Category Archives: Poetry

Gary Sloboda

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cenotaph

our eyes enlarge behind the lenses of our glasses. coats out of season and heels worn out. like prisoners at the moment before release. we are held so tightly. and the tall buildings’ windows once dazed by the river. glare down tonight at our home. of pressed wood and carpenter’s glue. glitter paint job in the moonlight. and our belongings piled everywhere. as if we’re about to or will never leave.

taurus

i was distressed. voices of others landed in our conversations like spores. when we stood on the curb. its scattered jagged glass reflected the years to come. and our mutiny of life’s more gentle features: hollering on the street like it’s the end of the world. and on the walkway of the bridge. how the form of our breath ascended. like the ghosts of pigeons. floating through the city. and the stars fetchingly arranged.

renewal

the intention was always there until it wasn’t. moon glow on the balcony before eviction. i stared across at the alley peppered with bugs and struggle. without a holler or alarm to catfish my attention. i stood there as if standing in line. to be written out or scripted. the last tenant’s plastic plants gathered tightly on the sill. and left for the next one to leave. as they were left for me.

sunfish

i’m made in the same way. shambling out of the stale fungal scent of my books. through the rusted gate that leads to the cellar. or the courtyard the lobotomized belltower looks down upon. where bullets whine when creditors arrive. in a ripple of wind that once laid down on the sea. people are moving towards me. their arms wide open and slightly animatronic across the concrete. and they hold me against the tides of refusal. as we taste the first light of the day.

memorial 2

the decades of ellipses tracked us home. it’s broken now but weighs the same. and the same emotions linger. pelican wedge overhead. like the hillside cemetery flags fly. we stumble with our bags. as the last days’ dark melodies unwind from passing cars. in the salt pinch of the waves that corrodes the metal railings. along the walls of rock where the ocean begins. and goes on forever.

Gary Sloboda’s work has recently appeared in such places as Blackbox Manifold, Twyckenham Notes, and Word For/ Word. He lives in San Francisco.

Bryan Price

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Light coming over the mountain

I.

you are dead but light keeps
coming over the mountain
as you awaken from life you
realize that the mountain is a line

and the light is everything else
no color or substance
nothing but clarity for the
last few moments of finitude

II.

there is a thing Adorno said
about poetry and yet I go on
returning to it reading about
beds into tombs reading about so

much death among future ruins
a lilac a little finger a grain of sand
dust into dust but the light
keeps coming over the mountain

The mystery of transubstantiation

the wine smells like grass again and vice-versa

when I say ghosts I mean his inglorious past

his oiled boots reminded me of gun grease

he shot the lights out once—sunsets made the

age of angels immaterial but we’d sit and watch

planes crash into the mountains we’d burn

tires in order to fuck with the satellites and when

he gave us his teeth we sharpened them on

a landmine the shape and color of a new moon

The libra archive

one cannot conjure out of thin air or the dead blue leaves
cannot make or break cannot hit or beat with belt
cannot swim or shower cleanse bathe or soak in acid
cannot put plastic into effluvial veins one
cannot ride or rail or with tongue the color of snail put napalm
in the black-as-night shoes of a former lover
the street weeps inchoate the sky falls in dribs and drabs
summer summons suicide summer summons situation-comedies
about certain simulacrums concerning the immutability
of young parasitic love one cannot conjure lovelorn mindless
mind-numbing mindfuck gyrate to gunplay cannot do so
clandestinely without what I’ve heard referred to simply as the
gadget one cannot wear black theoretical tightrope-walker’s shoes
and just walk into the distance between hazel and hazelnut

Bryan Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, EPOCH, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

Stephen Paul Miller

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For David Shapiro (1947-2024)

I can already see the wall around
paradise lifting

Ecstatic,
I know no difference

between heaven
and this moment,

your garden
and a bell,

a violin and going crazy.

Angel Boss

I wake up ‘n
see
my mother
pulling off my sheet

I look straight ahead
and see my births
layered in
crystal.

I close my eyes
and see
my angel boss
ordering

me around your
sonnet factory.

