Issue #35
Honor Vincent
Moirology
I keep my voice rough
let my wail go in a rhythm
that leaves room for the others.
The tomb wall is made for quietly scraping my knuckles
so when I tear my robes
the mourners see blood there.
This can clear a family’s head
of boils, waste, fall-broken faces
of men made dry as leaves, or soft as sinking loam
It is my work not to flinch from them
as they consider where their own blood is.
Like living, the real work isn’t
pulling air in and pushing air out.
It is knowing each wall,
And your place within it.
I writhed so well for one man’s death—
shrieked generously, stayed late into the evening—
they used my shape to model the relief
on his son’s sarcophagus.
My body bows across his body
in his mother’s veil, a drape of grief
a well-played woman
They carved her face on my shoulders
but I know my hand
by the care with which it cups his chin.
Honor Vincent is a writer who was born and raised in New York. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Strange Horizons, Entropy, The Ekphrastic Review, Nowhere Travel Stories, and elsewhere. The first issue of her comic series is available here.
Elodie Barnes
June
evening light dappled with swallows
passes over the minutes
with the beating of wings
ripples curving into sky
pour through my skin
like a heartbeat.
we are just borrowing air
from this life
from the bright spaces between birth
and death
borrowing space
from a sky that cannot
hold the moon
(look at the echo it leaves behind
swelling in darkness that isn’t quite dark
look at the houses we knit
from stone
stitch by careful stitch
that then unravel
trails of yarn billowing behind
like laughter)
and still we think
that this life is ours
Elodie Rose Barnes is an author and photographer. She can be found between Paris, Spain and the UK, daydreaming her way back to the 1920s, while her words live worldwide in various places on the internet. Find her online at her website and on Twitter @BarnesElodie.
Stephen Massimilla
Disclosure on the Shades of Words
Ghost of harp,
tiny strain.
Behind drawn blinds, the spider lunged
to the kill. Sharp.
Incommunicable pain.
Dust along the sill.
Stephen Massimilla’s multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. Previous books include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera/CUNY Prize); Later on Aiaia (Grolier Prize); and translations of books by Neruda and others.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
Antlers are true bone
Antlers are true bone
and an extension of all antlered-animals from
bleached skulls that are
a part of them. But it feels
like they’re their own being:
a separate animal.
As a little girl, I used to yell
at my feet. One was good
and the other one bad.
Both a part of me
and not.
They got hollered at
for being a portion of my body
but so much their own
person, wagging in the backseat of the car.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, as well as the author of the flash fiction collection, Better Bones, and the poetry collection, Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House.
Cameron Morse
Storm Windows
Men come to paint my mother’s house:
a brother-in-law, an old friend of the family.
Come to be served quesadillas,
BLT’s on the back patio. Ring the doorbell
for a fresh pot of coffee
while the baby sleeps. I grind the beans,
tap out the powder and brew.
I percolate. So it makes sense when you tell me
how worthless I am. How much I enjoy
myself at your expense, masturbating
in the shower, while poop dries its mud pie
in the diaper or Theo tears your hair out, Naomi
with her balled up fists full of your hair.
March can’t make up its mind. Without storm
windows, a single pane of uninsulated
glass stands between us and a more winter
than spring rain, a cul-de-sac shimmering
with the static of rainfall, white torrents charging
like invisible linebackers, the waves
in my father’s hair. When the heat kicks on,
blowing down from the ducts, the liquified tub
of coconut oil congeals. Without a home
of our own, we shelter in place, like deer
standing stock-still in a field. I would like
to believe I have some worth. Outside,
the hyacinths double over in the rain.
Their little towers lean. Out back, the dog paths
puddle with mud and maple leaf buds.
I was never good at anything.
Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and two children in Blue Springs, Missouri. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020).
Ellis Elliott
SIS
My secrets ricochet off the sandstone
and slate of these mountains I will wait
to chart by signs seek to leave my home
by the season’s half-moon shine escape
the thin sooted hem of my dress chop
clean the black braid down my back
turned to dreams that others sought
for me to wed and birth and act
as if my shorn head would not love
to press my ear at river’s edge born
to hear of ancient indigo seas and cove
forests in valleys I am formed
like our mighty hemlock sturdy I grasp
for fingers of sunlight as they pass
Ellis Elliott has been published in Literary Mama and participated in the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2015 Workshop with poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Rhodes College and currently is enrolled in the MFA program of Queens University.
Henry Brown
gethsemane
stainless-cast shameless second touchdown of god
sleeping still under treetops repent weak flesh
bolting in, hands wave shaking silenced by pride
skyward eyes tell the story when clouds turn red
shameless end! shameless, and speaking to nothing
framed on wall flapping gums for answer to prayer
one glance past deadline neck cranes nothing to see
losing time looking toward what cannot look back
gleaming god! circles, begging metal motion
stricken split weeping shameless! cries to repent
temper flesh blazing fire seek steel deep beneath
only ash! weeping metal unheard for one
simmers down histrionic lord of eyes shut
frantic pant delirious to dust return
Henry Brown is a writer and third-year Religion major/Spanish minor at Carleton College, where he organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America. His poems have appeared in Kingdoms in the Wild, After the Pause, Amethyst Review, Isacoustic, Eleventh Transmission, Eunoia Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Quatrain.fish, and Unlikely Stories Mark V.
