Picaro

Sarah Brockhaus

The world dipped and waved around us, and we were perfect, those
gentle eyes, cherubim smiles. I didn’t know how to hold her,
but I wanted to learn her warmth. She held my hand as we ran across the street,
two little kids playing runaway. Waking up walking through deserts, no more

gentle eyes, cherubim smiles. I didn’t know how. To hold her
left me empty handed. We were standing in the parking lot, just
two little kids, playing. Run away. Wake up. Walk through deserts, no more
soft kisses. She knew the words the angels sing in the middle of the night, but she
 
left me. Empty handed, we were standing in the parking lot, just
before the light ached its way over the horizon. We emptied ourselves of
soft kisses, she knew all the words. The angel sang in the middle of the night. She
lied with me for hours until we knew cold like it was our home.
 
Before the light ached its way over the horizon, we emptied ourselves and
the world dipped and waved around us. We were perfect, though
she lied to me for hours, until I knew. Cold was like our home,
but I wanted to learn warmth. She held my hand as we ran across the street.

---

Author’s Note: When I began working on “Picaro” I was trying to make sense of a moment, thinking through it over and over to make it mean something different. This made the pantoum a natural choice of form. I love the pantoum’s ability to capture the dizzying repetition of memory.

---

Sarah Brockhaus is a creative writing student at Salisbury University. She has poems forthcoming or published in Sugar House Review, New South, The Shore, Ocean State Review, Broadkill Review, and The Macguffin.

To a Young Poet

Max Roland Ekstrom

Hack Demeter’s tree,
steal the club from Hercules,
pluck Augustine’s pear—
can you speak now?
For it is no office to tell the truth,
only humiliation to diddle with words,
to play at legislating the soul—
your self-made prayer,
your half-baked manna,
your upside-down thunderbolt.
To wait to be blessed is no blast.
Glory to yourself!
Hurry off to understand
the old language while we are young
and coerce lightning in a bottle.
Still your poem will leak
like a punctured pail of sand.

---

Author’s Note: This is the poem I wasn’t supposed to write as an early-career poet. Any of the advice I offer has likely been said, and said better, by others. But I needed a little carpe diem in my life—a little Thomas Merton, a little Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a lot of Mahmoud Darwish. So please, steal this poem, and make your life your greatest experiment.

---

Max Roland Ekstrom holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. His poetry appears in such journals as The Hollins Critic, Illuminations, and Confrontation. Max lives in Vermont with his spouse and three children.

Hidden Pools

Richard Dinges, Jr.

Broken trees etch a gray cold sky.
White nothing lies where pond once pooled.
A flat blank plane, unmoved by wind,
its frozen attitude dares me
enter its void. I stay sheltered
from temptation, trudge my endless
circle, keep our secrets separate,
shiver to think what lies below.

---

Richard Dinges, Jr. lives and works by a pond among trees and grassland, along with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and ten chickens. Home Planet News, The Journal, Eureka Literary Magazine, Cardinal Sins, and Caveat Lector most recently accepted his poems for their publications.

The sky is grey

Ivan de Monbrison

The sky is grey
A shadow dances on the roof.
Birds fly like open eyes.
Yesterday the people on the beach looked like fish or seals.
The boats went south.
But on the roof of the house, under a gray sky,
The shadows are dancing
Always in a circle.

The watercolor is made by itself.
Colors fill the empty spots.
In the drawing, you find a door.
You open it.
On the other side
You see many colors
The landscape of your past.

A game.
A city.
The sea.
It’s morning already.
You still see yourself as a child.
That was a long time ago.
Life doesn’t change in childhood.
Then childhood suddenly collapses.
For all my life I’ve seen
Once more the child that I was no longer,
walking with me

---

Ivan de Monbrison is a French poet and artist living in Paris. He was born in 1969 and has been affected by various types of mental disorders. He has published some poems in the past. This submission includes the English translation with the original in Russian. Ivan is the original writer and the translator.

