Issue #26.1 A Triple Issue: Justin Carter, Jan LaPerle, and Chris Monier
Two Poems by Justin Carter
Watching The Cleveland Browns On Christmas
is like the slow fizzle of our lives.
How we age like Baker Mayfield interceptions.
How one morning we wake & we’ve become
so suddenly empty of all the promise
we once had. We’re left with just this cold.
The XFL Reminds Me Of My Own Mortality
At the end of the XFL season, we don’t know if there’ll be another one—
this new creation that’s so fragile, clinging to this coil.
It’s too obvious to say it’s a lot like death, this transient gridiron,
especially when you can say that about anything—the yellow
of a goal post, the beers crushed in the bleachers, it’s all
a lot like death, isn’t it? Does it matter that this one thing
happens to be a little more temporary than most others?
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Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.
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A Poem by Jan LaPerle
Vibrato, Or Where The Little Wren Lands
The evening light, her chin resting on her hand. Who am I, she asks. I have no answer: I am so small in here uttering a sloppy, little half- assed prayer: vibrato, please. Please? I brew a coffee, pour in a bit of Irish cream. I think I taste all this: the farness, the cows, their fur in waves. What am I doing praying like this? Who am I to barter with a stiff drink in my hand? I apply rosin to the bow. Back and forth, back and forth, my prayer riding along and smiling. My cat submersed in the couch cushions. From the depths, he sends up his tail, periscoping the room. When he hears that first note he rises to the surface and sprints upstairs: the stairs, one-by-one, look up from their little jobs collecting hair in their side-pockets. I try not to take the cat personally. Or the stairs. Even you, are you still listening? I sip, play another Beatles song. I finish the exercises I learned on YouTube. I sit for bit. I watch the light turn her head. My plants lean in. Confluence, I whisper into their dusty leaves. When they don’t respond, I say it to the refrigerator. I like the way it sounds in my mouth, anyway, am I too old for this? My arms old dogs again. A branch leans her head against the trunk. I am not lonely. My violin says hi, so I play some more, and then! I think it is vibrato. So quick, when I wasn’t even trying or watching or thinking… (my teacher said it would happen this way). All I can think about is prayer. What is real? I try again, and it comes again. I text my husband, and then my daughter (they are far away for the holidays). I run upstairs and tell the cat and he does that slow eye thing that I heard in a documentary about cats is a smile. I take it as that and run downstairs, a woman on fire. In this house I rent my spirit of belief rings around me, the little bells they are, this song: this is really something. So I play and I play. I play until my fingers hurt. That hurt, I know, is all part of this gift. When I look outside again, it is all tree and light and simple, there where the little wren lands.
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Jan LaPerle’s book of poetry, Maybe The Land Sings Back, was published in Spring 2022 from Galileo Books. Her other books include: a book of poetry, It Would Be Quiet (Prime Mincer Press, 2013); an e-chap of flash fiction, Hush (Sundress Publications, 2012); a story in verse, A Pretty Place To Mourn (BlazeVOX, 2014), and several other stories and poems. She completed her MFA from Southern Illinois University. She lives in Kentucky where she serves on active duty at Fort Knox as an Army master sergeant
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A Poem by Chris Monier
Luthier
You tried the meeting under the live oaks at the Episcopal church but didn’t go back (I said it might have been a better experience in a more cosmopolitan area—not helpful, I know).
Later that night, after everyone goes to bed, you stay up among sawdust and tools.
Up and down the bayou, gas stations wait like altar servers.
Moon washes the yard, flawless save for blemishes where armadillos dug and two wayward shots made the turf snicker.
Now, you set katalox to bend into the sides of a guitar, spruce gets bookmatched, bone is radiused— a séance that some could foresee.
Not until they cut the cane will you actually be taken by song, not until the fields are burned and embers are in the rows and cold rain is falling.
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Chris Monier lives with his family in the Bayou Region of south Louisiana where he teaches French and English at Nicholls State University. He has published poetry, literary criticism, and translations of several French-language writers.
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Issue #26.2 A Triple Issue: Michael Robins, Vikki C., and Mary Buchanan
A Poem by Michael Robins
Marking the Start of Hurricane Season
Maybe you sleepwalk in a life of repeating hours, a second dream folded against the first, two creases for wings & merrily sunk or ready to sail across the room. Decide whether to pack a few shirts or leave the closet like a museum, a time capsule of the summer that changed everything. Try your hand with mirrors & a pair of scissors, tape to your own shoulder a clean note with whatever time remains. You dig beyond muscle & bone until you hit water, paddle the river in which floats a house & in that house your closest friends. The sun rises by metronome, by the pendulum of a grandfather clock, like a death you welcomed long ago. But really the day arrives like a cardinal who, in a language science has yet to crack, sings of approaching weather.
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Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, including People You May Know (2020) and The Bright Invisible (2022), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and edits of The McNeese Review.
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A Poem by Vikki C.
Mother of Pearl
I still wonder of all those worlds that housed the sixty pearls strung across her thinning neck.
