Issue #89

Cam McGlynn

She Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune

a reverso

You should’ve paid the pipers, the beasties and jumbies too. They stole all those children. Precious brood. Don’t doubt it— they resemble their mother. Shadows always do.

shadows always resemble their mother? They doubt it. Don’t brood, precious. All those children they stole? …the beasties and jumbies too? The pipers should’ve paid you.

Cam McGlynn is a writer and scientific researcher living outside of Frederick, Maryland. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in JAKE, The Shore, One Art, Molecule, Open Minds Quarterly, and Cicada among others. She likes made-up words, Erlenmeyer flasks, dog-eared notebooks, and excel spreadsheets.

Jamie Lynn Wirth

The Sluagh

Three fifties of splendid, warlike horses,
Noble, slender-girthed, thundering on great
Areas of land, bearing a sídhe force
To destruction, blades to whet and crows sate

In the red embroidery of slaughter.
“Behold, glad tidings!” they sang as they rode.
“We are dead, yet live! And our bones inter
By sun’s rise, swift-built cairns our last abode.

“Behold! A catastrophe. Luminous
Our gold-bossed shields, spears glinting in moonlight,
Arming our host mighty and valorous.”
This host Ingcél wrecked in a single night.

Ingcél, luring his three fifties, ambushed
The bright sídhe. “For to us, all wealth is owed.”
And a great terror fell upon the host
As sídhe sang and their land with curses sowed.

In dark, swift-built cairns they interred the sídhe,
The field red-embroidered with wounding strife.
“An ill death owed thee, Ingcél, I foresee,
Shadow-haunted by the sídhe’s eldritch tithe.”

So spake Ingcél’s seer, and so he perished.
“Plunder, death, and destruction I am owed,”
Ingcél declaimed, wiping clean his red-sheathed
Blade. In silence, then, his three fifties rode,

Rode against the last bastion of the sídhe.
Crows swarmed their host. Shadows grinned and skittered
In their wake. Behold! A catastrophe.
We are dead, yet live! Death’s boundary blurred

By our bones, in dark swift-built cairns interred.
We swarm, javelins gleaming by moonlight,
Curse embraced, grave-loosed, by death undeterred,
As the madness skirling wild we incite.

We sluagh, we restless, hungering dead.
Come, they whispered. Blades whet and shadows sate.
Thrice fifty, Ingcél, on their horses fled—
To destruction, blades whet and shadows sate.

The field, white-stayed with clean-picked, sun-bleached bones.
Behold! Shadows wail. Ward and watch we weave.
They creep through ruins, lurk on empty thrones.
‘Ware!, the sluagh shriek. We who death deceive!

Jamie is a nurse practitioner whose writing blends the mythopoeic style of Tolkien with the modern dark Faerie of Holly Black’s Tithe. This poem draws inspiration from tales of the sluagh – the restless dead – of Irish and Scottish folklore, as well as the ancient Irish myth The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel.

Shannon Guglielmo

Carmela (36 weeks old)

For chess and beehives
protect the queen.

Then why am I so tired
with these flooded lungs?

The jargon babbles plum
through your lips

sounding off viscous honey
sensate             sclerotic

I walk around with this squeaky heart,
my daughter a metronome on my chest

doling out doses of longing.
I can see the silky thread undone

the cocoon unravels.

Carmela (40 weeks old)

I’ve never felt more like a river.
First a source: heartbeat to heartbeat,
body inside body,
I carve a canyon, millennia & weeks —

all that sediment dredged up
around the edges pulled downstream,
quick, quick, quick, plunged through the ravine,
streambank collapsed,
furrowed gully until
the cliff was in sight but was too late —

here we were — over
the waterfall like shouts in the gullet.
A new voicebox through the oxytocin & new blood,
plummet plummet plummet no sleep,
just gush, woosh, shush

that consonant sound in water four times faster than air,
into a cave, dark as a prune:
my brain held hostage by my skull in the darkest dark,
my eye sockets the only windows.

Then: the channel was viscous with sludge,
delta toward the marshlands,
dense with creature life.
You were: catfish, possum, beaver, heron —
last river time slunked around tree stumps.

Now a mouth to release to lake to ocean
to moat in a sandcastle along the shoreline.
The day before you turn 40 weeks old
my period returns:
There’s a river yet.

Shannon Guglielmo is a poet and teacher in New York City Public Schools. She is a recipient of the Fund for Teachers Award and the Math for America Master Teacher Fellowship.

Gunilla T. Kester

Lifeline

I started
in a corner
all snug and cozy
chained to a master’s grammar

Branded a slave
I heard many a hard story,
spelling us into the vast expanse.
Yet even there, in the Wilderness
with sand between my teeth

I still viewed the Book of Exodus
just a piece of fiction torn from a cover
thrown by the Sirocco and the Khamaseen.
Where or when I crossed
I can’t tell you.

Couldn’t describe the sea of reeds
if I tried, didn’t mark the spot
which matters little: you must
find your own way
to write home.

Gunilla T. Kester, Ph.D., author and editor of six books in three genres including a full-length poetry book If I Were More Like Myself. Lately, she has published over 56 poems in various literary magazines including The American Journal of Poetry, Citron Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Pangyrus, and The Potomac Review.

Rituja Patil

moth/mace

The memory is a moth hitting your face.
It doesn’t linger, flap! And it’s gone!
A nimble thing — it hits you like a mace.

Anything — a picture, a tune, a space
a silly meme they sent you on the phone —
brings swarms of memory moths hitting your face.

