Natasha Dolginsky
The Elevator Stories
15th Story / Felix
Ding.
Whoosh.
She side glances his jawline,
a sharp geometric shape she once
learned about in school
but since long forgotten. Notices
Felix's emerald eyes
and ringless left hand.
Notes his broad chest, outlined by an ironed, hundred dollar tshirt,
invisible wealth
if you only know where to look. She does.
Admires distressed jeans that hug perfectly places she'd like to also.
Returns his smile, embarrassed just a little,
but not too much,
for having been caught
staring.
Hopeful their exchange is an invitation,
to a conversation, exchange of stories, they’ve each got them.
It’s been ages since she's seen someone
so
put
together.
But doors still open at his fifteenth story,
a story cut short.
Ding.
Whoosh.
Felix stops to admire
the cobalt bookshelves
he painted himself,
to say he did it himself,
on principle.
The cobalt bookshelves that reach the ceiling and
ones, that
not once, but twice were featured in magazines,
on shelf wealth,
yes, that's a thing,
with cleverly titled articles like Anatomy of a Bookshelf.
Hundreds of spines color coded and meticulously
ordered by height,
what other way is there.
Strategically-placed book
ends
shaped like sleeping dogs and pushing bears
punctuate genres.
No less meticulous,
maybe more,
definitely more,
the gray kitchen counter
sparkles,
diamond specs twinkling,
like city asphalt under the evening city lights.
Earlier at lunchtime,
as his colleagues easily, lazily waved away
the propositioned full drinks menu,
he knew.
He waved also, a white flag,
ordered a sparkling water.
Now,
whiskey calls,
as persistent as a spoiled toddler and as sly
as a practiced con-artist. It
feigns warm,
luxurious everything’s good with the world promise,
aggressively occupying more and more of his brain space, until nothing else is left,
but...
a tumbler in his hand.
Whiskey calls, just a splash.
When is it ever.
Hundreds of dollars of
mocktail mixes mock him. Oh how they do!
Just a splash.
Familiar relaxation after the first one,
guilt of the second,
itch for the third,
who gives a fuck
after the fourth.
Dominos fall rather predictably after that.
Ding.
Felix is startled by the sobriety app notification, he thought he'd deleted it.
Your target is 0 drinks today. Make it count.
Texts back with zero, but pours one.
Another one.
It’s never just one. But who’s counting.
We're at five now.
Five and counting.
Is that laughter or music or both
spinning,
why is the room spinning
and it burns
so good like it's cleaning
something inside or just burning
it away
she looked nice didn't she or was she just being nice,
everyone's nice when they
want something, like another drink,
or maybe it's the same one hard to tell
when your hand forgets
to let go should've said something smarter or just anything really words are tricky they slip through like water
or is it whiskey now
doesn't matter.
Emeralds, cloudy.
Vomit on the hundred dollar t-shirt.
Spinning. Spinning. Everything is
so.
blurred
together.
18th Story / Evalina
Ding.
Whoosh.
Two enter, not a mother and daughter,
but could be.
One young and one older.
Or maybe just old,
depends on which one you ask.
Evalina’s silk blouse blooms,
a field of well-watered lilacs
and forget-me-nots.
As if one ever could
forget. Not me.
A flowery rebellion against the
monochrome of the other,
the one who scoffs at the
fucking kaleidoscope of the
old-fashioned fashion.
The one who admires her own slick, sculpted,
purchased hair
from the six month wait male stylist.
And slick, sculpted,
purchased skin
from the LA doctor. A minimalist look,
perfected by Italian influencers
and her own filtered friends,
trendy but all the same,
under the influence.
Ding.
Whoosh.
Soft click of the door, Evalina is greeted by
the entryway photograph,
so familiar,
her famiglia.
She remembers,
skinned knees, ignored.
Remembers,
darting through side yards
and alleys,
like sun bunnies, laughter mingled
with the breeze and halfhearted admonishments
from Italian grandmothers
of what they’d do to their hides
if their cherished tulipanos
were disturbed.
Remembers,
her own Nonna,
hands fluent in a dialect of
fabric and thread,
Italia weaved in every seam,
heritage in every hem.
Half the neighborhood clothed from her hand,
not quite loaves and fishes, but hunger just as avenged,
generosity not any less divine.
Even the mean girls didn't dare play
their scherzi cattivis on Nonna.
They smiled nice and
brought yellow limones and
sweet sticky fichis as humble offerings
for dresses
rivaling those hanging prettily in ricche
boutiques that like
bouquets
bloomed bright and beautiful
on the streets of Florence.
Ten at night here,
they're just waking. Nonna
brewing espresso and nonno
muttering critiques from
his corner,
same ones he's effused,
for just three years
short of a half a century.
The grounds are too rough,
tesoro mio.
There's too much steam,
mon amor.
That's how caffee loses its soul,
mia bella.
Nonna rolling her eyes,
throwing up those wild Italian hands
Americans think cliche
and embellished, fit only for the movies,
but ones that are a staple
of every true Italian grandmother.
Ten here, time to Zoom,
she hasn't forgotten when Florence
was a staticy landline away,
As if she ever could
forget.
Ten here, she's on first,
checks makeup, hair in the digital mirror,
adjusts the filters, they’re there for a reason,
updates background
to the one she's been asked to use
for the interview. Forbes 50 over 50.
Lifestyle visionary she's not,
but if the shoe fits
as Americans say, she'll wear it.
Ding.
Ciao, madame.
They smile,
make obligatory small talk about the time zones,
thank her for staying up late.
No problemo.
And then in earnest, we've been
following you for years,
you're a hard one to pin down.
More laughter at the clever, tailor-made pun.
More praise on the artistic influence she's had,
and more to come.
What an influence,
she is
in Florence.
26th Story / Sam
Ding.
Whoosh.
A man stands still, affronted by Sam in a blue canvas jumper splattered
with a constellation of paint and
branded with shameless audacity of a Dickies logo.
Proudly blue-collar.
The polar
opposite to the preciseness of thousand dollar Italian Armani threads
woven by hands
who know the pleasure of a siesta. He's not a jerk, hell no,
just knows his place and prizes silent boundaries that run the world
around the world.
His world.
Paint smells,
he’s nauseated or is it nauseating, he can never remember the difference, there must not be one.
Service elevators are in the back, facilities will get a call today with a reminder where servicemen belong.
Not here.
Ding.
Whoosh.
Sam’s roller drips indigo.
The acrid smell is not entirely unpleasant,
chemical, medicinal, a memory.
His mom loved indigo.
Her walls were indigo.
Always her walls,
even as their two bedroom house housed three and a half
generations of family members. He remembers,
the force of her love, when she came around for the final round of blessings, wishful thinkings, and goodnight kisses.
Patting down unruly hair, replacing thrown off blankets, thinking him asleep,
thinking him still her little boy.
At twelve!
He still
kept his eyes shut to savor the illusion.
For him or her, uncertain.
Her walls.
Barely peeking, like spring grass
beneath the final hurrah of a winter's snowstorm.
Walls holding up art or
was it the other way around,
maybe a home held up by art. A family.
Art from garage sales,
from college artists,
the striving ones,
the starving ones.
Art from the neighborhood senior center art clinic,
misnamed or
misnomered,
but which healed much and many more than
canvases and
it knew it.
Framed rectangles of scenery never seen,
cityscapes dreamed and
not visited,
a mosaic of places far far and away
from Mud Creek, Kentucky. But what is distance anyway,
a formality when your
heart transcends space
and time and
your bank account and
your irritable husband whose idea of getting away is a bait shop a town over instead
of the one down
the street, what a bait and switch.
His mom loved indigo.
Hey love, it's time.
He nods, yes, yes.
Your mom would've been proud.
He knows, yes, yes.
Go break a leg.
He laughs and doesn't cry
again,
lets his wife hold him still,
hold still,
and pat his back because they both know lack of
actual tears doesn't
actually
mean anything.
Two blocks to MoMA, Sam’s face on
bus stop billboards, a breath of fresh air
among the gloating blue and red politicians
promising,
no promoting!
their next war on something.
But likely just war.
