Triptych

Mariam Ahmed

Entwined upon gray slate
a pulse - two beats - a
third heard faintly

Bodies embrace, soft breeze
petals fold, delicate
and three trees

Trails wind, the edges
frame a face
silence, finally

Mariam Ahmed is a poet and educator living in San Diego, CA. Her poems have appeared in The Elevation Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, Flint Hills Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Offending Adam, and elsewhere. Her book reviews and interviews can be read in Poetry International, The Los Angeles Review, and Atticus Review. Mariam holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from San Diego State University. When she is not writing or teaching, she enjoys trips to the ocean.

 

Farewell to The Union

Carol Barrett

I began forty-three years ago, first University Without Walls,
teaching in the Loveland, Ohio retreat center run by a Catholic
order of lay women who grew their own food, served zucchini
every meal, one form or another. We slept on cots too short
for the tall among us, waited in line to call home on the payphone.

I traveled up to 37 trips a year, flying far to greet colleagues
from around the globe, meet students presenting dissertations
in their living rooms. I told one he drank too much. He quit
drinking. I installed an extra-large mailbox, got a second phone.
The work was interdisciplinary, life-changing, just like the brochure.

Now we meet online. I read and comment ten hours a day. The work
stretches all of us. I have hooded over a hundred with doctoral satin
and velvet. They carry the mission of social justice on their backs:
domestic violence, incest, homelessness, slavery’s half-life.
They inspire, provoke, change policy, dream. Always, they dream.

Something went wrong. What I know: rent went unpaid,
the building padlocked, phones shut off, student loans did not
materialize, paychecks were late, again, again. The Dean ordered
bottled water for the hot July residency on a cousin’s credit
card. The Provost used his to hire signers for the deaf.

I want to be like poet Tess Gallagher waiting for two fawns
to return to the yard, prance proudly across the lawn, then
leap over the low rock wall to the stand of Blue Spruce out back.
But the University President has taken her Mercedes for a spin, run
a red light. Instead of Pomp and Circumstance, a screeching siren.

 

Carol Barrett currently supervises doctoral students at Antioch University and Saybrook University. She has published three volumes of poems, most recently READING WIND, and one of creative nonfiction, PANSIES. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol earned doctorates in both Clinical Psychology and Creative Writing. In addition to creative work, she has published scholarly articles in psychology, women's studies, religious studies, education, and dance and art therapy journals.

 

at the laundromat, a cleansing

Shannon

at the laundromat, a cleansing
the swishing swashing, a hymn
communion of low humming
sitting, the very catholic ache
the way metal sticks to your thighs
the same steamy heat
fills every empty vestry

a red hair tie digs in
like a prayer

on the window, a newspaper
clipping: I saw Jesus in the laundry cycle

probably, there should be
someone at the counter

but there never is

just the purifying presence of the fluorescent lights

 

Shannon Cate, a UX designer living in Annapolis, Maryland, finds comfort in rainy days and the written word. When not crafting digital experiences, she's immersed in poetry, often with her cat by her side. Her work has been published in Humana Obscura, Flora Fiction, and Outlander among other journals.

 

The Sacred Place

CS Crow

They sacrificed pig's blood on their altar
But it had long been a desecrated place.

A long desecrated place, their sacred space, 
First with their words, then with their votes. 

First with their votes, then with their money.
Tithes to their God, donations to their golden calf.

Donations to their golden calf stopped 
When we had enough and tore him down. 

When we tore him down, they promised us
There would be no place where we feel safe.

There has never been a place where we feel safe.
We consecrate ourselves in unsafe places.

We consecrate our safe spaces into sacred places. 
They had their churches, we had our queer bookstores.

The queer bookstore they threatened to burn 
When Sam Sax read Pig at a poetry reading.

After the poetry reading, they called us pigs;
They demanded we sacrifice our blood on their altar.

 

CS Crow is a storyteller from the Southeastern United States with a love of nature and a passion for writing. He believes stories and poems are about getting there, not being there, and he enjoys those tales that take their time getting to the point.

