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SoFloPoJo Contents: Essays * Interviews * Reviews * Special * Video * Visual Arts * Archives * Calendar * Masthead * SUBMIT * Tip Jar
May 2025 Issue #37 Poetry
Cynthia Atkins, m. l. Bach, Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, Beth Brown Preston, Chris Dahl, Alexa Doran, David Eileen, Steph Ellen Feeney, Gary Fincke, Erica Goss, Andrey Gritsman, Charles Haddox, Colleen S. Harris, Nancy Huggett, Caleb Jagoda, Micah Marie Johnson, Malik Jones, Michael Lauchlan, John T. Leonard, Christina Linsin, Corey Miller, Cecil Morris, Kathleen Nalley & Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Alessandra Nysether-Santos, Fejiro Okifo, JL Pracki, Bella Rotker, Kelly R. Samuels, Peter Schmitt, Ephraim Scott Sommers, Annie Stenzel, Elizabeth Sylvia, Ellen June Wright
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POETRY Issue 37 Launch Reading: Friday, May 9th at 7:30 PM ET |
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Don't forget our video archives and YouTube channel @soflopojo
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Cynthia Atkins
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photo by Anne Valerie Portrait
POEM WITH A SHARP POINT
I remember when life was simple
as a pencil balanced behind my ear.
The blank space to possibility
waiting in the wings.
I remember that feeling of putting
a fine point on something, precise
as lace. And the way as children,
we made hand shadows of wolves
on the night-lit walls. I used to
have the memory of an elephant,
but now it’s a screensaver equipped
with a mouse and keys. All I needed
was the lead machinery, sharpening
as the rinds and shavings fell to the floor.
The architecture of mind and hand thinking
in a doodle, a word, a punctuation mark
turning up to clarify an argument.
I tendered the smell of my pencil
ramping up for this internal magic.
Trouble shooting, arranging,
amplifying an avowal to purge and cleanse.
Then sometimes stumbling on an ache
so deep, there was no way to name it.
Too many layers and skins to get to the heart? ―
Stowed now at the back of a drawer,
my pagan instrument lonely
as a church basement when no one has died.
I remember when life was simple
as a pencil balanced behind my ear.
The blank space to possibility
waiting in the wings.
I remember that feeling of putting
a fine point on something, precise
as lace. And the way as children,
we made hand shadows of wolves
on the night-lit walls. I used to
have the memory of an elephant,
but now it’s a screensaver equipped
with a mouse and keys. All I needed
was the lead machinery, sharpening
as the rinds and shavings fell to the floor.
The architecture of mind and hand thinking
in a doodle, a word, a punctuation mark
turning up to clarify an argument.
I tendered the smell of my pencil
ramping up for this internal magic.
Trouble shooting, arranging,
amplifying an avowal to purge and cleanse.
Then sometimes stumbling on an ache
so deep, there was no way to name it.
Too many layers and skins to get to the heart? ―
Stowed now at the back of a drawer,
my pagan instrument lonely
as a church basement when no one has died.
Cynthia Atkins (She, Her), is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure, and Still-Life with God. Her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Diode, Cimarron Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Permafrost, Plume, Salamander, and Verse Daily. www.cynthiaatkins.com
m. l. Bach
Childhood Ode
If there was fear and horror,
haunting and devastation,
there was also light:
the way my mother smelled
first thing in the morning,
like deodorant, perm solution,
coffee and cold air, the way
the babies looked when they came
home from the hospital, pliable
and milky, to make four out of us,
the place setting of my father’s friends
assembled, puzzled together
afterhours in the concrete garage,
smoking cigarettes and speaking
with one another in lower and lower
tones through their wheaty mouths,
my brother squinting down at me
through his thick little boy glasses
from the high branch of the big tree
in that backyard. When the carehome
sold, I collected these things like spare change,
I set them on windowsills and tucked
them between the car seats in my mother’s
blue SUV, I stored them in emptied liquor
bottles, and my father’s gun safe, behind
my bookshelves and under my bed, in hopes
that one autumn morning someone
would cut their eyes in my direction,
ask me what it was like in that place,
what kinds of things happened in that place, how,
surrounded by all the grieving weight of that place,
we gripped images in our hands and held each other.
If there was fear and horror,
haunting and devastation,
there was also light:
the way my mother smelled
first thing in the morning,
like deodorant, perm solution,
coffee and cold air, the way
the babies looked when they came
home from the hospital, pliable
and milky, to make four out of us,
the place setting of my father’s friends
assembled, puzzled together
afterhours in the concrete garage,
smoking cigarettes and speaking
with one another in lower and lower
tones through their wheaty mouths,
my brother squinting down at me
through his thick little boy glasses
from the high branch of the big tree
in that backyard. When the carehome
sold, I collected these things like spare change,
I set them on windowsills and tucked
them between the car seats in my mother’s
blue SUV, I stored them in emptied liquor
bottles, and my father’s gun safe, behind
my bookshelves and under my bed, in hopes
that one autumn morning someone
would cut their eyes in my direction,
ask me what it was like in that place,
what kinds of things happened in that place, how,
surrounded by all the grieving weight of that place,
we gripped images in our hands and held each other.
m. l. Bach is a poet and heavy reader from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who is currently in their last year as an MFA student at the University of South Carolina. Their work has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Paper Dragon, the Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona
Parsley
I rejuvenated a bowl of dried parsley flakes with beer
and conjured signs of your life in the bitter taste.
I draw a card from The Literary Witches Oracle
with you in mind. María Sabina’s floating torso
appears above dismembered ankles and feet,
grass sprouting from the severing.
I’m supposed to run for an hour tonight
after waiting for dry pavement all week.
Tonight I only want to jog as far as the grocery store
and run back with a bouquet of fresh parsley.
I want to play pretend for dinner: we are together again
comparing our arms and backs and hips and breasts
trading stories on when we aimed for an artery
but survived. Maybe we’d be caught in the act
of revisiting girlhood under duress, churches
and fathers claiming we had no reason to be depressed.
When I look hard at my wrists, I think who am I
to tell my students now how to question, persuade,
delay? I envied how you did not delay your dying.
I’ve been unlucky in trying to die. I burn dried parsley
and pretend the match is your hair. Smoky curls
spilling through my fingertips. Fresh flame. I shake
the match. I lace up my shoes. I have been through worse
heaving than being breathless on a run. My trainer’s words:
your mind will give up before your body does. I run. It hurts
for ten minutes until Evanescence croons on: bring me to life.
I rejuvenated a bowl of dried parsley flakes with beer
and conjured signs of your life in the bitter taste.
I draw a card from The Literary Witches Oracle
with you in mind. María Sabina’s floating torso
appears above dismembered ankles and feet,
grass sprouting from the severing.
I’m supposed to run for an hour tonight
after waiting for dry pavement all week.
Tonight I only want to jog as far as the grocery store
and run back with a bouquet of fresh parsley.
I want to play pretend for dinner: we are together again
comparing our arms and backs and hips and breasts
trading stories on when we aimed for an artery
but survived. Maybe we’d be caught in the act
of revisiting girlhood under duress, churches
and fathers claiming we had no reason to be depressed.
When I look hard at my wrists, I think who am I
to tell my students now how to question, persuade,
delay? I envied how you did not delay your dying.
I’ve been unlucky in trying to die. I burn dried parsley
and pretend the match is your hair. Smoky curls
spilling through my fingertips. Fresh flame. I shake
the match. I lace up my shoes. I have been through worse
heaving than being breathless on a run. My trainer’s words:
your mind will give up before your body does. I run. It hurts
for ten minutes until Evanescence croons on: bring me to life.
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona is a writer from New Jersey. She is a winner of the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2022) and Epiphany Magazine's Fresh Voices Fellowship (2023). She's currently a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA Program at Northwestern University. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Fulbright Program, Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her debut chapbook, Roundtrip, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025.
Beth Brown Preston
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Mélancolie
after Francis Poulanc
The heart now requires its singular pleasures:
the babble of water flowing in a brook
as seen through a bedroom window
surrounded by a symphony of the chromatic forest.
In a meditation on tenderness: I let poetry inside,
into this unsung realm of mine.
What is this music I hear insist among the trees?
This music ― an offering to the silenced of the world.
I want to tell the world: I am no longer afraid.
But now dancing in this world for the unsung others.
I can fill blank pages with stories of their forgotten lives.
I thought that I knew my heart,
but the heart requires its vengeance
on those who would make war upon us, abandon us
to our grieving cities. I dance for the world,
for the unsung, unknown others.
I hear their plaintive song as if it were my own.
The rain descends in a fine, staccato mist.
This poem is a sadness in which nothing is forgiven.
after Francis Poulanc
The heart now requires its singular pleasures:
the babble of water flowing in a brook
as seen through a bedroom window
surrounded by a symphony of the chromatic forest.
In a meditation on tenderness: I let poetry inside,
into this unsung realm of mine.
What is this music I hear insist among the trees?
This music ― an offering to the silenced of the world.
I want to tell the world: I am no longer afraid.
But now dancing in this world for the unsung others.
I can fill blank pages with stories of their forgotten lives.
I thought that I knew my heart,
but the heart requires its vengeance
on those who would make war upon us, abandon us
to our grieving cities. I dance for the world,
for the unsung, unknown others.
I hear their plaintive song as if it were my own.
The rain descends in a fine, staccato mist.
This poem is a sadness in which nothing is forgiven.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College. She has been a Bread Loaf Scholar and a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in numerous literary and scholarly journals and magazines.
Chris Dahl
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Doe and Fawn Season
Doe and two fawns, or some days doe and a single. Sorry,
I tell them, sorry we landscaped the backyard and took down
the browse all the way to the lake. Still they nibble at a few
recovering shrubs and the flourishing grass at the water’s edge.
The fawns munch away, but the doe is busy staying alert,
scanning for something she hears, not sure what. One neighborhood
over from ours, someone reported an eagle had carried away
a fawn. It must have been newborn. I know the eagles here
and they aren’t large enough to carry off much, ducks and trout.
This is how the cycle goes of course. A stray cat now comes every
afternoon and waits patiently for us to feed him—and our own cat,
who tried several times to chase the newcomer away, ignores him
because O’Kitty—O’Kitty I’m calling him, short for Other
Kitty—he’s twice the size but oh, those gooseberry green eyes!
Eyes to fall in love with. He won’t come in even when it rains.
A squirrel scrambles across the deck and all three deer swivel
their ears. Not too long ago I got up at 1:00 a.m. and saw a posse
of coyotes, a gang, taking over the street and I couldn’t call
the house cat to come in because she might take to running and
set them on her. Eventually, she showed up and right now the grass
might be lush but I don’t know what I’ll do when storms loom
and the cats won’t come in and the fawns have to find their way
without the moon.
Doe and two fawns, or some days doe and a single. Sorry,
I tell them, sorry we landscaped the backyard and took down
the browse all the way to the lake. Still they nibble at a few
recovering shrubs and the flourishing grass at the water’s edge.
The fawns munch away, but the doe is busy staying alert,
scanning for something she hears, not sure what. One neighborhood
over from ours, someone reported an eagle had carried away
a fawn. It must have been newborn. I know the eagles here
and they aren’t large enough to carry off much, ducks and trout.
