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The Gathering of the Waters

by Scott Waller



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.







I’m Tall

by Ron Riekki


so tall
that I get asked how tall I am
every day,

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.”







A Pair of Sparrows Brawling on the Sidewalk

by George Capaccio



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.











When You Find Selma in the Bare Branches

by Beatrice Feng


‘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.







To Devour Heaven

by Syndey Fisher


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. 






grain of sand

by Scott Taylor


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.







loneliness rides my bed.

By Lorelei Bacht



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.





Trying to Tell You

By John Cullen


Imagine a group of ten. Include your grandfather,
briar pipe in hand, puffing a wreath of Borkum Riff
over his chair; and Mr. Allen, your math teacher,
Kroeger bag in hand escorting his poodle a quarter mile
down Clark so Sparkles can crouch at the cul de sac;
and the wallpaper hanger with the barbed wire tattoo curling his bicep;
and your neighbor the postman, who tucks ash in his cuffs
while weeding dandelions. Add six individuals from your local
State Farm. Most likely, this collection couldn’t agree
whether to order frosted doughnuts or pecan rolls.
So let’s gift each with one simple item, say a plastic kayak.
Set them sailing down Main Street after a storm early Wednesday
morning to avoid snarling traffic and misdemeanor tickets
written by police for the operation of unlicensed transports.
Now the group has a mission. This should make the day simple,
like peeling Macintosh apples into grandmother’s stoneware bowl,
adding one cup of sugar with cinnamon and clove to spice filling.
About this time, some Einstein tweets there is never enough water after rain
to float a kayak down Main Street, and Mr. Investigation complains
there’s too much ground clove in the filling; the pie tastes like potpourri.
(Which might be true!) Like when fire hosts a meeting;
before you lift a pencil, timbers and struts disagree and screech,
even grumbling after engines and tankers return to the station.
Now imagine this case in court, your ten individuals annoyed.
Are kayaks paddling in one direction traffic or protest, rally or riot?
Do traffic laws apply equally to boats, bicycle riders, and the occasional
turtle moving through June as fast as nature to lay eggs?
What is the implication of all this on the Endangered Species Act?
Boats never use turn signals! Now, the prosecution rejects a potential juror
who states for the record David Kirby is his favorite poet.
At this point, the people you imagined demand to leave the poem.
If you look quickly, you can see them sailing toward the horizon.
And now they are gone.
The poem is defunct, hanging by a few loose lines and rhymes,
and a boodle of kayaks causes backups and one shooting. 
People will wake tomorrow to the smell of the sea
and lost dreams, and news headlines will announce an emergency
town council meeting to discuss next year’s kayak festival. 
At least we can end with something simple: An old man
wearing a lazy fedora plays guitar in the key of E while sitting
on a Borden’s milk crate. He looks like Robert Johnson.
A half dozen children listen and tap their feet to the music.
Most of them wonder why his monkey smokes a cigar. 



Revolution


When your dad swung at you
and connected with mad dogs running drunk
through his blood, you howled,
grateful your mother wasn’t pummeled.
She cringed, and hunched
her flesh, an umbrella for you and the puppy.
Then you ballooned from kid to punching bag.
At first, arms and legs snarled on the floor
and you wondered if you could shelter mom
under the deck where your dog, Jack,
deaf in one ear from a haymaker, dug
foxholes under a cracked plastic pool.
Eventually you parked dad on his ass.
It had to happen, and he sat, dizzy,
crouched but growling. You felt you won,
and the world tasted safe.
You learned the world fist first,
and so you’ve got to understand your own
will plant you wordless, nose bloody,
and puzzled, just like your old man
wiped spittle and blood that day
from busted lips on bruised knuckles.



Harsh Words


Trained by whistle
to race to my side
and growl, they ate
from my hand. Chipped
on the shoulder, they
returned and slept
in my bed, muzzles
on my heart.

My mother asks
what happened
with my girlfriend
and why these lines
are so short.
I’m typing this
explanation
with one finger.
They bit the others off.





BIO

John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Recently he has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and New York Quarterly. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press. His piece “Almost There” won the 52nd New Millennium Award for Poetry.







