Issue #83
Jennifer Avignon
what spring does to cherry trees
after Pablo Neruda
i want to leave you pink and trembling
my hands running over you
coming away full of you
make you open more and more
each time you think
there couldn’t possibly be
further to go
you’ll burst open again
pink, pink, pink
a pomegranate is a berry
i should find pleasure in the treasure hunt,
popping open each layer to find
jewel-bright seeds, glowing red as secrets,
dropping gently into a bowl of water
with a satisfying musicality.
but the sweet gush as i eat the fruits of my labor
does not outweigh the hard crunch between my teeth,
or the long minutes of standing in the kitchen
with a sharp knife and a bowl of cool water.
still, i am drawn to pomegranates,
to their drama of self-containment,
until, when broken open, chaotic plenty.
you have to love a fruit that can be all things at once:
well-guarded perfection
and messy generosity.
pomegranates in tarot mean abundance and luxury
and dangerous choices. no surprise
that they also represent female desire and indulgence:
the slow, gentle approach through a tough exterior
is rewarded with fruit breaking free
too fast to keep up with, juices flowing
over my fingers. it seems like more
than could possibly be contained
in the tight, round vessel, more
than i know what to do with.
Jennifer Avignon (she/her) is a queer poet who lives in Seattle with her husband and lots of houseplants. She holds an MFA from Seattle Pacific University. She serves on the editorial board of The WEIGHT journal. Her work also appears in Amethyst Review, Lingua, and miniskirt magazine.
John Luna
(Lamp black brogues)
|
You may have had thoughts about suicide while taking song lyrics you have sung back into yourself from whatever form they have become in the world; consider that this is no fault of theirs, nor yours, but part of the wear & tear their travail… Just now the keyboard is glowing for instance like bright white stars, and fugitive light from the snow outside is bringing to everything a desolate kind of specialness cum calm. The natural color of the soul is providentially the flattest carbon black that, could you pound it as flat as gold leaf, might coat church interiors, ‘murdering-out’ each arch and dome, until all that was left was hallowed-hollowed acoustical rapture of dark, tenebrous and tentative, brushed over a gauze of egg yolk, swirls forming where its membrane would tug and pucker, in touches like fireworks behind blind abutments. Your call has been forwarded… to a voice message system… that has not been initialized by the customer you are calling. Classically epicene, automated tones signal wariness of a self-destruct mechanism’s countdown in the triggered system. Nothing in mind, I uneasily waited, checking to see if I would be called for, understanding the latent attraction of a mute silhouette to a door frame-shaped, solidified void. Tonight, the house is a cave under snow. Lights flicker, a sore throat taking pains to clear itself. Fearing an outage, we lie under scattered blankets as if at the beach, as if displayed before an audience; assured children feeling something nearer to normalcy in dear nearness that might as well be love. A hoarding of impressions is, in our family, a special form of cause and consequence, ordered so the former shouldn’t ever meet the latter… There is a tired rouge hue that, belonging as it does before my time, may not last on my palette: a streaked steak blood of Venetian iron oxide, Alizarin Crimson and Cadmium, elsewhere dusted with pale blue light of the moon; cooling contrasts in quiet default, a hush of deliberate, durational care. This is the shade tracked back to the house like clay with homecoming recklessness each day on the bottoms of your shoes. |
John Luna, MFA, is a poet, visual artist, teacher, and critic. He is the author of one full-length book of poetry, Listing (Decoupage, 2015). Publication of his written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Cordite, Train, and Matrix, among others.
Galen Cunningham
Bicycle Ride
Oh, I went on my bicycle ride around the town,
through the golden rod, round the moon twice I
came, and thrice I caught the sun from the earth
with the spokes of my bicycle. Up and down
the driveway, the hills, the county lines I went
with my feet steady, splayed, and cycling; like
Einstein unleashed from his study; like a hermit
released into the air, I rode with the wind in my
hair; rounding the curvatures of space and time,
motion reducing my speeding thought into an orbit
clear enough for swift chronological points, allowing
method, if not meaning, to delineate itself from
the madness made by thinking still too long: or,
it was my body, reaching the speed of my thought—
a conjugal of flesh and spirit of sorts—that made
for so much clear and uninterrupted motion. Yes,
for consciousness moves like the bicycle; and being so
interdependent with physics, how can a bicycle not
move the body’s mind to spaces we ourselves are
unable to inhabit without it; an invention of not
just mobile but psychic necessity—an extra umph
to get us to whatever frontier the flesh and spirit
are after together—a machine that catapults not
just between point a and b, but through the logic
loopholing our infallible Universe like so many
dreams that do not get enough fresh air: that sets
us firm not just upon the axle of the world as we
ride it, but above any dream, thought, emotion
that staled between the respiratory and mind
that breathes; that eats on prana as well as flesh
(and would have been canned a long time ago had
not someone taught it to ride a bicycle, slap
the wind from the chest; to fall, crash, and get up
again); a silencer that eclipses all things the sun
and moon wished they could say, had they the wheels
to say them by. I went on a bicycle ride, and like Albert
Hoffman, I hewed caverns in the moon with the grips
of my wheel; paths for the youth to graze dreams
and madness into, portholes for your consciousness
to escape by; odysseys to embody: a transport for
the vacuums’ made by life inside houses and cars;
for a world overly motorized and underly winded.
