spring 2021
Table of Contents
Return to Home Pagearma virumque cano Revelation on Baptist Hill Libby Maxey
Ghazal With Malbec, No Cigarettes Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem Lisa Richter
The Deer Who Sneak Into Father's Butchering Shack at Night L M Schmidt
Watching Netflix Elana Wolff
Fits and Starts Natasha Pepperl
The Guilt of Not Wanting Ashley Prince
Self-Portrait as Used Condom Riding the Wonder Wheel Melissa Eleftherion
White Rhino (Ceratotherium simum) Coyote (Canis latrans) Blue Morpho Butterfly (Morpho menelaus) Jordan Mounteer
Drought Flash Flood Samantha Jones
The Year We Considered Foster Care Sunni Brown Wilkinson
No Fixed Thing Space Follows Adam Day
The Retrograde of a Frigid Planet Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016 Lauren Turner
Watching Netflix
We sat last night on the sofa watching
Messiah, wondering whether Mehdi Dehbi, the actor
in the title role, is playing it real or slant. He has
the long black hair, the past-and-future face, a
backlit glow, the yellow robe and multitudes
attending. A sudden sandstorm sweeps the foe—
as if by superhuman hand. Is it his or God’s
and does he believe it? The part of us
that’s soft and sinking
into the sofa’s dip, lends us
for the story, to suspend
our disbelief. The hero tells his foil—
the wide-eyed agent who plays for the CIA—
things about herself she thinks he could
only know from intel.
Say what you will there’s something happening—
radio bursts plink extra-galactic
war drones infrasonic memes and oceans rising
holographic waves I’m thinking from the sofa
that the thermostat is set too low, and neither of us
feels like rising to raise it. When the episode ends,
we let the TV load the next one, even though we’re freezing,
and dinner has congealed in grease on our plates.
Suddenly your hand slips through my skin like spider silk.
Fine, light, diaphanous,
already gone—
as if I’ve interrupted a snowball’s chance.