Gathering amongst my body (camping out in a sense) are images that’ll remain until my flesh, bones, and blues become the compost within the garden of my children’s children.
Steadily able, probably more-than at this moment, daydreaming of the promised life of rejoicing and praising and singing, all while imagining the growth of my children’s children and their garden.
GRAVITATING TOWARD THE MELANCHOLY FONDNESS I ONCE SHARED WITH A STRANGER NAMED GILDA
I got lost. Somewhere between the yippies! and the trees I was awakened to the scent of an hours old cigarette. There, within the night dives, I tried to peek at the fortune of her shimmer. Gilda smiled like I always knew she could. I am found.
THE LAST DRAG FROM 12/18/1978
permeates and bathes the night lungs in a warmth you haven’t felt in what some think of as decades; but you call them years. The momentary respite is long enough to think it’ll keep on and on and on. Your eyes open to nothing but snow; just a man in the cold, waiting for life.
BIO
J. A. Lane is a writer whose short stories, plays, and poems focus on exploring moments in time that often examine the depths of the human condition. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
They make up stories for each other like children, drinking tea and leaning together over the couch. Their laughter crackles through the rooms. Heat fills the midnight windows while each tale bounces and glows. Even the electrical storm beginning outside cannot shock them apart.
ESCAPE
It’s hazardous outside. I’m double locking the door to protect you. I’m your mother and I want to keep you safe. You’re escaping? They’ll eat you alive. Don’t you know they all have knives, guns? They stick up banks and pawn shops. Supermarkets, too. Watch yourself.
Why are you running away? You never had much common sense, never return books on time to the library Do you think you can just leave? Your father and I are so concerned. You can’t just live on the sidewalk or under the trees in the park. You’d be reckless enough to eat a pigeon.
IN THE DEPTHS
In memory of Zach Harris
My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday in the highlands of West Virginia. He dreamed of the Milky Way, that walkway of stars. Biscuits and gravy for breakfast, then work. That afternoon, he fell into a lost mine, cavern of nightmares, stepping on the paper-thin edge of sky. Accident in the coal fields, the news reports announced.
Every song about the coal mines is a dark ballad, a room without windows. The mines take and don’t return. So many think they are secure from the depths of earth. My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday, expecting his days to be the same, counting on it in ways he couldn’t, dreams reaching upward, away from the deep that killed him.
BIO
Elizabeth Morse values the quirky, the darkly humorous. She is hard-wired to be a night-owl and writes exclusively after 9 PM. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as Ginosko, Survision, and Kestrel. Her poetry chapbook, “The Color Between the Hours,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in late 2023. She was a finalist in the Blue Light Press full-length poetry collection contest and has her MFA from Brooklyn College. A job in information technology supports her writing.
the white slick of January cold enough for unseen flames
heats the blistering cold, leaping across space like Jack Frost
etching my window silent scratches, making light years
string time — broken chrysalis and webbed wonder
a caravan of long-lashed camels searching for warmth like finding water
in the blazing desert thread the days with a meager
wisp of transformation smell the sweat of winter’s chill
sizeable piles of relaxing snow let old man winter die a dawdling death
Partial Eclipse
Grey-brown creeps over the horizon on its way to sundown, shading the bridges,
ridges of trees and hills and buildings as it gathers the troops of night
for a full-scale assault on the lightness of midday, offering another brand of illumination
that supplies shadow by the bucketful, adds nuances to all the silhouettes
not seen in the brightness and chases the clarity of day away. “I surrender.” I say
in my most mysterious voice. Like a lover, shadows oblige my request embracing daylight and me with it.
We are the penumbra cocooned in the gathered gloaming.
BIO
Annette Gagliardi looks at the dimly, tinted shadows and morphed illusions that becomes life and finds illumination. She sees what others do not and grasps the fruit hiding there, then squeezes all the juice that life has to offer and serves it up as poetry – or jelly, depending on the day. Her work has appeared in many literary journals in Canada, England and the USA. Gagliardi’s first poetry collection, titled: A Short Supply of Viability, and her first historical fiction, titled: Ponderosa Pines: Days of the Deadwood Forest Fire were both published in 2022. Visit her author website at: https://annette-gagliardi.com
You’ve been called in to construct a language. You should feel flattered, perhaps honored, that they chose you despite your amateurism. What worries you is theirs: vital texts are missing from shelves and computer. Meals are slow and cold. The girl assigned to help you is eager when there, but never there. You wonder if she loathes you. With the instincts imparted by age and marginality, you wonder if you were selected simply to get language and/or you out of the way. But that’s upsetting; you immerse yourself in the advantages and disadvantages of agglutinative, fusional … Zamenhof was eurocentric; you want to bring in that Japanese noun for the sound of a pencil rolling across a table, a Warrumungu expression for thirst that brought you to tears, once … What’s worst is they never told you whether they want something ideal or pragmatic, mere trade-talk. Given your nature and the effects of solitude you tend towards the ideal: that harmony Leibniz convinced himself the West would achieve by imitating Mandarin. Your notebooks fill with ideograms, vast melded radiating concepts. All seem based on reddened eyes, a haunted spotted hand.
Plein Air
Raying along the short blocks beneath the usual big cloud (like the belly, I think, of a boar), the westering light creates a Wagner-effect that is almost too much. The rubble-slides twinkle from glass; I’ll omit most of that and the rays, but retain, inevitably, the upended, somehow embarrassed vehicles, the crater ponds.
Some trace in the air affects my oils, but this adds an aleatoric kick. And I’m never quite sure what I’m seeing through the mask. At Times Square, all paper posters are torn (they’ve been done), but the looming Black Squares that used to throb with ads lend a focus, can be made to have poignance, as if longing for an image, any image.
Eye of the Denier
The years, high double digit, are a weight, a block – what can you do with that? But the days were many; it’s easy enough to multiply, and then you have such a wealth! You could even obtain a blank set of calendars, from an environmental NGO, spread them over a floor and discover the animals mysteriously linked to your months, some gone now.
And from the little empty squares, like a mole peering out, a bird who nests in earth, a mouse among rocks or a small or large cat, the true protagonist of those days would emerge – you could peer down at him making love and money, successfully striking foes and poses, disdainful of your gaze and the flat white world.
The Harbor Cruise
Half a kilometer past the marina, the boat turns east, and as it parallels the shore, the lights that gild the walls of hotels, casinos, seafront mansions, and those of looming inland office buildings go on more or less at once. Overwhelming tourists aboard with magic: the calm sea calmer, air cooler with dusk, the boat turning, the lights – all for them! While older locals, here to rekindle whatever, applaud a successful expensive effect. The captain, alert to his radar, avoids yachts entering and leaving, heedlessly, the harbor, a cruise ship’s wake. Young guests, mostly rich and native, perceive the lights as a signal for something, though unsure what it is besides drinking.
