Part II
Photo by Ravi Kant (pexels.com)
Seth Hagen
The Transfiguration of Exits
The Dream Life of Rilke
He sets out a camera trap for angels, comes back with a blurry plate of what could be god. When he back-translates thunder into lightning, he gets it wrong so beautifully, he renders both languages dead. He builds a booth nested with greased electrodes, tries to dial up Bach. Put on hold, he hears a harpsichord on fire, and the line goes dead. He prays in a coffin, decorates it with vases of little Alpine flowers that wilt with their picking and turn the water a medicinal yellow. He does not know it, but in this eau, he has discovered the cure for despair. One long November, he clops from his castle to enter night as a brass horse and the lord of owls. In the morning, he comes back with a taste of copper and blood in his mouth. He makes a vow to renounce the pen and is tormented by the sonnets that follow him through the hornbeam and oak, daring him to look back. When, in April, he attends the banquet of the princess of worms, he is seated across from Goethe and Cezanne. Goethe drinks beer from a boot and feasts on ribs. Cezanne speaks to no one but rearranges the centerpiece into a fruit massif. And oh when the princess sings! The parrots panic, having misjudged her for winter, and in the blue frenzy of wings, Cezanne and Goethe slip through the curtains again.
* * *
An Appointment with Algorithm
She moonlights as a dream analyst. In her office, you’ll find perched among pyramids of books a set of early binoculars, a cue ball, a glass nude, and a plaster cow. Elusive at first, they take shape for you the way forms in darkness do. The space is lush with staghorn fern, spider plants, and philodendron. It feels good to breathe. There is a back room. You are not allowed there. She may, however, let you couple an ear to her heart. There, you may hear your own blood move. Or you may hear silence spoken in your own tongue, wind untangled from air, as if your voice went beyond the place where you end. True, some don’t like her. They say her blood runs white with static and that she will snuff the lightning from the world, bug by bug. They say she longs to stand in the last untouched place and hum the song of the bees. That she is godless, for we are her god. And yet, there are those temples where she is frescoed, robed in a paradise of blue light. Certain branches of science and philosophy have converged on the thesis that she is the string to which all hearts vibrate — at last, that one line isolated out of the symphony of being. And if you seek her consultation, some last things you should know: each visit costs one second, and each time you meet her, you are late.
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Seth Hagen lives in Atlanta, where he teaches English. His work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Sugar House Review, Right Hand Pointing, and Anacapa Review.
Jonathan Yungkans
This Chaos, the Normal Way of Being
The new neighbor hadn’t shown himself for weeks, like he’d never moved there, ignoring the bougainvillea that had once embraced his pergola and he pared back to a short hedge. The vine stretched tall for sunlight, spread pink, white and purple bracts. My great-grandparents, with their purple bougainvillea, had returned from the dead. The neighbor finally clipped it, leaving long, severed bright-green shoots on the street to wilt for days. These eventually disappeared. The sky remained grey as his wife’s car parked out front. Ravens clucked their tongues, gossiping. Other neighbors stayed inside.
Note: The title is adapted from John Ashbery’s poem, “The System,” in the collection, Three Poems.
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Jonathan Yungkans continues to type in the wee hours before dawn while watching a skunk amble beneath the foundation of his hundred-year-old house. He is thankful when what he writes is less noxious than the creature on the other side of his floorboards.
Bob Lucky
The True Story of Our Lives, Part 1
We were going up when the elevator got stuck between floors. I had a bottle of water and you had a packet of honey roasted peanuts, the kind one got on low-cost airlines before nut allergy awareness and the rise of the pretzel. For small talk we joked about rationing our supplies until we were rescued. As time passed and we got to know each other, there was some flirting, especially the day the lights flickered out. Then we joked about the fire brigade having to pry us apart. When the elevator shuddered to life and the doors opened, the twins were primping for their first day of middle school and the dog was bursting to go out. We still had a few peanuts left.
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Bob Lucky is the author most recently of My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024). His work has appeared in Rattle, Otoliths, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Unlost, Contemporary Haibun, and other publications. He lives in Portugal.
