The Seventh Wave

Issue 16: Proximities We are at the start of a new season that brings with it the accumulated sense memories of fall, decay making way for rest and future growth. But our perception of time, reality, and each other is somewhere lost between the calamities of today and the impending catastrophes of tomorrow, real or imagined. As a result, we’re facing a blurred understanding of what is past, present, and future.

impression through my eyelids yellow wall of sun was I in the drawing room from the book turning my head this way on instruction from voice or light the flower growing part begonia my left jaw throbbing I was propped on something an impression lying like some incline above the autumn lake beside a bush caught the sun again and opened my eye to the map a line of pain from teeth to chart pinned to wall I put it in mind and placed pain there ceded attention to the fingers on my lap tense and...

these things now for my companions i shall sing beautifully what would queer visions of the family network look like? what are queer visions of the longevity of relationships in a world of disastrous mortality? what becomes of intimacy in wounded shelters? how does an embrace become a bullet? what is a lesbian in a world of villainized femme embodiment? what part of femme bodies are the most protected? how do you know the sound of your lover? where is your heartbeat uplifted?

Zeenat Khan is a visual artist and poet from India. She holds B.A. in English Literature from Delhi University. Her poems and artworks appear or are forthcoming in Penn Review, Aleph Review, Haiku Foundation, Hakara Journal, Borderless Journal, Café Dissensus, Cattail among others. She has co-authored NOMBONO (Sundress Publication), Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts (Red River), and Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021 (Hawakal Prokashana).

/ The hands of the clock strangle my neck. Each hour, a rueful sigh. I haven’t done anything good today. People enjoy your being, says my therapist, as much as your doing. Last night, I googled, “What does it mean to just be?” The night before, I spent three hours watching YouTube videos about celebrity couples, then guilt-tripped myself into sleep. Where did time go? Those precious minutes, tally marks inside the skulls of our hurried bodies. If only I had enough time to forgive myself.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is the author of the chapbook Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020). She is a recipient of a fellowship from Anaphora Arts in 2022 and the inaugural Vijay Nambisan Fellowship 2019. She was the Charles Wallace Fellow writer in residence (2019 – 20) at The University of Stirling. An awardee of the prestigious GREAT scholarship, she earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from The University of Plymouth (2017).

I had thought I was alone. A familiar scent of bleach and black coffee hung suspended in the warm air of my childhood kitchen. I remember looking down at my five-year-old knees, constellated with scabs that shone in the afternoon light streaming in through the window above the sink.

RUPTURE Before we leave Virginia, the doctor calls us from his home. It’s a video call and though he is the head of the clinical trial at Mass General Hospital, he is casual, wears a black T-shirt and sits in front of a window with no shades or curtains. In the yard behind him, I see his wife pass by, can hear his kids in the background. He says the lesions on Daryl’s liver have grown by a couple of centimeters. Growth, in this case, is never good.

Rebekkah Leigh LaBlue is a poet, ornithologist, and educator pseudo-native to Appalachian North Carolina by way of Long Island. A recipient of support from Bread Loaf, her work appears with Figure 1, Black Warrior Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others, and was nominated for Best New Poets.

Reading in Carceral Tense Vignettes of/with the Russian Dictionary of Imperial and Soviet Prison Slang “It seemed that the incommensurable gap between the Soviet police state and the benevolence of American law and order was an illusion, that objects had been rearranged and images distorted, but the overarching carceral structures remained the same.” —“Refusing to Bury the Living,” Egina Machalova “My tongue and your tongue are already an aggregate, a site of multiple and collective...