Issue #33
Susan Ayres
Wildfire
Where is my old voice
dripping dew from spiked
maples onto my hands?
My liquid voice almost a whisper.
My voice when I was solid and
certain, before I quavered like a charred
aspen whistling beneath the moon.
My voice when I was ragged
ponderosa, bark-bruised by antlers.
Ten years later, landscape
still ravaged. Charred hollow trunks
scattered over mountains. I want
my old voice, chirping like wrens
in silver-gray branches. I want
your touch without your destruction.
Susan Ayres is a poet, lawyer, and translator. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a Concentration in Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Dime Show Review, Southwestern American Literature (vol. 43, 2017), Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Dec. 2019), Sycamore Review (vol. 17, 2005), Watershed Review (vol. 40, 2018), Cimarron Review (vol 129, 1999), and elsewhere. She lives in Fort Worth and teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law.
Dawn Terpstra
self-portrait underwater
blame it on the moon the songs she sings
wake the living with submerged thoughts
phantasms we wring from tanks and shorts
puddle black at our sandy feet
memories of Rock Islands pile
like kukui nuts pushed at high tide
sunlight waves through stringy kelp
my blonde hair streams surface-bound
mortal moorings undone
your hand pulls me sister
long knives between our teeth
glint metallic smiles
armed mermaids catch currents
unafraid snaking sea kraits
and flapping manta rays fly above
laughing-jawed eels bob
beneath a Japanese Zero
nose down in anemoned ardor
we glide with seahorses
galloping tiny silent strides
swirling curtain jerks open
green jack tails flash sequined scales
starfish scatter a rainbow
at coral’s edge blues
slope deep eternal night beyond
across the lagoon death
tangles in mangroves
faces swirling at the surface
call our muffled names
let’s stay here sister
where moon pushes our cradle
and warm liquid salt
loves a dangerous girl
swallows her elegant whole
grit for oyster tongue
too beautiful for air
Dawn Terpstra’s poetry appears in forthcoming or current editions of Third Wednesday Magazine, Raw Art Review (Fall 2019 issue pending), Eastern Iowa Review, High Shelf Press, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Vol. 13, Issue 2, The Write Launch, and others. She leads a communications team in the energy industry in Iowa and enjoys life in the country with her husband, cats, and Chocolate Lab.
Yash Seyedbagheri
None But The Lonely Hearts
none but the lonely hearts
absorb rose colors and lavender bursting among pale
evening skies
feet sinking into shadows
a step, another step, while normalcy looks down
lonely trying to stay out
(while hoping to run into another lonely heart)
among bars with butter colored lamps, neon calling
laughter husky up streets, where footsteps and starched smiles
mingle with Lady Gaga and barely acknowledge but offer
groceries and the contours of mold and onion lives shared
the weight calling to lonely hearts
who stay away
(while I wonder what a fellow lonely heart looks like)
stay away from walls without pictures and smiles
fridges without a favorite box of Belgian chocolates
without White Zinfandel from a sister, a mother
lonely hearts stay away from a phone never inviting
to parties in backyards under swath of evening
we really want you there, texts soothing
I imagine lonely hearts wearing pathetic garb, a torn sweatshirt
but could it be the man in the suit, the woman in precise lavender?
for they wander, try to hold feet down
though walk home is fastest, and
they can only pass the little lit houses
with laughs that float like fiddle echoes
before suspicion steps out
interrogating why do you linger, asshole? Why?
I wonder, if the interrogator was once
none but the lonely heart too, but
sold souls for suburban with
love for none
but the lonely hearts,
try to hold onto rose-colored eventide
even as velvet envelops the skies
washes away cloud dances, soon to be filled by stars stabbing
calling them, sinking onto futons
with room only for one soul
where dreams scurry away
Come find me, other lonely hearts
I beg, but only the wind whispers, the trees chiding skeleton arms
none but the lonely hearts
trying to dress the wounds of stabbing stars
convincing themselves
tomorrow night, someone will hear
but none but the lonely hearts
can hear tears
please, listen, lonely hearts
and even then, only their own
our own. call me, none but the lonely heart
I call into the night
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His story, “Soon,” was nominated for a Pushcart. Yash’s stories are forthcoming or have been published in Café Lit, Mad Swirl, and Ariel Chart, among others.
Maura Yzmore
My Husband’s Crying Pennies
I thought I’d read in a tweet
but it was “carrying” really
bless the guy’s thrifty soul
it is too late already
for I’ve swiftly imagined
a handsome crying dude
soft copper-coated coins
sliding out of his eyes
why is he crying pennies?
maybe he’s being laid off
so he’s alone and broke
but, as the pennies fall down
I see verdigris stripes
coating this faux man’s skin
chemistry, tears and copper
damn, he looks hot in green
Maura Yzmore is a writer and scientist based in the American Midwest. Her poetry can be found in Elephants Never and Fourth & Sycamore, while her short fiction appeared in Kanstellation, The Arcanist, The Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere. Find out more at her website or on Twitter @MauraYzmore.
