April 2022 | poetry
our granddad fought the Germans but I battled through lunches
my bloodline gathered in the kitchen uncles with 5 o’ clock
shadows mistake me for schoolgirls they lured with pocketmoney
& promises I pull myself together in their pipe smoke
arrange tins of beans in jaunty pyramids kick shins of cousins
beneath the table their tree bark cheeks ruddy passing the sauce
as past lives lurch across history’s headland victories chipper & hard-won
I want to start fires in the bathroom wear the alley like a cat in heat
upend the garbage take off my clothes swear like a trooper
slice my thumb with the carving knife mop the blood with my bread
but I please&thankyou my way through dessert
impossible the things we don’t say to one another
stewing like spoilt fruit & cream
Rebecca Faulkner
Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet and arts educator based in Brooklyn. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Solstice Magazine, Smoke Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Pedestal Magazine, The Maine Review, SWWIM, CV2 Magazine, On the Seawall, Into the Void, and other journals. She has been anthologized in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021, was a finalist for the 2021 Foster Poetry Prize, and the Jack McCarthy Book Prize. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London.
April 2022 | poetry
Octopus Ink at Dawn
I’m in the garden on a bench with green leaves
dripping diamonds of lemon sun.
Grandfather’s beard is growing on the fence and I’ve
Put out the umbrella I found at Bunnings.
It’s my red Japanese parasol that I pretend with.
A bee is buzzing somewhere, and I take photos of
Myself looking back at a phone to see someone new.
I think about making one of them my new profile pic
When the kitchen bench begins to swarm. I look
Back and I’m standing there, dress round my ankles
Not wearing any underwear. Thankfully, it’s all in my mind
But I’m by the sink; it’s true I shouldn’t try to think
So much when I should be sleeping, but I tell myself
The morning glow will soon wear off and while
I’m here smoking I can still feel the night snow.
A night of ploughing through the sleet at my computer
Makes me realise there’s jewels in my eyes, but
Then I cough and wonder how soon my last little
Breath might come, and how silly it would seem then for
Me to be sitting here singing about dream dragons.
On the news last night was a boy down the road
And a girl in a barrel, and I’ve put too much lemon
In my whiskey sour. It’s awful, but not like that.
I want to live but still be awake for tomorrow in this brand
New day. I might find another way to see the trees
Through the sun. But now it’s way past dawn and
The fire breathing clouds keep on hanging
Beyond the tree that keeps on waving,
And butterflies are still light and flying around
In the shining sun. It makes me like it here
Sitting and thinking on octopus ink,
Hoping I won’t take my last breath till
The very last run of the clock that is turning
Around and around like a kaleidoscope
Spinning down into a rabbit hole at the
Bottom of the garden. I’ve got to realise
Something surely. So I’ve got sage clouds burning,
And incense sticks are sending clouds to the
Sky to smudge the dark rain away.
‘I love you anyway,’ I say to the tentacles,
Eely snakes swirling across the blue horizon.
I pray to them, a poet caught in a too hot
Fire that floats in the gentle yellow wings
Of flying insects before anyone knew they
Were born: just a well worn truth, I guess,
A fact of nature and a limitless plate of
Blue where alligators pounced on a swimmer
Who never knew that the water hid a hungry
Limb that was ready for a person such as you.
And I knew that I was you too.
Like the coo of a pigeon in distant lemonade,
All that was missing was the image of your cry.
But I really must go now even though it’s
A veritable shame, as sad as the bees and the crow
That caws all alone, a flapping black omen of morning.