A Living Force Field

is holding your hand. Turn around.
Here comes the east. A pool
player frets and struts
watching your footsteps
heart in hand over a new aura
some time when you have time.

Around

All the dead
are like a dachshund
following you around.

Tide

She asks
me if
I can
identify

a particular moment.

You mean
the moment, I answer,

when I

become the cliff I hover over

and time goes out with the
tide.

Yes, she

says,

that’s the moment.

Stephen Paul Miller’s nine poetry books include Beautiful Snacks (Marsh Hawk, Fall 2026), and his critical books include The Seventies Now (Duke University Press). He’s co-edited Radical Poetics and Secular Judaism and New Work on New York School Poets. His poems appear in Best American Poetry 2023, 1994 and surrealist and Jewish American anthologies. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, and he’s a Professor of English at St. John’s University, NYC.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

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If With You

i look and you tell me to look and i look
—Laura Walker

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.
—Pauline Oliveros

I.

If I walked with you      on a dimly lit afternoon.
If we descended      a scrub hillside,   the air fine
& dry—      where would the trail lead?
A thousand leaves      lying on the floor—
a thousand      leaves

II.


If we made our way      past lichens & bearded moss.
If what looks like bittersweet hangs    in spangled vines.
A handful of acorns, waxy & wood brown.
On another coast,    acres of shaded farmland—
maples flaming      in autumnal red.

III.

If I followed you      to where the trees thin—
sheep without a shepherd,      no goatherd to be seen,
cracked earth      welt & bone      switchbacks & brittle grass,
bearded heads      bent     to the ground
If they lift not a single head      at our passing.

IV.

If I lay myself    among the bracken fern
beside tangled roots      & understory—
longing    sweat      goatherd

V.

If with you    I find    my way into silence      & back again.

VI.

If with you every leaf      is an instrument—
every oak      a song      If with you I become
the trail itself—      sweat & muscle      dry heat.
If my mind parches—      & my mouth
dirt    dirt      shade me    dry— the sun

VII.

& the land’s uneven      tempo,
oak-laden forest      &   scrubland,
the trail’s      wandering score.

VIII.

If my heart narrows, then circles around.

IX.

If first one leads, then the other—      you, me
then you again—      alternating along the path,
your steady footfall—      & mine, echoed
across chaparral—      a sound    I might
not hear,    if I weren’t already      listening

X.

If we cut across miles of scrub oak      whisked
leaves & surface      forest dim      light filtered
& wide      If we pause to listen—      sound poured
round our head      every leaf & stem, trembling—
If the forest      shook my mind      a mountain wind
falling on trees    crowns billowing in late afternoon.

XI.

hard-packed earth   & dappled light      it sings
sun-bleached grasses      it sings      twining wood-
bine & honeysuckle      it sings      underbrush
& speckled leaf—      shall dance    & sing

________________________________________

This pastoral sequence derives much of its form and language from Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive, Sappho’s If Not, Winter (trans. Anne Carson), the book of Psalms and Laura Walker’s psalmbook, Obi Kaufmann’s The California Field Atlas, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, the coast live oak scrublands of Northern California.

Wave Organ II

& seated by a window  at first  she might  keep the feeling  at bay
maybe  take a breath or two  & staring at the glass   the ocean’s
vast flattening  & release   in the corner of her mind  a little tug
not a self  she can look   in the eye   body blurring  in  & out  of focus
though  in the presence  of this little one   she might feel  her own
frequency  slow  to a steady whoosh   & the little one  sensing this  shift
might draw nearer  & they might find themselves entering  into phase
all around them  the feeling  of a great heart  beating   or she might
be out walking with a friend  who might turn to her  & say describe that
sadness   a sudden flush rising  behind the eyes  or under the skin
a bruised color  surfaced in the face of the lake  lifting & lapping
gravelly shore    a lake is not  an ocean  she might think to herself
but a body  surrounded on all sides     with this new safety a person
could navigate this  glittery self-contained life  & never  drown

 

