Katabasis for Semele

You were once my earth—

blackberry jam, lilacs.

In late summer dusk

you called me for dinner.

I was your kitchen.

I became Mars, the planet of war,

at war with your Venus

and the men of Mars and Jupiter

who orbited you each night

downstairs, while Dad was away.

Years later, I returned, a wanderer

with only memories of home.

I don’t know how it happened—

my shell of anger broke.

Maybe because you again

made bacon and eggs,

burnt eggs,

but we danced at your bar,

Dante's Circle.

You were so small,

your head on my shoulder.

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

I was your baby.

You were my mom.

The whiskey bottles orbited.

The world spun around us.

Now you are Pluto—

as far as death,

the barrel of a gun in your mouth.

And sometimes you come at night,

a slowly falling star

with visions of the life you never had—

burnished by a beauty lost and buried,

but never quite extinguished.

George Burns's work has appeared in journals such as The 2 River View, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlanta Review, the anthology, The Writes of Spring by Tupelo Press, and Verse Daily. He won the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Prize and the Special Merit award from The Comstock Review. His first poetry collection, If a Fish, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press.

Kaleidoscope

Bloated, bloodshot eyes etch into the asphalt, and she tastes the grain, the tar sticking to her lids, pinching them back until the block becomes a terrarium broken open, bludgeoned until the onlookers become a piercing, inescapable screech, a skidding halt, exhaust rushing up her nose,

and in that exhaust is a moment before, a stepping into the street, Frank Ocean on her headphones that makes her think of a fishing town, of her girlfriend visiting there for the summer, of that girlfriend sitting in a luxury apartment, of their assumed mutual affection, of the effect capital takes on intimacy, of how a moving together can tear apart,

and in that there is girlhood, the clenching of muscle, a blue, crooning net of veins creeping like improvised dissonance tamed by a needle, by a pill, by a patch, by the hope that her voice will turn bright and buoyant all on its own, that ease will arrive like a swiftly tilting sedan, careen into her flesh, fuse chest with headlights, heart with dashboard, breath with air filter,

and in that filter is a stale inhaler, the bitter blanketing of mist across the back of her tongue, awakening on a playing field, feeling the hand of her purple-faced father on her back, of murmuring made in perspiration, of him seeing his brother’s face in hers, of his brother’s brains spilling into his own eyes, of that abandoned boyhood, of her boyhood, of his girlhood, of intersections, of cross walks, of walking with a cross on her back, the stench of martyrdom, and a lover who will look at

her long enough to meet the multiplicity in her gaze,

and in that gaze there is the car, and there is the road, and there is the stranger rushing toward her with a coral wash cloth, and there is the blotting of blood, and there is the bliss of being cared for, and there is the wish to crash all over again.

Rose Jenny is a trans writer based in Tennessee. Her poetry chapbook, My Apocrypha, is available through Bottlecap Press. She is the recipient of the 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize from Gasher Press. Rose has also been published in SWWIM, Oroboro, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her writing has received additional support from Tin House and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Rose earned her MFA in Creative Writing from University of Miami.

Cape Hedge, September

Eyes closed, floating face to sun

beyond the roiling breakers, I banter

with my sister who drifts belly down

on her boogieboard, both of us enthralled

by the green swells, minnow-glittering

clarity, and forgetting

the stealthy, whipsawing

undercurrents, predation masked

by sparkle and sway, and so we fail

to mark the dwindling shore,

mistake drift for drive, chance

for choice until she says, almost lazily:

oh no, rip current, swim, parallel.

We thrash in opposite directions.

She, off with an explosive kick, while

I strike a rattled rhythm, flash back

to salt-scathed signs: At Your Own Risk;

Be Shark Smart, which kindles stinging

recollections of other grave errors:

Stoli shots at the frat house

and the missing weeks after,

the sudden braking on black ice

in Vermont, my untrustworthy Mazda’s

near hurtle to oblivion

with sister, friends, skis, and the endless

falling and falling. And I call up smaller,

less consequential shames: splattered

yolk on charcoal skirt before keynote,

shin burned just short of shred

on a forbidden Harley’s tailpipe.

The old survivals comfort, buoy

me to shore where I finally crawl

onto warm sand. But no sister.

I stand, shout to her ebbing silhouette.

She waves from her boogieboard.

For a moment, bewildered, I think

I hear the ricocheting ghost of her laugh

as she spins ever further, waving,

and waving, how we always do, always

have, almost-but-never drowning.

Mary Beth Hines is the author of “Winter at a Summer House” (Kelsay, 2021). Her writing is widely published. A recent poem placed first in Naugatuck River Review’s 2025 contest and new work appears, or is forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Connect with her at https://www.marybethhines.com