Issue 19 Full Text
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Chelsea Dingman
Letter From the Dead to the Living
This morning, riding the train
past my childhood
home, I am traveling the natural
lapsus of disease,
by which I mean desire
-less fields and grasses
that lay dry
inside the soil. A kind of free
-grace. Beyond longing,
the address that allows the illness itself
to attain its own truth. Broken
geographies of blue
-bonnets. The mind, fragmented
in the images. The green carpenter
bee’s nest falls
from the dead
tree. Plums, apples, peaches—
even counter-memory is illusion now. A child’s bones
deemed too thick
to break, too thin to saw. The mother
who endured a miracle
by falling apart
after ten months in a bath, each
organ a dark
hollow in the language—
the train carrying me
now, both remedy
& poison. Like that life I left to no
one—how violence
is also its beauty—
the cry of the train
whistle against the pines. Rain
that became a reason
someone had to die. The absent sun
falling through the fall
sky. Even in heaven, I long for
heaven. Even here, desire is a wish
for home.
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Chelsea Dingman
Nachträglichkeit
Between survival and surrender, what is rearticulated in the shadow
archive? If memory is present
not once, but several times over. As it rained, it might’ve been
summer. To enter the forest across the street
from our house, I might’ve agreed. Only in writing
about my father years after he lay down
by a roadside, do I re-transcribe
the encounter. With time, or death. My own
loneliness. I was only nine. The older boy who took me to the woods
moved soon after. My father went away for work
that winter & did not return. Yet, I return to memory
unarmed. The red cedars loom. They allow me to remain
unseen when the boy takes off my clothes. I remember sky.
I remember looking up. I remember not wanting
to look at myself, unsure why. I remember running home
through the dusk until home was a memory of trees
and dusk, the betrayal of the body
that would later become a disturbance
like love. If time too can be lost,
the shape of the world I was. Beneath the shimmering leaves
strewn across my bare belly and back. I’ve learned nobody
exists, day or night, except in the present. That I might
betray what I know, even in memory—
in a year of damp forests, of tenderness
like youth. The dusk, an endless loop
where rain begins & begins. From ruin.
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Chelsea Dingman
Tenderness
May I not disappear inside the loss
May you appear
May proof be the too-close world as it enters the ear
May any of us wake
free from hard grasses that crawl out of our shadows
May this wilderness of unknowing not be a death
May our silence exist only as resistance
May we understand what broke
beneath the sink was a whole life
May deer carcasses & shell casings & fields that used to be
forests mean once
we were something held
May accidents of light be haunted by aviaries
May the war in this afterward be want
May I not want
May the hours be without, as you are without
pain now
May you speak as rain
May you
teach me to belong to the sound
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Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press, 2017). Her second book, through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2020). Her third collection, I, Divided, is forthcoming from LSU Press in the fall of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.
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Noor Shahzad
Bitch Pastoral
Earth as brothel, brothel as the breath of a baby, a star
as a tin cup of lard, bitch-tits as wicks gone black,
black as the pitch of a planet spit out, the moon as a flooding
gland, the moon as one still howl, how to hear what’s still
born, born as something that barks, barking as Bach’s “Pastorale,” the wind
as one long woof, organs gone with the wind, organs as tubes of
sound, an organ playing a fallopian tune, an instrument as a network
of tubes, tubes tied and untied like a shoe, shoo to drive out a child, shoofly
as a rocking horse, hoarse as a galloping larynx, whore as stable
as the wee hours of morning, mourning as a prayer from doves, prayers
as birdseed leading to your mother’s feet, feet as foxtrot, mother as country,
country as cunt, cunt as lampshade, shade as the space beneath
a tree, tree as sovereign, monarch as butterfly, the butterflies are free,
free as falling planets, planets as minipills filled with estrogen, estrogen as
a supernova, superfine as periods of rest, rest as tax, tax as fees
and figures, figure in motion, motion as force, force as orbit, orbit as lady
of the night, night as the scent of a woman, ascension as prostration,
prostitute as forgiveness, forgiveness as a panting
dog, dog as dogma, dogma as literature, literature as Homer’s
bitch, Byron’s bitch, Joyce’s bitch, bitch as a birthright.
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Noor Shahzad
Spring
after Kathleen McGookey
How the air moistens itself like a body. How the river walks
forward again, like the thirst you forgot made a home
in your throat. How the faucet runs warmer, like a hummingbird
up from sleep. Go on, tell everyone you know to come
take sips from the sink, this sweeter water keeping itself secret
through winter. Secret becomes logic again: we turn
the tap for water. Your hunt for money shrinks
in damp dollars falling from the dryer. All that time
spent searching, saving, for this house to say take this gift. We
open the windows to air out aches and pains, to let in
a dogwood-lined sigh from the street. We hang our
grief to dry, we forget it to the coo of a mourning
dove.
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Noor Shahzad
Sunday
There’s day-old dishes in the sink, and the darks
finished drying hours ago. The water in this vase
of still-alive lilies is yellowing, and I’ve not washed
my face. I’ll get up in a few
minutes—hours gone by. The sun drains
itself of day. There is no dinner, I’ll have
a cup of hot milk. If my mother calls
I’ll tell her about the fecundity
of—she’s calling now. Off to shower, I let
her know. If my sister calls, I’ll ask her why the air
doesn’t just whisper in our ear and say I’ll carry you
for you. She doesn’t call, but now
my brother is calling. I tell him worrying
is silly. Tired of the dark, I turn on a lamp, finding
my shadow in the dim living room. I shrink her with
more light.
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Noor Shahzad received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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Jenny Munro-Hunt
The Drying Green (Glasgow Green, 1732-1977)
Did you take the black poles for trees, perhaps
you took the sheets for ghosts?
The women’s eyes
are humming, low and fast,
talking: you are on their land
and the wind’s.
The cotton and the winceyette
are coaxed cool and stiff
dry, that wind
will knock out your kneecaps
if the women want it.
Tonight the children’s beds
and lovely heads
are perfumed with grass
and April and brewer’s yeast.
