Issue #73
Bella Rotker
Self portrait while visiting my childhood dog’s grave
—After Harrison Boe
I land softly, like so much potential. I am keeping
this girlhood as a kind of grief, writing poems that cannot
account for this loss. I’m reading the legacy
poets and trying to cram myself inside
their souls. When I return, my mirror
still has a crack spindling up the side
from the time I threw my hairbrush at my brother
and missed. Like an admission of guilt, I am sitting
on the carpet that used to be mine and combing
the months-old dog hair out of the shag. Not anger anymore
but this emptiness settling over the air like the thick
blanket of southern summer. I am inheriting my mother’s
legacy, which is to say I am gently mourning the kind
of girl she wanted me to be. Like gravestones,
the sweaters I buried in my closet are still waiting
for me to sort them into things worth preserving
and a donation pile. I stick my fingers in the mud
where the dog house used to be and drop seeds
in the holes. I squeeze the water out of a clump
of mud and apologize. Like a poet, I’m calling this gone.
I am re-reading the sparkly diary I found under the mattress
and forgiving the girl who wrote it. I am falling
into the body I have always been trapped in. This body
like a permanent hometown. I could not
run away from myself. This is the age of mercy.
Like an exit, I am still the girl I always have been––
not escaping but waiting to become. I lay cool stones
around the dirt they buried the dog in. Imagine
my mother laying the animal’s stiff body down there
with the blanket she’d parade around this now-empty
house. Like a ritual, I rise like I once did:
expecting to be held. This is the age of spirits
hanging behind the pink wallpaper. Of remembering
that we weren’t always so senseless.
This is the age of nothing left to wait for. I land
like my mother, this emptiness
a generational kind of hurting.
Bella Rotker studies at Interlochen Arts Academy. Their work appears in The Lumiere Review, Full Mood Mag, and DePaul’s Blue Book: Best American High School Writing, among others. When she’s not writing or fighting the patriarchy, Bella’s hanging out with friends, watching the lakes, and looking for birds.
Shiwei Zhou
Love’s Shadow
I loved you by worrying you were dead
while you walked home one May evening in the balmy air
with the birds quiet in the tree-lined streets.
I loved you by criticizing everything I could find
of where you fell short from all that you were supposed to be —
and you could have been so much more.
I could have loved you by hitting you, as others did
to their children, but I did not go so far, nor push you as hard as some.
Maybe I could have loved you better.
I loved you in the deep canyon of my fear. As deep
as fear runs, so love must also run,
a river carving deeper beneath the stone.
Why is it when I write about my love for you
all I say is what I’ve seen
of Love’s shadow?
So be it: you will know my love by
the cool darkness of it on the grass. After all,
a shadow was cast by something real.
Shiwei Zhou is an infectious diseases physician in Michigan. Her narrative writing and poetry have appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and the Healing Muse (vol.23, forthcoming October 2023).
Annette Sisson
First Language
A girl of five, she dreams in tongues
of bark and root. She mounts rungs
nailed to a burred trunk, grasps
the greening branch above her head,
wrenches her small body up.
Hands, elbows, knees, feet,
she scrambles one fork to the next.
Leaves imbibe light, obscuring
her parents’ jagged morning, brows
drawn, checkbook splayed open,
the hiss and rasp of brittle tongues.
Harbored among nest and twig,
she idles, drifts, breathes in
ripples of breeze, exhales sky.
Annette Sisson’s poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust and Moth, Citron Review, Lascaux Review, Glassworks, Cider Press Review, and others. Her book Small Fish in High Branches was published in 2022 by Glass Lyre. Her work has received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.
Ali Beheler
Animal, Driver
This frame around everything I have
ever seen, half-presence of nose
lining the margins, proscenium arch
of shadow, ghost, curtain pulled
sideward, fringe of all memory—
is itself forgotten, the impassable
horizon eclipsed—I look, live through
my vision, even recall what I have seen
as if everything had been gathered
panoramically, the full 360 travelled,
as if there were no limit to my grasp.
I think and speak of them as mine,
like they were bare tools, separable
and pure—vision, hearing, and the rest—
neat, round beads I held in my hand
then strung one by one on a string I wear,
I own, I nearly forget is there
around my neck—or single, sharp arrows
packing my quiver silently until
I am surrounded, reach for them, slice
an opening through the moment’s invisible air
to my object, now clear, now possessed—
look what I caught!—as I name it, bring it home
to encase with the collection, thinking
my mind is my home, and my home
is a columbarium of the captured, filed,
and not this taking place—this breathing,
reaching, crumbling and rebuilding skin—
bounded space, world, creator, profligate
of every molecule and motion that gives support
to me, to the very illusion of a me
it carries on its back, quietly through
the dark parts, driving while she dreams.
Note: After Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense.”
Ali Beheler (she/her) teaches philosophy at a small college in Hastings, NE, by day and cycles sonnets by night. She has most recently published in Plainsongs Poetry Magazine and Philosophy Today, and was a writer-in-residence in September 2022 and May 2023 at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, CA.
Julia Caroline Knowlton
On Painting
After years of wanting
to try, I dared to try.
I opened tubes of color—
burnt umber, cerulean blue,
blood red, forest green.
I spread and whispered,
blotted, brushed and scraped,
swaying in a liquid dream.
It felt like betraying language
(that old marriage of black words
on a white page) in favor of color.
I felt like a wife taking a lover.
Cool touch of cotton canvas
stretched on a new bed!
