POETRY
WHEN I WALK MY DOG IN LOUISVILLE,
ONLY MEN WITH NECK TATTOOS
STOP TO FLIRT WITH ME by Emily Nason
Derby Saturday, and I’m making small talk
with a man named Ben. Every grocery store in town
is selling red roses. Huge bouquets, spilling out
of cellophane crowns. I swear I can smell them
from the rain-soaked sidewalk, and Ben does, too.
An octopus sprawls across his throat,
two gray tentacles writhing, as if they control his head:
oceanic marionette. Four months and I still don’t feel
at home here, but at least the flora is familiar:
white hydrangeas, honeysuckles, swamp milkweed,
Taco Bell wrappers, used condoms, a baby’s pacifier.
Two blocks over, a breakfast place serves cinnamon rolls
the size of soccer balls. The post office never has a line.
A church. Six, but their bells are set to different clocks.
Earlier in the week, I saw a woman thrown from her car.
Tailbone-first against the yellow curb. Before I could cross
the road to help her, the driver came back. He pushed
open the passenger door, and she got in. Windows down,
Johnny Cash on the radio, and they were gone. No one else
was on the street to see. The octopus on Ben’s neck
is the closest oceanic thing for miles. I imagine resting
my ear against it. Tide rising. Tide going out.
Emily Nason’s poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, and TriQuarterly.
LEGEND by Sara Eliza Johnson
You feel dead now, but there are ways
to reach through time, to resurrect yourself.
Listen: many years ago, a reindeer died
from anthrax in the tundra. The ice kept its
body intact, and when the permafrost
melted, the carcass thawed, and the spores
awoke inside its lungs and heart, little lesions
another reindeer ate, and infected the herd,
which all died, and the shepherd boy
who tended the herd died, too,
after contaminating his whole village.
Sometimes the horrors of the world amaze me.
In laboratories, scientists have revived
bacteria frozen eight million years,
and prehistoric viruses from meltwater,
which became infectious in seconds.
From this you learn we’re never safe
but maybe it means we’re never alone.
Under a microscope, the bacteria in me moves
like a moonfield with an amoebic flower
at its center, an ancestral organ, petaled
afterglow nothing can see, not even itself.
I know it by the fever that waxes and wanes
against my forehead, as a name
you repeat to not forget, or a word for home
when you’re far away, that homesickness
when you’ve never been home before,
but, like the miracle of the worm
regrowing its head after the children cut it off,
can still somehow find your way back.
Home by Sara Eliza Johnson
All the trees in the backyard have my disease,
all crooked, sad things that shake and bend
at the threat of teeth or touch, bleed sugar
and rust. I think I’m afraid to stop bleeding
because it means sleeping forever.
On one island grows a tree called dragonsblood
that bleeds red sap, and arthropods bleed blue
threads, the blackfin icefish bleeds clouded milk
and far south a glacier bleeds iron oxide
that still feeds a primordial ecosystem.
Even flower stems bleed latex. Everything bleeds.
Still, nothing so beautiful lives inside me,
nothing like the tenderness of horses,
their trembling eyelids and tangled manes.
Sometimes I cry in the bathroom, the car,
behind a tree, so no one will see.
Sometimes I drive out to visit a stranger’s horses
just to be near them, stand with them awhile with
my empty hand outstretched
like another animal, dark and small, coming out
into the light for the first time.
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of two poetry collections. Bone Map won the 2013 National Poetry Series and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014. Her second poetry book, Vapor, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2022. Her poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series.
