April 2021 | poetry
is harvesting eyebrows grown in a petri dish teeming with a mixture of Minoxidil, Finasteride, (think recent, indecent President), sandalwood oil, lavender, rosemary, and thyme oils, or a mixture of hippopotamus fat, crocodile, tomcat, snake and ibex oils. Alternatively, in a mirror experiment, he parboils porcupine hair in creek water, which, when cooled, is applied to the scalp for four days. In his spare time he sautés the left foreleg of a female greyhound in 50 weight motor oil with a donkey hoof, the smell of which he finds efficacious. He shies from the likes of Hippocrates, a shining dome himself, whose hoary recipe included horseradish, fresh pigeon guano, beetroot, opium, and an obligatory artillery of other spices, though not necessarily in any requisite order. In a later immodest proposal, he, Hippocrates II of Kos, none too gingerly suggested castration at an early age, an effective procedure confirmed by modern day researchers, but not advocated. When Jules Caesar began losing his hair, and minded, he tried everything to reverse the curse and hide his shiny pate. He firstly grew his thinning mane long in the back and brushed it over his scalp in an early version of the Propecia comb-over. His lover Cleopatra recommended a home remedy consisting of ground-up mice, a neigh of horse teeth, and slathering of bear grease. This too had little effect. So the Roman dictator took to covering his scalp with a laurel wreath. Truth will out. The Ides will march. Though popular in ancient times, hairpieces were revived in the 17th century by such as King Louis XIII of France, who donned a toupee to mask his blinding baldness. Massive wigs featuring elaborate curls and peppered with white powder, raged among French and English nobles. Many superstitions surround hair and hair loss. A Man bemuses: most common in North America concerned disposal of hair combings. If a bird acquires the combings, the owner will go mad, lose what’s left his or her hair, or simply die. To lose one’s hair in a male pattern or female pattern can be extremely distressing. Modern therapy involves the use of topical minoxidil (2% and 5%) and oral finasteride. Excreta of various sorts have featured heavily in history’s baldness cures – presumably inspired by the same fertilizing properties sought by gardeners. A gentle physician in old Rome prescribed burning the genitals of a donkey and mixing the ash with one’s own urine to form a paste. While Aristotle may have applied goat’s urine to his scalp, King Henry VIII was said to favor dog and horse urine. Some Native American tribes preferred a poultice of chicken or cow manure. Ireland, 1000 A.D.: One Celtic remedy for baldness instructed patients to stuff mice, no matter live or dead, into a clay jar, seal it, bury it beside a fire, and take everything out after a year. A tip to the not so wise: Make sure to wear gloves when you touch what’s inside! If you don’t, hair will sprout from your fingertips. Meanwhile, the man, remember him, has lost interest in things depilatory, and gone madly Nair do well.
Richard Weaver
The author lives in Baltimore where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the poet-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. More than 100 of his Prose Poems have appeared since 2016. He is also the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, 2005, performed 3 times to date by the Birmingham Symphony, and once by the Juilliard Ensemble. He is neither a blockhead nor a stanzagrapher.
April 2021 | poetry
Take your sorrow soup,
sour mash of sand
that slipped through
your mother’s hands on
days spent resenting a husband’s
regretful weakness.
Trickle in the salt from old
wounds, sprinkle an ounce
of onion tears over whatever meat
you can trim from the fat
on her old chopping block.
Stir in the shadow of the owl
that passes overhead
whispering that necessary question
who cooks for you?
Kelley Jean White
Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are Toxic Environment (Boston Poet Press) and Two Birds in Flame (Beech River Books). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.
April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
The darkest hour is just before
the middle of the night.
Mishka Shubaly, “Destructible”
I climbed the infinite staircase
that leads nowhere;
it took me almost a decade,
a fractured ankle,
a fractured rib,
a broken tooth,
my peace of mind,
and half of my soul.
I played the eleven games,
those were happier days.
But I remember the rejection,
the taste of blood in my mouth,
the humiliation,
a pitch-black bottomless pit
of youth and sadness.
I know how it feels to be depressed
at your aunt’s birthday party,
to think about death at the dive bar,
I know the strange looks you get
when you make jokes about misery,
I know how it feels
to spend the entire weekend
under a fortress of shadows and blankets.
Endless Sundays,
unnerving Mondays,
Advil and beer for breakfast.
I know.
I know.
There, there.
Black and white movies,
empty bottles of cheap white wine,
broken glass on the carpet,
suicidal fantasies at the supermarket,
tears at the airport,
cold sweat at the parking lot,
hot coffee and antidepressants,
shattered dreams and broken hearts.
That’s all that’s left:
Bad memories of the good old days.
Juan David Cruz-Duarte
Juan David Cruz-Duarte was born in Bogotá, Colombia. He lived in South Carolina for 10 years. In 2018 he earned a doctorate degree in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina. His work has been published in Five:2:One, Fall Lines, the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Jasper Magazine, Blue Collar Review, Burningword, Escarabeo, Máquina Combinatoria, and elsewhere. He is the author of Dream a little dream of me: Cuentos siniestros (2011), La noche del fin del mundo (2012), and Léase después de mi muerte (Poemas 2005-2017) (2018). He lives in Bogotá.