Ariel’s Revenge
no work today but dystopia flagellation
coming in close to home,
oscilloscope arriving
Kate Durbin stethoscope
toming on a throne for a seat
for an ‘I’ for an iPrincess
‘Me’
fat red lips
smeared frog green;
trout blood wax layered about
smacking pout:
‘Beautiful’
sigh – still life bowl
where all the refuse goes
Seraphim stickers I watch
flush away
close up, flying
into churn of phosphorescent
tubes of web worms’ hole
draining down heaven’s
apocalyptic vision
sick day today
procrastinate everyway
so funny:
raster ray babes diagnosing
disease with electron gun parody
silly me
girls, effigies
mutilated dolls, doppelganger
cyber-fracking trolls
wishing back into being
little mermaid complete
another video to pastiche:
Lara Glenum’s orange fish
swim on Paris Hilton hair
with scissors
with Ariel standing over her doctor’s
corpse: sea foam, daughter of air
reaching for dry land –
she revived during the dissection
to see two self-sliced
legs live streaming for her defection
Megan Anning
Megan Anning is an Australian writer who is fascinated by Bohemianism and the romantic idea of the ‘starving artist’. Her stories and poetry often incorporate intertextuality and have appeared in Text Journal, FIVE:2:ONE, October Hill Magazine, The Citron Review, The Closed Eye Open, The Dope Fiend Daily and The West End Magazine. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is completing her first novel as part of her PhD at Griffith University, Queensland.
April 2022 | poetry
Clear skies—who would’ve thought?
It’s not every day we get the chance to ride
in a hot air balloon.
High winds and clouds of grey
delay the hopeful balloonist;
just as overcast dreams and a
whirlwind of worries stall
the engines of the mind.
How easy it is to forget that
although we are grounded, we are not
overburdened. We are not
pinned.
All it takes is a gentle flame
under the skin for our wildest
dreams to take flight.
A sky of clear blue silence for our thoughts
to gently roam, raw and free.
Higher and higher, the balloons fly—
waves of cotton with quilted panels, a
sea of flames wandering in perfect sync.
They hover on the horizon like splatters
of paint on a canvas.
A gesso of milk and pallid paints
smear the heavens with hues of
sherbet and lavender. Drops of color rain
down to the emerald earth below,
while others cling
to the twinkling jewels of the dark beyond.
Waiting to be seen.
Azriel Cervantes
Azriel Cervantes is a writing and design professional with ASD living in the mountainous state of Colorado. He currently writes web content for dozens of law firms throughout the United States. Azriel’s poems have been featured in The Plentitudes Journal, SPLASH!, and Cathexis Northwest Press. His obsessions with nature, music, history, and psychology are what primarily influence his work. When not researching legal statutes, he spends his free time writing poetry, practicing various instruments, and taking care of his pepper garden.
January 2022 | poetry
While I was a girl waiting for life
to improve I did what I could, a ladybug
on her back kicking her feet in the air.
Dreaming of flight, I discovered
my mother’s hoarded stamps, unused
hodgepodge of American hope:
Skylab, Credos of the Founding Fathers,
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Exploring the Moon,
Coral Reefs, Emily Dickinson, Collective Bargaining,
Energy Conservation, Robert Frost,
Indian Art, Osteopathic Medicine, Peace Corps,
Apollo-Soyuz, Save Our Water, Peter Max’s
Preserve the Environment, Robert Indiana’s
Love, which was all we needed, e pluribus unum
entreaties to the common good.
Doing what she never would, I organized
each intaglio prayer into an album, protected
by the verdigris majesty of our Lady of Liberty,
the infinite halftone dots within painting
a bigger picture to show me how
my pattern of spots might one day fit.
Broadening, I started to write the world,
sending scarce singles via post for stamps
on approval, something I could do while grounded.
Each month, the universe was delivered:
glassine envelopes opening like blurry windows to full-color
propaganda from the Soviet Bloc and African dictatorships,
perforated portraits of the unknown: Burundi.
Bulgaria, Equatorial Guinea, Fujeira.
The Maldive Islands. Tonga.
Some countries even marketed to the likes of me:
a 3-D moon landing from Ajman, scented flowers
from Bhutan, a peel-off diamond from Sierra Leone.
I could select scenes of the Montreal Olympics,
Japanese landscapes, cat breeds, Mickey Mouse,
gemstones, creatures of the African savannah.
Such power even a 10-year-old had
in her nascent geekery, to buy or reject,
the limited locus of my choices in those years.
I licked countless translucent hinges, fixing
them to sheets in my Ambassador Album,
“For Stamps of the World—Personally Designed by H.E. Harris.”
Providing brief colonialist histories for each country,
a world map on the plasticized back cover,
Mr. Harris taught me all I knew of the planet,
preparing me for when I would no longer be stranded.
He gave my curiosity structure while my mother slept
and shouted her nightmares.
