Bone & Ink Literary Magazine Vol. 7 can be viewed or downloaded here. #boneandink #boneandinkliterarymagazine #vol7 #poetry #creativenonfiction #prose

from the bathroom at the union transfer this poem is for the girls who dance at punk shows. with pink hair and brunette roots, with dark lipstick on their teeth. this poem is for the carousel ring metallic smell on my hands left from a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, blood smell, dirty city smell. this poem is for the honeycomb bathroom tile, moving like acid trip nightmare. this poem is for the drunk girls waiting in line to use the toilet. for the girls who are beautiful because

There is a thump on the trembling door, Soft like the brown September breeze, Then it turns to iron with urgency; I open it hurriedly, There is a woman who stands before me, Her hair imbrued with silt, Her body cloaked in muck. She mourns gently at first, Then she wails loudly, her indignation a feast For eyes that left willingly. She says she stumbled on the roadside like an expectant cow, The passerby ignored her tragicomedy, Her brute was nowhere to

Saint Lilith You're welcome bitches—all you pretty Eves Adam was a jerk from the beginning We'd walk thru Eden brushing away leaves and he'd lecture + mansplain everything— all the goddamn names of the goddamn things + commanding me to lie beneath him—which I might have chose, which is what stings. So I left—left Eden naked beneath my pride + went to Hell to fuck demons and yes size does matter + your pretty little children then all had sex with mine tho they mostly kept your

overediting my suicide note my spotify premium subscription runs out the same day i cover my chalkboard in a suicide note and it’s not a coincidence. but the chalk breaks in half and squeals as it touches the wall, so the apology for trying to kill myself becomes a lot more concise. by this i mean that right before i die i’ll be standing or sitting or laying or whatever and my brain will be heavy with everything i think i forgot to say which will be laced with everything i sa

Christopher John Eggett is a writer from Cambridgeshire trying to live close to water. He writes a literary newsletter and blog called Etch To Their Own which you can sign up for here and read online here. He tweets here and you can read more about him on his website. Image by vk red #poetry #christopherjohneggett #vol7 #boneandink

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press, publisher of LBT poetry. She has published three chapbooks and three full length collections of poetry: “Mean Distance from the Sun” (Aldrich Press, 2013), “Whirlwind @ Lesbos” (Headmistress Press, 2016) and “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018). Image by Jenni Konrad #poetry #risadenenberg #vol7 #boneandink

When I think of you, I smell the candied fennel you're chewing on. I smell that perfume you stole from Nordstrom during that period when you fancied yourself some kind of Stevie Nicks fantasy in that stupid fucking oversized hat. That perfume always smelled like water to me -- like if water were supposed to have a smell. When we first met we talked about the ocean, and for a second I thought it was corny, but I let myself like it. I was 22 years old and I thought everything w

I dream of dead humans, the true ones, in dirt and dreaming their own agonies. Residing in ether and urn, there’s really nowhere left to fly to. The sky waits for no one. My grandmother, lioness in the garden sauntered her way about tomatoes. I teetered around the rectangle, atoms and nickels happened in me, I was soon taller than the sunflowers, then she was gone. My father is still the painting I hang like a trophy in imagination, a place I still touch the wet paint, blue a

There is nothing intentional about twenty-eight limbs and seven heads stumbling against a screen door so that it knocks against the doorframe stutteringly. An unpracticed tangle of spirits might accidentally jog piano keys, break tea cups of coffee, slice bread raggedly by scratching contorted backs on cupboards or counter awnings. Your special spook camera arrived in an unmarked box. Through it you think you have seen one or two spirits an orb of blurry li

we do not speak of what happened in the rhododendron tilted axis calling mother oh mother my alpine vertebrae; unbirth them unbirth this ruinous tear in the sky oh sister unforgivable: how i let you undo your skin from the inside, as if i don’t know how horses burn oh baby in hay fire & hell fire in thirty seconds: charcoal lungs in two minutes: heat like a panoramic view heat like

Ridden/Riddance I am a passenger again as morning sleep cradles the trains moving past Burlingame bougainvillea corners and as jacaranda graffitis onto mosaics on anonymous walls. The peninsula is knit through its many lines— they cross into tracks left behind, like what it means to be a history of place. We reach no new conclusions. We have forgotten the old beginnings. Afternoon Train to Porto The small hand motioned towards five in the clock of the train station where they

Aubade with Russian Tearoom Sweetheart, our last day you woke with a nightmare in your mouth, clamped down to sever its head conjuring three new teeth, and bit your tongue instead, shared the saltless blood with me. We lost count that spring of snakes, of sparrows that watched our descent, of the way our friends averted their eyes, unable to watch the murder, their phones on silent, deaf to our desperate death rattle. No one knows the distances we traveled, how you exhaled sm

Hurricane (I) Do you remember the heat-stroked evenings we laid spent like wrinkled bills exchanging hands for the last pint of beer? How it rained every night but we held one another by each other’s dream through it? Now, the sky bats an angry, mascaraed eye in my direction. Nothing but your presence has changed. There are many modes of dying – many having already been tried – and the rain on the roof keeps me awake, alive. Hurricane (II) It’s not the storm, but the weighted

Lampyridae Fireflies in different areas have different colors so your fireflies were never the same as mine though I never told you that I kept it like a secret I texted you one night that I’d walked outside and the sky was alive with light you told me to take a video but my phone only captured the dark You said you missed fireflies how you used to catch them in cupped hands as a kid they flickered in and out lit up your palm lines I said, maybe they were reading your fortune

I’ve seen ghost towns in their eyes I. She wrote about traveling through Europe, sent pictures of her pink high heels, and her new friends with tight smiles. (I wondered if they had just met the real her.) She likes to collect looks from strangers (but they better not stare at you), smirks when their eyes linger on her bare legs. She’s still trying to get over the guitarist who loved cocaine more than he loved her. Though he liked the way she’d drape herself over him in publi