Issue #94

Lara Chamoun

Mama Bears You

The mirror repeats itself
until it doesn’t. You step through,
barefoot, bareboned, raw,
into a wooded room filled with
everything you never told her,
still wet and red.

The bear is waiting,

smells like oranges crushed into the sun,
juice turned thick, spoiled sweet.
Her breath is heat and rot, damp musk,

it should not have made it through winter.

Grandma made marmalade in a copper pot,
stirred until it clotted,
until it clung to the spoon like fat to torn skin.
She said patience is the key to keeping things whole.
She did not teach you how to hold the bear

who licks your fingers. Your hands smell of sugared glass,
bear’s tongue warm and rough, the scrape of
grandma’s hands against citrus rind,
peeling pith, gnawing, knowing the bitterness.

You cannot tell if the bear is bleeding
or if the blood is yours.

She presses into you, fur matted, sticky.
You remember the first time your mother handed you a knife
and told you to cut away the bad parts.
The first time she told you to hush.
The first time she looked at you like you were something
she had not meant to make.

The bear growls in a voice you remember,
low and patient, like a story told through clenched teeth.
You do not know if she wants to be fed or forgiven.

Grandma says a hungry mama is a dangerous bear;
not when she trembles for her cubs,
but when starvation hollows her heart from her ribs,
when marrow births blood to fill the womb
where she shaped you, newborn honey,
from her grisly, cloying wildness.

Grandma taught you to never run;
that just as she’d learned to redress,
to grow back into her clothes and to walk again,
mama bear will too.
The bear is heavy in your arms.
She will not leave you be.
It is a carving to be considered a daughter.

Lara Chamoun is a high school student from Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The WEIGHT Journal, On the Seawall, The Shore Poetry, Fleeting Daze Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2024 Adroit Summer Mentorship mentee in fiction and reads for Eucalyptus Lit.

Leonie Lacey

My Father Was Never an Artist

But her dad was a painter who
draped her bedroom in seascape.
He braided her hair over breakfast
and pushed the sofa against the wall
when we belted bubblegum hits
after midnight. I can still recall
his cheers from the kitchen. The precision
of her themed birthday cakes. That canvas above
the desk; a roiling, cerulean sea under pencilled
love hearts. A masterpiece invited to ruin.

My father was never an artist
but he could carve exits from long-held
breath. He twisted arms and bent will
until we became monument
to his absence. We let him paint
the whole house black.

Leonie Lacey is a graduate of the Creative Writing programme at University of Galway, Ireland. She lives in Spain with her husband and their dog. Her poems have appeared in Skylight 47, Headstuff.org, and The Galway Review.

Louise Worthington

What You Conjured

Your rage grew feathers, built nests
in my sensible hair, hatched questions
that pecked holes in my certainties
until doubt swarmed like locusts.

Black birds burst from your throat
during dinner, their wings smearing
butter into battle maps. They roosted
in the ceiling beams, dripping shadows
like berries, while your smile spread
sharp as a crow's wing.

Your anger moulted daily, leaving darkness
scattered across my clean floors,
each feather a promise broken,
each nest a problem unsolvable.

When night came, your fury took flight,
circling the house like a storm
of starved ravens, their hunger
echoing your endless no, no, no.

Louise Worthington is a Pushcart Prize Nominee whose work can be found in Reflex Fiction, Storgy, and Boston Literary Magazine, among others. Her publications include “Life Lines”, a poetry volume, “Stained Glass Lives,” and the novel “Distorted Days” described by Kirkus Review as ‘a formidable work that defies narrative orthodoxy.’

Shannon McNicholas

The Last Time We Spoke

Hannah and I

You drove me to the overgrown dirt road
behind your parents’ house in Blacksville
to show me the most picturesque leaves in
West Virginia. I asked if we could hunt
chanterelles when there is a break in the drought.
You asked why I ended things.

You supposed there must be a million
mushrooms for us to find on those hundred
acres. We whipped back and forth through
the winding terrain towards Pennsylvania.
I responded, “You knew from the beginning.
I’m not good with anger.”

We stopped at Mason Dixon and let your dog
out of the truck, all of us meandering towards
the Fairy Trail. Just the edges of each leaf on
the maple tree ahead were tinged scarlet.
You wailed, “You knew about the holes in my
kitchen wall before we dated. I’ve never been
angry at you.” You were right.

