by B. J. Buckley
Moon splintered bone, each cloud a torn and dirty winding sheet, a shroud for stars. This is what the world is: killing to stay alive: wasp and caterpillar, fox and vole, the aging lynx in one last leap to the back of a panicked deer, clawing for its neck, for red, for warm, the beautiful simplicity of blood beyond which nothing has any meaning, bear chewing through flesh and sinew to free itself from a trap. There’s always a knife at the throat of love, some desperate hunger, wolf devouring its heart to save its heart. B. J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her recent work appears in Grub Street, Hole in the Head Review, About Place Journal, Dogwood, and Calyx.
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by Willow Kang
for Ishita Pandey On Coney Island listen, to the unquiet of the night rabbits turning nocturnal & wintery, China dolls hopping off their prairies Yet the carnival rides never stop rolling, nor the restless tides, pulled by a moonlit chariot Tonight is fit for space station escapades, stay watchful. May caffeinated owls concoct for you an insomniac’s poison in the silk worm’s nest What shenanigans loom around the alleyways, giggles atop the street lamps, skyscrapers like monuments to fireflies Scurry between midnight parties on High Street & peek into the shimmering rooflights, on this night filled with cratered, puzzling belongings Willow is a writer from Singapore. After school, you can find her reading thick history textbooks, aimlessly writing poems, and solving frustrating math problems, in a futile attempt to conquer boredom. Just make sure that her coffee bowl stays full. by Jas Saunders
Sometimes when I’m anxious I’ll write poems on the plateaus of my palms, blue waves of ink flowing within their gradients and ridges When I want to hide those feelings from the rest of the world like a hermit crab tucked inside itself, I’ll share an empty fist, displaying new and delicate fingernails like bleached white seashells washed ashore learning to grow in real time with the rest of me. Published in UWA’s Pelican and Peafowl magazines, as well as Perth’s youth magazine Pulch, Jas Saunders is an Honours (Creative Writing) student at UWA, with an undergrad in English Lit and Public Health. Her writing focuses on liminal spaces, nostalgia, or memory, with representation her younger self would have desired. by Yuan Changming
for Qi Hong Taking a walk around the neighborhood at sunset Leaves rustle as if they are crows flapping by In the twilight sky, the moon looms- What if it vanished into an unknown space as the clouds exchange their feelings in a hurry? Seeing a passer-by come my way, I derail my body & thoughts alike What if the planet really comes to a pause during the pandemic? What if social distancing becomes the order of the day forever? What if the season, in other words, lasts between rain and snow? Seeing two teenagers approach, I jump aside and hop on the curb like a lousy dancer as they run along What if the doors of my homeland remain closed until I am too old or too weak to move, to see and kiss my first and last love? What if my family cannot afford to immigrate to Mars from this burning or frozen planet? What if another huge meteorite hits earth hard enough? What if what I know is neither true nor false? Yuan Changming hails with Allen Yuan from poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations & chapbooks (most recently LIMERENCE) besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), Poetry Daily & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1929 others. Yuan both served on the jury and was nominated for Canada's National Magazine (poetry category). by Sienna Taggart
paperbag bush, prickly poppies, creosote ironwood blue phacelia bitter root —the desert’s offspring sewn together, rustling whispering their brisk secrets up the mountain. I taste them on my tongue when rain beckons and calls feel them on my palm, their gummy milky sap drying on my fingertips I walk climbing higher to the Yucca with her sugary waxed cream flowers sheathed in sharp points, roots swelling with sudsy pulp; I stand before her threadlike neck concealed behind a bladed fan cup my hands as wind pulls velvet tears from her cheeks. Sienna Taggart (she/her) is a Creative Writing and English student. Her work has appeared in Dundee University Review of the Arts and The Ekphrastic Review. Sienna lives in El Paso, Texas, with her family and spirited pup, Ronin. She can be found on Instagram @siennaraine_ by Tom Brami
When in poverty, your altitude becomes familiar, and you realize the difference between being short and being short of thrift. You fly and think of falling into the spiral of earth without obligation of forming belief, like a peach prone to bruising. We are all air bound, arranged in failure and moving. Observe her husband below. Right now, he’s changing by walking the feet to an invisible line. He is a kind of glass she held to the sun, an emergent quality present in ways or degrees. In the future, you will recognize your face as a groper probing a fisherman’s hand. You’re a boy crawling into a crevice to sleep. Anemones stain the sea; birds are lost in migrating sand. You use them as half buried pillows. Outside you, a ship is casting a frost that freezes the ocean. The snow is calm and reddish, prone to bruising. Wreathing clouds are suspended on a sphere. Tom Brami is an Australian writer and filmmaker working on a PhD in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry can be found in Of/with, otoliths, Futures Trading, Southerly, and Foam:e. by Emily Bartlett
