October 2023 | poetry
There’s only so much you can change about yourself.
Like this morning, I dreamt I dropped a baby down the stairs and trumpets started playing
As it stared through me with my own eyes like I’d just suicided.
Flavors of trauma come with malleable parts.
Today, I ate an entire bag of chips and painted a watercolor octopus. I thought I had cancer.
I took my blood pressure three times. I told everyone of my fear… to practice saying cancer.
In public places, my neck strains like a dried sunflower curling down, looking for the stairs.
Hell is a dream full of music.
Brandyce Ingram is a writer, tutor, and jazz-head in Seattle, WA. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press, Willowdown Books, Sand Hills Lit Mag, Wildroof Journal, An Evening with Emily Dickinson (via Wingless Dreamer), and elsewhere. Her latest search history includes “20th-century lunatic asylums women” and “how to use a crap ton of fresh mint pesto chimichurri sauces or soju cocktails.”
October 2023 | poetry
It’s always the rot stench of the wound
that draws me in—the beetle to the Corpse Flower.
You were eager to unfurl your bruised blooms:
you told me about the poverty, the prison, your abusive,
alcoholic father. You winced to mention him. A palpable
stab. I ached to smell more of your festering, to share how it feels
to be birthed of betrayal. I wanted to open myself up
to you like a trench coat, show you the ax to my gut—
my mother. My vanished leg—my father. Now,
I wonder if the stalking, the drugging, the rape
was your wound reveal: This is the ghost
of my dead inner child. I’m here to show you
what can happen to children and how bad it can get.
The blood and feces in my sheets said, This bad.
Anne Champion
Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
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.
