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FOUR WAY REVIEW

ISSUE 33

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Four Way Review

POETRY

FLEVATO by Richard Siken

PARIS by Elly Bookman

THE BABIES by Dara Yen Elerath

YESTERDAY AUSTIN TOLD ME TWO SWANS by Arro Mandell

PASSTHROUGH by Haley Lee

GOLD by Kunjana Parashar

BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary

THE YEAR YOU DIED by Vasvi Kejriwal

TWO POEMS by Alexa Luborsky

TWO POEMS by Caroline Richards

TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl

 

FICTION

RUN by Katherine Vondy

THE GATEWAY by Laura Wolf Benziker

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THE BABIES by Dara Yen Elerath

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Dara Yen Elerath

I am watching the babies. The gray one in sticky pants who keeps picking his nose. The pale one with headlice, scabies and fleas. I am watching the babies. This one choking on a plastic bottle. This one talking to itself in the dark. I am hauling the babies to the park, to the library, to the pool. The orange-hued baby is dirty and plays with crayons. The makeshift baby is taped together like a cardboard box. Where did these odd babies come from? Why are they languid and dull—limp in their cradles as loaves of bread? Why do I find them now in the garbage, now in the fork drawer, now in the kitchen sink? I grab a pink one crawling from between my thighs. I clutch a yellow one suckling upon my breasts. I find one hanging from branches like a piece of fruit. This one I dug from the dirt like a vegetable freckled with roothairs and worms. I gather the babies and turn them over, looking for the maker’s mark, but find no scrawl, no autograph, no trace of when or how these babies were made. I try to abandon them, but they come crawling after. I put them in a hamper, but they clamber out and grab my hair. These babies are my babies. I take them everywhere. This one carries my kneecap. This one carries my thigh. This one carries my heart. 

dara yen elerathPoetry
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YESTERDAY AUSTIN TOLD ME TWO SWANS by Arro Mandell

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Arro Mandell

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/yesterday-austin-told-me-recording.mp3

 

drowned a local man
for coming too close and
 
Thomas and I laughed but 
I still think if I don’t count my teeth
 
they’ll be taken, can’t
be careful enough out here.
 
Last night I stepped onto a
stage heaped with dead
 
fish. I was looking for the right
earrings and late to tea. An
 
army approached but
I couldn’t quite remember
 
to remember. Downstage
trenches crept closer and closer
 
to the cafe. The man with the sword
hoped to take my life. Twenty-six
 
teeth. More than I
started with but less than
 
I once had. Am I missing
something? The skirt of my blue
 
dress was just a little too tight
for me to throw punches
 
but I wasn’t worried– 
the tea was so good
 
and so warm. The fish
stank and I didn’t notice.
 
That night my lover had made us
a bed in the open window so we
 
could sleep listening to the rain.
My days hemorrhage;
 
I can barely recall what
I’ve done with them.
 
Yesterday Thomas told us he
almost lost his hands
 
in a freight elevator and
afterwards looked at them
 
all day astounded and now
doesn’t think of them
 
anymore without getting
a little sick. Last night I woke
 
horrified at the war, at my body
pale as the fish, and stared
 
at the shadows of houses the gleams
of wet bushes the drunk trees and reached
 
for my lover’s sleeping hands.
I’d known them a couple
 
days didn’t want them
to cover any of my
 
confusions, didn’t need
to borrow a future from them.
 
They would kiss both my cheeks
quick and I liked to look at their eyes
 
the little chip in their left iris where the blue
dripped into the whites. I looked
 
as long as I could in the dim
morning with no sun and
 
no wind but they were already driving
cities away leaving me stunned
 
at what I didn’t have
and hadn’t known to want.

arro mandellPoetry
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PASSTHROUGH by Haley Lee

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Haley Lee

After the play we talk while
we wait for the C with our shoes 
touching on the platform. Say, 
when the magician unrolled 
the sea, an old tunnel in us 
burst open. Lights off, all 
air – with you I believe 
in water wrung from paper. 
They didn’t need to use names 
to make us understand the whole
premise is being alone at the 
end. Can I say, I like when 
the train gets stuck. For a click,
time stops dying in us. And 
at the end, we only want to 
go again. Against the current:
delay my breath.

