Ladies’ Night Out
by Lynne Burnett
I sit down, unaware cancer has circled
our table again, tapped someone else. Chemo
snatched Brandy’s hair and now it’s regrown:
a storm-tossed sea where sweet vanities drown.
She and I are the same age, a wicked flicker
of the candle on the table between us with
every opening and closing of the pub door.
Our group clinks glasses, her old self trickling
back from its hard bench: the white-knuckled
wait for a sick impostor to get up and go.
Twenty years we’ve leaned on each other,
a six-pack. Our kids have just graduated,
man-boys sure they can shoulder what’s next.
We talk about letting them go, pride sweating
it out with the resident ache of emptying rooms,
as we also are let go. We mean by them—
a mutual milestone. Later, I’ll remember
our voices low in the dark—the hum
of an ancient river coursing seaward—
how gently it rocks a boat with no oars.
Today, Yesterday, After My Death
by Maureen Alsop
I saw you, and once thought you were real.
The air clotted my thin lips with confessions.
There were star points and if I drew them back
through the water, they were planetary and smooth
like the men’s eyes—marbles cold in her mouth.
I remembered her. I remembered her, though I did not
know her. She died, directionless as her body drifted
to Michealmas Cay. No thanks to a map. Now clicking—
pelvis bone and coral—she’s the sound of chimes,
the clarity of other realms in wave’s circuitry.
The commerce of the body is both heavy and tender. The body, too, is myth.
I am to see her only as sound so there is one dimension
only. Light damages the object of the sea. And the sea
relents in a deep whirl beneath my skin, impermeable,
fear like water, is diluted and uncertain. That voice, her
voice within waters and groves, shaken from streams, eddying out
the last lake, is the voice of imperfect stars. A condition
like each condition, terrestrial. I was bound by a great thing:
the love to love you, and now to love you without form.
First Time at The Airport
by Dianty Ningrum
When I carry my passport I bring along a certain smell with it
the smell of galangal chicken slow-cooked over a dawn looming
with solemn adhan by the hands of a sleepless, clueless mother
who doesn’t know her daughter will be fed by a cabin crew, by
someone’s mother who politely hands out italicised menu with a
sleepless smile paralleling her own, my mom—she doesn't know how
capitalism works, only ways to survive in it, only knows her
seven-to-five, bogus-brand stilettos and excel spreadsheets
only knows love and love for no reason, only the
tedious things she mistook for devotion, the comfort she gets
from ripping monthly bills she has paid. I get more comfort
from pouring the scatter from the bin and piece them together
like a puzzle. Who wants to picture a faraway Eiffel tower when
you can piece together your utilities consumption? No—no faraway
land is farther than a life lit with fire. As it smears the hands
of its beholders with sharp galangal smell, my passport’s parting
ways ahead of me like God parting the Red Sea for Moses
like a general in a journey of conquest, it clears the path for me to
stride and stride forward in a line of people
crossing boundaries I feel like an island contracting, closing chasm
with my elbows I keep gently expanding, I remember those bedtime
whispers when my mother used to say boundaries are myths, I mull
over it while we’re crowding here still bodies dovetailing, waiting
for a band of strangers pointing at the lines we shall never cross—
Dianty Ningrum is an Indonesian currently residing in Naarm (Melbourne) completing her doctoral degree in sustainable development. She has been published in The Scores Journal and Australia Poetry Anthology.
Finding What He Can of His Own Way Home
by Pamela Porter
Grand Canyon, Arizona
There is a precision in nature.
The way air is a living thing. Taking form,
changing form. Like the spirit when it has left the body.
As though the walls of this canyon were cut
with the sharpest of tools. Wind. Sand.
Olga, my mule, prefers to walk on the brick edge
that holds the trail in place.
Beyond the edge, the canyon.
At its deepest point, the river. The body
must go with the mule. The mind must trust.
The day gathers to itself pigment, and gradations
of earth. Beyond what we imagine.
The way the heart turns inward
over the intricacies of love, and the one who has died.
We say, Bless this man who died.
We have carried him this far.
When the mules need to rest, we stop,
turn their heads out over the edge, into sky
as a mountain climber will swing from a solitary rope
in sleep. Bless this man as a raven
spreads its wings, an island in the air.
This one who died. As the spirit lifts and rises.
There is a sacredness, a gravity,
where the hour between present and past
is a point in the palm of the hand of air.