And as all crowd the bar and table, the distinction between those wearing tuxedos and those in shorts and T-shirts increasingly galls the old, diverts the young who notice. Holding glasses and plates, the groups separate, tourists distinct in each; but in the romantic darkness all are merely shapes, with the lights of the city reaching for them across the water. Seeing bits of the young, the nicer old attempt to forgive their laughter. Seeing them, the young at most recall superiors to get around. Some figures, outfits, and the sea are noted. One of the old remembers lighting a cigarette in darkness; thinks, If I could do that now I would be real.
BIO
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, September 2023). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review,Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com
The ground breeds trees with an itch for air beneath our armor of atmosphere. The sea’s restless swaying so seldom visits land it thinks land’s a beast, a fish so large its scales are windows where my pocket square reflects, flowers on weapons, born to tame, upholding the best of all tides. The soaring thunderheads of smell eclipse rain, snow pebbles, and crunching road under turning tire. We proposed an opera here and built if for the deaf to know the depth of music, to spike frozen notes into rocky ground, to freshen spring of our next year.
NO ONE BOTHERS ME
No one bothers me. I’m not accountable to anyone. I’m forgotten and happy, not centuries dead but alive, today! I pass unnoticed, driving next to you. I stand on your sidewalk admiring your walnut tree, cataloging the pleasures I never miss while enjoying them. I’m nobody’s somebody, loafing in each day’s summer parts, in a coat with binoculars, on an ocean voyage, with wings. I’m unproductive, never make things, march with bands, hurl morning papers, read in a park, everybody’s nobody.
WHEN I TRIED TO SLEEP
When I tried to sleep, I slept for a year. When I tried indolence, I withered to sticks, anxious that I could never return to rigor, knowing my notion of work made me a loafer. I disappeared, no forehead, hands, stomach, or nose, no seat for chairs, elbows for desks, feet for floors. I just clawed the air in silence around you. I am your breeze, bird at your window, your morning temblor.
THAT BERG OF AIR
That berg of air out the train window flies south with all my cares. It’s crosswind you don’t hear until you’re in the next lane. Relinquishment, then a forgotten verb. Choose one. Remembers. Reminds. Reprieves. Restores. R is for red. Roar past emotions like shredded paper that doesn’t cling. No wake wallowing. Wait a few days and you’ll have forgotten.
BIO
Lawrence Bridges’ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). You can find him on IG: @larrybridges
the razor chokes on spider-leg hair, roils cold water, and coughs again, to erase bit by bit her body thicket.
her thighs crack like moth wings cornered and dry for the dustpan (weeping).
Hat Trick
The climbing gym’s closed so we watch the Chicago Bears draft a defensive back from Washington. We pick a scab on our chin clean off. We don’t get sad this time when the frat boys talk about the girl’s deadlifting ass and can still enjoy the same sunshine. What else do we do? We don’t reply to Nana’s text: “I want you to be in heaven with me. Please respond.” She would love to see us come home with one of these hairless men strutting to the door in greasy gym shorts who headline their Instagram profiles with 1# God 2# Family 3# Football. She would clap her hands together and weep, the perv. We stretch out one leg. We forget to stretch the other. We watch the Dolphins pick next. We wonder what to do with Freedom and freedom, if we can get away without seeing another snow and ski on banana leaves until the knees give in then mercury tremors finish us. Papa made lots of money calculating bullet trajectories and cut off his gay son. We don’t know the gay son’s name but we know he rides motorcycles. We love our grandparents, their bone spurs, cancers, and other Freedoms. Nana taught us how to glue anything to anything else and this is our most precious talent. Papa taught us how to wrestle for our life. We pull love out for them like hares from a magic hat. Jeff Goldblum tries to get us to bet on our favorite sports team in an app. The gym closes early on Friday because there are better things to do, like following the trail of frat boys to their drinking games posted in dirt backyards, then waking up in time for church on Sunday.
We will always betray ourselves
moving as fast as we do through embracing arms we go so fast with a force so loud we must wonder if we heard a snap we must wonder if we could have finally been held
Madrigal (as a type of bird)
i am a teenager and wish i could be smart enough to draw as poorly as them the ones with a place threaded through their fingerbones i made my hills rounder than they come because childhood is learning how not to see. i only know how to draw the birds with hands pieced together from graves it’s so dead this me now the bird on its head a deliberate accident but creating is throwing a piece of broccoli over family thanksgiving into the fat laughing mouths of people who set house alarms like violence. creation opposes birds on their feet but the wings disturb God the tears from nana’s eyes
BIO
Charlotte Suttee’s poetry is published in a handful of Colorado magazines and her experimental speculative fiction novel “Weather and Beasts and Growing Things” is available through Lethe Press. She howls, cooks, and explores with her husband in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Something finally showed up after a too long of time, knocking at the door to my mind, a thought, patiently waiting for me to open it up before disappearing, lost and forgotten, like the many before it, but once again, not quick enough.
WAOFTMM
(WHISKEY ALPHA ZERO FOX TROT MIKE MIKE)
We do not talk any more. I do not understand his language. Dots and dashes, dashes and dots. I have no antenna or radio to receive his messages. He speaks in Morse code. He may as well speak the language of the apes.
BIO
Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, NE. He has had poems published in Fine Lines, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of ‘On the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk,’ ‘The Blood Drives: One Pint Down,’ and ‘Conquer the Mountains.’
All flows together, even if so painfully slow. The baptized & the doves tweet in bursts, Johnny got the back of his neck Brazilian waxed, but he ain’t gonna spoil none for Leif & Chris, & I talk too much, so we’re just being cute & innocent ab it.
Then Josh comes by, like “Hey, wanna see a trick?” So he makes Jordan run with Bud Light & turns pebbles into chips. The air went putrid, the poisoned tilapia floating about, but it was then that me & the Messiah turned friends for life & I felt a glowing ribbon emerging from my hair whorl.
1 night, Josh tells me to split myself in 2 to go both beyond the pillars of Hercules & north of Danube. “What the heck man? What is there for me to do? I’m too old to be a rapper, too young to be a millennial!” But before I replied he was already making out with Jude.
When they took him down, I left the town, once sweet like the wine of quarter-term night, now gross like the pukes the morning after. So under this onion-cutting sky of steel it’s just me & a homez of mine, & half of a cig we’ll pass till it gets so short it burns our fingers & just drops on the stony road. Your story ends here. Ours didn’t.
homeric Oregano
FNAP! it’s summertime, it’s Oregano time. purple flowers, torches in the daylight, spades of green, leaves with peach hair. i came to talk, perennial son of the basin. between us the roaring vacuum of time,
the abyss of white peering from between letters, the silence between nondescript syllables. NOOOOOOO! the brightness of the mountain is the sole common waypoint. we will never be lovelier
than we are now. get it offa me! Time! i can’t stand it, i can accept only not too hot summers before i’m old again. YEAH opposite leaves follow the burning, cracking into murmurs i struggle to transcribe into
straw circles. faces carry what’s lost. LE’S GOOO! Yin — there is the heat of Love, irresistible. Yang — the cold lemonade gulped from below, running down soft stones. the beverage is a matchmaker, our bumblebee.
eyes locked, we swerve. though it’s a thing of the past, gone Soon after constant laws like the ice cubes melting, watering down the ambrosia. taste the pain! bless the inflorescence, late but still! cheer before the Ulp!
