kingsoftrain

Ashley Bullen-Cutting is a writer concerned with the Weird, Eco, Gothic and Queer. He has been published in Lonesome October Lit, Three Drops Poetry and can soon be read in an upcoming issue of Riggwelter. He holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield.

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Cutis Calligraphy

I

Her eyes are like

twin stars and hard liquor

like oblivion shores

black-glass lapping

mascara tears

cutis calligraphy to destinations

                            unknown

We call her Hali

I want to be different

                                  she thinks

but cardboard is cardboard

apathetic pre-made flaps

and I’m not ready to rip

to change my design

Her skin is like

November and a misdemeanor

like purpled purgatory

Our Earliest Tattoos
poems, Peter Twal
The University of Arkansas Press, 2018

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With vision and expanse enough to spot grass in the teeth of god, poet Peter Twal is able, in Our Earliest Tattoos, to palm the pop mortality of what it means to be appropriately beheld and, as such, so gently infiltrates the inner circle of distance that one may get carried away with the knowledge that we don’t last long. In form, the work is bent by sonnet to its interrupted blessings; in shape, it is a gospel gone to pray for the unclosed if of immediacy; in voice, a haunted medicine dropper lifted from imagination’s melancholy and held above the ghosted vulgar of characters italicized by a dryness specific to the short life of apocalypse. Twal’s touch is deceptively light, but not secretive; mystery, here, is visibly moral; and mark, a brief bed for the…

Kate Garrett is the founding/managing editor of several web journals, including Picaroon Poetry, and her own writing is widely published online and in print. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. and her latest chapbook, Land and Sea and Turning, was published by CWP Collective Press in August 2018. Born and raised in rural southern Ohio, Kate moved to the UK in 1999, where she still lives in Sheffield with her husband, five children, and a sleepy cat. http://www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk Twitter @mskateybelle

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Solitaire

Once upon a time I shuffled cards, exchanged
insights on the suits of wands and pentacles
for cups of wine and ten cigarettes.

Everyone’s clarity comes in a different
package. Back then a north wind cut
through clouds of tar that wouldn’t stick

on lungs too young to be anything other
than invincible. I’d tell them their new…