Issue 15 Full Text
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Emmanuel
morning with tea
my mother is lull & longing. she brews tea just
to watch the water heat up, watch the color spill
from the teabag, soiling the pot, the clearly
distinct layer between liquid & granules blurring
into one large swirl. she pours one-fifth into a cup
and sits by it in the balcony, breathing over a novel
about war heroes. in the novel, as in this house,
someone is dead. someone’s last name has abandoned
the squad. a priest is counting elegies, but
they could be blessings if inverted. in one chapter
is a field of scattered mangled parts, so that when
you pull out the weed in a garden, you could be
undressing somebody’s wound. mother describes
this as therapy. and be mindful when you meet
a stranger sipping tea, they could be practicing
new ways to preserve a lover’s soft memory.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Emmanuel
the night holds no love
i read of a city where the streetlights cast halos
of people displaced from their lovers’ grips,
how they became a colony of sounds reaching
for what they lost. it means that a finger sometimes
goes at war with its ring, a bullet with its trigger.
you don’t have to come into this room, but if you
do, there is music, there are glasses of white wine,
there is the promise of roses by your pillow, a basin
of water for your swollen feet, a playlist curated
from hours of stargazing. we can be merry, can
libate the wounds in our mouths, can nail wooden
temples for the dreams we took from your grand-
mother, where we carried a tongue bathed in saltwater
as we crossed out the names of cousins who
climaxed into limbo as waves buried the seashore.
we can pour wine and call a toast to dusk. and if we
escape the night, may the bullet be kind to our memories.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Emmanuel
the first lesson—names
every day i lose my name a little: a skewed vowel,
a syllable stretched into a question by our neighbor,
as if to say, this one will survive, and i try to keep
the spirit in my name alive, feed it a serving of wine
for its missing features, smile when it suffers the
accident of accent in my landlord’s mouth. our monthly
compound meeting commences with [extended] sighs.
we are crowdfunding for the woman who opened her
lover’s body to darkness.
there is a cliche in how we practice condolences, how we
tender our palms in unison. e ma fara sile, a wa pelu yin.
but no one offers to tend her grief while she sleeps,
or lingers at the doorway to welcome his silhouette,
or sniffs his encore jacket to retain his scent.
that night, i watch the woman furl beneath
the sheets, a relative perched by her side, supplicating
and in the relative’s muttering i recall my mother, who
the first time i whined about the error in my name,
pulled me at both ears and sentenced me to squats
for assuming the world assembled at my feet.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Emmanuel is a creative writer from Lagos. He was a semifinalist for the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Contest, a honorable mention for the 2022 Stephen A DiBiase Poetry Contest and was on the longlist for the 2021 Ake Creative Trust Award. His works have appeared in Ake Review, Jalada Mag, Twelve Mile Review, perhappened mag and other places. He is on Twitter @mikey_emmanuel
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jill Crammond
How to Bury a Bird
Always the same remedy:
one wispy feather, a dried worm, a slice of beak.
A lover knocks on the door
at the same time
a house wren begins her nest above your porch light.
One wispy feather tucked in your fist,
one wiry wing
folded in the family tree as you wave goodbye.
Your love was an electrician
until he began to go blind.
Going blind. Going home. Two different fossils.
On today’s agenda, a bird, an egg, some dry grass.
Every time you mow the lawn,
a small animal rescued.
Your son cradles a turtle named Corona.
You are still here, one wispy feather tucked in your fist,
one thumb curled around the skeleton of a fledgling.
Wave goodbye to the last lover
kicked out of the nest, eyes not yet open.
When the next lover comes.
When the egg cracks,
shells gather at your feet.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jill Crammond’s chapbook, Handbook for Unwell Mothers, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Slipstream, Sweet Tree Review, Limpwrist, Tinderbox Poetry, Pidgeonholes, Mother Mary Come to Me Anthology, Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry and others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and teaches art and preschool at a nature-based school in upstate NY.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ali Wood
Fable
Back at the lake that used to be an ocean,
a young woman wears a red thong bikini,
and from what I’m told by the hands
of the boy gripping her, she wears it well.
From what I’m told by my girl-eyes too, skirting
where dimpled skin meets the graze of blue-yellow water.
Walking in, it’s hard to feel the cling of pollen
against thigh and not imagine the self
as a repurposed plant, a weed waiting
to be fertilized;
to butterfly my legs apart, let in all that gold;
to look again and find the water hemorrhaging red beads
of dead ladybugs, dozens of them, their own legs
curled compact to their chests,
as though they could hug
life back into themselves.
All these gone bodies
among here-now bodies, bodies irrevocable
sandalwood smoke,
sex ballooning the air a deep fable, a damp want.
Further away the woman glitters red,
sunburn-red, swim-suit red, naked red
and I want to follow the gloss, to take her
away from that boy, her hair in my hands
as I pluck each shining beetle out.
Place one on my tongue and call it a forever
piercing of lady, of lady against lady, a lady train
of lady legs curling into each other—
curling each other golden—
until desire reduces the day to a salt rim
in a freshwater lake,
not unlike a dam, or a lesson, or other things
that are bound to break.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ali Wood received her MFA poetry degree at North Carolina State University. Her poems have appeared in Passengers Journal, Gulf Stream Magazine, Bear Review and others. Ali currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Amy Wang
Summer fire
jumping the banks of the river, the sky flutters
overhead like it knows something I don’t. Like
loveliness is something you can pick up and
swallow, like we only ever open up from outside
-in. Woke up this morning and realized I was in love
with you. Sorry, sorry for waiting to hear your voice
over the phone when I should’ve just called. Sorry
for asking you to bring me down to the fields
with you last night, sorry for pretending I knew
something you didn’t. Sorry I didn’t tell you
about that dream, the one in which we slept through
the evening with armfuls of violets. Feet skimming over
the horizon, seeking the end of the gullies
we ran through as children. Blue checkerboards,
little children running up and down the dirt roads
as if they go on forever. July looming close like a door
that only opens when you load its hinges with heat
—I draw ripples in the pockets of the river, trying to see
you in the flashes of my reflection. Breath,
rushing out of the trees like the guttering
of a match. Sorry for the fact that by the end
of this month, I will still only
be dark grass in a low field, my body studded over
with panes of green dreaming. Sorry that I’ll still
be waking up each morning
realizing I’m in love with you. Still only
waiting to hear your voice over the phone.
