SoFloPoJo Contents: Essays * Interviews * Reviews * Special * Video * Visual Arts * Archives * Masthead * SUBMIT * Tip Jar
Aug 2023 Issue # 30 Poetry
Yalda Al-Ani * Kathryn Aldridge-Morris * Brian Builta * Rosa Castellano * Chanice Cruz * Mark DeCarteret * Marc Alan Di Martino * Tim Duffy * Nancy Freund * Anyély Gómez-Dickerson * Adrian Harte * Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen * Amorak Huey * Luci Huhn * Richard Jordan * Thomas Kneeland * Kik Lodge * Mel Mancheno * Natalie Marino * Kaecey McCormick * Judith Mikesch-McKenzie * Bryan R. Monte * Jason R. Montgomery * Judith H. Montgomery * Chris Pellizzari * Maria S. Picone * Kenneth Pobo * Marina Ramil * Bruce Robinson * Alafia Nicole Sessions * Matthew Isaac Sobin * Michael Sofranko * Liane Tyrrel * Evan Vandermeer * Rachel Walker * Wendy Wisner * Maggie Wolff
POETRY Launch Reading - Tuesday, Aug 8th at 7 PM ET
Please Register in Advance
Please Register in Advance
Editor's note: Please be aware that many of the poems we publish come to us with content & trigger warnings.
In fact, the last poem in this issue is titled "Trigger Warning."
Witness, Write, Act.
In fact, the last poem in this issue is titled "Trigger Warning."
Witness, Write, Act.
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Maggie Queeney reading "Metamorphosis : The Female Into" An Erasure from OVID's Metamorphoses published in NASHVILLE REVIEW August 2018 featured in THE SLOWDOWN October 2021 |
We invite you to view a Visual Erasure and the accompanying poetry of Joel Harris in our Special Section
Yalda Al-Ani
Sestina with Six Random Words
The man grabbed my shoulder with a hand smelling of oil paint
and walked with me up the ceramic spiral stairs to his studio
whose walls were covered with colorful Quranic calligraphy.
He promised to teach me to be a painter and handed me a brush.
Then he warned me that artists must never reveal their secrets
and that everything in the room was a secret. I nodded and obeyed.
To be a painter is to never say no to the teacher, so I always obeyed.
The air in the studio was damp and cool, and it smelled of oil paint.
A single candle was burning, the faint light guarding our secrets
that I promised to never disclose and to forget once we leave the studio.
Brushes sprouted out of the man’s hands, but I had never touched a brush.
I was eight and he was fifty-one, and I didn’t understand calligraphy.
He asked me to open the drawer across from the blue Diwani calligraphy
and to hand him the two stacks of papers in it, and I happily obeyed.
We spread the papers on a rectangular table, my hand still gripping the brush.
On the pages rested drawings of nude women, and the man promised to paint
me on a canvas and said I was more beautiful than them. He locked the studio
door and approached me with slow steps, a faint smile on his face. “Our secrets
are important,” he said and unzipped my pants. This was our first secret.
He slid my purple pants down. My gaze fixed on the wall’s calligraphy
and my fingers squeezing the brush. My white panties glowed in the dim studio,
but soon enough they disappeared under my feet where my pants lay. I obeyed
when he told me to spread my legs. He lowered his head, his neck tilted. The paint
covering the walls and the floors smelled like rust. His hand clutched the brush
and laid it next to my foot. His lips sucked at my vulva, my gaze fixed on the brush.
I had kept secrets before, when mom’s boyfriend sat me on his lap, but the studio’s secrets
were warm, for his tongue tickled my body gently. My mind was empty and the paint
colors in the room began to collide as my vision blurred. I squinted to read the calligraphy
as his tongue moved in my labia. I tried to move, but he instructed me to obey
and his tongue crept to my moist vagina. The candle flickered, quivered and the studio
smelled of smoke before the flame vanished. Now it was a dark room, not a studio
anymore. It was silent, and the man was slurping something between my legs. The brush
lay lonely beneath my foot, and I intentionally pressed it with my toes whenever I obeyed.
The brush whispered to me, begged me to keep it under my foot and this would be our secret.
A ticklish sensation in my vagina crawled up to rest in my stomach. I pondered the calligraphy
and wondered whether the Quranic verses were watching us. Thought about the smell of paint
and how it saturated the studio and about mom’s boyfriend, his secret with her and my secret
with the sleeping lonely brush. Wondered why art embraced both nudes and Quranic calligraphy.
He pulled his head back, told me to pull my pants up. I obeyed. I could no longer smell paint.
The man grabbed my shoulder with a hand smelling of oil paint
and walked with me up the ceramic spiral stairs to his studio
whose walls were covered with colorful Quranic calligraphy.
He promised to teach me to be a painter and handed me a brush.
Then he warned me that artists must never reveal their secrets
and that everything in the room was a secret. I nodded and obeyed.
To be a painter is to never say no to the teacher, so I always obeyed.
The air in the studio was damp and cool, and it smelled of oil paint.
A single candle was burning, the faint light guarding our secrets
that I promised to never disclose and to forget once we leave the studio.
Brushes sprouted out of the man’s hands, but I had never touched a brush.
I was eight and he was fifty-one, and I didn’t understand calligraphy.
He asked me to open the drawer across from the blue Diwani calligraphy
and to hand him the two stacks of papers in it, and I happily obeyed.
We spread the papers on a rectangular table, my hand still gripping the brush.
On the pages rested drawings of nude women, and the man promised to paint
me on a canvas and said I was more beautiful than them. He locked the studio
door and approached me with slow steps, a faint smile on his face. “Our secrets
are important,” he said and unzipped my pants. This was our first secret.
He slid my purple pants down. My gaze fixed on the wall’s calligraphy
and my fingers squeezing the brush. My white panties glowed in the dim studio,
but soon enough they disappeared under my feet where my pants lay. I obeyed
when he told me to spread my legs. He lowered his head, his neck tilted. The paint
covering the walls and the floors smelled like rust. His hand clutched the brush
and laid it next to my foot. His lips sucked at my vulva, my gaze fixed on the brush.
I had kept secrets before, when mom’s boyfriend sat me on his lap, but the studio’s secrets
were warm, for his tongue tickled my body gently. My mind was empty and the paint
colors in the room began to collide as my vision blurred. I squinted to read the calligraphy
as his tongue moved in my labia. I tried to move, but he instructed me to obey
and his tongue crept to my moist vagina. The candle flickered, quivered and the studio
smelled of smoke before the flame vanished. Now it was a dark room, not a studio
anymore. It was silent, and the man was slurping something between my legs. The brush
lay lonely beneath my foot, and I intentionally pressed it with my toes whenever I obeyed.
The brush whispered to me, begged me to keep it under my foot and this would be our secret.
A ticklish sensation in my vagina crawled up to rest in my stomach. I pondered the calligraphy
and wondered whether the Quranic verses were watching us. Thought about the smell of paint
and how it saturated the studio and about mom’s boyfriend, his secret with her and my secret
with the sleeping lonely brush. Wondered why art embraced both nudes and Quranic calligraphy.
He pulled his head back, told me to pull my pants up. I obeyed. I could no longer smell paint.
Yalda Al-Ani is a writer from Iraq who resides in Williamsburg. She holds a B.A. in English from William and Mary, where she also placed first at The Goronwy Owen Prize in Poetry, first in the Glenwood Clark Prize in fiction, and second in The Academy of American Poets Eva Burch Prize.
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Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Why We No Longer Take Risks
We could’ve taken the metro from the centre of Moscow to Yugo-Zapadnaya. But we drink bootleg Stolichnaya fall out of the bar down slush-topped steps the scrunch of boots a soldier off duty from Lenin’s tomb the smoke from his Kino cigarette curls in our rigid faces in the soviet night air dissolves the contrails of our frozen breath he swaps his cap for a rabbit fur and we roll our eyes like dice say da at the open door of his Lada and the slam, and his rough red hands, and his wheels, easy across ice-filled potholes like he’s done this a million times before. Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a flash fiction writer and emerging poet living in Bristol, UK. Her work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Janus Literary and Flash Frog and her story ‘Electric Storm’ was recently selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. Tweets @kazbarwrites.
