Issue 9 Full Text
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Dana Blatte
Premonition with Extras
After Lily Zhou
I never liked mirrors because of the lies they told.
How a good girl can be a bird: thin-boned, lace-necked,
swinging from a tree. In the script she is always
silent, waiting to be filled. If my life were a movie,
I would be the dead girl in the alley. You would forget
my face before you saw it. I never wanted
to be famous, just known. The way a leaf can love
the wind without ever knowing its name. Everything repeats.
Rewinds: the movie, my smile opening in reverse.
Do you remember me? You and I met in this alley
under the sheet of rain that hissed into the air like smoke,
like each tear was softening us into something new. I cried
for you, because of you, because I saw you in a mirror.
You practiced your mouth: leaning into the telephone,
brushing toward an ear, slipping through a quiet collar.
The buildings darkened. Windows flashed with noise.
This is where the story goes wrong. Every time I tell it
it changes. It works like that, you know: I held it in my palm
until the girl could find her voice. I wonder if this repeats.
The bird, the rain, the city of split throats. Listen
before the credits roll. Maybe you knew me.
Maybe I was famous somewhere.
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Dana Blatte is a junior in high school from Massachusetts. Her work is published in Fractured Lit, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Peach Magazine, and more, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Pulitzer Center, among others. You can find her hyping up her friends on Twitter @infflorescence.
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Jessica Poli
To My Second Lover
Now the last things we said are like the moon
on the night we said them: shadow-bound, absent.
An egg tucked in a black cloak, or a form of hunger.
And that moon is like a single rundown house
underneath it: porch bowed and sinking, ill-lit, stale.
Or the handful of straw that I stuffed in your mouth
in my dream last night: dry and tasting of moondust.
And as for the hay rake on the back of the tractor
making neat piles of gold in rows across the field—
that rake and field are like the swelling in my chest
when you called me for the last time and told me,
or might as well have, that the straw in the barn
had been soaked by rain, that out of your mouth, now,
would only come buckets of water instead of moonlight.
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Jessica Poli
To My First Lover
And here we are now in the place
where the trees flicker on and off.
I came here, climbed the mountain
despite knowing that you didn’t want
to be saved. The two of us stand in a circle
of breadcrumbs and broken glass,
a dead horse lashed to my back.
You look at me from your blue mouth.
A lake of gin sloshes behind your eyes.
The horse twitches, and I toe
the ground with my boot. All of us
are coiled, full of green longing.
So that we might find our way down,
we hold out hope for the light.
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Jessica Poli is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Canyons (BatCat Press, 2018) and co-editor of the collection More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal and Redivider, among others. She is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, founder and editor of Birdfeast and Assistant Poetry Editor of Prairie Schooner.
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Matthew Tuckner
Elegy with Balls of Neptune Grass
It is Sunday & I have still never seen / a hippopotamus
there’s a bird outside my window that sounds
like an oboe / I’m not sure I can tell the difference
between an oboe & what apes an oboe / my grandmother
is intubated a few states away / her heart
is functioning at a quarter of its full
capacity / today I learned something new / the lifecycle of
the Neptune grass bryozoan / is synchronized
with the growth cycle of the seagrass / on which it lives / I feel better
for knowing this / it feels like true love / balls of Neptune grass
wash up on nearby shorelines / the doctor says my grandmother feels nothing
but my sister is singing her / Hallelujah
over the phone / a song my grandmother listened to every day / days
in which she felt many things / the word no broadening
a pair of lips / wafts of seabreeze / the particular sadness
of green olives / I have nothing new to say
about oxygen / it’s what ties the sadness of the olives
to my sadness / in the course of my cataloguing what I don’t
know / my grandmother has died / my father is using the word edema
on the phone / like it means something / edema means
to swell / passed away is the phrase
the doctors delicately maneuver around / I have taken days for this
it is Monday / I take days & sever them / in pieces / with meals
the article the / does very little for me / it just points
to the next thing / knows
what I’m going to say before I say it / Susan Sontag also died
on December 28th / there is no the / in the body
of that statement / Susan Sontag wrote she discovered
she was tired / of being a person / I am happy
that she no longer has to be / any kind of person
at all / when my father said the word edema
I thought the words green olives / what does this say
about grief / what do green olives denote / I have never seen
a ball of Neptune grass / I could write a book
with all of the things I’ve never seen / at the funeral
my sister plays Hallelujah again / this time it’s a recording
the sound of the birds overhead / overpower the sound / of her singing
I like it this way / the direction they are going is far away from here
& that means something / what does it mean / I have yet to master augury
when I put a green olive in my mouth / I don’t feel sad
I feel close to nothing / I swell with the nothing / sometimes
the world / plays me like an oboe / sometimes
the world tongues my reeds / and blows me away
I have still never seen a hippopotamus / I don’t think
my grandmother did either / I never asked
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Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He received his BA from Bennington College and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he is Assistant Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review. He received the Green Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets, selected by Rick Barot. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, The Massachusetts Review, New South and Tupelo Quarterly, among others.
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CD Eskilson
XNA —> XNA
After Tiana Clark
I can’t go home another birthday though I try
to hold it here. Hold California stars inside my head.
In Arkansas, I drive past glades and spot deer
stripping oaks. Learn color from the cardinal wings,
sleep lullabied by frog songs. Still tonight I wish
for concrete or the dapple under brakelights, to watch
each prick not zipper as they merge into a lane.
I come from reckless driving, countless reckless
nights on Sunset. These past months show I’m driftwood
stuck in sand and skunkweed out a window. Heart
thudding like worn tire over pothole. Back home I hated
this, though. The going out, the high gas, rent, and Arkansas
is none of it. In Arkansas, I climb hills gray with winter, stare at
nameless constellations. The roads slick blue with quiet. Here
I’m still searching lakes for waves. Before leaving I combed
beaches for a rock I might take with me, lost it walking to the car.
I come from where the shore holds out its hands to give back
all that’s vanished. Here that shore cannot find you.
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CD Eskilson
Ode to an Anti-Joke
After Patrick Rosal
When I love myself again
I’ll smell of jasmine
strong enough to turn heads
on the street. When I love myself
again this girl won’t dance
through smoke, her gown won’t
chafe my skin. The story of my
loss is this: I’ve tried to douse
in glitter and be churchlight,
sway hips like angels do.
I’ve held boys with balmed lips.
In turn I’ve earned a bloody
mouth, I’ve torn acrylics off
in backseats, felt the knife eyes
at the laundry folding skirts.
At what point is a body just a bivouac?
There’s a joke about what’s similar
between a grape and an airplane
I heard once on a date,
the punchline being that they
both have wings—except the grape.
If I love myself again
I’ll tell this bit to everyone
who cannot help but laugh
at something so unfunny. In those
moments I’ll stop thinking
of the thing I am am not,
instead just watch teeth
glint inside of smiles.
