in air thick with lack of light deep stink of hot mammal
and stabbing breath
looped like my passage through this space
what is it we fear when images come to mind
do we sense something that inhabits rooms and woodlands
beyond exhalation
under duress
my door ceases to be mine
I crumple into an apology the bedsheets are too clean for me
when the human beast arrives it hunkers down and won’t budge
remembering the man gone mad asleep
clubbing his family to death
James Knight is a poet, artist, performer and publisher based in the UK. Publications include Cosmic Horror (Hem Press), Rites & Passages (Salò Press), Machine (Trickhouse Press) and Void Voices (Hesterglock Press). Website: www.thebirdking.com. Bluesky: @badbadpoet. Instagram: @jkbirdking.
of midnight, your ironed shirt, clover-patterned pants
sitting angular at the edge of a conceptual stare,
a concrete floor, iron bed-sit, installation.
Being, the notion of prayer,
or, in waiting at an abutment outside the Mudd Club
or somewhere else , in another outfit,
I remember your troweled performance on a couch
in the sprung rhythms of acid house.
Such memories / walk / me waking
forward
to specular lipstick on pale skin,
circular meridians drawn in cups
from a river.
To tie red hemp rope around your
waist, tautly hold down your thigh
to hook beneath the back of knees
for levitation, a shuddering radio static
meeting clustered mind, gathering up
in suspension’s glove for inertia. We ache
in de-evolution towards ancestors, the
awesome incisive markings, spine of
your bridge, arched, offering, gravity-less
spectral juxtapositions: wigs / wraps,
buttoned / in collated
collars; marginalia /collective sighing of electric
guitars in process /a novel /
pages with annotations, yes, without
you we are in for a long triage.
Hand over hand, climbing over
indelicate industrial clamor, unrolling
typewriter ribbons to erase propaganda broadsheets / smear
the news and various
other kinds of puppeteer topographies /
with spilled black ink blood.
Wandering / steps behind a
procession. At the parade grounds of immolation,
we sit on our knees, for hours / Try to
stand up straight with
a wishbone lodged in the prism of
your throat, already broken, outmaneuvered /
we were plates of glass, shattered
fragments, separated from everything.
Sometimes /planes take off from here,
on time. Even cauliflower
softens in the pan. You were once
serenaded by electricity volts, hand-held by numbers
of your fans who came to see you perform.
(new stanza)
Now / (note): I serenade your memory.
Dictate stenographic emblems
to exposed toes. I
want to shake in crescendo, howling
in a complicated realm of teeth.
Programmed noise for synthetic generative
chatter.
Titled, Music # 4: It is /
so cold outside. Never forgot
your urgency /
The predilection / to wander.
Robert Frede Kenter is a widely published writer, visual artist, performer, & publisher of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net) with work in over 200 publications published or forthcoming including: Watch Your Head, Harpy Hybrid, ballast, winged moon, ABR, storms journal, heavy feathers, petrichor, Cable Street, Burning House, Pissoir, Lost & Found Times, Blood & Honey, Otoliths, Paragraph, The Prose Poem Journal etc.. In Anthologies incl: Capitalism is a Death Cult (Sunday Mornings at the River), Speaking in Tongues (Steel Incisors), The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press). Interpoem 1 & 2 (Sedserio), Glisk and Glimmer (Sidhe Press). Select books: Moon Writing (with Catherine Graham) (Ice Floe Press, 2026), In the Blueprint of Her Iris (with Vikki C) (Ice Floe Press, 2025), Father Tectonic (Ethel Zine, 2025), Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Robert was guest editor of Secrets and Lies (July, 2019) at Burning House Press and has lots of other projects on the go. Soc media X: @frede_kenter, IG: icefloe22, r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, Bluesky: @rfredekenter.bsky.social.
Laurence Lillvik (Portland, OR) is the editor of “Skullcrushing Hummingbird,” an international arts and literature zine. A new full-length collection of poems, “Catharsis Is Never Fully Shorn From Glee,” is forthcoming from Trident Press in the spring of 2026. His chapbook “Criterion” (Greying Ghost Press) was a featured small press title at Powell’s Books. His poetry has also appeared in several literary journals and DIY poetry chapbooks. Musically, Laurence is the founder of KalloHumina, an umbrella project for solo work and live improvised collaborations. He’s worked in Public Libraries for over two decades. IG: larstarts / skullhum.com
Sara Matson (she/her) is a poet in Chicago and host of the seasonal online reading series Words // Friends. Her poems can be found in Discount Guillotine, Kicking Your Ass, The Chicago Reader and elsewhere. Her favorite color is lime green and you can find her on Instagram @skeletorsmom and Blue Sky @saramatson.bsky.social.
