Issue #86

Dave Malone

Crawfish boil

I don’t know the names
of my nerves, but the chefs
at hip and right ankle

are having a long-distance
phone call as in old days,
with plenty of crackle

and dead air
comin down the line.
I’m pretty sure

there’s also a murder of chefs
in the cradle of my groin,
their fat hands

swaddled in cayenne
and Cajun Chef,
raised and raging

and transmitting dinner orders
all the way down to my kneecap
where the crawfish boiler

is really cookin,
with a round
of sous chefs

learning the trade,
poking and jabbing
and stirring

and messing
with the heat
all hours of the afternoon.

Dave Malone (he/him) is a poet from the Missouri Ozarks. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Bypass (Aldrich Press, 2023). His work has been featured on NPR and appeared in Midwest Review, San Pedro River Review, and Red Rock Review. Online at davemalone.net.

Marceline White

Hunger Ghazal, 1981

As days in Long Kesh drag on, Bobby Sands shrinks, more breath and bone than muscled man yet his spirit never falters, the desire for dignity stronger than hunger as man after man devours himself, ouroboros, bedsheet becomes shroud, a carapace, man transforms to martyr, still the Movement hungers All I’ve been taught by the Catholic Church is how to deny myself what I desire, what brings me pleasure. At 13, I die(t). In solidarity, I strike too. I hunger for the unoriginal sins, for an apple, for apple pie, a young man to taste it. This empty, this ache in my belly. Ancestors fled famine, arrived hungry for new lives but the old ways remain baked in these bones. Old men nurse beers and centuries-long grudges that ancient familiar hunger for a united land and vengeance. Here, we pray, light candles, say rosaries to appease our god who hungers for offerings– Hail Marys or new martyrs for his great gob. After school, we watch the news, another keening mother, another hunger striker gone. I’m on my knees again, looking for answers, here a small black box I enter. Lie. Confess to sins undone because I’m told I am sinful. Like Eve, I’m hungry &this garden is pretty but who demands unquestioning obedience? The smallest child asks a stream of whys? I want a world of why, a world of yes&more. Oh, Marceline, stay hungry.

Marceline is a Baltimore-based writer and activist. Marceline’s writing has been nominated for the 2022 and 2023 Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, trampset, Prime Number, The Orchard Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review and others.

Marie Cloutier

I Can Count

The cat’s plastic face says I Can Count.
I bought the calculator with a bracelet of fake pearls
from a yard sale, traded for it the third grade,
with another little girl.
just white numbers on a red plastic case.
nothing anyone but me needed.

but it doesn’t matter if I needed
it or not. I was good at math; I could count
on my own. I carried around in case
I wanted to show it off, like my pearls,
but better. Many of us little girls
didn’t care about the kind of grades

on report cards, just the grades
we gave each other. We needed
things for our third grade girl
pride. You weren’t going to count
with old shoes and tacky pearls,
or an out of style pencil case.

it stayed with me for years, in any case,
that calculator I got back in third grade.
I still have it today, alongside real pearls,
other things to bring joy I need,
and now that collection, too large to count,
includes some thing definitely not meant for girls.

but people judge you. “That’s for little girls”-
your plushes, pencils, toaster, even the pink CD case
with your favorite cat on the front, counting
all the ways you’ve failed to make the grade
as a woman, failed to do what they think you need,
be the grownup in a twinset and wedding pearls.

now I know better which pearls
of wisdom to accept, better than the girl
who let someone else tell her what she needs
to be happy. Now I keep it to make the case
that joy is its own reward, that nobody gives out grades
or the right to say “I can count.”

Marie Cloutier (she/her) is a writer and poet. Her work has been published in Scribes Micro, Bare Back Literary, and elsewhere. She is at work on a memoir. Connect with her on her website, www.mariecloutier.com.

Lulu Liu

Chickadee

Summer closes in.
Ferns unfurling at the treeline. Even the understory is thick with green.

She      has added to her nest
in the hollow. Some lint, it seems, straw, bits of cat fur.

I feel like one of her chicks. Each time
she shows up      my heart skips. The nest erupts in tiny beaks.

Lulu Liu is a writer and physicist working in the space industry, lives currently between Merrimack, New Hampshire and Parsonsfield, Maine. Her poetry has previously appeared in Apple Valley Review, Rust + Moth, Passengers, and others. She’s excited to be featured on an upcoming episode of Poems from Here, on Maine Public Radio.

