Archives

Grief

I wanted to grieve

but the garden

was in such a good mood

and the bubbly

blue sky

kept calling C’mon! C’mon!

and I swear

the wind lifted me

like a toddler

onto the burning back

of the sun

galloping in such

a wild and

unbroken way

that not once

did I think of

my mother’s ashes.

Andy Macera has received awards from Plainsongs, Mad Poets Review and Philadelphia Poets. His work has also appeared in Pearl, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Drunk Monkeys, Gyroscope Review, Straight Forward, Sierra Nevada Review, Old Red Kimono, Passager and other journals. He has lived in West Chester, Pennsylvania since 1998.

Rapture

i wish the world would stop for me.

in its tracks, never felt such weight

gracefully crumble onto its palms.

 

i’ve added a couple of pounds

since i started walking the hypotenuse,

driving my life with triangular wheels.

what can i say—i came out of the womb horizontal.

 

how to lessen the weight?

starve yourself of these earthly pleasures.

shelter a cocoon and live and laugh all you want,

but wait until the world doesn’t glare anymore,

 

then the roads are open to rapture.

run as you will—lose more weight,

but swallow that impossible feeling.

it will be weightless gain.

full, impossible to hate again.

i swear i don’t miss the empty well,

where every sip of water is an echo in a spacious cave.

 

to be perfect is to cut skin and bone

and i no longer have to do so.

i am ever-molding surface no more.

my thinning love rhymes with pounds and mounds

and one day i’ll be loved and give love,

but still wonder if the jawline is sharp enough to cut.

 

when there is a way to measure how heavy,

learn to step down from the scale

and keep your worth (or weight) inside you.

after all, even a word sounding as nasty as rapture can mean bliss.

王潇 / Evan Wang is a 15-year-old poet from King of Prussia whose work has appeared in Juste Milieu, Bleeding Soul Poetry, The National Poetry Quarterly, etc. He is the recipient of the Youth Appreciation Award and a featured artist in the Our America Now festival. Evan is spellbound by the catharsis of the moving language and worships the pens of Savannah Brown and Ocean Vuong.

where something happens

how, at the trolley stop, we all have a common mountain.

morning like a tall pine the day starts with, strong and silent;

 

how heavy scarves and hats and gloves sleep

on our bones. that the silver tracks pull around the last stop,

 

by a wash-and-fold where something is always moving,

soap and water hiding the colors of soaked clothes.

 

how standing here is so easily understood: the patience

or impatience, the idleness of hands. how it’s acceptable

 

just to know you’re in the place where something happens,

where the route ends and then again, begins. it’s possible

 

to ride with spare coins, barely treasure, the range of it

like peaks and valleys: to creek or city, to streets and homes.

 

how the waiting here is a good thing, how everyone rushes

just to be in this, this very, this very happening place.

Rachel Betesh is a nurse and a gardener who writes poems – at a wooden desk in a 112-year-old house, with the window open. Her poetry has been featured in The New Yorker, long-listed for the 2022 emerging poet prize at Palette Poetry, and is forthcoming in Brink magazine. She rides the #13 trolley through Philadelphia.

Bensalem

You take Street Road back to the world,

pine needles fall nearby.

These places still exist, revisited

like a box of wilted baby pictures in a storage locker.

On a Sunday, you take Broad to Vine to I-95

and you take the exit to Pain and Mercy

and go to the places that kill you.

It all stands before you confident as ghosts.

320 Pine Court is still there and you drive slowly

and out of the passenger side window you see yourself

sprinting out the door

and you see yourself

walking behind Holly

over the pine needles

to the bus stop and the third grade

and your Oldsmobile is not where mom parked it

and a steakhouse replaces the woods you rode your bicycle through

and a wrought-iron gate keeps Street Road from Beech Court

and you want to call Kourtney Melendez and tell her she was the best friend you ever had

but you know that Cyprus and Spruce and Willow

are not to be revisited today.

