Issue #96

Jeffrey Heath

Dali, On His Deathbed, Dreams of Lorca (w/ Olives)

There is a bull here in the olive groves
Here, a toreador, blindfold and crown.

Darkness aimed toward sky
                                    awash with bullets
Butterflies            bead and break apart
A body falls like fruit from a tree
    split         and nectar spilt
                by hummingbird rushes

This is what satisfies me still
          “Ole” the brush shouts
                     “Ole” the skin whispers

I imagine the gunshots in you
                   an explosion of roses churning
         blooming red
multi-layered and spiraled
                                                  a flowering gut surrounded
    by invisible men

Twinned images
                                          my hands hover at your waist
                                     the taste of olives on my tongue

Consummate or not, our bodies are one
even after the long death
even after I have forgotten you.

Now I am the sex and death of you
    but in your death
all I have is the shock of you.

Locusts echo in my skull
                   spreading news of my illness.

Here the olive becomes the nipple erect
the basket of bread broken by war
                lengueta de la mariposa
                                  la langue du papillion
tasting the nectar
                   chasing the swallow’s tail

You are my catastrophe

Jeffrey Heath formerly lived as a cat stalking the shores of South Florida. He currently lives in Memphis, TN, where he works for a non-profit. His work has appeared online and in print in Poetry Super Highway, Eunoia Review, Synesthesia Literary Journal, The Syzygy Poetry Journal, and Amaryllis among others.

Birch Wiley

Persephone / Hades

Knew men a moment
I may have loved, if
we weren’t both brief creatures.

I’ll never see the earring
I lost in his sheets again, but
I have some hours to hold

when we touched. My laugh open
mouthed, he undressed of his black.
We ate slow summer things

in bed, bare skinned, shared
fruit from sticky hands
and begged seeds to root

bitter dark inside us.
Heat held between open
palms. No lover, just

a long night we forgot
anything but pleasure
in borrowed hours after

one shift, before the next.
I carry his voice, sleep thick
in my ear, bodies left behind.

Birch Wiley is a poet and librarian living in New York. Their work is forthcoming in Pleiades and Union Spring Literary Review, among others. Their first book, Mythweaver, will be published by new words {press} in summer 2025. You can follow them on Instagram @tothelimitsofyourlonging.

Alison Hicks

I SLEEP INSIDE A REED

skim along the water
in the sun, dodge vortices,
canoes pushing through spatterdock,
gasses bubbling up from the mud,
fish dropping to the cool bottom.

I do not die as expected.
When the water freezes I skate.
The mud is quiet, pines
whisper in their creaky language.
I call to them an octave higher.
They laugh, their branches
wave me away.

It is a relief, the thaw,
the river unfolding,
floating me out of bed,
moving me down
to the confluence.
A greater current
will wash me to shore.

Alison Hicks’ fourth collection of poems is Homing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024). Her previous book, Knowing Is a Branching Trail, received the 2021 Birdy Prize (Meadowlark Press) Her work has appeared in Permafrost, Poet Lore and Smartish Pace. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

Lily Tobias

Two Ways

There are two ways
to enter a cold body
of water: limb by numb limb
or all at once
into the deep blue, sinking
the same way laughter sinks in the belly.
There are only these two ways: submerge or emerge.

Lily Tobias is a poet from Fenton, Michigan. She has work published or forthcoming in Rockvale Review, River Heron Review, The Big Windows Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and elsewhere. Learn more at lilytobias.com

Lauren MacKinnon

Mist

You’re a bold, shapeless thing,
heavy weight imprinting
fog across the darkened streets,
& I shut up
miles away
still carry
your slugs & airy surroundings:
damp & dew-shaped, gray flakes
tarnishing
every good thought.

I have half a mind to call you up—
or conjure
one of your pure
injuries,
seep into your feathered
advection
spread like bedstraw,
like cobras of gorse—
fumarole yellow
scales of thorns.

So unnatural, your mudding
fade, whispering—
a mooring of aperture,
your blankness
so pulling,
& I want to be
swallowed,
to disappear:

a brume of spears & briar.
Your mouth
a gloom of clouds—
mellow
trained wire.
Cut mirrors
upturned
& evaporating.

Lauren MacKinnon is an emerging poet from Oregon whose writing explores the meeting point between divergent elements. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest and is forthcoming in future journals. She does not have social media and hereby vanishes merrily.

