April 2025 | poetry
Thank you for laughing each time
I aver, “Who is Samuel Pepys?” when
the Jeopardy category pings “Diarists.”
I thank grad school for resurfacings,
the tedious pages worth a chilly May,
Hampton Court morning around
the corner where some costumed King
Henry adjusts blue velvet cuffs, offers
guests winks, wisteria patches traipsing
purple along brick walls. You leave for real
tennis viewing while I warm in the Chapel,
a Royal steward my new mate who details
below floor Victorian heating flanking
Jane Seymour’s green gallbladder. No other
tourists around, he shifts
his head as if preparing to cross streets,
leans closer, then loud whispers a question
I’m sure he’s bottled for weeks:
You know Samuel Pepys?,
and before I can nod, he unbuttons the red
waistcoast, his Tudor Crest patch disappearing,
and I wonder if he’ll display rows of fake
watches like a shady tv character. No, I am
not scared or nervous when he produces
scissors, I think, smiling at me, them palmed
flat for high regard.
He had stones, bladder ones,
he informs, his hand rising with each word,
so pleased he seems to clarify “forceps,” as in
those used to remove Pepys’s pain. So many
questions clog my cords, my larynx, did he know
I’d be his audience today, and what do seventeenth
century tools go for on ebay these days?, still
he marvels at surgery without anesthesia, greets
your reentry, and I thank him for his time.
At the gift shop on our way out, I try on the Boleyn
stacking rings, how seamlessly the “B” fits into
pearled band, yet all I want is to run back, search
the gardens’ gravel borders and paths for any
cloudy or misshapen pieces in honor, homage, stones
rescued, revered not solely for Pepys’s pages,
but to etern on his chamber’s mantel.
Amy S Lerman
Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert, where she is a residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press), won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest. She has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Atticus Review, Muleskinner, The Madison Review, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.
April 2025 | poetry
Needles glittered on the streets in the soft Dutch dawn,
like shards of broken glass catching the light.
Children drifted in and out of narrow passageways,
their movements sluggish as the canals,
like something waiting to drown.
Behind the street where Anne Frank’s House stood,
a small, brown building crouched—
the hostel, ten bunks crowded into a room
heavy with the stench of dope and damp.
The showers sputtered when you forgot your coins,
cheap shampoo burning your eyes,
clouding the world into oily blurs.
Jakob, the owner, wore purple eyeshadow,
smoked maroon cigars that left the air thick and bitter.
Behind the front desk, a menorah stood,
its red candles unlit and melted,
wax globs like forgotten rubies.
On the opposite wall, a photograph:
a family, dark-eyed, arms crossed
in a field of sunflowers, waiting.
Each face marked with a bold red X,
sharp as a blade.
No one asked why.
Bill, the American boy who helped Jakob,
checked our passports, handed out keys,
cooked breakfast, inspected for bedbugs.
His face, a battlefield of purple acne,
flushed every time someone said thank you.
Five years ago, he checked in and never left,
becoming part of the place like the wallpaper.
Jakob adored him—
squeezing his shoulder, murmuring,
“Bill, Bill,”
as if speaking the name too loudly would make him vanish.
Bill wore long sleeves,
but the scars on his wrists, pale as ghosts,
were impossible to ignore.
One night, we missed curfew.
The bell rang, slicing the silence like a siren.
When Jakob answered, mascara smeared,
his bloodshot eyes wide,
a violet scarf unraveling from his neck,
he whispered,
“Bill is gone.”
His mouth opened and closed,
like words were too much to hold.
“Leave Amsterdam. Leave now.
It is the city of the dead.”
We ran upstairs,
locked our doors.
In the morning,
the hostel was empty.
Suitcases tumbled down the stairs
like forgotten promises.
I looked for Jakob, for Bill,
but the only thing left
was the photograph—
the family, the red Xs,
burning so bright
I had to close my eyes.
