Piazza

by Nicholas Pagano

 

The city slept while the air baked orange.
Florence, at midday, was 106 degrees.
I didn’t know how to be a tourist, never learned
the ease required to hold a language always
wilting. The time boiled down
to a search for benches cooled by fountain spray.
When a statue shattered, it was rebuilt
according to custom, the new shape
glowing in the alcove. No one could say why
ruin was ruin, not simply abandon,
if it meant slow wilt, an inward sag
to the cupolas, roads worn blue by wheels
a thousand years. While a crowd watched,
a pig was smoked in the square. Its grease slick
along the pietraforte. Wonder slipped to its knees
everywhere we went.

 

 

 


Nicholas Pagano has previously been published in Chronogram, Field Guide, The Windward Review, and elsewhere. He has work forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal. He lives and writes in New York.

2024-11-16T09:56:49-05:00November 16, 2024|

We Can’t Undo the Moment Our Organs Develop a Taste for Fire

by Justin Karcher

 

I’m stuffing my face with the best
Vietnamese food in Buffalo
when Chris tells me old kidneys
stay inside your body when you have
a transplant. He is skinnier
than the last time I saw him

and I wonder how many of us
will disappear completely
in the months to come.

After dinner, I walk by
the old KeyBank, which is now
a Trump pop-up store
and in the parking lot
shirtless methheads are hotwiring
what’s left of the sun.

 

 

 


Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help (Alleyway Theatre). Check out his website: justinkarcherauthor.com.

2024-11-10T10:21:39-05:00November 10, 2024|

Reading Beowulf, I Remember My Mother’s Address Book

by Candice Kelsey

 

I

Atop her stack of cascading bills and letters
like a Polly Pal paperweight or pink
and white gingham kenning its mylar cover

uncharacteristic of the middle-aged woman
gate-keeping my firedrake adolescence
this blond breaker of rings with curved bang

bowl-cut hair helmet as gleamy and round
as her ivory bracelet battle tusks from Thailand
an elephant graveyard stacked like slain

warriors pitching about the Valhalla of her
nacreous forearm and wrist this poached score
of my childhood was a cacophonous death rattle

II

Mornings brought finger snaps be quiet can’t you
see I’m on the phone and every brandish of her fist
heads will roll and the ease of her ball point

strike-through heavy and scriptorium-slow across
the pages moments after hearing the news
of the latest friend or relative no longer around

fingering A-Z tabs for names and addresses
like my godparents Peter and Mary Kunda
at 543 Prospect Avenue Scranton PA now gone

III

Into the earth and out of her cache of Ks they lay
near cousin Frances Klein and Dr. Koursh
each donning my mother’s skull and cross-outs

her casual delineation between the living
and the dead between Christmas cards and ancient
history swift as the tornado in ’79 descending

moments after I stepped from the afternoon
bus with Jane Connors when her own chimney’s
brick struck her head–I wanted to empty her

backpack and take her new supply of erasable
pens pooling like Freyja’s tears the only
hope I had against my mother’s hand in the Cs

 

 

 


Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a writer and educator living in Los Angeles and Georgia. She has been featured in SWWIM, The Laurel Review, Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, and About Place among others. Candice mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Her comfort-character is Jessica Fletcher. Please find her @Feed_Me_Poetry and candicemkelseypoet.com.

2024-11-09T10:54:03-05:00November 9, 2024|

I Laugh

by Robert Okaji

 

Because I say to myself I’m going to
miss her so much, when no, I won’t miss any-
one, because I’ll be dead. I won’t be thinking.
Or feeling, or remembering. I simply
won’t be. So I’m grieving now, well in advance
(I hope), though the drugs quit on me and my knee
swells and the lead balloon in my chest expands
even as I write and eat cookies because
everything else tastes like sawdust. I miss her
so much now, even though she’s here, more present
than anyone, ever. Because I won’t be.

 

 

 


Robert Okaji served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, and once owned a bookstore. Sixteen months ago he was diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer. Thanks to the wonders of modern science, he still lives in Indiana with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper, whose poems resonate with emotion and craft—stepson, and cat. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in fall 2024, and his poetry may be found in Only Poems, Big Windows Review, Verse Daily, Broadkill Review, Vox Populi, Taos Poetry Journal, wildness, and at his blog, O at the Edges.

2024-11-03T10:46:28-05:00November 3, 2024|

Long-distance

by Natasha Moskaljov

 

She wears her spacesuit
when they dance in the water.
He’s strong because he can
carry both her and all her
air and earth and the callas
taking root wherever
his hands play those tunes
she heard him sing through
the speakers she slept with
at night. The promise is—
to float until gravity decides,
until the garden on her cheeks
disarms all the layers of salt
on his skin. She wants to tell him
about this peaceful war, about
the multitudes in her brain,
but she’s mute. His fingers taste
of love, of the future.

 

 

 


Natasha Moskaljov is a writer from Croatia. Her work appears in Typishly, Rue Scribe, Full House Literary and elsewhere. She won 1st place in Poems on the Move 2022 Competition, Channel Islands’ category. You can find her on Instagram @natashamoskaljov.

2024-11-02T10:39:12-04:00November 2, 2024|
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