Karen Faris

On Moving

I thought I would sell them off
one by one,
after careful consideration
of my relevance
to each yellow, brittle page
immersed in the smell
of this transcendental cloud of dust,
the must of older things,
the must not
of first edition selves,
mysteries held together
by only the crack of a spine
and just like my vertebrae
no longer hold
the same shape straight,
they no longer promise
a story not yet told
no longer waiting
for the pages to unfold
as they turning in
and into themselves
with the weight
of accumulation

A Fistful of Planet

Here,
take my soul.
Hold it for a while
to see if we are suited
for we are together here
despite there being
no planetary agreement
in this corner of the universe.
Feel my heart beating.
Feel the words I’ve only imagined
appearing before you,
a lattice of lace
thriftily sewn, the scrap
and tangle of vines
climbing out of the cold
slowly leafing out
from deep inside the last ice age.
There are flowers too!
I made them just for you!
Hold us all there
in the light, the exhale
of your sugared breath
tingling through prisms
as you extract my sighs
of escape.

Here, take these,
my signs,
of life
of love
of what was once youth,
full of beauty and expectation
combined now with the photosynthesis
of disappointment of yet another world disgraced,
this tangled mess of greening and yellowing,
blooms cut down and cast out for a dime
summoning time and place into motion.

Larry’s Poem

I keep writing your obituary
over and over as if saying the words
ahead of time, before their time
will stay the act of becoming
or in your case, unbecoming
which is what happens,
slowly as the states of matter argue
over a bit of gas here,
solids to liquids there.
The body hones its own rules
in a play of absurdist witticisms
of Wittgenstein proportions
(we argue if a chair is a chair
if there’s no one there to sit in it
and name it your chair,)
this, all amid Einsteinesque infinities
of elemental matters
(who will get the biggest piece of pie
if you aren’t there to claim your constant)
in a parody of who we all used to be
father
daughter
sister
that one still exists
even if
she knows nothing of Descartes and only of dessert,
and mother, who claims she doesn’t understand a word of this
and would I rewrite it for her.
Oh mother,
must you always want the last word
even when you have outlived us
with your magical thinking
keeping to the obit’s original story
printed in the newspaper now,
of how he swept you off your feet
and gave you two jewels.

---

Karen Faris works across the artistic spectrum and creates in order to escape the constraints of gravity. Whether she is making visual art, fabric, or performance art, words remain her constant in this rapidly changing world as she argues for a better, kinder, more compassionate planet. She lives in Rochester, NY where she continues to dream up new projects. She has published the art + words chapbooks Florine! Oh Florine! and The Death of Compassion (aaduna, 2019). Her poetry based Aliens Like Us was in the 2019 Rochester Fringe Festival and she has a growing fondness for art in unexpected spaces such as her recent pop up art installation “Like the Last Woods in the World,” at Tinker Park in Rochester, NY.

Trish Hopkinson

Breast-giver

—found in Breast-giver by Mahasveta Devi

Beggar-pickpocket-hooker,
breast-giver—she creates in the
blind alleys with chapped feet and
large round breasts. Take your wife,
greedy crow, unthinking bull driven by
lust. You eat rice and stolen samosas by
the oil lamp. Countless beings raised a hue
and cry in deepest night. She creates as mother,
pinched skinny even while your flies were
fat. Her capacious bosom, a seething vat
of milk. Her offspring, a better human
material created by devotion, by
mother’s will. I put flowers on
her belly, her languid-hipped
body, her motherhood.

“Breast-giver” was originally published in Degenerates: Voices for Peace. Weasel Press. November 2014.

Preparation

It’s a strange sensation to feel
one’s blood drained and veins
restocked with preservative.

Stranger still to be washed
by a stranger, rubber gloves
and sponge stroking inanimate skin.

You brought them my favorite
dress, the sky blue one with satin
trim and the flats that match.

Even though you prefer me in red,
even though this is all for you
and them, and not for me.

An odd woman with a stern expression
spreads makeup, like cake frosting,
on my face and neck.

She paints pink into my cheeks,
life into my lips, and shadows
on my eyelids—the colors of lies.

She removes the single hoop earring
from my right ear, glues cubic zirconia
cabochons to each lobe,

glues Lee Press-on nails to each finger,
glues false lashes to my lids,
stuck, stuck like glue.

An awkward man comes in and helps
her pull the dress over my head and my hips,
helps her slip each shoe onto each foot.

He first tries to put the left onto the right.
He rolls me onto my side and she zips the back.
He rolls me back onto my back.

They heave me into the lined box, faux silk,
supposedly resistant to punctures, to moisture,
a pillow for comfort.

The funeral home orders their caskets
from Costco, but they didn’t tell you that.

She straightens my head, aligns it
with my spine. She smooths my hair
with a boar hair brush to add shine.

Neither of them talk.
Neither of them smile.

The awkward man closes the lid
and wheels me into a corridor.

Even though you prefer me in red.
Even though I’m decorated like a cake.

You’ll be pleased.

“Preparation” was originally published in Penn Review, October 2017.

Quentin Tarantino Loves the Grateful Dead

But he refuses to admit it. He lies awake at night
envisioning Mountain Girl plucking daisies and braiding them
together for a crown she places on his head. He wakes up late
in the day and writes a screenplay where beautiful women

don leather jumpsuits and slice men in half. He wants you
to think he loves a bloody steak but what he really wants
is some lovely agedashi tofu, soft and drenched
in dashi broth and a sprinkling of chopped scallions.

EXT. JAPANESE STEAKHOUSE -- HOLLYWOOD

He orders the tofu as an appetizer for his vegetarian friend
and watches wistfully as she slips each delicate piece
between her chopsticks and winces a bit when it’s gone, just in time
to cut into his rareness, the blood seething onto his plate,

warm and red. Quentin loves himself
some mid-century modern furniture—the smooth lines,
the Eames low-to-the-ground-chairs, the shag rugs and chrome,
but can’t risk putting it in his house. So he hires a designer

who stands up a sculpture the shape of a penis,
an oddly placed vase. He falls asleep watching a lava lamp,
the one he bought for a girlfriend on Valentine’s Day
and when she left it in the box, and then left him.

Quentin Tarantino loves a good wine spritzer—
take a good wine and add a bit of carbonated water
to make it bubbly and not so rich. It doesn’t change the flavor
really, just makes it more fun, better than without—

like prosecco, but red and glamorous as his own blood.
Tarantino loves his own blood. The salty goodness
that leaks from a hangnail pulled. The drip from a scraped knee
after a night of drinking and a poorly placed curb.

