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…

Another Day Like This A day like this? she asksThat’s all I need; another day like this. Wet chairs on the front porch. Her voice dripping on each syllablewith berry, wine-slurred lips. Glass-blue puddles in black-brown mud. The only ark that could have savedtwo wave-worn souls like us left this port days agowhile we got drunk in a waterfront cafe. I take it all back – what I saidabout rain, about floods, about that cemetery sky. A full ashtray, a plate of olives,another day like this; Good God. Scott Repass is novelist, poet, educator, and bar owner He has an MFA in fiction from the Creative Writing Program at the…

Fruit Fresh Joe says back when he sold cocaine, he cut it with Fruit Fresh. There were bins of it at the buffethe worked at. Joe scooped it up by handfuls. Joe says Fruit Fresh has antioxidants and vitamin Cand shit, so fuck the money, he was looking out for them. We light up another cigarette. He’s inmarketing but wants a change, so he’s cutting back on weed. I once did coke with my poetryprofessor. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t feel antioxidized. Bathroom sink.Mirror. I wanted to fit in. I tell Joe my cocaine story. I don’t tell him my professor cheated…

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…