Dew On The Sea

Dew On the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm Star/savior is an infirm rhyme, but here:even the smallest music box will chimeif you place it all the way inside your ear.It’s like unfocusing your eyes to seethe nest snug within the burning wood;it’s like when the weather map pulses greenafter you look away from all that red;it’s like an artless belief in mercy(who is smarter and happier than youpermit yourself to be); it’s a near-dream.It all exists, but we may need to softenour bones to be born into it. Think dewon the sea, think hammered gold, think zygote.We may have to be both borne and boat. Poetry Home Art by Sean Riley

nothing is more sad than a waning moon

nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (transl. Anne-Sophie Balzer) nothing is more sad than a waning moon in dwindling candle light you write this to have a body means tremendous responsibility and no one is born knowing how it works   but someone has hung a flyer on the crescent  people are being sought after cats went missing if the apple is the embrace i am the worm  eating it away Poetry Home Art by Mickey Haist Jr.

The Cabinda spouses

The Cabinda spouses by Landa wo O mbé – dé 1 returned to life!O kuet – dé 2 who will protect us from lightning!If the bottom of the sea is luminous.Why does your dark eye not reflect a light of love? 1 The night hunter that kills the game for Cabinda villagers but is killed each morning by his last prey.2 The wife – widow of Mbé – dé, interred every morning and disinterred every evening before the hunt. Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

Fears, Explained

Fears, Explained by Kayla Jessop After A. Papatya Bucak’s “I Cannot Explain My Fear”   I have a fear of spiders, snakes, and bees. At my favorite brunch spot downtown, a bee kept flying around my head even after I wished it away. It landed in my mimosa moments later and drowned in the sweet nectar of orange juice and champagne. The waitress brought me another. I have a fear of red ant piles. Once, my grandfather accidentally stepped in one while mowing his yard. When the little bites didn’t heal on their own after weeks, he went to the doctor, and they found cancer in his bloodstream. I’m afraid of swimming in the pool alone, swimming in the ocean without people close by, and floating on an inflatable in the river. I saw a movie as a kid where an alligator came up from under the water with its mouth wide open and swallowed the relaxing woman in one go. Their death roll scares me, too.    I have a fear of thunderstorms. The thunder causing the house to shake makes me think of a picture falling off the wall and giving me brain damage. Motorcycles and scooters scare me. Two tires don’t create enough balance to protect my lack of it. I’m scared of restroom door handles, gas pumps, and restaurant silverware. I have a fear of Russia. I didn’t sleep for two days when there was talk of going to war with them. I live in a major city– we would be an easy target. Asteroids, meteors, and falling satellites make me scared. I have a fear of dragonflies after they were used as a way for the dead wife to communicate with Kevin Costner in the movie Dragonfly. Ghosts, ouija boards, and the dark scare me, too. When I visit my mother’s grave, I’m afraid each step I take near a headstone to get to hers is going to make a ghost angry and follow me home to punish me. I’m more afraid my mother’s ghost won’t visit me.    I have a fear of scales, carbs, and calorie trackers. Shopping for jeans and little black dresses gives me goosebumps. I’m afraid of fireworks because of a Fourth of July celebration that ended with everyone fleeing from the outdoor venue because of a possible active shooter. I’m afraid of ditches because it was hard for me to climb out of the one we hid in once the police arrived to secure the area. I’m scared of Easy-Bake Ovens because I don’t know how they work. I cannot explain my fear of scarecrows. I’m scared of AIs, my Amazon Alexa, and the camera on my laptop because they’re probably spying on me. I’m worried I made my sister afraid of deer because I make her look out for them when I drive in the dark, terrified of hitting one. When I was a kid, I was afraid of dogs because they were loud and liked to jump. My family still makes fun of how I used to be now that we have a dog.    I have a fear that the gum I swallowed when I was seven is still in my stomach. I’m even more scared of the idea that my stomach won’t hold life in it after being on birth control for ten years. Relationships and love scare me. I’m afraid of marriage because my mother was miserable during hers. I’m more afraid of divorce because she was too heartbroken after her marriage to love again. Airplanes, cars, and buses scare me, too. I’m afraid of the words “no” and “yes” but prefer to say “yes.” I’m afraid of Costa Rica because my boyfriend wants to propose to me there. Sharks, iguanas, and rogue monkeys live there, too. Nonfiction Home Art by Keegan Baatz

