Issue 3 — Autumn 2019 Full Text
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Sarah Barber

Interesting Acrylic

Even the ebay listing frames it
as a problem painting, this Winter’s Tale
signed, in good condition, dated
Feb. 1975. Beside his name
my uncle—dead these forty years—
had written 322 Oak Circle,
Wilmette, his address, which is how
I knew it was his. It sold
a month ago for 24.99. Of course
it breaks your heart, outsider art,
but this is different from all
the landscapes our great-grandmothers
painted. It might be the bear
before whom the man in red
cravat and red-black jacket—
is it velvet? double-breasted? I count
three coin-buttons, gold—exits
as if pursued by what might not be
a bear at all, not furred or faced
but sure a headed shape
on which the sun though visibly
behind them casts both shade
and golden glaze along the flank
of what increasingly I’m sure was heavy-
footed and unsteady: that charming
manic marriage, and they were broke
though he was regionally
collected. Of course it breaks,
the fever of a king who’s all but
killed his wife and child—
but this is not a play. In the far
background, blue mountains.
In the near, a purple house
with deeper-purple roof, teal pines.
Its shadow—so it must be sunset—
drips, mauve-pink, away
into the middle distance of a field
pale as corn or wheat or sand:
and how is he running through it,
this fat-chinned balding man
whose hand limps toward his heart
as if he feels it break?

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Sarah Barber

Meditation with a Bottle of Drano

First I must turn myself—
rubbered-palm pressed firm and flat
on the cap—against the clock.
How not to hurry the pouring
of what’s concentrated out.
How to wait considering, maybe,
what the clogged drain knows
of resurrection: each day
it chokes down its own drowning.
This water is nothing.
Here I seal, tightly, the cap.

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Sarah Barber

In Praise of Strike-Anywhere Matches

At the end of the seventies, tired
of watercolor landscape but unready
for portraits of kercheifed girls
in oily, garish rows, my great-grandmother
turned to clay. And so, against her taste,
my mother made her windowsill
a habitat for herbivores. For years
the weird menagerie of squirrel
and duck and lamb and rabbit squatted
out their crude-shaped lives, beige
and placid, there—and then they came to me
as if in definition of an heirloom:
not to be got rid of though tried
on every shelf and always out of place
until—thanks be to phosphorus
sesquisulfide and the Diamond match
company—the surface of their feet
revealed itself to be, for ignition,
suitably frictive—to my great relief.

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Originally from St. Louis, MO, Sarah Barber now lives in rural upstate New York. Barber holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 2010, she has taught at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY where she is Associate Professor of English. Her poems have appeared in journals such as New Ohio Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and Poetry. She is author of two collections: Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry; and The Kissing Party, published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press.

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Lilia Dobos

Walking the Pulitzers (Hunyh Cong Út, 1973)

Inside us
the burning, burning and we stood

like trees lit up by an empty
fire, a fire we could feel in the crevices

of our fingers. Flames rained our blue-lit sky,
one then another, limbs bare and voices

barren, our skin almost-ashes in acid.
We yell through the dust

on our tongues, run on these naked
feet, on this road turned wax, and the clouds

could see it all, as if they’d spent years waiting
to squeeze their hot venom on us. How

we used to juice lemons into our mouths
from the balcony in winter.

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Lilia Dobos

Walking the Pulitzers (Arnold Hardy, 1947)

From the balcony in winter
it was this: the smell of burning

wood, smoke weaving
between the utterances and memories,

a scent I know like ember-warm
walls on my palms, my feet missing

stairs and filled with poignancy. On the way,
I forget time and what do we do

with what’s left? After the pipe-split
landing, the crowd’s cameras and roaring, how

can I admit to being seen pantless, my unmentionables
documented, prized? My family knows my one

leg, and I am not the girl in the picture—
she, naked, walks by herself.

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Lilia Dobos

Walking the Pulitzers (Kevin Carter, 1994)

She, naked, walks by herself,
sun-drowned. Her head above bone

shoulders above her knees and wrists you could
break with a firm handshake. She’s

walking until she collapses where the dirt
holds no moisture, and now

she’s crawling, the inevitable behind
her, two bodies hunched and waiting:

one sinks into the ground, one
prepares for flight. Like the moment before

a tsunami, when feathers meet
bone, meet skin, and the quiet

quake. He waits through
the camera lens, captures them both.

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Lilia Dobos

Walking the Pulitzers (New York Times, 2002)

The camera lens captures them both—
sirens silence traffic. We could all hear

it. It sounded like a rocket. And they lit up
like September marshmallows. The sky

a dark morning while we sang
behind a window give a dog

a bone, this old man came rolling
home or down the street, where fire

rescue will find them later, buried
in the ash-grave. Bodies or debris

confettied through the air, and the clouds,
not completely themselves and loose, came

down. That morning we were all
blanketed under the same white.

