POETRY #25 - May 22

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POETRY

ISSUE 25 May 2022. Sixth-Year Anniversary

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

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

STELLA HAYES. RIMMA KRANET. GARI LIGHT. OKSANA STOMINA. LIYA CHERNYAKOVA . SONIA AGGARWAL SUSAN AIZENBERG ADRIENNE MARIE BARRIOS & LEE CHADWICK. GRACE BAUER . JACOB BLOOM. ANNETTE C. BOEHM. DUSTIN BROOKSHIRE. CHRISTOPHER BUTLER. AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY. DAVID CAPPS. SUDHANSHU CHOPRA. BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL. JAE EASON. ELISABETH ADWIN EDWARDS. JOSEPH FASANO. DINA FOLGIA. CHARLOTTE FOREMAN. JEN STEWART FUESTON. JOANNA FUHRMAN. RENOIR GAITHER. MALISA GARLIEB. LILYA GAZIOVA. ANDREY GRITSMAN. ANDREA HOLLANDER. PHILIP JASON. CHRISTEN NOEL KAUFFMAN. GUNILLA KESTER. SANDRA KOELANKIEWICZ. KOSS. SUSAN KRESS. ELLA LATHAM. ELIZABETH LOUDON. KURT LUCHS. MARIE-ELIZABETH MALI. DANIEL EDWARD MOORE. JESSICA PURDY. JONATHAN ROSE. ESTHER SADOFF. M.E. SILVERMAN. ALYSSANDRA TOBIN. MATT VEKAKIS. ELLEN JUNE WRIGHT.

POETS of Ukraine

Ukrainian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California and is a graduate student at NYU M.F.A in poetry. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Poetry Project’s The Recluse, The Lake, Prelude, Spillway, and is forthcoming from Stanford’s Mantis, and Poet Lore, among others. She is assistant fiction editor at Washington Square Review.
(Larchmont, NY)

In Loss’s Motion

You were like a feudal lord, hair back, sword drawn on
A shiny red bicycle, cutting the air into slashes. It was hardly enough,

The air would stop. Breathing hardly enough for half
A person. If I could breathe my first & last breath in you, I would!

You would siphon off electricity from the electric grid,
So that we could have what was left of enlightenment.

How our Russian vinyl records were heard from the turntable,
The one you would crank up in the afternoons, that drowned

Out the stew’s song simmering on low heat in the kitchen.
Laughter’s shaft of memory sounds out the nudity

Of winter. On drives to Kiev, I would count receding power lines
Connected to a nuclear power station in our newly-built

Town. Root vegetables grew with flourish in collective
Commercial fields, outside our apartment. Now, not sparing

Any air for myself, I would swallow fire wrapped
In fire for you. I’m not far — somewhere, Father,

You’re breaking up a fist fight or a universe, and I predict
You’ll break my heart in an uneven number.

Hand-Me Downs

I don’t remember being hung up on his things. After all like our things, they weren’t his — they were handed down. Furniture, clothes, all the spoons & forks of the world, having been dumped in our kitchen by a social worker from the Jewish Federation. They were hollow aluminum, lacking weight. They resembled us. & he was weightless. Like he was already outside us. Like he didn’t require beautiful cutlery. Charismatic, well-turned out, a handkerchief inside a coat pocket. Why would he need to look turned out — his body assuming zero gravity, as if in preparation. He didn’t want the whatever comes next. He was fine with the easy, the weighted, the weighed down world. The white plastic bag the nurse handed us with the clothes he wore that morning.

Root Cellar

Down you took me my hand gripping yours
Underlying a girl's abundant fears

You were a gentle person, leading me down
steps that smelled of a cement mixture innovated by the Romans

But of no use in this aging infrastructure of tract
Identical apartment buildings with damp root cellars

Storing jarred & pickled cucumbers
That would become half-sours & full-sours, tomatoes

With skins breaking, as you take it to the mouth
Carrots, beets & potatoes that would grow

Horns that we would cut off with a knife & eat
Too old. There were mushrooms

Foxlike, with orange-brown skins foraged in the local
Forest we would drive to in our Fiat made for the Soviet consumer

That brand new seemed second-hand. Crocodile
Green, with fabric seats, a radio & a stick shift that was too hard

To drive. Too physically demanding for someone
With a failed heart. The root cellar was divided

Into a multitude of parcels like the vineyards
Of the Côte d'Or. Neighbors sticking to an implied code of honor

Of never taking hold of the enervated vegetables. Of steering clear
Of what did not belong to the neighbor on each side.

You were one of them later.
In the beginning you were a thoroughbred, an amateur boxer

In the lightweight division. Fighting icicles cutting up
Snow. A tragedy frozen in time --

The refrigerator plant you managed sheltered a dream
Of leaving one day for good with us

One day landing into a happy ending,
A refrigerator full --

Of America,
Lined with large-scale manufactured foods.

Eggs, red-skinned onions, butter, milk
Lacking you father, to show me my way.

Rimma Kranet is a Ukrainian-American writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from University of California Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Construction Lit, Coal Hill Review, EcoTheo Collective,The Common Breath, Drunk Monkey, Door Is A Jar, Jewish Fiction net, and in The Short Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices. She resides between Florence, Italy and Los Angeles, California.

What to Do In Case of War

I was told what to do during a phone call from Dnepropetrovsk.
It was Friday night.
Tell them to stay off the main roads. There is a lot of artillery fire still.
The soldiers at the checkpoints are very jumpy, nervous.
Do not use video equipment or make any sudden moves.
Make sure they put their passports in a plastic Ziplock bag on top of the dash, in plain sight.
They will be asked to open their trunk and where they are going.
The men will be asked to step out of the car, but not until they reach the border.
Do not overload the car.
What car are they driving, how much milage does it have, do they have enough gas, how many
people are travelling, what are their ages, what direction are they headed, what route are they
taking, did they map out the trip with caution to avoid the roads destroyed by the bombing. The
bridges, did they take into consideration the bridges?
Wear thermal clothing. Make sure they have a pocket full of plastic bags. If they have to get out of the car
and walk, they need to wrap those around their shoes for warmth.
Make sure they have a backpack in case they need to leave the car behind.
Bring protein bars and peanuts. No hard-boiled eggs or kotleti. Do not bring food that takes up
space.
Tell your loved ones.

Skin on Skin

Lying inert, only your eyelids open and close like a lizard’s. Your face gone the color of mayonnaise, back pressed against the walnut of the hardwood floor, blood seeping between the glossy planks and slowly thickening like cranberry jelly.
All that blood.
Your hands are cold from lack of circulation, a fear instilled by your body’s revolt.
The sharp edge, the crack in your balding skull, blood licking the base of the column in disobedient waves.
Stop. Stop. I whisper, but my will has no power here.
“Stay with me...stay with me...” I say like they do on tv.
Only I mean it.
Stay. With. Me.
Eyesight goes blurry, breathing goess steep.
I press rags against your wound as I slip out of myself, inhaling through my mouth, gulping from
a mug full of air.
They say it’s shock, but I feel remorse for wanting something other than what I have.
For taking it all too lightly.

Gari Light (Chicago, IL) was born in 1967, in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Has been living in the United States since 1980. His several books of poetry were published in Russian in U.S. and Ukraine, starting in 1992. Since 1993, Gari's poetry is published regularly in the literary journals and poetry anthologies of the United States, Canada, Israel, Europe and Ukraine. He is a member of the American PEN Center and the Writer's Union of Ukraine. Gari’s most recent poetry book in Russian, entitled The Return Trajectories has been published simultaneously in the U.S. and Ukraine in 2017. It was awarded the Ukrainian Writers Union's Literary Prize for the best collection of original poetry published that year. His English language poetry book entitled Confluences appeared both in U.S. and in Ukraine (Bagriy, 2020, Kayalya, 2020). Gari is regularly published in literary magazines and takes part in poetry readings on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA with Honors in Slavic Studies and Literatures (1989). He became a lawyer some short time after, and is working in the area of international jurisprudence, both in the U.S, and abroad.

***

The whole world loves Ukraine which is being murdered
in righteous repentance, feelings of guilt and such other feelings,
but with an eternal smile, sailors, defenders of Zmeiny island,
will not hear that world, having been torn by artillery rounds to pieces...

A violinist girl joins the Civil Defense of Kyiv,
she sort of believes in God, but not so much in saints,
icons tremble from explosions in thousand years old Cathedral of Saint Sophia
and the naked, exposed, wide-open Ukrainian sky is crying...
Special forces from Kropyvnytskyi region don’t count on being lucky,
but on behalf of wounded Kharkiv, and for the burning of “Mriya”,
they kill point-blank the Russian horde which entered suburban Bucha,
thus covering, simply the best they can, the ancient capital city of Kyiv.

In Chernihiv, a nurse bandages the wounds of a POW Russian,
she will curse what he did in Ukraine later, through her eyes of Judith,
but not now, when he is crying and whispers words about his mother,
the plot thickens as if in the ancient Greek myth, or even biblical stories
In Irpin, only a kitten got out of a burning apartment building,
she is being held and warmed inside an Israeli volunteer’s parka,
after all, he is lucky for cats, counting back to his childhood in Odessa,
he has his own two cats in Haifa, holding this one he’s just silently praying...
All of this is transpiring now, as clock in the spring move forward,
my friends, who are poets and soldiers walk into internal explosions…
Americans and Europeans love Ukraine on TV, while it is being murdered,
enough of that love, already! The Ukrainian sky needs to be closed to non-humans ...
It might soon be too late, and there won’t be another Ukraine in this world of ours.
March, 2022

August. Morning. The Current War.

August. Morning. The Current War

The Army captain was dying
in a vivid sunflower field in Ukraine.
From that morning there remained
just a third of the battery charge in his phone,
and some lingering minutes of credit.
It was clear to the captain:
There will be no mercy to anyone captured,
as there would be no welcoming music,
to whoever escaped this calamity whole and alive,
as the price of a life was declining abruptly.
All night long, after a bloody and desperate day,
he led a diminishing platoon of young soldiers-survivors
through the fields and ravines under heavy artillery rounds
as the Russians,
abundant in their ammunition reserves kept it coming,
distributing death in measured proportions…
It appeared that the air was burning
as were all the sharpened remnants of the officer’s oath…
In the morning, a Russian sharpshooter picked out
the rest of the most inexperienced fighters
from the captain’s platoon,
while wounding the captain, denying him use of his legs,
which he covered in soil.

As the captain observed, the enemy was closing in,
getting out through shallow ravines was no longer an option.
He took out his old but reliable Nokia phone
and attempted to dial a number in Kyiv,
at home, on the left bank of the Dnipro river,
his wife answered in jubilant voice:
Dear, finally! We were so worried,
the nightmares we see are so awful,
you really should try and call more often,
you are exhausting us with all these worries,,,
As his daughter, a student accepted to study abroad,
then grabbed the phone and demanded:
come home soon daddy, we really really miss you…
He envisioned them both in the kitchen,
Watching the dubbed American sitcoms on the Soviet era TV,
while the captain—in and out of consciousness, smiled and spoke:
Girls, I love you so much!
What’s with those pesky felines of ours—the carpet destroyers?
How are things with the “Dinamo Kyiv”,
are they playing good soccer, are they on the ball,
as the season is rolling?...

