Issue #2.5 – Special Ekphrastic Issue – Coming soon.
Cover Art by Jorge Oyarzún Sardi
Typography by Annelies Zijderveld
A Journal of Hybrid Literature and Art
Issue #2.5 – Special Ekphrastic Issue – Coming soon.
Cover Art by Jorge Oyarzún Sardi
Typography by Annelies Zijderveld
Art by Jorge Oyarzún Sardi
Issue #2.5, our special ekphrastic issue, will launch at the end of October.
Cover Art by Jessica Dawn Zinz
Contributors: Kayla Rodney, Christopher Atamian, Joy Alexander, Yi Jung (Jolene) Chen, Michelle Villegas Threadgould, Jessica Dawn Zinz, Richard Oyama, Yuan Changming, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Satya Dash, Raphael Luis J. Salise, Guna Moran, and more.
Kayla Rodney: What it all boils down to is that people from New Orleans always want to be home because there is something about the city that draws you back to it, and many families from the city have lived there for generations, my own included. …
Her talent with diction, music and the lyric is apparent in her first collection of poems, Swimming Home, which begins with a grocery list which very quickly becomes much more…
by Kayla Rodney
Over two-hundred years ago black feet
In shackles shuffled to shores they were unsure of.
The jingle of chains a precursor to the jingle of change in coin purses
Used to purchase us.
But still we sang into blue skies…
by Guna Moran
translated from Assamese by Sadiqul Islam
I can see at night,
not in daytime.
After the nap
the ribs talk to the bedstead.
…
by Guna Moran
translated from Assamese by Bibekandanda Choudhury
Because they do not have a
permanent home…
Poem by Carl Scharwath
Video by Jeanette Skirvin
by Mike Knowles
by Zach Murphy
There’s a formidable stone house that sits atop Fairmount Hill. It’s been for sale as long as I can remember. …
by Raphael Luis J. Salise
I lied
when I said
“I’ll be home soon,
don’t you worry about me”
…
by Raphael Luis J. Salise
we are soldiers, right?
comrades, always there for each other
no one was watching us, right?
it was just you and me in the middle of the night…
by Thom Brucie
I did not want to watch my grandfather die
but I did
as surely as I watched him
prune his grape vines…
by Michael Buckius
When you were 12 years old you destroyed your mother’s garden. You used a miniature souvenir baseball bat that was purchased at Camden Yards two summers prior. …
by Kim Bockus
Two months into chemotherapy I begin to think about Alice and her Adventures, triggered by the toxic cocktail coursing through my veins and permeating my brain. …
by Penny Harter
Preparing the cup of coffee that leads off my day—one of just two cups, the second only half-decaf—has become a ritual. …
by Penny Harter
Recycled loss composts this garden. Loss of everything dear you’ve treasured since childhood: your tin shovel the sandbox swallowed. The mewing kitten your mother rescued from the white line. …
by Sean J. White
who knows the difference between lazurite and lamprophyre a rock is a rock is a rock is a rock
unless a rock is an answer …
by Satya Dash
Had to argue against tale of breasts
Curving to shape my narrative of breath
…
by Satya Dash
rope me by grips of mane vowels in my name
jealous in yearn feed me me
liver hearted God was I no skin or hair no wound
by F. Daniel Rzicznek
Limitless, compassionate energy between snow and tree, the fall of each, those several thralls. …
by Karen Loeb
Match the comment with the response.
Relatives/friends: Why in the world are you going to adopt a child?
by Howie Good
A Toast to the Dark
I search my sock drawer for a clean shirt to wear. On the subway, I pretend my briefcase is full of secret nuclear launch codes. …
by Roy Duffield
a reflection on the self reflection of a
self portrait of the poet as a young man as a self
…
by Ryan Greene
in the void
a whole lot of floating
old old light
…
by Yuan Changming
盲人摸象(the Blind Feels the Elephant): Another East Idiom
Here’s the elephant…
by Richard Oyama
It does not think of the boy’s bird screech and water pistol, the girl’s pas de deux and pursed lips. They batter each other’s head with flattened palms. …
by Adam Ai
Dear Orloj, My Wondering,
The last two dreams were not about her.
by Matthew Dettmer
I got home Friday night with a bag of potato chips because the woman working at the gas station a third of the way home saw me lurching down the aisle with the shelves of wine and said “no booze for sale now” …
by Jessica Dawn Zinz
full & complete
change is
by its nature
difficult.
by Marlene DeVere
She sat alone in a corner of the café, toying with her pearlescent necklace that for fifty years held a special place in her jewelry box. …
by Amanda McGuire
Three eyes in the back of the head but it’s impossible to see the reign beyond & above…
by Amanda McGuire
Leaves scratch the sidewalk again, and the air here is electric with possibility, according to the meteorologist. ….
by Michelle Villegas Threadgould
No hay reggaaeton sin ti
Tennessee is a black tree blur
…
by Michelle Villegas Threadgould
Not film / Not guns / Not you
But I could
and I did
when I outran you
by Robbie Curry
awaken your
body to your ancient future
celebrate
by Sandra L. Faulkner
Dear Mom,
I made your cake today
since I can’t see your face
…
by Sandra L. Faulkner
July 8, 2020 / Dear Alice, / Today would be your 112th birthday. They tell me that / I look like you…
by Jill Carpenter
Quilting develops an internal ruler—I know an inch, or six inches, or 36 inches when I see it.
