Natasha Deonarain

the desert in between

grackle cloaked in purple-black sheen glares with one golden eye	this land lies supine under a moth-eaten sky	whir of dragonfly wings in the hushed      desert night
	wind wails through the emptied eyes of a coyote’s skull	vulnerable, bruised	lake crawls back and into herself
gray-white ash left on her unmade bed		demon’s breath on my face	thorn-coated tongue licks sweat from my neck
	hooded moon turns her pallid face to dark		saguaro’s corpse beside a rattler coiled nearby
twisted, dry	horned owl calls at midnight		cricket click-crawls
	a hiss rises like two hands from the ground

I step outside these words       and find you—

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Natasha N. Deonarain is the author of two chapbooks, winner of the 2020 Three Sisters Award and Best of the Net Nominee. She was born in South Africa, grew up in Canada and currently lives in Arizona.

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Sara Eastler

Song of Anna May Wong

And so it came to pass that I carried

a lantern in that first film, uncredited,

the way women were see-through as wind— 


orchestrating the flapping of flags, propelling

sails across seas. The way Bits of Life handed

me a baby and husband after years of rice

paper roles to see, finally, my silent name

in print. The way stardom burned

beyond the Hollywood lighthouse, scattering

crushed diamonds, sharp-edged

and glittering in gowns like a well-lit

sea. Beware the siren call of men in suits,

of growing beyond the island that tames

your imported fruit. I was too Chinese

to play a Chinese, too forbidden fruit

to kiss a moon-faced man. But roles

and tides reverse course— so produce

what the heart must and shed the dragon

skin to embrace the pomelo’s yellow.

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Sara Lynn Eastler is a poetry editor for Qu Literary Review & freelance contributor to the Southern Review of Books. Find her work: Passengers Journal, Anodyne, Bangalore Review & saralynneastler.com

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David Axelrod

Le Monde C’est Terrible

Whenever someone asks, what do you recall

about that time just before they were born,

what they mean isn’t the messy verge of the present

nor clocks ticking toward the same midnight.

I remember tweekers bickering at each other

on a park bench on Queen Anne Hill,

their faces like carved masks.

It was the same then as now, only rats

divide their cache equally among themselves

without a court ruling or a coup.

That’s the feeling I remember, afloat

in an intimacy we were fools enough

to say we’d arranged that night

to stay in the house of another couple

we never met, friends of a friend,

out of town over the holiday.

Our business done there the next day,

the house we slept in overnight

received its couple home from the coast

and the man on whose pillow

I lay my head, went into the garden

with a rifle and placed the barrel in his mouth.

Afterwards no one knew why. The sky

that morning we departed was clear,

the Sound glassy and the city, a towering mirror.

The next day was Obama’s Inauguration,

the beginning of a new world.

The rest it of since, you know.

The Persistence Forecast

We didn’t know our host

nor anyone else, much less how

we got invited to the party—

in fact, we were the first to arrive!—

but the persistence forecast called for

our catching Covid after that isolate year.

We were eager for it and wanted to hear

the Ladino singer from Beersheba.

And what a view from that suburban living room—

a case of wine and the entire 19th century

expanse of thunderstorms and lightening

branching over the Big Belts, miles high

beams of Bierstadt light sweeping east

over the capitol dome and Scratch Gravel Hills—

an entire world inside that room besieged

by tinder dry juniper, rabbitbrush and sage.

And I almost forgot about the trombone

the singer soloed on between verses of “Landarico”

sung in our medieval mother tongue

about the king’s golden pride

and his sleeping wife’s folly, mistaking his

for her lover’s pride that she gripped

in her dream only—the words never change,

only the answers change

and only as many as we can bear.     

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David Axelrod teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana and founded Bear Scratch Press. His 10th collection of poems is Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems.

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