Issue #30.7 A Triple Issue: Steve Lambert, Chenyue Wang, John Grey
A Poem by Steve Lambert
Souvenir
Edinburgh, West End
Up at 2:30 after a piss, I grab my phone and go out to the living room couch, check email, Scroll X, BlueSky, Facebook. Nothing. I Walk the unfamiliar living room, look closer at things, trying not to wake Keri, every move I make Tai-chi. Everyone we know is far away and sleeping. I can’t read. Twilight comes early here. Wide awake and far from home, windows open and chilly June whisping in the burnt smell of billions of roasting coffee beans. Chilly in June. I go and part the drapes, see a small, pale figure across the street, in the gray morning, like a child playing hide and seek, squatting against the back wall of The Caledonian Hotel. Not a ghost or girl, actually, but a young woman, early twenties, having a wee, a black ribbon of a man swaying guard next to her in the gloaming. They don’t see me—or pretend not to—and I watch until they swerve out of view. Don’t ask too much of what you see, I think. Sometimes, ask nothing.
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Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana but grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Saw Palm, Trampoline Poetry, Chiron Review, The Pinch, Northampton Poetry Review (UK), Broad River Review, Longleaf Review, Emrys Journal, Bull Fiction, Into the Void, Cowboy Jamboree, Cortland Review, and many other places. In 2015 he won third place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest and in 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (CW Books, 2017) and The Shamble (CW Books, 2020), the book-length poem Dutch Ears (2025), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (Cowboy Jamboree, 2020). He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches at the University of North Florida.
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A Poem by Chenyue Wang
Swallow
I walk between dorm & library, piled leaves crunching to pulp. It’s the only sound small enough
to accompany me through a New England winter. Years ago, in the warm breath of December, white smoke rose in my home, steaming
the kitchen windows over the pot. Somewhere, my father still presses his squat palm into this memory like dough itself–
kneading on our pastry board, before he passes it to me. My fingers are clumsy, but human enough to remember, even
through waves of time, through oceans crossed, how to keep the dough warm as breath. As bubbles churning in the pot, threatening
to overflow—Mandarin words I can’t quite recall simmer across the window’s humid blur, moisture
covering the strokes along the sill. Once ready, I always watched the dumplings cooling down, their skin shrinking, vanishing into
translucence. Pink pork & shrimp, black wood ear, green Napa cabbage always daring to spill out. (They never did.)
But today, in this cold gray space, leaves translate to ground before I’m even awake. I chew
a crumbly ham sandwich to its edges. Soggy and homesick I swallow. I swallow again, even black tea
too bitter to wash it down.
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Chenyue Wang is a writer from Beijing, China. She is currently a high school student in Connecticut. In addition to poetry, she enjoys writing short stories in her free time. Her work often explores memory and cross-cultural identity.
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A Poem by John Grey
The Season of Ghost Horses
Lonely, the evergreens stand sentinel, Berries ripen, dreams too – though neither are much good once the sun’s gone feral.
Hell’s coastline stretches on, a jagged hymn of rock and salt, purple sea streaked like bruises on the body of the world. Islands jut up, fists raised, angry at nothing in particular.
We descended – not so much fell as tore through a thin skin between thought and indulgence. Sex was a currency, spent in the underworld of mind where memory forgets to keep records.
Through the fogged-up windscreen, they’re horses, gray, shrunken, ghosts of something once wild. He had a rubbery face, flushed with the kind of generosity that forgets to ask questions. Not as rare as he reckoned, but seldom alone long enough to know how lonely he was.
My thoughts - those old, unsaid things from years before - came back like birds without their songs, roosting in the nests of memory. One stroke, and the years between were gone.
His poems were vivid, so much so he mistook them for the world itself. The devil, of course, never left - just changed zip codes.
Dreams, forgotten by morning, return like stray dogs sniffing at the back door. The artwork reminded me of those shapes that dance on the retina before sleep takes hold.
I face the world face down – not in defeat, just in defiance. Some things are too good to miss, yet too fast to catch. And I’ve stopped chasing.
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John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review and Flights.
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