October 2024 | poetry
Alice Chu lives in Chongqing
and she attends classes online
loves hotpots and her friends
never submits work on time
can’t follow essay instructions
but she speaks perfect English
and writes crystalline sentences
a potential poet or a novelist
but her father has other plans
One day Alice logs into class
splotchy bruises on her arms
a heavy cast around her ankle
every part of her looks broken
but Alice Chu is still smiling
her dad shoved down the stairs
for a C plus grade on her essay
Who do you call when the
abused live on other continents?
and what’s there to be done
about never-returned messages?
and how do you tell parents
your child’s not doctor material?
and how do you lift someone
when you can only reach so far?
Alice—this dreamy teenager
not quite ready for university
a poetic giant, ready to awaken
with more guidance and patience
her father demands perfection
but Alice Chu’s already perfect
Brendan Praniewicz
Brendan Praniewicz earned his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State in 2007 and has subsequently taught creative writing at San Diego colleges. He has had poetry published in From Whispers to Roars, Tiny Seed Journal, That Literary Review, and The Dallas Review. In addition, he received second place in a first-chapters competition in the Seven Hills Review Chapter Competition in 2019. He won first place in The Rilla Askew Short Fiction Contest in 2020. He was a Pushcart Nominee for poetry in 2023.
October 2024 | poetry
Post Break-up Souvenir Shopping, Naples
No to the limoncello, liquid sunshine in hand-painted glass bottles.
No to the porcelain-handled pizza cutters poised to slice a pie.
Nope to the floral-print tablecloth/napkin sets, nope to Deruta pottery blue-rimmed with lemons.
No to the prayer candles, neither Madonna and Child nor Madonna Ciccone.
No to the mother-of-pearl music boxes tinkling That’s Amore.
No to a Sexy Priests 12-month calendar— but Father August is devilishly hot!
Nope to Quentin Tarantino prayer candles— enough already.
No to Mount Vesuvius snow globes, though the ashes are quite fitting.
But to the wicker baskets brimming with little clay heads— I say Yes!
and pay three euros for the one that looks like yours.
Dreaming of the Jersey Shore
The Muffin Man woke at 4 a.m., turned on
the lights at Drury Lane. He gathered ingredients: lemons,
flour, eggs, sugar, poppy seeds, baking powder, milk, butter, salt.
It was Tuesday, a lemon-poppy seed bake.
Everyone knew The Muffin Man. Or thought they did.
In the solitude of pre-dawn, he was not above smoking a cigarette
while he stirred, flicking an ash or two into the batter.
And it wasn’t even Ash Wednesday. People didn’t know him,
only that Thursday was cherry chocolate, Friday was blueberry crumble.
Muffins weren’t the only thing crumbling.
For years now, The Muffin Man dreamed of a different life—
one where he braised osso buco at a seaside café.
Where he worked side by side with a soulmate wife
while the kids played underfoot, and his friends— those guys
he should have stayed tight with since high school—
came around on Saturday nights for a plate of oysters
and a bottle of pinot gris. Things hadn’t turned out the way he’d hoped.
He took another drag on the cigarette, greased the muffin tins.
“After the morning rush,” he said aloud to no one but himself,
“I’m going to post my profile on one of those dating sites— Binge,
or Yes, Chef, or maybe FreshCatch.com.” But The Muffin Man knew
he was all flour dust, no yeast.
He’d spend another afternoon in the safe embrace
of Zillow: commercial zone, large oven, ocean view.
Ann Weil
Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023) and Blue Dog Road Trip (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, October 2024). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Pedestal Magazine, RHINO, Chestnut Review, DMQ Review, Maudlin House, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. Her poem, “Moon Child,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Burningword Literary Journal and selected for inclusion in the 2024 Edition of Best New Poets. She earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan and lives with her husband and soul-dog in Ann Arbor, MI, and Key West, FL.