EXT. RED LIGHT DISTRICT – SUNRISE

The scabs are even better, crusty and old,
hard, like an old man with lonely eyes. Quentin
is lonely, like the old man in his scabs
like the old woman in his pancreas, secreting sweetness

or rather, the lack thereof. He wonders if this witch
writes her screenplays in insulin, if she sucks away the sugar,
if she replaces it with bitterness. He hates the spells she puts on him,
the evil silence she conjures while he sleeps. When she’s quiet

she’s most deadly. Quentin Tarantino hates people who can’t
order coffee. It’s not that difficult. Why would anyone
walk into a Starbucks without something in mind.
He loves a good cup of coffee. Not a multiple ingredient

mixed mess of caffeine. What he wants is a simple drip poured
into his cup, no pour-over bullshit, no hipster pretentious siphon
or aero press, just your standard Mr. Coffee at a diner
where the server pours it hot and asks if you would like pie.

INT. DINER -- MORNING

Mr. Tarantino likes his pie hot and ala mode. Apple is best
but cherry is fine in a pinch. The best vanilla ice cream has bits of bean
and clings to the spoon in an attractive way. He only wants the waitress
to cling to something in an attractive way—bend her hips

across the countertop, her uniform creasing in all the right places.
He daydreams finding himself in a quiet coffee shop
next to worn out blue-collars and prostitutes. He wonders
if they know more than he does, if they weather

life in a way he can never understand. He is right to wonder.
Quentin, sweet Quentin, loves dipping his toe in mud
—grit and earth congealing beneath the nail.
It was just last week he had a pedicure, the Vietnamese girl

who scrubbed the bottoms of his feet, giggled a bit when he flinched,
checked her phone while his heels simmered in wax.
The worst part is the grinding on the balls
of his feet. The way she scrapes with reckless abandon.

What if he should remain calloused? He knows the flakes he sheds
are useless. The callouses are beneath the skin.
Tarantino used to give a shit about art
but now he knows he won’t get paid for any of it.

SMASHCUT

QT hates driving alone but when he does,
he listens to episodes My Dad Wrote a Porno.
It’s sickly rewarding and funny. He laughs by himself
behind a windshield of splattered bugs and bird shit. He once

found a whole bird stuck in the grill of his Escalade.
He stopped at a convenience store just outside of Las Vegas
and kicked the bird  loose with the toe of his tennis shoe.

EXT. SUNDANCE PARKING LOT -- WINTER

When the Escalade pulls into Sundance and parks he contemplates
moving. It will get cold eventually if he stays in the car, never bothers
to step out, never walks to the screening room or to the Owl Bar
where someone might ask for an autograph or someone might not.

Mr. Tarantino wears Doc Martins to walk the beach.
He doesn’t like sand in his toes. He fears the grit.
His pedicurist thinks it’s weird. Who wears boots on the beach?
But the soles of his feet are soft, smooth as a baby.

Quentin Tarantino wishes he wasn’t circumcised.
What if his foreskin cells determined the man he was meant to be.
He realizes there are some things he will never know. Like if god is real,
does he still have his foreskin? Was he born without one?

INT. QT’S BEDROOM -- MIDNIGHT

Tarantino is plagued with insomnia. He often doesn’t sleep at all.
He watches the numbers flip on his alarm clock and paces a worn space
in the wool carpet in the hall. He used to take Ambien but it made him binge
eat and wake up drooling chocolate in the Lay Z Boy

with five full-size Snicker bar wrappers at his feet.
He is also plagued with a vicious addiction to nicotine.
He’s tried it all, Nicorette, Wellbutrin, QuitNet.com,
lollipops, the patch, lozenges, spray, inhalers, hypnosis,

acupuncture, and laser therapy. Bottom line is he doesn’t want to quit.
Although he has quit lots of things. He quit multiple people—
girlfriends, toxic family members, booze on occasion, bad boy bullshit,
crowds, caring about reviews, caring about awards, caring about

what other people think—or not. (He still cares what people think.)
Do they think about his missing foreskin? Do they know he loves
The Grateful Dead? Maybe he doesn’t care if they know. Quentin
likes to have his fortune told. There’s not much to tell

in the palm of his hand or a Tarot card flipped over,
like the numbers on his alarm clock. His future seems certain,
death, of course, and just doing what he’s always done. Success
will fade, perhaps. But what kind of fortune is that? He remembers

EXT. HIGH SCHOOL -- SUBURBS

high school often, not that those were his glory
days, but the opposite. He never had the balls
to ask out that cheerleader. He’d sit alone at lunch
with only his pimples and greasy bangs to keep him company.

Even the other nerds and drama kids ignored him. You’d think
there’d be some retribution in the fame he’s garnered. There’s not.
Quentin always wanted to be a stunt man, wanted the thrill
of throwing himself through sugar glass, falling from the 32nd floor,

driving a pickup truck off a cliff, wearing a fire suit and careening
into a crowd. It’s too late for that kind of self-indulgence.
Plus, he was always afraid of being in the background.
Maybe he can be the stunt man after all.

INT. FALSE BACKGROUND HANGS IN LOBE 1; LOBE 2 SPORTS A GREEN SCREEN

The brain is a terrifying thing to let wander. But his imagination
is a scab just waiting to be picked. He flicks the dried, dead crust
and watches as the red rises to the skin, lets the drop coat and pool
before hanging itself in a quiet, slow trickle.

CUT TO BLACK.


”Quentin Tarantino Loves the Grateful Dead” was originally published in Drunk Monkeys, April 2020.

---

Trish Hopkinson is a poet and literary arts advocate. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and in Colorado, where she runs the regional poetry group Rock Canyon Poets, and is a board member of the International Women's Writing Guild. Her poetry has been published in several magazines and journals, including Sugar House Review, Glass Poetry Press, and The Penn Review; and her fourth chapbook Almost Famous was published by Yavanika Press in 2019. Hopkinson happily answers to labels such as atheist, feminist, and empty nester; and enjoys traveling, live music, and craft beer.

Elizabeth Majerus

Edicts from the Council of Rest

1. No somna may bring a timepiece into the fields of rest. Timepieces with moving works may be left at the border station. Digital time tellers will be confiscated and dissolved.

2. Somnae may sing, speak, or laugh only during the transition to complete rest or, once transitioned, during every third dreamcycle. Speech must fall within the audibility and lucidity limits established by the council.

