Issue #18.1 A Poem by Ann Pedone
HER-
I had had to pee for at least an hour & couldn’t find a bathroom so I walked
the
entire really long length of the parking lot & when I finally found a spot that looked good I pulled down my under-
wear & squatted behind a kind of large bush. The job
was finally done & I really like this particu-
lar pair of panties & didn’t want to throw them away so I balled them up & was just shoving
them into my bag when I saw this woman she was sitting all alone in the front seat of her car She had the door wide open & p-
robably the biggest plastic bottle I’d ever seen propped up very neatly right there on the seat next to her
&
I know this is going to sound weird post- Trump & every- thing but for some reason she kept touching it, rubb- ing it as though it were a very
small animal or a b-
aby or I guess some really really private part of herself
I couldn’t tell whether or not she rea- lized it but her shoes were on the ROOF of the car Which, it goes w/o saying was the whole of the 20th
century
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Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring, 2023 Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (2022, Press 53), as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, 2River, The Dialogist, Barrow Street, and New York Quarterly. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared as Best American Poetry’s “Pick of the Week”. Ann graduated from Bard College and has a Master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley.
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Issue #18.2 A Poem by Mark Jackley
WE NEED TO TALK, YOU SAID
and as you steered the conversation all the while I pictured a school bus we once saw sliding on black ice, sweeping across the road like a second hand, I recalled how we both felt the pulse, the moment’s love and blood, throbbing from the neon mustard color field on wheels, and I remember that you murmured Please god no, and later you spoke of Rothko, wondering if he painted heartbeats
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Mark Jackley lives in northwestern Virginia. His poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Sugar House Review, Natural Bridge, and other journals. Main Street Rag Press recently published his book of poems Many Suns Will Rise.
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Issue #18.3 A Poem by Alex Carrigan
Garcelle Beauvais Wields a Golden Shovel During the Apocalypse
You don’t need me to protect you, Erika, but you should know my strength. You should know I sprout amethyst wings when my heart rate increases. I don’t need to sprint when I would rather soar. It may surprise you that I have this ability; I’m sure that for you and the others to see my poise and wingspan, I’m just an object you make a mockery of or make into this week’s running gag. You can’t cage me in a Birkin you glance at with an envious look, nor can you try to convince America I’m another bad
casting choice. Truthfully, I glided over the ocean while you turned green from the rocking of the boat. You may think you can bring shears to try and pluck my feathers like your friends do, but you can’t even handle the spice of a margarita that I flavored with saltwater. Go ahead and try your best to stitch on wings made from horsehair, and you can try your best to knock me to the ground, but I choose to leave the sky on my own.
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Alex Carrigan (he/him; @carriganak) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. His debut poetry chapbook, May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), was longlisted for Perennial Press' 2022 Chapbook Awards. He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Barrelhouse, Sage Cigarettes (Best of the Net Nominee, 2023), ‘Stories About Penises’ (Guts Publishing, 2019), and more. For more, visit carriganak.wordpress.com.
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Issue #18.4 A Poem by Gunilla T. Kester
Sisters
I wish, and I don’t wish, my sister would stay away.
If she returns, we’ll have to share corners, sharp crystals she wears under her skin.
She runs with a hammer and a ghost. How to trade peace in such a place?
Biting the dark, a young man raises his hand to greet her.
I tried a prayer. It cut right through like a corkscrew, spilling the wine.
No rain this evening and only a pattern of leaves on my hand.
Mother sleeps on the blue bed, father not yet back from war.
Sand and dust in layers by our door when I hang words on the clothesline.
While they shrink and dry, I must bury the birds, pretty birds, red and golden.
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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.
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Issue #18.5 Four Poems by Joshua C. Pipkins
Preaching to Ravens
It was dawn when we waded into the moon-lake not knowing that we were children that needed to be saved by God.
The quiet prophet spoke in riddles, took our feathers & held us below the moon-water, where all our practices became like knives, & our nature back-bent screamed against the black sun.
I am not your messiah, the prophet said. I am not your drowning god, but a messenger sent to warn you against yourselves.
We took turns staring into the prophet’s eyes, beak to nose, our wings pushing against the sweetness of his flesh, & collectively we cried out
to become no longer birds, but men pretending to be lions.
My Mother Says There Is No Milk In The Refrigerator
Under the laurel wreath, I assess the nature of my hands: beautiful and dirty. Tonight The Bull says, come. I follow him down the staircase not knowing the sound of my own mother’s voice. My mother says, Joshua, there is no milk in the refrigerator. I say, I know, and would you like me to go get some? Her face becomes no one, her body becomes nothing. Fata Morgana. The Bull cackles. I assess my hands again: beautiful and dirty, dirty and manic, manic and violent. The Bull is proud.
