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James King
After the End, after Alison C. Rollins they told the ghosts we could go and have anything we wanted, so we all dropped to the ruin like blue needles. So many of my friends haunted houses they never had, but I was always afraid of skeletons. The sharpness of want drew me to the dark backseat of a car once fucked in, to recall the scent of hips and keys and pine-scented air freshener that hung from the mirror. I pushed into a train station, begged the curling flame in the sky to let me let the subway move. I begged it like an alarm clock but it threatened to make me a roach. For a long while, I became one living girl, who slept on a pile of phone booths. I did my damnedest to be her. I cried and slept. I waited and waited for the phones to ring. Carrie Bennett
The Stage Builds Itself Outside 1 In the first spring a stage appeared outside like a drawbridge. Once the set was assembled hot air balloons appeared in the distance like soft sailboats. Actors prepared their lines with their masks on. The stage directions told us to breathe as deeply as we could—“Hold your breath, now take a second breath, now a third”—until our chests exploded in sick dahlias. Once we were people who went grocery shopping with lists in our cold hands. We waited for new scripts to appear. The trees waited too. That was when the sickness was still on the sidewalks. I thought of all the uses of a marshmallow. “What does waste look like in your own mouth?” It’s less important now to be seen. On stage an enormous screen projected the audience back to themselves. When we were finally on stage we opened our mouths at once like hundreds of butterflies. Outside the quietest applause filled the air like static or rain. Inside Every Play Is an Apology I swallow the scene whole. The sky first blue then gray then orange. It takes too long to learn the tree’s lines. In another scene the swan spins in water. The audience claps like wooden boxes. What do you wish to replicate? It’s never easy to follow the script. The day derails so magnificently. And my mind like scattering flies. In the next scene the swan stays stranded in the middle. She sobs out her breath at the snapping turtle. Two words stuck inside my mouth like magnets. I sit for a while and point at the swan. I try to organize the air chronologically. The days continue like a machine chewing at cement. How each morning is an application for more. |
Tangible Things Sought, Lisa Segal. Mixed media.
Futile Repair, Mikayla Voller. Gesso and thread on canvas.
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Derek Thomas Dew
Roaming Burial The warm, smoky beach began to crawl through the room. The door repeatedly opened and closed, but quicker than anybody could get in or out. Ever since the sand, jasmine is how to withhold a name, and go on, marriage-less. A secret a lack of origin, like our street. Cloister stale with pigeons mid-forgetting us. I gave the doorman over to the idea of citywide copper. I made our embrace a lie by keeping my eyes open. Lily Kosmicki Creature of Habit Where is the lightning held? In strange religions. Distant lights Echo through the valley, lightning through the core. The big space fills a gap in me. The mountains are blanketed by clouds and by trees. Turn wheels to make blood. Turn wheels to make prayers. I pry nails from wood with angled fingernails. Do you remember what a chest feels like hanging off of you? Neha Mulay Aubade with Genesis Say I want to walk in a dry ocean. Would there still be lilacs in another house I can’t fill? For the filament is creeping up my nose again. Everything I want is bloodless. The Fishermen are calling to storm, sky souring with locusts as I try to make baskets out of water – I am as divided as this nation ochre as the heart of earth. What dream will turn me now? What strange incantation? Kali Yuga Either we birth obsidian or the time comes for this play to turn berserk as a bee in an ear, not the end, no, more a leeching just earth disowning us spring arriving with nowhere to land – Raoul left mother around the same time color began to leave the reef, there must be an imprint of death in our clean-cut stones, look, again, you are receding paramour, the world and my eyes crusted with salt streets imprinted with bullets and choke, all night I dream of salves & brass polish, wake, the rosary beads slipping this hour like a windowless room cave of black ink let me make a hull of you almost in the way we make bones of land heat making sick fire losing luster yuga curling up yuga ready for sleep cocoon no longer Paramour, no court will have us now we are turned like remain in teacup & sun skin-to-skin pigmented motherless moth-struck mute & sport-drunk in the back-garden hills hoist singed garden sink upturned we never did get new tiles but we spent months flipping through color Garrett Stack Mine My ear yawns on a pillowed hill pouring choking smoke into her canary lungs. She turns from my slurry cold as coal and wakes and wakes until woke, rises slow, starts the sooty coffee drip, drops grey eggs into blackest cast iron. She’s exhausted but better still than lying too near here and my open pit