Issue 32.2

Table of Contents

Red Grade Road by Rebecca Kanaskie

“There Are No Beautiful Synonyms for Nostalgia” by Sophie Foster

“Tossing” by Victoria Gill-Gomez

Med Check by Frances Spargo

“Acts of Dissonance” by Rebecca Kanaskie

“The Boogeyman Escapes” by Jacky Smith

Self Care by Marianne Herbst

“The Empty Years” by Lauren Moynihan

“I am taught to break its neck and then cut” by Victoria Gill-Gomez

My Garden is in Bloom by Liz Tilley

“Relics” by Vivienne Sharp

“why poets are always writing about bones” by Nicole Hatfield

Vinegar and Metal Objects, October 2020 by Michelle Ly

“Ekleipsis” by Joshua Torrence

Reeds by Rebecca Kanaskie

“Conversation in Fragments Between Sappho and Aphrodite” by Sophie Foster

Painting of the Sun in Indian Madhubani Style by Sneha Vireshwar Dixit

“Stay a While” by Colleen Pogue

“The Lord’s Market” by Regina Del Pilar

End of Day Analiese Bush

“in which you admit that the water has gone bad” by Nicole Hatfield

by Victoria Gill-Gomez

Tossing

after Yasunari Kawabata

When he catches her this time, only reaching out one arm to pull her into his chest, it’s the gasp that surprises her. Any moment is an opportunity to escalate, so she does everything she can not to touch him.

“Get a bigger bed,” he mumbles. His breath shivers down her scalp. “One that masks the stench of tears that rattles from the springs with dreams you think are memories.”

When he asks her in the morning, already up and blinding himself through the shades, how she slept, she notes, “I lose sleep because of you.”

He takes her hand. His fingers linger on the top of the chair from which he sits a little longer for her sake. She looks up at him, sickly, and lolls her arm in a detached effort to meet him where he wants to be. He begins to glide up her forearm only to be caught.

“Your hands are yours. Your jaw is yours. Your chest is yours. But I can’t hear anything except for an echo of several different hearts.” She pushes the pad of his fingers. Without words: “I don’t know most nights, when I wake up above the break of water, who is next to me.”

What scares her when the sky paints the buildings outside her window salmon is the rememory of salt. A dead salmon: pinky, flapping, but so so ready to give in on her back. A shadow polishing her shoulder with a breath, a heave, a grunt. She curls into a ball, having the cool wall against her back like her mother’s hand is better than another heartbeat that stops at her scent of oleander. I care about the way I love them.

She rests more peacefully alone with the chipped ceiling watching her. Without her body painted against the spread she finds the penetration more off putting.

“Maybe you should take your melatonin,” he laughs, “and learn to be asleep forever.”

“Maybe you swallow all of your pills so you can stay awake forever,” she spits. “Nothing lives under my bed but dust bunnies, and even if they did grow into creatures, I’d sneeze them out of existence.”

When she gets up and gives up the chance for a minute more, he tugs on the edge of her shirt like summer burrs.

“Why can’t we just stay like this until I won’t be here anymore?” His whisper quiets the birds outside. His voice rolls up her skin, familiar to a child. 

“It’s not you and I understand that much in here. But you snatching the pillows gets feathers all over the bed. My face becomes powdered and I suffocate from my own dreams. However, I will find the resistant in urge to dip too fully into your chest in case all the pillows go up in smoke.” 

“Let’s start a fire and use my abdomen to cover the suffocating dreams,” she gives in to him.

He adjusts to an elbow and pulls her close. She lets him take her, and she concludes that this is comfort.

“The dark fingers that snatch your ankles in the middle of the night do not resemble mine. Every crevice of your body that creates a shadow I promise to always shine some light on, so your skin doesn’t become a graveyard. So you are no longer haunted.”

Their routine began to feel like brushing one’s teeth, putting on socks and then shoes, a conclusive goodbye until they finally had to say those words. She believes in this. When he started to toss, she waited to stare at the chips in the ceiling but noticed his inching away from her. The invisible thread. The invisible thread. She tucked her arm under his head to cradle and her other arm over his waist to clasp her palms. She cannot help, despite the dead salmon parts of her, to forgive herself, to forgive the doubt of any possible goodness.

“Okay. I’ll let you,” she whispers into the shadows of his empty pillowcase.

by Rebecca Kanaskie

Acts of Dissonance

In the moments before I stop exercising I am not sure how to quit. I’m not talking about cooling down or stretching muscles or untying shoelaces, but of how to leave the motion behind and move on. How do I let that run just be a run and not carry its weight with me throughout the day? 

