Lament for a Daughter
by Jena Woodhouse
In darkness, cauled in purple wool you nest, my pale
Persephone; delicate, ephemeral spring iris
at your feet and head.
Here lies a little girl, my child, robed in gold and violet.
Asclepius, great sage of health, why could you not
forestall this grief?
The autumn fever stole her breath – season of Dionysos:
she heard the flutes and drums, and begged to dance,
but lay delirious.
We dressed her for a different feast, fresh pomegranates
at her breast, and harvest fruits for sustenance,
to sweeten parting’s bitterness.
Her ivory doll we laid to rest, with sandals from the high priestess
to speed her through the asphodels, and fragrances
the priests had blessed.
May the sarcophagus guard well the gift it holds
in chill embrace, and may her spirit journey
among kindly shades, to Hesperus.
But I am desolate, bereft, estranged from life, at odds
with death: I long to share my daughter’s sleep
beneath the irises.
Hellenistic sarcophagus
(from the period 323 BCE-31BCE)
Volos Archaeological Museum
Greece
Jena Woodhouse, based in Queensland, Australia, is the author/ translator/ co-compiler of ten book and chapbook publications in various genres, five of which are poetry collections, most recently The Book of Lost Addresses: A retrospective (Picaro Poets 2020). Her poems were shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2013 and 2015. Having lived and worked in Greece for ten years, she draws on that source as a site of continuing revelation and inspiration.
Picking Berries, Belvedere, 1975
by Michelle Bitting
Praise to the summers spent whacking paths through blackberry bushes and
to our mothers who knew just how much sugar and pectin to swivel in, just
how long to let the violet pots bubble and swirl while they tossed back
Tanqueray & limes under an evergreen canopy, Mom and bestie Susie from
Seattle tucked into the Spruce-dotted deck, late sun slipping away like a
child with stolen pantry cake through backdoor screens, light sucking its
stomach in, making a skinny ribbon, an echo without a blink. Our
mothers sipping their tart, icy drinks while we foraged, gossip and
You’ll never believe what happened next gasped into the last rays casting
shade over redwood slats and stripes across their swim-suited chests, rendering
them zoo creatures or inmates—cages or heaven—it’s hard to say, caught as
they were in that epoch’s cross hairs, shades of June Cleaver fading under
Steinem’s bold new strokes, frosty points of their pink toes tapping code
against the deck’s dark grain, their stifled bursts—laughter or low moans—
over a husband’s secret deals, affairs, clients gone awry, the leaked lives,
domestic baggage unleashed like exotic lap animals between them as cold
gin greased vocal strings and volumes rose: signal to us on our return of
their liquored, compromised state and therefore freedom to do as we
pleased after we’d dumped our brimming pails—bounty left to ruddy
immaculate kitchen sinks—sprinting then through shushing sprinklers to
rinse dirt and brambles off, cooling ourselves in the high August heat. Our
quest completed, one summer, my ersatz cousin Karen came running to
where our mothers still reclined, savoring twilight cocktails while dinner’s
chicken pot pies bronzed on indoor racks, a scarlet band worming its way
down Karen’s leg as she ran, staining daisy bikini bottoms. I’m bleeding! And
we thought maybe a rabid bush—berry prick—the tooth of a straggler vine
catching her thigh’s soft underside in our rush to straddle thorns and snag
the inky clumps, little brain-shaped bursts we’d fill our mouths and baskets
with, ravenous for the dark marbles, their juicy explosions, like the city’s far-
off glimmer, its roiling, magical bay. We’d leapt like ponies back to where
our mothers cackled on, and now here was Karen doing a little plié,
displaying the red rivulets, eyes lowered, overwhelmed. I thought she and I
might be sick for a second, excitement and dread for my cousin’s first period
(how I wished it was me!) while our inmate mothers leaned in to Ooohh and
Aaahhh and grin big at Karen, stroking her rookie cheeks, slurping the dregs
of perspiring highballs as furies of forest leaves rustled, circling us in the
dusk breeze and we moved inside to help Karen clean up, past the black
simmering pots, dipping our pinkies in that stygian, sugary goo—best you
ever tasted—sticky and sweet like the news of a daughter’s menses we’d jar
and seal under layers of thick wax long before the fathers came home.
