Issue #71

Jacob Schepers

High-Minded Lyricism

seeps into everything
because it can but it does not

spill over because it knows
the crux of a boundary

the sense of ethics therein

In saying so I welcome a death
into Sheol with lullabies and sweets

piper that I am to this pestilent rat
Uncouth me in this final defilement

Let my exuberance grow straight
downward without budging

an inch either left or right
Let no sway inhabit my underground

Should any ounce of me resurface
let it have a well-documented emergence

Let any who come across me
come across me as pilgrims

determined and cautionless
on their way to uneasy respite

O tendentious artesian spring

Jacob Schepers is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project 2014) and, with Sara Judy, edits the lit mag ballast. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Ross Thompson

Fireworks Display

A benign kind of lunacy: this throng
of people assembled in the darkness,
waiting for the show to start, a few wrong
steps from jagged rocks and the suck and wash

of a shoreline fissling like sweet wrappers
in the previews before a matinee.
A whoosh. The sloped roof fills with firecrackers
pistils and flying fish: a sensory

overload of weeping willows, crossettes
and fountains puncture clouds black as cola;
the ecstatic truth of watching comets,
liquid fire and blooming girandola

as if witnessing the birth of our earth;
the full extended repertoire of stars
and planets captured in microfiched bursts
of memory to be replayed in hard

winter months as proof that the charred remains
of summer can be reignited when
we find ourselves repeating this refrain:
the finale is not always the end.

Ross Thompson is a writer and Arts Council award recipient from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His debut poetry collection Threading The Light is published by Dedalus Press. His work has appeared on television, radio, short films and in a wide range of publications. Most recently, he wrote and curated A Silent War, a collaborative audio response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently preparing a second full-length book of poems.

Bat Collazo

Godefelawe, At Rest

In that farmhouse bed, winter wind whistling
in plastic wrap window-lining,
portraits dismantled, faces to wall,
spirits of place— the mallard, the creaking oak joints—
plied with earnest oatmeal,
your rose tea soaked in cream on plate on nightstand,
you relaxed next to me, stretched out,
and set down the performance.
Lob-lie lazing, satisfied.
Strain-eased. Happy.
I promised I would miss you,
even if I don’t remember why.
And isn’t that what they always said, in the nursing home
where I, a maid, scrubbed,
mildew mop airing out in
the 5 am gloam: love greater than fear. Human body holding
everything, every experience, even
when Memory’s wings are ripped clean off.
Nursing home labyrinth, no clocks,
like a casino, and with pushcart clatter of dishes,
I got lost, so lost.
But, Pride-Bright, you were proud
and peaceful
in our borrowed bed.
Mightn’t I forget the way you draped,
but relief to us both
for what my body knows.

Bat Collazo (ze/zir/zirs) is a queer, Latinx, Pagan poet and artist. Ze is the editor of Blood Unbound, and zir writing has been published in places such as The Wild Hunt, Idunna, and Collective Fallout. For more information, please visit batcollazo.com.

Christina M. Rau

The Hatter Shakes

Before the onset of addled speech
when stitch becomes swatch becomes
swish becomes swash becomes schwa,
the fabric needs to be dipped and dyed,
measured and cut, patterned and sewn.

But it’s all wrong, needs to be done
twice again. Shaky hands, poor sight
make for mis-measurement, mis-hue.
The felt has never been sick, yet it’s still
cured with mercury in rooms with no vents.

In the late stages,
the hats make themselves.
Dance under needles. Zip through machines.
Twinkle. Entwine. Glow velvet neon.
Crush with feathers. Drink the mercury
gallon by gallon, let the hatter
sleep in his maddened bed.

Christina M. Rau (@christinamrau) is the author of What We Do To Make Us Whole, the Elgin Award-winning Liberating The Astronauts, and two poetry chapbooks. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching yoga or watching the Game Show Network.

Iris Cai

self-portrait as aphrodite

sixteen & only in
the bathroom mirror
am i a woman.            finger
tousled hair, pin-straight & dry
as the crackle of scallop shells.

sunswept golden girl, good for two hours!
promises the cyan bottle spray.

i am good for two minutes,
wannabe bombshell—
shrapnel ribs
rising from the shower mist,
almost divine.

tonight, you touch me
for the first time, press
my knees into yours. there
on the bleachers, i hunger
into something sharp:
a woman, perhaps.

lingering, soft as sugar
& your blushing cheek.
the two of us, unspoken.
golden girl grazed
by a misshot arrow
so i pull away.

later i dance disco,
the bathroom floor my stage.
when i tire, i pull out
hair like tangled thread,
two minutes’ grace clogging my sink.

one day i’ll find me, split open—
an overripe papaya.
girl bled golden on cold tile
sparkling in her sea.

Iris Cai is a sophomore at The Harker School in San Jose, California. Her poetry has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and is forthcoming from On the Seawall and Eunoia Review. When she’s not writing, Iris enjoys reading, playing piano, and perfecting her milk tea recipe.

Matt Dennison

Night Fish

On returning
I go fishing in
the family waters
only to pull out a
night fish with
soft father eyes
and soft father
lips who did
not want to be
caught or brought
to the surface or
made to feel the air
and my hook has
hurt him but I
am not brave enough
to touch his lips
to set him free
—his eyes are
shocked, seeing
what they were
not meant to see,
skin feeling
what it was
not meant to
feel—I cut
the line,
dropping him
into the water but
he will not swim
away, he lies
on his side
in the shallows
breathing
hurt—I kick
him into the
current as I break
my pole in half
and bury it in
the sands of
home.

Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for Better from Main Street Rag Press. His work has appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize and Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoo, Marie Craven and Jutta Pryor.

Leslie Lindsay

TRUNDLE

In Whispering Oakwoods, my room              Was in the front of the house,              Overlooking the yard.              The hillside fell gently to the road below              and to the trees that slipped              beneath the hills.                           One night, my father in a whisper sang—                           I’m locking your door, for safety. Something’s not right                           With your mom.              Afterward, I knew, inexplicably that she would somehow devolve              into glows casting out glare over the ridge              Where the train met the river, met the interstate, met the buildings              At my window, I pried a piece of wallpaper, ripping              Crumbs of drywall, creating a tunnel, a channel.                           The lintels stretched to the beams—                           A hidden world, tails of constellations cut through darkness                           What was joined together, once before: unhinged.              I listened for the train, the diurnal soundtrack of my childhood,              Lumbering down the tracks beyond my town, my home,              The sun would shine again, for now; blue black purple,              Shrill and still. And then the metal. Like a gurney. A door.              The sound pressed. Her wail, the train. Was there a response to his                           Call?                           Something’s not right|with your mom.              The train carried. Materials. Bolts. Coal. Who knew?              It trundled along, shaking bones of other houses, shrieks and sighs.              Did other mothers, in other homes, have minds that went loose, did fathers                           Lock bedroom doors—keeping the roof heavy above heads where                           no one slept but paced and held strange thoughts inside their skulls.

HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS

No one knows why she started to see
the ghosts of her ancestors—wrinkled in a heap,
the iron red and hissing, perched precariously
like a topple of bricks on the little sod house.

At first, they said she was just tired.
The flu? Woman’s trouble. Nerves.

The shades were drawn. The dishes piled up.
It became something akin to the debris of memory,
             calamities that distorted the mind, creating a swill of
anguish, fear, and bliss.

The doctor pronounced it madness—
the kind settlers got when the wind blew
             tall grass
that resembled the undulations
             of the mind,
             churning like waves, rollicking
until they bashed against the edge
             of sanity.

The treatment, the doctor said—
             is rest.
             An oasis appeared, a mirage.
But she was surrounded by chaos,
             longings and hazards,
The house went silent.
             The house,
her mind.

                          No matter.
Darkness turned brilliant, the light
             full of shadows.
No visitors,
             Wasn’t that what she needed?
                          Now a ghost of the land,
Stillness led to
             Frenzy
Was that not the very thing
                          She was seeking to avoid?

Leslie Lindsay’s writing has been featured in The Millions, CRAFT Literary, and The Rumpus. Her fiction has been nominated for Best American Short Stories. She resides in Greater Chicago and is at work on a memoir excavating her mother’s madness through fragments. Leslie can be found @leslielindsay1 on Twitter and Instagram.

Wayne Lee

Centerpiece

Gratitude isn’t something you can earn
or gain; it is unearthed, like Ruth’s missing
garden trowel. Gus discovered it this spring
as he turned the new-thawed soil after
the hard-frost winter. Thanks is only found
down where suffering has been buried deep,
like the food scraps and fallen fruit Gus leaves
for worms to turn to casings underground.
Ruth used that trowel back in mid-November
when she harvested the turnips, red beets
and purple yams for her last Thanksgiving.
Then in late May Gus saw something silver
concealed in the dirt. For his Easter feast,
he used it as his centerpiece, gleaming.

Wayne Lee lives in Santa Fe, NM. Lee’s poems have appeared in Pontoon, Slipstream, The New Guard, The Lowestoft Chronicle and other publications. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three Best of the Net Awards.

Cathy Allman

DEBATE FOR THE EXACT WORD

             “…it was her poem and she herself up against
             that gymnasium wall, and it felt like love,
             and the hell with all of us.”
                          Stephen Dunn, “Decorum”

And the time I said it felt like love
there on the beige coarse carpet,
TV blaring nonsense nightly news behind us,
two unfinished puddles of mashed potatoes
and chicken bones waited to be cleared.
Not eaten, because we weren’t that kind
of hungry.

                          And that time I said it felt like desperation—
your shirt unbuttoned, my jeans unsnapped,
your knees, my elbows rug burned.
You left your boots on.

And then after, unwrinkled, reclasped,
presentable and tidy, I returned
to the stainless-steel sink, scraped
leftovers into the trash, squirted blue
dish soap on black cast iron—scrubbed,
dried, put away pans and continued
to view that 1970s war, which was
reported on screen every night
while I didn’t pay attention.

Why, out of all the lovemaking or
fucking or whatever reptilian
consumption of one another
we engaged in, do I label
that night as love?

What name would you give it?

Cathy Allman entered the writing field as a reporter after attending the school of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. She earned an MFA from Manhattanville College. Her poem, “Not in the Wonder Box” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ford Weisberg

The Quilt

Sewn by not-so-long-gone-helpmeet N.,
scraps, castoffs,  mute

floral sentinels no
one knew as muse for a life of sutured

lips. Not
made for comfort, no

fluff for the soffit of this
pastiche, periwinkle and purple

leaf plum: creche handcrafted in her curdled
time. That must

in the air spread to the welting. I beg
it may be my shroud, but what

will this new bride
abide?

Ford Weisberg is a poet located in Ladner, B.C. He has spent a lifetime in the arts, concertizing on tinwhistle and flute in traditional Irish music. After years as a photographer and digital painter, Ford turned to poetry in 2014 after his wife (now deceased) was diagnosed with cancer.