This is how the cycle goes of course. A stray cat now comes every
afternoon and waits patiently for us to feed him—and our own cat,
who tried several times to chase the newcomer away, ignores him
because O’Kitty—O’Kitty I’m calling him, short for Other
Kitty—he’s twice the size but oh, those gooseberry green eyes!
Eyes to fall in love with. He won’t come in even when it rains.
A squirrel scrambles across the deck and all three deer swivel
their ears. Not too long ago I got up at 1:00 a.m. and saw a posse
of coyotes, a gang, taking over the street and I couldn’t call
the house cat to come in because she might take to running and
set them on her. Eventually, she showed up and right now the grass
might be lush but I don’t know what I’ll do when storms loom
and the cats won’t come in and the fawns have to find their way
without the moon.
Chris Dahl hopes to cup a handful of murky pond-water and reveal another world half-hidden in this one. Her manuscript, Not Now but Soon, scheduled to be published in April, 2025, won Concrete Wolf’s 2024 Louis Award. Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts, a chapbook, won Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition. With numerous journal and anthology publications, plus poems nominated both for Best of the Internet and a Pushcart Prize, Dahl, a board member of the Olympia Poetry Network, also edits their newsletter.
Alexa Doran
On Dimension
When Engels said “the sum of all repulsions” he meant a single woman. I know who I am by the space I holly into wreathes around me. 34-36-arctic loneliness is not a set of digits men invest in. Though anger is the cleanest emotion, the pin-swift build of a harpoon, I no longer know its pivot. Yesterday, Spotify tagged me Trap Queen two decades too late. True, I used to open Upstate like a vein, dime bags sold to Tennessee at three times what I paid. Stupid to believe in that bloat. But I did. I Slinkied across those states, MapQuest and yesterday’s tips the only armor to keep me safe, so sure men determined which girl was hotter based on who could go farther. Now, my mouth only an aperture to God, I wonder how much sadness changes our experience of space, if we have to believe the world is too small once emptiness takes on the scale of rage, if the reason I ran screaming from the mirror maze my son wanted desperately to explore, is because everything has been closing in since the cement scoff of your door. It’s true, sometimes I want the sword to win and sometimes to fall on. Still, no matter the phase, I want that silver pressure, longer than any moon. Puncture has hands like Jesus when no one touches you. Vertical Divider
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Dowry
I teach my son to enter South Florida like a church. Palms bell our entry. Here, the air has earned the right to line our bodies, to choose us. As we cleave closer to the coast, I drunk-Tweet pix of the December bit beach: my son’s face in the cash of wind, his fingers wept in sand. There, lit by the moss-frill of sea he tells me he only half believes in God. I don’t ask which half. * God is sick. I wear his vomit down my throat. He feels like a butterfly born too soon, like He’ll be raw forever. My son knows that I am always choking. He does not know how holy the rope. When he says mom, listen to the ocean, I only hear the lawn crunch beneath the rocking chair I used to nurse him in, the yellow one I abandoned before leaving his dad. * Thorn has a vision I envy. Something perfect about being built to defend, to be a weapon at birth. When my son worries mommy I can’t sleep because I am thinking about earth when you’re not on it. I offer a version of solace. Beg him. Son. There is garden enough. * I feel God coagulate. Another tongue. He never tells me why He curdles. Why He can only heal where I choke. From here, my ex-husband and the horizon are one thing. The foam-fucked ocean a rear view image. My son and I disciples of the distance. |
Alexa Doran completed her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. Her collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was published in April 2021 (Bauhan). She is also the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). You can look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Pleiades, Witness, Massachusetts Review, pigeonholes, NELLE, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. For publications, awards, and interviews visit alexadoran.com.
David Eileen
Craft Lesson Disguised as Love Poem
The finest July in Florida was the one we had first in the swell of our glittered
combustion, the one where summer used all its sun to bleach room
for our conversation, time long & languid enough to make me complacent
enough that my unexamined judge
slipped into the backseat unnoticed & road tripped
along with our pop radio silently until inspiring
my smug announcement:
yeah yeah yeah
wouldn’t & could never hold its own without
music, never rise as a fine line for a poem, being
as it is all singular & naked. I said this without any doubt
stumbling over my tongue, standing only
on me. But all she had to say was
why not
for the world’s color & my speechlessness to flush into so many
washed out places. She asked one magnesium question & our car
turned the road into a neon ramp & bore down on its wings.
She cured this crab of its shell— I came clean
as an animal: with a precise hunger, unharmed. My pulse skipped out
to call for more muscle. I lived in a possible world away from myself.
Each breath walked into my lungs single file through a long lace veil.
Taught proper that season, I still lift my hands
against our sunroof just to notice my palms
clear as prisms, splitting the light just because.
The finest July in Florida was the one we had first in the swell of our glittered
combustion, the one where summer used all its sun to bleach room
for our conversation, time long & languid enough to make me complacent
enough that my unexamined judge
slipped into the backseat unnoticed & road tripped
along with our pop radio silently until inspiring
my smug announcement:
yeah yeah yeah
wouldn’t & could never hold its own without
music, never rise as a fine line for a poem, being
as it is all singular & naked. I said this without any doubt
stumbling over my tongue, standing only
on me. But all she had to say was
why not
for the world’s color & my speechlessness to flush into so many
washed out places. She asked one magnesium question & our car
turned the road into a neon ramp & bore down on its wings.
She cured this crab of its shell— I came clean
as an animal: with a precise hunger, unharmed. My pulse skipped out
to call for more muscle. I lived in a possible world away from myself.
Each breath walked into my lungs single file through a long lace veil.
Taught proper that season, I still lift my hands
against our sunroof just to notice my palms
clear as prisms, splitting the light just because.
David Eileen is an Ohio native who earned his MFA from Florida Atlantic University while Editor-in-Chief of the school’s literary magazine, Swamp Ape Review. They are currently a poetry editor for Alien Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Diagram, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Best of the Net, among others. You can find more of them at david-eileen.com.
Steph Ellen Feeney
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WHO RUN THE WORLD
(a YouTube dance party) It’s my daughter’s turn and she chooses Beyoncé on horseback at the end of the world, sexy and riding to end the world-order with backing dancers draped in shades of blood. When the riot police aggro in, Bey doesn’t wait to aggro back. She gets the frontman in a blood choke, then salutes, a fuck-you salute to no flag this country’s ever flown. Every flag this country’s ever flown has fucked girls. The riot police bunch up tight, arms raised high against a thousand stiletto-studded legs raised higher. Their shields are flimsy, and they know it. Hands shielding his eyes, my son goes all flimsy, starts to cry – the heaving red-faced big-drop kind. I take him heaving, red-faced into my arms to have the talk about the thousands of years before, the thousands of years when boys kept girls in a blood choke, and how this song, this video, the fact of Beyoncé at all, the fact of Beyoncé, Madonna, Dolly, Ella, Billie, gives girls courage, but the tears keep coming like he’s seeing what’s literally coming, men no more than a blotch, and his own mom singing along. He’s all blotchy. Still singing, his sister hands him the remote. It’s his turn, but he doesn’t want to take it. Vertical Divider
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GUMBO RULES
after Ian McMillan The Magnalite must not gleam. Must never be new. If there’s a recipe, it’s in your grandmother’s head, and she’s not writing it down. The butter must not be butter, but Crisco. The flour must be All-Purpose, sifted to within an inch of its life by a child who would otherwise be up to no good. The flour must be introduced to the Crisco spoonful by spoonful. The Crisco must be allowed to sing to the flour. The spoon must be wooden, lopedged and blackened by stirring. If there is dried sweat somewhere in its grain, it must be your grandmother’s. The roux must brown till it seems it can’t get any browner – then a prayer longer. The onion, celery and bell pepper must dance with the roux: a fais do do. The stock must come from a yard bird, neck broke by hands you know, simmered overnight, ladled like the blues, slow, but not too slow. Your feet must ache, simply ache, from the standing. The bay must be plucked from a tree grown in soil rich with the bones of family dogs. If anybody knows whether pinch or palmful of paprika, it’s your grandmother, and she’s not writing it down. The lid must be placed on the slant, the gumbo left to bubble long enough to scent up and tempt the whole neighborhood. The porch light must be lit, front door open. Somehow, it will feed us all. |
Born in Louisiana, and raised in Texas, Steph Ellen Feeney now calls Suffolk home. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Gutter, litmosphere, and Propel Magazine, among others. Her debut collection, SMALL CHANGE, was a semi-finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, and is out next year with Broken Sleep Books. She grew up in a family of fishermen, musicians and drinkers, and still dabbles in all three.
Gary Fincke
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In the Changing Room
A book, this morning, informs that spiders, on average, live through seven generations of the insects they feed upon, a number I am passing along like gossip, citing age as coyly as a storybook Victorian maiden six years after my retirement, private, too, about discomfort so deep beneath my ribs that I feign early evening sleep, remembering my mother often closing her bedroom door to suffer in what she believed was secrecy. In the changing room, during my first visit to the imaging center, I noticed a belt hooked through a tarnished buckle, forgotten by someone who might have been delaying his exam, sliding it slowly through six loops of his pants, and I thought, undoing my jeans, his widow might already wonder where he left that belt she cannot see no matter how many mornings she’s opened his closet, closed it, and found its order a bit unsound. In a shared cartoon, the dead, in hell, watch a video of flames on a small television because, one remarks, annual fire-safety education is required. Though I’ve laughed, Satan looks serious, as do the recent dead who welcome, perhaps, instruction on how to endure eternity. Already I’ve caught myself imagining the malignant news, whether I will accept the worst-case like a fresh prescription to be indefinitely filled. Before the CT-Scan, the technician said, “You look good.” She meant my chances, the odds tilted my way because I showed no symptoms in my face. As if confirming, I held my breath beyond what she asked for, telling myself I didn’t want mistakes made. Soon, while I was dressing myself again, the clothes I was putting on seemed stranger than the clinic’s gown. I sat and listened to a man coughing in the adjoining closet. In age, evenings are chaperoned by myths that eavesdrop where the forsythia conceals thistle and honeysuckle, stories that creep closer, sniffing the air, satisfied that risk is so small they can chance exposure. They settle among flowers and shrubbery to stage-whisper the old reassurances: “And yet.” “But wait.” “Despite everything.” their codes cadenced by wish and desire into litanies for the alternatives of hope. Once, there was a man who measured each day in seconds, calculating, upon waking, where he had entered his obsession’s noir, picking up the countdown precisely to monitor one more impossible-to-deactivate bomb. As soon as I fumbled my shoelaces tight, I had a specialist to see about photographs arranged in his office like backlit, juried art. “Goddamn this thing,” the man who coughed in the next-door closet said, and I nodded. Vertical Divider
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Utility
After I read my granddaughter’s application essay, After it left me stuck sad between bland and safe, I told her to use concrete nouns and action verbs, Not writing to please, especially not summarizing Like millions do, she messaged me a rough draft That opened, “I was six when my father passed out, Cigarette in hand, on the cement sidewalk outside An Arizona gas station while he was supposed To be watching me. I watched a passerby call 911. I heard her say she believed him homeless and Likely dead. I was seven when my mother pushed My bed against the bedroom door to stop . . . “ From there, her memory in motion, was and were Vanished. She abandoned bloat’s passive voice, Shedding that camouflage for shame. Cross-country, I texted better and yes, as pleased as a distant, Post-creation god. Snow swirled around my house As I nudged each thermostat to rewrite the rooms To ok, pretty good, and comfortable while the wind Against the thick, sliding glass door worked through Its huge set of keys for flaws and weaknesses. Her self-portrait stared at me, straightforward as A senior’s yearbook head shot, a miniature Of early learning sprawled between the margins. No longer anonymous, it demanded consideration. Or to be autopsied, I thought, that verb leaking Into the room to mix with my satisfaction Until it was inside a sweltering van or a small, Shared bedroom while I thought about choice And how I’d made her select confession And to barter for whatever college she sensed Was best among those that were located near What passes for paradise – the Pacific Ocean Close by, the weather, though aging badly, Still famous. I might as well have said “Bless you” And rushed back to that saved file, celebrating Selfishness and cooing useful like an owner Of a well-trained dog to summon its heavy body From where it dozes in its disordered room. |
Gary Fincke fourteen poetry collections have been published by such presses as Ohio State, Arkansas, Michigan State, BkMk, Lynx House, and Jacar. His new collections For Now, We Have Been Spared and The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems will be published in 2025 by Slant Books and Press 53.