LAST NIGHT ON THE WAY TO DAIRY QUEEN

By Shae Krispinsky


You guess it was the chocolate you ate several hours before,
a half of a square of the $25-bar that tasted like chalk and grass
and off-brand M&Ms that always remained uneaten at the bottom
of Halloween buckets that imbued the night with wonder and
significance, a heft to the grey clouds, impending storm, as you
rode shotgun on the way to get better chocolate, the real
thing crushed up and blended, served upside down in a cup, its
immobile red plastic spoon proving its thickness, a treat that felt necessary.

It had been a long, hard week in a long, hard year and a half.
Surely there was some form of deservedness at play. What you want
is what you need, a phrase you often recalled and feared, those two nodes
oppositional throughout most of your life. Did you, in fact, need
a Blizzard? Did you, in fact, need anything? Were you not just talking
earlier in the day about how evolved you were as a human? How you
had leveled-up, now out of the messy cesspool of one’s id? And yet,
ice cream, candy, in a paper cup.

And you sit, waiting, in the drive-thru, the last lingering light
of the day gets pushed aside, smothered, by greyer, thicker clouds.
Palm fronds shudder, birds fly for safety, a man in khaki shorts
approaches, hand out. You see without seeing. You see without
being seen. How easy to pretend—non-existence. Car inches forward,
cash handed over, change thrown in the cup holder next to the e-brake,
two sweating, frozen treats in hand, mission accomplished. Onward.

To a red light next to a gas station. A gas station with a barber’s shop inside,
its door open, fluorescent lights on, two chairs, one taken by a man. A woman
with bleached hair circles around him, arms swooping down with scissors
and comb in hand, the precisely practiced movements of her trade. From afar,
she looks young. Does anyone grow up wishing to be a stylist in a gas station?
Does anyone even consider that such things exist? The local Qwik-Stop or Kangaroo
could be a community’s hub—why not? Except here there are two on every block,
the community never grounds itself but shifts by the season or semester.

You think about the stylist with the platinum bob and chiseled arms and black
denim pants well after the light turns green, well after you’re on the interstate,
well after it starts to rain then stops. You imagine an honor to her life you
most likely will never know for your own. Would she offer the same assessment?
We’re all blind to the wonders of ourselves. We’re too close. We only feel
the struggle, the exhaustion. Across the city, the streetlamps have started
turning purple. You know this means they’re dying, but what a beautiful way to go.



HANLON AND SEAMUS DISCUSS THEIR VIEWS ON ART


Sit still in silence. Receive. Art
is not meant to be easy.
            There is no valor in suffering. I drink
            from the fount of joy. I seduce
            he muse and allow her to seduce me.
My mind is my muse, and I am in control.
Breathe in and out. Following the breath, I am
contained. I am a container.
            Restraint only restrains. Creation ought to be
            an explosion, a flood, quivering and pulsing
            and throbbing with beauty.
Oh, beauty—the lure for the simple mind.
            If that is true, then fuck: I’ll bite. Until
            my lips become a sieve, until my teeth chip
            away like ice. I refuse to be starved, while you—
I? I refuse to eat. I have raised myself
beyond all that.
            —all you know is hunger.
Yes, please. The hunger satiates.





BIO

Shae Krispinsky lives in Tampa, FL, where she fronts the band, Navin Avenue, whose sound she describes as Southern Gothic 70s-arena indie rock with a pop Americana twist. In 2022, she released her band’s first album, A Little Warming, as well as her debut novel, Like Lightning. She is currently at work on her band’s second album, her second novel, and a poetry chapbook. Shae is also a photographer, tarot reader, and janky baker. Find her at https://www.instagram.com/dearwassily/.







On Being Deciduous

by James McKee


Nothing like a storm
to blazon the wisdom
of wintering trees
that jettison their leaves.

Scrapping the glory
of an emerald canopy
lets them resist
wind-lash less:

not much can snag
on a skeletal twig.
The lushly-attached
gets its branches snapped.

They collude with loss
to claim, as their choice
from the catalog of griefs,
one spring relieves.




