Merlin June Mack
Things I Think About Driving Past The Movie Theater That I First Gained Consciousness In Which Is Now Closed Down and Has Rats
Merlin June Mack (they/them) is an intergalactic lesbian, proud disabled human and writer with all the pizzazz of a jackalope. If they aren't writing on their laptop covered in stickers they can be found reading a book with at least one good literary motif in it. They are currently working towards a BFA in Creative Writing. Merlin has work published in Main Squeeze Magazine and Lavender Review. They currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with lots of love.
James Gering
A Shining, a Revving, a Jiggling | A Shining, a Revving, a Jiggling – The Return
A Shining, a Revving, a Jiggling
‘Quickly, Isabella – drop everything, come ’n see!’
A vintage Cadillac, roof cast open, has come a revving
a shining, a jiggling into our cul de sac.
The driver, half a century old, coiffed and sporting
shoulder pads, manoeuvres his lime-green lolly into
the no-stopping zone below our second-storey window
and eases off the engine. Lovely leather upholstery
in cream and tan. A bull-doggy pup, wearing goggles
and a matching scarf commands the passenger seat.
‘Okay, Snoopy,’ the bloke says, ‘you’ve got two minutes
for a pee and a run-around.’ Snoopy leaps out, has a pee
and a run-around. The day waits. Bella and I wait.
Click goes the courtyard gate of the residences yonder,
and tralaa… a young woman – light of step, summery of
garment emerges and beelines for the spiffy wheels.
Let’s call her Gloria. Bella suggests Gloria
is the bloke’s daughter. I smile and wince.
Hug-hugs, kiss-kisses play out in the illegal zone.
‘Is this your car?’ Gloria asks.
The fellow – let’s say Roger – winks and swings
open the passenger door in a flurry of charm.
Snoopy jumps in. Roger responds at warp speed,
his tanned arm practically a blur,
flicking the dog into the Cadillac’s rear.
Roger breathes afresh, pat pats the passenger seat
and ushers in the usherette of the day.
He scoots around and leaps in behind the wheel.
‘Right, he says. What shall we… I say we head for
the nursery café in that grungy suburb. You’ll love it.
It’s a jungle.’ Roger starts the car and glides away.
A Shining, a Revving, a Jiggling – The Return
Bella, Bella, come quickly!
The lime-green Cadillac is back from the cafe,
a jiggling, a shining, a revving.
Gloria sports a vast bouquet of jungle flowers
in her lap. Snoopy is brooding in the back.
Roger pulls into no-stopping and kills the motor.
‘So, as I was saying,’ he says,
‘we could stay at romantic Jervis Bay.
I know this perfect bed ’n breakfast...’
I have to lean precariously out of the window
to catch the words and the action
but the danger is poetically worth it.
Gloria climbs out of the car. Roger also, to meet
her behind. Gloria sees him coming and hoists her bouquet
like an inverted traffic cone with foliage protruding.
She leans around the flowers, air-kisses Snoopy
and wiggles two fingers at Roger,
a revving, a shining, a jiggling.
James Gering is the Australian Society of Authors Emerging Poet of the Year, 2018. His collection of poetry, Staying Whole While Falling Apart, was released by Interactive Publications in July 2021. His second collection, Tickets to the Fall of Icarus, came out in December 2023 with the same publisher. Publication credits in the United States include Rattle, San Pedro River Review and Star 82 Review. James lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. There he climbs the cliffs and rappels the canyons in search of Rilke’s solitude, Chekhov’s humility, and dreamscapes in general. He welcomes visitors at jamesgering.com.
David Kirby
Silly Kids | Always Something | GumElvis
Silly Kids
Kids like to run and skip—walking’s not fancy enough
for them! Walking’s vanilla. Kids don’t like vanilla,
they like mint chocolate chip, rocky road, raspberry ripple,
cookies and cream. And then something happens.
A friend tells me her daughter was crying last night
because she wants to give away the stuffed animals
she’s had since kindergarten; she’s older now, she says,
and she doesn’t know how to play with them any more.
What happens to that power of imagination? You lose it,
sure, but it deepens later, gets better. A neighbor’s child
was sitting in her front yard this morning at a table stacked
high with all sorts of knickknacks and a sign that says,
“School supplies sold here and nail salon and make-up.”
She’s thirty-six. Kidding! Just kidding. She’s a kid, too,
and, like all kids, thinks big. Boundaries, barriers, borders,
limits, lines: who needs them? If you love school supplies,
love crayons, scissors, pencils, paints, markers, sharpeners,
and glue sticks, and who doesn’t, why not stock them
right there next to the files, brushes, buffers, nippers,
clippers, cuticle exfoliators, and such other items as might
be required by your licensed nail technician who just
happens to be not only willing but thrilled to throw a few
pens, pocket folders, and hole punchers into the bargain.
One of my nephews wants to be an astronaut and fly
to Mars when he grows up but also own a 7-Eleven
so he can have as many grape slurpees as he wants
whenever he wants them, though the odds are that
he’ll do neither of those things but something he hasn’t
thought of yet and won’t for years. Marianne Moore
loved animals and athletes because they mind
their own business: “Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers,
catchers, do not pry or prey or prolong the conversation,
do not make us self-conscious, look their best when
caring least.” In Stanley Elkin’s novel Boswell,
the main character goes to his son’s sixth-grade science fair
where he sees a spaceship, a water-processing plant, a robot.
And then he gets to his son’s entry: two raisins, a paper
clip, a wad of toilet tissue, a dead fly, and a scrap
of paper on which the boy has written “grbge dunpf.”
Look at that silly kid. You were him. Look at you now.
Always Something
I’m in the airport at the moment, sitting across from a guy
who is glaring at me as though I’ve committed some offense
of which only he knows, since I’ve done little more than
take my seat across the way and gaze about with what
I’d like think is a pleasant and inoffensive expression,
one that contrasts distinctly with that of the guy whose glare
actually seems to be intensifying, now that I think about it,
as though I’d questioned his parentage or said something
defamatory about his favorite political candidate or sports team.
Karl Popper said, "It is impossible to speak in such a way
that you cannot be misunderstood,” but I haven’t even
said anything yet! Then again, you can always insult someone
without uttering a single word: during the Turkish siege
of Vienna in 1683, legend has it that a baker working late
at night heard the Turks tunneling under the walls of the city
and alerted the military, who collapsed the tunnel, thus
eliminating the threat and saving the city. To commemorate
the occasion, the baker baked a crescent-shaped pastry
in the shape of the Turks’ emblem, the crescent moon,
and thus was born the croissant which permitted
a famished Austrian to satiate his early-morning appetite
but also devour a symbol of Turkish culture. Oh, kick a guy
when he’s down, will you? Or a bunch of guys, or an entire nation.
There was a letter in the “Dear Abby” advice column today
in which a woman said that her husband, Alex, doesn’t like Roy,
the husband of her friend Darlene, because he thinks Roy
is obnoxious, to which Darlene took umbrage, saying Roy is
a great person and Alex should apologize, whereupon Dear Abby
replied that, while the writer and Alex shouldn’t be
guilt-tripped into spending time with Darlene and Roy,
Alex shouldn’t have said Roy is obnoxious, at which point
I realized I didn’t know what the word “obnoxious” meant,
so I looked it up. Did you know that “obnoxious” not only
has two meanings but that those meanings are the total
opposites of one another? “Obnoxious” derives from
Latin “ob” (or “to,” “toward”) and “noxa” (or “injury,”
“hurt”), which, combined, mean "subject to something harmful”
and “exposed to injury,” or at least that’s what it meant
back in the 1590s. But by the 1670s, people forgot
the “ob” part and just started using “obnoxious” the way
they used “noxious,” that is, to mean "offensive, hateful,
highly objectionable.” Maybe Alex was looking out for Roy!
I bet Alex was a Latin scholar and was using that word
in the old-fashioned way. Boy, people were really stupid
in the 1670s, weren’t they? Anybody can be stupid,
though. My Nigerian student Dami says that if you are
from his country and speak English, people will think
you are smart, even if you aren’t. Same here, Dami!
