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May 2024 Issue #33 Poetry
Abdullah Jimoh O., D A Angelo, Bruce Bond, Daniel Brennan, Harley Anastasia Chapman, Amanda Chiado, Chelsea Dingman, Caitlin Forsgate, George Franklin, E.C. Gannon, Lynn Gilbert, Mary Grimm, Don Hogle, Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey, Neysa King, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, Tony Magistrale, Carlos F. Martin, Rita Mookerjee, Marcus Myers, Cassady O’Reilly-Hahn, Sergio A. Ortiz, Seth Peterson, Alex Rettie, Mike Sluchinski, Kenneth Tanemura, Monica Lee Weatherly, Jan Wiezorek, Joshua Zeitler
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POETRY
Launch Reading: Tuesday, May 14th at 7 PM ET |
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Abdullah Jimoh O.
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The Elephant has fallen
There used to be two mango trees in our compound prior to some years back when father called the lumberjacks to remove one. I saw them running their saw blade around the base of the tree. The machine screaming, I hated the sound. When they were done, the tree prostrated as if a king was around the corner and the ground trembled like that adage in Yoruba: Erin wo!— an elephant has fallen. In dismay, I began to think of the implications of this fall. This fall means the noon sun's shade is gone. This means the bats lost one of their homes which they will grope for at night. This means they will find home in the remaining one & there will be overcrowding. This means the number of sweetness, the mango, we will be able to give out to people will reduce. And though he had planted some other trees around that time as the government instructed, I don't know why, my grief for the one gone remained with me — maybe it's because of the fruit. |
Abdullah Jimoh O. is a linguist and a poet. He holds a Bachelor's degree in linguistics and is a Natural language processing enthusiast. He finds delight in creativity. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Gyroscope Review, Efiko Magazine, IHRAM's anthology: Thorns, Tears and Treachery, Verum Literary Press, Thanatos Review, Mudroom, Kalahari Review and Afritondo.
D A Angelo
Dating Tips For Beginners
Yes, I would like to don an octopus
to pretend I'm an astronaut.
Yes, eating ramen in the zero gravity
of your conversation is always fun.
Yes, my heart is a harpsichord.
Yes, I live above the treetops,
watching them sway like elephant
tails in the breeze. Yes, we could watch
the city argue over the overflow
of flightless birds decked in neon blue.
Yes, I'm thrilled to listen to the operatic
breathing of your house. Yes, I'll do shots
in a bar staffed by the dead.
Yes, I would like to don an octopus
to pretend I'm an astronaut.
Yes, eating ramen in the zero gravity
of your conversation is always fun.
Yes, my heart is a harpsichord.
Yes, I live above the treetops,
watching them sway like elephant
tails in the breeze. Yes, we could watch
the city argue over the overflow
of flightless birds decked in neon blue.
Yes, I'm thrilled to listen to the operatic
breathing of your house. Yes, I'll do shots
in a bar staffed by the dead.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize, D A Angelo is a UK-based poet with work in Eclectica Magazine, The Crank, SurVision, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Sage Cigarettes, Flights of the Dragonfly and Petrichor Mag.
Bruce Bond
|
Lunette 5
If the moon were a ship, it would be ice leaving a wake of smaller bits of ice, pieces of moon severed into jewels. I too have walked the cold floor in the middle of night. I stood for hours in the pale breath of a freezer that was sweet inside. In time I turned a little numb. And then, it could have been a mother’s voice, or something I lost, some kind of a disease with eyes to see me through the hard series of surrenders. If I reached my hand into the mist like a magician with a hat and pulled out only vapor, water, ice, know that it was worth it. Grieve as you will. Give me the path littered with shattered crystal. Hell, how many times has the moon cut a passage over your face. Expect no less. I too go cold, plow the looking glass, and leave a field of shards, the steppingstones of the morning after. I am addicted to what comes after. Like a moon, in a state of continual withdrawal, continual fracture, with whose knives the path turns back to rain. Vertical Divider
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Lunette 19
When I was a child, I stood transfixed, looking up beneath a ring of alcoves in a dome. Lunettes, my father said, pointing to the echoes of enclosure, each with its likeness of a prophet cut in stone, an evangelist to no one, only a pigeon, now and then, a songless fluster blown across the emptiness. I never quite belonged, in this place I loved. I never reaffirmed the faith that lifted such a grand arrangement, such a beggar’s bowl of light draining through the rubric of the glass. Me here, saint up there, half-way into paradise, chambered in a blue some call heaven, others earth. Can you blame the soul if it assumes too little, affirms too much, if it needs a breather in the morning, time, as dream recedes, to wait, wake, walk the shoreline of the sleep machine, kneel to read what the night washed in. |
Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-three books including, most recently, Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), and Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023).
Daniel Brennan
The Largest Burmese Python on Record
1.
Does this ever end? Here, with
his hands around your waist. Quiet until he’s done making you
a good boy. Good God, he is everywhere, arms with
their coarse hair, a straight-jacket in the damp heat
of your bed. His tongue runs circles against your neck;
he calls you whatever name you need
under the weight of summer. This crush, his body,
luminate in the dark. Tell me about your blood-cold
dreams, how you pull him
closer, close enough to taste his leathered cologne.
Close enough to forget the way
pleasure can leave marbled flesh in its wake.
2.
Once upon a time you were a boy
and you loved mythos and those three-headed beasts
so you sought what couldn’t be real,
what you dared to be truth.
You flipped over rotted logs in your back yard,
slick with lichen, and revealed the underbelly of life.
Humming limbs and squirming creation.
Do you remember the sensation of fingers
plunging into the dirt? Were you old enough
to imagine yourself a god to the
small, scaled things that hurried away into sunlight?
Their fear; these warm, feeling things.
3.
The largest Burmese Python on record grew to be
nineteen feet long; nearly two-dozen feet of hunger and
ribcage. A mouth made for feasting on
the stars canvased overhead. Ten thousand years ago,
we might have believed it a god in disguise,
the impossible child of a universe more maddening
than we knew. Doesn’t it always
go like that? Treading the fine line between the
horror and the immaculate? Hands upon its
cold body, we might have felt
the closest we could come to eternity,
aware that at any moment it could unwind its jaws
and make us into sacrificial rites, into
the narrow space between mortality and revelation.
Make and unmake us
as the best gods do.
4.
In the dark, his limbs measure yours;
they bind and take stock, ensure you’re no match
for the strength of his needs. In the dark,
his breath becomes the boiled hush you worship
as his chest pushes and pulls against
your vertebrae. You are both playing god
in ways your trembling tongues cannot define,
stroking the warm underbelly of life. In your sleep,
you wonder if his eyes wait open like glassy pools.
You wonder – yes, say it – if one night
his lips will part, revealing what you’ve
always known. And then what?
In what wet earth will your hands find salvation?
He has burrowed into your bed, all muscle
and cunning. There is a price to be paid;
his mouth will open and seize whole constellations.
