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♦ So ♦ Flo ♦ Po ♦ Jo ♦
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SoFloPoJo Contents: Essays * Interviews * Reviews * Special * Video * Visual Arts * Archives * Calendar * Masthead * SUBMIT * Tip Jar
August 2024 Issue #34 Poetry
featuring
Abdulrazaq Salihu, Alison Amato, Clayre Benzadón, Sheila Black, Ace Boggess, Lauren Crawford, Fatihah Quadri Eniola, Chris Faunce, Scott Ferry, Alice Friman, Taylor Franson-Thiel, Jessica Goodfellow, Bex Hainsworth, Dylan Harbison, Lois Marie Harrod, Jose Hernandez Diaz, B.B.P. Hosmillo, Alison Hurwitz, Sarah Kersey, Amelia Loeffler, J. Parker Marvin, Edward Mayes, Olivia Mettler, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, David Moolten, Megan Nichols, Kenneth Pobo, Beth Brown Preston, Kathryn Pratt Russell, Daniel W. Rasmus, Cecilia Savala, Rebecca Schneid, Zeke Shomler, Sara Jeanine Smith, Kelsey L. Smoot, Rosa Sophia, J Thiel, James Wyshynski
Abdulrazaq Salihu, Alison Amato, Clayre Benzadón, Sheila Black, Ace Boggess, Lauren Crawford, Fatihah Quadri Eniola, Chris Faunce, Scott Ferry, Alice Friman, Taylor Franson-Thiel, Jessica Goodfellow, Bex Hainsworth, Dylan Harbison, Lois Marie Harrod, Jose Hernandez Diaz, B.B.P. Hosmillo, Alison Hurwitz, Sarah Kersey, Amelia Loeffler, J. Parker Marvin, Edward Mayes, Olivia Mettler, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, David Moolten, Megan Nichols, Kenneth Pobo, Beth Brown Preston, Kathryn Pratt Russell, Daniel W. Rasmus, Cecilia Savala, Rebecca Schneid, Zeke Shomler, Sara Jeanine Smith, Kelsey L. Smoot, Rosa Sophia, J Thiel, James Wyshynski
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POETRY Launch Reading:
Friday, Aug 9th at 7:30 PM ET View the recording here >>> |
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SoFloPoJo is a "passion project." We do not charge submission fees or hide accepted work behind a paywall. Likewise, we do not pay the authors that appear in our quarterly issues.
If you'd like to contribute to the cause, we have a Tip Jar. The Tip Jar does not in any way affect whether your work is published in SoFloPoJo.
If you'd like to contribute to the cause, we have a Tip Jar. The Tip Jar does not in any way affect whether your work is published in SoFloPoJo.
Abdulrazaq Salihu
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Silence is a ghost.
In the lantern, the flames want freedom.
To spread through the night. Into the fields
And beam. Outside, there’s a scar for every
Fight the fire won against the waters.
Against the flood. Against the precipitation
Of sweat against a skin on the verge of death.
Outside, the humans want closure.
I put my lip on my mother’s forehead
A kind of cursive line on another
A blister in the neck of my ache.
At the interception of loss and pain
We exchange our sorrows; us and the flames
The fields and the drought. The flood
And the desert. The death and the life
Beyond the lantern’s broken skin,
language is the first closure the flame holds
Music is the definite pull the burning gave
Silence is a ghost, the way the lantern is closure.
In the lantern, the flames want freedom.
To spread through the night. Into the fields
And beam. Outside, there’s a scar for every
Fight the fire won against the waters.
Against the flood. Against the precipitation
Of sweat against a skin on the verge of death.
Outside, the humans want closure.
I put my lip on my mother’s forehead
A kind of cursive line on another
A blister in the neck of my ache.
At the interception of loss and pain
We exchange our sorrows; us and the flames
The fields and the drought. The flood
And the desert. The death and the life
Beyond the lantern’s broken skin,
language is the first closure the flame holds
Music is the definite pull the burning gave
Silence is a ghost, the way the lantern is closure.
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The People I Cover with Empathy
In the white country of my father’s spurted blood, I call my people by names of people they’ve lost. I name them breathtaking in Sarkin pawa Because this is the only place we can call home. When I sing, I’m no singer, not blessed With the order of music. When my people die, I’m no victor, Not blessed with the power of cowardice So I fold my name into my mouth I gather the almost dry blood Of my father, gather it with the mud, I raise it to the skies, if God sees this-- This level of ruthlessness against My people, let Him wash us. I raise it to the sky, the clouds Form, but there’s no rain My people have suffered , but perhaps, This is not how it ends… Vertical Divider
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Unraveling in the Wilderness
Light brushes through the dark of bones, My not yet grandmother; hair in a comb Unfurls graciously as the music leaves Her radio and into her. The thing about Music is, what listens is damned to dance I’m a little too broken to be fixed. I broke Myself. I did this; rub the knife against my Wrist till I got a clean cut. Blood, size of the quiet In Sarkin pawa. Blood-- Too small to swallow a life this beautiful A life too dark to be covered by pixie dusts and glitters. This skin against fire; water washed against a wound. My ache, a wide gap between countrymen And bullets. I’m too wild to love something so delicate Call it absence, I’m too wild to know the softness of Touch, too wild to be called back home. |
Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian poet and member of the hilltop creative arts foundation. BPKW poetry contest, Poetry archive poetry contest, Masks literary magazine poetry award, Hilltop creative writing award, and others. He has received fellowship and residency from IWE writers residency, SPRINg and elsewhere. He has his works published/forthcoming in strange horizons, Unstamatic, Bracken. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu; instagram: Abdulrazaq._salihu. He’s the author of Constellations (poetry 2023) and hiccups (Prose 2023).
Alison Amato
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The Angler These things collect like fish in a school, gathered, fins brushing and agile bodies thrashing alive inside, moving through limbs. On restless days my hands do what they want, palms turned up or down, sweep the hair from my face or cut the auburn curls scattered at my feet. And dinner? Dinner will be at five or nine depending on my knife work, the clean lines, the carrot rounds, or blood in the garlic. And I have stretched at the abdomen three times over, our children the fish in a bowl, my private whispers fished out of a six-inch smile with all of our secrets filling the room, a kaleidoscope of gasps. And every time feels so hollow and high, another drunk mother lying in the dark wondering if anyone fed the fish. |
Alison Amato lives in Maryland and studied creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Her work has been published in Sweet.
Clayre Benzadón
Love Letter to Florida
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Clayre Benzadón (she/they) is a queer (bi) Sephardic-Askhenazic poet, educator, foodie, and activist. She has been awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for her poem "Linguistic Rewilding." Her chapbook, Liminal Zenith, was published by SurVision Books in 2019, and her manuscript, Moon as Salted Lemon, was a finalist for the 2021 Robert-Dana Anhinga Poetry Prize and Semifinalist for Sundress Publications’ 2021 Open Reading Period. She has been published in places including SWWIM, Olney Magazine, and Blue Stem Magazine.
Sheila Black
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We Keep Living You return to Beirut, the edge of the war, to hold your ninety-one-year-old mother’s hand in the hospital where you were born, after your family was forced out of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, I make lists for the grocery, try to sell spots in classes. I tell someone that telling their story will help them uncover their soul. I am ashamed after at what this soul word might mean. No rain for a hundred days, then the late monsoons, palms whipping back and forth as if in ecstasy. I write you everyone is fine, then cross out what I have written and start again. There is no word for what happens in the rooms of death—that abrupt clouding behind the eyes. Or for how in one place a person contemplates boiled chicken with maybe some spring asparagus while in another a whole city is flattened, and the world rolls on. I try to grasp the voices of the ones who keep calling for what they term “a difficult necessity,” by which they mean the right to commit atrocity. It rains all night, the streets gleam. You write me an email about the work you do: building hospitals, strange to walk through this one, where you were born and your mother is dying, both exiled, at the edge of a war that only flares down intermittently. I drink a cup of tea, chop onions in twilight. I remember you, holding wide your arms for your child, who ran towards you, head tilted down, with the speed of a bullet train. |
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry colllections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).
Ace Boggess
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“What Feels Exciting in Recent Times?” question asked by Mark Danowsky I’m taking a trip into the past, hiding in shadows of black-&- white films, many foreign, often noirish, literate & literary, reading the scenes or listening to steamy hisses of men plotting. I’m older but still learning, comparing lists of one-thousand-&- one films to see before I die. How much I missed in my alien universe of prison-sense & sci-fi self. I’ve read Mishima, but not seen Patriotism; mocked Hemingway, while The Killers double feature waited to unravel me like a ratty sweater. Bergman, Fellini, Kurasawa― I ignored how their subtitles grew in beauty like a poet’s words across time―time I’m ignoring now, what wars & plagues have scarred the world with graves. |
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
Lauren Crawford
Hello I Wrote a Poem
Hello I wrote a poem.
I don't want to listen to it.
