Nadine Ellsworth-Moran

Red-Eye Flight

a found poem

Arrive ready for  

sacrifice.  

I’ve managed to carry  

my years, but overwhelmed 

I run to her, wake paranoid

because I forgot my gamble 

comes filled with need, 

something key— 

security 

Self-explanatory     Spill-proof 

I never keep for myself pain, or 

love. I hide my face, 

protect who I saved. 

Original text used for found poem.

I listen for the tumblers to fall into place 

marvelously useless keys that confounded the reason    

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

According to the London Mirror, the average person carries nine keys, but only knows what six of those keys will unlock. Meaning, three of those keys carried around daily, jangling in the pocket or swimming about in the depths of a purse, are complete mysteries. Mysteries the average person seems to be completely complacent about carrying and will only, on occasion, cast their thoughts on the questions, Why do I have this key?  What in this world does it unlock?

I always want to believe in reason,

in hopes it will provide the key

to unlocking all that has confounded

me. Though I admit, I am often confounded

by many things. Insights other reasonable

people seem to acquire with facility, I must key

into my mind, carve in that gray stone, just to reason

out the reason I should want to be un-confounded—

for very often I believe, mystery is key.

In an attempt to control our keys, we capture them on utility rings, key disks, and carabiners. We color-code & number them in an effort to know what each one unleashes, unlocks, looses upon the world: the keys to the Kingdom, the answer key, the key to success & happiness, the key for the door at the end of the world, if such a door exists, is on someone’s keychain — perhaps,      
one of the mysterious three.

Locks in multiverse
abound. Break their mystery, keys 
summon worlds to be.  

Eyes are the windows

I know my sisters by their eyes, 

though I have only brothers, still

my sisters exist, connected by disguise

to cover our divided hearts.

Though I have only brothers, still

I am an only child in this discourse, 

so as to cover my divided heart 

I gather my sisters, my soul resource.

For I am an only child in this discourse—

my own subterfuge runs with the deep 

within my sisters, my soul resource,  

whose eyes conceal the secrets they keep,   

while my own subterfuge runs with the deep 

and I pour out my sins as easily as lies 

and my eyes can veil the secrets I keep— 

Yes, I know my sisters by their eyes. 

---

Nadine Ellsworth-Moran lives in Georgia where she serves full time in ministry. She has a passion for writing and is fascinated by the stories of the modern South unfolding all around her as she seeks to bring everyone into conversation at a common table. Her essays and poems have appeared in Rust+Moth, Calla Press, Theophron, Interpretation, Ekstasis, Thimble, Emrys, Structo, and Kakalak, among others. She lives with her husband and four unrepentant cats. 

Paige Eaton

Earth Update:

Rivers flow faster if given coffee. [1]

Rivers of coffee flow faster if given cyanide.

Cyanide has been nerfed by 50%.

You can now poison your friends with apple-cores.

Apple-cores are now sold at circuses.

Circuses are now spawnable in packs of five.

Five clowns make a murder.

Temporarily removed insects.

Silence has been increased 40%.

The uncanny has become the recognizable.

Fields have become mass graves paved over with life.

Flowers have grown legs and can have sex to reproduce.

Grapes are now the food for the gods.

Insects have been returned and the world

caved under their collective weight.

First graders have been removed.

Screaming is punishable by death.

If you scream while dying we will kill you again

in a hail of bullets, the only way you are permitted to

die here. [Update retracted as it is not an update].

Second graders pop out of the ground like gnomes.

Gnomes have started showing up to the school in

droves demanding an education too.

Schools have become clouds.

Clouds have been removed.

Shower buff; showers now warm up 12% faster

Ice pellets rain clinking

Tubes of water pressure drain into the lungs.

Crabs now have the ability to run at 50 MPH

Crab legs are now 90% more likely to dance in the mouth.

Fish now spit angry words at their predators.

Humans are now the prey to fish.

The ocean biomes have been nerfed by 50%.

The sleep paralysis demon can now speak

[1] The Earth Updates Twitter account demands rights to all italicized suggestions.