Other children practiced scales or played Little League
for parents shaping their lives like sculptors. With my postage paid,
I carefully opened each colorful window and escaped
into the beguiling worlds then closed to me: page after page
of my meticulously ordered ambition, plans
for how I would right myself and fly away.
Lori Rottenberg
Lori Rottenberg is a poet who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She has published in such journals as The Dewdrop, Artemis, Potomac Review, and Poetica, and in anthologies by Paycock Press, Telling Our Stories Press, and Chuffed Buff Books. She has a series of six poems to be published by UCityReview in June 2022 and another poem to be published in December 2021 in The Moving Force Journal. One of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition and appeared on county buses this spring. She has served as a visiting poet in the Arlington Public Schools Pick-a-Poet program since 2007, was an invited poet in the Joaquin Miller Cabin Reading Series in 2002, was a finalist in the 2006 Arlington Reads Poetry Competition, and was a recipient of Best Published Award in the March 2009 issue of Poetica. She is currently a writing instructor for international students at George Mason University and is in her second year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program.
January 2022 | poetry
The way clouds seep through in wings
Fringe of shadow After summer Fall camouflage
I see me
Outside a window looking in
My first baby
Sam the dog
Trusting Wandering
Snow Ice Branches littered Trees
From storms Bowed
I see snowmen and snow angels One more child
Packed in a snowsuit Dad on skates
Burning trash Sitting with a beer
On a summer night
My mother kneels
offers her flowers to bees Waits
One second
Another needy plant
Calls her eye
Small flutter Leaves
Petals rise light Hallowed breaths
I see the wooden man
Whirligig White canoe Saw cut
Feathers Slipped halo
He rides lopsided
Above my mother’s garden
Like a wing
One lone paddle
Lifts the sky
Sheryl L. White
Sheryl L. White is an artist and writer living in Boston. Her writing has been published in The Comstock Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Split Rock Review, Great Lakes Review, The Woven Tale Press Journal, The Roanoke Review, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Finalist Grant and was twice selected for the Mayor of Boston Poetry Program. In 2019, she was a Pushcart nominee and in 2021, a Best of the Net Nominee. Her chapbook, Sky gone, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.
January 2022 | poetry
The sun had already vanished behind
the lights, while we were busy arguing over
a meal gone wrong. I turn to the sea
after the goodbyes with no handshakes or
kisses. The bins aren’t empty yet, of
the plastic bottles and spoons, paper cups,
sandwich wraps, and other unnamable
stuff. A lone seagull hovers above, but I’m
the least bit worried. An artist, with a
fast-burning cigarette in his mouth, carries
his unsold paintings – ‘Jesus and Uncle
Mephisto on a Fishing Trip’, ‘Amy
Winehouse’s Inward Gaze’, ‘Self-Portrait of
a Frog as an Artist’ and so on – back
to the store that’s going to be his studio at
night. There’s a man persuading
a reluctant dog on a leash to get back home,
to end its inane engagement with
a piece of dirtied cloth that looks like
a headscarf that must’ve flown off
too far from someone who might not have
bothered to get it back, or to cover
their head again. I let the dialogues, tones,
gestures, omission of words, choice
of food, and length of sighs from my recent
memories lap against a receding
conscience. They froth over the signs, soon
to be washed off like footprints on
the sand; the very same signs that’d pushed
me to this vast emptiness where a stale
breeze caresses me, amidst what’s lost, torn
apart, stolen, relinquished, or thrown
away for no reason, to the smug black bins.
Jose Varghese
Jose Varghese is an Indian author who has worked as an English teacher in colleges and universities in India and the Middle East. He is the author of ‘Silver Painted Gandhi and Other Poems’ and his short story manuscript ‘In/Sane’ was a finalist in the 2018 Beverly International Prize. He was a finalist twice in the London Independent Story Prize (LISP), a runner-up in the Salt Prize, and was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His works are published in Litro, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Haunted Waters Press, Tempered Runes Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Best Asian Short Story Anthology (2019 and 2021), The Best Asian Poetry Anthology (2021), Dreich, Live Encounters, Meridian – The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology, Unthology 5, Unveiled, Reflex Fiction, Faber QuickFic, and Flash Fiction Magazine.