Erica Goss
Fairly Small Horses
My mother’s brain has entered
the realm of lost ships.
As unbidden messages
pour over the transom,
she negotiates appeals
from the imaginary
and the dead. Today
it’s the horses, who languish
in a cramped barn
across from the tiny park
she gazes at each day.
She hears their faint whinnies,
sees their eyes, huge and dull,
inhales the stink of
their confinement.
I touch her hand. Her skin is cool
and dry. She gestures,
a royal wave at her surroundings,
cleverly designed to disguise the locked gates
and doors of the assisted living home
where I’ve placed her.
“They need space. Horses need to run.
To eat grass.” She looks at me,
her wide-set eyes slightly
out of focus. Across the park,
no barn, no horses. Just a road that leads
to more roads. “I know,”
I tell her, “Horses need to be free. How can we
help them?” She looks through me.
“They are small.”
“The horses?” “Yes. Fairly small.”
She smiles at me: two gray front teeth,
the corners of her mouth stained
from the chocolate I snuck her.
“Fairly small,” I repeat. But she’s picking up
a new signal, the horses forgotten.
I tighten my grip around her hand.
My mother’s brain has entered
the realm of lost ships.
As unbidden messages
pour over the transom,
she negotiates appeals
from the imaginary
and the dead. Today
it’s the horses, who languish
in a cramped barn
across from the tiny park
she gazes at each day.
She hears their faint whinnies,
sees their eyes, huge and dull,
inhales the stink of
their confinement.
I touch her hand. Her skin is cool
and dry. She gestures,
a royal wave at her surroundings,
cleverly designed to disguise the locked gates
and doors of the assisted living home
where I’ve placed her.
“They need space. Horses need to run.
To eat grass.” She looks at me,
her wide-set eyes slightly
out of focus. Across the park,
no barn, no horses. Just a road that leads
to more roads. “I know,”
I tell her, “Horses need to be free. How can we
help them?” She looks through me.
“They are small.”
“The horses?” “Yes. Fairly small.”
She smiles at me: two gray front teeth,
the corners of her mouth stained
from the chocolate I snuck her.
“Fairly small,” I repeat. But she’s picking up
a new signal, the horses forgotten.
I tighten my grip around her hand.
Erica Goss is the author of Landscape with Womb and Paradox, forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2025, and Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, Redactions, Consequence, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review.
Andrey Gritsman
Motel
All cheap motels possess
that terrible smell of dispossession,
dislodgement, airless sleep, and plastic crucifixion,
an owlish, shapeless face
behind the double-glass window,
the smell of life unlived,
of old rugs and dusty sorrow.
What can be dimmer than
the night of dreams that followed
the thick, tenacious odor
of the sleepy hollow.
You leave behind
this street and a frozen meadow,
the only blinking light.
You leave behind
a vacant cube of the borrowed,
of the sealed, stale, and silent space,
where one stays overnight,
where time is seized,
the pool is dry and cracked,
the phone is dead,
TV black and white,
the corner pizza place closed
last winter
and the street sign says: Do Not Enter.
All cheap motels possess
that terrible smell of dispossession,
dislodgement, airless sleep, and plastic crucifixion,
an owlish, shapeless face
behind the double-glass window,
the smell of life unlived,
of old rugs and dusty sorrow.
What can be dimmer than
the night of dreams that followed
the thick, tenacious odor
of the sleepy hollow.
You leave behind
this street and a frozen meadow,
the only blinking light.
You leave behind
a vacant cube of the borrowed,
of the sealed, stale, and silent space,
where one stays overnight,
where time is seized,
the pool is dry and cracked,
the phone is dead,
TV black and white,
the corner pizza place closed
last winter
and the street sign says: Do Not Enter.
A native of Moscow, Andrey Gritsman has published eight volumes of poetry in Russian. A 2009 Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention, he has also been Short Listed for the PEN American Center Biennial Osterweil Poetry Award and Best of the Net. Andrey’s poems have appeared in over 90 literary Journals.
Charles Haddox
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Paquimé
Those great ollas, red and black, filled with alkaline, amniotic waters, and the river was not a boundary but a bridge. City, soap-walled nest, its wealth in trade, copper, turquoise, obsidian, auricled conch shells, the macaw feathers, common as altars, orange reed baskets, even though there was no word for orange. Laughter, as when the dead have drunk, buried under temporary doorways, you are my city, Paquimé, I am buried in you, regretful, transient, without borders, nascent, tasting of chocolate, chocolate, calcination, and clay. Vertical Divider
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On the Border
It seems peculiar, barren, cruel, this hatred of migrants, like hating your grandparents or yourself. Go ahead and hate the sky, and that blazing planet like a stone in the bladder of space, the river, that saws through andesite with the fury of a sculptor ten yards from death, the tree with its innocent bird wings, but do not hate your grandmother. It’s not the fear of the other, but fear of ourselves, of seeing ourselves as we are, poor, defenseless, homeless, helpless as a stick. Hate the sun with its highland roar, but do not hate yourself. |
Charles Haddox (he/him) lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in over a hundred journals and anthologies, with poems published recently in Gulf Stream, Notre Dame Review, and Vita Poetica. charleshaddox.wordpress.com
Colleen S. Harris
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Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita [1]
Midway through the journey of his life, Dante found himself at the edge of a dark wood facing a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. I stand at the threshold of a carpeted office with a doctor, my mother, an absent ex-husband lingering over my left shoulder. The doctor arrives armed with an array of images: a spine fusing to itself, bone to bone architecture muddied, a topography of enthesitis. My mother wields her faith as sword and shield, believes God names every freckle. She knows suffering, knows faith means nothing until it is tested. I left God behind, but I believe in Mary—a girl carrying a child, judgment, and a grief that should have cracked the earth with every slippered step after Gabriel appeared. I carry no child, but small vials of a putrid yellow nostrum that should kill enough of me to survive. The dose makes the poison, crows the doctor who will not be holding my hair back over porcelain tonight. I wear lapis on the off-chance Mary might intercede. I swallow daily pills, take the needle to my thigh. My body burns. My pen is mute. I am not Dante. [1] Transl from the Italian: “Midway through the journey of our life”, first line of Dante’s Commedia |
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A Brief Biology Lesson
Tattooing does not push ink into your skin. The cluster of needles jabs as many as 200 times per second, the ink-coated stylus descends past epidermis into dermis, and a hole two millimeters deep opens. The needle escapes, and the vacuum of the void inhales pigment particles too large for the immune system to swallow. I think about this as I pour water, count the line of yellow and white pills that will catch in my throat. Yellow and white, colors every tattoo aficionado knows will not keep with time, smaller particles an easier meal. I consider macrophages choking on heavy metals, embracing them until they die and new sentinels pick up the work, blurring the edges, softening bold colors. But the body persists, cells creating a wall to imprison the large ink molecules, holding tight to the lady pirate on my forearm, keeping her breasts high and firm. My body will give me that much. Vertical Divider
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On the Banks of the Cumberland
I have printed the divorce papers. I take a wet evening walk to test the limits of my new courage. The river swallows my doubts into its depths, dark as a coma. I walk its edges, invisible as the bullfrog’s call. I plunge my hands in, insolent, and hear the currents croon to me like a choir of drowned girls. The river mud spreads my toes, breathes me in, tests the taste of me. I have to fight for it to let me go, the way I want to have to fight someone who wants to hold me too close, keep me in one place, turn me from wandering fog to rooted sediment. The way I want you to want me without me reminding you, the way you remember to take your pills because they bring you to life. I ask the river my fortune, and the river simmers with expectation as dawn slides over and into the water, burning like a bride under her new husband’s hands. |
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, forthcoming 2025), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014).
Nancy Huggett
Shoveling Out
One snowstorm after another slams
along the river, shuddering our little
brick house until it staggers. What began
as delicate flakes, each crystal
scattering light and floating,
slowly builds and blows,
sky and street white-washed until
we cannot see beyond the window.
This small frame of warmth and safety
frosted in, our shovels teaspoon tools,
a fairytale imagining of tunneling
out. Each minute, another layer
loads itself into drifts that rise
above the snowplow banks, the porch,
the doors, the furnace vent.
I suit up in Bogs and balaclava. Take shovel
and broom to clear the deck as fast
as this old heart, these tired muscles
will allow. But on it rages, each gust
of wind and layer another burying
and deflection, another flurry
of executive orders determined
to lock us in. All I can do is keep
a small path open, until my neighbours
shoulder in and we unearth each other slowly,
the steady scrape of shovels echoing down the street.
One snowstorm after another slams
along the river, shuddering our little
brick house until it staggers. What began
as delicate flakes, each crystal
scattering light and floating,
slowly builds and blows,
sky and street white-washed until
we cannot see beyond the window.
This small frame of warmth and safety
frosted in, our shovels teaspoon tools,
a fairytale imagining of tunneling
out. Each minute, another layer
loads itself into drifts that rise
above the snowplow banks, the porch,
the doors, the furnace vent.
I suit up in Bogs and balaclava. Take shovel
and broom to clear the deck as fast
as this old heart, these tired muscles
will allow. But on it rages, each gust
of wind and layer another burying
and deflection, another flurry
of executive orders determined
to lock us in. All I can do is keep
a small path open, until my neighbours
shoulder in and we unearth each other slowly,
the steady scrape of shovels echoing down the street.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant writing and caregiving on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in MER, One Art, Poetry Northwest, and Rust and Moth. She’s won awards (RBC-PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
Caleb Jagoda
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poy-zah nigh-vee
I’ve always forged the four syllables
in the wrong formation, placing a break
before the n instead of after, alchemizing
the mush of letters like my mother, also
Portuguese, obscured beneath the blush
of her Massachusetts inflection until a wedge
of strange phrasing strikes you as would
a satellite dish, out of orbit between two planets
of meaning.
I’m always reminded of my vovô, his small frame
launching soccer balls at me full-force, his clipped
English instructing me to be strong, like bull,
to always dive, for show, a shanked ball
leading me to brush where jagged leaves grab
and grasp, apply oily resin, the ball
like a planet bathed in sunlight, glistening in dew,
the two of us, Carolos and I, speaking
through the impact of foot and hand
on leather.