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Lilia Dobos

Walking the Pulitzers (Mary Chind, 2010)

Blanketed under the same white
dam foam. He said it wasn’t a problem, that we could

avoid it. In this blunder, a breath
couldn’t be enough for the rough wavebreak,

the heavy bag I became against the river’s force.
It was the orange I held onto, above

my head, waiting. Thinking that this is
the color I will die remembering, the cold

imprinted on my skin. Forgetting
the warnings, and we shouldn’t go that way, and what

should we eat for dinner? A voice seeps
through the breaking, reaching. A grasp

and a breath I couldn’t take
amidst all the rumbling.

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Lilia Dobos is a current Graduate Teaching Assistant studying TESOL at Salisbury University. Her other publications include Barely South Review, New Mexico Review, The Quaker and forthcoming work in Red Flag Poetry.

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Jeffrey Bean

Ella in the Classroom

Ella spins the globe
until the continents blur.
She wants a country

with a wild shoreline, where
the national language
is color, and people walk the streets

in silence, holding up cards
with purple or orange or blue shapes
to greet or shout or buy things.

At lunch, Ella eats only seeds from
raspberry jam. One day
she faints of hunger, and when she wakes,

the whole class surrounds her
with their soothing faces. Tomorrow,
she will tell them her secrets.

The shortcuts through the cornfields.
The stash of licorice in
the tire swing. The creek behind her house

brimming with salamanders
and geodes. Inside the geodes, purple crystals
gleam like buildings

in a capitol city. Inside the buildings,
little citizens
face the windows and glow.

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Jeffrey Bean

Ella’s Garage

Instead of rakes, the feet of huge birds.
Instead of oil stains, six bats dipping in a gray sky.
Instead of light from a dusty window, a mirror

behind curtains in a dream. Not chemicals in cans,
but cups of tinsel stars. Not a shovel, but a thumb,
dirt under the nail. Not sacks of cut grass, but

bundles stuffed with money, the scent of the bank.
Instead of a mower, an intelligent turtle asleep.
Instead of bikes, double-clocks that need winding.

Instead of a car, shoulders—her father’s. No—a room
with no mothers or fathers. No flavors or hunger. Or
a body without arms, reaching toward water. A river.

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Jeffrey Bean

You Are Going to Die

The ding and scratch of crickets
floats out of grass, keeps floating.

We think there is nothing amazing,
we sniff our mail, cry into our hands.

Then at night we point our eyes at trees
the size of dinosaurs and gobs

of fire above them in space. You,
reading this, your arm bone

in its sheath of skin is leaving you.
It will go whether you remember

to think of water and pebbles
or hum songs while you walk.

You drink bits of yourself in teacups
then crawl into bedsheets. Your body

makes ripples in that cloth: a map,
a landscape, the shallow valleys of your sleep.

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Jeffrey Bean is currently Professor of English/Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. His poems have appeared in the journals The Southern Review, Antioch Review, Missouri Review, FIELD, Willow Springs, Subtropics and Slate.com, among others. He is author of two chapbooks and the poetry collections Diminished Fifth and Woman Putting on Pearls, which won the 2016 Red Mountain Prize for Poetry and was published by Red Mountain Press in 2017. www.jeffreybeanpoet.com

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Benjamin Cutler

An Invitation to Light

What is distance but a failure
of light?—light pulled

to its listless terminus, a rope
grown heavy with reaching. Take,

for instance, the third and fourth folds
of mountain: how they pale

like lips bruised blue with need
of breath; how, from my distant seat

behind this window, these peaks lose
laurels and pines, rivers and vines:

courageous greens that never feared
to be so gray.

And what of your window?—where
the light fails me entirely, where

you read these lines
despite this failing. Friend:

let us tie each frayed photon
into a new, far-reaching braid.

Light needs such quiet, gentle work.

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Benjamin Cutler was raised on a riverbank in the mountains of Western North Carolina where he now resides and teaches high school English and Creative Writing. A two-time North Carolina Poetry Society award-winning poet, Benjamin's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications, including The Carolina Quarterly, Barren Magazine, The Lascaux Review and Longleaf Review, among many others. Benjamin is also the author of the full-length collection The Geese Who Might be Gods (Main Street Rag 2019). When he's not reading, writing, or playing with his four children, Benjamin can be found of the creeks and trails of his mountain home.