Haley LeePoetry
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GOLD by Kunjana Parashar

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Kunjana Parashar

Lately, I’ve been yearning for things: car keys,
houseplants, dhurries, cubes of ice, petals,
but really for something skin-deep. I keep 
addressing myself as we; like I am the bull 
& I am the matador. I am the prayer and 
the devotee. We are prying open our mouths
to sing. We are the ear and we are the song.
We are two rundown radios talking 
in a frequency none of us knows 
how to reach, let alone emit our rightful sounds.
I’m trying to be someone other than me.
I’m trying to be the woman who shucks
oysters clean. Dredges them from 
the depths of the sea with her bare teeth.
I’m trying to be her gold tooth, her
one and only, mended with the light
of the auric sun. Changing the form
of what’s obscene in me. Filigreeing 
my fucking bones. All the crops
of all the lands genuflecting 
to the bright brag of me. 

Kunjana ParasharPoetry
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BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary

Friday, 15 August 2025 by James O'Leary

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/blue-period.mp3

 

It’s 9:31 PM where the end
of the city tinges the sea. An empty
 
spiderweb hangs motionless between
the blinds & the closed window leaking
 
the street’s neon onto the unmade bed. No
moon. Not even the comfort of wine,
 
bottles shaped like the body I want,
& will never have. I keep thinking about
 
the group of boys I passed huddled
around their broken car like priests over
 
an altar. I want to drink, to forget;
it makes the fashion of my sadness
 
tolerable. Driving on the highway, city
-fluxed, sober, trying to ignore my engine
 
light, my mind’s tidal drift reminds me
I never made it to my childhood
 
best friend’s funeral. Avoided it,
so I didn’t have to see his family,
 
the sharp angles of his still face. The radio
asks where the joy has gone; I try
 
to find it, I do, admire clouds, make food
for the people I claim to love. & the difference
 
between a claim & a lie is my hands,
their learned fluency in devotion
 
under the passage of each spent moon.
& the difference between the end of the sea
 
& the start of the sea, is how I feel
when I open the window & listen
 
to the pages of the water turn. Tonight
the sky tastes like ozone & time—I buy
 
a bouquet of chrysanthemums
for my beloved, a full tank of gas.
 
There’s safety from suicidal ideation
in imagining the material reality of the other
 
drivers, the names of their daughters
or sons as strange as wildflowers
 
a loved one might leave
on their sudden tombs. After

I spend the night piecing back together
what fragments I can still
 
recall of my first friend’s face,
I am however sober it takes
 
to watch the ghosts
of our hometown retreat
 
from the blanket of the rising sun.

James O'LearyPoetry
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THE YEAR YOU DIED by Vasvi Kejriwal

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Vasvi Kejriwal

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/The-Year-You-Died-Four-Way-Review.m4a

 

05/19:
 
A tornado flung a fridge into the bones of a tree.
 
Its bark, gnarled, like the mouth of someone, new to grief.
 
 
05/22:
 
I found your pen at the edge of the dresser.
Yet to collect dust, it held your fading 
fingermarks.
 
 
06/18:
 
Then, hunger as a thing to be unafraid of.
 
How the terrapin emerged from a wallow,
found two lions erasing blood from the jaw. 
 
Alone, it tried to get them to leave.
 
 
06/30:
 
I wore my death wish in secret
like a talisman. A fifth ocean to drown in.
 
 
07/07:
 
The panda was no longer endangered.
 
 
08/10: 
 
The smaller zipped pouch, within the larger zipped compartment,
of your toiletry kit—as if its innermost secret. 
Here, I found a condom. Unopened, sealed in plastic. 
Expired a year and 3 months before you passed.
  
 
09/27:
 
The moon came without menses.
 
Finally spoke: Go to sleep.
 
 
10/06:
 
I grew closer
to being older than you’ll ever be.
 
 
11/19:
 
While civilians reached Space, I reached
for the silhouette of a stranger. 
My body, flailed, like a fish stunned with air, 
underneath his weight.
 
 
12/08:
 
I made a word that combined surrender
with vomit—knees, cold with linoleum, bent against 
what your body could not hold—picking up
what X-rays could not.
 
 
01/01:
 
The world spun without you in it.
 
 
02/05:
 
Skin prayed but there was no skin to touch it.
 
 
03/11:
 
Like an invasion on a thousand hooves, the monsoon
paraded town. The house you’d built, quivered.
 
 
04/10:
 
A boy dipped out of a coma and stared at his own name
like it was combustible.
 
 
05/12:
 
When they came for clothes for the orphans, 
your parka with the broken zipper—
I banished to the shadowed end of my drawer.
 