…
by Yi Jung Chen
A ring, quietly stays
on mom’s little finger, passing down
a tale of frugal living…
by Joy Alexander
I had to laugh.
I just had to laugh,
my thoughts, a manic violin.
…
by Joy Alexander
It was late evening and the Jamaican downpour of rain made it seem even darker in the bus in which my mother and I were traveling. It did not matter that I could not see outside from the rain beating on the side of the window or glimpse the shadows of trees sprinting by the window. ….
by Christopher Atamian
Growing up in Yorkville in the late 1970’s, nothing thrilled me more than visiting my dear old Tante Angele in Morningside Heights. Manhattan had not been completely gentrified yet, so Yorkville still retained its mostly Hungarian and German flavor, and Morningside Heights might as well have been Tokyo, it seemed so far away…
Open for Themed Submissions until August 31, 2020
What can murals, street art, and graffiti teach us about our urban and increasingly gentrified communities; our cultural identities? What can they teach us is at risk? How can they demonstrate and invigorate our internal, individual, and communal powers? We are looking for submissions of ekphrastic poems or hybrid works in response to murals, street art, and graffiti.
Contributors: Siobhán Scarry, Lyn Baldwin, Ellery Akers, Lauren Camp, Abeer Y. Hoque, Joy Castro, Wyatt Welch, Iris Orpi, Annelies Zijderveld, Rob Carney, Justin Kitts, Marvin Shackelford, Paolo Bicchieri, Edward Lee, Lynn Finger, Elena Valdés Chavarría, and Irina Mashinski.
by Siobhán Scarry
How do the thoughts move?
With whirring, with wings, with unthinkable thoughts.
by Lyn Baldwin
On a Sunday afternoon in middle March, I open my truck door and step into in the high, thin light of a spring afternoon in the upper Lac Du Bois grasslands, just north of Kamloops, British Columbia.
by Ellery Akers
After working for months banding seabirds on a rocky island, I lean over the rail of our boat and smell land…
by Lauren Camp
1. Moderate-stage Dementia, Most Likely Alzheimer’s
by Abeer Y. Hoque
Here I love you, New York.
In the neon-striped night, people rise and roar.
The sirens and singers vie with their ululations.
A hundred times I listen.
by Joy Castro
“…friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.”
—Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
by Wyatt Welch
Birds are dying all over North America and I make a margarita.
Three green water-crisis limes, California.
by Wyatt Welch
I was,
I was each time,
conventional…
by Iris Orpi
Friday 2011, Chicago
Razor slices of red-tinted winter sky through the blinds, like verses of a waning fire.
by Iris Orpi
For eleven minutes, there was no God
by Annelies Zijderveld
1.
Pour the sugar and water into a heavy-bottomed pan set on medium high until the sugar roils in what resembles ecstatic agony—but don’t reach for the wooden spoon to relieve it.
by Rob Carney
Because The La’s were playing on the stereo, and the crescent moon looked frozen in the morning, and I wasn’t thinking about traffic because these phrases kept popping up and keeping me busy . . .
by Rob Carney
Just now, in the middle of a nineteenth email from OTL about Kaltura and their systems-training videos to help us “begin immediately transitioning” to teaching all our classes via teleconference . . .
by Justin Kitts
Get to see your face
In a hotel hell
Not much to look at
But it’s better than jail
by Marvin Shackelford
Along the tar-chipped road ponds dry at their edges, banks spreading, the streams and springs that feed them narrowing through their stones and winds, disappearing. The sun works at the earth unimpeded for weeks, sets each evening far behind the parched trees bunched across the horizon.
by Paolo Bicchieri
at some rodeo
you kissed my neck in front of my grandparents / it wasn’t that you couldn’t / everyone laughed / it was that five miles away / someone wept when they heard the crack…
by Edward Lee
From the series ‘(Un)Revealed’
by Edward Lee
From the series ‘(Un)Revealed’
by Lynn Finger
Cotton canvas is the most flammable, although poly blends can go faster because they melt.
by Elena Valdés Chavarría
En las calles del olvido
merodea un recuerdo de ti
que persiste
pese al tiempo…
by Irina Mashinski
Anyone who remembers, a lifetime ago, trying to make out new patterns on the wallpaper each night and being terrified by the dark frightening folds of that strange shape on the chair will understand what I am about to say.
by Irina Mashinski
a bird of glass,
a bird with a scratched throat,
a bird that tries to tell it all at once,
a bird that turns its head when called,
a bird that’s pinned with hopes…
by Irina Mashinski
I slept to you,
slept into you,
and then, to fall asleep, escaped from you
behind a cardboard wall, as if unbound…
by Irina Mashinski
November wind
sways you – bewildered lost
between two languages:
one a birch tree and one a willow.
Review by Lynn Finger
Rob Carney is someone who can find the soul in an empty room, or abandoned spot, and give it a chance to sing. His poetry explores the person in the emptiness, or the emptiness in the person, and shows how it is beautiful and enduring.
Rob Carney: People need their wildness back. Using figurative language to evoke the animal in us seems like it ought to be one of poetry’s jobs…. Personification is helpful because most people need to, as [Robinson] Jeffers says, “uncenter our minds from ourselves” and “unhumanize our views a little.”