GLITCHWORDS Issue 6

CONTENTS

Daily Meditation Yeşil atlar
Courtney Messenbaugh Hibah Shabkhez

a desert reef different
Hannah Bercovici Amber Renee

body odor Outlines of yesteryear
Rowena Joy Newman Eleanor May Blackburn

Blue-Tongued Skink Hummingbird from Yesteryear
Amber Nuyens Alex C. Eisenberg

Neuropathology* The Effects of Daybreak
Halle Preneta Matthew Schultz

Bubble Cloud Picker
Basiliké Pappa Sy Brand

How We Fall To Peacetime
Claire Taylor Pippa Russell

Daily Meditation
Courtney Messenbaugh

Lately, I’ve been trying to envision my mind as an open dome
of cerulean sky and cottony clouds. No luck. What
I’m trying to say is that my thoughts are running
wild like a bullet train that I rode in my dreams
last night, a string of boxcars full of famine and fatigue,
that exploded onto the voluptuous viridian countryside.
What I mean is that this is all a nightmare even though
that yoga teacher on the screen said our hearts are meant
to burst open. She said that with dimpled smile and lollipop
slick lips before leading us through a string of soulless stretches
that left my mind feeling as if weather had moved in, a different
kind of blue, my heart reeling from this tumultuous world.

a desert reef
Hannah Bercovici

we are a bowl & the walls are mountains.................. washes full of boulders & infant
sand.................. teasing of a time when water flowed these canyons.................. lichen
swaying in the tide.................. parrotfish in a reef.................. i am picking & picking at the
rock.................. until it dissolves into waste.................. see how the prickly pear looks like
sea fans.................. palo verde like sponges sucking in briny water.................. hoping to
devour.................. look!.................. this saguaro is charcoal with the memory of an ungodly
heat.................. see how her shadow remains after being burned............... asking to be
remembered.................. how she once looked..................thick & thorny.................. &
strong..................& desperate.

body odor
Rowena Joy Newman

fish and fruit and rotting love
and peach and icing and peeling onions
mucus, food, chemicals, fear

when you live in your body
your life tells a story
to your nose in odors
words can only capture
some of that story you live with
your body
it is your own

Blue-Tongued Skink
Amber Nuyens

My lizard has begun biting me more as she ages. She
refuses to eat unless I feed her by hand. I guess this
means that I am the hand that feeds her and she has
unlearned how not to bite it. Maybe she’s become
conscious of death creeping up on her, in which case I
don’t think I can blame her for getting antsy as she
grows old.

She scratches at the doors of her enclosure but every
time I let her out for walks, she curls in on herself and
asks to go back to bed.

Neuropathology*
Halle Preneta

Cut me open
to find out who I am.
My slices of brain
will prove to you that I see color
in everything that’s grey.
That I feel too harshly.
That I’ll break apart if you touch me
because my body is made of glass.
Darkness will surround you
when my brain is cut,
when my blood spills
and reveals who I truly am.

*Neuropathology is a medical field that examines the brains of dead
people for different diseases and conditions in the brain that could be the
potential cause of death for the patient

Bubble
Basiliké Pappa

And I walk around the room with no plan /
parents come to watch TV / news flash blue / static
/ eyes like buttons on pajamas / And I stare / mud
on tongue / parents get up / turn off TV / go to
sleep / And I sit in the dark / no plan / except to
see the sky dome crack open overhead / birth of
a million new worlds / and in one of them,
maybe a home.

How We Fall
Claire Taylor

Like the fallen tree this morning
I am ready to give up.
Forty feet and decades old
it cracked at the roots and collapsed
slowly, like how I sink
down into the soft hollow of despair,
without a sound, no crash. I am not surprised that
we fall without notice
one moment standing, a shadowy presence
beyond the window and then
gone
only gray sky stretching out for eternity.

Yeşil atlar
Hibah Shabkhez

Horses are not green. You don’t exist. There are no such things as green horses. But
I see you standing there, my green, green, green, green horses, with just a touch of
brown where your hooves meet the gravel. At first I told everyone about you,
strangers and unstrangers alike. But each time they laughed you faded a little, you
aged a little, you became a little less green. Now I tell them nothing, because you
don’t exist, voyons. Horses are not green. Do you hear me, green horses? There is
no such thing as you.

different
Amber Renee

Once I was on fire. Now I’m just the ashes.
Separable blown to pieces powdered
scattered by some wind.
Extinguished , from within. The very place--
The very spark / behind my eyes--
A fuse that’d blown--
A power surge.
Before I was a god. What’s a god to
the non-believer? I’m the pharaoh sent
a drought / where once my wrath ran like a
river.

Outlines of yesteryear
Eleanor May Blackburn

We got tattoos for the anniversary of our 17th year of birth /
rebels without a cause / I had asked my mum first / each the
representation of the other / an elephant for you / a rocket
for me / a large mammal and space / only the black simplistic
outlines / say I love you without saying I love you / pick
something big pick something vast pick something enormous /
I believe I secretly knew what I was doing / your wrist / my
rib / I had to be able to cover it up / not seen as much / the
pain was akin to a blinding flash of light / I thought I may pass
out / you: felt nothing as the ink penetrated your skin / burying
me deep within / nowadays I forget both but it is nice to know
I always have a little bit of love inside of me / unless the
rocket gets sick of the all too planted and early nature of my
flesh and soars off into outer space of course / perhaps I’d be
relieved / no longer tied / probably not / you saved me in a
way I am indebted to you for / at exactly the same moment
in the expanse of the years stretching out before us,
I owe you nothing at all.