A battered, bullet-ridden Ukrainian army emergency ambulance
somehow got through the encirclement,
and suddenly appeared from out of nowhere,
as the nurse and the doctor tried to get the captain inside…
The Russian tanks were fast approaching from the side of the ravine…
The ringing…It was either a church bell or a concussion...
The captain could not really tell.
The paratroopers who followed the tanks shot the nurse dead right away…
They were hesitating as to what to do with the doctor,
when one of the Russian officers appeared to have recognized him--
they were in the same Soviet unit serving in Afghanistan in the 80’s…
Thus, August of 2014 burned over Ukraine… The captain was dying.
It would forever remain unclear whether
there was reproach in the eyes of the captain.
As lingering as that burning August air is the rhetorical question:
Who will be burdened with all the forgiving to be done?..
In accordance with the unspoken terms of the criminal elite,
or conceivably through the guidance of the Scriptures
or perhaps the concepts of the Qur'an?..

* * *

The odds are there to beat…
— Leonard Cohen

A brighter ray of sharp perceptions comes to life--
comes from within, it’s pondering and subtle
such imperfection of the clouds feeds all strife,
subconscious childhood resurfaces to stutter…
The year before Prague witnessed Russian tanks,
apparent spring succumbed to winter’s echo,
our parents braved the cold (so many thanks!).
And we appeared to fill the void of murdered brethren…
First memory brought forth the Babiy Yar
from those ravines, I seek the answers even now
my phantom burns from bullet holes don’t get me very far,
the pain excruciating, as I bow…
Our genetic burden overall,
is of the sort one wouldn’t wish as wind on willows,
don’t even notice petty theft at all,
as our thoughts are on the march to Salaspils.
Not much has changed, equator measures still,
yet a brighter ray will always pierce the cloud cover
Who had forgiven, perpetrators, victims will…
Deadlock in rhetoric—there’s nothing to discover.
Yet we appeared—the odds were there to beat,
our core peculiar, on verge of constant tearing
We won’t give up the corner of our street,
Despite attempts of present Goebbels, Hess or Goering

Oksana Stomina (Mariupol, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian poet, activist, volunteer, and community leader from Mariupol. She is the author of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction books in Russian and Ukrainian: The Ties that Bind: Wartime Diaries, About Living, Walking with Marik, The Incredible Journey with Marik and Marichka, and Unintended poems. Her poems were finalists and won in the following competitions: Luzharsk Midnight, Pushkin Fall in Odessa, Pushkin in Great Britain, Immigrant Lyre, and Parnas. She was named winner of poetry festivals: Slavic Traditions, New Age, New Fairy Tales. Winner of poetry competitions: Writers for Young Adults (Ukrainian writers Guild) and “such things never repeat” (International Writers Guild). She won a poetry award in honor of Yuri Kaplan and a Slavic Traditions Literary award. Her poetry has been translated to German, English, and Lithuanian. Initiator and co-founder of numerous literary, community, and charity projects. She lives in Mariupol.

Silence

In the beginning was the Word…
Gospel of John

As was reported by crisis center “The defense of Mariupol” starting Sunday and until today not a single shelling stated in sector “M” – for the fourth day straight the ceasefire is being observed
From the press releases 2.09.2015

And once again the rumor spreads and mounts.
But who’d trust rumors when our case so dire…
For four nights, straight, they’re holding cease of fire,
But I’m afraid to say it out loud.

And peeking out from my hiding hole
To bigger world, unsure timid mouse,
I listen to the lull of musical pause,
Admiring how it’s skillfully performed.

I recently have learned to not rely on,
Try not to scare away it accidentally,
But silence thunders, harsh as heavy metal,
And echoes to the very fear of mine.

I’m waiting. I’m afraid it’s not for real,
Meticulously search for tunes that’s off-key.
But silence sounds so strange and lofty,
Such endless, that it brings my soul to tears.

We gradually, slowly getting used to it,
Including me, my house and my back yard.
We’re all aware: the first will be the word
The word here has the final say. As usual.

translated by Liya Chermyakova

Liya Chernyakova, (Milwaukee, WI) a Ukrainian-American poet and songwriter, was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Several of her Russian-language poetry collections have been published in the U.S. and Ukraine. She is a winner of poetry festivals: The Road to Temple, Parnas Games, God Saves Everything Especially Words, World Cup in Russian Poetry, among others. She took part in the Parnas Games festival as an independent juror and was a featured poet in The Horseshoe of Pegasus festival in Vinnica, Ukraine. She has translated Russian-language war poems of Ukrainian Poets. Her English poems have been featured in several almanacs. Liya holds a master’s in physics, math, and computer science.

Spring of wars

“...But silence thunders, harsh as heavy metal…”
Oksana Stomina

Those manuscripts ashes are knocking doors
Like a newborn phoenix with broken wings
Is it gonna be a drama, it’s gonna be a war?
Will they ever let in this bold shaved spring?
Will they cover her head with the needles of grass,
Ones, that tear her flesh into bird trill syncopes?
Will the leftover fabric of feverish sky blues
Be enough to carve out a few timid crocuses?
It will not crack the ice, will not rattle the tin
Bagging on the streets with panhandled sun gold --
Traitor silence is staking the off-key tunes
Into frozen breath of the marching souls.
But filling her palm with the fresh morning smile,
I just keep repeating with hope so desperate:
“They will not get drawn in blood — they will rise:
Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odessa.”

There is only you

When time is leaking through the looking glass,
When every cricket hero sings “Alas”,
There is no second chance, no second glance
Allowed,
When sun is shrunk, retracting every beam,
The trees stand naked with their branches trimmed
The linings are not silver - dull and grim -
In clouds,
When old phantoms are rising from the dust,
Entrapping you in their macabre dance,
No eyes to smile, No hand to trust,
No path to follow,
When words are silenced by the tons of gold,
And no sound penetrates the wall,
There is only you to save disjoint world
From falling.

Poets of rUSSIA

Liliya Gazizova (Rfeseri, Turkey) is a Russian poet of Tatar origin. She was born in Kazan, Russia, graduated from the Kazan Medical Institute and Moscow M. Gorky's Literature Institute (1996). Member of the International Pen Club (PEN-Moscow). Executive Secretary of the international magazine Interpoetzia (New-York). Gazizova is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry, published in Russia, Europe and USA. She compiled the anthology Contemporary Russian Free Verse (Moscow, 2021). Gazizova's poems were translated into several European languages and published in number of anthologies. Currently she teaches Russian literature at Erciyes University (Rfeseri, Turkey).

The lonely cigarette

Third table on the right
at the Lobachevski coffeehouse.
The lonely cigarette is smoking on the table,
left by someone,
it sadly curls above the table…on the ashtray…
Where was he rushing, this person who didn’t extinguish it?
Why didn’t he finish it?
Why did he leave everything in this world—
but sometimes cigarette is everything in the world—
Why did he leave it in order to be in the other place?
I hope that he was not run over by a car,
that he managed to reach
his love,
the sunrise,
the miracle.
Stream of smoke,
never entered the lungs,
disappeared in the air forever.

Translated from Russian by Andrey Grıtsman

Одинкая сигарета

В кофейне на Лобачевского
На третьем столике справа
Дымится сигарета,
Оставленная в пепельнице.

Куда спешил человек,
Что не дотушил ее?
Почему не докурил?
Почему бросил все на свете –
А иногда сигарета и есть все на свете, –
Чтобы оказаться в ином месте?

Я думаю, он не попал под машину
И успел добежать
До любви,
До рассвета
До чуда…

Струйка дыма,
Не втянутая в легкие,
Тоскливо вьется над столом.

A lighthouse keeper

I’ll be a lighthouse keeper
No, better his wife.
I'd rise at dawn
And cook him a simple meal.
I'll watch him eat
Silently and unhurriedly.
I will come to him in the afternoon
With a thermos of hot coffee.
I'll watch him drink it
Peering into the horizon.
I will notice how the color of his eyes changes
Depending on his mood
Or time of day.
I will know little about him
And I will not seek to learn more.
In the evening I will fall asleep alone
Not waiting for him.
I will dream about ships
Taking me away
From that damn lighthouse ...
I will get up at dawn

Translated from Russian by Andrey Grıtsman

Смотрительница маяка

Буду смотрительницей маяка,
Нет, лучше женой смотрителя маяка.
Буду вставать на рассвете
И готовить ему простую еду.
Буду смотреть, как он ест,
Молча и неторопливо.
Буду приходить к нему днём
С термосом горячего кофе.
Буду смотреть, как он пьёт его,
Вглядываясь в горизонт.
Буду замечать, как меняется цвет его глаз
В зависимости от его настроения
Или времени суток.
Буду мало знать про него
И не буду стремиться узнать больше.
Вечером буду засыпать в одиночестве,
Не дождавшись его.
Буду видеть сны о кораблях,
Уносящих меня прочь
От чертова маяка...
Буду вставать на рассвете.

Andrey Gritsman New York, NY. A native of Moscow, Andrey emigrated to the United States in 1981. He is a physician, poet and essayist. Gritsman has published 10 volumes of poetry and prose in Russian and six in English. He received the 2009 Pushcart Prize, Honorable Mention XXIII and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. His poems, essays, and short stories in English have appeared and forthcoming in over 90 literary journals, including Nimrod International Journal, Cimarron Review, Notre Dame Review. His work has also been anthologized. Andrey received MFA in poetry from Vermont College and runs the Intercultural Poetry Series in New York City.

Siege of Moscow

General Guderian touched his mustache,
fixed his binoculars on his trench coat.
Noticed the first snowflake over the burned-out field.
This is the beginning of the end, thought the general.
A shell flew over to the invisible target.
The general unfolded a large-scale plan:
Alexandrov, Vyazma, Chimki, Moscow.
Cold rains, winter is close.
Deadly, large fishes float slowly in the sky.
Everything is frozen: field, forest, lake.
And on the old photos Guderian himself is frozen in dead calm.
The sky is graying; winter is closer.
Snowflakes descend slowly on the wasteland--
as blind agents
from the near and faraway
renamed lands.

Translated from Russian by the author.

Moscow Walk

There is nothing left.
Still flows snowfall of the poplar fur.
A couple of watering holes.
The tram’s end station beyond the city line.
Soccer dust in overgrown courtyards.
What else? Thank God it’s still there.
Then who’ll understand, who’ll remember, who’ll turn sad?
Childhood, youth sailed away.
A dovecote burned down, broken memory thread.
And the cold scales cover the dead plastic of the Fourth Rome.
Nothing’s left,
And who will grasp--
this white city is covered with the tight net
of the security watch.
Still, my free memory walks along
Moscow Boulevard Ring.
But the dark raven follows me, unnoticed
in the twilight.

Translated from Russian by the author

Boat

There is a wooden shed by the Moscow Presnya subway station,
a Georgian eatery where my friend is served
the best dumplings. He is in the back room next to the dusty ficus
by the kitchen door.
This used to be a local community club
where Brezhnev’s portrait hung on a dilapidated wall.

My friend downs a shot of vodka, topped by sparkling water,
wolfs down stuff on his plate,
but thoughtfully. He remembers the misty Hudson,
us together on the Circle Line, passing
through summer, by piers and parks,
by a restricted area,
listening to the Indian song of Canadian winds.

I am sitting at the river café, having
penne arrabiatta, drinking Valpolichella,
looking at the same boat
that is heading toward our meeting point,
always there.

Dust floats from the Metro-North tracks.
Here you can get real close to the river.
On the opposite side is the Park Police Headquarters.

