Poetry

Salvador Espriu translated by Cyrus Cassells

Song of Triumphant Night

Where the gold slowly ends,
flags, unfurling night.

Listen to the roar
of countless waters
and a wind opposing you:
unbridled horses.

When you hear the hunter’s horn,
its bold blast,
you’ll be summoned forever
to surrender to dusk’s kingdom.

An ancient, deep-rooted pain
that has never known dawn!

After the Trees

When I can no longer lose myself
in lush snow, an acolyte
of lights and the clashing horizons
looming above
my country’s imperiled trees,
I’ll know the wanderer’s bone-deep weariness
for the bonanza
of a home-place and fountain,
exhilarating smells of earth
and sliced bread set on the table.
Then, unchained at last
from fear and hope,
I’ll lull myself to sleep forever,
listening to the slow
sound of hoes in broad fields,
the rustle of dusk
among the vine-tendrils.

Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) was Catalan Spain’s most venerated 20th century man of letters and its main contender for the Nobel Prize. After a sickly childhood in which Espriu was seriously ill for two years, he began publishing short stories and novels during the early 1930’s. During that same period he studied history and law, and was on the verge of taking a degree in classical languages when the Spanish Civil War erupted. He was then drafted into the army and served until 1939. Espriu’s first book of poetry, Sinera Cemetery, was published in an underground edition in 1946. Like many of his stories, it depicts the small village of Arenys de Mar (Sinera), his parents’ hometown in the Costa del Maresme, a little north of Barcelona, where the poet had spent a fair amount of his youth. Espriu’s poetry wed political critique and denunciation with a brand of austere lyricism and often brooding, death-obsessed imagery, as the flame-keeping poet prevailed, despite Franco’s long, truculent ban against the public use of Catalan. He fashioned a series of parallels between Jews and Catalans, whom Espriu felt were exiled from their collective identity even while they remained in their own land. 2013, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, was declared “The Year of Espriu” throughout Catalonia.

Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of nine books of poetry, including Soul Make a Path through Shouting, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, and The World That The Shooter Left Us, (Four Way Books: 2022). He is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, which garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2019 Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the National Poetry Series, an NAACP Image Award nomination, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a tenured Professor of English at Texas State University.

Candice Kelsey

Aerodynamic Lift

Candice Kelsey [she/her] is a poet, educator, and activist in Georgia. She serves as a creative writing mentor with PEN America's Prison Writing Program; her work appears in Grub Street, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, and Worcester Review among other journals. Recently, Candice was a finalist in Iowa Review's Poetry Contest and nominated for Best Microfiction 2023. She is the author of Still I am Pushing (FLP '20), A Poet (ABP '22), and a forthcoming collection with Pine Row Press. Find her @candice-kelsey-7 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com.

Adrian Silbernagel

American Dream

Humid June. Hair of the dog. Nostalgia

a dripping faucet in a global water crisis.

My roaring twenties were eclipsed 

by a great depression: 35 and still drinking

the dregs of dreams of power lines, dance

clubs, and speed. A burned out carnie

speaking Cant, his dead native anti-language.

Richard Dawkins delivers the Narcan.

I wake up in the aftermath, pipe dreams leveled

except for this old carousel I now operate

with only fleeting reprieves from the grind

of the gears, the remainder of my sum.

And when the youth caw about revolution

I’m the first to feel the rumble, like a moth

atop a tower just before it crumbles.

Adrian Silbernagel is a poet and activist from Fargo, ND. Adrian now lives in Louisville, KY, where he and seven other queers operate a worker-owned coffee shop. Adrian writes and facilitates workshops for QueerKentucky, a local LGBTQ+ publication and consulting service. Adrian has published two books of poetry: Transitional Object (The Operating System, 2019) and Late Style (Nanny Goat Books, 2021). Visit Adrian's website.

Peter Serchuck

Car That Can’t Resist a Wall

We’re driving as fast as we can
on the road called Great Tomorrow.
 
Road signs rise up like ghosts to shout
warnings, but we ignore them.
 