Baby Car
One newborn car tried to carry me into the air in its bout, for a glimpse at grander perspective, for a fleeting touch of Death, for a cliffhanger, for a moment of uncertainty.
James is gonna save them. I murmured in the dark, teetering on the twin sharp points of solitary orchid scissors. This means they’re frozen until the next episode, screaming in the corner, but safe.
Cats are born blind & deaf, but into mother’s warmth. Cars are born complete, but cast alone into cold superposition dormant volant meant to viciously race each other since infancy.
This driver was mad his brand new ride got scratched. I tried my best not to yell. It was a baby car after all.
Frank O’Hara Eyes on My Wings
I recognized a lamp, started flap after flap, charcoal trace from the trunk to the nose, a thread of a rod to the fresco, like the settling ashes — still warm & nameless. Half-words come thru giggles, a great psalm in this space of interruptions.
I let it drip, the teary sand in some hourglass, even if time & time again I mourn the years gone where what’s real history is a mystery & all the truth drowned the moment a moment is no longer now. Just like this one.
Me? I’m no witness, just a passerby. Don’t you worry, paddle on to the lake’s apple, where the moon likes to swing doubled, where the sand regroups & lovers’ sweet words soften further into the abyss, under the algae powerhouses regime.
Up & down, here I go, no note taken, just a postcard to be eased between unread pages, erroneous navigation due to no fault of mine, a little out-of-character irony to smile at — once by the light.
Hell Parade at Szczeliniec
Backpacks against chests, sponges of sweat, jammed between dried seas. A weekend
trip down the walls that speak but can’t hear. Made in their shape, for our times,
ever so slowly, down that throat, where tomfoolery is mass murder, we tiptoe.
BIO
Michał Zieliński lives in Poland’s Lower Silesia. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Metaworker, Wayward & Upward anthology, The River, and elsewhere.
She tries to forget the discussion of human suffering, the side effect to tongue or to the heart, which can burn too. She listens to NPR to remember her stance (liberal) and the world (screwed).
A sudden orchard comes and goes, its steely branches, barb-wired in winter sun. Months back, the doctors gaped in their white coats as if they’ve heard the wrong joke. The diagnosis is preposterous.
She tries to think of better times, but what are those? The children’s tiny coats and boots, a crazy night in Troy, NY? What do you go back to when you are afraid of dying?
She thinks of all her misplaced conviction, like how she bothers to correct people who use who instead of whom. And now, for God’s sake, a flock of wild turkeys make her lurch.
A dozen or so of them, their red and brown paisley, stocky bodies awkward as suitcases, their branch-thin legs strut their reaching, stiff-necked gait across the road.
Two dozen eyes glare at her with a so what? No pity there, just their tweaking bodies, moving like old comedians in silent movies.
PEONIES AND WINGS
I did not know these were peonies, these heavy-headed, tight, thick blossoms
layers dozens of pink petals, blooming right now on the side of the house.
I have seen them painted in a still-life by Manet, a postcard I thumbtacked to a wall,
two white peonies, lying on a wooden table, picked, doomed, extraordinarily open.
More than once, I have asked myself, how can you not recognize the world?
When I was a child, an aunt and I walked in those same New Hampshire woods.
She bent at nearly every plant and said aloud, skunk cabbage, cinnamon fern, trillium,
virgin bowercreeper, boneset, bunchberry. She called them rough-fruited or common, tall, wild, almost extinct.
It was like a dream language, those words like the shadows of clouds on a moonlit lake.
I dreaded the flash of a fish at the end of a line, silver-belly glint, fanned fins, a parent’s question
What kind of fish is it? Did I make a deal, a decision not to know, or did I think
in time I would come to simply know the way we do with love and loss?
I am leaving sooner than I thought, Though whoever thinks of leaving
once they have arrived, wet and bodied? Today I see a dusty-feather bird, a bit of blue color.
It flies, tight-winged, from my black fence to the sky, then stays on the pitch of the barn.
Its distinct call must be recognizable, but I don’t recognize it, even in the shadows,
where our senses deepen like small tribes, waiting to ambush the unknown.
BIO
Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. Her work has been published in such journals as Bellevue Literary Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, and others. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and originally published in the Tipton Review. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.
Tell me about tomorrow or the next. How it reaches into your belly, reminds us we are going extinct. I try to caulk over gaps and the heat, too hot actually. Try to adjust to sickness or death. Not me yet but of course it could be. Those others die without any visual knowledge of me knowing them. The heat is oppressive and the weather dry like a toad’s back.
The wives’ tale about not rubbing it’s back is still a memory. What else can reach as far down as sad moments allow? My hand warts up as a reminder that I once believed. I smother the lump with clear fingernail polish, a treatment handed down from generations, as if heat, and the unbreathing skin will choke all viruses, cure that which rocks out of kilter.
I Almost Sent You This Postcard
Have you seen a sting-ray skeleton? The bones fan out like a geisha’s accoutrement, cooling her painted skin, but here, it moves through film of liquid atmosphere.
The skeleton splays out, too beautiful to sting, but that is the deception of beauty, isn’t it? The bruise after the violent, full-lipped kiss.
The Visit
I’m visiting the sister with such bad luck: bad husband, bad job, kids that were not easy.
Slender and neat, she chatters about San Diego, her daughter, granddaughter, the granddaughter’s husband, how large cities are difficult. Asks questions but the space for answering grows shorter and shorter.
I’m visiting my sister, the beauty queen whom photographers begged for a pose for their portfolios, the sister who convinced me I was privileged to polish her shoes when I was 10.
The sister who had her younger sister screen the men at the door, to see if she was available.
Still, she is lovely, even now, even when she has given up hennaing her hair, gone to a softer pale red, or maybe not, maybe giving up the tremendous work of it, letting those thick natural curls go entirely to what they want to be.
I’m visiting and I’m giving her advice between the breaths that are mistaken for short pauses: Try riding the bus to get to know the city; see if the library has part-time work.
Me, the kid, who begged to try on her crinoline skirts, suggesting a plan of action and thinking of all those boys turned away.
Fall, Falling
If I knew it was the right time, I would find fall beckoning, the bark course against my hand stroke. I watch time ticking in circles. I mind the waiting for the coming season.
Knots tick past me. I am a currach, moored in an inlet, watching. Write, please write. Crows fall from the sky. I know it’s food they are after, my stomach knots.
Names hang onto sharp, thorned roses. Even still, the boat, my mind, drifts up and down with each leave- taking, the bed between us a crumpled leaf. I can’t make it right. From shore, you wave.
I think it’s goodbye. Roses dry in the vase you gave me, dry strokes against my hand. It is too late to face the fall. I hear the crows caw from my bed.
