Volume no. 10, Issue 1
“The Fool’s Journey”
what followed wasn’t, now you see
a star
at all a star wasn’t
what you see you
followed
“Bethlehem” by Colleen O’Brien
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“Still Life” by Joon Lee
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He pitches marbles during recess. He calculates the angles quickly, makes allowance for the uneven asphalt. He wants to win a bright blue marble he can trade for a “Thor” comic. His very own copy. He’ll put it under his textbooks in the box in his bedroom. He might even paper it with clear plastic wrap from his mother’s kitchen so that the edges won’t crease.
He ignores the jeers of the boys around him and concentrates on the angle. He squeezes his fingers to just the right tightness, flicking the green marble with his thumbnail. His marble clacks against the big, bright blue marble and he grins. One step closer to Thor. He wipes his palms on his pants and goes to collect his prize.
“Marble Pitch” by Phedra Deonarine
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du hast zu lange
auf schwankenden pontons gestanden
und jetzt schwankst du selbst
ein einziges schwanken
durch gassen
die sich salzig verbiegen
zu möwenflügeln
selbst im schlaf
schwankst du noch
selbst im traum
eine durchsichtige mülltüte
auf deinem kopf
die im vaporetto flattert
und sich sanft an dich legt
you stood too long on
softly rocking pontoons
and now you also sway
back and forth, rock
through salty alleys
that twist and turn
into wings of gulls
even in sleep
you sway
even in dreams
a translucent trash bag
on your head
flutters in the vaporetto
and softly collapses on you
Poetry of Carl-Christian Elze translated by Caroline Wilcox Reul
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An interview with Maggie Smith
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“We’re gonna kill. We’re gonna fight for our rights,” shouted the fresh-faced young men around him on the first day they’d been called in. Recalling the promise he’d made when he was 7 years old after watching his mother slit the throat of an agonized chicken, he knew he wouldn’t kill. The desperate squawk of the flapping chicken had haunted him every day till he saw some of the chanting young men blown to pieces, their remnants slowly rotting into the soil.
“‘Kimchi’ Jones Is Scared of Killing” by Ayshe Dengtash
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While I zigzag through the woods, Nate walks fast along the ridgeline. He gets farther and farther ahead, and his calls grow faint. The distance between us worries me. If our fears come to pass—if Lyrock is dead or gone for good—what will that loss do to us? Losing a pet is a minor tragedy, but this already feels like a tear in the fabric of our marriage.
“In the Woods” by Lucy Bryan
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The internet then feels like hinterlands. Like a wall of voices climbing out of the void, or out from the skulls of random figures.
B.R. Yeager, “Amygdalatropolis”
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While my eyes struggled to see through the liquid in the gourd, a sharp jerk from Mama’s trembling fingers pushed the back of my neck even deeper into it. With my face now immersed, my mind travelled back to childhood and to bending over for my mother to wash my hair in the aluminum basin we also used to soak slaughtered hens in freshly boiled water. The water set the suds free, and their restless bubbles raced around my neck and into my eyes, till they were almost as red as the tomato puree for Sunday’s jollof rice. Once my heart started racing, those few seconds underwater felt like hours, and the scoops of liquid my mother splashed down my crown felt more like being buried under a waterfall.
“The Curse” by Ebele Mogo
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told us the truth: our corporeality was indeed the true haunting, and the ghost world, and spirit realms, and the platonically merely-imagined where all the dead dissolve out into fantastic bands of pure gloaming, were real, and our bodies which we wished to extol and display their multitudinous physical splendor by parasailing and lovemaking and the pseudo-healing our inevitable ailments that will bring us down, upon entering, were merely corn-husked, sloughed-off, and our shells and all the understandings that came from what turned out to be shells were shown to fictions and, hardest of all, real enlightenment turned out to be a re-remembering of our previous perfections, before we were suited-out in our oddly flawed vessels, before we were born
“Finally the Vice Deacons” by Casey Fuller
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“Ancestral Home” by Rithika Merchant
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when the black mare broke her leg,
we lost our bet and stumbled out
to a milky oblivion of stars.
