Issue #45

Luigi Coppola

String Theory

We settled on string, having tried
and failed to use, among other things:
wood, plastic, fire, bread, talcum powder,
chewable vitamins, meconium, nail clippings,
breath and thoughts about mothers.

First we pulled apart the strands, an un-
twisting of a Russian doll’s hair, each length
identical to the fibre, each width laughing
at the hair on the hands that tugged them free.

We licked each end, as if thread for
a cosmic needle. We burnt loose wisps
away. We pulled and tugged and jerked
until they could be held erect and parallel
to our feet, quivering at the tension.

Then the real work began. We made shapes
and outlines, tied and twirled until a form
formed in the air: a structure of twine,
a frozen explosion of a ball of wool, mercurial,
morphing, warping in the breeze of our sighs.

That night, we rested in its shadows –
exhausted cats in a spider’s cradle
with lines of black casted on sweating tan.

It spoke to us in our dreams. We woke
to rope burns on faces and purpling limbs
from this tourniquet of faith – our blood and
our hopes clogging the veins.

Luigi Coppola is a teacher, poet, first generation immigrant and avid rum and coke drinker. Shortlisted for Bridport Prizes, longlisted for the Ledbury and National Poetry Competitions, publications include Worple Press’ anthology ‘The Tree Line’; Acumen; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Iota; Magma; Rattle, and The Rialto.

Rachel Tramonte

What We Could Not See

The house had no structural integrity and we wanted it.
The realtor didn’t speak of how the Hawaiian red oak dulled

and we wanted it. There was a view of the Bay Bridge visible beyond
the branches of an oak tree, visible on your toes.

The water glimmered and the lights twinkled.
The house was on a fault line and we shot high anyway.

We scraped the money together like crumbs from a pan
to mend the cracked foundation in case we won.

We worked out the ancient American tension of success and consumption
in twin dreams. Our materialism was bad and we dueled with sticks

and dressed up like wizards to pretend it was better than it was.
It wasn’t a McMansion in a development in the suburbs.

It was a historic home in a real neighborhood. We were high
on our liberalism and typically American in our strivings.

We didn’t see it could have been jewelry, cologne, two expensive cars.
We just wanted more, much more than we could afford.

Rachel Tramonte’s work has appeared in Bluestem Magazine, Broad River Review, The Broken Plate, The Cape Rock, Emrys Journal, Evening Street Review, Glassworks, Green Hills Literary Lantern, HitchLit Review, Hobart, The Indianapolis Review, Jelly Bucket, Mantis, Packingtown Review, Perceptions Magazine, S/Word, These Fragile Lilacs, Third Wednesday, Whistling Shade and others.

George Rawlins

Worlds Betwixt

At age 16, Thomas Chatterton invented the imaginary persona of a 15th-century poet and tried to pass off the poems as the work of a previously unknown priest to the literati of London. When that and other attempts to help his mother and sister out of poverty failed, he committed suicide, decades later being credited as the founding spirit of Romanticism.


How, Tom, could you not yearn, among browning
tomes and an unfinished sun that dips

into an unfished sea, nothing between
you and there but a monstrous

will to disappear? Like an allemande stuck
in your head you hear it as you work

through the furious weather of your twilit
garret overlooking the docks that

jut from the birthplace of sadness. What
to become but what you despise? One last

carriage cruise ‘round Piccadilly: early
bird tarts saunter before an August

sundown blur, half dressed
by feathers of indolent swans.

George Rawlins has degrees from Ohio University and the University of California, Irvine. He has recent publications in New Critique (UK), New World Writing, and Nine Mile. His forthcoming poetry collection, Cheapside Afterlife (April 2021, Longleaf Press), reimagines in 57 sonnets the life of the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton.

Dana Robbins

Carnivore Sundays

My father and I start at the butcher shop. While he chooses
a steak for dinner, I munch a piece of bologna the butcher gives
me, the processed meat equivalent of a lollipop.