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Kimberly Grey

Intellectualization (An Excerpt from A Mother is an Intellectual Thing)

:           it is through an aspect of mind we interpret
the proper scaffolding

:           in which to fasten memory

:           I was little once and the smallness of me did
not warrant attention, as a child among
several, all needing, I was

:           (a conflict)

:           lost on a beach one day, near mother, in sight, the sun
hot and my five-year body forgotten for hours

:           wherein pain is a collaboration between
the body and mind

:           (a glittering continuousness)

:           and years later, while mindless with desire, a lover’s body
affixed to my backside like a button, there was
the illusion of fire

:           I find translation electric

:           Freud might say “purposeful”

:           wherein I said to the lover as he showered me,
do you think she heard me in the night
when I cried?

:           (a transition to reason)

:           go to sleep, I was told

:           how I remember my back’s whole world
blistering, red suns bleeding
through my nightshirt

:           (a defense)

:           always a secret scaffolding
to hold language

:           to which the lover said, you know language
might not always accept such action

:           (I can’t remember
how to properly remember)

:           that lover has gone now, moved
to Mazatlán

:           what do you do with a backbone
you can’t love?

:           fashioning a response is always
an achievement of

:           the mind
(which mothers me)

:           reports the imagination:

:           you let the sun burn it.

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Kimberly Grey is the author of Systems for the Future of Feeling (forthcoming from Persea Books in 2020), and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and teaching lectureship from Stanford University and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship to Umbria, Italy. She is currently completing a PhD in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and teaches for The Stanford Online High School and Summer Institutes Program.

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Brett Harrington

De Profundis

I stare into a fire
hacks swarms of embers.
All around me
birch-bones glow.
Above only a fang
of moon. I hold
my palms to flames—
could I pray,
could a prayer
tear through my breath’s
cocoon: come,
come morning
like a shattering
of white moths.

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Brett Harrington’s previous publications include Third Coast, The Inflectionist Review and Bluestem. He was a finalist for the 2012 Best of the Net award.

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Kimberly Dawn Stuart

Ghost

There is something beyond
the tree line toward road
and red house of the dead
man I never knew. I can feel
it like a sunburn sprouting
from the back of my neck,
down shoulders, blisters
forming like buds—it
prickles. Also, it rained last night,
and wet leaves are not discreet,
so rustling is amplified
and concentrated. Then there
is the horse along the way
who has stopped her gnawing
to stare in the very direction I am
talking about.

It becomes a game of chicken: me
or the horse. Who will run first?
I suppose we could team up and charge
the thing. I could shed this robe into
grass like dead skin, a pupa of hair
and tits, and we could ride
the sound together.

But what good would that do? Neither
of us has claws or fangs, and anyway,
by this point, we’d both be disappointed
if all we found was a bear or a boar
or a body.

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Kimberly Dawn Stuart's work has recently appeared in Rust + Moth, Louisiana Literature, 8 Poems, Barren Magazine and Deep South Magazine, among others. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, the writer Marley Stuart, where they direct the small press River Glass Books.

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Justin Runge

Peasant Dress 14

black is a collection
     black is gathering     an exit

waits to be finalized
     I feel asked to sit but not

to speak     her necklace
and bodice for now receive

the attention     he will not
leave until the lack of light

behind her is as heavy
as it is     I see     we are not

built of anything besides lines
like these     the door could be 

four or fewer     her left arm frail
braided grass     she is leaden

with the lesson     not looking
while also being so seen

     both he and I succeed
at being gone     a leaving

     at being what white is
     a godlike lack of gathering

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Justin Runge

Peasant Dress 13

a weak wall     his weak hand
that pulled the L of it down

     a line bifurcating into hills
     I’m spending more time

alone like her     my lap
and my heavy hands in it

     I’m unsure     is the room
effaced from left to right

or created in reverse or not
enough to be spoken of

     the door     the excerpt
of hall it permits    he knows

both     neither close
     I let music visit me

like a mother checking in
on her child     right now

I’m that accidental hillside
     the one with its east in fog

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Justin Runge is the author of Plainsight (New Michigan Press, 2012) and Hum Decode (Greying Ghost Press, 2014). His criticism has been featured by Black Warrior Review and Pleiades, and his poetry has been published in Best New Poets 2013, Cincinnati Review, Sycamore Review, Poetry Northwest, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM and other journals.

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Will Cordeiro

The Antikythera Mechanism

The gears of it, corroded
lumps of green.
                            Success

and failure are so similar,
any moment might change
what one means: a zodiac

as readable as air… The Air
Force dropping notes which say

Surrender!
               though no official war
has been declared. Electrodes
placed upon a shaven skull,

their shadows are a prison
through which we breathe.

Our habitual street theatre…
This gulf between the dull
brick buildings and a breach

of comets disappears—
wavelengths, particles

which veer off sideways
from each snarled segment. Star-
fated amorists’ private carnivals

destroy the schedule
of our parapegma.

