Issue #25.1 A Double Issue: Glen Armstrong and Russell Rowland
A Poem by Glen Armstrong
Spider Legs and Churchgoers
The rain is unexpected though the talk of rain
is constant. Conversation, hell,
all human connection has overplayed its hand.
Most of the songs about hands and rain
are sung by children. Fingers turn into spider
legs and churchgoers. Rain makes progress
difficult. There are drainpipes
and marriages that never made sense.
There are children whose questions
go unanswered.
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Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. His latest book is Night School: Selected Early Poems.
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A Poem by Russell Rowland
Percussionists
Not much birdsong nowadays from the hardwoods or evergreens; possibly little for birds to sing about—
mates and territories all settled for the season, choir reduced to soloists anyway.
Yet that woodpecker cohort— Pileated, Downy, Hairy, Flicker, Sapsucker— are still at it, up in the Ossipees,
so we hear percussion now, instead of arias and barcarolles,
tunes I could never carry. But while I’m no Flicker, Downy, or Hairy, I have their urge to hunt-and-peck,
their well-traveled aptitude for resonance, and a hammer for a head.
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Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Red Eft Review, Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.
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Issue #25.2 A Double Issue: Dolapo Demuren and Ericka Clay
A Poem by Dolapo Demuren
Summer was Trayvon’s Body and Trayvon was Gone
—for Trayvon Martin
While I study abroad in Italy, I am ill with a feeling I brought across the sea. Everybody is hiding something; I try too. In the Uffizi, the hallway leads my class to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus– I study the other tourists— each one looking for something they’ve read, each marveling at the scale of the painting, each quiet—
swallowing: the giant pearl-white scallop shell carrying the deity to the island of Cyprus, the rose-pink floral cloak blown helpless over her right-side, her white breasts, the light caught in the thick net of her hair. But, her whole body is improbable— not because it is full-grown at birth or because her golden-ivory skin is too quiet—
it’s the posture of the goddess’ stance places too much weight on the left leg— she would tumble into the waters, pale her elongated neck, ruin the unnatural fall of her shoulders. Maybe that’s why white flowers dally at her left like spring snow, or why her body, and all the other ones in this quiet painted world, is without
a shadow. Only the scallop shell casts one, over the shivering waves. Only a few miles from here, onlookers pondered me near the Ponte Santa Trinita, like others who watched me at the Pallazo Strozzi and San Marco, who studied me like I was a shadow caught moving on camera, free of its master. Like I was without
Trayvon. Who was gone. Who knows the limp in my walk, the tired fists in my head, the fever of silence in my chest the heavy light of memory that summons a body drawn by heart– when I slip out of the exhibit
who notices the exit wounds.
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Dolapo Demuren is a Nigerian-American writer from the Washington D.C. area. He received his B.A. in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, M.F.A. from Columbia University, and Ed.D from the University of Southern California. His honors include a fellowship from the Cave Canem Foundation and The Academy for Teachers, as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His poems and other writings are featured in the Adroit Journal, On the Seawall, Frogpond Journal, Prelude Magazine, and Small Orange Journal. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland College Park, where he is the associate director of the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House and a lecturer for the College of Arts and Humanities.
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A Poem by Ericka Clay
I Can No Longer Hear the Music
It’s You, me, and nothing
But no noise and the silence
That comes from watching
Everything I can’t control.
I call it meditation,
My husband calls it “anxiety,”
My daily offer, my daily sacrifice
At Your feet. The fool I was,
Once young and in love with You,
And now I’m old and in love
With You, feeling out the nooks
And crannies of lifelong devotion
And skin rippled with my heart’s
Regret. But I don’t regret jumping
Into the only relationship
That has withstood my (un)doing
Because of everything You did,
and do, and will always do,
Even when I sit and wonder
Why I can no longer hear the music.
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Ericka Clay is a published novelist and poet. As a former atheist turned believer, she seeks to write raw, real, relatable books that have a heart for Jesus. She's been awarded several times by Writer's Digest for her short fiction pieces and has just published her fourth novel, A Bird Alone. She lives in Northwest Arkansas with her husband, daughter, and an insatiable need to push buttons, both figuratively and literally. You can learn more about Ericka at erickaclay.com.