I Drank The Whole Beast Down
I’ll drink the whole beast down like any other spirit. I’ll let it claw. Howl. Scrape. I’ll let it nestle buoyant in the sea of these child-ribs. Whenever I hum a song I will accept its voice, hoarse and familiar, like the voice of my father’s father, who put down his bottle of brandy and cried for the son he abandoned. He may not have been worthy, but I am, Lord, I spread my body across this page so that I may antagonize this beast within me. I expose my body to you, Lord, so that the pain might make something beautiful of me. Beautiful enough to swallow, and beautiful enough to be shat out again for another’s rumination, for another’s father’s father to hear and say, I choose to drink this whole beast down. I choose to be a hero.
Elegy of Healing
Spring comes in like a lion Roaring Deadly.
I am not who I was in autumn. I witnessed the coital swallowing of decision How the flesh of seasons draw in to devour all childhood innocence Until a man becomes all but numb in his heart.
Summer will be a tidal wave Sudden Annihilating.
I’m sorry to confess I will have moved on without you. So forgive me. The will of a poet is only as strong As his passion for the dead.
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Joshua C. Pipkins is an African-American poet based in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of A Quiet God Howling Over Hymns, a self-published chapbook made in collaboration with Greek artist Dimitri Vasilakis. Joshua is studying Creative Writing at the University of Memphis.
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Issue #18.6 A Poem by Mike James
Mike James makes his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has published in hundreds of magazines, large and small, and has performed his poetry at universities and other venues throughout the country. He has been nominated for multiple Pushcarts, as well as for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His many poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) Redhawk recently published his 20th collection, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021.
Issue #18.7 Two Poems by Joshua Merchant
Hook Decay
when peter moved to the east wendy didn’t yell at him as often and only from inside the house. he had a full beard and at least three kids he was responsible for. I can’t tell you which one was his but he loved them. all of them. self included. one day, he forgot how to fly and wendy taught his clothes to soar instead. one day he forgot he was falling / in the middle
of the street and I watched my brother grow twice his size, not in age, but in fists to cuffs unseen by even our parents and we cried for him, even my brother before he bathed pan’s bare back in asphalt across the street from the middle school we were told to never attend until eventually we too would lose our frequent flyer miles, landing on jeans ripped behind the ankle as we reminded each other we could still float on our way to class.
As Transfers of the Truant
the bus driver slowly passes a crowd. another reason to laugh through the fear of a tally mark air brushed or worse, your brother being punished for doing what the elders preach- standing in code and waiting for punishment by bullet or pink slip
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Joshua Merchant (they / them) is a Black Queer native of East Oakland exploring what it means to be human as an intersectional being. A lot of what they’ve been exploring as of late has been in the realm of loving and what it means while processing trauma, loss, heartbreak. They feel as though as a people, especially those of us more marginalized than others, it has become too common to deny access to our true source of power as a means of feeling powerful. A collective trauma response if you will. However, they’ve come to recognize with harsh lessons and divine grace that without showing up for ourselves and each other, everything else is null and void. Innately, everything Merchant writes is a love letter to their people. Because of this they've had the honor to witness their work being held, understood and published or forthcoming in literary journals such as 580Split, Anvil Tongue Books, Heart Balm, Verum Literary Press, Corporeal, Spiritus Mundi Review, Snow Flake Magazine, Roi Faineant Literary Press, and elsewhere.
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Issue #18.8 A Poem by Steven Searcy
American Spring
All the azaleas’ gaudy vibrance drops on the moist lawns like piles of vomit, like massive hunks of meat and cooking oil spiked with alcohol and commodity crops
erupting from a ravaged gullet, rush- ing down to mingle in the sewers. Such sweet goodness overabounding, rotting, lit- tering the landscape in heaps of bright mush.
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Steven Searcy lives with his wife and four sons in Atlanta, GA, where he works as an engineer in fiber optic telecommunications. His poetry has been published in Ekstasis, Boats Against the Current, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Amethyst Review, among others.
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Issue #18.9 A Poem by Ken Meisel
Poem w/ Vengeance & Love in it
After the police arrived, muscled folks away, the sweetness happened. I’ll get to that later.
In those days the gray sky was pulpy, & the sad trees were disfigured, grotesque, & the bars, along the street, were unafraid & that was why men fought until they were misshapen, ugly, like vegetables, & the jukeboxes, momentous, blasted on until all the violence, like music, softened, petered out, & someone would stumble out the door, whistling “You’re All I Need,” or “Chasing Rainbows.” & someone big, a man in a cap would fling his arm over another man, like comrades & they’d lumber off to a parked car around the corner, laughing it all off.