Kent Kosack is a writer with recent work in minor literature[s], the Heavy Feather Review, Some Words, and 3:AM Magazine. His novella, Adar's Freedom, is out now with Subtle Body Press. You can read more of his work at kentkosack.net / bluesky: @kentkosack.bsky.social
I remembered how Leni Riefenstahl attached automatic cameras to balloons.
I want to fall in love
with a blind flower girl
who mistakes me
for a millionaire.
Even the Automobiles Here Seem to Be Ancient
Dear Cinnette, I grew tired of the world
at the Braintree split
but there’s no shepherdess in sight
the ice floes on the Merrimack look like wounded angels
Dear Cinnette, the sun’s fixed stare expresses something beyond death
I’m letting my beard grow
Let’s just say
your period
is the ultimate form of punctuation
Which one of your phone calls changed my life fuck
it
I’m raising a toast to Odin
and the beauty of Japanese volcanoes
Last I heard you hitched a ride to Salt Lake
O Madonna
of the Trail—
Dear Cinnette, Infinite Jest turned 30
Sabalenka was penalized for a midpoint grunt
I saw a woman at Stop & Stop
buying avocados
like it’s 2010
I heard Thom bit off a prostitute’s toe in Prague
I’m high on benzos godspark
Dear Cinnette Il faut être absolument modern
Did you know in 1955
Friehofer’s still used horse drawn carts
to deliver baked goods in Schenectady—
Imagine if your whole job was putting cherries on cupcakes
Imagine if our midpoint grunt went on forever.
Dobermann
If you said all I do is write love poems
I’d say I’m solving the crisis of panty lines
but that’s just another comedy
for our conspiracy
theory
age
Again the snow is scatterbrained
millions of individual
amens
and I’m thinking
about the time
we had sex at the Tate Modern
If you said it was like a love poem
featuring Rouveyre’s car and several Soviet bikers
I’d say
look at the charm of the industrial streets.
Fun is a steel bath in Mitteleuropa,
your tongue like a menacing dobermann.
MALMO
it feels very intimate, very private
being an author and a character simultaneously
like a crowd of people
at the beach
screaming shark! Shark!
Quite unlike the Oulipians
who organize their internet novels
by color
fake barn country
the IKEA back catalogue.
Dear Cinnette,
I prefer the dark arts
“So we shall take the train here to MALMO,
then get into the car
and drive home to our house,
and all the way I shall revel in,
truly revel in”
how we used to smoke
in bed on Sundays
and read The Boston Globe,
Akhmatova, Letters to a Young Poet,
the cat purring like
a bloom of chocolate,
mirrors caressing the room
and the sense of things
careening
towards
a head
still a long
way
off
like a seizure
on a boat
in the middle of the sea
Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. His latest collection, Bullet Pudding, is forthcoming from Roadside Press in 2026. Recent publications include Horror Sleaze Trash, Apocalypse Confidential, Be About It Press, Revolution John, The Literary Underground, RESSURECTION magazine, and others. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. He is a poetry editor at Blood+Honey and The Argyle Literary Magazine. bluesky: @hubbsd.bsky.social
The muffled sound of your maple-infused voice stirred me; it trapped me in a vertiginous whirlwind of fire and water.
What the hell is this— this fighting that bends, never breaks—starves, yet illuminates.
You are the cement of the sky; the sun casting skin cancer and eternal glow, the stars that count wishes and blow to
dust.
How can one be the spit of the smoker— and the silver faucet that cleans it?
Blinding fog that chokes and shows the way;
I am a diver, not a seer.
Sylvia Plath Momentum
Blood-like fragments in a silver sky— I know it’s not true; why, then, should I lie?
The water poisoned; hellfire in my brain— thoughts like ashes, yet your smiles remain.
If you can’t see it, will it destroy you? I’m still surrounded by roses, illusions, boredom.
And love keeps stuttering the words of a slut, embracing what pours up out of the mud.
Clay for the unwise, moulding the impure. I talk to God, yet like
she said; the sky is empty—
I taste iron.
