Another useless notification in your neighborhood

/

Alicia Swain

Fireworks or gunshots?
I heard a loud
pop, pop—
do you think they’ll stop?
I’ve got children sleeping,
my husband can’t hear
the same movie he’s seen only
seven times since he was sixteen.

Fireworks or gunshots?
A sixteen-year-old died last night.
Wish they’d make the violence stop
so that I can sleep, enjoy peace,
invite over friends without it being
embarrassing. I’ll never know who
it could be, not in reality, but I worry
how it affects me. This pop, pop, pop
doesn’t match my farmhouse aesthetic,
it threatens the sanctity of my patio,
disrupts my sweet sips of prosecco
as I pop the cork under plastic ivy leaves
adorning a perfectly selected canopy.

I think I heard gunshots,
maybe ten shots, maybe two shots,
maybe
it wasn’t after seven o’clock so not
likely to be fireworks, can you
stop the pop I can’t focus on my doting,
I can’t be interrupted while I tie ribbons
in my daughter’s hair, never mind
a young man lies cold, a ribbon tied
around his toe—where are those labels?
I bought them last year, the little name tags
with depictions of cardinals sitting in the snow.
They really pop—

Did you hear gunshots
coming from the east?
I’m tired of this neighborhood I moved to
last week, bought this newly renovated bungalow
for super cheap, I hope it sparks some change—
seems like the rent keeps going up. I think
I can make a difference here, unlike the neighborhoods
they gentrified over the last few years.

Fireworks or gunshots?
There’s a body in the street, a mother
feels a pang in her chest reading the same post
every week. Fireworks or gunshots?
But never was that my son? What a privilege
to never cower, to never fear, to only wonder
whether to call the cops and not
your brother,
your cousin,
your daughter,
your lover,
your neighbor,
pop, pop, pop.

Author’s Note: This poem was inspired by Ring's Neighbors app. Night after night, people flood the app with the same post: fireworks or gunshots? These posts become routine, and the rounds heard in the night seldom lead to meaningful discourse as users grow desensitized—each post nothing more than another useless notification in your neighborhood.

Alicia Swain is a feminist poet and author living in Richmond, VA. Her debut poetry collection, Steel Slides and Yellow Walls, released in August of 2025 with Belle Isle Books. Her work appears in publications such as The Vehicle, Half and One, and The Closed Eye Open. She can be found on her website at https://aliciaswain.com/, on Bluesky as @aliciamswain.bsky.social, and on Instagram as @aliciamswain. 

Wonderland

/

Angel Alman

Please.
I want to go.

Where the Buffalo roam.
And the wild Dogs run amok.
Where the Turkeys and Pheasants and Doves
Fly straight of hot bullets and flaming arrows.

Where the Crooked and Corrupt are dragged by the ankles.
And hung for all to see.
To celebrate.

A Jungle.
Neither Heaven nor Hell.

A land far off and distant.
With grazing cattle.
Herded by naked blondes,
With dripping breasts.

Please.
I want to go.

Where I can run and jump.
And dive.
Where I can pull the trigger
Without waking the neighbors.

(Angel Alman) A.A. Radončić is a poet/essayist from Boston. He has work appearing/forthcoming in AlienBuddhaPress, PrometheanCity, DontSubmitLit, TheCambridgeDay

Mildred & Giuseppe

/

Daniel Thomas Moran

At the delicatessen on
Henry St. in The Heights,
he was the senior counterman
at only sixteen years of age.
The 8th grade diploma from
P.S. 32 over on Union made
him the family scholar at the
brownstone on Woodhull St.

He had escaped the docks &
(unlike his brother Sal) the glamorous
& greasy clutches of the Gallo boys.
Culling from the brass cash register,
he took to filling salvaged jars with
Indianhead pennies, & the occasional
nickel, intent on taking them to his grave.

Over those early months,
of six days & long hours
laboring for the Dutchman,
packing white bread & mustard
around thin-sliced meat & cheese,
She came in, occasionally at first,
for packages of Chesterfields,

And then, to visit with her future,
in a stained and starched white apron,
working the boards & macaroni salad.
The Kraut & Kosher pickles were
kept souring in dark silence in two
big oak barrels of brine.

His first expressions of love
came in the shape of snug cigarette
packs he pilfered on her behalf,
women hanging smoke in the air
still scandalous, even among the
dank & sooty streets of Brooklyn.
But she was blonde & gorgeous,
cast like a Venus dream at twenty-two,
& never having heard spoken the
euphonious tones of Italian in her life.

