I log on & want to be called
by my name. I rush around

like a panic, getting out
of the house. In town,

where conversation pays
a price, I’m a fool. Cherry wants

me to grow her a new turn
of peaches. Her attention

makes my world level up.
I know it’s a game when cash

shakes down from a tree,
when it lands & makes music.

There’s nothing I can’t work
toward. I set the town

tune to Runaway. I sit
& lay down. It’s all I can do.

Rachelle is the author of the poetry collection That Ex, out now from Big Lucks. She is the editor in chief of Peach Mag.

You can sit down in a chair
have a wrinkly cowl wrapped around you
and tell her about you.

Hair falls away, or hair returns
if you hide what your intentions are.

Hair cascades from you or away
should you confess to your crimes
against cleanliness;

vanishes
when you live for chaos;

comes and goes as you heart to heart,
until you wear your truth.

When you tell
the pheasant
you’re content to see them go

and they take that as an invitation
to stay
to try harder to be your friend

Do you become the heel of your own home?

When the hamster
says it’s time to go
to return to being a frozen face on the cover

and you beg him to stay

and he won’t

Were you never important enough to him?

They don’t,
they never felt like numbers.
They always felt like
the people you tolerate
your self-interested friend
the ones you could never make leave
the ones who were never going to stay.

Will LaPorte (he/him) is a musician, wannabe lyricist, kind of a cartoonist and evidently trying his hand at poetry. He lives in Kingston, NY and has a very cute/absolutely possessed by *something* kitty named Domino. Animal Crossing: New Leaf got him through some particularly rough times, so now he's here to share the love and pay it forward a bit. P.S. Dan is cute

touch to shake
fruit from the trees, to
pick it out of the bed
of leaves, to take
it back to camp and
make a salad, a tart,
a cake. Have you seen
a wolf blush? The great
coincidence is returning
all at once. Touch to swap
stories, change what was
found for what was brought.
Have you held hands
in passing?

Harrison writes and lives between Vancouver and Toronto. His poetry has appeared in Hart House Review, Acta Victoriana, and Half a Grapefruit Magazine.

i just wanted to take the time to say hi.
i will be moving to town soon with nothing in my pockets except 50 bells and all the good intentions in the world.
i hope we can be good friends who cheer each other on and give each other furniture and make each other pies. i’ll make you all pies, i promise.
ive heard so much about all of you.
to filbert the squirrel, i cant wait to lay around and watch the clouds with you.
hippo rocco, will you fish with me?
to wart jr., even though you are so grumpy, i’d be happy to go bug catching with you, even though you might find me slightly smug.
and finally, to isabella, i do it all for you, my favorite talking puppy ever. (don’t tell bea).
see you all on the island!
much love, brian
p.s.
kk, lets collab

brian is a writer living in brooklyn. he is a digital media marketing content creator by day and meme consumer by night. he is currently attempting to make his own kimchi. brian’s tweets: @_brnwnd

It’s the morning of Animal Crossing Direct
but I can’t wake up in time. Such simple acts
can feel this way. Last night, I listen to the book
Know My Name by Chanel Miller, set a sleep timer,
let her voice lull me to sleep. I’m desensitized
to this kind of lullaby: the story of Emily Doe,
not that Emily Doe, but each one, emerging
like an apparition, an unexpected villager,
a colonizer. When Chanel says Philadelphia,
I wake up. Everything happens so close
to home. This is my worst habit:
I roll over and check my phone
in the middle of the night. On Twitter,
AOC slays Mystic7, the Pokémon Go Youtuber.
I check to see if there’s anything new
in my Pokémon Home wonder box. I fulfill
requests on Pocket Camp. I’m so good
at fulfilling expectations. Everything will coalesce,
eventually. To make space for the coincidence –
to cross paths with me on Walnut Street,
another Emily Doe, and then another,
and another. To reproduce one Emily Doe
across every island, every console, a character
stripped of herself, who lives in all of us.
We know how to shrink. We know how
the story ends. Zoe texts: OOOO eventually
u get a construction permit and can change
the landscape of your island!!!!! & I imagine
Emily Doe shaping all of us, envy the ability
to cut out these parts of me. I want to write
a poem about Animal Crossing that is not
actually about trauma, about Emily.
How nothing can distract me
the way Isabelle can. How I don’t have
the capacity, too many items in my market box.
How even Tom Nook can’t expand my body,
build extra space for this burden, these burdens.

