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ISSUE 26      August 2022.           

POETRY

Judy Ireland, Meryl Stratford, Michael Mackin O'Mara, Lenny DellaRocca, editors

If you are a poet, prophet, peace-loving artist, if you are tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between; if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl;  if you value the humane treatment of every creature and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo seeks your best work.

ERIN AKINS      PRUDENCE ARCENEAUX    NISHA ATALIE     CYNTHIA ATKINS     ERIC BRAUDE     STEVE BRISIDINE    DEVON BROCK     SHAWN BROPHY     JOSEPH BYRD     DAVID CAZDEN     KEN CRAFT    MARK DECARTERET     JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ     E.J. EVANS    STEPHEN GIBSON     ERICA GOSS      LC  GUTIERREZ     DON HOGLE     PATRICK HORNER     DAVID J. KENNEDY     PARKER LOGAN     MICHAEL MINASSIAN     KERRY MUIR     J. ALAN NELSON     STEVE NICKMAN     IAN POWELL-PALM     MADARI PENDÁS     HLR     CHARLES RAFFERTY     DOUG RAMSPECK     SARAH DICKENSON SNYDER     JOHN WOTJOWICZ

Erin Akins     Austin, TX

Erin Akins (she/her) is a writer and literature PhD student living in Austin, Texas.

Sowing

I want to turn my hands
into gardens. I was raised
on soil and the fear of 
God, but my bones weren’t 
made for all of this gravity. 
Nothing has grown in ages.
I don’t know how to love
myself, really love myself, 
like how the moon falls 
around the earth with 
so much faith. I wish 
I could fall like the moon. 
It feels more like tumbling, like 
a loosed leaf negotiating wind.
We can still see where our 
bodies struck the soil. Nothing 
has grown in ages, but 
there is so much hope 
in seeding; I want to turn 
my hands into gardens.

C. Prudence Arceneaux     Texas

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry-- DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY.

The President did not want to see anything “difficult” at the National Museum of African American History and Culture August 2019


Bring that boy, David, here. Tell him to put on some clothes; he’s just too stupid. When he gets here, hang him from the rafter, iron hooks, just so, an inch from sure footing. After a day of that, put him in the sugar shack with Venus. I DON’T CARE WHICH ONE! But either without arms will put up less of a fight. Bring that here, HERE, here; I need that Klimt to lick the heel of boot. Make him leeeeeeeeeean down; I only want to see the top of his hair. I see your face, boy, she gets this fist in her forehead. It’s too loud in here, these other foreign boys--de Kooning, Maderson, de Stael—clashing and shouting. Put them in the back corner, near the drying racks, leave them until the yellow runs like piss down their sturdy frames, ‘til they know to quiet down. Strip the Picassos and weave me a shade, and a mat, same for the dogs. put a roll of those in the outhouse. And did you cut those boys from their supper? You told them what I said would happen if they did it again? Hang a boy on each fence post; it’s what they’re most afraid of. That aimless boy over there is not thinking. Put a fire under him; maybe it’ll make him into something useful. But that smug ass Mona girl? Get her from the shack, her sweat should make it easy to wipe her down, get the clothes off her, make her shine. How else are we to know what she’s worth if we can’t see her breasts?

Nisha Atalie     Chicago, IL

Nisha Atalie is a mixed poet from the Pacific Northwest. She is a poetry editor at MASKS and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, CALYX, Blood Orange Review, The Hunger, and elsewhere. She received the 2021 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize. 

Season of the Virus 

Let’s retreat, bury ourselves                                                                                                          
inside the brick. This place could be

our shallow creek, our phantom 
season. Fall asleep with me in the soft 

folds of the apartment. The water boils. 
A train goes by. The moon swells. 

From the window, the tree tops go all the way up. 

I had to throw away many of the days. 
They’d molded, started smelling of vinegar. 

We’re ghosts, radiant ones. 

Come, check the mirror. 
See what we look like. 
​

Cynthia Atkins     Lexington, VA

Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), and Still-Life with God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a chapbook forthcoming from Harbor Editions, 2022.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. More info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com

Instructions For Looking in The Mirror

I have to be naked, by that I don’t mean unclothed, 
but raw, stripped bare to the filaments and rafters--

My head is a sky-laundromat of folded clouds,
creases as chiaroscuro. I need my body to find

it’s nakedness like the maiden in fairytales
getting her garment pinned by two mourning doves.

My flesh is an eco-system, feeding on detail, it works
to be in mint condition, to remember 

every flower I ever picked. Process? —I need to feel 
a little sexy, even in the din and dust 

of my sweatpants, slip-shod with teeth
unbrushed, because the words trawl to stick to the resin--

My pen aims to climb a noun and hear its bounty of sounds.
An adverb that will leap me into my childhood, where a witch

spelled me with glyphs and houses made of peppermint, 
promises not kept.  Because God is such a liar--

I believe in aspirin; it knows where to go--
I need to feel longing like a train leaving a station. 

Scribbling words to wash my own mouth out 
with soap, unclad in a chasm of moon-tides and unrest 

to see where the unholy goes.

Eric Braude     Andover, MA

Eric Braude is a computer science professor who began poetry in earnest in the early 2000's. He grew up in South Africa. Eric wrote the frontmatter poem for a collection, Songs from the Castle's Remains, won a newspaper competition in the New England Merrimack region, and has published several poems in Poetica. His work is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Constellations, and J Journal.

Bolzano, Northern Italy

There’s always someone willing
to drive you around memorials, 
but we’re here for Ötzi, Copper Age man
flash-frozen on the Alps; for fountains

fashioned from gurgling frogs. 
The station's brown columns herald 
Brenner Pass into Austria. Tourists 
mug in the sun. Beneath hotel canopy,

we sample mezzelune, Tyrolese 
formaggio. We lap the pool
in dappled solitude.
Behind the stucco wall 

hum Malian refugees.
But we're on vacation, relishing
evening concerts in marble piazzas.
A road sign as we exit town spells

the city's other name, Bozen. This
I recognize: transit camps, hotels
hosting logistics officers, piazzas
as holding pens, trains.

Steve Brisendine     Mission, KS

​Steve Brisendine is a writer, poet, occasional artist and recovering journalist living and working in Mission, Kansas. His first collection, The Words We Do Not Have (Spartan Press, 2021) has been nominated for the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. He is also the author of Salt Holds No Secret But This (Spartan Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, Connecticut River Review, Modern Haiku and other publications and anthologies.

