SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

Let me tell you about this magic world    surge of snowsound    small
Birds streak across the sky   First   you must bury what you brought with you
You must bury  Find    the light and find the mirror You are not outside
The astrocytes     the combination   We have now created   a language together

Slow winter snake with the tail cut off    if you follow the trail of blood
You’ll enter a house    and find in a bloodsoaked bed a woman   missing a foot
Peek not    through the keyhole    lest ye be vexed   lest ye be hexed
The mistake of looking   is what makes the ones you love    disappear

I wind the twine around the twigs   make arms   make legs   little body
Little head    Carry it in my pocket   name it    to make her love me
Yes I am nimble-finger blessed   Yes I am starting at the start  This is how
I came apart   Now I move every day   under stars   we know nothing about

Now I am reminded    I will never know the names    of all the people
My father removed from this earth    in the hour of the wolf     I am
Reminded    I am a child of this place   We are all molecule synapse starlight
Mouse tooth     Please please please    please    please       don’t shoot

Darwin puts a cup of worms on the piano    to see how they react
As his wife plays Chopin   Nothing    I burn you burn we all burn together
Twist the warp   wind the weft   light the touchpaper     Bring water
It’s not what they call you    grandfather says     it’s what you answer to

Let us swim now   and be pulled under only to emerge from black sand
With glittering   mica in our mouths       smooth stones on our eyes

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Carolann Caviglia Madden’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, World Literature Today, Interim, The Stinging Fly, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Navy brat, the granddaughter of immigrants, and earned her PhD in Poetry and Folklore, along with a Certificate in Translation Studies, at the University of Houston in 2021. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Letter to DiasporaNational University of Ireland, Maynooth.

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Carlo Saio, born and raised in Kenya. Studied a Poetry MA at the University of East Anglia. Currently 6 months into a walk through Africa and writing a book about the wild journey.

trees dangle upside down from a sky
which is no longer sky
but mineral gem earth insulating us
from the various problems of birds

singing below     singing below
a reminder of the past kept
in the folds of distance

as I walk through blue & discarded clouds
I examine tree canopy’s swish
a froth situating my ankles

these shocks of green
everywhere     everywhere flesh
of leaves & stalks pertinent
to my arms & legs & face
an almost-substitute for people
(remembering when people
touched each other’s bodies)

branches are capillaries & how like skin
to be this dry & forgotten
like when you were here last
& I rubbed rose oil
into the difficult geometry
of your scars

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Nature’s intricacies inspire Carolyn Wilsey to write poems, sometimes surreal ones. She wrote this poem during the Community of Writers workshop, which was extremely meaningful to her. Mary Oliver’s idea in “The Swan” that the bird “pertained to everything” sparked one of the lines. Carolyn’s writing appears in Pretty Owl Poetry, Eclectica, West Marin Review, Quiet Lightning, and other publications. She has an MFA from Emerson College.

the children can’t help / but puff out their cheeks / when the first numb nose of fall / makes them feign to kiss the wind / back to back / like a promise to dying flowers / matters amidst the mulch / like our neighbors that layer plastic / over their bushes / might be able to save / us all / like the schools might suddenly open again / or bare faces might one day / be as beautiful as a masked face / can be when it carries / no autobiography of death / in a drop of spittle / like the men in my hometown / might stop threatening me / for reading poems / over the graves / of their children / because the president has said / i should be buried / for warning them / that all drugs are wolves / that all wolves / are death lobbyists / are bought by death / like our president / who has counted dead children / by the hundreds / as bricks in a wall / that will keep us / warm this winter / when no fabric will matter / when the layering / i have kept specifically / for my three children / will not matter at all / because the fires will be burning / the smell will be turning / our stomachs / all of the kissing will end / in a proper smack / of this world / rushing towards the boundaries / of existence / like small lips / wishing they did not have / to be asked / to frame the words / of a future / they don’t quite believe in

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Darren C. Demaree is the author of seventeen poetry collections, most recently “clawing at the grounded moon”, (April Gloaming, forthcoming in August 2022).  He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry.  He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

i shuck the oyster of my life
and it is foul;
listening to Kate Bush while
the poodle takes too long
to pee, instead sticking his snout
between frothy hydrangeas—
he is prancing across the yard now
and i am mincing on the sun—
i call to him,
standing in the doorframe,
besieged by a sense
of inbetweeness;
he ignores me and
we both devolve
into platitudes.

