thwack

thwack

BRANDED by Zachary Lundgren

Zachary Lundgren

Zachary LundgrenBRANDED He was drunk and I’m sure it helped when I took the iron from the stove: a loud red, a cruel star. I held the iron like a relic of some religion we’ve all long forgot but is…

BUNGALESE CONSTRICTOR by Jason Kapcala

Jason KapcalaBUNGALESE CONSTRICTOR No one told me that Carlos’s gallery exhibition was that night until after I’d wrangled the Burmese python from under the porch and I was drenched through with rain and covered with dead leaves and muck. Storm…

IN SEARCH OF DEATH by Olive Mullet

Olive Mullet et al

Olive MulletIN SEARCH OF DEATH Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me. —Emily Dickinson —So why are you working at Hospice? Death is my thing. I’ve read all the books on it, most of them…

ALL EARS by Rick Bailey

Rick Bailey

Rick BaileyALL EARS A few weeks ago my father woke up almost totally deaf. He already had a significant deficit. For years he has worn hearing aids. One for each ear, they are a microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker all in…

IN MY TIME by Shannon Viola

Shannon Viola

Shannon ViolaIN MY TIME I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. Sometimes when I’m writing, he’s over my shoulder. He seizes my hand and slashes the Latinate adjectives on my page while I wince and moan. He tugs at one…

WINGS TO GO by Jane Carroll

Jane Carroll

Jane CarrollWINGS TO GO There’s a chicken place on Ridge Avenue called “Wings to Go.” I occasionally wait for a bus across the street, and that sign always seemed to me a little too poetic for a wing place. It…

IN THE MEWS by Nicole Callihan

Nicole Callihan

Nicole CallihanIN THE MEWS Two feuding gardens are thought to be responsible for the most recent blooming. According to the rain, in late summer, a band of tiger lilies recruited a pack of peonies, and those peonies, comely as they…

MARCH 5, 1953 by Robert Wexelblatt

Robert Wexelblatt

Robert WexelblattMARCH 5, 1953 The funeral was flowerless. Every early spring bloom had been expropriated by the KGB for their boss. Scarcely forty people dared show up. Charged with counter-revolutionary bourgeois tendencies, tormented and shunned by the Composers Union, his…

ALL GOOD THINGS by B.A. Varghese

B.A. Varghese

B.A. VargheseALL GOOD THINGS The milk was white and it squirted out from under his hands. He pulled and pulled the cow’s udders one at a time to a rhythmic beat and I watched it fall down in spurts after…

SHACKLED by Kim Suttell

Kim-Suttell

Kim SuttellSHACKLED If it’s a fever you want, then I’m frenzied. What are you but an ice ax ear ache, an ice cleat hike down my throat, the churned Weddell Sea in my paunch. Hell, you’re the whole Antarctic. I…

FLESH AND BLOOD by Jamie Lin

Jamie Lin

Jamie LinFLESH AND BLOOD He’d done it again. Little puddles of sticky green glop all over the floor, specked with shards from the small glass bottle that’d held the apple purée. His fist clutched the plastic spoon as more pale…

PSYCHOGENIC FUGUE by George Moore

George Moore

George MoorePSYCHOGENIC FUGUE Every time I leave home I begin a new life. I am a boy again, sometimes a girl. My memories are so discrete that they talk to each other, gather in rooms, develop friendships without knowing. My…

THE MISER & POSSUM by Lauren Hall

Lauren Hall

Lauren HallTWO POEMS The Miser “He was never a nice man,” she confessed, rolling her stockings slightly below her knees. “Nobody liked him much, not even me.” Through the screen door, I can see my great-grandfather swinging an axe at…

PIGEON by Thompson Mayes

Thompson Mayes

Thompson MayesPIGEON He was hot, too hot, walking on the sunny side of the hard stone streets through tourist stickiness of dripped gelato. He felt as wilted as the reddish-pink blooms that drooped out of the doorway, and he could…

BETTER by Molly McGinnis

Molly McGinnis

Molly McGinnisBETTER I am salt and champagne. Salt and dirt and stars. Two-sided story, double-edged knife. Dinosaur bones and tambourines. I have walked into town by myself at dawn and seen my face reflected in the windows. I have danced…

ARACHNICIDE by Ray Scanlon

Ray Scanlon

Ray ScanlonARACHNICIDE An organ pipe mud dauber is building a nest in the ornamental tin-roofed wren house Cheryl hung by the door. I hear her stridulating at her masonry work, and see her carry a small ball of mud into…

BLOOM IN REVERSE by Teresa Leo reviewed by Anna Strong

BLOOM IN REVERSE by Teresa Leo University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series), 104 pages reviewed by Anna Strong From the dedication page, Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo’s friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we’re at all like Teresa Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the the Sarah Hannahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten. Donald Hall wrote an astounding collection of poems chronicling his wife’s cancer and death, Without. Bloom in Reverse reads much like that collection—in each poem, we feel the keenness of the “without,” the strain of recollection, the reconstruction of the smallest moments of friendship and intimacy in the clearest language accessible to the speaker. Many of the poems are two-line stanzas, heavily enjambed and riddled with fragments, clauses that build and build on each other only to be let go in a kind of sigh—we feel the struggle to hold onto whatever memories come to mind, only to realize that that’s all they are. The ending of “She Said: It’s Not that Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things” struck me as the most poignant of these conclusions:

CARDBOARD PIANO by Rina Terry reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Cardboard Piano
CARDBOARD PIANO by Rina Terry Texture Press, 102 pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat We tend to equate the word “prison” with concrete, metal and despair, ostensibly as means of change or as a tool of rehabilitation. In her new collection, Cardboard Piano, Rina Terry reveals multi-layered evidence of the transformative power of art versus stone. Anyone who is familiar with Stephen King’s prison stories, The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (or at least with the movie adaptations thereof) expects to question the prison system and to explore the humanity of both the inmates and the guards. Terry’s words push the reader to consider the realities of an in-person search for and confrontation of that humanity, in all its potential glory and obloquy. The opening salvo, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Inmates” offers a kaleidoscope through which we can feel the entire collection. Terry challenges our accepted notion of rehabilitative space as cyclical: “There is only one/direction. Single file/through metal detector.” Parole notwithstanding, the suggestion is that for most who enter, there is no hope, and what’s more, the system-keepers believe that as well. After all, “an inmate/is and inmate/is an inmate.” The guards do not see what Terry sees, the one man who holds on to his sense of self enough to iron his uniform, or the baptism trough as cleansing agent.

LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY by Ivy Hughes

Ivy HughesLAVERNE AND SHIRLEY I held the handset of the house phone to my ear, the dull tone providing a soundtrack for what was sure to be the most humiliating conversation of my life. From the sitting room, the three-foot…

FLORIDA by Cullen Bailey Burns

Cullen Bailey BurnsFLORIDA The pelican was a kite or vice versa in the way I was a wave in the body my mind made of ego and thread. How do we glue the ideas into order? In the gulf, warm…

ICELANDIC KISSES by Shane Joaquin Jimenez

Shane Joaquin JimenezICELANDIC KISSES The man in the fur coat paused in the electric blue of the porch light. He sniffed the air, as if trying to read some presence in the atmosphere and the ice particles. A blinding wind…

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