Non/Native

I am a son of Kansas –
but not a son of the Kansa;
they live in Oklahoma now,
People of the South Wind blown
even farther south by a pale
    storm out of the East.

(The Iowa live in Kansas now;
I am not their son, either.)

I am a long child of that inexorable, 
industrious storm, rising from 
lakes and lochs, lacs and loughs,

leaping an ocean and gathering
    strength on the near shore.

Our mouths, surplus to requirement
in our old lands, landed ravenous.

We tamed the tallgrass,
the wooded hollow; we feasted 
on cleared meadows, on the bison, 
on hopes and homes of those 
    here before us.

(Let none call us ungracious; we
have set them in memory in our
place names, in choosing mascots
    for our home teams.)

The messy work was done long
before my time; I have carried arms
on the prairie, yes, but only for
cottontails, jackrabbits, bobwhites.

I am a son of Kansas –
but not a son of the Kansa;
they live in Oklahoma now,
and my life goes comfortably
on in a Brown v Board suburb,

where the local team has changed
its name from Indians to Bison, to
much applause from us to ourselves.

Devon Brock     South Dakota

Devon Brock is a line cook and poet living in South Dakota with his wife and dog. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, William & Mary Review, Passengers Journal and La Piccioletta Barca, among others.

Steam

The board sways as my mother’s iron
skates in whirls, exhales in huffs
like a child teased and alone
on a frozen lake, her blades keen
as her creases—her angers starched,
folded, stacked, as if in the rock
of her shoulder and the lean grace
of her wrist, some perfection
can be made of solitude
and the glaze of cotton
scoured with shouts of steam.​

Shawn  Brophy     Wisconsin

Shawn Brophy is a hospital clerk and sometime voice actor who lives in southeast Wisconsin. He studied poetry and the works of Weldon Kees with the late Donald Justice. Be advised: small magazines sometimes publish Shawn, then disappear.

House, Tree, Person

The house the child draws is always on fire.
The roof roils in red and orange crayon flames.
A stick figure leans from an upstairs window, reaching.
Another stands in the street below, distraught.

How does she do that? 
Convey “distraught” with a stick figure?
From eight colors and two stick figures
Comes a fugue, a tableau of anguish.

The tree is green and unscathed
In the lower right-hand corner.
It’s the rallying spot 
No one in the stick family will reach tonight.
​

First View of Mount Fuji

There is a great wave
Poised to strike
From a Japanese woodblock print.

The wave has been drawn back like a clenched fist
Since Basho in the forest 
First sensed tension in the deer he couldn’t see.

The wave swells like a great resentment.
It is poised to strike 
From a copy of a woodblock print.

That copy hangs on the wall of a diner in Iowa.
Outside of the diner it is snowing
Flakes as big as cherry blossoms.

Deer lay in the beds of pickups
Collecting snow, their eyes open.
The wave is a cocked pistol, inches from my head.

In the foreground of the print is a smaller wave
Shaped like Mt. Fuji.
In the background stands Fuji itself.

Through a green sheet of glass
I see a grain elevator in the distance.
A pyramid of silos, it backs into the storm

And becomes Mt. Fuji.
The great wave hangs like a veiled threat.
An eight-man boat founders in its trough.

Basho senses deer nearby
And as he rides across the Mogami River
A snowflake melts in his horse’s ear.

Joseph Byrd     Oregon

Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared in The Plentitudes, DIAGRAM, Aji, The Ravens Perch, and forthcoming work in shufPoetry and PROEM. He was in the 2021 StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar, and was an Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.  He lives in Oregon, twenty minutes away from Multnomah Falls.

Faith, (      ), and love

Nothing seems to get me there without an overdose of balloonery (my 
heart had to go to pop school), and nothing gets me going like when those three
cardinals get
shoved down my throat, the ones singing
faith, fuck, and love 
(I skipped class whenever they taught hope)

                                   One 4th of fucking July (substitute you-know-what for that naughty modifier), I
                laughed my way with Aunt Gale to that old, iron-windowed grocery on the corner of
                Francisquito and Sunset, hauling a watermelon home in my 4th-grade spaghetti arms, my
                broken aunt giggling alongside as we talked and tripped over spent sparklers on the cooking California
                sidewalk, skipping consonants altogether as
                                   gall became all         never, ever
and there between the vowels that moan us all into being, I heard it        the way that my
marrow makes good on why it is where it is         held and holied by what frames        and He’s got
the whole watermelon world in his fucking hands started to land on the moon of my mind
                and I ran back inside grandma’s house, shouting
                Please trust this container, this unconditional costume called What the Hell!
                                   Please know that no streets really go ONE WAY (lies are everywhere)! 
                                                         Please fingerpaint “Hope is here!” with watermelon sauce on every available 
                                                                             paper plate! On every human condition everywhere!    

He’s a juiced genius, I heard my relatives say        or maybe other things    
                but I heard what can happen 
        
when mercy rises like rain    
when down becomes up    
when getting there is knowing what here is    
(I am now magisterially ashamed of the first line of this poem)    
I know I have found myself to be right where I thought I’d never be    
having formerly thunked my way into life 
(oh you tantalizing, TWO-WAY street) when all the while, I was
living my way into this thing called thinking     
which is not like 
thinking at all, oh 
hope, you 
fucker, you
four-letter word

Teach me more, please

Hiking Mt. Tabor with you

When the slope-breasted
tank-topped
tongue-arrested woman said 
Can you
show me where the 
lava cone is?
I saw you know in your 
wish-bone brain
what can be told, and when.
And I knew then, in my fist-borne mind, that
I could say to
you that it’s true that
Ursula K. Leguin said
I function only by falling in love.  
I said this to you as we 
neared the end, and as you, my friend
assuaged my bird-nest fear of coming too near, when you said
I’m no good at small talk either, helping me confess, without having to pray things, that 
I, in fact, only function when I say things like
pus, umbilical cords, hard-rock festoonings, slave monuments, insult artists, mental balloonings
and as you turned to return to your car, I asked without speaking
                What country is this we share?  I do well with Afghanistan, finding mountains under my 
                   heart, and men who can’t speak anything but heaven
                 And when you pause between a word and your breath, that’s where the leaven shows up
                  I like our bread
                  I felt you fall in love with our gait, as dog hair hung from your black-blue tee
                    and I wanted the holes in your well-gauged ears to be retrograded into me
                    into my little, sixth-grade heart, place of original panic, though I fear
                    nothing in your presence, punk of music and of fuse, kind to all things manic
                  I like all the words I forget to use with you
                  I like cracking open our playlist, hearing you say “I do” when I ask if you
                     bottle the wine that’s offered at the altar of your smile
                  For when you say suicide and mommy, I know from whence you speak    
                   Oh nests of broken bird wings    in the harem of your beanie
                   Oh sweet mosses of shoelaces lost while running through the shadows you share so freely   
                      with me in speech and in stride
                   Oh beauty of your bared straining arm, veined and wide
                   Oh talking unrestrained, oh listening that gives
                   Oh you who have shown me where and in whom the lava cone lives