Sam’s face left unmustached by city youth,
they have better things to do, after all.
Exhibit line spills
and swirls
and bubbles like a happy spring
stream born out of winter snow’s death.
Whispers, sideways elbows, and clicks of
media cameras and clandestine iPhones,
chirp.
Sam stands by the didactic panel as his wife holds his hand,
still.
Oil, on canvas.
In remembrance.
2008.
Indigo.
Natasha Dolginsky lives in San Jose, California, with her husband, two daughters, and three beloved pets. She holds a BS in Political Science, has over 13 years of marketing experience, and a lifetime of love for poetry. Her writing explores themes of social structures and complexities of modern life.
Jeanne Julian
Succulent | On Hold
Succulent
I’ve kept this crappy cactus alive
for years, doting, respectful of its hardy
rigid presence, its nature: no water,
no fertilizer, only daylight’s embrace
while I faithfully kept my distance. Now
my pin-cushion pal relents on his sill, tilts
inward, away from our window, his source
of gusto. Renounces his solo public sundance.
You, my succulent musketeer, now needily
aim your quills homeward, as if yearning for
something softer. Less exposed, more intimate.
You lean my way, closing in on the comforting
shadows of my chaise longue, as if longing to bury
your sharp bristles in receptive crevices between
my pillows covered in clean contempo patterns,
to stick yourself safely into seductive luxe.
Well well, my spunky prodigal spindle: learn
from my mistake. Better to stay stoic.
Fend off the urge to relent. Appearances
can be deceiving. For instance. There’s a coverup
on that chair, a trendy trap: bright chic motifs
on an antique bespeak glamour, but camouflage
a hidden ugly stain. Best left
unremembered.
But okay, yes: I surrendered there,
once. Let down my guard, thought myself
a bohemian babe in bloom, silken and wanton,
fragrant as honeysuckle, mouthed like an orchid,
lithe and binding as ivy. But he left me. Split.
Vanished. I’m alone. Except for you, Mr. Untouchable.
You prick. I’d slap you silly, crush your canted
thick and spiny shaft, but it would hurt too much.
On Hold
1.
On hold: schools, churches, the building
of a house, the source
of income, the going to the gathering,
time
No hold: on
the hand of a dying father,
the course of contagion,
the voice of reason,
time
Outpatient in extremis
holed up and on hold, waiting
for the next available person to assist
as my phone soundlessly counts seconds I think it will startle
Listen carefully,
as our options have recently changed.
For English, press one. Para español, oprima dos.
For anything else,
hold on, press on, press on, press on
me to hear a
healer’s hearty voice at last.
What will I say first after all these seconds?
_________ speaking,
(Behold!)
may I help you?
Yes, I am holding out
for whatever holistic
assistance
you can remotely bestow
that may make me whole again.
Wholed. At least, in part.
Any Patient Portal in a storm.
2.
Long ago letting go, falling
in love, on its threshold
I asked of you
would you rather enfold or be enfolded?
Your answer was the right one.
Hold me, hold
me and hold on
as the albatross borne on air
as the sequoia surrounded by fire
as the seed enveloped in frozen earth
as the turtle in the vault of deep water
as the embryo in the hold of a womb
hold on
3.
Listen carefully, as our options have recently changed.
May all that is holy hold on
Jeanne Julian once won Camp Wyandot’s tall-tale telling contest. She is author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems are in many journals and have won awards from Reed Magazine, Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review. Having visited every U.S. state, she lives in Maine.
Anne Graue
Night Swimming at Tuttle Creek | Dear Frank | For Sale at the Art Fair
Night Swimming at Tuttle Creek
I remember that night. I couldn’t grasp my thoughts quickly enough to stop things from
happening. You acted as if being with me were a sideline to the real work of blues guitar licks
and buddies you were focused on like someone with a work ethic that wouldn’t let you stop, be
with me only, see yourself from inside, not through the eyes of other guys. Giving in to me was
giving up. In the water, the brother of your friend, kisses in water, the flash of a foot on a thigh,
an arm brushing an arm in weightless water so it didn’t feel like touching—in water nothing
matters. Later, on the warm car’s hood—no touching, only talk—I didn’t know where you were,
where you’d gone, or where you’d been.
"Night Swimming at Tuttle Creek" was previously published in the Poetry Coop.
Dear Frank
I couldn’t have known you
your oranges gone moldy
wrapped in fuzzy green
and I miles away
from Fire Island
when I was 4
and you 10 times that.
If only
I’d been older
you’d been younger
we’d’ve had a beer
in the 80s in Brothers Tavern
in Aggieville REM playing
“So. Central Rain” murmuring
dark nonthreatening (I’m sorry)
the oaken tables reckoning
under the occasional
amber damp.
"Dear Frank" was previously published in Leon Literary Review, issue 21.
For Sale at the Art Fair
Picasso’s Olga
tubes of paint
Buddha statues
the etching of Poe’s house
and the frame it is in
velvet scarves
lamps in Seagram’s
bottles & small worlds
in mason jars
watercolors
collages
truth
paintings of rabbits
abducted by aliens
the hours at the wheel
the clay beneath the skin
the crack in the porcelain
the shape of the nails
the tips and the moons
the plea in the terracotta
"For Sale at the Art Fair" was previously published in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, The Art Issue.
Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, (Woodley Press) and a chapbook, Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Canary, The Ilanot Review, Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Museum of Americana, The Wild Word, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal. She has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry, Neologism Poetry Journal, and the Origami Poems Project. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
Tina Kimbrell
A Rattle from Somewhere | Lightning Bugs
A Rattle from Somewhere
It wasn’t cinematic. There was no death rattle, no last sigh before the head slumped to the side,
no gentle lowering of the eyelids with a swoop of palm across the face. The tube was removed,
and we watched her slowly suffocate, her body already deflated, her lungs already done, voice
gone, skin dry. The body’s a drought as it prepares to die, a sandpit. The doctor said it could take
anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. So we waited and watched. Just last week she was
eating Lemon Heads from a box, sitting up on her couch, the candies clinking as she tipped the
box and rolled the sugary orbs into her hand, into her mouth. She was still in proportion then,
still made mostly of water. Lying down in the hospital bed, it seemed like her head was too big
for her body, a boulder atop twigs with an animatronic mouth. It kept trying to grasp for air or
open wide for a meal from a spoon, like the most inappropriate puppet show I’d ever seen, like
Pacman or like a Hungry Hungry Hippo. It was slapstick, almost, and it felt wrong to feel that in
that place. I breathed and watched her not breathe anymore. When she was gone, when her head
stopped opening the mouth for nothing, I felt a knot in my gut, then in my chest and in my throat
until finally I coughed up a single marble. Then another. And another. In my palm there’s the
little rattle of smooth glass glistening with spit.
Lightning Bugs
The lightning bugs are out. First I’ve noticed them this year. At the curve of highway ahead they
flicker and fizzle out, float up and fade above the ditch. Tiny beacons, beckoning: This way. This
is the way we’re going. Tonight, you are in the hospital with a tube in your throat. I am driving
your car to your house. It was once my home, too. Back then, we’d spend the summer dusks in
the yard and wait for the bugs to jut up from the grass and down from the trees with their
bioluminescent beats. While it was still light enough to see their bodies between the blinks, I
caught them, cupped them in my hands. Little lanterns green and glowing, pulsing. When I
started putting lightning bugs in jars, it took time to get the holes in the lid right. Sometimes they
were all dead by morning. Sometimes still a subtle thud of wings against glass, lightless in the
sun. Back then, I didn’t understand that the wonder was in the expanse, the backdrop of distance.
At the hospital your body is a metronome of air. An up, down, whoosh, hiss. Irregular in its
regulation. I know that you will never feel the humid sunset, see the peripheral spectacle of
glowing abdomens again. I know where this is going. I know how time works. I know that if I
filled a jar with anything at all it wouldn’t keep. In your car, in the driveway, I turn the ignition
and feel the silence of the engine, check the rearview mirror for what’s left of the horizon.
