hunter is deadly quiet when he comes home after seven twelves on the rig eyes in the defilade between brow and cheek nothing’s bad enough to hold sway like what he saw in the desert a girl holding half of her twin like a red rag doll like half of her heart missing so when he drinks he does it with purpose and his doodles on the napkin spiral looser as the fallen soldiers mount next to him until becca brings them to the recycling quietly
More about the author:
Chris Lisieski is an attorney and poet. He graduated from Antioch College with a degree in philosophy and creative writing, and the University of Virginia with a J.D. His work has been published by In Parentheses, The Courtship of Winds, and The Journal of Undiscovered Poets. He has one good dog, one other dog, and a multitude of rotating hobbies.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking recently about how essential dualities are for human experience: that pain is part and parcel to love; that happiness must contain sadness within it; that anger and peace are different ingredients in the same soup. At a basic level, you can’t know, understand, or appreciate any single emotion without its counterpart. If you feel joy, at some point, you’ll feel the absence of joy. So, when I hear “the good life,” I think of the weird amalgam that flavors it, and how that includes “the bad life” within it. Some bitterness, some sweet, some salt, all key to a rich broth and, in the end, inevitable to our very human lives.
~ after Michael Kleber-Diggs’s “Coniferous Fathers”
i.
Speak to me about the boys. Sunday armor ill-fitting and incomplete. Their starched collars yet scuffed soles. I bow to no deity, still I watch their lips, shape words like abomination and love while knelt in this stained-glass aquarium, swaying to currents of guilt and glory, as if still nestled in the flood of their mothers’ wombs.
ii.
Only in dreams do we truly sing, limbs unfurling like hesitant ferns. In sleep, we are all Davids dancing before the ark, unashamed.
iii.
After service, these boys, with patent leather dulled to scars, litanies already fading from their tongues, weave through each other like water. Even their shadows play at holiness, neckties slipping off like shed skin. The chain-link net singing its metallic psalm, each rebound a confession, each shot arcing towards grace.
iv.
They don’t yet know which rituals they’ll spend lifetimes unlearning, or how fiercely they’ll cling to the sacrament of touch long after the sermon fades.
Ezra Fox reads their poem…
about the author:
When I hear “good life,” I think of my life. It wasn’t always like this. There were many years where I didn’t feel like this life was even worth living. But now, when I hear “good life,” I can just think of my life, how I cannot remember the last day I went without laughing. To me, my good life is how easy it is to laugh with my partner Annalise, how we laugh many times throughout the day until our stomachs ache. In that pang in our ab muscles, in the tears rolling down our cheeks, in the echoing of our laughter, I don’t have to think it—I can feel that this is a good life.
Ezra Fox lives and writes in San Francisco, CA. In their writing, Ezra is curious about impermanence, and non-duality, and how it pertains to their subjects of lineage, queerness, and spirituality. You can find Ezra’s work in or forthcoming in TriQuarterly, EcoTheo Review, Zone 3, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net.
Masses would not have cried for days on end, nor would the streets outside The Dakota be littered with poster board—a quarter of the alphabet torn and strewn along the street, the letters I M A G I N E painted in black—and something of a blood stain on the ground. John would be alight with life, sitting naked on a plastic cube and tickling the fraught ends of his vocal cords— new bars for the next great album off Geffen Records: a legioned fantasy, the accordioned fold of each note stretched out, John tilting his head to see the vibrations that hum from his throat moving the folds in various different lights. The wailing ambulance and winding red siren would not bend through the streets of New York to find him there, dead—in fact, John is rearranging the abandoned letters of poster board now, sitting on a bench in Central Park, spelling I, ENIGMA on the ground at his bare feet, his sneakers kicked away at some length, eyes squinting behind lenses to sketch a man: alight with life, barefoot on a bench, with vines of strawberries sprouting from his shoulders like wings, ripening for flight.
about the author:
Keira Deer is a writer and poet based in Southern California. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University, and her work has been published in Scapegoat Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others. She can be found on Instagram @keiraswords.
Somewhere Between Childhood & Your Vertical Abandoning You | Alex Dodt
My student, apoplectic, hallucinatively frothing, eyes the growing boatload of candy on my desk,
asks Will that be curved? Into their test-warm palm I pour fifteen Skittles. A handful lands
somewhere between jack shit & a shit ton—a scooch more than some, a tad less than a load,
cousin of bunches—but a handful, I’m sure, is nothing like a fistful. The difference is what’s being
held. A handful nurses gifted milk Kisses, a newborn’s wet cheek, a spring cherry blossom
surprise; a fistful clenches dollars, trophies, enough pills to not wake up. A hand can console
a fist which cannot hold a hand, a prayer, an inchworm suspended in silk. A fist cannot raise
a basketball & dunk it for a crowd of cul-de-sac kids. Maybe the difference is how it’s held.