Guy Elston
Sir Life of Butter
was my name, self-knighted,
my armour a vest of woollen chainmail,
Charlotte’s grey beanie,
a wooden sword with a wound string grip
and St George’s cross emblazoned
on a rubbish bin lid shield,
A4 paper and peeling tape.
I ranged ahead of my responsibilities,
family and dogs, guarding them
from forest monsters, Welsh impostors,
any external threats
as we walked daily to the lake.
Through the sedge stalks I thrashed,
in the lake weed I loitered,
scattering all enemies and chasing.
Dad went skinny dipping and I guarded
with my back turned, observing
Mum’s protests with a bodyguard’s discretion.
Mum was scolded for forgetting something,
or not, and I barely heard; Sir Life
was scanning the uncertain undergrowth.
Silent dinners, separate bedrooms;
these are not a knight’s concern.
Each evening I escorted them
through the dwindling sunlight faithfully,
in perfect safety; together.
Guy Elston is a poet and EFL teacher who lives in the Wirral, UK. In 2020 his poetry has been included by Atrium, and Re-side, and is upcoming in Anthropocene, Rust + Moth and Selcouth Station. In October 2020 he will be performing at the Wirral Poetry Festival.
Linda Wojtowick
Stupice
From the outside he’s a husk, a grey man in a raveling coat.
That was the deal. Mostly it works. It suits him,
this look of clocked miles. In town he gets a creased paper,
bites ice at the bar. He likes the way it creaks between his teeth like cars.
Green corn screaming in a starved field. The job, truth told,
used to be simpler. But the children now are streamlined, pared down.
Their belief in him is thin and stretched, spun. He’d tried to make
some changes in his life but who can say. He still feels
dirty, still run. Like humans, this trouble. The bursting head.
He still lights caves, takes the offered dead teeth.
Leaves coins and cards and beads in their moldering sheds.
He taps on windows under killed moons at dawn.
His skin turns from a pearling pale to a ruddy, splotching ruin.
No matter, he thinks. Even the mud here runs a little pink.
When he takes some rest in the creekbed and cold white sun
the derelict faeries straggle in from bars. Like him,
they cling to leaking dreams. Because what else would stoke the fires.
All the lights of Cairo on their small backs like stars.
Walfordite
So he rides through the landscape, as slices in pie.
He stops in the villages, the inns. He knows,
sees the scrambling as his horse comes up. It’s fine.
They try hurriedly to quiet their dogs. He checks
papers, barns. He does his job well. He owns
everything, is feared. At home, in quiet hours,
he opens the big windows wide and kneads flour, rests dough.
It’s a thing that reigns him back in, away. His oven sings.
He shapes vol au vents, Napoleons, ninety-niners. Financiers.
His mouth is an arc over a holy river. His neck a royal fan.
He loves his music, the science of salt and heat.
He loves the loving crumb. But here make no mistake,
he will break windows, teeth. Bones. Things have even died.
There are rules here as everywhere, and they’re staying
and clean. There are kings, dogs. Everyone knows it’s fair.
There’s cake, and bright brains open to sun.
There are flags.
Linda Wojtowick grew up in Montana. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she can indulge her cinematic obsessions and read stories for scary podcasts. She’s a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has most recently appeared in Wax Seal, Really System, and upcoming in The Oakland Review.
C.C. Russell
THERE IS NOW A SILENCE HERE
Like your wake
in the pool,
the ripples
that pushed themselves
aside
so quietly
as you dove
in.
These notes nostalgic,
shadows
across the ice there now.
I’m coming to grips
with the stars –
their burning
silence
and our unflinching distance
from them.
C.C. Russell has published his poetry and prose in such journals as Pidgeonholes, Softblow, and Wyvern Lit among others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (poem) and for Best of the Net (poem) and will be included in Best Microfiction 2020 (piece). He lives in Wyoming with a couple of humans and several cats. You can find more of his work at his website.
Richard Bentley
Our Crypt
Nothing will sleep in our basement.
It’s damp as a ditch.
Small flowers break out of boxes stalking
cracks in the concrete.
Buds sway and slouch,
dangling from moldy crates,
drooped down long yellow vile stalks, like serpents.
And what a muster of stinks!
Roots with wet shafts,
muck, green, swollen against slimy planks.
Striving for life:
While the muck keeps gasping.
Richard Bentley has published fiction, poetry, and memoir in over 200 journals, magazines and anthologies on three continents. His books, Post-Freudian Dreaming and A General Theory of Desire, are available on Amazon, Powell’s Books, or at www.dickbentley.com. His new book, All Rise, contains recently published stories and poems.