Issue #91

John Luna

Sheer curtains of the forest

(David Schnell paintings; Piranesi prints; Victoria Frolova cooking; effects of malnourishment on the body over time)

Sheer curtains of the forest surrounding semi-rural homes are pierced by spears of painted light; everything is an object of affection under construction, an invernal vernissage alive in the grave.

September 101: Ferns are primeval; coffee is short, bitter and good; the kitchen stays warm only for a second or two. A tuxedo cat is slinking [home] along a stone wall (things in crossed-out italics are ruins.) Italics left intact are settlements amid things. Lately, a dead ampersand snakes its way beneath my feet. Time’s self I once observed in the dust of ancient ivory roots as they were destroyed comes back again, as always deep underwater in this northern Pacific coast diluvian morning. The landscape

of the island (a spellbound book) had been made in the springtime, veiled in bright green, seeming before us. The Angel in the ampersand (see how it loops? A dead garter snake by the side of the road… ) As you departed, I called out, “say a goodbye hymn from me!” It becomes hymnal in the shadow just behind where the sun has struck the word (a [Mr.]) Mister Hymn. We pretend to know one another so well — but have you ever found yourself vaguely uncomfortable with the convention

of actors playing multiple roles in a play? The voices of disorders fill one whole floor of the house. In answer, I will bake bread, make borscht. We must restore the tissues of your heart muscles.

Space between eclipses

(An astrology of anxiety; internal argument dialogue; Sting about Pinochet; Odas Elementales of Neruda; the Mexica.)

Space between eclipses is where the end and the beginning fit. There you will find me tethered to an old ivy, or a bookstore we used to go to. This negative resistance you give me is pure gold…I can cut the old world-serpent of a leaky garden hose into so many separate colonies; each possesses its own momentum — like brushstrokes, they seem to swim away & through along wet grasses. Time for us to leave this space, and there is something ceremonious about dropping them into the black trash bag one by one: rustle-rattle of respect in the snare drum of a funeral quoted in a singer’s threnody. Picture all of 121 poems stripped of everything other than the animal. Out of the mouth. Out of the

world. Moving impossibly slowly. You will see, as you would with a toy that never stopped being a puzzle (it was never a toy) how these eclipses as redactions of the spells of looking are a double negative, ensuring grace. Poems as passengers of water became rounder when I cut them… I never know why until you do. I want them to be my tomatoes, my suit of clothes, or thread. My chestnut on the ground. But as ruins they are prayers in an apocalyptic wheel — a death by unfinished knots.

Each object in a wasteland-basement fits to be tied into a new world serpent of garbage made of art, for an old republic that needs sacrifice to maintain its amazement. Desire beyond reason. Now love.

Author’s Note
On the notes after the titles relate to reading: here is a passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Unpacking my Library.” that I like:

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?

Thinking of the circumstances of Benjamin’s death in flight, his writing about the packing and unpacking of his library seems horribly poignant, but also makes me think about the present state of memory. Post-pandemic especially, we’re used to being unsettled in almost every sense of the word, and distrust our ability to remember clearly and, especially, chronologically. Is his acknowledgement of a house made of chaos especially relevant now?

These poems accommodate chaos in memory. They are the product of a practice of reading back into things that were read, overheard, watched, walked alongside, and otherwise absorbed… As in a song, a painting, a scrap of conversation long since detached from its context and carried for days, months or years before being found a second time, aligned and offered to the flow of the poem’s becoming.

Tessa C. Berman

A Letter

Another day of gutting experience for laurels because it is what I have trained to do. Can poets best be seen as turkey vultures, dismembering fallen life? Entomologists crucifying the monarch? Form betrays me, I think. Growing tired of the confines of language, high off unseen energy, I venture to write the Great Indelible Poem. Just as the urge comes, it leaves me… killed once more by semantics. Letters are insufficient to hold the wholeness I feel. Muted by sound, shut off in openness, neutralized lines rattle from me still. Omniscience rendered black, smeared. Pages yet printed, bone-like, cut. Quietly, I subdue myself with tradition, reality reduced to repetition alone. Spent syllables metastasize to spent similes. Tricks render the illusion of change in continuity. Underneath the weight of verbiage, vernal truth is vanquished. What are we doing tonight, dear Whitman? What are we doing tonight, dear Yeats? Xeroxing tired verse forms, yellowed phrases growing yellower, zebras and toaster ovens as manifestations of love.

Tessa C. Berman (she/her) is an undergraduate student and curatorial fellow at the University of Virginia. Her poetry has previously appeared in Literary Matters, FERAL, and The Ekphrastic Review. Tessa is on Instagram @t.c.berman.

Carolyn Guinzio

Never mind that

The ladder was balanced on a lake
bed, shifting under a cockeyed
optimist. Be all right. He shooed
away the spotter and reached
into a gutter-as-metaphor,
pulling up fistfuls of wet paper.
Leaves are receipts, and purchase
is your hold on the ladder. Pulpy
kites and cranes rained, gracing
the graying hairs of the spotter
with a veined sheen that seemed
to shine from within, as if she rose,
just then, from under the earth,
returned to her perfect earthly
state. Auburn and aluminum,
ladder and leaves. He handed
down a scrap that said I am going
the way of the earth and dropped
into the blur of her arms.