He’ll leave nothing of you for future lovers to find,
swallow bones and all. Caught between
his teeth – you: warm, feeling thing.
1.
Does this ever end? Here, with
his hands around your waist. Quiet until he’s done making you
a good boy. Good God, he is everywhere, arms with
their coarse hair, a straight-jacket in the damp heat
of your bed. His tongue runs circles against your neck;
he calls you whatever name you need
under the weight of summer. This crush, his body,
luminate in the dark. Tell me about your blood-cold
dreams, how you pull him
closer, close enough to taste his leathered cologne.
Close enough to forget the way
pleasure can leave marbled flesh in its wake.
2.
Once upon a time you were a boy
and you loved mythos and those three-headed beasts
so you sought what couldn’t be real,
what you dared to be truth.
You flipped over rotted logs in your back yard,
slick with lichen, and revealed the underbelly of life.
Humming limbs and squirming creation.
Do you remember the sensation of fingers
plunging into the dirt? Were you old enough
to imagine yourself a god to the
small, scaled things that hurried away into sunlight?
Their fear; these warm, feeling things.
3.
The largest Burmese Python on record grew to be
nineteen feet long; nearly two-dozen feet of hunger and
ribcage. A mouth made for feasting on
the stars canvased overhead. Ten thousand years ago,
we might have believed it a god in disguise,
the impossible child of a universe more maddening
than we knew. Doesn’t it always
go like that? Treading the fine line between the
horror and the immaculate? Hands upon its
cold body, we might have felt
the closest we could come to eternity,
aware that at any moment it could unwind its jaws
and make us into sacrificial rites, into
the narrow space between mortality and revelation.
Make and unmake us
as the best gods do.
4.
In the dark, his limbs measure yours;
they bind and take stock, ensure you’re no match
for the strength of his needs. In the dark,
his breath becomes the boiled hush you worship
as his chest pushes and pulls against
your vertebrae. You are both playing god
in ways your trembling tongues cannot define,
stroking the warm underbelly of life. In your sleep,
you wonder if his eyes wait open like glassy pools.
You wonder – yes, say it – if one night
his lips will part, revealing what you’ve
always known. And then what?
In what wet earth will your hands find salvation?
He has burrowed into your bed, all muscle
and cunning. There is a price to be paid;
his mouth will open and seize whole constellations.
He’ll leave nothing of you for future lovers to find,
swallow bones and all. Caught between
his teeth – you: warm, feeling thing.
Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in numerous publications, including Birdcoat Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, and The Pinch. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @dannyjbrennan
Harley Anastasia Chapman
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Ostara
I blow you in the cemetery, feel you harden between my teeth which are parted and harmless by choice. I don’t think it’s particularly disrespectful to give the dead a show & are the ghosts jealous or relieved they no longer have to worry about the viscosity of their horniness, whether they will be betrayed by the density of their skirt? It’s my fault, I jumped you, said I couldn’t wait & I couldn’t, the first time feeling green in so many months, ready to be plucked, the soft-wet smell of March as close to sex as air can get. Each breath: fresh dirt, turned-earth, dew staining my knees through cheap polyester stockings that won’t last the night. Later, I’ll find a wayward cabbage worm squirming above my navel. Plant him in the devil’s ivy, my souvenir ghost in-bloom. |
Harley Anastasia Chapman holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago & a BA in English Studies from Illinois State University. She was awarded the Allen & Lynn Turner Poetry Prize and has been a finalist for the Palette Poetry Emerging Poet Prize and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her poems can be found in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Superstition Review, & Bridge Eight Press, among others. Her first chapbook, Smiling with Teeth, is available through Finishing Line Press.
Amanda Chiado
Baguette
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In the overfelt world you never stop wearing your wedding ring. There is no human way to sing the song of your body. You keep apologizing in your overfelt bodysuit. There is a blossoming and shedding, all reds and pinks, all body-mist. You are cactus from your birthplace, your father’s needled tongue. He drums a hymnal made of curse words to describe his psychologically sophisticated fears. You can’t keep up this act any longer. You can hold yourself like a baguette. Unravel this throng of belonging. An overfelt skin is the best way to become a Hallmark movie, an epiphany, your mother’s little doll that you once were. Your eyes looked real. You are wrapped in a paper called skin and you keep coming back to life to touch it. Madame Tussaud says you look uncanny. Your son preaches at sundown with his newly pierced ear, lay me with me, we don’t have much time left. Mother Mary, you keep giving away hearts that never come home. In the overfelt world you keep unbuttoning your shirt asking for the choir to touch your scars.
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Amanda Chiado is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her poetry and short fiction has most recently appeared in Rhino, The Visible Poetry Project, The Pinch, Barren Magazine, and Entropy. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. www.amandachiado.com
Chelsea Dingman
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Hope, British Columbia
The care with which refusing to write with your right hand is wrong, & the language you dream in is wrong, & the language you never learn to write is wrong, & the country you fled is wrong, & the strangeness of rain is wrong, & the longing to perfect your longing is wrong & the weather & the keening mountain & the years inside the sound—wrong, yet without mistake. Why there is rain, & inside the rain, all this human suffering that touches you & everyone who has lived before you & still it goes on, touching the earth & the ears of corn in tender fields, & the stone memories of the mothers diminished by time, dimmed by brilliant flashes of wildfire. If a mother is all that is constant, what absence is collapsible? That plastic bottle you drank from instead, you couldn’t reinvigorate, you couldn’t help but refill, you couldn’t return to its prior state. Might one be returned to the first country that abandoned them, its sad little alliances, would you have returned to your mother’s body? To living as close to hell as heaven, feeding on her grief. Instead, abandonment is your religion, is your passport, & your reasons for leaving & your reasons for arriving, & the people at the last place, like the people at this new place, don’t let you forget that. You, tender & remarkable, for whom home is the violet inside the Black Sea seeping into that coastline you cannot see. You cannot see what anyone has done to the fields nor the cathedrals you were born of either. A border, imagined boundary. The mind, the memory. If the only true border is the skin. Are you too. Imaginable? As a destination, as sound. That you lived, wrongly, from war. Always edging toward another. As you edged all this night that is wrong, & the closeness of a world that is wrong, & your mother’s missing that is wrong & the rough squall of not enough that is wrong & the vacancy inside distance that is wrong & the terror of closing then opening that is wrong, & the irony in naming that is wrong, & this terrible Hope that is wrong, & the use in any of this. Any of this. The why, too extravagant later. Like a yearning to enter & exit at the same time that time that cannot contain you & your breathing & the care with which the rain & the shadows & the table become just surfaces, unlike & like justice, & the windows & the lips broken from fever & the lungs & the ordinary air they held. Until. Vertical Divider
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Pathocartography
In any ongoing aftermath, the uncountried sun. A ritual of cloud- bank. As if through teleopoeisis, you imagine someone is speaking who can give you what you want from them. Still, water desires a return to being that unbearable sky. In the noise and the quiet, you realize too late that you want a child you won’t live to see through her life. You realize the end of a life isn’t about how anyone lived. Now, when you think of your father who died young, you think the only country he knew was your mother. You think your grandfather might have been that child you read about in the news. You think time has not passed, but stalled near the Black Sea. This time outside time. You want to draw a map in the water to testify to the bodies it reimagines as dandelion fluff blown out of a rifle. You want to thin the hours that remediate your mother to the unknowable silence of aftershock. To be living, but not too alive, the sun you take for granted. The sun, and time. In your constant approach, the sundial maps a country you’ve never known. A legend takes the shape of a crisis situation you volunteered at as a young woman. You left other children there. You left the past to its absences. The water, everywhere, asking how long an hour might last, how much weight it hefts, how the present became an obstacle to living. Instead, the cruelty in being left. Instead, apostrophe means you trust no one to speak because intimacy is better when it is imagined. A river carrying, out of habit, what it holds. The perfect nothingness in distance that feeling lacks. It is a fantasy that desire simplifies you. Home is the event no map will speak of. A zero- point is that departure captured by a window. Your mother, all but forgotten by the depression glass scattered around your living room. Her eyebrows, all but forgotten by her face. White and thin, the rain pressed to the glass wants for nothing. Where you first encountered a child, the too-near rain was still too far. When you say extimate, you mean touch leaves you alone outside the other. You mean it is love you mislocate in the present loneliness. The belatedness of ordinary time as it arrives & arrives without ever arriving. |
Chelsea Dingman is a former Visiting Instructor at the University of South Florida. She is originally from British Columbia, Canada. She has lived in four countries and countless cities in North America. She currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband, two sons, and baby daughter.