Off into the Sunset


There I go, sauntering along
as if I don’t notice
this bright amber evening already
auditioning for your memory,
though naturally I do.
You can tell I’m savoring how
this magic-hour sunlight
ignites tiny tiaras atop the upper edges
of each sombre object I pass
(car, stopsign, mailbox, car, wall),
like a swarm of small dawns I’ll remember
to describe for you later—
meaning now—
as a sizzlation,
but not just yet.
I’m still basking in the facets
that gleam from bark and steel and brick,
flecked with a luster that will linger
just an instant longer,
though now it’s arrested here.
Sort of. Anyway,
it looks like your mind—
your lovely, captious, queasy mind—is content
to cavort among these surfaces too, as if
the world’s tide of misery
has receded somewhere far beyond earshot,
exposing this block’s homely treasures
for us to admire with the just-
barely-not-ironic gusto
we share like a tic.
It can’t last; it doesn’t.
A sawtooth skyline steps in front of the sun,
some streetlamps blip on,
and the low-angled light
that’d made even the East River look good
for a moment,
departs. As do I.
You’ve plugged yourself back in,
and by the time you surface
from the cyan screenglow of your pent-up phone,
there’s nothing left to forget
but the moment I turned the corner
into everything that happens next.




A Visit from the E-Muse


Wow. Looks like someone needs a hug.
Lucky for you I’ve always gone
for that undead-at-noon affect,
that but-it’s-freezing sweat-glaze.
Mimic my insomniac speech-gush
all you like, but you’ll never
match my scorched-earth aplomb.
Let’s spare you a trip to the FAQs:
I awe like a diva with my avatars,
smack a few fanboys around for show
before (lol) upvoting them. I’m as meta
as a fractal node. Gauge my reach
by counting up the screens I cloud
with an ammoniac sheen of rage.

Want in, noob? Launch no threads
that don’t exclude, then just
keep subtracting till you belong
nowhere else. If anything I post
sounds like your cue to go full
IRL, you’ve read too many poems
I didn’t write. Asking what the memes
mean tags you as far too basic
to follow. Does anyone actually like
what they like? You’re not doing this right
unless you rig, for every mind
you’re mining, a playpen in the slag.

That’s it: just keep scrolling through
the troll-spew of comments to discover
your life-score, somewhere south
of loser. Don’t even, with the facepalm.
Remember our deal: you binge on a one-
quadrillionth wedge of bandwidth pie
as if my jonesing for quick hits of clicks
doesn’t matter, and I curate your uploads
as if they do. Don’t I keep your browser
barnacled in ads that contrive flattery
from hoarding your trivia, like a stalker?
You’re welcome. Remember what you said
would happen, if you ever caught me
livestreaming your bedroom again?
Me neither. Now, refresh that feed.




Víti, a Volcanic Lake in Iceland

                                                                                                for A.

Charcoal uplands, barren and crumpled.
Lunar distances, a serrated horizon,
low murky skies. Rain this morning.
Rain again soon.

A puddled uphill path, slimy
with trodden ochre mud, skirting
the pipes and outbuildings of a hydrothermal plant,
sleek and toylike and alien
against this jagged umber sea
of scabbed-over lava.

At the top of the rise, more mud
slickening the approach to the unfenced rim
of a fissured escarpment.
Down where the crater
plunges like a puncture,
our first glimpse of what we came for:
a blown-glass pool, improbably blue,
aglow like a sapphire ember,
stoked by breaths from a sun
slathers of cloud keep hidden.

We look and look,
but discover nothing
of that unlikely color
for these waters to mirror.

And so,
almost dissuaded from fancying ourselves
as likewise bedded, jewel-bright,
amid broken tracts of circumstance
but not quite,

we turn away as one
into the weather coming swiftly on.





BIO

James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the otherwise uneventful spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, Grist, New World Writing, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, THINK, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.







