October 2021 | poetry
The Autumn leaves of the maple tree
died. Standing at the tired roots, the basement pottery wheel still spinning,
I vulnerably vowed that the red finger with a long nail growing out of your eardrum
sliced the “I” in half and stuck the pieces back together sideways
into an “H,” that you heard something about hell
when I said something about us.
What always changes
doesn’t. Faithful, I parted my lips to release
the substance of things, “You (mis)heard me.”
and you heard everything
but one wor(l)d.
Words are creative fingers that slither
in throats, striving for vomit
or to make all things new,
trustworthy and
( ).
They are in skulls, nyctinastic,
ready to flick a new Gaia
back into the light, out of three tunnels,
where the power of life and death can rest in peace
as sound.
You didn’t hear (“It’s not over”)
again. Angry, you were not obligated to listen,
and it was Christian for me to apologize
for your deafness, for lacking a miracle—
out of love.
You thought the fingers were mine, for they were made
in my image. I should have spoken
outside the house we shaped children in
as a stranger, for everyone hears correctly
what matters not. Central,
I should have said that I hated you.
After promises of affection, wondrously,
you would have finally heard
what wasn’t hard to believe
and been free to live
with a sliced extremity floating within.
Now, far apart, I hope that bits don’t grow like maple seeds
or letters that could float in dark, deep, and cerebrospinal waters
and bump-merge in(to) inner speech,
but rather that fragments miraculously become
that which never existed—nothing—
metaphoric parentheses which do not suggest “fill in,”
a hope which can only be desired if
the hope is lost. At the very least,
is it wrong to think (and think and think)
wor(l)ds could be noise?
O.G. Rose
A finalist for the 2020 UNO Press Lab Prize and 46th Pushcart Nominee, Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, Allegory Ridge, Streetlight Magazine, Ponder Review, Iowa Review online, The William and Mary Review, Assure Press, Toho Journal online, West Trade Review, ellipsis, Poydras Review, O:JA&L, and Broken Pencil.
October 2021 | poetry
No bright fruit now seems to hang for us,
we who never really saw a garden
or tasted anything to draw us to
the spinning core inside all seeds
or dormant roots coiled in their depths.
No taut reins seem to move us now
with unbearable symmetry
vexed equilibrium, balancing
apples, oranges with flights of swifts,
all out of place, but looking artful at first.
And what of this still whispers
through our bones, multilingual, falsetto
off ancient tongues, naming things over again
under the shade of knives, belated
breath pulsed out from hearts of wind?
What use is there in speaking now
when nothing here is reconciled;
not trees or endless streams,
nor wild geese in circling flight,
with what’s beneath the frozen ground?
Roberta Senechal de la Roche
Roberta Senechal de la Roche, Professor Emerita at Washington and Lee University, is an historian, sociologist, and poet of Miꞌkmaq and French Canadian descent, born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Vallum; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Yemassee, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. She has two prize-winning chapbooks: Blind Flowers (Arcadia Press) and After Eden (Heartland Review Press, 2019). A third chapbook, Winter Light, and her first book, Going Fast (2019) are published by David Robert Books.
October 2021 | poetry
Dead twelve years, dusty in a drawer
of my heart, like the leaf insects and giant earwigs
in the basement of a natural history museum.
A tiny figurine, still wearing a tattered terrycloth robe,
still holding a glass, although the ice melted long ago.
My no-idea-how-to-love-a-child mother.
My prefer-a-drink-to-playing-with-my daughter mother.
Sometimes late at night I hear her stir, accusing
me of stealing her silver or hiding her sapphire
rings, of not visiting, not calling, not caring,
threatening to beat me with her bristled brush
or toss me out like leftover broccoli and I curl up shaking,
chills shooting my spine, reaching for my stuffed bear
with its bald spots and chewed ear.
Sometimes I hear her weeping for the husband
who wasn’t, the infant who didn’t, for the child
she once was, beaten with the belt
of her father, the fists of her mother,
for the little girl wearing wool sweaters
in summer to hide swelling bruises.
If the figure were any larger, it would break my heart.
Like five loaves and three fishes feeding
five thousand on the shores of Galilee,
like free-flowing ambrosia, the ethereal food
of the gods feasting in gold and marble palaces,
you can swallow grief forever
and still there will be plenty left
in the dry basement where memories linger.
Claire Scott
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
October 2021 | poetry
Apache Indians hunt the buffalo.
Comanche arrive on the war trail to Mexico,
the Apaches disappear.