Caitlin Forsgate
rabbit and wolf as ceramic figurines
you’re a small palace
my pastel teacup
my pearl
don’t let
the warm
blood fool
you
i’ve been dead
for hours
you’re cold like
apple skin
this apple flesh is
friendship
could
we paint
iridescence
on each other
i
don’t
know
how
but still
push your hand through
my almond
chest
my
lovely
universe
taste its
sweetness
spit out
its pulp
love me
love my
groggy
hell
the end is always here
i’m the
orange, thank you
you’re a small palace
my pastel teacup
my pearl
don’t let
the warm
blood fool
you
i’ve been dead
for hours
you’re cold like
apple skin
this apple flesh is
friendship
could
we paint
iridescence
on each other
i
don’t
know
how
but still
push your hand through
my almond
chest
my
lovely
universe
taste its
sweetness
spit out
its pulp
love me
love my
groggy
hell
the end is always here
i’m the
orange, thank you
Caitlin Forsgate is an MA creative writing student at the University of Lincoln, UK. She enjoys writing surreal poetry about this surreal world, and crocheting silly hats. She has been previously published in Obscene Pomegranate, and is currently working on her first collection.
George Franklin
|
Jules Supervielle's Beret
His family was Basque, so the beret Came naturally. The photograph’s background A bridge on the Seine, or the ocean outside The harbor—the heart beats the same everywhere. On the open sea, a sailor’s longing Gives birth to a child who can neither live Nor die, an imagined French town where No one lives. This takes place in the space Of a heartbeat. At night, he rolls to his left And feels the heart pump against his arm. This is how life is measured. The drummer Inside his chest keeps time and improvises. He has long conversations with God, but God is not forthcoming. Each morning, The newspaper and coffee, hot rolls And marmalade. Each morning Unexpected. His heart has been bad All his life. If he should dive into the waves, They’d carry him back: Montevideo, France, an unidentifiable suburb, sounds of Passing cars and buses, a crane at the docks Unloading cargo, algebra of wooden crates, Blue ink and letters written in the clouds─ Not in French or Spanish, but a language Spoken by birds who nest in the mountains. Sometimes, they fly all the way to Paris. |
George Franklin’s most recent poetry collections are Remote Cities and a collection in collaboration with Colombian poet Ximena Gómez, Conversaciones sobre agua/Conversations About Water . He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez's Último día/Last Day. In 2023, he was the first prize winner of the W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize and his poem "A Question for Borges" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by SoFloPoJo.
E.C. Gannon
Susanne
She sold heads to beauty schools,
so any time I’d go over her house
for a drink, I felt like I had an audience.
She’d set cheese and crackers and wine
on the coffee table, and I’d braid
some hair and talk about fermented foods.
She’d light a joint and turn on Jeopardy.
Every time I went over, the categories
got more obscure. Places where lightning
has struck twice. Favorite poems of
19th-century governors. Picturebooks
written by women of color in their thirties
who have degrees in STEM. Every time,
one of the contestants would get the answer.
I’d toss whatever head was in my lap
over the back of the sofa and find
a new one with a different hair texture.
After Jeopardy, Susanne would open
the wine and take the first sip from the bottle.
Sometimes, she’d ask if I wanted to ride
the city bus. Sometimes, I did. We never
went anywhere, just sat with our backs
to the aisle and watched the skyline
disappear and reappear as we circled,
stealing sips from the flask she hid
in her trench coat. At some point,
the bus driver would tell us he didn’t want
any trouble. It was always the same man.
We’d never caused any trouble before.
Sure, we might have giggled too loudly.
We might have stayed in one place too long,
watching the city fall asleep around us.
Susanne, I don’t know what happened to her.
I went over one night, and everything
but the heads were gone. I took them home.
We watch Jeopardy together as I braid them.
The categories are normal now, I think.
She sold heads to beauty schools,
so any time I’d go over her house
for a drink, I felt like I had an audience.
She’d set cheese and crackers and wine
on the coffee table, and I’d braid
some hair and talk about fermented foods.
She’d light a joint and turn on Jeopardy.
Every time I went over, the categories
got more obscure. Places where lightning
has struck twice. Favorite poems of
19th-century governors. Picturebooks
written by women of color in their thirties
who have degrees in STEM. Every time,
one of the contestants would get the answer.
I’d toss whatever head was in my lap
over the back of the sofa and find
a new one with a different hair texture.
After Jeopardy, Susanne would open
the wine and take the first sip from the bottle.
Sometimes, she’d ask if I wanted to ride
the city bus. Sometimes, I did. We never
went anywhere, just sat with our backs
to the aisle and watched the skyline
disappear and reappear as we circled,
stealing sips from the flask she hid
in her trench coat. At some point,
the bus driver would tell us he didn’t want
any trouble. It was always the same man.
We’d never caused any trouble before.
Sure, we might have giggled too loudly.
We might have stayed in one place too long,
watching the city fall asleep around us.
Susanne, I don’t know what happened to her.
I went over one night, and everything
but the heads were gone. I took them home.
We watch Jeopardy together as I braid them.
The categories are normal now, I think.
E.C. Gannon's work has previously appeared in Assignment Magazine, Olit, and elsewhere. She holds a degree in creative writing and political science from Florida State University and lives in New Hampshire.