 
*

PoetryVasvi Kejriwal
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TWO POEMS by Caroline Richards

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Caroline Richards

Recovery poem with jargon
 
After reading Auden, I water my moth orchid with ice cubes
and watch a girl with green hair draw a benzene ring in white erase.
I pay attention to time. I arrange my table of books into heiroglyphs 
and try to say something before the sun sets. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, 
I am the forest. In tarot, the hanged man. In nightmares, the bottle 
with infinite volume. Carpe noctem and carpe diem chasing each other 
like clock hands. A möbius band. The shadow-harp. Carbon. Auden himself.

 

Recovery poem with an ocean between it

I came to understand vastness the way we come to understand anything.

The last seat opened in the church pew. I could see the top of the black casket,
I could smell the white lilies.

That’s just it, something in me moved to make room for one more.
Something bore a hole in my head and disappeared again.

The funeral came before the death, the grief before all of it.

In other terms, water is unlike dopamine except in its absence.
Then its presence is thorough as a flood. Gray water, downed trees,

pathways sealed. Chemical imbalance I was told in the white office
on the white paper, as though I could point from the same shore they did.

As though the tide had not come in and buried the sandbar where I once stood.

caroline richardsPoetry
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TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Corinna Rosendahl

from Scenes from the Seconds 

 

It was written

 

for an exhibition

that at

the end of her life

Louise Bourgeois circled back

to her birth1

 

When I did as asked

 

like long hair

I pulled my fire back

 

1Unknown

 

***

 

 

Henceforth and forever I am my own

mother2

          crouched in dirt

          squinting at the root

 

Oh but now

 

          it’s just my look

 

                          loosened

 

to dive and surface

 

                  as if to risk worth

 

          beyond birth

 

after which

 

the introductions are endless

 

2Roland Barthes, “Mourning Diary”

Corinna RosendahlPoetry
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PARIS by Elly Bookman

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Elly Bookman

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Elly-Bookman-Paris-Audio.m4a

 
At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes
at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible
palms around a rosary. Soon 
I’d learn to drive a manual transmission, 
the backward N of the ascending gears. 
The still-war had been on for more than a year, 
and there was something so similarly earned 
in her un-atrophied grip. I knew 
someone must’ve tended in secret to 
the wax around her hands and face, and 
that they’d given themselves a soldier’s 
kind of grace, balancing deception against 
the miracle it presented, like the clutch 
and gas pedals at the moment of change. 
It took a while to find the feel for it—
the confidence to hover between the two. 
In the end it was something like joy, but 
greedier. Like flying back across the ocean 
to a peaceful country, where nothing decays.

Elly BookmanPoetry
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FLEVATO by Richard Siken

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Richard Siken

We are going to poison the rats, announced the Transit Authority. They had posted fliers but no one was reading them. The subway was crowded. I was late and trying to think diagonally, up and around the corners. I wasn’t used to it. I grew up in a flat land where there was no descending. The ground was too hard. The Transit Authority was responsible for a lot of signage—the trains had letters, the stations had names. There were arrows on everything. It was a lot to take in. I took the D train to work. I worked in a bookstore. I was responsible for fiction A through M. I took books out of boxes and put them on carts. I climbed the ladders and stocked the shelves. The ladders had wheels on them and slid back and forth in front of the shelves. I loved them. After work I would go drinking and then fall asleep on the train home and wake up in Coney Island. There was a sign at the far end of the Coney Island station platform that said FLEVATO. It had an arrow. I didn’t know if it was a place or a thing. I was always too rattled or blurry to check. It started to bug me. It was a mystery. I would climb the ladders at work and try to imagine it. I couldn’t imagine it. I lasted nine months. In the city, I mean. I burned through my savings, abandoned my things, and flew home broke. Before I left, I decided to find the FLEVATO. I took the train to Coney Island. I walked to the end of the station platform. The letters on the sign had peeled. The R was gone, the E was damaged. The sign read ELEVATOR. 

PoetryRichard Siken
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TWO POEMS by Alexa Luborsky

Friday, 15 August 2025 by Alexa Luborsky
https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/I-was-the-wet-cloth-that-kept-the-phyllo-damp-vf.m4a

 

I was the wet cloth that kept the phyllo damp.
 
