Summer 2023

The Summer Issue | 2023

July 3, 2023

“When you read this work, I hope you’ll be, as I am, moved by how lost we each find ourselves, whether in dark forests or bright cities, as we navigate individual landscapes of grief and want and the confounding joy of living. May you delight in the journeys plotted here, forward and back, sometimes tracing the circles we pace in our inescapable and baffling humanity. In each of these voices, may you recognize your own voice, the strange human voice we share and cannot shake.” — Francesca Bell, Guest Editor

The Summer Issue | 2023

“When you read this work, I hope you’ll be, as I am, moved by how lost we each find ourselves, whether in dark forests or bright cities, as we navigate individual landscapes of grief and want and the confounding joy of living. May you delight in the journeys plotted here, forward and back, sometimes tracing the circles we pace in our inescapable and baffling humanity. In each of these voices, may you recognize your own voice, the strange human voice we share and cannot shake.” — Francesca Bell, Guest Editor

Petr Hruška: Remembering Cormac McCarthy (20 July 1933 – 13 June 2023)

The fire on the American mountainside was dying down. My thought was that horror cannot be cheated if hope is to become believable.

Andrea Hollander

As if without a man, winter could take over. / But I loved winter, love winter still, so / what am I trying to say?

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

My violence astonishes me some days, the way I regard the lesser / goldfinches in the lavender, each the size of a thumb, I want / to cram them into my mouth

Jeanne Wagner

I would tell him I told the officer you didn’t rape me. Because I was awake that morning before six. Because I was dressed for work. For the world.

Michael Mark

Trust my inabilities. They are / reliable as gold. Count on the / gravity of my fragility. It will / always let you down.

Adam Berlin

He holds the cigarette far out on his fingers. Like they teach in acting class. Tight to the chest. Tough guy. Tip of the fingers. Aristocrat.

B.A. Van Sise, Photo: C.S. Muncy

B.A. Van Sise

I have been asked to teach / a workshop at the public library / about found poetry and I / do not know what that is.

Frances Klein

The suspension slips pile up / like maple leaves in October. / The golem’s parents enlist a therapist / and a tutor, a rabbi and a cool college student / from the Troubled Youth Mentor Center.

Timothy Green

All I really want are the Seven Wonders / of a Marriage. Find me standing in line for / the Marvels of Your Many Moods.

Nathaniel Eddy

Let’s pretend it wasn’t fleeing but instead the curiosity of a flame. A month in Mexico, the details lost but for a few memories, mementos. The copper bowl, purchased from a woman kneeling by the side of a road. A milky looking scar, thread thin, drawn into the muscle of your shoulder.

Cleo Qian

Your books, I still can’t find them. / For years, when I remembered to, I looked. // Your legacy: an image of a split head / bleeding into a river.

Saddiq Dzukogi

Even / though I loiter on the cliff / of a love that wants me, I refuse / to fall.

Italo Ferrante

oh I love / how a tree bisects our garden / so we can reunite every time / we stumble on the other side / of our legs

Benjamin Paloff

After I’ve spent all day talking about concentration camps, my father tells me to get him out of this concentration camp. It’s his birthday.

Jenna Le

Before homo sapiens, the woods on this hill / were thick as a young bride’s wedding-night-tangled hair, / coronet of sunlight bedazzling / a canopy miles above moist earth

Rob Shapiro

I throw my voice / to the end of my life and what comes back / is bird chatter, dog whimper, a bow drawn / across a cello’s neck.

Klein Voorhees

All pilgrimage is trans · / position of the throat and hands / palming prayers into the crooks of an unfamiliar / coastline

t.m. thomson

See how possum’s eldritch teeth chatter — a warning of the way the lowly can take the diseased into body, break it like bread.

Steven D. Schroeder

The children find themselves farther than they are. To return home means to earth. In their eyes, forest. In their hearts, more forest.

Ashish Kumar Singh

You have grown enough to know / that everything will kill you if you let it.

Julia B. Levine

Someone please remind me that it is okay / to feel terror and a terrible sadness at the visceral forge / where our friendship passes now into my sole keep.