I don’t know any better and some days
it feels like I don’t know anything
else.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Amy Wang is a writer from California. She is a 2020 prose alumnus of The Adroit Journal's summer mentorship under Andrew Gretes. When not crying over fanfiction, you can find her translating Chinese literature, coding and taking long walks.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lynne Ellis
To Walk on Earth
with two sentences from Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.
With nowhere to go I took off
my bra, put it back on again, ten
times a day. The weight of my body
compressed the underwires into my ribs.
I heard a lot of people felt this way.
International ambition to go to Mars
had to wait. In hundreds of isolated days
one cohort displayed hibernation behavior.
One cosmonaut grieved the loss of gravity.
Only in space do you understand
what incredible happiness it is just
to walk. He'd said. To walk on Earth.
I wanted a better piano because
you played Beethoven like you'd known him.
We sewed pillowcases over our mouths
& kissed. I felt you as light enough to lift;
your oxygen form wrapped around
my carbon one. Our chemistry a study
of heat: molecules in high energy states
could escape to space if not for gravity,
if not for a blue & fragile atmosphere.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lynne Ellis (she/they) writes in pen. Her words appear in Poetry Northwest, Sugar House Review, The Shore, Barzakh, Stanchion, Full Mood and elsewhere. They were awarded the Missouri Review's 2021 Perkoff Prize and the 2018 Red Wheelbarrow poetry prize. Find their broadside collaboration with Felicia Rice, "A Virus Held Us," online at Moving Parts Press. She also self-publishes fridge poems on Instagram @stagehandpoet. Ellis is co-editor at Papeachu Press, supporting the voices of women and nonbinary creators.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Doug Ramspeck
untitled oracle
father named us
shut up & don’t push it
& you’d better hope
i don’t catch you
& the light in the bedroom
my brother and i shared
grew as dense at dusk
as fertile loam
& we leaned against the windowsill
& imagined that the dimming bodies
of the clouds were broken
handkerchiefs & the sinking sun
was a stalled & bloated wagon
floating in its blood haze
& maybe we spotted the gift
of a dead raccoon at the roadside
ghost creature
surrounded by vultures bowing
their heads
like priests
________________________________________________________________________________________
Doug Ramspeck
untitled oracle
father named us
shut up & don’t push it
& you’d better hope
i don’t catch you
& the light in the bedroom
my brother and i shared
grew as dense at dusk
as fertile loam
& we leaned against the windowsill
& imagined that the dimming bodies
of the clouds were broken
handkerchiefs & the sinking sun
was a stalled & bloated wagon
floating in its blood haze
& maybe we spotted the gift
of a dead raccoon at the roadside
ghost creature
surrounded by vultures bowing
their heads
like priests
________________________________________________________________________________________
Doug Ramspeck
open hand
i once wrote a poem about a skull
& the poem wrote back & said
the world is a rented room
& it said when you scoop out the pulp
what’s left is the scaffolding
& once i wrote a poem about an open-
handed slap & the slap said
every unbroken window is alike
every broken window has a story
& the window wrote back to the slap
that a rounding error explains
the distance between the word
on the page & the word inside
the skull & the window said
i am the tongue that slathers
all words in their saliva
________________________________________________________________________________________
Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, one collection of short stories and a novella. One recent book, Black Flowers, is published by LSU Press. Five books have received awards: Blur (Tenth Gate Prize), Distant Fires (Grayson Books Poetry Prize), The Owl That Carries Us Away (G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction), Original Bodies (Michael Waters Poetry Prize), Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize) and Black Tupelo Country (John Ciardi Prize for Poetry). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Slate and The Georgia Review. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Robert Carr
Reflection in Ice
I’ve always had a hole for there,
and one for missing. In the hole
for there, I keep some black oil
sunflower seeds to feed the gold-
finch, a few resentments
in a crowded kitchen corner,
a pike pulled from lake ice
for the raptors. In the hole for missing,
there’s a jet smooth edge,
a mouth I left outside an unlocked
door, a kiss I didn’t catch.
Holes are wincing eyes in a skull,
whirlpools in the dark keeping me
alert to what I have, and don’t.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Robert Carr
I Contemplate a Passing Sky
Everyone is going.
Ellipses of birds
cross a flat grey
green, rumpled paper
sky. This isn’t sadness,
simply movement.
Autumn spattered skin,
marbles grinding
in my knees.
Across the lake
a dog howls. Wakes
of boats
break waves
on dock posts.
I’m on my back,
float beside a yellowed leaf,
legs wide,
drifting North.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Robert Carr
Not Unlike My Father
I dream
in a four-hour radius.
New England coast,
anywhere
between Gloucester
and Belfast.
I live
most of my life
at a distance from
where I am,
imagine they’ll find me
glowing in a room,
Ocean Sunset
playing on the screen.
Disc package torn,
Ambient Calm,
remote cupped
in stiffening fingers—
The sound of waves,
filling far off spaces
I’ve abandoned.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner Journal, Maine Review, Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Selected by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, he is the recipient of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org
________________________________________________________________________________________
Nano Taggart
On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three
We can’t help and we can’t help but postpone grief
with something. Our hero had given up but hope
has again regained hold. Isn’t it strange that zero
isn’t nothing? And so we learn you can buy time
(once it's running out) with winter’s inversion
bearing down so low we could lose the sun
if we didn’t know where to look. It's strange to know
that zero had to be invented as I notice Natalie’s row
of unlit candles has collected a thin skin. What would
you mail a twenty-five-year-old that's dying? Hand-
written notes from all of us. Knick-knacks of short
purpose? We feel as though we’ve cut a larger hole
around a hole. It’s stranger still that zero was invented
independently and all over. It’s not the same as nothing.
We’re making a list. A short list.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Nano Taggart lives among the red rocks of southern Utah with the poet Natalie Padilla Young, where they stumble through the inner-workings of Sugar House Review. He's a recipient of an artist’s scholarship from the Utah Division of Arts and Museums and he has some stuff in/forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Terrain.org, Weber—The Contemporary West, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He would like to meet your dog.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Mary Ford Neal
O California
after Danez Smith
California’s an empty page, but scented like a candle
so you have to write over someone’s idea of loveliness.