---

Paige Eaton is a recent graduate of Hartwick College, with a Bachelors of Art in History. She is originally from Rochester, NY. Her recent work focuses on surreal and dream-like experiences. Her work has appeared in Word of Mouth, Dark Entries, and her poem, “The Itaewon Tragedy was a Pentadecagon,” won honorable mention for the 2023 Anna Sonder Prize for Poetry.

Megan Cartwright

Frankenstein Stuff

Subject line: Frankenstein stuff

Marking: UNOFFICIAL

I fear the missive is something perverse,

an amputated limb, or worse –

‘Beautiful! – Great God!’

An overgrown email trail,

details of ambition so grotesque

it must be put to rest.

Frankenstein stuff –

remonstration from an Executive

with a god-complex, and a penchant for

two-hundred-year-old metaphors?

More likely a meme sent, well-meant,

by bolt-necked Boris from Sales.

It could be the abomination –

hulking hallucination of opiate fevers

reaching out in 8-foot font, an

UNOFFICIAL invitation

to turn myself inside out,

fleshy bag of neuroses, stitched–together–with–doubt,

a mind made monstrous with what-ifs.

Woman’s-Woman

I’ve been told I’m not a “woman’s-woman.”

For what it’s worth, it could be true.

Women change shape in the space

between flashes/of/strobe/lights.

Bathroom girls are the best friends

you never had in high school.

They fix your hair; let you cry over that guy.

They kiss you on the lips right before last drinks.

Bathroom girls are not women’s-women.

When they shed their clothes and tumble

into bed, all hair and legs,

their lights go out, not a flicker of doubt.

---

Megan Cartwright is a poet and college Literature teacher who resides in Australia. Her writing has recently featured in Swim Meet Lit Mag and Passengers Journal.

Bruce McRae

The Neighbor

We share the same headspace
and howls of derision.
Moonlight avoids us equally.
We're a couple of shadows
in a blackout.
You can't choose your family
and we are conjoined
at the hip and head.
I told him, Your problems
are my problems,
and Buddha replied,
You don't have to be me
to be you, our bloods
thicker than water and mud,
the mailman confused,
the neighbours' cat, a tyrant
of the usual lawns and gardens,
mewling contentedly.
Death pursues me up the driveway.
Time is building its machinery.
Love has gone down
with the ship and I'm hearing
gunshots on the television.
I'm seeing lights in the sky
and meditate on alien intervention.
That this yard needs a new god
and armies of angels
to build us a wall
between ourselves and all.
Oh sweet Christ on a bike,
my neighbour is waving now,
a nod and a wink towards recognition.
Small-talk is a rat chewing on a wire.
Pleasantries are unpleasant.
I told him, I'm not a misanthrope,
I just don't like people.
See? This woman is not my wife.
These children are not my children.
He smiles like a dog that requires petting
and a long walk down a road.
I sacrifice a bull in my mind
and contemplate the effort it takes
to walk on water.
I can taste metal and smell smoke.
I'm like a last candle
and cry out for sanctuary.
I am committed to his slight eviction.

Up A Tree

There was a woman up a tree
and she wouldn't come down
for neither love nor money
and we said lady you're in a tree
and she wouldn't answer smiling
like the cat that got the cream
and neighbours gathered gossiping
and a cop looked up slightly bemused
and the papers sent a photographer
while the wind played merry havoc
through the leaves and branches
and the woman in the tree looked
over the city as evening came in and
a man who I think may have been her
husband coaxed and cajoled the
woman in the tree and night fell hard
and still she refused to take a blind
notice and the crowds dispersed
and the children tired of mocking her
and the lights came on and we went to
bed and in the morning the woman
in the tree was no longer there and the
world went happily about its business.

You Can’t Give it Away

The editor kept sharpening his pencil.
I sat there, a pile of sticks,
a promise half-recalled,
an accident about to happen.

“You never publish what I've written,”
I said, hating the sound of my own voice.

“I'm no miracle man,” said the editor,
“I'm no snake charmer.”

