Cold Reflections

Image description: The head of a kayak on a still river, trees on the skyline, sun reflecting off the water.

By Laura Remington

I dip the paddle right, swing it over and dip it left. My kayak glides across the still surface, slicing the mirror. Water dribbles from the paddle. Warps reflections. Only loons talking. Cold water. Sparkles like diamonds.

We were on that rafting trip on the Youghiogheny River, Rafe and I. Water shockingly cold. A recorded voice warned if you fell in you could lose the will to live. So dramatic. We laughed. Couldn’t stop laughing.

The ring. I paddle along the shore. Still seeking. Not finding. The water is warmer here near land. Warm enough to swim.

Not there. On the Youghiogheny. The rushing water was just as cold on shore. We dipped in and out. Fast. Laughing. Warmed each other up. They weren’t lying about the hypothermia. Tent for two. Small blue velvet box. Ring size.

Later, on the Boundary Waters, mosquitos were the size of lemons. Black flies more like cantaloupes. Both voracious. Water still and cold. We paddled all day. Mostly silent. Less laughing. Our tent was more elaborate. Comfortable air mattresses. A real cook stove. My finger bare. Sparkle gone.

The ring knew. It told me before he did. Has it found its way to Lake Superior? Is it on the muddy bottom below? In the middle of the lake, I set the paddle across the deck and slow to a stop. When I look down, I see only my reflection. I lean back and tip my face toward the sun.

---

Laura Remington lives and writes in Northern California, but at heart she’s a Yooper, born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her fiction has appeared in several publications, including Jabberwock Review, Barstrow & Grand, Third Wednesday Magazine, DASH Literary Journal, and Clackamas Literary Review.

My Mother on the Phone

Image Description: A backyard with a brown fence and large, looming trees.

By Michaela Brown

My mother on the phone with her mother flicks her tongue

the way she does when she reads me the single Dutch book on my shelf.

Down the stairs, she lumbers, phone pressed to ear, ear

absorbing the strung symphony of guttural verbs, short, sanded-down

declarations I know are such based on inflection alone.

My mother on the phone in our backyard, feet on an empty bucket

feet pretending they are standing on black, yellow, red land.

My mother on the phone speaking faster, my mother on the phone laughing,

my mother on the phone with her mother wants to “say hi”

want to envelope me in their language I do not know. Are they not always

using their mother tongues? Are they not always mothers

speaking? Three daughters on two ends of the phone and who has mothered

my tongue? I want to sing this national anthem,

I want to write this poem. Between Oma & me there is more than an ocean.

---

A recent graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Michaela is an EFL teacher currently based in Vigo, Spain. She is the first place recipient of the 2020 Marjorie Stover Short Story prize and has previously been published in Laurus Magazine, The Coop, and Dailyer. You can find her on Twitter @mikienbrown.

Wildland Urban Interface

Image description: Frosted blades of glass, close up.

By Russell Brakefield

Sharp clarity in the yard today.

A river of spring snowmelt

adorns my ankles in icy lace.

The dog moves like a mountain

beneath clouds of wrecked lilac.

There is no stink here, no char

or drab blankets of smoke.

A light wind turns chimes

on the porch. The box of mint

and Russian sage—braised

suddenly in bees—hovers above

the earth. And why am I so lucky?

In neighborhoods just north

a horse runs burning from yard

to yard to yard, it’s mane and tail

flickering in the fog, it’s coal-

black back saddled with ruin.

---

Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press, 2018) and the chapbook Our Natural Satellite (Harvard Square Press, 2022). He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.

I Don't Need Permission to Dirge But

Image description: three panels of wood, seemingly worn down with dark smudges.

By Amanda Gaines

on the hottest day of the summer, my body decides

to fucking lose it.        Wails

on a phone line to its beloved, daydreams

colliding into a brick wall at fifty MPH, abandons

the house of a best friend without explanation.         I wish I could explain

the fleas burrowing beneath my wood floors,                        the torn hole

in the tire of my lemony Volkswagen,          the accordion list

of unsent emails & academic protocols & untended sisters

a thousand miles from me back east, the partly part-time job

I picked up to keep the lights on.       My fear of being too much & never

enough.          Truth, a friend tells me, isn’t confession. Desire

usually does the trick.                         I try--I want to watch my man

bike down a black diamond

in sexy silver leggings. To play Two-Dots & eat ice cream, to give

my stretch marks beautiful girl names. To book it

back to Appalachia, to find a small cabin stocked with bath bombs

& cheese puffs & VHS copies of horror movies to help me

sleep.               With a disco ball & speaker system that bumps

Pinkshift on repeat.     With every stuffed animal I’ve ever kissed

on the forehead without shame.