Do not cut across this place,
as though it were waste ground,
perhaps you took the ghosts for sheets.
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Jenny Munro-Hunt is a Scottish poet. Her work appears in Raceme, Poetry Scotland, The Interpreter's House, The 6ress and several anthologies. Her poetry was highly commended in the 2022 Winchester Poetry Prize and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming from Black Cat Poetry Press.
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M M Porter
On Shaking Hands
You, in a blue cardigan, saying, Strawberry
salad or anything, really, fist open
& looking. We interlace & I pulse
some projection of your funeral:
see every cornflower & delphinium. See
your body nowhere. Your body on the table.
There’s a picture—you always took
so many pictures. It hurts
how I can’t un-conjure this. Every farewell
throated & weeks later, mid-camp night,
these hurricanes happen: fingers skim.
Tongues unravel. Even now, I can’t quite
find water the way it is: on the desk,
in a bottle, waiting to be grabbed.
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M M Porter
Failing Marriage
There’s a scotch glass,
water bottle,
another milk carton:
where’s all this
ruin pouring
from? The river
bed’s retiring
beach-glass sand-downs
& anything
broken can be soft.
When he walks,
he walks
so sharp.
It’s a masquerade,
the way cuts come
warm. Her hand
opens like a mouth,
red on every
apartment wall. Still,
it’s their voice
in this sleep.
She’s untying
this world
in bassinet terms:
can’t buy one
large enough. ’Course
the bird sings
like wind
over reeds, & he
plays telephone
in the mimic.
Him, watching
rabbits
while she keeps sipping
from the bathroom sink.
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M M Porter
On Craving
If picking a body part to borrow
for the night, I’d take your shoulder
blades ironed
against my back. The bondage of another
body. Ingesting this want, I swallow another
croissant & in Macy’s parking lot, I look
at lane markers
pinned to asphalt,
how frequently they’re traversed.
That tire means four tires, & if every
car’s weight can’t crush earth,
why’s absence so destructive? All
these leggings,
all this gravity & shower scrub, & still
nothing touches me on purpose.
Scary what I’d give for a car accident:
even skin welded metal doesn’t feel like
paramedics compressing
my chest. If I could be flower filled,
my breath would stingray every socket.
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M M Porter is attending Ohio University to pursue her PhD in English with an emphasis in Poetry. She is a graduate of the MFA poetry program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Originally from Michigan, she continues to pursue the arts and hopes to one day teach creative writing with others who share her passions.
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Navigation CURRENT ISSUE About INTERVIEWS Shore Things ARCHIVES
Marisa Lainson
Fall in California
Someone drops the marble of the world
into a glass of bourbon. A dark mouth
descends over the rim. Driving down the 5, we
sweat and hunger in our metal husk, counting
jacarandas limp against the overpass. Dutifully,
I witness the flash of purple flowers crushed
between tires and tar, crane my damp body
towards the capsized sedan belching flame
into a wobbling, wildfire sky—
Will it explode? you wonder idly. I implore:
Keep your eyes on the road. The heavy hand
of some bored, cosmic entity tilts the tumbler,
flushing us into October breathless and sick.
Jacarandas wave their bruised arms at our windshield
and beg us to take them somewhere, anywhere
else. Some say the Santa Ana winds are named
for Satan, caliente aliento de Satanás, but I know
the taste of God when he shoves
his dirty fingers in my mouth, the same way
I know fate is just another ghost
story I wrap around my fear. There is no giant
in the smoking hills, only another
matchstick. The ungentleness of human hands.
The highway groans, and I turn up the radio.
Put my feet up on the dash. Watch the smoke
spill darker, stranger, black mold on a rotten orange.
You sing off-key, just under your breath.
The jacarandas burn.
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Marisa Lainson
Old Scabs
She and I lie on sunwarm tile, playing
dead for kicks: ketchup slick
on our stomachs, eyeshadow
stolen from her sister purpling
our eyes. Children, we
have only seen death in goldfish
and movies but make a mock
offering, paint each other’s skin
red for the game, lick our fingers
clean. Later that summer
we carve our names into the dark
oak but pocket the knife, press
together old scabs, wanting blood-
sworn pact sans slice
or scar. How we spurn holiness
unknowingly. Our spines curl
together in the tire swing, her honey-gold
hair tangled with mine. Feet bare
in the dirt, her thigh pressed warm
into my hip, I want to kiss
the bruises on her knees.
I don’t. Always,
I get worship wrong, shy
away from the scythe.
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Marisa Lainson (she/they) is a queer poet from Southern California. She recently earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where she served as Poetry Editor of Faultline Journal of Arts & Letters. Their work has appeared in The Journal, Poet Lore, The Pinch, Frontier Poetry, Peatsmoke Journal, Stonecoast Review and Foothill Poetry Journal, where they were a finalist for the 2021 Foothill Editor’s Prize.
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Catherine Weiss
Marriage: Connected, Unfinished
only using words found in real estate listings
This ideal harbor,
these mature gardens—
kitchen abundance.
Connected by original charm
and many different layouts.
You have been searching for
a custom-built love.
Just steps away from potential touch,
gorgeous appliances.
This absolute one-of-a-kind is
an opportunity to enjoy
the very best the quiet has to offer.
Grand in its day. Needs some work.
Spacious is an understatement.
There's a wall of details.
Sweet hospital window.
Stainless. There's plenty of room
for floating. The perfect blend
of yesterday and today, but the bones
look especially lovely,
so carefully crafted
that they almost disappear.
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Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist living in Deer Isle, Maine. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, Birdcoat, Bodega, Counterclock, HAD and Taco Bell Quarterly. They are the author of chapbook-length poem Fervor (Ginger Bug Press, 2021), full-length poetry collections Wolf Girls vs. Horse Girls (Game Over Books, 2021) and Griefcake (Game Over Books, 2023). More at catherineweiss.com.
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Jennifer K Sweeney
The Little Deaths
The ghosts are all day with us.
