Claire Marie Anderson
Mom,
I’m here again
Where you told me I shouldn’t be
I may have been convinced
By someone potentially very untrustworthy
That the forest wouldn’t be so dark
Or the thorns as sharp
If I took a side road
In my Buick
And skipped over the tolls
Thus saving money for
Summer vacation
And
The house I’ll never buy
I maybe or maybe not
Should have listened to you
You may or may not
Have been right
I possibly or very possibly not possibly
Need your help right now
An arrow dipped in lead
And flaming
Sinks into my heart’s center
Aortic blood spreading
Like a bad day for a saint
A glimpse of eternal suffering
Of something holy and great
Fingers/toes/limbs/hands cut off and
feelingless
Martyrdom for one
Delivered and left on read by all
To gawk at with unrefined,
Untouched and unholy mouths
In tour groups led by unwed princes
Of God and children
The arrows multiply
And I find myself chained to a tree
Protesting alone
The desecration of Something unholy specifically to me
Unsure of how I got here
Or who has chained me
Myself in a drunken stupor,
Hallucinogenic rage?
Or cherubic mischief gods
Of lore I skipped
While playing that one video game
That one time
Cut scenes of my life
Playing out without
Me even blinking
My hands are getting
Tired gripped around nothing
Bones crushing under
Dense weight and
Over someone new
I feel the chains uncoil
Dropping steadily
Bark ripping
Toes and ass cheeks clenched
And
I might step forward
Tense stings crawling up
My esophagus and ribcage
Sharpening like butterfly wings with every movement
Arrowheads meant to expand
With every forward motion
And stop the walker from walking
I think someone I know conjured up a spirit
And with its help lifted my nail-hammered feet
From their granite coffins
The middles of my palms bloody
And splintered
Like a tree branch—
Wishing to be painted in
Foreshortening and perspective
Still alive though
Eyes closed
Smile pressed
Like a clean white shirt
Currently folded on my mother’s ironing board
Awaiting my return
(female Jesus)
Claire Marie Anderson is a writer, art and film historian from Houston, TX. Her poems have appeared in Alchemy, The Decadent Review, BarBar Literary Magazine, and Unfortunately, Literary Magazine (Best of the Net nomination), among other publications. She is the former Managing Editor of Landing Zone Magazine.
Measured excavations by Jonathan Jones
A controlled evacuation.
4 a.m. and the solitary piss,
with no idea what woke you late
as childhood slept.
You haven’t finished breathing -
still one final drop. Lungs
fill with sand. Doubts
vanish into Pyramids.
The past is hopeless. Carpet
bags I cannot cup to hold
the circus fragrance of my mother’s house,
a tooth caved in. Long drop,
short drop, old friends first
born of seagull voices. Each Manichean
franchise taunts, ‘Here one
has crossed’.
Sheer drop, dear Saboteur,
you see the empty band,
a ghost ship full of faces lost
like laundry.
One returns an hour or less
to where a car is set ablaze
outside my window.
These measured excavations
of my body’s bottomless
crater A soap dish
and towel clinging
on to save civilization.
Jonathan Jones lives and works in Rome where he teaches at John Cabot University. He has a PhD in literature from the University of Sapienza, and a novella 'My Lovely Carthage' published in the spring of 2020 from J. New Books.
Clouds by David Capps
Day 1
You awoke to find that she had transformed into a cloud. Puffy and off-white.
Where her hands had been there was cool condensing mist. Where her fingertips
had been there was air, a dry stalk that grew in circumference as her path followed
its, a kind of passive groping that arguably extended as far as the horizon. Besides
that, the elements were with her, and her mind was clear as day; clearer, in fact.
Some in the sky had striations, as though they had given birth, and had wanted to
follow their first born into the golden dripping dawn. The previous day began to
return to you, casually, without the hesitation or strain that sometimes afflicts
memory and leaves the rememberer in the loom-woven thicket of its folds. It took
the form of a thought: as jaded as you had become, you had been chasing rainbows.
