Category Archives: Poetry

by | May 3, 2024 · 10:45 am

Joyce Safdiah

instead of holding

my fingers wove through trampled grass

at the creek you brought me to

hidden out on the side of the road

told me it was “make out creek”

like i’d kiss you again    for aptness of name

  watched me         twist and braid

                        the waxy green tendrils

splitting them          up the side

when i couldn’t tell you how i felt

                     i’d say it with my hands

you watched my mouth spill out

                   excuses

calling bullshit on every single one

you cried

            heavy pink and green greatlash tears

  tried to muster up water to my eyes

you didn’t know how much of an actress

      i always was

the typewriter in my head

plagiarized every movie

       we didn’t finish watching

couldn’t come up with an excuse

           good enough for you

sat there with a pile of grass

              wilted and torn on my lap

you wouldn’t let me walk away

           until i said it

Joyce Safdiah is a poet and undergraduate studying anthropology and communications at Purchase College. She derives inspiration from the everyday and her inability to be normal about anything. Her work can be found in the notes app, love letters to friends, and scrawled in bathroom stalls.

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by | April 29, 2024 · 12:11 pm

Cielo N. Howell

Platoon Manager

I

I didn’t know you very well at all.

You used to show me a DJ’s equipment in the garage of the Pennsylvania house your father owned,

You started doing Ketamine at 12, and I’m just as sure as everyone else that wasn’t the only indulgence of your youth

There was a son,

                     a teenaged mother,

a father with a gun waiting for an excuse—

You, the great and grand firstborn son:

You, the marine, brother, addict, protector:

You, uncle I barely knew until my mother screamed from across New York State

and I came running.

II

My brother idolized you.

He too, first son, wanted turn-table happiness, graffiti artist misunderstood by a society

that sees boy bodies as expendable.

It is a curse.

When he was 12 he would scream and bite at his own flesh like a cage,

                     and mother screamed

and I came running.

and now you—brother I barely know, tamper with pill bottles and the idea of hospitals, as you take a gummy bear laced with Ketamine.

I saved you for four years.

I went away and didn’t hear the screams.

And I saved myself because that’s all I thought I could do,

because I was also just a

child.

III

Now the uncle’s liver has turned yellow like the pus in marine warrior boots,

swamp foot. Called my mother a thief, and her sisters harpies, but you were the oldest

and I was the oldest,

                             and our first instinct was to run away.

         And now you are a garden of tumors, just like your father. In the house where his garden

became a grave—

And my mother ran to Pennsylvania to beg forgiveness of

her brother

            while her son’s eyes blinked

one day,

                       one day.

Cielo N. Howell is a Purchase College creative writing major from Westchester County, New York. She has an intrigue for the unanswered, the chaotic, and the natural world. She is the managing editor of Italics Mine. When not writing she can be found in trees, antique shops, and feasting on seasonal goodies.

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by | · 12:08 pm

Lauren Royce

Things that bother me

I’m wondering when I’ll finally sit and churn out that kind of poem, that kind of poem that looks at the quiet beauty of life but in a different and special way, and it does it in a way that is so thought provoking, so subtle, so perfect in its mix of show not tell, but telling and showing at the same time, and I pick the right title and it maybe even comes with a double entendre of some sort, I love that word, entendre, to intend, to mean it, mean something so directly and indirectly but not so directly that it makes the whole thing annoying, annoying like my brain right now as I make this, but I have to get it out now, see? This is what swirls in my mind each day, the poem, many poems, their infinite structures and boundless forms and subjects stretching from the obscene to the rage filled, rage fueled, rage induced, even, to the mournful and nostalgic and dream-tinged works that arise out of the deepest parts of the psyche, my psyche, in a place tucked in far more cozily than all that rage that pulses in my veins when I think about things too much. Too much! It’s all pouring out of my fingertips to the keyboard at once now, and it’s the same feeling I used to get hunched over the toilet bowl with a bout of that childhood flu that comes through and knocks everyone on their ass at least once during youth and then you never experience it again until some new bug comes in and you’re there again, heaving, begging god to let this hurl be the last so you can just get some fucking sleep tonight god dammit. You feel awful but the weight of whatever was in your stomach gets replaced by air and your eyes are watering for the first time in ages because you don’t let yourself cry enough, but that’s because you can’t find a place in the house that isn’t the bathroom that feels secret enough to you in order to truly have a cathartic, soul-healing sob. And so you bottle those in, those physical releases, and you store them up in the crevices of your brain to age them like fine wines. I started with me and I, and now I’m talking to you. Who are you, are you me? No, no, you’re the reader, and then so am I, as I make this. Glad we made that distinction.