Michelle Bitting’s fourth collection, Broken Kingdom won the Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. Poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Love's Executive Order, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. A finalist in the 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests, she won the 2018 Fischer Prize and Robert J. DeMott Awards. Michelle is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U.
Bird Feeder
by Toma M. Ray
I wait for you
Shoulder line tense and hard
Broad beaches teeter sand
I stand; a bird feeder for the stray
A pit a stop a full on monsoon
Tracing rims with fingers of doom
Once upon a time a story teller
Blowing glass into beautiful shapes
I wait for you razor clean
A hairless baby in its crate
Born in Russia, raised in Israel, Toma M. Ray has called Montreal home since 2006. Childhood memories include the opera house (off stage and on) in Tel-Aviv. Writing has been a lifelong pursuit and passion. A polyglot, Toma writes in several languages. Flowing from a body of work in Hebrew, this poem is a part of Toma’s debut work in English.
Half-Asleep in Daddy's War
by Brooke McKinney
And all our dreams will roll toward the hunt,
some half-asleep dogs mingling behind doors.
My family swallows a habit of barbiturates—
the old spores of war, last years of crumbling
leaves. The wind comes back for us. It stalks.
Whose lungs cracked open in a dream wheezing?
What kind of wind goes off wheezing?
Half-asleep dogs come out of doors to hunt.
Our dream comes back for us. It stalks.
My family keeps a habit of closing doors,
memories of Vietnam come back crumbling
and years have a way of keeping us on barbiturates.
This dream is a body full of barbiturates.
How do sleeping dogs die without wheezing?
We bring back to the dark a habit of crumbling
lungs half-asleep after returning from the hunt.
To believe this family can still walk through doors,
smelling the odor of war, its moldy body. It stalks.
And all of memory will follow us dead. It stalks.
We can’t help but beg for our barbiturates
and now the family must lock all their doors
or else nothing is free from the wheezing.
The wind finds a way to carry us back to hunt
as dogs go off again into a dream that’s crumbling.
We can’t keep us here in a body still crumbling.
There’s a love that war stole and it’s here. It stalks.
The same way the dogs dig up bones from the hunt
and, no, we can’t stop our family tradition of barbiturates.
But don’t we lie down sometimes to feel the wheezing?
Sometimes we rise again and open a few doors.
The wind has brought something to our doors—
A memory stacked memory, and oh, its crumbling.
Will silence come and take away this wheezing?
The family thinks the war is gone. It’s back. It stalks.
We think we are safe because we are fed by barbiturates
so let’s go now into the mind and bring back the hunt.
Wheezing, it sounds like the opening of doors
and we forget the crumbling that wakes us to hunt.
We hold on to our barbiturates—afraid of what stalks.
Brooke McKinney is a poet and writer from South Georgia. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Awards and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals. Recently, she received a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference for her memoir about a thirteen-year journey with her bulldog Max. She lives with two dogs, Jane and Arlo, and a cat named Blue.
The Door
by Jeff Bien
It stands inanimate, unclothed, magisterial
High as it is, a slag of coal dust and light years of musical silence
It lives for every fleeing thing, every word, every stammer, ever knocking sound
The pulpit of pulley and screw pump, and swinging spirals, Archimedes is said to have named.
The musical sphere of the Pythagorean infant universe stretching its wings, dream weaving
Breathless frightened shadows, the mares of night that stole the fire from the Gods
On a wooden crate, in the quiet of the speaker’s corner, it barely whispers to the moon
Minions of metalanguage gird the painter’s hand to shade colour shapeless sapling stars.