I bet Roy was exposed to injury and didn’t know it,
and Alex was being a good guy and trying to protect
Roy from some pending catastrophe that only he, Alex,
was aware of, which is all very fine and useful,
I’m so sure, only here in the airport, the guy sitting
across from me is still glaring at me
as though he’s about to tell me to step outside and say that.
GumElvis
The room where I write backs onto a busy street
bordered by a sidewalk, so all day long I hear people
talking—on their phones, to their companions
or just themselves—and right now I’m listening to a boy
saying something to his mother that she doesn’t like,
because even though I can’t make out his words,
I can tell from his tone that they are disrespectful,
a guess which is confirmed when the mother shouts
You keep that up and I’m gonna tear your ass
to pieces! and suddenly I’m four years old
and my mother is hosting a garden party, meaning
that the ladies from her garden club are wearing
their big hats and flowery frocks and sipping tea
and nibbling finger sandwiches and cookies
as they eye and sniff and effusively compliment
my mother’s roses, jonquils, day lilies while I,
who am invisible in the shadow of the hedge,
fill my lungs with air and cry I’m a 100 million
jackasses and stinkpots! over and over again
because my brother, who is eight, has told me to.
My mother boils away from the other ladies
just long enough to yank me from my hiding place
so she can wear me out, which was her version
of tear your ass to pieces, though even as she
raises her arm to strike, it must occur to her
that the sound of a child howling in pain as his mother
wears him out will appear even more unseemly
to her guests than her younger child’s assertion
that he is 100 million jackasses and stinkpots.
Even a four-year-old knows what a jackass is,
but why 100 million of them, and what, exactly,
is a stinkpot? One definition says that it is a type
of turtle capable of producing an unpleasant smell,
certainly an accurate description of your average
four-year-old boy, particularly one who spends much
of his time outdoors in the Louisiana humidity.
Who are we, really? The last time I splashed around
in a hotel hot tub, I was joined not long after
by a middle schooler, I’d say, with questionable orthodontia
and a worse complexion, yet he fixed a scowl on me
for so long a time period that after a while I felt
as though I’d done something wrong, though
I didn’t know what it was. He got out after
a while and took the first steps toward a life
he’d enjoy with straight teeth and clear skin
and become successful and travel himself
and end up in a hotel hot tub somewhere
being scowled at by a twelve- or thirteen-year-old
who hasn’t even been born yet as I sat there still,
wondering if maybe I’m not the hotshot I thought
I was up to that moment, not the gift to humanity
in his own mind that GumElvis is, that being
the name I’ve given to the guy at my gym
who chews his jawful of Juicy Fruit so loudly that
the other gym members scowl at him, especially
the women, and he combs up his tresses into
a towering pompadour, having previously dyed them
a shoe-polish black, and even sneers the way
the King did and has alienated himself from
the more serious lifters not only by cracking his gum
just when someone is trying for a personal best
on the bench or the squat rack but also,
instead of observing strict form, by performing
sloppy repetitions with far too much weight
and far too many grunts! and yeahs! of the type
Elvis voiced during his karate-chop period
and in that way failing to have any effect at all
on his own physique, which remains slack
and pudgy. Loves that gum, though. Oh, to enjoy
the self of steam of a GumElvis! Not for him
the doubt that plagues the rest of us. Not for
GumElvis the alternating self-love and shame
of the man who confessed to Dear Abby
that his wife found it “weird” that he liked
to wear panties and bras under his business suits.
Wonder what kind of childhood that guy had—
GumElvis, too. The man says he has tried
to suppress his desire to wear lingerie
in what will almost certainly be a futile attempt
to keep his marriage together, though at least
he has found some solace in telling the women
at the lingerie stores he frequents “that what
I am buying is for me, and I delight in the fact
that they are accepting and that they help me
find items that I like.” I’m with him.
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.
Daniel Addercouth
Beavers Will Save Paradise Fields | Give Us a Billion Bitcoin or Humanity is Doomed | Plausibility of Fact
Beavers Will Save Paradise Fields
1
Oh Christ, not more bleeding Jocks. Bloody city’s full of them already.
2
You were happy to hunt us to extinction for our flesh and fur. Happy to deem us fish when it suited you. Now you decide you need us. A miracle cure, imported from north of the border. Well, stand aside. Let us clean up your mess.
3
Pretend that shopping trolley isn’t there. Imagine dams across the river. A series of pools, connected by channels. Wetlands glistening in the sun, sponging up rain. Excursioning school groups face-to-face with nature. Yes, Mathilda, those are reeds.
4
The city has always welcomed newcomers.
5
Who doesn’t love a keynote species? Nature’s architects, geoengineering the environment to suit their needs. (And ours, of course.) Consider the benefits:
(a) Provide a wide range of ecological services
(b) Limit environmental disasters cost-effectively
(c) Save McDonald’s from flash flooding.
6
Well, why not? Worked with them voles, didn’t it? Same body plan. Just a thousand times larger.
7
And then one evening as you lie in bed, you hear, beyond the sirens and the stereos, the gnawing of their teeth, which never stop growing. Building, building, building.
Inspired by the article “Will Beavers be eager for London life?” in the 1-2 July 2023 edition of The Financial Times.
Give Us a Billion Bitcoin or Humanity Is Doomed!
For my next book I’m going to write a thriller set in the Global Seed Vault in the Svalbard archipelago. International terrorists will take over the underground vault and demand a ransom from the United Nations, otherwise they’ll blow up the bunker with its millions of seeds. In this near-future, crops are failing around the world and the seed vault is humanity’s only hope as the back-up for all of agriculture. The terrorists have their own private island stocked with enough canned food to last a lifetime, of course. The seed vault doesn’t have permanent staff on the ground, but the charismatic director will be on site for the 25th anniversary of the opening. She’ll be assisted by a local teenage hacker who breaks into the vault’s security systems for fun. The director and the hacker will be chased around underground. Bullets will ricochet off concrete walls, boxes of seeds will be smashed, entire strains of Peruvian corn will be lost forever. The electricity supply will get cut off and the vault will begin to warm, threatening the viability of the seeds. In the denouement, the leader of the terrorists will let a polar bear into the vault to devour the director and her hacker accomplice. Except it’ll end up eating the terrorists instead, just as a fleet of UN helicopters turns up to save the day, showing that nature and international cooperation always triumph in the end. At the end, the director and the hacker will stand outside the vault watching the Arctic sunset, secure in the knowledge they’ve saved humanity. But the final scene will show drops of water falling from the vault’s tower as the ice melts. The warming will get us all in the end, seed vault or no seed vault.
Plausibility of Fact
Cranberry juice. Nice. Are you aware they
grow in marshes? I’m Alex, by the way.
Are you friends with the host? No? Me neither.
Excuse me, does this have onions in it?
I’m allergic. And are these gluten free?
You’re a doctor? Me, I fact-check poems.
I know, it sounds like an oxymoron.
But it’s a fun job. I’ve become a more
interesting guest, if nothing else.
It’s not my task to tinker with the poem.
I’m not there to catch the poet out.
I’m trying to save their blushes when they
confuse Fahrenheit and Celsius
or place a chiming clock in ancient Rome.
I know the weight of clouds and the types
of cherry trees you can find in Sweden.
I know how many fragments Sappho left.
And I can quote Homer to you at length.
If I find an error, I get in touch
and suggest that Wordsworth probably did not
skate on frozen Windermere as a kid.
Or explain that Cortez never set foot
in Darien. They must mean Balboa.
(I’m just making that one up. That was Keats.)
I don’t take pleasure in finding mistakes,
but I don’t trust anything these days.
Thanks, I’m OK for a drink. Go ahead.
Have you tried the pumpkin? It’s very good.
Did you know it’s related to nightshade?
Inspired by the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, 21 December 2016: “How Do You Fact Check a Poem?” with reference to The Poet's Mistake by Erica McAlpine (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Daniel Addercouth grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Berlin, Germany. His work has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Roi Fainéant Press, among other places. You can find him on Twitter/X and Bluesky at @RuralUnease.
