Issue 8 Full Text

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Doug Ramspeck

signs

after their father dies they see his boots
overturned by the barn     deer prints

in the shape of his eyes      a mummery
of clouds     & the grass come winter

becomes a tabletop of snow     & the boys hold
their breaths & think     death is a moon

with a stationary dance     & they listen
to an emission of crow calls from the fields

the days thrashing like catfish dragged
to the bank     & they dream their father

buried hard as a bulb in the earth     as stiff
as his clothes still waiting in his closet

the weeks as fragile as discarded snakeskins
& the boys imagine death as a weigh station

or a hawk hanging crucified in air     & the boys
think     last fall the trees coughed & the acorns

dropped into the yard     & the boys think     death
is a train in the distance     one you hear but cannot see

& their father whispers in their thoughts
i wish i could bring you here to join me

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Doug Ramspeck

the old men climb a flight of stairs to go to bed

& so they step up & up    their legs stiffening into ancient stones
the years veiled over & pleated     their hair like ghost heads
of dandelions     & as they rise they imagine the ascent
as one more sagging death march     mute as the splinters
on the wooden railings     & when they reach their beds
they dream that the world outside the house is a kind
of fallen harmony     & maybe their wives lie beside them
like dropped petals     & maybe there is a thorn in the skin
of the night sky beyond the windows     something hooked & howling
& come morning they stand at the top of the stairs & imagine
that each step downward is like waiting for fruit to fall

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Doug Ramspeck

the brothers try to drown each other at the guthrie quarry

for the water here is a green corridor     & the view from the top
is the first prophecy     & stones fly through the air & whistle
past their heads     & the myopia of summer reminds the boys
that death is yet another numerology     this counting while holding
a brother’s head beneath the surface     & death is the squirming of arms
& legs to reach a first inheritance     some original body like a vigil
& the water says to the boys i will marry you in stillness
& the boys say to the water we used to believe we were bound to the earth
& sunlight dreams a darkness pooling around the lungs     dreams
a contagion in the nostrils & the throat     & the brothers see giving in
as the only actual death     even later as they ride their bikes back
to their father’s house     & keep trying to bump each other into traffic

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Doug Ramspeck

the midwest hangs itself while listening to bobolinks

& the birds know how to slow a lifetime’s hands
how grass is not a quickness but a history
& once the midwest dreamed an epistle of moonlight
above the quiet houses     & once the midwest made a religion
out of the cadences of loam     though the skeletal remains
of the factories still wait amid the broken glass     still hold
themselves aloof in that same forgetful abeyance     & the midwest
studies how the stars after dark are open wounds     how legs
thrash before the toes point down     but here     now
there is something holy in a bobolink      holy in the spiral
staircase of dusk leading up & up to nowhere     in the clawgrip
of the clouds     & the sudden drop like a souvenir

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Doug Ramspeck is the author of seven poetry collections, one collection of short stories, and a novella. One recent book, Black Flowers, is published by LSU Press. Five books have received awards: Distant Fires (Grayson Books Poetry Prize), The Owl That Carries Us Away (G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction), Original Bodies (Michael Waters Poetry Prize), Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize) and Black Tupelo Country (John Ciardi Prize for Poetry). His poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Slate and The Georgia Review. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

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A Prevett

A New Kind of Quiet

I am seeking desperately a new kind
of quiet. One where I can drop a glintcoin from my palm
and even the coin will wonder where

it went. Like everything, I imagine this would be
within a room. That it would take a dark, carpeted tunnel
to get there. But oh, when I get there. There 

will be a piano and an anvil
that I will drop onto the piano. The noise it makes?
Gentle as a maggot

hatching from its sticky womb. After,
as one would a thin wafer, I will slip my coin
into my high-piled mouth, spend it
to buy the anvil

a better name. And each morning, it and I, we’ll
practice our soft, private language, the one
we’ll dress only our littlest fears in, new    
as grape dew, as a lost tooth’s absence.

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A Prevett

That is a lovely hat. I would like to be friends with that hat.

I mean it: we could build something
resembling a friendship. I’ve done it before:
the shoes I wore till they died, the burgundy sweater
I wear while writing.

The thrift store skirt that the woman behind the counter
didn’t hesitate to sell to me.

A hat would be easy, instinctual.
I could be buried in a nice hat.

When the last of us here becomes a not-animal, there will be a heaven
for each of us. A tennis-shoe heaven. An elephant-shrew heaven.
Yes, even a cockroach heaven. Or so has been promised to me.

My heaven will be all hats.
All skirts and rain the color of elation.

I cannot go to your heaven. I could not begin to tell you
about your heaven.

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A Prevett

Two Witches

after Paige Lewis’s “You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm”

Come onto the porch
and chew this mugwort. Right now,

deep in the sweat glands of
the earth, two witches

have just moved in to a warm, muddy studio.
It has three chimneys and one clawfoot tub

big enough for the both of them
if they transform into Shiba puppies,

which of course they’re always happy to do.
One was never any good at potions:

she prefers broomstick racing, the thrill of wind
tugging tears from her eyes. One is the first trans witch in history, which

means she especially is aware of the mortals who want her
tied to the stake, strung up like some heavy, sad sail.

As a child, ages and ages ago, she researched every spell
looking for one that could turn boys into girls, not yet understanding

what that meant for her, who she would be.
No, I won’t tell you which witch is which.

We cannot visit them there, and yes, that is sad.
You’re right; they would love our wormwood quiche.

Yes, there were options above ground—damp swamps, forests
no light could penetrate. But in the earth there exists a freedom for them

that the surface, its lack of generosity, cannot afford.
But may this cheer you up:

Each time they open a box of their things,
all the items flutter out as if on bat

wings, do gentle, loving loops through the air,
then nest perfectly where they belong.

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A Prevett (they/them) is the author of the chapbook Still, No Grace (Madhouse Press, 2021). Their recent poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from West Branch, Fugue, Denver Quarterly and other journals. They are pursuing an MFA in poetry from Georgia State University, where they edit the journal New South. You can find them online at aprevett.com or on Twitter under the handle @a_prevett

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Donald Platt

XV. Album of Figure Studies
—From Male Venus Rising

I imagine Sargent opening
the black cloth and cardboard covers of his album of figure studies,
                        frayed brown leather binding,

watch him thumb again through the charcoal sketches of nude male models.
                        Over his shoulder, I see
how Nicola’s hooded eyes, his long Roman nose, keep reappearing

                        among the models’ half-averted
faces. Many of the drawings are of Nicola d’Inverno,
                        Nicholas of Winter,

his beautiful body changing over twenty-six years. The last
                       folio in the album
shows a young, lithe, lightly muscled man with his legs drawn up

                        under him, right wrist bent
and posed on his hip so the palm faces up. His other arm,
                        perfectly perpendicular

to his torso and V-angled at the elbow, rests flat on an invisible
                        table of air.
Though Sargent made this collotype in 1921,

                        three years after
Nicola stopped working for him, the young man has Nicola’s
                       thick eyebrows, soft shadow

of his mustache. Is it Sargent’s memory of Nicola
                        at nineteen, dream boy
with a satyr’s insatiable body? Fawn flesh still untouched,

                        he is Nicola
di Primavera, Nicholas in spring. The drawing is an old
                        abandoned man’s

dream of first love. Here is also Nicola d’Estate, his boxer’s
                        lean, well-toned body
reclining on an unmade bed. He’s pushing himself up

                        with his right forearm, right leg
dangling over the bed’s edge, as if he’s only now awakened,
                        after making love three times,

from a hot afternoon’s sweaty nap. His long cock rests
                        on his white right thigh.
His left leg is raised on two silk pillows. He’s Sargent’s summer

                        lover. Here’s also
Nicola d’Autumno, a man of forty leaning forward
                        on his left leg so only

the ball of his right foot touches the ground. He still has a boxer’s
                        broad pectorals and thighs,
but his slim waist has thickened. Both arms are raised over his head

                        to form a Y,
a boxer’s gesture to the yelling crowd after he’s knocked
                        the other man out cold.

