Issue #30.10 A Triple Issue: Leslie Cairns, Julie Elise Landry, Margie Duncan
A Poem by Leslie Cairns
Wisteria
Sometimes, when I haven’t been touched For months, I pretend/dissisociate/meditate/picturesque/decompress
The image of you touching me, finding your vowels In my name. Thrusting your tongue near my shoulderblade-
I picture lingering kisses when we first met, The swell of the belly near the sunset, upside down, as we laid in fields unplowed–
& pretended the world couldn’t see us yet. I picture times my face was cradled. The way my baby and I just stare at each other, in the hospital
Cradle to cradle. My belly healing, his just Figuring out movement, beginnings–
& all that matters is this. & the way my childhood bedroom had pine trees that swayed Even on my hardest days.
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Leslie Cairns is a writer from Denver, CO. She has written in Querencia Press, Honeyguide Magazine, and others. She is a former Pushcart Press Nominee ('23, '24).
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A Poem by Julie Elise Landry
Indistinguishable
For Maudie
We met someone somewhere in a pile of pizza boxes, one of the boys or the men or what have you, but I only remember us standing in a living room arena, their dull toy guitars scoring badly while we watched, shouting grandeur,
and back then even professors collapsed us—our names always paired among chalkboards and chairs with shieldmaiden arms, our big voices slipping and vaulting like spilled solo cups in tenement rugs behind the football field, accused together
of corroding collegiate prestige with sulfurous vulgarity and volume, of cracking teacup reputations— so inseparable, presented as dyad to any assembled. The most neurotic vandals this side of how-dare-they!
And after, days after, you poured me a three-times distilled grain of parley: how our friend said his friend said some thing about “the girl” from the party “with the lazy eye”—but nobody knew which one of us he meant! And how bizarre, and they laughed, you laughed, I laughed.
Until I reflected. And I noticed. An asymmetrical surprise: my disparate pair of eyes. Invisible for 20 years until some guy I cannot even remember told a radio intern to tell you to tell me to see mismatched circles and diamonds in every blue-eyed, crook-eyed smile.
I wish I knew which eye to love, but I am loathe to ask.
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Julie Elise Landry is a New Orleans poet whose work has appeared in A-minor Magazine, Midway Journal, Vassar Review, and more. She holds an MA in English from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, and she is pursuing an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans. In 2025, she was named a poetry finalist for the LMNL Arts Patty Friedmann Writing Contest. She serves as an Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine and as the emcee for Silver Room, UNO’s virtual reading series.
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A Poem by Margie Duncan
The Cyborg Learns Something About Friendship
The handlebars crackle under my hands. I am careful not to crush them. The bike and I are riding across the surface of Earth, to the house of my friend.
She sat in front of me in school. I watched the back of her hair. Whenever she turned to hand me papers, I could detect cereal on her breath.
The air is hot at this latitude in summer. This Sun’s surface is usually 5600 degrees Celsius. The rays meet me at a steep angle. Earth’s tilt is a problem for science but not for me.
I got my name from a cardboard box. It included cereal, a piece of plastic -- listed on the box as my prize -- and dust from the fur of a mammal.
I don’t eat cereal. Earth travels in an ellipse around its Sun, which is moving farther away. I feel this but no need to mention it. I am
getting closer to her house, and I do not sweat. I learned her name on the first day. I saw her test answers no matter how small she wrote.
The bike and I stick to posted limits of speed to avoid trouble. Trouble is different from problems. We stay off the grass. When we stop
at a traffic light, I keep my feet on the pedals and balance my weight on the seat. The skin of these arms turns pink under the Sun. The bike does not change color.
Why are you here? She talks through the screen. A bathing suit is waiting in the bike’s saddlebag. The friend has a pool. I didn’t invite you.
I detect cereal on breath. The closed door is the invitation to leave. The Sun is a burning ball of gasses
147.42 kilometers from Earth. Tomorrow it is the bike’s turn to decide where to ride.
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Margie Duncan lives and hikes in NJ with her husband, Brian, and the ghosts of two dogs, while their two tuxedo cats mostly sleep at home. When she retired from the business side of academia, she returned to writing poetry and sometimes remembers to look out the window. Her poems have appeared in Thimble, OneArt, Rust & Moth, Lily Poetry Review, Gyroscope Review, Third Wednesday, Halfway Down the Stairs, and other places
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