Issue #98

Shinsaku Ashida

Flowers of the Deep

My grandfather
used to say he wanted to die in the sea.
Scatter my ashes, he said.

A whale lies still
on the ocean floor,
in the vast emptiness
life gathers—
as if a flower bloomed
in the wilderness.
That was the place
my grandfather longed to go.

The whale’s bones rejoice,
knowing they will nourish new life—
but human bones do not.

Scatter my ashes,
my grandfather said.

At some point,
we stopped
returning to the earth.

At some point,
we forgot
how to become flowers.

Shinsaku Ashida is a Japanese poet whose work explores the intersections of nature, memory, and the human condition. His poems have appeared in over 120 publications worldwide. He writes in both Japanese and English, aiming to bridge cultural and linguistic boundaries through poetry.​

J.M. Vesper

When the Levee Breaks Inside

Delta mud between splayed toes—ancestral silt
carried from watersheds I've never seen.
These floodwaters rising carry artifacts
of civilizations I thought I'd buried.

Behind my eyes: not mere hurricanes but
the accumulated fury of generations,
atmospheric spirals of inherited rage
unspooling across inner geographies.

I hear foundations crack—my grandmother's
porcelain ghosts thrust through splintered floorboards,
a childhood bicycle rusted beyond recognition,
love letters bloated to illegibility.

When the levee breaks inside,
chronology collapses. Past, present, future
suspended in the same muddy waters.
All carefully constructed narratives drown.

Mississippi churns not with metaphoric teeth
but with actual histories—bodies weighted
with stones, settlements washed away,
civilizations born and dying by the same waters.

The harmonica wails—notes carried upriver
from delta throats to borrowed white hands.
I stand drenched in waters I've claimed as mine,
this baptism performed in someone else's church.

From this dissolution, tentative blooms:
not simple phoenix myths but complicated
resurrections, carrying forward the very
destruction that made renewal possible.

The waters recede but never vanish,
leaving sediment in lungs, between vertebrae.
The landscape transformed resembles nothing
written in our collective prophecies.

J.M. Vesper writes speculative stories and poetry from their Phoenix home, with work forthcoming in Intrepidus Ink. They hold degrees in Creative Writing (B.A.) and English Teaching (M.A.).

Denise England

Vanité

Alfred Agache, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Beware me, they warn:

             Shun her loose-bound hair,
her lustrous shoulder sculpted in marble,
for she entices with a siren’s stare
and ensnares with Aphrodite’s girdle.
She readies raven-silk talons, traipses
among merchants who barter to own her,
captures her moment: collects their corpses,
splays their wasted bodies in dishonor.

And yet,

             all clamor to hoard my portrait.
Their ogling eyes absorb me. Impotent,
they mentally unravel my corset
and ravish my golden pearl in secret.

Now you,

             transfixed before me, consuming:
which of us is guilty of vanity?

Denise England’s passion for languages, art, cultures and connections inspires her writing. She studied in Bordeaux, France and holds an M.A. in French literature. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in Cave Region Review, UAMS Medicine and Meaning, The French Literary Review, SLANT, and Ekstasis Magazine.

Carolanna Lisonbee

Peach

The light is tinted yellow
with the smoke of distant wildfires.
The sunflowers bend their heads in the heat.
For a moment, the summer day
is absolutely silent.
I pick a ripe peach from our tree.

Carolanna Lisonbee is an English teacher, writer, translator, and amateur globetrotting adventuress. Her poems and translations have been published in Tea-ku: Poems About Tea, Reliquiae (Corbel Stone Press), AzonaL, Book of Matches, Blue Unicorn, Ballast Journal, Acumen, and Poet Lore. She posts on Instagram and Threads as @carolanna_poetry.

Daniel Hewett

To Mr Gordon

I think you know you have to die
Your breath was ragged when we met
It's been some years since that day passed
You've always had that special trick
Of lying in your evening throes
And dying just a little bit

But you've been wasting far too long
To change what's dry back into spit
Or add a fifth to four good toes
Or glut your gut, what you've amassed
Your scabrous hands have grown too thick
For kindness to repay its debt

You say in death, you want to lie
In starless dark and padded silk
And solemn men will come inspect
The crumbling box you occupy
But you are cruel, and may yet live
With shadows that you made your friends

If something seems a tad awry
It's that you've had so many ends
But I can never once forgive
The ghost within your cold dead eye
Your living one cannot affect
The way I view your broken ilk

Your spindly legs were swift and sly
But soon, your suit will cease to fit
Your soul already comes and goes
Your armchair bulk by night attacked
By forces that you prayed to once
You knelt when faith was all the rage

So I will tighten up your tie
And rest you in your wooden cage
In all your lives, you were a dunce
Your bonfire oak is tall and stacked
When you are back, we'll come to blows
I'll take the eye that, unburned, glows.


Daniel Hewett is an English teacher living and working in China. He’s previously lived in Sicily, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and feels most alive when experiencing new cultures, languages, and environments. He’s written poetry and short stories for years, but only recently started to regularly share these with others.