Lauren Royce is a senior at SUNY Oswego, where she is studying journalism and creative writing. She is currently working on both creative and news interviews. She is happiest living as a bridge between these worlds. Her work consists primarily of news stories and entertainment reviews in The Oswegonian.

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by | · 12:07 pm

Kashi Bakshani

in my free time i haunt the hurricane house

the cymbal crash of rain holds firm till the a.m.—warm-lit walls sing as

thunder strips them of saturation—downpour pools to gutters of

sepia tile—do wet socks bother you?

the power’s gone out—along with the sun chased in fear by the tempest’s

guffaw—look this is how to make light dad indicates to a potato

chock full of serpentine metals, since wax is drying low

(go, go look out the front door where the hurricane wails

HELLO MAY I COME IN)

in the ivory tub, mom’s hands kiss my head—eucalyptus shampoo

suds and she tells me so sweet: the storm is inside already, no need

for her to knock

i watch the firmament form from the living room sofa—damp cushions

perpetually cool in the hurricane house—warping book sticks my palm

with weeping ink—what was the title?

there on the wall contorted by waist-level water, is that a photograph or a

painting? regardless it will disintegrate—remember

the house is sinking

soaked blaze drips to decay—hard maple water-weakened to soft wood

—for always i cycle in the hurricane home—do you ever remember

having dry socks?

Kashi Bakshani is a queer, South Asian poet from New York City. She is an undergraduate university student pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in spatial experience design at FIT. Her work explores multidisciplinary intersections of the arts and sciences. Her writing has been published to Columbia University’s State of the Planet and W27 Newspaper.

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by | · 11:49 am

Stella Gleitsman

Bread Blue Planet

I’m a bread blue planet.

Among a crazy shuffle of blue.

I’m like

too intense

for the malt of the run.

For the sake of the gun.

I was a child that ate leaves.

Now I’m an adult among a wintry hail.

A wintry wait heaven.

When you touched me

you thought you had a firm grip

on a girl body.

When you touched me

I felt like sky.

Like cry.

When you touched me.

I didn’t even whimper a bit.

Didn’t even feel it really.

Every time I’m touched I feel like heaven.

I feel like grip.

Everything moves within me and I become responsive.

And I become a bold sparkle.

Yes I become responsive.

I wish I had a way to talk

But please know I’ll just respond.

There is a baby in me.

That’s not my daughter:

But it’s my spoke.

That rinses at the world.

That craves the world.

That bleeds the world.

Boasts the world.

It’s an animal

and it’s a blunt

hand.

I wish I knew how

to greet you

in a way that can

make you understand.

Understand.

My body split in two.

Reclined in a malware.

Cold rhythm. Scope.

I’d love to be blue. 🔵

The whole color. The whole

world. God!

I’d love to be the whole world.

Watery + blue + baltic.

But you touch me.

I’m just a touch.

Stella Gleitsman (she/he/they) is a poet from the Lower East Side of New York. They make zines and artist books. 

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by | · 11:44 am

Kirry Kaufer

Watershed/Waterspout

I swallow from your straw sixteen times.

A man on the city street sings into a paper cup.

He once said, there ain’t no devil,

Only a god when he’s drunk.

Everyone wants to be God on a Saturday night.

Everyone wants to be touched tonight.

My upper thigh: the freshly trimmed

olive trees against the sky. Pearly cream

plunges the sidewalk, side ledge

against the branch. The insides of olives are actually red,

but you didn’t know that since you never got

your first taste of blood.

My waterspout is turned on.

twisting, writhing like the numb tips

of our snowflaked noses.

I dread the watershed.

Light washes over my face,

coloring the backs of my eyelids acid yellow.

Can you feel the butterflies

drowning in my stomach acid?

I glaze honey around the cooler parts of your stove.

I’m thirsty. I want a Coke.

I want to feel its sticky sweat down my throat.

I once had a lover

who said I make beautiful things sound

disgusting. My sweet insides

disjoin & decrystallize into the yarn

I never learned to crochet. Your tongue

arcing the pink caterpillar of my mouth

has me foam frothing, whiting your landscape.

Why the hell are the walls painted white?

A white chocolate sweater is folding

at the collar of your rim. Sometimes

I like to dress your demons in warm

woolen sweaters while you cradle my bottom lip.

Is my skin keeping them out or locking them in?

Kirry Kaufer (They/Them) is a senior at SUNY Purchase who studies creative writing with concentrations in both poetry and fiction. They are the recipient of the Ginny Wray Prize in Poetry (2023), and co-manage Purchase’s literary magazine, Italics Mine, alongside their roommate. In addition, they are a poetry editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine and Small Orange Journal.

