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February 2025 Issue #36 Poetry
featuring
Carol Alexander, Bree Bailey, Joe Barca, Rynleah Barrios, Ayomide Bayowa, Janet Blair, Dustin Brookshire & Donna Vorreyer, Shawn Brophy, Maddie C. Craig Cotter, John Cullen, Marc Alan Di Martino, Wendy Drexler, Jennifer R. Edwards, George Franklin, Stephen Gibson, Dennis Hinrichsen, Judith Juste, Katie Kemple, Alison Lubar, Jill Michelle, James Miller, Liana Minassian, Michael Minassian, Juan Pablo Mobili, Rachel Lauren Myers, Bleah Patterson, Purbasha Roy, Phil Scruton, Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Travis Stephens, Amy Thatcher, Julie Marie Wade, Laura Grace Weldon, Margot Wizansky
Carol Alexander, Bree Bailey, Joe Barca, Rynleah Barrios, Ayomide Bayowa, Janet Blair, Dustin Brookshire & Donna Vorreyer, Shawn Brophy, Maddie C. Craig Cotter, John Cullen, Marc Alan Di Martino, Wendy Drexler, Jennifer R. Edwards, George Franklin, Stephen Gibson, Dennis Hinrichsen, Judith Juste, Katie Kemple, Alison Lubar, Jill Michelle, James Miller, Liana Minassian, Michael Minassian, Juan Pablo Mobili, Rachel Lauren Myers, Bleah Patterson, Purbasha Roy, Phil Scruton, Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Travis Stephens, Amy Thatcher, Julie Marie Wade, Laura Grace Weldon, Margot Wizansky
POETRY Launch Reading: Friday, Feb 7th at 7:30 PM ET
Please register in advance
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/kDqokI7ATlWddKQaqTdrBQ
Please register in advance
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/kDqokI7ATlWddKQaqTdrBQ
Carol Alexander
Mt Mansfield, When
What but these borrowed boots
some alien spirit
ice goatee on the mountain’s chin
trillium that flirts above the fanged chasm
gnarl and wrack, berry-loving thrush,
wind scrabbling through yellow birch?
My foot on schist, intransigent face,
a trail imprinted with chisel cuts.
Climbers scan for doom.
Lungs burn. you are not afraid you come
near to extinction, your skin rouged.
A mantilla of dark feathers.
Needles and seedpods.
Nothing so alien as the human voice--
somewhere it echoes
across the cold millennia.
To have gotten there. To divine thunder.
We are tokens of something:
clubmoss or scree.
Some hold fast to air,
fingernails torn away. Found in spring
halved of bones, south of the road.
What but these borrowed boots
some alien spirit
ice goatee on the mountain’s chin
trillium that flirts above the fanged chasm
gnarl and wrack, berry-loving thrush,
wind scrabbling through yellow birch?
My foot on schist, intransigent face,
a trail imprinted with chisel cuts.
Climbers scan for doom.
Lungs burn. you are not afraid you come
near to extinction, your skin rouged.
A mantilla of dark feathers.
Needles and seedpods.
Nothing so alien as the human voice--
somewhere it echoes
across the cold millennia.
To have gotten there. To divine thunder.
We are tokens of something:
clubmoss or scree.
Some hold fast to air,
fingernails torn away. Found in spring
halved of bones, south of the road.
Carol Alexander is co-editor of the award-winning anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice. She is the author of the poetry collections Blue Vivarium, Fever and Bone, Environments, and Habitat Lost. Links to some of her poems can be found on Verse Daily.
Bree Bailey
A Scene Inside the Broken Elevator Within My Chest
It’s a Friday night when he asks me if I’m unhappy.
I pause mid-commercial break, knowing I must extract the right words.
I quickly mumble I’m not unhappy,
but also not happy.
He sinks like a crumpled duvet.
Hoping to catch him before he falls deeper into blame games,
I attempt to fashion words into comforting cloth
to explain it’s crucial to recognize:
I said I wasn’t unhappy first.
I live in the in- between like a subway car or a half moon or a
broken elevator paused mid-floor.
Who isn’t living at the yellow light at a traffic stop these days?
No one is quite ready to flee, but no one wants to stay.
The disease of my current living situation isn’t terminal,
but I’m beginning to think there is no cure.
Playing a mental charade of leaving
and coming back for fifteen minutes
for the last seven months.
Crazy to think it started off as a ten-second game.
I say I keep coming back,
and maybe I’m not happy,
but I said I’m in this for the long run,
even if I’m a little out of breath at the moment.
Bree Bailey (she/her) is a proud giggly bisexual Latina poet who lives in Southern Austin, TX with her tiny delightful family. As a mental health advocate and former high school educator, Bree speaks about her experiences with PTSD, depression and anxiety, while doing her best to bask in the light, beauty, and grace of the world. Most recently, Bree won the 2023 Write Bloody Jack McCarthy National Book Prize and her debut poetry collection, Wailing on Whisper Street, is currently available anywhere you buy books.
Joe Barca
Grande Half Decaf Iced Mocha, Light Ice, Almond Milk, No Whipped
I walk down Manhattan Street in Brooklyn, thirty feet
from Starbucks, his sign says “Homeless.” I pull out a twenty.
His name is Chris. He stayed at the shelter last night, got into a fight,
a guy was screaming and hissing — Helter-Skelter. He smells like piss.
A man gave him a bus ticket to Ohio yesterday.
Today he’s begging for snack money — He calls me Sir.
I come out of Starbucks and he tells me that I have to see the bruises
on his butt from last night’s fight. I say “No.” But he shows me anyway.
Blood pools purple under his skin. It reminds me of my sister’s lips
when she passed from cancer at forty three. When I visited her,
she was a skeleton on a couch. A doll on a shelf. After I flew
back home from Pennsylvania, I got the call.
I get Chris an Uber to the bus station, shake his hand. He pulls me in for a hug,
tells me that Jesus loves me, and that I’m gonna be all right.
Elephant Vigil
They are prodded and poked. Harassed and harangued. Herded and hunted. Twenty one
of them — Nana is the leader of the pack. Word is the herd is violent, prone to attack.
Lawrence Anthony welcomes them into to his wildlife reserve. But they resist.
Insist on knocking down fences. Chasing defenseless. He spends time with them.
Dawn to dusk. Tail to tusk. Plants prayers in their ears. They call him the Elephant Whisperer.
He prefers the Pachyderm Listener. He puts his palm on Nana’s chest — her heart pumps
like a hummingbird. Her trunk blankets him. Lawrence dies abruptly at age 61. The elephants
come from miles away to attend his wake. Cloudy skies walking. They arrive without warning,
without pretension. They fill the void in front of his home. Legs as pillars. Food cannot soothe
them. Tails droop. Eyes pool. Nana sees rosary beads on the ground. Brushes her foot
along the beads like a mother wiping tears from her child’s cheek.
They are prodded and poked. Harassed and harangued. Herded and hunted. Twenty one
of them — Nana is the leader of the pack. Word is the herd is violent, prone to attack.
Lawrence Anthony welcomes them into to his wildlife reserve. But they resist.
Insist on knocking down fences. Chasing defenseless. He spends time with them.
Dawn to dusk. Tail to tusk. Plants prayers in their ears. They call him the Elephant Whisperer.
He prefers the Pachyderm Listener. He puts his palm on Nana’s chest — her heart pumps
like a hummingbird. Her trunk blankets him. Lawrence dies abruptly at age 61. The elephants
come from miles away to attend his wake. Cloudy skies walking. They arrive without warning,
without pretension. They fill the void in front of his home. Legs as pillars. Food cannot soothe
them. Tails droop. Eyes pool. Nana sees rosary beads on the ground. Brushes her foot
along the beads like a mother wiping tears from her child’s cheek.
Joe Barca is a poet from the Boston area. He has a partner, two children, and a wheaten terrier named Brady. He is a reader for Whale Road Review and a regular contributor to The Poetry Space podcast. He had a poem published in Rattle in December of 2024. Some of his favorite poets are Mai Der Vang, Kevin Young, and Li-Young Lee. He is a fast talker and a slow runner.
Rynleah Barrios
Late Night Whisperings on the Rosary Pea
Jequirty bean, your habitat hugs the equator
of our warm loving earth like a belt too tight.
You live in drums and in prayers, climbing
and climbing. Your reach will never end. Invasive,
they say. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, girl, you’re
just living in it. Lady of many names,
your hard red shell is no challenge to me,
for I am no man. I love how your ivy strangles
and chokes out native brush. You remind me
of tourists, you know. Pave paradise, put up
a parking lot, said Joni Mitchell. Your approach
is far better, dear country licorice. Why
should we destroy the land visibly, too? I
don’t remember my first pineland, only that
I’ve trudged their endless stickbrush and sappy
paths for miles and miles. Dear love pea,
does twisting your vines against the throat
of my Florida home bring you joy? I’d like
to introduce you to our governor. I think you’d
get along. Oh, coral bead. Oh, prayer bead.
You are impossible to remove. Your heavy
roots clutch and drag on our sandy soil
like an insecure girlfriend. Wikipedia says
that your growth is aggressive, but I say feminist.
Dear Indian invader, do you not love your home?
We call you rosary pea, but you were strung
in japamala—prayer garlands—before any
of us silly beings were conceived. Mala, how
many pods of yours does it take to string a loop?
Guest, I thank you for visiting and leaving
your abortifacient seeds screaming brightly: Stay away!
in Florida hammocks. I never saw you until I did;
your pearls glisten in the noon sun like dry
pine needles piercing the skin beneath my shoes.
Olinda, my wild woman, the British think you’ll
kill them with just a pinprick. How silly. Murderous
lady of the weeds, we both know
that I have to chew for you to work.
Jequirty bean, your habitat hugs the equator
of our warm loving earth like a belt too tight.
You live in drums and in prayers, climbing
and climbing. Your reach will never end. Invasive,
they say. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, girl, you’re
just living in it. Lady of many names,
your hard red shell is no challenge to me,
for I am no man. I love how your ivy strangles
and chokes out native brush. You remind me
of tourists, you know. Pave paradise, put up
a parking lot, said Joni Mitchell. Your approach
is far better, dear country licorice. Why
should we destroy the land visibly, too? I
don’t remember my first pineland, only that
I’ve trudged their endless stickbrush and sappy
paths for miles and miles. Dear love pea,
does twisting your vines against the throat
of my Florida home bring you joy? I’d like
to introduce you to our governor. I think you’d
get along. Oh, coral bead. Oh, prayer bead.
You are impossible to remove. Your heavy
roots clutch and drag on our sandy soil
like an insecure girlfriend. Wikipedia says
that your growth is aggressive, but I say feminist.
Dear Indian invader, do you not love your home?
We call you rosary pea, but you were strung
in japamala—prayer garlands—before any
of us silly beings were conceived. Mala, how
many pods of yours does it take to string a loop?