Graven Image

By David Sapp


Isn’t this all silly
A little embarrassing
(All because of Constantine’s
Very Christian mommy)
An old white guy
Is the object of our adoration
Our graven image
In mosaic fresco T-shirt
Who supposedly bestows
Comfort and joy
A doddering fogy well past
Wise sits on the throne
Why not Isis Horus or Mithras
Dionysos was fun fun fun
For that matter how about
If you insist upon a single entity
A golden calf
A tire a shoe a billiard ball
An ass or an elbow
(It is enough knowing
The difference between
No need for idolatry)
A penis a vagina
Yoni Almighty
A mouth or anus effigy
(Truly it’s not about the orifice)
As the only thing that makes
Any sense is love-making
How about a Disney princess
Or rotating pop stars
For the Virgin Mary
The color blue!
A Yves Klein painting
On every sacred altar
Andromeda the galaxy
Next door might work
Then again please consider
How about love?



Cardboard Pleasure


We crave we desire
Hanker at the very least
We gorge our orifices
Bottomless gullets
Yum yum yum
Implacable gourmands
We insist upon
A nameless hoard to
Manufacture our accumulations
Plush toys weed eaters flip flops
New and improved silicone
Battery-operated vibrator dildos
In stock and on sale now!
Ships bump at our shores
Brimming with our gluttony
Trains trucks men women
Push it all pull it all
Hurriedly here and there
Convenient cardboard pleasure
Buffets on our doorsteps
We sigh we moan
Sated for fleeting moments
And then used up we
Launch it all out our asses
Shove it all to the curb
It is the American Way
Wouldn’t you agree?
Eventually all that’s left
Are hills of empty plastic
Eventually all the dildos
Fill all the landfills for
A thousand years.
Eventually all the forests
Are shaved from our skin –
So much stubble on
Legs crotches chins
All that’s left is highly
Confidential memoranda
Regarding merchandise avarice
Receipts for our demise



A Precious Transience


As soon as the stars
Were born their deaths
Were inevitable
The stars are dimming
In their nativities
And we are informed
Physicists surmise
There are no more
We live out our days
Indifferently act as if
There are plenty of stars
To go around
Our vision narrows
To what’s within the frame
Of our bedroom window
We busy ourselves
We obsess we squabble
Over petty details
We deny and we deny
The heavens fade
Our sun like us
Increasingly fragile dies
A little more each day
And a lifetime is
Required to comprehend
Our stark predicament
In the meantime
How are we not
At every moment
A precious transience
Reflecting upon the depths
Of space the spinning
Of distant galaxies?
How are we not
Spending our last
Hours making love
Or playing with children
Or holding one another
In our demise?





BIO

David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawingstitled Drawing Nirvana.

The Silence After

By Sloan Porter


It wasn’t the humidity
or the record breaking heat
so rare in a cold city.
Lounging around without an AC,
the cheap fan was enough
to calm my boiled blood –
I mean, cool me off.
It wasn’t that you weren’t enough,
although I saw what creeps on your skin
at night
in your sighing state,
the prickle of tiny soldiers that stomp and sabotage
all those good intentioned neurons.
It was, perhaps,
that I was caught in the crossfire,
although I knew
braving the no man’s land
meant getting shot.

It was, perhaps,
the silence after.




Manifestation


Last year you were my arms,
carrying boxes of junk
attached to memories
I tried to throw away myself.

Last month you were my legs,
running to my finish lines
long after the sunrise
kept putting me to sleep.

Last week you were my neck,
turning my head from
directions I wanted to see.

Last night you were my lips,
sewing them tight
when I was thirsty.

Tonight you are my eyelids,
snapping them shut.



On Wanting


Trust me
I may dig too deep,
pry you open with my claws
and rummage around for treasure.
I may stun you,
each of my fingers are tasers.
I may collapse
from the weight of wanting more,
curl up,
drown in my own liquifying words
that never leave me
but catch in my throat.
Can you watch me suffer?
Or even notice?