Bullets fly past the windshield
whistling God Bless America.
 
There are fires in the rear-view mirror;
but that’s so yesterday’s news.
 
It’s been raining for days, but why worry?
The good lord promised no more floods.
 
People by the roadside flag us down
but we know how to blur their faces.
 
The radio screams, Stop! Go back!
so we turn the dial to Elvis.

We’re diving as fast as we can

on the road called Great Tomorrow.

When we close our eyes we can see
a future nobody will forget.

Peter Serchuk’s poems have appeared in a variety of journals including Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, New Plains Review, North American Review, Atlanta Review and others. He is the author of three published collections: Waiting for Poppa at the Smithtown Diner (University of Illinois Press), All That Remains (WordTech Editions) and, most recently, The Purpose of Things (Regal House Publishing). He lives on the Monterey Peninsula in California. More at peterserchuk.com.

Lulu Liu

The problem with talking about physics

Aspens doing something in the wind.
— Robert Hass

 
 Then, when finally we were
no longer hungry, talk
turned to the end of the Universe.
The kitchen light hummed. Your hand
turned, lifting
and placing things on the table, and we
felt as near to oblivion

as a pile of kindling.  You
wanted to know how it will end,
all this, so we huddled around
the three topological
infinities, and I struck
the match.
Light and murmur, time
like the head of a cauliflower,
maybe. You laughed. You were enchanted,
but I felt as ashamed of your
wide eyes as
if I had told you a lie.
Badly, I wanted to feed you wonder
in that tiny pill.
To say even the word, infinite,
it’s too easy-
and too provocative, and
you were enchanted, but I felt
as dull as cloth: as if I had
picked up your oranges from the bowl
and juggled them — ta-da–
I’m sorry. There is real
wonder. And sometimes I do
feel that wonder, too. Sometimes
I look into that dark hole
sky and I know that your God
is my infinite. But, no, I can’t
tell you more. I don’t
know what any of it means.

Lulu Liu grew up on the East Coast of the United States after moving from her birthplace in a rural part of western China. Currently, she is a writer and physicist, and lives between Somerville, Massachusetts and Parsonsfield, Maine. In that period when she considered making writing a career, her reporting and essays appeared in the Technology Review, and Sacramento Bee, among others. For the time being, however, she is content pursuing her interest in deep space exploration as primary occupation. You can find more of her poetry in Apple Valley Review, Rust + Moth, boats against the current, and Thimble. She's grateful to be nominated for Best of the Net 2023.

Emma Jahoda-Brown

East West Highway

One year with two afflictions. The hemispheres of
Guilt and relief. I list the good things each morning.
The cicadas crisp shells cling to the fence.
I have been more than one person.
My heart is surrounded by water.
I have a small anger when he talks to me
From which I can grow
The ore of compassion.
I smash bags of ice on the kitchen tile. 
Peel garlic and ask for forgiveness.
For pleasure, unearned.
For growing quieter
The wind rattles the shower curtain on its hooks.
At six am he lumbers into another room.
His language is sliced fruit.
When I attempt to speak
The machine says did you mean representative.
Our conversation is put through a sieve. 
The swallows come profusely from the barn.
Asterisks of daylight, graphite
coming loose from the page.

Emma Jahoda-Brown is a writer and photographer. She holds a BFA in photography and media from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles.

Lisa Delan

C-PTSD

Lisa Delan's work has been featured or is forthcoming in American Writers Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Passengers Journal, Poets Choice, The Pointed Circle, Viewless Wings, Wild Roof Journal, The Write Launch, and other publications. She has been nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. When she is not writing poems, you can find the soprano, who records for the Pentatone label, singing art songs by American composers on texts of many of her favorite poets.

Rebecca Irene

Weigheth

Though art weighed in the balances,
and art found wanting. —Daniel 5:27 KJV

Weigh the bread.
Weigh the calf.

Three-square-meals-a-day, but some girls choose to feast on cotton balls
soaked in orange juice to stay thin. How strange the machines of sustenance.
Nights, I serve women who barely eat—scrape leftover food from thirty-dollar
dishes into the garbage. Risotto, polenta, foie gras, crudo, veal, salmon, & venison.