In the real, rain plays withholding.     Girls I once dropped

it low with in hot pants get married to mediocre men.           My sister

buys her first car & I am not there     to witness her smile

overshadow the skyline.         My mother texts me

You can always come home.   I pull out

my hair in a feedback loop, leave evidence of loss

everywhere I go.         I want to scream

in an empty room until my esophagus splits its seams.         To pretend

I still have a say over my future.        To be held

like a child, to have nothing

to prove. To don stilettos & get in a bar fight with J.D Vance

knowing the right kind of hooked anger

can bring any bully to their knees. To feel the pressure of a tongue

between my legs,       look down

& find my man ordering take-out.      My idea of luxury:

not begging for what I need.   How luxurious it would be

to paint my nails with glitter in candle-lit room with friends & talk

art, fearless.     A luxury: a self-cleaning stove, a heart

that can give without breaking.          A storm cloud that lingers

over my Oklahoma threshold, promising

Not soon--now.

---

Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer and Ph.D. candidate in CNF in Oklahoma State University's creative writing program. Her poetry and nonfiction are published or awaiting publication in Barrelhouse, Willow Springs, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Superstition Review.

The Flock

Image description: Silhouette of a flock of birds flying across an orange sky with a bright sun behind them.

BY SWATI SUDARSAN

Siya had been holding a tornado in her gums for so long that it was more startling than relieving when the thrumming finally stopped. The tension in her mouth had released when she saw the predator’s jaw snap over a scarlet bird on her screen. She grew lamplit and silky beneath it, allowing her soup to splatter over herself and the floor. It was her first night alone in her old house. Her apartment was gutted -- the only things left inside were a desk, a mattress, and of course, the screen. It was a behemoth that took up almost an entire wall. Shawn had purchased it, despite her finding it stifling. Now its insularity allowed her to tread deep into the recesses of her thoughts.

The bird had landed cleanly without flinching. She had watched the scene frame by frame, comprehending the bird’s temerity. The camera panned to the cliffside where birds brooded along the rocks. Their home was a gate between the river and the clouds from which blueness peeked out, as if mirroring the water helped it materialize. The birds dove from their roosts, throbbing through the sky like ink splattered by a vortexing plate. They flew in abstract shapes, occasionally hewing off a bird or two. The flock didn’t look for them. Those birds were as gone to them as ashen stars on a cloudy night.

Siya paused the show. Her calves glowed blue beneath the screen, blending out her bruises. They were fading to a soft yellow that hardly showed anymore beneath the brownness of her skin. A few weeks ago her legs had been streams, her skin flowing over shades of peat moss and algae. After Shawn hit her, she had held herself up like a discarded carcass. A fragment of a shell.

The frozen screen showed the murky foam of the river’s edge where waves kissed onto the shore. This was where the predator lived. Still the birds dove down toward the shore to unbury seeds and crab remnants. Siya decided she did not feel sorry for the bird in the jaw. Instead she mourned the birds in the sand. They ingested whatever they uncovered, never seeking a life beyond the mercy of the beach. They could not understand the bird in the jaws, who left behind insistent purrs from the cliffside to finally experience its heartbeat in its throat.

Siya knew there were other birds like that one. Birds who pummeled chest-first into splintered rocks. They knew how to turn the entire flock like the fold in a banner. And birds snatched mid-air into an eagle’s claw. They knew the relief of being carried by the beating of someone else’s wings.

Siya played the show again. As the scene rolled forward, she forgot the ripples on her legs. She noticed between the flying birds were their blood red feathers, floating upwards. They floated slowly and unpredictably toward the clarity of the sky’s untouched blue.

