we made ribs on a sunday.
just felt like the right thing to do.

cleaned out the pit, stacked
charcoal with the paper bag bits;

a fiery pyramid to
bless this food.

she came thru with the brats. also
had a taste for them hot links

farmer john. —ADD’EM!—
he prepared potato salad

a la BIG MOMS. he also found a can of beef chili,
HOT! added brown sugar + syrup + sauce BBQ & mustard

cause, we made ribs on a sunday.
this how we do things round here

Hailing from South Central, Los Angeles, Tauwan Patterson is a Black + Queer Poet and recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. His work has appeared in online literary magazines Cool Beans Lit, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Muse-Pie Press’ Shot Glass Issue #41, the Rising Phoenix Review, The Amazine, University of Baltimore’s Welter Literary Journal, and JMWW, and will also appear in the forthcoming Moonstone Arts Center anthology Which Side Are You On?!, With his poetry Tauwan aims to, in the words of the great Poet and Thinker Marcus Jackson, announce his freedom and presence. Making a sound that echoes in the end that says Tauwan Patterson. No more. No less.

in remembrance

Two matching cans of peaches in the cupboard
I can make that work said the chef’s eager hands
Flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter for the crumble
Said the kitchen : for your cobbler, we got all that

Second go round went with a can of diced pineapples
Upside down cake like taste please come inside
This time add the cake mix on top said the sibling
Didn’t forget lemon extract and that sweet sugar brown

One hour later :
Science forged
Let them taste it
Foot stomps/Eyes closed/Watery eyes

Hailing from South Central, Los Angeles, Tauwan Patterson is a Black + Queer Poet and recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. His work has appeared in online literary magazines Cool Beans Lit, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Muse-Pie Press’ Shot Glass Issue #41, the Rising Phoenix Review, The Amazine, University of Baltimore’s Welter Literary Journal, and JMWW, and will also appear in the forthcoming Moonstone Arts Center anthology Which Side Are You On?!, With his poetry Tauwan aims to, in the words of the great Poet and Thinker Marcus Jackson, announce his freedom and presence. Making a sound that echoes in the end that says Tauwan Patterson. No more. No less.

two honks and he is risen
in the living room from a couch more comfortable than you’d expect.

she cascades across the street in an ivory bathrobe
playing in the sunshine like a new year’s day float.

through the open front door on it comes :
the scent of morning glory on the breeze.

a row of drumsticks itching to be bbq’d
sunbathing in the window— thaw.

blinds cracked, do the dishes, vacuum the floor, brew the coffee;
skillet, eggs, sausage : home.

Hailing from South Central, Los Angeles, Tauwan Patterson is a Black + Queer Poet and recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. His work has appeared in online literary magazines Cool Beans Lit, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Muse-Pie Press’ Shot Glass Issue #41, the Rising Phoenix Review, The Amazine, University of Baltimore’s Welter Literary Journal, and JMWW, and will also appear in the forthcoming Moonstone Arts Center anthology Which Side Are You On?!, With his poetry Tauwan aims to, in the words of the great Poet and Thinker Marcus Jackson, announce his freedom and presence. Making a sound that echoes in the end that says Tauwan Patterson. No more. No less.

I put a little of myself
into everything I cook
Mom says, making bread
on the formica kitchen table

I watch her stretch and fold the dough
her hands push and roll the spongy mass
that reminds me of her belly
pasty and deflated by motherhood
she pinches off a small ball
and pops it into my mouth

I smoosh the slightly sour glob
between my tongue and the roof
of my mouth savour the yeasty treat
she pats my protruding stomach
and leaves a smudge of flour
soft as baby powder on my apron

when I realize particles of her skin
have been incorporated into the dough
each time she kneads it. I stop
mid-chew but can’t spit it out swallow
the gift and allow it to nourish me

is this why she has shrunk?
have we been gnawing away
at her all these years?
how many loaves before she disappears?

Angelle McDougall is neurodivergent and a graduate of The Writers’ Studio program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has poems published in Rattle Magazine and Wordplay at Work Magazine. Some of her other work can be found online at angellemcdougall.com.

and the woman who sold them wore a thick sweater
buttoned in the middle of 90 degree heat.
But we didn’t notice, reaching for the salt shaker
on the counter then opening our mouths wide to the boiled
and baked dough, once a gold field of grain
now enclosing cream cheese pinked by lox.
We sucked the dough before it stuck
to the roof of the mouth,
then ran back on streets wide enough
to nourish birches planted before foundations
were metered and bricks laid.
The heat always stayed, metal to touch. The earth welcomed us
squawking raw and sweet
from finches overhead.
Our cousins said to us, You have no accent
at these Jersey reunions with great aunts and uncles
who left Poland and the Ukraine. Like Tessie
who in her Queens apartment stayed up until 3 a.m. baking rugelach
and in an upstate cabin each summer served us kasha varnishkas
loaded with butter. I knew her sisters sold
their wedding rings to bring her over.
Yet for us the war had been replaced by Hogan’s Heroes,
the same way a remnant onion
on a sesame bagel called
backwards, the same way we didn’t consider
the bagel woman
and how her accent
betrayed everything she escaped.