We navigate familiar rocks as if scattered by a hatted chef with careless, exquisite precision. Driftwood charred and bloated, washed up, and our silence is sliced open by the cries of seabirds. And other pieces of whole float stiff; crab shell, cicada wing, twig, cast adrift, sucked into cavernous spaces, spat into currents laced with torpid, yellowing foam. How long to roam before our final resting place? You really have to wonder. Never before has this ocean made me afraid, except on such days, when churning water blurs; seclusion hoped for but not promised beyond the waves. Emily ‘Emmy’ Bartlett (nee Walsh) is an Australian writer, artist and Pleiadian starseed living between Sydney and Coffs Harbour, NSW. She runs a creative agency and is writing her debut novel, Ozora. Emily is the assistant editor of Plumwood Mountain Journal and loves etymology, singing and the feeling of being underwater. by Julian Palacios
tonight i taste like warm, wet nothing. like an excess of self pushed into the crevasses, and loneliness. it tastes like lemon and looks like a boy pretending to be the girl of your dreams staring out the window, elbow deep in bubbles, and calling upon some primal part of herself that waits to do something stupid and make one glorious, defining mistake. apron on, children running amok a fervent heartbeat on hardwood floors; the idea born no sooner than it is dying. waiting for you to come home so that she can begin again. her animation, your imagination, me holding my breath, mouthing the words i want her to say but trying to be quiet. Julian (he/they) is a writer, cat dad, psychology student and aspiring vampire. He writes poems and gets his hands dirty with good-old fashioned glue-stick and paint making mixed-media collage - all about gender and sexuality, love, obsession and dreams. You can find his work on Instagram @patroclus.incarnate. by Scott-Patrick Mitchell Two Black Cats Night does not know where her shore ends and their fur begins. In the dark, one cat could easily stand in for the other. Street light pours invented sun into pavement. Bushes brim with wing and insect purr. One cat calls to the other as if a bird is caught in its throat: affectionate shorthand. A nest of rubbing. Kerb crests the edge of street as if a dune. Shard of broken taillight, a sea rose. The other cat answers with a long stretch: night envies feline’s starless arch, how it will never dissolve into day. A walker-by can feel the touch of four green moons watching them. The cold regards everything. Movement bells as if Christmas, coming early. They make a playground out of dark, chase each other until the sun colours the world in. Ecologies & Eulogies
Elsewhere, other ecologies are collapsing. A koala clings to the top of a burnt blue-gum, searching for leaf and kin, her paws pink, blistering. In the artery of the Murray- Darling, cod and carp bloat as the current chokes for oxygen. Across two hot days, flying foxes amass grave. In an outcrop, a black-flanked rock wallaby gathers her offspring near: wind whimpers scent of surveyor. Serenade for end days: my mother’s fever rambles from her throat. She tells me how every wrinkle across her body is a lineage, endangered or extinct. How, as a child, she wanted to make the world into an Ark. But the only wood she could craft was a coffin she called a home. Afloat on elegy, she struggles for breath. Elsewhere, other eulogies are being carved into earth and bone. Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a non-binary poet who lives as a guest on Whadjuk Noongar Land. In 2019, they won MPU’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award. SPM was recently shortlisted for the 2020 and 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. SPM’s debut collection, Clean, will be released early 2022. by Dani Netherclift
Everything collapses. The moon hangs low a bottom-heavy boat gravid with ballast slipping snail trails, lighting the way for more night, this cycle of terrible sorrows an accumulation of griefs, imagine a susurration, dead leaves gathered, faded things like the left scales of butterflies at the ends of their lives almost colourless, all joy leached out, and today, today blew in so many wrongs that might never be righted, and the mild-faced moon will not care, will never dim the silver shine of the spill – those bodies, drifting, their eyes wide, mouths like funnels, and no matter how you call and call, they will not hear, cannot look your way. Dani Netherclift lives surrounded by mountains in the Victoria high country. She was the 2020 winner of the AAWP/The Slow Canoe Creative Nonfiction Prize, and has recent work in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Rabbit, Stilts, Mascara and Meniscus. |
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February 2023
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Photo used under Creative Commons from John Donges