I cannot rise. Under the nightstand a damselfly is dying.
BIO
Cynthia Pratt is one of the founding members of the Olympia Poetry Network’s board which has been in existence for over 30 years. Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Bellingham Review, Quill & Parchment, Feminist Theology Poetry, The Raven’s Perch and other publications, and in the anthologies, Tattoos on Cedar (2006), Godiva Speaks (2011), two anthologies by the Fusion Collective, Dancing on the Edges (2017) and Garden of the Covid Museum (2021), Hidden in Childhood anthology and the anthology by Washington Humanities and Empty Bowl Press, I Sing the Salmon Home (2023). Her manuscript, Celestial Drift¸ was published in 2017. She is a former Fish and Wildlife biologist having graduated from Humboldt State University in Science and The Evergreen State University in the Master’s of Environmental Studies program. She was a former Lacey Councilmember and the Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey for the last 12 years, with her term ending in December 2021. She is the first Poet Laureate of Lacey as of 2022.
I have a feeling that each of us lives in their favorite scene the backdrop the default setting of our lives Me, I sit at an arched window my first night in the magic I look over the moon-pathed lake (who cares if it’s spotlight over backyard pool) I stroke snowy owl beside me who is actually Albee our cat and I’m home your son (but mine too) and his girlfriend upstairs your mom (my bestie) watching late Red Sox from Oracle Park, across the breezeway your sister and her husband in barn renovated against all ill winds and you who moves through every picture every scene opening all the doors password “Kiss me good night” I just did they’re all my house-mates but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow you teach me flight.
until finally
I don’t know where the manna comes from I don’t know how the quail appear I thought it was just a story but here here here they are every morning every day I should have starved by now throat closed like a cockroach prayer but the water is as sweet and everywhere as air fresh air the freshest air and the eagles came for frodo and harry woke up in the arms of giant and I, I shall not want. Oh Hero of the Realm! Lumos yourself like sunflower at night prayer, shema shema shema until ears unpop depressurize, wrestle yourself through the dark gate that opens enfin on today’s dunkies with cream that you sip beside the tree-lily yellow pink and real as lore repeating itself until we get it right
BIO
Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, is an educator, poet, writer, shaman, sage, and Gryffindor. An adoptee and former Franciscan seminarian, his adoption search led to the discovery and embrace of his Jewishness. Wayne-Daniel is a Peace Chaplain, an interfaith clergy person and former college chaplain. He is the author of 12 published books, including Little Ghosts on Castle Floors, Poems Informed by the Potterverse (Kelsay Books 2022). He lives in Mansfield, MA, with his wife, The Lovely Christine and their cats, Harry and Albus.
Old English sang, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch zang and German Sang. Male hedonistic pleasures are summarized as wine, women, and song.
Speaking of pleasures, in my time I’ve heard many a siren song. I’ll write a song and dance ghazal next, but in this one I have to say “a dance and a song.”
I can’t think of anything I’ve bought or sold for a song. Rolling Stone Magazine ranks Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” the #1 song.
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is ranked the #1 pop song. W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blue” is the greatest blues song.
“Hoochie Coochie Man” by Muddy Waters is the greatest blues song. B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” is the greatest blues song.
“I’d Rather Go Blind” by Etta James is the greatest blues song. Howlin Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” is the greatest blues song.
So, Solonche, you do know that you need one more song? Yes, I do know I need one more song, so here is my swan song.
DANCE
Middle English: from Old French dancer (verb), dance (noun), of unknown origin. Terpsichore (the most beautiful of the nine) is the Greek muse of dance.
As I promised, now I can quote the correct idiom of a song and a dance. I never went to my high school prom because I didn’t know how to dance.
One of the biggest hit songs (The Bee Gees) is “You Should Be Dancing.” The debut (2008) single (Grammy nominated 2009) by Lady Gaga was “Just Dance.”
The samba of Brazil is the world’s most popular folk dance. Baladi is a form of Egyptian belly dance, a truly hypnotic dance.
The hora is a popular Israeli circle dance. Popular in South Africa is the gumboot (they wear Wellingtons) dance.
Clogging is the official Kentucky and North Carolina state dance. Minnesota is the only state that has no official state dance.
So, Solonche, will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? Oh, someday, one day, maybe Sunday, I may, I mean, I might join the dance.
HOLY
Old English hālig, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch and German heilig. William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well: “Love is holy.”
In the first season (1966) of Batman, Robin said 356 phrases with holy. The room in a synagogue where only the rabbi may enter is the holy of holies.
The exclamation used by Captain Marvel to mean Wow! is Holy Moley! The trademark expression of Yankee broadcaster Phil Rizzuto (1917-2007) was Holy cow!
In the New Testament, “set apart” is the definition of holiness. In the Old Testament, connection to God’s perfection was holiness.
Sapta (seven) Puri (town) are the seven cities in India considered the most holy. In Buddhism, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha attained Enlightenment) is the holiest.
In the Shinto religion of Japan, The Grand Shrine of Ise is considered the most holy. Of the sacred sites for Muslims, The Ka’ba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is the most holy.
So, Solonche, you atheist, what, if anything, do you consider holy? Like the other atheist above said, “Love is holy.”
BIO
Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Orange, J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 500 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s, including The New Criterion, TheNew York Times, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Progressive, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, The Literary Review, The Sun, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Poetry East, The Hampden-SydneyPoetry Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Free Verse. His poems have been read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and other radio shows and have been translated into Portuguese, Italian, German, and Korean. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions , 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book), Enjoy Yourself (Serving House Books), Piano Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Serving House Books), For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (Word Tech Communications), Years Later (Adelaide Books), The Dust (Dos Madres Press), Selected Poems 2002-2021 (nominated for the National Book Award by Serving House Books), Life-Size (Kelsay Books), The Five Notebooks of ZhaoLi (Adelaide Books), Coming To (Word Tech Communications/David Robert Books), The Lost Notebook of Zhao Li (Dos Madres Press, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Around Here (Kelsay Books), It’s About Time (Deerbrook Editions), The Book of a Small Fisherman (Shanti Arts Publishing), Leda (Dos Madres Press), The Dreams ofthe Gods (Kelsay Books), Alone (David Robert Books), The Eglantine (Shanti Arts Publishing), and coauthor with his wife Joan I. Siegel of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.