It’s nobody’s business how we throw our words, and they fly away
on northerly winds.
That’s how poems are. This is our meter.

So from a distance we are both looking at the boat,
into our plates, at the sky;
I look at my Caesar salad, my friend at his dumplings.

Manhattan floats to Canada as the Flying Dutchman
to our meeting point,

God knows where,
where our words freeze in flight,

lit by unreachable light
in the boundless, echoing, Arctic space.
We are not there yet,
since our words are
still flying.

Translated from Russian by the author.

Poetry

Sonia Aggarwal Boston, MA

Matar mala--

I make my mother say it again
and again as she pulls
the black string close
to her neck. The gold
beads hover around her,
sitting on the rising
of her perfume.

I want to remember
how it sounds--
soft and round, something to catch
between the teeth and roll
to the tip of the tongue.
Matar mala--

string of peas.
What a fitting name
for such a soft gold.
The metal, I think,
must be so malleable
that even the slightest
brush of skin
could mold
it again.

Sometimes,
we mold it too much
and it becomes less
matar and more mala.
It sounds thin and coils
in the throat, trickling
out of the mouth
too slow. The string losing

its peas. My mom stops
singing, gives me the prayer
plate, and folds the lining
of her chunni like a tissue.
I wonder which of her past
selves she prays for
this time.

Some days
we don’t catch it
between our teeth,
we swallow our gold
until it overflows.

Sonia Aggarwal is a Boston based writer, currently pursuing her MFA at Emerson College. She is interested in cultural and personal histories, and the moments in which the two intersect. Her work has appeared in Common Ground Review and SWIMM.

Susan Aizenberg

The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes
--brothers Grimm

Locked in every night
by their father, they escaped.
They dressed in silence,
*
in the dark, no sound
except the rustle of silks,
a single bright knock
*
against the trick bed,
its slow sinking as the door
opened and they passed
*
through it, going down
and down and down, as they
do in the Brothers Grimm,
*
to a shadow ball
beneath their palace, a world
beneath their dull world.
*
Each night the same tale
of descent and release,
twelve virgins escaping
*
the nursery, dull days
of French tutors and corsets,
off-key scales, and naps,
*
for secret forests,
a hidden boulevard lined
with gold-leafed trees, boats
*
shaped like swans, in them
twelve handsome princes waiting
to row them across
*
a lake so clear each
fish was wholly visible,
a starlit palace
*
where they danced beneath
hyaline light until dawn,
the slow return home.
*
What I dreamed wasn’t
the palace or the lovely
and spellbound princes.
*
I wanted the heat
of their dancing, the music,
to know those wild hours
*
beguiling the nights
as if morning, its good-girl
rules and dailiness,
*
might never arrive.
I wanted my shoes worn through,
cool floor on bare skin.

Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection, A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems, is forthcoming in 2024 in the University of New Mexico Press’s Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Plume, North American Review, Cultural Daily, Summerset Review, American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.

Adrienne Marie Barrios & Leigh Chadwick

Adrienne Barrios and Leigh Chadwick Decide to Write a Poem About Domesticity

On a Sunday in a month of Sundays, after spending a month of Saturdays watching HGTV,
Leigh Chadwick drinks three mimosas at brunch and then builds a house out of popsicle sticks
and horses. Inside the house, Adrienne Barrios tries on dresses that look like jazz clubs and
martini glasses. She tries on a dress that feels like depression pretending to be lust. She picks a
dress that makes her think of other dresses. Outside, Leigh Chadwick is outside. The inside of
her head is damp. It matches her cheeks. They glisten, and Adrienne Barrios thinks Leigh
Chadwick is the sun. Leigh Chadwick doesn’t disagree. The sun shrugs. Leigh Chadwick
remembers the sun before this one, and the one before that. It was a pretty good sun. Adrienne
Barrios fills the house built out of popsicle sticks and glue with smaller houses made out of
smaller popsicle sticks and miniature horses. The sun says it could fry an egg on pavement if it
wanted. Leigh Chadwick doesn’t disagree. Adrienne Barrios looks at her house holding the
smaller houses. The heat begins to melt the glue. The popsicle sticks crack. The houses sway.

Adrienne Marie Barrios is the editor-in-chief of Reservoir Road Literary Review and CLOVES Literary
and author of the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Leigh Chadwick.
Her work has appeared in trampset, Passages North, Sledgehammer Lit, and X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, among others.
She edits award-winning novels and short stories. Find her online at adriennemariebarrios.com.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the poetry collection Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and the collaborative
poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Adrienne Marie Barrios. Her poetry has appeared
in Salamander, Passages North, The Indianapolis Review, and Hobart, among others. She is a regular contributor at Olney Magazine,
where she conducts the "Mediocre Conversations" interview series. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

Grace Bauer Lincoln, NE

Land Line Resurrection

Call from: Bauer. Frank.
my answering machine announces
in that familiar robotic female voice
I count on to screen out strangers,
though I know it must be my mother
or brother who has dialed from the number
still listed as my father’s account.

I know it won’t be him on the line
when I pick up, asking about the weather
or my car—his go-to topics—and I won’t get
to ask (as I did each day those last few months)
what he has eaten, if he has showered, if he has
managed to make it down the stairs.

I listen to the insistent mantra of his name
repeated like a promise I know this world
can no longer keep, then lift the receiver from its cradle
and mouth my cheerful hello, happy there are still
some among the living who will ring me up
just to hear my voice lie and say I’m fine.

Grace Bauer is the author of six books of poetry--most recently, Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska/Backwaters Press, 2021). She also co-edited the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Jacob Bloom San Francisco Bay area

Jacob Bloom is a college student from the San Francisco Bay Area.

House

I’ve lived my whole life here.
Years accrued like the thumbtacks,
candy wrappers, nickels, receipts
that gather in the drawers.

My cousins, when they visit tell me,
your house has a scent,
not a bad scent, just
your house’s scent. But I can’t smell it—
funny how you can’t smell
yourself, your own

house that neither gathers nor evaporates the
years, that neither possesses nor
cleanses itself of the blue sheen of the
TV, the blue shimmering of
faces behind bedroom doors, the family
whose laughter for a brief moment
brims the walls,

the family whose other lives
ooze from the ceilings and
sprout like potatoes in a musky cabinet, the
family whose shoulders
turn
as they lay down their heads
each night and
glance,
blush at the
same faces that
are not here, the same
faces that surely live
somewhere nicer:

somewhere in a house overlooking the sea,
somewhere where honeysuckles
bloom in the garden, where
parakeets fill the Eucalyptus,
a house with cherrywood floors,
a house where, when she sits on the
deck, she feels the warmth of the hand she
loves resting on her knee; as if
maybe that could change everything.

Annette C. Boehm Germany

Still (Susan Storm Richards, the Invisible Woman)

When little Franklin arrived, I worried; still,
he looked normal: two arms, two legs, two eyes

— miraculous after all this radiation. But I didn’t want
a child, I wanted children. Don’t ask how many I have.

In one universe: One daughter, slippery and blue with fins,
scales, and gills, darting through underwater towns,

in another, she’s chubby pink and backwards-baseball-capped,
a parallel-universe genius smarter than MIT.

Before them, a daughter born small, complete,
but absolutely still and gray.

And now, this squirming, spitting, crying girl thing
that is, and isn’t, my husband’s. He knows as much

or as little as I — we talk, sometimes, about these things.
Still, he can’t bring himself to ask how it feels.

I’m a purse, emptied and refilled with objects
familiar, but not quite right: someone else’s

chapstick, the plastic ballpoint from some obscure motel,
a library card for who-knows-where, the wrong brand

of mints — They’re still mints, I tell myself, and she
latches on to my breast, urgent, a perfect fit.

Annette C. Boehm is the author of The Apidictor Tapes (forthcoming Feb. 2022) and The Knowledge Weapon. A queer writer from Germany, she serves as a poetry reader for Memorious and has authored two intertextual chapbooks available from Dancing Girl Press. Website: annettecboehm.wordpress.com

Dustin Brookshire Wilton Manors, FL

This poem is part of a tribute chapbook to Denise Duhamel and her book KINKY, which turns 25 this year.

Limited Edition Good Bones Barbie

after Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”

Life isn’t short when you’re plastic.
It takes a thousand years to decompose.
Mattel tells Barbie:
Think of all the delicious ways you’ll live,
collecting centuries like charms on a bracelet.
Mattel keeps the truth from Barbie:
For every Barbie that is loved,
kept safe, and passed down
generation to generation
there is a Barbie that’ll be melted
on a stove top, decapitated
by an older brother,
mauled by the family dog,
or forgotten on a playground.
Like any business seeking profit,
Mattel says what is needed
to keep the Barbie smile,
smiling:
You famous,
a name more recognizable
than Cher, Oprah, or Madonna.
Millions of little girls want to be you.
They’ll grow up to be women
who keep you on a shelf,
a shrine for all to see,
a deity worship.
Mattel never discloses,
even those people,
will sell Barbie on eBay
if the price is right.

Dustin Brookshire is the curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series and founding editor of Limp Wrist. He is the author of two chapbooks-- Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me  (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Visit Dustin online at www.dustinbrookshire.com.

Christopher Butler Canada

Scriptures & Stoicism

I was ready to go full Nat Turner with the pitchfork.
Holster filled with the spirit of the revolution,
The venom you spewed is foolish. Ruthless.
You’re lucky. I was raised Christian. Blessed hands
Christened me to forgive your inflictions. Yeah, you’re lucky.
Faith holds me back from the art of actin’ stupid. I was taught
by scriptures that were delivered... Spiritual sonnets
told me, every wrongdoer knows not what they are doing.
The Stoic songs sung by Seneca mixed with my Pan Afrikanism
kept me cool, too. The Kwame Ture in me knows,
if I blow—a gasket, I'll be beat down by the law. Locked up.
Or completely fucked. Tucked in a casket.
When the volcano explodes it erupts on the Black rock,
& when the lava spills like waterfalls—it never stops.

Chris L. Butler is a Black American and Dutch poet-essayist from Philadelphia and Houston, living in Canada. He is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Sacrilegious (Fahmidan Publishing & Co, 2021). In 2021 he won the Kurt Brown Fellowship for Diverse Voices at the Solstice MFA Program in Massachusetts. His work can be read in Culture Days Canada, APIARY Mag, Afros in Tha City, The Canadian Journal of Poetry & Contemporary Writing, HAD, Trampset, Flypaper Lit, Perhappened Mag, and more.

Akhim Yuseff Cabey Columbus, OH

Dear Djellaba

if only I could’ve figured the math
like carnival men weight sussed out

with the legerdemain of wizards
the dizzying line between numerator

and denominator
like I had the thin one between sea and sky,
they would’ve accepted me

to the school on the cover of that brochure,
where gargoyles guarded entrances of three-story
dormitories—ones that rivaled
the gothic-style tenements
of my birth—
just for white boys:

a glossy quartet of them on page two:
crisp button-downs plus blazers, plus vests

adorned with century-old crests beneath
breast pockets.
I dragged a licked thumb

across their faces to give them edge and depth
with my saliva, to further the truth,
you need one like me.

with my mother’s craft knife
I cut out each stitched insignia
and sewed them
needle and thread to the dinner jacket

borrowed from the boy down the hall my size
who nodded and understood.

