Issue 5 Full Text

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Julia Bouwsma

Study in Epigenetic Memory III

I turn to photographs to help me recall—my mind wafting
fifteen years back to summon the cherry blossoms

in Fairmount Park, the Sundays we gathered
with picnic blankets and beer beneath a serenity

of pink falling as afternoon sunlight cascaded its floral
veil. Sense of smell is the sense most closely linked

to memory. The chemical equivalent of cherry blossom scent
is acetophenone. In the experiment, researchers spray it

at the male mice as they administer electric shocks
to their feet. The goal: to trace how trauma molds our DNA.

The flowering cherry may have an upright or weeping habit.
Once the mice know the pink scent of tumbling blooms only as pain,

they are bred. Most of the flowering cherries you can buy in stores
are abominations, weeping higan limbs top-grafted

to a straight cherry trunk. The mouse pups of the electrocuted
are raised by mice who never learned the honeyed deceit

of cherry blossoms, but still when the smell is released
to the air, they show alarm, grow jumpy and nervous.

In second and third generations, this fear fades to sensitivity
but lingers on. An ornamental cherry lives no more

than forty years. When the researchers dissect the mice they discover,
in the small buds of their brains, a greater number of neurons

able to detect the cherry scent. But still the researchers know little—
just the small cruelties of fact, how sweetly they helix and drift

through our contorted branches, our outstretched
fingertips, as memory drops its petals all around us.

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Julia Bouwsma

Pastoral in the Anthropocene

It’s the uncertainty that corrodes,
that greens me most—I fold myself
into myself, cordon off and wait

for sprout. Or I pace the loop road
daily, catalog each effort
to survive. Panic grows tectonic—

the erratic at the crest of the hill
now an ecosystem all its own—lush moss
muscles to rot atop this granite skull crest

until the topsoil’s thick enough to root
a sapling. What will hold us? The rusted Saab births
a forest of branches from windows and roof

out on the back lot. Bullet holes
constellate its cream-walled sky. Shotgun casings
bloom yellow in place of daffodils. One by one,

the old patterns chip and flake, early snows
without frost. Our dirt road, suspended
in partial hibernation, heaves

and buckles, chews its own
mass lean. Ice slicks so dense they
shine a mirror. Our anxious faces

stare right back. Nothing hardens properly
anymore. We’re soft, porous, prone
to radio monotone, each day’s

new prophecy. We bide our time, we watch.
Again our wells run dry. River recedes
to summer bones before the rime is barely off.

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Julia Bouwsma

Letters were once bodies, are bodies now

could be the first line of my father’s eulogy, if he were dead.
Calligrapher, madman: letters licked seriffed tongues of flame into his head. 

I lick old mad tongues to flame, let unsent letters pile up inside my head.
Each blank sheet tells me another memory I can’t trust.

Each blank sheet allows me to tell another memory I can’t trust.
I can grasp each stroke, he said. Shape it in space like a sculpture.

            A child, I could not grasp his strokes. I let him shape me like a sculpture.
            Ink pooled like demons, my unsteady hand. Still I filled the page. 

What demons will I unsteady into this poem? Still I pool the page
unkempt and smudged, inking out between the lines.

My father—unkempt, smudged—inks his face with lines,
commands each day holy with his mouth of crushed boulder.

Thou shalt, a command he crushes into my mouth. Still I rise bolder.
This could be the first line of my father’s eulogy, if he were dead.

Note: The title line is by Natalie Diaz, as quoted from an interview in The Creative Independent, 2017. The form is a duplex, invented by Jericho Brown.

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Julia Bouwsma

Premonition

Imagine like horses you can scent death months
before it comes—the rotting cedar and smoky drought

of it acid and prickly on your tongue. The air around you
hums, electric with silence. The sun is crumbling

off the hills. Fear unfurls its snake-spit flinch
along your legs, rattles you new each night until

your dreams stitch you to the mattress, belly down
the bruised fabric, your body taut and thin, a pulled sheet.

Out in the back of the pickup, the old ghost stories
are gnawing bread, their invisible teeth strip and crumble

each brittle bite. Tossed matches gutter the road—murky
secrets of oil slick and ice. You are learning to walk naked,

numb, winter caught in your hair, unbuckling. The stars
vibrate for miles, but each morning the wind subsides,

a last breath that is never the last. Everywhere
you look, the staggered branches glitter with disease.

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Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the recipient of the 2018 Maine Literary Award; the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver; and the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Linda Pastan. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Grist, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx and other journals. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.

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Charlie M. Brown

Without Notice of Default

What I remember is the cracked, red wooden door that stood like grief—
ajar so long no one knew if it was opening or closing (and if memory
is only a cast, worn over the broken hourglass in your spine,
then grief is only an address). What I remember

is your jaw jutting like a night lantern hung,
someone forgot to set light to. Your eyes
the color of fog, still staring, too heavy
to hold on my own. You and the walls wore the same

stillness until the compressions.
With every press exhausting your body of whatever else you tried
to take with you. I remember learning then:
the body is another word for home (a word that not only dies, but keeps

dying). You never told me when you left
your cheeks would keep the way the sun turned honey
on your brown skin. Or your hands, the way spaghetti
tastes on my tongue when you add the right hint
of sugar. Here— these are only stories.

But I can still hear you speaking them
the night before you left. The words soft

from your lips like a kiss to an infant. And then you sang
quietly to yourself, a song

only your voice
could remember.

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Charlie M. Brown

Aphantasia

Not so much the sun
as that clot of shadow
pulling close. Inhaling

that sun-kiss
fast enough you forgot
who gave it.

But you remember
the distance,
you remember the waiting

like warm breath
on your neck. Your stillness

the gap between two hands
skin could never fill.

And after.

Your hands know
a child always touches the stove
twice.

And your feet, the way
time only knows falling.

Or that they must hold steady
the night, from pressing

cold hands
into day

where the breath of every dusk
has become
the air,

there is none.

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Charlie M. Brown

The Price of Thread

— after Misery by Kathe Kollwitz

And sunlight knocks at the window,
but doesn’t enter. Grief

waxes a father slowly
into the way he stands.

The eyes of the child he holds
address the unweaving loom.

The walls are breathless. The breathless
are walls—

A mother’s hands pull at her strands
to find a thread of reason.

And the boy waits
below. Patient between inhale, exhale. The note

only played between
the black and white keys. And here

I am waiting,

knowing
soon the child will wake,

and say maybe those who jump from burning
buildings aren’t any less

afraid.
In the end, they know

the ground is the only place we’ll find
rest.

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Charlie M. Brown’s poems and essays are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review, 30 North and The Scarab. He is currently an undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University in Maryland. He enjoys film, photography and music.