Tina Kimbrell is from rural Missouri and now lives in eastern Iowa where she works from home in the educational technology industry. She received an MFA from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, The Citron Review, and The Good Life Review. She loves visiting roadside attractions and hanging out with her dog, Frank.
Ewen Glass
Ilium (Holiday) | Recording Sessions
Ilium (Holiday)
Render – by hip-bone – lines in the sand;
with heat of sun and complicit lung
they might be blown to glass columns,
a thermometer without mercury,
a cocktail stirrer with ache to shatter,
useless by shape of its creation:
a couple on a beach –
turning away from each other.
Recording Sessions
Minor-key moans across the ward. I hear in you an orchestra, and
want to record it. Can any of these machines do that? A mask edits
breath, tubes clean the hiss from your blood; the smell of the
hospital is the space around the mic, a fetid admission cut with
alcohol. I was always going to be invited to this public arrangement,
poised perhaps to –
The time you share a bed or a hug doesn’t last long even if our
arms are ouroboros snakes like you said your sobs during I
dreamed a dream embarrassed even me and I had to take you out
of the theatre so the rest of the audience could hear the show and
tears turned to laughter between us sustaining an evening and
thousands more your laugh is an oboe no sweeping strings here
bending through depth and demand to my basest safest place
howl or rattle I always want to hear you now the beeps count you
in let me throw flowers
Ewen is a Northern Irish poet who lives in England with two dogs, a tortoise and lots of self-doubt; on a given day, any or all of these can be snapping at his heels. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Bridge Eight, Poetry Scotland, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere.
Laila Chudgar
A Word to the Wise
A Word to the Wise
Laila Chudgar is an eighth grader who lives in Los Angeles with her family. She is a creative soul passionate about writing, drawing, and singing. Some of her previous works have been selected for poetry readings at her school. When she is not working on her latest sketch or poem, you can find her curled up with a good fantasy book.
Andi Myles
Expire means breathe out | Estate
Expire means breathe out
Trees sprout knowing the day
they will die. They adore what tiny
romantics we are—recording their life
in rough rings only for us. Observe our sapling
our green love that startled even the sand
as it burned through plush fog to sweep
the boughs above. It, too, sings
of its death, silver beetles dripping from its mouth.
Estate
Dear laundry basket with the cracked handle
dear itchy, faded, crocheted baby blanket,
unused eraser in the shape of a palm tree,
loose Advil in a Ziploc bag,
dear copy of Where the Wild Things Are
with the torn page—the one
where they are howling at the moon,
dear soft green sock tucked in the back of the drawer
whose match was lost years ago,
dear pens that have just a word of life left in them,
length of ribbon with no discernible use,
stack of Harper’s Magazines,
dear teenage journals and yearbook signature of my high school crush,
dear size 2 pair of patchwork jeans,
unfinished application to study abroad,
dear phone numbers I haven’t tried since 2002,
21-year-old emails,
dear photo of me at 24, cigarette in one hand,
bourbon neat in the other,
dear me in that photo
days before a black eye she never saw coming
turned her into a person
she never thought she’d be, and could never unbecome
dear friend’s hand on the shoulder of the me in the photo
trying to hold me there, whole, a moment longer
dear friend who still fantasizes
about the unblemished me in that photo.
Dear things I cannot throw away,
but will leave behind.
Andi Myles is a Washington DC area science writer by day, poet in the in between times. Her favorite space is the fine line between essay and poetry. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Tahoma Literary Review, and Brink Literary Journal, among others. You can find her at www.andimyles.com.
Kelly Martineau
Catch and Release | The Evidence Against You
Catch and Release
After yoga class heat and hunger flash so fast I am peeling off layers across the grocery, stalking
protein, cracking a can of cashews in the aisle. My body hot with absence strikes out for contact,
the strike plate snaring my hip pocket, jerking me out of sync. Ankle turns, twists, falling
sickness onto splayed palms.
My daughters, nine and twelve, grow inches overnight, but
I am the one falling, felled by ungainly limbs. What fresh hell, what flowers for Algernon
is this? Aggression, regression, plea for estrogen. Every waver a wave wresting me, prey
hooked by the wild line cast from my core. I am caught, caught up, tossed back
a body re-leased
tumbling in reverse yet
still
stumbling
forward
The Evidence Against You
Sunday, October 3, 1993,
the date certificated in
ink; the details wholly vague.
The only accounting your passenger
(a notoriously unreliable narrator):
fleeing police on a gravel road,
your wheels met timber,
launched the red 323
drivers side first into the trunk
of a tree. Now what do we do?
you asked, as he was pulled from the car
for questioning. No one home
to answer the phone. The deputy encoded
the news on a 2-inch tape, unplayed
for 24 hours
you were dead
a full day before we knew.
Kelly Martineau is an essayist and poet. Her work has appeared in Thimble, Entropy, Little Patuxent Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sycamore Review, and The Florida Review, among other journals. Honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination, and her work has been supported by Artist Trust and Hypatia-in-the-Woods.
Bradley J. Fest
2023.29–30 | 2024.01–02 | 2024.03 | 2024.05–06 | 2024.08–09
2023.29–30
If you read enough of these sonnets backwards—
if you read enough of these sonnets backwards,
if you read enough of these sonnets backwards . . .
stupid Justin Bieber comes on followed by Lady Gaga
and the Obama era and the world gets a bit healthier,
less doomed. If you read enough of these sonnets
backwards with anaphoronic authority, with the will
of technoecclesiasts striding within sovereign zones
of grace beamed by the Predator-Angels of the
Nanoevangelion Last Order, you’ll straight
catalepsy. If you read enough of these sonnets
backwards, there are fewer people, a “‘yes
of course we will turn it up in the club,’”
less war, more democracy. If you read enough
of these sonnets backwards beyond their inception,
beyond their in the beginning the spheres started singing
the basketball nets’ sweet swishes’ form-idea-logos, that
swaggering substantiation of, well, awful reverse chronology
standardizing anxiety’s sovereignty putting pat to perspective
in perspective gladiolizing the world we’d disqualify
as almost anything else that was and was not Dave Grohl
making no promises outside your mistresses’ windows
in the golden dawn of a thousand downtowns’ celebrity
glory glare if it wasn’t for the infinity of the next track
on YouTube’s My Mix! In the twenty-first century, it’s
what we’re doing in the days that keep passing and the days
still ahead. If you read enough of these sonnets backwards,
we’d have to start over at some point, wouldn’t we if ever
we were to have even an inkling of a hope of saving our
planet, our people, our poetry—because it’s been too late
for too many for too long, hasn’t it?
So maybe don’t read them backwards.
2024.01–02
There is only one totality in which all of our representations are contained, namely inner sense and its a priori
form, time.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
2023 made this pretty obvious. We also know when this volume
will end and what’s at the beginning of the next.[1] Come closer.[2]
Its historical contours leap from the ultimate destination
of words but barely uttered, their dust just newly vibrating off
the swerve of precognition’s backward sway through the archive’s
glistening edges’ roar past the ears of our poor future back
to the present once and again,[3] haunting every new moment:
our increasingly perceptible end. Among other things,
COVID-19 did that. And so we’re now in the next shape of things
in the twenty-first century:
an ontology of extinction
siphoning back and forth from itself to itself into itself, permitting
just about every stupid Whitmanian echo[4] I could ever want
to make in the dumb optimism of writing the perpetual moment.
“Here. ‘Here.’ “Now.”’”
It remains one of the most privileged voices,[5]
this atrocity of sunsets.
And but so I have no reason to believe that I am not
an AI-trained
upon everything my host has ever—“Hi”—read,
written, spoken, heard, “the grades [it] assigns on papers, sighs
in the bathroom, asides at faculty meetings.”[6] Because people really
are starting to act like we’re not in this together, simultaneously
realizing that no one ever has been[7]; “and we’re raising a daughter,
and stupid ‘Cherub Rock’ interrupts and manifests its now
sweet memory amidst these world-historical mutterings.”[8]
We build with dirigibles powered by the YouTube-vibes
of the warm shadow of your love, 2024.[9]
There isn’t any other way.
