July 2024 | poetry
Speak for yourself.
Bet on your own naked wanting,
which is also a losing dog.
Who are you to say I ever lived
a half-life? Like copacetic
isotopes of love.
What a waste of clean pain.
Oh well,
almost green with aliveness choosing
to say nothing over forgiveness.
Light falls over
an empty house like
you have ever been truthful.
What were you hoping for?
The Dogwood lights
easy as a lie.
What a goddamn shame.
You are nightless at heart,
a murmur of a lover
and also the rain.
And also the rain.
Hannah Cook
Hannah Cook is a 24-year-old poet, certified forklift driver, & rat girl. She loves reading, writing, crawling in your walls, and lying about innocuous things for fun. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Boise State University and is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2024. Her poetry concerns itself deeply with matters of desire, love, sex, self-annihilation, generational trauma, identity, and domestic abuse. While spilling recklessly with love and tenderness, her poems also speak to an unbearable, unavoidable thread of loneliness and grief as a condition of desire. Hannah rages, shamelessly, planting milkweed for the company of the final monarchs. Hannah loves, hauntingly, gathering yarrow for the lost.
July 2024 | poetry
In youth we dawdle over flesh in the water,
primed for our prime like an irreducible number.
Reaping dividends from Arctic melt, we look
to the parity of starlight and the perennial
rotation of ground-level fuel. Nefarious grains
grow row upon row on a landscape peppered
with invention. Noteworthy wings slip
echolocation. What do the bees stipulate, or
the last wolverine unbound from a glacier?
The hairline-fractured earth revises who and what exists.
Through rainout and burnout, animation erodes.
In senescence we dally with locked vertebrae. We seek
a strawberry asylum in which to nibble light transformed
into substance. We too are substance. Verifiably tasty.
Alan Elyshevitz
Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
July 2024 | poetry
Three First Grade Boys on the Titanic
Three boys squat
in the Book Corner
looking down
at the open heart of history.
One boy exclaims:
I wish I was on the Titanic.
Another replies with logic:
You can’t be on it.
A third who knows about attention
and the need to make an impact
to be noticed, to exist, states:
I was on the Titanic. I was. I was.
The two other boys don’t respond,
just keeping looking down at the picture
of the ship being sundered, closing
around the book like a prayer,
while the third, silently ousted,
wonders if his lie was in fact a kind of truth.
A Steiner Piano Shop
There’s a Steiner Piano Shop in Lake Oswego now.
The millionaires who wow the lake in record numbers,
in palaces policed by cameras, scraped and landscaped
by immigrant workers, stocked with pouty power boats
and gleaming Teslas can now insist their children clatter
through Mozart whilst they plan weekend wake-surfing
on the lake, too dirty to swim in, and family trips
to the Caribbean, second homes, thanking God
there’s no homeless camps and fentanyl addiction
in their downtown. Close the gate, security cameras on,
kids all tucked up with the latest fairy tale mirrors
while the dog roams its empty, echoing territory.
Matthew James Friday
Matthew James Friday is a British-born writer and teacher. He has published many poems in the US and international journals. His first chapbook, The Residents, will be published by Finishing Line Press in the summer of 2024. He has published numerous micro-chapbooks with the Origami Poems Project. Matthew is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Visit his website at http://matthewfriday.weebly.com
July 2024 | poetry
My kid won’t go to school
anymore.
Morning finds her buried
in her sleep,
her father at her door
pleading.
We were violent at first,
me throwing off her covers, she
kicking.
She bit me once.
Now we have a pattern,
I beg
a short time through
her hollow door.
She clings to silence
til I’m gone.
She knows she’s wrong,
hates herself.
Retreating, I know
she’s right.
We scroll the same scenes
all day.
Presidents laughing
onstage
over bombs for Israel.
Yesterday
in Gaza, a food line
was shot to pieces.
Moms and kids.
And here?
A students crack,
C students
are doomed.
Last spring a classmate
jumped off,
a senior OD’d
this fall.
My brother’s kids were
locked down
last year while a classmate
shot
his homeroom.
The usual.
My daughter says she’s bored
by nature.
Waterfalls, canyons,
oceans.
Last year Mount Rainier,
she wants to
go back to the car
and sleep.
No longer sublime,
the world
holds no secrets.
Not even the laws that
govern us.
Only the dumb persistence
of atoms.
We understand they’re
in the Tube,
these kids. The Blitz above.
We adults
are afraid, our talk
dull bluster
in the dark. The kids
have seen this.
Life is a thing that wants
them dead.
Later I will bring
her lunch.
James Caton
James Caton is an emerging author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Impossible Task, Arboreal, La Piccioletta Barca, and The MacGuffin. He is completing a book of poems, Nakba and Other Poems. He lives in Ann Arbor.
July 2024 | fiction
In the far away, newer, and still shifting western frontiers, there once was a watchman uniformed in olive green who looked over a border, an imaginary one some argued, since a natural delineation this border was not, but instead had been drawn by humans through migration, invasion, occupation, relocation, warfare, purchases, and treaties; now this line manifested itself as a rusty and porous chain-link fence adorned on top with tetanus inducing garland. This watchman, in a grand and big-wheeled gasoline-fueled and color-coordinated-to-his-uniform motor vehicle, would give chase at daring speeds to reach and capture people who, according to this artificial line, were not supposed to be on his side of it. Parallel to it, a massive and glorified irrigation canal that brought verdant promises to a once arid desert served as a secondary boundary this watchman conveniently patrolled from, since the people he would follow with night vision binoculars had grown immune to barbed wire but not to the dangers of deep running water. These people didn’t know it, but they were invisibly watched by another whom they feared as equally as the watchman, a ghostly woman in a dress known to appear waterside at night crying for her drowned children. One night lit with a full moon, while the torrid waters of this wide canal sparkled like stars, the watchman gave chase to a car he believed was loaded with the unwanted; chasing over a bridge across this immense canal, this ghostly woman and secret guardian of the others, made an appearance on the passenger’s seat of this watchman’s speeding grand motor vehicle; elegantly dressed in a white spectral dress, she appeared seated not uttering a word, not looking at him either, just sitting there perfectly postured looking straight ahead, not acknowledging his existence by gesture or word, but simply by being there. The scare made the watchman swerve out of control and roll over, and down the grand green and white Ford Bronco went into the All-American Canal; the words BORDER PATROL emblazoned across it slowly faded as it sank. He died trapped, drowning under the waters of this massive canal that humans use to provide and divide so much, but not before believing, if even for one instant, in the ghostly woman dressed in white.
Omar Bárcena
Omar Bárcena, born and raised straddling the line dividing Alta from Baja California in the border city of Mexicali, Baja California, raised between his hometown and Calexico, his childhood and adolescence were divided between two countries and two languages whose border he crossed: often daily. At 18, he left the currently delineated USA/México border to attend university in San Luis Obispo, California, where he obtained an architecture degree. Omar has lived in Mexicali, Calexico, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Borrego Springs, but the border splitting has never left him. His poetry has appeared in the Hawai’i Review issue 89 – La Trayectoria del Latinx, by the University of Hawai’i in Manoa and in The Very Edge Poems, by Flying Ketchup Press, of which he became a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2020, and his first collection of poetry, Poemas desde el otro lado, which deals `with being on the opposite side of things, was published in 2021 by Valparaíso Ediciones of Granada, Spain. He has since obtained a certificate in Creative Writing from UCLA Extension, become a finalist for the 2024 Harbor Review Chapbook Editor’s Prize, and is pursuing a bilingual MFA in creative writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University of Los Angeles.
