Migration

October 2023 | poetry

he passed through brackish streets

filled with disintegrated rubble

and dilapidated homes unmoored

from their footings strung together

by sagging electrical lines extinguished

of power and children’s playgrounds

with rusted jungle gyms lonely

and exsanguinated of their frivolous

vigor like some wandering itinerants

living in hollowed shells of their

former selves searching for morsels

of food for his quavering children

who hadn’t eaten since saturday

and even then it was only oily corn

from a rusted tin can salvaged from

an abandoned root cellar at a

devastated farm with poisoned

crops sagging in their furrowed

fields devoid of any identifiable

forms of life not even cut worms

or creeping charlie or redroot

pigweed and just six days removed

from burying their swollen mother

in that ashy soil on the outskirts

of some backwater town on the

shore of some wandering river

populated with unmoored tug

boats and land locked pleasure

vessels long ransacked and devoid

of any human usefulness what

with the rancid water and rotting

fishes peppering the swollen

shoreline like some biblical

plague of epic proportions and

all the while following the circuitous

route of some meandering railroad

line in an unmitigated effort to

to salvage another form of life

in an undiscovered land devoid

of suffering owing to its sheltered

location between two preening

mountain ranges while carefully

evading those roving bands

of demented marauders

 

James Butcher

James has published work in Box, Hole In The Head Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, Cream City Review, Wildroof Journal, and Raw Art Review.

Mark Anthony Burke

October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Learning to Dance

Hooked on the two-four sorcery,

bass and drum, dances at St. Jerome’s,

I held up a wall for half an hour

before I could ask the one

whose eyes turned ice to water,

spun home through the dark

between the streetlamp pools of light.

Lost in a trance for a year,

I woke when the plane

bumped down into Luxembourg.

Lost the first day at the hostel,

I took the train to Zurich,

found an old Tolkien

jammed behind the seat,

carried him all the way to here,

hitch-hiked south and crossed

four days later near Chiasso,

rode a box truck into the Dolomites,

traded my boots for a sweater.

The new owner took me

to his family’s stone house,

steep meadows, barn filled with sheep.

For a week I was a shepherd,

combed pastures with the ewes,

saw why I had to go away.

Like a brother, he brought me

back to the road-fork;

I didn’t want to get out,

flatbeds and Fiats all the way to Venice.

Three days later I started again,

no rides past Solesino, evening falling,

I laid in the grass, read

until the dark took it away,

ate the crushed bread and cheese,

slept in the field.

In the morning I sang Creedence,

waited for kindness

danced on the empty road.

 

Came as Ravens

Cloaks as black as widows

they strut the deck railing,

peer in the windows, leap away,

their shadows stream

across the ferns and rocks.

They come, peck at the doors,

smear saliva on the windows

that dries to a chalky cuneiform.

When I was small, she’d kneel beside me,

coach the story I couldn’t believe.

But last night, kneeling on the kitchen floor

sweeping up pieces of glass,

dust rolled from under the stove

and her voice came into the air.

They glide from tree to tree,

compile their inventories,

drift over the swath of light

I cut in the crowds of hemlock,

a shrine for the lost opened to the sun,

cast the ashes there like seeds.

The winged mourners scavenge

offerings I lay on the boulders,

a lamb abandoned by her ewe,

stiffened hens tired of winter.

I sit on the porch and sift the past,

see her folded hands,

the raised tracks of skin,

burn scars from the bindery’s vinyl-sealer,

listen to their guttural calls,

the clicked code they chant

high in the dead fir by the lake.

 

Mark Anthony Burke

Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal, and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Please see markanthonyburkesongsandpoems.com

Leslie Brown

October 2023 | visual art

leafred

leafred

Leslie Brown

Leslie Brown has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her digital work appeared on the cover of Zoetic Press, “NBR: World Tour,” and Variety Pact Art (Winter 2023/24). She was recently published this summer in Phoebe Literary Journal. For the past three years she has created digital art.  Her photographs are enhanced with editing software. The interaction of the physical photograph with her imagination triggered by the editing applications is displayed in these works.