I renounced before him
the droning sizzle and odor of fried chicken
plus hot-combed burnt hair
plus no more fucking

reverse layups high off the glass. I am a long
loose stitch held temporarily in place,
I told the woman
at the interview. if left here raw, I might fray.

but they went in another direction
because I hadn’t shot-up enough
algebraic slope—hadn’t inhaled enough

numbers to the higher power. in the future
one needs only to be poor to attend

a private college where I dressed everyday
like I was going to the club
and crossed my legs like a politician.

junior year in the Sahara,
an old Berber man told me my name
was wrong then scripted it correctly
in Arabic

in the sand as the sun rose over dunes
tall as houses—and finally I was able
to weep for something
less than myself.

in Fez the next day, I walked with classmates
through tannery souks—mint branches
held to our noses to subdue
the odor of hides soaking in stone vats

then laid out in a courtyard of earth
to dry in similar sun that indicted my skin
with each hour.
I wonder now

of everyone I meet, of all I see how
good is their math how ripped
their hearts—like the tongueless girl later
in the medina--

face encased in an elegant chador--
who took three months
on purpose to sew a rug

with needle and thread. I found you
hanging in a small shop
amid a buffet of exotic
fabrics and cloths—the room thick with heat

honed for the purpose of commerce.
you fit like a gown muted the chic
dress shirt plus tweed belt
holding up my slacks—plus

reduced my french cut boots to the saltless
design of slippers to the eye.

for two split seconds first multiplied
then divided by four

I spent mornings strolling cloaked
to the mosque, and nights on the veranda
drinking mint tea
and reciting my name correctly--

guttural homages
from the back of the throat.
I think there was a wife, children clad
like their monk of a father.

isn’t it our desire
to numb time, to limit the belligerence

of the imagination—and not blood--
that corrals us all congruent
under the roof of this universe?

back on campus,
the desert wore off and I buried you
at the bottom of my dorm room closet

because there was no sex in stoicism--
no lick-lipped invitations lined
in the creases of modesty.

I was meant to cut my face into pieces,
hand the shards out to be pinned to corkboards
or saved under fingerprint
within the digital infinity of cell phones.

I have suffocated so often
mechanisms of memory, your disposal
feels like a tangible fiction:

I must’ve just said fuck it and thrown you
away like a dead body
to rot plus decay—plus, then, to unravel
amid a landfill

whose mounds of refuse
I sometimes stand in the shadow of
counting on my fingers and toes
how long a life it takes
to unstitch hems of shame.

BIO: A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Salamander, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, The Sun Magazine, Puerto Del Sol, the Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. A six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, he is originally from the Bronx, NY and now lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he advocates for the relationship between mental health and bodybuilding. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet.

David Capps New Haven, CT

Ophelia’s Dress

There were things no longer necessary
in the rush of April breeze:

fine china, the delicate blue dinner plates
hung over the mantel,

whether or not we heard the punchline
of the same tired joke,

whether blouses were starched enough,
clothes-pinned by mother

in April before the storm shook the house,
loosening already

unthreading buttons in a way that time
only dreamt of.

What time is we don’t really see, though
soon it stands before us

glaring like a ghost we don’t say, a problem
casually expressed

to sidewalk worms, in intersectional norms,
strands of the storm’s

fierce conviction. Empathy has no limit.
Not one of theory, anyway.

Ophelia drowns with her dress billowing
as Shakespeare leans back,

quill spilling over, his flower turned inside
out, her smoky plume pulled

down into a lake impossibly placid. Ophelia’s
thumb hooks into its hem

as a memory tries to latch onto something
more concrete. As if I have lived

my whole life and said nothing, though there
was nothing left to say.

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of three chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), and Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020).

Sudhanshu Chopra India

Cimmerian
The famous actor would never arrive
on time to deliver his one-man tragedy.

He had no idea of the props that were
appropriate for the show. He pilfered

the occasional objet d’art from the thrift
store on his way to the theatre. His stage

was brightened by a sole spotlight whose
beam never moved, even though his dis-

-oriented body would keep falling – into
the surrounding darkness—out of the cast

golden patch, causing his oeuvre to alternate
between light & dark, like a chessboard.

With one arm he flapped like a bird; with
the other, swam like a fish. The chequered

mystery kept the audience nailed to their
seats. One day when he couldn’t steal

from the thrift store (because it had gone
bankrupt) he brought his wife & kids along.

The whole family after forming a smart
row along the illuminated circle’s diameter,

began to flutter like a country’s flag caught
in the wind, before finally stumbling out of

the lit view. The crowd, expecting a rather
clever improvisation, at first, waited for the

artists to reappear for days. They put their
wrist watches to their ears—still ticking,

but not a word was heard from the stage.
Rubbing their faces with the back of their

fists all they could perceive was a multi-
-course, blood-related meal belched down

luminescence’s black, obscure opposite.

Sudhanshu Chopra is a poet, wordsmith and pun-enthusiast. 31 and rootless, he is fascinated by nature and frustrated by its incomprehension. He wishes we had evolved better or not at all. It is the midway that causes Catch-22 situations, which are quite troubling, mentally and otherwise. He tweets at @artofdying.

Barbara Westwood Diehl Baltimore, MD

Gift Shop

In the spinning rack of Gift Shop, each postcard wants you to
remember that it was possible to leave the tedium of your life.
Briefly. To leave the revolving door of your nights and days
and step outside. Each postcard reminds you of the day that
the sun, finally, shone. When you could, at last, see the view
from your room at the lodge, and not the fog that hung in the
air like a supervisor in an office doorway.

These are not the kinds of postcards you would mail. There is
no mailbox for them wherever it is you visit, especially not in
Gift Shop. The postcards expect you to take them home with
you when you go, in the tissue paper in the paper bag
imprinted with the name of the place you visited, tucked
inside the sweaters inside your suitcase inside your car. They
cling to you with the cockleburs and campfire smoke.

These postcards will never be addressed to anyone. Once
unpacked, they settle into your daily life with the sofa
cushions that sag under your weight, the sweaters that gape at
you between their buttons. They settle into the drawers with
your staples, pens, and packing tape. Although the postcards
will never go back to Gift Shop, they maintain their sunny
dispositions. When you feel yourself spinning in circles, the
postcards will grin at you like the office clown who makes
work bearable.

Postcard from the Blossom Room, Palmolive Building, Chicago, Undated

If you enjoy silence, you might feel at home in the Blossom
Room. Although you might not be silenced enough for the
Blossom Room. Even the quietest among us make sounds. A
throat clearing. A cough. An unsolicited opinion or polite
apology.

You may feel the stares of the matronly plates. The ogling of
the empty bowls. Note their flanks of cutlery. How the goblet
knows its place above the knife. Each napkin sharply creased
into a linen tent. Each place setting its own genteel
encampment.

You regard the armed chairs. The parade of debutantes.
The orchestrated seating. The chastened taffeta on their laps.
The surrender of white gloves on their brocade. A hiss of hosiery
below the satin folds. The baby’s breath in a wrist corsage.
Hushed.

Imagine yourself thus petaled. A peony in a cut glass vase. A
blush on your blossoms. Before the loss of breath as you are
cinched in ribbon. A glimpse of some narcissus in a gilt-edged
frame. Before your escort’s proffered arm. For the requisite
waltz.

Before you are returned to the armed chair. Where you observe
the stillness of the wallpaper blossoms, how each branch has
been painted into a certain and unchanging season. To match
the froth of skirt. Its hidden seams and bodice pleats. The
shadows of a wedding dress.

If you enjoy stillness, you might feel at home in Blossom
Room. Although you might not be still enough for Blossom
Room. Even the most subdued among us sometimes make a
move. A narcissus snipped. A fish knife slipped inside a long
white glove.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding and senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her short stories and poems have been published in a variety of journals and have recentlybeen accepted by Star 82 Review, Raleigh Review, and Fractured Lit. Also a poem in The TELEPHONE Project.

Jae Eason

6:57 AM

February’s air chills my steering wheel &
Billie Holiday’s voice echoes in my
speakers. Most of us probably know,

but tomorrow & even today,
someone will die. The news is

whispering in our ears. It speaks of American values, &
now I wonder what American values are. Audience,
do you think this body is an American value?

In 2018, I took a class on fake news—

[I’m currently realizing how fucked up academia is. Bogged down by semantics;
too enclosed to do actual work. How many people died while we sat in air conditioned
classrooms exasperated, trying to extrapolate why peoples lives matter.]

—I can’t entirely remember what I learned,
but I know my co-worker believes the liberal

media is lying to her. Does she think America does not
value her skin? Her white skin. That Fox News &
CNN do not work for the same cohort?

The nectar from the blood orange I bought
at the grocery store dribbles down my chin. Dribbles down
the way sap seeps down tree trunks. The way
blood percolates out

wounds. And right now, someone has just died. There are too
many condolences to hold in worn hands—tongues can no longer
hold onto heavy words. Last summer, there were people found
hanging in trees in local parks.

There were Black people found hanging in trees. Black people
who were once very much alive. Billie Holiday’s voice screams
from my speakers. & I don’t think I know

what a magnolia smells like.

Jae Eason is a poet from Long Island, N.Y. They studied English Literature at Arizona State University. While there, they won a Swarthout Award in Poetry. They currently work as an Office Manager at Brooklyn Poets and an English Teacher in South Korea. If they are not up to all the normal things people usually do, they’re most likely having an existential crisis.

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards Los Angeles, CA

1981

Wanna know what comes between me
and my Calvins? Nothing, Brooke confided
through the T.V., and at twelve I wanted to be her
minus the unplucked eyebrows, to have
what she had, it didn't matter the trend
had passed, I wanted my nakedness held in
by those dark-wash denims, my fiery little body,
wanted it gloved in dark, dark as dark as the ocean
where the light can't reach, dark to blot out the Now and Later colors
all the "in" girls wore, Erika of the sleek pink Dickies,
the Leveroni twins who bounced down the hall
in their Izod shirts, collars up, one apple green, one candy striped,
Kristen with an e, Kristin with an i, their bare foreheads
straining against grosgrain-ribbon headbands that seemed to me
a kind of punishment, gaggle of girls that one day threw me
a long look in the caf, my back-length hair greasing my flannel shirt,
hand-me-down from mom’s best friend's son, the pair of jeans
I begged for that we finally found at Marshalls, and they laughed,
dismissively flipping their Herbal Essenced bobs, returned
to passing notes with hearts inside hearts about Todd, or Jamie, or Peter
but that day I didn't care, I had a secret, I ate my sandwich,
crossing my legs under the blond formica, my Calvins
cupping each cheek of my bare, round ass like they meant it.

The Raven of Dunsinane

The Thane of Fife had a wife,
she was a mother. Where's she now, ha?
In a better place? They say she fought
like a warrior, kicked and bit as two swords
for hire took turns with her while a third
slit top-to-toe those Pretty Ones.
My idea, not my husband's. Never liked her,
found her love-smug. Loathed her rich
womb, her fur-snug breasts that sprang
hot milk and leaked through linen, a tit
stopping every aching O—tell me, what's "Queen"
without that kind of worship? When MacDuff
fled to join the rebels, I leaned in,
whispered in my man's ear, Take them all out,
and he listened. And so their souls
flew to heaven and I flew to--

Just so you know the facts:
Hell isn't murky, it's clear, cold as ice
and I don't do regret. It's a million-
dollar view from my perch up here.
I wear the night and croak smoky air,
there's no Amen to choke me. In that first
life, I'd climb the castle steps in my nightie,
dance on this wall-walk to unwind
with the witches and the wind until insomnia
set in. (After the stains. O my hands.
Bloody skin! I rubbed 'em raw, and still
it stayed.) Doc said don't mix wine
and Ambien, but I just couldn't help it,
I loved the high. Did you know it was I
saw Birnam Wood first move?! Hell, I thought,
If trees can walk, I can fly…

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in The Tampa Review, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in Hobart, CutBank, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. A native of Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books.