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under     the skin
that bruised color
surfacing

describe that     sadness

she     might say
a tenderness
rising

behind the    eyes

 

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body     blurring in
and out o f focus

two selves     rhythms
beating
against
each other

a great    heart
pulsing

around them        like the sea

Wave Organ V

& later    making her way along the harbor    around cement blocks    bits    of broken masonry
strewn across the jetty    she might sit    with a hand to her forehead    shielding herself from
the sun’s glare    as it reflects    the ocean’s brilliance    its foamy spray    catching    & releasing
the children    playing along the water’s edge    it could swallow them at any second    she might
think to herself    watching their lithe bodies tumble    in   & out of the surf    but no day is
without its movement    she might say to herself    reaching down    to brush    the sand from her
ankles    stopping to press her ear against the pipe    angled    into the ocean    like a periscope
listening to its open-mouthed whoosh    she might hear something    of the body’s origins
its rhythmic thunks & gurgles    the tide going out & coming back    empty masts of sailboats
bobbing along the dock    & the sky’s limitless blue    & in the distance    the lighthouse    in its
immovable clarity    keeping watch over all aspects    of the sea    an unlit eye staring    in six
directions at once    & the murmur of waves in the air    the pull of some immeasurable depth
drawing her    into the restless    element of her    own interior    its lively    & perpetual    music

 

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at the water’s     edge
sea
the sky
the waves

its     foamy     white     spray

 

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pulling her

deeper
in     her
infinitude
a restless blue     that

spreads     and spreads

the sea’s     steady music
rocking her
from     within

 

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O
sea

resonant
its      music
surge and return

tide
going out     empty
and     coming back
whole

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, 2025) and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year. Currently Mia lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a 2025-2026 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Ma Yongbo

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Night Stay by Gongchen Bridge

Two dark red painted boats bring dusk from upstream,
moored for a long time, emitting smoke, like two dowries
waiting to be opened, barges carrying sand and stone
pass under the bridge arch, almost soundlessly,
under the bow light, a few white plastic boxes
nurturing flowers, someone in love, unmoved by the flowing water.

Fine rain wets the lanterns, no one rides a donkey in the drizzle,
passing through doors and gates, no one ties a lean horse under the willow tree,
unfolds poetry scrolls and dark swords from yellow parcels,
how many old things along the riverbank are hidden by the willow colours?
They only emit faint light and sighs when there is no one in the deep night.

But there will still be someone waking up against the wall,
what he supports just waits for him to fall,
like a dead end filled with miniature landscapes,
at the southern end of the canal, those irregular heads
shine like lights, instinctively pure.

I can’t have a life as long as a river,
the skeletons of moths revolve around my silent brain.
Don’t regret, just turn off the lights,
this is your night, this is the world’s way,
autumn rain is still falling in the darkness,
still disappearing into the waters of the Grand Canal.

News of the Snow

In my hometown, snowfall
is a frequent occurrence,
those I asked about the news of snow
have vanished deep within the hometown,
just like snow vanishing into the sky.

And then, cold seeps from a single word,
like frost emanating from within a stone.
Some people returned, exhaling air,
nameless yet oddly familiar.

Because snowfall, in my hometown,
is a frequent occurrence,
as if riding in a car, the road seems to be rushing towards you,
rough landscapes are illuminated,
only to be engulfed by endless darkness moments later.

Sleeping on the Street

Step by step, you step along snowflake stairs
down to the street; often, the street
is a deep black river,
you are on the riverbed, flickering like a failing signal.

Snowflakes gather around your head
like the final tribute to a thought
continuously surprising you, wherever you go,
like a jellyfish stirring up dust – it takes a lifetime to be born.

These snowflakes in the dark
are the remnants of everything you touch,
transmitted to you through your fingertips;
it seems that you are always the uncertainty they crave.

Inch by inch, you lose your skin,
blood, bones; you become the wind without nerves,
beyond the ancient struggle between being and nothingness.
You rise again, like snowflakes from the depths,
no-longer flickering awake
but falling asleep again; relaxed and nameless.