 

The Day After the Funeral

Pat Daneman

Everything she owned is on its way down the front steps
or through the garage onto the U-Haul her daughter rented
this morning and backed up crooked into the driveway.
The pink couch, the lamp with the crystals dangling
around the bottom of the shade. Her summer impatiens
and petunias are frost-burned, heads hanging.
Her son’s dusty footprints step on each other across the porch.
He goes in and out the propped-open front door,
letting flies in, carrying boxes heavy with books,
rattling with pot lids. I used to see her sitting out
on warmer days, oxygen tube running from nose prongs
down to the tank. She was tiny, always breathless. Not at all
the smiling woman on the cover of the memorial program,
wearing a low-cut gown, raising a glass to us all.

 

Pat Daneman’s poetry is widely published, most recently in Mid-American Review, Naugatuck River Review, Potomac Review, and Poet’s Touchstone. Her full-length collection, After All, was first runner up for the 2019 Thorpe-Menn Award and a finalist for the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award. She is author of a chapbook, Where the World Begins and co-librettist of the oratorio, We, the Unknown, premiered by the Heartland Men’s Chorus. She lives in Candia, NH. patdaneman.com

 

Sister Mare

Narya Deckard

 

Horses
                  rumble inside me

Horses
                  beat in my chest

Horses
                  with their flesh like love

Sister mare
      Let me weave your mane with daisies
      In return for your gift of milk to the wayfarer

Men and gods cannot catch us with their fetters
As my hands touch the soil, earth’s dark grave

Sister mare
      Let me braid your tail with yarrow          
      Your forelock with clover

Horses are the thunder in rain
A hammer to the thorn

Sister mare
      I’ll make you a crown of forget-me-nots
      To ring around your blossoming ears

We rise in a moonlit sky, the palomino
Soft beneath my bare legs as she flings her seafoam mane

Sister mare
     Teach me
     The way of the horse

Sister mare
      I yearn for humility
      Here in your gift of grace

I see you in the lake of my mind.
I am rounded at your feet.

Narya Deckard is an Appalachian poet, teacher, and backyard farmer living in Western North Carolina with her husband, cats, dog, and chickens. She has an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry and narrative medicine. Her poems have been curated by journals such as Tiny Seed Journal, Kakalak Anthology, and The Dead Mule School. Follow her on Instagram at @naryawithwings

 

Because this is the American Story Too

Sahar Fathi

The CIA staged a coup,
The people wanted
The freedom to choose,
Instead - a theocracy
That ruled with an iron fist.
And her parents fled,
And ended up here,
Their promise
Reduced to washing dishes
And barely holding on.
In a one-bedroom apartment,
They named their only child
The Persian word for “dawn,”
And the American kids
Laughed and teased
That little girl
Who had gormeh sabzi
Instead of ham and cheese.
And in the summers,
She received her first
Hijab of many.
Two big eyes
Lost beneath
One long eyebrow,
A crumpled veil,
Forced on her head.
She was
Born in one country,
To people lost from another,
And this,
This is the American story too –
How she grew up
To watch
As her blood lines
Fought to be free.

 

Sahar Fathi, Iranian-American, graduated from the University of Washington Law School and is a member of the New York bar. She also earned a Masters in International Studies from the University of Washington, and graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California with a dual Bachelor of Arts in French and International Relations. Her poetry has been printed in Writers Resist, The Jesse Butler Womens Poetry Contest Anthology (2020), and the Writers Resist: Anthology (2018). It has also been featured in The Dewdrop, The Halcyone, Other Worldly Women Press, Barzakh Magazine, For Women Who Roar, Platform Review, Fauxmoir, Swimming with Elephants, FEELINGS journal, ARTS by the People, and Not Your Mother's Breastmilk. Her favorite Persian dish is Fesenjoon, and in 2016 she finally mastered her Tadiq technique

 

Permaculture

Hannah Houser

In the trailer of my childhood,
sister asleep in the bed with me,
I hear the deep groans
of sod beneath cinder block –
thick clay that has held and holds
my mother’s family,
and her mother’s,
whose kin plowed this land
before it was a home.
It sighs now, full of
what seeds went planted and
unplanted, a question of
present and future need.
“I can take it” the soil breathes,
“I can hold it all for you.” And so
I give it my childhood nightmares
of beasts and violence,
passing through quilt
and wood paneling
into that soup of
memory and roots.

