My husband loves languages lavishly: latin, arabic, greek-
a polyglot traveler (hic/ibi), so to speak, as if to seek

more tongues might mend a broken heart
(le coeur) but still kept mine apart-

from inside him- his blood, his passion
(su pasion) my own language still unspoken.

“I am,” he said, “entering the ancients’ home,”
(“kalos/beauty.”) But did he know I could not roam

those woods, the words (lexi, logi) not mine
to understand? I did know how to harmonize

(armonioso, harmonisch): at night alone
in bed with silence, books and poems

until I learned to teach the tongue
he had not heard, had never sung

with me- though even all those years,
frozen, mute with fears,

hiding in translations in his hand,
and crouched outside the lushest land,

I like to think we knew that, even wordless, none
could keep our hearts from being one.

Martha Kahane is a psychologist and an avid choral singer. She misses choral singing terribly since singing in groups has become lethal. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband of forty years.

It’s hard to see beyond the drizzling winters.
Restaurants closing.
Apartments falling into the street at night,
without noise.

And after the naming
of the deserted pigeon parks,
the people listen to the anti-
ratflight podcasts:
let the fetuses live,
let them be born and told
there will be nothing
but a life of school followed by a life of hiding.

I always think I hear screams on the moon.
Or the rain that’s lost there.

Maybe it’s where catamites conceive and are born.

Maybe they don’t believe in the Earth,
its gazing wound of snow and wind
that can’t be proven.

An Asperger’s teenager
dismantles the thoughts of the one who said,
“Tell me what you are, I do not know what you are”
upon his shaky walk-by.

And on a world
of subtle lightning mountains
that do not end,
he copies and pastes the spinal foliage,
adding color, thinking he, too, can create summer.

A woman shivers
from the face he uses for “hello,”
and quickly turns away
because she can see them there,

in his shallow troughs of worry,

the only angels left,
scavenging.

Rob Cook’s most recent book is The Charnel House on Joyce Kilmer Avenue (Rain Mountain Press, 2018). His work has appeared or will appear in Epiphany, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, great weather for Media, Rhino, Caliban, deComp, Interim, On the Seawall, Borderlands, Barren, The Bitter Oleander, Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He is currently working on a novella.

Translated by Natalie Feinstein

A Plea

I plead my immense fatigue to subdue
Me like the dragon beseeching Saint George
To grow from his fertilized, defeated body a kingdom on the banks
Of the Lethe River and graceful oblivion models will trot beside it
Adorning a wreath of witless smiles.

A Thought

When a thought plummets at my feet
Bruised
I bandage its wings
Which I clipped
Until it revisits me
In faltering
Flight.
I then shoot it again.

Gad Kaynar-Kissinger (70) is a retired Associate Professor from the Theater Department at Tel Aviv University. His poetry was published in major Israeli literary periodicals and supplements, and compiled in seven books, including a bi-lingual Hebrew-Spanish publication Lo que queda (What Remains). For ADHD he won “The General Israeli Writers’ Union” Award (2010). Kaynar is a stage, TV and film actor, and translator of 70 plays from English, German, Norwegian and Swedish. For his Ibsen translations he was designated in 2009 by the Norwegian King as “Knight First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit.”

The light streaks through the opening,
Taunting me, tugging me, begging me
To explore its edges and push myself
Through, so I can learn what is on the
other side. Reflection fractions, glinting
stabbing and making me squint, but
forward I go. Each splash of light is
distracting, and my eyes wander until
the light in the opening brightens and
catches my breath, pulling me by my
fingertips until I can no longer resist.
I fall, tumbling and tripping into the
New, washing away the old with a
Brightness so fantastic that I must
Relearn how to see.

Amber Pierson writes with the intent to pull emotions with her words.

What are the parameters you use,
to judge a life well lived,
a marriage to call it great,
a job to say it satisfies–

What are the parameters you use,
to judge my sheer laziness
my lack, my poverty or wealth,
to judge my life, my actions.

What are the measurement you get
after my speech had been quantified
by linear our quantum parallel equation,
an antiquity to our fault and purpose.

How is it that you can tell,
what my life ought to be.
All a farce.
By parameters faulty and rusted,
for the smiling one does of depression,
the couple spraying kisses fight behind closed doors.

Let man not judge I say or,
Let man judge, never listen.

Abasiama Udom is a Poet and Writer with words scattered all over including at Rigorous Magazine and U-rights Magazine. She lives in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria with her family (parents and annoying brother) and finds the time to sleep, dance or watch football. Twitter:@AneuPoet

Crystal goblets that can ring
have a final song they sing;
tinkling sounds of shattered glass
quickly shriek and quickly pass.
Shards now swept into a mound
make no music; only sound.

