Issue #26
Gay Baines
Cicadas
Still have cicada carcasses
from 17 years ago Beautiful black
and khaki stripiness Wings
fragile could no longer bear their
infinite lightness Eyes still red
They lie in a brass cup where I keep
burdocks smooth stones feathers of
mourning doves
No surprise
that on a bookshelf sits a square
teak and maple box screwed closed
lined with purple felt holding ashes
of one I loved still love I can lift
a weightless cicada from its
bed and say to a startled visitor
Isn’t it pretty? but I can no more
invade the dark depths of that box
to sift the gritty dust through my fingers
than I could touch the moon’s face We are
all bone and mush Death purifies
not us Just cicadas
My Mother’s Voice
I hear my mother’s voice
from my own mouth.
Saying not the words she might
have said, but words she never
knew, let alone spoke.
Like pissed off. I savor that
sibilant state, imagining her
ecstasy of chagrin. I say
Fuck off a lot, too. She loved
old words&&—“Fetch” was one of her
faves. Could I palm off the idea that
Fetch off is the same as Fuck off?
Perhaps rather than exorcising her with
rough speech I’ve instead said for her
the things she wanted to say but
was too afraid of her own anger?
As if she was never angry! What rot.
What crap. What shite.
Paddling in Eden
Arms alternate left then right
We push the kayak through the lake
paddles eating pearls of fir-filled water
great sheaves of the icy runoff of green
slopes and fallen birches
Sun high lake rough a day for deep-
brim hats sweatshirts over swimsuits
We’re rough canvas shoes stained
green and carbon frayed red kapok
cushions our life preservers should we
tumble in And have done
The rocky western slope green
and gray with lichen thin birches
our handholds as we scramble
up the resin-scented air of the place
the long sweetgrass the canopy of
leaves and spirals Across the lake
the eastern slope we walked to to see
Stormy Lake from above the wind-
rough lake where you paddled astern
while I let the jib swell with
the northwest wind of late afternoon
One day we slipped along the water
barely using paddles watching
a family of loons Another time
a beaver came upon us slapped his
wide tail on the surface and swam
off disgruntled leaving a wide wake
in the darkening depths This lake
and its western wall of rock
is the place my mind goes when
I want to remember everything
Gay’s poems, essays, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in
over 50 literary journals, including 13th Moon, Alabama Literary Review,
Amarillo Bay, Anemone Sidecar, Apricity Magazine, apt, Atlanta Review,
The Baltimore Review, Bayou, Burningword Literary Journal, Caveat
Lector, Cloudbank, and Confluence. She lives in East Aurora, New York.
Benjamin Wagner
Kopae
A woman with cobweb hair
plastered to her forehead
raises a finger, singles you
out from the crowd
gathered on the sidewalk
around the tacos al pastor
foodtruck & says kopae, kopae
kopae. Your skittish eyes
settle on her linen shirt
luffing in the rare breeze.
Once drawn by the idea
that repetition dissolves
meaning, you give up
your place in the fan-
shaped line, sit beside her
in a sun-faded chair.
She might remind you
of your grandmother,
a parrot who could only say
hello on her ninetieth birthday,
if not for the bright auras
encircling her eyes.
You lay a finger to your chest,
kopae? and she’s already
pointing to her own chest
& the slow-wheeling sky
& the vanishing point
down the avenue & saying
kopae, kopae, kopae,
kopae. Everyone in line
hears what is happening
but pretends not to. The old
woman giggles when
you motion to the pineapple
chunks falling from a taco
to the sidewalk—kopae?
Kopae, she whispers
& nods, kopae, kopae.
That night, as you
enter the unlit room
of your apartment,
there comes a purring
around your ankles:
through the crack in
the window slipped
a stray, whose name
is rising in your throat…
Benjamin Wagner is the author of two illustrated books of erasure poetry, A Race with The Sea and Night Flight (Die Oase) and the forthcoming novel Hideaways. His poetry has recently been published in Isthmus, The Conglomerate and Vaidapé. Based in Berlin, he creates installations of non-invasive graffiti poetry around the world..
Mary Ann Dimand
Castaway Curses Live On
The haunted shark
is swimming, swimming,
swimming just like
every shark. But in its gut
heave stories from the land,
inconceivable, impossible,
malcontent and spiraling
down, then up those valved
intestines. Down. Up. Down. Stories
caper like whales or dolphins
in the bowels of a creature
without frolic. They burn.
Mary Ann Dimand was born in Southern Illinois, and the influence of this region is evident in her writing. Previous publication credits include: The History of Game Theory Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1945; and Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics, among others.
Marc Tretin
Maya, Because I Love You and All Species of Octopus So Much, I Feel Frightened
Hectocotylus—the specialized arm of the male octopus that contains semen. It detaches during coitus
Though I pretend you baked bread
with our daughter because you love her,
I know you just let her watch
and yelled at her for spilling some flour
and though I want to tell you I want us to touch each other more,
it is easier to talk about breadmaking
and it is harder to talk about a child who cannot hold a job,
and since I study sexual selection among animals without backbones,
and since the female octopus almost always cannibalizes the male
I’ll speak to you about how a male octopus can disguise himself as a female
then stealthily shove his hectocotylus into her funnel and not be eaten.
I just want to get next to you.
I want to love you, if I can, or even if I can’t.
That’s why this morning I did not ask you to pass the butter
and ate my rye toast, dry.
I did not want to interrupt you as you made peaked buttery swirls
on the cinnamon bread you had baked
and though I looked at it with hunger,
like I am looking at you now, you didn’t give me a piece,
not even a tiny little piece,
as we comforted each other by pretending not to hear
our daughter, who had locked herself in her bedroom to sob.
