This issue features
photo by Pere Sanz,
poetry by Kharan Badri,
poetry by Madeleine French,
poetry by Paula Goldman,
poetry by Kenneth Pobo,
photo by Stafano Ember, and
poetry by Haleigh Yaspan
Pere Sanz
The Andromeda Galaxy
© by Pere Sanz.
Kharan Badri
On the Train to Andromeda
An outdated ticket traps me in someone else's dream
–––I chug along, postponing realization.
Disdaining the person I was, am, and will still become
–––setting about with sweet self-immolation.
Foisting fears of abandonment upon new neurons
–––I’m Mister Geppetto’s most defective toy.
Increasingly convinced my being lacks radiance
–––for these joints too infrequently hum with joy.
Trying to recall when I was last happy beyond
–––indulging futile dreams of myself unmade.
Wondering if anyone knows that my lights are on
–––with nary a soul at home for decades.
Scattered in the liminal space between time's fine lines
–––I've disassociated with alacrity.
My soul has forgotten something it can't remember
–––like the Grail mislaid in some lost sacristy.
I’m blind, like aged Longinus and his holy spear
–––thick brambles obscure eternity’s visage.
How am I meant to rediscover the long-frayed thread
–––of my life’s purpose before it disappears?
I’m deaf to veracity’s soft hums tumbling about
–––my serotonin-deprived mind's sad confines.
Overwrought, I declare existence’s blessing wasted
–––moody pessimism numbs every sense of mine.
Pleading once more with my sleep-paralysis demon
–––it’s nigh three a.m. I pray only for some peace.
For nothingness and the embrace of the endless void
–––to wash over me and see these tremors cease.
Unresolved traumas of past lives distant swirl amidst
–––those which are still yet to usher me astray.
Left rudderless in a wretched mess of consciousness
–––I’ll find the way to Shangri-La someday.
Lying to my reflection in gently cracked windows
–––dull with disuse and fogged by dishonesty.
Hopelessly mired in the muck of bygone millennia
–––myopia, my single measure of constancy.
When passengers arise to love's melodious chimes
–––they gift me their best regrets as souvenirs.
Oblivious that I am to the beauty of this birth
–––my ignorance and their bitterness cohere.
Conscious of how far I am from everything’s meaning
–––I search for the Me who might yet understand.
On all planes of existence, at every moment
–––He bides his time, weighing each grain of sand.
A painful cliche, the lovelorn soul with wistful dreams
–––which reality soon saw me abandon.
As the train halts underneath a panoply of stars
–––I disembark, awaiting new companions.
Copyright © 2023 by Kharan Badri.
About the Author
Kharan Badri is an Austin native and a first-generation American with roots in India, Germany, and Syria. His creative influences are an upbringing steeped in Vedanta philosophy, his cats, Freyja and Helios, and the writings of Rumi, Carlos Castaneda, Osho, and Kahlil Gibran. He composes poetry, self-reflective prose, and irreverent comedy on his website, badwriter.net. His work is forthcoming in Bryant Literary Review and riverSedge.
Madeleine French
About Waxed Canvas
Here’s the thing
about waxed canvas:
it remembers, too
I might sketch a finger
along its smooth patina
trailing the scars
of each nick and fold
Like I did, as a girl
playing dot-to-dot
with my freckles
as I could now
tracing my way back
through tiny rivers
on the backs of my hands
Copyright © 2023 by Madeleine French.
About the Author Madeleine French lives in Florida and Virginia with her husband. You may find her in front of a sewing machine, behind a copy of Persuasion, or occasionally on X, @maddiethinks. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Roi Fainéant Press, Dust Poetry Magazine, West Trade Review, The Madrigal, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Remington Review, Door Is a Jar, The Westchester Review, and elsewhere.
Paula Goldman
Vronsky’s Thinning Hair
Anna Karenina by LeoTolstoy
How will it be when you, husband, cover
your bald patches with other hair on your
noble head, settled and married a good
many years? (Three times Tolstoy mentions Vronsky’s
thinning hair as if he were no longer
the lover, but the husband.) Living day to day
with Anna, each inhabits the same space.
Vronsky grows restless, younger than Anna.
(You are bicycling; I’m watching “Hamlet.”
Yes, Hamlet should have taken up a sport.)
Will Anna and Vronsky argue over
what’s for dinner? Who should come
to the next dinner party? And what about
the nights he wants to spend with his officer
friends? What will Anna do? She’ll never fit into
the surrounding society. And what if
Vronsky’s mother stops sending money?
Anna will be penniless. Is all Vronsky’s
thinning hair tied to this or is Tolstoy
saying that time is encompassing
Vronsky? Who has not been enthralled only
to be dejected? The real person versus
the ideal one we project? Who will save us from
jumping before a train? Some say,
Anna’s looking for death, wakes up too late.
Copyright © 2023 by Paula Goldman.