There is a bridge we cross, strung over the river.
Bless him. Who died, this man.
We have crossed the river with him
and do not know how to go back.
in memoriam, Patrick Lane (1939–2019)
______________________________________________________________________________
Finding what he can of his own way home -- Patrick Lane, “Apples in the Rain”
Bless this man who died -- Patrick Lane, “Fathers and Sons”
Pamela Porter’s work has won more than a dozen provincial, national and international awards, including the Governor General’s Award for her young adult novel The Crazy Man, as well as the Pat Lowther, Raymond Souster, and the CBC/Canada Writes shortlists. Among her 14 published books, her most recent is Likely Stories, released in 2019 from Ronsdale Press. Pamela lives near Sidney, BC with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs, and cats.
Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We're Dead
by Catherine Graham
The moon arcs—in and out, playing form.
Stars wrap our fate while intruder dreams
signal: come back. They hold our stability with quickened steps.
Stand where grass weaves basket strands, make
the centre heave, the pinched earth speak,
before thoughts erase and we have no names.
Fixed on the busy you miss the owl-winter, the who-cold
crizzling lake. Raindrops inside snowdrops.
When our shoes sprout hello-flowers, cold lips pucker, speak—
What to do but follow this thread? Wind circular words
to chain our necks. A necklace without clasps
means another light’s not listening.
To think story is to construct from that other realm
where jade water cools fire’s friction. Pockets where pleasure finds memory.
Take this nosegay, touch intuition, before we float off the page.
Now go past sentence. Air-sheets shatter—absorbed
by grasses and creatures scurrying there.
Viral green points down, we watch the swarm.
Swan’s neck quickens to question—her wings,
snow-blinding flaps. Nest birds have it—twiggy cup to sink into
after cracking. The rub that brought forth twine and twig weaves the cradle.
Head naked like a freshly hatched bird, moist with dew from the wormfield.
What moves in tawny spurts, jolts. Silence rearranges. It does not mend.
Seed. But know bloom. Unravelling defies gravity. False to think otherwise.
Fools. We have a future to hatch. When roots shoot out—
the sun-calling art of escape: leaf, sepal, petal—the sun
plays hide-and-seek. Silence is a kind of flight.
Scratch light to a rain-flecked level. Twitch strategic to inhabit submission.
Repetition renews. Upland by the railroad tracks—eggs disguised as stones.
Slip past daylight to a time held by skein of old stars—
past evening, past waiting—
Enough! Never enough, until pulled to flight or sleep.
And a dog bounds helplessly wet for a tossed stick he cannot find.
Catherine Graham is the author of the award-winning novel Quarry and six acclaimed poetry collections including The Celery Forest, a CBC Best Book of the Year. She teaches creative writing at University of Toronto where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. Published internationally, she is a previous winner of TIFA’s Poetry NOW and leads their monthly Book Club. Æther: an out-of-body lyric and her second novel, The Most Cunning Heart, are forthcoming. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet
Massgirl
by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
Is it cool to dedicate a book to “u know who u ahh”
Do you think the Atlantic Ocean will know I mean it
I am totally massgirl
I can’t help it
I ride with the top down
I listen to Robyn
I will cut a bitch
I want to be slapped around
Pulled over
Issued a warning
Pulled over again
Spoken to sternly
I am wild to be called “YOUNG LADY”
I want to tumble from the fog of le Wednesday de Thanksgiving
The savagest night in the savagest city
I want to trickle blood from blunt force
I want my wedding ring to open my lover’s jaw like a book
I want his tongue to read my braille apocalypse
I want Canadians to cower
I want other girls to wobble and puke
I run until my lungs explode
and everyone who rows the Charles can taste the blood
innard molasses copper dust
I read until the library is empty
break my face on the Timaeus
the liquid gildings, the colliding bodies
I want to be a liquid gilding, to edge us all in gold
and burn with hot metal wrath the margins of everything
I smash a bottle of wine on the toilet rim because I have no wine key
drink from the shards
Sit on the bathroom floor
Wait for security to find me
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is a poet, translator, and scholar of postcolonial literature and theory. Her poems and essays have appeared in venues including the Poetry Foundation, the Boston Review, FENCE, Critical Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. Her scholarly book, Epidemic Empire is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in late 2020. She teaches at the University of Toronto and lives in New York.
