January 2024 | visual art
Facing It Together
Jack Bordnick Studio
Bordnick’s interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy. As a photographer and sculptor, he has been able to share his professional experiences in ways that benefit both business and community projects. With over twenty years of experience, he has successfully designed, fabricated, and installed a wide range of projects. He is an industrial design/sculpture graduate of Pratt Institute in New York, where he has had his own professional design business and has been a design director for numerous companies and local government projects. They included a major children’s museum for the city of New York and the Board of Education.
January 2024 | poetry
In another dimension, it is me & not Dostoevsky
who claims 2-plus-2 can equal 5.
I have pressed TV rewind enough times
to see how toothpaste can slide right back into the tube
after dissolving across teeth & draining into the sink.
The vomit gurgitates itself back into a glass of kegged beer.
I have seen blood pour itself back into the vein, from wine.
& who is to say that after her father laid himself to rest
under the commuter train that he didn’t lift his body
back into another world
where we are still twelve years old
at Fenway Park. At the seventh inning stretch,
he holds both a beer, & a camera
to capture our sweet Caroline smiles.
O, ode to the Jeremy Bearimy!
To be a dot in the I
& repeat that one life
forever and without time.
A place where nothing never happens.
I mean, if Leo himself can climb through a dream
inside a dream, then why not me?
There could be a galaxy in which I’m seen.
In which my body was never taken away from me.
A world in which I can spot love
3 trillion miles away.
I can hold it in my palms:
a crystal ball of intimacy.
A life in which your death is only a death in flesh.
& when your bones crumble to ash, they will
sprout with the grass,
germinate with the morning dew.
Yes, you will be reborn in a different world –
you will arrive again, as you.
Lis Beasley
Lis Beasley (she/her) is a licensed mental health counselor. She was previously published in the Worcester Review. A lifelong writer, her poetry often explores the intersection of family, mental health, substance abuse, and incarceration. She can be found on Instagram @lisbeaspoetry.
January 2024 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
By the time I realized why this sublet was so cheap, it was too late—I was being tortured by the Inquisition. In case you were wondering, it was nothing like the Monty Python skit. How awesome would that have been? Well, it doesn’t help that I started giggling when they told me to, “Confess the heinous sin of heresy.” Oh God, hah! Oh, hah, huh. Hmm, sorry, can’t help it, makes me snort every time I remember that bit. But yes, my burns are still healing. Dear God, who knew screaming into a small transponder would cause so much hullabaloo. I forget how touchy the early Spanish empire could be.
I mean, I grew up Catholic, for Christ’s sake, but I never had to learn Latin, thank you, Vatican II. So when they asked me to prove my religion by reciting a few prayers, I busted out what I thought as “Profession of Faith,” but these guys thought I was spouting heresy because I was speaking modern Spanish. I did forget my Babelfish, which may have saved my ass. Wait – is it even programmed for medieval Latin? Well, lessons have been learned, that is all I have to say.
And here they are:
(1.) Double-check that your sublet to Andalusia’s Golden Era is for BEFORE 1478.
(2.) Remember to look at the profile of the person you are subletting from to make sure they aren’t a bored, rich sadist who wants to watch you suffer a bit AND pay for the “pleasure” of it.
(3.) Always, and I mean always, remember your Babelfish. Modern languages are always a tip-off and can mess with history. Ah shit, did I just change history? Has my guest rating gone down? Thank God for the fixed term on the sublet and automatic return to our time period. Not sure how the empty shackles will be explained to the Inquisitors. Hold on, I am quickly checking Spanish history on the network to see if anything has changed dramatically. Hold please. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!
Which leads me to
(4.) Always do a thorough research of the current understanding of the history of your destination and write that shit down or copy it somewhere where it cannot be altered in order to do a thorough comparison afterward.
And if all else fails,
(5.) See if there is a cheap ticket back to the immediate past to prevent yourself from buying the sublet in the first place.
Heather Bourbeau
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin. Her latest poetry collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