These charcoal sketches are Sargent’s love poem to Nicola,
                        to the quarter century
they lived together. He collected the drawings he’d kept always

                        hidden in his studio’s cupboards
and glued them to the album’s pages so he would remember
                        Nicola. They’re no different,

except in quality, from the snapshots of Nora I’ve taken
                        over twenty years
and put into our photo albums. I too marvel when

                        I open them and see
Nora young again—in her black bathing suit with the blue diagonal
                        stripe running over

her full right breast, lean abdomen, to her left hip—fallen
                        asleep on a yellow and orange
lawn chair on the end of a dock. She’s unfolded the chair flat

                        to make a bed surrounded
on three sides by lake water. Two blue flip-flops stand
                        like empty footprints

next to a crumpled, wet, brown and white towel. They are what’s left
                        of those long summer days
I can’t remember except for Nora lying there, white sunhat

                        slipped to one side
so I see each delicate ridge of her left ear’s cartilage. One gold hoop
                        hangs from her earlobe

and catches the sunlight. She wears her long thick hair in two wet braids.
                        The swell of hip and breast
is a speedboat’s wake rolling, undulating across the calm

                        lake to break against
a seawall. The water laps and laughs. Schools of minnows
                        dart and flash

through the barred shadows under the dock. The whole bright day
                        comes back, contained
in the single angle of a snapshot. I dangle my feet over the edge

                        and the minnows swim up
to nibble them. Those small mouths make thirty simultaneous kisses.
                        They tickle until I can

hold still no longer. I flinch. They scatter. They are our twenty
                        summers, autumns,
winters, springs together. Here is Nora, eight months pregnant

                        with Amy, our second daughter
who just turned twelve. Nora’s standing in baggy blue tunic and matching
                        shorts on our front porch

in Salt Lake City, three houses ago. She wears owl-eye sunglasses
                        which reflect me taking
her picture and the two small squares of grass enclosed by concrete

                        that are our front yard.
Everything’s doubled and distorted in those dark convex mirrors—
                        my head like a tadpole’s,

bigger than my body. Why are there always two of me?
                        In the next moment
Nora will lift her blue tunic to show Valerie, our older daughter,

                        her belly swollen into
a taut-skinned balloon, big as a globe of the world. Her navel is
                        the balloon’s tied end.

In the photo Nora holds two red swollen tomatoes with green stems,
                        which she’s just picked
from the garden, up to her breasts engorged beneath her blue tunic

                        and grins. One
of the tomatoes is so ripe its skin has split and spills
                        juice and seeds.

Nora’s nipples are already leaking colostrum. In the next
                        snapshot, Valerie
stands in the garden. She has wormed her way into an empty

                        tomato cage’s cylinder
and twines her arms and legs around the rusted wire. She wants
                        to grow up fast, leaf out,

and be a green tomato ripening in the hot sun.
                        Every summer
Sargent and Nicola would visit Violet, Sargent’s

                        sister, and her six children
“on the Continent.” Nicola would remember, “One of my self-appointed
                        tasks was to carry them

about on my back. They are now quite grown up, of course, all but
                        one of them.
Rosemary, a sweetly beautiful girl, was killed by a bomb in one

                        of the air raids
on France.” Beyond the bomb, Rose-Marie Ormond still stands
                        at seventeen in Sargent’s

sketch, The Cashmere Shawl, watercolor and pencil on paper.
                        She’s walking a garden path
in early spring. Only daffodils are flowering. The stucco wall

                        behind her is scribbled
with shadows. She wears a billowing white dress, has wrapped the shawl
                        tight around her waist

to show off her slimness, the fullness of her hips. It is a study
                        in cream, brown, beige, and taupe.
Head bound with a mauve scarf, she is swathed in her long dress

                        like a mummy. Hands
hidden. Only her face visible. Bronze hair, blue eyes gazing at something
                        beyond the picture.

What is that clotted turquoise blotch to the left of her head? A shadow,
                        the painter’s too impetuous
brushstroke? Her dress blows in harsh March wind. Soon she will walk on.

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Donald Platt

XVI. Male Model Resting
—From Male Venus Rising

                        I am too old for him,
this poetry-slam circuit rider who shouts his gay free verse
                        through bars in Boston,

beautiful man whose red-blond hair falls coyly across his freckled face
                        until he tucks the strands
behind his ear and looks at me with blue-black eyes that blaze

                        like lightning strikes
on rainless nights over hayfields waiting to go up in flames.
                        I want love’s scorch-and-burn,

but he treats me like the father I could be, my forty-nine years
                        to his twenty-two.
We sip hot chocolate at a kitchen table within earshot

                        of his mother who introduced
us. He’s given me a chapbook of his poems. I am supposed
                        to be “encouraging.”

I’m jealous of his poems, of their pain, of how easy gay sex
                        can be, collision of flesh
on flesh, one-night-stand fender-benders or three-way, freeway wrecks

                        from which no one walks away
unscathed. I want a love that “totals” me, but sex at fifty is always
                        complex. I cannot live

my heterosexual years over. I cannot be Verlaine
                        to his Rimbaud. I am
only stodgy “page verse” to his heart-in-your-mouth slam poetry,

                        those blue quartz eyes
whose color is quarried from clear, cold, spring-fed lakes, deep aquifers
                        that keep love’s water table

full. I finish my hot chocolate, praise his good poems.
                        He will live the love
I cannot have. John Singer Sargent at my age sketched Nicola

                        in watercolors
resting on a bed. The walls are a wash of cool aquamarine.
                        Sunlight reflects off

torso and thighs so his body shines blindingly. He’s closed
                        his eyes, head laid back
on a white pillow, left hand behind his head so we admire

                        his pumped-up biceps.
His right arm gathers the folds of red silk sheets and holds
                        the slippery gleaming fabric

against his white ribcage as if it were an armful of twenty
                        long-stemmed rust-red roses
that Sargent has just given him for his birthday. In the background

                        the brown wooden stairs
up to the mezzanine parallel the diagonal of Nicola’s
                        torso. Our bodies are a stairway

we climb slowly, languorously from one floor to another.
                        Nicola has drawn
his left leg toward him. His knee makes an upside-down V. A small

                        triangle of scarlet silk sheet
hides his genitals. The folds of drapery serve only to disclose
                        the bulge of his half-erect

penis. I remember waking early in a college dormitory.
                        My roommate slept naked.
It was hot. In his restless sleep he’d thrown the covers off.

                        First hesitant sunlight
fell across his thighs and showed me how his hard-on rose
                        from red-gold ringlets

of pubic hair. His cock was longer and thicker than mine.
                        Uncircumcised, a swollen
purple-red and orange-red, the shank’s chafed skin was mapped

                        with big, blue, knotted veins
and the finer purple ones. I stared. I wanted to touch it. Two rocks
                        struck sparks within my loins.

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Donald Platt

XVIII. Figure and Pool
—From Male Venus Rising

No wonder then that Sargent
reclaimed his picture after the scandal and repainted Madame X’s
                        fallen shoulder strap,

put it back in its “proper” position, over her shoulder blade, and never
                        exhibited anywhere
his album of nude male figure studies. I too hesitate to say

                        my love for men out loud,
that new desire I’ve only just discovered late in middle age
                        though it’s always been

an underground river that ran beneath my adolescence. It percolated
                        through sandy soil
into hidden springs, wells, still pools I saw myself in

                        when I leaned close.
In my high school’s cream-tiled shower room, I would imagine
                        naked women

to make my small prick start to swell, lengthen, and become as big
                        as those of my schoolmates, snapping
wet towels at each other. I watched them while they soaped chests, necks,

                        shoulders, arms, backs,
stomachs, buttocks, cocks. Rinsing off, they let the hot stream splurt
                        over their faces, across

torsos and thighs. Before toweling dry, they slapped the water
                        from their bodies.
Once the wrestling coach chose me as his partner to demonstrate

                        a quick escape.
He got down on hands and knees, had me grip him around the waist.
                        The room was humid

from sweating flesh. Steam hissed from rusted radiators. I felt
                        each inhalation of breath
expand his taut stomach beneath the damp gray T-shirt.