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CD Eskilson is a trans nonbinary poet, editor, and educator from Los Angeles. Their work appears or is forthcoming in The Washington Square Review, the minnesota review and Redivider, among others. CD is Poetry Editor for Exposition Review and reads for Split Lip Magazine. They are an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas.
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Dakota Reed
The Shapes a Hand Can Take
They chopped down the orange tree on my street
and now the sidewalk is a collage of peel and petals
of pulp. The church bells were rung: not for the tree
itself, but the way in which it swayed. Not for the fruit
it held, but the palms from which they extended.
How my neighbor’s sister loves oranges, so at seventy-one
he is thrusting a stick into a cluster of branches,
hopeful that fruit will fall. How one bleak October,
the library custodian shared his candy-corn with me
in the elevator: tiny kernels of color tucked in a crumpled,
restroom paper towel. How, in such moments, we find
that we can all split a slice of the sun.
I want to learn to love with an open hand,
to not squish the body of the bird
when it grows new feathers. I want the fingertip
of the psychic reading my palm to linger off
into the air, my heart line extending invisibly beyond
my hand. For water to always be cupped in the curve
of it. To be palm-down in the ground, doubled over
in thanks, a pair made for prayer, for professing of what is
good. They chopped down the orange tree on my street
and now all my neighbors are painting their homes
the color of a clementine’s ripeness to remember
how we learned to flatten our flexed fists, to extend, to hold.
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Dakota Reed
in the dream all the bees were dead
wings wilted still as morning
my hands sticky with honey
their little bodies like lint
stuck to the carpet like
confetti leftover and limp
from a party
already forgotten
I thought a bad omen
that afternoon I almost cut
my fingertip off while
slicing a green apple into
thin slivers like crescent moons
like waxy wings falling into
a pile of themselves
I found a butterfly later on my walk
into town let it balance
on my bandage for a few blocks
‘til it flew from my finger
fluttered
into the road
floated down
onto wet ground
and was run over by a black
car slick
with rain
I thought a bad omen
now we all wear surgical
masks and wash our hands raw
my fingertip is still throbbing
stinging from the soap from the serrated
blade opening back up like the slow
spread of wings blooming
with blood
in the dream
all the bees were dead
but I could still hear them
buzzing
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Dakota Reed
A woman in my neighborhood’s Facebook group asks, “where do the geese go at night?”
with little to no
context for her question
which lingers with me
as I sit on the toilet
and mindlessly scroll
and I think about their elongated
necks draped in moonlight and I,
too, wonder where they go, where
they are, where they want
to be. One Halloween I dressed up
as a goose and drank too much gin and passed
out in a sticky nightclub booth: black leather,
white feathers. A stranger tried
to convince me to come home
with him, stroked my arm lying
limp across the table and
whispered he would take care of me,
to just let him bring me back. I think
of the summer I kept seeing dead
birds and kept Googling what it meant,
how I felt like it was a kind of omen,
a sort of feathered foreboding, perhaps
for some night when some man
would want to take home some
broken bird and do with it what
men do.
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Dakota Reed is a copyeditor for Atmosphere Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the College of Charleston, where she was a Woodfin Fellow and senior editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, has been published in Blood Orange Review and has been awarded the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Nancy Walton Pringle Memorial Prize, College of Charleston’s MFA Creative Writing Prize and honorable mention in AWP’s Intro Journals Project.
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Kelsey Carmody Wort
Our Three-Quarters Phase
Our autumn Sundays were extra everything.
Hair twists knotted with ballpoint pens, squash
soup thickened with cream and more spoons
than we needed just in case. We visited the piano
more that year than we ever had, still too stubborn
for lessons... but just think how much easier reading
music might be the next time we go through our phase.
If it were warm enough to be barefoot, I would
have been. Northern Wisconsin turns frigid too fast. Finn
told me his thumbs were too big to keep finding
the splinters in the soles of my feet from the unfinished
wood floor. The batter was always in the fridge
waiting for a griddle or a muffin tin. The morning
I told him about the dreams I’d been having—prying
crab claws off my toenails, how I kept swallowing them—
was bundled sweaters deep, knees tucked on the back porch.
He’d never said less. When the rain came sideways,
he reached for his ball cap instead of going inside.
The yard had no flowers—only overgrown grass tickling
the backs of our calves, trees that kept the sun from us.
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Kelsey Carmody Wort
I Watch My Girlfriend Put Poetry Under Her Microscope
inspired by an image from Matthew Rohrer’s
“There is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier”
There is a picture in her parents’ living room
from when she was probably seven,
maybe older because she’s always looked
young, of her staring straight into the camera,
with lips parted and a cowboy hat. Stoic before
she knew what it meant. She calls it her true grit
phase and if I were a photo-in-the-wallet kind of person,
this would be the one I would keep.
When she gets excited, she talks so fast and long
that she will stop only for a weak cough after losing
her breath. She’s taught me that plants and trees can tell
when they’re being eaten and some can even send
out chemical defenses that attract the enemy
of what’s eating them—somehow even a parasitic
wasp can be an unlikely hero, coming to save corn from
invader worms. That the Black Plague has “always
fascinated her,” studying gruesome lumps in case
of an impending epidemic. And although she is phobic
of spiders and cries when she thinks of them, sometimes
she still chooses to look up their photos and remind
herself of their importance to the trophic structure,
even the ones with fat bodies and tiny quick legs.
After the last poem she read about the Mars Rover,
she remembered a fact she learned about it singing
to itself each year on its birthday, and she took a few
minutes of closed-eye consideration before confessing
that she thought about the Mars Rover often
and sometimes she felt sorry for it, so far away
and all by itself, but she would like to believe
that it would be proud of the good work that it’s doing
for NASA and for the rest of us as well
and that she’s thankful someone decided to write about it
because she wouldn’t know where to start.
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Kelsey Carmody Wort
O
O to be unloved to be left alone
to watch a movie and sit close to my
purse filled with tissues & green M&Ms
O to shiver against my hand know precisely
how to use her To cry soft and sure
into a mattress that only feels on one side
O to unlock a door for the silly thrill
of opening it To have the perfect amount
of grocery bags so I walk up only once
O to lean against the door frame
and heave Held up by the sturdiness
of a warm painted plant to sigh until
the noodles have cooked To make the stroganoff
recipe I don’t like for the chance I may surprise myself
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Kelsey Carmody Wort
Gemini Drunkenly Scrolling through Her Twitter Feed in the Bar Bathroom
Vaguely sexy. Itching to be proved right. Scrolling through exes’
likes doesn’t thrill the way it used to and the purple glitter
building on my waterline could be a cosmic sign I’m choosing
to barrel through. Sticky waves styled with coconut and Cuervo fall
into my Gemini mouth as I amend the lipstick pep talk other
twins decree on the stall wall: two wrongs don’t make a right—
but let’s see if three do. Tights bunched around my ankles remind
me how much I like being tied down while still having hands
free. That was always my favorite part of being two: head that rests
& the lap that holds on the cab ride home. When I can be both,
I never need to choose.