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Brian Builta
Your Heart Shall Throb and Overflow
I know I should appreciate the day as the affirmation says, but the janky way the hospital monitor glows is a distraction, like a wounded shuttlecock bat-flapping across the sky or two-legged opossum crawling up to say hi. Nothing brings people together like death, a much-needed break from work even though it costs you a loved one. These prayers are supposed to lift me up but here I am sitting on the toilet reading about 300 people displaced in an apartment explosion, one in a tree hanging from a branch no one hurt but everyone leveled. The dandelion thugs have been at it again mowing the prairie remnant before the controlled burn. How hard is it to venerate something wild? something naked and pure instead of installing some hydraulic system for lifting people to the sky? Yes, I believed in God less when I saw the priest, t-shirted and pantless in the sacristy. Some veil had been yanked down, a naked poet behind the curtain writing blank verse. Still, there’s the day wide open for utter magic or street clutter. The monitor beeps, the bag of drugs drip drips, the guitarist on the corner plays a hopeful tune, the gardener makes two passes through the bed with a shovel then plants something. Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. His work has been published in North of Oxford, Hole in the Head Review, South Florida Poetry Journal , New Ohio Review, TriQuarterly and 2River View.
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Rosa Castellano
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A GIRL THE COLOR OF A CRACKED WINDSHIELD WAITS WITH HER SISTERS
AND BROTHERS IN A TUB arms wrapped around knees pressed to chest in a kind of genderless dark. Hoping for quiet for the sound of something soft to say the Hurricane has passed. In the tub the rise and fall of chest of breath, of waiting together― knowing that if someone came turned on the lights they’d find only a jar― glass, with a ship inside. It’s ebony sails, the dreamed-up longed for black-dark velvet of the sky. |
CAMELOT IS A TRAILER PARK IN FLORIDA
My white grandfather named the park, the roads too, so Undine Drive and Lancelot Lane cut between the trailers and live oaks, whose wide canopies keep cicadas, television laugh tracks and the thumping swirl of the laundromat close. Even at night, clouds climb atop clouds, silent and electric as the neon green spines of the elephant ears my children duck behind to shuck their bathing suits What then besides chaos? My mother asks and laughs as we watch them chase each other with the hose. When I was ten, we cast the devil out of every room in the house. Singing laughing crying hands on the walls on me. At 4, I climbed onto the lap of a department store Santa, his red suit itchy against my cheek. Please don’t go to hell. I said and cried until he cried and prayed with my mom. Like a tree, my roots go south thru sand and shale to the gleaming caves of the Florida Aquifer where the past gathers in wild pools disappearing the distance between myself and home. Vertical Divider
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Rosa Castellano is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. In 2021, she was a finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship and her work can be found or is forth coming from RHINO Poetry, The Southampton Review, Nimrod and Passages North, among others. She has an MFA from VCU and her work has been supported by Bread Loaf, the Visual Arts Center of Virginia and by Tin House.
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Chanice Cruz
Kitchen Tiles
We dance, the kitchen tiles are cold under my bare feet, when she wraps her hands around my waist, reminding me to take a moment or two, when the water meant for the pasta don’t need watching, when the sauce is on low, the stove buzzing in warmth, waiting for her to come home, so we can dance in the center of our kitchen, with nothing but the appliances as an audience, to no music but what’s playing in our minds, somehow it is always the same song; all these years we are still a rhythm, dancing our ways through kitchens, the old cast iron skillet is our devoted admirer, a constant through arguments, apartment hunting, renovations, the first pan I taught her to cook out of, to watch us dance from the back burner, cool and quiet when she burned the green oven mitt separating the ground turkey meat for tacos, and we couldn’t stop laughing, oven mitts still make us giggle, kitchen aisle filled with our amusement and nothing else matters, after all these years it’s just us; just our hips swayin’, in moment or two, we stole and made our own, my head rests on her collarbone, her nose buried in my hair, our eyes closed, a synchronized sigh escapes our lips, as the silent song is filled with bubbles popping out of the pot, before we break, she kisses me on the forehead, and I put the pasta in water. Chanice Cruz is originally from Brooklyn, NY, however, credits Richmond, VA, for introducing her to slam poetry world. She is currently an Open Mic coordinator at Kew & Willow Books in Queens, NY and is a co-host for The Poet & The Reader Podcast. She received her bachelor’s degree in English at Queens College. Her poems have been published in Newtown Literary, Sinister Review, Periphery Journal and several other literary magazines.
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Mark DeCarteret
Indulgences
I was roughed up by four nuns from Our Roused Interest in Bodies. And if a fifth one thought at all about love it was love of the shifty, unfinished, she would love to see filled in as either all or none of the above. So much for that call button of sun, that ball bounced over my theme song. Instead, the dead clouded my head. Found beds in the beads of my rosary. I couldn’t fit half my sins in my fist. I lost touch with my fingers. So, I doubled up on Christ and His Blood. I tried to get rest. I got tested. Outside, the world continued. Had fewer words for my silence. I was even hit in the mouth. I was lit upon by thousands of stars. I still hear them thinking. We know where you are. Mark DeCarteret’s work has appeared in The Flagler Review, La Fovea , Mangrove, Mudlark, Plume, Sanibel-Captiva Review, Saw Palm, South Florida Poetry Journal, Tampa Review, and White Pelican Review. His seventh book lesser case was released in 2021 by Nixes Mate Books.
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Marc Alan Di Martino
Basement Tapes
We’re at that point in the Handmaid's Tale where June finds the mixtapes in the basement of the Commander's house, that wrinkle in time when I rediscover my own Maxells in a box on the office shelf. Years back I’d packed them up for an indeterminate period of time: months, years, decades as it turned out. The cassette player still works, tonguing the dusty ribbon’s underbelly as if licking the sugar off a stick of gum. I queue up Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village backed with Ornette Coleman’s Of Human Feelings. We used to tape our vinyl records so LPs stayed pristine, never foreseeing their demise in the rise of MP3s, streaming, unlimited access to the history of sound for ten bucks a month. I’m not romantic. I don’t believe in the inherent betterness of tapes or analog or any of that. I just come from a certain time when music was gold lodged in a stream bed – to be sifted, weighted, assessed. We obsessed over finds, proud of a Basement Tapes bought at a yard sale for fifty cents, or a John Gavanti (‘the worst album ever recorded’, wrote Christgau) scooped up at a record fair. Tapes were a type of currency between us, keepsakes of love and friendship to be forever cherished, shorn of economic worth. That, in a word, was their subversive power and June knew it, too, as she hid out in the cellar of the Commander’s house making her own basement tape, risking her ninth life to send an SOS to the man she loved. Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of the collections Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski's Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in On the Seawall, Rattle, THINK and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. He lives in Italy.
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Tim Duffy
Teresa in Ecstasy
I was jetlagged and sick of crowds when I learned that whatever shatters you must come from above. The usual cycles of the day: the bric à brac love song hummed in bliss while you soak the beans or warm the bread—none of it is real. Just outside the moment, the thief sharpens a knife, the sickness takes hold in the deepest tissues of the lung and you, oh you, are just about to be seized. When I first arrived in Rome and jet-lagged I walked to Santa Maria della Vittoria in a crowd of nuns and bored schoolchildren. There it was: in the upper right-side. The small church was a marble shade around its glow. When I had studied photos, I imagined it lower to the ground, more central. I had stared for so long at the folds of her clothing melting her body to God under the threat of the arrow, the golden shower lewd in its holy drip. I had written once that the folds are, as in Deleuze, the infinite packed into a small trans-locative miracle. Who could see this and feel they are not in Heaven? But, here, I am still exhausted in Rome. Her ecstasy is a surprise in peripheral vision. It enters the eye like any trauma. I break away from the schoolchildren, the nuns are shushing them. Here, I am, it says, always just at the edge, but don’t worry: you’ve come to the right place after all. Tim Duffy is a writer and teacher in Connecticut. He has recently published work in Salt Hill, Sepia, Pleiades, Hominum, Bodega Mag, and elsewhere. He is at work on a collection of poems.
