What inspired you to write “Trigger Warning, “Nostalgia and other risks” and “between us?” And was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?
Of these three, “between us” has the clearest origin story: a trip to the zoo with my siblings. Time with my siblings often prompts me to write because they are simultaneously the humans I communicate best with and the humans I communicate worst with. And I love writing in response to zoos and museums; we go to these places to encounter animals or artifacts, but what we actually encounter is often our distance from those animals and artifacts–arranged and choreographed into an experience that we move through. Any time I can combine fact-learning and people-watching, a poem is likely to result.
Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?
I’ve just reread (for maybe the 10th time) Stolen Air (Christian Wiman’s versions of Osip Mandelstam’s poems)
FICTION A Groundhog’s Day – Patrick Duane I’m Tom Hanks – Mark Leidner Crushed – Matt Leibel The Program – PJ Henry Tornadoes – Andrew Graham Martin The Loaves – Phoebe Baker Hyde The Pirate – Peter Gordon Hope – Rebecca Pyle We Don’t Joke About Such Things – Neil Serven Calendar – Maeve Barry Other Living Things – Alexander Fredman Particulation Glitch – J. Paul Stein The Blue – Mary Helen Specht
NONFICTION The Ways to the Cabin – Chris Fink Why She Cried – Larry Allen Pankey The Dive Reflex – Kayleigh Norgord oung Girls, Like Me – Nina Semczuk This Land Is Your Land – Abbey Cahill Finding Our Way: On Maps and Mapping – Priscilla Long Sunfish – Lynn Eustis Necessary Things + Cheap Sleep – Gordon W. Mennenga Alternative Education – Abigail Carl-Klassen Feathers in Tar – Joel Long The Woman in the Factory Who Will Cut the Fish – Katherine Cart The High Pass – Frank Light Pleasant View Drive – J.A. McGrady Dr. Pangloss’s Intelligence Quiz – Debra Coleman Head on a Swivel – Juliana Gray The Year We Were Almost Famous – Katiy Heath Puzzle Box – Jeff Ewing
THEATRE Eat and Be Eaten: A Play – Carter St Hogan
POETRY Tell Me About the Glaciers – Kaylee Schofield For John at St. Vincent’s + Adonis + Final Visit – Cindy Milwe Learning to Pronounce /L/ + Body Tree – Daniel Ooi Dusk in March, 755, China, Civil War + Afternoon in the Meadow – J.P. White Life Poem 2 + Caravaggesque – Elisa Gabbert Paper Flowers + Paper Cranes + Paper Flowers + Paper Flowers – Brandon Shimoda Patina + Some Fairly Useless Reflections on Cakes & Pies + This is Not a Rehearsal – John Dorroh Soundings + Fable – Sarah Carriger Getting Lost – Ryan Fitzgerald Love Canal – Claire Christoff Too Happy – Luke Bloomfield Syntax Practice – Hannah Rego The Fugitive Lands – Christopher Brean Murray Have I Been Too Much? + The Great Song of the World – Chris Martin Poem + Room – Sean Singer Shroud (Ghost Apples) – Sébastien Luc Butler Little Volcano + Nothing But Time + Metro, North – Jared Harél Don Juan, + soiled + Midnight Mass – Javier Sandoval Itch [some sunburned writing] + Bacon Cheese Combo + Dappled + God Salsa – Benjamin Niespodziany Elegy + Character Witness + Reluctant Inheritance + Gingko Tree as ASL Interpreter – Beth Ann Fennelly The Bat – Jeremy Voigt currents / recurrence – Amelia Bell Svalbard, Two Days Before Polar Night – Georgia M. Brodsky April 23, With a Glancing Thought + Begin – Eamon Grennan The Reverent Spaces of Childhood + The Neighbors Took Down Their Twelve-Foot Skeletons Today – Andrew Hemmert Trigger Warning + Nostalgia and other risks + between us – Ceridwen Hall
We’ve buried our sadness and all the spades of therapy can’t dig it up. In public it’s embarrassing people trying to hide their mild feelings. Looks like we missed out on misery this year we say in line at the sandwich shop while clinging to despair but despairingly feeling it slip away like a terrified frog with its panicky little heart puckering its sides while it wriggles out from our child’s grip and jettisons itself all crazy legged into the weeds. People just aren’t depressed the way they used to be. Deprived of melancholy there’s a sadness to that. We all feel it, that longing for something worse. The therapists are taking it extra hard going to work like weary travelers coming home to a desolated empire dragging themselves up the cracked and ruined stone steps to the crumbled ziggurat of their former greatness. We try not to look at them muttering their medleys of incantation around their measly fires while we mournfully feast on bulls by the hundreds and lap up lakes of wine.
