Jen Adams (she/they) is a UK-based researcher, feminist and writer.
“When are you going to do it?” Lenny asked Susan.
“When am I going to do what?” she responded, laying a card carefully on the dining room table where she was playing Solitaire.
“When are you going to kill yourself?” Susan glanced at him warily.
“I have no desire to kill myself.”
“But you need to,” replied Lenny. “After all, it was you who had the affair and ruined my name in this town.”
“Your name!” Susan screeched, slapping the card she held onto the table. “What about my name? Not only have you trashed me to my friends, you went to every bar in town talking about me, trying to get sympathy, but all they did was laugh at you.” Lenny kicked a small trash can over.
“I would never have done that if you had been a faithful wife.”
“But the affair was over five years ago,” she reminded him.
“So I heard,” he retorted, but it’s new to me.” Susan stood, ready to leave the room.
“You shouldn’t have listened to my former lover’s new girlfriend when she called here trying to make trouble.”
“Oh, is that so? When I asked you if it was true, I expected you to lie, but now I know you told the truth about everything.”
“Yes, I did,” she replied. “You should be man enough to let it go.”
“I will NEVER let it go!” he roared. “You should die.” Susan ran into the bedroom and locked the door. Lenny had been this way ever since he found out about Susan’s affair. She felt like throttling the hussy who called her home and demanded Susan come talk with her about Susan’s former lover. Susan had refused, and the woman informed Lenny. None of this would have happened if the man she gave her heart to had kept his mouth shut.
Susan became a pariah in the town where she lived. Everywhere she went she could hear snide remarks behind her back. Leering men made obscene gestures. She was forced to shop two towns over so as not to be seen by anyone she knew.
Lenny was not innocent. He backhanded Susan for the slightest thing she did wrong, even before her confession about being unfaithful. She often went to work wearing dark glasses because of a black eye. As a receptionist at an insurance company, she had to be presentable. It was hard to hide a cut lip or swollen, bruised face. Her boss threatened to fire her if she didn’t leave Lenny. She had no place to go, no children, no family. No one cared what happened to her.
Lenny hung around her work place, often waiting for her at the ground floor of the elevator when she got off work. His face in a perpetual sneer, he would inquire as to when she would commit suicide. He decided he wanted to be present when it happened. Susan told him not to worry. She would make sure he was there if she did it.
She wondered what Lenny would do if she did kill herself. She was the only one who worked. Lenny was a dead-beat who never lifted a hand to do anything except drink and play video games. Their marriage had gone steadily downhill. She wished she had never met him.
She also wished he would see a therapist or mental health worker. Of course, anyone would be upset if a spouse cheated, but Lenny went too far. The torment had been going on for a year. Lenny began suggesting various places for Susan to kill herself. He wanted her to shoot herself in their flower garden, but she said that would disturb the neighbors. There were too many parents with children at the city park. No, she would not go there. But she was thinking of ending her life more and more. What did she have to live for anyway? Lenny’s constant barrage of hatred and ridicule were causing her a great deal of depression and despair. Because of trauma Susan had been eating more. She was a big woman before, but now she topped three hundred pounds, something else for Lenny to make nasty remarks about.
At last Susan decided to do what Lenny wanted. When it happened, Lenny was
there just as she had promised. As he was walking past the building where Susan worked,
she jumped from her office window on the twelfth floor and landed squarely on his ugly
head.
LaVern Spencer McCarthy, has published eight books of poetry and four books of short
stories plus three journals. Her poems have been published in Visions International,
Poetry Society of Texas Book of The Year, Open Skies Quarterly, National Federation of
State Poetry Society’s Encore, Austin Poetry Society’s Austin’s Best Poets, A Texas
Garden of Verses and numerous state anthologies and newspaper columns.
Her poem, October’s Agenda was nominated for the Pushcart Award in 2023.
Some plants grow and turn green
without props, splash, or sunshine.
I was on an emotional diet
much before I understood
its implications.