Lynn Gilbert
|
THE ICY NEVA
Leningrad, 1959: she must have been there then, in the granite ‘Venice of the North,’ in some chill apartment, but at that time I didn’t know her work or her appearance. At any moment ─ while I stared from the tour bus or trudged down the Nevsky Prospekt to some bare vault of a state-run department store, transliterating as I went—she might have stepped out onto the pavement bearing a looped string of bagels or a few apples in a knotted twine bag, her high-arched nose still unmistakeable though her face was padded by a postwar diet bereft of almost everything but starch. But I wouldn’t have known her. By the time I arrived in England in ’65 I had read Akhmatova, but missed her again by a few months; she had made her last trip abroad, away from her ‘icy Neva,’ into which, she wrote, she had thrown thousands of clanging bell towers but remained insomniac. |
Lynn Gilbert’s poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, Arboreal, Blue Unicorn, Consequence, Constellations, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Fjords Review, Gerald Cable, and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in a suburb of Austin and reads poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
Mary Grimm
|
Instructions included, but now lost
If you go swimming at night can you tell who is beside you in the water: old woman or is it a man wearing a mask, and you are younger but not young. If you swim in the dark, there might be violence, happening or remembered, the twilight settling down over the trees, the berry bushes with their thorn fingers, the grass room. Someone always building the house, the hammering goes on all night. If you are swimming through what you have already lived that is nothing to anyone else. You need the dark water. If you swim secretly, no one will be there to watch you dive and dive again. No one lives here now. You may swim to escape: someone is dying. Swim long enough to leave this darkness, this story, water drops a trail, footprints drying behind you. |
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection), and a number of flash pieces in places like Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a YA thriller.
Don Hogle
|
Boy Jumping off a Cliff
In the reel you posted on Instagram, a young man in a square-cut swimsuit that’s florid as a bouquet of poppies jumps into midnight-blue water churning in the inlet below–– not a dive, but a feet-first fall. Perched at the edge of the cliff, he glances toward whoever is filming before he jumps. Freed of the cliff’s footing, he plummets, entering the water like a knife into a sheath. He disappears, swallowed in one quick draught. What is it––fifteen years, twenty?–– since we said good-bye at Newark Airport that brilliant morning in June? Vertical Divider
|
Audrey Hepburn and the Southern Belle Soirée
While I was meditating on the sofa this morning, I felt as though you were sitting next to me like a transparent version of yourself, legs tucked beneath you, hands resting in your lap, like mine. I’d been lost in a memory, and you were in it. We were together in the fitting room of the thrift shop on 80th Street and Second Avenue. I was trying on a pink cocktail dress for a drag ball––The Miss Dixie Pageant and Southern Belle Soirée. We were giggling like schoolgirls; a clerk came over to shoo us out. We stumbled from the dressing room, doubled over, me looking like a poor man’s Audrey Hepburn. I wonder if you are still among the living; I haven’t heard from you in years. Maybe you’ve died, and your presence next to me was a message; maybe you had something to tell me about life and death and what may or may not come after. Or maybe you were simply asking that I not forget. |
Highway at Night
I knew the meaning of the word hospice,
though it sounded more like a country inn
where the weary find respite from their trip.
I hope the whispering of the sago palms
comforted you, that you saw hibiscus bloom
through the haze of the morphine drip.
I’ve tried to understand my inaction,
blamed it on bad timing. But what time
would have been good, actually?
I was like one of those furtive deer
darting across a highway at night,
when your death came bearing down.
I knew the meaning of the word hospice,
though it sounded more like a country inn
where the weary find respite from their trip.
I hope the whispering of the sago palms
comforted you, that you saw hibiscus bloom
through the haze of the morphine drip.
I’ve tried to understand my inaction,
blamed it on bad timing. But what time
would have been good, actually?
I was like one of those furtive deer
darting across a highway at night,
when your death came bearing down.
Don Hogle's poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, SoFloPoJo, and Penn Review among others. A chapbook, Madagascar, was published in 2020 (Sevens Kitchens Press.) He lives happily in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey
a contribution to the lunar canon
“It is the very error of the moon. She comes more nearer earth than she was wont. And makes men
mad.”
William Shakespeare, Othello
“[He] was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly
beautiful with light from the sunken day”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“You need me like the wind needs the trees
To blow in, like the moon needs poetry”
The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back from San Francisco”
When there is no more life on earth, the moon
will be just another chunk of space rock.
She’s gotten used to compliments by now,
her brightness, since forever, a refuge,
a talisman, on memorable nights a goddess
reeling drunkenly between the stars,
her pocked surface discernible
by sheer dumb universal luck,
her straw drawn short, her skin exposed–
after all these millennia, she has just about
convinced herself it was meant to be.
They sing to her, those creatures crawling earth.
They paint her immortal, capture her
blurred profile on screen. She is the hot shit
of the cosmos. Not one other entity
can claim itself the muse of so much poetry.
And how her glow companions each life,
a constant across continents, so that her face becomes
the one all recognize, her attendance prayed upon
by lovers, prayed against by thieves, that slow famous
turn pulling at the tides like a gown’s trailing hem
as its wearer swings away, visage covered in shame
or shadow. But when there are no more humans
on earth–and to say this is not catastrophizing, not
for the moon, it is merely cold hard cratered fact
that she will outlast the terminal infestation
of her cloud-spun blue neighbor–what is to become
of her? What could she mean without those
makers of meaning? In the meantime, the moon
will bathe in her stardom. Look down, right here,
even in this moment another human hunches
over the page, inking out a tribute.
“It is the very error of the moon. She comes more nearer earth than she was wont. And makes men
mad.”
William Shakespeare, Othello
“[He] was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly
beautiful with light from the sunken day”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“You need me like the wind needs the trees
To blow in, like the moon needs poetry”
The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back from San Francisco”
When there is no more life on earth, the moon
will be just another chunk of space rock.
She’s gotten used to compliments by now,
her brightness, since forever, a refuge,
a talisman, on memorable nights a goddess
reeling drunkenly between the stars,
her pocked surface discernible
by sheer dumb universal luck,
her straw drawn short, her skin exposed–
after all these millennia, she has just about
convinced herself it was meant to be.
They sing to her, those creatures crawling earth.
They paint her immortal, capture her
blurred profile on screen. She is the hot shit
of the cosmos. Not one other entity
can claim itself the muse of so much poetry.
And how her glow companions each life,
a constant across continents, so that her face becomes
the one all recognize, her attendance prayed upon
by lovers, prayed against by thieves, that slow famous
turn pulling at the tides like a gown’s trailing hem
as its wearer swings away, visage covered in shame
or shadow. But when there are no more humans
on earth–and to say this is not catastrophizing, not
for the moon, it is merely cold hard cratered fact
that she will outlast the terminal infestation
of her cloud-spun blue neighbor–what is to become
of her? What could she mean without those
makers of meaning? In the meantime, the moon
will bathe in her stardom. Look down, right here,
even in this moment another human hunches
over the page, inking out a tribute.
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. Their work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beaver Magazine, Gone Lawn, and Anti-Heroin Chic, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. They are a prose reader for VERDANT, as well as a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer. They can be found on X/Instagram @esmepromise.
