To All the Fool Wishes

October 2021 | poetry

Entire environs have become

transmitters of an over-personified manifestation

twisting through the Multidimensional Ether

like counterclockwise wisteria sprouting

from the lungs of ashen children.

It’s the inevitable scorch.

The painful kiss.

The curiosity that intellectualized the cat

before killing it.

Mouths turn the shape of cheerios

and stare at the sky, awestricken,

observing an event

equivalent to some

vague description

from a biblical passage.

Heath Brougher

Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press as well as poetry editor for Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee and received the 2018 Poet of the Year Award from Taj Mahal Review. He also received the 2020 Wakefield Prize for Poetry. He has published eleven books and, after two years of editing the work of others, is ready to get back into the creative driver seat. His book “Where Hammers Dwell” will be published later in 2021.

Featured Author: SM Stubbs

October 2021 | poetry

In the Aftermath

Each body broken, violet wounds, ash,

bullets like fireflies, dozens of caskets

weighted with clay unmade by misplaced rage.

Mourning continues as a vacant ache,

an absence heavier than upturned dirt

while the body’s a miracle of dust

and lightning. Yes, I would like to be scorched

under the umbrella of you tonight,

can’t wait to burn with the mercy of your

fevered kisses. Please reduce me to soot.

Please use me to mark the doltish faces

of those who would deny we are dying

or show me how I can twist grief’s thick neck

into a shield I carry through the world.

Downstream

Everything good happens in another town.

They’ve got better schools, better teams,

better-looking beauties at whom to stare.

What did those people do to earn

such bounty? At night tears swarm

your cheeks, escape shapes your dreams.

In a field between here & there kids get wasted

on cheap beer and whip-its while snow

complicates someone’s climb up the tower.

They fall & die. You cut off your hair, master

your misery and start to wonder

about other towns with fresher meadows,

how much money you have hidden in the drawer,

how long you can survive on air and straw.

SM Stubbs

SM Stubbs until very recently co-owned a bar in Brooklyn. Recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf, he has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets. Winner of the 2019 Rose Warner Poetry Prize from The Freshwater Review and runner-up in several others. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Normal School, Puerto del Sol, Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, December, The Rumpus, among others.

why I don’t sing in public

October 2021 | poetry

Tiffany & Annie & me are playing on the swings.

they’re singing a Taylor Swift song I don’t know yet,

and so I wait two verses before joining in,

think I can try the chorus the second time around,

but then, it’s just me, voice quavering, me and

all these words I don’t know,

two girls silently staring at me:

stop acting like you know the notes.

Tiffany comes back from vacation

with one lollipop for Annie.

Tiffany plucks my hair at lunch

and asks why I got split ends.

Tiffany says I have to walk behind them

so we can be a triangle.

no one knows loneliness like a 7-year-old girl.

I saw her once, last year, draped on the arm of a friend

of a friend. drenched in holiday party sparkle,

a little red blister of a person.

she giggles as she tells her date:

oh, we used to kind of bully Juliana.

I don’t sing in public, but god, I wish I did then,

slung my fat tongue over her stupid little hoops

until it made a shiny pink welt on her eardrums.

yodeled until a chandelier fell on her head.

funny how new wounds sound like old wounds.

I wish I sang then,

but what I was scared of was this:

I open my mouth, and nothing comes out

but two giggles, two sets of rolling eyes,

one single searching note

wandering quietly into the rafters.

Juliana Chang

Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American poet. She is the 2019 recipient of the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, the 2017 recipient of the Wiley Birkhofer Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medalist in Poetry. She received a BA in Linguistics and a MA in Sociology from Stanford University in 2019. Her debut chapbook INHERITANCE was the winner of the 2020 Vella Contest and published with Paper Nautilus Press in 2021.

Apologia for the Undeniable

October 2021 | poetry

Baby, baby, baby, light my way. In Anno Domini 1991, that lyric

was universally liked. Liked like butter is liked. And what’s the deal

with spider eyes anyway? And why is it considered weird to go to the zoo

by yourself? None of these things seem contradictory. Or an appropriation.

Or approximate. Or anti-anything. Sweet multiplicity. Sweet butter and honey.

Todd Copeland

Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, California Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, Christianity & Literature, and Sugar House Review, and his essays have been published in Literary Imagination, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and Media, War & Conflict, among other publications. A native of Ohio, he lives in Waco, Texas.