Ampersand

Karen McPherson

and, and, and... flood the seabowl, churn of milkfoam,
eggfroth, windwhip, tattering, liquid slide to suck to
pool, draw back to, crack to, whirl to sheer, to even
tide, to surfaces gloved in whitest
cream, to glisten...

but, but... but, no, listen! to the damper sand, the
jongleur’s clever hand, his amber band, his singing
monochrome, those trailing strands
of foam of track of
seaweed, syntax...

and, and, and...and it’s back and foreground, middle ground, all
back and foreground, middle ground, all
(all all all)
a glorious erasure. Until.

Agitated sanderlings. Until. Then.

Sudden birches.

---

Author’s Note: Once in a while on the Oregon coast the waves churn & spew with a thick, frothy seafoam that coats the boulders & driftwood white along the rocky shore. The effect is otherworldly & glorious. This poem came tumbling & singing into me, riding a tide of sand & sound.

---

Karen McPherson is an Oregon poet and literary translator. She is the author of Skein of Light (Airlie Press) and the chapbook Sketching Elise (Finishing Line). Her work has appeared in literary journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Cincinnati Review, Zoland, Potomac Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Between 2013 and 2017, she worked as an editor in the Airlie Press poetry collective. Her website is kmcphersonpoet.com.

Two Poems by Liane Tyrrel

Walking with Grief

There is a thing about walking with grief.
It’s not just me. I read about it in a novel. They lose their son.
They work and work and can never be free. Then they walk.
I have to believe that what I meant, I said, and not go back
and look again. For instance, will we ever reach one another?
My life is punctuated by walking and not walking. I am aware
of all of the ways this planet is moving. If I list them here for you,
you might join me in this endless churning. I used to say at parties
or in hushed tones with select people, I don’t like magicians or outer space.
Magicians because you can’t trust them. But I’m open to another opinion.
Tell me some magicians believe. I love space now. It makes me think
of the thing people say about love and hate being close. It happened
sometime in my 40s. I can’t walk there like I did when my long marriage
ended or when my daughter was far away but I could still see her
so I kept walking. I feel funny using the word cosmos, but that might change.
I used to never say divine or even soul. I know it’s the same thing. Us,
the color the sky makes, the incessant knocking of woodpeckers and sapsuckers
out my window. Reading about black matter and the gods.
When I’m walking my dog now I catch things from the corner of my eye,
see movement in the brush or even a plastic bag waving. I hear
birch trees making a different sort of creak like a human child
or the young of another animal. It doesn’t matter that I’m alone,
something swells up inside. It moves from my stomach,
a mixture of grief and love. Right there it extends from every point
inside to the prickling of my scalp in all directions, including the sky,
and whatever else is beyond that.

---

Homecoming

You walk out to the driveway with a wrench in your hand turning it absentmindedly
between your thumb and forefinger, nails long and dirty for playing the guitar,
from building houses, because you like it that way.

From my position looking out and then in the kitchen where I peel potatoes
I look calm as you pass by the window on your way to the barn.

I came home last night after a week. The house smells, the refrigerator smell
overtakes me every time I open the door. There’s an old bean pot in thick liquid
I tell you is rotten but you insist you’ll eat on Monday.

Last night I dreamed she was there in a disembodied way, was not she
but the place in me I tend like rotting fruit in an orchard. You were there
and you were in your body but it was hollow and I could not touch it.

You stole some soft down from my bed already threadbare and transparent
to add to her bed. You showed her the way to the shower, twisting the dampened
knob, tenderly adjusting the temperature. How could you not?

It almost moves me now to imagine the way you walk so softly down the dim hallway,
the way you pull back the shower curtain, resting one hand on the cool porcelain
and lifting your other hand to the water to get it just right.

