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?
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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
________________________________________________________________________________________
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?
________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
________________________________________________________________________________________