Issue #74
David Chorlton
How to Kill a Peach Tree
(Kit Carson at Canyon de Chelly, 1864)
For Shawn Skabelund
Arrive from a distant place. Wash the journey
away and lay claim
to the sky. Obey the order
to conquer sunset and sunrise.
Where mesas are bookmarks
between passing storms and immoveable
earth, raise a flag
through which wind is water
running. When supper is so dry
it tastes of gunfire
rinse it down with sunlight.
Sleep beneath the silver lining spilled
out from the clouds, wake
to the sound of darkness dripping
down the canyon walls. Become
the uninvited guests
who ask the hosts to leave, to simply
disappear into a raindrop
and evaporate. Say it in the only language
you know. If people don’t
understand, the peach trees will. Do
what you came to do for your
one nation under lightning.
David Chorlton is a European who has long considered Phoenix to be home. The desert and its wildlife often finds its way into his poetry, and he recently had a nonfiction work about Vienna in the 1960s published as “The Long White Glove.”
Craig Kirchner
Librettist
He was what he repressed,
ignored, denied, resisted.
The pale, knotted crust
of a limp and aged hand,
reality’s veneer was shattered
by phantasmagoric sleep.
The apocalypse of him as him,
a will be reined by freedom’s reign
and he would be as he sleeps,
know what he was when he loved.
He was overzealous,
codeine and Capulet,
professed himself of primal root,
and total alienation,
thus, compelled to babble love
in death’s anticipation,
reach for mineral soils of stage,
conceive of timeless,
stage-less stage,
bloom another’s other.
Craig thinks of poetry as hobo art. In the early 2000’s he had numerous poems published in on-line journals and had two poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Craig has a book of poetry, “Roomful of Navels.”
Jackson Willis
Snake Eyes
| an off-color slit of paradise lost it begins with a glint in my eye sight like a salamander my evolutionary route i metaphysician who advised we wind serpentine down the eye chart ophidian tunnel vision synaptic scribes pen daemonium |
| doc says god says rare condition belly wriggle no luck snake eyes |
Jackson Willis is a Maryland-based prose and poetry writer. His current projects are interested in exploring the intersections of the fantastical and the feral. In his free time he enjoys reading, playing narrative-driven games, and hanging out with his pet snakes.
R. A. Allen
Transmogrification
When I was in second grade, a third grader told me,
“there’s no such thing as ‘recycling.'” She laughed
at my inconsolable tears. Later, I found out that
a continental philosopher had long ago QED’d
the death of Recycling; and that a martyred rock star
once deemed his band more popular than recycling.
Yet still I believe. When I drag my recyclables out
to the curb, a guy with a Beatles haircut takes them away.
The plastic will come back in the fenders of next year’s
Tesla. The glass will become other glass. I’ll read about
it in magazines made from 100% recycled materials.
And I’ll know in my smiling heart that I’m doing my bit
to save our planet.
R. A. Allen’s poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, B O D Y, The Penn Review, RHINO, The Hollins Critic, The Los Angeles Review, Pennine Platform, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Best of the Net and two Pushcarts. He lives in Memphis, a city of light and sound.
Rochelle Shapiro
IN A HALF HOUR HER SCHOOL BUS WILL ARRIVE
Even in winter when she stamps snow
from her boots and unhoods herself
from her puffy parka,
she brings spring.
When she plunks her weighty backpack
in the foyer, she is as burdenless as summer.
Her hair holds the russet and gold
of unfallen leaves.
Her Hi rings out like a piccolo,
but cross her, and her voice is
the boom ba boom of a kettledrum.
Her long, well-arched feet splay in pliés.
En pointe, she rises
like a preteen Venus
from the ripple-shell pattern
of my linoleum.
The very air awaits her.
Rochelle Shapiro’s novel, Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. She has published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines such as A Thin Slice of Anxiety.
Daniel Brennan
Feathers
In the back of my throat
feathers quaking like
wind chimes All the
dreams I’ve not yet
swallowed or said
aloud to you You tell me
nothing lasts until it does
Mid-morning and the soft
bruise of light makes us
both into miracles
Warm bodies Soft voices
Quick breaths and the
sound of bird song from
the window left ajar
How is it I’m speaking
a language I don’t even
know for you?