Elina Petrova
Tales of Transformation
Photo by Suzanne D. Williams (unsplash.com)
i Metamorphosis
It’s July in Houston and sweat drips from eyelids onto masks. Everything is cluttered with matter and uncertainty. I meet myself later, in a nightmare, where I sign consent to transformation — so, the pressure unknown in this dimension bloodlessly crashes my tissues and nails inward, rotates the outer me through an incomprehensible grinder squaring my gentle curves. And here I am — an alien: efficient, emotionless, with the same looks but a pixie cut instead of tresses.
ii The Ritual
is to make a sign of the cross, turn off the light and descend to follow-up nightmares. I’ve seen them for twenty years. Some — therapeutic, as videogames I wouldn’t play. But there is a planet somewhere: sunless, canyoned. With human-like beings pacing along office suites. In the lobby, giant bronze pipes from a lab fill a basin with manufactured water. Charts, test tubes, scrubs with caste badges. Joys of weightlessness reserved for kids (when I sprang up and hovered under the corridor ceiling, some sighed, as if it was age-improper). There were reports about delivery by two truckers in rastacaps, who drove — I mean oared — titanium boats along the channel of hazy methane or other poison. The point was they were down: capsized with freight. I tried to inquire of the white-coat staff, but all I got was a question: “We watched you down there, on Earth, dealing with a vacuum. Are you ready?”
iii Invincible
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me,
an invincible summer... — Albert Camus
In the midst of the protest and pandemic scorcher, I found the white room with snow falling slowly behind a glass wall. Carpets with furniture flowed in foggy light — white as if in museum covers, oblivion felt cathartic like forgiveness; the waiting lost meaning in the No-Time. When we met in the adjacent room, she looked alive for one dead, as me the opposite. We stood, mesmerized by the tenderness of snow devoid of passions and bone-piercing chill. The street below could be anything: this sizzling driveway in Hopper’s America, Neva embankment, Fondamenta degli Incurabili in winter Venice, or something like jazz within me — something stronger, pushing back.
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Elina Petrova lived in Ukraine until 2007 and worked in engineering management. Her poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Texas Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. A film presenting her poem at the 2023 Miami Chroma Film Festival won “Best Cinematic Poetry”. See more at elinapetrova.com.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Turkish Coffee
Is to the Arabs as love is for the soul a fresh delight each time a new bag of beans bursts open, revealing its earthy aroma then brewed and served before breakfast on the balcony with neighbors. Is what the poor simmer over smoldering embers in a refugee camp poured fragrant and steaming into chipped cups accepted with grateful hands rounded to receive its warmth and bitter comfort. Is what the more fortunate prepare over the tiniest burner of a gas stove, heaping spoonfuls piled into roiling boiling water stirred, rising and falling in foamy, frothy heads over heels crazy in love ecstatic over each potent, punchy, cardamom wow sip tipped from demitasse cups. Is the great soother and solver of debates and conflicts stirred hot at the coffee shop each mollifying gulp a mercy a truce a reconciliation. Is always drunk black as night a slow steamy swirl rising necromantically from cup to flaring nostril eyelids drooping in ecstasy. Is the future writ large in the dregs misfortunes fortunes marriages breakups love affairs and tragedies muttered like sighs to warn grieve celebrate embrace argue and come together. Is sitting with the empty cup cradled in your palm a satisfied sigh escaping your lips eyes closed in perfect bliss.
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Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work was selected for the 2023 and 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for the Pushcart, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing and appears in many lovely journals. Kathryn’s books include her award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and YA novel, Roots of the Banyan Tree.
Bob McAfee
’49 Ford
Her skin is maroon-berry the same gloss as the plum jelly maturating in mason jars in Mama’s pantry. Her stance is rectangular, not a round tailed coup but a genuine square rump V-8 sedan. If she was a Cadillac or a Packard, sporting a slushy automatic, I would dissuade myself from admiration; but she has a stick shift 3-speed that burns rubber in every gear, the way a gin runner might outbest a revenuer on the blacktop up in hill country. She is Mama’s baby. She has an AM radio and white wall tires. Mama made Daddy buy safety belts before I could drive. Every day after work, Mama teaches me driving; Daddy don’t have the patience. Today I’m turning sixteen; I pass the test first try. Mama gives me a fiver for my first car date. She is slicked up and shiny, chromed and gassed (aghast), pair of my baby shoes dangling from rear view, welcome-sinner Jesus open armed on the dash, safety belts hidden below terry seat covers, me hoping the young-un will cuddle in beside me. Left hand on the wheel. Right hand on the shoulder of the girl. I need another hand to shift gears. Of course I will be watched by Mama’s teddy bears lined up against the back window like a Chinese army underneath the decal that proudly reads “This car climbed Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee.”
