Issue 13 Full Text
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Lisa Compo
Postscript
I can hear every breath
in this place, and I feel sorry
for the tintype spirits left
as nameless. I can smell the brackish
water, tannin tinted—a sepia
and sulfuric scent. That’s why
they become footsteps
here. Bones left at roots,
animal messages and all the unrest
in one small tooth. It means to tell me
someone else’s future, pressed
and faded as an autumnal leaf—gone. So,
I stop. The bats snag
dragonflies, cicadas—all the noises
I imagine this letter to feel
like. Swift, empty—
how I always take static
and hear a message from it.
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Lisa Compo
Exilic Return
I have a language in movement,
an inheritance of deciphering
steps. Each bone memorizes
that careful sort of quiet.
I’ve fallen for palm readers: how
they know and don’t. My hand
vector-less, waterways pressed
away for convenience—I am left
tracking only by distance. The perpetual
mantra: safety in going. Pinhole-
shaped moonlight through my blinds
makes an album of bodies
on iron, faded and emulsifying
their lacquered spirits with the voided
sky. Their faces woven into
a loom in which memory is a spell
flared, words without manifestation.
Not every memory is electrical. My body
remembers the way my mother ran, slept
on porches before she was
a mother. The house
always lamplight, unhinged
doors. What if I could read our palms,
find an origin? Our hands
simple as answers. At night,
when we were very small, my brother
and I would trace the lines
of each other’s hands. This was how
we went to sleep—the house becoming
transference: too bright, deafening silence.
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Lisa Compo
Small Haunts
That lighthouse ghost
shimmering, swallowing
haze—sea-stained red paint
a body soaking
up the faded edge. I wanted to be
cut silhouettes, brief
hands touching—
I know you
were sure. But our hands.
Fragile mists smudged
with wooded depth. Phantom
pine and salt
skin. What was
it, in us? Our bodies
marked, lawless. In pictures,
never still. We caught spirits,
orbed poses, light-
headed. I was moving
far away in small
frames. A hand floating
in wisps of sky.
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Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate at UNC-Greensboro. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: The Journal, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Cimarron Review and elsewhere.
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Stephen Lackaye
The Heart in the Royal Ontario Museum
If you’ve ever pushed a small car
over untrod ground in the dark
of a monster’s chest cavity,
in a rubber suit, towards a hole
that you carved out of the night
with a miniature chainsaw,
then maybe you can imagine it,
the largest heart in nature,
preserved for the first time
outside the body: inflated
to diastole, and soaked
6 months in acetone
until every molecule of water
was replaced, resistant to
the hands of museumgoers
warned not to touch by
the hopeless nearby sign.
But once it was there,
if you could, how could you not?
In life its beat was heard
2 miles away, mistaken
in its reach for other
movements of the ocean,
until, lifted in a harness
from its first slump onto earth,
and even settled on its plinth,
it risks to crash at some
late hour, laboriously
to the floor, another
movement of the world
heard by the night patrolman
spiraling through halls
at the end of the block,
who’s barely interrupted
from how quietly, he thinks,
he’ll close the door
to his daughter’s room
after he’s looked in on her.
He has no shame for the
indulgence, not knowing
how the little mysteries
of scraping cylinders,
of latch on plate, will
manifest in dream.
Because even he has felt
the plastinated thick of it,
the heart of the blue whale, pale
with what keeps it, and knows
it’s nothing like what rises
from the darkest quarters
seen by beasts requiring,
however occasionally, to surface,
how even then, before us,
it is still beyond conceiving
to the heart in its regular fist
furious at work, carrying
despite its labor, nowhere
on the air. It has one sense
it’s said to measure with,
by which it comprehends how
after process to preserve it,
every thought derived of
what’s been drawn with hands
in gloves out of the dark,
will only ever be again
derived of what it’s not.
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Stephen Lackaye
The Poet at Seventeen
after Levis
My youth? I see it mostly in the sure decline
of quarters in the dull and bright arcades where
I spent it all, religiously, committing habits
and patterns to reflex to extend my future games.
Outside, the asphalt’s rain steamed off while
floodlights shied or seemed to make their peace
with the cover of cars holding couples up
who leaned on each other, wondering how to leave.
The next day they’d plot the paucity of hours
spent in the same theaters, cinematic aspirations
orphaned on their tongues. Even then they worried
how to occupy the years that spread before them.
When the poet says there were fields he disced,
I don’t know what it means, even though I know
I lived some equivalent boredom, and these days
you have to make a choice to remain this ignorant:
anyone can find video of tractors’ indolent turning,
pesticides enacting their controls in lapsed time,
or a seventeen year-old in a field in throes
in Sausalito or Mejugorje. It didn’t matter
then, in Poughkeepsie, in New York, in 1996,
when the poet I never met and loved anyway
but did not love yet died. By the standards of the place,
I was dying too, though he had a 30-year headstart
the night I drove a car into the pedestrian-saving
pylons of the mall, then walked to the motel where
I hoped the police wouldn’t find me at least until
I’d slept it off. Of course, I could see it coming.
There were people in that town who knew already
they’d never leave and who pitied me the absence
of a god. I practiced a turn of the wrist against
the assurance of death. And I don’t even know
what a kind of triumph would have looked like:
to play the game to its end or prolong the playing.
The hours churned and I went unseen. Stars fell
in broken elements. It rained or didn’t rain.
A life like that? It seemed inexorable—
Running quarters down to nothing, then credit
at the bar. The vacant 3-lanes through downtown.
Light pollution. Asphalt. But mostly now I remember
the roar of gates in the mall at close, a fatal
post-teen pulling the plugs on machines around me.
And then the night air like the breath of two people
filling space enough for one. The inveterate lots.
And then the neighborhoods I coasted, windows
like dead amusements. And games I never played.
And how determined houses clutched their lawns
although the nights were short and nothing was in doubt.
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Stephen Lackaye
Marriage
after Dickey
If we’re lucky, there may always be
some mysteries between us,
even if I’ve learned the things you like—
the ribbons at your wrists and throat,
a little time on Sundays to read,
how suddenly my hand in your hair
becomes a fist – and those you don’t—
the laundry when there’s none to do,
my opening and closing of the fridge—
because we have both asked questions
we don’t want the answers to, agreed
upon safe words to use when
none of them, in their chosen moments,
work. What else can you do, you say,
when I’ve been eight months laid off
and lately silence worries us
more than any answer. Some work
is not far from our pleasures,
and others getting paid for it buy shoes
and all the other junk we’ve had to
eat instead of, going on a year. Experience
hasn’t stopped me so much as what I refuse.
