Christine Potter

On A Photo Of Edna St. Vincent Millay Sitting By Her Swimming Pool At Steepletop

Hair draped to one side. Naked—as she insisted guests

be to swim—under a toga-wrapped white towel, one

hand and one foot trembling the dark reflections of tall

bushes and trees. I want to say August. I want to say

cicadas whirring like wind-up toys, the air musky with

summer growing old. I want to say the humid air, want to

say a thunderstorm muttering somewhere off beyond

Great Barrington. She’s sitting on crab grass by the

pool’s stone border, a white stone bench behind her.

In her house, day blows in and out open windows, her

papers rustle—imagine that sound—and curtains

shrug in the breeze. Also wind-borne: a car’s motor.

Coming here?  No, turning away. The pale, loose curl

of her body like the pose my mother asked of my fingers

on the piano. The music of a camera’s shutter, its

metallic kiss. The sign hanging in her library: Silence!

Things

 My mother volunteered at her church thrift shop.

When she began to forget many things, she stopped

donating and started bringing things home. This

on top of her red and white wedding china, which

I’d stored for her in white plastic cases along with

the other things my father wouldn’t let her give me:

lawn-green Depression glass, brown casseroles,

rolling pins older than her marriage, maybe older

than my grandmother’s marriage. Even after he

died, when Mom lived alone with her helpers, I

couldn’t bear to take much. After they were both

gone, we had to hire people to help us give it all

away. Grief-stunned, I watched as table things, as

kitchen things, as the antique, bought-at-auction

oak dining set, the marble-bottom candle holders

with their rainbow-casting cut crystal tears, all got

sent to Good Will. I did speak up for some things,

took the china, some hobnail glasses, more things

than I want or even have room for, and somehow

still not enough. Maybe the wrong things? I don’t

know what to think. Their household. Paychecks.

Goods. Presents, department stores. The interior

arena of my childhood, a sugar bowl in the shape

of a Tudor cottage, English muffin crumbs left on

the kitchen table. The day I realized my parents

wanted to love me but had no idea how. A cobalt

vase, a white milk glass pitcher. Sun in wavy glass

windows, strings of Christmas lights that twinkled

on and off one bulb at a time, from Italy! But not

the cheap kind, my father always said, never cheap.

I Can’t Lie To You

Why should I trick you with daisies

and pastels? Peace is not a blue flag

applauding a blue sky, not the two or

three hundred encircled arrows I drew

without even thinking about it on my

notebook in 1969. Truth is, we’re all

angry. We woke up afraid. We were

left alone to cry it out. Someone once

raised a loud, deep voice to us. Now

we recruit armies. We’re all looking

for a false dawn: that yellow line of

light at the bottom of our shut-tight

bedroom doors as our parents drink

downstairs. We hear the rising tide

of their laughter, smell the enticing

bonfires of their cigarettes. But they

don’t hear us calling them. And we

pretend we don’t remember. I can’t

lie to you. Peace sits by herself on  

the breathing ocean’s other side and

watches the darkness of a ruined city.

She texts neighbors who fled the war,

phone a candle cupped in her fingers.

Then a full moon unravels the clouds.

And Yet

 I am thinking about the things that silence me today—

fear of ridicule, fear of being wrong, the great fear

of harming someone with my words. I worry, but the

day rolls over in its sleep, tugging the clouds’ torn

blankets over one shoulder. A weak stripe of Western sun,

a breeze, a frost-blackened sunflower stalk nodding

the dead star of its flower. I am thinking about wars,

of people who plan how they will happen and where—

and I am thinking how every war burns down the

house we all have to live in. And yet someone hurts

badly enough to drive a tank down a city street, or run

into a concert with guns. We have always had weapons,

always. But autumn’s slide into this winter felt like

someone full of dinner fighting to stay awake and watch

TV’s neon lies. I want to say the world is what’s truly

beautiful, and I’m having trouble today. If you hold

your open hands in front of you, fingers slightly curved

as if you were trying to catch something, you might

feel the heft of your life, and it might be holy. Newly

baptized babies almost always reach for the candle the

priest is holding, towards its light—cheap trick or not.

So we all know where the light is; we just can’t agree on

its name. See how the sky has cleared? How can you

ignore sunset through that architecture of empty trees?

---

Christine Potter’s poetry has been curated by Rattle, Kestrel, Third Wednesday, Thimble, Eclectica, The Midwest Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily—and featured by ABC Radio News. She has work forthcoming in The McNeese Review and One Art. Her young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her third collection of poetry, Unforgetting, by Kelsay Books. She lives in Valley Cottage, NY, in a house with two ghosts, two spoiled cats, and her husband.

Robert Okaji

Metastases

This is the story of a body and a man. A history of failure and whimsy. Of numbers and proliferation and electrical impulses oscillating without thought of consequence. The voice vanished. The body grew, and then lost itself. Thighs withered, overnight. Cells divided without invitation. This is bullshit, he says. I never believed in the Marlboro Man. But I wear boots, drive a pickup, and live in a ranch house with a blue dog. The driveway of crushed stone. Black vultures soar overhead. Dung beetles. Dew. Pancetta. Everything touches everything. What is a cough but an explanation? An expression of counted failure and cast-off reckonings? A dream, diminishment? Heart and hip. Mind and bliss. Left ventricle. A leaf. Body and man. Fractures and lesions. Refusals. That hole. The whole.

A Patient Noose

The man thought of spiraling towers, of concentric circles in nature, how they resembled his relationships, both failed and successful. Round and round, up, down and over. What is the use, he asked, of reflection or deflection, of shields and traps and Taylor Swift? I am that sullen soul in the fifth circle of Dante’s Hell. I am that scorpion lurking in the boot's shadow, a patient noose on a political t-shirt worn by a mad woman. If the treatments work, I will gather time, listen to those I once ignored, recover lost energy. If I regain my voice, I will sing.

Everywhere But Here

…or the leaf, twisting in its ecstasy. How does the man rectify such movement in light of his failure in simplicity, in reason: the junco at the frozen birdbath, chuck roast thawing on the counter. Ground glass nestled comfortably in his lungs. If I could insert myself into a particular vein in that leaf, he asks, would I enhance the wind, or merely disappear in the moment’s arc, a beginning, middle and end touching everywhere but here, on the south side of the window, looking out, looking in.

---

Robert Okaji was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer, and lives, for the time being, in Indiana with his wife, stepson, and cat. His full length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press sometime in the near future (not posthumously, he hopes). His poetry may be found in Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Vox Populi, Evergreen Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Big Windows Review, The Night Heron Barks, Indianapolis Review, and other venues.

Laura Damian

Future job prospect

How about an invisible bird nesting in the old ficus tree

at the end of the street. You know, the one that leans

against the school wall. I would apply for an entry-level position

on the bottom branches, the light heavy with green,

chirping allowed and encouraged from sunrise to down.