CHERRY LEAF WINE by Rose DeMaris
White sheep bones
from one hundred years ago
unearth themselves in this place,
and curls of wool are pulled
from the air, woven
and rewoven into nests
up in the very trees that gave
him shade, the shepherd boy
with glands in blue flames,
only twenty and French, alone
on a Montana plain, peeling
every afternoon a boiled
egg he wished were a teen
with a tongue like a peach
and a lake-scented leak
in her crook, an adrenal angel
to clutch and love. On a hot
July day he panted while the flock
chewed forbs and clover,
remembered the cherry leaf
wine, iced, he drank in Provence
last summer. The grasshoppers knew,
stopped scratching as the sky lowered
a black blind against the sun
and gave him a lightning crown
so heavy it pushed him
into the earth
for whom it is all the same beauty
whether we bleat or bleed.
Rose DeMaris is the author of The Lovebird (Random House, 2013). Her work has appeared in Big Sky Journal and The Millions.
Shooting Trap by Dorsey Craft
My twenty gauge and my husband’s twelve gauge nestle in foam
like bodies in a silk-lined casket. Mine has a short stock
because my arms haven’t grown since my father bought it for me
when I was twelve. It’s matte black so the sun doesn’t glint off it
and it has a neon green bead at the end of the barrel. There are five
concrete paths. I choose the first one. The man who operates the thrower
says not to look at the bead. I say pull. I bend at the waist. I press my cheek
down hard and stare at the green. The clay goes away to my right,
shatters quietly. My husband takes the center path. He loves
the pump action noise when he reloads. The man says
a burglar would hear it and shit his pants. My husband says pull.
He has a thin scar above his eyebrow where he looked too close
at a rifle scope. It bled into his lashes. My father wrapped the gun
in antler-patterned paper for Christmas. My husband opened it
and cleaned it with oil and then went outside to shoot Halloween
pumpkins in the woods. His shoulder jumped six times. He hasn’t
told his parents. He says pull, I say pull. Clays go in halves,
in thirds, spurt into shards. Most flop on the ground in one piece.
The man says old trap shooters aim where the clay will be. He says
that’s where the name comes from: the way they trap the clay
between earth and gun. They keep the barrel at the same height,
they step back on the paths, shoot report pairs and true.
My husband wants to try the pairs to hear the heavy clunk
of his pump action, but the man tells him we’re not ready. I point
at the tin roof and track the clay up. I open both eyes, see double,
shoot air. When I was young I was a good shot and a dog
brought a mourning dove to me in its mouth from where it fell
across a pond. It held it soft above the water. It was well-trained
and had webbed feet. I used to pet the birds’ grey down,
pull open their round eyelids, stretch out their wings. I used to
shake them by the neck if I found them paddling through the corn.
The man tells me to open both my eyes. He says to swing the barrel
past the clay when I pull the trigger. He says smooth motions
are the new method. I stop after every shot. I bruise my cheek.
My husband busts so many clays. The man says no one is coming
into our house and I believe him. My husband didn’t hold a gun
until we met, but he plays a lot of video games where the screen
is just the end of a barrel floating. He bought the hard plastic case,
which can go on airplanes. I never flew until we met, but I understood
the sky: its hands the lightest cotton, how clouds can swaddle,
how the wind holds tight to wings, and how to make it let go.
Dorsey Craft is the author of the poetry collection Plunder (Bauhan Publishing, 2020), and a chapbook, The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella (Cutbank, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Indiana Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Poetry Daily.
CUMULONIMBUS by Christa Romanosky
An empty thing might as well be tossed—
My mother writes: often you might think
I was an understudy. Climate-sizzle, little
annihilation from the ground‑up. The sky, gone;
the fields turned off. I shortened
my lifespan just by living. Lodged a mouse
in a dream in my throat to survive. A trash-bagged
adolescence with air-holes, so that nothing
died. My mother states: So often I felt taken,
there was nothing left. We bleached cat vomit
from the plywood. Kept the raccoons stacked
in crates marked LIVE TRAP. Dogs left raw
in the rain like nails. A fawn, a fence,
a gun, that god. I did not understand love,
so I unlocked doors. Dog shit Andromeda
on the floor. There was a day,
then there was another day. Anything
that wandered in got stuck.
