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Contents Aubade, Barcelona
Daniel Fraser
R at Cosmogony Tr yst
R.K. Fauth
A Pisan Canto
Dan Beachy-Quick
From “Parables”
Gerald Friedman
Songs to Guiomar, I Rainbow Trout Wreck
Benjamin Shapere Ezra Lebovitz
TÍO RAMÓN
Kenneth Schultz
On Writing Poems
Ezzat Abouleish
With You at One A.M. Under the Swann Street Ginkgos Thin Idea
Seth Kleinschmidt Duc Van Khanh Tran
Samaia
Nini Sikhar ulidze
Gallows, Gallows
Abubaker Zahoor
Aperture
Sarah Edwards
Wedding Day overgrowth of a holiday Cistern
Livio Farallo Philip Alexander Mills
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AUBADE, BARCELONA Daniel Fraser begins with dust and road tunnels a blue hour in a city we don’t live in the first shore like a blacked-over postcard palms crazed with parakeets yes it is early we are oblivious peripheral as a stray dog waiting for the first train while the cars shuffle trhough graffiti and dark I tell you about a book just like what we were living pistachio-coloured twilight a bruise healing on the houses
alone
the boulevard shore-side and ours
the window-sockets refill their eyes all the particles of ourselves shake to touch want biting through sleeplessness breathing its code red hills / the red hills with embers of sagebrush
newly happening the dark-brushed land resolves / HILLS / now risen yellow orchids hidden the colours re-learning themselves in the act of light sun-head now crownin the water yes the city mouths as the pixels spread towards a full reveal soft rectangles of concrete spread their balconies
with flapping laundry and pet cages /
key to lock all slippery full-blush now bleeding in from the horizon the harshness of shadow in retrest your black dress slips below breasts, belly yes your mouth repeats the city we shed our memories knowing how we’ll come / later walking these fractures / in the no-longer fullness of time / knowing it was ours for a moment
that road
RAT Daniel Fraser a ‘graft’ for Edwin Morgan The rat catches in the catch of the rattrap; is mangled rat – tra The double-t stretched like a spring on the breezeblock floor in the bark shed warmed by the burner. On my spade now: one more word I have killed and hurled, a form cleaving to it. The rigid claws are pale as the light rows over the garden.
COSMOGONY Daniel Fraser Void fills the millpond. Undisturbed for decades, all night it processes the dark to black slit. A mouth, foaming. It eats every leaf it has reflected. Born there, from a squirming egg laid under the lip, a dragonfly wrestles to burst the tongue, the water surface. It sucks air through its gemmed flute–– brooches, later, the gorse with blue-silver. Landing lets the wings spread the bright tips. ** It shivered off and the stunned light moved to hold it.
TRYST R. K. Fauth Before the fox leaps, I catch a glimpse of the vole dining in the night weeds. How he gambles everything he has–– A small sum of flesh. A prized clover. Overhead, the pinking sky’s cloudwork spreads and sets his hunger going, despite what he knows is frozen in the high fields. If he’s lucky, evening comes. And he dives back to his hole, more alive than before––thinking only how he loves to live an die so close to those striking foxes, and asks nothing, nothing of his brief heart.
A PISAN CANTO ––for Jim Galvin Dan Beachy-Quick sun bright as sun on white marble ––lapping up its Lethe–– & is blinded by (a cur laps water from a fetid puddle) what it sees a tower waits centuries to do as does a leaf as does the lid of any eye (seeing what it cannot see) to fall–– all in the blink of an eye. Want to remember but taught to forget (the poem begins in emptiness) its cure is its * curse––the eye. The sun spills its diamonds in brown water the pigeons watch the Arno flow into the past. A scent of thyme at the edge of the mind–– a dove coos hidden in the olives (& another dove coos back). Found roses instead of facts. Her eyes gray as the underleaf of an olive leaf (gray & then bright, bright & then) & then a memory from another life–– the wild birds
would not eat the white bread... around the gods who always pretend, it’s useless to pretend. Red mites and orange lichen on an old gray wall. A thought is like a white ox pointed on a path to Pisa staring at the tower it cannot see–– (cannot see at all). Stone after * stone of beauty cast down... & beauty is & beauty is... wanting to forget what cannot not be remembered (the church built around emptiness to make emptiness of use.) An obedient dog at the foot of the mystery–– curled against his dead mistress’s feet. (Blind Saul using his sword as a cane, the blade carving arcs in the dust.) One wants to do as one must–– relinquary the real–– a fragment of bone from St. Blaise’s arm around which another arm is built (all of gold) fingers holding a sheperd’s comb to tease the tangles from the lambs. A labyrinth greets the pilgrim, carved into marble so old it’s soft to the touch. (A reminder of some truth forgotten.) To see the sun you must first get lost–– and yet, the sun is what fills the maze. Light urges us on, we who have passed swift over Lethe... *
...swift as Thetis up the cornflower rises and just as silver-blue stands avoce the grass bent down–– the dwarf-morning glory climbs a single blade–– & the ache that wept out for her to come (slender goddess, cornflower silver-blue, the grass bowing down) still * weeps. The muses are daughters of Memory. Some Nights come as an owl w/ poppies & an unworn mask upon which the naked allegory sleeps, (one breast pulled to earth, the other pointing up to the sky)–– & Day turns his bearded face and looks away, at Dawn and Dusk, those earlier selves, allegory on the other side * of the chapel. A faun dances to the cymbals he clangs together, while Love pulls out a thorn from the arch of her foot. Graves tell stories to distract us from death & (Hercules labors his arm inside a lion’s mouth & later wears the lion’s mouth for a hood; a girl almost a child stolen while picking red poppies, carried down into darkness in a chariot pulled by snakes; Apollo surrounded by the Muses, a sarcophagus dug up, emptied out, and turned into a fountain) distract death from us. The body falls toward the voice that discovers it, announcing the unthinkable––a sparrow *
made of clay.
