Issue #20.1 A Poem by Maura H. Harrison
On Starlight
I. Night Menagerie
Your velvet fainting sky is punctuated With piercing lights, a love articulated With sighs and lines of constellation, styled With myth and history, with twins, the wild Unruly bear, the north and southern cross. Menagerie—collected swoon and loss Of privacy—you stir infinity And pulse the zodiac, a gift for me.
II. In Pursuit
He’s hiding and pursuing me with stars, Small worlds of distant light that pierce my heart And interrupt my night. I find the moon, Full and profound, and climb illuminated trees.
III. Starlight Rhyme
Within her cloak of night, she stitches signs With silver sequence so that when she lays It over time, time hears the starlight rhymes Of prophet, planet, poet: singing praise.
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Maura H. Harrison is a poet, photographer, and fiber artist from Fredericksburg, VA.
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Issue #20.2 Three Poems by Lynn Glicklich Cohen
FRINGES
The caramel-scented spiral from your pipe, a ghostly thunderhead in the cold tile study where you’d summoned me, your disobedient one.
That sweet smell and queasy dread blurred into what I knew— what I would always know— as love.
In synagogue, your satin tallis brushed against my arm as we dutifully rose and sat, rose and sat, sometimes for so long you snored, your furious breath
impossible to ignore so I took a fist of your tallis with its long silky threads and held it to my nose, a guilty reprieve, until it was time again to stand.
Years later, we confided about those tedious hours spent in a tradition we both loved and misunderstood, the way we also loved and misunderstood each other
the way a tallis was never meant to be shared.
ELEGY
(for my dad)
I am your family first to speak. I tell a forty-five-year-old story about how you once flew cross country to bring me home for surgery.
That’s all they need to know.
*
You would remember, I had an ovarian cyst, menstrual bleeding, stabbing pain that no doctor from the Berkshires could explain.
You picked me up at noon for the afternoon flight. I would miss the rest of summer, rehearsals and performances, but mostly the bassoon player with dark curls and a Long Island accent. We were seventeen, practicing Mendelssohn triplets by day, doing it at night on the dorm linoleum floor.
I don’t remember how you jammed my bass into the rental car, drove us to Boston, or anything we talked about. From the in-flight meal, I gave you my roll and dessert; all I had as an apology for making you come all that way just for me.
I awoke from anesthesia; you and Mom and the surgeon. Oophorectomy. Benign. Ectopic. Pregnancy. Fallopian. Hemorrhage. Other than pregnancy, a jumble of words. I bypassed fear and mortification and remorse, and thought only about the boy back at Tanglewood.
Afterward, I always wondered why you never summoned me to your study to hiss and seethe your disapproval over my disgraceful behavior.
When I was twenty, you divorced Mom to marry the office woman, a two-year affair. You told her another old story.
Your new wife had a son my age. At sixteen, he unexpectedly became a father, and you took him in: supported, advised, loved him.
I would only learn this when photos of you holding a newborn baby filled the house’s living-room shelves, empty of books since Mom moved to a condo. I would only learn how you welcomed the young family when my bedroom became a nursery.
I would learn these things and forget and learn and unknow and learn and pretend not to care and learn and ignore and learn and for forty-six years be unable to put it together, like a massive memory slip just before the final coda.
*
The son speaks too. So proud, grateful, calls you honorable, extraordinary, calls you “my dad.”
After Kaddish, people gather around; your medical colleagues, some patients. “He saved my life.” One wipes away tears. “Thank you,” she says, “for your sacrifice.” She means the relationship I lost out on while you worked so hard for others.
Now I see head-on what was a peripheral blur: your secret second family, your years of lying.
And this too: You and I are on that plane from Boston when you accept my roll and dessert, but it’s you trying to atone, coming all that way just for me.
HISTORY LESSON
My eighth-grade teacher said things like, “Don’t be so smart.” She looked at me with distaste over the rim of glasses worn on a beaded chain that swung against her bosom.
I inadvertently took her advice and shoplifted eyeliner and earrings. I smoked Kools, wore steel-toed boots and a faux black leather jacket with silver studs. I got felt up and fucked over by wannabe biker boys from the suburbs. I got mono.
My high-school report cards said, “Lynn does not apply herself.” Clearly they didn’t see how hard I tried being a biker’s girl.
Today, parts of me from seventh grade remain unclaimed. I imagine they are stored in an old locker whose combination I used to know. I’d love to take them out, dress them in sweats and sneakers, and tell them to run as fast as they can toward the smartest girl they know.
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Lynn Glicklich Cohen lives in Milwaukee, where she writes poetry, plays cello, feeds birds and squirrels, and walks along the river and lakefront with her exuberant lab mix. Her poems have been published in numerous literary magazines. She is grateful to Trampoline for supporting her work. She can be reached at: lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com.
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Issue #20.3 A Poem by Genevieve Creedon
Celebrex
for Rod
A crash course in the language of medicine
is what you call your diagnosis: you always
knew palliative was a word, but you didn’t know
what it meant until now. Isn’t it strange
that the pain medication sounds like “celebration”?
you ask, sipping water from a straw in the recliner
you bought as a replacement bed when lying flat
became impossible. Your partner, whose first language
is not English asks: what does it actually mean?