Something twists and hollers, glum as a rainy day, that shoe shines the river eternal
Chasing swallows from the perch of an unfledged twig, a blearing smallness, tinier than they are
The nested diminutive kingdoms children watch, asking only to be children, for no reason at all
And the gods, unemployed, by that salvation, and final sin.
On both sides of everything, grimly determined, simply there, as though it were not
Born of the both of me, where aggregates of thought cradle the circling song
And if I move from my sick bed, as surely the death of death, another morning flower appears
Though late in the day, it will open and close, the infinitesimals of angels and parrot fish bloom.
Yet I dream of that door, that is unhinged, to all those who find it glacial in their path
The folly of walking to no other side, stumbling into a barefaced sideling glance
And there, laddering birds, cloistered like creeping vines, sequined silver
Where wingless they march into eternity, the mirror that takes them back.
The blue of the beyond that chimney sweeps the gold
Joual of the jasmine, the rainbow colours of the windswept eye
The azure-winged magpie fluttering, crayoning the metallic taste in our mouth
Knowing the new millennia is the Trojan horse of the old, and older still, the sling of it unborn.
Jeff Bien is an internationally acclaimed poet, musician, and highly regarded meditation and consciousness teacher. His work has been published, translated, and performed in more than sixty countries. He is the author of numerous books and his poetry has been the recipient of many awards. His latest collection, In a Time of No Song, with an introduction by A.F. Moritz, was released by Exile Editions. Bien’s inaugural CD received fraternal greetings from Leonard Cohen and accolades from other major international artists.
Chiroptera: Seven Ages of Juliane Koepcke
by Rico Craig
& Juliane is reborn through clouds, with a polished coin
under her tongue, no wings. Lightning scrawls history
on the sky; bats cradle her falling, each scream swaddled
in leathery wings. Metal, fire and loved bodies cascade;
her brief infancy is sonar — screeches and rushing air.
& Juliane opens her eyes; the earth reaching for her, arms green
and clothed in leaves, vines twisting and snaking, branches running
through her hair. There is a bone outside her skin, she has been born
from the deepest sleep. Her lips bite together, fish move in the river
confessing water. She learns to walk, lets the mud hold her ankles.
& Juliane moves along the river with a branch in her hand, pushing
from the banks. There are creatures squirming in the red
under her skin. She has doused them in fluid from a metal can.
People are lusting from the shoreline, waiting for her to breathe
so they can write words in newspapers and fill screens with light.
& Juliane escapes to the lawns gripping university buildings; twenty years,
and all the pages she types are bound with fig and fructose.
People cannot hold a conversation with awe; she cannot love people
who drape her body in gowns. She longs for a cloud roiling
with bats, their yawning wings, their faith in science.
& Juliane is a tiny body cradled in the membrane of decades. The bats gnaw
at nocturnes. She stalks caves, listening for the echo of flight, painting
yellow words on wings as they sleep. The bones in her arms are thin
as starlight, longing to be marrowed. Each evening a thousand bats
swirl from the cave-mouth and never worry a hair on her body.
& Juliane flutters eyelashes and people see immortality, a wild man
pretends to wear her skin. He looks at the sky for raining metal
and fills her pockets with chess pieces, promising they represent
something — the way they persist. She sifts through
bat waste, gathering seeds, looking for scratches made by tiny teeth.
& rainforest trees remember the sound of her breaking bones,
under the canopy there are mounds that could be maternal, flesh taken
by leaves. The forest is always hungry and the river is tireless.
She returns the coin to the place under her tongue and lowers
herself into the river-mud, waiting for her mother to fall from the sky.
