Issue #101
Sharon E. Svendsen
Let Them Eat Cake
The couple on the wedding cake
have eyes glazed open, frosted feet—
their plastic hearts may never break.
They seem to be alert, awake,
yet all they see is bright and sweet.
The couple on the wedding cake
won’t ask if it’s a big mistake,
cannot envision loss, defeat.
Their plastic hearts may never break.
They’ll never fall to stomachache?
To indiscretion? To deceit?
The couple on the wedding cake
have no idea what’s at stake.
Each plateau promises a treat.
Their plastic hearts may never break.
And still we pray, for blind love’s sake,
their dreams may thrive entire, complete—
the couple on the wedding cake—
their plastic hearts may never break.
Sharon E. Svendsen has published 14 pieces of fiction, articles, and over 200 poems in literary magazines and many other periodicals and anthologies. Her work has most recently been published in Stories That Need to be Told, Little Old Lady Comedy, Defenestration, Plainsongs, Abstract Magazine, and Feathertale #15 and #16.
Carol Tiebout
The Clock is My Sun
This gurney is my home. I live
next to a linoleum road where
people in blue jog by, eyes
forward. Most of them
are women, hair pulled
back tight. Bodiless voices ride
the air world announcing, conferring
in a language I am partly
learning, partly remembering. Behind me
an old wooden wall topped by thick, wavy
glass, a pale green ocean, frozen,
holds me in place.
The clock is my sun, its white face hangs
above the metal rail and the shelves across
the road filled with sheets. I follow
the slow sweep of its second hand, note
the slight hesitation it makes before
it moves into each second. Down the block
of squared rooms there’s shouting. “An elephant
is sitting on me!” yells a man whose voice
is used to being heard. A countdown
begins in silence. The blue clad
people move quickly, disappearing
the man and themselves. Earlier,
I was inside a brilliant white
tube, listening as it clanged its strange
song, a universe trying to break
through the walls, trying to tell
its story by telling mine.
Carol Tiebout lives in Edmonds WA on the traditional land of the Salish peoples. Her work can be found in New Ohio Review, Calyx, and BoomerLitMag. Her chapbook Each Time, a Forest was published by Finishing Line Press. Her work is informed by seventeen years of work in hospice.
David Chorlton
Beth
Cloudlight on the ridgeline, dust
yellowing below, blue wind
in all directions and a blind spot where
the sun should be. It’s been six months
since anybody saw the lady
whose mind escaped her when she fell
and the turquoise car in her driveway
is the only sign
of life today. She used to sit
outside and chat, took her dog a block
and back, complained a little
or a lot — it always was the same — and when
she came home from being cared for
turned a monsoon’s shade of mean.
Some days another car
parks next to hers, some days the silence
that surrounds her house
cries out for understanding. It must
be comfortable living
with air conditioning and cats, window blinds
down, listening for
a storm to break and rain
to be delivered to her door in cups
just large enough for her to stir some thunder in.
David Chorlton lives in Phoenix and continues to value the desert’s advice in matters of poetry. His most recent book is “Dreams the Stones Have” from The Bitter Oleander Press in 2024.
Sara Vernekar
Loss
Loss is love interrupted
and derailed.
The heart’s attempt to “l —”
faced with a beast made of everything
it hoped wasn’t true. If there are alarm bells
you won’t hear them toll, not till you’re peering
at the wreckage that used to be home:
picture frames and diaries
and a potted plant that droops,
the fate of all things held too close.
Hindsight arrives at last, reckless
and soaked in blood.
The heart utters a strangled “ -o”
Incoherent — guttural — driven to madness
by what it cannot unlearn.
Then the familiar feeling
of sinking into defeat
and a fitful rage that grips you
in your hours of sleep.
When something beautiful ends,
not as a disfigured version of itself,
but as a lesser thing that flickers
with the ghost of radiance passed,
it makes a peculiar sound:
a flat “–ss” that sounds like
the echo of a cymbal
fading to a halt.
Or a raw slab of meat
landing on a sizzling pan:
one is forever changed,
the other unscathed.
You’re tender meat in the morning,
blackened metal in the dead of night —
you take turns at playing both parts.
Some days you’re the fire
caressing the dark.
Feeling numb, knowing only this:
to burn is proof of life
still left to live.
Sara Vernekar is an alumni of Anita’s Attic and recently won a place in The Himalayan Writing Retreat’s short story course. She has published 20+ articles in The Hindu and had one of her short stories featured in Last Girls Club magazine. She is currently working on her first novel.
Sky Davis
the translation of a woman
she says the rain tastes different in every country.
(in this one—copper & static)
the gutters choke on it, spill over.
she watches water push through the cracks
in the street like a language she should know by now.
(there’s a word for this in her mother’s tongue—
but she’s forgotten it.)
she forgets a lot of things lately.
her keys. // the pot left boiling. // the boy
who kissed her once under a sky split wide open.
she forgets to answer her father’s calls.
she forgets how to say I’m sorry
in a way that doesn’t sound like leaving.
but she remembers
the market in the old city—
the scrape of knives on fishbone /
the woman with plum-stained palms
slipping words from her mouth like seeds.
she remembers her mother’s wrists, thin as reeds,
twisting dough into braids, the hum of the stove,
the oil spitting, the soft music of hunger.