Jerrice J Baptiste

With The Return of The Geese

Her face was buried deep in the lap of a stranger whose scented skin was a close field of lemongrass, not in some far away land where she would be questioned for crying. Here, in a white organza skirt her tears flowed. She didn’t know the full name of the woman who had become her soft bed of grass. She was simply Jo. Here, in the low fluorescent light of a church side room the hour brought in sound of the busy geese traversing sky. The scent of fresh cinnamon raisin bagels from the middle of the kitchen counter and the drip of black coffee into white styrofoam cups, throats clearing after the serenity prayer encircled like an infinity ring. Here, she could be a recovering addict or just a wandering woman who didn’t know where to turn and hide when her tears rose. She needed the body of another woman to rock with her pain, to contain the flood behind pupils, blue irises, pink eyelids. Here, in this room the harsh truth echoed. It will later only be shared as a whisper with geese by the creek.

Jerrice J Baptiste is a poet and author of nine books, Jerrice’s poems are published in The Write Launch, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, and Lolwe. Her collaborative songwriting and poems are featured on the Grammy nominated album: Many Hands Family Music for Haiti.

Valerie Nieman

Sin No.10

        For Al

This morning, I’m startled
by shards of light swinging
across the floor of this home
that’s barely mine,
reflections off agate wind chimes
bought at the start of an
earlier new life.

(This recurrent picking up
and breaking & gathered goods
to be sorted, left or stashed.)

You stored my tools
during the move,
along with ancestral pots
and these slices of stone,
which (also loving wind chimes),
you hung in your own garden.

Housed once more as leaves
and heedful birds flew,
I longed for that sweet random
clashing, the music of rock falls
and talus trembling
at gravity’s urge.

I coveted the things, I admit,
but how can you covet your own?
Finally, abashed, I asked
for their return.
Yesterday you arrived
and hung them from a fern hook
on my front porch.

I took the wind from your trees,
friend, I stole the notes
right out of your ears.

Valerie Nieman is the author of new historical fiction Upon the Corner of the Moon, as well as In the Lonely Backwater (Sir Walter Raleigh Award). She has held NEA and state writing grants and was a founder of Kestrel and Prime Number literary magazines.

Rich Murphy

A Note from a Bird

Every crotch, crook, curve
in the trunk and limbs, stands
in for a history in the making,
a biographical episode for an arbor
that continues to reach for the sun
all day and all night too.

And the same for the branching
big dig, dodging rocks, following
fertile soil in the search for water
to complement the light.

The bark and pulp antagonize
to compose the first poetry
with prepositional metaphors
(propositioning up, down)
that can’t get more accurate
on a spinning and circling planet

while the poet softens the awe
for the audience with “inspiration”
and forgetting, for now, expiration.

So here the deep high school lesson
in grounding begins for a life-long
learner, whether leafing through
experience wearing a backpack
or shading loneliness with a book
opened to meet another for living.

Rich Murphy’s Inside Stories was published this summer by Resource Publications at Wipf and Stock, which has also published First Aid (2023); Meme Measure (2022); and Space Craft (2021). His poetry has won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice (Americana, 2013, and The Left Behind, 2021) and the Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008)

Zhu Xiao Di

The Rain

It comes gently without my noticing
It wakes me up to note the passing of time
It tells me that timing is everything
It times everything I’m doing

Zhu Xiao Di, author of Thirty Years in a Red House (memoir), Tales of Judge Dee (novel), Leisure Thoughts on Idle Books (essays in Chinese), and poems at [Alternate Route], Assignment, Blue Unicorn, Eratio, Eunoia Review, MSU Roadrunner Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Crank, and WestWard Quarterly

Helen Gu

summering

smoked leather skin seasoned with sunburn.
in the season of peaches, red cheek touching
red cheek, juice seeping into skin. i am thirsting
for a season tinging bare shoulder against skyline,
pale skin fading raw. season passing season.
girl sits on grass, puddling. limb to turf, seasoned
green. picnic season. girl sits with girl. pandora
and her secret lover, unboxing seasoned sandwiches
and skin and sin. feet-first spillage. in the
next season, girl tells girl a secret. i love
the mud seasoning our legs. she means to say i love
your season and her voice is seasoned with regret.

Helen Gu is a writer based in San Jose, California. An alum of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, her work appears or is forthcoming in Eucalyptus Lit, Eunoia Review, Scapegoat Review, Inflectionist Review, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Winged Penny Review.