Amanda Silberling is a poet, journalist, and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in NPR, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, Kotaku, and other places. She directed the documentary “We’re Here, We’re Present: Women in Punk,” which premiered in 2017 on VICE, and has since screened at Cineteca Madrid’s Mujeres Hechas de Punk Festival and the Art Attack Gallery in San Francisco. She was a 2019-2020 Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos at the Luang Prabang Film Festival, and she is currently the Van Doren Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Her favorite villager is Cherry (don't tell June), and she enjoys wishing on shooting stars with Celeste. Find her at amandasilberling.com, on twitter at @asilbwrites, or in the park playing Pokémon Go.

Content warning for domestic violence

He took me to GameStop to get a 3DS XL
and Animal Crossing: New Leaf
on one of his good days. On one of his
apology days. On one of his baby,
you mean everything to me days.

I played through his rage blackouts. The
bathroom door was the only door in the apartment
that locked so I played on the floor. Kept
an extra charger under the sink.

I played and I played and I kept playing
but now I’m sort of dreading
the new Animal Crossing game because
what if all it does is remind me of him?
The way he’d hold my neck against the wall
followed by baby I’m so sorry. Followed by
I swear it’ll never happen again.

It always happened again and I would
always find solace in New Leaf,
a place where no one ever necklaced
their hands around my throat. A place
where safety was manufactured but real.

It’s been three years and I can still feel his hands.
It’s been three years and I don’t know
if I’m ready for Animal Crossing again.

Rachel Tanner (she/her) is an Alabamian writer whose work has recently appeared in Tiny Molecules, Impossible Task, Tenderness Lit, and elsewhere. She tweets @rickit.

Do you know how many towns I've seen?
Sparsely decorated beachfront chalets,
nestled amidst dense suburban bustling communities.
Thatched roof construction overlooking beds of marigold and rose thorns,
never seen so much as a pinprick in all my years somehow.
Do you ever wonder why that is?

It's that calming kind of presence I know of Autumn,
witnessing the end of something lovely before it plunges into night.
I find myself visiting these places often,
and fondly reminiscing about the other places that I've been.
Villages I've left to fend against the whims of time,
like trying to remember the face of a friend from long ago.
It's an approximation of what came before...
just more weeds now, I suppose.

So what does it mean when a time capsule ages?
As years pass, is there a serenity in knowing what's possible?
I hope my friends forgive me when I visit somewhere new.
Just like my friends before,
and before,
and before.

O spiral eyes!
I feel them burning,
fixated on a number floating just above the surface.
I watch your legs trudge a hundred miles worth of inch-long shores,
as if a million shells will be the answer.

And when you turn them in
to line the inside of your pockets
with an even higher figure than before,
will you still say yes when asked
if you'd like another wing?

I bet you will.

O spiral eyes,
step onto my welcome mat,
or that of anyone in this burg,
and behold a one-room palace
in the shadow of your monolith.

Because while your home splits upwards,
a mountain amongst knolls,
we all wonder what it is you really want.
And if it's not a place to rest your head,
then what?

Brendon Bigley (He / Him) is a person who never logged off. When he’s not working at Marvel, he’s making podcasts or ambient music. He wonders if it’s legal to marry an Animal Crossing New Leaf cartridge. Might be weird. Who knows?

in memory of the suicide i didn't have two summers ago

isabelle said i’d been gone for weeks.

in my absence, the town was overgrown.
i spent the afternoon in bed, pulling the weeds,
obsessively transposing flowers
so the cosmos did not interrupt the rows of roses
i had planted by my house last year.

my favorite lion moved away, but the koalas stayed.
good friends leave, but sometimes that’s okay.
a new cat came to town and built herself a home
a little left of my cherry tree grove
in a spot i’d meant to put a clock tower in.
that transgression, i did not mind so much.

mom sent me a letter.
peanut asked where i had been.
alice said i’d changed a bit,
i looked a little different from the last time i was here,
in need of a haircut, a change of clothes.
she’s right, it’s been a moment since i’ve been alright,
but bad times are just times that are bad,
and i feel i’m coming to the end of mine.

i think my friends have missed me.
i think that i will be missed.