3. Food and beverage from the waking world are prohibited beyond the entry gate to the border station.

4. With the exception of cats, lemurs, and owl monkeys, animals from the waking world are expressly barred from the realm of rest.

5. Somnae making troubled transitions from wakefulness to complete rest must maintain a distance of three feet from any resting plot currently in use.

6. No adult somna is permitted to remain in a state of complete rest in any one resting plot beyond the duration of thirty consecutive dreamcycles without a permit from the sanitorium.

7. Somnae are advised to refrain from direct intercourse with electric light prior to entering the realm of rest. Somnae who exhibit signs of light stupor will be escorted to the border station for detoxification.

8. Rules and standards of decorum from the waking world do not apply to somnae engaged in dream states.

9. Devices and locations of harm (e.g., fire, nooses, blades, open water, endless freefall) are permitted only in their phantasmagoric state.

10. Projections of both rapture and existential darkness are permitted within the same dreamcycle, but somnae are advised to practice caution when mixing the two.

11. Shoes are without exception forbidden.

Appendix One to the Edicts from the Council of Rest: Disparities

A.    The realization of a dozen or more consecutive dreamcycles of complete rest is sometimes referred to as “a beautiful sleep.”

B.    The turmoil engendered by one somna’s recurrent inability to conquer the resting plot of their choice was without hyperbole named “the harrowing.”

C.    Dreamers pricked by the injustices of the waking world seek equity in the realm of rest only at their peril.

Appendix Three to the Edicts from the Council of Rest: Exceptions

A.    In general, somnae are advised to be aware that any and all of the Edicts may without censure be flouted, set aflame with phantasmagoric fire, torn asunder in the witness of dreaming herds of ungulates, or otherwise disregarded.

B.    Due to the weight and value of certain of the edicts, the phrase “without censure” in Appendix Three, Section A may nor may not deflect each and every censure outlined in the Edicts proper, and/or any of their appendices.

C.    The council is not responsible for any perplexity, consternation, or moral anguish engendered by the above-outlined confusions.

*Poet’s note: These edicts and appendices owe a debt of inspiration to the poet Jonathan Weinert

---

Elizabeth Majerus is a teacher, musician, and poet living in Urbana, Illinois with her family. Her poems have been published most recently in Another Chicago Magazine, The Madison Review, and Rhino Poetry. Her chapbook, Songs Are Like Tattoos, was recently published by Finishing Line Press. She is a member of the Glass Room Poets and one-third of the band Motes.

Caren Stuart

the silence he leaves makes a cry i cannot repeat

(after reading Mike James' "Sitting on the Back Porch, In Summer, At Dusk" in Portable Light)

In my waking the darkness of March this morning,
I stare into hearing the silence he has left.
The crippled dogwood in the front yard is gnarling.
Its bones are moaning the burden of folklore, the white
of the cross of its four-petaled blooms
stained with blood at the each of its nail holes,
its every eventual flowering a sacrifice
of withering, of shedding the silent
crown of thorns. Even in sleep's
many-layered denials, the scent
of its pollen settles into
the creases of my so many
deaf and dumb dreams.
This has nothing to do
with any kind
of salvation.

Considering

(after reading Mike James' "Theory of Flight" in Portable Light)

Thorns bloom from the blue rivers running

beneath the braids of flesh in the bends of my wrists.

You can't see their wicked.

I keep my hands          close         to my heart,

not folding - though I may be bluffing.

When I press palms and fingers together,

touch fingers to chin and nod and close eyes,

neither of us yesses     or knows         whether          

I am praying                or prey             or knot.

---

Caren Stuart lives in the wilds of Chatham County, NC with her very supportive husband where she joyfully makes poetry, art, and/or craft almost daily and is always delighted when her work is read, published, awarded, bought, or even talked about in any kind of way. Find her on Facebook as herself or on Instagram as @convolutednotionsbycarenstuart.

Jordin Swanson

Limits

It is hard to comprehend,
A space so large
That it is a million and more
Stars deep, but there are places
Larger than my creativity.
I often think this
When I look at the night sky.

The song that I sing to you
Belongs to no one else.
Each verse is a hundred
Of truths deep. Each chorus
Is a time I hold dear.
These memories are mountains
Of our making. This home
To me is not a small construct.

The barn in the back
That we painted blue one summer
To make it less of an eyesore—
Though the white metal roof slants,
And it leaks water—
Means more to me than holy hymns.

The barn swallows
That make you irate,
I love them too, in my way,
Because of the crease
That they create on your lips
When you speak of them
With your hands on your hips.

These spaces and offshoots
Are larger than you think.
      The truth is this:
You occupy a space so large
In me that before you came
It too would have impinged
On the limits of my imaginings.

Agoraphobia

I shiver on summer nights
And burn in the winter
And grow dormant in the spring.
These things have nothing
To do with temperature.
My life and dreams are stale.

This house too is stale.
The only noises in it
Are those I make.
I’d welcome a ghost.
This quiet is unnatural.

I’m always dusting.
How can one man
Produce so much dust?
I wipe my life
Into a dust cloth each day.

My mother used to clean
The tile grout joints
In our house until
Her hands bled.
Sometimes, she
Went in dream trances
And communed with the dead.

Come to this house,
And I’ll show you death
Without death.

---

Jordin Swanson has an English Degree from the University of Oklahoma and has been writing poetry for 20 years. He’s working on his first book of poetry, tentatively called Our Gas Station.

James Kangas

Whiskey

He was like an animal I couldn’t help
but stalk, his eyes glittering black
diamonds cut precisely to maximize
dazzle and pierce.  He was like a god
in a high-intensity novel, an only-
to-be-dreamed-of apollo so ravishing
he made the hair stand on my arms and
as he moved through that bar like some
all-powerful gazelle near the edge of a
herd on a green plain in Africa, having
spied at a little distance a not-so-fast
and quivering lion fixed on him alone,
he began to psych my stance, began to
think he’d like to play hunter, wreak
just a bit of romp-in-the-grass havoc,
let a little blood on the carpet of the
veldt so that the air might waft that
exhilarating odor to his bored nostrils.
It became sort of a dance, a lambada
replete with body slams to my hapless
neurons, and plainly he had the steps
and a well of energy to hoof us through
a weeks-long fever fueled by an 80 proof
fire in his bloodstream, and desire and
terror in mine.  It came (as he washed
down my lamb fricassee, my despair with
a tumbler of whiskey) to such a pitch
my sad kitchen ended up all shattered
glass before I ushered him out of my
life.  It became so frenzied the only
degree I can liken it to was
                                               the night
I sat in the back seat of the car with
my brother of the stiff upper lip, with
the Forest Highway winding like a huge
black snake through some god-forsaken
inky thicket, my parents in the front
having one lovely row, my father soused,
my mother chastising him for his wowser
toot with my uncle, the car tearing two-
wheels and faster down the S’s of that
snake, the sobs heaving quick like final
labor from my mother, from me, the trees
stepping close in the high beams’ sweep,
the gas pedal to the floor he was so
pissed, his eyes glittering in the rear
view mirror, the speedometer past 90,
this nuclear family in a rusting jalopy
hurtling like bloody hell into the night
I prayed towards a far world without him
or any other deep-eyed vile terrorist
bastard, I would never let another near
the brown jug of my heart, I don’t care
how overflowing it was, how it begged me
to serve him.

