Issue 10 Full Text

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Lindsay Lusby

Machine as Well-Oiled Girl

                   / an autopsy /

beneath her ribs / a pulley

& ropes / tug the blue one
& watch the filament threads

            in the brightbulb of her head
                        spread light like tendrils

            of foxfire / pull the red
& her bloodpump will flood all

            the empty spaces / her mouth,
                        her lungs, the hollow place

between her splayed legs / a gutted girl

            becomes her own slab / stone as
a cellar, stiff as a door / do you

            still call her a pretty thing?
                        do you hold your breath

            & stick a garden-gloved hand
inside? / wake her with a spindle-prick 

            & she will stitch herself unsplit:
                        a time-lapse study in unripening.

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Lindsay Lusby

We Do Our Best Work in the Dark

—seen on the side of a Tojo Mushrooms truck
on the highway outside Richmond, Virginia

This is a love poem.

This is the game in which
we bury ourselves at opposite ends

of the same forest.

Even though we’re underground,
we still close our eyes
to concentrate,

hold one arm above the dead leaves
among the jack-in-the-pulpits—

Testing. Testing. 1-2-3.

To wake the network
of small ghosts between us,

these strands of mycelium—
   a string of lights.

Is this your card?

Three sinuous lines
gilled as a death-cap.

            Listen.
     Here.

To haunt each other
across this wild dark,

we must first forget
our bodies—

let my hands
be your forest floor

& let your mouth
be my mosses running over—

            Is this your card?

A five-pointed bloom,
            blunted earthstar.

Yes,
it glows—
greening with groundlight.

This is where we meet
in the middle

of the night,
of nowhere & grow

so still my heart
cleaves your sternum—

a pale clutch of ghost pipe
beneath the slow patience of oaks.

—for Mark

Note: Zener cards are a deck designed by Duke University’s Parapsychology Lab for experiments in extrasensory perception. The series of shape outlines featured on the cards are a circle, a plus sign, three wavy lines, a square, and a five-pointed star.

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Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in New South, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North and Plume.

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Jenn Koiter

Reading Tour

for Craig Arnold and Jake York

Two poets go on a road trip. This is not a joke,
though there is laughter. It is a good road trip,
maybe the best road trip, were it possible
to measure such things.

Both poets are tall and beautiful,
which always helps. They are both smart.
They know things. And because
they inhabit the same strange sub-subculture
that is American poetry in the early aughts,
they have enough in common
to make conversation easy, yet
enough difference to keep things interesting.
They stop somewhere and read poems, then drive
and stop and read poems. It is heaven.
Also they have dried figs, five pounds of them,
and they eat them for three days straight.

One of the poets will lose himself so well
we cannot find him. (This is not a metaphor.)
The other’s body will betray him
suddenly, irredeemably.
They will both be unlucky, at the end.

But on this road trip, they are the luckiest.
They have found each other, and in each other, taste
friendship’s bright tang and slow ferment.
They will each tell the story of it for years.

It’s not really a story. Just two friends becoming
better friends, which is a not-story worth telling
over and over, even, perhaps especially, now,
when there is no one left on earth who remembers
the taste of those figs.

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Jenn Koiter’s poems and essays have appeared in Smartish Pace, Bateau, Barrelhouse, Ruminate, Rock & Sling and other journals. She lives in Washington, DC with three gerbils named Sputnik, Cosmo, and Unit.

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Sarah Brockhaus

Perennial

My eyelids collapse
against each other and your body forms

flowers in the home-made dark, whispering
their way out of the romance novels I used to

strain my eyes reading. Now I spend my nights
reading you. Let me graft myself

to your floral, braid you into
me. Let me keep this, please. Futures

feel futile anyway, forget
the living room and my hands in
my own hair, your feet finding their way
to the door. Forget the words

I let slip, how we unsolidify
ourselves to become a solution. Forget
how I try to write a poem you can read
and it always cripples itself

into this. Be lips. Be liquid. Be love. You are
rooted into place. Maybe I drench myself
in disbelief just to swim in the same pond,
maybe the window stays open all night,

maybe I never yell, maybe the bed doesn’t ache
and you reach back for me. Hold me
to you and I’ll inherit the aching. We never can
tangle ourselves in a way that won’t be

unwound. I kiss you and you turn to sailboats, to the color
green, to pressed flowers. The air in the room

condenses in on us. I haven’t been buried
like this in years.

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Half-Truths

We are eating ice made of I love you and I miss
you to convince ourselves we aren’t

starving. Our attempt
at kintsugi, artistry we don’t understand.

A way of holding onto this
Still so it cannot become anything

less. A way of saying
I’m sorry there isn’t more.

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Sarah Brockhaus

I’ll Be the Canvas

Make me still life, paint my
yellow roses red. I still don’t know why I love you
tastes like dandelion stems. You repeat the same nothing

over and over but you aren’t praying. You are the wolves howling nothings
at the moon. We pray through pinky promises, me
and you, through mint leaves and untied shoelaces. You

know I can flavor lies to truth, I can kiss you till you
taste me true. Kiss you till I taste me true. I am nothing,
not the white chrysanthemum you pick me to be. Christen me red carnation. Paint me

forget-me-not, let nothing erase me. Sketch me into your garden, I’ll be the wild roses.

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Sarah Brockhaus is a Sophomore at Salisbury University. She is studying English and Secondary Education and hopes to become a high school English teacher after graduation. Outside of class she enjoys playing volleyball and drinking coffee.

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Grace Li

plastic bag

it hangs in the thick
air, an homage
to short-term memory,

a wrinkled sneeze
still held against release.
the day rolls down

its dispenser, o heavy day
and there is no such
thing called wind, instead

the passing anger
of a car punts it down
the sun-slicked aisles. who

can ignore the heat spilling
into the unremarkable
buildings, the high halls

where there must be
people, wasted and not
alone. it is the easy debris

of their lives, this ragged
phantom tumbling through
the laundry of motor oil.

the drunken street veers
straight into the horizon
as if there is no other

choice. it follows in
the foreground,
a trailing comma

between parking lots
and drains and no
easy ends. bird-snatcher, sea-

choker, punctured with
light, this tangled
mass, the color of

convenience. it is shaped
like something familiar,
the pitch and yaw of it,

how it heaves and blows.
for all its uselessness,
the easy spillage of

what it once carried,
it is not yet dead
and, nudged on by whatever

is left of Newtonian
order in this world, it lurches
further down the road

within a foot of where I stand— there
is the sound of a bicycle and then
it lifts like sudden rain.