Adrian Belmes is a Jewish Ukrainian poet residing currently in San Diego. He is a senior editor for Fiction International, editor in chief of Badlung Press, and vice president of State Zine Collective. He has been previously published in SOFT CARTEL, Philosophical Idiot, and elsewhere. You can find him at adrianbelmes.com or @adrian_belmes.

You look like a glitch or some inside joke between developers, but
You were always so nice!
I used to visit our town on the bus,
When everything else was too loud,
And even though I had to play with the noise off,
I heard your voice in my head and it sounded sweet and so very very soft!
I loved your house!
You hung around mine! You never asked to be roommates (unlike the funny rabbit) but I wish you had and that I could have said yes!
Your hard exterior hid the gentlest programming!
You showed me how to be kind again.
Coco, if you hadn’t moved out,
I probably would have failed all of my senior year tests,
Because I would have played until I became pixels too!

Ale Rosales (she/they) is a leftists mestizx lesbian. She lives in Tijuana/SD with her cat, Suh, whom she adores. She is an editor for Chaparral Press, and has previously published work in The Fruit Tree. You can find her on twitter @sorginale, and you can find her zines at issuu.com/mossmoon.

for a few brief years, we felt we had mastered time
or you did, at least
you were always braver, more adventurous

starlit walks, lying on our fronts in a tent
and in the morning your father
whose hands could be so unkind

waved hot rolls before our faces to wake us up.

sat on the school bus, bags resting primly in our laps
we played guessing games
which is your favourite villager?

which furniture do you like the most?
i liked sturdy bedframes, white sheets
you wanted your world to be framed in gold

royal. what even is that word?

you did not believe me when i told you
you were saying it wrong
we were headstrong girls, bound

by nothing but the street we lived on,
the same street,
and dislike of your younger sister

remember the love letters
i wrote to Angus?
i liked him because my dad liked AC/DC

we laughed ourselves silly when the letters circulated
around town. he was so mad, do you remember?
and i so hungry to be loved

some nights we’d be sitting, side by side
on the floor of my room
and i’d give my world to you to hold

catch that shark for me, will you?

Josefine Stargardt is a bilingual poet currently based in Germany. She will never forgive herself for deleting her very first Animal Crossing town. Her words can be found in Homology Lit, The Cardiff Review, and elsewhere.

They ping down from blue-jean sky—one then two,
then the animals’ god dumps the whole batch,
putting me inside a pinball machine.
Wishing takes practice. The trick, which is really
not a trick at all, is that you must first
put away your fishing pole. Miracles need
attention. I’ve already lost a few
figuring this out. I can’t remember
the last time I spent this long, with hands clasped,
looking down at the tiny sky. Patience
is involved. You—and I—must be okay
with the fish that got away, and trust that
tomorrow there will be a shard of star
on shore for every one of yesterday’s wishes.

Sarah Robbins is a washed-up humanities major who graduated from Missouri Southern State University in May of 2020. You can follow her on Instagram (@tri_saraahtops) and Twitter (@saaraahkate).

If dogs played guitar,
it’d spell the end of dating,
and we’d go extinct.

Josh Smith was born in Buffalo, raised in punk, and currently lives inside his own heart. Josh has choreographed fight scenes for two different poetry events, which must be some sort of record.

I never expected to be looking at a squirrel for body confidence.
But here I am,
Laying down tweezer pincers,
And repurposed nail scissors,
Filling my phone with images of her.

My Muse;
An icon resting beside beautiful bodies,
Unapologetically hairy.
Unapologetically chubby.
Unapologetically woman.

The stomach folds of Grecian models,
Cast into marble and stone,
Women wearing eczema scars
Shining like the surface of the moon,
And eyes alight with laughter, captured in a moment.

And then, a squirrel.

Her uni-brow and wonky teeth,
Part of what makes her character so cute,
Cute - not repulsive.
She doesn't comment about her features.
And doesn't change them.

She lives in a slice of paradise;
Loved by her neighbours
Where it’s okay for squirrels to wear heavy blush,
With a tracksuit, and have a uni-brow.
Nobody cares about your appearance in an island of animals.

She enjoys the world around her:
Wears what she wants,
Does what she wants,
Plants flowers,
Sings off-key and dances.

I'm genuinely envious of a squirrel.