I sat there, a victim
of chance and circumstance,
a travelling salesman of oils and balms,
a lump under the carpet.

“I need to get the word out there,”
I said, lulled into a state of grace.
“I'm a flea without a soul,
a house without a window,
a dog enamoured of a bone.”

The editor leaned back
in his faux-leather wingback chair.
Everything I had to say had been said.
Like a Cadillac in a snowbound ditch,
we were going nowhere.

---

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle, and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been performed and broadcast globally.

Gita Smith

Gossip

Crows spread their rumors overhead, some of them believed by jays
who take up the cry. I wear a careless Saturday hairdo
and a half-buttoned coat. I walk in step to a soundtrack
of my own composing, in slow 4/4 time.

I'm neither old nor young on this ruddy day
that smells like autumn
and is wrapped in light
and the gossiping of crows.
I roll my grandfather to the park where
the scents of wet leaves
and wood smoke touch off
olfactory synapses,
our links to childhood.
He is now only the shell of my grandfather,
his once-strong facial bones collapsed,
his ropey eyebrows
like circumflexes atop the confused Os of his eyes.
His face spreads wide in a smile of pleasure at the sight of
a black Lab leaping for a Frisbee.
One withered arm rises slowly
and he calls, "Catch it boy, good boy, good Sparky!"
We sit together on a green park bench, dreamers both;
grandfather chases a long-ago dog through the flaming maples of Quebec,
and I chase a not-yet-written story to its conclusion.

This piece was first published in America’s Emerging Poets, 2018.

The First Fifth

The first time that
Beethoven’s Fifth was played,
people ran into the streets.

Men and women wept.
No one was left unchanged.
Thieves returned coins and silver while
Wife beaters laid hammers to their hands.

Clergy turned away from preaching hell
and sang long hymns of love at mass
or all alone in bare-walled cells.

The audience and those outside the hall
wanted nothing more than love,

to love,
be loved,
make love and music,
all.

This piece was first published in Alabama’s Best Emerging Poets, 2019.

---

Gita M. Smith is an ordinary, aging woman who writes and keeps a garden.

Erica Cameron

Dinner

“The herbs are from the garden”, you say.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, “the plating”.
No one wants to make the first move although we both know
you already did.

We stare at each other like this.
“I got the butter you like” you say,
“The kind with four sleeves in the box”. “Less messy” I say.

Although I haven’t picked up
my knife, I can see the butter is
still too hard
“What time did you take it out?” I ask
“An hour ago.”
“ah.”

Outside the streetlights flicker, one after another. rumblings from the last Gotrain vibrate through the walls.

From the kitchen, the timer will eventually ring telling us dessert is ready. We’ll dish it onto little plates together and
return to our seats.

How to Watch a Friend Die

Grab a cup of tea
and sit on the porch, notice rust
growing on your bike,
kids playing bubbles across the
street. How elaborate
this simple game has become; a
machine manufacturing bubbles, a dim roar
as kids dance in the giant bubble glory.
Make a mental note to buy WD-40

Go on a date.
Hell, go on several dates
Lower your standards and your neckline.
“Always in your neighbourhood, never his.”
Let him pay. Drink more than you should.
Let him tell you your ass looks good
in those jeans. Let him tell you
you’re hot. Listen to his life story.

They want this and need this. Be a good listener.

Go to a park and make out with these
boys way past midnight. Let them
kiss your breasts and hold you around the
waist with deft hands, let them walk you home.

The following morning, grab a cup of coffee
and sit on the porch. Call your friend and tell her you
 made out down the street from where she lay and it was hot.
Tell her you followed her advice and she is right, it
really does just come down to tight jeans and listening

Buy A Simple Dress

Buy a simple dress. About two fingers above
the knee. Black sandals. Thin straps-thick heels.
Walk the dog in them. Pick up the mail in them. Stand
at the bus stop checking the time in them.

Accept a ride home with a colleague. Let him
tell you about his day. How the kids in his fifth
grade class are liars. Smile graciously. Let him
tell you about his new car, how he bought it with
Inheritance from his dad. Tell him
you are sorry for his loss.