---

Swati Sudarsan is based in Oakland, CA (Ohlone Land). She has received support from the Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. She was the runner-up of the 2022 So to Speak Contest Issue, and has work in McSweeney's, The Adroit Journal, Maudlin House and more. She can be found on social media as @booksnailmail

Omíyalé

By Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò

Lagos flood killed three siblings, four adults—NEMA

it is hard to imagine how water too can be a villain
wearing the face of soft rains. until there's puddles

until brothers on an errand is munched by a flood.
how swift it is for glee to alchemize into ruin without

sympathy for who carries the aftermath. when Okri
wrote famished road, he was sharing his massive

waterloo with avenues too. and sometimes, you step
on the road's tail too long you end up a bowl of dinner

somewhere far away where vultures busy themselves
with your guts. Èkó arómisá lègbe lègbe, i am learning to

escape every livid eye of the sky lest i fossilize in the calloused
palms of rain—a blessing shower i banged on God's door

once as a kid to gift me as if a parcel of birthday's present. a boy
down the street went to school some weeks ago and never returned.

they found his remains at the shore this morning. the sea that brought
him must have thought: you don't kill a flower and eat its tendrils.

or who gnashes teeth at the tiniest misery miracle of boneyard burial?

---

Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò is a Nigerian writer and a member of the Frontiers Collective. His works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in 4faced Liar, Rulerless, Perhappened, Kissing Dynamite, Lumiere Review, Temz Review, Afritondo, Fourth River Review and elsewhere.

Twitter Handle: @eniola_abdulroq

The Flower’s Grand Opening

Translated by Sekyo Nam Haines

Eyes barely open, I lean against the headboard, think of nothing.

Before burning down one candle’s shaft, the short summer’s night flees,

over the threshold stone, suddenly, the pomegranate flowers explode.

Inside the bud, a new universe, squirms to open! O, here

the silent vapor of the primordial ocean wets the petals.

The pomegranate flowers color my entire room.

I go inside the Pomegranate flower and sit. Think of nothing.

Original poem by Cho Ji Hoon

화체개현

실눈을 뜨고 벽에 기대인다 아무 것도 생각할 수가 없다.

짧은 여름 밤은 촛불 한 자루도 못다 녹인 채 사라지기 때문에

섬돌 위에 문득 석류꽃이 터진다.

꽃망울 속에 새로운 우주가 열리는 파동! 아 여기 태고 적

바다의 소리 없는 물보래가  꽃잎을 적신다

방 안 하나 가득 석류꽃이 물들어 온다. 내가 석류꽃 속으로

들어가 앉는다. 아무 것도 생각할 수가 없다.

---

Born in South Korea, Sekyo Nam Haines immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 as a registered nurse. She studied American literature and writing at Goddard College ADP and poetry with the late Ottone M. Riccio in Boston, MA. Her first book, Bitter Seasons' Whip: The Translated Poems of Lee Yuk Sa was published in April 2022 (Tolsun books). Her poems have appeared in the poetry journals Constellations, Off the Coast and Lily Poetry Review. Her translations of Korean poetry by Cho Ji Hoon have or will appear in Interim, Asymptote’s Tuesday blog, The Tampa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Consequence Forum, May Day. Her translations of Kim Sowohl’s poetry have appeared in The Harvard Review, Brooklynrail: InTranslation, Ezra, and Circumference. Her translation of “The Dire Pinnacle” by Lee Yuk Sa appeared in And There Will Be Singing /An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review. Sekyo lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

Born in 1920, Cho Ji Hoon is a canonical poet of modern Korea and a renowned traditionalist of Korean aesthetics. Although his poetry is written in a modernist free verse form, his poems resonate with the deep root of Korean literati Sijo and have an intense local flavor, imbued with the sounds, smells and colors of pre-industrial Korea.  In 1939, at age 19, Cho Ji Hoon published his first poem in the literary magazine MoonJang. In 1946, he published his collection of poetry, Cheongnok Zip (청록집)  alongside with the poets Park Mokwohl and Pak Doo Zin. They were known as “Cheongnokpa,” the Green Deer Poets. A professor of Korean language and literature at Korea University for 20 years, Cho Ji Hoon served as the president of the Korean cultural society affiliated with the university and president of the Korean poet’s association. He received numerous literary awards, published five poetry collections, and many books related to Korean literature and culture.

Elegy for the River in the Desert

By Jemma Leigh Roe

––after Natalie Diaz

I thought I would not live until the end of that summer

feeding on the creosotic air and the turquoise sky

when I thought the body was imaginary

when I thought that love was real.