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by | · 11:41 am

Brianna Gamble

Wheatstalk

My mother was the germ from which my life sprouted,

her hands my axiom in discipline.

Backtalk meant open palm pushing face into wall.

Classroom failure was merit for head to lovingly meet table.

When med school granted her acceptance, we gloried.

And when the coursework stress came,

I learned to walk like ballerinas–tiptoes and landmines.

When she tutored the girl I loved in biology,

she explained hormones, called ovaries and me “estrogen-machines.”

Now once a week I flick needle tips, clearing air bubbles,

and the irony of injecting estrogen is not lost on me.

These days it’s hormones and not fists, reshaping my face.

But when I look in the mirror, sometimes I jerk in fear.

And when coursework stress has me clinging my hands to weary temple,

or bottling screams for roommates who dare walk near me,

I weep.

I don’t know what to do.

Even when I grieve I look like you.

Brianna Gamble (she/they) is a student in her final semester at Monroe Community College. She studies creative writing, vampires, and how to make a mean gumbo. She has not previously been published.

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by | December 4, 2023 · 1:42 pm

Kay Mancino

Plaything

We were once six, and then seven, and

then nineteen. We blink and

it’s Christmas. Already, it’s

snowing. Already, it’s too frigid

to prance outside naked. We feel

the wind bite down

on the parts of ourselves we despise

but want so badly to love

that we bear them to each other

anyway. We stare into the reflections

of us that wear a different face

but weep all the same.

One year ago, I did not know him.

Ten years ago, I knew her so well.

I ask him what song he listens to

after he argues with his father and

she tells me she likes the private sound

of her own heartbeat best,

the rain piercing her skin,

the pricking of a sewing needle,

the harvesting of a home in her ribcage.

It calls to me, then, in a quiet voice,

it happened to me, too.

I hold my ear to his chest

and take in all the worship.

Kay Mancino is a creative writing major pursuing her undergraduate degree at SUNY Purchase. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in several magazines such as Italics Mine, Sandpiper Review, and Submissions Magazine. In her spare time, she crochets and hangs out with her professor’s fifteen-year-old dog, Willa.

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by | · 1:39 pm

Mollie McMullan

Lethal

Carol Jean melts into the bed,

a symphony of flesh and bone.

Shadow falters at the sight of her

but advances nevertheless.

In the valley between pillow and sheet, my mother reaches

into the hollow of Carol Jean and remembers

the way she loved her husband.

How she scooped up the moon in soap-cracked palms and

served it for dinner.

How she scrawled her will on watercolor paper and played

Fur Elise on Beethoven’s birthday.

The way she knit hats through the knobs of her fingers

for her grandchildren.

Her memory is interrupted by others,

the edge of a screwdriver down an esophagus.

An ambulance,

morphine’s embrace,

the blink of an eye: a camera.

She suffocates under linen:

respiration betrayal.

In an orthopedic bed, Carol Jean is dressed in her favorite shirt and given back her glasses.

She will have no watch.

Mollie McMullan is a junior at SUNY Geneseo. In her spare time, she enjoys chasing her dog around in circles and cutting up magazines for collages she’ll never complete.

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by | · 1:35 pm

Elianiz Torres

as mother’s flowers rot

Mother was born from a garden of greens. Just as the woman who came before her.

Her mother’s delicate fingers danced over every flower petal, breathing life into them with each despairing sigh.

Day in and day out she’d watch her watch them.

Wondering why she was the only one that ever held them.

Your father is allergic. She lied.

He simply hated the smell of them.

She took it upon herself to continue the garden.

She learned how to tend to them,

day in and day out she went with her mother.

She learned to dance her fingertips along their edges delicately.

When she was done, she learned to wash the dirt from her knees.

She learned to be careful—to keep their scent off her

like the scent of a forbidden lover.

She watched the way his hatred for the garden grew.

Watched the way he beat her sister when she was reckless

when she forgot to wash off the dirt

when she let their scent intoxicate her,

blindly strengthen her.

He reminded them who was strongest

with scars that matched his

day in and day out.

Until they all stopped tending,

until one turned to two,

two to three

years in the same

flowerless

weed ridden home.

After he died they put flowers over his casket.

Mom didn’t touch them, she didn’t even look.

When the condolences hit her doorstep,

wedged between dozens of flowery buds

she let every petal fall.

Let them wither in their own solitude.

The way she learned to,

the way he taught her to.

Just as the woman before her did

day in and day out.

My sister didn’t understand,

Mother’s allergic too. I lied.

Just like grandpa.

Elianiz Torres is a junior English (creative writing) major at SUNY Geneseo. She started writing fiction in middle school and has since discovered a love for poetry. Her writing often focuses on themes of family and womanhood.

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