Nomatter how delicate the fragrance, I could write
a fist. I could write a swollen eye. I could write a lie. Perhaps
a little blasphemy is okay. Bruises are not okay
in California. Perhaps I bother about bruises
but don’t even notice my snapped neck.
Whatever you do, don’t move me.
I’m resting on the lip of an ocean, and I want the ocean
badly, but not this one. This one spits cold.
I need the one so vast its edges are always gentle.
I’ve told them that by evening I’ll be on a plane. I know
if I could get to California it would sand me smooth.
I know if I could get to California I could die big,
die pacific, melt into the horizon like a god.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Mary Ford Neal is a writer and academic from the west of Scotland. She is the author of two poetry collections: Dawning (Indigo Dreams, 2021) and Relativism (Taproot Press, 2022). Her poems are published/forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including The Interpreter’s House, Bad Lilies, One Hand Clapping, Long Poem Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, Dust and Atrium. Mary is an assistant editor of Nine Pens Press and 192 Magazine.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jessica Baldanzi
Rough Beast Flies
Ghosting our age, Yeats has been tweeted down:
a clutch of letters and a grumpy mug,
128 characters preserved
on famousprophets dot com. The falcon’s
been grounded, poisoned by lead shot lodged
in the flesh of its prey. In the reeds where it fished
float halves of a plastic ball—bright trash,
blue like a robin’s egg, but the size
of a diviner’s cloudy globe. Launched
and lost by a child, it must have frozen,
thawed, and frozen again to split
in two. Some kind of beast burst out,
took to the air. Only satellites know
to where. Not Bethlehem, Dublin, Coole,
or Innisfree. Here on this rounded
earth, we raise umbrellas against
the rain of data dislodged as that dark form
pumps and wings through bright black skies.
I’ve set my phone to wake me when it lands.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jessica Baldanzi’s writing has appeared in publications from Booth to Genders and she blogs about comics and graphic novels at commonscomics.com. She enjoys the challenge of writing in multiple genres, and just published a lit crit book about female and nonbinary bodies in comics. She has recently refocused her attention on poetry after co-writing an epistolary (and decidedly anti-maudlin) manuscript with her late aunt, as she was dying of pancreatic cancer. Baldanzi teaches writing, comics, literature and theory at Goshen College, a small but mighty liberal arts college on the Indiana side of the Michiana region.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Anne Cheilek
Eclipse
The hole where the sun belongs
is very small. —Annie Dillard
The sentence is a series of arrested falls.
On the ground, under the trees, a salt
of crescents. In the path of totality people
stop traffic and step out. Eyes riveted to
the moment. All the nows hitched up
clanking like articulated railcars
on a lonely freight line. Blur of station.
Snatch of whistle. Snap of serrated pines.
For the purist the sentence has failed
yet lurches on fully loaded. Hoppers
seized up with the dust of memory.
Flatcars filled with the estimate of
accounts. A stab—at what?—for posterity.
The sentence tries to lasso the redshift,
particularize the stampede. The sentence
is a bust. The paragraph is a string of defeats.
The poem is a double blind. Its recidivist
sits inside squinting along the barrel
of her paradox and trying to correct
for parallax error, aiming at a cloud of
cinnamon teal or widgeon but bringing
down instead a circular plug of blue
sky, dead to rights, a manhole cover of
denotation. But for the famished it'll serve.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Anne Cheilek is a writer and editor living in the heart of Silicon Valley—if Silicon Valley can be said to have a heart. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Catamaran Literary Reader, Gone Lawn, Juked and other literary journals. She is a poetry editor for DMQ Review and past poetry editor for Reed Magazine, garnering the latter their first Pushcart Prize.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jeanna Paden
Where do we go from here
the spot behind my eyelids is shot / in the dark, sad / like pouring the sun into bottles / throwing each out to sea / where do people go / to get their hope / where am I / when the sun reaches / its highest point in this sky / then decides it misses its lover and must return / to the cold side of the spinning rock / I have always stood alone / on one leg / in the middle of a small town / meteor shower / I am not afraid of vastness / ice and soot and the missing / sound bites in a static-lined phone—conversation / but where do we go from here / when we are friendly with only the air in our lungs
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jeanna Paden (she/her) is a content marketer, poet/novelist/essayist and founding editor of Antipoetry Magazine. Her work has been published by Foothill: A Journal of Poetry, Her Culture, Pulp Poets Press, Okay Donkey, Harbor Review and others. Connect with her on Twitter @TheHalfway3 or @AntipoetryMag.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Joy Levinson
Liner notes.
We listened to The Church
under a run-off bridge you lined
with votive candles,
stashed an old blanket,
but would not touch me more
than to keep yourself warm.
I didn't know about suppression.
I didn't know that I could touch myself.
It was cold and we were trespassing.
I thought you were supposed to
push me up against a wall.
I didn't know how any of this
was supposed to go. We were fifteen
and we just held each other
as the trucks rumbled overhead,
as winter crept into the water,
trimming it with sharp and frozen hands.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Joy Levinson
Subnivean
Beneath feet of snow,
where it is less cold,
where small plants hold,
like studs, like girders,
walls built in sublimation,
tiny ice castles, crystalline rooms for
moles or mice,
they shelter in snow, until
sudden thaw and flood
an owl's talons,
the fox's keen leap and snout,
weaving ermine,
they haunt those halls,
and why shouldn't they,
which would you choose?
Hold this small velvet against your cheek
which softness does the world need,
which softness do we not?
________________________________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Joy Levinson is a high school teacher in Chicago. Her work has been published in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, Cobra Milk, Anti-Heroin Chic and others. The author of two chapbooks, As Wild Animals (Dancing Girl Press) and Running Aground (Finishing Line Press). Her first full length collection, Uncomfortable Ecologies, will be published in the fall of 2023 (Unsolicited Press).
________________________________________________________________________________________
Juliana Gray
Omega Train
The dead take their coffee black. They slip
habitual shrink-wrapped Danish into their pockets,
where they go stale. When they descend the stairs,
their shoes rasp a dull susurrus. The train
is waiting, doors folded back like wings.
