Issue 12 Full Text
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Shannon K Winston

Mustard Seed

A girl glues a mustard seed to white draft paper.
She steps back to admire her work. This is my origin story,
she announces to her art teacher who will never understand her.
Later, she adds blue-eyed grasses and black hawthorn.

She steps back to admire her work. This is my origin story.
Chatter about the timid, rootless girl fills the halls.
Later, she adds: Blue-eyed grasses + black hawthorn
= my body. In my gut, that’s where alfalfa sprawls.

Stories about the timid, rootless girl fill the halls.
Her art project grows and grows into a landscape
that equals her body. In her gut, she feels alfalfa sprawl.
She works tirelessly. Apricot blossoms and sage leaf make

her art project grow and grow into a landscape
she can finally call home. How it unfurls for acres and acres
around her! Apricots, blossoms, and sage leaves make
a girl from a mustard seed. A draft on white paper.

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Shannon K Winston's poems have appeared in RHINO, Crab Creek Review, The Citron Review, the Los Angeles Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. Her poetry collection, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings, was recently published by Glass Lyre Press. She currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/.

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Marlo Starr

Ghost & Gun

The gun has a grammar.
It makes the shape of
a question in my hands.
I do not feel powerful
but want to understand
the hard excesses of belief.
On the firing range
every pop triggers
a muscled blink. Here,
we learn, eyes must close
when ears can’t. Meanwhile
the men are loud above
the blowback and sulfur
stink. A riddle that chimes
with country: darkened sparklers
on a sun-sweated lawn,
a bombed sky quiet with smoke.
Meanwhile, we rehearse
active shooter drills.
Under our desks, a classmate
back from Afghanistan, says
interrogation
for shorthand. The university
will award him best poem
for his camo-lyric.
The same week, they host a vigil
            for Boulder’s ten, Atlanta’s eight.
Here there is a river called
Gunpowder. Here there is
a field called Soldier’s Delight.
Here I am listening
to 3D printers manifest
an age-old design.
How the West Was Won—
did rhyme precede fact
in the Winchester’s time?
Meanwhile the heart
with its separate chambers
pumps its message between walls.
The gun has a grammar: it makes
the future conditional. Meanwhile
I fold my paper target small and squat
among brass shells at sunset.
I can’t hear my own piss in the grass.

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Marlo Starr holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D. in English from Emory University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Threepenny Review, I-70 Review, Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse and elsewhere.

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Lynne Ellis

The Dinosaur at the Bottom of Lake Tahoe

Trees turn to yellow heat, on the velvet
slope of a fault basin. Smoke-socked firemen,
mattocks in dirt. A chaos paintbrush
moving through its palette. Amid these photos
of loss, I'm sent tiny ads for new shoes.
Booze delivery apps. Undergarments
to compress my body into standard
shapes, blenders sent right to my doorstep
overnight. Some goods I own already.
At what point do we admit our sins?
The dinosaur at the bottom of Lake Tahoe
was real to me, awkward kid in 1990,
submerged in snowmelt, waiting for my cold-
numb skin to wake so I could start swimming.
There was a sand bar 100 yards out—
I'd freestyle fast until my fingertips hit
something soft-solid and slipping (terrifying),
then belly-bump the lake floor sand and stand,
ankle-deep in alpine liquid, like some girl prophet,
as my skin sparkled and flamed, bright
in sudden summer air, riding the shadow thing
I knew could only destroy us.

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Lynne Ellis

When my love for you was a body in the world

A viola is simply wood and glue,
it will decompose in dirt.

The morning after my mentor died
you drove me to the Columbia River.

It's all we could think to do.

With early light
pink on the strawbacked hills,

I sang short hymns
on the balcony of our road motel,

my mentor still
a body in the world.

You slept on,
unembarrassed to hear me sing alone.

A viola is not good at holding pitch.
That first measure, though—

that'll split the chest.
Popped and bloody,

wire abandoning in all directions.

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Lynne Ellis writes in pen. Her words appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Sugar House Review, WA 129 and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2021 Perkoff Prize in poetry by the Missouri Review. Her book—In these failing times I can forget (Papeachu Press)—considers the human cost of rapid economic growth in a prosperous American city.

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Kyle Vaughn

Memory of September

The expanse of sky is not a direction.
But you set off anyway, like you could navigate
the country on foot. You unraveled your best
sentences from the fire, typed them on raw
paper, folded, folded, and let fly at
low altitude. The Earth is still perfect.
Your child’s mouth no longer exists. You saved
his teeth in an envelope in a drawer. Blood
means everything. Blood was a lamp.
You wanted the company of a loved one.
The light couldn’t be bothered to show him the way.

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Kyle Vaughn

Inscape with Aviary

I have heard the myna speak nonsense,
his chatter like laughter amounting to nothing but trouble at home.

His throat’s interior, a mystery—and mine:
essentially body-less, razor-like ideations.

He is only knowable
after turquoise rupture.

The mystery is poison
and how I kept on after ingesting.

Hunger nearly ended the one
who tried everything as food.

It was the blueberries,
sad buckshot of blueberries,

round as the eggs of an invasive species,
a crazy bird among them, heckling anyone near.

In the center of my belly,
I placed the Sinaloa crow,

the one wearing black
as the image of a martyr.

He insisted on nesting
in a tree of thorns.

Forgive me who is between comfort
and the seven cords of the scourge.

On the one hand, I’m untangling
miles of spilled insides.

The other, I’m setting out fruit
for that flock of released pet parakeets.

Their color is for me,
but my blood makes a threatening noise.

A miracle would be
the return of the owl.

Saw him that once
in my nights behind glass.

But best of all would be
an olive ibis in mangroves.

That one’s outside of me
guarding his boat tied to the roots.

Lonely child, I made a bird
out of driftwood and twine.

I still believe he’ll fly
into a cloud that won’t rain away.

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Kyle Vaughn

Vocabulary

When I tried to find the word
for the longing for you alone,
I returned to kindergarten
to gather paper scenes
I had cut in two by accident.

I learned another alphabet
interpreted from the flight of birds
who live in minarets
in a city always at dusk
and who love your natural modesty.

I gave our beginning
a word from the middle of a book
and spun it like a moon
with a desire for an orbit,
a longing for you alone.