Hello I wrote a poem about my life.
I don't care about your life.
Hello I wrote a poem about when I was 15.
That's awfully young, the poem is probably not any good.
Hello, fellow poet, I wrote a poem about when I was 15.
I also wrote a poem about when I was 15. Want to hear it?
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem
Oh, how sweet!
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem. Will you please publish it?
Unfortunately, this does not fit our needs at this time.
Hello, friend, I wrote a poem about when I was 15. Do you like it?
Yes I like it, but I didn't actually read it.
Hello, teacher, I wrote a poem about a time when I was 15.
You have a strong voice, but you have some growing to do,
and money to spend. You should consider MFA programs.
Hello, professor, I wrote a poem about a time when I was 15. Is it any good?
Follow these steps, take out some loans, take these classes,
and study everything I tell you. You could be great.
Hello, fellow poet. Yes, I would love to give you feedback on your poem.
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem. Will you please publish it?
Unfortunately, while there was much to admire,
we have to decline your submission at this time.
Hello family, I wrote a poem.
That didn't happen. You must be remembering it wrong.
Hello publisher, I wrote a poem about a time when I was 15.
Will you consider it for an award?
Unfortunately, your poem was not selected to move forward,
but if you pay us $20 again, you might win next time!
Hello heart, are you still there? I am doing the best I can
to make your voice heard. Please hang on a little longer.
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem. Will you please publish it?
Only if you pay us $3, and even then we won't look at it.
We're busy soliciting work from our friends and famous people.
Hello agent, I wrote a book of poems and I have an MFA.
Will you represent me please?
[No answer]
Hello stranger, please don't do that to yourself.
I know things are hard for you right now,
but can I read you a poem I wrote?
I think it will help you with your demons.
Sit down and read it to me right now.
Here is my poem about a time I [---------------] at 15.
I'll stay if you read it to me again.
Hello I wrote a poem.
I don't want to listen to it.
Hello I wrote a poem about my life.
I don't care about your life.
Hello I wrote a poem about when I was 15.
That's awfully young, the poem is probably not any good.
Hello, fellow poet, I wrote a poem about when I was 15.
I also wrote a poem about when I was 15. Want to hear it?
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem
Oh, how sweet!
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem. Will you please publish it?
Unfortunately, this does not fit our needs at this time.
Hello, friend, I wrote a poem about when I was 15. Do you like it?
Yes I like it, but I didn't actually read it.
Hello, teacher, I wrote a poem about a time when I was 15.
You have a strong voice, but you have some growing to do,
and money to spend. You should consider MFA programs.
Hello, professor, I wrote a poem about a time when I was 15. Is it any good?
Follow these steps, take out some loans, take these classes,
and study everything I tell you. You could be great.
Hello, fellow poet. Yes, I would love to give you feedback on your poem.
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem. Will you please publish it?
Unfortunately, while there was much to admire,
we have to decline your submission at this time.
Hello family, I wrote a poem.
That didn't happen. You must be remembering it wrong.
Hello publisher, I wrote a poem about a time when I was 15.
Will you consider it for an award?
Unfortunately, your poem was not selected to move forward,
but if you pay us $20 again, you might win next time!
Hello heart, are you still there? I am doing the best I can
to make your voice heard. Please hang on a little longer.
Hello, editor, I wrote a poem. Will you please publish it?
Only if you pay us $3, and even then we won't look at it.
We're busy soliciting work from our friends and famous people.
Hello agent, I wrote a book of poems and I have an MFA.
Will you represent me please?
[No answer]
Hello stranger, please don't do that to yourself.
I know things are hard for you right now,
but can I read you a poem I wrote?
I think it will help you with your demons.
Sit down and read it to me right now.
Here is my poem about a time I [---------------] at 15.
I'll stay if you read it to me again.
Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the recipient of the 2023 Willie Morris Award, a finalist for the 2024 Rash Award, and the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award, and her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, The Appalachian Review, Prime Number Magazine, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, THIMBLE Lit Mag, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven and serves as the assistant poetry editor for Alan Squire Publishing. Connect with her on Twitter @LaurenCraw4d.
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
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After Moving On.
I dreamt of garlic, condoms and sweat, everyman I left followed me into my sleep. The women from my house said it is the work of jinnee, they said I would wash my head and change my name. Bismillahi. Ahudu Bikalimotillah Taamot She ask me; Do you still hear him? I said; I do not hear him, I hear my body cracks in his voice. The silence gets so loud, I play Rukiyah to drown him out. Love is relentless like an addiction but desire is the drug that is often misused. Once you kill the bird, its blood stays in your smile forever and once he touches you, remember his hands might steal away your dreams. |
Born on a Friday in December, Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a young Nigerian poet whose work has been featured in Torch Literary Arts, Blue Marble Review, Agbowo, The West Trade Review, The Shore Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Nominee and a nyctophobic gathering experience in Law in the University of Ibadan.
Chris Faunce
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"Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” - Stephen King
If you saw a bird carrying a shadow as it flew into the sunset, then the bird was a goldfinch and the shadow was a talisman gripped in its talon, the sunset at least a fire glowing orange, if not a glimpse into eternity. If there was no bird to begin with, then its wings were the most golden shade imaginable—marigold or sunflower—and its talons were razor-tipped steel carrying orbs of sunlight signaling the second coming. Never mind if the bird was a kite anchored to a tree branch, its claws piercing a fictional landscape. Never mind if the sunset was a lamppost magnifying midnight, the first lantern before the rest switched on. Despite the reflection in the window, the universe looked like a giant spade shoveling the stars as you drank a cup of coffee and sank into the miracle of the mundane. |
Chris Faunce is a writer from Pennsylvania. He graduated from Drexel University in 2023 with a degree in Civil Engineering. He won Drexel University's Creative Writing Award for Poetry in 2019. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Shore, Philadelphia Stories, and the Pennsylvania Poetry Society's Prize Poems anthology.
Scott Ferry
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expectations i am fishing in a bucket i have filled with waterghosts and i am surprised when i catch a silver eel i swallow it so it doesn’t say too much but the hook is still attached so i end up gulping down all the wires between earth and the jewel-mouthed dark |
Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His tenth book of poetry, Sapphires on the Graves, is now available from Glass Lyre Press. More can be found at ferrypoetry.com
Taylor Franson-Thiel
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On a Day Where You Eat a Whole Bag of Jelly Beans and Think About Killing Yourself You know the flavor of shame, its black licorice aftertaste tucked in the pocket of the jacket you wear to hide. You want to try decomposing, just for a bit. Want to see what the brain is like when dead, just to be more prepared. You list your body parts in order of importance. Which could you discard to feel, finally, light? Maybe the spine, a fragile railroad spike you have already hammered to dust, the cartilage crumbling off like rust chips. Without it, you could accordion down, let the folds of your skin stack like books, shelve yourself away. If not that, then the skin itself. What’s left to be ashamed of, if exposing the muscle proves your body works? And it does, doesn't it? Let you pull two arms through denim, let you think about death, candy, how badly you would miss taking walks with your husband. This thing you are so ashamed of― what could you give up to gain its smallness? |
Taylor Franson-Thiel is a Pushcart nominated poet from Utah, now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She received her Master’s in creative writing from Utah State University and is pursuing an MFA at George Mason University. She enjoys lifting heavy weights and posting reviews to Goodreads like someone is actually reading them.
Alice Friman
Content Warning: the author, a Jewish American poet, includes the K-word in the fourth stanza of the following poem.
Obsession
I can't stop thinking about Hitler,
how on those hot July nights, he'd toss
in his bed in Kehlsteinhaus, safe in his aerie,
worrying. Not about the war which
was going well. The panzer divisions,
the Luftwaffe, all dependable, devoted.
Eva breathing gently at his side.
Yet see how he fusses, yanks at
the sheets tangling his ankles, his feet
searching for a cool spot. He groans,
then flips on his right side, stares―
daring the dark for an answer.
And maybe then he gets up,
pads to the bathroom in bare feet,
peers into the mirror, touching his face
as if he can't believe how easy
it all had been. See how he loves his face.
His eyes, steel-blue, Aryan eyes.
Mustache bristling like a privet hedge.
But mostly his ears. Whipping his head
side to side, he examines them: their rims
steadfast and disciplined. The spirals,
German to the core. Then he scowls,
recalling why he was standing there
in the first place, unable to sleep.
Ears. Not his ears but Stalin's ears.
Were they the right kind―neat, trim,
or loose and floppy? Hairy? Sticking out?
Pointed like his German shepherd's?
Ah, if that were all. He frowns.
The crucial thing: were they Jewish ears―
attached with no space between the lobe
and head. That's what the pamphlet said,
the pamphlet he kept on his bedside table.
Hadn't he studied the pictures? Jew ears.
Attached ears. Kike ears. He had to know.
1939, year of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Even though Goebbels and Göring think
Ribbentrop a flatterer and a fool,
Hitler's sending him anyway.