Father said it is no coincidence the oyster resembles unclasped angel wings. That is to say, maybe these worlds are a little holy, bearing the satin sheen of a higher realm rather than the dirt of an ocean burial.
When Mother handed me the necklace that balmy July, it was too late, even for prayers. A violet dusk cutting her silhouette into the bony spine of a silver birch rooted in a small island of silt. The sand at her feet falling away even as she smiled, securing the inheritance around me as best she could. All around, the deepening indigo of what must have been her patience, already littered with the dust of decaying stars.
No one would question the vastness above, nor the ease of vanishing. Now, my daughter wears the string of milken pearls. From a safe distance, I watch for the warming of planets around her small neck. A young galaxy not yet pulled apart by a man's hands.
Generations happen this way. A passing along of fragility, a god’s small milken eyes we are unable to swallow. Even in our deepest sleep.
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Vikki C. is a British-born, ‘Best of the Net’ award-nominated writer, musician and author of the chapbook The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press) and the full collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press).
Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Dust Poetry Magazine, ONE ART Poetry, Ballast Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, Black Bough Poetry, Ice Floe Press, Acropolis Journal, DarkWinter Lit, One Hand Clapping, The Broken Spine, The Belfast Review, The Winged Moon, Origami Poems, FeversOf, Salò Press, Igneus Press, Jerry Jazz Musician, Loft Books, Across The Margin, Literary Revelations, Sontag Mag and various other venues.
X: @VWC_Writes
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A Poem by Mary Buchanan
The Fall
Beheading the broom over the litter box. A thin sheet of B12 pocking the bathroom floor—rose pink, little salt mines, a dissolvable pox on the place. The corners of the room belching nasty fluorescents: broken spring sunshine, bulbed chaos. Three knocks or a certified death sentence—three more, and a cancellation of self. Signed, sealed, delivered a cracked plastic box of disturbed raspberries. A salad readjustment as serious as an unpaid bill. The moment of her call synced up with the moments of my day—so well she knows me, even from this strange, bricked distance. So well and brown do I know her eyes, while we cry together, hands palmed up on the table. Psychosis, our only symptom of this stigmata. Mental institution is a phrase to spell backwards. Zip it up, store it out of sight before the others see. Shh, I tell her, not so loud or the ladies will hear. Later, the walrus speaks of time and how it’s here. Animal’s in the rafters next to my bedroom and the cats are coming by again. They say late October is a time of harvests, slippery edges. What sad souls sink into themselves like Dali’s limp clocks do against late daylight sand?
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Mary Buchanan (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and occasional tarot card puller. Her writing centers on mental health, magical realism, and spirituality. She edits Libre Magazine. She received her MFA in Fiction from Louisiana State University. Her fiction and nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in: Bending Genres, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Hobart, Flash Fiction Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, among others.
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Issue #26.3 A Triple Issue: Casey Killingsworth, Sarah B. Cahalan, and Mark J. Mitchell
Two Poems by Casey Killingsworth
Participation trophy ________________________________
Our next award goes to Casey, a headlight of a man of common brilliance a mid-range place holder
displaying normal movement and ordinary explanations of the world
yet here he is, payer of rent, breather of air, expecting more.
About my will ___________________________________________________
Well, maybe you could go get an old movie camera, drive around listening to music, maybe some classical, maybe uplifting classical, but also some of that new age stuff with acoustic guitar and oboe?
You could drive up those bike trails we hiked near the coast, remember? Then on to the valley, maybe even head east if you have time, drive around somewhere I never got to see, listening to that song list like it’s a documentary or something.
And it’s okay if you stay away from the cities, but make sure to get the sounds of the birds on their way south or north. And water: get the sound of water. Any water.
Anyway, then it would be time to get a lawyer to draw up legal papers to divide that trip of me into equal pieces, and mail a piece to everyone who likes the sound of water, or birds.
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Casey has been published in numerous journals including The American Journal of Poetry, Better Than Starbucks, The Moth, and 3rd Wednesday. His latest book is A nest blew down (Kelsay Books, 2021), and a new collection, Freak show (Fernwood Press, 2024).
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Two Poems by Sarah B. Cahalan
Setting out
End of life, vegetative, glioblastic honeysuckle coiling haywire
in the backyard branches Green just catching breath up on the trees
I said aloud, “the mole had been working very hard”
My father, animate, barely nodded, knowing “…all the morning,”
“bother,” and then “boats” were coming, that April morning
Spring light through dusty windows, motes aflutter No more urine smells
No more jello, just wet sponges and some syringes, no more tv, just
the tenderest bruise of time between one now and another
as through water, as light through branches, as a vessel sculling
sparks and endless ripples, molecules again displaced, regrouping
in the absence of an oar.
