8/2/2023 1 Comment Poetry by Heather Swanminka CC
Kermit Because I'm not giving up... -Kermit the Frog, The Muppet Movie That morning, when you returned from your tunnel of darkness, the grasses of the marsh still brown in early spring, the air remembering the dead of winter but offering a promise of green, a flicker of movement pulled you from your hood of despair, off the trail and into the mud, following the instinct you had as a boy, something stronger than the undertow, at last, and your arm shot down into the muck. You emerged from the damp reeds cupping a tiny frog, and I saw in your eyes that spark, a gleam, inchoate, as you stood again in your church of cattails, and I believed then you would survive. Field Notes: Cedar Waxwing The weight of his limp feathered body in my palm was less than that of a lemon. Still warm, his heart wildly beating, a bird who believed the blue of the shop window to be more open sky. I know the way what looks to be a clear path is often only an illusion. Why is it we only begin to connect when we are truly broken? Inside, he soon stood, clutched my finger, ate what I offered out of my hand, my heart, and within days, flew out of my life. Then I wake to sleep and take my waking slow... -Theodore Roethke Pressing against this unknown, this unknowing, I am a fallen leaf against the wall of soil. Only by softening will I enter. See how the light pours through the leafless trees? Only by dissolving this mask of separation, by becoming porous enough can we begin to fill, to belong. Like the hollows of the tree filling with moss, with fungi, with breeze. Heather Swan's poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, Midwestern Gothic and Cold Mountain. She is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and the chapbook The Edge of Damage ( Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison.
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8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Sarah Peechery_egan CC
Marigold, Strawberry Blonde Before that first fear, I stood. A girl at a precipice, a cliff above an umber, carpeted abyss, one plush silken body with a plastic face in each of my fists, blanket trailing like a gown. Desire for something – I can’t remember what – at the bottom of the cavern, filled my tiny rose-gold head. I began my descent slipped suddenly on the second tread my body flung like a wilted flower. Slamming my skull on the cool floor, I lay silent in the amber dark before the shock ripped my vocal cords open – my worry of brokenness soon mirrored in my parents’ wide eyes. After my millionth fear I just kept walking, clutching the firm glass of a bottle of malbec. Feeling cold as a polar vortex wind, I played it back – the rush of the white Mustang, my legs hurrying in slow motion, my own scream sounding outside of my head. If it kept playing forward – the crush, the flare of red and blue lights against splayed petals of skin. The voices of my friends reached me somewhere deep within – are you okay? It felt strange to say yes, and so quickly. Sarah Peecher is a poet living and working in Chicago. She holds a Creative Writing MFA degree from Columbia College Chicago and was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Her poem, "Wayfinding," won the Allen & Lynn Turner Commencement Poetry Competition. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, Bluestem, The Lincoln Review, and more. You can usually find her obsessing over her container garden. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Hunter HodkinsonAbe Bingham CC
In The Hot Tub With Briana, The Girl Everyone Called “Slow”, Myrtle Beach 2008 At the age when cursing is the most coveted form of language she teaches me how to say fuck. I make fun of the way she walks and laugh when her sister tells stories of her toilet bowl birth. I do not come from good people. I come from people who ridicule the person I came out to be. I beg Her to hold me under the violent bubbles with her foot to prove that I can hold my breath longer than a minute. I’m just too small. I float right back up. Scrape my fingers against the cement sides. The next morning she’s still in the hot tub. When we check out I ask, where's Briana? Every one points to where the pool is. She’s still there, my poetry begins as a little robin's egg beneath her tongue. Hunter Hodkinson (he/they) is an Appalachian poet hiking the writer's path outside the world of academia. They are currently an Event Assistant at Brooklyn Poets. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in december, Dream Boy Book Club, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, Artistic Tribe NYC and Samfiftyfour. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Chiara Di LelloKooikkari CC