Galen Cunningham has been published or is forthcoming in Literary Yard, The Creativity Webzine, Blue Unicorn, Ink In Thirds, Sparks of Calliope, Apocalypse Confidential, Fresh Words Magazine and IHRAF. Originally from New York (the North Country), he lives in the foothills of Colorado.
Amy DeBellis
Panamint Valley
|
in the desert i find not death not freedom but immortality / a terrible beauty that cuts like a throat filled with thorns / and although i’ve brought no water i don’t die / for days i lie in flaying sunlight and slake my thirst on memories / on your father before he died before he drifted / away rootless / no descendants now / no funeral / only lighters flicking on and off against the dark / mechanical fireflies / one by one & quickly extinguished / burial at the top of a mountain / crows coming down like huge sheets of ash / tearing him apart into the sky / i watched them for hours the birds i couldn’t bear to feed you to / and now they have followed me here / as i watch they circle me / but when i return i’ll sneak to your grave / find you like a rotting crow / life mirroring life / glass reflecting glass / now i can bear it / now i can bear everything / death not an end but a terrible beauty / a throat filled with and crowned by thorns |
Eight Weeks
On the windowsill, dried birds. In my mouth a taste
like ashes. I’ve called you at work knowing you’ll rush home
to a white gasp of heat, an apartment without air conditioning
or central heating, a dishwasher that stalls and spits foul water.
Sludge under my nails, summer a filthy tongue running down my spine.
It’s hard to speak through the contractions, which even at eight weeks
are more like hammer blows than waves. Nothing so gentle.
Nothing so eternal.
I tell you that I was starting a bird study—finally—
when it happened: cramping, blood, pain like ripping paper.
I’m sprawled on a white sheet meant to catch paint splatters,
to shield the floor, to protect these tiles that are as ugly
as a battered face. My palms and the canvas are clean, the paintbrush unused;
the only color is the crimson beneath me, red adder
uncoiling between my legs.
You come home funereal, your thoughts like elephants
circling bones. Piously self-indulgent, already practicing the remembering
before the bleeding has stopped. It can go on for days, you tell me.
You’ve been googling it on your way home. Days or weeks, I say.
I sit in my own pollution and you reach for me like you’re putting your fist
through a wall, through air so thick with heat and smell that it’s almost blood-
flecked, febrile, everything red like the vomited-up lining of a womb.
What I don’t tell you: these were not the first signs.
For days I was waking with red in my underwear,
with cramps that hunched me over like I was mourning,
walking around with the taste of soot and pennies
filling every crevasse of my mouth. I told no one.
And I don’t tell you that I decided to let this part of you go
the first time you shouted Stupid cunt at me. The first time you let me lie
in the bathroom until dawn, shivering, splinters of glass ringing me
like vagrant stars. I thought about leaving, then,
but there was nowhere to go. No way out of this tangle
of nameless streets, these sagging-throat buildings
with their boarded-up windows like blinded eyes.
Nobody waiting for me besides another you.
I don’t tell you that the birds I trapped and dried
were things I hated because they could have left this city.
They could have vanished, but they chose not to, and then it was too late.
I don’t tell you that their shapes on the windowsill
are fossilized inertia, the burden of memory
I can’t free myself from.
Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, HAD, Write or Die, Pithead Chapel, Monkeybicycle, and other journals. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2024).
François Chan
Spontaneous Generation
Dust, owl shit, vibrations
from the farmer's boots
stirring wheat kernels to
heart, hair, lungs. Delicate
feet. Fine incisor teeth. Grey mice
a little frightened of everything,
descendants of tree sap
parched by lightning, hardened
to amber.
