Kari A. Flickinger
Go back
who knew gulls at dawn
bear warning?
The bell in the campanile tolls.
Quiets the gulls.
A breath between their warning words.
Orange piercing silence through
wracking caws
calms a calamity of frenzy.
Winds warm will.
O deep ocean so near the desperate
Feathers.
Cackle in
this ditch hidden in this
seed and star
un peu à gauche de (planets)
near the milkiest
stream—down
an ivy way.
Creative NonFiction Contributor
Jane Marshall Fleming is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Ocotillo Worship (APEP Publications, 2019) and Violence/Joy/Chaos (Rhythm & Bones Press, 2020). Her poetry, collages, and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Ghost City Review, Barren Magazine, Pussy Magic Magazine, and Honey & Lime, among others. She is currently a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine and blogs at lunaspeaksblog.com.
Preston Smith
Kaleidoscopic fabric climbs my walls
like ivy, poisonous only in the false hope
it invokes. My hats are compact like a coral
reef, their varying colors culminating
in Humanity. I ask only for my tower.
I sweep the room, ever aware of outside
stares, ever unaware of how everything ended
up dreadfully. I see hats haphazardly strewn,
and I realize: my tower is my Underworld.
I only wished to discover Elysium.
My history unfolds two distinct chapters,
one before the Accident and the other after,
the connective tissue narrating Their deaths.
“How did you not foretell this tragedy?”
they ask, as if I bore the sight of the Fates.
Instead, obsidian velvet matches my gaze
as I examine each hat each day, never hesitating
to craft more, fabric flying in a clashing circus
of pastel and matte, hoping one will reunite
me with my family.
Today, I forge my own Olympus.
Adrian Slonaker
It doesn’t matter that you
don’t understand my language since my
speech is a whirlpool of stammers,
but my fat ring finger
taps the inside of your wrist,
telegraphing a resurgence of trust
crafted from kvass and vegan caviar and
Elvis Presley and the solitudes we slashed so that
my paisley duvet could shelter layers
of vulnerable limbs while
thunder throbs in our eardrums.
Poetry Contributor
Courtney Burk’s writing has been published in Pussy Magic, She & Her, F-Bom, and featured in WOMEN Art Show in Detroit. She’s constantly on the hunt for engaging prose about mythology as the fiction editor of Cauldron Anthology. She loves nothing more than a good story and hikes in National Parks with her husband and rescue mutts. She blogs at www.spoonfulofink.com and her social handle is @spoonfulof_ink.
Fiction Contributor
Camille Clarke is a Midwestern writer currently living in the South. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, she has a degree in Asian Languages and Literature with a minor in English. She is working on a novel in between cups of tea. Find her on Twitter where she mostly tweets about how adorable her nephew is: @_camillessi.
Sasha Carney
I’m eight years old and I’m shucking corn on the sun-splashed patio. I’ve just learned how to clench my pudgy fists and snap off the stem, dig my ragged nails under the whisper-rough leaves and unfurl what’s underneath.
Mother scoops up the naked corn to boil in her big corn pot. I watch the waxy kernels plump and swell to starch-soaked sweetness, and have the urge to plunge my fingers in.
I’m eight years old and my aunt gives me a book called ‘Dangerous Book For Girls’, and I understand all at once that gender is a peril so I make myself a double agent, creeping through the underbrush in black wool tights, whispering intel to a cardboard walkie-talkie with no one on the other end.
No one knows my real name, not unless they can read the Morse code I scratch into the corn husks before they’re buried in mulch, or hear the words I smuggle into the rolling boil of the pot, and I am gleeful, I am undetected, I’ve Flat-Stanley-ed myself into two dimensions, superspy in thorn-torn thighs, chewing garden mint like tobacco in gangster movies, or scaling trees like skyscrapers, and womanhood can catch me if it can, because mother, I’m on the run.
The Dangerous Book for Girls says spies in World War Two carried a cyanide capsule threaded round their neck, which they would chew if they were captured till their limbs stilled and they bubbled at the mouth. I touch the necklace my grandma gave me for Christmas and wonder, absentmindedly, what it would be like to want to die, and I
wrote my will when I was four. I wrote my will when I was four, which should have been a warning sign, but it was simple, harmless, really. Scrawled hastily, decoded, on Winnie the Pooh stationery: Dear God, I want to be buried, not burned.
Dear God, tuck me soft under the compost. Dear God, let my soft tissues simmer and bubble and seep into the earth. Dear God, let something grow from me.
Gender is a masquerade, is an evening charade, is a code name. I’m far too young to watch James Bond but Mother puts it on at Christmas anyways and femme fatales stalk my screen, blow poison kisses, turn stiletto heels into stiletto knives, and the message is clear.
I’m fifteen and I kiss two boys at a party and keep my eyes open the whole time. I’m sixteen, and I laugh drunkenly when a man grabs my ass in a chicken shop. I’m seventeen, and there are worse stories I could tell. Gender as trauma and defense mechanism both. We don’t live in a house with a porch anymore, and I don’t shuck corn anymore, that’s for little hands speckled with nail polish and invisible ink, but I’m still a spy of sorts.
I’m eighteen and womanhood fits me like an outer husk, half-rotting, that I tried to fling from the patio long ago. I’m eighteen and my mother doesn’t know my real name but it’s not a game, gender is a no-man’s-land and I’m sick of being undercover,
and I want to scream at the boiling, starch-soaked sky:
unhusk me, motherfucker
pop my tits like kernels of uncooked corn,Mother,
dig your dirty thumbnail under my skin,
don’t flinch if I bleed, just like everything else,
infection can always be covered or shed,
boil me to a pulp in your big corn pot,
motherfucker, I changed my mind, I want to be burned.
Susan E. Gunter
The words he penned outlive the tomb of time—
“We look about for what we find inside.”
A clerk in Clement’s court, Petrarch rhymed
on living angels. He and Clement turned the tide
from out to in—from god to man—from saint
to beast. “I am a sinner among sinners”, Clement boasted
as he baited the white bear in his menagerie. Taint
of florins, stench of power, taste of roasted
gilded capon, embrace of whore—this pope
indulged, sold indulgences—then saved
Jews, fed the starving, to the plague-stricken gave hope.
He and Petrarch so loved the world they braved
hell to tear the dark tapestry that Rome
had woven, making instead a human poem.
Marianne Brems
Random renditions,
of complex water jets,
height,
duration,
erupting in
symphonic patterns,
from a street level fountain
into the penetrating heat
of the town square.
Smiling children taken
by unpredictable rhythms
of ever changing streams
rush through a gap
in the broken curtain of water,
shoulders drawn,
arms lifted,
smiles dissolving into laughter–
Repeat, then repeat,
wet clothes pasted to skin.
Fewer more prudent adults,
beckoned
by the soul of the fountain,
plan their course
between the chords
of a liquid melody.
Gleefully they dart through
with measured precision,
just once, maybe twice,
helpless to outsmart the dance,
unwilling to soak themselves
before enchanted onlookers.
Unconcerned,
this intricate orchestra
continues bursting skyward.
