April 2025 | poetry
Then I did my impression of a drag queen
impersonating Ed Sullivan singing T. Rex.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go over.
What a lousy Thanksgiving.
Everyone wanted to ‘do yoga.’
But asking Middle-Class white people
to take up space seems redundant.
Did I make it into the middle class? Nope.
I had to borrow money from them to declare bankruptcy.
If they approach you, keep everything but your tears.
We put on Ella Fitzgerald and the trees go wild.
Here even grass attacks (slowly).
I confess to worshipping the nightingale, among others.
At times all culture seems a pantomime fronting a great evil.
Physicists say that time in this universe is red.
Their cigars smell of dust.
The mystery of the kitchen is like the dream of an angel.
Some of these spices induce inactivity.
Some speak directly to the poisoned soul.
We catch a glimpse of the reality we are about to enter.
Everything looks like a cartoon but it’s the right place.
They say it’s easier if you have a teaspoon.
They say the machine restores itself.
Walk with me toward new prayer opportunities.
We are too high to find your coat.
It takes time to get comfortable with your minimum.
You’re doing great shrub by shrub.
It’s called ‘the partridge of meditating.’
The people on this street are as interesting as anyone.
Or we could just get in the Trans Am.
The path to god, whispers a little sparrow.
John Colburn
John Colburn is the author of Invisible Daughter (firthFORTH Books, 2013), Psychedelic Norway (Coffee House Press, 2013), dear corpse (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), and unabandonment (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) as well as four chapbooks of poetry. He lives in St. Paul, MN, and is one of the publishers/editors in the Spout Press collective.
April 2025 | fiction
In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested. “No one has ever finished a round of Eseidra,” wrote Phillip McKenzie in the gaming journal Squaare. “It is nearly as impossible to understand the rules of the game as it is to know when a match has ended. Furthermore, combatants who abandon the game in frustration may not even realize they are continuing, in some manner, to play it.”
Critics contend the game fosters a type of compulsion. Guerra considers this a virtue. “The hallmark of any successful amusement is its ability to elicit obsession,” she has said.
Guerra made her name and fortune with Around the Whirl!, a multi-player dice-and-card game that sold in the tens of thousands worldwide after its release in 1962. Though Around the Whirl! was credited with ushering in an era of so-called “heavy logic” gaming, Guerra eventually disavowed the game, citing not only “the dreary conventionality of its objectives, strategy, and maneuvering,” but also “the abominable illustrations on the board, box, and instruction sheet. It is an ugly game in all respects.”
In interviews, Guerra has often invoked a piece of family lore to explain her interest in games. Following the Sergeants’ Revolt in Cuba in 1933, Guerra’s father was to be executed behind a hotel in Havana for alleged loyalty to Gerardo Machado, when an officer with the assigned firing squad recognized the condemned man as a champion backgammon player. The man offered to play Guerra’s father a single game of backgammon and promised to spare his life if he won. “I credit my existence to a double-six my father rolled in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional,” Guerra has said.
In her early-thirties, following a tumultuous divorce, Guerra began experimenting with board games she called, alternately, “transcendental” and “infinite.” Early efforts yielded games whose rules shifted according to readings of players’ heart rates, games whose “boards” were the given physical environment of the players, and games that included increasingly perilous feats of physical endurance.
In 1985, following an estrangement from two of her four children, Guerra moved to Hibiscus Coast in New Zealand. She denies all requests for interviews and does not respond to letters or phone calls. She publishes an annual “update” in the magazine Straits of the number of Eseidra games active worldwide (last year’s tally was 32), though she offers no explanation for her accounting. In 1986, in what may be read as an act of apostasy or pique or both, she stated that several members of the Lisbon Circle have been playing Eseidra for twenty years now, even if they claim ignorance of the fact. Sembla Intelligencer – March 6, 1988
Ben Guterson
Ben Guterson is the New York Times bestselling author of The World-Famous Nine, a Barnes & Noble Young Reader Pick of the Month, The Einsteins of Vista Point, and the popular Winterhouse trilogy. Winterhouse was an Edgar Award and an Agatha Award finalist, and an Indie Next List Pick. His books have been translated into eleven languages worldwide.
April 2025 | poetry
What nobody tells you about marriage is
It’s blackheads and popping
pustules. It’s watching someone
get old in the shower. Its tweezers
and hair in the drain and knowing
where the scissors are. It’s three
hour long fights about what kind
of litter to buy at the pet store
and knowing you are both responsible
for all those egg shells. Both on the hook
for that $60 parking ticket, no matter
whose fault it was. It’s remembering
the good times, and also getting undressed
down to your worst layers. It’s lying
on the bed in a pile of your own tears
from laughing so hard, and it’s like having
a mirror that follows you around reciting
everything you’ve ever done
wrong. It’s agreeing to destroy someone
else’s life together – your children,
your neighbors’ peace and quiet.
It’s mutually disappointing your parents
by trying to follow your dreams,
and its fruit flies because somebody left
orange peels under the bed, somebody left
tissue paper in the sink, somebody didn’t clean
out the blender again. It’s knowing
what they had for breakfast, demanding
they leave some over, demanding they pick up
bread on the way home, pick up the orange juice,
pick up their goddamn socks from the living room.
It’s asking someone to pass the salt and open
the blinds and hand you that thing off the shelf
and knowing what that thing is.
It’s confessing that you’re still unhappy,
that their love isn’t enough to fix you.
It’s slamming windows, and books and screens.
It’s walking into the other room and slamming
the door shut. It’s knowing there are no working
locks on the door. It’s knowing when you lie
to yourself, somebody will catch you
like a net catches a trapeze artist
or a fish that’s wriggling in the sea.
What I did while waiting to become famous on instagram
I worked in a daycare.
I took the names of the tired mothers,
the hurried fathers. I gathered
emergency contacts, checked
for allergies, for ear infections, for anything I should know.
With the older kids, I recapped
the markers, folded
paper into airplanes, pulled
Barbie’s decapitated head
out of the toilet every day
after lunch. I helped
fill the bottles. Helped
handle the diapers. Helped
empty the waste baskets, rerolled
the toilet paper.
Between shifts I made appointments
for my ailing parents, made calls
to my sister to ask
how her invitro was going,
if there was anything I could bring.
I made $10/hour. Paid
my taxes. For a whole year I gave up
eating peanut butter because of other people’s allergies.
For 9 months I lifted someone else’s baby
to my milkless breast
and tended to the future,
with its immediate, anonymous needs.
Tresha Faye Haefner
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize and three Pushcart nominations. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear,” was a finalist for prizes from Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. Find out more on her Substack at thepoetrysalonstack.substack.com.