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Issue #25.3 A Double Issue: Jennifer Klein and Tohm Bakelas
A Poem by Jennifer Klein
Jackfruits
Jackfruits take hold of my eyes like a glare But one I wield- like a lightsaber My mind finally at peace Neuron-deep In the mysticism of bubbleless gum
Vegan this, vegan that How could animal death lead me here? Cows crying, pigs squealing Future ghosts haunted my teeth To sink into plant ovaries year after year
There’s no way my own ovaries taste this good The teratoma that consumed one Might beg to differ But it was born into a jackfruitless existence And the poor thing didn’t even know it
This is a secret language Obscure fruits in the west Animal lovers are fluent in it A perfume to chase away Incessant doom attacking their nest
Sensitive, sensitive! Why do us soyfolk care so much? Blood and guts is what makes people tough But little does it know It can be ripped apart by love
Forbidden fruit is easy mode Rare ones love you while they can Jackfruits love you, animals love you Only one is killed to be ripped apart In your hands
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Jennifer Klein is a writer, musician, and artist. Poetry is one of her favorite ways to make social commentary and merge her inner and outer worlds. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Hawai`i Pacific Review, Fahmidan Journal, Bombfire, Green Ink Poetry, and others. She received a bachelor’s degree in English with minors in Dutch Studies and Norwegian from Indiana University Bloomington.
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A Poem by Tohm Bakelas
“clarity”
Call it the Purkinje effect, but the leaves on Parks Road might as well have been painted by Van Gogh’s ghost this afternoon.
And perhaps that’s what makes grey days (such as this) favorable to poets—we’re forced to face the colors of life we desperately try avoiding.
As if those colors will somehow cause us to lose our allure to the shadows, like our fixation with death and darkness will somehow dissipate.
Tonight, dry your eyes by the fire. We need all the clarity we can get.
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Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a New Jersey psychiatric hospital. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world, including: Cardinal Sins Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Ignatian Literary Journal, Mantis, Pinyon, Poetry South, Red Coyote, the Roanoke Review, and US 1 Worksheets. He is the author of “Cleaning the Gutters of Hell” (Zeitgeist Press, 2023) and “The Ants Crawl in Circles” (Bone Machine, Inc., 2024).
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Issue #25.4 A Double Issue: Ken Meisel and Rebecca Collins
A Poem by Ken Meisel
Love During War Time
She drove a rusted yellow 74’ Datsun 210 and wore a faux mink coat when she’d visit me. Sometimes she’d come over with nothing under the fake
mink coat. Sometimes she’d drive through the Devil’s Night Fires when Detroit burned its buildings down like so many structures clutched by rage.
She’d exclaim to me that the burning buildings, set to flame like Halloween castles, hurled hot black cinders down over the freeway. They bless me with
death, she’d say. I’d meet her at the gate, let her in and we’d light a bowl, hit the tequila and take the hard week to bed with us. She had a St. Barbara
statue glued to her dashboard. In the saint’s right hand, a goblet as the Holy Grail. And in her left hand, a sword. This is love during war time, she’d say.
Put that record on again. We need the Holy Grail and a sharp sword. Let’s get down and deep again because a city will fuck you and assassinate you at
the same time, at its own whim mind you, so put that record on again. And I would. Psycho Killer too. Don’t Worry About the Government. David
Byrne. That cool chick bass player, Tina Weymouth. What a band. I tried to tell myself I wasn’t falling in any kind of love with her – the woman in a
faux mink coat. She only loved ideas. And to boot she was an art school model. And mostly preferred hanging out with bands. You ought to know
better to stand near the window, she’d say to me afterwards. Gun shots, snipers, vapor trail bullets, whatever. This is love during war time. Her lips
were rouged. We’d just been kissing across the bed and my face was rouged too. She was laying across the bed, naked, the sheets half crossed over her
body so I could see the same vast nakedness a painter would see . . . and then ask her to model on a bed in a dirty studio. She laughed at the lipstick
on my face. Heard about Houston, heard about Detroit, heard about Pittsburgh, PA? she’d mouth as the record – Love During War Time by
Talking Heads – spun on. She’d light up a cigarette. I’d bring the empty tequila bottle over to her. Have her put the top of the bottle to her mouth
and sing the words into it. So that I could capture the fog of her voice in a bottle. She’s in the bottle. Get that voice in there like wet tequila. Blow it
deep down into the bottom of the bottle so I can watch it swirl like a hurricane in there. More gun shots, more ambulance squealing, more street
fights and call and response nonsense going on below. A testy couple outside the door quarreling over who had the keys to let them into their
apartment next door. We’d start kissing again and then fucking and then afterwards we’d cook up some spaghetti and then wrap ourselves in blankets
and watch Taxi Driver with Robert DeNiro and then catch some TV Bible show blazing out of Texas and then we’d start it up again –
it would be after midnight – for another round of hot love during war time.
