Dashboard Horus: A Bird's Eye View of the Universe

  Jan Steckel’s debut fiction collection Ghosts and Oceans came out from Zeitgeist Press in 2023. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California. Sea of Ghosts Buried ships of San Francisco sail under a ghost Bay Bridge, though neither saw each other in life. In another era, Chinese men in a bay-side camp watch ghost schooners sail by. The laborers eat cockles, mussels, bite the heads off squid. Grains of the rice they steamed run through a giant hourglass. One old man draws a bow across a two-stringed erhu. Another plucks individual r...

Jeffrey Bryant is a Pushcart-nominated queer poet from Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the LA Weekly , LA Times , Poetic Diversity, New Verse News , Poetrysuperhighway.com , Synkroniciti, Quill and Echo, Tension Literary, Journal of the Plague Years, Coiled Serpent, Altadena Poetry Review, Shadowplay, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Cholla Needles Literary Journal and Tender Hearts Club . He will appear in a forthcoming photography book of Los Angeles poet portraits from Moon Tide Press. His debut collection The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers is out now on Cherry Pie Press. @thecherrypiepress A poem that could be about Oakland ----- I carry my favorite ocean  with me on the plane,  saltier than bags of nuts,   and drink bottomless coca cola,  its ice cubes  dying in a vat of corn syrup.  I moan the safety lecture back word for word in my best Jayne Mansfield,  aroused by the idea of holding my ankles  if the engines fail,  taking ...