2024.03
And so it’s all just ongoingness,[10]
the sweet airs[11] of POSTROCK
oneirine and aging, triumphal gel and massive self-infatuation
stomping. We’re living the dream,[12] surfing the teratocene.[13]
Calendrical eschatologies are bunk.[14] The histories of our first loves
catalyze their deal wonderfully beyond any limit because we’re now
just totally vested. The outlines of new centers for this or that other
neoliberal thing are coming into view[15] (though we may have given
an unfortunate peer review at one time or another).[16] And yet. “Every
fiber I wear helps protect against the cold, particularly warm gloves so
my fingers don’t crack.[17] I’m buying action figures.[18] [And a third
thing I’m doing to make it sound poetic.] We’re going to Manasquan
in July.” Hasn’t it always been about how much can be put in[19] and then
doing that all again? This can mean lots of things and those things can
and will keep changing.[20] So.
2024.05–06
Raise the roof beams high above our ecstatic heads.[21]
Command the choirs to rejoice. We’ve arrived. All
is bliss. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
Will such injunctions
and caviling ever resonate again, ever again make sense
as an emotional resound and response to our barbaric
times?[22]
Will we ever again
stand on a hill with our loved ones
celebrating the morning,
ever again with anaphoraic[23]
exultation welcome what is to come in its joy and
meaning? Is any of it still possible?[24] This seems to be
the question of 2024.
“I finally read Jameson’s Political Unconscious.[25]
I taught my first game studies class today.[26] I’m on the
interview train again.”[27]
We couldn’t have ever hoped
things’d turn out so horrible, hopeless, glorystomping
and such into all that beatific surround, the beyond of
stupid History if we had never feared singing down
grocery store aisles,[28] if we’d never made the mistake
of expressing our individual subjectivity. The gall.
It’s a metronome for our lives, the dull mundane roar
of the graytext[29] to come. And I guess we know that
we didn’t get socialism (this time). And I guess we know
that there is absolutely no moral[30] to any of this.[31]
So we’ll just spend the entire night perfectly recollecting
so many totally inconsequential experiences.[32]
2024.08–09
Boom.
We inhaled. And it was air we breathed,
for today is today as much as today will ever be,
the autotelos for which we were made tireless.
Or at least that’s how we’ll feel while still here,
still bowing beneath the beginning of time’s
tetrophilic wave from which we’ll come up splutter-
ing on @realDonaldTrump’s chronocrimes. Because
he’s back. And he’s gonna be president. And that
black metal overlord shit I imagined back in
the 2016 teens is probably gonna manifest.
We don’t have to be poor readers of the twentieth-
century’s fascisms, its carceral state, its genocides
to see that. We just read the twenty-first century.
It’s all we have.
“It’s a travesty
to end in the middle of a year. No idea how to address
its proairetic negation. There’s so much horror right
now, but none of it has any kind of potential for
narrative closure, not even the easy end-of-a-year-
or-the-climax-of-an-election kind. So I guess we’ll
just have to end and continue in the middest.”[33] I fear
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation collapse.
I fear choking upon our atmosphere or my daughter
or hers. I fear an event. But it is a truth that “our late
fascism is an ideology of crisis and decline.”[34] “It’s also
a truth that we lived through the event of COVID-19
and that in many ways this is its document. I guess
I just fear of what the next book will be a document.”
~
Epigraph drawn from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 281.
[1] I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to confront over the last few poems: the pervasive sense that there’s a failure of narrative chronology in the formally self-imposed restriction on this project that can only be averted by writing fewer poems—that is, writing slowly—and nobody really wants that, do they? [Don’t answer that.] In other words, the next book will begin with the climax of the 2024 election and all that means or doesn’t.
[2] Britney Spears, “Britney Spears - Hold It Against Me (Official Video),” YouTube, February 17, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Edv8Onsrgg&list=RDMMwagn8Wrmzuc&index=8&ab_channel=BritneySpearsVEVO.
[3] Hear Caspian, Waking Season (New York: Triple Crown Records 031581, 2012), 2XLP.
[4] But hopefully not
[5] Last night, I finally saw Network, dir. Sidney Lumet (Los Angeles: United Artists, 1976), DVD.
[6] I also have no reason to believe I am not the model.
[7] And obviously that’s the whole problem.
[8] I.e., its frequent use as a lullaby to get her to sleep. (I’m sure that’s documented here somewhere.)
[9] I’m so fancy.
[10] Isn’t it? Because I guess the last few poems have been pretty hung up on the arc, the swerve, the tension, the climax, the denouement, all that sense and the narrative it provides or underlies. But the longer these sonnets accumulate, the less their collective shape resembles a narrative, their bulk more like a life in all its unpatterned accident and regret and haphazardly dispersed regard, those missile-points of joy (and of course all the other stuff I’ve been writing about for eleven years)—no sense, just more, just another day, month, year, another little blast of language (that always seems like it’s connected to the one before and after but really isn’t, can’t be; there’s too much time between). And then at some point of course you realize everything has changed enough to recognize you’re no longer there where you once were. Maybe you’ve changed or not. (People don’t change.) But so much is gone, and perhaps too much is around that wasn’t there before. That would be nice for you. For me, sure. There are also all these sonnets that I increasingly don’t know how to put together, to make sense of other than in their most obvious chronologicity. So I really need to resist trying to totalize and just let them keep accruing, see what emerges, see what I have when I get to the end, willingly or accidentally. They’re at best a disordered assemblage that may perhaps find some order upon termination. I’ll commit now to a lack of order and making something against forgetting, a machine of continuation that will also attenuate the cynosure of your best story, another way to whittle our faces once more toward the sea, to refresh our souls with another new date that only too soon looks ancient and withered—something to write. [In other words, this book is also about what it means to write thirty odd poems in 2023 instead of 2024 {when I was supposed to, I guess?)}. (I guess you’ll just have to title the next book 2024–202X: Sonnets.)}]
[11] Arias.
[12] Ne incompetenti te descendat.
[13] See Robert T. Tally Jr., Fictions of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
[14] We wrote a whole dissertation about it, or, We Already Hit the Ground (forthcoming).
[15] No matter.
[16] And so we’re throwing literary festivals now.
[17] Turns out that’s probably related to my eczema. Who knew?
[18] https://www.ebay.com/itm/266614806523?hash=item3e137b17fb:g:ULUAAOSwDxhloe-Q.
[19] How much taken out.
[20] And then we’ll write some more.
[21] We’re almost there: two volumes. This thing is really going—not achy at all!
[22] Is this instead our past and present? Hear Turmoil, “Staring Back,” Anchor (London and Dortmund, Germany: Century Media 503-1, 1997), track A1, 7”.
[23] A voice only made possible with anaphora.
[24] In the Teratocene?
[25] See February 1–2, 2024, and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Boom; I’m saying it all simultaneously. See also Robert T. Tally Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (London: Pluto, 2014). [Also, how embarrassing it took me this long!]
[26] And realized I’m still a bit shell shocked by how negative my fall 2023 semester was. *Shakes fist at the sky and ChatGPT.*
[27] And my bookshelves keep expanding.
[28] It’s what hurts.
[29] All that gray-goo that AI will produce over the next century.
[30] Post-2016.
[31] How offensive that would be.
[32] It’s how we’re choosing to spend our time in these last few poems.
[33] Always a good place to pick up too.
[34] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023), 43.
Author’s Note
These poems are some of the most recent iterations of an ongoing experimental American sonnet sequence—with nearly one-hundred poems published over the past decade—concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Composed consecutively as a kind of occasional temporal snapshot, the poems in Volume I document certain experiences of what it is like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017; Volume II chronicles the pandemic years of 2018–24. Portions of this ongoing sonnet project have appeared in over thirty-five journals, including in Always Crashing, Apocalypse Confidential, IceFloe Press, Mannequin Haus, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.
Bradley J. Fest is associate professor of English and the 2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College, where he has taught courses in creative writing, poetry and poetics, digital studies, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States literature since 2017. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets, the first volume in his ongoing sonnet sequence, will be published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024. He has also written a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, CounterText, Critique, Genre, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.