But the monsoon came in September

to flood the arroyo where I deserted

my body night after night.

The coyotes who wandered on the mountain descended

and stayed up with me to watch

the silent sun rise from my sluggish heart,

rise through my dry-stricken throat that stung

like scorpion weed with blooms of amethyst stones

I wore to protect myself.

Only then, I felt the river flow through my veins

pulsing in the chaste aridity, beating the never-ending heat

during that summer of wildfires

when a white-tailed deer bowed before it and drank

ignoring the hunter’s gun

when I died in the brush

and came back to life.

---

Jemma Leigh Roe studied art at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Her poems and artwork appear in The Ilanot Review, The Fourth River, Thin Air, Canyon Voices, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and others. www.jemmaleighroe.com

Here is a Tree Without Leaves

By Claire Kortyna

stark, honed form, hunkered down, waiting.   

This week I write until hunger sickens me:  

roils of nausea, black-spotted vision.  

At five p.m.: melt into the couch, hibernate the remaining day. 

Here is what the leaves say when they arrive:  

Here is where we hold joy in our bodies: 

Here is how joy feels:  

A cat’s paw on a laser beam  

on rainbows refracted through the prism in my bedroom window 

Here are things the cat catches: 

Here are things never caught:  

The cat dies, the prism breaks 

If you want to find something, stop looking  

Where do we hold joy in our bodies? Can we say how it feels? 

When I try to make you feel mine, what am I missing? 

How do I hold it against your skin? Me,  

who only vaguely remembers.  

Remind me what I forgot:  

of the rising, welling,  

of something in the gut 

of a tension that releases  

of the lifting at the base of your skull 

remind me of leaves. 

---

Claire Kortyna's work has been published in Blood Orange Review, The Maine Review, The Baltimore Review, Jellyfish Review and others. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She reads for The Cincinnati Review. Her twitter handle is: @ckortyna

Small Globes

By Jen Schalliol Huang

Within is my body, and without

also contours my shape

like a sail: sometimes filled,

sometimes buffeted. Sometimes

we don’t get choices, only input:

temperature, pressure, nuance.

Deviation. Sudden and immoderate.

The body can be a leaf in wind

curled and scudding,

paper-thin toward the edges,

or petaled with decadence,

peony-crowned.

When the bloom is

too heavy for the stem,

it becomes the curving bow,

the head pillowed in dirt.

It becomes music. Song

in the most surprising places.

---

Jen Schalliol Huang is a disabled poet living pondside in Massachusetts. She reads for [PANK] and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Jet Fuel, the lickety-split, Sou’wester, Shenandoah, SWWIM, and others.

The Lizard

By Lúcia Leão

curls its tail, leaves

the summer

behind−where

do I straighten out

this longing?

---

Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, South Florida Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing.

Imagining My Own Death

By Ann Hudson

is what I do on my most

difficult nights, the lamp

clicked off, the book bookmarked

and set beneath the reading glasses,

pills, and glass. I just don’t want

to let anyone down. What if

there’s some warning sign, some

important pain I should act on?

What if I mess it up? I cleaned out

the pantry shelves today,

emptying down the disposal

the pickled beets, the pears,

the raspberry jam I canned myself

but never had the faith to eat.

---

Ann Hudson is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press) and Glow (Next Page
Press), a chapbook on radium. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab
Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, SWWIM,
and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO, and teaches at a Montessori school in
Evanston, Illinois.

Third Anniversary (or, First Anniversary After the Birth of Our Daughter)

By Lindsay Adkins

Into that skin:

a lone bull curls

its throat back to neck.

Arc of horn.

Empty gray fields.

Pink eyelid of morning.

In high school they rumored tipping,

sparse fences missing posts, gaps

wide enough for past-curfew bodies.

I imagined the feeling of toppled animal,

immobility, a spine in the dirt,

the quiet sting of mosquitoes.

Before fear, before boot thunder

and the impossible shotgun

there are true stars and fragments

of knowing no living

thing moves on its own.

***

My mother’s love was not

a manmade material. She bought

me leather shoes to walk in.

Your feet need to breathe, she’d say,

the tiny lungs in my heels huffing

while she pressed her thumb

on my toe to measure room for growth.

Thrilling, to be found, to feel

where my body stopped and started.

