Issue #29.1 Three Poems by Lynn Glicklich Cohen
After Their Fight
Politeness screams from his bouquet of daffodils, buds that look dead in their brown spathes, stems bound by rubbers bands.
They’ll bloom in a couple days, he says. She leaves them on the counter, continues to perform their ritual of getting over it. She brings him a bowl of stew with white beans and barley, napkin and a spoon.
Too much cayenne gives him a coughing fit. She thinks of the woman who watched her husband die choking exactly this way. She thumps him hard on the back.
Water he says, dabs his eyes.
She hurries to the sink to fill a glass. Too late, he reaches to squeeze her hand.
No, he says, for the flowers.
Lightning, Hail
Last night’s storm split my favorite birch in half, straight through her crotch and left
one leggy bough on the ground, her green buds severed from their source, already thirsting.
Where she stood there is now a void—a swath of blue-white sky and my neighbor’s beat up
red Bronco. Mostly there is a terrible gap, space I didn’t know I didn’t want.
The surviving half of her is, I must imagine, in shock. Lopsided, she looks like she could
collapse. Her splintered insides are raw, exposed. There ought to be blood.
I think about the dangerous boys I gave my body to, wanting to be cool and beautiful, loved. But behind
my back, girls called me a slut. That is some self-respect I’ll never get back. Crews with saws
and pulpers clean and haul. I will mourn my tree, but soon it will be like it never existed.
Ensemble
Clearing out closets, I discovered my bass part for the Trout Quintet, margins full of your penciled markings, a dare to make me laugh. Our eyes met for a blip before the violinist— what was his name?— cued the downbeat for your ecstatic arpeggiated opening, plunging us into the stream.
I heard you live on an island where orcas breach, a ferry required to arrive and depart, You never visited, didn’t want to deal with “America.” It shamed me, my life in a mid-sized city, a walk away from Whole Foods, two movie theaters, a hospital.
Sirens go by through the night. I’ve learned to listen to the slow upward glissando, the downward portamento, repeated with crescendo to triple forte until I have to plug my ears for the climax, cymbals crash, brass at full intensity. The Rachmaninoffs of rescue. I think about the day an ambulance will come wailing my way, about the coda and finale you will never hear.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. Her poems have been published in numerous journals. She loves cold weather, late autumn darkness, deep conversation, tart apples, a clean lap pool, and wrangling a poem in progress. She is grateful to Trampoline for supporting her work.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #29.2 A Triple Issue Ace Boggess, Ron Riekki, Nicholas Pagano
A Poem by Ace Boggess
Some Days I Want Nothing More
I exist in nothingness of the moment, computer on my lap, letting it play any of five thousand songs at random, five thousand moods from rage to lust, the universe boiled down to code deciding what I experience next. There’s a lot going on outside: wars, business deals, & surgeries. I choose none of it for as long as the space of an afternoon can hold. I used to do drugs to teach my body calm. Before that, there was music, & in the future, music. What about the absence of people? you ask. When needed, that can be a sort of poetry.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His forthcoming books include poetry collections, My Pandemic / Gratitude List from Mōtus Audāx Press and Tell Us How to Live from Fernwood Press, and his first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, from Running Wild Press.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Ron Riekki
During Desert Storm, I remember seeing these officers running
with blowup dolls. It was after midnight. I had insomnia. We were doing bombings every hour-and-a-half. And these officers in dress white uniforms howling and running with blowup dolls the color of fright and they disappeared towards the shore and everywhere was towards the shore because it was a small island hidden in the middle of somewhere and I thought of what it’s like when the responsible ones are irresponsible when the women are vinyllatexsilicone and the men are wolveswolveswolves and the hooting faded, Doppler, and I would work a thirteen-hour shift tomorrow, because every shift was unlucky, and we were children, us, teens, and only two of us would commit suicide, only two, just two, and their deaths would not count in the death toll for the war. But I remember the woman’s face, a CPR-agonal-gasping face, her stiff oxygen-pumped-full body supine and, yes, her eyes begging the fullest moon and I was up above hovering on the barracks balcony looking down and they didn’t see me but she did
and she was terrified
and so was I.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki's listening to Portishead's "Glory Box."
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Nicholas Pagano
Plot
The yard had no fence, because it had no need.