At the Met to Get Wrecked
by Shane Neilson
I wander the monuments in the Empire State and do not think
of victims, per se; larceny, per se; scale, per se. I’m hurting –
I just want to not be part of something, this thing; I want a good,
beautiful song. In the Met are the good things, endowments
that purchase the painted flowers, the nude female bodies,
but these form the detritus of time – privilege fanning itself,
saying: I take, and take, and take, me o my o me o my – therefore
perfect for the Empire State and its crowds. No. I gravitate
to one sad and broken scene reproduced over and over – the family.
How to take in The Family as objet? How does one scan Manets?
Degases? Van Goghs? One does, if one is pulled to canvases
with families. Forgotten – bare flesh, epic combat scenes, landscapes.
Then I see: the fatherless, the motherless, scene with children aged
like mine – Picasso’s “La Coiffure.” Do you know why you stood
at the altar, really? Isn’t there mystery at the core of metaphor?
I was summoned here to not-understand, to wonder at how the children
are comfortable with each other. A domesticity of foreground, no home
or other life; the boy’s face at an odd slant, as if he, too, is tilted at the angle
of the world, and the girls so carefully grooming beauty – the eldest
arranging the middle child’s hair, the middle child holding onto a blank
mirror with both hands. I could tell you we’re the lack of background,
we’re the mirror that won’t reflect; more ekphrasis can be done. But
my problem’s here: the entire regiment of my body wants to protect
these children, to let them be with one another unharmed; but I would
want to be background, and that would ruin the picture. I love you,
my family! It is love that I feel, with every rough gesture and word!
May I save you? I may not, there is no background for that. Que sera,
Doris Day sings to my son’s temporal lobes, Que sera. There’s only
the boy in his own self, disinterested in his sisters and the background,
and yet parallel to them. Is he sad? is my constant question and worry.
What does he know? Does he know more than me? He is in the picture,
next to beauty – closer than I will ever get, protected.
Shane Neilson is a disabled poet, physician, and critic who lives in Oakville. His Dysphoria (PQL, 2017) was awarded the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry in 2018 and New Brunswick won a best book award from The Miramichi Reader in 2020. He is the festival director of the AbleHamilton Poetry Festival. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, the Walrus, and Verse Daily.
Secateurs
by Mark Fiddes
Back in my mother’s garden,
the fences were always broken
as the whole of creation clambered in
with tendrils and buried nests
and shanks of love-lies-bleeding.
Star-bright stock, always night-scented,
lit the crazy paving to a fern bank,
where toads with golden eyes
guarded my marijuana crop disaster.
Ivy followed us all the way indoors
with moths that slept in lampshades.
Beetles fell from our homework.
Chrysalides glistened in sock drawers.
Lawns and borders were outlawed
being too needy and English.
Any frost chose its victims sparingly.
Every Spring tasted of honey,
long before the arrival of bees.
Geraniums thrust through rubble
so green was the blade of her knife.
The harder the stem was cut,
the stronger it grew back.
In her hands, life was inevitable
until her fingers grasped only ours
over the bedrail. She coughed
then turned her back once more.
Also, clematis, mint, mallow, foxgloves,
elderberry, phlox and delphiniums.
Mark Fiddes’s titles The Rainbow Factory and The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre are published by Templar Poetry. Recently, he won the Oxford Brookes University International Prize, the Ruskin Prize and was placed third in the UK National Poetry Competition. His work has also appeared in Poetry Review, POEM, The New European, The Irish Times, Magma, Aesthetica, and London Magazine. He lives in temporary Brexile in the Middle East.
Tomato Plant Survival Song
by Kathryn Simmonds
In a terracotta pot, ambition staked to a broken cane, and nameless
(for the lolly stick has blown away), I pull at hope without a tap root.
My character is lack: lack of vigour, lack of flower, lack
of what it is to be tomato. The Moneymakers and Gardener's Delight
continue ravishing, predictably,
but I'll have no self-pity, no suspicions of this third-rate third-use
potting compost. Light and leggy as I am yellow at the lower leaves
I'll not lament disease: I need my sugar fuels to live.
From veiny hour to hour I live.
*
Nothing escapes me,
woodlice roll their silver stomaches,
bees sip the sweet pea's intimate interior. The fearful caterpillar
undulates and crawls: it shall become, unless that blackbird has it.