They stole away on his off day,
bought the license required &
promised their lives to one another,
before a magistrate on Court Street.
They bore first fruit a year later
& they named her Jeannie, a woman
who would become Mother to me.
That is how it was, & likely how
it is still, life working its insouciant
sleight of hand in dark rooms, light
upon ruffled sheets in the steam heat.

And I have had this life doing the
very same, pilfering as I can, making
love between the shifts of my labor,
Witness to a life made possible by
a libretto of longing glances &
the slow choke of liberated smokes.

Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City in 1957, is the author of seventeen collections of poetry. His new collection, “Five Questions” will be published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in early 2026. "In the Kingdom of Autumn", was published by Salmon Poetry in 2020, who also published his previous collection, "A Shed for Wood" in 2014. His "Looking for the Uncertain Past” was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2005. He has had more than four hundred poems published in over twenty different countries. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived at Stony Brook University.

Sunfall on the Sierra

/

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Sunfall on the Sierra

after Galway Kinnell

Out of the blue ferns, a pale half-face
turns to grasp the lid of the horizon.

Warmth wetting clay, the man
quits braying from a gash at the throat.

In stillness, the shiver of leaves,
a whimper. The bear, quieting

hump, fades to a linger of meat-breath.
Rump to rump they lay waiting

for the rest of that poetry to leave
them: ghost man, ghost bear.

On the hill’s crooked blade wolves
tune their toothy mouths to O, serenade.

Author’s Note: I'm fascinated by poetic influences and apprompted poems. In fact, I wrote my linguistics master's thesis "Lines by Someone Else" about the risks poets take by referencing a text connection with a predecessor. We all come "after" others, and these three poems represent conversations I've had with "Spider Crystal Ascension" by Charles Wright, "The Bear," by Galway Kinnell, and Richard Hugo's classic training manual for young poets: The Triggering Town. I feel so deeply about these works. They keep speaking to me, and I keep trying to answer. I don't mind if my signalling the text connections makes my poems seem less original--that's part of the bargain of declaring an influence. I hope I'm creating a tempting opportunity for the reader to fall in love with them too.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran has writing appearing or forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Dunes Review, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, Jelly Squid, Saranac Review, Thin Air Magazine, Saw Palm, and elsewhere. Raised in Thailand, she now  lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.

Ascension

/

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

after Charles Wright

At dawn an effervescence circles the lily-padded pond,
pricking the backs of frogs that leap, mewling, into the spittle-starred black.

Dust. Sunlight. Ten striped miles edge by
and a hundred little beasts have died since daybreak between the zebra trees.

Now and then we force ourselves to eat, adjust our packs.
A wormy goblin of the woods, hundred shuffling feet,

attacks our scraps, moves on. Patches of charred saplings
crumble under controlled burn, send up smoke from a hellscape.

Branches crack the air, and here a devil’s slacked and left its skin.
Spiderwebs, millions, break crystal threads across our hair.

Ahead, the mountain waits. We cast our nets, ascend.


Commentary on The Poems: I'm fascinated by poetic influences and apprompted poems. In fact, I wrote my linguistics master's thesis "Lines by Someone Else" about the risks poets take by referencing a text connection with a predecessor. We all come "after" others, and these three poems represent conversations I've had with "Spider Crystal Ascension" by Charles Wright, "The Bear," by Galway Kinnell, and Richard Hugo's classic training manual for young poets: The Triggering Town. I feel so deeply about these works. They keep speaking to me, and I keep trying to answer. I don't mind if my signalling the text connections makes my poems seem less original--that's part of the bargain of declaring an influence. I hope I'm creating a tempting opportunity for the reader to fall in love with them too.

Bio: Kimberly Gibson-Tran has writing appearing or forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Dunes Review, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, Jelly Squid, Saranac Review, Thin Air Magazine, Saw Palm, and elsewhere. Raised in Thailand, she now  lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.

The Kitchen

/

Peihe Feng

Ma is in the kitchen, pouring oil into a red-hot pan
creating a small explosion. Beside her left hand
were knives of different sizes: the slimmest for the tomatoes and lettuce
the awl-shaped one to open the belly of a fish,
the square one, heavy as a brick, to chop through bones,
that would soon be floating in a boiling pot,
to be used as bleacher for the soup.