Rico Craig is a teacher, writer, and award-winning poet whose work melds the narrative, lyrical and cinematic. Craig is published widely; his poetry collection BONE INK (University of Western Australia Publishing) was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018. His next collection, Our Tongues Are Songs, will be published in 2021. https://ricocraig.com/
Hercules Strangles the Nemean Lion
by Max Mitchell
Parallel geometric planes, each plane a hologram of an ocean’s surface, the holographic slices of ocean stacked vertically like the storeys of a building, in infinite series. All motion here is frictionless, inarticulate: you can glide over the surface of a plane until the shadowed horizon recedes or pass through each hologram to the ocean above or the one below. The oceans have a cloudy translucence in which phosphorescent filaments of blue, white, gold, red, orange, and violet glint like the scales of fish. Often the iridescence synchronises across whole tracts of water and you can make out proto-forms in the glimmering churn. But look now yonder: islanded by the fluxing swell, a membrane of water is lighting the rude outlines of a landscape, an encoded mathematical memory of events from eons past: irregular spits of pitchy rock forked in the gritty, weedy soil of an olive-hued scrubland beneath a bleached, cancelling sky.
Extruding ribcages of mauled oxen sticky with congealed blood and swarming with blue-green flies lie between tufts of wild grass, and a shepherd’s dog is barking dementedly, and bubbles of blood inflate and deflate on the lips of a shepherd boy who is still alive, his eyeballs, brow, and the bridge of his nose torn from his face, and something is loping in the periphery, its mane and head dark umber and slick with blood, and it has been chased twice on horseback and pelted with arrows and stones back to its cave a league distant from the nearest settlement, but it smells the sweat of the livestock on the breeze.
His greaves jag into the flesh of his ankles as he pounds uphill, the loose chalky topsoil giving way underfoot and scattering backwards in dusty cones. In his right hand is a truculent wooden club honeycombed with dull nails, the weighted end pointing downwards like a third leg or a pendulum, which he periodically drives into the earth whilst climbing to keep his footing. Nearing the crescent lips of the cave mouth he relaxes his pace, uncords his vast shield from his back, and rights his club. The entranceway is hooded like a monk’s cowl, and he sidles through it while his eyes adjust to the grainy darkness inside. Amid the black organs of the chamber he sees two golden zeroes hanging in mid-air, and with its long, shadowed, rutted face it is as though the luminescent eyes of some minor rustic deity are peering from behind a carved wooden mask. He rushes it with his shield, hoping to lame its front legs with his club before it can react, but it is lying atop a flat-topped, chest-high rock, and as he raises his club it throws itself at his head and lands on his shield and clings to his shield’s top edge with one paw and with the other paw swipes at the arm holding the club, and ribbons of flesh open on his forearm and he drops the club, and its claws lacerate his bowed neck and shoulders as he carries it clinging to his shield like some monstrous baby and slams its back against the cave wall. With its limbs pinned and splayed under the bronze oval, he starts thumping its head with the bottom of his fist like a shipwright nailing planks into a ship’s hull. After twenty blows it writhes free and with its bloodied head makes for the white pool of the cave mouth. He throws aside his shield and jumps on its back. He reaches around the soft underside of its huge neck with his right arm and with his left hand palming the back of his right hand grapples it into a chokehold, and it struggles demonically, but null its face and claws it is nothing but blind, striated ropes of muscle pulling on rods of bone, and his face is pressed into its matted mane and he breathes the hot musk of its body as its life ebbs away.
Max Mitchell is currently doing a PhD in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. His research is focused on mindfulness meditation, peak experiences/flow states, and the nature of ethical truth. His favourite novel is Lolita. His favourite poem is “Ode to a Nightingale.” His favourite old, boring classic is Madame Bovary.
Canadian Currents
by Laura Bourbonnais
eroded maple flags
link sea-sick landscapes,
fathered by sorry settlers
sculpting them into capitalist chronicles.
lush prairies hush the Rockies’
wail, cradling knots of gulfweed,
effervescent lakes luring the
blissfully illiterate cartographers.
leisurely, currents swell sunbaked sails,
summer seeping in unearthed soils,
slick ships sink in the ebb,
sanctimonious sprays mothering cornucopian sod.
ancestral earthquakes echo from Awkwasasne
to the Anishinaabe,
white prestige washing up in Canadian textbooks,
residues of residential schools on the shore.
polished wastewaters twist
parched assault stories into sex,
putrid essays on the people’s past
buried under debris of patriarchal patents.
welcome signs halt the incoming tide,
iridescent immigration rocks refusing
the flood safety. Canadian turf
reveals its secret saints.