Joseph Fasano

The Elephant Man

       "The showman — speaking as if to a dog — called out harshly:
         `Stand up!' The thing arose slowly and let the blanket that covered
        its head and back fall to the ground...In the course of my profession
       I had come upon lamentable deformities of the face due to injury
       or disease...but at no time had I met with such as this.”

           - Frederick Treves, upon first viewing Joseph Merrick
        (1862-1890), billed as The Elephant Man

I could sing to you now
as though the words were pure,
pure enough to survive me.
I could tell you, such as it was,
my story.

Once, in the garden at Evington,
I heard my mother singing to the roses.
Anyone passing her
would have thought her mad,
at most, or a little odd,
or just distractible,
in the fashionable manner of her century.

But only I knew:
She was singing to them
the way she would sing to a thing
she did not have to look away from,
something its thirst had made perfect.

Perfect. I say it now
and it sounds
like justice, love and justice.
Tell me what those are.

That summer I touched the world,
I did not yet know
its music was abandoning me. I did not yet know
the difference between the singer
and the song.   Go on,
she would say to me,
when I held her.

How terrible
it must be
to hold a body close
and not to feel in it
the master hands of a craftsman.
How cold to be deprived
even of the practice of your own compassion.

Come, now. It is summer, only summer.
My body was a wall
we could not cross
to touch each other,
as it is a wall now
between us, you
and me, whoever we are, as I sit here

in the garden at Whitehall
and count the martins
gathering like so many ghosts
in the elm trees, a secret
iridescence in their shoulders.

They made me sing, once,
when I was young. They wanted, I think,
to hear the soul
singing beyond its imprisonment.
I was sorry to disappoint them.

I could sing it for you, if you wanted.
It has birds in it, and ancient rivers,
gold cities in the clouds
that you and I could only dream of.

And that's what we would do,
wouldn't we, if you came to me?
We would lie, side by side,
in the garden, and close our eyes,
and listen to the birds
passing overhead, to the great trains
howling out through the hillsides,
to the beautiful yews
bowing themselves as they were found out
by the wind, twisting themselves
with a simple hymn to beginnings.

How incredible
it would be
to begin again, how terrible.

In the dark of darks
we would close our eyes
and listen; we would lie back
in the soft loam
of the garden — colder, with no one
close, unbreaking —

until very slowly, in the soft light
of its changes, the moon rose
through the old oaks, through the spruces,
the same moon
from a first
world, from a nursery,
a ghost moon
illuminating our bodies
where we'd wake to find
we were clasping hands to that music
like the first, pure touch
of perfect strangers.

photo credit Laura Rinaldi.

Joseph Fasano is the author of the novels The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry include The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year." His most recent project is a "living poem" for his son, which he is live-tweeting at @stars_poem.

Dina Folgia New Jersey

I thought the moon was an atom bomb

I.

I taught myself not to jump at the chance
to bow gracefully from the stage of life
light from the proscenium shaking protons
like coarse salt from my lungs

someone with clearance
has to put in the codes
because I can’t
do it myself

II.

I told you I loved you under Orion. I pointed you out behind the bats, the barren pines, carved
you wailing and laughing out of the sky. I named you Fornax but you scorched my tongue,
begged Andromeda instead. How do you forgive someone who hauled you dying onto land,
removed you from the cosmic delta? We listened to your father use precious final breaths to
puff “Zombie” into the piccolo he loved more than you, sought out cinders and guessed them
from craneflies. I didn’t tell you about the paper cutout treeline, or the Butterfly Dream theory,
or how often your hand rubbed raw the polyester scarecrow skin of mine. No, our constellations
sat too close together for that, speaking through rattling atoms but always anchored, chained.
Even Cassiopeia turned to look at us.

III.

my father drove drunk two hours
fireworks bursting along the coast
conflagration spilling from breath laden
with stumbling apologies stamped his footprint
into the sand beside a groaning folding chair
he mumbled about the matrix
watched it without a tv
in the space between smoke
and an endless reaching sky

IV.

J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer

succumbing to the radiation

he failed to contain.

V.

I won’t become death as long as there
are tumbling asteroids on the horizon
rocks in exodus from their primordial orbits
unstoppable forces and immovable objects

as long as there is a hand hewn from stardust
of god or something with a deeper echo
the frequency of gabriel or john or fission

as long as you lay with your head in my lap
stroking comfort into the side of my hip
blinking our future into existence

as long as you tell me that the moon
is just the moon and it cannot hurt us

Dina Folgia is a poet based out of southern New Jersey. She was an honorable mention for the Penrose Poetry Prize, and in 2021 she was the recipient of two Denise Gess Literary Awards in poetry and creative nonfiction. She was a 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project nominee in poetry. Follow her writing journey on Twitter: @dinafolgia.

there is sorrow in this house

deep enough to feel with your toes
when you step over it in search
of the stairs in the child-deaf night
it can be heard when the land settles
creaking and groaning at two four and six thirty
because bad things always come in threes
reducing a family down from four
one: my grandmother laid herself across the couch
caught off guard in her last winded moment
died with her phone in her hand and someone
had to be the one to tell her sister’s accountant
that he was the last person to hear the chime
of her voice grainy through the speaker
two: I emerged quaking from solitude running back
to my education after six months of agoraphobia
I left the trailing strands of my family behind
my father benjamin franklin at the kiterope
of his blessed but failing marriage
my sister swore they wouldn’t last
without the anchor of my sickness
three: my father left with march
lion and lamb out the rusted door
I took down their wedding photos
replaced them with caulk and clear packing tape
I held two decades in my hands as my mother bent
kidney-stone-wailing on the floor
passing what was left of the man who fled
I feel his absence in the windowsills
the paint started chipping that same semester
I saw fragments like rain in the summer when I opened them
I never read the note he left but the kitchen table did
the carpets tasted his gasoline-soaked soles
as he packed a single bag of dvds and pictures
I asked him three years later why he did it
he said he couldn’t stand by for another decade
and watch the degradation of his wife and family
I thought it was an interesting choice of words: degradation
he wasn’t referring to the foundation of a house that was rotting
but to the rift formed between a sliding glass door and an aging deck
gravity had to intervene sometime

Charlotte Foreman Davie, FL

Wolf Lake

Marissa had the idea that we could be sisters in some place boys couldn’t hurt us. Maybe across town, at Wolf Lake, where plant stems bend up the marsh prairie & all the teenagers smoke splis in the shade of Australian pines. We’d jump the fence in the moonlight to lie in the grass with starved cattle. Occasionally, the farmer would wave his Remington from a trailer in among some willows. We’d let the beauty polish of the rain carry us home, where the ranch houses dozed beneath the gowns of oaks. Rumor has it, after a particularly nasty fight with her boyfriend, the town councilman’s daughter overdosed & drowned near the mythic, sunk sedan. The horse she rode in on, it thrashed through the power lines, it whinnied & died.

Charlotte Foreman is a writer and educator in Davie, Florida. She is the English editor-in-chief of the international cultural criticism magazine The Swings. Her work has previously been included in Yew! Magazine and Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering, published by Jai Alai Books.

Jen Stewart Fueston Colorado

Nostalgia

A girl is milking a cow while nuns pray the hours
in a stone chapel edging a wheat field. In a tower,
a man sits surrounded by parchment, dips a quill
into ink and draws a circle, the earth at its center,
planets blooming like a flower crown. In windowless
rooms, mothers die bearing children, and last rites
are read to their groans. Off in the hay wains, a woman
lifts her skirts, florid thoughts rooting in the moist soil
under her fingernails, and a blue flame of desire whirs
behind oil glass. Outside the window, the goats pass by
headed home for dark. And the girl behind the barn
tips her head up when she’s kissed along her throat
her eyes open in delight, the stars overhead
spinning like milk in a bucket.

Jen Stewart Fueston is the author of Madonna, Complex
(Cascade Books 2020), Latch (River Glass Books 2019) and
Visitations (Finishing Line Press 2015). Her poems have been
published or are forthcoming in AGNI, Western Humanities Review,
Structo, Spoon River Poetry Review and elsewhere. A native of
Colorado, she has taught writing at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey and Lithuania.

Joanna Fuhrman

330 College Avenue

After she dies, your mother moves back
into your childhood home.

Neither of you has lived there for 35 years
but the birdhouse nightlight still lights up
the dark of your childhood bedroom

and in the living room
the tiger flower sofa still blooms.

Here
there is another you:

still a young child,
she dances alone to scratchy records,

while her parents dial the rotary phone or
put away groceries upstairs.

*

The woman who was once your mother
is no longer your mother.

Is there another mother who has always lived in this house?
Has she always been here, digging holes for crocus bulbs
or sorting papers at her desk in the den?

The other mother, the one who never left
your childhood home was never your mother.

The you who still lives there, the you who still sleeps
with her binoculars under her pillow, she is not you.

As your mother walks by the mirror in your childhood home,
you see yourself within the gold frame.

You are the age she was the minute before she died.
Your glasses reflect clouds in the shape of a word.

It’s a language neither of you understand.

*

In the sunlight on a cruise ship on the other side of the Earth,
a mother is wearing a locket she never found a picture to fill.

Or she is sitting in the backyard of your childhood home
smoking a cigarette (though when she was alive she only
smoked in the car in the garage with all the doors open).

In kindergarten, you wrote a picture book called
The Motherness of Mothers.

At 6 years old, you didn’t care that “motherness”
was not a real word.

Or a real world. Neither did your mother.

Ten Months After My Mother’s Death

I throw out four bottles of barbeque sauce
that expired three years ago, a jar of sour
cherries in rum, two boxes of graham
crackers and vegan jalapeno queso in a tube
all purchased before her valves broke down,
before the heart attack and the blooming stent,
before sepsis and spine surgery, before
the morphine drip and antibiotic infusions,
before the surgeon whose name,
Doctor Incognito, made us joke that
he was actually a character in a cartoon noir,
before the 3 am move from the rehab
to the hospital—they wouldn’t tell her why—
before the afternoon phone calls when
I’d get the lowdown about the Ethiopian guy
from 90 Day Fiancé, before the 6 pm call
about the nice nurse who would visit
even if she was working in a faraway wing,
before the 8 pm call about the mean nurse
who wouldn’t change her bed pan,
before the 7 am call where she told me
her dream about the ICU as a wandering ship
(it didn’t feel like a dream to her)
and the 5 am call where I pick up
and all I hear is breath.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2016) and Pageant (Alice James Books, 2009). She teaches creative writing and coordinates the introduction to creative writing classes at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Poetry Foundation website, the Pushcart Prize anthology and the podcast The Slowdown.
"330 College Avenue" appears in The Best American Poetry 2023.

Renoir Gaither St. Paul, MN

Things Men Say in the Dark

I turn to my father
coffined beside me.
We’ve turned to clay,
pine roots for blankets.

Smoke rises from pine
tar barrels above us.
It peppers the porridge
that has become our eyes.