At night when foxes screech inside their filthy quilts
I breath their musk shit-perfume
fragrance these splotched leaves. Season my dream.
*
Slugs! Their terrible soft mouths.
New shoots in tatters, done for. Why doesn't she bring salt?
Why only frowns and secateurs?
Aphids! Aphids! Look! Their icky feet. Their hairs upon my hairs.
She lifts my blighted leaves, notices four flowers
dangling abortively and pinches them away. No to-ma-to.
I remember that nasturtium, how it bolted, shrank, how she finally
up-ended it, broke its feeble systems in her hand.
I am alone and thirsty.
*
It persists. (On occasion now it speaks about itself in third person,
which allows for rest, and oh it wants to rest.)
There is no rest. Grow, it whispers to its planted brain.
*
Sweet rain! In wet light: blackbird song.
*
All day, all night, petals whisper We'll become.
Seed-sized bulb of green, small machine of longing,
first dream of fruit, hung like modest earrings
swelling then becoming pale orange pale red ripe scarlet,
gladness edible. Sing your songs for I am entering myself.
I have become tomato.
Oh tomato I am the thing I am!
Kathryn Simmonds has published two collections of poetry, ‘Sunday at the Skin Launderette’ (2008), and ‘The Visitations’ (2013). She lives with her family in Norwich, a small medieval city in the east of England.
Birthday Poem
by April Freely
H.F. (father)
9/20/49 – 8/12/2000
A. F. (poet)
8/12/1982 –
I had been thinking of coffins
while lying in my childhood
canopy bed, at 28, watching
Grey Gardens on repeat, the house
folding in and over the mother-daughter
as I folded into the wedge between bed
and wall and thought: baby blue satin
folds of my father’s mahogany, or oak
or was it blue, or was the light red upon it?
The areca palm, the lily, or red carnation?
Weak flower of this Ohio. Though I grew
nothing during these years, I thought
of the Pothos crowns from my old place
in Iowa, and the tornado that blew into
the apartment, wrecking leaves, knocking
off plants from hooks: a hole in the room
I could walk right out of—and then what?
Two stories above the spoiled magnolia
I loved without sense, though I knew next
year the blooms would be back three-fold.
My blooms? The night of the tornado, I sat
on the kitchen floor open to stars above
as a grey-blue cloud began to cover each light
like the weathered cedar shake in the Gardens
where you might lie down first, or be laid down
into position from which to beat out of the body
a language like fists, or rocks—this is not
the first time I woke up in a cedar shake
thinking of delicately twisted birthday candles
thinner than a finger, or the blue flame
underneath the light, like the half-moon
cuticles of the little baby I can’t have.
April Freely's work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Cave Canem, the Ohio Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives and works in New York City.
Jaani…
by Maithreyi Karnoor
…as a favourite aunt
Called you—she took it upon herself to fawn over you the most
Even as you occupied your mother’s midriff
As little more than a short longing
For she knew your father wanted girls
To not ride bicycles or wear silver anklets
Like unsubtle whores—
Shortening a vedic marker to an endearment in a more poetic tongue,
You, the gulab jamoon of her eyes’
Saccharine mist for a feminine child she never had,
Took to food
When lack of masculine predilections
Left you undernourished.
Languishing heavily on a stripped jamkhaana
One hot, postprandial afternoon
You lumbered on through laboured breath
Of a drunk uncle who had read
Eighty five years
—eighty three clear and two blurred—
On your palm
Sending me into a panic.
I have caught yours
And gathered my own manly let-downs in whisky glasses
And beer mugs and wine goblets,
Jugs, tumblers, bowls, cupped hands,
Eyes, lies, skies
Until age ceased to be a number.
While I trust my eyes
To peer into yours, my sight may shake
With the affliction
Of the ever-shrinking nineteen years you have over me;
When you push his
Clear prediction—and two more in ‘coma splice’—
The idiom of reciprocal tenderness may be worn
Out on the tongues I would have reaped by then.
So, jaani, most beloved of aunts,
You must defy uncles
Who are but mere men –
More men.
Maithreyi Karnoor is a writer and translator from India. This is the second time in a row that she is shortlisted for this prize. She was also shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and has won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati prize for translation. Her debut novel, Sylvia, will be published in 2021. She lives on a mango orchard in a village in her native state of Karnataka with her “family and other animals.”