Almanac
It’s sickening how little time we get How sudden rain can wreck the reaping
As soon as the forecast breaks It’s go: shear those fields, sheaf them
Storms, towers out of atmospheric turf The clouds are land art, sun prints
The horizon’s moon is sunset Printing earth’s shadow
I can scythe the hay and rake it in, Light as can be, just fields of light
Can go and go til there’s nothing Storms pass or strike against the grain
What passes for food passes away Wineberries in the wheat again
But storms miss this lucky place, today, Amenable to prayers, or curses
The cows are glowering at the harvest No, they’re glowing in the fields
My ground has been quite fertile The kids are doing well
As sun hits water that’s still hanging A hornbeam blows against the barn
No blights legumes can’t fix, with time Bacterial rainbows in fallow soil
It’s getting better, or I am, or adrenaline Has drained to productive levels
There are bales of cattle, haystacks Of sheep as far as the fields are visible
Your death lasts for such a long time From my perspective. ________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah B. Cahalan (she/her) writes about natural history, hope/grief/faith, the layers of places and how those correspond with our own layers as people moving through time and place. She has poems, current or forthcoming, in Echtrai, Image, Stirring, and others. Sarah is from Massachusetts and is currently based in Dayton, Ohio (USA).
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Two Poems by Mark J. Mitchell
COLD LAUGHTER
Et qui rit comme un peu de braise qu’on aurait enchassé dans la neige… And who laughs like an ember as if it were inlaid in snow.
—Andre Breton
Not even winter laughs as hard as forgotten icicles or laughs like a wolf lost in a deserted city you can’t see who laughs as you turn around like a child trapped in a game you know—almost—the mouth it comes from—forceful memory tells you while withholding mercy the snow is imaginary this cold is real or might be you stand by yourself looking at the ember glowing so briefly in snow knowing it will wink out before you can start laughing at its courage.
Pilgrim
She talks to the living but sings to the dead.
Moving through gardens of stone, a lone note
under silver light. She measures each melody
by dates carved deep in cold rock.
She sings till sunup scoring the night
then walks, meekly, to church.
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Mark J. Mitchell has worked in hospital kitchens, fast food, wine and spirits retail, conventions, tourism and warehouses.
He has also been a working poet for over forty years.
He has published 2 novels, Knight Prisoner and The Magic War. His latest, A Book of Lost Songs will be released by Histria Books on March 11, 2025. He is the author of several chapbooks and poetry collections. and three chapbooks.
Born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. A UC Santa Cruz he studied writing and Medieval literature under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Robert M. Durling.
He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, he is seeking work once again.
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Issue #26.4 A Triple Issue: J.R. Solonche, John Dorsey, and Bleah Patterson
Two Poems by J.R. Solonche
FOUR SHORT ROSEBUSH POEMS
1.
Listen to the red rosebush.
It is whispering as loud as it can.
2.
The red rosebush is surely prolific.
It has made 55 roses. But they are all red.
3.
Is the rosebush this good
at making red roses
because it has nothing else to do?
4.
I cannot hold 55 beautiful red
thoughts in my mind
all at once. Therefore,
I am not a rosebush.
THE SONG CAVE
When I was a child, I read a book called The Song Cave. It was about a boy about my age who loved to sing, but no one wanted to hear him sing. His mother, his father, his brother, his sister, his classmates, none of them wanted to hear him sing. So he would go for walks in the woods behind his house and sing to himself. One day while walking on an unfamiliar path, he discovered an opening in the rocks. It was a small cave, not much bigger than himself. He sat down in it and started to sing his favorite song. Suddenly an amazing thing happened. The cave got bigger. It got bigger and bigger until it was the size of the world. It was a very strange ending to a very strange story, but the only ending that made any sense.
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Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 38 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
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A Poem by John Dorsey
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the Side of a Pill Bottle
how do i tell the doctors that i want feel my heart explode just to remember what teen spirit smelled like from the back seat of a friend’s car in the autumn of 1992
you can’t paint van gogh’s sunflowers on the side of a pill bottle with your teeth rattling like the bones of a silent weathervane
here you’re lost in a dream where half the sky is always missing & it hasn’t rained for weeks
with a barn painted over & a heart reduced to a list of medications
when suddenly looking out the window at a quiet country road feeling almost young again i remember a time when a thousand birds yearned to taste honey on my hands.
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John Dorsey is the former poet laureate of Belle, Missouri and the author of Pocatello Wildflower. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
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A Poem by Bleah Patterson
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Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet born and raised in Texas. She has been a Pushcart and Best of Net nominee. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home and has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Electric Literature, Pinch, Write or Die, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, and Taco Bell Quarterly.
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Issue #26.5 A Triple Issue: Natalie Marino, Paul Ilechko, and Jon Riccio
A Poem by Natalie Marino
Taking Shape
After the superbloom a cloudburst of butterflies and bees
arrives for the mariposa lilies.
Death Valley mercies no one.
Red air fattens with ash, the sky spares no currency. After noon
the temperature swells to over one hundred twenty degrees.
Dry as a shoe, Death Valley mirages water and harbors dreams.
RVs take the shape of a canoe as their aluminum halos angel the sun,
triumphant as an apricot.
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Natalie Marino is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Heavy Feather Review, Pleiades, Rust & Moth, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.