I’ve always seized the chore of visiting the store
in New Bedford the day before Christmas, grocery aisles
alive and buzzing like a honeycomb with language
rich and displaced, children weighing linguiça, chourico,
uncles eyeing caipirinha ingredients, families
spreading like a rash through the building, across
the region, as if an accident, mispronounced words
mutating with each slip of the tongue, my vovô’s
voice ringing in my head: My people
so beautiful.
I’ve always forged the four syllables
in the wrong formation, placing a break
before the n instead of after, alchemizing
the mush of letters like my mother, also
Portuguese, obscured beneath the blush
of her Massachusetts inflection until a wedge
of strange phrasing strikes you as would
a satellite dish, out of orbit between two planets
of meaning.
I’m always reminded of my vovô, his small frame
launching soccer balls at me full-force, his clipped
English instructing me to be strong, like bull,
to always dive, for show, a shanked ball
leading me to brush where jagged leaves grab
and grasp, apply oily resin, the ball
like a planet bathed in sunlight, glistening in dew,
the two of us, Carolos and I, speaking
through the impact of foot and hand
on leather.
I’ve always seized the chore of visiting the store
in New Bedford the day before Christmas, grocery aisles
alive and buzzing like a honeycomb with language
rich and displaced, children weighing linguiça, chourico,
uncles eyeing caipirinha ingredients, families
spreading like a rash through the building, across
the region, as if an accident, mispronounced words
mutating with each slip of the tongue, my vovô’s
voice ringing in my head: My people
so beautiful.
Caleb Jagoda talks in aphorisms until those closest to him demand he stop—but hey, you know what they say: Buy the ticket, take the ride. Caleb is a poet, journalist, and MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where he works as managing editor for Barnstorm Journal. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, The Queens Review, and Down East Magazine, among others. He lives in Dover, New Hampshire, and is big on the internet: www.calebjagoda.com.
Micah Marie Johnson
How to Leave a Sound Behind
Yelling won’t do a thing out here--
just gets lost in the trees, swallowed whole by the gators.
Slamming doors is useless too,
the hinges already lean like a tired old dog, groaning with every step.
Gunshots crack the air sometimes, and they take more than they give.
Praying is just another way of talking to yourself.
The hymns feel thinner every year,
stretched like banana spider silk between the pines.
I’ve been practicing my growl,
testing it against the wind,
against the kitchen table’s wooden edge,
against the way the porch floorboards hum beneath my bare feet.
It’s not quite right yet, but I’m close.
The best way, I think, is to burst―
into song, into running, into a laugh
so wild it startles the chickens.
Find the creature in your chest and let it loose.
Let it howl, shake the trees.
make this swamp remember.
Yelling won’t do a thing out here--
just gets lost in the trees, swallowed whole by the gators.
Slamming doors is useless too,
the hinges already lean like a tired old dog, groaning with every step.
Gunshots crack the air sometimes, and they take more than they give.
Praying is just another way of talking to yourself.
The hymns feel thinner every year,
stretched like banana spider silk between the pines.
I’ve been practicing my growl,
testing it against the wind,
against the kitchen table’s wooden edge,
against the way the porch floorboards hum beneath my bare feet.
It’s not quite right yet, but I’m close.
The best way, I think, is to burst―
into song, into running, into a laugh
so wild it startles the chickens.
Find the creature in your chest and let it loose.
Let it howl, shake the trees.
make this swamp remember.
Micah Marie Johnson, appearing in The Pierian Journal, Two Friends Publishing, SWWIM’s collab with FIU, Indie Earth Publishing, and others―has performed live at events for Front Yard Theater Collective, O, Miami, as well as at iconic venues such as the Adrienne Arsht Center and The Olympia Theater. In 2024, they were honored as the Poet Laureate of the Coral Springs Festival of the Arts. Micah is also part of the Executive Leadership Team for the nonprofit Miami Poetry Club and serves as Programs Director.
Malik Jones
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Tongass Unrequited
You give my name meaning. I give you the world.
I am the forest. Your cities sleep in me.
I know you once loved me
as much as I love you.
My lungs are the changes in air pressure
that pull winds along the southeast channels.
My voice is carried to you
on the lips of swaying tree limbs.
You feel my gaze on the back of your skull
and on the bumps of your skin;
my eyes are the ravens.
When you lace up your boots
and zip up your jacket,
you don childhood armor, my love.
My teeth are what grind the glaciers into silt,
make waters impossible to tread
and drag kayaks to the riverbed.
I smother the stars with gossamer and spite.
In winter, I choke mountains with my spinnerets.
What you call autumn, I call evening.
I rot the leaves so that my trees may rest.
Every spring I say hello to you with flowers.
I sing to you with showers,
though you do not know that it’s for you.
You cannot even hear my lonely drops of rain.
So I belt my love for you.
My sky holds many clouds
and their coats hold many knives.
Gathered under rainstorm,
I know you hear my lullabies.
I watched you crawl when you were small.
I watched you cry when you thought you were alone;
I decorated your shoulders with pine needles as I joined.
I give you the world, but only for a while.
I can’t wait to feel your ashes on my skin
and give you kisses once again.
You give my name meaning. I give you the world.
I am the forest. Your cities sleep in me.
I know you once loved me
as much as I love you.
My lungs are the changes in air pressure
that pull winds along the southeast channels.
My voice is carried to you
on the lips of swaying tree limbs.
You feel my gaze on the back of your skull
and on the bumps of your skin;
my eyes are the ravens.
When you lace up your boots
and zip up your jacket,
you don childhood armor, my love.
My teeth are what grind the glaciers into silt,
make waters impossible to tread
and drag kayaks to the riverbed.
I smother the stars with gossamer and spite.
In winter, I choke mountains with my spinnerets.
What you call autumn, I call evening.
I rot the leaves so that my trees may rest.
Every spring I say hello to you with flowers.
I sing to you with showers,
though you do not know that it’s for you.
You cannot even hear my lonely drops of rain.
So I belt my love for you.
My sky holds many clouds
and their coats hold many knives.
Gathered under rainstorm,
I know you hear my lullabies.
I watched you crawl when you were small.
I watched you cry when you thought you were alone;
I decorated your shoulders with pine needles as I joined.
I give you the world, but only for a while.
I can’t wait to feel your ashes on my skin
and give you kisses once again.
Malik Jones is an electrical engineering undergraduate from Juneau, Alaska. He is published in The Rising Phoenix Review, The 2024 One Page Poetry Anthology, and self-published one poetry collection, As You Were, in 2024.
Michael Lauchlan
Across Twelfth Street
Trying to hold off annihilation,
I empty a shoebox of old photos
and return to a blur down a sideline,
to a kid laughing in a gym, to someone
I might meet this week for coffee
if he hadn’t been shot to death
on his porch when he was fifteen.
He’d take a pitch-out, juke one guy,
run over another, and vanish.
I knew him well, having tackled him
in practice, having walked with him
to school, replaying the last game
and broad jumping sidewalk slabs.
I didn’t know him at all.
Then we went to our high schools
and entered unaligned orbits. For years,
I bought some reporter’s version
about a girl and a rival. Like that
explained it. Maybe a girl fell for him
and maybe he grew up fast.
Those are stories we tell ourselves
when it’s all too raw, when words
and bullets tear the air, tear
through skin and muscle and soul.
In the team picture: his eyes.
Trying to hold off annihilation,
I empty a shoebox of old photos
and return to a blur down a sideline,
to a kid laughing in a gym, to someone
I might meet this week for coffee
if he hadn’t been shot to death
on his porch when he was fifteen.
He’d take a pitch-out, juke one guy,
run over another, and vanish.
I knew him well, having tackled him
in practice, having walked with him
to school, replaying the last game
and broad jumping sidewalk slabs.
I didn’t know him at all.
Then we went to our high schools
and entered unaligned orbits. For years,
I bought some reporter’s version
about a girl and a rival. Like that
explained it. Maybe a girl fell for him
and maybe he grew up fast.
Those are stories we tell ourselves
when it’s all too raw, when words
and bullets tear the air, tear
through skin and muscle and soul.
In the team picture: his eyes.
Michael Lauchlan has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, and Lake Effect. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press.
John T. Leonard
December
I am constantly cleaning up dog
hair and driving on a quarter tank
of gas, around and around this wet,
small, and violent Midwestern city.
I go insane with the vacuuming and
suffocate my home with eco-friendly
odor eliminators. In 6th grade, instead of
washing our gym clothes, us guys would
double wrap them in plastic Giant Eagle bags
and unload like half a can of Axe Phoenix
Body Spray into each one before tying them
off, spinning them around madly, and stuffing
them into our lockers. We tried something like
this with a boy once, instead of a bag of sweaty
laundry. We almost killed him. I can’t blame that
on Indiana. I go insane with the modern dancing.
A cord wasps around me and I end up lying flat,
like a pile of mysterious gelatinous goo that has rained
down on some small shithole in Missouri and disrupted
their annual virgin sacrifices. The government wants
to kill you. Anyways, my son loves our vacuum cleaner
and being vaccinated (probably) and stealing onions
from the pantry to chew on. More than anything, he loves
our chocolate lab, Sadie. My wife and I will have to put her down
very soon. We have already backed out of it twice.
We suffer from that disease that gives you a bleeding heart.
No matter how serious the suffering of others, we endure.
We carve a hundred angels wielding chainsaws into the tall,
great oak tree of our shared guilt. Our son is nearly a year old now,
and this year has felt like my entire life. I’m trying
this new thing with pharmaceuticals that have actually
been prescribed to me. I’m also drinking as much as I can
right up until Dry January. Jimmy Carter died yesterday.
C, the mother of my wife’s best friend, who was like
a second mother to her, will die three days from now.
Time didn’t give it to me, the lion heart or thick epidermis
I was promised. I’m solely responsible for the picked clean
skeleton of my grief, tied to a cinder block and swaying in
the benthic zone of some undiscovered oceanic moon.
You’ll never come looking for me or write those coordinates
down. Leave a buffet, before the gravy has stiffened? Ha!
I am constantly cleaning up dog
hair and driving on a quarter tank
of gas, around and around this wet,
small, and violent Midwestern city.
I go insane with the vacuuming and
suffocate my home with eco-friendly
odor eliminators. In 6th grade, instead of
washing our gym clothes, us guys would
double wrap them in plastic Giant Eagle bags
and unload like half a can of Axe Phoenix
Body Spray into each one before tying them
off, spinning them around madly, and stuffing
them into our lockers. We tried something like
this with a boy once, instead of a bag of sweaty
laundry. We almost killed him. I can’t blame that
on Indiana. I go insane with the modern dancing.
A cord wasps around me and I end up lying flat,
like a pile of mysterious gelatinous goo that has rained
down on some small shithole in Missouri and disrupted
their annual virgin sacrifices. The government wants
to kill you. Anyways, my son loves our vacuum cleaner
and being vaccinated (probably) and stealing onions
from the pantry to chew on. More than anything, he loves
our chocolate lab, Sadie. My wife and I will have to put her down
very soon. We have already backed out of it twice.
We suffer from that disease that gives you a bleeding heart.
No matter how serious the suffering of others, we endure.
We carve a hundred angels wielding chainsaws into the tall,
great oak tree of our shared guilt. Our son is nearly a year old now,
and this year has felt like my entire life. I’m trying
this new thing with pharmaceuticals that have actually
been prescribed to me. I’m also drinking as much as I can
right up until Dry January. Jimmy Carter died yesterday.