& I’ll tell you one more secret: they loved each other, the men there who worked by day, alongside each other as pipe fitters, as carpenters, as painters, & the fights were just disgracious, unjustified expressions of that worldlessness in them, that’s all, & that’s all you need to know.
&
this was when we were alone, in a room. He stripped his shirt off, dense with sweat & somebody’s blood & his eyes thick with tears.
& I held him as he cried, & it was too late. & I poured him strong coffee & we sat, two men, alone as two far-off stars a mile into each other’s light beam & all the dark between them, on them, cavernous, but usual.
& when two men cry against an impotence, when they punch with a vengeance until they bleed, people move away, they flee, & it’s just the rage of not knowing something yet,
& people get scared of it, they call the police & it’s because men’s violence is veiled & inborn.
& that’s why one throws stars against a ceiling while the other hurls rocks against a face & here’s the softer part: men feel a vague self-hatred until somebody tells them they are beautiful &, when that happens, usually when they are laying still in a bed, a leg curled under a sheet & a lover there so struck by the languid beauty of it, tells him, “you, sir, are as beautiful as a streak of summer honey,” most men long to hear it but they can’t, or won’t, because they are indefinite, & undecided as to what they are
& here’s the sweeter part: when I told him his life was a worthy root tuber, something dug deep & rooted in dirt &, yet,
clear & luminous, & with white skin trying with all its might to be in the light of a day without all the self-hatred, he put his head in his large, wounded hands & cried until the
coffee pot interrupted us & he stood up, said, “enough.” & later, when we saw one another
at the Flame Restaurant, him, stirring through oatmeal & me, sipping a coffee & reading Camus’ Essays, he didn’t say anything to me.
He just smiled, grinned deep down. Indeed.
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Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Crab Creek Review and Trampoline.
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Issue #18.10 Three Poems by Nikki Ummel
grand bay, mississippi
bag after bag shucked, each family perched atop their own shell hill. every family to themselves, the day almost done. after the kids played king of the hill, raced to the top and plummeted back down, tyrants of their own oyster mounds, they handpicked the prettiest shells to peddle roadside on the way to town, gimmicks for traveling salesmen, beach-bound tourists. welcome to grand bay, baby, they cooed. the land of kings.
Dream Sequence
A scrapbook, so big it spills into both our laps. We face my front yard, scattered with pumpkins and aluminum ghosts. Our knees touch. Our butts are on the top porch step. You sift through the pages, point to various photos. Me, graduating. Me, buying a house. Me, writing a book. You start to appear in the photos as we look at them, and it doesn’t seem strange. Of course you were there. Of course you were. You laugh with your whole face, and when you smile, I see all of your teeth. I’ve been told my whole life I have that smile, those teeth. You hold my hand. We watch the neighbors come and go. We sit like that a long time. Like mother and daughter.
Still Here
I am bone white, laid bare. Hammered earth, a teeming mud slush. I want to stop the drip from my nose, my eyes. The man left the gate wide, flared his feathered crown, fled. The taste of steel, his palm prints, the tang of fear twisting him like woodsmoke and wind. In order to feel held, he needed to hold me down.
The butterfly yellow and clean dips slowly before climbing the tree. I lay on the ground, cracked open. Nothing to see, just a woman pulling her insides out by a string. Hello. I am still here.
Interview with Nikki Ummel by Meghan Sullivan
Introduction:
Nikki Ummel is a queer writer and educator currently living in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans. Nikki spends her days writing poems, going on early morning runs, scratching her dog Cubby’s belly, and organizing events for LMNL, a creative writing arts organization in the Crescent City. Nikki’s first chapbook, Hush, was published through Belle Point Press in October 2022. The collection gives us an eye into Nikki’s world as the aunt of Elah, resident to Dauphine St., and as a human navigating her own “river of flesh” from Sarasota to Louisiana. On January 23rd, 2023, Nikki was generous enough to answer some questions about the work.
The first thing I notice when I open the pages of Hush is the table of contents. The collection’s thirteen poems are divided into two respective sections. What motivated the decision to split the chapook into two sections? And what motivated the choice to leave the section unnamed?
Well, it is only a chapbook so naming the sections would be a bit extra seeing as how short they are! The first section is very much focused on family whereas the second section transitions to identity and place.
The title of the collection, Hush, first appears as the last word in “Self-Portrait with My Sister’s Will.” How did you decide on the title?
The word “hush” appears often in my work. It felt like a fitting title given the quiet nature of many of these poems as well as the forced quiet-- the repressed giggled in “My Sister’s Double Mastectomy,” the swallowed sobs of “Self-Portrait with My Sister’s Will.” Even the sexual assault in “Sarasota, 2010” is hushed. Quiet is both liberating and oppressive, and I think both are found in this collection.