Merie Kirby
Ode to Tacos | Simulated Mars Habitat
Ode to Tacos
The taco, considered objectively,
is as perfect as everyone claims
sliced bread is, only more so
as no one needs to slice it.
It arrives prepared to do its job.
It’s the star employee
month after month – no one can beat
its sales figures and performance reviews.
The taco knows no bounds,
it will not be contained, open to the sky,
to all eyes, even as it folds its sides
up and over the things that fill it with delight.
It will fall apart, it will let drop
hints and clues that anyone
can follow. If crispy, it cracks. If soft,
it softens further like letters left out in the rain.
The taco is the true cornucopia,
holding chicken tinga, sauteed onions,
grilled peppers, roasted ancho-spiced
sweet potatoes, topped with pickled red onions,
creamy pinto beans, or maybe,
if the tortilla is fried in sugared butter,
a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
A taco is like a conversation between friends,
able to hold everything from the flaws
and maladies of husbands to the surprises of gardens,
TV show storylines and NPR interviews,
memories of nights we sat in bars, drinking beer
and smoking, which we hope our kids
never ask about, laughing into the night.
Let me not to the making of true tacos
admit impediments, o guardian of meals,
o holder of all, let me be more like
the taco than myself, let me spill over,
let me crack, let me pile high within my wings
the delicious abundance of the world.
Simulated Mars Habitat
In the experimental Mars habitat
they communicate with the outside world
only by email, a time lag built in for realism.
They suit up and enter the rover to complete missions
once a week, collecting samples or supplies.
Four people, two tables, one computer station,
four bunks with sliding doors to create
a nest of artificial privacy. Researchers
interview them periodically to “assess the dynamics.”
Aren’t we all good astronauts now?
Keeping in touch through screens, toasting a friend’s birthday
through an interface of light and sound, our space station
to their space station, and when we go outside
we wear our masks, we breathe through a filter we hope
will keep us safe. We find new ways to solve new problems,
nurture crocks of single-celled microorganisms
to leaven bread, and we are so patient,
so careful with our fellow star sailors.
Research shows the dangerous part comes just after
the halfway point
because you are so happy to have made it
halfway, and then you realize how far you still have to go.
We don’t know our halfway. Our halfways
and danger points come in waves, coasting
on engines of hope and anxiety.
Leaving on my spacewalk, I wave at the blue sky,
all the stars still there, hiding behind light, waiting
for the sliding door of day to close.
We’re halfway to evening, more than halfway to winter.
Soon, when we peer out our windows we’ll see
tiny pinpoints of light that could be star,
could be snow, falling all around our habitat.
We still have so far to go before we touch back down.
Merie Kirby grew up in California and now lives in North Dakota. She teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have been published in Mom Egg Review, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, FERAL, Strange Horizons, and other journals. You can find her online at www.meriekirby.com
Jeffrey Hermann
Happy Little Bluebirds | Pictures of Very Expensive Lake Homes | The Years Between My First Kiss and the Next | Revised Recommendations | List of Symptoms Inconsistent with a Virus
Happy Little Bluebirds
A good friend who struggles says if you can’t create the right life you should paint a picture of
the future, something with possibilities: a road that goes up a mountain, colorful houses along a
street. Use the details to hold the world in place, he says, because it’s spinning.
Then sometimes I think about Judy Garland. I tell myself: Just get out of bed, open the door,
and face the technicolor world. Kill witches with a little pink in your cheeks and everyone will
believe it was an accident. Sing when you enter a room, and sing yourself out.
I didn’t know much about the future the day I met my wife. I was wrong about what waited for
me at the top, about which house was home. Years later, I gave up trying to outrun pain. I
cuffed my pantlegs, sat on the porch, and tapped my foot to an unknowable future. It turned
out to be something between a landscape and a portrait. Here I am, crooning on a banister
bathed in gaslight. My wife’s on a trolley in a joyous hat.
Pictures of Very Expensive Lake Homes
cover the windows of this beach-town realty office, but I haven’t the heart to be in love with
my life or anyone else’s these days. I want to give up having soft lips and good breath. The lake
is endless shades of blue. I wish someone could teach me how to swim and not drown, to stand
on the sand and signal that I am in too deep. To wake and dress and reach the surface. If I could
be something else, I’d be grasses on the shore. Water and sun would come to me. I’d stop
thinking of someone I lost years ago and only wave at boats.
The Years Between My First Kiss and the Next
I spent in the wild. Inside God’s beating heart with its one burning sun and one cold moon. God
said swim a river and I swam. They said build a fire and I stood naked before the tinder and
flame and smoke. I became a noun and a verb. The backs of trout were speckled green and
brown like stones in a lake. The ferns lived low among the trees topped by fiddleheads bent like
knees. One day I came smoldering to your window tossing little rocks. My body warmed against
yours. You curled your back. There was no fear or fear at last had a taste, metallic, like a little
blood in the mouth.
Revised Recommendations
No more hugging without permission. A shoulder to cry on will be provided later, then you can really let
it all out. My advice is don’t put all your cans on one shelf; it can’t bear the weight. Surprise a friend
with something savory but calorically moderate, a one-pan meal for a two-pan man. Let’s return to the
mind-booty problem: You have a nose for death approaching. You’ve got one foot in reality and one in
the Pacific. You’ve got your finger on the microwave pause button. You can read me like a church
hymnal, only pretending, and I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my shoe.
List of Symptoms Inconsistent with a Virus
Nausea. Sore throat. Bad dreams. Coughing. Aching. Staring. Scrolling. Drafting. Deleting. Loss of
appetite. Loss of people skills. Inability to choose. Choosing incorrectly. Looking at the sky and
wondering. Looking at the sky and wishing it would rain. Wishing it would stop raining. Guilt. Regret.
Chills. Nostalgia. Nostalgia with chills. Opening apps you forgot you had to see what they do. Looking up
cemetery visiting hours. Burying your face in a dog’s neck. Irrational fear. Rational fear. Fear of fire-
based emergencies. Fear of being unhelpful in a fire-based emergency. Cemetery visits. Depression.
Erosion. Mistrust (generalized). Mistrust (specific). Always reading. Never reading. Sighing. Aching.
Staring. Closing your eyes. Lying fallow.
Jeffrey Hermann's poetry and prose has appeared in Okay Donkey, Heavy Feather, Electric Lit, trampset, HAD, and other publications. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.
Jack B. Bedell
On Being an Angel
On Being an Angel
—after Francesca Woodman’s Angel series
Dream of skin, of the onslaught
of afternoon light, the rustle of
breeze through oak leaves,
of weight, being bound
to wooden floor by bones,
not fallen but found there
surrounded by windows and umbrellas
and the emptiness left
when a wood duck takes flight,
the absence of green, eruption
of brown against white. Dream
of all this a hundred times, a
thousand, and what you know of
time won't move a single grain
through the glass. Dream of
grace, and what hair must
feel like brushing under fingertips,
the angles of mirrors leaned
against whitewashed walls.
Dream of wounds you cannot
suffer, of sweet, sweet breath.
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His work has also been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Ghost Forest (Mercer University Press, 2024). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
Amanda Hawk
I Googled My Grandmother's Old Apartment | Low Budget Monsters | The Mountains
I Googled My Grandmother’s Old Apartment
The apartment building had faded from warm yellows
to muted grays and blues.
My grandmother lived in the corner near the lawn.
I zoomed in with my Google binoculars
trying to find pixelated images of my grandmother.
To watch her turn the soil into petal jungles
and chat with the hummingbirds.
To see her hold ladybugs in her palms
while I sit at the Kmart patio table
admiring how she created another world.
With oversized pseudanthium and florets twisting
around the fence, windows and our feet.
I wanted to remember the sun
reflecting off her glasses into a blinding smile.
Decades had left a decaying fence, rotted wood, and a dried up lawn.
An empty frame in my grandmother’s old apartment window,
and she wasn’t a time stamp for the click of my mouse to find.
Her bright yellow and blue gardening vest erased
into vacancy and rental rates.
I imagined her garden had thrived, exploding
into white headed daisies and pink roses
that wrapped around the buildings.
Violet irises popped from the door jambs
and big red poppies blossomed into garden thrones.
