Issue #10.1 Two Poems by Catherine Weiss
a recollection
do you remember the time you and I made plans to go to dinner and a movie like grownups so we went to our favorite wine bar back when The Bourgeois Pig was on E 7th street and I don’t recall what we got to eat maybe bruschetta or nothing only that we finished the second bottle and we were late to the movie so we sat in the front row I think it was an IMAX and we kept getting shushed for stage-whispering what's going on because in those seats and our states we couldn’t follow the intricate plotting of I Am Legend
I wish I Am Legend was the only punchline here I wish you were still on this sweet stupid earth I wish we could get drunk and misbehave one more time do you remember my dear friend how we were overwhelmed by inappropriate giggles in the empty city I need you to know I am left here grateful that for a night we laughed through all the parts where everyone's supposed to be worried about what happens next
***
how to go extinct
i want to headbutt a sharptooth in the eye. i want to kiss my shadow and call it mom. i want to practice flying and then do it for real. i want to follow my heart to wherever green. the thing about the land before time is we know the great valley couldn't last, right? like, best case scenario, littlefoot & co lived nice dino lives but still went extinct. it’s a movie about solidarity at the end of the world— some friends banding together to find a place to live and die. it’s a notoriously sad film. the goodbye in the rain. the kindness of old rooter. the loss and the grief and all that survival. every hope i have left is for these types of narrative flourishes. what grace we’ll find in our final days as human beings on this earth, etc. pity that for our last years we spent our nights asleep in the footprints of giants.
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Catherine Weiss (she/they) is a poet and artist living in Deer Isle, Maine. She was the 2017 Grand Slam Champion and the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam rep of Northampton Poetry and has competed in national poetry slam competitions. Her poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, Bodega, Counterclock, Hobart After Dark, Flypaper Lit, and elsewhere. Catherine is the artist behind the collaborative poetry chapbook/card deck I WISH I WASN’T ROYALTY (Game Over Books, 2020). She is also the author of chapbook-length poem, FERVOR (Ginger Bug Press, 2021) and full-length poetry collection, WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS (Game Over Books, 2021). More at catherineweiss.com.
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Issue #10.2 Two Poems by Julie Choffel
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Julie Choffel is the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham, 2012) and a chapbook called The Chicories (Ethel Press, 2019). Her poems can also be found in Zócalo Public Square, Posit, Interim, New American Writing, Ghost City Review, and other places. She lives near Hartford, Connecticut, where she teaches, parents, and plants more things than can survive.
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Issue #10.3 A Poem by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
Last Text
Please categorize all of the times you thought of me
now Sudoku it draw a large square with
smaller squares inside of it that’s how I’ll find you stare through your window at night
objectify me to the tiniest detail in each square
I’ll do the same to you but you won’t like it
mention a body part an eye glimmer
I’ll tell you what part I’ll touch before I touch you.
Suspense increases the heart beats
leave some space for the meta material the best parts
leave some parts for the press the Insta posts in a few hours
the things we cannot touch a crinkle, a softness strain
a smooth torso I’ll shave you
my attention: a salve, the strength of my grip on the razor
the height of my leg on a pedal as I ride out of the garage
Do you like it?
do you like the stain on my skirt?
at 2 am. I’m home I’ll open you like a new genus species
support your shock brain bury darkness and hold it tight
include extra ingredients in my notes I dish out like pie
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Jennifer MacBain-Stephens (she/her) went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she is landlocked. She is the author of five poetry collections and fifteen chapbooks and enjoys exploring how to blend creativity with nurturing the earth. Recent work appears in The Westchester Review, Cleaver, Dream Pop, and Grist. She also hosts a free, monthly reading series sponsored by Iowa City Poetry called Today You Are Perfect. Find her at http://jennifermacbainstephens.com/.