---

Liane Tyrrel is a visual artist and poet. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Guesthouse Lit, Small Orange and Volume Poetry, among others. Her prose poem “Spontaneous Combustion” was nominated for Best Short Fictions 2021 and her poem “Always Happening” was nominated for Best of the Net 2022. She walks with her dog in the woods and fields of New Hampshire where she lives. https://www.lianetyrrel.com/

There's No Point in Nesting After a Miscarriage (and yet I can't help myself)

Mia Herman

I begin with the closet
flinging shirts and shoes
and used cosmetics
onto the bed in a desperate
attempt to make room
for new additions—
like the sparkly crop top
I can barely look at
now that my belly is flat again
or the six-inch heels
I will never wear
because wobbling around
like a fawn first learning
to walk makes me think
of women giving birth
legs splayed in stirrups—
and now my place is a bloody
mess and there is nowhere
to rest this tired body
and I don’t know how long
it will take to make sense
of the chaos, but even so
I am convinced that I can create
some order here.

---

Mia Herman is a Jewish writer and editor living in New York. Her work has appeared in over two dozen publications, including Barren Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Emerge Literary Journal, F(r)iction, Ghost City Press, [PANK], Stanchion, Third Coast, and Variant Lit. Awards for her writing include an Honorable Mention in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, nomination for Best of the Net, and finalist for the Frontier Poetry New Voices Fellowship. Mia holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hofstra University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor for F(r)iction magazine. Follow her on Twitter @MiaMHerman.

Two Poems by E.B. Schnepp

If a girl

toss an apple, once bitten, over your shoulder.

if tossed its peel will unravel, spell

out the name of your husband-to-be—I tossed an apple once

bitten over my shoulder, but what blossomed

in soft leaves, hardening autumnal earth was not a name

I could pronounce, not one that could belong to any man;

what blossomed was a forest so I married that instead.

---

A Field Guide for Bats

When the forest calls I’ll go
willingly, grow my antlers

velveteen and bloody, an offering
to anything that wants my bones. The coyote,

he kept his milk teeth,
but he’s no less hungry. Here

even the rabbits are cannibals,
they’re just better at hiding it than most;

they simply distend their jaws, swallow.
If I lay hushful,

bald and naked, breathless,
an imitation of still born,

they would consume me too.
In the dark cavern

of a soft mammalian body I’d find a different
sort of nature, where bats could be born,

and go deeper. Find welcome and water—
it was in this sweet grass I fell asleep

and a garter snake dreamed with me,
curled in the hollow of my throat, scales

rasping against my skin, he nuzzled there.
Worried himself closer;

I knew enough to stay motionless,
to let him be the first to leave.

---

E.B. Schnepp is a poet currently residing in Chicago. Their work can also be found in Up the Staircase, Molotov Cocktail, and Lumiere, among others.

Like-Like

Wendy M. Thompson

Like Sprite for black people.
Like Saltines after yellow vomit and ice chips.
Like the burgundy carpet in your grandmother’s
old house and the smell of church pews.
Like the wet semicircle in my panties
when you stand too close to me.
Your thigh touching my thigh,
the musk on your jacket.

Imagine all the space between us.
All 40 years filled with bodies &
missed opportunities & mistakes &
mouths that felt so right, so real at the time.
Wide turns in the back seat on the hard leather
upholstery of your grandmother’s LeSabre careening
around a corner and all the kids sliding into each
other and you into the metal door handle.
Her grey wig tight as she leans
forward into the steering
wheel.

We should have asked our people
all our questions then. But what were
we but fully absorbed in our own bony scarred
kneecaps running us down streets full of kids & dogs &
open fire hydrants & ice cream trucks & bigger
kids with older girlfriends and boyfriends?

Where do you come from?
When were you born?
What did the house look like
that you grew up in?
What made you fall in love
with granddaddy?
Why did he leave you?
Was it hard raising my daddy?
What were your dreams like before
your first husband?
Before you got pulled out of
the sixth grade?
Before you began cleaning up
white people’s houses?
Before you left Mississippi-Louisiana?

Like watching boys, sweaty
and shirtless, on the basketball court.
Two years later, those same boys be on
bikes and ATVs outrunning the
police.

