ISSUE #12

Matthew Olzmann

FEATURED WRITER

My Favorite Tinfoil Hat

In a field of snow, it’s a legitimate option to see
the tracks made by the myth but never
the myth itself.  There’s nothing there.

No mysterious creature to ravage the livestock,
assign paw prints to the barn doors,
or claw marks to the black walnut trees…

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Dennis Hinrichsen

Copyright N. Scrantz Lersch 2021

[Toast with Honey and Cold War on It] 

as I feast so I am feasted upon by what I ingest // mouth
chewing hard // sucking marrow // sips and great gulps
of air working me like an ocean wave // fission and
fusion happening all at once // all the sweet liqueurs //…


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Lily Greenberg

Copyright John Dulay 2021

To the boy who thinks his body, like a woman,

a thing to be controlled. Purify by fire
you say. Pain: of the mind. Discipline:

island in the distance to which you swim 
daily. Get out shivering: I have done

what I did not want to do. Someone’s
father is proud, but not yours. Whose…


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Meg Stout

Copyright John Dulay 2021

Hinge 

In memory’s eye, I imagine my grandmother,
lithe as a willow tree, swinging
the vacuum across a high pile
carpet, washing a dish in the sink
overlooking the suburban marsh
she never visited. Her life a stop sign…

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Hattie Jean Hayes

Copyright John Dulay 2021

Trip

Voices muddied by a screen door, the memory
of music: you send me photos from the front porch. You’re reading.

For fourteen months I’ve known exactly where to find you. It’s April, and it’s October. It’s
spring, and it’s September. You are down a road I’ve walked before. You smell like grass….

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Meghan Sterling

Copyright John Dulay 2021

The Weight of a Cumulonimbus is One Million Tons

Morning is a drawn-in breath. Morning is
an old boat, drummed out of its mooring, 
left to sink or drift. The dread inside the shell, 
the mantle and its empty rainbow. The dawn shatters…

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Charles Baxter

Copyright John Dulay 2021

The Last Sign

A weekend drive: and we got lost just west
Of Waconia, near the lake whose name you couldn’t
Pronounce, though we knew it sounded like “Whisby” or
“Wherby,” and around then, cresting over a hill
We came to a green stretch of somebody’s farm,
The grass so saturated it might have been boiled
In paint…

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Debra Allbery

Copyright John Dulay 2021


Incunabula

Ridge and hollow, where I began:
Hollow said holler, creek said crick.

Every word my father spoke
spelled itself, unspooled within…

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Kathleen Hellen

Copyright LEON Literary Review

—my mother, Asian squatting

between the crown and pier of limbs,
the architecture—my mother
like the side of an arc, bending at the hips,
and everything up underneath…

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Julia Watson

Copyright John Dulay 2021

THINGS THAT LAST TO 15

,…An angleworm, a chicken, a fox

                                   in good health. Pink peonies, latched

roots on an iron gate. The poison

               of monkshood in frost. A Lenten

rose, a red car: its idle hum…  

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Jen Ryan Onken

Copyright John Dulay 2021

Ode to Ambivalence

Drop it. Slowly. Let care go
like a dirty hankie. Don’t
pick it up. Who needs chivalry?
They don’t see you: you’ve let
your hair go grey. Who cares?
Lose four committees. Lose raises
after earning your degree. Lose…

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Victoria Korth

Book Review

The Curator’s Notes, by Robin Rosen Chang – A Review

The Curator’s Notes is confident, unapologetic in its display of intimacy, emotional directness and imagistic lucidity. The protruding spinous processes of a dying mother’s bowed back become “the chamber of a nautilus,” one that “spirals inward / toward oblivion.” Rosen Chang’s choices are succinctly rendered, precise, convincing. But more than that, they are also capacious…

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