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.
October 2023 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Learning to Dance
Hooked on the two-four sorcery,
bass and drum, dances at St. Jerome’s,
I held up a wall for half an hour
before I could ask the one
whose eyes turned ice to water,
spun home through the dark
between the streetlamp pools of light.
Lost in a trance for a year,
I woke when the plane
bumped down into Luxembourg.
Lost the first day at the hostel,
I took the train to Zurich,
found an old Tolkien
jammed behind the seat,
carried him all the way to here,
hitch-hiked south and crossed
four days later near Chiasso,
rode a box truck into the Dolomites,
traded my boots for a sweater.
The new owner took me
to his family’s stone house,
steep meadows, barn filled with sheep.
For a week I was a shepherd,
combed pastures with the ewes,
saw why I had to go away.
Like a brother, he brought me
back to the road-fork;
I didn’t want to get out,
flatbeds and Fiats all the way to Venice.
Three days later I started again,
no rides past Solesino, evening falling,
I laid in the grass, read
until the dark took it away,
ate the crushed bread and cheese,
slept in the field.
In the morning I sang Creedence,
waited for kindness
danced on the empty road.
Came as Ravens
Cloaks as black as widows
they strut the deck railing,
peer in the windows, leap away,
their shadows stream
across the ferns and rocks.
They come, peck at the doors,
smear saliva on the windows
that dries to a chalky cuneiform.
When I was small, she’d kneel beside me,
coach the story I couldn’t believe.
But last night, kneeling on the kitchen floor
sweeping up pieces of glass,
dust rolled from under the stove
and her voice came into the air.
They glide from tree to tree,
compile their inventories,
drift over the swath of light
I cut in the crowds of hemlock,
a shrine for the lost opened to the sun,
cast the ashes there like seeds.
The winged mourners scavenge
offerings I lay on the boulders,
a lamb abandoned by her ewe,
stiffened hens tired of winter.
I sit on the porch and sift the past,
see her folded hands,
the raised tracks of skin,
burn scars from the bindery’s vinyl-sealer,
listen to their guttural calls,
the clicked code they chant
high in the dead fir by the lake.
Mark Anthony Burke
Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal, and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Please see markanthonyburkesongsandpoems.com
October 2023 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
I.
Honeyed mystery of mahogany,
oak, walnut, teak, Fall’s tawny
offerings sanded into curves,
smooth invitation to touch,
like the sun-warmed thigh
& rising hip of that sunbaked
young woman you once were,
drowsing on a black sand beach
in Santorini, water beading
on your belly.
II.
This box hides your secrets:
How did you get from there to here?
What bodies? What lies?
The stolen quarters/kisses,
the unmade bed, the 6 a.m. departure.
What did you know & when?
III.
After you’ve been unmade,
can you learn trust like fitting
pieces of different puzzles
together? Remember how
they returned your uterus
to its wet cave after the knife
discharged its shrieking cargo?
IV.
How do you birth yourself
into a new name, receive
the gift of it in another’s mouth,
let it melt onto another’s tongue
like Amaro—bitter/sweet & smoky,
let that same tongue undress
your inhibitions, rendering
skin & sinew, splaying bones,
exposing the last hidden chamber?
V.
Is it too much—
all this allowing?
How your ribcage’s rusty hinges
once oiled with clamor and hush
swung wider and wider in desire.
VI.
Were you too much, wearing
your need like drought?
How he slipped away
in millimeters of silence,
disappearing even as he stood
before you—naked, dripping,
cowed.
VII.
Your blind fingers stagger
around the subtle lynchpin.
Had we arrived at the end
of each other? Or could a box
be a road to reunion?
VIII.
Relax. Let surrender carve
a door to a new dimension. Step
through. Let his arms curve
around you. Let his elegant hands
reveal what was jigsawed shut:
a lacuna large enough
for hope.
Elya Braden
Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA, and is an editor for Gyroscope Review. She is the author of the chapbooks Open The Fist (2020) and The Sight of Invisible Longing, a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Competition (March 2023). Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, Sequestrum, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.