Not cartoon roundnesses or bitter haunts
but the stirring upon surfaces
as things let go.
Bellied mouse and husked grasses,
tumbleweed orbs I bundle in late fall.
Whorl of the coyote’s eye as it passes.
We are strangers in our passing but borne
out of a brushed wood I gazed into
moments ago and saw nothing and from that,
the eye
amended the vacancy.
And I thought, I’d seen it before
so familiar as around the old table,
Rose’s eye or Teddy’s eye.
The poem puts on its grief-jacket
to write the poems about death before death
has a shadow, rehearsal when there is not yet
a play. I pull the little deaths close to me.
They are my deaths, they breathe
and lean in like a group of children once
did when I swayed above them
reading a book. The story is short
and when it is over,
they leave and do not close the door.
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Jennifer K Sweeney
Pomegranates
When my neighbors left it was the way you leave
a stove in the desert a secret on a train
the way the sky grows teeth
after decades of champagne the woman
who had both the same first and last name
dropped the bottle of sparkling cider
on the threshold her husband might have
carried her over and though she’d hardly ever said
a thing she screamed goddamnit
into the night the RV loaded with whatever
they hadn’t hauled away
and it sounded like the one true word
undrained from the sieve of pleasing everything.
She wanted to give me the bottle
the woman she’d side-eyed as I raised my sons
next to her with more freedom than she’d allowed
her own now grown and unraveled with divorces
and addictions. I wanted the breaking
to be auspicious I could see
that she didn’t want to go
that something was making her I mean
it was the way you leave
a baby in the rain all wrong and against
the grain but still she handed over the bottles
in my doorway the two that had not smashed
then handed over two boxes of maxi-pads
she didn’t know I couldn’t have
any more babies ten years old they were
but she thought I could use.
I received them with as much tenderness
as I would a baby in the crook of my arm
and hoped she would be happy in her new life
though I didn’t know yet about her
husband selling the house to a bank
and driving them toward the nowhere
town where his mistress lived no house
waiting for them and when the RV trundled off
I waited until they were ripe the pomegranates
they grew but let rot on the tree each autumn.
I couldn’t use the maxi-pads but I picked
armfuls of red fruit it was dusk and the rain
fell softly an owl called
the slender branches bowing to dry grass
and I stood underneath them privately
feeling which ones were heavy with seeds
and which were already hollowed clean.
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Jennifer K Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with L.I. Henley, will be published in 2024 from Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared widely in journals, most recently or forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Guesthouse, On the Seawall, OneArt, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Terrain, Waxwing.
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Emily Patterson
Hope Is a Wildfire
When Canada sends down
its curtain of smoke—rending
the bright June air,
the sun a smudged coin—
night comes sooner
to my daughter’s window.
Rocking her to sleep
in the thick haze of heat,
I think of how some things
only dissipate when you
get close—and that’s a story
I want to tell her, to tell myself,
even though forests
are still burning down
while the sea level rises.
Even though the sparrow,
one wing bent, shuddered
and died on our own porch.
There are so many songs
of loss I’ve yet to sing—
their weight clouding
my vision. Night wings
toward morning, rises
to its music, even though.
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Emily Patterson is the author of two chapbooks: So Much Tending Remains (2022) and To Bend and Braid (2023). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, SWWIM Every Day, CALYX, West Trade Review, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. Emily holds a BA in English from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she received the Marie Drennan Prize for Poetry and an MA in Education from Ohio State University. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.
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Melody Wilson
Resting Bitch Face
To a younger woman being mansplained
in the museum after viewing Alfredo Arreguin’s
The Magic Shawl
What isn’t an eye when breasts
are painted deserts?
Dissolve to background.
You only imagine yourself
solid matter.
Pretend you speak
seahorse.
Don’t smile. Don’t
tilt your eyes
in surprise no need to shatter
his Diego Rivera.
We worked so hard to knit
the shards together.
Let him pointillism,
abstract expressionism. It’s a long, long way
from here to your knees.
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Melody Wilson
Viceroy
It was a particular privilege,
being asked to pull
the slender ribbon of gold,
lift the cellophane
from your Viceroys.
I unfolded the foil corner,
unveiled a row of cylinders
robed in tan paper,
pressed my nose to the pack—
floral with metal on the tongue.
You smack the pack
against your fist, propel
a cigarette out, light it,
(one quick drag, one long one)
exhale, settle it into your
green ashtray, resume typing.
A column of ash climbs
from the tip’s amber crackle
as smoke rises between us.
I watch you work from beyond
the veil, take from you so much—
how your hands move,
your compulsion to burn.
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Melody Wilson’s work appears in Sugar House Review, VerseDaily, Tar River Review and Crab Creek Review. Upcoming work is in Kestrel and Pangyrus. She received 2022 Pushcart nominations from Redactions and Red Rock Review. She was also semi-finalist for the Pablo Neruda Award. She is pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.
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Mary C Sims
Upcycled
His wrist in my jacket, I said, What friends do.
It’s what––& there’s so little to thank when I think
to thank it. On the roof, he’d said, Really close
to getting out of here. & now I wrap fists
by his window, sky uglied violet & him laughing
on the couch. I water plants in different apartments
& train myself to take. Once, I walked alongside
finish, saying, Some place out there. I know it.
& like absence begun again, I splice each apricot
to brightness.
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Mary C Sims
Indeterminate
He says, Enough already. Christ—
& if I believed that, I’d have left
the last time. I set my ankles
in his lap & the whole night,
I hold what hasn’t happened
in my mouth. Then, he rode sunline
with stillness, asking, The point, isn’t it?
Just some fucking point? & all the prophets
get it wrong. Like me, past
keeps changing: sets another trap
for what finds us well. He fills pantries
with plums like a first life
knowing it’s first.