Then we go on to the supermarket, where my father selects
produce with a discerning eye. In adulthood, I will feel him
in my fingers every time I choose a piece of fruit.

When no one is looking, he makes me giggle by dancing
to the piped-in supermarket music. Though he is built
like a bear, he is light on his feet. Back home, he makes
me lunch.

In our family, we eat cream cheese the way other families
might use mustard or mayonnaise, so perhaps he makes me
a grilled cheese with cream cheese and Havarti, or a bologna
sandwich with cream cheese.

Then, I suppose I wander up to my room to read or dream.
In the late afternoon, I find my father in the kitchen,
the steak unwrapped from its brown paper and displayed
in all its glory as he carefully trims the fat.

Every so often, he slices off a small piece of meat, toasts it
for me on a fork held over the gas jet of the stove, as if we
were two hoboes at a campfire. He chuckles as I snap up
my pieces like an eager puppy.

Dana earned an MFA from the Stonecoast program of USM. Her books, The Left Side of My Life and After the Parade were published by Moon Pie Press. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and on the Writers Almanac. You can read about Dana at danamartinerobbins.com.

Holly Day

She Goes

The wings stretch out and pull at your skin
as though they’ve always been there, flap.
Practice moving them again and feet
leave the ground. Feet never really belonged
on the ground, anyway, this is the way it’s supposed to be

now, one toe still dragging circular, twitching trails
through the dirt as if tethering the body to the ground,
still, an anchor, reality.

First the wings and now the skin. You crawl through
the hole in the top of your head, pulling the new wings
after you as you split the tired, old body that has held you
to the ground for so many useless years. There is
so much of the world left to explore, so many places
you could not see from the ground. Let’s start with
the tops of the trees, the hidden hollows of clouds,
the arc in the middle of the rainbow. There’s a reason
birds work so hard to fly. The view from here
is more beautiful than you could ever imagine.

This is how you were always meant to be, I say
over and over as I stroke your cold, pale hand. You
were always meant to be a butterfly, a dragonfly,
an iridescent midge dancing in a beam of sunlight.

Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hubbub, Grain, and Third Wednesday, and her newest books are The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), Book of Beasts (Weasel Press), Bound in Ice (Shanti Arts), and Music Composition for Dummies (Wiley).

Jim Kraus

Seawalls and Shoreline Real Estate

I am waiting still,
while the past accrues behind seawalls
of mined caliche or coquina,
as against the long-traveling wave-muse
shoaling over its reef and its broken parts:
bits of shellfish and sea bones in the sand wash,
its depreciating rhythm,
the impermanence of mortar slowly dissolving.
Then the washing of wave-hands
against the pathos of shoreline real estate
being repossessed by the rising sea itself.

Jim Kraus’ poems have been published or are forthcoming in Apricity Magazine, Cape Rock Poetry (forthcoming Spring 2021), Hawaii Pacific Review, Kentucky Poetry Review (Vol. 18, No. 1, spring 1982, p. 32), Virginia Quarterly Review and Voices de la Luna (Vol. 12, No. 4, August 2020, p. 21) among others. Currently, he is a Professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu, where he also edits Chaminade Literary Review.

LE Francis

“You’re all just crows on the powerline”

Nobody here but us crows, wire riding
ornaments of feather & scream, flutter
folded into the snow & the crowd, into
the scrape of boots over icy sidewalks;
& these streets would be paved with
our bones, if this damn world had
the sense to turn symbol to structure;
we’ve got no better way to be, beautiful
as an oil slick in the sun & as maddening
to wash clean; shed our feathers like ash,
to briefly dust the shoulders of lovers, to be
brushed away, to be acknowledged once
& forgotten. Nobody here but us, shrieking
the sun down so we can blend in with the sky.

after “I Didn’t Say I Was Powerful, I Said I Was a Wizard” by Chiodos


LE Francis is a recovering arts journalist writing poetry & fiction of varying length from the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.