Issue #34

Ren Pike

Coming upon my house burning

eyes weren’t enough
to take in the flames
licking thirty feet
and screaming
vinyl curls collapsing
arched-back
surrender, molten drips
distorting the eave trough
grandeur
fence and grass
and patio—fuel, flickering
rapid orange-black, rising
plume-choke, pane after pane
pop-cracking unabated
blister-fraught, the lilac tree
standing footless
and fugacious

Realty

haha, these realtors
    are killing me
        with their don’t worry
            worry-mongering
tree roots and sewer lines
each house its own
    abomination
detritus and smells
lives lived, stacked
        trash-bag deep, layered
            boredom and excretion
this fresh laminate
    isn’t fooling anyone

from newish vinyl
        double-pane
            in this partially updated
                kitchen
I see a dog circling
    icy path tight to the fence
        black mark palings
he’s hustling
    oblivious
        to opening cupboards
            watermark mutters
one day soon he’ll exit
    a different gate
        nose-map new terrain
this sunny yard will be
    a dream, one wakefulness
        exchanged

Horse bellies

the sky’s a dappled horse belly in this slipping sun
tremulous pinks and whiplash oranges

this writhing highway sleeps on its feet

I am back here, again, riding the same range, past prairie sedge
past markers and warnings, dangerous when it pours

this trip, I learned you died in tremendous pain, the way it is
when your stomach twists on itself, cutting off and squeezing in

I’m no longer thinking about where I was yesterday

up ahead, the dusk has settled and I see the glow of a rest stop
they will have food and drink and people I do not know


Ren Pike grew up in Newfoundland. Through sheer luck, she was born into a family who understood the exceptional value of a library card. Her poetry has appeared in Pithead Chapel, blood orange, Orson’s Review, and Juniper. When not writing, she wrangles data for non-profit organizations in Calgary, Canada.

David Reuter

Single Diner

Across the way, the empty space that stares
me in the face looks back without a sign.

The muted TV glares a silent tale
that only I can care enough to see.

The crush of chatter, waves upon the sand,
astounds my solitary state of mind.

The patrons lean their tilted frames into
each other, hoarding every loving phrase

they lavish on each other, holding up
my mood despite the distance left between.

There’s magic in their squawking, vibrant chat.
The spiraled steam escapes my clinking plate.

So I dig deep into the sheltered booth
I wear like warming sand around myself.

The churning world recedes and lies at bay
as long as I remain in this respite.


David Reuter has been published in The Cape Rock, Existere Journal, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine (2018), Visitant, and Vox Poetica. He attended the William Paterson University’s Writer’s Conference and the Rutgers Writers’ Conferences since 2017. He has a bachelor’s degree from Caldwell College and work as a paralegal.

Isaura Ren

powerline ’17

autumn rumbles awake,
roars like rogue breakers.

embers flit and skitter, little
lightning bugs kissing asphalt.
we skip over them, toes singed.

let’s slip into the swimming pool
with our clothes on. let’s undress
underwater and never come up.

let’s get drunk from the glow,
indulge in precious seconds,
pretend we could have run.

if flame spares us blight,
what a mercy to burn.


Isaura Ren is an emerging poet from Northern California. Yes, she’s a fire sign. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Green Light, Sea Foam Mag, and Electric Moon Magazine (Issue #2).

Kushal Poddar

I’m Hope

The neighbor we don’t discuss
leaped into nine-forty flashlit subway tracks.
Not that he’d lost all his hope.
He hoped to escape from his self.
The shelf life of hope exceeds life itself.

On the day of quarantine we talk about him
without naming his affliction. Rain plunges
nosedown and makes splatters on our panes.
Wind masks itself in defensive leaves and loiters
lost in the thoroughfares. We talk about death
not because we lack hope but our brain throbs with it.


