Issue #99
Dudley Stone
The Apple Problem
They devour to the seed
each red, yellow, green-gold globe,
even those brown at the bitten edge,
wormy, soft, and rotten.
Adam yawns. Like an Italian actress
Eve wipes her mouth with the back of a hand.
Every bite crackles like leaves underfoot
in a tinderbox forest.
In the chaste air
among mountains of spent cores
they coax from one another the best
and most secret employment of their bodies.
In my theology, they abandon the garden unbidden,
naked but not ashamed, to chase rumors
of figs along the beach, passion fruit, ripe peaches,
to frolic like seals in the surf.
Later, the serpent, asleep in the sun,
languid and luxuriant, stirs without alarm,
and pays no heed to gathering thunder,
the approach of snake-crushing steps.
Dudley Stone’s poetry is Pushcart Prize-nominated and has recently appeared in Spare Parts Literary Magazine, MORIA, and Corvus. In addition, his writing for the stage has been seen in theatres from California to Connecticut, and he is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. Mr. Stone lives in Lexington, KY.
Claudia Kessel
Psalm of the Heart: A Dizain
If we say its name, speak the word out loud
will it tarnish as pewter, as a mouth un-kissed
dissolve like salt, or crumble like a cloud?
Now, unspoken, it hangs as morning mist
ungraspable as water’s turn and twist
its melody carves a virgin path, lies
in the cavity between four locked eyes
woven into gaps between words unsung
its opal gauze draping mind’s thirsty skies
glistens as liquid gold on silent tongues.
Claudia Kessel’s poetry has been published in Richmond Magazine as a finalist in the 2021 Shann Palmer Poetry Contest, awarded by James River Writers, in the 2024 Poetry Society of Virginia anthology, and in online and print literary journals Ekstasis, Arkana, Literary Mama, Uppagus, and Lullwater Review.
Elizabeth VanBuskirk
Kindling
Kindling, my job, my joy. Even old leaves’ fermenting scents,
connotations of rottage, sink with delight into my avid senses.
I cannot overlook one tight decrepit tree knot or pine offering.
Eager I am to handle, to stroke each beat-up remnant,
last night's storm-surged bits, thrashed into this cove and caught,
each fire starter with its story of breakage, of calamity,
having served as witness dog-chewed branch or gnarled ball,
baby-rocked all winter in lake's deepest cold cradle.
Wild root segment, mother-grasping its round smooth stone,
proud feather, standing tall on its spent-log pedestal,
light-as-bone driftwood cut into twelfth-lengths,
plus two lines of rope in rusty decay, rife for rhyming.
I will stay among lakeside treasures. What more desired?
Grateful for splinters and unraveled ends to blaze my fire.
Libby VanBuskirk’s poetry book, “Living with Time,” will be published in 2026 by Kelsay Books. Her poems appeared in “Beloit Poetry Journal,” “Orchards Poetry Journal,” “Passager” and elsewhere. Libby published a book of short stories, won national awards from the Society of Children’s Book Writers, “Writers’ Digest” and “Mademoiselle” magazine.
Alex Stolis
And the only angel who sees us now watches through each other’s eyes
“We Belong Together” – Rickie Lee Jones
She’s kitten soft, pinprick clean,
tells stories with no
endings, no middles, beginnings made-up-as-we go,
stars fade
to a cacophony
of clouds, light stirs, planets lost to gloaming,
I know only one love
song, am easily
distracted by magic; there’s nothing going on here,
nothing to see
no crime,
only Rickie Lee floating from a banged up speaker;
if there’s any future
it stays between us, stranded
between what hasn’t happened and what we believe.
Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. Full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in One Art, Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, Louisiana Literature Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, and Star 82 Review.
Lucinda Davis
The Rendezvous
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues
—Wilfred Owen
Even in their midst,
it was the measure of
what was obscene.
Strange meeting.
An azimuth that aligns
us in a changed view
from battered hill
or kitchen window sill
where the world ends
soon on any hot,
cloudless August
afternoon.
Where circumstance’s
satire gives the lie
to wisdom, courage.
Life. To everything
I casually called mine.
As if the assertion
set apart something
I could keep.
Although it is all
I have, it is cheap.
And easily lost.
Yet from those who have
not been forced to
this admission,
whose veins run cold,
whose lives remain
charmed and oblivious
to the line, rut, division,
I, too, am now other
on this side of what
they do not know.
Still haughty and beguiled
by ambition and lust
of blood as if they
matter, how could they
know the pulse I hear
counts down?
Or that staring out
along the sleeping
green, I see
some day like this
that will no longer
even remember
purposes in which
you still believe
you conspire.
Or include me.
Lucinda Davis was included in the longlist for the 2022 National Poetry Competition and recently published in Nimrod International Journal.