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Will Cordeiro has work appearing or forthcoming in Best New Poets, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fourteen Hills, [PANK], Phoebe, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Sycamore Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, Typehouse, Valparaiso Poetry Journal, Zone 3 and elsewhere. Will co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions and currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

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Kelli Russell Agodon

When You Are a Ghost, I’ll Also Love Your Shadow

Mostly life is life and kitchens are filled
with lovers who don’t put their cups
in the sink. Mostly life is people who don’t
believe they’ll be a corpse or those
who compose poetry while drunk and in love
with loss. These are the ones who flourish,
these are the mice in the cookies who nibble
into the dawn. Mostly life is a mask
of contentment and a tie of jasmine
reaching down into pleasure. Forgive
the thunder and the man who left zucchini
in your unlocked car, forgive the oysters
without a pearl and all the years we wasted
being young. We are numb, but trying,
and when your bent body is brightened
by the refrigerator light, I hear myself whisper
to dark, to the mice we cannot catch, please
forgive me, and kindly place your mug into the sink.

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Kelli Russell Agodon

Torn (Old Fabric)

I've begun praying again      because I don't trust
the sand to hold me             or maybe I was born
with stitches on the edges         of my heart
a flimsy doll who thought she       could swim
thought she could fill the lake      with her tears
maybe the world has wings        and it's what
keeps us floating between             storm surges
or maybe there's a string tied          from the lip
of America to a hook in the ceiling     of a galaxy &
like a disco ball we spin hoping         our mirrors
catch light    like watercolors we      want to mix
we kneel as the anthem begins       we pray  we float
underwater   we praise  we write        our roof is falling
meteors   remember our dandelion     crowns how
beautiful we thought we were when      we painted
our chins with buttercups  lucky child        you loved
this world more when you couldn't see     its tears.

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Kelli Russell Agodon is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her most recent book, Hourglass Museum, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room was the winner of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year for poetry and was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Her work has been featured on NPR, ABC News and appeared in magazines and journals like The Atlantic, Harvard Review, APR, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day and O, The Oprah Magazine. She also coauthored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, with poet Martha Silano. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State where she is an avid paddleboarder. www.agodon.com

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Romana Iorga

On the Bus

I wait to get home.
The bus keeps on its route.

Shadow buildings bow in the rain.
The driver recites in staccato

names of streets, names of people,
years of passengers’ births and deaths.

Each street grows its people.
They ripen and wait to be picked up.

I fear that future in which I live
less than I die. Beyond the window

pregnant buildings
hide what they carry in their wombs.

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Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian, Poem of Arrival and Simple Hearing. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Stoneboat, The Normal School, Cagibi, Washington Square Review, PANK, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

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Jeff Hardin

A Different Tone

Maybe, if I held my poem in another language,
a tongue I cannot read or speak; if its tone
were different, more explicit or less so, clearer
about its own uncertainties, then I wouldn’t
need to sit for hours in a gathering silence
to hear how, even when here, the poem is
really elsewhere. It is standing at a barn door
while a man inside reaches a bucket back to
its nail. The poem waits beside a river where
a crowd amens a family’s baptism. Unlike
so many, it is not weary; it continues; it moves
past the baker opening his shop and the wino
asleep at the edge of an alleyway. Neither notices
metaphor, enjambment, metrical substitution,
vowel to consonant ratio, assertion versus
question. Soon, the poem has entered seminary.
It wants to know how certain words, translated
incorrectly, or incompletely, have warped, even
defiled, our view of nature, love, government,
so much about which our confidence leads us
astray. Maybe the poem is searching for a hush
that silences whoever speaks. Was Heraclitus
correct, most of us ill-equipped to experience
words? Is strife truly justice? Will the boundaries
of the soul never be found? Perhaps if the poem
were bolder, shyer, more forgiving, less heedful.
If the poem were filled with hillsides of snow
or geese elongating the sky’s eternity. The poem
is only itself, going where it goes. Can it even
be trusted, for out of nothing its language had
to be invented to contain it—how poor it is,
how insecure, how unremarkable. It thinks its
last line a beginning, an inquiry that finally
gets somewhere—until nothing more is found,
no word or image, no metaphor or aphorism,
no anaphora or caesura, no mourning or joyful
noise, no arc of light to trace, no cardinal flying
again and again against a window, lightly, insistently,
not enough to batter itself to death but enough to
remind us we cannot enter even what we see through.

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Jeff Hardin

A Poem Is a Way of Leaning outside the Self

I rub sleep from my eyes, stare through windows,
note the deer feeding, but let’s not exaggerate too much
how insignificance is the course of most lives, even mine.

One more day breaks open like those stones piled
near tree roots when I was seven.  I was convinced
great wealth lay somewhere in the dust smoothed away.

Some wrong turn years ago explains why two people
meet on the page, share the same thoughts for a while,
and then set about remaking the concept of time.