With him, Hoffmann the photographer.
His task? To record the proceedings
then sneak in a picture of Stalin's ears
for Hitler's approval. Hitler feels
he's indebted to Hoffmann for keeping
him supplied with those "happy pills"
and introducing him to his assistant―
Hitler smiles—his white rose, that Liebchen
making herself at home now in his bed. Eva,
who will agree to death by cyanide at the end.
But she doesn't know that yet, does she?
August 23rd. The pact signed, a pact
neither Hitler nor Stalin will keep.
Nine days later, September 1, 1939,
Hitler marches east into Poland.
September 17, Stalin marches west.
The rest, history. All due to a photograph
of a pair of ears—rather fleshy ears,
Slavic ears. But not Jewish ears.
We'll have plenty of those later.
I can't stop thinking about Hitler,
how on those hot July nights, he'd toss
in his bed in Kehlsteinhaus, safe in his aerie,
worrying. Not about the war which
was going well. The panzer divisions,
the Luftwaffe, all dependable, devoted.
Eva breathing gently at his side.
Yet see how he fusses, yanks at
the sheets tangling his ankles, his feet
searching for a cool spot. He groans,
then flips on his right side, stares―
daring the dark for an answer.
And maybe then he gets up,
pads to the bathroom in bare feet,
peers into the mirror, touching his face
as if he can't believe how easy
it all had been. See how he loves his face.
His eyes, steel-blue, Aryan eyes.
Mustache bristling like a privet hedge.
But mostly his ears. Whipping his head
side to side, he examines them: their rims
steadfast and disciplined. The spirals,
German to the core. Then he scowls,
recalling why he was standing there
in the first place, unable to sleep.
Ears. Not his ears but Stalin's ears.
Were they the right kind―neat, trim,
or loose and floppy? Hairy? Sticking out?
Pointed like his German shepherd's?
Ah, if that were all. He frowns.
The crucial thing: were they Jewish ears―
attached with no space between the lobe
and head. That's what the pamphlet said,
the pamphlet he kept on his bedside table.
Hadn't he studied the pictures? Jew ears.
Attached ears. Kike ears. He had to know.
1939, year of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Even though Goebbels and Göring think
Ribbentrop a flatterer and a fool,
Hitler's sending him anyway.
With him, Hoffmann the photographer.
His task? To record the proceedings
then sneak in a picture of Stalin's ears
for Hitler's approval. Hitler feels
he's indebted to Hoffmann for keeping
him supplied with those "happy pills"
and introducing him to his assistant―
Hitler smiles—his white rose, that Liebchen
making herself at home now in his bed. Eva,
who will agree to death by cyanide at the end.
But she doesn't know that yet, does she?
August 23rd. The pact signed, a pact
neither Hitler nor Stalin will keep.
Nine days later, September 1, 1939,
Hitler marches east into Poland.
September 17, Stalin marches west.
The rest, history. All due to a photograph
of a pair of ears—rather fleshy ears,
Slavic ears. But not Jewish ears.
We'll have plenty of those later.
Alice Friman's new book, On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems, was published by LSU Press in 2024. She is a Jewish American poet and the author of eight full-length books, including Blood Weather, also published by LSU Press (2019). Other books from LSU include The View from Saturn and Vinculum, which won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. Inverted Fire and The Book of the Rotten Daughter are from BkMk Press, and Zoo was published by The University of Arkansas Press. She is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and is included in The Best American Poetry.
https://www.alicefrimanpoet.com/
https://www.alicefrimanpoet.com/
Jessica Goodfellow
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Difficulties in Translation The title of a painting by a Japanese artist was translated as ‘Categories of Difficulty’― by whom? the artist? by the museum? As nouns in Japanese are not inflected for number, the title might have been rendered as ‘Categories of Difficulties’ or ‘Category of Difficulties’ or ‘Category of Difficulty.’ How in van Gogh’s painting we cannot tell if the blackbirds are flying into the canvas or out of it. Or the strange ways angels mispronounce your name. The Latin for desidus can be translated as ‘from a star’ or ‘of a star’ or ‘moving away from a star.’ But the Pope chose to translate it as ‘lack of a star.’ And if there is ice in the water, there will be fog. That time someone said ‘shapeshifting’ but I misheard it as ‘shoplifting’ so I was busy cramming cans of tuna into my overcoat and did not see him disappear himself into a pheasant or perhaps a cedar. It’s like how artists choose lavender and yellow, blue or gray, even pink, and very occasionally I’ve seen also green― how they use every color but white to paint snow. How in every language we use the mouth to curse the mouth. |
Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Kobe, Japan.
Bex Hainsworth
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Cardea
Janus will tell the story differently, but I came to that cave knowing what I had for currency. I opened for the god of doorways only once. That was the beginning and the end of it. In return, he granted me divinity: I became deity of the humble hinge, guardian of the world’s threshold. Lingering on the periphery, lady of the liminal. I blessed your homes, kept watch as your fingers locked in your husbands’ hair, every elbow and knee a clasp, whilst children slept on in your orbit. You hung hawthorn, berries bright as paint, over cradles and lifted your prayers to me. I listened, and let no evil thing come for your daughters, your houses remained unhaunted. My hands are calloused, now, from all the iron I have caressed, clutched. From fresh hinges shiny as fish scales, which allow doors to arc like a hush in the dust, to the dulled, aching joints of temple gates, creaking and crunching with rust, I have witnessed every visitor you have allowed into your lives. I remain, always on the edge, protector, shade, hoping that one day soon, someone will let me in. |
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Sonora Review, The McNeese Review, and trampset. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press. Find her on Twitter @PoetBex and Instagram @poet.bex
Dylan Harbison
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The End of the Poem
My poetry teacher says death is the easy way out of the poem—that death is predictable, comes as no surprise, and poetry she says is all surprise. So I write another ending—end the poem in a dream― or not in a dream—I don’t want to call it a dream while it still feels possible. In the not-dream, I gather what I love and hold it close. I wake early, walk the field, gather flowers, carry them in my skirt. I list their names: foxglove, trillium, thistle. Later, my lover names me from the kitchen, where she cuts the stems at an angle, fills a vase with water. I pause & hover. Garlic-sweat hangs in the air. And the orange rind of her breath. What if the poem never ends? What if we stay up all night, rocking in the endless not-dream dark. The yard, a choir of frogs. They are singing for love. We are all singing― |
Dylan Harbison is a writer from Burlington, Vermont. She now lives in Western North Carolina, where she studies creative writing at UNC Asheville, and runs Meter & Melody, a local poetry series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Offing, Prelude Magazine, and elsewhere. She loves tercets and sitting on porch swings late at night.
Lois Marie Harrod
Ode to the House That Has Begun to Resemble a Funeral Parlor
for Lee, 1942-2022
The melancholy transformation began this spring―
or when I decided though not yet spring, it should be spring―
I was seeing rank upon rank of plants at the grocery store, plants impatient for spring―
impatient impatiens, those shady lovers, and I had seen enough shades recently
to populate perdition, too many stamens like ghosts, What man stays? No man,
Nemo, Stay, Man, Stay. I bought some for my window.
To counter the law of contraries, I bought sun-lovers too, the law of agreement,
pink petunias and Shasta daisies with faces a little too happy
not to contain sorrow, white begonias and yes, desiccated daffodils
which will return to life next spring after a winter rot in their pots.
I bought flowers, lots of flowers, the ones that don't need too much attention,
which is the way I've always chosen flora, sometimes fauna, yes even friends,
knowing the needy are Venus flytraps, waiting to suck the milli-ounce of insect blood,
knowing too some demanding flowers flourish without taking more of me
than an ice cube thrown in their direction once a week.
Look at this delicate orchid on my windowsill: it’s bloomed
four times in the last three years and this time, 22 blossoms.
The Law of Contraries, odi et amo, oh my Catullus, I loved you most of the time . . .
as I loved that orchid which first bloomed lilac, a pale orchid ballerina,
then turned boy, blossoms with pale boy faces
and purple freckles, trans-flowers, the way we are all shift male to female,
woman to man, strong to needy, reliant to self-reliant,
but let’s leave those distinctions for floral philosophers, those fools
who may or may not tell us this too is a corollary of the Funeral Home Effect.
And then because I was feeling rather brave and funereal, or was it grave
and fun, really funny, what are you reeling in now wherever you are or not?―
except I know you aren’t here because your ashes remain in the guest bedroom.
I don’t know what to do with them.
Before you died, we joked about my hiking solo five miles into the Wyoming Big Horns
and dusting the lupins and the Indian paint brush with what is left of you.
I think that was the plan, because you always said you’d die first, and then you did,
as if you had to be faithful to your word,
and now I am 80, and a bit hesitant to set out for the high hills
alone.
So because you are no longer here to hear my incessant babble,
notice I don’t say listen to, you didn’t always, I decided to buy cut flowers too,
carnations, that stalwart funeral flower, they last weeks—a bit like grief.