12 Hours


  3:00 pm         Nothing exists but us.
  4:00 pm         I sketch your smile on the window.
  5:00 pm         I air the room with your scent.
  6:00 pm         Your laughter becomes the birds.
  7:00 pm         Parts of you become this room.
  8:00 pm         Your legs are the frame of this bed.
  9:00 pm         Your freckles are the sparkled light of this lamp.
10:00 pm         Your hair is the fabric of this duvet.
11:00 pm         Our hands make their way beneath this duvet.
12:00 am         My voice is viscosity when I say your name.
  1:00 am         Your voice is liquid when you say my name.
  2:00 am         I sink in the sound waves and drown in my name.
  3:00 am         Your sighs are hurricanes as you fall asleep.





BIO

For Sloan Porter, the art of poetry has been an all-consuming journey since a young age. As a writer and interdisciplinary artist, she’s most interested in exploring a darker side, the questions that linger at night, and the passions that drive us. Her work first appeared in Montréal Writes, The Sirens Call, and The Journal Of Undiscovered Poets. She is currently working on a full-length poetry collection. Find her on Instagram @sloan.porter.poetry





“Contemplating Autobiography”

by Christina E. Petrides

There was nothing presently worthwhile
in her old correspondence,
no unconscious novel composed
over several years of college emails.
Dried corsage flowers from a forgotten dance,
the enthusiasm and despair there was without context,
youthful mementoes fallen apart,
inconsequential activities and long-lost contacts,
and the needless stress of academic classes
whose information had been irrelevant decades since.
I am not like that person anymore, she realized.
Any tale salvaged from those outdated files
must needs be framed of new timber,
and the cutting might not be worth
either deaths of trees or loss of time.



“Poetry”


It shoulders my apartment doorbell well after dark,
staggers through the vestibule, and drops sobbing on my sofa,
bewailing the callousness and perfidy of ex-lovers and current coworkers.

I was just about to go to bed.
Fresh from the shower, in clean jammies,
unguents smoothed over my hands and face to keep wrinkles from entrenching
overnight.
And suddenly I am thrust into a maelstrom of emotion, passion, and complaint.

I proffer a selection of herbal teas and wait for the kettle’s pained scream
to drown out the moans and mutterings from the couch.
Hot porcelain at my elbow,
I hope my prostrate guest says something coherent.
Sometimes I hear wild tales,
sometimes a short pastoral,
at other moments only curses and colors.

There are months it doesn’t visit,
and weeks when it comes calling every day,
when I meet it on the street even in broad daylight,
or it interrupts a class, to everyone’s chagrin,
times when we stay up past midnight discussing every subject under the moon.

I don’t know how long we can stay friends.
Are we, even?
Such irregular co-dependency is complicated.



“Seogwipo Weekday, 3 PM”


Aromas from kitchens and covert cigarettes
waft among parked cars and idle dogs.
A pair of stained men clutch green glass bottles
under a leafless tree.
A dame in odd florals diligently stretches,
while sparrows peck a playground’s plastic soccer pitch.
Then, at the echoes of a single tone,
a flood of schoolchildren pours around the corner.





BIO

Christina E. Petrides teaches English on Jeju Island, South Korea. Her verse collection is On Unfirm Terrain (Kelsay Books, 2022). Her children’s books are Blueberry Man (2020; Korean translation, 2021), The Refrigerator Ghost (Korean translation, 2022), and Tea Cakes, Quilts, and Sonshine (2022). She is the primary translator of Maria Shelyakhovskaya’s nonfiction book, Being Grounded in Love: A History of One Russian Family, 1872-1981 (Slavica, forthcoming). Her website is: www.christinaepetrides.com





What to Expect

by Kristen Hoggatt-Abader


                  The only response
                  to a child’s grave is
                  to lie down before it and play dead.
                                    —Bill Knott


Black boys getting shot in Harlem—that’s certain,

waiting like a germ between our taste buds for the chance to begin a plague. The news

reports in a six-sentence quip, and all is revealed: street party, crossfire, shot in the head.

Pity, to be 13, black and poor in New York’s only home

that welcomes such folk, its skyline dotted with decrepit roofs and

a quick buck. We keep our mouths closed, though we sigh (“Not

again.” “No, not again!”) when we hear of the boy’s demise. They

won’t report this the next city over—let alone the next state.

How many bullets have reduced a black body to mere flesh&bone?