Guest, I thank you for visiting and leaving
your abortifacient seeds screaming brightly: Stay away!
in Florida hammocks. I never saw you until I did;
your pearls glisten in the noon sun like dry
pine needles piercing the skin beneath my shoes.
Olinda, my wild woman, the British think you’ll
kill them with just a pinprick. How silly. Murderous
lady of the weeds, we both know
that I have to chew for you to work.
Rynleah Barrios is a native-Floridian poet who spends most of her time chasing her Shiba Inu back inside the house she shares with her wife and in-laws. Her work can be found in other publications such as new words press and The Listening Eye.
Ayomide Bayowa
Ayomide Bayowa is a poet and absurd playwright. His debut collection, Gills, a semi-finalist of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize was published in 2023. His literary honours include a longlist of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize in 2018, longlist of the 2021 Adroit Journal Poetry Prize, finalist of the 2023 National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize. He was the 2021-24 Poet Laureate of Mississauga, and is currently an MFA in Poetry candidate at North Carolina State University.
Janet Blair
rebel
this poem doesn't want to teach you a lesson
it doesn’t want to mimic Mary Oliver and the way she captured
slivers of nature like a photographer catches light
it doesn’t want to fossilize a memory for future generations
or leave a legacy.
or be oh so clever as Billy Collins
it doesn't want to do a slow striptease
presenting some hidden part of me
it refuses to adhere to form or stand quietly in lines like Kindergartners
it doesn't talk in an inside voice or raise its hand, patiently waiting to be called on
it slipped out like a belch
running from assonance into chaos
flinging itself onto the bed with a sigh
stretching and then farting loudly
it wears sweats instead of alliteration
no thesaurus was consulted
no edits required
it came out like a birth―messy and fluid filled
plopping onto the page rumpled and wild-eyed
wriggling out of any beauty I tried to clothe it in
and I could not bear to tame it
this poem doesn't want to teach you a lesson
it doesn’t want to mimic Mary Oliver and the way she captured
slivers of nature like a photographer catches light
it doesn’t want to fossilize a memory for future generations
or leave a legacy.
or be oh so clever as Billy Collins
it doesn't want to do a slow striptease
presenting some hidden part of me
it refuses to adhere to form or stand quietly in lines like Kindergartners
it doesn't talk in an inside voice or raise its hand, patiently waiting to be called on
it slipped out like a belch
running from assonance into chaos
flinging itself onto the bed with a sigh
stretching and then farting loudly
it wears sweats instead of alliteration
no thesaurus was consulted
no edits required
it came out like a birth―messy and fluid filled
plopping onto the page rumpled and wild-eyed
wriggling out of any beauty I tried to clothe it in
and I could not bear to tame it
Janet Blair lives and works in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, she is a weekend poet who dreams of writing full time. Her most recent publications can be found in The Eckerd Review and The Florida Bards Anthology.
Dustin Brookshire & Donna Vorreyer
Wistful Villanelle With Museum Admission
A contoured villanelle using "Villanelle at Sundown" by Donald Justice My mind drifts off when I see the color yellow― cornmeal, marigold, an old bruise, a deepened Golden Delicious. Will I always think of you? These paintings show me nothing but my failure. I lean into clichés. I still question what happened, paralyzed by what-ifs, amber-trapped in yellow. I try to remind myself that regret holds no value― even brushstrokes of Van Gogh can be cheapened. His self-portrait stirs memories, and I think of you― see your eyes in The Potato Eaters dark milieu. My therapist pressed until my memory sharpened away from the blur of nostalgia's sepia- yellow. She asked, Do you think betrayal has a color? I have no answer except sunflower, bedsheets, weekend. I promise. My actions aren't the sum of what I think of you. I recall my callous words, your expression, drawn and sallow. Yes, I cheated. You were right all along. My lies end here. You're smiling, somewhere warm and yellow. You've moved on while I still think of you. _______________________________________________________ A contoured villanelle takes the end words from each line of an existing villanelle, matching end words in the same order to construct a new villanelle. |
Dustin Brookshire's (he/him) chapbooks include Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, forthcoming 2025), Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is the editor of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton (Harbor Anthologies, 2024) and co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). More at dustinbrookshire.com.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poetry, fiction, and essay work have appeared in Ploughshares, Cherry Tree, Poet Lore, Salamander, Harpur Palate, Booth, and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the new journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poetry, fiction, and essay work have appeared in Ploughshares, Cherry Tree, Poet Lore, Salamander, Harpur Palate, Booth, and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the new journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
Shawn Brophy
A Pale Green Horse
I woke to radio static and screens blue with beetles.
Was the sun a little brighter? My tongue tastes like a penny.
By Tuesday, the panting of our dogs was no longer comic.
They the faithful were dying honest and apologetic deaths.
Thursday’s shaving water was yellow and smelled of eggs.
Mealworms precluded pancakes.
Marble sweat runs down the long windows,
And Sunday’s pew-warped prayers
Are for moon-blue dust the eyes of the sun,
Or at least a private death. Stillbirth
Has become as common as the crows,
And crows, blue and awkward are everywhere about.
Now iron filings blow past the windows in sheets, like rain.
And metal shavings clatter against the siding, like
Handfuls of gravel thrown by a mob of love-struck imbeciles.
My wind-blown dreams are of spikes and wire, blades and wings.
The world now chokes on iron red dust
From Mars, from Mars, from Mars.
Some of the younger trees have formed a skirmish line,
Roughly between my heart and the lake. Too late.
There must be a generator the size of a Buick
Powering that siren. Listen. No, really listen!
It’s our Prophesy, and in only two notes.
I woke to radio static and screens blue with beetles.
Was the sun a little brighter? My tongue tastes like a penny.
By Tuesday, the panting of our dogs was no longer comic.
They the faithful were dying honest and apologetic deaths.
Thursday’s shaving water was yellow and smelled of eggs.
Mealworms precluded pancakes.
Marble sweat runs down the long windows,
And Sunday’s pew-warped prayers
Are for moon-blue dust the eyes of the sun,
Or at least a private death. Stillbirth
Has become as common as the crows,
And crows, blue and awkward are everywhere about.
Now iron filings blow past the windows in sheets, like rain.
And metal shavings clatter against the siding, like
Handfuls of gravel thrown by a mob of love-struck imbeciles.
My wind-blown dreams are of spikes and wire, blades and wings.
The world now chokes on iron red dust
From Mars, from Mars, from Mars.
Some of the younger trees have formed a skirmish line,
Roughly between my heart and the lake. Too late.
There must be a generator the size of a Buick
Powering that siren. Listen. No, really listen!
It’s our Prophesy, and in only two notes.
Shawn Brophy is a hospital clerk and sometimes voice actor who lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Poems by Shawn have appeared in Apricity Magazine, Quarter After Eight, and in 45th Parallel.
Maddie C.
Intervention
At the dinner table someone calls for appetizers
and my mother throws up her entire left lung,
all pink and garbled in the middle dish.
Now covered in gravy
her lung makes a run for it,
vaults across the mashed potatoes my father’s
father, half-asleep four seats down,
spent two hours too long mashing with his
tendoned hands, split his skin while he was at it.
Lung now leaping over boiled carrots no
one touched, skidding across over-stretched
green beans saturating in onionskin oils
leaking lung sized grease stains onto
threaded red tablecloth we wash once
every two and a half years. I think
the lung grows a hand
out of the left ventricular or whatever
that blackened cylindrical tube is called,
and reaches out from it’s bluegrey
flesh slaps my mother’s father right
across the face before sprawling towards
the hardwoods below, ripped skin a floated
shawl, my mother gathering the lung’s veins
before slipping them, knotted and
slowly calcifying
into her half-empty glass.
At the dinner table someone calls for appetizers
and my mother throws up her entire left lung,
all pink and garbled in the middle dish.
Now covered in gravy
her lung makes a run for it,
vaults across the mashed potatoes my father’s
father, half-asleep four seats down,
spent two hours too long mashing with his
tendoned hands, split his skin while he was at it.
Lung now leaping over boiled carrots no
one touched, skidding across over-stretched
green beans saturating in onionskin oils
leaking lung sized grease stains onto
threaded red tablecloth we wash once
every two and a half years. I think
the lung grows a hand
out of the left ventricular or whatever
that blackened cylindrical tube is called,
and reaches out from it’s bluegrey
flesh slaps my mother’s father right
across the face before sprawling towards
the hardwoods below, ripped skin a floated
shawl, my mother gathering the lung’s veins
before slipping them, knotted and
slowly calcifying
into her half-empty glass.
Maddie C. is a poet living and writing in the South. They have a cat called Goose.
Craig Cotter
Drayton Plains, Michigan
I'm back in my childhood home
in the garage, ready for a run.
If I turn right out the driveway
I jog into current era Los Angeles,
left
I can jog through the old neighborhood.
It's been 35 years since we left Michigan
when I was 15.
I jog left up the hill
run through the old streets
to the Nature Center and back.
But the hundreds of acres of fields, woods and swamps are gone.
I jog through new subdivisions,
houses, parks, businesses
I jog through monks
and pseudo-monks,
by a park with a relief of a Detroit Lions helmet
cut into sections and inserted into the grass.
There is a slingshot sky lift amusement park ride
but instead of a ski chair coming down from the top of the hill
it's individual people who glide down
holding a T-bar by the hands.
And when you get to the end of the ride,
if you're good, you do a mid-air flip before dismounting.
One of my former students, DJ, has just made a run.
Always shy and reserved,
it's good to see him extraverted,
although when I watch him fly through the air and execute
a very graceful flip, his face still holds
the same flat affect.
*
My mentally ill friends check-in
on my mental health.
I want to get laid
but am not strong enough
trying to come off immunosuppressant drugs
that gave me cancer.
No objective present:
Tolstoy tore the cover off the czarist system
and the Russian Orthodox church.
O'Hara found a way to survive kill-the-fags America.
*
After 20 minutes of surfing massage ads
the Vicodin is taking effect.
Maybe I can get back to sleep
and wake-up with some of the wonder
we all deserve.
I'm back in my childhood home
in the garage, ready for a run.
If I turn right out the driveway
I jog into current era Los Angeles,
left
I can jog through the old neighborhood.
It's been 35 years since we left Michigan
when I was 15.
I jog left up the hill
run through the old streets
to the Nature Center and back.
But the hundreds of acres of fields, woods and swamps are gone.
I jog through new subdivisions,
houses, parks, businesses
I jog through monks
and pseudo-monks,
by a park with a relief of a Detroit Lions helmet
cut into sections and inserted into the grass.
There is a slingshot sky lift amusement park ride
but instead of a ski chair coming down from the top of the hill
it's individual people who glide down
holding a T-bar by the hands.
And when you get to the end of the ride,
if you're good, you do a mid-air flip before dismounting.
One of my former students, DJ, has just made a run.
Always shy and reserved,
it's good to see him extraverted,
although when I watch him fly through the air and execute
a very graceful flip, his face still holds
the same flat affect.
*
My mentally ill friends check-in
on my mental health.