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Mary C Sims is a recent MFA graduate from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and a former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared in wildness, Josephine Quarterly, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly and more. Currently, she splits her time between working as an editor, visiting art museums with her sister and laughing over blurred Polaroids with friends. Find her on Twitter @mcathes
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Vanessa Ogle
Mother of 0
If you add real to the Google search for newborn you get dolls,
pink dolls, white dolls, weighted dolls, dolls with bare feet, toes curled inward
so they’re always moving something, a twitch even in sleep. And isn’t it just like life
that adding in the qualifier of real makes something not real—
false, imitation, our best attempt. I wanted to show him what a baby
would be like, covered in that pale slime I assume is from the vagina.
Movies use docile 8-month-olds or dolls, anything but newborns. My mother
thinks Hollywood hospital scenes should use real babies,
weak-necked and wobbly. She wants cheeks with fingernail scratches. Real life.
She’s a literalist who stays awake even when she snores, who remembers her surgery,
saying, I kept tapping my arm to let them know I was awake.
She heard them say she was under.
Every choice always seems like the wrong one. On the bus today, I saw a mother
so patient with her child, the baby thinking every red sign was an apple
and I didn’t know which one I’d rather be, the one who knows someone is wrong
or the one who speaks without thought, only instinct.
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Vanessa Ogle is a poet, writer and educator. Her work has most recently appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Insider and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2020 and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Ruth Williams
Motherhood
Overnight, the spider
on the wall of the garage below
birthed a bunch of babies. Upstairs,
I overhear a little girl see them, excited,
though the other little girl with her
intones, Now the mother will die.
She knows the score—one in,
another out. The real,
human mother with them, explains,
These baby spiders might live
their whole life in this garage,
enfolded in the web of the world they know
which is the world as far as they know it.
In the middle of my life, I envy
their limited perspective, a periscope
in which the most beautiful view
is magnified 1000x
so you can see the whiskers
on the spiders’ legs that feel a 1000x
what a human finger feels touching itself.
Dumb mammal I am,
I can’t tell if the human mother
speaks with awe
or if she pretends for the sake
of the children. One in,
another out, I lost you
and all of the world of you
which felt like the world
as far as I knew it. Oh,
how I wish I could call you now
to tell you this.
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Ruth Williams is the author of a poetry collection, Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and two chapbooks, Nursewifery (Jacar Press, 2019) and Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at William Jewell College.
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Jill Klein
Larches, Gentling
My husband likes to say you are what you do,
something he read. You are what you do, he says,
usually referring to something he'd like to do
more of, like sex. I'm more on the you are who you are
side of things, a being, although I'd like to be
doing more sex. My cat, who is dying, likes to snuggle
in my armpit near my mammaries. I wonder if it brings back
memories of her 6-month old mother, who had done sex
somewhere with another feral cat, done birth. She was a cat
whose kittenhood had been cut short. All to say what?
I fed children with my breasts, which stretched
for a bit. That was thirty years ago,
that was last week. My breasts are very real,
and somewhat spectacular, no longer “athletic.”
I preferred when I could run in a regular bra.
Now it’s compression in fuchsia or teal.
My scar is below my bikini line, back in the day
when I would venture forth, always feeling imperfect
in my long-legged beautiful body, a beauty that never
appeared in the mirror. Now my body has a flush
of softness—remember the larches’ needles
turning yellow, smelling of grapefruit before they fell?—
gentling my cat as her limbs twitch in a dream.
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Jill Klein holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and a BA from Stanford. In between came years of stay-at-home parenting and a career in commercial banking. Her poems have been published in Bellingham Review, Borderlands, LEON Literary Review, Portland Review, Radar Poetry, Rattle and others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Lila Waterfield
Lazarus, Come
He’s all skin and bones
I said plainly. The cat lay
near my cheek.
This time I let him,
not because he slept;
I just couldn’t hold
the stripes of his ribs
a fourth time that night.
Few things have permanence
like what does us harm;
regret is silver-white uranium
and heavier yet to carry.
Still, it has a half-life, or
however chemists measure
the rate by which we disappear.
From pane, light slatted
skeletal and bodiless
atop my body,
draped a chair’s frame
which could have held lungs
wanting breath.
I needed to ask
how he did this, every night
pace his grave.
The room was full of ribs
as the cat rose,
loping into the shadows.
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Lila Waterfield
Whale Fall
Your hands clammy and slick,
grasping hard enough to bruise.
My lips blue and gasping.
We chased one another,
weeds tangling our legs
and pulling us down.
I don’t know why I can’t forget
the way my chest breached
green water that summer,
or the first stinging bite
of a horsefly. I am still thinking
about whales and deep water,
how sometimes, it’s what you expect
that swallows you whole.
Let me show you how people fall
like whales: watch me settle,
fish flickering until the water rusts.
Teeth bright stars as they unravel me
and fight for the weight of my heart,
the acrid bite beneath my skull.
In what remains bottom dwellers settle;
they touch and clasp bone
to feel the way water eventually
smooths all edges.
I dream my body a haven
to raise their young.
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Lila Waterfield is a freelance editor, journalist, poet and full-time procrastinator. She received a BA in English from the University of Toledo. Her poems have found a home in Anti-Heroin Chic and her byline has appeared in the Toledo City Paper and its subsidiaries.
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Terin Weinberg
What the Mountains Know
Jugtown Mountain, NJ
I don’t walk the same fields
I used to, but the cattail & lilies seem to follow
my path, through the mountains. In my dreams,
I’m at the pond side, hidden
in hills of my childhood. I sit in
the wet grass & pluck dandelions, smear
their petals in my hands, lift them
to my nostrils to smell the sweet grinds.
+
My father bottles them for wine & our bees ricochet
between stamens,
their pollen-pouches swollen, fighting
the stems to stay strong. I too, fear snapping
my neck at the weight of other’s
strength. I see my child-hands dangling fingers
in the pond scum,
pinwheeling the duckweed, spinning it around, feeling
it in my bones. Suffocation.
The duckweed lives off choking its water. I wonder
if a tight grip will end me too, if the roads will
wind back & carry me—
if the cattails will still call me home.
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Terin Weinberg
Whale Fall
“Death fills us like night will fill that old barn.”
-Kevin Prufer
The krill dance tonight,
beat down on my baleen.