Ma Yongbo, Ph.D was born in 1964. A representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, he is a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original books and translations since 1986, including 9 poetry collections. His translation included the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, Ashbery, and Rosanna Warren. His complete translation of Moby Dick has sold over 600,000 copies.

Joseph Lease

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Wake

 

we have this chance, when the sun opens

all the doors, somebody died, someone

lost the answers in the night sky, don’t

say it, don’t say that, I tried to be in the

 

space, I made the plastic capsule, we’ll

come running, daydreams in hand,

there’s less now, just, there are fewer,

fewer minutes, fewer useable minutes, I

 

was dazzled by the words, I couldn’t

read them, be specific, say place names,

Cambridge, Southie, Providence, place

names don’t place me in my life, he said

 

when I was a kid, when I was your age,

when I was this, when I was that, there

was no room for me, we got used to it,

we are getting used

 

to it, we fall upon the thorns of life, we

bleed, and this pen, this notepad, he left

pages and pages, key words, he left I’m

not the man I think I am at home,

 

make the sound of some dying mouth,

give me back my life, give back what

once you gave, so they gave you the

earth, or they said they did, the earth said

 

remember me, I was trying to stay sane

in the other pages of the book, I am

respectable, what passes for respectable,

we are quite literally here, draw the sign

 

in the corner of the page, return to the

breath, he just doubled down and tripled

down on knowing the names of flowers,

he seemed to come out of nowhere,

 

filling the page with light, the page as

slab of light, work was my salvation he

said, get to work, get back to work, we are

the people who mask, look, a picture of a

 

blackberry, why can I remember that, so

I’m writing to you again, I guess I’m

saying anything and everything, how can

you leave me, how could you die, I know

 

you wanted to see him again, what did it

feel like to pass over, to go there, oh, how

I’d love to be in that number, turning the

paper this way and that, I want you to

 

read this and imagine me: in Berkeley,

in Chicago, drinking tea, eating apples,

walking slowly in the blustery day, the

day was full of talking animals

 

The Buried Life

 
(head full
of
plastic
(“you can

 

be anything
you put
your mind
to” (are

 

we
extinct?
(colors burn
like garbage

 

on fire
(we
shoot
cows in

 

the head
(the wind-
washed
air

 

(roses
(bones
(bones and
dirt

 

and (we’re
waiting to
die (we’re
waiting to

 

pray (God
the rabbit
afraid
(God the

 

cat
dying (God
are not
my days

 

few (rain
side-
ways
(redwoods

 

(on
fire (horses
on
fire

 

Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books include Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023) and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s new book, Now What, winner of the Philip Whalen Award, will be published by Chax Press. Lease’s poems “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2002 (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor).

 

Emily Kingery

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Home Front

The night of our wedding, another couple pounded beers at a frat party. They slurred their love-yous, collapsed on a bed with rope lights wound on the posts.

In the morning, they ate pancakes. They talked about spring, booked a hotel, nursed their headaches and awaited the declaration. When it arrived, they threw shoes at the television, missed the President’s face by inches.

We stood in the stale-coffee air of a Midwest church, blood harelike in our legs and a blizzard coming through. We sucked in champagne like helium, and somewhere, lovers waited for bombs to explode in their rooms.

We bore the explosions of old friends in tuxedos. They passed a microphone and slurred into the black foam sponge.

Things would get ugly. Our friends would split like a wishbone: one part seething stay the course, one part turn back, thou pretty bride. It would continue this way, without exit. Shores would continue to recede with our hairlines; footage of far-off countries would loop.

The watch turned to a warning. Snow drifted onto mute cars in the parking lot, poured static into the local screens. The private companies soon rushed in to unbury us.

God bless, our relatives crooned through the cake. They drove their forks like tanks through the roses, leaving streaks of raspberry filling behind.

The Shelley Disciples

The Shelley disciples keep dirt in their kitchens, in rinsed-out hummus containers. They plant mint and basil, sometimes; they never pick the leaves. They look bruised. They fall apart at the windowsills and stay there for days.