Greg Probst is a teacher, writer, and filmmaker. He is the recipient of the Pam Perkins-Frederick Memorial Scholarship for the Marriage of Art and Poetry and the Dr. Allen Hoey Memorial Scholarship for Short Fiction. His writing has been featured in The Centurion, The Temple News, Hyphen, Rathalla Review, and through the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia. Probst is currently pursuing an MFA degree at Drexel University where he will be teaching first-year composition and creative writing.

Free postcard from the saint shrine

Deliciously dark confession

booths and big lightless

pupils with golden

grapes and dead guy

in a glass box. Everyone

so so still. So silent.

Backs of their heads

devotional. Guy restocks

the votives. Clink,

clink, the color glass.

Mary Zhou (they/she) is an artist based in Philadelphia. Their poetry is also forthcoming in Oversound and Philadelphia Poet Laureate Trapeta B. Mayson’s Healing Verse Poetry Line. Poetry, both read and written, has carried them through the last two years. You can find them online at marzhou.com.

’69 Mustang

To read ’69 Mustang by Joshua Barnes, click HERE.

Joshua Barnes was born and raised in Boyne City, Michigan, and is now a Philadelphia transplant with a career as a Nurse Manager. His poetry has previously appeared in Kairos Literary Magazine, The Bloom, and has been featured on the Lake County Arts Council website. He’s been a devoted comic book nerd since he was ten. When not writing or working, he can be found reading poetry and horror fiction, perfecting his handstands, or binge-watching Drag Race.

Kulikitaka

Dominicano soy!
Dominicano soy!
Dominicano soy
in a city of cold.

‘toy cruz’ao
in my heart.
My body, made of bark,
and hair of mango fibers
is rooted to the orderly lines
painted on perfect concrete.

Mi sangre de zapote
doesn’t move with
easy mountain river speed, here
in the
fluorescent white
banks of
fluoride streams.

No puedo bailar
como los arboles de palma en la brisa,
because in the mirror
I see a rigid oak tree
wearing a stiff shirt with tight collar—pero

Dominicano soy!
in the choking alleys
of montaña tall skyscrapers.

Dominicano soy!
barred outside the wide
finca de arroz bright
fashion avenues and high
art boutiques and white
spaces.

Dominican soy!
morenito con sol
in the cold.

Dominicano soy!
while American.

Michael Angelo Abreu is a leaf. He takes frequent walks through the Wissahickon woods, musing about life and its many particulars, such as love, happiness, suffering, and spiritual growth. These kaleidoscope ideas find themselves splashed across his poetry. Through his exploration of writing, he seeks not only to further develop his voice but also to obtain a deeper understanding of who or what he is.

Authors’ Tea

In school we learned that there are four types of sentences

classified by their purpose:

To tell, to command, to exclaim, to ask.

I decided that I would not make demands of the world—

even my statements lacked the confidence of a real person.

Even they were a kind of asking.

 

There’s always one crayon that won’t fit back in the box.

I learned to take up the least amount of space,

saving room for the others.

I wanted to erase myself like a misspelled word

rubbing the paper so hard it tears

leaving nothing behind but pink crumbs.

 

The teacher wanted our best work for the authors’ tea,

but I knew my writing was asking too much.

So I wrote a new story, one that was a little charming,

a little funny, but not a lot of anything.

I used as few words as possible

to shorten the length of my voice against the gnawing silence.

 

In my retelling, I stand as tall as an exclamation mark.

I look you all in the eyes and I ask you—

no, I command you

to place your hands on my shoulders, gently, and tell me that one day

I will learn to use my voice to put out fires,

and also, to start them.

Sarah Mills is a former English teacher who now works as a freelance writer and editor. Originally from Delaware, she received her bachelor’s degree in English Education from the University of Delaware and her master’s in Literacy and TESOL from Wilmington University. Her poetry has appeared in Glass Mountain. She is currently writing a YA novel. You can visit her at sarahmillswrites.com.