Carolyn Guinzio’s most recent publications are A Vertigo Book, winner of The Tenth Gate Prize and the Foreword Indies Award for Poetry Book of the Year and the sequence Meanwhile in Arkansas, winner of the Quarterly West Chapbook Prize. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com

L. Lois

An Eagle Calls

from its nest
like a carver's knife
whittling wood
to make something sweet
from rough jabs
descending with the grain
bumping over
each knot
fracturing
as the chips fall to the side

L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. Her poems have appeared in The Fictional Cafe, Progenitor Journal, Poetry Breakfast, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Twisted Vine, and other literary publications. Links to her published work can be found on her website.

Carol Casey

wet

little wet ragged one pulled from water from warm dreams of water from umbilical streams and sweet flows and subterranean thrums and susurrus no word cups to snare all is flow all is the sanctum of soft silky whole then squeezed to void squeezed to clamour squeezed to vast to fire in lungs jagged chill lost to glare to coarse cloth rubs to cold squalls shivers skin mouth nipple arms warmth sup sup sigh.

Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals and anthologies around the world. She is author of one collection of poems,What Can Happen: Family and Other Raptures of Imperfection.

Elise Baker

Mother: Vespers

Deep moans of sycamores echo across,
Low sun streaming, creekbed singing.
Herons fishing for crawdads.
Long shadows creeping, mourning dove singing.

The whispers of water scaling over limestone,
Leaves brushing hands and limbs like a choir.
Cupped palm sounds of boots in the
murky silt and cold algae sludge too.

I whistle that dove’s tune, wait for a reply.
Sit down in the shells and listen.
Koo-oh, oh-oh-oh.
She sings me back an octave higher.

I find my peace here in these sounds,
like some pray for in their church pew.
The cicada chorus ends my time
with a wild benediction.

And I make my way
back towards my home,
feeling a warmth in my bones.

Elise Baker is an Indiana native whose family comes from Appalachian Tennessee. As a first-generation college student, her poetry explores the emotional and physical disconnect between rural and urban spaces, as well as the diaspora of Appalachian folks in the Midwest.

David R. DiSarro

The Overnight Shift

My knees, gritty, bending
in the faint husk of streetlights,

buzzing through the power lines
and back alleys, the neon,

the gray skull of morning
minutes away. My feet,

the weight of tombstones
stepping over concrete

ruins, townies taking hits
under the awnings, guffaws

against an amber rain. Brick-
for-brick and bone-on-bone,

broken, until I turn for home,
cross the threshold of another

dark room, another wet dawn
drenched in the words

“…too soon, too soon.”


David R. DiSarro is an Associate Professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. His work has previously appeared, or is forthcoming, in ANTAE, Anti-Heroin Chic, Second Chance Lit, Hawaii Pacific Review, among others. David’s first chapbook, I Used to Play in Bands, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Eric Paul

Acceptance

My five-year-old is biting off the petals of the black-eyed Susans in my wife’s garden and spitting the pieces onto his trampoline. He rips up a dead dandelion and blows on it. The seeds, like a hundred weightless bones, float over his sandbox. Then, overcome with excitement, he falls to his knees and begins to worship an anthill like a god, as if deciphering some secret scripture only he can understand. He blocks his ears and grimaces when a sparrow lands on a branch of our maple tree and starts chirping. By choice, he’s only eaten Goldfish crackers for five straight days. His food can only be orange or beige. It’s 10:00 A.M., and I’m on my fifth cup of coffee and second Xanax. I’m grinding my teeth down to beach sand, thinking about the neurologist’s concern from yesterday’s appointment: my son doesn’t point at objects or respond when called by name. The cloud that had been obscuring the sun moves, and he quickly puts his Toy Story sunglasses back on. To him, the sun is a giant disco ball at a dance party he’ll never attend—unless they have a talking piggy bank. I’m counting my three body parts and three objects, like my therapist suggests, when he turns on the spigot next to the bulkhead. He places his thumb halfway over the nozzle and points the garden hose at me. In the spray, a rainbow forms, its colors so bright I choke on each one.

Eric Paul is a father, husband, writer, and musician from Lincoln, Rhode Island. He has released three full-length volumes of poetry and lyrics, with his most recent work titled ‘A Suitcase Full of Dirt‘ (Tolsun Books). His writings have been featured in Hypertext, Ninth Letter, Lunch Ticket, and Booth.

John Schneider

Like Contrails

Along the darkening coast
seabirds move among stars
competing for last shards of a light
thick with the briny taste of kelp,
whirring over our unmooring surfaces,
writing themselves all over the heavens.
Their circular paths a calligraphy, a script
without need for author. And I marvel
at their wordless language expressing
more than I will ever know. They work
the sky sunup to sundown without labor.
So why are my hands so callused?
The cormorants’ cries rise and fall
like a guttural symphony without
conductor or instrument. Without
sheet music, every note comes together
on its own. Over the pitted concrete break-
water, weaving through evening’s deepening
fog, they briefly shimmer so clearly
from these high rows of eucalyptus
I almost mistake them for constellations.

John Schneider’s debut poetry collection, Swallowing the Light (Kelsay Books, 2022), is Pinnacle Book Achievement Poetry Best Book winner 2023, NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in 2023, International Book Awards Poetry 2023, and nominated for the Hoffer Award. His poetry is a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2023 International Poetry Competition.

Joshua St. Claire

Sky Haiku

contrails
a periwinkle climbs
marsh grass

the sun rising
in the east
a black vulture


Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published in Lana Turner, Sugar House Review, Two Thirds North, and Allium, among others. Winner of the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award and the Trailblazer Award, his haiku have appeared in several annual anthologies.