What they say: “Who knows what to do with it?” What they mean: “We wish our mothers were here. We wish you would be our mothers.”

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When we were girls, we filled a banged-up pot with puddle water and mint. We crouched on the porch, used branches to stir while mosquitos swirled, haloed us in sound.

Once, a brother came out. He played along; he tucked a napkin at his chin. But when we gave him a spoon, he laughed: “You can’t really cook.” He spat.

He grew up to be a father of girls. Remember how he raised his spoon to the cat, how it hissed and pawed it to the ground?

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I was a daughter fond of families, unbodied. I would dunk my hands in paint and smear the legs and arms right from the heads. No stomachs, lungs– just heads. Moons, reaching to the edges of things.

My father boasted that I used every color: “So thorough,” he laughed. “Such a smart girl.”

He kept a box of my paper monsters because he was like any father. He has never missed what’s missing.

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The Shelley disciples press books to their laps. The room creaks under the ache of desks.

And what were thou, he asks a mountain, and rivulets wet their chins. They nod and nod like lunatics or limbs in the wind.

We walk to their houses, shifting weight. We imagine the sand of snack crumbs making headlands of their mattresses. Some of us who imagine less think of books before we lay them down: how they slap our hip bones like the sea.

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The Shelley disciples admire our hair, or how words about hair turn to song in their mouths. They sing of our hair spread over wood grain, of locks of the approaching storm. The notes quicken; the castors glide. Chairs catch poems beneath us.

After, they weep for their fair copies torn. We are sorry, as though for typewriter errors. We twist open, like vials of correction fluid.

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They set flame to hand-rolled cigarettes. When they speak, they move like acolytes. They dream of expulsion, of snuffing out God, of women who receive men in graveyards.

We group at their elbows to hear. In this town, what isn’t a grave?

Smoke perfumes our clothes and the spike of their unshaved skin. We trace the dizzy embers when their hands float, flick cherries to their feet.

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I stood at the arm of my grandfather’s lawn chair. He tousled my hair, his hand warm from a Bic. “You get prettier each time I see you,” he said. I breathed in beer, prettiness; I studied the float of ash in a half-drunk lemonade.

When the Shelley disciples talk anarchy in their kitchens, wine bloodies their teeth into the teeth of lions. The beers of men before them haunt their refrigerator doors.

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We sew loose buttons, purchase hummus. We are Mary: mother of God, mother of infants dead enough before born. Some of us who imagine less sew stones in pockets, dream of water: bodies of it; steeping leaves.

The Shelley disciples speak, unbound. We brutalize. Our pens turn blades in the knife games they play in dive-bar light.

After, their doors hide empty plots. After, they sigh in kitchens.

We are Mary, whose hair drapes down from her head to her prophet’s unclean feet.

A Made Place, That Is Mine

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

—Robert Duncan

In Bambi, the part that breaks me comes before the doe is shot. A frantic bird is told, Don’t fly, but she can’t bear waiting for the gun. She showed me what to do when you came. When you fit the needle in crackling grooves. When you poured gin in an orange juice glass.

I think of your hands breaking eggs, your fingers swirling butter pats. I was broke and ate what you made me. Can I bring you more? you said. My yes held still in an open field for you, quailed in the light. Your hands raised over the expanse.

I was broke. I took your paper: thick, expensive sheets. I made them into fat-creased birds and with a sewing kit I pricked them, put a needle through the peaks. I love them, you said. The thread came cheap as bloodshed, air.

For years, your threaded bird-heads have hung starry in the hall. At night, I run a finger in my mind across their backs. I make for them a thicket, and beyond that place, a field. It is featureless as an egg. I raise a shovel to it and break.

Emily Kingery is the author of Invasives (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals and has been selected for multiple honors and awards. She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Ambrose University and is an emeritus member of the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community.