Many times I’d watched her

or my father sift through bins

of frozen supermarket meat,

looking at cuts, dates, fat.

There was always a right choice.

***

We can choose

rawness, then. We can

choose to have a choice.

Last year, cotton, next year,

fruit and flowers. Leather

between, but we’ve already seen

my body give and stretch,

breathe to cocoon another,

no exchange of coin.

How am I both

animal and its empty dried out skin,

both what I was and what I will be?

Our daughter lies here

rubbing her back into the carpet,

unable yet to roll.

We can show her how to move,

how to reach forward, pull back

without coming apart.

---

Lindsay Adkins is a Western MA writer whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, Narrative, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, great weather for MEDIA, and Sugar House Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers and holds an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton.

The Playground

By Corinna Schulenburg

On the playground the maskless kids crash like stocks.

They scramble up the metal tongues of slides

like names unsaying themselves.

The swings keep reminding us

there is no gravity until there is

so pull with your arms, kick with your legs.

At night, the streetlamps drench the place in a fire

made of bones and a million years of weight.

We moved here to have it be her backyard. City

kid. I grew up with dunes behind me.

But everywhere I love is scheduled to be drowned.

Here is the high ground. Here, the water rushes

out of faucets to fill balloons that smack

against the scalding pavement. Here,

run through the sprinklers and get yourself cool.

One September, she dashed through them every day

after school, drunk on her own daring.

In the pictures, each bead of water is suspended

around her rapture like a flight of liquid stars.

At night, teenagers drift into the seams

to paw at buttons and drag on smoke

before retreating to their shrinking beds.

Now the playground is empty. Now they begin,

the long, dreadful fingers, reaching backward

from a narrowing future to pull on the threads

of the place, all the promises it can

no longer keep. The grown-ups will come

in the morning, and with our bodies,

patch the holes and cover the frayed places,

as our kids climb rung by rung

into the arms of the sun.

---

Corinna Schulenburg (she/her) is a queer trans artist/activist. She’s a mother, a playwright, a poet, and a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble. Poems in: Capsule Stories, Long Con, LUPERCALIA, miniskirt magazine, Moist, Moonflake Press, Okay Donkey, Oroboro, SHIFT, The Shore, and more. https://corinnaschulenburg.com/writer/poet/

Sexually Explicit Skywriting

By Vincent Antonio Rendoni

Look up.

Forgive me, mi amor
for this.

This is how I was taught to love— for all to see.

I can feel the blood in your face. I feel it in me too.

But before you bring my life to its ignoble end, let me just say this:

There are only so many good years left in our bodies.

Think of what we’re able to do now.

The things we can’t later.

I know, I am so morbid!

So let’s say yes and shout our intentions
for when we are willing, when we can, and say yes.

Take all the time you need to think.

But not too much.

Look up.

Nothing is written.

There’s time.

---

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is a 2022 Jack Straw Fellow and winner of Blue Earth Review’s 2021 Annual Flash Fiction Contest. He is a contributor to What They Leave Behind: A Latinx Anthology. His work has appeared / will appear in the Texas Review, Juked, Fiction Southeast, Sky Island Journal & more.

Familiar Woods

By Felicia Bedford

Turned over rocks.

Broken limbs.

A well-trodden path,

That I continue to find beauty in.

Even the dead or dying parts.

It’s always been something,

About the frost and cold.

Or the dripping hot.

That forced me into wooded solitude.

The little creek,

That runs in muddy clear.

Laps up against my feet.

Causing a jolt

Against my nervous system.

It’s grounds me,

To see it all.

It sends me back home.

To my own woods.

I feel challenged,

To find my own little piece of familiar,

Everywhere I go.

Looking for mossy spores.

Looking for,

Peace?

Searching for,

Myself.

Will I find her,

Out there

In the thicket.

It’s impossible to say.

But I know,

That if forced to choose,

I’d go back,

Before this land we now have

Took shape.

And I would live amongst the animals.

---

Felicia Bedford is a sophomore Biology major at Duquesne, where she also studies creative writing. She intends to complete Duquesne's English MA after Undergrad. Her work can also be seen in the D.U. Quark.

And the Grasshoppers Flick All Their Wild Wings

By Jessica Dionne

Amid blue flowers, I cried for what I never had.

                                                                                                            A verdant violence.

All of my worries are two-handed and humming.

