Issue #65

Julien Griswold

Swimming Lessons

You lose an hour as the water climbs your scalp. Words bubble. Spread my arms to float as the water carries me, but You are standing in a fish tank and clutching a hose, leaking from your hand. Tell me about ↓ How my mother bribed me with bananas To dive off the board, just jump from the side, step And fall. Hold breath close to body, move With curve and fluidity. And now I hate Bananas and swimming and I still won’t Budge from the pool ladder. Palm-sticky Afternoons: how my mother drove us to the Y She gave me goggles, too much sunscreen, Thin towels that embarrassed me, and she swaddled Me into the water in a basket of reeds, singing Baby, it’s okay to let go. Just breathe. It’s okay- I’ll be by the sidelines. Little starfish, you can float Twenty minutes later, I peel off my socks. The water laps hungry, so we review strokes: free-style (my favorite because it's easy), butterfly like a desperate frog, breath-stroke to save you so we can eat bananas and you can tell me about ↓ How my mother bribed me with bananas To dive off the board, just jump from the side, step And fall. Hold breath close to body, move With curve and fluidity. And now I hate Bananas and swimming and I still won’t Budge from the pool ladder. Palm-sticky Afternoons: how my mother drove us to the Y She gave me goggles, too much sunscreen, Thin towels that embarrassed me, and she swaddled Me into the water in a basket of reeds, singing Baby, it’s okay to let go. Just breathe. It’s okay- I’ll be by the sidelines. Little starfish, you can float Hose spray slaps my cheek (a reminder: SWIM), and you, fully-clothed, spit with it.

Julien Griswold (they/them) is a non-binary poet studying literary translation at Brown University. Their work has appeared in Philadelphia Teen Stories, LIVE POETRY SOCIETY OF NEW JERSEY, Imazine, and more. Connect with them online @cheerupjulien on Instagram.

Alex Carrigan

The Body as a Nemesis

How did my body betray me?

Was it when it decided
to give me multiple punches
to the gut so I could
revisit every meal I had?

Was it when it decided
I have to drop everything
to confront the red essence
that pours out of me,
tilting my head back to
see God and choke on
his wine?

Was it when it stiffened
and bent me in the morning
to tell me that I
may have lost the
back brace,
but I will never lose the
anxiety of my spine?

Or did it betray me when I
took the first breath?

As if to tell me
that a countdown has started,
and that it may speed up
when I don’t realize,
so I should get used to the ringing in my ears,
a warning of my coming malfunction.

I stare at a digital clock
hanging on my living room wall.
I see how the red dashes
bend and stiffen as they reshape
in sixty-second intervals.

I know I’ll revisit those dashes
when I lay on the coroner’s slab
and they’re painted across me
in a Y-shape,

as they ask themselves,
“When did his body betray him?”

It never did.
It was always open about its intentions.

After Camisha Jones

Moon Blend

I get a text message from
a friend who tells me that
there’s a Hunter’s Moon out tonight.
She sends me a blurry picture taken
from her car, the moon
hanging behind the red traffic lights.

I step out into my courtyard,
but all I see are treetops,
arrows that point to everything
in the obsidian night
except the moon:

There’s an airplane coming in for landing,
one point on Orion’s belt,
another plane departing,
a satellite shaped like a buckle,
that yellow balloon I let go of when I was four,
all easier to find that evening than the moon.

I sometimes feel like
the moon finds me before
I notice its presence,
that great orbital assassin
with the pale face
and missing an eye
after Georges’ miscalculation.

When I find the moon,

I look up to the rabbit
hunched over and grinding away
and ask for it to make me
a blend with its mortar and pestle.
Something I can rub
behind my ears,
across my sternum,
under my nose.

The tea leaves it grinds for me
taste like bergamot and lemon.
I can sit on my patio and
feel tickled as I stare out into the parking lot.

My eyes water from the steam,
and I can feel the tip of my tongue
become as numb as my feet are
in this autumn evening.

But I still can’t see the moon tonight,
even with the blend
I can’t find it
through the pine nettles.

The night is getting colder,
and I’m running out of tea.

After Anna Suarez

Alex Carrigan (he/him; @carriganak) is an editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. He is the author of May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).

DB Jonas

AT THE CROSSROADS

This is the distant elsewhere
We imagine always up ahead,
The place we bear or drag behind us
Bumping like a sled.

This slow andante is a ticking clock
The measured price of getting older
The heft of a familiar rifle stock
Slung heavy on our shoulder.

We seek the place that diligence
Prepares and hope anticipates with fear,
Those intersections left behind long since,
The bypassed crossings hurrying near.

Out beyond each turning in the street
We seek an unencountered sky,
The swirling leaf, the iridescent fruit,
The gutter’s greasy drosophilic eye.

The crossroads is a thoroughfare,
Each crossing is a meadow
Where daylight penetrates the sullen air
Through palaces of shadow.

The past that’s here, the past that’s gone,
The song that crows with every dawn
Invites the sweet rebec and thumping timpani,
Repeats in every ear its baleful ¡Ay de mi!

We seem to sing the past in each
And every rhapsody or sonnet,
So, lost in this arresting motion,
Let’s just heap stones upon it.

THE UNINVITED

Louche in bluest gabardine, he occupies
the room’s far corner like a grand piano.
The trouser-leg’s precise cascade proclaims
the boundless inventories of his draper.