Robert Rothman
THE BEASTS IN TANDEM
We made a truce: He won’t devour me; I
won’t imprison him. An uneasy armistice
punctuated by shouts and shoving, books
slammed down, swearing matches. He stinks
to high heaven and is illiterate. He finds me
tame and without a pungent scent. He bares
those teeth like knives, his mouth a rictus of
primeval appetite, scrapes the desk, heaves
a chair across the room. This morning he
is still, his yellow eyes staring through the walls
at a vastness I can’t see. I didn’t tell
him when she died. We hold the pen together
like a planchette quivering on a Ouija board.
It will go where it goes. If either of
us push, it is no good: We throw it out.
NOVEMBER
Not a day not to remember the snow
coming down like a bender from
the mountain full of itself wild
windblown and wobbly and skunk-drunk
as I meeting midway on the street
what a how-do-you-do blowing
my cap off and lost to view in
the pelting pushing me over
like a bullyboy down on my back
can’t stop laughing so besotted in
my bespoke suit of white the storm tails
off into a soft flurry these eyes
big as moons as the flakes fall like
a rain of stars so gentle and quiet
I could lie here forever not care
where the cold takes me maybe better
than here what talk lug up to the
vertical zigzag down the street
all mine this night of white November.
Robert Rothman lives in Northern California, near extensive trails and open space, with the Pacific Ocean over the hill. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Tampa Review, Willow Review, and over sixty other literary journals. Please see his website for more information about him and his work.
Hibah Shabkhez
Layers of True Lies
Crushed card-splinters from a chocolate’s nest
In clutched fingers scrambling for answers squirm,
As the black speckies dance on the glaire roof.
Sallow walls swallowing compulsively
Lest they burst over with all that they know
Watch dark shakers of rainbow confetti,
These black speckies, into barreaux grow.
Shushed shard-glinters from a slate’s hot unrest
In hutched slingers shambling for lancers thurm,
As the black speckies prance on the glaire roof.
Speck-dragons avenging fallen comrades
Now float above the bowed heads of the shent;
Who moan: “I and I and I alone lent
This awful force to your flames and your blades.”
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in The Blue Nib, Cordite Poetry, Headway Quarterly and a number of other literary magazines.
Jason O’Toole
The Terrible Gulls
Above twin redbrick
Smokestacks, inert
urban volcanos:
Gulls wing through
sky tinted in
own plumage’s
grey pearl.
Bumping midair:
they’re not mating,
nor being social.
4-year gulls hunting
the smaller ones.
Picking them off.
How terrible!
says I, chewing
chicken salad
sandwich as downy
pale feather descends
past dirty window.
Jason O’Toole is a Rhysling Award nominated poet, musician, and elder advocate. He is the author of two poetry collections published by the Red Salon: Spear of Stars (2018) and Soulless Heavens (2019). Recent work has appeared in Nixes Mate Review, The Wild Word, and Vita Brevis.
Chila Woychik
Grief is Not a Hand Grenade Until the Pin is Pulled
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Some say move on, like standing still might break the back of reminiscence. Some say tomorrow tomorrow, like a moment might explode if not thrown soon enough. And others say bright, that sun, if you’d only look up or whittling a stick takes a really sharp knife, but you keep eating and leaning and twiddling your thumbs as if your life were a truck stuck in neutral. Loss is loss is loss, and when will someone patent a use for all that salt on your face? |
German-born Chila Woychik is a complex organism trying to live a simple life. Kismet has led to awards from Storm Cellar and Emrys Journal (2016 #33, print), and publication in Cimarron, Passages North, and others. When she wants to see her family roll their eyes, she calls river debris “tidewrack.”
Jesse Miksic
Being a Thing in the Fall
Some just-stimulated denizen
of the dogwood tree
is singing
her life-story in cantos
(several
per second),
while the tree
listens
patiently
and appreciates the continuation
of its smallest,
most spritely
modulations
It has had all the time
to do the calculations,
to know
that it will lose a few
weary and withered leaves for
every tweet – How I want
that kind of history
inside me,
that long recurrence
of hatchings,
songs,
and matings,
moltings, a family
stirring
on the wing and setting out –
Farewell, elder leaf
Farewell, brother bird
Dislodge yourself, oh
Child of the bough
I have to stay,
A child of the earth,
This seed will split,
This egg will crack
I’ll feel a million
hollow deaths in every
naked birth.
Jesse Miksic (@miksimum) is a graphic designer and writer living in Peekskill, New York. He spends his life writing poetry, nursing unfinished projects, and having adventures with his wonderful wife and daughter. Recent placements include Leveler Poetry, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Juke Joint, and others.