Dennis Hinrichsen

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DEMENTIA LYRIC :: unbeknownst

a short film on engram theory called the forgetting

was confusion substrate
all

along :: dispossessed

of memory he
basks

there now ::

a pre-death
uterine

clutching at nothing’s
wall ::

still
some part of what

I recognize
as him

wondering :: how did I get here ::

what purpose
is

contained
in next :: he roils in damp

covers saying this :: I watch him
roil ::

not even a bird
of

prey anymore :: there is no
grand

seeking :: he has woken ::
immediately

desires sleep ::
wants

to know how it is
he knows

me :: whatever constellation
of neurons

I am to him
dead-sky locked ::

as for emotion :: it is mine ::

I rub his neck and shoulders
as if to say

you possess
a body still :: this is how

blood moves ::
this

is a muscle :: I am
indicating

care with thumb and fingers
which

you will forget ::
it has

relaxed you
which you will forget ::

I have flown here I am

leaving
tomorrow before you wake ::

it will be
as if

I were never here :: gone ::

not even ghost :: memory
of ghost ::

therefore :: never grieved

TU•MOR•SE•QUENCE

(near the Palisades Nuclear Power Station)

that line from Whitman that still resonates in bone ::
that’s the chemo ::

as for the rest:: the world :: it drinks
its own urine::

it will drink its own radioactivity soon ::
lifestyle loaded to the edges

even now
with future :: children screaming

in warm water discharge ::
thyroid

still butterfly either side of the windpipe
pulsing

as they swallow ::
they

may have to love cancer
again :: fission

needs lake to survive ::
it happens ::

it’s accidental ::
if not here then… somewhere ::

spent rods
(that other malignancy) piling ::

how
dune sand dry-sizzles when I piss ::

eroding as poem erodes :: lines
(its cell walls)

that break and
break

until all I see are black trunks
uprooted ::

tumorous veins exposed ::
meanwhile

this language-stare ::
I have driven 100 miles in rain

to confront
the site :: and so I stand :: in rain ::

sky fallout ::
collateral damage :: feelings ::

I had them :: they needed burial somewhere

RE•AC•TOR•SE•QUENCE

cloud-turbine churning of moisture

high in the troposphere ::

wind off lake

drizzling clear
plastic ::

I think the

poem is big
enough

now it has sky in it ::
brain

still a field :: summer
dusk :: fireflies sparking

neuronal

gaps :: it would like to live
in the world

forever

the brain would :: its demise
will be

death of fresh
water :: the body

aquifer :: I can feel it
as self-

shining
dries :: handbacks leathered ::

spotted :: the cerebellar
pinching

at memory already
beginning

maybe :: neural nets

tearing :: knots
(that

kiss in the dark) ::

coming
undone :: I am

forever
‘twixt the wings of it :: wanting

to ride the overwhelm
and let

quantum purring ingest
this better

Eucharist :: body
and blood

of me :: raised by dogs ::

it can chew
and spit

the rest :: it can play
and bite

at fingers
until I am mineral

blown through hollow
bone ::

anonymous
(I

embrace this) cave-wall
portrait :: death

the portal :: death

yellow

and feral :: uranium-
pellet

spine loaded
to the

skull as I feed
atomic fracture to the air

Dennis Hinrichsen’s twelfth full-length collection, dementia lyrics, will appear early 2026 from Green Linden Press. Other recent books include Dominion + Selected Poems, gathering work from forty years of publishing, Flesh-plastique, schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation, and This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the Grid Poetry Prize. He lives in Michigan, where he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area.

Oz Hardwick

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Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty

A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens, and coughs up fragments of glass animals. His voice is a crack in the polar ice, through which sabre-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and other apex predators crawl, shaking crystals from their shaggy manes and blinking blood-lusty eyes. It’s a predictable avalanche that leaves peaks denuded of snow, with frostbitten corpses staring at the sky, toilet tissue wreathes, and flies. The man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull. When the bombs come, or when the Sun catches in bare branches and refuses to set, the man in the blue suit needles tears from the corners of his eyes as he photoshops his hands out of pictures of star-struck girls; and when he waves from low-slung cars and ornate balconies, he’s just a stand-in for himself, or a shop dummy with a blue suit slapped on in cut-price paint. Meanwhile, mammoths and mastodons march two by two, waving fire that turns mountains into cracked glass, while a disembodied voice gags in the throat of a dropped megaphone, summoning the two-faced faithful to free lunches, free holidays, melting ice creams, and blue suits for each new wailing infant.

