Issue 17 — Spring 2024
POETRY
Out, Out
GR Collins
Sometime after sunset
when the sky dabbles with
purples and blues and the
houses are flat shapes cut
from black plastic, the kids
of our block are still out
playing football in the street.
They are nearly invisible
in the fading light but you
can hear them laughing
and calling each other names
and their sneakers scuffing
on the asphalt with the rasp
and squeak of little birds.
You can feel the soft thunk
as the ball is kicked, see it
rising above the trees, and
you can see it pause there
at the apogee, trying to decide
if it will come back down
to us or keep going out, out
into the night, leaving behind
this spinning earth forever.
GR Collins is a writer from Milwaukee who has held jobs as brick mason, farmhand, middle school teacher, prep cook, and currently works in biotech. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Ponder Review, Red Flag, Hive Avenue, Red Rock Review, Flint Hills, and others. He lives with his family in the heart of dairy country, where there's always great cheese.
They Lean
Laine Derr
Though I never knew her, I tell
them that I love her, our bond
is more than mother and child.
They smile, glad to have found
one who loves: She who loves.
They never ask me about my father.
They never ask me why my eyes are green.
I was created in darkness –
bodies unearthing existence.
My dead mom used to say, before
my time, Life smelled of evening stone.
Though I never knew her, I tell
them that her tea could sweeten
the sun. Come closer, the want is easy.
We Sing Our Names
Laine Derr & Caroline Torres
The skin of lovers, incense threaded oils
drifting under a moonless sky, Alpha
and Omega, a ring lined with legs that live
within the sun, dancers surfing the drums.
Follow the center, an invisible road I hear
them call as sweet rose wine touches my lips,
a desert traveler, regent of an itinerant storm,
wind and sand, music veiled in shades of flesh.
I am young, thirsty for floral scented hips,
days of busy nights, a chorus trading in spice.
Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from J Journal, Full Bleed + The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Carolina Torres is a Biologist and Public Health researcher who enjoys the arts and literature. As a scientific author, she has published in peer-reviewed journals within the biomedical field. Her writing, mostly prose, is a practice for spiritual reflection.
Before Metastasis
Kaitlyn Crow
They’d fill plastic buckets with sudsy water on the front steps
and give us long plastic frames—at the time, I remember them massive,
but they probably weren’t much bigger than my hand is now. Each one was
a different shape, but the bubbles always blew the same—round, light,
lingering in the slow Sunday air around our heads. Some drifting, popping
in Grandma’s hair, a little soap in a cousin’s eye, low bubbles dancing
between my fingers: sudsy smiles, sudsy laughter, sudsy tears.
Kaitlyn Crow (she/they) is a queer writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Their work has appeared in Door Is A Jar, COUNTERCLOCK, and Screen Door Review, among others. You can find them on Instagram @kaitlynwriteswords.
Washing the Shells
Greg Nelson
Sitting on the edge of the porch,
I gently churn mother-of-pearl shells
in the pail of soapy water between my feet.
The nacre's smoothness astonishes my fingertips.
Kneeling on the wet sand,
I pried the gritty rainbows loose.
It's not a crime to lose your mind.
Nor is darkness in itself a sin.
Life was death, and death a promise.
After a year, my counselor smiled,
You're good to go. Learning from her
how thoughts can influence feelings,
rather than tumble at their mercry,
was the kind of work that exhausts you
to make you stronger, like splitting firewood.
I can sing goddamn,
or go with the good in good to go.
With a soft cloth, I burnish the shells,
and fan them on the grass.
Iridescence glistens across the gyres.
My job is to furnish the lens.
WEARY OF IMPERATIVES, HOWEVER WELL-MEANING
Greg Nelson
I close the anthology of poems and go for a walk.
So, to move you to hear the flute on the wind,
I need to tell you to listen?
I remember the pastor reciting upon this rock,
and the Lord's halo in the stained glass windows¾
an epiphany at seventeen that faded beneath the Milky Way.
There are inferences we're free to take or leave;
flesh and blood cannot divine when, where, or for who,
the window overlooking eternity will open and close again.