FROM “PARABLES” Gerald Friedman I
There was a boy who dreamed a cardboard horse of his own. The boy opened his eyes: he didn’t see it, though. Again of a little white horse the boy started to dream, and caught it by the mane... You won’t escape from me! Barely having caught it, the little boy awoke. His fist was tightly clenched. The little horse had flown! The boy grew very serious thinking there’s nothing real about a dreamed-of horse. And no more would he dream. But the boy became a youth and had a love, and spoke to his beloved girl: Are you real or no? When the youth reached old age, he thought: It’s all a dream, the dreamed-of little horse, likewise the horse that’s real. And when death came to him, to his heart the old man posed the question: Are you a dream? Who knows if he awoke!
SONGS TO GUIOMAR Gerald Friedman I
I could not see if what your hand, Guiomar, might contain was a yellow lemon, or strand of daylight in golden skein. Your mouth smiled at me. I asked, “What will you share? Fruitful time your hand chose from all that your garden grows in its prime? Or a fair stiff evening’s pointless time? Gold magic of hours when you are gone? Copy in still water? On fire from hill to hill, the true dawn? Does love break in two the spool that used to hold its twilights, now grown old?
RAINBOW TROUT Benjamin Shapere Like all those words leading up to the picture of a big rainbow trout in the Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton Or like the mountain loads of epistolary commendations and recommendations leading up to a single rose in some Other book which I forgot. Like something which leads up, a mad cadenza from the clavicembalo not mere a bourgeois entanglement In Christmas. but the adventure is discursive: it starts and stops. why red and green I never got that The girl with a Powerball hat crouches for lost cards, I make my way to a parked car for your cigarettes. We are Somehow always traveling and never letting go. Even in sleep find one finds he craves a blue picture. Hey pal, Tone down the euphemisms. We need direction if we’re gonna get to our infinite destinations on time. How To avoid relativistic word-soup, and get to the real chowder. Ah, my friend the news is blue, We were supposed to be there last Christmas. Today I saw a white furry caterpillar struggling In the blue water I didn’t move on him. No, not I. A heron went ahead, I appreciated it and you when you stood bewildered
Searching in the dark yard for the lost dog or cat or something else which I did not see and envied.
WRECK Ezra Lebovitz After the news The rain shuffles like a child walking around my room. There is no inside or outside. The air? Same air. They beat the windows. They beat them. I dreamed idly: unmarked buses, dulled spoons. It was not the nightmare I waited for. Who sits outside even now. In the rain, the burgeoning hail. Falling like a child.
TÍO RAMÓN Kenneth Schultz Some people just come out broken. That’s how my mom said it when she explained to me that her brother, my TÍO, RAMÓN, was coming with his wife and son to stay at our house in ALTADENA. I had never met them before. I was SIX. There were a lot of reasons why it needed to happen—RAMÓN had just finished a three month stint at the county for driving on a SUSPENDED LICENSE, not incidentally while also high on METH, and had no job. INES, his wife, was in the middle of school to become a DENTAL ASSISTANT and was struggling to find time to care for their son, JUANITO. But it wasn’t all them. My mom had just been discharged herself. Not from jail though. She OVERDOSED on some PILLS—and when you OVERDOSE on some PILLS—you’re liable to go to REHAB. A few weeks of inpatient care, a few weeks of meetings with doctors and specialists to learn about THE DISEASE that apparently ran in the family, and it seemed like things were better now. The doctors advised my dad not to leave her alone, but he was at work all day, so something had to give. Everyone would help everyone, that was the promise. But again—some people just come out broken— and no amount of planning will ever account for that. • The morning they moved in I was sitting up on the kitchen counter. RAMÓN walked up, head shaved bald, muscles bulging out of his extra-long white T-SHIRT that was tucked into a big black BELT. His whole face looked scrunched up, angry, with a TINY NOSE and BEADY EYES like his body kept growing but his features never got bigger than a child’s. He caught me there, staring at him. —Sup, WEENIE. He went over to our stove and turned the burner on. Once it had sparked up, he waved his hand back and forth right into the blue flame. Then he laughed this whiny HYENA laugh. —Sometimes you just gotta let GOD know who’s in fucking charge. He turned the burner off just in time for INES to walk in. She was carrying their bags. •
RAMÓN called my mom MANA, and spent most of the day shouting at her about whatever it was that was on his mind. —MANA, you ever see these fucking WETBACKS waiting for the BUS at six in the morning with their UMBRELLAS? Like what the fuck is the UMBRELLA for? Not like they burn. —BRO, shut the fuck up, you’re a WETBACK too. —MANA, whats up with all these fucking BLACKS knocking on the door trying to talk about JESUS? Don’t they know he was WHITE EXCELLENCE? —That’s enough BRO. —So I was at the SEX CLUB— —BRO don’t talk about that shit in front of the kids. —Nah it’s whatever. I was just gonna say I’m sick of seeing these fucking FAT CHICKS. Why’s every bitch FAT now, MANA? • It would be easy to blame the METH for RAMÓN’S crazy rambling, but he was clean when he moved in. For some, addiction starts outs as an ill-sought treatment for being fucked up in the head—RAMÓN was one such case. He technically never got a mental diagnosis, but anyone who talked to him for longer than thirty seconds would probably agree that he was a SOCIOPATH. He hated other people, couldn’t even feign interest or compassion unless he decided that you could entertain him. See, RAMÓN