With my organizational skills, the fellow sparrows would

sing higher every time pedestrians walk by so they stop

and pay us a smile. I could negotiate with the wind

to blow gently and leave a small white cloud above us,

the perfect drawing model for the 5-year-olds looking

through their class window. I would oversee the blossom

like a Victorian mother hurrying her daughters to pinch

their cheeks to be courted. And maybe you’d argue

our inconspicuous flowers are not a threat to the violet

jacarandas around the corner, but you’ll come back to us

in a month or so, to breathe in our shadow and spy together

on the old couples—women with stoic faces carrying

on their shoulder the hand of their beloved, convinced

they are being guided through life. At noon, when the only

lingering sounds are the echoes of teens—#MyFuckingMom

ToldMeToTidyMyRoom—I would plunge into the debate

between the cocky bunch of birds of paradise and the austere ficus,

the underground mycorrhizal network humming with controversy.

The next day

Boa feathers scattered in the hotel elevators

like early morning dream fragments—blown

by hot wind on the silent streets, spilling

from garbage cans, even the train. You

dedicated months looking for the perfect

concert outfit; stuck brilliant hearts

to your jeans, bought 3 t-shirts and

a red boa online from China, practiced

makeup in the bathroom for months.

“Glitter on the cheeks too, you have to be

a real fan to understand it, mamma!”

You wore his necklace under uniforms

and pajamas, and his real-sized

cardboard dummy—Alba’s gift for

your birthday—stiffly smiled at you

until it bent and fell on the floor.

He whispered in your headphones

“I’m coming” and you whispered back

the letters of his songs untuned. We

woke at 5am, took a fast train to Madrid

and a bus, mangled in the buzzing waves

of 65 thousand joyous people sweating

happily. He was there. You cried,

you sang, you yelled, you danced.

You saw him. Almost. He vanished,

leaving behind the echo of his songs,

sore throats and boa feathers. Now what.

Liver biopsy chronicle

I’m a mutant. My friends laugh when I tell them

Magneto could not take me down in a fight;

my liver accumulates copper, a superpower

my genetic disease awarded me. Being a mutant

is an attractive feature to doctors. Not

in a romantic or sexual way, unfortunately.

One can still dream on a freezing hospital bed

when a handsome surgeon approaches

with a 16-cm pointy instrument. “It’ll be quick”

he says. The walls of the operation room bend,

time collapses, and the screams of George,

a pig my grandparents sacrificed for Christmas

40 years ago, burst into my inner ear. Turns out

you cannot bury the sound of death

under a pillow. George was like a hairy pink

marshmallow, liked to play ball, chase the cats,

and once his nose piercing got caught on

my bike chain. With infinite love my grandma

unhooked him, rubbed his belly—same love

she rubbed salt on the slices of fat before

letting them cure 6 weeks. And his liver,

oh his liver made a delicious pie.

---

Laura Damian is a Romanian-Spanish poet residing in Barcelona, whose recent work has been published in Perceptions Magazine. A mother of two teenagers and a dog, she works in finance and enjoys sharing poetry with her colleagues.

Hardy Coleman

If sadness is a nagging doubt,

            well, here's an antidote:

With every breath you fill

            fall in love,

then exhale.

Some of the Reasons

That it is fragile

            and when cracked

may not mend.

That it can be shattered

            by negligence or anger

and the shards shall slice your flesh.

That it can lead you astray

            and the crumbs you've left as markers

have long since been devoured

            by the songbirds of circumstance.

That it may lie and cheat

            on no more than a whim,

a pretty face, a fast car

            or the heat of an old flame.

That it is burning

            like your house down,

your barn, livestock and crops,

            but you've been freezing all this winter.

That it is bright

            enough to steal sight from your eyes

on this night so long and dark

            that you may never see again.

That it is like a puppy who,

            God willing, you will outlive,

then bury down below the garden

            and nourish with your tears.

That it will become a memory

            with parts pared out on the editor's floor and

a scene, here and there,

            like a scar, still tender.

That all of the above,

            given time, are guaranteed.

That it is yearned for.

            That it is needed.

That it is sustenance.

            That it is Holy.

That it

            is what has brought us

into being.

---

Hardy Coleman gave a few bucks and change to an Elvis Presley impersonator who was attempting to impress a girl in a mink stole, but who’s Cadillac was nearly out of gas. He sat next to a Harlem Globetrotter on a New York City subway and they shared a couple of dirty jokes. He resides in Minneapolis with Patricia Enger, drag racing queen of Jackson County, Minnesota and living muse for much of his work.

Jody padumachitta Goch

Warrant Officers and Sergeant’s Mess or The Biggest Change I Ever Made Was

For a three bit glass of beer from
a hundred dollar bill.

I struggled to make the correct change,
ended up tipping over

my tip jar, writing IOUs
I got it done and then the fool

came back twenty minutes later and ordered
a round for his table of fifteen staff sergeants.

I got my change back but he didn’t tip me.
The black hearted son of a gun.

The corporal who bussed tables
while playing bouncer

watched the whole thing go down.
She shook her head and wasn’t sure 

about Civilians who worked the
bars on the Base.  But took

me home that night to her
tiny off base apartment and pulled rank.

Leaving me to walk home in the middle of the might
swearing never to get tangled

with any more Armed Forces
even if they were cute, even if they tipped.

The next day before work
I bought a roll of quarters.

I’m Just the Neighbor Retired in the Countryside

Someone left the gate
Open again
I pull on my boots
Search and count
Hoping I got all the cows

I don’t call the farmer
He’s at work on a construction site
His wife in her town job
Both working until they come home
To work on the farm,

I count again and come up
Short one
It’s the young cow
Heavily pregnant
I hold my phone to text
And then hold off

I hear her
Tucked in by the log pile
Scared into delivery
By the hiker’s dogs
There’s nothing to do
But fumble for the farmer’s number
I hold the phone to my ear
Deliver the calf by FaceTime

Thomas

Tom Dukowski speaks fluent Japanese, he didn’t always
and I missed him so much the years he was away learning.
We ate sushi together before he left, years before
we knew he’d follow a tall man back to Tokyo,
one time a hundred bucks worth in the early 80s. And we ate
chicken cacciatore; I cooked for a day before
I’d let anyone even taste it.

Tom made my life bearable; we lived in student basement suite,
a hovel where we huddled under blankets drinking anything
I brought home from bartending on the military base,
end bottles bought as tips by the watch sergeants and noncommissioned officers. Sometimes it took me hours to tally up the night, until Tom would come and check my math. We’d grab the tips and walk home, sitting under big-ass elm trees, winding our way past million-dollar homes to our basement haven,

My bedroom, a mess of female bodies trying to get under my comforter.
Tom wandering out to the steam baths, pre-AIDS. Who worried? We had
a memorable two days one evening lying on the kitchen floor, the cabinets pulsing bright yellow. We hadn’t painted them, dead Nina did it,

Before the Brahms requiem, shit don’t you know someone always dies within a year of playing the requiem? Nina played the bass.

That was later.