I want to get laid
but am not strong enough
trying to come off immunosuppressant drugs
that gave me cancer.
No objective present:
Tolstoy tore the cover off the czarist system
and the Russian Orthodox church.
O'Hara found a way to survive kill-the-fags America.
*
After 20 minutes of surfing massage ads
the Vicodin is taking effect.
Maybe I can get back to sleep
and wake-up with some of the wonder
we all deserve.
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals in the U.S., France, Italy, the Czech Republic, the U.K., Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, India, and Ireland. Books include The Aroma of Toast, Chopstix Numbers, and After Lunch with Frank O’Hara. www.craigcotter.com
John Cullen
Ritual
I measure two scoops of hope
over two scoops of French Roast
into Mr. Coffee. Steam spurts, and talks
trash about the neighbor’s cat.
I count the eyelets on my shoes; still the same.
Monkey-faced lilac buds howl at the door.
Pad in hand, I use lead pencils and hope
my words don’t collapse or drift
before I finish this sentence. I want each word
to clutch the hand before and after
like a kindergartener on a field trip. I hear
my neighbor’s daughter practicing piano.
Beethoven again; bagatelles
scatter off the keyboard and blow
across the yard, a score of blossoms
raining.
I measure two scoops of hope
over two scoops of French Roast
into Mr. Coffee. Steam spurts, and talks
trash about the neighbor’s cat.
I count the eyelets on my shoes; still the same.
Monkey-faced lilac buds howl at the door.
Pad in hand, I use lead pencils and hope
my words don’t collapse or drift
before I finish this sentence. I want each word
to clutch the hand before and after
like a kindergartener on a field trip. I hear
my neighbor’s daughter practicing piano.
Beethoven again; bagatelles
scatter off the keyboard and blow
across the yard, a score of blossoms
raining.
John Cullen teaches in Michigan and has recently published in The New York Quarterly, The MacGuffin, and Pembroke Magazine. Bass Clef Books will publish a chapbook of his titled The Observation of Basic Matter early next year.
Marc Alan Di Martino
Light in Late September
I’ve always loved and loathed late September―
its vague promise of ripeness, clear stars
and gauzy weather, as if one had woken up
in an old sweater smelling of mothballs,
cheap beer and tobacco. “Small gnats mourn,”
Keats put it. Clouds of them swell and die
in the sun’s dappled patchwork, dance a jig
like electrons around some secret central core
invisible, intangible to us. We diminish,
too, just a little more this time of year
for some reason. It must be the falling
light, its shattered columns everywhere
scattered like an ancient ruin, and time’s
crisp shadow here beneath the desk lamp
inching its way steadily forward across the page.
I’ve always loved and loathed late September―
its vague promise of ripeness, clear stars
and gauzy weather, as if one had woken up
in an old sweater smelling of mothballs,
cheap beer and tobacco. “Small gnats mourn,”
Keats put it. Clouds of them swell and die
in the sun’s dappled patchwork, dance a jig
like electrons around some secret central core
invisible, intangible to us. We diminish,
too, just a little more this time of year
for some reason. It must be the falling
light, its shattered columns everywhere
scattered like an ancient ruin, and time’s
crisp shadow here beneath the desk lamp
inching its way steadily forward across the page.
Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of the collections Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski's Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco was published by World Poetry Books in November 2024. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Perugia, Italy.
Wendy Drexler
Photo by Debi Milligan
Haibun
On our last vacation together, I ask you to wait for me on a bench outside the bookstore. I should have known better. “Walking home,” you text, and are gone when I come out. Blessings for the 2% charge left on your cell phone. Blessings that you pick up when I call. That you can tell me the name of the street you are on. Housatonic from the Mohican usi-a-di-en-uki, “beyond the mountain place.” Love, it’s time for us to travel up and beyond the mountains. At the peak we must take separate paths down. When I find you brushing your teeth with a razor lathered with muscle cream, I can’t tell you how terrified I am. You wouldn’t understand. Or when you wake from a nap and try to insert your hearing aids in your mouth. We can’t live together much longer in the same house. My fear may ease then, but what of sorrow deepening, what traces of sweetness will vanish? Rilke writes, The great solitude begins, but mine began years before, Alzheimer’s whittling you like a piece of wood. My right eye twitches as I carefully fold your shirts away, into the suitcase for the trip home, clean your CPAP mask, snug it back into the padded compartment, zip up the case.
The future chills me / a window left wide open / in winter’s cold wind.
On our last vacation together, I ask you to wait for me on a bench outside the bookstore. I should have known better. “Walking home,” you text, and are gone when I come out. Blessings for the 2% charge left on your cell phone. Blessings that you pick up when I call. That you can tell me the name of the street you are on. Housatonic from the Mohican usi-a-di-en-uki, “beyond the mountain place.” Love, it’s time for us to travel up and beyond the mountains. At the peak we must take separate paths down. When I find you brushing your teeth with a razor lathered with muscle cream, I can’t tell you how terrified I am. You wouldn’t understand. Or when you wake from a nap and try to insert your hearing aids in your mouth. We can’t live together much longer in the same house. My fear may ease then, but what of sorrow deepening, what traces of sweetness will vanish? Rilke writes, The great solitude begins, but mine began years before, Alzheimer’s whittling you like a piece of wood. My right eye twitches as I carefully fold your shirts away, into the suitcase for the trip home, clean your CPAP mask, snug it back into the padded compartment, zip up the case.
The future chills me / a window left wide open / in winter’s cold wind.
Sitting with My Husband on a Bench in Front of Clay Pond
a not-so-beautiful pond, but I like the way the leaves
form an arch over the water, the sun slanting thru,
making them glow, and on the far side of the pond
we see a swan my husband refers to as “a white fish,”
which makes me think more about the solitary swan
we’d passed earlier who was sitting on the bank―
the way she was grooming herself so conscientiously―
this is her work, after all—corkscrewing her limber
and endless neck under her, nipping one feather,
then another, and then I began to listen to some water
sounds on my meditation app as I looked at the moiré
patterns the wind was making on the actual water,
and the wind was just the wind, but cool on the edges
with a slightly warm core from the warm day, and yes,
the earth is probably dying, and on the radio today
I heard the Colorado River is running out of water
and can maybe be saved if people would only eat
one less hamburger each week, which shouldn’t be
a big deal but is, and I don’t eat hamburger anymore
and live nowhere near Colorado as I once did.
And I don’t know how many more walks like this
we will have together, these our most ordinary walks,
and I’m trying to hold this space as something sacred,
even with a dozen or more cigarette butts littering
the ground under my feet and a lasso of fish wire dangling
from a branch, and if the wire gets into the pond it will
likely strangle a great blue heron or some fish, which
are likely already done for (a signpost says, “This water
may have been contaminated with chemicals”)—which
pisses me off—was it or wasn’t it, and who is minding
this water anyway? Water that nevertheless looks serene
and beautiful under the setting sun. We start walking home
when I notice that the swan we’d seen earlier is now
gliding toward the swan on the far side. Had they been
estranged, or just taking a break? And I name the one swan
acceptance and the other swan grief as they draw close
to one another, while keeping a companionable distance.
a not-so-beautiful pond, but I like the way the leaves
form an arch over the water, the sun slanting thru,
making them glow, and on the far side of the pond
we see a swan my husband refers to as “a white fish,”
which makes me think more about the solitary swan
we’d passed earlier who was sitting on the bank―
the way she was grooming herself so conscientiously―
this is her work, after all—corkscrewing her limber
and endless neck under her, nipping one feather,
then another, and then I began to listen to some water
sounds on my meditation app as I looked at the moiré
patterns the wind was making on the actual water,
and the wind was just the wind, but cool on the edges
with a slightly warm core from the warm day, and yes,
the earth is probably dying, and on the radio today
I heard the Colorado River is running out of water
and can maybe be saved if people would only eat
one less hamburger each week, which shouldn’t be
a big deal but is, and I don’t eat hamburger anymore
and live nowhere near Colorado as I once did.
And I don’t know how many more walks like this
we will have together, these our most ordinary walks,
and I’m trying to hold this space as something sacred,
even with a dozen or more cigarette butts littering
the ground under my feet and a lasso of fish wire dangling
from a branch, and if the wire gets into the pond it will
likely strangle a great blue heron or some fish, which
are likely already done for (a signpost says, “This water
may have been contaminated with chemicals”)—which
pisses me off—was it or wasn’t it, and who is minding
this water anyway? Water that nevertheless looks serene
and beautiful under the setting sun. We start walking home
when I notice that the swan we’d seen earlier is now
gliding toward the swan on the far side. Had they been
estranged, or just taking a break? And I name the one swan
acceptance and the other swan grief as they draw close
to one another, while keeping a companionable distance.
Reversing Your Diagnoses
I steer us back to 2021 and your Camry, tomato red
as Campbell’s soup—the kind my mother made with milk
to dilute the bitterness—is unsold in our driveway, and you
untake your failed driving test and unhear your neurologist
say it’s unsafe for you to drive, and let’s go back and I’ll erase
the tangles and scrub out plaque on your PET scan so you can
boogie board with me unblemished as a peach
at Good Harbor Beach and I’ll ungoosebump your skin
for you to thrill to the waves lifting you like a waiter a tray,
and now we’re riding the bus in Haifa where you can unforget
the names of the tour mates you could never memorize
and lean your sweetness into me. We’re moving faster now―
soon we are night dancing again in my kitchen in 2002,
the radio playing Coltrane, we have turned out the lights,
slow dancing and slow undressing, leaving our clothes
on the kitchen floor. And as we make love, we walk the shore,
Narragansett, two years before—we are just three months young
and you have given me emerald and diamond earrings
for my birthday but you won’t tell me you love me—love has
slammed the door on you twice before. See how I unlatch
your heart before I take us back to the first smile I sailed
your way, a long-lost tune, somewhere between prayer and song,
igniting the air between us, plunging us past the lost surf of years
that have crested into years and the long breakers of days now
slowly sweeping you away. Please stop them here.
Hand me a buoy to keep us afloat.
I steer us back to 2021 and your Camry, tomato red
as Campbell’s soup—the kind my mother made with milk
to dilute the bitterness—is unsold in our driveway, and you
untake your failed driving test and unhear your neurologist
say it’s unsafe for you to drive, and let’s go back and I’ll erase
the tangles and scrub out plaque on your PET scan so you can
boogie board with me unblemished as a peach
at Good Harbor Beach and I’ll ungoosebump your skin
for you to thrill to the waves lifting you like a waiter a tray,
and now we’re riding the bus in Haifa where you can unforget
the names of the tour mates you could never memorize
and lean your sweetness into me. We’re moving faster now―
soon we are night dancing again in my kitchen in 2002,
the radio playing Coltrane, we have turned out the lights,
slow dancing and slow undressing, leaving our clothes
on the kitchen floor. And as we make love, we walk the shore,
Narragansett, two years before—we are just three months young
and you have given me emerald and diamond earrings
for my birthday but you won’t tell me you love me—love has
slammed the door on you twice before. See how I unlatch
your heart before I take us back to the first smile I sailed
your way, a long-lost tune, somewhere between prayer and song,
igniting the air between us, plunging us past the lost surf of years
that have crested into years and the long breakers of days now
slowly sweeping you away. Please stop them here.