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Nicholas Samaras

Mrinalini

Years after the October Assassination of Prime Minister Gandhi

I don’t remember saving these clippings,
decades ago. When did the pages dinge
yellow from their dark petals of print?
I remember Mrinalini and her country,
her curled syllables of language,
my youthful desire. Our lives were lived.
New York and India past, and the years
to learn that assassinations have grown

into daily occurrences, varying types.
In Florida’s October where summer seems
endless, holding the sun like a crucible,
I remember Lini, cherished and gone.
In another country, history happened.
In another country, the air is edged with fall.

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Nicholas Samaras

Directions for the Kidnapped Child at Three Years Old

Take this cigarette and put it in your mouth.
Close your lips around it and breathe in as deep as you can.

Reach out and put your hand on this stove.
That’s what hot means.

Reach up and open the hall’s tiny door to the incinerator.
This is where bad children can be thrown, anytime.

Do you see this belt? Don’t make me take it off.
If you talk when I’m home, I’ll have this belt

talk back to you. Get over here
and hand me the Mickey Mouse comic book

I brought you yesterday. The way I rip his body
to shreds is the way I can do it to anybody.

Cry all you like. You’ll breathe
when I tell you to breathe.

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Nicholas Samaras

Among the Red and Yellow Tulips of Boston Common

This is a man in black, speaking to the air around him
as he strides through vivid stalks and flamed blossoms.
This is the world that will always pretend not to see him
as he weaves through, still touching everything vital,
the world receding behind him into its own business.
His is a grey breath of inhalation through a broken mouth.
He is a man whose mouth is lost in the greyness of his beard.
He is a man who bites down and vanishes.
This is a world of colour that is colour when seen.
He is a man who always wakes to lightness again.
This is the lucid morning that goes on with or without notice.
He is a fine leather wallet from Vienna. He is the worn
and cherished photographs, holding their smiles in the plastic leaves.
This is the coloured world that wears away.
This is the whisper that keeps the rare world going.
This is a man in black speaking to the air.

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Nicholas Samaras is from Patmos, Greece (the “Island of the Apocalypse”) and, at the time of the political Greek Junta (“Coup of the Generals”) was brought in exile to be raised further in America. He has lived in Greece, Asia Minor, England, Wales, Brussels, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Jerusalem, thirteen states in America and he writes from a place of permanent exile. Currently, he is writing a poetry textbook and critiques client-poetry by appointment.

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Sarah Marquez

Shopping on Ventura

The world is twice as troubled in the daytime.
You and I walk the sunlit boulevard and see

a home furnishing store closing for good.
Everything on sale must go. Afternoon crowds

the windows inches from us. Our reflections
ready to pass through. Inside, empty shelves

hold themselves together for the final pause,
while we reach for something new. Set our hands

loose from tethered wrists. No one sees your
shadow flit between the watercolor carpets

hanging like curtains or draws my attention
from the farmhouse buffet table. Neglected.

Like new but for the white oak finish chipping
off. We split the building in two. I take one side.

Leave behind my desire to save what is left.
This moment, with you still in it. You take

the other and find a deal on accent pillows.
Tell me that browsing the end is the most

unpredictable fun. Sun bends out of view
too long. Shade is dangerous. I imagine,

we will buy nothing, like everyone else.
Move on and forget this place ever existed.

Leave an imprint of our blues in the dust
collecting on the rustic lampshades.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Marquez

Self Measurements

inspired by Kelly Grace Thomas

I am the biggest place / I know. / A concave vessel, / a cave of listening.
No sound can escape. / I enter, myself / bone-framed, breaking, / and find

I am the loudest echo. / Last wish. If we / talk about lonely, / how I live now
will remember / how I want to live. / I am deepest. An open grave / waiting for silence

to drop. / For worms sticking out / to crawl backward. / The end is a house
made of shadows / of women’s hands, /cut off and sewn together.

Women taught that blood / stays blood. / When all the water inside them / is gone,
they are still family, / still female, / still. / Father is the head, / memory of the snake.

He will be again / and again / forever. / And the rib that made them / is not
indestructible / after fire, / after the vessel they are / buoyed / burns down.

Dust to dust they become. / Carry on. / Seek the near-bright star / and pray
to veil /and unveil the reflection / in the mirror. / The true-false measurements.

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Sarah Marquez (she/her) is an MA candidate at Southern New Hampshire University. She is based in Los Angeles and has work published and forthcoming in various magazines and journals, including Amethyst Review, Capsule Stories, Ink&Nebula, Kissing Dynamite, Peculiars Magazine and Twist in Time Magazine. When not writing, she can be found reading for Periwinkle Magazine and Random Sample Review, sipping coffee, or tweeting @Sarahmarissa338

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Nicholas Holt

The Survivalist’s Field Guide to Seducing the Mothman

We talk a lot, you & I, but the conversation
always comes back to cryptocurrency.

Remember what you thought? You thought
cryptids. Bigfoot pulling a woodland tenner

out of his ripped jeans and paying an owl
for some beet chips. I told you it’s more

like a factory without the steam whistle.
A line of computers humming chiptunes,

their eyes blinking red. I read that’s how
they smile. You smile when you dream,

but I don’t. I’m always at dream work.
The minimum wage is pillow drool

to keep plowboys in poverty. I spend
the pittance on new lipstick to wear

in my nightmares. I don’t hope it keeps
my teeth in my gums, just that they’ll be

a little prettier when they rattle
into the bathroom sink. I hope

when I boot-up and move into a studio
oak tree, you’re right — that it was

cryptids — the Loch Ness lets me slide
down his neck & into the lake, and mothman

is the village idiot, and the village boyfriend,
and my idiot boyfriend. He drops by

holding stacks of two-by-fours under
his wings and offers to renovate

my countertops. I stare at the lipstick
trailing up his neck and up to his big

red eyes. I pet the chipmunk in the hamster
wheel that powers my computer and check

my currency. I unbutton my shirt
and say what will it cost me?

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Nicholas Holt is a fourth year student studying Creative Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He is finishing his first manuscript to earn an Honors status within his major. His work has appeared in The Kudzu Review.