*
It’s not too late for this to
mean something Mean
everything to someone
You tell me this can last
if we let it You slyly ignore
the coffee-stained pillow
and the sour musk we’ve created
caught in these hours Focused
instead on where my hand ends and
your body begins
The feathers are novice
and shaking behind my teeth
For you I laugh up nightingales
finches cardinals & blackbirds
I do the impossible to prove
we share one tongue
One language
I take pieces of dreams and
make one whole living thing
for you I am not yet
out of miracles
Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. His work has recently appeared in Passengers Press, Sky Island Journal, The Banyan Review, Hive Avenue, and Last Leaves Magazine, among others. You can find him on Twitter/Instagram at @dannyjbrennan.
Mikal Wix
All the Songs I Can’t Sing of Him
Today, I walk out into the yard under highways
rural birds sing, trains wail distant, diesel trucks
idle at the taco bell window under tall pylons
transporting voltage over rivers and countries
of men in beards climbing to overhead grids,
when I hear what the dead hear among transmission
lines crisscrossing summer days above turquoise
swimming pools: Carolina parakeets, pinnated grouse,
the great auk, the digestive process of worms, the way
his mahogany skin smells of coconut and cinnamon
in the sun, trees swiveling to ensnare the light in him.
A trick of the ear. I’m not here to understand why.
I’m not dead yet, I say aloud, which startles my mutt,
who follows me to the patch of milkweed and indigo,
that said, I often die in a quirk of desire to be resting
with him again, my arm across his chest, as I say
because I was born moments ago again to remember him
torn from pages of a book full of sheep, goats, mercy,
suffering, not sadness, still with time to purify the past,
how I hear songs of extinct bodies, why I need to ask
the men for more damp, crumpled dollars to pay for my
places spliced into the surface of clear waters stolen
from the idle whimsy of his fire, the snake heat of loins.
It turns out that the world is narrowing my choice
to but a few birds, the ones that are endangered, rare
feathers perhaps a final judgment to preserve my dwindling
options, his voice poised to vanish into a void his wife
never heard, but I believe that anyone can change contour
feathers among wing and tail, in new mother tongues hot
to preserve answers to my daydreams of him here with me
and my fingers slowly digging underground to touch thirst
to reach him before all the songs expire.
Mikal Wix is a queer writer from Miami serving as an Associate Poetry Editor with West Trade Review. Their poems are found or forthcoming in the North American Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Moss Puppy, Olit, Door = Jar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Other creative work, including book reviews, can be found here: https://linktr.ee/mikalwix
Kathleen Hellen
a leaf is a sail on a stick
that takes you/ downstream/ a reaching toward the window where the light comes in/ roof thatcher/ meat wrapper/ golden sheaf of sheen on temple’s stone vigil/ a bone picked clean/ a whistle on the lip/ a sound like brittle wind, like fire crackling in the fist/ insect catcher/ curl like deadened skin/ a finger hinting the direction, like resurrection/ a supple blade/ a cup of tea-brown rain/ the inside story to the page / a tender braid/ the taking that is going/ the plural of alone.
Kathleen Hellen is an award-winning poet whose latest collection is Meet Me at the Bottom (2022). Her publications include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, which won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento.
Annie Stenzel
“oh, holy holy, ah, purity purity, eeh, sweetly sweetly”*
If I let my whole body speak
of this experience, feet firmly in contact
with the complex swish of leaves along the trail
my ears will be alert
for the next thin tweedle
from a hermit thrush.
If my eyes stay quick, catch each glimpse
of sparkle from Tomales Bay through the shaggy
trees that clog the Point Reyes slopes
I can still pause and pluck ripe
huckleberries from bush after laden bush along the trail:
so sweet! so tart—both in one brief mouthful.
Bandanna hard at work to mop
my neck and brow—beneath this complex canopy
of vines and dangling branches, it’s not as hot,
but uphill pulls moisture from my body . . .
thank goodness for my water bottle, contents still cool
under its quilted cover. Ahhh! I smile after every sip.
Of course I think a lot about my heart—that sturdy
pump I took for granted until it fluttered and hiccupped
to get my attention four years back. And what about those lungs
that now boast a chewy appellation meaning
my airways are not entirely trustworthy either, their function
reduced to novel numbers. The doctors’ compassionate shrug.
But these two tricks have turned into
my license to say hooray for every hike, no matter
how slow my tempo. To relish with the entire
envelope of Me each scrap
of song from the well-hidden bird. Oh joy,
dear thrush, you sing so sweetly, sweetly. Lucky me.
*Title is the verbal description of the song of a hermit thrush, as provided by the online resource, allaboutbirds.org
Annie Stenzel’s (she/her) poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Chestnut Review, FERAL, Kestrel (Issue 48), Lily Poetry Review (Issue 8), On The Seawall, rust + moth, Saranac Review, SWWIM, Thimble, and UCity Review among other journals. She lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.