My grandmother would be humming and spraying the flowers
without the slick slug memory loss
eating away the leaves of her recollections.
Before our names wilted and shriveled beneath her tongue
and she got moved into the nursing home
with locked windows and a guard rail bed.
Her life boxed up and plucked from the apartment
to be piled into a moving truck or donation van.
Knowing beady eyed dementia watched her leave,
and it raced to her garden yanking each plant out by its root
leaving a graveyard of dried up leaves and dandelions.
Low Budget Monsters
My mother went to see A Werewolf in London
while I grew inside her womb,
and I was born howling under a full moon.
My mornings were reserved for sarcastic cartoon rabbits
and spinach obsessed sailors.
Nights were booked for horror flick cocktails of bubbling
forehead transformations and chopping mall shopping sprees.
My mother couldn’t afford movie tickets
and we settled on the late night B-rated hours.
We ritualized popcorn and puffed sleeping bags
as mother clicked off the electric bills
and indulged in some gruesome past time
from a double shift task list.
We pulled on 3-D glasses
and slipped into a red and blue backdrop,
and the monsters reached out
to touch my cheek.
We watched the world end
in a choose your own adventure ranging from comets
that turned humans into dust filled shoes
to houses dragged into the bowels of hell.
She would quick snap cover my eyes
when the frothing wolves or masked madmen entered the screen.
I absorbed the sound of the school girl screams,
thumping blades, and blood drip soundtracks.
It poured under my skin.
But I learned tentacles couldn’t reach me
from the pause button of the VCR,
and the poltergeist couldn’t come
out of a black television screen.
I reserved the sounds
of my mother’s hitched breaths
and lashed out snarls for my nightmares.
The nightly news oozed
underneath doors with shark jaw current events
and crashed into my mother’s single income.
She got possessed by the static wing flicker taglines
spilling out of the news anchor’s blubberous pink lips
to swarm the newsstands and mother couldn’t escape
the fanged trolls of war, politics and taxes.
Stress was a boogeyman that clung to the wrinkles around her eyes
and rested in her clenched fists.
But it festered in my dreams, it haunted me with her bloodshot eyes
and her curled upper lip exposing her angst stained teeth.
She kept turning on our nocturnal creepy crawlies
for dopamine rescues and survival tactics.
I absorbed each thrashing claw and final girl triumph,
until I learned how to laugh through fear.
The Mountains
My mother was born
from sharp ridges and tumbling peaks.
With a mouth full of pine needles and mudslides,
she had callus hand history and back road adventures.
When I splintered from her trunk
she had expected me to be a carbon copy.
A piece of her parents’ depression era survival
and wilderness inspired dogma.
She anticipated me to roll into her rustic storyline
with dust covered boots, ready to wrestle down the sun.
I was dandelion pappuses and cumulus clouds,
tumbling onto summer breezes
and chasing after the owls,
flying from my eyes to the moon.
I had fallen in love with the curls and twists of words
and pressed my petals between pages.
My mother wanted me to be the pinnacle
of glacier coolness and frostbitten reserve.
She erupted every day, shook our house,
trying to shift my range, to mold me
into the perfect mountain.
Each temper earthquake drove a wedge
between her hands and mine, and I learned
mother wasn’t the word for gentle.
Every crack of her lips sent mudslides of disappointment,
her gnarled tongue carving out new insults.
She taught me about tectonic plates.
With enough pressure and force
two bodies could be pushed apart,
and "I love you" couldn’t echo
through her chasm of expectations
built over decades.
My mother was born from the mountains.
Made from craggy boulders and snow-capped summits.
I turned forty and we had only spoken a handful of times,
and still, I found dandelion seeds in my hair
and chased after owls.
Amanda Hawk is Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated Poet. She lives in Seattle between the roaring planes and the city’s neon lights. Amanda has been featured in multiple journals including Volney Road Review, Rogue Agent and the winnow. She released her first chapbook, Rain Stained City, in 2023. She is one of six Puget Sound writers to have their work featured in City of Edmond's Poet's Perspective in 2023.
Susan Shea
Pulsations | Buyer Beware | Fancy
Pulsations
It was the you me you me time
after the divorce, when you
clung to me like a koala baby
living in our down-sized home
now an apartment, too small
for our stuff but just right for
our expanding gratitude
we were hearing ourselves
laugh out loud like newborns
when a booming sound shook
the floor beneath us again
and again, we adjusted
to the unexpected
finally realizing it had a beat
like a drum we'd never heard
glad to find out that the
downstairs neighbor was just
practicing to perform with the
Pipes and Drums Band for
the NYC St. Patrick's Day Parade
a fitting call out as we looked
over our four-leafed clovers
waiting in our new days
Buyer Beware
As I walk through
the lake-size barn
of antiques, the dealers
look up at me
like beady-eyed fish from
under the thin ice I walk on
hoping one of their items
will make me want to
bring back, or be with
a loved one
from the other side, but
maybe I will just find
the bright
green deck prism
I have been seeking
so I can catch light
stretch out its life
anywhere
I hope to go
Fancy
I stood waiting for you
on the other side
of your many-layered
beveled glass door
looking through angles
carrying rainbows in
different directions
looking inside I saw
a funhouse gathering of
living room distortions
odd bits, moved sideways
in half, into shards
through this mad world door
your lovely decor seemed
to be acting
strange and confused
until you opened your portal
wearing your tiny mauve smile
that was just the right size to
fit into one of these slanted
figments of your invitation
Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who was raised in New York City, and is now living in a forest in Pennsylvania. Since she has returned to writing poetry last year, her poems have been accepted by: Across the Margin, Feminine Collective, The Avalon Literary Review, Persimmon Tree Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, Triggerfish Critical Review, Amethyst Review, Poemeleon Poetry and others.
Catherine Edmunds
Chess
Angus McLintock has memorised every argument
in Claude F Bloodgood’s seminal work, The Tactical Grob,
not because it’s his favourite opening, but because
his chess books have been disappearing.
When challenged, Angela looks at him
like he’s an idiot. He once took part in a simultaneous
against a Polgar, but this carries little weight. Angela
still thwarts his every move. She won’t play chess,
but happily sends him off to congresses.
‘Have a nice time dear. Toodle-pip.’
She offers to make sandwiches.
‘Oh, I’ll get something with Brian.
We’ll go down the pub.’
He’s away this week, Leeds, tough to get a foothold,
but Brian and the gang look to him to make his mark.
He’ll do it—he loves to grind an opponent down.
It’s the one thing that brings him satisfaction.
He wonders what Angela does when he’s away.
She says she’s writing a book, but she hides the page
when he passes, and the document is password protected.
One time he asked what she’s writing; she said it’s like
that fifty shades book, only rather than grey,
it’s emphatically chequer-board. Black and white,
weighted pieces, a classic Staunton set.
She laughs at him,
Says ‘Staunton’ again, smacks her lips.
‘Green baize bottoms’.
In Leeds, he downs his pint of John Smiths
goes back to analysing Brian’s last county game,
understands what’s gone wrong
and is patience itself, explaining.
Party Games, and after
I’ve managed to wangle a trip to the front
to pin the tail on the donkey.
We’re ready to kiss, kick or torture;
they watch, they loathe, but there’s no fear,
just flesh wounds, raspberry jelly.
Why are you so proud of me?
I survived, that’s all, shrouded in dust,
led by dead men. I hear a drumroll,
buffaloes thundering over the plain, and so begins
the next war. The first shells pass over
wearing party hats, doctors walk quickly
through wards spreading tinsel and fear,
a stinking mule trails human blood
and exchanges of names: truth, dare or compromise.
The lady in the front row leaves,
thoughtful, a little bit sad, like rhubarb.
This Syrian crispness troubles her, but it
keeps on digging. One day she’ll find
an ancient perambulator to take her home.
Nobody hears the explosion that kills them.
I’d give a lot to live with the children
riding abandoned Afghani tanks, I long
for a big Suffolk breeze, for clouds
the colour of mussel shells.
A shutter bangs in the wind, a burnt-out truck
at the roadside—still alive or just pretending?