Just last week an owl stretched a field nearby
and then the one beyond that, and even these words
still following can’t reach where that silence sails on.

It helps to think Bach left a few notes unassembled
and that leaning a little outside myself, I catch how
they brighten cherry blooms and hold them aloft.

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Jeff Hardin is the author of five collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press Book Award); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); Small Revolution; and No Other Kind of World (X.J. Kennedy Prize). His sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, is forthcoming in 2019. The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN. Visit his website at www.jeffhardin.weebly.com.

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Karen Rigby

“There is a worse thing,
I wager, than being seen.”
—Sarah Gridley

in silhouette, from the street, as in a noir
where something ominous is set to happen,

and when it happens, a black car peels
from the curb into the iron metropolis.

Or being seen at the shore hauling
an empty sack, which might have held

evidence, or nothing. Imagination runs
to the worst scene, always, and worse

is being heard, the line cut short, static buzzing
with malice, a question hung in celadon air.

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Karen Rigby

Archaeology: Pine

Each chip small as my thumbnail.

In my father’s house, twin weights strung on the chain for the German cuckoo.

Now I’m seven, glittering the rough bird in my palm: another December.

Every hour, the pulley rose in my sleep.

I dreamt of wooden teeth.

In the fairy tale on the tinder box, the soldier climbed through the knothole.

Whose hearth did he miss?

I write my name on a page of breath.

The kingdom splinters light. What evidence. What wish.

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Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). Her poems have been published in The Spectacle, Australian Book Review, The London Magazine, Foundry, Bennington Review and other journals. She lives in Arizona.

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Barbara Daniels

The Wool Peacoat

When I was rail thin my clothes
smelled always of smoke. Men smoked
in boardrooms, bedrooms, bars.

It’s a man’s world, I said then.
I studied cartoons—collapsing houses,
comic strip cannibals, chorus girls,

battle-axe wives shaped like rocket ships.
A bosomy cartoon woman let a man
lean over his desk to leer and light

her cigarette—even a girl on a hassock
knew something was wrong. We used to
burn leaves. Bright risk, rustling splendor,

choking smoke. I might still have that
wool coat smelling of cigarettes, closed
in a box. I hear, always, a sound like rain.

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Barbara Daniels’ book Rose Fever was published by WordTech Press and chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

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Adam D. Weeks

Ode to Half-Light

   In the closing   notes of elegy, I taste
the taste of dusk          and sweet
 release, oolong   lasing through
    my teeth while I lounge in the corner
away    from the candles. The pressure
on my eyes is lighter      and no one
    seems to see    me, I’m lazing
in the dim-glow   and   dancing   free
    of their grasp, steeped      in the gloaming
       lit only by the signs of distant    vacancy.

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Adam D. Weeks

Penultimate Letter

“but then you say look
and the earth is coming back”
–Chloe N. Clark

I’m sure I’ve said too much, cracked
the speakers with the back of my throat—
then again, a bird can’t help

but sing in the morning. If I promise to keep
a little    quieter, will you stay
to see the early    light

in my eyes? If I say I can’t    stop my shaking
hands and you tell me to try (a little
harder), could we call it    love and blunt

this burning   in the grass?
See, some girls, they want
to collect    their men, and me, I want to be

clovers tacked     to your dash.
Maybe if I stretch myself
into longer notes and chords you’ll lip

the words we wrote together.
Maybe if you count
your little fingers while I keep the rain above

your head, you’ll see      how much I can hold
in the broad of my palm.

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Adam D. Weeks is a junior undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University. He has poems published in Asterism and a poem forthcoming in Prairie Margins. He also has a fiction piece published in The Scarab.
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Seth Jani

Second Bodies

The man sheds everything and steps
out of his bones into the newly born light.
It’s morning, and there’s nothing of maleness left,
nothing of marrow, nothing of the small stories.
Pure being breaks among the birds,
becomes wind, becomes storms,
becomes the field grasses
weathering a history of droughts.
What will happen to all these energies
tied to passing forms?
Who gives instructions to the forge
of worlds?
The man reassembles as a woman
in a dress of dark flowers.
She steps back into the shadows.
We people the cemeteries with ourselves.

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Seth Jani lives in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). Their work has appeared in Chiron Review, The Comstock Review, Common Ground Review and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. Their full-length collection, Night Fable, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2018. More about them and their work can be found at www.sethjani.com.

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Emma Bolden

The First Trumpet

I learned the sound of the center of winter:
a cord of wood flint-struck into smoke.
By this time my country heard every emergency

the radio gave us as a buzz, wasp-small. By this
time my country was no longer a country, nor
was it mine. Nor was I its.  Soon we had torched

our simplest valleys, taught ourselves to identify green
as an enemy. We watched bodies fall in the streets
and on our screens and every emergency was a buzz.