In an instant, we board the subway, our hands around pocketbooks

with force as we traverse, in and out and underground,

the network of tracks like sutures across our shoulders,

linking the city and our lives: Lord, please, let it not be our child.



What to Expect


Kids getting shot in colonial New England—

Wait. What? The news yanked out our tongues

and wrapped it around spreadsheets and pizza stones,

calling out to our little ones in a hollow timbre,

their fresh bodies close, breathing their bubble gum,

breathing scabbed knees and muddied shoes. If only

the killer had gotten counseling. If only gun laws were

just so. Our minds wrapped around what-ifs

until the worst of us remained convinced it was a hoax.

Surely our precious 6-years-olds are not slaughtered with

automatic weapons—these bodies, this pink flesh.

Something else must explain it: conspiracies, trauma actors,

the media! We always blame them, rolling out blankets

to snuff out what burns us: Lord, please, let it not be our child.



What to Expect


                  Peshawar, Pakistan

Do children get shot in that corner of the world? In the city of

flowers? It is, by all means, extreme: summers boil, winters

witch-tit cold, dust, hail, and when the gunmen crash through

the doors, it’s another kind of storm brewed in the landlocked valley,

stirred by the impossible wind that descends the peaks.

One hundred plus children, gone. Children—dead and gone. The

smartest ones barricaded the door, a lesson in physics: Angle of

crossbeam? Density of wood? Not enough to stop men from

crashing it down in praise of God. In the city of flowers,

workers load the ambulance with blood stain. In the city of flowers,

mothers unveil themselves to wrap the wounds of little boys in pink, blue,

orange, red. In the city of flowers, the MPs hug their M16s,

skullcapped fathers scream. And the storm rages on, in the city of flowers,

in the cities of our first born: Lord, please, let it not be our child.



BIO

Kristen Hoggatt-Abader is the author of the poetry chapbook Arab Winter and the former Ask a Poet advice columnist for Drexel University’s The Smart Set. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric and composition. Her work has also appeared in The Ledge Magazine, Nimrod International Journal, and Poetry Porch. More of her work can be found at khoggattabader.com





How We Got Here

by Jim Murdoch



Everything is a response (it’s important
to appreciate this before we continue);
mysteries, secrets and puzzles all need answers.
Nothing is truly original but all things
originate even if their origins are
far from obvious.

Becoming is not straightforward. Most things evolve,
are invented, sculpted, spawned or stumbled upon.
In a dream last night my subconscious said to me,
“Everything is a response.” When I awoke
I jotted the words on the pad next to my bed
and now here we are.



Unbound Things


We attach meanings to things

with nails and staples, stitches and knots,
with memories, dreams and crude imaginings,
with loves and hates, wants and needs,
with words, with looks and empty gestures.

Nails rust, memories fade, love loses its way.

Unbound the things move on
to our children and their children,
to strangers, to posterity,
to dust and then oblivion.

Only nothing lasts forever.



Observer Effect II


          (for Vito)

He has not written. Again.
Again he has not written.
He has not written again.

No matter how I phrase it
this makes no sense to me.
Not the not writing, what it amounts to.

How do you measure the notness of things?

Writing is more than accounting—
we both know this—just as love
has little to do with its expression

still we fixate on its trite gestures,
furtive glances and light brush pasts,
and shrug off the silences (or do I mean the emptinesses?)

that say it all really.



Echo’s Bones


I ordered the dead man’s book today.
I expect it will be full of dead words.
What other kinds of words are there?

I never knew him. I like to think
I know what became of him but the man
who wrote these words was a strange one.

A dead man writes to a dying man
about things that could only subsist in
the closed system that was his mind.

Now he’s gone and all that remains are
dry bones for me to gnaw on or bury.
Imaginary bones at that.





BIO

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct magazines and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake and Eclectica, that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and (increasingly) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.





Night

by Brent Short



Under its starry arch
where we cross
the vaulted abyss,
its own insistent mix
of darkness and light,
velvety curtain,
a difficult work,
darker possibility,
moment interminable
demanding a stricter faith.

