Issue #57

Katy Aisenberg

Black Ice

She took everything as a sign.
She said they were portents,
the date, the day, the yellow dress,
his lucky blue tie. The stop light.
The No 7 bus and, of course, the stars.

Silly woman. There are no signs.
We are all roaming fault lines
across a continent.
Geese just hurting each other
with choppy beaks and wings.

Despite the rosary or the mandala or
checking the stove several times
the child died a crib
death. The lover broke his
hip sliding on black ice.
The car flipped over
just because.

So if you stumble into
another human wandering
whose skin smells right
lie down beside them.
What the body needs
is another body.

Katy Aisenberg is a clinical psychologist who lives in Somerville MA. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Agni, The Antioch Review, The North American Review, The Mississippi Review, The Partisan Review, Ploughshares, One Art, and The Quarterly. Her book of literary criticism, Ravishing Images, was published by Peter Lang Press.

Shine Ballard

idyll

Erasure of “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Immigration,” by Barack Obama, November 20, 2014

Shine Ballard, the font of fantods, currently creates and resides on this plane(t).

Bex Hainsworth

Pebbles

I walk the crescent of Oyster Bay
like a grocery aisle, browsing for pebbles
hidden beneath the black-green bubbles
of seaweed. Glistening, slick with salt,
the shine of dark-eyed rocks follows me
as I pass a cake of jellyfish, a carrier bag.

The first pebble is small and grey,
a moon rock, brought by a celestial tide,
made of the space dust holding us together.
There is a white loop around its middle
like a wedding ring, a chalky gasp.
It lifts from the sand, lighter than a chick.

The second is large and red, an anatomically
correct heart – your preferred version of romance.
Rust-skinned, this sea cog bleeds as I heave it
into my hands, the lines across my palms
fill with water and glow scarlet, like a promise.
Taxidermy anemone, it weeps in my pocket.

Gentoo penguins are known to mate for life.
They present gifts of pebbles to their partners,
to court, to convince, to keep. I return home
with my offering, which you accept, add
to our nest of tea lights, badges, flags, icons.
Our collection of tokens, love currency.

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in The Lake, Visual Verse, Atrium and Brave Voices Magazine. Find her on Twitter @PoetBex.

Jesse Darnay

Industry

Industry brought to us by Dawn. Eighty-hour-a-weekers calibrating chrome shower handles in granite bathrooms throughout fifty- and sixty-story condos, commencing urban matins: “At least I don’t have kids. With kids it would be too late.” Fluorescent stings over untenanted cubicles indicting the lapse in production, in steel phalli, fortified facsimiles of Fazlur Khan’s capital cock, morning erections poised to milk underdeveloped markets. Vacated streets glazed with a newborn sun’s liquid-salmon melancholy—a last lamppost flame twitching to death. Pavement Zamboni snailing along to sweep off waste for the day’s game, Humanity v. Efficacy (Humanity with +3,786 on the spread), the neon-jacketed driver slugging tepid coffee from a wizened Starbucks cup and flicking Marlboro ash out a sliver of open window. The bleating staccato of delivery trucks shimmying backwards along curbs, their steely insides glutted with packaged opiates (Skippy Creamy, Dove White Beauty, Samsung Eternity, MAC Queen Bee, True Religion Skinny). The effluvious overture of chomped Sausage, Egg & Cheese Croissan’wiches. Uncracked RedEyes. Karkov vodka. Scorched rails. Choler. A brittle Backpager mincing toward the Roosevelt platform and wriggling down her sequined mini skirt, toward a Green Line that would take her back south before the Solar Godmother exposed her pariahdom. A Weber Shandwick intern buffeting a treadmill in an incandescent gym, shrill hook of “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas blasting through her earbuds and invoking that fantasy of lemon-garnished martinis with voguish friends in a River North penthouse, deifying it. A paunchy émigré from Guadalajara tottering along Walton Street after another night spent vacuuming the Axminster halls of the Four Seasons, en route to the foreclosed single-family home in Archer Heights he shares with two of his sisters and their husbands, hoping to hear the ethereal sigh of the Pacific in his four hours of sleep before heading back downtown for a bussing shift at Rosebud. Scintillant retail windows—spectral effigies behind walls of glass, swathed in sweaters, blouses, booties…

Jesse Darnay is a poet and novelist from Chicago. After many years spent in writing workshops at UCLA Extension, he earned his MA in English Literature from DePaul University. He is the author of The History of Now and has a poem in the Decadent Review. He enjoys performing his Beat poetry at open mics.