Weigh the diamonds,
  & loaded dice.

It’s true. Waitresses judge what customers consume, & their wedding rings.
Maybe we can’t help it. It’s our job to take note of what’s not eaten, & hands
are omnipresent during most of dinner. I would say diamond size doesn’t matter,
but like everyone else working for tips, I sometimes lie. I want the sparkle, covet
the weight of a spouse’s yearly salary wrapped around my chosen flesh. V guffawed
that the diamonds I drooled over were probably fakes. She also considered even odds
a pipe dream. Face it, she grinned, some are destined for 5-carat, others 10K gold-plate.

Weigh the apple.
  Weigh the snake.

V refused to believe it was an apple in the garden of Eden. Convinced it was a pomegranate,
she blamed John Milton, specifically, for perpetuating the fruit lie, as she called it, paraphrasing 
Paradise Lost at every opportunity. It didn’t matter that Milton had never actually used the word 
apple. When I argued he had only called the forbidden fruit fuzzy, & acutely juicy…wasn’t there
a possibility he was implying peach, V crossed her arms, sighed that I understood very very little. 

Weigh the naughty
  & nice.

Femme fatale is more pleasurable to say than the girl next door.
(& frankly just more pleasurable. Period.) The former has often been
the latter, but rarely the other way around. Once one visits Paris, it is difficult
to return to cribbage, & baking cookies in a small town. If a femme fatale somehow
does become the suburban woman next door, chances are she believes past regrets can
be atoned for by good behavior, & random gestures of kindness. She wears an apron, always
pays the toll for the car behind. V once asked if I was still waiting tables because I felt guilty
for previous behaviors. My beautiful martyr, she whispered whenever I crept in after midnight.

Weigh the want
  & worthy life.

Perhaps we will be remembered by what we most wanted, but were unable
to get. Or judged by what we decided wasn’t worth the price of having/keeping.
Does love always imply sacrifice? Whenever someone asked V how she was doing,
she replied better than she deserved. We discovered gratitude late in life. Some days,
it was almost enough to save us.

Rebecca Irene is a poet, editor, and performance artist based in Portland, Maine, land of her ancestors. Creative obsessions include scriptural mandates for women, the impact tipping practice has on self-esteem, female invisibility/immobilization after forty, ocean tides, and cicadas. She believes art can shatter paradigms of worth, and that you can simultaneously be a dog and cat person. Her poems are published in Spillway, Parentheses Journal, RHINO, Carve, and elsewhere. She was named the 2020 Monson Arts: MWPA Poetry Fellow. Poetry Editor for The Maine Review, Rebecca holds an MFA from VCFA, and supports her word-addiction by waitressing. Find her online at www.rebeccairene.com.

Susan Michele Coronel

My Younger Daughter Resists Tradition

She tells me one day I don’t want to take Yiddish 
classes anymore. In Fiddler on the Roof,
the youngest daughter insists on leaving the fold

because of true love, but to her father
she’s a splinter in a cantaloupe, untethered
from tradition & from every family who has ever said 

stay, follow, without doing it themselves.
True love: a violin shivers naked, trills on a hill,
attempting to play a familiar tune. But the music escapes

through holes in pockets, beguiles even those 
with the best intentions, singing, Look
what you’ve done. Loss is a bone caught in the throat,

a sewing needle threaded not once 
but in both directions. The only Jewish tradition left
for my daughter is food: matzo ball soup, chocolate coins,

herring drowning in sweet onions & cream.
What she does not know is that I am trying
to keep my balance on a roof whose shingles dangle 

like warped leaves. There are no prayers of devotion
but reams of remorse, the repeated desecration
of our culture through history confirming

that we still sit on rotten hands. I care nothing for the temple,
empty rituals opening like a can 
of preserved peaches, but yearn for the parsley sprig, 

for the Star of David to be twisted & reimagined 
so my children will not lose what came before 
without knowing what they’re losing, even as I know 

it’s already lost forever. Love is sweet but better
with a bisl of salt, a kiss on the punim. 
Thieves & the dead I’ve loved knew darkness

like a tattered coat. Children always refuse, 
but it’s still better to ask them to carry something 
than to come to the table of the future empty-handed