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Kelsey Carmody Wort is an MFA candidate in poetry at Purdue University. She loves her home state of Wisconsin, pop music, postcards with painted flowers and dancing around her kitchen.
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Martha Silano
The blooming
had given way to what comes after. What comes after.
The huckleberries that were plump and sweet
now dry on the tongue. I noticed the leaves
were turning red, were red. A hike on a dry, rocky trail
I asked you about Teddy, whether the fall to his death
was an accident, to remind me
how it happened. He went up a ridge. They found his body
a hundred feet below. I let that fact
hang in the air.
Do you think he might have found out the day before
he was terminal? I mean, he was so fit, so agile.
Teddy would be the last person I’d expect…
but no, he said, Teddy wasn’t that kind of a guy,
to make his friends go looking for him.
What comes after.
We calculate the time we have left, assume it’s a die-of-old-age
situation. But Teddy. He was our age. Sitting
with that knowing we might not have
thirty years. Pretty much everything
but the asters had gone to seed.
A few lupine blooms,
a shock of fireweed along a granite ridge. I hated
passing under the powerlines, buzzing
as if they were alive.
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Martha Silano
Despite knowing the sun will implode,
I gussied up, met you between the legs of a coconut crab.
Where were we, Amuri? What were we eating,
consomme of carpe diem? I think you were
my Turtle Back Zoo, like the day I caught an eel
in the Raritan River. Despite my small
confusion that most of the cosmos
is nothing, that it will self-destruct in three billion years,
I took you up on a visit to Dublin to meet the man
who’d written mistakes are the portals
of discovery. Mornings I’d leave you in bed to stroll
along the sea like the wide-open mouth of our future.
A sea we were willing to drink
so we could swim with the elusive barracuda, past foregone castles
we navigated in flip flops, sans sunscreen, sans map.
And we navigated nightfall,
scraped the spent wax from glass votives, searched the closets
for candles, a scent called Mine Were Peasants,
Yours Were Royals.
I don’t think I burn anymore, or, if I do, it’s a headlamp
that keeps going out no matter how many times
we fiddle with the batteries.
It would be easy to say only smolder which I guess is true,
my hands stinking of the Butane my father dribbled
on briquettes before throwing in a match,
that my brain’s always a spark away from igniting, an untended
fire forged from dry Ponderosa. I’m always reminding my son
to never turn his back, but who am I talking to, really?
I gussied up, greeted you like a garden spider
with an X-shaped web, the exact function
of which is unknown.
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Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press). Martha’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and in the Best American Poetry series, among others. Honors include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Poetry. She teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. Learn more about Martha and her work at marthasilano.net.
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SK Grout
Ghosting
Some nights the bones plant fog
and not even a murmuring ficus
can move the path. I have not yet
learnt the difference between motion
and momentum. It is the time of year
when evening keeps the window open
with a welcome chill—a small portal
to tomorrow’s clarity. Hope can be measured
in increments of light, developing like
chemical formula into image. But there is no
clearer way to express this: I have
never been able to taste its technicolor
nor balance equanimity. If every morning
there is a crack, to blue the thought of light,
what about the elemental force of wind or rain
or sun it takes to expel the fog. Tomorrow
I wish to wake with different obsessions. A slice
of ginger every day to thin the memory.
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SK Grout (she/they) grew up in Aotearoa/New Zealand, has lived in Germany and now splits her time as best she can between London and Auckland. She is the author of the micro chapbook to be female is to be interrogated (2018, the poetry annals). She holds a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London and is a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Her work also appears in Ambit, Cordite Poetry Review, trampset, Banshee Lit, Parentheses Journal, Barren Magazine and elsewhere. More information here: https://skgroutpoetry.wixsite.com/poetry
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Hilary King
Death Tries a Meal Delivery Service
She likes the way the service makes
a cheerful assumption of her hunger,
that what she wants for dinner is
a proper meal with entrees and sauces
and not popcorn or pudding out of the cup.
She likes the Korean-style tacos
and maple-glazed pork chops that smell
like Thanksgiving at an elegant friend’s house.
She likes the package on her doorstep.
At first she even likes the little bottles of vinegar
and the individually wrapped pats of butter
But there are too many potatoes and soon
too many little bottles. Death is single.
She doesn’t need so many bottles of vinegar
and she hates potatoes. They remind her
of Ireland, the famine, the way it went down,
the way she let it go down. Death has regrets.
Too many regrets and too many individually wrapped
packets of butter. She cancels the meal delivery service,
but it haunts her for years and she thinks that’s fair.
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Hilary King lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California with her husband, two children, one cat, one dog, and many masks. Her poems have appeared in Fourth River, Belletrist, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Cortland Review, Mom Egg Review and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid's Car.
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Babo Kamel
The cursor pulses likes a silent metronome of the not yet written
Images collage but last night’s dream
won’t give up its custody.
What I wanted to say
took refuge in a stranger’s mouth.
Without papers, I couldn’t cross the border. Not even
in the abstract. Last night’s silence returned my mother
to the inaudible, between the whoosh and squeeze of the machine.
The night she died, she lip-synced her own thoughts.
I brushed the hair from her forehead, and she closed her eyes.
It’s a lie, but that is the way I want to remember
instead of morphine’s cruel trick, a breath stopped
a gasp, a breath stopped, a gasp like a dress rehearsal
for the letting go. Each moment was a finale and then not.
How many times can you say goodbye between poles
of relief and regret. The dead leave us with more
to say and so the dialogue lingers, like a hawk riding
currents, then circling back. She didn’t believe in an afterlife
but she returns some evenings to the kitchen
when I am washing dishes she once loved
to say, if you hand me a towel , I will help you dry.
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Babo Kamel
She shows them her part of town
where industry once choked the sky and laundry waved to attract
a bit of sun. Generations spent entire lives here, as if the world began
at Hickson and ended somewhere north of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows.
She remembers playing stickball street-side until the lamps came on.
Then stoop sitting summer nights, the air so thick it felt like she could drown
breathing. How the sound of a distant siren sounded lonely as if it mourned
the loss of someone she didn’t know. Later, the city would lull her
to sleep with the sweep of car lights across her room, the murmurs
of neighbors through walls like secrets of foreign spies
and the creak of her mother’s footsteps on the wooden floor
dependable as Ed Sullivan on Sundays. Everyone smoked then. Even
the woman next door, who never would say where she came from
but baked her rugelach and sang in languages she could not understand.
Now, crossing a vacant lot, she sees a foodie bar promising grit and authenticity.
The old corner store renamed The Corner Store, sells scarves on shelves
once stocked with soda pop, penny candy and pickles so sour
they made her eyes squint as if trying to imagine herself into a future
like today, her children wandering through her story, the sky a cornflower blue.