The dog bounded ahead of us through
the first muted mustard leaves and into
still water that usually flows to Dunkard Creek,
scooting through the water and splashing,
upsetting us both with his lightheartedness.

I kept my voice steady.
“We can be friends.”

             I’d never seen you cry sober.

Shannon McNicholas is a social worker based in West Virginia. She finds great comfort in writing poetry. Her work has previously been published in Yellow Arrow Journal and Borrowed Solace Journal.

Kaitlin Tan

urban remains

Like a drunken reveler come dawn, a lethargy of heat sways along the asphalt as steam rises from the kettle in my apartment. Slowly, my plywood foundation gives in. A brimful of tea sprouts from my mug. Meanwhile, the flowers in the vase beside me look more like fireworks in a bundle against this blanched morning light. Petals so crisp and clear compared to that hazy everything when, last week, thunder shook those pots of peonies lined along my windowsill, jangled my dirty platters in their unwashed tower until a sound like teeth-clattering filled my face. How the window shook like it wanted so badly to escape the city heat that it’d sooner shatter itself against a tropical storm. I’m paddling between now and then when suddenly, everything turns microscopic: a half-peeled orange rots on the sunlit sidewalk far below, where, along a nearby patch of shore, a barge worker ignores the gum-sticky stares from tourists on the deck of a passing ferry. I didn’t think to ask why I thought I saw a black bear crossing the empty street at three this morning since those looping neon signs blinked just like me, sole witness to a thing no one else would believe. My mug is empty when the setting sun bounds off the skyscrapers, sending light back and forth across the view until I can’t tell building from sky or sky from building, but all are real and true enough. The golden slinks through my blinds, into my draining mug until I am filled with hushed light.

Kaitlin Tan (she/her) grew up between Manila, Philippines and Macao, SAR. She is a junior at Johns Hopkins University majoring in writing seminars and cognitive science, with a minor in visual arts. Her fiction has appeared in Contrary Magazine, Unlikely Stories, and Every Day Fiction. Her poetry is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.

C. Cimmone

Out in California

This Texas winter night is abstruse, a perpetual exhaustion
of wood-creaking days strewn loosely together

with monogamy and family-style casseroles,
kept intact with television shows and various elixirs.

My cold feet unknowingly distract my aging hips
as I rest, and I am able to linger between present

and past to recall a time when each savory California night
was heavily weighted with uncertainty and wonderment.

I anticipated nightly submersions until successfully escaping
each crisp morning, like a tiny bird, as if I’d barely survived

the thin air of a long-winded drive with a man I hardly knew
We avoided nothing, unaware of the risk of going too fast

into discussions, and pressed ourselves into each other’s
futures like dried flowers between book pages

no one could ever possibly find. There was no story
we couldn’t write, no white lie too small for use,

and we balanced ourselves on a fate we drafted in sand
under the momentary bright green flash of a San Diego sunset.

I doubt I even loved him enough to begin the journey,
but the pull of his strange philosophies was stronger than

the frail life my father had paved for me outside
a small factory town in a forgotten Texas valley.

There is no vibrant epiphany to be found in towns
like this, only dusty men sitting in bars, going on and on

about wives they’ve sent off to mental wards as they stumble
to clog jukeboxes with oily change and songs about Oklahoma.

Here in Texas, there are no rocky hills with avocado trees
and freshly rolled cigarettes. There are no valiant roars

of 18-year-old pride overlooking Tijuana. There are no twinkling
city lights or all-night diners to eat lemon meringue pie.

And there is no Pacific Coast Highway to sing along with you
when the moon is nowhere to be found. Just as my father told me,

I found no wet, stormy days to untangle and decompress
my wild and hurried mind in California.

There were no plump women cooking meals with bacon grease
for their husbands. And there were no easy walks home

for sheltered rest on my mother’s soft side of the bed.
But what my father was right about most of all—

something I think about all these years later,
something perhaps I knew even back then—

there were no good men to love me in the golden hills of California.


C. Cimmone is an editor and poet from Texas who fantasizes about waking up in Vermont.

Charles Elin

Paper Stars

His girlfriend moved out, carrying a bag
of overnight changes. She went to live in a tent,
taking her beach chair and a stuffed bear. The
apartment only came with a ceiling and walls.
She felt more protected closer to the curvature
of the horizon. And in just a few steps, she was
within a dome that wrapped her up.