~
Hiking through morning fog
alone in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon
somewhere between the river and me
I'd taken the wrong fork
when a raven calling in the mist
led me through the dark ravines
up the steep switchbacks
onto the wide plateau.
The sun breaking through
the scalloped sky
dappled the red rock
and coconino canyon walls.
I did a two-step
and bowed to the dream
noble as it is
tethered to the air.
Greg Nelson is a former teacher and a depression survivor. He received an MFA in poetry from George Mason University, and resumed submitting a few years ago after a brief hiatus of twenty-six years. Like John Lennon says, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." Recent publications include poems in CATHEXIS Northwest Press, South 85 Journal, Flying South and Atlanta Review.
Bucharest Autumn
JC ALfier
Nightfall, and I step into the labyrinth of the city.
I pause for a smoke, watch a woman speak brusquely
on her cell — bitterness caught in her breath,
hard eyes determined as a helmsman in a storm,
darting about like someone who’s been cornered.
In the chill air, her breath ghosts above the streets.
The rose tattoo between her breasts spits red
against the ambient light that contours her,
and I think of men I’ve known who gave themselves
only to women doomed to fall from grace.
When she hangs up mid-sentence, I approach,
ask if I may buy her a drink to cool her distress.
She puts a finger to my lips as if to seal a secret.
Beyond the streetlights that gild her,
the dark will part to let her pass.
JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.
I Learned Love
Thomas Orr
when my mother taught me
to bead,
sitting at the kitchen table,
speaking, in her quiet rhythm,
the beads,
over the beads,
what to clasp and crimp,
how to make, and measure
the wrist, the string,
one by one, sliding
agate, onyx, garnet orbs
on steel wire, and in our hands
transformed
to bracelets, to moments,
bursts of color on bare skin
all jangle and clack – smooth
rolling statements of stone,
glass, and metal to turn
heads, bring a smile, say hello,
and turn again, like prayer,
like memory, counting
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
spaces to be sure
it will fit
just right
Thomas Orr holds a BA in English, Creative Writing from Longwood University and is currently pursuing their MFA in Creative Writing with the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. While they currently reside in Herndon, Virginia, they can often be found wandering the shores of Lake Anna.
village of the unburied
Jieun Paik
from out of my hotel room
drifting in between jagged rocks is an old man.
his whiskers tremble and for a second i think he’s
crying but he’s just losing himself to the wind.
and remembering is like reliving,
the fire cleansing only what it can destroy,
sweeping the dust of war into books,
the village evaporating upon death.
he gestures at the seagulls that are tearing at his clothes,
working his way through a conversation with his mother.
umma, he says. umma, umma, umma, like a chant,
like he’s beginning to remember and it’s paining him,
the village of unburied people,
the breath of them
heavy and panting scared under his own chestplate,
bursting out of his own mouth,
a gust of dying wind that he cradles in his arms,
and for a second it anchors him down enough so he can keep
walking on.
it cries like a small baby,
the sound crashing upon the rocks on the shore.
Jieun Paik is a high school senior and poet from New Jersey, who participates in the Juniper Young Writers Program and whose work has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing.
Woman in a Goldenrod Summer Dress
Ace Boggess
Joined me around the corner for a cigarette
because no one else in Richmond that night
showed daring or out-of-town bad manners
to light up in public, & what all of us want,
as humans, is a few minutes of unity.
I spoke about West Virginia & poetry.
She said she attended Virginia Tech
where, I told her, Bob Hicok taught.
A sort of famous poet, I said, he wrote
moving pieces about the shootings.
That’s when I was there, she said,
followed by a long drag & stuttering exhale
as though the shadowy turn of our conversation
made her need it more. Such a peculiar,
untimely, interconnected world in which we live.
Hard to see down paths in front,
bending toward darkness like this dialogue
between strangers that, despite its end,
was the happiest five minutes spent in what,
for me, had been a mostly perfect day.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
Nowhere
Pam Sinicrope
A shovel in West Virginia dirt says
bury his ashes here—
so my father digs, our plan
to throw them in the Cheat River
abandoned in favor of a place to visit,
though I know we’ll never go there.