mind. Allie Rigby To the Listener \\ Whose Listening These are trying times by the bottle open, bottle to drink I want, I need new ways to feel change, not bristle pinpricks I’m talking about unsettling these are unsettling times staying grounded hustle culture, hard on good day—see, I’m a bit boxed in here totally great, overall— accepted the struggle, what now, malaise nestles deep unlike the soft grooves of a Matilija poppy, these are unsettling times I’m talking about, accepted the great struggle overall in bristle pinpricks. I wanted a boxed salve, new ways to feel by the open bottle—now what? To drink trying times when these are trying times, by the bristled bottle, bottle-opened, laugh at the drunk now. J V Birch Funny dreams You left and came back with another, her young son in tow. I turned into a doll, spent nights getting lost in huge rooms shifting with shadows and space and no air. And you, standing in a doorway I could never reach. Household things loomed in between us, as if I must tidy my way through. I spoke only tiptoe. Now you’re gone, I find it’s still there when I linger, the fathomless panic, pulling me back Rachel Turan Immersed You stop your Tiny home on wheels In park unknown to you Jaw out sniffing, mission sent Seeking Not the gentle light Scattered, shadowless Or the echo of the Bouncing ball, the small Exaltations You seek write-ups of the past Those that shout in the same Learned language that they gave to you The chainsaw’s distant itching towards each leaf’s death Fall lost against the concrete structure of the frog war Prudence I couldn’t see her anymore She had become the hill’s shadow And underneath me grew the fungus That choiceless, I scraped away Until her far-flung echo fed the spores And let them multiply Wandering, there was a cat Brooding toothless and with its confidence spread out; a faded map Thinned and immediate but blank And I took her in with all her hesitation Mine lodging itself between my fingers Her soft, age-speckled fur Scattered over my empty lap Inside her mouth The fungus multiplied just in time For her to suck and salivate and swallow it down. |
Nebraska Bridge, Greg Clary. Photograph.
Reaching Grasping, Mikayla Voller. Mixed media on canvas.
Sixth Turtle, a Healthy Turtle, of the Land, Ilya Gutner. Pen on notebook paper.
Sixth Turtle, a Healthy Turtle, of the Land (Alternate view), Ilya Gutner. Pen on notebook paper.
Always, Cynthia Yachtman. Ink and acrylic on paper mounted on wood.
When the Street Lights Come On, Lisa Segal. Mixed media.
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CM Preston
Have Gone Circumscribing
A rustling praise day
so the fluidic sincerity lives on in a banana, the poetic house of the father,
the loving
bed that is sensible and resplendent.
I want you to fly on my heart.
In the first take, the soft woman
is struck by a giant. In the second
scene he returns, to swim and to weave.
There are no havocs but nauseous cycles
of knave and marine
cathedrals of handsome rusted broken glass.
You are going to ask where are the fill?
And the resolute springtime?
And the thunder full splattering its starry skies and hating them full of vicinity and toucan?
It was the night of the lobster.
Behind the furious land of melancholy love.
It was the day of the iguana.
It was the sunrise of the toucan.
Return to the homeland of the productivities.
I saw how perfumes are mixed
by the enchanting tree.
The chimney around hers
a history we tell in passing,
with notions of honor
and a passion for journalism and oceanography
of your opaque dark movie when you hold out your foot.
It was the midnight of the ostrich.
A loaf of bread baked with atrocious tiredness and salt. Wave of wave of wreaths rolling down the sea.
A springtime focuses its dream of a beginning, its old ending, the new beginning of the writing order -
its smooth gates.
Here I am, somber hips silenced in the city of movie.
Have Gone Circumscribing
A rustling praise day
so the fluidic sincerity lives on in a banana, the poetic house of the father,
the loving
bed that is sensible and resplendent.
I want you to fly on my heart.
In the first take, the soft woman
is struck by a giant. In the second
scene he returns, to swim and to weave.
There are no havocs but nauseous cycles
of knave and marine
cathedrals of handsome rusted broken glass.
You are going to ask where are the fill?
And the resolute springtime?
And the thunder full splattering its starry skies and hating them full of vicinity and toucan?
It was the night of the lobster.
Behind the furious land of melancholy love.
It was the day of the iguana.
It was the sunrise of the toucan.
Return to the homeland of the productivities.
I saw how perfumes are mixed
by the enchanting tree.
The chimney around hers
a history we tell in passing,
with notions of honor
and a passion for journalism and oceanography
of your opaque dark movie when you hold out your foot.
It was the midnight of the ostrich.
A loaf of bread baked with atrocious tiredness and salt. Wave of wave of wreaths rolling down the sea.
A springtime focuses its dream of a beginning, its old ending, the new beginning of the writing order -
its smooth gates.
Here I am, somber hips silenced in the city of movie.