In Eternal

In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue Mary stands by the window, her fingers making cat’s cradles in the air. It is a winter afternoon, and the light is pale. It rimes the floral-patterned bedlinen, the hem of her long camel coat. There are water spots on the mirror. She would like to give the place a good going-over, to scrub the dust from the skirting boards and brush the cobwebs from the light fixture. Not that the room is dirty⁠—not really. Only cheap. Only a little grubby at the edges. The hotel is a nondescript new-build on the outskirts of the city, near to the train station. Mary walked quickly through the lobby when she arrived, fearing questions, but the girl behind the reception desk didn’t even look up from the magazine she was reading. Perhaps this sort of thing is common here. The man Mary has come here to meet is in the en-suite bathroom. She can hear running water through the walls. Making himself ready. Her pulse chatters in her throat, rapid as a baby bird’s. She should take her coat off, she thinks. It seems like the thing to do. But every time her hands move to her lapels they flutter away again, coming back to rest in a spot just above her navel. Her stomach turns, the lurching of it somehow not unpleasant. Under her coat she is wearing a dress of green rayon, the one with the rosette at the collar, and underneath a plain slip that is fraying at the seams. Below that she has on a peach-coloured brassiere and knickers of a similar colour, the closest thing she has to a matching set. Her nylons are new, purchased that morning with money she took from Bridget’s piggy bank. Mary hopes their perfect sheen will distract him; from the weight of her breasts, the soft flesh of her thighs, the lightning tracery of stretch marks across her hips and belly. He has already told her that she is beautiful, but she fears he will shrink from the fullness of her. The pipes give a sudden, high shriek as a tap is turned off. Three heartbeats of silence pass, and then the door to the en-suite bathroom opens. The man Mary is here to see is not particularly handsome. His hair is thinning at the crown, and there are dark spots on the backs of his hands. But he smiles when he sees her, a broad and honest smile that deepens the creases around his eyes, and after years of not being seen at all, that is more than enough. Where and how they met is immaterial. She is here now. Mary removes her long camel coat, folds it over her right arm, and lays it neatly on the chair by the window. The coat had been John’s gift to her a week after she first stepped foot on English soil. Her good tweed overcoat, inherited from her mother, was ruined on the crossing from Dublin to Liverpool. A summer squall had bruised the sky not long after the ferry came out of port, and the vessel was bobbing queasily on the choppy water. Christopher had picked that inauspicious moment to make himself known, two weeks ahead of schedule. Mary’s waters broke as she was clinging to the guardrail on the ferry’s top deck and were sluiced away by the rain within moments. A woman called Agnes, a navvy’s widow from Kildare, acted as midwife. She’d six children of her own and knew the workings of it. It was her who folded up the tweed overcoat and propped it, businesslike, under Mary’s hips, to be spoiled beyond salvation in a rush of amniotic fluid. Mary’s screams, she was told later, had the lads in the engine room crossing themselves. Later she would hardly remember screaming at all. Only Agnes placing the squirming, wailing infant in her arms, his body red and wet as a skinned rabbit, and the way she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. She called him Christopher, the name she and John had agreed when he left to work the beet harvest. One of the crewmen opened a bottle of sherry to wet the baby’s head. By the time the ferry came into port an hour later, Christopher was asleep at Mary’s breast, and the sky was so cloudless you’d never know it had rained at all. Her fourth child will be born in a hospital room, a modern phenomenon that her mother would never have approved of. Mary will be brought in on the advice of her doctor because of the high levels of protein in her urine, and she will be grateful for it. It will not feel right, somehow, to birth this child at home, in the same bed where Declan and Bridget filled their tiny lungs for the first time. Mrs McKee will mind the children when Mary is admitted, albeit reluctantly. She will have heard the backyard gossip, same as everyone else. Mary will not require Mrs McKee’s approval. All Mrs McKee needs to do is keep the children fed until Mary returns home and to keep her cat’s arse of a mouth closed while they’re in earshot. It will be a difficult birth. There will be moments where Mary will be certain that she will die in that room, with its bare lightbulb and walls so white it hurts to look at them. She will tell the doctor that she needs her rites, and he will pretend not to hear her. The maternity unit will have opened its doors for the first time less than a month before. It will smell like paint and antiseptic. Mary will be sick into a metal dish that a nurse will hold beneath her chin, again and again until there is nothing to bring up but bile. When it is over, the midwife will ask Mary if she wants to hold the child, and Mary will say no. She will ask

