A Faller / B Bucker / Idaho

“Monsoon Summer from the Loneliest Road” by Kathleen Frank

By Miriam Akervall

I wanted to forest,

to stick my dogs into death

for personal heat,

but trees are also bodies.

I couldn’t stand their bleached joints

saluting from the duff.

Paved over, reticent.

Bending toward a Steer’s Head,

I feel as many here

as below Babyn Yar’s skeleton suburb,

bodies staked by soccer cleats

and television towers.

My own great mirrors are driven

with holes.

Memory is a raking chain

of small sharp teeth

and mouthy gullets. Chapped,

neck wrapped. I wanted to cut

with the Great American Tooth.

The first tree I felled was already dead,

charcoal snag sticking up

like a wick in black wax.

The last took hours,

I sighted, chopped,

it sailed down entrails

of brush. The sound came after

the ground shook.

---

Miriam Akervall is a Swedish American first year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. Their work has appeared in Volume Poetry, Stone Journal, Voicemail Poems and elsewhere. They live in Moscow, Idaho.

hunting poem

“Wolf” by Terry Brinkman

By Connor Beeman

twelve years old, still childish

in the ways that matter.

your weight, small as it is,

pressed into the back of a doe.

your father shot it in the spine,

paralyzed it from the waist down,

but failed to kill it.

so now, it suffers.

now, it dies slow.

her front half thrashes—

animal desperate, life desperate.

the back half doesn’t move.

wide black eyes, fear-dark eyes, the smell of blood

and damp moss and dead leaves.

your father,

knife in hand.

the doe’s neck

cut open.

the thrashing stops.

all things stop.

the doe is still.

you are still.

your father rises.

not the cleanest kill, he says,

wiping off the blood.

but still a kill.

---

Connor Beeman (he/they) is a queer Midwest poet who focuses on queerness, place, nature, and history. They are the winner of the 2022 Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award and the author of concrete, rust, marrow (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Other publications include Ghost City Review and New Reader Magazine.

Street Name / Gatans namn

“Vanitas Redux C” by Erica Catherine Matthews

By Katarina Frostenson, translated from Swedish by Brad Harmon

It lies in the light of day

a sense ruffled by its name

you say it and continue on

someone says it and comes home

a rose outside a gate

one day someone thinks without words a face

the street’s name, recited in stone

someone steps on it, dust stirs

a name

what is a name

the undead crown that remains

a set of syllables (once t h a t p e r s o n )

someone said it for ten years

someone called out

someone wrote it and saw nothing

and so one day when someone went there

the name ran across their lips

and at first it was just the sounds someone spoke

e l s a b r ä n d s t r ö m s g a t a

i n t h e m e a d o w

a light unfolded

a rippled strand of hair

someone said it again

and someone else passed by with the breeze

like the body of the poem before the words arrive

like the story that takes place

like everything is and must be awoken time and again

in sunlight and dust

a women on a path

in the time of war

she was called the Angel of Siberia

on the road of gravel

meadows of death

a creation of light as a bandage

what is a name

a rose unfolded

what is a syllable, what is a human

someone says it and goes

someone says it and comes home

someone says it and the street name bursts out

and the sunlight

and the gravel glow

a woman’s life

and everything that existed

in the time of war

a sea of names

---

 Den ligger där i dagens ljus

en aning krusad av sitt namn

man säger det och går

man säger det och kommer hem

en ros står utanför en port 

man tänker utan ord en dag ett ansikte

man sade gatans namn som namnet på en sten

man trampar på det, rör upp damm

ett namn

vad är ett namn

den odödliga kransen som är kvar

ett antal stavelser (som var d e n  m ä n n i s k an )

man sade det i tio år

man ropade

man skrev det, inget sågs

och så en dag när man gick där

rann namnet över läpparna

och det var bara ljuden först, man sade högt

e l s a  b r ä n d s t r ö m s  g a t a

i  f r u ä n g e n

ett ljus vecklades ut

ett krusat hår

man sade det igen

och i ett moln gick någon där/fram

som diktens kropp finns innan orden är

som händelsen som äger rum

som allting är och måste väckas gång på gång

i sol och damm

en kvinna på en väg

i krigets tid

Sibiriens ängel kallades hon

på grusets väg

ängar av död

en ljusvarelse som förband

vad är ett namn

en ros som vecklas ut

vad är en stavelse, vad är en människa

man säger det och går

man säger det och kommer hem

man säger det och gatans namn slår ut

och solens ljus

och gruset yr

en kvinnas liv

och allt som fanns

i krigets tid

ett hav av namn

---

Katarina Frostenson has held a major influence on Swedish and European poetry since the 1980s. She is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and received the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2016 for the collection Sånger och formler (forthcoming in English as The Space of Time).