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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 latest 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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Three Poems by Rebecca Collins
Lavender Roses
Each petal I am layered into a lavender rose,
now drying, now fresh from that death,
my point of rising through the sweet merge of silk and water…
Cypresses
Tower-cones guard freedom,
eye-cones watch,
looseness harbors insides that could echo in caves
sending me out into all waves of existence…
Moths
We are moths,
one laying out cream-spotted brown, one fluttering red,
a surprising earth and sunrise equal in this moment.
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At age 44, Rebecca wrote in Italian and published her first book, Tre raccolte poetiche (Midgard Editrice, October 2022, reprints September 2023). Its free-form poems were mostly born in Perugia, Italia, where she lived on and off for almost one year. Since September 2023, she has been living in Sakartvelo (the country of Georgia), which has transformed her and therefore become home. Her poem "Fish" was published in Cosmic Daffodil Journal's ebook, Horoscopes. She also wrote the lyrics and tune for the Christian song "I Come to You", and one of Outside the Box’s poets, Shashanna Hummer, is writing the music.
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Issue #25.5 A Double Issue: Ed Ruzicka and A. A. Gunther
A Poem by Ed Ruzicka
Years Before He Broke Big
for Randolph Thomas
He was just a kerchiefed punk from Moab, UT when I saw him crushed down into chords as he plucked a pawn-shop resonator in the back Of a Twelfth Street bar nobody cared about. Banged, soft-soloed, wailed with enough soul to squeeze blood out of a beet. When you come from pain and go toward pain When you sleep in a Toyota from Moab to Fort Worth to Savannah and back again the hard way, some nights you might sing pure as a sedge wren beside morning glory On chain link fencing just before Dawn tops over the roof lines.
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The lightning-cracked pages of Ed Ruzicka’s third, full-length book of poems, "Squalls" (Kelsay Books), is due for a March release. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary and many other literary publications. Ed lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge, LA.
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A Poem by A. A. Gunther
Dry Drowning
We gave you everything that you could want,
And all we asked of you was not to hurt.
When did we falter? Where did we desert?
Pronounce the fatal words, that they may haunt
Us two that failed the only vital task
We ever in our folly undertook:
What in our blindness did we overlook?
What question did we ask, or fail to ask?
We were awake all night and every night,
Caulking each leak we found within the boat,
Until, all confident that we would float,
We fell asleep in dawn’s unwinding light,
And while, yet dreaming, to our children clung, The one lay dead of water in the lung.
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A. A. Gunther is a Manhattan legal writer by day and a Long Island poet by night. Her short fiction can be found in Dappled Things, while her poetry appears in Ekstasis, The Friday Poem, Mezzo Cammin, New Verse Review and ONE ART and is forthcoming in Merion West and elsewhere. She has eight younger siblings, at least two of whom can vouch for her character.
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Issue #25.6 A Double Issue: Gunilla T. Kester and Simon Ravenscroft
A Poem by Gunilla T. Kester
Better Not
Better not return to the old ways when we knew where we and others we met grew up by their pronounced or swallowed vowels, consonants, making them buzz, burr, brighten or zip our ears with a clang, or their manners, a certain hand gesture older than Alexander the Great and most of all the shoes, those old gossips.
At the grill bar by the train-station we laughed at the robust ugly shoes of the Americans yet gave them beer so they would talk to us: English, the gate and the port to out and away. At night we drove to the local airport and sat in the empty bleachers and waved at the planes, dreaming of America, large brown paper bags filled with food we saw and smelled in the movies.
Coming home, the sad drinking man had tripped on our doorstep again, was bloody and weeping. Better not feel again stones so old they grow like cold skin. Trees wrapped in furs. Clouds kissing windows and smoking on balconies. Copper roofs climbing slowly toward heaven. Grass locked under leaves, a hidden fugitive. Oh, City of Youth —in my mind you hold me still.