Hand me a buoy to keep us afloat.
Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. Her poems have appeared in The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018 to 2023 and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.
Jennifer R. Edwards
Meat Bingo at the Legion
Our phones flare. Lately, we gravitate
towards each other, missing our old orbits.
The children & husbands asleep or playing
video games, or non-existent. Renee’s on
a hopefully permanent break from a boozer
who chased her for 20 years & closing soon
on Palmisano Plaza. She hangs with Danielle
again & finally embraced her grey per the posted
photos at Smashing Pumpkins. Danielle and Renee
flash their winnings like Olympic medals. 5.5 lbs. of
boneless chicken breast gleaming & pale as them
in the Legion’s artificial light. Truly’s & daubers
littering shellacked pub tables. Ladies in fleece coats,
cut loose without a man in sight. I’m already in bed
but intrigued, still hoping someone will plan a New Years
party when Chrissy comes up soon. We’re all excited,
they keep winning, it’s a cover all, it’s small four corners,
it’s escape, it’s freezing. Of course, they split winnings,
Danielle always wants her cut & likely charged gas money
to get there. I picture them meal planning in the
defunct Grand Union parking lot Nicole’s dad used to
manage. Christine’s kids have never seen snow
and she heard the song 1979 play at Shaw’s today.
Weren’t we just blaring that around Montpelier
in Renee’s crappy car? Who can take time off work?
I only have sick time, but my phone changes it
to dick time. Instant flurries of I want some of that!
Me too! Can it be scheduled?! Lol!
We throw out potential party dates with feral
ferocity. We say we’ll get together soon
but I won’t go back; not really.
Our phones flare. Lately, we gravitate
towards each other, missing our old orbits.
The children & husbands asleep or playing
video games, or non-existent. Renee’s on
a hopefully permanent break from a boozer
who chased her for 20 years & closing soon
on Palmisano Plaza. She hangs with Danielle
again & finally embraced her grey per the posted
photos at Smashing Pumpkins. Danielle and Renee
flash their winnings like Olympic medals. 5.5 lbs. of
boneless chicken breast gleaming & pale as them
in the Legion’s artificial light. Truly’s & daubers
littering shellacked pub tables. Ladies in fleece coats,
cut loose without a man in sight. I’m already in bed
but intrigued, still hoping someone will plan a New Years
party when Chrissy comes up soon. We’re all excited,
they keep winning, it’s a cover all, it’s small four corners,
it’s escape, it’s freezing. Of course, they split winnings,
Danielle always wants her cut & likely charged gas money
to get there. I picture them meal planning in the
defunct Grand Union parking lot Nicole’s dad used to
manage. Christine’s kids have never seen snow
and she heard the song 1979 play at Shaw’s today.
Weren’t we just blaring that around Montpelier
in Renee’s crappy car? Who can take time off work?
I only have sick time, but my phone changes it
to dick time. Instant flurries of I want some of that!
Me too! Can it be scheduled?! Lol!
We throw out potential party dates with feral
ferocity. We say we’ll get together soon
but I won’t go back; not really.
Jennifer R. Edwards' Unsymmetrical Body (Finishing Line Press) was an Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention, First Horizon Finalist, and BAC Julia Ward Howe Award Finalist. She's received Pushcart and BOTN noms, the NEPC Amy Lowell Prize, and conference fellowships. She's a speech-language pathologist and MFA candidate at Bennington. Read her poems in Beaver Magazine, RHINO, ELJ, MER, One Art, Terrain, and https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards @JenEdwards8 X Jennife00420145.
George Franklin
A Bench in Venice
He sits on a bench in Venice, staring at the Neva in December,
All his clothes purchased in Italy or the States, his coat wrapped
Around him the way a new language surrounds the old.
By the desk in the apartment, there are two typewriters, English
And Cyrillic, and a ream of white paper. Late for an appointment,
He hurries across the wooden bridge at the Accademia.
His heart beats fast; his body cries out for espresso and a forbidden
Cigarette. He wants to sit in the San Marco when the band is playing
And later eat cuttlefish cooked in its own ink, spooned
Over white polenta, white as a sail on the lagoon. But the truth is
He never sees white sails on the lagoon. Mostly, there have been
Water taxis and fishing boats, green ferries carrying
Automobiles destined for Trieste or the Balkans. Beside the statue
Of Garibaldi in the park, a couple shares a cup of strawberry gelato
In winter. He laughs reflexively. Garibaldi’s statue lacks his trademark
Red shirt. He’s wrapped in stone, the way the poet’s wrapped in wool.
Water from the lagoon surrounds water flowing beneath the Bridge of Sighs.
All the water in the world mixes together. The Amazon flows
Through Florence, and the Nile through New Orleans. Rivers, like humans
Change their clothes, but water is always water. The Aegean,
The Black Sea, the Mediterranean, all taste of salt: each buys its
Underwear in Istanbul and Odessa, each wears the sky for a scarf.
The poet thinks of space folding around him, just as fungible as water
Or as all the sounds a human voice can make.
His chest still aches from surgeries.
He sits on a bench in Venice, staring at the Neva in December,
All his clothes purchased in Italy or the States, his coat wrapped
Around him the way a new language surrounds the old.
By the desk in the apartment, there are two typewriters, English
And Cyrillic, and a ream of white paper. Late for an appointment,
He hurries across the wooden bridge at the Accademia.
His heart beats fast; his body cries out for espresso and a forbidden
Cigarette. He wants to sit in the San Marco when the band is playing
And later eat cuttlefish cooked in its own ink, spooned
Over white polenta, white as a sail on the lagoon. But the truth is
He never sees white sails on the lagoon. Mostly, there have been
Water taxis and fishing boats, green ferries carrying
Automobiles destined for Trieste or the Balkans. Beside the statue
Of Garibaldi in the park, a couple shares a cup of strawberry gelato
In winter. He laughs reflexively. Garibaldi’s statue lacks his trademark
Red shirt. He’s wrapped in stone, the way the poet’s wrapped in wool.
Water from the lagoon surrounds water flowing beneath the Bridge of Sighs.
All the water in the world mixes together. The Amazon flows
Through Florence, and the Nile through New Orleans. Rivers, like humans
Change their clothes, but water is always water. The Aegean,
The Black Sea, the Mediterranean, all taste of salt: each buys its
Underwear in Istanbul and Odessa, each wears the sky for a scarf.
The poet thinks of space folding around him, just as fungible as water
Or as all the sounds a human voice can make.
His chest still aches from surgeries.
El Café del Sonámbulo
He wore a pinstriped suit and brown wool
Overcoat. He’d already finished
His coffee, but he still nibbled on
A roll. Crumbs fell to the tablecloth.
He opened a leather notebook with
Ivory-colored paper and wrote
A poem in green ink. I wanted
To ask all the questions I’d saved as
I read the Residencias, thought
How many varieties there are
Of loneliness, how they’d bloomed
From his chest, an English garden
Bordered by ribcage. I couldn’t think
How to ask about the cost of it,
Shame, dysentery, an abandoned
Corpse in the street, night sweats and fever.
His fountain pen moved in neat circles,
But I couldn’t see the script, the lines.
And, I don’t know that he could see me
There, standing by the wooden table,
Plates and cups, the spoon balanced above
Some lumps of sugar. Was it me who
Spoke with him? Someone did. Words hung in
The air like brightly colored laundry
Almost dry, and Neruda, dead for
Fifty years, ordered one more coffee.
He wore a pinstriped suit and brown wool
Overcoat. He’d already finished
His coffee, but he still nibbled on
A roll. Crumbs fell to the tablecloth.
He opened a leather notebook with
Ivory-colored paper and wrote
A poem in green ink. I wanted
To ask all the questions I’d saved as
I read the Residencias, thought
How many varieties there are
Of loneliness, how they’d bloomed
From his chest, an English garden
Bordered by ribcage. I couldn’t think
How to ask about the cost of it,
Shame, dysentery, an abandoned
Corpse in the street, night sweats and fever.
His fountain pen moved in neat circles,
But I couldn’t see the script, the lines.
And, I don’t know that he could see me
There, standing by the wooden table,
Plates and cups, the spoon balanced above
Some lumps of sugar. Was it me who
Spoke with him? Someone did. Words hung in
The air like brightly colored laundry
Almost dry, and Neruda, dead for
Fifty years, ordered one more coffee.
George Franklin is the author of seven poetry collections, including What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused. Individual poems have been published in SoFloPoJo, Sheila-Na-Gig, Solstice, Rattle, Cagibi, New Ohio Review, The Threepenny Review, The Comstock Review, One Art, and Cultural Daily. He practices law in Miami, is a translations editor for Cagibi, and teaches poetry workshops in Florida prisons. In 2023, he was awarded the Yeats Poetry Prize and has been featured on the public radio podcast The Slowdown.
Stephen Gibson
Boxed Set Frida Kahlo
—at the Norton Museum of Art Gift Shop
Frida said that how you suffer reveals who you are
and that time is pain between moments of pleasure:
neither Frida saying is on a set of drinking coasters.
Nor is what her mother said when Diego married her:
she described him as an elephant marrying her dove―
Frida said that how you suffer reveals who you are.
There’s a painting after Diego had sex with her sister;
the affair with Cristina went on for more than a year;
you don’t see that work on a set of drinking coasters:
it’s another self-portrait, and Frida’s torn out her hair
and put on a man’s suit—she’s not a woman anymore―
Frida said it’s how you suffer that reveals who you are.
There’s a self-portrait during another of Diego’s affairs
(he compared fidelity to wearing handcuffs and collar),
she bleeds from a thorn necklace—each set of coasters
has it (and trolley-bus accident sketch almost killing her):
she said loving Diego was her life’s worst accident, ever―
and best. Frida said, how you suffer reveals who you are,
a saying that is not on any boxed set of drinking coasters.
—at the Norton Museum of Art Gift Shop
Frida said that how you suffer reveals who you are
and that time is pain between moments of pleasure:
neither Frida saying is on a set of drinking coasters.
Nor is what her mother said when Diego married her:
she described him as an elephant marrying her dove―
Frida said that how you suffer reveals who you are.
There’s a painting after Diego had sex with her sister;
the affair with Cristina went on for more than a year;
you don’t see that work on a set of drinking coasters:
it’s another self-portrait, and Frida’s torn out her hair
and put on a man’s suit—she’s not a woman anymore―
Frida said it’s how you suffer that reveals who you are.
There’s a self-portrait during another of Diego’s affairs
(he compared fidelity to wearing handcuffs and collar),
she bleeds from a thorn necklace—each set of coasters
has it (and trolley-bus accident sketch almost killing her):
she said loving Diego was her life’s worst accident, ever―
and best. Frida said, how you suffer reveals who you are,
a saying that is not on any boxed set of drinking coasters.
