Cleaving, We Respond to a Fascist To crack open a window shreds the spider’s workas to smash an egg along the sharp glass rim kills possibility,defunct already. Soon enough all will be broken. A zipper shreds cloth I can’t hold together, teethplacid, irrevocable. One guest leaves behind a hair fastenerand so, like cirrus, her white mane flows freely down her back. She won’t return here to claim it.We are all near death but speak only about the stateof our days in a world coming apart. If we say “seamless” or “inevitable” or one such word cowardswill use to mask their horror at helplessness we jointhe pack, don’t we, foregoing agency…

Black Feathers It’s time to stoop and gather up black feathersfrom corners of the run we built, its sidesa type of chain mail meant to bar the mostdetermined predator. One found the onlyhole we missed, squeezed small and burrowed into stun our pullets one by one—the chickswe named and trained to trust our clumsy handsas if our care could keep them safe. This morninga stillness tipped me off to what I’d find.Though we spent hours fashioning this fortress,death outspent us, fueled by one sure thing:it would outlast us, worming its way in. April Lindner is the author of two poetry collections—Skin (winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from…

Two months into the trial separation a man offers me coke in a hotel bar30 years or more since my last time, racingthrough campus as a light snow fellon the black balloons I gripped, propsleft over from my friend Carl’s productionof Suddenly Last Summer, the coke racingmy already high strung body, high strungmy mother’s words for the anxiety she andmy father grew in me with their fracturedunion—my father’s fist to the dining tablemy mother’s excuse for my father’s fist—so that in the conference hotel bar the manhas to talk me through it, the bathroom stallthe key, how I only need a little and he’s rightI party with him all night…

Poem Where I Confuse Halloween for Groundhog Day The husband and wife are in their small bedroom, talking about whethershe will leave him for the woman she loves. This conversation takes placeevery day. She sits on the green club chair his parents gave themand he balances on the edge of their sleigh bed, rocking back and forthon the curved piece of cherry wood that sold them on the bedroom set.He lists the reasons she should stay: he would like a chance to makethings right and the boys deserve their family to remain intact. She looksat the pattern on the chair cushion and wishes she were a tiny, sewn,yellow flower, indistinguishable…

A Review of Romeo and Juliet Silly plot. They die before the drama begins—raising children, paying the mortgage, deciding where to go on vacation,when he likes the Alps and she the Riviera. It’s over before she complainshe comes too fast then falls asleep, before he rues her lost figureor the way her nose, in age, turns like her father’s. How long beforeshe pegged his friends as bores? I’d have seen them liveand suffer more. Valerie L. Egar‘s poems have been published in Barrow Street, Lullwater Review, The Closed Eye Open, and other journals. Her creative nonfiction essay, “Cross Stitch” is forthcoming in The Literary Forge Magazine. When she is not…

Mission Church Hall, Sydney I hunt a chair, a heart thump awayfrom the door. Sink into my seat, an imposter. A teen declareshe’s been clean for three weeks. A chorus of applause. His mother’s tight eyes,flighty smile from the trenches. I begin to steep in their ritual of confession. Envious,I dream your face at the door— what miracle that could set in motion.Obliged to explain myself— I trash my sugar cravings, workcompulsions, feign coherence, confess I’m waiting for my brother.A copper-haired woman sobs, thanks me for the memory joltof her family’s anguish. Others ghost-stare. I’m a montage for the parents and partnerswhose love they stunted. Don’t admit I tried to…

Burlesque “The doctor told meI have a beautiful bosom,”Memere announces at 80.My sister and I exchange glances,but not surprised.She always tells us, “wear a braeven when you sleep–you will havethe bosoms of a young womanfor the rest of your life!” In the mornings, her bra entersthe kitchen before the rest of her,stiff and pointed like ancient pyramids. Memere’s claim is, once upon a timeshe was in burlesque.Like many of Memere’s stories,we are not sure if it is true.It’s possible. She performswhile she vacuums, swerving, beltingout songs loud like Ethel Merman.My sister Karen and I call her“Ethel Memere.” Memere crochets and fishes.“It teaches you patience,” she says,and teaches me to clean…

At Home …terribly nervous when I sang…. You just have to love performing, and I happen to be an introvert.—Annette Hanshaw, early-twentieth-century jazz singer Some animals belongto land. Some to water. Some to the inbetween: an alley cat swimming, a fish flunginto orbit. Reader, where do you belong? My late greataunt stood under the stage lights and despised it—secondby second, year by year. Is shein the wind? Is she super annuated, beautifulor gone? I find my dog asleep on the couch. I easein beside her, close my eyes. Margaret Hanshaw is a poet and writer from Sudbury, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, New American Writing, West…

High Crossing This part is true.Somewhere right now,a man stands in a car lot, confused.His hands hang unused at his sidesand the sun declines across the highway.He does not understandwhy he is here.The car lot is already closed.Fields of pavementare swallowing the approach of night.The man looks down the frontage roadthen up at the quilted blanket of sky.From here he can see the highway.He can picture himselffloating away on its stream of lightsas sirens echo on the wind.Across the road, the hotel signglows with memoriesbut does not reassure him.He has no knife,no matches, no kindling.Without a fire, he could perishin the talons of creaturesthat come hunting in the night.He climbs…

Vase Behold the vase upon its plinth. A tight carapaceof sang de boeuf reflectsthe light, warding offthe gaze. The narrow neck closely guardsthe ample base, admittingnothing. Only where the lip flares outto reveal the naked ivory throatdoes it allow that once, perhaps, there was a pouring in or out. Suzanne Osborne—after an early career in theater, a stint in academia, and too many years as a legal secretary—now lives in Forest Hills, NY, and writes poetry. Her work has appeared in New Plains Review, Oddville Press, and Indolent Books’ The Second Coming series, among others, and is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review.