Christa Romanosky’s poems have appeared in EPOCH magazine, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and Kenyon Review Online.
Gonna Blow It Down by E. Kristin Anderson
after Paramore
It was a trick when they gave us the keys. We opened doors and laid down
pillows and modems and waited for the birds to come and tell us how
to live, how to falter as our arms filled with butterflies, how to fall to rest
on the pavement, collecting coins. Here is the imminent failure of flesh—
we are living in the brine of every decay and dressing it up in denim and rouge.
When days are lines on a calendar I am a statuary, feet on the ground, stone heart
beating. Here is the unfettered grief of living, the requiem I whisper with
every new truth I take on. So I hold myself like a keepsake knowing the heyday
of treasure is over—I cannot fulfill that promise of the prodigal daughter.
The world will always be ending and futures dry up and this is how a woman
can be maiden and crone but never mother. How this is me. How the magic
inside me is somehow stunted in this revelation. And I wrap myself in cellophane,
scratch through this migraine to the other side. Maybe it’s time to let the clouds in,
to pull the bricks down and throw them in the sea, to swim in the truths we
cough into the sink. Butterflies still travel south, birds still roost on power lines,
and I still carry a shovel so I can crack the road deeper and deeper. All these
futures have caught a ticking clock, an unworn dress, a slack tide, a ghost licking
at the throat. When I split my life I still know where I want to be—vivisected
by the Mississippi, sipping at a sky that that touches my hair with a mother’s
tender hand. What we put in the ground is as hard to forget as a song repeating
on the radio, the DJ gone. I hold this like the danger it is, pack down the dirt,
watch the clouds for thunder holding the rain that won’t wash me away.
E. Kristin Anderson’s chapbooks include Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), A Jab of Deep Urgency (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014). Her poems have appeared in The Texas Review, Pank, The Pinch, and TriQuarterly.
ALICE, MISSISSIPPI by Audrey Hall
We passed mobile homes resting
on their sides as horses do when dying.
An hour ago, I helped dig under
muddy plywood for missing pets.
My mother recited her memories
of Hurricane Camille and the way
days thickened with humidity.
Tornadoes are different, she said.
I nodded, imagining dogs big as Clydesdales
hunting in the Mississippi switchgrass.
Someone tallied volunteer hours.
In the very back of the van,
a white rabbit with black eyes
rustled its newspaper bed.
Audrey Hall has published a poem in the Crab Creek Review.
OUTSIDE ACCRA by Jodie Hollander
When I had the legs to do it,
I used to just run and run,
the exercise was an excuse,
running is just what I’d do—
Even on Krokrobite beach,
I ran out in the Ghanaian sun,
with an old yellow Walkman
that played just one tune.
And that day I was thinking
of ripe mangoes and star fruit,
when I felt a strange shadow
running right beside me.
I turned, and it turned too:
a looming man with a knife—
Give me that, he said,
pointing to my Walkman.
That—what did I care?
The thing had been in the wash.
I handed it over, he said run,
I ran—and the deal was done.
Years later I am in England,
my mother is dying of cancer,
and I swear I see that mugger
wandering through the park;
I think of that day on the beach,
and how he held up that knife
clean and sharp as a mirror—
how little I seemed to care.
Then I thought about my mother,
and how she’d always say
I was running from something.
In her final few weeks,
she won’t allow me home.
The house is for those who’ve stayed,
she emailed – then she died.
So I stayed in England all winter,
alone in my little dorm room,
thinking about my mother,
then thinking about that mugger,
and how I’d just run and run.
Jodie Hollander is the author of the poetry collection My Dark Horses (Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, PN Review, The New Criterion, Verse Daily, and The Best Australian Poems of 2015 and 2011.
