Issue #97

Vincent Santino Smarra

Palimpsest

Cross-beams in dusty attic, insulated gaps. By some divine
Providence I don’t fall through. The mirror
Is impressive enough, and will
Fit, snug, in corner; missing a fragment
Sucks the light from behind my eyes, a void in reflection
Swallowing whole

Memories. It’s disconcerting, the whole
Reality fades as I divine
Staring at me now, from the future and past, reflection
Freed from mirror.
Greater than me, the fragment
Me overpowers my will

A lesson in powerlessness that I will
Try not to forget as the whole
Reason I had before seems like the fragment
Now. Facing divine
Instead of what I thought I brought to the mirror
It’s total reflection;

My reflection,
Will,
With possessions all mirror
That part that isn’t whole
The glass house from which divine
Casts stones, making a fragment

Back out of me. In my fragment
After this moment of reflection
Something like the divine
Is nothing but a problem that will
Keep the room I meant to fill from ever being whole
It’s in my attic. It’s just a mirror.

But in that mirror
Where fragment
Makes known the whole
Problem of perception, my reflection
I fear, will
Never escape the divine


Vincent Santino Smarra wishes he was more known as a writer, but has bad luck with lamps. No genies, just light for his pen and paper. Still, he does his best, publishing stories across the Internet and in whatever magazines will have him. More of his writing at VincentSantino.Com.

Maia Brown-Jackson

desperate faith

author’s note for context: from the introduction of Sigmund Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud), mostly because I am so furious with the way he treated young women and swept sexual assault under the rug that I felt I had to turn his work into something new.

Maia Brown-Jackson believes in the altruism of strangers, the power of direct action, and the Oxford comma. She has worked everywhere from art galleries to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and volunteers for a Yazidi NGO. You can find more of her work at maiabrown-jacksonwriting.com.

Mark Wyatt

Under a mulberry tree

                        “All
                       I want
                 is to be with
               you”, whispered         the
        girl  with a dagger at  her  breast
       gazing with love at the beautiful face
     of the boy with the beautiful words under
    the mulberry tree in the moonlight where he
   could have been sleeping, so angelic was his
  face, were it not for the blood. Eloping young
  lovers have spilt too much blood, from Babylon
  with its feuding families behind mud-brick walls
 and lions prowling in the moonlight to Manhattan’s
turf warfare on the upper west side. In so many hearts
  greed and fury stifle love, as irrational prejudices
build up, while children of different creeds and colours
play happily together. Love will find its own secret path
under the light of the stars while over-protective parents
  stare like searchlights for mirror images of themselves.
      Yet, with   excitement, danger lurks from tip-toeing
        out of     the house at the dead of night, afraid of
                 waking barking dogs.         Disturbed at
                  the rendez-vous, I              dropped
                  my shawl, which                 became
                   a lion’s play-
                    thing, and
                    fled. I
                   returned
                  to find my
                 love, thinking
    me gone, dead by suicide. The snowy-white fruit of
the mulberry tree began to turn red, then purple and black

Mark Wyatt now lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. His recent pattern poetry inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses has appeared in Ink Sweat and Tears, Osmosis, Streetcake Magazine, Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, and elsewhere.

Sam Barbee

1000 Cuts

Blots akin to Seurat’s pointillism. Bewitching specks
splattered inside a new frame like razor’s graze into a freckled cheek.
Tight punctures across palette and canvas, a degrading mix
of pixels to bless variations of blemish. Still-life of oddball items:
staged homage to burned candle or apple core. Primal discipline

from the artist, artisan, or poet partisan to muse. Dodge rumors
and lights degrading pulse of false pigments. Take broad strikes
at love’s conceit, life’s sweetest wound – blood trickles as affection,
avoid spouts. Accept a scar cluster, each meditative nick. Kiss
the keloid niche like humble sunlight pierces a bough to pock

fresh snow. Be never too savage, and bandage regretful gash
flaring beneath mournful skin before it erupts. Each swatch
a twitch, lethal when gouged at random as if in chest, wrist, palm.
A thumb smudges gleam, or prunes a frayed scarf. Offend the frame
or page with flourish: strokes provoking stippled petals in a porcelain bowl.

Sam Barbee has served as President of the Winston-Salem Writers, and NC Poetry Society, and is one of the originators of the Poetry In Plain Sight — now in its thirteenth year — a poetry initiative to feature NC poets on broadside posters and display them in NC towns statewide.

Mark Dunbar

You held tight

You’d have thought we robbed a bank,
not scaled a fence for a midnight swim,
but it was the country club, so
they sent a helicopter,
and we fled its feverish light
and reveled in our criminal whim,
our tinpot prank
beneath the upstaged moon.

