Blood splattered at the entrance of my building. Rats startled in revolt inside the bushes leading to the sidewalk. Nothing says Welcome summer, Welcome to Berlin, like the endless days and the insatiable birds singing at 4 a.m.
Blood splattered at the entrance of my building. Rats startled in revolt inside the bushes leading to the sidewalk. Nothing says Welcome summer, Welcome to Berlin, like the endless days and the insatiable birds singing at 4 a.m.
Every moan a lamentation
to cement our entangled bodies
like Rodin's kiss,
in an eternal embrace
of marble
while I clean
the dried coffee stain from the couch
I understand that desire
rules the body.
Latex fingers ran cold and wet
cold and wet,
Will I run out of poems when I finish this book?
I also wish the lump that lives in my throat
would dissolve by itself.
so ripe in the summertime
I've dug holes in the ground around me.
So many holes.
But rain can't be willed because of want—
Biographies
Valentina Titakis
I am not good with goodbyes. I write poetry to process my emotions. But I also create stories to understand the world; I understand what surrounds me through fiction. To stay present & in this world, I take 35mm pictures of real-life scenes and people.
My art journey began when I was very young, as part of my mother's theater company in my hometown in Uruguay, South America.
My work is interdisciplinary; I navigate my creativity through photography, visual storytelling, and poetry. Memory, identity, family dynamics, and nostalgia are captured by a whimsical natural-light aesthetic.
Pauline Leoncio
Pauline Leoncio is a writer and poet living in Berlin. Gazing tenderly at the ordinary—objects, nature, people—her writing explores power, identity, memory and relationships. Her work can be found in Vagabond City Lit and Palindrome Journal.
Buy our Zine
In physical form
24 pages ✦ 16 poems
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About
GUSH contains the overflow. The desires that have nowhere else to go but be poured from one container into the next. And these corporeal vessels can only hold so much before a leak appears from the most peculiar of places. That's how GUSH was conceived. As baby poets in Berlin, we were both searching for a gentle receptacle for our work, a permanent nest that would house our flittering poetic distillations. This inaugural edition features poems we wrote over the course of two years, and we hope that in future editions we can support and encourage the voices of other poets-in-secret or poets-in-the-making.