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Grace Li is a Californian writer, currently attending the MFA program in poetry at San Diego State University, and a UCLA alum. Her poems can be found in Los Angeles Review, Red Wheelbarrow and Westwind Journal of the Arts.

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Karen Rigby

Why My Poems Jump Speed Rope

Isn’t it erotic? How a double
under trick has less to do
with power
than control in a wrist
rotation? Timing matters. So, too, the spring

in takeoff and landing
rhythmic slap
groove the brain tracks.

I love the clean arc rope makes of air
when there’s no slack: vaulted ceiling

as a body below touches
pavement. I’m a sucker for grace,
even its punishments.

Repetition is prayer for the driven.
Memory one more path

to euphorias. About glorious names for muscles—
gracilis, adductor magnus—
it’s not marble
I love, nor beaded salt
but satisfaction

hitting the mark. Shaving seconds. How to build
a pylon from burning thighs.

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Karen Rigby

Why My Poems Turn Forensic

Half of reverence is getting the names right.
So a petal is never a petal, but an origami dove
inside the Holy Ghost orchid. Commitment
is the other half: Dita in pasties
swiveling in an oversized martini
for her burlesque act. I never write
without measuring, each line
hooking a quicksilver hunger.
For precision take the delayed axel,
each phase of a Grand Prix gala jump.
Or Mizutani scissors in the hand of my stylist,
knuckles tattooed STAY GOLD.
For lack of picture a border cop
who asked a dealer about weapons,
said cuchara (spoon) instead of cuchillo (knife).
I can’t abide the uncarved poem. Give me a jade roan
saddled up. Don’t be the rifle, but wilderness
glanced through the bull’s eye.

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Karen Rigby

Girl I Can't Bring Back

Girl in yellow capris, rabbits
appliquéd on each knee, forgive me

for the years I didn’t love you,
or the pale one on a gurney

called anhedonia. Forgive my nested
selves, thin as balsam, who dined

on memory like mammals
that rake what the lion leaves.

Girls with dyed, burgundy hair—
catwalk of grim supplicants—

they never saw their own beauty.
Forgive velvet & wire tongues

that sought cures on the altar
of no good & the year

of emergencies. Girl who built
a marquee of her grief. Forgive

hands like bird bone dioramas,
each hollow a skyless dream.

They were all of them me, in river
cities, blue hours. Inked lines

down their sheets. Forgive each
night I wrote them into blankness.

The moon was never a lozenge,
but a distance no language speaks.

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Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). New work is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and Southern Humanities Review. www.karenrigby.com.

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Brittany Atkinson

Missing the Funeral

How do I unrot your body? Dead
skin, dead hair, dead fingernails.
They buried you, but I was not there
to hear one gravedigger ask another,
Is six feet deep enough for a six-foot
body? I did not see them shovel to
entomb your casket: a wooden beetle
burrowed beneath dew-blanketed
dirt. And yet I still have nightmares:
everyone wears masks made of
maggots. I bury this image only when
I see your face in the slope of my
mother’s nose, not quite hooked
enough to invite the words kids threw
at you: Here comes the Jew. These
words live on while the coffin rots. So
how can I not picture the saddened
sag of the oak caving into the etch of
what’s left of your frame? A frame
once large enough to consume a room
from floor to ceiling, or at least that’s
what we’d say. It’s been months since
I abandoned my mug of tea at the call
of your absence. The bag now bathes
in its own rot: saturated and bottom-
sunk, tea leaves black and frowning.
Yes, six feet is probably deep enough,
but still do seven. It’s better to dig too
deep into the dark and damp than
leave a body too close to the sun.

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Brittany Atkinson is a first-year MFA candidate at Western Washington University. Her work can be found in Barren Magazine, Electric Moon Magazine and Picaroon Poetry. When she isn't writing, she enjoys roller skating, thrifting and drinking vanilla oat milk lattes.

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Erin Wilson

There Will Be Enough Time Otherwise for Salaciousness and Ruin

This poem begins in the morning,
pushing the stink into the shower,
absolving the body of its living accomplishment
of sweat, saliva, vaginal accretions,
stains around the asshole and gunk between the toes,
shaving the armpits slick, nicking the legs until nubile,

then bringing that freshness, that supple skin
brimming with the scent of goat soap,
that brushed hair shining with coconut oil,
gathering it beneath the shroud of Icelandic wool
and pushing it up through the collar, today becoming
a civilized buffalo, one who cherishes its skullcap,

getting into the car and driving out of town,
past derelict museums and new grocery stores
with laminate floors that will never last,
past the daily businesses, banks, insurance companies,
car shops and funeral homes,
past the farmlands, past the still-standing
stripped silver/white shining snag,
an encampment for two eagles
glaring at roadside carrion,

            the radio intolerable,
            the news intolerable,
            your thoughts intolerable,

turning instead to Purcell's hymns,
Purcell's affirmations, dares and railings,
his human directness,

meanwhile fondling your cheekbones,
contending once again with the recessiveness of your chin,
flaking off dried epidermis, rubbing your skin to a tactile lustre,
taking in the miles,
ticking off the memories,

meanwhile the dove,
            the dove
beating upon your shoulders,
            the dove
smoothing the folds of your mind,
            the dove
pecking at the place, the empty egg
that dangles from your sexual dewlap like an earring,

Purcell again, "O Solitude,"

you're travelling again,
your car hurtling again,
you hurtling again
having forgotten it,
the smothering smog,
the din and closeness and snuffling of towns,
the sin of self
and society, not people,
because Purcell is here with you, a person
and although long-dead,
singing with moral goodness,

you're going into it
glazed in goat soap
and sheltered in wool,
you're going into it with femur and ulna,
with sacrum and coccyx,
your mind a whitescape,
yourself become a palimpsest,

your body still,
a beady black eye's twitching,
you're watching for the one thing,
watching and waiting for the one thing
to sing, to wing,
to cross the wide white field.

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Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander Magazine, Crab Creek Review, takahē, Reliquiae, Columba, Trinity House Review, San Pedro River Review, Pembroke Magazine and in numerous other publications internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet, published by Circling Rivers Press. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.