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Originally from Montreal, Babo Kamel’s work is published in reviews such as Whale Road Review, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, CV2, Poet Lore and Best Canadian Poetry 2020. She is a Best of the Net nominee and a six-time Pushcart nominee. Her chapbook, After, is published with Finishing Line Press. Find her at: babokamel.com
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Noa Saunders
Up Beacon Hill
Small world, small Boston, like a molar. Starlight and lamplight palette,
the surface curves of the street
curve like a guide for the rain
if it rained.
Walking unbalanced, head front, foot twisted
—age was a hole I fell into
which was like waiting for the show of animatronics to at any moment berate me,
crack out its impositions from a lit window,
and fade to a shallow mystery, but there were none. No faces at all,
just paint, just brick,
no space but the length of a brick. A backhoe loader splayed out,
a colossal scorpion who makes of the brick
chump change or little flecks of wheat. What kind of size
of humans were here?
The doorframes coming down from the street ranged in size
by prisoner type: rusted can & bars type, crippled cold & naked type,
ratman busy with the fleas type, raggedy ann who reads type, so small sleeps in a drawer type,
but there were none.
This is what we get with no history. Gonzo might as well
do his emerging, claiming to be Chuckie D.
Naturally, I do not think I am exaggerating the disjunctiveness
of oh of it all I guess,
of the spinning of houses siphoning themselves off
to the sky, a heavens drain,
of cowboys witching away their anonymity in an old American folktale,
of a final generation mounting the soapbox
balanced on a coin, yes aswarm, yes hysterically.
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Noa Saunders
Shepherd
After a wildernight full of darlingest Rilke, you come, desperate as a beggar for rest,
to a bench in Denney hall. You ask me to stay while you sleep.
Curling yourself, hands kneading between knees, a remora against the belly of the wall,
you left this place, you fell away.
I cannot finish my work. Noon light skims the window’s whale rib, dives into the hall that we are
slowing, letting a far-off muscle pump its breath along without us. Noon light
radiating out from the wide green where there is a shepherd of some kind
trotting after a master
who twirls every few steps to check the dog’s fidelity. The dog glides through its resilience:
grass and spit forge with the tongue
as dog tongues do, eyes fixed on the guiding star. The boy
could have been a mile ahead. Of course,
you do not remember this. You awoke surprised that I would still be here
at your reunion with the world.
You loved it, loving me.
My friend, I looked down a barrel through you and I saw nothing
but me.
Is there a body I would not keep? A light I would not take in—?
Light is never a metaphor, writes one of our favorites, praying.
And neither is the work of the eyes.
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Noa Saunders is a PhD Candidate at Boston University, where she teaches poetry, film, and writing. Recent poems can be found in Ninth Letter.
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Jeremy Michael Reed
Paradise
You died the same season your hometown burned.
It rained for weeks, the pavement black with wet.
Your dogs howled every time I walked in the door.
Too many symbols, you’d say. I think we’re getting it
already.
On the news, I saw the pictures of Paradise:
each house turned to whistling ash.
A friend told me once
how vocal chords vibrate when words are read silently.
When I typed “how vocal chords,” autocorrect made “vocal”
into “I am.” I’m not sure how.
Too many again, you’d say.
When I see the pictures, each window framed in flame,
each peak to home ensconced in red orange billowing,
taken down to beam skeleton, I think of your poem,
of every road laid out in golden sunlight, in honey,
and I wonder if this isn’t a different kind of danger:
to remember—
Let’s
not read too much into what you said that last day;
let’s not see Paradise as only flame. Let’s understand
the fire as one part of a history of harvest, melons, grapes.
Let’s see how you stood by the car longer than I expected
the same simple way you used to turn in your office chair
at my knock.
I hesitate over this poem,
reading back line by line, answering what you didn’t
have to ask that day by the drive.
I am. I am.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jeremy Michael Reed holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee, where he was editor-in-chief of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and assistant to Joy Harjo. His poems and essays are published in Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere. He is an associate editor for Sundress Publications and an assistant professor of English for Westminster College in Fulton, MO.
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Lucy Zhang
Only We Were Left
The story goes like this: the children became books, spines worn and pages read, discarded in recycle bins, emptied in landfills instead of melted down for reuse. The children became pulp and fiber, lost between decomposing banana peels and metal hangers bent into sticks. When the compactor came rolling over them, tamping them into the ground, puncturing them with spiked wheels, they sank below the earth, taking their words with them. And then their parents came searching, pulling away torn sheets of cardboard and plastic bags, digging for an arm, a finger, a toe, anything to put their hearts at rest. The parents found nothing, and when a breeze rolled in from the coastline, blowing over a compacted layer of dust and grime, they shielded their eyes from the flurries of scraps, blocked their ears from the rattling of metal against plastic. How it might’ve looked like snow lingering into the spring, how it might’ve sounded like whispers crinkled between slips of paper.
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Lucy Zhang
Lacto-Fermentation
Survival of the fittest is how I learn it. I fight evil off with salt. Sugar converts to lactic acid, lactic acid inhibits everything else. The sourer, the better, and somehow that’s going to make us live longer, down a foggy road cradled by mountains, mist and humidity masking yellow lane markings, I head for the sky. I pickle beets and turnips and cabbage, thinking my gut flora could digest all the rocks and jade bangles that tumbled down my esophagus while I was distracted: jade makes you immortal, not sure about the rocks. Why couldn’t an umeboshi have been pressed into my mouth instead of a stone, like I’m opened for breakfast rather than being buried with the remains harvested from a jewelry box? Grow up strong, a thought I gulp down, choke back the gag reflex as I submerge silken tofu in kimchi and red miso, top with green specks of scallion, let simmer until the soybean’s off-white takes on an orange and the soup boils crimson. Is this living? Blazing forward, incinerating bacteria, leaving the green as ash swept up by the roadside, not that jade melts, though I’d not call it alive.
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Lucy Zhang
Maillard Reaction
The skin sticks to the pan if you’re impatient, unwilling to see the carbonyl and amino groups’ reaction through, browned and crisped crust forming a clean divide with the iron, but that sort of time, who has it, balancing between too short and too long, too low and too high, barely skirting carcinogens. We learned to avoid hurtful things young: stray far from intersections without streetlights, refuse every man’s reach because there’s always one hand that’ll choke your words from your trachea and seal your eyelids shut until you can only listen to the slurping of premonitions, made real. The butterfly flew too close to the fire, left us with smoke and charred chitin to drown out the stench of human feces in those hole-in-the-ground toilets; wings that smelled like incense, we’d say. We learned to steam in layered trays, avoiding the oil and sizzle, preserving vibrant hues, almost pastel-like, baby-like. In a sear, the burning comes too late, the scent an aftermath of deprotonated amino acids deglazed with sake or Pinot Noir, the taste of acid and coal and glutamates, darkened to something like death. We scrape and scrape the bottom of the pan, trying to salvage what we lost.
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Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in The Boiler, The Hunger, Fractured Lit and elsewhere. She is a finalist in Best of the Net 2020 and included in Best Microfiction 2021. She edits for Barren Magazine, Heavy Feather Review and Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
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C Samuel Rees
Last Days of Small Archangels
Road flares melt the median.