Neysa King
|
Clit
Finally you found her my happy camper in the middle where even I’m sometimes not allowed to come my tiny wrecking ball waiting to be swung I don’t need a 12-inch wood saw for my little lumberjack I don’t need a speaker for my listener to jazz I don’t need 4am or gluten spoons or a speculum I don’t need Ocean Rescue or anyone paid to not wear underwear I might need a cardiologist with a six pack I might need dark leaves and more Wednesdays I want to need puddles and hospitals absinthe and arias and my entourage of shadows I know I need rubber gloves and better soundproofing more good mornings and occasional fatigue I need thicker fingers the devil and a good nightlight I need fangs and for all vampires to be umbrellas I need the torn coconut husk that wants to be a bird maybe I just need a better tongue you can spell a lot of things without the O but not love or God like Nietschze she’ll kill you by calling you dead I don’t need a philosopher I need a magician I don’t need Jack I need a very thick candlestick and a very long jump |
Neysa King’s writing has been featured by O Miami, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Sand Berlin Literary Journal, Darling Magazine, SWWIM Every Day and others. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Rainbow Body (2021) and My Heart Points Back (2022), a poetic collaboration with Oscar Fuentes about love and sex in Miami.
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
|
A Child Survivor in Old Age
Sleep is fleeting so I am thinking again of that last hectic taxi ride to the hospital with Death right on our tail and of how you apologized for “everything” and I said you had nothing to apologize for but we all do all of us who live a lifetime and when it is my turn to get into that taxi with my children I hope I will have the good sense since time is fleeting and that they, too, will lie |
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father's struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. His most recent book, an all-ages graphic novel called The Singing Rock & Other Brand-New Fairy Tales, was published by First Second/Macmillan. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family. He has poems forthcoming with The New York Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, DIAGRAM.
Tony Magistrale
Fathers & Sons: Clothes Make the Man
The boy and I felt only exhaustion. Eight days of attending to an old man’s dying
leaves only enough will to avoid dying yourself. When my thirteen-year-old son
began dressing in the clothes of his grandfather, appearing each morning
in his lawyerly silk ties and Armani suits, cuffs dangling like two black tongues
beyond his small fingers, pants puddling around his ankles, what could any of us do
but smile at this sweet, sad, last indulgence—as much homage as tease. The day after
he died, my son and I went to the Marriott hotel to use their pool and weight room,
any excuse to do something anywhere else. Dressed in another borrowed suit, the boy
wandered off as I disappeared under the impassive weight of chlorinated water.
I found him an hour later in the hotel lobby. He was sitting high up in a red mahogany
chair peering down as my father’s expensive shoes were being buffed to a high gloss shine.
For a moment, I saw the ghost of the man who until recently owned those shoes
and emerged every morning of my adolescence in sartorial splendor, his long proud
career as a lawyer. I thought what am I going to do with all those clothes hanging limp
in a dead man’s closet? But what I said was, Do you understand that shoe shines are not
free? Do you have the money to pay for this? The boy glanced over from atop his perch,
the hands of the man beneath him suddenly slack. He smiled down my father’s
same toothy grin, pulled out a thick wad of greenbacks from inside a front pant pocket.
Plus a tip, he added, and the man shining his shoes went back to work.
The boy and I felt only exhaustion. Eight days of attending to an old man’s dying
leaves only enough will to avoid dying yourself. When my thirteen-year-old son
began dressing in the clothes of his grandfather, appearing each morning
in his lawyerly silk ties and Armani suits, cuffs dangling like two black tongues
beyond his small fingers, pants puddling around his ankles, what could any of us do
but smile at this sweet, sad, last indulgence—as much homage as tease. The day after
he died, my son and I went to the Marriott hotel to use their pool and weight room,
any excuse to do something anywhere else. Dressed in another borrowed suit, the boy
wandered off as I disappeared under the impassive weight of chlorinated water.
I found him an hour later in the hotel lobby. He was sitting high up in a red mahogany
chair peering down as my father’s expensive shoes were being buffed to a high gloss shine.
For a moment, I saw the ghost of the man who until recently owned those shoes
and emerged every morning of my adolescence in sartorial splendor, his long proud
career as a lawyer. I thought what am I going to do with all those clothes hanging limp
in a dead man’s closet? But what I said was, Do you understand that shoe shines are not
free? Do you have the money to pay for this? The boy glanced over from atop his perch,
the hands of the man beneath him suddenly slack. He smiled down my father’s
same toothy grin, pulled out a thick wad of greenbacks from inside a front pant pocket.
Plus a tip, he added, and the man shining his shoes went back to work.
Tony Magistrale is professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of four books of poetry, the most recently published is titled More Fun Than Pretty (Moon Pie Press, 2021). His poems have also appeared in Harvard Review, Spillway, Green Mountains Review, The Cape Rock, Slipstream, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other places.
Carlos F. Martin
|
Along Flagler and in la Saguesera, Santeros Sing to Orishas
After Ariel Francisco I heard them and can still hear them above the hissing heat pulsating from the asphalt above the screech of plastic EVs crashing in intersections above the wail of the goats before sacrifice above the Cubanos protesting outside of Versailles above the crackle of right-wing Spanish radio above the ballot harvesters threatening the elderly─ a vote for the Dems is a vote for Castro and Chavez, above Jehovah’s witnesses knocking on our Sunday morning door above the gurgle of shit seeping from pipes in Biscayne Bay above the salsa blaring from a parking lot quinceañera practice above parents accosting middle school umpires above the yelps of children hurtling down the Tropical Park Hill above the desperate silent drowning of a girl in her pool above the guilty sobs of her drunken inattentive relatives along Flagler and in la Saguesera, Santeros sing to Orishas and I hear them West into the river of grass as the mosquitos begin their lustful hunt and the night awakens lighting the stars sinking below the alligators and gar, sinking below the black bass and cichlids into the muddy bones of the Value Jet dead |
Carlos F. Martin is a current applicant for the FIU MFA in Creative Writing program, having recently worked as a reader on FIU's Gulf Stream Magazine. He is a practicing lawyer residing in Miami, Florida with his wife and two daughters.