No safe place to land—only distractions from the inevitable Everything most sacred thrown to the fire I was careless, selfish I failed Ignorance was bliss That belief that I was invincible I was wrong but I felt so safe So impenetrable Now just vulnerable Unheard Undervalued It doesn’t matter But she does We are reclaiming the forgotten We are writing ourselves into our own history We are bodies with bodies performing Disorientation of loss Once we go into Mourning We never come out We are never ready for death Even when it’s a relief Our art Our craft Our life’s blood and beat Destabilizing Exploring Return to the mundane Return to tradition The massage of the message Literary Speak Reframe pains, betrayals Transformation
the pebble
it started with a pebble she took it as a favor no problem on her shoulders she just wanted to offer help and others learned she was willing to shoulder a pebble word spread quickly they formed lines requesting she take another pebble pebbles became rocks then a little bigger then boulders requests became statements demands then people just silently dumped their burdens she knew this was on her no complaints allowed the baggage had piled up so gradually she expected nothing to change
Waiting
Full speed ahead. Always. Do something productive. Don’t just spin wheels. Make progress forward. We were ready to go. We had been ready for months. Finally ready to tell those closest to us. Tight lipped, but selecting our important people to know. Then they told everyone. Everyone we know was the way they explained it. And we had to take it back. Stop mid race. Undo. Stop planning. Cancel orders. Call everyone. We know to announce the feet. It’s empty. It’s isolating. It’s no longer. Must remember, it’s no tragedy. The baby didn’t die. Nothing bad happened to the mother. She just made a different choice. A choice that no longer includes us. “Don’t worry, Mommy,” my six-year-old says. There are lots of babies. There’s a birth mommy who will need us someone will pick us.”
BIO
CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit. She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, as well as flash and poetry pieces in several literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Magical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.
The rain here splashes air into nothing— Maggie said this to me once, that maybe when we die there is a nothing like the black nothing before we were born. A tiny egg of time in a vast and tiding black ocean.
A glance out of the window tonight leaves everything this dark: black as black darkness in the bottom cave, the quilted black, bobbing in the endless seas between galaxies. The black when we close our eyes in front of a casket.
She said her father died, and now he was nowhere, and not being that close to death it struck me as kind of odd. My grandfather died before I was born, and I see this black in my father— stares across the Christmas dinner table to an empty seat, conversing over bills with the air by the fireplace. The time he packed me in the car on a moist August day and cried at the gravestone, in front of his restless son.
She asked me, How do we exist in this black? I think we bury our dead alive.
Divorce, September 4, 1985
Two cantaloupes lay outside, tipped up on the patio between the deck and lawn. A giant crescent cut out of the larger one exposes the rich orange of melon and as I walk closer to the bay window, ants scurry along the lacerated fruit like chocolate sprinkles on ice cream. One ant is alone, confused. He is running around the melon like an equator. He hasn’t learned he cannot burrow under the thick corded shell, that this is what it’s for— so the ant zips away without a snip of melon, just the cordage of the melon-skin rasp on his legs. I swing around to the woman on the stairs— sleek hair and shoes shrugged off, looking plainly to the wall behind me, over my shoulder like a suspension bridge. As I leave out the front door, I am no better than the smallest ant engaging for the first time, a pulpy mass who hides its fruit like a rind.
Planting Trees on an Easel
Touch the rough cord of the canvas. Run fingertips across it like you would a lover’s chin: from corner to corner, a hand tickles doughy flesh.
The palette is freckled with fat splotches to rinse the surface with sable hair, or knife. Berries thick—black, red hybrids squinched off oil branches drying like blood on concrete.
Watch as a tree’s roots web inside the soil of canvas. When there are too many trees, build a cabin of wood. If a cold lake gleams a motionless, porcelain dish— the ripples of water over a jetty of rocks. Place a foot in the happy grass, comb your toes through the scalp of grain.
When I walk to class, after mornings of planting trees on an easel, the grind and mash of gravel beneath my feet, I sometimes think of anti-matter, inter-stellar clouds, life coming down from a hasp of space, rinses a fallow field, lichen spreads like the green oxidation of copper. The lifeblood lines along the throat— Much like a carefree stroke of brush, a sifting of paint on the canvas.
BIO
James Iovino was educated at St. Andrews and Oxford and has master’s degrees in medieval history, international relations, and theology. He enjoys training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, traditional American and Japanese tattoo art, horology, and cutlery. His poetry has appeared in the Mankato Poetry Review. Originally from Long Island, New York, and still in possession of a considerable accent, he lives with his wife and six kids in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
Incandescent crimson tips of dawn-sauntering icebergs make drift afar in the foreseeing eye of the airborne creature shards of soothingness. Sublime swans take flight in song.
O sea-dunes, with your fading grandeur, godly bearers of tightened moisture, ancient store of ephemeral flakes, flotillas of our shame, echoes of a sleepwalk towards a mutual grave, stir spirits in our disparate souls, prod the snoring, sorry beast wallowing in its own dirt to awake, arise, emerge!
At Beach
… sighing, sated, the sea’s foam-rimmed drape slips down, revealing dark lugworm adventure in squirming pores on flushing sand panting with life’s echoes and ancient trinkets scattered overspread with sadness after flight’s rapture, till the mind finds clear fresh air; calm, still, eerie, eerie, till
lifting muscular curl, stretch upward thrust, gathering protean brawn-heave, mustering dense shard-army of proud and godly might raised, rising colossal strain to euphoric renovation swell of ephemeral hope peak. Then, it curves, stoops, the fine line of its own ecstatic masochistic blade tumbles in sorrow-furrow with bang of phoenix water-fire shatter, slashes, bites skinless self, exploding suicidal gargling laughter, as words-bones-shells-stones grind in throat-thunder glee; sea-veins slit open and burst forth salty froth flow; splash, climactic spittle, shower suds wink and, hiss; silk slides back tired down slope; while burrowing squiggles grope, to meaning in dark hope, ground-bound through smooth, naked sand- hide stripped again of sky-shimmer, in sand blush; littered with sea-debris at peace easy easy till …
Three Sounds, Six Colours
I. A Bell
Through munificent air the magnetic clang, the bang of iron thunder draws me closer: it swings this way. That way. Slow. Sway. Its song smithereens into a chaos choral throng of mini-sounds. You can glimpse its deafening mercury stagger, swirl, now juddering, now sluggishly: the wavy potion of clamour swishes round the inside of the caldron’s bulk. You feel a world emerging from overflowing liquid; something carried, like the young, firm green of a fragrant branch clinched in a white courier’s beak, over the misty passageways between noise and music.
II. Land and Sky
Like the dying man’s arid throat the baked, dusty mountains round Almería distort the shriek-thudding of metal on metal.
By the time it reaches your ears the greedy mountains have hammered out on it their stamps of sound and private sense, so you’re not sure whether you have dreamed the beating arms of distant workmen or whether, after all, the gods were here where the savage, ruddy land serration cuts clean across the pure blue sheet.
III. The Invisible Jazz Drummer
Without noticing, he’s been lifted from the moment. as the washing machine spins, the buttons of a beige shirt tap a tempo on the inner chrome drum.
He listens to the rhythm-rattle till it effaces its beginning and its end and accomplishes transition:
his stretching out of memory, beyond the miserly air of a musty laundrette, to a better hour brings ease; the musing of a musical moment, when he was being in completion.
Still the buttons keep rap-tapping tacked onto the rock’s up-rolling to the very peak of paradise, tied to the spinning whoosh way, way down again to new and hard beginnings.
