Valerie Bacharach

COUNTDOWN AS ENDING
after Michael Wasson

10. Refusing oxygen, gasping. Your fevered hands, restless,
pluck at the blanket.

9. Face pale as clouds, as snow, as corpse.

8. Your colorless mouth forms prayer: my mother, my sister.

7. I am your daughter, my body drained

6. of love. Empty as your eyes
that stare at some far horizon.

5. Your chest rises, falls, stops, moves, stops, moves.

4. I hold your hand, my breath too close to my heart.

3. My heart wants you

2. to be done, to be still, to let go of fury and sadness.
You become ephemeral, opalescent as

1. your breath, my breath, your breath.

0. No breath.

Lisa Lewis

WHERE IT HURTS

Life was still long with much to learn and migraines lit the highway
like torches, zagging red and orange, firing the gullies and spreading.
I had no idea. I kept a calendar but dreamed it away as the signature
of girls who did what they were told and I already loved the nasal
murmur of no. The good of what it could count with its paper hoof
was fireworks on the side, glitter and trash the next morning.
Stay, fullness of soul, I might’ve sighed in the diligent practice
of everything I knew and didn’t gathering along the floorboard
like mayflies dead in an hour. Pain like bread in the oven,
pain like pans dangling from wires to shoo off crows. Precious
pain made me a serious woman, in flight from the sides of my skull
or drawn by gravity to the pit foundering in dust beneath my ribs.
Pain like a tarnished tambourine. Pain laughing shrilly, pain buying
my contempt with lead. Pain on a dare, pain for boasting, pain
for closure but not behind the eyes, too much bright dance on the toes.
I could feel words blocking blood in my veins all the way to numbness.
The thick clusters of leaves all add up to five, and I began to read about
the numbers and their mystic meanings I never believed. A lie was flat
as truth no matter how many times, and one night it was neon light,
another strong wind and another boom with an echo, boom boom flat.
I watched shingles skid from roofs like men besotted with death.
It was all my blood in there, strained out thin. It was all my touch
fingering edges of sky, and how did I figure out what happened?
I remember certainty slamming the side of the house and leaving
no mark when I ran outside. This magic is invisible too: it always is.
Raise the hand to the window where summer rushes in. There’s a list
of names but it’s only sufferers, not including you. It’s the simultaneity
of lightning strikes and madness that does the trick. Suddenly the answer
bolts upright in bed frightened of the future, the fragrant hole at the end.
I apologize for speaking to you this way. I must adjust the maps
and the explanation. Everything gets bigger, then shrinks. No one
has been able to formulate a request that makes it through the system.
Along the ditches a flickering distracts your gaze and all you need to know
is that it comes from inside, where the secrets are. You need not fear
they’ll show when you’re torn to such diligent lace you sound like song.

Naomi Bess Leimsider

THE CALL OF THE VOID

“He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy.
But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes and in the abyss…"
Kierkegaard

I can only handle the call with gritted teeth precision. Only the organized chaos
of surgical intervention and the clean lines of the scalpel path will do in moments
like these; the red light of the rules barely hold me back. In a high place,
the rubbery band of atmosphere almost pulls away. The urge to spider-climb
the how many steps from the abyss staircase up a slippery wall. Swing up
before the deep drop down from branch to sky to branch at the top of the world.
The tense cling to the desperate waves of some ocean -- any ocean --
until the sick in the small of my stomach kicks in.
I'm fine to take a punch, but I can't shake the push of the call; the frantic
high frequency pitch ringing danger in both my boxed ears. You can
cold spoon my eyes and truss my head up tight, but here I am, like I've always
been, about to sink into the pure pressure to give in.
It's so much, always too much, but it's the only way I feel love.

Caroline Shea

NARROWING

Each time I go under
the x-ray, a prayer.
Even now, rendering myself
legible, and for what?

You’ve heard them say: Pain is weakness
leaving the body. Little girl, tape up your feet
and dance. Toenails bloody snowflakes
shedding, catching, in the light. Or a home
without children? Empty nest. Which spells my parents
into hawks, perched around a dinner table meant for four.
Which makes me—what? A womb.
Nana says she will die this year.
She says this every year, and every year
I forgive her less.