Karina Longo is a neurodiverse Brazilian-Italian poet based in Milan. Her poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Expat Press, Be About It Press, Resurrection Mag, Some Words, Dodo Eraser, Michigan City Review of Books, Prosetrics, and elsewhere. Karina was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her on X: @TheDarkestStar_
(upon reading Pasolini’s review of the Italian translation of Osip Mandelstam)
like the sun sets in motion a series
of actions let’s use the word ‘darkening’
let’s use the words ‘pre-emptive
state terror’ Lord let’s remember
mistake of merry Madelstam
too late gives back kisses lost love
of cunt tortured beyond desire
&attempts suicide after layering
perfect moustache joke memorized
perfect entropy eyes speculumed well
‘wounded’ is the wrong word now
‘monumented’ will have to do
so let’s go on knees attempt
to kiss a torso as tight
as Pasolini’s
countryside mannerisms
as object impermanent
as Lenin’s mother’s death
an old wet rope
a neck caressesd
a punchline
a snap as dull as a string of musty poem words
hope quick
hi hey
Boccaccio baby swim
pool bottom
end race boy oh boy
win ‘gain billiards
with Wilson buds from age
of buds wooden rackets from age
of wonks boozy-brilliant &binge stories
then &last night like morning
rumors like body &night arcs
&crossings like news
stations really ending no no
really ending wars
ending hallelujah
hey hey here come literally
sex w/ Bowie
whelmed by
two colors
&soft eyes of brother Terry
always with
a suicide body—
a sexy psyche—
salivating schizoid functioning
so Zurich friends
in those days wrote letters—
not instructing so much
as blowing a self
well dressed to heaven
wind
wild &caress
Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and video/audio/spoken word artist, living in Toronto, Canada where he works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with his dog, Tao. He has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including Antiphony, bethh,Die Leere Mitte , Ice Floe, Version9Magazine and others. He won the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award in 2024. Meggeson has published three chapbooks, Cosmic Crasher (Buttonhook, 2024), ta o/j, and soma synthesis (both from lippykookpoetry, 2025). Forthcoming: a full-length poetry collection, j: poems (primitive press, Toronto, 2026) and an EP of spoken word & soundscape tracks, The Capacity to Be Alone. Sean is poetry co-editor of Blood+Honey Literary Magazine.
Burning House Press are excited to welcome Ingrid M. Calderón as the seventh BHP guest editor of our return series of special editions! As of today Ingrid will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the month of February.
Submissions are open from today 1st February – and will remain open until 25th February.
Ingrid’s theme for the month is as follows
___
LOVE & HATE
___
Where does love end and hate begin? As an advocate of love in all its manifestations, I‘ve often found myself pondering and teetering on the soft umbilical cord of disillusionment when it comes to these emotions. I am not alone. Love & hate are siblings, —often share a room and define themselves by the company they keep. If needs remain unmet, what changes and how fast before combustion? If disappointment isn’t addressed, love and hate begin their resentful coexistence of two high volume breeds of circuitry.
I invite you to send poetries, hallucinations, uncomfortable journal entries and artworks pulled from the depths of where love & hate live inside you.
Ingrid is a poet, seer, collagist and the solitary editor of Resurrection magazine. She resides in Los Angeles, CA
___
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All submissions should be sent as .doc or .docx attachments to guesteditorbhp@gmail.com. No cover letter is necessary but please include a short third-person bio and (optional) photo of yourself for potential print with your submission. You may also consider including social media usernames, especially if you’re on Bluesky/Instagram– I want to promote your work!
Please state the theme and form of your submission in the subject of the email. For example: LOVE&HATE/FICTION
Submissions are open until 25th February and will reopen again on 1st March 2026 for a new theme/new editor/s.
Poetry and Fiction For poetry submissions, submit no more than three of your best poems. Short stories should be limited to 1,500 words or (preferably) less. We encourage flash fiction submissions, no more than three at a time. Send these in as a .doc or .docx file, along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Art Submit hi-res images of your works (drawings, paintings, illustrations, collages, photography, etc) with descriptions of the work (Title, Year, Medium, etc) in the body of the email. Files should be in .JPEG unless they are GIFs or videos, and should not exceed 2MB in size for each work. File names should correspond with the work titles. Video submissions can be uploaded onto Youtube or Vimeo for feature on our website. Send these submissions along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Virtual Reality/ 3D Artworks For VR Submissions, please submit no more than three (3) individual artworks. For Tilt Brush works, please upload your artwork to Google Poly (https://poly.google.com/), and mark it as ‘public’ (‘remixable’ is at your own preference). A VR/3D artwork can also be submitted as a video export navigating through the artwork. If you prefer this method, please upload your finished video file to YouTube or Vimeo and provide a URL. With either format, please provide a 150 word artist’s statement.
Non-fiction Non-fiction submissions (essays, reviews, commentary, interviews, etc) should be no more than 1, 500 words and sent as a .doc or .docx file along with your third-person bio/and optional photograph.
_______
BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing Ingrid M. Calderón – friends, arsonistas, send our February 2026 guest editor your magic!
Words spoken through blood-wetted lips, old words older than old stars rolling cold and heavy across the calloused skein of the sky to ends unknown, to wherever stars go, wherever they end, or so she had been told.
biting the inside of my mouth i am more gum than smile, because even on the internet i don’t know how to say no in the breathless space of a text message
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 