I pull back a handful of Sara’s hair & kiss her naked collarbone; she grabs a fistful & yanks
after slamming down the phone. Sworn enemies shake hands in truce; businessmen shake
on greed. Maybe the difference is whether we grab it. A hand fills with the memory of a father’s
thumb snagged in a steel chain net, a ball bouncing into a bulbed street. A fist forms
around the memory & when it opens the memory has the face of a boarded-up town
named for someone not born. The memory returns home alone, compresses the hand
into a fist into a bomb which is still just a handful of dust; this body, name, life,
too, one handful of dust held up briefly by another hand, which is the heart’s,
which is the Milky Way’s, which means the difference is the hand’s will to be empty.
Alex Reading his poems. Somewhere Between Childhood & Your Vertical Abandoning You…
And Yesterday is…
Yesterday is | Alex Dodt
Teaching punctuation with infanticide examples was Mrs. Arnold’s way—
Use your scissors to cut kids! she would read aloud, flashing her incisors
at us as if to say Write that comma, or else! I would chase my grandmother
around the kitchen after school, my index finger swinging like a sickle, a scythe,
the comma that separates supper from cannibalism, squealing Let’s eat
grandma! It was her who taught me tense too can turn meaning inside out,
unmask a conquest. Every place was another place in disguise in the stories she told
about New York—stories so old that in them she is still Cynthia & my mother
a dream. That farmer’s market is a mall now, she would say, as though the farmer’s market is
still there, the mall its costume, nowhere really past. I never thought to ask before
her memory went: what does that mean for the market? For the mall?
During the war that led her to my grandfather & that he never spoke of, hollowed out
cities shipped rubble to America, the ruins of Parisian cathedrals building Manhattan
into the sea, my grandfather driving home atop wreckage he had fled, survived, maybe
sifted through for life. It is very American to believe with enough effort you can
be anything, to believe God could be human & a human a slave.
Sitting on the lawn of Calvary Cemetery in Queens, my grandparents six feet below,
three million interred beside them, I can’t tell whether the skyline is made
of these tombs, or the Empire State Building is a mausoleum
blotting out the sun.
About the author:
Every semester the question my philosophy students are most interested in is “What is the meaning of life?” What is the good life? Students want the answer. I find it helps to give attention to language, how articulation affects the answer.
Students ask, “Have you found the meaning of life yet?” but do we find it out there? Or do we create it? And is there the meaning? Or is it different for me and you, different even for each of us at different points in our lives? Students ask, “What should I get out of life?” as though we get to leave with anything in tow! How would it change things (and ourselves) if we asked, “What should I get in life?” What if we asked, “What should I give to life?”
[At this point, the bell rings, students leave, and I have successfully dodged actually answering any questions, because hell if I know!]
Alex is working on a book of poems and a screenplay, and you can find his words in Emerson Review, Stoneboat Journal, Ghost City Review, and other wonderful places across the internet. He founded The Grief Commune, a magazine about the politics of public grief which will publish its first issue this year. Free Palestine!
Sunlight blooms akimbo through the window where you’ve left wet towels on the bathroom floor, your mother is in the next room, the candle you lit for the bath burns a black “s” rises your mother is dead your mother has died she’s on the phone in the next room you can smell her perfume
your mother hands you a platter of grilled chicken marinated with tamari & lemon your mother puts the chicken in the broiler asks you to water the violets hang the spider plants where the sun will find them the cantilevered windows open trails of jasmine float on summer air, cold rain falls like a broken spigot
the air is chill, fog is thick soup simmers in a red pot you’re on the couch you’re on the floor
your mother says I love you your mother never says I love you your mother is a myth ordinary, chews her food like any other you hear her high heels walking around the house toast on the plate, coffee in the cup, no one is home you are eleven years old you are forty years old
your mother holds you your mother never holds you says you are beautiful the sound of you never escapes her lips your mother is never home she forgets your birthday she remembers—brings you roses, sweet peas & a basket from the pueblo near where you were born
you were never born you were born to parents who fill a merry house with cherry & pomegranate flats of strawberries, the cream is white, the cream is fresh, whiskey pours into shot glasses, lights are on, lights are never on moldy soup is in the fridge no one is home
your mother, mermaid your mother, nightingale your mother, no one
you find a photo of your mother the day she married your father there are no photos you were never born, but you find a photo from when she was five your heart breaks for the child/ woman she was never allowed to be, you want to step through time hold her close, your arms, her arms— teach her how to love you
your mother is dead your mother is in the next room drinking black tea with sugar & lemon, she asks you to bring her a biscuit, you bring five biscuits with dark chocolate you bring her no biscuits your mother is dead the black “s” of the dead candle rises, the towels are wet on the floor, they are drying on the hook, the towels— still in the linen closet
there is no bath, there is no house the house is filled with art soup simmers in a blue pot the night reverses itself, rain returns the sky is black the night is cold the sky pink, the fireplace lit whiskey flames in a glass
wet towels on the bathroom floor remind you of your mother.