I scoop the whole ocean
into my mouth. Fibrous
walls of gullet tickle
my swallow, where teeth
once were. The body echoes
all the way to the floor.
Tell them I’m coming—
building a carcass worth
feeding the abyss. The bottom
meets my flesh, my fat
fills the crustaceans, greedy
in the hunt to be satisfied.
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Terin Weinberg earned her MFA from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She graduated with degrees in Environmental Studies & English from Salisbury University in Maryland. She is a lecturer in the English Department at DeSales University. She serves as a reader & book reviewer for Beaver Magazine. Her work has been published and anthologized in journals such as: The Normal School, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Red Earth Review & Split Rock Review. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she is farming her family’s property in rural New Jersey.
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Heather Truett
Let me tell you what I know about beds,
how my friends Kimmi and Nicole and I fit into a twin,
teenage skin bared and pressed, head, feet, knees,
but Gray's grown-man bed was a siren’s call, a cotton
caged island in waves I couldn’t swim. I scuba
dove down—drowned in the brimming brine of how
he deep sea fished for me, whispered
bait, minnowed me with kisses while
I was fifteen, offered a rowboat and splinter
sunk the oars. I missed my mother’s
safe harbor of a bed, free from his tossed tangle
of a net, his long-fingered hands, but there was no
space for me to moor myself, pillow float on floral
sheets. I could not time machine
back to country rose comforter, a sister’s
feet to kick my shins. I’d give the whole sea
to pedal boat back, tidal wave away
the years until a bed felt safe again, sand
dune over the boy saying my no
was sexy, his hope to bore my boat till
the no blow jobbed him a yes, sail
past the tackle box of my body, the lobster
trap crab cage low country marsh
mattress I snorkled to on wobbly knees.
Tonight, I choose memory
foam, marriage mattress. I paid so much
to wreck myself ashore a softness
that will not smother.
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Heather Truett holds an MFA from the University of Memphis and is a PhD candidate at FSU. Her debut novel, Kiss and Repeat, was released from Macmillan in 2021. She has work in Thimble, Hunger Mountain, Sweet, Whale Road Review, Jabberwock and others. Heather serves on staff for Beaver Magazine and is an editor emeritus for The Pinch. Find out more at www.heathertruett.com.
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Dogs
Those were the days that dogs ran wild.
Shit everywhere. Not unusual to meet
their end from a speeding car. My parents
made me take one last look at Twinkie
laid out on a blood-flecked towel
in the back of the family station wagon.
Then we got Spooky. I’m not saying
we weren’t sad, I just don’t remember
dwelling on it. Still, it was something
to see, old Twinkie struggling for a few
final breaths. Last night my son
got into a wreck. Not a tragedy, nobody
hurt. Rain, curve in the road, teenager,
what can you do? But the more we
looked at it, the worse it got. No tire
should come to rest at that angle,
for example. When we confirmed
it was a total loss, he said I made
a mistake and the blood rushed away
from his face. There are places
the imagination should not go. Today
I returned. I wanted to see it in daylight,
maybe clear up any debris. I ran my hand
over the cold light pole, stared down
at bits from the shattered headlight
as they blinked across a gash of mud.
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Bill Hollands’ work has been featured on The Slowdown podcast and has appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, DIAGRAM, North American Review and Boulevard. He was recently named a finalist for New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize and Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son.
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Derek JG Williams
Mammals
Awash on a beach
in Scotland, netting and debris
had filled, I mean killed,
the male whale, but
it was impossible to know
for sure the exact cause
of its demise. When I tell her,
Saskia says: he, not it—
and she’s right, as usual.
Unusual was the sheer
volume compressed
in the stomach
of the twenty-ton mammal—
his stomach. A whale
flies no flag, raises no army.
Another was found
in the Philippines,
eighty-eight pounds of plastic
cups, bags, and gloves
knotted it shut, while
an Italian whale
held only forty-eight.
My right hand holds a can
of IPA; I never
raise my hand in salute
to anyone, to anything.
I empty the ends down
my throat in one gulp.
I don’t know where
the can goes when I throw it
out. I see the news
each day and know little
for certain—light bends
and refracts in water.
I think it gets dark
when we die, and that’s it;
I don’t find such revelations
bleak. A whale is one
of many. It lives in a pod,
in the twilight between
the surface where it breathes
and the midnight where it swims.
I wish I could dive as deep
and live in the bright
quiet dark. Even now,
I disappear beneath
waves of chatter,
far into myself. Too much
of the time I want to be
left alone. On my favorite
beach the sand sings
when you walk across it—
at least that’s what the locals say.
Thoreau thought the sound
was more like
the waxing of a table.
I think it’s like sneakers
on hardwood in a game
of pickup basketball.
I ignore whatever
science is behind the noise
when I sun myself
in summer, feeling only
occasionally ashamed.
When whales wash up on sand
or beach themselves, they’re
buried in that land—
there’s little else to do
with a mammal
so large, so unruly.
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Derek JG Williams is an American writer. He is the author of Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost Press, 2022). He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His poems and prose are published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Bear Review, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Plume, Banshee and on Boston's MBTA trains as a part of the city's Poetry on the T program. He lives in Germany with his wife and dog. Learn more about him at derekjgwilliams.com.
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Tiffany Aurelia
Heartbreak as Rooftop Corner
I use the wind as a ladder, scaling waves
of asphalt with my fingertips. The city
resets — neighborhood homes shrugging
off thin layers of rain, the sun creasing into
the grooves of a Nirvana vinyl we bought
last summer. Needle-tip tracing the outline of another
life. Like us, the sky slips a little, shuts a window
to the retreat of its bed as shadows curve
secrets into the silver-slick evening. I am tired
of this separation. Gathering grime against
the shutters. & I think back
to yesterday, months ago, before: how
we snuck out of our lives, found this cove
buried between an ocean of shingles.
Bodies softening in a space where the sky
takes notice of the Earth. How emptiness
holds the biggest imprint. Above,
two birds search for each other in the dying light.