had this way of workshopping you, trying to find the exact way to make you uncomfortable. And then he would hammer on it. If you were gay, he’d say XXXXXX. If you were black, he’d say XXXXXX. If you were a liberal, he’d say them both. If you were a conservative, he’d call your dick small and your bloodline inbred. For RAMÓN, nothing meant anything. There was a freedom, and thus an obligation to say the thing that no one else could say. Maybe he was a performer. Or maybe he was just fucking crazy. In any case, he learned pretty quickly that the way to get under my skin was with a dog. We had this little DACHSHUND—a girl named DAISY. She’d follow me around and lick the dirt off my feet and curl up under my shirt when I was sleeping. One time I was sitting on the ground, playing with her, when RAMÓN scooped DAISY up and started touching her privates. —See, WEENIE, you gotta FLICK THE BEAN! FLICK THE BEAN! FLICK
THE BEAN! They like that. I yelled and jumped and punched at his leg, but RAMÓN just laughed before eventually putting the dog down and walking away. • The next day my mom drove us to EVEREST, this little burger place up the street that made really good ONION RINGS. RAMÓN sat down at the table and looked around. —Ok MANA, so there’s EVEREST in ALTADENA. And you look at its menu. And then there’s TOPS in PASADENA. And you look at their menu. There’s HI-LIFE in SOUTH PASADENA. And you look at that menu. And then there’s PHAROAH’S in HIGHLAND PARK— —Alright. —They got the same fucking menu. And you eat the food and the food tastes the exact same. And they all got the same BEANER cooks in the back with their HAIRNETS and shit. —Talk quieter. —They’re all owned by the same company MANA. They get more business if people think they’re mom and pop, so they style them all just a little bit different. —That’s smart. —Yeah, fucking METH BRILLIANCE. —Shut up, BRO. —METH makes you smarter. I figured out who killed JFK last time I was tweaking. —Who’d that be? —I don’t know, I’m not fucking high anymore. • While RAMÓN was talking about how much he loved drugs, my mom was busy taking them. For some people, REHAB is really a time to process, to reflect, and to break bad habits. For others, though, it’s a TOLERANCE BREAK. She learned a lot about THE DISEASE in REHAB. They were just the wrong lessons. Use, but use smarter. Don’t leave shit around. Don’t get caught. DOSE, don’t OVERDOSE. She picked her moments—back when she still could—to scarf down some PILLS. One day she’d be normal, the next day she’d lay in bed like a ZOMBIE. I knew on those days to stay away, but that came with the price of getting closer to RAMÓN. We used to—on account of the suspended license—walk up LAKE AVENUE, the main street in ALTADENA that ran from the 210 all the way to the mountains and EATON CANYON. There was this place on LAKE called THE COFFEE
GALLERY where we’d go to buy CHAI LATTES with money he’d stolen out of my mom’s purse. The place had big leather sofas and a backroom I used to think was haunted but was actually where they’d host COMEDY SHOWS and SINGERSONGWRITER CONCERTS and other things that WHITE 30-SOMETHINGS like to do to feel like they’re not old and boring. When the barista brought our drinks over I could tell that RAMÓN felt inspired. —You know this place used to be a BARBERSHOP? —No way, really? —Yeah, it was a BLACK BARBERSHOP. —Ohhh, nice. —Yeah, but you don’t serve them here now huh? I didn’t understand what he meant, but I knew it was bad because she struggled to respond. RAMÓN just laughed and walked out of the cafe with our drinks in hand. —Ey fuck that WHITE DEVIL, WEENIE. • Across the street from THE COFFEE GALLERY was this abandoned looking GAS STATION. But one time, there were big trucks and lights and ladders and dozens of people buzzing around. Me, RAMÓN, and DAISY went to go check it out. I had to carry her up to the scene, though, because the crowd of people scared her. RAMÓN approached a guy and asked him what was up. —We’re filming. —Like a movie? —TRANSFORMERS. Robot cars and stuff. Big budget. —No shit. I used to watch that show when I was a kid. So what are they doing here? —Oh it’s just a small scene. We’re taking some B-ROLL right now. But later I think they’re shooting with SHIA. —Who? —SHIA LABEOUF. —The fuck is that? —I dunno. Kid from HOLES. RAMÓN cackled. —Aw that guy’s a XXXXXX. Tell SHIA LABEOUF that if he shows up out here I’m gonna beat his PUSSY ASS. And then we got told to leave.
• And at the top of LAKE, just before the street turned to a dirt trail, there was WEBSTER’S. WEBSTER’S was this local pharmacy that also doubled as a stationary and candy store. The place looked like it had gone unchanged since the fifties. I loved going there, because they had strange sodas like BIRCH BARK and SASSAFRAS. And I got to go there a lot, because that was the place that filled my mom’s prescriptions. That day she had taken so many PILLS that she couldn’t go get her new PILLS and so, somehow, RAMÓN was the one that had to walk to get them, which meant that I did too. I knew he was upset when he didn’t talk crazy to me on our walk there, or to the lady who gave him the PILLS. We walked back home down the middle of the street, almost in silence. —You know what I hate about this place, WEENIE? —What? —The streets don’t have any fucking sidewalks. CRACKER neighborhoods. If you’re not in a house, you’re on the street. That’s how they like it. —What’s a CRACKER? —Like stupid fucking white people. —Ok. —Yeah. And as long as you’re in a house, they don’t give a fuck. It’s all about image. —Image? —Yeah. • After that day, RAMÓN got angrier. —MANA, let me drive your car. —No way, BRO. —Why not? —It’s on lease and you got no license. —It’s on lease it’s on lease I have a new car and a new house and I’m a fucking cunt and I pop PILLS but nobody cares because it comes in an ORANGE BOTTLE instead of TIN FOIL— He mocked her like that until she left the room. But it’d pick right back up at a moment’s notice.