My love, I understand, the silence is the worst of it,
the worst of how we have to live
together. We’ve had our civil drinks
and talk again. The clock is stalled on
our worst year, the hand never stops
being a fist. It’s okay, okay to ask. After all,
what’s a little pain, a certain amount of pain
that we could put an end to? Forgive me.
Say the word or don’t. You know
by now the things I wouldn’t try again.
Only the past is strange anymore.
Do you remember we once believed
there was a right kind of exhaustion?
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Stephen Lackaye
After All
My daughter asks me for a strawberry,
which she calls a small, good thing,
after she’s asked me once already, and I heard
only the dust shifting inside the grey wall.
I had just put down the phone from some fresh
disappointment, germane to circumstances
that I knew I would have to outlive, when,
Please, can I have, she repeats herself
in faith, one small, good thing. A strawberry,
I have learned, takes 7 months to cultivate
from seed. A vole is 20 days from conception
to its birth. Despite cliché, the goldfish will
remember your face its 10 to 15 years of life,
and if released to local waterways may grow
to 13 pounds on detritus, zooplankton,
the dark opportunities of space. It’s true,
I’ve sought to take the world as granular,
dissolving to solutions, in order to survive
one setback at a time. I once also begged,
however audibly, a small, good thing,
an ear that was preoccupied. So what
misfortune now wants my attention?
I’m busy with this one life still discovering
its appetites, the small, good voice
she gives to them, the sun that stripes
her feet dangling beneath the table.
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Stephen Lackaye’s first collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Eric Hoffer Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Review, Southern Indiana Review and Los Angeles Review, among others. He lives with his family in Oregon, where he is a bookseller.
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Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Syllabics
As if you could escape yourself, you take a walk to the lake where
winter’s ice recoils to shore, and across the surface, a wide blue eye
awakens. At the ice’s edge, a child’s ball waits for the sun to tip it into
the water. You think, no one has gone out to get it. Ducks return, tottering
in the wind. Ducks cluster at the rim of ice. Here, you count eight
ducks: no one has gone out to get it. There, four ducks: no one gets it. You
try not looking at ducks. But the white flash of their under-tails,
bobbing for pond weeds. Two ducks: no one. No thinking. A breeze
on your neck. Shadows rippling toward you on the lake, dark stabby
triangles. One two three: triangles. Try not counting these five ducks:
nobody gets it. Nobody gets it. Go home. Spring is chronic. The mind is
chronic.
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Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer. Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Fence, Blackbird, diode, the Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.
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Jen Gayda Gupta
Training
I was given an electric shock
collar for my dog. Before
the jolt of metallic fingers
ever prodded her neck,
I held the bolts between my thumb
and pointer and pressed
the lightning bolt button ‘til
my teeth turned to tin.
The shock rang from my jaw
into the follicles on my arms
dragging each hair awake.
My veins turned to ice.
All the while, my dog chewed
a stuffed pig and listened
to its whine. After it ended,
there was firework in my blood.
I pressed it again.
I pressed it again.
I pressed it until the lack of shock felt
like drowning in thin air.
I grabbed the gutted pig
from my dog, replaced it with
the controller, and yawned
as she gnawed on the button.
I became a subject of pain, disciple
to its knifed edge. I snapped
the collar around my neck,
a strand of fiery pearls. Now
the jolts entered my brain, took
the wires inside and tangled them
into a muddled yarn.
My dog watched me squirm,
bend to her jaw’s will,
become fleshy, carnal,
something without thought,
something well behaved.
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Jen Gayda Gupta
The most intimate thing in the world
is knowing
you are going to watch
someone die,
watch the blood
drain from each hair
till the whole colony
bone whites.
Watch skin
tuck into crevices
of flesh that grow
tired of stretching taut.
Watch their back
twist towards earth,
run slow to a crawl,
knees pop like
crushed acorns.
Watch their teeth
lose hold, drop
one by one, resin
replaced till they sleep
gummy mouthed.
Watch their brain
blur, your face
become static till
you both forget
the nights you lay,
skin plump,
skull generous forest,
pictured aging
bodies, knew you would
hold them like this.
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Jen Gayda Gupta is a teacher, an avid hiker and a horse lover. She is currently on the run from responsibility, living nowhere at all with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Bandit Fiction, Capsule Stories, Olney, Sledgehammer and others. You can find her on Instagram @jengaydagupta
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Jess Smith
Retreat
I had a lover in
the woods, his body
slight and shaking.
We dipped ourselves
like fingers into cold
streams and emerged
with something to
taste. One night I bled
all over his sheets but
in the moonlight, through
the window, the red
looked like a map, not
a mistake. The sheets
seemed the deviance,
the glass and wood separating
us from the night the
unnatural – not the air, not
the stream, not the blood.
In daylight we sought
no linen to cover the green
burnt into my back, no
knitted summer shawl
to wrap the wet at
our knees, just
his tentative hands
turning certain, the same
way the moon’s
pale silhouette in late
afternoon reminds us
what will shine in full dark.
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Jess Smith
People I Envy the Most
Easy sleepers, especially on planes.
Parents who enjoy pregnancy.
Anyone meeting my father
for the first time because that’s
the best of him
you’re going to get.
Men who have been inside me.
(I am the kind of person
I would like to fuck.)
Homeowners with elaborate
Halloween decorations.
Champagne flute women wearing satin robes
who wake up hungry
and proceed to eat breakfast.
The dead who know our secrets.
Not doctors but actors who play doctors.
Cobble Hill
Dads.
Anyone in silk without sweat circles.
Myself at 28 who worried
more about which soup
had secret dairy than if
she would survive.
The man next to me on this flight
who is sleeping soundly.
We curl toward each other
like long-married lovers, his mask
slipping just enough for me
to recognize his soft mouth.
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Jess Smith is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University. Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, The Rumpus and other journals. She is the recipient of support from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center.
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Jane Zwart
Artificial Light
In light, color is a function of kerning: the ruby meander;
the purple switchback, rounded vertices slaloming dimes.
