Miranda Beeson

Tell Me Where I Should Go

Because you know the words & can't get them wrong.

I listened to how his mind split the country into a wound

we could not suture. Not the words—but the silences.

A ball of yarn is attempting to unravel. A bookmark

in memory's eye. The spill of Barolo, tar and roses.

And who among us hasn't been held helpless, before?

I could hardly blame them. Sorry, no more room.

A conflagration of untamed language.

You thought your hunger mattered more than hers.

Whatever tenderness. Wasn't that the point?

Nothing, she says. A stammer of caught breaths.

How the world works, stripping the land of pitiful fruit.

Mornings break against the body I’ve made do with.

We had everything on earth & what did we make?

A cento from the poems of Stefania Gomez, Sasha Pearl, Joshua Bennett, Paisley Rekdal, Paul Tran, Rowan Wilde Riggs, Dan Beachy-Quick, Omotara James, Daniel Halpern, Hermelinda Hernandez-Monjaras, Heidi Williamson

Miranda Beeson is the author of Wildlife (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), and a recently completed collection of sonnets & This Too. Stay tuned for publication details. She has taught all over including at Poets House in NYC and at Stony Brook University. She also teaches privately, offers editorial services to poets in need, and consults in the IP field. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton, and lives in New York City and the North Fork of Long Island. 

Michelle Menting

Interdigital Neuroma Sounds Like a Useless Grammatical Term

your feet are semi-colons abrupt near full stops of hurt that keep going because you make them keep going despite flares that feel like em dashes smooth bolts punctuations of nerve that are tired and confused like parentheses that don't know to close or should be brackets and end there there is no symbol for this painful repetition only the inflamed and no one knows why but surgeons want to cut to cut to cut out the nerves the tendons and into the balls the pads the ligaments quote unquote the whole compound sentence of arch and toe and revise your feet as if they are shitty first drafts and they the doctors who do not run blame the running the movement the blissful miles of trails in woods among fields out in the shade and sunlight and all the things that keep you you your mind your body your heart full not fused but run on and fused are not necessarily the same but the enjoyment of joining is there discursive sometimes perhaps maybe in fragments but whole with your pulse an ellipses an ellipses an ellipses until interdigital neuromas declare no not a pause not a break but a period a full complete stop.

Michelle Menting grew up the youngest of 12 siblings in a small and poorly insulated cottage in the Wisconsin "Northwoods" near Upper Michigan. She now lives in Maine in a house with similar insulation. Her poems, flash nonfictions. and flash fictions have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Passages North, One Art, Diagram, Cimarron Review, and other places. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and directs a small-town library in rural Maine. www.michellementing.com

Michael J. Galko

Dusk on the Osaka-Kobe Shinkansen,

Imagining Myself Still at Nara

My back is to the emperor’s eye.

I am facing the chimes

hung from the temple’s eave.

In the light breeze

they touch below sound,

then darken suddenly.

If I stay facing east

and night falls before the shadow passes

I will never know

whether it was cloud

or beast.

Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review and the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contests. Recent poems will appear in Stillwater Review, New Plains Review, Spillway Magazine, Rappahannock Review, Atlanta Review, and Rockvale Review, among other journals.