Stephen Gibson has published eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2024 Able Muse Press); Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press); The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press); Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize winner, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, reprint, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), and three others.
Dennis Hinrichsen
Little viper
(a short film of my Cold War birth)
White blow (Whitman) white heat (Dickinson) the difference between flesh
and bone is vapor
blasted at the speed of light―
white of the dresses (mother’s) all in a row, white
of the hidden parts
of the body (father’s) converted to TNT. Whitman some part Fat Man. Dickinson
(the top of my head is crowning)
some part Little Boy.
Or some part (even later) coral pulverized to ash. Castle Bravo.
So that it falls even after
rain has ceased. I brush this snow from my eyes my hair my tongue.
I put a little in a jar as keepsake. Sleep with it under pillow―
Cold War child—Daigo Fukuryū Maru--
little viper sucking at all the poisons offered by nipple and spoon.
(a short film of my Cold War birth)
White blow (Whitman) white heat (Dickinson) the difference between flesh
and bone is vapor
blasted at the speed of light―
white of the dresses (mother’s) all in a row, white
of the hidden parts
of the body (father’s) converted to TNT. Whitman some part Fat Man. Dickinson
(the top of my head is crowning)
some part Little Boy.
Or some part (even later) coral pulverized to ash. Castle Bravo.
So that it falls even after
rain has ceased. I brush this snow from my eyes my hair my tongue.
I put a little in a jar as keepsake. Sleep with it under pillow―
Cold War child—Daigo Fukuryū Maru--
little viper sucking at all the poisons offered by nipple and spoon.
I do the boogaloo I do the tighten up
I got no moves Katy says :: so she pins my hips
I am engulfed :: dance move ::
the boogaloo the tighten up ::
her voice my ear ::
enigma
of world to come :: brain split-tongued
firing code ::
where to place
feet (hip
thrust)
(hip
thrust) ::
then how much skin hair smell taste of kiss
I could memory home ::
all of it prelude to
(when I could drive) unzipping Mustang nights ::
the stealth erotic then :: a deck of porno cards ::
expressions :: raw pagan masks
that attracted :: then repelled ::
IDENTITY :: jump shot souped up Dodge
.410 shotgun six point buck ::
one boy’s bravery killed by river :: another’s by cloud ::
yet another’s by his girlfriend’s willing
15-year old body :: the Romeo in him
jailed by law and rage ::
then Gulag silence ::
bodies (maybe fetus) Cold War vanished ::
we made for lousy men then :: ready
to harm and ruin
those roller rink Saturday nights
we stood along the rail
and listened to white guys cover James Brown ::
we did the boogaloo ::
we faked the tighten up ::
waiting for some pretty girl ::
smell of whale
on her :: and deep ocean :: to take our hand
I got no moves Katy says :: so she pins my hips
I am engulfed :: dance move ::
the boogaloo the tighten up ::
her voice my ear ::
enigma
of world to come :: brain split-tongued
firing code ::
where to place
feet (hip
thrust)
(hip
thrust) ::
then how much skin hair smell taste of kiss
I could memory home ::
all of it prelude to
(when I could drive) unzipping Mustang nights ::
the stealth erotic then :: a deck of porno cards ::
expressions :: raw pagan masks
that attracted :: then repelled ::
IDENTITY :: jump shot souped up Dodge
.410 shotgun six point buck ::
one boy’s bravery killed by river :: another’s by cloud ::
yet another’s by his girlfriend’s willing
15-year old body :: the Romeo in him
jailed by law and rage ::
then Gulag silence ::
bodies (maybe fetus) Cold War vanished ::
we made for lousy men then :: ready
to harm and ruin
those roller rink Saturday nights
we stood along the rail
and listened to white guys cover James Brown ::
we did the boogaloo ::
we faked the tighten up ::
waiting for some pretty girl ::
smell of whale
on her :: and deep ocean :: to take our hand
Bathroom stall graffiti
stupid boy :: that set of hips and Brillo wedge you’ve
scratched
is really the Venus of Hohle Fels ::
35,000 years
of human (holy shit!)
history in your hands :: you’ve skipped geography again
to decorate the world ::
and that cock
and balls
nearly perfected? :: it’s Greek in origin ::
a first cut
at environmental policy :: this rock my dick
I shall carve
its image ::
it is good to know where things
come from
even if later they are plagiarized ::
by you the Romans by cinema still image ::
until
an entire planet has formed and roils and
eats up data and is right there leaking
the porno-
graphic over everything :: like in that Alien film
with the giant nearly naked guy ::
he fucks a river
with his genome making life :: but we just paint
our dicks
on everything :: either way it turns out bad ::
death ray :: jism
with a little consciousness in it :: rising waters
with all the rest ::
they know where they’re going :: we can chart the seepage ::
those animated increments
of closing down
coastline that feel nearly feminine when we watch :: a caress
stupid boy :: that set of hips and Brillo wedge you’ve
scratched
is really the Venus of Hohle Fels ::
35,000 years
of human (holy shit!)
history in your hands :: you’ve skipped geography again
to decorate the world ::
and that cock
and balls
nearly perfected? :: it’s Greek in origin ::
a first cut
at environmental policy :: this rock my dick
I shall carve
its image ::
it is good to know where things
come from
even if later they are plagiarized ::
by you the Romans by cinema still image ::
until
an entire planet has formed and roils and
eats up data and is right there leaking
the porno-
graphic over everything :: like in that Alien film
with the giant nearly naked guy ::
he fucks a river
with his genome making life :: but we just paint
our dicks
on everything :: either way it turns out bad ::
death ray :: jism
with a little consciousness in it :: rising waters
with all the rest ::
they know where they’re going :: we can chart the seepage ::
those animated increments
of closing down
coastline that feel nearly feminine when we watch :: a caress
Dennis Hinrichsen's most recent work is Dominion + Selected Poems from Green Linden Press. Previous work includes Flesh-plastique, schema geometrica, and [q / lear], also from Green Linden. He has new work appearing or forthcoming in The Indianapolis Review, Midwest Review, and Third Coast. He lives in Lansing, Michigan where from 2017-2019 he served as the area's inaugural Poet Laureate.
Judith Juste
Bleached Stop Signs & Faith
I am from Miami…
A distance away from crystal beaches
and purple club lights,
smiling faces
and fully fed families.
This is the portal to the pork and beans
where STOP signs are bleached
like the skin of a queen whose crown is self-hate,
like a page in a history book,
like a T-shirt from a house that could only afford
a cup of Clorox.
But we can’t stop
the rocks
shrunken and encased in brass
that pierce through the hallowed skulls
of our children.
Their heads
rattle like the maracas
playing in neighbor’s bachata and kompa,
whose booms and bangs
mask the pangs of crying blood
on cracked concrete.
They whine their hips,
the dancers of the night,
while newborns seated on straw seats
await their turns to join
the dance, the grind.
In these streets
we don’t sleep…
SWAT teams bang on doors,
red lights burn peeling walls
peeling open the eyes of
children getting ready to learn
the next day.
Their textbooks
are found by the coffins of slaves
with the pages on the code for liberation
still torn.
Only the covers remain.
Here in the streets of Miami
there is an intersection
where rap gods
and drug lords
and the Devil meet.
Where families look for justice and meals
by dancing over straw brooms
and neckless chickens,
flooding the devil’s mouth with malnourished blood
in exchange for a bag of rice
and a handful of beans.
Maybe a dead child on the side
if they’re lucky.
But here in these streets of Miami
there is a corner church,
with an ATM in its office.
It feasts heavily on hand-picked green
but does not return a leaf to
these unholy.
Here in these streets of Miami,
we are the rope
in God’s and the Devil’s
white knuckled hands
twisted and taut, and
drained of all blood
as they play tug-of-war
with our hope.
I am from Miami…
A distance away from crystal beaches
and purple club lights,
smiling faces
and fully fed families.
This is the portal to the pork and beans
where STOP signs are bleached
like the skin of a queen whose crown is self-hate,
like a page in a history book,
like a T-shirt from a house that could only afford
a cup of Clorox.
But we can’t stop
the rocks
shrunken and encased in brass
that pierce through the hallowed skulls
of our children.
Their heads
rattle like the maracas
playing in neighbor’s bachata and kompa,
whose booms and bangs
mask the pangs of crying blood
on cracked concrete.
They whine their hips,
the dancers of the night,
while newborns seated on straw seats
await their turns to join
the dance, the grind.
In these streets
we don’t sleep…
SWAT teams bang on doors,
red lights burn peeling walls
peeling open the eyes of
children getting ready to learn
the next day.
Their textbooks
are found by the coffins of slaves
with the pages on the code for liberation
still torn.
Only the covers remain.
Here in the streets of Miami
there is an intersection
where rap gods
and drug lords
and the Devil meet.
Where families look for justice and meals
by dancing over straw brooms
and neckless chickens,
flooding the devil’s mouth with malnourished blood
in exchange for a bag of rice
and a handful of beans.
Maybe a dead child on the side
if they’re lucky.
But here in these streets of Miami
there is a corner church,
with an ATM in its office.
It feasts heavily on hand-picked green
but does not return a leaf to
these unholy.
Here in these streets of Miami,
we are the rope
in God’s and the Devil’s
white knuckled hands
twisted and taut, and
drained of all blood
as they play tug-of-war
with our hope.
Judith Juste is a Haitian-American writer and Epidemiology student based in Miami, FL. She enjoys spending her time watching and absorbing the world around her. Some may say that her greatest passion is day-dreaming and living life in other’s shoes! Her body of work consists of poems and short stories that reflect the struggles and pleasures of the silenced. She can be found on Medium at medium.com/@judithjusteliterature.
Katie Kemple
Joy Fish in the Blood Moon
In the bathtub, my quads ache from the hormone
attempting to empty my uterus.
It gets greedy and grips my muscles from thigh
to belly button, squeezes me, as if
I were a jelly donut. And I see red paisleys paint
the water, minnows of pain
radiate like punctuation, ending horrific sentences.
I am bathing in my agony,
trying to rid myself of last month's foul luck:
the lost job, the crashed car,
seven years’ worth of poetry files that ghosted
my computer's hard drive.
I wait in water for a word to rise out of the depths
in my own cauldron. I am a witch
casting about for a joy fish, that plastic fortune teller
who arrives in the Christmas cracker
and curls in the palm of my hand toward luck.
In the bathtub, my quads ache from the hormone
attempting to empty my uterus.
It gets greedy and grips my muscles from thigh
to belly button, squeezes me, as if
I were a jelly donut. And I see red paisleys paint
the water, minnows of pain
radiate like punctuation, ending horrific sentences.
I am bathing in my agony,
trying to rid myself of last month's foul luck:
the lost job, the crashed car,
seven years’ worth of poetry files that ghosted
my computer's hard drive.
I wait in water for a word to rise out of the depths
in my own cauldron. I am a witch
casting about for a joy fish, that plastic fortune teller
who arrives in the Christmas cracker
and curls in the palm of my hand toward luck.
