enamel flow
Today we celebrate two years exactly since we published our first issue. The theme then was SECRETS.
Since, we have published twenty-five issues that feature work from artists and writers in a dozen countries. We’ve released interviews with luminaries we learn from: Susan Stryker, Denice Frohman, Jen Richards, Jay A. Gupta, Ryan Cassata, Kim Maxwell, Lily Brown, Brett Childs, Plácido R. Bonnín, Andrea Gibson, Kai Coggin, Diannely Antigua, Nnadi Samuel, GARCIA, Sylvia, and Adam Golub.
We are grateful to each person who enriches this space.
For our anniversary issue, we offer loud sun, lips exploring the countryside, a dawn of draught, and a sore throat.
Next month’s theme is:
range
Submission guidelines can be found here.
happy pride,
amanda lezra
Editor-in-Chief
electricity. a solar array. Macodes petola.
Saying, Please Fuck Off
(to the one you love)
It’s not that I’d rather sleep alone
without your warm feet touching mine,
fingers, lips exploring the countryside.
Bed’ll be way too big, second world war-
drobe will be superfluous without an ‘us’.
I bought that drobe because you moved in
but that’s hardly worth mentioning when
there are no refunds on used furniture,
spent years, emotional investments.
I’ll return to eating sardines from tins and
fries from Heads&Tails when Mediterranean
meals that take time to prepare, head out the door
and hightail it with all the kitchen gadgets
I cannot identify. Hurts me more than you but
I can’t give up my selfish habit of being myself.
What attracts can repel. Ever over-indulged
in cheesecake? My lonely cloudishness while
tracking stray phrases or a word on the wing –
who knew that could ever sicken anyone?
Perhaps thought clouds were uncultured cheese.
Allan Lake is originally from Saskatchewan, has lived in Vancouver, Cape Breton, Ibiza, Tasmania & Melbourne. Poetry Collection: Sand in the Sole (Xlibris, 2014). Lake won Lost Tower Publications (UK) Comp 2017, Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Fest 2018, and publication in New Philosopher 2020. Chapbook (Ginninderra Press 2020) My Photos of Sicily.
glass amalgam
Possession Is Nine Tenths Of the Law
The sun is too loud. It
shrieks inside my veins
slicing through unguarded
cracks in shuttered blinds.
On the windowpane its
ripples shatter in pools
of liquid light. Days pass
like shards of glass
embedded in bare feet
pacing unswept rooms. I
traverse undercurrents by
osmosis – hearing looming
gestures behind my back
before they strike. I feel
the bite of razor teeth
before they’re unsheathed
behind a smile. Unsettled
as the air around me –
dark shapes scrape past
peripheries of sight and
vanish on phantom winds.
I am boarded like a bus
by homeless augurs and
portents – their back packs
bulging with catastrophes –
in this besieged body
occupied by strangers.
Judith Borenin was adopted at birth and claimed Poetry as her mother after she survived the hard, holy hands of The Sisters of Mercy (who had none) in a convent in Western Australia at the age of ten. She has been published in various online and print journals including; The Raven Chronicles: Last Call, The Floating Bridge Press Review IV, The POETiCA Review, The Night Heron Barks, Synchronized Chaos, The Lothlorien Journal of Poetry and Ethel Zines 3 & 4. Her chapbook, The Evidence & The Evermore was published by Sara Ethel Lefsyk (Ethel Zine) in 2019. She survived the Great Alaskan Quake of ’64. Her greatest joys, besides her poetry, has been her two sons, one of whom died at the age of 32 in 2016. Dogged by disaster, dark poetry pulses in her blood.
forever enclosed
fallen
Olaitan Humble is a writer, editor at The Lumiere Review and reader at Bandit Fiction. A finalist for NND Poetry Prize and a nominee for Pushcart Prize, he was shortlisted for Loft Books Poetry Prize. His writing appears or is forthcoming in FIYAH, North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, Hobart, Superstition Review, Luna Luna Magazine and Rigorous Magazine, among others. He is currently an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. Twitter: @olaitanhumble.
oxidation
Van Swearingen
“I’ve been making photographs for more than 20 years. I have shot commissioned portraits, events, episodic video stills, interior design, architecture, and botanical rarities for scientific texts. This in addition to my own personal everyday wonder at the glory and misery that is our existence. I am compelled to photograph what catches my eye and my attention. Design, history, and intent inform my pictures to capture an instant of eloquence in balance, form, depth, and color. To look and to see.”
enamel flow
Today we celebrate two years exactly since we published our first issue. The theme then was SECRETS.