Any irresponsibility you may have felt, any sense of regret at your own callousness
had now been purified, distilled. Anything left over would rain down from her. That you knew. Only the felt presence of others watching, the cloud-watchers, the storm-chasers and dreamers, posed some momentary distraction. They weren’t all good—there were oglers, voyeurs, peeping Toms, roving eyes, embarrassed souls. The wrong batch of friends. She didn’t deserve that. To be seemingly squashed between the thumb and forefinger of some conspiracy theorist. There were idealists whose own soul-mirrors reflected back, to meet at some point in infinity, Ra (periodic abbreviation).
That’s to be expected if you’re embodied. But this, this experience felt like the
beginning of a new way of defining freedom as a cloud floating free, and did it
matter if the result was circular? The point was that no matter the direction of their
gaze, there was no penetration, no swallowing up or devouring whole, no possibility of an enclosing embrace if the object was air the subject’s arms would clasp and in clasping go through as cleanly as a perfect Katana, no stifling pressure or resentment without outlet.
No one could touch her who hovered above all. You wondered how long it would take her to drift out over NYC or whether she would evaporate before ranging far above the pedestrian heads, cyclists and flower delivery guys, Amazon trucks and interns, the homeless sheltered in cardboard tents, the burbling fountains of sketches whose meth-induced catcalls would fail to reach her, the floating skeletons whose deafening failed imitations of the sound of the human heart beating as music whose waves would thin out like stretched taffy as they popped would likewise fail to reach her.
In the thin air she might become there would be silence. Those pictures of jostling crowds of men in bowler hats, no more. That, or she might walk (why not just assign it a new private meaning? walking as experience through motion) out above a pasture, a green field somewhere in Middle America, where she might just observe the spots of cows. One or two or three. Black or white or brown. This is what it means to not be afraid, this is freedom from.
Day 0
‘It’s in how they walk, how they carry themselves with such confidence, it seems
with too much purpose, or more precisely too much commitment to whatever
purpose(s) they have, or perhaps overly precisely, with too much commitment to
whatever purpose(s) they assume others attribute to them’, she had commented on
your last time together. –‘Then what about you, isn’t your purpose to survive—to
walk to the car so you can commute to class, to eat a sandwich so you can teach—
and what if you had to take care of an elderly relative? Then wouldn’t your purpose
be to make their last days or weeks or whatever little easier, more bearable?’ you
asked, and stooped down to caress the unfolded petals of a giant yellow flower in
the manicured flowerbed of a law office. –‘I’m beginning to not understand my own criticisms, but my own purpose is not survival, rather I’m producing something that expresses part of the soul—don’t pick it!’ –‘I’m only petting it, you usually don’t see one so giant’. –‘Maybe the idea is that someone who seems so committed to a purpose betrays a falsely unified will, which they then parade before others’. – ‘What’s wrong with having a unified will?’ –‘”Falsely” is the key word; in reality people are more fractured than they seem. It’s nice out now but over the weekend the temperature is supposed to drop by twenty-five degrees, we’ll see if the cherry blossoms stay on the trees, but you still do want to go to the festival in Wooster Square I’m assuming...When they bloom, I’m talking at the height, which you have to be vigilant to catch, they fall all over pink and white like clouds, like nature whispering something so beautiful into your ears that you can’t understand’. –‘I don’t know, we’ll see’.
‘Maybe you are too attached to trying to find anything meaningful’, you sighed, but it was a sort of sigh only transparent to yourself, a sort of premonition that there would come a time of having no friends at all, no relations, only airy substances transpiring through the sky, there would be a time when no one needed to confess to others, to mirror in each others eyes like souls, a time of being done with social roles and expectations though it wouldn’t be in the afterlife, after this life with its trivial worries of how to sound and whether you’ve raised your eyebrows quite high enough if you find yourself in wonder, whether in banging on the makeup in the mirror after last night’s too-tame liaison you think to yourself how pointless it was even to wake up out of bed and raise yourself up on your elbows as your cat demands it mopmops and eyes the bowl, and your elbows on the cushions ache from last night hovering on the glass table where they kept spreading lines of coke and everyone was thick with sex and chatter in their gaze and everyone who had come expected you to follow suit but you didn’t, yet you didn’t say no either, and you didn’t say no for her as obviously she could make her own decisions, obviously, leaving you in this sort of position no one ever told you about, not mom or dad, not the therapist not the therapist who said to float like a cloud above all, not your professors or the internet, that you felt like a kind of sailboat with no wind.
