C.S.I.

(an early Halloween)

 

Mildred has a gash on her forehead where

the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone.

Nearby, there is a skeleton hanging by its left

foot from a small maple-oak across the way.

The rail fence is shattered where the van

with thirty-two immigrants went through it

and they got over the earth in a hurry, never

coming back.  Above, the blue moon not

the slightest color of blue is more brilliant

than a neon planet made of platinum, brighter

than anything I’ve ever seen on an August night.

 

Which reminds me, once at 1:30 in the morning

when I was seventeen at Mt. Gretna, out in

the middle of the woods, near a picnic area

drinking stolen beer with other/college kids:

ghostly through the trees…

and a lone, rich baritone voice from Broadway

sang a love song to his lady for the night…

(he’d been Li’l Abner, they said)

no music, the most beautifully romantic thing

I’ve ever heard  —  fifty years later in jail

thinking about it.  In the meantime, they put

my bed on the porch roof to be funny… oh, it’s nice

to be the butt of jokes, and the one everyone

hates… seems like, as if to have been born was

to wear some kind of putrid curse around your

face like a necktie for people to piss on, that’s

what it is to be bullied from six to seventeen—

when it stopped, and I pulled the trigger of the

shotgun 14 times where they sat.

 

 

[true incident in pieces, but I never shot anybody;

no matter how much I might’ve sometimes wanted to]

 

Richard Atwood

Born in Baltimore, Rick has lived in Denver and Los Angeles, currently in Wichita, Kansas. He has published three books of poetry, and been published in several literary journals: Karamu, Oberon, Avalon Literary Review, Mochila Review, borrowed solace, Penumbra, ArLiJo, The Raven’s Perch, and Iconoclast among others. He has also authored 3 screenplays, 2 large stage plays; plus an m/m erotic-romantic fantasy, with a GOT ambiance… no supernatural jazz, and a strong moral thread woven throughout (Chronicles of the Mighty and the Fallen, under the name of Richard McHenry).

Ron Riekki

I get asked to be on a podcast

and he’s never read any of my poems, ever,

doesn’t even know my name, asks me, “So,

what’s your name?” as if this is a thoughtful

question, and I wonder how much research

he’d have had to do to find out my name,

especially when we’ve already exchanged

multiple emails, and he says, “So, what are

you?  A poet?  A fiction writer?”  And I

realize he’s going to ask me my height next

and weight after that and maybe we’ll get

into sports and weather in a bit, and I realize

how much I ache to have a person who just

simply sees me, how I was just on an elevator

yesterday with two people, one on my left

and one on my right, and how they talked

through me, as if I am a ghost, and I get

ready for the podcast host to ask me if I’m

a phantom and I get myself ready to say,

“I don’t know.  I might be.  I feel like

I’m fading.”  And I remember seeing

an interview with Norm Macdonald

when it was nearing the end of his life

and no one knew it was nearing the end

of his life, except him and a few other

very select people, and it feels like that

for me, like I’m near the end, and when

I write, sometimes I think, “Is this my last

poem?”  And I remember talking to Donald

Hall, who was always so kind to me, and him

telling me that he was too tired to write poetry

anymore, that he could write non-fiction, but

that poetry just took everything out of him,

the exhaustion, how he felt tired just telling me

this, how you could hear the enthusiasm lessening

in his voice, how frightened I was to get the sense

that someone was leaving before they were leaving

and, thank God, his words have stayed . . .

 

A friend asked me what kind of a poet I am and I said,

“a horror poet” and he asked what that means and

I showed him the statistics of murders in Detroit and

I showed him that we have a murder every day and

I took him in my car and we drove one block and

I pointed and said they murdered him for his watch.

Who?  I told him who they murdered and about his

watch and we drove and we were in front of a restaurant

and I told him about the bodies and in the last three days

we’ve had shootings on Minden Ave and on Jefferson Ave

and on Moross Rd and on Joy Rd and on Biltmore Rd

and I think of joy and not-joy, of how we keep mastering

anger, how online’s a storm, how I’ve seen footprints made

from blood, how I looked down after the riot near

my home and the footprints led to a tree and I looked

up, expecting to see someone up there, but it was empty,

and my mother used to be a therapist and she told me,

“The more symptomatic someone is, the more severe

the depression or the anxiety, the more guns they own.”

She said she could tell someone’s mental health by

the amount of guns in the home, that the people

who were the most unstable would have ten, twenty,

thirty, more guns.  That it was like the guns were this

screaming of how they needed help.  That their houses

were made of guns.  Gun-walled.  We drove by abandoned

homes and I’d think of abandoned people.  And my

mother said angels are anyone in this life who makes

people hurt less.  She said that we get a rush in our blood

when we hurt people, but that it is the evil of everything.

She said that the calm comes when you try to protect

the hurt.  She said this while smoking.  She smoked like

a chimney in a house that was on fire.  She’d get mid-

night calls from people who were suicidal and I remember

hearing her whispering in the other room when I was little.

I remember asking her, “What is suicide?” and it was near

Christmas and the lights were blinking behind her and she

started crying, not saying anything, just bawling, and I was

so little that I thought that was her response.  I thought that

the answer to “What is suicide?” is a brutality of tears.

And maybe that is the only true response.  I wish I could

paint it for you, the pain, how beautiful those lights were,

the music on softly in the background, something promising.

Ron Riekki

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to Holy Fuck’s “Lovely Allen.”

Vaporub

1900’s high tech vocabulary comes to mind.

