Poetry
The Singular Female’s Wicked Plans by Kim Silva
One female fish, a pert denizen of the depths, an angler fish drifting her way through the
darkness, lit only by a lamp bell that tinkles when she gets too close to another drifter, tinkledee
tinkledum, here she comes. She has fans, a small gathering of open-mouthed, unblinking workers
and flamboyant citizens of the depths, some plainer than others but all shimmering, their bodies
swishing past each other, in muted terms they share their concerns, their eyes darting amongst
themselves as they whisper about this singular female in this deeply dark and rather isolated
bottom of the ocean.
step right up by Linda Laderman
see the lines
set around my lips spread
as if a hot knife
took my face for
a dish of cold butter
sleep scrapes my cheek bags
lie under my lidded
eyes soft folds of flesh
on my neck papery
skin hangs loose thigh/knee
exposes a worn uneven
frame in the mirrors i’m
contorted like a carnival
clown’s balloons stretched
& knotted one leg pops
& then an arm
i can’t take back time
so, i buy more
chances despite the odds
unwilling to pass the possibility
of future good fortune
Visitings by Elizabeth Sylvia
My girl was soft and round as a toadstool
the year we moved to the forest-edge house.
Now she’s sheet metal angles in the sun.
Earliest mornings, I am farthest from my family,
closest to the idea of nature grown over the remainder
of colonial fields behind the house. Black rain
of moth frass shaking off the bitten oaks. When I look
at a tree, I don’t remember to picture
its absence despite the cankers lacing through
its leaves. Between my face at the slider and the doorway
of the woods, a false pond in an old metal tub,
goldfish flashing like thought in a dark belly –
or were. A heron’s soft wing of mist hangs
over the yard, a full-grown heron
pauses at the pond lip, clear lines in the oystershell light,
then his wings spanning open with the power
of a splitting maul as I try to close our distance
for a further look. What I remember
is that I was visited. The heron rises again and again
in memory, mythic, a shining wrestler
some godlike touch transfigured to a bird.
Only later to note the pillaged empty pool.
When the wet flakes of our first winter coated the grass,
my girl ran for the woods. I tracked her footsteps,
little loaves of darkness stamped in snow,
imagining evening in the curious teeth
of the near-wild, coyotes and the fisher cats
my mother-in-law averred would come
to bury their snouts in the pink pillow of her face.
Distance drew the house down to whiteness before
I found her at last in a circle of birches,
my heart banging the house’s worry.
I’m telling you a story about years ago –
and yesterday. I was awake before everyone.
Nightmare by Mackenzie Rose
And the moment slows. I can’t hear
myself breathing. I’m not listening.
The water, the sky, the water rushes
to slimy-bright skin. Black, thirsty
eyes drink me. Watching
from my head, the water drowns
into the day, leaving the cracked,
rusty ground to hold me. It swims,
flashing fins, white-iron belly and raw
teeth, forward still. It wants me.
The scream tightens my throat.
The moment leaves. I remember I am walking,
away, into my neighborhood.
My feet glide. Where was I
just before? Matched-happy houses lean
down the street. Their shadowed faces streak,
infecting the next in line. With silent release,
purple decay worms from dead beds
and door-sockets. Licking for my bare legs,
its cancer reaches. Pulling
with my hands, I turn into the air, kicking
to stay afloat.
Blankets. This is my room.
My feet are black, far away hills. Dark covers
up the walls. He leans down
from the moon-blue ceiling. His bone-brilliant
face breaks with a longing tongue. Greedy
hands spread, for me. My body
is gone, stuck in this sheet-nest and tucked
toys. The window is already open and only
over there.
The room is dark, as before, but I can hear
the night again. My legs bend
when I will them, but I don’t want to disturb
the shadows and the man and the hunger
and the reaching. I won’t move
until morning, when she comes
to wake me.
morning meditation of an eldest daughter by Kaitlyn Owens
The hollow nettles with carpenter bees,
each woman provocated to offer
her body as sacrifice, thirsting to release
a potent venom upon the world.
In the muddle of gooseberries and ivy,
in patches of violet and oak,
they scrabble toward a soft sound
armed only with trust in order.
The collective buzz sips honeysuckle
from the unkempt peach skin of men,
finds wine in the gurgling red ravine
of their bodies until only the air hums and
the shells of stinging beauties
line the grass like fallen soldiers,
crumpled leaves underfoot the thump of boots
and the thwack of bird wings.
