Issue #32.1 A Triple Issue: Steve Lambert, J.R. Solonche, Zebulon Huset & James David Adams
A Poem by Steve Lambert
A Genius of Mood and Setting
Reading in our small house by The beach was something. I can Remember. Mississippi tried to Sleep with her. Being in a bookstore With a mother. He drank the sea. Something done with a child, like Coloring. My father, my black hair Is turning gray, slowly. My mother Read to me nearly every night. Every night before bed. One evening After a long day of Cutty Sark Drinking. She bought lots of books, Ordered them from the TV. She Read Dr. Seuss, and she read the Story of the three Chinese brothers. One evening after a long day of Cutty Sark drinking. All the Sweet Pickles and on and on. Mississippi, whose real name Was Jon Lowry. Frog and Toad Was my favorite. One drank the sea. When I was fourteen, I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail With my dad and his best friend. Mississippi I’m afraid is dead. One day one drank the whole sea Up, he drank himself into oblivion, Daily. A genius of mood and setting. With Scotch. Arnold Lobel. Coconuts. My mother never minded reading These things over and over, either. He was my godfather, even though We weren’t Catholic. My mother Told my dad and he thought it was Funny. She heard voices. Hears voices. And has no memory of it. He confronted Him about it later. She did voices.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana but grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Saw Palm, Trampoline Poetry, Chiron Review, The Pinch, Northampton Poetry Review (UK), Broad River Review, Longleaf Review, Emrys Journal, Bull Fiction, Into the Void, Cowboy Jamboree, Cortland Review, and many other places. In 2015 he won third place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest and in 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (CW Books, 2017) and The Shamble (CW Books, 2020), the book-length poem Dutch Ears (2025), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (Cowboy Jamboree, 2020). He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches at the University of North Florida.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by J.R. Solonche
Dream
I was in my kitchen, which was just the same. The toaster was on the counter. The kettle was on the stove. The window looked out on the backyard. There was a tree. A single tree. It was not an apple tree. It was a pine tree, but it was covered in apples. Big, red apples that hung so low they almost touched the grass. I was in the dream long enough to see the apples glinting in the light. To notice how heavy they looked. Then I woke up. I thought about the dream. I was sure it was a pine tree, not an apple tree. I was sure they were apples, not pinecones. I looked everything up. Freud said apples were symbols of the breasts, especially if there was more than one apple in the dream. Yeah, I saw a lot on that tree, and the pine tree itself symbolizes spiritual connection and longevity, not to mention being sacred to Dionysus. And the kitchen? That’s where I had the best sex I ever had with my while we were drinking cabernet sauvignon, and she was wearing nothing but an apron.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Zebulon Huset & James David Adams
from Stanza Trades
Juvenilia
Roman candles and bottle rockets shriek acrid streaks through crisp suburban dark
calypsoing into jacuzzis. On tiptoes, this is how the night begins its ministry.
Resting tulips genuflect and collect dew on their pastel backs while sneakers tromp
down the wet grasses of spring. What is the lesson here? The world asks everything
of our developing brains while we're still getting a handle on our maelstrom of hormones—
poor, moaning, pitiful things. Mademoiselle, I remember I once wrote, is it not poignant
how fleeting our flames, how short our time alive, like the burst of a firework? Of course,
like a dew-filled tulip, she refused to answer. There is so much you have to get used to.
So many perpendicular pathways angling into and out of your life despite your desire
to have a cup of tea and read a decent story. You might as well be flying a kite in the woods,
skipping stones in the wishing well, or begging the clock to talk the calendar into
turning back its pages to the heart of winter— when the slow, frozen explosion of roots
tipped boots and tripped you into the future of uncertainty and surprise and fireworks.
________________________________________________________________________________________
James David Adams was born in New Hampshire. He now lives in the Shenandoah Valley.
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine, which is back from hiatus in 2026.
________________________________________________________________________________________