Sylvie Oleta

October 2026 | poetry

Terminus Rotgut

I have the recording scratched bloody as a red record groove into my body, the totality of my body, a needle sending resonant, flowing memory through every vein, cut in rows, scratched, recorded and played, scratched recorded and played, the blood running in and through, drawn back by the writhing mass at my center, the organless weight of consumption, antithetical to being, antithetical to anything but driving the needle, driving the etching and scratching and playing, tasting whiskey and blood and piss and vomit in a kiddie pool of off-color sick-like salmon drool, driven by that corporealizing phantasm of my muffled grunts and his labored breathing, his piston machine desire flowing not through but into, driving like a nail laying track for an express destined to run indefinite, always in, deeper into the dynamite blown cavity of my cervix, over the precipice, into the train graveyard, the organless weighted writhing mass, crashing, compounding, a pear of agony wrought from tortured shrapnel…

Sylvie Oleta

Sylvie Oleta is a poet and fiddler residing in Charlottesville, Virginia. She once fell off a cliff while hunting for the wreckage of a B-25 Mitchell and is now forever grateful for conveniently placed trees.

Merie Kirby

October 2026 | poetry

I am not the housewife of perfection

Saturated with gin and academic takes on subjectivity

I sit surrounded by summer sunflowers and the cosmos

I sowed beside the patio and wonder how to continue

in a body, in a world, that does not think it needs

this body, even as the planet turns, taking along

me, my dog, our companionable silence in waning sunlight.

I should sweep the patio, exile the effluvia of trees

and plants that fell here, tidy up the crumbs

beside the woodpile. I am not the housekeeper

of the backyard. I am not the housewife of perfection.

I reject the broom, the whisk, the great dustpan of time.

Shriveled flowers of linden, yellow leaves of elm,

curls of outer bark, here you may linger. Rest

beside the cricket, ready to serenade the diminishing

sun and warmth, the ants following the highway of sand

between the pavers, and the shucked body that was bee.

Cricket, genius of late summer, dutifully stridulating your wings,

this tune insists on the lowering of stage lights,

the show ending earlier each day, and a pause,

as if for applause, to gauge the audience’s investment.

The dog sits at attention, but his ears are tuned

to other sounds, his eyes on the street, watching children run home.

Merie Kirby

Merie Kirby teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems, and has been published in several journals, including Whale Road Review, SWWIM, West Trestle Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, with work forthcoming in The Prose Poem and Scientific American. You can find her online at www.meriekirby.com.