Just one reason

If you are a Buddhist schoolmarm
I am a book shot through with emptiness
If you are a Jewess
I hold an awful play by Christopher Marlowe that drips what I love
If you are an egg
I have a saucepan dedicated to searing you
If you are an empty hobo hat
I am this city’s brains gone dumb on politics
If you talk with your mouth full
I am the doggy bag you can spit into, and you may
wear me like a silk tie
I will drag my undersides along your overcoat and all will whisper Hot Creature 
If you are my dead mother
I am mourners in an onion field, ashes in our oven-hot eyes as we all dance piggy-backed
and if you are a castrato
I will sing Handel from heaven, and drop hot halos on you
When all of our nimbleness says adieu
there will be subway trains on taffy tracks that beep our names in sugar toots
If you are a dark angel
I will wear sunglasses, and if the 
town tips over into a crimey hell hole of tavern shootings
I will wear my pillowcase with its pillow intact and
all the people will see all of the 
robustly vulnerable men who 
love lifting me up and over their heads, crying
If we were a dais, would you stand upon us? and I will say
Aren’t we all of us already just that?  Aren’t we all of us ashamed of our
shoes, how they stop us from footing what has long needed the 
bubbling springs of I Feel You Here and Now—?

Take me to the tickly time when your
lips will miss what no target has ever offered:
my molten seal, my crunch-wrap soul, my Honduran beach-heat, my steadfast love that endures
forever

If I were a psalm, you would
sing me, but only until your
mouth fell to the floor, a
blackened onion ring of
abandonment, an
hors d’oeuvre of
dumb desire
If I were with you
I would heave Frida Kahlo onto my
basement wall, and she would thank me as she
slowly slid down the cinder block, her
seeping fluids painting a 
portrait of what this poet is like when you refuse to
teach to play to bless to shoot because I need to have a
reason 
just one
to help me understand where you have
gone

David Cazden     Danville, Ky

David Cazden's work has appeared in Passages North, Nimrod, Crab Creek Review, and most recently Still: The Journal.  David used to be the poetry editor of the magazine, Miller's Pond and he lives in Danville, Kentucky. ​

In The 70s

No one was shot in school,
instead we died on the road.
At first, a sudden skid
we couldn't pull out of,
then a fusion of metal--
chrome with red paint,
Ford with Chevy, and a nova
of glass, the scent
of booze evaporating
like a wraith to the afterlife.
If you didn't flip a car,
you might flip from drugs.
Once I took acid
and for a week, every surface
was embellished in reptile scales--
cars slithered, engines hissed,
lizards curled in the sheets.
I slept in thistles
until it wore off
like house paint.
Layers of myself
peeled away, tumbling
with fall leaves--
russet-gold, yellow-gold--
over the roads and through
winter's coat. In the 70s
Mom stopped driving,
never leaving the house
that swaddled us.
Her m.s. was worse,
our food, odorless, tasting
of overcast skies.
Time unpeeled--
Frozen pears
dropped from the branches,
my bother left home
and Dad fell on the stairs
like fruit in autumn.
When I too left,
acorns tumbled from limbs, whole
forests tucked in their endosperms.
Russet hulls
cracked on the sidewalks,
crumbling and bending
with the world
under my feet.

Ken Craft     Wells, ME

Ken Craft lives in Wells, Maine. His poems have appeared in Spillway, Pedestal Magazine, The Writer's Almanac, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Reincarnation & Other Stimulants (Kelsay Books, 2021).

Abandoned Station

Before nature had its way, the towering Shell sign’s canary-colored call lured motorists off I-95
with regularity. Before weeds fingered their way through fissures in the station’s asphalt, this
wasn’t any old gas station, but one near a restaurant, a refueling stop for both man and car. Rest
stops had meaning back then, especially when your father was driving the family from New
England to Miami. When Dad pulled up to these pumps, Gram told my brothers and me to “go
make bubbles” and be quick about it. The rest piled out straight away, but me, I lingered. Lying
on the wagon’s front bench, I watched the gas attendant’s methodic wash of the front windshield:
the streak of suds, the squeak of rubber, the careful lifting of wipers, as if he were cleaning a
holy relic, not a piece of Detroit glass. It was sleepy-nice to see, that, but when the attendant
walked back to top off the tank, I jumped out, too, and by the time I returned, I’d learned the rest
stop’s familiar and its strange. The heady smell of gas. The sticky sound of my sneakers from
dried pee on the floor beneath the urinal. They had strange, “Y’all come back, y’hear?” foods
like “grits” and “chitterlings,” too, but I recall grilled cheese with pickles, shoestring fries, a
Coke to go. And, for dessert, per Mom’s good-cop grace, a candy of my choice. I carried the
cardboard tray into all that outside yellow, all that sunshine and Shell. To me, Shell’s logo was
the pinkie-promise of Miami Beach to come. And why not? Happiness seemed simple enough
back then. All it took was an empty bladder, a full tank, the hum of the Buick’s engine and
Goodrich tires on the highway. Somehow it seemed all for me. Me slow-pulling strings of warm
cheese. Me mining Jujubes from my teeth. Me blinking in and out of sleep as sun and shadow
striped the reed of my body, dreaming that gas stops would always be fun, fast food would
always taste good, and weeds would never finger their way through my family, leaving us
​untouched for endless roads, shiny new stations, and Miami vacations. Before nature had its way.

Mark DeCarteret     Rye, NH

Poems from Mark DeCarteret’s manuscript The Year We Went Without have been taken by The American Poetry Review, Hole in the Head Review, Meat for Tea, Nixes Mate Review, Plume Literary Journal and Unbroken.