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Nancy Freund
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Night Picnic
Face down on warm-cool concrete, in the end I’m missing one rubber shoe. My Oxford-educated friend, Turkish novel on audio in his ears, his broomstick gripped lightly, is cleaning. Always. Doing his job. Drizzle rain, it’s just a mist, a witness. White t-shirt. Baskets gathered, busy. Busy. Jumbled treasures. Trash. Obscured collected colors in unclear plexi-pale. Lids, both lost and found. Worn wood. Where the shoe might be. Underneath a picnic table. Someone will find it. Someone will not. And my old school pal rests his palm on the warm backside curve of my body. The Swedish word, I’ve learned, is svank. I want more from him. My ancient friend. He sits beside me, a still and silent dance of the two of us, pretending to decide. While piles gather, and searchers search, and cloths are shaken out, fabrics whipped and pleated. And submission. Set aside. Strings of lamps switch off too soon, then illuminate again. Music and breezes blow. A shoe surfaces, but it’s a child’s – not mine. We have more time. Do the others see us here off to the side? What stories will they tell tomorrow, when we wake? Clean Sweeper sees it all, he hears every sultry word straight through his Turkish, even with his headphones on. He knows what I’m up to. What I want, who I claim and aim to be, this woman here face-down, flat. I could turn, flip to face the naked bulbs, breathe in the breeze and all the stars, and greet him with my please. But the joy lives solely in the question, as everybody knows. |
andYouknewYouwould
ledzeppelin WeWentOutside Idon’tKnowWhy maybetoLoseAcoat or GetaSmoke pretense.endedUpinthebackseat whichlookingback wasThepoint. ThePoint. DarkoutThere,kindachilly rainonthewindows HeadlightsHighlightsHeartbeatStars. Justrightdrunk. HeadfullofmusicHummingfromtheclub.All thosePeopleinthereWonderedifthey’dMissMe Us SuddenlyAnUs w/thisGuy? Miniskirt.IHeldMyknees.HeLeanedinHisgrin whatHeHopedPerhapsmightHappen on hisEyelidsHisLips. GuyhadMouthandShoulders so I movedMyPalmsOnUpMyLegsAnInchOrSo LeanedIn.Up. Saidmy yes inSilence theWayWeDidItThen Rain.Drumbeats.ObviouslyFog. Vertical Divider
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An American-Brit in Switzerland, Nancy Freund writes novels, essays, poetry, and flash. She has pieces in Jellyfish Review, Hobart, Largehearted Boy, Splonk, Reflex, Ekphrastic Review, Fictive Dream, Citron Review, Takahe, Bending Genres, and The Disappointed Housewife, among others. She has Creative Writing degrees from UCLA and Cambridge. Twitter @nancyfreund.
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Anyély Gómez-Dickerson
When Is a Window Not a Window
you may think a window is just a window, and I assure you it is not, even if you insist on defining it in architecture terms, as an aperture that lets in light, or a portal to look through a window in Miami is not just a window, it’s a ventanita that hangs off restaurants and bakeries, this window breathes its cultural oxygen into our lungs and ansiosos, we inhale porque that ventanita sells more than pastelitos, cigars y café, our ventanita solidifies our identity, fills us with a longing unique to our starved and homesick pueblo in a city where sorrow dies among the palm trees that sway and silhouette an apricot sky, a city erected on diasporic mortar and dreams of antiquity to lessen the pain of loss, yet still disconnected in a city of hondureños, cubanos, puertorriqueños, colombianos, haitianos y dominicanos, brasileños, panameño, venezolanos and so many latinos and caribeños, each gathered at the city’s ventanitas each yearning to forget and remember, and savor the well-seasoned, the simmered or stewed, the sweet and the salty and the freshly-baked, and feed on melancholy and sips of yesterday, for a taste of home Click below to download a pdf of this poem. 
Anyély Gómez-Dickerson was born in Cuba and grew up in Miami, FL. She earned her poetry degree from Florida International University and her BS from Temple University. For her, being a Latina writer means creating art with “teeth” to expose issues plaguing our communities to foster change. Her projects highlight her life in Miami and explore her black, European, and Taína history back to Cuba’s slavery period under Spain. Her poetry also appears in The Latino Book Review, Acentos Review, West Trestle Review, Ocotillo Review, La Libreta Poetry Journal, and Label Me Latina/o Journal. |
Adrian Harte
A Light Year Heavier
When the ups stop she stalks me all the drain me afternoon. Oh, to have the body that sucks coffee and cigarettes. And nothing. Not pills, spit, and sweat. I'm a light year heavier. Everyday. The sign in the hospital common room where no one goes to play piece-less jigsaws says: You have the right to know where you are and, You can be detained if you have a mental disorder and, Breakfast is no longer served here from six am I no longer have tubes of Pringles, dead English books, or teeth-cracking ginger nuts. No visitors allowed, my world is a ward. I obsess about getting a room to myself. If I'll be bussed or taxied to ECT. If anyone will notice I'm gone a while before I make it to the train tracks where deer mooch in wild garlic behind the chain link fence. In a rusting vending machine I find four fingers wash them down with Listerine. Who needs caffeine or cigarettes when your entrails boil and your god's long gone? Memory is shocked astray the lightest breeze seizes all light blows shrunk flames away. Adrian Harte is Irish but has lived in Aubonne, Switzerland for 20 years. He has been published in the Peregrine Journal, Vita Poetica, Beaver, Embryo Concepts Zine, A New Ulster, Awakenings, Roi Fainéant Press, and Abridged. He has also written, to critical acclaim and commercial success, Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More (Jawbone 2018). He works in communications for UEFA, and has previously worked for the BBC and The Guardian.
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Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen
Away Down South in Dixie
I’m trying to do my groceries, Just to forget how miserable I am, And a bright light blinds me: A gloved hand, maybe leather, commanding me to stay put. Like a good immigrant. Like a good American, too. Just stop. Stay there. Don’t move. Don’t think. Don’t even look. But I do think, I guess. About my mom, And what she used to tell me When we had the money to go to Disney: Do whatever the police officers tell you, sweetie. They’re here to protect us, honey. Do as they say. So I do. I’m gonna get my wallet, sir. Left pocket; really slow. I know how it is; I know it’s hard for you. I’ve seen the videos where your people get shot. I promise I’m more scared than you are, And I can assure you that I love America, I really adore your country, sir, officer. I even call it America, Like you want to, Because you want to be your own continent And I respect that. It may even surprise you, Coming from a guy like me, But I can name every president, sir, Even the ones you have forgotten or never cared to learn at all. Ain’t that something, eh? I also like Gran Torino, officer, You know, the movie with all the cars and the guns, And the straight, white male violence; Maybe you look up to it too. And I don’t think Vietnam was a mistake or Saddam a saint. I even like the CIA, I promise you, sir. I don’t want any trouble, You already saw my visa. I don’t mean to offend, officer, But I think I know my rights Or something. My grandpa was comisario Back in Argentina. In Quilmes, that’s where I’m from. That has to mean something, right? I promise I won’t go out anymore, I swear. I’ll just stay in my room and don’t bother you anymore. I’ll just leave the sidewalk for Americans, From now on. Are we cool, sir? Cool? Great. Phew. Okay, officer, thank you. If you don’t mind now, sir, Only if that’s okay with you, I better get back home. Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen holds a Professor Diploma in Humanities from Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. He is twenty-six and has been writing —with some ups and downs— since he was a child. In his creative writing, he humbly follows the steps of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and Haruki Murakami.
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Amorak Huey
Let Us Return to Singing the Praises of the Moon
I’ve read four poems making fun of the moon in the past two days, and I’m telling you we’ve gone too far. Who am I to talk? I wrote a poem last year called “The Moon Can Go to Hell” and I remain foolishly proud of it, as if being proud of a poem is a thing that makes sense, as if a poem can keep us alive or control the tides or bounce sunlight from the other side of the world toward us so brightly that lovers swoon. There’s a T-shirt that says Fuckin’ Poets, Man, and I tell you what, that shirt gets it right. We want you and we want you and then we get mad/sad at you for making us want you and we build a rocket ship of words to launch at you and then we get mad/sad when the words change nothing and it’s like the fuck did we expect, they’re words, not enormous amazing rocks that hang in the sky for millions of years, man, a poem that could do that would be something indeed. Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize.
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Luci Huhn
That Day in August
I lived in Florida – you knew that – we had hugged each other goodbye. In that memory, in our mother’s house in the Midwest, you wear a plaid flannel shirt, black and white, like a photo from our childhood. You couldn’t know how hurricanes are tracked in Florida – for days or weeks – as they travel all the way from Africa, no matter how slowly they move. That day I was taking a real estate class. I sat next to a gentle woman who stored, at her house, Florida’s AIDS quilt. All that loss – measured and organized – then folded again and again like surf. Each day of class, I asked her when the storm was coming. That day she told me to go home, close up the house, pull the shutters down. I drove instead to buy water. All the people in the big, bright store – they bumped against each other, they were happy loading up their carts. I don’t remember what color I was wearing. I never did sell a piece of real estate, or see the painstakingly stitched squares spread wide as a field. I almost made it home before our sister called. You’ll never know how much her voice and mine have come to sound the same. A hurricane flattens the barrier islands, scrambles trees. The water rushes through – boats on land, houses in water. There’s no sense to be made of it. Another thing you couldn’t know: one of the dark sides of a hurricane is how you wish for it to turn and hit some other town along the coast. No one will say it. What does it matter where I was? Some days just can’t be reconstructed. The eye of the storm – gentle eye – is quiet. But the wall – there’s no steering there. Counter-clockwise, it picks you up. It spins and spins. Luci Huhn is a poet writing in Southwest Michigan. Most recently her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, Leon Literary Review, Rattle, and Persimmon Tree. She was nominated by West Branch in 2022 for a Pushcart Prize, and by Leon Literary Review in 2021 for a Best of the Net Award.