I can’t remember how my brother’s ashes
spilled from their cardboard box—
or if it bothered me—but I still see
his whittled form posed with a wristwatch
at the viewing, soul already gone.
I eulogized his discordant strutting with a guitar
while my sister and I watched Grizzly Adams.
I try to forget
his last birthday in a hospital bed,
forty ridiculous candles unlit.
I see the Cheat’s tannin undercurrents,
a blooming sugar maple as tombstone,
all of it beneath the gaze of a vacation home
we don’t own, and no one visits,
on one square acre among empty hundreds,
our family’s farm abandoned, but for logging
by my grandfather who couldn’t wait to leave
to make a life in town. Each year,
the ground’s icy overcoat will hide
the bittercress gushing over his grave
on land my mother will donate
to purge her grief, to keep it pristine
in the middle of the nowhere
any of us will go to see.
Pam Sinicrope has an MFA in poetry from Augsburg University and a doctorate in public health. Some of her work can be found in SWWIM, Spillway, The Night Heron Barks, Aethlon, Appalachian Journal, and 3 Elements Review. Pam lives in Rochester, MN, where she works as a medical writer and is a senior poetry editor for RockPaperPoem.
Timepiece
Amelia Jones
The spirit I have watched passed upon the ocean,
It was within the coursing breath of the breeze,
Above the surf that shone as shattered crystal;
I was immersed in light upon the levitate
Air and drew within to satiate there and incant
Through time. I travelled boundless for a while.
A duet with nature when my mind and spirit lapsed
Beyond the seal and sipped corporeal air;
Where upon my face, the dial that reflects
The hour of the day stood still…
Until the quick, by the sun, felt its warmth:
I felt the passing lips of the sun and drank the sky within,
Quenching the world anew; I was the light and summer
All at once then cooled within the clouds
I became that spirit, as infinite as sand;
In the measure of time, I held the glass globe till
All that I am slipped through my fingers.
Amelia Jones is born in Wales and takes her inspiration from the landscape. Wales is the perfect place to illustrate the environment through words and feelings. One day she hopes to stir up some kind of alchemy with a little bit of ingot in some verse.
To My Child
Jeff Burt
The white-and-black lilies are too heavy to loft in the wind.
Water’s expensive and rare, but we have shared
it with the lilies so they do not become shriveled bloom,
waxed petals pollen-strewn arid and wilting.
It is we who look diminished, our showers spaced
and short, our dishes stacked in the sink
waiting for the right day to wash.
I lose track of how long it has been
since I didn’t pray for rain.
When I teach you about stars,
I say there are millions, gazillions,
that someday scientists could reach a count,
but what I mean is to look up in awe,
to stop the data-driven process,
yet here I am stuck in the dark looking at the large dipper
and counting, and counting on, only three stars
in a handle and four to make a rectangular cup.
I am praying for rain in a sideways manner,
the way a coyote sidles up a street
hoping I can reach the handle and tip it
forward, make that ill-formed cup
you’d think pounded out in metal
pour whatever it contained.
I want to tell you of this stupidity of mine
so you will be prepared for the night
when you are deprived by death, loss,
separation, cancer, even love,
and look skyward into the starry sky
and forget awe, and focus on a single light,
and wish, and wish, and wish.
It will be okay to do that, to pray,
to extend the desperation of your thoughts
into space and attempt to configure
a constellation into satisfying your desire
knowing that it will not.
It is, after all, the better part of being human,
why we look up and out
at least half of the time, to search
what cannot give, to give to us,
why I sat with my mother breathless
from cancer asking her a story to tell
of her youth that she could not remember,
or asked a homeless man
how his day was going.