Rita Mookerjee
|
Abecedarian for Crazy Girls
for Lindsay and not cute crazy like Zooey Deschanel + ukulele or any blonde Becky in a baby tee that reads don’t talk to me before coffee even though she talks to everyone & I don’t mean klutzy crazy who forgets to pay electric bills & presses the panic button by mistake while fiddling with her keys in the parking lot not her god no I mean the committed crazies the A-1 certified crazies hell bent on leaving this school this city this dimension I’m talking to the girls with wide eyes & rap sheets who joke about death not out of flippancy but from intimate knowledge & perpetual proximity come rain or more rain let’s hear it for crazy girls who drown in hydrangeas & leave messages on your phone saying things like last night I made noodles & did peyote by myself on the bridge by the cranberry bog I harnessed the power of the wind by the way you’re out of oat milk quiet crazy loud crazy messy buns mascara crumbs real scars tattoos tattoos tattoos & piercings for days show me your teeth wild things crazy girls they try to shame us because they know the truth: we are unstoppable we are impossible we are pissed off & violent forget live laugh love let’s kill scream & hate we will find each other in alleys & galas then exit stage left we are the grand finale the coup de grâce young & old we are legion we are forever there are zillions of us bad girls go everywhere but only crazy girls come back Vertical Divider
|
National Address on the Misuse of the Word Literally
There is no room left for exaggeration. We have pushed language to its limit & now we fail to make sense. Before if you craved emphasis maybe you would raise your voice. Widen your eyes. Bang on the table. But inside the sloppy vortex of cyberspace those tried and true techniques dissolve so we bottle & inject them into the arms of literally. Now she is bloated & slack like a potato skin freed from its innards. Literally is a sign on a bulletin board softened and pastel with age half-hidden behind laser-etched shinies. Now literally is a tired old queen but 50 years ago she could own the room & make the stage, the audience, the night literally hers to own. Literally called me last night. She left me a voicemail so I would know it was serious. Girl she sighed on a cigarette. It’s time. I’m gonna retire, so do me a favor & tell those bitches to keep my name out of their damn mouths. |
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the winner of the 2023 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award and the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press). Her poems can be found in CALYX, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, New Orleans Review, and the Offing.
Marcus Myers
|
Unsent Message
I have seen Kris. Happened to run into her last month with her son Archer at Prairie Fire. We hadn’t spoken in years. When I asked how she’s been, she said, “I’ve been patching my roof, in school again for library science,” and in her hazel eyes─greenish now, the way I remember them while we lay inches, not years, apart and still in the sweet-smelling tallgrass afterward─ I saw the storm and walnut or sycamore do the violence, the literal damage suggested by her idiom, do the piercing through what anybody needs between their self and any kind of sky. And so I left it there (until now) without any attempt to decode her cypher. Instead I smiled to mirror her light, all the lumens she drew from wherever she stores it within and through the large walls of glass with fields of gold and blue out there absorbed by the most affluent suburban city in Kansas and, imagining the scant preserved acres of Flint Hills to the west of her journey, wrapping the many shelves of books and decimals and quiet pleasures that await her in her new study and career, I said a white and dorky thing I’d once read, one of many I’m too old to be too cool to say to such a beautiful woman. Vertical Divider
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Driving into Kansas on What’s Likely the Coldest Day of the Year
Dear god of spare and stubbled beauty, dear god of these windswept and careworn years, or whichever one of you gods will listen, when driving west and the snow erases all but the peaks of the wheat-field furrows, and the bare windbreaks are frozen in a state of fatigue for the farmer’s risk of bankruptcy, of lonesome or violent endings, of law enforcement, of weak ties with neighbors and self, or worse─ of numbness, dear gods, how we know this chemical bond with feeling and death, this whiskey- rusted tractor, this fog-rotted-tobacco-barn- from-yesteryears sort of beauty and the power of presence it saddles us with by way of material absence cannot last much longer! Please move us through and away from here! To find the blue god who, what, blushes lilac?! Who lifts the evergreens toward the snowmelt and mildest summers? |
Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches and serves as co-founding and managing editor of Bear Review. Author of the chapbook Cloud Sanctum: A Letter to My Daughter (Bottle Cap Press, 2022), his poems have been published in The Common, The Cortland Review, The Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry South, RHINO, Salt Hill, Tar River Poetry and elsewhere.
Cassady O’Reilly-Hahn
|
3 Untitled Haiku The motes of backwash tumbling inside my water─ A Faerie’s cartwheel. The clothing line dips just low enough for the moon to share the teapot. My hands cannot draw the fluttering of the leaves on this still paper. |
Cassady O’Reilly-Hahn’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Folio and the Oakland Review. He works as an editor for Foothill Poetry Journal and Deluxe, a localization company. He holds a Masters in English from Claremont Graduate University and lives in Redlands, California with his girlfriend and their pugs.
Sergio A. Ortiz
|
True Lies, a Cento
All joy carries with it an invention. All pain, songs in which a self dies. The rivers, the rivers are overflowing. Shipwrecks, we die inward. Between the real and the desired the celestial land of the imagined Don't abandon me, hiss and silence. Don't throw nonsense at me between the door cracks. The hunt is on, and sprung the trap flayed by thrones I treck the rocks. There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself. A gray wall now, clawed and bloody In the last angel's hand unwelcome and warning, the sands have run out against us. Used to be I hung on your every word. Sing! you’d say: and I was a bird. All dreams of the soul end in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body. I too enjoy soft palms on me, enjoy when he rests on my body with a hard breath. To receive all things wrenches my stomach and I vomit to calm wanting. Vertical Divider
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*Gabriel Celaya, "La Mentira de Verdad" *Mario Vargas Llosa, "La Señorita de Tacna.” *Pablo Neruda, "Sólo la Muerte" *Gabriel Celaya, "A, con de, por, para Amparitxu" *Gabriel Francisco Ruiz Rivera, "Refufuñeta" *Sylvia Plath, "Pursuit" *Sylvia Plath, "Apprehensions" *Audre Lorde, "Movement Song" *Ross Gay, "Love, I'm Done With You" *Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon" *Elizabeth Acevedo, "Iron" *Miguel Alegaron, "HIV (1994)" |
Sergio A. Ortiz is a retired Educator, Bilingual-Gay Puerto Rican Poet, Human Rights Advocate. Pushcart nominee, Best of the Web, Best of the Net. Sergio last appeared in SoFloPoJo in of May 2021
Seth Peterson
The Clock That Went Backward
My great grandma had a clock that went backward.
Time is real if you think it’s real, she would say,
then go on about self-fulfilling prophecies.
For as long as I can remember, its hands were frozen
at three. That’s when it was struck by lightning,
she claimed. Even her name, Doris Loch, sounded old.
We would joke she’d probably lived through all of history.
Funny thing is, even though her place smelled
like cigarettes bathing in their little glass dish,
the screen door clapping in the background,
it was always a powerful sedative. They say sedatives
are mostly placebos, that they only work if you believe in them.
Let me tell you, even in my dreams, she was always the protagonist.
She was in the cab of a plum-black steam engine,
face scarlet from the light of the firebox. She was
leading a march, shouting Don’t iron while the strike is hot!
She was the real Johnny Appleseed, but she planted Eucalyptus.
She was a doctor, a judge, a president. She was a girl
hearing: You can be anything, my love, but you can’t be everything
at once. Years later, I was in Salt Lake’s genealogy museum,
searching for her in the computer. Gradually, it dawned on me:
her name was everywhere. Doris Loch. Doris Loch. Doris Loch.
I spent the day re-living her stories, until the light outside went dim.
This is the truth, I’m telling you. My great grandmother
traveled through time—not in a flashy sort of way
—more like the furling & unfurling of a dream.
The important part is that you believe it, she would say.
