The Accident
​by Kellam Ayres

Why hadn’t I noticed it before,
the protrusion below his shoulder?
My fingers press into the nub,
 
move up and down over the raised bone,
my palm grazing the spot above his heart.
His collarbone had given way long ago
 
after a drunken night in the valley,
when he’d pedaled his bike into a parked car.
We’d been together for a while,
 
but this was new to me.
The bone had taken three months to heal.
He’d slept propped up, immobilized
 
on a recliner in his parents’ television room,
sweating out the summer.
His mother had sliced strips of stick deodorant
 
with a worn-out knife, and carefully pressed them
into the ripe space between arm and body,
into the dampness of skin and hair.
 
I know his body, know what it does to mine,
and in his small bed my fingers grasp
this bit of helplessness.
 
He told me how, after the accident,
he’d wake in the night delirious
from the pain and drugs,
 
and sense he’d been babbling, crying.
Could still feel his mouth moving,
could taste the words still wild on his lips.

The Farmhouse
​by Kellam Ayres

Give it new life, I thought,
the wrecked house, the apple orchard.
Camped on the edge of the property,
I’d wrapped myself in a wool blanket.
Deer hoofed through the thick field,
snapped fallen limbs
a few yards from where I slept.
Down the road lived a goat
named Festus, and when we met
I stared into his orange eyes.
His shelter was pitiful,
a small plastic dome
he ducked into when it rained.
Soon after, the house was mine.
Neighbors turned out with pies
and advice, and fresh eggs laid
by geese and bantam hens.
I tried to eat everything
before it spoiled. Cleared the brush,
peeled back layers of neglect,
while Festus stayed chained
to a metal spike in the ground,
walking in circles, wearing down
the frozen grass to bare mud.

Final Day
​by Kellam Ayres

Even in August, a chill.
Boxes stacked on the painted pine floor.
Sheets pulled over the wingbacks, the sofa.
The door closed after letting in the last
of the room’s good air.  
 
Years ago I burned here.
Brought him into the near dark.
Held his hands while he breathed in my hair,
passed it between his lips.
 
A Wyeth print hangs on the wall now,
farmers scything the fields,
a late-summer mowing. It means
almost nothing, you know how it is,
the image passed into scenery,
or shadows, years ago.
 
But here, once, he held me,
his arms around my body, my arms
reflecting his own, linked to him.
It seemed that we were endless.
 
On this, the last night of summer,
I sleep on a cot next to an open screen
and am soaked by the night rain.​

about your wings
​by Jacqueline Kolosov

                                  Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights
                                                                              – Simone Weil​
​white   as the tundra
    swan       magnificent—​
into un-         tethered sky
             we      plunge
tempestuous     visions   
  fledge     into birds   
 
                    what can one do
            to ascend lower?
  
     surrounding us     
stars     bright as sorrow
    why then    this
            blood?    why 
      this    gravity
            these   talons?

Hush
​by Jacqueline Kolosov

                                         Nothing is the force which renovates the world
                                                                              – Emily Dickinson
​​This mare who abides within. She is sculptural, fleet.
This mare of ebony mane and tail

whose brow bears a white star,
the kind a child’s hand

might make, one white streak in a body
resembling night.

This mare is the pasture’s stillness
whose eye contains the depths

of Baltic amber, gold thread of iris,
thorn, crown, bitterest tears.

The wind may gust, and here
on the high plains it does gust,

as it gusts in Damascus and Aleppo,
though I doubt there is silence there.

Why can we not remember
the feathered fall of angels,

the way the desert remembers the history of wind,
weightless, mute.

In ancient times keening gave shape to grief.
Bodies swayed and rocked.

Tell me, mare of the white star,
tail like the quill

with which God wrote His book into being,
is He still writing it now

so many children, wolf-eyed, hungry,
have ceased to speak

while poppies bloom
through the bones of the dead?

You, oh mare, can withstand wind
sharp as shards.

​Help us, I beg you,
to remember our names.

