Things I Notice While Washing My Hands for Twenty Seconds at the Kitchen Sink
by Diana Clark

The dish soap is especially pink today.

My roommate sautés chickpeas & broccoli

that should have gone bad last week, but whose heads

stay ripe with blossom, stalks strong & pressed

against red & yellow peppers. The oranges

in their basket do not bruise despite

their shelf time. I held them–just held them–firm

inside my palms before washing, each

M i s s i s s i p p i second                  stretched

for a little extra time.

 

 

Wildness
by Clare Roche
Photography by author

I have turned middle-aged. The number is lower than I had thought when I was a glowing sixteen, my face plump with youth and the elasticity of unknowing. My hands are now my mothers, broad and speckled, with extravagant knuckles and veins turned ocean green. You’ll need an oil-based hydrating anti-aging cream, judges the chirping sales assistant, looking up and down my face. She doesn’t know I am wild. That turbulent seas swell through me. That rivers roil behind my grey eyes. That I shake rainstorms from my feet and cause cascades when I loosen my hair. That I am the energy of oceans. That I cannot be contained.

 

 

Fielding a Question
by Sean Lyon
art by former student of author

A student asks me
what pumpkin butts look like
and if they are any different
from alien butts.

So…
with accessible language for
a fourth-grade child,
but without pandering, mind you,

I painstakingly describe
the typical pumpkin butt.

With equally exhaustive
detail I verbally bring to life
an average looking alien butt,

and then
like a good teacher is wont to do,
I encourage the bewildered children
who’d gathered around me

to compare the butts
and arrive at their own conclusion.

 

 

Pizza Rat
by Pune Dracker 
art by author

Five years ago, right up the block at 14th and 1st, Pizza Rat carried a piece of plain cheese pizza down the steps of the L train. An average slice of pizza can weigh up to a pound, which is similar to the weight of an average rat. Pizza Rat abandoned the slice on the third-to-last step, as recorded on video by a passerby. Days later, NYCPizzaRat was retweeting a video of a Brooklyn rat dragging a bag of garbage down the sidewalk. “This is not me,” tweeted Pizza Rat. “But serious respect.”

 

–

 

Diana Clark is a 2019 alumni of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where they graduated with their MFA in fiction. They live in the South with their adopted cat, Emily D.

Clare Roche is Sydney-based. Her poetry is published in Dwell Time (UK), Leopardskins and Lime (Berlin), and Uppagus (US). Her creative non-fiction was short-listed for the national Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing (2020).

 

Sean Lyon [published in HOOT, Typishly, Cleaver Magazine] must dedicate this poem to his countless wonderful students and their infinite off-the-wall utterances. Accompanying image is a portrait made for him by a former student.

 

Pune Dracker writes, edits, runs and dances in New York City, and is studying design research and writing at SVA. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, SLICE and Epiphany.