Her Body Lines

You should have stayed friends with her. You shouldn’t have learned about her death through social media when your yoga teacher posted a picture of her smiling on the yoga mat, looking pale and dreamy as the sun hit her face. Rest in peace.

You made a beeline to the bathroom at work and hyperventilated in the corner stall. You didn’t have permission to feel the way you did; you were the one who cut her out of your life. All of those friendships after her, you strived to find someone like her to get that close again. You had yet to match it.

Grief has a way of making things feel like yesterday. Memories that were inaccessible in the subconscious become unlocked and flood your mind. Suddenly, you were eighteen again when she took you to your first yoga class. She drove you to class in her tan Chevy Malibu that resembled a grandmother’s car and trembled when the ignition turned on. She liked to drive with the sun visor down, not to protect her eyes from the glare, but she slid the mirror open to look at herself as she drove, finding her own vanity hilarious. You bent and flexed your bodies together and trembled in the poses.

She got better at yoga. Her body could withstand the demands of the poses and the heat. Her moves were untouchable, and she made everyone stare. You watched the yoga teacher give her more adjustments in class, and you craved the touch she received, or maybe you wanted her all to yourself.

You would give her a ride to the train station for her Vinyasa training. She’d wear leotards with high-waisted leggings and leg warmers into the city.

“On the train, I feel like Nina in Black Swan,” she said as she refreshed her makeup in your rearview mirror. “Remember that movie?”

You remembered. You’d watched Black Swan together. She envied the ribs that protruded out of the ballerina’s leotard, and you remember the throb radiating between your legs when Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis had sex. You didn’t know you could get so turned on from watching women together. You wouldn’t know that you were bisexual until much later.

Once, after a few drinks, she kissed you outside of a bar. Her long and devilish tongue hooked into the roof of your mouth. You grabbed her thick hair in your hands and pulled her close.

“Do you remember last night?” You whispered the next morning with your bodies interlocked on the single mattress in your parents’ house. You could hear your blood pulse.

“Nothing,” she had said as she rolled off the bed, out of your reach.

***

A psychic had warned you, after all. He had told you someone you loved would die in an accident. You were angry at the news. This psychic had broken a code. You were a trained clairvoyant, and you would never reveal such detrimental information during a reading. You only read the good things or harmless things like past lives and forcefully tuned out the bad. What good was it to tell someone that death was coming? Death was coming for all of us.

***

You ran into her mother at the grocery store.

“Do you still keep in touch?” she asked with an arm full of produce.

“No, unfortunately.” We had a falling out. Her Chevy Malibu broke down, and she would come over to your house but then ask for a ride to her boyfriend’s house. The habit kept reoccurring: each time she arrived, only for you to drop her off with disappointment. You eventually told her you couldn’t do it anymore. You couldn’t keep watching her leave. You wanted her to stay, and that’s what ended things. But you never told her you loved her. You never knew if that would have changed anything or everything.

“She moved to Philly to teach yoga. She followed her dreams,” her mother said with a proud smile.

Eventually, you moved into the city, too. You meant to go to her yoga class to reconnect, but you never did.

Now, you can’t stop thinking about her body lines as she hung onto the man’s back on his motorcycle. He didn’t have an extra helmet for her, so her long black hair danced in the wet summer night. You wondered what the stars looked like that night when the storm rolled in after a dry summer day and made the streets wet and slippery. When the biker made a turn, she ejected into the sky. The lines her body made in the road when she landed, forever marking her end in asphalt unworthy of her perfection.

Leah Mele-Bazaz is a proud Philadelphian and the author of Laila: Held for a Moment. Excerpts from her memoir were shortlisted for the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize (2021) and a finalist for The Southampton Review Nonfiction Prize (2020). Her writing has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal Online, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2021, she won Barren Magazine’s December Instagram Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Drexel University, where she also teaches Rhetoric and Composition. You can often find her at one of her two favorite places in Philly: the Schuylkill River Trail or her local library.