Laura Bourbonnais is a twenty-one-year old French-Canadian (Montreal native!) third-year YorkU Screenwriting and Creative Writing double major. She is the Winters Free Press Editor-in-Chief, the AMPD Journal Lead Editor, a York Her Chapter Co-Head Editor, a HOLR writing intern, and an INKspire volunteer writer. She is a versatile artist with experience in competitive dance, music, film, theatre, and the visual arts. She strives to keep educating herself on systemic issues in and outside of Canada.
Hold Harmless
by Mirande Bissell
Two boys kill half a million honeybees
outside of Sioux City just after Christmas,
the hives smashed, the dead bees clustered
in the snow, and people weep over lost honey
and enterprise, but my heart is occupied already:
a black and white photo of two boys killed
by Soviet partisans at Seitajärvi in July, maybe
six or seven years old, barefoot, their hair
cut short giving them the look of cancer patients,
laid in the dry haygrass, their knees bent up,
but softly, their faces averted, their bodies
not yet vacated in the motherly summerair.
Mirande Bissell is a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, and a recent graduate of Bennington College's MFA. Her first collection of poems will be published in 2021.
Easter
by Thomas Joseph Mealey
I got the taste for it
young
under ten
stealing swigs
from bottles
in the larder
I called it the tomb
because every time
I stepped in
and took a gulp
the stone would roll
and I’d walk out
resurrected
anew
It smelt
of the sponge
the soldiers offered up
on good Friday
Two angels
John and Lily
were
in the garden
That time
they thought
chocolate eggs
had made me sick
Thomas Joseph Mealey is a poet, songwriter, and artist, from Liverpool, England. He began writing his first book of poems in 2020. He is influenced by the temporary human experience and inspired by the effect it has upon memory and the changing perceptions of existence. www.thomasjosephmealey.com
The Battle of the Eclipse
by Amber Adams
“There is no suicide in our time / unrelated to history” —Denise Levertov
Just imagine: light fading from spears
and desert pinnacles, Lydian & Median warriors
looking to the sky to see their downfall foretold.
Currents of shadow bands fanned
the battlefield as the moon bit through
the sun, a sudden disappearance of day. The war stopped
as three celestial bodies, an ellipsis,
came into perfect alignment. I dream
of all wars that didn’t lead to your suicide.
What does it take? What doesn’t it take?
There in the sky, your unfinished
life hangs in the cerement clouds.
I keep coming back to it: the way your mind
turned on itself—became war itself—after endless,
elliptical rotations
between here and Iraq. Inevitable
deployments, inevitable danger, inevitable
heat, inedible MREs, incomings,
invasion of phosphorus dreams, insomniac. A fugue
state let slip your own birthright, a boy
looking up at the sky with a pinhole
camera made of cardboard and aluminum foil. Awe
is something so easy to create that we forget.
Any eclipse is worth stopping for…
any suicide is an eclipse.
Amber Adams is a poet and counselor living in Boulder, Colorado. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver, and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. Her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Narrative, War Literature and the Arts Journal, Stone Canoe Journal, and elsewhere. She served in the United States Army Reserves and completed one tour of duty under Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Where the Gnarled Claw Grew
by Michelle Porter
(to gather: to understand; to harvest for food; to pick up from the ground )
A gnarled claw grew out of their dislocation in the shape
of a pear tree there behind a rusty chain-link fence and
discovered the children when all the branches were
beginning again with ravenous sirens of blossoms.
They wrapped each other’s fingers around the metal
chains, pressed their eyes to the gap between
to watch the tree in her strut, right there, on the other side.