If I told you what the spring evening said
If I told you what the spring evening said, Through the warm window Of aches, hopes, and tiptopoloftical chatter, You would thrust into my hand the visa to that place Where marsh creatures slink reptilian and bronze Trapped inside a sweltering stupa and the high grass wails Because it doesn’t understand ‘The circuitry of sympathy.’
Transitions that require you to fully be there Require your pain for their accomplishment.
Behold the gambler clambering on the plinth; Its whitewashed bricks of calculated pleasure! They once hid behind the trellis As the craftsmen were hung to dry. Despair kneaded by events to A forgotten password that gets lost inside Ice hanging forests with winds sending off a girl To fetch autumn fruits scattered among the willows.
BIO
Scott Waller is a teacher in the Paris area where he participates in literary writing groups and public performances. He has published articles and poems, including a collection of prose poems entitled Starlays (2020). His novel, Dystopian Triptych, was published in 2020.
so tall that children point at me in supermarkets and their super-mothers tell them in super-language that it’s not polite to do that,
so tall that it’s my turn to attack the village, so I march across the forest crunching trees with every step and when I get there they have all their pitchforks ready and their torches aflame and they wait for me to make the next move so I tell them to please look, to please do the research and you’ll find that all those people killed by police
were tall and, yes, I know they’re minorities too, but they’re
also tall. All of them. I know. I always look up their height after I find out someone was murdered by the police and over and over again they’re guilty of having a large body, one that must be stopped by any means necessary even if they are just peacefully walking through a park.
I Have the Same Birthday as L. Frank Baum
and I look like the Scarecrow too, walk like a scarecrow with my 50% disabled veteran body, my tremors where I shake
like it’s the cusp of the tornado and I write too, except I’m unknown, stuffed with straw,
hanging there for all the world to discover me, take me down, take me to the castle
where all of my dreams will be given to me only to discover that they were always right there, stuffed inside my straw-hearted chest.
I Listen to Blonde Redhead’s “Silently” for the Tenth Time in a Row
and when Kazu dances it makes me remember when I could dance and when Kazu dances it makes me remember when I could walk and when Kazu dances it makes me remember when I was loved and it was good, like a song, that love, how she kissed me at the sink and we fell to the floor, my hands all wet, her laughing carmine lips, her intense love of God, and how she left me, a year later, because, she said, I didn’t love God enough, and I remember all the hollowness that came after she was gone and this revelation: now.
So simple: Now.
Now.
Now.
Chronic Pain
I look at the abandoned building. It looks like it just got out of prison, like the building had just spent its tenth year inside another building. Its glass-shattered front window with a couple of remaining hanging shards that look like teeth and the window moves, the building speaking to me, asking if I have a chimney, if I have a spare chimney it could have, but I tell it I gave up smoking years ago,
and inside I can see its carpet looking so thirsty. I don’t know what to do. So I stand there and talk to the building. We talk about our pain, how bad our lungs and living rooms hurt and the heat that radiates in my head and in its kitchen
and the window yawns because it’s getting late, and I walk away and it hurts to walk, but I’m thankful for my legs and it’s thankful for its roof and we’re blessed with gratitude.
She Said We Shouldn’t Have to Say ‘I Love You’ (for Amélie)
so she didn’t. She said it was in our actions. So I tried to see her love when she turned off the lamp at night and I tried to see her love in the strange way that she would fall asleep with her cell phone in her hand, the light glowing like it was coming from her angelic center.
BIO
Ron Riekki’s books include Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press, poetry), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, hybrid), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, nonfiction), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press, fiction). Right now, Riekki’s listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”
Like liquored up brutes spilling out of a bar with fists flying over some misconstrued remark and bruised egos ready to unleash Armageddon, the two birds are having one hell of a fight with no holds barred and feathers flying
as they take turns pinning each other down in a fury of wings and jabbing beaks, till one lay panting on the pavement forced to admit defeat. Then the champ, briefly distracted,
releases his hold. Too bad! His rival recovers his strength and with a sudden bolt leaps to his feet ready to peck and claw his way to the top
of their rough and tumble brawl. Two featherweight fighters in hot pursuit of each other soar skyward, wings pumping rapid fire.
Someone more fable-minded might draw a moral from this clash of avian brawn about the nature of man and his reliance on force when some cocky interloper threatens his perch and whatever crumbs
he claims are his. But as for me all I see is a mad scramble for dominance and final control of natural resources before the planet goes up in flames and the moon falls into the sea.
Danse de l’Esprit
Perfectly blended bodies No blemishes No wrinkles No frown lines Thick lustrous hair The sort you see in commercials For some new miracle shampoo
Dancers Young, dazzling in their youth And fiery quest for fame and adulation They are after all artists Their bodies the very birthplace of glory, grace, and wonder As they twist, turn, spin, leap, slide, vanquish Age and all its imperfections Rapture in their every movement The ease with which they shape time and space Into the most exquisite patterns of light
I who am not young I who am not lithe nor slim nor perfectly attuned To the tempo of my own rapidly passing time I who am falling further and further away From whatever promises I swore to keep I lift one foot then the other Dragging behind me the weight of years The heaviness I have come to equate With the measure of growing old
Still, the silence of my ways And the music that plays when I am most alone Beget a style of dance, a kind of turning and turning about, Perfectly balanced, arms thrust out
Blackbird Autumn
Was it a blackbird that spoke to me before I had even opened my eyes for the very first time, and did he tell me the way it would be in my life and how autumn would be that time of year when my soul feels most at home in the world, especially as the sky begins to darken, and the trees against the falling light become sheer silhouettes, and the silence that surrounds me replicates the absence I feel when I am alone?
Almost palpable, that feeling is. As if when the last scrap of light is gone from the sky, my death will approach with the tact and deference of a true gentleman and tell me what I have always known.
Look, there is a solitary star shining through the branches of a tree. It appears so suddenly, so succinctly, almost the way an unintended tear will form in the corner of someone’s eye followed by another and then another the way the stars are shining now.