                        “Hold me harder,” he roared.
“Don’t hold me as if I were your girlfriend.” The other wrestlers
                        snickered. I blushed

and clamped down. “That’s better,” he said. The boy I wanted to hold,
                        though I couldn’t have said it then,
was my rival, Charlie Langtree, who was already taking calculus

                        and knew how to translate
Catullus. We were each assigned a poem to write out. “Just now
                        I surprised a darling boy

screwing my girlfriend, and I—may it please Venus—yoked myself
                        to them, ploughed him
with my hard cock.” I went scarlet. I thought of how I’d fallen

                        for that schoolboy joke—“Bet you can’t
bend over, look between your legs, and spell ‘run’ ten times as fast as you can.”
                        “Are you in? Are you in?”

I’d stammered out before I got it and stopped. When the boys dared Charlie,
                        he merely laughed,
“Don’t be so incurably vulgar!” He usually wore khaki pants, a wool

                        blazer that matched his rusty
auburn hair, which curled, I thought, like marble acanthus leaves
                        on Corinthian columns.

His wide blue eyes were more beautiful than any girl’s. He had
                        bruised circles under them
from studying all night. He skipped his senior year to enter

                        Harvard, was first in our class
while I was always second. They called us “dorks” and “grinds.” Too proud
                        and shy to talk to him,

I hated and adored him. In 1917, one year before
                        Nicola left Sargent,
they visited Villa Vizcaya, the Miami estate of millionaire

                        Charles Deering. Sargent painted
watercolors of black workers swimming nude and lolling in the shallows.
                        The water laps

their hurdler’s thighs. They lean back in the shade of banyon trees.
                        One man straddles a smooth
driftwood log and stares in disbelief at the fully dressed

                        artist as if to say,
“Get rid of that ridiculous hat and shirt. Strip naked with us,
                        let the sun darken

your white skin.” In another watercolor, a black man stretches
                        full-length on his stomach
and gazes into a tidal pool that gives him back himself,

                        the pebbled bottom, the sun
behind purple clouds. Light and shadow dapple his bare back,
                        buttocks, and legs spread wide

into a wishbone’s Y. Palms flat on hot sand, biceps flexed,
                        this black Narcissus leans
down to kiss the self that trembles the tidal pool’s still surface.

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Donald Platt’s seventh book of poetry, One Illuminated Letter of Being, was published by Red Mountain Press in 2020. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Southern Review and Paris Review as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006 and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1996 and 2011) and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s MFA Program.

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Jane Zwart

Rarity

My sons, given crayon bins, mine for the rarities: cadmium
red and razzmatazz. Given a baseball diamond, they kneel
in a kibble of limestone, each sifting for chipped jewels,
each sure to come home with his fist of small stones, asking
to be told they are gems. Already they have learned to want
what is scarce.
                            Blame me.
I want to draw such afternoons
a corral of colored wax. I want to rake a moat around them,
to defend as an island this trove of gravel, this now.

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Jane Zwart

Basketball

In summer, when the windows stayed open
and it cost an hour to rake the daylight
from the sky, I lay in bed and listened
to boys playing pick-up in the park.

In fact, their patter distracted me
to sleep. Sure, I drifted off wondering
what fucks and fouls were, but mostly
the shirts and skins reffed

and razzed each other in fugues
too soft to parse. Plus their percussion
was gentle: the yo-yo ricochet
of guards dribbling down the pavement,

an abrupt gallop and lay-up, a spangle
traveling the argyle chains when a jump shot
fell. I fell asleep always before the game ended,
but I knew how those boys would quit

scrimmaging, man-on-man, pulling apart
like dance partners, and how they would right
their bikes, and how the luckiest
would ride off cradling the orange world.

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Jane Zwart

Freud and Grimm

I no longer upbraid the angels
for what angels can’t unbraid.

Of course the dreadlocks
we backcomb into being--

love ratted, fear teased--
perplex the sexless harpist,

plucking fingers callused,
pageboy halo-bound.

. . .

For us, yearning is a plait
that can be eased apart

only at the beginning
of the story, only so long

as our mothers unweave
and brush our crinkled hair.

. . .

But there is no denying
frisson. 

. . .

  There is no denying

that Rapunzel draped her hair
over that rough sill, wanting,

and reeled it back, recanting
want, a hundred times

before the saw-toothed bricks
at last dreaded her mane,

before she decided to side
with desire.
         And no denying

that the prince trembled
when the blonde ropes

slapped the wall beside him
just like a cat o’ nine tails.

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Jane Zwart's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Rattle and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.

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Iheoma Uzomba

A Recollection of Self

I am two full shades of an august morning
ripe and unblossomed
but let's pretend this is a poem
and I am more worried about
an ocean drinking back its moans
until it is gutted into dryness
than the gradual sloughing of my memory.
Like all things preened to bloom & fasten
I refuse to see the twin motion
of this ocean rising on tidal wings
only to crash again
& the uneven soaring
of a young bird one mile away.
Because I know that even dieing
is not death enough until you fall
& don't rise; until you've tasted bits
of yourself and can hardly resist
ceding to a course more unsteady
than being. So I do not pause
to crop further tufts of this yearning.
When the ocean crashes once more
I rise on its back with these words
coming to life on a piece of stray paper:
I am two full shades...
I live and I die.

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Iheoma Uzomba

To Girlhood & the Texture of Static

Time would stretch towards us
to the many times we've let tap-water
cruise through our open mouths
distended by the weight of thirst,
the languid aura of staleness.
But even this does not let us
sore this girlhood custom
of trading liquid
one mouth to the other,
until our mothers are screaming
from halved windows:
You don't drink that way!
There's no perfect way to sin
than becoming other.
So tonight, we do not count the stars
and thumb our names into the sand
while this crust of darkness encircles us.
We have grown now
and this is what time brings:
unscrewing your favorite cocktail in the dark
with music high over the sideboard
and our lovers' lips clung to ours
bodies upturned, sleek and wet.
Each breath exploding, a short victory earned
to how long we may share this freedom.

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Iheoma Uzomba is currently a student of English and Literary Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her works feature in Kissing Dynamite, The Rising Phoenix Review, Fact-Simile Editions, Dreich Magazine, The Muse (a creative and critical print journal) and elsewhere. She considers music and writing two beautiful artforms to best express herself.

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Aiden Baker

what happened at schiller’s

They say a sandwich started it all. Forty one
million deaths, slammed between two slices of
bread. What was it, then? I picture pastrami
and cabbage on dark rye, real thick. Meats and
greens and heirlooms all stuffed, swelling,
dripping juice—tell me, Gavrilo, how did it
taste? I’m sorry, maybe I’ve got this all wrong,
they served you up lamb or maybe they never
served you at all. It’s just a story we tell,
serendipitous timing at the delicatessen, dumb
luck for the young Bosnian kid. And tell me,
too, about summer when you were a boy,
running no shoes into the river and under
brown water, standing, toes in the silt. What
did you find? How did dusk smell when you
wandered home? Did you kiss your mother
goodnight? Fall asleep to sounds of Sarajevo
and imagined tomorrows, tomorrows with
swallows and sand and no black hands
shooting into cobbled streets. When you were
a boy, tucked in your bed, did you hear? The
it’s nothing it’s nothing it’s nothing rattle of
death.

