Here again | Issue 13

Te Extraño/Estoy Perdida

Ciana Socias

How strange it is to miss you now,
when the earth has painted itself

a color I first met with you, so vibrant
it deserves a new name, ‘halogen lichen’
or ‘I wish summer green could suture

the wounds of space and time’. Even now,
about to see you again, I remember
staring into the valle de yumurí

and calling it ‘oasis’. Sunlight and clouds
like cataracts, yours, calling you on the phone,
how voices make the journey that bodies must

refuse. The fertile green, the city splayed, the water
on the bark where I cracked a coconut in two,
the roots below who drank the overflow, whisper

that you long to be here, here is lost,
here is fantasy. How strange it was
to miss you there/to feel you missing/

to become a stranger
to who I was before I left.

1

Yellow

Andrea Ferrari Kristeller

“Consider the wildflowers” He said
but there aren’t so many now

Look at them, sunning beside the highway
as if yellow were a force greater than the asteroid
of public gardening declaring them weeds

A week later, they are pouring yellow
while insects drink from pollen stars

Galaxies of them roar yellow while cars
drive by their unceded territories

Perhaps they do lack nothing still
it’s enough to be clothed in yellow
and shine an unafraid light

Not a worry
as they open their heads together for morning
and close them for a weak moon
Their slanted heads
that listen to the secrets of highway fields

Still they trust something,
perhaps this rounded eye in the sky
delivering, delivering

2

Lesbians Abroad

Jessie Holmes

The bristle of silvered
Ring dripped pinkies
Fig ripe, emerging
Fleshy and corpulent
Greening mottle
Spotted with simultaneously
Sparkled nail
Varnish, delineating the
Edges of
This: an inscrutable foreign field

To our pavement compatriots
You are poppied,
Enemy in tinted gold
Rimmed sunglasses
I, map-less
Still formless tongue
Piloting this inexperienced
Tumble between
Sunburnt finger webs, when
Licked they taste peach-fuzzed
And static-y and

Corporality is
Not for us, tenderised
Tactility sun-scrutinised,
But yet
I will still eat from
The palm of this
Hand that I
Can not touch, at least
Not here, not
Now, not on this
Particular stretch of tarmac
Not under this specific
Quivering sun

3

Metaxú

Brooke Bovee

He laughs when I say I think sometimes things are better when I’m not there.
I look out across the Palmetto, all those forklifts waiting in the rental lot.
He’s back to The Atlantic, and my presence is neither here nor where
I want to be.
I want to be both
sitting around the loud messy table
and in that stone chair at the top of the Holy Cross Wilderness.
I want both autonomy and to be as indispensable as the Great Divide
is to the salmon who need that melt, that rush, that flow to push on against.

4

A January Thursday in California

Bracha Garmaise

is when I wake up to a
world on fire. You do not need to get out of bed to see the sepia spilling on everything outside the window—the soggy, day-old heartbreak already
makes your bones buzz.

this smoke makes sense
for now, like a righteous indignation or my own misdirected anger at anyone but
God or fate or the weatherman, because
somebody’s gotta be responsible for all

this. I am thinking of Interstellar:
acres and acres of crusty, cracked, cropless
land, stretched out as wide as the eye can see. In my shiny dreams,
the planet
I inherit does not have a death rattle.

Squares of orange light glow
on the slightly scuffed-up wooden floors and
stucco walls of my childhood home. In the distance, soapy clouds of smoke multiply.

the Santa Anas march forward,
a matchstick to the dry brush, a provocation, a false start.

I do not hear them singing back
as they beat down the valleys.

5

Empirical Incoherence

Gurupreet K. Khalsa

When in doubt, cry ‘empirical incoherence’ and make a run for it.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad, “Quantum Consciousness” Scientific American, Dec. 2023