Patina
by John Dorroh
I hate new growths, every day another one, some white wart the size of a cherry tomato, hard as a bone.
A single white hair climbing out of some godforsaken pore on the left side of my neck.
The toenail on my right big toe begins to wind around itself like the shell of a snail, & a white patch adorns my left arm just inches from my elbow.
What the hell is going on, this stain, such testing of who I am inside, outside the dull imperfections that tarnish my once-fine exterior.
John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano, nor has he caught a hummingbird. However, he did manage to bake bread with Austrian monks and drink a healthy portion of their beer. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Others have appeared in over 100 journals, including Feral, North of Oxford, River Heron, Wisconsin Review, Kissing Dynamite, and El Portal. He had two chapbooks published in 2022.
Crushed
by Matt Leibel
I noticed a woman walking down Market Street in a red bowler hat, and I wanted to say something. I wanted to compliment her, I wanted to say “nice hat” or “I like your hat,” but I didn’t want to sound like a creep, I didn’t want it to sound like a come-on, unless she wanted it to sound like a come-on, in which case, come on, of course I wanted that, haha, except maybe I didn’t, who knows, what if she wielded the hat as a weapon to vanquish her enemies, or what if she were a henchwoman who had her hat at the ready on behalf of some white-cat-stroking international supervillain or syndicate of supervillains, something along the lines of a female Odd Job from the James Bond films? But maybe I shouldn’t have been wary at all, maybe she would deploy her powers for good, maybe she’d be supportive of me, use her hat to slice through my enemies, or at least the people standing in the way of that promotion I wanted at work. Were I in a position to do so, I imagine I’d support her career goals as well, whether or not they had anything to do with the red hat, but my God, how could they not, why would she wear such striking headwear if she didn’t want it to represent her as a person, as a professional? I realized at this point that I was objectifying her, reducing her to an object associated with her, yet on the other hand, it was an object she chose, not an object she was born with, and I knew as well the hat had had a life before it even met the woman’s head, it had been created in a hat factory, which is a building where they make hats and not a building in the shape of a hat, though I suppose it could be that as well, there are lots of buildings that are designed to resemble the things that they make, and even before that the fabric itself had been created, probably in the fabric district of some far-flung foreign city, and likely, I knew, the hat was manufactured by people, most probably women, who were paid far less than they deserved, and certainly far less than I made in my relatively cushy job here in the city. In fact, I guessed that the hat fabricator likely made less in a year than I made in a single one of my direct-deposited, biweekly paychecks, and this thought made me think of grabbing the hat from the woman’s head and flinging it at the factory owners and clothing companies who exploited these workers, or at least made a healthy profit off their blood, sweat, and tears—and was it, I wondered, actually the workers’ blood that gave the hat its striking red color? I’d once read that carmine red was produced by crushing the bodies of cochineal beetles, common in South America, and wondered if some of the beautiful hue of the hat I so admired was achieved by some analogous crushing of the factory workers’ spirits. As I was pondering all of this, the woman in the red hat had passed out of view, and out of my life, perhaps forever, I