—Fucking treat me like I’m a piece of shit ROADKILL on the side of the freeway. —Act like you’re better than me just because you got a WHITE BABY DADDY who set you up. —What the fuck am I getting clean for if you assholes are still gonna act like I’m fucked up? I’m damned if I do and damned if I fucking don’t. I should just go get high. • It was easy with how much space RAMÓN took up to forget the family he brought with him. INES was silent, stoic, and seemed almost like she was in a different dimension. She basically just read her nursing textbooks and sat with her son. As for him, I learned after weeks of JUANITO refusing to speak to me that he actually didn’t fucking know ENGLISH, even though RAMÓN spoke it all the time. JUANITO only spoke Spanish. There’s a lot of MEXICANS in LA who speak only Spanish. I guess there’s so many of them that they don’t need to learn anything else. But yeah, we didn’t share a common language, and we couldn’t find one. Sometimes I wonder if RAMÓN knew that he was losing them. Sometimes I think he didn’t care. • With the way things were going, I wouldn’t have brought him to CHUCK E. CHEESE that day, but then again, I was SIX. I stayed with JUANITO for the first couple games, tried to show him my strategies for getting the most tickets, but he didn’t really seem interested. After a while I got enough to win a little squishy ball thing with SPONGEBOB on it. And with my prize in hand it was time for us to sit down and eat some PIZZA. RAMÓN was sitting at the end of the table, rocking his legs and chewing his finger nail. He kept sighing, in that way that people sigh when they are pissed off and want you to know. The waitress came to our table and asked us what we’d like to order. RAMÓN pulled his hands away from his face and smiled. —I’m a PEDOPHILE. I didn’t know that word, but I knew from the way the waitress’ face dropped that it was bad.
—What? —I’m a PEDOPHILE. My mom slapped his arm. Then everyone started yelling. INES grabbed me and JUANITO and took us to go wait by the car. —What? I’m just fucking around. Ok? I’m done. Let’s order a large pepperoni. • The next day, my mom took him out to talk about what happened. It made sense that they’d do it out of the house, keep the kids out of earshot—but obviously that didn’t work. RAMÓN stormed into the house. I was on the floor playing with DAISY. —Fucking CUNT. Fucking self serious big time talking small time HYPOCRITE bitch CUNT. He stopped and stared at me on the ground. —WEENIE, your mom’s a bitch. I stared at him for a second, then went back to DAISY. —You know we used to live here too? Growing up—we lived two streets away. I stopped and stood up. —Can I see? • RAMÓN and I stood outside of a small tan colored house with a Spanish tile roof and a bare yard with no trees or bushes. —So you lived here? —Yeah, WEENIE. —I thought you lived somewhere else. —Well we moved later. —How come? RAMÓN looked up, straight at the sun, then back down. —Our parents got divorced and we couldn’t live here anymore. I was just a couple
years older than you. —I’m sorry. —No, don’t be. It was the fucking best day of my life. Dad’s a piece of shit. —Why? —Oh he was always coked the fuck up. He yelled and threw things. He’d walk into the house with a GUN in his waistband and a bottle of PATRÓN in his hand like a fucking WETBACK. RAMÓN laughed. —One time, it was really bad. He pointed the gun at mom. —Abuela? —Yeah. And he pointed it at me and your mom too and told us to go sit in the bathroom. —What happened? —I went to the fucking bathroom. But your mom, she didn’t move. She got right in between them and fought. —Woah… —Yeah, she took a pistol to the face that day. —Mom got shot? —No, he just hit her with the back of it. But that still hurts. RAMÓN sat down on the curb and picked at the lawn with his fingernails. I sat down next to him. —We used to have a whole bunch of dogs here too. Most of them came from TIJUANA, we’d just pick them up and drive them across the border. —What were their names? —There was PANCHO, and SPARKY, and PEEWEE, and BROWNIE. —Were they friends? —What? Yeah, WEENIE. They were good while we had them. —What happened to them? RAMÓN turned away from me. —Dad made us take them to the POUND. —Was it because you were touching their privates? —No. —So why did he do that? —I don’t know. —I’m sorry. —And just like everything else, when it came time to walk them up to the gate, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. Your mom had to do it for me.
His face was still turned away from me, but I could hear he was sniffling. I stared and waited for him to continue, but he wasn’t speaking. —I would be sad too if I had to give up my doggies. —Yeah, it was sad. He wrapped his arm around my head and pulled me into his chest. —WEENIE, do you think your mom is better than me? —Yeah. He sighed. —I hope so. And then we both stood up. RAMÓN wiped his ass off, turned back at the house one last time and then pulled me up too. —You good to walk home alone WEENIE? Like you know where to go? —Ok. Where are you going? —Just not ready to go back home yet is all. I started walking down the street and when I turned around he was gone. • It was early the next morning—the sky was still dark—when I heard INES scream from the other room. She ran over and woke my parents up. They all stepped out into the hallway and talked for a moment, then came back into the room and told me to get some pants and shoes on. RAMÓN had been stabbed. We got to the hospital just as the sun was coming up. INES and my parents got name badges, but they let me and JUANITO go straight through. We walked through the emergency ward, past crying BABIES and ailing OLD FOLKS and CONSTRUCTION WORKERS with job site injuries and towards a room at the end of the wing with the door slightly ajar. RAMÓN was laying on the bed with some bandages over his groin. His eyes were wild, and I could hear him gritting his teeth from across the room. He had smoked METH. It was obvious, even if I didn’t know then what METH was or what it did to you. There’s something about seeing someone on drugs where they kind of look like something is wearing their SKIN like a SUIT. —Ay BITCH why’d you bring the whole fucking BLOODLINE?
