wanted to mix my oil and mustard at the lunch
counter             get me on hot salad at the sandwich shop             my ribs floated above your noodles
my shoulders have caught your snot by the open kitchen. I’m for the people in bits inside a
one-way street             or tied up in strings for not the people             I’m good for more than a buck
thirty don’t you think             you liked each other because you liked me.

Kath DeGennaro is a writer originally from Long Island. A graduate of The New School with her BA in The Arts, she currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is most often focused on documenting the Gowanus Canal.

Salad forks scrape
across scalloped plates
from a window I watch
them serve the main course:
duck au confit
avec herbs de provence
satin dresses & designer suits
each face same choreography:
chew, dab, smile, laugh, chew
I eat a stale peanut granola bar
and turn back into the wind
naked limbs of winter
stretch towards me
while indoors they pop
Moët & Chandon
for one moment my eyes meet
another’s: gentle brown,
they might have been hers
but the mouth is rigid,
a life in training to live
in opulence without
ever understanding
its decadence
and by the time I glance back
she is lost on the ballroom floor

Erin Jamieson (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, including a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the author of a poetry collection (Clothesline, 2023) and four poetry chapbooks. Her latest poetry chapbook, Fairytales, was published by Bottle Cap Press. Her debut novel will be published by Type Eighteen Books (November 2023). 

funky aged ham
pale as a Christmas star
like skiing in Aspen
mashed potato gilding
off cornices
cranberry gems
collapse
dinner roll walls and greased gravy ponds
cannot hold back the trash
when they stand
on forked feet
of molded, mangy
mushy fat ham
centerpiece left to accidentally slow cook
(thanks Uncle Fred, we really didn’t need that)
abandoned, collapsing
now
the night breaks us
with it

French Toast and a Live DJ
too early to wake up
too late to sleep
too sober to get down
breakfast is meant
to be silent
near solemn
over my French toast
I grit furred teeth
as the café is wracked
by a DJ’s table-rattling
milk-curdling
egg-scrambling
beat box to hell, howling
garbage disposal, demon despoiling
my syrupy communion
lost grace on my tongue

Tain Leonard-Peck is a writer, actor, monologist, and model. He paints and composes music, and is a competitive sailor, skier, and fencer. He is the Poet Laureate for West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard. Among his awards, he won #ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence, the first place Poetry Fellowship to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and Honorable Mention for the Creators of Literary Justice Award, by IHRAF, the largest human rights art festival in the world. His work has been published in numerous literary journals. He is completing his first novel.