Maya, Facing Dementia, Speaks to Her Adult Anoxic Daughter
Zipporah,
if I can say beta-amyloid tangles
are tying my thoughts into knots
I do not have minimal cognitive impairment now,
or is it yet?
When inside the MRI’s cannister
that almost touched my face
I refused to shut my eyes,
but I comforted myself by pretending
I saw the invisible sky beyond the sky
that is so infinite it cannot be misnamed.
That is why I named you Zipporah.
It means bird in Hebrew.
I wanted your home to be in the air,
since my lungs did not give you enough
oxygen to build your brain.
The banging, grinding and random thuds
of this metal womb-like machine
made me think of my incompetent uterus
that had amplified my bellowing lungs and beating heart
and how that noise must have scared you.
Yesterday, when I was removed from the MRI,
I was a reborn woman whose diminishing brain
will turn her into an infant.
Maybe, I will finally be a mother to you,
by letting you be a mother to me.
I can’t promise it will be better next time.
My therapist asked, “Do you want to be a moral person?”
I said I want to end my wanting. Maybe dementia will help.
Since falling white flakes of oblivion will my brain into blankness,
my mind will be like a snow globe.
I need a sculpture of my brain I can hold onto
so I can let go of knowing who I am
and let go of not knowing who I am.
Someday I will forget your face
since my mind will be filled with the half-remembered music
of an extinct bird, Zipporah, at least to me.
I should have loved you for your kindness.
I never touched you when I touched you.
Please throw a bon voyage party for my mind,
when I no longer know your name.
Show off the snow globe.
Say it has a secret recipe for Mother-Under-Glass.
Stay gentle even if I yell a lot.
I am scared.
You’d be right to wish I did not give birth to you.
Thank you for the tears I cannot shed.
A joke. Losing a hippocampus, since it is shaped like a horseshoe,
is a real kick in the head.
Can I hug you?
Can I?
Marc’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Caliban Online, The Diagram, Faultline, Litbreak Magazine, Literary Orphans, Lullwater Review, Whistling Shade, Ghost Town Literary Magazine, Qwerty Magazine, Vox Poetica, and Willow Review. My poetry collection, Pink Mattress, has been published by New York Quarterly Press in 2016.
Mela Blust
Dead rabbits
it was december or january
or february they all
looked the same,
un-sounded the same.
the violent quiet of snow, and
everything sleeping under that
blanket.
for days we watched the gentle white
trapping everything in her silent
embrace
each day , we wrapped our feet for
a long icy walk
out to the meadow carrying feed and water and
fresh straw and hay
and on the last day, walking back,
carrying dead rabbits who couldn’t
weather the storm.
Mela Blust’s work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander(Vol 25, #1), The Nassau Review (forthcoming), and more. Her debut, Skeleton Parade, is available with Apep Publications. She is Head Publicist for Animal Heart Press, editor for Barren Magazine, and poetry reader for The Rise Up Review. Follow her on Twitter.
Victor Altshul
Not As Well Known As Handel, But Damn Good
Had Arcangelo Corelli blown glass
in a third-floor flat on the Via Veneto
he might have fashioned herons,
delicate, decisive, barely visible;
yet I see them flapping brittle wings
soundlessly, tilting to avoid the window
casements, soaring seaward, transparencies
unnoticed by Tyrrhenian fishermen,
and flying nonstop to the Seychelles,
they extend dipped wing tips to underwater nymphs
whose toes do not quite touch the lovely coral hues,
yet siphon them up into the wings and breasts
of the now transfigured birds, unobserved
no longer, glassily shimmering.
Though brighter birds fly higher, faster,
regard the undiminished herons
as with muted colors they saunter home.
Modestly archangels soar, absorbing
pastel hues that do not fade, glass wings
limbering slowly, never breaking.
Victor’s second and third books of poems, Singing with Starlings (2015) and
Ode to My Autumn (2017), were published by Antrim House. Another poetry
book, Strange Birds, was published by Antrim House in 2019. Two of his
poems have appeared in the Hartford Courant.
Abigail Warren
Decomposed Organic Matter
Abby, darling, let go of it,
let go of yourself.
There’s more interesting things
to dwell on.
It’s humility;
your son handed it to you like
mint leaves pulled from the yard.
This is why God gave you children:
so 50 years into your life
you could be brought to your knees.
Think of it as being closer to the
ground.
And now you can go on,
find another angel to fight,
be broken, be glad.
Abigail Warren’s work has appeared in over 30 literary magazines, including Tampa Review, Mantis, Crack the Spine, Big Muddy, Stonecoast Review (#9), Delmarva Review, and others, as well as in the anthology 30 Poems in November. Her essays have been published in Huffington Post, and SALON.
Clara Burghelea
Small hours
Every spell of my son’s furious appetite
reminded me of how my dying mother
could no longer swallow.
Food piled up inside her mouth like a molehill.
Her eyes gazed into mine,
their sparkle turned into muteness.
All I could think of
was the milk staining my shirt
sticky and warm.
Inside the room, life mirrored death
and both of them clung to womanly flesh.
In the corner, the son’s fumbling mouth
called for the milk
dripping over my left hand,
holding the chipped bowl.
For a second, I wondered
if the savor of its taste,
the way my son gulped
and held to the nipple’s potent spring,
could sweeten my mother’s last bites.
A few drops and the taste of me
would always inhabit her mouth,
her decaying body in need for a familiar taste.
It was not the blood that tied us
but the urgency of our feminine bond.
I tasted hers and now,
as her body shrank and thinned like a brown leaf,
she could taste again the daughter
she could no longer recognize.
Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, she got her MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other is scheduled for publication in 2019 with Dos Madres Press.