Issue 36
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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, -
Lost is the Road
By Alexander Etheridge
It was long ago now, the way hail
kept falling into the open September streetright 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 likeclumps of shadow in firelight.
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burn and leave your hometown, said New Found Glory
by Liam Strong
Saturday: 16
mile an
hour windsleaves ensconced
to wire fences
like a tapestryof flaking paint
hail melts as
soon as it hitscement
this year no
SaintPatrick’s Day
what does the Earth
know of panicis it the 24-hour
diner closed
for more than24 hours
when we see
an empty restaurantwe call it
dead
nobody wants to bea bead of
an abacus
panic another termfor starving school
children
they say loveis a kind of disease
if we were to give
each other a bagfull of hands
whose family
memberwould we be escorting
away
to say nature knowspanic means
we are alone
to call chaos pureis to say
all that we
want is withinreason
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.
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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, -
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. -
Kiss
by Nathan Erwin
After Nastassja MartinLast 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.