Andew Vogel
Inheritances
after Emily Dickinson
Here where we have been living,
sleet on a can’t-put-it-off morning.
Here sits across a desk from a lab-coat
doctor to get news from another life.
Here resides in the no of the body,
the no the body throws to the horizon.
Differences among us born and learned
and each new word fills in the picture.
Here reverberates in what is said.
Also the bite in the way they say it.
Here the sticky filament of experience
adhering in every flinch of hesitation,
the syllabics of regret that never rest,
each of us soundly designated a place.
A million nerve ends bending tuneless
grace notes, utterly abstracted worry
that drones, tides of unfeigned music,
yet we have not actually been listening.
The whole of the body is mind enough
to hold the world and itself beside,
so who can identify the boundary
where each breath trades into sky?
Here between us a dazzle of laughter
opens over the pinch of salt-roughed skin,
knowing as we do, children must grow up
so quickly or they will never grow up at all.
Andrew Vogel listens, walks the hills, and teaches in rural eastern Pennsylvania, homelands of the displaced Lenape. His poems have appeared most recently in Poetry East, Crab Creek Review, The Briar Cliff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Roanoke Review, White Wall, and Cider Press Review.
John Muro
Reappraisal
Half asleep, I’m watching summer dim and darken
as the incoming waves stall a short distance from
shore as if they are having second thoughts before
they collapse upon themselves and advance towards
a row of ghostly cottages that are now boarded up
for the season and slumping away from the long, straggly
arms of the marsh, and I’m watching how the outlines
of those furthest from me reemerge in fading light
like large pieces of driftwood left behind by the
receding tides and, in a world that’s so clearly shattered
and enamored of emptiness, beds of slender, long-
throated flowers have convulsed and withered and
mop-head hydrangea are relinquishing their deep-
blue opulence that I suppose a late summer sky
might envy, and I soon realize that even the common
gulls are complicit, having abandoned the cooler air
and now everything appears as if it were a loss or in
the act of surrender, and I can sense the season’s soft
diminishing as a sudden gust of wind glides over the
distant bluffs and across the surface of the water before
it slows and falls to dreaming and, when day breaks,
I commit to gathering up what remains of this broken
world – bits of shells, whittled bones and shards of
colored sea glass – that the wind and waves have
left behind in tangled nets of sunlight – and listen
to the slurred cadence of the water as it thins to
silence in its slow, deliberate retreat from shore.
A 2023 Grantchester Award recipient, twice a Best of the Net nominee, and thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, John Muro has published two volumes of poems — In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite. His work has appeared in Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, Sky Island, Neologism, Valparaiso Review, and elsewhere.
Laura Hannett
Crow
Not a detail in this scene but its clever-boots hero:
He hefts and resettles
his perfect sheaf of feathers,
each precise in shape and function, each black barbule neat,
all his quills taut and gleaming,
each Byronic pen.
He mutters verses from his treetop, then shouts his haw-haw refrain:
his antique voice the scop’s,
conjuring the scene.
For the saga of this day, he inks himself a charcoal checkmark,
a crisply printed comma,
a dark diacritic on the sky’s pale page.
Laura Hannett lives in Central New York with her wonderful family. She is a graduate of Hamilton College and the College of William and Mary. Other work has appeared in Verse-Virtual, Neologism Poetry Journal, Mania Magazine, Last Stanza Poetry Journal and The Bluebird Word.
Patrick Meeds
The Old Silence
It’s always a surprise when
the power goes out. The sudden
absence of light
and that all pervading hum
that comes from everything
in the house that is powered
by electricity. I once rode
in a very small plane as it flew
above an Adirondack lake.
It surged and stalled with the wind
and every time we dropped
it felt like someone was tugging
at a stitch that might unravel
at any moment. Say what you want
but I believe every injury is permanent.
Sooner or later every satellite's orbit decays.
Dancing is exhausting when your partner
is dead. You spend so much energy holding
them up you can’t focus on the steps.
You can’t hear the music.
Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. His First Book, The Invisible Man’s Tailor, is available from Nine Mile Press.
Nora Sun
2005
i dreamt woman-
hood as a corner store
of strange wares: ancient
teas, magnolias of cardboard,
dirty display window
homing frayed mannequins.
in a storefront two corners
away from yours:
womanhood’s reflection in the
abandoned slot machine
by the plastic stools, unimpressed
by the flashing neon
sign: LUCKY FISHING.
on the machine console,
four loggerhead sea turtles
swam figure eights
in the waterboxes with
$24.99 stickers.
years passed, none sold.
one by one
the turtles could no longer
inhabit their once-shiny
bodies, flashing bellies
at the customers
who never came.
one by one
their illegal bellies
bloated blue and upturned
towards the neon sign.
Nora Sun is an undergraduate student at Harvard University. Her favorite anatomical landmark is the iliac crest.