Wasp-small. The sound of a child screaming
with its mouth pressed against glass heard
as unheard from the other side of the glass.

From the interior we declared every exterior
an enemy. And inside our small houses kettles still
boiled themselves into shrill but manageable

alarm. By this time my country watched bodies
fall and refused to acknowledge. We were the hand
that held the gun. Ricochet and buckshot.

The sounds of a species ready for an oblivion
with which we were so comfortable
we gave it the name of God.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Bolden

Collect of the Widening Gyre

Here I found an echo rung
around the holler that death is.

I stepped inside and saw
a shepherd. A crooked

hook. A falcon severed
from the rope umbilicalling

it to earth. So too the saints
balloon, buoyed by breath

that is if not prayer
then intention to continue.

Living – listen –
is a prayer for action

without the reaction
of an end. All night

the falcon kept sweet
and singing even

as the meadow lost
the notes to its own song.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Bolden is the author of House Is An Enigma (SEMO Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), Maleficae (GenPop Books), and four chapbooks. A 2017 NEA Fellow in Poetry, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best Small Fictions, and Poetry Daily. She is Associate Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly.

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Lauren Camp

The Ballad of Autumn

Today, traces of peaches far more queenly
than the upcoming philosophy

of a boneless winter. I’ll linger on the typical
routine of garden, wanting to hoard

gold fronds, each tooth
on the cacti. To slip between bees

in my small plot—
capable, tilling for elixirs, spinning wings

over browning earth. We’re not yet at wreckage
and wind thrashing or the stiffening

rounds of cold that furrow and quiver
our loving. I have so much to see

right now—birds and preferences, the flank
of the spiraled blooms touched

with the season’s last oils.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Camp

To Fail and Fail and Still Go On

Sunrise. Tight roads
hew to a line
of Sitka. Gatekeepers, gray scaffold.

Agnes Martin burned her paintings.
For twenty years, she painted and for twenty years
she made them
ash. Someone in the kitchen called this ambition.

Tonight, we build a fire.
Sit on wooden chairs, a wire bench.

Where a mouth might enter
one solitude follows another, ready to loosen.

A man smokes a cigar: fingers the fume.
In the pit, flames bend
and funnel. I say very little, watch the red

sparks spit. Bright scatterings.
When the flames weep and jump, I realize
how raw I am. I want to go

nowhere. Surrender to its twists.
Listen less to what I think

I need. What if ambition is stopping? How immediate
it feels to notice nothing, to scent the air.
The talk turns to politics, and what reason.

In the pit, ember and everything
I wish to bear. Sighs and the questions.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Camp is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Turquoise Door (3: A Taos Press, 2018). Her third book One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), won the Dorset Prize and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award and the Housatonic Book Award. Lauren’s poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, DIAGRAM, Boston Review, Crazyhorse and elsewhere. An emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she lives and teaches in New Mexico. www.laurencamp.com

________________________________________________________________________________________

Cassandra Whitaker

Catwife, in Spring Rain, Flash Flood Alert

Lie where the good world puts you. Lay all day
green-eyed, kept. And outside? Rain and sirens.
The ocean crawls into fields sluiced in reeds
and shredded litter. Flash water laps the curb
while the wind fiddle-crabs a dead leaf across
macadam cracked and macadam blue.
Catwife stretches out, lap wise. Purrful. Don’t be
shy, don’t be shy, don’t be wise.  Rain clouds
forget they have rained and again begin
to pour out memories. Under thunder,
the ocean can be heard trying to catch up,
with each harried breath closer, closer, close.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Cassandra Whitaker

From End of America Fantasmagoria Number 6

DC, circus town, summer
noun, home flags eating tourists
alive. Flags sharpen their teeth
on shoulders and backs. Nothing
gets past patriot incisors, even
at rest. The president swallows
ferris wheels, Adirondack chairs,
ice cream cones, games of dozens.
How long before the earth sinks
beneath the weight of his cousins?
A robotronix Lady waves
like a queen, a halo hello
in big bright lights, singing
out into the citydark, “Come see
the cages, they are filled
with miracles. Come see
the stage to end all stages,
Come see, come see!”