***
My mother dreams tsunamis on repeat,
always waking as the wave meets the shore.

Once, she tells me, her mother woke her
late at night, put her with her sister in the car.

Still pajama-d and milky with sleep,
they weren’t allowed to fasten their seatbelts.

She drove for hours. Told them they’d be dead
by morning, bloated with river.

***
You are what you eat,
my grandmother teases.
Am monstering. Am severing.
When zipped into my mother’s
wedding gown—her mother’s dress first—
it pinched, left a welt around my waist,
that I fingered that night in bed,
as if there was anything left to decode.

Impossible, then, to separate the scar
from what it has patterned: a way of living.
When did it start?
Early. Always.
Once, playing house, a friend pointed,
said You’ll be the dog. I was beautiful,
bent, on hands and knees.

Kelly Hanwright

MATTED

When your mom didn’t brush your hair
or teach you to brush it and it gets super matted and
she sends you to school like that until people
notice and the topic becomes unavoidable So
she takes you to the hairdresser; Tells her its your fault –
You got lazy Wouldn’t brush it She warned you…
Together they laugh about how kids can be like that.
Then you go to school the next day and people say
the cut is nice and you have to pretend you wanted this;
come up with reasons to love it while inside
your heart is becoming a matt of feelings wound around themselves
She lied? Not possible.
It must have been your fault.

Uche Ogbuji

EASY WORDS

Artist statement:

When the police murder of George Floyd sparked protest and fury, I noticed an all too familiar pattern of responses to #BlackLivesMatter. In the politically diverse circles I intentionally cultivate, I heard condemnation of demonstrators. I heard continued denials of racial and other social inequities. I spent many days in silence absorbing what people were saying. I spent many days reflecting on other times when I had been the one doing more talking than listening. Then one morning this poem spilled out of me in a torrent. It came almost more quickly than I could write it down. So many easy words, such entrenched positions, so many arguments based more on formula than compassion. The COVID lockdown had previously prompted me towards a long-standing goal of learning contemporary music production, so I was able to create a track to help amplify my message. My friend Slade Ham listened to an early version of the track and offered to create a video. My dream is that "Easy Words" might give at least one person a moment's pause, just one extra moment in which they might entertain the possibility of changing their mind.

D Rosen

(AT THE BACK OF YOUR TONGUE)

there is an acidic liquid
that breathes up your throat
––a feelings harbor

Ziggy Edwards

NONCONSENSUAL REALITY

Slice a hole in the machine
And climb inside

Wool coats in a wardrobe
A box of water and wires
A steaming buffalo sacrifice

Sit in the cockpit
Sleeves brushing our cheeks

Names stitched in the lining

Look across the river:
The child will reappear
Barefoot along the concrete slope

Sierra Montgomery

MEMENTO

Green leaves peek through splintering wood so slowly that you could call it revenge, twisting and pushing in such a way that the boards bend for far longer than they break.

He’ll say that he knocked only once. After that, he just might admit that he may have tapped on a window or two at some unspecified point. In the coat of night, we know only the sounds that sneak up on sleeping ears. The feel of linen on my back, fingers traipsing store-bought cotton. I couldn’t tell you if it was him.

I am always pulling up weeds without gloves, always breathing the air outside of my own house. I shovel benadryl and xanax into every fresh crevice and cut that I find, knowing well that I’m an allergen to all gardens that I tend.

It only takes a splinter; the most miniscule, silent crack can erode into a tunnel. Wrapped in a towel, I sit on the kitchen floor, inhaling sweet nothings from the leaves. As they reach towards the light, grams of pink roll away from the bulging floorboards. I hardly noticed.

Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum

CHILLS AND FEVER

A dream starts and ends,
abrupt. bang! a window explodes,
a red and yellow fireball,
I wake before the burning
room devours me.
So real, I get up to search for damage.
In the mirror’s window,
my sclera are clear.
The morning sun flashes in my eyes,
stroke, not stroke, omen, not omen.
A population hemorrhages
in the mind of god.

Waiting. Each breath.
I trace the sore line under the edge
of the ribs, where my lungs
may burst. The rains of March are fierce.
Unchained from snow,
they beat back the spring.
My sister with her daughter in one room,
My cough is getting painful.
We are running out of food,
we had tuna with apple slices for supper.

