spring 2021
Table of Contents
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Fits and Starts
Natasha Pepperl
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum)
Coyote (Canis latrans)
Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus)
Jordan Mounteer
The Year We Considered Foster Care
Sunni Brown Wilkinson
The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet
Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016
Lauren Turner
Drought
Flash Flood
Samantha Jones
The Guilt of Not Wanting
Ashley Prince
August
James Reil
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel
Melissa Eleftherion
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night
L M Schmidt
arma virumque cano
Revelation on Baptist Hill
Libby Maxey
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes
Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem
Lisa Richter
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
August
Once when I was still married a loping,
slobbering golden retriever on our road
ripped out a neighbour’s right arm ligaments.
The dog had to be put down and for weeks
the neighbour wore bandages and a sling.
When her arm had more or less healed
it was thinner than the left one
and strikingly pale, like something recently dug up.
By then it was August and my soon-to-be ex-wife
was almost ready to move out: we had told
the children (the oldest took it hardest), signed
the separation agreement and piled her boxes in the basement.
To get out of the house I took to walking the length
and back of our dead-end road. Very early one morning
the dog was back or at least a same size retriever
with the same sideways leaning gait.
The dog was running out of a hay field reduced to stubble
by drought and heat. On the road it stopped
and stared at me. Behind the golden an agitation of black clouds
was gathering in the east.
Hunter—I remembered that the dog’s name
had been Hunter.