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Aiden Baker lives in South Florida, where she teaches, writes and gets really sweaty. You can find her work in Sonora Review, Variant Lit, Orca and elsewhere.

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Jennifer Loyd

Rachel Carson: Juvenalia

Over breakfast Mother reads to us
the papers                    their Sunday words

Turkish / unburied / field / soldiers.

A popular metaphor (soldier)
and I am training—
for what?         I write poems with pilots,
not questions.

Parents encourage asking but only about certain things.

The radio warbles a word        Dardanelles,
and I move on an inner map.

It’s lonely, but the only work.

People are being killed over words, and I don’t know how
to take them
any less seriously.        General / enters / Allenby / Aleppo.

In the woods, I wonder-train—
fern’s articulated blade
verbena’s umbrella
sweet gum’s inquisition.

Vines query
a trunk’s tender architecture—

Questions have a largess          I want.

The Union Jack hoisted above Basra.

A blockade, by definition, stops the flow
of bread        on the same earth that grows vines
thicker than a soldier’s arm.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Loyd

Rachel Carson: Genealogy

Everything rations. But her great-great-
grandmother’s laugh—a watercourse—rough, flirting
with the shore, stopping short of flood.

Another ancestor dug in, the Alleghenies,
springs in the hillside.
Grim though magic.

A great-grandmother, hands magnolia-
white in an infirmary under the stairs,
healed wild indignant cardinals.

Her grandmother disowned the sea, warned of danger in
the cold shine. Buzz-cut her hair, a dead husband’s razor.

One day she will want what they once wanted—
azaleas, and to be naked in a field,

or nothing.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Loyd

Rachel Carson Leaves Springdale, PA for The Sea

Most nights the moon
isn’t full. Rain in degrees

of hard and rage.

Field edges, failed
beans. Houses in various states

of disrepair and loved—

wood pile slid sideways,
seed heads left

to nod at winter.

And the pastor insisting
we were created

in Sunday’s image.

On the coldest days,
a frozen dust trails behind a truck bound

for the glue-factory. It
whitens the cargo
of old horses.

Soon enough, the girl will be
reading letters from home, pulping them
into her morning oats.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Loyd

Some Mothers Are As Lighthouse to Ship

All warning : No shelter.

Rachel Carson’s mother: an ill husband, no running water,
clapboards, three children, inherent intelligence, no degree.

She sold the family china, paid tuition, gave Rachel
a ledger book with inked-in cost, and instructions
to subtract every pencil and lemon ice.

If you get pregnant, you’ll be worth nothing.

Since the first daughter, whose name God forgot
to record in the bible, this has been going on—

this want of mothers

for their daughters. This selling
of china and its cabinets,

this pricing of red as pink.

If I catch you
under the stairs
with that girl again,
I’ll kill you.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Loyd is a 2020/2021 Stadler Fellow. She holds an MFA from Purdue University, where she was managing editor for Sycamore Review. She has also served as a senior editor for Copper Nickel. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between the private voice and public narratives, have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, New South, Colorado Gardener and elsewhere. For now, she resides in Colorado.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Satterfield

Epistle with Luggage and Large Bouquet

Phrases drawn from Julia Voznesenskaya’s Letters of Love: Women Political Prisoners in Exile and the Camps

Candles were flickering, music
            was chosen,
I was leaving with a large bouquet,

a translation, a banned Western book.
Simultaneously
one by one, dreams from the day before

began making their way
back to me.
Scarlet tulips, a scrap of bed sheet,

dogs barking in the forbidden zone.
What motives
explain special forms, investigators,

letters torn from school exercise
books,  leaves
from a diary covered over in ink

cutting off paragraphs where captives
give greetings,
the reasons they were imprisoned

and how? Reading one
thing, I forget
another, dousing in cold water as if

I were still floating about in a fabulous
long skirt and
lace. Quiet nooks elsewhere won’t

remind you how a film ends if
you’re living from
one amnesty to the next. Cue

the flood gates,
potatoes and
protest, the city standing in line

for sandbags. It sounds simple
enough. Think
about it and sharpen your pencils.

Such ferocity in that bonfire
of ours:
a poppy sways in a field.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Satterfield

Equinox: A Blessing

As the eagle angles the draft
above the rigging of sweetgum & oak,
I invoke the name of the gods who rule
the one swatch of land left between the campus
byway & bridge to peel back Scotch Broom &
other invasives—
Come forth, cleanse & restore—
In the days of our distress, let heartwood
nourish the living tree, the vesper
sparrow ring out, anthemic. Protect
the small stream where deer come to drink,
racoon to range.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Satterfield has received awards in poetry from the NEA, Bellingham Review, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mslexia and more. Her books of poetry are Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by David St. John. New poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Hopkins Review, Interim, Nelle, Orion and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Emry Trantham

Isn’t It Pretty to Think So

That it never did depend upon the old dog,
a hushed heap of amber beside of the road.
That after everything and before everything

else—underneath the single sinking star reflected
by the river that raged herself to sleep,
in the hidden pocket where he closed his eyes—

that everything was okay. That the glass grains
still followed gravity, that the silver light
of the floating lamp showed his shadow standing,

and that the perfect space was two rows
into the orchard and eleven paces
from the hives. That the old dog wasn’t left

for dead beside the apples, unburied.
That the buzzards didn’t disappear
him, piece by piece. That there’s a story

on the page after this one in which
you remembered his name,
and when you called, you called him home.

That you rubbed his ears on the porch,
beneath the rattling moths, and the speeding
yellow headlights never even grazed him.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Emry Trantham is an English teacher in Western North Carolina, where she is raising a family and writing poems. Her poetry has been published in Tar River Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, Booth, Okay Donkey, Cold Mountain Review and others. She was also a 2019 Gilbert-Chappell Emerging Poet.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dylan Ecker

About Last Wednesday

I’m not joking around
my friend told me
before he went home.
Stained teeth and toothpick
body. Closed up
that night. All the waste
I bagged and left
beside the loading bay.

It’s not that I’m afraid
my friend told me.
I called in sick and
met him at the ledges.
We threw rocks at birds.
We weren’t trying to
run away. We were waiting
for gas prices to go down.

That’s not a job for us
my friend told me
in church. An old man
wobbled up for blood.
Started crying. We kept
the ash smudged on
our foreheads because
it looked sort of cool.

Not a huge surprise
my friend told me
stopping on the sidewalk
to peek inside at the gun
grey shelves all wrapped up.
I didn’t see what he was
seeing. On the window
his handprint, mine too.

Nothing left to love
my friend told me
reaching into the stream.
I took the warmouth
by the lip. I did exactly
what was needed. Eyes
seeking eyes. Eyes
redder than late fall.

This song has no song
my friend told me
drunk, but very aware
of the distance between
here and there. Here
being close to each other.
There being the dirt, its muscle
and all the pulverized pieces.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dylan Ecker

Swing States

To want the glimmer
first, then the rain.
To think this can go
on and I would be
a recipe for a cloud
come apart. Plain
view of an Ohio floodplain.
The splendor in noticing
a great loneliness I have
touched. I am preglacial.
Ride around town. Tell everyone
how nice they look. Today
is election day. We sneeze
inside school gymnasiums.
We think of a future with
guns, without guns, with
-holding guns, guns that
are empty or
approaching. Between states
there is a tunnel built to
withstand tremors, and I
hold my breath. Wish
for it. It’s not a burning
away, it’s a runaway
cinder. Rescinding
bodies stuck in the
process of. Mending
resembles open mouths.
At the bottom of this hill
stop signs lie in the ditch
dug out yesterday
for routine replacement.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dylan Ecker

Person Place Thing

He used nouns like
trowels and forks.

