Issue #78
Athena Melliar
Herbarium
“Truly no flower yet withers in your hand”
—Hart Crane, “To Emily Dickinson”
Quite the reverse — not Delphic, vatic;
palindromes' dreams onehow merge in statics.
Rivulets dream up their aqueducts; domes
ricochet (re-)currencies of soporifics
a dram of henbane, a drachma’s mandrake
off words not Delphic, though wombed, vatic
that whisper impregnable yells to rhizomes.
chimaeras on sweven draughts here
Pressed into something nyctinastic,
statics immerge how one dreams palindromes
of pained dates; details slip off the bedside comb.
Aqua vitae – aqua ardens wick
up through a mise en abyme vatic
enough to dream the dream that sleeps off Lethe —
skiagraphy that chalks its dark to trick:
Still Life with a Coaly Pasithea on a Passing Immortel, 2002
A palindromic dream to merge in statics —
this — mounts up itself on sulcal catacombs
latent of sound how the nyctipelagic,
credo quia absurdum est
long-lost, breathe (no, there is no Prophecy,
just verses). Fascicled into a poem,
ACT VI., B. SCENE: REDIVIVUS
a dream slips death back, like a mad palindromist.
Athena Melliar is a Greek feminist poet. She is a philologist specialising in educational and developmental psychology. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, LEVELER, So to Speak, and other literary publications. She has been profiled in Maudlin House. (she/her) Twitter: @AthenaMelliar, Instagram: athenamelliar
Rob McClure
Fireworks, her
No one holds a roman candle to her,
puts punk to her peony pistil.
No one rockets the cherry-bomb battery
of her black powder bombette.
The wheeling star-strobe of her tourbillion
tail
tantalizes all our firefly missiles
but see the falling leaves of her dahlia ring-
shell a bouquet pattern brocade,
leave fish to flare in flitter fountains.
Silver salute her saturnine shells!
Celebrate the crackle-effect crossette
sparkle of her cake-candle chrysanthemum
comets of cone confetti!
Let the aerial barrage of her palm tree
parachute
flare forever our reeling leering eyes!
Thereupon, the conclave of wise men
laid flat at the base of our blackest sky,
mused long on gunpowder, treason, plot,
and made this hymn that we might hear it:
We can but sing to starless sky
for here such sad damp squibs we lie.
Rob McClure‘s poetry has appeared mostly in UK literary magazines (New Writing Scotland, Lallans, Eemis Stane, Dreich), but his creative work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and other magazines. A novel is forthcoming from Black Springs Press this Fall.
Claire Gunner
Two burials
I.
Up the road from the house my parents built—
where I cannot return, nor want to—
behind the stone wall's crowded teeth
and the pine tree the town felled
I recall rows of cast iron grave markers,
their curved heads on long stalks
piercing the pincushion of earth
pulled from the golden tacking stitch.
In my memory, two dozen,
but I wasn’t counting then.
Impossible names push through
the whitewash and moss:
called Eunice, called Xzena, Mehitable.
Called Shakers because, in ecstasy,
that’s what their bodies would do.
II.
What is a body to do
with longing? Inter it:
as seed, as bone,
as power line, as hatchet.
Claire Gunner lives in Brooklyn, where she is an attorney for a legal services nonprofit. Her work appears in Stone Poetry Journal, The Cardiff Review, and Paddler Press.
Sam Ambler
The Boy
The boy is just a boy,
with silk on his arms
and down on his chin.
He listens the way a leaf
joins its fellows on the forest floor—
subject to the wind.
He goes walking in the warm spring
and hums like a honeysuckle
waving in the breeze,
dances like a bee
stealing pollen from a flower.
He rests in the meadow,
lying with the mustard seeds.
He waits for a butterfly
to pass him like a shadow.
The boy is just a boy.
Mr. Ambler’s writing has been published in Apricity Magazine, Avatar Review, Brushfire, City Lights Review Number 2, The Courtship of Winds, Evening Street Review, Glint Literary Journal, Headway Quarterly, Hearth & Coffin, Mount Hope Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, The Phoenix, Plainsongs Poetry Magazine and VOICES OF THE GRIEVING HEART.
Ruth Towne
Lost Object
Sunset Cliffs, San Diego, California
There and back again, seafoam and white surf turn
to sawtooth claws, as you dog paddle straight to G°d.
Here, it’s midnight on the other side of the horizon,
and the sun is a Ferris wheel agleam, it creaks around
a single cold bolt. It blinks coral, teal, celadon green.
The great wheel reels you in by the clear, thin wire
of your life. Stroke by stroke, the terracotta coast sails
far and farther away from those unstable coastal cliffs,
cliffs too soft to climb, cliffs off which you lifted,
from which you jumped into the Pacific to swim.
Listen. Can’t you hear the gray whales far below?
They migrate back to the Bering Sea. And listen—
you can hear the thoughts of cephalopods below
as they prod you through water, their tens and tens
of gentle tentacles egging you along, a swift surface
current. There and back again, you’ve come to life,
you can breathe beneath the sea, and you can see
in saline waters. At last, you are as G°d made you
—an indestructible object. Draw it all in. The dark
dot of your pupil swells to drain the ink-black sea,
that park ride in the sky, the sun spins in your iris.