Kushal is Editor of ‘Words Surfacing’. He authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals’, ‘Understanding The Neighborhood’, ‘Scratches Within’, ‘Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’. Find and follow him here

Kyla Houbolt

Homesick Road Trip

running away
fast as I can
no life’s made to last
past the end of its day

a motel’s neon sign
alongside the highway
not too close
but through the window

lullaby whoosh of big trucks
oh solace of beige carpet
of bathroom disinfected and bright
of little paper caps over two water glasses

but by noon a motel room
has lost its crisp appeal
I’ll travel on again til dusk
I’ll look for the next motel

running away
running fast or slow
I just can’t stay
I’m nobody you know


Kyla Houbolt’s debut micro chapbook, Dawn’s Fool, is available from Ice Floe Press. Most of her published work can be found on her Linktree, here and she is on Twitter @luaz_poet

Madison Zehmer

Oracle

I stand upon the ground where mystics
sacrifice themselves—
Death rattles resounding as

invocations. Leaves

braided in unwashed hair. Salt on
sweating tongues from moss
covered bone rot. Smoke from altars

thick as seawater.

And I cannot unhear gravity’s
call. Wonder what it
tastes like to sink into earth. Skin

molting like blackland.

Lifeblood into loam. Loam into grime.
Sticky on fingers
that dare to pick it up. Ooze

of revenants I’ve

left behind on cracking lips will come
back to visit me.
I will greet them with a breath.

Greet them with a pause.



Madison Zehmer is a poet and wannabe historian from North Carolina. She has published and forthcoming work in the Santa Ana River Review, Gone Lawn, LandLocked (Issue 2.2, Summer 2020), and more. Her first chapbook, “Unhaunting,” will be published by Kelsay Books in 2021.

Samuel Swauger

Cielo, Much Later

Whenever I think of Cielo
I hear what I couldn’t say
and all the words crashing
into the backs of my teeth,
their wet stoicism of white
clamshells on the seafloor

as if they’d been welded shut
to defend a pearl there. From
far away, I looked joylessly
into her heart, or I tried, to
see behind her shell what I
hoped to be glistening inside
that I couldn’t bring myself
to say I also had.


Samuel Swauger is a poet from Baltimore, MD. His writing appears in Tilde (vol. 2, issue 2), Third Wednesday, and the Ghost City Review, among other publications. His Twitter is @samuelswauger.

Pete Mladinic

Bobby Greenlease

1. The Gas Chamber

Full figured is what they’d call you today.
A blowsy brunette,
your small dark eyes
spoke a quiet mirth.

A Kansas girl
on Missouri’s death row.
A medium rib eye and strawberry ice cream, your final meal,
you put on a black dress and step into eternity.

2. An Old Story

It came to this:
marriage at fourteen to a much older man,
drugs, prostitution,
bad checks. Carl Hall, a sport
with a five o’clock shadow and a fast-money scheme.

3. The Courtroom

The white blouse becomes you, Bonnie.
Forty-three, five two,
there’s a personality in your kinky hair,
in your top heavy, spindle legged frame.

In the packed courtroom
a deputy unlocks your cuffs.
The bailiff says, “All rise.”
Your thumb rubs the kiss-shaped bruise on
your left temple.
Two days earlier, when you said,
“At least I planted flowers on his grave”
the bull punched you hard.

4. The Crime

At Saint Bonaventure School,
your gray blazer and black pill-box reflected in a mirror,
you play Bobby’s aunt convincingly.
Across the desk Sister Margaret
tells her secretary, “Miss Desmond’s room.”
You tell the boy,
“I’m your father’s sister. Your mother says I’m to bring you home.”

Your compact rattles in the purse on the Packard’s floorboard.
He sits beside you.
“This is my husband, Carl,” you lie.
No more traffic lights, tires crunch the gravel.
A field leads to a tree line.
Carl raises the gun to the back of the boy’s head.

5. Bobby

In front of our house my Springer Spaniel
and my German Shepherd
watch for me.

The lady who took me from school, my aunt,
was asking about my black parrot.
My parrot is green, but I didn’t tell her.
A man in the back petted a small white dog.
I didn’t look back at him.

They put me in my grave.

In heaven
trees reach over the roadway,
forming a tunnel. A sunny day checkered
with lights and shadows.