 

Hannah Houser (she/her) is a lifelong East Tennessean, writer, and manager of internationally renowned musicians. She has been a part of the music industry for over a decade and specializes in artist relations and management, community building, and creative content management. She holds undergraduate degrees in English and Art from Carson-Newman University, where she was named the Outstanding Graduate of 2012 in both departments. She has been previously published in The Red Branch Review, Same Faces Collective, and The Pigeon Parade Quarterly. She resides with her husband and black cat in Knoxville, TN.

 

Gestalt v Zeitgeist

Heikki Huotari  

You can't spend the currency of Philadelphia in Pittsburgh but you can say mea culpa in place of both hello and goodbye.

Tell the amygdala to grok the paper roses. Rock breaks scissors and gestalt deciphers zeitgeist. Dissonance is brighter prior to alignment.

Having Doppler shifted, I know neither my velocity nor my position. My sweet chariots are at the ends of pendulums. When what I thought was odd was not I

lacked imagination but when what I thought was not odd was I lacked emotional intelligence. What doesn't happen doesn't happen in a vacuum.

One alarm clock if from the existing infrastructure, two if the result of an internal search. In every argument with reds, blues lose.

I'm reading the original Armenian. Let's astrally project just like we did last summer. Worthy is the lamb that wasn't slain.

How precious this misinformation is! How unobtrusive the acoustics! You will know your expert witnesses but by what they've done for you lately.

Every insect in its hexagon and leisure in gazebos. I'm the i in team. It's my apotheosis and I'll celebrate excessively if I so choose.

 

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since turning his attention from math to poetry in 2012 he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections and has won one book and two chapbook awards. Two new collections are in press. His Erdős number is two.

 

My Friend, In Real Time

David P. Miller

in memory of Karen Friedland

 

My friend confronts her dying.
Hundreds witness with her.
She posts the cancer’s
every next appearance.

I want to resist figures of speech.
“Cancerous” describes the cancer.
Metaphor is repellant.
“Like a cancer” is the simile
to elaborate the cancer.

Among her replies to the thing:
Greenhouses, manatees, snowfalls,
night skies, lotuses, spiderwebs.

I remember George Harrison’s difficult
nothing in this life that I’ve been trying
can equal or surpass the art of dying,
but have known no one else to practice
this art in full view, as she does.

She writes: Next up, soon, is hospice.
We’re introduced to death doulas.
We paste Valentine hearts across
everyone’s screens. Our replies
spill, stumble, weep, amen, hover,
mouths uncertain. Each typed word
a strain against speechlessness.

Images crowd regardless. Hundreds
perhaps picture a room and bed.
Before sleep, and in the morning,

I scroll in hopes of reading one more
Have a great night, friends!

 

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Reed Magazine, About Place Journal, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Kestrel, Vincent Brothers Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in an issue of Magma (UK) focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.

 

INSIDE THE CAPITAL CITY

Joanne Monte

It’s not a graveyard of enduring losses,
or an open hole in the ground

where a priest will offer prayers.

It’s never been a field of crosses,
crushed laurel wreaths, or flags. No,

this is the dumping ground

where children will come
to sort through the empty jars,

hoping to find just one

with a single spoonful of citrus jelly,
a drop of sheep’s milk;

a crushed bag of Goldfish; a kernel

of two of corn.  All this in view
of those who will one day

bottle the blood of their wounds.

 

Joanne Monte is the author of a poetry collection entitled The Blue Light of Dawn, which received The Bordighera Poetry Book Award. In addition to receiving a Pushcart nomination, I am the recipient of numerous awards, namely Sixfold, The Jack Grapes Poetry Award, the Princemere Poetry Award, Sheila-Na-gig Award, the New Millennium Writings Award, and Palette Poetry Award.

 

Missoula Floods

Sam Monroe Olson

 

So many nights I drove the flood’s cut, slept
by that river, and woke in a scatter

of shotshells, star-jot beer cans– so many dawns
rocked awake by eighteen-wheelers

jake-braking down from their home-shaped
wounds in the cliffs. I always promised

those mornings after not to harm that way
again, not driving but fleeing, boring down

white lines like bright rails through Earth’s crust,
my little truck pitching towards the center

of a world without light, where I learned to feel
my way by hand, panning that mantle’s glint,

tracing it for what strange warmth can be found
there, and following it deeper, down to the liquid

core where I once saw luminous geese plying themselves
from inklike seams and rising away, beating

silently up to a starlit road to be born. Years ago,
on the gravel spur to a mine, quaked out of sleep,

I promised the child I have not yet had I would never
cut from our doorway, promised her I would hold on

the way bluffs cradle floods, letting her ream but never
letting go, promised myself I would hold her the way

thrushes held themselves at the tops of my earliest
hemlocks, lost in the ocean dark, hanging fault lines, but still.