Bookend to a Flood
by Damen O'Brien
Sky empty of clouds and we chew stubble for weeks
until he tells me we are leaving, but there is nowhere,
the Earth is evaporating into dust and desperation.
The drought reveals the land’s knapped skull,
skinned to a grin of granite teeth, the end
of the Earth begins with dust and dubious gifts:
hulls on their blocks, beached beyond any ocean,
piers over dunes far from their tepid shores, the
acid retreat of water, the last days of petrification,
and things better hidden, rummaged into corners,
or drowned for forgetting: dented barrels, wrecks and
disasters, surreptitious concealments, sunken treasure.
The day before we abandoned hope, tossing it like a
wriggling bag of kittens, the scouring dried the middle
of the dam and we could see a bleached and bloated suitcase.
Nothing given over to the nip of eels and poke of turtles
blankly nudging, can do a man good, can re-pour the water
or populate the ossification of our town, dead of thirst,
but my husband dragged it to the cracked margins of the dam
grunting about salvage and stood staring at it with
the raw eyes of a fortune teller whose card will not turn.
I thought of Pandora cupping shadows and a curse, I
thought of the emptiness to be found in a Magician’s hat, I
thought of the bundles buried underneath a silent threshold.
He broke the old locks and swore at the contents, stumbling
from the bones of a little girl sleeping, here in the water of
the district’s last dam. Now there’s truly nothing to hold us.
I wonder how long she huddled in there drowning, while the
great drought baked us, and how long in turn will the wind
push us to wander. Until rain falls again to cover all our secrets.
Damen O’Brien is an Australian poet writing in Brisbane, Queensland. Damen has won or been shortlisted in many poetry competitions in Australia and internationally including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Moth Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Cordite, StylusLit, Southerly, Island, and many others. Damen's first poetry book will be published in 2021. www.dameno.org
One Way or Another
by Marian Kaplun Shapiro
One way or another
it will happen
because we are alive.
We animals.
We fish. We birds.
We plants.
Or,
it will happen
whether or not.
Stone. Mountain. Star.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks:Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). A five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts, where she lives and practices as a psychologist, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her latest book of experimental poems, At The Edge Of The Cliff, will be published by Plain View Press early next year.
Elegy for a Tiler
by Davide Angelo
When God is still young and of good hearing. When I ask you how one boat
could fit two of all living things. When sunflower landscapes of Sicily still bloom
the further south you go. When you never see a single sunflower in your aging.
When an illuminated road exists on a map, never incised into rock. When mist, like a cloud
unmaking Etna at dawn, wraps itself around the overpass so it appears unfinished.
When a thousand red shirts envelop the strait of Messina, ceaseless
and certain as a wave. When steel migrant ships beach themselves like whales,
in Alang, India, bloated hulls of rusted scarlet reef. When the migrant ship,
Gulgluelmo Marconi, is sold for scrap, liquefied and reborn as an impossible cantilever bridge.
When you make yourself very small, each portion of you pooling. When we lap at the folds
of your body and the paramedics beat on.
When you prepare us for the mystery between wind and water. When it is necessary to know
where you are. When I imagine birds with feathers so light,
they can only make their nests on the ground. When the Valdaro Lovers
and their enduring Neolithic embrace will always be proof that we are binary, show us how we
love when we are dying. When monologues transcribed on parchments still reach
for the higher plane of meaning-making in their slow violence. When each of the seasons
bully their way across your face. When I rewind thirty-five years.
When your hair is squid ink black. When your perfect eyes are in vitreous lustre,
skin silverpoint, the rest of you, muscle inside glass. When you try to teach me the way
of the floor, the way of the trowel, proper proportions of mortar-making,
and levelling. When you make me the cutter of the isolation
sheet before I can become the cutter of the tile. When I stare into a languorous zoom
of mosaic and memory. When you, dark and hulking over
the mousetrap, take the spring-loaded bar back, lock the latch, and wait for the sound of the wire
to swing down, snapping the mouse’s neck. When I dream
of tiled floors, the mist of dawn unmaking the volcano and the bridge. When you,
made of fire clay, lay on your back on a generous bed of Lungomare sand. When vigil and sleep
mean the same thing. When you don’t need a priest,
who you call the middle-man, to get between you and your God. When your courage
is a weapon and a lie. When the surgeon with the skilled fingers of a seamstress,
loosens the long thread, picks the garment apart. When Garibaldi and his mille arrive, wrapped
in the hill of Calatafimi, red twilight on their backs. When comets, the long-haired stars,
leap out of the Sea of Sicily in arcs, guarding the house where you were born
and I have never been. When your clean and immaculate feet
point skywards. When I see you, half-way across the bridge, complete, unending.
