Azzam Alkadhi

My second kiss.
The less said about my first, the better.

My second kiss and my first girlfriend.
Maybe not girlfriend,
I really don’t know.

I remember wet snogs
And my tongue scraping against braces.
I remember holding hands
Outside KFC on Gloucester Road.
I remember buying her flowers.
I remember struggling to get my hand down her trousers.
I remember being nervous and embarrassed
All the time.

I remember seeing her photo,
Years later,
In the Evening Standard.
I don’t remember why it was there,
But I remember sitting on the Tube
And vaguely recognising that face.

That’s all I remember really.
I don’t know if she remembers much about me.
And I don’t really care.
But it’s an inextricable part of both of our stories.
Paths which are probably so blindingly different,
Or unique.
But which were vaguely the same
For a few short weeks
Back in 1999. Ish.

AZZAM ALKADHI (@autistic.peacock.poetry) was born in London, UK, to Iraqi parents, and most recently spent eleven years living in Bogota, Colombia, before moving to Dubai last year. So he’s clearly confused. Ever since he was ten and his cat died, poetry has been the easiest way for him to process and understand the complexities of a world that can seem overwhelmingly perplexing for somebody on the spectrum.

John Repp

thick heat—
oak branch clatters down—
our son kicks

JOHN REPP is a poet, fiction writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Broadstone Books published his most recent collection, The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020.

Toni Artuso

I tread gingerly, crunching on mud
made suddenly solid
by capricious Arctic blasts
that throw Spring’s thaw into reverse.

I stop,
arrested by the rustle of chimes:
thin, delicate music from

a bed of upstart tulips,
red-and-yellow flashes
in a miry field.

Swaying on spindly stems,
tossed by the bitter breeze,
frozen brittle petals become bells,

until the next warm day,
when they will brown, curl,
fall into the softened muck.

TONI ARTUSO (she/her/hers) is a trans female writer from Salem, Massachusetts. Her verse has appeared in Honeyguide Literary Magazine, which nominated one of her villanelles for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor,Eclectica, Space City Underground Literary Magazine, samfiftyfour, Nixes Mate Review, Molecule, Salamander, The Cackling Kettle, The Lyric, Star*Line, and Ibbetson Street Press. X (Twitter): @TAltrina. Instagram: @tonialtrina.