April 2025 | poetry
The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of
brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy
tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep,
that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow
scarce? But there’s comforting memory as
well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a wet but
soothing thaw after sledding outside for hours.
Childhood leaves its imprints, remote and often
faded, only to swell at incongruous moments
like now, here in the late afternoon warmth, as
hundreds of seagulls circle above this lagoon,
white specks in the distance shimmering with
light against the western face of Tamalpais,
from the Miwok támal pájis, “coast mountain,”
an approximate translation they say. I was once
a mountain girl, but not this kind; no ocean
near, frozen ground for months, and snow swirling
as white shapes in wind like these gulls I could
write, if I wanted simile today but I don’t. I just
want these gulls as gulls, rising and circling,
circling and soaring, and I want the pull of
the tide in and then out . . . waves of ache tangled
with rapture; this poem a rough decoding of
the fugitive sway.
Virginia Barrett
Virginia Barrett is a poet, writer, artist, editor, and educator. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco, where she was the poetry editor for Switchback. Her six books of poetry include Between Looking and Crossing Haight—San Francisco poems. She is also the editor of four poetry anthologies, including RED: a Hue Are You anthology.
April 2025 | poetry
House and Universe
The single-story house’s flat roof would have been a wondersoaked site to lie and study clearsky starscape, but I remember flatness without below, without above.
And I remember, rather than imagine, how bruiseblue regimen of the old, lost house trapped us within, but memory occludes the dateless daydreams Julie and I lived in defiance of a realm where words portray amniotic vastness as nature’s hostile overflows, where the trailer is a fortress against the enemy’s attack when snowstorm unleashes its bestiary of windrage and menace.
And after such a snowstorm, wakedreams defy bruiseblue sleepdreams, defy the baretoothed violence within original house, where fondness for blueprint, plumbline, and spirit level’s bubble traffics in handshake regimens, where the magnetism between earthrooted home and skyclad world is unreal—
defy fistclench threat to weather’s together and animal pleasure in sanctuary.
And after such a snowstorm, real cropfield borders Northgate Estates, and further off, Deertrails beneath a skeletal forest canopy.
Silence is the orchestra of vastness. Snowtufts crash down from branches of Paper Birch and Balsam Fir. Footsteps thunder through milky surface of snow.
The sonority of silence, when snowfall blankets landscape in acoustic intimacy of armchair tucked into a corner.
Inside the skeletal forest beyond the cropfield, the crumbling shack would be hearthfire’s sanctuary.
More than original house in a realm of planes, envisioned home will dare to conjure universe.
Julie sees the toppled chimney alive with lorestitched duty when forest cottage shouldered into winter stormgusts at nightfall.
Clapboards and roofshingles merged with fractal surround of weather and forest, sheltered the merchant from his worry about the westfacing window that sutured inside and outside. He was expounding how to profit, what to do to get what you want from life, expounding the actuarial warmth of risks that sell well, while the snapping fireplace shyly melted the underlayer of snow that covered the forest cottage and windfingers smoothed the rooftop’s colding winter stuff into an icy cocoon.
Hope’s dormant rootstock of Sharpshinned Hawk’s nest anchored to cottage chimney, Coyote pawprints in snow, the chrysalis within transcends the regimen of blueprint, plumbline, and spirit level’s bubble.
The creature inside his cottage cocoon lost his habit of handshake logics, lumbered free to wander beyond planescapes, to wander below, wander above, and found himself endowed with a taste for nectar.
As seedcoat, cocoon, and clapboard cottage are inner sanctums of cotyledon, chrysalis, hearthcrackle, Julie and I lived our daydreams of home when winter snowplush blindingbrightly blankets cropfields and silence is the orchestra of vastness.
And winter-ready animals, we plunge into snowdeep and dig through the strange bright soil with our hands. More than danger of frostbite we feel the freedom to dream without regime. We claw a tunnel network beneath snowdrifts.
On all fours we crawl from one lair whose walls and ceiling we firm round with mittened paws to another lair we shaped from the inside. In our bright cave shelter from colder winds, we huddle in warmth created from fistclench, baretoothed givens.
I should like my house today to be as warm as our childhood sanctuaries of snow.
And lonely work, no profit, no blueprint, plumbline, nor spirit level’s bubble, to restore a faucet handle’s luster, to liberate the sutra of woodgrain from a coat of ash, to clear cobwebs from corner that augurs room that augurs home that augurs the silence of vastness, amniotic below, amniotic above, cotyledon, chrysalis, hearthcrackle sheltered within their sanctuaries.
The Dialectics of Outside and Inside
Thresholds write our memoirs, the doorways we cross,
the doorways we close, and all the doors we pass
without conviction. Someone in charge conscripts
doorkeepers who believe the them they exclude
is not coextensive with the sooth of us.
