Poetry Winter 2023 fiction all issues
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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
Bridget Kriner
A Few Lies & a Truth
At my first confession, I said what I said, meaning
I only said things that meant nothing to me, meaning
I lied. I stole skittles & a cherry lipstick from the drugstore,
kicked my sister under the table, peed on the floor
& blamed the cat. I denied it, mostly denied
I liked it—the feel of a lie in my mouth, a triumph
of evasion for all my small evils—how even then,
I knew who I was. So, the priest could not absolve me
of my real truth & the lie, it was still inside,
blossoming quietly. It’s true I was lurking in the bushes
at my friend’s house down the street & I was scared
of her dad with the beard in the car pulling into her drive
& while it made no sense, it was real for me.
He was a coroner, arriving home from his day
of finding out about the dead. I hid, then crossed
the street alone when no one was watching & ran all the way home.
Later I lied to the priest about the lie because of the shame
seeded in the ground of my body. Years later, when a car hit me
in a crosswalk, I did not see it coming & still I knew right away
it was the old lie come back around, snaking up like smoke rising
into my lungs until I can no longer properly inhale. See the car
hit me & I just knew it was my penance for the street-crossing lie
I told when I was seven, a bill come due after 20 years, dormant
virus triggered in my depths until I found it wasn’t that lie
that mattered at all, but the lie I didn’t know was a lie
back then—someone had taken my voice & believed for years
my silence was saving me, when all along that was the real lie.
On Being Home Alone & Watching Serial Killer Documentaries on Netflix
Supposedly, we are stronger in broken places,
ruptures reinforced, seamless skin obscures
one truth of what happened. For others, the duct tape
of healing is threadbare, its adhesive degrading.
Still others are frozen, pregnant with fear, a calcified
fetus lingering invisible inside. Because fear lives
in the body & the night has a thousand eyes, latent
as a half-buried wick catching a flame just before
the match expires & sulfur swims up your nose.
You switch channels, warm by the fireplace TV station,
roaring as if warmth dwells in the mind, not skin. Your
unease escalates on the sofa, whistles through the window,
where the empty eyes the night stalker—two embers
smolder through his worn balaclava. You want
to unknow everything about his hunting. You want
to rewind the night back to the spark, bury the wick,
blow out the match, unsee how his face takes shape
in the fake fire, while you just know someone, maybe
him, is just outside, towering like the century-old
aspen in the yard, watching.
Birds Aren’t Real
—Once a preventative cause, our initial goal was to stop the genocide of real birds. Unfortunately, this was unsuccessful, and the government has since replaced every living bird with robotic replicas. Now our movement’s prerogative is to make everyone aware of this fact, birdsarentreal.com (Peter McIndoe)
On the viewless wings of drones, light as a thing
with feathers you can’t sing this tune
without the birds. It was evening all afternoon,
& the only moving thing the eye of the drone,
always watching, eyes in the sky, perched
in the soul. My mother would be a falconress
aloft with liar pigeons and hummingbird assassins,
spearing targets with their long needle beaks.
Sparrows, swallows, nightingales & peacocks,
while behind all those birdy eyes are cameras.
And I was of four minds, thinking a robot
could only be a metallic machine, thinking my fear
would subside, remembering that I am a human,
wondering how many birds were killed. Then the drone
said nevermore, the lie and the bird are one,
flying in a lucid green light in inescapable rhythms,
soaking up data for an indecipherable cause.
The only way to properly explain is with birds.
I am part of the pantomime. This never
happened. Wake yourself up from the lie.
Bridget Kriner
(she/her) is a community college professor in Cleveland Ohio. Her work has appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), Book of Matches, Shelia-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Whiskey Island and Split this Rock, where she won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest in 2012. She has two children, a dog, and a cat.