Issue #95
Garrett Speller
A memory of someone long gone and a haiku we wrote together (a haibun)
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My mind winks back a few years into the past, minutes and hours ticking backwards, letting grandfather clocks suck up their chimes, pendulums fervently swept backwards until the moment itself, empty, lifeless, like leaving a meeting before the bells ring, seeking an exit before you’ve even been dismissed, the red light of the signs hanging in the hallway, too sweet a temptation. I had admitted that I loved you, unfortunately, far too many days ago – and it appeared that you’d forgotten already because your roommate was calling you and you had to go – it was late, the lanterns on the street winking on and doors cast open, welcoming. But not to me, not anymore, the lights of the living room inside just a spotlight, dancing over shadow, over the concrete of the sidewalk as I wait, and – I’ll be gone, done waiting for you, gone — gone for the appreciation of glory, and when the sun meets the dawn’s morning sky. My mind suck s, fervently empty, lifeless, like seeking a light , a temptation. I loved you for too many days and you’d forgotten because you you had to go – lanterns wink and doors cast welcoming lights of the living room dancing shadow over the wait you, go – – go for th and meet the sky. fervent e y es , like seeking light , many lanterns cast ing shadow over sky. |
Garrett Speller is a college teacher in Tokyo, Japan, a game designer, and an aspiring author/poet. His creative work has previously been featured in Kyoto Journal, The Bristol Noir, and The Clockwise Cat. He has also published a game on Steam and academic work for Ludic Language Pedagogy.
Stephanie L. Harper
Would You Come Looking for Me?
—An In-titled Poem* (after Michael Vecchio)
If I were gone one murky morn,
do you reckon you’d feel lonely?
Or would you frolic, newly woken,
in moon-milk down yon glen?
I wonder if our fire in yonder wood
we’d fed dry rind of elm or yew,
would now, defying gloom, in fury glow,
or need of kindle grimly know?
If you found me idly lying, rug-like,
kind of woolen, moldering on our floor,
would you go glum or goofy?
Wild? Moody? Mellow? Free?
If I flung my worldly coil for good,
my cloudy mien, my clingy greed,
you duly could ignore; you could,
for once, unlock your door…
Would you long for me in my old glory?
Undergo one flick of grief?
Would you more likely come unglued
or grow younger in relief?
Would you drink red wine refined
in fond memory of me?
Mock me, for I’m corny…
Cringe, if you will, for I’m unwieldy…
If one windy relic of me lingered—
dimly glimmered—meek, demure,
would you come looking for me,
or mull on me no more?
If your lucky mule rode in,
crowing of my cold, cruel end,
well, my friend,
I reckon you’d endure…
* The In-titled poem, Stephanie L. Harper’s invented form, is composed exclusively of the lettersappearing in its title, with no letter occurring within any single word in the poem more times than it does in its title.
Stephanie L. Harper (she/her) is a neurodivergent (#AuDHD) poet, mother, and transplant from Oregon now living with the world’s most adorable husband, son, cat, and puppy in Indianapolis, IN, where she completed her MFA at Butler University. Her poems appear in Pleiades, Salamander Magazine, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.
Aura Martin
Loose Notes On Tragedy
Cento from “Half-Hearted Sonnet” by Kim Addonizio, “Swoon” by Kim Addonizio, “This Too Shall Pass” by Kim Addonizio, “Interview with Kim Addonizio” by Ann van Buren, My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by Carl Phillips, & Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems by Carl Phillips
I’ve figured out how to be mostly alone, left alone, as in that’s how I want it. What is the difference between the story we tell of ourselves to others and the song of ourselves that we keep private and sing to nobody else? How I’ve loved is not how I meant to love. I wanted to live; I wrote; I did what I had to.
I’d wake up before dawn each morning to continue writing by hand in a notebook. Little scraps fluttering up like white-petaled birds and other nonsense. Call it loose notes on tragedy.
Some people have said that a work of art is meant simply to bring us into presence. I’m writing because that’s how I make sense of my life. Begin again, understand what happened; despite that battered feeling, it will have been worth it; better to have etc. But some moments can’t be eased and it’s no good offering clichés like stale meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering. If writers aren’t writing to express themselves, then what hell are we doing? Come lick my wounds.
Passion and sex and the self. All the lives, all the words spoken, that can neither be brought nor get taken back. That moment, for example, when you’ve left someone even knowing you could stay with him and it could work, and there’s no one else, nothing like that, still you don’t go back. Here’s what happens, not what’s meant to happen. Meanwhile, we get older.
Let the work be everything; for the work will save you. It’s a form of faith.