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Tiffany Aurelia is a South-East-Asian writer and student from the bustling city of Jakarta, Indonesia. She loves writing poetry to explore the intricacies of memory, heritage, time and her cultural background. She has poems published or forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Emerson Review, ellipsis lit and others.
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Alejandra Cabezas
Sirena
I find stars at the end of every barrel.
They are the wooden nightboats
where my dreams elope. Night after
night, when the shellfish, lonely
cling to my tummy.
The fisherman have been asleep
for hours. Back home with their wives
and plump, little children. I am left
hungry. With nothing to feed on but
the aftertaste of sex.
I swallow fish whole just to
keep myself from singing.
The last man I loved taught me
how to crawl in between stones
like a flounder. Handy trick for
when the waves wash away
the roughness of their surface.
Spiny, the way I stay still when
kissed nowadays. I save my sounds
for beneath the water. When the
jellyfish sting, I orgasm.
Women like me are like corals.
We open up our stomachs just
to eat.
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Alejandra Cabezas is a poet and storyteller from Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Beaver Magazine Anthology, Litro Magazine, Pleiades, CURA, 128 Lit, Moida Magazine, The Literary Bohemian and elsewhere. She was named Poet of the Month by YES Poetry and represented Mount Holyoke at the 2021 Glascock Poetry Contest. She currently resides in Amsterdam, where she is completing a Master's degree in Museums and Heritage.
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Conan Tan
Open Air
By the light’s lazy stream, I was panting,
springing across that rainbow bridge
& peeking into pond. I was five
again & the world’s best boot-stomper
hopping in all the muddy puddles. & there were
castles in the clouds, lives floating
above mine. The day soft as tissue
even the marigolds were out singing. The fields
were peaceful, the fields were gorgeous & right
after I boarded the bus to school,
sat next to a man friendly as the sun.
He was making small talk, asked about
my studies, home, all the dreams I had.
Said I was twelve & getting older
& that the most beautiful thing I could be
was quiet. & I quieted my chest, recalled
the family of ducks settling into water
lilies, recalled the heat of his hand
across the bridge of my lap, peeking into
pant. & I was there in that field, I was five again
hopping into another world with fairies,
flowers, so much open air, so much
space for me to run.
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Conan Tan (he/they) is a queer Singaporean Chinese writer. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rattle, Beaver, HAD, SUSPECT, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and elsewhere. The winner of Singapore's 2022 National Poetry Competition, he is matriculating at Oxford University this fall. During their free time, they enjoy reading, collecting vinyl and capturing fleeting moments in snapshots. Find them on Instagram and Twitter @tmyconan
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Lizzie Hutton
The Vantage
Only at your home’s back door you said you’d treat yourself to one.
Sad body—so you’d put it—
holding open just enough
of that screen door to the outside so the smoke,
both its and yours, plumed up
in shifty spirits to what seemed an endless night.
Years later we are hurtled forward through November rain
in your warm car on 96.
You speak of moving on
as we are moved just by the shadowed quiet of your pressing
the pedals at your feet, almost as if this means they don’t exist,
neither the pedals nor your freeing
slender streams of gasoline
piped safely off from us,
our claims of doing right.
But thoughts of quitting, thinking better, stay beside the point.
There’s cost to everything, although
I watch you keep this thought arm’s length.
The difference is back then we took our risks in more directly:
the time you say your live ash dropped
onto your daughter’s inner nape
as she flew past into the yard,
that one screen door quaking
as the rosy scar took root. But risk travels even
when the pleasures turn ascetic, I think but don’t remind you. Untouched body.
Wish-lists places.
Grey bird, what you finally see
the moment that it lifts,
as from a mind,
out of the mountainside’s
masses of evergreen,
the evergreen in which—even in brightest spring—the shaking dead
hang on,
and good for what, you’d ask,
wreathed as they are among
the plumpest needle buds, whatever’s new.
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Lizzie Hutton's book of poetry, She'd Waited Millennia, was published as Editor's Choice by New Issues Press. Her poems have appeared in journals including the Harvard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Interim, NELLE, Florida Review (where she also won the Humboldt Prize) and Sycamore Review (as winner of the Wabash Prize). Lizzie is currently an assistant professor at Miami University, where she also directs the Howe Writing Center.
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Sam Moe
In another universe, you stay, and we do each other’s hair for the wedding
Arguing about what chiffon really means, we in pale
blue silk pajamas, everything is seductive, the ants
are recluses until we bring out the cakes, I remember I saw
your arms up to the elbows in batter once, thought,
you are my home, now I say, why stay, the grandmothers
are gone and the kitchen is a sword, your ex hums
in the foyer and your mother is pitching a fit over her makeup
leave it all behind, I say goodbye to you in the daffodils
but you never followed me out here and to begin with I shouldn’t
be hanging in the brush, it’s fire season and my heart
is weak as matches and a wick, I’ve given up the knives and
forks with embossed flowers, let’s divide this old house
in two, you must leave the space in my chest where you once
built a nest, please don’t ever try to hold me again with
the same hands, please know I’ve learned and unlearned cloud
formations, the sticky daisy patterns in the diner downtown
we are actors and I’m wearing pearls, an embroidered leaf dress
I let my body climb out of my resting suit, I let you have
stories about scars and tongue depressors, you learn to call
a heart a heart and the moon stays a moon but you won’t
know my face when it’s old; forgive me, for I have never been
the same woman twice.
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Sam Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe Community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Sundog Lit and others. Her poetry book, Heart Weeds, is out from Alien Buddha Press and her chapbook, Grief Birds, is out from Bullshit Lit in April ’23. Her full-length, Cicatrizing the Daughters, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.