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Rachel Small

we are all the laundered girls

strung from lines like bed linen                      as a white flag waving in the wind, separated by a
final
            farewell caught in slow motion

(by their hands are the yellow daffodils found          slick with morning dew
         a reminder of rubber raincoats            lost hair bands             beeswax melting from a
candlestick)

and spring does not smell the way the detergent bottle promises. it comes with the strong brag of
cloudy lavender                      taken from fields by girls barefoot, dressed in white.

but instead it exists as a wash of dullness       spun and tumbled in whirls of soapy motions
            rattling in the small room off from the kitchen (left before right       and reversed).

my mother hangs bedding from the line atop the hill             and it waves like a dozen girls

dancing

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Rachel Small (she/her) writes in Ottawa. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines, including ottawater, many gendered mothers, blood orange, The Shore and other places. She was the recipient of honourable mention for the John Newlove Poetry Award for her poem “garbage moon and feminist day.” You can find her on twitter @rahel_taller

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Noah Stetzer

That Old Song

The sixteen-wheeler—hit head on by the left front corner
of your father’s car—jack-knifed and exploded: chain reaction
into seven more cars, seven drivers; a piled-up, four-lane
interstate shutdown; six hours under helicopter cameras.

You might think that there was music and, watching the rear
view mirror, his eyes went off the road and went instead
to where he’d been: an image in front of behind, the highway
bending the other way.

And one time coming home late, you found him with his eyes closed
on the couch, the stereo speakers clicking with a record long past over;
and while you watched his eyes opened and looked right at you
because he knew all along where to find you.

The officer’s handwriting says initial impact point 11 o’clock — Driver
One visibly deceased in car — ref. photo three where there’s a picture
in a file, in a box, on a shelf, in a dark room, behind a door no one
ever thinks about

— where you might find him listening again to his old records:
this one never goes out of style and that turning ticking sound
of the needle’s useless spinning.

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Noah Stetzer

Bait & Blind

this is the man that I cannot forget
that I fold into cranes and hang with string
from the ceiling, a twisting gray paper
keepsake catching the corner of my eye

there a glimpse of him moving—must be wind
inside this still room that I cannot hear
or feel—this creased idea, mythic
shape of leaving of heading out and gone

the still square of this cool morning inside
the room inside the house; an unseen wind,
exhaled breath of the hidden passes through

but I’m folding sheets of blank white paper
to capture him, tucking corners inside
corners with small hope that something lingers

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Noah Stetzer

The Wall Instructs

it’s been months
since the sun came
through the blinds
the way it's here now
the wall striped and lit
with a slanting and slow
moving squared shape
of warm late afternoon
light and the way
the window’s now
a stencil a cookie
cutter the wall’s a comb
of slat shadows
that are creeping a slow
burn candle wick
into the corner as day
folds into itself
leaving the room
this little dark
that makes me think
it’s even colder now
draft behind my neck
a chill under foot
you could stand
to leave a place
that loses such magic
in ticking seconds
a place that shows
you just exactly
how to go

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Noah Stetzer is the author of Because I Can See Needing a Knife (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). His Pushcart-nominated poems have appeared in the New England Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Green Mountains Review, Bellevue Literary Review and other journals. He has been a fellow of the Lambda Literary Retreat and a work-study scholar at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Noah lives in Kansas City and can be found online at www.noahstetzer.com.

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Kathryn de Lancellotti

The Meadowlark

I feel guilty picking lavender,
and stepping on stones.
I see a ladybug land in my son’s hair
and let it rest awhile.
A long-legged spider weaves a home into the corner.
A reoccurring dream
of a recluse in my bed, I try to kill it with a shoe
but it gets me first.
I’m the one the mosquitoes want to drink,
the sucker for love, the meat.
I see a cloud and think I could live here,
the sun is peeking through the pine
the vine is climbing the trunk.
We all need a host to carry us.

Sometimes I cry to the lark.
Sometimes I beg for its wings.

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Kathryn de Lancellotti is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a former recipient of the Cowell Press Poetry Prize and the George Hitchcock Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems and other works have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Press Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, The American Journal of Poetry, Rise Up Review, The Bind, Cultural Weekly, Bending Genres, Quarterly West, Rust + Moth and others. Her debut chapbook Impossible Thirst will be forthcoming with Moon Tide Press in 2020. Kathryn resides in Harmony, California with her family.

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Molly Tenenbaum

They Find Me

On the grass beneath the feeder, among the sunflower hulls.
In my sock feet, hand on half a catnip mouse.

In the sand, do they ever find me
below the garnet grains, in the crux
of a white sponge spicule?
I’m clinking among the oolds.

They’ve found my calendula, teaspoon.
They’ve found my cuspid and dipthong.
Out the window on the bushes
where pomace was tossed after crushing.

In the shop of the man who boils down the gold
the thieves bring by cufflink, by tie-clip, by tooth,
lining up to drop each one on the gleaming heap—
they find me at the bottom of the pot.

All this time, I’ve been searching the world
for the stolen rings that were my mother’s.

They knew me by the shoe caught in the chain of the swing.
On my face, an expression of curly brackets.
Cut me open to find the ballet in progress.

What are the odds the leaf would fall directly on the lyre?
What are the odds that through the missing
bottom of the cup, a bright red fish would swim?

A string plucked in the room behind them made them turn.
When they found me, I was in a boat,
they could not believe it, I was still rowing.

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Molly Tenenbaum is the author of four books of poems, most recently Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) and The Cupboard Artist (Floating Bridge, 2012). Her chapbook/artist book, Exercises to Free the Tongue (2014), a collaboration with artist Ellen Ziegler, combines poems with archival materials about ventriloquism. Her poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Her recordings of old-time Appalachian banjo are Instead of a Pony  and Goose & Gander. She lives in Seattle, teaching at North Seattle College and Dusty Strings Music School.

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Jide Badmus

Driver

the road is
full of mouths
& everything is
out to eat you.

stuck in the
jaws of traffic,
thirsty—a cold
bottle of water
sells for double
its normal price
on the long bridge.

engine overheats.
you still need the
overpriced water
for the radiator.

& when you think
you have broken
free of traffic,
police palms open
—like tithe bags—
on potholed altars.

the road is
full of mouths
& everything is
out to eat you.

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Jide Badmus is an electrical engineer, a poet inspired by beauty and destruction; he believes that things in ruins were once beautiful. He is the author of There is a Storm in my Head, Scripture and Paper Planes in the Rain; curator of Vowels Under Duress; Coffee; and Today, I Choose Joy anthologies.

