Tom Barwell

somerset

i heard a tale this place is fake,

her poetry, her paint,

this gentle birth of hips and cheeks,

her quiet, mossy springs, 

as though each filament

had not emerged from tragedy,

and snowdrop couldn’t tell the tale

of death, collapse all hope, and

nuzzle its breath into the ringing earth. 

spring’s caress tempts wheaten fingers

from such sodden graves, their waves

atomically massage human witnesses,

overturning revolutions’ straight,

undoing critical urban planes.

bricks, in relief, become supple long leaves,

traffic lights turn into bees,

the thunder of bored offices

runs by in unrelenting streams.

her belly, under the ruffles,

takes in concern, breathes out,

skittering her lambs in morning

steam, heaves their carbon into

hungry crops, making oval loaves

from pure sunlight and precipice.

these fields are like the sky, passing

on all that london’s tried,

woodland eyes clock the shade with

mona lisa’s surety; not a speck of pretence

taints her poise.  there is no stab wound

in this acorn, no bullet in the songbird’s

tune, villages nestle in crook and brow,

churches tie a timeless vow,

hedges stitch and cattle low,

not in ideal dreamt, but stead.

while toxins flood these blue veins,

she remains immune, her art

blossoms, filling fruit-high hems, as

blackberries crown the dry stone walls,

apples flush alert,

and graveyards, peaceful as a root,

lay shaded by her ferns.

august crow

regarding, master crow leans,

then withdraws with a bead of my

belly wedged in his resin beak.

he doesn’t swallow yet.

he tips his head, incurious,

tugging at a ticket

machine, elastic skin tearing,

not quite severing.

a gentle exchange of potential,

no frustration, courtesy of my

pescatarian forefathers.

he adjusts a shoulder for grip, his

nimble fork, delicately clawed,

contemplates my tongue, tines

poised for piracy.

i know his wife: she’ll put my blaze

of turquoise around the rim

of her nest, and

save the burnt sienna for the

living room. our egg indent

will make a good sofa.

i appreciate the murder: a calming

sermon, delivered with undeniable

expertise, a distillation of

bright water. something decided,

this corpse was never home.

there’s a place i know, if

fortune’s feathers splay so far –

a yew a thousand years, a hollow

older than that, the other side of

a river that cannot break.

i’ll go to that glade, as i always have,

he to his broomstick mansion,

our lightning brushes together,

a gate releases its catch.

---

Tom Barwell is an English poet, psychotherapist and coach. He’s especially interested in nature, human nature and the relationship that implies.

Jane Bloomfield

Basic Instinct

Leonard Cohen made a cocktail called The Red Needle

Tequila, lemon and cranberry poured over ice, there’s

a coloured photograph of him in a day-lit kitchen

mixing three in fancy gold rimmed glasses

he’s wearing a short sleeve white shirt

dark striped tie top button undone

stabbing a block of ice with an ice pick

on a marble counter top ala Sharon Stone

in that movie she shocked the world with her

muff triangle. Leonard is tapping his toe in time

to his picks and humming the chord to a new song

he’s not really concentrating on the task at hand but a smile

sparkles in his eyes as he secrets the pick into a high cupboard

adds lemon twists to the golden drinks now pink with Ocean Spray

eight hundred and fifty cranberries per serve

Sharon winks and takes a sip.

Bob Dylan’s First Name Was Robert Allen Zimmerman

Once upon a small mountain town

there was a hairdresser who picked up women

in late night bars over whiskey rocks & promise

he took them back to his salon

to wash their hair - apparently

he gave heavenly head massages

whatever colours they had on their minds

the women stepped into the midnight

tingling moonshine scented scalps but damp

curly locks - they couldn’t wait any longer for

the world to begin while he longed to see them in

the morning light - they all said he looked like

young Bob Dylan

I recall his name was Robert.

Editor’s Note: This poem contains lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.”

The Definition of Affection

After dinner each night, my grandfather peeled, sliced and

cored an apple for my Nana, presenting it to her on a small

floral saucer in gentle act of affection. I can see him now sat

in the mid-century chair between chiffonier and side table

a smoked pipe cooling in his ash tray, a mother of pearl

handled fruit knife beside the ribbon of peel - a yellow globe

under the long skinny water colour of Gallipoli - worlds away

on the wall beside him. A smile lifting his face as she offered

him the last quarter.