Since, we have published twenty-five issues that feature work from artists and writers in a dozen countries. We’ve released interviews with luminaries we learn from: Susan Stryker, Denice Frohman, Jen Richards, Jay A. Gupta, Ryan Cassata, Kim Maxwell, Lily Brown, Brett Childs, Plácido R. Bonnín, Andrea Gibson, Kai Coggin, Diannely Antigua, Nnadi Samuel, GARCIA, Sylvia, and Adam Golub.
We are grateful to each person who enriches this space.
For our anniversary issue, we offer loud sun, lips exploring the countryside, a dawn of draught, and a sore throat.
Next month’s theme is:
range
Submission guidelines can be found here.
happy pride,
amanda lezra
Editor-in-Chief
electricity. a solar array. Macodes petola.
Saying, Please Fuck Off
(to the one you love)
It’s not that I’d rather sleep alone
without your warm feet touching mine,
fingers, lips exploring the countryside.
Bed’ll be way too big, second world war-
drobe will be superfluous without an ‘us’.
I bought that drobe because you moved in
but that’s hardly worth mentioning when
there are no refunds on used furniture,
spent years, emotional investments.
I’ll return to eating sardines from tins and
fries from Heads&Tails when Mediterranean
meals that take time to prepare, head out the door
and hightail it with all the kitchen gadgets
I cannot identify. Hurts me more than you but
I can’t give up my selfish habit of being myself.
What attracts can repel. Ever over-indulged
in cheesecake? My lonely cloudishness while
tracking stray phrases or a word on the wing –
who knew that could ever sicken anyone?
Perhaps thought clouds were uncultured cheese.
Allan Lake is originally from Saskatchewan, has lived in Vancouver, Cape Breton, Ibiza, Tasmania & Melbourne. Poetry Collection: Sand in the Sole (Xlibris, 2014). Lake won Lost Tower Publications (UK) Comp 2017, Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Fest 2018, and publication in New Philosopher 2020. Chapbook (Ginninderra Press 2020) My Photos of Sicily.
glass amalgam
Possession Is Nine Tenths Of the Law
The sun is too loud. It
shrieks inside my veins
slicing through unguarded
cracks in shuttered blinds.
On the windowpane its
ripples shatter in pools
of liquid light. Days pass
like shards of glass
embedded in bare feet
pacing unswept rooms. I
traverse undercurrents by
osmosis – hearing looming
gestures behind my back
before they strike. I feel
the bite of razor teeth
before they’re unsheathed
behind a smile. Unsettled
as the air around me –
dark shapes scrape past
peripheries of sight and
vanish on phantom winds.
I am boarded like a bus
by homeless augurs and
portents – their back packs
bulging with catastrophes –
in this besieged body
occupied by strangers.
Judith Borenin was adopted at birth and claimed Poetry as her mother after she survived the hard, holy hands of The Sisters of Mercy (who had none) in a convent in Western Australia at the age of ten. She has been published in various online and print journals including; The Raven Chronicles: Last Call, The Floating Bridge Press Review IV, The POETiCA Review, The Night Heron Barks, Synchronized Chaos, The Lothlorien Journal of Poetry and Ethel Zines 3 & 4. Her chapbook, The Evidence & The Evermore was published by Sara Ethel Lefsyk (Ethel Zine) in 2019. She survived the Great Alaskan Quake of ’64. Her greatest joys, besides her poetry, has been her two sons, one of whom died at the age of 32 in 2016. Dogged by disaster, dark poetry pulses in her blood.
forever enclosed
fallen
Olaitan Humble is a writer, editor at The Lumiere Review and reader at Bandit Fiction. A finalist for NND Poetry Prize and a nominee for Pushcart Prize, he was shortlisted for Loft Books Poetry Prize. His writing appears or is forthcoming in FIYAH, North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, Hobart, Superstition Review, Luna Luna Magazine and Rigorous Magazine, among others. He is currently an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. Twitter: @olaitanhumble.
oxidation
Van Swearingen
“I’ve been making photographs for more than 20 years. I have shot commissioned portraits, events, episodic video stills, interior design, architecture, and botanical rarities for scientific texts. This in addition to my own personal everyday wonder at the glory and misery that is our existence. I am compelled to photograph what catches my eye and my attention. Design, history, and intent inform my pictures to capture an instant of eloquence in balance, form, depth, and color. To look and to see.”
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