Issue #84
Karl Sherlock
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At Some Point in Time Is the End of the Horologist’s Pocket Watch
Shambolic
/ to me / \ for Paul Funge \
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in the charnel of a kitchen sink letters fearsome with honeycombs cigarettes searing me while he sketched sudged my profile in scuffled hues my Corrasable Bond thick with rants in my prime Keats coughing final sprigs gifted Sunday afternoons to slip under my unmade bed latch my door make it hard hard work to read it again after he died go on pick the strongbox in my passport wallet raise its leaves folded palimpsest all his frontways pining \ your cheekbone \ BLUE nacre \ my acrylic \ saxophones \ of lonesome paint then write like that shambolic hunger until words peel me back to front like that just to have loved my self the body’s long bones with no need |
panic burn my Wexford artist’s love of his desire for mine for he’d have my naked youth on canvas board and I’d have purchase now to fill up about the toils of becoming me dying of blood and verse instead menial jobs long books of short poems and write wherever I could hide it from myself his one single remaining love letter with its locked jaw find it slumbering to daylight read its jumbled lovesick atop his backwards joyful nonsense RED ruff / desert / beardissimo famished / January / GOLDfinches / walk astride us stricken into the hardtack of Monday and swallow me water and ash just like that to let the ink drizzle down for the hard honest work of a poem |
Author’s note: The late Paul Funge, with whom I lived in Dublin for a time, was a kind and fiercely brilliant artist of some gravitas in Ireland as well as internationally. Info about him is widely available on the Web, but his listing in the Dictionary of Irish Biography might provide a competent general introduction to him and his work.
Sense
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You’ve listened for it; cupped your hand around a hearing aid, to eavesdrop on your pantry’s orderly silence. Thought, perhaps it’s down a hallway, buzzing on a tv—its kazoo of polemics. No, not there either. Searched for sense where it lives, as if not rhetorical. As if sense had longitude and landmass puzzled across time zones, like Soviet republics. Looked in vain for the good of sense, hoping it’s not just another meridian to divide the terrible from the horrible. Inveighed how sense leaves you to brine in its smallness of death-rattles; its COVID despairs; the loud waking unto sudden deafness one April hour; the kōans that seize you in the white noise of a DMV, how we will never save ourselves from our selves. Yet, even there, you sensed sense lurking, colonizing you unawares while it shifted its syllogisms underfoot, cool and heedless as a nation’s annexed borders. It counted your steps to its guillotines; prepared you for the cleaving of head from commonwealth, pulse from breath; your body splayed into Mercator projections. Until, in a lost language of tinnitus, sibilant with cicadas and chant, it occupied your blood-filled ear, spoke into it one final lie before leaving altogether: oh yes, you were always its native soul, and, oh, my love, how it longed to map the elusive source of you it never could find within the homeland of itself. |
Disabled, queer author Karl Sherlock’s recent work appears in Broken Lens, Mollyhouse, RockPaperPoem, Stone Boat, Street Light, Third Wednesday, and others. Karl’s an English professor and a Sundress 2014 “Best of the Net” finalist for his disability memoir about marrying an electroshock conversion therapy survivor of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
John Muro
Al Fin del Dia
Clouds hover like a second, higher
horizon above a dead-calm harbor
where the curved bows of wooden
boats imperceptibly rise and fall
as if they’re in a soundless sleep
and night pushes on, gradually
overtaking the inlet’s whetstone
luster moments before the last
of summer light is reeled in and,
barely audible above a listless
wind, the feeble ping of rigging
cuffing masts and transforming
this moment into one of becalmed
marvel when all burdens appear
to be lifted just the way the misfit
moon was later unyoked from
the sprawl of marsh and a fevered
spill of swallows rose to savor
the last light lingering and the
deepening peace of dusk.
A Best of the Net nominee, thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and a 2023 Grantchester Award recipient, John Muro has published two volumes of poems – In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite. His work has appeared in Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, Sky Island, Neologism, Valparaiso Review, and elsewhere.
Harry Katz
April Showers
The darkness here is verdant in
The spring.
Humming and warm,
Playful in its tenuous grasp on the neighborhood,
Broken up only by fireflies.
Bonfires.
The usual.
On the night before the funeral,
I take a break from packing
And watch my son run down the street,
Our old dog at his heels
As they chase lightning bugs.
All things in bloom.
When he turns back to me, I am so grateful for the shadows on my face.
Grammar and the Afterword
I have a question.
And so I dawdle up to my teacher,
All buck teeth and baby fat.
Lips licked, bowl cut shaggy, pencil in hand
I speak bluntly:
Mrs. Flynn, if a lady was married
and then her husband died is she a
miss or still a missus?
Her smile is wry and wistful and
Other words I’ll learn in time.
Missus, sweetheart, still missus.