It’s the belief that makes things true.
My great grandma had a clock that went backward.
Time is real if you think it’s real, she would say,
then go on about self-fulfilling prophecies.
For as long as I can remember, its hands were frozen
at three. That’s when it was struck by lightning,
she claimed. Even her name, Doris Loch, sounded old.
We would joke she’d probably lived through all of history.
Funny thing is, even though her place smelled
like cigarettes bathing in their little glass dish,
the screen door clapping in the background,
it was always a powerful sedative. They say sedatives
are mostly placebos, that they only work if you believe in them.
Let me tell you, even in my dreams, she was always the protagonist.
She was in the cab of a plum-black steam engine,
face scarlet from the light of the firebox. She was
leading a march, shouting Don’t iron while the strike is hot!
She was the real Johnny Appleseed, but she planted Eucalyptus.
She was a doctor, a judge, a president. She was a girl
hearing: You can be anything, my love, but you can’t be everything
at once. Years later, I was in Salt Lake’s genealogy museum,
searching for her in the computer. Gradually, it dawned on me:
her name was everywhere. Doris Loch. Doris Loch. Doris Loch.
I spent the day re-living her stories, until the light outside went dim.
This is the truth, I’m telling you. My great grandmother
traveled through time—not in a flashy sort of way
—more like the furling & unfurling of a dream.
The important part is that you believe it, she would say.
It’s the belief that makes things true.
Seth Peterson is an emerging writer and physical therapist in Tucson, Arizona. His writing is published or forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Santa Fe Literary Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2023 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry and teaches with The Movement Brainery.
Alex Rettie
|
Dream of the Father
I dream I am a soldier, with rifle at the ready and bayonet attached. My bearskin scrapes up against the Eiffel Tower, which rises from a row of thatched roof cottages. Pierrot lights my smoke and smirks: “This is the day of dandies, what?” He gestures to a matchbox car I broke when I was seven. Somehow I forgot to tell the girl to hold my calls today. I peer down from a chalky over cliff. My youngest child has fallen quite away from me. His face turns blue. Small body stiff with fright, he sinks into the yellow sand.. The sun comes out. I shoot it where I stand. Vertical Divider
|
Dream of the Seagoing Uncle I dream of someone waiting to be hurt – skin of turmeric and a rosehip squeeze floating like minesweepers under a shirt whose scoop-neck mouths victory. “Half the ease of story’s in the telling of it twice,” a boy of pulled peach silk beneath a gong constructed of the leavings of crab lice is saying now. He’s never yet been long at sea or long of dripping, parboiled shank like Mister Easy Midshipman, which book his pen depresses as he writes a thank- you card. I lower my moustache to look. I cauterize my canines for the bite. The rain is neutering the nearly night.
Dream of the Only Son I dream my father fastens to my chest as cauliflower to a bed of mud and mulch. He puts out tendrils of my blood to feed the flock of rock doves in their nest beneath the black fruit of Douglas hawthorn. Poppies and snapdragons wander away from their rows and root themselves in the day lily leavings and rotted cobs of corn that crowd my father’s bawling, balding head. I can’t keep up with all the goddamn weeds. I can’t remember how to cut the grass. I’d ask for help, but no one’s here to ask except for Dad, whose eyes have turned to seeds and ears to rotting tubers. One more pass and I’ll be finished with my filial task. |
Alex Rettie writes from the top floor of a rented house in Calgary, Alberta, His poems have appeared in journals in Canada, the US, and the UK, including Raceme, One Art, the lickety-split, Queer Toronto, ellipsis, Passengers Journal, and Sinking City.
Mike Sluchinski
|
mushers call and cry (for miami)
it was getting interesting on the plane the seats next 13c and b and maybe not so lucky but so i turned and they asked me the two of them there where from and so on the typical airplane crash landing of sorts and i had to adjust sure adjust wiggle to make up a good story for these people i was stuck with for five hours flying south the end of my rope and then a cold one and in the meantime the story went about the snow in canada and they listened so so warm and believing me with american truth and that’s where i was going so why not right the truth with sleds and dogs barking and huskies and mushers too us canadians like to do this well story tell and when i got to the part about no roads and fur trading and saving our town from thirst because the snow just couldn’t melt in time and the cubes in my drink sure did after several well the story it was good and then to get out of that aluminum tube with those wide eyed neighbors and into the sweet miami night stray dogs streetcorners mush mush mush i cried save me from thirst Vertical Divider
|
hell and again back to it
the number of people ahead of you is five and i couldn’t in the daylight see them there on the phone and i waited and a voice came over the line and i was just so happy and it repeated the number of people ahead of you is five and this again and on and again and on so my neck was wet and my wrists curled and tightened for the numbers to get lower and lower and nothing just an hour there my life and marriage and house and car just passed in front my eyes glazed and no music i could have used some coleman hawkins or some strings but nothing and something just the number of people ahead of you is five |
Mike Sluchinski is a mature, part time student and does construction and demolition work. Sometimes his teeth hurt from the education and jack-hammering. He gratefully acknowledges the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Foundation for their support of the arts. Find more of his poetry and spoken word at @nastystairspoetryspokenword on youtube. His poetry has been published in Kelp Journal, Freefall, In Media Res, and Grain magazines and more forthcoming!
Kenneth Tanemura
Junk Truck
Couldn’t process the past
without it, the memory comes
where you were when
Persuasion in your hands
you can’t extricate
the hippocampus in action
translated to the rest
of you as loss,
the bed your son
was conceived in
dragged by the scruff
of the neck
to the junk trunk,
the body warms up
recalling nights laughing
in front of that TV,
gym bag you took to the pool
with the since deceased stepson.
You who don’t share
let Prasad in on the joke,
he watches the books
mostly classics
get boxed,
carries them to his SUV,
his ventral striatum waking
from long sleep,
books he could have read.
What was he doing back then?
DJing, light meditation,
a child born
then another.
Friendships form
over the amygdala
popping at
the same time
different memories
aren’t they
called by the same
parts of themselves
both sets
of memories encoded
a way to produce memories,
a gene
makes a type
of behaviour.
Coming back to the storage
unit alone, Prasad who helped
yesterday is missed
along with the fan
spread air
on your skin,
soothed your pregnant wife
to sleep in another country,
the small boy’s desk
where the failed novel
began to be written.
You loved sitting there
skimming books.
Brains need continuity
past
present connected
to force life into coherence.
The dress you convinced
your wife into wearing,
half of it spilled out
of a torn cardboard box─
they’re not really taking
things away
encoded in the brain.
Couldn’t process the past
without it, the memory comes
where you were when
Persuasion in your hands
you can’t extricate
the hippocampus in action
translated to the rest
of you as loss,
the bed your son
was conceived in
dragged by the scruff
of the neck
to the junk trunk,
the body warms up
recalling nights laughing
in front of that TV,
gym bag you took to the pool
with the since deceased stepson.
You who don’t share
let Prasad in on the joke,
he watches the books
mostly classics
get boxed,
carries them to his SUV,
his ventral striatum waking
from long sleep,
books he could have read.