That night we did poppers and tequila, unable to stand we crawled or sort of scooted to the can and back, eating old potato chips and cheeseys, two washed up 20-somethings, already jaded with bars and gay bashing and not being loved the way we loved each other, I don’t know how I lost him, how he was gone for almost 30 years, when every day was a Tom sized ache that – even when I ate sushi –never quit.

We’d spent a weekend together baking cookies and hash brownies trying to make a child, wanting to co-parent and have something from our friendship, but it didn’t work. Maybe it was the brownies, maybe it was just the failure of two gay friends not being up to it.

And years later, eating pasta and loneliness, a tentative like appeared on my FB feed, and it’s taken six more, but we are friends again, sharing snapshots of our lives. All the things we ate together are on the forbidden list.

And I don’t know when I will fly home again. He moved back almost to the day I headed to Europe. Now it is me learning a strange language and trying to remember old recipes while Tom eats alone at our favorite restaurants.

---

Jody padumachitta Goch is a Canadian living in the German Black Forest. She writes poetry and short fiction, chops wood for the stove and wanders or rides in the forest. Her jeans and shirt pockets are full of stories and poetry. It’s hell on the wash machine. She rescued a short story, from the lint catcher and it was published in an anthology. Since then Jody checks even when there’s no laundry. Jody has stories and or poetry in Wild Word, ComLit, 50 Word Stories, Co-Op Poetry, Does It Have Pockets, Poetically Yours NPR, and Strasbourg Short Stories 2021.

Jane Bloomfield

Lady Writer on The TV

When my mum was freshly separated from my dad my

sister and I went with her on job interviews in downtown Auckland

we sat in our mustard-coloured VW beetle on Queen Street and waited

I guess we were given instructions | be good don’t touch the knobs or

turn the key don’t talk to strangers don’t spend the bridge toll money

one time we did talk to a stranger

a tall thin bearded hippy dude in a muslin shirt and cross-body tasselled bag

we’d locked the keys in the car

Mum had taken too long

we needed help to pop the lock

Jesus and his patchouli vibes were still hanging about with his imaginary coat hanger

when she appeared apologetic and guilty and grateful

he had one of those permanent 70’s stoner smiles

and was soon in our Bayswater villa adding a heaped teaspoon of salt to mum’s once

delicious now ruined pea and ham comfort in the big soup pot on the stove

I can still see on tip toes that white sodium bomb hovering over the sea of sweet green

he wasn’t her type at all long unbrushed hair bare feet as slow as a sloth in denim flares

while she your Mary Quant minis patents and blonde hairpieces on black velvet combs

just the way that her hair fell down around her face those wigs lived on stands

she must have eventually told him where the bus-stop was up at the Belmont shops or

drove him down to the Devonport ferry so he could drop one and dissolve back to the city

Mum got the job as in-house model for Everard Rogers Knitwear

she was the ultimate solo yummy mummy of two before they were a thing

hey man she wasn’t even twenty-seven

our rabbit eared TV was black and white and played Disney movies

once a week on Sundays

Rapunzel Tie Up Your Golden Hair

 In preparation for leaving home for boarding school

at aged 12 rising 13, a sort of coming of age took place.

My Mum booked me into Luigi’s Hair Salon, Hastings

I had a mouth full of wire, train tracks and rubber bands

hauling a row of bucked teeth back into my face no

modern mane makeover would disguise.

I wept silently as my long blonde last summer of freedom

hair and lash skimming fringe fell to the checkerboard vinyl

black and white, plain as day, I emerged mouse brown

a short wedge accentuating my round face cheek dusted

freckles and fangs.

I wondered if Luigi took pleasure in my metamorphosis

everyone but me declared my uglification a success

I didn’t need a short back and sides, hair ties were cool in ’77.

A photographer was promptly booked, Mum now keen

to record the occasion of her pixie coiffed daughter.

I hunched in shame in my newly sewn apricot linen shirt

against a sad mottled brown backdrop as the camera flashed

in memory. And sat on the mantlepiece for years in tragic testament

to this painful adolescent period until a silent concession took

place and that portrait, still in its studio monogrammed

cardboard frame disappeared to a box in the garage

where it belonged.

---

Jane Bloomfield is a newly published poet based in Queenstown, New Zealand.

Matthew Isaac Sobin

The Bereft Makes an Offer to the Goat Queen

Wearing a navy blue pinstripe suit, unpracticed—really uninitiated—in all forms of animal husbandry, you herald entry to a goat enclosure proffering a provender of yellow grass, which is everywhere at hand, or hoof. Three doe turn their noses at you, though their mouths are full of the same yellow grass. You smartly move on, noticing the goats have moved on to a large, fallen eucalyptus branch. Seeing their enthusiasm, you assist the cloven quorum by crafting a tidy assemblage of the choicest brittle twigs from the tips of the eucalyptus, and present this to the flock queen.

Consider their worldliness: these goats who watch cartoons in the morning; who rise late when the sun is already high. Aghast, you recognize her razor wit; she is well-versed in skepticism, and like a shadow passing into tempered disdain, levels a stream of urine onto her breakfast table. You were supposed to contain multitudes like the goatherds who beseeched her favor and that of her foremothers. But you are bereft, and the flock knows.

Rare Specimen

I was out with the boys playing disc golf in a park in Oakland. In the middle of the third hole, one of them said, “Check out the cork tree.” I thought I had misheard. I’d never seen a cork tree before. To be honest, I didn’t know cork had its own tree. I thought it was like the gefilte fish of wood. It looked, I suppose, how a cork tree should look: miniature corks cobbled together piece by piece into a trunk. When I touched the tree its flesh was soft and malleable, just like cork. I was a believer. The tree stood slanted, bent at a low, precarious angle to the ground. All around us were redwoods, eucalyptus, and towering oak trees. “Are there others?” I asked. The cork tree expert said, “This is the only one I’ve ever seen.” The rest of the guys agreed. It seemed absurd to continue slinging a disc near this rare specimen. We decided the best thing was to build a fence to protect the cork tree. Someone pulled out an ax. We took turns chopping until an oak crashed through the third and fourth hole fairways. We erected a picket fence around the cork tree. As the sun set, we painted a sign that said, “Keep Out: This Cork Tree is a Rare Specimen.”

Crime Stopper

My father and I stopped speaking for one year. It was a mutual decision. We didn’t discuss it, of course. In the evenings, I began craving crime procedurals, like Law & Order and Blue Bloods. This is how I knew my father would still think about me. So, I wasn’t worried. Sometimes I imagined we’d watch the shows together. One night I paused NCIS and decided to join the police academy. Once I became a detective, unraveling mysteries, my father would surely speak to me again. After graduation, I went to the streets. I solved cold cases, interviewing witnesses, and documenting clues in my marble notebook. Whenever I solved a particularly heinous murder, I’d decompress by watching actors solve murders on television. Sometimes I’d hear the phone ring when an episode ended. I always answered the call.

---

Matthew Isaac Sobin's (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from The Lumiere Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Midway Journal, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, and MAYDAY Magazine. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He lives and writes with his wife and two dogs. https://twitter.com/WriterMattIsaac

Leanna Petronella

Little Houses

Little House in the Big Woods was my first chapter book.