And who’d believe we took
the quarry road curve at 100,
ditto on the moonlight,
the white bomb shaking,
our shouts that leavened the night,

but the tangent we daily
ducked into, the one too dull
not to believe meant bloody knuckles
in the heat and sweat,
paint for the house and the porch,
for the eaves and the dirty peak,
red paint they hated
but couldn’t change,

the black girls of Oak Street
who lit us up with joints and eyelashes
and laughed when we danced,
red paint we washed off

the way your mother lying swollen
in her damp bed couldn’t

what had her
a torment down to the name
you worked to pronounce
as if to control it
and abolish that bend
she was taking
at the speed of light,

falling in the shrill light
as leaves from the maple
at your door
over the dry grass
of August.

You held tight,
but she slipped
into another summer.

What summer did we live?
What good is memory if it’s at best anesthesia,
at worst just chronic pain,
a warped prism spitting out blue
and only blue, an invisible pinata
that keeps breaking open,
the lamentable treats raining down,
grabbing at your feet like an undertow
to take you beyond the shore,
waves hissing, muffling the alternative score:

a humming car engine on a summer night,
a dance in the spotlight,
and the Oak Street girls
laughing, still laughing,
all woven now like years
into that bittersweet ode
that passes for solace.

Mark Dunbar lives in Brookfield, IL. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grist, Red Rock Review, Rogue Agent, Corvus Review, Bicoastal Review and the Ekphrastic Review, among others. He attended Kenyon College where he was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award.

Paul Bavister

Tanyard Pond

I appear in Spring, reflected,
looking over the black brick wall
into an almost circular pond
shimmering with bright cloud sky.
Marsh marigolds light shadows
under willows, as lily pads unfurl
through watercress. A crow
wheels on the breeze that breaks
the pond’s surface. I disappear.

Paul Bavister has published three collections of poetry with Two Rivers Press, his latest being The Prawn Season. His work has appeared in Oxford Poetry, The Rialto and The North. His poem Starlings came highly commended in the RSPB/Rialto poetry competition.

Carole Glasser Langille

A WILD HORSE

“If ye know it not, ask how many stopping-places there were
in the Apostle’s journeys round about unto Illyricum.”
St. Augustine

I slept all morning. I slept
half the crowded afternoon.

When night came, I rode my sleeplessness
like a wild horse.

I rode as if I could catch
the shapes sun first flicks on the ocean’s back.

Like some frightened mare,
wanting the confines of a stall but breaking that stall

and galloping miles into morning,
I kept coming closer

to what I wished to keep away.
Asleep again, briefly, I made boundless journeys

crossing continents in a flash,
and then I woke,

had an apple and coffee,
went to work. To my surprise,

I’d traveled all my life
to get here.

Carole Glasser Langille is the author of 5 books of poetry, 2 collections of short stories and the non-fiction book, “Doing Time”about giving writing workshops in a prison in Nova Scotia. Nominated for The Governor General’s Award in Poetry, The Atlantic Poetry Prize, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction.

Patricia Nelson

Saul Travels to Damascus

i.
Caesar wants them gone.
Caesar with his many hungers
thickening like pockets.

I am meant to end them:
Clever Saul, who twists things
with his beak of words.

Wise men would see the danger
and stop calling to a better God.
But these men are everywhere, like sparrows.

They must think that wishes are a real place
with a King who has to answer
when they love Him with their wants.

ii.
Let me see it as their God might:
a world whirls prettily below me;
its roundness turns without complaint.
But maybe there are other things

a silent world could use:
hand-wide whistling birds;
visions for the things that wish;
a struggle like a higher vowel.

A love that bends
to touch each shape that grows there:
the buds, heavy with unsaid colors;
then the purple flowers, then the yellow ones.

iii.
But I know enough to put imaginings aside,
as a god might, with the side of my hand.

Caesar smells the variations here
and can lay many hands upon a truth.

Patricia Nelson works with the “Activist” poets in Northern California. Her new book, Monster Monologues, is due out from Fernwood Press in 2025.

Mykyta Ryzhykh

haiku

the tree drinks
the bird’s silence
after the rain

Ukrainian poet. Nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, The Metaworker, Ice Floe, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, among others.

Erika Seshadri

The Closest Call

You take me for a drive
under this ashen sky of dusk

where the heat shimmer has faded,
but air is still thick

in our throats, so words barely go
back and forth between us.

I roll the window down, time
receding in the rearview

so I leave unflavored thoughts
by the roadside.

Swallows take flight
as carbon black outlines, plunging

through that slim space
between breadcrumbs and the night-hunted.

One feathered silhouette
meets the grill of your car.

Life’s no picnic, you say.
I twist around in time to see

bird-shadow return to his sky.
Sometimes it is, I say back.

Erika Seshadri is a wildlife biologist living in Lamy, NM. She is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Her first book, HIMALAYAN TSUNAMI (Memoir; Austin Macauley Publishers; Erika & Niranjan Seshadri), won a 2024 BookFest Award and is currently being adapted for film.