Issue #16.1 A Poem by Lauren E. Burgess
From CAGE
Two walls meet and that’s the two of me. I live in the corner, I am the corner, it’s nice here to be both small and big. Take one wall: she is small. She is a sadgirl. She is making believe a teardrop runs down a harp. She is opening her legs and backbending in a silent movie for two viewers. Who are directors. Rape requires touch? No no now who would call this a movie? She is lopped over like a dying fruit tree. Rape the story is a sad one and the father is downstairs with closed ears but I’m muted as it is. He cannot protect what he cannot hear. I oblige so that he does not hear. He cannot protect what he refuses to see. I am scared of noise. I move slowly or not at all because the movement snaps off me branch and twig. Break is loud, too loud. It is too direct. So then bend as far as I can before.
The stiller we are the deeper we go.
*
A poet will get inside of a space and scream, and that makes a poem.
Sadgirl used to be the poet before I busted out of myself. You see Sadgirl can only do so much, what with her harp and the tear, she has her hands full. The walls make the corner and Sadgirl reaches for other me and that’s when I get BIG, when I touch and mix up my halves. Sadgirl is small, her world is small, she suffocates every day, she suffers through obsessive compulsive disorder, depressive episodes, body dysmorphia, and one day she reaches out for another hand before going all the way under. My hand, and it becomes her. I am much bigger than her. Mania shoots outward in all directions. Imagine sloughing off the sad and crawling into a big bad Anger. A sexy bleed. The poet that screams. Can you hear now, Daddy?
I used to write poems (before I was diagnosed) about a lion that snuck into my room at night and swallowed me whole. I would parade around in the Lion with obscene confidence. I thought I had a choice, then. I’d make people want to fuck the Lion. And I thought this was very funny, that I created a world where people wanted to fuck a lion, and I was in the Lion, swinging my paws and flicking my tail.
Before I had language to describe Mania, I called it the Lion. I also called it the Poet. I thought the Poet in me took over at night, and I thought what people found so interesting about me was the Poet. Now I know that I was switching me(s). I don’t know how it happens for other people, but for me, it happens quickly and forcefully. I go to sleep maybe sad maybe breathing a bit irregular. I wake up and my blood pressure is so high my temples bounce off the pillow. There is an immediate panic that feels sexual. There is not so subdued Anger. A mane wringing my neck.
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Lauren E. Burgess is a poet and essayist from New Orleans. She received her MFA from Louisiana State University, where she served as poetry editor of New Delta Review. Her work has appeared in Bodega, Dream Pop, and A Velvet Giant, among others. She is the recipient of the Kent Gramm Award for Literary Nonfiction and the Robert Penn Warren Award for Poetry.
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Issue #16.2 A Poem by J.R. Solonche
OFFICE HOUR
I don’t understand this poem, Mr. S., she said. Which one? I said. “The King of Ice Cream” by Steven Wallace, she said. Okay, I said. Let’s talk about “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens, I said. Know what? I said. What? she said. I don’t understand it either, I said. You don’t? she said. Nope, I said. But you’re the teacher, she said. That’s right, I said. I’m the teacher, so now I’ll teach you something. Think of the poem as a conversation starter. A conversation starter? Yes, Something that starts a conversation. What you and I are doing right now. You mean having a conversation? That’s right. But we’re having half of the conversation. Go home and have the other half of the conversation with the poem. Then come back, and we’ll continue our conversation. Okay, she said. She didn’t.
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Nominated for the National Book Award and twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R Solonche is the author of 28 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
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Issue #16.3 A Poem by Clay Waters
melting
behind my lids he awakes in a pure white void
coal for his eyes silk hat for his head contingency for his being
for a morning he was alive as a notion could be
but the sun was rising and our time was reddening
his mouth two twigs brittle with worry
(what have I done?)
to distract him from the sharpening shadows I taught him hide and seek
but could trace his wet prints through the streets headed nowhere
we played paper boats in the creek, but everything sank in his grasp
the less said about the swimming hole the better
still the morning slipped by on skates under the heightened sun
stranding us at the final gun with two wooden smiles one trying, one on trial.
Don’t forget me, he pled, and all the fun we had.
I’m not sorry for your life, I said, I’m sorry for your fear. You’ll be in my heart, I swore, touching my head, other hand on his soggy shoulder to calm his quivering
until his coal lost its context and his hat lost its meaning
I salvage his last grin a kindling for memories of what might have been:
two twigs twirling toward the drain.
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Clay Waters has had poems published in Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Santa Clara Review, Poet Lore, and Roanoke Review. He lived in Florida until the age of four and recently returned to find it hasn't changed a bit. Three of his six memories from that first stop involve the alphabet, which in retrospect was a bit of a tell.
