Issue #39
John Tustin
HOW MANY DAMSELS
How many damsels
will you leave
demanding their freedom
in the quiet
defiance
of divine
ivory towers?
How many dames
will you leave
sitting alone
at the bar
staving off
the wolves
and watching
the front door?
How many ladies
will you leave
sitting forlornly
in rain-splattered
cars
waiting for
you
to come and change
the flat tire?
How many women
wait for you
to answer
your door
or
your phone
or
your message
on some dating
site?
The answer,
really,
is
none.
It’s none.
John Tustin is currently suffering in exile on the island of Elba but hopes to return to you soon. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his poetry online.
M. Stone
Cinquains of Writing and Want
Dozens
of men, married,
still in love with their wives
yet frustrated from lack of sex,
read words
I penned
and grow aroused.
They seek me out in hopes
that a fat woman will settle
for scraps.
*
Those men
I created,
into whom I breathed life
through my stories, I find wanting:
Adams
bowing
to my power,
yet I am a false god
and they are made in my graven
image.
*
The page—
smooth as milk glass,
blank-faced priest making note
of words I spill like so many
regrets.
M. Stone is a bookworm, birdwatcher, and stargazer who writes poetry and fiction while living in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She can be reached at writermstone.wordpress.com.
Jordan Potter
Downtown Huntington
We shall not, however, consider these contemporary depressants,
which Hegel, as a German Romantic, could not have envisaged.
—Findlay
What doesn’t sound embarrassing to say?
You do miss it, how legs were spread
like cautious pilings, urchin dark
beneath the pier. How sentient and near
the world seemed then. How the waves
beat like a grand polonaise.
Where can we live but days?
You’re now the fool walking along the shore,
wondering at the lovers kidney-curved
into each other on the sand. The same
fashionable hypocrites, the same oil-slicked
undecideds, the same hands fumbling
with a blue jean button or climbing
like prayers up a dress. Even now
someone else is there, her hair
a black allegro, his hosannas,
the trees permed into penitence
by unrelenting Santa Anas.
Hadn’t you also stood by graves
and felt nothing but the urge to leave?
Hadn’t you shrugged at the dewy dawn?
You were once the twinkling cups of distant lightning,
once the phosphorescent cross
glowing in the marine layer beyond
the liquor store, cold as doom.
Here, now, is that other side of time.
The ocean is a field of silverware
working at the same eternal meal.
Seagulls scream, then rendezvous.
A foghorn rehearses. Nothing is for you.
Jordan Potter is a writer and actor from Huntington Beach.
DS Maolalaí
Kitchen renovations.
ceilings collapse
with a chalk of asbestos,
thick in the milky air
like kicking a bag
of unmixed tilegrout
or flour, floating
in a flourmill.
and we crowbar down corners
to test them for damp,
scraping our flat screwdrivers
in unobtrusive places. I don’t know why
they put tiles in
like these drop ceilings
or when they would even
have done it – the plaster
is sound; all they did
was lose a foot of space. nothing is hidden;
you don’t expect gold, though perhaps silver,
secret documents,
some semi-precious
stone. but it’s just
the same ceiling
as they have in the sitting room, same as the rest
of the house. like tuning radios
to foreign stations
on one of those days
of still weather,
high pressure and air
clear over europe.
finding that in sweden
they like the same songs.
DS Maolalai has been nominated seven times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019)
Ryan Norman
Meditation in Water
Tonight, I meditated under a waning moon,
my intentions modest,
a quiet connection
driven through bared soles, resting
in puddles on a dark balcony.
Did I feel the draw of the dark?
Was Selene pulling my water as I sat
spellbound, less wooden, more liquid,
tidal?
Sloshing between her world and mine,
despite the grounding,
tethered by gravity, lassoed by stars
—rising. Above
what stands rooted: forests.
Into
what moves in me: rivers.
But
in exhalation, it disappeared,
and I sat with
wet feet on a
damp porch
as reality buzzed by.
Ryan Norman is a writer from New York living in the Hudson Valley. Inspired by the landscape, he writes what he feels. His work has appeared in From Whispers to Roars, Perhappened Mag, Black Bough Poetry (vols. 1 & 2; forthcoming Freedom/Rapture edition), Storgy Magazine, XRAY Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @RyanMGNorman.
Aïcha Martine
(It’s Because) I’m a Maximalist
I don’t recall.
Did it always
sink and bloom
this way? Funny.
What was I looking
at all those times
distorted, spent
microdissecting?
Surely not phases,
phases teach small,
Subtle Things, and
me? Maximalist at
the jazzy core.