Imagine the trapped insects!
beating in gold, buzzing
like a continent
of souls speaking to their wives, screaming
long-distance, their loud syllables
seeding clouds with rain,
with vital elements.
From mud, frogs of all seasons,
distant cousins of salt
and poison. Blood
and temperature. These
were sure things:
men from clay, maggots from meat,
Venus from bloodied sea-foam. Blood
from blood. Blood from blood. Blood from
blood. Where do you suppose new flowers spring from?
In the breeze, they tremble,
your little sisters of stalk —
Hyacinth, Columbine, Delphinium.
Willow leaves tumble into water
become dragonflies, pond fish,
Ripples. In the beginning, there was an egg,
and in the egg:
Nothing
François received his MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and he has had publications in North Dakota Quarterly, The Santa Clara Review and Transfer. Unfortunately, he has been sidelined with a long-term illness for the past decade. But he’s back now, and is excited to be sending out work again.
Judith Sanders
Blue’s Ballad
Blue had a head for constellations and a trusty supple grin
Bones slung to fly like arrows and bristles on his chin
Palms crossed with lines like roadmaps and photographic eyes
Blank pages in his passport and a fistful of supplies
His father ate martinis, his mother nursed a trance
If they’d hushed the music, he’d have tried the dance
When old friends had all tied their knots to college pedigrees
He chose to sleep in hotels where he checked the sheets for fleas
No one could take him to the airport, so it was time to go
The roads spelled out black calligraphs on fields of snow below
He heard good news as rivers rushed full-throated to the sea
He loosened up his seatbelt and toasted hope tax-free
In Africa, in Europe, on a golf course, up a hall
In subterranean storerooms, in fluorescent shopping malls
In moonlit ruined arches, crumbled canyons, on dirt floors
With one foot in a slipper and the other out the door
Peas from cans by campfires, drumbeats in the ground
Barefoot live religions, sundials left unwound
Black market deals in bathrooms, drunks with tales to sell
Kids who cried for cigarettes—Blue got through it all so well
His head a bursting album, photos spilled onto the floor
He began to take siestas, which he’d never done before
“Good-by” in every language, coins left unexchanged
Travel was expensive: he’d bankrupted his brain
The countries passed like hours, some were fat and some were lean
He forgot a hundred places that once he’d sworn he’d seen
With no tablet for his theories, no socket for his songs
His flashlight broke, the night went dark, he’d traveled too damn long
He made love on a carpet, the weave wove in his head
(He thought that dreams bred better on a floor than on a bed)
She called him cream and topaz, she called him lemon tree
One hand on his breastbone, her bottom on his knee
Her father swilled rum punches, her mother watered plants
They’d ignored her music, so she’d flown to Paris, France
She talked in nylon stockings, then not a stitch at all
Blue’s ribs were bars, a prison cell; he flung them to the wall
She said:
“With your skin as bright as glass and your mouth like ripened dates
Your bones slung like arrows and your eyes as blue as fates
Your breath of smoke and spices and your heart of unhulled seeds
Your passport stamped with promises and your unlocked chest of deeds
“With your head for constellations and your pockets crumbed with sin
Your worn expensive stockings and the dimple in your chin
Your palms like broken roadmaps and your wrists hung loose with grace
Your tale of worn geography and your fallen angel face.”
