ISSUE #14
Maurice Manning
A Thread Worth Pulling
You have to wonder, why go on
with tale after tale of highly doubtful
people who find themselves ensnared
in a knot of unlikely events,
many of which defy reason,
offend polite taste, and invite
belief in the utterly ludicrous?
I suppose one answer would be satire…
Carla Schwartz
Farm Life
I’ve called off the folks who bale their hay—
the grasses—growing in my fields—
that now sway quietly in the wind
I called the hunter, who from the blind
he’d built in my stand of pines
picked off deer in his sights…
Patrick Wright
Liminal Worlds
After Maria Popova
When so much of you is a smog-filled sky
the causeway extends towards skyscrapers
half-demolished
when birds fly off precognitively from window
ledges
I re-script my dream in which you’re alive
In the moment between fireball & thunder I
imagine a white rhino is born…
Dujie Tahat
MAKING ART IN WARTIME WHICH FOR
US MEANS ALWAYS
U.S. Constitution Article I Sections 1-4
A visual poem…
Barbara Edelman
Exoskeleton
Each trek has its own syntax.
My home on my back. My Quasimodo
shadow. I’m a slow beetle. Destination,
the top of a mountain, the Milky Way’s
veil and the silence. Each time I wake
in the night there’s a new sky. The Earth
spins faster up here…
Daragh Fleming
Eight Down
A visual poem…
Philip Jason
The Swan
I.
i ask the woman next to me if she remembers
the mother that held her in the bardo as she
waited for the call to return to this world
she shakes her head
I make a swan with my hand and leave
its shadow on the wall…
REVIEW by Robin Rosen Chang
How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away With It, by Lara Egger – A Review
“[I]f “if the heart had a bucket list, what would be on it?” Lara Egger asks in her debut full-length poetry collection How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, which won the University of Massachusetts Press’s 2021 Juniper Prize for Poetry. How much love can it hold? It turns out that the heart beating throughout this book is capacious and generous. It cruises between reality and fantasy, navigating a course that touches upon love in all its messy manifestations….
Read More
Edie Meade
Truck Stops of America
If you want to feel more connected, track your Amazon packages.
Don’t look up how many long-haul truckers might be serial killers.
The map of the bodies is a map of Truck Stops of America.
All this, and a sky blue as the pool by the oil refinery.
Bury me in Dollar Tree compression socks and Wet-n-Wild blush.
Fibroids like you wouldn’t believe, clotting clues for polite company…
Suzanne Langlois
Extinction
A dodo lays an egg with a mirror inside.
When the egg hatches, the mother dodo
sees her own reflection and believes
her offspring to be her spitting image
and feels pride, but also a little regret
that the chick has the same deformed
middle talon on its left foot…
Emily Light
Crowded
Best that midnight has a nearsighted squint
so I don’t get lost in wonder.
Best that rows of trees don’t crowd my window
like a new box of pencils.
Lichened roofs don’t seduce
the way a veil of cherry blossoms would…
Maja Lukic
Bowie/On Love
Bowie knows you’re sad today. Bowie is the color
and texture of the sad you are today. Bowie watched
you wake at 5 a.m.—how thin your body, notched
your spine, and heavy your movements. Bowie is
the char of black coffee on your tongue, the cold
jade rolling across your cheekbones. It feels like
meeting the sea’s face with your own. Bowie knows
how you resent what you love, how it ruins and degrades…
Jill Klein
Ode to a List-Maker
You make fire
for the first time
and it’s like you tried to climb
out of the crib.
Burning up,
you check off
caroling
and sex…
REVIEW by Kristen Hewitt
The Girl Who Talked to Paintings, by Shannon Winston – A Review
“There are a thousand / ways to begin a story,” writes Shannon Winston in the opening poem of her formidable and tender new collection, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). And throughout this book, she offers alternatives—interpretations, imaginings—different ways into the story she will tell and retell, stitch and restitch, rip apart, excavate: “To embroider, decorate. / To strip back, cut. / Yes, maybe / this is the best / way in.” (“Ways to View Joan Miro’s Triptych Bleu, I, II, III”)…