Christine Potter
On A Photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay Sitting By Her Swimming Pool At Steepletop | Things | I Can't Lie To You | And Yet
On A Photo Of Edna St. Vincent Millay Sitting By Her Swimming Pool At Steepletop
Hair draped to one side. Naked—as she insisted guests
be to swim—under a toga-wrapped white towel, one
hand and one foot trembling the dark reflections of tall
bushes and trees. I want to say August. I want to say
cicadas whirring like wind-up toys, the air musky with
summer growing old. I want to say the humid air, want to
say a thunderstorm muttering somewhere off beyond
Great Barrington. She’s sitting on crab grass by the
pool’s stone border, a white stone bench behind her.
In her house, day blows in and out open windows, her
papers rustle—imagine that sound—and curtains
shrug in the breeze. Also wind-borne: a car’s motor.
Coming here? No, turning away. The pale, loose curl
of her body like the pose my mother asked of my fingers
on the piano. The music of a camera’s shutter, its
metallic kiss. The sign hanging in her library: Silence!
Things
My mother volunteered at her church thrift shop.
When she began to forget many things, she stopped
donating and started bringing things home. This
on top of her red and white wedding china, which
I’d stored for her in white plastic cases along with
the other things my father wouldn’t let her give me:
lawn-green Depression glass, brown casseroles,
rolling pins older than her marriage, maybe older
than my grandmother’s marriage. Even after he
died, when Mom lived alone with her helpers, I
couldn’t bear to take much. After they were both
gone, we had to hire people to help us give it all
away. Grief-stunned, I watched as table things, as
kitchen things, as the antique, bought-at-auction
oak dining set, the marble-bottom candle holders
with their rainbow-casting cut crystal tears, all got
sent to Good Will. I did speak up for some things,
took the china, some hobnail glasses, more things
than I want or even have room for, and somehow
still not enough. Maybe the wrong things? I don’t
know what to think. Their household. Paychecks.
Goods. Presents, department stores. The interior
arena of my childhood, a sugar bowl in the shape
of a Tudor cottage, English muffin crumbs left on
the kitchen table. The day I realized my parents
wanted to love me but had no idea how. A cobalt
vase, a white milk glass pitcher. Sun in wavy glass
windows, strings of Christmas lights that twinkled
on and off one bulb at a time, from Italy! But not
the cheap kind, my father always said, never cheap.
I Can’t Lie To You
Why should I trick you with daisies
and pastels? Peace is not a blue flag
applauding a blue sky, not the two or
three hundred encircled arrows I drew
without even thinking about it on my
notebook in 1969. Truth is, we’re all
angry. We woke up afraid. We were
left alone to cry it out. Someone once
raised a loud, deep voice to us. Now
we recruit armies. We’re all looking
for a false dawn: that yellow line of
light at the bottom of our shut-tight
bedroom doors as our parents drink
downstairs. We hear the rising tide
of their laughter, smell the enticing
bonfires of their cigarettes. But they
don’t hear us calling them. And we
pretend we don’t remember. I can’t
lie to you. Peace sits by herself on
the breathing ocean’s other side and
watches the darkness of a ruined city.
She texts neighbors who fled the war,
phone a candle cupped in her fingers.
Then a full moon unravels the clouds.
And Yet
I am thinking about the things that silence me today—
fear of ridicule, fear of being wrong, the great fear
of harming someone with my words. I worry, but the
day rolls over in its sleep, tugging the clouds’ torn
blankets over one shoulder. A weak stripe of Western sun,
a breeze, a frost-blackened sunflower stalk nodding
the dead star of its flower. I am thinking about wars,
of people who plan how they will happen and where—
and I am thinking how every war burns down the
house we all have to live in. And yet someone hurts
badly enough to drive a tank down a city street, or run
into a concert with guns. We have always had weapons,
always. But autumn’s slide into this winter felt like
someone full of dinner fighting to stay awake and watch
TV’s neon lies. I want to say the world is what’s truly
beautiful, and I’m having trouble today. If you hold
your open hands in front of you, fingers slightly curved
as if you were trying to catch something, you might
feel the heft of your life, and it might be holy. Newly
baptized babies almost always reach for the candle the
priest is holding, towards its light—cheap trick or not.
So we all know where the light is; we just can’t agree on
its name. See how the sky has cleared? How can you
ignore sunset through that architecture of empty trees?
Christine Potter’s poetry has been curated by Rattle, Kestrel, Third Wednesday, Thimble, Eclectica, The Midwest Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily—and featured by ABC Radio News. She has work forthcoming in The McNeese Review and One Art. Her young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her third collection of poetry, Unforgetting, by Kelsay Books. She lives in Valley Cottage, NY, in a house with two ghosts, two spoiled cats, and her husband.
Robert Okaji
Metastases | Everywhere But Here | A Patient Noose
Metastases
This is the story of a body and a man. A history of failure and whimsy. Of numbers and proliferation and electrical impulses oscillating without thought of consequence. The voice vanished. The body grew, and then lost itself. Thighs withered, overnight. Cells divided without invitation. This is bullshit, he says. I never believed in the Marlboro Man. But I wear boots, drive a pickup, and live in a ranch house with a blue dog. The driveway of crushed stone. Black vultures soar overhead. Dung beetles. Dew. Pancetta. Everything touches everything. What is a cough but an explanation? An expression of counted failure and cast-off reckonings? A dream, diminishment? Heart and hip. Mind and bliss. Left ventricle. A leaf. Body and man. Fractures and lesions. Refusals. That hole. The whole.
A Patient Noose
The man thought of spiraling towers, of concentric circles in nature, how they resembled his relationships, both failed and successful. Round and round, up, down and over. What is the use, he asked, of reflection or deflection, of shields and traps and Taylor Swift? I am that sullen soul in the fifth circle of Dante’s Hell. I am that scorpion lurking in the boot's shadow, a patient noose on a political t-shirt worn by a mad woman. If the treatments work, I will gather time, listen to those I once ignored, recover lost energy. If I regain my voice, I will sing.
Everywhere But Here
…or the leaf, twisting in its ecstasy. How does the man rectify such movement in light of his failure in simplicity, in reason: the junco at the frozen birdbath, chuck roast thawing on the counter. Ground glass nestled comfortably in his lungs. If I could insert myself into a particular vein in that leaf, he asks, would I enhance the wind, or merely disappear in the moment’s arc, a beginning, middle and end touching everywhere but here, on the south side of the window, looking out, looking in.
Robert Okaji was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer, and lives, for the time being, in Indiana with his wife, stepson, and cat. His full length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press sometime in the near future (not posthumously, he hopes). His poetry may be found in Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Vox Populi, Evergreen Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Big Windows Review, The Night Heron Barks, Indianapolis Review, and other venues.
Laura Damian
Future job prospect | The next day | Liver biopsy chronicle
Future job prospect
How about an invisible bird nesting in the old ficus tree
at the end of the street. You know, the one that leans
against the school wall. I would apply for an entry-level position
on the bottom branches, the light heavy with green,
chirping allowed and encouraged from sunrise to down.
With my organizational skills, the fellow sparrows would
sing higher every time pedestrians walk by so they stop
and pay us a smile. I could negotiate with the wind
to blow gently and leave a small white cloud above us,
the perfect drawing model for the 5-year-olds looking
through their class window. I would oversee the blossom
like a Victorian mother hurrying her daughters to pinch
their cheeks to be courted. And maybe you’d argue
our inconspicuous flowers are not a threat to the violet
jacarandas around the corner, but you’ll come back to us
in a month or so, to breathe in our shadow and spy together
on the old couples—women with stoic faces carrying
on their shoulder the hand of their beloved, convinced
they are being guided through life. At noon, when the only
lingering sounds are the echoes of teens—#MyFuckingMom
ToldMeToTidyMyRoom—I would plunge into the debate
between the cocky bunch of birds of paradise and the austere ficus,
the underground mycorrhizal network humming with controversy.