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John Sibley Williams

Chimera // Pablo Picasso

Though nothing about her many faces makes sense, all
incongruous angles, overlapping symmetries, fire-

breathing assemblage of impossible parts—taken
together, made whole. As if everything is self-

portrait. That casing flattened by a train I wear
as a necklace looks too much like my grandfather

after Europe husked & dried him, & stuffed his shirt
with yellowed newspapers, how we’ve hung him

over our dead fields to terrify the crows. How they return
to feast from our dry earth, regardless. & the monstering

bodies my children invent to make loss seem holy.
These safety scissors: some fabled anchor. This cutting shapes

from cloth: the sibling they never knew they had. Once.
As if once is enough. As the plastic stars we’ve glued

to their sky birth fresh constellations, & we name them
after the most brutal animals we can think of. Tails

snaking up into lion into goat into nothing that looks
anything like love. Because love is meant to be enough.

Because her face doesn’t hurt the way it should when we
wear it over our own. Because all angles are the same.

Because we must eat before we’re eaten. In turn, how
I cannot wait for them to eat me. Husk & dry me.

Make me myth. Then disbelieve.

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John Sibley Williams

How to Pronounce Knife

stage the scene. another unquiet family
ritual. dawn & the woken world already
exhausted. light extinguished. curtains roughly
parted to an unharvestable field. off-
white milk thickly swallowed. someone else’s
child, cheeks pillowed, hands somehow still oceans.
great-greats & steps- & promises sanded down
so the edges won’t hurt. not so much. truth, as it is,
kept from. later, throats to open. pluck & drain.
a beastless calm follows the bleating. excruciating
silence. a morning train or two phlegms by, steam
like contrails lingering, briefly. overchurched sisters. half-
brothers fingering bolt guns too rusted to pierce.
on the radio, the kind of static you can sing to. full-
hearted. open-palmed. eyes turned inward.
tin foil keeps the signal in place, swaddles
bent wires together. like an unintended infant, kept. or moth
snug in a barn spider’s embrace. embrace the loose wooden
handle. blade dulled by overuse. still, the sun catches
in its thin mirror. press firmly & saw skin from pit
until everyone you love drips down the counter,
your lips, chin. these stains an altar. sweet,
sweet atonement. not for anything you’ve done,
of course. we’re past that now. the overripe
nectarine doesn’t hold up under such scrutiny. no
metaphor here. no future poem awaiting hindsight.
necessary distance. just a wobbly kitchen table
cluttered with bartered fruit. you can’t remember
what it is you have left to trade for. or how it is morning
like love rarely ends with a house filled with family
on fire.

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John Sibley Williams

And Other Acts of Mercy

Snuff: as in the charred half of a wick;

as in the extinguishing candle of her body, so
bent & burning it no longer resembles a mother;

as in the tobacco pinched between father’s lips
and gums, dawn’s amber spittle without a vessel

to contain it, waiting here all night for something
to finalize; as in the kind of film that ends with

soaked sheets & a broken harmony, one less reason
to love each other, one less reason to stay; as in

how she lingers in our nostrils like lilac & piss,
how this will end up defining her, this last morning,

this closing reel, this noose of heaven, this suffocating;
as in how long it will take to remember her fully lit.

Fully lit: as in a wide-open, shadowless shore.

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John Sibley Williams is the author of eight poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press) and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly.

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Paul Ilechko

The Molecular Way

Taking the molecular way     the sliced open way
oblivious to the music that detonates within
our quiet brains     steeled and ready for this unintended

camouflage     a quarter century too late     voiceless
in our stark integrity     a pyre of remnants burning at
the edge of vision     deep within this orphaned world

by the river     by the lake     by the estuary
we need immersion to survive     the smoothness
of still air     the animals in their dreaming stillness

clustering beneath the trees     exhaling exhaustion
as if it were a gas     as if it were a periodic element
pushed up against the rows of metals     inert as breath

the forest has expanded as the towns recede     death
provides new spaces between the empty lots     birds
wheel and shriek above a broken perimeter     from above

the streets are veins and arteries     punctured like the lungs
that strain for one more gasp before the expiration date
is reached     before the blood becomes metallic

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Poet and songwriter Paul Ilechko is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Pain Sections (Alien Buddha Press). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Rogue Agent, Ethel, San Pedro River Review, Lullwater Review and Book of Matches. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.

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Audrey Gidman

History

My sister cracked her wrists on a Tuesday. It was breezy. It was July.

She lifted so her wrists were less like hinges and more like edges to veer from; afraid of breaking; afraid
of being wrong. I understood—I tried to carry her.

She had always hated wrists—the way they moved like loose hinges, like they could fall off. There were
nights I swear she feared touch, as if her hands would leave her.

It was July. We were in Maine. She did not often crack her wrists; thin and sharp; they had good
angles.

The sun was high and not unhappy. The clouds were shaped like spines. Tall and jagged mountains. It
was a Tuesday.

I cracked my wrists. She seemed afraid the wind would break her; Maine and its mountains. I tried to
carry her.

The sun a kind of orchid—I tried to carry her.

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Audrey Gidman is a queer poet living in Maine. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in SWWIM, Wax Nine, The West Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rogue Agent, ang(st), Doubleback Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, body psalms, winner of the Elyse Wolf Prize, is forthcoming from Slate Roof Press. Twitter // @audreygidman

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Stella Lei

Olympia

Ekphrastic of “Olympia” by Nicoletta Ceccoli

These days, you are birthing alternate universes
and swaddling them in baby blue, combing

their hair so the strands lay soft against your hands.
You gather each timeline and sculpt

them into the mirrors of girls, mold faces
so bloodless dawn shines through, fit

them with eyes full of empty
ponds unscarred by a stone’s weight.

U-1 will crown herself in the dust that limns
windows before a house can crack awake.

U-2 will collect the bones of broken birds and carry
them so light they float above her hands, unsnapped.

U-3 will stand at the gorge as the river hurtles by, close
her eyes against the wind. U-3 will dig her toes

into the crumbled edge of rock. U-3 will not look down.

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Stella Lei

A Gate Agent Prepares to Make a Boarding Announcement

In the airport terminal there is a clock—
numbers an inky circlet around white. In the airport

terminal there is a clock and its arms tick
forward, each step a subtraction,

each subtraction a ghost. The terminal
is filling, overspilling, and I watch the face

of the clock, count the ticks-steps-ghosts,
watch the faces of the passengers

as they shuffle and swarm. I read
that 176,000 commercial flights take off

a day which means two commercial flights
a second which means three to four hundred people

a second, launching into the sky,
leaving behind the ghosts of people

who cooked and swept and sent the children
to school, red-eyed nights blurring into too-short days,

shedding shadows like skins and stepping
into deafening blue. Or maybe they are heading

home, unfastening sunlight like loaned jewels,
pearled seconds losing themselves to dirt.