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A Poem by Paul Ilechko
Guilt, and So On
It’s painfully obvious that I carry a fair amount of guilt inside of me which I have no desire to discuss at this time instead I will focus on the passage of time which leads by a process of elimination into the fear of aging I’ll talk about what it meant when you came to me and what it meant when you stayed which was in fact the bigger deal because I have so few reasons to feel worthy but the days keep on passing some days being better than others but no matter how they are rated (on a more or less arbitrary scale) you are still here when the day ends so I go to the supermarket to buy food and I cook a fabulous meal that says hey thanks for everything and I wonder about that fact that it never once snowed this winter there is already so much crap piled up and shoved into a darkened back room the door double locked and we are both learning how to live quietly while time continues to pass on by.
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Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Pirene’s Fountain. His first book is scheduled for 2025 publication by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
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A Poem by Jon Riccio
Middle Age
What mortified me about 1983: carrying a Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox. Collector’s item, Dad thought. Travolta diploma. Picture day at restaurant school a matter of baguettes indoctrinating mission creep.
Dear Hocus with low BPA: pocus tanked. Celebratory cholesterol, the greeting card you
browse. Where have the Sinéad O’Connor albums gone? All the bulldozed yester-cancels stuffed into crabmeat or dialing Silent Witness and it’s Martinů’s Nonet placating (412)’s muttonchop capacity.
I wear my austerer tam-o’-shanter, ask the pastry chef, What’s your favorite occasion tiramisu?
They still make carpet cleaners that foam like whipped cream. My physics learning, that Einstein-sticking-his-tongue-out postcard too.
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Jon Riccio teaches literature and creative writing at Western Michigan University and the University of West Alabama. He is the founding editor of Interpretations, a journal dedicated to undergraduate literary criticism.
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Issue #26.6 A Triple Issue: Susan Gevirtz, Andrew Cox, and Jenkin Benson
A Poem by Susan Gevirtz
from The Guides
Registrar
detour wanderer wait
fight for or choose to be stateless non assimilant
I am not you but still we meet on the path of paved mirrors
keep your job sanctioned sealed eloquent shut
reception the reconciling ask nothing
carve containers in air walk into
ledger meticulous registrar paid to track the fearsome by shine of timid cursive trace who without birthplace born without state taxed without border contained mourn for stranger members swimmers in their lanes speake unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book
To the orchard in the wilderness
On the day of the firstfruits Spread a cloth Do no ordinary work The expense of the journey is itself a tribute
Come forward
Feast without roof
Offer the burnt
Cauterize lines between stars but
the still points move
while
the hand
races to follow
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Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). Gevirtz works with Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. In 2004 she and Siarita Kouka, Greek poet/restorer of maritime antiquities, founded the Paros Symposium, an annual translation and conversation meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. She is based in San Francisco. Her latest book, The Guides, is now available from antiphony press.
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Three Poems by Andrew Cox
Demolition
The crows are anxious About the trees
And their wisdom of the unknown I am here
Where parallel lines cross And the dangerous buildings stand ready
For demolition Up there where the buzzards coast
You wait (it was always you) For the explosion
While those tagged as prey Wonder why they are the wrecking crew
The crows complain And the trees say tear it down
Crash
The mothers migrate north While the fathers grow
Black flowers in the sky
Trumpet vines provide the soundtrack As the hummingbirds
Helicopter in for a drink
The hands nest In the land only they know
Where the children are an afterthought
I look up to see The great flocks of mothers
Blot out the sky While the fathers spiral down
Ready for the crash
History
The foxes are history’s soldiers
And know their footsteps Must not be heard
As they raid the coop
And worship the night’s Imponderable weight
While the mothers and fathers Watch history
Rain on the children with no umbrellas
As the sun’s corona warns them
The skulk of foxes cannot stop history From sending rain
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Andrew Cox is the author of The Equation That Explains Everything, (BlazeVOX [Books] 2010), and the chapbooks, This False Compare (2River View, 2019) and Fortune Cookies (2River View, 2009). He edits UCity Review.
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Two Poems by Jenkin Benson
buzzwinkle, moose who wandered downtown anchorage, killed humanely
meter parkslipped report moose slumped senior found outhind lot back there northomic Anchorage Printing eyes onyxloss turned their celebrity did Buzz and I
cross em in paths ‘07 back was I by straits too Prince Willthracked gulfed puffinfull of lights mass annointed russet like adornering allfestal allantlers
Buzz surely I met dithering had to have mom swangpush so soswung where did you close Buzz crabtangled of the apples got yardbillowing I did
and dad bungalowed past Bernie’s offyoung walk way too lounge too slurry for the spotpour I could keep bet I could his Buzzpace now keep him sauntry
pristine drifthaunch far and snows farthing no inletologists binocular him less lawed bus path no rudetour Lake no oriented Clarke trudgesnout Buzz
lumbers to and to I want to join the mostmoose
why are tires being dumped onto property along sw 9th Street?
for south des moines
glasswound viaduct ramps fractward to faultholes rutfenneling all fill and foil
pass graziano’s crudostained stoop the traffic craves value the marlayer mouth smacks “afanabola ” steers
sidewalklessly towards maxilla puddles so little pity for possums and proles and other plugdestrians
eluding twodoor coups musclebirds leakletting myolately your tar actins
maneuvers taut flat car flit don’t stir igdrive don’t gear throttled girth fuel lit no park now park you pay
you lurch keep it sadosouth til you get here get lead get hit
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Jenkin is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. He primarily studies the literary interchange between Ireland, Wales, and the Black Atlantic, focusing on writers like James Joyce, David Jones, and Claude McKay. He is also a poet and a musician interested in bending and estranging language. You can find his work here: https://linktr.ee/jenkinbenson
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Issue #26.7 A Triple Issue: Dana Henry Martin, Howie Good, and Hallie Fogarty
Two Poems by Dana Henry Martin
Back Ward
In the dream, nurses hose down
my mother in the back ward
of the state asylum the way they did
with patients a few years before
she came on as a psychiatric nurse.