WOLVES by Jasmine Templet
wolves began to talk
and they said, we are very hungry
books opened themselves to pages that read
time’s up time’s up time’s up
and I broke my heel on the sidewalk
when the sky filled with housewives
wearing mink coats and hair straight out of Leave it to Beaver
riding white horses and carrying just-baked cherry pies
one of them adopted me
she said her name was unpronounceable
but I could call her Tiffany and we
rode through broken forests
hunting men and pigs who had not yet
assumed speech as the wolves did
Tiffany calls it the
culling, says when we
are making a pearl
sanding frost-skin
to find shapes underneath
more pleasant
less smoke
and the wolves won’t be hungry
and the forests will split in two
green again and again
brand new
Jasmine Templet’s work has appeared in the speculative fiction anthologies Strange Economics, Hidden Youth, and Dystopia Utopia.
SKY RABBLE by Mercedes Lawry
Outside, an ascension of raspy crows.
On the windowsill, two blue bottles arc
light over a scatter of stiff insects.
In the spare pause of an October afternoon,
I am counting up the dead, the years a fog
and too exhausting to decipher. Gone
is gone. The house is empty and I like it now,
my thoughts in chaos and unfettered.
The spindly apple tree shivers and bows,
red orbs hanging by a thread, shriveling.
Behind, the great gold leaves of the maple
come down in noisy cascades
when a brisk wind slices through.
I am diminishing at a steady pace.
Winter is harder to endure.
The gates are closing. I pay attention
to the birds now, their scoot and flit
across the woolen sky.
Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks: In the Early Garden with Reason (Writer’s Relief, 2018), Happy Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Crows in My Blood (Pudding House Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and The Seattle Review.
SALVAGE by Eileen Walsh Duncan
In the mid-1970s many teens in the Puget Sound region would get summer jobs at local farms, harvesting produce such as blueberries. Thousands of refugees from Vietnam arrived in the region and entire families worked at those same farms.
During August’s white sky, the starlings came
in a twitchy flood, their dark bodies pelting
an acre or more at once. We heard their urgent
twisting in the bushes, every ripe berry plumbed by beaks,
one bite from each orb, a curled star-shape left to rot on the stem.
Some of us ran at them pounding buckets,
and they hopped downrow, feathers metallic
on the fleshy leaves, alarm calls poured from black throats.
The farmer said, “Hell’s gullet is after us again,”
and hauled out the air cannon on its wooden pallet.
He pointed the tractor along the marsh road,
and called over the field bosses.
“Start in the southwest field. And someone
tell the Vietnamese this thing isn’t loaded.”
A field boss gathered them, patted the cannon,
covered his ears, pointed to the bird cloud.
One teen responded, “OK, yeah, it’s only noise, like
Fourth of July. I’ll tell them tieng viet.”
We began on the west end. Inch by inch
gleaning the crop. A few acres downrow,
the cannon boomed at random intervals
and starlings spiraled up in a muscular funnel.
Then a sudden quiet as they dove in unison,
thousands of small landings like one long hiss.
Along the south margin where farmland gave way to marsh
the berries hung like grapes from six-foot bushes.
After lunch we found the grandma, sitting very still
on a blanket – and smallest granddaughter, sleeping.
The birds, the cannon, the sputtering tractor
echoes on the trunks of red cedar.
I’d been taught heaven was decades away, suspended
safely above us all in pillowy perfection.
But it was here along the south margin
between the human tide and the erratic boom at field’s end,
the moment her tieng viet song floated over amber water
and someplace was deep enough
for all that is broken.
Eileen Walsh Duncan’s poems have appeared in Hubbub, The Seattle Review, Switched‑on Gutenberg, Crab Creek Review, Faultline, Cascadia Review, and the anthologies The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology and Rewilding: Poems for the Environment.
Atomic Imprint by Nancy Dickeman
When we last closed our sand-battered door,
we did not expect the atomic town
to come with us.
