Issue 1.3
February 2023
Ella Rous
Ghazal at Dawn
Ghazal at Dawn
I had to watch your face to see the light coming.
A mirror for a horizon that was behind me, a sight coming
to touch my mind gently and lift off, a butterfly, delicate, fragile
and transitory. I blinked and the beauty ebbed, the white coming
over the horizon, so cold and clean as to purify and excruciate.
The final wash of terror over our bodies. This isn’t Christ’s coming:
the blood in the water, the acid in the rain, the settling of locusts
over a field. Only, I am the blood, the acid, the locusts. It’s a blight coming.
But I’ll wait for something to harm or wrong, and for something
to harm or wrong you. In the meantime, I watch the mites coming
and whorling in the strands of sunlight. I avoid your touch
and I dream of blades in the dark. You are the right coming,
and I am the wrong coming, and I want to avenge you. It is all
I know how to do for you. And still I fear the night coming.
Call me what you will: glint, molar, luster, baby’s breath,
honey, darling. Ellie, E.J., Ella. I won’t see the light coming.
Devon Brock
Manufacture
Manufacture
In its original sense:
to shape with the hands—
how you draw the line
of your lover’s jaw
from neck to chin;
how she leans into your palm
as you wipe a tear
from the corner of her eye
with your fingertip.
Remember this
when the clay dries,
when the glaze cracks.
Adam Haver
The Sower Arepo Holds With Effort the Wheels
The Sower Arepo Holds With Effort the Wheels
Each spring the fallow fields await the sower
like a savior come to give them purpose,
divine if not destined, the mounded rows.
Arepo has taxied the fields for so long he knows
no other route to take, from seed to harvest
he holds the wheel straight until winter’s signs.
The seedlings know the land before they grow,
their parents having instilled a legacy of what
they know of this soil, blessed by Arepo’s hand.
And when the sower’s bones mingle with the seeds,
he’ll find a sweet familiarity within the ground,
as all the fields rejoice at his rooted homecoming.
Mark J. Mitchell
Witness Protection
Witness Protection
Around the time her mirror snapped, she wrote
names of lapsed gods—their long, dangerous names—
on hems of drapes. Her talisman—her hope
against plague and fire. She let her pets out.
Then she shuffled old cards, spread a long game
around time. Her compact snapped. So she wrote
small verbs on her palm. She stumbled through days
like that—half-dressed in darkness, left without
her face for comfort. She waited for blame
to wash over with its red tide. Small doubts
about time made her mirror snap. She wrote
on shards, with long fingers, all those false names
they asked to hear before they’d let her out.
Matthew Hutchins
No Luck This Morning
No Luck This Morning
Walking with my father, I stumble over his bootprints.
Lever-action clumsy in my arms
like a teenager holding a baby.
He presses the barbed wire of a fence into a V
so I can cross. Lowers his orange mask
to ask, *No luck this morning?*
I do not tell him that I drank two cups
of french pressed coffee against a cedar tree.
Rifle unloaded—out of reach.
I do not speak of the buck that came to me,
movement masked by the rings of fog
it puffed into the air
nor of the minute we spent watching each other
as it stomped damp moss. The rifle forgotten
until it turned back to the tree line.
*No luck this morning*.