Issue #40
Barbara Daniels
Double Tonguing
Trembling, pulsing,
I try vibrato on my flute,
spring, freshman year.
When peonies float
their bewildering scent to me,
I dream out the window,
practicing grief. I study
double tonguing, t to k, t to k,
faster, faster, every note
a consonant, mastering technique.
At the outdoor concerts,
Tuesdays, we flutists wear
our summer dresses.
Brass players flip spit
from their instruments into weeds.
I shift, distracted. We pick up
the pace then, piccolos
shrieking, cruel trombones,
then get into cars and kiss
till our lips are numbed.
Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner (vol.89 #1), Mid-American Review (vol. 32), Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Julia Gerhardt
The Dreams (A Haibun)
I know I’ve been thinking of death too often. My therapist tells me not to read into the dreams. The dreams of those who have passed, coming back, reanimated, barely able to speak. Dreams where I am so afraid & so excited. Dreams that taste like static on the tv. I think of death lying on the couch, on my back, imagining you in the hospital bed, on your back. I think of my muscles, unable to move them. I think of my lips, unable to speak. I think of my eyes, unable to open, even for those who I love the most, begging. I know how good it would feel to have my beloved’s hand smooth back my hair & I think, I should have smoothed back your thick, chestnut hair, from the widow’s peak to the base of your neck. Instead, I told you of my favorite memories and sang you our song, quiet like a church prayer, so no one could hear, except the one I love the most. I hope it was enough, the squeezing of your hand, the kisses on your cheek, the words I said
you taught me to love,
singing & reading to birds,
thank you for my life
Julia Gerhardt is a writer living in Chicago. She was nominated for the Best Microfiction Anthology 2020 and Best Small Fictions Anthology 2020. She has previously been published in Comstock Review (print, 34.1), Okay Donkey, Rogue Agent, Perhappened, and others. Visit her at juliagerhardtwriter.wordpress.com
Julio Monteiro Martins
translated by Helen Wickes & Donald Stang
ON THE TRAIN
The train is traveling
in the valley.
It moves through a splendid
and long-lasting day.
On my cell phone
you tell me
your plans
for the two of us,
and I listen to you
while watching the landscape
through the window:
the reflections on the river,
the cypresses,
the distant farmhouses.
Darkness.
A shock. Suddenly
a tunnel.
Your voice disappears
from the palm of my hand.
Outside the window
absolute darkness.
The void.
I look around the railway car
for the first time.
I am alone.
How can that be?
I think I remember
that a little while ago
there were others.
When did they get off?
Where did they all
go?
I quickly try
to redial the number,
but now there is no signal.
When will it return?
Outside the train
from the shadows
there comes a deafening sound
of steel slicing the air,
of air slicing rock.
In my car
the lights flash
and then go out.
Now it is just me
and that roaring in the darkness.
In my body
my organs labor.
When trains go into
the mountain
they disappear forever.
When trains
lose their brakes
they do not achieve liftoff.
IN TRENO
Il treno corre
dentro la valle.
Attraversa una giornata
splendida e duratura.
Al cellulare
mi racconti
dei tuoi piani
per noi due,
ed io ti ascolto
mentre guardo dal finestrino
il paesaggio:
i riflessi sul fiume,
i cipressi,
i casolari distanti.
Buio.
Un colpo.
Una galleria.
La tua voce scompare
dal palmo della mia mano.
Fuori dal vetro
il nero assoluto.
Il nulla.
Guardo dentro la carrozza
per la prima volta.
Sono solo.
Come mai?
Poco fa,
credo di ricordarmi,
c’erano altri.
Quando sono scesi?
Dove sono andati
tutti?
Cerco in fretta
di rifare il numero
ma ormai non c’è campo.
Quando tornerà?
Fuori dal treno
dalle tenebre
viene un rumore
assordante
di ferro che taglia l’aria,
di aria che taglia roccia.
Dentro il mio vagone
le luci balenano
e poi si spengono.
Ora ci sono io
e quel ruggito nel buio.
Dentro il mio corpo
gli organi faticano.
I treni
quando penetrano la montagna
spariscono per sempre.