            Dug holes that housed
opal-eyed adjectives,

transplanted sentence
fragments. I hoarded his

            voice. I heard it drying off
in the mud room. Baby

petals pressed between
the end of the letter O

            and the beginning of what is
expected. Synonyms

for loved: string beans, new
mulch, bad photo. This

            was him, teaching me to
tear out the entire root.

My eyes are closed. His
keep watch over my hands.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dylan Ecker is from northeast Ohio. He received his MFA from Miami University. Rejoices in the squish of a just-plucked elderberry. Has writing nominated for Best of the Net and is published or will soon appear in Indiana Review, Hobart, The Penn Review, RHINO, HOOT, Outlook Springs and elsewhere. Send your least funny knock-knock jokes to Dylan on Twitter @dillyeck.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Trivarna Hariharan

Now that you are gone, I conjure you in dream language

A fire
necklacing a farm.

Toll-bells of
  rattle-snakes,  dahlias

whorling
        in the distance.

How I fail
   to sew you  back.

Desire—
  a clump  of berries

crackling in
   a horse’s mouth.

A pianissimo
         seeping down
a moon sown
        otherness.

Here is the star-
       dust of our
shared rooms.

A glow-worm
    gnawing some bread-
crumbs.

Do you too,
    sour over our last picnic—

the plums

    spleening
      my teeth?

How I laughed &
      laughed  all night.

Deep enough to
lull you. Deep enough to

let you pass.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Trivarna Hariharan is a writer and pianist based in India. She has studied English Literature at Delhi University and the University of Cambridge. A Pushcart-prize and Orison Anthology nominee, her poems have been published in Duende, Stirring, Entropy, Front Porch, Noble/Gas Quarterly, After The Pause, Third Wednesday and others. She has authored two collections of poetry: Letters Never Sent (Writers Workshop Kolkata, 2017) and There Was Once A River Here (Les Editions du Zaporogue, 2018).

________________________________________________________________________________________

Karah Kemmerly

indiana jones

when I was small, he was undeniably cool:
muscled khaki & five o’clock shadow,
historical know-how & skills with a whip.
snarky & rebellious but reliable. he finished
the job & got the girl. only later I dismissed
his career—the robbery & shitty imperialism—
but even in 1998 I was unimpressed by the snake
thing. it seemed so basic. downright stupid, really.
why go into the tomb-raiding business if you
already know a cobra makes you squirm?
there’s a lesson in here somewhere about fear
& desire. a wanting-always-what-you-shouldn’t
while dreading-still-what-you’ve-been-gifted.
the metaphor is panic-as-window: look outside
or use it as a mirror. it’s true I like knowing
what everyone is afraid of. my party trick once
was making my acquaintances uncomfortable—
prompting others to tell me which obsessions
make them cringe. I have so many that listing
them almost counts as a comfort: the way
you imagine catastrophic falls as preparation
for walking on stage. driving. house fires. crawl-
spaces. opaque lakewater. knowing people
think of me when I’m not around. knowing
most of them don’t. not spiders but the sound
of skittering. not snakes but a sudden loss
of limbs. I still envy indy, but now for different
reasons. imagine naming just one weakness.
imagine such miraculous awareness of self.
the meat we eat is muscle, kid-me said before
I cut it. but now it’s near impossible to let
anything alive or once-living near my mouth.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Karah Kemmerly is a queer writer who grew up in northern California and received an MFA in poetry at Oregon State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, Roanoke Review, Breakwater Review and Redivider. She currently lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Su Cho

Aubade with Metal Spoon

                                    for Michelle Cho

My sister never forgets
to store a metal spoon
in the freezer before bed
in case she is let down
by her monolids
on weekday mornings.

We check our eyes
to see what kind of day
we are given. But we still love
the symmetry of our faces.
Both our left eyes like our mother
and our right eyes a plush double lid.

But to be safe, she holds the cold spoon
against her eye, the edge we use to cut
into steaming kimchi dumplings, soft tofu,
acorn jelly, against her lid. She counts
to thirty, asking if anything changed,
if all this is worth it.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Su Cho

At an Apple Orchard in Door County, Wisconsin

for A

In a barn, which is really a store, I stand in front of a pyramid of horseradish spreads
and everyone stares at me. The garlic mustard kraut horseradish isn’t even from here
but from Blackberry Farm in Georgia. I read each flavor profile.
Put everything I touch into my basket. From a bushel of pears, I pick one
of each color. I wait for you to come back from the bathroom and think
of the weekend I spent whispering I haven’t seen anyone like me, yes, there!
I see a family I knew in Purdue Village but that would be impossible
because that was over 15 years ago. I saw their black hair, square silver glasses,
daughters in pigtails, squeaky light-up shoes. Instead of smiling,
nodding yes, I see you, I stare at their empty red-trim basket.
Yes, my love is white and yes I do wonder how long our children’s eyelashes
will be, what shade of brown their hair turns in the sun.
This no longer gives me joy but a wish to watch them race each other
through the hay maze, laughing loudly at the caricature pumpkins with giant eyes.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Su Cho lives in Milwaukee, where she serves as Editor-in-Chief for Cream City Review. You can find her work in Poetry, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Southeast Review and elsewhere. Her essay “Cleaving Translation” was the winner of Sycamore Review’s 2019 Wabash Prize for Creative Nonfiction and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can learn more at www.suchowrites.com or follow her on Twitter @su__cho

________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Minor

In Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, the Eponymous Female Lead Survives

I'm holding a napkin, ready to smite a cockroach
dashing across the floor? It wants nothing more
than to go forward, find some fuel and devour life.

I need a meteor to push through
this bloody cup of years,
            not a boil of stairs and doors—

it’s either stay and make a life in Brooklyn
or go find a way in Costa Rica, or another
fertile tract where ex-pats get happier.       

            It doesn't always have to be
leaves in the face, mud in the hair,
crying into an elbow at the edge of a cliff—

I'm saving myself from the heart's autumnal wreckage,
            just as Cabiria does at the end—
the air of decision is                swagger and sway,
            lean and kiss.

I will the wind to dust me off—
walk away from the cliff. I will
the tide below to wad its fists and vanish
            as I amble back to what's left of a life
amid the plum-blossoms of my people. Semi-inflated
with the dignity of survival,                bound for home,
I gratefully punch through another midnight chill—

________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Minor won the 2020 John Ciardi Prize for her debut collection, Flowers As Mind Control, forthcoming from BkMk Press in spring/summer 2021. She was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and nominated for both a 2018 Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2018. She won the 2019 International Literary Awards, Rita Dove Poetry Award, chosen by Marilyn Nelson, the 2019 Sassaman Graduate Creative Writing Award, and the 2016 Emerging Writers Spotlight Award, chosen by poet D.A. Powell. She was named in the 2018 article, "10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors That Will Inspire You" by collegemagazine.com. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in The Normal School, North American Review, The Missouri Review, South Carolina Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Journal, Berfrois and the 2020 New River's Press Anthology, "Wild Gods: The Ecstatic In Contemporary Poetry and Prose." She was a Teacher’s College Fellow at Columbia University and the recipient of a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award, chosen by Denise Duhamel, where she also received her MFA. She holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University where she recently resided as Visiting Teaching Faculty. She currently lives off the Appalachian Trail.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Hannah Bridges

The flame opens like a hand

On the day you took off, we watched
from a set of bleachers three
miles away. I wore your baseball cap
and a NASA shirt. Mom made
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
for us to eat once you were in space.
She fiddled with the corner
of one of the bags; I could hear it
crinkling in her purse.
The largest rocket, fat hot dog
of a thing, surged up and then shucked
itself away. All that was left was you,
hurtling from the earth
in a glinting toy.