Overview Effect When I was a kid – soft-sided purple lunchbox and star-patterned leggings days – there was a countdown clock at the exit of the rainforest area in the Central Park Zoo. It was the number of acres of Amazon left, and it was endlessly ticking down. A demented New Year’s Eve, a specific but far-off doom that now is here. Some terrible scientific math concludes that as of this year the Amazon rainforest now emits more carbon than it absorbs. Too much of it has been razed and converted to soy and livestock these lungs of the planet now foaming red We’ve ruined it, and there was so much of it to ruin. It’s the vastness of the crime, as well as the evil of it. This summer William Shatner went to space and all he felt was grief. The kind a kid feels when she realizes death is not only something that happens to her mother’s friend with cancer when she sees in red blinking flipdots the exact amount of earthly bounty there is left, that it is knifingly finite and decreasing every day. And it makes her think of her father, ironically the way the harm never abated, the bullheadedness and blithe inability to say I’m sorry I hurt you and mean it. To say I regret what I did or I will do whatever I have to to make it right. The rainforest can’t send back performative, shitty birthday presents. The rainforest can’t say don’t text me or call me anymore. The rainforest can’t take comfort in knowing the beef ranchers don’t have to be invited to its wedding, can’t feel the confidence of its choices, and even if it could very little would be okay, because there is still the cloud of smoke and ash and acres of charred dead ground. Captain Kirk peers through the plexi and feels it, the shuddering in the lungs, because we are still the only inhabitable speck in the cold and dark. And it will never be okay that I don’t know the feeling of a dad having my back, never heard him say you deserve better in any way I could have believed You deserved better, orchids and jaguars and river dolphins and all you plants and bugs no human ever catalogued fungi and frogs and spider monkeys capybaras, toucans and sloths I’m a pointless person in a pointless era watching from the nosebleed seats while we wreck something that ought to have nourished us that could have healed at any time if we had heeded its cries and even now I can barely hear my own voice force out stop. enough. no. Chiara Di Lello is a writer and educator. She delights in public art, public libraries, and getting improbable places by bicycle. For a born and raised New Yorker, she has a surprisingly strong interest in beekeeping. Find her recent poems in Variant Lit, Whale Road Review, Across the Margin, and others. Find her on Twitter @thetinydynamo. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Kolbe RineyAmrit Patel CC
consume what if i looked in the water and in my reflection saw a leopard. what if I took from her a shred-skin tongue, pressed a lime directly to it. felt the vesicles break, burst over and over: now sharp, now sour, now bright. somehow I told you I need everything to feel bigger. need the world to crush me, split my chest into pieces, spots, cover me in a pile of wriggling bodies like a dog. Need to stir their pelts into a hood, watch its’ slip form between my fingers, as in spotted. As in gold. As in harvest. Need to stare at the sun. Need the earth to be a swimming pool where I am weightless, pressed in on all sides, skin dappled in turquoise, fluorescence. Need the world to be a concert with a heartbeat. bass line, azalea-pink neon, then tangerine, then lime. Let the light turn skin both wide and alien until I can feel it in my throat. On my nose. On my ears. The sounds of tongue pressure, cleaning the deep inside. Always more, more. even more than that, sop When I was younger, I talked about the days ahead as though they were made of snow. Impassable, maybe, or untouched, cold, just fallen. Never was I ready for this dimensional version of myself, full of hot hearts in every corner like earth-warmed lakes, steaming in the dark. Also healing, growing true, holding seances on plover-hatch beaches for the spirits of my childhood self, the ones who knew the wishes inside me before I knew what secrets to keep. No longer am I seeking people who will crush me underfoot just to feel a form. I am not an eggshell. Instead I am trying everything I’d like to feel the shape of, like a drop of water, and surface tension, and the warm, silky body of a seal. I’m kissing somebody who pauses to give me what I want, feeling their hands finding my shape in the water. always sleek and moving, moving, faster than fast. holes Some nights I dream of boyhood. In some universes, I think I had one, woke with the mountain of my throat illuminated in pink light, all slopes pulled darkly into shadow. In those universes I am less sacred, for surely these slashes on my chest were painted there by a god. In many worlds I am exactly as I am, chosen to open from sand like a hatchling, to spread arms wide and arch back to salt: that which I did not know but was born struggling towards, born to be taken further, and thus folded in. Kolbe Riney is a queer poet and nurse from Tucson, Arizona. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Tinderbox, Arc Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Stoneboat Journal, the Chestnut Review, and others. They were nominated to the Best of the Net and their manuscript, “mythic”, was short listed for the 2021 Sexton Prize. Learn more: kolberiney.wixsite.com/website 8/1/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Alicia Turnerminka CC
Strangers “Never talk to strangers, no matter what they offer you,” mumbled my dad, who himself was a stranger to me. I wouldn’t have been able to identify him in a chalk outline, yet he drew one around me while I was still fresh. Still breathing. He told me that, should I ever be held hostage, to “scream at the top of my lungs.” I’m still breathing to tell you that there’s a kind of curse in that — the preparation to be someone’s property, to be properly disposed of before the rotting settles in. We never really know anyone. We are all just stories we like to tell each other -- over breakfast or soured milk cartons with our faces hollowed out. I scoff at the thought of being lured into a trap, of being both hook and bait, and insist that I don’t want to taste the candy, I just want to sit with the sweetness, feel sweet sometimes. I want the offering, where they give and I take, but then they’re taking and I’m giving, and how many strangers does it take to spoil the ending? I am looking to get lost. I am lost in the looking. Alicia Turner holds an MA in English and is a grant writer, poet, & storyteller. She can be found writing confessional, conversational poetry in an over-priced apartment somewhere in WV. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Four Lines (4lines), CTD's ‘Pen-2-Paper’ project, Voicemail Poems, FreezeRay Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, Luna Luna, Defunkt Magazine, Sybil Journal, The Daily Drunk, ExPat Press, Rejection Letters Press, Screen Door Review, J Journal Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, Cartridge Lit., Space City Underground, among others. 8/1/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Francesco LevatoOracles, The cessation of Legion, The Thundering Blood, circulation of
Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include SCARLET (forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil); Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. 8/1/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Kris FalconScott Dexter CC
Yard Days The owner of the vines is all about waiting for energies to grape to dry wine back to mood again, notes again as he muses there comes a time one has to live on mostly dirt and a percent of water. For hours I don button-down checks as if mine. Repeat him in English, even the land was my first love. My back to a friend in the role of the unfairly little-sistered by this beadle posture, as she still dissects leaves of mine she’ll later lift, not seeing for a while now our scarves where I held my pen, as she flips how turned up, all love songs are drink songs in July, the flow cooler than whimpers. Come dark. Mid-pour her glass I freeze. Cold-turkey quit fronting. Not everyone a son when sheltered like a toddler. My latest prayer on such sunseted, may your day not end in carelessness. More from the presenter as he rinses his hands from a pump: for luck is some weeks, the street in a white mantle over to the next quarter. Followed by other months, some rows fracturing wide as a road can, not caring the world glimpses how much its center barely spins from thirst. Sounds mid-parable. My friend deep in a swirl I revise into a year of a rolling stone who has just learned how to whistle. After whispers half her life, trying for a whole note out of smoke rings, now on her way to carve out a sec to sigh as if in her first ocean. Like a tune she likes to karaoke I wish her love. The heart to grow up our host and his tastings finer across plains, less words recurring, but in my bright blouse. But who paddles home to a stocked kitchen. We should be able to compose a hope bubble good to be heard in a valley. To funnel the panorama. Once we have a lot of a bit of everything. Our saucers fill with milk then coffee. Onion-garlic broth, could cool to tea. The air avuncular-mellow. If there is a need, it isn’t for any one pierce. Light Bloomer If asked, with next to no warning my hopes began to reach, as if wherever glade I landed a weather from a nimble mother made sure I was on trine. Maybe it takes no humbler than this, unknown wind for climbing. Chimes. A carafe, bread basket—plenty handed free with roots stock, a lit nook. The lone art a snapshot of a barefoot love against a wall of small white blooms it would be a constellation. I can’t complain in my tent. Whatever waning has blended. Even simpler a song is when everyone is inside a circle it’s more than enough to be in high spirits, slowed tide. Arcana: Temperance if dealt a hand. No why so quiet? Why aren’t you looking harder in the shadows? On a few tack-gray days, I did the interviewing. A lifeguard who used to put out fires at sea said he began to sleep soundly, in a good loop too, when his calling found him. He had given up the sigh of someday out-rocking. How many times in a life span does one hear, let me tell you my story. Story—have you seen a body? Begins in the blades. People and their eclipses. Their vows of exodus by dawn falling on a long sleeper. All their spinning and and and and end as they believe they lead away, letting me miss my feathers. Kris Falcon’s second poetry collection Some Blue, A Little Spur has recently been released. Her poems may be found or will appear in The Hong Kong Review, Red Ogre Review, Havik, Atlanta Review, SMEOP, and elsewhere. She received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 8/1/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Maurya SimonCarl Wycoff CC
Callisthenic Sometimes I want to unzip the jumpsuit of my flesh and leap out from my lantern-self-- just to see a grown woman shatter a skylight. The world’s too much with me, yes, but who’s to know what pinions me to prayer, if prayer is what a poem is? My daughters lean away from me, stalks of winter wheat yearning for some glimmer of steadfastness, or else an eclipse. Bittersweet soothsayers, they say I’m a zoftig scarecrow, wind-blown and truly obsolete. Enough of men’s empires, febrile desires, and the endless vicissitudes of pain. Brimming with half-truths, I sieve myself back into my sleeve of breathing body like wine decanted in an Erlenmeyer flask, and await whatever song drinks me next. Maurya Simon’s tenth volume of poems, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association. Other awards include: a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (Bangalore, South India), an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America. She’s been a Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), and at the MacDowell Colony. Simon’s poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Greek, and Farsi. She currently serves as a Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside and resides in the Angeles National Forest in southern California. 8/1/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Jess Rosesminka CC
no better it’s not better. i am ascetic with heaven beyond the stars in my eyes second to the left and straight under the radar - weightless, braiding daisy chains waiting for the sky to pour gold instead of grey. it never came. it’s not better. i am the butcher of my flesh the artist of a craft in love with red against the wash of empty, playing in the plasma like fingerpaints. my razorblade tightrope dance - but muses wane like myth. in the morning light: i am carved out, empty. It’s not better. i am the fire lit by a fifth and a cigarette, i am the molotov cocktail on everyone’s lips trading favors under the table for a kiss in return - what makes our reasons good enough, is this what freedom feels like? and do you feel it too? but when the night ends i’m driving four friends home on the wrong side of the road teeth coated with secondhand rum and still taking shots at how far i can go before i blow us all to pieces. bad dreams turn to hungover sunlight in someone else’s bed. i retrace my steps until where i am makes sense walking backwards under the moon looking for a satisfactory answer, finding nothing but hangover and more satisfaction from a cigarette than an answer to who i am. it’s not better. i know the the rules. tie hard, slap the vein, aim true find the blood and shoot the arrow loose. i learned sitting on a toilet in a house in the desert with someone i still care about, someone who still terrifies me. a year with dope like a serpent in my veins, no one knows this coin trick; i carry my world around with me in dime bags in pinpricks in swollen hands scraping the loose change from the bottom of the fountain nickel and vinegar, cotton and copper i drink ‘til the the water runs dry. it’s not better. the truth comes out in summer and i wage war on the black tar thirsty vengeance rising iridescent in the heat.. orange orange blossoms make me sick but i swallow for something. that much is true. lilac trees shed themselves gently and wish i could fall like that, soft - into this small sea. i keep changing but i never leave this place, what metamorphosis would break the chain? it’s not better. the list of illness fluctuates but some things are True and they remain. each week a new list of tests and hopes dashed and hopes raising their heads from the ashes with hands tied, the ocean beats against the rocks and wonder which, in this analogy, is me. i think i know the answer but sinking comes so easy to me, to swim is an odyssey not yet written. the secrets of our pasts come out and fill empty pages, i am grateful but the maze runs rampant, with every question comes a hundred more, with each solution another reason why not, defined by the body i swear to claim as mine, the mind i no longer wish to fight, and the way that chemicals stitch me together like a scarecrow, like a chimera. it’s not better. i lie on the floor and cry. i chew each bite 100 times. i take my meds and i hate thinking about those handfuls so i watch reality TV and escape into the blue light. sometimes i write poems. sometimes i think about a history made of something else. there is better somewhere. i am the brave girl i am the thorn she pulls i am the lion, humbled by my own warm blood on my hands. Jess Roses (she/they) is a disabled, neurodivergent, emerging writer. Her focus is the transformation of relationships and experiences with pain and the taboo. She explores how these communal experiences form and relate to societal and personal narratives within and without the psyche. She has been published in Caustic Frolic, Coffin Bell Journal, Raven Review, Grub Street Literary Magazine, and more. You can find her work on Instagram at @jessroseswriting. |
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