Matt Stefon

A warning is a threat

The moon’s a cleaver
crouched behind
a gray three-decker.

Salted streets shiver,
shine skull white.
Cold carves up the night.

Matt Stefon lives and writes north of Boston. He has one micro-chapbook, two chapbooks, and 463 wiffle ball home runs.

John Muro

Loon

Buoyant, black-winged burl
crepuscular swan, phantasmal thrush,
fallen from conical spires of smoke.

From your charred canyon of throat
dusk’s inconsolable howl and thrust,
anguish made audible in spectral curl.

Channeling wail of wolf and owl,
a haunting dirge in whorled conch.
Shapeshifter, ember-eyed cinder, black-green

glistening, draped in iridescent sheen,
white lines flaking from speckled collar
into a tidewater of opulent swirl.

A resident of Connecticut, John’s first volume of poems, In the Lilac Hour, was published by Antrim House in 2020, and it is available on Amazon. A two-time 2021 nominee for the Pushcart Prize, John’s poems have appeared in such journals as Barnstorm, Euphony (winter 2021), Grey Sparrow, River Heron and Sky Island.

Carla Sarett

on the beach

A beach a radio
    my friend says
somewhere a radio
    many blankets ago
on Jones Beach I dreamed
    Beach Blanket Bingo.
Long Island summery
    suburban skins blister
my young parents forever
    forgetting me
napalm-scented surfers
    Apocalypse Now
wild and wounded This is the end
    The Doors sang
beautiful friend
      I remember
North of Damnation Creek
   we christened Infinity Beach
miles of chilled fog never-
    ending until broken
beer bottles, a not-dead pyre
    a hypodermic
A beach a radio she wants
    god how I know

the invasion starts
    in the middle

Carla Sarett is a poet and fiction writer based in San Francisco. Her novel, A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press) is published in February, and her debut poetry collection, She Has Visions (Main Street Rag Press) in November, 2022. New poems appear or are forthcoming in Quartet, Thimble, Hobo Camp Review, UnLost, Speckled Trout Review, MONO and Pithead Chapel.

Jessica Purdy

You Can Catch More Flies with Honey than with Vinegar

And I’m caught. Lured by the smell of rotting fruit

I creep in smiling. My feet stick. Just a fly.
When I was young how could I know the oak gall
came from a wasp laying her eggs?
Am I even old enough to have learned anything from
my mistakes? I’d pick them up and press my thumbs in
rip them apart expecting sweetness

getting dried chambers instead. A birthplace.
When I last saw my grandfather he called me a different name.
This was how I knew I wouldn’t see him again.
Younger I was so wise. Now I can’t tell at all if

I’ll see the ones I love again. The honeybee on
the dandelion, his pockets full of gold
I worry will seep herbicide into the comb
kill the queen.
Smoke will sleep them into compliance. The keeper

encased in classic white
protection readies the ladder
to retrieve the swarm high up in the oak.
Vision—a bridal veil—blurs, tucked in at the throat.
Heels caught in the branches. Silk rips.
Stung lips and their pout.
I have been ungrateful—
sour and fermented. A goiter. Any growth
a growth borne of assumption.

In spring a spider and her silk egg sac pour
out of the spigot
and into my watering can.
She isn’t stupid. Just unwise.

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Gargoyle (forthcoming, #73), Feral, Dream Pop, Museum of Americana, SurVision, and Bluestem Magazine. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018.

Sarah Etlinger

Conchology

Once I met a man who carried a mussel shell in his pocket.
His specialty was conchology—the study of mollusk shells—
and he loved their black oval arches mottled with the afterimage
of barnacles and sinews; he admired the white gloss glazing their undersides
the way the moonlight lines the sea. He had no use for the scar
of teeth, the bite of sweat, for guts hidden only by the thin grease
of skin and smile or even the heavy-duty bulk of a heart—
just the idea of a shell, a clean, polished mass clinging to rocks by the thinnest
of threads. Don’t you want to be strong, he asked. Don’t you want
a firm, rigid shell holding you in?

Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor who lives in Milwaukee, WI. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of 3 books. Interests include baking, cooking, traveling, and spending time by Lake Michigan with her family. Recent work can be found at SWWIM Miami, Kissing Dynamite, FEED literary, and many others. Find her on Twitter at @drsaephd.