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Kyle Vaughn’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Adbusters, The Boiler, Drunken Boat, Poetry East, Vinyl and Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions). His prose has appeared in English Journal and his photography in Annalemma and Holon. His non-fiction book A New Light in Kalighat, featuring photos and stories about children in the Kalighat red light district in Kolkata, India, was published in 2013 and featured by Nicholas Kristof's Half the Sky Movement. His classroom curriculum book Lightning Paths: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises was released in 2018 (NCTE Books).

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Eunice Lee

Aubade

Love you like a progress bar running backwards on a screen, like the 4 minutes remaining
that turn into 4 hours while you look away. Hours, rewinding, unfrying your eggs.
Days and weeks putting your hairspray back in the can. Months and years
thickening your computers, decades blurring your videos as if
kissing them (then taking their colors off). Centuries singing
their jets and fleets back to sleep, empires receding behind
kingdoms receding behind villages receding
behind a forest where you and I might
discover the first hummingbird then
decide to let it go, and watch it
fly backwards into
the sunset.

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Eunice Lee is a poet and translator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Columbia Journal, The Shoutflower, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture and elsewhere. She is pursuing a PhD in English at Harvard University and graduated from Princeton University where she won the 2018 Academy of American Poets College Prize.

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Lauren K Carlson

How to Be a Better Listener

Night’s pitch
thrown through
the eardrum, blue
but deeper than
blue. Dark like dark
waters when calm
are flat or glass
seen into and through,
surface and depth.
The ancients perceived
two dreams: the waters above
and the waters below,
which reality parses.
The body real
as a knife
through fruit.

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Lauren K Carlson is recent graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her poems can be found in such publications as Waxwing, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Salamander and others. Her chapbook, Animals I Have Killed, was published in 2018 as the winner of Comstock Review's chapbook prize. She is also a reader for Palette Poetry.

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Fatima Jafar

Silence

And then—
A sound, shimmering from within the closed bedroom;
behind the door, my two daughters sing to each other,
one plucks the guitar, the other cannot stop
laughing each time they reach the chorus,
that point in the song that tenders like a bruise
when their voices rise with the flurry of pressed leaves.
I sit in the hallway and imagine them collapsing into each other.
Something bright and orange swims out from the keyhole
coming to devour me entirely   I am a willing bowl
brimming with thankful blood,
desperate for the yellow light leaking out from under the door,
for their warm feet on the wooden staircase,
for the squares of green glass they wear on their ears.
As a young girl, I believed my mother to be fashioned from concrete,
packed tight into a manufactured sternness,
there to straighten collars and tuck hair firmly behind the ears.
Only now am I privy to the softening:
her curved back as she shuffles out from
her bedroom in a shower cap, crawls on to her knees and
sighs beside me, one good ear
pushed against the door to hear the singing.

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Fatima Jafar is a Pakistani poet living in Boston, where she is an MFA Poetry candidate at Emerson College. She is a Poetry Reader for Muzzle Magazine and Redivider, and is the co-creator of the South Asian literary platform DHOOP Journal. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Anti-Heroin Chic Mag, The Pinch, Jamhoor, dreams walking and more. You can find her on Twitter at @rafajf2112

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Taiwo Hassan

Home, Despite

it's heavy once again, this song, this prayer,
a testament boils, whispers build, it is time, it is time.
but what is a boy if not broken pieces, shattered shards
trying to grow wings, to find a nest, to taste meaning.

you once told me home is where the dust settles,
where wet embers still carry fire in each of their
spaces, where these walls don't reject any colours
smeared by the morning sun. where
nothing is but a basket of metaphors.

this is what it means to carry shades of blue.

to journey into scars
and bury young memories,
to understand the accent of solace
in the language of a stranger's smile.
to taste far places on familiar faces.

the radio is a guest in my ears,
the aroma of coffee meets ginger,
the news is another stale bread
& this clothed house fills my bones, despite.

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Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and vocalist. A Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in trampset, Lucent Dreaming, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Shallow Tales Review, Second Skin Magazine, Warning Lines, Augment Review, Madrigal Press, Nigerian NewsDirect, Praxis Magazine, Wizards In Space and several other places. He emerged the first runner up for the MANI 10 year anniversary Poetry Competition. A poetry editor at Jupiter Review, he's also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria.

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Stefanie Kirby

Woman as Xeriscape

A body: sweet, scavenger teeth perish
in your flesh. Throat locked, your skin
sings flame. There is separation here,
a pattern of sun across your folded
face. Without food,
a body survives
for weeks. Without water, days.
You know the ground draws sweat
from the living to feed its aquifers.
Leverage against desiccation
or drought. Absence swells
from your center in tides.
A body
rebuilt in the slice and peel of need.
A piecemeal victory in clay soils
that won’t absorb water, will split
in enough sun. Division borne of self-
perpetuation.
A body shaped in this
earth fractures without effort.
Your body
a landscape emptied in thirst.

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Stefanie Kirby is a Pushcart nominated poet residing along Colorado’s front range. She studied poetry at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and has taught writing to middle and high school students. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Dialogist, Plumwood Mountain and elsewhere.

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Charles Hensler

Smart Phone

Your wood shavings curl
in the slanting sun where your hands
release the aged aroma of cedar behind
your lead paint door

outside you could drive for days

on the extracted breath of a long gone world
map chirping in a french accent to find the same
weary display of charm in a box on another
same road in another same town

the President speaks

his head large as the watermelons
you recall in some other summer - green eyes
blinking back the cool pink flesh while cameras
falling around the blue edge of earth record
the satellite’s last photon flare before
crossing the sun’s farthest reach

look it’s always eight minutes ago here

the jets draw down the blue sky
tight across the checkerboard land
the roads wind everywhere finding
every door

we swipe the same waves now

we all have the same story
in our hands.

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Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.  He attended Western Washington University where he won the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize for Poetry.  His work has appeared in Jeopardy Magazine.

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Simon Perchik

[All but the splash is thickening]

All but the splash is thickening
half as marrow, half
feathers and long ago seas

share this pot with bones
dropped end over end
though they stay, are growing wings

the way mourners are overcome
by turbulence, lean into each other
–it’s a dark kitchen, barely room

for the talons that will stretch
are already flying side by side
as smoke reaching around the silence

all afternoon carrying the dead
though finally every bone becomes too heavy
from nothing inside but shoreline.