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Richard Jordan
Off the Map
Deep in the woods beyond Buttimer’s Farm, the spring was so narrow I could clear it with a hop, but the current was swift, the water cool. I found it one Opening Day while older fishermen lined the banks of large streams and rivers like gargoyles, thrashing up froth with their frantic casting. Expecting nothing, simply passing time, I lowered a mealworm on a hook into a quiet hole and pulled up a brookie, barely long enough to span my palm. Too small to have been stocked, a native with reds and oranges brighter than peak foliage, I released it and it flashed away downstream, fading, as in a dream. And I’d return to that place through my childhood, never telling anyone what I knew was there. I wouldn’t even bring a fishing pole. I’d stand and listen to the bubbling flow, maybe sometimes dip a toe in the translucent water, but only for a moment. Richard Jordan is a Ph.D. mathematician who also writes poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle (finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize competition), Valparaiso Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, The Atlanta Review, Kestrel, The National Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, Rust & Moth, Little Patuxent Review, and elsewhere. He resides in the Boston area.
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Thomas Kneeland
ancestors live in the trees we plant
Our fig tree was a great-grandmother― silent & wise & eternal, yet temporal. I went to her when my grandmother would send me outside, because I couldn’t be cooped up in the house all day I reached for her fruit, gently snapped them away from sockets without piercing ripened purple flesh & to my corner of the backyard, near the plum trees & away from the windows, I ate of the fruit blue jays & cardinals would dream of stealing in early Spring, each bite, a reminder that old things bear plentiful fruit the closer they get to Heaven. Thomas Kneeland is a Frontier Poetry 2022 Global Poetry Prize Finalist for the continent of Africa and the author of five poetry collections. He is an MFA Candidate at Butler University and an English Composition Instructor for Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis, IN. His chapbook entitled, We Be Walkin’ Blackly in the Deep is forthcoming from Marian University this spring. Kneeland’s writing has appeared in Rigorous Magazine, The Hyacinth Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly and elsewhere.
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Kik Lodge
Find the duck
The duck is not inside the cup where the toothbrushes are kept, or in the laundry basket, or the cupboard, or beaking out from the corner of a family photo. It is not between the spokes of the bicycle wheel parked in the hallway, nor wedged through the letterbox. It is not under the wheelbarrow, feather-deep in the soil of a potted chrysanthemum, nor sitting at the bottom of the albizia where the other duck is buried. The duck is floating in a cosmic void behind the spine of the picture book. Silent, amazed. It’s not that the duck doesn’t want to be in the house hiding behind the shower curtain on its own. It loves the shower curtain. It’s a Laura Ashley shower curtain, and every time the duck hides behind the faint side of its meadow motif, what a delight it is to be found! It’s just that currently the duck is researching deviations from general relativity and the thing about dark energy is that it nudges the universe to expand, creating more planets, more houses, more ducks. Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer and sometimes poet. She is from Devon, England, and lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats and rats. Her work has featured in The Moth, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, trampset, Maudlin House, Milk Candy Review, Splonk, Bending Genres, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and other very fine journals. Erratic tweets @KikLodge
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Mel Mancheno
Hanging in your bedroom were three posters by Egon Schiele. And though you were still a woman back then he reminded me of you.
On those in-between nights. When the sun hasn't quite blushed its cheek at you. And the moon has been bold and traced its body on the sky.
When you've brushed, dry bird-bone brittle
but beautiful, pulsating red hair out.
And drank your last glass of water for the night.
with a healthy serving of biotin.
Is the last thing, the only thing
you have to reach for
a knife?
Not a sheet, but a knife?
It's a sad song you sing
Before you go to sleep.
About laying a willing hand around your quartz-dust skin. Warming up balled fists,
& Opening up those cosmic palms,
Letting doves fly out and into each other's stomachs
Kissing on each star making up that galaxy in your belly.
And out comes a beautiful boy, or girl, or whatever they want to be.
Whatever portrait it’ll paint, that’ll be more than fine, it’ll be great.
But when you’re alone. Clinging onto the self that’ll let you survive.
What is this feeling for?
When you wake up just a tad too late, in a half-mistaken, exceptional mood. Rushing to pull
the denim around your hips, up your thighs.
Admiring the curves to your comet.
When you're halfway through/out the door
catching glimpses of yourself in a mirror of rainwater collected by the subway station,
do you remember who you used to be?
A pre-loved you, before you had taken each and every rusty, and unlovable brick out of you, to replace it with a new.
Before you cut-out, killed parts of yourself, in the name of liberation. And the forming of a pearl.
Inside it do you see
An eighth of the size of the tip of a sewing needle
worth of you?
Before you understood
The man you needed
Was right within you.
Before you had realized
misery didn't love company, it just hated being alone.
Before you know you’re
exactly where you're supposed to be.
On those in-between nights. When the sun hasn't quite blushed its cheek at you. And the moon has been bold and traced its body on the sky.
When you've brushed, dry bird-bone brittle
but beautiful, pulsating red hair out.
And drank your last glass of water for the night.
with a healthy serving of biotin.
Is the last thing, the only thing
you have to reach for
a knife?
Not a sheet, but a knife?
It's a sad song you sing
Before you go to sleep.
About laying a willing hand around your quartz-dust skin. Warming up balled fists,
& Opening up those cosmic palms,
Letting doves fly out and into each other's stomachs
Kissing on each star making up that galaxy in your belly.
And out comes a beautiful boy, or girl, or whatever they want to be.
Whatever portrait it’ll paint, that’ll be more than fine, it’ll be great.
But when you’re alone. Clinging onto the self that’ll let you survive.
What is this feeling for?
When you wake up just a tad too late, in a half-mistaken, exceptional mood. Rushing to pull
the denim around your hips, up your thighs.
Admiring the curves to your comet.
When you're halfway through/out the door
catching glimpses of yourself in a mirror of rainwater collected by the subway station,
do you remember who you used to be?
A pre-loved you, before you had taken each and every rusty, and unlovable brick out of you, to replace it with a new.
Before you cut-out, killed parts of yourself, in the name of liberation. And the forming of a pearl.
Inside it do you see
An eighth of the size of the tip of a sewing needle
worth of you?
Before you understood
The man you needed
Was right within you.
Before you had realized
misery didn't love company, it just hated being alone.
Before you know you’re
exactly where you're supposed to be.
Mel Mancheno is a 17-year-old writer and student hailing from Miami, they began taking up activism, volunteering, and writing essays and poetry as a way to process their emotions and foment awareness among those in their city. In addition to their artistic pursuits, Mel is studying to pursue a career in psychiatry. Endlessly fascinated by the workings of the mind, Mel hopes to use their platform as a poet and future as a healthcare provider to assist those who they feel need it the most.
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Natalie Marino
Like Faraway Stars
My dead mother visited me last night but we didn’t talk. She stared at me with the moon’s blankness. She was a muted winter sky. If she could have spoken my mother would have told the story of a thousand women before her. Her ancestors were Mestizas. Her ancestors’ ancestors were slaves raped by Spanish invaders. There were few likable characters. Memory was water and everyone was always drowning. I woke this morning and looked in the mirror. I saw beauty in the darkness of my hair and remembered how I was taught to hide the brownness in me, how now I can let go of nightmares like faraway stars. Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Atlas and Alice, Gigantic Sequins, Mom Egg Review, Plainsongs, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, Salt Hill, West Trestle Review and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, June 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.