My mom took a seat at his bedside. —BRO, what the fuck? —I was at that fucking SEX CLUB again. INES stared down at her son, then walked them both out of the room, just like she had at the CHUCK E. CHEESE. It felt unconscious, mechanical, rehearsed to perfection from all of RAMÓN’S outbursts. He turned to my mom. —This guy was saying some XXXXXX shit at me. —Alright. —I told him I’d punch him the fuck out. —Then what happened? —Well I punched him the fuck out. —Right. —And then he stabbed me. She buried her head in her hands. —But check this out, my fucking BEANER BELT saved me. Big ass RANCHO BUCKLE caught his knife. He barely scratched me. They wouldn’t listen to me, though. They called an ambulance and had them take me here. —Probably because you’re all tweaked the fuck out. —Nah I’m good. He turned to me. —WEENIE, go tell the WHITE NURSE to get you some pudding. • Things moved quickly after that. They held RAMÓN in the hospital for three whole days in a 5150, which didn’t make any sense to me because he was basically fine. But it gave the adults time to plan. RAMÓN had a lot of room to fuck around when my dad was at work, but his latest stunt proved he did not deserve the benefit of the doubt. There was going to be a big talk, and I was told to go sit in the bathroom with DAISY while it happened. I thought about what RAMÓN told me, about how he used to hide in the bathroom too. I planted my feet in the ground and refused to move and when my dad picked me up and carried me into the bathroom I walked right back out again and again until finally he gave up and it was settled that I’d be there too.
RAMÓN and my mom arrived home. In the living room, INES and JUANITO were sitting on one couch. My mom joined them. My dad was standing beside them with his arms crossed. RAMÓN took a seat in a chair by himself on the other side of the room. INES began speaking in Spanish. —Me voy a casa de mi mamá en TIJUANA y me llevo a JUANITO. Te voy a mandar los papeles. El DIVORCIO va a ser fácil, porque no vas a pelear por la custodia. RAMÓN sat with his head down. —MANA, do you got any like soda or some shit to drink? —BRO are you fucking kidding me? —Well it sounds like her mind’s made up. I don’t know what I’m supposed to fucking— —Can you fucking be for real right now? INES started crying, and she held her son, and even though I didn’t speak Spanish I understood what was happening. —Fuck yeah let’s start being real MANA. Let’s start being fucking real. He looked me right in the eyes and smiled. —WEENIE, your mom’s on drugs. Her face turned bright red and she stood up. —RAMÓN shut the fuck up. But RAMÓN ignored her completely. He held my gaze while he rubbed his head, then dropped his hands down to his knees. —WEENIE, don’t ever trust a fucking thing these people say. • It’s been a long time since RAMÓN and his family stayed with us, but there’s something that I still think about. RAMÓN, INES, JUANITO, and my mom— all of them spoke Spanish as their first language. I was the only one that didn’t. And yet I don’t think I ever once heard RAMÓN speak it. It never made any sense to me. But I realized that he actually gave me an
explanation. A year after RAMÓN left, DAISY started to shake and refused to eat. My mom was popping PILLS even more then, so it took her a few days to see for herself what I had been worrying about. When we took her to the vet, we learned that she was dying—a congenital heart condition we had never known of. Some people just come out broken. Some dogs too. That morning the air was warm and there were clear skies, but when we left the vet after putting her down, the streets were flooded with rain. Funny how it works like that sometimes. When we got back home, RAMÓN was there, waiting on our front porch. He had stubble on the sides of his bald head and his teeth looked yellowed and worn. His white t-shirt had been soaked through by the rain, and I could see through the translucent fabric that he was a lot skinnier. We got out of the car and RAMÓN walked over to us. He scooped me up with one arm and held my mom in the other. And we all cried together, like that, for a moment. —I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. And then he said something strange. —You two are the only people in this world that I love. I didn’t know it then, but it was a confession. If you’re born broken—if you think you are, at least—how can anything that you made ever be unbroken? Why even bother to talk to them? They’re not worth it. Better to focus all your attention, in the only way you know how, on the one that you hope did not come out broken—on my mom—and on me, the one who came out of her. But maybe he was just fucking crazy. The night we put DAISY down they both used. Together. I saw it. And in that blur of grief and tears and rain slashing the windows and PILLS and FOILS—he looked broken, and she looked broken, and I looked broken too.
ON WRITING POEMS Ezzat Abouleish She used to make tables of exceptional seeing. Then she was rearranged.
People still sit at the tables. And watch: the dawn is long is exceptional seeing. I sometimes sit at the tables, resounding in her craft of woof. Her shaping the affects of small deconstruction like all shapings. She was rearranged with a disease with no known cause. The dawn is like running among floating bright tables. Marx is dead. Hold on.
WITH YOU AT ONE A.M. UNDER THE SWANN STREET GINKGOS Se th Kleinschmidt
Rayon go the wind chimes what do we have here rum’s morse ticking November gives a huge rat a purpose in the gutter, touching that’s the knee, oh I get it I can be now more than me that’s the gist and I think I think I can rise in the pace car The spectrograph prodigious of a caterwaul (we’re talking) Smooth, breasting a creek I have heard late of your carapace a good news not now to say you can preach the dickens out me clean all marble needs a rasp soft on a honey vein hotsprings often produce travertine slabbing but see that’s a whole other charter it will suffice say will it to get down yes, and be yourself with my self for a lurch a span a night yes, agreed and all
but how wide is a leaf or molten—but then it cools enough and you can lift it safe with two bare hands
THIN IDEA Duc Van K hanh Tran A thin idea hit me sleepy. My brain smoked hastily, and the reality imagined itself. My brain smoked hastily, and a thought floated downward. The imaginary reality was dead. A thought floated downward, although the reality imagined itself. Although a thin idea hit me sleepy, the imaginary reality was dead.