The Year I Went Without Singing 

Last night’s rain still fell from the trees. Now and then stalling in the air. Where light slowly
fastened to it. Eased it into one of three seasons. An earlier version of myself would line up these
figurines on the stairs. Lion-maned and demanding. Stand-ins for my denials. So, no one was
allowed to get to where they were going. Till this day I have no fight in me. When the wind dies,
I follow. With a video-hiss. And the slightest of flutters. All sorts of stuff draining out from my
side. Let’s leave it at that. Nothing lied about. Or divined. The trees steaming. The air reimagined
as light. My mind admired for its dimness. Rid of all thoughts but the ones I’ve reworded.
Though afterwards, I’m mouthing off to the stars again. The last soul to lend myself. To this or
any refrain.  

The Year We Went Without Rain

It was nearly impossible to make out the banner being pulled by the airplane. What with the
smoke and the cameras and the air show. But we could smell the pork and the pork rub. The tires
messing with the asphalt. My how your knees smarted. Worshipping like they were. All those
cricket-ticks that stuck with us from childhood. The afternoons we spent whistling. Rearranging
some blocks. Me? I’m a mere cut out. Something better being remembered than actually being.
You know, it really stings. The ointment busting loose from my forehead. The start of one or two
stars. It’s all wilderness now. Once you’ve picked up everything off your list at the pickup
window. Still, I keep the line about “having an orange cone for a face.” And dance every
morning in my candy assed way. Behind this door the same shore. Behind this one the same
heron. The same wind that keeps reassuring us. It’s just our memory. Going through another
phase. Roses are poetry. And rosehips are prose. Thus replaceable. Dylan Thomas stopped raging
​when he took his last drink. I stopped writing this when. I stopped writing this.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater  (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Journal, Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.

First Impressions of Hell 

The afterlife is exactly what I feared the most. Being naked in front of a crowd while I’m on fire.
At first, I start weeping like a baby. I want my mother. I can barely crawl. I feel I can’t endure
this hell much longer. Then, as if in the middle of a novel, I begin to have an epiphany: there’s
nothing to be ashamed of. We all look basically the same. Also, fire, once you get used to it, is
essentially the same as water. Pain and pleasure, synonymous. It’s just a matter of perspective. I
light a cigarette, from the hellish flames, and take it easy the rest of the afternoon. After all, I no
​longer have to go to work. Jokes on them.

Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man

A few years ago, I was in the same library,
In the same quiet, upper-middle-class town

I didn’t live in. I’d just finished writing 
A prose poem that would eventually

Get published in The Nation. Writer’s high.
Then, a white lady came up to me

And asked about the trash. I was confused,
Until I realized she thought I was a janitor,

Because of my Brown skin.

E. J.  Evans    Cazenovia, NY

E. J. Evans is a poet and musician living in Cazenovia, NY. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Conversations With the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press).

Maquiladora

What I remember is that they showed me everything
I met the men in charge
they were from up north
conspicuous with their sharp dark suits and neat haircuts
I heard their mocking jokes
about the Mexican women we passed on the road
they took me into the huge factory like a cathedral of noise
I saw the rows on rows of machines 
and the hundreds of women
working on the factory floor their downcast faces 
intent and focused in patient resolve
later when the men took me back across the river 
to my hotel I dozed in my room and imagined 
the factory building and its high fence
out there in the night surrounded 
by endless desert and dark hills
and watched over by generations of spirits

Stephen Gibson

Stephen Gibson is the author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2020 Able Muse Press book prize finalist, forthcoming); Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press); The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press); Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize winner, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas Press), and others.

On Woman Washing Herself in a Small Tub at Art Palm Beach

Degas used wine bottle corks in the head, chest,
     and stomach of Little Dancer to fill in her cavities,
paintbrushes as armatures, and filled in the rest
 with anything from his studio floor he might see
  like old cloth or paper: it was like building a nest
inside of her, he said, like a songbird in the tree.
This wax’s model was no songbird, and, at best,
 despite precautions, contracted venereal disease,
  being a brothel whore, from one of her “guests.”
 Some biographers attribute the artist’s misogyny
  to contracting VD when he was young—a guess,
   since there’s little evidence. But with Gauguin, he
   is known to have contracted syphilis back in Paris,
    which he passed on to his teen mistresses in Tahiti.

Erica Goss     Eugene, OR

Erica Goss won the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her poetry collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Mercy

Two small owls arrive the day 
after the death of an old friend. 
They say birds visit those 
who’ve lost a loved one. Where 
were you, I ask the owls, when 
my father died? Or my daughter, 
never born? Through the window 
their golden eyes shimmer, radiant, 
penetrating. They don’t blink. It hits me, 
how young they are. I might be 
the first person they’ve seen, and they 
look a little hesitant, as if unsure how, 
exactly, to proceed. Still, they persist, 
these two little owls, sitting
patiently on the rhododendron branch,
long enough for me to leave the room
and fetch my camera. Fluffing
their ash-and-frost feathers, 
they watch me with the deep
curiosity of children. I snap a photo.
When they fly away, their purpose at
my window, whatever it was, finished,
I feel a little odd, as if I’ve
wandered into a town square just after
a parade went by, the last float rumbling
into the distance. Over and over,
I look at my photograph, note
the symmetry of the owls’ faces, 
their steady, unblinking gazes. 
To this day, I don’t know which 
surprises me most—how much I needed 
to see them, or how they possibly 
could have known.

LC Gutierrez     Madrid, Spain

LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the South and the Caribbean, as well as writing and comparative literature programs at Louisiana State and Tulane University. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His poetry is most recently published or forthcoming in Autofocus Lit Mag, Notre Dame Review, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. 

Signs


How could we not count this as center?
Summer gathering our kin, in
from Colorado or California:
that small diaspora of escapees who, 
like my mother, snapped right back 
into that gentle Acadiana creole, 
the rounded flower of the vowels. 
Gone the gutturals and the raspy nasals,
sloughed off centuries from Continental French.
Zoned in a hand-carved rocker
her face taking the same soft contours
as her sisters’; the same patient spaces
between their speech beseeching the old 
cuckoo clock to slow-peck out the seconds, 
punctuating the endless presence of that ‘there.’ 
Pecking away the bridge between her Rolex 
and their Timex. Synched for the day.