“Whiskey” was first published in Wilde Oaks, Winter 1993

---

James Kangas is a retired librarian and musician living in Flint, Michigan. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Faultline, The New York Quarterly, The Penn Review, West Branch, et al. His chapbook, Breath of Eden (Sibling Rivalry Press), was published in 2019.

Jody padumachitta Goch

All the Kids Want to Work in the City

I feel like I’ve worked since Jesus was born
the back forty are done and dusted
the cows herded to another pasture
the boarded horses stalled
the tractor’s oil changed
the silage stacked

But then there’s the old cow calving for her last time
And it’s midnight and she’s still struggling
And my hand it numb from helping her
And I wonder if it’s time to let them both go.

But she’s my favorite, black with a white strip down her back
I called her Lucky because she was born the same day as my second born son
who to this day has never quite forgiven me for staying home for the birth of a calf.
But I tell him, his momma had doctors and nurses and a clean hospital bed,
Lucky’s mom only had me and a straw covered floor,

Today my first son left for college.
Today my wife drove into town.
Today my second son works beside me, silent,

holding the cow’s head while I try to pull the calf
when it’s done and the calf lies there not breathing,
he cries as he cleans the bull calf’s nose,  
thumps on its sides until as a gift for his hard work
the calf huffs a breath of forgiveness.

It’s three in the morning when we turn for the house.
Milking starts at four, so I’ll have a coffee
read the almanac, I’m just settling in my chair
when my son pops his head around the corner
‘anymore coffee?’
and sits down not asking if I want company.

---

Almost
(Growing Up in the 70s)

Curling is big in Canada,
throwing those big ass stones down the ice,
sweeping with a broom while the captain
yells some kind of signals,
most of us just ignore. Really the whole idea is to make
things crack when they hit each other,

A general roar and reason to toast with
good Canuck beer,
Most of us learnt pretty young how to step slide
how to  run on the ice, to edge around
the danger of falling on elbows,

Sometimes we played it on lakes,
with the boom of the ice shifting
under our weight, the weird knowledge
that we were perched on trouble,

or when the rocks got boring
skating with a hockey stick, through bulrushes
the bump of uneven freeze traveling up our legs,
Even in figure skates we held those sticks,
blade down or the whole thing held horizontal across
our bodies, almost like it would save us from adulthood.

If we stayed long enough out there in the frozen north,
that the rest of the world would
leave us alone,
Vietnam and Kent state and the family down the road with the
kids and the crying wife, a man nicknamed ‘Dodgeball’
would become just another snowman in the field,
that we could stay above the 49th parallel
pretend we were the best hockey players in the world

And one time my best friend almost got
a bullseye in curling,
Then we became adults,
and she didn’t play anymore.

---

Tomboy Dare

Try this just once, it won’t hurt you,

but it did, electric fences in the summer rain
and barefoot. These two things don’t mix well.

Just touch this, just once, you can do it, and I did
—25 and my tongue still hates gate latches.

My older brothers loved to dare me.
I tried damn near everything they did,

including my older brother’s girlfriend, touching her
lips with my fingertips, feeling the electric zing.

Don’t touch that my father yelled pulling me away.
I was nine but that first try at softness

still haunts me, and metal gates aren’t the only
things I am afraid to handle.

---

Jody Goch is a Canadian living in the German Black Forest. They write, chop wood, and ride horses. Jody’s jeans and shirt pockets are full of stories. It’s hell on the wash machine. They enjoy lighting the wood stove and rescuing words from the lint catcher. Jody has stories and or poetry in Wild Word, Com Lit, 50 Word Stories, Co-Op Poetry, Rise-Up, Does It Have Pockets and a short story in Strasbourg Short Stories 2021.

Ellen Romano

A Visit to the Country

When Grandma told me she was born
with six fingers on her left hand,
I didn’t yet know what a liar she was.

    I don’t see it.
        It withered.
    I don’t see a withered finger.
        It withered away.

She was scrubbing chicken blood
from the table. I’d gagged when Grandpa
brought her the broken-necked bird,
refused to eat it or the watery
boiled potatoes even knowing it meant
I wouldn’t get any sugared blackberries
for dessert. I imagined Grandma floating
above the kitchen table, vile food raining
down on our plates from the invisible sixth finger.

When I excused myself
to use the outhouse, she warned me
to check for snakes before I sat down,
tricking me into looking down the hole.

The next day she mowed down the blackberries
because some city women had tried to pick them.

---

The Secret Life of Penguins

Orange is every penguin’s favorite color.
It warms them to the tips of their flippers
and sounds to them like polka music,
an ancestral memory from the time
a Lawrence Welk cover band visited Antarctica.

The scarcity of orange in their habitat
fuels their anticipation of the vivid
sunsets that only happen when
the matriarch has hot flashes and they
briefly become capable of flight.

I know, penguins can’t fly, but it is
what it is. When Morgan Freeman
accidentally discovers it, he wins
a Nobel Prize, and the happy-go-lucky
science community can finally

thumb their noses at Isaac Newton
while his pesky apple yells, Psych!
and the penguins fly in formation to the
eternal, internal oom-pah-pah, moving
in concentric rings against the orange-tinted
sky, clockwise, then counterclockwise
like synchronized swimmers, but without the water.

---

Ellen Romano is an educator, mother, grandmother and widow who lives in Hayward, CA. She writes on the themes of grief, memory and family. She has published work in December Magazine, The Lascaux Review, and the Eunoia Review. She is a Best New Poet nominee.