Touching down and rebuttoning their molt—
wrinkled, a size too small.

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Stella Lei's work is published or forthcoming in Honey Literary, Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.

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Todd Osborne

Ode to August Walker

The week my grandmother died
I bought a 5-pack of Mission

Impossible movies on blu-ray
—and a blu-ray player. Watched

Tom Cruise grow older without seeming
to age, and all of this can be blamed

on grief, how it squirms its way into
every situation, no matter how mundane,

and you are crying outside of your apartment
door, your mother on the phone,

the one you love standing within arm’s reach,
and you remember seeing the newest trailer

—how Henry Cavill cocks his fists
like he knows they could kill a man back to life.

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Todd Osborne

Saturday

On the morning my sister survives
a hurricane, I sleep so late the day
is over before I’ve woken up. The blinds

low in my bedroom mean it could be anytime
at all. The new bedsheets don’t fit
the pillowtop, but I make do, consider

buying new sheets but don’t—I’m however old
and still trying to figure out how to be a person.
I know my sister is okay because she doesn’t

call, my mom doesn’t text me frantically.
I am as alone as a person can be these days,
a goose who thinks they’re flying by themselves

then looks around and sees a perfectly arrayed V.
Maybe we are always trailing the people we love
in our wake. Or following theirs. The meteorologists

stay quiet about Mississippi, but I know: heat,
humidity, a chance of rain every day. I walk
around the room, make coffee, say the only prayers

I can say these days: thank you and thank you
to whatever lives inside empty places,
thank you to whatever I cannot name

that keeps sending their presence outward,
the point the geese follow because they know
it’s where they’re headed next.

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Todd Osborne is a poet and educator from Nashville, TN. His works have previously appeared at Tar River Poetry, CutBank, The Missouri Review, Redactions, Nat Brut and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for Memorious and a feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. He currently lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife and their two cats.

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Bobby Parrott

Before We Were Small Enough

Even with ten thousand
channels of clear moonlight,
a revolution reaches
the pharmacy of a tulip. 

A seam.

In the story's erasure at death,
my house spills galaxies
the way a casket pacifies me
into the same space
as love. Born of wood,

before we were small enough
to turn on the stars,
the weave of a new mother's

forgiveness. We lay
awake in our grave, gauge
the distance in suns,
fishtail and slide in this race
to be loved, this brace

of doves released from earth
as killing flowers, violets
bent to render us, to keep us,
to remember us from birth.

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Bobby Parrott

Toy Drum, Misplaced

Younger than ever,
the frowning girl studies
the math of my shadow

until the bunched lines
of her December brow slide
back, bronzed. Selecting a genuine
replica, she focuses on a single
equation, one less Euclidean
if only for background
boys, and their strange pull

on the brittle arm
of her memory. Her toy drum
misplaced, she points
a finger at the melted whistle
of my voice box. I try to speak,

can only honk my cardboard
birthday party-horn. Now
she aches for magenta, tells me
so. Her prim-pleated sundress fades—
lemony bloom into fluffy pear,
cemetery chrysanthemum. Decades

stir the tender wreckage. The glass
of water in my hand trembles,
concentric ripples circling
the string of bees
she pulls through my eye.
I circle for the center. It’s all
I can do. Her little hand
pauses. Her head tilts open.
I can no longer find her.

I wish I were less solid,
penciled in
like the open curves
of her neck—my head clear,
gift-like, complete.

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Bobby Parrott was probably placed on this planet in error. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, this poet's universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." Poet, musician, photographer, and teacher, he currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles in ascension, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule called Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his house plant Zebrina and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.

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William Littlejohn-Oram

Postlude

I’m not afraid of death, but imagining
my body alone in the empty dark,
lost to some bloated silence,

except for the feathery footsteps
of the pill bug, somehow,
working her way inside my container.

I’ve been told to ignore my fears,
but the 5am news flashes the scene
of my neighbor, seventeen years old. He drove

headfirst into the large oak tree on that bend
in the road, just above our houses,
where I’ve often seen robins on telephone wires.

I did not hear the accident, but now, outside, hear
the sirens and the boy’s homemade EDM mixes
from his car, rising off the stereo like steam off a grill.

And I imagine, where his tires tore up the dirt,
the sound of earthworms, wriggling in the earth.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William Littlejohn-Oram received a degree in Fiction from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Poetry from Texas Tech University. He can currently be found in Lubbock, TX, wearing brightly colored shoes. His work is forthcoming in Inkwell Journal, Amethyst Review, Eunoia Review and Ancient Paths.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Ford

Night in Africa

The globe on the windowsill
spins in the sun’s last hoorah.
And you are further away than ever—
somewhere in the rain-field
of our past we are dissolving.
It is night in Africa. Shadows tear
the paper from the wall.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Ford lives in London. He has had poems published in a wide range of magazines including Poetry Review, Rialto, Iota and New Contrast (South Africa). A collection of poems was published by the Happenstance Press in 2010.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Valades

The Birth of Wichita

Wichita, you growth from heaven, you naked dream, you are joined
mist and mistakes, a curious prairie flower wearing a shell of light.

Wichita, your code of folded petals sleeps below the grass’s roots.
Wichita, buds split wide, you are flooded with tents and buckaroos

who snatch their claims as the river’s helix of moths and bats closes.
Wichita, you fog the horizon with wind and soil, shake and levitate,

soaring in your July of smoke, your inflorescence of fences and wire,
your porch lights and furrows strung wide, hedgerow to hedgerow.

Wichita, opening through softened ground, you spread, spread and rise
beside the stream of blood that brings you, leaves a name as its grave.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Valades

Little Song

The good work of going back to the well,
of dipping a new bucketful. The path
between the trees, their bowing slow arms
intricate with sticks, swaying and catching.
The season of rifts that rain on you alone.
The headstones and elms, thousands of names
lost, the solemn leftover song as bright
as a copper kettle tilted on its hook.
A song rowing against the sun. A song
of ground broken open. A song of no help.
A song laughable to children and crows.
A song that waits underneath the woodpile
and only slides out at night. A song tapped
on a rail that just you, there tapping, can hear.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Valades's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Subtropics, Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review, The Moth and The Pomegranate London. He has also had book reviews published in PN Review and Quarterly West.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Melody Wilson

Tongue Prophecy

We know Death is a
moth-eating liar
from his crude

display of the elements
of grief.  Mourners
stumble toward sanctuary,

adopt the vowels of loss,
speckle the naked ankles
of time. What an act.