Which one was you?
Pointed out in a lineup.
Dragged out during a raid.
Caught in a sweep.

Which one was you?
Still baking,
fermenting,
rising all through
your teens & early
twenties. Caught up &
playing games &
scheming & fucking &
fighting in your thirties.

Which one was
you at 40?
Unlikely
husband material
for a woman who
spent her decades
equally searching &
running. Stealing &
giving away too much.
Eating & starved for
the very thing you
promise me
in excess
now.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this poem following a traumatic and criminal incident that occurred during the pandemic. One of my children was harmed by their father, an act that broke apart multiple families, forced my child to become a survivor, and sent my ship careening off course into a darkness that I could not outrun and a terrible pain I was forced to carry. Having long fashioned myself as both the captain and the ship of my household, to have both home and family destroyed meant I had to face life without a boat. To drown in open water.

In an attempt to avoid being submerged by tremendous pain and guilt, I went in search of comfort, in search of land, venturing into the world of online dating at the age of 40. There, I would meet a person also born and raised in Oakland, a black man who survived the city through the crack epidemic, municipal abandonment, and police sweeps. We would have a very brief and intense relationship during which our many insecurities, childhood trauma, defense wounds, and survival tactics surfaced, all of these things eventually leading to our breakdown. Before splitting, we would share mouthfuls of stories, reflecting on our parallel and different memories of being young and black in Oakland in the 1980s: Southern grandparents, monstrous fathers and fatherlessness, home cooked meals, the roughness of the streets, the beauty of the skyline, a desire to see the world beyond that we only read about or watched on TV.

This poem encapsulates the early stage of us getting to know each other, imagining us chasing love and shadows of our younger selves.

---

Wendy M. Thompson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at San José State University. Her creative work has most recently appeared in Sheepshead Review, The Account, Funicular Magazine, Palaver, Gulf Stream Lit, and a number of other publications. She is the coeditor of Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and the Progressive Illusion.

The Needle

Dmitry Blizniuk

The city has crawled away, like a dog with a broken spine,
leaving behind the dark, mazut-like mass of factories.
Yesterday, they were pulling metal shavings out of my eye,
a delicate spiral, and the eye liquids around it
had already started getting rusty.
And I left a mental notch
on a tree in the vitreous forest of time: I will definitely write
about it one day… When I grew up into a real person.
Reality smiles like a hyena.
The bite force is 1100 pounds per square inch.
In the evening, I pull off my trunks,
but my body oozes engine oil like a tree that excretes tar.
My life has swallowed up so many splinters
like a drunken fakir who swallows kitchen knives.
Do you remember? When we were kids, we were afraid that
a needle could fall under your collar, then get into your vein,
then reach the heart
as fast as a boat floating downstream,
and you would die.
The foreman, wrinkled like a phallus, was scolding me listlessly,
"Wear safety glasses when you cut metal!"
But everything swims in front of your eyes when glasses are on,
and I see a myopic, cartoonish world.
I prefer to be face to face with life,
prefer to see clearly the needle that zeroes in
and swims down the red river like a water snake.
And a thought that got under your skin
will definitely reach your heart
and kill.
 
 
 (translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian)

---

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The London Magazine, Pleiades, Another Chicago Magazine, Eurolitkrant, Poet Lore, NDQ, The Pinch, New Mexico Review, The Ilanot Review, National Translation Month, East West Literary Forum, and many others.. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. Dmitry Blizniuk in the Poets & Writers Directory.
http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk

Two Poems by Lorelei Bacht

To get lost is to learn the way.

I am a miner descending
for deposits. I mine whatever blocks 
 
the light, whatever pools, sulphurs, 
oxides – my task is to bring it to the 
 
surface, inspect: I name, I tag, I list and I 
bar chart - this, this and that. Some of us
 
moths ascend. Not I. Instead, I pick, 
drill, shaft deeper into these slabs 
 
of black, barely remembering the rope, 
the trap. They sent me down because 
 
I am a child. Only very small things 
descend this dark. I heard you call: 
 
teatime. I heard you call: bedtime. But I 
am not finished inspecting these 
 
trenches. There might be anglerfish,
luminescence. I am a miner descending
 
for grief: yours, mine. Whatever you 
lost at the bottom, I am bound to find. 

