Category: prose poetry

Sometimes your prayer rises up and turns to smoke. Sometimes a prayer asks too much. Sometimes you offer a prayer for the undeserving but there must be punishment. Even so the smoke continues to rise. It ascends and ascends to heaven. In heaven when they inhale they smell your smoke, your prayer. It reminds them that down on earth, where the fire is, even the wicked can be loved.

Abe Mezrich is the author of three books of poetry on the Hebrew Bible: The House at the Center of the World, Between the Mountain and the Land Lies the Lesson, and the forthcoming Words for a Dazzling Firmament, all from Ben Yehuda Press. Learn more at www.AbeMezrich.com.

When I was six, a man at the corner store force-fed me cigarettes: four in a row that first day, and it was enough. I tried to fight it, pursed my lips and turned my face away as he came at me with the sputtering flame, but my arms were about as thick and breakable as matchsticks. And something clicked with the nicotine, all my organs danced to that sultry song, and my body leaned into the next inhale like a plant bends toward light. Soon I couldn’t stop long enough to brush my teeth. I became a prisoner of my patio at home, where my parents spoke to me through the screen door as I lined up lit cigarettes like disintegrating finger bones. And okay, all that was a dream. But this is true: in 1975, my grandfather got a Marlboro sample pack in the mail. He didn’t smoke, so he gave them to my father, who was eighteen and breathed his first cigarette that afternoon. States away, my mother had started in eighth grade when friends struck a match against the brick in the back of the school, huddled in rain. I’m fascinated by the ease of these beginnings. I, too, crave this small drama, want the tiny violence of something in a back pocket kept ready to burn, to crush with the sole of my shoe. Each cigarette a blank, helpless voodoo doll of myself, my piecemeal insides crinkling like brown tobacco paper. What do I have to blame for what’s broken? I want something inside me to keep catching fire. I want to let my pollution bloom. So when I need another, I triumph. I strangle their throats between my fingers. I murder them one by one.

Quinn Forlini (she/her) has writing published or forthcoming in Catapult, X-R-A-Y, Jellyfish Review, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Can’t shift this sticky Hoosier summer. No walks off the front porch anymore. My hair won’t behave and it floats like a cloud. My hangnails are drying up and my armpits are wet and the sky is a chalkboard of plane exhaust streaks. Ants nip at my dirty feet and crawl up my dirty jeans and the wind tickles the base-fuzz of my spine. I shaved my toes and still stepped on bees. The house chimes an idle litany. My dead dog’s dishes are asleep in the backyard. I scrambled barefoot over the prickle-grass, trying to find some remnant of her dried shit, but I missed the spring and the softening and now the bluebells by the stoop have turned beige. The basketball on the driveway bakes inside its mud shell. The cars hum down Carlisle. The monarch butterfly I’ve been trying to catch since first grade jitters in the peripheral. I don’t turn to face it. The wind dies. A fly pisses on my arm. A branch cracks by the road. A squirrel sneezes at me and I bark back. He scurries into the tree crown as my hair haloes.

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. Author of Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022) and recipient of a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, Kristine’s work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and 2019 and is published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Speculative Nonfiction, among others. She is the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.

We made art. We wept. For no reason. There were tidal patterns in our souls that we could not understand. We had souls, we suspected. We knew very little. We saw colors and we named them. We burned things, yes. We burned everything. We took it all and we used it and we did not feel bad. We turned off the television. We cupped small lifeforms in our hands. It grew warmer. We looked for mushrooms in the dirt. We hosted dinner parties. We drank til we were sad. We never learned. We learned to forgive ourselves and continue. We held the door for a stranger. We were all just babies once. We were all so anxious. We invented occasions to feel warm and generous and sorry. We let the stains set. We put off the important things. We made love. We said love but didn’t mean it. We meant to say it more. We regretted everything and nothing. We were hard, then so soft we couldn’t bear it. We made dramas of our suffering. We could not get out of bed. We humiliated each other. We used our hurt in hurtful ways. We embraced. When it rained, words came to us, and we sat alone and wrote them down. We sang, and the singing broke our hearts, made us kind again, made us better listeners. We were terrible listeners. We were terribly selfish. We built cathedrals and would not let each other in. We were boring. We grew bored. But sometimes we stopped as a bird swooped, plunged its body through the water, reemerged, soared away. We knew to watch. We knew it to be beautiful. We knew.

