Issue #75

Paige Moreau

I Blew A Sea’s Summer Hour

I blew a sea’s summer hour
Into a bottle corked with red and tossed to sea,
To bob and kiss sun shards and whisper
In shadows the secret trysts Selene
Has with the water, her soft glissades blush
Surface silver; Ocean froths with his release.

I willed a sea’s summer care
To the gull that sails the sun to sleep;
Slipped on a summer sunset, the gorged descent of light;
Round, satisfied and red, rhythmic tides in swelling
Skin and hope’s sweet breath under twilight’s wing.
Impatient Dusk drew from my cheeks pink,
From my eyes, light; woe to all who contain the sun.

I lost a sea’s summer song
To frothy waves split by the hull,
My ship of dreams befell the night; trident, thunder
Reamed and rifted; swallowed by the squall it sank
And drifting planks in silence slipped through
Pentad streams that line the dead and sunder sound.

Andrea M. Penner

(HER) JAPAN

A found poem from Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Interpretation (1905)

Language of the unlettered full of meaning:
proverbs and household phrases,
the songs of the street,
the speech of the workshop.
—the image on a boy’s kite
or a girl’s battledore, every kind of decoration.

First impressions—Japan seen
in the white sunshine of a perfect spring day.
You will never for-
get the dream—never; thousands of
years, remains unchanged. The dead
remain in this world—

welfare of the living
depends on welfare of the dead.
Goddess of Rice Pot,
forms of servitude,
a wife that proved
barren might be divorced.

Common for bereaved wife to perform
suicide, religion of loyalty,
to follow her husband into the other world
to wait upon him as in life,
fact and myth interwoven, difficult
to distinguish obedience, affectionate submission.

Emigrant community—
communal coercion in Canada, Hawaii
collective opinion
              —the thinking of all is the thinking of one.
Woman cultivated by home training
silence and softness
and (her) hostility render it all the more alarming.

Great social tree, clipped,
cared for—all are polite, nobody
quarrels, everybody smiles
in the teeth of pain—
pain and sorrow
remain.

Andrea (Andi) Penner’s poems show up in lit mags, rags, chap books, and anthologies. She’s living her best writing life in New Mexico while working on a memoir, a third indie book of poetry, and weekly posts for her Substack newsletter, In Our Own Ink. She believes in mindful editing.

Ken Poyner

Alternatives

I am no longer living with the maid.
I thought the arrangement might work out,
Or at least sustain in some sort of
Unbalanced equilibrium — but soon
For each of us the profit in the relationship
Tilted to different equations.
My old habits came back.
Her moments of unforgiveable beauty
Arrived with uncomfortable hours of construction.
We imagined too much. I remember
How you and I had gotten regular, no longer
An explosion of the unlikely, just
Day to day sufficiency. For some reason
I thought that wrong. Not knowing
The glide path in relationships is what
Destroys them. Nonetheless, there was
The maid. What drew you to hire her?

Ken’s eleventh book, “Winter’s Last Apple,” is just out. Eight of his previous ten books are still in print. He lives in Virginia with his wife of 40+ years, assorted rescue cats, and various betta fish. “Café Irreal,” “Analog,” “Grey Sparrow,” “Mad Swirl,” and elsewhere.

Alice Powers

Paralysis

You drag your leg
Behind you like a rake
Clawing at what is
Left of your life
The tattered bits
Trail you like a wake
A daughter who’s a stranger
Two ex-wives
One who shot herself
In the chest
And one who survived
Then even thrived
I like to think my
Bitterness is gone
I made myself turn right
Where you went wrong
But who’s to say
In the final analysis
Comparison is just
Another kind of
Paralysis

The author prefers not to share a bio.

Hynden Walch

Resurrection

I arise
three days later
out of the ashtray and the empty bottles.
Resurrection-style
I reanimate.
Not like Jesus,
but like some minor sinner He
pushed out of the way,
as people cried
and waved their palmy fans.

I revive
to spit the ruination of another fine wine
out into the sink —
while across the square,
I imagine Jesus there,
magicking the mob’s tears into Montepulciano.
(They were in Italy, weren’t they?
— Caesar and all that?)

I refocus
and I come alive!
— to clear my throat for quite a while
and receive a host of aspirin
from my own unholy hands.
(I have naught to do with Jesus or his fans.)

I am —
a fallen woman.

No, really, a woman who fell
right off her tipsy heels
into a bush afire!
Then cursed the bush —
until finally glad the bush was there, limped home —
to revitalize
three days after these ataxian attacks,
bruised now, but less inflamed,
less a zombie moaning
zombie words for pain.
(But really, wasn’t Jesus just a zombie, too?)

I am heretical!
A queen alighting from the bed of her like-name;
sweat dappled and lace-veined;
distended, headless, Auntie Mamed.
But I am foot-sure
and liver-true!

I redress
in summer-shift,
a garment I found twisted on the floor,
whose zipper sticks to irk
my crown of hair,
a thorny madness still unready for the comb.

But then I blink.
Who is this sinner in the mirror sink?
Bee-blank and shock-hued,
jaundiced, trapped, and unsubdued,
I am too stung to see with
Visine weeping eyes.
(Like Jesus wept, I think.)

I am shocking!
As I wipe my bloodshot face,
I toss my Turin shroud, disgraced,
mascara-blackened
in the dawning noon.
I am a horse
with newly hammered shoes.
Bolting, half possessed,
partially dressed,
and afraid to meet my gaze,
I run,
now fully spooked by the sun
and the hymn of distant bells.

Hynden Walch is an actress. She’s currently on tv all day in animated shows like Adventure Time and Teen Titans Go, for which she’s also written. Her essays have appeared in Popula and Culturico, where she’s film and media editor. She’s working on her first novel.