And yes, I bought yellow carnations, too late for your white sports coat
and pink incarnation, which hasn’t happened either . . .no, these are pale yellow
and I won’t call them sickly yellow because they have already lasted for three and a half weeks.
A few are getting a bit brown around the frills―
not unlike the big bruise on my knee where I tripped up the stairs.
Oh, I shouldn't have been wearing those clunky unisex Crocs,
unisex—another way of being dead, nothing sexy about Crocs
but my knee is the shade of shades, no sex in heaven, OMG,
a bruise the size of a peony—green and yellow and purple and blue.
I know, I know, you told me once, more than once, I shouldn’t wear those shoes,
though I was listening without hearing and once again proved you right or wrong.
Well, I have survived the fall and am surviving in this house of flowers—so many,
too many, and just as I was ready to plant them deep in the earth, aching knee and all,
I got COVID. I stayed in bed, no flower bed for me this week, no bed of roses,
but people kept dropping bouquets on the porch for me to take in and tend.
Flowers now from one end of the house to the other, kitchen, living room, bedroom―
wine-red calla lilies, blue chrysanthemum daisies, ghostly begonias, Eurydice’s coleus.
Last night my doorbell rang, the one that plays Hymn to Joy.
the one I installed all by myself because I am learning to do a lot you used to do,
and at my door there he is, a godling, maybe 20, maybe 23 with dark black hair
and obsidian eyes. And he is holding out a bouquet of red roses and red chrysanthemums,
deep red with a spray of baby breath, another aspect, I suppose, of that wall of contraries
I keep falling from, into, and I say, Oh my God, how beautiful.
And he says, as if he were Hermes, as if he were Cupid, as if he were Hades himself,
yes—as if he were you, Happy Mother's Day, Love.
Love, that fleeted-footed messenger with the beat-up van,
the one that escorts us to the underworld, Love, he called me Love,
and I think once again, The wages of dying . . .
The wages of dying is love.
for Lee, 1942-2022
The melancholy transformation began this spring―
or when I decided though not yet spring, it should be spring―
I was seeing rank upon rank of plants at the grocery store, plants impatient for spring―
impatient impatiens, those shady lovers, and I had seen enough shades recently
to populate perdition, too many stamens like ghosts, What man stays? No man,
Nemo, Stay, Man, Stay. I bought some for my window.
To counter the law of contraries, I bought sun-lovers too, the law of agreement,
pink petunias and Shasta daisies with faces a little too happy
not to contain sorrow, white begonias and yes, desiccated daffodils
which will return to life next spring after a winter rot in their pots.
I bought flowers, lots of flowers, the ones that don't need too much attention,
which is the way I've always chosen flora, sometimes fauna, yes even friends,
knowing the needy are Venus flytraps, waiting to suck the milli-ounce of insect blood,
knowing too some demanding flowers flourish without taking more of me
than an ice cube thrown in their direction once a week.
Look at this delicate orchid on my windowsill: it’s bloomed
four times in the last three years and this time, 22 blossoms.
The Law of Contraries, odi et amo, oh my Catullus, I loved you most of the time . . .
as I loved that orchid which first bloomed lilac, a pale orchid ballerina,
then turned boy, blossoms with pale boy faces
and purple freckles, trans-flowers, the way we are all shift male to female,
woman to man, strong to needy, reliant to self-reliant,
but let’s leave those distinctions for floral philosophers, those fools
who may or may not tell us this too is a corollary of the Funeral Home Effect.
And then because I was feeling rather brave and funereal, or was it grave
and fun, really funny, what are you reeling in now wherever you are or not?―
except I know you aren’t here because your ashes remain in the guest bedroom.
I don’t know what to do with them.
Before you died, we joked about my hiking solo five miles into the Wyoming Big Horns
and dusting the lupins and the Indian paint brush with what is left of you.
I think that was the plan, because you always said you’d die first, and then you did,
as if you had to be faithful to your word,
and now I am 80, and a bit hesitant to set out for the high hills
alone.
So because you are no longer here to hear my incessant babble,
notice I don’t say listen to, you didn’t always, I decided to buy cut flowers too,
carnations, that stalwart funeral flower, they last weeks—a bit like grief.
And yes, I bought yellow carnations, too late for your white sports coat
and pink incarnation, which hasn’t happened either . . .no, these are pale yellow
and I won’t call them sickly yellow because they have already lasted for three and a half weeks.
A few are getting a bit brown around the frills―
not unlike the big bruise on my knee where I tripped up the stairs.
Oh, I shouldn't have been wearing those clunky unisex Crocs,
unisex—another way of being dead, nothing sexy about Crocs
but my knee is the shade of shades, no sex in heaven, OMG,
a bruise the size of a peony—green and yellow and purple and blue.
I know, I know, you told me once, more than once, I shouldn’t wear those shoes,
though I was listening without hearing and once again proved you right or wrong.
Well, I have survived the fall and am surviving in this house of flowers—so many,
too many, and just as I was ready to plant them deep in the earth, aching knee and all,
I got COVID. I stayed in bed, no flower bed for me this week, no bed of roses,
but people kept dropping bouquets on the porch for me to take in and tend.
Flowers now from one end of the house to the other, kitchen, living room, bedroom―
wine-red calla lilies, blue chrysanthemum daisies, ghostly begonias, Eurydice’s coleus.
Last night my doorbell rang, the one that plays Hymn to Joy.
the one I installed all by myself because I am learning to do a lot you used to do,
and at my door there he is, a godling, maybe 20, maybe 23 with dark black hair
and obsidian eyes. And he is holding out a bouquet of red roses and red chrysanthemums,
deep red with a spray of baby breath, another aspect, I suppose, of that wall of contraries
I keep falling from, into, and I say, Oh my God, how beautiful.
And he says, as if he were Hermes, as if he were Cupid, as if he were Hades himself,
yes—as if he were you, Happy Mother's Day, Love.
Love, that fleeted-footed messenger with the beat-up van,
the one that escorts us to the underworld, Love, he called me Love,
and I think once again, The wages of dying . . .
The wages of dying is love.
Lois Marie Harrod’s most recent book Spat was published in June 2021. Her collection Woman won the 2020 Blue Lyra Prize. Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 (Five Oaks); her chapbook And She Took the Heart, January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet and lifelong teacher, she has been published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Online link: www.loismarieharrod.org
Jose Hernandez Diaz
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Ode to the Surreal Prose Poem
You refuse to conform, don’t you? Why can’t you just be normal? Just kidding. You’re
perfect the way you are. Michael Jordan is Poetry, but you are Dennis Rodman. Take us
to the dream world. The subconscious. Another dimension. Space. Another time-period.
Magic. Dragons. Centaurs. I want to read you to escape. To laugh. To cry. All of it. One
day you will be mainstream. One day tomorrow will be the past. All is possible. All is
welcome. Take me away.
You refuse to conform, don’t you? Why can’t you just be normal? Just kidding. You’re
perfect the way you are. Michael Jordan is Poetry, but you are Dennis Rodman. Take us
to the dream world. The subconscious. Another dimension. Space. Another time-period.
Magic. Dragons. Centaurs. I want to read you to escape. To laugh. To cry. All of it. One
day you will be mainstream. One day tomorrow will be the past. All is possible. All is
welcome. Take me away.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025), and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He teaches at UC Riverside and for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer's Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.
B.B.P. Hosmillo
CONVERSION
1. [Fajr]
i didn’t know it was that early – sunless, light emitted from a handy lamp,
just enough to see how quietly things happen. milk darkening on the stove.
lentils cleaving to become soup. my partner knifing red meat, his arms the repletion
muscling through the earthen heat of pilgrimage and Punjab.
i hid the gaucheness of my jittery spirit under my tongue. i flashed my alien eyes
where he wrote prayer instructions for the first day of my first Ramadan.
together we ate. filled ourselves with taxed smoke and dates. the love i was with
believable to the core, a family looking for god. i didn’t know intimacy that way―
cleaning of bones, being groomed, disgorging all desires like a sect of lice
stumbled, sliding off fur when the stray shakes its afflicted body.
in the bathroom i brushed my teeth, the mirror studying a sheep in brown skin,
entering a kingdom whose elders’ battle cry was to expel the animals the kind
we were, but we entered it anyway.
above unrolled prayer mats an invisible ring afloat to live around my neck.
i looked at him before he started the first prayer, a meadow in his lips, sun to burst.
in that awakening i bowed my head without history, without ego—that was how
badly i wanted to be in heaven. if it never existed, we were finely invisible.
we obeisance. we kneecaps that trickled. we tombs that murmured.