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Satya Dash

Ornamental Design

"You have to play like you don't care, but you have to care a lot”
                                   ―Grant Elliott after playing a match winning knock
                in the Cricket World Cup Semifinal, New Zealand v South Africa, 2015

Such was my composure in an orchard full of arrows
once, someone hid behind me thinking I was a tree.
Eventually my appetite for oxygen gave me away.
It still remains a fond memory. Now I see great sportsmen
on TV deliver under extreme pressure of expectation
& wonder if they somehow found that place where you
care so fine that your muscles move like the sky does
during rain. Is that the key to performance? I want
to know where I can find that thing called sangfroid.
Even in love, I find my neck stooping & mouth
frothing if I’m too earnest. Which is such a shame
really. What I’m saying is ―why is everything such
a game of contradictions, why are some nights
too humid to cry myself to sleep. Water in the air
& suddenly no water in my eyes. Ugh. I’ve been told
I’m a noisy eater. Time to time, the decibels residing
in my countless orifices prick me too, injecting
garden varieties of sadness. Forgive me when I say ―
one major benefit  of sadness is intelligence. I mean,
just look at how reverberations of a body wave
through time. Spooned up by other desirous
bodies within radius. Then yawned into countless
moons for their new nights. I can tell you
even when the British left this country, the smatterings
of language they left behind, we used as salt ―first
on our bruises, then in our food. To be honest,
I wouldn’t be writing this poem otherwise. In a
language that feels so utterly mine because now
I even fantasize in it. Through twenty eight years of being
vigorously pinned to days & nights, I now realize
this is all by design. The beasts in us shall smash up
against each other in fury & accident. That’s all right,
even the planets roughed up each other at the start.
Bodies will rise to silence, lick their fountain wounds.
After a deciduous length of years, shake hands. But
here’s the catch ―you won’t act as if you know
even though you do. This is by design too. Look, I know
you stole a glance at me glancing at you. In your book,
keep me young or keep me old. Up to you.
But I’m interested in knowing if you kept me
gentle. With a little scope for venom.

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Satya Dash's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Pidgeonholes, Glass Poetry, Prelude, and others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. His work has been twice nominated for the Orison Anthology. He spent his early years in Odisha, India and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at : @satya04

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Wheeler Light

Kaddish

A week ago, you were here
and now everyone is posting
song lyrics on your Facebook
hoping the wavelength might
reach you in Gehenna. Here
I am, thinking not having
the words for your passing
says more about me than it does
about you. Jews do this—also
everyone. Grieving is a process
of many days and nights. Passing
by nostalgic playgrounds
I place you in memories where
you never existed to begin with.
It’s selfish, wanting to know
the dead better than the many
ravines of the ego—the cracking
of a voice, the breaking of silence.
The many eyes drowning in songs
that help the remembering.
Rabbi says the words I never learned
to understand for me. I send my best
into the night as though untying a knot
and turning grief into a guitar string.
Let me play you a song.
You all know the words to this one.

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Wheeler Light

Teeth

In a dream, all my teeth fall out. In another,
my teeth shatter. When I am not dreaming,
I bite my bottom lip when I get angry.

My brother used to say it would telegraph
my punches and that is why he would
always win our fights. In reality, he would
win because he was a better fighter.

He would never celebrate the wins,
he would just win and get sad about it
later. We were always fighting. I was always
scared I would lose. Now that I have adult
teeth, whenever one is a little loose,
I am afraid that I will be alone when I die.

I have a retirement fund which my friends
think is useless with the apocalypse on
the horizon. I wake up and make muesli
and an unsoaked oat gets lodged between
two molars. It is so important to look forward
to something even when living in the present.

Everyone who is alive right now has had
the dream where their teeth fall out.

That’s not a verifiable statistic. I don’t have
source or proof of it. I have a retirement fund
because I’m scared that if the apocalypse
doesn’t come, I will have to deal with the fallout
of being old with a body that doesn’t work.

The dreams about the teeth mean the same thing
despite containing different ways to break.

I am not afraid of being afraid of you anymore.

In a dream, I killed myself over and over
in an alleyway. The alleyway filled with my body
until it couldn’t contain my body. Then I woke up.

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Wheeler Light currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, Hobart, New Delta Review, Pretty Owl Poetry and December Magazine, among others. He is the author of Blue Means Snow (Bottlecap Press 2018) and Hometown Onomastics (Pitymilk 2019).

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JK Anowe

A Road’s Guide to Kill

Like any city under no siege, she fell
to sleep watching me hear myself

think. Quite wholly
she fell, the child in the noose

of her mother’s arms. & the car breezes
towards another city that knows me

not by my scent or face, my fate
nor sweat, but by my fear—                                                 

that tragedy of arrival
to arrive to. & the sky came down

in mild cloaks of rain
multiplied into puddles

of more sky. Trees outside raced us
nowhere, windows wound down

only to let in a whiff of deadness—
of roadkill, months-old perhaps, & sole

-crushed leaves—how our nose
hair grabbed at its cologne

of rot & earth & flesh, all the silence
that rests amongst us

long enough to keep
our hearing from the dead.

I peel black clot off a knee-wound
to reveal another day, violent red

as any other day.
& it is the last hour 

in which she wakes, this
child, to continue watch

—her gaze piercing me full
of pores so microscopic I’m sure

she’s seen through me to the future.
A slow-dread enthusing none but itself.

________________________________________________________________________________________

JK Anowe, Igbo-born poet and teacher, is author of the poetry chapbooks Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019) and The Ikemefuna Tributaries: a parable for paranoia (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016). He’s a recipient of the inaugural Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2017 and a finalist for the 2019 Gerard Kraak Award. Recent works appear in Palette Poetry, Glass Poetry: Poets Resist, Kissing Dynamite, the temz review, The Gerard Kraak Anthology 2019, The Shore, The Muse (University of Nigeria’s literary journal), Agbowo, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Fresh Air Poetry and elsewhere. He’s Poetry Chapbooks Editor for Praxis Magazine Online. He lives, teaches and writes from somewhere in Nigeria.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Saunders

Ode to My Alternate History

I want to go back now—to take everything I know
at fifty and pour it into that girl
the way we used to drill a quarter-sized hole
into a watermelon rind and fill the fruit
with vodka, the sweet ripe flesh soaking it up
and burying the sting so we got spinning drunk
just off the sweetness. Or even further back, sixteen,
on the beach, just outside the glow of the bonfire,
just enough in the shadows to think nobody could see
his fingers working in my jeans. What I could do now
with that boy, with that girl’s body,
with the night and the bonfire and the shadows,
with his fingers, how I could cast a net of pleasure
across both of us. I know how to say
yes now and mean it, I know the difference
between gift and theft.
That watermelon ripe body I didn’t know
what to do with. I didn’t know
I could have turned those boys inside out,
didn’t even know I could have turned myself
inside out. I could have straddled those boys,
their jeans tangled at their knees,
could have ridden my own pleasure like a horse,
could have said, I want you to touch me like this.
Could have said, put your hands over your head,
could have said, let’s make each other shine.
Look at the moonlight rippling on the lake.
God, I could have said, wouldn’t it be great to shine like that?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Saunders

All I Really Need To Know I Learned From YouTube Videos (“Pack Behavior”)

with a line from Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Some days you’re a twice-folded prayer, some days
you’re the wind that frays it, but you’re never the body
that staggers away. Hyenas begin devouring their prey
before it’s even dead, pull entrails out of a zebra
still trying to break loose. Jaws deep in the flanks.
There’s no pity in a season of hunger.

