Issue #47
Yvonne Higgins Leach
Songbird
Once a week
mail in hand
oxygen tank dragging
she enjoys
the pleasure of fresh air.
She wears a clean house dress
and while the wheels
over the sidewalk
go cu-clunk, cu-clunk
she feels the cloudy light
as the cooler-than-expected air
restricts her lungs.
Her neighbor doesn’t
look up
from watering his patio plants.
She’s learned not to care.
Instead
when she hears the
elaborate song
of the Pacific wren
the tune plays
in her chest, too
the inhale and exhale
effortless as if
she were a child again.
She tugs the tank
around her ankles
taking the turn
toward home, owning her
alliance to air.
Yvonne Higgins Leach spent decades balancing a career in public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. Her first collection of poems is called Another Autumn. Her latest passion is working with shelter dogs. She splits her time living in Vashon and Spokane, Washington. For more information, visit www.yvonnehigginsleach.com.
Simon Perchik
*
These dead again and again
follow behind as the goodbyes
that never leave home, overgrown
till they gag in what passes for dirt
asking for a blanket or snow
̶ what you spit on the ground
is the melt, making room inside
where there was none before
and each breath further away
though you can hear your teeth
grinding down the word for we
when there was nothing else.
*
Not with linen ̶ stone works better
lasts the way you dead still gather
as if the sun not that long ago
had a twin who died in the night
became this hill kept warm
for you, your mothers, fathers
and the brightness that was left
to tell them what’s going on
to close your eyes, that that’s
why you’re here, move closer
hear who still loves you
wants you step by step to stay.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Family of Man Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2021. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at simonperchik.com
Kenneth Doerr
Starting Work in Southest Texas, 1985
In Galveston, my sister moves shell-houses
out of the seaweed and sand, passing by the too
perfect Pecten or Blood Ark for a part-broken
Lion’s Paw, so rarely found.
My brother and I
are rooted loosely
as these weeds in sand.
Chat going dry
growing no blossom.
Random ‘I’s sticking
up like awkward stalks.
Another new place.
*
Rain comes off the bay.
So, we leave the strand
eat at Arby’s
by I-45.
We head home to hurricane
fences that take leaves
from wind they don’t stop.
While we watch Volkswagens,
General Motors,
all the passing cars
that run by Deer Park’s
refinery flares, eternally lit.
Alligator Alley, 1979
Swathes of blowing sand reflect the moon and pattern the surface of the road.
Driving at night in this humid wind
we hear the cicadas elongated whistle.
Clouds of Love Bugs flatten on the safety glass, in a kind of passion.
Our auto slows, then comes to a stop.
An odor of gasoline floods over the swamp.
Animals come and tear open our luggage, finding our belts and our shoes.
*
Later, we scramble away at last
grateful for a simpler tongue and a smaller brain.
We split the algae crust and slide below the well-remembered water surface.
Kenneth Doerr is a native of St. Louis, Missouri, but at some point in his 30s, he had lived in more places than he was years old. For the last 20 years, he’s lived in Central California, where he hikes in the mountains whenever they aren’t on fire.
Goddfrey Hammit
The Bird With the Pepsi Plumage
I wasn’t wearing my glasses; I often don’t on walks,
since their absence only improves the morning,
turning everything into a pleasant dappled blur,
as on this morning, when I mistook
a half-full bottle of Pepsi littered on the
side of a shady road for a dead bird, thinking the
dark brown of the flat soda to be a grounded belly,
mistaking the dew that had accumulated in fat drops
inside the bottle for brittle glass feathers refracting the
spare light that could reach them. The last thought, before
the truth hit, was that this bird was done up in a
dapper vest of red and blue across his midsection,
this little dead gentleman, dressed for the day,
and it was this that made me want to lean in
to squint this strangeness into clarity, to be disappointed
to find that all that had moved me was a Pepsi bottle,
whose beauty I had never considered before,
though now, I guess, it would be consistent
to walk into the convenience store and a pause
to see the bottles lined up—chests puffed proud—
a line of strikingly handsome birds perched behind glass,
keeping the cold at bay by crowding close.
Ridiculous, seeing them, to think of the sincere sadness I felt
standing over the corpse of a bottle of Pepsi, though
I do maintain that, in the blurry morning light,
it did look a bit like something that had once known
how to fly, the sun glinting through its dew-drop feathers,
its head a blue cap above a perfectly fitted vest.
Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit is the author of the novel Nimrod, UT. Nimrod, UT plumbs the consciousness of a place, exploring the ways individual histories add to the raveled knot of all tight-knit communities and the tight-knit characters that call such places home. Website: goddfreyhammit.com
S.T. Brant
Portrait of Fire
We are not in time but beside it. Yes. Things catch
at the peripheries of forces;
When inside it they’re the forces. Yes. What’s in the fire
is the fire, what circles it
Is burnt. No. What’s in its center’s burnt. What’s around
it isn’t lit but only heated.
No. The fire on a source may burn it and disperse,
yes, the wick not sufficient
To the force, still the burning thing was fire as fire’s
fire. Burnt is after,
What we call it after. During, what surrounds the fire,
we call burning,
But not in fire, so not fire. Burning. After burning,
burnt, yes. Fire is always fire.
There is a word to name what’s not in fire but heated
by it, a word
To name the result of fire, but while fire, fire is
called fire. So with time.
In time you feel no effect from time because time
is time, and is untimed,
As fire is fire, so unburnt. Fire, after fire, is not there,
but is not burnt. Time,
Out of time, is not there. Not timed. Fire, while fire,
is fire, so not burning;
What’s out of fire but around is burning, what’s on fire
is fire. What’s out of fire’s
Burnt. In time, Time, so not timed; next to time,
dying as what’s not of time
Has died. Yes. Fired. Yes. Yes.
S. T. Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. Pubs in/coming from EcoTheo, Door is a Jar, Santa Clara Review, Rain Taxi, New South, Green Mountains Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Ekstasis, 8 Poems, a few others.
Jared Beloff
The feral pigs of Chernobyl are glowing
at night, fecund snouts move
through rubble, underbrush like pines
pushing up these thirty years,
to obscure each window’s tilt,
widen each foundation’s cracks:
the scent of decay holds
a greater half-life than any memory
we’ve made, pulls each bristle, crosses
each grind of tusk or tooth, keeps them
snuffling to prize and rust this solitude
we’ve buried, like truffles underneath
the average fungal bloom—
I imagine them pausing, looking up,
stars scattered like atoms,
feeling the cold air settling in
underneath their scentless lustre
Jared Beloff is a teacher and poet who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. You can find his work in The Westchester Review, Contrary Magazine, Gyroscope Review and others. You can find him online at www.jaredbeloff.com. Follow him on twitter @read_instead
Jake Bailey
Portrait of the Woods as Prayer
Brittle pines lean
into breathy specters
outlined in the translucence
of winter. Smokey mitts
parting forested exodus.
A doe leaps
from brush brittle in its stance,
trots
beneath limbs meant to shade
the snow.
Her feet trace the landscape
like a mother
sifting through leaves
for answers
to whispered prayers.
Still-running streams
crack their ice
as if solidity was a sin,
waters cutting trails
never knowing feet.
What kind of light
can pierce a veil?
Shadows loom
like sullen patrons
in a silent bar;
shadows mark
the space between
oak and mouth.
The doe departs
at the sound of a name.
The pines straighten
themselves into arrows
pulled from emptying
quivers. They shoot
from the ground.
Loosed
of frozen earth,
a flock of forms
heads south
in the hopes
of warmth reserved
for a middle.
One found
in hands warmer
than these.
Jake Bailey is a schiZotypal experientialist and host of Poetry and Pot. He has work published or forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Diode Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, Guesthouse, and elsewhere. Jake received his MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. He lives in Illinois with his wife and their three dogs. Find him on Twitter and Instagram (@SaintJakeowitz) and at www.saintjakeowitz.xyz.
David Scott Anderson
A Study of Sunset
The sun drifts behind the snow-tipped Tetons, fading
out of view. My only life was a waste
no one ever truly met me. I waited for my wife to die,
expecting freedom. My body did not wait with me
it stiffened, grayed, collapsed. Radiant light still seeps
over the ridge, casts the mountain range in a silhouette.
I still miss him: his knowing smirk and blue within blue
eyes; warmth, touch. Some potent force kept me from him.
Beneath clouds and faded stars the landscape without
sun is washed in purple hues, cold departure.
Tomorrow the sun will rise again, bleed its only self
across the farmhouse and crops and animals, nourishing
orange glow will crawl above the horizon, consume
the night as sure as I’ll sit in this old chair, alone.
Perhaps it’s a torment—to be locked in that cycle,
etched into some unseen fabric with time itself. The sun ends
where it began, immeasurable power reduced to nothing
but a wheel without freedom—
or courage—to act.
David Scott Anderson is an emerging writer published in Mythic Magazine. He earned his BA in English from the University of Arizona. David is a member of the LGBT+ and addiction recovery communities, and these subjects often influence his writing.