Magnesium clings to yellow
thermoplastic. It is late
& it has rained. There
is a shorthand for disaster
I want to disregard. Rain parts
as if it were fingers & the world
was afraid of what it might see,
but eager to, if a little
sick. We will devour every
beautiful thing & know why.
Rain is in my eyes, on the
exquisite small hairs of my arms.
Skin blends with water like moths who
soot their wings for generations
to survive industrializing
cityscapes. Who know that
luminous is another
word for dead. Who know night
is a dimension of context.
That is enough.
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C Samuel Rees is a Pennsylvania-born, Austin-based teacher, poet and MFA candidate with the New Writers Project. He subsists on a steady diet of ecological texts, scifi, contemporary poetry and horror movies. His work has appeared in Sonora Review, Frontier Poetry, Bat City Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Grimoire Magazine, The Account, The Matador Review and elsewhere.
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Becki Hawkes
Hidden Teeth
Lick off the last bit
he says
and I do, though the way
it has gone cold and thick
makes me want to gag.
The word slut
is slippery, almost translucent
if you say it right
it is combed pearls
and languid curls of sea foam
it is a well-planned smile
that heats your tubes
as you muscle it out
it is a snail at night
on rain-sluiced bricks
inching its soft shape
into the smoked wet city
cell by cautious cell
scraping in moss
and shelled petals of beetle
feeding on stone
with all its hidden teeth.
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Becki Hawkes lives and works in London (UK). She has had poems published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Rust + Moth (forthcoming), Brittle Star, Pulp Poets Press, Crow & Cross Keys (forthcoming), Little Stone Journal (forthcoming) and Trouvaille Review. Her work explores topics such as disordered eating, surviving abusive relationships and sexual assault, our relationship with animals and the natural world, and the experience of losing loved ones to dementia. Twitter: @BeckiH_678
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Kevin Grauke
A History of the Newest Term of Venery
A rag of colts may very well be to a bed of clams
what a clam of beds once was to a colt of rags,
but a charm of finches is oh so precious,
as was wee Strayhorn, who once declared
flowers to be lovesome things, a fact knowable
only to a man loved as Swee’pea, though he was not
the baby found on a doorstep the same year Delano
claimed that fear is all there is to fear, my dear, a year
long before fear truly came into its own, which, for some,
was a year soon after, and for others this year ri’chere,
but always, regardless, the same year a wake of buzzards
first came to be known as a certainty.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Kevin Grauke
An Invitation, of Sorts
I whispered in your good ear
about fires burning backward
as the music died around us
and smoke withdrew into my fist.
A cabin on stilts sits in the desert
in darkness and silence and in the blood
of signatures echoing infinitely in a pair
of mirrors cracked in half by an egg.
This is my home, I say. Please be my guest.
Sleep on my green naugahyde couch
while I gather the last mice into a bowl
and finish the skim milk you brought.
Here, night ends when the sun loses
its scab, okay? Be long gone before this.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Kevin Grauke has published work in The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Sycamore Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester and Quarterly West, to name a few. His collection of stories, Shadows of Men (Queen's Ferry Press), won the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Originally from Texas, he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
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Jenny Wong
Rua Augusta
It's the street
of cork wallets and Ginja drinks in chocolate cones,
of shelves that gleam with canned sardines.
The bacalhau dangle.
Leather bodies tied with dry strings.
That smell that reminds me of my feet.
How I can walk thousands of steps over
these limestone streets
set in black and white,
shadow and light.
A new pattern emerges—
walkways, crossings, pathways aside.
Of mermaid scales.
Of ocean waves.
Of broken compasses pointing east and cracked stars of sailors’ dreams.
The man in front of the egg tart bakery gives me
a piece of advice.
Smile,
you're in Lisbon.
His hands return to his drums,
to bounce on those little circles of skin,
to give a new heartbeat between
the hardness of sidewalk and tired old foot bones.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. She resides in the foothills of Alberta, Canada and tweets @jenwithwords. Lately, her writings have been more about indoor things, but she still dreams about evening wanderings around Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centres and Parisian cemeteries. Recent publications include Truffle Magazine, Split Rock Review, Burnt Breakfast Magazine, Parentheses Journal and Crow & Cross Keys.
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Steven Pfau
Sappho at Gem State Crystals, Moscow, Idaho
He seems to me equal to the gods, that rattlesnake
who charms you without even lifting his tail
or head. While he holds your gaze and keeps
playing dead, I cruise
the shelves of quartz and jade and tourmaline,
but none of these stupid rocks can beguile you
to look back at me. How embarrassing
to want so much—
aren’t I too old to rattle my heart like this?
Yet that snake’s even older, the clerk says
as I study her pet’s inveterate composure.
Someday I’ll learn
to stay so cool in the warmth of your regard,
if only I could flag you down without a sign
like the one on this cage: YES I AM REAL
YES I AM ALIVE.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Steven Pfau is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in creative writing at the University of Idaho and the managing editor of Fugue journal. He is working on a collection of essays on uncles, nephews, and queer tutelage.
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Ashley Steineger
Grief Poem while Hiking
I’ll call you long black snake swimming in the clear stream I’ll call you violent
mercy and god I’ll call you man with dog disappears
behind a rhododendron snapped twig under hiking boot
weight in chest monarchs flitting over campfire ashes
I’ll call you like I didn’t call you last week last month
one hundred ripping echoes into cave’s mouth cobwebs on bridge of nose
hushed path of tears I’ll call you poplar blossom ringed in orange
maze of ants through pine needles mountain laurel flushed with sunrise
bitter throat of guilt I’ll call you thrum of wood thrush screech of catbird
spotted fawn in the underbrush dandelions in field clearing
I’ll call you carpet of running cedars hum of love song
sun dimmed by tree canopy memory burning on dry tongue
I’ll call you deserted cove restless shadow of everything every
thing I’ll call you forgiven
Friend I’m calling you do you hear me is that you
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Ashley Steineger is a freelance writer and psychologist based in Raleigh, NC. She received her MFA from Queen’s University. Her poetry has appeared in Mohave Heart, Tiny Spoon, Silver Birch Press, The Mantle and Life in Ten Minutes. Ashley loves tattoos, hiking, and avoiding small talk.
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Danielle Pieratti
Mothers of Boys
Already a sepia photograph’s secretly acrid
with its unknowing.
Your body’s a dinghy-sized aperture
scouring the ocean floor, a migrant
that worries the sea.
A boy’s body’s a sailful of stars.
But the ocean’s an unfriendly
keep unmoved by your losing.
And his skin’s the color of moon.
And all snow’s the color of grieving.
And his fingers are plums whose flesh
you would bloom with your lips.
And his skin’s the color of dates.
