Journal

Finding Direction

David Felix is a youthful septuagenarian English visual poet who lives in Denmark. For more than half a century his writing has taken on a variety of forms, in collage, three dimensions, in galleries, anthologies, festival performances, video and in over fifty publications worldwide, both in print and online. Born into a family of artists, magicians and tailors, he is still fully conversant with a stylus-hand-eye circuit, the needle through your thumb and a buttonhole attachment.

Standing Apart

In Sommerlicht Schwebend

Our marriage began
the two of us on a carousel
young and lost and spinning
to the pretty music, sitting on griffins and dragons
with wooden wings and static claws

Once he introduced me to an older colleague
“Meine Verlobte,” he said
the old man took my hand with reverence to his lips
and my husband smiled in that way of his–
back and forth between us, love,
a champagne fueled badminton birdie
flying higher and higher on late summer nights

the faster the merry-go-round
the more he liked to stay on it
the same piped in music
screaming inside his head
melancholy and melody wrung out of it
like water from a dirty mop

the day the carousel spun too fast for me
he was busy spinning inane tales of power
stories of winning after losing
jobs and so many other things
I let go of the drop rod, hurdled across the Atlantic
orbit-less, like a comet without a tail

He spun on, bottle after bottle
drag after drag, year after year
chiming beer under the canopy’s striped firmament
he stayed alone with his addiction
with only the chipped menagerie to lean on

I hope his last ride was superlative and fast
a deep maze of flamboyant fantasies
wind flapping shirt and pant leg
“Look how my slip on shoes don’t fall!”
he would have shouted at my ghost twirling next to him
and breaking into his toothy smile, the gap in the middle
a channel for the dove inside him to fly through

Click here for more about Claudia Castro Luna. This poem was previously published in Psychological Perspectives.

The Ice Has Begun to Unclench

The pool froze months ago. Above me,
bits of twigs and leaves suspend in a slab of grey.
My glass ceiling is an infinity mirror—a mise en abyme,
no more than a funhouse trick of misogyny,
cracked but unbroken—a barrier to a darker ceiling
of false sky. Looking up I see how fractals of stars limn
each leaf. I have no more choice than flotsam.
When this ice floe breaks up and melts will it make
any difference to me? Even my body isn’t my own.

I was born with eyes that can never close…

—Joy Harjo Poet Laureate

Well not born exactly.
Can you imagine, me, Barbie, swimming
doing the scissor kick, swan dives,
the breast stroke—more my style—
synchronized into a Busby Berkeley
extravaganza. Get out your kaleidoscope.
I can perform this number all by myself
in stop-motion animation.

Peepers start Evensong in high C major.
I see a pink jet trail—puffy pink clouds.
Let me tell you about water, dark green
and purple underneath. Pink light retreats.
My mind drifts beneath a liquid blanket.
I hear your brother watching TV.
Mother is washing dinner dishes.
You are curled on your bed reading.

If the stars fell into this pool
would they hiss when they hit the water?
Would they sputter out and drown?
I lie here like a stunned mullet—
fishy and diluted—when cicadas
start their racket I might go out
of my mind. I miss sex. Then I imagine
Ken preening in front of his mirror.

My drowned eyes point toward the sky.

Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine arts. She is the editor of Verseweavers and director of Conversations With Writers. Dale has published in VoiceCatcher, North Coast Squid, Willawaw Journal, Mojave River Press, The Opiate, and other publications. In November she published her first collection, The Barbie Diaries, with Just a Lark Books.

freedom 18

That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.—Death, in The Appointment in Samarra

my therapist says i look very tense, i say have you seen the clowns i work with⁠, three stooges⁠, and a GOAT, transcendental oriental. i give up the confederacy for some bubble tea, my comfort, my carnage. verse daily does not mean what i thought it meant, germs of desire, show me the goods, mucinex monster, stop putting boys on pedestals, boys are shit, we’ve heard enough from them, dirty grunts and quick tempers, they need to be quiet for millennia. they compliment my almond eyes, do you know how much water it takes to grow an almond, i am chaste and blushing, cute cute cute, kawaii kawaii kawaii, put this on, they zip me up, they say i can be cool & cute, i say you mean like sweet & sour pork. they don’t know how i live, they short-circuit my time machine, they jinx my rabbit’s foot, they pin me to the wall, they break my skin with their incisors, their vestigial wings twitching, their legs thrashing, they kiss up and kick down, they tinker with my machinery of death, they siphon my humanity like enron, their concern only a hoax, angels dancing on a pin. unmoored from the ground, untethered to reality, they fit in my curved palm, much too young, their seed modest, bitter nectar sloshing in their mouth, they practice their pout, fix their handsome bangs. i turn the tables, for once i ask a whiteboy, can i touch your hair, he leans in and i am in the chapel reciting our vows. orchids remind me of singapore, and sean, he is a financier now, can we pick up where we left off. still, sorry, i wish i could but, these boys build cathedrals, their mouths taste like whiskey and rocky mountain oysters. all is forgiven.

Michael Chang (they/them) hopes to win the New Jersey Blueberry Princess pageant one day. Michael strongly suspects that they were born in the wrong decade. A recovering vegan, their favorite ice cream flavor was almost renamed due to scandal. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in Q/A Poetry, Yes Poetry, Typo Mag, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Bending Genres, Heavy Feather Review, Cabildo Quarterly, Neon Garden, Yellow Medicine Review, The Conglomerate, Kissing Dynamite, Little Rose, Milk + Beans, and elsewhere.  They are the proud recipient of a Brooklyn Poets fellowship. They poet to feel alive.

“Still Life”–12″x 18″ oil pastels on paper

Artist Statement: With the use of frenzied texture, tonality of color, and awkward positioning, I attempt to offer up a glimpse beyond an unsettled tabletop, where an unnatural arrangement of two pieces of fruit, seemingly hovering, offers a perplexing look into gravity, shadows, and light. I use repetitive and patterned slashes of white tints in depicting a questionable source of light that is both illuminating and off-putting. 

For more information about Lisa Ni Bhraonain, see the Back Page of this issue.