Issue #30
J.I. Kleinberg
Artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg tears up magazines in Bellingham, Washington, and posts frequently at her website.
Kyla Houbolt
Weed Lore
Heading to the creek,
watersong on the left,
first fall leaf fall crunch underfoot,
then under the bridge
hiss and whizz of morning traffic.
Never a sign of a homeless camp.
One time a can.
But look, that little white flower?
That’s bindweed, the plant
everybody hates.
One thing we’ve all got in common:
somewhere in the world,
somebody hates what you are.
Kyla Houbolt writes, even though she is old enough to know better. You can find all her published work on her Linktree, and follow her on Twitter @luaz_poet.
Emily Hyland
IN A MOMENT CAUGHT
When we opened the
restaurant, we knew
it would be some sort of
bitter tincture like
an oasis cloud.
We had been children
sipping honeysuckle
at the edge
of the Willard playground.
And then enterprise emerged
nascent, but not like
an open flower—hard
in the way that alights
a head with gray, and
so quickly we are
these two adults now
who hold each other
in stolen hugs amidst frenzy
in front of the oven, but I
want to see
my husband again
beyond a business partner
a creature whose hair
is a lullaby
across his face as I
fall asleep at night.
SCHISM
The routine of getting the set
all ready again—the tables set,
setting up the kitchen, setting the
dough to rest—becomes a
braiding of each day into the next and
more often there are full days our eyes
never meet—we roll away
from each other with a canyon
between us in tired sheets and then wake
to toss on the same combination of
wrinkled wear and scoot over to the space
so he can slice the necks and legs
off of ducks and I can arrange
boxes of wine on racks
and sweep the floorboards. Then
when it is dinner and the room is alive,
we interface expeditiously and precise. Pies to
table two. Fire table eight. Go with this, he says,
and then I’m away into the ocean of eaters.
When we set aside a moment
for lunch before the deluge and I
look at him, lock in and wait
he might see me too but
there is a vacancy—a wanting
to still be soft in the corners but
he sees me now, lost
in the talons of this creature
we have built ourselves
with our hands and our funds and our
family—now he sees he has
turned his dream into the truth and he
is standing at the apogee of his life
and he can see in the distance the
expanse of sky and
possibilities and I
am here astray.
DIVORCE AGREEMENT
It was not the
paltry sad of one final
making of love I
don’t know how to write
about the way his eyes looked
the last time. It was not
fucking it was not sleeping
together, it was
a powerline cut was
a body alone in my body, his
bile eyes above me bothered
dreamboats of anger on the
sparsely flowered bedding
two crags chipped off
and into the sea
down and down. He was
intense that night those eyes
the pitch of raven
starless ink like punctures
looking perhaps more
deeply than I’d
noticed in some time
a look of breaking
vein popping across
unsunny undereye
heavy as if hit. When
it is time to sign he
makes edits anew
again, asks me to dinner.
What I know is
no woman
will ever
uncover him more, will
know how his dad would
read to him at the beach how he
savored the rustle
of his father’s feet
against summer sheets
to lull him to sleep. I know
other bits too how he
does not like his
ribs to be touched or
the bony part of his
iliac crest how
to hold him
is a skill
of sliding an
arm around his
skein of bones
barely to brush
and be
very still.
Emily Hyland’s poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Review (print, 2006), Sixfold, The Virginia Normal (forthcoming Spring 2020), and Stretching Panties (defunct). A restauranteur and English professor from New York City, she received her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College.
Marc Meierkort
MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS
Every night every arena
stadium ice rink
gymnasium fieldhouse
playground courtyard
backyard or basement
(not so) subtle
ritual is taking place
the yankees take down
the warriors Before play
the nationals subdue
the blackhawks A song to anoint
the patriots destroy
the rangers The military
the rockets annihilate
the jets Of sport
Eat your Wheaties Fight
our foreign occupations
All-American linebackers
battle-marched / armored
Cops / robbers kill them
bad always a them Sings
our National Anthem
Salutes our united immunities
Your traumas raised to say
“Thank you for your service”
sincerely convincing yourself
you are free
from the Glory of War
Marc Meierkort is a writer and educator who taught high school English for 19 years. A graduate of Southern Illinois and National-Louis Universities, he currently lives in Chicago’s suburbs. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he recently had poems published by Inklette Magazine, Inscape (Vol. 44, July 2019), Spectrum (Vol LXII), Burningword Literary Journal, Gravitas, and In Parentheses.
