October 2023 | poetry
My life is obsession without passion,
compulsion without end,
disorder without rhyme or reason.
A chemical maelstrom dragging
my free will into the crushing ink-black of hopelessness.
Hands bleed in perpetual cleanliness next to no god.
Grey matter overclocked,
overflowing with thoughts
too numerous to comprehend, too chaotic to control.
But control is what I seek,
bleak as that pipedream may seem,
I must fight to walk
without retracing my superfluous daily routine.
I am a blind hummingbird flitting
around the same depleted flower;
I linger around the same moment
too disabled to press on.
I’m nothing if not consistent;
consistency is my curse and my savior,
but a savior I wish would abandon and forsake me.
Mine is a life defined by tepid perfection
in an imperfect mind.
I dwell in every moment…
and yet…
Joseph Vickery
Joseph Vickery recently graduated from Oregon State University where he majored in creative writing. He is currently working on his MFA in writing at Lindenwood University. He has lived all over Tennessee but currently resides in Nashville. His work has been featured in The Phoenix.
October 2023 | poetry
My father hated coyotes, implicated them
in every “missing pet” poster we passed. I didn’t understand,
not really, until they took my dog. They must have been
just beyond the fence, eyes glittering an amber light, like yellow flames
in the dimness, yipping, jumping, speaking
a language my dog knew once, but had forgotten.
Like seeing himself in a river: they the bright, sharp jasper and he,
these centuries departed, the smooth river stone.
They led him out into the neighbor’s orchard, where he found himself
trapped, those yellow flames rising, climbing the walls,
he was trapped in his becoming, all those eyes of pyrite
turning in their sockets with each snap, each severance.
Come morning I found the pieces of him, bones
littered around, broken open
like glass bottles they drank the liquor from,
the tufts of fur like flocks of fallen birds, and all of it
gone so cold in its stillness, I’d consider it a painting:
the Goya in the pale hair, the dirt, the vermilion
of Saturn’s Devouring. I hated them for it,
for years, but why shouldn’t they
feed their hunger in the ways they can, have the thing
that climbs into their mouths? Why shouldn’t they,
voracious jewels of stone or glass or fool’s gold,
glitter like they do?
Cami DuMay
Cami DuMay is an undergraduate at UC Davis, pursuing a degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing. She has won two first-place awards and one second-place award for her writing at the university, and her work has appeared in Equatorial Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and by the Moonstone Arts Center. She writes about myriad aspects of life, from intimacy and trauma to nature and insects, but has a particular fascination with the intersection of the natural world and secular worship.
October 2023 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
We drank Tang, just like the astronauts,
but stopped short of breakfasting
on freeze-dried eggs. Saturdays,
Dad melted Crisco in the fryer,
dropped little meteors of batter
into the bubbles, served up fritters
with real maple syrup. Sixties kids
had it made in the shade— all-day freedom
on banana-seat bikes, Oscar Meyer
bologna sandwiches eaten on the fly,
Nestle’s chocolate chips folded
into Toll House cookie dough by Mom,
a June Cleaver clone except that she wore
capris instead of a dress, and hair statuesque
in an eight-inch beehive. Her Max Factor lipstick—
Electric Pink— always freshly applied,
the house swept, dusted, and promptly at 6,
martini’d. The family’s crisp white edges
began to curl at cocktail hour, threatened to tear
at dinner, the effort of kindness simply
too burdensome for our mission commander to bear.
As the Green Giant canned peas were passed
and the potato-chipped tuna noodle casserole
spooned out, one wrong word, an errant opinion,
an ill-timed sigh— and all planets ceased
rotation around the sun. I sat farthest away,
little brother too close. Little elbows on the table…
a big man can be a fast man. A spoon a weapon.
A woman, powerless. A moon child escapes
in her mind-made spaceship— rocketing away
to the lunar maria, their vast darkness
so perfect for hiding.
Ann Weil
Ann Weil is a past contributor to Burningword Literary Journal. Her most recent work appears in Maudlin House, Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, 3Elements Review, The Shore, and New World Writing Quarterly. Her chapbook, Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman, debuted in April 2023 from Yellow Arrow Publishing. To read more of her poetry and flash fiction, visit www.annweilpoetry.com.
October 2023 | poetry
In the crisp death of summer, a cat
falls from a broken branch.
The moon sings, amused by paw
half-crushed under the stares of a passing car.
Vacant children drive purposely
through the blaze-maze of gilded cul-de-sacs
scattered with condoms and crushed fireball nips,
numb to clouds adulting overhead.
Outside the bar a couple try to kiss for the first time.
On the fire escape, some woman hums anxiously sweeping.
Waiting, I stare into my scotch
as the glow from an RCA television
and smells of ammonia suffocate the pub.
Above the bar, the moon reflects a rooftop coop.
The pigeon sits upright in its wired grave, cooing
as a priest doubles over.
Ed Gaudet
Ed Gaudet is a writer who lives in Hanover, Massachusetts, where he is a cybersecurity software entrepreneur in healthcare. He has written for Forbes Magazine. His journey with poetry began at an early age and grew during university where he studied under poet Ruth Lepson and was greatly influenced by Robert Creeley. While attending Bentley University, he was the Editor-in-Chief of its literary magazine, Piecework. In 1999, Ed was awarded the grand prize for his poem, “Sitting Shiva,” which appeared in Into the Sun. His work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Panoply, Clade Song, and Book of Matches, Lit.
October 2023 | poetry
Back there, someone crowned me.
Yes, me! — Where do you think
I got these carnations?
I’d like to unclaim candidacy,
but there’s already a Klimtish woman
threading my hands with rings while
someone calls for shin ribbons.
A man cradling five pincushions
coaxes my sclerae to bloom.
I enter on a bridge of hands.
Dozens, it seems, press my midriff,
and thumb my hair.
What’s this? Only halfway
to the stage, and they’re dragging
dimes from my curls. Too much
tugging, clinking,
I feel myself kick —
When I find my way home,
you’ll have many questions, like:
Out so late? Tea, my love?
Darling, where are your shoes?
I’ll promise to explain later,
complain of a headache —
could be the cold, or the hour,
or maybe the wind,
rattling the coin slot
wedged between my eyes.
Christianne Goodwin
Christianne’s chapbook “Oracle Smoke Machine”, a collaboration with painter Stephen Proski, is forthcoming with Staircase Books (Cambridge, MA). Her work has been published by Rust + Moth, The Lakeshore Review, Fahmidan Journal, and Panel Magazine. She is a graduate of the Boston University MFA program, the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow.
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.