The North Atlantic Right Whale
​by Jacqueline Kolosov

In death they float, and so became known
as the “right” whales. Escalating now, their vanishing. By day
the remaining few brave ships, nets. Ahab said the eyes

define the face of man. What of a whale’s eyes?
Theirs capture the light, too. Yet these great beings know
what is visible only within the dark, surfaces and depths. Today
​
the right whales numbers are three hundred. When their eyes
close, two portals remain open. How we see, we know.
But how little, how very little do we know.

Broken Words
​by Barrett Ahn

Shakes hand shakes head
long journey before words out of mouth
(use hands and eyes to convey meaning
wave around
gesture frantically
be emphatic on the tones I know)
 
Broken rice broken sounds
understand? no
cocks head, smiles shy
(next time, plan to bring my young, fluent niece)
 
Points to map points to self
attempts new phrase, hangs in air
too loud but repeats
maybe hearing issues
(realize the stranger has no hearing issues
know he just can’t decipher the foreign blanket
under which the question hides)
 
Gives up gives chance to another
sighs in relief as
stranger switches to language from home
(gestures are no longer necessary)
found someone familiar in foreign city.

The Inside Twitch
​by Robert Okaji

Of leaving: nothing ever lasts
but odd habits and those rancid
bits of love’s lonely power grid
held hostage. Having survived blasts
of rage, battered enthusiasts
patch their holes and hope to mend. Did
you ever observe an eyelid
twitch from the inside? We outcasts
share these tales. I unlock the door,
step out into rain. How easy
to forget what we’ve lost, what we’ve
never held. I will sweep the floor,
wash dishes, cook, pick up debris,
set it aside, regret, heal. Grieve.

So I Am Little
​by Hasham Khalid

​And madness is like a discus 
bolting and tearing the space with burgeoning circumference. 
        I have kept my little 
     And in keeping my little, found
      all that is little is like me. 
          All that looks curious,  
All that keeps waiting.
        How patient I am in my vigil, 
At the sorrow of the things passing.
How sane in my knowledge of our shrinking, 
        As time leaves us. 
    Let me be glitter on your skin 
          Or the sunlight clasping your spine 
                As the ringing voice of early morning, 
Wakes the earth. 
       Here I have found in your scent in your clumsiness,
          My own body made into a flower.
      Call this thing love,
          Our mooring in the littleness of each other.

A Personal Guide to Forced Displacement
​by Daniel Nemo

“No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative
and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul
and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”
– Simone Weil

Let us rest a little. 
There is much to take in here. After a long process of disintegration, 
rootedness. 

         The life instinct gives off sparks

flashover of pure form
before it breaks free without recall. 

Art is the conductor–

across space and time
and life and death. 

To break free 
will take a lifetime. 

A lifetime is a form of flammable cladding 
growing anxious to ingest the oxygen in cavity walls.
The blaze burrows through 
at length 

and eats away at it, 
as a blaze would. Art is the conductor,
memory the meeting place.

Tilted at the sharp end of the passage-
way        
         were they a voiceless chorus 
                 in a vessel being filled

                                            the same memories would turn up the self-
same passageway.
                                
Send in all personal inquiries and sit tight, it’s just a matter 
of investigative procedure.

And wait and wait,
for nothing to happen.   

Channels open 
in the membrane 
of the nerve cell.

Human breath 
collection apparatus 
in sensorial space–

I’d like to ask moreover what dead book fiction 
was used to shroud, to mask everyone’s spirit of discernment so completely–

Is it true there isn’t a valve to shut off the flow of that blue smoke in here

the outlet pressure’s going to exceed 1000 kPa 
and someone may choke to death 

before they iron out eventual bugs and safety flaws 
and add new self-correcting features, and whatever that piece is 

       that’s dislodged in me might, 
                        and why not, cant round chasing after whom to blame      
                                                                                                                            
bordered in 
again                      

internalized, for all intents and purposes,           
like a compression field stretched across a nexus of events.



Time’s up, foster a rapid decision. 

                                             Foster, for what it’s worth, an image, 

                   a destination. 

Not the kind one feels confined to 
as in a stray subway car 
buzzing round an unlit tunnel 
darkly packing hours 
deep inside the hourglass

but a harbor of pursuit, a transplant of the will to believe  
no less desirous than habitual,                                  
habitually a size too large. 

Because the first act of war is feeling small. 