I remember someone once said,
that the kitchen in a Chinese household is a slaughterhouse of everything.
Corpse of living organisms wrapped in foams and plastics
severed from their trees, their stems and their flesh
to be dismembered, disfigured,
and flung into Inferno’s sizzling flames
fueled by natural gas and lit
by my Ma, a forgotten silver ring bond
to her right hand, weathered and withered
by the heat of the stove and the chilliness of the tap water
that runs through her skin as indifferently
as she dissects a fish alive with those hands.

A traditional Chinese kitchen must be an ideal place to
commit murder. Almost everything around you has the potential
of becoming a lethal weapon.Those long glass bottles
filled with vinegar and soy sauce could crack a human skull
as easily as she crashes a pistachio between her fingers. The knives
that she have wielded for twenty years over numerous pieces of flesh
could eradicate all evidence. Then start a fire – a fire,
leaping straight out from the madwoman’s attic
at a careless twitch of her finger.
Among these deathly objects my Ma reigns,
too busy to notice the fact that she could set the whole city aflame
with the fire in her kitchen that was her oldest friend,
her most trusted comrade
in her career of keeping the house warm and alive.

Through the kitchen door I occasionally heard her singing
to some 30-year-old songs on the radio. Lightly pacing
the floor like the schoolgirl I’ve never met, among
the objects that feast on
the blood of chickens, calves, cabbages and cauliflowers.
She argues with her husband through the kitchen door, the iron sink
supporting her weight like a loyal friend,
The knives of different sizes hung behind her as an array of soldiers.
Those heavy glass bottles of
spices (placed high enough to prevent her children from hurting
themselves by accidents)
are just above her head.
It would have been extremely hazardous to place an exasperated person
in a room filled with destructive weapons that she knows
as if they were the extensions of her own body.
Yet she seems completely ignorant of her powers, unaware of
those minor explosions occurring before every meal was served. Would that
ever reminds her of those flaming buildings that collapsed majestically on TV?
When she pours out the intestines of a fish
for the hundredth time in her life, would she ever imagine
that it was something else – anything would do – struggling between her fingers?
imagine another person standing in this kitchen, clutching the knife
that has once been tightly held by her mother,
and that she has been looking forward to put in her own daughter’s hand
since the day that she was born.

Now as I am learning to cook in my Ma’s kitchen, those knives
she proudly displayed before me remind me of a hospital.
In a documentary about childbirth that I had watched in Biology class,
a masked surgeon would lay that exact number of cold, sharp, metal instruments
in front of the woman, ready to slit open her body
for a new life to spring out from hers.
When Ma grabs my hand to teach me how to open the fish’s belly,
My mind wanders back, back, back,
all the way to my childhood bedroom
where she first showed me the long scar across her abdomen
that had once served as my entrance to this world.

Bio: Peihe Feng is a student poet from Guangzhou, China. Her poems can be found in Frontier Poetry, Gyroscope Review, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. She enjoys gardening on her balcony.

Bluetown

/

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

after Richard Hugo

Your town was all haze and cow-plow. No cartoons
could break the static, and only skaters in empty silos
held any conversation.
Your dad was a deadbeat, your mama
the saint of puff-gold hair.
How they rocked and rolled up the church stairs.
You hit seventeen hard, squeal and lurch
on gator-leather backseats. You were dying to be
born, those mornings you crawled out,
reeking of charred grass and gasoline,
scratching back, drunk ghost, to the pale road.
Where you stopped, nobody knows.

Author’s Statement: I'm fascinated by poetic influences and apprompted poems. In fact, I wrote my linguistics master's thesis "Lines by Someone Else" about the risks poets take by referencing a text connection with a predecessor. We all come "after" others, and these three poems represent conversations I've had with "Spider Crystal Ascension" by Charles Wright, "The Bear," by Galway Kinnell, and Richard Hugo's classic training manual for young poets: The Triggering Town. I feel so deeply about these works. They keep speaking to me, and I keep trying to answer. I don't mind if my signalling the text connections makes my poems seem less original--that's part of the bargain of declaring an influence. I hope I'm creating a tempting opportunity for the reader to fall in love with them too.

Bio: Kimberly Gibson-Tran has writing appearing or forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Dunes Review, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, Jelly Squid, Saranac Review, Thin Air Magazine, Saw Palm, and elsewhere. Raised in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.

Indelible

/

Andrew Vogel

What will we not allow ourselves?
Consider all we carry with us in the body.

In The Valley Diner, Tuesday morning,
sturdy plates soar from the kitchen
on the girls’ arms, good chow glistening
with filmy grease. Ceramic clatter. Plastic
flower and felt-snow season. Outside,
rain washes caked salt down the lot.
Detroit steel.