Jordan Potter
Parallax
What does this mean to you? he said,
and held the painting up. Something
like fingers held an ice cream cone
which dripped onto a background
bursting with pixie stick green and pink,
all kitsch, and little substance to work with.
I dunno. Would it help if I told you
the title is “Do It Yourself”? I gazed
a little longer, knowing I’d come up
with nothing else, yet selling the effort:
I wanted T. Scott (don’t ever call him Tracy)
to think I really cared. His wife had just died—
something like Huntington’s, but not that—
and I knew, deep in the valley of his heart,
he never forgave my uncle, his “father,”
for what he did all those years ago
in the echoless bedroom north of Denver,
where T. Scott still lived.
Elsewhere,
in Fountain Valley, we’re in my uncle’s trailer—
nine months prior my grandmother’s,
whose things we had finally
sold or thrown away. And after the brief, obligatory
renovation tour, we’re sitting around,
nursing beers, realizing just how little we know
of one another, only the copula of blood
to link three contrariwise strangers.
T. Scott tells me he’s selling the house
in Denver. Says he wants to move to Tucson
where he doesn’t have to wear a jacket
and where he can ride his several motorcycles
uninhibited on the open road,
which I take as euphemism. I just don’t
know what to do with these paintings,
he says, and brings up “Do It Yourself”
on his phone.
I still haven’t said anything about his wife,
who married him without mentioning
the slow thighs of her burgeoning disease.
I haven’t asked about her brother, who also
died, and who T. Scott nursed simultaneously.
Perhaps it was easier if I pretended not to know,
and could avoid the conversation
altogether. So far, it had worked. Besides,
how could I pretend something pretty
someone said could gain a purchase on his
situation and ape authority to his dead?
I knew, too well, when someone dies
everything surrenders to the flimsiest
definitions, crackling around
the rigging of our reasons like St. Elmo’s Fire.
And who could really tell that he grieved?
The burden of them shucked
and him alone. Left to his cucked
life, ready to resume it. It must have felt
at least freeing. Though who knew
how he really felt at all? Maybe it killed him to
even talk to me like this. As if nothing
happened. As if there was no wife or brother
or “father” or love or Denver. Maybe
his guts twisted like a pit of snakes
and every ounce of being left inside him
cried out at the mirage of his
untroubled stare. I stared
back at him. I said
I still have no clue
what it means.
Masturbation, he said.
Collection
ever since they swapped
the collection plate for a felt bag
with smooth wooden handles,
it’s been more difficult
to steal from the church
on Main and Adams. That,
and most people pay with checks
now, or toss in chump change
too meager to bother with.
It’s true, change is important.
It makes the bag heavier
without betraying, like Judas,
the paltry silver punishing
the seams.
Even the lightest
lifters would have trouble
plundering that sack without
getting caught. And, Jesus,
if you get caught…
It’s best to linger at the second-
or third-to-last place in the pews—
or if you’re in one of those
amusement park churches,
to snag a stadium seat
three spots from the aisle,
where the attendants won’t
see how gently you press
your knee into the bulk
and raise, like Lazarus, whatever
notes appear—laundry-wrinkled
Washingtons and, by some miracle,
the occasional Jackson,
stolid as St. Paul before conversion.
If your goodly neighbor asks
what’s going on,
simply reply you put too much in,
that you’re saving at least
a couple bucks for the vending
machine outside. Sipping from
their polystyrene cups,
they’ll understand.
You were supposed to be a good man
How quickly nothing happens.
The rent past due.
And the building blocks
of other people’s lives
falling into place. Their children,
Christ, are already walking.
The budding parvenus accessorize
their penthouse suites.
They give things up now: meat,
unsaturated fat, gasoline.
You donate to their well-meant charities.
And you let them do the talking.
What’s your stake, after all?
You’ve none. If, on a sinking
ship, you were among them,
the lifeboats dwindling,
what claim to life could make
them step aside? Daft boy,
you’re forfeit.
No innocent, either.
The deeds you can’t say here,
the ones you misremember
in the postcards of your prayers.
These nights know better.
Their silence, reliquary,
and the cool, truncated air
beneath the power lines
measuring nothing
but footsteps
to and from
encounters.
As you walk, you think
you’ll never say
“We ate dinner beneath
the veranda.”
Likewise “It was
a lovely gala.”
Love, itself, in question.
Do you really love her?
A good man would have an answer.
Marginalia
he writes in notebooks wanting to be found.
Wanting them found out. But only after
he was famous. Famous, and maybe dead.
But certainly famous.