I treni
quando perdono i freni
non si levano in volo.
This poem is from the final poetry collection of Julio Monteiro Martins, La grazia di casa mia, published in 2013 by Rediviva Edizioni (Milan). Martins (1955–2014) was born in Niterói, Brazil, but lived for many years in Italy. He was a prominent teacher, publisher, and writer of essays, stories, theater works, and poetry. In his home country he had worked as a lawyer for human rights and environmental causes; in Italy he was director of the online journal Sagarana. Almost none of his work has been published in English.
The translators: Donald Stang is a longtime student of Italian. His translations of Italian poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Mantis (#17), Newfound, Catamaran (vol.6 #3), Ghost Town, Blackbird, and Apple Valley Review (vol.13 #2). Helen Wickes’s work appears in Dreaming Machine, Sagarana, and many others. She has written four books of poetry: In Search of Landscape, Dowser’s Apprentice, Moon Over Zabriskie, and World As You Left It.
Nels Hanson
The Castaway
Galveston, oh Galveston
I still hear your sea winds blowing,
I still see her dark eyes glowing —
The night I got my ex-wife’s late call
I drove drunk six hours to Port Arthur,
the white lines wavy, wandering, then
took the speedboat to Glen Campbell’s
Galveston, a slender island’s sad song,
always seeing the thing that happened.
The festival was roaring, a Rhinestone
Cowboy and Lineman From Wichita,
brave dying Texas Ranger who saved
Kim Darby in “True Grit,” costumed
dancers crowding the central avenues.
She said the house on stilts stood on
a highest dune and I climbed a street
toward the place flickering with vivid
strings of prayer flags. At the spiraled
staircase barred by some monastery’s
antique gate I took the hanging mallet,
struck the gong and managed the rope
ladder she let down. I drank two cups
of coffee, two of whiskey, before she
led me to a terrace where it lay, shiny
black, and taller, heavy, wings wider
than an albatross, broad bill in profile
a giant raven’s for Poe’s giant Lenore.
Its picture wasn’t in her Book of Birds.
Five days since she first saw a shadow
circling like a plane’s, it waited, silent
at a sliding door, frozen, watching her
every breath and soon each gulp of air
seemed a numbered grain in quicksand,
a whirlpool in the hourglass. On Friday
evening she heard a thud, like its body
falling, rocking the bed, and ran, threw
back a curtain, in the porchlight found
it prone. Was it sleeping, dead, maybe
feigning death, scaled feet with razor
talons just waiting to fly up and strike?
She’d wakened from a nightmare, she
murdered me and now I’d returned, my
ghost for Halloween a speechless bird,
silver dollars for eyes. Softly I touched
it with a toe and dense feathers almost
stirred, perhaps the expiring plumage
recalling a tropic breeze a century ago.
She wanted me to do something with it,
or carry it home where it belonged, my
old obsession the vampire haunting her.
I nodded it was true but not on purpose,
I meant no harm, apologized that I still
loved her so. And so? she asked. With
a block and lever I positioned the sling
and overhead from the sturdy beam for
a silken awning hung winch and cable.
Cocking and cocking the arm I hoisted
the thing above a railing, pushed hard,
made it swing far, and farther, quicker,
its amplitude rising like an old clock’s
pendulum at last escaping all the tragic
seconds, soaring on the outward arc as
if reaching for an invisible star. Higher
I lifted bolt cutters to shear the woven
steel and the burden flew, dark meteor
over turquoise waters to find the secret
blue riptide’s current and drift forever
beyond unnamed isles. Way out all day
the storming seabirds turned in a funnel
crying, calling to themselves or others
to come, or warning them away, never
diving, only with sun half down wings
veering, beating for a darkening shore
I’d dreamed of once and woke in tears.
Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.
Carson Pytell
Shambhala
At most upon the rock
you are none much taller
than Titans, Gods or God.