SAMAIA1 Nini Sikhar ulid z e We could only exist in this periphery, To stand clown-faced with poppies and twirl stillborn. There would be our nimble-throated demands, ghosthood of wire growing out of loathing of a sort. My part of the town is under a stripping mountain, its carnival dressing uncoming, unbecoming on herself. Do not look under. The walls would thicken in wanting too loud to call anything but a purgatory illusion. If the Caucasus exists, it is an apparition. This bride as she hunches over for navel-gazing her umbilical cord, the place where 1 Samaia – სამაია. Georgian ritual traditional folk dance. It is frequently performed by three female dancers, dressed as King Tamar (Queen of Georgia).
the place where we live twisting in. I would take you here to entangle our feet or forget about the poppies and the Gods forever neonatal. Our jewels would scratch against the edges of her fenced distortions. To spin this lifeline means resistance. Delay the crowning! There shall be no birth: we would need to clamp ourselves back together into forgetting. Each step turning a choir never gazing at the spiraling hollows within.
GALLOWS GALLOWS Abubaker Zahoor Truly Allah alone has the knowledge of the hour he sends down the rain… knows what’s in the wombs… -The Qur’an Actually, Ayub did sleep, and dreamt nice dreams—a tanga with arabesque flanks drawn by a stringy pony; a turtledove pecking a moist aspidistra— and awoke to the dawn chorus of gallows birds. Their cell—some of the inmates called it a darbar, king’s court, a place of worship—was to his left, a few forlorn rooms down. He had shared with them two years of clock-time, an eon of soultime. The first three of the seven solitary nights in his black cell, where he had been brought to be kept under extra security and care, he had missed his birds, their surreal ritual of rising from the deathbeds with a newborn’s spirit. Earlier he had prayed, though he was a little unsure about his wudu. There was a bowl and a lota at a healthy arm’s length from his quilted mat, but a nocturnal thirst he couldn’t now remember had left little water in both. With a scrunched up nose he dismissed the notion that the same spout that habitually threatened to collide with his genitals had been in his mouth. He caressed his elbows and feet with symbolic water. He couldn’t gesture prostration either: the floor rose to meet his forehead. Then, buttressed against the warty cement wall, he breathed into the scented shawl of his daughter, which his wife had given him during their farewell meeting forty hours ago to fight the odors. His catheter was heavy with urine. The humidity was bitter. A creased picture rested on his pillow. It was taken by a travelling photographer who visited—what a colorful bicycle he had—their town in the summer. He had captured them well before he grew disloyal to her. Floral background: a bedsheet spread on a vertical charpoy. Lubna was wearing a blue starburst linen dress, Ayub gray slacks and a brown oxford shirt. Lubna’s eyes, he couldn’t look away, looked filmically intense, cruelly committed. He thought of the life that was begging to be lived. Thought of their twins who saw nothing of this world but their mother insisted they had, had smiled—“just a little.” And when, eventually, she had reconciled her rift with God, she would say: “It was His smile.” Thought most and longest of his only living child, Ayesha, his daughter, born two years before the crime of passion, the passionate murder. In about two hours he would be wheeled to the gallows. He was not delirious or apathetic. He wanted to sit in a tree bough and see white horses and pebbled water. He had not submitted to death “long before the hour of departure,” as the warden had said, the same person who prophesied sleep wouldn’t come to Ayub and if it did it’d bring him necrophiliac fevers or Azrael’s infinite-winged
silhouette. Ayub’s Birds had said other things, also wrong. Meaning: in those hours, with his death no longer a theorem, no longer a looming prospect, but a clocked certainty, he didn’t quite know how to be. So he breathed and sunbeams tongued his windowsill and footfalls came near, nearer, receded, came nearer again. The guard who patrolled Ayub’s hours opened the door and a twitchyshouldered, mustachioed one entered. He was holding a file. A heavy-set doctor was with him. Ayub smelled tobacco and some Arabian cologne. Damask rose? The doctor’s revulsion at the odors and Ayub’s condition was obvious, for his mask kept getting sucked into his mouth or slipping down his nose. “Dr. Ghulam will take a look at you,” the guard said. “I am him, I am Dr. Ghulam.” “How does it feel to cure one of life?” Ayub said. It was not a morbid or maudlin question for him. He did feel curious about the doctor’s experience, whose nervous conduct suggested he had never dreamt of stumbling into this part of the world. Dr. Ghulam tucked the blue tips of his stethoscope into his ears, crouched, wavered his gloved hand over Ayub’s body curled in a fetal curve, unable to decide the music he would hear first: the murmur of Ayub’s heart or the cheep of his lungs. Ayub found the cool steely weight of the diaphragm comforting. To be touched— wherever. Every time the doctor scribbled something into the gray ribbed file, he muttered: “What’s the point, what’s the point.” “Khuda Hafiz,” the doctor said, tapping Ayub’s tiny hands “Allah Hafiz,” Ayub said with a pitiful smile. Moments later the moustaches came back and said, “You’re good to go, payen (older brother).” By which he meant Ayub had been declared sound for the gallows. “I’d like my black suit then, munny (younger brother)” Ayub said, and chuckled. He was playing off the old guard’s peculiar way of addressing him, the aged irony of his calling Ayub payen when he seemed at least two decades older than him; and the guard, as if from a sudden recognition, laughed too with a couple of extra twitches. “Clever,” he said, pointing a praising finger at Ayub in praise. “You go at 7:30, we have, let me see, some 58 minutes.” He waved his red timepiece. “Can I have my wheelchair at least? I’d like to sit and”—see the sunshine, Ayub wanted to say—“my back hurts, sir.” He touched his back and produced an achy sound. “Now, here is the thing. You do probably want to just sit, but bosses wouldn’t allow that from the fear that you might take yourself out and then they wouldn’t get to do it the proper way.” The guard had walked closer to Ayub’s mat. His eyes were moist. “Are you my hangman, Umair?” Ayub said, looking at the metallic name tag.