October 2024 | poetry
my mother dreams of taking off
in a hot air balloon, not exactly flying
but rising, a slow-motion escape
fueled by the hiss of flame
parachute silk and her breath-
held longing to be lifted
from ground
she collects postcards and prints
of antique airships and dirigibles
turn-of-the-century flying machines
captained by men in waistcoats
and bowler hats – she has a flight
plan of her own, a Magritte fantasy
to disappear
from suburbia to surreal
in a swirl of sun and fringed scarf
glinting spyglass held to her eye
she will launch in a basket
packed up like a picnic
rainbow canopy overhead
she will ascend with a whoosh
and a wave from bumpy field
tedium to aerial parade – high-stepping
above trees and cow leas into clouds
as the earth below grows as small
as she knows it to be
grasslands and cul-de-sac
homes, cars ferrying families
to church, bridge games
and laundry days, blackberry
bushes to pluck, gardens to weed –
and we three
watching her float in the gondola
of a full-moon balloon, circled by birds
bon voyage cries and those on the ground
clapping leaping reaching –
‘til all that remains is shadow
big and round as a basilica crown
Lucinda Trew
Lucinda Trew lives and writes in North Carolina with her jazz musician husband, two dogs, one cat, and far too many (or never enough?) books to count. Her work has been featured in Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest, Mockingheart Review, storySouth, Eastern Iowa Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net nominee, and Boulevard’s 2023 Emerging Poet Award recipient.
October 2024 | poetry
The day as white as snow reversed
The gash in the boy’s chin-flesh reknit
The starling sucks its song back into its head
The fire net door quiets to static nothing
The moth rises from dust toward the turncoat beacon
A spark flies away
Alto notes return to brass the bell replaced in its glass
And the phone calling from the next room cuts out
Like a false alarm the clock windmills counterclockwise
Days grow long
Father walks through the door with his back turned
In every direction the family waits for him to come home.
Nick Visconti
Nick Visconti is a writer living in Brooklyn with an artist and a cat. He plays softball most weekends.
October 2024 | poetry
Bells clanging clang clang,
crunching rocks underneath these feet,
chirping birds
chirping crickets,
silence masks its own noise, a white noise,
hostile eggshell cream colored-noise
There are so many subjects
that are Difficult to talk about.
Focus on the sunrise shining, glinting off
diamond rings, trespassing through windows,
windows of houses, quiet, early, early like
the railroad workers, the airline service desk,
screaming babies, diner cooks
Different people will find some subjects
more difficult to talk about than others.
And our edges are eventually eroded by the
onslaught of unpredictable weather patterns
and we all eventually disappear,
though we never entirely leave our guises
behind, our treasure troves six feet under
the ground and thousands of feet above
All that I care about is the memories.
Samantha Moya
Samantha Moya is a data specialist with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. She does her own writing and arts on the side. Her work has been featured in Serotonin Poetry, The Raven Review, Epoch Press, Tension Literary, and The Poetry Question. She is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Denver, Colorado with her husband and two dogs. She can be found at Twitter/X and Instagram @samanthalmoya.
October 2024 | poetry
You mourn yesterday’s bare branches when
not a single cherry blossom was
on them. The silent neighbor who takes
slow walks, where is he? You can’t get over
their absence, how they settled into your
invisible calendar, tracked life
so you didn’t have to ponder life’s
unanswerable questions when
3:00 in the morning haunts and acts your
nag. There is no present, only was.
You don’t want to know this play is over
so decades of scenes come back, take
you on journeys the future would take
you on, if you believed in it. You guess life’s
mysteries have answered themselves over
time—Who are your loves? Your friends? When
your brother-in-law died young–wasn’t
that day the most tragic? A late baby–your
happiest? Done. You walk past the house your
mother lived in, relive all the outtakes
of the movie that starred only you, was
boys, tears, edge-of-your-seat drama, life
that was always about to happen when
the sun rose. She watched. And it’s over.
Even your father’s judgments are over.
That report card he frowned at, that boy you’re
still wild about, the career you’d start when
you got real, the money he’d say it takes
to survive in the world, make a full life.
You didn’t know all those strictures were
your spine. You Google old boyfriends, always
a bad idea. Most are dead and over
you. Actors alive during your whole life
slip away. Why do you care? But losing your
touchstones means finding new ones. That takes
an open heart. Living backwards started when?
Dreams are no better. They take over
where the day left off, flashing their childhood
pictures when your life was going to be.
Rosanne Singer
Rosanne Singer is a poet and memoirist living in Baltimore and just about to finish an MFA at the University of Baltimore. For 25 years, she was a teaching artist in the Maryland schools and also part of small arts teams working with wounded warriors and their families at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, and with pediatric patients at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, DC. Her recent poetry appears in Allium Journal and 1-70 Review, and her recent memoir appears in The Baltimore Fishbowl and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine.