Mom is here, Dad is driving.
Our ’52 Caddy executes a sharp turn.
Climbing I look down
at roofs of houses. I listen closely.
Birds twitter. I can’t see them.
A hill of woods.

I spy Death through the trees.
He lives back there in a shed with tools.

Boston Red Sox

He said, “It’s not about the animal,
it’s about you.” I believed him,
even though he’d almost gotten in
a fight with Jerry Holmes,
who played left field for the Red Sox
part of one season,
and drove too fast around a corner
one night when we played stickball.

“Asshole! Jerk!” Dave shouted.
A slam of breaks, the car slowly backed up.
“You were speeding!” “Like hell I was!”
A minute of yelling and profanity but
Holmes stayed in his Chrysler.

The next summer, my dachshund was
mauled by a chained mongrel
he had gotten too close to.
I dug a hole in the back yard
and shoveled dirt over Jake’s
remains. At dusk I trudged
down the street, bat in hand,
to kill the mongrel, when Dave appeared.
He’d been sitting on his stoop
and crossed the lawn. Shock of dark
hair parted to the side, white T shirt,
beer bottle in hand, he asked,
“Where are you going?”

He said what happened
happened to me, what happened
was about me. It was dark when I
stood the bat in a corner of the garage
and walked in the house.

I played stickball with one of this two sons.
He himself as a boy had been blinded
in one eye by a BB gun.
He never talked about it.
I heard my parents talk about it.

When he wasn’t wearing a suit
and carrying a briefcase,
Dave wore a white T shirt and sipped
Bud from a bottle. Tom Massey
said, He’s got a pretty good build
for all that beer he drinks.
He watched us play stickball
but didn’t coach us. Years later
his eldest daughter died from cancer.
We lived near woods and a river.
He only had to walk a little further than I
to stand on the riverbank.

He didn’t take the bat from my hand
but looked straight at me,
as he’d looked at Jerry Holmes,
who glared from his Chrysler’s
rolled down window.
I understood that what happened
when I wasn’t here
to possibly keep it from happening,
the chained mongrel,
the mauled dachshund,
was about me.


Pete Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington. His poems have appeared recently in Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Mark, and forthcoming in Metafore. He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.

Christine Brooks

morning wood

they come in—bright
full of hope & promise
the amber slants of light that reach
and stretch across my
dark paneled walls
towards what

     I don’t know.

I imagine though
      blonde fingers on the other side
waking and stretching & reaching back for
their golden counterparts

and on those rare mornings
in those quiet moments
when the street is still
      silent
minus the busy bodied birds
chick-a-dee-dee-deeing
& dancing the leaves right off the giant American yellowwood tree
  outside
my window

every single thing
is heard and seen and felt
spontaneously
serendipitously

until slowly the warm beams
retreat to the sun & the
place that exists
beyond the paneling

     and life is dark again


Christine Brooks is a graduate of Western New England University with her B.A. in Literature and her M.F.A. from Bay Path University in Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry can be found in The Cabinet of Heed, Door Is a Jar, Cathexis Northwest, and Pub House Books. Her book of poems, The Cigar Box Poems, is out now.

Louis Zieja

Pretty

I wish I was pretty                    like an atm machine
                          or the spring rain
I’d like to embrace a standing ovation                            while my understudy schemes
A dream date                               with dirty nails
     once informed me                              that an empty box-wine bladder
          inflates easily                                                         to become a comfortable cushion
                        for the long bus ride back.

Forbidden Larva

my national anthem is crickets
                                                        my flag the night sky
let others be discouraged by ticks
                                                        this blood grows stale inside of me
gimme that mud
                                                        I want to wallow
before I become
                                                        just another sequined number
                             tossed upon the
prom dress pile


Louis Zieja is a cinematographer, collage artist and writer originally from Philadelphia. His poetry has been published in Ghost City Review. His comic book series “The Subliminals”, a collaboration with artist Anton Blake, will be published in late 2020. @IDriveACampfire on Twitter & Instagram.