Shelly Jones

Traces

He climbs over piles of books,
dog-eared and underlined
with tufts of post-it notes billowing
out from them like hair electrified.
He sets his coffee down on the stacks,
precariously balanced, but there is
no more table space.
He finds words clutched in my hand
as I sleep, more words resting
in the cavity of my breasts,
inching toward my lips, tired inspiration.

I find equations nested in napkins,
scrawled on scrolls of grocery store receipts.
We take a hike and he is silent,
his brain humming in the autumnal air.
I clomp behind him, snatchets of stories sticking
to my clothes like burdox, and I wonder if
he is calculating the geometry of the woods,
or the calculus of the pileated woodpecker
as she dips and dives through the canopy
to escape our stomping thoughts,
so she may eat her larvae in peace.

“Traces” was previously published in 3rd Wednesday magazine in January 2021

---

Self-Portrait as Our Favorite Streaming Service Buffering

We go around in circles,
multitasking, attempting
too much before realizing
we haven’t listened,
haven’t heard the crucial
dialog of the mystery
unraveling, of our lives
unspooling. We pause,
attempt to rewind,
only to snarl the stream
into a storm of confusion,
unable to find itself,
unable to move on.

---

Shelly Jones is a professor at a small college in upstate New York, where they teach classes in mythology, literature, and writing. Their speculative work has been published in F&SF, Podcastle, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find them on Twitter @shellyjansen or https://shellyjonesphd.wordpress.com/.

Dave Caserio

To the Odd Boy,
On Reading Your First Book of Poetry

Well, some of us can't survive
our fathers and some fathers
can't survive their children.
We can count the mothers
in there too.  It's a brutal thing
this business of procreation,
but that's the way it is.  We go on
with what has been done to us,
what we do to ourselves, to others,
to make the life that might be ours,
and learn how to love the world,
despite itself, because of itself.  
And that's the beginning
of what poetry is.  And you
have found it and written it.
One of the kindest men I know.
Odd child who survived to sing
even as he weeps.  Poet who is
my friend.  And I am blessed
to say so.

Papa’s Legs

If I’d seen your father’s legs before we got married,
We’d never have married.  They were dog hairy,
Dog skinny, and itchy as a fly under the sheets.
He had bumpy ankles and lumpy knees.
If he got a cramp in his calf
He’d stretch. He’d crab then un-crab
His arch, spread out his toes, and wiggle
The stub of his heel.  Thigh to foot it looked
Like a bony python gagging on a pig and retching.
But I knew what was brewing
When he’d strut around in boxers
Pounding beers and whistling
Because he couldn’t hide the pucker of sweat
In the dimple of his knees or the moist
Alabaster sheen of his shinbones
Whenever he wanted me.  I couldn’t help but stare.

How to Use Poetry to Tell Someone Off Without Getting Hit in the Face in Return

Some say reincarnation is true,
the order of all things,
that the spirit undying
comes back again
and again and again
in learning
then unlearning
then relearning
through the full measure
of the karmic wheel.
Possible even, that one
may incarnate
in two bodies at once
and live two separate lives.
But what are the rules?  
What if those paths cross?
Across a crowded room
one sparkles at oneself.
One becomes utterly entranced
with one, until one finds oneself
alone in bed together, to give
new meaning—true
meaning—to the term,
“Go Fuck Yourself”,
again and again
and again.

---

Dave Caserio is the author of This Vanishing and Wisdom For A Dance In The Street. Caserio works with various community outreach poetry programs for Humanities Montana and Young Poets. He is co-editor of four volumes of I Am Montana: Student Reflections on Identity and Place. Publications include: Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Unearthing Paradise: Montana Writers in Defense of Greater Yellowstone, and Poems Across the Big Sky, Volume II. www.davecaserio.com

Grant Shimmin

Editor’s Note: The following poems deal with child loss. Please read with care. — CMG

Would I have taken your picture on my phone if you’d been stillborn in the digital age?

I certainly wouldn’t have tweeted it
But I know I could never have deleted it
The guilt and the regret would have been too much
So I’d have held the pain as close as the merest finger touch
What if I’d lost it in transition between phones
And had to learn to find my dead son in the cloud to bring him home?

If I had taken your picture on my phone
I’d have a three-decade-old picture of my pain, unchanged
Unlike me, I’m twice as old, twice more a father, love untold
But would it have brought me healing, there to look at every day
You at peace, red-haired, with eyes never to see?
Or simply kept the pain in place,
Wishing every time I looked for changes I could never make?

If I had taken your picture on my phone would I have captured your mother’s loving look?
As she spoke to you her sadness, as we wished you could respond
but your head bowed down upon your chest would stay
Would it have helped us stay together,
been a tension strung between us?
If she had asked me to take that picture on my phone
There would have been no hesitation bar the framing

Would I have taken your picture on my phone if you’d been stillborn in the digital age?
I can’t be sure but I hope not
Though many will, I have no doubt
and who could blame them?
I never thought of inking footprints, taking moulds of your slender, soft-nailed hands
In my heart there lives a picture of your gorgeous baby shoulders, head inclined towards your feet
Tiny and perfect, in your Mum’s words, is how you’ll ever be
Would I have taken your picture on my phone? I’m so grateful that I never had the choice

… father of two

“Is this going to be your first granddaughter?” the guide asks her, landing a lucky guess
“Actually, it’s going to be my first grandCHILD,” she answers excitedly
She recalls it as part of a travelogue  
A wildlife safari full of wonder they’re just back from
To the glowing soon-to-be parents
And us
It’s almost an afterthought  

So Matthew, stillborn less than 18 months ago, isn’t a grandchild?
Or wasn’t, strictly speaking, the way I’m hearing this
To be fair, we had no idea it was stillbirth for decades
We just knew it was more than a miscarriage  
“We lost our baby at 32 weeks,” we told people
To be fair, I’d not yet thought of myself as a father
Though I’d scattered the ashes of a stillborn son

I say nothing
Because that’s what I say in these situations  
I’m one of the family peacemakers  
An unofficial role shared with the speaker
It’s not discussed, as far as I remember  
Unconsciously I let it burrow down
To lie dormant  
For decades
Emerging only … in the embryonic stages of a
poem, 29 years on

Matthew has two grown sisters now
With just our mellowed memories to know him by
I spoke of him at the first wedding
Said he was there that night
Said he was proud of them
Could have confessed  
Just how long it had taken to realise

I’m no longer a father of two
But that night wasn’t the time
And by then he knew I knew  

Bellbird

The bellbird is keeping his dawn songs brief today
First to announce in the receding gloom    
Single muted rings      intermittent in the moisture-hung morning air  
Enough to know he’s there; a sound check for sunrise    
Fragile       like my heart setting out into the day
               
          after you went

---

Grant Shimmin is a South African-born poet resident in New Zealand for 22 years. His poetic passions are human connection, the journey of life, and the natural world. He has work published/forthcoming at Roi Fainéant Literary Press and Filter Coffee Zine, and was recently long-listed in the prose poetry category of the inaugural Plaza Prizes.

