Space Between

Shakiba Hashemi

I learned about negative space in art class. 
My teacher said, without the emptiness 
between the objects, they would clash 
into each other and become one. 
The nothingness around everything 
is what makes all the difference. 
I didn’t understand it then 
but I do now. Now all I think about is negative space 
and distances and how far apart we are 
since you left. Today I found the birthday card 
you gave me when I turned twelve. 
I didn’t look at the words as much as the gap 
between them, and wondered what you meant 
by leaving an empty hole between love you, 
and always. I asked mom where you were 
and she told me the story of the heaven 
and the sky. If she is right and you are in heaven 
with grandma and uncle Mo, 
what do you all do when you get bored? 
Do you play in the bouncy house of clouds, 
twirling around in the ether like a bunch of loons? 
I can still feel you, like I felt the sun 
this morning, radiating through the blinds, 
waking me with its rays. 
I bet you are very close, and if I blow you a kiss 
it might hit you. I just did it, did that tickle you?  
 
Sometimes I close my eyes and wrap my arms 
around your hollow embrace. And sometimes 
I gaze into the abyss hoping that you stare back at me. 
It drives mom crazy when I talk to you like 
I am doing now. She puts on her headphone  
and does her Zumba routine like a whirling dervish, 
trying to forget her pain. She believes 
in the heaven story and heaven is too far away. 
My art teacher would probably say 
that you simply blended into the negative space.  
And there you are, posing for me to draw 
your holographic portrait. All I need 
is tracing paper, a rainbow to set the mood 
and stardust to cover your face. 

---

Shakiba Hashemi is an Iranian-American poet, painter and teacher living in Southern California.  She is a bilingual poet, and writes in English and Farsi. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Laguna College of Art and Design. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Atlanta Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, I-70 Review, The Indianapolis Review, Cream City Review, The Summerset Review and the New York Quarterly Anthology Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith.

Triptych with Peacocks & Slight Delay

Darren Morris

A mind eraser is a type of drink consisting of several
There was a kid at the hospital with a pronounced delay

I grew up in the suburbs, but what made it exotic was that
Layers of spirits, shots separated by their densities

The neighbors kept peacocks & allowed them to roam freely
The kid blankly received verbal information as if unengaged

High proof rum or grain alcohol is floated on top
Peacocks were used since ancient times like watch dogs

Three days later, the kid would return with a response
Lit aflame & blown out before a straw is added

For nights they crow at every nearby unexpected movement
Often cutting into an ongoing discussion on a separate subject

You drink it all at once through the straw. The fire
(trespassers: wind bending the branches, raccoon, snowfall)

The process would repeat with difficulty on a three-day lag
The crow was a purely maternal scream, sorrowful, a dirge

Is for the memory, which holds there like a tender ghost
Christ was said to have risen after three days entombed

The light we hold burns from a dark star orbiting
And I would awaken on occasion to it after my little brother died

I always wondered what Christ did during his delay
With a planetary gravity of loneliness & longing.

Or maybe it was my mother crying through the walls. She
Mesh of space & meaningless as the distance between

Who is dead now herself & who did not after three days rise
Just as I wondered what Christ did with his youth. Perhaps

The old marble statues of love. Give me your hand
He tried out his powers, or maybe he was a kid in a hospital

But continued dying herself, each day a little more, until
Interdigitate that I may feel time moving through us

With a pronounced delay. It suggests only that the afterlife
All that was left: an empty box of chardonnay in the fridge

Might require some adjustment, the same way that the body
Always diminishing, always forgetting, but for this:

needs three days to purge alcohol, while others need Christ.
If I could, I would take from her mouth, this exotic emptiness

That I will always know her as what I have missed the most.

---

Author’s Note: This poem was an experiment with form that resulted from first writing three separate and distinct poems independently, one of 13 lines and two of 12 lines. I thought there might be some connection between the three. So I preserved the linear construct of the originals but shuffled one line from each to build a new, combined, single corpus. In each 3-line cycle (12 cycles in the poem plus an end line), a line from each poem appears only once but in a variety of orders. There is a slight disruption in this strategy in three cycles plus the end line, which was the 13th line in the first poem. By breaking it into couplets rather than tercets, this muddied the relationships further. But the theory was that each original poem would benefit by its forced relationship to the others. I had become bored with my linear style and sense-making. I was afraid that my poems at that time were becoming prosy. I was not going to write a single poem and abuse a standard form, so I created a form of my own that seemed to carry what I wanted and forced me, in a way, out of myself. Often the enjambments made for strange fragmented syntax outside of lines while preserving it inside the lines. This helped. Form should not be a game of pure limitations, but the container or logic of the form should at least signal the message of its contents, or even, as was the case with this poem, create it.