________________

Chloe Tsolakoglou is a Greek-American writer who grew up in Athens, Greece. She obtained her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School, where she served as the Anselm Hollo Fellow. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming by Denver Quarterly’s FIVES, The Adroit Journal, GASHER, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at www.fridaycowgirl.com

The lab results record flags
on an unspoiled landscape

as coup d’etat. Children
draw to her ferrous scent.

Men side-eye temporary
breasts. They get blamed.

She’s spent too much time
missing the seasons tapered

to nights you were mistaken
for an unmet condition or

worse, stickiness to wash
away. Redact any magic.

After years simmering mutiny,
evidence of the coup dots the report,

red flags on new colonies.
She imagines blood fertilizing

lush an overzealous womb.
She imagines a new magic;

coagulations verdant against the
topography, green as summer.

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darlene anita scott is a writer and visual artist. Author of the poetry collection Marrow and co-editor of the creative-critical volume Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, her recent writing appears in Witness, Obsidian, and Revolute. Her art can be viewed in The Journal, The West Review, and The Journal of Compressed Arts and her photography in Barren Magazine, Auburn Avenue, and Persephone’s Daughters.

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Emily Hyland’s poetry appears in armarolla, The Brooklyn Review, Palette, and The Hollins Critic, among others. In 2021, her poem, Ashes Arts and Crafts, placed third in the Frontier Award for New Poets. Emily earned her MFA in poetry and MA in English education from Brooklyn College. A restaurateur and educator from NYC, she co-founded the national restaurant group, Pizza Loves Emily, and her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books in 2018.

FEAST

At night I eat a garden, though I keep this from my sister. She wants more
from the remnants: to bloom sweet green scraps, bok choy from chopped heads
ghosts rooting climbing down through clear glass, curling in and in, carrots bobs
no bodies but green froth good for pesto,
cabbage a crown of new life and scallions
folding themselves up from the insides, wet and thinly slimed
all rims, a course of hair uncouth at the base. Her hands retain
the wax of leaves, dirt at the nail and
signs of scrubbing like when
she was new to me. Hello
she says to spinach buds reborn, the tempo of greeting
unfurling now – knowing
as I know, her patience is cut
with a quick and verdant anger
a slit tonged wrath at racists, the nosy, the rude
that I covet
and admire – knowing greenly
of my midnight feast, how wants in this time
are fecund, allow some meetings and not others.

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Emily Mitamura is a queer Japanese American poet and PhD student living in Minnesota. Her academic work takes up afterlives of colonial and mass violence, in particular the narrative demands placed on those in its wakes. Her poetry works through continuous bodily, relational, archival  hauntings and appears in AAWW: The Margins, Discover Nikkei, AADOREE, and Clarion Magazine among other places. You can find her at http://emilymitamura.com or at Magers & Quinn booksellers’ $1 section.

The snow didn’t know, but the sheer could have shaved
the shapes off your face, you off the mountain, your

memory from anyone in its path. To fall six thousand
feet is almost flying, but this wind could carry you

further before you even knew you fell, before you missed
the parts of you it could hard freeze or twist free. Sensitive

instruments told us what they could, something no one
had recorded before and haven’t since: a roar

tornados and hurricanes never thought a loner could
muster. This is where the high howl sings everything

to death. This is where the sound found ways in
and out of bodies it never knew it could. Elbows, skulls,

teeth, ribs stripped clean are all chimes. What gale
could resist a tug, the dull clang to follow?

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John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: North American Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, American Literary Review and Massachusetts Review. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his M.A. from University of South Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

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Lucy Walker is a New England poet. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has been most recently published in Radius, Stonecrop Magazine, and Bodega Magazine.