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Simon Perchik

[Again a calendar, each page]

Again a calendar, each page
is burying you in the sea
that races past your forehead

with only your hands for shoreline
and one year more
–by nailing it to this wall

you agree not to forget
and fast, go hungry :trust
will return, already draining the light

from the sun, sprinkling its warmth
not yet those old love songs
choking louder and louder

as days, weeks, wing beats
and from this heavy paper
an overwhelming joy

–it will happen, embraced by circles
and fresh scented shining blades
–you will lean into this wall

become branches and leaves
that are not yet smoke
though month after month

stay close, want to be lifted
remembered as the dotted line
the promised, no longer falling.

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Simon Perchik’s poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.

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Stephen Ruffus

The Visit

—For Kathy

When you come into the room
I am forever wrapped in the gauze
of half-sleep.

You are dressed in white
standing behind
waves of bedsheets
and chloroform

that rise and fall
like a thousand strands of hair.

A jar of formaldehyde hovers
just above your shoulder.

It is like this each morning:
Dreaming of a handkerchief
that falls away
from someone’s mouth

and you stepping towards the bed
carrying your shoes in your hand.

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Stephen Ruffus has studied poetry at Colorado State University, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Utah. Most recently, his work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, the American Journal of Poetry and Hotel Amerika. He has work forthcoming in The Stray Branch and Vita Brevis. He is originally from New York City and resides in Salt Lake City where he taught at the University of Utah and Salt Lake Community College.

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag

Lying in a Sleeping Bag at the Bridger Bay Campground on Antelope Island

Companion poem to “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
by James Wright

Above, the nightspring purpling—a toss
of stars. Below, bison sway in indigo
grass. Down the trail, next to the shore,
maroon boughs suspend orbs—
at each still heart: eight tigered legs.
Behind me, lit from within, she—
white stone—
ruminates over eastern peaks.
I rise to my shadows, her fullness
here and here and on, lean
forward as algae consume
oxygen and die.
I have seen past the thought of me.

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Colorado Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Ethel, Rock & Sling, The Inflectionist Review and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose (Torrey House Press, 2021). She lives in Salt Lake City. kathrynknightsonntag.com

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Amy Williams

Lot’s Daughter on the Couch with Her Therapist

To feel the slick of moss on cave stone          to clench
a fist    behold moonmilk, the way it tumors   I got
by        got good at breathing  under
water    popping corks             he’d say girl,
you better say your prayers
girl,     you better pour that wine.

Outside, a desert. Outside, ashes
swirling like starlings in some frightening helix.
Meanwhile, he spoke of being lonely in Sumer.
He spoke
of her sins.
Didn't    I  want to be    good?

You're  the      chosen      one
honor              thy                   father
you stupid ugly            cunt.
Meanwhile,
his                   thick
fingers
meanwhile
my spindly
knees
I was counting   stones            getting
by
knowing
cave stones  moonmilk  the slick
of moss
you’ll say

it wasn’t my
fault    you’ll
say I wasn’t
on my knees
asking to be filled

cold mouth & the wine on my tongue
cold wet mouth & the air was tasting like salt.

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Amy Williams is an educator and writer based in New Delhi. Her poems have appeared in Redivider, Contrary Magazine and Sweet Tree Review. She was a participant in the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for poetry and is working on her first chapbook.

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Meghan Kemp-Gee

Quick

I will dig in. I will keep your feet close
to the ground. Since your time of sprouting, I
have known you, have known your name, and the most
world-stopping name I know is you. Fleetly
and sickly, your body grew around where
the world stood the weakest, where it missed
the mark and misremembered how to bear
its own vast, familiar weight. You grew best
and strangest where it misremembered
how to hold you under. I hear it grind
like sand between your teeth, grind into a
thin-grained ending, ground up like good last words.
I will pull you together, knit you up
and I will keep your feet close to the ground.

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Meghan Kemp-Gee lives somewhere between Vancouver, BC and Fredericton, NB. She writes poetry, comics and scripts of all kinds. She co-created the webcomics Contested Strip and Space Heroines of El-Andoo. Her comics have been published in numerous anthologies. Her poetry has recently appeared in PRISM, Copper Nickel, Rising Phoenix Review, Stone of Madness, Altadena Poetry Review, Anomaly, Train and Rejection Letters. She studied at Amherst College and Chapman University and is currently a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. She also teaches composition and plays ultimate frisbee. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen

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Matthew Murrey

Greatest Hits

Sputnik sang a ping song
from its airless orbit,
sang a song of war, hot
as an engine, cold
as space or the grave.

There was a counting song
that went body body body
all through my childhood.
Since then, the disappearing song
(those were some dirty wars),
the shock and awe (death metal)
song and the drone song (so cutting
edge) where the refrain
arrives after the blast
(it’s that fast they say).

Space has other songs:
crackles, static, and the hum
from the beginning of time.
Today I heard the spare aria
of waves from two dark,
city-sized, god-heavy stars
spinning into each other
at close to the speed of light,
rippling the very the cloth
of the cosmos and setting off
a brilliance that left in its wake
Earth masses of platinum
and Earth masses of gold.

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Matthew Murrey runs a high school library in Urbana, IL. He’s an NEA Fellowship recipient and has one book of poems, Bulletproof, published by Jacar Press in 2019. He’s had poems published in North American Review, One, Okay Donkey and many other places. He and his partner have two grown sons. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/.