The dead file inside, no touching, no rush,
find their seats or stand, reaching up
automatically for a cold rail.
Their plain dark clothes reveal nothing
of their bodies– of tumors, flu, gunshot wounds,
bad hearts or lungs, overdoses.
Their mouths might as well be wired shut.
The doors furl, the engine chuffs, a chime
signals their departure. Hands empty,
the dead stare out the windows as the train
shuttles past a blur of brick, stone,
smeary light. When the train must pause at a station,
the dead gaze out at the crowd, locking eyes
with waiting passengers who step back,
clutching tokens they’ll someday have to spend.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Juliana Gray's most recent poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press, 2017). Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from West Trestle Review, Willow Springs, River Heron Review and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Madelyn Musick
Blood Orbit
the house slants, all the fruit sweats & flings, in the humidity
even the kitchen floor tempts me, sometimes I drop a nectarine
& watch it roll down the hall with a velocity, admire its planetary
tilting—
we are two nudes alike, restless, undressed, spun up, off axis,
dearest Venus, this is the kind of night where I want to press
hard on the bruises,
find the soft spot, eat without using my hands
a kind of kissing, overripe honeysuckle down my chin like blood
dripping, portrait of two women in red—
most nights I would rather see your ghost, would rather
be haunted than alone,
what is force called when you cannot help but do it?
centrifugal? something arising from the body’s inertia
that acts outward, moves around—
I wonder now, how I never understood,
but want to be showed gravity, not held down, but pulled toward,
to the stony center of its red pit, and later like my love,
create an orbit—
________________________________________________________________________________________
Madelyn Musick is a poet and creative writing instructor with no one home in particular who currently writes in Boston. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina—Wilmington. Her work has been published in Poetry City, USA.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ryler Dustin
Memorial Day
On my father’s street, branches of redbuds bend
with wind and the weight of new blossoms.
Pink petals tumble over pavement, broken bottles,
a streak of green antifreeze outside the liquor store.
Everything looks young, still wet from last night’s rain.
A teenage boy spoons ash on a church’s azaleas,
the scarlet flowers shaking like flame as he stoops
by the yellowed marquee. Praise the bright promise
of our country, it reads above an oily ditch.
At eighteen, my father ran away from home
into the tang of jet fuel and napalm. He tells me
only one story: how he fell asleep by Ha Long Bay
and woke with the sun stitched into his flesh.
His shoulders blistered and peeled for weeks,
leaving blood on the leaves where he walked.
Today we’ll drink beer in his kitchen
and I won’t press him for more—
how he got through the burn, the bullets,
the booby traps blooming like brief, blind stars
or why he freezes, hand on the fridge
as if afraid the past waits inside—
as if the dead and unsaid
might burst into brightness,
that waking of light when it’s opened.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Ryler Dustin has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam. His poems appear in places like American Life in Poetry, Gulf Coast and The Best of Iron Horse. "Memorial Day'' features in his forthcoming chapbook, Something Bright, available from Green Linden Press, and you can reach out to him via his website, rylerdustin.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michelle Park
Dear Mother
Your husband shivers onto his bed
in the living room, smothered in light
grey ashes that smell like concrete.
He flashes his hands at me,
covered in calluses, as if a thick fabric
has cloaked it, and says that it’s because
of moving steel poles twice his size.
It’s only been two months. The dark
circle under his eyes descends down
onto the crest of his cheeks. He says
it feels as if time has stopped there,
the draining hours reviving longer
and longer each day. Today he’s fast
asleep before he’s able to watch
his favorite sitcom, and I hope
he was only on crane duty. Every
morning, I see him crawl out
of the house, disappearing
into the dawn, towards Naksan-gil,
and into the swell of the roadsides,
their piquant smell turning bitter and rusty.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michelle Park is a 16 year old junior currently living in the Philippines. Many of her poems are about nature and memories from her childhood. She loves to eat food, and during her free time, she enjoys playing soccer, dancing and listening to music. Her works have been published or are forthcoming in The Weight Journal, The Rising Phoenix Press, One Art Poetry and elsewhere.
________________________________________________________________________________________
McKenzie Teter
Where Do You Open?
“Where do you open? Where do you carry your dead?”
—Heart, Maggie Smith
See? Under my tongue, lying flat
as knives, are the women of my life.
Some as familiar as flesh and lips,
some as transparent as a fable.
They were swallowed whole by their lives
and revealed to me in manageable pieces.
An anecdote here, a joke there, until the vision came together.
A painting so large, I had to step back to see it fully.
Between my fingers and in the creases of my elbows
are the men. Though I have tried and tried, something
about them won't come clean. Generations of stubbornness
I have yet to crack. The keeping of tradition can be
a violent act, and I have the knuckles of my father.
Deep under my nails you’ll find the fibers
of one boy’s shirt—the result of holding on too tightly.
Between my toes are someone else’s track marks.
Dangling from my ear is someone else’s jewelry.
A Frankenstein's monster of my own history.
Unearth my chest and the stories will emerge gasping for air.
I am nothing, if not wide open. A fruitful thing
with a seeded core—some sweet, some cyanide.
________________________________________________________________________________________
McKenzie Teter is an alumni of the University of North Carolina Wilmington's MFA program, where she studied poetry. Originally from Ohio, her work focuses on working class themes, family dynamics and her Italian heritage. Her work appears in the Italian Americana Review, Voice of Eve Magazine, Foothill Journal, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. She can be reached on social media or through her website: @kenz_teter & mckenzieteter.com
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lawrence Di Stefano
Percolator
There is no other way to begin but by returning
to the rounded edge that bends square
into circle—a recurring kitchen scene of morning
and the satisfaction of seeing separate ends
made compatible—an inhuman, perfect form of blue
flame to copper plate, the direct contact in facing
the day with its submission. A mounting pressure
building and in its chrome the same portrait
wavering with steam—a nervous energy, the constant
need to be transformed. This is one way of passing
through a system of obscured miracles, with only
the muffled sound of some quiet struggle
as evidence to what appears on the surface,
as a kind of grace.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lawrence Di Stefano
Constellation
A sky infested
with stars,
is perhaps
what the fly sees
when it collides
with itself
in the bathroom
mirror. Flies
appear around
excrement,
and the dead
—rats too.