“Elegy for Avenue B” by Sheila Black
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“You’ll regret such a wish,” she said.
“Asleep in the River” by James Braziel
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“Umbra” by Julie Renee Jones
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No lloró al nacer.
–Las plantas no lloran– le dijeron.
–Pero si no es una planta– respondió la madre agotada, deshecha-. Es mi hijo.
La enfermera y el doctor se miraron. Él lo sostenía. Las raíces le cruzaban entre los dedos. Aún había sangre. De entre las piernas de la madre caía tierra como si lo hubieran arrancado del suelo. No era una planta, era un árbol. Pero los Doctores qué van a saber. Le llamaron planta. Le registraron planta.
–Nace planta, sexo desconocido, a las dieciocho horas …
He didn’t cry when he was born.
“Plants don’t cry,” they said.
“But he’s not a plant,” the mother answered, depleted and exhausted. “He’s my son.”
The doctor and nurse exchanged looks. He held the child up. The roots crisscrossed down between his fingers. There was even blood. Dirt fell from between the mother’s legs as if they had ripped the child from the ground. It wasn’t a plant. It was a tree. But what do doctors know?
“A plant, sex unknown, delivered at eighteen-hundred hours …”
“Plants Don’t Cry” by Jonathan Minila translated by Will Stockton
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An interview with Seth Borgen
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Beautiful day. The infuriating beauty of the ice. Prism, shatter, all the work to heal hip tissue gone in one short fall. Crack of body on ice, the way fat doesn’t cushion because it’s tense with cold. Nothing yields. Our walkers’ hearts grow tender with their own soft warm pinkness. It looks like we’re crying and blushing at once, tender-heartedness pulled out by sub-zero sting, the ache of trying to keep warm. Kindness wrung from exhaustion.
“Three Hills” by Natalie Vestin
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To see it is to trespass. The signs are posted
And that slack length of uncoiled barbwire
Was meant to keep you on the other side.
“The Continuous Present” & “The Crossing” by Eric Pankey
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“Krakow” plumbs the depths of a relationship with honesty in its ragged edges, raw emotion in its tone and poetry in its language.
“Krakow” by Sean Akerman
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I was trembling. Trembling. Blood thundering in my temples, and the image of a baby robin, fallen from the nest, floating before my mind’s eye. As a child, I’d taken such a bird into my hands, and as the beat of its tiny heart made it quiver uncontrollably, carried it into the house, only to have my mother turn me out with instructions to be rid of it. I left the tiny creature beneath the tree where I’d found it, and the next morning it was gone. My brother insisted the cats had eaten it, but I preferred to believe its mother had rescued it to the nest. Was it rage making me tremble now? Panic like the baby bird’s? Did I sense that my destiny lay in hands I did not control?
“Black Bullet” by Jeff Pearson
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Outside in the cold distance—I listened to the wind blow down from Alberta to Montana and over the Dakotas, surging over half of Iowa before finding me here. It ran its fingers over the house and then kept leaving, arriving and leaving, over all that long distance while I lay still, believing things.
“Cotton” by David Franke
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An interview with Nick White
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Sometimes the house was comfortable, but sometimes it was a sinister place. Shadows would leap around the woman’s blurry vision, people would speak to her and not reveal themselves. In these moments she would say a “Hail Mary,” try to pirouette, and fall on the ground writhing, yelling “Demons unhand me” in what she assumed was a real language.
“Perfume” by Sarah Jennings
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“Los cuentooos, niñoooos, los cuentooos”
gritaba aquel enorme y allá íbamos
dejando a la brisa los coyotes de bronce
“Stooories, chiiiildren, stooories”
yelled the giant and there we went
leaving the bronze coyotes to the breeze
Selections from “Galápagos” by Malva Flores translated by Jennifer Buentello
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“I think humanity’s place atop the evolutionary ladder will come to an end.”
“All Right, S.A., Really” by Kevin Finnerty