Harder to chart the degree of light’s guile--excepting
unimpeachable suns. Take the motes that ride bright air
on earth and chalk the moon: how do we rate regolith
relative to railroad worms, to standard embers, to the milk
of incandescent algae the surf can’t stir into the sea?
Nevermind the pretenders at the spectrum’s far end,
the tanning beds and flameless candles, oily fluorophores
burning inside ravers’ haloes and Halloween bangles.
How artificial is the light from a bulb that must ease itself,
humming, into radiance? How artificial the blitz
inside the tubes that school janitors flick on, setting off
domino lightning, rituals of fluorescent paroxysm?
Two weeks before his last birthday, my brother wasted
a roll of film, setting off blasting caps in a flash cube,
outshining the explosions in the sky. He took pictures
of night scuffed by lux, but which flares were more false:
the zirconium that burst in a crystal box or the fireworks?
We named them after each other as they chandeliered.
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Jane Zwart
Mapparium
Mary Baker Eddy Library
Boston, MA
I thought we would be able to walk into that world alone,
or nearly alone, through a door built into equatorial seas.
I wanted our whispers to carry under the earth’s glass crust
like underground water, like magma, like a seam of something
rare and molten, and I wished--I will not lie--the noisy kids
who shared Mary Eddy’s library with us back home to Shanghai.
Any kid, any crowd, I would have wished away. I wanted
a secret planet in which to love you, and here were the young
pointing to their country, orange and enormous; here was
their chaperone, tracing, like an astronomer, the wide red dome
over her head, the Soviet north.
And then they sang. We did not
know the song. But we wore it, we wore its unfamiliarity
like couples wear hotel robes: the same milk and honey
with separate sleeves. We wore it and stood, a junior high choir
between us, inside a fragile globe, and it was more intimate
than nakedness. If we were the last two on earth, how blandly
we would love. Were we never kept from one another by hymns
sung in other tongues, how chaste a kiss would taste.
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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.
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Simon Montgomery
There’s Something I Forgot to Tell You
I’m dancing with the handle and you’re dancing
with him and that’s okay—the handle’s
got rhythm. The door to the place
is locked like some past we could have
sealed and I’m flat underneath the solitude
of it, wonder if I’m being kept in or kept
at all. The walls are pushing in and out,
sweating away the wallpaper. I’ve learned
to prefer the present. I’m coming around
on the future. Any day now, I’ll water
those plants prepared for death
on the windowsill. Their leaves as brown
as the cashmere jacket still glued
to the corner chair, put in timeout.
As this night grows to light,
what’s learned? That even growth requires
loss every now and then?
That if a bird could fly
without its wings,
it would?
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Simon Montgomery
Nice to See You
We sat in the yard
and wondered what next
and wouldn’t we have
liked to know what went
wrong without the burden
of how the truth might stay.
Stay present we
reminded ourselves, made
a game of here and now, watched
the grass go from mowed to in need
of. It was easy to name the growth
a figment, hard to accept that despite
our fixed stillness, the world went on
and away. And we believed it. We sat
in the yard and wondered what next,
believed that if we were to just stay
present, the grass we never had
a reason to mow would
adjust, become our new dumb truth,
shape a past worth returning to.
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Simon Montgomery is an aspiring poet based in Atlanta, Georgia. His work made the top twenty percent of submissions for the Francine Ringold Awards at the Nimrod International Journal in 2021. He is currently studying creative writing at Georgia State University.
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Lee Potts
After Hours
We allocated to the office
ghosts miles of dark halls, windows
that never open full of empty
parking lots, every unused
voicemail box and ask them
to tally all night
the pages secretaries
didn’t lock away, the ceaseless
teeth behind each
clock’s face, the chairs
with broken wheels.
If we left them the last
piece of birthday cake
at the end of the day
it was only because
we forgot it.
They know how often
you cry in the last
toilet stall on the left.
They admire your
commitment to silence.
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Lee Potts is the author of the chapbook And Drought Will Follow. His work has appeared in Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Parentheses Journal, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal and elsewhere. He lives just outside of Philadelphia. He’s @LeePottsPoet on Twitter.
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Calgary Martin
Mercy
Coney Island, NY
Look: the way the sun sets on Kings County
from the trestle of Smith/Ninth: burns up the city
until there is no city there: no
homes, nor trees, nor steeples. Just one
ancient molten lake a body
of water of fire, for miles.
The encroachment of callery pears in April,
spines curved, drooped over the primordial
streets, the scent of semen. Hoarding
daylight in their white petals.
Anything can be made beautiful. See:
how comely, the Atlantic,
after one termination point
or another: train station, job,
baby, etc. Laid beneath
a deepening sky
like the harmonious pairs
of a Rothko, blue
on blue, goddammit.
And when you run
into the waves
in your jersey skirt
and red-buttoned silk shirt
to stand with your back to the camera,
still holding your purse—how beguiling
the residual image will be to you, ten years on.
And you can, if you want, choose
to remember every shit night
in the city of your youth
just like this.
See?
For you and for the person you were,
mercy. Every train ride with your cheek crammed
against the window was pierced also by the sun
at its highest. Condensation crystals formed
on the plastic, exploding with light, while you slept
accidentally on the empty express:
the kindest accident! the perfect rest!
to miss the mess
to ascend the stairs
and arrive so quickly, finally,
into the familiar light
of your neighborhood. Yes.
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Calgary Martin
Wave III
i –
You still think it will end that way.
As you dreamt it—teeming over
the sea walls to fill the waiting riverbeds
erected however long ago
in concrete, in limestone, and glass.
You still dream it, weekly. Then you daydream
of the land recreating itself and yes, the romance
of a monstrous city, a beautiful city,
transformed by vines and water.
The wind is here already but we do not read
its signs. We do not speak the language,
nor do we feel appropriately afraid. But the violets
in the yard are bending with its force. The nettles
tilt back and forth like a band of bodies intertwined.
Do we know where to find it, to collect it, lay it gently
in the sun, to wait while it dries? And what
then? The nettles sting us
so we run. Our blood
still pines for it. We don’t know to wear gloves,
where to place the scissors, how to make the safest
cuts. When our hearts beat
too fast. When we grow unwanted
children. Do we know how to tend
them, to pass them gently away.