She’s manic. They make her strip
and straddle a grate while they spray
her like livestock. Feces and blood,
thinned by water, bloom across
the cement floor. She deserves this.
She’s done things to patients, too.
Held the funnel for insulin shock.
Pulled restraints taut. Trotted down
halls in her starched cap and tailored
smock like a little white pony, eager
to augur another mind with Thorazine.
No, she wasn’t hosed. That ended
when a local reporter exposed it in the 40s.
But this is a dream. Dream time does
what it wants. I’m with her in this
afterlife, witnessing her perpetual
torture. In the dream, she closes
her eyes. In the dream, she holds
one hand over her chest, the other
over her mons pubis. In the dream,
she lifts her head like royalty, as if
to say nothing can strip her dignity.
In the dream, she says I’m sorry
to the other back-ward patients who
can’t hear her over the water’s hiss.
I hear her. Maybe she’s saying
she’s sorry to me. Maybe my anger
is what’s keeping her in purgatory.
I startle awake. Someday, I’ll tell you
what the nurses and doctors really
did to her. It’s worse than the hose,
even if the water’s cold and dirty
and it bruises or tears the skin.
Worse than your daughter’s dream
about the back ward, where you’re
both trapped twenty years after your
death. Worse than her not accepting
your apology as the tempest strikes
her face until she reels backward
out of the dream. You’re alone until
she falls asleep again missing you.
I Was Put on This Earth to Be Draped
Once I was draped, I was called danger. The draping of me made me dangerous for those holding the drapery. They said I was never draped or I wanted to be draped. Draped like a nipple on a marble statue. Draped like a mirror after the funeral. I couldn’t have been draped over and over if I hadn’t asked to be draped, covered, smothered, which means it’s not a draping. It’s a date. It’s a relationship. It’s a fling. It’s a family. I’ve been draped so many times, you can’t even see me through the folds. Am I here. Am I in the room with you. Can you see me, see right through?
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Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their chapbook No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press) is forthcoming.
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A Poem by Howie Good
It’s Obvious
Barbara says at breakfast that she dreamed she was the one receiving radiation. I jokingly ask if I was at least in the dream. She shakes her head. A 13-year-old kid with braces on his teeth was sucking on a cigarette outside the main entrance to the cancer hospital when she walked up. The ocean was home, once. She smelled it. It smelled like the burning of martyrs in medieval times. “I’ll float on my back,” she thought, “and then not always.” She was blind to the obvious: the trees were stricken, and the leaves tarnished, and all the people gone.
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Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.
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A Poem by Hallie Fogarty
Post-Grad Plans
If I don’t get into a PhD program after I’m awarded my master’s degree, which I fear I’m not going to, though I don’t know if this feeling is based in anxiety and the lack of self-confidence I’ve been trying to work on in therapy or effective, correct introspection and guessing, but if I don’t get into any of the schools I’ve applied to then I’m gonna take a gap year, and no I don’t care if it qualifies as a gap year if it’s taken right after a master’s degree which was right after a bachelor’s degree, and during this gap year I’ll read some of the canonical poets but not all of them because even I know my limits, but I’ll read some of that canon that I fear I lucked out of reading in undergrad due to my self-made degree program, yeah I’ll read Poe and Ginsberg and Whitman and probably some Pound, because no, I haven’t read Pound, but I’ll probably focus more on the women that made it into the canon, cause I do a lot of things out of feminist spite, so I’ll read more Plath, cause I’ve read some, and I’ll read Parker and Brooks and Rich and Angelou and Millay and Lorde and wonder how much of one poet I have to read to have qualified as having read them, and I’ll think about the man who walked in front of me at my undergraduate graduation, who started talking to me when he realized I was the poetry editor of the literary magazine that had published one of his poems, and started asking me if I’d read all these writers in the canon, like you’ve read Sylvia, okay, I haven’t read much of Sylvia, but have you read Murakami? How have you not read Murakami? and by gap year I really mean gap year, no school no work just moving back in with my parents, and I’ll get more involved in my local poetry scene, and the poetry scenes of the cities around my local poetry scene, and I’ll go to open mic nights and gain inspiration and flatten out the quiver in my voice, and I’ll walk my dog and I’ll go to the gym and I’ll spend a year writing a single poem and I’ll travel to visit my sister wherever she is, because she’s all over the country with a job that pays her well enough to do so, and I’ll follow her to wherever she is and take in the sites she deems beautiful, and maybe write a poem about whatever mountains that live nearby.
