Issue #32.11 Linlang Zhao, J-T Kelly, G. Sabbatini
A Poem by Linlang Zhao
Thunder of Nights
It was years ago beneath the noon light, under the kind of melting air sticking under the sun, where something like water moved between my father and me.
He stood there, pointing at the architecture in red and black, drifting like another hill the river never reaches in that dusty county we called ours.
It felt like foam without the sea, or a lucid summer light where morning mist thins before it settles, as if the air erased the outline
of my lungs in the heat. I kept wondering why the county shifted like waves without ever holding water—
how brutalist buildings cinched themselves inward, how wheat practiced folding into its own shade.
It’s that distance between us and rain: Gutters bleached to bones, smog worn like an artificial scarf. Summer passed without breaking open the sky;
we named clouds but never followed them, as thousands of them loosened their shape What stayed was dust settling into our knees, when time walks through the ridge, dripping in the forty-degree.
I left carrying a dry season sewn into my pockets. The train loosened the county from the skeleton of my name. It must be a miswilled fortune, when the rain forgot me and then
decided to compensate: it keeps finding me in Guangzhou: on borrowed streets, on rented windows, soaking up the language I speak now. The south opens its palms. I stand there, almost leaking, as water presses against the glass
and waits.
The river pauses before touching us. Childhood stays where rain never arrives, where departure is the only season that moves. Now I keep wondering how to pour the ridge’s water back into my hand. Across treasure and treasured, into the unforeseen raindrops. Night gathers without thunder, evolving to veil that county across the span of years. I’ve attempted to peek inside there once, but it’s never raining, nor entirely dry.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Linlang Zhao loves eating and cooking. She enjoys messing with her cats as well. Her work can be found at Midway Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Tap into Poetry, Cetera Magazine, and others. You can find her at @thisissobad1.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by J-T Kelly
Untitled [In my simple world...]
In my simple world—and this is logistics—here is where I learned laundry and composting, and there is Ryan slipping into the river after drinking alone, leaving everyone feeling guilty about feeling relieved. Things accumulate after a tragedy. Plastic, mainly. But Pete did have to get a tetanus shot—in his stomach if you can believe!—so you know there’s some metal down there, just like you know there’s something bad down there. You can feel things change around you when you get close to the place where the water goes underground. Once you’ve been there it’s always with you. You can close your eyes and follow the river into the dark opening and past the cold metal grate, down under the highway and the new hospital, and up out of the city. But before it gets to the swamp, it passes directly under the Cincinnati Museum of Children’s Book Illustrations, where you can—and this is more complicated than it sounds—stand in this corner here and whisper, and be heard clear as a bell in an alcove on the other side of the courtyard, way over there.
________________________________________________________________________________________
J-T Kelly works in real estate in Indianapolis. Poems in The Denver Quarterly, the nu review, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere. Chapbooks: Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023) and More of How to Read the Bible (above/ground, 2025).
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by G. Sabbatini
Centuripe’s Daughter
No one prepares you for how you will feel when you encounter your blood in the archives. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you realize how suffocated you’ve been by the reductive hellenistic haze that has, for some years now, made it impossible to recognize your ancestor for who she really was. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you come to terms with the fact that we will never know how she died, or if her brothers were killed in the war with Carthage, or if her mother prayed to Hybla, or what she thought of the stories told of tyrant Agathocles. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you are conscripted into her service: that militarized parlance you adopt in an attempt to validate your quasi-academic obsession with a single terracotta funerary shield that has been banished to a back corner of your campus’s wannabe-encyclopedic antiquities hall. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you decide to rationalize your compulsive pacing in front of her (back-and-forth-and-near-and-far, repeat, repeat again) as a necessary precondition for creativity. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you realize that the truths you tell about your intense desire for a family history made whole are, some days, days like today, little more than a mask for the lies you tell about your OCD. No one prepares you for how you will feel encountering this artifact, of all places, five thousand odd miles from its point of origin in the middle of a corn-fed college town that has never been nor ever will be your home, despite the lie your driver’s license tells. No one prepares you for how you will feel when your treading (back-and-forth-and-near-and-far, repeat, repeat again) is called out by a crowd of middle-school visitors whose Nikes squeak as they prance between installments, never taking note of the girl whose flesh was painted onto clay as seemingly fragile as she. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you realize that the family history that has been passed down to you in murmurs has gone quiet. No one prepares you for how you will feel as you punish yourself unnecessarily for the curse of being an American who resembles your immigrant grandparents physically but not linguistically. No one prepares you for how you will feel when your sense of self becomes collateral damage in a homecoming you’re told you aren’t allowed to have because you were born here, not there. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you stand before her, desperate to quiet the clichéd echoes of Kennedy’s— no, Palmerston’s, no Cicero’s—exceptionalism: Civis Romanus sum. No one prepares you for how you will feel when you stand before her, paralyzed at last in a final act of supplication to Centuripe’s daughter—Sicilian, Roman, Greek—wanting nothing more than to be recognized as hers.
________________________________________________________________________________________
G. Sabbatini writes poetry and fiction that investigate creative mythologies and cultural memory. Her work explores the stories we tell about art, artists, and their afterlives.
________________________________________________________________________________________