Wall of black, dead bliss,
profound allness,
an endlessness
teeming with stars,
the darker metaphor,
a gauntlet, bowl of fire,
dark brilliant secret,
what comes before dawn,
but never
the vivid world of day.

With its turned back,
stars turn on their pivot,
all honeycombed and sparkle—
an inky iridescence
where the earth
has fallen away.

Brimming,
peeking over the rim,
infinite roar of an infinite sea,
a gleaning of luminous things,
lit trellis, a vast mind pouring
over my head like water,
light and darkness
flowing irresistibly
toward the other.

Moonlessness,
fields of cold, clear light,
orchard of stars,
all-encompassing wheel,
all that’s lost,
journey’s end,
the dark invisible,
the nothing that is—
looking up, night
is a long way down.



Flash


Thunder claps
extending out into an expanse,
between where I look
and the mountains’ distant flash,
where jagged streaks ignite
a vast exposure—
this x-ray of a town
flooded in a riot of light.

In the earth’s dark shudder
there’s a passing through
of uncertainty and surprise,
picked up
and set down,
as if this place
was already what I left behind,
somewhere else,
a disappearing vibration,
lost inside the sound
of its own dark crash—
the night’s arc
all grimace,
no sound,
the sky ripping,
ricochet.



Cracked


A cracked sky
swallowed by
cracked light,
the invisible as it splits,
an upheaval and buckling,
vibration broadcasting forward,
earth and sky
filling with the sound
of their own dislocation—
all shudder,
reverberation,
a discrete space disturbed,
erupting into
its own contradiction,
a peel of terror
slammed against dark air,
cleaving, the world moving off its spot—
what I call out to there
inside the breach,
rumble and flash,
inside the throat
of that hollowed black echo.





BIO

Brent Short lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. His poetry chapbook, The Properties of Light was published in 2015 by Green Rabbit Press. His poetry has appeared in Eads Bridge Literary Review, Sandhill Review, Tar River Poetry, Saint Katherine Review, The Windhover, Amethyst Review, San Pedro River Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal.







This is sea
Berthed here.
Look
through the windows
the winds open
and then close.








The door was left open
and all of a sudden,
Tangled branches of fire
– blossoming into the room –
Appeared at the doorway
like parrots spreading out their crowns.
I could stare at
from the lane.







I burst into laughter
by earth rotating around the sun
and by earth rotating around itself.

I turn into water
Leaking through the cracks,
Falling down the waterfalls of your shoulders,
Sharp blades unkissed.

I am the water and I am the seeds
White doves eat
their wings unfolded.

Or the mist of the sky
Descending into yellow grass gardens.

Now I am throat of singing birds
Sleeping and silent
Like a cup engraved with flowers and birds.



BIO

I’m Arezou Mokhtarian, a 45-year-old Iranian woman from Esfahan. Since my teenage years I started writing poems, I`ve never stopped writing, I never could. My poems have appeared in various literary journals, and I have also published three poetry volumes in Persian. Currently I am pursuing my writing career as a poet, as well as a self-taught researcher and essayist.





Transition

by Richard Dinges


To step out from
trees onto open
prairie requires
steady nerve, eyes
shaded to sun’s
tense sudden glare,
thigh’s balanced to
any gust of wind,
and no reason
other than a need
to stretch out arms,
twirl in place,
to grasp freedom
to run without
inhibition,
yet to stand still
in awe of your
inability to exploit
your new freedom
under open sky.


After First Freeze


Still deep red smudges
among faded frost-bit
leaves, rose petals linger,
brittle lips kissed by
a November breeze,
memories of warm
embraces and sun’s
heat.  Hope clings
to the last petal when
it releases its grip
on yesterday and blows
away into next spring.



Burn Pile


Flames swirl above
piles of brush, a last
farewell to limbs
that waved lush leaves,
green hope before
storm’s fierce gust
brought down trees’
long stand under
summer drought and
winter fury and harsh
words from frantic
hosts.  Now a pile
sinks into ashes.
A gray wisp rises
into a blue sky
with a wistful
wish for peace.