When windowpane adjudicates the edge
of outdoor and indoor, the unstinting space of Moonlight’s
halo enlarges the inward of lamplight soothe.
October via Largo Argentina,
with its Temple to Feronia and feline
sanctuary, I mutted around the streets
of Rome. En route to Piazza dell’Orologio,
I strayed past Pasquino and scavenged his adjectives.
Lunacy should be at home in poetry,
but few admit their Saturday morning nonsense,
sister and brother together building tents
with blankets spread among the living room furniture,
they daydream renunciation beneath Moon’s light
alongside sibling Birch and Balsam Fir.
I found myself caught in crossfire between Pasquino
and Censor Marforio, two talking statues of Rome.
Marforio twitters, moonshine is just a ploy
to famish craving to tame. The places from which
we are gated help us be the us we are.
Pasquino answers, music’s largo movement
melts geometry’s artificial membrane
between a circle’s inner and polyglot outer.
Marforio twitters, margins close the purebred
in and shut the mongrel out. Pasquino
answers, mongrel blood is multiply pedigreed.
Moonshine scandalizes stingy geometries.
The wilderness of retreat within oneself,
feral chamber inside chamber inside,
boundaryless within of spira mirabilis,
refutes Marforio’s artificial paradise,
the origin myth of inside and outside, partitions,
and other lazy certainties. The reach
of unstinting outside is coextensive with one’s
own inside. I knelt in narrow spaces
below Witch Hazel and Sumac, narrow spaces
amid Eryngium and Echinops. The more inwardly
I mutted, the further music’s largo wandered.
Marforio’s functionaries refused to stamp
a crane’s foot upon my diploma because I noticed
how the Mezzaluna garden’s honeyvoice
coursed through outermost branches of beinghere,
flowed through the stairwell’s silence from cellar to attic,
the forest’s silence after snowfall, the silence
that amplifies Panicum’s whisper and the press
of feline paws on ancient Roman rubble.
Wonderless horse’s mane emits no flame.
Marforio’s henchman only validate
the facts that shall toggle yes or toggle no.
In binary notation, lawful coordinates
may register unit one or unit zero.
Wonderless time is no longer just a Yewtree.
Rather than conform to henchman protocols,
blueprint, plumbline, spirit level’s bubble,
rather than toggle yes or toggle no,
when readers voice a poet’s exaggerations
as their own unforeseeable creations, they
enlarge the poem’s more than real halo.
James Bradley Wells
James Bradley Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Main Street Rag, New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Wells has written two poetry translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: A Translation of Pindar’s Songs for Athletes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
April 2025 | poetry
A group of college students takes a stroll the morning after September 11th
The stripling season’s light – timeless but tirelessly untrue.
No matter – bright is that penultimate geometry felt round
a sensible world,
To which the goosefleshed credence of morning itself empurples
kindly waters in their wane.
A bargain of cold Providence and older daylight is terribly plenty:
Returning morning’s umbrage and forethought, warm,
to this place preluded not by myth, but color;
If it cannot be told why the elm trees shed themselves
before this year’s almanacs had,
Deepening their orange preludes
above the surface of the reflecting pond,
To which Boston Common’s swans swam headway
over the floating flotsam of.
Those human sentimentalists squat closely off the shore
And toss with penny-pinching gestures of charity –
Johnnycakes, cereal and barley grain, water biscuits –
To Boston Common’s feeding pool,
Feeding the swans, famining to and fro.
And we circled around the unassuming pond, thrice feeding
The swans into the hour of our unassuming business.
The birds circumscribing a world round
their unagonized selves. We wondered
Nevertheless when we shall separate this little meaning from
the heart of our own matters.
Down Boylston Street, one ordered toast and aperitifs. Another said,
“Tomorrow we will glad let our Cultures of Credence pass, feeding
the birds, though only they remain.”
This is all one nation’s unconscious knows:
What sad Sophocles to Churchill found,
having heartened from history to hearth.
This is all two millennia’s unconscious has learned:
Here and there looking on at cold huddles of the swans,
Feeding the devoutest progress of the birds.
Maxwell Tang
Maxwell Tang is a young writer whose work pays homage to the crux of being human.
April 2025 | poetry
Postcards from the Knife-Thrower
May 15 Vallejo, CA
Magdalena said, let’s forget we’re strangers
Let’s talk about ragged breath
gasps for air
Let’s talk about binding hands
Let’s talk about pleasure too deep to describe
Let’s talk about exquisite freedom of release
Let’s talk about communion when pleasure collides with pain
Let’s talk about creating a world, our own wide-awake-make-believe-reality
Let’s talk about flushed lips
Let’s talk about blindfolds
black/white/red/silk/satin/cotton
Let’s talk about a hand on throat
fingers in pussy
Let’s talk about nails digging into skin
Let’s talk about pulsing sweat and bodies
pressed tight against the wall
Let’s talk about us
I bet you’re in love with me now.