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Issue #10.4 A Poem by Douglas Cole
Four Way
The past is a foggy boat ride to Riverside. The present is a black cloud of birds in flight. The future is a song coming out of a Chinese restaurant. And I am the theater operator and lighthouse keeper in that movie full of unknowns you still remember
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Douglas Cole has published six collections of poetry and The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in several anthologies as well as journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Poetry International, The Galway Review, Bitter Oleander, Chiron, Louisiana Literature, Slipstream, as well Spanish translations of work (translated by Maria Del Castillo Sucerquia) in La Cabra Montes. He is a regular contributor to Mythaixs, an online journal, where in addition to his fiction and essays, his interviews with notable writers, artists and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blond, Flash Count Diary) and Tim Reynolds (T3 and The Dave Matthews Band) have been popular contributions https://mythaxis.com/?s=douglas+Cole. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry and recently won the Editors’ Choice Award in Prose from RiverSedge literary journal. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com/.
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Issue #10.5 Two Poems by Nate Logan
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
On the roof of the high-rise you stick a grapefruit spoon into the waxing crescent.
A tire rolled out the laboratory door, down the driveway and across the street where it stopped right before the Île de Sainte-Marguerite mailbox.
It was a syndicate of dermatologists all along.
Valerie’s hand dangled perilously over the toaster. That’s the second time this week.
How dedicated can you really be wearing a space administration hat?
Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave.
A bet’s a bet’s a bet.
***
Hearts of Darkness
Merrily we go to Connecticut. Small farms dot the horizon like so many piles of folded moving boxes. No ideas but in the painting brochure. The foyer in Blood Moon would give an impression, but would it be the right one? The guest bathroom in Motorcycle Rally was the obvious choice. “Just think it over for a few days,” the realtor says. We agree, but soon feel pangs of guilt in our necks. An intrepid pest control CEO pours molten iron on every anthill in our yard. It was years later we learned he was given no authorization, he just thought it up and did it.
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Nate Logan is the author of Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He teaches at Franklin College and Marian University.
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Issue #10.6 Two Poems by Nadia Arioli
On “Pour Yves” by Kay Sage
I use my fingers to know the real
when my body strives to undo itself.
A straight road will collapse—
side touching side in the distance,
except if you were to walk and feel
the width is the same.
A tree will dance,
but if you lick your finger
and hold it out,
you'll know it's just the wind.
I've never seen floating colors,
colors that aren't attached to the back
of things. But I have color in tubes
and on pallet. Some I won't let out.
For you, Yves, a small miracle.
A thing that is and is not real.
Who are we to tell trees
they are not dancing,
roads they won't meet themselves?
I've seen snail shells in the garden,
on the undersides of plants.
You can touch them with your fingers.
You can bring them home.
***
On “Listen to the Wind” by Kay Sage
I am defeathered gull. I have turned to innards, nothing else left to examine.
I, immortal and listless,
hide under cars, cry when
it rains, go to bars mid-afternoon.
Always for me it is mid-afternoon,
waiting for a twilight that never comes.
Nothing about me isn't boil,
isn't overgrown tissue. I am overfilling myself like wind overfills tablecloths.
When bars fill up, I slip
out. I’ve been to all holes.
Without even thinking, I can find
this one again. I don't collect
my threadbare coat, don't
pay my bill. Find the hole
that is under the city. Listen
to the wind. I unfold myself
an umbrella, wait.
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Nadia Arioli is the co-founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Her recent publications include Penn Review, Cider Press Review, Kissing Dynamite, Heavy Feather Review, and San Pedro River Review. She has chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, Spartan, and a full-length from Luchador, and a full-length forthcoming from Lemures Books. She was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 by As It Ought to Be, West Trestle Review, Angel Rust, and Voicemail Poems.