I was in first grade and I still remember my awe

that a book could be this long, that there could be so many words,

that the story could go on and on.

The controversy about the Little House books is,

who wrote what? The candidates: Laura Ingalls Wilder,

the protagonist, and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,

who appears as a baby in the last book of the series.

Caroline Fraser’s biography argues that the division is clear:

Laura was the writer and Rose was the editor.

Laura, the butcher, knifed through her childhood’s meat,

while Rose trimmed the fat and batted the pig-bladder balloon.

Rose became a journalist who travelled the world.

She wrote salacious biographies, was one of the first libertarians,

and wrote articles and stories about Laura’s childhood,

dramatizing, embellishing. Going big. To Fraser, 

Rose’s writing is purple, political, and over the top.

Unseemly, she implies. Laura’s writing, on the other hand,

is spare, wholesome, full of good values and details:

the rag doll in the puddle, brown braids in pink ribbons.

That buffalo wallow of violets.

Little House in the Big Woods ends with Laura thinking,

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and

Ma and the firelight and the music, were now.

They could not be forgotten, she thought,

because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

This passage doesn’t exist in any of Laura’s manuscripts.

Fraser claims that Rose probably wrote it.

It’s one of the most beautiful and strange passages in the series,

also one of the most understated. But Rose was the one

who was always too much. Her prose was darker than violets.

Rose wrote it?

*

In grad school, my professor Sam loved the Little House books.

Her field was the long nineteenth century: fascicles, women poets,

the American frontier. (I love that phrase, the long nineteenth century,

the century bursting from its corset.) You can see Sam’s childhood passion

in her work: women writers and place, domestic labor and poetics.

I think she ran a Little House Society at some point.

Sam was a member of my dissertation committee.

I had a terrible chair who was also head of the department,

who never showed up to meetings, never read my stuff,

and I wanted Sam to be angry for me, to defend me,

to march my story of wrongs straight to the most powerful dean.

(Never mind Sam’s years of scholarship and teaching,

scrabbling towards tenure, never mind that – I wanted Sam to gasp,

horrified, and then throw herself under the bus for me,

loudly denouncing my chair.)

I cried in Sam’s office occasionally, testing her reaction.

I was Rose, escalating to emotion, poking and poking

at the calm facade that I could not move.

She was my Laura, always dancing just out of my reach.

My mother was like that. I was always trying

to get something from her – I don’t know what.

When I was 22 and she was dying,

I kept peppering her with questions about her life.

She said to me, “Leanna, I’m not holding out on you.

You like to speak of the soul, to dive into its mysteries.

I’m not like that, is all. I don’t think that way.”

I thought that was beautiful. It is beautiful,

how she did and didn’t talk about the soul. 

*

Also, I was right. Flaky chair shouldn’t have done me like that.

Why didn’t Sam ever do anything? She just kept saying

that I needed to work within the system, the system being

the enormous ego of my chair. I withered.

One spring, I took Sam’s Dickinson seminar.

Chad, in a different cohort, was in that class, too.

At a party, someone asked if he’d take another class with Sam.

Chad said, “No. I don’t want to ruin her life.”

Wait a minute. Let’s parse that:

If Chad took another class with Sam, he would ruin her life.

As in, she would not be able to resist him. As in,

she would cheat on her husband and sleep with a student

because Chad and his charms were so powerful.

But Chad would not ruin her. What a hero. 

I can’t stress this enough: Sam never did a damn thing wrong.

But that was the story Chad told.

Chad liked to write about the white panties of his girlfriends.

He liked to scold me for writing poems that were too aggressive.

I got so tired of his fragile, sticky crotches.

(A professor once told me I should write children’s books

and not poetry. Another told me my poems were too loud.

Oh, sometimes I feel like the long nineteenth century,

leaking from my corset. A soggy, silly clown. I suppose

I could juggle pies to myself, but I’d rather throw them hard

and creamy, to whip pursed lips with lemon foam.)

My friends wrote a comic strip about Chad.

On social media, he liked every strip! Laughed at its cleverness!

He left comments showing no awareness whatsoever

that the strip was about him, barely disguised.

Chad, you forced yourself into Sam’s story,

or at least the story you made up.

Then you couldn’t find yourself in your story,

at least as told by other people.

Many stories build a house

and Chad, you and I were friends once.

You once texted me about a poem I wrote:

Brava brava, you rockstar. I’m crying as I read this.

A few years ago, Sam had a terrible accident.

She fell down the stairs and broke her jaw, knocked out teeth,

had her mouth wired shut. Countless surgeries and infections.

Now, she seems mostly okay. But in photos on Facebook,

there is the clear marker of pain in her eyes. It reminds me

of women after childbirth, or people after loss,

something peeled away or added. A certain slant of light.

Sam – you helped me and you hurt me.

How am I to read you? I keep revisiting this story.

Perhaps I’m wrong about your eyes.

* 

Rose’s sole heir was her lawyer, Roger.

She liked to mentor young men, and he was one of her projects,

the son of her editor, a teenager when he met her.

Roger called himself Rose’s “honorary grandson”

and wrote a series about her, Little House: The Rose Years.

Supposedly it’s libertarian propaganda for third-graders,

but I didn’t notice. Roger died halfway through the project,

and then I think the publisher took over, ghostwriting the rest.

Rose, the ghost in Laura’s books; Roger, the ghost in Rose’s.

Then, a publishing house, probably nameless assistants,

ghosts in the ghost in the ghost. So many thin veils of paper.

The First Four Years is the last book in Laura’s series.

In a major plot point, Laura and Almanzo’s house burns down.

Laura grabs toddler Rose and runs. For the rest of her life,

Rose insists that she caused that fire by accident.

Laura’s writing never blames her. But that was the story Rose told.

The story Fraser tells is that Rose moved around her whole life,

ceaselessly, unhappily, from one place to another,

because of the destruction of that first little house.

I’m not sure how Rose’s nomadic life curls up from the ashes,

but I like the smoothness of Fraser’s argument,

how everything comes back to little houses.

*

Laura’s first try at her book was a biography for adults.

Rose sent Pioneer Girl to her agent, who scoffed it seemed written

by a “fine old lady [who] was sitting in her rocking chair.”

Rude. Next, Laura revised it into a picture book,

When Grandma Was a Little Girl. Then, finally, the transformation

into the chapter book, Little House in the Big Woods.

“Have to finish my mother’s goddamn juvenile,”

Rose wrote in her journal in 1936.

“I am going to insist that the story starts as I started it,”

wrote Laura to Rose a few years later.

Who wrote what? Is it the chicken or the egg?

I say chicken. Laura started her career as a poultry columnist.

Her chickens were known for their abundant egg laying,

so many white little houses for their almost-chicken children.

For the hens, the shells were empty. 

For Laura, they brimmed with food, juicy suns

gone faceless. Who lives in a little house is the same

and also different, depending on your needs.

Maybe I don’t want to separate mother from daughter,

lifting yolk from egg white. Maybe I want to see the ghosts mix,

to make something of my own from haunted batter.

