Issue 36

  • Issue 36,  Poetry

    Baseball on a Threatening School Day

    photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

    by Ken Been

    I write water
    Across a worksheet sky
    As if its pale color could hold fast
    And not rain out
    Baseball
    The secrets of Little League kids
    Revealed in the vocabulary lessons of the clouds on our desks
    Nimbus words and definitions
    Supposedly matching up
    With my pencil line
    Dragged
    Between them
    As the suspense of the window sky squeezes into Room 10.

    There is no light passing through the afternoon
    And I’m called upon
    To raise my hand higher than theirs
    Up over the outfield fence
    Up,

  • Issue 36,  Poetry

    Lost is the Road

    By Alexander Etheridge

    It was long ago now, the way hail
    kept falling into the open September street

    right after flash floods there stripped back
    hickory and willow roots.

    This is our lives, how our story vanishes
    into memories, into winter after winter.

    Our faces blend into night snows,
    and the plans we made break apart like

    clumps of shadow in firelight.

  • Issue 36,  Poetry

    burn and leave your hometown, said New Found Glory

    by Liam Strong

    Saturday: 16
    mile an
    hour winds

    leaves ensconced
    to wire fences
    like a tapestry

    of flaking paint
    hail melts as
    soon as it hits

    cement
    this year no
    Saint

    Patrick’s Day
    what does the Earth
    know of panic

    is it the 24-hour
    diner closed
    for more than

    24 hours
    when we see
    an empty restaurant

    we call it
    dead
    nobody wants to be

    a bead of
    an abacus
    panic another term

    for starving school
    children
    they say love

    is a kind of disease
    if we were to give
    each other a bag

    full of hands
    whose family
    member

    would we be escorting
    away
    to say nature knows

    panic means
    we are alone
    to call chaos pure

    is to say
    all that we
    want is within

    reason


    Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cottagecore straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior.
  • Issue 36,  Poetry

    Dear Lock Ness Monster

    by Emily Cejkovsky

    Dear Nessie,

    Do you get lonely, or do you have a family? I’ve been wondering.
    My lake is lonely…lovely Champlain
    champagne sunset, sunlight on the surface
    While I’m below, where the dirt is.
    Are people nice there? Or do they not care?
    Are your scales for sale,
    like mine? Does it get better over time?
    Misty mountains protect me. Do you have mountains too?
    Do you have someone to protect you?
    I want to know all the things I can do, enclosed in a lake,

  • Issue 36,  Poetry

    The Wolf

    by Jan Edwards Hemming

    Her hair is too red
    against the crumpled white
    sheets. In my mouth
    twenty-eight pieces of bone
    bleached nearly blue
    at the edges
    line up like suitors
    for her lips.

    I reach for her face.

    My fingers hold
    her scent—sun and salt,
    moon and ink—
    and it blooms again
    between us.
    I am exposed pulp,
    soft and wet
    in the middle
    but better to pet.

    I pull her to me.
    My pupils beg.

  • Issue 36,  Poetry

    Kiss

    by Nathan Erwin


    After Nastassja Martin

    Last night’s wind is over the mountains now.
    The lofty sky’s cast with red. The mountains
    are red. The clear brook has become
    an aorta, pumping red, giving counsel to the morning’s               rise:
    my face is an open gulf,
    crawling in wet snow, I can’t hear over                                 my throat
    slickened by internal tissue & fluid. My face, a caul,
    pledging to the sinews of this life
    with                  a rattle-breath symphony.