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Photograph by Erin Silber
Issue #16.5 Two Poemz by Nicole Callihan
Amazon
To get through what promises to be a long winter, I’ve purchased a UV lamp.
It’s about the size of a small dinner plate and weighs a little more than a pound.
Because I have Prime, it arrived in one day.
On a Wednesday, in the half-dark of noon—still in that flowered robe, still with the tubes draining fluid from my body—I thought I’d die, or want to so much that I might as well die, before again seeing a crocus push from the earth. By Thursday, I was bathed in light.
Artificial light, electric light, but light.
Of course, I’m not without shame.
The cardboard boxes stacked and tied in the pantry.
And the other cardboard boxes that arrive and arrive.
Juven to mix into water for wound healing; a new dry brush; the machine to project stars on Eva’s ceiling because there’s a pandemic and I have cancer so she should have stars on her ceiling if she wants them; the protein bars and macadamia nuts; one of those triangle Calvin Klein bras for if I ever don’t have to wear the sad, pink bra the hospital provided; another machine to project stars on Ella’s ceiling because Eva has stars on her ceiling and there’s a pandemic and I have cancer so Ella should have stars too if she wants them.
Artificial, electric, but stars.
And another box to break down.
Amazon.
A, meaning “without” plus mazos, variant of mastos, “breast,” meaning without breast; meaning without breast.
Woman without breasts.
Woman without breasts but with many boxes.
Woman without breasts but with many boxes which will arrive in one day.
Prime woman. Woman in prime. Or, woman who while in Prime paid for Prime and so even after Prime does not cancel Prime because woman wants light.
Who can so easily give up light?
The Amazons cut or burned off one breast so they could draw bowstrings more efficiently.
But I can hardly throw a ball, and I let the doctors do it.
I followed my doctor, a pretty woman with five year-old triplets who wears gorgeous, expensive high heels, but who for surgery was clogged and masked, into the operating room. I said, it is so weird to walk myself into the operating room.
Everything was bright.
The anesthesiologist gave me a thumbs up, and I said something like, whoa science is cool, and when I woke up in ICU, the light was dim and the machines were beeping, and I was underneath a plastic blanket filled with hot air.
For a while, I pretended I was on the beach. My friend came to sit on the blanket we’d laid out, and for a long time we stared straight into the sun, and then, when it got too hot, we took off our clothes and swam in the sea.
But then the drugs wore off.
For anesthesia, the Amazons likely used powdered opium in a cup of wine.
Or, nothing.
The former sounds rather delicious and appealing; something I might add to my cart or buy now; something that might be arriving tomorrow; something I might feel a twinge of shame about as I take a knife and cut into the seam of the box, surprised at how easily it collapses.
How easily it collapses. All of it. The body, its counterparts.
Like tripping on the cord to your new lamp, how the darkness comes as quickly as the light.
How the light—if I can get down on my knees and find the outlet—might come again.
Humiliation
Traced back to the Latin humus, meaning, “earth, ground.” As in, my dirty hands. Giving rise to the verb humiliare. In the first two stories, there were peonies, but in the third, a girl in a bloody coat. The doctor says, I might expect my voice to lower. Hair thinning is not unusual. Last summer, I took a photo of a tree in which it looked as if legs were parted. Open. Wanting. To be split. From the Latin furca, meaning “fork.” I also took a photo of a drawer of spoons. My many upside-down faces. Bifurcate. May constipate. Loss of appetite. And I was just starting to get hungry. Weakness. Sleeplessness. To dream of a lion may indicate power; may aggression; may hunt/ hunted/ hunter. Related to hentan, “to seize.” Proto-germanic. To be taken at the same time each day. Taken. Verb (used with object). To get into one’s hold by voluntary action. From the late Old English, tacan, “get (especially by force).” Of unknown ultimate origin.
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Nicole Callihan’s This Strange Garment will be published by Terrapin Books in 2023. Her other books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as the novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.
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Issue #16.5 A Poem by Linda Delmont
ODD
I once dated the deceased. Sometimes we frenched
in a blanket at the beach. It’s such a strange
wake, high school reunion in his mom’s garage,
tombstone-sized sheet cake with brown frosting cross.
We sit in plastic chairs, consume cold cuts,
sip Coke in cans crying condensation, no beer,
no one in black except the woman wiping
crumbs from a faded tablecloth. I touch
her slumped shoulder in a sweater knit
from lead. She grips my wrist, whispers
you were the one I hoped could sober him.
It’s all so odd. Feet away from where her son
died, a strong breeze blows Bud cans
hanging from a a sign: Nascar wind chime.