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Spillway 29, TAB Journal, Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and One Art. In 2021 one of her poems was first runner-up for the Beacon Street Poetry Prize, and another was a finalist in the Millennium Writing Awards. In the same year, she received a Pushcart nomination and was longlisted for the Sappho Prize. Her first full-length poetry manuscript was one of five finalists in Harbor Editions' 2021 Laureate Prize.

Bailey Quinn

in the house where god lives

after Terrance Hayes

in the house where god lives crooked back
unpainted fingers cracked bare lips She prays
calla lilies and pale lace stitched behind
her eyes in threaded vines She blames
her shame on hips wide like a running river
men dive uninvited brazen they chide wanton trills
define her song discordant notes provoke her
catacomb hymns coat the back of their throats
broken bread they blessed on unspun doilies
devouring beauty in vain her open veins
stained black florid violets swaying whispers
in caves echo: violent, silent, women before
her, shame. in the house where god lives She is
praying in the house where god lives She is prey.

EVP Session in the Basement of My New Home

Bailey Quinn (she/her) is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in English at Weber State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, West Trade Review, and Sand Hills Literary Magazine, among others. You can find her on Twitter @baileynquinn.

Ellen June Wright

Time’s Traveler

(for Angela, enslaved, Jamestown, Virginia 1619)

If I could sail on currents / of minutes, hours, days and years in reverse / and find myself upon the eastern shore / by the old settlement / and watch the man-of-war lower anchor / watch the light and dark passengers / climb into the dinghy and descend / row towards the sand / if I could be there to watch the 20 plus ‘Ngolans / groggy from months at sea / eyes full of wonder at this strangeness/ place their feet upon land / then collapse / I would fill my arms with each and every one / like a Charles White woman or great mother holding her children / and I would wipe their faces / each one with a warm cloth / remove the blood and the briny seawater / the way a midwife welcomes a babe / just from the womb / even as she knows what the world is. 

Let me whisper even as I hear
a dirge of jazz clarinet and saxophone,
playing for you.

This is not Gilead.
There is no balm here.

You will have to salve
your own wounds.

You will have to be your heart’s
own Promised Land,

Ellen June Wright was born in England and currently lives in Northern New Jersey. She is a retired English teacher who consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021. She is a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and received 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominations.

Emily Lake Hansen

WOMEN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

after Eavan Boland

These days I’m a poem in a person costume. I mean nothing
romantic: flies buzz fragments of memory, frogs chirrup

over an empty lake. I come from a long line of women
without a country. From Ukraine to Canada to Jersey

how did my mother end up in Orange Beach burninga
home onto her body with baby oil?  How did I come

to this Americana: red & white checkered tablecloths,
a flag of spongy white cake. There is so little

of a home inside me. You’re America, my mother sang
Amazing Grace, the National Anthem, crying at the reach

of her own notes. No one is alive to tell me when
this hunger & madness started, the binge & purge

of our womanhood. By the fourth grade, my mother
wore a size 9 shoe, had to choose between high heels

or work boots. At age 9, my favorite animal
was the sea. I thought I’d live in California forever.

I wish I could say I’m different now, but that would be
a lie no more or less than this one. Of the 8 living women

descended from my grandmother, 8 out of 8
are crazy. We bake rolls of beer on our breath, rolls

of history in our bellies. If memory isn’t an accurate
mirror, I am sorry. To heal is not to say it didn’t happen,

but to make something from what remains.

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled poet and memoirist and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks: The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh's Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, OxMag, Pleiades, Up the Staircase Quarterly, So to Speak, and Atticus Review among others. A PhD candidate at Georgia State University, Emily lives in Atlanta where she serves as the creative nonfiction editor for New South and teaches first-year writing and poetry at Agnes Scott College.