“Go ahead now, paayen, go ahead and make me weep. You can’t see your executioner’s face. Why would you want to? Also, the hangmen are always Christians. I am a believer in Allah and Muhammed.” “Well, I don’t know, I want to be able to see that face. I want to kiss the hands that will finally liberate me from this torture.” “Let me give you a feel-good,” Umair mumbled. He was on the other end of the cell now, filling Ayub’s lota and bowl with water. “I can tell you this: you’ll be facing a mango tree, and not one of these wretched walls, and there will be sunshine, and it will be quick, quick, quick.” It had become overcast when two other guards came. The stockier man had the classically notorious policeman built: a plump behind and potbelly, chevron moustache, drunkard’s red eyes, dark face. The tallish clean-shaven man had a strangeness about him. He had either been part of too many executions, Ayub thought, or hated his job with comparable morbidity––so devoid of sympathy was his face. The tallish guy lifted Ayub up quite easily, languished as he was, weighing about 88 pounds. The potbelly took Ayub’s sage-green shalwar-kameez off and garbed him in the black death-wear. “Wow, you’ve got a pea-cock here.” All three of them laughed. Ayub laughed the most. “Clever, that’s clever,” he said. At 7:03 they wheeled him out into the gallows. The rusty metal gate opened with a lively rumble. The men—two jail officers, three guards, the condemned— stood beneath a tarp awning facing the platform. A non-uniformed man stood leaning against one of the slabby concrete walls, tickling the wet wild flowers and bermuda grass, smoking one cigarette after another. Ayub concluded that he was his hangman, and jerkily craned his neck with the hope that he would be able to take a good look. He could not. But—a feel-good—there indeed was a mango tree, and it looked beautiful, the way it rustled in the farewell breezes. By the time “magistrate sahib”—all the guards said the words as if it were a spell—materialized, it had begun to rain, and the thunders croaked in the sky. The magistrate would’ve perhaps liked to take the officer aside but the rain meant they’d have to discuss the logistics of execution—seven minutes to go—in front of the condemned. Ayub, however, was glad to know the exact process. “Sir, we’ll have to forego the walk-up clause,” the officer said, whispering in vain. He was referring to the rule that said the condemned must walk to the platform. Ayub knew that because his lawyers had tried to use it to stay the execution. “Other than that we can go either way: I recommend using human support for a smooth drop, not that I’ve any doubts that the wheelchair situation will also work.” “But it’s slippery?” the magistrate said, scratching himself privately. “Sir, I think if your boys can stretch me into an erection, it’d work,” Ayub said, and winked at Umair. A crow swooped down on the crossbeam, pecked the shuddering noose, evaporated. “Shut up,” the officer said. “No,” the magistrate said.
The hangman tossed a half-smoked cigarette over the wall and lit up another one. He was now standing, being rained on, one hand braced against the wall, reminiscent of someone taking a leisurely leak. “Magistrate sahib, I know you’re worried, but consider this done.” The magistrate threw his arms up in affirmation and began to walk toward the gate, his orderly struggling to keep the umbrella from grazing against the magistrate’s large head. *** Ayub was now on the platform. His executioner, a mystery still, has disappeared somewhere behind him. A couple of stippled figures stood under the awning, the makeshift rain shelter. Through the splashy warble he heard someone sing: “Listen, oh giver of life, I am sick of your world.” “Farewell, Munna,” Ayub said. “Farewell, Paayen.” “The hood,” someone screamed. It fitted him perfectly, felt like an erotic peekaboo, like Lubna’s hair falling, night-like, on his eyes, and in the night of grace endless images entered his blindness, all painful and prophetic and marvelous. “Stop, stop, stop,” a man yells from the pattering beyond. “Sahib Jee’s order: let the rain stop.” “What?” holler the guards from the platform. They had rolled Ayub’s chair closer to the trapdoor, one of them had his wet hand under Ayub’s armpit, and Ayub seems ready to be hoisted and dropped into eternity. Now, the infantine cluelessness he had felt earlier while awaiting his execution comes back to him: the idea of returning to that life, however briefly, he gleefully escaped terrifies him. He thrashes his arms, cries out to the deafened heavens, makes prayers sacred and profane. But the orders are final, his eloquent despair futile. The guards have brought him back to his black cell. One of them tells him he can stay in the black dress until further notice. Ayub deems the suggestion moronic: “Yeah, soak me properly, you bastards.” Hours pass. The rain stops around noon. Through a chink he can see a slice of the spruce horizon. The pissy warden who brings him his lunch—watery daal, a burnt-edged roti—had no news. In the afternoon Umair informs him the execution has been postponed indefinitely. Ayub has missed the dhuhr and asr prayers. The maghrib he could not resist. He recites the verses, pressing his forehead against the wall to signal prostration. The prayer over, he goes back to it, that strange gesture, each time a little harder. He stares at the wall with hopeful finality. He waits for the moseying guard to go away. In that labyrinthine pause, a butterfly drifts into his cell, flitting from this corner to that in silken arcs. She has no business to be in that world. END
APERTURE Sarah Edwards I love the bench that overlooks the baseball field that overlooks the house that looks like “Church, Sprott, Alabama, 1977”: A shock of white among pine. It’s mine. I try to love the gap, the blur, the way things collapse or expand with just one look: Now morning, next evening; reprising worth the risk like Heaney’s double-take of feeling. Or how—at my brother’s games, before everything changed—my father led me along the clay fringe in time-killing loops he called trips around the earth: We are in Russia, he’d say with each clover scuff. Now Malaysia. Now Italy. Next, Mexico.
