Category: Webzine

Ajar

Lillie Elsworth

However you think a woman should pack
and leave her life, she didn’t do it that way.
She left at a reasonable time,
after breakfast and in a raincoat
and having stopped
for a glass of water.
No small bag and no sign of a note
and no one to notice
that she left the door ajar behind her,
careful to step round the wet lilac,
pushing buds through the cracks in the terrace.

Lillie Elsworth lives in Exeter in a small flat with her boyfriend and two guinea pigs. She enjoys surrealist poetry, candles and baked gnocchi. Lillie has been published in The Cardiff Review and on The Young Poet’s Society website for a third-place win in a poetry competition.

Hop On

Joan García Viltró

I was engrossed in my reading
on that bench
at a train station,
in the warm glow of an April sun
and the bite of cruel air.

It caught me off guard,
the urge to hop on,
so I found myself on that
rolling train platform,
behind that sliding door,
staring at your amused
and daring face,
and then back at all I’d left
on that bench,
running away from me.

Joan García Viltró is a teacher and poet based in Cambrils, on the south Catalan coast. His poems are populated by Mediterranean characters and mythologies, and they often reflect his concern with Nature struggling under human pressure. He has published with Punk Noir Magazine, curates a Twitter list (@joangv66/Poetry Matters) and posts and reads poems aloud on Instagram (joangv66).

Certainly Not Trees in Winter

Karen Walker

In spring, when the trees aren’t hungry and naked, he’ll return to the park bench. Hardwoods fallen on hard times, birches silver, but penniless. He gets it. He’s there too. So no point in twig fingers, bending low under the weight of snow, tapping his shoulder for help. He’ll wait until the trees have been fed by April, clothed by May. After all, he isn’t their keeper. He has his own troubles, and, damn it, no one cares about those. Certainly not trees in winter.

Karen Walker writes in a basement. Her work is in or is forthcoming in Bandit Fiction, Defenestration, Virtual Zine, Reflex Fiction, Potato Soup Journal, Roi Fainéant Literary Press, Versification, Sledgehammer Lit, and others. Twitter (@MeKawalker883).

Colored Feathers

Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar 

She climbed the wrought-iron ladder and pulled a suitcase from the loft, the large maroon one her mother had once filled with beads and frills and embroidered napkins for her wedding. Her mother’s voice inside her head warned, If you plan for the worst, it’ll happen. Think only good things. But she cupped her hand around her lips and whispered the voice into silence. Even as she tried hard to think of the yellows at the center of daisies and the purples of plums, she knew she had to prepare.

Day after day, she filled the suitcase with shavings of herself – pieces that didn’t belong there, in the house, the marriage – neatly arranged, layered with colored feathers, for use at someplace, sometime. At night, she stowed away the suitcase under the bed. The bag bulged like an over-risen loaf, the leather cracking, the contents spilling out at the sides, the zippers catching fabric and snagging longings. A pair of sandals with a cushioned footbed waited beside the suitcase.

What’s poking under the bed? the husband complained in a slurred voice one night as the mattress sagged under his weight. A corpse you’re hiding there, woman? With a knee to the center of her spine, he kicked her off the bed. She lay on the cold floor staring at the darkness under the bed until light crept between the window slats, and the outline of the suitcase emerged like a curled-up swan. Outside, sparrows chirped under the eaves, a song of sweet escape.

Later, she pressed the bulging suitcase into surrender, tucking in the contents, and zipping the jaws shut. As she strapped the sandals to her feet, moaning at the softness against her callused soles, something fluttered inside her belly. She pressed a hand to her wren-colored dress and discovered a honeydew hardness. A glance at the one-page calendar on the paint-peeled wall showed she hadn’t bled in months.

Let the seed grow in shelter, her mother’s voice in her head again, this time soft like a plea. She collapsed into a heap beside her freedom, hugging her knees like a pheasant of winter, head burrowed into its wings, eyes frozen shut. Day after day, she unpacked the suitcase, flinging the contents into road-ruts to be discolored by rain, nipped by free birds.

Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Born to a middle-class family in India, she later migrated to the USA. Her stories and poems have appeared in many publications, in print and online. She is currently a Prose Editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection “Morsels of Purple” is available for purchase on Amazon.com. See more online. Reach her on Twitter (@PunyFingers).

Two Photos

Lila Kahn

Lila Kahn is a photographer, illustrator, and designer from Oakland, California. She has always been fascinated by the expressiveness of landscapes, both natural and human-made, and aims to explore that quality through her art. When she is not creating, you can find her cooking, thinking about the cosmos, or trying to befriend a neighborhood cat.

Someone Else’s Dream

Silk~

earth losing its shine the moon so uninspired

his thoughts a pool of mist in the sunken valley

whispered wishes where there are no wells

hills no longer rolling they simmer

tides don’t just rise they sigh and swell

horsetail fall into someone else’s dream

Silk~ is a poet.

Beyond Unbinds the Dragonfly

Kristina T. Saccone

My daughters dart in the dreg, still wingless nymphs fresh from the egg. They feed from a school of tadpoles — a feast — then molt in the algae bloom. I stretch my wings to test for an escape.

Before he visited my silted lake, I knew nothing of the beyond. He beckoned in turquoise, glistening veins vibrating in the spring shade of the pond. We coupled, his wings across my abdomen like a veil at rest, whispering about clear streambeds and unsullied waters.

In tandem, we dropped our eggs into the mire. Then, in a moment, his cobalt and sapphire vanished, gone to a far-off somewhere. The ovae, an anchor, held me here. 

But now my nymphs need blood, larvae, and the worm, not a mother who yearns for other shores. So when the kayak floats by, I drift onto its prow. I tremble with the lull of the boat before the oars dip. Together, we launch into the beyond.

Kristina T. Saccone crafts flash fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Six Sentences, The Bangor Literary Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, and Unearthed, and she curates Flash Roundup, featuring the latest releases in flash fiction. Find her on Twitter (@kristinasaccone) or haunting small independent bookstores in the Washington, D.C. area.

sunday afternoon

Isabel de Andreis

coffee is almost too
hot for my tongue the
blue of the cup too
invasive but nice I tuck
my feet under while
arching one instep
your rocking chair
rocks and rocks

Isabel de Andreis grew up in the US and Germany, and went to university in the UK. She is currently writing her first poetry pamphlet.

The Group

Jeff Skinner

We come back each week
strangers to ourselves

going round in circles
of what if, if only –

taking turns to cry
white tissues the flags

of surrender, of solidarity.
Someone to do nothing with, that’s what I miss.

I say something new happening
is worse: the return

of the rose, flourishing careers
assiduous love prepared the ground for

that letting yourself one spring morning
into the house you cannot share.

Jeff Skinner, longlisted in this year’s Briefly Write Poetry Prize, has been published in a number of journals with poems to come in the Fenland Poetry Journal and Poetry Salzburg in 2022. Third in the 2021 Poetry Space competition, he has also been published in several competition anthologies.

Re: Action

Alisa Golden

Plum tree
cut to the quick
swarming with termites

I regret
complaining about
sticky sidewalks

Alisa Golden writes and makes art in a one-square-mile, California city. She is editor of Star 82 Review, author of Making Handmade Books, and her stories and poems have been published in Blink-Ink, Nanoism, and Litro, among others. www.neverbook.com