THOMAS OSATCHOFF | SEEING IT

Seeing It

stacking boxes again
this realization the burning
bush this moment this you me
tried tiny bathroom
on the second level
looking out the barred square window
at someone in the empty green lot
lighting a fire like one minute
to make it betweenesses

Thomas Osatchoff, together with family, is building a self-sustaining home near a waterfall. Recent work has appeared in New Note Poetry, Letters Journal, L=Y=R=A, Red Coyote, Thin Air, and elsewhere

ELEANOR CLAIRE | I LIED WHEN I SAID THAT I MISSED YOU

I Lied When I Said That I Missed You

what I meant was that I miss
myself; I miss my youth and the way
that each day somehow stretched out
to hold unending time – or did it unfold
so slowly because each second felt
drenched in cruciation, unmoored and
delicate, I was always so close to the
edge, flirting with the ravine beneath me
and I was always waiting to claim
my inevitable end; perhaps I do not
miss the pain itself, but the way
each moment felt sacred, like I
could taste my own desperation, like
I needed some sudden shock to rewire
my breaking body

and yes, I have come to love this
peace I now hold, but sometimes
I wish I could return to those days,
all flashing lights and thunderstorms,
my chest breaking open with each
sunrise, fists for hands and a mouth
full of broken glass, and sometimes
I want to relive that burning,
that eternal fury, I wish
I could dig my nails in, hold
viciously onto that girl so fervently
chasing her own destruction

and yes, I love this life that I have
built, slow mornings and love that keeps
me warm, but a thrum beneath my
breastbone may always sing
for the chaos that I learned to call
home, for that eternal yearning
for something, anything to burn
away that restless energy
that waits in my bones, curdling
and rotting until I am only
caffeine and consequences, crossed
out letters to my own self
and it feels as if breaking this
tie is like losing the last strand
I have to my own mind, to
being nineteen and reckless, afraid
of everything and nothing all at
once, and I never want to
let her go

I do not know
how to tell you that when I say
I miss you, what I mean is that
I miss myself

Eleanor Claire is a writer and artist from South Florida who has been previously published in Verity La, The Cape Rock, In Parenthesis, Paragon Journal, Plainsongs Magazine, and others. IG: @e.escalatedquickly, @eliot_ekphrastic

SANDRA KOLANKIEWICZ | SHE WOLFS

She Wolfs

In my sister’s current job, she pours her
love down the drain. She asks questions, is told
lies, smiles back. She regularly distributes
to the unappreciative who just
expect, kinder than I who think at least
thank you is due. In foreign countries, she
buys cans of tuna to feed the stray cats,
though the women bang their pot lids at her.
She waves to them, smiles even in her sleep,
never learned to cook, lost her hair in
menopause, uses a cane for mushroom
hunting even when on wet days the tip
sinks in with the weight of her limp till she’s
bound to fall on the soft ground, lying in
wet leaves and giggling like a girl. We had
the same parents, but she favors neither,
someone’s crazy aunt, the one that’s really
adopted. Hand me a jar of that stuff
you’re always eating, I say, which she does,
right away. To me it tastes bad. She wolfs.

Sandra Kolankiewicz is the author of Even the Cracks, Turning Inside Out, Lost in Transitions, and The Way You Will Go.

ANNA IDELEVICH | HORIZON SABER

Horizon Saber

The saber is melting in spite of January with raindrops over the grass.
A solid horizon hung like a fish, driving me crazy.
Cold in December, dry up, but flared up with the fire of love,
dancing bud catches the rain and knows that there is no death.
It melts with moisture on the tongue and the gums are his bed.
Probably there is no beach, probably there is only one blizzard in my head. Probably it’s time for me to sleep, but whispers that there is no death,
still sings the words again, wiping his nose first:
Everything you do, makes me crazy ’bout you.
Nothing that tenderness hangs, I’m only here until seven.
Everything you do, makes me crazy ‘bout you.
I am a molten sapphire, a souvenir not found.

Anna Idelevich: Anna’s poems were featured in Louisville Review, BlazeVOX, The Racket, New Contrast, Zoetic Press, and Shoreline of Infinity among others.

LAINE DERR | BUTTONS I KEEP

Buttons I Keep

I still have
glimpses of her –
mouth wiped
on a soiled sleeve,
snow falling
on a February day,
trees etched
on a blouse of blue

buttons
I keep
like a lost
eye – a jar
next to a jar
filled w/ white.

Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Chapter House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Laine lives in a landscape, free and quiet.