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David Dodd Lee

After the Golden Age

There are better memories
than ones of getting hit on the side
of the head by a football
in winter
There are better ways to grow old
Cement poured over rebar
silicone calcium aluminum shells
smoothed over with a finishing trowel
The people who spend
days in the library
The people who without my regard
continue unrelentingly
to focus
These are my heroes so unmoved
are they as the basements flood
as the black water pours forth from
the subway entrance with a capsized
umbrella rising up past the second story windows
I think it’s the clownfish
that with the delicacy of a mother
rubbing ointment into the chest
of a boy with a cold disarms
the sea urchin by removing its quills
with its bony mouth
before it devours the fleshy body
The water covers the leather furniture
Some houses have cars parked in front
of them some do not
Newspapers collect at the head of the driveway
This is not indicative of human presence either way
It’s been such a long ten years
some of the flags at half-mast or
in other cases paired with other flags—
flags everywhere
so many flags

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David Dodd Lee is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014) and Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), as well as a forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems and original poems, entitled Unlucky Animals. His poems most recently have appeared in Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, Triquarterly, Thrush and in Salamander. In 2020, his short story, “Hawks,” was selected for inclusion in the annual Best Short Fictions anthology, published by Sonder Press. He writes and makes visual art and kayaks in Northern Indiana, where he lives on the St. Joseph River. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, which will soon be publishing the literary magazine The Glacier.

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Lorrie Ness

Visual Distortions

the best entrances            exit
onto untangled sky
                         titanium glare
of queen anne’s lace
pouring
the meadow’s edge
over the horizon her eyes              were that kind         
of opening            
lids pushing margins
away
wild irises           constricting sun    
to a pinpoint 

even then            her world
was shrinking

that final summer       she spent  
under the arbor                 coaxing
            chickadees   
                        with peanuts
                        in an open palm
            close enough
where she could still see

through wisteria            
coiled above        her narrow aperture
            of sky
was purple & green
her sky
was a fading bruise

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Lorrie Ness is a poet working in Virginia. Her work can be found at Palette Poetry, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Typishly and various other journals. She was twice nominated for a Best of the Net Award by Sky Island Journal. Her chapbook Anatomy of a Wound is published by Flowstone Press.

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Julia Schorr

Invasive Species

I like how our eyes lock when they shouldn't. I find you discreetly
between the verses of my old favorite songs, in the thick of the spring when the pollen
made you crinkle your nose. You are every red Camaro that
revs past my Volkswagen bug. Had I known
your roots were so stubborn, I never would have crept
into your spreading arms.

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Julia Schorr

Attrition

I cut my hair, he didn't notice. I keep forgetting
to thank him for the milk Chocolate, sweaty
and sticky from his sweaty and sticky

hands. I fed it to his dog because I only eat dark.
Yesterday, I spotted a rusty smudge
on his pillowcase, and today, the same color

on his assistant. He should tell her how it makes her
eyes bulge. Every night he seems to fall
asleep closer to the edge of the California

king. I can't wait for the day he slips
off, onto the fan by the bedside. The
cat keeps knocking the cover off.

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Julia Schorr is a student at Salisbury University. She is an associate poetry and fiction editor for The SCARAB. Her poetry is forthcoming in Allegheny Review.

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Jake Bailey

Darkness

Enter the dialog between

the dying of language
and doubting crows,

trees communicating with
the book of the dead,

pages creased
where vision lingers

on irreducible constructs,

the ribbon in the box, dependence on uncertainty,

pen on the page, a pale sun
dyeing soft sky into apology,

eschatology of communion,
a single silver cup

awaiting the kiss

of lips dried to bone—

perhaps all darkness is

hunting

for home

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Jake Bailey is a schiZotypal experientialist with published or forthcoming work in Abstract Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Constellations, Diode Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, Guesthouse, Mid-American Review, Palette Poetry, PANK Magazine, Passages North, Storm Cellar, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Tar River Poetry and elsewhere. Jake received his MA from Northwest Missouri State University and his MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. He is a former editor for Lunch Ticket, current associate editor for Storm Cellar and reads for The Los Angeles Review and Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. Jake lives in Illinois with his wife and their three dogs. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram (@SaintJakeowitz) and at saintjakeowitz.xyz.

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Katie Kemple

Once I Played Persephone in Middle School

Hades appeared blond and tan, a lifeguard in red swim                trunks
and I, a pale thirteen-year-old following him with my          best friend
to a new beach every day by bike, on vacation                 in new bikinis,
mine a pink so light I looked naked. We went to           where he waited
tables at Denny's and ordered Cokes. He tied        our cherries in knots
with his tongue. And I can't even recall                 how I ended up alone
with him at night, against the blue       vinyl siding of my friend's rental
house, his hand up my blouse,           assuring me it's not the size of the
wave but the motion of the           ocean that counts, his hand down my
shorts, asking if I knew                   what he was looking for, whispering:
we won't have sex           tonight. His soft lips, his smooth body against
me, what if he'd         said something else? The sweet grass at my back,
the sandy earth,      it could have all broken beneath me in that moment.

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Katie Kemple (she/her) is a poet, parent and media consultant based in San Diego, CA. Her poems appear in current, or upcoming, issues of Atlanta Review, Longleaf Review, Lullwater Review, Lunch Ticket's Amuse-Bouche, Matter and The West Review.

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C C Russell

Haunted in August

If evening, if light
fading over this horizon of slate and stone,
if umbrella held
not against falling water, but sun,
if your breath – heavy with alcohol,
if half of a flicker
in your periphery—

if we are
mistaken

for ghosts.

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C C Russell has published his poetry and prose in such journals as The Meadow, The Colorado Review and Whiskey Island. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net and is included in two volumes of the Best Microfiction series. He lives in Wyoming with a couple of humans and several cats. You can find more of his work at ccrussell.net.

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Adam Deutsch

Never Alone

To try to save every cricket
with an over-turned glass

like we lost the keys or that trinket,
our rings made from some bone

that once had legs. We find dead
ones in the hall, sweep the garden

by a mooon my child can spot
in daylight, point to and say.

He adds o’s—the unspool like string,
abandoned signal wire where birds preen.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adam Deutsch

Swapping Karma

That is to say, when we’re with people,
fully threaded together, an exchange is made,
and then there’s the ground wire that rattles contact
with bare surfaces, uncrimped of sheath, in the stereo’s back.

The signal’s mostly clear, flickering off in bumps,
car wheels, power pressed into the ruined road.
There’s always more to hear between beats in a driving
song. It’s interchange, an apathy or love kneaded in.

