dreams of my father
plug n play
Gregory Hom makes cut-and-paste collage works. His work has appeared in the Shanghai Literary Review and Catamaran Literary Reader. Hom makes a living as a librarian, and is rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find more of his work at https://theoretical-mutant-4734.tumblr.com/
Tug is listening to music at his desk.
“What’s that instrument that sounds
like a washing machine?” asks Claire.
Tug says “That’s what we in the industry
call a ‘drum,’ Claire.”
A single eyelash falls from my face,
into my yogurt cup.
A redbird taps its head against the window.
I’m deep in the forest right now.
I have no time to listen
to grown men argue
whether Bib Fortuna
survived Jedi or not.
I want the forest in this poem
to function like the forest
in Shakespeare comedies:
A place of working things out,
unencumbered by social constraints.
But I may have learned that wrong.
No one talks about Jane’s Addiction anymore.
Their admixture of heart and decadence.
They seemed so important at the time.
I wish a machine would take me back.
Spring is here with its dampness
and smell of shit.
A guy balancing on a skateboard
with an armful of flowers.
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of the chapbook My Heart is Shaped Like a Bed: 46 Sonnets (Fjords 2022).
Cold Feet
Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a photographer, educator and poet living in Los Angeles. Her photos have been featured in Barren Magazine and her poetry in the Eunoia Review. With an academic background in Migration Studies, Larena is passionate about visual storytelling at the intersection of belonging, displacement, and cultural capital. You can find her on Instagram @lalifish and @lalifishwrites and her photography at www.larenaortiz.com.
Squinting through fresh
joy I can see everything
the sun sees and like a
child full of new words
I wish to name all of us
who are here under this
upended periwinkle bowl
Tow truck! Convertible!
Cell tower! Foot bridge!
Dead raccoon! Another!
The steering wheel is a
warm gift in my palm
At a cellular level I am
aware of not being alone
At a cellular level I know
two raccoons now revel
somewhere having made
the most of embodiment
I am not too busy to
love whichever song
an algorithm chooses
as the sun loves all it
must touch. Today the
pines grow tall enough
to cast dark pools where
deer will graze a safe
distance from traffic
as the sun loves them
enough to feed the grass
and we are all still here
together boat trailer
ambulance red pickup
Even at night when a
tower of weathered logs
is consumed by a slow
controlled explosion
whose amber light I
receive in open hands
the sleeping cat makes
a long spoon of her body
and drinks every drop of
the tree that once held
her favorite red birds
Lauren Endicott is an emerging poet who is grateful for forthcoming publications in West Trade Review, Duck Head Journal, SEISMA, and others. She is also a masters student of social work training in psychotherapy. She lives in the greater Boston area with her spouse, two children, and cat.
His hands are rough, like sex, and when he touches me it is delirium and fever and ecstasy, but he is only reading my palms. Butterfly, he says, digital butterfly and traces his fingers along the fate line. Social media influencer, I remind myself, that’s who you are. It makes sense. He has long hair, black, melanin, falling against his shoulders as he dances his pointer finger and then his middle towards the heart line. Yes, there is rage and loss and obsession. Yes, there is desire. Jacaranda, he says and I understand. The petals would fall on Los Angeles sidewalks.
Yes, I remember.
He traces further, white t-shirt, black silk. He feels like cool sands at midnight, like quiet beaches with prescient waves. His fingertips move along my palm and I wonder if I’ve ever been known and then he stops, looks up, his eyes grey but also charcoal. You like wine? He asks. Don’t you know? I think, but he pours a glass and it is dry and friendly.
I drink and my skin grows warm and buzzes. From his couch I can see into the kitchen and there are hand towels printed with small black butterflies.
Don’t you wanna hold me down? Touch me? I ask.
He’s sitting on the bed, Motel 6. I’m standing in front of him, florescent pink lace and long legs. Glitter on my eyes. I put my hands in his hair, hair the color of the dark pavement in the parking lot when it rains, the darkest. I run my hands through that black silk, run them down white t-shirt, chest, abdomen, thighs.
No, he says, I only want to touch your hands. His eyes empty beaches late at night, early into the morning before the sun rises.
I place my hands over his face, cradle him, and his lips run along my palms as I bring them down in front of him to hold. He takes the right and then the left. This is the heart line, he says. This is the fate line. On his arm beneath his shoulder is a tattoo of the yin-yang symbol, thick black. The color green, he says and I think of the heels I wore last night, plastic against metal. Philosophy major, and I think UCLA. Dancer, and that is now, how I make my money, how I got here, this motel room. He moves his thumbs along every line.
Beneath his skin I feel electricity like a gentle hum, wings, beating.
Elle Reed is a writer from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bombfire, Bullshit Lit, Misery Tourism, White Wall Review, Metonym, and others. She is currently finishing her first novel, about the desert, longing, and friendship.