Some who muse when dinner’s done
let a moistened finger run
round a lip that once held wine,
not a lip that pressed to mine.

Made with breath instead of hands,
they revert to primal sands.
Air remains, and somewhere flame,
wilderness from which they came.

John J. Brugaletta is the first member of his family to finish high school and then three degrees from universities. He is now professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, where he edited South Coast Poetry Journal for ten years. He lives with his wife on the redwood coast of California.

Daddy? Daddy, I never believed in God. No one believes
in oxygen or sun rays and moon beams. People ask
questions, I used to, but lost curiosity half a life ago
when I was four. Remember when you asked if I wanted
Jesus in my heart? “No,” I giggled, but no one else got
the joke. What else in the world could I want, Daddy?

I believe in hell, never more than when my overactive
imagination is fueled with fire and brimstone and eternal
flame and suffering gnashing through the skin of bodies
of the children born in earthly places, flashes in a pan,
not special like me who’s going to heaven. I am going, right, Daddy?

I invited Jesus in, and He loves me, this I know, but
the other night as I laid awake staring away from my nightlight
straight at the shadows cast across the empty ceiling where I painted fires of my own imaginings,
beautiful flames to burn and melt in, flames that sink right through your chest, Daddy, that make
your heart beat hot dripping bitter blood down the cuts in your skin where the ashes seep through
I felt an itch.
The itch of sackcloth on bare skin, the itch that can only be scratched
with broken nails and pottery shards until your life beads on your skin.
I stared into the dark and I asked Jesus
to get out of my heart.

Daddy, I think He left.
Daddy, how do I get Him back?
Daddy, I didn’t mean it, I don’t want to go to hell I believe in heaven.

The velvet red carpet and crystal chandeliers of hotel hallways,
the pristine and neat and sanitized ever after. A solitary hallway,
perfect to meditate and daydream and Daddy, in those moments
I believe I want to be there forever. I’ve a talent for forcing whimsy.
What else is the heart of a young child designed for but peace
and wonder and joy in beauty. I am good at shedding my skin,
drifting down carpets, and imagining eternity as an ageless spirit

pretending I don’t want a body long enough
that I almost believe it.

Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ve learned to pine
for God, as He pines for me, ignoring questions
about His intentions in setting me so solidly
down His path, closer to His light and fleeing
the hypnotic temptations of the dark, trekking through dirt
until my feet crack and bleed.

Yet when I lie awake at night and remember Jesus’s holy light
that is coming to melt my flesh and take me home to Him
I tighten my fists on the headboard, and till my knuckles are white,
cling to the earth.

Hannah Beairsto hails from the Poconos in Northeast Pennsylvania, home of ski resorts, waterfalls, and family fun. She spends most of her days holed in her room writing. She has no pets, spouses, or children to brag about, and would like everyone to remember her first name is a palindrome.

Fermentation from
Latin: boil.
The experiment fails,
seal, pops—
jar, breaks—
Life.
On knees
around
spilled jar:
cabbage, carrot,
vinegar rising,
seeking
a more flavored life,
bigger jar,
not yet ready to be
opened.

Unlock bubbled heat,
decode time.
Try again.
Another batch
of kimchi.

Paula Kaufman writes from Washington D.C. Her work can be found in Quail Bell Magazine, What Rough Beast, Heartwood and other publications.

To Breathe

A breath has never had
A need for nicety –
It is simply taken,
Grabbed from the air.

The Long Night

Morning. And I remember
You and the night –
Both soft, supple,
Smooth and unwrinkled.

Now you bring us coffee,
And what I see is
An old woman
Hobbling on her cane.

Could it be the night
Was much, much longer
Than we ever dreamed.
Nonetheless, tonight is another night.

Edward Michael Supranowicz has had artwork and poems published in the US and other countries. Both sides of his family worked in the coalmines and steel mills of Appalachia.

Autumn is the season swans will sing
their final song before the world will stop,
the raindrops frozen and become a blade,
the trees in catalepsis and the finches mute.

This wound afflicts our world when we’re fatigued
with spring’s old promises and summer’s wealth.
The promises are shallow, wealth soon spent.
Must they be realized another way?

What would that be but in a timeless state?
For time is what brings on the feeble round,
and time, when plucked away, displays our hope,
because this is not yet the closing end.

This world is like a clock that runs one year
and then must be rewound to heal the wound.

John J. Brugaletta is the first member of his family to finish high school and then three degrees from universities. He is now professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, where he edited South Coast Poetry Journal for ten years. He lives with his wife on the redwood coast of California.