Following the stapler, stethoscopes, steam locomotives, safety pins,

and tungsten steel much spoken of in our metallurgist’s family

where Dad won a Bessemer medal and we all hazarded a worry

while stepping into the Barney’s department store elevator

about metal fatigue, came this rearrangement

of antique comforts and distresses. Camphor,

eucalyptus, levomenthol, thyme, and cedar oil:

call them to mind and hearing this

you can feel already the aromatic stirrings swirl

up your sinuses. I think of embalming — myrrh

in the exotic garden setting the space ajar between death

and preservation. I thought it was named after my Dad — Vick’s —

and remember dimly him circling it on my chest

at night through the crush and press and gasp

of pertussis, how he sat by my bed through the night

when I was four, and camphor swirled like saints’ ghosts

up from the sheets. Bitter bewitching notes of turpentine

made me dream of his soaked rag in a tin in the cellar

for wiping oil paint splotches off our hands;

and paraffin — that lit my Nana’s glass lamps before the cords

came spidering across the ceilings. These ancient consolations

cleansing, opening, embrocatory magic

worked their mending sorceries toward sleep.

I have only to unscrew the small blue jar

from the shrine of my medicine cabinet’s back shelf

and trustworthy hands are anointing me again like hierophants

by night, whispering: rest and mend, and then,

you, too, go out and heal and make things strong and well.

 

Jennifer M Phillips

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, and painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips’ poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling with the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock).

The Brasserie

Today’s sky is a weak imitation of blue.

She slips in the back door, a line cook

at the brasserie in Saint-Germain-des-Prés,

well-known for duck, well-known

for drifters and dreamers, lovers long gone

and those newly found. The man at the bar

will lie his way into any woman’s good graces

but that’s not her problem today, even though

they talk about him in back in many languages.

 

Duck perfectly rendered, apricots

tender and jam-like as they let go

of summer to tantalize with their scent

before the lunch rush,

haricots verts amandine butter-basted,

and if she has a few extra minutes, help

the pastry chef with crème brȗlée.

 

Curtains sweep open to her childhood

cooking with maman before the postcard—

dashed off in pencil—au revoir my child,

be strong, love well, you will always

be in my heart. She grabs a small glass

of almost-going-bad Bordeaux

and a bummed-off-a-bad-boy cigarette,

takes a quick break outside,

torn between the touching young words

of that postcard, and the yelling going on

in the kitchen.

 

She wears drab clothes one could call

military castoffs, and clogs, the footwear

of all kitchen personnel. She walks

the streets of the city before her shift,

goes to the markets, feeds heels of bread

to the fish in many different parks,

watches a gulls wings widen

in the coming-up sun, and greets

the old men playing morning chess,

espresso carts waiting to serve them when

they break—she plants a maternal kiss

on each man’s forehead, she’s known them for years.

They will always be in her heart, even the ones

whose weary eyes are shut against the world.

 

By Tobi Alfier

Tobi Alfier’s credits include Arkansas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cholla Needles, Gargoyle, James Dickey Review, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Louisiana Literature, Permafrost, Washington Square Review, and War, Literature and the Arts. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Lounging at Wilton Manors

Hook mouthed; a cadaver turns to kiss me—

Danny—adrift through skin, grabs

 

my filament of fishing line, pulling back

to bloom. He wears a lesion,

 

maybe three, dark and almost blued

to midnight, tells me it’s a birthmark

 

I’ve forgotten. The dream is 1986—

when death was stored in a dimpled

 

bottle, amethyst, scented, Halston Z-14

in every cabinet. I wake, find myself

 

poolside with shadows of old friends.

Gifts of age creep pockets—cock rings,

 

magnifier wipes, phones programmed

with reminders. Tired of survival,

 

dried like air cured cod, I flee Danny’s

pancake-hidden lesions, step into the afternoon.

 

Timeless scrotum by the pool, I swim

in yet another hour, outdoor showers and cabana

 

crypts. Lounging, friends and I are varicose,

a clot of sixties, seventies, a murder

 

of anniversaries breaking loose

and traveling to the heart. Time repeats,

 

a second AM/PM pillbox. I’m losing them.

I’m losing them all, again.

 

Robert Carr

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books, and two full-length collections published by 3: A Taos Press – The Unbuttoned Eye and The Heavy of Human Clouds. His poetry appears in many journals and magazines, including the Greensboro Review, the Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoah. Forthcoming collections include Phallus Sprouting Leaves, winner of the 2024 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series, Seven Kitchens Press; and Blue Memento, from Lily Poetry Review Books. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org

Alice

Alice Chu lives in Chongqing

and she attends classes online

loves hotpots and her friends

never submits work on time

can’t follow essay instructions

but she speaks perfect English

and writes crystalline sentences

a potential poet or a novelist

but her father has other plans

 

One day Alice logs into class

splotchy bruises on her arms

a heavy cast around her ankle

every part of her looks broken

but Alice Chu is still smiling

her dad shoved down the stairs

for a C plus grade on her essay

 

Who do you call when the

abused live on other continents?

and what’s there to be done

about never-returned messages?

and how do you tell parents

your child’s not doctor material?

and how do you lift someone

when you can only reach so far?

 

Alice—this dreamy teenager

not quite ready for university

a poetic giant, ready to awaken

with more guidance and patience

her father demands perfection

but Alice Chu’s already perfect

 

 

Brendan Praniewicz

Brendan Praniewicz earned his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State in 2007 and has subsequently taught creative writing at San Diego colleges. He has had poetry published in From Whispers to Roars, Tiny Seed Journal, That Literary Review, and The Dallas Review. In addition, he received second place in a first-chapters competition in the Seven Hills Review Chapter Competition in 2019. He won first place in The Rilla Askew Short Fiction Contest in 2020. He was a Pushcart Nominee for poetry in 2023.