________________________________________________________________________________________

Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a trans writer from Virginia whose work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Mississippi Review, Foglifter, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Evergreen Review and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle and an educator.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dani Putney

Sidewind into the Universe

Standing atop Rattlesnake Hill,
the sun slashes
my cheek.
Skin peels
off, melts down
my thighs slithers
toward a puddle of gravel.
Wind catches my molt,
fertilizes the hillside.
Crescendo.
Earth brought me here
to witness
my undoing,
my becoming.
I’m sylph of the desert,
quarks buzzing my bones
(xylophone to the cosmos).
Coda.
Coda.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, Asian American poet exploring the West. Their poetry most recently appears or is forthcoming in The Chaffin Journal, Elephants Never, Lockjaw Magazine, and Tule Review, among other publications. Presently, they're infiltrating a small conservative town in the middle of the Nevada desert.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Prem Sylvester

When I Think of Touch

I cannot imagine   this body holding anyone    but itself
Looking for crystal  you find gelatin   lavender with blush
moonflesh   that carries the undoing of pebbles    I hold
rosebuds between my teeth  the saccharine of body
turns to salt on my enamel  Remember when you wrapped
my ears around your blooming  Beneath the arched
constellations I  gave you my tremors  You brought goose
flesh to my tongue  Feathering  I don't know my way
above you  I don't know my way around   myself  Swollen
ghosts spread over my exegesis  A body  is only a body
in the moment we  recognize it is more than patina
more than  sweat  Pulled meat roasted under a broken sun
Raked ashes in pits churning  under the sheets  I volunteer
plum seeds  in exchange for walnuts  and alchemical denudity
When we are together  you are assurance you are  puffin down
When we pull away my veins are stygian  When you ask
what we are missing  I tell you it is me  How do I give you
what was never mine?  In your heaving delta, I am unrecognized

________________________________________________________________________________________

Prem Sylvester is a writer from India who turns into words the ideas he catches a whiff of from time to time. Sometimes people read these words. His work has appeared in Homology Lit, Parentheses Journal, Rabid Oak, Turnpike Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review and Memoir Mixtapes, among other homes.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lee Patterson

an essay about mental health

last week the dog buried my head in the backyard, & this morning I woke up vomiting bluebirds. there’s nothing
weird about loving you, I tell the bluebirds as I use a damp washcloth to wipe the bile off their beaks. there are
thought bubbles floating above my head which are filled with a list of facts: I know god because you have eyes & I
get to stand in front of them. also: the sky gets foggy when too many people start dreaming at the same time. I
could be a giant why not, I tell you, as you sit in the middle of the living room with your legs crossed. you’re
building a birdhouse out of popsicle sticks for the bluebirds. you’re not listening, but I keep talking. I could be as
tall as weather, I say, breath thicker than space, stepping over buildings like anthills, sitting on parking garages
like park benches.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lee Patterson's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Queen Mob's Teahouse, San Pedro Review, Unbroken and Love's Executive Order, among others. His chapbook, I get sad, is forthcoming from Ethel Zine in late 2019.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Winter

Finally the girls

just have to talk about their hearts.
My heart keeps me up all night;

I’m extremely adjacent to it.
My heart’s the warm helium core,

I’m a thin film of rubber
which keeps it from escaping into

rain that’s more fast footsteps than
hands, more rockslide is my heart

as it makes itself felt, horse
in a restaurant corridor

blocking the bathroom.
How many times did I

try to deport it with poisons--
liquid, pills or granular--

but my heart is myriad nests
recurring like fire ants in the yard

or in seams between river rocks
that form the porch’s floor.

Louder than storm or dream
my heart accelerates

in the tail lights, mass of leather-
legged, leather-jacketed long-haired

& hairless bikers—how many?
fifty sixty seventy? I pull to

the shoulder, it keeps streaming
foreign & familiar, I can’t think

of anything else till it’s over.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Winter

Phone Interview with Medusa

Privacy’s the key to quietude.
        Certain alienating facts outside
& inside my mind can’t be denied,

        like the little snap
when a serpent’s detached from my scalp,
        gets shut in a door, some painful mishap.

People wonder Does she or doesn’t she?
        I feel every last one of them. You see,
in the winter when they’re limp & lazy

        I, too, am depressed. Of course
I can recall looking like everyone else.
        Nice & easy, you’d guess?

My preference is to be dangerous.
        I don’t desire society or odious
surprises: salesmen, missionaries. Luxurious,

        my palace glows with tapestry, carpets
from Persia, jeweled lamps, a granite
        bathing pool—because I’m worth it.