A family of deer passed daily against the tree line. I picked
what I hoped to save before the next freeze
—Wild Rose, Impatiens, Cape Marguerite Daisies
the color of a bruise—blue vestibule before something
like finality. There were no vases that weren’t cracked along the rim;
designs in the glass, like starshine. The difference between being
trapped and held was an essential condition, something that couldn’t be
bargained for, or made to drink the water you place it in.
Knowing this almost makes it enough. The sun receded
into tenderness, a sky like steel. A line of petals cut the table where they fell.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Nicholas Pagano has previously been published in Lucky Jefferson, Mid-Atlantic Review, Stone Circle Review, Chronogram, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in New York.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #29.3 A Triple Issue Jason Ryberg, Guy Zimmerman, Ken Meisel
A Poem by Jason Ryberg
{Quote / Unquote}
I’m just never sure where mist ends and fog begins,
unless it all comes down to a matter of translucency versus opacity,
in which case it’s mostly a matter of degree, I guess, meaning, logistically, at least – how deep and long one could get lost in it were they to wander off the main roads in- to its heavier pockets where people have said to have {quote} heard and even seen strange things {unquote}.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 2024)).” He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Guy Zimmerman
BANGING
My teeth hurt. I can’t concentrate. Someone’s always banging in the dark. Outside, it’s freezing. I’m killing myself with these cigarettes. I am the aftermath of an explosion. This is me not adding up.
But I still find ways to speak about kings, about birds and galaxies. Images hang in the air. There is prosperity, good works in the world. Love and kindness tip the balance and whenever I hurt someone, I fill up and choke on regret.
I must be honest with myself about delusion, self-flattery. This big mind so prone to error, this small, malleable heart, and how late in the game I am trying to wake up from this childlike malevolence.
My heart begins to open, a cloud passes over the sun, my mind reels back. The moment passes. I’m off again, running.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Guy Zimmerman is a playwright and director and the author of Mammal 1, a collection of poetry published by Slow Lightning Press. In addition to many plays and theater pieces, he has published widely as a theater scholar with a focus on Beckett, Pinter, Shepard and the Padua playwrights. He served as artistic director of Padua Playwrights for two decades, and now teaches at UC San Diego and writes fiction.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Ken Meisel
________________________________________________________________________________________
Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Crab Creek Review and Trampoline.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #29.4 Four Poems by Benjamin Myers
Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” Travels through Space at 38,000 Miles per Hour
A low Gethsemane howl etched in gold and flung at fifty times the speed of sound aboard Voyager 1 has now outrun its drifting iterations barked from horns of parlor phonographs from Memphis down to New Orleans, the voice a barren tree flocked full of winter birds, the probe a switch- blade knife to slice the thick of outer space.
To demonstrate the things we seem always almost in danger of forgetting—what my eighth-grade English teacher always called the human condition—along with Bach, the purr of furrowed surf, and fifty tongues of greeting, science sent this song and launched it while my father lived his body long ago and I was small beside him. Let the record show groanings too deep for words, and let it show the way down cold, bare earth we bed some nights and still and still get up.
Human Remains at Ribemont
Digging trenches for the Somme, they turned us up like stones from plows, brushing dirt from our unfleshed brows to marvel in pre-battle calm.
The conquered dead will never speak, headless as here they are. And we, the victors’ bones, are equally dead. Our lone voices are too weak
to carry on the smoke-sieged air. But piled up we start to rattle, clicking low talk of sawing battle, until our voice is everywhere.
And you’ll want soon not to have known the things we say, to let us rest above our fathers’ bones unblessed, beneath our children’s bones.
Alexandria
The bright bay glitters like a bed of coins beside the citadel atop the lighthouse ruins.
Beshawled and stooped, an aged woman dips her long pole toward the glaring sea before she drops
her line into the sharply sparkling blue. The languid surf limps in and falls but barely moves
the bobber on her line. All is so still you’d think nothing had ever moved. The smallest swell
of ocean stirs the tiny weeds. She waits beside the mutely glaring sea. Small tethered boats
nod their painted heads as if at war with sleep, slowly and more slowly over the knife-bright deep.