---

Queenstown, New Zealand based writer, Jane Bloomfield, is the author of the Lily Max children’s novels. Her poetry and CNF are published in Tarot, Turbine |Kapohau, Does It Have Pockets, a fine line - NZ Poetry Society, Roi Fainéant Press, MEMEZINE, The Spinoff, Sunday Magazine and more. Find her at Jane Bloomfield: truth is stranger than fiction -janebloomfield.blogspot.com.  

Blair Martin

Editor’s Note: The first poem in this collection touches on body dysphoria & eating disorders. Please read with care.

Self-Portrait at 13

I befriend Ana

in a cookbook, whose

cheery print recommends

800 a day for ladies.

I, though no lady, round down.

Knit potholders to avoid the stab.

I fascinate on my two wrist

bones, pecking like a hatchling

still sticking with shell. Shame

worms in as I count each calorie’s

stitch. I have no sense that I shelter,

without feather or flight, in twigs.

The Bodies of the Dead

luxuriate as they decay.

Unhurried, no traffic cones

derail their commute.

They endure no disputes with neighbors

over the placement of fences.

Instead, they spill open in welcome.

Bacteria gorges on blue-black

flesh, the worm curls cozy

in an empty eye socket.

No one cuts them isolated

with a sharp judging glance.

They constantly commune

as their molecules whisp elemental:

the green in a blade of grass,

the taut raindrop before it falls,

the mushroom’s damp bloom.

When you trace the death date

on a tombstone, gather yourself

in envy. The living, alone, in the times

in which we find ourselves, suffer

when roots rot. The dead are already rising.

---

Blair Martin grew up on a small farm in Lancaster County, PA. They received their PhD in Clinical Psychology from Bowling Green State University and teach at Joliet Junior College. Their work has appeared in/is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, New Feathers Anthology, Redrosethorns Magazine, Knee Brace Press and elsewhere.

Catherine Arra

My Power

I’m twelve, blooming breasts, baby-bottle nipples,

clutching the shower curtain, a ring-like affair

in an old-footed tub, modesty wrapped,

head turtled out watching him

wrestle with the clogged drain, frustrated. My father.

Another household malfunction.

He looks up, scowls at my rising blush.

Oh, for Chrissake! Who do you think you are, Brigitte Bardot?

Frozen between who we are, who we would always be,

between my shock, his anger, wanting to please, to pacify,

I release my drape, dripping bursting girl-flesh,

silky mons pubis, tulip-soft wet skin. Punishing sexuality.

He looks away.

Goddamn drain.

Make-believe

Other little boys pretended cowboys, G.I. Joes.

Grew up to be pioneers, warriors, protectors.

You, fascinated with carnivals,

moving wheels, sweeping capes,

pretended a magician, then a knife thrower.

Grew up to trick your

whiskey-washed, cussing, smoke-choked,

dish-crashing, hollering, hammering, too terrified to breathe

world and pin it to the wall. By the hair, T-shirt,

black silk negligee. Wrestle it to the floor, stake it to the carpet,

only it wasn’t make-believe.

Ghosts wriggle free, voices tease, the cape twists

and plants you face down.

---

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter, when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals, both online and in print and in anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections and four chapbooks. A former high school English and writing teacher, Arra now teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at www.catherinearra.com

Kimberly White

The Little Girl Who Knows How to Spell Turquoise

 There is no silent beauty in her soul, it spills out loud.  Beauty of sidewalk chalk in Easter egg colors. Beauty of dandelions defying concrete, puff spores floating without need for breeze. Beauty of rust patterns on dented metal fence bars and mutilated cars which grow in the gardens of her neighborhood. Beauty in the hopscotch dance of her ten-year-old feet as she spells t-u-r-q-u-o-i-s-e with the dexterity of a forest sprite reborn on city streets complicated by competing thugs and decaying shades of stone and paint and yes, turquoise, where gunshot patterns bisect the hot air and bloodred burns into her sleep if there is any sleep in a hypervigilant world tempered by books and TV with stories of worlds which can’t be true and if they are, they will never touch her but it’s okay, they’re not really true, truth like that can’t live on her streets. The rough map of her street bleeds color shifts of black asphalt cracked into darker patch-veins betraying the dark heart of ground conquered by underground, shifts of blues filtered through dirty bricks and gray sidewalks and neon sparks and lit cigarettes and blinded stars until it is no longer blue but still blue, shifts to what was once green to what is now dead to that which resurrects in colors beyond primary, tertiary, more than what breathes into her lungs, sinks into her pores, pollutes her eyes and ears, more than her streets and her books can teach her, more than the name of any color can hold.