BIO
George Capaccio, a native New Englander, now lives in North Carolina. He rose to prominence in his twenties with a series of dead-end jobs while writing on the side—poems, mostly. In his thirties, he added storytelling and acting to his résumé while still writing—poems, mostly. To date, he has written over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction for educational publishers. His book-length poetry collection—While the Light Still Trembles—took first prize in peace writing from the University of Arkansas. George is currently touring his one-person performance as Albert Einstein. You can learn a bit more about him at https://www.georgecapaccio.com
There is nothing in the museum of words but the Father of Christ Dream sporangia reach intuitively for granular sunlight The world is already ready to eat Everything in the world has already happened and been said
The olive of hearts turns to thorns Meat and fish become flesh The intonations of silence thicken Molecules and atoms play in motion Every second
Every second someone dies instead of me on the cross
Clouds, grass, parents’ sleds, a rusty shovel, worn-out sandals, an arbor, a fat neighbor’s code, grandmother’s screams – there is no way to convey the feeling of a home that no longer exists.
the bird accidentally dropped the heart and broke it on the rocks ¶ heaven turned inside out and swallowed the rain ~ my mother did not return from work and became a seagull in the eyes of the beholder ± the house turned into a horse and blew away and commotion . a lot has changed since the beginning of the last war …
Someone covered the tracks with snow Someone inappropriate is out of sight The eyes pretend to be a bird flying into the unknown The path is the essence of the bird’s path Death and birth of grass Every person is grass Every person is an animal Snow fangs bite travelers Where did the travelers go? A trip to a fairy tale is like a trip to Kafka The boy stimulates the imagination with caresses The girl mentally turns into a mermaid The impregnable stone sings an ode to silence Delimiters are converted to spaces Ragged shirts of syntax envelop the syncopations A little man is looking for happiness A small person plays with happiness The dwarfs look at Snow White to rape her Wolves feed us minced meat from grandma Babysitters pretend to be adults A boy stimulates a girl’s prostate The girl becomes a thought Torn skin shirts envelop a heart lost in bones The eyes are looking for a mirror The lips silently repeat the same thing: Please
The knot on the neck of the rope is compressed The crunch of bones that cannot be filled with any passion
Someone in a golden gaze mask stands by a silver fire Someone pours semen on the mint from which we were born
The latex of the night sky puckers at the hips A casual smile puffs with mystery
The heather rises up like a phallus The clouds part in front of a couple in love with life
BIO
Mykyta Ryzhykh: Winner of the international competition «Art Against Drugs», bronze medalist of the festival Chestnut House, laureate of the literary competition named after Tyutyunnik. Nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published in the journals “Dzvin”, “Ring A”, “Polutona”, “Rechport”, “Topos”, “Articulation”, “Formaslov”, “Colon”, “Literature Factory”, “Literary Chernihiv”, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals “Literary Center” and “Soloneba”, in the “Ukrainian literary newspaper”, Ice Floe Press.
‘Selma was deeply thoughtful rather than talkative, and her silence was a kind of music that carried onto a world of dreams and made him listen to the throbbing of his heart and see the ghosts of his thoughts and feelings standing before him, looking him in the eyes.’ —Kahlil Gibran, Broken Wings
Summer has taken her shower and turned off the heater, abandoning
the bare branches that are knotted threads of her lost hair to the yet undissolved white steam of clouds and blue shampoo vapours of the sky.
‘Ghostly notes of flowers withered, leaves fallen, birds departed and their songs evaporated, still linger in the intricate net of branches. They were from
Summer’s conditioner. When the branches are exiled from her and consequently take a life of their own, the faint notes become crystallised as their memories.
And are memories not weavers and conjurers of soul? The notes are inseparable from the branches as smoke from a pipe.
If you smoke a branch, you can preserve a copy of the notes in your lungs, a manuscript of its soul.
Let the brisk air you just inhaled and warmed with your body temperature incarnate that manuscript,
and let your every breath be a memoir of a forgotten branch before all your breath is returned to the air, when it would be the time
for the branches to write your memoir: an aria of flowers blooming, leaves flickering, birds nestling and singing.’ Selma’s silence rustles in your trachea.
The Lighthouse of St Blanche
‘BLANCHE: […] And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard–at noon—in the blaze of summer—and into an ocean as blue as [Chimes again] my first lover’s eyes!’ —Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
…and Blanche Dubois’s dying wish is fulfilled. She’s turned into an abandoned lighthouse.
The trauma haunted her human life refuses to abandon her now. It comes as myriad mirrors of raindrops capturing the beautiful world and showing it to her.
Then, as always, the mirrors crash down on her without rhyme or reason, as if only to smash that lovely picture they just promised.
And the cold and clear music of the mirrors’ shattering washes the pristine snow of her skin, tarnishing it over time.
And the mirrors’ sharp fragments glitter in the red scars they’ve cut into the pale birthday cake she has gradually become.
Yet she, kneeling on the harsh edges of rocks, keeps praying to the clouded crystal of the sea.
Would it grant her three wishes like the angel did Dwynwen?
No. Her faith lies not in God, but buried deep in her beloved, sinful one who had destroyed the beauty of her world.
Instead of imprisoning his image in ice for his crime, she makes his eyes the origin of ocean with all her magic at the expense of her whole life and soul.
The sky is grey and cloudy, but the crepuscular rays have descended, that holy passage waiting for the bride who has drunk the divine poison: her scars red as fresh lips, her frail white skin an ethereal wedding dress.
La Petite Mort
‘She smiled a bright hot smile which was forgetful of time or place or anything but the memory of his mouth on hers.’ —Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
The sweets cast their variegated glance at you from the glass case. What? Do you call them art? You know how frail their allure is, a phantom tower whose only support columns are but fantastic shapes and dreamlike patterns. If you look into its windows, you will not see anything deeper or richer than a seductive ratio of clarity and intensity. It’s the most crude and basic form of fairy tale: creamy basketballs, green jade chess, sunflower cameos, miniature peaches and magnified cocoa beans, chocolate keyboards insinuating their thirst for fingers and the melody sealed in them, a dainty raspberry storm fueled by dark pink fragments of a mysterious flower happening on the summit of a cupcake. Streams of magical hair sprouting from a fudge violet, somehow finds a heart as hair clip, and somehow ends up being a lovespoon.
After caressing them all with the childish love bite of your eyes, you go for the prettiest one. That elderflower picasso. It’s half a planet, nebula blue with rivers of cirrus and a flower of blood. Though the planet is not the hemisphere you’ve bought, but only the paint on it. This blue world is thinner than sequin, the rivers have no depth, the flower is no more than a red dot. But you will live here for this moment, will you not? You will fall in love with the story the deep blue runestone and snow white inscription tell you about the sanguine blossom: when the Countess of Nosferatu bleeds for the first and last time, she looks at her own blood with awed fascination. Realises what she is composed of, and what she could express. Shattering the cold porcelain cups of life and death, she lets the magical red fluid escape from the prison of her cadaverous skin. Yet the spilled blood, doomed by its former dwelling in the frail chamber of her heart, cannot become anything else. So it instantly blooms into this bleeding heart flower here. Look! The balmy heart spreads the velvet wings of its petals and a graceful teardrop descends from its core. Come closer. Can you see another heart enveloped in this teardrop as if sitting in a glass capsule of a Ferris wheel, watching sunsets concentrated in the flight of the petals? Doesn’t it look exactly like your heart? You cannot deny. But it is truly absurd that you have lived without a heart for so long and you shall find it in a sweet shop. Is that why you are not bleeding even if the little vibrant world you are eating is as thin as the blade of a knife and the cut it makes. And certainly as sharp. But wait! Its blade has cut through your whole being. It’s so sweet…you scream, groan, weep The world, it’s really so sweet underneath its nonchalance and your heart is, in fact, oh how can it be… so sweet.