No signs designed for us. We learned 
the muddy ripples in the gully meant something 
live, but only after our five uncles
barrel-chested and beer-bellied, thick 
forearms dripping, hoisted a turtle like a trophy, 
plucked from its nest. How were we to know, 
the hooting Cajun trills were celebrating 
soon-to-be soup? Until it steamed in bowls before us, 
magical as their muscles, wartime tattoos 
of battleships and bare-bellied hula girls.
Sawed off truck drivers, carpenters, roughnecks.
How were we to trace that heritage of brylcreemed
Elvis hair and thick sideburns to our plaid
Bermuda shorts and leather loafers?
My brothers and I, wide-eyed in the country.

No signs but for the patent present ones. Posting
miles to Opelousas. Lafayette. Carencro,
Rayne and Sunset. Rusted RC Cola tin 
on the side of a general store. Mississippi 
river bridge from Baton Rouge, “to grandmother’s
we’d go.” A riverboat-ride distance, passing
Cancer Alley and ghost plantations splintered 
with the slave shacks we hadn’t yet learnt about.

Were we to know that boiling plentitude
of tables spread red with crawfish,
in the shielding shade of oaks, the gris-gris
of the line hung with drying red peppers, 
against the garlic-gray cypress porch,
barbecue fire, accordion chords of summer,
and perfect pralines spun from grandma’s gnarled fingers,
our seeming eternal return, wasn’t a promise?
Too young to taste the stove-top coffee,
filtered through a stocking, precious in a demitasse,
it still seeped into our psyches, a house of scents
and senses. We were wholly steeped in that 
presence. Did we not know this as love?

Whence did we wade into the slow grief of decades? 
As hapless and blind as those hogs that came to slaughter, 
feasted on potato peels, corn cobs and all the waste 
of our want that slushed in slop buckets. 
The call now virtual and the response hollow: 
punch in the name of the place in Google 
and land a different town across the state. 
Or finally find it on the map and the name lies
like the gray bones of nothing across a line of state highway. 
A mocking photo appears of the roadway shoulder: 
a place you might stop to piss unobserved.

Search the names of the divorced. Correlate 
birth and death dates and the survivors
mentioned in the funeral home obituaries, 
framed by a twilight bayou background.
An uncle who once carved you toothpicks; 
his son a diabetic, alcoholic amputee.
A cousin on a list of sex offenders: 
we would sit with him on the train tracks, 
we were five smiling boys
our legs dangling over the muddy gully,
our sweaty, bare arms rubbed against his.
And we would choose to stay like that forever,
hurling ragged rocks at the signs.

Don Hogle     Manhattan, NY

​Don Hogle's poetry has appeared in Apalachee Review, Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Penn Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal among others. Awards include an Honorable Mention for the 2018 E. E. Cummings Prize from the New England Poetry Club. His debut chapbook, Madagascar, was published in 2020 by Sevens Kitchens Press. He lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com

Questions of Attraction 


Was it that your initials were sewn 
on the cuffs of your shirts? 

Was it that S wasn’t for Steven 
or anything like a middle name, 

but a family name, a word that means 
able to bend with ease or grace? 

Or was it the tales of visiting your uncle 
in the lush, Costa Rican jungle? 

We were just two boys, meeting 
randomly in a freshman dorm, 

and maybe love waits patiently, 
like a jaguar in the jungle, 

for just such an accident, to spring.

Patrick Horner     Copenhagen, Denmark

Patrick Horner is a Canadian poet and engineer living in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he works to develop new water treatment technology. He co-wrote and co-produced “Waste Dump,” a serial radio play, and his poetry and fiction have been published on Wax, Dandelion, Broken Pencil, and more. His first book of poetry, Refugia, will be published by the University of Calgary Press in the fall of 2022.

In the schoolyard after school the children tear each other limb from limb, running after and away from each other, screaming and laughing, throwing parts of each other into the air.  Pulling the skin from each other’s faces.  Soon there is no one left. The asphalt covered in arms and hands and ears and eyeballs blinking looking up at the grey clouds hiding the blue sky.

Frenzy
oil on canvas
300 cm x 350 cm

The lovers lock themselves in an empty room with one window and one door.  They take off all their clothes and play hide and seek for years.  Outside the window the city rests on the edge of the sea. The lovers survive by eating each other’s flesh. Passing themselves back and forth, seasoning each other with laughter.

Locked In
water colour and graphite on paper
30 cm x 50 cm

The wind blows between the buildings like a woman singing underwater.  Rain dances back and  forth as it falls through the dark sky.

Singing Wind
lithograph
40 cm x 50 cm

David J. Kennedy     Sydney, Australia

David J. Kennedy is a poet and non-fiction writer from Sydney, Australia. Themes of aging, wonder, and mortality feature prominently in his writing, and he has work forthcoming in Words & Whispers, Boats Against The Current Poetry Magazine, and Jupiter Review. Twitter: @DavidJKennedy_

Postcards from America

When I was four, you sent postcards from America
describing octagon-shaped barns in Milwaukee;

built at the turn of the century and designed
to withstand high winds and snow.

“Love, Daddy,” you wrote.

Blanche Scott’s resolve shone like a beacon 
from postage stamps that remind me of the girl I love.

Across the Pacific, I woke to the descending whistle
of the satin bowerbird, as you penned bedtime stories

of cable cars that pirouette on the corner
of Powell and Market.

You saw the world in all its splendor
and turned it into word toys I could play with.

“Write to me, and let me know 
of all the things you’ve been doing.”

I’ve been meaning to reply — I sift through time, 
searching for the language of an apt response,

but you’re still seven seas away, and the light is poor
in the shadow of expectation.

I have a son now, Daddy. He is seven, and late at night
when the rain is torrential, he calls it ‘sleeping music.’

He is curious, stubborn, and brave, and puts questions
that wrinkle the mind and rouse the soul:

Do the numbers keep going? Who created God?
And do bushfires mean we’ll all be extinct like the T-Rex?

“What then?”

He’s besotted with the moon and files trading cards
with military precision. Says “I love you,”

before politely insisting I leave the room. I see our reflection
in him — at peace with the adequacy of silence,

drawn to soothing solitude, and prone to turn inward
when noise drowns out existence.

Parker  Logan     Baton Rouge, LA

Parker Logan is a current MFA student at Louisiana State University. Originally from Orlando, Florida, he has a bachelor's from Florida State University. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he writes and gardens with his friends. 