We just blurry the glass
with our breathing. My hands:
what petty substitutes for scars.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Danielle Pieratti's first book, Fugitives (2016, Lost Horse Press), was selected by Kim Addonizio for the 2016 Idaho Prize and won the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for poetry. She is the author of two chapbooks: By the Dog Star, 2005 winner of the Edda Chapbook Competition for Women (Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press), and The Post, the Cage, the Palisade, published by Dancing Girl Press in 2015. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Boston Review, Words Without Borders, Mid-American Review, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut.
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Eric Steineger
Sylvia, Becoming
It’s February. Telephone wires ice.
The sound of a passing automobile
makes squirrels wince, if one could
see them. The leaves, if any remain,
blend with snow and sidewalk.
Too few feet on their way to flats
near Primrose Hill. Then coal. Then
attend to kids’ needs before your mind.
How do you cope? With pots of stew
from intolerable treks to the market?
No telephone either. Just letters and
the Muse who startles in the parlor
on Tuesday. While Frieda and Nicholas
sleep, Ted is wandering, being a poet.
Candlelight the worst time, that silence,
eye in the pallor of the kitchen
and for what? No one understands
the attempts, the memory of Him,
pernicious uniform and ok with it—
Other voices compete for attention.
To pretend nothing is wrong is a symptom
like keeping appearances or being
the woman of the house while the dishes
of the mind pile and never get rinsed.
You live here at 23 Fitzroy Road
in the former house of W.B. Yeats
in ’63 and there are rooms in need
of paint; the laundry must be done;
someone has the croup, too.
The city is coughing in the cold.
Everyone is coughing, Sylvia,
even the yew tree in its grey-green,
arms to the sky, a metaphor for
nothing, maybe, or maybe the body
learns to decide: health or illness
before the field tilts in a direction.
There will be a nurse; there will be
tape and there will be legions;
there will be solace someday,
many will keep a journal.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Eric Steineger is the Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review. His work has been featured in Waxwing, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle: The Poets Respond, Tinderbox and other journals. His chapbook, From a Lisbon Rooftop, explores themes from Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet and is available at Plan B Press. He lives in Asheville with his wife and daughter.
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Farnaz Fatemi
Artifacts
In every childhood photo she and I
are dressed like one another.
By accident, twenty-first century Icelanders
unearthed a settlement beneath their capital.
Fur-trimmed pantsuits, cherry jumpers,
floral pinafores. This is how I learned to see myself.
Their atlases were wrong. Where they thought
their ancestors lived was miles away.
One day the moon consumed my sister’s face
and I thought she’d left.
They’d never had reason to doubt
where the old turf walls and longhouse stood.
It took me years to see myself. I wondered about the tides
and where they came from, found people who might know.
An earlier century, previously empty, was now
populated, full of stories they’d need to learn.
Now a photo in a pile: she is on the floor,
We are wearing the cherries. I have climbed her body.
Add markers to their maps, stand in old places
with new words for what they know.
I stare into the cavern of my sister’s mouth and see her sadness,
the walls of our childhood homes, and the past answers.
I name what I see.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Farnaz Fatemi is a member and cofounder of The Hive Poetry Collective (hivepoetry.org) in Santa Cruz County, CA. Her poetry and prose appears in Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Grist Journal, several anthologies including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope and elsewhere. Farnaz taught Writing at UC Santa Cruz from 1997-2018. www.farnazfatemi.com.
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Scarlett Peterson
Every Garden a Munition Plant
Uncle Sam says garden to cut food costs,
grow vitamins at your kitchen door,
plant the seeds of victory, then comes
the violence, the shoot to kill, protect
your victory garden with a handheld spray-gun,
a call to action: join the women’s land army,
this, our feminine legion of soil and manure
bids you to do your bit on the food front,
to grow your own vegetables for victory,
then again we bleed into violence, write
our food is fighting, an infantry of pole beans,
tomatoes pulpy with want of blood.
Will you have a part in victory?
Let your fear of famine devour you,
supplement your rations with a victory garden!
Heed the warmonger’s call, Women! Farmers
can’t grow all your vegetables, dip your hands
in shit and soil, gardens love compost. Even you
can grow your own— The seeds of victory insure
the fruits of peace we never seem to reap.
Note: Italicized lines are pulled from various
sources of WWI and WWII propaganda.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Scarlett Peterson received her M.F.A. in poetry at Georgia College. She is currently working on her PhD at Georgia State University. She is editor in chief of Exhume Literary Magazine, a poetry reader for Five Points and a former assistant editor of poetry for Arts and Letters. Her poetry has appeared or is upcoming in Five2One, Pennsylvania English, Ink and Nebula, FRiGG, Moon City Review, Fire Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Peculiar, Pidgeonholes, Gargoyle Magazine and Ponder Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Madcap Review and Counterclock Journal.
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Sarah Elkins
Going Home
“…the Swedish tailgunner who,
After twenty missions in the Pacific, chopped off
His own left hand
To get back home. No one thinks of him.”
—Larry Levis, “Irish Music”
He knows it must be done
in one blow,
that a second won’t be possible.
A job for a butcher,
his cleaver.
Or perhaps an ax
choked up so the swinging hand
stays close to the blade.
He practices first
on the writhing body
of a fish, cleaving in one stroke
the skin, meat and fine bone
of a living thing, learning to aim
at a point that might move
against his will.
Then, a whole chicken
pirated from the galley,
its cold, plucked skin sliding
loose from the fascia
beneath his steadying hand.
Surely, a chicken halved
in a single strike,
all that bone—
real bone and sinew—
is drill enough.
Then, to the whetstone
where the sharpening rhythm
of steel thrashing stone
is an echo
of his canvas overcoat
against the bulkhead,
the sea against everything,
of his will against itself.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia where she works as a freelance writer and marketing consultant. Her poetry has appeared in Sanskrit Literary Arts Magazine, Northridge Review, Summer Stock Journal and Rust + Moth; critical analysis in Kestrel. Sarah is in her final semester in the MFA program at Pacific University.
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Katie Holtmeyer
Cadavers
there are some structures
that crack under the pressure
this town’s full of foundations
that made a suicide-pact
and the bones of their buildings
still haunt the alleys that swallowed them
broken beer bottles scattered among
the cigarette ashes
and receipts so worn
you can’t even read the buyer’s secrets
the paths that get you to the cemetery
the fastest are like ghost tours
of these abandoned properties
all you need are knives and knuckles
and the guts it takes
to fill the skeletons in your wake
________________________________________________________________________________________
Katie Holtmeyer is currently in graduate school at Truman State University. Her work has been published on Pocketfire's Kindling. Katie uses she/her pronouns and can be found on twitter at @HoltmeyerKatie.
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Robert Fanning
The Rose Peddler
Through empty daybreak alleys, on streets
steaming with last night's rain, you pedal
into another day of passing strangers, a blur
of empty glances at your roses’ muted horns.
Evenings you return home, your cart sagging
with unwanted flowers. The sky ash and cinder,
the hours falling darker in a world without want.