Yet here it is, from this life
to the next, my mother’s scarf
still shielding her eyes,
my father’s jacket hiding the catch
in his chest. We carry
the imprint of our desert life:
Our yard beyond the shelterbelt
and nuclear reactors,
swing set creaking
in the invisible radioactive mist,
my scuffed childhood shoes flocked
with the sandstorm’s dust, tumbleweeds
pinned against the house,
wind-driven sand caught in my throat.
Then came the stain of plutonium
shipping from the gates
to a distant weapons factory.
Through it all, we followed
my physicist father’s shadow
we thought solid enough
to protect us,
the ragged hole in his heart,
his bent shape digging in the garden
for all he’s worth, fingers coated
with the altered earth.
Nancy Dickeman is the author of Lantern (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Post Road, Pontoon Poetry, and The Seattle Review.
The Haughty One by Kathleen Tarr
for Anna Akhmatova
The room in which she wrote
did not belong to her.
No audience for the poetess
on stage tonight. No one to toast her
in the cabaret, to stroke
her regal hand.
Cold and blue as porcelain,
her bony fingers held an empty tea cup in a dark flat.
If only she had another candle . . .
That might keep her going.
Anyway, who wants her dusty trunk of verses,
and notebooks from a bygone age,
when shackled voices once recited
love’s spontaneous lines?
A harlot,
or a nun,
the poetess played two parts,
they said. Her words meant nothing to them.
But history proved the shrewdest actor.
Blood spilled from Leningrad
to Sakhalin.
All her dear ones
were taken from her.
Still, her muse carried on,
recorded Life.
She wrote out of
the silent, bleak winter:
a bitten pencil, a single
sheet of precious paper—
Kathleen Tarr is the author of the nonfiction book We Are All Poets Here (VP&D House, 2018). “The Haughty One” is her first poetry publication in a national literary journal.
INHERITANCE by Allison Albino
My mother’s mink hat was 60s chic, made for Moscow
winters, a matching hand warmer, black leather
boots, oversized sunglasses and a square purse
to dangle from an arm, copper lipstick inside. That hat
was the kitty I wished I had – I’d bury my face in it, sing to it,
call it Minky and hoped that she would crawl to me, rub her arched
back against my leg, meow for milk. My mother bought the full coat
to match. Wearing it made her feel rich, worthy of an America
far from mosquito nets, prickly heat, and hungry children
she couldn’t feed let alone cure. She bought it from Flemington
Furs in Central Jersey, with money she earned from treating
the depressed, had it tailored for her small frame: gold initials
in the lining. This dead mink covered up the part of her
that was third world. That’s what she called home: Third World.
“There’s nothing for you back there,” she’d say. And I’d wonder,
how many more worlds are there, beyond this one?
I’d slip the coat on over the long T‑shirt I slept in, its sleeves
too long, the coat dragging on the hallway floor
as I walked, it smelled of Shalimar, of her,
and I’d admire myself, my wrists and fingers with imagined
jewels. “Enjoy it,” she’d say, “What’s mine is yours.”
When my mother died, the mink was immortalized in cold
storage, the gilded morgue of Flemington, next to rows
of furs waiting for someone to re-inhabit their skins.
Allison Albino’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Lantern Review, The Oxford Review of Books, The Rumpus, and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets.
DIAGNOSIS by Elly Bookman
Yesterday a little camera
slipped inside me and let me
look around. Turns out
a body is all walls and debris –
a morning sky behind tiny petals
floating over the windshield
like snow. But it is newly
spring, when bright winds spin
delicate white dots down from
the trees, around the roads.
Nothing will freeze for
a while. Inside, everything
was empty. Outside the sky
was thick as flesh, the bruised
white of an interim dawn.
And there was still time.
Elly Bookman’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and The Cincinnati Review.
SIZES by Greg McBride
My sister found our father’s ring,
turquoise faded, sullied silver-plate.
It stopped my breath. Thirty years ago
I took it from his cold hand.