Some animals don’t know when to lie down and die
and what kind of animal you are or are not
remains to be seen. Caress of grass and wood smoke,
slow rosying of dawn, that old weather-rhyme:
sailor take warning. Grief comes sharp-winged,
white-backed and breaking bones for marrow.

Enough hyenas can snatch a kill from a lion
if they come at her from all sides,
if they remember to act as a single shimmering thing.
You watch the kill over and over,
dog-laughter in your headphones, blood
on your screen. Pause, rewind, replay:
you’re waiting for the scene that never arrives,
eyes wide for some moment of mercy.
But the clan is nothing but hunger and frenzy
and the zebra goes down in the dust every time.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. She is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Orison Anthology nominee and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, The Shallow Ends, Stirring and elsewhere. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland, where in the winters she teaches skating in a hockey school.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Dodd Lee

After Receiving a Bill from the Water Department That Wasn't Mine

In the baby book it says I had pyloric
stenosis, “fine after operation.” I never

knew what caused that scar. All these
cops everywhere, doctors flipping open

charts, someone whose job it is to make
sure the tap water keeps flowing. I’ve got a

well. And a snake’s skin laid out on
vellum. Once I found the thimble of half

a robin’s egg, tipped skyward, filled with
rainwater. I picked it up and peered inside

at the tiny globe of teardrop-colored water
at the bottom of which lay a single deceased

ant. All of our deaths take place to scale.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Dodd Lee is the author of ten full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), & And Other’s, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2018), a second book of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines (including The Nation, Copper Nickel, Chattahoochee Review and Diode) & is currently making final edits on Flood, a novel. He is also a painter, collage artist and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one person exhibitions, mixing collage & poetry texts into single improvisational art works. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Hunger, The Rumpus and Twyckenham Notes. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, original poems, erasures and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in 2019. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Maxine Patroni

When I Came Back

I was a sparrow in the dark
shadow of an elm tree.

I was a leaf dropped towards
the lake, my face star-like

and swirling—no longer
fragmented, no longer a breeze

of bullets, hot and smoke-
circled. I was a woman

who saw shapes in the clouds,
who painted landscapes

with her finger. I was a green valley
where all the horses lived.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Maxine Patroni

In Winter

In the shower,
we’re alone

together.
Fog veiled

over blue
shutters.

Inside:
we unravel.

One slender stroke
then miracles

of salt.
Moon-soured,

night enters
then lifts

to bend grasses
westward—

too bland
this house.

Our wet cuts,
traces

we touched
and meant it.

Something
in our blood

quelled too long,
hums.

A towel across
the mirror

the only prayer
after

the crying
stops.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Maxine Patroni

Ode to Gray

O our buried.

            O our song
around the fire,
            which dies
but comes back
            once we feed it.

O crush.
O mussel shell
            I use to mark
            an X on your skin.

O disappearing glare
when night comes—
            why do we rush
            for it?

            O but we have to.

To touch or not to touch you?

O the easy questions
you ask
            like how I know
            we’re alive.

            O your shadow
how it rises
like a spear.

O owl, its wings circling.

            O how I see your ghost
in all things

just before they move
and just after.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Maxine Patroni graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University where she was the Teachers and Writers Fellow. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Literary Review, Greensboro Review, Allegheny Review and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Stephanie Seabrooke

Object Permanence

The night I found you in the snowbank behind my eyes
was starless and scattered with heretics. They guzzled kerosene

and burned down the barn and I laughed along with them
like someone who’s discovered money isn’t real. Their queen wore

a crown of sternums and sang into my spine as I spotted
your champagne head on the horizon, as startling as mercy.

The drifts were no match for your mewling black magic
and soon you were back with me in bed, smiling in your sleep

and shit staining the sheets. Now I have scorch marks at
the nape of my neck and birds of prey try to pluck you

from the patio. They should know by now a nest perched
on a powerline never kept me away. I could fetch you

from the rings of Saturn. Our latch is a law of nature, as
binding as the tide that took us in August. We were almost

a tragedy, doomed to commune forever with eels and angelfish,
when something on the shoreline heaved us home. It was my

winter witch, moaning bone music while my back
buckled under your weight.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Stephanie Seabrooke’s work explores identity, the subjectivity of perception, and the inexorable march of time. She holds a BA in English from Towson University and resides in the Baltimore metro area. You can follow her on Twitter @StephSeabrooke.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Tara Ballard

On the Notion of Lentils

Za’atar dusts the yellow soup / like poppies across a field. // I stare down at my bowl, surprised / by the salt in my reaction: / It is as if / I’m looking at a stretch of photos, watching / a video I did not realize was recorded, / as if I’m seeing olive oil: pressed by dear ones, / picked from trees: My husband again on the ladder, / me on the blue tarp, dividing good from not so. / As if I am again washing soil from my fingers, / edging earth from under my nails after a full day, / remembering the table, elbows that rest / on its edges, stories spoken and heard / and told to bring with us. // I lift my spoon / from the napkin and take a sip. // Again / remove the stones. Again chop the onion. Mouth / the words for water, cumin. / It is November / and cold. Again we sleep in scarves and warm / hands on the space heater that too heats chestnuts. / It is winter, and, again, the news is bad. / We watch a tank on the street corner. // No, it is March. It is spring. I am in Portland, / and there are no poppies. It is spring, / and, please, don’t bring the coffee. // I already know what the fortune reads.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Tara Ballard spent eight years in the Middle East and West Africa, but has now returned home to Alaska. Her collection House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press) won the 2016 Many Voices Project prize in poetry. She is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, and her poems have been published in North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Spillway, Tupelo Quarterly and other literary magazines. Her work recently won a 2019 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ned Balbo

Passengers in Payne’s Gray

Amtrak, Northeast Corridor: through glass,
what colors are impatient to be gone?
We pass the Payne’s gray of the water’s surface,

unstoppable between stops, instantly
perceived and lost. The rumble and the tremble
carry us like decorated glass

about to break. Bridgeless, the bridge supports
we pass, gulls dozing, whirl and glide away,
planted with scrub trees. Now the water’s surface

scatters in Payne’s gray flecks of memory…
Horizon and sky are one, a vanishing
that’s no one’s fault, or ours, like blue-gray glass

that casts its glow of iron or indigo—
We’re going, going, gone, like watercolors
stanched with rags, or bread, the river’s surface

panning right, blues leaning black or gray,
cobalt or coal… Where do we start, or end,
riding the Northeast Corridor, under glass,

where pain’s gray, like the speeding water’s surface?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ned Balbo

Night Sky of Another Earth

We didn’t even know that it was gone.
In place of stars, a dark gray curtain
hovered overhead,
half haze, half urban

lightstorm from the ground up. Did we look,
or see it on the news, stars bright
in archived images?
We’d lost the sky

to satellites in never-ending orbit,
programmed from below; to waves
of coastal light ascending;
to the glare

that climbs from roads and airfields everywhere,
the wasted afterglow cast off
by cities, radiant towers…
We made that trade.