Hummingbird from Yesteryear
Alex C. Eisenberg

I still dream of that day on the mountain
when joy attacked me just as I was falling
into my despair—its buzzing wings like a bullet
against my cheek; its hum an angry song against
my sorrow; the white dead tree and the colored
wings that scattered; the shadow I followed
endlessly; and the light that followed me.

The Effects of Daybreak
Matthew Schultz

Thimble-gray grackles congregate
at the puddle near the end of our drive.
The rain sounds of bacon fat blistering
over a bonfire’s rust-gold plume,
smells reminiscent of tent camping
at Chautauqua with my vague cousins.
Our neighbor whorls from bush to bush
looking for her cat who has escaped again.
The birds coo-cackle to one another: “There!
Upon the gutters, light as a pumice stone.”

Cloud Picker
Sy Brand

Cloud picker under the soil
your time will come
do not fade your smile
these mountains have been
dark for too long.

To Peacetime
Pippa Russell

i warred so far inland
i had nowhere left to roam
my oar mistook
for a winnowing fan
and then
still lost
i wandered home

Courtney Messenbaugh lives in Colorado and delights in the vast blue sky there. She likes toast and kindness. Her work has appeared in Yellow
Arrow and FERAL.

Hannah Bercovici lives in Tempe, Arizona. She works as a freelance writer and farmer. A poet and fiction writer as long as she can remember, she
has just recently begun submitting her creative work for publication. Her piece, "I exist!" was recently published in the Slippery Elm.
rowena joy newman (she/they) is a queer poet and writer from a Thai, English, Malaysian and Irish background. Words have appeared or are
forthcoming in Ink Sweat & Tears, Litro, Wrongdoing, Sundamaged, Orange Blush Zine, and Thanks Hun. Tweets at @reconditematter

Amber Nuyens (she/her) is a Creative Writing and Psychology student living in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. Her work has
appeared in Second Chance Lit and The Paper Shell Anthology. She can be found on twitter @amberuhh, very unprofessionally.
Halle (she/her) enjoys writing short romance, sci-fi, and horror stories along with poetry and gets her ideas from random life experiences and
fanfiction. When she’s not writing, she’s either watching YouTube or playing Animal Crossing. Her Twitter handle is @YaTheatreNerd and you can
check out more of her work here:
https://medium.com/@halleee
Basiliké Pappa lives in Greece. Her work has appeared in Sledgehammer Lit, Heron Tree, Punk Noir, 11 Mag Berlin, Rat’s Ass Review, Bones Journal
for Contemporary Haiku, Sonic Boom, Visual Verse, Surreal Poetics, Dodging the Rain, Eunoia Review, Timeless Tales and Intrinsick.
Claire Taylor is a writer in Baltimore, MD. Her micro-chapbook, A History of Rats, is forthcoming from Ghost City Press. You can find Claire online at
clairemtaylor.com and Twitter @ClaireM_Taylor.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore,
Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Zin Daily, Litbreak, Broadkill, Rising Phoenix, Big City Lit, Constellate, Harpy Hybrid, and a number of
other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a
particular fascination for her. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez
Amber Renee, she/her, is a chronic writer & resident spoonie from Bucks County, PA. Known to mix mediums, Amber released a book "Thoughts on
This Most Recent Episode" in 2016, shortly before its musical counterpart. In January 2020 she put out a Poetry Picture book “i feel like i’m nothing”
available online. Presently she finds herself an editor at Serotonin Poetry.
Eleanor is a 23 year old actor and writer from Sheffield. She has been published in the recent anthology: Globalisation: The sphere keeps spinning
by Making Magic Happen Press. She loves moomins, Yorkshire pudding and Blink182. Follow her on Instagram: eleanormay_actor/Twitter:
EleanorMayBlac1.
Alex C. Eisenberg (she/her) is a child of the western high desert and the pacific northwest rainforest. Her first chapbook "Holy Ground" won the
Black Dog Arts Coalition Prize, and she has poems featured in several journals. Alex currently lives by candlelight with her partner, their 5 cats, and
an ever-changing number of chickens in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. Follow her at alexandriaceisenberg.wordpress.com or
@alexceisenberg on Twitter.
Matthew Schultz teaches creative writing at Vassar College. He is the author of two novels: On Coventry and We, The Wanted. His recent work
appears in Rust + Moth, Versification, and Juke Joint.
Sy is a queer non-binary poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland. They write through the haze of cat-/child-induced sleep deprivation to try and make
sense of gender, relationships, and ADHD. Their work has been published in Popshot Quarterly, Capsule Stories, and ZARF Poetry, among others.
You can find them on Twitter @TartanLlama and their publications at https://sybrand.ink.
Pippa Russell is an aspiring screenwriter, avid science fiction and fantasy fan, and the co-host of Adapt or Die, a podcast about adaptations. You
can find her on Twitter at @russell_writes or @adaptordie_pod.