Issue #58

Eric Fisher Stone

The Lake Worth Child

In 1914, the city of Fort Worth, Texas dammed the Trinity River, creating
Lake Worth. The reservoir covers the grave of a child.

Wind spooled bluestem
yarned like Mamma’s hair
where moles plugged earth.

Towhees stared chokecherry eyes
when I died my second April.
Fish blabbed over my sleep

after the river drowned
the church’s steeple in root stew.
Bass mouths opened craters,

my tombstone’s name rubbed
by snails, dreams oozing
from the soaked bones in my casket.

I remember cornbread meals
before the lake pickled pastures,
my doughy infant hands,

the wagon wheel rotting out back
where my first words cooed like a dove.
The world is deeper than waters.

Clownfish in Love with the Moon

My carnival mouth slurps
specks of fairy shrimp.
I want to kiss the white squid
swimming in the sky, her tendrils
of light filed through scallops,
candling the creature inside.
I’ll leave my home of polyps
to press her warm mantle
creaming my tangerine lips.

A Garden Slug has 27,000 Microscopic Teeth

The last snow froths among gutters
bitter as cankers mixed with oil.
Loam-made bones sweat ghosts
dallying through low pools of fog.
Downtown, skyscrapers like great tusks
jut from the gumline of cement.
My dentist pulled a bad wisdom tooth.
I nurse my palate’s bruised plum,
swishing saltwater after eating. Spring
comes in two weeks, my tooth buried
under muddy wood. Garden slugs
chomp moss in slurping rasps
to dirt for yellow prairie broomweed.
Soggy angels complete my flesh.

Eric Fisher Stone is from Fort Worth, Texas. He received his MFA in writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His publications include two full length collections of poetry, The Providence of Grass from Chatter House Press in 2018, and Animal Joy from WordTech Editions in 2021.

Kyla Houbolt

Picture of a Piano, Standing in a Field

photo by Mark Wunderlich

Rained on,
wasting.

An outdoor wedding
failed, they forgot the piano? Or
piano ran off because
it got sick of Cortot.
Heart & Soul.
Sticky fingers.

Weeds in a planter
above the keyboard. What?
Perhaps a comment
on placement.

Snow carpet.
Decay displays
a sour note of romance.

The Underworld
dreams some music.
Fingerless haunts
try their hand.

Kyla Houbolt (she, her), born and raised in North Carolina, currently occupies Catawba territory in Gastonia, NC. Her first two chapbooks, Dawn’s Fool and Tuned were published in 2020. More about them on her website. Her individually published pieces online can be found on her Linktree. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet.

Lilia Marie Ellis

sad by the river again

waves transubstantiate into waves—shedding weight, hoarding sunset. it is lovely here and only sometimes lonely. i think maybe God left us by ourselves, except God also gave us love. and God is love. except i think i have more love than i could possibly hold. i feel it slipping out my armfuls and bruising like pears atop my toes, and i could spend my whole life on hands and knees, gently scrubbing muck off their pieces, telling each i’m so sorry. i could crawl for miles and miles and never leave the riverside and only sometimes i’d slip. and i’d learn to love the sun for bathing me, for being the only thing whose leaving is beautiful. everything is beautiful. everything is so loathsomely beautiful it could flood me forever.

Lilia Marie Ellis (they/she) is a trans writer. Their chapbook Love and Endless Love was published by giallo. Follow them on Twitter/Instagram @LiliaMarieEllis!

Suzanne O’Connell

Cop Shows Changed My Dad

The once gentle high school teacher
started strutting, wore thick black shoes,
set his jaw and swore a lot.
His hair, instead of fluffed to the left,
was buzzed.

He no longer answered the phone with “Hello,”
but with “What’s your location?”
He began to ask: “What’s the 911?”

As the evening puts on its clothes,
the girl in the busy intersection
begins to take hers off.
In a car, a man hides his drugs.
A woman who’s been beaten
sits on the sidewalk crying.
In each situation, Dad knew what to do.
At home, not so much.

Dad couldn’t arrest us, but he made threats.
“If you don’t pick up your clothes,
there’ll be a 187 in progress.”
Mom coped by watching cooking shows.

She talked nonstop about
blanching, au jus, confit, deglazing and stuff.
I missed old car-pool mom,
when she dressed like a mom,
not in clogs and wraparound apron.
Old mom made meat loaf.
Now we had tasting menus
and vichyssoise.

Authorities say opposites attract.
I guess my parents deserved each other.

Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Brushfire, Delmarva Review, Visitant Lit, Paterson Literary Review, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, Pine Hills Review, Silver Birch Press, and many others. Her poem “The Viewing” was included in the Finishing Line Press anthology
Covid, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic.

Melanie Greenberg

When Salvation Army takes flesh donations and you ask why i have no past selves to drop in the bin

I wish I knew the gospel of forgiveness
I have never reconciled with anything
I don’t have the patience for it. When I want
calm I look for an untouched expanse.