about the author:
Alicia Elkort’s first book of poetry, “A Map of Every Undoing” was published in 2022 by Stillhouse Press with George Mason University, after winning their book contest. Alicia’s poetry has been nominated several times for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology, and her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. She reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal where she also writes reviews. She works as a Life Coach. For more info or to watch her two video poems: https://aliciaelkort.mystrikingly.com/
~ Texas Southern University, Special Collections: The Heartmann Collection Texas Slavery Documents, 1818-1886
These notarized letters are written in oak gall ink, itself a burnished brown eating the paper, they bear wax sigils, but sometimes the notary has no stamp, relies on a squiggle labeled “my seal.” Mr. Amis of Lowndes County brought his hundreds from Mississippi, he died, his lawyers split them into sale for Fort Bend, Brazoria, Galveston, the maw of sugar and money and grief. “Ada Abt 18 mos,” “Hetty, F, pregnant, 20,” a receipt that runs for pages and tawny pages. In the slave schedules my children would be “C” for “copper,” and would go anon. Here’s a crowd of people who are not people even though they’re named.
about the author:
Katharine Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, and has published poems in such venues as The Gettysburg Review, Friends Journal, Commonweal, GoodFoot, The Red River Review and the Yale Anthology: Before the Door of God, among other places.
“The good life” means time, for me. Time enough to make poems, time enough to be in my garden, abundant time to be with my children and spouse.
Accompanying artwork by Sholanke Boluwatife Emmanuel
We were the kind of couple who walked down the street, hands in each others’ back pockets. We stayed up late and steamed up car windows. And when our friends counseled caution, time, a longer than a three month’s engagement, we thought they were crazy. We knew what we knew and felt what we felt. (Of course we were young.)
When it was time to fight we fought, and when it was time to make up, we did. Once in a while we gave each other the silent treatment – two cars headed straight for the headlights of the other. It was always me who swerved first, and I hated that, wanting to stand my ground. To win.
In high school Driver’s Ed, we were to keep a scrapbook of newspaper clippings – of car crashes which seemed so prevalent at that time: cars hurtling off embankments, colliding with semis, cars crashing into the tonnage of trains. We were to be stunned into safety, I suppose, all the young lives lost. I wanted to live and be happy, happy, so I swerved.
About the Author:
Lucy Adkins’ poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies as well as former poet laureate Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. Her latest two collections, Two-Toned Dress and A Crazy Little Thing, were winners of Nebraska Book Awards for Poetry in 2021 and 2023. She’s also co-written two books of non-fiction, Writing In Community and The Fire Inside, and has been a writing workshop leader for many years.
I confess what I know of God is better felt than spoken: the sun going down, the children tucked in, dishes and floors still unwashed, our bodies bathed in heat, the last call of the swallows, dust and quivering grasses alight with sunset, blackbirds swooping low.
About the Author:
Lisa López Smith is a shepherd, equine therapist, and mother making her home in central Mexico. When not wrangling kids or rescue dogs or goats, you can probably find her working on her latest novel. Recent publications include: Huizache, Live Encounters, and The Normal School, and some of these journals even nominated her work for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart prize. Her first chapbook was published by Grayson Books in 2021.
oh my girl—someone is going to love you with your bed hair and black coffee breath your mismatched pajamas and naked toenails your late for the bus kiss your text message shopping list your half-written story the back of a receipt someone is going to love your late-night insomnia your just-in-case herbal tea your ginger caramel dark chocolate fudge your fingerprints all over the fridge door all over the stove all over the dishcloth someone is going to love your do the dishes later lick the bowl first love your rainy-day melancholy soundtrack love when you ask them out for a walk and miss the track and skirt right round the island the long way someone is going to love that you see whales or sea lions or mermaids or a great purple octopus emerging from the waves someone is going to think you’re a lighthouse someone is going to want to swim in your shelly cove someone is going to long to run their fingertips through your tussock grass graze on your samphire drink deep from that puddle of rain by your navel oh my gorgeous island girl someone is going to love you
About the Author:
Kathryn Reese is a poet living on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical science and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in Gone Lawn, Engine Idling, Kelp Journal and Australian Poetry Journal.
Little Sparrow, Baby Mole (The MoMo Twins) | Carey Salerno
Listen as Carey reads from her poem…
About the Author:
Carey Salerno is the executive director and publisher of Alice James Books. She is the author of Shelter (2009), Tributary (2021), and the forthcoming The Hungriest Stars (fall 2025, Persea Books). Her poems, essays, and articles about her work as a publisher can be found in places like American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, NPR, and The New York Times. She serves as the co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing arts at the University of Maine at Farmington. In 2021, she received the Golden Colophon Award for Independent Paradigm Publishing from CLMP for the leadership and contributions of Alice James Books. careysalerno.com