She had died that year, but her spirit made no sound, not to you, and then if you
waited the girl you loved appeared, aimless, contemplative, who thought like you
even the darkest thoughts—was that why her ‘friends’ explored so much, the caving, the drinking and partying, these desperate attempts if not to flee the self entirely then to enlarge it to the absolute bursting point, how did it really differ from the balloon you held in your hand, the child’s helium against the sky, a lamprey on the side of a tank, groveling, sucking, deranging itself and being deranged until there was no more left, nothing left to feel like, nothing to be for there was no more of this we call ‘I’ and ‘mine’, but clouds, dust, sand, wind, air, breath, mood, pulse, grass, leaf, the errant and riotous laughter of rainbows thickening on in the purity of afternoon’s defiled rages...and to be like that, to be like that what would any violence have meant...
You could never have conveyed it at the crosswalk with your friend that day.
Day ?
Clouds were beings who reveled in becoming: white buffalo waves emerging
across the changing sky, flagships taking the shape—always particular—however
humans below might misconstrue them, pointing up at this one and that as they
billowed together in their own chaotic star-fed dough. Animals, grump-faces. She
learned that the tension of being a particular cloud released itself by storming a
procession of ideas before Ra, though it ended in squabbling and tears, collective
groaning and lightning, ultimately being yoked again by a rainbow before the skies
cleared. At which point its repetition would remind of her of a previous life. How the people would be concerned about their fields, tomato plants, sunflowers which had already gotten too much rain—albeit rain of an unknown quality which came from a solid green cloud with an curved trunk that seemed to encourage its lamentations by means of an abrupt swinging motion. No matter. The clouds held together as the farmer swore and shook his metallic fists. Sit there and philosophize and have as your purpose survival, but the divine and mythic feminine moved south with them, away from endless soybean fields and toward a small house on a hill in Middle America. Though fully cloud, she could still recognize the child who looked out of her bedroom window each night, his eyes filled with hope and desperation. She could never have afforded NYC.
Anonymous, unobserved, clouds moved towards the widow by the window in the other room, as though to jut their pain between them.
David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.
Leather Coat by Erik Peters
The cigarette burns
and grinning seams
of your leather coat
are wounds
in weather-beaten walls
from which you shoot
passers-by.
A good bowman
could mark those slits
and the soft-shadowed chambers
within.
Erik Peters is a teacher and avid mediaevalist from Canada. Erik's work with marginalised students has profoundly influenced his writing which has been published in numerous magazines including Coffin Bell, Superlative Lit, Prospectus, The Louisville Review, and The Dead Mule School. Read all Erik's publications at www.erikpeters.ca or @erikpeterswrites
Siler City Blues by AP McAnarney
Siler City Blues
She tells me that:
The doldrums of August
-with their damp breeze limping off
the sizzling asphalt, mixed with
the diesel fumes from tractors,
and the wafting aroma
of corn burning steadily on the grill-,
remind her of her city,
where young boys spin loaded gun chambers in their small, tattooed-scarred hands
instead of soccer balls at their tiny, nimble feet.
It is hard for her to remember where home is
anymore, she says.
We quietly prod our shared
white threads of chicken
in our shared Styrofoam box
with triangular bits of
flour tortilla.
Among a sweat spackled sea of pink and blonde strands,
her black, lank hair incongruously shoots
obsidian sparks under the Piedmont sun
The corner of her second-hand
turquoise sundress waves
meekly in a brief gust of wind
like a tattered flag, forgotten on conquered sands.
But she sits, contentedly, eyes warmed by one last ember of wonder.
When we finish,
she hides her knotted brown hands,
arthritic from the freezing water
they blast the chickens with as they
zip past her on the assembly line
under her thighs.
They’re like spindly mangrove roots shying out of the black earth in an unexpected winter frost.
Like that place I left long ago.
Her deprecating laughter cascades from her full,
chapped lips and cools our red bench when I tell her this.