The next day
Boa feathers scattered in the hotel elevators
like early morning dream fragments—blown
by hot wind on the silent streets, spilling
from garbage cans, even the train. You
dedicated months looking for the perfect
concert outfit; stuck brilliant hearts
to your jeans, bought 3 t-shirts and
a red boa online from China, practiced
makeup in the bathroom for months.
“Glitter on the cheeks too, you have to be
a real fan to understand it, mamma!”
You wore his necklace under uniforms
and pajamas, and his real-sized
cardboard dummy—Alba’s gift for
your birthday—stiffly smiled at you
until it bent and fell on the floor.
He whispered in your headphones
“I’m coming” and you whispered back
the letters of his songs untuned. We
woke at 5am, took a fast train to Madrid
and a bus, mangled in the buzzing waves
of 65 thousand joyous people sweating
happily. He was there. You cried,
you sang, you yelled, you danced.
You saw him. Almost. He vanished,
leaving behind the echo of his songs,
sore throats and boa feathers. Now what.
Liver biopsy chronicle
I’m a mutant. My friends laugh when I tell them
Magneto could not take me down in a fight;
my liver accumulates copper, a superpower
my genetic disease awarded me. Being a mutant
is an attractive feature to doctors. Not
in a romantic or sexual way, unfortunately.
One can still dream on a freezing hospital bed
when a handsome surgeon approaches
with a 16-cm pointy instrument. “It’ll be quick”
he says. The walls of the operation room bend,
time collapses, and the screams of George,
a pig my grandparents sacrificed for Christmas
40 years ago, burst into my inner ear. Turns out
you cannot bury the sound of death
under a pillow. George was like a hairy pink
marshmallow, liked to play ball, chase the cats,
and once his nose piercing got caught on
my bike chain. With infinite love my grandma
unhooked him, rubbed his belly—same love
she rubbed salt on the slices of fat before
letting them cure 6 weeks. And his liver,
oh his liver made a delicious pie.
Laura Damian is a Romanian-Spanish poet residing in Barcelona, whose recent work has been published in Perceptions Magazine. A mother of two teenagers and a dog, she works in finance and enjoys sharing poetry with her colleagues.
Hardy Coleman
If sadness is a nagging doubt | Some of the Reasons
If sadness is a nagging doubt,
well, here's an antidote:
With every breath you fill
fall in love,
then exhale.
Some of the Reasons
That it is fragile
and when cracked
may not mend.
That it can be shattered
by negligence or anger
and the shards shall slice your flesh.
That it can lead you astray
and the crumbs you've left as markers
have long since been devoured
by the songbirds of circumstance.
That it may lie and cheat
on no more than a whim,
a pretty face, a fast car
or the heat of an old flame.
That it is burning
like your house down,
your barn, livestock and crops,
but you've been freezing all this winter.
That it is bright
enough to steal sight from your eyes
on this night so long and dark
that you may never see again.
That it is like a puppy who,
God willing, you will outlive,
then bury down below the garden
and nourish with your tears.
That it will become a memory
with parts pared out on the editor's floor and
a scene, here and there,
like a scar, still tender.
That all of the above,
given time, are guaranteed.
That it is yearned for.
That it is needed.
That it is sustenance.
That it is Holy.
That it
is what has brought us
into being.
Hardy Coleman gave a few bucks and change to an Elvis Presley impersonator who was attempting to impress a girl in a mink stole, but who’s Cadillac was nearly out of gas. He sat next to a Harlem Globetrotter on a New York City subway and they shared a couple of dirty jokes. He resides in Minneapolis with Patricia Enger, drag racing queen of Jackson County, Minnesota and living muse for much of his work.
Jody padumachitta Goch
Warrant Officers and Sergeant’s Mess or The Biggest Change I Ever Made Was | I’m Just the Neighbor Retired in the Countryside | Thomas
Warrant Officers and Sergeant’s Mess or The Biggest Change I Ever Made Was
For a three bit glass of beer from
a hundred dollar bill.
I struggled to make the correct change,
ended up tipping over
my tip jar, writing IOUs
I got it done and then the fool
came back twenty minutes later and ordered
a round for his table of fifteen staff sergeants.
I got my change back but he didn’t tip me.
The black hearted son of a gun.
The corporal who bussed tables
while playing bouncer
watched the whole thing go down.
She shook her head and wasn’t sure
about Civilians who worked the
bars on the Base. But took
me home that night to her
tiny off base apartment and pulled rank.
Leaving me to walk home in the middle of the might
swearing never to get tangled
with any more Armed Forces
even if they were cute, even if they tipped.
The next day before work
I bought a roll of quarters.
I’m Just the Neighbor Retired in the Countryside
Someone left the gate
Open again
I pull on my boots
Search and count
Hoping I got all the cows
I don’t call the farmer
He’s at work on a construction site
His wife in her town job
Both working until they come home
To work on the farm,
I count again and come up
Short one
It’s the young cow
Heavily pregnant
I hold my phone to text
And then hold off
I hear her
Tucked in by the log pile
Scared into delivery
By the hiker’s dogs
There’s nothing to do
But fumble for the farmer’s number
I hold the phone to my ear
Deliver the calf by FaceTime
Thomas
Tom Dukowski speaks fluent Japanese, he didn’t always
and I missed him so much the years he was away learning.
We ate sushi together before he left, years before
we knew he’d follow a tall man back to Tokyo,
one time a hundred bucks worth in the early 80s. And we ate
chicken cacciatore; I cooked for a day before
I’d let anyone even taste it.
Tom made my life bearable; we lived in student basement suite,
a hovel where we huddled under blankets drinking anything
I brought home from bartending on the military base,
end bottles bought as tips by the watch sergeants and noncommissioned officers. Sometimes it took me hours to tally up the night, until Tom would come and check my math. We’d grab the tips and walk home, sitting under big-ass elm trees, winding our way past million-dollar homes to our basement haven,
My bedroom, a mess of female bodies trying to get under my comforter.
Tom wandering out to the steam baths, pre-AIDS. Who worried? We had
a memorable two days one evening lying on the kitchen floor, the cabinets pulsing bright yellow. We hadn’t painted them, dead Nina did it,
Before the Brahms requiem, shit don’t you know someone always dies within a year of playing the requiem? Nina played the bass.
That was later.
That night we did poppers and tequila, unable to stand we crawled or sort of scooted to the can and back, eating old potato chips and cheeseys, two washed up 20-somethings, already jaded with bars and gay bashing and not being loved the way we loved each other, I don’t know how I lost him, how he was gone for almost 30 years, when every day was a Tom sized ache that – even when I ate sushi –never quit.
We’d spent a weekend together baking cookies and hash brownies trying to make a child, wanting to co-parent and have something from our friendship, but it didn’t work. Maybe it was the brownies, maybe it was just the failure of two gay friends not being up to it.
And years later, eating pasta and loneliness, a tentative like appeared on my FB feed, and it’s taken six more, but we are friends again, sharing snapshots of our lives. All the things we ate together are on the forbidden list.
And I don’t know when I will fly home again. He moved back almost to the day I headed to Europe. Now it is me learning a strange language and trying to remember old recipes while Tom eats alone at our favorite restaurants.
Jody padumachitta Goch is a Canadian living in the German Black Forest. She writes poetry and short fiction, chops wood for the stove and wanders or rides in the forest. Her jeans and shirt pockets are full of stories and poetry. It’s hell on the wash machine. She rescued a short story, from the lint catcher and it was published in an anthology. Since then Jody checks even when there’s no laundry. Jody has stories and or poetry in Wild Word, ComLit, 50 Word Stories, Co-Op Poetry, Does It Have Pockets, Poetically Yours NPR, and Strasbourg Short Stories 2021.