They had nothing else to do. God, the sisters
on the day they chased them from the strawberry fields,
how their hunger had overwhelmed their desire
to be good and to follow the rules. That pear tree belonged
to no one, produced fruit for no farmer. They couldn’t bring
themselves to clamber over the fence so early, not while
the pears were hard and tight. They gaped: pears turn out
like this? They ripened in a cleft of weeks the sun couldn’t crack.
They didn’t know anything. The bees came
thick when the pears fell and their tender skins broke open.
The smell, a sweet that oozed in their fingers, left them
clumsy. They could hardly bear the anxiety of want. They knew
they could get into a world of trouble. Their hunger
cussed them out and led them on until the hot day
the fence couldn’t hold them back anymore and the
sharp children with their twig limbs scratched over
the barb wire, alert for the threat of an adult.
Oh, those pears: curving in toward their dark seeds
then filling out into fat hips; shades of green composed
as jars on a willing windowsill; faint brown speckles that
let slip the promise confined, the taste inside; juice that might
trickle. The bees shadowed them, lurching among
the pears and reeking of spiced liqueur and fermented sugar.
The sisters’ tongues spoke quick and greedy against
the forbidden pulp. They had witnessed how the swollen
fruit could learn to detach from tree and branch—how to
offer all that flesh and juice to one flight, no matter what
the fall and the struggle of grass might bring—how to cast off
the rot of confession and to worship the sultry spoil of summer.
Michelle Porter’s first book of poetry, Inquiries, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry in Canada in 2019. Approaching Fire is her newest book – a creative nonfiction exploration of the history of her great-grandfather, who was a Métis fiddler. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation and member of the Manitoba Metis Federation. She currently lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
To Find, To Be
by Nehassaiu deGannes
awake now: moths shocking the garden
as if bougainvillea or startled white
begonia have taken wing: beds (count them:
in the great room empty: kith not yet returned
from last night's excursion up into the bush;
what if? on a hairpin turn: the earth careens
over the crevasse; and now an S.O.S–––
see sky's dashiki or morning iridescence
so much like war confetti over
the triumphal parade? stand. watch. how the hawk -
moth hovers. birds hover. grazing fish hover and
you? does your lovely place treble above mine?
might our dead ride in a car that out-threads
the light's green canyon? might we, its regal tow?
like startled glass; pandemic cans: wind
a caution not to cry: not to rattle
rose-packed chapels with our grief? but hear
the gravel-crunch of tires, the tired
swinging open of the compound gates, thick
lazy slam of all four doors–––and voices
like so many bangles, bearing souvenirs: imagine
even the children are safe. cup each one.
touch eager foreheads to your own. consider
what trucks beneath the furrowed wheel: red dust
from the road. crushed begonia. its crowning toll?
the heart's earth-bound watery hack
un-freight red trebles, world: wail your cargo home
... if in the garden, nothing, but more moths.
Nehassaiu deGannes, born in Trinidad & Tobago, raised in Canada and now based in New York, is a grateful actor and poet with two chapbooks, Undressing The River, winner of the Center For Book Arts National Letterpress Prize, Percussion, Salt & Honey, recipient of the Philbrick Poetry Prize, and a book-length collection, Music For Exile, due out from Tupelo Press in 2021. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Caribbean Writer, American Poetry Review and elsewhere.
