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Issue 4

Page 1 

1 2 3

demeter as cypress

 

those hands of his, chilled and brittle as just-turned earth,

taking her under roots and blind worms,

his dust-choked halls, heavy-veined stones

weighing her down, lightless, buried, the cries

of torment writhing in her ears, sans night, sans day,

 

my beautiful girl, with hair spun down

to her ankles, who caught sun's rays and flung

them out around her like liquid,

every step

a song

with an arc deep as the sky.

 

my hands knot supplicant.

i do not know how to kneel

but i have knelt. like a tree's limb

battered

under a ceaseless wind.     

 

sara couden

Touch Me

 

draw me how I was

in spring

    sable brush

roundness

of a field

    don't look away

gather flowers

where horizons disappear

    slide down my shoulder

like a thin strap

    touch me

press and softly churn

    the creases of my mind

 

— Sergio Ortiz

My Before

 

In this still point,

we shared a veil of blue wool.

 

In bare feet we marched the parameter of the front lawn

on an early August evening.

A little bride dressed in blue

matching your footprints in the damp grass

 

From this still point

my tiny toes with chipped neon pink polish

made an expedition to its edge

to take one last breath of childhood

before passing through its porous cusp.

 

Before your airborne infection of want and need

hurtled me forward,

depositing me on the other side of girlhood.

 

— Shannon Quinn

The old man sits in his room

 

On the green chair

he got when his grandmother died

he thinks about the day to come, and he decides

that he can’t move.

The sky is still red.

And everything he has been

and was

is found inside the grooves of the life

carved behind him,

carved for him

with purpose and a gentle press

like the pressure applied to a cut

but no one can admit that this distress is not a mistake.

Strategically placed.

His life is erased so it can be drawn.

 

— Jake Arnold

Untitled

 

I hold a shriveled tree in my palm

Listening for bird calls far away

Wondering how long until the end

Of hoping for a new voice arrives 

Rise of darkness becomes

A form of silent extinction in

Empty winter branches— I am

Sitting on a river bank layered

With years of silted remains

Carried into stagnant waters. 

Dippers have left these shores

Leaves blow into wet hollows

Piled thick and rotten underneath

Smelling of old loss heavy now 

Almost beyond repose this poor

Tree frozen in my withered hand

Like tiny birds missing from

Daybreak, this deep silence

Settling in for the final act. 

 

— Emily Strauss