He says white men
called his grandfather
“Uncle Charlie,”
as he and his grandfather
passed in their mule wagon
mired in ripe peaches.

“The word uncle was their
way of showing respect
for an elderly colored man,
especially a former slave,
someone they knew
who could read and write
and who had a subscription
to the local newspaper.”

Ants tunnel through the gristle
of my right big toe. I think
of brown girls skipping rope
on chalk-thirsty sidewalks
in a city somewhere up north.

“Imagine that,” he says,
“a former slave teaching
his generations to read.”

A dirt dauber hums where
my knees once were, a faint
contrapuntal to the searing
trill of cicadas that hews
the green canopy around us.

Days now are little more than
roaming exhalations.

“Wish I had some buttermilk
and bacon,” my father whispers,
his voice lilting with sadness.
“Why d’you stop eating pork?”

Words live longer than flesh.

“Hush,” he says. “You hear
that? That’s Gabriel.”

I hear an earthworm quivering
in loam spangled with shards
of porcelain.

“No,” I answer. “I hear Blue Mitchell.”

In the dark, one hears
what one hears.

Renoir Gaither is an African-American poet based in St. Paul, MN. He has published widely. His poetry has recently appeared in Green Mountains Review, Into the Void, Lucky Jefferson, Crab Fat, and the book, We Are Antifa. His poem "The Alt-History of King Kong," originally published in Speculative City, was a finalist for the 2021 Ignyte Award for Best Speculative Poetry.

Malisa Garlieb South Burlington, VT

Often employing myth, art, and nature, Malisa Garlieb writes personal histories while simultaneously unfolding archetypes. She is Poetry Editor for Mud Season Review. Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Calyx, Tar River Poetry, RHINO Poetry, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. Handing Out Apples in Eden is her first poetry collection, and there's a second manuscript in the works. She's also a mother, energy healer, and artist in South Burlington, VT. Find her at malisagarlieb.com.

Garden

They say it was raised to heaven
but I’ve found a way in
under an electric fence.

I bring my lover on airless afternoons.
We sit beneath the tree of life
for we are sick of death
and do not want more knowledge.

The beasts my beloved once named
approach tentatively,
they are still tame and docile
but have almost forgotten us.

Slender giraffe pleats her legs
finding shade beneath the awning,
the tree sings with neon birds
and the last white rhino comes near,
but his armed guard hangs back.
We rest in brokenness together.

Listening to the bright sky
drifting to periphery
I realize it is no longer possible to destroy

my soul quivering in a sheath
descending ladders of ephemera.
This is revelation.

Because he’s all-knowing
God must know we’re here
but leaves us be:
too much has happened on earth
for him to object.

Andrea Hollander

Now That She Knows

Though it’s about to rain, she pins
all her husband’s clean shirts to the line,
white shoulder to white, white to blue,
and so on, to the pale yellow one he wears
only on special occasions, all of them lined up
as if targets at a shooting range.

The sky voices its deep warning once, twice.
Its daggers of light pitch forth
in the nearer and nearer distance,
and she saunters inside to watch
from the kitchen window.

When the rain begins, the shirts
shiver a little in unison,
a kind of legless chorus line,
torsos bending, tails
slapping one another.

In the downpour, sleeves lengthen,
heavying at the cuffs, then swing
wildly against one another,
rain pelting, wind whipping them
one way, twisting them another.

The storm passes, the mud-splattered shirts
motionless now, spent, a line
of prisoners chained together,
sagging, but as straight as they can
lest the guard come by.

She’ll leave them hanging there all day.
She likes the way they look,
as though their legs have been sucked
all the way down into a bog.
As though what’s left
will soon follow.

Andrea Hollander is the author of five full-length poetry collections. Her fourth was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in many journals including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction) and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is founding director of The Ambassador Writing Seminars. Her website is www.andreahollander.net.

Philip Jason Long Island, NY

Remote

Oh great mother, microwaver of hearts, turn
your television on. You are the sun now, and I,
the remote control device. Please don’t
push the button marked “Paralyze Soul.” That
button is a mistake; a modification made
by marketing fiends–gurus of the fat brain–and the
crows that pick at the crumbs that fall from the white
Formica countertops of their eyes. Oh great
mother, parking spot of kindness and information,
turn your closet lights on. It is winter now,
season of salt and movie stars, season
of the long night; it is time to burn calories
in the fiery lakes of our cells. Please, tend well
the snowman who sits at the gates
of the deli. He meditates on the heroin addict
nature of God and knows in each
of the one-of-a-kind snowflakes of his brain
that I long to be larger than the troubles that
feed me, that some of us long to grow beyond
these stinking bodies, that we are all forecasted
to die crazy and alone. Oh great mother,
high-speed ceiling fan of the holy trinity
of cause, effect and mercy, turn your pancakes
over. They are starting to burn and I
am the flesh of burning pancakes, injecting
heaven into my bridgeless veins. I can feel
the heat of self-pleasuring bacteria coming
from your lips as you press them to my
forehead. This must be the day when the garbage
man finally comes for me. This is the day when
the jugglers and Port-o-potty salesmen come
and take me away. Oh great mother, meat slicer
of the reason why it so often seems
a thing can’t be itself and be loved at the same
time, turn your head, please, take my hand,
hold it in your throat, save me, save me
from the open pores of banking and investment.
All I want is to see the universe’s kindness
in everything. All I want is for you to silence
the pudding pop commercials that run in my
head without permission. All I want is a blessing
for these asphyxiated plums that have
hardened into knuckles because someone
forgot to eat them. All I want is for you to
put your gun down and give me a name.

Philip Jason’s stories can be found in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Canary and Summerset Review. He is a recipient of the Henfield Prize in Fiction. His first collection of poetry, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. For more information, visit www.philipjason.com.

Christen Noel Kauffman Richmond, IN

Christen Noel Kauffman is from Richmond, Indiana and is author of the lyric essay chapbook Notes to a Mother God (2021), which was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Nimrod International Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, Booth, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, and The Normal School, among others.

It’s as Much About Place as it is About God

the first time someone hit me, I swallowed the blood
to keep it for myself, metallic coat dripping down
my throat like a promise. look up, they say,
before it all runs out and you’re left with nothing
but an emptiness no one can fill for you.
I’ve lived in too many towns without bloodlines
connecting me to steeples or the trailer cooking meth
in the middle of the woods, the one we found
when we were kids making love on a fallen oak.
after school, we were flocks of children walking
patterns from the door, but then look what we’ve
become – strangers on a crowded street carried
from one side to the next. I used to believe
there was something to haunted houses, that nothing
was empty when someone had been there, hitting
or loving, cutting holes through peeling walls,
but at night I’m alone with sirens, helicopter
flying low above the house like a giant bird.
tell me where the girl is who fell in the river
at thirteen, the cemetery lined with hundreds
of little flags. when I drive home, my mother
makes tea in the microwave, boils water one
cup at a time because nothing is promised
and we know it. She tells me the city is godless
but what I hear is how I never make room
for the cone flowers growing behind the house,
their faces turned up. rows of open eyes.

I Want to Unspool Every Shade of Yellow

they told me scripture is
the yellow afghan on the chair
knitted into technicolor faith,
falsetto of the last avocado.
it’s enough to be resuscitated,
transplanted to the Days Inn
where god speaks from the
nightstand, or a marble covered
in paint I drop on a tilted board.
any animal could follow the line,
make the line with enough gravity
to pull the color down,
write devilry in each particle
suspended in my hands.
there’s calibration in chapels
I can smell through my skin: vanilla,
Old Spice, water at the bottom
of the gorge. when I say I’ve found
scripture on the backs of fruit flies,
the hind legs of alpaca, exhumed
from the burial of wolves,
what I mean is I want to unspool
every shade of yellow,
separate the red from green,
save them from the prisms
hanging from my mother’s lamp,
man-made and tacky as hell.

Gunilla Kester Buffalo, NY

Ghanaian Morning

Beat, beat, rhythm of feet. When did I learn
to look for danger? What’s stolen so easily
lost, but what’s poured into the dark
earth I can’t forget. Tried crawling out

of that space, crawling, calling his name,
but he was already gone. Open the window!
Let me hear! Is the plumbing moaning?
The hot loud 5 AM rooster? People running

barefoot on red dirt? Windows with netting
and bleating goats. My worn sandal lazily
caressing a grey cement floor. Nobody sleeps.
Lentils in red-red sauce waiting on the breakfast

table. I found potatoes, he said gaily, emptying
a sack of yams and cassava on the ground
by the stove where the girls cooked on the open
fire. Cool taste of apples teasing my mouth.

Gunilla Theander Kester is an award-winning poet and the author of
If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer's Den, 2015). Her two poetry chapbooks,
Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009), were published by
Finishing Line Press. Dr. Kester lives outside of Buffalo, N.Y.

Sandra Kolankiewicz

Till Now

After all who could have explained were dead,
and we were left with just yellowed
papers, a fragile heritage without context,
we found a great aunt who’d written poems
and sketched drawings in the back of her handmade
recipe books, confessed to loving
the minister, tracked the comings and goings
of yearnings she was denied in a home
where no one was interested in cooking
enough to discover the truths inked out
in her own hand, the disclosures
and accusations, the sort of domestic scandals
that made her walk into the pond with an infant
soon after birth, leaving the washing undone,
the noon meal unprepared,
following her desire to create beyond what
would soon be eaten and turned to
waste, or dirtied and needing
to be boiled again on Monday,
the lye making her hair white
like an old woman’s, claiming
her freedom to sink into the depths
they all denied, leaving them full of regret
up to the next generation, who never
heard of her till now.

Parrot

I don’t know what to say as I listen,
for the hearing is more important than
my desire to chime in, advise, talking
bird, tilting my head to look at you, the
world beyond my perch, clipped wings, sole chain on
my thin leg. I could say the lawn needs trimmed
or the girl next door is moving out to
shack up with her lover, who’s not you, though
you still wish it. A full beer sweats on the
counter. I’ll live one hundred years and, when
you die, have no forest to return to.

Sandra Kolankiewicz's poems have been accepted at Fortnightly Review, Galway Review, The Healing Muse, New World Writing and Appalachian Review. She is the author of Turning Inside Out, The Way You Will Go and Lost in Transition.

Koss

Flint Girl Handcuffed Along Dort Highway

who might have seen the young girl
handcuffed to a candy-striped swing set
scissored legs bent backwards
wasting overgrown grass
framed by a tapered picket
white and keen as blades
along the Dort that sunny spring day
drivers raced over asphalt
minding their business
clouds shifted the azure sky
as time passed in child decrements
in the lull and ache of the day
that teenager who did it, was he playing?
she questioned the act without
anger, with an open sense of wonder
he taught her how to meditate that day
those hours and minutes sitting still waiting

Koss (they/them/she) is a queer writer with work forthcoming in Diode Poetry,
Five Points, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic,
Prelude, Chiron Review, San Pedro River Review, Kissing Dynamite, Schuylkill Valley Dispatches,
and others. She also has work in Best Small Fictions 2020. Koss won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Award
and received BOTN nominates in 2021 for fiction (Bending Genres) and poetry (Kissing Dynamite).
Keep up with Koss other website at http://koss-works.com.