They take some of you, and leave bits of self
in that same etheria. Celery slices pulled from potato
onion stew, cubed chuck dropped in. A union,
the way our waitress marries the two unfull ketchups

the last task in a long shift, the work before clocking out,
a head for home to wash away kitchen greases, prepared
wrong orders. A veggie burger with bacon: the decision of a future
already in-progress. A sum in the trade. A wholesome alone.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adam Deutsch has work recently in Poetry International, Thrush, Juked, AMP Magazine, Ping Pong and Typo. He has a chapbook called Carry On (Elegies). He teaches in the English Department at Grossmont College and is the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books. He lives in San Diego, CA. AdamDeutsch.com

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nick Visconti

Cynosure

This ash tree
cements the garden as

a concrete thing, a half-
remembrance that will persist

through perfect drought.
Blue and yellow

clasp hands in my head,
around a missed pill. I can’t look

at pictures long enough
to reconcile—was he really

all that beautiful and dearly
loved? This alone can’t hold

all the blood I must resemble.
I compost your last orange rind,

whorls imperceptibly embedded
in the pith: tell no one

about this. The dog glitching
in a loop for his tail,

one part nipping another
in a mad bid to know himself.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nick Visconti is a writer living in Brooklyn with another artist and a cat. He currently studies creative writing at Columbia University.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Krause

The weather forecast rescheduled the snow

so the road crew stamps gravel
into fresh laid tar, cars sink
indifferent galoshes, slashing criss cross

into bitter licorice, braided inky strands.
Let us hold on, bow our heads.
The lake beams with kerosene.

Carry ruby red awe, frostbite
and scars. Grip a dim paring knife, peel
your virgin goals, thumbs clumsy

into the wind. The smell of roots
is complicated anise. Spoon the soup
from outside in, don't

let ordinary hunger
scald your heart, hasty
all the way down.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Krause

If You Take Silence for Distance

I'm an introvert far far away, disguised
in mineral make-up, permanent

solace reveals a shy pearl. When today circles
around, will I be afraid of its face? I combed

out my middle part to protest the loud
asymmetry. The clock is crossing its arms,

ambivalent about noon. I’d bet on
luck, but I’m already indebted to wishbones

and cortisol. Don’t tempt me to believe
in broken clocks and coincidences. Look

at the bedazzled roadkill going South
on I-5, posed like a feather boa,

tragi-quirky. The wind blows from here
through filleted ribs like a stranger.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Krause (she/her) lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. Her work is published or forthcoming in: Maudlin House, Autofocus, Kissing Dynamite, Sledgehammer Lit and elsewhere. She nods along on Twitter at @PNWPoetryFog

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sam Moe

The Winter House

We return to home woods, wool hugs, warm floors, oh how I press myself hard
against the wood to catch a glimpse of your bird. I hear your laughter from inside
the kitchen, how everyone loves you terribly, how golden you’ve become, but I

think you were always so true,

I hope I get you near me but I’ll have to wait until after dinner, when
everyone’s tucked away in pine cone beds, after the last deer and rabbit
pair have walked into moon, slow and with ease will return amber lights

and gold drinks

do you still care about me?

I hold your words in my mouth

Latch breath to hitched hands, I care for your love as I would a flame,
tease sugar baby beetles into waiting glasses, I am wax, I am inside
myself, looking for a way out. Past dusk you join me, cold outside so we
talk with our arms around our bodies, I see you seek
after birds, cloth-winged watchers in pine clusters, I’m folded

open-hearted               lying                as dangerous as I’ve always been

glowing red-coal crushed, pressed tea leaves against chin, catch
me in mittens, pull me against your better judgment. Rules
do not apply anymore, I told you what I told you that day true
midnight passed, knowing it wouldn’t be enough, for low inside
my thrumming treasure chest is my final dying secret,

a catch in the throat, a true ocean, I think you are the laughter and
the soft press between thighs, you antlered fool, won’t you say it
back, just once, call me rabbit, lungs, split, golden star cakes cool
on the racks, you are the wire and the fire, softer than the word January or starlight.

Snow is on my hair, cruel how I’ve lost strength and balance, I’m barely passing,
won’t you warn the forest?

If you leave I’ll need to hide among the pines           nettles sap sticks

overturned stones, shattered lake and frozen turtles, my life is cold,
asleep, late. I catch you looking at me but I can’t witness your mouth,
do my eyes laugh despite it all? Back inside I’m chilled to my ore, curled
blue sweater hangs over my shoulders. You lean close, doesn’t matter
I’m holding my breath, I want you here. Sometimes I’m a cruel button of
heat and distress, I’m enamored with winds, tides that twist foam into faces, the moon’s
craters and holes.

so

now what? I’m a catch meant for the fridge, I’m loose as true love’s
bite, I’m a latticework of sugar, golden only for you—tell me because I’ve
forgotten, are your eyes green or brown, do you love inside or outside
helplessness, bites or nail, after the storm breaks or during,
when the sky is filled with wet crows or empty.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sam Moe is a queer writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Illinois State University. Her work has appeared in Overheard Lit Mag and Cypress Press. She received an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing residency in June 2021.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Patrick Wright

Cold Dark Matter

Thanks to you I am learning to see again
through a sparseness of particles—

like how I learned to listen
to an eyelid twitch yes and no through a coma.

Darkness I’ve come to realise is a privilege—
known at 4am & sleepless

the sun rising like a scalpel
& turning the room purple.

Somehow, we go on & somehow it never ends
& we go on like a double pendulum.

Perhaps love is like this fixed explosion.
Perhaps you’re nearer now than the word belief.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Patrick Wright is author of Full Sight Of Her (Black Spring Press, 2020). He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brittney Corrigan

Roadkill Afterlife

“Just because it’s the end of an animal’s life doesn’t mean it’s the end of its story.”
—National Geographic

i: Caloric

Sometimes rodents and deer chew
on the bones. Insects and fungi surge
on comestible flesh. Coyotes and bears
redden their snouts in the night.
Sometimes the eagles. Sometimes
the crows. Sometimes the carcass-deep
vultures feasting at the pavement’s edge.

ii: Aesthetic 

One artist still lifes the bristle-tailed body
so it appears only sleeping, curled into
a porcelain dish among bright-seeded figs.
One artist filigrees a curve-horned skull:
lotus-carved forehead, toothed jawbone
calligraphed with light. One artist casts
claws, shapes talons to dangle from necks. 

