July 2022 | poetry
Squinting through fresh
joy I can see everything
the sun sees and like a
child full of new words
I wish to name all of us
who are here under this
upended periwinkle bowl
Tow truck! Convertible!
Cell tower! Foot bridge!
Dead raccoon! Another!
The steering wheel is a
warm gift in my palm
At a cellular level I am
aware of not being alone
At a cellular level I know
two raccoons now revel
somewhere having made
the most of embodiment
I am not too busy to
love whichever song
an algorithm chooses
as the sun loves all it
must touch. Today the
pines grow tall enough
to cast dark pools where
deer will graze a safe
distance from traffic
as the sun loves them
enough to feed the grass
and we are all still here
together boat trailer
ambulance red pickup
Even at night when a
tower of weathered logs
is consumed by a slow
controlled explosion
whose amber light I
receive in open hands
the sleeping cat makes
a long spoon of her body
and drinks every drop of
the tree that once held
her favorite red birds
Lauren Endicott
Lauren Endicott is an emerging poet who is grateful for forthcoming publications in West Trade Review, Duck Head Journal, SEISMA, and others. She is also a masters student of social work training in psychotherapy. She lives in the greater Boston area with her spouse, two children, and cat.
July 2022 | fiction
- Digital butterfly
His hands are rough, like sex, and when he touches me it is delirium and fever and ecstasy, but he is only reading my palms. Butterfly, he says, digital butterfly and traces his fingers along the fate line. Social media influencer, I remind myself, that’s who you are. It makes sense. He has long hair, black, melanin, falling against his shoulders as he dances his pointer finger and then his middle towards the heart line. Yes, there is rage and loss and obsession. Yes, there is desire. Jacaranda, he says and I understand. The petals would fall on Los Angeles sidewalks.
Yes, I remember.
He traces further, white t-shirt, black silk. He feels like cool sands at midnight, like quiet beaches with prescient waves. His fingertips move along my palm and I wonder if I’ve ever been known and then he stops, looks up, his eyes grey but also charcoal. You like wine? He asks. Don’t you know? I think, but he pours a glass and it is dry and friendly.
I drink and my skin grows warm and buzzes. From his couch I can see into the kitchen and there are hand towels printed with small black butterflies.
- Dancer
Don’t you wanna hold me down? Touch me? I ask.
He’s sitting on the bed, Motel 6. I’m standing in front of him, florescent pink lace and long legs. Glitter on my eyes. I put my hands in his hair, hair the color of the dark pavement in the parking lot when it rains, the darkest. I run my hands through that black silk, run them down white t-shirt, chest, abdomen, thighs.
No, he says, I only want to touch your hands. His eyes empty beaches late at night, early into the morning before the sun rises.
I place my hands over his face, cradle him, and his lips run along my palms as I bring them down in front of him to hold. He takes the right and then the left. This is the heart line, he says. This is the fate line. On his arm beneath his shoulder is a tattoo of the yin-yang symbol, thick black. The color green, he says and I think of the heels I wore last night, plastic against metal. Philosophy major, and I think UCLA. Dancer, and that is now, how I make my money, how I got here, this motel room. He moves his thumbs along every line.
Beneath his skin I feel electricity like a gentle hum, wings, beating.
Elle Reed
Elle Reed is a writer from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bombfire, Bullshit Lit, Misery Tourism, White Wall Review, Metonym, and others. She is currently finishing her first novel, about the desert, longing, and friendship.
July 2022 | poetry
Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro Harbor, CA
The green bridge is a weighty suspension
of disbelief,
its angle of ascent firing my muscles,
a forced march in country
shadowing my climb up its short suspenders.
Hands heavy on the rotund rail,
its pitted touch flashes a pier railing,
my father demonstrating baiting a hook,
the wriggling body dangling over the side.
Night pulls up its blanket
veiling the wind-stropped containers
stacked like toy blocks below
while nestled in the standing army of alien cranes
a decommissioned battleship sleeps.
The watery bay beckons.
Below a siren wails to climb the rail.
Roger Camp
Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he tends his orchids, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons with his pal, Harry, over drinks at Saint & 2nd. When he’s not at home, he’s traveling in the Old World. His work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Poetry Review and Nimrod.
July 2022 | poetry
Even during class, my sister
strummed chords, fingers
caressing frets or stretching
strings bleeding the blues.
Sometimes she’d pick
a country tune, wailing for lost
beers and pickup trucks,
mourning every orphan.
Now her fingers pluck
bibs and diapers
from laundry, her kids
a Greek chorus of woes
and triumphs. The guitar resonates
during birthdays
or under a beer tent.
My brother-in-law puzzles
at her frustrations. After beers
one night, he confessed
she hums in her sleep,
and taps her finger.
It’s weird, he tells me: sometimes
her hand finds a rhythm, as if
stroking our last dog’s head.
John Cullen
John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press.
July 2022 | poetry
They know before we do,
the birds. In the yard,
feeders swing on their chains.
If you think we don’t bury
our cash in the thaw
of the dark dicey frostbite,
you’re wrong. Trust God
or no one, I urge my husband.
Do not answer the door.
I pour vodka down his throat,
call through the cracks
to bring back the warblers.
Bird bird bird, where is your,
when will it, why why why.
What jumps faster
than blood from a vein?
If you think we don’t practice
the dash to the bunker,
you’re wrong. We’ve run out
of drugs and honey,
but we cannot run far,
railcars packed with
no more time. Before
the siren glass shatter,
we walked fine,
and the mistle thrush
spilled operettas
over the sunflowers.
The neighbors are hiding
their children in attics.
The absence of silvery
wings. Do it now,
begs my husband, break
the thermometer, inject me
with mercury, hollow
my bones before lark
and nightingale swallow
each other’s songs.
Jenny Hubbard
A former high-school English teacher, Jenny Hubbard writes full-time in her hometown of Salisbury, NC. Her work has been published over the years in various journals, including Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, Nine Mile, Maryland Literary Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Both of Jenny’s novels, And We Stay and Paper Covers Rock, have earned major awards from the American Library Association. Represented by Jonathan Lyons of Curtis Brown, Ltd., Jenny is currently under contract with Penguin Random House.
