Archives

Within the salon’s dark cough, beauticians

glue fingernails to their anchorage.

Enslavement to labor is nothing like sleep.

Awake they wait for papers whose likelihood

is quantum mechanical. They consume, pay

taxes on tobacco and tea, and move through

a city as though stickless in a kennel

of unfamiliar dogs. Where they were born

they welcomed eggs without salmonella.

Extractive industry propelled a century

of blackened air. At night they could feel

atmospheric mud and the breath of siblings.

And into the night they would evacuate

to flee the earth’s hand-wringing. Here, they

subsist on a translated diet. They must train

the tongue backward and learn to swim

through natives’ suspicion. Headlong, they plunge

into the mainstream with so much fervor, so little rest.

Alan Elyshevitz retired as an assistant professor of English from the Community College of Philadelphia. He is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks. Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

To read “A Photo of my Grandfather (Sumter, SC circa 1928),” click HERE.

Darryl Holmes received his MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University where he also served as an editorial reader for “The Literary Review,” the university’s international journal of contemporary writing.  In the past few years his poems have appeared in Water-Stone Review, New York Quarterly, African American Review, Obsidian, River Heron Review, Kind Writers Magazine, Jelly Bucket, and Toho Journal. His first book “Wings Will Not Be Broken,” was published by Third World Press in Chicago.  He lives in NJ with his wife and youngest son who attends college in PA.  

My brother looks me in the eye when we

talk – always. Even driving through Philly

at rush hour after the airport. He drives

with his left knee, both hands going up

with questions, out for emphasis, pointing

at landmarks – like the cheesesteak

place we passed at 70 miles an hour,

the c and the e in the neon sign dark

because, bullets. He plays drums at Temple

and works with street kids and stuffs himself

with all the life he can find. The sketchier,

the better, he says. He’s still going on about

cheesesteaks, wants me to know how good

food works. If you’re not running scared

to the counter and back to your car, you’re

eating average at best. I’ll take my chances.

I’m not here forever. Have you called mom?

He means he won’t live in Philly for long

but suddenly my stomach feels him gone,

sees my own hands white knuckling

the wheel, turning down the safest streets

with a broken heart and a hungry mouth

that wants another hundred miles of American

cheese and sautéed onions, driving so fast

you’d think God was tapping his foot, talking

about everything out loud as if our lives

depended on it, because they did.

Stacey Forbes is the author of Little Thistles, a poetry chapbook published by Finishing Line Press as the winner of their 2023 New Women’s Voices competition. Stacey’s work appears in some of the publications she loves, including Beloit Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, Terrain.org, and Split Rock Review. Born in Pennsylvania, Stacey now lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona.

I watched the blind beggar drag his body

into the shadow of Broad and Samson,
his hands like ash, his face half-covered

by an old hat he treats like an heirloom.

His cup was there, waiting like an open mouth,

the faint sound of coins bouncing against

its tin skin, each ping like a cracked bell

calling for something bigger.

He could tell a nickel from a dime by the way it settled,
its spinning stopped cold, and he must have felt
the difference between mercy and mockery—
the penny tossed by a man with rings on all his fingers,
the same man who spat once and crossed the street.
And the sign beside him, “Love Your Neighbor,”
written in some shaking hand, curling at the edges,
greasy with fingerprints by a friend in exile
bent away and ashamed of this kingdom.

I think about the weight of his bag, the bottle tucked
under his coat, warm against his ribs—his only comfort—
and I wonder about the composer of that sign, if he believed it,
if he too sat here once, holding out his hands.
He knows the sound of justice, the ache of an empty cup,
the slow, careful way hope folds itself into a corner
and waits for someone who knows its name.

And I want to ask him if he remembers
a song or a prayer, or if he only listens now
to the shuffle of shoes, the endless clicking
of heels on pavement, the city moving past him,
never stopping. Would he recognize my breath
if I knelt and dropped a quarter wrapped in a twenty
or would I become just another sound,
another dull thud in the cup’s wide-open mouth?

Tim Gavin is an Episcopal priest. In addition to his most recent publication, A Radical Beginning (Olympia Publishers, 2023), he is the author of Lyrics from the Central Plateau, a chapbook of poems released by Prolific Press in November 2018. His articles, essays, and poems have appeared in The Anglican Theological Review, Barrow Street Review, Blue Heron Review, Blue Mountain Review, Cape Rock, Chiron Review, The Cresset, Grow Christians, Digital Papercut, Evening Street Review, Library Journal, Magma, Poetry Quarterly, Poetry South, Poetry Super Highway, and Spectrum. He lives with his wife, Joyce, in Newtown Square.

Village shuttered against night, clay stove fired up, the kettle steaming

in the damp. Her position set, the old Dutch-German requires it, a cook

to bank the fires to prepare the meals. His bed? She has her own, a right

to refuse the man; she made him sign his mark upon the deed she’s folded up,

squared in her belongings, a quilt she patched with her mother, a bronze knife,

a single coin to pay her funeral. The bride could be called young in polite nations,

here she is the cook, a lover if she permits it. There is no church, no dowry,

not even a dress beyond what she made on her last name day, stitched like her

comfort depended on it, the dress, a sturdy enough coat against cold, rain,

the haymaking weather she will cook in, every day, for the rest of her days,

with a man who agreed to pay her, shelter her, and fuck her with child, in her

own time, or his own time, should he drink or take to anger, as men do.

She is given flowers to cover her from evil, a bit of dirt from her father’s house,

a bit of ash from her mother’s hearth. She doesn’t believe evil is darkness,

she understands darkness divides evil into shadow, nothing can be trusted

with the eye. When the old man picks her up he whispers, I’ll keep demon’s fingers

from your ankles, and carries her into the house, and puts her down

like a basket of beets. He salts the stoop, strikes candles against the known.

They eat a stew with bread. He drinks to shatter her place. She hears the crack

of the whisky cask and tumbles into a well of worry. He visits her in those first hours

of darkness, the journey hardly off her, to keep you safe from it, from the evil 

that would take you right outside the door. She knows she has no choice

in the matter, she’s  heard her mother’s bed clatter;  the demon is in the gaps

between spirit and man, how often he lifts it to his lip, how often he puts it away.

Cassandra Whitaker (she/they) is trans writer living in rural Virginia. Whit’s work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, The Mississippi Review, Lamba Literary Review and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle and an educator. Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf is forthcoming from Jackleg Press in 2025. wolfs-den.page