Bargain

Contrary to counterindications, we are not flying. We are not fleeing the scenes of crimes in which we may or may not have been complicit. It’s complicated, but we were not created – in God’s image? A dog’s image? A cat, perhaps. Me? How? – to comprehend, any more than to combust from the fire in our bellies. Believe it or not, we are falling, in love like teenage sweethearts, and into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones. We’re like kids in a sweetshop: not children but goats, sorted from the sheep by Disgusted of Godalming, Surrey, with his fringe on top. Stop. Why-oh-why-oh-why must we distrust the scores and indentations spread out as plain as the noses on our faces? Two wings don’t make a plane. We walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down. The relationship of verb to subject remains. Ambiguous.

Interpretive Malacology: The Arecibo Division

We monitor the snails with cameras and trackers, then chart their movements with coloured pens on sturdy paper. The technology’s changed, but it’s much the same as it was in our parents’ day and, for all we know, their parents’ day, and on and on, until the Gods of your choice and their analogues and avatars first created snails. To the casual observer, they’re just scaling the fence for the finest leafy greens, then retracing their trails to sleep through the day beneath rusting bins and barrows. But if you look at the charts – here, and here, and particularly here – you can see the patterns and their relation to language, the script of slime on weathered creosote. We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. See how the lines caress the edge of meaning. We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.

The Assassin’s Last Bow

Reviews are in and they’re not looking good. Three stars at best, and one of those is O-type, hot and massive, its hydrogen burning out as it swallows itself into a black hole. Another is a washed-up lush in a downtown bar, repeating the same tired tales of the road to anyone who’ll listen. No one will listen. The last one’s more ambivalent, pinned to a five-year-old’s jacket, a tangible signifier of law and order in a clapboard frontier town. He looks at his tears in the mirror, as if they belong to someone else, as if they’re the binary stars he can only dream of. The reviews, he reflects, are disappointing to say the least, peppered with typos and tired tales. Maybe he should jack it in? The old man in the mirror weighs a gun in his innocent palm and aims it at the stars.

Oz Hardwick is a York-based poet, who has published “maybe fifteen?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

John Gallaher

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Modern Life Is a Porno

Life, like any fancy dinner, started with soup.
And then an inflatable backyard nightclub
and terracotta army. What if I told you it’s a time bomb
and neither the red wire nor the black wire
are connected to anything important?
Joke’s on you then. You should have cut the red one.
The only acceptable growth is infinite growth. That’s what the explosion says.
And look how well that’s going. One can sleep through an alarm
and be awoken by a whisper. And then I died
and got into composting. End of season one.
I climbed through the window, so the window’s a door.
Kindness was also a survival strategy. Thank you.
Can you pass the salt, please? Thank you.
I’m going to try eating my heart and having it too.

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Knowing it’s an advertisement doesn’t keep it
from persuading you. Like when they talk about sex and death
as foreplay. Hold on.
I’ve not yet gotten over my desire to be beautiful.
Walking down the hall just now I imagined I was
someone else, far away from mirrors, and one of the rest
of these people. That beautiful one.
I decided it was a simulation and that didn’t change anything.
We still debated free will and that didn’t change anything
either. The point of vistas is to be cumbersome
in their staring. And then desire pops up, and all bets are off.
Pull down the shades on these shady streets,
the remote viewing and hideout. You’re not fooling me.
Oh, America, at long last. Everyone’s in drag.