KORY VANCE | TODAY

Today

we grow old between two bosoms like vines
climbing through crumbling bricks
and mortar to salt the earth
with rubble

i wrote that when i was twenty
or maybe twenty-one

they were the first good lines i ever composed;
the rest of the poem
sucked

today, i am twenty-nine,
alone, and living
in a van

today, i tried to impress strange women on
tinder with facts about
hummingbirds

it did not work

today, i am unemployed for the sake of bitter rest, sat at
a bar drinking my savings, considering the chattering
through my spine that might happen
if i place a blue lily in someone's
hair, the woman who is still
my secret

today i am very aware of how vulnerable
my wafer heart has become
to falling in love

this time, i should not
run

as i have done so many times across state lines
or over oceans in search of gold
from a different
dandelion

but i still see the rubble with a crystal ball eye
i do remember a childhood
fighting back the vines
from green beans

today, i wonder about a life lived alone hovering
on aladdin’s flying carpet
just watching, just
watching

as the little humans clean their water, and cure the illnesses,
and find love, and reduce carbon, and eliminate
borders, and tell the truth, and stop death,
and then the sun
still flares

our god can’t stop it and my gin and tonic
disintegrates the paper straw

and mom and dad are still so sad
that i drink alcohol

Kory Vance is a poet and his career can be followed on Instagram @strength_and_poetry.

DANIEL NEWELL | TWO POEMS

Two Poems

BLACKBERRY PICKING

When I remember my mother happy
I go back to her emerging from brambles,
a loaded bucket keeping her from dancing.
How she’d get into it, thumbs and fingers
purpled from berries that also stained
the cutoff milk jug she carried. Handing me
a used ice cream tub, lugging their dark weight.
Some were sour, not ready for the trip.
But the big sweet ones in hot cobbler
with vanilla ice cream melting over an evening
at the bottom of summer. I'm getting ahead of her.
And her scratched shins and hands. Sweaty legs. Sneaking
over the old Battlefield where the best patches were
without competition. Picking half a day of illegal berries.
Dodging the park ranger, dropping in waist-high grass
when his truck would pass, lying belly-down on the stained
shirtfront she’d sometimes flipped up as a makeshift basket.

RODGEY POEM

I hope I get the news late
when you die. That I live a while
more with the thought of you
alive. Maybe the paper misses it,
or you're missing for days
and for all we know, you might
return in a week from the woods
hungry and filthy, crawling with stories.

SHYLA SHEHAN | TO WHOM OR WHAT OR WHERE

To Whom or What or Where

It’s been low tide
for a while, the beach
parched. Seagulls search
for salvation from starvation
and move on.

The sky is endless—
immeasurably clear.
I cast my questions out to sea
and marvel at the whole, lonely
Milky Way.

"To Whom or What or Where" was previously published in Local Honey | Midwest

JACK PHILLIPS | TWO POEMS

Two Poems

Luna’s Wolf at the Door

It takes a couple of weeks to pass through the sun/moon door begins to open on the Solstice and full swung on the first full moon, Janus/Jana male/goddess Dianus/Diana Sun/Moon two-face deity of the past

and the future and the present belongs to Luna (as Diana also called) known to the First Nations as variously She-bear and Mama Wolf attended by juncos – full moon on belly new moon on back pinky-beak dipped in daybreak –

she rounds the year through a deciduous door opens to a meadow through which we too shall pass swing open our hearts full-mooned ripened/stripped laid naked to wrap

ourselves in coyote-light, the closest we come to a wolf or bear when the Moon-she comes six days into January.

Spillover Poems

Blue

As with all creatures the flow of my veins carries a measure of tears in the flat hand of night but in this light the daybreak wears the skin of my dreams and holds me, not without her own sadnesses but in this light she reveals a softer shade of blue, liquid orange spilling over and through me.

Weight

The moon in heat plays with mating foxes and when they call it a night she throws cinders mostly ashen juncos flinty titmouses pyrite chickadees and cardinal sparks, finches. Passions fall on this maiden dawn when gravity proves an earthly lust the lyric physics of desire, pinkish lingua on paper in ink, the weight of devotion on snow.

Shadow

Canopies draw skylines then veins then a web then sutras stitch the thin waters of my eyes and the rest of me. Write bird-songs in the snow a thumb for a crow a pinky a chickadee frog-song in mud come spring. Be known by these woods one flesh among many make shadows with the same sun lay lyrics on the land.

Curve

While we sleep the earth rounds herself round having spun a morning verses slip into view. We wake on the curve – night trails into birdsong belly to dawn, saucering wanderers tuck and curl, mustering sun rolls over edges as pulls the westering moon, souls take the shape of daybreak bent in the middle and a little on the ends.

Seep

In-breaking wildness or other sort of poetic rupture makes a lesion some seek to heal (keep the savage at bay) but this stomate makes real the passage of breath. In this spring-fed belly blood-bound bone of bones gristle and grist the animal gush of our being gurgles a sylvan seep to write a lune, a crescent-shaped suture to hold the wound open.

Swamp

Autumn bleeds into Solstice the way poetry soaks before the ripple but comes as wordless breath that vanishes on composing. Morning swamp-to saunter taking pause on recumbent ash soft awash in pondish laughter, bull-rushes murmur rose hips so tangy to the tongue, the first word.

Nuthatch

Even on this sharp dawn eleven days into the solar year a thousand eyes shine images creaturely windows into waking being. We can deny our true bodyselves but here in cold wildnesses not so, stirring earth into bluey-black comes orange her original skin and ours.

Mud

The daughters of Atlas escape Orion in chase and to the west the crescent cup fills with leaking daybreaks, at dawn spills claytonia fairy-spuds and fawn-lilies asters in the meadow moonseed by the creek, a galaxy on the belly of a toad, map of heaven in mud.