Kaddish 9

Kaddish 9 by Daniela Naomi Molnar                                                 below the quick ]                                            [ surface currents of the                           mind muscular water moves     ]                                  [    undiluted sentience                               sole and fluid flow   ]                                                       [   through everyone your                                  tongue and your own wet breath   ]                [   already knows the nameless                           so it’s ok to disown the dead   ]                                         [   multiplication                and to disregard the sad arithmetic    ]                            [    of the bad and tired plan        it’s ok, do not call the failure any name   ]                                [   let your voice calve an inoculant                                            omission  ]                                                    [   of the self                  a home that’s all hinge  ]                                                                         [ let that zero                   loll    ]                                                                                                                        [    open be muttered or sung   ]                                                                                                      [muttered or sung by the nameless one    ]                                                                                                      [   a sound thick  as no mirror   ]                                                                                                                         [    and dense as love’s    ]                                                                                                                                    [  black hole   Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

Kaddish 2

Please View this Poem on a Desktop Kaddish 2 by Daniela Naomi Molnar Let the rhyming, dying dream              carve a tunnel in your trachea                                            for breath then name                                                              Let the name be lush                                                                             Let the name be rangy                                                                                            roaming past time                                                                                                            to the source of language : a huddle of clean ash —                                                                                                                                                                  the only                                                                                                                                                           promise time makes                                                                                                                                           is to be ongoing                                                                                                                         an inconclusive light that cannot dim                                                                              forming                                                                                             pink organs and petals                                                  green fuses and rot                                                               the metastasizing muscle                                                                               the prison, the cell, the organelle                                                                                              the eight dollar cup of                                                 coffee the animal with no teeth in the hungry street                                                              the person with no love left in the desiccated                                                                             valley the quake the rubble the flood                                                                                           the bone-dense shadows                                                                                                         the traps sprung on                                                                                              sinew in inconclusive light                                                                             god a fermata      

I licked a leaf

I licked a leaf by Ron Antonucci You think me mad but licking a leaf is the least of it.   I could tell you about the smell of a hummingbird’s wing. I could describe the sound of a rock as it cracks in its growing.I have witnessed the drip and streak of stars as they melt across the deep dark.I know the feel of water as it shudders into ice.I’ve heard the heartbeat of a caterpillar and listened to the soft cry and song of a dandelion as it goes from thick and yellow to whitened wisp.The pulse of pebbles on my palm…   So, yeah: I’ve licked, I’ve tasted a leaf.Like all things within reach of the tongue, the hand and the heart, I can tell you that it is bitter, and it is sweet. Poetry Home Art by Alice Stone-Collins

And After, No One Lowered Their Flag

And After, No One Lowered Their Flag by Matthew Williams Shift in the viscera’s tectonics. Your body was to be as any other glass chapel in a fracturing land: code blue, cold lips the color of early light at dawn. Yes, it seems, even in death, some part of us succumbs to American pageantry: the way your hand clasped your heart as you collapsed to the hardwood. This is what I hold in mind in study of broken windows, the pattern of fracture, its dendritic limbs, the ever finer fingers reaching into what once, with clarity, held, as it passed, life. If you were here, I would ask, if you believed we can grasp, not the instance alone, but the act of shattering, if the hairline break in the ankle bone of some fossilized ungulate is an inscription of structure governing prey and predation, given as I am to seek the grand abstraction that poses as explanation, and thinking, if the dead know anything, they must know the sound of that biggest symphony, where we hear nothing but the pluck of one string. I am still listening to particulars still listening to the misdiagnosis, still seeing the orange morning opening like a crusted wound above the gas station and the man who watched me careen into the parking lot, roll down my window, and shout, Where is the hospital, in silence, turning his back. The owners, days before you died, asking you to just do your best to manage the finances from the ICU. The insurance adjuster’s dulcet hiss in the phone for days. You, twisting in the front seat of that red hatchback at a red light, a scream scoring your throat: a note sharper than a neighbor’s glare—another glass shard fallen from the broken anthem of this breaking place: the hometown, the county, the country where we found ourselves lost, when you said from the bedroom floor, hand over your heart: Don’t call an ambulance. I can’t afford an ambulance. Poetry Home Art by Morgan Auten-Smith

Away We Go

Away We Go by Claire Wahmanholm My question for love is this: how do I livethis way. Which way does the breath go. Which waythe blood as it runs. If I am alive and in love, how long will it hurt. Away we go, I say, climbing into the boat I did not make but every night am made to trust. I practice letting go: one beat, two beats, eighty per minute. Death has mowed more and more of the meadow. Each day I have fewer questions but they are all about pain, and what I would do to survive it. Or not, being un-brave. I wave and wave at my swimming daughter, whose stronger arms pull her from me into something stranger. Poetry Home Art by Cynthia Yatchman