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.

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.

Photograph of a Young Woman, 1873: National Portrait Gallery

/

Kimberly Gibbs

Child, you seem neither princess nor lady,
governess nor maid. Fine black bonnet blooms
bourgeoisie over velvet pagoda
sleeves thanks to a bootstrapping patriarch,
his picture bride dreams. Plaid bow enormous
beneath your pale clamshell chin presents you:
white flowers, ebony curls, tender lips.

Slight fingers grasp the thin vermilion spine
of a cherished book, partially obscured
in ample swathes of lace at demure wrists.
Cage crinoline skirt, well outside the lens
of this epistolary courtship portrait.

Where will this portrait travel? West by train?
Does a future husband wait in St. Louis?
Or will you steam along the Mississippi?
Do you long to see the remote untamed
flats of the west? Or do you fear the wild?
Child, can this portrait manifest your destiny?

Author’s Bio: Kimberly Jane Simms (Gibbs) is an acclaimed Greenville poet, literary organizer, and educator whose voice is deeply rooted in the Southern tradition of storytelling, influenced by her British and Southern heritage.  Her poetry enlightens and moves audiences, offering works that are both poignant and inspiring. In her debut poetry collection, Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill, Kimberly chronicles the lives of textile workers in the Piedmont region with historical accuracy and imaginative insight. Kimberly is a former Carl Sandburg National Historic Site Writer-in-Residence, a TedX speaker, and a slam pioneer turned literary curator. She is a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau, and her work is archived in the South Carolina Poetry Archives at Furman University.

As the founder of the nonprofit Wits End Poetry—a thriving organization she has led since 2002—Kimberly has made significant contributions to the literary arts, organizing major literary festivals and fostering community engagement. Her poems have been featured in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and she is the author of two chapbooks in addition to her full-length collection. A past member of the championship-winning first Greenville Slam Team and a “Legend of the South” named by the National Poetry Slam, she continues to enrich the literary landscape with her creative contributions.

Kimberly holds a Master’s in English with a Creative Writing focus from Clemson University and a Bachelor’s in English from Furman University, with an additional 30 graduate hours in education. Kimberly is currently the Director of Education at the Metropolitan Arts Council in Greenville, SC where she lives with her husband and daughter. She previously served on the board of the Emrys Foundation, the Executive Committee of Poetry Slam Inc., and was the Literary Chair for the Travelers Rest Arts Mission.

Ron Rash, award-winning author of Serena, says about Kimberly: "she writes with eloquence and empathy about an important part of Southern history - too often neglected.”

A Poet’s Conviction 

/

Dr. Frank Alexander Clark

Dear Helene,

Your repetitive rapid rampant winds
and relentless ruthless remorseless rains
assaulted the Southeast with force
leaving trees, power lines, bodies of water, roads, and inhabitants melancholic
and traumatized!

Devastation and death became acquainted with one another while perseveration was submerged pleading for a life line.

Sorrow and disbelief embraced while mourning our trees whose purpose and longevity were uprooted.

Suffering and doubt stood powerless seeking generators of restoration and resuscitation.

Scarcity and fear became ravenous searching for periods of sustenance and satiety.

The before and the after, a stark juxtaposition 
for the lenses of aerial photographers. 

Your destruction will be etched in history.

However,

Our resolve remains durable and deep rooted in faith.

Our hands of humanity will restore cities with the power of prayer and passion.

Our hearts of thanksgiving will sync in rhythm as we clothe our neighbors with Godly love.

Our tear ducts will create waterfalls of abundant hope.

Our mules of humility will bear gifts of peace and antidotes for healing.

And 

Our pain will be transformed by the everlasting light.

Bio: Dr. Frank Alexander Clark is a board-certified adult outpatient psychiatrist at Prisma Health-Upstate. He also serves as clinical associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine-Greenville. Dr. Clark received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Monmouth College in Illinois and a Doctor of Medicine degree from Northwestern University. He then completed his residency in general psychiatry at Palmetto Richland Hospital in Columbia, SC.

In addition to his psychiatric practice, Dr. Clark has held many leadership positions in national organizations including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. He is the immediate past president of the South Carolina Psychiatric Association. Additionally, Dr. Clark is believed to be the first Black President of the Greenville County Medical Society. 

Dr. Clark is prolific poet who uses his creative side to provide a voice and raise awareness for issues pertaining to mental health and diversity, equity, and inclusion. He serves on the board of the Bellevue Literary Review. Dr. Clark has collaborated with composers globally who have set his poetry to music. His works have been performed by the South Carolina Philharmonic and the Wild Beautiful Orchestra. His poems have also been featured on an album in collaboration with Grammy Award Winning PARMA Recording label.

He has published two children’s book, Positively Haiku: Illustrated Affirmations in 17 Syllables and Positively Haiku Part 2: Peace, Love, Discovery in 17 Syllables. The books provide children early exposure to positive affirmations using haiku poetry.  Dr. Clark is passionate about faith and family. He enjoys exercising, traveling, and attending sporting events.