Claire Scott

Greek Myths Are Overrated

Aren’t you sick of Greek myths? So removed

from reality. Sick of Oedipus killing his father again

and again on his way to Thebes. Sick of therapists

telling us we want to marry our mother, therapists

who obviously have never met our mother.

What of Odysseus killing the suitors, all bloody 108

of them, manipulated by Penelope weaving her ridiculous

shroud to look like a loyal wife. But sleeping with Telemachus.

Or Heracles slaughtering lions and hydras, bulls and boars.

Doesn’t he have anything better to do? We yawn.

But here’s the thing. We really do need you Ariadne.

Are you still sleeping on Naxos, dreaming of Theseus

who left you behind, who never really cared,

more concerned with the bloody head of the Minotaur

tucked under his shoulder, hastening back to Athens,

too stuffed with heady success to change the sail,

to think of his father, to think of you who risked your life.

Wake Ariadne! We have lost the red thread to guide us,

the ball of yarn that leads out of the labyrinth

of lies, deception, duplicity and betrayal.

Let us stumble toward dawn’s rising light,

our tangled hearts unknotting.

Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Dementia

My daughter says my mind is sliding

words lost at sea, snagged in seaweed

tangled in silt

the round thing you put your supper on

I have post its on my fuzzy night shoes

my favorite red fruit, the photo

of my sister, or maybe my aunt

pills from my daughter dissolve on my tongue

post its on top of post its, no idea

which is the right one and what on earth

[no break]

is calamander doing on my desk

living in the shadow of the valley of lost words

but where was I going with all this? oh yes,

she (Lucy? Layla?) says no more bourbon

but I hide it somewhere, ha!

but look! there is toilet paper

floating into the harbor

followed by persimmon and potato peeler

I scoop them up in the thing with holes

dry them off and take them home

yet still fewer and fewer words

until I walk out of this watery world

under spinning stars and

a yellow saucer in the sky

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

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Sera Gamble

Rocco, Patron Saint of Pestilence

You do the Monday crossword, cheating frequently

because your mind works in no way

you recognize. It is a machine with oiled

buttons. You used to run

to catch the 6. Fuck

athletically. You took everything

for granted. Strength is a lie

that makes you fall in love

with life, then crumbles,

revealing paper bones, flayed

myelin, clotted milk. Remember

how easy it used to be? Hunger,

sweat, song, the unfathomable luxury

of pounding your body like asphalt.

Sickness is how we touch God, stickily,

salted by fever, brainworm

pop becoming prayer – I’m a slave

for you – that baby voice gasping

to the beat like lust is a virus

attacking the lungs.

Now you’re paying

attention. Now look

how grateful you are.

In the Dream, I Go Back to Cincinnati

Graeters is wallpapered in stripes. Barbie pink, hospital white. Alps of ice cream under gleaming sneeze glass. Every customer here remembers me. That’s the girl who won the spelling bee. Who cried on the bus. Wore the wrong jeans. Wrote the names of her tormentors on the soles of her Converse. Mary Anne. Petra. Lynn. I walked over them all day long. Hard to know the villain in any story where all the characters are little girls. I await my scoop of mint chip. Outside, the sun melts joggers and their obedient dogs. The waitress approaches in her striped apron. Cosmic-egg pink, sclera white. I can’t be sure but I think she’s the one who fed me a sympathetic cigarette in the stairwell outside the theater building the day the girls dismembered me and threw my meat to hungry pigs. She invites me to a party. I must have gone because there it all is on Instagram. The DJ in his fedora, the backyard transformed to an exotic petting zoo. Red velvet cake a blood clot on my chin. I look bad in all the pictures. I’d always thought people hated me for me. What a relief to know it’s my face they despise.

Sera Gamble's poems have appeared in journals such as Harpur Palate, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Bodega Magazine and Sky Island Journal. She also writes for film and television. Sera is a first-generation American living in Los Angeles.

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Howie Faerstein

Sugar & Salt

After a breakup I joined a speed dating affair held in a cavernous hotel ballroom. Socially distant singles of all ages occupied chairs at separate tables & every six minutes a director at the podium exclaimed rotate. Men then moved on to the next table to speak with women most of whom asked Are you a dog or a cat person? (Think of all the dogs & cats I’ve had!) I found it discomfiting since at the time I talked only to myself.