April 2021 | poetry
The land in Nevada seems barren
like evil witch skin until you get
a better view. Start with a
close-up of crater valley, five shades
of brown, the ochre lip of serious
plummage, cracked ridge,
circular but not perfectly so, its irregular
features staring up at feathery wisps
of malnourished clouds.
Something as forceful as god rearranged
what once was, what once lay dormant,
dehydrated rivers, quivering
with geologic memories, nothingness pre-
served, dead sea, land succession bolted,
flat-lined except for mountain
ridges, curved, curling up toward bleak sky.
Ancient birds, vectors of pestilence, rise
from pink ash beds, illuminating
the very place I stand. I reach out, I reach
up, grasping at history’s breath, pulling it
in on top of me, seeking resurrection
of soul, spirit, body; acknowledging
the eminent passing of all that I am
into the hot mouth of time.
John Dorroh
Whether John Dorroh taught any secondary science is still being discussed. He did manage, however, to show up at 6:45 every morning with at least three lesson plans and a thermos of robust Colombian. His poetry has appeared in about 80-85 journals, including Dime Show Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Os Pressan, Feral, Selcouth Station, and Red Dirt Forum/Press. He also writes short fiction and the occasional rant.
April 2021 | poetry
charlotte said
there are times when i feel like i’m observing
myself from a constellated distance in the same
way one would look at a starry sky or a pastoral
scene or a bloody gory picture show
and when i see myself
in this way
i am wearing a full length black dress
and my head is shaven in a haphazard
and misbegotten manner
and the background is so white
that it becomes a sort of nothingness
not quite an ethereal nothingness
but a quivering nothingness composed
of floating particles of debris that could be
flecks of white ash from raging wildfires
and so i wrap my quavering white
hands around my shuddering body
like a cowering child in a torrent of criticism
and all i can see are a set of white hands
wrapped around a flowing black dress
in front of a spectral white nothingness
and my chalk white face is emotionless
and my eyes are painted black coals
devoid of compassion or empathy
and i am struggling to keep my mouth closed
because i know if i open my mouth
i will release a stream of swarming plague locusts
and these locusts will be filled with lechery and greed
the sort of lechery and greed that devours defenseless
acts of kindness and helpless acts of tenderness
James Butcher
James Butcher’s work has appeared in Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, and Cream City Review.
April 2021 | poetry
Sound Effect
Come the dawn, clean through
my usual downstream drift
of random, qualm-suppressive
dreaming, there cuts a, not sound,
but sound’s hind-edge lull.
Stranger still, to be found
awake where the walls that make
for a house dissolve like doubt,
and all there is is our street’s,
bound in grief and not shamed
by its pain. Before this room’s accum-
ulations can again occlude
my gaze, I’m heading where, bare,
wrongs too embedded not to wring
their truth from song after song
prove how leadenly they’ll linger:
like granules in the tissues, but longer.
A day still loyal to its night.
White noise resumes while what illumines
dims. That, thus, seems that. Or
does it? Before fluming off
where next means same, let’s name
every hope this reveille hypes.
Let’s reclaim we will from you shouldn’t,
can from could’ve but couldn’t.
Let’s not wind up ended up
still deadending here. Declare
that we’re hearing rusty hasps
wrested off, and I’ll laugh, Yeah.
For those wondering whether or no
what needed breaking in fact
got broke, my take on it is
we should just make sure it did.
But as for you who long to hear
only the fist-eyed grunt
of a tightening grip, I won’t
cheer or chide such fear.
An hour ached-for as ours
blazes too briefly to waste
on a case as lost, a cause
as disgraced, as now is,
at long, long last, yours.
Confessional
Friends, I’m having one of those days.
Everything’s bad and getting worse.
It’s obvious by now that for all the valiant
and selfless striving, most of us won’t
change fast enough for it to matter.
The trash, the cars, the meat, the water:
do your part or don’t, trust science
or that guy on YouTube, it’s the same. Friends,
as a poet I shouldn’t be writing this, but
my mood’s in no mood to worry about
how it makes me sound. Well, challenge accepted.
Ask yourselves this: what were you expecting
when you breezed in here past a title
like the one above? Something squalid and personal,
all binges, breakdowns, and performative trauma?
Sorry to disappoint, but in my disclosure
the catastrophe on display is you, not me.
Fact is, friends, I’m ashamed for our species,
and for most of us as individuals too.
I wish it wasn’t like that, but it is. Boom.
So you can understand why I’m always
coming back here, this bright noplace
where I’m never too proud to remember
kindnesses shown me when I was poor,
or lonely, or foolish, by someone with nothing
to gain. Because here, the rinsed light of morning
never quite fades from the view out over
green quiltworked fields, orchards, a river
sweeping grandly off toward the sea beyond.
And today you came, which makes me glad
because why shouldn’t it? It does. It will.
Here I wish you, I wish us all, well.
James McKee
James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, while his poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Ohio Review, New World Writing, The Ocotillo Review, Illuminations, CutBank, Flyway, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.