At six I was wrong. I made a voodoo doll of myself.
I dreamed of great conflagration but had
no matches.

I contented with shoving stick figure girls
down the garbage disposal that awful
self gone when the whirring subsided.

The girl from two seconds ago deserves
the same grim encase. She was almost
right but ruin won. She splits
from me like a corn husk. She is the parched
give of rotten plums. A dead moon
on the lawn.

The rest of me stays still. I won’t ruin
it. I am one girl glacier. I know
the consequence of moving.
I try to wait it out.
The inevitable bloom
of breath physicality
mottled red and failing.

I see it rising in me
irredeemable
as a frostbitten limb
and strike it dead.

He won’t stop calling me a marvel

Mary was the source and container for Christ’s physicality; the flesh Christ put on was in some sense female, because it was his mother’s.¹

His face is a cliffside and i fling myself against it.
Sweat circles me (his, sick). He wanders, spent
to the bathroom. The flesh does what i tell it.
i go home triumphant and richer to dried orange peels
a green candle, collapsing in on itself
an intact crab skeleton, my Megan Fox poster
The woozy haven’t eaten feeling.

Then there is the devotional
grabbing for grapes face tilted upwards
glowing in refrigerator wash or beef with truffle oil
in the sunlit car. The skin yawns— i fill it with hunting
trophies. There is communion in consuming.
Lidwina knew it in 1400. She got sick
with giving, spilled over in sweet putrefaction.
The village of Schiedam gathered
with outstretched hands and the flesh
fell for them. They cried and swelled
with love at the scent of Lidwina’s collapsing left hand.
God sang through her miracle vessel.
The town fed on him: sustenance and cure
until she had no flesh to come home to.

1. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.” Representations, no. 11, 1985, pp. 14.

Melanie Greenberg is a writer from Seattle, Washington. She was awarded the Rex Warner Literary Prize during her year abroad at the University of Oxford. Melanie’s work has appeared in Nixes Mate Review, The Dog Door Cultural, Eunoia Review, FEED Lit Mag, and others.

Benjamin Harnett

Ghost

This is for the ghosts: Sage first, then cedar.
It works on moths as well.

Like a moth, your ghost will flap
into sight, unexpected, then

melt into dark again. Ghosts
are bad for sweaters, too

always gnawing away
at the heart of the wool.

If you can, eschew violent
reactions: catch your ghost

in a glass; an unsent postcard
will hold it prisoner while

you find the door. This
is for the ghosts;

I hope they like it.
Let them be well-disposed.

And if
it turns out

that the ghosts
are only of the mind,

then it pays double
to be kind.

Benjamin Harnett is a poet, fiction writer, historian, digital engineer, and union organizer. His work has appeared recently in Poet Lore (Vol 114 3&4), Entropy, the Evansville Review (vol. 30), Moon City Review, and at Maudlin House. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife Toni and their collection of eccentric pets. He works for The New York Times.

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

Tongueless

On the graph of our mortal travels we stand —
one at the halfway mark, the other at a frail

three quarters. How do I tell you
I mourn something that never was ?

The sand-glass crackles. I conjure up a parallel life
from the first cut of the umbilicus. We rewind time,

                                                        start over as the powdery grains spill.
                                                        In this version, we are synchronous —

                                                        you find expression in a tactile love —
                                                        I rejoice and christen myself as whole.

In this version, I imbibe that love is earned,
make peace with all its conditional clauses,

swallow bitter diamonds without complaint —
dissolve dregs of dissent in my bland blood.

In this version I am the tinselled child,
larynx shorn of thorns, no vital welts

                                                        or wounds twinge. You keep me warm the way
                                                        I always hungered to be — cocooned, in utero.

                                                        In this version I am tongueless. I pay my dues.

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist and poet. She has been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Eunoia Review, Black Bough Poetry, Bracken Magazine, and Neologism Poetry Journal. She is the author of two micro-chapbooks published by Origami Poems Project. She serves as a chief editor for Authora Australis.

Sara Watkins

Overwrought

o·ver·wrought; adj.
1. in a state of nervous excitement or anxiety.
2. (of a piece of writing or a work of art) too elaborate or complicated in design or construction.

1. It’s too early in the morning. I climb out of bed and put my sweater on backwards three times before I put it on right. I am already wearing pajamas but I want to wear more. That’s what I say,what I whisper like someone might hear me, as I layer on the bracelets and the bangles and my first pair of earrings and my second pair and my nose ring and my cardigan, my sweater, my double-knitted rainbow leg warmers on top of fuzzy ankle-socks with the hole worn in the toe.
I want to wear more.
           I can’t, of course. I never could. All of those clothes would never discomfit.
           Do you get the joke? It sounds like I’m talking about my inability to pair clothes fashionably (dis– like doesn’t, fit like comfortably) but discomfit means an uneasy feeling, and so I’m actually referring to the distress such an outfit might inspire; to my taupe dress with patterned tight, with my hair all crazy and my wide eyes flaring in different directions and the way they make me look mismatched even ill-assorted, but grammatically, discomfitted is the wrong word to use here. Instead, here belongs adjectives like flummoxed, like unhinged.