WEDDING DAY Sarah Edwards The morning glories the neighbor called invasive are ready for a new logic, the sky deepening into Iris blue. The market has not yet swayed the landlord, the old house not yet gone the way. Next door, the beautiful baby tilts toward the first muggy drops as her mother hands her over, running to pull pink slips from the line, whispering, like a woman in a movie, baby here comes a summer storm—even the plastic yard chairs prickle in planetary anticipation. When Jacob emails to offer oysters left from a wedding, I walk to his porch and kneel to lift them from the cold mouth of the icebox. The town dreams of lemons and lace, of cocktail sauce and a bride and groom readying out into the institution. Clouds swollen to capacity; the tall white yuccas flaming upward like candles. Something about abundance will always overwhelm. Once home, the briny shells stay untouched.
OVERGROWTH OF A HOLIDAY Livio Farallo i will calculate the happiness of jailbirds by the number of teeth or, spaces where teeth were, filling a smile. and i will love an oral history of love better than the children born of it; love love’s first and only hours; eternal and brief; unmortified. and, if you border on twilight like a dismal uniform will, you are the horizon hung from shade; a woodsman hacking at a hollow tree fallen mossy with years. and i
live deep inside celebrations, spilling all over myself, counting the dark splinters that fly.
CISTERN Philip Alexander Mills Witness the child, the architect of thirst. His gallbladder abbreviated; the cyst beneath his earlobe, reminiscent of a fig. He topples the stone cover, and places it beside the tumbleweed. A cavity, a cauldron The esophagus of a bowhead whale Fumes congeal Around his collar. Wreath of spoiled rainwater The inevitable embrace Of enzyme, salt, and limestone plaster [splash] ______________________________________________ _________
Daniel Fraser is a writer from Yorkshire. The author of Lung Iron (ignitionpress), his work can be found in places like: HAD, London Magazine, LA Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Drift, and X-R-A-Y. He lives on the Irish coast with his twin boys.
R.K. Fauth is the author of A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees,
winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (TTU Press, 2024). Fauth’s writing has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Fauth is a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, and a winner of a Treehouse Climate Action Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She has held fellowships with the The Fulbright Program, The Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She currently lives in New York City.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator, whose newest book of poetry, Elements & Offerings, is now out from LSU Press. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.
Gerald Friedman grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and now teaches physics and mathematics in northern New Mexico. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, and his translations from Machado have appeared in Ezra, Dialogist, RHINO, and Poet Lore. You can read more of his work at https://jerryfriedman.wixsite.com/my-site-2
Benjamin Shapere is a senior at Columbia. A collection of his poems Perfume Anthrax (Progress Print, 2026) is forthcoming.
Ezra Lebovitz is a writer based in Philadelphia, where he is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He can be found in the public parks and waterways of the mid-Atlantic.
Kenneth Máximo Schultz is a Mexican-American writer from Altadena, California, currently living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Apricity Magazine and the Columbia Daily Spectator. He studied English at Columbia University and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction as a Truman Capote Fellow at Brooklyn College.
Ezzat Abouleish is a recent graduate from Yale College where he studied
philosophy and political theory. He served as a poetry reader for the Yale Review and an editor for the Yale Philosophy Review. He twice won the Yale Creative Arts Award, once for poetry and once for fiction. The submitted poems would be his first publication. They were developed under the mentorship of Louis Glück during her final workshop.
Seth Kleinschmidt is a Midwesterner from the banks of Wisconsin’s
Rock River. After many years spent on and off the air as a radio producer and disc jockey, he is now an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Duc Van Khanh Tran is currently a Ph.D. student at National
University of Singapore and has started using mathematical poetry forms to write poems since senior year in college. He writes poems in English and Mandarin Chinese, with poems published or forthcoming in Juste Milieu Zine,《新大陆》, 《雨林诗刊》 etc. Updates on publications of his poems can be found on duc-van-khanh-tran-poetry.carrd.co/.
Nini Sikharulidze is a graduate of Harvard College (Class of 2025), where she studied poetry under the mentorship of Tracy K. Smith and Joshua Bell. Her work explores the shifting relationship between place and self, and the surreal terrain where they converge in language.
Abubaker Zahoor is a Pakistani writer with a PhD in English from
the University of Southern Mississippi and an MFA in Fiction from Miami University. His first book, Evening Rides with My Guru (creative nonfiction), was published in 2017.
Sarah Edwards is an editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Annulet, The Yale Review, Brink, Ninth Letter, The Southern Humanities Review, Joyland, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others.
Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream. His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, The Cardiff Review, Blotter, and elsewhere.
Philip Alexander Mills is a Greek American filmmaker with a master’s
degree in creative writing from the University of Cambridge. His most recent short film We Are All the Father was produced by the team behind Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-nominated Dogtooth. His feature script The Waste Land earned recognition from the Academy Nicholl Fellowship and Slamdance Film Festival, and he’s currently serving as a co-executive producer on a narrative feature titled Synthetic starring Charlie Cox and Haley Bennett. Alex’s aesthetic interests lie in climate narratives, socially conscious films, and body horror.