April 2025 | fiction
In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested. “No one has ever finished a round of Eseidra,” wrote Phillip McKenzie in the gaming journal Squaare. “It is nearly as impossible to understand the rules of the game as it is to know when a match has ended. Furthermore, combatants who abandon the game in frustration may not even realize they are continuing, in some manner, to play it.”
Critics contend the game fosters a type of compulsion. Guerra considers this a virtue. “The hallmark of any successful amusement is its ability to elicit obsession,” she has said.
Guerra made her name and fortune with Around the Whirl!, a multi-player dice-and-card game that sold in the tens of thousands worldwide after its release in 1962. Though Around the Whirl! was credited with ushering in an era of so-called “heavy logic” gaming, Guerra eventually disavowed the game, citing not only “the dreary conventionality of its objectives, strategy, and maneuvering,” but also “the abominable illustrations on the board, box, and instruction sheet. It is an ugly game in all respects.”
In interviews, Guerra has often invoked a piece of family lore to explain her interest in games. Following the Sergeants’ Revolt in Cuba in 1933, Guerra’s father was to be executed behind a hotel in Havana for alleged loyalty to Gerardo Machado, when an officer with the assigned firing squad recognized the condemned man as a champion backgammon player. The man offered to play Guerra’s father a single game of backgammon and promised to spare his life if he won. “I credit my existence to a double-six my father rolled in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional,” Guerra has said.
In her early-thirties, following a tumultuous divorce, Guerra began experimenting with board games she called, alternately, “transcendental” and “infinite.” Early efforts yielded games whose rules shifted according to readings of players’ heart rates, games whose “boards” were the given physical environment of the players, and games that included increasingly perilous feats of physical endurance.
In 1985, following an estrangement from two of her four children, Guerra moved to Hibiscus Coast in New Zealand. She denies all requests for interviews and does not respond to letters or phone calls. She publishes an annual “update” in the magazine Straits of the number of Eseidra games active worldwide (last year’s tally was 32), though she offers no explanation for her accounting. In 1986, in what may be read as an act of apostasy or pique or both, she stated that several members of the Lisbon Circle have been playing Eseidra for twenty years now, even if they claim ignorance of the fact. Sembla Intelligencer – March 6, 1988
Ben Guterson
Ben Guterson is the New York Times bestselling author of The World-Famous Nine, a Barnes & Noble Young Reader Pick of the Month, The Einsteins of Vista Point, and the popular Winterhouse trilogy. Winterhouse was an Edgar Award and an Agatha Award finalist, and an Indie Next List Pick. His books have been translated into eleven languages worldwide.
April 2025 | poetry
What nobody tells you about marriage is
It’s blackheads and popping
pustules. It’s watching someone
get old in the shower. Its tweezers
and hair in the drain and knowing
where the scissors are. It’s three
hour long fights about what kind
of litter to buy at the pet store
and knowing you are both responsible
for all those egg shells. Both on the hook
for that $60 parking ticket, no matter
whose fault it was. It’s remembering
the good times, and also getting undressed
down to your worst layers. It’s lying
on the bed in a pile of your own tears
from laughing so hard, and it’s like having
a mirror that follows you around reciting
everything you’ve ever done
wrong. It’s agreeing to destroy someone
else’s life together – your children,
your neighbors’ peace and quiet.
It’s mutually disappointing your parents
by trying to follow your dreams,
and its fruit flies because somebody left
orange peels under the bed, somebody left
tissue paper in the sink, somebody didn’t clean
out the blender again. It’s knowing
what they had for breakfast, demanding
they leave some over, demanding they pick up
bread on the way home, pick up the orange juice,
pick up their goddamn socks from the living room.
It’s asking someone to pass the salt and open
the blinds and hand you that thing off the shelf
and knowing what that thing is.
It’s confessing that you’re still unhappy,
that their love isn’t enough to fix you.
It’s slamming windows, and books and screens.
It’s walking into the other room and slamming
the door shut. It’s knowing there are no working
locks on the door. It’s knowing when you lie
to yourself, somebody will catch you
like a net catches a trapeze artist
or a fish that’s wriggling in the sea.
What I did while waiting to become famous on instagram
I worked in a daycare.
I took the names of the tired mothers,
the hurried fathers. I gathered
emergency contacts, checked
for allergies, for ear infections, for anything I should know.
With the older kids, I recapped
the markers, folded
paper into airplanes, pulled
Barbie’s decapitated head
out of the toilet every day
after lunch. I helped
fill the bottles. Helped
handle the diapers. Helped
empty the waste baskets, rerolled
the toilet paper.
Between shifts I made appointments
for my ailing parents, made calls
to my sister to ask
how her invitro was going,
if there was anything I could bring.
I made $10/hour. Paid
my taxes. For a whole year I gave up
eating peanut butter because of other people’s allergies.