The Skating Party
The concrete floor was blue, the paint so chipped the rink looked like a map, a flattened world we rolled across on metal wheels. In ripped jeans and in dayglo shirts the skaters whirled around the rink like streams of neon paint swirling around a drain. From one dark wall a line of hunkered games blinked lightning faint and digital. We waited for the lights to fall, the disco ball to drop its glowing snow onto our shoulders and our feathered hair, the music from the speakers to get slow and soft, a tingling in the frigid air. Then, hand in sweaty hand, we stepped, half grown, onto that ragged map, that world unknown.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Matthis Professor of Literature and the director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, he is the author of four books of poetry. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Image, The Yale Review, First Things, Rattle, and The South Carolina Review. He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and lives in Chandler, OK. His most recent book of poems is The Family Book of Martyrs (2023), and his second book of nonfiction, Ambiguity and Belonging, was recently published by Belle Point Press.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #29.5 A Triple Issue: Sharisa Aidukaitis, Jon Provens, Mykyta Ryzhykh
A Poem by Sharisa Aidukaitis
balm
I saw someone today who looked like you; at the store right next to the chocolate keto clusters you would have mocked but gleefully tried anyway; and the onslaught of nostalgia, seeing the not-you-human with your haircut and stately profile walk past in strangerly disinterest, swept away the levees generally so well cemented that I’ve forgotten them; and the saline essence of humanity leaked onto my cheeks there by the goldfish crackers and I instinctively felt in my pocket for the empty tube of lip balm I can’t throw away because you mailed it to me before the pneumonia
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sharisa Aidukaitis is a writer and college educator in upstate New York. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Penstricken, Waffle Fried, Moss Piglet, and Drifting Sands Haibun.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Jon Provens
Discovering the Restoration Notice on My Childhood Church’s Door
No one is a prophet in their own land, but here I am, reminded of the tooth I found in my hands, lost to communion, not when I bit the wafer, but later, in my kitchen, stuck in the bread of a sandwich that was meant for a guest. I’ve walked the 4-block stretch from the market to the Papa John’s marked with the bullet hole from the stray shot that did not kill the man who had nothing to do with the robbery. Louise said we only see things once and the rest is memory, which is probably why I won’t realize this one’s a second hole from when nine years later the bits of plastic in the folds of everyone’s brains led some to rob the same place again until I get home. One always returns home where the jacarandas grow, home where vans and masked men proffer you someplace else to go. How strange to arrive anywhere. Somehow, I always find myself lost, dusting unfamiliar stones for footprints gone awry. There is no guide. Unsearched for and unrecognized, I’ve forgotten who I will become. I’m hardly sensible. It’s been eleven years of mortal sin and festered sores before I finally cross the street toward my Church’s doors. When I reach out they’re closed.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jon Provens is an Argentine-American writer and educator currently based in Southern California.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Mykyta Ryzhykh
Water
What does a running river choose? To running away forever dissolve. How to kill the blood inside the meat mechanism? No one knows except the screaming stone. Empty birds fly in like paper and bring on their wings the air of the coming minutes; this is life. I walk and breathe like a fish or a flower. And the garden around me continues to move too. And the uprooted garden also continues to move. Glass reflects glass. The pigeon eats the pigeon. The first corpses grow from under the snow. Houses are falling apart like adverbs. However, the river inside me continues to dissolve death because the flow of liquid is the real alchemical time. The hands are like scarabs of the minutes on the clock, strained. My river crumbles like a desert.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Mykyta Ryzhykh, an author from Ukraine, now lives in Tromsø, Norway. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 and 2024. He’s published in many literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, QLRS, The Crank, Chronogram, The Antonym, Monterey Poetry Review, Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and many others.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #29.6 A Triple Issue: Alexandra Burack, Aaron Poochigian, Jax NTP
A Poem by Alexandra Burack
Garage Trash: An Argument to Restore the Matriarchy
--response to Koertge’s “What She Wanted”
What he stole were my neurons, though I’d given freely the rack of bone that kept my heart encased, and then the sinews of that muscle itself in blue mid-pulse.
In his musty garage, my astigmatic eyes squint from a plastic box, boltless and unlabeled like lone screws and nuts in junk drawers.
Jumbled in glass jars, every petrified word from my mouth (masking tape labels repeating “Always the Wrong Word”), now flinted display fossils, lips pouting deference in place of the wail my ear still hears, nautilus side up, under the car.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Alexandra Burack’s recent poems appear in Metphrastics, ucity review, The Missing Slate, Bulb Culture Collective, and The Sewanee Review, among other venues. She serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions, and a Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, Poetry is Currency, and West Trade Review. She enjoyed a 45-year career as a college creative writing professor, and currently works as a freelance editor, writing coach, and tutor.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Aaron Poochigian
Death and the Elephant
Oh no, sweet girl, the careful dirt accruing over that gray cadaver proves intent. Your trunk and toenails know what they are doing: hiding a body with a monument
because you can’t stand what’s no longer there. I hear you, priestess, on your saxophone communing with the god of it’s not fair. What went and taught you why to hit that tone?
