Issue #56

Ash Evan Lippert

bureal

winter begets in severance—slow, cut, white, skyline egrets
stark in the bureal sinking of dawn in barren stillscapes. o, vengeant

god, bring me winter in tea song liteling, scanted mist-in-sun,
bring me candles of night-gloam, & tinder struck morrows.

I want love increasing in pale virtue, lambent conventure sorrows,
the flame of mornings warne starched in mourning. I want such regrets;

to feel all of loneliness in abundance, the lack-sighing indolence;
to lie beneath the prayer colored windowlight of noonish brack

lately sleep-steeped & soft-settled with the coffee going stale.
let the days pass me by like the shadows of birds, let them all in,

all, immolation, annihilation, let me be abandoned to erasure, some
sad sainted fate, some apocalyptic grace. I invite the lasting light.

o, riving blight, let my name lose its holy name, let snow hide its own
bruises. brethrine, ribbing lake cells, storm levin raising hackled

bristling shine, cold blearning in waves, goosepresenced skin,
the pond all in sunshine flinted, the brunt of the snowfront

shoving inland, grave like bison herds. the world is small, smelted
under this snow of snows, the last of accursed heaven; snow everlasting

until time is only snowdrifts, in the villages & cities, becoming one
skyface, & all the huts are eyeless, & all the doors are mute.

Unborne

Beryl tiger, fur a fever-crust of blood,
he stalks my labors, a growing madness

of sultry cloud. He looms, under the luminescent huntress
moon, his breathless fervid glow within the juniper and June-red
wheat. I’ve seen his eyes burn through and through

the veil of summer storms, all burnished in his view.
The smooth flesh unfurls, the tiger-lily curls,
the body seeks the peril, the tongue, it seeks the kill, and yes,

I’ve seen his jaundiced eyes burn through and through.

I know he sees me underground, clutched in a sweat
of bramble and heat. Dirt and tears, cheeks all smeared.
The grime in my pores. My greasy hair matted down
with maggots, roots, bulbs and spores. I hide, I sweat,

I long for cold. The wide clear sweep of wintery gold—
a gold unlike his gold, cleanly pure and new as milk—was long
ago spoiled. I want to shrink and pale, to die, unknown,

blind as a mole. Alone. Control. Seeing is madness.

The heat of touch is madness. The tiger’s pulse
against me is madness; his mouth on my mouth; his smell
like mold rotting in the caul of this summer afternoon.

Womb-slick, placenta scent; sick, I choke on my milk-sweet hope
each overburning sense. He and I, we are an incest of twins, fetus-twined
his rancid tongue seeks through my mind, root through dirt. Putrid
hurt, I’m rotted through and through in the warmth of this tomb.

Ash Evan Lippert is a clay artist and emerging queer poet residing in the South Carolina upstate. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Failed Haiku, Red Eft Review, and Euonia Review. They are happily at work on their first novel, and the ongoing project of parenting two “whimsical” cats. Find them at their website and on twitter @mossinsnow

Arden Hunter

Remnants

He saw Jesus in the grease stain spreading all over the napkin, Nostradamus in the fingerprints on his phone screen. Joan of Arc in cookie crumbs, Santa in his teeth and a soap bubble he said was hiding Martin Luther King.

He spied his mother in between the folds of the couch cushions, his grandfather was laughing from the seven-layer dip. His love who passed away when they were both still merely children was dancing in the microwave to each and every beep.

He wondered where he’d end up – in grease smears or in glitter? In tumbleweeds or basketballs or icing on a cake? He thought it might be fitting to become a piece of driftwood; homeless but at home and finally going with the grain.

He told them they should look for him within the mouths of rivers, or glinting in the dust motes than cheered on the growing dawn. When it was done they found him resting in between the pages, and read him out so he’d recall he wasn’t really gone.

Arden Hunter is an ND aroace agender writer, artist and performer. They have words, audio and art hosted and upcoming with Sledgehammer Lit, Outcast Press, and Kissing Dynamite, among other places. Find them on Twitter @hunterarden, Instagram @thegardenofarden and at ardenhunter.com.

Bobby Parrott

Sublivian Crockagators

With squinkulous winks to Lewis Carroll and James Joyce

Sublivian crockagators spliverously purling
Aslish and aslash into the floaming pream,
Besmirched and besnook with crustiferous knurling
Maliferous whackers on scabulous skirling.

Pronunciapation awrack and awrecking
Cohorting and snorting my deathwording flaggers,
Their hooksharp harpoonage and doomful deathclutchings
Splayed bestial blather tweenst pointiful taggers.

Methought with methinker, “How toothsome, how dapple!”
While pinkskinned and blushing myselfdom did paddle
Away from those bumpassly gnashful reptilians,
“This pream seems askliver, though frumptious and flapple.”

So I froglegged my rumpass acrost and askunder
With quickshoving waves of Neptunic Splunder
But like a turtle in glueygunk stuckered and muckered
My delicate pinkskin felt gashingly plundered.

The fierce crockagators swaived lumptiously loppin’,
When hand over jowl I ran glop to the stoppom,
My crapulous flabules proved snackerly vista,
And my snufferly thumper thrummed “bunktummy-bunkem.”

Then the snidger-snadge sneer of my spoilyboned brother
Came thrashedly clear through my rumpled-up cover,
Behated beskated we’d slung and bumpchumpered,
Though most of our fisticuffed bloodwagon lumpered.