This is not a feeling that you chase
specially not when work has to be done
still tears sting as if you were sprayed with mace.

And as you feel them rolling down your face
the workday will not pause, it will go on
despite the memory moth hitting your face.

You get the clonaz out of the pill — case
And pop it in your mouth and you go on
A nimble save — no palpitations no mess.

No loss of productivity or pace,
It’s end of day and there’s no carry ons
Just you and memory moth that hit your face
And slightest sting in eyes from being maced.

Rituja Patil (they/them/any) is a queer writer and poet from Mumbai India. Their poems have previously appeared or forthcoming in VIBE, ALOCASIA, the~lickety~split,the dish soap quarterly and LiveWire.

Spencer K.M. Brown

Clean

It’s a good day for a drink, everything says so. I tell myself.
Late-summer sun, bright, but dappled amid that western herd of clouds.
Golden-green coming through leaves like glass.
Sun, but cool on skin. I thirst but do the dishes. Run water
Until that balance of hot and cold strikes perfect.
I imagine feeling a little more calm, of sitting down and letting
Go a great breath. I swallow my cotton tongue, sweep the living
Room floor. Dirty, then clean, oak-grained like honey.
It’s a fine day for a drink. Even Atlas laps up the dirty water
From the blue plastic kiddy pool on the deck. I tighten my jaw,

Rub my head as if crushing memory into place. Consider all
The memories I don’t have because of such days.
Good days for just one, but one is too many.
A dozen then, but fifty isn’t enough.
There’s a hunger now, but where are those good things you promised?
I gather up the boys’ blocks and books and green army men
Scattered like leaves. Run the vacuum, listen to the marble or rock
Rattle in the machine like bones.
Clean and chop vegetables from the garden, set them aside.
Soon everyone will be home. I’ll kiss my wife, wrestle the boys.

I am happy I think, and that makes me thirsty too.
Outside I take my shoes off and stand making fists with my feet in the dirt.
The evening comes down and I slide my clammy fingers over
Beads, start another decade. The Agony in the Garden.
I feel as dull as the neighbor’s saw gnawing through the dead
Dogwood stump. I thirst but think of rivers and streams.
Inside I sit on the counter and wash my feet at the sink.
Then my hands, face, neck. Everything gets clean.
I grab a bottle from the fridge and break it on the floor
And bend to clean it up.
The little jagged pieces of glass glow golden-green in my hands.
I grab the mop and get to work.

Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the novels “Move Over Mountain” and “Hold Fast,” and the poetry chapbook “Cicada Rex.”

Ken Poyner

ESCAPE

He did not mind the first tattoo. It was a fad, he assumed. Her peers were acquiring them. The second was too far, but he should have acted at the first. Counsel and control were lost. Her mother tried, but they had already entered the stage beyond sequence: rivalry. More followed. Quibble found himself less engaged with his daughter and more with the art she chose. It spoke to him more directly than she. Then, when looking for delicacies in the pile of tattoos she had become, he glimpsed on the porch fleetingly her unpainted self, and realized the plot.

Ken Poyner has nine collections of poetry, flash fiction and micro-fiction out there. He cheers his world-class power lifting wife at meets, and once worked wrangling computers. His individual offerings are strewn like a minefield across the web. Analog, Café Irreal, Mobius, Brief Wilderness, elsewhere.

Richard Dinges, Jr.

Last Breath

Drained of breath
night gathers a dark
sky brightened by
a pale face and
freckled by distant
wishes. In its
silence, my pupils
dilate to find
what light lingers
on spread palms
or fall’s last leaves
that dangle from
twigs and await
that final gasp
to send us twirling.

Richard Dinges, Jr. works on his homestead beside a pond, surrounded by trees and grassland, with his wife, two dogs, two cats, and five chickens. Oddball, Schuykill Valley Journal, Grey Sparrow, Wilderness House, and Illuminations most recently accepted his poems for their publications.

Rich Murphy

Communique

Bodies shelve in books
to animate character and spirits
that shelve books in bodies.

Vicarious libraries walk
around as unsuspecting historians
for emulating should an empty
drum dub, dumb, dumb.

Ancient heroic deeds
and daily habits and vital forgotten
behavior pull from the sapiens
torsos lessons in human practice.

These days the footbridge
between yesterday and tomorrow
stages for a momentary unrecorded
common ground performance.

Take a selfie each day for a lifetime:
Flash for whom, about what?
beyond instinct made banal. Blink.

Rich Murphy’s Inside Stories was published this summer by Resource Publications at Wipf and Stock, which has also published First Aid (2023); Meme Measure (2022); and Space Craft (2021). His poetry has won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice (Americana, 2013, and The Left Behind, 2021) and the Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008)

Karol Olesiak

novel home

molding witches seeking
disorientation     room to
room open to everything
why I imprisoned myself

here                 walk-in arches via
amnesia:                        home is an
active conjunction               walled
mazes constructing themselves

space changes           nausea
induction exorcizing ghostly
homeowners                bodiless
perp-walk I’m              not lucid

hoping for a  lesson I guess
descending           black hole
stargate flare-up     haunting
enclosure events burrowing

nonplace until            sanctuary
outshines       stage performing
tyranny of safety without horror
difference     between grass hut
&                       squatting incubus

Karol Olesiak is a queer disabled poet, writer, and activist. Karol’s poetic work is featured or forthcoming in Rogue Agent Journal, MAI Feminism Journal, Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors, and Pictura Journal. Karol has an MFA from University of San Francisco.