I was the rag that lifted and didn’t catch
the edges of things. I was lamplight.
In another place, I was shaina maidel.
Here, though, I was khokh- memory
and nots- space. I was khokhanots.
I was the kitchen, a whole geography
with borders of mother 
and step-father. Bubbie was nowhere
here. She left herself
to be used by my hands. Something sticky—
I remember my place. The damp rag.
Sam’s dark skin shining through
thin sheets of dough like a frame
for me to enter. My mother, the baster,
scattering walnuts. We held
our breaths, Sam’s hands initiated
their curtain call: the placement of
dough on walnut.
Phyllo, diaphragm of breath. Phyllo,
second skin too easily aged by unsteady hands.
Curtain. Sash of sweetness.
This was my mother’s kitchen
on a Friday. It was almost Easter,
so we made paklava. It was
Pesach, so I couldn’t
eat it. Pulped walnuts
thrown on tin sheets.
Her voice cocooning the words:
Never buy them crushed!
I should write this down.
I’m too busy watching the maw
of phyllo laid down like a memory
to care about this recipe for myself—
I’m humming zucchinis—
my sounds long in Armenian.
No one minds squash any season.
I grow like this, keeping
my mind elsewhere. I don’t call to Bubbie
willingly. Without her, I know how I’m supposed 
to move: All Armenian. We are doing the same things with our wrists
whether it is 1915 or no. Opening
our palms to cup something
paid dearly for. All words, papery layers of seed coats
stem out of the walnuts, manuscripts of black ink.
I crush them sideways
with the blade of my tongue.
I’m a good –nots. A good recipe
for what I am missing. I pull the cover
from a mirror.  Memory space
meant only for one part of me.
Bubbie has never been 
here. I dance and I sing
an Armenian dance, an Armenian song.
Why don’t you clap for me?
I say to her even though somewhere she might 
actually be clapping. I know this
and still can’t see her making
a sound. There is an Armenian “I”
and a Jewish “I” and somewhere
there’s my body. The walnuts, shipwrecked
at the bottom of a syruped lake sit split
up on the tin sheet. Every one of my homes has its season.

 

https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Notes-acknowledgements-Excerpt-vf.m4a

 

Notes & Acknowledgements (Excerpt)

I was my own gravity. Enclosed in overlap, I occluded myself to feel like myself, 
a bound thing, an ancestor of what I couldn’t feel. That oculus of a buried archive
dug down in the dark like a hole for me to enter as water. I wanted to be myself so
badly I made myself into a shape that had already promised to hurt me. So badly, I
shook the letters until they left me no choice but to announce
know what it felt like
to be unjust. To justify.                       
 I’d given up. I drowned myself in the
sounds
To count her ribs, the iambics of her back breaking, I couldn’t make. I
asked myself to be long
like bread between teeth. But now I am too tired to plead
like the water of me, the wound of me, and
my case. I confess, there is something
tragic in obeying
I meant it even when I could a kind of becoming that blossoms
the longer it is ignored.
not contain it, shouldn’t have tried. So I asked for the
person
 I buher her under apricot trees. I bless her like a promise. I loved most
inside me to leave.
A lantern under their mausoleum. I make a gesture as if to II
danced and performed myself in all 
                              the forms I could image myself into. If I tell you begin. I cannot think of
it. I cannot think of it this way
      my borders are not real,looping the diameter of
neck. She does not mind being a
you’re forced to see the quasars spin, theorem. A
sentence is a theorem. She, an unfinished one.      
forced to see movement at the
edge
I imitate the arcs of stars. Imperfect, never truly returning. of the atrocity                
photographs that are so violent they’veeach pass. A shift so small it is
imperceptible at first,
had to pull themselves from their time-
our bodies make each other under the pull of proximity. lines down into an unseeable mass.A
natural law. I am encoding a message only she can read.
You’re forced to see
them move, as light, as
  My wrist flicks scatter the gods I called to bless. A lyri
dance. Dance, a mechanism of survival
caught between absolute and absolution.
Circumcisio
for the Armenian people. Between battles, warriors religion from
proper heliocentrism to calf. A god unto
would dance, their pinkies knittedherself.
Slain inheritance. My mother told me,
be carefu
together, circling with the velocity
what you love. How could I not? O, arabesque of    of a we I can’t access. This
we,
Theachine of the beloved that turns her into antithesia we to honor their
survival, a we to defend the edges of 
 Polar coordinates of self made manifesto of
other.
the place you love with the outline of things Recursion of self and
self-conscious create the pitch of
you make yourself into. What do you ask a
caravan
hum. Doves babbling to each other like judges. I keep her of survivors of
survivors of survivors
like a newborn abandoned in the shade, alive, waiting to b        
except to survive? I asked them to stay  and                               protected and
picked up by another. If this 
with whatever version of me I could manage, on the desperation, I don’t know. Later that evening, we made absurdity of the page so
we       
madzoon of her mother’s of  