Susan Kress Saratoga Springs, NY

on receiving a package from the fulfillment center

it’s big the biggest yet so big
they had to take the door down
off its hinges it has to be
the thing I’ve waited for
the thing I want I want
to come up close and catch
the scent of lilies but all I smell
are pomegranates cut and left
to wither purple on the counter
it has to be the thing
I want a ceremony
for the opening a splashy do
with oysters and champagne but now
the law says no more gatherings
I want to dance
a tarantella beat tambourines
flash my scarlet skirt
I tap the package twice
a little code I have but
there’s no answer back
they must be tracking this
my phone says
there’s another package
on its way
and I hear the sound of cardboard
boxes being pushed up stairs
for all my neighbors waiting silent
in their little concrete rooms.

Susan Kress was born in England and now resides in Saratoga Springs, New York. She has poems published or forthcoming in The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, La Presa, Halfway Down the Stairs, and other periodicals.

Ode to My Daughter

I was driving to the checkup
that September day and the car radio
played “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down
on Me” and it was the wrong
song but it was in my head when
the doctor with his little jokes probed too
deep and the blood came – a flag
that you were in trouble but I was not
ready to be strapped into an ambulance
and I thought of the dishes
in the sink and the fish that would turn
if it were not cooked
that night and I was cold under the woolen
blankets that scratched my bare arms
and I told you not to worry
that you’d be fine and how could you not be
because I had obeyed the rules – no caffeine,
no alcohol, no anesthetic when my tooth was drilled
but I was cold on the operating table
shaking like a sad fish hooked for that day’s dinner
and the student medic held my hand and laughed
when I filled two catheter bags before the
operation even started and I could not bear
to watch you being born
and afterwards, when the doctor said the cord
had been hooked tight around your neck,
I fainted, and heard the nurse panic
when she could not find my vital signs and with
my voice still strange from anesthesia I said
I’m speaking to you from the other side –
and I was – and I spoke for both of us
until your lungs opened
and you gave a howl for yourself.

Ella Latham North Carolina

Strangers I Have Loved

The nearly empty laundromat
in the rain—just two chatting workers
washing other people’s clothes,
a man who sits after he’s repacked
his black trash bag while his
phone charges up behind Buck Hunter,
and me, reading June Jordan beneath
a child’s pair of overalls, rubberized
to the wall, and a sign in pastel:
Laundry—Where Mom Hangs Out!

For a moment I am so alone and so
content with my half of the orange plastic
bucket seats, the dusty monstera,
the free coffee and worn white rockers,
content above all with the twenty
minutes I have left before I have to get up
and fold that I could just die.

And then I look up and see you.

Outside in the coming blue night
right on the pressing edge where
the awning surrenders to the rain,
you are doing pushups. I can’t
see your face but I can see
how your wet hair clings against it,
count your even breaths when you stand
for a rest, watch your feet as you
line your body carefully again into
form, and we inside are fools
with our books, our phones, our gossip,
you in the rain-staticked glow of
the streetlight and our indoor light spilling
have found the most beautiful way of
killing time with the body, of resurrecting
the dead time that stretches in here
between every rocker and bucket,
and I startle at the flashing tail of
my contentment as it flees into
the distance, I sit in longing again,
here are you, going down for
another round, and here is the man
in the rocker watching me watch you,
I’m sure he can see it too, your
dripping hair, your breath, your shoulders
filling every inch of my indoor sky.

Ella Latham is a writer currently living and working in Western North Carolina. Her work has appeared in the Peauxdunque Review, where it was selected as the creative nonfiction category winner in the 2021 Words and Music Writing Competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Elizabeth Loudon Gloucestershire, England

At the Villa Reale di Marlia

A woman afloat on a rented bicycle
sails past a field of sunflowers.
Ahead of her pushes a man
who won’t take anything for pain.
She will never be older,
time won’t come to her rescue.
In his wake she has white legs,
fierce and ludicrous.

The morning’s already undone by want
of kindness. Judge and jury washed their hands
and went home satisfied and clean.
The honeyed floors and pretty balconies,
hats and cobblestones dancing below,
the worried eyes of a serving-girl
were all to no avail. Grief heaved its way
up and out, pitiless as the birth of the child
who clawed its mother’s heart to shreds,
as the men who came for the
body of the child.

The sunflowers are high as horses.
Bicycles rest against warm stone,
stiff with the iron sorrow of the abandoned.
Hands folded, head bowed,
obedient to the windrush of the axe,
she’s saved by the swift cut of knowledge:
this garden hangs on a museum wall in Boston,
she remembers the terracotta urns
on the loggia, their gold-splash petals painted
without any thought of how they might be seen.
A longing had nibbled her then
in the season of longing: to be
a woman in linen, children tucked at her side,
a gloved hand resting on a balustrade.
To surf the ease of a summer evening
through which a man walks closer.

That Italian heat, a slight burn on the palm.

Years fall like leaves and the villa is
shuttered for repairs, the galleries closed.
In the grassy amphitheatre Phedre stormed.
There’s no mercy in this kind of knowledge.
In Boston she cut a dashing figure in a red coat
but that was before the war that has no name.
She auditioned for the role of refugee
and now she’s shuttling between
the wrecked and the locked.
There are no second chances.
In the laurel-dark wings she could sleep
the wheeling night through, forgotten in the
driftwood of a garden whose gates
will be shackled till dawn,
but these are not the years of trespass,
these are the laughable years of penance.

A glass of wine will kill the hours before
whatever comes next: a confession cut short
by the faces of sunflowers turned away.
Surprisingly there are plans for other days.
Every Tuscan palace is packaged and priced,
treasures aglow behind fortified glass.
Every beauty’s affordable if you do not wish
to own it, even love’s on loan for an hour.
A brochure folded at the bottom of a bag.
Loam beneath the fingernails, proof of touch.

Elizabeth Loudon writes fiction and poetry. Her poetry deals with displacement and loss. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA/MA in English from Cambridge University, and has taught writing at Smith and Williams Colleges. She has published work in Denver Quarterly, North American Review, and Gettysburg Review, has won several awards for her writing, and recently completed a novel set in Baghdad. After 25 years in Massachusetts, she now lives in southwest England.

Figurehead

It’s the boys who act
like they’re drunk
when sober
you’ve got to watch.
We can tell
by the foam of their breath
that they’re hard on our heels.

We make ourselves small
on the bridge
as they pass,
sparrows in our frocks.
Where do the other birds go
for their winters,
what South Seas beach
are they pecking along?

We swell in their wake,
our gusts of laughter
blowing them away.
Beneath us twists of current
loop to the sea
and we’re figureheads
come to life –
not wooden effigies
with painted breasts
and Viking plaits,
fixed to a nail on a museum wall,
but girls that dip and crest,
hand in hand
as we run for the shoreline
where the tide lips up,
calling each other brutal names
to make ourselves faster.
Reckon with us.
Make way.

Kurt Luchs Portage, MI

The Dog One Floor Up

He begins howling the minute she leaves,
long before sunrise, dressed in pastel blue scrubs,
and he seldom pauses until she returns,
though sometimes the howl subsides into a sob
or a quiet moan. You would think someone
was working him over with molten fire tongs
but it’s merely the leading cause of death, loneliness,
and in this we are all mammals together.
While he howls outwardly, I do it inwardly,
my cries echoing down empty corridors somewhere
inside me, audible only to myself. In my case
no one is coming back, so the inner howl
continues nonstop, like tinnitus or a fire alarm,
until it becomes a kind of companion,
one I would almost miss if it were gone
and at whose sudden absence I might well
begin howling out loud in unison with
that poor creature I have never even seen
in the apartment one floor above me.

Listening to Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa

I. Ludus: With Movement

I’m sorry to tell you, purists and poseurs,
intellectual snobs, that music is no mere abstraction,
it has content, it tells a story, and any fool can follow it.
Here we have a soul in torment, the default human condition,
and if you doubt the soul’s existence you still need to explain
what it is that writhes in agony, a caged creature
seeking to escape, throwing itself again and again
against the wall of reality. Some might call it
a glandular imbalance. I call it a spiritual crisis
of no particular origin, though one is tempted to hear in it
echoes of the composer’s longing to leave the iron embrace
of the Soviet Union, something he managed a few years
after writing this. The commissars of culture
didn’t like his serialism (as it turned out later,
he didn’t much care for it himself), and when
he started creating overtly religious works, they did him
the great reverse honor of making him a nonperson,
a phenomenon that is so much fun it has finally
reached our shores and been embraced by the West.

In 1977 when he wrote this, however, his body was still
trapped and his spirit was only beginning to soar above
his early twelve-tone style, a chrysalis happily abandoned.
In any spiritual struggle, suffering comes first, understanding later.
Blind, mute pain precedes almost every visionary song.

So it is here, in the movement “With Movement,”
a nondescript way to describe ten minutes of exquisite thrashing
that seems to recapitulate the history of the 20th century
while recalling such fellow Eastern Bloc cellmates
as Bartok and Penderecki and even a bit
of Bernard Herrmann in the shower scene from Psycho.
Yet all things have an end, and just when we think
we can’t take any more, the movement “With Movement”
stops moving, stops stabbing. Blessed silence.
Everyone breathes—performers, audience, perhaps even
the instruments themselves. And then…

II. Silentium: Without Movement

The title of the second movement misleads, but only slightly.
If not exactly silence, there is a profound quietude,
and if not precisely still, there is merely the barest movement,
a kneeling shadow doing the impossible, trying to crawl
into the light. The crisis has passed. Has the pain passed as well?

No. It has assumed another form, a hollow, a cistern,
filling drop by drop with grief. With each falling sigh of the strings
the soul brims over once more. And we thought it was love
that was unending. How many tears can be pressed
from the lonely grape of humanity? And must the grape drink
its own vintage? We could refuse to drink, we have the right
to refuse, that’s what makes us human after all, and not
fleshy robots. But no: we will drink. It’s all we have in the end.
Happiness comes and goes, amusement, passion, industry,
all the modes of anesthesia, are cactus flowers that open and close
in one day. Only grief is eternal, say the descending strings,
back and forth, lower each time, seeking the ground of being,
until at last they find acceptance, surrender, peace.

This is the movement that patients in hospice ask to hear
while they prepare to float quietly out of this existence,
the strings vibrate in tune with the filaments of their souls
as they start to fray and unfurl into the void. This movement
speaks to the dying of suffering endured and transfigured,
of the spirit honed on the knife-edge of sorrow to a kind of purity,
which leaves it no longer at home in this world,
ready for the next, if there is one, but at any rate
finally girded to say a final goodbye. And when the end comes
we hardly recognize it, so slight the slipping away, so gentle
the last little wave carrying us into the unknown.

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) has poems published in Plume Poetry Journal, The Sun Magazine, and London Grip. He won the 2022 Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Portage, Michigan.

Starlings Eating Frozen Pizza

The pizza has been wrestled half out of its red cardboard
box by a small flock of them at the side of an intersection
on an overpass. Did it fall off of a delivery bicycle?
Unlikely when the temperature is zero. It must have
been thrown or dropped here through a car window
and now it’s anybody’s pie, even these garbage birds,
members of an invasive brown species that has only
been here a century and a half, still resented by nativists
as if there’s a Daughters of the American Revolution
for birds. The real reason they provoke anger is that
they haven’t had the good taste to die, they compete
quite effectively with each other and everyone else.
They slash at the pizza and occasionally their neighbors
with a technique called open-bill probing, stabbing
and then forcing the bill a bit wider. What works
for getting grubs in bark also doubles as nature’s
makeshift pizza cutter, and in no time at all the solid ice
pepperoni-and-cheese has disappeared as if this were
a college dormitory, the starlings chattering throughout.
The driver behind me lays on his horn, reminding me
that the light is green and that the starling’s language
incorporates ambient noises like car horns and even
human speech. As I step on the gas, the starlings scatter
upward to regroup on the power line, suddenly sedate
and well-behaved, almost assimilated, at least
until the next free frozen pizza is delivered.