Yet I crawled out
of it to take on
the duties thrust upon me.
Departure and its score
are the universe’s final
evaluation of the earthly tenure.
Sanjeev Sethi is an award-winning poet who has authored eight poetry books. His poems have
been published in forty countries and appear in more than 600 journals and anthologies. He is the
joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by the Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, among others. He lives in Mumbai, India.
X @sanjeevpoems3 ||
Instagram sanjeevsethipoems ||
The half-empty bottle of lavender
pure-castile soap haunting
my shower for months
after you left, the lonesome
burning sudsy mornings
moaning, masturbating,
inhaling a floral memory of you.
Reza Jabrani writes coarse prose and crude poetry @coarseprose
For weeks she willed the horizon ablaze
with word of triumph
Smoke from her fires sways lascivious in the mist
She dresses the house for his return
as a snake vestures itself in foliage biding for prey
Finally the homecoming
Streets filled with petals laughter song
Expectant women scan the victors for their sons
hope ebbing & absconding
She sees him argentine mightier than she remembers
feels an unwelcome stab of tenderness like self-violation
On the carriage next to him her daughter alive
tears pulsating threads of red dancing in the wind
He gleams godlike within the conglomeration
closer closer— She realizes his trick:
the girl foreign not her own
Fury intensifies within her seizes her by the throat
resolve floods her gut like semen
She bids him into the tyrian river beguiling
the bowels of the butcherhouse
House ghosts nab at his feet salivating for vengeance
he wades on blind as a god to silent suffering
For ten years he has cheated death as it caressed him unknowingly
thinks himself inviolable on par with the deathless gods
But her prayers have been steadfast inerrant
& Death is generous & heeding
She spinals the blade
hones her resolve into promise:
the moonfall will see him dead
a.d. is drawn to the sacred, the profane, the mysterious and the mythological, which provides inspiration for her work. She is an award-nominated bisexual poet, writer, and visual artist, with words published in HAD, Blood+Honey, MCRB, REDAMANCY Mag, God’s Cruel Joke, HAWKEYE, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, her visual art, mainly photography and self-portraiture, is featured in Hominum Journal, Occulum, RESURRECTION Mag, Antler Velvet, Bleating Thing and other outlets. Tumblr & Twitter: @godstained
Sawing Through
Lap dance underwater with
sharks.
Limbs tossed into
bleeding mosh pits.
Those still alive are uniform,
guns, glass, hate.
Won’t stop shooting,
biting, spitting out
splintered heads they don’t want
to swallow.
Lacerated tongues which
can no longer speak.
Stuffed animal lair only
allows meat eating breeds
filled with contracting, contractual,
expanding killer teeth.
Dialect of smashed windows
dragging you away.
Intrusive Obsession
Hiding in the background,
then quietly limping to the side
of my peripheral vision,
then suddenly racing towards my headspace.
Screaming internally then constricting
my throat with heaves and gasps and
compulsions, every membrane screaming
obsessive images about how men are looking
at creampie dripping down
younger women’s thighs
and I’m a boring middle
aged woman his age
with saggy breasts and a heart
instead of just an opening
aimed to explode in his face.
Like a Ouija board strobe light inside
my brain, this obsession won’t stop
until my head splatters.
Invisible Ink
Possible poem lines emerge in bed,
in the midst of what seems like a semi-dream/
semi-reality state, followed by internal glitch
in which a semi-truck aims to run over
my new lines or my entire head.
I thought I had managed
to temporarily sit up and
write down my impending words, but
the first pen was devoid of ink.
The second pen spit a thin drizzle
of almost invisible blood,
which soon disappeared.
When I awoke, nothing new
was on the page. Had my words ever been there
at all? I could no longer remember the words
which had felt like they were writing themselves
inside my semi-invisible brain.
Perhaps it was just an illusion.
The bedside table was loaded
with hundreds of sheets of paper,
repetitive to-do lists. But no poetry.
My new lines must have been
thrown away or swallowed or
trapped inside the dream or else
never fully existed.