When we were young, in floral dresses,
drinking drinks in trendy bars, holding them up
like pieces of quartz. When we walked
over graves in search of tacos. When we waited
in waiting rooms on Elizabeth Street.
and we slumped over the two-person seat
on the 3 am Q-train. When we danced
on a barge in the East River and starved ourselves
and yelled into phones on the white sands
of Southampton as if this was the only way
to love–it seemed so dire then.
ii–
Process it. That’s what you do with the herbs
once they’re dried. And pour over alcohol
or vinegar. And place it in the cupboard
and sit still while unable to perceive
that it’s working.
Water also is a menstruum
for imbuing by osmosis; in that regard
think of the river
of sea water
swarming with all of our possessions
all of our enmity and deceit
all of our meet-cutes
all of the baby birds fallen from their nests
all of our shouting on the sidewalk
all of the white tear drops from the callery pairs
all of the blood of the people we ignored
all of the last breaths
all of the colonizing flora
all of the dashed dreams that flew us across prairies to be here
The water makes a spell with its constituents
Who knows how much more potent it will be
steeped in our blood and our shattered glass
and our oxidized beams
and our wild flowers.
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Calgary Martin is originally from Washington State, but spent her formative years in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems appear in Hayden's Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Nashville Review, The McNeese Review, Tupelo Quarterly and others. She lives in Illinois with her husband and son.
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Daniel Ruiz
Still Life at Warp Speed
It’s not that I’m not laughing.
I am. At nothing. I’m trying
to participate in eternity.
The void appears stretched-out
like smoke or a pulled-apart mouth,
the present like a browned toothbrush
you’re waiting to get paid again
to replace. It’s gold-rimmed, full
of old water. It’s the lost
head of the vacuum, that slinky
neck, the body plugged in
somewhere, whirring.
*
A man with a calf
tattoo of a bicycle
limps across the crosswalk
while every bird bobs
its head to the song
stuck in it. Imagine
the ruckus: all our thoughts
out loud. That’s why
we cover the well.
You tell a toad
it’s croaking, it says,
“I’m working on my oms.”
*
One by one, lightning
maims trees, snapping trunks.
All those broken windows.
All your foes giggling around
a round table. All your clothes
sucked into the leafblower
as the interviewer calls
your name. You saw it coming.
Hell, you volunteered.
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Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, his poems can or will be found in POETRY, Crazyhorse, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Meridian and elsewhere.
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Shannon Ryan
Fruit Set
Your hands were the size of two
maroon grapes, halved
by the bend of my thumb. Gripping
the slippery pieces, the ache of coulure climbs
as the small berries shatter excessively
from the clusters. We were no longer
a pair of cherries stem-bound to the same tree, cleaved
by time’s hollow mouth, impatient.
They don’t teach you how
a second splits a seed,
how a flaw in fusion could untether
you from humanity, fission
the only option.
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Shannon Ryan
Scraps
Hot carrion splits the asphalt, spreads
open, pinned. The heat leaves
fingerprints pressed into the arch
of my spine. I want to be hand-
held, small in your palm, ready
to unfurl, tentative and prone.
I pick scabs over and over knowing
they’ll always bleed. My shadow
curls into every hollow, caught
in the motion sensors. Phantoms slink
in the mirrors, the corners of eyes, the pall cast by bodies lingering
in the stark sun. There are still silences that settle
in the stretch of my skin, gazes that grip
the outline of my body, blurring in the rush of burning rubber.
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Shannon Ryan
Wake
Your eyes, pumpkin seeds, harvest
the moon, a halved orange. My nose
chaps; the night trembles. Disoriented,
I follow the map of your skin. Let me
bouquet your city, peonies
peeking around every corner. Carmine
camellias adorn the crown of your head. Sprigs of azalea
to return the precious pink to your blank lips, perfumed.
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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.
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Wendy BooydeGraaff
Mother
can I curl up beside you, my head on your lap
in the hot summer humidity, you stroking the frizz
flat away from my forehead, my breath softening
and evening after an early Saturday rising and
selling at the market which is a place I loved
to wander because the free dark grape juice
samples across from us and the orange pink
yellow gladiolas beside us and the Mennonite-sewn
barbie clothes and the peaches we sold alongside black
currants and gooseberries which smell translucent
and prick your wrists as you pick them just as all good
memories do.
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Wendy BooydeGraaff's short fiction, poems, and essays have been included in The Ilanot Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Slant, Porter House Review and elsewhere. She lives in Michigan.
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Lori Lamothe
Revolution in the Back Bay
I want to fall with you out of loosestrife vernacular
into words resembling intimacy.
Out of dream into bread.
Out of fucking into salt.
Out of love into taste.
Say yes off the cuff.
Say yes to no.
Think or don’t think
as long as you stand beside me
when I tear the heads off the roses
and scatter the red across polished floors.
Let the maitre d’ come running.
Let the married man stare.
Let his mistress look away as her glass
slides off the table into pieces.
I’m warning you now—
escape by candlelight involves a flock of napkins
and a pinch of pepper thrown over the wrong shoulder.
Take my hand.
Let running become us.
Let night fling open all its doors.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lori Lamothe's fourth book, Tulip Fever, is forthcoming in fall 2022 from Kelsay Books. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal, The Literary Review and elsewhere. A four-time Pushcart nominee, she lives in New England with her family and two rescue huskies.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Adam J Gellings
Two Poems after Sabine Weiss
Snow banks & a swift kick that cracks the mist. Your legs are like odd strangers. Spires, singed black, bombed & barren.
Did you break yourself free from the Cirque d'Hiver to furlough in this field? Now you've straddled both worlds
& still there is nothing.
*
With the gale of grunts the clack of teeth
a gait the length of a shadow under a tiny splash or sip of sun
the boy whips me with a grin [or growl] beneath his gums
because he wants to believe I am the spiraling stag
ridden unsaddled through the streets
as evening begins
to light the first lanterns.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Adam J Gellings is a poet & instructor from Columbus, Ohio. His previous work has appeared in DIALOGIST, The Louisville Review, Willow Springs & elsewhere.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Mikko Harvey
Work Life
Happiness: the fiddle you don’t have
to practice — which plays itself.
At least it’s supposed to.
I don’t know.
My job is to polish the jars
that hold the other, smaller jars.
My hands never quite relax, even after
I praise them for being good hands. Restlessness
is how they grieve the past, the dear past,
the deer that passed, then turned
and glanced back—I named him Tony.