C, the mother of my wife’s best friend, who was like
a second mother to her, will die three days from now.
Time didn’t give it to me, the lion heart or thick epidermis
I was promised. I’m solely responsible for the picked clean
skeleton of my grief, tied to a cinder block and swaying in
the benthic zone of some undiscovered oceanic moon.
You’ll never come looking for me or write those coordinates
down. Leave a buffet, before the gravy has stiffened? Ha!
Daytime Hauntings
Looney Tunes is playing on the parlor TV.
What concerns me is the power is out.
These days have their own, unique sense of
humor.
Today is colorless, but also a flower.
It’s a windmill dragon and leftover chop suey
that has tragically become self-aware and
a pale, ugly fish that sucks the algae off
a paler, somehow even uglier fish.
The day fills your house with the least amount
of light that it can, from a legal perspective.
Notice how some houses will ask you to wait before
moving to another room, like you’re a child again,
waiting for the adults to sweep up broken glass or
wipe blood from a split lip or swat the clenched teeth
humidity out of the air.
The day is a white bedsheet drifting down the stairs,
floating to the kitchen, and turning on the faucet,
all while you sit in your reading chair, drooling
in disbelief, or a whimsical kind of horror
that’s difficult to describe.
The day has you under a blanket, frozen in fear,
just waiting for the sun to go down, so the power
will come back on and relieve you from a haunting
that keeps odd hours.
Looney Tunes is playing on the parlor TV.
What concerns me is the power is out.
These days have their own, unique sense of
humor.
Today is colorless, but also a flower.
It’s a windmill dragon and leftover chop suey
that has tragically become self-aware and
a pale, ugly fish that sucks the algae off
a paler, somehow even uglier fish.
The day fills your house with the least amount
of light that it can, from a legal perspective.
Notice how some houses will ask you to wait before
moving to another room, like you’re a child again,
waiting for the adults to sweep up broken glass or
wipe blood from a split lip or swat the clenched teeth
humidity out of the air.
The day is a white bedsheet drifting down the stairs,
floating to the kitchen, and turning on the faucet,
all while you sit in your reading chair, drooling
in disbelief, or a whimsical kind of horror
that’s difficult to describe.
The day has you under a blanket, frozen in fear,
just waiting for the sun to go down, so the power
will come back on and relieve you from a haunting
that keeps odd hours.
Bleak, Absurd, Almost Biblical
The wind drags its cold
hard tongue across hard
cold fields. It gets away
with almost anything these
days.
This is an ugly, empty season.
I’ve driven myself away from the
world, only for a little while.
At the same time, I’m
returning to it.
(Out of order)
Straight through summer
bonfires and book burnings.
These two are not mutually
exclusive.
Martha’s Vineyard,
volcanic ash, and Nantucket.
The world becomes an X-ray for several
moments. A glowing
green skeleton wearing a Virginia Tech
sweatshirt dives off trump
tower and molts into
a new scene.
I am driving past a group of young boys walking
down a ruptured sidewalk in Erie, PA,
waving at every car that passes.
I flip them off instinctually, with style
and substance. I know they’ll talk about this years from now.
Amish country. Suddenly and briefly.
Lina Bo Bardi helps raise
the wall of a barn alongside twenty
other women. Everyone looks happy
and strong and not very Amish. Thick
and sparse and weakening snowflakes
begin to fall,
slowly away.
Now,
billboards on the edges of cornfields
cast their layered shadows on grey,
wooden farmstands selling eggs and tulips
and glass jars full of spent deer rifle shells.
One sign says,
“The day is coming where you’ll beg the devil to take you.”
The other billboards are nesting dolls,
each peeled open to revel
Cracker Barrel, peeled open to reveal
Cracker Barrel, peeled open to reveal
TOPDOG GETS YOU TOP DOLLARS.
Peeled open to reveal…
There’s something deeply American about this
but not in the way Berryman
might have tackled it.
I want to make a U-turn and purchase
all of the eggs
commit small crimes for the greater
good.
Instead I keep driving,
am rewarded with
burning churches
for seven hundred miles.
The wind drags its cold
hard tongue across hard
cold fields. It gets away
with almost anything these
days.
This is an ugly, empty season.
I’ve driven myself away from the
world, only for a little while.
At the same time, I’m
returning to it.
(Out of order)
Straight through summer
bonfires and book burnings.
These two are not mutually
exclusive.
Martha’s Vineyard,
volcanic ash, and Nantucket.
The world becomes an X-ray for several
moments. A glowing
green skeleton wearing a Virginia Tech
sweatshirt dives off trump
tower and molts into
a new scene.
I am driving past a group of young boys walking
down a ruptured sidewalk in Erie, PA,
waving at every car that passes.
I flip them off instinctually, with style
and substance. I know they’ll talk about this years from now.
Amish country. Suddenly and briefly.
Lina Bo Bardi helps raise
the wall of a barn alongside twenty
other women. Everyone looks happy
and strong and not very Amish. Thick
and sparse and weakening snowflakes
begin to fall,
slowly away.
Now,
billboards on the edges of cornfields
cast their layered shadows on grey,
wooden farmstands selling eggs and tulips
and glass jars full of spent deer rifle shells.
One sign says,
“The day is coming where you’ll beg the devil to take you.”
The other billboards are nesting dolls,
each peeled open to revel
Cracker Barrel, peeled open to reveal
Cracker Barrel, peeled open to reveal
TOPDOG GETS YOU TOP DOLLARS.
Peeled open to reveal…
There’s something deeply American about this
but not in the way Berryman
might have tackled it.
I want to make a U-turn and purchase
all of the eggs
commit small crimes for the greater
good.
Instead I keep driving,
am rewarded with
burning churches
for seven hundred miles.
John T. Leonard is a writer, educator, and managing editor of 42 Miles Press and The Glacier. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. John’s poems have been published in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Louisiana Literature, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Emerson Review, and many others. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife and son. You can connect with him on Instagram @jotyleon
Christina Linsin
“Root for the thing half dead”
inspired by a line in Ada Limón’s “Stranger Things in the Thicket”
I wanted to heal but he didn’t,
and when I said what I thought
he smiled at me with
only his mouth―
the skin softening
and slouching,
a new blister
shiny and wet and afraid
of violent rupture.
I looked to his eyes, deeply-veined
walnut husks, halved
and missing their meats,
the caverns in their curves
called me to their edges.
I lowered myself slowly,
like dipping into dark water,
sliding, grasping,
everywhere hands.
Swirling in his slipstream,
testing the bitter sting
familiar salt
on my lips, soaking
to release
my stubbornest stains.
I drifted in his stew,
deliberate,
allowing his dark
to restore
all the things in me
time could not repair,
until the moment surfaced
when, if I’d had one sip more,
I’d vomit it, world and all.
inspired by a line in Ada Limón’s “Stranger Things in the Thicket”
I wanted to heal but he didn’t,
and when I said what I thought
he smiled at me with
only his mouth―
the skin softening
and slouching,
a new blister
shiny and wet and afraid
of violent rupture.
I looked to his eyes, deeply-veined
walnut husks, halved
and missing their meats,
the caverns in their curves
called me to their edges.
I lowered myself slowly,
like dipping into dark water,
sliding, grasping,
everywhere hands.
Swirling in his slipstream,
testing the bitter sting
familiar salt
on my lips, soaking
to release
my stubbornest stains.
I drifted in his stew,
deliberate,
allowing his dark
to restore
all the things in me
time could not repair,
until the moment surfaced
when, if I’d had one sip more,
I’d vomit it, world and all.
Christina Linsin is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and teacher in Virginia. Her work examines connections with nature, complexities of mental illness, and difficulties creating meaningful connections with others amid life’s obstacles. She currently serves as the Western Region Vice President of the Poetry Society of Virginia, and her poems have been published in Still: The Journal, Stone Circle Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whale Road Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and others.
Corey Miller
State Lines
We don’t have a voice
of deliverance. My wife
is pregnant after making love
with intention. Mortgaged a house trapped
in Ohio’s corner pocket of Lake Erie
& Pennsylvania border. Minimum wage crawled
over another milestone, but we’re buried
under the median, barely passing by. Ohio is shaped
like an orthodox red heart. Invisible
parameters fencing us in one organ. Two ventricles
battling control of our outcome.
Our midwife struggles
to discern the baby’s heartbeat
from a mother’s resting. What’s the opposite
of flatlining? The dot on the screen is hard
to spot. Trashtabula is as far right as you can travel
within our bordered beliefs. We pray unreligously
for the lentil-sized organism to not
carry suffering. Jagged lines on the monitor
spike like pro-life voters screaming for unborn
without care for mothers’ well being.
Canada waves over Erie
when laws multiply in our home
state. Our hope is the size
of a buckeye. By the time
a period is missed
& a doctor’s appointment
is scheduled, it’s too late
to legally retain a choice.
We don’t have a voice
of deliverance. My wife
is pregnant after making love
with intention. Mortgaged a house trapped
in Ohio’s corner pocket of Lake Erie
& Pennsylvania border. Minimum wage crawled
over another milestone, but we’re buried
under the median, barely passing by. Ohio is shaped
like an orthodox red heart. Invisible
parameters fencing us in one organ. Two ventricles
battling control of our outcome.
Our midwife struggles
to discern the baby’s heartbeat
from a mother’s resting. What’s the opposite
of flatlining? The dot on the screen is hard
to spot. Trashtabula is as far right as you can travel
within our bordered beliefs. We pray unreligously
for the lentil-sized organism to not
carry suffering. Jagged lines on the monitor
spike like pro-life voters screaming for unborn
without care for mothers’ well being.
Canada waves over Erie
when laws multiply in our home
state. Our hope is the size
of a buckeye. By the time
a period is missed
& a doctor’s appointment
is scheduled, it’s too late
to legally retain a choice.
Corey Miller’s writing has appeared in Salt Hill, Booth, Pithead Chapel, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He has received support from Literary Cleveland’s Breakthrough Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he enjoys taking the dogs for adventures. Follow him on Twitter @IronBrewer Instagram: @IronBrewed or at www.CoreyMillerWrites.com
Cecil Morris
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Midnight in the ER
I rise like an explosion of breath through watery layers of sleep,
thinking of phonemes, of the sound the letter c makes
in words like cure and cough, beckon and catastrophic, cancel, record―
the glottal stop catching in my throat, something I don’t want to swallow,
like asthma clamping bronchial passages, like fear climbing to panic
in her eyes, whites showing all around constricted irises, pupils,
and me shaking the inhaler and speaking calmly and bringing it
to her mouth where there is not even wheezing, where breath is memory,
and scooping her like golden laundry and running to the car, driving
like Popeye, like Bullit, under three minutes through stop signs and red lights,
and running with her through the ambulance bay doors at emergency
and they catch her on a gurney and take her and I am following
saying asthma, asthma, inhaler, her medical record number.
