Issue #33.12 Ron Arbuckle, Elizabeth Dick-Howell, Hayley Hung, Richard LeDue
A Poem by Ron Arbuckle
Waterlogged
Rain saturated ground Replace the nomenclature of lawns And yards and sod and joy With bogs and marshes And swamps and cognitively Appropriate behavioral interventions All that which is permeable permeated A sponge with every orifice overflowing Freshly cut grass clippings cling, Manufacturing Wooly Willy leg warmers Your mud caked clogs Clomp through my garden Lamenting the precipitation, The state of affairs, and your Predisposition to knee deep migraines Maybe there’s nothing left of me to save I set my goals just to watch The posts drift away in the current On pontoons of my own devising In rolls along the fog, carrying with it The aroma of my childhood nostalgias, Movie theater popcorn and the fact I haven’t showered in three days You always love the smell of the smoke, Until it seeps into your clothes
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Ron Arbuckle lives in Oklahoma. He is the author of the novel, A Matter of Design. You can find him on X: @touchgrass_ron
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A Poem by Elizabeth Dick-Howell
To my Son, if I Die in Childbirth
If I die, I will assume your father will raise you in his hometown. I hope you enjoy Buffalo, eating wings, shoveling snow, and bars closing at 4 a.m.. But I suggest you go home before 2.
Please remember, when you grow up, don’t believe in trickle-down economics, you come from a lineage that never benefited from tax cuts for the rich, your family prayed for some Robin Hood to get ahead.
There will always be two roads diverging in a yellow wood, I cannot say which path is right for you. Regret and exaltation meander freely between the two. Never pray for wisdom; instead, pray for peace. Because when you look back, you’ll never see the devils you could have reached only the angels that you missed.
Sadly, for most of your youth, you will be searching for me. Undoubtedly, you will decipher and uncover hidden clues that I have unknowingly left behind. In my collection of sacred texts, you will discover that the Book of Job has the most notes in the margins. I found comfort in believing there is hope, even in loss.
When you are older, one day, you will meet someone in an elevator, in your travels, or on a busy Wednesday. If you think she is who you are looking for take her to Niagara Falls and go on the Maid of the Mist. When she curses you and the falls for ruining her mascara that she paid too much for and over-applied. She will dramatically state the mist is a fire hose to the face, then you have found the right girl.
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Elizabeth Dick-Howell (she/ her/ hers) is a poet, librettist, and elementary school librarian. She holds a master’s degree in poetry from Seattle Pacific University. Her libretti include Everything After, premiered in Seattle, WA, and Little Things, premiered in Juneau, Alaska. Her poetry has been published in various online and print journals. Her website is elizabethdick.com Instagram Facebook
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A Poem by Hayley Hung
Goodnight Bunny
In the dead of night, phone screens on, in the Saatva bed I lay as my mother asks me about my slumber regimen, she contorts faces, then stiffens to a Pan Am smile, zygoma uprising. I count backwards from “ng sap”, stuck at “sap baat”—— fifty then eighteen in Cantonese and look away from her bone-dull eyes.
(She still calls herself Bunny) Stupid animals. An earless rabbit, a heartless lion. Their afterimages lour.
I stutter to utter the peculiarities, how the rabbit sniffled through the water, how the lion hastened, offering its dewclaws, wrenching the rabbit’s ears into little warped pieces of flesh, quartering the triangular puzzles into huge halos around its face—— a mane of earless hearing.
I am the mirror-maker, the lion who reproduces another lion. A replica with flat, un-blinking eyes, a uni-lined, inverted “e” mouth tilted open, languid
I look up, The departure of the rabbit. The actuality of the lion. All tangible.
Goodnight, Bunny My slumber regimen remains.
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Hayley Hung (Instagram:@hayley_hung_hhc) is an emerging poet and scholar who writes from her home in Hong Kong since middle school. Her work usually explores themes of family dynamics and generational trauma, expressing them through surrealism and animal imagery. Besides writing, you can see her cramming for tests in the middle of the night.
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A Poem by Richard LeDue
“A Poem About Almost Being 45”
If my greatest success is this poem and a glass of 10-year-old whisky as I listen to Bach, that’s better than pretending the silence is a ghost stomping in an attic or banging in the basement while the years pass like blank pages.
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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, “Existential Drunk,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2026.
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