We found them between ads for discount flower pots and a story of in vitro success, and I’d ask my mom to read mine. Try to understand the shape of a lion’s mouth, the color of water running over the side of a pot. Forecasts, love, written in dusty tongues she so desperately wanted to sink pincers into. She would sometimes buy them from the grocery store, tiny scrolls in clear plastic cylinders. Hers on orange paper, mine—blue, opposites on the color wheel. I like to believe the solar system and I are intertwined, our cells made in the furnaces of stars, the fate of the sun determining mine. I count the ways in which the moon is at fault for so much, so many crumbling constellations of lies I tell myself.  The stars are so heavy, ripe with what it is to be beast, to be bearer. I would look at my mom and think of all the starry things that we could never have. How the world is shaped elliptical and it keeps returning us back and back to the pages of the newspaper, the ink on our fingers, the seeds of something we could never map just right.

 

Randi Clemens is a poet, editor, and educator who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University, where she previously served as the Managing Editor of Passages North and taught creative writing. Her work can be found online at Pidgeonholes, LandLocked, Lammergeier, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Up North Lit and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

I’m completing the form:
Selection of Next Life
It’s due by Wednesday.

You never know what
you qualify for.
Maybe a tortoise or a redwood
or one brick in a great pyramid.
Maybe the life of a mayfly,
a Big Gulp cup taken to the landfill,
or the mold on a sandwich
forgotten in a locker.

The lives we get
are funny like that.

This time I’m up for a Life of Minuscule Importance
Is this an upgrade?

Section One: Moments and Spaces
(Select One)
 An open door on a parakeet’s cage
 The curtain parting on a stage
 A crack crawling on a dam
 The pop of cork
 The silence in a room with a corpse
 A symphony’s second movement

These don’t appeal, too much like another life
of being overlooked.

Section Two: Portentous Things
(Select One)
 An unfound shard from a shattered plate
 An electrical arc coursing a severed line
 Animal tracks in the muddy grass
 A pickaxe chipping for a vein
✔ A deadly storm’s first falling inches

Oh yes! The first flake of a blizzard
talked about for many years.
That’s the life I want.

 

Bill Verble lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his family. He’s inspired by his father, a former poetry teacher. His work appeared in the recent edition of The Poeming Pigeon. You can find him online on Twitter at @BillVerble.

        1. they come—
in a harrow of sacred pilgrims to the arch,
beloved         bestowed         &         innocent
with a creek in the smile

our old pillars are falling apart, like singles:
as a strand out of mayhem
but today, first, the smoke is in the barn
like an orchid fire     or     obvious forest agni —
a citrus split in the dark centre

We stand, we fold, we finger,
the horses are dead and the ashes are craving rabbits.

        2. they tell—
it would be the last time, last Oklahoma
farmland on gunpoint

I told you they would come for us
                        in a kind way.
I told you a bit of your meat
will run on the rear of my neck

I raced, I tried, walked backwards on the leaky
pebbles across the pond.

        3. I try—
to climb a wounded horse, I told you they were no guests.

        4. they think—
Of making it into a cemetery. A dead horse,
a dead master, and until you call us dead.

        5. I told you—
The only way this would end was in ruins.

        6. I would—
run a pint of beer in the falling pillars
and hide to Alabama.

        7. they watch—
when you cry on the lost island
you will become a feathered man
a mad bloke left alone after a red storm,
        a late worm
when they go after you
                they will take everything but debris.

 

Ajay Sawant is the assistant editor at the Southern Humanities Review and 2021 CPB Writing Fellowship recipient from The Bombay Review. He has received honourable mentions for the 2021 Christopher Hewitt Poetry Award and Dan Veach Poetry Prize. His poems and critical work appear in The London Magazine, Live Wire, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Bombay Review, The Louisville Review, Lunch Ticket, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. Ajay often tweets at @ajaycycles.

The ones who stand as tall as windmills: who glow like wolf breath across the field: the ones with runners’ bones & beating hearts as loud as a parade. The ones without constraints: embalming fluid: marble names: the ones who speak the language of television without hymns poisoning their veins: my ghosts who never died. My ghosts who never died: the ones who escaped the cemetery of my heart: the ones who packed a suitcase with photographs sliced in half & left my eyes behind: my ghosts who meet in dark bars. My ghosts who meet in dark bars: the ones who floated in my womb like goldfish: like stars: like hurricanes in a coffee cup: like zinnia seeds swept downstream: my hungry ghosts: my hungry ghosts. The ones as full as a pantry: the ones who swallow good bread & ripe tomatoes & sugar as sweet as a train: the ones who smash plates into blades: the ones who carry bouquets: the ones who twirl like ceiling fans: the ones with my love on their lips & fingertips. Daisy chains: my ghosts: my ghosts: my necessary ghosts.

 

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been published in The Citron Review, Passages North, EcoTheo Review, RHINO, Barren, Pidgeonholes, Pithead Chapel, and others. Her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, was published in July 2021 (Kelsay Books) and her chapbook The Water Cycle was published in January 2022 (Variant Lit). She is the Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art and the Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press.

While you bucked and brawled
against the nexus of your last
near-morning, the feuding

cells of you were already in decay.
Under the always-on striplight,
diffused to a deep fade between

the poles of this world and the next,
the frenzy of division cut its last
course through you.

Your body practiced
calling itself forth. A dry run
of the inevitable—the soon-expected

specter’s reluctant rise
in the tongue-slacked
rasp of this blue-burnt hour.

While you were dying, electricity
melted from minutes,
an unruly volta of the last synaptic

symphony’s wild refrain.
This, the veil that lifts,
that invents itself for you.

 

Elisa Karbin is the author of the chapbook, Snare, and poems that have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Diode, CutBank, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, and West Branch, among others. She earned a PhD in poetry from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was also a Tinsley Helton Dissertation fellow. Currently, she serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Marquette University. She has two cats. Find more info. at www.elisakarbin.com.

I cough up a cancer poem so y’all will shut up
about writing as healing. Like there’s anything
romantic about your body breaking your heart.
My surgeon sends me to an oncologist he calls a
snazzy dresser. He means gay. My gay oncologist
recommends cannabis and I ask if he knows any
strains that stop time. A trauma survivor advises
me to integrate this experience with my sense of
self. I think I don’t know what that means but just
now my self was a lizard tucked under a rock in a
screaming hot tank, occasionally scuttling out to
bask on a log and hope the lamp fries it. My guts
and I are hollow. They blew up the seed bank so
there goes the last of my schemes to resurrect my
grandmother. Also, I lost all my nose hairs. Did
you want me to include that in the weekly update?
My dad doesn’t know how to regulate around this.
Surprise. He’s always forty-one flushing pills fifty-
one begging yet again for absolution. He’s burnt
himself down to the bowels a thousand times and
yet. I stare at this poem for twenty minutes and
finally understand survivor’s guilt. But he won’t
do either of us any good dead. Also, I love him.
Thanks for the money, folks, and most days I want
you and everyone else to fuck off. How’s this for
meaning-making? Everything I’ve ever written is
a love poem and so is this needle. Amanda, all I’ve
got for you is this: My sense of self says the guts of
me will always be seventeen and too young to die.

 

Bear Weaver was built by Florida’s Gulf Coast, as were their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. They are currently writing, residing, and cancer-surviving in southern New England, but can be found tweeting and lurking @WvrBear.

My instinct is not to bite.
Instead I’ll show you all
my little square teeth,
point them out to you
one by one name them
then leave my mouth open
and breathe.

Enamel speaks a thing you can’t
understand—the grain of sand
churning in the oyster
who layers thick saliva
over and over until pearl
to numb the gnawing and is still
left with a tender lump inside—
one she is torn apart for.

Why isn’t the female larger
and more colorful? Give me
the terrified red veins
of the albino raven,
the deep flush and large forearms
of the orchid mantis, also afraid.
Let me have fiery long hair that stings
with the smell of burning oak.

When I skin myself, I skin myself
in front of a mirror to see
all that pretty muscle.

I rehearse what crying looks like,
in my wardrobe keep buttons
that close soft bobbled sweaters
and feel an increasing desire
to become mud, to lie

beneath leaf litter and hide
from grabbing hands
that would put themselves inside me,
playing dead to save myself
from the salt of their fingertips
that craves a wound.

 

L Favicchia is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Kansas and is the editor in chief of LandLocked. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Post Road, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.

Dusk dense with pending rain
& a cold front shoving its way across the water,

I want to believe
anything is possible

or I just want to be handsome.
I know how shallow

desire is & still
I want & want

& open the window
to let in the cooling sky

& this breeze hums your name
& the clouds slide over

& pat a space next to them on the bed
& the temperature falls

& out beyond the pines
a great lake churns & churns.

 

Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

The greens are brighter somehow. The grass
not grass but a speaker for soundscapes,

yard songs like forcefields, pulsing
with peace and purpose, sermon-like,

the way cool air fills the lungs
with both rest and waking. Every day

is today if one considers physics. Or
think instead in terms of reflectance curves.

Yes, today is glowing green, hedge-like,
untrimmed because it’s a wild hedge

without ties to property or pension, waving
in the wind like ceremony, like couplets

printed on glassine paper
then gently placed atop pool water,

which is to say, we are outside again:
the mating song of crickets

bowing wings with wings, an orchestral movement
under the guise of question, wondering

if today is actually today, as in
the moment one thinks of as now. Nevertheless,

time goes on with its many shades of green—
lime and pickle and pear—and so many sounds:

crickets and cicadas, the buzzing of bees,
but man-made things too: motors, machines

of all types. One could call it a symphony
if they were kind, but the world is never kind.

A cricket dies of old age after ten weeks.
The earth swallows everything.

A hideous, hungry caterpillar the earth is, until again
it is leafy and green, blissful in its budding.

Time passes and then it’s the sun’s turn to swallow.
More time and then there is something else.

A cosmic flower, dark with pull. A black hole
that never covers its mouth when it yawns.

 

Adam Gianforcaro is a writer living in Wilmington, Delaware. His poems and stories can be found in Poet Lore, Third Coast, RHINO, Bending Genres, HAD, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.