2. [Dhuhr]
it was hard to say goodbye, harder if you didn’t at all,
wasn’t it? if you lived with a listless pain for decades
and now it’s gone yet you are not healed at all, wouldn’t you
ask where it is? where is Christ? what would happen to Him
if i ignored His calls? does He even remember me remembering
Him? that night in Ouan’s farm, or was it a mountain of contrition?
and i was the contrition, wasn’t i? Jehovah-Shammah was there,
incalculable feeling of fire that didn’t burn me, did it? i trusted Him
to govern my life, didn’t i utterly? roving between sin and a rural house
only with my toddler sister and a portrait of my overseas parents,
who did i call in every place? who filled the void? who took
my anger and my grief? who knew i led a war against myself?
whom i first came out to? being christian and gay was abhorred,
but didn’t it seem a debate within, a possibility if alive, faith?
a right to be in a family, said the pope—wasn’t that the most humane
of all? did meaning that slit heaven? did i not consider the continuum
meant alright, child, live the body you could, go on? what would
i tell my earliest saviour if we met? i prayed a muslim’s prayer?
that i wanted to see if that’d stop my partner from abusing me?
3. [Asr]
look at the glass door refracting the enervated animals who refuse hunger.
no mundane pleasure runs in their palms. no thirst, but not for the same reason.
they read scripture on a digital tablet, one on the floor the other on the bed.
can you see the olive shrubs in their heads? their feet pointing to different directions.
the wall clock has seen it all, again and again. look at them ignore their crookedness,
their blessed rituals will reach as far as one of them climbs out from the cage.
then the other one ripples the view. it’s like a liver you drop in a quiet pond of fish.
4. [Maghrib]
we prayed the last prayer to break the day. i stayed where i knelt and prostrated,
my body a burned gate on a divided land. memory and future sharing the ashes.
not a doctor’s appointment for a twisted elbow, not a date on top of a skyscraper,
this intimacy feeds on my sacrifices—squashed honeycombs, more and more
of use from hands to mouth—my hands a print of disappearing bones. mostly
i’d know just by silence i must stand at the back of the food line or else―
the heaviness to numb my legs down to the last weeping stones they gradually
turned into. a boy drawing bubbles in the air with his own saliva would someday
throw those stones at the new woman in their house to spite his father.
that’s the urge to speak, a prophecy of rapture. how are you
thinking shit like that, my partner vented, the promised paradise in his face
instantly rumpled. when i looked at his eyes swelling into fire to calm him down,
it could be written as this moment: on a motorcycle waiting for a truck
to turn right a shadow stops so close to my helmet and pounds a sledge hammer
on my forehead. the shadows of everything then walks away into the direction of future.
5. [Isha’a]
this is a prayer of ruins and limits, of nights i didn’t feel much of my body.
a prayer of the wounds in the air, the heart in salt. out of it escapes a cloud
of smoke. a destruction i do not make simply out of the freedom of little hands.
the will to form. the will to deform. the will to see things as they are: deformed,
hostile, revolutionary like a lily in mud.
to consider the haunting of seas with man-made doors, the lands that rape built.
to cross the turbulence that ravages my head. the revolting sound of madness.
the lifetime echoes of being ensnared, of the need to throw myself against
a moving truck for quiet for quiet for quiet.
to leave the violence that stays hungry. the thirst that outlives water.
O Allah, i ask You by Your mercy which envelopes all things that You forgive me
like you forgive those wives and daughters who think of killing their men
before they hang their bodies at the window of their trap house.
B.B.P. Hosmillo is a queer poet born in the Philippines. Author of Breed Me: a sentence without a subject / Phối giống tôi: một câu không chủ đề (AJAR Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation, they are the founder and co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia: a literary journal of transgressive art. Their recent work has appeared or forthcoming in The Margins, The Lincoln Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, and The Offing. Currently, they teach at the College of Teacher Education, Southern Luzon State University.
Alison Hurwitz
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Two Aprils in Reverse “I think we are but a circumstance apart.” ― Anna Ellory A cardboard box collapses out of three dimensions. Spread towel refolds into the closet. Heating pad unheats, water sucks back up into the faucet. A loofah circles in reverse. Foam unfroths. Soap unpumps from the dispenser. Gooseflesh lowers, smooths. Eye unpunctures, crow claws leached of bloody pulp, cries unshriek into the softened light of April. The man unwhispers wetly in her ear, unbreathes down her neck, unruns his fingers through his hair. Two hearts decelerate until their trembles stop. Fur around the rabbit’s eyes unstains, red to brown. Soaked sidewalk bleaches back to asphalt grey. A gasp turns inside out and is reswallowed. Salt and black retrace the channels on her cheeks. Dog stops barking. Girl unscreams, uncharges into flapping wings and pecking. Shaking hands unsnatch the baby rabbit from the grass. Two slickened fingers exit, one hand unholds her down, the other moves to unstroke shoulder, unexplore her back. He unasks her where she’s tight. Crows undive, unflap their black cloaks past the topmost branches of the trees, unsettling. He unwalks into her room, unthrows his coat across her bed. The girl unwinces from the place her back is aching after class, unrequests a man she trusts to help work out the knot. A small white dog uncocks his head, trots in reverse, pushing on the leash, barking at crows who vacuum back into a cloud which then unwhisps, unskeined to air. The girl unwinds into the studio, turning backwards to a Waltz in 4/3 time, a counter-clockwise pirouette, a revolving door. Morning unassembles to a blameless wash of blue. Pause here. Breathe. Watch her lift her arms as if she’s flying, jetté across the floor. Watch a mother rabbit with her kits, sun-dappled, new, on the tender early brightness of the grass. |
Featured/Upcoming in Rust and Moth, River Heron Review, SWWIM Every Day, Thimble, Carmina Magazine, The South Dakota Review, ONE ART, Gyroscope Review, and others, Alison Hurwitz is a two-time 2023 Best of the Net Nominee, and founder/host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. She lives with her family and beloved rescue dog in North Carolina. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com
Sarah Kersey
photo by Philip Keith
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Transducer
Before there was a word for me, or you, there were hearts only 70 years from Africa. They fluttered at the sound. Everything you hold to your chest is a memory aid, like meter. How many iambs did it take to cross the sea? How many times did hearts beat themselves into slavery? How many unwritten sonnets ripped from flesh? At the shore, they were soaked, failed. When wrenched, they withered. Our hearts are the oldest things about us. When they die, they relay the rhythm to another and another like a copy that degrades, like an echo that fades. A 70-year-old heart, today, is 20 generations from the shore, carries 400 years of memories, 80 pentameters, 40 iambs, only 6 sonnets. Through aberrations in the atmosphere, the cosmos can speak. |
Sarah Kersey (she/they) is a poet and x-ray technologist who lives in Boston, MA. Her work has appeared in Columbia Journal, The Rumpus, The Account Magazine, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for the 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship and have received support from Tin House Workshop. The above poem is from her debut chapbook Residence Time, which will be published by Newfound on October 7, 2024. It can be pre-ordered at newfound.org.
Sarah tweets @sk__poet.
Sarah tweets @sk__poet.
Amelia Loeffler
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Vanishing Woman
The magician asks for a volunteer and I am always all too eager to please, even this crowd of strangers. I do not want anyone to be disappointed so I let him turn me into a rabbit, stroke me between the ears, stuff me into a top hat. It is dark inside and I am afraid but I do not ask him to let me go because my rabbit voice is too small, too quiet to be heard over the din of applause. I mean, I ask but he does not hear. I mean, I ask but he pretends not to hear. I am moments from suffocating when he pulls me out. A woman again, I unroll my curled limbs, unspool like a ribbon in the spotlight. He shuffles and cuts a deck of cards and bids me choose one. I draw the joker. Laughter rocks the crowd but the joke is lost on me. I mean, strangers are laughing at me but I do not know why. I mean, they are laughing at me because they are glad they are not in my shoes. Everyone knows how this act ends for the woman. The card disappears with a snap and, then, with some sleight of hand it appears, again, in my pocket: the card, his hand, the key to the box he invites me to step inside. Once more I am trapped, part of this tiresome act: the box, precisely my size, the impatient gaze of a hundred pairs of hungry watching eyes. The audience is effervescent, toothy open mouthed smiles cheering and spraying spittle that glints briefly in the spinning lights. Smoke, mirrors, then a hacksaw cuts me in two. The magician wheels the body away to keep backstage; I remain a severed head in the spotlight. For his last trick, the magician melts what is left of me into thin air, like spun sugar into an open, warm mouth. When the last of the smoke and vapor clears, there, in my place, is the playing card. Vertical Divider
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Marlboro Sandman
I wake and see that cowboy leaning against the doorframe in my bedroom, a lit cigarette glowing from the void of shadow under his ten gallon hat where a face should be, the spurs at his heels sharp like teeth that break skin, a belt hanging, unbuckled, from his slim-fit Wranglers, several lengths of rope slung over his shoulder. He scrapes clean crescents under his fingernails with a double-beveled blade, throws the knife across the room like a dart: when it finds its mark, the bedpost splinters, sawdust dust falls to my forehead. I wake again and he is gone, the door left ajar. The knife is missing, muddy boot tracks show he crossed to my bed in two long strides. I imagine the way he leaned over me as I slept, breath warming my face when he took back his knife; how long might he have lingered? I rub rheum from my eyes and see a circle of char where he ashed the cigarette against my pillow. I find the filter twisted in my sheets. |
Amelia Loeffler is a born and raised Kentuckian living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her work has previously been published by the Orange County Arts Commission and Short Édition.