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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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A Poem by Simon Ravenscroft
The Waters of the Lower Palaeolithic
Found in situ: an ovate handaxe, a thinning flake, a scraper, a hammerstone and fragments, a retouched flint flake. Evidence suggests the prevalence in these parts of alder and pine, with areas of oak, elm, and hornbeam. Galingale, buttercup, and nettle made a home in the fen and the reedswamp, company for water-starwort, water lilies, bulrushes, and others. Chillier by 3° C. A million years, give or take, have slipped by.
Today the fields around Grantchester still flood from time to time. The meadows turn to glass and the sky is in them, like the past. All the light is changed. Tame dogs burst through the shallow floodwaters in chase of sticks. Photographers appear in waders, paparazzi for the egret and cormorant. We are told that cranes are returning, slowly, and the eagle of the white tail, seen even inland near St Edmundsbury. I am from the Vale of White Horse and miss those hills in this flat country but I love how the light plays on the sheets of watery glass when the flat land floods, making it into a mirror of heaven.
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Simon Ravenscroft lives in Cambridge, England, and teaches and writes in the arts and humanities. He is a Fellow of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He has published variously, and recent work has appeared at Meniscus, Red Ogre Review, Swifts & Slows quarterly, JAKE, Roi Fainéant, and Ink Sweat & Tears, among others.
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Issue #25.7 A Double Issue: Amit Majmudar and Daniel Fitzpatrick
A Poem by Amit Majmudar
Castrati
You will sing like an angel, the impresario with the scissors used to whisper, I promise. A boy eunuch voiced Vivaldi’s Beatus vir, mother-of-pearl voicebox full of grace notes, venom sac empty between his long, hairless thighs. Sometimes, in a touristy sacristy, the sunscreen smell and background noise go dim. I hear the svelte castrati of the mind in unison, their ballast cut free, silk ribbons endlessly unfurling from their open mouths. My shoulderblades ache, nostalgic for the wings they never were, evolutionary phantom pain. What sacrifices would I make for my art? Would I give my eyes, like Borges? My reason, like Holderlin? My art itself, like Gogol locking the second half of Dead Souls in the safe of his fireplace? When Parzival comes to the castle of the Grail, the king gets wheeled out to the dinner table. He has a groin wound. It is weeping. He is weeping. Still, the young knight, pure at heart, close to the holy goal, can’t bring himself to ask about that yeasty rose. What hurts? How can I help? He doesn’t want to seem effeminate. He doesn’t want to wound the man’s pride. Knight and king, not nurse and patient. But that was the test all along. Could he sever himself from the twin fruits of the body’s poison tree and voice his pity in a seraphic falsetto? Could he change his timber, make it tender, boylike, girllike, singing consolations as he snipped away the gauze?
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Amit Majmudar’s recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and a poetry collection, tentatively titled In the Mother Tongue (Knopf, 2026).
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Two Poems by Daniel Fitzpatrick
Good News
There, that twinge, that’s Barnard’s star stitching up my side. Last week it was the Crab Nebula in my ears. Can solar wind shake the hidden garden, let fall with all the cosmic flood beating upon our heads the seeds to ask again who are we to ask again who put the word in whose mouth? Show me the reindeer’s words. Let me see seeing. Stand outside the theory, then the theorizer, then see who’s laughing. Help me, Carl Sagan. You’re our only hope. As if the cosmic heart skipped every beat between the fire at Alexandria and the finger of Galileo. Thing: a walrus ivory carving of a man and bear wheeling arm in arm for death. Fact: this is a lie. Bear has always already won. Fact: bear leaves no monument to his defeat, no thing to ponder as salmon strips cure in the sun at the door of the cave. Chatter on in orbit. Admire these dyadic energies. And all the while who is that looking back from the window of that craft bound for Pluto?
The Angel of Lligat Comes to Tampa
There is bread in a basket and then a bear and a gazelle. I am angelic, inclined to help in quiet just to make the world a better place, you know, for my children’s children. I am awaiting a glimpse. Wait till she turns a little, just a little more to the right and I am a cormorant hulking at the peak of a gazebo. I swim with gators like a nightmare and the sun dries my wings. I turn my back on it, and my yellow charnel mouth is cracked, pointing to the jacarandas. I am of all most pitiable, of all most gosh darn magnificent. Yes, that’s true. Often I pretend to be a farmer but today I’ve mounted an especially violent assault on my frontal cortex, having just sent Benjy back the way he wants to go around the square. America is drooling happiness. America is up against it. America does not know what to say but that, of course, has never been the problem.