The cat knows this—
dissolves the list of preconceptions
we voice

with each sandy lick of its paws.
Balloon, it says,
in one pink stroke,

God, it says in another.  It glows through eyes
glassy as moons, yawns,
whispers soberly, museum,

lake, tree.  Your arrival, your exit,
no distractions.  Everything is salt.
Lick it off.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Melody Wilson teaches writing and literature in Portland, Oregon. She received an Academy of American Poets Award before beginning her teaching career. She returned to poetry in 2019 and received a 2020 Kay Snow Poetry Award and a 2021 Oregon Poetry Association Award. Recent work appears in One Art Poetry Review, Quartet and Briar Cliff Review. Upcoming work will be in Cirque, Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, Timberline Review, SWWIM and Amsterdam Quarterly.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jared Beloff

Experiments with the Perception of Time

They brought the bees underground frothing
in the dark to see if they could determine
time’s movement, leave the hive’s geometry,
return to the humming order of a moment.
But what does it matter whether we are caught
in the angled slice of light, the ochre tint of home,
promise’s syruped smell in a petri dish?
We feel earth’s imperceptible arm toppling
on its axis, twitching with a drone’s rhythm,
wind ringing our ears: each cell ruptured in song.
I watched you leave. Waited for you—
Routines cloying as coffee grounds, a stirring spoon.
I wanted to press down, still their clockwork, forget
each grain, sip only sweetness clear as water.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jared Beloff

Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark’s Head, and Petrifications

after Antoine Berjon

Drawn to the rush of flowers, peonies ruffled, puffed out
bodies like startled baby birds, blinking in morning; the hyacinth
and daffodils drain color, tilt toward an opened drawer, discarded
as snapped roses; they swing their burdens, stems still pinned
against the pleats of yesterday’s newsprint.

My mother sat for two weeks as her own mother lay dying, a shell
hollowed out to echo her shallow breath, its pink flare gleaming,
tender as an ear. Their hands held, fingertips smoothing over
a knuckle’s folds, prayers through the dried cracks of their lips,
grief polished as a shark’s hooked tooth, their briny urge to remember,
to feel desiccation’s salted burn replacing what it would preserve.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jared Beloff

Papered Labyrinth

a teardrop of a wasp’s nest lay torn open,
its belly spilling rage in brittle flakes. you cry out.
I think it is for me, holding my hand—
I have trouble remembering the pain of others.

layered wells between fingers. ours press
a pinched braid. I can feel your ring’s dark rim,
folds of skin polished underneath.
you show me where things have started to swell.

we don’t move, knowing fear has its purposes.
so does pain, but the wasps aren’t there for us,
already searching for hidden spaces.
their comb stares back through vacant eyes.

what song are we listening for on their wings?
I often look for you in crowds, a papered labyrinth
where eyes might lock, quiver like wasps
trembling in the corners, crawling on a tear.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jared Beloff is a teacher and poet who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. You can find his work in Contrary Magazine, The Westchester Review, Gyroscope Review and elsewhere. You can find him online at www.jaredbeloff.com. Follow him on twitter @read_instead.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Russell Thorburn

Let Me Make You Bloodless in a Single Flash

Don’t breathe, the camera will not kill you,
the man says donning his shrouded cover

for a photograph of Bass Reeves, who feels darkness
sear skin just as much as the heat of the sun.

The starlight pouring forth in the constellation
catches him turning away to look

at the mountains, as if he were drawn
to something he can’t ever get back,

like his slender wife with the name of Eulalie,
who died in his arms one winter night.

Now Bass wears a windblown straw hat
enslaving his brow in shadow,

his battered shoes bearing the weight
of a man who would never return home.

The former soldier only nineteen years of age
breathes through his bulbous nose 

not knowing why he signed his name
on the form handed to him

with an immaculate white hand
by the fast talking Mathew Brady.

Time for me to go, his feet itching to move,
pick up his discarded rucksack

and walk until he can’t see his steps
disappearing in the inky pools of no light.

A soldier who buried the Civil War dead
bounces a hand off his leg, whispering 

how many souls are contained in a box
of your glass photographs: 

bone, gristle and flesh gone,
he waits for a bullet wound that never comes.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Russell Thorburn is the author of four books of poems, including Somewhere We’ll Leave the World, published by Wayne State University Press in 2017. He has received numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His radio play, Happy Birthday James Joyce, was aired on Public Radio four times, and his one-act play, Gimme Shelter, was scheduled to premiere at Northern Michigan University's Black Box Theatre, on March 13, 2020, but was cancelled because of the pandemic. Thorburn was nominated and chosen as the first poet laureate of the Upper Peninsula in 2013. He teaches composition at Northern Michigan University.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Toti O’Brien

Body of Evidence

At the top—    Narrow slit.
                        Opening a secret trap door.
                        Tip of finger incognito brushes the clitoris.
                        Contact made. Close.
A bit lower—  Narrow slit. Oblong. Horizontal.
                        It’s a comic strip, and yet serious. Undramatic
                        yet sternly, starkly, routinely grave
                        like the left-handed sound of a baby grand.
                        Black and white, like the baby grand as seen, guessed
                        through uncurtained windows
                        the entire floor brightly lit
by a cold glare of brass chandeliers.
Lower left—   Shirt longish, untucked
                        charcoal dye softer, smoother
                        than the ebony shine of the piano.
                        Dark pants, hair a sable shade
                        caressing the back of the skull
                        outlining the curve of the nape.
                        The man deepens into the page
                        tiptoeing sadly, in defeat
                        bound to espouse… oblivion, perhaps?
                        We don’t know. He is nothing
                        but an annotation penciled on the side.
                        A reverse illumination.
Center page— The main text.
                        Define length of lines, number of paragraphs.
                        Please, describe the text.

                        Erased, as well as the signature.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Toti O’Brien

End of the Peninsula

I had not been informed about the overpass
thin as a silk ribbon, stretched atop
tall pillars, like stems of concrete and steel
sprouted on dry, crumbling soil.