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Kaecey McCormick
Family Photo With Bird
The birthday candles are lit, the flicker caught on film as a flash of blue, one for each year of her life and one more for good luck. Look how closely the father and mother stand. And the siblings, leaning in toward the cake, mouths open in song though you cannot hear their singing. Can you tell how deeply the birthday girl has inhaled? Her lungs are full and ready. You must wonder what she will wish for when the song ends. Everyone watches her, except the tall girl there, half hidden by the father’s arm. See how she looks toward the piano under the open window in the corner of the frame. You understand why her head is turned if you look closely—a bird, captured by the camera as it’s about to alight on the music desk. Maybe she left the window open. Do you believe they guessed whose fortune the bird was bringing? The grandfather half out of frame, at the edge of the table—they must have thought it was him who wouldn’t live another year. What they don’t know is that the birthday girl felt it even then, the dark thing growing at the base of her spine― sending out stringy tendrils, like the streams of confetti we see tangling in her hair. Kaecey McCormick is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area where she served as Cupertino Poet Laureate (2018-2020). She is a current Steinbeck Fellow (2023-2024), and her poetry and prose have found a home in different places, including Jabberwock Review, One Sentence Poems, On the Seawall, and Clockhouse as well as her chapbooks Sleeping with Demons (2023) and Pixelated Tears (2018). When not writing, you can find Kaecey hiking up a mountain, painting, or reading a book. Connect at kaeceymccormick.com
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Judith Mikesch-McKenzie
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DEGREES OF FREEDOM WHEN YOUR PHASE SPACE IS AN AUTO SHOP
i. - the system The methodical rhythm of the ratchet wrench creates a perfect beat, the first sound I hear as I walk towards the open garage door, heard even above the burst of power from the pneumatic air gun, and the high soaring note of the grinder shaping metal in a cascade of sparks. bringing a feeling so much like hearing a favorite song, clasping hands, and running out to the dance floor. All the men here are table-mates, ready to dance to the same songs we do and make the world better. Everything is known. In physics, a “system” is any object or group of objects chosen for study. ii. - the phase space “That’s some real-life shit, Judy.” We are standing at his workbench at the back of the garage. Normal greetings have been traded, the way most of the world checks in without any risk of real connection. But a real story was told, and his hands stopped searching for the set of keys I’d left, and he looked at me and said that. So much here was comforting, like the olive green of his coveralls, so much more comforting than the cold white at the hospital. These same green coveralls were worn by the men in my father’s auto shop, the only color sold in the Army-Navy store in our small town - which is why they wore them, those men who laughed when I danced across their shop floor at six years old Every system has a “phase space” - the set of all its possible states of existence - called its “degrees of freedom” |
iii - the set I look at him and turn the conversation back to the easy kind, to picking up my car, and I watch as his hands find a pencil on the wide workbench made of thick wood, its surface covered with paper, tools, unwashed coffee cups, stains of grease and oil, and I see how the comforting green of his coveralls has streaks of the same dark color and I remember the smell of that thick grease and oil, the rough feel of the fabric against my cheek, the feel of arms pressing me in and hands finding their way around my ten year old body, and the feeling when the grip loosened just a bit, and I slipped free and ran, and never returned to the garage shop of our neighbor across the way, who slapped my father on the back every time he visited, and each time he bought supplies from my father’s store - and how it was when he came to my father’s funeral, and how all of my sisters looked at him that day, which was the first time I knew it was more than just me and it was the last time I was afraid iv - degrees I wonder at the state of mind of the scientist who named “degrees of freedom” – suggesting ‘you can be free up to here, but not beyond’ - the ultimate in limitations… but imagine instead thinking of your personal phase space, your ‘degrees of freedom’ - as a rejection of limits of any kind - a declaration that all the possible states of you can never be known, so that your degrees of freedom are infinite and fearless Vertical Divider
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Judith Mikesch-McKenzie has traveled much of the world, but is always drawn to the Rocky Mountains as one place that feeds her soul. She loves change - new places, new people, new challenges, but writing is her home. Her poems have been published in Pine Row Press, Halcyone Literary Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Closed Eye Open, Scribblerus, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea Valley Review, and several others. She is a wee bit of an Irish curmudgeon, but her friends seem to like that about her.
Bryan R. Monte
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WHY I DIDN’T USE THE BACK DOOR
Ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk. I force my wheelchair backwards up the four, broad steps Of my hometown library’s seventeen-million-dollar extension built with no ramps to allow me to roll through the front door. The new building’s straight-up-and-down, three-story pillars reminiscent of the Mussolini Dux obelisk or EUR’s colonnades. Gone is the old side entrance I used as a child with a bike rack next to the young people’s section, a sunny, western bay window with a built-in bench. Now a postmodern entrance hall whisks unknowing visitors and the homeless from the front door right out the back before they enter the library. No information or circulation desk in this great corridor nor books on a revolving wire rack, as in my day, enticing them to stay. No, this is a library for people who know where they are supposed to go, who drive and park out back who know how to walk left and take the stairs, or the elevator if they’re tired, to where the books and videos are kept Ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk. I roll up to the front counter and ask: “Why is there no ramp for the front entrance?” The librarian glares down and informs me of the two, blue, wheelchair in rear logo signs out front. I tell her a bicycle parked in the rack in front of a car with its hood over the sidewalk blocked that way in, and that the days of minorities using the back door are over. I tell her my family had a business in this town for twenty-five years, and a house for fifty-two, and that tomorrow I will call the mayor and the councilperson responsible for this ward. She gives me a business card with the name and contact information of a library administrator. I take the elevator upstairs and look on the shelves for a copy of J. P. MacLean’s Shakers of Ohio, but it’s not where I found it four years ago, the section since moved over a few rows. As I roll down the narrow aisles, picking up discarded stepstools blocking my way with my left foot and depositing them in the wide aisles at each end, I hear “Nonfiction” over the loudspeaker, realize that’s where I am. I hear the policeman’s squawk box a few seconds before he appears— military-short blond hair and pudgy. I say: “I’m disabled, not a criminal,” squint for his badge number and give him my Herr Doktor Professor stare over my black reading glasses, so he just walks by with a smirk. Barely in his 30s, he realizes I can take him to court or get a comment permanently placed on his record if he stops, cautions, or arrests me. Ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk. I wheel to Reference to check for the book in the on-line card catalogue, every terminal blocked by a heavy, wooden chair. I push one out of the way with a grunt as the phone rings behind me. The librarian answers: “Yes” meaning, I’m there, then comes over too late and offers to move the chair I’ve already shifted. I ask why there’s no accessible terminal. She doesn’t answer, but asks which book I am looking for. I tell her, she checks the number, and we look for it on the shelf back where I was, then she checks the number again and says it was charged out and just returned, but is downstairs waiting to be re-shelved. I tell her I’d like to look at it to check some rare photos I’d just examined at the Shaker Heights Museum a few days ago, that I’ll be delivering a history paper in Salt Lake City at the end of the week. She says the book will be on the shelf tomorrow. I tell her I will be at the airport then. She makes no effort to go or call downstairs to get the book so I can consult it before I go. Ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk, ga chunk. Sometimes I’ve wondered why I left four decades ago to save my family damage to their name and pharmacy. Now, in the one place that once offered my only solace, information, and protection to do homework, free from bullies and my parents’ nightly arguments, I know I will never return, the store long torn down, a parking lot in its place a five-story American flag painted on the wall of the building still standing next door. |
THE WAY YOU LEFT
Ronald Linder (1930-2004) I’m sorry the cleaner broke the paper band across your laundered shirt before I could stop her. She couldn’t have known it was one of the last things that you touched that touched you that week before you went into hospital and never came out. You said I was a poet masquerading as a teacher and you, a poet pretending to be a doctor eating brown-bag lunches in the hospital parking lot while reading Celine, Rilke, or Baudelaire, working The New York Times crossword puzzle and evenings building fractal screen savers to feed your quick, curious mind. You caught me cursing one evening hurrying down the street an hour late from work, just fifteen minutes before the weekly writers’ workshop was due to meet in my living room. You sat in your car’s passenger seat reading a book, the door open your feet resting on the curb. “You sure you want to do this?” you asked me as you helped put cups and saucers on the table for tea and cookies at the break. “This is the only good part of my week!” I snapped and we both laughed. You talked about reviving my gay literary magazine from its five-year hibernation and I thought only of emigration, my company having down-sized from seventeen to twelve to five to three offices in five years a dozen friends and one partner dead from AIDS complications no teaching, insurance, or computer jobs for me in all of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “There’s no one left to talk to here!” you complained when I called from Europe every weekend cheaper to call you for an hour in San Francisco than friends in Amsterdam, your family and friends dead or gone, rising rent and bills devouring your pension and savings the exhausting climb up three flights in a building with no elevator until the third time your cancer returned, for which, as a doctor, as a Buddhist, you were well-prepared, having watched countless patients die over four decades. You divested yourself of your treasures the reel-to-reel radio recordings: Copland at Carnegie Hall and Garland at the Palace, your Fritz Wunderlich opera records, your business shirts, jackets, and raincoats that smelled of your apartment’s dust, coffee, and the hundreds of moldering books you’d collected over fifty years. You’d slip two books into my suitcase every time I came to visit the night before I left. In hospital you tried to distract me from your jaundiced, skeletal torso by pointing at the IV pump next to your bed, its plastic cog pushing a milky liquid through a plastic tube without touching it. “The most sanitary delivery method,” you said in doctorspeak being clinical perhaps to give yourself distance and make me less afraid. Your bed pointed towards the snowy TV screen tuned to the History Channel during Civil War week, away from Richmond Beach’s miles of white breakers outside your window. I didn’t know then you were starving yourself taking only liquid nutrients to cut short your hospice stay. On the phone a week later I wished you “Good luck” afraid to say “I Love You” over the Veterans Hospital line (in the days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”) You said: “Good luck to you and Winny.” You died four days later, no funeral or memorial service no newspaper obituary your ashes scattered in the Bay under the Golden Gate. After a decade of sixty-hour work weeks I finally have time to listen to your tapes of Basil Bunting, Galway Kinnell, Ai, Ned Rorem, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. I read through your poetry books and write daily on my laptop at my “soft desk,” my bed, on one of my bad days. I wear one of your shirts your tape carousel spins atop my stereo, no longer frightened or angry by my weak legs or forgetful hands but remembering and honoring the calm, courageous way you lived and left. Vertical Divider
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Reprinted from Bryan R. Monte's book, On the Level: Poems on Living with Multiple Sclerosis, published by Circling Rivers (November 2022).
