October 2023 | poetry
They finished each other’s sentences about the differences
between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions,
how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard,
as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country.
Their dads knew how to build houses and get the right tools,
took their boys to the seances of men huddled in a circle
who spit as they called forth the spirits of wrenches and vises,
while I slept each night on the living room couch overhearing
Mom and Sis whispering in their beds about curlers and creams.
I learned about how to bounce drops of water on the heated pan
telling what size flame would make the pancake batter not stick,
and to speak about love and hurt, and not bolt it down inside.
The soft voices of poets and writers speaking sadness and joy
let me wander in places far away from that sofa in the night,
and I liked myself knowing the things that other boys didn’t
as they lay under cars with friends finding power in engines.
No dad, I sank lower in the back seat hearing how men loved
mastering gears, electrodes, filters, valves, and carburetors
like there was a way of friendship with the tribe of machines
always scary to me, who hissed I was not one of them.
Glen A. Mazis
Glen A. Mazis taught philosophy for decades at Penn State Harrisburg, retiring in 2020. He has more than 90 poems in literary journals, including Rosebud, The North American Review, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Review, Atlanta Review, Reed Magazine and Asheville Poetry Review, and the collection, The River Bends in Time (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), a chapbook, The Body Is a Dancing Star (Orchard Street Press, 2020), and Bodies of Space and Time (Kelsay Books, 2022). He is the 2019 winner of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize (Orchard Street national contest).
October 2023 | poetry
A house built on sand makes itself felt when a mother
hides glasses of whiskey in the drawers of her vanity table.
That our family was special and blessed was the wishful
fiction read to us children at bedtime. Asteroid and disaster
are linguistic siblings; the Milky Way is a road of milk, a spill
of cream in a black-coffee heaven; and stars, though regarded
as gods by the Greeks, are merely dense balls of gas that spewed
their chemical guts into the galaxy. “Let the stars sit where they will,”
Coyote cries in the Navajo myth, flinging up handfuls of glittering
mica that stick to the sky helter-skelter. My flame-haired mother
saw shades of gray that my father was blind to, yet she projected
her own tortured colors on each of us in turn, her afternoon empathy
sucking me in to be spat upon later. Etymologies tell more truth
about life than the words do themselves, as in the Greek prefix sark
linking “sarcasm” to sarcophagus, literal eater of flesh. Like my mother,
a star in its red giant phase, devouring her innermost planets, the milk
of her human kindness curdled by accusations that ripped me apart
like hyenas tearing the flesh from my bones. A star-crossed ancestral
curse hounded my Janus-faced mother, who winked out at last
like a star.
Sharon Whitehill
Sharon Whitehill, a retired English professor from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, is currently enjoying her retirement in Port Charlotte, Florida. After years of hard work and dedication, she has achieved her dream of having her poems published in various literary magazines. She has authored two chapbooks titled “The Umbilical Universe” and “Inside Out to the World,” as well as a full collection called “A Dream of Wide Water.” In spring 2024, she will release her third chapbook titled “This Sad and Tender Time.”
October 2023 | poetry
I’m talking the bitches who bring
their own dotting pens—the variety
pack that includes the bonus
glitter pen in fuschia. The bitches
who bring their own refreshments
and candies for when their blood
sugar inevitably drops
when the bitch across the room
yells bingo on a 30 dollar crazy L
card. Of course the bitch gets it.
She was winking at the caller
so of course the ball that came
next was a gift from him. His
balls. That’s what the real bitches—
my grandma and her friends say
when they lose. That, or they shit
talk the ugly Christmas sweater
that wasn’t ugly at all, even though
they’re all wearing gas station souvenir
shirts from tropical trips they took
years ago “before the ‘Vid hit.”
I ended up winning big—about
150 dollars richer but about 10
years lesser for it, but I was the bitch
who won three rounds while
the bitches were busy bitching.
Abigale Tabor
Abigale Tabor is a somewhat-recent college graduate living in a somewhat-decent town in northern Florida who writes poetry that echoes her life.
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.