Now look at water, how it sheds the colors
of time, how it proves—things we won’t do.

Taken with a fit of violent sneezing,
retired Petty Officer Paul Tomlinson
has completely spaced on what Kimberly,
the new waitress who insists on being
addressed by her full name, was telling
him across the counter about her
new tattoo.

Energies of the first law, porphyrin rings
congealing, ancient calligraphies knitting.

Tommy arrives back into himself,
damp blue eyes witnessing in her
young amber gaze a question he
wants to have heard, but when she
reaches, not quite almost touching
the long-faded ink on his forearm,
he flinches.

Authors Note: I think about what holds us together and what holds us apart. “Indelible” gestures toward some of the tensions that we experience as our sense of self

Andrew Vogel listens, walks the hills, and teaches in rural eastern Pennsylvania, original homelands of the Lenape peoples. His poems have appeared most recently in Poetry East, Crab Creek Review, The Briar Cliff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Cider Press Review.

My Mother

/

Harriet Weaver

is the coffee still in the microwave
and the note apologizing to the school.

She is Chef Boyardee, Hungry Man,
and a cheap homecoming dress.

She puts the Chambord in your champagne;
she knows painters, pilgrims, and Yale.

My mother is an open bag of wintergreen candies
in the midnight blue of the TV.

She is the bathroom door closing,
or the wall she might as well be talking at;

she is melting the coffeemaker’s lid by accident
on the surface of the electric stove.

My mother keeps a safety pin dipped in peroxide
perched on the sink like an addict’s spoon.

She is the bottom teeth in a grin,
the whites of my eyes in the mirror—

my mother is a darkened door
at the end of a long hallway.

Author’s Note: As a lover of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara, I enjoy litanies that build (in a sneaky way) to greater understanding. To me, lyric poetry is most effective when it feels like a direct experience of consciousness. In editing this piece, I cut everything down to the strongest concrete images so that the poem shrank into small stanzas, then into tercets, then finally into anaphoric couplets. A classmate did me honor when he responded to this poem with William Carlos Williams’ great line: “No ideas but in things.”

Harriet Weaver is a Los Angeles–based writer with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Yale University, where she studied with Harold Bloom. She was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books journal PubLab. In her previous career as an actor and producer, Harriet studied under legendary director Wynn Handman and brought shows to Broadway while working at Blue Spruce Productions. She was also an instructor of poetry and composition at UC Irvine. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wexford, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in LA with her husband and toddler.

Bukowski Bench to Bed

/

Edward Burke

He parkt his bones atop some city’s bench,
a sport for cats and grave somnambulists,
his empty bottles tuckt into the grass,
his sleep adjusted to his latitude.
His teeth would not crawl off into the night
but sleep inside his bottle-thirsty jaws.
Depending on location, temp’ratures,
the mercies of the elements and winds,
he might grab nineteen winks before a dawn,
another day for gravity to weigh
his calloused spine, abraded vertebrae,
the force of Down to measure neck and knees,
no matter posture or the style of bench.


He passt from beatnik roads to beatnik streets
into his beatnik house with beatnik bed
(where Desolate Jack found not one night his sleep):
responsible for no one but himself,
he’d earned his house and bed with Hank’s own guts
and rested his abrasions with his work
and cared for all the cats who came to call.

Author's Note: As to comments regarding this piece: The first Bukowski collection I read was one of the most recently published, On Cats (2015/2017). Having been that slow in getting around to Bukowski, I found some bio documentaries online, whose I cannot say, but that exposure helped give me a feel for Hank beyond what that first volume did. With respect to the estimable tradition of the Beats, I made sure to allude to Kerouac with whom I was better acquainted.

Edward Burke, under the anonym “strannikov”, has written flash fiction (absurdism, science satire, noir humor) and essays since 2011 and verse since 2016, with work appearing both online and in print. In February 2024 he was the guest of the “Translating the World” podcast with Rainer Schulte, director and founder of the Center for Translation Studies, University of Texas at Dallas.

Montag

/

Larry Narron

instead of my heart, a fire
salamander crawls

on my sleeve.
kerosene tongue

licking flames,
licking black

smoke back into ink.
above the inferno,

an illegible cursive
curls,

spills over into
margins of stars.

some letters
seem humbler,

their descenders
reclining

below the horizon.
a language perhaps

even i could learn
if i tried.

