Issue #64
Shelly Jones
An Autumn Rebellion
A field of fading
sunflowers, heads bowed,
green blades sheath
their darkened faces.
Rows and rows stand
like an army of handmaidens
not weeping, but
ready to march.
Shelly Jones (she/they) is a Professor of English at SUNY Delhi, where she teaches classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Her speculative work has previously appeared in Podcastle, New Myths, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @shellyjansen.
Kyla Houbolt
Death Mask
Every memory is the death mask of an ancestor. Clay or fabric laid across the event by attention then glazed by the shift of attention to something else.
What remains is memory, the death mask. All events are ancestors because everything in the past is an ancestor and if you remember something, even if you don’t, that thing is your ancestor. What are you descended from? Not all ancestors are good, we shall not worship them, but we will gaze upon the death masks we notice and claim them, whether we like them or not. We claim the bad ancestors more quickly than the good. I am the person this happened to, I am its descendant, here are my scars, and here I still bleed. (Dogs, too, do this.) Taking off the death masks of bad ancestors is like shattering the good china that sat on your hated grandmother’s Sunday table, the grandmother who pinched you and told tales about you to your parents, insulted you, hit you, secretly. When you shatter her death mask, the old Sunday table is wiped clean, the shards of her evil scattered and turned to space dust, and in the gleam of the table’s surface you see a face that you hope is yours because it is smiling and beautiful.
Kyla Houbolt’s first two chapbooks, Dawn’s Fool (Ice Floe Press) and Tuned (CCCP Chapbooks). Tuned is also available as an ebook. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Had, Barren, Juke Joint, Moist, Trouvaille Review, and elsewhere. Find her work at her linktree. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet.
Lisa Trudeau
Hangover at Armeni
our day begins badly
filthy heat and miles of road
lurching up a hillside sieved
by tombs black trapezoidal slits
virgin earth between still hived
with larnake Minoan bones
last of the summer crew we’re
dust-dead dragging ass
deaf to uncanny quiet shimmering
outside our tender heads
alone we are almost enough
you drape your gin sweat arm across my neck
I bear its weight its wet corrupt
young god how many nights have I waited
while you whet appetites in other beds
appease me with a peck before you leave to
profanely piss into a vacant grave
cicadas are the last to hush though leaves
still shiver with the echo of their wings
the hive beneath us stirs dreaming its
palaces restored ivory priestesses
rising like venomous queens
we are defilers of a sacred past
something was bound to wake
is that what makes you turn
breathless every gilded hair on end
what makes you reach
for me a motion I will mistake
Lisa Trudeau is a former publishing professional and independent bookseller. She lives in Massachusetts. Her work has been published by Levee Magazine, The Shore, Constellations, Neologism Poetry Journal, San Pedro River Review, Overheard Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, and Connecticut River Review among others.
Andrew Williams
Hiking at Daybreak
Mayapples shelter the forest floor from mist
as white walloping buds bloom on stem underneath.
Chorusing katydids warn of a storm in the wind
like morse code operators clicking in wartime.
Rutted silvery branches bead overhead
as I walk up the mound wearing fog as a cloak.
Andrew R. Williams is a poet from Virginia, USA, and has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Briefly Zine, Fevers of the Mind, Ink Sweat & Tears, among many others. He is also the editor of East Ridge Review and can be found on twitter @andrewraywill
Julia Caroline Knowlton
Life of the Mind
By nature, it is a wild thing. Its ocean waves
rove violet, leaves bud red, flowers dry & die.
It is a quest having neither sense nor witness,
seeking gold with nothing to find. Too often
it must be otherwise: an awareness tamed,
ever observed by words. An animal prancing
in a harness, obeying to survive.
I try breaking free, eating seed, fruit & rind.
Within this line I fly—hard seed, fruit & rind.
Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize, a 2018 GA Author of the Year award, and inclusion in the 2022 Georgia Poetry in the Parks project. She has published five books.