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Hallie Fogarty is a poet, teacher, and artist from Kentucky. She received her MFA in poetry from Miami University, where she was awarded the 2024 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Award for Poetry. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry South, The Lindenwood Review, Hoxie Gorge Review, and elsewhere. Besides writing, she loves cardigans, dogs, and everything peach-flavored. Find her online: www.halliefogarty.com
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Issue #26.8 A Triple Issue: Jacqueline Berger, Crystal Taylor, and Susan Johnson
Two Poems by Jacqueline Berger
Holy Days
Former leather factory converted today to a house of prayer. Yearly trek to end the year, start the year, atone, though I struggle with sin, the idea of.
I pass on my way a man sprawled— is sprawled a word too lacking in dignity to apply to the human?— on the sidewalk begging for a smoke, two fingers to his lips, gesturing, his tongue, what happened that it got so thick, his words so garbled?
When I reach the armed guard I’ve arrived and show the ticket on my phone. Let the atoning commence.
I don’t want to know the meaning of the Hebrew, just the feeling— communal lament.
Let me be done with bemused, little spacer that lets me stand near but not next to, not touching.
I sin against you when I sin against myself. I do like that part.
Let the trauma in me love the trauma in you, beloved or stranger, and the damage in me love the damage in you, and my love love your love, and let the cigarette someone finally tosses his way bring comfort and peace.
Two Deaths
The upended canoe of my father-in-law’s chest beneath buttoned pajamas barely lifts and lowers, and the bones of his face poke through the thin fabric of flesh. Someone has propped him on the sofa for our visit. He looks when we speak though his eyes stay closed.
The nurse says go, his labor to death a week, at least, away. On the long drive home, almond orchards, their rows opening as we pass. Let’s stop the car, walk into the tunneling beauty.
Let’s stay in the middle of nowhere a little longer. Everything for the Traveler exit— wide planks, swinging doors, pioneer times, lunch at the restaurant famous for pea soup, good by way of nostalgia, even a father could open a can and heat up a meal.
Hearing is the last to go though hard to say how much he understood. You were a good father, you told him. Not a lie but a portion of the larger truth. And I said I love you, correcting what I told my dad in his dying—see you tomorrow.
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Jacqueline Berger’s fifth book of poetry, Left at the Ruin, was published in 2024 by Terrapin Books. Her previous books include The Day You Miss Your Exit, Broadstone Books; The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Things That Burn, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, University of Utah Press, and The Mythologies of Danger, winner of the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Awards Poetry Prize. Several of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as in numerous anthologies and journals, including The Iowa Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation, Carnegie Mellon Press, Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, Rattle, and Nimrod. She is a professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California.
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A Poem by Crystal Taylor
Women Becoming
Two 16-year-olds, BFFs with necklaces to prove it, meandered around the park trails. They knew it wasn’t safe to wander in nature, so they loomed near the safety of cement. Through a cluster of trees, they could see a lamppost, erect, and oddly placed. Uneasy, they returned to the car, stopped off at the lake for some scenery. Another lamppost hovered near an old Bronco amid the brush and cattails, so they decided to go home. A dilapidated F-150 drove beside them for half a mile on the highway. It struck them odd, until they saw who was driving. More lampposts popped up over the next few years, but the BFFs, no longer shocked, stopped running. They learned that what they thought was a fluke was a rite of passage.
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Crystal Taylor (she/her) is a dis/abled latina writer and poet from Texas. Her work has been featured in Rust and Moth, Maudlin House, Ghost City Review, and other sacred spaces. Her poem, Pearls, was nominated for Best of the Net by Cosmic Daffodil. She is active on most social media platforms @CrystalTaylorSA.
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A Poem by Susan Johnson
Self-Portrait, Low Tide
If you were to paint your self-portrait,
where would you start? Examining
your face in a mirror, the same face
that is examining itself in a mirror?
Curious at first then so self-conscious,
it becomes downright sad. Just what
is a face? Your face. Eyes looking at
eyes but what do they see? Given it’s
the brain that sees. But that requires
thinking. And this is about looking:
lines, shapes, contours. The skull below.
Skin and blood. Muscles. Identity.
Right. I think I’d begin in a forest,
with one tree, one branch, a leaf.
Sketch the outline, the veins, the light
reflected after sudden rain. The way
the surface shines, a pupil in an iris.
The tiny ocean inside. The tide going
out, leaving a line of salt. Sand in
my lashes. Starfish on my brow.
An entire ocean unexplored.
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Susan Johnson’s poems and creative nonfiction pieces have recently appeared in Woven Tale, Abraxas, The Meadow, Dash, Front Range Review, Aji, and Trampoline. She lives in South Hadley MA and her commentaries can be heard on nepm.org.
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Issue #26.9 A Triple Issue: Richard LeDue, Pamela Bruns, and Kevin Ridgeway
A Poem by Richard LeDue
poems like this
i have no famous friends to lament no dejection worthy of documentary only poems like this trying to explain who i am and by extension who we all are
people as simple as nouns circled on a grade school worksheet
people as complicated as math problems we cheat to answer
and remember the Shakespeare you read in high school was a photocopy of a photocopy while the worm you dissected taught you nothing about death
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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 ten books of poetry. His latest book, “Sometimes, It Isn't Much,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in February 2024.