Katie Kemple's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, One Art and SWIMM. Her debut chapbook BIG MAN will be published by Chestnut Review in 2025. Website: katiekemplepoetry.com (https://www.katiekemplepoetry.com/) Socials: @katiekemple.bsky.social (Bluesky) @katiekemplepoetry (TikTok)
Alison Lubar
Unsaid, or, I eat my words every time I think of you again and that’s why I always have a stomach ache
say infinite tenderness
a first kiss before the train
sink your arm through mine
to brush my pink silk camisole
say this is my favorite song
we sip flat beer above the highway
you curl over a guitar like its body
is your own soft underbelly
say intention, inquiry
or you spray a teal bandana with patchouli
before we just sweat next to each other
say the currency of self
as ballpoint pen presses this
into the white styrofoam takeout box
say petroleum, polymerization
bronze dinosaur bones rubbed to mirror-shine
your black bike shorts, cotton-blend and pilling
your rosewater waves piled in a silver claw-clip
say last kiss
i probe the holes in every vowel
but hide the words behind my molars
say two more
on a walk back across the pebbled bridge
with its misplaced midnight crescent moon
say forever
link pinkies behind our boyfriends’ backs
then weave fingers together, thumbs touch like tongues
say something is always better than nothing
a tiny pocket knife in your underwear band
shines with its silver beetle-wing blade
say we will always exist here
the wet lip of crystal sings
when a finger traces its rim
say i dare you to keep dreaming
this is the truth i swallow
each night, a layer of nacre
on this quiet, unbirthable pearl
say infinite tenderness
a first kiss before the train
sink your arm through mine
to brush my pink silk camisole
say this is my favorite song
we sip flat beer above the highway
you curl over a guitar like its body
is your own soft underbelly
say intention, inquiry
or you spray a teal bandana with patchouli
before we just sweat next to each other
say the currency of self
as ballpoint pen presses this
into the white styrofoam takeout box
say petroleum, polymerization
bronze dinosaur bones rubbed to mirror-shine
your black bike shorts, cotton-blend and pilling
your rosewater waves piled in a silver claw-clip
say last kiss
i probe the holes in every vowel
but hide the words behind my molars
say two more
on a walk back across the pebbled bridge
with its misplaced midnight crescent moon
say forever
link pinkies behind our boyfriends’ backs
then weave fingers together, thumbs touch like tongues
say something is always better than nothing
a tiny pocket knife in your underwear band
shines with its silver beetle-wing blade
say we will always exist here
the wet lip of crystal sings
when a finger traces its rim
say i dare you to keep dreaming
this is the truth i swallow
each night, a layer of nacre
on this quiet, unbirthable pearl
Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. Their poetry collection, The Other Tree, was the recipient of Harbor Editions’ 2024 Laureate Prize. They’re the author of four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (CLASH!, 2023), and It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023), as well as one full-length, METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024). Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.
Jill Michelle
Ocean
n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man—who has no gills. —Ambrose Bierce Each time our Corolla pulled up to the beach, Mom repeated the story: she, just a girl, newly nineteen that August 5th afternoon in ’62 on a Sunday daytrip to Sunset Beach, she wades alone in the hybrid green mix of island sound and ocean waters—parents and freckled younger brother shrinking like immortal jellyfish as she ventures out farther becomes a dolphin caught in waffled nets of sea riptide snatching raspberry- tipped feet from under pink bikinied body that doesn’t know to swim horizontally. Her blonde head bobs between waves, a sunlit candle, a birth- day wish, granted as the muscled male lifeguard pulls her past the ocean’s prison, its alley of ebbing tides, hauls them to shore in time, saltwater dripping from their panting lips as they read the banner plane streaming news overhead: Marilyn Monroe found this morning, dead. |
Pray
v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. —Ambrose Bierce On this day of little angels I’ve lost you once again-- no point in spreading marigolds bright flowers for the dead. To call your souls would be unfair with nothing real to offer no favorite toys no foods to share no photos for your altars-- just this mother who knows nothing but the syllables of your names how hard she prayed to save you that you both died anyway. |
Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) and winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. Her newest work is forthcoming in The Florida Review, The Indianapolis Review, Pangyrus Lit Mag, and Zone 3. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more at byjillmichelle.com.
James Miller
Last Night in Rome
Six men carry their Saint Joseph, nailed through feet to a plank strewn with pale garlands. All fathers, all sons. Some have shared a smoke, a sorrow swallowed by Roman traffic. But it is dark now, nearing the deep drawl of late July. The heat offers a playlist of 60s cha cha, a few witless arias. The heat admits, you can easily cut most choruses, no one will miss them. We are stuffed with sea bass, hoping the bus will shave off half an hour to the hotel. Our last night abroad. I’m thinking of mile-wide nets across the Adriatic. Doubt caught alongside abalone, soft-shell, minnows unwilling to call themselves waste. Parishioners and penitents follow the plaster Joseph across the street. A crowd assembles. Shopkeepers, Uber drivers and a sprinkling of alien observers. Their human masks are unconvincing― flat, unable to droop with sweat. And there’s the priest, in ruby vestments, delivering a homily. Somehow his Italian has opened to me, and somehow his Italian is a pile of practical questions. Have you made your will? Reconciled with your widowed sister in Perugia? Where will the next mortgage payment come from? When the cancer grows in your left big toe, will you promise to cut it out by hand? How lucky we are are to pick among these bones, looking for wedding bands. We realize the bus will not arrive. Romans and refugees from the Marche stand in the street, waiting for the sacred show to wind down. I blink three times in thirty minutes. A woman next to us holds two leashes, guides two shadow dogs to sit at her feet. I see their spirits, a nervous throng of bee-wing brightness. The priest passes between us, alone. And Joseph with his people, headed back to his sacristy. Where he can get some sleep and catch up on Olympic coverage. In Rome, saints’ days must end with fireworks. Mostly little fists of fracture, flashes of pink and orangey flame. Throbs of maleness. Slug-meat, more lead than morsel. Again. Again. A second-unit director’s best work, he thinks. This is the bit where the city is liberated, a few apartment blocks fall but the people weep and share shortbread recipes with incurious soldiers. This is the bit where the actor we couldn’t afford is mowed down on the sidewalk. The camera can’t save him and the test audience isn’t sure what to think. No one notices the pasty taint in the sky behind his failing body. No one remembers how tasty the rain has been of late. More bombs. A string of seven assertions. This Jesus is ours! ours! ours! ours! ours! ours! ours! The dogs of Rome shrink into their companions’ skirts. I am with them. I am flat under their tongues. I slurp their terror-spittle. Feel our sphincters wobbling. We are weeping but only I am untethered and I am trotting down the sidewalk, across to the dead tramline, and now I am running, slipping past squad cars and Romans waiting for the next explosion over the cathedral square, I am lost among dimmed pharmacies and locked flowershops, my ears stunned into salt, knowing no language no other no face no wish but to stop the slaving saving, shut shut shut the stone, shut shut shut the stone. Ready. I am ready. I am ready to let you find me again. |
James Miller is a native of the Texas Gulf Coast, now settled in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in Best Small Fictions (2021), Hopkins Review, Broadkill Review, San Pedro River Review, Heavy Feather Review, The Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Psaltery & Lyre, Soundings East, and elsewhere. Follow on Bluesky @jandrewm.bsky.social. Website: jamesmillerpoetry.com.
Liana Minassian
Green Grapes
When my Amama was sick I used to drive to see her at a rehab facility.
She had fallen and never been able to get back up, bones like honeycombs.
She subsisted on jello cubes, valium, and the green grapes I brought her,
popping them in her mouth like gumballs,
and dutifully recording her meals in a pocket day planner.
As a former refugee, nutrition was always an accomplishment.
I fed her and she’d thank me, trying to force a smile
through the haze of drugs and pain.
Sometimes she’d forget I was there and hold conversations with the dead.
It’s said that people do this when they’re near the end.
One Saturday in September, she told me her mother came to visit.
They went for a walk in a vineyard and picked grapes off the vine.
“Doesn’t my tan look lovely,” she asked me.
So I took her photo under the fluorescent lights, green like the grapes.
Her eyes brighter than I’d ever seen.
The next day, they found her dressed in her Sunday best
and lying in the sun,
grapes on her eyelids --
her mouth open with anticipation.
When my Amama was sick I used to drive to see her at a rehab facility.
She had fallen and never been able to get back up, bones like honeycombs.
She subsisted on jello cubes, valium, and the green grapes I brought her,
popping them in her mouth like gumballs,
and dutifully recording her meals in a pocket day planner.
As a former refugee, nutrition was always an accomplishment.
I fed her and she’d thank me, trying to force a smile
through the haze of drugs and pain.
Sometimes she’d forget I was there and hold conversations with the dead.
It’s said that people do this when they’re near the end.
One Saturday in September, she told me her mother came to visit.
They went for a walk in a vineyard and picked grapes off the vine.
“Doesn’t my tan look lovely,” she asked me.
So I took her photo under the fluorescent lights, green like the grapes.
Her eyes brighter than I’d ever seen.
The next day, they found her dressed in her Sunday best
and lying in the sun,
grapes on her eyelids --
her mouth open with anticipation.
LIANA MINASSIAN i s a graduate of the University of Miami's film and theatre programs and is based in Los Angeles. Along with being a poet, she’s also a journalist, editor, photographer, film producer, and activist with many interdisciplinary interests. Her recent publications include Red Wolf Editions, Alt Milk, HyeBred Magazine, MORIA, and Muddy River Poetry Review, as well as two self-published poetry and photography zines. For more information: liana-minassian.com.
Michael Minassian
Madame et Ses Enfants
The old woman dusts off the ceramic dolls
lined up in a row on her bed.
She coos to them in French,
calls them her darlings, mes chéries,
pets them and combs their hair,
tying tiny ribbons through long locks.
When I come to her door,
she kisses me on both cheeks,
invites me in, serves tea in delicate
porcelain cups the size of a thimble,
pouring tea for the dolls as well.
When I leave, I kiss her
and each doll goodnight,
their lips still moist.
Oh, how they tremble
when she turns off the light.
The old woman dusts off the ceramic dolls
lined up in a row on her bed.
She coos to them in French,
calls them her darlings, mes chéries,
pets them and combs their hair,
tying tiny ribbons through long locks.
When I come to her door,
she kisses me on both cheeks,
invites me in, serves tea in delicate
porcelain cups the size of a thimble,
pouring tea for the dolls as well.
When I leave, I kiss her
and each doll goodnight,
their lips still moist.
Oh, how they tremble
when she turns off the light.
MICHAEL MINASSIAN lives with his wife in Southern New England. He is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
Juan Pablo Mobili
Hunting Berries in Dark Woods
After Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry Picking”
We looked for happiness the way
we foraged for berries, squinting our eyes
in the dusk light, or when the sun
was late rising.
We turned every leaf like we would
each page of an ancient sacred book,
afraid to witness its wisdom become dust
between our trembling fingers.
