About The Editor

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So far The Editor has created 116 blog entries.
24 03, 2024

the end for now

2024-03-24T10:14:33-04:00March 24, 2024|

by Jay Délise

 

I am porches, stoops, and marigolds
Sprouted bulbs and honeysuckle
Gold spacers, silver crowns, gapped teeth
Shoe-shine, tobacco leaves
Sugarcane and moonshine
Blue basement ceilings, collard greens
Zoot-Suits, pearls, and
Pantyhose and work boots
Ocean Ave and Bourbon Street

I bleed molasses and sassafras
Keep cinnamon in my pocket, glass bottles for rainy days
I breathe the breeze and drink sweet tea
My hands
Well oiled and calloused
Knead dough; need other hands
I grow dandelions; soft and simple, here without announcement
I smile like I’ve got a direct line
Like I ‘been here before

For me, the end is a sun shower
And often
I wonder what it feels like to put my whole foot on the ground
Speak with my whole mouth
Answer to my own name

And when
I feel like I am I’m racing with time
And grief is winning
Like I don’t know myself not running through smoke screens
Black on my heels
In front of finish lines
Arriving desperate at altars, unable to breathe
I’ll remember the me
Who has already seen this
And laughed

 

 

 


Jay Délise (they/them) (official jester of Sugar Hill) is a writer, theater artist, eater of grapes, and producer based in Harlem, New York. They have performed at The United Nations, The Schomburg Center, The Pulitzer Center, and Carnegie Hall. Their work has been highlighted around the world and in publications including Afropunk, Vagabond City, Glass Poetry Press, and Huffington Post.

23 03, 2024

Amber

2024-03-23T11:59:01-04:00March 23, 2024|

by Shauna Friesen

 

no.
you don’t understand.
i want to be here.
in this honeyed light.
i begged for the pine-pitch oozing down my throat.
really.
i asked to swim in marmalade.
and soak in spidercider.
you thought it was an accident?

ha.
i chose this.
no one told me.
to close my mouth around the syrup-spigot.
to candy my own spleen.
to skin the stain-glass nectarine.
and swallow its flesh in shards.
you were there, weren’t you?
that time i peeled back the rinds of an agate.
layer by layer.
and so envied the kernel of quartz at the center.
i pestled it to glitter.

see?
i never had your restraint.
i won’t stop until i get it.
what sand in a pearl has.
the pit in a plum.
earth’s iron ball-bearing, magma-greased.
remember?
i told you i’d rather be the sunken eyeball of a cave-fish.
a marble that didn’t fight to stay afloat.
on the heavy cream.

don’t.
you can’t tell me.
you’ve never wanted to be held like that.
the way the ocean holds bones.
tight enough to dolomite them.
and don’t you envy the ingot?
midas made of his daughter?

you might like it.
being loved to solid gold.
wading to the neck in resin.
getting sealed like a lace-wing.
in a fist of orange.

 

 

 


Shauna Friesen (she/her) is a mountain climber, rock collector, and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her words have been featured in Pithead Chapel, Chestnut Review, Foglifter Journal, Fictive Dream, and Bruiser Magazine among others. Shauna is on Twitter @friesenwrites and Instagram @shaunaexplores.

17 03, 2024

Summoned

2024-03-17T11:00:46-04:00March 17, 2024|

by Kathryn Knight Sonntag

 

pre-dawn

orange on drawn curtains. pull on this
sweatshirt, creak floors past babies,

pass kitchen counters—a rain
jacket, boots, an open

door.

olympus, sentinel of my eastern
sky, bids eyes open.

three

tired, blinking lids.

 

 

 


Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the poetry editor of Wayfare Magazine, the author of The Mother Tree (Faith Matters Publishing, 2022), winner of the 2022 BIBA Literary Award in Non-Fiction: Religion, and of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). Her poems appear most recently in Image Journal, Colorado Review, and Four Way Review. She works as a freelance writer and landscape architect in Salt Lake City. Her website is kathrynknightsonntag.com. She is on Twitter @KnightSonntag.

16 03, 2024

Ghostspeed

2024-03-16T09:21:26-04:00March 16, 2024|

by Matthew M. C. Smith

 

A father and a son, 1980s

My father wakes me, takes me out in the garden
by flickering torchlight. The stars are exceptionally bright

and what time is it – midnight? There’s a warm breeze through the garden.
Birdflap, dogbark, ruffle, rustle, roosting, and cooing. And then a settling.

Neon peripheral side-light, orange rinsing gleam, a distant city hum felt as rising hairs.
I snatch his thin wrist, dry and a little cool, as I stumble on a paving slab.

He slides through the shadows diagonally, like a chessboard knight
and we walk past the willow tree hanging over like a bristled, spent god.

The dogs are snooping shadows and we stop in the anklegrass
as he points upwards, shining his torch; ‘look up’, he says to his kid,

and I look hard for the whizzing chrome shell from Flight of the Navigator
or a bike flying with a covered alien in a basket, a silhouette of a boy,

but there’s no moon and no Apollo 11 burning up, no Starship stream
for steady gazers; no warp speed. Somewhere, William Shatner

might be consulting Uhura on intergalactic navigation but I see just one meteorite
and stand in damp slippers. Our thin lightbeam pricks massive expanses,

at its darkest overhead, and we see suns and star clusters, perhaps long dead.
Our feeble light breaks through, ever onwards, a microflash

through spiral arms in deep space. Unbelievable ghostspeed.
We are playing, it is replaying, and somehow, we move closer.

 

 

 


Matthew M. C. Smith is a Welsh poet with work in Poetry Wales, Arachne Press and Barren Magazine. Matthew is obsessed with Star Wars, Sci Fi, astronomy and deep time. He is campaigning for the return of the ice-age relics, the Red Lady of Paviland to Wales from Oxford. Matthew is on Twitter @MatthewMCSmith as well as Instagram and Facebook. Matt edits Black Bough Poetry.

10 03, 2024

Eden

2024-03-10T10:02:28-04:00March 10, 2024|

by Chris Bullard

 

Living in the garden was tasting strawberries,
forgetting strawberries, then tasting them as new.
Air was thrilling. Water was unbelievable.
Each day, we gifted the animals with extravagant names.

Whether the sun hovered like a raptor on a thermal
or clouds blurred the sunset, each was the best day ever.
But resentment arrived in anxious ribbons.
No one could remember when we started remembering.

Quarrels were a thing. Hurts survived sleep. Boredom
was invented. Complaining that we needed
something different to keep us interested
was proof that some subtle fruit had poisoned us.

We came to like the way clothes fit. We felt a need
to decorate. We learned to think before we spoke.

 

 

 


Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. His poetry has appeared recently in Jersey Devil, Stonecrop, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Waccamaw and other publications. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.

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