Bleary-eyed High-beam Strain-glow

Throwing it,

                        object-symbolic out window.

 
Lazy like careful.

                        I love through some other.

If it’s preeminent,

                                    hold back the tent flaps

                                    so, I can guess what shadow your

                                    fingers make.

Has a hole always been in your head?
Or did you just make that story up?

Powder the nose of the moon.

                        Anything you need, but

don’t covet the ring not bought for you.

                        The [A] the [a],

Suppose no other alternative object-double-other relation.

The sound of snow falling in the stream still makes me want
To put my head between my knees.

I couldn’t sleep flat on my back.

Flick on light up light down night light.

High-beams.

Andrew Hutto writes out of Louisville, KY. He was recently awarded third place in the 2020 Flo Gault Poetry Prize. In the summer of 2019, he served as a preliminary judge for the Louisville Literary Arts Writer’s Block Prize in Fiction. Presently, he serves on the Pine Row Press editorial board. His work appears or is forthcoming in THRUSH Poetry Journal, Plum Tree Tavern, Amethyst Review, The Weekly Degree°, BARNHOUSE, After the Pause, Math Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press and Poet Lore. His work has also previously appeared in Eunoia Review.

That’s

Was a name called not often
by the few sullen expressions?

A caterpillar hugs the blanket edge.

Flick match into burn pile.

Warrant not avowal of moniker?

The strung-outs kiss me on the feet.

Tremble asleep and I will
not check for breathing again.

Asheville is forgotten.

Swinging a gun when the flood
starts like that will do any good.

The Chennai skyline is under now.
The planks of our basilica
are being repainted for judgment day.

It must be below freezing to remember
what you see through a telescope.

Cover the cattle with cold weather blankets.
Cover the mums before it freezes.
Throw the covers over your head

you piss-drunk hypothermic risk.

Andrew Hutto writes out of Louisville, KY. He was recently awarded third place in the 2020 Flo Gault Poetry Prize. In the summer of 2019, he served as a preliminary judge for the Louisville Literary Arts Writer’s Block Prize in Fiction. Presently, he serves on the Pine Row Press editorial board. His work appears or is forthcoming in THRUSH Poetry Journal, Plum Tree Tavern, Amethyst Review, The Weekly Degree°, BARNHOUSE, After the Pause, Math Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press and Poet Lore. His work has also previously appeared in Eunoia Review.

Fell: A. The. A,

Drum beat on high-higher tempo
a reverberation ripple in-ground—
Expect this to be a time of great
appreciation.
Apocalypse in eyelids.

                        Resected vindication.
                        Known-world underwater.

Andrew Hutto writes out of Louisville, KY. He was recently awarded third place in the 2020 Flo Gault Poetry Prize. In the summer of 2019, he served as a preliminary judge for the Louisville Literary Arts Writer’s Block Prize in Fiction. Presently, he serves on the Pine Row Press editorial board. His work appears or is forthcoming in THRUSH Poetry Journal, Plum Tree Tavern, Amethyst Review, The Weekly Degree°, BARNHOUSE, After the Pause, Math Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press and Poet Lore. His work has also previously appeared in Eunoia Review.

Murder

“Over the burning marl” – John Milton, Paradise Lost I.295

Easy to assure, to seize by other means
the confidence needed to rightfully
press down on the applicator. Get it
gone out of mind the scenes of pre-
projected New York, Orlando, Tucson.
            Actively go about groaning—
            Pushing on, though timid.
            There is danger in 4 3 2 1.
The green bearcat, the subtle badger, the
yarn around the belly of a victim, yellow.
Trudge on pine cones through streams
of clear cold water. Do not filter the
water when you bring it to your lips.
Drink deeply because the hound
dogs have lost your scent.

Andrew Hutto writes out of Louisville, KY. He was recently awarded third place in the 2020 Flo Gault Poetry Prize. In the summer of 2019, he served as a preliminary judge for the Louisville Literary Arts Writer’s Block Prize in Fiction. Presently, he serves on the Pine Row Press editorial board. His work appears or is forthcoming in THRUSH Poetry Journal, Plum Tree Tavern, Amethyst Review, The Weekly Degree°, BARNHOUSE, After the Pause, Math Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press and Poet Lore. His work has also previously appeared in Eunoia Review.

