Comedown in a Club Bathroom

January 2025 | poetry

The boy’s feet are bound to the floor, body held before a mirror.

Cold lake, the glass spinning his near-naked body into fable, or cautionary

tale. How, how it sings back. Diamond-toothed doppelgänger.

The chambered hallways of his heart bisected, something like

a cathedral spire piercing through, thorny fingered; the enemy,

caught in his eye’s lazy gleam. The fluorescents whining overhead.

There is far too much skin to shed; it’s fastidious in its hold of him.

He doesn’t have the years required to unbind himself, to know what’s real;

can you blame him for mistaking a stranger’s touch for kindness?

Seismic: the hand clasping his wrist, roughing his chest, over his mouth.

He might never sleep again. Lips dry, eyes swallowing light. Every sound

scratching flesh. He doesn’t hear the night mother calling from beyond

the black-out curtains. When it rains, it pours his hot guts onto the black

and white tile. Germinates the future with his certainty that he will never

feel this way again. Even now: in the back of his skull,

a parable unraveling. An old preacher’s words like whiplash, hot sting

of bare thigh against the pew’s modest wood. Should he have known

how the past can come squirming up through a stomach, worms

up through mud during a storm? The living do their best not to drown here.

When did the dark grow talons so fine? He shudders, cold sweat.

Tired boy. Sick boy. Boy with a body of wet-dark tombs.

Cold mirror and his cold face staring out from the glass.

Glass defaced with crude sharpie sketches, a cock ejaculating across canvas.

A phone number. A name. The future, again and again.

His limbs fall one by one like autumn. His limbs are not his own anymore.

The high keeps coming, just as he was told. High beams

severing shadow in two. Everyone gets a piece when he gets this way.

He hopes you’ll stay.

Daniel Brennan

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. Sometimes he’s in love, just as often he’s not. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net, and has appeared in numerous publications, including The Penn Review, Sho Poetry Journal, and Trampset. He can be found on Twitter @DanielJBrennan_

Chronoscope 262: March like thaw water

January 2025 | poetry

Sun again:

that geode cold light

that briefly splits the granite sky:

storms there: storms there:

darker because of this

temporary brightness.

The first shadows in a week

like inkfade ancient tattoos

impermanent crease crosshatched

on the last of the blue wash snow.

And the red and cream lilies

you stem snapped two days ago

despite again March like thaw water

still pollen fill the living room

with the smell of blossoming

which for them is the smell

of fade dying:

but not yet:

but not today.

John Walser

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize, and the Zone 3 Press Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart, and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.

Airport Prayer

January 2025 | poetry

If I count the times I cried today,

I would need more than two hands—

an 81 year old passes through security

and tells me her mother just stopped driving

yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter

hands me my coffee and says Here, baby;

and when we are lining up at the gate by letter

and number and I don’t know where to go,

a woman tells me conspiratorially that I should

just go behind her. Sometimes life feels conspiratorial.

Like we are conspiring to help each other despite the noise.

How can I explain why I am crying for the glassy-eyed

dog being carried in a tote? For the little boy being led

bleary-eyed to catch a plane I pray will land safely?

I don’t want to be a part of this world, but I can’t stop

negotiating with time, with flesh, audience to myself,

spectator to my own body. I couldn’t bear to be called

baby every day and poured a cup of something hot.

I think it would break me. I can’t bear to be be born

again into the kindness of each and every moment.

I want to believe we are not witless, just wingless,

trying to soar above the wreckage we have made.

That tears are never wasted. Is it foolish to pray

for something you know already exists?

For something that is everywhere?

Esther Sadoff

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She has three forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Silence (Kelsay Books). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.