I had not understood about the convoy.
Didn’t know I would be towed by the tail
carriage, holding onto a scrap of cloth
with my teeth, like a trapeze artist.

Did I bite hard on that dirty kerchief, once
scarlet, now a mess of saliva and dust!
I knew I couldn’t let go. I had to follow.
Knew this was my last chance.

Strangely, I didn’t feel the friction of asphalt
rubbing against my skin. All I felt was the
strenuous effort of my clenched jaw.
Was I a corpse already?

As we rode upon the aerial causeway
a flash of cobalt seeped under my eyelids
from the invisible ocean, below. I smelled
salt mixed with tar.

I recalled how seismic our land once was.
I heard an echo of explosions from the
mountains. I remembered proud hamlets
claiming each its little hilltop.

Their names trickled on like a rosary.
Tiny towns. As we past, they fell like castles
of cards. With a sigh of surrender they met
the wide open mouth of the sea.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Toti O’Brien

Neanderthal

When they asked her about the sex
life of skeletons, “contrary,” she said
“to common sense, is not in the skull.”

She recalled a tall silhouette propped
into wet sand, red cape tied to the collar
bone, flapping like a wing in the breeze.

She recalled her own cheek resting
on a femur, how bone sometimes felt
soft like algae, smooth like driftwood.

Just brief, intimate impressions. And
those fingers, in segments, plowing
her hair like meticulous combs.

Those ribs, clicking like underground
waterfalls trickling over granite
miniature cowbells on the loose.

“It’s not in the skull,” she said. Perhaps
in the sinuousness of stacked vertebrae.
In the cavity of joints, slowly eroded.

In the sharp, wide angles
designed by forlorn limbs
like leafless tree branches

needle eyes gaping between fibula
and tibia, ulna and radius
pelvis a round, quiet, empty nest.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Toti O’Brien is the Italian accordionist with the Irish last name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician and dancer. She is also the author of Other Maidens (BlazeVOX, 2020), and An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press, 2020).

________________________________________________________________________________________

Trey Adams

Rings

We have the same slender fingers, the same blonde hair
between each knuckle bone, and the ring fits as if it were made
for me, but these are your initials carved into its golden face.

Your brother, a father in ways your father hadn’t been, gave
you the ring when you joined the forestry service, and you wore
it until you were ashes, until the funeral home director dropped
it into a ziploc bag.

Sometimes I wish you would’ve wandered off into the woods,
let the maggots have their fill, let the ring fall to the leafrot, but
you chose a dirty motel room, with cup rings on the dresser,
and the phone ringing on the bedside table, and this ring
on my middle finger, until I’m ashes too.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Trey Adams is a poet and fiction writer living in Nashville, Tennessee. He earned his BA from University of Tennessee and MFA from Stonecoast.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dare Williams

Pulasky County

My shadow wakes from the depression bed thirsty from guilt.
They tried to sell me god, but I didn’t have the money.
I was hopeful gliding in and out unpressured.
I was a thief made stronger by the sirens of this city.
I wasn’t just the water; I was the rain, torrential and constant.
I’m an empty field glazed over like a newly purchased gun.
I’m a yellow porch light calling moths to its glow.
I’m desperate in this motel room, waiting for the phone to ring.
All I have on me are these memories of you,
one where you are licking a stolen knife,
the sting of metal, a song on your lips.
Or, how about this one: you holding on as long as you could.
My name resting in your mouth soft as a bulb, hard to pronounce.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Dare Williams, is a Queer HIV-positive poet-artist, rooted in Southern California. He has received fellowships from John Ashbury Home School and The Frost Place. He is a co-producer of the reading series Word of Mouth which raises money for communities facing food and nutrition inequities. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a two-time finalist for Blood Orange Review’s contest. His work has been anthologized in Redshift 5 by Arroyo Secco press and is featured in Cultural Weekly, Bending Genres, THRUSH, Exposition Review and is forthcoming in Limp Wrist and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rebecca Patrascu

Slanted Aubade

I make my way through life like someone
trying to walk across a dimly lit room full of sleeping
bodies on the floor. I don’t know why they’re there.

Maybe they’ve celebrated extravagantly,
or have nowhere to go, or just came off a twelve-hour shift
of neurosurgery or jackhammering. Exhausted,

they sprawl in a jigsaw of exhalations and dreams.
And I need to move past them to the door
that leads outside, very carefully, with respect.

I have to be so cautious; I can hardly get anywhere.
I nearly trip. I must use my arms, stretched out
to the side. I am a tightrope walker at a circus

where the audience has been overcharged,
the tent is too hot, the children sticky and whining,
the elephants obstinate in their refusal to perform.

And the sky is lightening, so the sleepers are stirring,
gradually becoming moving targets to avoid.
All I want is to walk from one side of the room to another,

to the door that leads outside. Because I can hear the birds
begin to tell one another other what the trees will do
once the darkness seeps its way back into the earth.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rebecca Patrascu’s work has appeared in publications including The Racket, Pidgeonholes, Bracken Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review and Valparaiso Review. She has an MFA from Pacific University and is the author of the chapbook Before Noon (Finishing Line Press). She lives in northern California, works at the public library and catches honeybee swarms in the Spring.

________________________________________________________________________________________

McLeod Logue

Mother of Thousands (Devil’s Backbone)

Mother tended the plants with bare knuckles.
Her pale wax skin, naked under the side shifted
light, warming our kitchen sink. I watched
her cut leaves and frilly stems from plants that reached
back to her. She preened and stroked them
the way she did when she used to cut my hair.
Black lines against the white mold of the tub, I loved
the hot water, how it warmed my neck from the inside,
how her hands held my head like an offering.
She hummed and traced her fingernails
against my scalp, sowing me clean.

I turn off all the lights to undress, bathing myself
in the pitch black dark of my own tub. Mother says
I’ll never bloom inside, in the dark. And now, I yank
my own hair loose when I touch it, strands of black sinking
down with the water, my knuckles scab from picking skin
down to the bone. My head is hot with nothing to cool me.
I simmer. The nape of my neck decaying into my body,
the cold water reflecting from my skin, steam rising.
I pluck my leaves one by one by one.

I’ve killed every plant I’ve ever owned.

________________________________________________________________________________________

McLeod Logue

An Undue Burned

My key turned like maple syrup, the door stuck
nudged dipped molasses. She was startled

when I twitched even an inch, perched in the front corner
of the porch canopy, collecting tiny trinkets to raise her young.