For 9 months I lifted someone else’s baby
to my milkless breast
and tended to the future,
with its immediate, anonymous needs.
Tresha Faye Haefner
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize and three Pushcart nominations. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear,” was a finalist for prizes from Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. Find out more on her Substack at thepoetrysalonstack.substack.com.
April 2025 | poetry
Slum Archangel
The velocity of her fall must have
been excruciating / blackout-inducing.
Tracing the arc of the angel’s nosedive:
deadlift-dropped like Heaven metal and sparking
all the way down, uranium-heavy,
she would have cleaved the evening sky in two.
Then, molten from friction, crawling beyond
her crater, bones reform before moonrise.
A new wingspan flares. Her raw material:
lightning voltage, forest fires, charcoal.
Blue from down here looks so much darker…
There is no angel that can be touched
who isn’t remade in the diamond-crushing
gravity of hurtling earthside.
Quite an experience to crash on the world
as if through stained glass, to collapse into time:
serration is the sky we are fated
to drop through to understand how grace works.
I guess we must be sliced apart to reveal
the cold metallic core of grace within
and then feel its trembling pour down skin.
But I’m not so sure about its value.
Grace’s slow attainment looks like bleeding
just to make the claim you didn’t drown beneath
the bleed. Unseemly to think devastation
is our only flight path towards perfection.
Hauled down at night like a burning Lockheed,
every angel is born to land hard.
Abjex
Twist away the gates of steel
Unlock the secret voice
Give in to ancient noise
Take a chance on a brand new dance
Twist away, now twist and shout…
—Devo, “Gates of Steel”
The rogue’s gallery: two tattoo artists,
two bartenders, and me. This band was a
nosebleed miracle. All my amplifiers
died in separate fires (too much voltage). At
showtime we exploded like landmine shrapnel.
There were some real bruisers in that unit,
dressed like Hell. Bullet belts, engineer boots,
burned leather, unending appetites
for damage. Harrison swallowed a lit
cigarette as a party trick. Allie had
angel language on her face. Bad Wes
coughed and bled blackly under a moon that held
still like a sharpshooter. Josh had this strange
magnetic animal charm practically
sewn into the skin-side of his life.
I just bore witness, wrapped in my battle
jacket and doing my best to keep up.
An audience member spit on Allie
one time so she broke his nose. If any
member of the gang yelled “Go!” it was all hell:
we’re throwing hockey punches ’til it’s lights out.
We kissed goodbye with our hands taped. The band’s life
burned at the speed of head trauma. This is
how I learned to pounce on the world boots-first.
Zack Carson
Zack Carson is a poet and musician from Asheville, NC. He is pursuing an MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has been (or will be) published in The Shore, Soundings East, All Existing, and Inscape, among other places.
April 2025 | poetry
Books
There are too many.
They should be pulped.
They should be pulped to make useful things.
Cardboard coffins, for instance.
I’d like to be buried in unread copies of Moby Dick.
Old Photographs
I don’t like old photographs.
Old photographs are cruel.
Old photographs are sadistic.
They enjoy inflicting pain.
Here is the perfect example on
the windowsill in front of me.
Look at the smile on my young
wife’s face. And on my little
daughter’s face, look at the laugh.
J.R. Solonche
Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and the co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
April 2025 | poetry
I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability. Smoke, ice, ancestral fingerprints. Around this cold evidence, planets painted by a noble hand, lanterning the shade. Directing our eyes from a soiled hunger. Spaces of light relief, to birth screamless. The glass has been cold for decades. My lips pressed to its green imaginings, already misted before any invasion. The plants grow as a daughter’s hair — beyond common death. On good twilights, vines reach the height of a lover’s climax. I see my mother’s tresses waterfallen at her hips, before pooling, unassisted. The last recorded summer came thick & flooded. He reminded me of thawing glaciers. Blue china shaken on the mantle of a faultline. After the tremors, I washed my own hair immemorial, asking what could still float above eye-level. The small fish paying for my debts with their silver? The pink coral pleasuring in the absence of flesh? I’d backstroke through our burnished climate. Let the tailwinds shed his possessions over me again. Our bodies glowing in oil & salt. He, a good man for tending reflections. For oversleeping the season with. His hands electing fine rain, cradling the era’s bouquets over my belly.
Vikki C.
Vikki C. is a British-born writer, musician, and author of two poetry collections, including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Her writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature and has appeared in over 70 publications across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. Recent venues include The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Grain Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sweet Literary, Cable Street, Feral: A Journal Of Poetry And Art, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, and Ice Floe Press, among others. Vikki was named a winner of the Black Bough Poetry 2024 Poetry Manuscript Contest and was shortlisted in the DarkWinter 2nd Anniversary Contest, judged by Kim Fahner. Her writing and voice have been featured in various podcasts and audio collaborations, which showcase her music and spoken-word craft.