Bradley Harmon is a writer, translator and scholar of Scandinavian and German literature. In 2021 he was invited to the Översättargruvan translation workshop and in 2022 he was an ALTA Emerging Translator fellow. His book translations include Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Threadsuns Press, 2024), in which “Street Name” will appear.

Tyke the Elephant, 1994

“Tangent XXXIV” by Catherine Skinner

By Jeffrey Hecker

Thomas Square to King Street Catholic Cemetery, VIVE Church Kapiolani Boulevard to Big Island Volcano Tours, Waimanu Street, The Mezzanine at Hana Koa, to Tropical Lamp & Shade, Kamani Street, Café Duck Butt, Sunshine Scuba, Pohulani Processing to Dive Oahu, Yakiniku Sizzle, Mother Waldron Playground, Dream Vision Eye Care to Hanapua Flowers, prior to police shooting her 86 times, Tyke the Elephant crushed her abuser zoo-keeper Allen Campbell, and after cocaine came out of his skull, inside Neal Blaisdell Center to outside one half-hour all around Kaka’ako, Honolulu she ran ran ran ran ran ran ran.

---

Jeffrey Hecker is the author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press), chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press) & Ark Aft (The Magnificent Field). Recent work appears in South Dakota Review. A fourth-generation Hawaiian-American, he teaches at The Muse Writers Center & reads for Quarterly West.

Error

“Minimal” by Avik Sarkhel

By Aiden Heung

Rare to walk into an empty village

in this country, where autumn

has fattened persimmons, each

hanging like an unlit lantern.

At nooks abandoned yellow

of chrysanthemums, phantoms

of fragrance frigid on cobbled

roads. A dozen houses,

wooden boards bolted,

whose termite-ridden grey

sinks into mottled walls,

where dust gathers on clayed

eaves. In the square, baskets

of little harvest, like inlays

on an undone fresco; only

a pillar with fading calligraphy

telling a story of tea, simple

stuff, traded across provinces

by merchants whose heirs

now, migrant workers. I think

I’m the only tourist here;

even my breath sounds stern,

like struggling water in drying

brooks; Otherwise, stillness burns

like useless incense for a quiet

god, who changes as the village

has changed. I too wear a face

of the past, like a marbled

thing, like this village

with a pale crumbled

veneer, time’s exquisite error.

Aiden Heung (He/They) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous Town, currently living as a traveling coating salesman. If he is not on the road selling water-repellent solutions, you can always find him writing poems in one of the Costa Cafes in Shanghai. His poems written in English have appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, Atlanta Review, Parentheses, Crazyhorse, and Black Warrior Review among other places. He can be found on Twitter @aidenheung.

Waves of Huangpu

“Lake Saiko” by Leanne Dunic

By Aiden Heung

I

The waves come to the bund clapping

like hands when the skyline blasts

into light; Many people scuffle

to the cobbled riverside, a moving

collage in which I’m a clown’s

toy, tossed amidst a sea of colors

that abrade my eyes; my hands blurred,

bruised by the hue slung onto my skin.

Has the night fallen? Because

every place now is a non-place

and every face, a misplaced metaphor

in the long stretch of night.

If only I could burst out of this body

and become—

II

But the sound of waves swells

and swings, swings and smashes

into sound smithereens, a strange

reminder that I’m strung into a dis-

array of elements, and waves, yes

waves have come to the rescue—

a few drowned stars, bony

high-rises, the city that floats

off-kilter on its chromatic

reflection. A bloated landscape

on water that will be scraped clean,

before we notice, by iron claws

of the day, and the waves, too,

will disappear.

---

Aiden Heung (He/They) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous Town, currently living as a traveling coating salesman. If he is not on the road selling water-repellent solutions, you can always find him writing poems in one of the Costa Cafes in Shanghai. His poems written in English have appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, Atlanta Review, Parentheses, Crazyhorse, and Black Warrior Review among other places. He can be found on Twitter @aidenheung.

Paradise

“Monument Valley” by Kathleen Frank

By Emma Winsor Wood

Not a place to inhabit

But one that inhabits

*

Hard to get to

So not everyone can

*

There is one island in Hawaii where the residents still live as they did in the 1800s–no cars, no

computers, no cash. It’s owned by white men, who dictate the rules that keep it that way.

*

A bird, a fish, a town just south of Las Vegas. Las Vegas.

*

Whatever you think it is it is

Wherever you thought it was it was

*

Once named, it closes like a fist around another fist

*

Notice: Private Property

Notice: No Trespassing

Notice: Trespassers will be violated to the fullest extent of the law

*

: an enclosure

---

Emma Winsor Wood is the author of the poetry collection The Real World (BlazeVOX books, 2022) and the translator of A Failed Performance (Plays Inverse, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Fence, jubilat, DIAGRAM, The Colorado Review, and BOAAT, among others.