The machine we have made is probably
unstoppable at this point.
All the more reason
we should not hurt its feelings.
Jawbone
on a steel floor, I am trying
to see you for the tree that you are. You make the room
seem smaller; I like that.
Nights blowing by like
the pages of a contract, so dry between my fingers.
We were picking blueberries, then the road ended.
We were tickling the planet, then the planet started
ending. Too polite
to scream, weirdly cognizant
of the meat I have eaten, I settle
for making intense eye contact
with the pharmacist.
On the last day, I think we will all take
a very long bike ride, and that
will be that. But where
are we supposed to put
the charming details we’ve been gathering?
The rules of games, the names of knots, the muscles
of animals subdivided
into convenient cubes
and exported by large
transpacific vessels, themselves
rather cuboid in construction, now
that you mention it: the geometry soothing
when viewed from a distance.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Mikko Harvey is the author of Let the World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022) and Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi, 2018). His poems appear in places such as The Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. He currently lives in Western Massachusetts.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sy Brand
To Grow in All Directions
At 12 I forgot how to lie / about ghosts,
the same way a statue / becomes its own
stone, or light / turns to carousel overnight.
I refuse to find / my place to stand / still—a grave
should be terminal—I will / be in many eyes
at once, like a dance / made fingerprint, carousel
turning back to light / and shining through your walls.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sy Brand is a queer non-binary Scottish poet. They write through the haze of cat-/child-induced sleep deprivation to make sense of gender, relationships and ADHD. Their work has been published in Popshot Quarterly, Perhappened and Capsule Stories, among others. Find them at sybrand.ink and on Twitter https://twitter.com/tartanllama.
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Sam Rye
Rag and Bone
Having filled the ships all night with oil
my father comes home to sleep
one pillow, he dreams the broken English
he spoke out on the berth in the twilight
to the boatmen from China
huddling, smoking, under a crust of stars
as he sleeps
we know not to disturb him
satisfied in his rest
partly in our hands
beneath a late moon, until the rag and bone
man, so steady in his round
drives through the block at noon
collecting our unwanted things with his voice
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sam Rye is a 27-year-old poet and editor from the North East of England, now residing in Manchester, where he is studying a MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at The University of Manchester. His poetry has previously been published or is forthcoming in Butcher’s Dog, Dodging the Rain and Prole.
________________________________________________________________________________________
DS Maolalai
The Sun, Its Sharpened Shadows
oh, and to fall
against the window
frame! a shoulder and
a forehead on
the glass! and traffic
trails exhaust lines
like black ribbons
down the street. and people
step between them,
turning dancers
amongst ribbons.
stepping to some rhythm
in some horn-fed,
writhing dance. this city,
full of people, full
of leaves which tumble over
in a waltz and waltzing
step of falling
octaves, and this street,
its packed notation
moving slowly
through a song. this
afternoon, this evening,
this lively brisk
allegro. this sun,
its sharpened shadows
drawing staves
across the world.
________________________________________________________________________________________
DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and seven times for the Pushcart Prize. He has released two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019). His third collection, Noble Rot is scheduled for release in April 2022.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Carolyn Oliver
Horses in the Mist
I would like this to be a poem about rising early
on an Adirondack morning after an ice storm,
counting ghost apples he could melt
with a graze of his small fiery fingers
as we follow a split-rail fence to a pasture
where foals and mares, their largeness daunting,
flare their breath into the mist.
In this poem I would be the kind of woman
who carries sugar cubes in her pocket,
whose son becomes, as the haze dissolves,
a little less afraid.
But I have never risen in the Adirondacks
and it is not morning. There was no ice storm
last night, just a phone call, so I am counting
all the ways boys know how to make ghosts
as I follow the road to school alone.
I am the kind of woman who carries
her son’s health insurance card in her pocket.
There are still horses in the mist, he could touch them
if the classroom windows dissolved.
On their backs sway men with guns
so he won’t be afraid.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Carolyn’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST and elsewhere. carolynoliver.net.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Victoria Mbabazi
Game Night at the Fifth House
Do you want me
to put the poison in the wine I’m drinking
or in the beer you’ll drink later?
Are you still mad at me?
If an Apple dies as a tree
falls into an ocean
are you still staying the night?
Do you want to leave me?
I love party games
Mafia is my favourite
You are good at killing
loving is better
familiar and fatal
I am good at knowing
the mood of a door
when it closes
If the tap is crying
when it doesn’t shut
all the way off I am good
at engulfing my space
the couch is capable of breathing
and it keeps breaking its legs
I can be good I promise
I am great at becoming
whatever you want me to be
Give me a second give me time
Let me show you I promise
I can walk back into that burning target
and remember all the things
you wanted from the store
________________________________________________________________________________________
Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines including Rejection Letters, Minola Review and No Contact Mag. Their chapbook, chapbook, is available with Anstruther Press and their chapbook FLIP is forthcoming this spring with Knife Fork Books. They’re currently living in Brooklyn, New York.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Samuel Prince
A Dawn Wander in Modern Living
Peculiar, the sensation of standing
mid-development, mid-gestation,
with so much smacking of dereliction or desertion:
empty diggers, their clawed buckets left forked in the minced earth,
dumper trucks with their beds tilted, pouring air,
near-buried safety guides, obscured hazard signs,
diagrams of timber and gable roofs, screwed to scaffolding.
Sleepless and pestered by tides of thought
I couldn’t outrun, I walked
in the poignancy of first light,
past lethargic mallards in the furrows,
the gleam of late April dew tantamount
to a thousand bike reflectors dispersed on the fields.
A cure for wakefulness: trespass in someone’s grand design,
snoop around the new housing estate site,
from blueprint to artist impression, to its current fruition,
through the paneled fencing, onto its inchoate streets, closes and plots,
as keen as a carrion bird or warzone dog, I lurked among foundations,
the tangerine muck trenches and tread tracks.
One day, this anatomy of community will be future sanctuary,
a redbrick somewhere pined for in alien places,
with windows double-paned to withstand
nocturnal knuckles, insulate private delusions,
but for now, all shrouded in polythene
except a single skylight, gasped ajar, as an overlook
on these pains of creation,
tomorrow’s homes
where the magnolia walls dissemble, and inch ever-inward.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Samuel Prince’s debut collection, Ulterior Atmospheres, was published by Live Canon in 2020. Recent poems have appeared in The Alchemy Spoon and Pedestal. He lives in Norfolk, UK.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Christien Gholson
What holds everything together
1.