Still & Quiet Things
by Rebecca O’Connor
Somewhere in the Midlands a newly bereaved husband sits watching television with his three small children. A couple plants Jerusalem artichokes on their allotment in Zone 6. Up and down a street in Bromley, a window cleaner overhears family arguments. In Wiltshire, a woman and her daughter collect potting compost from molehills on the village green. A man in Coventry finishes his thesis on bats. Eggs are delivered to the neighbours, campers moved on from Flynn’s Pass. In Honolulu, an elderly lady completes the first draft of her book about her murdered friend while her husband teaches online. A woman plucks a stray hair from her nose. Mules stand in a field. A man in Bray posts a picture of an object he has thrown up into the sky. A boy falls off his bike and breaks his leg. Lilac grows. Two small children sleep in a teepee in the living room. Their mother is one of the first people in Naples to get a haircut. In California, a man films his husband playing the piano. A family’s new puppy shits on the kitchen floor again. A woman in Glasgow is told not to set foot outside her door for twelve weeks. Food parcels are delivered. Teenagers make love in the back seat of a car. On the island, a woman walks through the woods in her wellingtons and a kimono. A farmer tears out two hundred metres of nesting hedgerow. Ponds are built, an origami eagle. A vet straightens a surfer’s broken nose on Pendine Beach. A boy finds a crayfish in the lake. His younger sister falls headfirst out of the boat. Someone’s ex dies. A girl poses in her parent’s back yard. A young woman listens to birdsong outside her Leyton window. A mother of two small children is told her tumour is enflamed. Her husband cycles three times around the lake. In upstate New York, her sister pins a rhinoceros beetle in a display case. Twin girls run naked through a large house. An artist couple kiss in front of his paintings in their studio in Szczecin. Funeral services are broadcast live. In downtown Toronto, an aunt sits in her apartment surrounded by her life’s work, including the coffee table. A hare runs the circuit of a yellow field. A radiologist cancels outpatients. A man cooks a lone steak on a barbeque. Someone pays ten euro for a tape of other voices to harmonise with. A sculptor chips away at a stone horse. A teacher praises her student’s meticulousness. Children look blankly at their grandparents’ faces.
Rebecca O’Connor’s debut collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Irish Times Shine Strong Award. She is the recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was a poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust. Her debut novel, He Is Mine and I Have No Other, was published by Canongate in 2018 and shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award. She lives in rural Ireland with her husband and three children, and is co-director of The Moth (www.themothmagazine.com).
Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center
by Victoria Korth
One needs to be a little lost to find it
on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85
still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself.
Its lower story windows broken, boarded,
but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough
to taunt the empty village outside its gates
with State employment. Our lives, that “campus”
and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child,
and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there
my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home
from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me.
I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch
dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There:
bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing
for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden
in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch—
patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving,
stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze.
And over it all, like speaking eye, the glass high-rise, lobotomy
suite, insulin tubs and narrow beds for the electrically changed.
As my father was, strapped down in ’74,
having been there months and shrugging his way
beneath the gaping fence. He told us once he was tired
of trading cigarettes for whiskey in the tunnel
between the dorms, where sex was sold, and coke
and heroin. Said he’d aimed for Armonk, IBM’s mainframe
where he’d been a salesman, been okay, planned to show up
like Santa in a limo, got as far as Ureles Liquor, collapsed
beside the tracks, was brought back in, sent upstairs.
No wonder he made us stay at the sticky picnic table
in the shade when my mother took us there to see him.
No wonder he was afraid to look the orderlies in the eye,
or so I remember seeing, though it may be
I imagined what I saw, eyes alive with what he didn’t tell,
what I felt and what I’ve tried to know so well
it would unknow itself, unwind to nothing, disappear,
why I am unprepared for this cold fear
and rage—could I tear that grim museum
off the map, would that tear him, tear me in two—
no child should ever be there, or have been, no one.
Victoria Korth lives in Rochester NY where she has a psychiatric practice caring for the chronically mentally ill. Poems have appeared in Broad River Review, Ocean State Review, LEON Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and Barrow Street. The author of Cord Color (Finishing Line Press), she is working to publish her first full length manuscript. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
Brexit Haiku
by Umit Singh Dhuga
1. Memory
breaks, recedes, then swells:
flotsam of memorials
in Westminster’s cowls.
2. Pantry
The gauge siphon slipped:
water for washing up spilled
and spoiled stockpiled spelt.
3. Loose Shy
flailed around our stumps
but scored a century stamped
at the boundary ropes.
4. Autumnal Insomnia
awakes us and Leave
fills the space sleeplessness leaves.
Fall’s precipitous.
