Issue #31.9 A Triple Issue: Maudie Bryant, Matthew King, Frederick Pollack
A Poem by Maudie Bryant
Ode to a Consumed Bic
Fresh out the pack, first click provides fire, blue at the root, sharp at the edge, and the body shows nothing yet: shiny, precise. A tool ready for its simple duty.
Use after use, it begins to register touch. The sticker lifts at one corner, adhesive catching skin, and the flame, still steady, grows more measured, as though the valve considers each release.
Near the end, flecks spit brief, stubborn bursts. The button barely pushes back—a soft hinge, a thin exhale of whatever fuel remains. Casing polished smooth against the hand.
Then the final strike: a clean, empty clack. A spark jumps, bright but without purpose. The flint still chips, useless now and small. Ghost-weight plastic, occupying the palm.
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Maudie Bryant is a multidisciplinary artist and Pushcart-nominated poet based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her writing explores the thresholds between grief, healing, and the material, often tugging at the unspoken edges of the human condition. She holds an M.A. in English from the University of Louisiana Monroe, and her work has appeared in Progenitor, Welter, 3Elements Review, and other journals. Maudie is also the founding editor of Audi Locus, an online poetry journal. She balances her creative life with full-time work and motherhood, creating from the margins and making meaning from what lingers there. Find her at www.maudiemichelle.com
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A Poem by Matthew King
Lost Keys to Desert Dreams
I keep keys like calendars in case they’ll be good again some year. Does anybody ever throw away the key? How can you tell them apart; how can you be sure the lock isn’t still around somewhere? Sometimes you know exactly what a key was for and won’t be again and this is why you’ll never throw it away— Mom’s oval Oldsmobile, Dad’s angular Dodge—though hanging on to the actual keys themselves is hardly required to keep them alive for you: they would appear precisely as they were, down to each tooth, in a dream, if you dreamt of
keys. We want to say a dream is a key, we want to say a key’s needed to translate a dream, we want say “I am Joseph and I alone have the universal key: bring me all the illusions troubling you and I will tell the truth they’re made of.” But King Nebuchadnezzar unlocks Pharaoh’s folly for us: you may have found the key lying on the ground, or lifted it from a wire where it was hung for fortune to deliver. Nobody’s pocket contains the right key except Joseph’s but Daniel alone describes the kingdom’s beclouded door.
I keep drawers full of answers, like we all do. In opaque containers we set questions at the curb to be trucked off, crushed, not sanitized even, simply buried to become desert ground. On this we stretch our cities into the sea.
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Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems may be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.
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A Poem by Frederick Pollack
Early Show
It’s like being made an audience for robots. Robots as we know are specialists: headless, all limbs and pincers with a hard drive. But it’s as if they got together to produce the tubular metal guys we sort of wanted. These dance.
The alternative to watching is to roam the building, where piles of tools, materiel, odd painted bits and fragile, impetuous furnishings try to pass themselves off as rooms. Is your reaction being watched? Does that change it? There may be bottled
water in those baskets. You return to the performance. The music is electronic, the sort of annoying noise humans create in summer (sawing) and in winter (scraping).
Why this? you wonder. Is it satire? Of us? The robots have stopped dancing, seem to be attempting something like drama, or at least emotion: “Was I never real to you?” “You were always real … ”
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Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems: THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections of shorter poems: A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, 2024). Pollack has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
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