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Amber Mooers Another Chore I hate putting dishes away They all stick together An amorphous blob pretending to be a jenga stack of meals past Like candy left in a hot car A plate mates with the mug stacked precariously atop it the dishes whisper promises they cannot keep I see warped reflections in their curves My hand makes contact I become honey My fingers glue to the cereal bowl They dissolve into the white ceramic glaze Who will put us away now? Adele Evershed Skewwiff I woke up yellow—decrepid Something not quite right People born by the sea are older Yet this weathering surprised me The compression of the thing settled in my gut Rigmaroling me round the room like a drunk But I still couldn’t fill up the empty spaces Time once felt slippery in patches Skidding past—a flibberty-jibbit Now it hangs like a promise—each day a small fable I dig out abeyant words But use them in all the wrong places Washing them with my breath So they can exist for a short time-- Caper about creating their own mild breeze They are flashes of wit contrary to the sun’s course Amorphous—they float away on a riptide and I am too gutless to call them back |
Alone in the Snow, Derek Thomas Dew. Photograph.
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contributors
Carrie Bennett is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of biography of water, The Land Is a Painted Thing, and several chapbooks from dancing girl press. Her third poetry book, Lost Letters and Other Animals, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in early 2021. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Boston Review, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, and jubilat. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches writing at Boston University.
Lily Rose Kosmicki is a librarian at the public library and by night she is a collector of dreams. Her zine Dream Zine won a Broken Pencil Zine Award for Best Art Zine 2018. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Interim, Seisma Magazine, and elsewhere.
Ilya Gutner lives with his friend, two cats and a loose coterie of stray dogs, in the back shed of a farmer's house in a village on the city outskirts of Shanghai, and is a student of philosophy.
Neha Mulay is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review, and SAND Journal among other publications. She is the Web Editor for the Washington Square Review.
J V Birch lives in Adelaide. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, including Australian Love Poems, The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts and The Hunter Writers Centre Grieve. Her work has also featured in a number of journals and magazines across Australia, the UK, Canada and the US, including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Not Very Quiet, Plumwood Mountain, Magma, Cordite and Mslexia. She has three chapbooks with Ginninderra Press – Smashed glass at midnight, What the water & moon gave me and A bellyful of roses - and a full-length collection, more than here. She blogs (very occasionally) at www.jvbirch.com
A sculptor by trade, Amber Mooers incorporates writings heavily into her process oriented work. Her visual art can be seen at ambermooers.com, or in her studio in Durham, North Carolina.
Derek Thomas Dew’s debut collection of poetry, "Riddle Field," received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada Press. His poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tempered Runes Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Button Eye Review, and elsewhere. He is a winner of an Oregon Opportunity Grant and an Omnidawn Publishing Workshop Scholarship. He currently lives in Oregon.
Rachel Turan creates digital art for a nonprofit and writes music and poetry for her sanity in the forgotten wilds of New Jersey. Her work has been published in Alexandria Quarterly Press and Toho Journal.
Lisa Segal uses typography, geometry, repetition, maps, crow imagery, text from her poems, and hand-built multiples to continually reinvent a personal vocabulary of shapes and patterns. She is a founding member and past chair of StudioEleven, a Los Angeles art collective. She has shown in various galleries in Los Angeles. A teacher of poetry and writing through the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective, she has written four books: Kicking Towards the Deep End, Trips, Metamorphosis: Who is the Maker? An Artist’s Statement, and her textbook, Jack Grapes’ Method Writing: The Brush-Up. She is a winner of the Los Angeles Poet Society Poetry Month Contest. www.lisasegal.com
Garrett Stack is a teacher and writer at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. His work is forthcoming or recently published in the Great Lakes Review, American Journal of Poetry, Pine Row, and others. His first book of poetry, Yeoman's Work, was released as part of Bottom Dog Press' Working Lives Series in August 2020 and includes two Pushcart Prize nominees.
C.M. Preston is a Canadian poet currently attending the MFA program at The University of British Columbia.
Allie Rigby is a Bay Area poet and educator with roots in the chaparral of southern California. Her writing is published in the Manzano Mountain Review, Cholla Needles, Visitant, Living on Earth Radio, and more. Currently, Allie is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for one of her poems.
James King is a writer and student from New Hampshire, and the recipient of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize from Dartmouth College. His work has appeared in the Stonefence Review, The Foundationalist, Humana Obscura, and Bluing the Blade. He lives with his family and a very noisy beagle.
Adele Evershed writes poetry and prose from a desk overlooking a wood in Connecticut. She has had poems published in a number of anthologies and online you can find her work in The Fib Review, Rainbow Poems, and Flash Fiction North.
Greg Clary is Professor Emeritus of Rehab and Human Services at Clarion University, Clarion PA. His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Watershed Journal, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Trailer Park Quarterly, Waccamaw Journal, Rusty Truck, Ant-Heroin Chic, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1. His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Dark Horse, North/South Appalachia, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly, Winedrunk Sidewalk, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Avant Appal(achia). He was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Mikayla Voller is an Art Therapist and visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Through her work at a New York City nursing home, Mikayla supports older adults using Art Therapy to express themselves, connect with one another, and enhance their mental health and wellbeing. To cope with the challenges of the pandemic, Mikayla enjoys baking (albeit poorly), watching a lot of Schitt’s Creek, and taking long, contemplative walks with her dog, Jazmyn. In addition to making art for herself, Mikayla hosts virtual art events to teach small groups how to use art-making for self care. To learn more about Mikayla and her artwork, visit her website, mikaylavoller.com, and follow her on Instagram, @mikayla.voller.”
Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections in the Northwest and she has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming.
Erica Lane, Editor.
Published February 1st, 2021
Lily Rose Kosmicki is a librarian at the public library and by night she is a collector of dreams. Her zine Dream Zine won a Broken Pencil Zine Award for Best Art Zine 2018. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Interim, Seisma Magazine, and elsewhere.
Ilya Gutner lives with his friend, two cats and a loose coterie of stray dogs, in the back shed of a farmer's house in a village on the city outskirts of Shanghai, and is a student of philosophy.
Neha Mulay is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review, and SAND Journal among other publications. She is the Web Editor for the Washington Square Review.
J V Birch lives in Adelaide. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, including Australian Love Poems, The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts and The Hunter Writers Centre Grieve. Her work has also featured in a number of journals and magazines across Australia, the UK, Canada and the US, including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Not Very Quiet, Plumwood Mountain, Magma, Cordite and Mslexia. She has three chapbooks with Ginninderra Press – Smashed glass at midnight, What the water & moon gave me and A bellyful of roses - and a full-length collection, more than here. She blogs (very occasionally) at www.jvbirch.com
A sculptor by trade, Amber Mooers incorporates writings heavily into her process oriented work. Her visual art can be seen at ambermooers.com, or in her studio in Durham, North Carolina.
Derek Thomas Dew’s debut collection of poetry, "Riddle Field," received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada Press. His poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tempered Runes Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Button Eye Review, and elsewhere. He is a winner of an Oregon Opportunity Grant and an Omnidawn Publishing Workshop Scholarship. He currently lives in Oregon.
Rachel Turan creates digital art for a nonprofit and writes music and poetry for her sanity in the forgotten wilds of New Jersey. Her work has been published in Alexandria Quarterly Press and Toho Journal.
Lisa Segal uses typography, geometry, repetition, maps, crow imagery, text from her poems, and hand-built multiples to continually reinvent a personal vocabulary of shapes and patterns. She is a founding member and past chair of StudioEleven, a Los Angeles art collective. She has shown in various galleries in Los Angeles. A teacher of poetry and writing through the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective, she has written four books: Kicking Towards the Deep End, Trips, Metamorphosis: Who is the Maker? An Artist’s Statement, and her textbook, Jack Grapes’ Method Writing: The Brush-Up. She is a winner of the Los Angeles Poet Society Poetry Month Contest. www.lisasegal.com
Garrett Stack is a teacher and writer at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. His work is forthcoming or recently published in the Great Lakes Review, American Journal of Poetry, Pine Row, and others. His first book of poetry, Yeoman's Work, was released as part of Bottom Dog Press' Working Lives Series in August 2020 and includes two Pushcart Prize nominees.
C.M. Preston is a Canadian poet currently attending the MFA program at The University of British Columbia.
Allie Rigby is a Bay Area poet and educator with roots in the chaparral of southern California. Her writing is published in the Manzano Mountain Review, Cholla Needles, Visitant, Living on Earth Radio, and more. Currently, Allie is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for one of her poems.
James King is a writer and student from New Hampshire, and the recipient of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize from Dartmouth College. His work has appeared in the Stonefence Review, The Foundationalist, Humana Obscura, and Bluing the Blade. He lives with his family and a very noisy beagle.
Adele Evershed writes poetry and prose from a desk overlooking a wood in Connecticut. She has had poems published in a number of anthologies and online you can find her work in The Fib Review, Rainbow Poems, and Flash Fiction North.
Greg Clary is Professor Emeritus of Rehab and Human Services at Clarion University, Clarion PA. His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Watershed Journal, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Trailer Park Quarterly, Waccamaw Journal, Rusty Truck, Ant-Heroin Chic, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1. His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Dark Horse, North/South Appalachia, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly, Winedrunk Sidewalk, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Avant Appal(achia). He was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Mikayla Voller is an Art Therapist and visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Through her work at a New York City nursing home, Mikayla supports older adults using Art Therapy to express themselves, connect with one another, and enhance their mental health and wellbeing. To cope with the challenges of the pandemic, Mikayla enjoys baking (albeit poorly), watching a lot of Schitt’s Creek, and taking long, contemplative walks with her dog, Jazmyn. In addition to making art for herself, Mikayla hosts virtual art events to teach small groups how to use art-making for self care. To learn more about Mikayla and her artwork, visit her website, mikaylavoller.com, and follow her on Instagram, @mikayla.voller.”
Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections in the Northwest and she has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming.
Erica Lane, Editor.
Published February 1st, 2021