*

My friend, a children’s librarian, says that these days,

children don’t really read the Little House books. Instead,

they read Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series, written fifty years later.

The protagonist is Omakayas, an Ojibwa girl. Little Frog.

Her little brother, Quill, has a pet porcupine

that sleeps on his head! And drinks tea just like people!

Every morning, he holds the cup in his fat little paws.

Omakayas befriends a white girl. She calls her Break-Apart Girl

because of her corset, which seems to slice her in half.

Omakayas is puzzled by the girl’s odd ways,

but only gently, a little patronizingly,

a stark contrast to the attitudes in Little House, 

blatant in their racism. Now, some parents ban the series altogether.

Others take a different approach: read and talk about it,

teasing out history, context, language.

My friend tells me that she lets the market of her readers decide:

The less that kids check out the Little House books,

the more likely it is that she won’t restock them.

Laura once screamed for a papoose and didn’t get one.

Omakayas, on the other hand, won the “game of silence,”

where of all the children, she was quietest the longest.

Between Laura and Omakayas: Who is louder?

What story survives, and do we listen to both,

or is it one or the other?

*

At a book fair, when she was older, Laura said,

            All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.

            There were some stories I wanted to tell but would not

be responsible for putting in a book for children,

even though I knew them as a child.

These days, I guess we’d call her books auto-fiction. By fiction,

maybe we sometimes mean craft, because there is always craft,

unvarnished truth doesn’t exist, there’s always a perspective,

as any poet knows. But still critics like to tremble over

what’s true and what’s not, especially in women’s writing.

I didn’t much like PhD school.

The writing papers part, or at least writing papers

in the way they wanted me to write them.

I didn’t understand why the critical and the creative

had to be so separate. Criticism was suffocated

into neat anthills of prose, every damn sugar grain plucked out.

The creative, on the other hand, was an anteater,

snouty and slothy. That long tongue,

horrifying and almost sexual when it darted out.

I needed both: the regular beads of black ants

but digested through my skunky folds.

Let me make my bolus: nutrient rich, masticated,

prey and predator united.

The giant anteater is sometimes called an ant bear.

I try to imagine an ant that looks like a bear

and can’t see it. But I like that,

how it doesn’t decide. I like stomping on some ant piles

and pouring sugar grains on others. I think something can be said

by nibbling down the edges, to grab the story with your teeth

and be serious with sweetness.

Laura and her sisters loved Christmas candy.

They could lick it every day for a week, barely tasting,

or gobble it down in a blizzard like Pa, lost in a den of snow.

That Pa. He was always looking for the next best thing,

fording a flooded river until they almost died,

planting crops in failing fields, going to town over the long winter,

where they nearly starved and almost died again.

Laura included some of Pa’s stories in her books:

the pig riding a sled, the owl screaming like a woman,

a bear that was actually a tree. A lot of one thing

looking like another. But what were Ma’s stories?

Did she tell any?

Laura told Rose about her childhood, over and over.

Locusts marching over the baby, Nellie crying over leeches,

the pig’s crispy tail and the fight over who would eat it.

Green hickory chips and brindled bulldogs,

fever ‘n ague ruining the watermelon’s pink heart.

My mother wouldn’t tell me about her childhood.

I nudged and prodded, thinking that her stories about herself

might tell me something about myself. She gave me only scraps,

which I reuse over and over, scrawling and erasing.

“It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob,”

said Laura about her doll. Funny child-Laura.

And funny-writer Laura, or maybe funny-writer Rose, 

but in any case – it’s no person’s fault what they’re made of,

what gold atoms cobble them together.

*

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.”

So wrote Emily Dickinson. Reverie is needed, too, she adds,

but if bees are scarce, “revery alone will do.”

Yes, make a prairie with the gorgeous bee-nest of your brain.

Every female yellowjacket has the ability to sting.

Cousin Charley knows, he danced upon their nest,

screaming until Pa and Uncle Henry dragged him off

and sent him home to all the women.

The women plastered Charley’s body in mud,

wrapped him up in sheets, then sent him off to bed.

Only his nose and mouth poked out. He took tea for rising fever.

Amusing, this next sentence: “Laura and Mary and the cousins

stood around for some time, looking at him.” Just staring!

Ruthless little Ingalls. And how long did they stand there?

What did they see in that stung mummy, in need of preservation?

Yellowjackets look like bees but have smaller waists,

as if they’re wearing corsets. They chew cellulose to make their nests,

which look remarkably like paper. Each nest is started by a queen.

The queen is called the foundress.

The word foundress makes me think of the word poetess.

I called myself that in the sixth grade until my teacher said,

just say poet. Okay. But I liked the ess sound,

the sharp slash of something extra, a flourish

curling from the stinger. And I like the buzz our thinking makes,

in our little houses made from paper.

---

Leanna Petronella’s debut poetry collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, and other publications. Her nonfiction appears in Brevity and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and her fiction appears in Drunken Boat. She lives in Austin, Texas.

John Zedolik

Nary a Thought

“She’s a little downbeat,

a little too much into

‘What does this poem

say about death?’—

you know what I mean?”

            Since I wanted the year-long

            position, I replied that

“I didn’t even think about death

until I was twenty-seven,”

which was my previous year

so leaving this one open

for the thought that really had been

rustling about for a decade or even

longer like a stealthy animal

in a crawl space,

but that beast remained silent,

away from administrative ears,

and we left the subject with easy

smiles like the ones

that would spread on faces

after pleasant reads

in the fall across from summer’s

lazy gap when some other

teacher took the hint

and temporary substitution.

Logical Application   

“You can have the shotgun

or the dogs,” proclaimed the future

suicide to us pre-teens as we sailed

the portion of creek that strayed

through his land—after my mate

responded to his initial command

to vacate: “You don’t own the water

in the creek”—fluid logic for ten

years or so upon this thinking earth,

of which, a tiny portion belonged

to this man who would, in a generation

lose all hope and relinquish

his rights to property he was now

asserting with the threat of buckshot

and fang to be applied to insolent

interlopers and one’s flowing casuistry,

floating along with inner tube and plastic

tub upon that cool public liquid

they would relinquish upon utterance

of the unpleasant choices, one of which,

upon an interminable diagnosis, in the cold

stream of years, he would visit upon his destined self.

---

John Zedolik is an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and has published poems in such journals as Abbey, The Bangalore Review (IND), Commonweal, FreeXpresSion (AUS), Orbis (UK), Paperplates (CAN), Poem, Poetry Salzburg Review (AUT), Third Wednesday, Transom, and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In 2019, he published his first full-length collection, Salient Points and Sharp Angles (WordTech Editions) followed by When the Spirit Moves Me (Wipf & Stock, 2021 and Mother Mourning (Wipf & Stock, 2023. His iPhone is his primary poetry notebook, and he hopes his use of technology to craft this ancient art remains fruitful.