In medicine’s makeshift vocabulary, I hear cerebral
where you hear celebration, but the pill’s primary way
of relating to your brain is in producing clouding,
not confetti: it doesn’t deter the tumor growing up
and into your spine like ivy. Nothing does.
We sit across from each other in the home you designed
three days out from the news that your cancer
isn’t responding to treatment, the cancer that emerged
like a wildfire in a Californian drought, spreading
beyond containment just as the first spark
was becoming visible. When I get off the plane
from the east coast, it is raining: a western fall.
In the next two months, the garden will blossom,
you tell me, moisture enveloping the earth like a shroud.
As my east coast world turns brown, the greenery
in your garden will grow greener as you grow weaker.
Even after the diagnosis, you had hoped there would be
moments of normal life: eating cheeseburgers and driving
your Fiat downtown, maybe teaching your Architecture
students one last time. How strange that the end of life
is making you surrender the languages that graced your tongue
with ease for so long, replacing them with the prolific
dialects of pain, poorly managed by pills whose names
are both vaguely familiar and entirely fabricated.
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Genevieve Creedon is a scholar, poet, and essayist. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA Program and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. Her writing across genres focuses on the wonders and mysteries of earthly life. She has lived in Connecticut, New York, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, and most recently, Indiana, and strives to explore the worlds around her with her human and canine companions. Her work appears in About Place, Cider Press Review, Kelp Journal, Narrative Northeast, Still: the Journal, and Thin Air Magazine, among others.
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Issue #20.4 A Poem by Darren J Beaney
TWEAKING
I feel unsafe, rueful, as if held in maudlin arms, cuddling toxicity. My language has become inextricably lachrymose.
I have begun thinking the wrong way. My mind wedged in a ritual of forgetting as long as a lustrum, full of galimatias exchanges with bighead harbingers all discombobulate the grouse.
I proclaim parlous limerence, she is terrene. A shibboleth.
Torrential ad-hockery becomes crucial, the belly-wash eventually turns alembic. Words now diegetic of course.
I feel secure in beamish hands, hugging snug camaraderie. Infatuation reigns large and heralds the meritocracy of love.
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Darren J Beaney cuts his own hair and loves punk rock. He's one half of Flight of the Dragonfly, which hosts regular spoken word evenings on Zoom and in Brighton, produces the Flights e-journal, and recently expanded into independent publishing. He is also responsible for back room poetry (www.backroompoetry.co.uk) Darren is the author of five poetry pamphlets: The Fortune Teller's Yarn, The Machinery of Life, Honey Dew, The Fall of the Repetitive Mix Tape, and Citizenship (Scumbag Press). X:@DJ_Be_An
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Issue #20.5 Two Poems by Jane Zwart
Birth of the Reaper
Of course it was a Cesarean. The question is whether he cut himself out. Some say so, but others argue no one knew until later, that the secret was safe for years, that if anyone noticed how at home the reaper at two looked in a hooded towel, how flatteringly the terry cloth draped, they shuddered and unease lifted, like a fly.
We did not want to be monstrous, after all, to hang a woman’s hemorrhage in childbirth from the orphaned neck of her son. The doctor did not know it was the first of many medallions when he unhooked the reaper’s finger from the uterine wall. The nurse fanning the ash from the room did not know. She blamed the father’s cigar.
Sign Language
People pecked by their heartthrobs swear to work their ablutions, from then on, around the lucky cheek.
It was like that: after one lesson, I did not want, ever again, to lift the lid of my desk lest the air I had sculpted over it topple.
I feared for the loaf of bread I had sliced, for the family I had put inside a circle drawn with shadow-puppet roosters.
Home, I signed, shaving with two fingers. Sorry, using a fist to rub the frost from the pane of my chest, so the one
I had wronged could see my heart. And earth–again and again, earth– my thumb and third finger planted
at the antipodes of the other, balled hand. Earth: where golfers waggle and violists press on notes’ puckering.
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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have appeared there as well as in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Issue #20.6 Mary Grace Mangano & Jesse DeLong
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Mary Grace Mangano teaches at Seton Hall University. She received her MFA from the University of Saint Thomas in Houston and her writing has appeared in Dappled Things, The Windhover, Fare Forward, Church Life Journal, and Reformed Journal, among others. She lives in New Jersey.
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Jesse DeLong is the author of The Amateur Scientist's Notebook (Baobab Press). Other work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings, and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press. Other than writing, he teaches composition and literature at Louisiana State University. He tweets @jessemdelong
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Issue #20.7 A Poem by Lester Batiste
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Lester Batiste is a savage writer in living color who writes for political, social, economic change and Black futures. Born in Chicago, he holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, and an MS. Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, and Toni Morrison, Lester strives to weave traditional forms and techniques with the vibrancy of African American experience and speech. Rich details are enhanced by the musical tones from Lester’s childhood on the Southside of Chicago all the way to his present on the Northside, Ward 5, straight across the street from the Farthest view of Downtown Minneapolis. His work serves to emphasize the Midwest of the US because elements of the magical, mystifying and essential exist in the narratives here. Lester's work has appeared in print in The Stone House Anthology (2014), the Southern Griot Journal (2012), the Tulane Review (2017), A Garden of Black Joy (2020), Brushfire Literary and Arts Journal (2020), Hidden Peak Press (2022), The Indianapolis Review (2023), and The Bitchin’ Kitsch (2023).