They cut her pajama top away, expose her pale thin chest, her ribs
like curving ripples that waves leave on sand, her chest her ribs working, working
like bellows, like wings trying to fly, to lift into air, and they attach
sensors trailing wires, place a mask over her face, over her moving mouth
which is working, too, gulping, soundless gasping, a fish fresh from water,
and I can’t even see her anymore among them, my minnow swallowed
in a sea of white coats and blue scrubs. Someone is drawing me away,
saying she will be fine, helping me into a gown for I am nearly bare,
giving me hospital socks, handing me my keys, saying security
has moved my car. She speaks softly like a good mother, her hand touching
my shoulder, my arm, bringing me to normal time, questioning me,
explaining. And then it is just my little goldfish on the gurney,
still pale but breathing, her chest barely moving the sheet drawn to her chin,
the mask replaced by a tiny cannula, her mouth closed and smiling
up at me, her eyes sleepy normal, and I am breathing again, too.
I rise like an explosion of breath through watery layers of sleep,
thinking of phonemes, of the sound the letter c makes
in words like cure and cough, beckon and catastrophic, cancel, record―
the glottal stop catching in my throat, something I don’t want to swallow,
like asthma clamping bronchial passages, like fear climbing to panic
in her eyes, whites showing all around constricted irises, pupils,
and me shaking the inhaler and speaking calmly and bringing it
to her mouth where there is not even wheezing, where breath is memory,
and scooping her like golden laundry and running to the car, driving
like Popeye, like Bullit, under three minutes through stop signs and red lights,
and running with her through the ambulance bay doors at emergency
and they catch her on a gurney and take her and I am following
saying asthma, asthma, inhaler, her medical record number.
They cut her pajama top away, expose her pale thin chest, her ribs
like curving ripples that waves leave on sand, her chest her ribs working, working
like bellows, like wings trying to fly, to lift into air, and they attach
sensors trailing wires, place a mask over her face, over her moving mouth
which is working, too, gulping, soundless gasping, a fish fresh from water,
and I can’t even see her anymore among them, my minnow swallowed
in a sea of white coats and blue scrubs. Someone is drawing me away,
saying she will be fine, helping me into a gown for I am nearly bare,
giving me hospital socks, handing me my keys, saying security
has moved my car. She speaks softly like a good mother, her hand touching
my shoulder, my arm, bringing me to normal time, questioning me,
explaining. And then it is just my little goldfish on the gurney,
still pale but breathing, her chest barely moving the sheet drawn to her chin,
the mask replaced by a tiny cannula, her mouth closed and smiling
up at me, her eyes sleepy normal, and I am breathing again, too.
Where Our Daughter Lives Now
Our daughter’s quarantined in memory
like our childhood declarations of what
we’d be when we grew up, when we were at last
complete and as certain of ourselves
as paintings or photographs finished, framed,
and hung. She’s in there now with everything
we’ve ever known or almost known—Nana’s
secret recipe for egg nog, the phone
number our parent’s made us memorize
before the first day of the first year of school
back when phones stayed in one place forever,
our locker combination from high school,
the proper coordination of clutch
and gas. She floats in our hippocampi,
displaces Archimedes and his rule
of buoyancy, unsquares Pythagoras,
and casts her long hypotenuse across
our future joy. She turns her face away
from Avogadro and his constant,
arranges a mole of My Little Ponies,
brushes those extravagant manes and tails,
breaks her heart on the wrong men, and slips
recursive through conscious and unconscious.
She is quieter now, always inside,
the sighs of alders leaping in wind
or Pacific waves in endless retreat.
Our daughter’s quarantined in memory
like our childhood declarations of what
we’d be when we grew up, when we were at last
complete and as certain of ourselves
as paintings or photographs finished, framed,
and hung. She’s in there now with everything
we’ve ever known or almost known—Nana’s
secret recipe for egg nog, the phone
number our parent’s made us memorize
before the first day of the first year of school
back when phones stayed in one place forever,
our locker combination from high school,
the proper coordination of clutch
and gas. She floats in our hippocampi,
displaces Archimedes and his rule
of buoyancy, unsquares Pythagoras,
and casts her long hypotenuse across
our future joy. She turns her face away
from Avogadro and his constant,
arranges a mole of My Little Ponies,
brushes those extravagant manes and tails,
breaks her heart on the wrong men, and slips
recursive through conscious and unconscious.
She is quieter now, always inside,
the sighs of alders leaping in wind
or Pacific waves in endless retreat.
Cecil Morris, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, Lascaux Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, At Work in the Garden of Possibilities, will come out from Main Street Rag in 2025.
Kathleen Nalley & Gabrielle Brant Freeman
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Authors' note: "this is a collaborative project, we treat the pair of call and response sonnets each as one poem."
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1/8/25
How We Compare to the Trees The glass and metal of my brother’s restoration Camaro had rearranged themselves, become molten, ebbed and flowed into installation art resembling a car. It stood near the carcass of kitchen, couched in a mountain copse of blackened trees, their trunks still tall, their California branches like spokes spiraling, still living witnesses to the fire’s voracious consumption. As I watch Los Angeles burn, Pacific Palisades burn where once I sat in envy of every rich swim kid whose team was better equipped than ours, we who lived below the smog line, I am reminded. Money burns. |
1/9/25
Bread and Circuses A California resident looks to social media to see if and when she needs to evacuate. Here are photos from the Golden Globes four days ago; here’s video confirmation the fire is a cover to burn Diddy evidence; here are politicos discussing how to invade Greenland. I scroll late-night TV and the screen flits between game shows and fire. Price is Right and fire. Raid the Cage and fire. The Palisades Village Starbucks building, 100 years old, stands as charred carcass, only some arches, a wall of columns left: the Business Block: American ruins. |
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1/9/25
How to Invade Greenland Exploit women. Get lots and lots of women pregnant. Some won’t survive. Have lots and lots of babies. Some won’t survive. Collateral damage. Exhaust the natural resources in your immediate area. Learn there are more natural resources in lands where you are not. Invade and colonize. Exploit indigenous peoples. Some won’t survive. Develop technology to try to reverse the damage you caused. Learn the resources you need exist in other countries you can exploit. Have native peoples dig mines that pollute pristine lands. Call it jobs. Name yourself savior. |
1/9/25
How to Invade Greenland If That Doesn’t Work Grab her by the land mass, erect a gold tower on her crevasse, tell the Saudis and Putin to come, come. Douse the land in golden showers, take all her wealth, her people, her power, plow through protestors and proclaim there’s good people on both sides. Move on her—the deeply troubled countries are always the best. Just start kissing her. Claim that you’re not invading her. After all, they just let you do it as long as you’re powerful and wealthy. Nobody has more respect for Greenland. Nobody. Nobody has more respect. Oh, Greenland, you want it. I will be your protector. |
Kathleen Nalley is the author of the prose poetry collection, Gutterflower. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines and anthologized in several collections. She’s participated in several community poetry projects in Columbia and Greenville, S.C.--most recently, with the Metropolitan Arts Council exhibit, Visual and Verse. Over the years, she has served as poetry editor of south85 literary journal, as a judge for the SC State Library’s annual student poetry contest, and as a board member of the Emrys Foundation. She teaches literature and creative writing at Clemson University.
Gabrielle Brant Freeman’s award winning and Pushcart nominated poetry has been published in many journals, including Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, One, and Scoundrel Time. Press 53 published her book, When She Was Bad. Freeman’s poetry was included in the creation of the choreopoem A Chorus Within Her performed at Theater Alliance in Washington, DC. She lives in Eastern North Carolina with her family.
Gabrielle Brant Freeman’s award winning and Pushcart nominated poetry has been published in many journals, including Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, One, and Scoundrel Time. Press 53 published her book, When She Was Bad. Freeman’s poetry was included in the creation of the choreopoem A Chorus Within Her performed at Theater Alliance in Washington, DC. She lives in Eastern North Carolina with her family.
Alessandra Nysether-Santos
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Overripe Green Things
“It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top,
just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula
Everything too
Bright and loud
Bursts your eardrums
With every pump of blood
Salt and pepper radio silence
Skitters across
The webbed archives
Stops crying
Takes the form of Nel’s sadness―
Gray, fuzzy,
lingering―
Matted, muddy
Scrambling signals,
Dense and deafening
If you get too close
It breaks, scatters wishes
her very own howl
coming clean through
“It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top,
just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula
Everything too
Bright and loud
Bursts your eardrums
With every pump of blood
Salt and pepper radio silence
Skitters across
The webbed archives
Stops crying
Takes the form of Nel’s sadness―
Gray, fuzzy,
lingering―
Matted, muddy
Scrambling signals,
Dense and deafening
If you get too close
It breaks, scatters wishes
her very own howl
coming clean through
Alessandra Nysether-Santos is a queer writer, educator, artist, and reiki healer. Their poem “Marvelous Marble Jesus” recently received honorable mention in the 2024 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize. Find more of Alessandra’s work in places like Até Mais: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms, the Space538 Poetry Hotline, the North Carolina Literary Review, and the lickety-split. Alessandra lives in Florida with her husband, dog, and two kittens who are actually goblins. Follow her on Instagram @hashtagalessandra
Fejiro Okifo
Renaissance
Detroit doesn’t always
wear makeup in the morning
We woke up like this
Mosaics, murals, and
Numidian marble
Arched, gilded ceilings
Guardian of our Galaxy
Fisher Building
Surviving brother of three
Unassuming
We don’t hold out our hands
Yet
our palms are facing God
It’s not if or when
It’s where the granite road
meets the red sea
Freedom wears
A red leaf
The last stop before
Freedom
Silence when we speak
MLK’s first speech
Where Rosa Parks
Rests her feet
Long Live Black Bottom
This is renaissance
Just wait and see
Detroit doesn’t always
wear makeup in the morning
We woke up like this
Mosaics, murals, and
Numidian marble
Arched, gilded ceilings
Guardian of our Galaxy
Fisher Building
Surviving brother of three
Unassuming
We don’t hold out our hands
Yet
our palms are facing God
It’s not if or when
It’s where the granite road
meets the red sea
Freedom wears
A red leaf
The last stop before
Freedom
Silence when we speak
MLK’s first speech
Where Rosa Parks
Rests her feet
Long Live Black Bottom
This is renaissance
Just wait and see
Fejiro Okifo is a Nigerian-American resident physician living in Detroit, Michigan. Her work has been published in The McNeese Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Sou’wester, Litro Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Gasher Magazine, and upstreet. She was also named a finalist in the 2021 Black Warrior Review Contest.
JL Pracki
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The Ruins of Aleppo
Different names of God descended and spoke to each other long through the night with bright tongues of fire. In the morning light, grey smoke still tangling in the white mist, wise men read the writings scrawled in soot and blood, seeking enlightenment, but found only a list of stinking obscenities. Tawny white chiseled stones of homes were lifted from their fitted beds and tumbled down into the gardens of peace where families had talked and laughed long into the warm nights amidst the ripening figs and grape-draped canopies where the children played. The ancient Souq, famous city center, lost its many chambered mind. The tart breath of cardamom still clung to silk and cotton robes, but to the senses brought no pleasure. The sellers cowered before the indiscretion of flung ordnance, while all the gold and silver leaked away. At the University, special lessons were given on the stopping of hearts and lungs. The sudden visiting Professors holding khaki degrees lectured with their instructive projectiles. Exact notes were taken down on skin and bone. And at Wanes, that ever favorite gathering place, the waiters no longer waited. They set no more tables, welcomed and served no more guests. The chefs grilled no more skewered meat. They dripped no more cups of coffee, nor prepared one thing savory or sweet. Vertical Divider
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Erasure
I couldn’t bury your children under rubble. I couldn’t fry you in white phosphorus. I couldn’t burn your professors and books into ashes and melt the windows through which you view the sky and the sea. I couldn’t make you drink pollution, eat dust alone or putrefaction, or writhe beneath the surgeon’s knife with no relief from searing pain. I couldn’t raise your houses into the sky to rain back down upon your heads. I couldn’t end the lives lived just the first days or months or years, or rip the final days away from those that have but a handful left. I couldn’t tear you to pieces with bullets at point blank range or pierce your skull or heart, or grind what was your life, your precious flesh, beneath the treads of tanks or atomize you with an aerial attack. I couldn’t condemn you to the nightmare of searching for the gruesome, strewn pieces, the bloody shards and gobs of those you love. I couldn’t erase your lives, your history, your culture, your purpose, the very name of your people, but there are those who can, who have, who will. |
JL Pracki is an international school English teacher and freelance editor who writes every day due to his addiction to trying to make sense of things. He has lived and worked in over a dozen countries rich in culture, history, and artistry. He has learned that no matter who and where people are, they all want essentially the same things. You all know what those are.