Heather Sager

Can’t Sleep

Through my window

the train horn blurts

Yellow and red leaves

touch the screen

Imagine a troupe of

elephants playing

some kind of jazz horn

when the trains pass

I try to scavenge

an afternoon nap, but can’t sleep

The train wakes me up

night and day

My thoughts wake me up

I wonder about people

who love fog horns

Maybe, wrecked upon bed,

listless, I will come to love

the noise of my life

Today, I will walk out

into the drizzle that’s started

Find my knit cap

A park that’s green

---

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Most recently, she has contributed poetry to Bending Genres, the New Feathers Anthology, The Basilisk Tree, Creative Flight, Moss Puppy Magazine, Backwards Trajectory, 7th-Circle Pyrite, and more journals.

Rodrigo Círigo | Tyler Gebauer

A Piece of Bacon

Translated by Tyler Gebauer

if you were a piece of bacon

and you crunched salty between my teeth

and my fingers glistened with your fat

and ferocious you adorned hamburgers

lentil stews

eggs easy over

if you were a piece of bacon

and you slipped

between the smoke and heat of frying pans  

and your red-white thirst and your saliva

governed over triglycerides

the echoes of an artery as it collapses

if the pig you must have been

could still be heard

between the frozen cuts of meat

your snout a crackle of flowers

the mud the sun the damp

happy pig among pigs

more singeing than speaking

if you were a piece of bacon

we’d be able to love each other, isn’t that right?

you would fit in the palm of my hand

Pedazo de tocino

si fueras un pedazo de tocino

y crujieras salado entre mis dientes

y mis dedos brillaran con tu grasa

y adornaras feroz las hamburguesas

las sopas de lenteja

los huevos estrellados

 
si fueras un pedazo de tocino

y resbalaras

entre el humo el calor de las sartenes

y tu sed rojiblanca y tu saliva

gobernaran los triglicéridos

los ecos de una arteria al derrumbarse

 
si el cerdo que por fuerza hubieras sido

pudiera aún oírse

entre las carnes congeladas

tu trompa un crepitar de flores

el lodo el sol las humedades

cerdo feliz entre los cerdos

más quemadura que palabra

si fueras un pedazo de tocino

podríamos querernos ¿no es así?

cabrías en la palma de mi mano

“Pedazo de tocino” was originally published in Spanish in Revista de la Universidad de México.

---

Rodrigo Círigo is a writer and translator from Mexico City whose work has been published in Revista de la Universidad de México, Punto de Partida, and Punto en línea. He has received a scholarship for his writing from the Foundation for Mexican Letters, as well as the Mexican Secretariat of Culture’s Young Creators program. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Tyler Gebauer is a literary translator from Minneapolis, U.S.A., whose translations have been published in Packingtown Review, The Tiger Moth Review and SORTES, among others. Tyler Gebauer translated “A Piece of Bacon” for publication with the author’s permission. You can read his other translations at: https://www.tgtranslation.com/

Jane Shlensky

Creation

Your hands

     are potter’s hands,

          deny them if you will

     their history of skin,

sound sinew, soft snare.

Your long fingers

     take earth to task,

          smooth it to service,

                 palms cupped in clay

          creating vessels

     that last and remember,

round-lipped, well-gripped

     spouts and ears,

          a lap of bowl, all

                excess squeezed away

          to make room

for emptiness.

I watch you work,

     your encircling arms

          and bend of neck,

                your face peaceful

          with unknowing,

     and I fancy I am clay

beneath your hands,

     that thoughts knead you

           as you knead me,

     that images whirl and blur

as possibilities move

     beneath your hands

shoulders, breasts,

     chins, lips, and eyes

          emerge from dust,

     take in your breath,

and worlds are formed.

To a Mandarin Mirrored On Water

God loves a duck to make him living art,

his feathers tufts of scarlet, teal, and brown,

white stripes on dark feathers, an inner tube of maroon breast

afloat, aloft,

a white tip on a beak of flame,

his dark eye shadowed with whiskers of gold,

a color palette created just for him.

Imagine the Designer’s sudden joy

when he was done, the duck’s wings spread to wind,

his waxy feet plunged to paddle water

where he hovers, dreamlike,

his echoed image mirrored for all the world to see.

Mama tells me all this by a lake ornamented with water fowl.

I look into her eyes and see myself there

looking back.

God loves a duck to make him so

like a rippled rainbow that fades and glows

and that is good

              is good

                        so good.

---

Jane Shlensky, a veteran teacher and musician, holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. Her recent poetry and fiction has appeared in sundry magazines and anthologies, including Writer’s Digest, Pinesong, KAKALAK, Southern Poetry Anthology: NC, moonShine review, and Nostos. Her poems have thrice been nominated for a Pushcart. Her chapbook is Barefoot on Gravel.

Mark Jackley

Dream of a Stepladder

I didn’t

climb it but

crawled under it

like a child

entering

a world

where the only

thing to fix

was the urge

to step

instead of

listening

to my bones

quietly

explain

there was

nowhere else

Rothko With My Pants Down

After the nurse rubs Lidocaine

on my penis and

the doctor slides a camera through it,

I spy a Rothko poster,

pink and pale blue bars

floating in cloudy greys. I wonder

what he saw,

what the doctor will see,

what I will see when I stumble out

into the parking lot

blinking at the canvas

of the uncommitted sky, free to be astonished

by a drop of rain.

Fully Retired, Sonny Rollins Does the Laundry

The dryer hums.

Yoga breath,

humdrum zen—

not the horn’s bright fire but

a heap of

crumpled pants

still warm,

singing

to long fingers.

---

Mark Jackley's poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, The Cape Rock, Does It Have Pockets, and other journals. He lives in northwestern Virginia.

Chris Coulson

Millions of Midnight Stars

Tomorrow, always the boring routine
but always too, the burning
romantic unexpected
unseen.

This piece first appeared in Go With the Floe: Free perVerse (Pinehead Press, 2019).

alcohol

those years were like

living in a cave

facing away from the

sun

with the bones of

the dog

I forgot to feed

This piece first appeared in The Midwest Hotel: Free perVerse (Pinehead Press, 2013).

Still Life With Seagull

saw a dead seagull
on the coast road, beak in the sand
eyes in the asphalt

pulled the car over
saw that one wing was straight up
and still fluttering

each car that blew by
blew her feathers like she was
alive, still flying.

This piece first appeared in The Midwest Hotel: Free perVerse (Pinehead Press, 2013).

---

Chris Coulson is the rowdy writer of Nothing Normal in Cork, The Midwest Hotel, Go With the Floe, A Bottomless Cup of Midnight Oil, and Red Jumbo. At the moment, and for moments to come, he’s writing Babies on the Run!, a sort of children’s book, which will be published to the delight of supportive parents everywhere—and to show babies how to run, if they need to! Chris Coulson has been writing his way out of trouble since kindergarten.