Jane Bloomfield
Lady Writer on TV | Rapunzel Tie Up Your Golden Hair
Lady Writer on The TV
When my mum was freshly separated from my dad my
sister and I went with her on job interviews in downtown Auckland
we sat in our mustard-coloured VW beetle on Queen Street and waited
I guess we were given instructions | be good don’t touch the knobs or
turn the key don’t talk to strangers don’t spend the bridge toll money
one time we did talk to a stranger
a tall thin bearded hippy dude in a muslin shirt and cross-body tasselled bag
we’d locked the keys in the car
Mum had taken too long
we needed help to pop the lock
Jesus and his patchouli vibes were still hanging about with his imaginary coat hanger
when she appeared apologetic and guilty and grateful
he had one of those permanent 70’s stoner smiles
and was soon in our Bayswater villa adding a heaped teaspoon of salt to mum’s once
delicious now ruined pea and ham comfort in the big soup pot on the stove
I can still see on tip toes that white sodium bomb hovering over the sea of sweet green
he wasn’t her type at all long unbrushed hair bare feet as slow as a sloth in denim flares
while she your Mary Quant minis patents and blonde hairpieces on black velvet combs
just the way that her hair fell down around her face those wigs lived on stands
she must have eventually told him where the bus-stop was up at the Belmont shops or
drove him down to the Devonport ferry so he could drop one and dissolve back to the city
Mum got the job as in-house model for Everard Rogers Knitwear
she was the ultimate solo yummy mummy of two before they were a thing
hey man she wasn’t even twenty-seven
our rabbit eared TV was black and white and played Disney movies
once a week on Sundays
Rapunzel Tie Up Your Golden Hair
In preparation for leaving home for boarding school
at aged 12 rising 13, a sort of coming of age took place.
My Mum booked me into Luigi’s Hair Salon, Hastings
I had a mouth full of wire, train tracks and rubber bands
hauling a row of bucked teeth back into my face no
modern mane makeover would disguise.
I wept silently as my long blonde last summer of freedom
hair and lash skimming fringe fell to the checkerboard vinyl
black and white, plain as day, I emerged mouse brown
a short wedge accentuating my round face cheek dusted
freckles and fangs.
I wondered if Luigi took pleasure in my metamorphosis
everyone but me declared my uglification a success
I didn’t need a short back and sides, hair ties were cool in ’77.
A photographer was promptly booked, Mum now keen
to record the occasion of her pixie coiffed daughter.
I hunched in shame in my newly sewn apricot linen shirt
against a sad mottled brown backdrop as the camera flashed
in memory. And sat on the mantlepiece for years in tragic testament
to this painful adolescent period until a silent concession took
place and that portrait, still in its studio monogrammed
cardboard frame disappeared to a box in the garage
where it belonged.
Jane Bloomfield is a newly published poet based in Queenstown, New Zealand.
Matthew Isaac Sobin
The Bereft Makes an Offer to the Goat Queen | Rare Specimen | Crime Stopper
The Bereft Makes an Offer to the Goat Queen
Wearing a navy blue pinstripe suit, unpracticed—really uninitiated—in all forms of animal husbandry, you herald entry to a goat enclosure proffering a provender of yellow grass, which is everywhere at hand, or hoof. Three doe turn their noses at you, though their mouths are full of the same yellow grass. You smartly move on, noticing the goats have moved on to a large, fallen eucalyptus branch. Seeing their enthusiasm, you assist the cloven quorum by crafting a tidy assemblage of the choicest brittle twigs from the tips of the eucalyptus, and present this to the flock queen.
Consider their worldliness: these goats who watch cartoons in the morning; who rise late when the sun is already high. Aghast, you recognize her razor wit; she is well-versed in skepticism, and like a shadow passing into tempered disdain, levels a stream of urine onto her breakfast table. You were supposed to contain multitudes like the goatherds who beseeched her favor and that of her foremothers. But you are bereft, and the flock knows.
Rare Specimen
I was out with the boys playing disc golf in a park in Oakland. In the middle of the third hole, one of them said, “Check out the cork tree.” I thought I had misheard. I’d never seen a cork tree before. To be honest, I didn’t know cork had its own tree. I thought it was like the gefilte fish of wood. It looked, I suppose, how a cork tree should look: miniature corks cobbled together piece by piece into a trunk. When I touched the tree its flesh was soft and malleable, just like cork. I was a believer. The tree stood slanted, bent at a low, precarious angle to the ground. All around us were redwoods, eucalyptus, and towering oak trees. “Are there others?” I asked. The cork tree expert said, “This is the only one I’ve ever seen.” The rest of the guys agreed. It seemed absurd to continue slinging a disc near this rare specimen. We decided the best thing was to build a fence to protect the cork tree. Someone pulled out an ax. We took turns chopping until an oak crashed through the third and fourth hole fairways. We erected a picket fence around the cork tree. As the sun set, we painted a sign that said, “Keep Out: This Cork Tree is a Rare Specimen.”
Crime Stopper
My father and I stopped speaking for one year. It was a mutual decision. We didn’t discuss it, of course. In the evenings, I began craving crime procedurals, like Law & Order and Blue Bloods. This is how I knew my father would still think about me. So, I wasn’t worried. Sometimes I imagined we’d watch the shows together. One night I paused NCIS and decided to join the police academy. Once I became a detective, unraveling mysteries, my father would surely speak to me again. After graduation, I went to the streets. I solved cold cases, interviewing witnesses, and documenting clues in my marble notebook. Whenever I solved a particularly heinous murder, I’d decompress by watching actors solve murders on television. Sometimes I’d hear the phone ring when an episode ended. I always answered the call.
Matthew Isaac Sobin's (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from The Lumiere Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Midway Journal, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, and MAYDAY Magazine. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He lives and writes with his wife and two dogs. https://twitter.com/WriterMattIsaac
Leanna Petronella
Little Houses
Little Houses
Little House in the Big Woods was my first chapter book.
I was in first grade and I still remember my awe
that a book could be this long, that there could be so many words,
that the story could go on and on.
The controversy about the Little House books is,
who wrote what? The candidates: Laura Ingalls Wilder,
the protagonist, and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,
who appears as a baby in the last book of the series.
Caroline Fraser’s biography argues that the division is clear:
Laura was the writer and Rose was the editor.
Laura, the butcher, knifed through her childhood’s meat,
while Rose trimmed the fat and batted the pig-bladder balloon.
Rose became a journalist who travelled the world.
She wrote salacious biographies, was one of the first libertarians,
and wrote articles and stories about Laura’s childhood,
dramatizing, embellishing. Going big. To Fraser,
Rose’s writing is purple, political, and over the top.
Unseemly, she implies. Laura’s writing, on the other hand,
is spare, wholesome, full of good values and details:
the rag doll in the puddle, brown braids in pink ribbons.
That buffalo wallow of violets.
Little House in the Big Woods ends with Laura thinking,
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and
Ma and the firelight and the music, were now.
They could not be forgotten, she thought,
because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
This passage doesn’t exist in any of Laura’s manuscripts.
Fraser claims that Rose probably wrote it.
It’s one of the most beautiful and strange passages in the series,
also one of the most understated. But Rose was the one
who was always too much. Her prose was darker than violets.
Rose wrote it?
*
In grad school, my professor Sam loved the Little House books.
Her field was the long nineteenth century: fascicles, women poets,
the American frontier. (I love that phrase, the long nineteenth century,
the century bursting from its corset.) You can see Sam’s childhood passion
in her work: women writers and place, domestic labor and poetics.
I think she ran a Little House Society at some point.
Sam was a member of my dissertation committee.
I had a terrible chair who was also head of the department,
who never showed up to meetings, never read my stuff,
and I wanted Sam to be angry for me, to defend me,
to march my story of wrongs straight to the most powerful dean.
(Never mind Sam’s years of scholarship and teaching,
scrabbling towards tenure, never mind that – I wanted Sam to gasp,
horrified, and then throw herself under the bus for me,
loudly denouncing my chair.)
I cried in Sam’s office occasionally, testing her reaction.
I was Rose, escalating to emotion, poking and poking
at the calm facade that I could not move.
She was my Laura, always dancing just out of my reach.
My mother was like that. I was always trying
to get something from her – I don’t know what.
When I was 22 and she was dying,
I kept peppering her with questions about her life.
She said to me, “Leanna, I’m not holding out on you.
You like to speak of the soul, to dive into its mysteries.
