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issue 4.1

crocus

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.

 

feels

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. 

​

​

queen

[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.

early

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.

time

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.

summer

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

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

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

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.  

inebriated

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

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 璧 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.

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