Everything besides this is a lie.
not an idea, they say, only some progression
unameably natural, small in all, as shoreline you
are tread on, eventually consumed by the one
certainty worth the time impossibly imagined,
unresolvable lest by ignorance or transcendence
through penance for the deeds undone by
or from fathomed fear, chiseled chance
or any other fancy we feed ourselves handfuls of
when we’re hungriest, none of which would exist,
not even the next you, if not for you, the mirror
in the studio where you don’t paint, but live in
reigned revelry because all’s for one who’s won it all,
be it nothing, or the back end of books earnestly
read, nevermind held limitlessly as you make it
by the limitless library to which you’ve made
only donations and from which you expect the same,
like the fib that the sky is blue or blue is the sky
or that telling the truth is what’s right or wrong
because what’s right or wrong, besides truth,
we get to decide whether or not is even true,
or the fallacy that death is more than reversed
birth, the ultimacy of knowledge told then known,
and if you expect more, if you say there’s more
than truth to nature, at least take a second to
watch a tree quickly dying and realize that
You’re just fooling yourself.
Under the rock
may we find we lie
truthfully at last.
Carson Pytell is a poet living in a small town outside Albany, NY whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous venues online and in print. His debut short collection, First-Year (Alien Buddha Press, 2020), and first chapbook, Trail (Guerrilla Genesis Press, 2020), are now available on Amazon.
Carla Sarett
reading of his death
they say he died
after a long illness
I wonder was
this long disease
his life like
hunchbacked Pope
was dying long
forgetting
the living
was it worth it
Noir poem #1
Detour
He opens that door.
You think, oh
that’s the
detour
(or)
when he dumps the corpse
(or)
when he picks up that femme fatale
(or)
when he chokes her.
Think again
to the start
when he lets
his lover go
so easily.
He becomes
her detour.
Carla Sarett’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday (Fall 2020), Halfway Down the Stairs, Prole (#30) and elsewhere; her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart. A Closet Feminist, her debut novel, will be published in 2022. Carla has a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania and lives in San Francisco.
Pete Mladinic
A Child Being Born
Dorothy tells Schaeffer, “If you
don’t believe in God you’ve never
seen a child being born.” He thinks
her point as good as any for
God’s existence, but not good enough.
After she said that he grunted, stared
at his sunny-side eggs, and broke
the yolks with his fork. He thinks:
years ago two men at war wrestled
each other in a tunnel, pitch dark
so they could only hear and feel each
other. One put his thumbs on
the other’s trachea, choked him to
death, as the other, had he the
advantage, would have done to him.
The war made the other man and Schaeffer
enemies years after they were born bawling.
Schaeffer wonders if the
man who came out of the tunnel
believes in God.
Pete Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington (co-authored with Charles Behlen), all with Lea County Museum Press. His poems have recently appeared in The Mark Literary Review and Adelaide Literary Magazine. He has poems forthcoming in The Magnolia Review. He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.
Carol Casey
Bear Until the Broken Grow
Sometimes there’s nothing but to
bear.
Bear
until
the bearing loses teeth.
Bear
until
muscle forms to meet it
until compassion wins, or the branch is
broken
on the meaning of a single tear,
broken like the laughter of water hitting rocks
splitting into foam-spray
and deep quiet pools
where fishes dart
and small things
grow as if nothing has ever
broken
grow because everything’s
broken
broken until there is nothing
that has not been born of
broken agony becoming a song
then a pure moment
till this is
broken too
and the sacred finds that
there are holes large enough
for it to
grow through.
Road Trip
It starts with a yellow line,
steering wheel, tractor,
transport truck,
horse and carriage,
roadside stand
beside a grey stripe cut
through green summer fabric,
occasional gold of grain,
dusk of sugar bush,
splash of barn, house, cow,
then city.
Grey swallows green.
I am one of many, a bee,
in a convoluted hive.
I turn here, twist there.
Only for love will I enter
this overwhelm,
the honks, the cut-offs,
the burgeoning skyscrapers
closing in, the buzz and
angst of multitudes
creating and destroying.
I sigh the car
into your driveway.
Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (“The Phoenix in Winter” in The Prairie Journal, 2018, #17) and has appeared in Cacti Fur, The Plum Tree Tavern and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, Tending the Fire and i am what becomes of broken branch.