Issue #38
Emily Uduwana
Explorers
The superbloom came
in the summer,
poppies blanketing
the hills
in a wave of allergenic
wildfire.
They bobbed their heads
as one,
tossing petals like flimsy
graduation caps,
offering shade to bees
worse off still.
The tourists came
that summer too–
sweeping across the mountain
in an ocean
exploration,
they had little need
of pirate ships,
progressed without the sails
of a vessel
at sea,
their cameras and eager feet
alone
accomplishing the task
of extinguishing
the latest
California fire.
Emily Uduwana is a poet and graduate student based in Southern California. Her work has recently appeared in Rogue Agent Journal, Miracle Monocle, and Stone of Madness Press.
Aaron Sandberg
The Odds
That night—
crayon in our hands
and thinking a prognosis
was something to outrace—
I watched my boy fight
to color within those lines,
trying to make peace
with so much room
and so little
space.
Aaron Sandberg resides in Illinois where he teaches. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, English Journal, Right Hand Pointing, Abridged, Drunk Monkeys, The Racket, Writers Resist, Yes Poetry, perhappened mag, Unbroken, and elsewhere. You might find him—though socially-distant—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.
Blake Bell
Visceral
I am all over their house. The spare room
reeks of my sweat, of my breath.
Their kitchen air is heavy with my scent.
The dog knows a faint hint of rose.
Their couch has felt the pressure of my knees;
the dining room table the weight of my back.
Their guest bath has labored to wash me clean.
The hall remembers the creaks of my footsteps.
I am all over their house,
except their bedroom.
He keeps their door shut tight, and I imagine
the room a mausoleum of his fidelity.
Blake Bell is an MFA student at Mississippi University for Women and writes whatever comes out. Bell teaches at a magnet high school in South Louisiana, and these days, she can mostly be found on her back patio reading, writing, and gardening. To read more, visit blakelbell.com or follow @Blakelbell.
Madelyn Camrud
War
Cucumber submarines
carved for games we played
behind the barn; crashed dive-bombers
in our water-for-cattle-ocean,
that day she, five years older,
my necessary partner; left for the house.
I waited at the trough—screen door slamming
behind her when she came back
on the run, dipped a pail, half-full,
mumbling have to do something—
and like an army general, victorious,
marched us to the barn front:
emptied the pail over my head—
shouted—The War is over.
I, the lesser soldier, wet
with celebration, sorry for the game’s
interruption; convinced her, in minutes—
we go back to splashing names, same as before:
Tajo, Hirohito; Kamikaze pilot
cucumbers too large for dill pickles,
Mother’s victory garden, played
that hot August day, our war
still going on, no change—hadn’t
yet learned the meaning of infamy;
the two new names: Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
Born in North Dakota in 1939, Madelyn Camrud is a graduate of the University of North Dakota with degrees in visual arts and English. She’s had three full collections published. Her poems have appeared in Virginia Normal, among others. She was named an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota in 2005.
Wortley Clutterbuck
The Bore
BASED ON HENRY JAMES’ SHORT STORY “THE PRIVATE LIFE”
Ah, my friend, how you’ve been missed—
’cause when alone, I don’t exist;
I need someone to hear me talk
which I’d fain do around the clock.
Sagacious cogitations I
have memorized, rote, on standby;
eximious expressions I’ll
regale you with, they’re all on file.
I haven’t made an utterance
that’s not repeated months on months;
expatiations I’ve rehearsed
and, pity you, you’re now immersed.
I’ve observations orotund
which you might find most moribund;
and ’tho all this you’d evitate,
you’re helpless as I, prolix, prate.
Reciting miscellanea,
endure my verbomania;
oh wait, before you don your coat,
I’ll add a pointless anecdote.
Verbatim platitudes I got
and fine points of an afterthought;
I will ingeminate on end
minutiae which I’ll augend.
You think it’s dull? I’ve just begun,
this tedium’s what I call fun;
just nod your head and hope to get
a break from my next quodlibet.