She says that:
Despite having sworn to Christ,
that she would never eat a single damn chicken again,
especially after the manager nibbled her earlobe
unsolicitedly,
she can’t believe that somehow this bird tastes
particularly well cooked today
Alexandra McAnarney-Castro is a Salvadoran-American writer raised in Mexico City and San Salvador. For over ten years, she has worked as an activist and advocate for health, immigration, and human rights issues across Latin America and in the United States, with articles published in Truthout, NACLA, and Spain´s El País, Defunkt Literary Magazine, and soon, LatineLit Magazine, as well as various outlets in Colombia, El Salvador, and Brazil, to name a few. Much of her fiction these days focuses on how culture, memory, trauma, and geography hold their sway in shaping communities, families, and individuals. Alex studied journalism, literature, and creative writing at Florida International University and received a Master’s in Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago.
In Plain Sight by Maddy Abdella
Hey! I’m Maddy Abdella (she/they/he) :) I’m 21, and I’ve lived in Southern Colorado for most of my life. In 2016 I was diagnosed with Lymphoma in just 8th grade, and I’ve been in remission since 2020! After healing from chemotherapy, I’m healthier than ever, and have found a new appreciation for life. I am now studying Anthropology and Environmental Conservation at Fort Lewis College. Since a little kid, I’ve always wanted to be an artist, and I know I’m fulfilling my little hearts dreams. Throughout my life I hope to live in the moment, laugh loudly, take risks, and make lifelong friends across the globe :)
Shop Toasters in Toasters
by Annabel Kusnitz
My dad was a toaster and had been for quite a while. Mom said he used to watch nature documentaries about penguins in the Arctic, take his coffee with five sugars, and call me his little rotten tomato. I didn’t remember this; what I remembered was the metallic and long reflection of my own face, my father, staring back at me.
It was embarrassing really, to talk to friends and meet their families, knowing that someday they would know his ugly, metallic truth. I couldn’t lie, say my father was dead, because that wasn’t the whole truth; somewhere in that circuitry was the man who sat with me, saw my first steps.
Now, though, my father sat in his favorite armchair. I greeted him when I came home from school, always met with silence. Sometimes I saw him with a newspaper folded under his boxy body, other times our dog sat beside him, the TV on. I could only assume that my mother had “helped” with these things.
I didn’t talk to him much. I used to try and tell him about soccer games and science class but it never seemed like he was really interested. No one could say for sure how he was feeling, but my mom seemed to treat him normally enough. She took him on dinner dates, they went out for movie nights and left me alone. We were a happy family, full of life, and toast.
“I’m taking your father out for dinner tonight.”
“Okay?”
“Dinner’s in the fridge.” She twirled the lipstick in her hand. I tried to stare at the TV,
into the static, and let my mind blur all the same, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something
needed to be said.
“How come he doesn’t take you out for dinner?”
My mom looked at me, pained in a way that I hadn’t understood at the time. She looked at me like I had pushed her down the stairs, stabbed her, burned her, shot her, threatened to destroy the house, told her that there was a freak accident, that I was sorry something happened while she was away, that something terrible happened to her husband, that things may never be the same as they were before, that she may have to pick up the broken pieces and reassemble herself and swear not to let it ruin her life.
Her hair was graying, sprawled out on her scalp, and scattering across the auburn in her hair like a fungus, like a disease. She hadn’t dyed it since we’d heard the news about my father.
“He’s preoccupied, honey. Besides you know that I like to take charge,” she spoke sweetly. Her expression betrayed her. One thing I will say about my mother is this: despite everything, she still did her makeup impeccably. She still clutched her pearls with care and adorned herself routinely with the appropriate garments.
She picked him up, pock-marked him with her lipstick, and watched the color mear on cold metal. I couldn’t help but notice my mother stare back at herself within his shiny skin. She smiled and looked long-fully at the warped, elongated teeth that smiled back.
“I’m glad you like my outfit baby.”
I knew it would eventually get out, what happened to my father. There was only so long before people started questioning why my mother carried a toaster, insisting it was him
How did it happen people asked me again and again and again, and for the millionth time, I told them. He was there one minute, scratching his silver stubble, and then he just became a toaster, like magic, like a witch’s curse. That was the story my mother told me, through tears and choked sobs when I was old enough. That was one of the only times I’d seen her makeup smudge, running down her face in a murky waterfall, hitting the carpet with corruption.
