Issue #87
Anne Graue
Glowing Intermittent: a golden shovel
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
—Gwendolyn Brooks “the mother”
In the habit of procrastinating, I
imagine expectations that I don’t have,
that others might, and I’ve just heard
a voice say fraught and feel boxed in,
suffocating. I’ve found the
best thing to do is to search for all the misplaced voices
from dreams harboring strange faces and maybe that jar of
fireflies glowing intermittent during the night as they scratch the
glass in their attempts to climb out into the splintered wind
to fly, regroup, and find mates according to their flashes made for the
purposes of going on and on. They ignore muffled human voices
in favor of green lightning and lives they can be proud of
one day, one hour, one minute. They don’t live for very long, to my
knowledge, and eventually become earnest and dim
signaling to anyone who might be watching that the new climate has killed
them, is killing them slowly, them and their shining children.
Unravel
-a duplex, after Jericho Brown
A poem is a shout into the void.
It screams sotto voce across a stage.
A piercing whisper is heard from a stage.
An audience leans forward to listen.
A collective organism tilts forward, listens.
They’ve altered a planet’s orbit, changed a little.
They imperceptibly change earth, themselves.
Many read meaning from nothing.
Many people read meaning where there is none.
Finding clues is satisfying like an orgasm might be.
When they come to you, it is satisfying.
The code unlocked is an easy click.
The code clicks to life, unlocks itself.
Another poem bellows into nothingness.
Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press) and has work in numerous journals and anthologies, online and in print. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review. Find more of her work here: https://www.annegraue.com/.
Patrick Kennedy
Abracadabra
If written right and uttered well
By someone with the proper skill,
A formal poem is like a spell.
Take the winding villanelle,
Which conjures spirits good and ill
If written right and uttered well:
As when they’re rung correctly, bells
Can summon, sadden, warn, or thrill,
A formal poem is like a spell
For working magic fair and fell;
And there is little doubt it will,
If written right and uttered well.
Like fortunes only time will tell,
It may take many years until
A formal poem is like a spell.
So if it doesn’t work, don’t kill
The messenger; remind yourself:
If written right and uttered well,
A formal poem is like a spell.
Patrick Kennedy is an assistant librarian, an antiquarian bookseller, and the author West of House, a book of poems. His work has appeared in The Rotary Dial, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, The Literary Hatchet, and elsewhere.
Amalie Kwassman
A QUESTION FOR MY RABBI
So, rabbi, if every time you do a mitzvah
you grow an angel, then where
does that angel live once it’s born?
The rabbi answered with a stare
heavy on me, making me think
angels must live everywhere.
Angels are in the
ribcage and the heart.
One lives
in the stomach or second intestine
for bodily protection.
This must be the secret reason
why the old Jewish women stand
me
in their kitchens to watch me
practice the bracha over the bread.
They cough once, anxious,
and say that was very good;
now, do it again. Because you
should not embarrass anyone,
they do not say I left out a word.
I’m supposed to talk to people
as I was taught to speak on the phone—
Amalie Kwassman has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and the Environment from Iowa State University. Amalie will be an Assistant Professor in English at Montana State University-Billings starting Fall 2024. Her poetry has been published in Ruminate, the minnesota review, Salt Hill, Hobart, juked, and elsewhere.
Caleb Edmondson
Verisimilitude
notes of smoked cedar flowing
as polyester teardrops oxidize
flakes from bathtub spout burnt
orange to a tongue bitter as old coffee
air through september mornings
packing lunches with a bloody grip
on the past fingertips around
this neck of cheap liquor and a dream
buoyant ivory sinking slow
into a pink lady’s seedless core
Caleb Edmondson is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches English and is an associate editor at Mid-American Review.
Lee Evans
POLYPHEMUS
Throughout this fabled country of the free,
And dominating every living room,
There squats a Cyclops sentry guard to whom
All dwellers in each cavern must concede
A backward posture, so that his eyebeam
May cast upon the darkened wall shadows,
Which take the shapes of things they cannot know—
And this is how they realize their dreams.
But woe unto the man who sues for grace
In meditation, or who longs to hold
Communion with a living human face!
He winces, when upon the cave’s damp mold
They worship an electrical device,
And in that trance envision Paradise.
Lee Evans lives in Bath, Maine in retirement from the Bath YMCA and the Maryland State Archives. He writes poetry whenever he cannot resist the urge to do so.