Panoptic explications I
will inculcate and multiply;
my own illations I’ll confirm
while, hapless you, just stare and squirm.
It’s politics from headlines which
I will recite like a sales pitch;
abandon any word edgewise
as I, vapid, soliloquize.
The stories that I like the best
are ones that sound like all the rest;
apostrophes that go nowhere
mismatched with apogees threadbare.
Stop me if you have heard this one—
I’ve got others even less fun;
there’s nothing I’ll say apropos
informing my vast portfolio.
I’ve got opinions on the way
someone perpends some vague hearsay;
I know a lot about the stuff
that prompts, vexèd, a stern rebuff.
Now, some suspect when I’m alone
I cease to be flesh, blood and bone;
for when I have no audience,
I vanish into abeyance.
Consider me a type of ghost
who only shows next to a host;
I need someone to listen to
my dialectic residue.
It’s true, my friend, when you leave me,
I cease all corporeality;
I only have existence if
you’re listening to me, bored stiff.
Wortley Clutterbuck is the author of Wortley Clutterbuck’s Practical Guide to Deplorable Personages and the operetta Wortley Clutterbuck. Recent work rejected by Granta, Paris Review, Ploughshares and other established organs of the aristocracy. More scuttlebutt at wortleyclutterbuck.blogspot.com.
Marc D Brown
TIDAL
there’s a siren singing inside my head
parting crashing waves of thoughts, do i drown?
a never-ending flow of something more
i am one with the sunken ships, let down
submerging beneath the words lesser said
wishing the minutes away with no sound
the water creeps in, i ask what is left?
A wreck on the ocean floor, never found
I held on so long now i’m out of breath
thoughts wash upon the shore to stare at clouds
The basic info – Marc (insta, twitter) is in his 30’s and from the UK. He takes inspiration from life, music and lyrics. You can find his previous books ‘Words of Marc D Brown’ & ‘The Lost Art of Self’ on Amazon.
Don Brandis
Near Hearings of Wallace Stevens
no mind of winter, we move
to keep the blood from freezing
yet the moment keeps, uncertain
ice-glazed branches forward spare daylight
other branches snow-laden move heavily
in a slight breeze
for a moment we are inside out
a moving strangeness beyond thingness
a stirring skin-and-ear report, just noticed
that will not wear a label
a poem we cannot hear without remaking
Don Brandis is a retired healthcare worker living near Seattle, who has published poems in various journals and has a book of poems called Paper Birds pending publication with Unsolicited Press next spring 2021.
Rhienna Renée Guedry
Just Take The Picture
Every dumb motherfucker myself included weaned
from the school of O’Keefe’s flowers rolls of film
fell into scarcity logic: a patience at first, rations
that lasted months, followed by a rush and a push
urgency to finish and develop
This business of saving and rapidly spending
like coins
we took so many photographs
things unchanged by time, unremarkable as a
generic postcard of the coastline what did we need
with one more photo of a palm tree?
Is that what youth is? Not noticing the things
changing before our very eyes
I never thought I’d long to gaze into
the refrigerator of my childhood what type of mayonnaise
did we put on our tomato sandwiches? Did
my grandparents make their own pickles?
I’d like to get a good look at things now nostalgia is the
pain from an old wound I’d like to look through
today’s eyes but hold it in yesterday’s hands
It might explain why some nights I’m online
image searching using
current tech which was once future tech and will soon be
old tech for photos of Blockbuster Video, like,
did any of us know there just wouldn’t be video stores anymore
what did 1996 sound like carbon-copy credit card machines
made the most absurd cha-ching but that’s what we had
We dropped off rolls & rolls of film imagine if the last photo of the roll
was a stack of VHS clamshells instead of a macro of a fucking rose
I guess as the shape of our hands changed we changed too
Rhienna Renèe Guedry (site, twitter) is a Louisiana-born writer and artist. Her work has been featured in Empty Mirror, Bitch Magazine, Screen Door, Scalawag Magazine, Taking the Lane, and elsewhere on the internet. Rhienna holds a MS in Writing/Publishing from Portland State University. She is currently working on her first novel.