Crawl-spaced and halved by borders
and not so infrequently punished 
for crossing borders. Flux.

[Reflux.]

Can you hear me. 

It’s just like old times.

I left my self in the old quarters, 
a boy gliding in and out of the brickwork
forever ushering new tenants in, hanging on for dear life,
having only been taught hate. 

I left to see how far I’d come–

When I looked back I was a navigational hyperlink, 
collapsed, light at nightfall 
the final sight to mark my progress,

all initial and ulterior installments of escapement 
born out of a mere change of direction

not unlike an experience 
not fully formed yet– conjoined at the root 
by their own function or, perhaps, 
lack thereof. 

Which brings to mind the story 
of the dissident poet with bad teeth surviving prison. 

‘His teeth survived prison?’ 

‘Finis vitae sed non amoris,’ he’d say, soon all things perish 
as approximated

simply to reveal traces
in a case of evidence 
without clues

as from a swift
underwater explosion 

during which for the subject to be transformed 
it must initially be stowed at the center of its vulnerability, it, the subject, 

and then propelled, albeit later than ever, high into the air, 
ridiculously majestic– 

                                          Into making a farewell appearance

on a narrow ledge
surrounded by its counterparts, pain
and beauty–                       

To see the object of universal contemplation
in the flashing eye-ball 
in the sky                 

reflecting, upside down,                                          the seeing of events,
                                                                                 the natural enemy territory   
the sweet guillotine mends dreams 
for the unloved in. 

Hard to know when to stop, having arrived into the world head first, 
anonymously, the next place beside the last, so few crossing rafts.

---

Micro-Machinist 
by Daniel Nemo

​How much further to keep on as to get over. 
What was got to is made real. 
 
                                                  The sound of the city waking up to life
 
matched to the waking city’s unique sound print
reveals a voice unaccounted for.
 
An outflow of yellowness across every inch of tunnel,

checkpoint 
for a longstanding 
hunting season.

The guards cash in each time they let the hunters through

free to continue 
plaiting fresh data strands unimpeded,                           ununiform with the near 
                                                                                                           daylight sweep 

so that the rest of us
here      transit breaths pushed on by gusts of idiopathic hypersomnia
should access                                                         information at a higher speed,

                      then become it.

Thoughts are foldings-over, after-thoughts. 

Not fully independent of    
to what extent 

and why 

    these almost instant overfolds tend to remain still even as we try to speak, 
or speak & act out post-truths all at once, 

an atrial flutter one beat every .4 seconds                   generates miles
and miles of industrious erosion. 

                                                An investigation has been launched, is now ongoing, 
meaning, despite reports themselves being permanent and darkly 
growing more collapsed 

from the mirage 
of constant changings, 
transformations, 

we’re configured/ 
reconfigured 
in the eyes of statues 
we can’t escape around the room.

What, at this very juncture, isn’t weighed down by the circuiting breakage?

Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
consciousness awaits the big homecoming 
cheering on

                      nothing but survival training 
with a deathwish. 

The ungainly way made is visually transposed: 
homelands melt between 
the cypresses

dimming distance 

with the birth 
of a neo-century of maiden spirit.   

Duplicity is fetishized.        

The sediment of doublethink crumbles the alveoli on either side 
of the recruit’s heart 

and compounds
a vast continuous presence.

Having come across the slow familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
​machinist, all that commands him does not exist.

---

The Skylark
by Daniel Nemo

The poet sees the lark burning 
like a candle for the birds who disappeared–

Its song teaches words 

to love inside 
and outside 
the poem–

I see it too
and see him 
look at it

we both 
look skyward
like conical 
reflectors. 

Through the dark
a gap filled with half-light opens up.        



Note:
The poet sees the lark burning like a candle for the birds who disappeared – 
in reference to "For the Vanished Birds", by Marin Sorescu

---

Click & Connect
by Daniel Nemo 

​At night tricks of light sleep 
at dark angles. 
The heart feels like waves
gently rock you 
in the middle of the sea.   

Misdirected acts of kindness.    

Proceed by connecting
the following statements:

You don’t really KNOW yourself.

You drink down nature 
so she spits you back OUT.

You remain deeply UNHAPPY.