Will they learn to ask why
before giving their lives
away to a fire god each morning?
Will I?
BEAT DOWN by Mitch Rayes
​
a ragged young entrepreneur
waves with a broken tree limb
hey dude!
hit me with this branch for a dollar
you are jealous
of the blunt way he gets
to the heart of the matter
every shit job
every bad relationship
comes right down to this
friday nights before the pandemic
he’d have a good chance of getting
thrashed to a richness
beyond his dreams
but a lean street tonight
turns up no takers
how much to stick it up your ass?
you consider to counter
but pass not looking
not crass or obliging
for the sake of the trees
Jugged Hare by John D Kelly
​after Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer; 1502.
He somehow knew he could never really ever find
a way to be able to kill it; and yet, for some reason
(even for all that) he shot and drew it without the fine
sable of an Albrecht Dürer: gutted his ‘masterpiece’
with a keenly honed knife, while knowing it was still
fully alive; his skin crawling as he flayed it hanging
from a metal tenter; blood very slowly dripping . . .
into a dull pewter pail
And now I paint it anew – as flesh made word – as
a changeling. I watch my verbs transforming
into gerunds. All parts of my future – my own self-
quartered Being – are very slowly . . . slowing, but
never ending. I am become a deathly ever-stewing
in a pot – a hot bubbling, a simmering, a squirming.
The Fox by Rebecca Surmont
​​
​Flicking movement in the shadows
of tall grasses, barrier to the
inward creeping water of the lake
fish flop in soppy mud
having waited until the sunset to retreat
to the lake itself --
their weight sinking further and day is ending.
There is a brief twitching energy
of passers-by, skates, bikes, and blurry
conversations that rise and fall,
like fish line with a bite.
The late summer heat meets a chill at
invisible intersections when everything merges
with the night.
Then, a flurried scuffle directs our attention
to the shadowed and shallow beach head.
Barely an outline against the darkened sky
though only 20 feet from our toes
a watchman, patiently poised, preying --
a fox.
As a dart to its target, straight and shocking
it lands. Fluff shrieks hidden from our eyes
and its mother.
Now, battered in sand, basted in the arms of its taker,
cries and flops.
We hold our breath or it holds us
equally in captivity as the bunny in fox jowls.
We eye the graceful retreat,
a final march and funeral rite, perfect placement of the carcass
in a sandy grave and he is off to the grass,
returning moments later as if for an encore
but there is only the sound of lapping, a dirge --
as he lifts it once again as if to set the waves straight
then hunches down to dine.
The Day Death Will Arrive by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
​
I hope that the day death will arrive
will turn out to be a horrendous mess,
a disaster, a catastrophe, a blockbuster misery,
such that death would not have the gut
to await the galloping closure of my breath
like the clanking of broken bicycle’s wheels,
before it takes off into the nearby bush,
running like a cockroach at the switch of light,
when the house owner suddenly surfaces.
I hope that at the point of sneaking into the light
to switch it off and cast a veil of darkness around,
there will be a tremor in the sky to obfuscate death
before it plunges my room into deep darkness,
sending watchful cockroaches and rabbits into a panic;
the mosquitoes, moths and crickets will have no option
but to scamper from my room in search of another
where the clammy fingers of death would not reach.
Before death succeeds in blacking out my home,
I want thunder to scream into the night,
lightning to send out a blinding flash of red lights
to throw into chaos and panic the trees and flowers
that await my moment of triumph to set them free.
There will be a storm to hit the precincts of my country,
the peaceful banks and shores of every river and sea,
the green vegetation of all the mountains in my land,
where fishes swim ashore when they seek warmth,
the plains of the plateau, the valleys of Zuma Mountain,
from where echoes of the approaching volcano reverberate
to shatter death’s horrendous plan of luring me away
to where no one would comfort and mourn for me.
That day, there would be no mourners but dancers,
who will arrive from a distant country with bands
to play praise and thanksgiving music, dance to it,
and celebrate the life that death wants to whisk away.
The Last November Sunset by Lawrence Bridges
​
Rays shine through grout.
The bricks float as if gravity
were a quaint nostrum.
I march with pomp and high purpose
on crystal hinges deliquescing
in sunlight, my frame gapped
as bones go around
with a laughing embrace
settling scores joyously.