J. Parker Marvin
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] Lifing Journal [] 44820 [ The relevance of an old room stepped out of just after the decision to demolish it I painted over the humid dusty grit of my childhood once that I remember but I will hire someone to unravel Coming to a place of memory without memory is worthless when the angles of moting ashes disappearing my face remind me of the constant discomfort I wasn’t sure if I should empty the house before the cremation but I do not understand empty but I do not understand ashes but I don’t not understand how nothing can exist but everything is ultimately conserved The being here and the absence are constructed exactly the same What is falling ] Lifing Journal [] 44821 [ It is the needing of that impossibles it The moment of and the artifacts grate against the brittle windows It is not the impacting that sounds it is not the airborning shapes it is not the arcing futility against gravity When my body shatters it is only the ending of the collapse the worthless rebellion the running down and away from and into the shattering after the first shattering Already there is dust I cannot recapture ] Lifing Journal [] 44822 [ Gray fog wetting gray stone grayer The romanticism of concrete Arthritic knees brittle over the unstraying patterns They are dictators against the soft underfoot organic Prohibitions bring density bring hardness bring fracture The mission of god must be to dehumanize everything in preparation for chaos That is why a mother breaks and dissolves away from her children Gray stone ground into paste and dyed darker as appeasement Gradients evolving toward darkness is trending Gradients trending toward darkness is darkness The fog is already dead |
J. Parker Marvin is currently a data analyst working in the semiconductor industry and lives in Saitama, Japan. Parker’s poems have been published most recently in Mantis Poetry, Levitate, and Second Factory. Parker’s collection Postlude to the End of is forthcoming in the Fall of 2024 from April Gloaming.
Edward Mayes
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WHEN I FIRST SAW WILLIAM BLAKE’S “THE GHOST OF A FLEA” When I first saw William Blake’s “The Ghost of a Flea” It had been several years that I had been Eighteen and several years that my brother Had been nineteen, there, at the Tate Gallery, August, nineteen hundred and Seventy-three, where I found myself Looking for stasis and looking to be untrapped, Looking for the big shake-off and looking For all things contrary, and all for This we are created with only one heart, Created with one body in which we can so Easily find ourselves lost, one poem dissolving, All the words becoming ghost words or The ghosts of words, a stranger mouthing Something to another stranger, or the eye, That we “look thru it & not with it,” The ghost of a breath on a window, that I could think I could open it, that I could Think the only movement of my arm Could wipe all that I see away, here am I, Still, a go-between for vision and shadow. “The Ghost of a Flea,” 1819, Tate Gallery, 1973; the eye: “I look thru it & not with it”, William Blake; ghost, gasp, breath; sweet Thames; gridlock; ghost word; flow, go; on first looking into “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” 1816
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Edward Mayes has published poems in The New Yorker, APR, and Best American Poetry. His books include First Language, Juniper Prize (University of Massachusetts Press) and Works and Days, AWP Prize in Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press). He has recent poems published or forthcoming in Poetry, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, and others. He lives in Durham, North Carolina and Cortona, Italy, with his wife, the writer Frances Mayes.
Olivia Mettler
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You Know the Cigarette Lighter Works Because you looked into the red rings and felt them press back. It hurts but not in the way you expected. You inspect the small arcs along the tip of your finger, overriding your own print, and wonder if you are a new person. If this cigarette lighter from your father’s old truck has changed you in a way you’ll never understand. A hot kiss you could have never been ready for. A sweeping of coal and electric currents. The truck tips over the edge of the ridge with you inside this moment. Your father forgetting who you were between the half cab and the full bed you’ve loaded and unloaded a hundred times, so he does not try to save you. You wish you’d sat in the middle seat to see what it was like so close to the wheel but far enough from the doors so the wind could not grab you and you did not have to crank the window up to escape the watercolor bog rushing up to greet you. The soft twist of your hair settling along your neck in a way it never will again. |
Olivia Mettler is an alum of Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is currently a graduate student at Florida Atlantic University pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in poetry and lives in Boca Raton, FL. Olivia spends her free time complaining about driving in South Florida and pretending she can talk to birds.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery
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A Doctor Says He Understands Women Can Be Fussy Because He Has Daughters
I wonder what they know of pain the way it wrecks a woman from inside but is believed a lie because a wound should be worn for others to see as clearly as a smile. He shows me his girls grinning like their mother―she’s difficult too― laughs like a secret I should keep and invites me to guess which one is the worst behaved the way he makes me label pain on a scale I did not create. You won’t believe it’s the youngest, he says before turning his doubt to how anyone my age could hurt the way I report, except his daughters do so he understands the nuance, women another broken part of the body like a sprained ankle or leaking heart valve, an aching tooth rotted through to the root. He pulls up my chart to remember my name and says he doesn’t mind if I return for his expertise the way wives are never satisfied even after they should be fixed for good. Vertical Divider
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My Husband Goes with Me to Doctors so They Will Believe My Pain is Real
He responds to all the questions they direct to him ignoring me on the table in a shroud. I have nothing left to examine, illness invisible as the reasons why gender means only a man not a woman is allowed to answer inquiries about bodies not their own. Sometimes my husband gets it wrong. I speak up in the cold, chronic a condition quieter than medicine’s many machines insisting recovery is possible. I offer truth that disrupts a tidy narrative where a man in a white coat tells a confused husband his wife really ought to get some rest, pain the ailment of a worried mind, a womb wandering off unattended. I capture my husband’s gaze and he translates what I say to a doctor who still refuses to look me in the eyes. |
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), and three poetry chapbooks. Nerve, a craft book on unlearning the ableist workshop and developing a disabled writing practice, is forthcoming with Sundress Publications, and Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.
David Moolten
MINOTAUR WITH A GOBLET IN HIS HAND AND A YOUNG WOMAN
I never understood my mother loving
Picasso, who went through women like cheap sherry.
Then again, she married my father,
who didn’t make a single masterpiece
out of his predatory trysts. At least Picasso
let everyone see he was a beast, his confessions
proudly hanging in the world’s museums.
If they turned his whims into a cult
they got what they asked for, torn from their clothes,
shown his wild side, here his better half
for the night in a self-portrait
like she’s recursive, and whatever he’s done
he did to a part of him, even if just an etching
he invites her up to see. This lets him feel evolved,
bravely contrite for all he went through
with the rest, remembering birthdays, weeping
in their arms. He’s bullish on the technique;
so what if it involves acid and as in some lab
experiment gone awry he’s emerged
as a self-effacing cross between Theseus and Baal?
He’s learned manners, read de Beauvoir,
taken up chess. She listens to this, placing a finger
to her thoughtful face, an eager casualty
who doesn’t care if the same tussocks of fur
jut from fascist generals. Of course, here I am
claiming I understand when maybe the same
reverse satyr lurks in me. Yet I’d like to think
in my best moments I’m not artful, just wounded
enough by my father’s frenzies
and my mother’s surrender as parley
in the sheets to half-believe I’ve come a long way
from torchlit alleys: so a wall print alleges,
seminal brainchild or the wine's zest.
David Moolten's last book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won last year’s Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.
Megan Nichols
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To ask him for anything was a wish for agony. It wasn’t just that the rug was pulled. Half the time I didn’t know anything was even underfoot. Like a violence so subtle you bleed minutes, or never, after contact. This is a real phenomenon. The obsidian blade so fine the vessels contract or the speeding lead that cauterizes after itself. I don’t see red he’d say, show me your supposed red. I would make it real for him. I would wonder what I had done to myself. Vertical Divider
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In a guided meditation I am told to go back to the last time I let a man turn no into yes so I travel to yesterday when I said my hands were able to carry what a stranger insisted I could not. So we walked to my car together, unbalanced, his arms holding what I really thought my own could handle and then I travel back further touching all the reflections of the original terror until I am in the eye of what has twisted even generous acts. |
Megan Nichols is the author of the chapbook Animal Unfit (Belle Point Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Threepenny Review, Frontier Poetry,
and elsewhere.
and elsewhere.
