Tina Cane

Letters From The Sky

When a shell casing from the twenty-one-gun salute at my father's funeral arrives

it will be engraved with his name and relevant dates and given to his next of kin

and when his wife presses it into my hand I will not hold it to my ear to hear waves

breaking like my father's fading drawl a final time on the telephone line I will peer instead

inside its shallow depth to explore its nothingness in search of some residual force or silent

report to insist upon a truth

that war blew apart the man's life to the point

he could barely even watch the news that such a small space should accommodate

a belief as deep as duty is indeed a special kind of magical thinking

for a spent bullet

cannot be anything other than what it is hollow or not all I've got is this ritual and a dad

AWOL for fifty years now finally gone for good

good that I skipped his service

on purpose to be alone with my grief apt that having missed him in life

I should see him now in the sky of my mind drifting like a cloud magical and also good

that he be impervious to bullets flying where energies align with messages beyond my reach

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Tina Cane is the founder/ director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. From 2016-2024, she served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books include: Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, and Year of the Murder Hornet.

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Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal

Duality, Projected

After Angela Ball

Your history begins when your father,

freshly dropped out of community college,

watches you—then two—hold a cat.

You drop it, surely unintentional,

in the driveway of your grandfather’s

gas station (which is named after you).

It is this moment, feline screeching

in the background, that your father

decides you are a serial killer.

At age five, you cry at your gran’s

funeral, an act, which in your pre-queer awakening,

is deemed by your father unmasculine.

In middle school, it was pills on which you choked,

that made you fall asleep in class,

that were supposed to fix you.

In high school, it was absence—

a bright Texas-size void through which

you wandered, fatherless, unhoused.

You learn your father’s history begins when he lines

up his sisters and touches them like barbie

dolls unagented in his presence.

And a therapist asks if this trespass

is what your father, in his haunting guilt, projects

onto you, falsely believing your face a mirror to his own.

And when the war didn’t take you,

Neither did he, instead shifting further,

rejecting what he thinks there might be of himself in you.

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Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran. Winner of the Plaza Short Story Prize, their creative work can be found in Story, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. Other work appears in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, and additional journals. They teach creative writing at Gannon University and are the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review.

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Les Bares

Oh Canada

This is what happens when clumsily knotted aspirations

come undone You camp illegally in the rest area

of the Bad River reservation In the middle of the night

almost apologetic tribal cops For your own good

order you to leave You load your bicycle and pedal

in the pensive moonlight musing

how romantic this nameless Wisconsin country road

with its full moon would be if only she were here

But she is somewhere in Greece squeezing the sun

a world away from the quiet reflecting eyes

that stalk these nocturnal woods suspiciously spying

a lone bicyclist with a dying flashlight

You cross over the border of the reservation of last resort

and burrow into your sleeping bag at a fire lane

much nearer to train tracks then you know

In your sleep of snarled traffic and red lights

your dream of America implodes with Vietnam

a lost draft deferment with tin soldiers and Nixon coming

with smoke and ashes cities burning and

with once daring to have a dream

—until tremors rumble ten yards from your head

A train hauling pulpwood lumbers and squeals

over loose train track ties thumped by wheel wobbling bogies

as if they were the pedals of a church organ stomped

by a heavy footed organist And with America lost

in the dark and your love for it convulsing

with the wail of a train horn this jilting wasteland

shakes empty and aching as you straddle your bicycle

Is this the road north It might as well be raining

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Les Bares lives in Richmond, Virginia. He was the winner of the 2023 Meridian Journal Short Prose Prize. He also won the 2018 Princemere Poetry Prize. His work has or will appear in New York Quarterly, The Madison Review, The Midwest Review, Cream City Review, Southword (Ireland,) Stand (England,) and other journals.

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