BIO
Beatrice Feng studies Creative Writing at Lancaster University. They are an aspiring writer.
It’s a familiar taste upon my tongue– The flesh and blood of my flesh and blood
I bite and chew and grind and suck Yet my hunger…. It lingers
This instinct, it gnaws at me, making my stomach gurgle and kick like a memory inside of me– Like elbows slamming into my ribcage and muffled screams obscured by muscle and sinew
From where you stand it is a quiet affair. The squelching is minimal- its jaw unhinges and he swallows the body whole.
“I see you,” his eyes say to you. “You can’t look away,” the tiny body begs- as if that will change anything at all.
It’ll be your turn next, you know? And it’ll be his turn forever.
The Cartographer
Every breath adds a fresh mark on the map Every sigh forms a new landmark in remembrance Every stumble leaves a scuff in its wake- a frowny face here, a scowling skull there My inkwell is full and ready to touch fresh parchment
Sometimes I meet another cartographer in my wanderings We compare our maps and let our quills touch each other’s hearts Beware the deadends, the dark alleys, and the precarious ledges Stay here if you’re ever in town, talk to this person if you are blessed with the opportunity
Sometimes when I don’t like what I see before me I look to my map My map has changed so much since the day I first shakily dragged a quill across its surface I can’t help but sigh and say, ‘But look how far I’ve already come.’
BIO
Sydney Fisher is currently getting her undergraduate degree in English at Azusa Pacific University and plans to get her master’s degree in Library Science. She also is pursuing minors in Screenwriting and Biblical Studies due to being a queer Christian artist with a love for all things cartoon.
i’ve gotten myself screwed up somehow. i sit here on the floor in the dark with music playing, and pangs of loneliness conflict with a vague revulsion that would prohibit anyone from being here right now. a little bit of cocaine and suddenly i am terrified, needy, a pilgrim fawn, i am living a life unsupported and unsustained, no one here but perhaps that is because i don’t want them here. i listen to notes like raindrops and wonder why mine don’t sound like that, i wish my thoughts could be beautiful, i wish i could be beautiful. like a dead end in hell, i frown in the dark with a mind and a dick that just won’t work right, and still pine for the women that i don’t want anymore.
call to arms
O malcontents who hide in computers and books, perk up your ears and harken to me, turn off the TV and unite under a new flag. we can band together like worker ants, no uniforms or handbooks will point the way for us. O collection of ragtags, heed the call, the earth will one day take us all, your routine is the disease and you are the cure, each of us a universe in defiance of a collective nothing, fuck macdonalds and the prom and the new york yankees, beauty is found in second-hand stores and genius in the babblings of lunatics in chains. O cellar denizens, creep out from the sewers and reclaim what is ours, everyone’s, i repeat, EVERYONE’S, not just for the politicians, not just for the bankers, not just for the inherited wealthy, not just for the supermodels, you’ve been told what to like, you’ve been shown your place, you’ve been told what to be satisfied with, now decide just once for yourselves.
there’s a death in their eyes
there’s a death in their eyes, deeper and darker than any pit if ever there was light there it is gone now forever, the world has won and there is no going back.
there is a pain in their smiles that chills me to the bone, the heads bob and the mouths work but they can’t mask the scent of their fear.
i watch them on television and on the sidewalks, in bars and in checkout lines, all agenda and ambition, praying for the American Dream and only finding the universal nightmare, confused and angry but always coming back for more.
the spirit wanes until only survival remains, it is understandable and tragic, childhoods forgotten, replaced long ago by some murderous job, now you accept the lie because you have to, it’s too late to object, might as well go out to dinner with the wife tonight and plan this spring’s vacation.
BIO
Scott Taylor is 49 years old, and hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler.
furled sail: i failed to boat around goodbye. could not, would not –
nobody left to ripple these linens.
i should have bottled a message, apologised, red flared. now crest-
fallen, doldrummed, i raise a single malt to my failing fictions: no
map, trade wind, turbine. dwindling supplies of fish and oranges: i am
turning forty. no ghost fishing, bottom trawling, no mouthful of
nacre – herringbones all. i looked a captain for a while, then not so
much, then not at all. fallen hook, line, sinker. others make love while i
flush upon flush, anemone fever. fading instead of adding up, frayed
pyjamas starfished across, my body neither vessel nor halo. something
said no. did not say try again. said shut up, sit here for a while. do not
cast nets, do not searchlight. do not.
you must moon your own sky.
felling
hands of tree bark. on me, a mark that you could not, would not
axe out. the undercut is where we part,
a pity of heartwood.
medullary anatomy once treasured, wished sapped and replete –
now led afraid, tangled veined leaves, congealed, blank molasses.
what is a mess for? a forest
now hysterectomised. my floors will abstain from growing lemons,
apricots, pears. you stare at the damage, wishing yourself away,
a bird, a light, something singing, still. the process of
cutting, gutting a tree repulses you.
you say your song of feller from fortune: catch-a-hold this one,
catch-a-hold that one. the song
is not enough. is not ever:
you won’t be home in the spring of the year.
apart
is how he takes the mechanical heart: hacksaw, bradawl, diagonal
pliers. my mood reduced to paper moon, tinfoil – only the nuts and bolts
matter. statistical champion, a clamp instead of the open hand my lonely
demands, he claims: you, me – a mere blood count, a column addition.
i inhale his red lines, broken mercury beads. are we lost or failing rusty
fire ladders? hit hell. hit square one and as you attempt to drag your
broken wing up that catwalk once again, consider this: with him, it was
never your when.
i could drop this black stone. i don’t.
i hold onto the lightning rod and tell myself fables, collect the little hurts,
invent a reason why, or a reason why not: knuckle, jacknife, golem.
i could drop this black stone. i don’t.
i refuse to look for colour, refuse to walk the orange grove, collect
petals, prismatic, kite, marble, shoe- shine. don’t care for anything but black
and blue – i document and document, fingerprint ghosts, deform every
morning. you call me out: sew that sleeve into a white flag, you know
how to. but i sit and sulk, eat my own red chalk. one day, i might grow tired of
holding myself hostage. not yet, not yet, i mumble, treasuring the hurt.
let’s dance.
home: not a yellow brick house, not fortunate, four solid square windows,
but precarious, tumbled rainbows, a wild stone throw of fireflies, ephemeral
at best, a test of all the medals you carry: allan, carrie – some decade or
other, you decided upon a game and played every single friend along the road:
losing, losing, finding yourself gutters once more, trucker piss bottle full
of stars – one time, two times, seven times unlucky. when will you learn to take
the shoe off, throw away that stone?
BIO
Lorelei Bacht is a fabrication whose poetic work has appeared / is forthcoming in The Night Heron Barks, Queerlings, Feral, Barrelhouse, Sinking City, Stoneboat, OyeDrum Magazine and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @bachtlorelei and on Instagram @lorelei.bacht.writer. In a past life, they wrote and edited fiction. They are currently watching the rain instead of working on a chapbook.
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