Bella Rotker
god said let there be light
and then he created me. sometimes
i am paris hilton and sometimes i’m like
jesus on the cross. i cannot
be blamed for my taste
in men––that insatiable craving
for a hunk of muscle, that skinny marg
in a beachside bar, sand in my cheap
pink bikini. i want to bring back
calling a man easy on the eyes. bring
back eye candy, grainy lipstick,
smeared mascara. lately i’ve been
missing wendy williams. clap
if you miss that one boy who played
you like a bop-it. clap if you miss
communion wine. clap if you want
to live forever. we’re all dogs
locked in god’s hot car, a 2004
honda civic parked in the shade
of a single palm tree. in an alternate universe,
i’m that foam flip-flop they give you
after a mani-pedi that makes you
feel barefoot in the strip mall. freshly done
toes on the pavement is a sacrament
given to girls by god. if growing up
means making fewer messes, i want to be
this young forever. i want to consume
the weird mushroom drink i found in the back
of a gas station. at the end of the night,
i want to know there’s a taxi waiting
to take me to a man whose sheets
are navy blue and haven’t been
washed since before
the recession. i miss vine. chevron
on everything. i miss when taylor swift
was country fried, that fake accent
we all pretended was real. i miss
body glitter, crumpled dollar bills
for the drag queen singing madonna,
singing britney. i want back prophecies,
those inspirational texts i send
while sitting in the sink next to two girls
making out. that feeling you get
when the vodka cran starts to taste like
i should call him and the girls
pause the makeout to rip your cell
out of your hands. i miss flip phones,
knowing that god or a priest
or the immaculate are always a dial away.
and then he created me. sometimes
i am paris hilton and sometimes i’m like
jesus on the cross. i cannot
be blamed for my taste
in men––that insatiable craving
for a hunk of muscle, that skinny marg
in a beachside bar, sand in my cheap
pink bikini. i want to bring back
calling a man easy on the eyes. bring
back eye candy, grainy lipstick,
smeared mascara. lately i’ve been
missing wendy williams. clap
if you miss that one boy who played
you like a bop-it. clap if you miss
communion wine. clap if you want
to live forever. we’re all dogs
locked in god’s hot car, a 2004
honda civic parked in the shade
of a single palm tree. in an alternate universe,
i’m that foam flip-flop they give you
after a mani-pedi that makes you
feel barefoot in the strip mall. freshly done
toes on the pavement is a sacrament
given to girls by god. if growing up
means making fewer messes, i want to be
this young forever. i want to consume
the weird mushroom drink i found in the back
of a gas station. at the end of the night,
i want to know there’s a taxi waiting
to take me to a man whose sheets
are navy blue and haven’t been
washed since before
the recession. i miss vine. chevron
on everything. i miss when taylor swift
was country fried, that fake accent
we all pretended was real. i miss
body glitter, crumpled dollar bills
for the drag queen singing madonna,
singing britney. i want back prophecies,
those inspirational texts i send
while sitting in the sink next to two girls
making out. that feeling you get
when the vodka cran starts to taste like
i should call him and the girls
pause the makeout to rip your cell
out of your hands. i miss flip phones,
knowing that god or a priest
or the immaculate are always a dial away.
Bella Rotker is a proud Venezuelan and 305 local. A six-time YoungArts winner and Best of The Net nominee, her work appears in Fifth Wheel Press, JAKE, Best American High School Writing (2022 & 2023), and others. When she's not writing or making shadow puppets, Bella’s thinking about cafecitos and bodies of water. Find her online at bit.ly/bellarotker
Kelly R. Samuels
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The Particular Sorrow of Following Behind
a Poultry Truck I was only somewhat sad before. The sky had not done what it sometimes does, and I was leaving. But, there was Tuesday and leaves irrepressible in their changing. I noticed the stray feathers first and then the dog sat up and began to sniff, looking to me as if to confirm that there was another species near. Too far to distinguish beyond a white blur, though as everything slowed and we made our way in the same lane, I could see they were turkeys in the later stages of fattening. Packed behind mesh, caged, going south as I had seen them―now, I recalled―the same time last year when I proclaimed we would no longer stand at the sink reaching into the cavity to extract the giblets and then truss the legs with plain cotton twine as my mother had done―basting for hours, faithfully and delicately, at the timer’s chime. Knives were sharpened in adjacent rooms then, and she spoke of tradition, but we always liked the sides more anyway, and look at how they so inadequately can shift their bodies, temporarily blinded by the headlights, their eyes startled. I thought of how he had said they were dumb in the farmyard in that other state and how late September was when he would get paid. It wasn’t long before I sheared off and the night settled in and I tried to think on other pleasures―other winged things journeying above what clouds there were. Vertical Divider
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Cut-a-Cross Road
We were sent along back roads to avoid recent and swift flooding. There were ascents and descents and wild rises that provoked me to speed. Off to each side, fields that were almost too green for all the rain, and blurred― a wash of exuberant color. I think you cared less about the feeling and more about our welfare, hanging onto the grab handle, scanning for what might come across our path—what few inter- sections there were unmarked and nearly blind, no gravel dust in the air as warning. This was the summer we had said things we could not forget and I looked for ways to leave, had already left: rooms and the space of your rarely outstretched arm. I could not go fast enough. I could not go fast enough. |
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections and four chapbooks—the most recent Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press, 2024) and Talking to Alice (Whittle Micro-Press, 2023.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in River Styx, The Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, december, and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
Peter Schmitt
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One Poem
Miami, 1978 Beaten, bound, drowned in his own blood, found face down on the floor, a transistor radio gone, but left, leaning in a corner, a white cane― Realy, although blindfolded, he begins his poem, I can tell how pretty you are, and goes on to compare his unnamed friend― is she back home?—to an untouchable star. The teenage killer had also stolen a pittance of cash―If I send you money, he writes, save as much as you can; the next line likening that offer to drops of honey… The newspaper describes his living alone at eighty-one in a small apartment in a downtown housing project for seniors, thirty-seven dollars a month for rent. I am living so narrow, he continues… and I am not yet twenty, and aspire to be a poet, as the old man is called, but what the detective mails me, the entire contents of the writing he left, comes to all of a single poem. Should I send you flowers, he vows, I would send you only one, but don’t throw it over (would she, friend who seems she could) b’cause it belong to Juan. Was it dictated, or written before his sight was lost? Something might happen tomorrow, the last stanza begins, today or tonight, I don’t know. He was from Santo Domingo, and lonely praying for love in his last line. And what of her, did it ever reach her? And Juan, did your poem leave no next of kin, like you? In your night sky, no other star? for Juan Amechazurra Vertical Divider
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Cocaine Wars, 1987
(Miami) Two days after a Neighborhood Crimewatch sign is nailed to our building, I stroll right by a Chevy Blazer with darkened windows tucked into a corner of the parking lot, aswarm with flies: the driver must have plowed through dogshit. Barely an hour later two policemen in mirrored Aviators appear, huddling outside my door. When I ask if anything is wrong, one cocks a thumb: three bodies in the back seat of the Blazer, each stuffed into a duffel bag like Chinese egg roll, the ultimate takeout order. Soon the cordoned-off parking lot comes alive: officers from sundry departments, flatbed and forensics trucks, helicopters hover like dragonflies. And the neighbors: all of us gathered to gawk, debating when the Chevy’d first shown up, who’d left it there and how long our own cars would be confined. Introducing ourselves: living just feet from one another, people who’d never met, never spoken, now brought together having been chosen as a place utterly quiet minding very politely no one else’s business. By nightfall the Blazer and its ghastly load is gone. For the next two or three weeks we smile, greeting our newfound neighbors in the hallways, stopping to ask if we’d heard anything more, remembered anything unusual, doing our best to summon each other’s names. But in a few more days the conversations give way to a friendly nod and then it’s back to how it always was, each of us moving, heads down, to our separate apartments, our one reminder the fading crime scene tape scattered in pieces across the parking lot like the yellow ribbons tied around trees that have long said to a community someone waits for someone who has not come home. |
Peter Schmitt is the author of six collections of poems, including Goodbye, Apostrophe (Regal House). He also edited, and wrote the introduction for, his late father's Pan Am Ferry Tales: A World War II Aviation Memoir (McFarland).
Ephraim Scott Sommers
ODE TO THE OLDEST MUSIC LESSON THERE EVER WAS
You cocky fuck. Again, you have forgotten.
Again, you have thrown too much of yourself
toward the algorithm of wanting to be adored,
so you must go back with only your ear, now,
to the first moment of your being moved toward
motion, that first rhythm that shoved your shoulders
forward against the walls of your own skin, the sound
of your hometown, your father’s drums like buffalo
running through the basement below your bedroom.
You must go back to kindergarten choir, one tenor
vomiting, inadvertently, into the curly hair of the other,
the first trainwreck you made in front of an audience.
You are mistaken, again, today, so you must concede
so. You must recognize the horror of on-stage silence
not as defeat but as necessary blood given for beginning.
Again, you must destroy the notion you are owed anything.
You must bury yourself again in many remembered
silences. You must go back to being a wooden child
in the back seat of a station wagon, a big Christmas
pine tied onto the top with red twine, and your mother
humming a red hymn all the way down El Camino
on the way home, at night, all the electric outlines
of lights holding together the outline of each house,
like neon churches, like glowing lungs caroling away
the winter darkness over California. Some days,
you must blend the color of your voice with others,
and some days you must only sit still. You must
go back to that past album of you in Mitchell Park alone
with Joni Mitchell on a Monday, yellow splatters of summer,
you on your back in the slow grass with a tall can of beer,
a ladybug taking the long way up your forearm, you
with your headphones on, falling in love with what
blue sounds like, the sound clouds make when they die.
Go back again. You must. You, who are engaged
in this lifetime rehearsal of bending yourself
into a better instrument, must go back to all those
days you and your guitar sifted through the empty
spaces in your house for the exact shape in the air
to make of loneliness, that hollow auditorium
a body can be for feelings to float right on through.
Some days have a soul running in a dead sprint, without
a body, just like that, right on past you. Some days
play you with magic fingers outside an open car window
and leave nothing behind as proof. Some days
make a music that is so perfect the world seems
to have forgotten all about you, and the lesson, of course,
is this: some days, there are no more notes to add,
and you just shut up and listen.