She’d built a word in the soft wood, a blur of brown
any time I cracked the door, she fled to watch a stone throw away.

We were at odds, me and the mother, both needing
to enter the world, to taste the sun, her in constant motion,

motherhood meant staying alive. I could feel it
coming, her anxious escape, followed by four shallow clicks,

like a flicked switch from heaven. I heard them slice
through air and then nothing. The eggs collided with the ground

in harmony, A tiny beak lay dormant on the pavement,
still shelled in blue. On the other side of the door I let fat tears

come dripping down my cheeks like diamonds. I heard her,
the mother, crying in melody, as if a lifetime of catch

and release had only ever prepared her for this. Grief
stretched its wire through the door and her song echoed

in the cavity of my stomach. A grief that I could wake up from,
and she would always carry, the weight of her broken nest,

a nest we broke, falling beneath her feet, an anchor tethered
to a grave. I prayed for rain to wash away the blue egg shells,

and when it did,
it rained for days.

________________________________________________________________________________________

McLeod Logue is a creative writing MFA candidate and poet at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, her work is influenced by her family’s fine art, southern roots and attachment to location. McLeod's work has appeared in The Nashville Review, Passenger's Journal and is forthcoming elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeremy Rock

Buried

“Pity them, caught . . . in a shadow of the world
they once knew. To destroy them is a mercy.”
—Carved runestone in the Valheim Swamps

Under the rain, under the streaming moonlight blue,
we were there, huddled, hungry, holding each other
for warmth in the ripe mucus of a bog, the kind of wet

that makes a lung of you. We knew how close
the sun was, how good even fir-filtered day
would feel on our filmed skin, and yet we stayed

for the rust, the metal, the way I felt seeing you
in plate so familiar I could imagine the straps
wrapped like tree rings at your chest. I am always

moving your boots closer to the fire, watching
the leather sweat poison, and at night I know I can’t
shake the stain of that place in my guts, the way rot

steeps in water, so tell me you’ll take me somewhere
this cold will starve. Tell me where we have left.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeremy Rock is from Frederick, Maryland, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. He has work published in Ninth Letter, Waccamaw, Stonecoast Review, Cider Press Review, The New Mexico Review and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jen Karetnick

The Opossum Is a Marsupial

zombie, stumbling under the slog of sun, stealthy in spirit with the moon. We never
minded them nesting under the deck or snoozing in the mondo grass even though

we sometimes had to wrest them from our dogs, stiff and drooling the way they
are when scared, bowels emptied, eyes and mouth open as a contemporary floorplan,

the tonic immobility as complete as it is involuntary. Still, we made a mistake in the recent
past. Believing one truly dead, we grabbed her tangle of babies from her pouch, despite

knowing we would have to raise this cluster of snouts on ticks and palmetto bugs. But
post-removal, hours later, she was gone. Possums can be injured, bones broken, in this

dreaming state. But we only stole what was rightfully hers, our hands in her insensate womb,
generation of liberators signaling virtue, rescuing what had been doing fine without us.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jen Karetnick's fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020). She is also the author of Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize; and the chapbook The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, in addition to six other collections. Karetnick has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among others, and has been an Artist in Residence in the Everglades, a Deering Estate Artist in Residence, and a Maryland Purple Line Transit grant recipient. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain.org and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jordan Deveraux

Winterizing

In the version of my life in which I wake up early

enough to beg the two-man demolition crew to spare
the picnic tables they’re dismantling in the court-

yard, they let me pick a souvenir out of the rubble.
I rescue the board into which Grace carved stars

with a housekey when the wood was wet with rain.
I keep that board in my closet until I’m ready to build

a house—where I use it as a rib in the frame
because the heart wants continuity, the heart wants a star

tattoo. The heart wants legato in a world full
of staccato, the preferred music of the hammer.

In the version of my life in which, by the time

I look into the courtyard from my window, I’m too
naked to go down and ask for one last moment

with the picnic tables, which is this one, I watch
the men cart off the wood in wheelbarrows

to a place where it may constitute a pile—
think of how we sat under the balding sycamore

one afternoon, can almost taste the wine on my lips.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jordan Deveraux's poems have been published in Bodega, Gravel, The Meadow and elsewhere. Originally from Utah, he now lives in NY, where he works as a substitute teacher.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ifeoluwa Ayandele

Of Sniffing Faith & Breaking Bird's Cage

This city wasn’t forced down my throat;
I harped my harps near its willows
& beheld my first sun in the bulwark

of its walls. Yet, loneliness moaned
through its empty streets—this loneliness
is like a dog running through the desert,

sniffing faith & a piece of bone.
Amidst this, Maami opens the rear window
to peep into the future & sings:

we can’t make a home in this city
without breaking its eggs; we can’t hold
home in our hands without breaking birds’ cage.

Our living room housed dusty furniture—
love was an old chair creaking in the dark
& our legs couldn’t walk to the front door

alone: fear. I broke the living room chair
when I knew I-love-you was just a talk show
airing on an evening T.V. show.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ifeoluwa Ayandele is a Nigerian poet. His poetry has featured in The McNeese Review, Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Rattle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Tiny Spoon, Paper Dragon and elsewhere. He tweets @IAyandele.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mandira Pattnaik

Abeoji

it’s an accursed appointment
late on Sunday night
in streets without names,
distinguished by width
the way it is with urchins
or boot-leggers.

I haven’t seen him since Monday
when I went to school in yellow dungarees
and he waved from the gates
an arm lightly on mum’s shoulder

the bridge of thirteen years
is a boa constrictor, has
eaten away three lifetimes.
he bolted before I was back.
in the closet was mum
turned to stone,
trailing her, everything
that belonged to us.

my convicted dad’s eyes
no longer stray. No one
to bother him with questions.
No longer needs to say—it
was an accident.
The way he talks, I listen.
Learn a thing or two
about blood connections
and how to spot cracks on glued-up
brittle bonds.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mandira Pattnaik

26

Twenty six months in your
student life, you grew tendrils on your limbs,
clutched the line crawling by microspaces for mill workers,
and took the 6:05 back, gnawing

Grill windows, and smudged soot.
Bodies crammed, wilderness running
through, perpetually
craving for your portion of the sky,
a commuter
wedded to the local.