thought—yet because I walked this way en route to work every day, and apparently so did she, I saw her again the next morning, and each weekday after that. Each day, I resolved to speak to her, and each day I failed in my resolve. One afternoon I had an idea: I would go to a hat store and buy the exact same hat, and that would make her notice me without my having to even say anything to her. But it didn’t work the first day, or the second, or the third. So I had another idea: I would buy a second hat and wear it on top of the first hat. Still, she didn’t blink an eye when she walked past. I added a third red bowler, then a fourth, fifth, and so on. It got to the point where I was wearing a thousand hats at the same time, in the literal sense and not in the idiomatic one of a skilled multitasker, though I was also that, and I was even paying a guy who operates a crane to carefully place the hats on top of my head (ideally, at a jaunty, Leaning Tower of Pisa angle) on my way out the door to work each morning. I wanted to ask the crane operator what he thought, was I wasting my time, had I gotten drunk on the crushed sour grapes of a failed romantic obsession. But I doubted the operator would be honest with me, he’d likely humor my madness, because I was paying him quite well, certainly compared with the third-world hatmakers who’d enabled my ability to purchase mass quantities of hats affordably. So he and I communicated silently, engaging daily in the delicate operation of outfitting me with a thousand red hats. I learned to hold my head more still than I thought was possible, and when I’d mastered the technique I could leverage my new skill by portraying a gold-painted statue like the folks who play this role for spare change in Union Square. Still, despite all my efforts at stillness, one morning there was a gust of wind that blew all the hats off my head and scattered them billiards-style throughout downtown. Hats landed on the heads of the homeless, on the tops of storefronts, in the grates of sewers. Hats thwacked into the glass windows of office towers, floated inside cable cars. They alighted, jauntily, on the necks of streetlights. They caused traffic accidents, cars and buses and bicycles, including several injuries and two fatalities. I didn’t feel great about this, but also wasn’t keen on copping to the cops that I was the one who was the proximate cause of it. The crane operator and I continued our code of mutual silence, realizing we were both, potentially, implicated here. And the woman—the honestly still spectacularly appareled woman of whom I’d taken notice, who I regarded and still regard as the initial ripple that went on to cause a wave of consequences—I no longer saw on my daily route. I continued to search for her, and continued to be unsure as to what I’d say to her if I found her, what my opening line would have been. I was humbled now, by the interaction of my own desires with the consequences of said desires, writ large. But of course I couldn’t avoid the woman forever, even if I wanted to, which I honestly didn’t. So when I finally saw her again, crossing paths on Market Street, we were both hatless, which in my mind was tantamount to our being naked, so there was an intimacy to our interaction, a peek-behind-the-curtain thrill of vulnerability, however brief. I froze in place, like a less convincing and unpainted version of those Union Square human statues, inadvertently blocking her path. She spoke to me for the first time, saying simply “excuse me,” and shuffling through. When I turned to watch her walk away, I noticed her shoes, deep-blue pumps, like nothing I’d ever seen before—and I was so distracted I walked straight into the side of a Halal food cart, and gave myself a big bright-red welt, a crushing blow, right on the meat of my forehead.
