spring 2021
Table of Contents
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The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet
Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016
Lauren Turner
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night
L M Schmidt
The Year We Considered Foster Care
Sunni Brown Wilkinson
The Guilt of Not Wanting
Ashley Prince
arma virumque cano
Revelation on Baptist Hill
Libby Maxey
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes
Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem
Lisa Richter
Fits and Starts
Natasha Pepperl
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum)
Coyote (Canis latrans)
Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus)
Jordan Mounteer
Drought
Flash Flood
Samantha Jones
Dreilinden
Heather Bourbeau
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel
Melissa Eleftherion
Dreilinden
My friend has taken his life 5000 miles away.
I learned this from email upon waking.
I learned this from the sorrow of a sister wracked.
I learned from this, I am not as numb as I believed.
Before I leave Berlin, I light a candle in the Polish church.
I am an imposter among the crowded faithful, singing.
Hallelujah universal rising in my throat.
For a moment, I am calmed.
For a moment, I belong.
The swallows are gathering in trees
as I pass the greening Dreilinden forest,
former Checkpoint Bravo into the DDR.
In Leipzig, a museum caretaker wipes the second floor bannister
as dirt falls from shoes climbing to the third.
No one in this gallery knew him, that he breathed once
and breathes no more.
I learn that Karneval donuts are JFK’s Berliners
and that a popular band from my youth took their name
from the twitch of bodies being shot along barbed wire.
I continue south to the Swiss town he called home.
I wander streets, aware his feet fell on these stones,
that it was somewhere here that the voices began.
I look to the night sky for Orion.
I want to anchor myself as if the world did not spin.
As if we are not little prisoners, little prisoners.