Penny Jackson
Penny Jackson is an award-winning writer who lives in New York City. Her books include Becoming The Butlers (Bantam Books) and a short story collection, L.A. Child and other stories (Untried Reads.) She won a Pushcart short fiction Prize and was a McDowell Colony Fellow. Penny is also a playwright with plays produced in New York, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, and Dublin. www.pennybrandtjackson.
April 2025 | poetry
Their fires have spread from sea to the mountains
Circle the wagons, our herds have fled
Night crackles like a fox
Is that a carriage, a hotel, charged with what?
The old country is filled with that morning light
We look for in paintings with one old tree
A clearing beside a road with one lone traveler
Golden bramble, homes made light
Smoke in whirlpools from the chimneys
Her cheek is your jewel, that map on the wall
Measures the radius of desire
That skull is your marital contract
That branch stretching from her crown
Is a symbol for solitude en plein air
And visible behind a lilac shade is a young prince
Fixing the queen’s long ochre pipe
The Good Solomonite fixes her tea
Some men live lives so voluminous
Their images profligate, disperse & are nothing
Better than all else to have the one thing
A flood, a crash, another tour somewhere
That might as well be ether: it is the one image
That will get us there
Listen, go down—go down then come back up
This is all one does, all one is
Soft train sounds
On a rainy day
Softer than rain
Sam Kerbel
Sam Kerbel was shortlisted for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. His first chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price (2025), is available from Bottlecap Press. His poems are forthcoming from Eunoia Review and Libre.
April 2025 | poetry
Then I did my impression of a drag queen
impersonating Ed Sullivan singing T. Rex.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go over.
What a lousy Thanksgiving.
Everyone wanted to ‘do yoga.’
But asking Middle-Class white people
to take up space seems redundant.
Did I make it into the middle class? Nope.
I had to borrow money from them to declare bankruptcy.
If they approach you, keep everything but your tears.
We put on Ella Fitzgerald and the trees go wild.
Here even grass attacks (slowly).
I confess to worshipping the nightingale, among others.
At times all culture seems a pantomime fronting a great evil.
Physicists say that time in this universe is red.
Their cigars smell of dust.
The mystery of the kitchen is like the dream of an angel.
Some of these spices induce inactivity.
Some speak directly to the poisoned soul.
We catch a glimpse of the reality we are about to enter.
Everything looks like a cartoon but it’s the right place.
They say it’s easier if you have a teaspoon.
They say the machine restores itself.
Walk with me toward new prayer opportunities.
We are too high to find your coat.
It takes time to get comfortable with your minimum.
You’re doing great shrub by shrub.
It’s called ‘the partridge of meditating.’
The people on this street are as interesting as anyone.
Or we could just get in the Trans Am.
The path to god, whispers a little sparrow.
John Colburn
John Colburn is the author of Invisible Daughter (firthFORTH Books, 2013), Psychedelic Norway (Coffee House Press, 2013), dear corpse (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), and unabandonment (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) as well as four chapbooks of poetry. He lives in St. Paul, MN, and is one of the publishers/editors in the Spout Press collective.
April 2025 | poetry
What nobody tells you about marriage is
It’s blackheads and popping
pustules. It’s watching someone
get old in the shower. Its tweezers
and hair in the drain and knowing
where the scissors are. It’s three
hour long fights about what kind
of litter to buy at the pet store
and knowing you are both responsible
for all those egg shells. Both on the hook
for that $60 parking ticket, no matter
whose fault it was. It’s remembering
the good times, and also getting undressed
down to your worst layers. It’s lying
on the bed in a pile of your own tears
from laughing so hard, and it’s like having
a mirror that follows you around reciting
everything you’ve ever done
wrong. It’s agreeing to destroy someone
else’s life together – your children,
your neighbors’ peace and quiet.
It’s mutually disappointing your parents
by trying to follow your dreams,
and its fruit flies because somebody left
orange peels under the bed, somebody left
tissue paper in the sink, somebody didn’t clean
out the blender again. It’s knowing
what they had for breakfast, demanding
they leave some over, demanding they pick up
bread on the way home, pick up the orange juice,
pick up their goddamn socks from the living room.