The Douglas-fir’s dead body is not dead. How can it be
dead, half of it still standing, twenty feet into the sky,
trunk five yards in diameter? I place my palm against
the bark, feel the curves of bark beetle galleries beneath,
and the hollow deeper still, the emptiness that holds this
tree together.
2.
There are times when I can feel that same emptiness
inside me, the space that stitches together all the parts
of this body—skate-made ripples of pond water, blood
and cortisol, sawdust, marbled meat, and a few red
needles sinking into mud, into the mycelium ley lines
that hold this entire forest together.
3.
What’s alive and what’s not is unclear here. Listen—
the ecstatic energy of decay, breaking down all bodies
into their source elements. Listen—resurrection is close:
the beat of a heart, shadows moving from tree to tree,
a flurry of dead needles floating down onto dead leaves.
What’s alive and what is not is unclear everywhere.
4.
I’ve known this space. Nights in childhood, reaching
out and recoiling from the dark around and inside me.
It has always been here, looking in our windows,
curious, sometimes leaving things under the pillow—
a beetle leg, a pebble of green sea glass, a fish scale
able to reveal the colors hidden inside cold moonlight.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Christien Gholson is the author of The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing); On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press); All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press); and the novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). A long eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, “Tidal Flats,” can be found at Mudlark, along with its sequel, “Solutions for the End of the World,” at The American Journal of Poetry. He lives in Oregon. http://christiengholson.blogspot.com/.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Battisto
Dry Cool Garden
Your small hands open
the dry cool garden.
The mountains there allow us to be older
than our sleep.
We see where the horizons palely
folded in on themselves,
we see their thin red roots
the light has been making beneath the hills.
We see the palm tree centering the landscape,
keeping the morning and noon and evening in its leaves.
The plants hold their shadows inside their crowns
and receive the coolness as water.
We can receive less than we need
and make that fact our condition.
And so we alter
our concept of garden,
which is where the beauty of human art
finds the beauty of the world.
In the evening the owl is a story
we tell about the sky.
Your small hands
close again.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Battisto has work that can be found or forthcoming in HAD, Cypress Poetry, Josephine Quarterly, MoonPark Review, Frogpond and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, but you can find him online @michaelbattisto.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sara Fitzpatrick
The Promise of Rot
Something goes off in the cellar. Radish goes
to sponge describing the marital arc—spice
and wood pith to puce paste, sockets cupping
for gone teeth, leather seeking the fond promise
of rot. Something goes off in the bush. Feathers
shake out in the shape of a hand, top hat dove
magic for the kids. A doe feeds too long away
from the fawn. Something goes off in a chest,
lace browning back before the antique bleach,
the tick tic of a pacemaker animating the throb
of useless flesh long after the fingers have gone
numb. Something goes off in a suicide vest
—the heart, always asking the time. North, creaks
the weathervane, there’s a north of everything.
In Chinese, maybe, it’s the direction of how we
get hurt, our radicalization. In every north, a war
is sorting out who is right, perpetual as rust.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sara Fitzpatrick is author of a debut poetry collection, Bury Me in the Sky (Nixes Mate, March 2020). Her work has been published recently in The Tampa Review, The Night Heron Barks, XRAY and Anti-Heroin Chic. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in animal welfare. Find her on Twitter @SaraFitzAuthor
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ja’net Danielo
This body I have tried to write,
this betrayal, to trace its roots in my blood,
through the labyrinth of my mother’s
genome. And I have tried to write myself
into memory, traverse its dark gray terrain
to find myself again. To classify my grief.
Call it fish, thread a needle, stitch the label
into its fat greasy scales. To write my cousin’s
cancer into a beautiful life, a horse running
on shattered ankle, striking white of bone
fragments in dirt. I’ve tried to turn bad cells
to ghosts, starve them of milk & honey
offerings of myself. And capture butterflies
like in that sixth-grade science project, how I
took scissors to the Audubon Guide, how precise
the curve of my hand as I made my way
around their wings. How I mounted their
bodies, contained them, pressed glass against
burnt siennas, icy blues. How I named them:
swallowtail, red admiral, mourning cloak. An exercise
in precision, I thought it would always be
that way—clean white space, a place for each
gold-winged thing: which beast carried poison,
what beauty could kill, & which rose from the two
wild daffodils in my childhood yard into the sky
like a black-flecked flame ready to burn
anything in its path.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ja'net Danielo is the author of The Song of Our Disappearing, a winner of the Paper Nautilus 2020 Debut Series Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in GASHER, Mid-American Review, Radar Poetry, Gulf Stream, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA with her husband and her dog. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Stephanie Kaylor
He Tells Me to Take Care of Myself
The days the smoke stretches
into our eyes from the wildfires
of Seattle. Burning, like everything
else: summer in New York,
we keep every window shut—
the sun, so brazenly
the reign of Leo, charging in
more forcefully
in the wake of confrontation—
the barriers we pretend to keep
papering the houseplant leaves
into shrunken, failed histories
we’ll sever before we ever read.
Beside them already,
new offshoots, little fools
who don’t yet know
that soon, it will be coming
to take them, too.
There is always more to say
when you let there be, but then
there is no answer from the other side.
A flower in the throat is rotting;
winter in Louisiana will never come.
Perhaps there is no such thing
as a perfect environment, an Eden,
prospering for everything,
so we simply raze them all—raze
the stakes, raze tirelessly as late July,
the days the morning after stretches
into afternoon and it is time
for both of us to leave. From his floor,
I gather my dress of green silk,
costuming myself as something watered
& wanting to grow.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Stephanie Kaylor is Reviews Editor at Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is completing her PhD at UC Santa Barbara and curates the Sex Workers' Archival Project. She lives in Brooklyn.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Afton Montgomery
Tuesday after the long weekend
I’m baby-fisting an Etch A Sketch at the dentist’s office:
green chiles are roasting, their smell under the curve of pumpkin skins
in the magnetic sand grains dragged to their places by round white dials.
Almond Joys are still in the bag: worthless to trade but Mom’s
favorite. We’re stripped of puffed parkas and capes, smearing
witch-eyes on the hat strings untied by our mitted pink
thumbs. We construct carpet-side shop windows of cardboard
to trade Smarties, royal Milky Way Midnights, and the single
full-size Butterfinger from the house on Mississippi, plastic cauldron.
