Poetry Winter 2023 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover
Susan Wilkinson
Selena Spier
Red From The West
& other poems
Pamela Wax
Talk Therapy
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Honey Water
& other poems
Mark Yakich
Necessary Hope
& other poems
Bridget Kriner
A Few Lies & a Truth
& other poems
Keegan Shepherd
Silver Queen
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
Sacred Conflagration
& other poems
George Longenecker
Those Who Hunger
& other poems
Hailey Young
Ball Room
& other poems
Sébastien Luc Butler
Aubade
& other poems
Savannah Grant
Ever Since (v.2)
& other poems
grace (logan)
Dynamic
& other poems
Samantha Imperi
A Poem for the Ghosted
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Limerence
& other poems
Kayla Heinze
Stop checking the score
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Chasing Through to Dawn
& other poems
Alex Eve
A moment
& other poems
Robert Michael Oliver
Prison Hounds
& other poems
Sébastien Luc Butler
Aubade
smell of almost rain dust
green wood lightning bug
pining above flotsam pollen
spooling in the river
sphinx moth nuzzles foxglove’s
speckled interior i didn’t know
i was real before you touched me
the storm comes rain
a path of memory so deep
it hardly resembles memory
the veins in your eyes when you looked at me
the first time before
words to witness
before one knows how
Aubade
i am a poor witness out walking at night
when streets dream only
of themselves broadside of a farmhouse
white paint scuffed as the bar of soap
i sometimes get to wash you with your valleys
hard then soft more often
it’s my own hand running across
my skin trying
to figure yours the night is cold
enough for snow but
there is no snow the wet tips
of my hair harden crinkle
like the dead grass dawn is impossibly
far & its song of you
proper stage for my lament since when
did i assume it worked that way
during is so short
& ever
Aubade
Mornings I balk
awake into aubade. Default
mode: entropy in green
& blue. My blues, my love,
without you, filling out
an ocean. What’s new?
An ocean in your touch.
Your skin’s salt-lick, briny
caper of days you come
to visit. Diver’s bends
in the blood, I wave-
break against your back’s
mussel-pink muscles, your
spine’s rosemary rosary,
the rosary your name
makes my throat, tide-pool
of wet flame. Outside,
sap suckers pepper
cedar’s bearded bark
for each nectar-sleeve, crepe
myrtle shatters itself
over red earth. Months I forget
to be with you, long
longing of watching pasta water
wait to boil while cooking
for one yet again,
thinking how
after slow dancing
we picked bits of thyme
from between our teeth.
Aubade
crows gather vortex in hundreds
the leafless tops of trees scavenging
wind how i wish i could say
it’s nothing like hitchcock made them
that would be a lie i don’t know
what they bring other than
another winter without you
a selfishness i have no defense for
it’s said crow memory is so strong
it could count in a defense trial
they remember all who were cruel
who showed grace some claim
they can even learn to speak i turn
to say as if you’d be there
winter without you i know that song
play it again if you remember how
Aubade
i’ve been reading too much charles wright
i take a walk expect a poem
just as somehow i expect you
as if i were owed you owed
the starlings again their ring
around the rosey their dusk
coronation sweet murmuration
no poem just a line—
once in a stark turn sun splashed
their understory alark
into a thousand eyelashes
who would believe me if i said
i’d seen your eyes just so in bed
a private history we’re consigned to
precious falsehoods we bought
will never return just like a poem
i feel you above my left eyebrow
invisible shard in which there’s light
Sébastien Luc Butler
holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, the minnesota review, Four Way Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2021 Hopwood Award, and a finalist for the 2023 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, his writing can be found at Fifty Grande, Foreword Reviews, and West Trade Review. Hailing from Michigan, he resides in Brooklyn.