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Danny Fitzpatrick is the author of the collection Yonder in the Sun and the editor of Joie de Vivre.
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Issue #25.8 A Triple Issue: Matt Dennison, LC Gutierrez, Phil Flott
A Poem by Matt Dennison
Guru
I once worked in a restaurant
owned by the local religious
commune whose guru had been
a member of the university
business fraternity before going
to India and seeing the light.
After his second trip he returned
a full vegetarian celibate guru
so all his followers immediately
gave up meat and sex and gave him
all their money after working
in the restaurant ten hours a day
for free.
I considered them fools,
especially after seeing
the guru’s stunning,
hamburger-eating girlfriend.
But I had a dream one night.
In my dream I woke up
within my dream to turn
to my left and face
a swirling yellow cloud
whose energy pushed me away.
I turned back to it only to be
repulsed again. Then I faced it
until I exploded onto yet another
level of sleeping wakefulness to see
the guru sitting in front of me.
“I am helping you face your anger,”
he said, smiling, “and you are doing
just fine. Tom, however (and he flashed a picture of my friend into my mind),
is not doing so well. But you,
you are doing just fine.”
And then he was gone.
And I never gave him a cent.
And I quit the restaurant.
But I never forgot.
And, occasionally,
I wonder.
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Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider and Cider Press Review, among others. His fiction has appeared in ShortStory Substack, THEMA, GUD, The Blue Crow (Aus), Prole (UK),
The Wondrous Real, and is forthcoming in Story Unlikely.
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A Poem by LC Gutierrez
Urban Angst
People grow tall in the city while even the shortest tower
over me like giants. I roll cigarettes to accompany my fingers
although I do not smoke. I find the other small person
where she works. She steams the milk which turns a coffee frothy light.
I imagine us sitting together (hip by hip) (and head to head) to share a newspaper
scanning the headlines for our names. One day I might know hers.
Have started a new job recently and have failed once again
to avoid being named manager. The people I supervise look at me hopefully.
How I envy the clear-eyed and those who do not fear.
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LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the Southern USA and the Caribbean. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work has been published in a number of wonderful journals, and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Sugar House Review, Trampoline Journal, New York Quarterly, The Banyan Review and Delta Poetry Review. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review, who fuels on sweet, dark chocolate.
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A Poem by Phil Flott
Suicide Denying Affirmation
What it amounts to is fluoridated water rinses my skin, a sand-blasted texture as I wash sticky syrup off breakfast dishes.
Plastic sunflowers twirl in this Sunday morning’s intermittent breeze that scares off birds from next door; roses flank a faded statue of Jesus;
birds I cannot identify make some instinctual noise, a vibration that makes me belong in this constantly stirred batter.
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Phil Flott retired from carpentry, became a priest, and retired from that, too. He has work in Raven's Perch, The Windhover, The Sun Magazine, and Pinyon Review.
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Issue #25.9 A Double Issue: Jacob Schepers and Robert J. Howe
A Poem by Jacob Schepers
Becoming Ancient
by virtue of just remaining here is no small feat nor is the hanging on
I draw an impossible hypotenuse across imagined corners placed end to end
connecting continents by way of archipelagos so that a string of islands gets placed so
closely the separations succumb to an isthmus thrust
Let this be a resurrected Pangaea ever congealing
Let this be a final or primal turtle egg hatching itself stacked oval
after oval after oval end to end in a balancing act of entropic triteness
extraneous & decadent a history all its own
with little to no strangeness escaping the atmosphere & geography animating
my terrarium achieving a state of endless bloom
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Jacob Schepers is the author of the poetry collection A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014), the chapbook Connections & Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as antiphony, Psaltery & Lyre, Dialogist, The Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Heavy Feather Review and Hobart. He is an editor of ballast, teaches at the University of Notre Dame, and lives in South Bend, Indiana. More at www.jacobschepers.com and @jacobschepers (Instagram) and @jacobschepers.bsky.social (Bluesky).