 

Sam Monroe Olson (he/him) is a candidate for the MFA in Poetry at Oregon State University. Raised in Portland, Oregon with family roots across Montana, he calls both states home. Prior to undertaking the MFA, he taught environmental science, managed wilderness trail crews, and facilitated creative writing workshops in Montana's public schools and juvenile detention centers.

 

Elegy for Cormac McCarthy

Isaac James Richards

I remember the first time I read The Road
in one sitting

when I was supposed to be volunteering
at a Boy Scout Merit Badge Powwow. 

Afterward, I walked through sunlight
differently. Felt I was floating.

Then again, for the second time,
in an introductory sociology class.

Why is there order?

I still remember the course questions:
who wins, what is real, how do we know

what I want to know:
how Cormac would’ve answered

those questions—
what he thinks of them now.

I remember my grandpa gripping
a glistening rainbow

trout, something slipping
out of his hands.

 

Isaac James Richards is a reader for Fourth Genre, a contributing editor at Wayfare, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Constellations, Red Ogre Review, Stoneboat, and several other venues. His most recent work is forthcoming in Oxford Magazine. In the fall, he will begin a PhD at the Pennsylvania State University. Find him online at https://www.isaacrichards.com/ and on Instagram @isaacjamesrichards.

 

LOVE, WHICH WAY IS HOME?

Abhijit Sarmah

on this quay of denim memories what confounds his devotion
for wuthering winds is a quaint symphony of the spirit,

symphony of the deepening rivers that often daub a helix,
symphony articulated in barracks and songs trailing hearses

a fraying harvest moon means little to a merchant of starlings
in pursuit of reaped and threshed remnants, hiraeth for

a shadow town with the dead weight of burning sequins, red
hooks afloat in the luster of a sky working on an infinite etude,

heifers silent as the exit music of spring blasts in the leas.
The dissonance between longings of altered kinds only seems

fancy to ones without constellations of grief for softened palms.
When allowed, derisions of black winters shadow the splendor 

of roiling terns imitating the ceremony of returning, of living with
the language of self, of singing sweet madrigals for gulf ghosts

that still lug the memories of serpentine nights of defeat and rue.
Must he always loathe his desire to fleck the world in theories,

stories that remain creased in his inner pockets, ones sewn to
his body like skin or incantations to melting flint afternoons?

No way should a merchant of starlings know the immensity of this
Elysium crafted of minutiae: suffusing clouds, buoyant black birches,

geese floating in ether, surfs squeezing into another, a frisky sun.
A muslin-soft wave laves his steps as the symphony dawdles.

 

Abhijit Sarmah is a third-year PhD student in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia whose poetic concerns are shaped by having grown up in the north-eastern borderlands of India, that remain home to some of the longest running insurgencies in the world. Abhijit writes poems about the psycho-social and inter-generational trauma experienced by the indigenous communities that continue to subsist and resist in spite of being constantly exposed to death and tries to fill the gaps in the nation-state’s historical, cultural and scholarly records.

 

Koj lub npe hu li cas? (What is Your Name?)

Mary Vang

 

I told a friend, “You should embrace your name,
because it has either given a blessing or misfortune.” A long time ago,
a Hmong man and woman got married. They were siblings. There was no celebration—
everyone whispered, criticized the family
who belonged in the same clan village. A curse has haunted them
as they vanish into thin air, a reminder for the rest of us
some loves are ill-fated.

In the Hmong culture, when a baby entered the world from its mother’s womb,
white string bracelets had been tied on the wrists as blessings
in this imperfect, vivid world.

Then, she called your name.

It has always been true,
some loves are permanent
or someone’s voice
made your name special.
It got entwined in a bond—
secured, knotted, and inescapable.

 

Mary Vang was born in Stockton, California, but has been raised and currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is an aspiring writer and a liberal arts graduate from UNC at Asheville, where she studied literature and creative writing. Most of her works focus on themes of family, loss, self-journey, and the identity of a Hmong American. Mary aims to pursue her dreams of publishing a collection of short stories or poetry in the future.