Meredith Boe

Leo Season

Somewhere, an infant cries, maybe dreams, and no one agrees on what the cloud shapes should 
signify. Jesus, animals, war. Pesky nostalgia that’s too severe to recollect. People are turning 30
in batches and patience is out the window. The air hints of burning, but no one necessarily dies 
and no piles of ashes materialize. The distance between 30 degrees of celestial longitude is 
smaller, by far, than the space those internal infernos occupy, only visible to those with earthly 
crowns. One toothy yawn and the world they’ve known, every set of longing eyes, shivers. Oh, 
I’ve heard this story before. Someone once told a lioness she was a predator. She replied, Every 
moment is a masterpiece. Wherever your mind goes when you hear that song

Meredith Boe is the author of the chapbook What City, which won the 2018 Debut Chapbook Series Contest from Paper Nautilus. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022, and her work has appeared in Newfound, Another Chicago Magazine, Chicago Reader, After Hours, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and contributes to the Chicago Review of Books.

Cecilia Savala

CARDIO (n.)

When you loved your brother’s best friend; when you ran track in high school. Traveling at three 
feet per second—a marathon in twelve and a half hours. A town in Greece—a battle in 490 BC. 
Sounds like—it doesn’t get easier, you get stronger. Femoral if you’re brave. Athletes measure in 
volumes and breathe—in 4:4 time—literally, the after-shape. The before is all huffs, 
riffs—sporadic. The foot is measured in falls. To cause muscle-wasting (adj.); on the road to 
skinny fat. There’s no such thing as spot reduction—ask your core to do the counting. Root: 
connected to the—leg bone. From the Greek science to mean—to speak of the thing. Timing 
yourself to do the math later. When you were a competitive eater. When you hated yourself 
enough to outrun yourself—in spikes in neon in miles. Look at the calves on that one. The 
shuffle—the roundabout. Let me count the ways—elevation, speed, a crush, devotion, carb up, 
sprint, one-night, all night, overnight, pacer, altitude, dopamine high—committed—to go the 
distance or tread in place—hottest where the blood is closest to the surface

Cecilia Savala is originally from the Midwest but is currently making her home in Tempe, AZ where she is an associate editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Boiler, Swamp Ape Review, and Barrelhouse, among others. Follow her at @cecsav on Instagram.

Kenneth Johnson

Moon Rabbit

There is a rabbit making tortillas on the surface of the moon. You can see it, if you look 
closely, as it stands over a comal heated using batteries from an abandoned go-kart. 
Lately, it has been thinking about installing solar because it’s eco-friendly. It makes tacos 
on Saturdays to avoid being called a cliché. For special occasions, it makes tortillas 
pintadas with images of skulls or birds. It is said it saved a man on earth who later 
became a god. Now, Moon Rabbit can live on the moon rent free forever. On holidays, it 
makes tamales with salsa verde and tres leches cake for dessert.

Kenneth Johnson is a poet, visual artist, and educator living in Claremont, California. He likes to think his visual art and poetry are reflections of one another-- they include myriad subjects, from the mundane to the conceptual. His poetry has been published in Carousel, Hitchlit Review, The Diaspora/UC Berkeley, and other publications.

Anthony Procopio Ross

Security

Anthony Procopio Ross serves as a Poetry Editor for deadpeasant, a counter-cultural literary magazine of arts and writing located in KCMO. Anthony's poems appear in the McNeese Review, the Laurel Review, Bear Review, The Inflectionist Review, and others. An Andreas Creative Writing Fellow in 2021-22, he read his work with Ross Gay at MNSU, Mankato. He has led creative writing workshops for adults with developmental disabilities, learning and growing with Cow Tipping Press. Currently, he teaches writing in and around KCMO.

