Issue #52
Gordon Akerson
Periodic Storms.
There is something romantic about writing in storms.
Audible wind.
Visceral thunder.
Celestial strobes.
Until the power goes out.
Back to typewriters and.
Candles.
Until the typewriter breaks and the wax melts.
Night-vision.
Then inkwells.
Writing in blood.
On the walls of caves.
The first walls.
That something doesn’t love.
With stolen fire.
Tools of frost and stone.
Therianthropes.
Stories of gods and women.
Things we can’t understand.
Told by the intermittent light.
Of periodic storms.
Gordon Akerson developed a love for writing and reading poetry while in prison. He now works and lives in Ft. Myers, Florida and will be attending FSW next semester pursuing a social work degree.
Yue Chen
Leaf Whistle
For MH
When I find out you are gone, on the wrong, motionless,
mountainless side of the country, I go for a late walk.
Abandoned by music, I can only listen for human sounds:
laughter, smoker’s rasp, man passing a proud hand over
his snarling whip, wet-soled children hunting lightning bugs.
So many happy stories in the world I cannot give you,
the way veins of sunlight traversing untrod snow refuse a map.
Head swung back, guarded by a scorched awning of pine, I think:
you will never touch a leaf again. I wonder, then, if it pained you
at the end: to touch, to be touched by fresh loam, a totem
of river stones, fiddleheads—telltale signs of beginning, again and
again, despite and because. I shudder. No matter how I try, I cannot
listen to the wind and hear you, and I’ve tried, don’t you think I’ve tried?
I don’t want your echo, your face fogging my dreams, your legacy on
another man’s back. I want you here: fingerprints and gathered
crow’s feet. Pointing at a breath of greenery: Look. I resent
the neighborhood’s rejection of my silence. It all troubles me
to speak: lilies of the Nile snapped at their swan necks, gluts
of twilight gnats unveiled by lamplight, sunset torching all proof
of life. Look, I say. I make the shape of your hand. A leaf.
The breeze angling about its tender bough, its brooking arm, agrees.
And there it is: broad, dust-crumbed palm still crisp at the margins.
Still lingering, like nightfall and exit wounds are but romancings
for birds, for things made to leave.
Yue Chen studies economics and literature in the cold and edits Sine Theta Magazine. Her poetry and short fiction have been recognized by the Academy of American Poets (2021), Bridport Arts Centre (2018), and others. She tweets at @togekisskiss.
Peter F. Murphy
Her
She dated catchers,
not first-basemen, and nary a pitcher.
You’d never catch her
this side of the pitch. Her
tour as a ballet dancer
taught her one thing: the wetter
the better, and the warmer the dance, her
fee went up. They’d wet her
down, make her fatter
then slimmer, and hire a waiter
to deliver a steak to her flat. Her
rules. She couldn’t wait. Her
worst enemy was fitter
and remembered her. The waders
got her out in the stream. They didn’t fit her,
too tight, but she’d wade her
ass off sooner or later.
No voter
arrived late. Her
decision her own. Her vote, ‘er
yes or no, was for the litter
to be moved where it wouldn’t totter.
She spent her life half-lit, her
nickname in school was “Dim.” Taught her
self the miter
saw after the water
came in through the floor. Right over might, her
credence, what her
father preached and her mother
lived by. The Irish setter
snapped at the moth. Her
mantra grew thin. You could set her
off with a rusted gutter.
That and the lousy quitter
who’d planned to gut her
accounts and quit her,
all in the same day. Tit-for-tat, her
paint thinner
failed to thin, and the rags were lost in the tatter.
Slim her chances and thin her
pickin’s, though the abstract painter
had been a production potter.
He could paint her
after he plied her with pot. Her
tolerance was low and the brass planter
was near at hand. The patter
of rain intervened when a plant, her
favorite, reached out as if to pat her.
Bunco
She knew him to be a cheat.
He’d started as a small-time thief
with a crew of amateur car-jackers.
She’d been a cat burglar
then, and before that a purse snatcher
of some renown. When a pick pocket
called her a common outlaw,
she thought of her father, the People’s Highwayman,
and her aunt, Milly the Moll,
convicted extortionists
hunted by bunco
as no-account swindlers,
in it for the long con.
He’d been a hustler
in Vegas, and a safe cracker
in New York where he was a card shark
one minute and an art thief
the next. She drove a getaway car
for a stick-up guy
before her stint as a cut purse.
He’d met a grifter
inside who’d fleeced a jewel thief
wanted in eight states for B&E.
She’d try her hand as a bank robber.
Peter F. Murphy grew up on the St. Lawrence River in Alexandria Bay, NY, where he learned to ice fish and shoot pool. His poems have appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review (#37, Spring 2010), New Madrid, The Café Review, and his chapbook, A Map of Three Continents, (Moonstone Press, 2020). His book Underwater and Other poems is forthcoming October 2021.
Robert McCarthy
Tutorials for the Eyes
The world as we see it. Or see it
as, say, Pissarro saw it, or
Cezanne, or Corot, those tutors
of the visual, and others too,
who have schooled the innocent eye,
subdued it to delineation,
boundary, chiaroscuro, figures
uprising like ghosts from grounds,
gestalts announcing themselves before
sinking back into muddy browns,
slate blues, neutral hues. The proximate,—
no longer just approximate,—
but prospect. All the confused
assaults of colors, sizes, shapes,
textures— smoothed to the picturesque,
the order of the visible
aligned to latitude, degree,
immutable as drying paint,
each entity assigned its place,
exactly, without remainder.