Rotate

I first fed sugar cubes to a horse when I was six, either the vegetable peddler’s horse or the knife sharpener’s pony. I’d hear the bells clanging & a booming call: Knives sharpened, scissors & knives. Enormous eyes, curling eyelashes, wet nose—with sticky fingers I’d swat the swarming flies.

Rotate

From chrysalis, swallowtail.

From black-footed tick, disease.

When father came by a month after mother left him, we were living in an attic, needed money to buy a car. His chapped hands, like mortar, like brick. He helped out with some cash & we gave him cold cream to take back.

Rotate

There were long nights in a strangely familiar apartment off Third Avenue where a devoted, somewhat deranged, clarinetist practiced scales relentlessly. Once he finished he’d play Autumn Leaves till dawn. People from the floor above bang on their floor. We bang on the ceiling. The music plays on. The dream repeats. Salt & sugar. Sweetness with its double e like eyes or mice teeth.

Rotate

I thought nothing as comforting as strolling

Manhattan with my brother on Friday nights.

We'd catch an Antonioni film or Truffaut’s latest,

then in Chinatown eat clams in black bean sauce at Wo Kee

on Doyer Street before taking the local back to Brooklyn—

I thought nothing could be sweeter.

Rotate

From winter: flakes spiraling, whales breaching.

From spring: shoots furling, green fingers twisting.

And the red-headed freak on McDougal Street wearing John Lennon Granny glasses. He was real, not just a rumor, had sugar cubes dosed with LSD for sale & I bought a half dozen & later my friends & I let the lysergic acid dissolve on our tongues.

Do we really need instructions on not giving up? Think of all the fascists in our midst. Didn’t I just eat the sweetest orange?

A Taiwanese woman was going blind in one eye when doctors found four microscopic sweat bees living under her eyelid, sipping her tears. Once the bees were removed her vision improved. We’re all aware that moths drink the tears of sleeping birds, shine shears the swaying meadow & snowlight bends the body’s atmosphere, each second infused with rapture but how often do we weep beneath quilts? Have you ever seen swallows sleeping?

Rotate

From seed: eggplant.

From junco: cardinal, bare white lilac branches.

Limping over from the stove, my Ukrainian Grandma placed a glass of hot swee-touch-nee tea—tsvetochny, the Russian word for flower—in front of me, seated at the kitchen table three blocks from the Atlantic. I’d take two lumps from the sugar bowl, hold them between thumb & index finger & place them between my front teeth. Only then would I take a first sip. Only then would she serve her carp with carrots in such a way I've never tasted since.

Exchange numbers &

Rotate

Death in Brooklyn, Long Ago

Ex-wife & I once had predatory sex

on a derelict basement couch

neither of us had ever before sat on.

She had something to prove…

(did she believe she was successful)

as I had everything to lose

which I did       eventually.

Ragbag of divorce & dissolution

exile expatriation—

both of us diminished—

It’s so easy to answer the phone & declaim

there’s no one here with that name.

When the utility company’s granted a right of way

does it mean the same as

My baby gave me

an easement through her heart.

And since lilacs’ intoxication

& bloodroot's fleeting bloom

last a week or less

is it comparable to one’s early love,

to woodcock’s first sky dance, phoebe’s

first tail flapping, come April.

Total abandon, surge of shame,

Figures in windows lose definition

they often lacked to begin with.

Even my eyelids

now pocked & wrinkled

my mouth, feral,

a bracelet of charms.

Howie Faerstein is the author of five poetry collections. Stay (Human Error Publishing) was published in February 2023. Poems and reviews can be found in On the Seawall, Nixes Mate, Nine Mile, Banyan Review, Rattle, upstreet, Verse Daily, Hole in the Head Review, and Connotation. A multiple Pushcart nominee, Cutthroat Discovery Poet, and recipient of the NOVA 2022 poetry prize, he’s co-poetry editor for CutThroat and lives in Florence, MA. https://howiefaerstein.com

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