Welcome in. Stay awhile.
Settle in with your most comforting sweater. At the end of the day, we hope you tell it like it is, and that love and tenderness find a way to nestle into that truth. Enjoy, m & co cover by Melissa Knopp four poems by Heidi Miranda Rice Pudding at High Altitude by j. archer avary three poems by Shannon Cuthbert three poems by Fran Westwood three poems by Kristen Roach How to Bake Bread by Courtney LeBlanc a soldier slipped two messages into a ginger beer bottle by Kate LaDew 100 Ways to Grow Stargazing and the Rumors are True 10/31/2020 Fall 2020 What do you do when the birds stop chirping and all that’s left is the hum of a radiator and the sound of the ocean? Heidi Miranda is a Mexican poet working towards her B.A. in English. She has published poems in both online and in-print journals and is active on Instagram (@weepingblueberry) where she can be found posting landscape photography and quoting from her favorite poets. one symptom of altitude sickness could be euphoria that feeling when young lovers kiss and flee on skateboards the ancient city a theatre infinite storylines unfolding as the fingers turn blue what sticks with me most is the vendor’s weathered face a ladle of warm rice pudding those styrofoam bowls my blue-blooded heart palpitates when does that feeling of lightheaded clarity become the default? so much of modern life depends on repetition it almost resembles death crouched like a puma J. Archer Avary (he/him) came of age in the American midwest. He rode the magic carpet of television journalism across the US and to the Caribbean where he became a champion lionfish hunter. He quit TV in 2019 and moved to Guernsey with his wife. His poetry/prose has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Ariel Chart, The Daily Drunk, and Rye Whiskey Review. Certainty in all thingsThe boy who gave you comics Folded under his sweater In the courtyard where his chessboard Gleamed with its pieces Stolen from surrealism, His face blurs but you think It looked like the average taken Of all other features, Mathematically perfect in this. You are bouncing a rubber ball You spent a quarter on from a machine. You do this and simultaneously Chew five pieces of gum to reset your jaw Whenever you feel Some movement too big to contain. After this your dad will ask you To hold the board straight as he saws it For a treehouse he’ll never finish. You keep jarring the board an inch out of whack, And he keeps pretending He doesn’t know why. A year later you’ll stand in the courtyard Smoking something low and sweet That keeps you from moving As long as you need to. Venture Only in the woods he wears His butterfly-winged purple peacoat. Daubs of eyeliner he’s drawn on Floating up at the ends Like blades of grass That mama always said pointed straight To heaven, standing at attention. Birches in the hollow whisper his name And pluck at his arms and skin. He has nailed here Secret shards of mirror, A thing that to be broken will grind you To its own dust first. And the collars have come on all the trees. Their stone eyes laugh with his own As he stretches, pliés, Winnows himself the width of ribbon Tied on a branch. Imagism Disappearing with you Has never been easier than it is today, While the wind makes bones Of our summer bulbs, While the blades of me stretch taut As wire you use to climb across, Passing between two buildings of glass. This is not the day we were promised To construct out of needle And counterpoint, those years ago Across which I stare out Like seeing a lake behind your eyes. We were promised There would be fruit and fire, A long tail of smoke to snuff out this night, This waver of which you seem Unaware, leaving me dancing here Stuck between worlds, Thin and breakable as a word. Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have been nominated for three Pushcarts, and have appeared in Plum Tree Tavern, Bangor Literary Review, and The Oddville Press, among others. Her work is forthcoming in The Metaworker, Big Windows Review, and EcoTheo Review, among others. Melissa Knoppis a self-taught amateur photographer living in Washington state. She is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing at La Sierra University. Melissa spends her free time drinking coffee, lying in, and photographing whatever catches her eye. Reaching I hunt & find a creased note. Open, an olive leaf unfurls. On a cream envelope I write your name. I say, I know it’s been hard: the apartment silence. I tell you any small thing I can think of. The plant living next to the one dying on my shelf, my neighbors. I ask you, no answers needed. I ask you every small thing I can think of. The orange sunrise placemats you ordered. What you saw on your walk. Any yellow chalk hands, footprints in soil. The drop off in the lobby, your first face-to-face conversation in six weeks. The seasons turning, we don't know what toward. I want a part of me to arrive at your door. To find you- I need to know I have not forgotten how Self Portrait As Tent & Pot Tent shoulders wake, damp with dawn dew. The birds have been calling for hours. I drove twelve hours yesterday through backroad graffiti & church marquees, through Virginia forests cupping barns & family dollar stores. Under a hover of silent feathers, drew up shelter. Splashed water, nearly ice on my face, beer can empty on the bathroom sink. This morning’s fire boiling water for tea, I tend oats & apples. Auburn trees a half-cover, fabric skins shaking in wind. Steam pictures in the cool air. The leaves beginning to fall & fading grass spindles a last drink. Crouching by the heat, I grasp a metal spoon & stir the shallow dish. My body may travel miles but hosts my same mind—the ever-gnaw of mind. Bone & breath so slow to loosen. I am skilled, am I not brilliant to match every land to my ache & stories? I wake the same human, even in far countries, the scrape & wings. Pieces You sit at the edge of a season. At the table nephew hands & yours work together. A thousand puzzle pieces pile. Through the window grey tomato stems crumple under old snow weight. Vision toward tightens you with the soap of a rubric gaze. You scrub yourself dry. Possible tomorrows press you onward, thin & specific. Tacked behind you on a cork board, seven plots on a notepad leaf dotted with coffee slosh. A small red door of hunger shakes as you fit a border piece, you glimpse easily everything that is yellowed dusk & done. Tiny fingers fumble. Flipped over cardboard curves meet. A muddle of images form. See how though not nearly finished, he raises his eyes, races outside toward green & blue. Fran Westwood's poetry was shortlisted for the Room 2020 poetry prize, and has been published or is forthcoming in various journals including Contemporary Verse 