Sara Burge

Talk Show Haibun

My ex calls from Chicago to see if I’m watching the Jenny Jones Show. It’s the 90s. Outside, the 
forest looms within its nakedness. I’m about to be quasi-famous. He pleads through the screen to 
understand why I left. Jenny wants to know why, too. No one asked me. Stock footage of a plane 
represents him fleeing Missouri. I crushed him so savagely. Thank god he didn’t give them a 
picture of me. Thank god this is pre-social media. Outside, the forest can’t crawl from its brown 
husk. He purrs with one of the girls on Jenny’s stage. I’m happy for him. He introduced me to the 
Dead Kennedys. Helped me do my taxes. Made sure the old folks in his neighborhood didn’t 
suffocate in summer. But he also used talk shows to broadcast personal situations. That’s one 
reason why I left, I would have told Jenny Jones if she’d asked. Outside, the trees try to speak. 
Their mouths fill with wasps. Later, his mother will call my mother to say I make him sad. She’s 
worried he’ll hurt himself. We shouldn’t speak again. We never do.

Stock footage flickers.
No one has died this winter,
though there’s always time.

The Call Is Coming From Inside the House

I won’t say Bloody Mary

three times in a mirror

or Candyman   Ed Gein   Bundy

I won’t say Zodiac  Night Stalker

Speck   I won’t say Boogeyman

Bell Witch   Spook Light

Bride of BB Highway

I won’t say the name

of that babysitter        

who held my hand 

over the stove because

he said I told a lie    

I won’t say 

cholesterol   trans fats  processed meats  

I will say One more drink 

I won’t say cancer   lay-off  

dog bite or car crash  

anxiety   heavy cream

I won’t say shortness of breath

heart attack   dementia

when I stare too long at nothing

or forget a good friend’s name   

I won’t say We should meet this week

I will say I’ll quit smoking

next week because who can say 

because the killer’s always 

in the back seat

Sara Burge is the author of Apocalypse Ranch (C&R Press) and her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Pacifica Literary Review, Cimarron Review, River Styx, and elsewhere.

Zackary Medlin

Bleeding Mycena (M. haemapotus)

the tree isn’t a tree yet
it is a body stretching out
its hands towards others

the bodies aren’t bodies yet     
they are children molting
their bones are shredding

their hands  their hands
are twigs shedding skin     
the children aren’t children

yet  they are stick figures     
braiding stick-figure-fingers
into limbs  the smallest

twigs needle into the others’
arms until the bodies are
saplings leaning into one

another  being stitched
together into a single black
gemel  a rot runs deep

beneath the bark  tarry sap
dripping from a tree-tap’s
septic spout  saprophytic

mycena sprout like bloody gills
hungry to inhale their own
putrefaction  molasses-thick

cat-piss-ammonia stink
one of the diminishing voices
knotted in the tree will say

“hey at least i’m still a fungi!”      
the tree will fall down laughing   
the rings of children inside

will laugh themselves to death

Zackary Medlin (he/him) grew up in South Carolina, ran away to Alaska, tried his luck in Utah, and now lives in Colorado, where he teaches creative writing at Fort Lewis College. He is the winner of the Nancy D. Hargrove Editor’s Choice Prize, the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, and a recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award. He holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, where he was awarded a Clarence Snow Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, Grist, and more.

David Goodrum

Sandpapered and Trimmed

   he scuffs up fractured varnish
   bleached grain  and startles
         he’s at Lewy’s Body Shop & Hardware Store

         old Mr. Parkins helps him  choose paint
               mixes colors   when asked for white               
               the latex   turns to smoke
               when it touches the stirring stick

   another quick doze  and eyes open wide  a foot jerks
         and arms waver  as fingers grip the Lazy Boy armrests

         he whisper-shouts  towards where mom used to sit
              Tell them I’m at our house fixing the kitchen!