What was he doing back then?
DJing, light meditation,
a child born
then another.
Friendships form
over the amygdala
popping at
the same time
different memories
aren’t they
called by the same
parts of themselves
both sets
of memories encoded
a way to produce memories,
a gene
makes a type
of behaviour.
Coming back to the storage
unit alone, Prasad who helped
yesterday is missed
along with the fan
spread air
on your skin,
soothed your pregnant wife
to sleep in another country,
the small boy’s desk
where the failed novel
began to be written.
You loved sitting there
skimming books.
Brains need continuity
past
present connected
to force life into coherence.
The dress you convinced
your wife into wearing,
half of it spilled out
of a torn cardboard box─
they’re not really taking
things away
encoded in the brain.
Kenneth Tanemura teaches writing at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Daytona Beach.
Monica Lee Weatherly
|
Kosciusko
In 1940, there were 4,291 people living in Kosciusko, Mississippi. That don’t count the black people living off dirt roads in shanty houses, sharecropping and singing in whispers. That don’t count the haints that hovered above the cornfields screaming for justice after somebody hung their living body from a tree. That don’t count my grandmama and my daddy and his brother, or even my grandfather who was buried out near the cornfield three weeks before the census takers came. That don’t count humans with brown skin and cotton under their fingernails, right there in the center of Mississippi, in a town sixty miles from where we lost Emmett , forty from where they found those three boys. Kosciusko don’t count like Jackson, where The Mississippi Enterprise gave you the news about Negroes going to skating rinks, and colored soldiers returning home with Good Conduct Medals. Where the Big Farish Street Parade happened on the fourth of July Where you could get correct glasses on credit at Brakin’s, and the 5 cent bus got you anywhere you wanted to go, In Kosciusko, everybody was poor Everybody picked cotton or worked in the cotton mill Everybody struggled to buy Oleo for twenty five cents a pound Vienna sausage was twelve cents a can A two pound box of cheese for eighty four cents An eight pound sack of oranges 42 cents That don’t count all the other sundries and such that weren’t but a dollar but were out of reach to most. Kosciusko, that little place that’s in my blood, that little place that matters to me, that little place my daddy called home Vertical Divider
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Men’s Things
I am surrounded by dead men’s things My father’s rifle that he used for hunting pheasant and quail The two suits I took from his closet the day we buried him A t-shirt with a black and white picture of his face transferred onto the fabric An expectation that every man should love me the way he loved me I am surrounded by gone men’s things My husband’s cologne that still sits on the bathroom counter A garage full of tools that I don’t know how to use A Harley Davidson motorcycle that I don’t know how to drive A wrinkled piece of paper with his bond conditions from the court that tells him to stay away from our home and my place of work Three children who want their daddy back even though he hurt their mother I am surrounded by broken men’s things The women that stole the trust and respect from those who would follow Family trauma of a mother who bedded men and bore illegitimate children Generational violence learned from drunken heads of households The sorrow from thinking about what my life would have been if I could have found a man like my father, a man who was whole I am surrounded by good men’s things Good stock from Africa to the shores of America, then on to Mississippi The gift to grow fields of crops from a single seed The ability to catch crappies and bass by the dozens, then filet them without a single trace of needle sized bones hiding in the flesh The goodness to make people smile with my mere presence The magnetism that makes children want to follow at my heels hoping for love My strength to endure bad men’s things |
Monica Lee Weatherly is a poet, writer, and Professor of English. She is the 2023 winner of Georgia Author of the Year for her chapbook of poetry, It Felt Like Mississippi, a 2023 Key West Literary Seminar Workshop Fellowship recipient, and the 2021 winner of the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Tulane Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Nzuri Journal, Merge Literary Magazine, Obsidian, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Auburn Avenue.
Jan Wiezorek
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Once Removed from Reality
Girl with Plant, Fernand Leger, 1954, The Detroit Institute of Arts We have been born in the year of bold geometry, with plantings and features like a woman among color-fields: yellow, orange, red, green, and blue like those big, wooden blocks children used to toss; what will be, will be unfamiliar, as we view life through thick line and color once removed from reality─ we are unsteady and wobbly as a gyroscope, upside-down with uncertainty, as the youth in us moves further into disquiet, where instability will stress our aged gristle—so I float while I can as your color-field: help me reach the ground of you. |
Jan Wiezorek writes from Michigan. His work appears, or is forthcoming, in The London Magazine, The Westchester Review, Lucky Jefferson, Loch Raven Review, Minetta Review, Talon Review, Modern Poetry Review, The Passionfruit Review, Sparks of Calliope, The Wise Owl, Poetry Center San José, and The Orchards Poetry Journal, among other journals. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and wrote the e-book Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011). He posts at janwiezorek.substack.com.
Joshua Zeitler
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The Damselfish
Every morning as a child, the boy who wasn’t a boy poured cold coffee on their cereal and drank hot milk. You’re confused, their mother told them. This confused the boy who wasn’t a boy. How will I know whether a planet is a heavenly body or a collectible toy? they thought. When they went to school, they wore their backpack upside down. You’re confused, the teachers told them. The boy who wasn’t a boy thought, How will I know which lockers are secretly fighting wars over their borders? They never voiced their questions. Instead they communicated through a slow morse code of hunched shoulders. They sank into themselves like a fish who didn’t wish to be discovered. How will I know the true depths of a false pocket, much less an ocean? they wondered, filling mechanical pencils with pink ink. One day they would graduate to pencil skirts, sequined blouses, burlesque monocles. You’re confusing the children, the politicians and administrators would tell them, but how could that be? We have all now seen that they, too, were once a child with unspoken dreams. Marcel Proust
If you meet Marcel Proust, he will probably only be able to speak by reciting the text of Laura Joffe Numeroff’s “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” This might not bother you, and so you will go for a walk, holding hands so Proust will not get lost. He cannot ask for directions, after all. You might feel his heartbeat in his fingertips against your knuckles. The leaves will turn the color of fire, then the color of ash, then back to the colors their mothers chose for them that morning. The sky will remember its childhood and take pity on you as if you were lovers. It will rain, and so you will be forced into the nearest café, whose menu is plagiarized from “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Proust might try to tell the waiter that you are quite happy and do not wish to order anything, but the waiter will misunderstand. He will think you want everything on the menu. To avoid the albatross of debt, you will be forced to run out into the torrential rain, hand in hand again, until all shame is washed away. Collapsed and laughing, Proust will say, He might get carried away and sweep every room in the house. And you will. You will confess you never read “Swann’s Way,” that you tried but your mind was swept to a room you hadn’t lived in since your mother kicked you out, a room you could never return to. It is too painful. And Proust’s eyes will well with tears. If you give a moose a muffin, he will say, and it might feel you have arrived somewhere new. |
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in Alma, Michigan. They received their MFA from Alma College, and their work has appeared in Cutthroat, Stanchion, manywor(l)ds, Transients, Black Fox, and others.