Ray Malone

étude 67

look for a while, at the winding path, its way
down to where you were, what would best
accomplish your return, erase your tardiness
in declining towards it, the delays that stemmed
from hesitations in the heart, the many missed beats
in the blood, its rhythm otherwise the measure
of everything your eye opened to, wide and desiring,
of every dream exposed to the light of your days:
is it the dark itself inhibits, the habit of abandonment,
from the first reverse, the rending of the world
into pieces, to put together again, the how many times
of who knows, and how, adrift in the threats,
and the promises, disturbing the path, perturbing
at every turn, as if at sea in the mind, in sight of
nothing but itself:
is it the fear of what to find there, the known
to be unknown, the dirt and the dust it throws up
unfamiliar, the favoured way to be utterly foreign,
that where you were was not your home, your own,
but where, one day, you simply failed to be there

Ray Malone is an Irish writer and artist living in Berlin, Germany, working on a series of projects, of which Études is the latest, exploring the lyric potential of minimal forms based on various musical and/or literary models. His work has been published in numerous print/online journals in the US, UK and Ireland.

David Colodney

Where will we hide when the rain stains us?

Storm clouds dangle like ghosts
in a vapor trail & buildings downtown
fold into sky. No umbrella, we scatter
for cover like reckless syllables
colliding under thunder. I squint
into the squall & see an ibis perched
on a bus bench chest out, defying
shelter. We cut across Biscayne,
up the stairs to the Metrorail
where the screech & roar
of the train’s arrival drowns
out another gale. Water pelts us,
stinging harder than the words
we’ve spoken. The ibis takes flight,
flaps its black-edged wings, soars
over the Freedom Tower.

David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is author of the chapbook, Mimeograph, and his poetry has appeared in multiple journals. A two-time Pushcart nominee, David has written for the Miami Herald and the Tampa Tribune and currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal.

Sara McClayton

The Morning He Arrived

The morning he arrived there was a wind
That whistled through our village like a cry.
A fear fell on our hearts; we clutched the children,
Their faces, rapt and shining, watched the road,
They shimmered with a strange and prescient song,
The youngest were the first to hear the flute.

The grown among us could not discern the flute
From the plaintive wailing of the wind,
But the children felt the wonder and the song,
And they clambered to the music with a cry,
A knowing man was dancing down the road,
And his dark eyes were a promise for the children.

We were startled by the clamor of our children,
By the piercing marvel of the flute,
The man played, skipping blithely down the road,
Then like an ecstatic snake began to wind
Around the town in circles, and his cry
Filled every gaping heart with reckless song.

We heard the call, we understood his song
In the glowing eyes, the glisten of our children,
And we cared not for the plague, we gave a cry:
We will accept the rats before the flute!
But our vehemence was swallowed by the wind,
And the indifference of the empty road.

The rats screeched, and they scattered down the road,
They were frightened and reproachful of the song,
But like paper dolls he did unwind
A luminous reel of children,
Who gleamed and leapt and opened to the flute,
And left us stunned, too desolate to cry.

We remember how we soothed them when they cried,
And how they vanished down the waiting road,
We buried the last vestige of the flute
In the recess of our hearts preserved for song,
We crave the sacred place reserved for children,
The space between the music and the wind.

The children, glad as angels, chased the flute,
Their joyous cry resounding in the wind,
In our history, on a road still filled with song.

Sara McClayton is a teacher and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She enjoys spending time with her husband and dog, exploring the outdoors, and practicing and teaching yoga.

Gail Braune Comorat

Daughter Who Paints Only in Green

What does it mean? The pistachio sky, jade house
on lime green grass. Nothing but myrtle,
juniper, sage, and basil, blooming in your garden.
No fuschia or magenta, nothing lemony. Only
pine and olive, emerald and moss for your palette.

Daughter of jealousy, of desire, whose eyes are skyblue
not skygreen—you refuse rosecolored glasses,
doubt days of amber honey. In your chartreuse seas
you paint celadon dolphins and the round seafoam
bubbles of Right whales as they surface and feed.

Dear Green Girl Warrior: you’re fourteen, jangly
malachite bangles stacked on your arms. You dream
of riding the night train in Prague, of viewing Iceland’s
shifting Northern Lights. You are imagined music, bandaids
on skinned knees. You are suffering your first boyfriend,

insist his eyes are the color of rain in a van Gogh painting.
You say you believe there is a god somewhere
snapping his fingers to a scratchy version of “Mack the Knife”
while you are left to read the gathering clouds
like mint tea leaves, wondering what catastrophe comes next.

