Issue #33.1 Paul Ilechko, LC Gutierrez, Russell Rowland
A Poem by Paul Ilechko
Planning for the Future
The girls hopscotched their way through our lives never missing a square while we threw rocks at trees and made plans to steal
packages from the local store we didn’t understand that they were already living in a world that we were unaware of
the girls dreamed into being their future homes farmhouses or penthouses they chose furniture from catalogs
locked the liquor cabinet and hid the key they knew they would have to teach us how to be human but were putting it off for as long as possible we came home
from the estuary with a sack of crabs our clothes reeking of salt nobody had drowned that day and we wallowed in our success.
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Paul Ilechko is the author of Post Moby (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026) and Fragmentation and Volta (Gnashing Teeth, 2025). His work has also appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, Bear Review, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Laurel Review. He reads for Marrow Magazine.
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A Poem by LC Gutierrez
I, Pinocchio, Confess
It wasn’t her handsome, square-head husband that kept me from taking a taste. I was too young and my tongue too small and wooden to reach out for her: tan and peach-firm as she was.
So many fairy tales have seeds and weeds and stalks that sometimes pass right through the clouds. This one would rise out from under my evening sheets.
My hands fumbled furtive, pumpkin eager, midnight warm. My new-teen pulse ticking off each freckle spotted on her chest in the universe of our kissing back yards.
All of me would fresh grow swelling, blood, tight: I’d hold myself in the hungry belly of night. When he left her, I wondered how any flesh-born man
could turn from the sweet and almost real of her. When he left her, my neighbor’s wife was still pig-tailed, cotton-candied in denim, tight-cut shorts,
but now she lies in far-away glass, wrinkled and curled up like a witch. I have grown older and chastened too, while my nose just grows and grows and grows.
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LC Gutierrez is an erstwhile academic and product of many places in the South and the Caribbean. He currently lives, writes, teaches, and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work is recently published or forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Tampa Review, Rust and Moth, Blood Orange Review, and Trampset. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review.
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A Poem by Russell Rowland
Be It Ever So Humble
I paused at the edge of a ramshackle stretch of woods, branches fallen helter-skelter on the forest floor, broken trunks leaning like scattered jackstraws.
Windshear and microburst, drought, depleted soil, made this a slum among hardwoods.
Sheltering deer seemed to favor it, though—and an owl was reported uncomplaining, in the night watches.
Farmers of older days sent their offspring into woods like this, to harvest kindling without recourse to hatchet or saw. Even a toddler could fetch a twig or two, along with a piece
of blue eggshell, to put on the mantel over the fireplace— a token of evidence that life will nest, hatch, and fledge in any excuse for a woods.
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Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.
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