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Elinor Ann Walker
After Cave Acoustics & Chimeras
We can un-monster the Y cells
in spleens, lungs, hearts, brains,
boy-notes in mothers, genetic
refrains, so chimeras, my dears,
save your fire for the lioness days,
strike hoof on stones, as we clatter
back proof:
beings may fissure through
us like streams, DNA strains inter-
mingle from donors of blood, marrow,
or bone. Fetal cells migrate & organ
tissues contain Y chromosomes
after we bear sons, temporarily,
or forever,
so I, too, may be changeling, body
split twice, cries harrowing air;
calling back to me as if from the mouth
of a cave, my fierce exhalations
reverberate—
we may be vessels for code after
code: rivers carve rocks, drop
by drop rain cisterns a bowl,
breath tendrils through flutes
made of bone, & a trace goes
whistling:
this helix
that carries us,
binding,
unbinding,
ties in us
these so-human,
invisible
strands
like echoes
in air.
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Elinor Ann Walker (she/her) holds a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, lives near the mountains and prefers to write outside. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals and anthologies as Cherry Tree, Hayden's Ferry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Pirene's Fountain, Plume and The Southern Review, among others. She has recently completed a full-length manuscript of poetry and is working on two chapbooks. Find her online at elinorannwalker.com.
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Alyse Knorr
Contrition: November
The fucking leaves again! Surprising and
inevitable like a very good story,
which is what the world is. Like how they’re called
leaves since that’s what they do. Every day we
crunch through the new dark with our arms full of
everything, then try to stuff it all down
into a lawn bag—all that won’t be con-
tained. How I made my daughter cry, shooed out
the bumbling kitten who, like all babies,
meant no harm. All my misspoken words piled
in a pile, each curled brittle at the seam.
And who to absolve me but my beloved lost beloveds?
The ones always watching from the thin edge
of the yard, the night—from anything with an end.
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Alyse Knorr is a queer poet and associate professor of English at Regis University. She is the author of three poetry collections, a non-fiction book and three poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, The Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review and ZYZZYVA, among others. She is a co-editor of Switchback Books.
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Todd Campbell
Group Therapy
I’m the clamor of other people’s lives.
The census taker for the legions
of headless statues who guard
the roofless stone temples
of all those long-abandoned
ancient towns. The kitchen
scrubbed clean, knives sharp.
The fragile truce between target
and arrow. The engine,
louder than thunder,
pulling a thousand-car train
loaded with garbage that will rise
as fly ash and pestilence
from a smokestack on the far side
of the ever-churning sea. I am
the answer I will fail to comprehend
for years after the question
no longer pertains. The small ship
sailing toward the horizon I stare at
with utmost concentration,
knowing if I blink, it will
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Todd Campbell is a Seattle-based poet, speechwriter and mosaic artist. His poetry has appeared in Hobart, Reed Magazine and Sepia.
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Mckendy Fils-Aimé
the lougarou discusses origin
where's anyone from really? i know, someone
somewhen died for you to exist, but would you
consider yourself part decay? don’t ask me
about me. i was born boko or bourgeois
or abducted. i don’t remember which
but my birthstone is a sugar crystal. what’s that
make my rising sign? an ocean swallowing a ship
full of black cargo? a flaming sword browning
at the edges? a chestful of languages dropped
from Napolean’s balcony & reassembled
by dark hands? see, i can write a poem too.
i can conjure beauty from the blasphemous
or benign. each night, i unzip my skin & the sky
blushes– my arms: an outstretched mess
of feathers. my beauty: a blue moon rising—
if a miracle is too busy being miraculous
then does it matter how it's made?
what if i’m alpha & omega like that water walker?
answer that, poet-man. answer that, PhD
at always-in-everyone’s-business university.
answer that, blanc. & hurry up before it’s time
for me to shed my human & hunger
is a song swelling in the theater of my stomach.
hurry up before i spot someone in the distance
& mistake them for a member of the audience.
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Mckendy Fils-Aimé is a Haitian-American poet and educator. Mckendy is a former artist in residence for MassLEAP as well as the Art Alliance of Northern New Hampshire. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow whose work has appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, The Collagist, The Journal, Callaloo, Acentos Review and elsewhere. He currently lives in Lowell, MA.
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Jennifer Bullis
Space?
The final front, dear. Wave masquerades
as particle at the Ball of Time.
Later, it’s not just a matter
of seeing the universe in a grain;
it’s that all space gains its grit from light.
Don’t ignore illumination, past or present,
of asteroids, or dust. Don’t be fooled
by eyesight’s saying It’s dark. Your eyes
throw sparks in every direction.
Every ash ignited, is igniting,
will ignite again. The universe
does not cease to shine because
it does not cease to matter. Go ahead,
take a moment. Now: that’s enough.
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Jennifer Bullis is the author of the chapbook Impossible Lessons (MoonPath Press) and of work appearing in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Iron Horse, RHINO Poetry and terrain.org. She is an Artsmith Residency Fellow, recipient of honorable mention for the Gulf Coast Prize and finalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize. She holds a Ph.D. from University of California-Davis and lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she writes about long-distance foot travel, deforestation, horse-keeping, repurposing myth and women in the courtroom.
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S E Street
Take as Read in Our Small Country Town
The newcomer wades in,
stroking across the surface,
asking why our award winning
crime writer has turned her back on success,
on her brilliant serial killer—
a malignant narcissist—
to write about her farm.
About birdsong bookending the day.
The azure flash of a kingfisher flying low
above the river in the morning light.
Evening mist settling
into the valley’s hollows
like a curdling, milky sea.
There was once a small child
drugged and carried from her room.
There is, unsullied, a farm,
a map of a new world.
Asking another
why she is writing about cyberbullying,
about images being a weapon
like a knife or a gun
when there’s so much out there already.
But not a daughter,
only an explicit video posted
by an ex-boyfriend.
Asking how you can write
about a marriage being happy
if it holds a lie
like an egg, mid-air.
It is like watching
sea anemones closing,
retracting their tentacles
into their hollows
as they do when water
strikes them from above.
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S E Street’s fiction, nonfiction and poetry has been published in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. She is the recipient of the Dymocks Short Story Prize for fiction, the Hunter Writers Award for nonfiction and is the SCWC HARP winner for poetry.