Website: www.leahmelebazaz.com   

Don’t Trust Reflections

It’s been weeks since I had seen my face.

It feels so strange now, Kevin sat across from me in our small tent, a chessboard sat on the floor between us. He looked down before making his first move, moving his king’s pawn forward one space. Nobody knows how or why they started appearing, all we know is that while reflections are the only way to see them, reflective surfaces are also the only way they could get you. When the news broke, people panicked. Anything reflective was smashed and thrown away. The lucky ones got out; Kevin and I were able to get some camping supplies together and make it out to the woods before the worst happened.

“At least we have each other, and….” I paused, I knew the silver lining in all this, but it just felt wrong after everything that happened. I took a breath and matched his move, moving my king’s pawn forward one space.

I looked up to meet Kevin’s eyes with my own. “It’s okay, Caitlin, you can say it.” I let out a deep sigh, and a light cloud formed as my warm breath met the cold air.

“At least we are together, and, in a way, looking at each other is the closest we have to see our own reflection, kind of. Well, it’s more than most people can, at least.”

My twin looked me directly in the eyes before looking down and considering his next move. Despite being born only mere seconds before me, Kevin was always the more protective of the two of us. When I would get myself into trouble, he was always there to help bail me out. We did everything together, and he was my brother as well as my best friend. “Guess there is a silver lining in that, but-”

“Stop.” I cut him off. We were both thinking the same thing, but I couldn’t bear to hear it out loud right now. “It’s your move.”

Kevin let out an understanding sigh as he glanced at the opaque water bottle beside him. We had barely managed to fill it before things really got out of hand. We were the lucky ones, far enough outside the city and some supplies to keep us alive, at least until things calmed down. Although we both knew in the back of our minds that there was no way to know if it would ever be safe to return to our home and find some semblance of normal life. There were only a few sips of water left, going down to the nearby river felt too risky, and neither of us knew when it would snow next. Instead, we sat in this tent, day after day, playing chess and just talking.

He looked down at the board again, his hand drifting over each piece as he considered every possible move. Eventually, his hand settled on the pawn in front of his queen and moved it forward one space as well. After so many games of chess between us, it often came down to who made the first attack; One simple mistake could snowball the entire game, so it became a game of patience. I placed my hand on my queen pawn and moved it forward one space.

We continued on in silence, move after move. Kevin would make a play, and I would copy it. There was only the rustling of the forest as animals scurried through the grass, and birds flew through the trees and called out to each other.

The peace was only occasionally interrupted by a gunshot ringing out, leading to a moment of silence as if the entire forest briefly held its breath. It hoped that the sound was simply someone hunting for food but knew all too well of the much more likely alternative. Sanity and resources were both in short supply these days. The further you could get from other people, often the safer you would be.

The game continued on; nearly every piece had been moved, the board still in perfect symmetry as I matched each of my brother’s moves, neither of us willing to take the first piece.

We both glanced at the board, each contemplating our next moves in the game. In tandem, we lifted our heads to look directly at each other. When our eyes finally met, we froze and then spoke at the same time.

Kevin whispered, “Caitlin.”

I whispered, “Kevin.”

For what felt like a lifetime, the two of us stared at each other. Neither of us moved, and I wasn’t sure if we even could if we tried. The forest fell silent, and the world seemed to disappear around us. Quickly there was nothing left but me, my brother, and the small chess board between us. In the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement. Then everything went black.

Andy Pressman grew up in suburban Philadelphia and has been attached to the city since he was born. He grew up always loving telling and sharing stories and writing short stories has been the best way to share that love. Writing has become a comfort activity for Andy, as it’s a wonderful escape from normal life into endless fantastic worlds, and he takes extra joy in sharing those worlds he creates with others.