I’m not like that, is all. I don’t think that way.”
I thought that was beautiful. It is beautiful,
how she did and didn’t talk about the soul.
*
Also, I was right. Flaky chair shouldn’t have done me like that.
Why didn’t Sam ever do anything? She just kept saying
that I needed to work within the system, the system being
the enormous ego of my chair. I withered.
One spring, I took Sam’s Dickinson seminar.
Chad, in a different cohort, was in that class, too.
At a party, someone asked if he’d take another class with Sam.
Chad said, “No. I don’t want to ruin her life.”
Wait a minute. Let’s parse that:
If Chad took another class with Sam, he would ruin her life.
As in, she would not be able to resist him. As in,
she would cheat on her husband and sleep with a student
because Chad and his charms were so powerful.
But Chad would not ruin her. What a hero.
I can’t stress this enough: Sam never did a damn thing wrong.
But that was the story Chad told.
Chad liked to write about the white panties of his girlfriends.
He liked to scold me for writing poems that were too aggressive.
I got so tired of his fragile, sticky crotches.
(A professor once told me I should write children’s books
and not poetry. Another told me my poems were too loud.
Oh, sometimes I feel like the long nineteenth century,
leaking from my corset. A soggy, silly clown. I suppose
I could juggle pies to myself, but I’d rather throw them hard
and creamy, to whip pursed lips with lemon foam.)
My friends wrote a comic strip about Chad.
On social media, he liked every strip! Laughed at its cleverness!
He left comments showing no awareness whatsoever
that the strip was about him, barely disguised.
Chad, you forced yourself into Sam’s story,
or at least the story you made up.
Then you couldn’t find yourself in your story,
at least as told by other people.
Many stories build a house
and Chad, you and I were friends once.
You once texted me about a poem I wrote:
Brava brava, you rockstar. I’m crying as I read this.
A few years ago, Sam had a terrible accident.
She fell down the stairs and broke her jaw, knocked out teeth,
had her mouth wired shut. Countless surgeries and infections.
Now, she seems mostly okay. But in photos on Facebook,
there is the clear marker of pain in her eyes. It reminds me
of women after childbirth, or people after loss,
something peeled away or added. A certain slant of light.
Sam – you helped me and you hurt me.
How am I to read you? I keep revisiting this story.
Perhaps I’m wrong about your eyes.
*
Rose’s sole heir was her lawyer, Roger.
She liked to mentor young men, and he was one of her projects,
the son of her editor, a teenager when he met her.
Roger called himself Rose’s “honorary grandson”
and wrote a series about her, Little House: The Rose Years.
Supposedly it’s libertarian propaganda for third-graders,
but I didn’t notice. Roger died halfway through the project,
and then I think the publisher took over, ghostwriting the rest.
Rose, the ghost in Laura’s books; Roger, the ghost in Rose’s.
Then, a publishing house, probably nameless assistants,
ghosts in the ghost in the ghost. So many thin veils of paper.
The First Four Years is the last book in Laura’s series.
In a major plot point, Laura and Almanzo’s house burns down.
Laura grabs toddler Rose and runs. For the rest of her life,
Rose insists that she caused that fire by accident.
Laura’s writing never blames her. But that was the story Rose told.
The story Fraser tells is that Rose moved around her whole life,
ceaselessly, unhappily, from one place to another,
because of the destruction of that first little house.
I’m not sure how Rose’s nomadic life curls up from the ashes,
but I like the smoothness of Fraser’s argument,
how everything comes back to little houses.
*
Laura’s first try at her book was a biography for adults.
Rose sent Pioneer Girl to her agent, who scoffed it seemed written
by a “fine old lady [who] was sitting in her rocking chair.”
Rude. Next, Laura revised it into a picture book,
When Grandma Was a Little Girl. Then, finally, the transformation
into the chapter book, Little House in the Big Woods.
“Have to finish my mother’s goddamn juvenile,”
Rose wrote in her journal in 1936.
“I am going to insist that the story starts as I started it,”
wrote Laura to Rose a few years later.
Who wrote what? Is it the chicken or the egg?
I say chicken. Laura started her career as a poultry columnist.
Her chickens were known for their abundant egg laying,
so many white little houses for their almost-chicken children.
For the hens, the shells were empty.
For Laura, they brimmed with food, juicy suns
gone faceless. Who lives in a little house is the same
and also different, depending on your needs.
Maybe I don’t want to separate mother from daughter,
lifting yolk from egg white. Maybe I want to see the ghosts mix,
to make something of my own from haunted batter.
*
My friend, a children’s librarian, says that these days,
children don’t really read the Little House books. Instead,
they read Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series, written fifty years later.
The protagonist is Omakayas, an Ojibwa girl. Little Frog.
Her little brother, Quill, has a pet porcupine
that sleeps on his head! And drinks tea just like people!
Every morning, he holds the cup in his fat little paws.
Omakayas befriends a white girl. She calls her Break-Apart Girl
because of her corset, which seems to slice her in half.
Omakayas is puzzled by the girl’s odd ways,
but only gently, a little patronizingly,
a stark contrast to the attitudes in Little House,
blatant in their racism. Now, some parents ban the series altogether.
Others take a different approach: read and talk about it,
teasing out history, context, language.
My friend tells me that she lets the market of her readers decide:
The less that kids check out the Little House books,
the more likely it is that she won’t restock them.
Laura once screamed for a papoose and didn’t get one.
Omakayas, on the other hand, won the “game of silence,”
where of all the children, she was quietest the longest.
Between Laura and Omakayas: Who is louder?
What story survives, and do we listen to both,
or is it one or the other?
*
At a book fair, when she was older, Laura said,
All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.
There were some stories I wanted to tell but would not
be responsible for putting in a book for children,
even though I knew them as a child.
These days, I guess we’d call her books auto-fiction. By fiction,
maybe we sometimes mean craft, because there is always craft,
unvarnished truth doesn’t exist, there’s always a perspective,
as any poet knows. But still critics like to tremble over
what’s true and what’s not, especially in women’s writing.
I didn’t much like PhD school.
The writing papers part, or at least writing papers
in the way they wanted me to write them.
I didn’t understand why the critical and the creative
had to be so separate. Criticism was suffocated
into neat anthills of prose, every damn sugar grain plucked out.
The creative, on the other hand, was an anteater,
snouty and slothy. That long tongue,
horrifying and almost sexual when it darted out.
I needed both: the regular beads of black ants
but digested through my skunky folds.
Let me make my bolus: nutrient rich, masticated,
prey and predator united.
The giant anteater is sometimes called an ant bear.
I try to imagine an ant that looks like a bear
and can’t see it. But I like that,
how it doesn’t decide. I like stomping on some ant piles
and pouring sugar grains on others. I think something can be said
by nibbling down the edges, to grab the story with your teeth
and be serious with sweetness.
Laura and her sisters loved Christmas candy.
They could lick it every day for a week, barely tasting,
or gobble it down in a blizzard like Pa, lost in a den of snow.
That Pa. He was always looking for the next best thing,
fording a flooded river until they almost died,
planting crops in failing fields, going to town over the long winter,
where they nearly starved and almost died again.
Laura included some of Pa’s stories in her books:
the pig riding a sled, the owl screaming like a woman,
a bear that was actually a tree. A lot of one thing
looking like another. But what were Ma’s stories?
Did she tell any?
Laura told Rose about her childhood, over and over.
Locusts marching over the baby, Nellie crying over leeches,
the pig’s crispy tail and the fight over who would eat it.
Green hickory chips and brindled bulldogs,
fever ‘n ague ruining the watermelon’s pink heart.
My mother wouldn’t tell me about her childhood.
I nudged and prodded, thinking that her stories about herself
might tell me something about myself. She gave me only scraps,
which I reuse over and over, scrawling and erasing.
“It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob,”
said Laura about her doll. Funny child-Laura.
And funny-writer Laura, or maybe funny-writer Rose,
but in any case – it’s no person’s fault what they’re made of,
what gold atoms cobble them together.
*
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.”