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Issue #20.8 Poems by M.A. Nicholson & Shome Dasgupta
A Poem by M.A. Nicholson
Solstice Ritual with My First-Born
At Cricket’s Gift Horst, the wild woman, unkempt, levers loose
the teeth in my ears. “Mola, Muljana,” she shrugs. Places them in your mouth.
Her eyes are all antennae and leafy moth wings. She sinks her fingertips into her sternum and pries
her chest apart, releasing bees in a ribbon from the cavity that was her body.
Why hadn’t I noticed the honeycomb above her antlered head? My hand signs thank you, and we walk our way. You wear
two green stones, bezel-set, in skyscraper pendulums dangling like lanky pears in pirouette.
The entrance is dark, but you wear a headlamp. I am breathless, but you laugh and shimmy closer,
show me the empty cup of your palm as you whisper she made it by hand.
Silver-eyed, I see you for the first time: Your body is not attached
to your head is not attached to your—My head
is not attached. We say, “Yes.”
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M.A. Nicholson is a poet, editor, educator, and M.F.A. graduate from the University of New Orleans, where she served as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine. M.A.’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2022, Tilted House Review, New Orleans Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Peauxdunque Review, and elsewhere. Her upcoming debut poetry collection, Around the Gate (The Word Works, 2024), received the Hilary Tham Capital Collection prize.
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A Poem by Shome Dasgupta
Soaked In Lightning
Saturation: bleached sky— splotched splintered split, a flash—darted fox, silver gleam and tilted head, over a yawn of the sun, layered— cascaded and covered, a breath of metallic tips, a singe, a touch—a mane of earth tugged and tightened.
Maze—river throats: hollow stomachs carved from wolf teeth, muddied wolves, worldly wolves, wolves of stone and moon— an oxbow meander, stream shift and shot light a covered shine, so a face, a face like breath over porous foliage: peering.
Ending—an ending: sound— a tectonic of foliage, gathered bark, towered and tipped, a trace: speckled histories of hand in hand, where no one saw silent creations of skin— palm and chin and wrist, you were once there, you, you—with closed eyes: I was once there, there, with you when air departed and struck us into nothing.
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Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels Cirrus Stratus (Spuyten Duyvil) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West Publishing House), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Jabberwock Review, New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, Necessary Fiction, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
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Issue #20.9 A Poem by Gloria Heffernan
Check Please
Heaven on a gold-rimmed plate. Bernaise sauce cascading over filet mignon. An earthy Cabernet gliding down my throat.
Sour cream and chives piled on the baked potato like a scoop of ice cream with sprinkles.
And the cheesecake, strawberry sauce reddening my lips with every luscious bite.
The waiter so accommodating, refilling my water glass without asking, and each time with a deferential smile.
My black silk dress and high heels make the lie almost as delicious as the meal.
A full belly, An empty purse, A table near the exit.
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Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming chapbook, Animal Grace, was selected for the Keystone Chapbook Series prize. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). She teaches poetry at Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center.
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Issue #20.10 Two Poems by Jason Abbate
Fire Season
a beach, empty, early evening no wait... a street in a residential section of a convalescent metropolis
most of the universe is far too cold to freeze, full of creatures who don’t bother wondering how to scrape events back into their tubes
the great pastors teach you to cuddle with the flames
that's why the season of red reds, the season of dog tongues, is the season of belief
you figured out how to behave while the smoke was in charge
you title this chapter: "Everything My Heart Won’t Hold Against Me"
you shoveled the embers back into the weather to beat back the blank pages but they loitered like unwanted apologies
the wind wears the grin of a desperate python when it comes for the sunflowers' necks
fire season doesn't end
fire season doesn't begin
it lingers in the backdrop every day like a dented version of your purest self, raking your sands, feathering your sanctuary, waiting to be found out
Everything You Weigh Is Made of Glass
Under my father’s desk, I find a small brown leather case with a snap – more skin than case – covering a pocket magnifying glass. It flips up on a thin, sturdy hinge – worn but strong for an item that had been his since childhood.
A relic of a time when he was there and I wasn’t. Now a token lingering in a time when I’m here but he isn’t. A lens heavy with its timeframe. Used by an immigrants’ son to aim his sunlight through the smoke and skin of all possible worlds.
Light gathers and collides. The weight of disappearance, of place without form, testifies to the seams of a galaxy in constant churn.
Every now is collapsible. Every then fits into your pocket.
Tonight, let these objects, these specifics, mingle with our crimes of memory across a lost philosopher’s eternal frame.
Let the weight of the glass be magically singular, left over from an age of kings.
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Jason Abbate lives and writes in New York City. His work has been included in publications such as Red Rock Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Collidescope and Subprimal. He is the author of Welcome to Xooxville.
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