And now I am on the couch,
Mom’s hands sealed around mine,
and you return as a hole
in the sky--as a crack in a tile,
we’ll later learn. We watch your spaceship
turn to spacedust, you return
as a flame opening
like a hand. Or really,
you return as dozens of TV pixels
in the shape of an orange blur,
and Mom isn’t saying anything,
she’s just staring at the TV, waiting
for the punchline, and all I can think of
is the day you taught me
to shuck corn: we sat on upturned buckets
in the driveway, your hands
hovering above mine like
parachutes, miming the sharp motion
of the shuck: snap and pull. I remember how
the strands of silk drifted away
from the tight nest of kernels.
They were luminous in the evening light;
I drew a picture of them and you,
and my teacher tacked it
on the blue bulletin board.

The sky looks too saturated
on the TV. The blue practically quivers.
Mom leans forward, gently places her hand
on the coffee table. There’s a heat mark
next to her palm. It’s from your mug
the morning you took off
and is in the shape of a crescent. Mom
has tried everything: mayonnaise,
baking soda, toothpaste,
steam. When she gave up, she said,
I guess he wanted us to have
a little reminder of him
until he comes back.
But the flame is a mouth, and you’re in it.
The sky is a bulletin board;
you are held there by little tacks.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Hannah Bridges is a creative writing MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. A Charlotte native, her writing is informed by her role as the oldest of five closely-aged siblings who find their way into her work in both grief and gratitude. She currently lives in downtown Wilmington with her husband and two dogs, and her work has appeared in The Southeast Review.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Eileen Winn

When I Peered Past Doubt and Knew Myself

I identify as a blind spot between two towers/ I identify
as the shining tin can/ crown/ on the fencepost before
target practice/ I am the stitch in time identifying as nine/ I identify
as the egg/ I am the chicken/ I come first/ as the watched pot/
that cannot boil/ I identify as the crook

in the long arm of the law/ I identify as a hand/ sliding/ into the back pocket/
of your economy/ invisibly/ I am a buried thorn/ identifying as my side/ as a bounty
of fruits/ as a ballet flash mob/ as poorly scripted slapstick
perpetually falling/ as the cane/ and the bowler hat

the mustache/ as the constellation of freckles/ as the red wax lips/ pressed
to your cheek/ I identify as an unprecedented increase/ as a corn kernel/ the whole
cob/ husk bundled/ and the green strings that bind it/ I identify as the pack

not a girl/ or a lamb/ I identify as a circle of salt/ and my pronouns
are anew/ again/ smarting in cold
water/ gulping/ yes

________________________________________________________________________________________

Eileen Winn

At that age, hatching our own chickens seemed like a good idea

and the optimism in my brotherish
sibling’s science meant
they had a plan: we’d raise the chickens
with the same deliberate glee

that we gathered in our bodies when we split
ticks like goatskins of wine, bloated sacks
plucked from canine hide and ruined in purple swaths
staining my aunt’s concrete driveway. We’d raise chickens

with that same curious confidence that we split those bugs full
of dog blood, that hot & dogged breath bottled up in a body
then broken in the light of our cruel and tender faces.

My kindred brother put eggs under anything safe: their hands,
their laced-up sneakers. They watched over
their new nests with scientific devotion, the same loyalty
we brought to smearing lightning
bugs on the grass, baby arsonists

kindly spreading flying fire slick and chemical along the chlorophyll fingers
making up this manicured lawn, our body-mashing destruction
still a thousand times more sparkly than church-lit golden vigils.

We’d see those chickens off to a bright future, shiny hope
like one long unending flint to flash suspending stuff
bright as smiles against death curled in the grass.

How hard could it be to have chickens, they said, to believe
that even shell-bound babies grow wings.

and I was old enough to tell them no
but I was young enough to be thwarted
every time I settled for a nap and maybe
young enough to believe that even useless wings
might break a body free—

And while I slept:
And while my mother slept:

my opal-fingered almost-brother slipped
a supermarket’s Fabergé
deep into the pockets of a child’s velvet dress,
tucked eggs pale as a milk tooth
under throw, cushion. An egg
for every soft & dark place, an egg
pressed into the ghost
toes of my father’s empty shoes.

They had plans for the eggs to get warm, for our house
to get warmer, our rooms
to be filled with tiny yellow
feathered chirps of joy: What better dream
for a tiny child to sleep to? To think of waking
in the midst of cheeping flames: what hearth
would not be warmer for a hen?

But my yolk-footed father glowered first
at his sun-dipped toes & cracked up sole and second
on this unruly scientist, small never-farmer,
wild-haired for a chick’s salvation—he raised
his voice all at once like a barn.

He felted his frown like a nest
around the breakfast they killed & knit
his brow over ruined groceries
until he could not see our hope.

All this to say: there is a tiny pocket of air inside every egg
that turns poison when it’s time to hatch.
If a chick waits to break the shell
until their breath is gone, they’ve got no
strength to do it.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Eileen Winn

My Grandmother Recreates Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in Brown County, Ohio

Indigo stew clouds
cover the dry
pocket of house—
from the window, a storm
lathers miles of flush
fields. At home’s center
you see your own arm
unstruck, grasping
neatly the silver
spatula. You love
the iron pan
searing pork
you cut
to fit, made fit
to eat. Rain
serves lightning
through the walls.
It licks the wires
where your cooking
heat is from.
It finds you
through the range
first, then the meat,
then closes in
through the metal
electric searing
fingers of your favorite
hand. A circuit.
You
a switch, on
for everything you
made & made
you.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Eileen Winn is an agender poet working on their MFA at Florida Atlantic University while also editing at Swamp Ape Review and Alien Lit Mag. You can find their work at Purpled Palm Press in the Breakup Book, bone & ink press and elsewhere. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ann Pedone

Two [2]

[my body tangled
doublefolded and red
you tell me
sex is the
making of marks]

[           a strange heat came between us
lets the self recede    always receding
if you come inside me
in full sun
maybe a woman is
the slowest form of electricity          ]
________________________________________________________________________________________

Ann Pedone graduated from Bard College with a degree in English and has a Master’s Degree in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. Ann is the author of the chapbook The Bird Happened, and the forth-coming chapbook perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho. Her work has recently appeared in Riggwelter, Ethel Zine, Main Street Rag, Poet head, The Wax Paper, The Phare, e-ratio, West Trade Review and The Open Page Literary Journal, among others.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R Samuels

Wool as Gatherer, or Seven Years

I learn that Roman brides hung it on the threshold
of where they were found ever after

             and that a particular Irish pattern mimics
the highs and lows, that undulation.

I’m told to give the wool-lined
glove, and then the other

for the winter that broods and waits.

Yet, even the minuscule prompts irritation, the shedding
of whatever contains. Recall.

I will not want the scarf, no matter
its color. Or so artfully wrapped.

The sheep with the black faces were always my favorite.

How awful their cries when cornered in the yard
and funneled to where they were held by the legs
and shorn of.

I couldn’t quite see clear that day. Couldn’t catch

my breath. Stood out of the way of, looking out

on the bare field.         Knit one. Knit two.

You’ll cover me with the throw, thinking you are kind.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R Samuels

Talking of a Kind

You are not the center
of the universe—walking down the middle
of the grocery store aisle—I said to them—

                                    my son, my daughter.

Take a look
around you.

And on the trail, watch the verge. Watch
your step—for the coiled fiddlehead.

Roots running along the surface are just a hint
of—what we scrap with our boot, what understands
that healing is what is called for.

All the grasses swaying.

Listen: all the shameplant’s leaves remain open
after only a few times. It’s learned quick. Recalled
well long past the bee.

All those years—I couldn’t keep anything alive
in that one space where the fence was bowing, as if

the tree knew something I didn’t. As if it had
corresponded with what I planted—saying not here—

                                                not here.

In the forest, we kept from picking the red trillium—
that butcher’s blood.