Ariadne’s Lament
You left me on an island
My mind turning
Like a top in a labyrinth
Bumping into walls
Until it topples and rolls
A little ways
Thinking of ways
To get back at/to you
To that loving self
Reflected in your pool
Blue eyes mirroring
A spry loveliness
I had not recognized
For eons
Now I search for the brute
Bull I helped you kill
Inside me always
Fueling my eyes
Dissevering my clothes
Until they fall like leaves
On that barren island
My abandoned soul
Copyright © 2023 by Paula Goldman.
Degas’ Bathers in the Locker Room
.
Seated on a bench outside the steam room,
near the whirlpool while I am drying off
from my shower, I see a larger woman,
30ish, smooth tanned skin, rubbing
a moisturizer over her body.
I think of Degas’ women climbing out
of the tub, or leaning over a basin
set on the floor. The flesh becomes beautiful,
in Woman at her toilette, c1900-5, where
a woman is seen in a three-quarter pose,
with a towel in her right arm washing
her neck, the other hand holding her long
auburn hair providing another
angle in her bent arm. She tilts between
yellow and orange drapery, her long auburn
hair pulled back to show a curved neckline.
In the locker room, our bodies pass along
the way in and out to the pool or showers,
women matting their hair, drying their backs,
under their arms, wrapping too small towels
around their bodies, walking to their lockers,
talking about politics, children, movies.
In Degas’ work there are no stick figures. Walking
naked feels natural in this sanctuary.
And yet, why do I want to be a stick?
So much about the way my butcher father
cut up the female body. Everything
was a meat market. Slicing the cow, gutting
the chickens, grinding meat for hamburger.
How much does this weigh upon my lean shoulders?
Copyright © 2023 by Paula Goldman.
About the Author
Paula Goldman's book, The Great Canopy, won the Gival Press Poetry award, and was honorable mention for the Independent Booksellers’ Award. Her work has appeared in Across the Margin, Oyez Review, Slant, Briar Cliff Review, Calyx, Passager, Ekphrasis, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Manhattanville Review, Cream City Review, Comstock Review, Harvard Review, The North American Review, Poet Lore, Poet Miscellany, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cæsura, and other magazines. She was first prize winner in INKWELL's (Manhattanville College) poetry competition and the Louisiana Literature Award for poetry. She holds an MA degree in Journalism from Marquette University and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Former reporter for The Milwaukee Journal, she served as a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Museum for 25 years. Late Love, a book of poems published by Kelsay Books in Utah appeared in February 2020. She lives in Milwaukee, WI with her husband of 57 years.
Kenneth Pobo
Bobolinko On Feeling Complete
The ad says Feel complete with him. I’m not a crossword puzzle. I don’t need to be solved. My husband doesn’t complete me or I him. He isn’t looking to be completed like a train set. We share some cranberry bread and look out the dining room window at the first passion flower suddenly open.
Copyright © 2023 by Kenneth Pobo.
Bololinko Blabs
I guess I do talk a lot, my grandmother Emma claimed that even as a toddler I talked a blue streak, most of my streaks are ruby red like inside a grapefruit, if it bothers you that I blab, I’ll try to tone it down, though why should I, words are seeds, and to get a good stand of poppies, you need to plant many seeds, let me be colorful as a poppy, waking up a cloud, unlatching the rusty cage where spring waits
Copyright © 2023 by Kenneth Pobo.
About the Author
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac and Sawdust (Meadowlark Press), Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose (BrickHouse Books), and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press).
Stefano Ember
The Catacombs of Paris, France
© by Stefano Ember.
Haleigh Yaspan
9/9
At the nucleus of the great catacombs, a macabre obelisk and a timely reminder: arrive, and take your place in the old chain amid a pastiche of bone, compact and allied— mortal scaffolding to fortify the final empire. In concert, a galloping, choral dream tucked in time between hinges, sketched unsteadily, prevailing in grayscale until proven otherwise, incipient and fragile—a reedy non-guarantee, and lusterless with the dust of imagination applied. Now the texture of breath, connective and elastic, rising to meet reverie—to select, announce, and incarnadine a vision, kiss it full of cloud and mist, and behold the hard-edged likeness, true in itself— truly luminous at last, stripped of all poetic glow.
Copyright © 2023 by Haleigh Yaspan.
Eupnea, Unpretentious
Breath is innate, but to wield it requires discipline. To correct its course is to confront your own amenability, for what sensitive beast is contained must be scrutinized, and pain the myth through which the body unravels. No one breathes alone, lest we forget where we began, we wriggling corn kernels tracing the curve of genesis. Over time we see a failure to adapt, that familiar misstep: expecting that which fosters safety to then induce growth. A sanitized cry renders silence its own form of confinement, a vault of tranquility in the tempest, salutary blue lights aglow. The sky was gray, chasmal; the universe agitated, tachycardic. But I waited for the old practitioner, as now he waits for me.
Copyright © 2023 by Haleigh Yaspan.
About the Author
Haleigh Yaspan’s writing has appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Cumberland River Review, Palette Poetry, California Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her scholarly work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library, Duke University, Florida State University, and Smith College. She lives in New York City.