Issue #33.9 Sarp Sozdinler, Bleah Patterson, Darren C. Demaree
A Poem by Sarp Sozdinler
I’m going to water your plants with my tears
I’ve been practicing crying on cue every morning. I can now cry for hours, long enough to fill a bucket. I’ll soon cry into the soil, and your plants will grow faster. After I cry, I’ll stand there & watch them flourish. They will be beautiful and strange, and You will wonder why your plants look so different Yet so similar to you. And I will keep my mouth shut to stay mysterious. I won’t probably even look you in the eye.
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Sarp Sozdinler is a writer based between Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has found places in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com
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A Poem by Bleah Patterson
gentle domestic, brutes
Grammie tells me that she is proud of me by telling me about the alligators. Her voice, the reassuring hum of a fly that reincarnates back into a fly over and over again in the kitchen, subsists on whatever uncleanable thing lives in the garbage disposal.
She tells me she is proud of me by telling me about being poor somewhere east of the Everglades, having two or four mouths to feed, depending on the year. About sneaking out in the night with a cousin or a cousin of a friend, getting in a boat out in the water, the gun with the silencer and how they shot into the river and pulled out bodies larger than bodies.
We wanted to eat it all. But you can only eat the tail. Everything else is bitter, tough. She is, of course, telling me something about survival. Something about emerging soft. Emerging palatable. The necessity of it.
But I was born all gaping jaw, all drooling thirst. Before all the yes ma’ams and pleases and anythings. Anything, I bark. A rabid girl wanting to buy anything that feels like love or feels like a palm full of mulberries from the treeline behind Grammie’s house. That sour mouthful, that gagging juice between my teeth to look back, hold up a handful and have her say good job, baby good job
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Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. A current PhD student at the University of North Texas, much of her work explores the contention between identity and home. Her creative and academic work have been supported by organizations like Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Bethany Arts Community, Tin House, and SWWIM Residency at The Betsy. Her work has also been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Write or Die, Electric Literature, The Pinch, Grist, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly.
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A Poem by Darren C. Demaree
Emily as a Village
Urgent, intense, the wealth is singular, is hers, the rest of us living here, working two jobs, witnessing her image, her explosions of want & denial of want do the best we can to dwell in the silences of her light hand on an easy day. Love is knowing, reclaiming the burn when she forgets the miles an undying heart carries. I don’t really care how she spends money as long as the library has books in it & she baths in the fountain while I watch with fresh bread.
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Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-five full-length poetry collections, most recently “Got There: Poems on Vanishing” (April Gloaming Publishing, April 2026). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
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