Issue #88
Alan Yue
Incomplete Blues
There are frays in the way a child lets a parent go.
Bb7
I drop a stone off the pier, wishing it would
bounce back into my palm. Or, to not be another body
held briefly by lakewater. I watch the reddish
water sear yellow and I think it’s a good day.
Eb7
I let an old story fall into the sun’s reflection
like a koi in reverse, shriveling back
in, the closing of a citrus flower. This once-dragon
sears into lakewater, I let the days rise out.
Bb7
drop a life into the hole in the land, we only remember
ends, or beds. I watch as you retreat
into a small, round mandarin wrapped by your blue cotton jacket. How
your red packets & seed-shaped eyes unwringe
into citrus flesh.
F-7
How many dead dragons find rest in the lakes they flew out of? I forget
all the shells I’ve dropped into bodies of water, have they reached bone?
Bb7
drop a sun into the water—drop a gold son into
the water: the lake evaporates in stray threads—holds life in the drowning called between.
Eb7
Yeye, your son holds onto your old scales – thousands of orange peels, ripped in
tender oblong chunks – he wears them like a surrender. They dry and harden,
thinning and falling in trails. Like sunset dappled waves, he is rapidly stilling.
Yeye, I wonder some days if he is nothing these things you left behind.
but
Alan Yue is from California. Outside of poetry Alan enjoys music and punchy essays. A CA Arts Scholar, he has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and Disjointed Poetry Magazine.
Analiese Beeler
blood orange baby
| my hands shake when | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
peeling blood oranges and opening litchi shells to reach the eyeballs. toes curling in anticipation, my whole body salivates to see the rind stripped back, the flesh bare, sitting here in my hands amidst my hunger for life, that dusty prayer rounding the other side of the world The tender flesh! My fingers rise white with pith. |
I give birth to her breathing as the tide—the sound of out-of-breath; the act of hastening water. I am consumed by her tiny hands scraping the air: the work of my hands. she is newness and life and nakedness: maybe hers was my birth, that call after the sun has gone into the cry of crickets in the night. I tear in two: Hours later, I put her in a box |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| amidst the red aftertaste of devastation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
love poem to a lost god
|
my diet has since devolved: painstakingly peeled pieces of lip (I’ve given up on bilabials now an impossible intimacy) to force from my mouth so that my sibilants ring when I cry out for some sincerity) of my stomach secretions (this old fool in my mind speaks!) till I am inside out, spread-eagle this hand/foot-piercing |
I rise from my bed and drop to the floor in machine silence. bleeding out, though perhaps a hassle, not that I’m suicidal! It’s just the sharpness of the lucid drowning of my dreams. in siblinged pairs when my thoughts sell me I wonder if anybody can hear me. tell me: what is my mind-body made of? “I cannot stand my own imbecility,” or, in terms of the Cartesian plane?” I cannot rest, love that is too much. I want my |
Analiese Beeler joyfully leans into Kay Ryan’s description of poet as “utterly exposed, inadequate, foolish, and doomed.” Her work is published in the North Texas Review and is forthcoming in the Scapegoat Review.
Lisa Delan
as : Algernon
– after Daniel Keyes
my transition is not yet so distant that i have forgotten
all gestures of affection : the language underlying the heart
the unnecessary detritus of human form : flesh
meeting love as flowers : thirsty and fertile : voracious
without my waist cinched and carbon strapped :
before my hunger was compressed as data : i spoke
blooms sweet on my blossoming tongue : i spun
the scent of sun when i crouched to the grass : a world
i could bend before : my discs were fused and
glazed : want rolling in my now sealed mouth :
though my lips no longer spread : they sear
with heat like blistered atoms : phantom limbs
courting remembrance : look : you see only
my reflection in chrome : i believe : once my skin : i
do not know why i have come :
Lisa Delan’s poetry has been featured in a broad range of literary publications, and she has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. When she is not writing, you can find the soprano, an international performer who records for the Pentatone label, singing songs on texts by some of her favorite poets.
Kimbol Soques
elm lessons
I know broken—
the unsustainable bend
the groan
the sharp snap
the pieces
the drip of hurt
What I didn’t see
—what happens when you can’t break?
sustaining the… what?
with every creak
and splinter
wetwood draining sap
through bark’s cracked shell,
cambium stinging in the air
Kimbol Soques has been writing since before she got her first typewriter at age 3. She strives to pare down to the bone, using white space like breath. Her work has been published in a variety of places, including NonBinary Review, and has been nominated for Best of the Net.
Alexa Torres Skillicorn
Home: A Duplex
When I think of home, it is yellow.
The Yucatán sun radiating heat,
the radiant heat of excising childhood.
Now I live in a six-story walk-up.
When I was six, I walked up the stories of Tulum,
each stride, like moving through so many times.
Through strident years I moved so many times.
Until all the new faces looked old,
until all my new faces looked old,
enveloping, like my Australian father,
enveloping, like my Cuban grandmother
who devours sunflowers with her eyes.
They are yellow, your sunflower eyes,
and when I think of yellow, I am home.
Where the Bees Go to Die
On my mother’s desk
her keyboard sits — its letters
recursively pricked.
The screen above reflects
years contorted in thought.
In the bottom left corner,
on a wooden floorboard
at her feet, their bodies pile.
