Issue Eighteen

i want you to come back to me
healed because i’m selfish & you left
me to wade through the weight of losing
you. i’ve spent so much of my life wrestling
with death & all it has taken
from me.

i pushed through
the silence & the static. the light settled
into my skin when i clawed
my way back. metal tooth ravaging
as i paced along my mind’s
interior.

now i know
no one could keep you. you,
closed-doors & driver’s seat
laughter. you, cold december
& bloodstained
mercy.

Cassidy Black is a psychology student, libra sun, and postcard collector from rural Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Rising Phoenix Review, Ghost City Review, and Recenter Press Poetry Journal, among others.

I find it lying in the grass beneath the shade of a jack pine.
Red streaked saliva drips off yellowed fangs and pale gums
while its chest pulls in shallow breaths that rise and fall
like the restless boughs above its body.
When I look down into its hazel eyes and unpleading pupils,
I know there is nothing anyone can do.
Even still, I stand beside it.
I stop watching the blood trickle from its side.
I close my eyes and imagine its undeath.

The wolf sucks bloody saliva back into its mouth.
It stands up while pulped organs and shattered bones
reform. The bullet spits out of its side and flies
across the field – back down a rifle’s barrel.
The casing leaps back up from the grass and glides
into the chamber at the slide of a lever. The casing
remarries the bullet when the man pulls the trigger.
He lowers the gun, locks eyes with the wolf,
And watches it walk backward into the woods.

Nick Trelstad is a twenty-one-year-old poet and undergraduate in the College of Saint Scholastica’s English program. He has had previous works of poetry published in literary magazines such as Sink Hollow.

I should like to be raw
One day
Undiluted
Free from fear and fate (and you)
No expectations
No one to live up to (or down to)
To be accepted
As individual
I should like to be raw
To be me (whatever that may be)
And this world
That is something
Yet to be
Discovered (or said out loud)
But I think (I know)
I should like it
To be raw

Tess is a red-haired girl who likes reading Jane Austen, watching too many property programmes, drinking hot chocolate and thinking too much.

Despite your brown belly, you still carry the vermillion
trademark of Virginia in the flecks of your rusty
tipped wings, my marvelous madam Cardinal.

Sing for me, my sweet, clumsy mother bird.
Twitter in tones like a digital blaster
and dance with your straw feet that jut and jive

about the round nest in oblong ovals:
your legs skip-tripping on feeble, unborn pebbles.
Fly in that forgetful flutter as you forage for food.

But be back to your twig-bowl abode holding
four little futures. Babes awaiting a hatching,
all asleep until that day. Even the odd

fifth egg. The fatter, foreign egg—laid in haste
by a stranger too cowardly to stay and nurture
her own soon-to-become brood Cowbird,

that breaks first. A chip and a chirp
and you’re called to your work, my simple spring-singer,
attending to your newborn. Not yours,

I mean to shout, but the wind rips out the sound.
Your song like a gunshot rings your return.
I gape as I watch your red crested head lean

down and bid from your blunt, peachy beak
the lumpy puke-slime that slides
into the wide smile of the lone little

parasite. A predator’s offspring. Perfectly content
with the presence of a surrogate mother. It sits in the soggy nest
with your four fetus babes—dozing in dribbling pools

of feathers, and bloodied pink yolk.

Gabriela Szczepankiewicz is a rising senior at Old Dominion University. After switching out of a STEM major, she found her passion for observing and exploring the world via creative writing.  Spurred on by her achievement of winning an honorable mention in the ODU Undergraduate Poetry Prize Competition two years in a row, she hopes to publish her work and continue her creative aspirations.

a paleontologist once told me her bones could lift the world. she showed me, let me stroke the splintered ridges, run my hands along the epiphysis grooves. in her closet is a collection of old relics, and she asks if i want to be fossilized. i tell her no, but she pours the pitcher anyway, and my skin cumulates honey that hardens into a prison of amber. i’m left to collect dust.

an astronomer once told me that the secret to finding extraterrestrial life was to look inside. i press my face to the telescope’s eye and see myself hinged to the curvatures of the cavity, plastered along the partitions, and she collides into my soil with her burning, sweating, kinetic energy. i am a floating cadaver, bruised with the imprintations of craters, trapped in time until quantum mechanics can invent a device to fish me out of this well.

a civil engineer once told me how to fix myself. she said build bridges from your heart to your head. if you use up all your materials now, you’ll end up broke and confused. well i’m confused right now, i answer. so my hands reach for planks of wood and i build a dam, stack the logs into syncopated staggers until i get a wall that is too tall for her to climb. there are splinters lodged into the silver linings of my palm, and the reservoir billows out into an erupting wave of white foam. gone is the dam, gone are the nonexistent bridges.

Katherine Wong is a student at Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA) in the Creative Writing Conservatory. She enjoys writing speculative fiction, poetry, and songs. Her work has been recognized in numerous competitions including the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She also is a writer for the LA Times High School Insider and frequently reviews science fiction entertainment and covers current public health issues. Outside of writing, Katherine plays the piano and runs a community service project called STEM THE ART, which teaches youth a combined curriculum in the sciences and the arts.