In the glare, we shuffled
to the side—mumbling Sorry.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R Samuels is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). Her poems have appeared in Salt Hill, The Carolina Quarterly, The Pinch, Sweet Tree Review and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Stockburger

North Carolina State Line

If not for the crows landing briefly to form the pines
above the winter-clear world

on the mountain peak,
there would be no markers to place here

and there. What is left of this life
if no one touches the shape of me but the woods?

A layer of frozen clay. Antlers arranged in a circle.
I guess I'm always cataloguing

the old or what hasn't yet collapsed:
one bright and discarded foundation,

stone upon stone, how darkness hems
in the wetland woods so similarly to home,

and the toads drawling to each other
are reminders of your shape in the dark.

Coyotes—I can almost hear them stirring.
On this side of the ridge, I've written no letters.

This evening seems seasons away from you,
away from lust over the silted body.

When all is too quiet, I know I'm not ready
to return to where your mouth is full of summer

heirlooms and the cosmos is in spirals.
To cross back over the flooded creeks.

To try to reconstruct something worthy
from those ruins we made.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Stockburger is the author of Nowhere Beulah (Unicorn Press, 2019). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Adroit Journal, Waxwing and elsewhere. Nicole received an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a BA in Studio Art and English from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was awarded a fellowship from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences. She lives and works on a vegetable farm near her hometown, Winston-Salem.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Battisto

Rose Garden

So now the world is rose shaped.
The light in our room
is the light through a rose window.

Sometimes a house opens:
it becomes
a rose.

The night again
will be a vast hallway
of roses.

We can choose which color
of petal
will be pressed into our sleep.

There is a rose
being held
inside all of our faces.

Our body will always
be part
of the rose garden.

This is the idea of roses:
there can only be one Beauty.
And we belong to it.

 ________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Battisto

Distillation of Pears

This is the machinery of autumn:
extracting sugars
from the ghost of a flower.

We drink what is offered
because it means another forgetting.
When we look into our cups

we see an entire season of skies.
When the cups are empty
we can stop looking at ourselves.

We can dance without thinking of our feet.
In the cold air our speech
will contain the warmth of a younger sun.

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Michael Battisto is a poet and chef. His work can be found or forthcoming in About Place Journal, NOON, Frogpond, Acorn and Modern Haiku. Born in Chicago, he lived in New York, Wyoming, Arizona and Texas. Now he lives in Oakland, California.

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Simon Perchik

[You lift a small stone on top]

You lift a small stone on top
till the smoke turns black
become a chimney-sweep

scraping the dust with flowers
cut in half, were still alive
helping you remember

though once your hand is empty
it opens the way these dead
were gathered from dirt

each year higher, are listening
for rising air and mourners
used to so many steps :her grave

knows how lovingly the ashes fell
cling to the ground as nights
side by side still counting the grass

by twos though you come here
for work, ask for work
with rags and dried-up brushes.

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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Reflection in a Glass Eye published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay, “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

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Steven D Schroeder

The March Crosses Another Hard Place

Roads and streambeds and wheat fields are all salt,
scrap metal and propaganda. The pamphlets demand

why try again when this is hopeless? For company,
only uninterruptable hungry sun and vulture croaks

coming encrusted from human throats. For comfort,
handfuls of gravel and grind the frontrunners pretend

are leadership and wisdom. Oh so many tiny apathies
as each keep-up, keep-up footstep grows heavier

over mattress outlet billboard remnants, soft and sweet
pieces of SLEEP and EASY and FALL. The best end

is not yet. Forward from three sorts of burning
toward reports of at least four more, through haze

that would take a shovel to clear, ahead who knows
how far, a mountaintop. How steep flatlands can be.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Steven D Schroeder

Portents

Pain in our arthritic joints meant rain.
A forked branch’s twitch meant
clean groundwater. The safety inspector
who passed away after testing
what trickled thick and rusty as blood
from wells during the drought months
could have meant anything
by unfit for human consumption.
If we found a penny on the sidewalk,
strangers would be coming to town.
If we found any foreign coins,
misfortune would soon follow.
When a four-year-old was lost
exploring the quarry despite the signs
we posted with the clear warning
No Hope to Prevent This, strangers
took the blame. The first time
a patient took sick with the shakes
after the doctor started selling
nerve tonic as a cure-all, we called
that case wait and see. The second
was both sides of the story. The third,
isolated incident. The situation
where twelve fell from the church
stairway built of spackle and prayers
with a blank check and no-bid contract
we ignored as according to plan
or agreed to decide hadn’t happened.
We all dreamed the same dream,
that we somehow elected mayor
a literal feral cur, and councilmembers
now went missing. Waking, we knew
the truth was give him a chance.
After the newspaper editor’s suicide
by icepick to the back of the neck
led to the headline HOW MANY
LIVES WOULD IT TAKE BEFORE
YOU BELIEVE, our answer
turned out to be every single fucking one
and more might be enough.

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Steven D Schroeder's second book, The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. His poetry is recently available in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM and Sixth Finch. He works as a creative content manager for a financial marketing agency in St. Louis.

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Jed Myers

Projector

I’d curl the film around the bright sprockets,
seat the square holes onto those metal teeth,
and thread the celluloid over the glass plate
behind the lens, so the beam could project
the frame-by-frame story onto the sparkling
screen I’d stretched and hooked up in front
of the class. It wasn’t a job I liked.
It was to discover I’m not made for tech.
I did take to wondering, while the rest watched
in the dark, while bicycle safety was modeled
by smiling ghost-kids on their silvery roads,
while Jascha Heifetz attempted to thrill us
again with his bow, or gray combines ripped up
wide rows of wheat for our airy white bread,
wondering, then, about what gets projected,

presented, inserted, fed…. I’m wondering
these nights again, the lamps off, screen lit
with snippets on fires, the plague, my need
to take turmeric daily, the web’s own selection
of swimsuits just the right fit for my love,
and swarms of warnings, more than I can heed,
uprisings yeasted left and right, the next
wild contagion pitching its warm-ups
in some Central-Asian bullpen, predictions
Wyoming’s caldera will eat the American
West, an asteroid’s aiming to knock us off
orbit, and dare I not password-protect
my passwords, what then. My stinging eyes lick
the salt of the alerts. Whatever I click on
brings on more spin, and I’m in my dust devils,

sucking at scandals, yes choking a bit
on the whirling particulates, still swilling
the whirlwind. I imbibe revelations
as if they were heaven-light, herbed medicinal
akvavit shots, blood-cleanser, swiggable
tincture of anticipation in this creaking
room whose walls flicker with the world’s
glinting sharp instruments. I do remember
the soothe of that insistent clicking I liked to get
lost in beside the projector, that hyper-quick
metronome keeping time for the dancing
picture, a ticking brisk as the frictionless
flourish and trill of Yehudi Menuhin’s
black-and-white violin the machine launched
into the chalk-dusted air. I’d look

into the beam where it widened between
the bulb-shine and that illumined rectangle,
to witness the aimless flecks, that floating grit
scintillant like early clumps of the cosmos
drawn to our star, first mineral stuff
of the unformed Earth—I’d have that sense
of before, before any thought, before a myth
brought an army of nomads together, or a mind
found the Hunter Orion out there in a cluster
of stars nowhere near each other. Tonight,
I wonder about all the lost minds clicking
on warnings they want or need to just hold
their lives together. The little screens offer
an incessant feed on the demons among us.
What would it be, to thrive on raw wonder?