Someone points
out that star
is rats
spelled backwards.
A constellation
sleeps beneath us,
wakes at night
while we sleep.
In a haze,
the fly dives,
then dies
before we wake.
As we
brush our teeth
in the morning
and later exchange
words—
words we will
surely mishear,
misinterpret,
the power lines
will buzz outside,
though,
the landline
has gone silent.
If you want to see
stars during
the day, all you
have to do is go
down into
a deep hole,
they say,
and look up
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lawrence Di Stefano’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Free State Review, STIRRING, The Shore and Santa Clara Review, among other journals. He holds an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University, is a Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and a Best New Poets nominee for 2022.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alicia Byrne Keane
Recently Deleted
The dusk, layered
purple at its furthest edge;
the washing machine’s circular whine;
the windows angled open, amber glow
segmented by blinds; the string of fairy lights
in a nearby garden. I hold my phone
out of the big landing window, experience
the evening as a consistency of temperature,
an envelopment like loose silk clothing.
I sit on the stairs for a while, although
I have no benchmark for when you are meant
to feel you have ‘taken’ the view ‘in.’
I am trying not to think of parties on patios,
of wet grass blades on calves and ankles,
vision pulsing numb with sun
or its absence in the cool interiors of trains.
I forget to close the window when I leave,
back up to my room, will only notice
when I sink through the darkness
of the stairwell later for a glass of water.
The sky indigo now, moths thumping in;
a portion of air with no glass
between myself and it, a matte hush
it seems I could reach to skim.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alicia Byrne Keane is a poet and concluding PhD scholar from Dublin. Alicia has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is in receipt of Irish Arts Council Agility Award and Dublin City Council Bursary Award funding, with a debut full collection forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Erin Little
I’ll never forgive you for loving me most beautifully at the Super 8 in Lake Charles, LA
Thin sheets, analog clock radio, fatigued rattle
from the window unit. The shower rail you used
for leverage to enter my many rooms. Never
more animal, more feral or brute than inside
those yellowed walls. We took photos of ourselves
in a bed where many had fucked before us, would keep
fucking after us, ecstatic to capture desire in the face,
to prove to ourselves this happened, we did this.
The night cleaved in two like a peach & we patted each
other down, lingering in soft places. Puppy bellies stretched
under fluorescent lights. How come nothing was more tender
than the middle of the night when I had food poisoning & you
went into the strange dark for me? You took my pains as your own
in a room done up in cheap plaster that wouldn’t last the summer.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Erin Little is the former editor-in-chief of New Delta Review and an MFA candidate studying poetry at Louisiana State University. Previously she was an editorial assistant at Penguin Random House in New York. Her work has appeared in Prelude Magazine, HAD, New Orleans Review and Chestnut Review. Find her online at eringlittle.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Abigail Chang
How I Live
After a little while of holding it in
I decide to get ink on my arms.
Great patches of it.
Tracing along the spine of the night
I notice three ridges
where the toes should be,
which is not at all auspicious.
So I only go when the light begins to gray, every
beam spread thin like headhair. Every night
holding me in transit. Between the it and the then.
I can’t see
very far beyond the turn
which is always moving away from us,
and we had promised we’d be together for
this prehistoric moment. A moment which is trying
to become the pelt that does the holding.
I can’t seem to forgive
and I’ve already forgotten how to forget.
I just keep on eating olives.
With bread or spread thin,
or mixed with cheese, until they start rolling
down my throat with no effort at all, as if
they were the marbles and I was the track.
We were barely children when we planted
an olive plant
in a little pot of terracotta,
the former of which blossomed
into a tree,
which later outgrew the pot, which fell
backwards off our balcony, and landed with a
noisy splat on the ground several
floors below. Do you remember?
It was a wet, cold,
noisy morning with too much rain.
I don’t think you’d remember.
You would have been too big, while
I was still in that pocket of time
when I was young and impressionable,
and all was well.
Here, in the square and at night, the lamps hum
quietly to themselves and I can’t see far beyond
my own hand. But the tattoo parlour is close by,
and even through the fog
I can see the familiar glow
of a 7-11.
Turning to our mother,
I ask her the time.
Just this once I hold it in and she seems to appreciate this.
I compliment the brim of her hat, which is blue.
Our car bumps lightly over the soap
and for a moment I feel as if I am home.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Abigail Chang is a writer based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cortland Review, Citron Review, Gone Lawn, Gulf Stream, Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. Find her at twitter @honeybutterball
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ion Corcos
The Salt on Rotten Apples
A car door shuts, a tram clatters;
rain, no umbrella. An assembling of desire.
Nearness: unpainted apartments, a steeple,
inexactitude. All the forgettings.
The stream under Lion’s Bridge is now a river;
it drapes its low banks. Abiding
in the rush of water, the impermanence
of mountains. Left behind, snow peas,
rotten apples, old silence. A red fox.
A solitary walnut tree, yellowing.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ion Corcos was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969. He has been published in Cordite, Meanjin, Wild Court, The Sunlight Press and other journals. Ion is a nature lover and a supporter of animal rights. He is the author of A Spoon of Honey (Flutter Press, 2018).
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alec Hershman
Ars Poetica
The King and Co. would be coming
with their laughter and their hounds
and the glee of their triggers. From nerves,
I thought to excuse myself. I don't know how
the antechamber extended
so as not to let me get too far.
Or how the ears outran me
like light in a mirror. To play the fool
was the only corner left, I felt. Forsaken
by speed, I turned to camouflage
and sprinkled myself with the cheap,
shredded cheese the kitchen used
to make the Royal Burritos. I lay prone
and sculptural on a foyer table.
It was a measure of my heat,
and of my wit. The King came in,
his stooge in tow, and like a wind
over grasses, little switches flickered
in the eyes of all my friends.
Of course he saw me there. And was derisive,
and amused. I hate your work and always have,
he said, and the lie of overstatement
seemed suddenly a bully's form of grace.
My chased heart stood still and lewd,
and sent a fistly smirk across my face.
I had been too hard on myself,
and there was a nausea in knowing it.
Cheese fell from my chest
in soft, shaggy pieces.
