Journal

Unoccupied Time

I’ve been watching Netflix Christmas movies all day.
Now it’s 4:51 in the early evening and both eyes are
worn through like a child’s socks after summer.
I look out my window and can’t see the house next door.
It’s no surprise that I can’t muster the motivation to leave this house
or even bring myself to get out of bed for more than a snack or the bathroom.
Every day is a challenge of stretching money, to make plans, to stay busy.
Occupy the mind, the body, the minutes so I don’t stare off
at painted walls wondering if my phone will ring in three minutes or three days.
Wondering if you have eaten today or taken a shower.
Wondering if you are hearing those voices or if they are quiet today.
Wondering if today is the day you will finally get help and we can be together again.

 

Aimee Nicole is a queer poet currently residing in Rhode Island. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Roger Williams University and has been published by the Red Booth Review, Psychic Meatloaf, Petrichor Review, Dying Dahlia Review and Balloons Lit Journal, among others. On the weekends she is an avid roller derby spectator.

SOFIA

i.
Far back it is, the beginning
in its ruined stillness.
I cannot say, with words, the line
around the calm of it, the invented calm.

ii.
The children came later, eyed and curving faces.
They want a story: a cycle and a resolution.
What they want is a game, a token,
an hour with winning, rules and spaces.

iii.
But my story is a bag that sags and pulls
through the light the lost and worst.
The walls that opened, the fires that fell
and made the shape of flowers.

Words in a dusk that floated without meaning,
shapeless. We were pale, out among the small.
The little black nocturnal things who fear,
who tear the dark with running and burrowing.

iv.
My lost and tilt-eye house is filled
with the fire’s jumping noise and color.
The raven flies off with its sounds altered by
its bird voice, the different size of its understanding.

The black wings of the bombs took less
than the love of breakage, knowing and abstract.
Eyes with joy in the burning, or turned away.
In the following calm, the wilderness of calm,

And the new light of forgiveness,
a hill of light, a tide.
The light is the bear that chases you.
It determines where you run.

v.
I tell my children something old: Rome full of farlight,
gone so something better could come. I lie.
Or how the universe came in a Big Bang,
making a sky of magical waves

that released like rain the blackness,
the heavy weight of being nothing.
Absolution.
I lie again.

vi.
I show them my hand that is heavy with Now
and not the remembering.
My hand full of Here, in its weighted cloud.
The calm of it: the palpable, imagined calm.

 

THE LINE

Around my exile is a line of green.
I had not quite reached it when the cold
came, the white sun dropping,
low and lower, its arctic stone.

I walked the space of banishment.
There was falling and shouting, then belief.
Silence that repeats and hardens
the leaf and the lost green sound.

In memory how they ache,
the old and vanished scents opening
my hands that were deft in their heat,
holding the long beans, the easy, ordinary loves.

 

Patricia Nelson works with the “Activist” poets in Northern California. Her most recent book, Out of the Underworld, is due out this year from Poetic Matrix Press.

Another One for the White Nights

It’s warm; I go home on foot.
A sandal strap is scratching
a mosquito bite on my ankle,
which makes me think of X

(but I shouldn’t I shouldn’t I shouldn’t)

I come home and check
how much I’ve walked today
and I turn off my phone
an hour before going to bed

but then I dream of floods
and boys my age
of handwriting I can’t make out
of a ripped dress

I wake up and look
through my curtainless window.
At 4 am, the sky is radiant cyan,
glowing like an aquamarine.

You never really get used to it,
which, at the end of the day,
gives one hope.
And I want to be hopeful:

open-minded, lighthearted,
nimble-footed,
endearing as I am enduring.
I want to love

the sewing needle
as much as I love
the one that leaves ink
on my skin forever.

I want to never feel the guilt
of running to catch
the last subway train—
and missing it.

I want to remember
the apple tree by the building,
the hotter summers and the colder winters,
being allowed to play outside

on my own. We were the last ones,
but it’s fine.
I want to think that it’s fine.
I want the itch to stop.

 

Maria Muzdybaeva is an emerging writer and poet from Russia. She holds an MA from Yale University, where she studied Comparative Literature and Film. She currently lives in her home city of Saint Petersburg where she works for Calvert 22. Her work is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal.

 

buy buy BABY

1
I dip my finger in a smudge
of rainwater on the tin metal armrest.
The terrible twos and teardrops
dangle from cheek pudges. He wants
to hold the empty bottle of lotion
so bad he wails on the stairs
leading toward oatmeal slopped in milk
and apple bits. Yesterday he threw
his first public tantrum
Harnessed in my arms outside buy buy BABY.
I hadn’t bought the Ride Around Racer.

2
Another day, another inquisition,
but I know better now than to leave my wife
alone with her anger. It’s a fireiron
that cools the closer you close you hand.
Sure it burns but it will soon
be extinguished. Besides, there’s a kind
of catharsis in self-prosecution and realizing
what an asshole I’ve been
late morning in July: Polar bears of cumulus
clamber bright dirty white underbellies
overhead after night rain
and I breathe deep from Arctic springs.

 

Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. Subsequent collections are Father Me Again  (Spartan Press, 2018), Coming Home with Cancer (Blue Lyra Press, 2019) and Terminal Destination (Spartan Press, 2019).

Our Homeland

Once, beyond the Wall

White olive blossoms clustered

Beside stone houses

Where high-pitched laughter rose.

 

Now, pine forests hide

Tree stumps and rubble

In the land once ours

Whose name we may not speak.

 

A boy of five,

Embroidered yarmulke over sandy hair,

Spits on my sister

And calls her a cockroach.

 

Tall Settlement teenagers

Uproot grandfather’s garden

And when he protests

Beat him with sticks.

 

You Americans

Who worship them as heroes

Should know why we despise

The Master Race.

 

Ron Morita is a former electronic circuit design engineer living in Northern California. His fiction appeared in The Chamber Four Literary Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and other magazines and is forthcoming in Pleiades. He attends the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and author Lisa Locascio’s class at Mendocino College. You can view his stories on his website.

Once

–after Cecilia Woloch

Weren’t we standing there once,
gripping the walls, pulling off shirts,
unsnapping straps, rustling up the sheets?
But weren’t we naked and fragile and young?
Weren’t you the hum and I the mum?
Didn’t we know it wouldn’t all turn out,
And weren’t we standing there once?

 

Swimming in the Rain

With my hands on her still strong shoulders,
I steer my mother
to the discount rack,
so she won’t complain
about the prices.
The sales girl comes over,
wearing an Oregon Ducks T-shirt,
her smart phone squeezed
into the back pocket
of her rhinestone jeans.
Cracking her gum, she asks
my mother in slow motion,
CAN-I-HELP-YOU?
My mother is slow as rain,
a creaky, twisted
bicycle chain.
Back at the car, she lifts
the black bathing suit
and folds it neatly on her lap.
“I look like a fat seal in that thing,”
she says, and I tell her,
“And I’m a seagull
crashing into the surf.”
It’s been raining
for hours
both of us swimming now
in uncharted waters.

 

Sherri Levine is a poet, artist, and teacher.  She lives in Portland with her partner, their son, and many backyard buddies.  Her work has been published in the Timberline Review, CALYX, Verseweavers, Willawaw, Driftwood Press, The Sun Magazine, and other journals.  She recently won the Lois Cranston Poetry Contest. In 2017, she won First Prize in the Oregon Poetry Associaton Contest. Her book, In These Voices was published by Poetry Box. sherrilevine.com