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A Poem by Pamela Bruns
Jenkins
He sat on the steps and tied his shoe, and again. His hands were shaking. Maybe that was
the medication. Maybe it was nerves. Didn’t they have something for nerves? He scratched his
chin and stood up. St Patrick’s Cathedral loomed large behind him. Atlas was holding up the
world before him. He just wanted to tie his shoe.
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Pamela Bruns writes fairy, fiction, and poetry. She is published at Darkly Bright Press. She currently lives in the Lexington, KY area where she has daily battles of wit with her terrifyingly articulate family.
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A Poem by Kevin Ridgeway
Footprint Rivalry
I used to think I was the only grown adult in Southern California who never learned how to drive a car, condemned to walk endless pavement, sometimes with zero destination— until the day I saw the lanky man with headphones on one side of the city and then another side of the city, walking past me with a blank face, eyes pointed forward to nowhere. Around the third time or so that this happened, he began to sneer at me, threatened by our shared claim to infamy, honked car horns a language we could both speak in our mutual profanity, but we hold our harsh words whenever we pass each other. On one occasion, I nodded at him in acknowledgement, and his grimace told me these sidewalks aren’t big enough for the both of us, but we’re too disillusioned with society and life to fight each other over it, an unwelcome reminder that even outsiders have to put up with trespassing into one another’s quest to be God’s lonely man.
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Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019) and Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, One Art, Main Street Rag, Spillway, San Pedro River Review, Plainsongs, Trailer Park Quarterly and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.
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Issue #26.10 A Triple Issue: Erin Duffy, Elly Katz, and Taylor Hagood
A Poem by Erin Duffy
Looking West
Before he left he said, “There’s a cornfield in the West that needs me, baby.” Did that wink in a white flash of eyelids and never looked back. Went to sleep in a pile of broken glass every night after that and woke up to a morning turned on its side. Wanted to miss him forever but as it turns out, I never memorized his face. That beautiful boy walked around absorbing light until there was nothing left to look at. His eyes a blocked doorway. Here the scorpion is again, and the cold water down your neck. Now Nebraska, now Wyoming, now I can’t picture anything but an empty chair. You of all people know what a train does to a girl. Thousand-mile hollow postcard and a blank stare out the window. That golden, golden summer. Sure, I left too. The difference is I always look back.
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Erin lives in Boston, MA, enjoys reading too many books at a time, and can be found talking to the birds in the neighborhood park.
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A Poem by Elly Katz
Ode to a Scribbler
I turn my back to reality Let language face front My life continues without a body My life staggers in repetition Why does this have to be beautiful
My grandmother paces the bassinet, insists on not being helpless She double-dips her grilled cheese in ketchup She recalls her primary colors, her ABCs, her times tables She prefers her Baldwin with a side of Eliot She knows how to whack pine in her art smock to scale salmon, how to smell a poem before its head turns
She bows over the kitchen table for the olive-green crayon to give legs to sunset Oily curls and pom-pom arms bounce as she lip-synchs Aretha, hurls every fourth lyric aloud She is hiccups in flamingo-pink underpants Porridge and raisins move hot down her tummy
If I touch her, everything about me will be real Nothing about her will be real I just stare dumb at Cinderella center-stage on her pelvis I linger for her to talk me back into my lines Nerves pinch at my sides
Her kneecaps work holes into the wicker She believes her bones will rest assured on this planet forever Why does this have to be beautiful
I stand here on thresholds where it is all laced up Here where constellations snuff out their own paths Here where the waves open at the cost of the wind Our circlet of fingers Our synchronized sea-lily feet pump tires in the air Tucked into bodies on sunburnt backs, we lay the hard stuff down A comic strip beats a wing on your thigh Sand up under our slick bathing suits
I wanted to give you honey sticks, vanilla ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, vagus nerves, bicycles, the trees and all their names I wanted to dab your every bee sting in Vaseline, watch your eyes hula-hoop as your mouth watered to try on your words I wanted to show you how not looking away is a kind of saving, how everyone merits saving
Why does this have to be beautiful I wanted to show you how to strip the ugly things of their ugly, how to enter their storm cellars beautifully, how terrifying emptiness is but how the meaning of things persists when the words for those things flake off Now we are no one Now we eddy as one in the water I think you would have liked it here anyway
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At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025). She is enrolled in the MFA program at Queens College. Find out more at ellykatz.com.
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A Poem by Taylor Hagood
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Taylor Hagood lives in south Florida and is the author of Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend and poetry, fiction, and literary criticism in such venues as A-Minor Magazine, Across the Margin, California Quarterly, The River, and The Rumpus.
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Issue #26.11 A Triple Issue: Luca D’Anselmi, Alan Altany, and Laurinda Lind
Three Poems by Luca D’Anselmi
Tomatoes
We’ve brought tomatoes by to help with the pain
in her chest. They’re healthy raw. I won’t complain
that they grow unasked for in our yard,
pull lattice off the porch, crawl through bars
on the doors, or have that metallic aftertaste.
They’re heirlooms, hearty, with thick flesh shaped
around four interlocking chambers.
We tried to rip them out last September
and I bent my shovel on empty helmets
buried under them, the size of stomping buckets,
and massive bones with charcoal marrow
as if they were consumed inside somehow.
But the vines grew back. Our yard is overwhelmed
with more tomatoes than we can eat ourselves.
Poetess
Cancers grow in my mother where I did.
Stone fetuses who clamor to be fed.
They cry for milk and honey in their tea
just how she likes it. Should I slide a reed
into her throat to pour them what they want?
I hear them gurgling up poems they found
half-written in her heart where it’s still warm.
They plagiarize. Should I threaten to call
the hermit from his pillar in the sky
to curse them from her with his hairy hands?
Or should I plead? Stop, stop, little brothers,
stop, you do not know what you are doing.
Should I deceive them, like the poets do,
who always mingle half-lies with half-truths?
Why won’t you see that she’s already dead?
You cannot take her life away like I did.
Dormition
If you can’t sleep, count the twelve tall men
whose long, painted hands are missing fingers,
then count the flowers caught in porcelain
vases by her feet. The thick scent lingers,
though after three days she still seems asleep
on the hard slab, almost as if she can
arise and greet the brightness that proceeds
forth from the corner, where a six-winged man
descends, kisses her, and takes a tiny child
from her mouth. Its face is like her face.
Held tight now in his motherly embrace,
it coos, clings to his burning breast, and smiles.
And then they’re gone. Her face grows greyer.
Count the tall men leaving one by one,
past the dark threshold, into the brilliant doorway,
their foreheads catching fire from the sun.
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Luca D'Anselmi holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Bryn Mawr College and teaches Latin and Greek. His poetry has recently appeared in The Hopkins Review, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. More at lucadanselmi.com.
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Three Poems by Alan Altany
Poems to God
No. 11
To be as useless
as a bird-in-flight
or as pointless
as random beauty
echoes idle wisdom
& latent imagination
acting without action,
doing nothing at all
with nothing undone,
an invisible weed
by a busy pathway,
moonlight floating
on a still pond,
a tattered banana
leaf silently flapping
in a summer breeze.
May I be as latent
as an unwritten poem
& as graciously useless
as Your holy emptiness.
No. 15
They say You are crazy
in love with each of us
even ego-infested me
madly willing to abandon
Yourself to ungodly ugly
suffered compassionate
descent into grotesque
humanity without delay
in divine embarrassment
& absolutely innocent
wisdom of the heart
willingly betraying all
godliness & propriety
to be born as a blood-
throbbing baby boy
destined for pure dying
& of ungoding Yourself
in infinite humility
loving us to death
with insane sanity.
No. 28
Unbelief as no rare stranger
a random dark night’s visitor
crowding out Your silence
with broad bandwidth static
in momentary intellectual
intimacy with atheism’s
bleak & stalled absurdities,
a transient & traumatic
dystopia of profane Sundays
like beauty turned ruthless
& hope morphing towards
a circling inferno of despair
for all who dare enter there.
Giving a certain sympathy
with the plight of unbelief,
my bouts of rejecting You
as consuming as they were
bashed through vacuums
of an always abandoned,
always orphaned universe,
springing so improbably
into a strange faith in You,
nascent & ancient at once.
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Alan Altany has BA & MA degrees in Catholic theology, and a Ph.D. in religious studies (University of Pittsburgh). After an academic career, he is a semi-retired, septuagenarian professor of Comparative Religions at a small college in Florida, USA. In the past he has also been the founder & editor of a small magazine of poetry (The Beggar’s Bowl), a high school teacher, factory and lawn maintenance worker, hotel clerk, novelist, delivery truck driver, etc. He has published three books of poetry for a series, “Christian Poetry of the Sacred”: A Beautiful Absurdity (2022), The Greatest Longing (2023), and Intimations (2024). His poetry has been published by Tipton Poetry Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Valley Voices, Sand Hill Literary Magazine, The Hong Kong Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Montreal Review, and others. He writes with the steadfast support of his golden retriever, Zeke.
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A Poem by Laurinda Lind
Guarded
My grandmother was sixty-five before I could speak and by then she had braced for every bad thing, a closed circuit of cloudy worry, like
kids could be annihilated wading in water over their knees or crossing the road alone even out in the country, where we lived. But now that I am wary
too, I’ve found what made her flutter so, her city’s early 1900s newspapers still readable online, the many drownings they had in her day dug in, as they were,
at the edge of the dark river, and stories about souls sent on by technology no one as yet understood. She’s gone now, but while she was still here I wish
I had seen how scary it is just going forward, that she was taking her best stand against everything that is going to get us at the end.
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Laurinda Lind lives in New York's North Country, close to Canada. Some of her poems are in Atlanta Review, Xavier Review, and Spillway. Her first chapbook, Trials by Water, was released in summer 2024 (Orchard Street Press). She has won four international poetry awards.
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