kɑrtˌʰwil (cartwheel)

/

Phoebe Reeves

One more Cassandra calls cities to herself.
Piles of casework tumble off her knees.


She sees Carthage, Cartagena, Casablanca
coming to her the way cartilage loosens


when the knife enters the joint.
No cartographer can control the coordinates his map carries.


The horse pulls the cart—cartons, casks, Casanova’s used condoms.
The carthorse’s sores make a Cartesian argument


across its withers, carved
in reflex down the flank.


Now you must make your case like Cassandra
seeing the edge of the world: wine


leaking from a cracked cask, the earth
lapping it up like any good Casanova would.


Author’s Statement: This poem is part of a book length project called The Lexicographer's Garden, which engages with the dictionary one page at a time, through the alphabet and back again. Each poem takes as many words from that one page as possible and incorporates them into its language. This began as an exercise I do with my beginning poetry students, and was so much fun that for two years, I did it myself every Sunday morning, loving all the forgotten words, strange coincidences, and musical engagement of alliteration. 

Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and now is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has three chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Flame of Her Will (Milk & Cake), and her first full length collection, Helen of Bikini (Lily Poetry Review) was published in March, 2023. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, Grist, Forklift OH, and The Chattahoochee Review, and she has been awarded fellowships by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband Don Peteroy, amidst her unruly urban garden. 

“midnight, dawn, dusk”

/

Tohm Bakelas

1.

Downtown, after midnight,
along Broadway, under
artificial light, past benches
the clocktower, and empty
parking lots, there are ghosts
that walk again. They are the
lost ones, the forgotten ones,
the ones without names. They
are the ones we locked out of
ourselves because we are alive.

2.

At dawn, in the cemetery, where
tombstones look like grey heads
protruding from beneath blankets
of powdered white snow, the sun,
blinded by its own radiance, was
naïve to autumn’s dying breath.
And winter’s bitter beauty cracked
its cold whip across the faces of
the living while the world was
frozen in glass-like frost.

3.

As if we could rewrite history,
as if we could turn back time,
we romanticize death by chasing
ghosts in the bottom of bottles.
These autumn days are numbered,
marked by crumbling daylight
that reflects in broken shards of
green glass beneath blue dusk.
We, who are forever cursed,
accept the night as our sun.

Author’s Note: Shortly before midnight I found myself on an inebriated journey, leaving my local watering hole, heading for my hometown. I decided to kick around my sanity while stumbling through the streets of my youth, past ghosts and memories I long forgot about until I eventually hit the cemetery. I thought about life and death and how it’s all one big fucking mess. After spending some time there, I checked the time and knew the sun would be arriving shortly, so I decided to go home. 

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including “Cleaning the Gutters of Hell” (Zeitgeist Press, 2023) and “The Ants Crawl in Circles” (Bone Machine, Inc., 2024). He runs Between Shadows Press. 

Layman’s Guide to Jungle Living

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Nam Hoang Tran

Author’s Statement: 🏃🏻💨 __________ ❗️oh hell naw ❗️__________ 🐍   

Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist based in Orlando, FL. His work appears or is forthcoming in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, ANMLY, New Delta Review, Tagvverk, Always Crashing, and Diode, among others. With Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT - a journal of intermedia poetics. Find him online @ www.namhtran.com. 

August, Time Stops in the Deep South

/

Paul Freidinger

I desert the future, forest the past
with clouded memory, conquest the air,

I am getting used to mouthing heat index,
amulet of despair. My wife keeps saying

it sneaks up on you, dangerous the woods
with ticks, bugs, snakes, poison ivy. I tug

the black river, dense from tannic acid,
time stops here, torpor of illusion. August

stirs muggy into every morning as the sun
hangs like a dead man on the end of a rope,

ghosts taunt me with their stories curdling
through an infinite afternoon, cicada buzz

electric when I gaze through deep shade.
I sleep the hour, everything closes down,

ennui is my neighbor knocking the door,
muffled with deterrence. Do I answer,

do I answer? You are welcome, no one else,
no one else. In the lull, I contest the quest

to keep on living.

 

Author’s Bio: I grew up in farm country in central Illinois and have always been drawn to rural settings. I also have a long history in Edisto Island, SC, and sense some similarity to its own rural ecology. Still, it is different from the Midwest. The weight of history is heavy in the deep South. A friend of mine told me years ago that the best description for summer here was the word muggy. People slow down in the summer, they temper ambition, and limit too much talk. Around the island are sand roads, live oaks, palmettos, marshland, and tidal creeks, with plenty of open space. Sometimes those settings seem primordial as if nothing has touched them for a thousand years. I often stop while driving around, get out of the car, and observe the scene. The views are peace, beautiful, and bucolic. They are also stultifying, all the more so when considering how Edisto was settled by Europeans. At one time there were twenty-nine plantations here, ranging from five thousand to ten thousand acres. In those moments I feel the struggles people faced here and the challenges of the climate, how it shaped attitudes and behavior. As climate change becomes more of a factor on our lives here, it is impossible for me not to consider that the heat, the sea, and the land will have the final word.

Paul Freidinger is a poet residing in Edisto Beach, SC, where the ocean continues to rise. It keeps him awake at night. Thankfully, writing sustains him. Paul was raised in Illinois farm country, taught school in suburban Chicago, and now lives in South Carolina’s low country where he also has a long history. He has poems recently published or forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Florida Review, Grist, Harpur Palate, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Isthmus, Pacific Review, Portland Review, Reunion: The Brasilia Review, The Dallas Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and William & Mary Review, among others.

Two Poems by Matthew Murrey

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Cassini’s End

What a finale, to go down in flames
all the while streaming
fresh details right to the end.
Twenty years was good enough.
They gave it one last loop
then sent it—foiled in gold—to burn.
Flare or stumble, may my last efforts
be so focused on my beloved
Earth, until I tumble and lose touch.
Brief pendant on a tether of smoke,
picture it blazing unseen high above Saturn’s
ferocious storms. Then radio silence forever.

Van Gogh’s Two Chairs

In the simple one his pipe and pouch
of tobacco. In his friend’s fine chair
two books and a lit candle. Oh,
to live and love like a small
flame. A book or smoke
can bring reverie
or bind you
to habits hard
to break. What breaks—
promises, the heart, the hold
on what’s real? Through cracks
in what seems whole, I find myself
seeking out a bit of joy—vivid colors
and swirls that some will always insist
are nothing but sky, lamplight, and stars.

Author’s Note: The seed of the Cassini poem was an animated video produced by NASA which showed the satellite burning up on its entry into Saturn's atmosphere. The image of it immediately brought to mind a bright pendant on a necklace. The online presentation can be found here: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/the-journey/the-grand-finale/. The Van Gogh poem took off for me when I learned that Vincent's painting of Gauguin's chair was kept from view for decades by Johanna Bonger who inherited the pair of paintings as the widow of  Vincent's brother Theo, but refused to loan out the one painting due to her dislike of Gauguin. People can read about that back story and see the paintings here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jun/18/revealed-van-gogh-empty-chair-paintings-gauguin 

Matthew Murrey’s poems have appeared widely, most recently in Poetry East, Jet Fuel Review, and Split Rock Review. He’s an NEA Fellowship recipient, and his collection, Bulletproof, was published in 2019 by Jacar Press. He was a public school librarian for over twenty years and lives in Urbana, Illinois. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/ and he is on Twitter and Instagram @mytwords.