My dreamdreaded crocks croaked agog and vermoosened.
Besides, the crustiferous knurling was loosened.
But long by, our sniffley and quiffley big sister,
Sublivian crockagators n’ere splivered farsooken.

Bobby Parrott’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Spoon River, RHINO Poetry (forthcoming 2022), Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, and elsewhere. Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado.

Margalit Katz

Proprioception

Imagine burial:
bend back to meet
sweet dark earth.
Reunion is blessed with silence.
But rhythm and ritual wax
warring, habitual
and panic possessive, avoidant aggressive:
a marvelous cloud of mood.
A single pulse throbs in a pressed ear,
lungs fill back up with water,
limbs icicles, pruning off
at the tips into—
Where do you end and the world begins?
A brain gets crowded, yearns
to puff more space into this body,
rearranges internal organs
to take up less room
to make more room
to build, not just a pile of rocks
but a home
in the pit of a stomach, not just excess
weight to lug around, clinging along vertebrae
that makes a left shoulder pop
like a floorboard under
tumbleweeds of hair and detritus,
makes an eyelid spasm like a glitch,
makes an air mattress of a gut
that an inhale fills with others’ insides.
Sun thaws skin on the nape of a neck into comfort,
the wind smells green in arms
and cools all leaden movements.
Runner’s high is a fantasy:
it dissolves in entirety
all nether regions,
promises a floating head when
all you want is spirit
but every temple
is a tomb or a womb
or a cage.

Margalit Katz is an Anthropology and Spanish student at Wesleyan University. They are currently working toward completing their senior thesis on the sociality of the New York City subway system. Apart from writing poetry, they enjoy reading, spending time outdoors, and trying out new coffee shops. They hope to pursue a career in primary education.

Cameron Morse

In the Window

In the window between treatments I father three children, calling each by name out of the dark first forest, walking each by hand into the slow dawn of arrival. In the window between widows, Light unsheathes their faces. My children will forget me. In the vacuum of sleep, I listen to the choir of their voices, echoes blooming in a chamber, dark torpedoes pushed out into bright water.

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.

George Bandy

yes I’ve said

yes I’ve said
& yes I’ve repeated
yet we wait
for that careless summons
the restless invitation
to quell what might
give recall to what
has been left out
yes

George Bandy’s publications include War, Literature & the Arts (USAF), New Millennium Writings (vol.17), Subprimal Art Poetry, Blue Unicorn, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His poem ‘Return from War’ won the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award and was published in Icon.

Danielle Mcmahon

If we should be taken again

by that flaxen thread and needled through the night doubly intertwining if we should each dissolve in that space as twin eyes igniting with each breath if we should each smile in our own separate darknesses and scatter just as easily let me unravel the seams of silence let me retrace the ridges of your fingertips let me hurry my words towards yes

Danielle McMahon graduated with a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh writing program in 2006. She has been previously published in Spinning Jenny (Issue 9) and Wicked Alice, under her maiden name.


Shiksha Dheda

I dreamt I wanted you

We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and
afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and
sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was
dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed,
wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.

erasure of Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare. Hover mouse over image to read original text.


Shiksha Dheda is a South African of Indian descent. She uses writing to express her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures. Sometimes, she dabbles in photography, painting, and baking lopsided layered cakes. She rambles annoyingly at Twitter: @ShikshaWrites. You can find (or ignore her) at her site.

J-T Kelly

Eclosion

You, too, will brood, and till your broodlings hatch,
you’ll wonder if your brooding means you’ve sinned.
Why else this suffering, this restless watch?

No end ahead, and when did it begin —
when you were swollen, drowsy, daydreaming?
Were wings gently fanning young flames, whose thin

tongues tasted something not yet become — cream
not yet separated, bread not yet baked?
You will murmur — your own tongue stupid; teem-

ing susurrations will skitter and take
no hold, make no words, name nothing. The void
will not be calendared; the sleeper wakes

when it wakes. What wakes wakes wrecked, though, destroyed —
unless you’re there. Without you, this change — it’s
all entropy, chance, accident — alloyed

with death. Each broodling is peaceful when fit
within the hollows of your breast, your palms,
your mouth. Its face is of water. It sits

at the gate called Beautiful, begging alms.
You must see it, call it, and you must grab
its hands and pull — until it sings a psalm

of thanks and dances off into the mob.
You, too, will rest when all your pulling’s done.
You’ll wonder if your resting means you’re rob-

bing God of your labor. For each child, one
tooth goes the old wisdom. What will you lose
as you doze in the clover in the sun,

while childless clouds float by in ones and twos?

J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis, Indiana. He lives in a brick house with his wife and five children, his two parents, and a dog.

David E. Poston

Errata

in line 7, sudden should be sodden
in line 23, incarnate should be inchoate

in line 37, Your soul like mist rising
                                          from a frozen lake in winter
should read
              anything but that

all mentions of Judith, it turns out,
should read Jezebel

that line repeated 6 times in the penultimate stanza
seemed so
incantatory and cleansing,
but now
                           not so much

(and despite
what we’ve all been told,
semi-colons should not
be judged
by some
patriarchal aesthetic standard:

stet
;)

David E. Poston is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Slow of Study. His poetry and fiction have appeared recently in Typehouse Literary Magazine, The Main Street Rag, North Carolina Literary Review, and Rye Whiskey Review. He is a co-editor of Kakalak.