I re-entered real life,
viewed the latest news,
saw death, murder, evil
worse than nightmares.
Part of me wished I was still stuck
in a dream. If I look away, am I acting
like another dead body is invisible ink?
Juliet Cook doesn’t fit inside an Easy-Bake Oven and rarely cooks. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including “red flames burning out” (Grey Book Press, 2023), “Contorted Doom Conveyor” (Gutter Snob Books, 2023), “Your Mouth is Moving Backwards” (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2023), “REVOLTING” (Cul-de-sac of Blood, 2024), and “Blue Stingers Instead of Wings” (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025). Her most recent full-length poetry book, “Malformed Confetti” was published by Crisis Chronicles Press. You can find out more at https://julietcook.weebly.com/.
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.
What was our poison touch, of palm lines
centred on hands, opening chords
into the body, incisions rent inside
like wreathless layers of skin?
A glorious kinetic estrangement
feed-back loops speaking in tonality /
urban reconstruction: organ runs, skronky sax,
industrious clarity / at the edge. In the frame,
increments. And
some time later, New York City,
alone. Glorious / audacity.
I saw your shadow forty feet long crossing
father demo square to come up stairs
after the ritual throwing up of food
I tossed down the ring with the skeleton key.
Enactments between us always began with something
breath/ less. Taking starkest energy.
Was it you then,
dressed in a white tuxedo? Art student
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.
American Sonnet #61
did you leave me here to collapse
or was your intention to transform
me into an elk? it’s important to
know because we used to park
at the waterfront in Red Bank
and make out and there was
that one time when a cop car
pulled up right next to us and
it looked like I was all alone in
the back seat of my car and you
really seemed to … well, you
had a flair for the dramatic, and
i often behaved like a child, blood
sugar issues and all of that shit.
Wraith
I’ve been privy to your bold designs,
Cold-called by piss merchants in
The dead days of spring, and seen
Your type on the esplanade,
Gumming yourselves mute, with
Expectations of recognition.
And who am I, you may ask,
So granular in my critiques of
Pure season, when just last week
I was pulling my skivvies on
With a pair of grilling tongs?
Hey, even a cool breeze on flayed skin
Is better than a hot sleep with dreams of you.
Even a dozen spins
Around the town’s worst rotary,
Exit signs obscured by the
Shimmying smog you call a
Marine layer, won’t leave me as dizzy
As one playback of your voicemails.
Selected Ambient Works
An outstretched and oversized-
Darlin’ you can kill kidnap me-
Kind of hand. Ringless
In the dull light, sunbleached
An afterthought. The roving
Cloudburst with ark-making
Deluge revisits your pathway.
It’s unusual for the snakes
To roost in the fickle strawbeds
Of your youth. Time-released
madness always often tricks
The lizard brain into a ceasefire.
Oh honey honeyed ointment,
Leave us sticky and commendable
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
<1>
my suede hand
warm + gloved
pinning swollen fist on
either side of ur mandible
+ screaming until the jaw
snaps (so visceral !)
my wet thigh sticky
(unexpected blood)
i tuck my body beneath
stubbed nose cold comfort
watching my verbal tics echo
in the rugless lobby
my god,
that’s what summer needs
a cropped linen jacket
just shaped enough
to warm my tits in
cool summer shade
no pride or shame in making
an old woman cry
… i’m the old woman
<2>
the ridiculousness of lunch glass
or getting chewed out
in the afternoon thicket
… unthinkable !
vibrant creature,
effervescence of youth
forest green + humbled by
succulence or prosperity,
buccal fat smeared in shiny layers
refracting age or wisdom
<3>
then me
+ the vibes i give:
nervous forgiveness
stuffed with love which cannot carry
s w a m p
incurable lack/deepest ache
sun schemes (insofar as to stop the sun
and it’s bullshit)
but like, … friendly ?
yes,
my hairline continues
to fur itself by fireplace
many extra fingers invited to
light + curl
squeezing crunch into velvet
before botox is just called youth
let me lick yours like a ruffle,
like a scream in church !