https://circlingrivers.com/books/on-the-level-poems-on-living-with-multiple-sclerosis/
https://circlingrivers.com/books/on-the-level-poems-on-living-with-multiple-sclerosis/
Bryan R. Monte was a 2021 finalist in the Hippocrates Open Poetry Contest and the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award, and a 2022 commended poet in the Hippocrates’ Contest. Recently, his poetry has been published in The Arlington Literary Journal, Irreantum, and Italian Americana. His book, On the Level: Poems on Living with Multiple Sclerosis, (Circling Rivers, 2022), has been praised by poet Philip Gross and Jacob M. Appel, MD for its humor and candor.
Jason R. Montgomery
I will never play saxophone
A friend once told me they could tell me what instrument I would have played in middle school band. I
smiled and laughed along as they told me I would have played the saxophone. I didn’t have the heart to tell
them my middle school didn’t have instruments
– or a band.
We had a box.
6’5 and made of steel.
For all the kids that’d take a chunk out of you.
We did have a library,
A small one room trailer filled with donated books,
But it was only open once a week for an hour at lunch
Wednesdays, mostly.
I found a copy of a graphic novel there.
It was about a blond woman and her beloved monster.
There were boobs in it.
I am still not sure it actually existed
The librarian was a blond woman who drove in from Seal Beach.
We were her beloved monsters, I think.
We had a LA County Sheriff Deputy
who patrolled the wide asphalt gaps between buildings in a squad car.
He was a pacing brown and white cougar
In a zoo where eating the guests was all part of the show.
A friend once told me they could tell me what instrument I would have played in middle school band. I
smiled and laughed along as they told me I would have played the saxophone. I didn’t have the heart to tell
them my middle school didn’t have instruments
– or a band.
We had a box.
6’5 and made of steel.
For all the kids that’d take a chunk out of you.
We did have a library,
A small one room trailer filled with donated books,
But it was only open once a week for an hour at lunch
Wednesdays, mostly.
I found a copy of a graphic novel there.
It was about a blond woman and her beloved monster.
There were boobs in it.
I am still not sure it actually existed
The librarian was a blond woman who drove in from Seal Beach.
We were her beloved monsters, I think.
We had a LA County Sheriff Deputy
who patrolled the wide asphalt gaps between buildings in a squad car.
He was a pacing brown and white cougar
In a zoo where eating the guests was all part of the show.
Thursday, April 30th 1992
Morning
John’s Hamburgers, 5815 Downey Blvd., was burned to the ground before the sun came up.
They closed the beaches, but we all still walked to school.
We ate hot lunch under the smoke darkening skies.
100 pre-teens at picnic tables realizing
we would have 1st period math
on the last day of humanity's last day.
Noon
When big kids at Wilson High poured out into the halls biting, kicking, and punching any face that didn’t look
like their own the schools decided it would be better for us to be at home, or out in the streets, or on rooftops
throwing stones at the police cars that were everywhere and nowhere all at once.
I remember sitting with my brother on the garage roof trying to decide if the pyrolysis products drifting on
the wind was nearer or further away than Mr. Kim’s store.
He was closed.
David said he and his son were there. He had seen them although the neon beer signs were off and the Street
Fighter machine was dim.
They stacked bags of rice along the glass front doors, but waved to him from the dark store.
Evening
The neighborhood men paced the length of the block half heartedly. They made groups of two, or three, but
when four or more stood for too long one of their wives would break them up.
I don’t know where my father was. Working, as likely as not.
At 6 PM the police drove slowly from block to block announcing the curfew.
We had breakfast for dinner. Bacon, pancakes, and eggs.
My mom was grateful the Wonderful World of Disney was only interrupted once by the news.
Night
We slept with all the windows closed.
The sounds of helicopters and sirens seemed no better or worse than any other day.
Morning
John’s Hamburgers, 5815 Downey Blvd., was burned to the ground before the sun came up.
They closed the beaches, but we all still walked to school.
We ate hot lunch under the smoke darkening skies.
100 pre-teens at picnic tables realizing
we would have 1st period math
on the last day of humanity's last day.
Noon
When big kids at Wilson High poured out into the halls biting, kicking, and punching any face that didn’t look
like their own the schools decided it would be better for us to be at home, or out in the streets, or on rooftops
throwing stones at the police cars that were everywhere and nowhere all at once.
I remember sitting with my brother on the garage roof trying to decide if the pyrolysis products drifting on
the wind was nearer or further away than Mr. Kim’s store.
He was closed.
David said he and his son were there. He had seen them although the neon beer signs were off and the Street
Fighter machine was dim.
They stacked bags of rice along the glass front doors, but waved to him from the dark store.
Evening
The neighborhood men paced the length of the block half heartedly. They made groups of two, or three, but
when four or more stood for too long one of their wives would break them up.
I don’t know where my father was. Working, as likely as not.
At 6 PM the police drove slowly from block to block announcing the curfew.
We had breakfast for dinner. Bacon, pancakes, and eggs.
My mom was grateful the Wonderful World of Disney was only interrupted once by the news.
Night
We slept with all the windows closed.
The sounds of helicopters and sirens seemed no better or worse than any other day.
Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano/Indigenous Californian writer, painter, community artist and engagement artist from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA. Jason is one of 2021 Newell Flather Awards for Leadership in Public Art outstanding nominees and 2021-2023 Easthampton Poets Laureate. Jason is also the co-founder of the police abolition group “A Knee is Not Enough” (AKINE) in Easthampton, MA.
Judith H. Montgomery
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How to Meet the River
In memory of June 18, 1992 At the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge How easily a hand may curl to scoop cool waters from any stream. Or release to toss a stone—say, into the river Drina, that cleaves the greening hills of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where centuries of children have tilted their light bodies from the ancient bridge to drop pebbles or sticks into the waters. But this day it’s not sticks that fly or fall. Not the children who let go. This day, soldiers’ rough hands hoist the still- breathing bodies of orphans—their mothers and fathers having been tied to axles and dragged red through the streets of Višegrad. The men lift the struggling children above the parapets, to hurl them high into keening air—to fall toward the river’s stone-cold surge. This, so their countrymen may raise rifles to play at marksmanship, piercing bodies how many times before they meet the stream. Each shot child, entering the clean currents, stains crimson the ripples that wash the banks. The pouring waters bear their burden downhill, to mingle with every stream, last to dissolve into ocean’s salt palms. How to stand on any bridge, drop a stone, and not see, floating beside your face, their drowned faces? How to cup a palm of water and drink, without kneeling on every bank? |
Through the Terrible Bright Furnace
after seeing new photographs of Bakhmut After Hiroshima, after so much fire-ripped life and not-life, what does survival mean, to stumble blind through blaze, to emerge on the other side of death? The Japanese survivors were pierced by radiating needles. Stitched by scarlet threads of loss—child, father, wife. Yet also in that city, six sacred trees―Gingko bilobas―withstood the searing blast. They bowed before the terrible bright furnace, bowed and burned, but at root refused to be consumed. Hardly spared, they struggled up, stem and shoot, unfolding palms of leaves to promise breeze, relief. Today― tomorrow—other war-fires spread to more cities, your city. Someday, perhaps to mine. How can either of us hold a breath for hope but in these six green trees persisting half a world away, still blessing ravaged earth. May each of us pass through blitz and blaze, emerge unbowed. Rise again green: to bud, to blossom. To offer shade. Vertical Divider
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Judith H. Montgomery’s poems appear in the Bellingham Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies. Her first collection, Passion, received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her fourth book, Litany for Wound and Bloom, was a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Prize, and appeared in August 2018 from Uttered Chaos Press. Her prize-winning narrative medicine chapbook, Mercy, appeared from Wolf Ridge Press in March 2019.
