The old black dog knows to turn around three times, even when all you say is lie. O Mother of rapt attention. O Mistress of Bones and Trust. How we dig holes and have nothing to fill them with. How the nuts we gather and bury are forgotten, and still we grow whole forests. This […]
Author Archives: Dale
I can’t remember exactly what his teacher said by Katie Richards
but I remember the knot in my stomach as I tried to hold it together in the narthex as my mother asked me what was wrong and I said James’ preschool teacher who is also his Sunday School teacher was noticing what I had been noticing and just told me and I remember the quick […]
Passing Obedience Around in a Moose Skull by Kelli Allen
The women said, you can have a daughter. The women insisted, there will be a big scene. The women begged, don’t mention the snakes. That’s the way it is with problems. Spreading the blanket over clover changes so little, but ground can be stubborn, often swallowing its own worms back down before the mallards arrive, and sometimes after they […]
Issue 25 CONTENTS
> read issue Julie Gard Viral Two-Step Tanja Bartel A Cat Pulling a Mouse Through a Crack With its Teeth Expiration Dates The Time I Saw Someone’s Childhood Without Them Knowing Ken Poyner The Man Who Painted His Wife Red Catherine Shukle When I Call Ramona at the Wastewater Treatment Plant Jeremy Gregersen Sistine Notebooks: […]
Viral Two-Step by Julie Gard
Self-checkout means no interaction, but I bring my own bags and it throws things off and the cashier has to come over. And the two-for-one vitamins don’t show up and the cashier has to come over. She does this all day, less than six feet, an essential worker on minimum wage. I am jittery with […]
Three Poems by Tanja Bartel
A Cat Pulling a Mouse Through a Crack With its Teeth A man pulling at a woman in a slant-parked car. She’s too full of blood and bile so she stays put, kicks out a leg. Nobody will eat today. There was this house: A safety pin held the boards together against a confrontational wind. […]
The Man Who Painted His Wife Red by Ken Poyner
What should he do with the red paint? Before he took it from the paint store he had thought he wanted the color blue. But then he realized he had no plan for what was going to be done with the paint; so, as he thought about the paint itself in ever more detail, what […]
When I Call Ramona at the Wastewater Treatment Plant by Catherine Shukle
She says: It’s you again. She says: Stop. She says: I’m going to have to report this. She says: I can’t. I would, but I can’t. Ramona says: I have three kids of my own. I know. But, she doesn’t know, because her kids are solid pieces of arm hair and foreskin and bumpy tongue and tonsils that wobble when they […]
Two Poems by Jeremy Gregersen
Sistine Notebooks: Death of Nicanor one night we were camping it must have been the usual crowd up late & drinking the cheapest beers we could illegally buy laughing & telling stories we had all already heard pete & andy were in the truck listening to music & sharing a joint i remember when a […]
It Wasn’t the Meat They Missed by Caroline Barnes
People hadn’t eaten it for years. The last cow had long since died of old age. Food scientists had replicated it so well even a connoisseur couldn’t tell the difference. Fake steak bled when pierced with a fork, plastic bones could be washed and returned to the store. Feedlots had been covered over with tract […]
I Am Not Wallace Stevens by Maddie Baxter
I am no Wallace Stevens. Oh, I am no Flannery. I won’t tattoo your back. I have no tools of divine permeance. I cannot strap batteries onto parachutes and hope to see your energies float. I cannot shoot water up through stems or tread lightly atop red wood roots. I had a friend recently tell […]
White Whirl by Andy Fogle
My mother makes friends with husband-and-wife dance instructors, and stays friends for 25 years until a falling out with the wife who two years later is dead of a brain tumor, but when I’m thirteen they have a pool and a hot tub, and I go over with my mother where sunshine abounds, where they’ve […]
Buzz by Richard Baldasty
Bees come from Hampstead, from Medina, from Milan and Singapore. From everywhere and more. It’s bee time, bees en masse buzzing like celebrities at Cannes. Sound means vibration, vibration equals quiver. Quiver turns quake. Bridges bounce. Streets split open. Buildings are falling down. People stand outside their vanished houses. Some in fancy dress, many naked. […]
In Two Wing Beats by Michael Cole
to the memory of Mary Oliver Great Blue Heron—blue-gray watchman with a golden-eyed stare—lifts from the breakwater and in six more beats, slow-glides down-shore pulling along his spindly black legs. A shadow in the rushes. He has been likened to an ascetic preacher…in his death robes delivering his sermon to whatever small creature will listen. […]
Two Poems by Julie Gard
Where’s Putin? He is shopping at a Moscow megamall disguised as a teenage model. He is haggling in the market in a headscarf. He is running shirtless on his treadmill, cursing Boris Nemtsov and every Chechnyan who didn’t assassinate him. He is standing guard with a Kalashnikov outside of a Vladivostok night club. He is […]
Parts of Zero by Fin Sorrel
I am breastfeeding angels. I hear machines, a knife can be buried in an orchard. I smell dogs coming around the corner. Someone’s lighting candles in the clouds. Oh, cartoons, overpass, worms drip from pears out of the garbage. I am breastfeeding angels. Coy fish swim around my legs when I wake. I drink water […]
Explain Like I’m Five: First Love by Zebulon Huset
You play marbles with aluminum marbles. Don’t ask me where your parents found those awesome marbles, just roll with it. So you play with your sibling all the time. Marbles day and night. You have perfected the flick and know about topspin and how far the aluminum marbles will bounce when shot at another— you’re […]
Alchemy: Outside Port au Prince by Lenore Balliro
They pick their way through the sadness of twisted chrome, clots of knotted wire, oil drums, blue paint flaking, beneath a faded sign, AVÈTISMAN, on the side of a slanted roof, a lean-to, but no guard dog, and no guard. They choose to visit at dusk, still light enough to harvest the corrugated, the gleaming, […]
Two Poems by Brad Rose
Exit Row This time, they’re sending me in a real ambulance. I may have short legs, but I’ve got a tall head. Normally, I try to limit my time in crowds, but I like to be everywhere at once. Some people say I’m just wasting my time. It makes me feel tingly. Thanks to my […]
Each Time by Bob Heman
Factual disputes cause the sun to rise later. The word “exception” is ignored each time it appears. There is a man or a woman or there is not. There are animals they are told about but never see. There is a house where the light cannot be turned off, and another that is always dark. […]
Issue 24 CONTENTS
> read issue Lara Frankena “Plume” Neil Carpathios “Do Not Disturb” Daisy Alioto “Zeus” Emilie Kneifel “<3” Eva Stefanidis “What to Do While Waiting for Your Luggage to Arrive in a Hong Kong Hotel Room” Elizabeth McLagan “All Around Is Passing, Mark Rothko” Cate McGowan “The World Will Blow” Jessie Eikmann “Love Poem: Inadequate […]
Plume by Lara Frankena
The F train judders to a halt, then resumes its crawl towards Manhattan. Across from me sits a man in a black wool coat. I have a book. He has lint, which he has been culling since I got on at 7th Avenue and 9th Street. On the other side of the carriage is a […]
Do Not Disturb by Neil Carpathios
Someone has hung it on my front door. It dangles from the knob. Stolen from a hotel, no doubt. Probably some neighbor kid did it on a dare. But wait. Ominous music starts to play. Like the soundtrack from Jaws. I stand in sweat pants, head swiveling for clues. From somewhere the deep voice of […]
Zeus by Daisy Alioto
I am sitting in the window of a Starbucks in Tribeca when a man asks me to watch his stuff while he goes to the bathroom. He tells me he just spent the night in jail. “I told the younger guys in there, every time your mother washes your clothes she’s thinking about the day […]
<3 by Emilie Kneifel
i less than three the fact that the heart emoticon dices love into something minuscule. a sum smaller than even a digit. almost as imperceptible as i want to be. i, almost nothing, almost breathing, listen to my maman tss tss read over texts for the sending. listen to her vacuum, little crumbs tinkling, clack […]
All Around Is Passing, Mark Rothko by Elizabeth McLagan
These paintings were to be his passport to a more luminous world, not encumbered by our nouns and adjectives, our interpretations which always fall short. Dore Ashton Passport photograph, signature, official stamp. Harmless blue, nothing blue, lost in the bottom of the bag blue. Encrypted, entombed, the vault of who you are. With a word […]
The World Will Blow by Cate McGowan
An aggressive vine eats its way across the South. It devours parking lots, clawing through Florida all the way to the Lake Fairy Inn’s foundations. Tendrils weave along the motel’s rusted railings, its rotted jambs. Creepers crawl through cracks, coming inside, taking over Ben’s brain. / In these conditions, he gets angry, his plans can’t […]
Love Poem: Inadequate Spider by Jessie Eikmann
On our first two dates, we stood in the dim street, you looking around at nothing, wondering if you should kiss me. Our last date, your lip imprints were so indistinct they could have belonged to an old lover, my mother, a stranger. My insides still unraveled out of habit. I jumped from your gutters […]
The Fourth Pig Made His House out of Sequins by Jessie Eikmann
They said it was the worst fucking idea they’d ever heard. I looked at the straw and sticks (horses. the Amish. Transcendentalism.) and bricks (inner city. Samuel Slater. Modernism.) and decided that mine had to be the most fabulous house ever made. I cemented it with glitter glue and imagined that when the wolf showed […]
Come and see the seals in sunny West Kirby! by Guy Elston
Take the Merseyrail from Lime Street, (they call it the Miseryrail round here, the locals have a famous sense of humour) or Central, or any of the other Liverpool stations, and ride until the very last stop on the Wirral line. Turn right out of the station, past the Victorian hotel, now a Wetherspoon’s, past […]
If I Had a Cemetery by Jory Post
for Lance I’d carve totem poles in place of headstones. They’d tell whole stories, better than inscriptions. They’d be the right height: five to six feet for men and women, twenty-one inches for babies. I’d hand-paint them. Crushed strawberries for red. Melted chocolate truffles for brown. The skin of eggplants for purple. […]
A Telescopic View by Jory Post
I was told by someone years ago not to write about the moon. That it was overused. A cliché. That was before I started writing poetry. But now, how can I resist? By avoiding the usual metaphors. By not having the rays of moonlight land on rippling waves at midnight. By never having the moon […]
Go Figure by Chet Corey
My life changed in a minute. It turned around on a dime. No, it must’ve been larger. It could’ve been a quarter. And it took more time. Infinitely more time to circumnavigate E pluribus Unum. Yet it seemed I’d gone nowhere, as if I’d been spinning my Goodyears bald, burning doughnuts in an empty parking […]