Author’s Note: This piece inspired by Law and Order, episode #398

Dirty House Poem

Springtime in my dirty house, and the corners are adorned with tiny cobweb empires whose silkroad strings flutter in the furnace breeze, still pumping against the early morning chill.  Who am I to judge these microcosmic worlds unfit to grace my home?  Next door, the dogs bark through the wind-torn fence holes, push their way into my yard to sniff and dig and make their own judgements about the dandelion blooms, the overgrown rose beds, the grass that is past its mow date.  I hang back, spy from the window shadows as they soak up the springtime flavors and textures to take home to unravel and interpret and compare to the sensory smorgasbord on their own side of the fence.  Seasons come fractious, discontented even when settling in for the stay they know is temporary, glorious and destructive with the bipolarity of the gods.

In my house, spring is an impersonal act, a visit from an out-of-town lover who forgets me as soon as he’s gone, displaced and replaced by the next iteration whose face is the same, different, the same.  The sedimentary footprints of spring mark the layered dust, my personal geology now bound to the season and its pollinated chaos and yellow air.  The open windows admit it all, cobwebs are stirred and reset with winter dust left behind, already braced for the summer layers to come. 

---

Kimberly White’s latest novel is Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, Skidrow Penthouse, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks, Penelope, A Reachable Tibet, The Daily Diaries of Death, and Letters to a Dead Man; as well as two other novels: Bandy’s Restola, and Hotel Tarantula. She also dabbles in other arts and spends most of her time in Northern California with her pens and papers and massive collection of Tarot decks.

Audrey Sachs

The Intergalactic Inside Out

They say it sounds different this time, train tracks

splitting to splinters, wooden teeth whirl-winding

to the skies, the entire enormous world yawning apart

from one minuscule particle.

The first time the universe was born, they say

it sounded like a tidal wave of mahogany pianos,

a chorus of seamstresses stitching to a ticking clock,

white satin gloves swaying in the mouth of the taxidermied

South Chinese tiger fixed above the mantle.

Each moment groaned as she merged into existence,

stretching long liquidus limbs sewn from time and crackling bones of change, and infinity,

human and inhuman desire.

The seconds blurred,

the stars oscillated up and down on the heat stroke of horizon,

laughing in chimes and pixie dust,

and from the dirt rose a single prisonous tree.

This time around, they say it sounds like tsunamis, the wail

of whole coliseums, colloquiums of liars, and psychedelic songbirds.

They say it cheats at poker, eats only celery, and lives in an old apartment in Warsaw.

They say it reads Kafka.

They say its Russian is very bad, but when it dances, the halls of Moscow dance back.

They say it could be so much worse.

They say it isn’t a saint.

They say it isn’t even sane.

They say it can only hear itself when it knows it’s dying.    

SHEEP SHEEP Through the Car Window SHEEP SPARROW SHEEP

There’s a person in the water wastes,

trapped in the fields at early dawn when the grey is bitten away by flecks of iridescence glinting off the glassy surface

They’re up early

Before the shepherds run loose, the birds sweep down low, and the afternoon thunderstorms trade voices with the accordion in the house below the hill

Early enough that you can see all sorts of things:

the green dipping into blues on the horizon

And little pink and white sails swimming out to sea

Little soot insects race away atop the drowned fields with every ripple of their big yellow boots traipsing zipping lines into the water

In a puddle, a white sparrow’s skeleton shows its fine bones to the bluing sun

But the person moves by, unwilling to break their sturdy stride

Past the roots, the forest, the garden patch

The fields of water feed into marsh feed into swamp

And in the forested wetlands

Boats of leaves do float with such density

That the ground appears blanketed

In a shifting mass of green carpeting

Turn left at the island amassed in petals

And find the ten thousand-year tree

Sunken. Beneath the surface of the world

The little person kneels, laying hand to the lowest branch

While it crumbles away

With the heat of a palm

Reminding the lone messenger

Of the soil

The trails

The drowning days

---

Audrey Sachs is an eighteen-year-old high school student from Los Angeles under the mentorship of Brendan Constantine. She writes poetry, short stories, and novels. In her free time, she brews green tea and thinks about jellyfish. She is secretly a witch.