Kelsi Lindus is a writer and documentary filmmaker living in the Puget Sound. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Autofocus, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Cloves Literary, and elsewhere. She can be found online at @kelsijayne or kelsilindus.com.

I was an orphan once. Lucky me it can’t happen twice. The story was my parents were a dime and a penny. She wore a long, elegant coat with a belt. He was a gun misfiring, or an empty suitcase. I can’t remember.

We played baseball in the yard behind the building. I remember. There was a runner at first, two outs. The batter was behind on the count. Our team felt lifted into the summer air. The pitcher looked into the clouds. He dropped the ball in the dirt, walked to the fence, opened the gate and disappeared. I lived in left field.

One morning I thought I saw them passing by in a car. They looked like two competing geometric shapes. Two hotel guest keys. Two identical planks of wood. She wore the sky as a hat. He held a bird in his mouth. A little struggle still in the wings.

Jeffrey Hermann’s poetry and prose has appeared in Rejection Lit, Variant,
UCity Reivew, trampset, JMWW, The Shore, and other publications. Though
less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding
beyond measure.

My father bellowed ballads on Sundays during and after his morning showers before driving us to the flea market. My father transformed into Chente, Jose Alfredo, Pedro Infante, Javier Solis, Antonio Aguilar, the great voices, the ones que tienen la voz, he asserted, thumping his fist against his hairy chest, real stage presence, macho bravado, their chests rising and falling with all the drama of the star-crossed lovers in their songs. It is when my father speaks to me about them that I learned they are not only real singers but have real hearts, real stories, real heartbreak. I learned that my father is a romantic. I learned that my father is a romantic in spirit but not in practice. I learned my father was once a fighter who became a lover. My father who became a fighter again. I learned that my father does not love to fight but often fights with people he loves. I learned from my father that this is what it means to be a man. I learned that I do not love men like my father. And despite that fact, I love my father and the way his crying makes it look like he’s singing and the way his apologies sound like soft love poems.

Alondra Adame is a Chicanx essayist, poet, and educator. They currently live in Chico, California where they teach and take walks with their partner and their dog, Buu. Their writing often revolves around family, identity, and the Chicanx experience in rural northern California. You can find more of their work in The Nasiona, PALABRITAS, Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets, and more. Follow Alondra on Twitter @alondrathepoet!

Today there is not a lot that the sun is saying—the thick layer of clouds keep back the sun’s venomous beam. The windows of sky are ajar. The wind is what leaps from the fine decor of heaven. I am camped by the slender frame of a tree, wind sways toward the shoot of leaves. I love a weather without the charge of heat.

Michael Akuchie is a poet and essayist residing in Nigeria. Wreck, Michael’s debut chapbook of poems was selected by José Olivarez to receive the 2019-2020 Hellebore Poetry Scholarship Award. He is continually inspired by mundane things.

One good thing is a pile of steamed crabs on butcher paper. Last night I dreamed I knew how to put out fires. My arms were sprinklers. We ran through the spray laughing. Nobody said the apocalypse is coming. Nobody said we’re running out of time. It was already over and we couldn’t remember how it ended so we ate popsicles and danced to Queen, our lips and tongues as red as a blaze. To eat a crab, you hold a knife to its shell and bash it with a mallet. You dig your fingers into every crevice, pull out the meat. Someone on Twitter says it’s the worst first date food. Someone on Twitter says you can make your own currency. So I pick the petals off all the flowers and pile them up like coins. I roll them into a ball and we kick it around the yard. When our son scores a goal he falls to his knees in mock celebration. I let it in on purpose. I let it all in: the shadows and the street lamps, the sound of the highway thundering like a waterfall at the edge of the world.

Claire Taylor is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of two microchapbooks: A History of Rats (Ghost City Press, 2021) and, As Long As We Got Each Other (ELJ Editions, Ltd., 2022), as well as a children’s literature collection, Little Thoughts. Claire is the founder and editor in chief of Little Thoughts Press, a quarterly print magazine of writing for and by kids. You can find Claire online at clairemtaylor.com or Twitter @ClaireM_Taylor.