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Showing posts from December, 2019

Agnes Vojta

I Need a Wrist Strap for my Ice Axe Wearing a short dress and sandals, I step into the outfitter, ice axe in hand, and ask for a wrist strap. The questions begin immediately: What do I want with an ice axe? Don’t I know that is a dangerous mountain? A real climb? Wouldn’t I rather be interested in a nice walk? My bearded friends on the other side of the store watch for a while, amused, before they amble over to me. Suddenly, the wrist strap is no problem at all. Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019). Her poems recently appeared in Red River Review, Minute Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, The Blue Nib, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Former People, Thimble Literary Magazine , and elsewhere. 

Gabriella Garofalo

Listening to comets, aren’t you? Yet you are deaf, deaf to the voice of riotous angels, Deaf to the green solitude that heaves at you While my sad place gathers A blue ambivalence, or missing lives Who dreamt of choosing between raw and hard light: These are sidereal places, Where fire can’t decrypt your hunger, Where you can’t give light a nice welcome, That’s why you need only A womb insensitive to breathing light, Here, among your furniture, And crumpled souls at night who hiss You won’t come back to the fields, Nor will you reach the water, Only exiled limbs hassling with the slant of demise, The blue light you silence as undeserving Of your hunger: is it a matter of voices, limbs, And pewter skies? Great, so please shape your light in mixed shades, That will do, and bring me not flowers, nor toys, As I saw too many at the children’s bedside- Please bring me seedy cafes where men Stare at an empty half-light, Where women all clad in blue go unnoticed ‘Cause

Max Heinegg

Lake House Guns Is it ever only a toy? Robert Bly in my ears talking campfire men who cry handling a sword. I get pissed at my nephews, firing Nerf guns, water guns, any gun—cocking pathologically until my daughters join the effort, pinning a hapless cousin in a bedroom corner. The squad rains doom, & I think it’s good for them—girls are better off not taking shit from anyone. Let them get hit & hit back, learn to handle them. So, I quit bitching about guns, firing equitably— no one’s watching them decide what’s fair play, protest the other child a coward. Max Heinegg's poems have appeared locally in Nixes Mate, Pangyrus, and Ibbetson Street Review. He lives in Medford, MA, where he teaches high school English and is the co-founder of Medford Brewing Company.

Simon Perchik

You stir this can before it opens as the promise a frog makes when asking for a kiss :the paint warmer and warmer will become an afternoon with room for mountains and breezes close to your shoulder though that’s not how magic works –there’s the wave, the hand to hand spreading out between the silence and your fingers dressed with gloves as if it was a burden and the brush raising your arm the way this wall needs a color that will dry by itself leave a trace :a shadow not yet lovesick no longer its blanket and cure. Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com .