astrocytes have slipped
into a gray congealed mass
after sixteen hours

squashed into sitting
positions and feet swollen
glial glue decayed

a day fell away
as though the plane had a hole
in its back pocket

collapsing effect
in full retro kinesis
parallel systems

disrupting balance
with poor probabilities
and pocket-sized pests

random useless fog
of interwoven logic
something like a five

dimensional surge
entropic tides pulling me
into disorder

processing pipelines
liquify reality
clogged with cruel chaos

possibilities
residing in sectioned snarls
bolted compartments

needing a good dose
of steaming masala chai
to get back to work

6

Passed Over

Charlotte M Porter

Angry at Mother’s doctors,
I’ve trashed the second-floor bathroom,
smashed sample sizes, witchy hazel, and mean-eyed scale.
Adíos, mustard plasters, alabaster pestle, Bangor incense, scripted meds —
curatives of others dead, long-expired drugstore unction,
a family album of our foibles and her toil.
Before the movers loot, I cluster heavy sedatives,
squeeze tubes, tamper with bottle caps — proof of past,
smudged fingerprints (ours), tooth marks (hers).
I suck all five lozenges (wild cherry) for sore throat
and open faucets to silence clangor,
ghosts lurking in the pipes with loss —
baby teeth, buffalo nickel, class ring.
Lastly, I smash the full-length mirror behind the door.
Late arrival, me, needy, always eating — today,
low-sodium potato chips in raucous foil.
As for Mother, beauty was her drug of choice.
Her favorite noises? That chatter, back again
in the redbud tree too close to the house.

7

recurring

Robert Verdon

I dreamt of you again this morning
sitting on a bookshelf
looking up your thoughts in an old dictionary
lest the senses dissolve into the same river
we cannot step twice into
an ocean of them from here to the Horsehead Nebula
will not do
to
explain why there are seven toilets in your house
the house you have only in that dream
all of them blocked or occupied
there are many rooms in your house
but only one is yours

8

Disposable Packaging

Jan Cronos

They are not packing guns
but people.
It is not a pack
of cigarettes or
a pack of wolves–
it is a pack of leathery
old men, stiff and wizened,
folded together, buttocked,
roiled, dried, rolled up like
desiccated tobacco leaves
ready to be smoked if not
cremated.
Kind of eco-friendly
don’t you think?

9

Houdini Shy of Sixty

James Gering

The grandfather clock in the museum of time trembles and
haemorrhages the past from its squat body. Houdini looks
up at its glassy face, down at its solid pedestal.

The escapist concludes that the clock doesn’t have to fall
on you to crush you–the shift of hands will accomplish
the job just fine. This week, Houdini’s ailing mother forfeited

more words. ‘Rain’ and ‘cloud’ vanished, also the name of
a lifelong friend. A semantic sentence over six words long
is no longer viable for her. Houdini recalls a recently minted

euphemism, that being ‘memory care’, as in: My parent is doing
fine–she just needs a little memory care. Houdini chants
the sentence to himself half a dozen times.

10

Trying

Kimberlyn Young

so I'm not rotting in a fruitful mind / it must truly be Sagittarius season / with zucchini thoughts and apricot cravings to keep me full until dawn / and I want to be thorough without cruel damage / you can tag along and eat Tagalong cookies too / cerebral swimming butterfly strokes / I put up my Virginia Woolf hairdo / in my palms the claw clips shattered scattered in the ashtray we never use but it's cute and we don't smoke / in 55 years we'll be chirpy ladies with 44 years of haikus for binding / reading stones when run out of pages / reaching tops of kitchen cupboards / encyclopedias underfoot / for thick oatmeal we have no means of getting stuck anymore / warm applesauce simmering kinder down the throat / sweeter in a Christmas misty mouth / and the first snow fell last night in barbed wire branches / Uncle Gene shoveling the drive rolling small talk snowballs / why did you not teach me politics dog / I am out of this world / off and on you get me with a tricky stumper / whining like a Beastie Boy when I don't get the truth / nothing gets through my monkey brain anymore / no more damage been done / we talk half of nothing / takes minutes for personality to thaw out / only a timid thinker trying to hunt for treasure / rubies pearls lazuli / names for fictional friends / rivers never plummeted / berries never ripened / children and stews never brewed

11

Forced Entry

Canaan Byrd

I conversed with roly-polies in the backyard,
wishing I could fold into myself and escape
abandonment issues and newly acquired
obsessive compulsive tendencies.
We reported glass shattered in the toilet.
Our new kitten chased feet like farm mice
and bit toes in spiteful victory.
A classmate found amusement in eating glue.
Drops of blood on the linoleum tile.
My stepfather drove me to volleyball games,
the automatic seatbelt sliding in its track across
my passenger-side window, ensnaring me in a
familiar anxiety. They went through the medicine cabinet.
The neighbor girl taught me how to ride a bike with no hands—
her father was gutting fish in their driveway.
Hidden behind a bush was a fillet knife.
We moved back to Tennessee before I could
say goodbye to the bugs.
The perpetrator was never caught.

12

Jack Be Nimble

Julian Koslow

returned to the scene of the climb

an empty swimming pool
poured in where the giant fell

weeds poking through the concrete:
armpit, crotch, diving beard

teeth scattered in the yard
millstones
grinding in their sleep

beanstalk stump
big as a redwood, a table
where we told the tale
season after season
until the lesson sank
deep as a well:

how it was him or us
life or death

this severed world

these undevoured bones

13