Isn’t there room in the void around all things
visible, room wider than the fields
where Orion paces and waits? Space for more
doubt and hope than our whole hoard of beliefs?
I’ll step out tonight, lose the Hunter, see
if I can erase the names Rigel and Bellatrix,
drop the belt and sword, gather the beams,
and muse on what presses a human creature
to swallow the spores of alarm, to stiffen
and point, to pipe a strained conviction
the throat constricts to a whine, to curse viral
visions of child-abductors, blood-harvesters,
world-ensnarers…. I’m wondering how
the projection mechanics and circuitry work.
The wetware must be just like mine.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jed Myers

Rain’s Memory

It’s dark out and I can hear the rain
through an open window, nothing to see
but a few lights haloed in the blur.

The downpour shakes a deep whisper
out of the trees. It could be the sea,
or wind through thick scrub on a bluff.

Could be the sound of time crashing
against life’s reef, what we first heard

as blood coursed the new snail shells
of our inner ears. And I remember

my grandmother’s bed, her windows
wide on a row of sycamores, a summer
shower—how the leaves roared

lulled me, that noise of the world
the rush and sizzle of surf, a water god’s
or a sky god’s hand brushing the earth,

a throng cheering its heroes home,
a radio on with no station. I’d float

that sonic ocean on my pillowed raft,
the fighting would go on downstairs,

my bellowing grandfather might strike
my aunt to the kitchen floor, and again
my father, called to the impossible

rescue, his black Buick growling
its harnessed explosions, would pull in
under the mottled boughs. It’s all there

in the rain even now. I’m at the sill,
drifting once more to the harsh music,

fusion of countless staccato blows,
the pummeled leaves lifting our wounds.

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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press) and four chapbooks. Recognitions include Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Prime Number Magazine Award, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize and The Tishman Review’s Millay Prize. Poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle and edits poetry for Bracken.

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Michael Garrigan

The River, a Mouth

We walk the river’s jaw
along its curved bone ledges,
long palates growing eelgrass,
spooking baitfish and bass, to the dam.

Rusty crayfish flick through
summer teeth slick boulders as we slip
the weight of our bodies becomes buoyant
and we float until our boots touch bottom.

Lightning bugs splatter
shorelines as storms split us in two.
Rain downstream, lightning upstream,
dam at our back, we are halves of all we held.

We wade deeper into the dark
our feet become a bed of pebbles
our legs tooth roots buried in bone
our waists eddies, our chest hair - hibiscus.

We follow the river’s tongue
down its throat into its lungs
and feel the crack of thunder choking
our names in the language of water and rock.

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Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and strongly believes that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He is the author of two poetry collections: Robbing the Pillars and the chapbook, What I Know [How to Do]. His writing has appeared in The Flyfish Journal, The Hopper Magazine, Permafrost, and Split Rock Review. You can find more at www.mgarrigan.com.

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Veronica Kornberg

Her Work

From the bone to the broth, the hidden
marrow of days leaching thin, from a wind-whack
of pie plates on bean and tomato vines,

from hand-sewn nights, threads knotted and bitten,
work of her hands, the kneading, the whipping
of cream for a cake, quick chop

of the knife, quick check down the list, scrape
of the chair as she rose, kiss on the hair,
swipe of cloth in the soft nick of the jaw,

until deep in the evening she finally sat with her cup
of Red Rose, feet puffy and propped on a kitchen stool,
the Trenton Times unread in her lap as we ciphered

our long division and the rule of the run-on sentence,
while stock thickened in the pot and the next day’s dough
swelled beneath flour sack towels and we settled, hungry
for the bread of her voice.

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Veronica Kornberg is a poet from Northern California. Recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, New Ohio Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Guard, #PoetsResist (Glass), Mom Egg Review, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, Crab Creek Review, Swwim Every Day and Meridian, among other journals. Find her at veronicakornberg.com or on Twitter @vkornberg

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Kate Sweeney

Apollo builds a shrine for Daphne, apologizes, tries to fuck a tree, and attempts to make sense of his dreams.

I’ve spent years torturing this hill, making an altar,
tilling, revising the heap of death pooled at my shins.
They say the white long-tailed tropicbirds are an omen.

A thousand years of omens and yet, the holy children still come.
They wear little bells roped to their wrists, and worship
at your roots. They gather your leaves and weave complicated

wreaths. I watch the tiny hands work in the sanctity of shade.
I teach them to tie knots in apple stems with their tongues, 
we exchange a sacred sap of your ooze to avoid sunburn.

I apologize.       We don’t share language.
They are always confused. Their nails grow
straight and without ridges. They remind me
of yours. If there’s a history of violence,
they don’t seem to be in pain.

Rain runs from your branches in the afternoons.
I rub your drought stricken boughs in slow circles.

You drink the wetness from my hands, creaking in
pleasure. Blow softly into my lungs. Accept my hollow

chest pressed against you           stiff and unforgiving.
Your naked body, slipped from my arms once before.

I was so close. Bent over you from behind, clavicle beaming,
your chest punctured. I've tried to wash the blood from my hands,

it saturates everything I see. Would you have allowed me
to wash you in this stream, would you have

let me teach you to float, let me clean your hair?
Let me coax your nipples to the surface break.

in my most
recent dream,
i try to fit your cold
body into a tub over-
filled with water. If
loss is what is spilled,
what then is the
displacement of water.
it may be wind.
but you are wind.
the perfect sum
of all language

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kate Sweeney

These are private words addressed to you in public

Why is the measure of love, loss?
It hasn’t rained in three months.
                        ­­–from Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson

For a short while, I could forgive the grainy recording
of our voices. Whispers jammed into tiny wires, wires
tucked away in the long-lag of distance. What I accept as
your voice. A howl. Backlit cicada’s singing. An imagined dog
roped to a fence, barking. I’ve become obsessed with the
amount of time it takes a grain of wheat to find its way
from ground to mouth. I’m hungry. I pretend to forget you
over time. I continue to eat.

There are years when the rhythm of body is everything,
brief moments worshiping the slow stretch of thigh.
The acute pain of an exposed nipple, a blurry image
in glass, mistakes. I don’t know why the velocity
of engorgement is testimony to some sort of heroic
hydration. I do know when you run your cock
against my cheek I ache to take you in. No one
explained this part. You never told me how
you learned to smell me from across a crowded room.

I’ve stopped wearing perfume.

How easily intention is tamped down
in damp shadows of promise.
The smallest movements of sound
prove out hope: a horizon teeming with
yellow-tailed hawks, a rotting pile of sycamore
branches in the yard, a drought.

We are afraid of decay.
We grow old. I wait. I plant herbs
instead of flowers, sweeping the dust
so it doesn’t gather. Words like:
longevity, or continuity. How far we’ve
come moving toward instead of away.
We abide in the natural order of things—
A celestial pattern confused for fact,
the not so subtle counting of moons.
The time it takes trauma to manifest
in our children’s children.

There’s a certain magnetism in the skate sacs hatching at sunset,
Dead, low water mixing with the sharp shadow of a body.

Note: The poem’s title is taken from T.S. Eliot’s A Dedication to my Wife

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Kate Sweeney has poems in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, SWWIMM Everyday, and Adanna Literary Journal, with poems forthcoming from Ethel Zine. She is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a political marketing executive.

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Adam Houle

Hand-Painted Hermit Crabs!

What slow art curled
in a hand-painted home.

The Myrtle Beach hermit colony
seems contemplative, lonely

at the center of a t-shirt store.
One shell is purple

with curved Viking horns
for a St. Paul snowbird’s kid

who sees now what vacation
means. It’s deathly cheap.

And they toss in a plastic cage,
a sponge, and a week of pellets, free.

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Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press 2017), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Baltimore Review and elsewhere. He currently lives in South Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of English at Francis Marion University.

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Ellery Beck

Art

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Ellery Beck is an undergraduate student majoring in English at Salisbury University. A winner of the 2019 AWP Portland Flash Contest and a Pushcart nominee, she is Interview Editor for The Shore Poetry. She has poems published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Sugar House Review, Crab Creek Review, Potomac Review, Arkana and elsewhere.