Robert Hamilton
Private Property
I run along twinned wires of endless
rusted barbs, lift my eyes to the hills
where stipa speciosa mutters sibilants.
Whose are you then, parallelograms
of juniper, creosote? Who made me
run always parallel to you? A stench
of death and oil, hot iron, the steppe.
Back home I smell neighborly butane,
try to think over the weedwacker’s
dipterous whine; out there, coyotes,
loose-limbed, howl at cacti never
deeded to them. Quadrants of yucca
fester in jail. We fall upon imagined
thorns, we bleed, ride pumpjacks
fort and da, imagining in quiet hours
the vast magma, always on the move,
surging below our puny deeds
and metal: coin, concertina wire.
Robert Hamilton’s poem “Senso Unico,” which appears in Posit, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. Other recent work is in Pøst- and 8 Poems. His chapbook, Heart Trouble, was published by Ghost City in 2018. He lives and teaches in Texas.
Dylan Loring
Trivial Meditation
I had it pegged as a banal question
on the coffee shop chalkboard—
how much honey does the average
worker bee manufacture in its lifetime?
—but then I realized that it was
possibly the most open-ended question ever
because, in addition to numbers and decimals
and zoology to consider, the coffee chain
named after a deer’s cousin didn’t specify the units
with which it wants you to (or more likely
doesn’t want you to) answer the question
and receive 10 cents off your purchase,
and me being me, the first thing I thought of
was to answer in whole and/or fractions
of plastic bottles molded into cute bears with
traffic cones on their heads, which led me to wonder
if there is a unit bigger than plastic bears, a sort of if
4 quarts is 1 gallon, 3 1/2 bears is blank,
but then, before I could think
any further, I remembered that the honey
within each bear is weighed in ounces,
which actually expanded the continuum
and landed me farther from the unknown locus of clarity
since there are ounces and there are fluid ounces
and I never learned the difference other than that
liquids are usually in fluid ounces, and honestly,
what the fuck is honey?
because it seems right in the middle
between a liquid and solid,
which I want to say makes it a plasma,
but even I know that’s not true,
and there wasn’t a child near the line
who could have been my Winnie-the-Pooh
consultant for a dollar—I was willing
to take a loss on this one—and my mind
was getting sticky as the cashier looked at me
and the line went from dying-small-business-sized
to Walmart-with-only-two-lanes-open-sized,
so I didn’t even give an answer, and when I looked up
the answer on my phone later, it said 1/12 th of a teaspoon,
and that rounds down to zero plastic bear bottles,
and to be honest, if there was that much honey
in my plastic bear I would no-question-about-it
throw out that worker bee’s life’s work,
even though the bee’s life is only a few weeks
to half a year depending on the season of its birth,
and I really am quite lucky to be able to spend
a random summer Tuesday afternoon
wearing sandals and drinking whipped cream—
I am the opposite of a worker bee today, overjoyed
at the prospect of likely having millions of teaspoons
of life left, enough time to convert the teaspoons
to bear bottles using only the knowledge of how long
a centuries-dead king’s foot was rumored to be.
Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa. His poems have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Gold Wake Live, Big Muddy, The American Journal of Poetry, Maudlin House, and New Ohio Review.
Megan McDermott
2020 Religious Water Color Wall Calendar – $1.07
I like the picture
its months cast of
a delicate faith
found in flowers
and phrases like
“Grace Wins”
and “His Face Shines
Upon You” and
“All the Earth Rejoice.”
There is no month
for Job. For Lamentations.
For “God, my God,
why have you forsaken,”
though that should
be the verse of the year.
A calendar is aspirational.
It imagines important dates
can be planned in advance,
their purpose clear
enough to be reduced
to a few words, a tiny box.
I can aspire to this: to their
March 2020, to “Sing
A New Song,” to flowers,
to yellow, to straight lines
dividing each day from the next.
Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Susquehanna University. Her poetry has been published in various publications, including The Christian Century, The Cresset, Psaltery & Lyre, Amethyst Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Saint Katherine Review (2014 #3).
Chiedozie Kelechi Danjuma
Aubade to Leaving
Once, I went scouting
for ripe fruits
before full light on my father’s farm.
Scanning the grove, I saw
a mango rot on the dark soil.
The wind must have hurled
it down,
& released it from the hands of the tree.
Small animals; ants and flies, worked
through its exit wound—a torn patch of skin
revealing pit.
Weed noise, chant of dirt.
A monarch butterfly,
yellow & green winged,
did a little bounce mid air
& joined the feast. A thing eating
a thing to survive,
the cruel algorithm of the world.
It laid there in the mud, yellowed
& resigned, unable to protest
the ruination of its body.
Like my mother in coma
in St.Nicholas hospital
in late 2005.
I have learnt
how to watch a minute hand
crawl in between decaying things
for sunless hours,
& see the Christ
wriggling on his cross
begging, too, to breathe.
Chiedozie Kelechi Danjuma is a Nigerian writer, essayist and lawyer. His poems and essays have appeared on The Guardian, Disquiet Arts, African Writer, Rising Phoenix, Nanty Greens, Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine and elsewhere.
Paul Waring
Nature Boy
Heron-still canalside
as though he knows
when and where
the hidden merge
with the seen
eyes lit by silver bream
capture moments
dappled pike emerge
cosh-headed from the murk
mouths rigged with razor-wire.
A boy whose fingers
read lichen painted
on bark of oak and ash,
feel sap pulse
along sinew tracks
hears coded notes
from nests,
newborn cries,
mating calls, music
lost to you and me.
Things no-one told him—
the day flower petals
shutter open,
first butterflies dance
on silent April air
as the dead stir,
whisper in language
only he would know,
words that could have been
his name.
Paul Waring is a retired clinical psychologist from Wirral, UK. His poetry is published in Prole (#30), Strix, Atrium, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip and elsewhere. He was runner-up in the 2019 Yaffle Prize and commended in the 2019 Welshpool Poetry Competition. His pamphlet ‘Quotidian’ is published by Yaffle Press.
Lisa Trudeau
Pyewacket
Pye upon the roof surveys house, yard, wood,
tracks fisher screaking for a mate,
flies past my window past the room
where I am moored, violet moods unmoving.
Every night fisher curdles sleep
his yowl the sound of stars, of summer
bought and lost, of violence superlative.
Pye having killed so many lesser things
feels only invincibility, his unbreachable domain,
sees only movement, size and speed,
not the box I will find him in tomorrow
left by neighbors with a note – fisher got him –
mouth and eyes stuck wide, side unseamed
like an opened can, right hip glistening to bone
where white will writhe, maggoty cat.
All screaming stopped.
Lisa Trudeau is a former publishing professional and independent bookseller. She lives in Massachusetts. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, Blue Mountain Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine (vol. 7, #1, Issue 19), Levee Magazine (October 2020), and The Inflectionist Review (2021), among others.
Shane Schick
A Hot Minute
Between sunbathing and burning
are at least sixty seconds of luck.
Just before the sting is sewn
into my skin like a STOP sign
I’d missed because I was
wearing it, I find myself basking
with the kind of grin I would make
into my smartphone, immediately
prior to crashing my bike
into the back of a parked car.
Oh, it’s going to hurt later,
even if I cover it with aloe
afterwards like a blanket apology,
but what other tightrope
could I walk where just to
exist is as delicious as a
glass of wine that might stain
the white tablecloth, where
The only last chances I’ll get
have a habit of hiding themselves
in the dark little continents
of shade the trees have
drawn into the geography
of the pavement.
Shane Schick has been a columnist for the Globe and Mail, the Editor in Chief of Marketing Magazine and an Editor-at-Large at Swagger Magazine. Shane is developing a publication about customer experience design called 360Magazine.com. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.