When I came to, I was more determined than ever to catch her attention. Somehow the bump on my head had imprinted the color of her shoes deep in my brain—not in the place where I store my idle thoughts, not in the place where I write bad-pun parodies of popular songs that I never share with anyone, not in the place where I rank my favorite kinds of pasta, not in the place where I think about what the ocean might be trying to tell me when I listen to it through a seashell, but in this deeper spot, this premium suite of the brain’s inner sanctum, the place where pure color lives. The next day I spent my lunch hour at work scanning women’s shoe sites, looking for the precise pair I’d seen on her. It was impossible to see color quite accurately on a screen, so I had no choice but to order all the pairs that were even close—dozens and dozens of pairs, but none of them, when they arrived, were quite right. Then I remembered reading about lapis lazuli, the deep-blue metamorphic rock prized since antiquity for its color. The shoes I had ordered were a similar color, but it wasn’t an exact match, so I decided to travel halfway around the world to Afghanistan to acquire some lapis lazuli, at great personal risk. But the risk paid off, and though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t meant to abscond with the precious stone when I left the country, I was able to do so, under shady and somewhat nefarious circumstances, feeling something like a badass Bond villain in the process. Upon my return to America, I decided to show the stone to a shoemaker and have the pumps recreated in my size. I had no idea where to find a shoemaker for hire, given that most shoes seem to be made in factories by large companies, companies who exploit their workers as much or more than the hat-making companies do; my only real shoemaker reference was that there was once a famous racehorse jockey with that name, but that was a long time ago, and mostly irrelevant to my current purpose. What I did was call up my friend, the crane operator, who seemed to be someone who knew a lot of handy people, and he said he’d be happy to help me locate a shoemaker, for a price. I paid the price not because money was no object—it was very much an object, and my rational self could easily raise a compelling objection to paying as much as I did—but because I’d been swept up by a wave, by a deep-blue wave of a woman, and by what that woman had dared to wear. The shoemaker took in my breathless description and my smuggled central Asian rock, and used them to craft a pair of shoes that I was satisfied mirrored in both hue and style those worn by the object of my desire, as she sashayed down Market each workday. The pumps fit my feet perfectly, and I felt like Cinderella, or maybe more like Cinderfella, a portmanteau that made me cringe just as soon as I thought of it. I taught myself to walk gracefully in them, and soon I was wearing them to work, crossing paths with my intended once again, hoping that she’d finally notice me, as something more than an obstacle. Days and weeks went by and I got no reaction from her, nor from anyone else for that matter—a man walking in a pair of woman’s shoes on the streets of San Francisco is, pun intended, about as pedestrian as it gets. Eventually, once again, I stopped seeing her. Maybe she had noticed me wearing the same shoes and had become self-conscious about it. Maybe she’d moved to a different city, gone to LA even, to act, or model, or to live out her ultimate destiny as a Bond femme fatale. I decided to keep wearing the shoes, as uncomfortable as they were, because the uncomfortable truth was I’d become convinced that the shoes had magical powers, or at least suggestive ones, and that the energy they exuded would, through some alchemical process I was at a loss to competently articulate, draw her back to me. And just as no one on the street judged me for the pumps I chose to wear, I didn’t judge myself for my continuing obsession—although in retrospect, perhaps I should have. One morning, while standing on the sidewalk amid the hustle and bustle of the grab-a-coffee-and-get-to-work set, I stopped at a row of newspaper kiosks and scanned the headlines through the glass panes. I paid my two quarters and pulled out a Chronicle. I read as I walked—and upon seeing my own face in a photo on the front page, my feet grew wobbly. I was wanted, in the criminal sense, for what I’d caused, for what the papers had taken to calling the Hatpocalypse. I hadn’t thought a lick about consequences when I’d started this quest—because consequences be damned—but now here they were, starting me in the face from my own literal face, or at least its flattened, unflattering newspaper image facsimile. I tried not to panic, though if I were really the type not to panic, would I have acted the way I did up until this point? I turned around to see a pair of cops who were clearly not following me and who were, in fact, sipping on their coffees and staring off into the middle distance aloofly. But the mere sight of them must have triggered me, and I broke out into a dead sprint, careful to dodge the food carts and newspaper kiosks, the bearded man speaking angrily into a megaphone about Jesus, the second-tier Michael Jackson impersonator, and the cellphone-besotted masses. The pumps, of course, were poorly suited to sprinting, and so it wasn’t entirely surprising when I turned an ankle rather badly, and fell into oncoming traffic, where I was crushed by a number 7 bus.