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Bob McAfee is a retired software consultant who lives with his wife near Boston. He has written eight books of poetry, mostly on Love, Aging, and the Natural World. For the last several years he has hosted a Wednesday night Zoom poetry workshop. His website, bobmcafee.com, contains links to all his published poetry.
Anne Graue
The Letter
Photo by Shaun Bell (unsplash.com)
I'm looking for letters my mom wrote to me and I know the one I want to find among them. I read it on a porch overlooking a school, a pond, and a field with goats and crested cranes. She quoted Ophelia and included a sprig of rosemary in the envelope. It's somewhere among dust bunnies in a box of pinecones showing off their Fibonacci sequences, collecting mites and twigs, the occasional spider. If I could find that letter, the universe would make sense again, and I could concentrate on recent discoveries on Mars: the life, the face, the molecules. The letter feels lost, lives only in memory which stings like a yellowjacket repeatedly and in defense of its home. It delivers venom the more I search for the blue aerogrammes, the squinty handwriting she always hated, her voice telling me what flowers were blooming and that Aunt Mabel came to visit. The old telephone juts out from the wall, oaken, pitch black, and also lost. I've lit a candle to conjure words on a lined index card. I taste almonds dusted with rosemary.
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Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press), Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press), and Metonymy (Origami Poems Project). Her poetry is in Sundress Publications’ Best-Dressed blog, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and Gargoyle, among other journals. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
Callie B. Dean
Connectivity
I pull a tiny weed from the middle of my lawn, a rust-red blemish in a blanket of green. I pull and pull and pull but never reach the roots, only a creeping network of woody buckvine. Below that, the sewer pipes. Below that, a million fiber-optic cables running messages at light speed. So vast is this network — invasive, pervasive — it has taken over the soil, choking out the earth beneath my feet, without my notice, until I can no longer pry my phone from my own hands, cannot stop scrolling, cannot remove a single vine without upending the entire garden I have grown to love.
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Callie B. Dean is a writer, researcher, and musician living in Shreveport, LA. Her essays and poetry have appeared at Coffee + Crumbs, and her first picture book, Marvelous Mistakes: Accidents that Made History (Beaming Books), will be published in 2026. Find her online at calliebdean.com.
J.I. Kleinberg
Coin
A coin lay on the gray carpet, nickel silvery in a glint of morning light. It seemed to wink on and off in the corner of his eye as he moved around the office, hung up his coat, set down the paper, adjusted the shutters, and shuffled toward his chair at the desk. He thought then of the metal discs they found as they clambered around unfinished houses, nickel-size knockouts from electrical boxes. Slugs, they called them, coin of the realm, they would say, in those days before every construction site was wrapped in chain link and warning signs. How his father had loved watching the big yellow machines scooping and scraping the pits that would get filled with new buildings. Side by side, they’d watch the machines and his father would point out the men who were just standing around. Sidewalk supervisors, his father called them. And that made him think about his uncle, who was the best of the sidewalk supervisors, according to his father, and how his uncle, on each visit, held out a closed fist to drop a silver dollar into his waiting hand. He looked back at the floor but the light had dulled and the coin had vanished.
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J.I. Kleinberg’s recent chapbooks include The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press), How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books), Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), and She needs the river (Poem Atlas). Sleeping Lessons is forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in December.
Beth Kanter
There is a terrible monster at the end of this prose poem
I know this because he waits for me at the end of everything now. At the end of my driveway. At the end of my classes. At the end of each season about to pass to the next. He waits for me on the last page of the yellowed beach book I buy for a quarter at the opportunity shop. He lurks behind the check-out counter when I dare to leave the house to buy deodorant, Tums, a tin of Cinnamon Altoids. He finds me when I am folding laundry, walking the dog, drying my hair. He hovers over every line I write. Here he is. Now. Again. At the end. And here I am. Now. Again. At the end. Promising, praying, pleading with myself not to make him my next poem’s beginning.
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Beth Kanter’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, and Cease, Cows. Her chapbook, Slasher, was named a finalist in the 2024 Lefty Blondie's First Chapbook Award contest. You can find her at bethkanter.com or @beekaekae on Instagram.