Blue counted up his prospects, mended buttons and his ways
The walls were thin, the climate bad, but still he planned to stay
He put his hopes in envelopes and sent them out express
He shaved now every morning, he let himself confess
There were apples in the bowl and poppies in the grass
Two plates on the table; he’d arrived somewhere at last
His map split at the seams, his palm was in a glove
The air was bright and smoky, he could not breathe for love
His spring tide was rising, his moon was slick and full
The stars slid off a necklace into hunter, dog, and bull
The ocean was enormous, it spilled into his shoe—
She bought a box of candles and blew one out for Blue
His boots down in the basement, his guides on some back shelf
He kissed her on the navel, he could not help himself
She was restless during breakfast, she ate tapping her feet
He cut himself while shaving when she warned how fate can cheat
She said:
“I hate apples, I hate poppies, I’m allergic to the sea
You’re rough, you’re tough, and all that stuff, and not the one for me
I’m this and that and other, so I’m not the one for you…”
While rolling up her carpet she said such things to Blue
Notebooks stuffed with secrets, pennies in a jar
A backpack bursting at the straps which Blue put in the car
He took her to the airport in the evening’s draining light
He wept into her handkerchief and far into the night
When herons fly they beautify; their awkward bones expand
He watched them through a window, flat-footed on the land
She’d called him cream and topaz, she’d called him lemon tree
Her breath lapping his earlobe, her groin hot on his knee
Her spun words trailed in cobwebs too thick to swab away
Now strangers made him offers; he heard each word they’d say
There’d been apples in the bowl and poppies in the grass
The stars had hung as clean as beads, his tide had turned at last
He heard that she was somewhere—something to forget
He oiled his boots and broke his lease and cashed in his regret
The bus was in the station, the driver at the gate
Stuck behind a winding line, Blue grew calm as it grew late
Someone had snatched his backpack—it was too heavy anyway
He closed his eyes and didn’t watch as roads bore him away
With his feet so heavy with the mud of everywhere he’d been
His temples scarred with traces of misuses of his grin
With maps of blue-veined mazes showing just beneath his skin
And a pair of empty pockets to warm empty fingers in
Judith Sanders’ poetry collection In Deep was published by Kelsay Books. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Pleiades, The Jewish Literary Journal, Calyx, The American Scholar, and Modern Language Studies; on the websites Vox Populi, Humor Darling, and Full Grown People; and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She lives with her family in Pittsburgh.
Debra Bennett
Flowers from Rocks
sax·a·tile: adjective: living or growing on or among rocks.
sax·ic·o·line: adjective: living or growing on or among rocks.
There’s a word for it of course,
because there’s a word for everything,
and a synonym for every word.
Nothing to do with jazz
or Byzantine décor
or diseases of the gut.
But go ahead and read stuff into it,
undefined, unrefined.
We always liked to play with language,
you and I.
Both odd and awed, let’s sway
in breezes where spirits live. Let’s
throw off these rubber-soled shoes,
and curl our feet into sun-soaked rock.
Along the bear trail, soil’s so shallow,
trees topple whole in the wind
so their roots greet us like flailing intestines.
Tiny flowers along goat-foot trail,
hardy as Laurel
in damsel disguise.
Flowers on flat rock beach not visible from
Deadman’s cliff. Beneath dashed waves,
lakeweed sways in water so deep you could
never hold your breath long enough
to bleed on the jagged bottom.
Inches from the water’s edge, our
gnarled cedar, trunk no bigger than
my wrist, aged in place for millennia
— too small for loggers
— too close to Huron for wildfires.
Remember how we hung our clothes
on her when we swam naked here
before we knew respect.
If sliced open, would her rings hug
so tight she’d appear ringless?
Her great greats sprout
fingernail size from the rocks,
laughing with miniature daisies and blue bells
—organic in the granite.
Let’s you and I go down the deer trail past the car rock,
let’s go barefoot under arbors of pine and maple.
Let’s be startled by panics of partridges,
by rattles of snakes, by rustlings of we know not what.
Haunting swaddles us here
draws us back to an alien womb.
There must be words for it,
that feeling of not knowing you’re home,
that feeling of wanting to be lost and never found?
Debra Bennett writes poetry to stay sane, with mixed results. Her formative years were spent in Ontario, Michigan and then Ontario again. Debra now divides her time between downtown Toronto and Cronk Lake in Eastern Ontario. Her work was shortlisted for the Walrus Poetry Prize, and appeared in Vallum.
