Joe Bishop

Your keen wakes goldfish.
Your voice picks my ossicles,
Octaves purple with lupins.

You pitch banker’s lamp
At my dodging noggin. 
I fear for the alarm clock.

Watching Wheel of Fortune,
I howl mad guesses
Just to make you laugh. 

You wear your mermaid gown,
Clutch a bunch of black roses,
Your freckles powdered,

In a photo on the mantle,
Protected behind glass.

JOE BISHOP’s work has appeared in journals such as The New Quarterly, Plenitude Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Riddle Fence and is featured on the League of Canadian Poets’ website. He is a recipient of a Newfoundland & Labrador Arts & Letters award for poetry. His first chapbook of poetry, Dissociative Songs, was published in 2021 by Frog Hollow Press. Joe has poems forthcoming in The Puritan.

Olivia Hajioff

We exist, you and I,
in body bags.
Stretchy, but a perfect fit.
And when we lie quietly, what do we feel?
Not an arm or a leg
But a buzz, an ache, an itch.

Try it.

And the rest?
Blank space.
Pricks of light in a dark city.

But choose a point in the numbness
and suddenly it will come alive:
The tip of your nose,
The heel of your hand.
Once unfelt, they now belong.
And you will be brought back to earth
in the knowing.

OLIVIA HAJIOFF, a Fulbright scholar, first published a story at age nine. It was televised as a children’s ballet for the British television show, Freetime. Since then she has written for the British Fulbright magazine, HIV Now project and various musical magazines. Olivia’s poetry has appeared on philosopher William B. Irvine’s website, Ginosko Literary Journal, Better Than Starbucks, The Shambhala Times and the Front Porch Review. She is the 2020 Grand Choice Winner of the Laura Riding Jackson Poetry competition. By profession, Olivia is a concert violinist, teacher, member of the Virginia Arts Commission Touring Artists and the Marcolivia Duo.