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Shore, Mom Egg Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Salon.

At a time like this
smoke drifts across the road
a few bars of harmonica
flit through the gusts of conversation.

You are no longer alive.

A very young waiter
serves me, proudly, a slice of pie.

This is a small celebration
of our rediscovered love
of your face looking up
gaunt and old from the pillow.

You always liked your pie.

How handsome you grew as the moment neared!
– the moment when something in you decided
it was time to give up on breath.

Old and yet young, vulnerable
haggard – debonair –
at last your face held all of you:
we couldn’t look away.

The conversations eddy in here;
the lemon aftertaste of the pie grows sour –
the flavour of mortality.

You made and marred me;
you muddled along, as we all do
and today, lying cold
waiting for the fire
still you lead the way.

Kai Jensen was born in Philadelphia but moved with his family to New Zealand when he was five. He married an Australian, is now an Australian citizen, and lives and writes at Wallaga Lake, on the Far South Coast of New South Wales,with kangaroos in the garden. Kai’s poetry has appeared sporadically in Australasian literary journals including Landfall, Sport, PoetryNZ, Takahe, Southerly, Westerly and Overland, and also in Rattle.

What do you hunger for?
The you who answers to your name,
all 30 trillion human cells of you,
is also the you made of 39 trillion
bacteria, virus, and fungi microbes
–all enough of a who to influence
how you sleep, how you feel,
and what you want to eat.

Choose a dish for all
of your yous to enjoy, maybe
a brightly glazed ceramic plate
or hand turned wooden bowl
or the thrift store find you love.

Your salad’s base might be
greens or other vegetation.
Its body might include
grains, meats, fruits, more vegetables.
Its garnish might be seeds, nuts, herbs,
maybe something pickled for tang.

Dress it to unify everything,
the way your skin cleverly holds in
all the stick and goo you call you.
You might toss this with your hands
for a brief sensory thrill in this time
when thrills are expensive.

Or you might arrange your salad’s
ingredients in different zones
of your bowl, each forkful
choreography for your mouth to enjoy.
After all, you are eating fellow life forms
who themselves once enjoyed eating
sunshine or sunshine’s yield in the nearly
endless circle of life eating life eating life

that will end, on this planet, some
four billion years from now
so go ahead, toss on extra cheese
and hum a little tune as you do,
singing to all of your multitudes.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Learn more about Laura at lauragraceweldon.com 

from the last of our bees
requires a spoon long and strong
enough to scrape a final huddled
glow from the jar’s corner. Gold
turned to crystal, gold flickered
with pollen’s memory of blossoms,
gold of real wealth in a time when
real, isn’t. A single worker bee makes
about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey
in her short steadfast lifetime. Now
our hives are silent. I lift the spoon
to waiting mouths of our youngest
family members, each in turn says
ewww at the taste and I damn
the river of regret coursing through me,
smile instead at faces unaccustomed
to such sweet intensity. I refuse
for now, to consider all they face.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Learn more about Laura at lauragraceweldon.com.

I don’t want to go to Hell when I die,
to be dead and still be suffering and
not only suffering but suffering
worse than when I was alive, well, that’s not
good but in Heaven where the Afterlife
is supposed to be painless if not pain
-free there’s suffering of an
-other sort, I guess, too much blessedness
up yonder, sweetness and light and all those
things associated with God maybe
because He invented ’em, but there’s no

third choice is what I’m taught in church and Sun
-day School, you can’t die and live forever
on Earth, you have to bail out when you’re croaked
and if you’re good you get the Good Place and
if you’re bad the Bad, I guess it depends
as well on if you believe that Jesus
is the Son of God Who was crucified
for our sins, etc., everyone

knows the story, He who has ears to hear
let him hear and so on and the point is
you’d better hear what you’re being told in
the sense that even if you don’t buy it
it’s so anyway, that’s how things are at
our church, plus they get my allowance,
twenty percent of it, I only get
a buck, they score two dimes of that, I name
those Adam and Eve and I kick ’em out

of the paradise of my pocket, pinch
each with thumb and finger, drop ’em in and
somehow they multiply though they subtract
me in a sense but what more can you ask of
sin? So after Sunday School I walk to
the Korn Dawg King for a free Fanta
because they honor my church bulletin
which is more than I can say for me, sad
to say, I don’t have much mammon, it’s like
drinking blood without eating the body
so I have a scrambled egg when I get home,
Man does not live by bread alone but it

sure as Hell helps, but all in all I’m set
for another week of sin surviving
me, ha ha. Next week we’ll try the root beer.

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in fourteen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine. Gale now lives in Tucson, Arizona.