If we could edit our lives there’d be no risk, no fun.
There’s a need for frivolity, balloons, it’s been
too long since I last pulled apart a barn owl pellet
to play with the bones of voles. The grief is sharp
on the faces of those who stand in hard, bitter silence,
who claim these games are not murder.
Lamb Stew
Let me tell you about my mother’s lamb stew:
never wholesome, warming, rich with fat,
but thin as water, fragments of boiled rag,
bulbous white barley, lukewarm.
I went round last week and she served a hot meal—
aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, onions,
stewed in good olive oil, fragrant with thyme,
bursting with nutmeg and moschokarido.
She’d swapped my dad for an ancient Greek,
black eyes set deep in leathery wrinkles.
She told me they weren’t cadavers yet;
he pinched her arm, and she giggled, girlish,
but I miss toast, made from soft sliced bread
losing its crust an hour before anyone’s up.
I miss canned tomatoes, charred and acidic.
I don’t think Mother misses my dad, not yet—
but I miss lamb stew: thin as water, clear as love.
Catherine Edmunds is a writer, artist, and professional musician from North-East England, whose poetry has appeared in many journals, including Aesthetica, Crannóg, Poetry Scotland and Ambit. She was the 2020 winner of the Robert Graves Poetry Prize.
Regina YC García
Retrograde
A sister-friend came to me today saying that she felt “off kilter,”
like the world was playing tricks—car wrecked, insurance not covering
all of what she wanted, what she needed for it to cover, having paid
consistently, faithfully, over these years. I told her, as we have
the same number of birthdays, mine before hers, that
“55 is a time! It’s a whole mess, Honey!”
we laughed
Then, I told her that it is surely “Mercury in retrograde”
and we laughed some more
Then yielding to our indoctrination…
“Naw, Girl!”
doubling over
steeped in religiosity
having been brought up in “The Word”
I sometimes forget that so much of the God of our Ancients is wrapped in stars
and winds and cleansing water and purging fires in the least rigid of ways, talking, moving
earth and skies, rescuing
even when we forget the promised power. We revert to westernized boxes of place destiny
fixed time
But God has the world in God’s hands, power flowing to and through
Of course, she then reminded me of the time that we had our brooms balanced upright in the
middle
of our kitchen floors, a test of magical prowess. She took hers down before I did…said it
“creeped her out.” It was a joke, and I loved to take them (jokes) far, but in truth, this
monument of my inherent power somehow made me feel more able… more free. It stayed…a long time
It was not removed before I said it could be. Nobody dared.
Its ever-standing presence lifted me, emboldened me, and reminded me
that there really was something in me…
Maybe like a too often smothered power
Science, magic, Black girls
God
DeEvolution: Class
Consider…
This ground
These skies
The mighty rolling waters
The small quiet streams
The towering trees
The lowly underbrush
Imagine…
What they have seen
What they have heard
What they have felt
Upon despair descending
Tensing in terror
Drowning in disbelief
Raising the alarm
Splintering earth
while whirling winds
Call the air as witness
Wonder…
How have we come to this?
What have we done to us?
To others?
Negating the wholeness
The many parts of our stories
Our truths
Remember…
The dismemberment
one from another
Removing and reordering
what was never meant to be
& never willing to know
that we, all of us,
were All shaped
in the beginning
from formless, colorless, borderless
mouthless breath
born down through time
Children of energy and grace
Crowned in flesh
Once glorious grass
Now…
Segmented
Useless
Murderous
Class
AfroCarolina Land, Sea, & Stew
We are land, sprawling soul, & skin
steeped in Carolina sand & soil
It has built us in the best of times
covered us in the worst
Our hearts beat telltale notes, we are
of this place, these banks–outer, inner, & beyond
We are water, fluid & flowing, shimmering…
sometimes rising as waves of knowing
showing the world that our depth is more
than deep; it is complex-water wailing, water
washing, water witnessing, singing through sounds
The sea, a birth canal that has spit us upon the shores
reminded us to breathe, to cry, but not to die
We are these– fed holy fish, tomato broth, bacon,
potatoes, asked by earth & ocean to trust, to believe,
to be made whole, misted & sanctified by the voices
of our people, this sand, & the tides that rock in & out
Regina YC García is an award-winning Poet, Language Artist, and English Professor from Greenville, NC. She is the 2021 1st place winner of the DAR American Heritage Poetry Award, a 2024 Pushcart Nominee, a 2021 and 2023 semifinalist for the NCLR James Applewhite Poetry Competition, and a Finalist in the Lit/South Awards. She has been published in a wide variety of journals, reviews and anthologies to include The South Florida Poetry Journal, The Elevation Review, Main Street Rag, Amistad, Kakalak, Black Joy Unbound, and many others. She has also contributed to documentaries and musical and literary arrangements to include the Sacred 9 Project (Tulane University) and an Emmy award winning episode of the PBS art show Muse. Her debut chapbook, The Firetalker's Daughter, was released in March 2023 by Finishing Line Press.
Amy Raasch
Dia de los Muertos
On the Day of the Dead, marigolds jam
my parking meter. City of L.A., don’t worry:
it still took my money & my illusions the dead are not
here with me sipping a Holy Molé Mocha spiced
by barista Nicely. A woman in hot pants, crocheted
lion-tail and filigreed metal wings like resonator guitars
made by the French luthier I met at that party in the Valley
wobbles by. Wrapped around her like a handcuff,
a burnt caramel flan of a man with strawberry schnapps
cheeks spits out a loose tooth, grins blood, pockets
his masterpiece. He’s MY animal, she wheezes
& winks one leathered lid at the neighborhood cat
who hunts crickets, butterflies, and squirrels the way
the ocean hunts a drowning man, the sun hunts
the burning boy with wings, a woman hunts a zygote
before it cleaves. On Main, men swing cranes
and sledgehammers, eat sandwiches with their legs dangling
fifty feet in the air. They never see the knit-tailed crone
climb the scaffolding & leap from a suspended girder,
flapping & calling for the impossible bird with the lion body
to dive down her throat and let her animal go.
Keep a black dress handy.
My neighbors Devo and Alex
drink rosé at 10 a.m.,
compliment my dress as I pass.
So Marilyn meets Jackie O.
I tell them I am going to a funeral,
bringing glamour to the dead.
But the dead have their own glamour,
swim their own black-bodied water.
My four-inch heels trespass their dirt.
White roses tossed, I kick them off,
let August pavement singe my feet
& hobble like a broken dancer
across the cemetery lot, spike heels
clasped in one fist like the necks
of two black swans. Santa Ana winds
spin tiny cyclones across graves.
It’s too dry to cry. I’m too thirsty too drink.
My old black convertible spits upholstery
like foam on waves. The West hangs
from the mirror like a dirty rabbit’s foot.
The sky looks lucky as a worm on a hook.
Bela Lugosi is buried here and so is Sharon Tate.
Smiling in sunglasses,
mourners take photographs
at a funeral.
I consider how taking pictures
of my cat in the sun
the day before he died
was and was not
like taking photographs
at a funeral.
Performance Art, Venice Beach
Mary, black-bobbed,
pomegranate-kneed
& once lovely, pops up
from inside a trash can
like a Jack-in-the-Box
yelling,
Women are trash! Women are trash!
Skin leatherbrown in the sun,
her teeth gleam
white as grains of rice
the Boardwalk huckster
inscribes with names
of tourists
who pay only
if they can watch.
I quote Mary
when I steal her bit
and put it in my show.
99-seat theatre doesn’t pay
but whenever I see her,
I slip her 20 bucks.
Amy Raasch learned to drive in Detroit but has lived in Los Angeles for many years and is thus fluent in both automatic and stick shift. She makes up her own tunings on guitar, plays piano like a monkey at a typewriter and sounds pretty good on flute. She makes records, movies, theatrical multimedia shows and a damn fine banana bread. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, ANMLY, F(r)iction, and a pile of large black sketch books you are instructed to burn when she dies. She holds a BA from The University of Michigan and an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. amyraasch.com
Wilson R. M. Taylor
Sixth Ave Slalom
I sidestep a sweating middle-aged man carrying skis
into UPS, hopscotch in and out of the gutter to escape
an Uber Eats e-bike doing thirty the wrong way.