---

Darren Morris lives in Richmond, Virginia, edits poetry for Parhelion Literary Magazine, and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Other poems appear in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. Work is forthcoming at The Blue Mountain Review.

because my brother is no longer with us

Michael Estabrook

How did mother get to be 89? Seriously. How? 
One minute we’re stopping off at the Penny Candy Store 
because we’ve been good in church 
the next minute she’s shuffling along 
like an old wounded bird holding onto me. 
One minute we’re passing around turkey 
mashed potatoes and gravy 
at her sister’s on Thanksgiving 
the next minute she’s crying – 

---

Michael Estabrook has published his poetry in the small press since the 1980s. He has published over 20 collections, a recent one being The Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany (The Poetry Box, 2019). Retired now, writing more poems and working more outside, he just noticed two Cooper’s hawks staked out in the yard or rather above it which explains the nerve-wracked chipmunks. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts.

Alchemy

Lisa Compo

Light bounces
tufted sky, rooftops
tangle with wire. It was
a strange ferry
ride there. My best
friend’s mom dying
again. The screen
in my pocket shares
tulips dusting a window-
sill. Yellow petals
softening the fluorescence.
In the simmer
and mirage a wave
makes a whale. A spell
is like this: to live through
language. Grammar
and grimoire,
the same root— I place the word soon
by a bundle of collected stems, press
prefixes like mon-, then wild onions, canary-
grass onto paper. Dusk glamours
so I keep arthropod husks
and hollow reeds, conjure
losing as a whisp
of soft brush. Rain is different here,
a mist trilling my face, static. In August,
desert breaks open
gypsum, curves a new land
-scape. Here— here, heavy heads
foreign my palms
hovering hydrangeas
plumed from heat.
I forage for all things
stony and mushy: a claw,
kelp. I remember
and it is almost
funny to me now, what we choose
to remember. Her mom in the car,
NPR on. The transition
music rumbles in a shopkeeper’s
tiny radio, this must be
what they mean when
they say everyone
gone will stay
right where you’ve left
them. Sifting mineral,
I search for red frost
-ed glass. Sun-soaked
and kissed by ruptured
streetlights— prayer
is like this: to live
on nothing.
I keep the hoard close,
make an inventory of all things
once alive and all things eroded,
softened, and half-eaten. An old wreck
divides the bluing
horizon. One side
holding Venus and the moon,
the other a threadbare
cloud. Hotel vents whistle,
windows bolted, balcony
facing the expanse
that is night melded
with sea— a silhouette
spans its wings
when I wake, a drift
of sunlight shuttering:
a gull’s swift
shadow a weight
-ed blanket pressed
with morning. My body
salted, shelled open.

---

Author’s Note: For this poem, I was interested in how the landscape could transcend the complicated experience of second-hand grief. The shorter lines allowed me the space to create a slow and ritualistic pacing which fits the themes of alchemy and conjuring of memory.

---

Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate at UNC - Greensboro. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: The Journal, Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Cimmaron Review, and elsewhere. You can check out her recent interview with Alexandra Teague at storySouth, issue 52.

Cover Letter

Seth Clabough

I am writing to express my interest in
engine oil leaked onto a parking spot,
the battered truck of the man selling cantaloupes,
the stain of deserted shopping malls,
the carcasses of decaying beasts.

In my current position,
I visit the graves of strangers,
lie naked in tall grasses,
observe, near the reservoir,
moss on a low slung rock wall.

This, and my familiarity with
the grief of 3am and
unresolved pixelations,
make me the perfect candidate
to believe, of your company, almost anything.

Additionally, the mezcal on my father’s breath,
my mother drunk behind the wheel,
far-off tassels of campfire smoke,
are qualifications beneficial
to your organization’s success.

Thank you for considering the
smell of rotting tobacco barns,
the rattle of a washing machine,
a sick dog yelping from the ditch,
how I parachute into nightmares
& look forward to hearing from you.

---

Author’s Note: On the one hand, I think “Cover Letter” captures the absurd juxtaposition of the bland, formulaic ways we often must present ourselves professionally and the quirky, wonderous wierdos we are underneath. On the other hand, I think the poem asks us to wonder, What if we thought of our strange preoccupations, musings, and attention to odd, seemingly inconsequential details, as a type of real job for writers and poets? As usual, I wasn’t aware I was doing either of those until I completed the poem and read back over it a few days later. Depending on how it’s read, the piece can make me laugh or it can make me sad. That’s probably a good thing.

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Seth Clabough’s debut novel, All Things Await, was nominated for the 2017 Library of Virginia Book Award for Fiction, and his creative work appears in places like Blackbird, Smokelong Quarterly, Barely South, West Trade Review, Magma Poetry, Litro Magazine and in numerous other journals and magazines. He lives in an old farmhouse near a peach orchard in Crozet, Virginia, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Randolph-Macon College.