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Eric Steineger
Returning to a Past I Have Not Known
On the back deck, an iron table where René Char likes to sit
after marching through the Alps. Capitaine Alexandre. There
he sits, usually alone, casually picking the dirt from his boots
with a dagger. Pulls out a green knapsack and a journal. I have
seen him do this from the window, wishing wine in his canteen.
For a second, this yard not a bombed village, but a Parisian café.
He manages a smile, then puts it away to focus on a map now
spread across the table, its coordinates checked by pencil, the
Comprenez-vous? getting nods. August, when the sun is not
insurmountable, only one boy’s urge to walk to the trees
to relieve himself while the great face is talking.
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Eric Steineger teaches English in Nashville. He is the former Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review (2012-2022) and his work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, Waxwing, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, The Night Heron Barks and other places. Against his better judgment, he is currently training for a Tough Mudder.
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Melanie Branton
Anxiety is a mother
who won’t let you go to the fairground
because the rides will collapse, sees broken bones
behind the coloured lights, hears screams
beneath the laughter. There’s a haunted house
and a hall of mirrors. Everything looks taller and thinner
or shorter and fatter than it really is, and skeletons
rattle out at you from behind every corner. It’s blood
that turns the candy floss pink, human flesh roasts
on the braziers, alongside the chestnuts and the frankfurters,
comes with fried onions and ketchup, mustard and mayo. Death
goes round and round on a clanking mechanism, can be won
by chucking a ball at a coconut, by firing a toy gun at long range.
She hands you death in a puddle of dirty water
in a polythene bag, a dart and glint of orange fin.
You take it home and keep it as a pet.
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Melanie Branton is a poet, spoken word artist and education worker from Bristol in the UK. Her published collections are My Cloth-Eared Heart (Oversteps, 2017) and Can You See Where I’m Coming From? (Burning Eye, 2018). Recent work has been published in Black Nore Review, Dreich, Poetry Salzburg Review and Poetry Wales. She was longlisted in the UK Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2022.
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Michael Lauchlan
Fact
Almost inert, wedged into chairs
in a dark bar’s dark corner
listening to music or not,
letting it wash past while
we stare at the band or at others—
younger, prettier, more drunk—
who seem to know where
they are and why. Did I once
imagine sliding through space
like a dancer, like Lynn Swann
gliding under a spiraling shape
to cradle fate on the fingertips?
My body has become a fact
in the world, a scarred tabletop,
a mop head leaning in the john,
a fragment of an unspoken phrase.
Gone leathery, I envy even
violin, mando, and guitar
that can hold so well
a full and passing note.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Lauchlan has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore and Lake Effect. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave. from WSU Press.
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Jared Povanda
From Death’s Pocket
I want to say there’s love here,
but my body is detritus, and I’m afraid
I’m projecting. I watched
Charon pocket my eyes
from where they coined the median.
He was kind enough, but I was surprised
the ferryman didn’t have a special bag for
passengers, only a robe made of old burlap.
A potato sack, really, blood worked
gentle into the stitching. The dark remains
still despite his motion. An elk’s eyes moon
over mine. The timing of our blinks
works the tides beneath the boat. Is this love?
I dream of a magpie gathering me.
Bells of hair threaded through
a garden gate in spring.
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Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and multiple times for both Best of the Net and Best Microfiction. He has been published in numerous literary journals including Wigleaf and Phoebe Journal. You can find him online at jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com.
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Maggie Rue Hess
Feminine Typo Unedited
Love me black dress fashionable
into next morning’s yogurt cup—
even the peach chunks. Whether a matte
or satin finish. Choose me at 4:30pm
Sunday joint deep in blues and frustration,
enough to walk your face against the wind,
dogs dragging at the harness.
Settle with me, rise to me, meet me
in between the infatuations
we carry and curdle, smiles like
parking spots on Market Ave.
Have me in your way, a pull
and a toss, the inevitable sweat
but let it be welcome, continue, oh yes
all throat. Hold me, feminine typo
unedited. No need to explain.
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Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a graduate student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their two crusty white dogs. Her work has previously appeared in Rattle, Minnesota Review, Connecticut River Review and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2024. She likes to practice latte art and share baked goods with friends.
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Jack B Bedell
Crux
after Francesca Woodman’s Zigzag series
The neckline of dresses, bend
of elbow, random play of sunlight
on shower curtain, right angle of
running knee—always the tangent
of line leading to the next image, to
another joining of tree trunk
to window ledge, to thigh
against thigh, against
horizon and shadow, then
and now, and even to truth
that somehow turns
toward her lens over
and again. The angel of congruence.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jack B Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Psaltery & Lyre, EcoTheo and other journals. His work has been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
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Donald Pasmore
Drinking the Kool-Aid You Live Inside
a red altar idols burning
late night letters poems of children
dashed on the concrete
so I hear the wet thwack
now skin to skin is cold
stone to place a gold portrait
that takes my ability to poetize
myself into other beds’ men
this image of you is altered as I kneel
sunlight shines on my face within
________________________________________________________________________________________
Donald Pasmore is a sophomore English major at Salisbury University who has been published in The Scarab Literary Magazine. He grew up in Delaware and aspires to earn a PhD and become a college professor. His other interests include philosophy, tabletop games and amateur woodworking.
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Ann Weil
Estrangement
The mystery not
who cut the thread,
but why. A death
without dying.
Mourning all day long.
His shadow comes
to every Sunday dinner.
We don’t set a place
for him. We would,
but we have learned
shadows do not eat,
even when hungry.
In our contagion,
we, too, have lost
our appetite. Thin
a way of life now.
We turn sideways,
disappear, as though
following him
into air once there,
and then no longer.
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Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, 3Elements Review and elsewhere. A former special education teacher and professor, Ann writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. She is part fish but won’t tell you which part. Visit annweilpoetry.com to read more of her work.
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Rachel Storck
Art
Rachel Storck An Expression of Sorts
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Rachel Storck studied at Northern Michigan University, where she graduated with a BA in Photography. She has exhibited work throughout Michigan, in addition to organizing two fundraising art shows in Marquette, MI.