Leaving Baton Rouge 

Louisiana doesn’t just soak up the water,
but bodies, too, a whole vault of skeletons
as big as the distance from Shreveport to New Orleans,
a closet of full wounds, snaps, blisters, and bones,
a thousand voices speaking up to our attics.
They’re whispering around Matty’s tea kettle,
and barking though her dog, Gemma Lu, chanting,
and on new moons, the people, here, write checks to burn them.
They manifest their fortunes with fire, 
their power though ashes, their daiquiris filled with liquor, liquor,
and large buckets of alcohol.
At 12:30 on Wednesdays, there’s a poetry-writing coven
that’s been hex-ing their landlords for practice.
Take me back to Florida, American Airlines,
because there’s a funk in this air
that’s got me all the way fucked up--
put me on a jet plane. I miss the stormy beaches
and those mud-trucking rednecks, and, shit,
I even miss Tallahassee that evil man, Ron Desantis.
At least there, I know which wars I’m fighting.
Here, strangers can spell your last name
and tell you where you got your shoes.
The people are so nice, here,
you don’t even notice how fast
you’re being consumed. 

Michael Minassian

Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist and photography: Around the Bend. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing are all available on Amazon. A new chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, is due out in Spring 2022. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com

Kemet

I wake up in the morning,
covered in gold foil,
convinced I’m in ancient Egypt--

Outside my window, a naked man
with the head of a white ibis 
is mowing the lawn.

While I watch, he removes
each of his eyes, rinses them
with the garden hose,
then puts them back in their sockets.

Later, I drive to the beach;
Ft. Lauderdale looks 
like the Pharaoh’s nightmare--
in place of bikini bars
there’s an unfinished pyramid
and mummies stacked 
up on the sand.

The palm trees look the same,
except for the archers
hiding in the fronds--
arrows whizz by my head.

A woman joins me;
she looks vaguely familiar,
and tells me we’ve been here before--
clouds cluster above us 
like backward spinning clocks.

We hold hands--
our watches, hot, like fresh
baked bread, the smell of time
on our wrists.

Kerry Muir  ​

Kerry Muir's work has appeared in Kenyon Review online, Crazyhorse, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Her award-winning plays, "The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me," and "Befriending Bertha/Conociendo a Bertha" (a one-act for children) were  published in dual language (Spanish-English) editions by NoPassport Press as part of their Dreaming the Americas series, curated by Obie Award-winning playwright, Caridad Svich. Visit her online at: https://kerry-muir-5gnx.squarespace.com. 

& Sometimes A Baby

& sometimes a baby washes to shore in  
a carbuncle of leaves, and sticks around for three 
twigs, or maybe four. & sometimes a baby flies to the moon and swims among the stars, but then 
comes crashing down to earth, and flies
with stars no more. & sometimes
a baby hooks a riptide, while in search of a lake, but when it finally appears, the lake comes much 
too late.
Long ago, the zebra
was Berkeley, and the dentist was 1968, and we were rowdy, tumbleweed-wildebeests, snug
in our circus hooligan-caravan. We were loud and clamorous pirates, and had chicken pox all the 
time. We were bon voyage-punk rockers, we— 
               We were. That’s all. 
Do you—? Remember? 
                             The tiger’s cage? 
               In the grocery on Euclid 
               Avenue, just off Hearst? 
It was so shiny, the tiger’s cage, 
               so very race car--
                             I mean, what kid wouldn’t want 
                             to run like Nebraska,
                             and push it like a dumpling? 
Do you—? Remember?
                —how, 
                without babushkas or even 
                the slightest ticket-taker,
                we rolled that tiger’s cage fast, 
                               then faster, 
                               then even faster still, 
& we leaped aboard 
                               the speeding rigor mortis 
you on one side 
                                              me on the other 
both of us clinging to the the grille, 
                                        until our hair and nails glowed? 
Do you—? Remember?
                                How we zipped past the Lion’s 
                                den, then ripped loose 
                                from Mountain Time? 
           We were black market 
                                auctioneers, flying past Werner
                                Herzog! We were spring-laden gangplanks, we were 
                                Mormon Tabernacle 
choirs, flying past a chorus 
line of debutantes, lounging 
in quilted smoking jackets, 
and marzipan pajamas! 

For once—just once!—I had 
a bit of Roman Polanski 
in my carburetor (usually
I was a goody-goody and 
a Puritan cocksucker), but
that day, you and I were both 
supermodel-snake charmers! 
We were glitz and glamour!
We were the good life in Ohio! 
We were a couple of Geronimos 
in search of a fender-bender! 

We were a baby in a leafy carbuncle! 
Laughing at the piano, and
the handsome, fleet-footed cholos! But then— 

            when in hell did it appear? 
            why didn’t we see it coming? 

—a towering pyramid
of silver-finned Ganymedes, stacked right up to the ceiling, and I— 
I lost my tomato. 
            I let go. Not you,
            never you: No: You
            were a genie snug
            in a bottle, a Canadian 
            Mountie riding side-saddle, you 
            were the neon letters flashing 
            over a Texas shooting gallery— 
You were a jaunty horoscope-eggshell! 
Hell-bent on the Golden Age,
eyes on the Spanish horizon!
You weren’t some crawdaddy- 
rumrunner Bellagio, scurrying 
back in your shell—not you! 
Never you! Not your style— 
no. Not your style at all! 

Unfortunately, it was mine— 
                                                                                    I jumped 
                and without my weight to counter yours, 
                the tiger cage tipped 
                and spilled 

pure science followed.
The guitar went blind, as did 

                                              the dulcimer. 

Goddamit to hell, old egghead. 
goddamit, my trusty banana, 
here's the Ugly-doll truth: I saved 
my turtledove 
at the expense of your muchacho. 

So here I am to say:
I’m sorry, old pirate.
I’m sorry, cup of tea. I’m sorry,
fellow pickle jar on the Titanic.
I’m sorry, Bohemian Rhapsody
in A minor: I had it good, and you had it bad, and nothing will ever change that, no 
matter how many wooden
ladders we toss
into the sky.
You washed ashore in a carbuncle of leaves, 
then stuck around for three twigs, or maybe four— 
but the worst part of the whole thing is 
you washed out to sea in a riptide of 
light, and baby, we 
​
              hardly knew ye. 