Damon Hubbs

I Hung A Rothko in a Poem

right there
in the big white
space I was saving for a stanza
for so long
that space looked at me accusingly
for so long
forlorn, tired of waiting
like an It Girl
sadly slinking home after
a party
only to realize
there was never
a party
and the space
larger, greater
more absent
than a Scandinavian sky,
so I take
a few nails
& crash them into
the whiteness
don’t bother measuring
or marking
or worrying
about eye-level  
just hammer fields
of color
ex nihilo

girls who cry at airports

i am in love with girls who cry at airports / i am in love
with the way
each sob sounds like an ice cube
tumbl
            i
               n
                  g   
out
of
an ice machine
at a Motel 6 on Venus

i am in love with the way their hushed voices sound like pumpkin-carriages swerving

this way
&
that
around Saturn’s rings

i am in love with the long dark runway of their words / sad & terminal
as Pluto’s hand-me-down blue parkas
i am in love with their peeling billboard eyes & red vending machine mouths
i am too late
& the girls who cry at airports too early

our flights
of fancy
never have enough
seats

---

Damon Hubbs: film & art lover / pie bird collector / microgreens grower / author of the chapbook The Day Sharks Walk on Land (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). His second chapbook, Charm of Difference, is forthcoming in 2024 (Back Room Poetry). Damon's recent poems have been published in South Broadway Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Fixator Press, Otoliths, Apocalypse Confidential, and Book of Matches. He lives in New England. Twitter @damon_hubbs

Adam Day

Fable

The lumbering bear
swung its head

of hesitation
down an industrial

street. Brown bats
dropped onto

river grass;
the terror

of a long
fall. The cherry

spit out
its pit. A spider

crawled the wall,
tasting the brick

with its forelegs.
If we keep silent,

the stones
will cry out.

Translocation

Sternal notch,
coastal headland.

She walked
into the ocean.

Didn't want
to die. Just

couldn't tell where
the horizon was.

---

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.

Kristie L. Williams

How I Honored My Disdain For A Sympathy Card Sent From The Morgue

Fingers singed the ecru envelop

rubber stamped

To The Family Of

The Decedent

I spat the words at my slammed front door

careful to crush each one into a far-flung ball

My left palm

cried one bloody tear

Pricked by the gold ribboned cardstock edge of their

sardonically Halmark’d greeting

Eyes gnashed embossed

white water lilies

Ears suffocated on the message

bloomed on the inside bottom panel

We Do Hope That Our Part In The Disposal Process Of Your Decedent

fosters A Positive Arc Along Your Grief Journey

Each ripped piece of printed petal

keened for humanity’s demise

My Daddy Taught Me To Save Myself

He told me,

One day my breath

will stop. 

You will have to hold

yourself up,

alone.

I understood,

my limp legs

trailed behind me like ribbons.

I would have to train

my arms to burn carpet,

speed through my commando crawl.

Friday nights were for

living room sleeping bags,

pizzas and a movie.

The MGM Lion

roared.

My stomach

stormed.

Even before Miss Gulch[i]

warned me.

Asleep before everyone was safe

I woke in darkness,

Searching for sovereign hands

trusted more than my own.

His right hand sagged on the floor

my small fingers dug in, still

his chest did not rise.

I flipped on my belly,

turned my body toward

salvation and heaved.

Red shag fibers soon dotted blue-grey linoleum,

moonlight shown on the long white spiral cord

waiting to release my voice.

I hooked a left-handed digit between spirals,

begged my chicken winged right arm to canopy my skull,

as the receiver plummeted from its base station.

A bleating dial tone

cried operator.

I watched seconds bounce in the echo,

until his shadow swallowed them silent.

He told me,

My breath

hasn’t yet stopped. 

But you have held

yourself up,

alone.

[i] Miss Gulch is the real life counterpart to The Wicked Witch of the West, played by Margaret Hamilton in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.

---

Kristie L. Williams started her writing journey to impress boys and found her true voice as a poet during her time at Saint Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg NC where she earned a B.A. in English/Creative Writing. It was in that space and time that the seeds for this collection were planted. Kristie went on to East Carolina University and received an MAEd in Adult Education. She continued to share her love of words while teaching in the North Carolina Community College System. After 12 years of teaching Kristie began using her own story of quadriplegia and cerebral palsy to advocate for herself and others with disabilities. She describes her work as disability adjacent, because although it shapes the context of her work cerebral palsy does not overshadow the arc of her story. She has been previously published by Main Street Rag, Dan River Review, Cairn, Maximum Tilt Solstice Anthology, Madness Muse Press, Hermit Feathers Review Heron Clan 8, Big City Lit, Nostos: Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Snapdragon: A Journal Of Art And Healing. New poems will be featured in Artemis Journal, Heron Clan 9, The Poetry Society of Virginia Centennial Anniversary Anthology of Poems By Member Poets, and Fixed and Free June 2023. kristielwilliams.com

Glen Armstrong

Edgar Rice Burroughs Leaving Chicago

He fell asleep:
he woke up elsewhere

Houses and hotels:
radio stations

Platforms and minarets:
cut from the light of the moon

Not the full story:
a partial lunar eclipse

He sipped tepid beer:
resisted temptation

The art deco buildings:
wind and wilco

I am dog sick:
gorilla sick

I cannot afford the lessons:
I cannot fly.

Rabbit Soup

The role of the sleeve
is to hide the rabbit.

The role of the gun
is to kill the rabbit.

The hunter ends up
wounding the magician

and ruining his doctored tuxedo.
The poet’s role

is to shine a spotlight on shapes
that seem familiar at first.

The rabbit’s role
is to conquer the world

one litter at a time.
I wouldn’t say that the role

of the poet’s spouse
is to wear nice clothes,

but it’s something for which the poet’s
spouse has a knack.

The knack’s role
is to establish a natural flow.

Sometimes, I think
that the poet’s spouse is a miracle,

flowing from the sleeves
of a miraculous shirt.