Kenneth Pobo
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PERUVIAN LILY
In the afterlife, Anne Boleyn, holding her head, welcomes me to heaven. She looks much as I imagined her to look in the 1530s except she wears more contemporary clothes. An angel escorts me to my cold and drafty mansion, unkempt. The angel says that all of my neighbors love God and I’d better be like them or they’ll come after me. Just like when I was alive. I ask where Bette Davis lives. He doesn’t know, says he doesn’t watch movies. Bliss is all the drama he needs. It’s nightfall but still light. I need a railing of darkness to cling to remembering my red Peruvian lily back on Earth just open. PICTURE OF ARLENE FRANCIS AND BREAD
In her five-string white necklace, Arlene looks happier than when she names the What’s My Line Mystery Guest, several loaves of bread at the ready. Here in our house, I see our dirty floor. I don’t dress up for food. Flypaper hangs near our blue tumblers. The cat’s water bowl, scrungy. I wish I had her bread, toasted, heavily buttered. I get on the floor and start to scrub. |
THE WAIT
Assemblage by Edward Kienholz Doris sits under her grandfather’s picture, dead for fifty years, yet present as the sewing basket by her feet. Grandfather, a train coming right at her, day after day, hour after hour, never stopping. Surely someday he would stop― he never did. When he died grown-ups told her he went to heaven. She thought that must be the depot. What if he didn’t go to heaven? Maybe the train shot out toward the stars, any place other than Earth with its burning fences that rebuild themselves when the first red rose gives the order before losing its first petal. |
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), 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, SoFloPoJo, and elsewhere.
Beth Brown Preston
Birth of the Blues
Was it Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature”? Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?
In the lyric of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
or in a Black child’s first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.
Was it Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature”? Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?
In the lyric of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
or in a Black child’s first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.
Collage - after Romare Bearden
Gather out of star-dust:
memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled
my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights
in our rented place on West 131st Street laughing and talking
the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings
when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur
yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then,
the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues.
Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs,
clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original Charleston,
the fine old step, the swing and the sway.
Gather out of moon-dust:
There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms.
Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow.
Lessons on how to become a "real poet," while Claude McKay
joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.
Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes.
Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust:
a time for the "new negro."
For Pullman porters to unionize
and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to exercise
her wings of gossamer silk and satin.
Music warbled from an ebony flute
while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews.
Was Christ Black?
Do angels really play trombones for God
in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten?
Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed?
As I gazed from the window at the skies
of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night.
To hear "Go Down Moses" sung in church on a Sunday morn.
Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones.
Daddy Grace.
Gather out of star-dust:
memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled
my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights
in our rented place on West 131st Street laughing and talking
the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings
when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur
yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then,
the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues.
Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs,
clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original Charleston,
the fine old step, the swing and the sway.
Gather out of moon-dust:
There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms.
Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow.
Lessons on how to become a "real poet," while Claude McKay
joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.
Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes.
Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust:
a time for the "new negro."
For Pullman porters to unionize
and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to exercise
her wings of gossamer silk and satin.
Music warbled from an ebony flute
while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews.
Was Christ Black?
Do angels really play trombones for God
in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten?
Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed?
As I gazed from the window at the skies
of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night.
To hear "Go Down Moses" sung in church on a Sunday morn.
Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones.
Daddy Grace.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary and scholarly journals.
Kathryn Pratt Russell
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At the Yayoi Kusama Exhibition My husband and in-laws bought the exhibit tickets. They’d known of her for years, Kusama, the illusion master, with her rooms of lights and mirrors. Each room had its own queue, half in, half out of the installation space, the walls washed in light, colored like the inner rooms. My talk with the two younger women in front of me outside the dark lanterns room was pleasant, sociable, but the more we found ourselves stuck together, other people almost brushing our shoulders, the more we became wary of making talk. I avoided eye contact, in the artificial glow. All around me, people ignored each other, while mere feet away. The open spaces of the gallery were narrowed by shapes, gargantuan shapes, and people. We’d come here by choice. I shuffled behind my husband into space that should have been calmer, a modest room, no darkness, no mirrors, white walls. The pink balls were nine feet tall, some on the ground beside me, some suspended to choke off the air, and everywhere, the people, who walked slowly, as if they weren’t trapped with many strangers, with giant polka-dot balls. I couldn’t stay there, but I couldn’t leave. I backed up to a wall, but the balls were right next to me. I sat down to make myself small as possible, ashamed to show my fear, and unable to stop myself. My family didn’t notice. Enchanted by the grand balls, they drifted forward to the next room. |
Kathryn Pratt Russell has poems published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Black Warrior Review, Chelsea, Red Mountain Review, Free State Review, Atlanta Review, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. Her prose and essays have appeared in American Book Review, Studies in Romanticism, Disappointed Housewife, Romantic Circles, and Studies in English Literature. Her poetry chapbook, Raven Hotel, was published by Dancing Girl Press in July 2021. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.
Daniel W. Rasmus
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Girl Reading After Berthe Morisot’s Reading Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg The same pages swooned over puzzled by reflected upon the same 568 words contemplated I think he is a pirate though I’m not sure this man with a beard and a sword the sentence begins on the preceding page the remaining paragraphs describe fish except the last fragment on the second page where the anchor snags quantum-mechanically awaiting an observer to fix its state. I am old enough to appreciate the need for context My brush strokes so loose and fluid you cannot discern poetry from fiction It will always be fiction If I had known I would be sitting so long I would have chosen a more comfortable chair. |
Daniel W. Rasmus is the principal analyst at Serious Insights. He is the author of Empower Business with GenAI, Management by Design, Sketches of Spain and Other Poems, and Listening to the Future. Daniel served in leadership roles at Microsoft and Forrester Research. His business writing has been featured in HBR, Fast Company, Wired and other publications. Dan’s poetry has appeared in the Indiana Review, Illya’s Honey, Barrow Street and other journals. Dan teaches scenario planning at the University of Washington.
Cecilia Savala
Song
The rush of traffic sounds like rain.
Birds swim in single file. It’s not a real river.
My son wears a uniform and speaks in code.
It’s not a real badge. He uses his teeth to chip away
at silver paint. Made in America. Made from the tears
of overnight men. Birds sing in waves and foam.
My son wears his hair down over his ears.
He can’t hear the birds. It’s not a real song.
The rain drowns the men on the clean swept sidewalk.
The mantras are metal, real. They puddle, make mirages, disrupt
traffic that sounds like water. My son puts his badge on the table;
he’s clean shaven. He cries for the men on the sidewalk,
becomes like them, silver, feathered. He watches the door,
waits for a flood that doesn’t come.
The rush of traffic sounds like rain.
Birds swim in single file. It’s not a real river.
My son wears a uniform and speaks in code.
It’s not a real badge. He uses his teeth to chip away
at silver paint. Made in America. Made from the tears
of overnight men. Birds sing in waves and foam.
My son wears his hair down over his ears.
He can’t hear the birds. It’s not a real song.
The rain drowns the men on the clean swept sidewalk.
The mantras are metal, real. They puddle, make mirages, disrupt
traffic that sounds like water. My son puts his badge on the table;
he’s clean shaven. He cries for the men on the sidewalk,
becomes like them, silver, feathered. He watches the door,
waits for a flood that doesn’t come.
Cecilia Savala is a Shrek-obsessed Latinx poet, teacher, and mom who writes about fatphobia, body image, and gender 1200 miles from home. She is a morning person, a cat person, an Assistant Director to ASU Writing Programs, and the poetry editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has been anthologized in Curating Home and Lift Every Voice: An Anthology of Poetry, and her work can be found in Red Ogre Review, the Boiler, and Poetry South, among others. Follow her at @cecsav on Instagram
Rebecca Schneid
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To Christchurch Tie the two sides of the sheet together with chain link. Fold them into something beautiful—like origami. Opposite tendencies create the same shape: the leaf of the country who took us in. The jade necklace my hosts gave, circular in Maori tradition. First time I didn’t see pity in a mother’s eyes. Host daughter came out as trans; I love that for her. She messages me about Lord of the Rings and watching U.S. Court confirmations from across the meridian. I’m reminded of yoga done in mornings past to ground us in days we would never remember. Just beyond the worst of it: they invited us there to learn something about teenage minds. A lighthouse, a beach, a breath-ragged climb to the top of a hill. Salsa dancers asking us to join in. We did—baked in grief. I remember my host mom stirring cereal with pears. I’ve been trying to replicate the taste, yet fail. A sunset in a new direction staggers. I remember crying on you, feigning overstimulation, when really you just broke my heart. We plant trees in symbols, and I hear drums in psychedelic distant patterns tell me it’s not enough. I hear myself hear nothing but the sound of your hiccups. How do I tell everyone this was the biggest lesson of my school shooting? Story of my life: sentimental at the wrong time—in the most humiliating ways. How do I say, in the wake of all that violence, that you are all I wanted. |
Rebecca Schneid is a recent graduate at Duke University, studying poetry and English. Her poetry has been featured in FORM, Beyond Queer Words and DUMBO. Her poetry has also been awarded a University & College Poetry Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Terry Welby Tyler, Jr. and Lee Emerson Tyler Award for Poetry. They are from Parkland, Florida, but now reside and write from Brooklyn, New York.
