Category: Issue 36
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ISSUE 36
Poetry PERIHELION by Ben Kline INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM by Eleanor Stanford I CONSIDER WHAT TO SAY WHEN THE DOCTOR ASKS ME TO DESCRIBE MY PAIN by Emma Bolden TWO POEMS by Margaret Wright HYPERPHAGIA, OR FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE by Matty Layne Glasgow I THINK YOU SHOULD NOT LET THIS TORTURE YOU by Miriam Milena THOUGHTS ON EVAPORATION…
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Two Poems by Graciela Reyes, trans. Jackie K. White
Nightingale The good nightingalecarries her song in her throat. It’s me you were discovering. The joy of those sunrises:that we were our own joy. She knew how to skip contentedly, like a little tomboy, in the middle of the street.She knew how to speak, how to be silent, to sleep.Yes, she was lovely and sweetness,…
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Two Poems by Anzhelina Polonskaya, trans. Andrew Wachtel
Abyssal Like a whole winter. Like Bruegel in the snow with hunters,and kennels of barking dogs.In deep barbarism, in the depths of perpetuity,in the fury of flames, February lasts for years. Dead.But its shadow lives.And I grow in its shadow like bitter grass,unable to shatter the fetters of ice, listening your breath, my sadness.My sadness:…
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J MOOD by Gerald Majer
18 November 2024 I have no time in some respects, or so I believe. Too much also, that does not matter either. I was out in the arroyos and climbing the ridges and I did a prayer and I always say aloud the date but yesterday I came home and went online and saw I…
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THE DOG WHO COULD PHOTOSYNTHESIZE by Fox Rinne
The house was bright as a foreign star and utterly pristine. The dog was an appendage to this cleanliness. He was washed outside the house once a week. There was also a cat, but her cleanliness belonged to her. Every day she brought it upon herself. She never left the house, so she couldn’t be…
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THE DOLLHOUSE CLOSES by Leah Kindler
I first saw the beautiful houses from the window of my English classroom. The baseball and football fields rolled out below and just past the scoreboard there stood a row of four or five Victorians in a spread of pastel colors. They were unlike the pastels I’d seen in the Florida Keys or the Jersey…
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I THINK YOU SHOULD NOT LET THIS TORTURE YOU by Miriam Milena
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. –Czeslaw Milosz Words from a man I want to make my husband: I think you should go for the biggest thing you can think of— I go for a walk under old growth Sitka spruce— look at the ground— try to imagine all the biggest things I…
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PERIHELION by Ben Kline
The summer after Halley’s Comet swung do-si-doaround the solar system, I grew six inches,and a local boy who helped usbale hay on Saturdaysnecked me behind the corn criblike a fawn on a salt block,his eyes too bright to deny.My belly burned for days. After a weekin binoculars, the comet taught meabout sublimation and Kepler, spacetimeas…
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INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM by Eleanor Stanford
The train to the city was alwayslate. I dressed in silk straps decoratedwith every seductive spell.I pricked myself to test their strength. Buta system cannot demonstrateits own consistency. I did not longto merge with the mathematician. In hisstark apartment at Ninth and South, wecollided. We made adiagonal argument.My living situation took a long timeto explain.…
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THOUGHTS ON EVAPORATION – A ZUIHITSU by Sarah Mills
In one of my earliest memories, my mother asks me what I want to be for Halloween and I say a lake, which she mishears as leek, so she starts talking about how leeks accumulate dirt, something I didn’t appreciate until the first time I made potato-leek stew, the grit like tiny beads that had…
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LULLABY* by Tran Tran
Con cò mà đi ăn đêm** Đậu phải cành mềm, lộn cổ xuống ao *** Night darkens on an egret’s porcelain wings. A lullaby begins and ends with silence. Mother’s love begins and ends with silence. A branch snaps. The egret tumbles into death. A bomb blasted. My mother tumbled into orphanhood. What’s unsung: the baby egret’s hunger—orphaned…
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I CONSIDER WHAT TO SAY WHEN MY DOCTOR ASKS ME TO DESCRIBE MY PAIN by Emma Bolden
Nothing. I can’t construct a sentence able to withholdthe weight of it; I can’t explain or calculate the kind of weightI mean, what it is that I am with or holding. In high school a teacher explained the difference betweenmetaphor and simile in terms of distance. I imagined likeor as as a door cracked, light…