Davide Angelo’s poetry has appeared in literary journals in Australia and elsewhere. He teaches English, and lives in Bendigo, Victoria, with his two daughters.
Mermaids of the Sacred Heart
by Bruce Meyer
They would loll upon the dumpster
behind Wong’s Chinese Restaurant
as the light went down on Saturdays,
imagining Sister as the sundown
and the night behind it the young priest
with dusky deep-set eyes.
Smoking and mouthing haloes,
they would sing about illicit love,
what it meant and how it sounded
in seabed songs the radio played.
Sin is never about the act itself
but the timing of the deed. Sex without
marriage was wrong yet tempting,
though marriage without love
followed like a wooly stranger
who begged them to touch him softly
with their youth. Everything
goes wrong as Time permits but they,
in the first verse of their lives, blossoms
of the Rose of Sharon and so belovèd,
blew clouds on which they floated
to wherever life would carry them,
opening their compacts and gazing hard
at lips that kissed the backs of hands.
Bruce Meyer is author of sixty-four books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and non-fiction and has eight more books forthcoming in the next three years. His most recent collection of poetry is McLuhan's Canary (Guernica Editions, 2019). He lives in Barrie, Ontario, and teaches at Georgian College.
Category Error
by Luke Hankins
Hummingbirds are fighting
over the flowers in the garden again,
because beauty doesn’t make anything
immune to cruelty.
Imagine a world in which each
beautiful creature could be trusted—
and isn’t each creature beautiful?
The sleek, streaked coat of the tiger.
The iridescent scales of the snake.
The shockingly blue eyes
of the shooter on the evening news.
Luke Hankins is the author of two poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a collection of essays, The Work of Creation. A volume of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was released by Seagull Books in 2019. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press.
The Devil’s Bartender
by AE Hines
I serve the booze, but know
never to play cards — he always wins,
and every man here owes him money.
He’s good to have around —
all those sweaty jokers coming in thirsty,
to cut their deals, clamoring to refill
empty pints and vacant accounts.
Like the rest of them, he can’t shut up
about his girl troubles. Goes on
about that first woman, who still won’t
return his calls, can’t forgive
that long ago madness with the tree.
“Hell hath no fury,” I finally say,
laying down another round.
“To forgive, is divine,” he says, and then
we both laugh.
Of course, he’s got his Daddy issues.
Hated the family business,
hated it so much, he went
into competition. Not the first kid
kicked out of the house, not the first
father to not understand.
But the way he talks
and talks, you can tell
he misses home.
One time, he brought the old man by.
Short, thinner than I imagined,
and although he smiled when I spoke,
deaf as a rock. I poured them whiskey
and listened as the son bragged
about work, the state of the world,
then talked about the good old days
back before the fall. It broke my heart,
to see how much the son
cared, how he rambled on,
as if the old man, nodding, could hear.
AE Hines is a poet who grew up in North Carolina and currently resides in Portland, Oregon. A recent Pushcart nominee, he has published widely in anthologies and literary journals such as Potomac Review, Atlanta Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review. He is currently at work on his first full length manuscript. www.aehines.net
Early Love as Archaic Landscape
by Jane Craven
Of my teeth, you said they made me look like a country girl
so I focused on the trinity
of fireflies circling your head. You were a city saint
and had no truck with the backwoods. It’s true, I loved
parting branches, the disintegration of fallen trees sidling downhill,
moldy cackle of dried leaves, a collapsed path.
I had journeyed to the foreground
of an archaic landscape to seek my fortune, stone rubble
of what was once home, aflame behind me at the horizon.
I practiced flirtation, gleaned
little learnings, listened as you offered how to pronounce
ebullient, though I wasn’t. You wanted me
to move on and I did, cried in the car behind a supermarket
as if alive. Even as a ghost, I hung on, slept
in your cold cottage, ate your co-op cheese, wandered
until I felt blood warming my fingertips, caught
the fox scent of prey, or love, wilding
through a crosshatch of blackberry canes. No need
for the melancholy of abandoned wells, or the bright static
exchange between high clouds, which are in the past and
are immaterial. I returned to the original line, sketched
myself in, blackened the heel of my right hand, the mind
contracting, stretching, to form visible thought:
I have never been ruined. I am the sum of a thousand ruins.