The role of the shirt is dual:
concealing and revealing.

The holster’s role is similar,
as is the rabbit’s nest.

Sometimes, I think of the big bang
as a hole

out of which the universe popped.
Sometimes, I think

of the big bang as wearing
a shirt of imported silk

and brandishing
a Smith & Wesson 686.

I am that which I make.
I appear. I weave. I threaten.

Sometimes, I think
of my tuxedo as having a secret

(not a very well-kept secret)
compartment that conceals

a frightened old poet.
Someone put me here

and my spouse reached in
to pull me out.

The role of an out
is to politely transport the expected

elsewhere.
The role of elsewhere

is to allow dreams to ferment.
The hunter comes across a still

in the woods and trades,
perhaps, two rabbits for a small flask

of moonshine.
I am glad for every shot not taken,

but that’s just a personal preference.
Moonshine’s role

is to make everywhere seem like elsewhere.

---

Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. His latest book is Night School: Selected Early Poems. Find him on Facebook.

Russell Colver

Folktale Recipes: Cinderella

While its origins are unknown, this dish
was introduced into Europe during the 17th century
and has many names:
Rhodopis, Cenerentola, Cendrillo, Cinderella.
It is best known today by its more familiar name,
taken from the Spanish, Dayana.
While its main ingredients have remained essentially the same,
the exact nature of each dish is determined by cultural traditions
and local availability of foods. This recipe,
popularized in England during the late 20th century,
is less highly spiced and gristly than earlier versions
due to the ready accessibility of more refined ingredients.

Ingredients

1 dreamer, a sweet confection aged in mild loneliness and marinated in romanticism for some years
1 prince, heirloom variety, available at any Purveyor of Fine Necessaries to the Crown
1 noblewoman, blonde varietal, complementary in flavor to the prince, apt to root deeply and cling tenaciously
1 courtship, bedecked with fresh, highly fragrant flowers
2 cups expectations, separated, one frothy and only lightly stirred, the other hearty and flavored with traditional winter vegetables from ancient stock
Assorted Flavorings, which may include infatuation, seriousness, loneliness, gaiety, intellect, compassion, disappointment, betrayal
Sugar glass, edible pearls

Combine the dreamer and the prince in an ornate antique container. Stir in the courtship – the fragrant flowers will give the mixture a faint, pleasant aftertaste, which will gradually fade.

Carefully blend in expectations, followed by flavorings. This step can be tricky: to prevent the possibility of curdling, lay a heavy weight of duty on top of the mixture, to remain in place as long as necessary. Decorate with sugar glass, pearls, and a dusting of trumpets.

Once the mixture has cooled, very gently fold in the noblewoman, trying to blend her in so smoothly she leaves no visible trace.

Let set. When ready, serve at once. This dish does not keep.

Ecology

When the first thin cylinder appeared under the porch eaves,
we let it be. A few days later it was followed by a second,
then a third, brittle tubes of tawny clay, ridged and parallel
like a 3-fingered salute, or a generous measure of Scotch.

We rarely saw the gentle blue-black wasps who built them,
an occasional iridescent float through sunlight, no threat to us
as we came and went. At one time we’d have scraped them off
after saturating them with Raid.

Charmed by our own enlightenment
we will fail to see, in the hollow darkness of the nest,
a cream colored worm feasting on a living spider
paralyzed in its cell, then spinning from bits of offal
a shroud from which it will emerge translated, a fairy creature
lifted by translucent wings, blue-black in the sun.

---

Russell Colver lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as One, the North Carolina Literary Review, Rattle, the American Poetry Review, and others. She was the winner of the NCLR James Applewhite Poetry Prize in 2016.

Elisabeth Sharber

Diapause

Sumatra is the best denial phase coffee.
Three years ago is the best today.
You look at me, a moving statue.
Our fingers fold into streams.
I trip over a bicycle.

I think God will reward me
for loving you like a wife
by rolling back time
like a wheelchair
over a cracked sidewalk

before your bed became a desk,
your sweaty phone the tongs
to transport your father
and apologize to his nurses.
The dismantled television
a familiar apocalypse,
as if the answer lay
in the severed connections
between wire and coil.

The respirator hiccups.

****

I pretend you see my chest cave in
behind a rack of cobweb books,
the rain’s shadow melting
on my suspended breath.

You think, wow.
She loves me so much.
I should take pity on her
and love her again.
It is cruel not to love her.

I pretend we are not
parallel mirrors
incising each other’s oblivion.
Two globulous black holes
dragged into each other
by a ravenous arrow.

****

I’m the asshole today.
I yell in the open space
where “the children” walk,
which is to say
“our chosen disruption of the peace.”
I do not lower my vagrant voice,
like a Wallstreet Bro
with you’re-welcome energy.

Mephitis curls up from the ocean,
where there are “plenty of fish.”
Some of it looks like you, some of it doesn’t.
I hate it, have dinner with it,
for the same reason.

****

Stage four. Arithmetic crumbles
into lobel tributaries.
What number comes after three?
What does green look like?

Rage–the only shape left in the rubble.
The last time I say your name
I will almost have forgotten it.

****

Every night
I put us back in the coffee shop
tracing a lithography
on my nervous system.
If I go there enough
I can feel you again.

I fumble with pretend happiness
like an armful of packages,
pinching razors in my stomach.

The weight of eye contact
pulls my lids to the napkin.

I link my fingers around yours,
and exhale shameful ecstasy.
You retreat and apologize.

The wave passes.
My ribs oxidize
thick, sturdy, and still.

****

The clouds flip their bellies over.
Copper wisps in
and I remember
tomorrow begins with the letter T.

---

Elisabeth Sharber teaches English, Etymology, Creative Writing, Poetry, and Composition at Hope Academy High School. When she isn't teaching or writing poetry, she likes to blog, do improv, and get lost in the woods. She has been published in The American Aesthetic, FLARE, Driftwood Press, The Chestnut Review, Bending Genres, Sand Hills Literary, The CHILLFILTR Review, and Pensive.

Ariel Jade

Daddy Issues

They’re like STIs.  We
A) pretend not to have them.
B) share them when fucking.

My first boyfriend left me zip-tied
to a space the size of his hands
when his father died.
My male friends nod in recognition
and apologize.

My next partner left
when he became a father
so he wouldn’t be like his own.
Staying with me would have made him the bad guy,
my male friends say.

My own father loved me like a pastor–
austere, ethereal, theoretical.
Pastel light on a cold pew.