The spaniel knocks the silvering 3 Musketeers pyramid
askew with her snout and its stinking coat of eye-ooze.
Colorado’s record cold will continue through Thursday (from the staticky television box
over the big rump ladies and the files they bend over and over
to find records of my teeth, which “just have to be here somewhere”).
I shake the image in my lap, hard, wishing to be anywhere
but here, even as the sweating chocolate scent remains—
metallic grains unyielding in the sticky sweet of something old.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Afton Montgomery is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho, where she is the managing editor for Fugue. She was selected by Vi Khi Nao as the prose winner of the 2021 Mountain West Writers' Contest at Western Humanities Review and was a finalist for The Pinch Literary Awards in nonfiction in 2018. She also has recent work in New South. Afton was formerly the frontlist buyer at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and calls Colorado home.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jenny Della Santa
Trying to Find My Mother in the Dark
Wait,
I’ll fall asleep soon
work dark
a spider
spinning post to post
a wake of lace
to cull you
from the hours lost
between the ear-marked pages
of your magazines
tissue-thin
edges unbound, lost
inside the creased ads
for last summer’s cruises
fingers tracing never-made recipes
unfinished crosswords penciled in
then erased
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jenny Della Santa’s poems have appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, Birdcoat Quarterly, Palette Poetry, Pretty Owl Poetry and other publications. She was an Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize winner and nominee for Best of The Net and Best New Poets. She has an MFA from Mills College and lives in Oakland with her husband and young daughter.
________________________________________________________________________________________
José Angel Araguz
Pen
for Patrick
He explains how one
would warp from writing
in ambulances.
Taking a person’s
name and vitals,
a pen would
bear with him,
take the shape
he holds now
between empty fingers.
This shape he shares
with me while speaking
quietly, I hold it now
and in this space is
the evidence of what is left.
________________________________________________________________________________________
José Angel Araguz, Ph.D. is the author of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review and Oxidant | Engine among other places. He is an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He blogs and reviews books at The Friday Influence.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sihle Ntuli
Mozambique
from the port of maputo
a current drifting in
& with it comes
a gathering of waves
& the warm waters of the indian ocean
while breathing in
the agulhas current
a pressure placed on bones
the natal pulse clenching
until a sudden realisation
that you have been holding
on for far too long
& on the verge
of burrowing too deep
on the inside
of a beachside reflection
the gusts of winds are blowing
for all moments you have survived
for moments still to come
the ones we do not yet know
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sihle Ntuli is originally from Durban, South Africa. He has had poetry published in The Rumpus, SAND Journal & Transition Magazine amongst others. He is the author of the chapbook Rumblin (uHlanga 2020).
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jeanine Walker
A Plea
Dig into me with your heels,
with the blunt end of a shell you’ve broken in two and dulled down.
Dig so I can feel it, but don’t break the skin:
blood on your hands is as good as a call to stop digging.
This is what I do. I close the door
to my room and don’t answer when
you knock. But I don’t want you
to stop knocking.
There are two ways to dig: for your pleasure, or for mine.
Nothing now will please both of us
at the same time.
Dig into me with whatever you have: your bitten-down fingernails, a wooden spoon.
Just dig.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jeanine Walker has been recognized with grants from Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center and Wonju, UNESCO City of Literature. She has published poems in Chattahoochee Review, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review and elsewhere. She has a full-length collection forthcoming in 2022 from Groundhog Poetry Press. She lives in Seattle.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Julia Hands
car camped on the olympic coast
let’s dream ourselves back
to your summer truck bed
those piny evergreens
there’s no moon yet
there’s moss on the tree
& the sky is lit pink
you say you like the clear skies
& i say i like puzzles
like a knotted necklace
like a good poetry line
if you pull the right threads
it all spills loose
in your palms
like wheat flour
or sea foam
churning with
what comes next
when it will crash
down the boughs sway
pull the darkness over us
the headlights recede
the first curve emerges
________________________________________________________________________________________
Julia Hands is a writer and editor out of Seattle. She is the current Editor-in-Chief at Crab Creek Review and has fiction and poetry published or forthcoming from publications such as Cream City Review, The Evansville Review, Whale Road Review, and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Matthew Herskovitz
In the Event of Moon Disaster
Inspired by: Alejandro Derieux Cerezo, “Elegy For a Man-Body”
fate has ordained
I was there. Stuck on the rock
that outlines me—this
is the grass that grows
between us. You and me—
where
did you think the first
seeds’d
come from? Where did you think
my water would go? It
flows where it flows, where it flows, where water belongs,
in the cracks between earth.
They sent me to flourish,
to give it my all. Secular rites.
Memory blessing.
My body
to the deepest of the deep
I have no choice
but to love this place:
pebbles dust
beneath me
________________________________________________________________________________________
Matthew Herskovitz is a poet from Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently a senior studying English at the University of Maryland, College Park with plans to pursue an MFA in poetry in the fall. His works have been published in Stylus, Laurel Moon and Chameleon Magazine.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Katherine Huang
The Watchmaker Dreams
After John Adams, The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra
the planets
he said
i will have
the planets i made
for dinner
planet means
wanderer
and he wanted
a heart like
the planets
jeweled melons
pirouetting
on the frosted
glass spinner
of the dinner table
spinning in time
to the one planet
he’d saved as a toy
speckled
with people
hustling through
lead-colored
cities when
he wound the key
and a sun rose
oh how he wanted
a planet heart
to chase
his river of a wife
and clutch her
like silk
in the meat
of his hands
whirring whirling
around the room
to the gears
ticking away
in the toy planet
with its figurines
going nowhere
just like
the two of them
a silk sash
perfumed
with jasmine
and freshly
baked bread
________________________________________________________________________________________
Katherine Huang is a graduate student in genomics and computational biology at UPenn. Her work has appeared in print/online at various places—most recently Pangyrus, West Trestle Review and Sweet Tree Review. When not writing or sciencing, she enjoys dancing and taking naps. You can find her on Twitter @Katabolical
________________________________________________________________________________________
Malorie Varnell
Jellyfish, Freshwater (Craspedacusta Sowerbii)
My father, resilient like ice, aware
when he is turned upside down.