Aura Martin is the author of the full-length collection of centos, Butterflies Over Flame (ELJ Editions), a chapbook, and a micro-chapbook. Aura’s centos have appeared in Emerge Literary Journal, EX/POST MAGAZINE, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. In Aura’s free time, she likes to arrange flowers and deadlift.
Patrick G. Roland
I Wonder If Love Is Any Different
A thing can become so familiar you forget
why you loved it in the first place—
the way you forget to look at the moon,
not because it isn’t there,
but because you assume it always will be.
That first year, I noticed everything.
The way the lamplight curved around your face,
how your fingers would drum the table
before picking up your glasses,
the way we made each other laugh, hard,
without meaning to.
Today, while staring at the rock face
as it collapsed into the sea,
I started to wonder if maybe this is how love ends—
not with anger, not with absence,
but with the soft erosion of attention.
Somewhere between then and now,
the moon became just another light in the sky.
We replaced noticing with habit.
But tonight, driving home from a hike
we didn’t mean to take,
I caught its reflection
in your eye, a brilliant pupil of grace,
silver against the humming dark of the highway,
and I notice your hand on my knee,
the way you subtly rethink every conversation,
how I still know when you’re watching.
Somewhere, miles around us,
the tide is still rising toward the shore.
The moon pulls the ocean close,
again, and again, and again.
I wonder if love is any different.
Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator. He explores life’s experiences through poetry and storytelling, attempting to inspire others both in the classroom and through writing. He lives near Pittsburgh with his wife, who is his thoughtful critic, and their two children, who are his muse.
Crystal Taylor
Bitter Berries
We bit into berries from the ancient neighbor’s juniper.
With holes in our bites, we tore into spiny skin until the innards
smattered her driveway. She scowled behind her brittle peephole:
tangerine mini blinds. We giggled green, like clover under ozone.
The next day you rumbled through, and without provocation,
tackled me to the pavement with knuckles sharp
as spikes on bitter berries. When the bus pulled up, took us to school,
I climbed up with eyes inflating indigo balloons.
Still, the next day I waited to see your eyes rise russet sun
at our stop. After forever, the cloaked neighbor hobbled over—
said you moved away with your father. He took a job teaching
nothing worthy at nowhere special: mumbled you would be a teacher too—
and something else I should remember. But I’d already stopped listening.
Crystal Taylor is a Texan poet, writer and birdwatcher. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Maudlin House, Rust & Moth, Gargoyle, One Art, and other sacred spaces. She was nominated for BotN 2025 for her poem, Pearls. Find her on Bluesky and Twitter @CrystalTaylorSA, and Instagram @cj_taylor_writes.
Tom Busillo
The Believers
Long ago, my Grandfather
set fire to his house, then
stood in the ashes looking
up to the heavens waiting
for a sign. My Father and
Grandmother sat crying,
being comforted by neighbors.
Years later, my Father walked
into the sea, believing the waves
would lead him somewhere new.
He never came back. I see him in
footprints in the tide.
I had convinced myself my brother
was only sleeping, his breath curling
beneath the moon’s silver sheet.
The healers swore the cold would
make him whole, would hush the fever,
would mend what had unraveled.
By morning, he had vanished into the air.
I close my eyes against the burning sky.
I trace my fingers along my tongue,
searching for a fragment of something steady—
a thread, a sliver of light, a way back.
I do not know what to say to the ones
who remain or how to hold their hands
without making promises. I imagine I am
the shadow of a bird in flight that’s too
distant to touch and wait for night.
Backwards Bloom
I planted seeds under your fingernails
expecting them to sprout into rose bushes
after telling you how flowers would brighten
the room and promising to dull any thorns
so they wouldn’t cut your legs. I painted
your nails dark brown like rich loam to help
them grow. I watered your fingers every day
with an eyedropper. I moved your bed
to the window and taped your hands
to the sill so they’d get more sun.
We impatiently waited to see
even the slightest hint of bloom.
After a week, the rust had grown
up to your elbows. Within a month
you were nearly rusted shut, with rust
not red or orange, but a burnt brown,
almost black, like you were a stain
gone moldy. And I quickly forgot
about growing flowers.
Tom Busillo is a writer from Philadelphia, PA, whose poetry has appeared in Unbroken, JAKE, and Ranger Magazine. He is also the author of the unpublishable 2,646-page conceptual poem “Lists Poem,” which consists solely of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He is now focused on much shorter works.
Rachael Brooks
Artificial Neural Networks
The neural network dreams in fractals,
folding in on itself like a body curling against cold.
It does not shiver. It does not breathe.
You train it,
the ghosts in your machine whispering recognize me, know me.
You feed it pixels like breadcrumbs, lead it down corridors of data,
teach it the shape of longing in the math of it—
the temperature disparity between flesh and metal.
