Issue #17.1 A Poem by Martha Silano
'Planet killer' asteroid found hiding in sun's glare may one day hit Earth —Space.com
You heard it right: a planet killer. Its name: 2022 APZ, heading toward the rock you’re spinning on. Another bit of news, a chance
to raise your chances of having to reach for a Xanax at 2 or 3 am, preventing that thing you can devolve into on account of dirty bombs,
the Thwaite shelf about to drop into the Antarctic Ocean, causing the Thwaite glacier to do the same. What my partner refers to
as the dark night of the soul, which I thought he stole from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crackup,” but no, it’s from a poem
by St. John of the Cross. In Spanish: La Nocha obscura del alma, which I kinda prefer, especially obscura. St. John’s poem is a narration of the journey of the soul
to the mystical union with God. Dark because, well, what else could it be? I mean, God being unknowable, the destination obscured. The article says there are 2,200 asteroids
that have a decent chance of hitting us, creating what they call an Asteroid Apocalypse. Are you having a spiritual crisis yet? I just want to say one thing, Space.com:
I know it’s your job to share news of the cosmos, but most of us don’t need to know that in 2013 a much smaller asteroid shattered thousands of windows
when it exploded over Chelyabinsk. That the sun hides many more than 2,000 asteroids. Maybe that’s why
we have the eyes that we do. Maybe we’re not supposed to see this stuff. Maybe in the dark is where we belong.
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Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books 2019). Previous collections include Reckless Lovely (2014) and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (2011), also from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Poetry Daily, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry series, among others. She teaches at Bellevue College.
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Issue #17.2 Two Poems by Patrick Meeds
Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
My mother worked nights. My father didn’t talk much Me? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I left the womb and it seems like I’m always late or very early, but never right on time. I wish I had four stomachs like a cow. Never mind, don’t ask. But if you insist on telling me about your childhood you’ll have to stop screaming. Scarecrow, don’t think I didn’t see you playing with those matches. Don’t be embarrassed, we all do it. In elementary school I used to have the urge to put my finger in the pencil sharpener. Sometimes during recess I could hear it calling to me. Now I know why graves are always six feet deep. It’s not like things are less complicated now. Take writing poems for example. It used to be so easy people did it with feathers. In those days all the words had wings. Even the heavy ones like anvil and boulder. Like shame and forgiveness.
Movies That Will Never Be Made
Is spending every Sunday ripping phone books in half the best way to spend your day of rest? Don’t you know that time is an animal that eats us little by little. That loves our soft mushy guts and that our bones are the only thing it won’t swallow. What feeds this secret strength inside you? What makes you grow taller in some places and wider in others? What makes that quivering feeling in your guts come and go? Maybe it’s all the time you’ve spent sitting in traffic while the construction worker in the orange vest was waving you forward and telling you to stop at the same time. Listen, I was always such a terrible student but this is how it was explained to me. Somewhere on the planet is the most perfect tree in the world and somewhere on the planet is the least perfect tree in the world and that’s just the way it is.
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Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. He has been previously published in Stone Canoe Literary Journal, the New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Atticus Review, Whiskey Island, Guernica, The Main Street Rag, and Nine Mile Review among others.
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Issue #17.3 Two Poems by Carson Pytell & Zebulon Huset
The Unbearable Weight of Winter Air
Snow ankle-deep and rising—
the wind drifts more than crystals
only now does the sky fall
because life is large and freezing
in the evening a weekend from
the end of the year. Pressure
clearly the culprit, and they
already named that a funny way.
The sky presses you with the gravity
of quadrillions of air molecules
you cannot see, thereby know.
Dictate the dirty trick of time—
annotate your past with deeds
to be seared in brains. Live
like you're surrounded by spies
doused in white—don't wait
until spring. Step carefully, but
moreso, remember to dance.