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Chris Pellizzari
Lorca Returns Home to Granada
Madrid, 1936 Friend- Federico, you cannot return to Granada. They will look for you there. Go to Argentina. Go to Mexico. Lorca- They will not find me in Granada. I’ll retreat to the hill beyond the Alhambra where God himself goes to get away from prayers. It will rain in Granada next week. I will hide between the inspirations of men, which are ruins of soaked trench coats. I will avoid eye contact with the storm clouds, like a woman passing a man alone on the street at night. Friend- But it will not rain forever. The sun will return. Lorca- Ay, the sun! You are right! I will hear the sun snorting in its pen. They will have to release it to the sand and the crowd. The sun of Andalucia with horns sharper than any bull. The sun that brings out Andalucia’s passion, the passion of the husband who has discovered how beautiful his wife is after she has fallen in love with someone else. Friend- Federico, you cannot hide from the Andalusian sun! Lorca- The blue of its sky holds me like a barren woman. I will never have a child of my own. I am scared of the royal barrenness of its blue. It is too revealing. It reveals too many of my secrets. There is nothing to hide, nothing to keep for later. It makes enemies of lemons and allies of oranges. But, my friend, there is nothing to worry about. What city kills its own poet? Cities are not created to kill poets. I will go home to Granada and they will never find me. I will pass like a breeze through olive groves. No, they will never find me. Chris Pellizzari's work can be found at Hobart, Slipstream, Gone Lawn, Not One Of Us, Ligeia, and many other places. He is a member of The Society of Midland Authors. |
Maria S. Picone
Asian Barbie Doll
Play with the idea of a girl To make this slim concept powerful, strong Snap off her arms and legs with burdens Then unbox; start afresh each time... To make a sliced down concept stronger from centuries of man-made honing: Unbox a fresh start for a new era, This time, beiging in her face From centuries of man-led homing Binding feet, expecting bows Unwhiten her face this time around Make her a picket fence in your USA With high heel bound feet and bows to all She works, she cooks and cleans and child cares An American white house with picket fence Awaiting her dumpling and hot dog life She works, cooks, cleans, cares for the children She has a heart-shaped loveable face A dumpling and hot dog meal plan With just enough Zen to be acceptable On her loveable, porcelain face Is painted the perfect smile Of an acceptable level of Zen exotic A mainstay of fusion restaurants and upscale spas The perfect smile is painted like a façade Over a person caught in expectations’ web A mainstay of upscale spas, fusion restaurants She can’t be too Asian or too white A person caught inside this web of exploitations of a cultural mélange of Hollywood and PF Chang’s Of course cannot act too exotic or not exotic enough So you must take her daughter and try again This cultural milieu of kung fu and K-pop stans Manufactures identity with—of course—production flaws So you take the next generation, try again, Toy with the idea of an Asian girl Maria S. Picone (mariaspicone.com/@mspicone) is a queer Korean American adoptee. She has two forthcoming chapbooks, Adoptee Song (mid-2023) and Propulsion, a fiction chapbook from Conium Press. She won Salamander’s Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Prize and grants from Kenyon Review, Hambidge, SCAC, and elsewhere. She is Chestnut Review’s managing editor.
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Kenneth Pobo
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MOTEL
Gregory Crewdson Beneath The Roses The guests in 14 say their shower water is dark. I offer them another room where stubborn water will be the same. I make my living from the anonymous, cars with unfamiliar license plates, people who squeak open the office screen door for coffee and doughnuts. Each year I barely hold on. My friend Katie says I should advertise, join the Chamber of Commerce. No budget for those. A TV goes on the fritz. If I can’t fix it, I call Harv the repairman. More money gone. Sometimes when I clean rooms I find needles, semen-stained sheets. Or a teddy bear that some kid forgot. I work until lunch, a bologna sandwich and iced tea. Fresh wheels creep in. |
JIM’S HOUSE OF SHOES AFTER CLOSING TIME
Gregory Crewdson Beneath The Roses Sometimes when everyone has gone home, I rest among boxes and loafers. Today we had a small run on hushpuppies. Dad ran this store better than I do, could figure sums in his head. I need a #2 pencil and my books don’t balance. I polish secrets, see a man every now and then. If she knew, my wife would probably demand a divorce. I want and don’t want that. My arches ache, too much standing. I drink Burger King Coke, leave the store in the dark, the moon something I believe is there since it often is. I may not see it, still feel followed. Vertical Divider
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Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press) and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Asheville Literary Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.
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Marina Ramil
Non-normative local desires
Oh, sing into the empty tunnel with me one last time ignoring the roaring engines above? no scraped knees for this one no zinc on your speckled back or tossing me into the surf I swear I won’t fight when you try to teach me to float I still won’t learn but I’ll sink quietly and in your old four cylinder no cat will be waiting for you to explain where I have gone. Oh, take me counting snapping jaws like we did when I was the right age for you? they bathe in the sun so meditatively they barely notice us pass them and tally score among the paper skin trees you remind me to leave no noises in my wake and I’ll wish I had taken more memories by the time we’re at the fruit stand buying something to share. Oh, will you let me lay on the cold tiles a little longer for I'd hate to walk the halls like this? pregnant only with hysteria but if rumor allows maybe I’ll finally bear that child someday if not this floor I’ll lock myself in a four cylinder of my own outside the city’s best bagel shop I won’t eat I won’t sleep I won’t read I’ll just try my damndest to blend in with the upholstery. Oh, walk the steps twisting upward into the sky with me like we did once for the view? it seems a good idea on the ground but I forget that somewhere around the tenth meter we can barely hear each other on the balcony for the wind is blowing but I think I caught it your lilting voice in the tone of roots creaking louder the farther away from the tree they get. Oh, watch me merge confidently onto the interstate from the backseat of my four cylinder? listen to the radio monarch sing of youth with marbles caught at the top of her throat we seek new experiences but on the way we’ll pass cows who have only ever seen one field because you’re there napping peacefully I’ll keep my hands steady and expect the same in kind. Oh, when I throw myself into the Millhopper’s gaping maw what happens then? joining the myths there sounds a better fate than wasting away filled with mucus and you built my body this way so you can’t get upset when it grinds to a halt when you see my bones stripped of their flesh know that’s what yours look like too. Marina Ramil is a lifelong reader and writer whose work has been featured in the Stoneboat Literary Journal, OxMag, and elsewhere. They received an honorable mention for the 2022 Penrose Poetry Prize. They and their writing live in South Florida with kid sisters, alligators, and strangler figs.
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Bruce Robinson
Portal
We’re far too fragile, like ancient works on paper or you right now, unwilling to travel, as if a line beyond our limits would unwind the brave and fulsome chants of alarm clocks that urge us out here go, right now an unhinged door. *** Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Mantis, Two Hawks Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Last Stanza, and Aji. He divides his time uneasily among several four-footed and sure-footed creatures. |
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Alafia Nicole Sessions
Second Opinion
Two weeks after I nudge a bulging planet under my pelvic bone, the fever comes. The ragged nerves and pacing, the senses beginning to fray like filament shorn between meddling fingers. The bed can’t comfort or contain me. The feeling that I’m inside out is both omen and receipt. My mother thinks first infection, spreads open the wings of my black orchid, still weeping birth blood. She winces at the sutured ruin between my legs, I have yet to witness. She sniffs quick, then lets her shoulders fall, relieved there’s no putrid smell festering the swamp of my feverbed. But I protest― something inside me has died. There’s an unnamed maiden trapped within, she oils her scalp with my boiling blood. This dead tenant writhes and constricts, thrashes her head against the smoking circuit board of my spine. I watch her shroud the shoulders of every mirror in the house, no way to tell which me I am. She is hijacker of time and tongue, she’ll wrench my sweet words into scourge― I must warn my beloved. I want him to lay eyes on my meat, to make a meal of me at my most tender, but for six weeks he cannot feast. I need to know that he can love me when the milk I spill is turned, not only during ecstasy, when I’m leaking both our nectar. I thrust the penicillin down our throat, hope the pills will save me, silence her. Unsure, I open my mouth to ask him. I watch the haint’s rage pour out instead. Alafia Nicole Sessions is a black poet and mother from Los Angeles. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Indiana Review, Radar Poetry, Los Angeles Review, Obsidian, Gulf Coast Journal, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. Alafia was selected by Evie Shockley as the winner of the 2023 Furious Flower Prize. She is a nominee for Best New Poets, a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and was selected as a semi-finalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize.
