Decency

/

Steve Cushman

Some days the decency of your neighbors is obvious
like the cake or casserole after a loss, the wave each
morning, the how ya doings and have a great days!
But what’s not so obvious is the way Jess,
the early morning jogger, tosses your newspaper
a little closer to your house or when mail is
delivered to the wrong box and they walk over
and give you what is owed, depositing it in your
mailbox without telling you or like last August
when you’d had a bit too much to drink after
Stella finally passed after that year of treatment,
and you fell asleep in the red and white striped lawnchair,
in your front yard, so far gone that they Meyers kid
on the corner was able to untie your shoes and
remove them, then tie the laces together and throw
them over the power line in front of your house and your
neighbor, the quiet one with the little white dog that barks
more than you like, spotted you while out collecting his paper
and pulled his A-frame ladder out before you woke and retrieved
the shoes, untied them and placed them back on your
feet, even tied them, so that when you woke you had no
idea why your shoes were tighter than normal and that
strange man was walking up the road with a ladder
in one arm and a for-once silent dog in the other.

Author’s Note: This poem actually grew out a writing prompt. For the longest time I have resisted prompts, mostly because I thought I write enough on my own and don't need someone pushing me to write about a particular thing. My poetry father, Mike Gaspeny, and I were joking that while neither one of us wrote to prompts we had both purchased the prompt book: Write It: 100 Poetry Prompts To Inspire because of a workshop we had taken, so decided to try one of the prompts for the hell of it. We asked, Lee Zacharias, Mike's wife and my MFA professor, who is a first-rate novelist and essayist and Hollins grad, to pick a prompt. She chose one that said write a poem about a high wire. For me this translated into write something about a power line, so that coupled with all those times I'd driven under shoes tied around power lines got my mind spinning and this poem grew out of that.

Steve Cushman earned his MA from Hollins University and MFA from UNC-Greensboro. He’s published three novels, Portisville, Heart With Joy, and Hopscotch. Portisville won the 2004 Novello Literary Award. Cushman’s first full-length poetry collection, How Birds Fly, is the winner of the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award. A new collection, Eating Paradise Without You, is due out in the fall of 2023. He lives in Greensboro where he works at Cone Health in the IT department.

Still Remember

/

Sam Kealhofer

I still remember
runnin' thru the clothes lines
into neighbors back yards
like I didn't know better
chasin' them lightnin' bugs
wherever the wind
might've taken us—
chasin' after ‘em just for the thrill
of seein' that warm yellow hue
emanatin' from my cupped up hands—
just for a moment—
'fore realeasin' ‘em
back into that buzzin' summer air
like I had given birth to light itself—
and then we'd run back to where
we came from, 'fore
mean ol Mr johnson caught us
like he owned the whole world
and couldn't nobody have any fun in it
without his say so,
which he never gave—
and that's how I'd spend my summers
with the cute girl from down the lane
who wore her hair in pigtails—
'fore I knew anything 'bout love
or relationships
or sex
or the boys who lived behind me
who chased those same lightnin' bugs
just like we did—
'cept they'd catch ‘em and smash ‘em
into their arms
so that warm summer light
would blink just for a moment,
smeared across their skin
and then never return again—

Author’s Note: I was really happy to hear this poem was accepted for publication. I wrote it years ago and never did anything with it. But the older I get, the more fond of it I become. I wrote it while teaching dialect and  BluesAin't No Mockin Bird by Toni Cade Bambara to my 10th grade English students. That's where the informal language was inspired. But what I love most about this poem, more so than any other I remember writing, is how I went to my desk and wrote it all in a single setting, no more than 15 minutes. I was totally engulfed in the creative spirit, and it just came out of me.

Sam Kealhofer is a Mississippi native who obtained a master's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from Mississippi State University. His work focuses on setting, tone, and revitalizing a modern day romanticism. His work has been featured in Dunes Review, Peregrine Journal, Roanoke Review, as well as other online publications. He plans to pursue an MFA in future. 

Between Stars

/

Jennie Ziegler

 

NASA Caption: Close up view of some high clouds in Neptune's atmosphere

Author’s Note: This erasure poem was created from a 1989 photo caption from a picture of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 as it flew by the planet, following its twin, Voyager 1, on its way to interstellar space, roughly 12 years into its mission. As these spacecrafts are the windows to our busy and bright universe, we become their witnesses, their interpreters, and their confessors through the wondrous dark.

Jennie B. Ziegler completed her M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Arizona. Her work has been previously nominated for a Pushcart and has been featured in Squawk Back, The Normal School, Essay Daily, Appalachian Review, Crabfat Magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, Atlas and Alice, and Consilience, among other outlets. She has forthcoming work in The Washington Square Review and currently serves as the nonfiction advisor for The Talon Review. She often focuses on the body, folklore, science, and regional identity in her work. Find her at @InTheFourteenth and at jennieziegler.com.

Marbled

/

Callie Crouch

And if you were to peel back my sun-scorched
skin – moving my tough flesh to the side and
picking at the tender meat nearly falling off the
bones of my ribcage and into your hands –
what would I look like to you?
Would you lick your lips, humming like a
cicada at the sight of my inner soul exposed,
wild-eyed and hungry for the first time?
Or would you merely gawk, mouth open and
drooling, paralyzed and stuck like the bug’s
empty shell instead?
As whole of a human being as you’ve always
known me to be, a working nervous
system of blood glue and clothespins, I’ll
keep myself together. But if I decide to unravel
one day, melting myself down into China plates
of carved meat and teacups of tears, please,
dig in.


Callie Crouch (she/her) is an English major at Saint Joseph's University and Editor-in-Chief of the university's literary magazine, the Crimson and Gray. Her work appears or is upcoming in Olit Magazine, Wingless Dreamer’s anthology Dulce Poetica, Quarter After Eight, Red Noise Collective, LEVITATE Magazine, RockPaperPoem, Coffin Bell, 300 Days of Sun, new word press, and New Note Poetry. Callie is originally from Florida but lives and writes in Philadelphia

The Therapy Here is for the Birds

/

Ivan Hobson

If the Internal Revenue Service audited seagulls,
a hundred or so of them would list this shipyard
as their primary place of business.

They would squawk job titles like:
food truck auditor, lunch time accountant,
and avian-Homo-sapien therapist (AHST).

Of note, AHSTs should not be confused with LPCs,
LMFTs, or any other psychological occupation
that requires accreditation or college degree.

In fact, and possibly relating to the high rate
of illiteracy amongst the entire seagull population,
there are currently no licensed AHSTs in the U.S..

Rather an AHST is more of an emotional practitioner,
one who is assertive and cosmopolitan enough
to specialize in one-on-one counseling.

Observe them at lunchtime, working the far spaces
of the shipyard where many of the troubled men
have gone to eat and unburden themselves.

Watch how their clients open up and confess,
paying with breads and meats—leaving leftovers as tips
before they walk back to their dim workshops.

And yes, there are pigeon AHSTs here too, but they
offer group therapy, like something you might find
in a parking lot, among smokers, after an A.A. meeting.

 

Author’s Note: The inspiration for the poem came from my interactions with seagulls, over years, while working at shipyards. Gulls are among the most intelligent of birds and are often open to developing individual relationships with people. Overtime, certain gulls recognized me and I recognized them, and we would routinely hangout with each other at lunch. Since some of the other shipyard workers had similar gull friendships and lunch routines, I started exploring that space: What do the workers get out of it? What do the gulls get out of it? At some point I realized that the seagulls were providing a type of therapy—listening and keeping things confidential—a seagull will never tell anyone your secrets. Instead of trying to constrain the poem in a weight of “poetic seriousness,” I just let myself follow my imagination—which made the writing and editing an enjoyable experience. The ending of the poem came from the observation that the pigeons at the shipyard act very different than the gulls.  

Ivan Hobson is an MFA graduate from San Francisco State University. Along with teaching English at Diablo Valley College, he works as a shipyard machinist on Mare Island. His poems have been published in, among other places, the North American Review, Oxford Poetry, The Malahat Review, and The Poetry Foundation’s American Life in Poetry series. His first book of poetry, Cutting Teeth (Meadowlark Books), was released in 2022.  

Troubleshooting Failed Connections

/

V. A. Bettencourt

Abort if explicitly rejected. Implicit rejections
may be a feature or a bug — check with source.
Reboot if inactive for days or if you’ve avoided
sparks for fear of shock. Complex systems lack
simple user interfaces, are dynamic and can be
volatile. Misfires with promising prototypes
should be promptly diagnosed and corrected.
Upgrade to new model if repeated patches
fall flat. Ensure your specifications fit
detectable features: even flagship specimen
flop in incompatible settings. Recovery isn’t
always feasible or desirable. Available sources
that actually listen form superior connections
with suitable counterparts; do not redirect.

V.A. Bettencourt writes poetry and short prose. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Burningword Literary Journal and SWWIM Every Day, among others. 

Two Poems by Jak Kurdi

/

I Do Not Write Poems About Gender

However, when the day sloughs off and falls
to the floor of my bedroom, it looks like dread
and a binder – a spandex and canvas fabric

masquerade – which only agrees to lower
its ligature from the contours of my ribs and lungs
when night declares, it is now safe to breathe.

Tchaikovsky’s Christmas angels, suspended
in gorgeous agony, remind me of this.
With battered bodies held together with only ribbon,

gel, and wire, they dance, sculpted and stiff
like marbled cupids, forced to find air
between the orchestra’s rests or through the eyelets

of their corsets, hoping the rib-throb does not leak
in salt from their eyes. I wish I did not seethe
each time the conductor cuts off their music

wings and they stand, human and panting
as roses flee commoners’ hands for a chance
to kiss their feet. I wish I knew how long

I must dance, breathless, in dim lamplight,
to unlace, unsew, unstick, or unwind the sensation
that I am merely an understudy in my own ballet.

Autumn Duck, Listening

Today, the trees have started boarding up
to prepare for the snap. They’re cinching
limbs and letting the wind’s gusts pluck

and toss each writhing leaf into
a haphazard husk meant to jacket
the feet of the swaying, drowsy trees.

Each of my steps down the hill cracks
this autumn crust, as I ruffle my way
toward the pond bank looking for you,

the emerald headed mallard,
who politely totters away from your roost
to greet me and accept the small gift

of grape halves from my outstretched palm.
I say, after an accidental pinch
from a miscalculated snatch, fingertips

do look a little like grapes, it’s okay.
I remind you that I will be back each day
until the sky is too gray and mean,

and that I hope you don’t wince
when the wind’s bite finds the skin
beneath your feathers. I also tell you

Alex died – chose a pill or a gun
to help him sleep, they didn’t tell me.
It’s okay, though, you will be warm and fine

in your nest under that mangrove
blanket. You will wait for Spring’s
sun to rise and find you, huddled,

until its warmth washes over your eyes,
and I will do the same, ready
to see you again.

Author’s Note: “I Do Not Write Poems About Gender," draws inspiration from the myriad times when my transgender body fails to meet the expectations, or "dance the dance," of the world around me.  

"Autumn Duck, Listening," is inspired by the ritual in which I found comfort after the death of a close friend. Yes, I actually talked to ducks. Yes, grief is weird. 

Jak Emerson Kurdi, a recent Best of the Net Anthology nominee, has been recently published or has poems forthcoming in The Citron Review, Radar Poetry, Chautauqua, Inklette, The Writer's Foundry Review, and others. He lives in the Dallas, TX area with his wife, cat, and two dogs and works as a high school English teacher. 

The Mother, The Father

/

Francine Witte

The Mother

In the history of you, your mother
was belly blossom and then the
primordial soup you crawled out of.
Your limbs stretched tadpole-like
as you finally touched solid ground.
Your mother held her breath as you grew
and walked away towards too much sugar
or a bullet’s possible path. Some nights,
she would wish you back into her womb
where she could feel you kick, or remember
how later, once born, she could hold you,
your milk breath sweet in the nursery air.
But now, as you borrow her perfume,
spray it on your first-date neck, she tells
you how the species will do anything
to survive, her actual words being, boys
will say a lot of things to get you into bed,
and you wonder If she could mean Daniel,
from Math class, Spock salute and tooth gap,
who you only agreed to go out with because
all your friends say you’re too picky. Daniel
who is right now pulling up in front of your
house in his father’s car, and he better have
it back by ten. Later, the two of you in the last
row of the Cinema 5, popcorn bucket down
to its buttery bottom, Daniel wiping his hand
on the velvety seat and reaching for yours,
like something crawling out of the sea.,

The Father

In the history of you, your father
was the bullet that joined splat with
your mother’s egg that night they lay
together and him rolling off of her,
his belly heaving up and down, her fingers
trailing the hairs on his chest. Later, you
show up, the whole new country that you
are, and he has to learn your mysterious
language, learn the exact line where you
both divide. Now, he drives you to your
first dance, where you will end up dancing
with Mike from bio, detention hall and fake
I.D. who is only trying to get Jeannie Peters
jealous. Mike, who will kiss you, take your
number and never call. Your father is too aware
of the things boys will say, remembers his own
teen-aged nights, grass-stained jeans, bottles
of Mateus. And now, he sits in the car and
watches you swallowed into the crush of sports
jackets and gelled-up hair. He taps his fingers
on the steering wheel until you are safe even
though he knows you’ll never be safe again.
Instead, you will go from being a country to
being a whole new planet among the strips of
crepe paper and swollen balloons. And he drives
home for a couple of hours until he comes back
to pick you up, knowing that everything, even
you, only lives in the moving away.

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem in two parts. I wanted to show the different perspectives of the two parents and how they react to the daughter growing up. I'm not a parent myself, so I actually identify more with the daughter in both parts, but I tried to think of how my parents probably felt. 

Francine Witte’s poetry collections include Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) and Some Distant Pin of Light (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, 2023,) as well as chapbooks Not All Fires Burn the Same (2016 first prize winner, Slipstream,) and First Rain (Pecan Grove Press.) She is also a flash fiction writer. She lives in NYC.  

Like A River

/

Peggy Hammond

That angry word hits hard,
cracks the sidewalk
between us; your eyes
flash a warning, say
there’s more
where that came
from. But what if
there was a cool
stream between us,
babbling, urging
tenderness, even
if for a second?
You could dip in
a toe, just to test,
maybe wade to
your knees and feel
the slip of smooth
stones under your feet,
forget
we are different, reach
for my hand.
I’d take it. I’d walk
right in, waist deep
before I thought
twice. That division,
that split, forgotten.
Listen, this brook
gurgles and laughs;
if you let it,
it drowns out
all the anxious words
of man.

Author’s Bio: It seems we are daily confronted with news of verbal altercations that turn to physical violence, and it is wearying.  I wrote this poem as a small plea to slow down and think before erupting into a squabble or worse. I used the image of a river because it's hard to imagine anyone remaining angry when standing beside water flowing over rocks; for me that's always a soothing experience. 

Peggy Hammond’s recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The Blue Mountain Review, Thin Air Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Olit, Club Plum, UCity Review, Heimat Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, River & South Review, The Paper Crow, Jarfly Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net nominee and the author of The Fifth House Tilts (Kelsay Books, 2022). Learn more at https://peggyhammondpoetry.com/.

Ghosts

/

Clint Bowman

In the middle of the sermon,
you passed a note that read,
“People who believe in ghosts
are more likely to see them.”

I looked at you, confused,
as I stuck the ripped piece
of bulletin paper
between hymnal pages.

As we exited the sanctuary,
families filed out
into the parking lot.

The air slowly filled
with deep thuds from a helicopter.

As it got closer, all the kids shouted
and pointed their fingers at the sky.
Then all the fathers looked up,
along with the mothers,
grandparents, clergy, and pastor.

Everyone gazed in amazement
as deeper beats penetrated the air,

but the sky
was robed in gray—
so nobody could see it.

You said, “This is what I mean.”
As though everyone believed
those whooping blades
were footsteps from heaven,
and this moment
was the second coming.

Everyone smiled at the thought—
ready and willing
to see, be saved, and leave.

I knew it wasn’t God.

But what if
people who don’t believe
only see helicopters
in the sky?

I looked at you,
beaming up in unison
with all those smiling faces,

and for that brief moment,
I believed in ghosts.

Author’s Note: The inspiration behind "Ghosts" comes from my upbringing in the south and where I currently live in the Appalachian mountains. Being raised in the church, I experienced how easy it is to get wrapped up in a congregation and just go through rituals without questioning the reasoning behind beliefs. I noticed that people with strong faith find God in everything—which can be beautiful but is usually overdone and seems to trivialize everything that’s deemed a "God moment."

Clint Bowman is a writer from Black Mountain, North Carolina. During the day, Clint works as a recreation coordinator, leading hikes and other outdoor programs around the Swannanoa Valley. In the evening, Clint volunteers as the facilitator of the Dark City Poets Society- a completely free poetry group based out of the Black Mountain Library. More of Clint's recent poetry has been published in Louisiana Literature, Mud Season Review, and ONE Art.

Opossums

/

John Popielaski

They are born in a brush pile before the spring’s full bloom.
Their embryonic digits grasp. They pull
each blind and hairless fraction of a gram, each portion
of audacity, across the mother to the pouch seam.
Each crawls in, a jostled grain. Each claims a nipple, curls
and fuses, dreams and purrs.

Their mother teaches patience, silence, placement.

Sounds and smells that tense their mother
enter them and leave deep marks. The babies cling more
tightly during tensions. They take refuge in her skin.

Contact matters more than anything.

Day by day, their mother tells the story
of the touched and untouched. She tells it
when she leaves the brush pile in the dark,
her babies fastened in her pouch. She tells it
when she picks up peanuts scattered by a fragrance
on an unlit patio. She tells it
in the budding woods when the coyote scent is strong
and when the flora and mycelia are songs. She tells it
by the river and the river trash. She tells it
in the strawberry fields and pastureland. And in between
these places, as her babies cling, she tells
the story of the land that least forgives, where dead lie
everywhere and are ground down, where light bears down
at unreal speed and all that can be done is to be stunned.

One night, her babies’ eyes still weeks away
from opening, she climbs a brownstone monument and perches
on the brownstone kepi of a brownstone Union soldier.

Across the road the soldier overlooks, a house
from settlement times is dark inside. Fine bugs
and moths exhaust themselves beneath a low-glare streetlight.

She rises on her hind legs like a fur hat come to life.

Her babies, tucked away, do not see
what she sees. They do, however, feel the undertow
of the road below. They feel the river’s undertow
beyond the field behind the house. They hear
the cables and the wires in the earth and overhead. They hear
the pipeline water underground. They smell
the stew of sewage, smell shed particles of tires, unending butts
of cigarettes, smell leaks and spills, emissions, infinite particulates.

She lies down for a while, forelegs resting
on the kepi’s bill. Her babies press against her, touched
by her alone. She tells each one the story only opossums know.
When she is done, she rises on her hind legs once again.
The spirits of the short-lived and resourceful come.
The whiskers of the spirits who lived through
the southern exodus transmit. The spirits of the margins
and humility see signs that the indifferent
and disintegrated will not rule forever. By tradition
and example, the transmissions counsel,
leave a path for those who will come after.

Author’s Note: After taking Rewild Your Words, an online course taught by Paul Kingsnorth through The Wyrd School, I have been trying in my writing to decenter humans. “Opossums” is the opening piece of a longer work that tries to imagine the parallel realities that we so often ignore. 

A mildly educated soul, John Popielaski is the author of a novel, The Hollow Middle, as well as several poetry collections, including Isn't It Romantic?. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Hollins Critic, Post Road, and Redivider.

Biopsy in the Land of Blood

/

Christen Noel Kauffman

a bath rug is painted with a body turning
on itself, this cave of wonders emptying the cells
I’ve tried to hold in. what is muscle memory when
everything merges into red and red on a bathroom
floor where I scrub the tile with a fine-toothed comb
until the color bleeds through. when Eve bled
the first time it turned into blooms, made a garden
big enough even god had been outdone.
I would like to take my uterus to a coffee shop,
let it sit in the open for the first time so I can see
its tired face, offer a biscotti to that worn and feeble
mouth. I’m supposed to be beautiful, I’ll say,
on the inside where my children un-scrolled
their legs into perfect Vs, put handprints on the walls.
I don’t know if anyone will notice it’s gone,
outside this biome where I’ll feel the space left
behind, where maybe only canines can sense
a different smell, a ram-shaped hole that once held
two hearts. in the land of blood, I walk to the clinic
to unveil myself, show them each specimen
they can touch and hold, endometrium thick
as the earth’s swollen skin. there it is, they’ll say.
let us save you from it.

Christen Noel Kauffman is a 2022 National Poetry Series finalist and author of Notes to a Mother God (2021), which was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series. Her work can be found in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. 

Applause

/

Donna Pucciani

Today all things are possible.
Berries become birds.
Daylilies become nighthawks.
Skunks become roses, roses lions.

Grudges morph into affection,
walls melt into bridges.
A loaf of old bread becomes caviar.
Shakespeare becomes Nancy Drew,
the Hardy Boys now Virginia Woolf.

But there is no miracle, Alessandro,
like the day you learned to clap.
Putting your baby hands together
once, twice, three times, amazed
at how they obey your silent desire

to imitate the grownups, you applauded me
for doing absolutely nothing but
being your ancient auntie, turned angel,
my blinking eyes becoming wings.