                                         —November, 2021
                                                          Berkeley, CA

J. Alan Nelson        

J. Alan Nelson, a writer and actor, has poetry, essays and stories published or forthcoming in journals including Peregrine, New York Quarterly, Conjunctions, Stand, Acumen, Pampelmousse, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer and California Quarterly. He also played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and  the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld.”

Married to Eos


My wife, still beautiful
as the dawn after a stormy darkness
 wants me to perform feats of strength 
like I did forty years ago, 
She wants me to manhandle a couch
 to look for her wireless earphones. 
She wants me to lift a king size bed 
several feet in the to look for her wireless earphones. 
I oblige and try not to make old man sounds. 
She doesn’t like old man sounds. 
Not from me. 
Walking is a best exercise, she says. 
I straighten, try not to stoop or hunch. 
Drink more coffee, she says. 
My gray hair disturbs her. 
A glass of red wine daily, she says. 
Even Betty White died, I say. 
Scientists are trying to discover
how to make your dog live longer, she says. 
Houston might sink into the ocean, I say
Up your Omega-3 fats, she reports. 
The United States is dying, I say
Marine clams live up to 500 years, she says. 
The time will come I say. 
Stop she says. 
The time will come and take--
No, she says. There’s a 5000-year-old pine tree. 
I say The time will come 
and take your love away. 
No. No, she says. I will not fear. 
There’s a glass sponge in the China Sea
more than 11,000 years old. 
No, I say. I fear death. 
I fear more a life too long.
I wither, I shrink.
I’ll keep you in a jar on the mantle, she says. 
I’ll listen to you chirp at night. 

​Steve Nickman     Brookline, MA

Steve Nickman's poetry collection, To Sleep with Bears (WordTech), is forthcoming in 2022. He is a psychiatrist who works mainly with kids, teenagers and young adults. Steve's poetry has recently appeared in Pleiades, Nimrod, Summerset Review, Tar River Review, Tule Review, and JuxtaProse. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and is a member of Poemworks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets.

Eggplant

At five I was fearless for my mother’s sake. 
It was just she and I in Manhattan
while my father was away at war.
Around the corner in Vitale’s grocery on Columbus
eggplants loomed vast and purple in a row
above the innocent summer squash,
plus a carton of them on the floor in plain sight.
I recoiled: People don’t eat anything that big. 
They might come out at night with teeth,
or else they had to be grenades or bombs.
I was Terry in “Terry and the Pirates”.
I got my mother out of there in time.
She never knew what I had saved us from.



​

Ian Powell-Palm   Belgrade, MT

Ian Powell-Palm is a writer, poet, and musician currently living in Belgrade, Montana. His work attempts to interrogate familial trauma, sexual identity, and the resurrection of the dead. You can read more of his poetry on Facebook at 'Powell-Palm Poetry'.

Montana
                
                                                                            “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes”

                                                                                               -Gloucester 

                                                                            “Speed is killing Montana’s drivers” 

                                                                                           -Billings Gazette 

           
White crosses: scattered across the highway:  

Like puncture wounds in God’s vision: driving this state:  

Is like uprooting a graveyard: like turning away from:

The woman cradling her daughter’s body: all teeth and broken wing: 

as she tears her from the car: as she turns into another syllable: 

God can no longer pronounce: gripping her tongue: my mother carves its meat   

Into a violin:  Sonata’s through her sobs for the children: these highways have changed: 

Tell them that in the corners: Of this beauty lurks the bones of Toyotas: mothers with 

Metal wings and children they will never meet: Tell them that my family lines these mountains: 

their crosses spitting out directions to nowhere. 


                                  2
    

80 down main street, the vodka bleeding 

    Threough both our hands 

She flips the car because the sirens 

    Have reached us too quickly 

And we can already hear the interstate calling 

    Our names, like children, 

Like it did my sister, my brother as his knees shattered 

    In Wisconsin, 23 and waiting, 

the pickup truck crashing through him 

    like a father 

and still you might ask, so what, kids die in metal jaws all across America 
    
But at least Montanans acknowledge it 

At least we fashion a cross from what’s left of our hands and mark 

    Where our bodies shattered. 

When the car flipped, my sister’s body tearing like a vision 

Across my eyes,

I bound my face in a white sheet, 

Let the men carry me back 

From sight 

back from the boy mangled on the stretcher 
    
Calling for his mother. 

His body, limp 

Like a prayer, 

    We all know we’ve heard before. 


                                  3

    
Listen: down that backroad of throat was a country: on the other side of language. 

I could see Marie’s body there, a slab of meat on the morgue’s metal: her breasts 

Two shut eyes, purpled with knots. I tried to scream: but my voice had been crushed 

Into music: That’s my city/What have you done to her?: I cried, but the women, 

And the men who had once been women, held me back  

All of us watching, silently, as the flames gnawed through 

Every living thing in sight. 


                                      4


That’s when I saw it. 

At the end of my family’s dying was a field. 

Beside its stream, mother and I prepared a fire 

For our daughter’s body, her cross clenched between us 

Like a chokehold. When father returns from tearing apart 

Every car he can get his hands on, his fingers shredded to bone, we will fashion 

a blanket from his hip and lay it down. A white sheet across 

our eyes, we will bring her back to the living, our daughter’s  

spirit breaking furiously into flesh. We will trace her rib, 

jutting and large, let its sharpness draw blood. 



We will touch our gutted eyes, wet with sun, 


With our daughter’s tears. All of us 

So lost in joy 

We will never acknowledge 

The reasons we 

can’t stop 

shaking 

Madari Pendás     Miami, FL

Madari Pendás is a Latin-American writer, translator and painter. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (Tolsun 2022). Her work has appeared in CRAFT, Pank Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and more. Pendás has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, FIU, and two Pushcart nominations.

Tortilleras 

Cubans call queer women, tortilleras, 
Tortilla makers/lovers/experts. 

I can't place the first time I hear it,
But I remember the scorn, the spittle

A word where the teeth dig into the lips
Like white enamel gravestones.

I memorize this reaction, hoping
I never twist my mother's face up.

The Virgin Mary has appeared
As a burnt accent on tortillas,

Hands clasped, the downbeat of an applause,
Eyes turned away in modesty.

A holy visit, like Jesus visiting disciples
After his death. A tortilla, flat, pock-marked

Like a moon, foldable, a miracle gripped
Between burnt brown hands. 