Yellow and black hulls,
stingers wilted, wings crisp,
the nascent pollen, quelled.
Sometimes, they collect for weeks
before we notice
the exoskeletal mound
growing, like the genesis of something.
I sweep aside the knotted bodies
and wonder if I am sad.
Maybe, I mourn a little,
but after all, they keep coming back.
There are so many
paths to martyrdom.
What is it that lures them,
Like a menacing hum
to these shrieking white walls,
this tired desk,
this final soundless locus?
I bury my guilt in the corner with the corpses.
And up above,
the rap of keys
like raindrops falling in reverse,
unwriting latent words
suspended in nihility.
An ineffable manifesto,
a eulogy for the bees.
Alexa Torres Skillicorn is a Latinx jazz violinist, ethnographer, and composer. She is currently a PhD fellow in Music Performance and Composition (jazz) at NYU. Her writing can be found in publications like the Journal of Latin American Studies and the Journal of Research in Music Education.
Carrie Conners
Inertia
I lost my balance
when you called me
beautiful, scraped
the toe of my new boots
on the sidewalk.
Kindness tilts
equilibrium. I trust
birds’ stomachs
flutter from the air’s
graciousness after
that first wingbeat
from rest to flight.
I wore the soles
of those boots down
always running home
to you. Lately
I’ve felt steady
on my feet. At night
I dream us kissing.
With each kiss
the corners of your
mouth tighten
until your lips
are sealed shut.
A doll’s mouth.
Fixed, perfect, cruel.
Carrie Conners teaches at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY. She is the author of two poetry collections, Luscious Struggle (BrickHouse Books, 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist) and Species of Least Concern (Main Street Rag, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in Bodega, Kestrel, Split Rock Review, RHINO, and The Monarch Review, among others.
David Chorlton
At the Desert’s Edge
I
Run, spirit, run; shadows are alive;
three-fifty-one and a Screech owl’s asking questions
of the pre-dawn world. Its notes bounce quickly
on the silence. The miracle will surely come
between hope and melancholy. Desert
thunder, heron passing overhead into the urban
world, to the dark sun
floating on still water.
II
What the hawk sees is
the way sunlight cuts into the earth and how
shadows follow snakes beneath
its skin. He sees a mountain’s wingspan.
He sees an angled change
in the direction an arroyo takes.
Sees it melt into rocks when
there’s nowhere else for it to go and it
just breathes in, breathes out, existing
where all that’s asked of it
is to be in time with the desert’s
slow pulse.
III
The suns of cultures past
are buried here. It is the hour
for the owl to undertake her ghost flight
to become heat’s shadow ascending
into moonlight. Saguaros listen
to the stones exhale
and glow a shade of blue scented with relief
that night has come
with all its ancient silence, broken only
by javelinas trampling stars.
David Chorlton is a European who has been at home in Phoenix since 1978 and now lives close to the 20,000 acre desert preserve that runs through the city. He stays aware of the local wildlife and his surroundings have become a significant part of his poetry and occasional watercolors.
Edison Jennings
Chesapeake Aubade
A damsel dragon fly darts and hovers
above the sluggish river’s sheet of green,
in which entwine young heedless lovers
dismissing the chance they might be seen.
A stilted blue heron cocks its bill
at minnows hovering inches below.
The water is warm and the world holds still.
A lover murmurs a languid ohhh.
The heron strikes and swallows its kill.
Edison Jennings is a Virginia Commission for the Arts fellow. He lives in southern Appalachia and works as a Head Start bus driver and GED instructor. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. His book, Intentional Fallacies, is available through Broadstone Books and elsewhere.
Robert Estes
Tom Thumb Wedding
My first marriage was arranged
I had no choice
but I put up a fight
Being only three years old
I had no chance
They got the wedding clothes on me
despite my all-out struggle
Then off to someone’s back yard
for the outdoor, nighttime ceremony
with a bride about my age I’d never met
and would only see again much later
But I was married all right,
as I told kids for years after,
a strange fact I couldn’t
fully grasp the import of
since no one else my age
had been thrust into my state
of matrimonial mystery
Grownups sometimes forget
to say what’s make-believe,
assuming children know
the limits of reality
We don’t
Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his Physics PhD at UC Berkeley, and had interesting experiences using physics, notably on two US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. His poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Cola Literary Review, The Moth, the museum of americana, Constellations, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere
Irina Moga
Unlabeled
Walking in the low glow of an early October morning,
I remember Homer obsessing over “the rosy-fingered aurora” in the Odyssey.
Pink,
—a jumbled-up derivative of pure colors—
its frequency unlabeled on the electromagnetic spectrum
a flimsy caress of light,
moving through the periphery of marigolds and summer.
There is no season like the sporadic onset of the fall,
an equinox hidden in its brackets,
hanging in the balance
of gusty winds and sleet.
This hesitation makes us better hosts —
amphitryons of a convivial and
cagey alphabet.
And from above — a colored leaf just floats.
Irina Moga lives in Ontario, Canada. Her book, “Variations sans palais,” (Éditions L’Harmattan, 2020), was awarded the literary prize “Dina Sahyouni” (France) in 2022. “Quantum,” a collection of poems, is forthcoming with DarkWinter Press in 2025. Her poetry has appeared in “Canadian Literature,” “carte-blanche,” “NYQ Magazine,” and others.