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Linda Delmont was born and raised in Southern California and currently lives in Westminster with her husband, one dog, two cats, and two fat hens. She graduated in 2012 with an MFA in poetry from California State University Long Beach and in 2010 with an MA in 19th Century American literature. Currently she substitute teaches part-time and volunteers as an usher for Musical Theatre West. Her hobbies include quilting, raising Monarch butterflies, and spoiling her two young grandkids. She has non-fiction published in Chicken Soup for the Soul books and her poems can be found in The Packinghouse Review, Pearl Magazine, Serving House Journal, Green Prints and Bank Heavy Press.
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Issue #16.6 A Poem by Aaron Sandberg
There Was a Time Before We Burned It Down
when we took to mending meanings. Our makings made a church of it. Our sermons sprawled and doubled back. We bought a rug when our house took sick.
And when that failed to save the sin, we buried what refused to burn, sprayed the earth with salt and lye, made a home in memory only. Remembered we forgot the keys beneath the ash and mat.
In hindsight all our prayers look dim. We bought a rug when our house took sick.
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Aaron Sandberg has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s, No Contact, Alien Magazine, The Shore, The Offing, Sporklet, Right Hand Pointing, Halfway Down the Stairs, Crow & Cross Keys, Burningword Journal, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his poetry posts—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.
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Issue #16.7 A Poem by JW Burns
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JW Burns lives in Florida. Poetry and short prose in several journals, most recently in After Happy Hour, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ginosko Literary Journal and I 70 Review.
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Issue #16.8 Three Poems by Austin Miles
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Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He has poems published in Clade Song, Cobra Milk, foam:e, and elsewhere.
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Issue #16.9 A Poem by Lynn Glicklich Cohen
DITCHED
I thought the phrase was “dull as dishwater,” and it made sense during my turn to clean up after the Sabbath meal, rinsing chicken fat and beet blood from seven plates, turning the sink water bleak as a Wisconsin winter sky, darkened further by the dregs of concord Manischewitz from crystal shot glasses, allowed even this eleven-year-old the sweet swallow of sudden warmth that would, years later, come looking for me.
The moment dinner ended, my older sister and brother bolted out the back door toward lives I didn’t yet know how to imagine, but understood to be far more interesting than mine. I dried and put away dishes as the candles sputtered, my parents somewhere, never quite there.
At sixty-one, I learned it’s “dull as ditchwater,” and once I pictured it, that made sense too, but it stole something from me: the poetry I had made of leftovers and loneliness, and the yearning for a life I still don’t know how to imagine.
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Lynn Glicklich Cohen lives in Milwaukee, WI, where she writes poetry, plays cello, feeds birds and squirrels, walks her dog, and mostly hopes, in spite of it all, for the best.
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Issue #16.10 Six Poems by John Dorsey & A Poem by Tohm Bakelas
Harry Dean Stanton Changes the Oil for Sid Haig
this is the motorcycle movie that roger corman never made a country on fire full of slow rolling hills two good men sitting on a porch crying to a tune that nobody’s mother ever sang
just chewing up the scenery & spitting out what was left into an empty coffee can.
Review of Spider Baby: Why Sid Haig was a Symbol of True Masculinity
ralph ate what he killed he fucked what he killed he went mad in front of our eyes with razor speed he was a good dancer he loved his sisters
the american dream was the spider web.
Sid Haig’s Heart Could Live Anywhere
his laugh was a death chant of never ending dust bowls thrown into the street like a tumbleweed covered in blood
this is america say it once with feeling the house of a thousand corpses is section 8.
Cancer Song
for everette maddox & paul blackburn
you made it closer to the sun than icarus ever did still i don’t want to fly on your wings headed toward happy hour or some homemade baseball diamond pointed toward your cosmic heaven where bob creeley dances with one eye instead i want to kick up dust made of my own memories i want to teach myself how to fly.
Cancer Song #2
this is the song of myself i’d thought i’d never sing whitman’s grass under my feet not making a sound but creating an anthem where our skin no longer betrays the wind that carried it here our bodies radiant as ever running through the streets of our history where one day we will all be free.
Cancer Song #3
i don’t want to eat like a bird words coming & going in small bites i want to think about girls i once knew sitting in the sun becoming poems with bronze skin becoming mothers with wide arms i want to dream of them all i want to swallow whole years of my past.
which way to the river
—by Tohm Bakelas
for john dorsey
conversations about stanford, maddox, hugo, embree, and ardinger don’t happen too often
not with many, not with any- one
please know when i say “it’s more than poetry,” i mean just that, it is more than poetry— it’s friendship, it’s life
we write poems to feel less lonely, only we’re writing for the lonely, we are the lonely
the ghost of your words will hold us accountable when you’re gone
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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), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022). 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.
Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been widely printed in numerous journals, zines, and online publications. He is the author of 24 chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including “No Destination” (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2021) and “The Ants Crawl In Circles” (Whiskey City Press, 2022). He runs Between Shadows Press.
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