So wrote Emily Dickinson. Reverie is needed, too, she adds,
but if bees are scarce, “revery alone will do.”
Yes, make a prairie with the gorgeous bee-nest of your brain.
Every female yellowjacket has the ability to sting.
Cousin Charley knows, he danced upon their nest,
screaming until Pa and Uncle Henry dragged him off
and sent him home to all the women.
The women plastered Charley’s body in mud,
wrapped him up in sheets, then sent him off to bed.
Only his nose and mouth poked out. He took tea for rising fever.
Amusing, this next sentence: “Laura and Mary and the cousins
stood around for some time, looking at him.” Just staring!
Ruthless little Ingalls. And how long did they stand there?
What did they see in that stung mummy, in need of preservation?
Yellowjackets look like bees but have smaller waists,
as if they’re wearing corsets. They chew cellulose to make their nests,
which look remarkably like paper. Each nest is started by a queen.
The queen is called the foundress.
The word foundress makes me think of the word poetess.
I called myself that in the sixth grade until my teacher said,
just say poet. Okay. But I liked the ess sound,
the sharp slash of something extra, a flourish
curling from the stinger. And I like the buzz our thinking makes,
in our little houses made from paper.
Leanna Petronella’s debut poetry collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, and other publications. Her nonfiction appears in Brevity and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and her fiction appears in Drunken Boat. She lives in Austin, Texas.
John Zedolik
Nary a Thought | Logical Application
Nary a Thought
“She’s a little downbeat,
a little too much into
‘What does this poem
say about death?’—
you know what I mean?”
Since I wanted the year-long
position, I replied that
“I didn’t even think about death
until I was twenty-seven,”
which was my previous year
so leaving this one open
for the thought that really had been
rustling about for a decade or even
longer like a stealthy animal
in a crawl space,
but that beast remained silent,
away from administrative ears,
and we left the subject with easy
smiles like the ones
that would spread on faces
after pleasant reads
in the fall across from summer’s
lazy gap when some other
teacher took the hint
and temporary substitution.
Logical Application
“You can have the shotgun
or the dogs,” proclaimed the future
suicide to us pre-teens as we sailed
the portion of creek that strayed
through his land—after my mate
responded to his initial command
to vacate: “You don’t own the water
in the creek”—fluid logic for ten
years or so upon this thinking earth,
of which, a tiny portion belonged
to this man who would, in a generation
lose all hope and relinquish
his rights to property he was now
asserting with the threat of buckshot
and fang to be applied to insolent
interlopers and one’s flowing casuistry,
floating along with inner tube and plastic
tub upon that cool public liquid
they would relinquish upon utterance
of the unpleasant choices, one of which,
upon an interminable diagnosis, in the cold
stream of years, he would visit upon his destined self.
John Zedolik is an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and has published poems in such journals as Abbey, The Bangalore Review (IND), Commonweal, FreeXpresSion (AUS), Orbis (UK), Paperplates (CAN), Poem, Poetry Salzburg Review (AUT), Third Wednesday, Transom, and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In 2019, he published his first full-length collection, Salient Points and Sharp Angles (WordTech Editions) followed by When the Spirit Moves Me (Wipf & Stock, 2021 and Mother Mourning (Wipf & Stock, 2023. His iPhone is his primary poetry notebook, and he hopes his use of technology to craft this ancient art remains fruitful.
Heather Sager
Can’t Sleep
Can’t Sleep
Through my window
the train horn blurts
Yellow and red leaves
touch the screen
Imagine a troupe of
elephants playing
some kind of jazz horn
when the trains pass
I try to scavenge
an afternoon nap, but can’t sleep
The train wakes me up
night and day
My thoughts wake me up
I wonder about people
who love fog horns
Maybe, wrecked upon bed,
listless, I will come to love
the noise of my life
Today, I will walk out
into the drizzle that’s started
Find my knit cap
A park that’s green
Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Most recently, she has contributed poetry to Bending Genres, the New Feathers Anthology, The Basilisk Tree, Creative Flight, Moss Puppy Magazine, Backwards Trajectory, 7th-Circle Pyrite, and more journals.
Rodrigo Círigo | Tyler Gebauer
A Piece of Bacon
A Piece of Bacon
Translated by Tyler Gebauer
if you were a piece of bacon
and you crunched salty between my teeth
and my fingers glistened with your fat
and ferocious you adorned hamburgers
lentil stews
eggs easy over
if you were a piece of bacon
and you slipped
between the smoke and heat of frying pans
and your red-white thirst and your saliva
governed over triglycerides
the echoes of an artery as it collapses
if the pig you must have been
could still be heard
between the frozen cuts of meat
your snout a crackle of flowers
the mud the sun the damp
happy pig among pigs
more singeing than speaking
if you were a piece of bacon
we’d be able to love each other, isn’t that right?
you would fit in the palm of my hand
Pedazo de tocino
si fueras un pedazo de tocino
y crujieras salado entre mis dientes
y mis dedos brillaran con tu grasa
y adornaras feroz las hamburguesas
las sopas de lenteja
los huevos estrellados
si fueras un pedazo de tocino
y resbalaras
entre el humo el calor de las sartenes
y tu sed rojiblanca y tu saliva
gobernaran los triglicéridos
los ecos de una arteria al derrumbarse
si el cerdo que por fuerza hubieras sido
pudiera aún oírse
entre las carnes congeladas
tu trompa un crepitar de flores
el lodo el sol las humedades
cerdo feliz entre los cerdos
más quemadura que palabra
si fueras un pedazo de tocino
podríamos querernos ¿no es así?
cabrías en la palma de mi mano
“Pedazo de tocino” was originally published in Spanish in Revista de la Universidad de México.
Rodrigo Círigo is a writer and translator from Mexico City whose work has been published in Revista de la Universidad de México, Punto de Partida, and Punto en línea. He has received a scholarship for his writing from the Foundation for Mexican Letters, as well as the Mexican Secretariat of Culture’s Young Creators program. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Tyler Gebauer is a literary translator from Minneapolis, U.S.A., whose translations have been published in Packingtown Review, The Tiger Moth Review and SORTES, among others. Tyler Gebauer translated “A Piece of Bacon” for publication with the author’s permission. You can read his other translations at: https://www.tgtranslation.com/
Jane Shlensky
Creation | To a Mandarin Mirrored on Water
Creation
Your hands
are potter’s hands,
deny them if you will
their history of skin,
sound sinew, soft snare.
Your long fingers
take earth to task,
smooth it to service,
palms cupped in clay
creating vessels
that last and remember,
round-lipped, well-gripped
spouts and ears,
a lap of bowl, all
excess squeezed away
to make room
for emptiness.
I watch you work,
your encircling arms
and bend of neck,
your face peaceful
with unknowing,
and I fancy I am clay
beneath your hands,
that thoughts knead you
as you knead me,
that images whirl and blur
as possibilities move
beneath your hands
shoulders, breasts,
chins, lips, and eyes
emerge from dust,
take in your breath,
and worlds are formed.
To a Mandarin Mirrored On Water
God loves a duck to make him living art,
his feathers tufts of scarlet, teal, and brown,
white stripes on dark feathers, an inner tube of maroon breast
afloat, aloft,
a white tip on a beak of flame,
his dark eye shadowed with whiskers of gold,
a color palette created just for him.
Imagine the Designer’s sudden joy
when he was done, the duck’s wings spread to wind,
his waxy feet plunged to paddle water
where he hovers, dreamlike,
his echoed image mirrored for all the world to see.
Mama tells me all this by a lake ornamented with water fowl.
I look into her eyes and see myself there
looking back.
God loves a duck to make him so
like a rippled rainbow that fades and glows
and that is good
is good
so good.
Jane Shlensky, a veteran teacher and musician, holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. Her recent poetry and fiction has appeared in sundry magazines and anthologies, including Writer’s Digest, Pinesong, KAKALAK, Southern Poetry Anthology: NC, moonShine review, and Nostos. Her poems have thrice been nominated for a Pushcart. Her chapbook is Barefoot on Gravel.