iii: Scientific 

Small body collected by careful, gloved hands.
How the skin of the torso parts to reveal
the non-pulse, non-breath of gorgeous organs
carrying secrets, codes, last meals. Bones
offer up their stories to mind after mind
after mind. Salvaged being, specimen-body
under knife, under scope, under eye.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation and 40 Weeks. Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction and the Anthropocene Age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection. For more information, visit http://brittneycorrigan.com/.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alex C Eisenberg

Driving my cat to her terminal diagnosis

The air this morning
was thick like I like it.
The sky wasn’t even
sky but water held
in suspension. So
thick it stayed
aloft yet somehow left
a finest mist
across every surface—
almost imperceptible
except in its accumulation.
Like morning dew
but sadder. Like hail but
even heavier. The whole
horrible thing like a bubble
of grief but before
it has been pierced.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alex C Eisenberg is a child of the western high desert and the Pacific Northwest rain-forest, with ancestral ties to Eastern Europe. Her soul is rooted in these wonderful landscapes and her writing springs forth from that connection. Alex currently lives by candlelight with her partner, their beloved cats and their flock of misfit chickens in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. To read more of her work, follow @alexceisenberg on Twitter or visit alexandriaceisenberg.wordpress.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Liane Tyrrel

You Can’t Even Imagine

There is a small door or if not a door
than an opening. I have to stoop down
to enter. It’s what it does to the body
or to the body in the mind and at the
threshold something happens.
There may be blue or there may be
buzzing or just a sort of silence. There is
an opening of what we call land or
when your eyes open think of eyes
opening onto a scene, first a field,
this unfolding weather, matter and
in all directions something called light
(tree limb cracks in the distance and
the imagined falling). You can’t separate
the light from the thing it falls on. You can’t
possibly see all the things it falls on.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Liane Tyrrel is a visual artist and poet. Her poems have been included or are forthcoming in: EcoTheo, JMWW, InkSounds and more. She lives and walks with her dog in the woods and fields of NH.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Stewart

Blueprint from below

My sister and I asked for a room
of our own for years   and when
we finally each received one
I returned to hers    this went on
for some time

In this room, there is no door
only one window in this room
there are two chairs  it does not
matter what they are made of
only that one is empty
and in the other   sits my mother

In this room, there is a podium
my father and I walk around
and around it   in this room
there are vaulted ceilings so
it’s bigger than all the other
rooms but    when we’re in it
we don’t really notice   the air
feels more like water than air
in here   but my father is a surfer
so he   simply holds his breath
I take different measures  I
sink to the bottom  and stay there

In this room there is a mirror on
one wall and each time she passes
my sister turns her head sharply
eyes downcast    as if someone
is standing in the mirror
someone is standing in the mirror
holding their pulsing heart   not
like a shock but like some
   bright question

In this room   there is a candle  lit
and I didn’t know about it
then    after some time        I do

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Stewart is from Glen Ellen, California. Her second home is San Diego. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, What Rough Beast, Hunger Mountain, Tar River Poetry, The I-70 Review and one of her poems was recently featured on the Poetry Foundation’s VS podcast. She has work forthcoming in Spillway.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Natalie Marino

Winter Jar

I know I should restart
the Effexor because today
is worse than yesterday,

because today the sky
is a dull shawl
in a black and white
photograph

and I can’t remember
the rise of red balloons.

My brain is slow as honey
in a winter jar. I hear
the children’s faraway
voices gray as sea water,

while I stare at a blank
wall and long for sleep
like a worn shoe.

The afternoon’s window
is a loud star.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Bitter Oleander, EcoTheo Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Leon Literary Review, Midway Journal, Moria Online, Oyez Review, Shelia-Na-Gig online and elsewhere. She was named a finalist in Sweet Lit’s 2021 poetry contest. Her micro-chapbook, Attachment Theory, was published by Ghost City Press in June 2021. She lives in California.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Morris

Portrait of Spain, Cubism

A fence of teeth shifts     slightly in the jaw

in a land where vendors and grocers
entertain the idea of becoming
matadores or picadores

from an overabundance    of the shiny blood of oil in a painting by El Greco

Background of dark planets            tenebrous shadows on torn velvet
the way Picasso paints her face       shaping the shift of squares
Too much running of the bulls        stampede of sharp planes

So much filigree of gold                          trembling in the house of belief
as tiny red harlequins serve                      the Mass of Thieves
A litany of perspective                             storms of hair and teeth

Guernica—causing even the best of sailors to turn back
toward the land of their mothers and farming

Soft and cooing      doves      the magician’s crow        draw us
toward first light—all angles    through stained-glass windows

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Morris is the author of three books of poetry: Enter Water, Swimmer, Dear October, and Late Self-Portraits, forthcoming in 2022 from MSU Press (selected by Leila Chatti for the Wheelbarrow Books Prize). Her poems have been published in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Northwest, Arts & Letters, Boulevard and Poetry Daily. A recipient of the Rita Dove Award, Western Humanities Review Mountain West Prize and the New Mexico Discovery Award, Mary has also won the 2021 National Federation Press Women’s Book Award for her collection of poems, Dear October. She has been invited to read her work at the Library of Congress, which aired on National Public Radio. Most recently, Kwame Dawes selected her work for American Life in Poetry, established by the Poetry Foundation.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rhienna Renée Guedry

This Corrosion Beats On

And so do the men we paid to rebuild the
collapsed bones, the stairs that led to our

home, one-hundred years hovering
like a ghost above ground, porch

a perch where someone in a bustle
might’ve descended from her threshold

seven houses and thirty horse rings down
from the masonic lodge with brazen pillars

we traded twenty-first century American
adult dollars for the use of mens’ muscle and wrists

they hammered the frame then poured concrete while
you and I do what we call work but not labor

on computers in bedrooms that we use as offices in the
house we call ours, century-old douglas firs flattened into

floors, we talk about nothing; we hover between walls, ghosts
ourselves one day, a threat to be buried out back, like pets

Instead I carved our initials into fresh cement with a toothpick,
splashed gold glitter like rice at a wedding to see what would stick,

what the birds might take; wet to permanent,
we poured something and called it ours

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rhienna Renée Guedry is a queer writer and artist who found her way to the Pacific Northwest, perhaps solely to get use of her vintage outerwear collection. Her work has been featured in Empty Mirror, HAD, Gigantic Sequins, Bitch Magazine and elsewhere. Rhienna is currently working on her first novel. Find more about her projects at rhienna.com or @cajunsparkle_ on Twitter.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Miller

Wedding Cake

You bought 107 lemons from Joe V’s.
We will say 107 as no one had will to count them.
Cat’s tongues catching at thumbs.