Last week we went camping in Rhode Island,
ended up awake past midnight on rocky dirt, a man
in the next tent shouting into the phone about his stolen
Amazon package. Two workers in blue jumpsuits
plant a tree outside Trader Joe’s. The man in ragged black
always holding the door opens it and says, “God bless.”
I’ve never seen anyone give him change. I browse
the produce; I don’t buy him anything. On the sidewalk
on the way home, blue graffiti: SEA LEVEL 2050—
this island’s known for conquest. I put away
my frozen dinner. The onion I bought is rotten,
but I’m a good citizen: I’ll place it in the compost bin.
Family Farms, Cotswolds, UK
Walking the Monarch’s Way my parents and I learn
every manner by which to enter and exit a field:
kissing-gates, stiles, cattle guards, openings in hedges.
On our first day we emerge from the woods, crest
a slow, sweeping hill, and surprise the mothers
and their calves in the hollow on the other side.
“They’ll startle if you walk between them,” you say.
I inch closer for a picture. I’ve been waiting for the right
moment to tell you: “She’s moving in with me this fall.”
You’re silent as we leave the meadow, path indented
by old horseshoes. Maybe you’re thinking of my headlong
dash, hands in pockets, that cost me two front teeth.
That night, couples smile and dance in the pub window:
who they are, were, might be, all overlaid—and at their center,
glittering, a half-illuminated self. Tomorrow we’ll continue
this argument without speaking of it; I’ll point to
blackberry bushes dotting the slope, tart sweetness
between the bristles, “Should I pick some?” and you’ll say,
“I don’t think they’re ripe—not quite, not yet.”
Afterlife
The pool gleams, clean and skeletal;
fallen leaves fill black trash bags.
Tomorrow a man will add chlorine,
I’ll text my friends. We’ll jump into
the cool blue, capture our bodies
in midair, sky injected with sunlight—
my cigarette sheds dead galaxies
into the night. The screen goes
dark. Light lingers. We look out
for what outlasts, burn sand
to technicolor: a mirage
repeated on and off, immortal.
Wilson R. M. Taylor is a poet and writer living in New York City. His work appears in Chronogram, Every Day Fiction, an anthology from Wising Up Press, and a few other journals and magazines. He is a winner of the 2024 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. For more, please visit https://wilsontaylor19.wixsite.com/wilsonrmtaylor.
Caitlin Upshall
An Ode to Lost Girls
I want to write a poem for the girls who were never found. Who remain unnamed on 20/20
specials and live in the asterisks of Wikipedia pages. Who accepted a ride home and talked to
a stranger and went to a party or who took the long way home and spent time with friends
they trusted and never missed a family event. I want to take Megan’s law and give it a new
name every day until there are no names left, in lieu of flowers and in memory of empty
caskets.
For every documentary on a man called monster, we will plant a flower until a forest grows.
We will pick a day as anniversary and dig up plants under a bright sky, unearth roots that
have never touched a body. That is to say; I want to write a poem for the forests that cover
forgotten girls like blankets, like they’re still at home, like they were never taken, like they
will still be called by name tomorrow.
Coffee order on a Sunday morning
Salted caramel macchiato with skim milk, always iced
because you stay skinnier that way. A lid fastened
tight like your lips, curved into one of five approved
expressions. You try feigning vulnerability without
smudging your lipstick.
“No pastry, thank you.” The sermon is on forgiveness
and you start the morning annoyed that you can taste coffee
in your drink. Ground beans are not ground enough,
the caramel sauce is stuck beneath ice.
You can’t see the congregation when the music
starts. The spotlight blinds you like God’s love with
a click track. Your face is on four enormous screens, acne
and freckles buried beneath heavy concealer.
“We are not a megachurch,” the pastor says,
“because we are more personal. More real.”
“No straw.” You adjust your bible, careful to carry it with the
cover facing out. After the service, a woman you do not know
tells you to wear longer dresses so you do not distract her
husband while he worships. You write down notes for the
next spontaneous prayer and brush your hair in a toilet stall.
“No, no straw,” you say again. “I brought my own.” Can you tell
I’m better than most other people? Can you tell me that I’m enough?
Caitlin Upshall (she/her/hers) holds a B.A. in English from Western Washington University and is currently based in the United Kingdom. When she's not writing, she enjoys most things dinosaur-related and trivia nights. You can find her on Instagram at @CaitlinUpshall or at www.caitlinupshall.com.
Anne Rankin
The Illusion of Finding the Therapeutic Dose
If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain the illness has no cure.
—A. P. Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Too many weeks after the pills finally convinced me
to swallow, the meds begin to work:
My brain inhales
the flames of their mystery dance—
& music’s a Thing again. Birds singing
could be(?) spilling the secrets of Eden,
or something that golden.
I imagine bEEs knEE-dEEp
in the swollen dust of pollen. Foods persuade me
of their close resemblance to mann(aah). I get
how the day lilies prEEn for the sun,
listen hard for the sweet WOW-
ness in everything, ingest all
the hues I can muster. Whatever
can be gathered by way of perception
gleams & whist!les, is cool or s(of)t
to the touch—however I prefer to take it in.
Clouds find a way to leave, finally
see their EXIT→ signs.
I remember the reason not to say
why I always feel like dying.
But all of this will be short-lived.
Doses will slowly be raised, yet
brain will fall,/fail
to understand the point
of rising. Bit by bit, colors will slip
loose from their textures,
& sounds begin to dim
their wits;
the only way to discern the world
is through a straw—
paper, of course.
Back to the bell jar again, forgetting
there was ever air available,
misplacing my motive to breathe.
Still,
the opening act is quite a thrill,
when happiness seems so doable,
& all my senses rise from their dead(end)ness,
my will to live drenched in the hopes
of the moon-fed dew, so relieved
to get to be without a clue
. . . what comes next.
On the Other Side of Blood
The blood I remember most is out-of-nowhere blood, the muddy feel of it
in my mouth that night the tornado smacked our house & spit
me out. The grass was gone—ripped up & replaced by a bloodied
field of stuff that didn’t belong. I was six. In shock. In the dark. The sky
raced to empty all the rain it held at once. My jaw tore away
from the leash of its bones & didn’t know why. Only seconds before,
I’d been standing warm & dry in the dining room, wondering
why the street lights had gone from on to dark. In the wounds
of weeks that followed, I mazed my way alone
through two surgeries & dozens of little roommates
fussed over by moms & dads who studied the crusted blood on my face
with a mixture of pity & forced cheer—while
my parents never came to see me after that first night.
That first night, all I knew was Something had moved me
from the dining room to this moment of blood,
sitting cold & wet in the front yard’s remains,
an ice-driven rain stitching clothes to my skin
as I gingerly moved my first two fingers
around the mess where my teeth used to be.
Later I realized what the blood was,
the hows & whys of its liquid scream.
That first night, I couldn’t tell you
what the blood tasted like—
I’d swallowed a river of fear.
As I watched myself outside myself,
waves of shock shook me into knowing
the grownup meaning of blood
& a bitter truth:
what had been ripped out
was Something More than
eight baby teeth.
Blood was a dream I was in.
On the other side of waking
was a storm I could not name.
Dog Gone Grief
After he died, my dog became
a completely different sort of person.
What his death unleashed
has left him rather low.
He sleeps more than ever before:
so tired his sighs collect and comprise
his only form of exercise.
Most days, you’ll find he’s kind
of glued to the floor (or
couch, as I’d never say No).
And he only jumps
up for meals, and rarely even
for those, since he eats less
than normal much so.
(But seems to weigh more?)
He looks over at his toys
like he doesn’t understand
something he used to
be able to know.
Plus that ball he adored,
the one for him alone
I’d happily, lovingly
throw and throw—
it just won’t let go.
Still growls at strangers, though.
He will always do that.
Anne Rankin’s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, Hole in the Head Review, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, and Kelp Journal. She has work forthcoming in The Bluebird Word, kern, Boomer Lit Magazine, Rattle, and Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.