True night, I’ve heard, survives where we don’t see it,
home to sentinel drones that guard
            the boundaries of a desert.
Galaxy-swept,

cave-black yet filled with stars, it’s like a myth
we memorized in school or half-
remember from some other
Earth where, standing

under immense sky, we gazed in awe
before the panorama, uncertain
of our place, and bothered
to look up.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ned Balbo’s newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. His previous books are Upcycling Paumanok, Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize), Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize) and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize). He received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and three Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland Arts Council. Recent poems appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Literary Matters, Literary Imagination and Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology. Balbo taught most recently in Iowa State’s MFA program in creative writing and environment and at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. He is married to poet-essayist Jane Satterfield. (More at https://nedbalbo.com.)

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna White

To My Parents:

I watch you from above with her, the little girl––furled
bud in the hospital bed, pale as a veiled

moon, wet lashes sealing her eyelids shut. She does not
unglue them to see your fingers drumming on the silver

rails of the bed, see you pluck a ghosted tissue
from the box. Her eyes are closed so she cannot read

the furrows at the corners of your eyes, but she knows
they are there. She can already trace their fissures

in her mind’s eye and feel the rhythm of your tapping
fingers through her skin, tight as a drum to her bones.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Music professor Joanna White has works in: Examined Life Journal, Healing Muse, MacGuffin, Measure, Sow’s Ear, Earth’s Daughters, Dunes Review, KYSO Flash Anthologies, Cherry Tree and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), among others. Her first collection, Drumskin and Bones, will be published (Salmon Press, Ireland) March 2021.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch

How My Light Is Spent

Something looks back from the trees.
Something cries in a voice
like bones scratching together:
hip joint grinding into femur.
Sycamores and black oaks
grab tendrils of wind in their knobby branches,
empty beneath winter’s poverty.

Something runs away,
a dark speck on the periphery.
The sun is almost all gold
and red in the sparks collected
in ice dripping from tips of branches,
from curled strips of sycamore bark.
The landscape is all dead.
The landscape is all alive.
The forest’s breath becomes snow,
flakes of bone settling like ash
on mulch and twigs.

Something looks back at the fallow field
I stand in, caught
between houses, behind,
and what remains
of a forest.

Something breathes and calls and runs away
while I can only stand and wait.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch earned an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her poems have been published in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, The Atticus Review, Panoplyzine, Confrontation, Conjunctions, Rust + Moth, American Literary Review, Apple Valley Review, The Red River Review, San Pedro River Review, Apt among many others. Her books of poems, The Wrack Line and Fleeing Back, can be found on Amazon.com or the FutureCycle Press website. Check out her website at http://pathanahoedosch.blogspot.com/ and Twitter @PHanahoeDosch.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Westwood Diehl

Canyon

Visitors fall into this canyon. People from all over the world fall here. Some are later found in pinyon pines with camera straps still wrapped around their necks. I tell you this because you won’t read this odd fact in the postcard’s caption, and I want you to be wary.

If you visit the gift shop at the lodge, you will find books about deaths in the canyon. As if this makes Utah a more exciting place to visit. As if you, too, might consider slipping from the crumbling lip above a scenic overlook. As if you might like, when the native plant identification group moves on from the mountain phlox without you, to step into a deception. Into the canyon’s beckoning. Sirens singing in its depths. The myth music filling the hollowed earth. Filling it with fictions of light and shadow. Stealing your east and west. Making you rudderless.

Do not be deceived by scenery. By what you see through a camera. By the seemingly solid edge. Stay tied to your mast. Your name does not belong in the index of this book.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Per Contra, Thrush Poetry Journal, Tishman Review, The MacGuffin, Atticus Review and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

________________________________________________________________________________________

KG Newman

The Sunsets in Our Heads

Coronavirus led to Chinese panic-buying
toilet paper, out-elbowing each other
for the last rolls of Charmin, and this was
before hysteria appeared in America
but after our queen drones
were infected with malware,
causing a distraction war as it
became unprofitable to wonder
the mood of your parents when conceived
or if world leaders were also hiding
scared in some cold, moldy bunker.

The grandmothers we’ve ignored
about proper ways to communicate
and the unbeatable taste of natural honey
don’t forgive us now, nor should they,
and in the new age
all that’s left is rocks along with
small gifts of incomprehension:

From the slits in the storm door
we thought we saw a vagabond white ox out
wandering around August’s nuclear winter,
followed by black buffaloes I recognized
as the ones who once led the procession
of flower carts into the evening market
before all the bees went extinct.

________________________________________________________________________________________

KG Newman is a sportswriter who covers the Broncos and Rockies for The Denver Post. His first three collections of poems are available on Amazon. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He lives in Castle Rock, Colorado, with his wife and two kids.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bryan D. Price

Theogony

first there was the god
of last stands
doubling as the spirit
of the waxing year
the patron saint of revolutions
(both just and unjust)
took the knife that originally severed
heaven from earth
covered it in lambskin like
a hand covering a fist and
buried it between
sheets of plain white paper
between onionskin
after the suicide of
a former lover there came
a screed of little acts
mostly profane and necessarily
somber some with
morphine and once
with cyanide
left a note that read—
in the ruins of the internet
there are tapes of me
we can listen to them together
I’m in the honeycomb
in the hive with you

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bryan D. Price’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Posit, Diagram, Hinchas de Poesia and Inverted Syntax. He lives and teaches in Southern California where he is working on a manuscript of elegies.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Merwin

Pretender

It’s October again, and the world is wide & flat
between us. I think of the heat-swollen nights, kaleidoscoped

with night terrors, jigsaw girls
in the starving jungle. Our legs grew

towards the sun. Your branches curved

around mine. Your hands were always cold.
Another October, you ran from me,

pink fingers, baby’s breath steaming
cloud-puddles into sky. The fence that separates before

and since. I tear stitches
from leather, shout raw

into the turning trees. If only it had been me.
If only my legs had been longer.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Merwin

One Night We Drove through Maryland

You couldn’t have survived long

away from the forest. I know.