Beth Kanell

Diatribe from Sophia Thoreau (His Sister)

The rapids of the Merrimack

roaring power of the icy waters

how the mills groan

someone took me north (don’t ask,

his name won’t ride your lips

the way his tongue rode mine)

to the wetlands, marshes, wild

Father said the beaver’s long gone

skinned for hats like his and yours

brother what kind of friend are you

I have come raw acquainted with escape

Dear Henry David

Brother, your spilled words cascade the page, scented like a Harvard

man with sweat and ink and determined absence of women (though

I must suppose they make your meals, wash your linens, lay the

next fire in the grate). As I always have, since I could stumble in

child’s petticoat across the wide board floor, I inquire for your good

health, your sustenance and studies. Enclosed (in father’s hand) your

cheque; the final zero endowed by my efforts. Stitching. Hemming.

I have hope: Uncle offers better pay. All for you, all for you, man

of the Merrimack. I make no other answer—

Sweeter waters in the woodland pond

moss like a man’s thick curls under my palm

I dip a finger into Walden water, suck

the vegetated broth of fish and frog oh yes

I brought our sister here once, she wept

I stretch my long arms unsheathed, my bare legs

shocking in their deliberate strength, no longer

little sister; woman whose pulse pounds

whose mind demands

whose eyes

follow the cloud of a summer afternoon, shadow

of the Southern Power, slavery’s stains

some shall not scrub clean

Dear Henry David, Brother,

I love the natural world you witness, pinned to paper. And yet,

false friend that I may be, I cringe at how you live: your fiscal

ease, your careless manly acceptance that no woman

could delight in wild pleasure without guild or ambivalence. Is this

how love of a brother manifests?—this denial, this despair.

Across a salt bay

the lamplit glow of bustling Boston

coal smoke seeping over the waters

fugitive riding a low barge

Mother made his bed

Frederick

his language rich with Southern vowels

black hair thick, protesting

God in his Moses eyes

the scent of wild places in his breath

saltwater baptism, midnight hymn

My brother’s gone to Canton, sir,

ink stains on his cuffs

the word “sir” writhing upriver

like shad returned to spawn

a man’s a man (my brother)

My age and desperation silence my feelings. Daily,

I witness that you have time to fall in love, to caress

your admir’d wood-thrush or frog with eyes and words:

embrace with your honeyed tongue a stem, a fin, a croak. While I,

bound to the broken children whose pain I witness, struggle to

braid their rope of rescue

earn another dollar for you

strip the outer membrane from my heart.

bread and butter carried

cold meat potted with a layer of fat

salt cod in a wooden tray

bacon in the beans

rum, cider, dark beer

offerings at your altar

Cain killed Abel

where went their sister? Bloodied

after battle, the reddened waters

congealing puddles

whose death now among Concord’s men

who fired the first shot

wore the wounds

unblessed

Kitchen and classroom, mend and manage, stretch

each shilling or penny. Forgive me, Henry David; tis not

your wooded life I despise, deplore, but mine. So it is

to be this woman. When Abolition at last succeeds,

when all enslaved are free, who will scrub the carrots

dice potatoes, chop meat, settle and battle the cow’s

sweet rich milk til butter congeals? I mistrust your reply

snarl like a beaver at your politics

belch at your prose. For you, brother, I’ll sell

a hundred hundred pencils, teach the unlettered,

mouth the back of my own fist, unkissed

Yr sister, bound and bellicose,

Sophia

---

Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont. The National Federation of Press Women recently tapped one of her Vermont features with a First Place award. Her novels include This Ardent Flame and The Long Shadow (SPUR Award winner); her short fiction shows up in Lilith and elsewhere. Find her memoirs on Medium, her reviews at the New York Journal of Books, her poems in small well-lit places.

Hardy Coleman

Flight 361/To San Francisco

My son and I fly over Kansas,

over westward trail of beatniks,

over rivers black as sky,

stars beached on their banks,

enclosing, foreclosing Mid-America,

over rain and wheat and Mary Jane tucked into fields,

over bright sunflowers in the dark,

over railroads spiked through Arapaho prairie,

over dwindling towns I don't go back to,

over storms that twist the top soil

all the way to Oz,

over clouds

that unload like B-52's,

and under moons & satellites & warheads

and California dreaming

in the summer of love on the rocky coast of A.I.D.S.,

over Ginsberg's fucking ashes

fresh, fertile underneath.

And it's just pretend that we are flying.

Should old men & boys really do such a thing

the cities would be eight miles high and everywhere and rent free and open

till dawn.

But I'm just wishful thinking, kid,

the way us codgers often do.

But rest, and rest assured

these facts, farewells and prophecies

are not important, child.

As all the barn yard lights fade off in 30,000 feet of night

and 44 years forgetfulness...

These are nothing but the places I have been.

It doesn't matter, son.

Just curl into the bobbing currents

this seven-20-seven rides,

let your eyelids follow gravity

and dream your own inheritance.

And should you learn to fly...

Should you learn to fly?

Should you

learn

to fly,

don't wake up

and you won't come down.

My wife likes the moon

and the darkness around it

even when it's raining.

Most especially in the rain,

all shimmery and wet.

She's booked our next vacation

to a cabin on South Beach

of the Sea Of Tranquility

during the monsoon season.

We'll hold hands and kiss

neath the light of the silvery Earth,

go for long walks

in the rain which,

due to a lack of gravity this far north,

falls like a feather in a mating dance and

we'll serenade every soul

who calls the moon home

like Timmy calls Lassie,

the muezzin calls

every one of us to prayer.

---

Hardy Coleman spent a few weeks crashing on Denis Johnson's couch in 1972, has cooked dinner for both the B-52's and the Rolling Stones and Charlton Heston once rolled his eyes at Mr. Coleman in an airport. He resides in Minneapolis with Patricia Enger, the drag racing champion of Jackson County, Minnesota.

Nadine Ellsworth-Moran

Red-Eye Flight

a found poem

Arrive ready for  

sacrifice.  

I’ve managed to carry  

my years, but overwhelmed 

I run to her, wake paranoid

because I forgot my gamble 

comes filled with need, 

something key— 

security 

Self-explanatory     Spill-proof 

I never keep for myself pain, or 

love. I hide my face, 

protect who I saved. 

Original text used for found poem.

I listen for the tumblers to fall into place 

marvelously useless keys that confounded the reason    

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

According to the London Mirror, the average person carries nine keys, but only knows what six of those keys will unlock. Meaning, three of those keys carried around daily, jangling in the pocket or swimming about in the depths of a purse, are complete mysteries. Mysteries the average person seems to be completely complacent about carrying and will only, on occasion, cast their thoughts on the questions, Why do I have this key?  What in this world does it unlock?

I always want to believe in reason,

in hopes it will provide the key

to unlocking all that has confounded

me. Though I admit, I am often confounded

by many things. Insights other reasonable

people seem to acquire with facility, I must key

into my mind, carve in that gray stone, just to reason

out the reason I should want to be un-confounded—

for very often I believe, mystery is key.

In an attempt to control our keys, we capture them on utility rings, key disks, and carabiners. We color-code & number them in an effort to know what each one unleashes, unlocks, looses upon the world: the keys to the Kingdom, the answer key, the key to success & happiness, the key for the door at the end of the world, if such a door exists, is on someone’s keychain — perhaps,      
one of the mysterious three.