Spell for Ophelia

            “We’ve heard you were a victim.
            Stop crouching in shadows, chewing your hair.”
            – “Okay, Ophelia,” Jeannine Hall Gailey

You have a copy of Jeannine Hall
Gailey’s poem propped in front
of the birdcage that sits on top
of your filing cabinets. Outside
the birdcage are many birds,
one of twisted wire, others with
feathers, gifts from friends.
Inside the cage are things
that remind you of various men:
an ocean stone from a trip
to San Francisco with your
ex-husband, an envelope
with your name written on it
by your first love, some change
a man dropped in your apartment
last month. This is in equal parts
spell and reminder, exorcism
and art installation. You ask
the universe and your listening
goddesses to help you keep
perspective where men
are concerned, and it mostly
works. On a date last week,
a man you’ve just started seeing
points out that you’re not
a damsel in distress, that you
don’t need to be rescued.
From him you have your
ticket from the American
Writers Museum and a ribbon
from the complimentary brownie
they gave you at the Palmer
House Hilton where you had
drinks. But the man you’re
really trying to gain perspective
on has left no souvenirs. So you
take the necklace you wore
the first day you met him and
that you’ve never worn since.
You slip it between the bars,
all shining and silver, a tiny
dried flower in a locket,
always remembering that what
is in the cage is never you.

Jen Finstrom is an adjunct instructor at DePaul University in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Department and is also Outreach Coordinator at DePaul’s University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL). She was the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine for thirteen years, and recent publications include Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, MockingHeart Review, and Red Eft Review, with work forthcoming in Thimble. Her work also appears in Silver Birch Press’s Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks.

Aubade with an Unfinished Sentence

            “It is easy enough
            to make cedar and white ash fumes
            into palaces
            and to cover the sea-caves
            with ivory and onyx.” – “Circe,” H. D.

He asks why Circe turned Odysseus’
crew back into men after turning
them to pigs, and you think
for a moment in the darkness
of your room, picturing
the Waterhouse painting, Circe
on a golden throne, her feet bare,
holding forth a cup of poison
to the man who enters. You want
to get the details right, but you’re
talking around the two Old
Fashioneds you just drank
at Moody’s Pub down the street,
the glass of bourbon on your
nightstand that you’re sharing now,
and all you say is “Circe fell in love
with Odysseus, but then—”
and you can’t or don’t finish
the sentence, feel it hanging
in a silence you do nothing
to break. Instead of considering
what more to say about Circe,
about the intervention of the gods,
you’re realizing how apt an ending
“but then” really is, for this, and so
much else. And the next morning,
when you’re sitting on a bench
at the Thorndale Avenue Beach,
watching the sun spear its way
out of clouds, you think again
of those words, that silence.

Jen Finstrom is an adjunct instructor at DePaul University in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Department and is also Outreach Coordinator at DePaul’s University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL). She was the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine for thirteen years, and recent publications include Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, MockingHeart Review, and Red Eft Review, with work forthcoming in Thimble. Her work also appears in Silver Birch Press’s Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks.

Small Things

Those years we lived in a small village in Spain: Pucol
narrow streets and beautiful balcony gardens where I could watch
the algae bloom from a sea of tiled rooftops. A small one-market
town, where we would wait, my dad and I—still not even two years old
standing in line with all the old women buying groceries. This is how
we learned ordering a whole chicken here came with head and talons
pieces with which my brothers and I would chase my squealing
shrieking mother, tired and home after a long day of teaching
this was just too, too much—a culture shocking

And so, even though it gave dad and us kids a thrill, tired also
from teaching our mouths new sounds, our ears new words
configurations, like constellations, a whole language, hecho de
cosas pequeñas. My papa, in his broken half-gestured way
and nudging me for the occasional word, began to gift these
small parts: beaks, and neck bone make, buena sopa, said
the abuelitas, the talons too. The heart and the liver though
they insisted we keep, taught my papa to pan fry them in olive oil
chi chi, nos dijeron, they told him, feed it to your daughter
dalo a tu hija, how it soon became my favorite dish, how it flavored
my tongue, la sangre de mi corazón.

A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, Kelsey Bryan-Zwick is a Spanish/English-speaking poet from Long Beach, California. Disabled with scoliosis from a young age, her poems often focus on trauma, giving heart to the antiseptic language of hospital intake forms. Author of Watermarked (Sadie Girl Press) and founder of the micro-press BindYourOwnBooks, Kelsey’s poems appear in petrichor, Cholla Needles, Rise Up Review, Right Hand Pointing, Redshift, and Making Up, a Picture Show Press anthology. Writing towards her new title, Here Go the Knives, find her at https://kelseybryanzwick.wixsite.com/poetry.