issue 4.1
Did Last Night’s Slim Moon Cast A Shadow?
By Mercedes Lawry
The struggle begins at dawn, always present
as I open and close my fists, and birds flutter
outside of any brokenness.
I am attached to certain sounds, certain
ways to elongate vowels and clip consonants,
a mirror of my words, of a voice
I vaguely recall in a dim, smoky room
where hope slid between two people.
I was one of them, before wreckage.
Pigment
By Jonah Saks
Croaking out for forgiveness shouting
the morning sky. What colour was it?
I’m not going to tell you.
​
But our suburban lawn was frozen
and we caught a glimpse
into silence, unadorned:
naked everything.
​
The old painters would have found it in caves. Chandeliers
swinging just slightly, iron-encrusted and fish teeth. That colour
you knew–and just when you thought,
​
your mother walks in on us.
Save your embarrassment. We must go out from here
and I can’t tell you what difference it would make, or your
mother’s tears or the colour of the sky.
​
​
[Phases] of the Moon
By Avigail Venema
Curled into a spiral conch
reverberating distant waves—
breakers of sore warm bruising,
a pebble rolled in lakeside surf.
I swallow the coral pills
and pray they make me a sand dollar,
continually rocked by silken water,
leaching away the stain.
Poems
By Nancy Byrne Iannucci
​
Walking to the tune of seagulls and plovers, and hybrids I call sealovers, walking back and forth ahead of breaking waves.
The look of the stained-glass sea as it opens, the meerschaum pouring forth like a sermon preaching at your feet.
They make you go Ahab mad pulled down by a cord of words.
This Autumn My Son
By Rikki Santer
​
…as if hope and will could make magic…
Dana Levin
Your ginger beard
these slippery paths carpeted
with ginger leaves surrendered
hickory nut shells rattle behind your forehead
your boy in man lurks inside the brackets
alongside too many flavours of pain
your heart a sad fist with extension cord frayed
your isolation a throbbing hologram
won’t Chance step in to offer you a compass
through the brambles, some flickering joy
a bit of moonlight on your tongue
a tenderness to graze you.
Vein Portrait
By Avryl Bender
​
He asked for a portrait, but this
is not the language of a face.
This is a system of blue
veins under a surface of skin
where a wrist spells H (and
a bulging temple says anger,
where wisdom is varicose,
is protruding cobalt-blue).
This is where you feel
for the human pulse. Yes,
right here, on the faint cerulean line
beneath the tender gestures of the palm.
Domestic Objects
By Giles Goodland
​
I. Book
Book in the canal, close enough to fish out. The text may be Urdu, with photogravures of heads in different styles of turban. It dries in a sun that accords no pages. Nouns flower. A tree sleeps in the wastes of the hand.
​
II. Styrofoam
The taste offers a tense of wave-forms, chewed clouds. Sleek-skulled obelisks remove their beards. Things are too vulgarly true, weighing our eyes, burying our heads in touchy arm width.
​
III. Fork
Z drops a fork and she shouts to the floor fuck off.
​
IV. Bed
This is the sum of all destinations—walls flex, floor, windows tremble, moon scalpels clouds. No reason the house would not fall. Rocking myself I was aware of the others dreaming their window open and rising up in their sheets, becoming the morning.
Muse-seeking
By Jez Punter
​
Gulled dud, you knackered your knees
to know that old Pierian,
only to find the gush a trickle,
weak splash, barely enough
to turn a wheel.
And so the default: London.
Return to Crete
By Stelios Mormoris
I set out to fail, I knew this.
He forgave that I was too much man—too smart, too lithe, too free. And still he gifted me with wings of wax and feathers, every child's sleeping and waking dream. But I had a son's arsenal: stallion to harness speed; coin, stone, stars, and blood; regret and laughter, rubied berries and moon jasmine. I fed kindred birds who pierced eyes into bark to amass their cradles.
Never was choice so clear: the gentleness below and wildness above. And so I left behind the embers of soft villages and flew straight into the sky, half-listening to the two-faced ode of sea and sun.
I returned out of love. And found on the shore the colour of murder, and a pair of blue iris—whose sword-shaped shadows branded my fall. I found lapsed friends—and mother, sisters, brother—caught in an icon weeping. My cat purring in a stand of reeds, my father sleeping with his hands on his face. I still hear that voice far above crying: come back, come back.
But the voice was heaven's blame in cloud-shredded rays. And I was back in the aegis sheltered from sun, my home an eye, a marrow of light.
an inebriated body lists to port
By Julie Allyn Johnson
wine, an accelerant, a slow burn—
arms bathed in warmth,
a dismantled brain
claws toward composure
in real time, it wonders
how well it’s pulling this off
pasted-on smile, sympathetic nod
eyes laser-locked in demonstration:
see how into you I am,
how willing my participation
in our social contract?
later, the body will lament
others’ lack of reciprocity
oblivious to sidelong glances
the awkward eagerness to move on
to extricate themselves
from this body’s pathetic need
its repetitions of grievance
an exhaustion of trivialities
taxing even those most
generous of intentions
after every flotsam performance—
numbed & alone, the body retreats.
公公
By Faith Ruetas
​
I remember the hands that fit so carefully on my shoulder, the skin the same mango pudding and condensed milk as my own. In the morning’s softness he’d settle in his chair by the window, a novel cradled to his body. The strong palms held up the story; the deft fingers followed characters down the page. When a cloud kissed the sun, I’d take this as a sign to tiptoe through the cracked door and interrupt his ritual, asking,
​
Why are your books backwards?
His eyes crease at the corners but remain trained on the page. I watch as they trace each line,
turn one about, set it down.
Is he thinking of his home? The one across the sea? Of rice and lotus and cream—
His jade ç’§ whispered of this place…
Is there room there for me?
Patiently, he reaches towards the wooden stool at his side, selects the lightest novella from the stack, and hands it to me. The sunlight returned once more to gather round his head, outlining tiny spikes in warm reds, glinting golds.