2. Like pandemonium. And I know you know what I am saying. The American work week has grown eleven hours since the 1970’s but the average middle-class family’s income has declined by 13%, according to The Washington Times. This is evident in more places than the hungry and the homeless, it is in the details; in the worn-out adults and in the failing ambitions of the American youth. Have you ever seen insanity? You’ll find it in the gelled down fly-aways on a supermodel’s hair, in the haggard face of the man clutching a baby doll with matted hair to his chest as he shuffles through the train station. The masses are flowers with limp stems. Being overwrought comes from being overworked as a society. It comes from the intricate system established by corporations.

3. My lover is the exception. He is treading water somewhere near the Great Lakes, and so I wake up with my heart on the other side of America. I wake up and the birds are singing but there isn’t any sunshine. I wake up to an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach that is sprouting roots and flowering, blossoming from between my lips. It’s a dream. I can’t tell if I’ve woken up at all. It’s too early in the morning. I climb out of bed and put my sweater on backwards. The world is already busy while I am falling behind, lost somewhere in the neck hole of wool. If this were a movie and I were the main character, this is the part where I’d whisper, “Ya pulled the wool right over my eyes, kid!” but I am alone because everyone wakes up alone, if they even wake up at all. I know that makes me lucky, but I can’t feel good about it. Not when my belly is a garden that my sunshine cannot reach.
           There is an episode of the Rugrats, an older Nickelodeon cartoon, that I will never forget. The show is about the misadventures of a group of babies. In this particular episode Tommy
Pickles swallows a watermelon seed. The frantic toddler is approached by his cousin, Angelica, who gasps loudly and turns the harmless incident into a scene. She tells Tommy that now a watermelon will grow in his tummy. She says that it will grow bigger and larger, expanding until it fills up all his insides and explodes his little toddler body. Tommy spends the episode terrified of the garden growing inside of him, but mostly of his impending death. I read this fan theory later that Tommy didn’t actually exist, that none of the babies on the show existed, not Phil, not his twin Lil, not even the adorable Chuckie. The idea behind the theory is that Angelica’s parents were emotionally negligent big time business executives which lead Angelica to create imaginary friends: the babies. Angelica imposed her parents’ negativity onto her imaginary friends, as is common with victims of abuse, thereby creating the premise for the whole show. I like this theory because it is overwrought, the right mixture of complicated sympathy. It makes you feel bad for Angelica, the bully. No one is worried about the garden in Tommy’s belly
anymore.

4. In wartimes, the women and children left at home used to plant Victory Gardens. They’d fill their land with vegetables, fruits and herbs in an effort to support an entire family, community or neighborhood. They were called ‘morale boosters,’ and they kept the citizens occupied on the home front. Victory Gardens gave them some kind of hope for their men and their soldiers who pillaged the border Austria-Hungary while singing patriotic songs. “This land is your land? This land is my land.” Now, the gardens have all wilted, dried up and shrivelled into the rocky soil. There is no victory in decadence. Americans are too anxious to dig down into our roots, we would rather set little pots teetering on the edge of dusty windowsills and have hanging plants high-strung throughout our cramped apartments.

5. A secret I don’t really mind sharing is that I wish I could be naked all the time. The only reason I bother wearing clothes is for the storage space, for the convenient little pouches. That’s what I say, what I whisper to myself like someone might hear me, when I put on the jeggings without any pockets and the tank top that barely covers my growing belly, my wilting garden. I don’t know if I am dreaming. Sometimes I wake up and I think that I am Angelica Pickles, that I lied to myself and to you the whole time. “Ya pulled the wool right over my eyes, kid!” Sometimes I wake up in Illinois, big carnations bursting from my mouth, laying in the sun. Usually, I wake up like everyone else—alone and discombobulated. I only put my sweater on backwards because my head doesn’t turn that way.

Sara Watkins is a developmental editor, author, and collector of tiny, fat dragons. She has been published in Pennsylvania’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction, Pennsylvania’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Nonfiction, and Blink Ink. Sara Watkins can be reached via www.sarawatkins.net or @saranadebooks.

Andre F. Peltier

Almost a Sonnet

A sonnet has but ten full feet per line,
And even-numbered syllables are stressed,
And always does the sonnet need to rhyme,
Or at the very least come very close.
The sonnet’s lines will always count fourteen,
And for Shakespeare’s there are three whole quatrains;
Italians have a different structure clean:
Petrarchan turns come after your line eight.
Of course, the English ends heroically
And places special meaning in the two
With fancy couplets rhyming G and G
And fancy iambs counted through and through.
But if you miss alterative wit,
Well then, your sonnet’s surely full of…

Andre F. Peltier (he/him) is a Pushcart Nominee and a Lecturer III at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches literature and writing. He lives in Ypsilanti, MI, with his wife and children. His poetry has recently appeared in various publications like CP Quarterly, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and Provenance Journal.