One day at a time,
I must face my brows in the mirror;
Grimacing as I push glasses higher on my face,
Covering the hairs desperate to cross no man's land
And embrace in a thin, fleeting embrace.

They've never managed to touch.
I’ve refused to let them meet,
I've seared my face with razors, creams and tweezers.
Mocked for furrowing them
Because they’d “look like they’re touching”.

I tried to wax them with cello-tape once.
The efforts of a desperate and insecure teen,
Unable to voice her worries at home.
Her sister looked up to her.
She had to think she’s pretty.

And pray she never heard what they said in the halls.

I never expected to be looking at a squirrel for body confidence.
But I spend hours glaring at my brows;
Willing them to recoil from each other’s touch,
Turn into the caterpillars I was told they resembled
And leave my face.

But I have nowhere to be.
The only person I’m seeing is my reflection in the fridge,
So why not let them have their moment,
On the bridge of my nose.
Isolation, like affairs end abruptly.

But for now, I’m letting the hair grow,
Letting lovers meet and spend their days together.
I don't know how long this will last,
But, when I turn on the game
I'm reminded that my brows are lovely.

No matter if I choose to change them or not.

Imogen. L. Smiley (she/her) is a twenty-two-year-old writer from Essex, UK. She has anxiety, depression and a relentless love of dogs. Although poetry isn't her strongest area of writing, she does enjoy the ability to neglect the rules of style, and come up with convoluted imagery that would otherwise be unconventional and inappropriate in prose.

We stockpile supplies at our meager campsite:
pears, preserves, snapper. We craft lattice
walls and lace them to brittle hedges. I tell you
it’s to stall the new winds from the Hollow
but really, it’s for our protection.

Soon, the peaches are slush and attract
purring fruit flies. We eat them in a sweet
stew with fruit beetles and ground butterfly
wings to taste.

You tell me: Last night I heard the intimacy of a
mouth, its slick and swallow, just outside
the walls. I tell you the village has already
fallen. Yet, I’m unsettled.

Next night, I head to shore
with my fishing rod and boning knife.
I should tell you when I leave camp
but I get a seductive thrill from wandering
on my own at midnight.

I perch on the rotting pier
and cast out. The salt-shaken breeze
shudders my spine. I look over my shoulder
more than once.

Hours pass before I feel a tug. As I reel
her in, I contemplate the lost days of breakneck
fishing and enough mackerel to feed
us for weeks.

I slop the catch at my feet. Moonlight
blotches putrid remains: clumps of purple
fur clinging to pitted flesh. She’s not good
for eating. I use the toe of my pumps to nudge
the cat back with a slosh.

NOTE:Originally published at Subbed In: Ibis House and in Rae's poetry collection Milk Teeth

Rae White (they/them) is a non-binary transgender poet, writer and zinester. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth (UQP) won the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Rae’s short story 'The Body Remembers' won Second Prize in the 2019 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction.

Say it's juju
or pea brain calculus
a limbless muscle memory

sidewinding the snake
over mounded silt
and pooled sluice

across the lesioned tarmac
a melty roadbed
hot to the braided belly

up and over
from peaty bog
to nettled patch

Say it's chemosensory stimuli
or coldblooded impulse
because you’re a closet biologist

Say it's part & parcel
a lifecycle thing
because you'll feel better

when you find its mossy leatherette
gutsplashed on Mary Road
where it bends toward 40th street

summer hipsters pushing their SUVs
toward Saugatuck
or downtown Kalamazoo

Jeff Schiff is author of That hum to go by (MAMMOTH Books), Mixed Diction (MAMMOTH Books), Burro Heart (MAMMOTH Books), Anywhere in this Country (Mammoth Press), The Homily of Infinitude (Pennsylvania Review Press), and The Rats of Patzcuaro (Poetry Link). His work has appeared internationally in more than seventy periodicals, including Grand Street, The Ohio Review, Poet & Critic, The Louisville Review, Tendril, Pembroke Magazine, Carolina Review, Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Southern Humanities Review, River City, Indiana Review, and The Southwest Review. He has taught at Columbia College Chicago since 1987.

here now on the road
only eyes illuminate
the so much suddenness

the self announced in the
breath already a cough
a grammar for goodnight

I want to worry more
privately

wait for the deer
to fold so

let blood melt the snow
a decaying long after

your hands make a shadow
against my face,
make my face

Noah Falck (he/him/his) is the author of Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020). He lives in Buffalo, New York.