It was hard to fear him,
faced with his comedic churl, and mine,
and the overvelvet of his robes,
and the haughty circles of his fingers overhead.
He had stepped through a small fog
at the entrance I had mistaken for a ghost,
and the bald spot with apology he sought,
once stubborn as a tooth within me, rose
easily and white upon my tongue.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alec Hershman (he/him) is the queer author of the forthcoming For a Second, In the Dark (MWC Press, 2022), as well as two previous volumes: Permanent and Wonderful Storage (Seven Kitchens, 2019) and The Egg Goes Under (Seven Kitchens, 2017). He has received awards from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The St. Louis Regional Arts Counsel, The Jentel Foundation and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art and Natural Design. You can find links to his work online at alechershmanpoetry.com. He lives in Michigan.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alison Hurwitz
Understory
We take the long way home,
eyes pixelated, still blinking
motes from manufactured light.
We try to walk the twilight in.
Foliaged among the ferns
and redbud shadows, we almost miss it
there, until a trembled branch reveals
its presence. Barred Owl.
Two scrying pools gaze into us,
rearranging time until the owl unfurls
its wings of muscled silk,
springs up to cup the dusk like water.
We forget that we have
names, watching hunger rise
beyond the river beeches: that curve
of owl flight, cutting loose the moon.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alison Hurwitz's recent publications include Global Poemic, Words and Whispers Journal, Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic and A Book of Matches. Her work is forthcoming from Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth and The Shore. Alison lives in North Carolina with her family and rescue dog. She hosts a free monthly poetry reading, Well-Versed Words. See details at alisonhurwitz.com
________________________________________________________________________________________
Rachel Walker
Elegy for a Live Oak
Before the riverbed dried and chalked the roots
of the live oak behind your house, wisteria
shocked the grocery store parking lot and
we split a carton of milk against the pavement.
Before the cracked metatarsal bone, we woke
to pain without the memory of its source.
We dreamed of that choked-up river,
of our thirst, the snarling dog. Before the room’s
bright green walls were lined with crates
of rotting apples, their fragrance curled in our throats…
the day flourished each of its hours: we cooled
our backs on the marble floor, and the oak leaned
into its vision on the water.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Rachel Walker
Pantoum
Soon, the paper birch will shed its bark
beside the unnamed statue checkered with rust.
When I returned to the old house,
sunset kindled the onion flowers.
Before the statue was checkered with rust,
we buried a bird beneath the molded bark.
After the sunset, an onion flower hovered
like a second moon above the grave.
The buried bird molds beneath the bark,
and I place my subject behind your eyes.
For a second, the moon above the grave
is sharp: it crosses over our shadows.
This place is my subject. Behind your eyes,
the old house returns. When I
am sharp, I will cross over our shadows,
and the paper birch will shed its bark.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she is an MFA candidate at UNLV. Her work has previously appeared in Mud Season Review.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jared Beloff
Returning from the Dead to Stare at Random Objects
after Emma Bolden
The silverware leapt from the drawer,
my shelves, stacked books, playbills
and figurines gone too. You left the pillows
on the right side of the bed, changed their cases,
folded a towel to hang on the rack
like a drop at the faucet’s rim.
I thought of run-off, the rainbowed sidewalk
as we walked home from the park. Salmon arched
in the wrong direction on grocery advertisements.
We stopped arguing against things, let them wash
across scales back out to a middle distance—
You caught me staring again. We touch
this silence, feel its heft, size its waist.
I keep expecting the tide, a naked moon.
I return to the pillows. What do you want?
A spoon lies face down in the drawer. I return
it to the others, their heads caught, cradled.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jared Beloff lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. His debut poetry collection, Who Will Cradle Your Head, is forthcoming with ELJ Press in February 2023. He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses. You can find his work online at www.jaredbeloff.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Wallis
Orpheus as a Wolf
I dreamed the wolf running
a grey winter beach,
primestrong
and full gallopsteam in his coat,
his paws pounding his prints
in the flying sand da-dum
da-dum, da-dum, heartstrong
and running now into the rolling
suck and surf as the waves break
gentle, near the end of the beach
he makes his turn,
at tongueloll and panting after his run,
when the plain floods with gold
light, and... disappears,
as a decision is made that would take
the heart of you or I, and leaves
his ringing howl alone
in the bare cathedral of sea and sky,
save for the drunken drumbeat
of his own low hung heart
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Wallis is based in Scotland, UK and publishes cross genre. Highlights include the staging of her works, The Rain King and Laridae, and having work in The Yorkshire Poetry Anthology. Her published works include the chapbooks Medusa Retold, Precious Mettle and How to Love the Hat Thrower.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Brooke Harries
How to Test Gold
Some stories only come out for certain people.
When the moon comes down so low,
what does it want?
To dry the clothes on the line too?
It was romantic because he was talking about himself
but it seemed like it could be about me.
Everything romantic is cryptic.
In the end I gave my love a miniature coffin full of poems
he could unfold and unfold.
Now tines reveal afterlives of eating as I'm cleaning forks,
looking for the new sponge I hid around the sink.
It takes a year to find out how bad a person is.
Everything is a distraction from the fact
you can forward anyone’s U.S. mail
up to six months at a time.
I forgot the days of the week in French
but I feel like one is almost like mediocre.
Maybe the middle day, our Wednesday.
I’m in the cool approach distance
hanging around like James Dean.
If I see him my eyes will be dancing on cobblestone
into a place only old stars go, a woozy wanting
not to lose a single thought of him sleeping
with more pillows than the Elephant Man like he joked.
With compassion, with bored reaching.
How my grandma would put a tissue over a lollypop
and made Halloween ghosts that way.
I heard you can choose to stop thinking of certain things.
It sounds miraculous,
like putting a birdcage to sleep with a sheet.
One time my great-uncle chased a bull out on the road
back into his pasture using a tissue and gentle coaxing.
I still wonder,
was he using the tissue like the red cloth in a bullfight,
or did he just happen to have it?
I still hurt under the freight yard.
I waited for someone like this for so long.
He was the type of guy who water-colored
with his back to me.
I want him to land on my lap like a lost purebred.
It happened once;
I named him Jackson.