Twenty six days in a caged steel and glass cubicle were
enough. Among polite conversations,
predators had you marked, and you knew that.
Prowling behind, eyes that soaked you up dry, gasping for water, deep
inside parched earth, you were
dying roots.

Twenty six alphabets to connect the dots,
tied up in troubled words, you pounded their
meanings into something to chew—
softened pulp on extracted paper, then
restoring those to factory settings
like humble humus to earth
let dandelions grow on your lips.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mandira Pattnaik's recent poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine, West Trestle, Variant Lit, Feral Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and Eclectica Magazine. Find her on Twitter @MandiraPattnaik

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey H MacLachlan

Connoisseur Smokes Medok Cigarettes

Soviet advertisement, 1925

Every day I wake up and smoke. It's a ritual
one enjoys when stuck in a loop. Six fifteen

on the dot. Every day I wake up and smoke;
it's a ritual one lavishes. One morning I used

Lenin's war portrait as a proletariat tray.
He accumulated a cowlick as tapped ashes

stuck in a loop. I wake up. I smoke. I passed
out one morning into the ashtray. Six fifteen

on the dot. I jolt awake and burst my face
through the yellow wall of our bedroom.

The wallpaper spiral ribbons below my neck
as a clumsy tie loop and now I'm stuck. I'm

a connoisseur of six fifteen on the dot.
Like Stalin I wake up and smoke every

shift to endure meetings with the ritual
of tobacco breaks. My wife said the first

time she kissed a smoker, she stoked
his internal bonfire with her breath in

a loop. It's a ritual one enjoys. I wake
up from envisioning this and shift for

a cigarette at six fifteen on the dot. My
yellow teeth rows are stuck in a loop.

I'm a smoke break connoisseur.
For fifteen minutes, I accumulate

ash-mist cowlicks and stargaze
lamenting a heaven stuck on every

dot. I accumulate shots of samogan
and my eyes ash after six blinks—

jolting awake with fifteen clumsy dots.
My wife says the first time she kissed a

smoker, New Year midnight fireworks
lavished six linked stars with yellow

Columbine garlands so her heart
spiderwebbed ash. In yellow light,

the boy resembled Lenin. Then she
laments fifteen seconds of samogan.

Her internal kiss loop. Every day I wake and
smoke. One accumulates rituals when stuck.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey H MacLachlan also has recent work in New Ohio Review, the minnesota review, Santa Clara Review, among others. He is a Senior Lecturer of literature at Georgia College & State University.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Burnside

Technologies of Sorrow

The years grew longer. We grew more cynical.  Indolent for easy delights.
The TV salivated snow. The microwave schemed to touch the spoon for its sparks.
And the sky – the sky, in all its infinite skyfulness! its pink ramparts of clouds – lured us in
with its grisly shapes just to break us down with desire . . . Steeple us on our own drippy fangs of
daydreaming.
There is a smallness to grief I cannot extract through these unseemly apertures, so tomorrow
I shall find some new honey to swim through.
Build my own bees to drown; sinuses slick with molten gold.
And we will tumble off the tracks like toy trains into life’s hungry mouth, engines thrumming
just to stammer the silence.
Pray tell there will be teeth full of helium.
Thicket-rich with reverie?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Burnside tweets about hot pockets sometimes @matthewburnsid7.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lawrence Di Stefano

Locking Up

First,            all sensation goes,
populating
                        the outermost region
of sensory perception—
                                       tired pigeons
lined across the rooftop,
                                      watching.
Now for the choreography

of unassuming movement. I unlatch

the keys from my belt loop—hands
                        trembling, pulled out

to sea, already.
                        Then the smell
of salt.
                        You’re still here
—waiting
               for your ride it seems
            —horizontal axis running
from one far end
            of the empty street

                                    to the other.
It’s just us                       

                        and the moon—
full and bright over the water
—but who am I

                                    to you?, I think,
but a pair of eyes
                         seen only from a distance.

I’m both here,
                              and not,
looking for the right key—
you, looking
                        at your phone—
skin, a rinse 

of moonlight in the dark,
                   as I’m locking up

the doors of the restaurant
we both work at.

Body—
              tidal, behind this crashing
of circumstance.
                           Clouds.

I know how to, I remember:
                         first, it’s the
deadbolt
sliding smoothly through
                          the strike plate—

engaged,
                          the sound
—these are corresponding sides

of a perfect union—
                    now you’re watching me,

I’m sure—

                         but what could I say

to you, except goodbye?
                        Your hair is down
in waves, wind
                        moving through—

and I,  down on one knee,
                                    am fastening

the padlock to the base
                            of the doors, now
joined together.

                          Everything is aligned,
in place—
                                        this is

the moment. Testing

                                    the integrity
of a locked door—tremors

in my reflection.
                          Who? 

                        —these are not angels.
Goodbye.

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Lawrence Di Stefano is a writer and photographer. He is currently enrolled in the MFA program at San Diego State University. He likes to roller skate.

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Majda Gama

East End Aubade

Dawn comes to Old Street down from a scabrous sky;
patches of bright new skin over the George & Dragon

over the Spread Eagle, over this flat above the tattoo shop;
its sign, prick, a simple spike of neon casts a red glare

upwards through single-glazed window panes,
their transparency wavy with scum, upwards to

faded Edwardian floorboards, checkered with empty cans
of Stella, upwards to us where walls that weathered the blitz

wear punk-rock 7 inches; a cat called Pogo, after
the manic dance of the ‘77 punks, broods over us all.

My man is a roman candle, pale from shift work & excess
he is the only natural light, he is soft in his sleep.

The end of time is inked on his arm (my evil rose
to meet it) the gates of hell outlined on one ropy calf;

Dawn comes, but it is false.

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Majda Gama is a Beirut born, Saudi-American poet based in the Washington, D.C. area where she has roots as a DJ and activist. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cordite, The Fairy Tale Review, Hunger Mountain, Nimrod, The Normal School, RHINO, Slice, Wildness and is forthcoming from an anthology of love poems by poets of Arab heritage edited by Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck. Majda is a Pushcart and Best New Poets nominee, a runner up in the 2019 RHINO Founder’s Prize, a 2020 New Issues Poetry Prize finalist and recently served as a poetry editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Audrey Anderson

Art

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Audrey Anderson has a degree in English Secondary Education from Salisbury University. She has served as assistant visual art editor for The Scarab and has had her photography featured in The Scarab.