In the afterlife, which looked a lot like San Francisco, only hazier, if that’s possible, I continued to search for her. I realized she wasn’t here quite yet—but I’d wait, pacing the cloud-lined streets, my colorful hats and shoes replaced with a white frock and afterlife-assigned sandals. But my will was undimmed; death had not put a fatal damper on my dreams. I needed her in a way I’ve never needed anyone, and to be honest, I didn’t know the first thing about her. Well, that wasn’t true, was it? Her red hat was the first thing I knew about her. Her blue shoes were the second thing about her. The third thing about her was that she was lovely, and the fourth thing about her was that she liked to walk, and she did so every workday. But I didn’t know the fifth thing about her. That’s what I would say to her if I got another chance to make her acquaintance, or her spirit’s acquaintance: I don’t know the fifth thing about you. It was an advantage, I knew, that I even knew the first four things: she didn’t know the first thing about me, that thing being that I even existed. But I no longer existed, strictly speaking, so there was little for her to learn about me. Meanwhile, days, weeks, months, and years passed in a blur—by which I mean my eyesight, not spectacular to begin with, continued to deteriorate rapidly in the afterlife, and it wasn’t like there was anywhere I could easily go here to renew my contact lens prescription. Soon everything in my field of vision became reduced to abstract shapes and colors—which I realize, in some ways, is essentially what I’d reduced the object of my affections to, now long ago. And also: Where was she, my eternal crush? Was she ever going to join me, or was she somehow immortal, in the same way that James Bond was, never dying because his death would necessarily mean the death of a successful film franchise? Or was she already here, unrecognizable to me minus her red hat and blue pumps, evading my fast-dying eyes, my still-living desires, my endless pursuit, and my shambling attempts to make meaning out of the fabric of her existence: inscrutable, impossible, irresistible.
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Florida Review, The Normal School, Socrates on the Beach, and Wigleaf. He lives in San Francisco.
Six Poems
by Martha Silano
When I’m on the Bed
called death, I hope to be thinking about the texture of the bucatini at Campiello, how they seated us in the bar by the pizza cooks, but when we asked to sit elsewhere
they put us beside a giant strangler fig with fake orchids we thought were real. Al dente, which I pronounced al Dante, in honor of my nephew, in honor of the circles of hell, my heritage. When I’m on the bed called death
I hope I recall your smile that evening when you learned budino means pudding, a butterscotch pudding, which we more than managed despite finishing our entrées. In la stanza della morte, shoving off my mortal foil, may I be dreaming of butterscotch pudding, the feel of my hand
on your back, recalling the call you made from a mile down the beach to tell me there were no yellow hilly hoop hoops, greater cheena reenas, or froo froo stilts. I walk back to the car while you call again, this time to tell me you found a flock of dunlins and semipalmated sandpipers. There’s an actual flush toilet
at the parking lot! And potable water! And my love calls again, this time to say he’s nearing the path to the parking lot. No, I don’t have the keys to the car or a single coin, but I’ve got water, binoculars, and my phone, a little notebook to write down the species—tricolored heron, royal tern, wood stork— which I’ll add to my list of what to think about when I’m on my giant bucatini platter of a bed.
How to Fall
Prioritize not bashing your noggin—that makes good sense cuz hitting it could be deadly. You don’t want a secret bleed inside that
sweet skull of yours, right? If it looks like you’re taking it from the top, for God’s sake turn your head to one side. Aim to teeter sidelong,
not onto your back, which can really mess you up. Also, it’s a good idea, as you careen, to make like a twirly bird. As the Bible
and the Byrds song say: Turn! Turn! Turn! There is a season for running without tripping, and then there’s loose carpets, a backpack left in the middle
of the floor. Jeez, kids, please don’t drop your slides in the path from the kitchen to the front door— do you want your mother
to break her arms and wrists? It says stay loose. I get it, but isn’t it hard to relax when you’ve tripped, don’t know what’s happened
or how it will end? A website suggests rolling out of it, I guess like you’re playing in the surf, in and out of waves that never slap or hurt.
It’s like they think we have complete control of our tumbles, our foibles, our faults, but the question is: do we? Spread out the impact is another tip.
I think this means the love of family and friends, an Olympic-size pool of folks who bring you chocolate pudding, homemade soy milk, potato-leek soup. What you want
is a squatting position, legs over your head, a great deal of momentum from this life into the next.