Not bothered by disorientation, always
recovers and flips himself up right.
Seeing him, you’d never know
what he’s lost.
The heaviness he carries—
took his mother twenty-one years to say,
I love you.
His love dissolved by the sun.
He holds these tight,
shuts me out to stay comfortable,
only hugs for show.
He comes from freshwater, and I
come from salt.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Malorie Varnell is a student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, working on her Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design. Malorie’s love for poetry began after reading her mother’s work. She is moved by how poets tend to look at the world and aspires to become a poet herself.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Meredith Arena
Crow Time
I’m going to walk around my house
again for not the last time
now wanting a solution
for some other vacancy.
Repetition tempts me into solitude,
climb the stairs ignoring the same images:
Dust bunnies gathering on the plains
of dented wood, fields of rye.
Always soft swooshing from
here to there, a snail’s breath
whips them up;
a murder arrives outside
takes up residency on power
lines. War begins again.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Meredith Arena (she/they) is a queer writer originally from New York City. She moved to Seattle in 2011 and learned how to drive in 2015. She is an interdisciplinary teaching artist, facilitator and organizer. She served as an editor on the journal Lunch Ticket for two years. Her work can be found in various journals including Longleaf Review, Entropy, Lunch Ticket, Peatsmoke, Blood Orange Review and forthcoming in Poetry Northwest. She was the 2021 Erin Donovan fellow in poetry at Mineral School in Washington. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Laurie Sewall
dream of the great water-being
Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere.
—Tracy K. Smith
we are holding torches and the pillars lean
on us at night in a sea where islands
reach out for miles. we are not/we are
not waiting for anything, yet a sense of departing—
depending on the sea for everything, and in this
we are together. specific specks of land call
to us for miles—ahead/behind/surrounding
our place, the space upon which we stand. I under-
stand something is about to be granted, but not
in the usual way. with this comes
the heat of drums from across the other
islands, as we are found—carried into water
by huge arms/forest-knowing-water-being
who tunnels through reels, real path-
ways undersea—not caught in the mouth
of the ocean but held/as if we could be broken, yet
we are not—undulating through it, this awake
and silver body, yellow birdlike fins with coral
undertow—all motion while still underneath.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Laurie Sewall’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Louisville Review, Minnesota Review and many other publications. She received an MFA in poetry from New England College and an MA in counseling psychology from Lesley University. She lives and teaches in Iowa.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ariel Clark-Semyck
nausea
another spit-ball day
the sun has circled to monitor
your deadpan downfall
a floppy disc frowning in wilting frills
bugs worm well into your obsoleting core
like a mouse to a hole you run
the gamut for wisely living in fear
spin cycle straps the tinfoil hat on, mucks
your gum-skull numb, infinite ukulele strum
the eyes in the mirror
flashing creaturely hunger
you could pull your own ponytail forever
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ariel Clark-Semyck is a writer from Chicago. Her work has been published in X-R-A-Y Mag, Horse Egg Literary, Flypaper Lit, Heavy Feather Review, Grimoire Magazine, Witch Craft Magazine, Yes Poetry and elsewhere. You can find her scuttling around on instagram: @mousecadet
________________________________________________________________________________________
Kevin McIlvoy
Privacy Curtain
Nurse said to draw the privacy curtain around the resident—
said, It makes the resident’s world larger, do you see?
Because I couldn’t see, she said, Lie down, young man,
and pushed me lightly onto the other empty bed, and took a
step back, smiled as my neck and hips and knees lowered.
She said, Look at you. I’ve already made you—I’ve unfolded
and spread and smoothed and tight-tucked you like layers
of bedding, and have turned you down neatly—that is what we
assigned do, who are the assigners, too. We join you in
the cradle holding your changing form. We learn you.
The rustling pages of the old resident’s breathing subsided—
his life-leaving sound was his only tongue and was, now, mine.
Pretend, she said, that you are small and still, and all
who aren’t the residents of your world will have to draw aside
their wonder-horror with their fists in order to look at you, tiny as
a flax seed fallen there from some nonresident’s chin or apron,
as quiet and as inhumanly venerable and vulnerably
human as anything you’ve ever seen from a distance higher
than any distance you have known or dreamed.
The curving sounds of the curtain rings travel through
and through you and the residents to whom we are
assigned. Our opening faces are the stunned
curved faces of lilies the full sun has moved beyond
the furthest possibilities of last-blooming.
What are you doing, love? This isn’t the time for you
to nap—get up, Nurse said. Come outside now. We’ll have
a smoke in the lot, throw our butts at the new electrified fence
to test the limits of the charged fields of darkness.
And I’ll button my blouse so you’ll look at my old
face. Gaze as long as you wish. I assign you this.
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Kevin McIlvoy lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His most recent poems appear in The Georgia Review, Consequence, Willow Springs, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Barzakh, The Night Heron Barks and other magazines.
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Rachel Marie Patterson
Market
The grocery store entrance is fussy
with apples and chrysanthemums.
In the spice aisle, my daughter clowns
for shoppers who coo and grin.
As soon as they’re out of sight,
she holds her breath because
I will not let her twist open the cloves.
Elsewhere, as always, I am conjuring
the days when I shopped alone—
had time to hesitate, weigh the bananas.
Still drifting in the check-out lane
as my daughter shrieks, stretches
for packs of gum. Until the man
in line behind us is standing too close.
Teacher who ran his fat finger across
my jaw. Neighbor on the news who lured
a toddler to his garage. I leave a 12-pack
of soda-pop on the conveyor belt,
wheel past the teenage clerk.
Brain now broken, heaving toward
the exit. Snug in her carseat,
my daughter knows only the thrill
of car rides and strangers.
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Rachel Marie Patterson is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. She holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Journal, Thrush, Parcel, Smartish Pace and other journals. The winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her work has also been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her poem “Connemara” was a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. Her full-length collection, Tall Grass With Violence (FutureCycle), debuted in March 2022. www.rachelmariepatterson.com.
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Nadine Rodriguez
Art
Nadine Rodriguez Untitled
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Nadine Rodriguez is a queer, trans non-binary Cuban-American writer and photographer born and raised in Miami, FL currently based in Marquette, MI. They are an MFA candidate for Fiction at Northern Michigan University, a Managing Editor for Passages North and a co-editor for Sinister Wisdom.