He was ten years my dog.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Brooke Harries’ work has appeared in Salamander, Sixth Finch, Laurel Review and elsewhere. She has received the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship and the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry. She has an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Adam Day
[And while awareness of and empathy toward issues]
And while awareness of and empathy toward issues
that concern others is important; difficult to know: who might
also voice of when, how or why. What is the proximity
of experience, identity, &c. necessary for one to speak about
for another—in what context is representation permissible,
effective? Of course, there is always firsthand, or what appears
to be, as in:
‘White woman across aisle eyed me entire
flight, gaze widened, neck craned as I (her eyes)
removed (her eyes) my shoes. What could say?
Sometimes I’m afraid I’m carrying a bomb, am
sleeper and don’t know when I’ll awaken. I should have
said: Identity isn’t an end—it’s a portal, a deportation
from the country of mirrors, an inflection within a
question, punctuation in the sentence of birth.’
________________________________________________________________________________________
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020) and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books). He is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha and of a PEN Award. He is editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project from 1913 Press. His work has appeared in the Fence, Boston Review, APR, Volt, Lana Turner, Iowa Review and elsewhere.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Hiers
When Reason Reaches Its Limit
That morning on television
a weatherman warned us
not to shoot at the hurricane
Over his pancakes my father muttered
who could be that stupid
Whenever faced with a disaster
he would knead his rosary
while pacing the garage treadmill
Two irrational actions
that were just different fronds on the palm tree trembling
beyond our little window above the sink
The night before my brother had stayed up painting
I knew this because I heard
the bruising rock music he cranked up when he was
Sometimes he let me glance at the canvases
hidden in his closet
all full of storming blotches
Of his talent my father always spit
that stuff looks like a five-year-old made it
In the hours between that and breakfast
my brother had shot himself
with a pistol stuffed under our old christening gowns
The instrument that extinguished
those fires a lightning strike once lit
in the lush forests of his brain
The masterpiece he had sprayed the walls with
was hard to understand
so my father hated it
________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Hiers is pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Houston. She is from Tampa, Florida. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Hare’s Paw Literary Magazine and Harpur Palate.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Bobby Parrott
In the Drift of an Eye
Before seeing
my ophthalmologist,
I alter myself
a pair of sunglasses
to block my right eye
so only one of everything
slides by as I pedal my bike,
navigate hallways. Doctor
Ortiz smiles big
at my self-treatment,
proceeds with his guesses—
Diabetes? Epilepsy?
Multiple Sclerosis? Each
a rebellion, a sticky schism
arisen between self
and body. So then, what is
a body? A double vision
between one eye’s tight-rope,
the other’s trapeze?
Oh agreement, we must
resolve! Only one eye
drifts, and the pharmacy
of your face collapses
in collage, overlap
and montage, a horror-show
carnival’s Picasso pinball machine
on TILT. So I play along, try
to relax. Begin to see—
How sidewalks penetrate
bike lanes, centerlines disrupt
the punctuation of trees, pinprick
this pulsing vessel. Street-slick
heartbeat in its lethal flow
of cars. Shock-trauma
transfusion in surgical steel—
my shortcut home.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Bobby Parrott's poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism and elsewhere. Wearing a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, this writer dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Hannah Schoettmer
I can't write a love poem to the foothills
after Rocky Mountain spotted fever
in Oklahoma because they tried to take
my mother. They roll around and swallow
you whole is what the fireman told me. There’re fingers
in this river. Things too small to catch
in the drag net, too important not to find.
I go home to the hospital where my mother bleeds
into an IV. The blood tests are ancient but here
they’re the only thing that tells the truth.
It’s an easy fix, they say. The side effects
are minimal. She’s lucky we found the tick head
before her feet started to rot.
The fireman told me to take a kayak
down the river. Alone.
So I push out into the peace
before dawn. There’s a heron. There’s
a hatchet. If you know him, tell him
I know now what he means.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Hannah Schoettmer's writing has appeared in The Louisville Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, SOFTBLOW and elsewhere. She's received a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. She lives in Los Angeles.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lora Robinson
Homeostasis
you have carved your wanting
out of what cannot be melted
what cannot be exchanged
to love is to vacate,
to over-engineer
your silence is a carcass
sun bleached bones
on an empty beach
a rack to be mounted—
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lora Robinson is a Maryland-born, Minneapolis-based poet, photographer, nursing student and cat-mom to Shark and Thea. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Superfroot, San Pedro River Review, Cobra Milk and Ethel Zine, among others. Her first poetry book, An Essential Melancholy, will be published in 2022 by akinoga press. Connect with her on Instagram @theblondeprive and Twitter @starsinmyteeth.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jesse Fleming
The pueblo is an eye
Gone down Deposit Street
Gone to buy stamps
across the new bridge
Running behind the poppies
with the horses, so I'm
gone up into the hills to see them
Closed like Mar Rojo,
wide open like Mar Rojo,
and the tidy row of Helins and Fields
and Calderwoods and Almacks all packed
and the pools drained down to the dust. Soft scuff
on the white tiles in the old school with the green roof.
And Paula and Natalie and Victoria
and David and Pau and Christian
and I sat on the swings and kicked
the weeds that smelled like soaked red pads and fish.
Gone forgiving, gone remembering why
it's the rainbow land and the basura sky
and the hungry air that makes me sick
with belonging to clay
gone with bells on morning on Pascua
on military planes clanging overhead
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jesse Fleming is a Chicago-based writer, musician and environmental justice activist. Her writing has appeared in Backstory Journal, Minnesota's Best Emerging Poets (Z Publishing, 2018), ELDERLY magazine and others. She copyedits for Haymarket Books and has done editorial work and Spanish translation for AWP and Milkweed Editions.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Taylor Cornelius
Brooklyn, February
Salt on the sidewalk to sop up the pitted ice makes your dog’s paws raw,
and she’s up all night licking the pink skin between. You look up mind eraser
and find several ways to make a simple cocktail. When you add the soda, ice floats belly up
around the straw, bubbles a polar bilge in your chest.
You start to see in snow-terms. The snow and not-snow of the streets
on the way to the subway. Reams of surgical masks and a solemn apology
on the intercom mitigate added delays. The gift of delaying
keeps on delaying. Still, you’re impressed by
Manhattan’s glitzed-out mega plows. All the way down Avenue of the Americas snow is crushed
into tectonic mounds. These peaks absorb exhaust until they are obscene Pepsi slush.