We wished to hoard good news like plum berries,
but those were the times of military juntas,
police tracking the scent of youth, friends praying
for friends who disappeared under the bramble.
We knew they were times to expect less,
to stay alert in dark woods, when the sun
was less courageous, when the berries
were few, tart, still hiding.
After Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry Picking”
We looked for happiness the way
we foraged for berries, squinting our eyes
in the dusk light, or when the sun
was late rising.
We turned every leaf like we would
each page of an ancient sacred book,
afraid to witness its wisdom become dust
between our trembling fingers.
We wished to hoard good news like plum berries,
but those were the times of military juntas,
police tracking the scent of youth, friends praying
for friends who disappeared under the bramble.
We knew they were times to expect less,
to stay alert in dark woods, when the sun
was less courageous, when the berries
were few, tart, still hiding.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires and, long ago, adopted by New York. He has been published, extensively, in the United States as well as internationally. He’s also a recipient of several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. His chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022. In 2025, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York.
Rachel Lauren Myers
In Washoe Valley, In Winter
Once, I took my train-hopping friend, Ben,
on a drive around Washoe Lake.
He made me stop so he could stand over a deer carcass
by the side of the road.
It was the type of day when the wind
rushed down the Sierras towards
the Washoe, the air chill sharp.
We drove up Kingsbury Grade,
to the cemetery in Virginia City.
Ben had his mandolin. In the parking lot
a herd of horses took us by surprise,
surrounded my car. He plucked at
strings while I murmured
shit, shit shit and accepted stillness.
Up close, all of their rumps showed
great, craggy scars. I could have reached
out a hand to brush them.
Ben finally asked what do you think of this
and played something mournful,
vaguely old-world Irish.
He’d composed it in minutes,
his eyes never leaving the horses.
On the way down, I took a photo of him
on the high overlook, crouched
on the tallest rock, facing the great wall
of the Sierra Nevada across the valley.
He told me he'd be leaving soon.
He was going to ride the trains south
to Arizona, run water to migrants crossing the border
for No Mas Muertes. I remember he was still so young,
but the full summer alone on the lines had
changed him. His eyes had grown keen, his voice
so determined, he'd become so decidedly him.
I studied his chapped lips, his crackled skin.
Like the trains he would catch,
he came into your life, unbidden,
a gift for a short time. For a few years after
I sent him poems, and he called me at
odd hours, and I told him he was loved. Today
I drove the Old Washoe Highway, stopped
to photograph a lone male horse across
a pristine white square of new snow.
I hummed something vaguely Irish. The wind
pressed my back, a leading edge like an icicle.
Ben was a body always moving, a mind so still.
I am not afraid of silence or long distances.
I am not always meant for wide open spaces.
As I write this, a train whistle beckons two miles south,
running along the Truckee. I wonder
if anyone now stands wind-drunk in the open
air, hands on cold graffiti metal, passing through
my sector of big sky. It’d be a shame to pass
through my home in the night. Tonight
I am afraid of open spaces. I am inside
enduring stillness. I am inside writing
wild horses, big sky, big sky.
Once, I took my train-hopping friend, Ben,
on a drive around Washoe Lake.
He made me stop so he could stand over a deer carcass
by the side of the road.
It was the type of day when the wind
rushed down the Sierras towards
the Washoe, the air chill sharp.
We drove up Kingsbury Grade,
to the cemetery in Virginia City.
Ben had his mandolin. In the parking lot
a herd of horses took us by surprise,
surrounded my car. He plucked at
strings while I murmured
shit, shit shit and accepted stillness.
Up close, all of their rumps showed
great, craggy scars. I could have reached
out a hand to brush them.
Ben finally asked what do you think of this
and played something mournful,
vaguely old-world Irish.
He’d composed it in minutes,
his eyes never leaving the horses.
On the way down, I took a photo of him
on the high overlook, crouched
on the tallest rock, facing the great wall
of the Sierra Nevada across the valley.
He told me he'd be leaving soon.
He was going to ride the trains south
to Arizona, run water to migrants crossing the border
for No Mas Muertes. I remember he was still so young,
but the full summer alone on the lines had
changed him. His eyes had grown keen, his voice
so determined, he'd become so decidedly him.
I studied his chapped lips, his crackled skin.
Like the trains he would catch,
he came into your life, unbidden,
a gift for a short time. For a few years after
I sent him poems, and he called me at
odd hours, and I told him he was loved. Today
I drove the Old Washoe Highway, stopped
to photograph a lone male horse across
a pristine white square of new snow.
I hummed something vaguely Irish. The wind
pressed my back, a leading edge like an icicle.
Ben was a body always moving, a mind so still.
I am not afraid of silence or long distances.
I am not always meant for wide open spaces.
As I write this, a train whistle beckons two miles south,
running along the Truckee. I wonder
if anyone now stands wind-drunk in the open
air, hands on cold graffiti metal, passing through
my sector of big sky. It’d be a shame to pass
through my home in the night. Tonight
I am afraid of open spaces. I am inside
enduring stillness. I am inside writing
wild horses, big sky, big sky.
Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet and writer from Reno, NV. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Red Ogre Review, Sky Island Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. She is an assistant editor for MEMEZINE. She recently moved to Massachusetts with her pug, Watson, and can't get over all the vivid green. Find her on Instagram as @hellostarbuck.
Bleah Patterson
20 years ago I wished on a shooting star that turned out to be dead bodies
“Seven astronauts died when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon
reentry on Feb. 1, 2003.” - npr.com
we’re saturdaying in that road–
tripped way and I, all childhood—before girlhood
had taken root--
am only skyward, am only looking into whatever
I can find that is vast maybe to get lost there, maybe
to feel awe and wonder before I am too old to find
awe and wonder in the earth
and it’s February but in January
I was turning eight and Mama was Mama, you know,
she wasn’t there and Grammie was trying
so hard to make sure I couldn’t tell
so we made seven wishes on seven of the eight candles
before we got a phone call and I
told Grammie every one because we don’t keep secrets
and in February I’m stuck between that blasting Texas heat--
the way it stretches out across the long, flatness
despite the early morning sun barely blinking above us--
and the rattling air conditioning and I
see a shooting star another
another make six wishes before
I’m confronted with the impossibility before I have the hands to carry
the possibility of impossibilities
they slip through my fingers and I am drenched in the disappointment of
it all
and on my birthday Mama
ends up in the hospital before the cake
has even been sliced was she coming to see me?
and there’s no beating heart
to answer me and I am allowed to pick whatever I want
from the hospital vending machine,
happy birthday, baby, Grammie is weak with worry
because Mama, fighting with Daddy again
smashed headlong into disappointment too
or a brick wall and she’s okay
or she’s going to be and I learn that I am okay too
or always will be so I make a seventh wish
falling stars grazing the sky to be okay
for everyone to be okay
one day
“Seven astronauts died when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon
reentry on Feb. 1, 2003.” - npr.com
we’re saturdaying in that road–
tripped way and I, all childhood—before girlhood
had taken root--
am only skyward, am only looking into whatever
I can find that is vast maybe to get lost there, maybe
to feel awe and wonder before I am too old to find
awe and wonder in the earth
and it’s February but in January
I was turning eight and Mama was Mama, you know,
she wasn’t there and Grammie was trying
so hard to make sure I couldn’t tell
so we made seven wishes on seven of the eight candles
before we got a phone call and I
told Grammie every one because we don’t keep secrets
and in February I’m stuck between that blasting Texas heat--
the way it stretches out across the long, flatness
despite the early morning sun barely blinking above us--
and the rattling air conditioning and I
see a shooting star another
another make six wishes before
I’m confronted with the impossibility before I have the hands to carry
the possibility of impossibilities
they slip through my fingers and I am drenched in the disappointment of
it all
and on my birthday Mama
ends up in the hospital before the cake
has even been sliced was she coming to see me?
and there’s no beating heart
to answer me and I am allowed to pick whatever I want
from the hospital vending machine,
happy birthday, baby, Grammie is weak with worry
because Mama, fighting with Daddy again
smashed headlong into disappointment too
or a brick wall and she’s okay
or she’s going to be and I learn that I am okay too
or always will be so I make a seventh wish
falling stars grazing the sky to be okay
for everyone to be okay
one day
Bleah (blay-uh) Patterson is a queer, southern poet born and raised in Texas. She has been a Pushcart and Best of Net nominee. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home and has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Electric Literature, Pinch, Write or Die, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, and Taco Bell Quarterly.
Purbasha Roy
Complex Tracks Of Silence
While you were leaving I discovered
the glass alphabets of your silence haloed
you. Strange but they seemed to be taken
from the day of childhood I stood speechless
see my ball go down the storm drain.
How losing also means unskilled. Last night
a train whistle woke me up from a dream I
felt seen. I believed it was you alongside.
And how it was still June. The river tender
in its ripples like a whole of body belonging
to itself without questions. A backdrop so
perfect, I desired citizen it in my psyche.
Silhouettes of joy filled themselves with
soft dapples. On them my hands chased
yours. The metaphorical sun-things as warm
as Kafka's letters. Those moments had so much
to give, I regretted, come out empty handed.
Although I saved every detail of the time we
spent. Except I never got hold of you. Like the
sky. Anyways, now that I am alone and confirmed
you are not to return like rain. In some other clouds.
At some other hour. Vocabularies of my body cringe
like feather in a wind sewing itself crossing a bridge.
A part of me is a wanderer now. In the time backwards.
Inexhaustible. Open. Inside that life we lived.
While you were leaving I discovered
the glass alphabets of your silence haloed
you. Strange but they seemed to be taken
from the day of childhood I stood speechless
see my ball go down the storm drain.
How losing also means unskilled. Last night
a train whistle woke me up from a dream I
felt seen. I believed it was you alongside.
And how it was still June. The river tender
in its ripples like a whole of body belonging
to itself without questions. A backdrop so
perfect, I desired citizen it in my psyche.
Silhouettes of joy filled themselves with
soft dapples. On them my hands chased
yours. The metaphorical sun-things as warm
as Kafka's letters. Those moments had so much
to give, I regretted, come out empty handed.
Although I saved every detail of the time we
spent. Except I never got hold of you. Like the
sky. Anyways, now that I am alone and confirmed
you are not to return like rain. In some other clouds.
At some other hour. Vocabularies of my body cringe
like feather in a wind sewing itself crossing a bridge.
A part of me is a wanderer now. In the time backwards.
Inexhaustible. Open. Inside that life we lived.
Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Margins, Reckoning Magazine as of late. Attained 2nd Position in 8th Singapore Poetry Contest. Best of the Net Nominee.
