Issue #62
Jordan Potter
Cigarette Break
The gods of sacked empires throw dice
behind the restaurant on the lake.
Old men too weak to sit up straight,
malnourished without sacrifice,
nurse steins filled with the blood of Christ
and whisper spells to mason jars:
Let’s go. Fifty five. Texas flowers.
Their voices crack like old guitars.
Bones in their unworshipped hands—
now runes that scholars would unpack—
once bore the weight of fatherlands
and led battalions in attack.
One rolls. One spits. One hides his face.
One grips his wingless back in pain.
One shouts the names of patron saints
who routed him and took his place.
What’s fire to a sotted corpse?
Their luck, like legends, all ran dry.
Their enemies, without remorse,
hung golden scales in the sky.
And had they not all but agreed
the greater hell was compromise?
The devil grabs the dice. He screams
“to hell with heaven!” and throws the eyes.
Inferno—Good Condition—Some Notes
O Virgil of this paperback, so wise,
so keen to underline a mortal phrase,
or scrawl, in narrow margins, a surprise
bon mot, forgive this modern reader’s age,
so unlike your mid centuries’ charms,
unraveled in black cursive. Give me sight.
Berate my urbane intellect, disarm
the dank redoubts, and free the catamite
so ready with a droll New Critic’s term.
Dante, himself, felt safe in ancient hell.
Let modern frauds in purple bolgias burn
and I will bow and kiss this quaint rondelle.
Your word is my command. Descend, and take me.
Unless, after the preface, you forsake me.
Jordan Potter is an actor and writer from Huntington Beach, CA.
Christina Phillips
Inevitability
I am as cold as a cut-up cadaver and
I lie here just as still as one,
just as desecrated.
I know I am alive for the breath
sawing like the scalpel through my throat,
gouging on the inhale.
Gutting on the exhale.
But my eyes blink, unseeing.
My body shivers, unfeeling.
I’m almost certain he stopped my heart,
that the click of the door closing between us
caught my pulse between its teeth and bit down
hard.
And suddenly, something,
something hollow and feral and mad,
possesses me and persuades me to check.
I’m gentle as first,
or maybe brittle is the better term,
and my fingers flutter over veins,
butterflies flitting over fair and blue,
and they come away empty.
Inevitable, but
unacceptable.
I claw and I clamor now,
desperate to get at that blackened, unbeating
thing in my chest,
and my fingers draw blood but not a pulse.
But there it is in my ear,
a galloping, galvanizing fiend,
and the panic retreats just as he did:
slowly and with great regret.
I smear away tears with a scarlet hand.
I am reminded of him and his gentle caress
and I curl in on myself like some dead thing.
Mama, He Cut The Tree Down.
I guess I always knew he would,
that something so lovely could never be suffered,
and I didn’t deserve it if it could.
Mama, he cut the tree down,
my rib cage rhododendron.
He pulled it out at its very roots;
he sliced through every tendon.
Mama, he cut the tree down,
tore the trunk and bark asunder.
He left this great gouge in my meadow.
I write to you from six feet under.
Mama, he cut the tree down,
plucked all the petals on which he’d once dote.
Their blood is cloying and rotten
and it pools in the hollow of my throat.
Mama, he cut the tree down,
cut it right out of my chest.
So please let me come home now.
Please lay me to rest.
A proud hard-of-hearing woman, Christina Phillips has been fascinated by words since before she could read them. She spent her high school years accumulating awards on the state and national level for her works in youth division fiction, poetry, and journalism and is currently pursuing a BA in English at Texas Christian University.
L. Acadia
Drop a Chopstick
Match the euphemism to its meaning.
| ‘Drop a chopstick’ | calling in sick on your birthday |
| ‘wear mosquito attractant’ | taking vitamins instead of birth control |
| ‘describe the tongue of the woodpecker’ |
wannabe micro-influencers gaining followers |
| ‘tell a confetti lie’ | dressing up for men |
| ‘click the requests’ | lesbians getting too serious too soon |
| ‘adopt a puppy’ | boring your date |
| ‘lock the wrong bike’ | tormenting your downstairs neighbor |
Acknowledgments:
the first is stolen from my wife, the second from my mother, and the third from Da
Vinci’s to-do list.
The author is a lit professor at National Taiwan University, a dog pillow at home, and otherwise searching Taipei for urban hikes and ghosts. Their writing has appeared, among other places in Autostraddle, Chu-Wai, Common Knowledge, Immanent Frame, Intertexts, Oxford German Studies, The Dodge, and Oxford Left Review. Twitter: @acadialogue
Al Maginnes
The Buried Painting
The first painting to smother
this canvas, before the choice
to paint it over, a man was
coming home from a great distance.
This part of the picture would
be easy to narrate. We could
see his figure in light painted to look
like it swirled with dust, his face
a maze of shade and color that might
say anything. He stares
at something distant, a motion
beyond the canvas’s border,
where the eyes and banked hearths
of the place once called home
wait, neither welcoming
or forbidding access.
We lost sight of this work
when the painter decided
he’d lost the painting’s center
and, short on money, covered
its confections under layers of fesso.
We have this image
because a friend with a camera was there
and managed a few shots before
the smothering (this was before
everyone carried a camera in their pocket).