Let’s dive into some content. Section One touches upon themes of both womanhood and innocence. I was especially interested in how womanhood appears, particularly with the questions, “What makes a woman?” in “My Sister's Double Mastectomy” and “Am I blessed amongst women?” in “Eleven.” I am reminded of a Lucille Clifton quote,“I think that women have some responsibility to say something about these things as being part of the human condition.” How does your identity as a woman influence your writing?
My writing is often based on my experiences so my identities are often folded into my writing. Being a woman is one of many identities I encompass, but over the last few years, it has continued to be politicized and polarized. Women’s bodies, especially so. I was listening to Candace Owens in an interview last night where she stated that women entering the workforce is one of the worst things that has happened to our country. You can’t make this shit up. As long as women are treated as less-than, as subhuman, as a different class of being, I will write about it. I don’t know how not to; it is a part of who I am.
It is also apparent that family is a driving theme in the first half of the collection. What has the experience of writing and publishing poems about real people been like?
I write about my family a lot because of how significant they are in my life and the shaping of who I am, my psychology. Both of my parents were addicts who died fairly traumatically before I was 25 years old. We’re not close with anyone else in our family, who all lived far away from us. Because of this, my siblings and I grew really close, particularly me and my sister, who had kids at a very young age. I visit as often as I can, sometimes monthly, and leaving is always difficult. I often feel torn and without a home. These things impact me, my thinking, my writing. Though I need to emphasize that what is on the page is poetic truth, not historic truth. While I often start from lived experience, I do not always end there, as poems become a living thing with their own currents and reasons. I caution readers to never assume what they’re reading is the poet’s truth, but the poem’s truth, and conflating the two is dangerous and foolhardy.
In your poem “And He Takes and He Takes and He Takes” we see the names Tess and Elah. In other poems, such as “Self-Portrait with Piano: A Duplex” there is a “he” that appears and is left unnamed. Why is name important to some poems and not others?
In “And He Takes and He Takes and He Takes,” I am writing about my sister (Tessa) and my niece (Elah) and my niece’s growth condition, so naming them feels important to the piece. In “Self-Portrait with Piano: A Duplex” and other poems that I have written that center sexual assault, I’ve not named the perpetrator, in part because the “he” doesn’t matter-- anyone is capable of being “he,” and “he” changes for each reader.
While the first section of the chapbook has to do with relationships, relationships with family, with innocence, and with womanhood, the second section seems united by a strong sense of setting. Why is setting important here?
Many of the poems in this collection were written while living in New Orleans or are a memory of living somewhere else (Florida). New Orleans is such a unique and alive place that it only makes sense to let New Orleans into the poem whenever and however it wants to be here. Place, like family, impacts and shapes who we are. I write about where I am. I live on Dauphine St, off Fats Domino Ave and St. Claude in the Lower Ninth Ward. I’m not writing about St. Charles or Claiborne because I don’t live in those areas; that wouldn’t be authentic or genuine. To me, that matters.
We start the collection with “rivers of flesh” and finish with “trees clapping their hands.” It is clear that nature is integral to your poetry. How do you account for nature when writing?
We are a part of nature and nature is a part of us, despite these boxes of concrete we erect to separate us. I don’t think I can write a poem without observing the world around me.
I want to wrap up with some threads I noticed throughout the collection. Perhaps most notably in the arena of titles, three of the thirteen poems in this collection are entitled, “Self Portrait of__” What work does this title do?
These poems situate my poet-self in a specific time or place, creating an artist-as-art moment that we see replicated throughout other artistic mediums. It is a special moment but not one to take lightly.
Finally, I am curious about the evolution of the poems in these collections. As this is your first published collection, it must have been somewhat new to go back and forth with an editor on final decisions for the chapbook. What was this collaboration like?
Honestly, working with Casie Dodd was a dream and much easier than working with my MFA thesis committee! The only real back and forth we had was with the cover and ultimately we decided on an image that we were both content with, that represented the collection well, and I must say, I’m glad she pushed back on my suggestions because the image we settled on is perfect. I cannot recommend Casie or Belle Point Press enough. They’re doing great work.
Conclusion:
Ummel offers sage advice to writers and readers alike: write from a place of honesty, but don't get too comfortable there. While her poems may start from the truest places of human experience–love for a niece, experiences of sexual assault, the beauty of nature, it is not necessary for them to end up there. While being authentic and genuine is important, it is just as important to let a poem live in a house of its own. And us readers? Well, we’re welcome to climb into a dolphin blue attic window to nest there for a while, join Ummel in her travels and meditations, so long as we “hush.”
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Nikki Ummel is a queer artist, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press’ In the Tempered Dark, and others. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.
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