Nicholas Barnes

 too much to ask

a wilson basketball thrown at my skull. life then was endurance. my best friend forgets how to spell my name. a pigskin catapulted into my spine. up against the wall, i see the entire school playing soccer, tetherball, and hopscotch without me. i recite all thirty letters to keep myself entertained. in the twinkling of an eye, i’m printing that same alphabet soup onto a photocopied lease agreement. a new apartment. the roommate says this just isn’t working out. a diet breakup, a minor severance. the first time i was dumped was a dear john affair. after a night of inhaling all the unlimited possibilities. the h bomb was face to face. surprise attack. you were always going somewhere and that somewhere was never me. and all the other brokenhearted guillotine psalms i held over my head. like bottlenecks of dewar’s white label, jim beam rye, and smirnoff caffeine muddlement. here comes one more swearing off, a fit of self improvement. a new fifth of london dry gin to take its place. to calcify my grievances. stronger than before the fracture. saline eye storms chased with grapefruit tonic. then, i lived in the mountains of my own making. busted peaks of high life glass pulled up from the earthquake plane. maybe in some faraway land it would have all been better. in another body. in another brain. maybe i would have been invited to a pickup truck bonfire. maybe i’d have fit in at the senior promenade. maybe i would’ve gone. maybe someone would have said cole, love me love me love me. maybe i would have said it too.

private beauty

bought a two-headed tulip: $3.99.

i don’t get out much to feel the spring sun

so i thought i’d bring the outside inside. 

now she sits on my molding windowsill

in a chipped peter rabbit coffee mug.

away from her grocery outlet of birth

into my domestic primavera.

only a mesh screen and a thin glass pane

separate us from all them bees abuzz,

sniffing the pollen and blackheart stigmas.

i thought i’d save her but it’s guilt instead

that rides me sidesaddle every morning.

parting the cheap white plastic blinds again,

i tell us this will have to do for now.

---

Nicholas Barnes is a poet living in Portland, Oregon whose work has appeared in over seventy publications including trampset, Juked, and Cola Literary Review. His debut chapbook, Restland, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025.

Austin Allen James

My New Girlfriend is a Vampire

All my kitchen appliances were white

before I met you. You, with your spiced

avocado toast, flush with the content

of buried lightning.  Coffee is served—

that Gothic Evangelical sort with a dark

roasted flavor.  Let’s paint the cabinets

in a 1970s sunrise glow— a vampire’s

curse holds no sway at dawn. Still,

I add glitter to my children’s pockets

so that they might float away at night. 

She is stubborn at daybreak as she crawls

in, covered with devotion and engravings

that spin her skin rouge.  At dusk, she fans

toward the gulf and disappears with the night.

Skin

I walked from home through my children’s

youth, to Spain and Magazine Street,

through every other southern state

in a string of red dots— Set my skin

free to roam the remnants of submission:

the alchemy of childhood.  I flow with gravity,

the Mediterranean, and a Mexican ship sweet

with vanilla malt; green eyes scan the shore

and skim the unconsidered parchment in a bedroom.

We are blinded by the pitched light

among cattails in the bog of boyhood. 

Love is captured in a child and does not cease.

I will follow you in time, as skin is left to

callus

and the memory of a father’s heart

remains present in each pearl of sweat.

---

Austin Allen James is a Visiting Professor at Texas Southern University in Houston, TX. He has taught at TSU since the Fall of 2012. In 2016, Austin and colleagues formed a committee to create a “Professional Writing” concentration, which includes five creative writing classes. Austin is also a visual artist, sculptor, and furniture designer.

Natasha Dolginsky

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

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

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

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)

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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 

                   —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.