10/7/2022 Editor's Remarks Nicholas_T CC
Time does not always feel like a gift. The body ages ungracefully, the number of people we love dwindle in death or a death-in-living. We can't go back and fix things (oh, though we want for nothing more) the best we can do is to fix a few things in the here and now. Even so, we want more time. With the people who are now gone, with the parts of ourselves that once were so vibrant and seemingly unencumbered (a beautiful illusion) or with the parts of us that never even had a chance to form before disaster struck. If time is a gift, it is a difficult one. There are things we come to know in no other way than through great difficulty. Perhaps it is not at all accidentally said that one must rise to meet a challenge. You can go through something and not meet it. A whole life can take this direction. A good part of mine once did. My early environment did not rise to meet any moment. We were on the descent. The toughest thing I have had to learn in this life is how to fashion my own emotional tools. We are the only ones coming. But that there are also more than a few fellow travelers on that road we come to know and lean on. Time brings them in and out of our lives in beautiful and devastating measure. Sometimes it's but a moment in time. And a moment is enough. We can hear a thing said a million times before, but sometimes it's the way someone says something to us that helps it to land. Timing. Tone. Timbre. When something lands it lands. It goes in the tool box. All of the work here, for instance. It lands with me. And it is but a moment in time, and it cannot last, but the feeling does. The purpose, the why of us, why we are here, why we reach out, why we even try at all to describe all of the things that have happened to us in our lives. I tend to think it matters greatly that we meet each other in this way. Meet a moment, or a feeling, or a loss the size of everything. How easily the trees let go of their cover in Autumn, we think. But why should it be any easier for them? We know as much about a tree's struggle as we do our own, and we know so very little. And just that little bit is enough. We can do a lot with that. Maybe it's a struggle for everything in life to let go. Letting go / letting in. Making room for more. How do we ever? But sometimes, don't you? With the little time we do have it is good to not stand alone in it. Even if it's only for a moment, and the tide is high, and it seems all of our work is written on sand. Who knows what the sand remembers of us on the washout? Surely, we each made some small difference here. We have learned our way through on the roughest terrain there is; in here, our own hearts, our own bodies, our own minds. But it's the meeting of others; hearts, bodies, minds, that makes for a richer crossing. Thank you all for being on this stretch of the journey with us. For sharing your stories of moment-meeting and heart-connecting, your how and your why and your rising. In this moment in time I feel extraordinarily grateful that our unique and differing paths have crossed, here, in this way. I hope we meet again. And even if we don't, this small and tender moment was enough. Happy Fall, and safe travels, friends. May you all rise and meet your difficult thing in your own unique and beautiful way, and in your own time. James Diaz Founding Editor Anti-Heroin Chic 10/6/2022 Featured Poet: Crystal Ignatowski Thomas CC Phase Change My therapist says Sleep Now, but I struggle. Each morning, I watch clouds give birth, witness starlings fling themselves into figure eights, squint to see Andromeda’s red star. My will says, Set me afire until I’m atomic, which is not a demand, but a telescopic question for my daughter to answer. Soon, my spine will be a mountain instead of a moon. Soon, she will spit glaciers on my chest. I will prepare her for my many unravelings, static fissures towards a single black hole. She won’t understand this poem, its bleak debris ashing onto the page. She’ll watch starlings migrate to Mars and float into sunlight she can’t name. She’ll whisper See you later instead of Goodbye. Johnny Cash My knee cap split open like a melon. We listened to Johnny Cash on the way to the hospital. I cried. It wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t pretty either. When we arrived, a mass of people snaked through the parking lot; we didn’t even exit the vehicle. Don’t worry, you said, My father is a doctor, as if learned skills could be passed down, as if you weren’t still drunk and over confident and in love. But we didn’t go to your father’s. We went home. You carried me over the threshold, cut a lemon for my tired mouth. I was just a shell of a person then, trying to escape. Hold tight, you said, not meeting my gaze. You poked my tender flesh with the needle, fished around for the other side. Fog Lines after September 11th Fifth grade, a foal on stilts learning to walk, and my father trapped in an airport far away, his voice a woolen whisper through the corded phone, and aren’t we all connected by small grass fields, river oxbows, cords to our mothers’ wombs. I am still sucking on my mother’s breast with a small tongue, her milk like a string of prayer flags struggling to wave as she witnessed me wriggle in the NICU window, my head a wire trap, the nurses stern like bees. You Can Touch Her Tomorrow, they’d say, then tomorrow the same thing, always tomorrow, her nipples puckering to the sky, her breasts hardening like tempered wings. Her hands formed fog lines across the ventilator’s window, lines she’d remember ten years later as her hands reached for the television screen to cover the New York skyline, the smoke pillowing the sky, the grayness a memory of me. Crystal Ignatowski's poetry has been featured in Barren Magazine, Four Way Review, Parentheses Journal, and more. She lives and writes in Oregon. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Lee Johns Thomas CC