---

My heart a road-kill, and I am the sea

My heart a road-kill, and I am the sea 
 
that longs for fish long gone: I grew 
him in circles, him in ripples, him gone
 
by daybreak, by daylight, light-years a line 
 
of traffic signs, stop sign, stopped red,
stop dead in someone else's track. You: 
 
truck-driver, you fisherman, you needle-
 
fish, blue jaw long gone, you rot. I grew 
you in ripples, round in circles, then grew 
 
you gone, you right through traffic signs,
 
stop lines, you road-kill stopped dead - 
someone else's track, morning capsized,
 
but not sinking, not returning to arms 
 
of undertow. Not the morning I know. 
Now, watch out for stoplights, taillights,
 
revolving phosphorus of the lighthouse
 
now dis-repaired, now disarrayed, now
gone, our hearts into the road-kill truck, 
 
one more go round the ocean round - 
 
around the ebb and flow of maybe yes,
maybe maybe, or maybe no, we go.

---

Author’s Note: “To get lost is to learn the way” is an African proverb. One night, while I was sitting on the porch listening to the rain and descending into my own darkness, it somehow coalesced with the opening line of ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ by Sylvia Plath, which I have been carrying in my head for decades: “I am a miner. The light burns blue.” The poem wove itself there and then.

“My heart is a road-kill, and I am the sea”: This poem is the result of allowing sounds and repetitions to lead my writing, as a remedy for intellectualism. I was trying to resolve a particular personal issue, but none of my journaling, talking to friends or dissecting the issue seemed to work. I wondered: what would happen if I did not try to make any sense? This poem offered itself as a perfect map of my confusion.

---

Lorelei Bacht (she/they) successfully escaped grey skies and red buses to live and write somewhere in the monsoon forest. Their recent writing has appeared and/or is forthcoming in After the Pause, Barrelhouse, The Bitchin' Kitsch, SWWIM, The Inflectionist Review, Sinking City, Door is a Jar, and elsewhere. They are also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter @bachtlorelei.

Sudden Empathy

María DeGuzmán

Mystic’s Vision

You open the book to a bowl, a hooded figure cupping fire, rotating updrafts of wind.

Autopoiesis of the Ouroboros

A snake eating its own tail, a phantom feline at the bedside of the dying,
a survivor remembering the others drowned at sea.

Petitions of the Dying

Confabulations with the dead begin in the zone of departure.
Flotsam of your history, they swim up.
Sinking down, you have never been so lucid.

We Watch You as You Ride Through Treacherous Currents

Successive storms have brought you here,
to a rider on a pale horse,
under a lowering sky of invisible witnesses.

Dalí & The Rocks of the Cap de Creus

The dead practice sudden empathy
with a precision rare in the living.
They remind you of refuge & awe
among sea caves of remembered turquoise.

---

Author’s Note: I obtained the photographic images by stirring water around in a bowl with a spoon and photographing the interaction between daylight and the moving water. Images such as these constitute a sort of optical unconscious, what surpasses our ability to see in the moment, but that is, nevertheless, there, as the photographic process reveals. However, what is “there” involves continual acts of interpretive perception on the part of viewers, myself included. I imagined the images proffered by the water bowls as pages in a picture book. The pictures suggested to me the verses of the photo-poem. These images appeared in my water bowls between late June and late October 2021, over a course of four months during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seem consonant with the reckonings, grief, and sorrow of these times characterized not only by the pandemic, but also by rapidly accelerating climate change, mass displacements and migrations, and a heightened awareness of the ever-present proximity of illness and death. Simultaneously dark and luminous, the uncanny formations of these images lend themselves to visionary transports and space-time travels that expand the spectrum of potential responses and engagements with them.