Allyson Roche
Cafe Los Feliz: Outdoor Seating in March Last Year
|
The nursing students, the out-of-towners, the in-laws, the regulars, the actress on that one show — no the other one, yeah — and the coworkers, and the dog walkers, the reluctant and complaining hangers-on who knew they should have gone to Little Dom’s instead; the issue with the baby carrier, the photos from last night’s concert, the resume that just doesn’t stand out, the 86% increase from last quarter; the how rude it is when they speak that language, she says, the baby carrier that’s carrying two dogs as it glides past, the “aesthetic ideal for modernism” — a fragment from the book that sits before me, a fragment from a sentence whose conclusion I’m kept from reaching because one of her bosses left recently, because Julie doesn’t know Phoebe, because that dog over there won’t move unless that girl says c’mon, sweet!, because she’s getting her lawyers all squared away, because that storyline made no sense, because why would you say I love you and all that stuff?, because the wristbands didn’t get us into that section, because it’s French electronic music, because everything around me is violently coherent, unassailable in its motion and movement, because he was like you can just get your stuff and go, because he chose good songs for his vocal range — considering, because it smacked the curb so hard we could hear it, because she’s taking her life in her hands, because that laugh was crazy just now, because I had to go over there and sign it for her, because the drive will take us ten hours, but it’s a direct flight anyway, because it’s April and it’s 1:19pm in Los Feliz, California, because they’re taking a group photo and might ask me to take it for them, because they didn’t ask me to take it, because I can’t make everything into one thing. How did that sentence finish? The one I was reading? “It is an impediment.” What is? “Its strange imposition of finitude, hesitation, boredom, and stoppage runs —” Are we eating here or bringing it home? Stoppage runs, stoppage runs, stoppage runs. I can’t finish the sentence because she was like screw it, because let’s leave before we hit traffic, because I don’t feel good, because it’s a conspiracy, BUT STILL, still — stoppage runs. And I sit here, trying to catch it. Where does it run? We could sit outside. Where does it run? “Stoppage runs counter to modernism’s accelerative forces and —” She had said that to me too! The people left. They’re gone. I can’t hear them any longer. The dog’s toenails scrape the sidewalk. Owner yanks the leash. A grunt. I dawdle here, I dwindle in the exhaust fumes of the grocery store delivery truck that’s blocking a full lane of traffic. Through its windshield, my gaze triangulates the sun’s. I burn that windshield, I incinerate it, I burn it and can’t look away. When I do look away, the center of my gaze dissipates, dissolves, a dark absence corrodes the center, like a photocopied error, the sun’s negative is laid over all that I see. It eats away at everything else, a chemical dissolving, its blackness expanding, it takes hold of the margins of my vision — but the periphery’s vibrance fights on, even if it’s nothing more than bright, blurry fringe. I don’t dare turn my head; it’d obliterate the margins, then, too. Her tonality will never, like, help her. I turn my head towards the tonality with the upperhand. Obliterated. |
Allyson Roche is a writer from Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Mister Mag, Inside Voice, The Cry Lounge, and Em Magazine, among other places. Her thesis about Virginia Woolf’s work was awarded UCLA’s 2023 Thompson Prize for Outstanding Thesis. Find her on substack: “Avoiding Conclusion.” More at: allysonroche.com
Michael Bickford
This Poem is Envious and Young
When I was green and people asked me
what my favorite color was
I felt like I was lying when I said green.
I liked all the colors.
The greens were lime and sage and olive,
Lincoln, tea, and serpentine,
jade, viridian, malachite and more—
I didn’t know which was real and envied
other colors’ primary certainty.
I said green because I knew it was mostly good:
the wise old calm of modeling clay
the earthy Gumby-green scent on my hands
when I made snakes and pre-school pancakes;
the accidental chlorophyll discovered
when I brushed the yellow tempera sun with sky
and wondered how green got there from the tree;
the spring-grass infield with the Dodgers on
my acid-green transistor radio,
my holey Levi knees no longer blue;
the viridescent dreams and hothouse
memories of Grandma with her fuchsias
and her glads, the sky sea-green through hazy glass;
the shades on either side of redwood leaflets,
a darker, public waxy green on top,
the secret water-channel glow beneath;
but not the putrid green
of the slimy, overcooked spinach
I choked on to escape the kitchen table,
or the color from some glistening gland
in the car-rent body of the cat
who crawled off under a bush to die.
There is no color without light;
the quiet of deep forest green
so quickly dims to black in early evening
but stabs back at dawn,
the golden red it catches in its summits
reflecting back its brightest verdancy.
No color is one color:
each a rainbow unto itself.
All the colors is no color at all.
This poem is not envious
of the no-color poems
of black-n-white interminable TV grays
that shout from either side
at all the colors they are not
neither rosy nor sanguine
ultramarine nor umber
amethyst nor plum:
it would rather be chloroplastered in the sun.
When this poem is old, and yet still green,
closer to the white light
(black as the pit from pole to pole)
living the green revelation
of our cool green privilege
it will not envy anymore
but only wish to be
like crocuses in snow,
key lime pie on ice,
avocado ripe in gator-skin,
green butter on a slice,
a grass frog croaking in the dark
before she makes her final leap,
an oval emerald on your heart,
a promise I will keep.
Michael Bickford writes poetry and fiction on the Redwood Coast, is a fellow of the Redwood Writing Project, and a founding member of Lost Coast Writers Community. His work has appeared in Abandoned Mine, Fauxmoir, Seven Gill Shark Review, Ink People Center for the Arts, and The North Coast Journal.