Listen, but not
too hard. If I knew
what shape my body
was, wouldn’t know
what to barter for:
teacup breasts;
nail face smoothie;
slack-toothed sly;
iron iris eyes.
In a storm I’m a
good man, and also
the storm, and
that soft ensuing
letup, and the
bellow that precedes
and everything
I forgot to name:
Werewolf and the
Moon, Selkie
and the shedded
epidermis, the
crabapple, the seed,
the bitter left
on bluest tongues.
I clapped to
make the waves and
careened them over
at the stillness.
The squall it
kicked up in its
wake is how I knew
how
fast
my
body
could
fall.
A. Martine is a trilingual writer, musician and artist of color. She’s an Assistant Editor at Reckoning Press and co-EIC/Producer/Creative Director of The Nasiona. Her collection AT SEA, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize is forthcoming with CLASH BOOKS. @Maelllstrom/www.amartine.com.
Laura Sminchak
Haiku for Pandemic Parenting
I.
children taste the world
eyes following mouths and hands
there is no village
II.
surfaces scalding
tiny fingertips searching
preying pathogens.
III.
Awake and asleep
hope hoisted upon her back
mother omniscient
Laura’s work has appeared in publications such as From Whispers to Roars and Cathexis Northwest Press. She lives in Ohio with her family and is a licensed attorney. She enjoys adventuring with her young children and drinking too much coffee. You can find her on Instagram at @laura_writes_words.
Alan Kissane
Sunset by the Lake
The way it drapes over my shoulders of bone and burden,
how it finds its way through nook, through cranny,
into the folds of my glass jar memory;
the way its colours linger and twist my footstep thoughts,
one by one, in syncopation, in patterns
incomprehensible to me like an Escher painting;
the way it spatters shape and shadow on canvas of grass, tree, rock,
as if it were a stag escaping the night, majestic and muscular,
before an iron pause, a look, in the eye like atoms, particles and dust;
the way it flickers as eye lids do when they feel love,
greater than the dark, more reverent than the day,
just makes me see the sunset by the lake as something approaching a reckoning.
Alan Kissane is a teacher of English and lives in the UK. His poetry is due to be published in forthcoming issues of Allegro, Dust Poetry, Emerge Literary Journal and Fahmidan.
Honor Vincent
When it’s safe to go
When it’s safe to go again,
there will be working
separate from waking.
there will be walks to the subway
stenches will reassert themselves in metal and stone.
there will be temperatures
and importance in having the jacket for them.
there will be crowds
a safe assumption they might be anything: joyous or neutral or angry.
there will be a new bird, a new crack in the pavement, a new green
who set up in the pausing quiet.
Who will no longer be safe from us, when it’s safe to go again.
Honor Vincent is a writer who was born and raised in New York. Her poetry has appeared twice in Neologism, which is where you are right now. Her work is also published in Strange Horizons, Entropy, The Ekphrastic Review, and Nowhere Travel Stories and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review. The first issue of her comic series is available here, and you can read about the process of making it here.
Richard Rauch
BRACHISTOCHRONE
a curve between two points along which a body moves under gravity in the shortest of times…
Time makes its mark by passing.
Its plurals are the memories
that make us, that loom the web and weave
the ticking of the soul. It leaves us so soon,
all the symbols of it: trees adding rings
to fingers caressing skin, limbs, branches,
those respites from flight, brachiating among them
hand over hand, aping pendulums, twittering
leaves before they turn and fall, their denizens
fleeing for cover, as if we know why
the sun chases the moon across the sky,
why hands pass over numbers
by the dozens, twirling in blurs
of faces, wasting it as if it were free—
first steps, bronzed booties, bad fit hand-me-downs—
the beat, the pulse, days lengthening, shortening,
all the metaphors and synonyms for it—
training wheels, baseball gloves, losing your grip, slipping
from the monkey bars—the sheer luxury
of wasting it—yearbooks, diplomas, quick visits
at Christmas—stuttering elisions.
The body loses a step, submits
to gravity. The mind wanders—
souvenirs, photographs, those few hours
that were ours—seeking its past,
in fear of its future. Time elides,
not without a certain mercy, lifetimes
trapped, running, feeling a way, teetering,
falling with unforgiving concision
along a natural brachistochrone,
mathematically, actuarially
precisemdash;cold, rigid physics hitting home
in the shortest of timesmdash;yet still,
that inner grandeur of enduring gravity.
Born and raised in the New Orleans area, Richard Rauch lives along Bayou Lacombe in southeast Louisiana.