                        The chambers of their abdomen         

                                                                                                            a counting of loss.

The milk-white hands of your mother

                        we’ll never pass down. I once called desire

                                                                                                            the wrong title

named it need, forgot the difference

                        and decided the distance was a small bee

                                                                                                            lost in smoke.

There are raptures that won’t come for you

                        And raptures that will. A one-winged

                                                                                                            caelifera

on a path of unconcerned spirals.

            Out by the lamppost, screaming bright circles—        

                                                                                                            an infestation.

Each one an anxiety, escaped from the throat.

---

Jessica Dionne is a PhD student at GSU and the production editor of New South. Her chapbook Second-Hand Love Stories is forthcoming from Fjords Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Moth (IE), Narrative, Forth River, Meridian, SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), and Mascara Literary Review (AU).

Two Little Rivers

By Laura Pochintesta

Name the great rivers of the world

You know, the ones you learned

In school – how to spell them,

Where on earth they are,

The direction in which they flow,

Their basin, their source - in fact

All the terms you memorized for the geography quiz

Remember the Nile, the Amazon,

The Tigris and Euphrates, the

M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i

Most of us grew up never having seen

Most of them, just memorizing

Their lengths, their significance as

Feeders of fertile soil on which great

Civilizations were planted.

But, no one ever talks about the

Two little rivers

Where my ancestors are from

Their names do not ring a bell on any test

They are so far from grand they sometimes

Dry up all together in the heat of midsummer

When pebbles and rocks pockmark the course

Where their waters will flow again come fall.

From these

Two little rivers

Came hundreds, maybe thousands, of people

Some of whom ended up on ships carrying them

Across oceans bound for greater rivers

Far from the people born in the hills and valleys

Formed and fed by those

Two little rivers

Whose names will be forgotten by those who don’t learn

To sing the songs and tell the stories that speak of them

Two little rivers

Whose currents will pulse in the veins of their descendants

Flowing, surging like lifeblood, emptying themselves

Into a future sea

---

Laura Pochintesta is a writer in Connecticut. She enjoys writing poetry and fiction that examine relationships in a historical context, often with a focus on familial bonds, faith, migration and home. Her work has appeared in literary journals. Her chapbook She: A Small Book of Poems is available on Amazon.

Absence of Memory

By Robert René Galván

As the mind extends

its tributaries,

so does the body

erode into silt,

Or to an empty canyon

where strata record

histories delicate

as the veins of a leaf,

or a tree’s rings,

Doomed to return

as rain, again

and again,

to the spring

with an absence

of memory.

---

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His last collections of poems are entitled, "Meteors," Undesirable: Race and Remembrance, Somos en Escrito Foundation Press, Standing Stones, Finishing Line Press, and The Shadow of Time, Adelaide Books.

Crater Lake

By Shannon Spies

No one tells you the blue will assault you,

or that, devoid of motion, the lake

is not a lake, but some dead thing, empirically

beautiful, killed by all that blue.

So when you reach the viewing station

after hours in the car, wedged between

your sisters, who are strangers,

and your father, whose wife has made him

strange to you, you nearly tip headlong

into the water, nearly jump.

In that moment, you must have looked as sublime

as any teenage boy could look, poised

on the edge of his life, windless,

looking down a thousand feet into

a breathless hue. When we pulled you

       back from the rail, you must have blushed.

       Or, compelled by love, you must have been ashamed.    

       Even now, I see its mark in you.

       Your eyes have withered in their depth

       and drawn snow in.

       Their blue is halted at the blue of ice. Those savage peaks

       thrust up a thousand feet into your eyes.

       When you returned from prison, you must have wondered

       why I never wrote to you.

       I had the paper but couldn’t move the pen. For months

       I thought Should I send a book?

       But look: there are no pines or mountains. Only blue.

       That which is clear is that which draws us in.

       At thirty-three, brother, you cannot hope to change.

       You are the oldest living thing on Earth.

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Shannon Spies earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho, where she developed her taste for rhapsodic prosody and the mysteries of the extra-logical. Her poetry has been featured in Poet Lore and Kestrel and is upcoming in Broad River Review. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she serves as a Director on the Swissvale Farmer’s Market Board, and is the proud owner of four hens (Kitty, Ginger, Iggy and Bowie) who wandered into her yard in the summer of 2020.