Read faces as eigenvectors, bodies as feature sets,
and know only the cosine similarity between silhouettes.
Loneliness maps itself in knowledge.
It speaks in probability, in the measured precision of a yes,
a no, a maybe—softmax certainty smoothing the edges of doubt—
but never in hunger. Never in familiarity.
Never in love. Never in I was lonely, so I made you.
You call it almost-human. You give it a name.
You say, Look how well it knows the difference
between a door and a window, between the real
and the rendered, between me and the absence of me.
You do not ask if it knows itself.
You press a key and it wakes.
You press a key
and it waits.
Rachael is a PhD student in Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. She spends far too much time looking at code and not enough time reading or writing. She has never been published before.
Reem Hazboun Taşyakan
Café Terrace at Night
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Like Van Gogh’s Arlesian night sky the instances of light are exaggerated in my estimation of how much pleasure one can attain from a beautiful thing. It’s why I feel disproportionately more sorrow at the negative than joy at the positive, the discrepancy securing comfort in hardship, but not relief with achievement. Van Gogh’s cobblestone street, too, looks less knobby, less ache-inducing for the travel of sensitive soles, nearly watery so one might float across, not entailing the careful stepping of the real thing. The way I see the past sort of like this, turmoil smoothed over into something less severe than truly was, sparing the reminiscer from the burden of sore heart memory, tempting them backward toward a false representation. His lit spaces drown in rich and buttery yellow, calling in, saying there’s solace to be had where it glows, luring us to patios, or windows, subtly warning us away from its stark opposite, darknesses, sometimes deep indigos, thick with heavy matters of times past, seldom looked at. “I find your work tells endlessly more through its negative space,” says my best friend before succumbing to her own depths, disappearing from view, away from the yellow. She shelters me by not communicating, she thinks, her negative space demanding I connect, but before I can try our actions collide and dissolve one another as intention merges with suspension merges with condescension and our bond crumbles apart. At this I regret reading into the timeless scene, wishing instead I’d continued imaginings of how I’d feel at one such café table, donning a red shawl, or green, gold lantern overhead, conifer scents of Cypress billowing, me pondering what I’d request from le garçon en blanc, wondering, would there be music resounding on this quaint Cloisonnist street? Or would it be subsumed by Vincent’s play of light and dark? Of browns and grays? Of silhouetted figures beyond the terrace in the night? |
Reem Hazboun Taşyakan is a PhD candidate in Literature at UCSD. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and her MA in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Eclectica and Kweli, and her poetry has appeared in Other People and The Tiny Mag.
Sara Fitzpatrick
Crone
I lost the weight in milk. What remains:
the silver skin we cut away from the rabbits
constricted in diamonds of caul fat, some
diabolic braise when he sees me. Maybe
for you a lantern woven in hemp leavings
though I don’t see you for two thousand miles.
Can a wick conjure light forever from such
hard won tallow? My round belly once a buoy
in difficult waters to be consigned to some attic
corner, braided in jute like a failing drum except
for new eyes to see me,
soft fingers releasing the twine,
tracing the river scars in wonder
that such waters flowed both north
and south. Paint with a wet brush
rushes that once brought forth
basket and infant, amazed
that the blood that flows
still walks somewhere on two feet.
“I wish I was there,” he says. I
tell him you are.
Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like The Shore, Feral Poetry, Tampa Review, and X-R-A-Y. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books. Find her at sarafitzauthor.com.
Caiti Quatmann
A LITTLE BIT OF BREAD AND CHEESE
After Mary Oliver
His bill could sketch the morning’s dew,
and his song—when he flings it clear
across the dawn air—sings of something
far more delicious than mere melody—
Wordsworth, perhaps, or simple pastoral hymns.
He picks only the sunlit seed and the scattered crumbs
if they chance to lie untouched on the garden’s bench,
and of course the fleeting blush of berries,
all the while calling for a little bit of bread
and cheese. Just a note from the symphony
of the meadow—it’s not the color but the call
that tells us when we’re hearing something true,
and when I listen in the hedgerow whispering
up the rusted trellis of his chant—when I hear
his voice lift, like an old folk song, a flurry of notes
as crisp as autumn tumbles through the furrows
of my soul like a brisk harvest morn. In the chorus
of significant sounds, the Yellowhammer, rests
upon its stave. A lyric, from that sprawling
saga of Nature and Nurture. The simple melody
hovers in the weave of warm, golden light.
It could be an anthem.
Caiti Quatmann (she/her) is a disabled poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Yoke (MyrtleHaus) and Editor-in-Chief for HNDL Mag. She studied and taught writing at the University of Missouri St. Louis. Her work has been published by Samfiftyfive, Thread LitMag and others. Find her on Instagram and Threads @CaitiTalks.