Atom Bombs


Ever since atomic
bombs stopped lighting
up night skies
and blasting tiny
atolls to atoms
that glowed behind
shark eyes, I
find it hard to sleep
with all those people
determined to make
the world a better
place and America
greater than that
with nothing big
to detonate
just what is in their
hands when they step
out of the shadows
as I walk by.



BIO

Richard Dinges, Jr. lives and works by a pond among trees and grassland, along with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and twelve chickens. Eureka Literary Magazine, Cardinal Sins, Caveat Lector, North of Oxford, and Poem most recently accepted his poems for publication.





Tempest II — Laura

by Phoebe Cragon


I have a bad habit of imagining disasters that won’t ever happen,
wasting time brewing up a storm for us to weather
just for the chance to emerge at sunup holding hands,
smiling, having proved ourselves impervious and deep-rooted.

I’ll admit I didn’t plan for an inland hurricane that struck as we slept
apart, tearing through my plans like a trailer park.
Without your laugh to chase it into hyperbole, the beating of branches
against shaking windowpanes just sends me running for the bathtub.

I sit, shivering, waiting for the inevitable is it raining where you are?
that tells me you’re watching the weather channel for me,
that you feel everything tilt when our pine tree finally topples,
heaved-up roots leaving an altar-sized hole outside the north window.

When I wake, hours later, blinking alone under an unexpected sunrise,
there’s only the silence of a wind that’s blown itself out.




Spring Cleaning


It drives Grandma insane; she swats at Grandpa’s hands
                  when they spill change into the fruit basket,
                                       shuffle playing cards under his sweating coffee cup.
She chases him across the house with a mop
                                                                         and still can’t keep him clean:
the whiskey hiding in the top cabinet
                  and the Marlboros cached in the defunct Toyota
                                                      are their own type of stubborn stain.
There just isn’t enough time in the day—
                                                                                                            doctors in the morning,
                                                                        dishes in the afternoon,
                                    and then it’s dinner                                   
and you’re starting all over.

The clock over the stove stopped years ago
                                    and she swears she’s been living the same minute over,
stuck in the breath between
                                     the punch of the spray bottle     
                                                                                          and the swipe of the rag.
He just laughs and laughs,
                  begrudges her wrung red hands
                               and her endless litter of candy wrappers,
                                              the peppermint smell of her nervous mouth
                                                                        as he leans in to kiss her quiet.

Of course, in the next year’s silence, she finally catches up.

She beats the clock back into motion
                                                      and suddenly the minutes won’t stop.

Without the abating curl of cigarette smoke
                                    the air is overwrought with the smell
                                                                        of her favorite sage soap.
The truck spends a week at the detailers.
                  The cabinets hold only Comet and Windex,
                                                      casserole dishes on loan
                                                                         and coffee cups wiped dry.
Bouquets drop withered petals on the kitchen floor
                  and Saturday seems a fine day for sweeping.
                                                                        What else is there to do?



Spiderwort and Blackberry


It’s a start, at least, my mother sighs.

The clueless gardener, summoned in desperation,
rips through vines and kicks something up
into the french door, leaves it fractured and frosted-looking,
hanging like a held breath behind the venetians
that we can’t exactly look out of anymore.

Once dirty work’s done there’s a relief
in surveying the empty agitated earth,
though victory doesn’t feel quite like we expected
with the irises beheaded and weeping indigo, 
Great-Grandmother’s hydrangeas dethroned
for daring to sleep through winter.

Victory doesn’t feel like victory when we realize,
too late, that neglect doesn’t kill fast enough.
Guilt is perennial.

Next thing we know it’s summer and we’re sweating again,
on our knees unbraiding lantana and thistle
under an indifferent sun.

It never ends, my mother laments.

Green and dying and ever-narcissistic,
the garden curls away from us.
With no deference to our hands
it rots and flowers and folds in on itself,
antic and unconquerable.

             Previously published in Sparks of Calliope, August 2022



BIO

Phoebe Cragon is a student pursuing a degree in English at Centenary College of Louisiana, where she is Literary Editor of Pandora Magazine. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Sparks of Calliope.





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