Gail Braune Comorat is a founding member of Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild and is a co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards. She served as an editor for Quartet, an online poetry journal by women fifty and over. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Grist, and The Widows’ Handbook. She lives in Lewes, Delaware.

Elizabeth Coletti

July

While my sister gets engaged in the endless blear
of heat-stained day-baked eyes and bourbon mirth,
I cry in church
eighth pew left side. Only foreign tongues,
inverted Pentecost, in the priest’s outcry on decisions
and spiritual
desolation. Désolé, désolé, sorry, sorry, I am
not here as heat smokes off the sunsetting beach
like ink
on the fingers of a man handling newsprint.
Désolé, désolé, I do not speak French. I do not
speak love.
The fingers of a man sliding a gold ring
over her knuckle while the horizon line sets fire.
I was never
made for this summer. July-born
for the irony only. I was never made for this love.
It smolders
in my throat, a coal atop on my tongue,
with the Eucharist dissolves. Désolé, désolé,
for this soul
I will drag to your wedding. Désolé,
désolé, in the cathedral front row left side.

Hey Beautiful

There are three things in this poem.

The first is that when I was catcalled
in the Walmart parking lot I said thank you
because my grandmother taught me
that a compliment is only cheap
if you respond like it is, which is
of course absolute bunk because

The second is I’ve become so full up
of failed self-betterment paints and pills
and prayers they’ve soured inside
me like wine and when I read


The third, a book where the author says
it’s the pretty girls who really need
to protect themselves I write in red
pen in the margins that on behalf
of ugly girls everywhere we would like
to be included in this discovery
of outrage so that one or another of us
does not start believing we are only
good enough to be gracious
of the jeers that deign to fall our way.

So there they are:
the parking lot the wine the margins
and the hidden fourth, that I was told
to stop speaking directly to the reader.
It’s needy, she said.
You don’t want to sound needy, do you?

Elizabeth Coletti is an editor and writer from North Carolina now living in New York City. She is a recipient of the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Prize in Fiction and a finalist for the James Hurst Prize for Fiction, and her prose and poetry has appeared in the Pomona Valley Review, Panoply Zine, Cellar Door, and elsewhere.

Jessica Wang

the night we turned 17

we lit a cig under the eye of the hunchbacked
tortoiseshelled neighborhood cat as

the second-hand CD store’s sign
crookedly flashed at us across the street.

the smoke tasted like mint in my lungs;
i imagined cilia dying. we blew out the gray

into hazy, amorphous spaces, dead-brain matter
suspended in peppered air. back in the Prius,

we passed the puff to each other between not-
yet yellow fingertips that scrolled up and down

Google Maps listings, looking for the next adventure
and its closing time. pulling into the lightless alley

behind the Chinese supermarket, we built a cross
of metal cans and sheets

and propped it up against the gritty brick wall.
rotate that 270 degrees, fuck! yes—

nu-metal blasts out from the car’s bass system
behind us as our heels fall to the ground in prayer.

find God in our feast of Dole canned pineapple
wrappings littered beneath His feet. we bow

and shovel debris into our stomachs,
waiting for the ten other disciples.

Jessica Wang is a Chinese-American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Their words can be found in places such as boxes in the garage and the underside of puddles. In their free time, they enjoy playing with their cat and running the literary magazine Eucalyptus Lit.

Ewen Glass

New Builds

Cul-de-sac as thought-bubble,
houses stitched white to fields:
grass, cows, barley,
the making of the place.
A Divorce of Homes
is what farmer William called it,
knowing in his unkindness
that the divorce was his,
and between generations.
Families, the town itself,
leant past trivialities like sustenance,
opening not like a flower
but a balled-up newspaper.
Custody in growth.
William could no more change his
kids than the heavy clay of his land.
Together, they would yield houses
of quiet confusion;
Of the town? Of the country?
And when old William retires
he will be forced to move to a bungalow
on the other side of town,
and in passing that cul-de-sac
will hear his own thoughts there,
saying over and over
something about time.

Ewen Glass is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and lots of self-doubt; on a given day, any or all of these can be snapping at his heels. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Bridge Eight, Poetry Scotland, Bending Genres and elsewhere.