Another dream ripens in secret.
A thin young man, dark-eyed,
wearing ocean-colored scrubs
stands in a puddle in my hall, barefoot.
Give him shoes.
Give him gloves, hat, mask, armor him
against cough, rage, his grief,
his endless dying.

Satya Dash

X-RAY

mirror unbuttons      ungenders
                my straightness
                                chin up waist down

the way you touch flowers is how you touch yourself
is how the night touches undulations dimpling your arch

pink heart gladdens murmurs drumroll
reassuring sequence of staccatoing staircase

I wonder if it’s me sharpening carefully preening
or the weather’s misappropriations

***

hold my wedge of an arm perspiring wet branch
of sad hairs

in tender sunlight I’m hoping to make an honest rainbow
of anatomy’s soft edges

grope in and out of the past      to satiate want
                   tunes operate in fuzzy loops

the only deep yearn      I’m glad I have
                                                  is kissing in a storm
                        such is devotion to lyric
muscles dance       in rings of rain      for plashing music

***

unrealized desire making poignant memory
skeins of fruit joined in milky glue

now look at me       four legged vegetable
                               hypnotized by gravity       falling on army
of erect knives      cleaving to form       reason from taste

blink, the language of humility       carries acceptance
                                                                       in my knees
as I hang prostrate      like curling fetus inside dark machine
                                                                   deflecting icy winds

Issue 64 Contributors

Valerie Bacharach is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her writing has appeared or will appear in publications including Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Tishman Review, Topology Magazine, Poetica, Voices from the Attic, The Ekphrastic Review, Talking/Writing, and Vox Viola. Her chapbook, Fireweed, was published in August 2018 by Main Street Rag.

Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She has studied poetry at the Joiner Institute in UMass, Boston. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in And There Will Be Singing, An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019 as well. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in I-70 Review, J Journal, Nixes Mate Review, Ibbetson Street and Spoon River Poetry Review.

Satya Dash’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Prelude, The Cortland Review, and Poetry@Sangam, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He is a two-time Orison Anthology and Best New Poets nominee. He spent his early years in Odisha and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043.

Ziggy Edwards is the proud owner of a loft bed. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications including 5 AM, Confluence, Main Street Rag, Illumen, and Dreams and Nightmares.

Kelly Hanwright is a poet, teacher and dog trainer living in the beautiful Smoky Mountains. She creates art to help understand herself, and shares to help others do the same for themselves. Work has appeared in Abyss & Apex, American Diversity Report, The Birmingham Arts Journal, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal. Find her on the web at https://kellyhanwright.com/.

Naomi Bess Leimsider has published poems and short stories in Coffin Bell Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Newtown Literary, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, Summerset Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Pindeldyboz, 13 Warriors, Slow Trains, Zone 3, Drunken Boat, and The Brooklyn Review.

Lisa Lewis has published six books of poetry, most recently The Body Double (Georgetown Review Press, 2016) and Taxonomy of the Missing (The Word Works, 2018). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, New England Review, South Dakota Review, Laurel Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor of the Cimarron Review.

Sierra Montgomery is a junior attending the University of Central Oklahoma for English and Creative Writing with a minor in Psychology. Her work revolves around state of mind and identity, and is usually told with a degree of whimsy.

Uche Ogbuji more properly Úchèńnà Ogbújí, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling in the US near Boulder. An engineer by training and entrepreneur by trade, he fell in love with poetry and spoken word at university in Nsukka and now performs regularly in Colorado and beyond. His poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press), is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). His forthcoming book, Ńchéfù Road is winner of the Christopher Smart Prize in the UK. Work published worldwide, and featured in the Best New African Poets anthology, fuses Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop, often exploring afrofuturist themes. @uogbuji on twitter.

D Rosen is an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits nationally and internationally. They operate from the position that questions of animality are not binary but rather a tangle of ecologies and richly complicated identities, frame by culture. In 2020, Rosen will be collaborating with Marcela Torres on a project that centralizes touch at Recess (New York) and will have an essay on interspecies scent rituals published by Routledge (New York + London). Find more at www.danielle-rosen.com.

Caroline Shea is the author of Lambflesh (Kelsay Books, 2019) and an assistant poetry editor for Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Pinch, The Shore, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other publications. In 2019, she received The Pinch Literary Award. She's currently an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU.

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