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Two Poems by Robert J. Howe
Chaika
her Sturmanskie keeps Moscow time falling at 4.7 miles per second missing and missing the earth above, the stars below the whisper of the void are numbers in her ear
Gagarin in a skirt spoke to Khrushchev from a safe distance while the CCCP listened then Bykovskiy—a quick brush five kilometers apart for a moment he imagined connection; she thought of fur coat salad
disobedient, she told them she gave her rations to peasants in Kazakhstan, a farm wife has a shrine to her Valechka the gray loaf desiccated as a saint’s shinbone
Pour Paul Verlaine
standing at the water’s edge we could feel summer tipping over into autumn the ocean knows before the trees that daylight is shorter and more glancing we sense it, she and I the fall, thrilling and sad as small tears in the fabric of days it’s not the chill we fear but the dark echoes
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Robert J. Howe’s poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, The California Quarterly, 50 Haiku, Punch Drunk Press, Serving House Journal, and other publications. His chapbook, Ghost Ship, published by Bottlecap Press, is a collection of poems about looking into the abyss and seeing a familiar face. He has published short fiction in Salon, The Flatbush Review, Analog, Newer York, Happily Ever After, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife, photographer Eleanor Lang. www.rjhowe.net
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Issue #25.10 A Double Issue: Steven Knepper and Meredith MacLeod Davidson
Two Poems by Steven Knepper
Lost Sock Dreams
Then one day the boy, urge inexplicable, climbs in the dryer, pulling the tinted door behind him to a bare rim glare, a sun all but eclipsed. The underwear and socks muffle discovery of his vanishment: her frantic steps, slammed doors, pleading prayers. Eventually, she leaves, and he drifts in a cave too hot for him to stand, red light and shadow shapes, a pile of bones somewhere deep down the humid dark, a tusked snout rooting them, he soporific prey entangled in a net. His mother, bursting through the door again, reporting name, appearance, age into the futile phone, startles when a shape masked in her baby’s face slides shrouded, swaddled, blinking terror-scalded eyes out of a metal womb.
Metal Love Song
He scrolls through last night’s scores, slips phone in vest, zips up, and stares between his Wolverines at the dank palimpsest of piss before the urinal, caked brown around slick gold clomped through by bleary men less cognizant than he, the morning scrub-down still to come. Outside, he leans on navy blocks to wait, pulls out the phone again to watch her post, a thirty-second screed at freshman chem, a dorm-room melodrama of long hair bedraggled carefully, four Rockstar cans lined up along her desk, lament exaggerated for effect. He smiles. His finger hovers over ‘like.’ Castillo pokes him in the side and asks, “How is your girl today?” A world away.
Extended cab packed with apprentices, he puts in earbuds for the ride to work: Maiden, Metallica, and Megadeth. His dad and uncles raised him on these bands. Guitar licks screech across the metal sky, the sun blowtorching seams along a distant ridge. Freak solos, chugging riffs, and double bass give way to whining saws, bits biting wood, hiss-thwap of nail guns sinking studs, quick swish of pencils marking cuts, tape measure zips, low drone of generators, thermos glugs, directives, curses, warnings, coughs, and jokes, a symphony in which he plays a part, resounding in the empty edifice where, later, he pulls up her post again.
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Steven Knepper teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. He has published poems in Roanoke Review, First Things, The Alabama Literary Review, The William and Mary Review, Pembroke Magazine, SLANT, The American Journal of Poetry, and other journals.
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Two Poems by Meredith MacLeod Davidson
Discharge a (retrospective) love poem
is it bad discharge / is it discharge assigned / moral value / like a tooth or a frog / corpse dried floated in a bath / a flap of something cream / whipped n’ swiped / off with a popsicle stick candied flat / log shrapnel / speculum speculum / speculum cranked up / muskrat from a song
muskrat got somethin to say bout love? / State it / hon’ / I’m remembering that first dream / where you held me in the woods / knifed me / in my gut ; that website / where you posted a nude / me @ 16 / unicorn blue / snakeskin wedges / that / false fishnet / shh, didn’t ask / pop
art! the great mass / the internet had to know you’d bagged a stunner / no? maybe / maybe maybe somewhere / in all that dream-scrap / is the place we, knee-high, died.