On thin, blue lines, he neatly prints
capitals and Qs. No letter forfeit. No i
decapitated, no t surviving crucifixion.
Clean Fs, curled with such fine articulation,
how could his future scholars question
his genius? Pictures, too. Each notebook
needed pictures. That’s what they all did, yes?
Made illustrations? Subconscious sketches
somehow corollary to what’s been written.
Yes, let them puzzle over the Fibonacci
sequence scribbled in the corner. Or the recondite
bold of scattered letters. A message?
Perhaps. He savored all the torment
they might be put to. The actuaries
treating every page as if it were the runes
of ancient magi.
What is this alchemy? he hears them rage.
Some things he’d write merely to lead them on.
To give them argument, and counterargument,
and dialectic.
To say he contains multitudes, and lengths;
to get away with error; to watch them split
and form denominations. Denominations!
All this and that.
And the opposite.
That he might be Prometheus: in turn,
sufferer, titan, rebel, progenitor
bequeathing fire so that they might burn.
Jordan Potter is a writer and actor from Huntington Beach. He operates the poetry film studio, Blank Verse Films, with his partner, Mike Gioia.
Sarah Panfil
Abecedarian
Almost a garden, where the cyclamen & iris
bloom in the yeast and saltwater of
Canaan. This land promises much, but not that its
dust will settle itself or that its knots will tie their own loose
ends. This land tastes like lemon juice in hummus,
fresh and tart, and like falafel, deep-fried garlicky
grit. This land formed of sweet chunky
Halva which melts into blood and
ink in the Levantine’s mouth. Do the flavors taste
just the same on JewishDruzeArabPalestinian tongues?
Kyklos, like circle, becomes cyclamen. Iris
like the messenger goddess. Will we pick them for our
Mother? Seeds dispersed to grow
no where, toward where no border
opens or opened. We must love these flowers –
proof something bright and beautiful grows here, something
quiet. There are blossoms where thrown
rocks and spent bullets land. This we know. People
seek home others don’t believe exists. How to be
thankful roots grow atop mountains,
under fences and beyond
vengeances? How to manifest another
word / world
xenial, meaning hospitable? How to
yank up cyclamen and iris and grind a new
zest on our tongues?
My Niece Eats a Plum on the Beach
before his daughter can bite into the fruit
my brother removes the pit
he stabs the drupe with his thumbnails
and plucks the seed from her experience
this is what a father does, I think,
shield his daughter’s few new teeth from pain
so that when she gums the plum
she tastes just juice-sweet pulp
the burgundy sugar flesh sticks to her cheeks
and her face transforms in song
she munches with the concentration
of a conductor on opening night
in one tiny palm she clutches
parts of the purple skin heart
for now, the pit / core / kernel / seed
lies discarded in the sand
Sarah Panfil is a writer, audio-storyteller, and food-lover. She lives in Bordeaux, France, where she teaches English, studies literature, and consumes her weight in bread and cheese most of the time. She graduated in May of 2018 from Indiana University with a self-designed degree in Narrative Studies.
Delvon T. Mattingly
Identifying Empathy
Rhetoric of sallowness
travel in heaps;
words converted into caustic
empathy, narrowly veracious
health messages flooding
brittle gates to chocolate
communities,
filtered through digital spaces.
Suddenly Black problems
are real and should be
taken seriously, according to
the 55-year-old
Appalachian man
who harbors obsidian organs,
believing unjust structures
plague him far, far worse.
Delvon T. Mattingly, who also goes by D.T. Mattingly, is a fiction writer and poet from Louisville, Kentucky and a PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Michigan. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Learn more about his work here. He tweets here: @Delvonmattingly.
Valerie Griggs
POSTCARD FROM THE PROGRAM
I’m sorry I haven’t written or called more often,
but I’m on my third resurrection
and I don’t have my sea legs yet.
My appetite is heron-like lately.
I’ve been meeting a Norse fisherman in sleep
who coaxes me to cast my net where he points.
I haven’t yet. You know how long it takes
for me to choose. Even my lists have lists.
We have the illusion of choosing, menus, meetings.
Floral prints, flat screens and porches point to
a heart breaking, eerie normalcy.
Say hi to all. Tell them my lines are tight.
In 1985, Valerie graduated with an MFA from Brooklyn College where she studied with John Ashbury and William Matthews. She belongs to a vibrant community of poets in Long Island, NY. Currently, she works as a writing consultant and adjunct English Instructor at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, NY. Read more of her in Typishly, Door is a Jar, and Avatar Review.