A big man, he never took it off,
not when he dug or swung or swam,
or smeared on huckleberry jam,
or held a cribbage peg, or gripped
a favorite pitching wedge, then fudged
his score again. With feeling,
she placed it on my palm,
we his keepers. I slipped it on.
It hung, slack, wanting more.
It stung. Once, the shoes. Now this.
Greg McBride is the author of Porthole (Creek Press, 2012) and Back of the Envelope (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2009). His work has appeared in Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Salmagundi, and Southern Poetry Review.
MEADOW by Joseph Millar
My father is a lowland meadow,
his tall rushes bend in the wind
over the vetch and hedge grass hay
and the pernicious dandelion
with its tough single taproot
that inches down through the clay.
He opens his heart
to the April rain
and the horses he loved
when he was here
to lean up against
and stroke on their silken ears.
At night he sees Venus
hanging close to the moon
and he doesn’t care
about ideas or sleep
or how far he had to roam
floating through space
in the silent deep
caressing the dawn’s
irresistible face
trying to find his way home.
FORGIVENESS by Joseph Millar
I took a sip of black tea and honey
crossing the bay at night
on the way to his last Christmas service
and he asked me, What are you drinking,
bound as he was to the feeding tube,
his mouth full of cancer-phlegm.
He was wrapped up
in his coat and scarf,
the Greek fisherman’s cap
he often wore
and the tumor in his cheek
hardly smelled at all
thanks to numerous chemical scrubbings
and a fresh dressing of cotton and gauze.
Also there was a cold rain
stinging the windshield
and a fitful December wind
gusting in from the west.
It wouldn’t be the King Tide coming in,
not for another three weeks.
It wasn’t the Solstice
or a falling star
or a penumbral eclipse.
It was my brother’s cool
fine-boned hand
resting on mine in the front seat
for one calm, deliberate moment
high above the dark water.
DECEMBER 2020 by Joseph Millar
This year an old guy named Lewis
has driven me to the market
in his blue half-ton Ford
which goes by the name of Anthony
and has a hole in the floor
and we’ve loaded up with a Christmas ham
and spinach and twelve ruby-skin yams,
pumpkin filling in an oversized can,
cinnamon sticks from Vietnam
and one copy of USA Today
useless except for the crossword
for today is the winter solstice,
winter to half the earth,
shortest day, longest night
here in the quiet north
under the moon and Venus above,
Saturn conjunct with Jupiter,
where no one needs to anxiously hope
or endlessly seek for love
though we can write down a solstice wish
and throw it into the fire
and peel an orange in the darkness.
Joseph Millar is the author of several poetry collections including Dark Harvest: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 2021), Kingdom (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 2017), Blue Rust (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 2012), Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007), and Overtime (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, Reprint Edition, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares.
The Rungs by Benjamin Gucciardi
Only the person with the green dice should be talking
I remind the boys, holding up the oversized foam cubes.
And the others should be? Listening, K. says,
and how should we listen? Con el corazón, M. replies,
thumping his chest with his closed fist twice.
That’s right, I say, with the heart. Who wants to start?
The dice are passed around the circle
and the boys gloss over the check‑in question.
When they reach B., who walked here, unaccompanied
from Honduras three months ago, he holds them like boulders.
We straighten when his lip begins to quiver.
It’s not my place to tell you what he shared that day.
But I can tell you how M. put his hand on B.’s back
and said, maje, desahógarte,
which translates roughly to un-drown yourself,
though no English phrase so willingly accepts
that everyone has drowned, and that we can reverse that gasping,
expel the fluids from our lungs.
I sit quietly as the boys make, with their bodies, the rungs of a ladder,
and B. climbs up from the current, sits in the sun
for a few good minutes before he jumps back in.
The dice finish the round and we are well over time.
I resist the urge to speak about rafts, what it means to float.
Good, I tell them, let’s go back to class.
After handshakes and side hugs, I’m left alone in the small room.
Two fruit-punch Starburst wrappers on the ground
and a box of unopened tissues.
Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of the chapbook I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review, Orion Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, Third Coast, and Best New Poets.
GINGERBREAD MAN by Owen McLeod
My gingerbread man says drink it
if it gives you shield, says remember
the nearest exit might be behind you,
says you’re probably part of God
and love won’t let you go back.
Used to be I had only three emotions—
Emergency Cone,
Crow Atop Utility Pole,
and Discarded Doll Stuck In Storm Drain—
but gingerbread man got me past all that.
Now I have more feelings than I know
what to do with. And if the elevator
is ever packed with rotting mummies,
gingerbread man covers my eyes
and sings me a nonsense lullaby.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling shy,
I hide with gingerbread man in the attic,
up there with all the mounted deer heads
and fading daguerreotypes
of nineteenth century clerics—
but gingerbread man never cries.
If he did, the tears would ruin
his Red Hots eyes, which he needs
in order to see the world in his sweet
and round and ruby way.
It’s the only world worth knowing.
Where else can you get a haircut, fill up
the truck, and mail a couple of love letters?
This one’s for my gingerbread man.
The other is meant for you.
Owen McLeod is the author of the poetry collection Dream Kitchen (University of North Texas Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Sun.
Tuesday morning, 2001 by Jabulile Mickle-Molefe
sewn into your left palm, a reckoning for the boy who laughed
out loud at your mother waiting for you at the end of a school
day, pacing. whore he had called her for being 16 years older.
gravel and fist for your mother, too, waiting for you to scrub the
frying pan clean and come back to the table and its piles of
festering dishes and its stacks of unfinished homework and its
ringing cell phone. she picks up—telemarketer. on the living
room floor, a mountain of clothes to drag to the laundromat on
payday and bills and loan offers and takeout menus to sort.
fields of books. she is in college. you hate the clutter and heat of
being two women raising each other,
love the sister and water and blood, but long for paper bag
lunches and casserole dinners and grand canyon summers, long
for the shutters and fences and lawns of the boy who must
disappear. when you were younger she’d take you to eden park
and watch you run from the ladybugs. it was all you ever wanted
to do until school. then you wanted ugg boots and a phone in
your room. are we growing apart? she asks her own mom on the
phone in 10 years, thinking you’re just out of earshot but you
hear her, you bite your knuckles and sneak down the hall
praying she didn’t smell weed on your breath. you will work
three jobs through college, fall in love, find buddha, kick jesus,
get married. but for now you are sinew and rage at the world
for spitting you out on account of one snowy night and a man
you call thomas. in your late twenties you have a girl of your
own and you’re grateful for the way things were – for her youth
and the aging that bound you together. but the sun is hot and
there’s only the boy with his runny nose and a pinched smirk on
his face. your mother’s car peels out of the parking lot on the
other side of the chain link. the boy parts his lips to speak, points
at the chevy but you rub your palms together, tighten your fist
and swing
Jabulile Mickle-Molefe’s work has appeared in Petrichor Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Triangle House Review.
After the passing of Mr. Owl, the boy, still uncertain of how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop, asks— by Marlin M. Jenkins
Mister, what is there
at my center? Yours?
How do you feel about
what clings to the trees?
About a neck that turns
all the way around?
Mister, why do you count
so fast?
Why are you so
impatient?
Why are you so uncomfortable
with my questions?
Mister, I can’t find Mr. Owl.
Will you leave, too?
Kid I can’t count the ways I’ve tried to get under
my own skin—was better at it some times than others.
Not sure what I wanted to find, or why. It’s true: each
tootsie-roll center has the same flavor
but will taste different depending on which
colored exterior has residue on the tongue.
But don’t get me started about trees. Or owls,
those seedy carnivorous fuckers—just ask the mouse
how wise the bird is when it’s rising
off the forest floor with talons in its back.