---

María DeGuzmán is a scholar, conceptual photographer, creative writer, and music composer / sound designer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photo-text pieces in many literary journals, among them Typehouse Literary Magazine, Oxford Magazine, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, and Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://m.soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.

Home Cooking

Brendan Galvin

I would cut my right arm off
for Magdalena Sacco, Foley said
out front of Ernie’s Pizza. We were
fifteen, of logic and non-sequitur
knew zero, but raised our eyebrows
to concede First Love. This morning
when I sliced a nine-grain loaf
too deeply with the serrated knife
I thought of that. My thumb pad bled
again. Bagels are toughest, but I
have wrung my hands in aloe
for not using kitchen mitts except
as sock puppets to make you laugh
in your living-room hospital bed.
Your favorite the red-bellied
woodpecker’s a regular at the suet
from there, and you can’t see me
in your kitchen butchering myself.
Hot skillet handshakes; cuts and nicks.
No microwave exploding veggies
fifty years ago in my bachelor pad.
A few pots boiled to black then, and some
pork chops solid as ashtrays,
but fear was never an ingredient
until the visiting nurses, wheelchair,
brace, this whole endeavor. Love, I will
take more care. I will not cut
my right arm off for you.

---

Author’s Note: My wife had a serious stroke before she passed away, and that left her in a hospital bed in the living room, with me in the kitchen doing the cooking. Since I’ve been writing poems for 57 years, I am always looking for subjects, and when this happened in the kitchen it recalled the events outside the pizza joint a few thousand years ago. I am always looking to combine things in my poems that really have nothing to do with each other.

---

For the last fifty-seven years, Brendan Galvin has been seriously writing poems, and is currently working on his twentieth volume. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Republic, Nation, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Tri-Quarterly, and many others. Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the Sotheby Prize of the Avon Foundation was awarded to him by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes in 1989. He has also written critical essays, book reviews, a translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (Penn), and been a manuscript consultant for sixteen publishers, magazines, contests and arts commissions. Photo credit to Ellen Galvin.

Touching Angels

Erin Wilson

I want to live
in a ramshackle shack
that touches—hyper-touches—
air, and have that shanty
startle back
like a child that has lured
and then touched a snake.

I want birch trees to mean
something to the utensils I use.
I want my spoon to have,
beneath the happy that it is,
a proper volume of vital sadness.

I want drakes, whippoorwills and meadow larks
to wheel in my dreams,
warbling their declarations and afflictions
amidst the woody rabble,
tearing thorns from the matte-brown
walls of this apartment block.

I want to learn to be so still
the hawk,
bound in its ancestral feathered mask,
will rise
god-like
from a glade,
to glide close over me,
perusing my ribs
like aisles in a grocery store.

I want to be attuned with the languages
of grasses, the harmony of culling.

Even for just one season
I want to be absolutely inside the pagan architecture
of summer.

The acrid stench of burning toast
will be no person's cataclysm,
only a strange galvanizing force
sent out by something ablaze, not someone next door,
for there will be no neighbours.

From my roots, I will listen hard to understand,
then leaning forward, listen harder,
and disappear through a hole in the night.

---

Author’s Note: This poem was written one summer from a ditch on a back road in rural Ontario. I would drop my son off for work and take refuge at this out-of-the-way place until it was time for me to start work. Standing there, on the side of the road in the early morning light, as away from people as I could manage on such a schedule, I was nearly rent with longing to be there more. It seemed like the cells of my body vibrated with the same intensity and desire as viper's bugloss, trefoil, chicory. The animals seemed separated from me by only the thinnest veil. I wanted absolute knowledge. What could possibly be enough? I wanted to explode into light, become absorbed into darkness.

---

Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Reed Magazine, The South Carolina Review, CV2, The Emerson Review, and in numerous other publications and anthologies internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue, is forthcoming (both from Circling Rivers Press). She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek.