Postcards from the Knife-Thrower
May 16 Napa, CA
I grew up in a dark desperate sexy messy beautiful world, a Turin shroud
of pain. Lazy blues from an AM radio, a songless bird, dreamt of in winter;
an Indian (Native American/Indigenous) fable, a story with no moral, no ending.
Under a cloud-rimmed sky I picked at a hole in my shoe, hair home-sheared,
neck blood-red from cold and shame.
Train whistles came first, then the clack-clickety-clack of taconite running south;
a foreign language, the sounds familiar. Another unhappily-ever-after
punctuated in fists.
You were about thirteen, strawberry blonde straightedge smile, neon wide
lovely eyes; the world we conjured was precarious.
We were preached to, prayed on, and ready for iniquity but never all alone
in Gethsemane.
Woke this morning wanting you. A burning stifling need.
I miss the rhythm and cadence of you, the flash of light when you speak,
want to write your voice but have forgotten the sound of the ocean;
sharpen my knives in preparation for another make-believe battle.
Alex Stolis
Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has published poems in numerous journals. Two full-length collections, Pop. 1280 and John Berryman Died Here, were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal, Beatnik Cowboy, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press in 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres by Bottlecap Press in 2024.
April 2025 | poetry
Going Strong
At eighty-one and seventy-eight, Mom and Dad
are still going strong. Halfway between twelve and thirteen,
Chance, our Beagle, is still going strong. Civilization,
at roughly seven-thousand years old, is still going strong.
In my dreams an asteroid is due to collide with America;
I announce, like a bored clerk at the DMV, that it’s four-thirty
and the sun is still going strong. Morning hits me like a slap in the face.
On the TV, a reporter predicts nationwide winter storms, snow and ice
and rain making travel treacherous. Stranded or delayed, our plans
are unchanged, for despite the carnage, the rubble, and the brutal cold,
life on Earth is going strong.
It Happened Here
In countless town squares, certain statues whose
antebellum lips have long been pursed in stone,
begin to smirk; still others, squirreled away in shame
to some macabre museum or mansion, seem to glow
in anticipation of the crane that will restore them
to their glory. Language too is being restored: disfavored
words, excised from public use, are forced into hiding;
mountains and bodies of water are renamed,
as though recently widowed; the gap between what
is said and what is meant is widened, until grammar
itself becomes incoherent; the sacred is made to be
profane and the profane is given sanction.
I observe a corpulent crow devour an Eagle, then
carry off its talons like a trophy. Covered in blood,
it lands in my yard and, briefly sated, preens its feathers
like a tyrant ironing his suit after a rape and pillage.
In my terror, I seem to hear him singing anthems,
making oaths, while all around his murder awaits
instruction. And throughout the land, the people,
knowing what they know about birds of prey,
having erected scarecrows and noise guns and
glimmering fences, stare in awe at the mutilated
livestock, the crops picked clean, as though
such violence couldn’t possibly visit them here.
Andy Posner
Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. His poetry has been published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem ‘The Machinery of the State’ for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Esthetic Apostle.
April 2025 | poetry
In your kitchen, we find three long deep shelves filled
with dozens of jars of dill pickles, and in your
freezer a half dozen bricks of weed wrapped in cling
wrap and tied with string.
I think of standing next to you at that counter, a bowl
of flour and butter in front of us as you tried
vainly to show me how you make perfect pie crust
every time. You were also beside me in
my kitchen, both of us stoned and silly long before
it was legal, you grinning as I explained
my theory about BLTs as we made bread, mayo
and bacon sandwiches.
In your bathroom, I reach for your toothbrush and
can’t touch it, because I see you holding
the headshots a director had asked you to get and
murmur sadly “I’m all teeth…”
bemoaning your own wide bright smile. I leave
the toothbrush on the counter and go out
to your desk, where I find and begin packing your
journals, stopping once in a while to
read the entries you wrote as letters to me, and one
you wrote to your old friend, telling her
that I was “the one who always took care” of you.
I think how the letters to me were rehearsals
for calls to me you actually made, delivering to me
your rehearsed lines and monologues, and I
wish the lines about taking care had been rehearsed
for me instead of for her, giving me the cue
to speak the lines I should have, the lines that would
have been taking care of you, even if I’d
only been able to deliver them
in a stage whisper…
don’t go back don’t go back
don’t go back
to him
Judith Mikesch McKenzie
Judith Mikesch-McKenzie is a teacher, writer, actor, and producer living in the Pacific Northwest. She has traveled widely but is always drawn to the Rocky Mountains as one place that feeds her soul. Writing is her home. She has recently placed/published in two short-story contests, and her poems have been published or are upcoming in Calyx, Her Words, Plainsongs Magazine, Cirque, Wild Roof Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, and over 40 others. She is a wee bit of an Irish curmudgeon, but her friends seem to like that about her.