Behind the exclamatory silk of his narrow necktie,
behind the flashing cufflink wreathed
in the insouciant haze of a slack cigarette, behind
the burning worm that bivouacs in his brain,

he sniffs the viscous ballroom’s nuptial air,
turbid as a lobster tank, thick with fraternity and friends,
target-rich with wives and maidenhead, bride
and bridesmaids, wary husbands, fretful fathers.

Patriarch! Thrice paterfamilias! you have them all
on high alert. While all the girls demurely smile
and smooth their flaring skirts, our edgy in-laws
watch like hawks this schnorrer in the corner.

But draw me, Charlie, to your perfumed shirtfront,
admit me to your manly, nicotine reek. Sing me a song,
Old Pop, and waltz me just this once your wildest waltz,
or should you choose, your ghastly little Lindy Hop.

And let us speak tonight as man to man of loss and trust,
of the subtle charms of bigamy, of larceny and lust,
of lies and grace and giving, and of the sidelong glance,
the headlong dash, the endless flight that you call living.

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Decadent Review and others.

Bethany Jarmul

Please Let My Child Be Normal

My two-year-old son shoves things up his nose—pieces of cardboard, paper peeled from crayons, foam from inside a stuffed fox, rubber from the toy taxi’s wheels. The pediatrician says it’s part of development, world exploration. My mom friend says it’s a sensory issue, compulsion. His nose starts to smell like snot, decay. I use the light on my phone to look up his nose. In the right nostril, I find a tiny nest with three speckled eggs. In the left, a neon green bird the size of my pinky fingernail, poking out her head. The mother bird sings a song to me, an ode to the chicks her eggs will become, a hope for nests they too will build. I breathe a sigh of relief, bring pieces of string, popped balloons, newspaper strips, for my son to add to his nostril- enclosed collection.

Bethany Jarmul is a writer, editor, and artist. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives near Pittsburgh with her family. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on Twitter: @BethanyJarmul.

Donald Zirilli

Indoor Cat

I geometry stream
the inbetween, shadow
the corners cast. I mine
the gasp, deadly not livery,
knifely clasp
from basement to attic dark,
squaring the mind, meadowing
the lark. I eye the dream
in the trough, I mark
the moment off.

Rooster Like to Play the Chicken

Rooster like to play the chicken
on his shiny red electric bass,
like some fizzy Frankenstein
blowing bubbles in the mud.
Rooster like to play the chicken,
beating sleep like a dirty rug.

He’s the night’s attacking heart,
he pulls apart, thighs and wings
and puffed-up breast,
strung out on some electric fence,
a melody experienced.

Rooster like to play the chicken.
How he moans the barnyard home,
a drone of feathers and feathery bones.


Donald Zirilli, James Tate Prize finalist, Best of the Net nominee, Forward Prize nominee, Now Culture editor, and the Poetry Adjudicator of the NJ State Teen Arts Festival, has dropped poetry into River Styx and other wetlands. His chapbook is Heaven’s Not For You, Kelsay Books, 2018.

Hes Bradley

Chapel

                          you driving
us finally to
millstone
             grit

you gazing
             over the stile
a damp nape, rumpled adidas

us mounting
             the coarse-grained rock

and leaning
             on rowan, above
the glitch in the earth

             I don’t notice
             the split
             beneath us

we go down
             and brass
             crocodiles, ash
             seaweeds, rust
             basils
just the gash left of iron
above
                          and a shallow pool
at our feet
             plinking

the moss, indigo green
             girdles
and spits
                          kuhnikteh
                          kuhnikteh
                          kuhnikteh

your voice
             softer than the gods
that
             drip

we walk three blue
whales
             of low
                          echoing


Hes Bradley is a community gardener, researcher, and writer living in Warwickshire. They’re currently designing creative workshops with local community groups and working at the University of Buckingham. They’ve published academic work and poetry with Aesthetica and Yes Poetry.

Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

[hillside rain]

         h          i           l     l         s         i         d           e                     r               a          i         n

                           t          r            i             c            k         l              e        s
                                                t            o       w            a            r       d
                                                                           u     s .
                                                                                           .
                                                                                             .

                                            what the clouds decided         against with whisper
                                what the mountains dare not say:          those six words
                                     halfway into our usual hike          defied my hope for clear sky
                                                     when you said           “I think I need a change”

                                     once-lush grass grasps at          sudden summer surge
                  how much longer dried roots can cling          the cows moo and moan
                     we are silent now waiting for a lull          droplets roll over known knots
                                        the gnarled trunk below          June gloom, as gray
                                  as shadows on your half smile          only now do I
                                                        hear the seeping          agony

       hillside rain trickles toward us          will the path ahead             roll like a stream
                    searching for body            spilling over cracks, ignored,         rushing to
               huddle in the drain ditch         coalesce through the roots        resuscitate
                       or will the rain pass            over bramble, refuse to sink         gather a mudslide
        move earth without regard           refuse to sink to sidewalk           finding floodgate
               and water: we begin           the cycle again, but our flows           stray, a separate rush

as we descend you                  evaporate                    and I accept                 the rain to come


Ricky Novaes de Oliveira lives and loves in Los Angeles. His poetry is found in Rigorous, UChicago Arts, and California’s Best Emerging Poets 2019: An Anthology (Z Publishing House). He is online @oliveirapoetry.