Issue 39

  • Issue 39

    Letter from the Editors

    “Sound the alarm metaphysical

    Subtle states

    Of being of

                            Consciousness, whenever

    They be confronted, a state

    of poetry is declared!” A. MacLise

    Dear reader, for those of us in the Northeast the rains have come and the ground yields to the spade; at last, we can bury the dead of winter; and those layers we hope that no one ever sees. It is early days yet but cautiously we dare to celebrate the coming of new life,

  • Issue 39

    About the Artists Featured in Issue 39

    Tiffany Dugan:
    (on the cover) Golden Orb Weaver, 2024, collage on paper
    Tiffany Dugan grew up in a California creek town and lives in the big city. She makes art and writes in her home studio in Inwood, NYC. She has exhibited in 30+ solo and group shows and is in collections throughout the US and Europe. Publishing her work in literary magazines bridges her love of art and writing. She received the Sarah Lawrence College Gurfein Fellowship in Creative NonFiction (2019) and wrote a memoir “Love and Art” about growing up the creative daughter of an abstract painter and the art legacy she inherited after he died.

  • Issue 39,  Poetry

    Imagining Commonalities

    "Rooftops, Brooklyn" Fidelia Bridges, 1867

    by Debasish Mishra

    The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For reach one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
    –Samuel Beckett

     

    Imagine we’re                 all clinging to                 one breast

    one mouth                       must withdraw              for the other 

    and                                    the other                         for another

    so that                              the milk                           is shared

    and also                           the lactating                   mother

    the mouths                     deprived of                      milk

    drink the tears               till another turn             of the gyre

    we’re siblings                 for more                          than one reason

    our cravings for             love and carvings          on skin

    architecture                    of the same                     school

    and our knowledge       of universal                    truths

    are derived                     from the same               hearth

    of history                        and habit                        our methods

    of killing                         a mosquito                     and of making

    love                                 are tangents                   of a fixed

    diameter                        our despair                     is tinted

    like tears                        and our hopes               are milk-white

    the gloss                        of an undying                flashlight



    Debasish Mishra,
  • Hybrid,  Issue 39

    Dissolution

    art by Zizanie

    by Maria Kassandrou

    I click my mouse from time to time.

    Not because I always do something. Sometimes I click randomly on the screen, in order to give sonic signs of life; somewhere without consequence—without buttons or links. I stare at the open pdf file, postponing into eternity the reading of that document.

    We’re both extremely quiet, each immersed in our own world. If we didn’t click the mouse buttons occasionally, the whole day would just pass over us. As if we were asleep,

  • Fiction,  Issue 39

    Taken

    "All As We Wish" art by Edward Lee

    by Aaron Sandberg



    In the driveway, your brother will be burning ants—magnifying glass a tool he will choose to use in other ways than good. He will not come in peace. You’ll read your book on the couch in numbness wishing the universe would nudge you. You’ll wish for wanting. You’ll get your wish.

    Above the skyline, a mothership will eclipse the sun, focus a beam, explode the little living things beneath. Some will be spared and abducted. Irony will not be lost.
  • Fiction,  Issue 39

    The Garden

    The Blue New York Botanical Garden” art by Yuko Kyutoku

    by Jessica Payne


    Nothing tastes sweeter than that of the earth, you convinced me, as we stood bent at the hips in the garden that summer. We opened our mouths wide and waited for the stalks to thrust from the soil. We lusted for the taste of tomatoes, eaten raw and ruthless like apples, their red juice running down our arms to show insides reversed. We spent hours there, balanced in different positions, our eyes straining for evidence that the ground had broken and a seed was indeed sprouting from within.