Issue 35

  • Issue 35,  Poetry

    The Big Empty

    By Philip Jason

    photo by Adam Gonzales

    Schrodinger said the cat exists in the space
    between two states, but there is a third state
    where you open the box and find only yourself
    -Plato

    The butterfly in October was not supposed to be there.
    In October, the butterflies
    live in our dreams. Nonetheless, I saw it
    where it was, and decided I’d lost the taste
    for whining about the human condition.

  • Issue 35,  Translation

    “Hehasnoname, 1-5, 7” by Sharron Hass Translated from the Hebrew by Marcela Sulak

    photo by John Peter Apruzzese 

    Where are you going? Not far from here.

    Further down the slope of the corridor.

    There despair will be defeated.

    I’ve nothing against it but father’s dead body.

    Poetry (I still don’t know what it is exactly)

    and the shadow that changes its names since my birth.

     

    מּוזִיקַת הַּנָתִיב הָרָחָב

    שרון אַס

     

    לְאָן אַּתְ הֹולֶכֶת?

  • Issue 35,  Poetry

    crabapple tree

    By Sera Gamble

    photo by Huie Dinwiddie on Pexels

     

    I.

    he makes a fist.

    my world splits:

    the truth / the thing

       that makes it stop.

    lying is easy

    as slipping

    into a silk coat.

    but we become

    what we practice.

    who was he before

    his father?

  • Issue 35,  Nonfiction

    500 Days and Counting: Memories from Ukraine

    by Clare Cannon

    photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash

    Day 7

    “Bomba. Over us,” my friend Anya, who cat-sat for me in Ukraine, typed into Messenger. “Pray. We are in corridor.” I slumped in the wooden chair where I sat at the Spear Physical Therapy clinic in Manhattan as I read, “Rocket was here.” My world exploded. My physical therapist Nada brought me a box of tissues and a cup of cold water. “My friend just got bombed,” I sobbed. 

    “Clare, I’m so sorry,” she said in her lyrical Egyptian accent.

  • Issue 35,  Poetry

    Someone Mentions Wild Geese Were Kept in Greek Households to Warn the Family of Fire or Intruders When Father Was Off at War

    By Christopher Smith

    photo by Ekaterina Astakhova on Pexels 

    Wade far enough into the valley, the sun marks banker’s hours.
    I sit some shade of darkness two-thirds of every day.

    The figure I relate to in the Phaethon myth: that downy little greenhorn
    presses Phaethon to prove he’s the chariot’s child.

    Who can buy even their own fables about their father?
    Portraits of him waving down a sunbeam. Personal olios

    of corporate fishing retreats, wood block watchtowers, the empty chair
    at back of the theatre.

  • Issue 35,  Poetry

    Box Negative

    By Tamas Dobozy

    photo by Karl Griffiths on Pexel

    Your locket terrified me as a child. You were an 
    old lady then. It swung back and forth as you
    bent, pouring tea, knocking against your
    breastbone below where your dress, always red,
    parted at the neck. I kept asking you to open it,
    and you did, out of tiredness. Open it again,
    please. Open it again. I had no actual desire to
    see the photograph inside. There was nothing
    special about it,