   then he’s downstairs       rummaging
               through the paint cabinet
         searching for color charts  spotting
   turpentine in canning jars
                                             looking for sandpaper and trim

                     sees the youngest slide
                     in socks down the back hallway
                     slippery with fresh wax

                     the middle son falls
                    off the roof sixteen years ago
                     breaking his collarbone

                     the oldest unable to drive
                     the single-family-car home from prom
                     wrecked

                     and the first-born daughter
                    desperate to leave home
                     leaps from high school into the nunnery

   still in the hunt  for a putty knife  he clutches
                           headless  paintbrush  handles
                           given out  to lure him
                                 back to the store for free bristles

         reaches deep in the cabinet  for repair kits
              finding only mineral spirits
                                            his weekend cologne

he never leaves the chair  which like his memory  is in shambles
                     my own overwhelmed by his decline

                     if he ever read to me   it is lost
                     and if he ever hit me   it is whitewashed

we both now latch onto   paint rollers   hard as marble
         shaking ancient metal paint cans
              most stone silent  others sloshing

    heavy with memory  aching for a pan

David A. Goodrum is a writer/photographer living in Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have been published in The Inflectionist Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Eclectica Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, Spillway, Star 82 Review, The Write Launch, among others. His photos have graced the covers of Cirque Journal, Willows Wept Review, Blue Mesa Review, Ilanot Review, and Red Rock Review. Even before his early thirties, he was certain he would never write poetry again. He continues, it seems, to be wrong. About most things. See additional work, both poems and photos, at www.davidgoodrum.com.

Matt Hohner

Note from an Adoptive Mother in a Baby Book, or Actual Results May Vary, with Addendum

You really cannot imagine how happy
you have made us. We waited for you
for a long time, and are so thrilled
that you are here. God has really
answered our prayers. I hope I will
be a good mother to you, and that you
will love us as much as we love you.

Even after I decide in ten years to leave
you, your father, and your younger sister
who your father and I will have three
years from now, for the toothless jerk who,
with his clueless wife, gave you a framed
image of Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio
(how appropriate) for your coming-home-
from-the-adoption-agency present. I mean,
look, a mother can only take on so much
full-time accountability before she gets
bored and tired. My limit will be ten years.
That’ll be sufficient preparation for your
teen years and the rest of your life, right?
Things happen and people change, I’ll tell
you when you’re ten. I’ll reveal the whole
truth when you’re forty-eight. Anyway,
that’s the deal, and now I’m going out
onto the back porch to smoke a cigarette.

Matt Hohner’s recent publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, Sky Island Journal, The Cardiff Review, The Storms Journal, New Contrast, Live Canon, Passengers, Vox Populi, and Prairie Schooner. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner has a collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House) that was published in 2018. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

John Salimbene

The Economy of Boyhood

“When I had no enemy I opposed my body.”
- Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky

My friends spent punches
like lunch money as kids,

printing purple receipts
all over our shoulders
 
to establish an unwritten system,
distinguishing the men from the boys.

I accepted those deposits
like an empty piggy bank
 
swallowing coins,
digesting them in my glass frame.

The body is the institution
where pain is traded.

At twelve, no one teaches you
tolerance is inherited in language.

When I had no voice
I made my mouth

a vault of echoes
sealed up like ghosts

on my tongue,
because silence is still

a choice—a transaction
between one body and another.

John Salimbene is a writer and MFA student based in New Jersey. He studies creative writing and holds an assistantship at William Paterson University. He's been a finalist for the Tom Benediktsson Award for Poetry and currently serves as the poetry editor for Tint Journal. His poems can be found or are forthcoming in giallo, Bodega, Small Orange, Voicemail Poems, queerbook (a 2020 anthology), and elsewhere.

Elizabeth Sylvia

On Learning that Kim Kardashian Exceeded her Water Allowance by 232,000 Gallons in June

The guide pauses to tell her group
that when Marie Antoinette
walked these paths
Versailles swallowed
as much water
in one day
as Paris
used in a month.
A likeness of the sun god
rises in the gardens’
central pool,
barely harnessing
his frenzied horses
of the dawn.

L.A. glistens
with elsewhere’s water.
Snow off the Sierras
misting the carpets of lawn,
collecting on the leaves
of imported citrus, every fruit
a globe bursting with juice.

At Versailles, too,
oranges were grown.

Elizabeth Sylvia is the author of None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women, winner of the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Prize and a Small Press Distribution bestseller. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by DIAGRAM, 30 West, and Wolfson Press and has been published in over 30 different literary magazines. She is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. elizabethsylviapoet.net