I stood beside you in the kitchen, sliced
and fit their flesh into your grandmother’s heavy press.
Pulled her lever down with my balance hand,
right palm otherwise mostly good for finding
door frames in the dark.

Juice dribbled pale into a measuring glass,
till bitter skim approached the fluted lip.
Pour, and pour. Some would flavor
the batter, some we saved
for icing.

I drew life out of each half, piled
their damp seeds and wilted knob-ends
in grocery plastic. Worked till my knees ached.
Behind, you pulled layer on layer
from the oven.

Late, I slept on the couch, and you stooped
to take a picture. Midnight tilted,
slightly, to the left. Wrist
flushed on the pillow
over my head.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Miller is a native of the Texas Gulf Coast. He is published in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press) and in the Marvelous Verses Anthology (Daily Drunk Press). Recent pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in Watershed Review, Phoebe, Yemassee, Elsewhere, West Trade Review, Sledgehammer Lit, Neologism, Press Pause, Coal Hill Review and Indianapolis Review. Follow on Twitter @AndrewM1621

________________________________________________________________________________________

Terry Ann Wright

Dornröschen

After Sylvia Plath's “Morning Song”

I can never get away from your
damp fingertips, your whiskey moth-breath
mouthing messages whose meaning flickers
just out of hearing. I see you among
walls built of words and glue, the
radiator gusting wet heat that peels flat
sheets down at every corner. Pink
pads and bitten nails pick at the roses
on the wallpaper. You and I
forever on either side of words. Wake

and hear me from your memory. To
your bedside I glide and stare:  listen:
we want the same thing. We want a
reckoning or a forgetting. I’m on the far
side of knowing what holy sea
heaves inside you, or what chill moves
you to tug the blanket higher in
your marriage bed. While you sleep, I take my
time plotting dreams to sigh into your ear.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Terry Ann Wright’s chapbook mad honey was released in 2018 by dancing girl press. Her debut chapbook Nature Studies was published by Sadie Girl Press in 2015; the title poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her third nomination. Her poetry has appeared in The Rise Up Review, The Harpoon Review, Chiron Review, Angel City Review, Spectrum, Carnival and East Jasmine Review, and in several anthologies by Cadence Collective, Sadie Girl Press and Picture Show Press.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Roy White

Thirteen

You’d think yellow and orange
would be cheerful.

It’s nothing but dreary,
the worn carpet I pace,

the woodwork buried
in thick layers

we’ll strip off with toxic gel
that burns whatever it can,

eating paint and skin
with equal hunger.

The guys are out, busy
with jobs or girls.

I’ve eaten the Jell-O pudding
Pato’s mother sent him, now

there’s powdered milk and stale rolls
and oatmeal from the food shelf,

which would be OK except
for the silence.

In the corner is a shotgun,
but I’ll never have

the nerve to turn it around
and pull the backwards trigger.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel and elsewhere. He can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy

________________________________________________________________________________________

William James

[I’m done trying to make sense]

an excerpt from “Everyone Gets Out of This Alive”

I’m done trying to make sense
of my poems      What is a poem any-
way but a coyote on a high wire,

or a road map with a loose tooth     
The city I live in can’t be mine
because I wasn’t born here     

I’m as guilty of colonization
as any of us      But I love this dirty river
that cuts us in half like a knife,

even when it smells like death      In December,
city workers fill their trucks with overflow
snow and dump it in the Merrimack     

Come spring, the water thrashes about,
all angry and infinite and swollen      I want
to be that kind of volume      A roar so loud,

even the old ghosts of bridges disappear     
I want to speak a language the entire world
knows how to swallow      Tell me the center

of the earth is warmer than the surface,
I’ll tell you that we are all born howling
just trying to figure out the shape of our lungs     

Dear friends,           forgive me
when I sound overloaded with worry,
like a spring river in a city that isn’t mine     

Sometimes my heart feels too big
for my body so I try to throw it away     
Or give it away      Sometimes my hands

rumble like six thousand horses     
I don’t know if I’m ready to be done
trying to find god      When I say I love you,

what I mean is today my world exploded
into a million shards of granite and there you were,
beaming      There you were refracting the sun

into a perfect star      When I say I love you
what I mean is the air in this city
that isn’t mine burns my throat     

It moshpits my chest      It earthquakes me
into pieces until I cough up so much boiling
blood, until I shake up all this reckless dust,

but you will always
make me want to breathe.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William James is a writer currently existing in the Queen City of Manchester, NH. He was born, once, and has been surviving ever since. You can find him online at http://williamjamespoetry.com or on Twitter (@whoisthebilljim)

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Rose Manspeaker

Conditional

Somewhere, a tree is always
toppling, timber meeting land

no longer bound & held by root. Their
closeness severed, left to life in fable:

If an idea of the world existed,
then the world came to inhabit it.

Or, put in a way closer
to the matter at hand: There were only the people

& the trees they felled; & then
the constructs buried where the roots once lay,

systems architect to the end
of the people & the trees

& their fondness for each other.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Rose Manspeaker was born and raised in West Virginia. They currently live in Brooklyn, where they are an editor at Three Rooms Press and teach at St. Joseph's College. They are a 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and their recent work appears in Hobart Pulp, Longleaf Review, Josephine Quarterly and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly Grace Thomas

How Long Do You Bleed?

Erase the statistics, the doctor’s sigh, the warnings
of eggs and expiration. Let go of the promises you made.

How you thumb grief like a stone. Smoothed by loss,
weighted enough to remind you of what you did not

carry. Say infertility three times in the mirror.
Accept what the world refused

to gift. Talk about it, until you don’t. Listen
to those said you never know, who promised this ache

would come true. Give back the advice, the mantras,
the supplements. It is hope that hurts the most.