I'm shoved away from my mother at the market
When I hugged her for too long,

People will think we're...you know,
I pray an apology as if I did know, 

As if I've always known,
It's sacrilegious to touch your saints.

Maybe she's known,
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. 

My mother, head hung low, embarrassed/fleeing,
Crossed-arm, she moved to the papayas,

A word my people use for womens' genitals,
I don't eat any when she brings the sliced segments.

Before you were born I set you apart, 
My prayer hands close like a votive flame. 

The papaya's juices puddling underneath, the seeds like
The beads of a rosary clustered, waterfalling.

I eat of the fruit like that first woman, deceived, fallen,
Yet I close my eyes to enjoy the syrupy pulp,

Deviations are made in darkness,
My tongue traces its clefs and hills,

Its peaks and valleys, kissing
With gentle precision of that low cavern what is holiest,

Making a covenant with my body, 
Letting the saliva run down my lips and chin. 

HLR     North London, England

HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning poet, working-class writer, and professional editor from North London. She is a commended winner of The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition 2021. She also won The Desmond O'Grady International Poetry Competition 2021 and was long-listed for The Plough Prize 2022. She is the author of History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone) and Portrait of the Poet as a Hot Mess (Ghost City Press). Twitter: @HLRwriter

Injuries You Cannot See #29

​
She has four dents                              in her head:
when everyone was obsessed
    with that game Fruit Ninja,
she grabbed a carving knife
    from the kitchen drawer and tried
to split her skull apart like
    a watermelon,                                desperate to
“get the badness out.” She didn’t
    achieve her goal of removing
her brain from her skull that day;
    the sharp knife cut her hair
wherever the blade landed,
    and she was left                            with little tufts
sticking up and out for months
    which made her feel silly
(her hair did, not the fact that she
    had casually attempted               a DIY lobotomy).

Charles Rafferty     Sandy Hook, CT

Charles Rafferty has a new collection of prose poems from BOA Editions – A Cluster of Noisy Planets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, and The Southern Review.

A Practical Mortality

Anything can happen if I only hurry up. I pour a glass anyway. After all, the day I tried to tune the piano is the day I broke the piano, and it’s been a while since anyone thought up a new religion or a new sexual position. Luckily, I can always find a spider somewhere inside the house. It devours things I would otherwise be crushing with a tissue or a boot. So many decisions and I am certain of nothing — except that I’ve abandoned Infinite Jest and I really don’t feel bad.

Doug Ramspeck     Black Mountain, NC

Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine collections of poetry, one book of short stories, and a novella. Individual poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Slate, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

Divination of Weeds

And the boy wears his father’s patience 
thin by forcing them deeper into the woods--

each new step a reluctant revelation.
And the boy points toward the abandoned bricks

hidden amid the scourge of weeds. And the father 
says it used to be a place of making and pronounces 

it “kill.” And the father shows the boy the shards
of clay bowls and saucers and cracked figurines 

lying wedged amid the mud, waiting with 
the forgetfulness of dropped leaves. And the father

says that someone there once summoned smoke 
to rise birdlike into air, lifting into a kind of buoyant

ghostliness. And that smoke might have been sorrow 
or gratitude or prayer. And the weeds around the boy 

and the father are peaceful as they bend to peer into
the maw. There is a loam smell there, a smoke smell. 

And the father reaches in and lifts out a small miracle
of pale bone. And fifty teeth gleam. And the boy’s

father holds the possum skull like a seer. Pitiless thing. 
Lost beauty from some abandoned country.
​

the river where the boy drowned grows forgetful

& believes only in its own meandering
& forgets that the sky is forever
an open grave     that the moon is a mouth
whispering to expel the stars   

& the boy is only an afterthought
or dream    a flotsam of son & brother 

& even the trees at the side of the river
hold their breaths     & even the mud
at the edge of the river is erased  
of deer tracks when it rains     

& no one can say where the water went 
that once held a boy in its moving arms
& no one can say what happened to the water
that clung to his body when he was dragged 
to the shore     

for water knows only to forget
& water is a manyness     

& rivers are exhalations
& what they remember is only 
how to move out always in the same direction  ​

Ghosts of the Apiary

I remember my father’s fingers
withdrawing the honeycomb from the hive,

remember hearing the bees buzzing
quietly with their resolute dreaming

while their tripartite bodies writhed.
And not one stung, the bees.

And the smoke silenced the air.
And the smoke boats drifted 

into years until the decades whispered:
Bees like old letters in a cardboard box.

Bees floating atop a brackish pond.
And the apiary moon lists tonight

outside this window, and the bee-stars
have not one hand to hold them.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder     Vermont

Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019) with another book forthcoming in 2023. Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and a Pushcart Prize. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com

My Anatomy                                

Did I have two hearts— 
one for loving bad boys 
and one for loving the kind ones? 

Too many summer secrets 
with the bad ones when we jumped 
into random pools and I took off 
most of my clothes on a golf course 
at night, always at night with them 
that aching heart 
that couldn't get enough 
of a two-sudden love. 

These were not breakfast boys, 
no light-of-day, no, they stayed 
in the chambers of dark dream and distance,
exhausting that heart.

Thank god my other one 
finally found its thrum.

The sun does rise— 
how bright and warm 
and forgiving everything becomes 
in the morning light.

John Wojtowicz

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he pays the bills as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts.  Check him out on the web at: www.johnwojtowicz.com

Lilacs & Rain 

Evening rain carries the scent 
of lilacs 
to my bedroom window 

which I think 
is better than smelling 
them directly because 

I’m laying on a memory 
foam mattress 
and because lilacs 

benefit from a good wafting. 
My wife is sleeping. 
Earlier, we made our version

of love — lots of cursing   
and consensual 
name-calling. Wilder lovers 

might’ve done it in the rain 
under the lilacs 
but I have a feeling 

that involves a lot of non-sexual
goosebumps, mud, 
getting poked with sticks.  

One of those experiences
better in a poem 
or a movie than in practice

like sex on the beach; if you must, 
my advice is bring 
a blanket or commandeer 

a lifeguard stand. I guess 
what I am trying
to say is that before 

wishing for chocolate syrup 
make sure you like
being sticky. I’m saying 

the wind is blowing 
all the wishes 
from the wishing flowers 

and tonight-- that is okay with me.