Issue #27.1 A Triple Issue: Harold Bowes, Harrison Fisher, and Julie Sumner
A Poem by Harold Bowes
Day of the Dead Bar
We are anxious arriving at the airport a little late to pick up our daughter who is visiting for a few days
We are hopeful driving down from airport hill daughter in the backseat like it used to be
We are pleased as she passes forward a gift, candy shark teeth in a tin like Altoids
We are expectant stopping at the new bar downtown that has a Day of the Dead theme escorting her inside
We are watchful sitting at the table drinking Pacifica beer looking for a reaction
We are hinting at what a great place this is, like nothing she has living In Vancouver
As though one bar with outstanding Day of the Dead decorations could convince her to move home
I hold a ceramic salt shaker shaped like a human skull and roll it in my palm shaking out the grains
onto the table top My soul is a blue boat adrift I scatter shark teeth on the ocean floor
We were heartbroken
We were lovestruck
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Harold Bowes is the author of Detached Palace Garden (Ravenna Press, 2017). Harold’s poems have appeared in elimae, THRUSH Poetry Journal, alice blue, SOFTBLOW, Portland Review, DMQ Review, failbetter, and many others.
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Two Poems by Harrison Fisher
I Ran All the Way Home
The transistor radio was born two months before me, retailing for $49.99, about $360 in 2020 money.
I had one by 1961, as much a relic today as an incunabulum. I listened to doo wop after bedtime,
under the covers,
weighted with a practiced sadness that started somewhere far away, coming to my street
gleaming with night rain, the sound in my ear like dark, empty stretches
of distant landscape, field, riffled by tornadic falsettos.
Your Name on a Grain of Rice
I stand on a corner as a city bus goes by. Through the filthy window I see the silhouette of a passenger with antlers on his head.
He is the Stag Man, all right, riding on to a sub-sylvan frolic, a quick coupling with a doe-woman in brush that comes after
the route’s turn-around, an area of squalid ghosts and immaterial stinks that marks the end of the line.
On our side, feeble civilization. I step onto his side. I am trying to think Apollonian thoughts, but I feel Dionysian.
This is the stag’s lot. Surround me the subspecies, the singing dancers. They sing, they dance.
They feed.
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Harrison Fisher has published twelve collections of poems since 1977, four of them book-length: Blank Like Me, Curtains for You, UHFO, and, most recently, Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real. After a hiatus from writing and publishing for most of the 21st century, Fisher has new work appearing in 2025 in All Existing, Amsterdam Review, The Basilisk Tree, Chewers by Masticadores, The Corpus Callosum, eMerge, the engine(idling, The Kleksograph, Misfitmagazine, and Rat’s Ass Review. He is retired from public service and living in upstate New York.
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Two Poems by Julie Sumner
Lament for Falling for It All Over Again
Genesis 3:4-5 Then the serpent said to the woman, “No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
I would have fallen for it, too, wouldn't you? That knowledge that gleams as good also revels in the evil it reveals. My curiosity, a moth lured in by the brightness of the thing, makes an easy prey. The next post, next podcast, next newscast will finally explain it all–at last. And so I fly right into the burning frame of light, the wings of my mind blackening to match the night. No god am I.
Too late, like Eve, I realize that like only ever means like. A facsimile, a resemblance, the way a hummingbird moth is still only insect despite the hum, the blur of wings, the glint of emerald green. Its life only a summer season, it travels merely from shrub to purple-flowered shrub rather than embark on any grand migration across the sun-spattered gulf. Moth remains moth and never becomes bird. And we become like gods only in our knowledge of what we are not.
A Lament for What the Ground is Forced to Swallow
Genesis 4: 10-11 JB “What have you done?” Yahweh asked. “Listen to the sound of your brother’s blood, crying out to me from the ground. Now be accursed and driven from the ground that has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood at your hands.”
As I sink my spade into this flank of clay just south and west of Shy's Hill, I remember that I am not the first to disturb this dirt. Beneath this suburban turf lie battle-scars deeper than the limestone, the blood from that old war by now swallowed down by aquifers, stubbornly staining even the groundwater. A boy rides by on his bicycle, waves. And I wonder what Yahweh hears now as I pray–are my prayers the only ones rising from this particular acre? Or are they joined by the soldiers' cries as they were slaughtered–like the water and the blood mixed together?
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Julie Sumner is a writer who has worked as a critical care nurse, liver transplant coordinator, and massage therapist. She now teaches creative writing, focusing on reading poetry and writing as ways to develop resilience. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Delta Poetry Review, The Intima, Relief Journal, The Englewood Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Meridian, was chosen by poet Jane Hirshfield as the winner of the 2023 Wildhouse Poetry Prize. Her website is www.juliesumnerpoetry.com.
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