Barbara Genova
Barbara Genova is the pseudonym of an actress/writer girl who got rid of her face and her birth name when she was stranded in Central Europe during the first Covid lockdown. She has been living and working as Barbara for a year now: poetry and stories have been published in journals such as The Daily Drunk, Anti-Heroin Chic, Sledgehammer Lit, Misery Tourism, Fahmidan, Hallowzine, Expat Press, The Bear Creek Gazette, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Roi Fainéant Press, and the Hecate Magazine anthology issue #2 (DECAY, winter 2021). She can be found on Twitter @CallGenova
The following work is Copyright © 2021, and owned by Barbara Genova and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
gusher
three years on end I was a spill of a woman
phone keys fire coins sorry sorry
a much disordered life, said on a train to no one
watch me now, hands in the air palms open
pacifier warden cross
find me shaking I dare you
body count
female alliances were a shack built on pain, assumed to be mutual
before the ambulance came (no siren)
there were drinks there were lights there was chatter about labels
there was that low blue rage shooting up into our arms;
earlier in the day I’d looked at (no name) and I thought,
if this girl doesn’t get every single thing she wants, the minute she wants it, we’re in for a body count
her list of wants was long
name still burns.
Olivia Dumas
Olivia Dumas is a poet originally from Northumberland County. She is a graduate of Queen’s University. She now lives in Ottawa with her girlfriend and their two cats.
The following work is Copyright © 2021, and owned by Olivia Dumas and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
And I when I fell I was dressed like the fat girl down the well
We paid for it : we paid to live in the path
Of a storm and when the house fell
we were living in the fantasy
we fell out of favour
and fell off the second story
into frank st. tumbling into the
return to Oz
Dress code for the costume party: and yet
our wardrobe was not on par,
we walked barefoot out into shattered pieces of a house we did not build;
The bubbly girl in the pink gown is in shock. Can you imagine
Yet here’s our Scarecrow, never the beggar, always in the know, saying
you’re still the life of the party as you fly into hysterics, the debris in your hair,
my wicked girl,
The tin man and his iron heart and
the femur that snapped,
Our lion in winter, never braver,
the flying monkeys that were our emergency responders
I’m choosing to believe the ground collapsed under the weight of our generosity;
we said what’s mine is yours,
and they took it all again.
The last thing I want to hear about
Is your dreams: you don’t pay me enough
I didn’t drink that night so I could remember everything about the smell of our bodies in the room together finally,
it was us, and
we all dream of falling
we all dream of losing teeth, and
the cows that fly by the window,
what fell out the sky that turned out to be all of us,
and we all dream of being stuck in the well,
spectrum diagnoses, twelve step meetings,
lying in a blood red field of opium,
snow in October
Curses that break, houses that fall on the
Right people,
Shoes that fit,
Endings that weren’t paid for