Phil Scruton
homeless physicist
make no mistake sir
stuff happens every day out here
though some days not much happens
that isn’t weather or infestation
violent squalls without warning
rust blooming on my silverware
I squint through a cracked lens
at a dream of rigor
so much harder in the rain
what should be without is for me within
drenching the tinder of curiosity
wind dies in the evening
sounds of day bugs and birds peter out
I’m driven to public screeching
by confounding events
the guild prescribes coffee reflection hypotheses
spirited conferral with beloved colleagues
may it please sir
observe my colleagues
thus extrication not discovery is the immutable imperative
situations alleged to involve me
nod yes for no
torch plausible rebuttal
insolence ensues I suppose
then tears I’m told
but even out here tomorrow is settled science sir
perhaps
I weep
with joy
make no mistake sir
stuff happens every day out here
though some days not much happens
that isn’t weather or infestation
violent squalls without warning
rust blooming on my silverware
I squint through a cracked lens
at a dream of rigor
so much harder in the rain
what should be without is for me within
drenching the tinder of curiosity
wind dies in the evening
sounds of day bugs and birds peter out
I’m driven to public screeching
by confounding events
the guild prescribes coffee reflection hypotheses
spirited conferral with beloved colleagues
may it please sir
observe my colleagues
thus extrication not discovery is the immutable imperative
situations alleged to involve me
nod yes for no
torch plausible rebuttal
insolence ensues I suppose
then tears I’m told
but even out here tomorrow is settled science sir
perhaps
I weep
with joy
Phil Scruton, a retired jazz musician (until a nice gig comes along) living in Boca Raton, is fascinated by the similarities between writing poetry and improvising in jazz. He can get around a flatted fifth all day but will rely on the SoFloPoJo editors to judge his poetic improvisations. He is originally from Indiana, like all great musicians.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Being Here
The gifts that arrive as if a UPS truck driver delivers each day something surprising, the way I take a sharp knife and slice open the taped box to see the present― what I didn’t know I’d love: the Wordle, turmeric, letterpress, golf, hiking, cinnamon, bicycling, cilantro, sculling. Can I tell you about sculling—feet Velcro-ed in a boat, two oars held and balancing on the touchable water, clouds on its surface, my breath like wind. The narrow boat gliding toward what I cannot see. And I am surrounded by river. Or golfing—the arc of a nine iron, my waist rotating, my eyes tied to the small ball and the club hitting it perfectly. Imagine that. Doing something perfectly. Not every time. The shredded carrot salad I am making most days― dressed with squeezed lemon, honey, Dijon, paprika, turmeric, oil, and chopped cilantro. And don’t get me started on hiking in autumn, leaves layered on the trail, the trees thinning into blue as I rise. And I am a saint. What I mean is the sun is a saint. It always returns. |
For you, Eve
Maybe after this, we take a break, let you exhale. How Eve is in everything even every level. Let's give you a trace of anonymity, let you walk out of the myth & browse the world, be easy in the sun as you skirt the shore, pull off the veil of blame & death, change your script a bit, apples for the taking. Let you conjure the womb you wished for. Let’s not ruin the girls with stories we cling to that divide our world again & again. Let's just love everyone, imagine each is a god. |
IVF
Oh, the wishes for my daughter
who is fluent in love and forgiveness
and deeply wants to be a mother.
Her life has become a series of tests
and syringes and doctor's visits,
unscheduled bus stops on the route
to motherhood. So many detours
in this new country. Words lost.
Other names for everything you know
and don’t know. I want a soothsayer
to say it will happen, some card
a tarot reader will turn over,
a genie to appear from the tiny lamp
I bought in Marrakesh.
My daughter wears my mother's ring,
a piece of someone she loved.
Mom, if you're out there somewhere
swaying in that wide glide of an eagle
I saw this afternoon as I sculled
on the river—Mom, can you make
this work for her? Or you,
bruised moon, with your power
of tides and curve of light,
please do what needs doing.
Oh, the wishes for my daughter
who is fluent in love and forgiveness
and deeply wants to be a mother.
Her life has become a series of tests
and syringes and doctor's visits,
unscheduled bus stops on the route
to motherhood. So many detours
in this new country. Words lost.
Other names for everything you know
and don’t know. I want a soothsayer
to say it will happen, some card
a tarot reader will turn over,
a genie to appear from the tiny lamp
I bought in Marrakesh.
My daughter wears my mother's ring,
a piece of someone she loved.
Mom, if you're out there somewhere
swaying in that wide glide of an eagle
I saw this afternoon as I sculled
on the river—Mom, can you make
this work for her? Or you,
bruised moon, with your power
of tides and curve of light,
please do what needs doing.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder carves in stone & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com
Travis Stephens
RUSTY SCREEN DOOR
when you come around
I have this feeling
when you come around
no screen door can stop me
hold me nightgown
night moth
night cool on my ankles
mosquito bit & itchy
scratch beard, you came
around & parked
your truck in my flower
bed
pillow punched in the face
your face
asleep at last
little boy
sleeping
a levee sprawled atop
the blankets
a fallen
scarecrow tin man
unafraid of the night
able to close his eyes
while the moon is watching
rustle
not owls but something
in the hedges
cool breeze on my neck
dirty feet
listen, you come around
for a reason &
it’s the same reason
why I stay
when you come around
I have this feeling
when you come around
no screen door can stop me
hold me nightgown
night moth
night cool on my ankles
mosquito bit & itchy
scratch beard, you came
around & parked
your truck in my flower
bed
pillow punched in the face
your face
asleep at last
little boy
sleeping
a levee sprawled atop
the blankets
a fallen
scarecrow tin man
unafraid of the night
able to close his eyes
while the moon is watching
rustle
not owls but something
in the hedges
cool breeze on my neck
dirty feet
listen, you come around
for a reason &
it’s the same reason
why I stay
Travis Stephens is a tugboat captain who lives and works with his family in California. His book of poetry, “skeeter bit & still drunk” was published by Finishing Line Press.
Amy Thatcher
The World is Dying, Valentine
The trees shush
and turn their heads.
Their distress, performative.
Like an unrepentant spouse,
I linger but don’t listen,
numb to the irreversible
damage I’ve done.
I nod to the passing couple
touring the arboretum,
arranging a bunch of heart-
shaped balloons before releasing
the threat of them
in a rare bird’s throat.
Extinction is the only kiss
that never ends.
The trees shush
and turn their heads.
Their distress, performative.
Like an unrepentant spouse,
I linger but don’t listen,
numb to the irreversible
damage I’ve done.
I nod to the passing couple
touring the arboretum,
arranging a bunch of heart-
shaped balloons before releasing
the threat of them
in a rare bird’s throat.
Extinction is the only kiss
that never ends.
Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian where she works as a public librarian.
Julie Marie Wade
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 21 volumes of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the newly released nonfiction novella, The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Her forthcoming collections include Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel, and Other People's Mothers (University Press of Florida, 2025). A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami.
|
Laura Grace Weldon
I Purple You
Recliner, grocery cart, baby stroller, shambles of splintered wood all shoved up against what was, until the flood, a bridge abutment. Already, brave bristling thistles rise around the rubble, one of the plant world’s first responders skilled at restoring starved soil. I watch over weeks as their delicate flowers begin to blossom atop sturdy stems. Today I see they have summoned one of our species’ first responders, an artist, who tagged on the bridge’s broken concrete swirling shapes around the giant words: I purple you. A Woman's Reach Should Exceed
My springform pan is on a high shelf in the Island of Misfit Objects cupboard along with cookie cutters, bundt pan, picnic wicker, metal ice cube trays, and a box of 100 plastic forks (eco crimes I’d never buy but saved when emptying my parent’s house because throwing them out compounds that crime). I can’t reach the pan but have a lifetime of height-challenged experience in pulling objects close enough to create a controlled fall. This nearly always drops what I need in my hand from store displays, office shelves, and barn lofts. It also causes bystander consternation which unduly pleases my puckish spirit. I can’t quite touch that springform pan so I scrabble, find a chopstick to inch the pan forward. It’s almost where I want it when the chopstick slips, swings sideways, smacks the box of forks which bursts open cascading a wave of plastic utensils over my head. I was never in danger but one fork stuck in my hair like a pitchfork in a hay bale. I laughed so hard I scared the dogs. |
Scream Closet
Hangers hold dozens of dresses. Shelves weighted by stacks of shirts, sweaters, and pants are heavy with what was or might be. The closet is deep, lined with what we can’t take when we go. These sleeves, those buttons, that belt wait to be worn, wait to enliven with our body’s swing and sway while they hold us. Conceal us. It’s quiet here, recesses behind and under so full it’s the safest place to hide. I call it the scream closet. Sometimes the children step in there with me. We close the door, invisible to each other, then we scream till we’ve made enough space in ourselves to open the door. |
Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books.
Margot Wizansky
PEARL
Every time I cook chicken and pigeon peas it takes me back
to Trinidad to the beat of steel drums, back to St. Joseph’s
in Port of Spain where Pearl, the Reverend’s cook,
wrote out her recipe for me, showed me how to start the chicken
in brown sugar and oil, gathered the ingredients,
climbed the big hill behind the house,
picked tomatoes and pigeon peas, shelled the peas, foraged in the yard
for wild culantro, chopped the saw-toothed blades, tomatoes and onions
and garlic on an old wooden table under the palms.
Pearl was younger than I and had two kids.
After a day at Maracas Beach, I presented her with a bucket
of chip-chips I’d found, multicolored tiny shellfish, maybe 300 of them.
I wish I had known she’d have to come in on her day off
to prepare chip-chip soup, scrub each one,
take a sharp knife to cut a nubbin of sea creature from each shell,
grate them, wash them, strain the sand from them.
I wish I had known it would take her all day
to deal with those worthless mini-clams
Trinidadians ignore on the shore.
Every time I cook chicken and pigeon peas it takes me back
to Trinidad to the beat of steel drums, back to St. Joseph’s
in Port of Spain where Pearl, the Reverend’s cook,
wrote out her recipe for me, showed me how to start the chicken
in brown sugar and oil, gathered the ingredients,
climbed the big hill behind the house,
picked tomatoes and pigeon peas, shelled the peas, foraged in the yard
for wild culantro, chopped the saw-toothed blades, tomatoes and onions
and garlic on an old wooden table under the palms.
Pearl was younger than I and had two kids.
After a day at Maracas Beach, I presented her with a bucket
of chip-chips I’d found, multicolored tiny shellfish, maybe 300 of them.
I wish I had known she’d have to come in on her day off
to prepare chip-chip soup, scrub each one,
take a sharp knife to cut a nubbin of sea creature from each shell,
grate them, wash them, strain the sand from them.
I wish I had known it would take her all day
to deal with those worthless mini-clams
Trinidadians ignore on the shore.
Margot Wizansky’s poems appear in many journals and anthologies. Margot won the Writers@Work fellowship, Salt Lake City, Dobler Prize, Isle of Innisfree, Ireland, edited several poetry anthologies. Her friend, Emerson Stamps, whose grandparents were enslaved, asked her to transcribe his memoir: Don’t Look Them In in The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow. Wild for Life, a chapbook, was published by Lily Poetry Review Press. The Yellow Sweater, a book of poems, was published by Kelsay Press, 2023, and Random Music in a Small Galaxy is forthcoming, 2025.