2, The Hopper, Channel, Prairie Fire, The Night Heron Barks, Inanna's Canadian Women Studies Journal, Recenter Press and Sunlight Press. Fran writes, grows vegetables and works at a mental health and addictions agency in Toronto, Canada. You can find her and more poems online at @fran.westwood (instagram) Good Company Sharon Olds, come, pin down words like wet clothes on a worn line in the sun: slow, deliberate, and tender, stark whites and jeans with knees faded. Neruda, nestle here in my hands with a dewy bottle of white and cut lemons. Move me slowly with the island waves of your sonnet mouth. Mary Oliver, walk me out back palms up, late summer, to the sleeping black bear Adirondacks, and home to the porch swing, broom whispering, Maurice Manning folding himself with boots there & rubbing the Kentucky dirt of his fingers magic and dry over the hardwood. Anne Sexton, sit by me after daylight has come and gone, & cross an anxious knee below your cigarette and your skirt, sharing a laugh, your thin wrists flying like startled birds out of a darkness. Let it be reading time. Do not disappoint me under this New England window. I am waiting for you, Emily, to fold your parchment sheets into tiny bells & lower them knot by knot on some old brown twine, fraying over the sill to my waiting luck. Not/Only Not forced into the eaves of the upstairs room with slanted drywall and a lone window Not worrying awake at night how many sheets to tie together to escape in case of fire or the mean-mouthed dog or the dark Not piling armloads of used-up clothes on the cracked linoleum plucking bled-out colors from dead whites Not hanging seaweed sleeves on the outside line delicate nerves of anemone fingers snapped raw by clothespins Only with Heidi would I walk up the hoof-rutted mountain road holding a milk goat by the horn in fields swooning with cloud-and-star flowers Only the day her grandfather’s eyes shone for us, would I laugh his gruffness packed and vanished like a beard shaved clean Only with Laura calicos wrapping at our knees in the sun, would I run barefoot screeching into the snow melt creek with sparks of it flying up in delight Only at the hearthside with the thread Ma drew through her muslin over and over whispering would I sleep. Maiden, M̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶, Crone the spell’s worn off the hornbook
she is finished with fig-burning the runes have been cast aside no more seeing shapes in smoke seeking touch reading palms & shadow cards of cups and coin Tarot knights no longer plant their swords in the highlands of her heather the scrolled prows of Viking ships push past the end of earth leaving the map of her sea bare vast and abandoned her watered-down blue winds trading with nowhere ~ 1 packet yeast, dissolved in warm water ~ 3 cups flour, sifted until it floats down like an airy dream ~ 2 cups mother’s judgement ~ 4 eggs ~ 1 unanswered phone call, 3 ignored texts ~ a dollop of honey, not as sweet as the honey from your family farm but it will have to do ~ 1 warm afternoon, the sun illuminating the kitchen
a soldier slipped two messages into a ginger beer bottle, sealed it with a rubber stopper and dropped it into the english channel 85 years later, a fisherman, off the coast of essex, dredges up the ginger beer bottle, pulls the rubber stopper out, and retrieves the two messages, one thin and coiled like a nautilus shell, the other an envelope folded over itself the first message asks whomever finds the note to pass the sealed letter onto the soldier's wife so the fisherman tries, and finds the daughter of the soldier still living at the same address as the soldier had 85 years before. when the fisherman slips the envelope into the soldier's daughter's hand, she looks at it a very long time before breaking the seal reading it once to herself, slowly, then again, out loud, to the fisherman. her father asked her mother to write the date and hour she opened the letter, and sign her name in the right hand corner, keeping it safe on the mantle behind their wedding photo, so that if she ever got sad, she could see his words peeking out from behind his face, like a child playing hide and seek and know, soon, he would come back to her, and they would both read the letter together, and laugh. the fisherman looks just past the soldier's daughter, the daughter now 60 years older than the soldier ever got to be, on the mantle, the wedding photo balances, unmoved there's a smudge in the right hand corner of the frame, the ghost of a fingerprint just touching the edge of the veil haloing a young woman's face, her smile a little tremulous, the one you wear when your clothes are brand new, when you're young and happy and all filled up with life and someone asks you to stand still and it's almost impossible because the one you love the most is right next to you and nobody knows what the two of you do, not for a second, and it's all you can manage not to throw your arms around him right there, in front of everyone and his hand finds yours, squeezes, and joy flares in your eyes just as the camera bulb pops and it's there, forever, no matter what happens next, whether you live a thousand years with your husband right next to you or if somebody decides to start a war in a place a long way away from the two of you and snatches up the one you love, as if they had any claim to him, presses a gun into his palm, still warm from your hand, buttons him into a uniform you wear to kill people and on the morning he leaves for the front, he thinks of you and your little daughter, a year old, and, on a whim, borrows an envelope and scraps of paper and writes a message to you, folds his words over themselves, slips them into a ginger beer bottle and, doing his best cy young, pitches it into the channel, two days later, in a field in some french town whose name he can't pronounce, he feels the searing heat of a bullet sever the carotid artery and jugular vein providing the blood and oxygen for his brain, and dies, bleeding out next to thousands of boys, just off a train, boots so new they squeak when they fall and you live sixty years without your soldier, watching the photograph of the scariest and happiest day of your life, never knowing a letter is meant to live behind it. the soldier's daughter looks at the fisherman who's still looking at the boy and girl in the image from 85 years ago. there's an old, old feeling at the base of her heart that almost floats to the surface it smells like salt and decay and unfairness and the arbitrary caprices of life, but she takes her hand with the letter inside it, presses it against the beating, and love rises up instead. Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin. |
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