in my mother’s voice:
CRY OUT A WINDOW ABOUT IT
TELL THE MIDNIGHT MAN
REMEMBER THE SLIME RIVER
ah,
of course
her indifference reminds me
to invoke the river of slime
to soak my sins in
the neon absolution
of undone mildew stains
like imposition over injury
<4>
the back of my neck
is so hairless
(from the accident)
that when i was nailing my wistfulness
to the new wallpaper
i adhered myself to the baseboard
gathering dust like spring grain
in my historically accurate suit
admiring medieval books
on weddings
+ informal sutures
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.
March
Indulge yourself in a final thought
as the year ends: If you leave her,
the road ahead opens into a midlife reckoning.
No money for the cliched convertible.
The trip to Japan. Holiday shrine
visits with the locals gawking at
the hulking, brooding, balding foreigner
gumming a squid on a stick.
Finding yourself is a luxury good.
Sex on beaches with divorcees.
Old and sweet and slow.
Mutual cumming on cue.
Hair coiled around your fingers.
Coconut hotel shampoo. Salt licked
off a near stranger’s skin, crotch full of
sacred sand as the tide comes in.
No. Leave your flipflops in the closet,
stow your sunblock beneath the sink.
Your health isn’t what it used to be.
Your wealth, pathetic and dwindling,
unfortunately is. Nothing ever changes.
Except the things you wish would stay the same.
She changed. Or maybe the way you saw her did.
It’s a new year. Resolve to do something. Do,
not think. But after the first thought claws
itself into conception, the second forms.
The third. A nativity scene of tortured neurons.
Days die. The calendar deforms.
January, with its resolutions, collapses.
Hopes crash on February’s shores and
before you know it, here again and
again, forever and again: March.
The thought of it. The reality.
Reading Rumi
Reading Rumi has got me depressed.
Or rather, I’m depressed and a friend
prescribed Rumi. Poetry is cheaper
than SSRIs or a gym membership,
easier than deciding to leave
your lover to their addiction.
But all the joyful whirling,
the light, the cups overflowing,
the appeals to a love
with a capital L — no, Rumi, sorry.
I had a Beloved but it turns out
I never really knew her and
this, whatever This is,
is nowhere near enough.
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
Olympia
Real love. Unsparing introspection
Oh, for heaven’s sake
fucking ____________________ .
- Jennifer
- You (& Jennifer)
- Jack the Modernist
- Veronica, Ted, Sabalenka, Sailor Socialism
- the museum goers at The Frick,
a poem for trapped things, the solar anus
the girl whose lips
are like
the last helicopter
out of Saigon
O lose the noise
you’re going to be all right
go home, spoon the Hitachi
blackmatter
Berkshire Hathaway
Dear Cinnette,
did you obtain cheap land, seek fortune,
join a religious community—
I’m taking the kitchen sink approach
Where do the coordinates lead…
Delia Deetz died.
The Lily Jean sank off the coast of Gloucester.
The streets are draped in anti-drone nets.
Today, when I was looking at the clouds
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
Symbiosis
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_
monument leaves
(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.
bluesky: @seangmeggeson.bsky.social
instagram: @sean_g_meggeson_poet
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
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LOVE & HATE
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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.
All feelings at once please!
Ache. Want. Lust. Desire. Hate. Hostile. Loathe. Thirst. Hunger. Disgust. Violence.
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
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- 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.
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BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing Ingrid M. Calderón – friends, arsonistas, send our February 2026 guest editor your magic!
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Continue reading “I’ll Be With You Soon by Jacob Wiebe”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.
Continue reading “The dishes are clean, the sun is set by Fan Wu”
I am going back to the beginning place before sun and sky and sea, before the slit discloses difference, before the shock of time abides…
Continue reading “Excerpts from The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau & Pornographia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo”… life itself, the perfect composition of flesh elevated into a cathedral of fluids and organs, into a little god of misery.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 