Rain-thirsty, caught in the throat

of a sunflooded continent, slowly

unmothering your way to the shore.

We could have become the coast,

let the salt-rim of Atlantic swell

rush our skin into purple calcite.

Remember when it all

came together? Your bones,

my bones, a twisted map

of east and west,

like the seaboards running

into themselves,

forever & always

remaking each other.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Merwin is a writer currently based in Baltimore. Her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Passages North, Hobart, The Journal, Sugar House, Prairie Schooner and Blackbird. She has read and/or reviewed for the Bellingham Review, WomenArts Quarterly and the Adroit Journal, and holds a MFA in poetry from Western Washington University. Her first collection, Womanskin, is available from CutBank Books. Connect with her at www.kathrynmerwin.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jenny Irish

In Texas There are Tours of Things That Aren’t There Anymore

Ten years from now I will think of Texas as the end of girlhood. Hot nights on the thin ledge of the edge of sleep, listening past the quiet to the cockroaches scaling the slick insides of a plastic bag of dinner’s discarded odds and ends—the last sweetness in the tiny sauce cup, the salted peel of a potato pursed like a mouth, the final, taffy-yellow bite of brisket-fat spat into a paper napkin, and then the train whistle, punching through, and I am upright, a hard-beating heart, and on the bedside table the cheap plastic fan at the furthest point of its rotation sticks, clicks, and clicks and clicks unable to reverse its course. A shift of the curtains, a spill of dishwater light: good morning.

One hundred years ago, on the spring-fed river boiling cold from the rocks, a silent film star sent to the country to be cured of an unnamed affliction fled the vast, verandaed hospital—a gray carcass now on a hill watercolored by wild flowers—and didn’t drown, though he dove down and down again, trying in a psychosis of withdrawal to swim through the split where the water roared up.

In the closer past, on the same river, but further down, after the slow flowing tannic stretch, dark as over-steeped tea, where the snouted softshell turtles rise through the red like a quiet corps of color-muted military hot air balloons, I didn’t drown.

Caught in a current surge, I submerged, scuffing over river rock, skin stripped back—my chin, my shins, my shoulders, my knuckles, my knees, all singing in a carrying high-note of hurt. When I was beyond breathless, black bursts of tar-bubble-light and raw fingertips reaching nothing, the river calmed again, widening, dropping down into shallow yellow acres of puddle-water. All the young mothers, the straps of their bathing suits pushed from their shoulders so as not to interrupt their tans, laid out on the smooth rock rim, their babies splashing naked.

Once, on the river, there was a concrete coliseum with a cold, spring-fed pool at its center: The Aquarena, where busty girls with pin curls set with Gum of Benjamin who could hold their breath for long minutes showed their athletic ability by performing synchronized tricks with a twitch-snouted series of pink piglets all called Ralphie. Visit The Aquarena! Home of Ralphie, The World Famous Swimming Pig!

This began as a love poem and still is.

Literary scholars of certain training and temperament will argue importance indicated by absence. That which never appears, still, they would say, overlaps every shadow and tickles each fine, premonitory hair at the back of every neck.

There are the ready phrases for the pain that accompanies love: swallowed stones, lodged fish bones, homesickness, sitting home alone.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jenny Irish lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Catapult, Colorado Review, Epoch, The Georgia Review and Ploughshares. She is the author of two collections: Common Ancestor and I am Faithful.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicholas Molbert

On Showing You My Hometown for the First Time

Let’s follow the funk
                        of diesel and washed-up
            redfish carrion to the coastline
                                    of this town.
                                    The number of people
            here who know
                        the definition of petrichor
is exactly you. Petrochor,

am I right? The cattails submit
                        to the emission-whiff of the wind.
            They bow to the refinery
                                    as if to they pay their respects,
                                    pay for their slow death.
            Men get cut a good check
                        to work at the shop there
but come out years later

with crude slang and chronic ailments.
                        The gasoline coming
            from the refinery powers
                                    planes that allow
                                    my parents to smoke
            their den with vetivergrass vapor.
As you can tell, this town is obsessed

with elsewhere. There is
                        a boutique named Else
            Wear just over the horizon.
                                    And in the same direction
                                    is my elementary school
            where I hacky sacked through
recess and swung from an old

wooden derrick-turned-playground.
                        In the spirit of elsewhereism,
            the town calls that derrick
                                    The Steiffel Tower.
                                    They just hopped over
            the Atlantic to France, forgot
                        the fact that the Tower
was based on a copy of the first inland 

rig only a handful
                        of miles away in Jennings.
            An old farmer stuck it right
                                    in the middle
                                    of his crawfish ponds.
            Those little lobsters didn’t give
                        a shit either.
They kept on keeping on

just as everybody else does
                        on this coast. Tomorrow,
            we can oops over the fence
                                    into the playground
                                    and goof off
            on the makeshift bars.
                        We can kick a homemade
hacky sack made from short

grain rice and a crew sock.
                        Let’s come back at sundown
            when the horizon glows red.
                                    Let’s play hopscotch
                                    in the grid made
            from the day’s leftover sun
                        as it shines through
the trifle of this derrick.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Originally from the Louisiana Gulf Coast, Nicholas Molbert now lives and writes in Cincinnati. His chapbook, Goodness Gracious, won Foundlings Press's 2019 Wallace Award. His poetry and prose has been published in or is forthcoming from Birmingham Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, Missouri Review Online, Ninth Letter and Pleiades among others.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alicia Hoffman

Sempre Forte

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." —Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, from A Treasure of Polish Aphorisms, translation from the Polish by Jacek Galazka.

I don’t know why Debussy said music is the silence
between the notes, but I do know the hushed hum

of an aftermath. Listen: between each fall a timbre
as it swoops to rise, giving way to pitch and harmony.

It’s the oboe’s reed, the mouthpiece beginning to glisten.
Fact is, I am far more insignificant than a snowflake,

unable to enact a crescendo on the smallest instrument
in the orchestra. So I plan to love it all, place no blame

or responsibility on each cell dividing, each microbe insisting.
My plan is to clash like a cymbal’s clang into the landscape.

To look the ruin in its face in order to know it better. Take
Vesuvius, before and after. Or the character actor’s slow gesture

in a Victorian tableau. As if the avalanche were anything other
than a natural fortissimo. A great sweep into some other shape,

with no regard for turpitude or distemper, duty or honor. As if
a crashing can ever be weighed by the brain’s dull architecture.