Jane Craven was born and raised in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in The Beloit Journal, The Columbia Review, Tar River Poetry, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others. She won the Cloudbank Poetry Prize and The MacGuffin Poetry Hunt. Jane earned an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Her collection, My Bright Last Country (2020), won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize.
The Square
by Diane Fahey
On the photography of Eugène Atget
Despite their documentary intent, Atget's images
seem to want to be placed in a story.
– Nicholas Mirzoeff
A self-secluded man, he made no claims
for himself, or for the body of work
that imaged dwellings, shops,
whole streetscapes of Old Paris –
many, soon to vanish. And there were
portraits of organ grinders, knife-grinders,
sellers of lampshades, brollies:
as Paris was remade, they'd vanish, too.
Each stands in an unseen spotlight
while, in his singular, patient way
but with Balzacian belief,
Atget photographs them, forever.
And he archived the shanty-towns –
beside a rise of sheds, cabins,
the rag-and-bone men, their solemn-eyed
children looking back at us.
All this with his massive, antiquated
camera, hefted around Paris for decades.
The Surrealists, in their universe of
found objects, discovered him,
prized his pavement displays of
spat boots, cauliflowers, corsets, dolls,
his storefront windows with clouds in flux
above the staring eyes of mannequins.
What he loved most was
early morning light, ashen, sheer,
when the actor, and the painter
he had been, could apprise
then set forth a mise-en-scène,
whether spectral and decaying
with playbills lifting from alley walls,
or exquisitely bare, resonant with
the absence of life and lives.
He sets up in a Square, like a silent room:
Eugène Atget, elegist, working on
as if nothing can be truly lost.
Diane Fahey is the author of thirteen poetry collections. She has won major poetry awards and been shortlisted for seven book awards, with Sea Wall and River Light winning the Judith Wright Prize. She has received literary grants from the Australia Council, and the Victorian and South Australian governments. Her poetry has appeared in many international literary journals, and in over seventy anthologies. Diane holds a PhD in Creative Writing from UWS. dianefaheypoet.com
Midas
by Naro Alonzo
Mother, gold digger of scorched rice, sleep-
sand, overripe banana, coca-cola bottled gasoline,
moonlight tests your fingers positive for
heavy metals, men of iron fists armed
with gold rings, you who found them a delicacy
but believed you could carve bare handed
through the thorn and toughness, taste
a durian’s many hearts. You’ve always loved
to scavenge bones, content with crumbs,
how many times you cracked open sea urchins
mining their golden sex leaving behind empty shells
to the sea, become sand that you would sift
for glitter with a winnowing basket.
Mother, gold digger of treasure hunters, pawn-
shops, fish sauce, betadine on shallow wounds,
beware of fool’s gold in cigarette-stained teeth promising
land pregnant with Yamashita’s gold and honeyed
cathedrals, necklace undressed to tin in your neck
that you still kiss, rust flavored lips on my forehead.
Mother, gold digger of thrice-used oil, crispy
pata, Joy dishwashing liquid, your body hardening
from their touch, how to convince you there is gold
that sings, not in earth but beneath the eyelids
in a blackout. Our house of light where karaoke songs
run off like heat for we have no need for walls,
where the closest gold I can hold is the shine
of your stretch marks, gold wept in a bedpan
which I pour in the ceramic kiln. Your womb gone
for good. Glory of stitches with nothing to hide,
stiff with God, body hardly touched hard by you
like a rosary bead skipped after decades held
onto. Gold digger of frayed brooms, dried fish,
old chopping boards, 3 o’clock prayers, let me
slow dance you, let me steady your spine
as we leave a trail of gold hairs turning ash in
twilight’s blues. Mother of mosquito coil
tongue tips, crunched leaves, rooster’s closed beak
on the edge of a nipa-thatched roof, still
clock arms, how much do we have left to lose?
Raised in Davao, Naro Alonzo is studying to become a clinical psychologist at the University of the Philippines - Diliman. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Busilak: New LGBTQ Poetry from the Philippines and Tingle Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing. They are also a proud talahiban-fellow of the 1st National LGBTQ+ Writers Workshop (https://www.pinoylgbtq.com/).