You thought she was so nice
and invited her to live on our island
sometimes we talk about you

She wonders if you’re okay

This is the farm I am planting
cherries and oranges
for you to sell
I haven’t found peaches
but I want to plant those too

I peruse the shop and wonder
would you wear this?
use this?
would this wallpaper match your bedroom set?
or is it the thought that counts?

I bought two jackets and two hats
so we can match

I sent them to you from the airport
I hate typing ‘I miss you’
one letter at a time
sometimes I type ‘I miss u’ instead
isn’t it the thought that counts?

These are the flowers you planted
this is the house you placed by the river
sometimes I go inside
and admire the pattern you made for the floor
I never thought these dots
could make me miss you more

Will Hall (they/them) is a nonbinary creative residing in Philadelphia, PA. As a person with Borderline Personality Disorder, much of their work concentrates on finding nuance in a world they are predisposed to interpret as “All or Nothing.” Will’s art can be found on instagram @whdoodles or on twitter @williamjdhall.

I manage to catch a fish. It
is worthless but I present it
anyways. I rattle at the base
of a tree and hope for mangos.
Somehow I ended up with
pears instead. A girl I love
promises cherries in a week.
Seven days is days more than
I can afford sometimes. I drop
a handful of red petals to make
room for the fish. They are
snatches of cotton, scattering
across a combed lawn. I wonder
if the fish is worth it, slow moving
under a protective wall of plastic.
I position of the fish by the beach.
Let it swim lazy circles, separate
from a wild stretch. Is it worth it
I try to ask. The fish doesn’t answer.
I think that might be my answer,
after all

Rachel Small (she/her) writes outside of Ottawa. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines, including Thorn Literary Magazine, blood orange, The Shore, The Daily Drunk, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, and other places. You can find her on twitter @rahel_taller.

Birthday house party
by midnight we were in bed
playing pocket camp

Iona Murphy (she/her) is a student and spends most of her time engrossed in the works of Sylvia Plath. She describes her writing as 'straddling the fine line between poetry and oversharing.' She has writing published with Black Bough, Teen Belle, 3 Moon, Re-Side, The Fruit Tree, Fevers of the Mind, Forty-Two Books, The New Southern Fugatives, Ayaskala, Ang(st) Zine, and Brave Voices. You can keep up with her on Twitter: @write_with_Iona and Instagram: ionasmurfy

We can take in & take on this town together,
watch the weather, see the seasons change.
We can run through the rain & after
we can pick the new flowers
& wear them in our hair.

We can make friends with our neighbors
& make their old furniture our new furniture
& rearrange our rooms for hours
& rearrange our bodies in our rooms,
our favorite songs on repeat.

All week we can duck our debts
& we can see shows every Saturday night.

If there are roaches
in our rooms, we can kill them
or let them live, if you want.
If our friends move away, or when,
we can write them letters
& they’ll always write back.

We can do all of this
& we can never die.

Mike Fracentese (he/him) is a poet from & in Brooklyn who runs the Flight Recorder Reading Series out of The Tank, a theater in Manhattan. During quarantine, he’s moved the reading series online and started publishing Distance Yearning, a weekly zine. He shares his Animal Crossing island with three roommates.

Fiery colors begin their yearly conquest of the hills,
propelled by the autumn winds. Fall is the artist.
Love, Mom

It is three in the morning and I am a wisp of a thing,
my heart hung outside a museum in Philadelphia
where my mother last looked sane with love.
My mother speaks in chances, mostly in those
she didn’t have, that she wants me to take for her.
My mother lies, blue-silly-string strung out
over ceiling fan, laced over her apron and zirconia studs,
and I rub my thumbs over my GameCube controller,
a wishing lamp with just enough magic left
to pour me into a pixelated place where living and loving are fair.
In another home, I plant gardens of cosmos
instead of the cucumbers we pickle all Saturday
to place on frozen, food-bank burgers.
In another home, another mother writes me love letters
from a night where the light isn’t blue.
On the drive home from the trip my mother saved
eight months of tips for, she glistens with sweat,
itches her arms in pace with turn signals.
I watch leaves blur in the colors of a home-cooked meal
and, at the stoplight, my mother turns to me and cups my face, says
We came to the city of our leaders because I want you to become one.
You, unlike me, will get to be you.