Anything Outside Our Senses Is Invisible

You’re a goldfish watching a feather. Maybe it’s ash.
You have a concept of ground and sea coming to a point.
Your truck goes airborne on ranch Road 12, flipping
and then landing flat back down into oncoming traffic.
A woman drives under, with a concept
of tunnel, maybe trellis. Or force field. God.
Everything is proof, says light to the double slit,
but I keep coming back to bed, saying “Yes, but.”
I’ve run out of variations on my approach. Hopscotch.
Bunny hop. Pogo stick. It’s paratactic. Floors
shine. My forehead crinkles and shines,
an edifice rising across the stars of noon. Say three “Hail Marys”
and don’t forget to vote. Be the statue
in a long conversation with the courthouse atrium wall.

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Holding a warm cup will cause you to feel
that other people are warmer, meaning nicer. Friendlier.
Somewhere in my body the decision is already made.
What gets you here won’t get you there,
unless it does, as things are both complicated
and redundant. You have just enough milk for your recipe.
If I could describe something closely enough. You escape
with only minor bruises. Sorry for all the jumping around.
A clear version of how and why, which ends up
on a cliff face where someone hands you a menu
to explain your hunger. New names for weather events include:
Thundersnow. Bomb cyclone. Heatflation. Atmospheric
lake. How about some fancy chess move as metaphor.
And my plans for a speedy recovery.

At Moments Such As This

They say positive people live longer and I’m not a positive person.
Define “positive.” Define “longer” and “person.” Meanwhile,
these freakishly normal things keep happening.
This toothbrush, for instance. Divorce.
Remarriage. Like that feeling you get when someone’s
looking at you, and you look around suddenly
and you don’t see anyone looking at you, or you see people
who might have been looking at you but have now
looked some other direction. Why might they have been looking
at you? What of this napkin on the floor? Is it a signal?
I’m holding on for a loophole, and what a positive person
might do, like the unexpected appearance of mercy
or it’s some girl scouts selling cookies. “Yes, we have Thin Mints!”
Concentrate on your breathing. Breathing is a positive development.

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Context demands action coherent within that context.
Sail on, sailor. Mow on, mower. Etcetera on,
etc. In history, before the rise of the industrial revolution,
most people didn’t live long enough to see all that much
change. But now we’re all dizzy. Falling over
is an action. So is panic. Living in a loud place,
one will be awoken by silence. I’m going to make signs
to hang around the kitchens of America on this and other matters.
I’m going to write something about life that doesn’t say death.
A car can last as long as you want it to, if you’re OK
with it not being (What was I even thinking about?)
a wise financial decision. This is a study of change. Maybe
you choose wrong in the fire, but an escape opens anyway.
Maybe you freeze as the bull charges, but it passes by.

As One Navigates the Hapless Colonnades

At night, the body says “roll over,” but to roll over a specific way,
and so why that? I flip the pillow, and then again,
like I’ve lost something. It’s one of those overnights
I wake up at 4am to do philosophy. And this clock
keeping everything in order. 4am is a great time for clocks.
Waking up, visualizing your skeleton lying there
in demure repose. It’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.
“Let’s create a threat level hierarchy,” the clock says.
Ants are going to carry this house away. “Wait for us,”
they cry, in their tiny, adorable voices.
The mental health marketplace is so different now. The brochures
are in color. The smiles terrifying. Like the world
is filled with teeth. I look in the mirror
and wonder what it would be like to be this person.

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You can say all sorts of things that you imagine are true,
later, when everything’s calmed into day, and truth
only matters generally, full of dictionaries and breath mints.
But 4am is very clear. It’s April 1st, 4:15,
a perfect time for saying what you really mean.
I really mean a set of reactionary diamonds. Like a framed picture
of one’s elementary school. Here’s a list
of everything there is. Here’s a list of everything
there isn’t. Ignoring the picture and holding the frame instead,
saying all I can hold is beauty, as I hold you, some you,
the band revving up for a big finish, the lights on my
neighbor’s garage, perfectly aligned through my window,
like feeling terrible about the news, sleeping with it
under the mattress, rubbing myself with it in the shower.

John Gallaher’s most recent collection of poetry is My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books 2024). Recent poems appear in APR, Ploughshares, New Letters and Copper Nickel, among others. Gallaher lives in northwest Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.