As if a single crystal can hold a moral code, as it transmogrifies
itself from gas to solid to liquid, as it slides itself into this blank

canvas. This white field. Fleck of notation on the sheet of a score.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of two collections, her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Radar Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, The Penn Review, Softblow, The Watershed Review, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Find her at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

T.W. Selvey

Privacy

I climbed a cell tower.
It was disguised as an undying tree,
evergreen spire, always
it’d be evergreen.

I found this, a secret diary page.
It had been taped to a limb crook,
the page corners were sticky.
Metallic specks adhered
to the transparent squares.

The page read:
Dear diary,
Last night, a dream
dropped on me

like a spark,
a spark dropping
on a wet leaf.

The dream told me:
become a stowaway
aboard a satellite.

Be one of them,
blinking.

Be driven on the satellite’s
raceway track.

Be a friend to stars,
as if you were up there to race them.

No that’s not a UFO, but nowadays
it doesn’t pay to be a skeptic

and in this lucky era,
you can be someone,
someone believed in

even if it’s inaccurate,

like so many beliefs,
baseless.

Who can see through the artificial aurora,
as reflected lights lampshade the city?

Who could look up and wonder who I am,
sharing in their secrets, a lens zoomed in?

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T.W. Selvey prolifically generated poems from the late 1990s until the late 2000s, publishing a chapbook (Next Month, This Month) and winning two poetry contests from a (now defunct) bookstore along the way. T.W. took a long hiatus from 2008 until late 2019, during which time the focus was on work, home and travel. Starting in Fall 2019, T.W. began revising an old manuscript, which is now entitled Urbanized Body. T.W. is also the proud curator of a haphazardly curated blog, www.documentdement.com.

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Theresa Senato Edwards

How He Understands Motion

Winter again, lack of sunlight on an empty blanket.
Your husband’s hunger underground. It never stops

waiting, searches for your smooth edge, outer layers
like prayers he details fervently although he’s not

a praying man. Sometimes you return to the paneled
railroad flat, fear of the ex-husband. Your body

a trigger attached to a rifle’s barrel: bent, boned metal
weary enough to break bones. Your husband accepts

the earth’s pull, helps you appreciate the motion of a
porch swing, knows when to stop it from moving.

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Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Her first chapbook, The Music of Hands, was published in a revised second print edition by Seven CirclePress. Poems from her newest manuscript entitled Fragments of Wing Bones can be found in Stirring, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Thrush, Diode, Rogue Agent, Mom Egg Review, Menacing Hedge, Moria, Harbor Review, Matter Press’ Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, 3Elements Review, Dialogist, SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received creative writing residencies from Drop Forge & Tool and Craigardan, and is a poetry editor for American Poetry Journal. Her website: Theresa Senato Edwards New York Poet & Editor.

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Clay Matthews

Psalm [the rain lets loose]

The rain lets loose
and branches come down in the backyard
like somewhere up in heaven
they’re taking off their arms and legs
and dropping them at the squirrels.
The communion of those who build
their homes on high. Carols play
on the radio and I am warmed
by the glow of fake candles in windows,
the hundred variations of wreaths
on doors. What it basically is, is this:
a prayer to let this be a memory,
to be granted a tomorrow
in the hopes that the present
might become a moment to perform
for, to witness this whole beautiful stage
covered in garland and Christmas lights
with fifth graders dressed up
on risers, antsy and singing and proud.
Moments before I was in a classroom
with my daughter, watching her
draw trees on paper, making cards
for a local charity. To finalize each
she signed them in black, then pulled out
whatever it is I imagine as my heart,
and drew it there right beside her name,
recklessly coloring it in.

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Clay Matthews has published in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review and elsewhere. His collections are: Superfecta (Ghost Road Press), Runoff (BlazeVOX Books), Pretty, Rooster, and Shore (Cooper Dillon Books). He resides in Elizabethtown, KY and teaches at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College.

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Anna Sandy-Elrod

The Sibyl Speaks to Circe

As a child, pulled
into the black shine
of obsidian—
When you made your love
into a myth,
your heart’s rival
into a nightmare,
you didn’t know the name
for it. Upon turning
the first man
into sniveling beast,
you did. Like the quick conjure
under the right moon,
the fixed herb,
the clench of bloodstone
in a fist.
How a candy jar riots.
How the meaninglessness
of time cartwheels by.
You come to call yourself witch.
You come to say spell.
Even the gods will
avoid your island.
Your island, yours.

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Anna Sandy-Elrod is a PhD poet at Georgia State University, where she also teaches. She is the current Editor in Chief of New South Journal, as well as of Birdcoat Quarterly. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Green Mountains Review, Adirondack Review, North American Review, Threepenny Review, Calyx, Arkana, Tammy and others. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and three cute cats.

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Clifford Brooks

The Sky Is a Nightgown

Bring the sky down
in a nightgown.
Foggy ripples
of fall’s first cold
choke off the harbor.
Shafts of evergreens
are still life
still wet.

The cold is a gauzy cloth
that rubs green out of everything.
An old summer,
its virginity lost,
those hours
are seeded cloths,
crinkled
underfoot:
The frozen night.

…

The dark is forceful.
It fits
around mountains,
into small towns.
Wolves and wind
push through pine needles.
Warmth is an ongoing
struggle.

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Clifford Brooks (www.cliffbrooks.com) is a poet and founder of the Southern Collective Experience LLC (www.southerncollectiveexperience.com). He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his girlfriend, Carolyn.

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Stephen Furlong

For as Long as I Could Remember

—for Bradley Harrison Smith

Today began
      with feet touching down
on the ground yesterday’s clothes
                strewn across the floor
books   on my nightstand        waiting to be read
I see Merwin’s The Carrier of Ladders
            such exposure  holding
a book or a person in the center
of their spine whether by dance or love—
making it up as we go and keeping what works        

fear keeps me tangled              in the bedsheets unable
to leave            comfort holds me        still      a picture         
my memory reveals a dinner table     we’re sitting
listening to each other             sharing
our human experience             I used to believe
the one true teacher was grief                        
revealing itself as a butterfly
such beauty     from chaos     
for as long as I could remember         your light has shined through
the corners of the home I’m building—

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Stephen Furlong is a poet living outside Kansas City, Missouri. He currently is an adjunct instructor at Metropolitan Community College-Longview. His poems have appeared in Bone & Ink, Louisiana Literature and Pine Hills Review, among others. Additionally, he currently serves as a staff reviewer for the journal Five:2:One and works specifically for the subset LitStyle. He can be found on Twitter @StephenJFurlong

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Melissa Marsh

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Melissa Marsh is a researcher, writer, and photographer living on the eastern shore of Maryland. She loves the history of place, the way memory operates, and is a travel enthusiast. Her work has appeared previously in Asterism, Sink Hollow and The Scarab.