With the banality of the act I realize it doesn’t matter. My feet will still hurt tomorrow and the next day after that.

——— 

I never took the time to ask myself why I like to run. It was something I started to do and then couldn’t seem to stop. I enjoy how the movement strips every moment down to its cleanest bones. Every second contains multitudes. 

My parents used to joke that if you wanted to live longer, go to a swim meet; they last forever. Standing behind the blocks I felt as if this pain would never be over. I felt as though I would die as soon as I hit the water. After every meet I could not remember a single race I had swam.

Now I find myself completing lap after lap in the YMCA pool, wishing time away. If it takes long enough to think about, I don’t want it. Tomorrow when I am making coffee, I will not remember the steady pull of my hands slicing through the water. Then I will be thinking about what to make for dinner that night.

———

During a hike I think about mountain ranges that are considered new mountain ranges. Young mountains that appear tall even in pictures and far away. To be considered young and monumental at the same time, what must it be like to be so important? 

I get lost in moments and memories the further I hike, imagining conversations and confrontations and celebrations that will never happen. I am back in my eleven-year-old mind walking in the dewy grass in my backyard. I am thirty and getting home from a long day of work.

I have tried to force myself to meditate, to think of absolutely nothing at all while my body remains motionless. This is as fruitless as Patty Loveless trying to think about Elvis instead of the man she loves. I used to think of exercise as a way to escape my own body—ironic as it turned me into a machine that runs on fabricated scenarios and musings in order to complete long workouts and sets. Perhaps concentration simply means to dwell on something long enough that it loses all meaning. 

———

Now I accept that I am only a woman. I, like Patty, need to focus on the imaginary in order to exist. When my legs move forward or my arms churn like windmills, my mind expands outward in all directions. Time ceases its control if I refuse to acknowledge the present.

by Nicole Hatfield

why poets are always writing about bones

It has something to do with fragility of bone, swollen white breaking into curved sharps
and soft life. It’s like dancing naked, when you could catch fire by running 
a fingernail along your collarbone. Or like pouring blood into soil and whispering
a prayer. Something with nourishment and bereavement, burned mouths 
and salt-licked palms pressed against a world of bones, still sanctified.
It’s like when the poet goes to the graveyard to hear wind throw itself against stone. 
Or when the poet whistles through their teeth to hush the wind and rattle the space
between teeth and bone. It’s the soul in disguise, isn’t it? When the mother builds 
a home out of dead words and imagines it can raise a baby. Holds it between
cracked coos and warm flesh greased in tallow. A bone out of body, something
hallowed and picked clean, something carved out of tenderness. 

by Joshua Torrence

Ekleipsis

A bur chewed through my heart today,
Right past the red and out the other side,
Its teeth all sharp with unbeginnings,
A nasty seed, ungrown, not gay.

It came from hollow iambs within me,
The earth of me, a widening hole I must have tried
To fashion green, to soften bygone stings
Into a gush of spring, a yellow-thread raceme

Of downy agrimony. What
A way to deal with this! I scold myself—
No soil under skin, just cells that keep
On going, cycling sugar into energy.

In my brief stab at romance, I realize that there’s
No rhyme to days, that I must weed the solipsism
Out of dreams. These stars and tears and nameless
Senses—they devour me like flytrap mouths.

So the bur. Who was a voice, who was a boy.
So the hole. Who was a river and a closing eye—
My body goes and goes, and I
Unchart and chart again those terrible terrains

Of coriander visions, of capacities unknown,
Yet seen and felt. The moon is here. The sun is gone.

by Sophie Foster

Conversation in Fragments Between Sappho and Aphrodite

Is the heart spirit or soul, 
or are they each the same?
My answers next to yours 
are copper greened. 

The best I can do is promise you
Sophocles was wrong about birth,
and the death of us,
and the things between them. 

My own anciency is outshined
by my womanhood /
by the moon /
by the current of history. 

Everything occurs more than once.
That which is loveliest can never be stilled.
I’ll be your mother in every season,
but you taught yourself to love. 

On my island there is no distinction
between the habitual and the spontaneous,
the routine and the sensational. 
I lead both lives. 

And you were meant to;
I conceived you to be all things
birth and light and love and Earth herself.
The ocean will wave and you’ll say hello.

I’m settled on the lip of wonder.
I let my life lead,
and sometimes my words will follow. 
I am always a daughter. 

If words are power and I am nature,
I have pulled you to me tightly,
tender and endeared,
and seen only that which is good. 

