January 2023 | poetry
the Waddington quins
died on delivery ~
their shared placenta
burned by local custom ~
their bodies sent to Dr Hunter
as medical specimens
pallid flaccid ghostly
water-babies hang in a tank
suspended
in solution
skin ridged like hands
left too long in bath water
liquor-steeped foetuses
with sightless eyes mere hooded slits
ribs protruding wraith limbs dangling
a chorus
of stringless
marionettes
wailing mouths gape
in soundless distress waiting in vain to hear
their long-dead mother’s heartbeat
Clare Marsh
Clare Marsh, a Kent based international adoption social worker, was awarded M.A. Creative Writing from the University of Kent (2018) and was a Pushcart Prize nominee (2017). She won the 2020 Olga Sinclair Short Story Prize. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Mslexia, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acropolis, Places of Poetry, Pure Slush, Green Ink Poetry and Rebel Talk.
January 2023 | nonfiction
Make yourself comfortable right here on the massage table. Just clean up the brows, right? Not too thick, not too thin. You’re tired? Go ahead and rest. So tell me about your life–where do you work? Oh that must be fun. I’m sure your students looove you. They are so lucky to haaaave you. You’re awesome. Your skin is beauuuutiful. If my customers have beautiful skin I tell them. You must drink a lot of water. You look really hydrated. I looove this music too. It’s Pandora. Hipster Cocktail Party Station. They have so many great stations. I love Pandora. It really helps because it sounds so happy and the world is going craaaaazy! The world is craaaazy right now and I’m going craaaazy. Have you seen Black Mirror on Netflix? Go home and watch it. It’s awesome. So awesome. You don’t have any chin hairs. Oh wait. There’s a couple. I’ll just pluck ’em. And one more. I can save you money by not waxing your chin. We’ll just do the lip and the brows. I’ll set you up with a frequent-wax-customer-card so you’ll get a discount after ten visits, whatdya think? Wow, are those your bike bags? They’re so big! I could probably fit in one of them. You could definitely fit in one of them. Are they waterproof? Sure, I can trim your eyebrows. It’s my favorite thing to do. I hate when they get long, like they’re reaching for the sky. Have you watched the January 6 hearings? All those rioters need jail time. Your skin is great, it doesn’t get red like most people’s when I wax them. You’re soooooo lucky. I didn’t think I’d like Liz Cheney but she’s awesome. It’s great that you’re right in the neighborhood. You can just bike over after work. We’re so close! That’s great. It’s just the three of us here. Heidi, Lisa and me. Lisa walked in right before you did. We loove it here. It’s so awesome. We’ve been here 15 years. Heidi’s the owner and she’s so great. Is purple your favorite color? Your glasses are purple, your shirt is purple. It looks awesome on you. I loooove your shirt. It’s so soft, so purple. It looks awesome with your yellow sweater. Okay, I’m just gonna let this wax dry on your lip. I’m just gonna turn on this bright light here to make sure I got all the hairs. Oops just one more chin hair. Deep breath. Ready, here we go.
Tess Kelly
Tess Kelly’s work has appeared in Sweet, Cleaver, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, among other journals. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
January 2023 | poetry
Waterfall: Speech
Beginning things
Armed figures emerge from the falls
Beautiful destroyers
A splash-live slapdash
Bodies, shapes
not of earth
but of the vapor, air
Atmospherics of the place
Creatures of pure emergence
Emanations ghosting home
Back from everwhere/neverwhere to here-again
Figures of air, frozen waves
The message and the static
incantation of the nation
The fire-stream on auto-mation
Energies of embarkation
First love, first life, verse indication
Inspiration of the waters
In the waters, breath and life
and if heard, attended to, rehearsal predication
Emergence of the word
Stents and stems and birdlike wonder
Self-dom seen and ever heard
Translation of an endless pulse
through the rumble of the verse
Clamor of the ancient lovers
Hunters herders growers
Builders, bearers, all immerse
Always Beginning
Capable figures emerge from the falls
Heroes, children, goddesses
From the spirit fog of old talk, weary tales, twining tales
from spheres of culpable imagination
Tails still scrapping over dogs
Powder-dust foundation lays, thought-dreams of a summer day,
Bees whine in the vernal haze
Pleasure-spots of time, feeling foci, laugh-prone languors
Tiny-voiced choruses squealing jokey
Laughter of the cells, ticklish moments
Parting of the particles
Pleasure-stoppers floating fee
Choruses squealing you and me
Beautiful creatures, beasts, fork-legged and otherwise
Birds indifferently joyful in their distant, facile way
Poppies dancing in an orange breeze, a whisper of moistened breath
Winged notions, messages from fore-n’after
Saxon farmers trenching the earth at Sutton Hoo
Beginning tales told to indifferent laughter
On the banks of the Indus heroes woo
Healing mothers, earth fighters, soul-warriors
Magicking quick-silvers, bent farmers, squatting pioneers of fertility
Breathing in//out, in//out at the start of things
Where to now? Clouds briefing in a gray bowl of beginnings
Hero-makers already emergent
Silvered Celts, backdating ancestry,
mothers sewing fates in silken vests,
Sands slipping free of oceans crests.
History and geology
Hegelian phenomenology
Starting from Paumanok
Fog-lifted meres, moan of the ocean, breath on loan
Too great a falling from thought-free height
as well, a swell, swelling
Falling to our fateful night
A wave that curls at the crest, then lingers, lapping,
ever-falling…
From the bowl of endlessly thinning ions
Figures emerge, men like lions
personae dramatis
Descend, like flowers
wilting backwards into life
Time, place, and hours
from the wispy, water-bearded face of the milky stream,
A paintbox of the gods upset, apocals…
lisps and sometimes worse
Scattering the nimbus to the you-in-verse
Dicing godes, explodes
Cinematic modes
What’s this, amiss in the midst?
Some body chasing some self-likeness
about the city’s walls, men’s work no doubt
Hunting fate like beasts, a many-headed rout
Mythopoeia steamy inspirations and gastric odors mingling
after, or before, the brazen hunt for doubles singling
The mother-goddess sewing the great table-cloth of fate,
Tapestry of time, winding sheet, rushing stream,
a day too early, a day too late,
down from mountains of thunder-gods
to the banks of the Indus,
the sands of Byblos,
the killing ground of fair Iona
A lifeline-like songline born from the fires of a conflagration
Many-stepped disaster for a busting nation, foretold by asters
poking upward, inches beyond the spray of the great uncanny falls
to find, once more a flume’s foundation, earth-bound estranged,
endangered, a soul’s vocation.
Robert Knox
Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, The Eunoia Review, and others. His poetry chapbook “Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty” was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He was the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.