Hair is Not A Living Structure (It’s Dead Protein)
We had a ritual then: mom would clip peerless obits and we’d share them over 6am cereal
that first month in Washington I couldn’t drop sternum-deep in the hot water I feared the lamb-shank organ
of my heart overwhelmed by heat would burst… stop…
I want to hold for 30 more years the feeling of taking blunted fingernails to my grandmother’s chin and plucking,
firmly, a whisker without damaging life-worn skin long-buried ash now but I’ve been thinking of that whisker
that fragmented her, I’d flung carelessly to carpet, or flicked into the trash decomposure, somewhere, divested of body
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Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she earned an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Meredith's poetry is published in The London Magazine, Propel Magazine, Cream City Review, Gutter, and elsewhere.
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Issue #25.11 A Double Issue: Jennifer Fair Stewart and Joan E. Bauer
A Poem by Jennifer Fair Stewart
Dead Butterfly (Kierkegaard and Me, Outside a Texas Psychotherapy Building)
Kierkegaard calls it worse than torturing a butterfly, the pain inflicted if told to master one’s obsessions, driven to borderlines of madness by guilt.
After I drop my son off, anxious for his next session (his next hope of new life forward), flex
and glide to that one last open parking spot cessation (the long migration ended), still
the finish line’s unreached. Here’s a bitter sight to stoop to hold; heart-slack, my hands cup and harvest a symbol
in this borderland of autumn: transfixed orange scaled wings in open position, intact, at my feet
the dead monarch, delicate as a scrap of tracing paper pennon, eloquent
herald loosed from royal blue sky, fallen– blotted on this inky bruise of asphalt
edges cut to black. The final credits roll with So close, nice try! as if
that legend of the desert people is true: our whispered secrets winged to God were
orthogonals of intrusive thoughts drawn to the vanishing point, punched down
heaven’s bread, a sacrament shaped for the second rise of fallen sparrows, fallen child.
Brilliant as flames, butterflies give witness: fire-ant-devoured-alive, or mangled bright on a car grille, like stillness
these nine years of his childhood consumed in mind-body torment. No snug cocoon,
nothing simple in ritual, arduous acts of pulling on one’s socks, just so when OCD confines, when truth begins in untruth, we grow to know
three thousand miles of migration, car rides of blessed restlessness, exposure therapy and release. Take, eat… a trail of breadcrumbs
into the broken hands of him who holds, impaled to a crossbeam tree of life, our fluttered souls
see, raw against the splintered grain, wine- dark tips of nascent wings
rising from the bone-deep burn of trust through uncertainty, at the swoop and ascent of both scapulae.
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Jennifer Fair Stewart is the author of the chapbook Marginalia: An Interactive Book of Hours (The Orchard Street Press). Her poetry has won multiple awards, including the 2024 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, and has appeared in Heart of Flesh, The Orchards, Quiet Diamonds, Crescendo, Plough, Bacopa, and Abraxas. Find her at https://jenniferfairstewart.carrd.co/
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A Poem by Joan E. Bauer
Thirteen Things I Never Told My Father
I dreamt I ran you over with your silver Jag.
In 1969, I registered Peace and Freedom. Mother was frantic, sure you’d lose your clearance.
When that bouffanted blonde rammed us with her car, I never believed she was just an unhappy employee.
I smoked for twenty years. Not much, but some. I can’t believe I did that.
When things got bad, someone should have told you Mother’s name was not ‘Dammit.’
Every year I took back the Neiman Marcus certificate you gave me to the store counter., ‘Hey, I don’t need a hundred dollar scarf. I need rent money. Can you just give me cash?’
Sometimes, I watched you listening to your second wife and couldn’t believe you married that woman.
I keep your ‘Eagle Has Landed. First Manned Lunar Landing’ mug on my desk. The one inscribed ‘Hal Bauer, Mission Control.’ (It holds pens, magic markers, scissors, an old toothbrush, a screwdriver, a pair of tweezers.)
Sometimes I hoped you’d come back home. After awhile, I hoped you wouldn’t.
Sorry, but I used to make fun of your Walter Cronkite voice.
At the hospital when I was seven & they couldn’t stop the bleeding, I remember how you stayed with me.
You appear as ‘this Errol Flynn with slicked-back hair’ in my poems. You did look like Errol Flynn (from a certain angle).
On the day you died, I sat alone in my office for a long time.
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Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream and Chiron Review. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.
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