Decide when to stop carrying. Stand at the mouth
of the sea. Give back this stone.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly Grace Thomas is an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is a self-taught poet, editor, educator and author. Kelly is the winner of the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, released with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Muzzle, Sixth Finch and more. Kelly is the Director of Education for Get Lit and the co-author of Words Ignite. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband Omid. www.kellygracethomas.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Biegelson

(ק) :: To See What You Cannot See

Come as close as you can.
            To forgiveness. Than resignation. Leave
the feathered thing behind. Go down
to the ship. The rattling ghost yard.
Where the SS United States—Blue Riband holder—rusts
or awaits its turn as a museum of the end
of maritime glamour and post-war détente
at a wharf behind an ikea warehouse
in the city
of brotherly love.       ‘Set keel       to breakers.’
Let my people        be people. 
Teach yourself to read    the human
faces. (At least the eyes. Under the dark
eyelids.) Created in imitation.

‘Last hawser      in you     creeks       my last longing.’
Are you the word
without echo. Written upon me.       You used to trace me.           
Call me.           My puerto rican. Should I have objected. More fiercely.
To the possessive. The slimness of your category. 
I am still working out the variables of my belonging.

//

I moved west to escape collapse and decay. Last molting
of an encased cicada
giving rise to the winged imago.
Kadosh. Kadosh. Kadosh. Rise upon your toes. There are no jews here.
Though what if the place         upon which      within which
you stand       ‘startle and stare out’ is already
holy. The earth holy. The sweetgrass holy.
The mannagrass holy. The hackberry holy. The apple holy.
The sternum holy. The navel holy. The nipples holy. Every
hair on the body holy. 

We sat around the table in an early mountainous winter before
reading some formalist I cannot now remember
bemused          entranced         off put            and off kilter
by bob pack relishing the notion that we don’t love
the smell of our own shit (or the sound of our ‘skin half drum
half fart). It’s what distinguishes us
from monkeys he growled and grinned. He was a dapper man. Making
some sort of play (‘Should I play
ball with the dogs / or should I walk away’) ‘Hardly
real’ as we all are from time to time         all at once about
to be enfolded or relinquished. Into the storied atoms
we already are. Now. Dispersed. Scuttled.
What do you say. Will you ‘be the throat of these hours.’
Please. Did the giving
famish the craving. An idol says. Always says. Yes. So.
Does silence. In some lights. Is silence
made an idol. ‘How can I write a holy litany’
when so many twist your tongue. In some lights. Some shades. So
not always (Holy
tongue. Holy stomach. Holy hell. Holy shit. Holy hola.
Holy shalom.)

//

Afterward. The familiar. A waitress at ruby’s café brought coffee. Watched me
scribble on napkins like hanshan on tree bark.
(Apologies for the grafted
elevation.) She asked me
what I did. In my silence. She asked
me if I made any money in my teaching.
            Enough for pancakes. We said. Differently. Her aside more
of a question. She said
she did her best thinking while painting.
Cats. Mostly. She didn’t like the abstract.
I do my best thinking while sleeping.
I can read almost any recalcitrant
thing and wake in the morning
with some understanding. Come closer.
Our embarrassment over
our metaphorical nakedness is the same. Our sigh. Our sorrow.
Re/turn to our branching lives together. My dreamed son
who I held as my son
was asleep for twenty minutes as I lay listening to sirens streaming
north up higgins toward the railroad tracks where folks
still       from time to time       hop onto boxcars.
My dreamed son who asks
for a microscope       a telescope       for his august birthday
to see what he cannot see.
My dreamed son is young. Not older
than/then. My ontological son.
Who calls out. Who is called.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He currently serves as Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University as well as an Associate Editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, FIELD, The Minnesota Review and RHINO Poetry, among other places. Find him at danielbiegelson.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Quattrone

Spring Regret

April fourth, I am a field turning
itself over. The year inside me, winter
sediment, and dormant seed unsettle.
My green earth body—arcing, prone—
lies open to the straight plow of a lover’s blade,
unzipping what’s been closed since summer
in furrow upon furrow of dark mineral soil,
all that seethes beneath the surface, shown.

Tractor of grief, how you complicate desire.
It takes a thing as heavy as you to move
the weight of something like creation—
for something like creation. I am sorry
for the human damage done by wanting
what cannot be taken, only buried, only grown.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Quattrone is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006) and the song cycle, One River (Wolfe Island Records, 2018). His work has been collected in The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013). Recent poems appear in Poets Reading the News, The Westchester Review and The Night Heron Barks. Michael curated the KGB Poetry Series with Laura Cronk and Megin Jimenez from 2007 to 2011. He lives in Tarrytown, New York.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Abu Bakr Sadiq

Half Memory

with my arms wheeling back
and forth around your waist,
I watch as squashed tomatoes
simmer into a bloodish red soup.
you bend over the kitchen counter
to pick seasonings for me to unwrap
& crush. there's no point being here
if you’re focused only on eating,
you say, between mouthfuls of half
cooked bean curds. i wonder if
it is more about keeping me starved
than teaching me how to bamboozle
ingredients to morph into meals.
the first night we have pizza for
supper, I wake up in the morning
with crumbs of dough brewing
in my mouth. now that you are far
away in another world: i imagine
that you still go about collecting
mushrooms & garden eggs,
for egusi soup to be cooked over
charcoal stove; that you still grate
onions & pepper as if somewhere,
there are people who would pay
with their lives to eat from whatever
your hands ever cook. now that half
the memory i have of it is a hungry cat
with a swollen paw, dwindling across
an alleyway in the middle of the night—
the last time we ate tacos in bed
could’ve had a better ending if I did
not ask if you'd like to be buried with
a knife shoehorned between your hands.

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Abu Bakr Sadiq is a Nigerian poet. His poems have appeared in The Lit Quarterly, Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Iskanchi Press & Magazine, Knight’s Library Magazine, Zone 3 Press Magazine, The Drinking Gourd, Rockvale Review and elsewhere. He writes from Minna. Find him on Twitter @bakronline

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Shannon Ryan

Art

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Shannon Ryan is studying visual art and creative writing at Salisbury University. She is the managing editor of The SCARAB. Her poetry is forthcoming in Asterism.