April 2024 | poetry
After I share my secrets, I’ll remind you to
Burn them in a pyre when my body’s ash.
Carry my regret, silence in stone. Feel the weight.
Deny my mysteries. The loudest plead for light.
Euphemisms are hallucinations of language.
Forget what I tell you. No. Remember. But first
Give me time to collect my words before I go.
Hide them, shove them through the shredder.
If I said I never wanted to be a mother, would you
Juxtapose that with my pride in my child–
Known only to me. Time within time, waving away.
Love for a child unexpected. At 23, how did I?
Mothering, an obligation my body accepted.
Nature or nurture, the argument goes. I have no
Original answer. Unclear, I forced myself to think.
Perhaps, I thought too much. Or did I do enough?
Quit listening to me ramble. I’m in a frantic state.
Reality is outside my unsecured front door. Lock it.
Soon, I’ll write my story–the truth, and the slant.
Too much to unspool. I unravel, mostly at night.
Usually, I see my cracks inside your curiosities,
Vagaries, moods, quirks, like those rickety rides,
Whipping me around. My rag doll head lacks support.
Xerox my musings. Pursue my words across the page.
Yowling, I let my utterance, a long mournful cry, go.
Z is for Zebra. It’s understood it can’t change its stripes.
Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Argyle Literary Magazine, SWWIM, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Scapegoat Review, Rust &Moth, Minyan Magazine, 3rd Wednesday, and Mom Egg Review. She has work forthcoming from Action, Spectacle, Quartet, and One Art. She is the 2023 recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her mini-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. Find her at lindaladerman.com.
Linda Laderman
April 2024 | poetry
It is a ritual to bathe the daughter.
Baptized, she purifies dirty water,
rinsed over long hair that falls out between fingers.
Years ago, we handed her to a man over a vat
and believed him when he said she would not drown.
Face down, screams dull;
Reverberated from a dank vessel now lost
in the catacombs she sacrificed herself in.
This new life – it is of another world.
The kind where she does not crave the bitter cold.
A kind where she is welcomed into the body of her mother
instead of the ghost of a girl
whose father told her to sink or swim.
How holy is this veiled light
when she burns her lungs amongst it
just to find out she is finally alive.
And how heavenly is the father that cleanses and kills
in the same room.
When he washes his hands of blood under the halo of moon,
he turns his back to his children,
still beneath the water,
waiting to be absolved of their sins.
Sydney Greiner is an undergraduate at Susquehanna University studying English Literature and Publishing & Editing. She finds inspiration in the stories she hears, whether it be from a friend or a stranger. When she is not writing she enjoys watching Twin Peaks and spending time with her cat, Tokyo.
Sydney Greiner
April 2024 | poetry
The boy loves lying
in this open field, blinking
at the bowl of summer sky.
Heedless of wiregrass itching his neck, of ants
sizing up his ears,
he tracks the somber wings that float
and swoop in primordial arcs
as though suspended
from puppeteer’s strings. Still
as a graveyard angel
the boy believes he can draw them near.
The pitch-black hunters
wheel through the midday glare,
shadows skimming the ground
crossing the boy’s pale legs.
He can almost feel the first one
thump onto his chest,
feel the talons’ fish-hook grip,
smell the stench of outstretched wings,
poised as in a dream,
above this small emptiness
in the shape of a boy.
Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that require getting through to people who may not be listening. When he finally got around to writing poetry, his work appeared in literary magazines like Dunes Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Rockvale Review, and Third Wednesday Journal. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife, Fran.
Ken Hines
April 2024 | poetry
The first time you get
the wind knocked out of you,
you will be astonished
by what seems a fatal wallop—
one moment running,
the next, bulge-eyed and gaping
like a carp tossed in a rowboat.
No one prepares us.
We face this first shock
as innocents, unwarned
of the breathtaking thwack,
unassured of its passing.
Having lost what was thought
a basic given, it’s only natural
to reconsider the dependable,
and adopt, perhaps,
a more cautious posture,
for who could frolic
in their stocking feet or leap
with quite the same abandon,
once they know
how slick the footing,
how sudden and cruel the blow?
Angie Hexum is a speech-language pathologist by trade. A Nebraska native, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduating from Swarthmore College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Caesura and Gyroscope Review. She currently resides in Campbell, CA where she enjoys hiking, cycling, and singing in a chorus.
Angie Hexum
April 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
When she said that,
I think she has never tasted how a good Irish whiskey
echoes in your mouth after you swallow its heat.
Or understood the way lint can reveal the archeology of your life.
Her comment tells me she has never watched
a vivid crimson cardinal alight on the halo of a basketball hoop
in the fading light of an afternoon.
If she can say that, I’m sure she hasn’t felt the love
when the wind caresses the yew tree.
And she will be mystified by why you must throw away
the first crepe in the pan to the dog.
When it comes to believing in the curative power
of the medicine of tears, she probably doesn’t.
And if she cannot hear how the meter of the telegraphic SOS
from the Titanic can truly break your heart,
She’s just not listening hard enough.
Larry Oakner is the author of three chapbooks of poems, including Unwinding the Words (Blind Tattoo Press) SEX LOVE RELIGION (Blind Tattoo Press), and The 614th Commandment (under his pseudonym, Eleazar Baruch), along with a chapbook, The Canticles of Private Lucius Swan, (Pen & Anvil Press). Over 50 of his poems have appeared in publications such as The Ekphrastic Review, Red Eft Review, Red Wolf Press, WINK, The Oddville Press, Tricycle: Buddhist News, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lost Coast Review, The Long Island Quarterly, and many others.
Larry Oakner