After Walden
by Sara Moore Wagner
I am leaving out the I as if it were bread
on the grocery list, as if it were an empty egg carton
filled with soil, leaving out the I, that small soldier
of egoism. Let it out like those little painted
ladies the children grew from caterpillars,
right before a rainstorm, how they hop on the grass
and there is the dog. Isn’t it beautiful:
nature wants to take, to break open
each moment, face or mouth, needle
jabbed into a bicep. Mother. How much
should we do before it’s time to give a body
over to science or to ashes, to dress it in its best
things. How can the speaker ask about best
practices. We are leaving out the I,
have left the I like the child we never wanted,
in the kitchen at her grandmother’s, mouth
full of dry toast asking why. We don’t know why,
have never known why a man or anyone else goes
into the woods alone, what he expects to be there
when he comes back, something hot like a body or meal.
Something like a why and when. Something
to calm him. And Thoreau tells us "every man
is tasked to make his life worthy."
And it’s only the women who want to go out
and claim the I like a city, which is our city,
who want to stand in the rain undone by it.
Darkness Passional
by Brian Sneeden
Is each turn in the ground
a mystery? What I grow reaffirms
an old trick, humus plus longing,
a formula for living in isolation
without resistance. Without forgiveness,
or praying for the body to open
at any other than its own speed.
Who else will winter in the eye of a crow?
This bedding of rods and black stems,
and absolution like a body of water
I do not know the name of, or the name
I wore when I sank to the bottom, the arcs
of my fingers a chalk smear darkening
in pulses. Who else enters when I’m
on my way to the other body, a vision
of rice field and black water and some
cloud-curious lightning like a fish’s
silver belly. Transmigratory. I don’t mean legumes,
or the way Pythagoras imagined the soul
folded upon itself like a library
in the umbilical protein of a bean’s
wrinkly bit. I already know we are edible
and whisper to each other while eating
the ones we did not name. I mean
this repeating field where the role play
of prey and hunter ad nauseums. How many times
was I the deer, my recurring volta
through undergrowth and mulch
continuing even now on someone’s screen.
If memory is just rented from the humus, then
when it’s my turn in the ground
go bury me in an acre of wind.
Dye
by Suphil Lee Park
In a menstrual cycle of balsamines
doubt revisits me.
The way it congealed
into the deer’s face, eyes punctured
open by saber-toothed dread.
The balsam petal
paste on my fingernails
ages red as ruptured mouths.
There goes the green tail of August.
There goes, pollinated air.
There goes the scythe
of my mind straight into
cornstalks the height of the past.
My kitchen floor remembered the deer
shoulder you’d brought home
for three deaths in the family.
The meat, heft of gore and fur,
which my hands now seem
to have tusked through.
There goes the sun
unable to contain itself.
What kind of fear gave eyes
to the bat, only to blind.
What gave the spider four pairs.
The cornstalks billow in the rhythm
of knowing, not-knowing, between.
There goes my scythe, blade first.
The First Thing I Ever Learned to Draw Was a Bomb
by Ra Avis
My father didn't know what a bomb was
'till there was shrapnel in his back.
At a pop-up French hospital,
he learned what a bomb could be,
learned what a bomb could take.
A nurse drew a cartoon missile,
three little lines behind it to show it falling from the sky.
She drew a stick figure boy underneath.
He learned then what a bomb could look like.
In the earliest picture I have of my father,
it is a year or so later, and
he is sitting on a grounded missile in Laos,
small boy legs dangling off an unexploded ordnance.
Small boys running and jumping,
playing hide-n-seek around debris.
One time, he said, Komal hid in a hole and found a body part.
One time, Savan jumped on a device
and they learned it only hadn't exploded
yet.
That second time, but not the last,
as they pulled blast from his back,
my father taught all the other boys
how to draw a missile.
Decades later, he taught me too.
We drew the body, and the three lines,
and then a long line across the paper
to show where Heaven forgets Earth.
He showed me how to draw the child on the ground,
arms up in the air,
stick figure hands spread wide, disproportional,
larger than the missile.
Exactly as he remembered.
Hands bigger than bombs.