Later you’ll dream their faces pressed to windows
watching you ride by, your bundled heap of bouquets
a red wick dimming into the distance. Dream of one
who opens his mouth to sing: gone goes my beauty,
gone goes all. His words like singed petals falling.
Dream of ember and star, of chimney smoke
and shadow. Of silhouette, of billowing gauze.
Of moon and maw, the night a sweet-tinged, scarlet
bulb, wet stems loosely tied, of bows falling open.
Of one who swallows the thornsong of his want.
Of one who hushes the bloodloud wish.
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Robert Fanning (he/him/his) is the author of four-full length poetry collections: Severance (Salmon Poetry), Our Sudden Museum, (Salmon Poetry), American Prophet (Marick Press), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press) as well as two chapbooks, Sheet Music (Three Bee Press) and Old Bright Wheel (The Ledge Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, failbetter and many other journals. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, MI.
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Jean Theron
City from Above
We fly over a terrain so inscribed
it can be read through the night—
galaxies looping in tide pools,
winking nets stitched with bulbs,
cloverstacks stenting open knots
of neon arteries under a moon lost
and found stirring in fountains,
spied swimming and spitting milk
in the river, caught mimicking
the stars on a reservoir’s face,
a moon eclipsed by high beams
spelling out new roads, almost
like carving names—just enough
light to keep fear in its place.
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Jean Theron is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Rust + Moth, One and elsewhere.
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Heidi Seaborn
For my first marriage,
I borrowed my wedding dress from a friend—
white silk, lace bodice, back buttoned, slender.
She had carried a slender bouquet of calla lilies.
In another decade, I’ll have a garden
of calla lilies by the sea. I have untangled
the roots of my memories, laid them to dry
like pasta. Once I was poor and ate only pasta
that hung like socks from the windowsill.
Years later in Spain, the laundry flutters
in the garden, the dryer broken. Another
marriage broken. We gathered our clothing
off the clothesline then said goodbye
for good. After calla lilies bloom,
their long stalks reduce to slime that I wash off
the stone path with a scrub brush and bleach.
My sister once bleached her hair the shade of sun
setting. She wanted to be silky blonde, a girl
she imagined with long lean legs; stride lit
from within. Lit like a taper, wick charred.
I have learned to live with wildfires like smoke
of cigarettes from a time I tired of refusing.
Lit up at night after the children gone
to bed. The white cigarette traced my ennui
in every gesture. I have broken
all my fingers at one time or another.
Once I had a wedding ring cut off my finger.
I thought of leaving
for the evening at least, to a bar or club.
I could dance even now. At my first wedding,
I discovered the dress had a bustle for dancing.
At my last, caught in the train of my white silk
wedding dress, I stubbed my toe.
I had carried blush pink peonies flown in
at great expense. My only extravagance.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn
After Life, the Carnival Begins
Vous êtes seule? In this forgotten light,
I am radiant. Lips a breath apart, a glint of teeth.
Broaches of bones and whorled skulls.
Strains of the Dance Macabre and I lift
my skirt, extend my hand. A shadow.
Bats. The cavern wall flickers.
It is my birthday and I wear red.
Slit up the thigh. It is all wrong—the cut,
the dress—a hot house strawberry, plumped.
Someone has nodded off in the corner—
the lacunae before the catacombs splinter
into fingers holding those once loved, fucked.
A girl walks by in a puffy pink coat.
Come spring, I’ll pretend I never came here,
I’ll ride the Ferris wheel above cotton candy trees.
If you want to get off, raise your hand.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of [PANK] Book Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (2019) and the 2020 Comstock Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks. Recent work in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. www.heidiseabornpoet.com
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Caroline Riley
False Spring, or Brighton
with a line from Maurice Sendak via Stanley Plumly
I love the beach when it’s empty
and cold. Everyone remembers
their first pregnancy scare.
The ones after that blur together.
Grey, then yellow, then grey again.
The evening unbuttoning its pajamas.
Heartache, and lots of it—
a pebbly kind of sustenance.
That’s something you lose
when you get married.
I file my fingernails round
like my sister’s, my twin, who was
my first and most important teacher
of loneliness— its function, its breadth.
I loved not being dead when I was a kid.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Caroline Riley
Not Babies
I want to make something ugly,
something to outlast this armpit life.
So, babies are out of the question;
too cute, and all adorned by floral
names I’ve had picked out for years.
My not-babies are never boys,
no fire truck sheets not-lining their cribs,
no brutish not-puppies under the Christmas tree.
I love Christmas. It’s more ugly
than most people care to admit,
more leg-lamp in the window
than anything else. Ugly things
last: cast iron skillets, sturdy thermoses,
and shoes— the practical and pinchy kind
I was made to wear for Easter vigils,
stems stockingless, knees knocking cold.
Maybe my not-babies will live
in a beach-scene snow globe all year, not here
nor there: never fearing death,
only what not-death can do.
My maternal yearning might not-die with them, too.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Caroline Riley is a poet living in Morgantown, West Virginia. She is a current student in West Virginia University's MFA program and holds a BA from the University of Maryland. This is her first publication.
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Sarah Stickney
Sinkhole: Future
Vultures sitting on the shot tower
leer over the sinkhole’s plastic perimeter:
local abyss. Workers warm their hands
in the whoosh of flame they’ve set
in a steel drum as the trees
cut off the last oxygen to their leaves.
Oh, it’s better than freezing to death,
doesn’t hurt. The men sometimes attach
a great claw to the crane and lower it.
The sinkhole has no end
of appetite. Sometimes they tie on
a wrecking ball and let it swing.
The sinkhole knows about the future,
but won’t tell. Occasionally,
looking down at it, I want
to sleep naked for old time’s
sake–and time is the oldest—
remembering how slight
is this skin that can be stroked,
or soaped and wet by water,
before it thins and breaks.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Stickney's poems have appeared in journals such as Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Forklift Ohio, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rhino, Bateau, B O D Y and others. Her manuscript Portico was selected by Thomas Lux as 2016 winner of Emrys Press's annual chapbook competition. Stickney translates Italian poetry, and is the Dean of Deep Springs college.
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David Keplinger
Encirclement
There is nothing that is not itself,
that will always be itself no matter
what. But there is nothing
that is not self-portrait also.
The hawk dives
down, a mess of dancing
spilling over. It is also
an encirclement around the dead.
I was hurt by someone
I am trying to let go.
I am trying to learn how to deign.
To glide. From out of Aristotle
comes a word, it is hierax, comes
this axe that chops away at air.
It is the hawk.
With distance there is discernment.
It is in me: the wanting
to forgive.
________________________________________________________________________________________
David Keplinger is the author of seven poetry books, recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Rilke Prize. In June, 2020 he was selected for the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. In September 2020, his translations of Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen, Forty-One Objects, were longlisted for the National Translation Award. His collection, The World to Come, won the 2021 Minds on Fire Prize from Conduit Books and Ephemera and is forthcoming. His poems appear in Ploughshares, The New England Review, The New Republic, Copper Nickel, Plume and elsewhere.