Charles Elin worked with writer, Larry Fagin, who published Charles’ chapbook. His flash fiction has appeared in Columbia Journal, Corium, Midway, and Fagin’s Delineator. Charles’ poems have been published in over a dozen journals. His latest chapbook is Orange Fanta. Mind what Comes and Goes is Charles’ first poetry book.

P.C. Scheponik

Where I Belong

It always happens— the longing, the sense of emptiness,
like a calling to return.
I swear I can feel the sea’s pull on me,
drawing me back like the surf, after it has thrown itself ashore.
I can hear the gulls crying, their calls echoing down the long halls
of memory.
I yearn for the sky with its clouds running free toward horizon’s line,
gluing heaven and earth together.
Even the sand beckons me with its swirls and salt patterns
that let me read the secrets the universe tries so hard to keep:
the abandoned shells of scallops and whelks—
temples and thrones fallen from fingers of divinity,
lying half-buried, waiting for me or one within me to come
and gather the abundance of infinity dashed before my feet
by the waves’ lunar rush and retreat.
I tell you this: when I am not near the sea, I am near the grave—
the best in me calling, begging to be saved, to return to the world
of wind and wave, to be home where I belong.

P.C. Scheponik is a lifelong poet who lives with his wife and their shizon. His writing celebrates nature, the human condition, and the metaphysical mysteries of life. He has published six collections of poems. His work has also appeared in numerous literary journals. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee.

Laura Hannett

The Poet’s Mother Visits Me

“What could it mean to a boy
that you had redefined the cruel
beloved”
—Agha Shahid Ali, from “Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz”

1.

The poet-professor cooked for his class,
beloved dishes fiery with spices
he had to drive an hour to buy,

one of the stings of exile he bore
with a half-smile and a shrug,

for the sake of an aroma from
ten thousand miles away.

2.

He wondered if I might stretch beyond
green-girl lamentations, the cruel one
never more than just a boy who didn’t stay.

And if myopic little mountains
I made from crumpled sheets
could be a vivid postcard vista
if I clambered up the scree
to see what was in the distance.

He wrote of dreaming of his parents,
asleep beneath a mirrored quilt,
filled with love and disquiet
a hemisphere away.

3.

This morning, in silence, his mother sits with me,
in the time of icicles, sharp beyond the glass.

I am not asleep but dreaming. I cannot see her face,
I know her only from his poems. Our gentle, rebel children
sleep too far away to hear, not precisely home
in the lands where they were born.

She is not asleep but dreaming of her son,
in Massachusetts, and knitting him a cardigan,
a gift for his return.

Between us floats a ghostly gauze of silver-dusted moonlight
and questions I would ask if we could hear each other speak:
How to know it’s time for exile, and how she bore his leaving?

How to dream across the distance from a cruel, beloved land?

4.

Indifferent one! Tormentor!
Your despairing lovers crowd the streets.
They long for you, as I do,

dreaming of your fabled favors
and of the just delights
that surely must be shining
from your averted eyes.

Laura Hannett lives in Central New York with her wonderful family. She is a graduate of Hamilton College and the College of William and Mary. Other work has been published or is forthcoming from Black Bough Poetry, Last Stanza Poetry Journal and The Bluebird Word.

George Smith

I Went to the City and No One was There

New York seemed crowded at first but I stopped seeing anyone at all. At the 9/11 memorial they sell hats. I had some difficulty finding things like apples and peanut butter. For the city that never sleeps, I walked past more people sleeping than I see in most. For all my righteousness, I acted asleep by the fifth person asking for change, I walked past the woman nursing an infant behind a cardboard sign. In the subway a man asked for a couple dollars and I gave him five of my seven. Down the stairs another asked for a couple bucks. I lied and said I didn’t have any, but since I gave the other five, it evens out. I committed two counts of theft of service then and when he saw me sigh at the three twenty-five fare, said,              “I got you,” reached over the emergency exit, and held the door for me. I bowed my head as I walked through. How hadn’t I seen anyone there? In Times Square a woman played the saddest song I’ve ever heard. Only this made sense. A homeless man in the busy street shouted,              “Help!” to someone the rest of us couldn’t see.              I’m not sure if I saw anyone there at all.

George Smith, a Christian artist from Georgia, studied poetry for a time at the University of Georgia, before leaving and hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2024 in pursuit of a closer relationship with God, time to read and write, and living in better service of humanity according to his calling.