Here, paddle until you find a permeable membrane—
when it rains just so in a dream, it rains on you, too.
And as you swim you come to know, there’s this,
what you hold in each stroke of your arms, and not
this, what lies on the other side of consciousness.
Remember? You woke up and recounted a dream,
what you’d seen in your sleep, not this, but beyond,
then back to this—it was a crystalline river horse
that smiled with human teeth, the black and white
photograph of Atlantis ruins in which you lived,
the dress you made of barracuda-blue anemones
and wore to visit the Cote d’Azur. There and back
again, if you return, you can climb up the cliffs,
it’s possible, the way a memory can pass from life
into dreams and back, and back into other dreams.
A lover’s eye, the morning star haunts the dawn,
it swings across the sky on a silent metronome.
O come, o come, Ǝmm@n⊔ɘl, there and back again.
There’s a dream no one wakes from, none recounts,
G°d looked you straight in the eye and told you so.
And M@n R@y no longer responds to any inquiries
about the ready-made titled Object to be Destroyed.
Ruth Towne is an emerging poet. Other poems from her project Resurrection of the Mannequins have been published by the Decadent Review, New Feathers Anthology, Coffin Bell Journal, New Note Poetry, In Parentheses, and the Stonecoast Review’s Staff Spotlight.
Liz Irvin
Have you ever
|
Have you ever held an injured bird that surged in your palm with a strangely-folded broken wing like a flag stuck up out of the rubble, and its breast sent a thrill all the way to your shoulder scapula wing with pine-needles pressed into your knee-caps and sticky popsicle melt down your shins and dirt under your nails and you felt something you had never felt before, the syrupy resin to your paraffin wax, the damp cave to your tarmac, the black chokeberry to your supermarket cherry and the list would have gone on had some adult not left the conversation with a drop or two of white wine gloss in the bottom of the glass to impart, with some racing urgency, a thought that would not have independently occurred to you: that the fledgling in your hand, that you had held and stroked for some time and brought to your lips and whispered to and named a silly name for its broken wing, might now yet be in danger of a maternal rejection, the likes of which we know no easy correlate in the human world; so that in other words, you, a fledgling yourself still (your kneecaps sprouted pine-needles and your legs bled popsicle juice and your dirt-tipped nails like the darker sliver of a moon), you shouldn’t have held that bird and your rancid human smell spoiled the baby fowl for its progenitor, the passerine’s wellspring done run dry love-light snuffed out with a licked-finger pinch— |
Liz Irvin is a writer and medical student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. She holds a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Barnard College. Her essay “Seasick: Lessons in Human Anatomy from Hyman Bloom’s The Hull” appeared in Hektoen International. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Lois Marie Harrod
If I when I wake alone
you now gone
more than a year
and the children elsewhere
and the sun a gray scrim
behind the black tangle
of oaks,
if I in my slow waking
wrap my arms around myself
as I sometimes asked
you to wrap your arms
around me,
you who would not hold my hand
in public, a show inappropriate
in your Wyoming lexicon
of love which provided long
and steady devotion
but outlawed public gesture,
except during those intervals
of 15 or 20 minutes
when you could not speak
or stand alone,
a genetic lapse, episodic ataxia,
we finally learned several months
before you died,
a fault that allowed you
to hold on to me briefly
until you could
steady yourself,
if when I wake alone now,
and wrap my arms around myself
I still want
you here wrapping your arms
around me
without my asking.
Lois Marie Harrod’s 18th collection Spat was published by Finishing Line Press, 2021 and her chapbook Woman by Blue Lyra, 2020. Dodge poet, life-long educator and writer, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Links to her online work at http://www.loismarieharrod.org.
Aaron Poochigian
The Moment
A sigh signals the sixth-sensed second
when late night turns to early morning,
when someone keen and sleepless, scorning
the hour the breathless clock has reckoned,
tolls yesterday has given in
and what had been tomorrow, spawning
promise of dawn beyond the awning,
has loosed the future to begin.
AARON POOCHIGIAN earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, “American Divine,” the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.
Suzannah Watchorn
Aching
People tend to get imaginative
about their teeth, my dentist declared
the first time we met, meaning Don’t worry!
but expressed in my writer’s language.
We laughed. I knew then he
was the one: so long as we both lived
in this city, I would not go to anyone
else. Tall, slender, with neatly-trimmed
grey hair and suntans from family beach trips
he always asked what I was reading and I
about his grandchildren. After an insurance
switch, I could finally afford a procedure
I’d needed since my teens. My relief was
so great I anticipated the appointment
like a birthday, and I vowed
I’d be the happiest woman in the
dental office. But first I flew across the Atlantic
to my hometown. It was on the news
every day: a post-pandemic dental crisis
so acute residents had resorted
to prizing out their own teeth.
How could I possibly
celebrate now?
Needle at my mouth, sweet
dentist by my side
I thought, This is what it is
to be human: pain, relief, guilt
longing, our imagination
an exposed nerve
deep in the gum.
Suzannah Watchorn is an English-Irish writer who grew up outside of London, UK and now lives in the United States. Her poetry and essays are featured or forthcoming in Red Noise Collective, Wild Roof Journal, The Bluebird Word and Passengers. Her internet home is suzannahwatchorn.com