Delicately Interrupt his story about
the jammed copier – your street
is coming up on the right. Cross
then uncross your legs. Tell him the copier
on the third floor jams a lot too.

Accept his offer to pick you up in the
morning – The train rolls out at 7:20 –
Tell him you look forward to it. Tell
 him you are sorry about the liars.

---

Erica Cameron is a writer/teacher living in Toronto, Canada. When not writing, she can be found reading, looking for the next book to read, or biking aimlessly around the city.

Tim Kahl

The Mother of the Shadowgone

 The split in the bark that runs up my side centers me.
It makes me think my line runs all the way back
to Yggdrasil even though I'm just a knotty oak
a stone's throw from the mountain. There's a few
bits of acorn growth this year and a sapling shaded
by the heavy limb. Those are the only ones who stand
beneath my reach. They follow. The rest are shadowgone
or stepped on by the travelers who come to gaze at
me naked. The farmers come to pat me down and
whisper into my bark's furrows. The one last week
brought his little bag of suet that he pasted into
the crag above my seam. He knelt and prayed,
and three hallelujahs later I could feel his shudder
rise up within me. He showed me mercy, and talked
to me all afternoon about the star people who came
to visit his fields, the dancing tomte in his barn
who spin plates on broom handles and sing about
the cycles of the moon. They teased him for
his powerful urge given to him by the Danes.
I wondered which one of my kin was standing
sheared and shaved as his dining room table.
I could enlist the help of the nisse to know for sure.
They would come to me at midnight for twigs and
acorns to make their dolls, and I might ask them
for this favor if my mind didn't always race into
the rift forming in the sky at that time when I saw
past and future lives come tumbling down—
prisoners and astronauts, playwrights and carnival
barkers, seamstresses and cab drivers, court
reporters and innkeepers, candy makers and
one-armed clowns—all of them felt like they
were my ancestors, my family of the future,
especially with the spirit of this little one
welling up inside of me. I felt endless. I felt all
the points on my leaves tingle. I shimmered.
I felt like the daughter of Yggdrasil ready to give
birth to a complicated scheme. But as always
the visions came and they went. By morning
I prepared myself for the whispering men.
So quiet after the break of dawn. I could hear
their footfall slowly plodding up the hill.
The whispering men were coming, but it was
not them. It was the woodsmen with their saws.

Listen to “The Mother of the Shadowgone” —narration and music by author Tim Kahl.

The Game of Crossing Guard

Listen for the wind's exclamation point.
Is this gust the great summation of the waves?
The next one could push the city into the dark.
All the downed lines mean the code of silence
is threatening to take over every room
and hold the core of the mind hostage. It flips.
It rolls. It ponders one of the towering oaks
striking the roof during its collapse.
The rain has been goading all the trees
to give themselves up. The soggy ground
gives way. The game of crossing guard is over
all because the wind is a wild hound knocking
over the things it meets. It gets excited by
the bare branches, such a tender mistress,
whom the steadfast take solace from,
where the sisters of divine light take shade.

Listen to “The Game of Crossing Guard” — narration and music by Tim Kahl.

The Grand Design of the Mane

I lost the part in my hair.
It had been moving around for years.
Some strands never knew which way
to fall. They didn't care for ritual.
The obedient ones called them out
as wild hairs. They stood accused
for their profligate ways, their
unintended disregard for rules.

I lost my part, but it had never
been straight. It felt like there was
a Civil War on my scalp, advance
and retreat. I could sense my
baldness widening into truce.
I could sense the will of every
follicle adhering to its natural state.
They fall down dead on the field of
play centered around the cowlick
like it was a heat vent on the ocean floor
where all life can trace its origin back.

Each hair is amazed in its separate
grace. All that is needed is a clear
map of the myriad arrangements.
But that is unattainable and I've
become suspicious of the simple.
The grand design of the mane is beyond
recognition. I steer a course through
the turbulence of fur and shag
and carry my comb into this New Dark Age.