Mark Jackley
Dream of a Stepladder | Rothko With My Pants Down | Fully Retired, Sonny Rollins Does the Laundry
Dream of a Stepladder
I didn’t
climb it but
crawled under it
like a child
entering
a world
where the only
thing to fix
was the urge
to step
instead of
listening
to my bones
quietly
explain
there was
nowhere else
Rothko With My Pants Down
After the nurse rubs Lidocaine
on my penis and
the doctor slides a camera through it,
I spy a Rothko poster,
pink and pale blue bars
floating in cloudy greys. I wonder
what he saw,
what the doctor will see,
what I will see when I stumble out
into the parking lot
blinking at the canvas
of the uncommitted sky, free to be astonished
by a drop of rain.
Fully Retired, Sonny Rollins Does the Laundry
The dryer hums.
Yoga breath,
humdrum zen—
not the horn’s bright fire but
a heap of
crumpled pants
still warm,
singing
to long fingers.
Mark Jackley's poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, The Cape Rock, Does It Have Pockets, and other journals. He lives in northwestern Virginia.
Chris Coulson
Millions of Midnight Stars | Alcohol | Still Life With Seagull
Millions of Midnight Stars
Tomorrow, always the boring routine
but always too, the burning
romantic unexpected
unseen.
This piece first appeared in Go With the Floe: Free perVerse (Pinehead Press, 2019).
alcohol
those years were like
living in a cave
facing away from the
sun
with the bones of
the dog
I forgot to feed
This piece first appeared in The Midwest Hotel: Free perVerse (Pinehead Press, 2013).
Still Life With Seagull
saw a dead seagull
on the coast road, beak in the sand
eyes in the asphalt
pulled the car over
saw that one wing was straight up
and still fluttering
each car that blew by
blew her feathers like she was
alive, still flying.
This piece first appeared in The Midwest Hotel: Free perVerse (Pinehead Press, 2013).
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. At the moment, and for moments to come, he’s writing Babies on the Run!, a sort of children’s book, which will be published to the delight of supportive parents everywhere—and to show babies how to run, if they need to! Chris Coulson has been writing his way out of trouble since kindergarten.
Beth Kanell
Diatribe from Sophia Thoreau (His Sister)
Diatribe from Sophia Thoreau (His Sister)
The rapids of the Merrimack
roaring power of the icy waters
how the mills groan
someone took me north (don’t ask,
his name won’t ride your lips
the way his tongue rode mine)
to the wetlands, marshes, wild
Father said the beaver’s long gone
skinned for hats like his and yours
brother what kind of friend are you
I have come raw acquainted with escape
Dear Henry David
Brother, your spilled words cascade the page, scented like a Harvard
man with sweat and ink and determined absence of women (though
I must suppose they make your meals, wash your linens, lay the
next fire in the grate). As I always have, since I could stumble in
child’s petticoat across the wide board floor, I inquire for your good
health, your sustenance and studies. Enclosed (in father’s hand) your
cheque; the final zero endowed by my efforts. Stitching. Hemming.
I have hope: Uncle offers better pay. All for you, all for you, man
of the Merrimack. I make no other answer—
Sweeter waters in the woodland pond
moss like a man’s thick curls under my palm
I dip a finger into Walden water, suck
the vegetated broth of fish and frog oh yes
I brought our sister here once, she wept
I stretch my long arms unsheathed, my bare legs
shocking in their deliberate strength, no longer
little sister; woman whose pulse pounds
whose mind demands
whose eyes
follow the cloud of a summer afternoon, shadow
of the Southern Power, slavery’s stains
some shall not scrub clean
Dear Henry David, Brother,
I love the natural world you witness, pinned to paper. And yet,
false friend that I may be, I cringe at how you live: your fiscal
ease, your careless manly acceptance that no woman
could delight in wild pleasure without guild or ambivalence. Is this
how love of a brother manifests?—this denial, this despair.
Across a salt bay
the lamplit glow of bustling Boston
coal smoke seeping over the waters
fugitive riding a low barge
Mother made his bed
Frederick
his language rich with Southern vowels
black hair thick, protesting
God in his Moses eyes
the scent of wild places in his breath
saltwater baptism, midnight hymn
My brother’s gone to Canton, sir,
ink stains on his cuffs
the word “sir” writhing upriver
like shad returned to spawn
a man’s a man (my brother)
My age and desperation silence my feelings. Daily,
I witness that you have time to fall in love, to caress
your admir’d wood-thrush or frog with eyes and words:
embrace with your honeyed tongue a stem, a fin, a croak. While I,
bound to the broken children whose pain I witness, struggle to
braid their rope of rescue
earn another dollar for you
strip the outer membrane from my heart.
bread and butter carried
cold meat potted with a layer of fat
salt cod in a wooden tray
bacon in the beans
rum, cider, dark beer
offerings at your altar
Cain killed Abel
where went their sister? Bloodied
after battle, the reddened waters
congealing puddles
whose death now among Concord’s men
who fired the first shot
wore the wounds
unblessed
Kitchen and classroom, mend and manage, stretch
each shilling or penny. Forgive me, Henry David; tis not
your wooded life I despise, deplore, but mine. So it is
to be this woman. When Abolition at last succeeds,
when all enslaved are free, who will scrub the carrots
dice potatoes, chop meat, settle and battle the cow’s
sweet rich milk til butter congeals? I mistrust your reply
snarl like a beaver at your politics
belch at your prose. For you, brother, I’ll sell
a hundred hundred pencils, teach the unlettered,
mouth the back of my own fist, unkissed
Yr sister, bound and bellicose,
Sophia
Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont. The National Federation of Press Women recently tapped one of her Vermont features with a First Place award. Her novels include This Ardent Flame and The Long Shadow (SPUR Award winner); her short fiction shows up in Lilith and elsewhere. Find her memoirs on Medium, her reviews at the New York Journal of Books, her poems in small well-lit places.
Hardy Coleman
Flight 361/To San Francisco | My wife likes the moon
Flight 361/To San Francisco
My son and I fly over Kansas,
over westward trail of beatniks,
over rivers black as sky,
stars beached on their banks,
enclosing, foreclosing Mid-America,
over rain and wheat and Mary Jane tucked into fields,
over bright sunflowers in the dark,
over railroads spiked through Arapaho prairie,
over dwindling towns I don't go back to,
over storms that twist the top soil
all the way to Oz,
over clouds
that unload like B-52's,
and under moons & satellites & warheads
and California dreaming
in the summer of love on the rocky coast of A.I.D.S.,
over Ginsberg's fucking ashes
fresh, fertile underneath.
And it's just pretend that we are flying.
Should old men & boys really do such a thing
the cities would be eight miles high and everywhere and rent free and open
till dawn.
But I'm just wishful thinking, kid,
the way us codgers often do.
But rest, and rest assured
these facts, farewells and prophecies
are not important, child.
As all the barn yard lights fade off in 30,000 feet of night
and 44 years forgetfulness...
These are nothing but the places I have been.
It doesn't matter, son.
Just curl into the bobbing currents
this seven-20-seven rides,
let your eyelids follow gravity
and dream your own inheritance.
And should you learn to fly...
Should you learn to fly?
Should you
learn
to fly,
don't wake up
and you won't come down.
My wife likes the moon
and the darkness around it
even when it's raining.
Most especially in the rain,
all shimmery and wet.
She's booked our next vacation
to a cabin on South Beach
of the Sea Of Tranquility
during the monsoon season.
We'll hold hands and kiss
neath the light of the silvery Earth,
go for long walks
in the rain which,
due to a lack of gravity this far north,
falls like a feather in a mating dance and
we'll serenade every soul
who calls the moon home
like Timmy calls Lassie,
the muezzin calls
every one of us to prayer.
Hardy Coleman spent a few weeks crashing on Denis Johnson's couch in 1972, has cooked dinner for both the B-52's and the Rolling Stones and Charlton Heston once rolled his eyes at Mr. Coleman in an airport. He resides in Minneapolis with Patricia Enger, the drag racing champion of Jackson County, Minnesota.