Missing It's forgetting season when the leaves fall, and in the yard we bury everything that died over the summer and offer the last of our love, name the ones we want to hold and not forget, and I am unheld, and my tongue restricts its own words of wanting. I missed the first October breeze and nobody knew where I was living and nobody thought to know. As I write this I have spoken only to the squirrels outside my window for several days and nights, asking them to tell me the point of a life too fortressed to let the summer in, to let the winter out. They scatter at the scratch of my unpracticed voice. All the remembered dead open their mouths and plead. Through this silent season that was all I needed and all I could not do. October is the month of forgetting and I am being forgotten. Old friends leave me like a needle pulled from the skin, which is to say I'm getting sicker. I wonder which patch of earth will cover me next year, which roots will finally embrace me, which fruit will grow strong from everything my life could hold. Bleak Autumn of the Fifth Year It's winter again, or almost, and no fire in the fireplace, and my father wears his big coat as he leaves, hat carried by the wind, scuffs on the car ceiling from hauling dead trees home from vacant lots, lonelier than it was some days, quieter, softer, darker, trees festering in a gaping sky, frost vanishing like days, blushful flowers greying, my sister's mittens hanging from the hook, the clouds of yellow death on every tree, impressionist street corners, a deep sigh, our closing hands, the creeping ice that threatens cold, and she is still dying in my memory, and I am still living for another year in this unlikely world, oh God, this world. Originally from Chicago, IL, Lee Johns is an undergraduate student at Yale University. Their writing has been published in Body Without Organs and the Concord Review and is forthcoming at The Agapanthus Collective. Right now, you can probably find them at the library. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Rachel White Nicholas_T CC
Undertow spring’s slow trickle of trampled snow unleashes backlogged precipitation swells Mississippi well over her banks I don’t fish but friends who do inform me bass don’t bite when the water’s rising they hide in eddies from the gathering current and I do read the obituaries of boys who jump in and come out white downstream in Vernon County boys survived by family who swear their deaths are intentional and I do observe that sliver of moon left to hang like a cut nail visceral as the silence between us and I do feel the cloak of your embrace hands that belie the goodbye in the soaked midnight world and I do wish to almighty to go back warn myself to evade your first touch but here we are scuffing blacktop under maple buds just opened the divergence as incidental and permanent as the river drownings Rachel White is an emerging poet and artist. She holds a B.F.A in Graphic Design from Viterbo University, and a M.Ed. from the University of Wollongong. Originally from Wisconsin, she has worked in Connecticut and Australia as an art teacher for over a decade, and is a U.S. Army veteran. Rachel’s work has been published in Third Wednesday Magazine. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Marko Capoferri Andrew Seaman CC
Self-portrait with Elegy (III) Whenever I am adrift a faroff earthbound watery star means home a house in the fields of memory where it’s always evening an ending just beyond reach and welcome that way And I’m always that kid kicking dirt clods the clotted remains of a growing season gone down the tubes too much rain too little time to breathe between the wet hoof beats clopping their way down the roof into my dreams A mosquito swarm into a chord a single car muffler sputtering down into the dark of the closing day At the window the bruise-colored waves of rain wash in from the west fireflies compel their own morse code with cricket and thrush and distant thunder hollering like a father from up the stairs I wasn’t much more then than the result of old growth that grew close enough to rub away the rough in each other But the world turns on the momentum of leaving There’s a moment when it feels like twilight can go either way the way maple leaves can seem to keep waving goodbye even after the wind stops blowing Partial Eclipse I’m learning to lean in to the falling almost- dark you call it a game of trust those arms warm rivers merging tracks of light lean in close tell me your lies I’ll believe them if you tell them truly you’re teaching me turn in to the skid the ice won’t form yet for another six months outside now blows profuse hymns in hummingbird tongues a honeyed weight as light descends too much almost to breathe sometimes when the days grow long twilight is a compromise of territories your rich outline and mine dark in the window tracing vague shapes doves in twilit flight barking dogs teach me how to live with your hands out there luna’s glossy plume halfway out of frame earth cutting into it a fine line we walk the bleeding edge this game of dim shadows shows us more fully than full light ever would Marko Capoferri has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he currently resides. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Porter House Review, Prometheus Unbound, Camas, and FatherFather. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Michael Beard kami rao CC
Phiale Shape my body into a bowl and drink from the shallow collarbone I leave for you. Wading in the wine sky, a half moon rediscovers us—the doctrine of our bodies. We lie here, offering the world nothing but ourselves. The way your cheek presses medallions in my chest aches. Your breath, flowers. A mouth is a measure of faith is a curl between skins is the night that belongs only inches from our lips is enough. Don’t wait until morning for renewal, when the bed is made and light turns everything too certain. Think of the gestures that make us endless. Speak, if you can. Tell me how prayer is too small for this. Michael Beard (he/him) currently studies poetry at the Bowling Green State University MFA program and serves as the managing editor for Mid-American Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jupiter Review, Bending Genres, Moss Puppy Magazine, The Mantle Poetry, and other places. He can be found on Twitter @themichaelbeard. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Michelle Menting Doug Kerr CC
Squall or, "You're always so quiet." normally I'd not swirl I'd not whirl about what seems at the seams a half acre there a crowd fest where quiet should be hush-hush could be but the rush that spasm so swish cataclysm of rain of sleet of hell more snow & hail hard blows in the thick of it like a bomb's tick-tick of it at the cusp of storm breaking last gust of two lovers aching holding together silicone-seal-tight fear of leaving greater than cold blight that silence that comes humid still but devours but devours but devours so why wouldn't I why wouldn't I now tell me: why wouldn't I throw all caution to that brawl of wind and scream & scream & scream? Michelle Menting's recent poems and flash prose narratives appear or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Eco-Theo Review, The Dodge, About Place, and others. She lives in a small house along a little river in a patch of woods in Maine. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Sandra Simonds Vlastimil Koutecký CC
Poems Written in First Ten Days of Sobriety Melancholic as bees filling a Crown Vic or a headlamp in ashes inside the cave while feeling for air, I become the breezeway of past attempts to stop harvesting liquid, a Penelope of sorts, agog and cramped, as I adjust to a new regimen of saltines and despairing downticks on the scale of absent suitors in myth. What once was written in sinew now weights heavy on blunt variations. My liver unfizzes, my kidneys relax, blood pressure moves the direction of fish. What I once was— another creature. What I will be—an upsurge. Unsure, I become options optional, imparting. * 5am, they injected the vaccine at a Walmart on the edge of a North Florida wilderness of gothic plastic assemblages while the wine glasses arrived broken in their Amazon box too big like a child who wears pants that fall from his waist revealing how flimsy the body. In ethanol and ferment, the pomegranates of our spiked hellscape sit quietly in their breeding turning my throat glassy: I’ve got hummingbird lungs. Green bottles thrown to goddesses and kings’ pudgy fingers clasp flukes and goblets, formulating decrees: You will never drink again. All things stew given enough time: cherry, elderberry, currant, me, you, brooding, lust. Lifting my arm above nothing was torture. * Half-baked lies permeate my existence: I can quit anytime, I won’t die on my own watch, silly epiphanies mocking themselves ad infinitum. Sisyphus hurled his gramophone across existence calling it a rock, then the rock was abstracted to a fate rolling towards hegemonic distractions like Google and socials. Cosmology is the next best thing. Curious how time dwarfs even the most disastrous of human cacophonies like Greta Thunberg offering snark to the Twittersphere of trolls, domestic terrorists, and recipes for scones. After work, I twist like a rag in a bucket of rumination. If I pass the supermarket, will the debit card cleave from my bleached justifications? Will I graze the wine aisle with my scarred knuckles in animal magnetism? Will I drive my car into the ditch’s creamy twilight or resist my own twitching impulses like carbonite? * Amphetamines make me orgasm super awesome. Like a video game to avoid the past. I wanted to burn down the treatment facility. As a way to unhinge the label from spirit. I couldn’t sleep because I would relive an incident involving my then two-year-old son. Like a script memorized to avoid the past. Because the world is so dull and tedious. The brain feels sandblasted and raw as dunes. It’s perfectly rational if you heavily discount the value of the future. As a way peel off the label from spirit. Fun fact: pleasure is a reason to do things : ) : ) : ) Bare as brain, sad as dunes. * To feel bummed like this, an avalanche of coordinates on the body’s temple translates into kissing sharks and parasites, for the long haul it’s been a week with no substances except a man telling me that I should inhale and exhale agog. I watch the crescent moon, say “I do” to the world but don’t mean it because inside I’m dying of fear and wine is sloshing like rivers of fuming days, days diluted, moon reappearing after thirty nights and calling itself eyes. * Water is cold and wet, wine—hot and dry like a lake on fire turns purple as pines smoke. Hippocrates tells the story of a man who slept on his back in a tent as serpent entered his open mouth and he bit down. * Day One: Finished with saturation. Done with the dish of spreading colors and clicking. I could Google myself twelve times daily only to find I have not left the house, that I’m really tending to my scraped knee. Day Two Fell again. Nothing changed. I don’t want to know the things I think I want to know, don’t want to drink things, I think I want to drink. Besieged by blight and loneliness deep in the body’s cavities. Behind the eyeballs weeds grow and parting the weeds, the murky pond gravitates to static when it should be stiller than hands that hold deadened plants at noon. * The spheres demanded I didn’t cry. On the pavement, I thought about it while pain shot through my arms and ankles. The spheres are cruel. The man across the street who saw me fall helped his wife into a purple car. Hey, that’s my car! I got up, blood gushing down my shin. Kept running, lush plants exhaled, hand numb by now—only 8am. What else did Tuesday have in store? Sandra Simonds is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry: Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems and criticism have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. She is the recipient of the Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She went to UCLA for her BA, University of Montana for her MFA and Florida State for her PhD. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Sharon Zhang Nicholas_T CC Becoming a better girl
The rain coughs phlegm down the gutters, skittering your skin with layers Of petroleum. How the distance Between the clouds and the future Is impossibly large. How you tried to See your next lover, but only saw more blue.
Caught and hung upon hook hands.
You up whole, to pronounce the living dead. Because you want to thrash yourself alive: To thrash yourself out of your mother.
And it burrows into your wrist, and you’re Still laughing, hand flattened out into An envelope with a name on it. Dawn is crackling on the radio, your feet are stuttering A little song; nothing else to do, love.
And you wanted it badly, sainting your body until you were sour. This was so you could let your skin roam, deify, another birth, zipping it all Back up, baby: we know that’s what you need.
Body as it falls off a highway. I sirened myself Instead, the country’s very best whore. You’ve Got to try me. You’ve got to see what I’m Good for. Sharon Zhang is an Asian-Australian, Melbourne-based poet and author. Her work has been recognised by Paper Crane Journal, Antithesis Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a mentee at Ellipsis Writing and an editor at Polyphony Lit. Outside of writing, she enjoys collecting CDs, scrolling endlessly on her phone, and thinking about Deleuze a touch more than that which is necessary. She is the poet laureate of pretentiousness and using the word “body” when any other noun would work instead. Skin. Limbs. Humanness. Tablecloth. 10/6/2022 Poetry By Jessica Mehta kerry o'connor CC
Genetically Isolated Since the Ice Age I starved myself down the wrong way not with a wailing stomach and day-long naps but with the kind of hunger you reserve for pure hatred (or fear) I was an animal gutting turkeys and chewing through the cow’s gristle pushing through bags of raw vegetables and passing on all the offers of sweet whiskey, the good bread puddings and perfect gin martinis with perfect slices of ice that had kept me warm and fat bundled in thick layers of subcutaneous blubber for all those lonely years I hadn’t sprung up like a flower and I didn’t wither like one either Not me, for me it was the failing predator’s way a flailing Kodiak bear dragging a rusted trap in my wake so you can all see where I’ve been until the starvation caught me tackled me to the earth and I breathed in the musk of where we’re all going the embrace turning more tender as the weight sloughed off until all that’s left is a solid block of sharp bones wrapped tight in a fancy pantsuit of new muscle so young and so shiny and so utterly unlike who I am or who I thought I was I don’t know how to wear it right and it’s just so painfully heartbreakingly obvious I’m playing dress-up in a closet I don’t belong Jessica Mehta is a multi-award-winning poet and author of the just-released "Selected Poems: 2000 - 2020," the winner of the Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space, place, and ancestry in post-colonial "America" informs much of Mehta's work. You can learn more at www.thischerokeerose.com. |
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