Kara Goughnour (she/they) is a writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They are the author of "Mixed Tapes," a part of the Ghost City Press Summer 2019 Micro-Chap Series, and have work published or forthcoming in over fifty journals. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram @kara_goughnour or read their collected and exclusive works at karagoughnour.com.

You getting home at 5.30PM,
hanging your miner’s helmet
and pickaxe on the coat rack,
sweaty from a day of breaking
rocks and scolding punks. I help
you with your dungarees,
opening first the button at your
left nipple, your right, reading
your body like an erotic novel.
Your shirt is sticking to you, and
your sleek brown coat is puffed
and dulled with the dust. They
do not understand you like I do,
and you don’t understand them,
take their carelessness
personally. It’s because they hate
me – no – they don’t listen to a
word I say, think I’m a joke. I
can’t do it anymore – so don’t.
We lie on the checkered duvet
of our Modern Bed to sleep.
No doubt, he dreams of a future
with autosave functions and a
million-bell retirement plan.
I dream of seeing him from the
waist down.

Of course I regret it, now that the option is gone,
but I just couldn’t justify buying enough leaf
tickets to keep K.K. and I thought the longing
would have died down by now. Story of my life:
Dogs are expensive, and I can’t have one, and I
can’t be trusted to care for them properly anyway.
I have this fantasy right now where I’m in my
thirties and have a house with a yard and a way
more reliable income, and live with my partner
and a dog called Matthew. Matthew will be large
or medium-sized, and will probably have darker
hair, probably black, and maybe I’ll have a car.
I have a hat with K.K.’s face on, not in real life
but in the game, put it on campers if they’re nice.

Toby Buckley is an archivist-in-training and zine-maker with an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. His work has appeared in a number of literary publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and Footnote. His interests include bugs, trains and medieval things.

to hide something underneath something else. of course

to pat the ground on the head, gently, like it’s your old dog

to begin a secret handshake

to stow your neighbor’s memories

to PRANK!

to mark with a star made of dirt

to summon flowers

to keep safe

Yeah sure fuck it
make my hair
the color of angel
wings, for today
I am a minor god
with 15 peaches in my
pocket and clothes
from a balloon.
If I can live a fable
while paying a
mortgage in bags
tied with ribbon
then there is hope
for a bad hairdo, or
a lost time capsule,
or my twelfth rusty
river can, or that HOE
who moved into
the middle of my
BAMBOO GROVE.
The moral of this
rom com, and it is
a rom com, is everything
is already okay.

Jenna is a technical writer from Texas. She hopes to like fishing and landscaping in real life someday.

See the golden moon outside my kitchen door.
It’s full and so am I, but the day isn’t over yet.

Not at all. I pull on my shoes, walk out the door,
lift my arms, dive into the cold.

Allow myself a single, long-ass yawn.
But the day isn’t over yet, and I’m feeling sappier than usual.

I walk across the street to the video store,
one of few remaining in the Cyberpunk Future.
Tell the owner, who’s been behind that register since 1978,
that I’m not looking for a movie today.

Walk out with a pastel pink DS Lite
and Animal Crossing: Wild World.
Think about how almost ten years ago
to the day, I was in bed at mom’s house,
playing this same game at 3 a.m.
when my rhinestone-studded Tracfone lit up.

It was a car accident:
speeding, drinking, dark country roads.

We didn’t even talk all that much,
but I still look up at the same moon
that looked down on them that night
and I wish they were here
to build their homes
and befriend their neighbors
and plant their flowers, too.

miss macross (she/her) is a Pittsburgh-based writer who enjoys watching mecha and taking naps. Her first chapbook, MISS MACROSS VS. BATMAN, was published by Dark Particle/CWP Collective Press in 2018. Find her on Twitter @missmacross.

there’s a new patch of lilies
where your house once was

did you try to say goodbye?
you probably wrote a letter
but i let my mailbox overflow
and now it’s too late

i guess i thought you would always
be there for me
so i missed my chance to fight
for you to stay

but it’s okay
i’m happy you’re
being there for you

wherever you are

Casey Morris (she/her) is a playwright and marketing manager who works throughout the Hudson Valley. Her work has been performed at Dusklit Interactive Arts Festival and CelebrateWomxn845’s annual gallery showcases.