Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
Return of the Puffin
October 21, 2024
Essays, Issue 28, Issue 28 Art, Issue 28 Essays, Studio
All posts tagged: 2024
A Day Revisited
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.
Akoloute (Sequi Me)
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
Tracing dusty footprints, you can be led
to fornix, to tombs, the circus and bars,
to my lupan, my cell, my earthen bed;
what waits is not secret—see what I are?
I’m not a barmaid, an actor or slave;
I’m not being cursed because I had sinned—
I’m earning my keep in this grisly trade.
For that I am traif, but come along in.
I’ll lead you to places you’ve never had;
to hell in a basket: one bloody as.
Ponderosa
October 21, 2024
Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction
By SHANE CASTLE
Laughlin learned to hear on the hobby farm in Montana. One late afternoon, the summer he and Cassie bought the five hillside acres outside Helena, he was setting wood posts for the new corral when he heard a sound among the ponderosas toward the top of their property. It was like nothing he’d heard before. He walked up the drive toward it. A breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, and he heard it again and imagined some kind of Mylar weather balloon, blown off course, deflated, stuck in a tree. That’s what the sound was like: someone blowing a taut edge. He remembered being a kid, his family visiting Meema and Peepa at their old place on Animas Creek. He remembered Peepa teaching him and his little brother, Tyler, to blow blades of grass like kazoos. Laughlin looked and looked but found nothing. He walked a while among the tall ponderosas, at times certain he was right under it, only to look up and see nothing, and it went on this way until that moment when dusk turned to dark, when, abruptly, the sound stopped.
Dead Elm (Plufort VI)
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
It stood beside the dining hall and taller than the dining hall
by half again as much, and in all weather, against all skies
it was like a lit synapse, wild. We went in and out under it
Letter to Archilochus
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing.
—Archilochus, 680–645 BCE
Well, Archilochus, I guess your lyre
might help me mock, and maybe mourn, this loss—
today I broke the frosted Elvis glass
I bought at Graceland when the symposium
of poets toured the mansion.
Roma Nostra
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
I said nothing and thought
of the Foro Romano—
its basilicas, temples, arches—
imagined being by the Lapis Niger
confessing by the tomb of Romulus
and listening to Livia.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
Rome, New York
after Austin Araujo
In my favorite picture of you, the hair blown across
your face, obscuring your face, it’s easy to make out,
deep in the distance, the hangers of the air force base
classified as a superfund site, a sprawling huddle
of buildings expanding out into the extent of the valley.
Prelude
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
Was it all simply adornment,
watching the rain fall from the sun,
or the mourning dove that carried
the wallet-sized photo in its beak?
Looking back, it was true—
I had stopped seeing the beauty in it all,
living from moment to moment,
looking to be granted some small sense
of pleasure, as if by respite or charity.
In Montgomery County
October 21, 2024
Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry
Maryland, 2020
My partner wears the panopticon,
and I carry the rope. Hungry
for the rush, the chase, we locate
the missing black calf
about two-tenths of a mile
from East Silver Spring.
He’s wearing a long-sleeve
jersey T-shirt, navy blue jeans.
He’s three and a half feet tall,
and I can tell his age means
nothing to him. In his mind,
he treads with no care.
The report says he threw
a basketball, knocked over
a computer, and ran off
the school premises.
He looks at us, begins to wail.
My partner grabs him by the arm.
There is no crying! I taunt.
To lasso a calf, cowboys
must first use their weight
to hold the animal down
and then tie the legs together.
Does your mama spank you?
The boy shakes his head.
I tie the boy down with––
She’s gonna spank you today.
I’m gonna ask her to do it.
He wails even louder,
and screams, “No!”
He’s hyperventilating.
I command him to stop.
When the mother arrives,
I affirm point-blank,
We want you to beat him.
Beat him down to size,
the size he fits into a curb drain.
Beat him with your hands.
You can smack that butt, repeatedly.
My partner pulls out his handcuffs
to handcuff the boy,
the boy whose wrists are like
two thin stocks of red tulips.
My partner affirms,
These are for people
who don’t want to listen
and don’t know how to act.
The boy feels the cold steel of erasure,
of his name replaced by numbers.
The boy needs to learn,
or else…
We warned him.
Thea Matthews is a poet, author, and editor of African and Indigenous Mexican descent. Originally from San Francisco, California, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Read more at TheaMatthews.com.