But is the world so easily
subdued? So matte flattened? Palettes
of dull greens going gray? Or is
it rather the senses giving over,
mere frontage onto nature;
gates that open passively, as they are
shouldered-through by the crowding welter,
the eyes whelmed and fraught,
by the flush of the world schooled and taught–
umbers blazing into violet dusks,
summer’s green cacophonies,
its routs of viridian blues,
shaggy spruces, its demarches
of chartreuse, all compiled, finally,
in autumn’s stringent reproofs,
chlorophyll’s yellow exhaustions,
the bleaching over-hung, red-gold,
meridian sun, absent now,
a respite under cloud cover.
We are not our own light, however.
Nothing comes with its fire pre-lit.
The soul acquires its ideas
by infection, and all of its surmises
by impress of extraneous
caresses, desires. Mind is
modification; worlds of forms
swarming in, no god’s finger-doodles
impermeable on blank slates,
nothing innate (though mind remains
god-haunted, or by the echo
thereof, haunted, the fading rumble
of the Sacred’s long retreat).
Disembodiments of light,
the flensing and pealing of it,
skin or skein pulled up over
the atmosphere; dusk-colored glow
as it is going, fading, gone.
And I see by touches now, daubs,
varicolored patches, thick slabs
of broken tones, tints, tinges; this world
a kind of visual Braille I scan
the raised bumps and shapes of, the vexed
concavities, to free myself
from sensible goods — the dissembling
and dissembled — disbelieving,
through mediation, the senses’
ecstatic reports, the eyes’
seductions, their beauteous
oblations. . . unworthy of mind’s
application and respect,
too wild, fractious, and uncouth.
I subsist now, as I must,
on the gleaned bones, the dry crusts,
of intellection; poor fare to be
sure, but rendered somehow toothsome
by their awful claims to truth.
Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. He prefers to use formal means to achieve lyric ends.
Mir Yashar Seyedbagheri
Autumn Song
the bushes wear their red and gold gowns
while I traverse the country road
my feet crunching over remnants of heat
and obligations, which the days add up
I feel a spring, my feet crunching with
the early pink, purple, and pale blue
shimmering over the valley
a butter-colored light plays peekaboo
and then another
while Ponderosas sway with me
and the moon smiles
a luminous lady, half, full, everything in between
drifting from cloud to cloud
in a lush lavender sky
at midnight I stand at the end of a country road
staring at the stars
the road is silent, the trucks and hurry
all eaten by night
I let the chill lead me home
the heat flees behind a moonlit corner
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and “Tales From A Communion Line,” were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.
Ross Thompson
Sisyphus
Still, the rain batters Bangor Blues, spatters
the backyard. A Belfast sink, excavated
from the soil like a wisdom tooth and used
now as a planter, is overflowing,
sluicing out slices of chipped crockery
buried for drainage: a tip gleaned from years
of absorbing Gardeners’ Question Time.
Funny how these things lodge in the brain
like the stray leaves that stubbornly clog
the unmaintained gutters and drain.
Over by the barren apple tree, branches
long since gone the way of the open fire,
a sweaty polytunnel is flagging,
sagging beneath the cumulated weight
of a standard Northern Irish summer.
But inside the fruit is warm, safe and dry …
and so are we. Grateful now for secure
walls, however stained, a garden facing
south that emblazons with glowing branches
and burning blades late in the afternoon,
for a soft apple bed and a kitchen
that smells faintly of buttered toast.
We are blessed. We have more than most.
Ross Thompson is a writer, avid video gamer and Lego fanatic from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His debut poetry collection Threading The Light is published by Dedalus Press. His work has appeared on television, radio, and in a wide range of publications. He is currently preparing a second full-length book of poems.
Dominic Harbinson
Exile
Deep night’s an ancient cavern, dripping liquid with crickets.
Its soft air’s furred with the soundless jet-black flit-pasts of bats.
As I drift into sleep on the hillside, I can hear the sounds of your hair,
can hear the murmurs of your curses like the sea.
***
Dreamed I was a trawler, trailing leagues of tangled net,
winch gear strained and creaking with dragged weight,
engines pounding.
Steamed heaving seas the night through headed for you
with a necklace of albatross, eyes blank as horizons,
hands empty as beaches at dawn.
Dominic Harbinson has a lot of fun trying to catch poems, most of which escape after barely a glimpse. He’s got a locker full of stuff from time living in Australia, Brazil, India, Massachusetts, Tokyo and China. He and his wife run a busy Chinese medicine clinic in Canterbury, England.
Jaime Speed
The sound of flying
I did not bring you into this world
with silence. There was vomiting, there was 12
hours of vomiting. Or 34 hours. Somewhere between
the bathtub and downtown, I up-
chucked my dignity and gave
in. I gave in to the brutality of being
born, the way geese echo the cry
of gunfire. The guttural crow
of shots across a blank sky. There was a line
of nurses, in a row. Or maybe that was another
night, another birth, another game. In the dark
I spewed out a great lake and then became
it. Became the very swell of carrying forth
and you were the crest, intuiting forward. Plucked
of your feathers and vulnerable and weightless and you
were there. You groused and beat
with fists at a groundless world.
The chirping from your lips was mine
to fill with suckling and hollow sounds and palms flat
as wings. And there was flying.
And it was anything
but silent.
From Saskatchewan, Canada, Jaime Speed’s poetry has appeared in several collections as well as numerous magazines, including Anti-Heroin Chic, Hobo Camp Review, Channel, The Wild Word, Eunoia Review, and Flora Fiction. Her prose poetry is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2021 by Sonder Press.