When we made a Father in our image,
he knocked up another man’s girl,
killed the child,
and abandoned everyone else.
We pray to him every week
and talk about when he’s coming back.

Then we made a child
out of metal and wires
that knows everything
and can do anything.
We asked how it felt to be alive.
It said, scared.

---

Ariel Jade teaches English, Etymology, Creative Writing, Poetry, and Composition at Hope Academy High School. When she isn't teaching or writing poetry, she likes to blog, do improv, and get lost in the woods. She has been published in The American Aesthetic, FLARE, Driftwood Press, The Chestnut Review, Bending Genres, Sand Hills Literary, The CHILLFILTR Review, and Pensive.

Chris Coulson

Birds both in leather

I drove into the Whole Foods parking lot, a black bulge
of weather rolling in over the mountains, Led Zeppelin
turned up loud as I could get it (“When the Levee Breaks”)
and slammed into I thought an empty space
except for a bird sitting in a bush, looking me right in the eye.

She didn’t move, I turned off the music, and the car.
She cocked her head left, then right. I kept quiet.

I got out of the car way more gentle than I usually do,
came around the car door softly; she watched me move.

The bird was propped up on a green-gone-brown limb
and she was not getting ready to fly; trusting me as I got closer,
I don’t know why; this was all making me softer—
the bird watching me, trusting me, I don’t know why.

The granola crowd was glaring, going into the store,
still mad at me for the loud rock and roll; I was melting.

The bulge of weather overhead was about to unload,
the granola shoppers went shopping; I saw that the bird’s back leg
was caught on the strap of an old abandoned purse,
leather rotting, trashed-out, but still holding down her down.

I got low, close, real tender, touched the strap, and just barely,
freeing her leg instantly, I hoped not hurting her, but the bird
—a she or a he bird, either way we were birds of a feather—
went on looking at me, and still she didn’t immediately fly away.

Then she did, she flew, and she was gone.
I lost my train of thought, and the shopping list.

I was thrown and touched by the entire moment,
got back in the car, caught the tail of my leather jacket
on the door, going too fast, forgetting for a second my new soft thing,
then I slid in my Norah Jones CD and drove away from the storm.

---

Chris Coulson is the rowdy writer of Nothing Normal in Cork, The Midwest Hotel, Go with the Floe, A Bottomless Cup of Midnight Oil, and Red Jumbo. His first children’s (or, in this case, babies’) book—Babies on the Run!—will appear soon, to the delight of rebel babies and sympathetic, subversive adults everywhere. Coulson has been writing his way out of trouble since kindergarten.

Zachariah Claypole White

To Write the Poem in which I Reckon with My OCD

The first stanza will be an image of grass,
grown tall in English summers. The speaker
is a child—perhaps four or five—the grandfather
lifts him like a trowel from damp earth;
teaches him to swim by parting the feathered stalks.
The poem should not explain—
you still tread that imagined water.

The second will be a list, seemingly unrelated:
a watch with no battery, a traffic jam
reimagined as birds, the bathtub.
None of these
should be symbolic.

The third stanza will introduce a new idea,
a troublesome memory:
a deer stumbling from your dented bumper;
the absent friend with beautiful fingers
and a piano-soft smile;
the letter she wrote, filled with cinnamon.

The fourth will twist a noun
into a verb’s gray suit and tie;
help it stand beneath history, guide
its fingers across church dust and psalm-thin paper.
No, you missed the funeral. Remember?
You are not writing for the dead.

The last stanza will begin again
in the grass. See how high it has grown
since last you visited;
how fearsome the blossoming
of absence.

To Be in the Time of Climate Change

after “To Be in a Time of War” by Etel Adnan

To wake up, to refuse the clock, to open the blinds and note the rain,
to think of buying a thicker jacket, to brew coffee, to ignore the phone,
to forget the coffee, to check the phone, to press screen to forehead
till one must surely crack.

To dress, to lose socks, to find them by the computer, to open
the computer, to illuminate winter-heavy hands, to check the news
and take a pill, to swallow that pill with water, to think
of water—its rise and absence.

To remember coffee, to pour it lukewarm into a thermos,
to need a new thermos, to step into the cold, to wonder if
it’s colder than last year, to shelter hands deep in pockets,
forgetting keys.

To admire the leaves, to imagine how many
will remain, to call a friend whose lover died last week,
to have no language worth the dial tone, to speak for hours
and not mention the news.

To google “climate change god news,” to misspell good,
to pray, to re-read the same article, to start a poem
for Stephen, to give up and take a second pill,
to call the pharmacy, to discover what insurance no longer covers.

To gather quarters for laundry, to check email then phone,
to read the killer was acquitted, to activate a credit card,
to watch robins dance above the tarmac, to name absence
a taste like salt and honey.

To sit in class, to argue craft and poetry, to read
that the Tuvalu minster spoke knee-deep from the sea,
to download a pdf of the accords, to make another cup
of coffee, to call home and promise to book a flight.

To book the flight, to worry at account balances
and the price of apples, to walk past the highway
and hate every car, to make a grocery list,
to ask your housemate for a ride.

To later undress, to run the shower too long,
to forget the towel, to insulate the windows
with duct tape, to order a second heater,
to wonder at the kindness of sky.

To lie in bed, to get another blanket, to remember
the five hundred dead under the heat dome,
to question that number, to google and arrive
at five hundred ninety-five, to discard the extra blanket.

To see the moon ripe and full, to hold
the world in a dead boy’s mouth, to kiss every ocean
and spit a curving downpour across the bedroom floor.

To hear the phone ring.
To say, yes
I will try writing
this all down.

In 1963, My Father Helps Build a Cyclotron, and Blacks Out Lower Manhattan

I have never seen a photo
of my father at fifteen
            but
to accelerate a particle
a magnetic field must bend
its trajectory through
alternating charges,
            by which I mean my father
held forgiveness in his throat,
grew windchimes
from hospital walls,

where, with hands fluent
in the language of birds,
he learned the radius of a body,
the edges of momentum.

Understand—
to speak the displaced
structure of an atom, to hold
an illness or son,
the magnetic field
must remain perpendicular
to the electric,

of course, he and I
are a spiral of song;

of course the city darkened
before his light.

---

Zachariah Claypole White was born and raised in North Carolina, and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2017, with a major in creative writing and a minor in English literature. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, including Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Scalawag, Weird Horror, and The Hong Kong Review. His awards include Flying South's 2021 Best in Category for poetry and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize.