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/

I Go Door to Door

Katherine Tunning

with my name in a bag
and the truth on a tag on my breast
to air out my questions:

like what fruit from this heart?
like what minute to clock it?
like what wire to cut when they all lead me here?

I have pamphlets if you want to know more
but I have no pamphlets for knowing less

if you’re not careful, and no one is,
I will make myself at home on your sofa
and drink all of your tea

if I’m not careful, and I never am,
the ark I build to hold my questions
will make a high gold temple of us both

I came here to tell you what I know
which is all an eye knows

when it looks through its own lid
when language lies loose
as a nail in its bed

I came here to tell you what I know
which is that the opposite of the body is not the soul
the opposite of the body is the world

nothing is not a love poem

the opposite of the soul is also the world

I am home now, if home is temporary ceasefire
I am home now, if home is caesura
I am home now, if you’ll have me

---

Katherine Tunning lives in Boston with her partner and a highly variable number of cats. Some of her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Penn Review, and Arc Poetry Magazine. You can find her online at www.katherinetunning.com

Stairs

Angel Baker

I counted the steps to our apartment in perfectly
measured numbers like a Baker counts eggs to
ensure the bake will rise. If I’d taken the steps

wrong I’d either climb them again or wait until
morning to clean the slate. For years it was,

Take the steps starting with the right foot and
descend with the left. Alternate at some ordained
moment then change from two to three steps

at a stride. The numbers stayed in my head all day
waiting to be replicated as I went up home or

down out to school. I never tried four.
My legs weren’t long enough to do it
without using the handrail, which was also part

of the order of things. The concrete landing in
the middle before the steps turned played

into the rhythm, too. Step on it or not step on it.
Add a step on an odd day or skip on an even.
Each day had its own number but they didn’t

add onto each other. Each set was separate,
isolated, like a barcode, a fingerprint.

At the top, my father drank beer to stupor.
Sometimes awake. Sometimes he didn’t
look awake at all. At the bottom, school,

neighbors, poetry of structure. Mother
living in her car somewhere. The game

was a strategy — chess even — to move
through numbers in a controlled way.
Rook takes Knight. Rook takes Knight.

Rook takes Knight. Over and over
until all manner of Knight’s death,

premeditated, had been exhausted.
Then to a more skilled move.
Bishop protects Queen.

Black and white board underfoot,
secured and steady in position.

The slatted stairs hanging over
matured cacti — pachypodium and euphorbia —
bird of paradise, June bugs drowning in the pool.

---

Angel M. Baker is a writer and English Instructor in California. Her first short story, “A Summer Story,” was published in the creative non-fiction section of the Eastern Kentucky University journal. She was a Poet of the Month for MoonTide Press and received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2019 for her poem, "Vista, California." She also has published poems in The Northridge Review and New Plains Review. Her critical analysis of modernist techniques in Yonnondio and Johnny Got His Gun was published in Associate Graduate Students in English Journal in 2021. 

Two Poems by Esther Sadoff

Cornfields

The corn stalks are not yet razed. 
Like abandoned flags they tatter 
 
their leaves, sheaves of emerald
green now brown as cattails.
 
I can't forgive their dying
though I yearned for them.
 
Let the harvester bend them 
low with a sharp blade, 
 
dust the air thick 
with a motorized haze. 
 
Let goldenrod and aster 
wreathe the forgotten field. 
 
Let prim blue houses reign
over perpetual night,
 
electric lines tower for miles
with their tooth-pick frames,  
 
a ribbon-lane switchbacking 
through clipped green lawns,
toward the certainty of home.

---

Some days are sea-deep

I weave the bike's wheel between 
white stripes in the road, interstices 
like chapters in a book, zigzagging 
precise as a knife, light sharpening everything.
 
When you were younger, you nosed 
your bike, skidded against your brother's 
wheel, maneuvering it like a razor,
the whiz of faded rubber brushed 
with the dust of a thousand stones. 
 
You went barefoot through potholes 
and puddles, feet chalked white, 
knowing only to worship the sun.
 
Other people's childhoods are easy to envision, 
though I can still feel the soft grip 
of the handlebars, the riotous tuft 
of tinsel streamers, the heat of a hand 
against my back as I wobbled,
the street gray-stippled like television static. 
 
Whoever invented days was lying. 
One day breaths into the next, 
the spade-shape of a bird's tail 
like a bandeau darkening my eyes,
 
the splay of the starling’s wings 
almost dipping into water, 
flitting still across the shadowy bank,
 
a hand warm against my back, 
always propelling me forward, 
alternating between hot and cold, 
light and dark, yesterday and the next.  

---

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Wingless Dreamer, Free State Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Passengers Journal, SWWIM, and many other publications.

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.

Two Poems by Romana Iorga

Weeding

She remembers the color,
the feel in her hand, its weight,
the smell of dry wood.
I watch from the steps of her house.
She fumbles around the yard,
picks up tools like old
postcards, whose sender
has already faded from memory.
Her feet part the thick weeds.
The pile of wrong tools
grows behind her.
It must be the hoe, I tell her.
Did you want to weed your plants?
What plants? She frowns.
Why are you here?
She turns her back to me, enters
the house. I hear her
in the kitchen, clanking pots.
She never lets me cook for her.
I see her in the window,
peeking through the curtain.
Grandma, come outside,
let me open the windows.
She shuts the door, locks it.
All morning I sit on the steps.
The sun leaps over the roof,
burns my skin. Under the eaves,
a swallow feeds its chicks.

---

Eve to Adam at the End of the World

Across the parking lot, the wind picks up bits of
conversation, twirls them around like empty
plastic bags. Whose fault is this? Mine, yours,
the wind’s? Words are scarce, you once told me.
Their price is steep. One must not forget to
render unto Caesar. We’ve traveled like this for
eons, never arriving, hitched to the cart of our
greatest fear. The invisible whip slices our
rumps faster with each passing decade.
Mornings are spent in anticipation of evenings.
The long nights are mere rehearsals for the
longest one yet to come. And our thoughts? Give
us this day our daily bread is often all we muster
while drinking tepid tea: the brew of watered-
down lives. You pluck half-rotten, discordant
fruit from low-lying branches. I watch the
unbearably beautiful harvest ripen elsewhere, in
someone else’s orchard. Eden burns all around
us, the Eden within us. Its trees are scaly,
reptilian, noxious to touch. So much living and
yet, how uneasy they can still make me, these
nightmarish trees. Forked trunks. Fanged
boughs. Sinuous leaves. Their shadows flick
veined tips across your skin. The mangled light
founders, eddies, its cargo sinking below the
horizon. What have we left to do but watch it
go? But praise the brittle bones of sleep? But
welcome the long winter?

---

Author’s Note: Both of these poems have to do with some kind of less than grand finale: the slow deterioration of a human life, the fast deterioration of a human world. I’m of an apocalyptic mind these days, given everything that’s been going on at a planetary level and how little we do to stop what now seems increasingly inevitable--our own demise. “Eve to Adam at the End of the World” describes a probable scenario should we not get our act together in time. “Weeding,” an earlier poem, is a harbinger of what’s to come, with a dash of youthful hope. I harbor no illusion about human nature, but I still nurture the hope that nature itself will find a way to survive us.

---

Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including New England Review, Rust + Moth, Tupelo Quarterly, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

A Siren

Lauren Camp

After the earache started, it harrowed to hear people talk.
I could not live but ambiguous within the thick animal
of voice. For weeks, constant
snow and weary matter. Smoke and flat
gash from each remark. Shadow sounds.
The doctor checked drum and canal,
and in a soundproof room, volumes and pitches.
His answer to this gristle was
to have patience. All along, I thought I must hear
the world. He said I might sink deeper.
I did not want to listen.
Friends offered advice for the fluid:
pressure points at temples or tablet and pellet
and dropper then lie down in darkness.
I was battened with volatile squalls
that didn’t end those months.
I drifted in obstruction.
The ear wanted its cocoon. No apothecary
could solve it. I apologized to everyone.
These days, the panic of the world
is the size of each of our heads.
What if we’ve amplified our proof and it repeats
as a hum? Or what if what is said
doesn’t stick, or if the diagnosis is
you stay in your house with the sounds
of your house and the plan of the day, and I live
in mine with the street that runs past and the history
and future that make their impossible noise.

---

Author’s Note: My poems begin from something I'm holding—either because I want to keep it close, or just the opposite, I want to be able to be done with it, to push it away. This poem certainly started with the latter and became more interesting as it layered over time. This meant some radical shifting in revision, whittling down from the direct narrative and rant I had begun with, and adding a turn to further enrich the surprise connections it lets me make.

---

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner and The Los Angeles Review, and has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com

Two Poems by Radoslav Rochallyi

linear norm

---

the roots are always hot

---

Author’s Note: At first glance, my poetry looks like a visual creation. But this is by no means an asemic writing or Dada. Every comma in my poetry equations makes sense. I try to combine mathematical formulas and equations, which I consider almost perfect, with my thoughts and feelings. In my opinion, art should be a razor blade, which cuts the reader's perception into thousands of pieces. And it should at least take readers out of "Heidegger's daily life" for a while. Before the poetry of equations, I was fascinated by the Golden Section. In the collection of mathematical poetry Golden Divine, I tried to connect poetry with Fi (φ), and thus with the number 1 61 8034 in non-graphic form and with the golden section in its graphic form. I called this poetry "Golden Ratio Poetry".

Equation Poetry uses mathematical language as an organizational principle and at the same time uses mathematical symbols to describe intonation notation (for example, nervous3), or to define various types of specifications that are simpler or more efficient to express in non-text form. We use equations to write formulas that describe the relationship between variables and, as we know, formulas are stable; similar to structural forms in poetry (for example, Haiku has the exact number of syllables). Mathematics can be understood simply as an extension of spoken and written language with very precisely defined vocabulary and grammar in order to describe and explore relationships. I am convinced that the ambition of Equation Poetry should not be to preserve the meaning of the equation, but to preserve the form, formula and symmetry as accurately as possible.

---

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1980, living in the Czech Republic, RADOSLAV ROCHALLYI has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, prose, and visual art. His poems have also been published in many magazines and anthologies. Rochallyi is a graduate philosopher, poet, and writer who writes mainly in English, Slovak and German. You can find him on Twitter @ RRochallyi and Facebook @ radoslav.rochallyi

Grace Street Nocturne

Frederick Wilbur

Along the sidewalks of autumn avenues,
angels skateboard, delivering evening’s
first blush and daily summary.
Children on their way home
slush through pools of gingko leaves
that glow like the circles of lamplight
not yet flickered to compete.

Grackles, in fashionable negation,
are obnoxious arguments
not easily ignored, but how
can we imagine a paradise without birds?
Windows are audience eyes
that worry about the falling dark,
that worry about the mirrors they become,
turning themselves back into the warm room.

Passersby seem like tragic actors,
ghost-faced by smart phone screens.
Anxious warnings of sirens fade
into the illness of the city.
But you and I know this neighborhood
like a postcard we might send
to a cousin; each house
has an obituary fixed to the fridge
with a colorful magnet.

The moon rolls down the slot canyon
which is our street, dogs chasing it
into the long perspective.
Love that is terminal has time yet.
The curtains are pulley-ed shut
and languages are uncensored
so that we might feel the flesh of it.

---

Author’s Note: "Grace Street Nocturne" is mostly descriptive, but the intention is to raise questions about contemporary living: the glow of screens makes us tragic ghosts in our isolation, for instance. It is in the personal that we feel the flesh, the fullness, of language.

---

Frederick Wilbur is an architectural woodcarver and has written three books on the subject. His collections of poetry are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. Among the many journals in which his work appears are: Appalachian Review, The Atlanta Review, The Aurorean, Cold Mountain Review, The Comstock Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and online, Rise Up Review, Rotary Dial, and Verse-Virtual. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Award by Midwest Quarterly. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine (online).

The Robins, That Is

Susan Underwood

The generations who put me in this skin
would hardly recognize me in late April dusk
among suburban dogwoods past their bloom,
a faint delineation of the daughter they thought
to make, sitting in a meager backyard.
Just beyond my kitchen door, the noise
of passing cars obscures the reunion I came here for:
to be among the robins stirring just before they roost,
their broken, bossy syllables of plain-speak
common like my own voice talking low to them.
I try to imitate their garbled whistling in my throat
and with my lips, calling to communicate my place.
They listen for their own, but I think they tilt toward me.
I have to believe they know I’m here.

---

Author’s Note: "The Robins, That Is" will be included in my forthcoming book of poetry SPLINTER, which deals with the Appalachian diaspora and questions what comes of staying "home" versus what comes from moving out of the Mountain South. This poem in particular is about the fleeting spirits which compelled me to stay put in Appalachia. I wanted to live near my parents and grandparents. I chose deliberately to do all I could to be near them. And yet we do lose our elders. And the landscape and our own lives alter in ways which are much out of our control. The robins in the poem are actual, and the experience with them was actual. But they also represent a sense of what it means to be a species which stays. Robins in East Tennessee are common through all four seasons, though more prevalent in balmy months. I have a sense that each generation faces new obstacles. Although I have stayed in Appalachia, I don't live in any way the agrarian life my ancestors did. I don't know what they would make of me now, and it's a question I ponder at least some point every day. How do I connect the lives which came before me with the lives in our region which will continue long after I'm gone? What kind of messenger am I of culture and family?

---

Susan O'Dell Underwood is the author of the novel Genesis Road (Madville 2022), and one full-length poetry collection, The Book of Awe (Iris 2018). She directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University near Knoxville, Tennessee, where she also teaches courses in Appalachian and Native American literature. Her poems are published and forthcoming in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Oxford American, and the Southern Humanities Review.

This ghost is learning

Natalli Amato

Summer is gone. Like the good ghost that I am
I walk to where the beach turns to cattails,
the small palm of land that held my bare back
when you were inside me,
inside me, and the moon looked on,
and the water looked on through the reeds,
and the air was part of our being,
being the medium that allowed travel for our gasps,
our breath.

Land is not concerned with past.
Land is not concerned with future.
Land is.

Now this land is holding my two upright sneakered feet
as I lock eyes with the stray calico cat
who has also come here
to kill something.

---

Author’s Note: 'This ghost is learning' was written during a period of grief, anger, and confusion. It is part of my forthcoming collection, 'Willing,' set for publication by Golden Dragonfly Press.

---

Natalli Amato is the author of the poetry collections Burning Barrell and On a Windless Night. She has two forthcoming works, Gone Walking and Other Departures and Willing. She writes for Rolling Stone, Vice, Chopra Global, and Taste of Country. Natalli lives in Burlington, VT, but is from Sackets Harbor. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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)

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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.