I swallow hard with air
at no progress—there is no progress
except cooling to a cold sleep,
soft tissue filed to roundness
and some troubling spots
with hoods shoveling casket meat.
I run against a clock that's yet
to click one second
yet still, it doesn't feel insane.
The last November sunset
over the pier may have been
the most beautiful this year.
Lost and Found in the Painted Desert by Jennifer Handy
​
Far off the path, there lies
a structure made of small
white marble stones, a sculpture
or an altar; two stones fall
down; they have no mortar.
They lie still, scintillating
across the brownness of the desert
as time goes by, its plodding
pace marking out the days,
the months, the seasons, years,
the same way it always has.
You pick up the stones, like tears
fallen from someone else’s eye,
and you place them back upon
the altar, to make it last
another day, another millennium.
The desert tortoise stops
to rest under the blinding sun,
a solitary creature whose progress
is eternal, his journey never done.
The wind ruffles the leaves
of the mesquite; from the bottle-brush
a jackrabbit lifts his head up,
hearing the chirping of a thrush
or perhaps your gentle tread.
He hops a few feet away,
then stops and lifts his head,
and, seeing nothing else, he stays.
Like you, he has things
he must attend to, the random
clover bud perhaps he missed,
and hind legs he longs to stand on
not for any reason,
but simply because he can.
You take your cue from the honey-bees,
buzzing yellow on the yellow pollen.
There is shade to seek,
grain to cook, crocuses
to gather. There is no place to rush off to.
There never is, never was,
anything but this.
Prose
ANNIVERSARY by AS Aubrey
​
You are the kind of person who feels rejected easily. You are probably even upset that I’ve said that. Every time you look at me, you wonder if I am thinking about something else. There’s no allowance for my ADHD, the way my mind goes like fireworks to particles in the air or the sound of a song, that bass thrum hammering itself past my eyelids.
But you also have to pee all the time. So that even when I am paying attention, you are squirming and wriggling free. How many times have you relieved your bladder right before having sex, just as we were starting to undress?
Your smirk, also, when I am telling you how annoyed I am with the Lakers memorabilia my best friend has: the way it collects dust on the shelf and on the front of the plastic packaging, muting the view through it, making me scared for his sanity. Your smirk says what: that I am too focused on forgettable things, worries that don’t last.
There is the time you told me I was lost and would never be found, and I believed you.
Which is why, when I write this to you on the eve of our fourth anniversary I want to tell you that your armpits stink from that non-anti-perspirant you insist on wearing (I know, the aluminum); or that I have done the dishes seven nights in a row, even though you are on hiatus from that tv show you hope you still write on (but may not know until January) and are practicing random yoga poses to see if you can do them without tipping over.
But I don’t.
Because this is actually not a complaint. If I told you all of this, you would also tell me that you can’t stand it when I snort out loud at pet videos on Instagram, having somehow called in that algorithm so that there is always another one to watch: cute gray kittens catching balls or getting their tails stuck in peanut butter and dragging the jar across the room.
You would tell me I’m a workaholic that has no friends, preferring late night typing sometimes even to hot sex (but our sex is not always hot, is sometimes boring and repetitive, you know this also) or to hot tea and conversation you try to bribe me into after my waitering job at the breakfast place where no one tips me and my feet hurt, throbbing from standing.
For that matter, you would say I am not making a living, not amounting to anything, and that I have a bald spot we are both pretending to ignore on the top of my head, above my left eyebrow.
But you wouldn’t say any of that either. Because we would probably have ended up not strangling each other, no, our rage just muted by the use of phones glowing us away from each other; but nonetheless snuggled nicely at the end of a day remembering that we used to have more fun and that we do kind of like the feel of our bodies under the blanket on this couch when it’s cold, our fake fireplace tv crackling.
I might look at a video of two dogs chasing their tails and bumping into each other. And you might get up to go to the bathroom, half tripping as you extract yourself from my crossed and hairy legs.
The moon outside would tell us it is night and we would probably laugh at something, at some point. Then, tomorrow, we mostly forget everything we think we know and start again; saying I love you at the intersection that is the doorway to the world beyond, relieved there is this to return to.
Music
Life is Beautiful by Burnt Mellow
The Gulf by Brandy Witthoft
Music & Poem by Aaron Beck