You cocky fuck. Again, you have forgotten.
Again, you have thrown too much of yourself
toward the algorithm of wanting to be adored,
so you must go back with only your ear, now,
to the first moment of your being moved toward
motion, that first rhythm that shoved your shoulders
forward against the walls of your own skin, the sound
of your hometown, your father’s drums like buffalo
running through the basement below your bedroom.
You must go back to kindergarten choir, one tenor
vomiting, inadvertently, into the curly hair of the other,
the first trainwreck you made in front of an audience.
You are mistaken, again, today, so you must concede
so. You must recognize the horror of on-stage silence
not as defeat but as necessary blood given for beginning.
Again, you must destroy the notion you are owed anything.
You must bury yourself again in many remembered
silences. You must go back to being a wooden child
in the back seat of a station wagon, a big Christmas
pine tied onto the top with red twine, and your mother
humming a red hymn all the way down El Camino
on the way home, at night, all the electric outlines
of lights holding together the outline of each house,
like neon churches, like glowing lungs caroling away
the winter darkness over California. Some days,
you must blend the color of your voice with others,
and some days you must only sit still. You must
go back to that past album of you in Mitchell Park alone
with Joni Mitchell on a Monday, yellow splatters of summer,
you on your back in the slow grass with a tall can of beer,
a ladybug taking the long way up your forearm, you
with your headphones on, falling in love with what
blue sounds like, the sound clouds make when they die.
Go back again. You must. You, who are engaged
in this lifetime rehearsal of bending yourself
into a better instrument, must go back to all those
days you and your guitar sifted through the empty
spaces in your house for the exact shape in the air
to make of loneliness, that hollow auditorium
a body can be for feelings to float right on through.
Some days have a soul running in a dead sprint, without
a body, just like that, right on past you. Some days
play you with magic fingers outside an open car window
and leave nothing behind as proof. Some days
make a music that is so perfect the world seems
to have forgotten all about you, and the lesson, of course,
is this: some days, there are no more notes to add,
and you just shut up and listen.
ODE TO SPOUSES OF DIABETICS AND HOW THEY FIND US
in the darkened kitchen
at 3:16AM
in our underwear shirtless
spotlit by the light
of the open fridge
our right hand wearing
a whole rotisserie chicken
like a winter mitten
like an edible oven glove
a scattering of exposed bones
across the linoleum all around us
like the leftovers of already been hatched insects
a few cracked pistachio shells
like oversized birdseed
and two opened rectangles
of naked white cheese
are waiting to be bitten into
on the white windowsill
while a squirt of mustard
on the microwave’s see-through face
dribbles down in slow-motion
and we diabetics are half drunk
not on booze
but on two dizzy
and opposite truths
the brief half-open window
where treating low blood sugar means
eating whatever savior we want
in the name of survival
and what a joy to abandon the nuisance
of nutritional charts
to wherever they tumble
out of existence
because we have returned to the heaven
of unencumbered eating
and always our lovers watching
like quiet shepherds in the background
like rock band managers
one eye on their lover on stage
one eye on their lover’s glucose monitor
themselves in their own polite dance
between when to let us paddle further
into the pantry
and when to throw us the grappling hook
to pull us out of the deep
so holy so so holy
are our lovers
who keep chaperoning us through
this delicate dodging of our own deaths
because what brief windows
between deadly tidal waves
all of us together as couples must rediscover
the muscles to open up wider and to laugh inside
and to laugh outside too
for what has been dangerous
on this tiny night
in this little minute
will now be survived
so back to this brief delight
of us diabetics at 3:17AM
beside the cool cherry pool
of a gallon of Greek yogurt
or a whole cherry pie
or a half a tray of cold lasagna
on the counter
and all of the waters
tasty and calm and wide open
and all of us about to shallow-wade
no handed
and with our whole faces
as if snorkeling
and without thinking finally (thank you)
right into every single one
in the darkened kitchen
at 3:16AM
in our underwear shirtless
spotlit by the light
of the open fridge
our right hand wearing
a whole rotisserie chicken
like a winter mitten
like an edible oven glove
a scattering of exposed bones
across the linoleum all around us
like the leftovers of already been hatched insects
a few cracked pistachio shells
like oversized birdseed
and two opened rectangles
of naked white cheese
are waiting to be bitten into
on the white windowsill
while a squirt of mustard
on the microwave’s see-through face
dribbles down in slow-motion
and we diabetics are half drunk
not on booze
but on two dizzy
and opposite truths
the brief half-open window
where treating low blood sugar means
eating whatever savior we want
in the name of survival
and what a joy to abandon the nuisance
of nutritional charts
to wherever they tumble
out of existence
because we have returned to the heaven
of unencumbered eating
and always our lovers watching
like quiet shepherds in the background
like rock band managers
one eye on their lover on stage
one eye on their lover’s glucose monitor
themselves in their own polite dance
between when to let us paddle further
into the pantry
and when to throw us the grappling hook
to pull us out of the deep
so holy so so holy
are our lovers
who keep chaperoning us through
this delicate dodging of our own deaths
because what brief windows
between deadly tidal waves
all of us together as couples must rediscover
the muscles to open up wider and to laugh inside
and to laugh outside too
for what has been dangerous
on this tiny night
in this little minute
will now be survived
so back to this brief delight
of us diabetics at 3:17AM
beside the cool cherry pool
of a gallon of Greek yogurt
or a whole cherry pie
or a half a tray of cold lasagna
on the counter
and all of the waters
tasty and calm and wide open
and all of us about to shallow-wade
no handed
and with our whole faces
as if snorkeling
and without thinking finally (thank you)
right into every single one
Ephraim Scott Sommers is a T1 Diabetic and the author of two books: Someone You Love Is Still Alive (2019) and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017). Currently, he lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and is an Associate Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is also an actively touring singer-songwriter. For music and poems, please visit: www.ephraimscottsommers.com.
Annie Stenzel
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Vesper
"I cannot tell if the day is ending,
or the world"—Anna Akmatova
Last night, on the train, unlike my fellow
travelers caught in the grip of their devices
I was the lone traveler who watched
the western sky turn molten, as though
it would boil the Pacific where it touched the water;
as though all the gold in the world had gathered
in one place. Yes, it was more beautiful
than anything I had ever seen, in those few moments
before the train dipped underground.
In my greed, in my appreciation of the way
the days now flee me at top speed
I wanted to fold up that sunset and keep it safe.
Yes, I wanted to stop it from ending,
never mind that ending is a sunset’s job.
"I cannot tell if the day is ending,
or the world"—Anna Akmatova
Last night, on the train, unlike my fellow
travelers caught in the grip of their devices
I was the lone traveler who watched
the western sky turn molten, as though
it would boil the Pacific where it touched the water;
as though all the gold in the world had gathered
in one place. Yes, it was more beautiful
than anything I had ever seen, in those few moments
before the train dipped underground.
In my greed, in my appreciation of the way
the days now flee me at top speed
I wanted to fold up that sunset and keep it safe.
Yes, I wanted to stop it from ending,
never mind that ending is a sunset’s job.
Annie Stenzel’s (she/her) second collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was published in 2024 by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Atlanta Review, FERAL, Gargoyle, Kestrel, Lily Poetry Review, Nixes Mate, One Art, rust + moth, Saranac Review, SWWIM, Thimble, Third Wednesday, and UCity Review. She is a poetry editor for the journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review. She lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of San Francisco Bay.
Elizabeth Sylvia
Recycling
I want to wash out the bottles and cans with the same hope my friend Susan’s mother had
washing out the bottles and the cans
Thirty-five years ago on Long Island soaking the paper faces off her sauce jars before
the blue truck rumbled by Monday Wednesday
Friday the recycling plant closing for the weekend at five its optimistic piles banging
their song of rescued orphans
I was still a copper penny of a kid back then and Susan’s mother’s sink warm and soapy with
the week’s glass
Though I never knew her she washed it out for me a knob of the past snatched up for
the future
She and a thousand other tidy mothers learning to worry about the mess they would leave behind
Tying up their aprons on that recycling business so Susan can sit on the back deck with me today
Immaculate sky seeping through every breath in summer’s canopy
Threaded by birdsong and Susan’s mother’s long dead no way to tell her I keep hauling
the yogurt cups
To the curb despite some townspeople’s complaints about the eyesore of the man-sized bins
Who will remember the care I took to scrub the peanut butter jars how I shook clean the milk
Who will remember I did all this
I want to wash out the bottles and cans with the same hope my friend Susan’s mother had
washing out the bottles and the cans
Thirty-five years ago on Long Island soaking the paper faces off her sauce jars before
the blue truck rumbled by Monday Wednesday
Friday the recycling plant closing for the weekend at five its optimistic piles banging
their song of rescued orphans
I was still a copper penny of a kid back then and Susan’s mother’s sink warm and soapy with
the week’s glass
Though I never knew her she washed it out for me a knob of the past snatched up for
the future
She and a thousand other tidy mothers learning to worry about the mess they would leave behind
Tying up their aprons on that recycling business so Susan can sit on the back deck with me today
Immaculate sky seeping through every breath in summer’s canopy
Threaded by birdsong and Susan’s mother’s long dead no way to tell her I keep hauling
the yogurt cups
To the curb despite some townspeople’s complaints about the eyesore of the man-sized bins
Who will remember the care I took to scrub the peanut butter jars how I shook clean the milk
Who will remember I did all this
Elizabeth Sylvia’s second collection, Scythe (2026), is forthcoming from River River Books. Her first collection, None But Witches (2022), was the winner of the Three Mile Harbor Book Award. Elizabeth was the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the West Chester Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers’ Conference. Elizabeth is a reader for SWWIM and leads the Imaginary Gardens Poetry Book Club. She lives in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.
Ellen June Wright
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Come, Grief
After hours, grief slips in like a man to whom I've regretfully given a key. Grief sits beside me, hands me a plate of fried chicken I don't want. I want what mother used to make for me, though she's gone and I can't cook the way she cooked. And all the time I carry a stone in the center of my chest. It hangs there. It won't fall free. It won't dislodge no matter how blue the sky, no matter how frosty the air no matter how swift the wind, the little stone refuses to go. I tell grief, Take your stone away. Leave my house. It says, No, I'm moving in. I'll be here at least nine years. I live here now. You can fight me or not but I'm not going anywhere. At night, when you get in the bed I’ll get in with you. I'll curl myself around your feet and keep you warm. |
I Let Grief In
The thought of grief living rent free with me for the next decade frightens me and comforts me. Why should I forget how good my mother was to me when she didn't have to be. I’ll let grief occupy empty spaces. I'll teach it to stew oxtail in an old dutch pot until the beef falls from the bone, the fat is sweet and the marrow is something my tongue suctions out. I'll teach it to dance to songs from my childhood. Come on, Grief; let me see you do the Watusi. Let me see you do the Twist like Chubby Checker when he was young, Let me see ya move your hips. We're going to be together a long, long time. |
Ellen June Wright is an American writer with British and Caribbean roots. She was a finalist in the Mississippi Review 2024 poetry contest and the Third Coast 2024 poetry contest. Her work has been published in many literary journals, including Caribbean Writer, Obsidian, Verse Daily, North American Review and is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and has received several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Wright also hosts a weekly poetry workshop for Black poets.