This issue features new poems by Lambda Literary fellow Nora Hikari, Terry Watada, Evan J, and more. Plus, an excerpt from George Elliott Clarke’s War Canticles, as well as
Matthias Mann | TO SLEEP
Write me to sleep,
Gently—lying
Beneath the beams, listless
As I am.
Nick Visconti | YOU, FLOWER
Blue bells, blue bonnets, blue
pool above it all; finished rain
settles dense vapour in violet
hyacinth combs, dousing air
James McKee | AUTUMN EXIT
Even here, along
an avenue as dementedly luxe as Fifth,
the sheer aplomb
of late-November ruthlessness
gets noticed.
Ken Norris | MOMENT
A pair of zebra doves
pay a visit, pecking about the grass.
I’m in the close shade
of an old twisty pink trumpet tree.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta | [PURGATORY IN PARIS]
(largesse of autumn)
how shadowy the trees
to replace the taciturn
with another quietude
Nora Hikari | ODE TO THE SWORD LOGIC
Once I could have loved.
But love was cleaved damp
from my body. Carved soft
and wet from the rest
of my hard existence,
cast aside, with everything
that could be renamed
“submission.”
Shane Neilson | SACRED TECHNICIAN
The little body, washed;
cleaned; swaddled;
transferred
from broken hand
to broken hand
to crib—
John Kinsella | RADIESTHESIA
Recounting things overheard
in the unfamiliar places of childhood,
I never heard mentioned the radiation
of granites.