G.R. Harriman
Premiere Home Theatre: Reflections in Haibun (Episode XXX)
|
From the high shelf behind the register, the young man retrieves The Blue Book ® for mature customers only. Humble husbands, ranchers, brick layers etc. cradle this smutty bulging binder at the counter’s farthest end. Decision reached, they utter coded requests; some write ciphers on scratch paper, folding and passing them down like killing votes. The young man fetches their counterparts, never spying their true titles on the dot matrix late report: they either materialize by morning, or embrace the shanghaied life. Once, the winking owner deputizes the young man and his subordinate to update the catalog post-porn delivery. Immodesty reigns. He will recall glitter (lots), flesh protruding, platinum locks, heaving hemispheres. The small town pleasure district as cellophaned, thumb-throughable, three-ringed plastic perversion: i.e. girls having gone wild. just out of reach these carnal dreams float like cheapo DVDs |
G.R. Harriman is a poet and educator living in southwest Colorado. His work has appeared in Atlas Poetica, Kestrel, Toasted Cheese, Drunk Monkeys, and Naugatuck River Review. I, Menagerie, his first poetry chapbook, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Please follow him on various platforms @inkwellsoon.
Christopher Klingbeil
Centerfold
I took your picture in the cove
the night we watched the moon rise
a night before it would be full
to catch the surf champagning
against bleached coral and volcanic
rocks the noise of static breathing
I wanted our remains there
breathing in between twin stars
we knew as planets blue and red
we were thinking about ourselves
in orbit with something larger
held swinging just above our heads
you were talking about Jupiter
pointing to the dot you said
our children are hot air balloons
this pool the wicker basket
or some hazy suggestion
for recording the galaxy
how frequently we speak about
escaping to some other place
with parts of us from long before
this moon in its white skirt against
the water rustling train hemmed up
against the boulders glitzy photos
your white bikini in the surf
lights bright freckles all confetti
starts in the moon and glitters back
to black ocean glass when the surf
pulls back and when we turn to watch
the voyager in its mission
we're set in motion by permission
signatures on report cards, Christ
what are we to do with all this
life just flashing on pond water
between what blinks and what is drawn
between that light before we know
when to announce new life and when
to name it if we only know
to have it sent for have it now
record us with closed eyelashes
to have it sentient you said
was a comforting lineage
the lights whose names we know despite
the distance I was watching
Venus dreaming of our kids faces
before they were born their pictures
were held with magnets to the fridge
imaging against dark spaces
we appear in every picture
we take of one another so
happy families all look alike
we look exactly like ourselves
until we're older then we look
like babies for another life
let’s go and learn to walk again
our elbows linked along the beach
wet sand dampening to purple
while the tide sweeps back each moment
together is the farthest still
we have traveled in this country
Christopher Klingbeil is the author of the chapbook evaporatus. His writing has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Salt Hill, to name a few places. He worked as a government lumberjack across the US West before arriving in northern Colorado. Now he rides up to teach in Wyoming.
Stefanie Leigh
Eleven Boxes
Every time we moved, I would wrap
our wedding album in soft cotton,
bubble wrap, blankets. I wanted
the soft leather, thick spine
to be supported
from the impending trauma
of travel. In the final house
together, you left first,
and I walked around taking stills
from the top of the stairs,
the front door, the kitchen
table, peering
into your office, the view
from my pillow.
When it was time
for me to pack everything,
I gently lifted our album
from the shelf, found
the biggest box in the stack
and placed it in,
naked, the front cover buckled
left pushing against its spine.
I piled twenty-four years
on top of it, not enough to make it snug.
Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre and is currently working on her first poetry collection, Swan Arms. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, ONE ART, SWWIM, Frozen Sea and elsewhere.
Matt Wood
Sphoṭa (After Mallarmé)
Between the pale parentheses
made by a waning
moon mirrored
in the waves,
you read the night
within night, listen for lemmata
lost, liminal on the lips, glimpse
the ghosts of dead
glyphs, your
voice shaping
void, circumscribing
in speech that lacunate locus
just beyond reach.
Matthew Wood is a poet and mechanic from Colorado. He has work forthcoming in Eunoia Review.
Heather Truett
Fuck no, I don't want to be pregnant
unless I can be pregnant like a poem
you wrote, like a poem wearing
a sunhat so big the heat can't finger
its cheeks pink and the hormones are all tied
up like satin ribbons on the rim, then I might
consider birth, gestation, the monstrous cannibal
creation of new life. If I can be pregnant in a pink
dress while fertile words drip on my pale
flesh, needle deep, lines gushing a salty pantoum
down the skin of my thighs, I will let the dry erase
board marker ink dye my nails green and think
of baby names to paint on perinatal parchment, to roll
up and eat with honey stings on my tongue, a soft
song to settle my own colic.
If I can be pregnant with joy, I'll labor.
I'll labor long.
I'll push.
Heather Truett holds an MFA from the University of Memphis and is doing PhD work at FSU. Her debut novel, KISS AND REPEAT, was released from Macmillan in 2021. She has work in Hunger Mountain, Sweet Lit, Whale Road Review, and others. Heather serves as managing editor for the Southeast Review.