When Haven’t I

October 2023 | nonfiction

The first human cremains I should have seen? What kind of question is that? I have an answer — my mom’s. I did not see them because when they were done (is that the right way to put it?) I was living 300 miles away. I had them overnighted to her mother, 1,200 miles away. The first human cremains I actually saw were on the east bank of the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Heavy-duty plastic bag, from a distance like sand. But then, label, name, death date, crematorium address. The name was Duka. I thought it was a cremated dog, like a female Duke. I regret this assumption but I volunteer at the dog shelter and they aren’t no-kill, so.

The next morning I returned, re-read the label, saw a surname. A person. Two coins by the bag. Fare for Charon? A straight shot to one of the islands, the afterlife. It’s a wide river.

I searched for an obituary, found none. Do I often search for obituaries? I’m not going to answer that. Saw references to the ethnicity. Nepalese. The city had accepted Nepalese earthquake refugees. They lit funeral pyres on holy rivers, part of the passage to reincarnation. I guessed that waterborne funeral pyres were not allowed in central Pennsylvania. I could picture elderly Nepalese doing the next best thing, ferrying ashes to the river’s edge, just setting them there. And the coins not for Charon, but maybe Lakshmi coins. Wealth.

I went back day after day and crouched by the bag, curious and sad. Who else visited? Is that a question you’re really asking?

I had this question: Why ashes? Cremains look like smashed coral. When have I seen smashed coral? When haven’t I. I kept thinking of the scene in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild where she tastes her mom’s ashes. I could not imagine putting this fine gravel of bone against my lips. I could envision reincarnation, however. Even Charon, I could imagine him.

What happened to the cremains? A flood, rafts of branches pummeled the bank, broke the bag. When the river level dropped to shallow, I could see a white swirl embedded in the mud, like a shred of a shroud. Wouldn’t the flood have taken it all away?

I hate your questions. Why not ask what compelled me to return and look.

 

Jen Hirt

Jen Hirt is the author of the memoir Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees, the essay collection Hear Me Ohio, and the poetry chapbook Too Many Questions About Strawberries. She is the co-editor of two anthologies of creative nonfiction. She is the editor at the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays, and was nominated by Terrain for the John Burroughs Nature Writing Award. She is an associate professor at Penn State Harrisburg. Read more of her work at jenhirt.ink

Dragonfly Puzzle Box

October 2023 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

I.

Honeyed mystery of mahogany,

oak, walnut, teak, Fall’s tawny

offerings sanded into curves,

smooth invitation to touch,

like the sun-warmed thigh

& rising hip of that sunbaked

young woman you once were,

drowsing on a black sand beach

in Santorini, water beading

on your belly.

 

II.

This box hides your secrets:

How did you get from there to here?

What bodies? What lies?

The stolen quarters/kisses,

the unmade bed, the 6 a.m. departure.

What did you know & when?

 

III.

After you’ve been unmade,

can you learn trust like fitting

pieces of different puzzles

together? Remember how

they returned your uterus

to its wet cave after the knife

discharged its shrieking cargo?

 

IV.

How do you birth yourself

into a new name, receive

the gift of it in another’s mouth,

let it melt onto another’s tongue

like Amaro—bitter/sweet & smoky,

let that same tongue undress

your inhibitions, rendering

skin & sinew, splaying bones,

exposing the last hidden chamber?

 

V.

Is it too much—

all this allowing?

How your ribcage’s rusty hinges

once oiled with clamor and hush

swung wider and wider in desire.

 

VI.

Were you too much, wearing

your need like drought?

How he slipped away

in millimeters of silence,

disappearing even as he stood

before you—naked, dripping,

cowed.

 

VII.

Your blind fingers stagger

around the subtle lynchpin.

Had we arrived at the end

of each other? Or could a box

be a road to reunion?

 

VIII.

Relax. Let surrender carve

a door to a new dimension. Step

through. Let his arms curve

around you. Let his elegant hands

reveal what was jigsawed shut:

a lacuna large enough

for hope.

 

Elya Braden

Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA, and is an editor for Gyroscope Review. She is the author of the chapbooks Open The Fist (2020) and The Sight of Invisible Longing, a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Competition (March 2023). Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, Sequestrum, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.