Author’s Note: I have just returned from a month in Madrid, where I was helping my American niece, a freelance writer, and her Spanish husband, a teacher, with their sixteen-month-old baby Alessandro. The poem was written some months ago, before he had even learned to walk. During this last visit, we have continued to bond, reading books together, going in his stroller to and from the nursery, and chasing each other in the park. I do not know when I will see him again, or on which continent. I live, always, between ecstasy and heartbreak, as the poem suggests. 

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, Mediterranean Poetry, Li Poetry, Agenda, Journal of Italian Translation, and others. Her seventh and most recent book of poetry is EDGES. 

collection

/

BEE LB

a day is only a collection of hours, but the collection
of hours stretches endless ahead. a day is only
something to get through. the way to get through
is to catch each sound, bottle it quiet, open when in need
of a living reminder. hold out your hand and i will pour a sound into it.
here, the distant hum of a machine. an engine is only a collection
of metal. a collection of metal can mean anything,
including the hulking body of an engine driving
your brother into the road. a collection of metal can mean
anything, including the rod keeping his leg straight and in-tact.
the sound of an engine is only proof of life. hold out your hand
for a new sound, this one has not reminded you of a life you want to live.
try the high, clear whistle of a chickadee. it’ll pool in the palm of your hand
like silk. the way its wingspan is greater than the rest of its body
and still, it does not migrate. instead, its small body learns to grow cold,
conserve warmth, push through the freezing so they can nest til june.
i’ll catch each one of its chirps and save it for winter.
i’ll memorize the sight of its body on your rail.
a collection of bodies can mean anything, including the presence of life,
and waste.  a collection of bodies can mean anything, including
your own holding still to encourage theirs to stay.
you’re used to that, aren’t you? the stillness of your body
can mean anything, including a way to avoid being seen.
the stillness of your body can mean anything, including a way
to avoid this living. the sound of an alarm in the distance,
the sound of a small child yelling, the sound of a door shutting heavy
beneath you. you’re chasing silence but the world is offering you proof of life.
isn’t this what you wanted? a sharp crack followed by a dull thunk
too far away to tell where they’re coming from.
all these noises from the belly of silence.
all these noises from the throat of life.
i’ll catch them for you, let you pretend you’re not living,
but each new sound requires a new bottle to quiet it.
the snapping of branches. the heavy click of forced air. a crane
groaning to life in the distance. tell me where to store this sound and i will.
i’ll teach your body not to jump. i’ll show your body how to stay.

Author’s Note: "collection" came about in Lyd Haven’s Solitude & Ourselves workshop, an examination of loneliness, sound, and connection through distance. The poem was a way of communing with the self, examining the way mundanity and crisis overlap throughout life, and attempting to offer what comfort could be found.

BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. they have been published in Press Pause Press, The Jarnal, and Popshot Quarterly, among others. they are the 2022 winner of FOLIO’s Editor’s Prize for Poetry as well as the Bea Gonzalez Prize for Poetry. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co.  

Two Poems by Jane Zwart

/

Why We Can Not Get a Dog

1.
My son, who wants a pet, drops objects
he no longer needs wherever they outlive

their use. He leaves the door open.
I tell him a pet would eat his socks.

I tell him I cannot chase another
living thing. He asks for a slice of bread.

2.
My son traps an ant. He crushes
the creature some in the capture

without intending to. He says
My pet was too fast for me when we met.

His pet lives in strange splendor,
domesticated to a clamshell, a plastic

greenhouse; to water in a Skippy lid
and wrung hydrangeas, a bread mattress

on the floor. I praise the ingenuity. I praise
the paraplegic ant. I pat its shoe-shine thorax.

3.
My son, who has ground the life
from many bugs, like a gangster

tap-dancing on Lucky Strikes; my son,
who scuffs through the hourglass heaps

of sand in the driveway’s seams—
how he cries when the pismire dies.

All night he is morose, dosed with loss.
A little love is a dangerous thing.

Ode to Wickedness

O, poison-apple queen, archer
of eyebrow, steepler of hands,
how sorry my arsenal: trochees
and burs, letter openers pulled
without flourish from plastic
sheathes. O, Wickedness, sin
in a catsuit, your sidekick is
a clumsy mimic. Mine are all
pitiable, lickspittle spites.
How blurry my envy, O, candied
evil; how humdrum my crimes.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. 

Memory of a Song

/

Kathryn Boudouris

By the time you disappeared, you’d been gone
for a while. You faded out like the last FM station
along a prairie highway, and the rest of us drove on
because we had no way to stop.
Some days, in the beginning, the wind
 
would shift and carry your voice back to us
in a murmured saying or a tune you hummed—
a tune recorded deep in your cells,
though you no longer knew what it signified;
a tune that had played in the home we left behind.
 
Was it like that for you? Did you ever
hear a note in your daughter’s voice—
a tremor like the first time she fell in love—
and remember her clearly?
Did she suddenly make sense again?
 
—and in your mind, did you encounter
a dark-haired woman, with an alto-toned laugh
and a sturdy way of loving, bearing her family
down the highway like a three-seat Pontiac wagon,
and think, “That used to be me”?

Kathryn Boudouris studied creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan before attending Yale Law School and practicing law for several years. She now works as a librarian and lives with her wife in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Shell Casings

/

Beth Oast Williams

February cracks her frozen
bones around my throat.
Turning blue was my own fault.
I wore the book jacket out
in the cold, forgot the true story
it told. That mirror won’t bring
the sun any closer, it shines
            a made-up face to the snow.
Brown blades of grass bend drunk
from icicled dew, their dreams
of green just guitars in a field.
            I wonder what the backsides
of clouds look like, a wig
            of mother’s gray hair or merely
a bag of unspent bolts. All this
            while David’s ankles struggle
to keep that once-perfect man erect.
            Take a peek underneath, the tick
of an alarm clock beats like a bomb.

Author’s Note: This poem began on an airplane with the sun beating through the window. Looking down, I couldn’t see the ground because we were above the clouds. I realized people below were experiencing a cloudy day and began to think about how so many things are not what they seem. 

Beth Oast Williams’s poetry has appeared in Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, GASHER Journal, Poetry South, Fjords Review, and Rattle's Poets Respond, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, was published in 2020. 









           

All That I Don't Know About Birds

/

Angela Kirby

The time that passes between the small feathered fury of mating
and the solitary laying of eggs; where and how the man of the nest
spends his time: she is carefully opening herself to the future;


What they think about arms when they see us, if we appear
fresh plucked, grounded: or do they curl wingtips and dream
little bones, little fingers stiffening preened feathers;


Where they carry the nails, the hammers, the string; what they build
inside hedges, behind leaved screens: what they love and crucify;


How two birds find each other again and again in the whole sky.

Angela Kirby is the 2022 Second Prize Winner in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Publications include Nimrod International Journal, Roanoke Review, Humber Literary Review, Another & Another: An Anthology Of The Grind, Seam|Ripper, and Lament for the Dead. She writes in the mountains of North Carolina.

Something I Saw as a Problem Years Before

/

Adriana Rewald

I’ve noticed my jaw moving
further out of alignment.
My dentist is in Detroit and
my orthodontist in Warsaw.
It’s so easy
to list off the origins of these
souvenirs: my Seoul earrings,
my Istanbul scarf, my Sarajevo
purse. The St. Croix bracelet,
the Belgrade diagnosis, the
Roanoked heart, the scar
Fincastle left on my foot,
and this new Guangzhou-cut
hair uncurling in protest,
dragging lines across my face
in foreign mirrors.
Everything gets here somehow.

Author’s Note: I had just moved to a new country and was reflecting on the idea of place and belonging, which manifested as a catalogue of my belongings both physical and abstract. Each place I've lived has left me something that I continue to carry, for better or for worse. During the most difficult moments of adjusting to a new home, I find comfort in remembering all these pieces that refuse to be disconnected by border crossings.

Adriana Rewald (she/her) is a writer and translator who was born in Detroit and raised in Warsaw, Poland. She received her MFA from Hollins University and her poetry has appeared in Artemis, Toho, Poets Reading the News, High Shelf, and on poets.org. Her work as an international school teacher has taken her to South Korea, Serbia, and, currently, China.

À Dieu

/

Hibah Shabkhez

When the last hunched seagull is gone
And the murmuring waves unlit,
I lose
All shame.
For one last word to dwell upon,
To drive inward like a horse's bit
I choose
Your Name

Author’s Notes:

The first seeds of this poem came to me while watching the sun set over the sea at Port Picain. Afterwards, I fiddled with the words I had hastily jotted down, offering them different forms until they sounded just right.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Zin Daily, London Grip, The Madrigal, Acropolis Journal, Lucent Dreaming, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez