Alyssandra Tobin is the author of PUT EYES ON ME NOT LIKE A CURSE, a chapbook published by Quarterly West in 2022. Her poetry appears in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, New Ohio Review, Grist, Fugue, and elsewhere.
Photo by Lisa Marie Basile
'I felt like I was disappearing' — poetry by Amirah Al Wassif
When My Arm Flew Into the Air
When my arm flew into the air,
I calmed myself by believing I must be dreaming.
Any moment now, I would wake to the sound
of the gecko that’s been living in my room
for the past four months.
I haven’t killed it.
I don’t want to.
I didn’t feel like I was flying.
I felt like I was disappearing.
You know that strange training—
when you teach your body to die,
and bit by bit,
you start to feel each part fade?
I smelled the okra stew
our ninety-year-old neighbor was cooking.
I saw a large yellow butterfly
telling a joke in Salvador Dalí’s ear.
He was trapped inside a painting
hanging across from the neighbors’ window.
I saw him laugh.
And I thought:
He really was mad.
Or maybe I’m the mad one.
It’s not easy to watch your arm
lift off into the air.
Not easy to ask:
Did you really detach from my body?
and hear it answer
in a voice beyond logic—
the voice of a muffled child,
as if his parents had rushed the burial,
believed he was gone too soon,
sealed the coffin,
and drove away.
When my arm flew up,
I thought:
This is delirium.
Maybe I’m dying.
Maybe I’m about to write a new poem—
one that will be rejected
by many editors
but adored by one person,
who will carve it into the bark
of a massive fig tree.
And after he walks home,
the fig tree will stir from its long sleep
and finish writing the rest of the poem.
I don’t know exactly what happened.
But I do know this:
Whatever part of you flies off
becomes braver
than it ever was
before.
Yesterday, I Met My Jinn Double
Yesterday, I met my jinn double.
Her fingers were shaped like forks.
She smiled at me three times—
with an upside-down mouth.
The roughness of her skin reminded me
of the last time I touched a leaf with my bare hand.
A long time ago,
back when trees could still be touched,
back when trees belonged to the earth.
Back when grape clusters were earrings—
and ropes to escape.
I knelt before her and whispered:
“How many times have they killed you?”
And I heard the echo:
“How many times have they killed me?”
I’m not her.
I don’t want to be her.
I’m free.
I flutter from flower to flower,
tasting mulberries,
playing with clay.
She points to the moon,
trying to pull it down with a rope.
I got scared.
I wet myself.
I’m not a child—
but fear makes everyone do that.
The baby next door does it.
So did my grandfather—
and he was a bank manager.
No one is bigger than fear.
She comes closer.
Her feet were shaped like hooks.
I step back.
Then again.
And again—
until I disappear.
Or wake up
from the dream.
Amirah Al Wassif is an award-winning poet with several publications to her name. Her poetry collection, For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate was published in February 2019 by Poetic Justice Books & Arts, followed by her illustrated children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories in February 2020. Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company published her most recent poetry book, How to Bury a Curious Girl in 2022. Her forthcoming poetry collection, The Rules of Blind Obedience will be released in December 2024.
Amirah’s poems have appeared in various print and online publications, including South Florida Poetry, Birmingham Arts Journal, Hawaii Review, The Meniscus, Chiron Review, The Hunger, Writers Resist, Right Now, Reckoning, New Welsh Review, Event Magazine, and many others.
Photo by Lisa Marie Basile
'light in my teeth' — poetry by Lisa Marie Oliver
Aubade with Light In My Teeth
Daybreak. Broken fever.
Drip of the eggshell sink. Light
in my teeth. Quavering smoke-brain,
mute steps. Panel of bright fronds,
pink orbs presses window panes.
Last night, the mimosa tree fell.
I did not hear it. How not to gorge.
How not to fear. I’m not afraid
he said before he died. Almost
last words. I did not understand
the way he was brought down
minus any thunder. How to respire.
How to describe a silk tree’s last
gasps. How to shrine the afterwards,
unquiet altar of branches traced
with morning. Cool brow.
Bark-husk. Honey. Resin.
12 questions
after Bhanu Kapil
On a mountain trail at the ocean we visit an alder with split trunks intertwined, call it ours.
*
Every day, I feed crows and hummingbirds. A seagull perches on my neighbor’s roof, watching hungrily. 200 miles from home. 144 hours as the bird flies.
*
In this metaphor I’m all three variations of birds.
*
After my lover dies, I visit the tree. I offer feathers, skin, hair, shells.
*
A pale whelk on the sand: apex, suture, whorl, rib, striations, outer lip, aperture, spire.
*
Memory is a heavy hooked beak.
*
I walk fully clothed into the ocean. Seagulls squat on wet sand, mired with rain. For one brief moment, I remember nothing.
*
Despite expectations and desire, there is nothing silent beneath a wave.
*
After he dies, I pull out my hair. It takes many days to break my teeth. Feed them to the seagulls. Throw each arm into the sea. These knees. My cleaved feet. Bury them under marram grass until all that remains is a useless engorged heart.
*
Rain all night. Fog shore. No partition between wave and sky.
*
A balcony with a view of basalt sea stack. He is too sick to leave the bed. I eat quietly to not wake him. I’ve never tasted anything so perfectly sweet.
*
Whenever I consume a huckleberry.
Lisa Marie Oliver is the author of "Birthroot" (Glass Lyre Press). Recent poems have appeared in Harbor Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rust and Moth, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her son. For more: lisamarieoliver.com
'a kind of devotion' — poetry by Elizabeth Sulis Kim
The bird
I saw the bird
heard
its high pitched trill
when I thought of a bird it’s what I saw
autumn
its cold-warm glow
the wind burnt my wet hair
or that’s how it seemed then
four years after the cat died
or rather,
was put out of her misery
in a room where nothing grew
it was late in the evening
hunger
no appetite we tasted the
bile at the
back of our
throats
death was uneventful
but the bird
flittered under my arm when I thought of it
disappeared into the thicket
in that shaded corner of town
months before I walked the crescent
glancing into the old houses
catching wafts of rose-tinted air
the Near East in the north
it always comes back again.
those petals were dew glazed and sweet
the bird came later when the flowers were gone
wet fir trees stirred
everything else garden mulch
and stone
The Heron
whenever I think of
the heron
I think of
the girl who traced the
playground
that now feels like a graveyard
hovered around its seams
weightless
elated
she stood on one leg
forgot to pray
or rather
thought her fasting
a kind of devotion
at the altar overlooking
the precipice
I wanted to be possessed by the
same demoness
or was she a haunting
or a feeling
or a spirit fuelled by light and air
a body
borrowed:
something to overcome
another mind-fuck myth:
mind and body cannot be separated
beyond the starving girl
the heron stands on one leg
waiting for some thing
or other
Elizabeth Sulis Kim is an Edinburgh-based writer. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, BBC Culture, Ambit, the LA Review of Books, the New Orleans Review, TANK, Stylist, Refinery29, Electric Literature, and Oh Comely, among others. She is the founding editor of Cunning Folk Magazine and edited Spiritus Mundi: Writings Borne from the Occult.
photo by Lisa Marie Basile
'disappear into the honeysuckle’s undying' — poetry by Marcus Myers
Love Song (6)
When she turned away my shame spoke its face
Tanned from a can wearing its awful straw hat
And rusted sideburns like curved knives
And in cocky seersucker suspenders sweaty
Spiting in my inner ear you’re not you’re too
And it fingers while mouthing the Mark Twain
Through its cigar-chomped mustache
A tooth-rotted
And tobacco-stained vernacular in the excavation
Of the mud-preserved vessel
I can’t unhear its jawbone’s gold fillings when it says
You’re a stupid mother
A dumber father of your futures
When she left my shame acted
It found me in my private quarters
Barged on in and pulled a cleaver from a leather sleeve
Hidden beneath my jacket slung left of my heart
It got what it demanded
A pound of our flesh
The returns on our returns
Can We Stop Calling it Blue Bile
If we haven’t spoken
In many years, the air
Between the trees
Thick as greenbrier.
If these blue marks are cuts.
If my boots are full.
If I’ve already stained the thigh
Of each pant leg.
If our fretboard holds
A fan of fingerprints.
If also the cap’s brim.
If cuffs and shirt pocket.
When footprints trail off
From the square. Disappear
Into the honeysuckle’s undying
And reappear along the stream
To the river and delta.
Then let’s call it a map
Of the blue trail.
The tune we made and how
We might teach them
To play it again. Instead
To play it green or orange.
The songbook anybody
Can take from the sky.
Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches, advises advanced students, and serves as co-founding and managing editor of Bear Review. In 2022, the Poet Laureate of Missouri published one of his poems, alongside those by MO poets Mary Jo Bang, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Aliki Barnstone, John Gallaher, Jenny Molberg and others, as a tiny book to hand to “readers who say they don’t read poetry”. Author of the chapbook Cloud Sanctum (Bottlecap Press 2022), his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Common, Contemporary Verse 2, The Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Poetry South, RHINO, Salt Hill, Southeast Review, and other such journals.
'pulled from dark stars' — poetry by Devan Murphy
ANGER AGENT (SCORPIO SUN)
Pulled from dark stars. Armored
luck, hot with breath.
My first planet is a heartbeat; my second
is dimmer and of the dead.
My attachment to the world is a knife floating
above my forehead and it’s how I make my way.
Dramatic taproot! I am my own rider and this knife
points only at my mouth; you couldn’t catch it.
However we originate, no matter the sky,
we are all fierce until we are not:
in dreams I shimmer
and am small.
ABSORBER (PISCES MOON)
Dreamed up by melting orbs. Scaly
assurance, shy and weepy with regret.
I take to my ice giant to forget. I am last in a loop—
a band no tine could puncture or divvy.
My attachment to the world is a crepe-paper
lantern over the sea: it cannot allure forever.
I am covered by the universe and I give
unto the universe. This concert of light pricks the eyes.
I melt. The lantern won’t resurface. You’ll see—after more
centuries, I will go beyond the farthest beyond.
Alone, I build fortresses
from fins, scales.
Devan Murphy is the author of the chapbook I'm Not I'm Not I'm Not a Baby (Ethel 2024), a collection of prose poems and essays and abstract comics about God and loneliness. Her writing and illustrations have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Cincinnati Review, -ette, The Iowa Review, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. You can find her online at devmurphy.club or on Instagram @gytrashh. She resides in Pittsburgh with her cat, Buddy, where she writes wikiHow articles and personality quizzes for a living.
'In dreams it’s your hands I see' — poetry by Kirun Kapur
Raga of the Reports
(for my father)
When it snapped, the thread of time, that chime—
god’s veena string—a line of melody I called life,
it ended. The moon creaked off its hinge, wind blew in
the little coffins of my ears,
my mouth opened, I found a field—
pathless, unpeopled, fireflies: off-on, off-off.
*
In dreams it’s your hands I see—peeling pith from an orange, midair telling a story, stirring sugar into tea, gesturing the makhta, lifting a splinter from my good-girl feet.
It’s your voice—the only one to say my name the way god says it.
I say my name in rooms, chairs full, the air conditioned, lights livid as if for surgery. I sound like I’m importing myself.
When I open my mouth, I see the quince is in its glory. When I open my
mouth I hope to find
that line of sound—my name, chime of you and me, of time,
a coral blossom. In the mind. In the mouth.
In the yard, a whole bush shaking with sparrows.
*
When the doctor couldn’t look at me. When she read out the report I’d already read—
the quince was glorious. I smelled the perfumed air. I felt the little mind. My mind
became a coffin, then a field. Do you have questions, asked the doctor in the moon?
I closed my eyes and listened to you call my name. My god. In the chime that used to be my life.
*
God said, let there be light. God said, let the flowers and the little coffins bloom. God said, time and fathers—all there is. You must open your mouth
and speak the world. You must import yourself to the field called life.
I repeat my name. My date of birth.
I went to bed a person. Woke up a patient that first time,
your hand on my forehead declaring
I had cold-body-fever, rubbing Ram Tel, god’s oil, over my scraped palms.
I went to bed a person and woke up sweating on a train.
Never eat the dessert, you used to say. The fields
of rice streaked by. I dozed and woke to find a charpai
full of turbaned men playing cards outside the window. I wondered. I woke again. Would you be at the station? At my bedside with a book?
Your hands. I see them—
I went to bed and a song went by
and now another man putting his hand on mine saying my name the wrong way, saying
Dexamethasone, Isatuximab, Lenalidomide, I’m saying
soon there will be lilacs. The quince has passed. I cut the last prickly branches. I wait for the lilac to choke me with perfume.
*
Once you brought me to a holy man. He told me not to put my nose too close to his roses. I could inhale small bugs. But you said every tiny thing makes a song. The holy know
the syllables. The songs of all the little living things. Thick silky roses hung over dry pavers in the mid-June heat. Gulab. Gulabi. The monsoon
hadn’t come, yet there was this pink lushness. I think of it now
pressing my face to my own not-yet lilacs. Who knows what’s inside
when you open your mouth. Your mind. When you will wake up
a dry field of study.
What kind of syllables are the doctor’s? Divine
enough to fill the little coffins? Lush
enough for all the little living things?
*
When god spoke in her ear, filled her night with fireflies. When she was
pronounced out of herself and into the field of care—
A dream of roses. A dream of hands on her forehead. Her god-name spinning her into the world.
*
Saraswati plays the veena. The whole world vibrates with sound. Oh, the sound of your name in the mouth of the ones who love you. Oh, the little melody
of love. Of fear. Of fever. Of flowers about to bloom. Listen, listen—
strings of the veena
calling
*
It’s too hot when the lilacs finally bloom. Smell so intense it feels
like sound.
*
In waiting rooms, I give my name, my date of birth. In moon rooms,
on lunar dates. In scanners, the lights blink on and off. I listen to the hum—
*
The goddess plays the veena. Flowers bloom and bloom.
Fingers picking out the melody. Fingers laying down the drone.
The holy wrote: the human throat
is a sareer veena—moan and hum
of the universe inside you. The rhyme of time. Open your mouth
to find the lilac after the quince, the song-flower of your mind.
*
On the day I first put the chemicals in my veins—
On the first day I use a medicine that will ruin my body to save my life,
learning to tune myself to that string of syllables
19 children are shot in a school.
This poem should stop. All the blood should stop in every vein.
What’s the use?
The broken veena string, the smashed chime—
all the gods and goddesses
should be stricken from the page.
We open our mouths—
horror error sorrow terror—
We open and close our mouths—
The syllable sobs
of life keep pouring into the light—
Name. Date of Birth.
The child blinking into the field. The field
filled with little coffins.
How will we bear the song?
How can any other story go on?
We open our mouths
and lay the flowers on the graves.
Off-on-off-off. Even today—
Stop, I say. Stop.
The notes have changed. The raga continues to play,
the nurse repeats the syllables of my life. A new music—
report after report. Name after name
nothing stops
How can a song contain it?
How can a vein?
It should not.
I open my mouth
and here’s the nurse with the needle
saying my name.
Here’s a father with an inconsolable bouquet.
Here’s a god-tune in my ear. Saying,
listen, listen—
you were always just a little variation
of one little refrain
listen, listen—
the monsoon after the white-hot June.
Kirun Kapur is a poet, editor, teacher and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015) which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares , AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner and many other journals. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.
photo by lisa marie basile
'our gaze aqueous' — poems by Gioele Galea (translated by Abigail Ardelle Zammit)
08
Unyielding
in our head
the thought of water
and our gaze aqueous.
Asking
what our eyes bespeak
is pointless.
From water
no sound issues forth,
and no sound remains
in its hold.
Insistenti
ġo rasna
l-idea tal-ilma
u ħarsitna fluwida.
Nistaqsu
x’inhuma għajnejna
ma jrendix.
Mill-ilma
ma jqumx ħoss,
u ħoss ma jżommx
ġo ħoġru.
09
Look, everything has receded.
Down to sounds,
one by one,
falling dead
in our laps;
and there’s nothing to revive them,
not even our lips.
What could
this water be, so still
as far as our sight can carry?
Our eyes open,
as if within them
the horizon awakes.
Ara, kollox ċeda.
Sal-ħsejjes,
wieħed wieħed,
waqgħu mejta
f’ħoġorna;
u m’hemmx x’jirxuxtahom,
lanqas fommna.
Xi jkun
dan l-ilma mank imkemmex
sa fejn tagħtina l-ħarsa?
B’għajnejna miftuħin,
donnu ġo fihom
iqum ix-xefaq.
10
Yes,
you may
lose your eyes
forever;
they might
never return
to your face.
If
the water takes them
the sky will swallow them up.
Have you ever
seen pools
not taken up
by blueness?
Iva,
għandek mnejn
titlifhom għal dejjem
għajnejk;
għandhom mnejn
ma jerġgħux
lura f’wiċċek.
Jekk
jeħodhomlok l-ilma
jiblagħhomlok is-sema.
Qatt
rajt għadajjar
mhumiex meħuda
mill-kħula?
11
To renew
the mortified pool of your soul
the sky sends water.
Have you ever
seen it looking at you
once more
after rain?
Renewing you,
and letting go.
Lest you
bind it through your gaze.
Biex iġedded
l-għadira umiljata ta’ ruħek
jibgħat l-ilma s-sema.
Qatt
rajtu jħares lejk
darb’oħra
wara x-xita?
Iġeddek,
u jitilqek.
Li ma tmurx
torbtu b’ħarstek.
12
What’s there
to keep
of your soul?
Water
escapes
from your hands
and the sun and wind
dry them up.
You’d be burying it
in a desert if you
bury your face.
in your palms.
X’hemm
xi żżomm
minn ruħek?
Jaħrabl-ilma
minn idejk
u x-xemx u r-riħ
inixxfuhomlok.
Fil-pali,
tkun tidfnu ġo deżert
jekk tidfen wiċċek.
Gioele Galea read theology at the University of Malta. For fourteen years, he led a solitary life in a hermitage. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Ifrixli Ħdanek Beraħ (Malta: PalPrints Publications, 1996), Dija (Malta: Carmelite Institute, 2012), Bla Qiegħ' (Horizons, 2015), Għera (Malta: Horizons, 2018), Ilma (Malta: Horizons, 2022), al of which give witness to an uncompromising spiritual journey where bareness is as overwhelming as it is essential. Galea has also published two prize-winning hybrid memoirs, Tħabbat Xtaqtek (Malta: Horizons, 2017) u In-Nar Għandu Isem (Malta: Horizons, 2020). His poetry has been translated into English and Arabic.
Abigail Ardelle Zammit is a Maltese writer, editor and educator whose poetry and reviews have appeared in international journals and anthologies including CounterText, Black Iris, Matter, Tupelo Quarterly, Boulevard, Gutter, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, Poetry International, The SHOp, Iota, Aesthetica, Ink, Sweat and Tears, High Window, O:JA&L, The Ekphrastic Review, Smokestack Lightning (Smokestack, 2021) and The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2022 (Véhicule Press, 2023). Abigail’s poetry collections are Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh (Etruscan Press, Wilkes University, 2025), Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (London: SPM, 2015) and Voices from the Land of Trees (UK: Smokestack, 2007). She has co-authored two bilingual pamphlets (Half Spine, Half Wild Flower – Nofsi Spina, Nofsi Fjur Selvaġġ) and written A Seamus Heaney guidebook for high-school students.
Trouble by Catherine Kyle
BY CATHERINE KYLE
Trouble
I dreamt I was a tree, deep in a forest. My roots were wound around a boulder covered with moss and needles I had shed. A voice in the dream said, “See—you’ve become so accustomed to this pain, you’ve grown yourself around it.”
Even then, my roots did not let the boulder go. Even then, they clung to it like a precious creature sheltered, a satchel held close to the chest.
*
I do not know how to speak about this. I do not know the word for watching someone I love become, voluntarily and involuntarily, swallowed by a garment they put on. I do not know the cry to make as the fur grows over their hands. I do not know what plea to scream as the collar grows over their face. As the line between the sleeve and their skin disappears.
A thing that transcended words. Words, the most reliable life raft I had known.
*
I dreamt I was battling a beast in the woods. Snow made crystals on the ground. In the dream, I was flat on my back, lifting a shield with one exhausted arm. The beast pounded on it, scratched at it, knocking its jewels loose. It roared terribly, shaking snow from the bare branches. Its body moved, reckless and relentless. But the eyes were those of someone I loved. In anguish. As horrified as I was.
The eyes spoke in words I do not know. The beast’s breaths, rising through the cold air in puffs, were words I do not know.
*
I do not know what to say when someone I love says, voice shaking, “If it is here, I will drink it”—then goes to the market, returns home, and fills the shelves with it. When my questioning of this, soft as a sparrow, is met with snarls and barks.
Whom am I speaking to, in these moments? The person, or the beast?
*
How many monsters can a heart contain? How many selves can dwell there? I imagine myself the way the beast must have seen me—a hindrance, a noisy gnat.
I imagine myself the way the person must have seen me, but here, there is only a void. I imagine myself as two eyes pleading, the silence of lifting a shield.
*
When everything explodes, when the powder keg of the home finally flashes into cinders, I dream I am hanging from a single board of its wreckage, dangling over a cliff. Smoke pours from the ruins of the home. The board I am gripping is charcoal. A voice in the dream whispers to me, “All you have to do is let go.”
I know I will hit every rock on the way down. I know the sea is there to catch me.
I unlock my fingers like roots from the board. I fall and fall and fall.
*
Foam and salt slice every red wound. I float on my back, gaze skyward. I have no name for the pillar of smoke at the cliff’s edge that used to be a home. I have no name for the absence of a figure that might have stood there and gazed back.
I swim because the stars have no language, just presence. I swim because the waves have no words, just a pulse. I swim because my own heart is present and pulsing. I let these things carry me on.
Catherine Kyle is the author of Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other poetry collections. She was the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award, a finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize in poetry, and a finalist for the 2021 Pinch Literary Awards. She works as an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing.
Checking my Dead Mother’s Horoscope by Alicia Turner
BY ALICIA TURNER
“the dead / borrow so little from / the past / as if they were alive.”
A Little White Shadow — Mary Ruefle
Shadow Work (on Checking my Dead Mother’s Horoscope)
It’s a Tuesday morning.
I am scrolling through an online obituary guestbook to relive my mother’s life.
She’s immortalized on the top of the page — the photo a scanned copy of a Polaroid from a throwaway camera that I once begged her to develop.
She’s wearing a solid white t-shirt — one that she changed out of just moments after the photo was taken, in fear of spilling something on it.
I always remember the minor moments, but not the mess. And I hate that about myself.
My mother went missing and was declared dead on the same day: Tuesday, October 17th, 2006.
Her body wasn’t found until weeks later, in the passenger seat of my uncle’s beaten-down, blue truck, nestled in muddy water and the river’s rage —
which is to say that she gave herself back to the earth and is the reason the earth has something to grieve.
Then, at fourteen, I colored it painfully ironic – that blue was her favorite color, and she never stopped moving, and she loved to swim. I was sure when the truck accelerated that she saw the sky in the rear view. Tested time, balled up her fists, and fought fate. Told fate to “Go fuck itself,” like she’d tell anyone who held her down, who told her to be still.
My mother was a twisting, turning thing. My mother was reckless in still water.
***
I’ve always said with certainty that October 17th was “blue.” On that day, the rain was relentless. I didn’t bring an umbrella to school because no one predicted it —
not even the weekly forecast in the back of the countertop magazines (* that my mother would refuse to get rid of solely for the horoscope sections). She was a real-life laugh track and a heavy heart (a proclaimed Leo rising), who loved to have her life be read back to her.
But not me, no — all Virgo. I’ve always been too afraid of flying off the page, to show up for life, to slow down. I’ve always been too careful to go puddle jumping for the fear of tracking messes – but my mother encouraged it. She liked predicted chaos, as simple and complex as it was.
***
This is the part where I transition into telling you that I tracked her body for weeks. And I tell you that the water was too elevated to find her. That October 17th was blue because it bruised me like a punch to the gut. Like a gut feeling. And you want to tell me that “it’s not [my] fault,” but I am not a blameless God. I am no God at all.
But on that day the moon was in Virgo.
And the moon controls the tides.
And rivers eventually end up flowing into oceans.
I make-believe that the sky helped me intuit the words she needed to her — and trust that I had the best view of her life.
While irrational, I wish I would’ve called it sooner. Not waited for her to call.
Not pretended to believe in underwater voyages where I spent whole days holding my breath.
Because now I think of her every time I find a phone book.
I think of her every time it’s bright out and twice when it rains.
I always check the weather before I leave the house, because I like predictions. Predictability.
And I always check my horoscope.
***
Today, it tries to teach me the difference between surface and depth:
“There’s a grand water configuration mysteriously guiding your hand.
Have you heard the water is still rising?”
From somewhere behind the shadow work, my mother’s starry-eyed news reads:
“Dear, Leo: Be cautious. Water is the only element that can extinguish your flame. But do not fear — your life is loud, all blazing. You are an incessantly-lit cigarette – no ashes. The river’s mouth is always hungry for more — but so are you.
You will never be caught dead in a white t-shirt, to be a stain on your own life.”
Alicia Turner holds an MA in English and is a grant writer & 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, Defunkt Magazine, Sybil Journal, The Daily Drunk, ExPat Press, Rejection Letters Press, Screen Door Review, J Journal Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Screenshot Lit, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, Cartridge Lit., Space City Underground, époque press, among others.
After Life by Aimée Keeble
By Aimée Keeble
After Life
When I die, I'm reunited with my parents for thousands of years. I look exactly like I did at twelve and my mom looks thirty-five which makes her happy. My dad is kind of a blur between thirty-seven and eighty. The cocker spaniel is back and so is the cat that ate my hamster. But he's outside because he was always outside. We have a great time, all four of us. There are always half-fizzy two liters of 7Up in the fridge and I wonder if there is any significance to this. We play board games a lot, especially Splat which I think disappeared from retail sometime in the early 90s. It feels good to be in memory. Mary Poppins comes on the TV a lot during the Holidays, and we normally make time to sit down together and watch it. Outside the windows, the sky is gold and moving.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, my dad says to me.
Can you spell it?
S, I start.
No, he says.
S, I say again.
Wrong! He cries out.
I say S a few more times and he's looking at me with his forever eyes, smiling like he's always known he's smarter than me. And I'm so glad about that.
Can you spell it? He asks again.
I look at my mother but she's holding the cocker spaniel like a baby and Dick Van Dyke is talking to penguins. Animals can be distracting.
Can you spell it?
I give up, I tell my dad. I want to fall asleep on the sofa before the movie ends.
I,T! He yells. He's delighted.
I get it, I say. That's so stupid.
The movie ends but I'm awake, trying to backtrack my mind into getting to the answer.
Move on, my dad says.
I can't, my brain won't let me, I answer.
It's dark now and I stand in the doorway calling the cat's name. He doesn't come and so I go further into the yard and say his name a few more times. I turn back and close the front door and stand in the hallway, enjoying the safe night feeling. In life, the cat was the first to go. My dad would have been proud of him.
Aimée Keeble has her Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Agency. Aimée lives in North Carolina and is working on her second novel.
A Visit to El Cementerio Viejo by Isa Guzman
BY ISA GUZMAN
A Visit to El Cementerio Viejo
for Titi Paula
Before the trip, I drew the Ten of Swords.
It was the first time going back to La Isla for close to ten years. The first time I would be there as a woman. The last time I was on the island, I was saying my goodbyes to Titi. It has been years, but it was too difficult to imagine the island without her. It wasn't possible to acknowledge it. In my mind, I could still envision her living her life at her house in Ceiba Sur. Feeding the stray chickens, or dogs, or people with whatever she had left in her small kitchen. There was no other truth.
As expected, the trip started out rough. We had to go from San Juan, in the northern part of the island, to Juana Diaz, a town well on the southern coast. We were expecting a long drive, but because of some complications, we only left the capital as the sun was going down. We would drive into the night.
I had gone to the island with my chosen family, and we all had our plans to reconnect with the aspects of island life that always eluded us. Puerto Rico is a place we so desperately want to call home. Distance and time estrange us. I think it is easier for the rest to say this is home, but not me.
Watching the island from the passenger window, I couldn't help but feel each sword pierce me. Who could ignore the failing infrastructure? Unlit and incomplete highways? The empty buildings? The for-sale signs on dozens of houses? That unrelenting thought that I was just a visitor, or worse, an intruder, with no business being here? Even the mountains appeared to turn their faces away from me.
I carried these swords over the next few days and nights. It was difficult to appreciate the views, the sounds, and the calm. There was an impending collapse inside my chest and mind. I spent Sunday night wasted on the balcony of our rental, overlooking a mountainside covered in trees. In the worst of it, a hallucination overwhelmed me with images of figures walking back and forth through the trees. An army of ghosts who refused to approach the house, but would stand in the middle of the road and stare up at me.
Then my turn came. We agreed to a day to take a few hours to drive to Juncos, and make that all important visit. I wanted to visit my family house, but first I had to pay respects to my Titi and the rest of my familia at the Cementerio Viejo.
The day was rain. At least, all I can recall is the rain that poured as we approached the town. My heart jumped at the first houses we saw. The basketball court. The cemetery itself. Little had changed. In fact, the area was doing well compared to many other towns on the island. As soon as we stopped, I got out of the car and began walking straight to my destination with only the graveyard attendant called after me to take his umbrella.
As always, I wandered around the painted white stones. Every time my parents and I would visit the island, we always set time to pay our respects. Every visit was a strange incident. Often, we got lost. My thoughts were racing with memories of under-cooked chicken, lullabies, mosquito nets, quenepa trees by her driveway, the stray dogs she took in, and her coffee I never got to taste. I was lost. Lost, lost. Right until I noticed the unmarked grave, apparently occupied by a witch, situated right next to my family's tomb.
The rain hadn't let up. A trembling took over my limbs. It overwhelmed me with the quiet and finality of the moment. The first time presenting myself as the woman I am. The tears came easily, but I hadn't expected how clear my voice would be. I began speaking in fluent Spanish. Something I had never done. My Spanish is beyond rota. I began talking to my great aunt, my grandmother, and everyone else interred in that tomb. Spoke with them about my struggles with my gender and all the horrible experiences I’ve gone through and hidden. Spoke with them about all my hopes and dreams. Spoke with them in earnest about the hopelessness that defined these two years of both the pandemic and my transition.
It wasn't a confession. I was searching for acknowledgment. A sign that I could be accepted and loved. So many regrets had tangled themselves inside my body. My self-imposed silence being the most prominent. As the words kept flowing out, the silence of the area finally eased me. I felt as if I was being listened to. I was being listened to. At my last words, a plea to protégeme y cuídame, the rain let up. Some sun broke through the clouds. It was the cue to leave in peace. A moment of tremendous love. Not only for the possibility of the acceptance from my family, but a tremendous self love that brought me to this moment. To speak myself without fear.
Isa Guzman is a poet and recent Brooklyn College MFA graduate from Los Sures, Brooklyn. Dedicating her work to the hardship, traumas, and political struggle within the Boricua Diaspora, especially the LGBTQ+ (Boriquir) communities within it. Isa helps lead several projects including: The Titere Poets Collective, The Pan Con Titeres Podcast, La Esquina Open Mic, and La Cocina Workshop! She have published her work through several magazines, including The Acentos Review, The Bridge, Public Seminar, and also appears in several anthologies, such as The Other Side of Violet, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. You can follow her through their social media: @Isa_Writes.
Poetry by Kathy Paul
By Kathy Paul
Kathryn Paul is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Her poems have appeared in The Examined Life; Last Leaves; Abandoned Mine; Rogue Agent; Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine; Hospital Drive; The Ekphrastic Review; Lunch Ticket; Stirring; and Pictures of Poets. Kathy lives in Albuquerque, NM
Peak Hurricane Season by Laura Andrea
By Laura Andrea
Peak Hurricane Season
Fall eeks into the tropics during sunset. Six in the afternoon beats its way inside through the blades of the box fan on my bedroom window. It’s still too hot to rip apart childhood novels and high school textbooks in a newfound passion for collage. It will be until at least late November. The poetry will have to find itself, black out itself.
I don’t remember locking the bedroom door. A habit stuck in a cycle of breaking and reforming, a specter onto itself. It’s the only way to assure the stillness promised by autumn. Hurricane season is entering its peak and the greens are greener. From the right angle—surrendered on the ground—they can cover up most of the sky. The blue is the giveaway but only if you’ve bragged to an expired lover about it.
Reaccustoming myself to perpetuity is taking some getting used to. If the seasons don’t change the people less so. The door is always swung a smidge, not that we need more than a crack or keyhole to breach back into something better left. Death here isn’t cyclical, seasonal, or expected—but violent. Purposeful. No skeletal trees and marigold yellow leaves to remind us rebirth is normal. Rebirths are suspect.
We can play at it though. Midday sun yells at me for traversing the busy street. It’s not my fault the sidewalks are parallels, never to cross paths. Refuge takes the form of a good ol’ American store seasonally defined even at this perfect latitude. I hold a baby’s long-sleeved flannel, soft and flat and perfectly orange. The store is empty save from employees stocking the clothes that won’t sell in this heat. The shirt is cheap because it’s small. Would make a worthwhile shoplifting story. It’ll never get lost in my hands, so I hang it back on the rack. They have clean bathrooms; the crying should happen there.
If only the beer would stay chilled in my hand, nightfall could trick me. Like a fake engagement ring worn only to bed. It fits better on my thumb anyway (freakish knuckles). The humidity induced sweat activate the ink. The green ring stain around the wrong finger is embarrassingly permanent. More green. More goddamn green.
Relentless. A metaphor too confused to seduce anyone. Greed, innocence, nature, jealousy.
It’s all gotta go.
The pile is intrusive. Moved from desk chair to bed to nightstand back to desk chair, like stubborn laundry. A dry erase marker, a trio of little alien men, an alcohol wipes package, two shirts, a hat, a palm tree tapestry. On occasion the pile will decorate the floor, but it imitates a hill too well. Putting everything back makes me scream so I tape them to the empty teal wall. It’s green enough to be punished too.