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Matthew Isaac Sobin
Heat in The Catskills
Remember a story from when my father was young and his mother and her many brothers and sisters were far younger than I can imagine them and we all know summer because for children its glory is undiminished the relief of shade and cool water after play and sweat and the leap into the shallows amid laughter and buoyant sunlight it is the moment which feels like a lifetime and all wish it might extend into eternity when an afternoon endures passing into the next day and how you must have thought often how you weren’t there (sick possibly in the camp infirmary hearing distant joy through dull nausea) as your cousin your buddy went under the cool water (as the thrushes swallowed their lilting songs) (who told you with what words) in silence (how the warmth of summer surely felt strange) thereafter Matthew Isaac Sobin's (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are forthcoming in Midway Journal and The Lumiere Review. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He lives and writes with his wife and two dogs. @WriterMattIsaac |
Michael Sofranko
Barnegat Blues
So many summers, I cursed in the choking breeze,
sweeping across the mudflats and the cattails as they rotted
by the inlet’s bend, the spray of salt lining my eyes,
the fragrant women passing on the bridge overhead
in limousines, exotic as French nouns.
I was fighting against the incoming tide near Barnegat Point,
toiling with a bamboo pole and drifting squid,
reeling in the garbage feeders: sea robins, blow fish,
all of them half-ruined by whatever
Dow Chemical dumped into the spillways.
Then one night, beside me, a printed dress against her figure,
a vision: she had a way of retrieving, a way of looking out,
and suddenly, in the frenzy I always prayed for,
she hooked blue after blue.
I’ll never know how long that quick, ecstatic,
flash of silver bodies lasted, but as swiftly as they swarmed
and struck, they fled. Silence between us then,
until she began, in a foreign tongue,
a song, I learned later, she sang for her son,
lost to the sea and the offshore wages.
And I left her there, swaying, one pole in the sand,
lulled by the sound of the water that carried him.
So many summers, I cursed in the choking breeze,
sweeping across the mudflats and the cattails as they rotted
by the inlet’s bend, the spray of salt lining my eyes,
the fragrant women passing on the bridge overhead
in limousines, exotic as French nouns.
I was fighting against the incoming tide near Barnegat Point,
toiling with a bamboo pole and drifting squid,
reeling in the garbage feeders: sea robins, blow fish,
all of them half-ruined by whatever
Dow Chemical dumped into the spillways.
Then one night, beside me, a printed dress against her figure,
a vision: she had a way of retrieving, a way of looking out,
and suddenly, in the frenzy I always prayed for,
she hooked blue after blue.
I’ll never know how long that quick, ecstatic,
flash of silver bodies lasted, but as swiftly as they swarmed
and struck, they fled. Silence between us then,
until she began, in a foreign tongue,
a song, I learned later, she sang for her son,
lost to the sea and the offshore wages.
And I left her there, swaying, one pole in the sand,
lulled by the sound of the water that carried him.
Michael Sofranko is a professor, writer, editor, and poet, who received his MFA from the Writers Workshop at University of Iowa. His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals, and he’s received the Sean Christopher Britton Award; his collection of poetry, American Sign, was awarded the Antonio Machado Prize. He recently co-authored The Vapors, a series for television, with award winning, documentary filmmaker, Michael McKinley.
Michael lives in Houston, Texas.
Michael lives in Houston, Texas.
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Liane Tyrrel
my father was animal
my father was animal reverie his fur his wolf body emanat- ing so i knew him by waterfall by dampening wood rock light touched by small notes of clouds of insect just born everywhere hovering i walk in my sleep and i don’t remember gates or stairs; stars how vast how entire my education see the fruit fall heavy the face obscure the child says memory as we circle the center Liane Tyrrel is a visual artist and poet. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Guesthouse, Volume, the Offing, Bear Review, and Four Way Review, among others. She lives with her rescued street dog in Concord, New Hampshire.
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Evan Vandermeer
Semyonovsky Square, 1849
“His uncertainty and his repulsion before the unknown, which was going to overtake him immediately, was terrible.” - The Idiot Long before he penned some of the greatest novels ever written, Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad condemned to death. He and the other revolutionaries had been kept in dank dark cells for the previous eight months, and were finally brought to Semyonovsky Square in a hazy winter light that was, to their maladjusted eyes, overwhelming. None of them seemed to believe it was possible they'd be killed, but then they saw a peasant cart full of what looked like coffins, and their hope for penal servitude faltered, and promptly disappeared at the reading of their sentence, which the tsar ordered was to hang in the air to ensure the next and apparently last minute of their lives would be torture. It was, and though they each denied the priest's call to confession, none refused to kiss the cross when he held it to their cracking lips. Evan Vandermeer is a writer and graduate of the MA English program at Indiana University South Bend. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Jersey Devil Press, Twyckenham Notes, and elsewhere. His haiku and haibun have appeared in contemporary haibun online, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Presence, The Heron's Nest, and elsewhere. His haibun "Pippin" was awarded third place in the 2022 Haiku Society of America Haibun Contest. He currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their daughter.
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Rachel Walker
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Undoer of Knots
I. Morning There must have been a moon overhead: I never saw it, the train moved so quickly. Morning comes with coffee coiling in my stomach, your ear a pillow pressed against a door. Boats crowd the marina. I watch the water suffocate my toes until they are sapphire-blue. I want to be smooth. Broken glass along the shoreline; the sea pulls its sharpness inward. II. Evening We kick up our legs and watch the knotted valley dim: earth snarled into mountains; apparition of stars tangled in the milky way. I am pulled to the beauty of coiled things: a cottonmouth strewn over rotting leaves, our legs folding together, the shaded thoughts beneath your speech. All along, I have been eating the wrong things. A raven’s wings beat the air above me. |
III. Transmigration She said the knots beneath her skin were tightening. She left the breakfast table to answer the phone in the back room. Bright winter: snow dazed the window. When she returned, she spoke with the voice of the white-throated sparrow. IV. Our Lady She straddles the sharp edge of the waxing moon; stars unraveling in Baroque style above her head. From beneath the shade of outstretched wings, we wait: how slowly her fingers loosen silk, how slowly the serpent circles her heels. On a humid night in West Virginia, the evening tightens its grip. We look at the world through stained glass. Barefoot on the riverbank, she turns to me and the whites of her eyes are blue. The moon’s sickle flickers with the current. Stars knotting her hair, she slips into its crescent. |
Ovid’s Arboretum
Low wind shifts the foxtail. Low wind beneath my feet. I plant my fingernails to forgive the blood-soaked petals. A scream becomes a song: a girl inside a bird twisting sunlight from her wings. What was I to become if not an echo? Birdsong passes through the leaves; echo becomes stone. The wind is a man with cold fingers. He asks me to sit beneath the laurel and drink from the orchid’s lips. Frenzy of bees, sunlight on my eyelids: rush of golden petals, falling. The river was a girl once, too. What was I to become if not a song? Vertical Divider
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Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she is an MFA candidate at UNLV. Her work has previously appeared in The Shore, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Mud Season Review.
Wendy Wisner
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Nechama
My grandmother knelt at the foot of the bed, and pulled out a glinting cellophane box. Inside, a tiny pink dress with a lace collar, pressed, wholly intact, like a museum artifact. This is the dress of the girl who died, she said. Then, pieces of a story: a ship from Kyiv, a sickness, a dead sister, a new baby born out of mourning. They named me Nechama because I was her replacement, my parents’ consolation, their solace. Then she knelt down again, and slid the box back under the bed, into its darkness. |
Shedding
Today I stood under the kitchen archway and stepped into my new body. Pasta was on the stove, a cold Tupperware of string beans on the counter. But I knew. I knew I would never be the same― the way I’m certain the magnolia down the block has lost all its petals. I haven’t checked in days, but I’m convinced tomorrow when I take my son to the bus stop, I’ll see them splashed on the sidewalk. What I’m trying to say is sometimes your old skin falls breathlessly off your body in late April, as you slice a cucumber into half moons for your child, and you just stand there and let it. Vertical Divider
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