Zeke Shomler
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Molecular Physics Comprehensive Exam
It’s true that every molecule is yearning, that desire pumps from every quark like blood inside a hunted moose calf’s heart. Nothing should surprise you about this. The bare granite rock face yearns for the pummeling of cold sea air, the sun-dried ropes of kelp form tough thin fingers of longing like my great-grandmother licking ketchup from her wallpaper skin while chanting names of friends long dead. Listen: every crashing wave is cloaked in undertones. Even atoms understand the necessity of distance, even stable nuclei know what it means to hold attraction and repulsion all at once. I promise this is not a metaphor for love. No: this is a pleading to retrieve what I knew once but have long since forgotten. To the ocean, what’s incidental is the shore. |
Zeke Shomler is an MA/MFA candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work has appeared in Cordite, Sierra Nevada Review, Folio, and elsewhere.
Sara Jeanine Smith
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Somehow
we set ourselves out to cool in the window
we let the bears steal the things we made
we let our mothers become the bears
their clawed paws scooping out
the best parts of us, bounding into the night
still wearing the aprons we remember
then we let ourselves become mothers
staring out of the open window
wondering what happened to us
what has happened to us
Sara Jeanine Smith is a Floridian, English teacher, and the mother of two daughters. Her poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Barely South Review, Pigeonholes, Roanoke Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Hurricane Review, and others. She has two chapbooks, entitled Queen and Stranger (2019) and Aftermath (2023), published by USPOCO Books. See more of her work at sarajeaninesmith.com.
Kelsey L. Smoot
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“what men are made of” As a man of new man experience, I've learned quickly that I should aspire to be a real man, you know, an OG, a don, a honcho, a boss the type of man who gets what he wants, when he wants I want to get the ingredients down, don’t want to get caught slippin’, so I look around and take notes on the behavior of men― jot down the essentials The best recipe; an ethnographic research study of what makes a man a man. And I appreciate how helpful they all are, teaching me things Like yesterday, I learned from watching a man, who is old enough to be my granddaddy call out to a girl who is young enough to worship Olivia Rodrigo and Normani, how to get what I want, when I want “You look nice today!” She doesn’t respond and this is when Granddaddy teaches me to speak louder, just enough to spark a small flicker of fear “You look nice today” this time barbed and bitter, broken off like a glass bottle held at the hip but gripped with a grasp that says: bitch, I will kill you “Thank you!” the girl manages to eke out as she crosses the street and it is then that I realize men aren’t made of masculinity, testosterone, oud tobacco aftershave or steel-toe boots and bright ideas like I’d always thought they were Men are made of ‘no, thank you’ bent into ‘yes, please’ Men are very persuasive; they can sell you a lemon or your own life back to you at twice the price but you’d better respond nicely To make a man: you take the best parts of women, add two fingers of whiskey, then shake with fury until the whole house is silent, ‘till it ain’t more sweet shit knock it back and keep your face in placid repose not no weak shit “It still doesn’t taste quite right” I mumble and a man old enough to be my granddaddy cuffs me at the ear, leans in close, the smell of oud tobacco aftershave mixed with whiskey pitches forward like a bad omen “the fear,” he hisses directly in my ear “you forgot to add the fear” Vertical Divider
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“How I Know You Love Me” I am not a recipe for your hands or their undoing you are mine in a way not reliant on bodies or borders There is nothing quite as exotic or erotic as the aftercare & I can wear my bonnet around you I confess that I never learned to skip double-dutch my body don’t move like that no god-given snap, click tap skip tap And still, we make this beat drop spectral, electrical eat down, as the babies say You, a bit of a fabulist every day, a new favorite thing to share an incisor, my furrowed brow, a rogue mustache hair I know you love me because you ask me to model my new shirt down the catwalk of our dining room mouth agape like it’s Parisian Fashion Week And at the slightest hint of uncertainty from me you stomp your feet thunderously pull my hands from my face and insist ‘don't you play me cheap, darling– let it be glorious’ “on bearing witness” I saw a baby girl in pieces today The longer I let my gaze linger on her small broken body, I knew I was committing the sight of her to memory A baby, made into shards like shrapnel And the momentary thought that my looking might mean something that, if I allow myself to look away, she might become some small percentage less real A dream from which the world had chosen to awaken No, I would not let this world take one more thing from her; the right to live to love to grow to know and be known This, the only thing I can still give to her now The right to be remembered |
Kelsey L. Smoot (They/Them/He/Him) is a full-time PhD student in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities. They are also a poet, advocate, and frequent writer of critical analysis. Kelsey's debut chapbook, we was bois together, was just published by CLASH! an Imprint of Mouthfeel Press.
Rosa Sophia
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Break Time at Lincoln Tech Automotive School in Mangonia Park, Florida I sit on a bench, and Felix sits beside me. We call each other best friends. He calls me Princess. The first time he calls me Princess in Intro to Automotive, I tell him not to. After getting to know him, I don’t mind anymore. I say, Hey, Felix the Cat—He laughs, makes a sound like a tabby. He’s a shade-tree mechanic trying to find a better job, his work days long, his hands thick with callouses. Felix says, Are you okay, Princess? I tell him my father is dying. He says, I’m sorry. Felix lost his family in an earthquake in Haiti. His aunt, uncle, cousins, and his father sat down to dinner. They all died. It starts to drizzle. People jog to the door, jackets over their heads. Felix says it makes him laugh when people try to run from the rain. He ran from gang bullets in a crowd once, saw handicapped men move faster than you’d imagine. He says, I never run from the rain, best friend. After a drive-belt accident, Felix loses two fingers, has them reattached. He withdraws a little. We stop hearing from him. I worry about him. I search his name on the Internet. I keep a photo of him in a frame: He’s sitting by a pool on a day we went swimming, laughter in his eyes. In our group of friends, I’m closest with Steve, who still asks― Where’d Felix go? Anybody ever hear from him? Nobody knows. I dream I’m standing with him at the foot of a mountain. He says, I have to go, Princess, and he hugs me tight. I wake up and stare into the dark― almost seeing a shadow, maybe his shadow, slipping back into the night. |
Rosa Sophia’s poetry has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sentience Literary Journal, Limp Wrist, and others. She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, through Florida International University, for her poem, "Villanelle at 37." She holds a degree in automotive technology and is the managing editor of Mobile Electronics magazine. Rosa lives in Palm Bay, Florida.
J Thiel
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The Box There’s a box in the back of my closet where the dress clothes hang. Clothes to be seen in, to grab the light in. Where once lay lace blouses and straight skirts now reside a suit jacket, elbow patches, and a spectrum of button ups. The box, once encumbered with heels, now harbors a dinner party of neck ties. Some thin as a drawn on mustache, some flashy as a drag show. None beige. There are turtles wearing top hats, another with skulls and crossbones, silver bells for Christmas, musical notes for dancing. They were purchased as a key to unlock a gender not assigned but born into after years of shedding old names, trying on new skins. The ties in the back of the closet share space with a question posed in fifth grade: would you ’ve rather been born a boy? Taunts of tranny in sophomore gym class. A brother’s warning: No one will date you looking like that. A mother’s retort: You'd be so pretty if only. The button ups have journeyed out onto the street where the light is dim and no one notices the androgyny. But the ties, the ties want more. They desire to be identified but have never been witnessed outside the refuge of my home. But now I stand in my closet with clothes strewn about, dressing for a friend’s black tie wedding. With hands sweaty and shaking I lift a tie out of the box, unknot the accusations and secure my truth around my neck. With a deep breath, I turn around and |
Out I come
Into the light
Into my own.
Into the light
Into my own.
J Thiel (they/them) is an environmental chemist who writes in their free time.
They enjoy the creativity there that they don't find in their day job.
They are trying to disengage from social media but can be found on Substack at J just J.
They have been previously published in SamFiftyFour.
They enjoy the creativity there that they don't find in their day job.
They are trying to disengage from social media but can be found on Substack at J just J.
They have been previously published in SamFiftyFour.
James Wyshynski
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From My Window I Watch the Teen Next Door Mowing a Yard Yoked to his mower, even his earbuds can’t drown out the injustice—there’s a city just past the lawn’s edge, where everything he imagines happens—curvaceous women and muscled men fry his phone with their desire, where signs on skyscrapers pulse with his name and someone holds open a Maserati’s sculpted door. For now, he etches lines on the yard, one after another, empty sentences on a blackboard―the engine splutters, dies. He wrenches the starter cord. Again and again. The silence brings him to his knees, before a world with a small carburetor and one sparkplug. I walk across the street for a closer look. The choke’s pushed in. I pull it out—jerk the cord. The motor stutters to life. He looks past me toward the city. Years will need to pass before I could tell him about the blueberry bushes hidden under an oak’s shade― their blooms clusters of Chinese lanterns moored to a land steeped in cloves and spearmint. |
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Terminus, River Styx, Stoneboat, Interim, The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, Permafrost, Puetro del Sol, SoFloPoJo, and are forthcoming in the Nimrod, and others. He currently lives and works in Marietta, Georgia.