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Issue #10.7 A Poem by Olivia Lasala
I count my appendages
Pearls where thumbs should be Palmettos for thighs Snails in the place of lips
Lizards flick their tongues on a veranda I call out to make them stop Can’t stand the sound
An orchestra plays for no one in particular Resin coats reeds sliding against bodies Their music lacks purity and rhythm
This is all to say that I don’t feel at home in bed Especially when another body joins me I look for rocks to throw
Alone I think of antique rooms in an abandoned home Walls dotted with taxidermied birds Moths drying in the dark
They look for books to read I look for vodka mixed with soda and lime No one understands but everyone nods
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Olivia Lasala is a novice writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She received a Master of Arts degree in developmental psychology from Columbia University in New York City and currently works as a Data Analyst.
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Issue #10.8 A Poem by Gunilla T. Kester
The Mosquito
doesn’t like my O negative blood. Goes for succulent positive flavors. Sitting on my veranda late in the evening with a glass and remnants of runes and letters in different shapes and forms, I offer my slim pale arms and ankles —blood veins writing their underground story— At night, too, grating against walls and blinds but never landing, making me think and rethink: did that actually happen or did I just want it to have happened. To be real. Even if it’s only a longing, a drop of shiny sticky drop of blood left on our kitchen floor after the dog bite. My father telling me it was nothing and reciting a poem full of stoic phrases, “If” by Kipling or was it Goethe that night or Homer? Or did he kneel by my side and wash my hand clean, kiss it and put on a bandage brushed with honey?
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Swedish-born Gunilla Theander Kester is an award-winning poet and the author of If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer's Den, 2015). Her two poetry chapbooks: Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009) were published by Finishing Line Press. She was co-editor with Gary Earl Ross of The Still Empty Chair: More Writings Inspired by Flight 3407 (2011) and The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407 (2010). Dr. Kester has published many poems in Swedish anthologies and magazines, including Bonniers Litterära Magasin. She lives near Buffalo, NY where she teaches classical guitar. Her work has or will be published in American Journal of Poetry, Pendemics, I-70 Review, Great Lakes Review, and Slipstream.
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Issue #10.9 A Poem by Matt Dennison
The Lawyer, the Businessman,
the Kid and You and I
At less than twenty we
sat in Nick’s Bar eating
free peanuts and watching
the same pool players
night after night
until of necessity
we named them
to allow ourselves
short-hand discussions
of their various
approaches
to the game after
crossing the field
behind the bar and re-entering
the cold and lonely house
where hungry rats glared
from bare kitchen
cabinets.
The players had style.
They existed firmly within
the sawdust music nights.
They could laugh, dance
and demand money—
make them balls do what
they told them to.
They appeared at least angels
of a sane and sufficient universe
as we nibbled, shifted,
and stared.
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After a rather extended and varied second childhood in New Orleans (street musician,
psych tech, riverboat something-or-other, door-to-door poetry peddler, etc.), Matt
Dennison—the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for
Better, from Main Street Rag Press— has had work published in Rattle, Bayou Magazine,
Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review,
among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven
and Jutta Pryor.
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Issue #10.10 Three Poems by John Dorsey
Once Around the Cemetery for my parents in september
we came here looking for ourselves younger thinner but the birds sing for someone else the sun turns into granite & arrowheads hidden in the leaves rustle us from invisible barstools from cement mixers from that one girl who will never die in our memory the light bouncing off her sunglasses flying off the side of a bridge in irwin pennsylvania in the winter of 1987 her name written in spray paint that will never fade away in the rain.
***
Poem for My Brother, in the Basement
the war of the roses still rages here in a land of high end weed & used guitars the blues are real the ghost of robert johnson floating through the suburbs from the tip of your hand rolled cigarettes putting up posters for lost dogs in youthful songs of angst
knowing that if anyone could really see you they might run you right out of town.
***
Poem for Frank Klapak in 1994
i wanted the girls to look at me the way they looked at you
it was such a waste you never even noticed your poems about the beatles were better than the beatles themselves
you had everything
a song without music a hot cup of coffee red wine from a dented flask given to you by an ex-girlfriend in 1968 a torn t-shirt for the british invasion bought in a used record store in pittsburgh & girls lining up to brush the snow off of the edges of your coat.
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John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017), Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), and Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
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