The wall faces two windows. After long enough it might yellow the assortment of plastic.
Midnight welcomes light storming. It’s finally dark enough drown the green even though I still feel it there. The window doesn’t even feel cold under my hands pressing against it. I must look like an apparition, the blackout curtains draping my back. Every flash of lightning forces me to blink. To hide the phantoms roaming the green.
It’s been a year or maybe a day. Time keeps folding in on itself and looping around. Bedroom furniture shifts around again but there’s nowhere else to put these old books except under the bed. Not enough pictures of 17-year-old me were taken so she rips herself from those pages and stands at the foot of the bed. She’d roam, but there’s little space for foot traffic and doesn’t want to get yelled at.
If I win tonight, she’ll join the green, below. If I don’t, we’ll stare at each other through the mirror usually covered with the tapestry. If she’s especially willful, she’ll wear me and visit the house. It’s slightly off and exactly the same as she left it.
Lately it only rains at night. It’s almost cold. Almost fooling. It’s hard too. Reminder of what is to come, the danger zone we’re about to enter and how the past months’ heat was a warning. Summer is a ghost haunting the Caribbean. Autumn is its white bedsheet.
Laura Andrea is a writer and educator from Carolina, Puerto Rico. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. Her work can be found in Contrapuntos, Acentos Review, and Boundless Anthology, among others. They’re the author of ‘genderbi’ (Ghost City Press, 2022) a poetry microchap, and writes the column 'Monsterfucker' for Final Girl Bulletin Board. You can follow their day-to-day on Instagram & Twitter @lauranlora
A Child of Air by Ruth Nakamura
By Ruth Nakamura
A Child of Air
A large part of me connects to earth. I am solid ground, cannot swim well, though I enjoy being in gentle shallow water. I am rounder, heavier, curvier. Give me bread, wheat-stalks of the earth, ground and transformed, fluffy, give me a few slices of buttered bread, French bread from the market, oven bread from the Pueblos, let me use it to mop up red chile ladled atop over-easy eggs as a meal, mini harvest, and I am happy.
But I am also a child of air. Give me the moon in a jar, an imaginative work of art or story, let me wallow, introverted, in creative writing, journaling, dream records. As the season changes, I look to the sky. Easily, I float there, follow the migratory birds. I can picture their journey, the temperature of the wind over each feather. The subtle colors they bend into the cooling evenings, ghosts of lavender, soft rills of pink.
The long lines of Canadian geese traveling south along the Rio Grande river bring autumn in their wings, in their songs, a trill I grew up hearing, down in in our river valley home. A thread of sound to weave that feeling of changing light, a rounder, softer, dimmer gold, into my bones, a siren call to lift stifling heat, carry it away on monsoon clouds.
What is it about the season that makes creativity so prolific for me? Many of my poems unfold in the rite of autumn, her ritual of leaf flame. The entire world I inhabit steps into a kind of nostalgia, settling deeper into itself as I sink my feet into muddied banks of Guadelupe River, stand on the sluggish brown bank, become still as a snowy egret hunting the moon, her feathers speared with light of cottonwood gold. I wear the mask of Dia de Los Muertos. Think of marigolds and monarchs while there is still gilt to be seen, I too am filtered through the lens of dying leaves.
It must be that I am witness to death. All around, insects are on their last flight, they glitter more than ever, the blaze of cicadas, the leap of grasshoppers, the gathering songs of butterflies, frantic, edged, then slowed and dulled, the last of the leaf chomp on my giant sunflowers, a feast for birds.
It must be that I am witness to leaving. I take down the hummingbird feeders, they need to travel south with their colors and their songs, while wrapping myself in sweaters against desert chill, or tapestried jackets, don long sleeve ware to knit the warmth they must travel to find. The bluebirds. Gone. The geese, heralds, take weeks and are far more visible, bodies and bodies, a mass exodus.
It must be that I am witness to gathering. The preparation of winter birds, they fatten themselves at the birdfeeders, gorge upon my giant sunflowers, grown from twenty-year-old seeds my dad gave me. Squirrels in the mountains run up ponderosa trunks with fattened cheeks. Mammalian fur thickens. The chile is roasted in front of grocery stores or we buy it in bulking sacks, pounds of it, peel, roast, repeat. Its splinters of smoky sharp smell breathe fall into the air. It is our leaving-summer-song.
I stand here fully welcoming the season. Preparing for the stew with buttered bread, the early dark, the stacks of wood, the morning frost, smell of cedar woodsmoke sharp and clean as a blessing beneath starlight. A break from wildfires. Sometimes from the wind. Sheltered in the valley of mountains. A longer sleep. An assessment of memory and dream brought on by the call of the great horned owl at 2 a.m.
It must be that all these things, they are old hand mirrors we hold up to peer within, finding ourselves inside, on the fringes. If we allow true sight, we find the connection to the world we walk. We are not separate from Her natural rhythm.
Things go to ground, to inner sanctum. And so do we.