At home, you obsess over the machinations of poetics, and pour out a drink. You lose track of the
ways you blotted things out to fix your syntax and ease your ache. Your dog is dreaming again,
twitching in a rabbit chase, black mouth aquiver with mumbled yips. She’s soft as a loaf, and she
imagines her feet thundering cool as grass in some other, endless summer.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Taylor Cornelius
Straw Man
I decide I must be dying, I decide to tweeze my eyebrows,
I’m out of foolish nothings to murmur back to an ex-lover. Once again, the spirit
is gone from the glass. I decide to bake a cake in my own oven again.
Sometimes I wake from a nightjar call and I like to think
I’m a swamp when this happens, surrounded by harmless frogs. I draw
a self-portrait called “Straw Man” and tape it to the inside of my coat.
In the green flat of a park lawn I overhear All the bad stuff too, you can’t take out the bad stuff and still
have that happy memory. It’s like separating wheat from chaff but no one cares if I paint it black and
shove it under a bed. I like myself better medicated.
The distance between feeling and understanding has an expiration date. In the corner of my room, I
see blended shadows like a leather coat, a pack of cigarettes, dirty sneakers.
I forgot to vacuum again.
I harbor unfounded envy like a little dark dock. Every lover’s last lover appears in neon yellow
tracksuits with perfect nail beds.
A year ago I bought every copy of a book so no one else could read it.
I said it was our little secret
but really it was because I hate admitting I loved it after all.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Taylor Cornelius is a poet, artist and writer from Denver, Colorado. Her recent work is published or forthcoming in Poets.org, The Spectacle and Leavings. Taylor is a recent graduate of New York University’s MFA program in poetry and was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship finalist in 2022. She currently works as a freelance writer and lives in Brooklyn.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Metsker
[Leave leave you say]
Excerpt from Psalms of Lament for Divine Imperatives
Leave leave you say
and so I run to the edge of the earth
where it meet the reeds and rocks and think
I’d rather be inside. If it’s true that you live
in the rock face of mountains
glaciers activation pools geysers
this is how a freeway can be a good thing.
It offers so many ways to get away from you.
I can never be the sky. I can never be empathy
persistent. I can’t be a castle or a basilisk.
You in my interior speed by all of my
forgotten dreams to thrust me into daylight
only to remind me that the time change is this weekend.
Can you help me move into my kitchen and put my hands
into silver basin of collapsing shifting ceramic water food
curdled tridents? Because I need to do the dishes.
The conquest of tyrants in the shelter of your market
is on the radio again. Maybe this is heaven? But only
if the sun agrees with the cabinets.
Jocelyn says to look for “it” in the middle of my
dream. But I don’t know what “it” is.
She is sleeping on my couch.
I stumble down to see her curled up beneath
gray is the color of existence. We can’t
get along with every creature because
when we meet them we don’t know what “it” is.
But I remember ocean sequence Swami’s beach
in the town of Encinitas. To sit on the edge of a cliff
and close my eyes and listen to cactus wind waves
breaking into the system as if you were
something we could all believe in.
Tonight when I close my eyes
I hear CDs skipping.
I need to buy more lunchmeat.
The wind is one mile per hour. Last night
it was sixteen miles per hour. I am gold. I have
something I like to hold and cracks in my feet.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Metsker's first full-length poetry collection, Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, won the Editor's Prize and was published by New Issues Press in 2021. Her poetry has been published in Beloit Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Whiskey Island, Rhino, Cream City Review and many other journals. She has also had poems featured on the Verse Daily and the Poetry Daily websites and has had audio poetry featured on the BBC radio show, Short Cuts. She is currently the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Carson Sawyer
Swan Song
Swan songs hang above a gospel.
Plucked feathers fall under broken
connection, a violin. “Il Dolce Suono”
plays again. Low enough for the mut
to get excited, shake its yellow tooth,
to forget what for, and lie back down.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Carson Sawyer writes from the Midwest. His work has appeared in Transom and Inklette.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Gary Fox
Ten Thousands Ifs on the Boardwalk
We eat cannoli
water ice and ice cream like
the fading orange over the ocean
and the pinhole dot of the rising
moon are not miracles
like my wife and her two blood
vessels did not burst
with the purpose of blotting out this
family outing like the dripping smiles
staining our kids’ shirts are not answered
prayers like I did not chant to everything
to attach to this very moment
and everyone has the nerve
to keep walking past
like they don’t see the now
full moon leave a rippling trail
over the ocean towards the holy
spirit like love and prayers did not mend
this possible hole in our being
like we do not have to wear masks
because we can be erased
from the script we act
out like we are not one cough
away from quarantined silence
________________________________________________________________________________________
Gary Fox has poems published in the journals The Bucks County Writer, Toho Journal, The Shore and High Shelf Press as well as the anthology Mass Incarceration in America: Advocacy, Art and The Academy. Also, he had a poem featured online by The Parliament. He has a B.A. in English and a certificate in creative writing from The Pennsylvania State University.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Annalee Roustio
Tending a Miracle
Radically, the way radish transfigures the liver—
this is how I bring her back. With purpled light,
variegating her sundress until the pleats blossom into iris
petals, her body into bulb, rendering her animate. Joyful.
The baskets she wove fill with clean air and quiet,
violets, sweet cheese, rhubarb, arugula, and she eats
where she can be nearest the beetles,
chin cradled in her hand iridescent with veins.
Her elbow is a pestle. Her mortar, the world.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Annalee Roustio is a poet from the Midwest in the third year of her MFA at Southern Illinois University, where she teaches composition and assistant directs the writing center. She also works in marketing and publicity for Persea Books and as an editorial intern for Crab Orchard Review.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Kaelyn Wright
Art
Kaelyn Wright who
________________________________________________________________________________________
Kaelyn Wright is a photographer living in Michigan's northernmost town of Copper Harbor. She explores the concepts of solitude, time and stillness with her work in portraiture and intimate landscapes. The dark coastlines and rugged forests act as not only the backdrop of her work but as a concept to immerse into.