And breathtaking statues, my guests come to grief.
        Soon I’ll make a new one. It’s a relief
to see art really can change your life.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Winter is the author of I will not kick my friends (2018), winner of the Elixir Poetry Prize, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in journals including The New Republic, New Statesman, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, Cincinnati Review and Poetry London. She received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Brown Foundation at Dora Maar House, James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, the Ralph Johnston Fellowship, and a Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Cass Francis

After Watching The Lobster

for too long i have been a beast,
greeting neighbors i only know
as numbers glued to unfamiliar
doors. i too am shortsighted
when it comes to the pairings
of the universe, the way dancers
find each other’s arms. how
does one become outstretched,
secure in the right lie, the shared
hope. i can’t count on one hand
those i would be willing to blind
myself for. i can count every atom,
multiplying myself until each neuron
& nerve ending is matched, & still
find no hand in the darkness, no
hoof or claw to carve my way.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Cass Francis

Postal

when did i become the long letters

of a lonely woman? breathing blue
bathwater, steamy scent of blackberry

mojito & quiet air humming

through dusty vents. hearing doors
open in the hallway, footsteps

of someone who doesn’t know

i’m naked. am i supposed to prove
that i’m still alive to every ghost

that haunts my mirrors?

can they swallow these questions
deep enough to condense them

into the thunderclouds of my dreams?

one day i will find a wall to walk on.
peace in the thread of a ribbon.

the stamp of a thousand miles.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Cass Francis is a graduate of the Arkansas Writers MFA Program and currently attends Texas Tech University. She was born and raised and now lives in Texas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in EcoTheo Review, Drunk Monkeys and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter @WriterCFrancis.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Haley Winans

Forgotten Headphones

Separated by nine groaning
rows and the crackle

of snack bags, we’re two disgruntled
babies on a flight to San

Francisco, our call
and response screeches through cooing

turbines. This metal crib
has no mobile, no jittery planets

or astronauts hugged by wires. Our moms
look tired, their eyes twitch as we teethe

on pretzels and plastic arm
rests. An old man’s chainsaw

snore is a challenge
to scream louder to you. My binky-sealed squeal

is ripping the deflated
pleather seats, the wings are shedding

sheets of metal. Senior citizens scratch
at the exit doors, pining to get sucked

out to swim through cloud
trenches glowing pink like
worms that endured a storm.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Haley Winans has poetry previously published in the Scarab. She is currently a student at Salisbury University in Maryland, studying environmental studies as well as creative writing.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alice B. Fogel

Ellipse

what does it even mean                   to be good
to be big       to do the right thing         to not leave
the table before being excused to not leave your trash on the beach
to not speak     what you mean unless you mean
this one little kindness that transpires            despite yourself
how good is it not to see            how to see who we are
meant to be                                  it is no picnic to be left out
in the elements all night without a blanket
under all that starlessness          so maybe
it was a little wrong that we left the bottle
on purpose    buried up to its neck      in sand but it’s not our fault
that the whole ocean completely couldn’t get ahold of itself
it keeps on running its finger          along the land         and the land
winces and shrinks
a little more each day                  see
wouldn’t it be good              to be in two shapes
in two places at once or the one         between them
the way a line is maybe         a horizon or a message
even if it never reaches        where we are because of course it can’t
help but be at cross purposes with us
we get that                 because sure we want enigma           we want
to be interrupted     but what if also
we can’t stand it and we just wonder
what on earth           do people talk about anyway
do they just make things up in order to push back
like some Einsteinian             dark energy against the inward collapse
we’d probably be good   and     relatively          stay put too
if we could only be a little universe         always expanding like that

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alice B. Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her latest book is A Doubtful House. Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry. Her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller, & she is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Web & ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist & DIAGRAM.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Josh Bettinger

Thanksgiving, Twothousandsomething

Two moons set inside of me at night—
a mound soft and full

of film, streaks against the wet sky featured
like a spotlit marquee
of maybe trees.

We wanted more, purchased
less, worked at the roots with an axe.

The way things work
is that they often do not—secretly paradise falls
so much so
that its water becomes

swimless in the light of release.
Two moons set
against themselves untie themselves.

Do we go out with those selves in the night
or will the dreams slouch

in silence as cars
move through the unlit city like dancers without faces
evacuating a stage.

Death enters and we feel his weight
as we sit down to dinner.

The way things work
is that we maybe get lucky—the heart is a thumb
built for grabbing and closing
but for all the things

in the world there is only us in this room
and I don't want to reveal that I'm the internet.

Two moons are yellow zebras running
up your leg in the sheet
and the boy and the girl move—bounding again
back from sleep—

into our lives as if
all our broken people ever had a chance
and we careen silently
back into the soft darkening of it all.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Josh Bettinger is a poet and editor living in Northern California. He is the author of the chapbook, A Dynamic Range Of Various Designs For Quiet, from GASHER. Recent publications include Salt Hill Journal, Western Humanities Review, Handsome Poetry, SLICE, flock, Columbia Journal, Atlas Review, Crazyhorse and Boston Review, among others. He lives in Northern California with his wife and kids.

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Anthony DePanise

________________________________________________________________________________________

Anthony DePanise is a photographer from the eastern shore of Maryland. He has worked as a photographer for the past 29 years—the past 19 for the State of Maryland, serving both the Governor’s Office and the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. His photos have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, among others. He enjoys photographing nature and his family, as well as, capturing expressive moments in time.