Author’s Statement: This is a persona poem about Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I was inspired to write it after reading the novel with my 8th Graders last fall.

Larry Narron grew up in Southern California. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Phoebe, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, Redivider, and The London Magazine, among others. They've been nominated for the Best of the Net and Best New Poets.

My Mother’s Mind Was Once a Well-Oiled Thing

/

Joseph Voth

Now she is sometimes a chance of stutters,
Each one a crossing gate gone down before
She can slip a next word past it. Other
Times, something in her mind leans on a door
And she falls brightly into a small room
Of bronzed feathers snatched from chattering birds.
It’s been the way with she and I, a bruise
Of talk between us, a creaking floor, curt

With little care, but now and then she goes
Where only she knows the landscape, a wheat
Field yellowed like a Dutch painting of slow
And brutal work, now ordered and complete,
The way she seemed to me to be before,
Before the birds, the wheat, the room, the door.

Author’s Statement: It struck me that the theme of a slow fade (in this case, a parent losing their memory, etc.) could be expressed in a sonnet because sonnets are formal and familiar, yet they make room for unexpected lyrical moments.

Joseph Voth has published one collection of poetry, Living with Noise (NorthShore Press), and has completed a second, A Brief History of How the Heart Breaks, containing poems previously published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, ZYZZYVA, and other literary journals. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Fresno City College in California and lives in that city with his wife, the poet Michelle Patton.

Do You Have a Family?

/

Z. T. Corley

When asked about my family, why do I think of the spiders I have allowed to live? My mother
with a cigarette, a crown of smoke around her head. Tennessee in January. Flowers I’ve
trampled, nameless and numerous. The cities I claim but who don’t claim me. My grandmother
in a hospital bed. The vultures on the side of the road. South Carolina in June. The sound of
beads. The blackberries I ate. The urn on the mantel. Not my father, but the beer he let me
taste—the bitterness of it. Fireflies at night. Georgia in July. Rainbows on the ceiling. Grass
stains and mosquito bites. Leaves in my hair. All the ashes I won’t eat. The taste of cornbread.
My grandmother’s brown eyes—both ringed blue. The rabbits I chased. Dandelions in spring.
The butterflies I’ve held. Church on Sundays. My great-grandmother’s hands. The hot comb’s
hiss. Long dirt roads. A man—not my father—standing in the doorway like a dark pillar.
California in December. All the dresses I never wore. The worms I studied like paintings. The
stench of coffee. The scabs I’ve picked and who, like an estranged family, attempted to recover
themselves even while I scraped and gouged with fingernails sharper than the beak of a condor.
What was the question again?

Author’s Statement: This poem is written after Ama Codjoe's "A Family Woven Like Night Through Trees" and the title itself is lifted from her poem. Like the speaker in Codjoe's poem, mine cannot answer the question directly. "Do you have a family?" started off lineated, in an effort to echo Codjoe, but quickly became a prose poem instead. Leaving it as a block of text created an overwhelming effect: both the speaker and the reader are overwhelmed by the seemingly disparate images, fragments, and almost-memories, and must go back to the beginning in order to try to find an answer in the deluge. 

Z. T. Corley is a Tennessee-based poet and a current student at Austin Peay State University. Her poetry explores themes of Blackness, memory, identity, desire, and loss.

Instructions for conducting a raid in kabaddi

/

Unmana


Plunge into the swarm.
Hands clutch your legs, your arms,
your breast; bodies drag
you down in conspiracy
with a fiery sun.

Bite down on the rosary
of words between your teeth,
spitting out bead by bead:
kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi.
If you breathe

you lose. How long can you hold
your breath while the whole world
holds you back?
Still, you know this
is your chance.

If you can inch closer to the chalked
line, straining towards the ground
till one finger
touches white.
Everything

drops away. You take great
gasping gulps of breath.
Your team scoops you
up in whoops of
victory.

Your heart is still
beating out terror
kabaddi
kabaddi
kabaddi

Author’s Statement: I’ve never been into sports, and kabaddi was one of the few sports I’ve ever played (as a child, many years ago). An essential rule of kabaddi is that the raider has to hold their breath and often chants “kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi” to demonstrate that they’re not inhaling. In Parini Shroff’s Bandit Queens, a character mutters “kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi” when she’s anxious. Which is such a wonderfully specific detail, but it got me thinking that holding my breath would make me more anxious, not less. It’s how I’ve always reacted to stress—it’s only in the last few years that meditation and yoga have taught me to keep breathing, and to breathe intentionally to release stress. It made me wonder if I’d often held my breath as a child in environments where I felt unsafe or hypervisible, desperate to escape. This metaphor bloomed into a poem for all of us who thought we were utterly alone, with all the world against us, but if you just make it through, you can find your people on the other side.