What up and wrecked you on the grown-up trauma? It’s bad to know the absence in that hide will take them all. This world is broken, mama. You’ve been a human since your baby died.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Jax NTP
use heavy bottom pans to cook with residual heat
pixelated neon tangerine streetlights quiver dance upon your curls an afterglow of cyan passion already gone condensation
muscle memory to press ear cartilage on top of bare chest greed is knowing desire without peace or without crumbs
a trace of flame breathing beneath tendons of morning ash a tongue detects freezer burn at the speed it senses hair on food
even novels with intentional plot holes burn from loss of moisture can be salvaged by trimming raw - marvering - encalmo - latticino
desire is need without name nor tentacles nor logic nor weight nor rest nor pearls nor haunt nor jack-lining flashing color trailing
no matter what you do with eggplant it ends up being so oily a sunless warmth clinging to the fish bones of the day da capo
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jax NTP is a queer artist from California. They teach critical thinking, literature, and composition at Irvine Valley College, Golden West College, and Santa Ana College. Their words have been featured in Apogee Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Hobart Pulp, Permafrost Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review (AU), Antithesis Journal (AU), Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Their debut poetry collection comes out next year: in bones & tentacles: how to pivot when you're paralyzed. https://linktr.ee/JaxNTP
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #29.7 Four Poems by Corwin Ericson
Film History
The legend of the onrushing train and the audience of brave bumpkins that did not flinch and how they glared back and grabbed the caboose and rode to the next showing to find themselves pointing revolvers at an audience bored by their organist who escaped during the ensuing duel carrying the single reel of The Staring Match the audaciously mesmeric film that burned a crater in the screen through which children explored backstage and left the stage door ajar for the cats to slink in and mooch for snipes unsmoked by last night’s audience because they came and went when they wanted like cats looking for warm seats freeing the artists to eschew narrative devices and make work like The Opposing Snowfields with two screens and no projectors which the cats dozed through unaware that most cinemas would burn down before audiences even learned how to applaud.
Last Universal Common Ancestor
Needing bilateral symmetry shoes are parasitic dependent on their hosts to pair them up with their mates.
Bucking the trend the furniture kingdom is unique using legs not for locomotion but to reach the ground.
The illusion of Euclidian flatness allowed tarpits to attract their prey. Parking lots retain this trait belying Einsteinian curvature to lure cars.
Whereas Linnaeus held a shadow is attached umbilically to feet phylogenetic taxonomy hangs it on a branch of the darkness tree.
Consider the carapaces of salt and pepper. Nearly identical yet without any shared ancestry. The desire to be shaken leads to convergence.
Flies evolved good luck to escape hands. Hands assemble into an audience for defense. Clapping makes it hard for performers to perceive individual fingers.
Intelligence thrives on problems concussions rising to the occasions.
Lake of Tears
Boo hoo hoo— the cat cries a lake and the mouse and dog bail out their bathtubs and paddle into the sky. They mop their brows with fistfuls of cloud.
The lake plug is pulled. The duck unfurls her parasol. there’s a cactus here, a mesa there a jailhouse. This is a map that has never been folded. Above it, the bricks zip by and the sun is as round as ever.
The dog shakes off his bath and it all floods again They extend their spyglasses— somewhere there is a dry town with shade trees with rocks for pillows with a good brickyard.
A worm is lowered through the map to explain to the fish the lovelornness of cats the scratchboard nights. The worm tugs twice on the line the dog smokes a cigar, the cat wails the mouse strokes his brick.
Ill-Bricked
I built it so badly that only a few people noticed it was a house. I would squat there in the rain holding bricks over my head.
Later when I was a ghost more people noticed me than before. They were rude. They felt they could say anything to a ghost.
I came to sense I’d lost my night vision and could tell I was losing my night voice and I was deaf to darkness already.
Before I got to this state I would lie in the grass where my house would be impatient for night for ruinous dreams.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Corwin Ericson is the author of the novel Swell and the collection Checked Out OK. His work has been published in Jubilat, Harper's, Sortes, Galaxy Brain and elsewhere. This summer, to his delight, he discovered that a sentence from his novel appears as an example of usage for the word "shit" in Merriam Webster's online dictionary.
________________________________________________________________________________________