I know, as you will, that you cannot tip
the handle, the cup will not pour.
but you need to know you will try,
and you will keep on trying,
and learn it is not the failure of praying
but the triumph of continuing to ask.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He has contributed previously to Heartwood, Williwaw Journal, Red Wolf Journal, and Willows Wept Review. He won the Cold Mountain Review 2017 Poetry Prize. He has a chapbook, A Filament Drawn so Thin, at Red Bird Chapbooks. Work can be found at www.jeff-burt.com.
Tunneling through Amber
Michael T. Young
I exit the doors of my office. Just a walk in the early autumn air.
Overhead, for the first time, I notice a figure hovering
above the archway, leaning down with a compass, a golden god
holding forth the authority of his measurements.
It’s typical of these buildings that try to recall the grandeur
of other ages. I remember the Ancient of Days from the book
of Daniel and how Blake rendered him in his famous print, though
less confident that such measurement was in our best interest,
putting Newton with a similar compass at the bottom of the ocean.
Yet measure is what it’s all about, whether a carpenter
cross-cutting, a musician tracking arpeggios down the keyboard,
or a poet composing lines by foot or fancy. I pause
to watch sunlight poke the folds of limp flags around the plaza,
and feel a warmth of summer lingering. How it trails
a light scent of freshly cut grass and watered shrubs, overlapping
memories of spring as imagination mixes with the season—
conjures walks under birdsong, through gardens in the Bronx or Paris,
or reading poets among flowers planted in our yard.
Today, I carry a copy of Hayden Carruth’s poems, hoping for
a free bench somewhere to read even in this city’s bustle
and swarm of tourists. A bus passes down 5th Avenue, its digital sign
for the route number reading “sim1c.” And I think of
Charles Simic, a poet who survived the bombing of his home city
of Belgrade by American war planes, to land himself later
in the United States, writing poetry admired by Richard Hugo,
a poet who flew one of those planes.
I find a stretch of bench snug between people—some workers,
some visitors—all eating lunch. I try to read, but the warmth
and aroma in the air intrude again with stores of recollection
and possibilities unfolding like the bell hyacinths in spring,
the moment transformed into a grace of nostalgia, how a life
telescopes its moments, nests distinct times within
each other, until we become a home of references to other places
and times, a well of echoes. Beside me, a family speaks Russian,
and recalls the deep resonant voice of Joseph Brodsky
reciting under the high cathedral ceiling of St. John the Divine.
The family finishes and departs, replaced by a couple speaking Italian
between bites of salad, and I think of sitting under Tintorettos
in Venice’s San Rocco. I rise, breathing deeply the depth of these pasts,
so all the warm days like this rise with me and walk
into the moment, tunneling through it like an amber, discovering
veins of precious stones, histories, even prehistories,
values buried in the air we breathe, and beyond measure.
Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.
For the Unforgotten Children Buried
at the Boarding Schools.
(bring them home)
Judy Mathews
Our Father who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name
“Twirling and talking leaves
the cottonwood reaching up
up
toward the sky
branches stretch, its bounty”
Thy Kingdom come thy will be done
on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us
this day, our daily bread,
“woven dream catchers birling
in the wind
silent chatter—feathers dance
petitions chanting”
As we forgive those who
trespass against us, lead us not
into temptation
“and hear a prayer of many
where graves unmarked are laid
children far from home
the cottonwood shelters their graves”
But deliver us from Evil, for You alone
are the Lord, You alone are the most High
“dreamcatchers twist and turn
capturing dark nightmares
releasing what is good
and hear the drum—It beats,
voices sing up healing
feathers talk like leaves”
Forever and ever
Amen.
Judy Mathews received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Spalding University in their Master of Fine Arts in writing program. Her writing has appeared in Wild Roof Journal, The Round Table Literary Journal, and a recent Pushcart Prize nomination for a poem published in The Round Table Literary Journal, Wild Roof Journal, The Belt, and The Santa Clara Review (And, soon to be in The Argyle Literary Magazine). Judy is an adjunct English instructor for Hopkinsville Community College and Owens Community Colleges (She also tutors for OCC). She is currently working on a collection of poems focusing on local natural places, and a novel inspired by four generations of strong women in her family and how family stories are interconnected to place.