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.
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.
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/.
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.
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.
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
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
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