Unmana lives in Mumbai and writes across genres on themes of gender, queerness and found family. Their short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Deodar Prize. Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd, published in India by Westland Books in 2024, is a deliciously bookish murder mystery featuring queer women characters.





The Trouble With Freedom

/

Ace Boggess

Chat with an ex-con friend online.
She’s struggling with life outside:
a mother who argues, threatens,
cajoles; seeing her kids;
talking to lawyers; working a job;
avoiding a chest of drawers
in front of the opium door.
She tries to keep her sobriety
from hooking up with madness on the sly.
I tell her, It’ll get better, & it will,
or it won’t. Existing has its cycles
of corruption, joy, disfigurement, relief.
I offer her three words & a pair of ears,
or eyes that read the sounds of her distress
because prison never stops calling,
saying, I’m sorry for the last time,
baby. Being out’s as hard as being in,
but with more opportunity.
I tell her, It’ll get better,
when what I want to say is, Sometimes,
we pause in a paradise of sweets;
others, we drop our ice cream
on the sidewalk, & catch a charge
for indecency.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His latest collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.

Final Scene

/

Alexey Deyneko

Author’s Statement: “Final scene” is inspired by the poetic aesthetics of Zen koans and screenwriting as a process of translating text into visual images. It is an invitation to a viewer to co-create and imagine a movie or a sequence of stills that may have this visual poem as an ending. 

Author’s Bio: He is the author of two micro-chapbooks published by the Origami Poems Project. His work has also appeared in Jersey Devil Press, The Raven Review, New Note Poetry, Sugar House Review, 82 Star Review, Molecule, and elsewhere. 



Two Poems by Nathan Coates

/

Maple Tree in September

The young maple tree on the corner
undressed in mid-September
at fall’s first freeze,
so eager to perform,
and now it stands knock-kneed
and bare, a gray spine
in a pool of perfect red and white leaves,
mute like Zechariah
burning with Elizabeth’s story,
or like a lone banjo player on stage
chasing the haunting notes
of an unsung lyric.

It waits like Barney Fife
to tell Andy
he already shot
his allotted bullet.

It’s a burnt match.

And I know that feeling,
of words spoken out of season–
spent and irretrievable,
within reach and inaccessible,
red with the regret
of being exposed and left leafless
while summer is still singing.

A Maple Tree Reflects

Here I am,
tricked by a September anomaly
into a premature abscission,
a skinny coat rack, now,
with no privacy for fall’s
remaining wrens.

It’s true that
all these leaves,
perfectly piled at my feet,
look like Schroeder’s
dust cloud or
like confetti that exploded
before an overturned buzzer beater.

What can I say?
To be honest...
I’m like a pinata
that gives up the goods
on the first hit
and then dangles,
twisting, for the rest of the party,
in Ohio’s leftover summer breath,
enduring the leafed grins
of neighboring trees
in their blue suburban lawns.

But I see the way
you can’t help but
come and touch these
red and white leaves–
dropped in perfect color–
like you’re reaching for
stolen jewels or the
hem of the rabbi’s robe.

Author’s Note: These poems started with a simple image that I found arresting so I kept experimenting with different ways to describe it. Eventually, I started thinking from the tree’s perspective and had to split all of the ideas into two poems and narrow from there.

Nathan Coates lives in Lebanon, Ohio, with his family and spends his days helping high school students read and write. These are the first poems he’s sent out into the world.

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper

/

Caleb Guard

We lift our hats to you
Casual daredevils of iron defiance
We have nothing to fear but
Fear of falling.

How many angels can you fit on the span of a girder?
And who lives not on the edge of pitfall?
Who wouldn’t risk live and limb
For a dime?

We came to build.
We stopped for lunch.
Here at the top of the world.
This is our town.

Hoisted to high heaven
Where there is no famine,
Da Vinci could not have painted you.
We do not die, we sup.

Tempered aspirations on a steel beam
Mugging it up for a buck.
The feats, the prestige, the beanstalk grandeur.
This is your skyline.

Caleb Coy is a freelance writer with a Masters in English from Virginia Tech. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Coachella Review, Hippocampus, North Dakota Quarterly, The Common, and elsewhere.