But I will note this: where we lived we didn’t
have forests. I don’t think I even ever saw an owl
until I was 19. For that matter I didn’t think I’d make it
to 19. For that matter, I grew up accustomed
to small numbers—miles to walk from school to home:
2, number of houses away from home I was
allowed to ride my bike: 5 (or 4,
if we measure it in trees), and this was before
I developed a fear of bicycles, along with my fear
of everything else. Though some numbers start
to grow larger—number of dogs we had growing up,
at various times, was at least 5 that I remember, number
of years I wanted to get out of there: 14—I don’t mean
out of that hood in Detroit I mean that house,
I mean my skin wavering like loose shingles,
my fingers itching to taste the meat of me.
Marlin M. Jenkins is the author of the chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, Waxwing, New Poetry from the Midwest, and Volume 2 of Oxidant Engine’s BoxSet Series.
Under the Mission Courtyard Arbor by Craig van Rooyen
“Please Do Not Pick the Grapes, Thank You”
So they go uneaten,
first dimpling then dropping
to the cobbled walk.
Their flattened skins mark the spots
where all that juice and sugar
go untasted. I like to sit here
not picking the grapes.
Overhead, sunlight turns
the leaves see-through like
a backlit dress on a woman
who prefers to wear no slip –
a woman about whom
I’m not thinking while
not picking grapes. The breeze
does not impress her dress
into sheer thigh-shaped wonder.
Men of a certain age obey
all the signs. We keep
our dogs on leash at all times.
We stay off the grass.
We drive like our children live here.
And we do not pick the grapes
because we have learned
just to let the leaf-light
shimmer-whisper and crescendo
down onto our expanding foreheads
and gently sloping shoulders.
Craig van Rooyen’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, and Ploughshares.
SOLSTICE by Jill Osier
One never expects to step under a wing
and fit there, standing.
One is always surprised
to find herself upright
under a wing. One forgets
it could ever be dark again.
In my mind I can almost do it.
I take your hand
and lead you out through snow and snow
becoming snow—what one might say
is light. One is always
surprised. At the top of a hill,
a plane sits in deep grass,
a two-seater, orange and white.
BEFORE MOON by Jill Osier
In the beginning were the ballerinas, and the ballerinas were on the hill. The ballerinas were like ponies first let out on the green grassy hill, high above the town, and all things were possible for them. Their heads, also hills, were glossy and wound or pulled tight and tilting in the sunlight, shining. And everything tightened would loosen. Small bursts, timid and flung, they ate in threes and fours on the green grass of the hill, their limbs like nature still, their motions unthought, their thoughts like a sun’s, their words new grass in their mouths.
BEASTS by Jill Osier
In Memoriam DB, EKI, and ES
Several times a day
the valley fills
with mourning.
The sound is cold
and longing,
comfort, almost
the sound of time
knowing what it yet needs
righted, almost
the very sound
a season might make
turning, or some wound
yearning for a next,
what could be
like rest.
Jill Osier is the author of the poetry collection The Solace Is Not the Lullaby (Yale University Press, 2020), and three chapbooks: from (Bull City Press, 2018); Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (Bull City Press, 2013); and Bedful of Nebraskas (sunnyoutside, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review.
THE ROBOT SINGS by Hailey Leithauser
That dustless, duskless night of empty moon
she tinned her hand in mine, it was a night
of shock of knit, of cling, of starless light
we spun in filaments to thrum and moan,
that night we, stirring, rampant, rising, rang
and struck like new aluminum our tongues –
our brightened, shined, our burnished, sudden tongues! –
and on till dawn we darked to burr and ping
and spurred to urge the singeing in our veins
from chest to dactyl up to crown where spit
the vacuumed zap and crackling of our brains
until at last within a ferric whiff,
at cease, we sank before new wilderness.
Eternity, she said it was, and is.
Hailey Leithauser is the author of Worm (Able Muse Press, 2019) and Swoop (Graywolf, 2013). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, and The Yale Review.