Tyler David Wilkerson

Drifting In and Out Through the Storm

i hear cicadas in the trees,
geese in the pond, and the murmurs of mothers
walking with their daughters around the trail.

i hear tulip-picking and tadpoles lurching,
cardinals singing their songs for the clouds
who hang onto the swing’s rusty chains.

i hear daylilies laughing in the fields together
and rabbits, ravished by their leaves,
stealing them back to their dens

for dinner. my hammock swings
and i let the rocking go until it stops,
go until it stops.

               i drift asleep and time slips away
               like little breaths,
               fresh and fleeting.

               the moon gives
               just as much as the sun; i hear crickets
               in the grass and the stars above gossiping
               about all the time they’ve let pass.

i hear the birds’ warnings of a storm.
raccoons, feasting, tell each other to take cover;
the lightning bugs seem to evaporate.

i hear droplets sweep across the ballroom floor
that is the pond and a thunderous applause accompany
the graceful ripples as they dash across the surface.

i cover my head and only wake when there is a tapping
on my hammock after the storm has passed and all that's left
are puddles in the leaves, dripping slowly down onto me

as summer rises
with me,
wet from the rain
and full like the lake.

Tyler David Wilkerson is a freshly graduated poet based in Springfield, Missouri. His work appears in Magazine1 and is forthcoming in October Hill Magazine.

Mark Katrinak

Passions

In summer sunset shows its loveliest,
its ripened plums and apricots and rouge
evening’s politest interlude, late June,
the telling bruise amongst the distant stones,
the ugly truth of day that brevity
is queen of beautiful, the queen that must
protect its king and soon the hour will
unspool the silver, silver’s cool periphery
of blue, the final coos of mourning doves
an indication of their sad approval.

It’s true, you said, you love to end each day
like this, catch fleshy apricot or bruise,
or red as red as oozing blood, the sun
who sacrifices self upon the evening sky,
horizons any passerby could see,
the self who disregarded I and made
plenteousness for the underwhelming eye,
turned quiet stones even quieter, dusk
moderating the last of light and dark
until dark partners with the moon and stars.

You feel like scarlet, carry lasting scars
within your broken heart, your scarlet which
upstages blue and overtakes the room
as sunset quiets over pinnacles.
Your taken by the magic of scarlata,
if only for tonight you’d overtake the world:
its lubricated gears maniacal,
a drive that doesn’t care to disengage,
a destination specified by wounds.
Red this raw lives one floor above abyss.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Mark is now a resident of Golden Valley, AZ. He enjoys woodworking, fine wine, and spending time with his family.

David Hanlon

In His Garden

rich with the sweet scent

of potted honeysuckle,

apricots glowing in a glass bowl,

we kiss—

and all distances slip away;

tongues searching,

eyes dark behind sunglasses.

Nothing but the murmur of honeybees

gathering nectar,

the hush of leaves stirred by wind—

the garden stills itself

to make room

for our blooming.

Muscles of passion stir,

bright as Himalayan poppies,

tended

by desire

glorious as woodlark-song;

our bliss-lit hands

ready—

to weed,

to prune,

to plant.

David Hanlon is a poet from Cardiff, Wales. You can find his work in many magazines and journals, including Rust & Moth, The Lumiere Review and trampset. His first full-length collection, Dawn’s Incision, was recently published by Icefloe Press. You can follow him on twitter @davidhanlon13 and Instagram @hanlon6944.

Pramod Lad

Night Moves (tanka sequence)

Could I forever
Make mine the body embraced
Each night? Absence sparks
Untamed fires, leaves fresh burns
No salve can soothe, but his touch.

Kindness is never
Enough, the body pleads for
Tender cruelties
Rough skin, calloused hands firm touch
Insisting on pleasure's peak.

So much can be made
Of small moves, eyes in hiding.
Heavy guilt, face turned ,
I wait for sharp seismic shifts,
head locked hard on my shoulder.

Pramod Lad was born in India. His poems have been accepted in The Examined Life Journal, Right Hand Pointing, Omentum, Eclectica Magazine, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Umbrella Factory, The Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Pennine Platform, Litbreak Magazine, Amethyst Review, Soul Forte, Creations Magazine, Austur Literary Magazine, Wilderness House, and elsewhere.

Fiona Hartmann

The Closest Call

There is no act
of writing that erases
you. No matter how
many words
are discarded with yesterday’s
trash or cancerously cut
at the point
of a scalpel. I have only introduced
more of you into the world.

There’s academic debates
about whether the hope
in the box Pandora
opened was a consolation
prize or a punishment
from the gods. You saw
sunflowers in the colour
yellow and I thought about
the paint Van Gogh ate.

Only the living lose
an argument to a ghost.
Only the lonely try
to make a reckoning
out of a blank
page.

Fiona Hartmann is a writer living in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in creating thought-provoking fiction that creates emotional connections that transcend through the digital landscape of modernity.