On the staked plain, a sacred white buffalo waters at Deep Creek.
A hunter shoots the albino with ease
and skins it as tumbleweeds tumble by.
Pete from Pennsylvania opens a trading post.
Big cattle ranches arrive.
Rusty untangles a hung up goat.
Barb wire cuts into its neck.
Nearby, a mare nudges its foal.
The Santa Fe Railroad lays tracks through town
and builds a depot, and men warm themselves
by a fire of burning crossties.
The Snyder Rodeo Arena opens.
Overseas, Snyder’s son Bobby orders his men across a canal.
Bobby is fatally hit by enemy fire.
Farmers plant cotton in cow pastures.
The bank folds in the Great Depression.
Friday night football begins,
Snyder Tiger adolescents become heroes.
A prospector discovers the Canyon Oil Reef,
the town triples in size.
A Phillips 66 gas station-restaurant opens.
Powers Boothe flees Snyder, acts in movies.
Oil collapses. Money leaves.
A boy falls asleep watching a Zenith television
in a small frame house on 3765 Avondale.
A dung beetle rolls a ball of dung
on a scraggly cattle ranch at town the edge.
The citizens erect a white buffalo statue.
They argue about its testicles, remove them.
A rich man parks a gold-plated Delorean
in the Snyder National Bank lobby.
An employee at the gas plant claims a UFO hovers,
a disc with lights, soars to the southwest.
Tumbleweeds ramble across the fields into mesquite.
The wind reveals an arrowhead in a creek bed.
Down the dirt lane where huge wind turbines line the horizon,
the white buffalo skin hangs on a ranch house wall, decays.
Alan Nelson
Alan Nelson has poetry and stories published or forthcoming in numerous journals including New York Quarterly, The Stand, Acumen, Pampelmousse, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Ligeia and Whale Road Review. He also played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning “SXSWestworld.”
October 2021 | poetry
I’m standing there, looking
at my old grade school’s set
of monkey bars. I can touch them
with my forehead. I almost do,
hoping to go back.
But I start to sink,
alternating legs, by inches as
I walk. I run and still sink,
feeling more than hearing
the laughter of the child,
grown giant underground,
grabbing hand-over-hand
at my moving feet. I reach
the sidewalk slogging mid-thigh
through earth, and lose both shoes
as I pull myself out.
Once should have been enough.
Mark Henderson
Mark Henderson is an associate professor of English at Tuskegee University. He earned his Ph. D. at Auburn University with concentrations in American literature and psychoanalytic theory. He has poems published or forthcoming in Cozy Cat Press, From Whispers to Roars, Defenestrationism.net, Bombfire, Former People, Neologism, Broad River Review, Rune Bear, Flora Fiction, Flare, and Visitant. He was born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana, and currently resides in Auburn, Alabama.
October 2021 | poetry
cattails in a bag, carried home on my back
best eaten in the winter, & we’re ten weeks
from the last frost, & the coming on of weeks
& weeks where vaccinations become
engagement rings, become christmas in spring,
become brushed hair & earrings & dinners
outside where i can see you
i can see you now, still, when i close my eyes
& hear your voice through the phone, remembering
how you make me laugh, hanging my feet
out the window, like it wasn’t just a year ago,
eating grapes on the porch steps, putting
crushed beer cans in the mailbox, or
talking grit from the backseat of your car
lunaria in a manila envelope & nightshade
from the dumpster; cockscomb in an altoid tin,
& the decision to stay through summer
& the voracious need to start a garden,
& the ache to be outside alone
& the dream to be inside this body
like i am inside this body
the dog, pissing on the hardwood doesn’t have a name,
& even if no name comes, there will be tomatoes,
& this summer the only fear i will have
is how i will keep track of all the vegetables
& flowers, seedlings in egg cartons,
tugging at my shoestrings, & what light
will i bury them in
all winter, i walked under a murder of crows,
crossing the bridge after work & a week of
single digit weather; when this city spends
over half the year in gray, the crows
taking my breath against the blue sky,
only half knowing the summer will take
the tens of thousands of them away
then, when the dog stops barking,
when the crows stop coming,
how will you know
i am almost home
Danica Depenhart
Danica Dagenhart is a Pittsburgh-based writer, maker, & educator. they are a recipient of The Alex Rowan Award for poetry writing, & their work has been featured in TriQuarterly and Pretty Owl Poetry. you can find them on Instagram @motherweather.