To a Tattoo

Emma Aylor

It’s just a line, really, and from the side
appears to be a crimped string, or nothing
much—a bobby pin with twists worked in,
edge of a broken oak, some given crumble—
though right side up it’s clear it’s mountains, two,
if not ones a person where I am now could know.
The bend in dear land is far from here. The kind
of sky is different now, a clarity I can’t sit beside.
Air should be so thick you can lean your body
along. Sky should be hazed as collodion, bright
and shade etched rare and strange as moved.
This is the world I’ve known. The story:
my mother drew the mountains loved,
Sharp and Flat (once Round), Peaks
of Otter, soft kick off the Blue Ridge, there
middling the back of the Appalachians. The artist
we wanted couldn’t be had, so we, impatient, took
another, a trainee, nervous, who drew the gun down
my mother’s forearm’s thinned skin the way you might
tow a knife on leather. To notch a mark. Mama—it’s late,
I think, for formality, to hide the call—closed her eyes
and smiled. Her line is vertical, up the radius; mine
horizontal, parallel to the elbow crease. And both
a little ruined, as it happens to a body anyway,
the lines bluer and thicker in kind than my older,
neater tattoo. You can see where my mountains
began to be drawn. You can see, hundreds
of miles from here, a match. You can strike
little warmth against the familiar trace
if I hold my arm a certain way

---

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem in homage to a tattoo my mother and I share, and to Bedford County, Virginia, where I grew up beside the Peaks of Otter.

---

Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, the Yale Review Online, 32 Poems, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD student at Texas Tech University.

What's Not to Like?

James McKee

Doors, because they close;
books, after they end;
spring, while it explodes;
cash, before it spends;

chocolate, because chocolate;
mountains, because a view;
in person, because internet;
wikis, because don’t know;

forests, for all they shelter;
ruins, for what they show;
New York because it alters,
but New York because it won’t;

what if, because why not;
whatever, because I’m lazy;
but now, because too late
for tomorrow, because maybe.

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James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, Grist, New World Writing, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

Between Cars

Zebulon Huset

Like a punch-drunk boxer, the rabbit
that darted with reckless abandon
from Home Depot’s overgrown bushes
far too late in the day to safely cross
four lanes, maintained its feet after
its head conked the Civic’s axel.

I was a lane over ignoring a phone
buzzing in my pocket as my foot
left the gas and my focus left the bumper
a couple car-lengths ahead, eyes wide,
brain conjuring sudden prayers
for the fluffball between speeding cars.

I didn’t see if its wits returned
quickly enough to retreat
into the undergrowth. Traffic
and its dozens of vehicles hurtling forward
on one unhinged hurry or another
had no care for the small life in jeopardy.

It had missed the Honda’s tires,
a small blessing that might not
have been repeated once my vision
returned to the many tons of metal
and plastic and rubber that seemingly
constantly endangered my life.

However long that lupine
lived in the ‘real world’ so filled
with and divorced from abstractions—
its lifespan of maybe a decade would fall
far short of the nights I’d eye popcorn
ceilings, wondering if he’d made
the shoulder as I rushed to somewhere
completely unimportant in such a hurry.

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Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer, and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest, and his writing has appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review, Texas Review, and many others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journal Coastal Shelf, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.

The good thing

Rose Auslander

As I head past sixty-six, I practice saying hello goodbye. The good thing is, it doesn’t take long if you don’t think about it & who has time. The good thing is when you say it, the sun looks like the moon floating silver behind the clouds & the moon never sets, gliding slowly all day long for the next sixty-six years & hey, maybe we’ll be happy. We’ll go on picnics every day. Hair shimmering in sterling light, we’ll unpack our hamper, spread gingham napkins on our laps, eat my mom’s deviled eggs & your mom’s potato salad & wash it down with the vodka my grandpa carried from Russia for luck. Sitting there on sea-soaked rocks, swallowing the last drops of liquid fire, eyes almost closed, we’ll wave at kids casting their lines past the jetty. Not taking time to recognize ourselves gliding past goodbye, we’ll say hello.