(thirteen: she stands in the mirror // pulls the foreign from her face.)
pinches her nose, bites her lips until they burn.
she thinks if she can smooth herself out like a wrinkle,
no one will ask where she is from.
but even now,
even in the dry mouths of strangers, the question still follows her—
where are you really from?
she wants to say:
from the river that swallowed my grandmother’s prayers.
from the knife that sliced the mango open & left its golden flesh bleeding.
from the soil my mother scrubbed from her knees.
instead, she says here.
watches how they try to make sense of it.
she learns how to explain herself
in ways that do not involve apology.
when the rain comes,
she opens the window.
lets the wet air cling to her skin.
she listens.
(somewhere, she swears—
the sky is speaking her name.)
& this time,
she does not ask it to explain itself.
“i’m thankful again and again for my rage”Quote by José Olivarez
(because it means i haven’t died yet.) (it never leaves) |
Sky Davis is a high school senior who writes poetry that lingers in the shadows of memory, loss, and the quiet reckoning of what remains. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Literature, The Scarred Tree, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, ONE ART, and others.
Celeste Perez
I WAS A YOUNG GIRL THEN
A phrase I grow slowly
more confident in singing
as the days turn
Once found only in the mouths
of mothers—
This fills me
with delighted dread
I am a jar of crystalized honey
and just now the season too
is leaving us
My mouth slips
when I think of my great
grandmother one moment
a girl sweeping dust
and crusts of Oklahoma
from her pockets
the next bathing blood
from limbs of fighters
plane and man alike
And here she is now
holding her own hands in quiet
To imagine her alone
in the air —
it bruises the wretched plum of my throat
I can hardly swallow without
throbbing amethyst
and so become a gorge
to gather water
extract the stone:
As one does with clocks
I cherish it in linen
and relish the abhorrent
marking of hours
Later, I gift the pit
to someone’s daughter
to bury or grind or remember
The choice, she thinks, will be hers
Celeste Perez is a poet living in Oregon. She received her MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She currently serves as adjunct faculty in the department of English at Willamette University.
Yanis Iqbal
Petal Possession
I eat the flower—I eat it whole, the petals not chewed but pressed to the roof of my mouth like host or hex, the throat opens like a chalice, the corolla disbands into mucous, into acid scripture, and as it goes down it writes me from the inside out, the pistil dragging behind it a soft thread of sentences, a golden ovary of transformation that bursts like a pomegranate’s grin across the esophagus, and I shudder, I convulse, not with pleasure but with the unraveling of law, I become a boy not by memory but by fever, by floral seizure, the flower flowering within me, flooding my belly with chlorophyllic instructions, my bowels trembling with stigma-sweet elixirs, the alkaloids of orchid and foxglove boiling through my blood like whispered invocations, I am being rewritten by petal-dust, the dermis loosens, the epidermis accepts brocade, I am spun into velvet not metaphorically but cellularly, I feel the skirt stitch itself from my liver, the hem curl out from the spleen, the pleats pulse against my thighs like new muscle, new nerve, new syntax, and oh god the stamens still writhing inside me, still releasing their pollen into my lungs, so I breathe lace, I breathe organza, I exhale ruffle and ribbon, and I do not know if I am weeping or blooming or both, my tongue is petal-soft, my ribs bend like wire hangers, my spine grows buttons, my shoulder blades sprout threads, I wear the flower and it wears me, my skin remembers every lavender its ancestors feared, every daffodil stitched into the wrists of boys who bit back their wrists, every hibiscus buried in the mouth of the unkissed, and now the flower is in me, commanding from within, I cannot stop—I am tulle, I am silk, I am scandal and surrender, I am the wardrobe’s exhale, the hemline’s haunt, and I am not pretending, I am not playing, I am finally breathing in the scent of my own undoing, each breath lined with honeysuckle and irreparable softness, I cannot walk right, I cannot speak right, I am a boy but I am also the floral sacrament, the ritual regalia of a gender devoured and re-stitched, and still the flower grows, it grows through my pores, it erupts from the navel like a trumpet, it coils around my ankles like bindweed, it tongues my wrists with petioles, and now even the moonlight slicking my skin feels like dress-fitting, like ceremonial slip, like the first time you look down and see your body as invitation, as archive, as velvet blasphemy—yes, I ate the flower, and in doing so I became gown, I became unboyed by the very grammar of petals, I was given no mirror, only pollen and pain and pinning, I was given no voice, only the rustle of skirts and the ancient hiss of flowers saying yes, yes, now you remember what you are.
Yanis Iqbal is currently studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. His poems have been published in outlets such as Radical Art Review, Culture Matters, Live Wire etc. Two of his poems were also selected for inclusion in the Anthology of Contemporary Poetry: Meet the Poets of Today.
Jenny Isaacs
Walking the Dog
These mornings coffee wakes you like a ghost
its skeletal and bitter scent a prize
that drags you off the bed and into streets
still stretching off the crust of city nights.
You never realized till this month how light
comes early in the winter, how the sun
might glint at seven, eight, and not again:
even the greyest days have clear beginnings.
The taxis clatter on the narrow streets
alive, at eight a.m., with runs to make.
The drivers, too, wrap hands round coffee cups
and grin at you through sheets of streaky glass.
The metal of the dog-leash takes its cold
from air, and curls around your wrist, a frozen
bracelet as you jog up towards the park.
The first frost (at your parents’, in the country)
rimmed everything, an acre’s worth of ice
just millimeters thick, so that the world
was auraed, every leaf and blade of grass;
the dog licked warmth into the ground and stared
at melted drops re-freezing on the twigs,
entrusting the weather, like everything, to you.
She loves the country. Now, at last, you too
want land and some iced vista in the morning
instead of graying streets and endless rows
of houses blank in early parallels
leaning one after the other east or west.
Mornings you dream of leaving, packing up,
the twinge of pine-scent, calls of winter birds.
You think of simply walking 95,
the ridge that is the spine between the roads
until the fences ended, where you’d cross
the spitting highway, angle up the sides
of crumpled hills. There in Pennsylvania,
millions of years ago, these mountains ripped
along their length; the ragged scar runs up
the ancient Appalachians like a zipper.
Here, in the folded dell of a city park,
the dog runs squirrels out of every tree
exploding the autumn leaves, her breath a white
corona as she thrashes leaf-dust air.
You spread your fingers — ten chewed moons — as if
to quench the growl of garbage trucks above you,
and study your hands, the damaged fingertips,
imagining them on a lover’s spine; the horns
of skin peel out like birchbark, and the tips
feel nothing. It’s as if your hands were blind.
You remember caring for your hands,
growing the nails out as a test of will.
They tapped, oval and pink, on table tops:
you were so conscious of them, they were like
cement, you thought, the weight of the whole nail
dragging your hands down, against your hair,
your cheeks. That winter you stopped drinking, trying
to be entirely whole; an ambulance
whooped by the building nightly, and the lights
would redden you, your nails and lips would glow
in secret, as you slept: darkened, alone.
Now a dog thumps nightly by your bed,
paws hammering down her presence. Now you wake
to see the winter sun before it grays
away, to walk the early city streets,
tongue stinging, a small penance to the wind.
Four decades after earning an undergraduate degree in writing poetry, Jenny Isaacs’ first chapbook, The Argument of Time, is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press as a semi-finalist in their 2025 Open Chapbook Competition. Her poems have recently appeared online in Pedestal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Thimble Literary Magazine.
Richard Stimac
Handmade
My grandfather gave himself to his work
in wooden patterns at Commonwealth Steel.
He built his house. He gave to church. He saved.
He served in wars. He drank his beer alone.
He kept his carpenter tools in a shed
along the chain-link fence of the alleyway.
It wasn’t things he built there, but himself:
end tables; kitchen stools; a rolling pin.
The practical things of life. I still have
a bookcase, the varnish worn, splintered legs,
no nails, pure joinery, where parts just fit.
Who knows the fruit of the labor of men?
My Father’s Work
My father returned from Vietnam
unrepentant for time he’d served
in the gangrenous canopy. He changed
out his uniform for civies in Hawaii,
by order; peace protesters assaulted soldiers.
His safety was no longer assured.
His father did his time in the same Pacific,
a field of blue with islands as stars.
The red and white of bloodied bandages
coordinated latitudes and longitudes
And his father marched for Franz Joseph
along the treeless craig of Dalmatia.
Like loaves of stone, he carried bitterness
to America, a dream to feed his children.
Fathers leave unfinished duty for sons.
Why ask of me? I took up my father’s work.
Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), two poetry chapbooks, and one flash fiction chapbook. In his work, Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region.
Mikha’El Dan
103rd Street/Watts Tower Station
the ride on the metro from
Highland Park to Watts Tower
sign says, jesus is the answer
looking for lighters, speakers blaring
jackhammers busting, breaking
full spectrum of deceased nails
smells of coconut cream and spent cigarettes
wrist braces, fast faces, acned
“this is your system, help us keep it clean”
is always sobering.
Italian towers in the middle
of black and brown identity
an odd Hajj for an art critic
the bones of the tower
seem to be waiting for something
waiting for Gaudi’s mud
waiting for respect
a purple finger tip to touch and acknowledge
not backed by trusts or benefactors
but by his dead brother
and hard work, nights and weekends
taught principles of survival.
but call it creativity
to build, costruire, construir
to compose an immigrant’s song
a rebar reminder of flux
a dedication to a principle
goals set forth and maybe not achieved
and these enslaved now or then
unpaid meander past its shadow
angry, liberation they still cry
hook and crook
ball and chain
wealth and power
prisons are built within if not let out
sign says, jesus is the answer
Mikha’El Dan is a poet whose work reflects an observation of the world around him. He is currently working on his first chap book, Publicus, a treatise on public space in Los Angeles and the surrounding area.