11am During workshop, everyone mute when not sharing, please. Lex reads her poem on Zoom. A distressed squawking masks her words. What’s that shrill noise? She removes her glasses, looks into the lens, my parakeet. This isn’t delightful chirping chatter, this isn’t song. The insistent screeching grows longer, louder. Trudy’s mate died…needs another companion. I’d […]
Issue 102
Sarah A. Chavez: Dear Carole, I look out the window
Hoping the reflection of the sun will glint off my hair, flood your ghost memory, and you will feel the tingling touch of my fingers on your phantom limbs and remember you meant to haunt me. That you’ll remember despite the door-slamming and lips of so many others, neither of us wanted this.
Kitty Carpenter: She Kindly Stopped
Even the cedars along the highway are diseased, each tree split down the middle half brown, branches bare and dry as finger bones, the other half still green as ever as if Death were interrupted halfway through, her work calling her somewhere more urgent. Perhaps the diseased branches of someone’s lungs were filling, filling and […]
Alan Basting: A World Announces Affection in December’s Snow and Fog
Locomotives In the guise of oxen Enter the village with humility, Heads down, sweaty From chugging up the street, Hauling the resurrection Bells to the chapel. Lowing, gospel sounds Drift like incense Among the faithful Wrapped In frost-crusted robes. * Mistaking song For sorrow and longing For notes of […]
Nikki Ummel
Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator at the University of New Orleans. Nikki has been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit, Hobart, PANK, The Georgia Review, and more. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry and twice awarded an Academy of American Poets Award. She is currently the […]