Harry Katz is a part-time bartender and student of American Studies at Stanford University. His work has appeared in the Rye Whiskey Review and Do Geese See God? and won the Bocock Guerard Fiction Prize. He lives in Central Virginia, and can be reached and found at @katzinbag on Twitter.
Nora Glass
Icarus Over the Grasslands
Sunrise.
Prairie.
Morning, broken.
Sun with halo.
Wind quiet, like a prayer.
I swear I see something, or someone, tumble
From the sun into the sawgrass jaws below, frightened, a small cry.
His body breaks gently and his blood spills,
Swiftly desiccated in the heat.
I look again.
Nothing there.
Landscape,
Silent.
Nora Glass is a high-strung 17-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia. Passionate about the theatrical, poetic, and linguistic, she can be found reading, writing, and making unnecessarily complicated spreadsheets. Her poetry has appeared and will appear in The WEIGHT Journal, Eunoia Review, Moonflake Press. Her website can be found at noraswriting.weebly.com.
Charisse Stephens
Sonnet, Unstable
“Those who leave the Church are like a feather blown to and fro in the air. They know not
whither they are going; they do not understand anything about their own existence; their faith,
judgment and the operation of their minds are as unstable as the movements of the feather
floating in the air.” —Brigham Young
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Those who leave the Church are like a feather? I hated him for saying that. The con -descension: like a feather in the air, helpless against the wind? Once faith is gone, the mind and all its judgment follow after? Unstable is the word he used, to spawn pity and fear and self-congratulation. Distrust. Dismissal. Distance. Yes, I’m bitter— cause he was right. Unstable is the word for what I was: a blown mind like shrapnel, like glass, expanded, melted, pressured, shattered, and volatile. Flying— like voices in a chapel, half wind and half will —like a bird, I know I’m falling, fear. |
Charisse Stephens is a poet and teacher with a deep fascination for history, science, religion, and language. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Body’s Experience of Religion anthology, Last Leaves, and Irreantum. She lives in Salt Lake City with her partner, two kids, and dog Polly.
Pamela Hobart Carter
Solstice Crow
for Paul Mullin
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On our downward voyage through ebony hours, you love to count seconds crossed off solar smolder, adore shouting before stroke of solstice, hope crowds join you to note momentousness of orbital motifs—longest or shortest, most, most, most … Fathoming only cold gloom or profound loss, forgetful of coming solid luminosity—months of protracted yellow, forgetful of our rotational rondo, (or seasonally disordered), others drown below low-color atmospheres. Eons ago you vowed to horn-blow upon those moments of shortest solar showing. Now your song jogs lost memory of cosmic knowledge: on solstice obscurity comes to ground. Journeys aloft closely follow journeys down into shadowy coal. Solar glow grows post-solstice. Orbs bounce. Old souls drop into tombs, carom out, reborn. |
Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Pamela Hobart Carter is author of the chapbooks “Her Imaginary Museum,” “Held Together with Tape and Glue,” and “Behind the Scenes at the Eternal Everyday.” Her plays have been produced in Seattle (home), Montreal (childhood home) and Fort Worth. Website: https://playwrightpam.wordpress.com/
Scott Waters
The Neighbor’s Porch Light
Night climbs inside the box
of the window, elbows pressed
against the frame—
keeps one gold eye open,
winking, as a tree passes
a palm over its brow.
Scott Waters graduated with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Scott has poetry forthcoming in Chiron Review and has published previously in Third Wednesday, Main Street Rag, and many other journals. Scott’s first chapbook, Arks, was published by Selcouth Station press.
Joddy Murray
June Waves
Elephant ears listening by the front door, sounds
rattling around in scurried eddies, squawks, diamond-
footed squirrel ready to drape birdfeeders, swinging
treasures even these gray-blue jays stab at, crack, and swallow. I
hear the way the sidewalk reveals slow groundswells,
an uneven heating skewed by geography and a willful dis-
content—crushed beer can guttered with its label washed off,
aluminum shining like moths tinking streetlamps: summer.
Come to the shaded grass, brittle as it is, and sit long enough
to imagine groaning thunder, as if it were here, emboldened, cooler.
Joddy Murray’s chapbook, Anaphora, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 70 journals, including, most recently, El Portal Birdy Magazine, The Torrid Literature Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, The Fourth River, Prism Review, and Nude Bruce Review, He currently lives in Marion, Illinois.
Bethany Ludwig-Eagan
sunnily
being in love feels like
the waves as they
become none
upon the
shore
& in their murmur,
do it once
more
Bethany Ludwig-Eagan lives in Upstate New York with her husband and two cats. Despite graduating from SUNY Binghamton with a degree in philosophy, she currently works in financial services and is studying to become a Chartered Financial Consultant. In her free time, she enjoys writing poems and short stories.