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

After Divorce

I can’t find the scaffolding, hover
in that second between step-out
and drop when the cartoon-mind
thinks it can scramble back to safety.
For four days, I’ve watched hummingbirds
visit the feeder and swing into the woods.
My windows need washing.
His books spill out when I unpack mine.
I need a handyman I can count on,
a hammer in a steady hand.
I’ve let dirty garden tools build up in the sink
and haven’t changed my shirt. What to do
with the photo albums? Yesterday, I split
a wishbone and wished for strength,
not knowing how to language a counter-spell
for this empty-dark. My map no longer has feet.
The old life, a bonfire shooting up sparks.
Singed wings all that remain of the pages
of a book burned and left on the beach
for a poet to find. Griefstone in the belly.
Is the body merely a collection of divisible bones?
On what does the good heart hang?
My heart’s a cathedral of dead bolts
and the janitor’s swallowed the keys.
A bat’s droppings dot the deck of the house.
At dusk, I glimpsed its porcine nose and ears
in the eaves, heard a cascade of clicks.
I’m all knock-knees and haze.
I grow adept at salads for one, listen
to my own damn playlist, ignore the cold
on his side of the bed. Sometimes I hear
voices that aren’t there. This no longer
bothers me. Between thunder and the start
of rain, silence. Go inside and shut all the doors.
Burrow under the covers and turn off the lights.
No, no, open doors and windows, blow off the roof.
The tools in the sink will be rinsed by the rain.

As a Relationship Alchemist and two-time TEDx Speaker, Marie-Elizabeth Mali shows people how to deepen love and connection in their relationships. Drawing on her Master’s degree in Chinese Medicine and over 20 years of client work, she teaches people how to be authentic instead of shrinking themselves to fit in. She also has an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of one book of poetry, Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of the anthology, Villanelles (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2012). Her relationship work has been featured in Thrive Global, SWAAY, and Forbes and her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, RATTLE, and Tiferet.

Daniel Edward Moore Whidbey Island, Washington

Dear Altar Boy

Watching you float on a leash of smoke,
   cleansing the air down memory lane,
parishioners stroked each other’s guilt
   in and out of confession’s dark cage.

It was there they learned that black leather feet
   tapping beneath the window’s red grill
meant judgment was done with its cigarette break
   as ash fell like snow on the third Hail Mary and

our father blessed their lips.

If only our innocent eyes would have met
   at the moment these mouths swallowed the body
of someone we never loved,
our father would have seen us pray.

Our father might have come home.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Front Range Review, The Meadow, Southern Humanities Review, New Plains Review, Temenos Literary Journal, Radar Poetry Journal, Plainsongs and Flint Hills Review. He is the author of "Waxing the Dents" (Brick Road Poetry Press) His recent book, "Psalmania" was a finalist for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry.

Jessica Purdy

What the Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly Brought

In the window though, it isn’t a butterfly wing.
It might be the sun through stained glass: black,
indigo. The subtle markings of brief life. Together
with people who will one day leave each other
in a certain order. At dawn the first bird speaks,
thinks of nothing but day. The dream it drags
me away from. The one where I reverse off
a cliff and the car falls to its death but my body
is pulled by something unseen backwards through
the terror of air. The one where it just might be
the end for me. My husband asks what would
you rather know: when you will die or how
you will die? Either way, it’s an awful
game. The black butterfly is a wish granter,
an omen of death, change, the passing of time,
good luck. The best sightings can mean
whatever you want them to. As I ate cheese
and dried apricots with my children last night
the robins formed a village army against
a marauding crow. Aerial bombs that in the end
could do nothing but protest. Their outrage
all volume and speed. The birds’ baby my son
found dropped on our driveway. Its eyes still
blind. Black knobs. Its featherless quills.
Its frank yellow beak grimaced, but was the color of joy.

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals including Lily Poetry Review, One Art, Hole in the Head Review, Museum of Americana, and Gargoyle. Anthologies include: Covid Spring I and II, Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall, Nancy Drew Anthology, and Lunation. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry) were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018.

Jonathan Rose Miami Beach, FL

Dearest   93

Joan Crawford, movie star,
Spread her name and more quite far,
Excelled at keeping most beguiled--
Save her disenchanted child.

Flexible   94

Isadora Duncan, danseuse,
Censured, suspected of Communist views
During her American tour,
Asked, "Is it because I bend for the poor.”

Joyous 402

Impressionist Pierre August Renoir,
Who limned female bathers sans peignoir,
Declared, "You must paint with joy,
Like making love to a woman--or boy.”

Idyllic 426

Banker turned painter Paul Gauguin
A Symbolist, Synthesist, primitive man,
Dreamed he could only approach completion
By becoming Tahitian.

Jonathan Rose is a bilingual (Spanish) immigration attorney and a cultural activist. An award-winning poet, he has translated poetry, presented poetry workshops, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Since 1999, Jonathan has published the arts calendar CULTURAL BULLETIN and has moderated the Famous Last Friday Open Mic Poetry Readings at Books & Books in Coral Gables since 1992. His poems have appeared in SoFloPoJo, Penultimate Peanut, as well as other publications.

Esther Sadoff Columbus, OH

Pebble

A girl shakes her head no like she
is loosening snowflakes from her hair,

sets her jaw clenched like the bow
of a ship stanched against waves.

Sees her face in a puddle,
pallid moon of forgetfulness,
and swallows sand and grit.

She looks toward the sky,
tender dreams like snails
slinking down wet banisters.

Stitches a word to her heart.
Pebble. Says pebble until it hardens
to stone, rock, mountain.

Snow prickles, crisps the lawn gray,
melts in her eyes, on her cheeks.
Pebble, stone, rock.

She knows no beginning.
A mountain bears the weight of the wind.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, South Florida Poetry Journal, Wingless Dreamer, Free State Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Passengers Journal, SWWIM, Marathon Literary Review, West Trade Review, River Mouth Review.

M.E. Silverman

This Is Not A Poem You Should Read
December 14, 2012, Sandyhook Elementary

The halls are decorated with holiday artwork, letters to Santa and examples of subtraction. Some
students are jazzed for morning recess as the mild wind starts to give way to warmth. The teacher
gets them ready to transition from morning centers by singing: Clean up, clean up, everybody
clean up. A few hear a sharp noise. A distant rumble perhaps? What is that? Did you hear that?
Listen, this is not a poem you should read. No amount of practice drills prepares for what
happens next. Listen, no scenario or countermeasures can be taken. Safe is not safe. Listen, the
second graders never say: sounds like fireworks. A thunderous pop. Pots and pans. Falling
folding chairs. The rattle of baking sheets. Earsplitting bells. 154 aching echoes crack around the
corner, stomp down the hall, bang on the other side of the wall. No child says semiautomatic
rifle. No one should see the way bullets reshape bodies, break through skin easy as a tangerine,
push through bone and blood and anything real like rain through a stolen shadow.

M. E. Silverman is the author of The Floating Door (Glass Lyre Press). Silverman co-edited
Bloomsbury’s Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, New Voices: Contemporary
Writers Confronting the Holocaust, and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium..

Alyssandra Tobin

Aidan & I lived in a small apartment

in a small town in vermont.

We kissed in the kitchen & other gross things.

We were pure elision. A love hard        to stamp out.

This town every year had the Walking    of the Heifers

where all the cows would walk

up the street led by their farmers.

We stood on the sidewalk

& cheered for them.

They wore flowers behind their ears

& big ribbons around their bellies.

You are so beautiful! We screamed

So generous! Our love for you is no small potatoes!

Some cows freaked & had to be put in a trailer

to go be alone for a bit & calm down.

These cows were the most hopped up on love.

Aidan too had to be taken back to his pen

with a not breathingness.

Panic at the cow parade.

He had just eaten a hot dog.

We went home & sat on the couch.

I'm the only one allowed to get scared, I wanted to say.

But I didn't.       I don't remember what I said.

Cows have sonorous memories. We remember

spring & winter & the rest is a blur

of green & blue.

You could teach me

about staying still. I know.

You could teach me about loving with my muzzle

instead of my head, yes with my big downy muzzle.

Cow kisses! I yell.

Now you've done it. You say. now you've gone

   & opened wide my pen. Let in warm my sunlight.

Let spring this gracious cow. this generous cow.

Cow king of all New England.

Alyssandra Tobin is the author of Put Eyes on Me Not Like a Curse,  forthcoming from Quarterly West in 2022.
Her poetry appears in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, Grist, and elsewhere.

Matt Vekakis Florida

Berlin Turnpike

Flamingoes warble over the battered
black-top, one leg lit at a time like three
Rockettes. Here, there are always vacancies.

He is low on Ativan, an honest
prescription. He’ll go to the guy he knows
with the office space behind Jimmy Johns.

He checks his phone just in case his wife has
called. He’s woozy and his steps feel muddied.
He can’t feel his toes. The strip is gray and

muted: there’s the liquor store with a side
hustle on high-grow Indica, and a
masseuse he uses only when he’s bombed.

He’ll pass the great chartreuse dumpster piled
a mile high. Two human buzzards fumble
with a stereo--the antenna bent

like a scabbard and still managing to
play “Raspberry Beret.” A van hobbles
left-to-right in park. A young girl dismounts--

ties her hair in a bun, drags a finger
under her bent nose. It is his daughter.
He doesn’t have the life to call her name.

Matt Vekakis is an MFA student in poetry at the University of Florida. Their recent work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Appalachian Review, Welter, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Matt serves as EIC of The Lunch Break Zine—the literary companion of Out to Lunch Records.

Ellen June Wright Hackensack, NJ

Song for James Byrd

Thank you for holding me in your thrall.
   Thank you for holding me these decades

of bodies heaped upon your wrongful death--
   a mound, a trench full taken from us

for little or no reason and if we—if we forget you
   dragged to your death, who else will we forget?

Will we forget Tamir Rice and his toy gun
   or Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes,

or Eleanor Bumpers a frightened grandmother.
   Will we forget Charleston and those killed in prayer?

Will we forget that the Crucifixion was a wrongful death?
   Who else will we forget, if we forget you?

The Last Time

The last time I flew three-thousand miles to visit
            I was prepared to wash her feet
as I had done before, my silent act of contrition.

It’s the least I can do. Take the old lady’s thick
            leathered limbs and with a warm cloth
rub away the dust she can't reach
            and let her aged feet soften and soak.

She’s not far from one-hundred years.
            I’ll clip the thick nails and play the part

of a loving daughter. It’s the least I can do,
            and maybe next time, I’ll bring a jar of oil
in alabaster, and just before I’m finished

break the seal and rub it in and scent
            the room with the sweet perfume.

Ellen June Wright who currently lives in Hackensack, New Jersey was born in England of West Indian parents and immigrated to the United States as a child. She taught high-school language arts in New Jersey for three decades before retiring. She has consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021. She was a finalist in the Gulf Stream 2020 summer poetry contest and is a founding member of Poets of Color virtual poetry workshop and recently received five 2021 Pushcart Prize Nominations for poetry.

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