The Method of Breaking Down
Lost in the quantum sauce like a hapless (if charming) quark
waiting to be part of a whole. Is what they should have told us
accurate in the purest sense or more outdated hearsay
already? Quarks have units too, just like everything else. Missing
plancks that once bore photos of children taken by more than time,
have we found ourselves as them? But science shouldn't end on questions.
Should it? Should it? Should it? Can a method become an embrace?
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Carson Pytell is a writer outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in venues such as The Adirondack Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Fourth River, and The Heartland Review. He is Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, and his most recent chapbooks are Tomorrow Everyday, Yesterday Too (Anxiety Press, 2022), A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and Hate, Love, Hate, (Back Room Poetry, 2022).
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, The Southern Review, Fence, Texas Review and Atlanta Review among others. He also publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.
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Issue #17.4 Two Poems by Sarah Bartlett
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SARAH BARTLETT lives in Portland, OR. Her recent chapbook, Columbarium, was released in 2019 by dancing girl press. Her poetry collection, Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Is Out, was released in 2016 by Subito Press. She is the author of two chapbooks, My Only Living Relative, published by Phantom Books in 2015, and Freud Blah Blah Blah, published by Rye House Press in 2014. She is also co-author of two collaborative chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Deep Overstock, Eratio, PEN American Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, Lit, Boog City, Alice Blue, and elsewhere.
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Issue #17.5 Two Poems by KG Newman
Bathymetry
I only eat jolly ranchers on clear fall afternoons, like if my son brings two out in his palm when I pick him up from school.
We’ll suck them down on the drive home and discuss our plan to make aquanauts relevant again. I’ll convince him
it really is possible to measure each trench to the centimeter. Then we’ll see how high he can climb the pine out front, and if
it’s too high, we’ll figure out a way for him to stay a while. The rancher will be long dissolved. We’ll map oceans a different day:
There’ll be time for the ticker and simple lives later. Our priority is now seeing how to get oxygen down to the deepest deep.
Soaring Flight
Before the birds are gone I promise myself to stop thinking about history’s lost empires; I turn a sliver of soap over and over in my hand and try to fall asleep without worrying about relationships morphing sans their appropriate soundtracks.
Maybe this insecurity over crumbling structures is all because I only found out years later my father went to therapy, when I was here the whole time.
Maybe it’s because I want everything I have and lost and will have right here in my arms, me and my sons and my memories content as sleeping dogs tick-running under an afternoon sun. It’s perfect these scars are still a lovely pink.
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KG Newman is a sportswriter who covers the Broncos and Rockies for The Denver Post. His first three collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.
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Issue #17.6 A Poem by Joseph Bienvenu
Counting Every Drop
Some guy is walking a sky blue cruiser that’s maybe been rustled, but when he bends his lips to the bell of its horn and whispers, You ready to get your teeth cleaned? cariño’s found a new home. I checked the kitchen phonebook, but unfortunately there is no extermination service for the line of douchebags buying an insipid breakfast of sesame seed bagels, much less for the more sinister invasive species propping up the bar with their unfettered libidos for cryptocurrency. I know this world is barely kept afloat on a half inch of pour over, and even though you don’t like coffee, the gulfstream whistles caffeine into your pores just the same. Listen to the flights of tiger swallowtails sprouting from black alley ferns. Their trembling striped wings set the yellow brow of every bittersweet bum ablaze with the holy sun. Every day-drunk conversation with junkies, weirdos, and petty thieves is better than yet another grad school seminar. Sidewalk saints are moondogging metallic jazz, and spoon fingers of Sri Lankan geckos are clinging the acrylic of the lit up sign in front one of those dive bars that changed names so many times we can’t remember what it used to be called before we ever met each other in some Big Easy beta build where we both drank and swayed in larval forms in different corners of the dancefloor. And even though the light bulbs making those immigrant lizards glow pink have long since been replaced with LEDs, the light shines through pretty much the same.