Elegy with Exhaust Fan and Robin Song at Dusk
Now that The War to End All Wars is a slug in the compost bin of history, I’m never going to say a batch of fudge brownies is done, even when the knife stuck into the middle comes out clean.
After I’ve vanished, I’ll get a new hairdo—a pageboy or a bob. After I’ve swum past August’s dry moss, after my eyebrows cascade past my collarbones, I’ll rename myself
Apostrophe, possessor of bends in the trail. Wear my cutoffs like a pair of bricks, sink into the intimate ground. When I disappear, I’ll no longer collaborate
with the house finches but hitch my trailer to a gust. It turns out all this time I’d been hiding in a patch of pentstemon, which meant the moon to me. I could lift my head, listen to the ruckus of hummingbirds,
never imagining I’d be banished from London and Paris, all the towns in between. It was like a flame in a campfire igniting from an ember,
tumbling in the wind, a flame that set an entire valley on fire. A flame I know I can’t put out.
If We Didn’t Leave the Task to Backhoes
The weather is a bright and obvious song. It’s noon before you realize you’ve spent three hours freshening the herb pots, feeding the ornamentals Miracle-Gro,
listening to a towhee, its wacky, off-kilter song, deciding it’s time to dig a giant hole for a root-bound hydrangea. The earth is stubborn, doesn’t want
to be messed with, so you change from sandals to sneakers, put your full weight onto the shovel’s rim as your mind wanders to the uncle,
cousins, and brothers who took turns digging your mother’s grave. Talk about a cross-cultural experience! Anyone digging anyone’s grave. A task that has united,
would continue to unite, if we didn’t leave the task to backhoes. The expression: digging your own grave. Freedictionary.com says
it’s being responsible for your own ruin. When your son was young, you took him to a Day of the Dead exhibit at the Burke Museum. Sugar skulls,
all order of marigolds. Dioramas of cultural practices from around the world. One about a society requiring its men to dig their own graves. Not prisoners of the Nazis or ISIS,
just a guy in a country where part of the deal is to foster a clear sense of one’s future, regardless of being one’s worst enemy, of shooting oneself in the foot.
Twenty minutes to dig a one-foot hole. A feeling of victory when the plant fits perfectly, and I tamp the dirt into place.
Mistakes Were Made
The weather app said the wind was from the south and west. It was from the north and east.
The sinus doctor said it’s your brain. Maybe you had a stroke in your sleep. It was a benign nodule in one of my lymph nodes.
The pan said nonstick. The fried egg stuck.
Another doctor ordered a swallow test. I chewed a cracker mixed with barium, learned my right vocal cord was weak.
I went out on a boat. A muscle spasm in my torso roiled like the surf. When I googled my symptoms,
I found ALS. When a friend said Stop it, you can’t diagnose yourself,I figured she was right.
All the testing. All the tests. The doctor who said If I were in Vegas, I’d bet itwas all due
to stress. The last stop was the eighth floor, Neurology.They looked at my tongue,
asked me to spit in a tube to be sent off to a lab where they’d check to see if it was inherited.
The weather report said sun, sun, sun. It rained.
Death Poem
Death is the one-day-alive mayfly clinging to a watering can. When the grass turns brown, how can I not think of death? In my heart, death lives like a mama raccoon with her two young. We haven’t figured out a way to undo death. Death awaits the pigeon on a roof, says the Cooper’s hawk. It’s not cool to mention corpse beetles when there’s a death. Did you know there’s a death’s head hawkmoth? A scrub jay squawks death, death, death! Dragonflies and death: they live about six months. Eating is for sure some kind of elaborate death feast. Sometimes death is invisible, especially when we laugh. Our planet: one big tribute concert to death. Death be not proud, says John Donne, but death is proud, I think. Everything ends up being an ode to death.
Martha Silano’s forthcoming poetry collections include Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025) and Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025). Her most recent release is This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024). She is also the author of Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and in many anthologies. Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.