One shot caught enough life to show
what we and the artist missed.
There is always a man
on his way home, the way
fathers only assumed their shapes
after they stepped from their cars,
rising to a height that said
they would never be painted over.
In this lost painting, the man held
something in his hand, a secret
that might say the reason for hiding
this painting, My father,
like most fathers is buried,
but he reclaims center ring
any time I think of him,
which is often, even after
thirty five years. He has been
a ghost for more of my life
than he was alive. Still,
I see him in my hands, which
have never sketched
a convincing line or coaxed
a decent run of notes on the banjo,
and in the bad vision
that bends me closer
to anything I wish to see.
Close up, the motion
of brushstrokes becomes
invisible, little waves cresting
this way, then the other,
landscapes built of dried ridges
of paint. Still, look as we might,
we can’t see what is truly buried.
He is stopped in mid-motion,
the painter’s hand frozen,
stopping the walker in mid-motion,
still continuing his direction,
carrying a message
you will not know you need
until it arrives.
Al Maginnes has published four chapbooks and nine full length collections of poetry, most recently The Beasts That Vanish (Blue Horse Press, 2021). Recent poems appear in eratio, Asheville Poetry Review, Inflectionist Review, American Journal of Poetry and many others. He lives in Raleigh NC and teaches at Louisburg College in Louisburg NC.
Alan Toltzis
An Invention to Make the World Better
Weaned on want,
nurtured on heartache,
he knew what precisely
this imperfect world needed:
an eraser that never wore out.
I watched him hunch over ledgers,
striving to straighten the crooked
or tally the missing. Count. Recount.
Count again. The stale smell
of sweat and stumble worn
into dirty-pink, rubber shavings.
At the edge of his worksheet,
an amalgam of error and craving
to make things right accumulated.
Turning his pencil over again,
he worried the eraser
down to its thin, tin ferrule.
A few cents discrepancy, sorrow, sin—
all the same to him—undoing
whatever needed to be undone.
A lifetime of loss poised to be scattered
with a quick wave of his hand, imagining. . .
The nub: Supple. Pink.
The paper: Smooth. Clean. Gleaming.
Alan Toltzis is the author of Mercy, Nature Lessons, 49 Aspects of Human Emotion, and The Last Commandment. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online publications. Alan is a visiting editor for Poetica. Find him online at AlanToltzis.com.
Rich Murphy
An Acknowledgement
“Pure thanks is rather that we simply think — think what is really and solely given, what is
there to be thought.” — Martin Heidegger
Thanking with presence in a universe,
feet wonder through analysis and imagination
at reciprocating the sun and moon:
Supplement, augment, honor what has
a planet meant all this … time?
Giving back for wandering thought
and pointed strategy, the sound
and rhythm may sooth or alert
within a two-legged creature cave.
The tipping point on the tongue
dips to ink in celebration on a sheet.
At first the squiggles dispel
to hold caring from fingers.
But neurosis fits on a party hat,
and crafting homage,
a more accurate frame, begins.
The senses sharpen in recognition
while curiosity points and applauds
at answers without uses (a science séance)
at corrections to missteps
at the simple in the complicated.
The appreciation border shouts
to neighbors and whispers to friends.
A praise for a repeat performance follows:
The footprints tapped out loved letters
into the night along a language edge.
Taught Ought Thought
Ought oozes from lips
and drools down a passing
moment in need with not a drop
dripping to feed behavior.
Hero talk skipping the walk.
Self-preservation can-cans
at each stage during the crying out.
Concern hovers for minutes,
but a lump in a neck corks:
A coward survives for another day
and often a fluid ounce richer.
When ears perk from critique,
should squirts into an eye
with is left holding an empty now.
Outside commandments
and policing trigger little effort
though cameras catch if not witnesses.
Shaming calls forth a shrug.
A victim sprawl doesn’t convict.
Uncovering self in another embraces
for life on a planet.
Rich Murphy’s poetry has won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice (Americana, 2013, and The Left Behind, 2021) and the Gival Press Poetry Prize (Voyeur, 2008). Other books include Space Craft (2021) and Practitioner Joy (2020) by Wipf and Stock, and Prophetic Voice Now (2020) by Common Ground Research Network.
Charles Weld
Carolina Wren
In my cartoon of the 1858 Illinois debates, a Heron
would depict Old Abe, and Douglas would be a Carolina Wren,
that small bird with the big voice, ten times a rooster’s, sound
for pound, I’ve read. So, made for the stump, its three-syllable
dactyl, jumping with the rhythm of clawhammer banjo: tea kettle,
tea kettle. Renowned as he was for dry put-down, a round
balloon over heron’s head would read, “Friend wren
can’t stick out his neck to stop the pro-slavery
ranks because he has no neck to begin with.” Wren then
would fall back on his notion of popular sovereignty,
knowing, after the Kansas border war, it was no remedy
and would add to, not quell, the growing, national calamity.
For the tall, ungainly bird, a one-word label: Soothfast.
The Wren’s ribbon caption would read: Reservoir of Bombast.
Charles Weld’s poetry has been collected in two chapbooks (Country I Would Settle In, Pudding House, 2004; and Who Cooks For You? Kattywompus Press, 2012) and has been published in many small magazines. A mental health counselor, he lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.