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photo credit: Liz Hanellin

Rose Auslander lives on Cape Cod. Obsessed with water and poetry (not necessarily in that order), she’s written the book Wild Water Child, chapbooks Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and poems in Berkeley Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, RHINO, Rumble Fish, Tinderbox, and Tupelo Quarterly.

Two Visual Poems by Melanie Kristeen

Borderline

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Feast

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Melanie Kristeen is a poet, writer, educator, and owner of a small content writing business. She holds an MFA in poetry from Texas State University and was the 2019-2020 Poet in Resident at the Clark House in Smithville, Texas. She was the recipient of a Damsite Residency in New Mexico in 2015 and has been published by Rust + Moth, Barren Magazine, Burning House Press, The Boiler, Black Bough Poetry, and University of Hell Press. She was also a commissioned, featured artist for Luminaria: San Antonio Arts Festival in 2017.

The pacific kisses the sand

Kay Lee

my aunt has many treasured memories
that she never fails to tell me, eyes crinkled 
in corners
fingers pinching skin gently with
an age-old fondness.
 
one of such, she says
with a measured glee,
is one of ten years ago as
my uncle sat with a new 
speaker, a saxophone blaring
through the halls-
the low 
thrum of jazz twirling through
the walls to grip my small hand-
guiding me into a waltz
across my pororo
baby mat.
 
i remember long car rides through
winding california highways the
tide kissing the sand with a quiet
rhythm as 
ed
sheeran belts a high note 
against the leather of the backseat-
half-mumbled lyrics tumbling out of
sleepy lips and into strands of hair
whipping in the salty wind and out
into the embrace of california-sun, 
the cold touch of the 
pacific.
 
i remember listening to 
coldplay start the drums,
guitar taking the stage to
divebomb through the clouds-
and the plane hummed a lullaby;
something low and droning
against the melody of a child’s wail
and the chatter of the flight
attendants
for some reason i can’t explain once you
go there was
never...
my mother snores next to me,
and the guitar picks up as i wave
goodbye to the california
sea.                                                      (it does not wave back.)
 
japanese and korean drift
through song-
i remember writing
english-fied lyrics on the palms of
my hands on
the sides of math textbooks-
writing
            yumenaraba dorehodo 
yokatta 
deshou
rolling unfamiliar syllables across 
my tongue until
letters sound like 
words sound like
lyrics that i never bother
to understand but in
half-sewn sentences winding together
far too late;
            wouldn’t--- be better--- if---
            was--
            a dream?
missing california-sun weighs
like an ache
but perhaps someday i will
understand the
letters-words-lyrics
that i write in fading ink 
on the wide expanse of my too-tan
skin.
 
the guitar drums again-again-again
but i am not ten- not
anymore- and it
bangs against the too-tired edges
of my brain, drowning out
thoughts and so i
pause and i tell it 
            thank you
and
            goodbye
in the same breath
and i listen to the silence echo before
my skull can shatter and
my heart beats hard enough to
break my ribs.
 
the silence holds my hand
and it does not try to
lead me or
bring me into dance.
it 
stands with unblinking eyes and
breathes next to me-
 
-and it lasts until it
doesn’t until
the silence
arranges my bones in
hollow space between
burnt stars so
i find small gems in between
the cracks of famous singers-
aching songs that
slip through fame-
 
            are you lonely?
 
they ask me,
 
            if you’re lonely come be 
lonely with 
me
 
they say, and
they play the guitar but it
thrums like the quiet kiss
of the lips of the pacific against
the sand,
the touch of california-sun against
skin,
the fading sounds of
a lone saxophone
drifting like a ghost through
empty halls. 
 
ultimately
            i believe we’ll be 
okay…
 
they take my hand,
they do not dance,
do not simply stand,
but instead they take my hand
and gently,
 
they tug me 
home.

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Kay Lee is a tenth-grader attending Korea International School in Seoul, South Korea. She is currently putting together her writing portfolio and was recently accepted into Juniper's Young Writers Program.