April 2025 | poetry
Slum Archangel
The velocity of her fall must have
been excruciating / blackout-inducing.
Tracing the arc of the angel’s nosedive:
deadlift-dropped like Heaven metal and sparking
all the way down, uranium-heavy,
she would have cleaved the evening sky in two.
Then, molten from friction, crawling beyond
her crater, bones reform before moonrise.
A new wingspan flares. Her raw material:
lightning voltage, forest fires, charcoal.
Blue from down here looks so much darker…
There is no angel that can be touched
who isn’t remade in the diamond-crushing
gravity of hurtling earthside.
Quite an experience to crash on the world
as if through stained glass, to collapse into time:
serration is the sky we are fated
to drop through to understand how grace works.
I guess we must be sliced apart to reveal
the cold metallic core of grace within
and then feel its trembling pour down skin.
But I’m not so sure about its value.
Grace’s slow attainment looks like bleeding
just to make the claim you didn’t drown beneath
the bleed. Unseemly to think devastation
is our only flight path towards perfection.
Hauled down at night like a burning Lockheed,
every angel is born to land hard.
Abjex
Twist away the gates of steel
Unlock the secret voice
Give in to ancient noise
Take a chance on a brand new dance
Twist away, now twist and shout…
—Devo, “Gates of Steel”
The rogue’s gallery: two tattoo artists,
two bartenders, and me. This band was a
nosebleed miracle. All my amplifiers
died in separate fires (too much voltage). At
showtime we exploded like landmine shrapnel.
There were some real bruisers in that unit,
dressed like Hell. Bullet belts, engineer boots,
burned leather, unending appetites
for damage. Harrison swallowed a lit
cigarette as a party trick. Allie had
angel language on her face. Bad Wes
coughed and bled blackly under a moon that held
still like a sharpshooter. Josh had this strange
magnetic animal charm practically
sewn into the skin-side of his life.
I just bore witness, wrapped in my battle
jacket and doing my best to keep up.
An audience member spit on Allie
one time so she broke his nose. If any
member of the gang yelled “Go!” it was all hell:
we’re throwing hockey punches ’til it’s lights out.
We kissed goodbye with our hands taped. The band’s life
burned at the speed of head trauma. This is
how I learned to pounce on the world boots-first.
Zack Carson
Zack Carson is a poet and musician from Asheville, NC. He is pursuing an MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has been (or will be) published in The Shore, Soundings East, All Existing, and Inscape, among other places.
April 2025 | poetry
Books
There are too many.
They should be pulped.
They should be pulped to make useful things.
Cardboard coffins, for instance.
I’d like to be buried in unread copies of Moby Dick.
Old Photographs
I don’t like old photographs.
Old photographs are cruel.
Old photographs are sadistic.
They enjoy inflicting pain.
Here is the perfect example on
the windowsill in front of me.
Look at the smile on my young
wife’s face. And on my little
daughter’s face, look at the laugh.
J.R. Solonche
Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and the co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
April 2025 | poetry
I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability. Smoke, ice, ancestral fingerprints. Around this cold evidence, planets painted by a noble hand, lanterning the shade. Directing our eyes from a soiled hunger. Spaces of light relief, to birth screamless. The glass has been cold for decades. My lips pressed to its green imaginings, already misted before any invasion. The plants grow as a daughter’s hair — beyond common death. On good twilights, vines reach the height of a lover’s climax. I see my mother’s tresses waterfallen at her hips, before pooling, unassisted. The last recorded summer came thick & flooded. He reminded me of thawing glaciers. Blue china shaken on the mantle of a faultline. After the tremors, I washed my own hair immemorial, asking what could still float above eye-level. The small fish paying for my debts with their silver? The pink coral pleasuring in the absence of flesh? I’d backstroke through our burnished climate. Let the tailwinds shed his possessions over me again. Our bodies glowing in oil & salt. He, a good man for tending reflections. For oversleeping the season with. His hands electing fine rain, cradling the era’s bouquets over my belly.
Vikki C.
Vikki C. is a British-born writer, musician, and author of two poetry collections, including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Her writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature and has appeared in over 70 publications across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. Recent venues include The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Grain Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sweet Literary, Cable Street, Feral: A Journal Of Poetry And Art, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, and Ice Floe Press, among others. Vikki was named a winner of the Black Bough Poetry 2024 Poetry Manuscript Contest and was shortlisted in the DarkWinter 2nd Anniversary Contest, judged by Kim Fahner. Her writing and voice have been featured in various podcasts and audio collaborations, which showcase her music and spoken-word craft.