         could dance in front of the gaps What else is there to say? …….,

their bodies made in the archives. I called to them’d I needed to know what it felt
like to be unjust. To justify.
        so you, reader, might see us dance, full of watert
her ribs, the iambics of her back breaking,          
of life, not spilled in the fields     
the Turks 
like bread between teeth. But now I am too tired to         made barren
from care, using the American Empire
case. I confess, there is something tragic in 
as an example of how. I asked myself a kind of becoming that blossoms the longer
it is ignored.
to stay a little longer, just a little longer, inside the shape I buher her
under apricot trees. I bless her like a prinside the shape
I’d tethered myself to,
until      the vibration
A lantern under their mausoleum. I make a gestuo of me
was too strong    

            to contain the mass I’d accumulated and I collapsed begin. I cannot think
of it this way. The blade, a curve
a black hole, a point ofooping the diameter of
neck. She does not mind being a  
                tension shelled in knowing. theorem.
A sentence is a theorem. She, an unfinished one.       
I’d left open the shroud of
my ancestral
imitate the arcs of stars. Imperfect, never truly returning.                
tongue. I couldn’t say I love you so I saidat each pass. A shift so small it is
imperceptible at first,
it in cut fruits, just like my grandfather our bodies make
each other under the pull of proximity.
had, just like he told me his father A
natural law. I am encoding a message only she can read.
and his grandmother had.
I was taught how to
makmeMy wrist flicks scatter the gods I called to bless. A
make silences, and then      I taught caught between absolute and absolution.
Circumcision of
myself how to make them visible. Still, I can’t say religion from
proper heliocentrism to calf. A god unto
anything in my great-grandmother’s
herself. Slain inheritance. My mother told me, be careful dialect except with my
body,
what you love. How could I not? O, arabesque of knife. this body that
survived through
The machine of the beloved that turns her into antithesis. her
body’s survival. I opened the wounds of the names
Polar coordinates of self made
manifesto of other.
that hadn’t been spoken for generations and           Recursion
of self and self-conscious create the pitch of           
mispronounced them. What did you expect? hum. Doves babbling to each other
like judges. I keep her
I wrote about places I should’ve beenike a newborn
abandoned in the shade, alive,      
and wanted revenge like it could cleanse picked
up by another. If this comes from mercy or
me. Righteous in anger, I drew myself
apart like those
desperation, I don’t know. Later that evening, we made
photographs of the genocide had taughtmadzoon of her moth eri 

                                                                                          me to, destroyed myself away 

from the air, from life, to live’d I needed to know what it felt like to be unjust. To
justify.
                        as someone without ease. I laid down into the shapes I’d
seen
t her ribs, the iambics of her back breaking,     and hoped would make me feel
less.      Less guilty, 
like bread between teeth. But now I am too tired to         less
alone, less. To miss it less. To miss Hayastan less.
case. I confess, there is
something tragic in 
To miss life less. To miss being kind of becoming that
blossoms the longer it is ignored. someone without shame less, as if that longing
could lay 
I buher her under apricot trees. I bless her like                    outside my
body on a page. This was the 

 

fallacy A lantern under their mauseum. I make a gesture as if t I clung to, wrote
into    

            my fingers rested on an ink that didn’t satisfybegin. I cannot think of it
this way. The blade, a curve
the urge to know. All I knewlooping the diameter of
neck. She does not mind being a  
was that I couldn’t make it easy theorem. A
sentence is a theorem. She, an unfinished one.                     
for you, reader. Show
you                                  a spectacle
the arcs of stars. Imperfect, never truly
returning.              v
without        the cost of looking: I’m not here. Weeach pass. A
shift so small it is imperceptible at first,
have erased the me that could have our
bodies make each other under the pull of proximity.
written this. I turned to my
shame,
A natural law. I am encoding a message only she can read. a shame that
was mostly my oppressors’ and said
we makeMy wrist flicks scatter the gods I
called to bless. A
so you couldn’t say No.      Not me. caught between absolute and
absolution. Circumcision of
You couldn’t redefine the stakes of agency with
shock.
religion from proper heliocentrism to calf. A god unto Let’s hold our
pinkies high like we’re
herself. Slain inheritance. My mother told me, be careful
mountains, holy, sacred, thewhat you love. How could I not? O, arabesque of
knife.
    
Caucus Mountains, that we The machine of the beloved that turns her
into antithesis.
are a we that never had to leave, never had to be this Polar
coordinates of self made manifesto of other.           
formulation of we 

at all.

Alexa LuborskyPoetry
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