Good, even as I unravel? 
Woven around the fingertips of giants,
my words spiral frail 
from between my teeth.   

I can make few assurances,
though I’ll say what I know.
I’ll tell you even as day fades
 that you are light. 

by Colleen Pogue

Stay a While

Let the woods soothe what worries you. Release your bunched-up shoulders, let the breath sigh out from your clenched lungs. The trees whisper from their leaves, you are welcome here, so welcome here. The things you leave fall into the background, beyond the trunks behind you. Let the soft leaves below cushion your steps, hear the crackle with each footfall. 

Notice how the light shines through the gaps in the trees, speckling the ground in honey-gold drops. Why don’t you lie down in it for a while? It seems so warm and inviting, you’ll have time to move on if you wish, but slow down for now, shut your eyes. Feel the light wash over you, feel it seep into your skin. When was the last time you felt this warmth? Don’t try too hard to remember, it doesn’t matter now. You have it here, you have it now, you can stay for as long as you’d like. It bakes away what clouded your thoughts before, feel your mind clear in its heat. The earth beneath you is soft. The sweet smells of leaf mulch and old logs surround you like a blanket in this patch of sun. If you stay a bit longer, ‘til nightfall perhaps, the leaves will cover you, keep you warm until the sun comes back.

The sun may ebb and grow, but the earth below you will stay warm, just for you. You can relax here, finally have a rest from it all. Your green blanket is fading to brown, but it only gets softer with time. There’s no rush here, not like there was before. Time doesn’t need to be stretched thin here. Relish in it, take as much as you want, as much as you need. 

Why don’t you stay? There’s no need to go back. You can stay here, no worry at all. You’re safe here, in your blanket of leaves. The foxes tucked you in when the sun shied away, how kind of them to keep you in mind. Rest your head, there’s no need to get up early here. The flies are singing a lullaby, do you hear them? Just rest, you don’t need to wake up any time soon. The bed of dirt you lie in was made just for you, why don’t you sink in a bit? The beetles will watch over you, the mushrooms will spread over you, fall into their embrace. 

How long have you been here? Don’t worry yourself about that, you have no need to leave so soon. You’re welcome here, could you say the same before? You can stay here, you don’t need to return to the outside. Settle in, get comfortable where you lie. Your muscles ache, don’t they? That’s no worry, slip them off, the worms will find a coat rack. It's so much lighter without, isn’t it? There’s nothing to cover that grin now. Stay a while, the skeletons in your closet will turn to dust, leaving only the one you carry. 

by Regina Del Pilar

The Lord’s Market

shopping for prayers in the supermarket.
bananas are $2 a pound,
croissants are half off
you’ve lost your son.

blessings hide in the back of shelves and psalms among sugar.
mercy is out of stock.
the voice of God echoes over the loudspeaker:
“Save and be saved. Use a coupon!”
yet you still can’t afford the keys to heaven

sometimes it’s easier to steal with Satan than face this crowd.
we dig for beans and bread in the dumpsters,
broken shards of stained-glass windows as plates and knives.
drunk off expired apple juice, we laugh at passers-by
as they call us sinners and sneer at our last supper.
those self-proclaimed
                                    saints
                                                have never told the priest

all their sins during confession.
they’d rather keep their mistakes hidden,
but God will still know.
he always knows.

a vicar is the bag boy, a cardinal the cashier
the Pope runs the store behind a wall of glass.
deacons behind the deli counter and nuns in the bakery
they sell prayers wrapped in plastic, sealed with candle wax.
hands washed in holy water, they slice the body of Christ, meat and bread.
you aren’t old enough for the blood.

shopping in the Lord’s supermarket
hymns play softly over the speakers
so many claim to be doing God’s work, but all they do is spill milk on the floor.

pay in adoration, contrition, and thanksgiving.
receipts printed on the back of intercessions,
you leave the grocery store, your collection basket full of God’s promises,
make a sign of the cross as you exit.
i hope you remembered everything you came for. 

by Nicole Hatfield

in which you admit that the water has gone bad

With your toes breaching the surface 
of the pond behind your house, you feel
rotten water, dark muck slick with shit
and chewed bubble gum. The pond is crammed 
with debris and broken needles, stinging sounds 
and greasy bubbles. The word eutrophication comes to mind, 
then utero. Then body, then fluid, then dense, 
but dead. Feet sucked into mud, you look
like something wild. The black yolks of tadpole eggs
find your eyes as you stare into the pond 
and think about the water turning your feet
green and how in the moment
you may look like a girl emptied 
and refilled with dead leaves; I mean,
like a thing reborn.