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Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
The Exorcistic Pillage of My Ruined Body
My phantom brims in stillness, in it, a boneyard can fit in.
I mock these dry bones impersonating me
as clatters of rusty coins. At dusk,
I walk myself out of every husk that shelters me
from breaking into downpour—It's easier
saving the world from drought this way.
When my eyes become a bloated cloud & I
settle to glimpse the trance in panel-beating
a ruined country—my body into a garden
of Mimosa—something that shies away from the
tinge of redemption. On my body that has since become
a rescue ground, I found the seven scraps of varied skins
stacked in layers. Mother said each of them
represents how many times I've come
to pluck growing petals from her womb
as an extension of love/an assay of loss.
Which means I was a mere drifter—ogbanje
until Nwaanyi Iga forged my body into a map—
the artistry that left me at the mercy of blades.
I dwelled, eager to fulfill this ransom.
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Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan is an emerging writer from Ebonyi state, Nigeria. He’s a penultimate medical laboratory science student who explores medicine in the day and worships literature at night. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in several literary journals & magazines; both online and printed. He was the winner of 2018, FUNAI CREW Literary Contest, and The IS&T Pick of the month Prize. He can be reached out to on Facebook @Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, on Twitter @wordpottersull1.
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Tara A Elliott
The World
Ball-peen hammer heavy in my small hand;
lid of the washer shut like a closed mouth.
My chore: hit the knob of the broken Kenmore
with a hammerblow the moment it kicked to spin.
But there in front of me stood the world—
open and outspread, each country defined
in delicate pastel, outlined by thick black borders,
imprinted atop the folding metal table
for which my dad was proud to have paid
three dollars at a yard sale. It summoned
me that afternoon to find the names of places
I’d only heard on TV: Puerto Vallarta, Oahu, Seoul.
In the rusted corner, the compass rose—a small star
pointing out the arrangement of everything. And the click
went unheard as I explored landforms rising like breasts
I didn’t yet have, the Brooks Range nestled
into the neck of the Rockies, the cinching of the Sierra Madres,
the wicked hip of the Andes. Suds slopping out the washer,
whitewater puddling the hard cement floor and me so quick
with the hammer, that corner
so sharp, my wrist so soft as rust bit into flesh
and a dark river rose to stream down my forearm—
a flood of blood on Ayres Rock, Brisbane & Sydney, the Coral Sea
O mop, O bucket, O washer, O wrist,
O map-so-gloriously-unfolded, O aged-white line—
a constant reminder of how this world can scar.
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Tara A Elliott’s poems have appeared in TAOS Journal of International Poetry & Art, The American Journal of Poetry and Stirring, among others. She currently serves as the President of the non-profit Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA) in Maryland. For more information, visit www.taraaelliott.com
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Lauren Mallett
Porfa
I’ll have Emiliano Zapata. Handing me half a mango
in the bath. My sash of bullets draped over the chair next
to the door and I bite the fruit from its skin.
Nevermind su bigote and how its ends uncurl,
the caracoles of soap and I don’t even brush the juice
from my chin. Nevermind the matte Nochebuena
blooms outside the window. Would I mind and quit
at being soldadera? This bristly chasm between apropiada
and appropriated? Is that tree even a species?
Hoist one leg at a time out of the tub. Care not to slip
on the tile—sus bordes, no importa—you’re rushing
to the train. Your shirtdress is on backwards. Nevermind
the bath scene was first read to you by a man and you
went ahead and made yourself protagonista. You landed
on the poinsettias, the heft of the sash. Mija, wipe the mecos
running down your leg. He was a jewelry maker from Cuernavaca,
you missed your bus, and when you bought the new boleto
you too had to begin with the two words for please.
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Lauren Mallett’s (she/her/hers) poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Passages North, Fugue, RHINO and other journals. She lives on the occupied homelands of the Clatsop and Chinook tribes, also known as Oregon’s north coast. www.laurenmallett.com
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Richard Prins
Samson’s Blues
Slaying a thousand men with a sharp donkey
jaw is what I'd like to do, because she's leaving
and cleaving's meant the strongest part of me
was shorn, dustpanned, bagged. I can't chase
because I'm naked and God's a dandruff flake
my split ends shed. Believing meant chewing
on a hangnail then blowing it off my tongue
to prune the future's pain. One thing I need
is three hundred foxes, rusty dashes of panic
in our garden, with torches wagging on their
flicky tails, igniting the crooked rhododendrons
we planted there. I don't want no torch to gouge
my eye sockets, make me fire-blind, begging God:
Pour your best hooch on my wounds, let me sleep
three thousand years. My bones leap off the couch.
The rest of me, glutinous with sweat, sucks leather.
God, you gave me too much honey and muscle.
If I had my way, I wouldn't tear nothing down.
I'd go to the park, watch ducks squabble for any grain
the old ladies toss. Soon it rains; a strangeness looms.
The grannies don't notice, for trees are their shields,
and the ducks stay put because they're still peckish.
God, please remember me. Let me see your rain
sketching circles in the water. The ripples dilate,
unraveling your design, until they collide
and pierce each other. Formless with urge,
they vanish like solutions I can't decipher:
Rafts of bread, buoyant as your embrace.
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Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker. Publications include Gulf Coast, jubilat, Ploughshares, and "Notable" mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Arrests include criminal trespass (Trump Tower), disorderly conduct (Trump International Hotel), resisting arrest (Republican National Convention) and incommoding the halls of Congress (United States Senate).
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Sam Sobel
wheels and the Difference
I seem to fall
head over heels
enamored in grocery
stores; squeaky carts
seem to be attracted
to me and I love loose
wheels. They make me slow down,
and make strangers listen.
We lock eyes and I’m left
alone with my thoughts
and theirs and there’s
something so intimate
about the whole exchange.
Maybe because grocery aisles
feel a lot like language:
just an act of
differencing.
Without words, beef and lamb
and chicken are just sounds
dropped in ice cubes
melting, reaching
for our ears
because science says
water should evaporate
and grocery stores
are just workshops
in reaching.
Mothers reaching for
unboiled russets.
Babies reaching for
things they haven’t said.
Me, reaching out,
to you:
carrying this piece
on creaky-loose wheels.
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Sam Sobel is an undergraduate student at Rutgers University, New Brunswick whose work has been featured in a
couple of places there (The Anthologist, Writers House Review). Most recently, he had a poem published over at Wild Greens Magazine in their February edition. Sam loves all aspects of language ranging from literature to
sociolinguistics, and he hopes to pursue an MFA in poetry. His favorite word at the moment is lacuna which means
"a hiatus, gap, or missing portion."
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Joshua Young
Art
Joshua Young “602-2”
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Joshua Young is a writer and multidisciplinary artist living in Everett, Washington. He is the author of the novella, Little Galaxies (forthcoming 2021, Variant/Lines and Blood), and six other collections. Find him online at joshuabrianyoung.com.