My wife asks me to leave
the porch light on before bed.
I ask if we are expecting
guests; she says it’s to keep
them away. There was a time
a flame in a window was
a welcome mat, a compass
in the dark. Tradition has
a way of unraveling the longer
it lasts. Think candles
to repel the moth; I wonder
how we learned to fear the light
more than its absence. When
I grab the banister and step
without flipping the switch on,
my memory is a stairwell, groaning
under shadow cast by porches—
neighbors inviting me to stay.

Geoff Anderson crosses the tracks, the bridge, the floodwall, and the overpass in Columbus, OH. His work is forthcoming or appears in Wherewithal, Outlook Springs, and Up the Staircase, among others.

Summer in its simplest colors
comes over Durling Avenue.

The sweetest invitations come
understated, the girl in the yard

barely lifts her eyebrows, the boy
shrugs his shoulders as if to say

I’ve been waiting, I can wait.
All we’re asked to do is recognize

the beckoning—the grass
splashed brown that will be cut

by dusk, the woman who’s placed
sun tea on her porch. She wears

the dress her mother wore,
lets it fall about her hips and pauses

because it’s Saturday, nothing
pressing in the news, the radio

turned to Frankie Avalon
and laughter, those days, that

handful of Pontiacs moving slowly,
making no dust. There are streets

in America that defend themselves
against time, streets of blackberry

and elm and clusters of boys
lining up to play stickball. I stop

the car and listen to their rules:
the phone pole’s foul, the hedge

behind the Murray house always
an inside-the-park home run.

If rain comes, the great, mournful
interruptor, we take lunch

to the pavilion at Memorial Park
and wait. Maybe Susie St. Claire

in her dress will bring sun tea;
maybe we can save the freckles

on her shoulders for later,
for bed, when all is cricket-sound,

the Erie train, our fathers holding
our church shoes under lamplight.

I was of and not of them,
inside their clothes and distant,

driving toward Broad Street
where the new light flickered red

(it was 1962, it was today)
at the Lutheran church, where I

married the day summer ended.
All the trees were yellow and I

in my gray suit lingered, laughed,
in time and far beyond it.

A native of Ohio, Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Ink In Thirds, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.

 

Rolled up in my sheets,
marinating in nervous sweat,
+++++brain a flipbook:
speed-painted images, words, phrases
like ticker tape rolling on & on.

I watch the crescent moon
steadily sheathe its blade edge
in a neighbor’s chimney.
+++++Alarm clock says “4 AM.”
+++++Hypothalamus says “Fuck this.”

If I got out of bed now,
I’d be like a half-forged moth
hulled too soon from its cocoon—
stunted, wingless, crawling, soft
+++++meat for the world to devour.

++++++++++Now

dawn takes wing
+++++from its silver nest
+++++behind the eastern slash pines,
+++++plumed in slivers of
+++++misted pink glass.

+++++I do my best to hate
the sudden splendor
of this,
the only star of trillions

+++++that keeps me alive.

Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK Magazine, Thrice Fiction, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.

Levee workers,
Plaquemines parish, Louisiana

Fourteen Negroes wheel barrows
along narrow planks laid over mud.
They build a levee to prevent
flooding of land they’ll never own.
Fearing bites of cottonmouths,
copperheads, and diamondbacks,
they sweat in humid bayou heat.

Arrayed along a nearby ridge,
four white overseers look on
in the shadow of a black sun:
an overexposed disc in an archival print
from a negative mutilated by a hole punch.
Without being told, you and I can guess
we weren’t supposed to see this.

David Olsen’s Unfolding Origami (80pp, 2015) won the Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Award. Poetry chapbooks from U.S. publishers include Sailing to Atlantis (2013), New World Elegies (2011), and Greatest Hits (2001). His work appears widely in leading journals and anthologies in North America and Europe. A poet and professionally produced playwright with a BA in chemistry from University of California-Berkeley and an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, David was formerly an energy economist, management consultant, and performing arts critic. He has lived in Oxford, England, since 2002.

Pack sackcloth and ashes in your carry-on.
Bring pens, your toothbrush, a good skirt,
and a magazine you will not read.

At the terminal, do not flinch
at his diminishment.
You are not strong enough
to support the weight of his

grief. You will support it.

Accept tasks before coffee,
urgencies colliding, lists so long
the sun will set
before you have turned the page.

Celebrate the crossing out of items.
Fold laundry. Make soup. Remember.
Say thank you. Do not

be surprised by the number
of times you speak of her
in the present tense. Their home,
their tickets, their checkbook.

Plural fades slowly. Practice.

Distant relatives arrive, circle,
contain his flood of words. Accept
this grace while you continue to sort
and pack her possessions.

Make executive decisions. Regret
them. Cabinets and bookcases will become
the stuff of nightmares. He will bolt
from sleep: searching, inarticulate.
Do not enter his frenzy. Join

the hunt. Preserve her spiral notebooks
filled with travel notes: sixty countries,
five continents, two sentences
a day in her tiny, perfect penmanship.
Tuck them away, destinations to which
he may someday return.

Pray not to make a mistake.
You will make mistakes.

Choose to believe that he is not crying
alone in the dark. Be prepared
to catch him bent double and wailing
when the lost opal pendant slips
suddenly into his hand from a tissue-filled
ziplock he found in the drawer you swear
you checked yesterday:
this one treasure he could not find.

(You cannot be prepared.)

Do not be shocked at his hurry to empty
her side of the closet. It is her faint
cologne that crushes him as he goes
to find his socks in the morning.

Do not break his heart.
Check all the pockets.

Kathryn Paul has lived in Seattle longer than she has lived anywhere else. She is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Carving out time for poetry is the most important thing she does. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Stirring: A Literary Collection, The Fem, Words Dance, and Lunch Ticket’s “Amuse-Bouche” feature.

Women gathered round the float
like the waters of the night—
nurses, pirates,
schoolgirls in plaid—and they lifted
shirts to necks and their breasts bobbed
up and down.

Beads of prayer fell upon
them and hit their heads and throats
and hearts.

The women dropped to their knees
to collect them—holy objects
on sullied ground—
but boots stomped upon their bony
hands and bodies pushed them left and right.
But they persisted and they
grasped—tarantula
fingers on concrete ground—
and they rose to stand,
lightheaded,

and pressed beads to forehead, beads
to mouth.

And up above the cold moon
hung. The float,
in its salvation,
passed—
drifting cheers of yellow-red, drifting flashes
of golden light—and the turning
waters turned the endless
flotsam: death
and delight.

Lana Spendl’s chapbook of flash fiction, We Cradled Each Other In the Air, is forthcoming from Blue Lyra Press in February 2017. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Hobart, The Greensboro Review, Quarter After Eight, storySouth, Fiction Southeast, Monkeybicycle, Prick of the Spindle, Gargoyle, and other magazines.