Wet paint became my untold desire.
Now I come home to the poem
eager to leave again. I come
home to the poem with paint stains
on my skin, memories of the
color lover spattered in my mind.
Julia Caroline Knowlton MFA PhD teaches French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her work includes a 2018 GA Author of the Year Award and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. Kelsay Books will publish her third chapbook, Life of the Mind, in 2023.
Lindsay Clark
did AI write this poem
and if it did, what command did I use;
what result would you get if you used it;
/search?q=is+this+rhetorical+device+suitable
&sxsrf=did we collaborate to convince […]
if AI frankensteined this stanza / which part /
who is the I &
where has it tentacled @whose-little-privacy
didn’t I query
here floods the light I named
my daughter for, through wind-jounced
blinds, pooling on a dime
store Anna Karenina
but you don’t know if any of that is true we suppose you
don’t know my voice or00100000what script it speaks
whether or not I am
username\home_from_work_today
you will have to tilt your head, squeeze the words
like ear drops, hold and decide if the cold slosh
like the primitive surf that assaulted the ossicles
of our ancestors is uncanny enough to be real
Lindsay Clark lives in NYC with her family.
John Muro
Magpie
Claude Monet 1868
Easy to overlook the bird,
perched on the edge of pasture,
taking in the land’s transitory
splendor with its educated eye,
certain it would be difficult to
ask for anything more than this
still hour and soft settlement of
snow devoid of sound or
movement, where the boughs
of trees are angled and adorned
in sleeves of bridal white,
standing silent beneath a windless
sky that’s been spun from frost
and clouds of angel-down and
all light flows and is held in
luminous shadows of diluted
blue and violet, evoking a kind
of fallen dusk that had ruptured
and then eased itself through
a wattle fence and a gate of
crusted ice where the pathway
leads to an unblotched landscape
and the reverent bird ministers
to a world’s exquisite emptiness.
A two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and also for the Best of Net Award, John has published two volumes of poems – In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite – in 2020 and 2022, respectively. His work has appeared in Acumen, Barnstorm, Sky Island, Valparaiso Review, and elsewhere.
Rich Murphy
Fairytale Ending?
Formal curiosity chased myth
deeper into denial tunnels to live below
rabbit holes twisted in the body.
Reason won’t put up with ol’ time religion
where hand-me-down stories repair.
Once, the unconscious ballast
beneath the ocean to allow the iceberg tip
all the attention whether for ship crews
or psychologists and neurologists.
Though the planet cycles innocence
and violence, every discipline
inside and outside laboratories
whistle while working on details:
Stem cells or a pin-point galaxy.
Messy entrails and the monsters escape
from participant and observer consideration.
Should conscious explanation fail
the Homo sapiens species,
the storehouse for thought and language
will be found as though novel
by hick and hovel mind miners.
Rich Murphy’s “First Aid” will be published this summer by Resource Publications at Wipf and Stock, which has also published Meme Measure (2022); Space Craft (2021); and Practitioner Joy (2020). His poetry has won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice (Americana, 2013, and The Left Behind, 2021) and the Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008).
Megan Wildhood
I Dare You to Hope
We scrambled over fractures of glass winking
in the sun, trying to mind the canyoned concrete,
car doors jutting, snapshotted in mid-
flail. Smoke seemed to waft up from the wreckage,
aching to soften this freshly serrated world, shrapnel
from the targeted buildings still falling.
The endless rain does not wash,
does not clean but gathers and re-gathers,
collects and distributes
assorted portions of brick,
angles of windows,
every now and then a solitary shoe or glove.
And then we saw it, a warning to survivors:
a grove of cherry blossoms, torn:
made wholly of cloth.
Megan Wildhood (meganwildhood.com) is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere.
Mark DeCarteret
Overheard in My Head
I’m as bored with the lost tapes
as I was with the strolls and the lollipops
I sucked to cut the taste of my pills.
But still, the past keeps its lists,
here, where the moonlight never hits
and the hours are re-married to tyrants, armed.
Is it too late to put in for the stupor,
the non-toxic paste you kept stored in a shoebox.
From where I stand, the park’s interactive map
panders only to those who can bear up
under the push button sun, plexiglass glare,
while the real trees swell with what’s left
of the real heat, each of its real leaves becoming
more out of reach with every guest speaker.
I’ll say this for what was the same
illness that she always saw in me.
But there’s little art to these latest creations less
routed in the act of transition or detour-taking.
So, even with most of my ear gone I’m still half-
listening to the same notes from yesterday’s tryout
as if they were stones tossed around
in my mouth for my most inner ear to hear.
The sun now goes for the fog. Then the unintelligible.
I’m being honed into shadow only lonelier, older,
more true to that self I supposedly sold off
in dash after dash after dash or so this is
what I’ve been told in these unlikeliest of silences.
If, as my horoscope warns, I turn into a werewolf tonight
it will not be the snuggly, pug-nosed, variety
they’ve pitted against the rage of the village
or the militaristic tactics of the castle,
one camera aimed at a raised torch,
another, a candle, the moths waiting to storm it.
I’m still not feeling myself. Here, where the flame
has left off, its blue stare reassuring me that
what isn’t the dance of a thousand reds. Is its start.
Mark DeCarteret has hosted and organized two reading series. Co-edited an anthology of NH poets. And was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth NH. Twice, a finalist for NH Poet Laureate. His work has appeared recently in The American Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and BlazeVOX (which recently published the first chapter of his novel Off Season).