Locks in multiverse
abound. Break their mystery, keys 
summon worlds to be.  

Eyes are the windows

I know my sisters by their eyes, 

though I have only brothers, still

my sisters exist, connected by disguise

to cover our divided hearts.

Though I have only brothers, still

I am an only child in this discourse, 

so as to cover my divided heart 

I gather my sisters, my soul resource.

For I am an only child in this discourse—

my own subterfuge runs with the deep 

within my sisters, my soul resource,  

whose eyes conceal the secrets they keep,   

while my own subterfuge runs with the deep 

and I pour out my sins as easily as lies 

and my eyes can veil the secrets I keep— 

Yes, I know my sisters by their eyes. 

---

Nadine Ellsworth-Moran lives in Georgia where she serves full time in ministry. She has a passion for writing and is fascinated by the stories of the modern South unfolding all around her as she seeks to bring everyone into conversation at a common table. Her essays and poems have appeared in Rust+Moth, Calla Press, Theophron, Interpretation, Ekstasis, Thimble, Emrys, Structo, and Kakalak, among others. She lives with her husband and four unrepentant cats. 

Paige Eaton

Earth Update:

Rivers flow faster if given coffee. [1]

Rivers of coffee flow faster if given cyanide.

Cyanide has been nerfed by 50%.

You can now poison your friends with apple-cores.

Apple-cores are now sold at circuses.

Circuses are now spawnable in packs of five.

Five clowns make a murder.

Temporarily removed insects.

Silence has been increased 40%.

The uncanny has become the recognizable.

Fields have become mass graves paved over with life.

Flowers have grown legs and can have sex to reproduce.

Grapes are now the food for the gods.

Insects have been returned and the world

caved under their collective weight.

First graders have been removed.

Screaming is punishable by death.

If you scream while dying we will kill you again

in a hail of bullets, the only way you are permitted to

die here. [Update retracted as it is not an update].

Second graders pop out of the ground like gnomes.

Gnomes have started showing up to the school in

droves demanding an education too.

Schools have become clouds.

Clouds have been removed.

Shower buff; showers now warm up 12% faster

Ice pellets rain clinking

Tubes of water pressure drain into the lungs.

Crabs now have the ability to run at 50 MPH

Crab legs are now 90% more likely to dance in the mouth.

Fish now spit angry words at their predators.

Humans are now the prey to fish.

The ocean biomes have been nerfed by 50%.

The sleep paralysis demon can now speak

[1] The Earth Updates Twitter account demands rights to all italicized suggestions.

---

Paige Eaton is a recent graduate of Hartwick College, with a Bachelors of Art in History. She is originally from Rochester, NY. Her recent work focuses on surreal and dream-like experiences. Her work has appeared in Word of Mouth, Dark Entries, and her poem, “The Itaewon Tragedy was a Pentadecagon,” won honorable mention for the 2023 Anna Sonder Prize for Poetry.

Megan Cartwright

Frankenstein Stuff

Subject line: Frankenstein stuff

Marking: UNOFFICIAL

I fear the missive is something perverse,

an amputated limb, or worse –

‘Beautiful! – Great God!’

An overgrown email trail,

details of ambition so grotesque

it must be put to rest.

Frankenstein stuff –

remonstration from an Executive

with a god-complex, and a penchant for

two-hundred-year-old metaphors?

More likely a meme sent, well-meant,

by bolt-necked Boris from Sales.

It could be the abomination –

hulking hallucination of opiate fevers

reaching out in 8-foot font, an

UNOFFICIAL invitation

to turn myself inside out,

fleshy bag of neuroses, stitched–together–with–doubt,

a mind made monstrous with what-ifs.

Woman’s-Woman

I’ve been told I’m not a “woman’s-woman.”

For what it’s worth, it could be true.

Women change shape in the space

between flashes/of/strobe/lights.

Bathroom girls are the best friends

you never had in high school.

They fix your hair; let you cry over that guy.

They kiss you on the lips right before last drinks.

Bathroom girls are not women’s-women.

When they shed their clothes and tumble

into bed, all hair and legs,

their lights go out, not a flicker of doubt.

---

Megan Cartwright is a poet and college Literature teacher who resides in Australia. Her writing has recently featured in Swim Meet Lit Mag and Passengers Journal.

Bruce McRae

The Neighbor

We share the same headspace
and howls of derision.
Moonlight avoids us equally.
We're a couple of shadows
in a blackout.
You can't choose your family
and we are conjoined
at the hip and head.
I told him, Your problems
are my problems,
and Buddha replied,
You don't have to be me
to be you, our bloods
thicker than water and mud,
the mailman confused,
the neighbours' cat, a tyrant
of the usual lawns and gardens,
mewling contentedly.
Death pursues me up the driveway.
Time is building its machinery.
Love has gone down
with the ship and I'm hearing
gunshots on the television.
I'm seeing lights in the sky
and meditate on alien intervention.
That this yard needs a new god
and armies of angels
to build us a wall
between ourselves and all.
Oh sweet Christ on a bike,
my neighbour is waving now,
a nod and a wink towards recognition.
Small-talk is a rat chewing on a wire.
Pleasantries are unpleasant.
I told him, I'm not a misanthrope,
I just don't like people.
See? This woman is not my wife.
These children are not my children.
He smiles like a dog that requires petting
and a long walk down a road.
I sacrifice a bull in my mind
and contemplate the effort it takes
to walk on water.
I can taste metal and smell smoke.
I'm like a last candle
and cry out for sanctuary.
I am committed to his slight eviction.

Up A Tree

There was a woman up a tree
and she wouldn't come down
for neither love nor money
and we said lady you're in a tree
and she wouldn't answer smiling
like the cat that got the cream
and neighbours gathered gossiping
and a cop looked up slightly bemused
and the papers sent a photographer
while the wind played merry havoc
through the leaves and branches
and the woman in the tree looked
over the city as evening came in and
a man who I think may have been her
husband coaxed and cajoled the
woman in the tree and night fell hard
and still she refused to take a blind
notice and the crowds dispersed
and the children tired of mocking her
and the lights came on and we went to
bed and in the morning the woman
in the tree was no longer there and the
world went happily about its business.

You Can’t Give it Away

The editor kept sharpening his pencil.
I sat there, a pile of sticks,
a promise half-recalled,
an accident about to happen.

“You never publish what I've written,”
I said, hating the sound of my own voice.

“I'm no miracle man,” said the editor,
“I'm no snake charmer.”

I sat there, a victim
of chance and circumstance,
a travelling salesman of oils and balms,
a lump under the carpet.

“I need to get the word out there,”
I said, lulled into a state of grace.
“I'm a flea without a soul,
a house without a window,
a dog enamoured of a bone.”

The editor leaned back
in his faux-leather wingback chair.
Everything I had to say had been said.
Like a Cadillac in a snowbound ditch,
we were going nowhere.

---

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle, and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been performed and broadcast globally.