Listen to “The Grand Design of the Mane” — narration and music by author Tim Kahl.

---

Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] [https://soundcloud.com/tnklbnny] is the author of five books of poems, most recently Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019) and California Sijo (Bald Trickster, 2022). He is also an editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He builds flutes, plays them and plays guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos as well. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.

Carol Parris Krauss

Mama kept the canning on a shelf in the corner.

Tomatoes, green beans, bread & butter pickles. Mason jars
splattered in spiderwebs. A dirt floor basement, and rickety stairs
with a quick twist at the bottom. If I got a good start,
I could gazelle sixteen risers in four giant leaps.

Use the railing like an Olympic gymnast. Swing, leap, land.
And if I was fast, no one could grab my train-trestle ankles
as I flew down the steps. That house had haints. Years
have passed, and I can still feel the breath on my neck

as I pulled the string to the lone light bulb. Reaching
and gathering the can of whatever goodness Mama requested.
Noting the graze against my calves as I bounded to safety.

When we moved, I pushed my nose against our station wagon
window, watched that haunted house fade in the distance.
Settled in with the dogs. Began to wonder what monsters might grab

my ankles as I took my first swim in the lake in front of the new house.

Mom Moves to the Nursing Home

The garage became the holding station for the articles
chosen to move with Mom to the nursing home. During
a packing break, I scaled the stairs to the attic. Pushed
past the humidity and spider webs to locate my father’s uniforms.

She was a hot blizzard when it came to breaking
down the family home. Clinging to and crying over items
such as Cool Whip containers, while giving away Granny’s crystal
to a new neighborhood family. Slowly I removed

the decorative, commemorative, and service medals
from his uniforms. Stripped and readied them to donate
to the high school ROTC chapter. Stored the medals and his name plate
in a small box lined with a square piece of cotton. Closed the lid

on the container, dropped in it my purse, and returned
to the garage to wrap and box Mason jars and Tupperware tops.

Dismal Swamp @ Dusk

In daylight, a wretched mass of wet and mangled tree carcasses. Bones scratching
warnings in the sky. Submerged souls, abandoned cars. At a knife past dusk, far worse.
The Great Dismal Swamp.

Teacher conferences were brutal. Criers, screamers, shoulder shruggers. After, I
began my trek home to a glass of wine and my easy chair.  Then: a four car pile-up
right before my exit. I was roosting on the cusp of that black hole for a solid hour
listening to NPR,  when I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. An albino buck.
10-point rack. Flanks quivering. A silent stomp. And behind him–

Grendel.

Slick and yet, leathery. A pyramid spine and eight inches of talons on each foot. Gray
as the Virginia sky, with oozing eyes. Teeth jagged, shit brown. I watched him. He
watched the buck flinch and spring across four lanes of traffic of rubbernecking.  No one noticed
the monster. Not as he watched his prey elude him, nor as he folded into his body

and collapsed into a hollow cypress. Ravenous. Silently waiting for his next target.
A black bear or a bobcat family passing too close. A hitchhiker between destination
and the rim of the swamp. A weary teacher changing a flat tire. Or one stuck in a traffic jam.
Unfolding from her car to take a piss on the brim of the Great Dismal Swamp.

---

Carol Parris Krauss enjoys using place as a vehicle for her poems’ themes. Her work is slow, new-Southern, and packed with imagery. This Clemson graduate currently lives in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Her work has been published in Susurrus, One Art, Story South, Louisiana Literature, Broadkill Review, Hastings, The South Carolina Review, Bay to Ocean Anthology, and other online and print journals. In 2018, the University of Virginia Press recognized her as a Best New Poet. Her book of poetry, Just a Spit down the Road, was published by Kelsay in 2021. She was the winner of the 2021 Eastern Shore Writers Crossroad Competition. She was selected for the 2023 Ghost City Press Micro Chapbook Series. In Spring of 2024, her chapbook , The Old Folks Call it God’s Country: Poems of the Tarheel and Palmetto States, will be published by The Poetry Box.

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