Issue #31.8 A Triple Issue: Richard LeDue, Dan Sicoli, Abner Oakes
A Poem by Richard LeDue
“A Common Lineage”
These words are the descendent of a bear carved from wood, with a look of rage probably more likely to scare away children than termites, and those uneven edges of the fur betrayed my father’s shaky hands, desperate to create something beyond a steel worker’s split shift, yet my lineage is still there, needing no historian’s footnotes, nor a genealogist’s branches, but only my memory.
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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.
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A Poem by Dan Sicoli
that day
that day i became you was a day of understanding how a door opens: one of foreshadow and time splitting: of slipping steps and misreading faces: trading masks and sharing repeated sequences: she spoke of you, of me, of the other: she said you were in the room standing there with her when i was me: she insisted on reminding me that i was you: i remember the grand canyon measurements of a bed: a profound and exhausting loss of space, denying those dimensions: i withdrew into the costumed, reckless nature of you:
and yet i missed the day your feathers splayed like a magician’s deck of cards
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Dan Sicoli, an editor with Slipstream, has a new collection, Slag Alley, out from Ethel Zine Press. A three-time Pushcart nominee, he's recently placed poems with Big Windows Review, dadakuku, Hobo Camp Review, Home Planet News, Hood of Bone, Steam Ticket, and Santa Barbara Literary Journal, among many others...
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A Poem by Abner Oakes
The Moose
The sky gold that morning, the yellow of the wiffle ball bat, my brother and I taking turns knocking line drives into the sure
hands of the weeping willows. And the yearling moose that stumbled from the pines up from the Connecticut River
with its button antlers, mottled coat clomping down Maple Street, legs like a giraffe. Uncle Dave said yearlings are driven away
each spring by their mothers, as they prepare to calve, and from the door our mother burst out, her camera aimed
at the scene, confused moose staring at her before crashing back into the blur of the forest. Our mother’s photos were unlike
her - off-center, unfocused, a chaos of color, of movement - but it never kept her from developing her rolls at Kuehl’s Pharmacy, her picture
books littering the coffee table: Sandy’s birthday party, March trip to Boca, our anniversary, each series of snapshots as if
she bounded through her own light dappled forest, lanky and free, squinting at the sun, sweat in her eyes rainbows.
Her wedding photos were black and white sharp, she not showing yet at the altar, her thin smile what she wore the rest of her life.
In the book labeled Moose one photo stood out for its unusual clarity and in it her fingertip covered a corner of the lens
as if pointing at the moose, and years later, when we showed her, she focused and whispered, There was a moose on our street.
That night in Benchmark’s dining hall she ate first her blueberry pie, ignoring the meatloaf. Her lips blossomed blue like the summer sky.
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Abner Oakes taught middle and high school English and has had poems published in the Potomac Review, the Maryland Poetry Review, the Baltimore Review, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Thimble Literary Magazine. He lives in the Washington, DC area.
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