It’s asking someone to pass the salt and open
the blinds and hand you that thing off the shelf
and knowing what that thing is.
It’s confessing that you’re still unhappy,
that their love isn’t enough to fix you.
It’s slamming windows, and books and screens.
It’s walking into the other room and slamming
the door shut. It’s knowing there are no working
locks on the door. It’s knowing when you lie
to yourself, somebody will catch you
like a net catches a trapeze artist
or a fish that’s wriggling in the sea.
What I did while waiting to become famous on instagram
I worked in a daycare.
I took the names of the tired mothers,
the hurried fathers. I gathered
emergency contacts, checked
for allergies, for ear infections, for anything I should know.
With the older kids, I recapped
the markers, folded
paper into airplanes, pulled
Barbie’s decapitated head
out of the toilet every day
after lunch. I helped
fill the bottles. Helped
handle the diapers. Helped
empty the waste baskets, rerolled
the toilet paper.
Between shifts I made appointments
for my ailing parents, made calls
to my sister to ask
how her invitro was going,
if there was anything I could bring.
I made $10/hour. Paid
my taxes. For a whole year I gave up
eating peanut butter because of other people’s allergies.
For 9 months I lifted someone else’s baby
to my milkless breast
and tended to the future,
with its immediate, anonymous needs.
Tresha Faye Haefner
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize and three Pushcart nominations. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear,” was a finalist for prizes from Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. Find out more on her Substack at thepoetrysalonstack.substack.com.
April 2025 | poetry
Slum Archangel
The velocity of her fall must have
been excruciating / blackout-inducing.
Tracing the arc of the angel’s nosedive:
deadlift-dropped like Heaven metal and sparking
all the way down, uranium-heavy,
she would have cleaved the evening sky in two.
Then, molten from friction, crawling beyond
her crater, bones reform before moonrise.
A new wingspan flares. Her raw material:
lightning voltage, forest fires, charcoal.
Blue from down here looks so much darker…
There is no angel that can be touched
who isn’t remade in the diamond-crushing
gravity of hurtling earthside.
Quite an experience to crash on the world
as if through stained glass, to collapse into time:
serration is the sky we are fated
to drop through to understand how grace works.
I guess we must be sliced apart to reveal
the cold metallic core of grace within
and then feel its trembling pour down skin.
But I’m not so sure about its value.
Grace’s slow attainment looks like bleeding
just to make the claim you didn’t drown beneath
the bleed. Unseemly to think devastation
is our only flight path towards perfection.
Hauled down at night like a burning Lockheed,
every angel is born to land hard.
Abjex
Twist away the gates of steel
Unlock the secret voice
Give in to ancient noise
Take a chance on a brand new dance
Twist away, now twist and shout…
—Devo, “Gates of Steel”
The rogue’s gallery: two tattoo artists,
two bartenders, and me. This band was a
nosebleed miracle. All my amplifiers
died in separate fires (too much voltage). At
showtime we exploded like landmine shrapnel.
There were some real bruisers in that unit,
dressed like Hell. Bullet belts, engineer boots,
burned leather, unending appetites
for damage. Harrison swallowed a lit
cigarette as a party trick. Allie had
angel language on her face. Bad Wes
coughed and bled blackly under a moon that held
still like a sharpshooter. Josh had this strange
magnetic animal charm practically
sewn into the skin-side of his life.
I just bore witness, wrapped in my battle
jacket and doing my best to keep up.
An audience member spit on Allie
one time so she broke his nose. If any
member of the gang yelled “Go!” it was all hell:
we’re throwing hockey punches ’til it’s lights out.
We kissed goodbye with our hands taped. The band’s life
burned at the speed of head trauma. This is
how I learned to pounce on the world boots-first.
Zack Carson
Zack Carson is a poet and musician from Asheville, NC. He is pursuing an MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has been (or will be) published in The Shore, Soundings East, All Existing, and Inscape, among other places.
