Online Issues
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Matches, and Shoveling
art by Carl Svantje Hallbeck, 1856
by Maureen Sherbondy
Matches
My father collected matchbooks under a glass table. He wanted visitors to know all the restaurants he’d been to. But no one ever stepped foot in his apartment but us four kids. There were no beds. He kept us on surfaces with no covers. We were his display items just like the restaurant names on paper. I wanted to sleep beside the matchbooks and pretend I was visiting New York restaurants. Once he took us to Cape May for a few days.
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IMAGINING OKJÖKULL FROM CASCO BAY
photo by Allison Guan
by Julia Morrison
The tree has too many hands
for me to trust it’s from anywhere
but the future
I keep trying to leave
you before night
falls out of my body
Too many birds
at bedtime
I don’t have enough blue left
for another morning
Oleander tephra, volcanic ash and glass
layers of the glacier under the microscope,
otherwise we don’t see it.
The noise and snow of the image
developing, -
Capsular, and Excerpts from a Chat with Godbot
Image curtesy of The Public Domain Review
by Christopher Phelps
Capsular
My first thought was that I hoped the openings in the volcanic rock of my life would be something other than spider-infested holes, something other than empty time capsules, each with a note of I’m sorry, time ran out.
My second thought was for the spiders, which I didn’t want to insult. Couldn’t they be relocated to their own traps? Was this a specious logic?
My third thought was that we’re haplessly in charge of this rock,
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It’s Probably for the Best that I Don’t Remember
image curtesy of The Public Domain Review
by Sara Flemington
I pitched a tent on the beach for Jupe. It’d been a while since I’d pitched a tent, but this one was easy, it just popped up. We picked it up from the outlet mall on the way. So now, it’s like we can go anywhere, I told her. Because we can just walk, and when we are tired, stop, pop up our shelter. So, it’s like we are free.
Like wolves, she said.
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3 poems by Saadi Youssef
art by Catherine McGuire
translated from the Iraqi Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Mukalla, Hadramout
A bird calls us to prayer,
as if the clouds here were diaphanous.
A wooden ship hoists its moorings,
its sailors wrapped in sarongs,
their shouts thick in the humid air.
The ambling steps in the women’s bazaar have gone home,
and the Sha’hr harbor melts in the sea’s expanse.
It was dawn, Mihhdar has just finished singing.
Look at how he lies on the cotton rug fast asleep
like a tired child. -
Texts to Sarah across the river
image curtesy of The Public Domain Review
by Jeffrey Skinner
Feeble wind, speak up. I am not the I am. Important to note. Work, for night is coming. And pick up eggs on the way home, pls. About your losses. Have you looked in the space between tic and tock? I lost a few years there, once. FOFL. James Wright taught me rivers. Everyone should call him James, I think. Formal sadness. Wonder if the signal between us is fresh? Kind of mid, maybe? The river’s a slow learner. Churner.
Sometimes the moon,
