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
Keegan Shepherd
Most Times It Was At . . .
night. Dad’s alcohol and sports radio
swimming thru the waves
of Oklahoma summers in Big Four.
Are my feet not like cleats
clinging to the red dirt and withering,
stomped grass?
I noticed he was gone
from dinner a long time.
I’m uncertain where I’ll find him.
This time, he’s in his truck, idle in the driveway.
An attempt to wake him from deep sleep,
so I open the door.
He says he doesn’t know me.
I say he never really has.
It Is The Sun That Reminds Us
It’s the magic of small moments—
walking you out the door
off into the October sunset
how the dulling rays collide
with every bit of blonde
atop your head to remind me
what light myself I walk toward.
Are you the sun
I wait for
every
day
to rise
and
to fall
cyclically?
Without regard, you stop
turn to my eye and smile to
remind me:
Yes.
Silver Queen
Ghost October tour of the night
twenty standing outside talking
the dead unease lingering within
that hotel silver queen.
It was bad luck for the min(or)ers
to talk to any red-haired woman
the day they leave
for work.
From what I understand, she was
rather famous.
Back in those old Comstock days
Rosie operated her business
out of room eleven.
She’s evidently never checked out,
having made countless appearances
in the decades following her
suicide.
The established ladies of Virgin-
ia City were lonely wives
who, of course, looked down upon
employed women such as Rosie
and you can’t help but think it was
something about riding that gleaming,
bladed edge, in the spots that cut
deepest,
that makes some desert town worth staying
for a silver queen.
Perhaps It’s Written On His Bones
I often think of his flesh and bone—
my father’s in another time zone.
and the state of the zero phone
calls, and the way words may
not be enough to say what we both need.
I need him.
The rules, the structure, the stern.
What would he say? What does he need?
I think anger can be
like an X-ray,
and I can blast back the bullshit
that’s clothes, and boots, and jobs, and titles
narratives of parent and child
and like an X-ray
shows us the point abnormality in the structure,
I can just point at it and say that’s wrong,
pick up the phone and dial.
“What you want to say is written on the white of your skull
and I want to see it, liar.
Come on,
jump out of your liar skin.
Look at my nowhere skin.
I’ve no defenses.
I’ve no fear.
I’m wide open.”
Come on,
old man.
This tall tree:
Look at my bones,
count the little rings.
Get to know me.
My Friends, The Ravens
Familiar caws calling me
upon the time of dinner
from my friends of black
feather there on the roof
eyeing me from away
and waiting for my spoils.
They eat spawned gossip
from my most horrid mistakes.
They flock behind my back
in frequency enough
to make me believe
there is conspiracy.
My friends, the ravens;
treachery and unkindness
exist in the worst of this
rave. My friends, the ravens;
somehow selfish and self
aware at the same time. I
scatter pieces of my dried
heart across the concrete,
watch my friends, the ravens
flock
peck
& eat.
Keegan Shepherd
has built a holistic relationship with writing—making it a personal, professional, and academic pursuit. He is an underground Hip-Hop artist by the name of Keeper of the Universe, and his music features on Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud and YouTube. Keegan studied writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, and earned the DQ award for Poetry in 2020. He is currently employed as a Copywriter and is studying for his MA in Rhetoric & Writing Studies.