I often wondered what might have happened if he had stayed human. I still wondered if he could still feel. I wondered what his life used to be like, and how often he may have said his mind if he could. I wondered if I woke up tomorrow, and if he was back to normal, what I would have said to him. Do you remember any of it? Do you still remember me, your rotten tomato? Or am I too old, and too moldy for your touch? Do you remember Mom tucking you into bed, and panicking in the morning when she heard you clang, crash, and fall? Do you still have the dents, the scars from your life before? Do you still have a scratch from the one time mom trusted me with you, and I dropped you on the tiled kitchen floor?
“We’re home!” My mother walked through the door, a smile curled across her face, looking for approval rather than asking for it.
“How was it?”
It was routine, I know, but I’m not sure how much longer I could’ve taken it. I’m unsure how much longer I could have handled the song and dance that ended in odd whispers at school in the morning. The same questions, the same date nights, that same TV documentary on rerun since he was changed- the same polar bears eating penguins. It made me wake up in the morning to silver hairs too.
One night, when my mother was asleep beside him, I drank some of her liquor. I drank and thought about the fungus in my mother's hair, and the fungus in my heart killing all sense of caring. I pat the family dog gently and ruffled his fur.
I stared at the moon on the back porch, squinting to imagine the detail within its craters. I saw the sky as a blistering face, stars bleeding and popping like some sort of cosmic acne, exploding and decaying and leaving behind scars that fade into dust. They are changing, morphing, and moving through the motions of life. They are above, and I was below.
I asked myself does he still bleed. My fingers grew cold.
I snuck into my mother's room with a kitchen knife. I stood over him, wondering what would happen if I plunged the knife deep into his metallic frame. What if he was alive, somewhere deep inside, a toaster with lungs, kidneys, a heart, and bones? Where would the arteries even be? I leaned down to whisper into his shape.
“I couldn’t image what it was like, the pressure to be a good father, a good husband. You have to know that this couldn’t last forever. I love you, Dad. I loved you, father, but you’re not him. You’re not him-”
I stabbed at the toaster, riddling him with holes and scratches. It fell off the bed with a clatter. Mom screamed, and yet it did not bleed.
“You were always a cheap replacement.”
Annabel Kusnitz is a senior at Champlain College who strives to meld her whimsical stylings with grounded character. When she's not writing, she's sketching, visiting her family (cat included), or having a movie night. Annabel is set to graduate from Champlain College in 2024 with a degree in Professional Writing.
Reflections
by David M. Alper
I emerged colder.
Day as white as a mirror fogged with breath, fleeting—dusk already casting shadows on the
meadow's edges like a mirror devoid of silver.
Cracks in the mirrored surface bare branches trembling against the glassy sky.
But now I stand where you are not, the one I believed I needed, like a mirror, to understand
myself.
If I dared now, I would be consumed like a mirror swallows the object it reflects.
Overwhelmed by sorrow, once, my body left a mirrored imprint in the snow.
Is that love?
How I watched you disappear into desire, never to return—yet still linger, at the edge of the
frozen lake.
Once, like you, I was certain— my agony infinite as a room full of mirrors.
In the heart of silence, a reflection that shows no face, a reflection I would break under the
weight of my presence.
Now I observe my suffering like a mirror, an impassive pane.
David M. Alper's forthcoming poetry collection is Hush. His work appears in Variant Literature, Washington Square Review, Oxford Magazine, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.
Bliss, or, Why I Do Not Need the News
for GL
by James B. Nicola
What I know, I know I know.
The News is not for everyone.
I know that when it’s time, I’ll go.
And you know that I know how to use a gun.
And where our leader wants our flag,
you know that I shall want it, too.
My patriotism shall not sag.
And you know I love my BMW.
I know the word “republican”
means leaders will decide for me;
that free elections choose the man
while they reconfirm that you and I are free.
I know that conquest liberates
invaded lands (when we’re not the
invaded land) and celebrates
the greater glory of God and Germany.
James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies (just out). His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller's People's Choice magazine award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels stunned and grateful. A graduate of Yale, James hosts the Writers' Roundtable at his library branch in Manhattan: walk-ins are always welcome.