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Joseph Bienvenu, author of Atom Parlor, Cocktail Poems, and Cottonmouth Incarnate, is a poet, graphic designer, translator, and educator. A New Orleans native,Joseph spends at least half the time eating or cooking, starts working on their Mardi Gras costume six months in advance, and would rather bike around the city on a fixie than drive. Joseph is also currently in the process of translating Italian poet Vittorio Reta’s poems into English. Visit josephbienvenu.com to find out more about their work.
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Issue #17.7 Two Poems by Kathleen Hellen
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Kathleen Hellen’s latest collection is Meet Me at the Bottom from Main Street Rag. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her poems have won the Thomas Merton poetry prize for Poetry of the Sacred and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review, as well as individual artist awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts. Her poems appeared recently in Another Chicago Magazine, Book of Matches, Hamilton Stone Review, Okay Donkey, Oversound, RHINO, Sixth Finch, Valley Voices, and elsewhere.
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Issue #17.8 A Poem by Cid Galicia
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Cid Galicia is a Mexican American poet who taught in New Orleans for over the past decade. He is in the final year of his MFA, through The University of Nebraska Omaha. He is a poetry editor for The Good Life Review, reader for The Kitchen Table Quarterly, and this year's FIRECRACKER Poetry Manuscript Awards. He was the recipient of the Richard Duggin Fellowship—granted for demonstrated excellence in writing, runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Helen W. Kenefick Poetry Prize, and most recently nominated for the Helen Hansen Outstanding Graduate Student Award. He has just returned back to New Orleans, from Los Angeles where interned as Assistant to The Editor (Kate Gale) for The Red Hen Press. His work has appeared in The Watershed Review, The Elevation Review, Trestle Ties, South Broadway Press, and Roi Faineant Press. He is excited to be attending the 2023 Residencies of Sundress Publications & The Kenyon Review. (@formal_poet)
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Issue #17.9 A Poem by Richard LeDue
We'll All Following Jolene
My carbon footprint is bigger than this page, my empty bottles quiet as ghosts who believe in themselves too much, the rotten fruit left in my fridge too long to be anything more than forgotten, and the girl in grade school we all had a crush on dead just the proper amount of time that we aren't supposed to feel sad anymore.
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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He has been published both online and in print. He is the author of seven books of poetry. His latest book, “Everyday Failure,” was released by Alien Buddha Press in October 2022.
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Issue #17.10 A Poem by Ace Boggess
Zagajewski
I’m a different person reading poems by Adam Zagajewski than when filling out job applications. In the first case, I climb inside my head, powerful & whole, ready to raze the city to save it. It’s as though my passion outweighs fear: dark, desperate— I muse on what I might do
or should’ve done. For the second role, I feel like a third clown in Hamlet, one too many diggers in the hole, my jokes striking harsh tones on paper while I list professional history, criminal background, education which is sound, although another mask to wear.
Sometimes I can’t spell my name, the page in front of me drifting like a blur of dirt kicked up by tanks. I’m at home in poems about wars I never needed to survive. How does one find work at being sensitive to poetry?
I need my Honoris causa in empathy to help me land a job mapping solemn lines on faces of clients who don’t speak my language or know a thing about history.
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Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
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Issue #17.11 A Poem by Thomas Hobohm
12:32am
My face has been drawn all day by the charcoal and the eraser copper in the jaws of my cottonmouth
One slithering big bend sunset you swung the beam of your flashlight across my forehead, and I told you when he sheds his diamonds, it stings We still had miles to go before we reached black mountain’s brilliant peak
For you I drank all the pineapple juice and loved it. For you I found crispy pears cold sweet slices made mushy in your mouth bite down hard, flex those cheekbones baby boy I can take it I can
see some birds playing hopscotch on the sidewalk stoop down with my camera, a reflex from the days when I could still send you—
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Thomas Hobohm lives in San Francisco, but grew up in Texas. They never learned how to drive. They can be found at: https://www.thomashobohm.com/.
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