ISSUE #23
A. Van Jordan
Young, Homeless, and Black Threnody
Oakland, CA. corner of High St & MacArthur Blvd
This world moves past me—cars, people, news of the day–
As a world moves within me, faith beyond my eyes.
People live, so to speak, on the streets of this city
In which I try living. If people’s concerns get stirred,
As this sista sits alert yet cool on the side of the road,
I don’t hear them; I see her gracile hands. This day…
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
He’s Electric Like Static Shock
It’s not that he folded my laundry, although
I could never say no to a man who knew
the drumbeat of the washer-dryer like the rhythm
of his pulse. Not that he made me spaghetti or did
my dishes afterwards…
Rosa Crepax
Majolica and Lemonade
Is it me or do churches look extra ominous in the dark? I will keep an eye on the staggering man with the knife. Don’t answer. You can go on telling me about your parents. You haven’t noticed him or the knife and that is okay.
Bryce Delaney Walls
Dipankar Bakshi Photography
Two yellow monitor lizards, varanus flavescens
hug each other close and human like. I know
some things about them. Subcorneal teeth,
short snout, slit nose…
Victoria Korth
Twenty-five Years of Jukai
Though it’s still like gliding toward a giant lion’s maw
in a shallow-bottomed boat, this self-guided tour,
off-kilter love canal we enter each November prior to Jukai,
single, barefoot and chill…
Michael Lauchlan
Someone Is Trying To Explain
relativity to me again.
I’d say more about her talk,
but I’m not drunk enough.
Not yet. A hundred years
after Einstein, you might think
we’d all understand time,
its pliant sinews, the personal clock
Jane McKinley
The Closed Door
For years I’ve kept my study door closed,
prompting close friends to speculate
about what I might be hiding. M imagined
hanging gardens, so I ordered a postcard
on eBay of the famous ones in Babylon.
It hangs on the wall with a photo M took
in 2001 of pack ice in the polar sea.
The gardens, the pack ice, and M—all gone…
Jill Michelle
Having My Spontaneous Abortion Mansplained As a Miscarriage, Or, To The Colleague Who Said It’s Probably for the Best
You could have just filleted me there
on the mailroom floor instead
then I wouldn’t need to show up
for Comp. I class, grief refastened
a worn-in red cardigan
buttoned up so high it chokes…
Ella Wadsworth-Bell
Blue
both sets of our eyes mirror the baby I lost before you, bubblegum blue ice-cream you never did like, blue blurred line on a hurried pregnancy test, blue gloves hauled you out of my womb, giving you bruises that bloomed blue as agapanthus…
Cynthia Atkins
Black Dog
All day long, like death on furlough,
shadows loom. You hear panting,
the snout twitching through the dross
on metal pipes clanking in your bellows.
You scope the far-reaching
hills where the ancestors yowl…
Miriam Calleja
End of summer nocturne
Figure out a compromise
by opening the window,
let the cold night stars in.
Glass bottles dumped all at once.
The room is too hot. Too cold
the far-away sound of water…
Rachel Custer
The Methodist Preacher’s Son Reads Jesus’ Son
There’s a ruined church in the woods where we get high. The cross has fallen crooked on the wall. Still the wooden Jesus looks at us. Nobody wants to move it – take it where? So we nod out beneath the gaze of God…
Bob King
When I Finally Began Talking To Myself In Sir David Attenborough’s Voice
Because I’ve always been oversensitive to my own shortcomings, & if you think in British, immortality might arrive whilst wearing a many-pocketed travel jacket & worsted wool trousers amid artifacts inside perhaps a heavily tapestried natural history museum…
Suzanne Langlois
Toothpaste
What I remember probably isn’t what happened,
but what happened as seen through a telescope
or a microscope or a kaleidoscope. I stood on
the stool my dad built from scrap wood so my sister
and I could brush our teeth and spit in the sink…
Cecille Marcato
Tartaruga
Longing to be a Maserati I look to my turtle for comfort. I could learn to love this guy since he is what I have,
begin to see him in the moon instead of a man
or a rabbit (as some insist); pass long moments
gazing into his nictitating membranes as they nictate–
Shane Schick
Copyright Kai Oberhöuser http://www.ko-foto.de/ueber
Wallflower
I never go so far as to sit on the toilet
when I’m hiding in a bathroom.
It’s enough to just stand behind the door,
counting a wall’s worth of subway tiles…
Mazzy Sleep
ghost
I’ll be honest with you
I remember what I choose to
my mind is a circle, and the inside of the circle
is my memory
but I don’t always herd the same sheep…
Monica McAlpine reviews
Catherine Arnold’s Receipt for Lost Words
In this debut collection, Catherine Arnold writes as a mother whose linguistically precocious daughter, between the ages of three and five, gradually ceases to speak. In Stella’s speechless world, the very ground, air and light are unreliable; sudden sounds, touches, eye contact pose threats. She is subject to fits of fury during the day; at night her mother cannot quiet her agitation…