By David O’Connell

Featured Art: Children at Play by Jean-Francis Auburtin

leaning back in our lawn chairs, the August constellations
crowded by a crush of stars, the Milky Way in soft focus
like a glamour shot. A couple and a couple at the end of the day
watching our kids zip sparklers back and forth across the lawn
like satellites or meteors. It’d been a story in the paper,
evidence of a supermassive black hole, and so we throw it back
like tequila shots and wade past our depth—me, deflecting
to Kubrick’s Star Gate sequence, those long light smears
on Bowman’s helmet, Julie, pulling both cords of her sweatshirt
taut, saying our bodies would be stretched to angel hair
if we were yanked into that hole. Then Janet’s telling us
how she imagines this supermassive black hole is like the hole
at the end of a vacuum cleaner. And right now—Saturday evening,
our kids growing restless, minutes from boredom, then, maybe,
those nudging arguments of who found who, who was safe,
and for us, at least, the hour’s drive home, I-95 congested
by the night-shift roadwork just beginning, Julie and I
talking quietly in front, reviewing the evening, overwhelmed
by the obvious, how we’ve all changed, how we won’t ever
be as young as we were, our daughter, grass-stained,
her hair wild with static, slouching down in the backseat
pretending to sleep as she listens in just as I did at seven,
those long drives to Maine, picking up things half-understood
in the language of grownups—this black hole, says Janet,
is Hoovering up stars and planets like so many pretzel crumbs
ground into the shag. We’re full. Everything off the grill
is hitting the spot. And Mark, back to Kubrick’s Star Child,
is leaning in to share his fanboy theories of what it all means,
though I’m not listening, not really, because it seems right,
that vacuum, because I, too, have plucked stray fuzz clinging
half in, half out of the attachment’s rim—and yes, this is how
it feels, year-by-year, to be drawn to the irresistible thing.

By Lucas Cardona

Featured Art: Tongue amulet in the form of a cicada (hanchan) by Unknown

My limp body lulls through the hot, humid days
like a lukewarm dog’s tongue hanging off the edge
of time, begging for disaster, for that rotten stench
of nostalgia to drift away & be buried in the brain’s
contemporary fiascoes. Night after night,
caught gaping out the window in the same chilled,
sterile room. Only the shadows of bats flitter into
view, and the dark, lush limbs of American elm trees
groping toward evidence of further tangibility
with a desperation akin to worship. Something in me
must cherish the sound of cicadas feeding off each other
in their suburban, summertime mania, like the soulless,
asinine chorus of a fraternity chant. The girl at the
7-Eleven in the purple hijab restocks the Cheetos
and the world goes on devouring itself for no other reason
than something must be devoured if we are to continue
loving one another in this crudely selective fashion.
It’s terrible but it’s true, all heartache inevitably
resolves in that surreptitious method pain can only
accomplish with the brain’s private blessing.
I know now what I did, I did to destroy you.
I know, too, that I’m the one who’s destroyed.
But somehow that still feels like forgiveness.

By Sara Ryan

By Susan Browne

autumn leaves glitter in their brittling
someone plays the french horn on the shore
beneath the blue flame of sky      the sound
like silver glinting across air like tinder

dear california
when I’m gone
will you still be here
will there still be a shore

someone stomps out of the reeds
holding a fishing pole
commands the horn player to stop
I walk by into silence

missing the music
wondering what else I want
on this hot november day
a cloud spilling rain

a voice that’s kind
not so many demands
not so many desires
I imagine mother earth is tired

our tumult & trash
our french horns & fishing poles
our eyelashes & elbows
our hands wanting to hold

dear humans
beautiful & dangerous
what will we do next
I keep thinking about love

about a man
who wrote to me years later
to say he was sorry for loving badly

By Maggie Glover

—West Hollywood, November 2019

I get a whiskey. I do not call my father back. I text you. I try on my new dress
in the bathroom among the western decor. I get another whiskey. I write a poem
about cowboys. I text you. I finger out the cherry from the glass. I take the cherry
the bartender offers me, red-glow-glop in a bare palm. I don’t text you for 24
minutes (I count it). I let someone down. I smoke a cigarette. I think of my mother
smoking: outside restaurants, department stores, in the kitchen on Sunday mornings,
late-at-night while typing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth with its long,
tender arm of ash. I order a whiskey. I don’t answer my phone. I ask the bartender
for another cherry but I’m way ahead of you, he says, offering a dish of alien
jewel-fruit. I like the dish: shaped like a cowboy hat, porcelain. I am being
trusted with breakable things. I joke: I don’t need to eat dinner now thanks
to all these snacks. I know I’m not joking. I don’t text you. I write a poem in
which I am the cowboy and you are the O.K. Corral and I make good choices
and my father is sober and my mother remembers me. I smoke another cigarette
and the bartender joins me. I know what this is. I say it out loud: I know what
this is. I pretend I mean something different from what I mean. I order a whiskey.
I listen when he explains his tattoo. I text you. I let him touch my shoulder. I
go to the bathroom and change into my dress. I ask him to clip the tags from
the hem. I write a poem in which I know exactly what I’m doing though I don’t
know it yet, do you?

By Marcia LeBeau

Featured Art: Colorful carpets hanging on wall by Meruyert Gonullu

The Lucky store a few towns over is going out of business.
That doesn’t seem so lucky to me. Every year, my husband and I hit
their After Christmas sale. We try on jeans with zippers that tell us—
Lucky You! when the teeth unclench. I once got a sweater
with LUCKY that stretched across my breasts. We pile clothes
in dressing rooms facing each other. Yay or Nay outfits.
With conjugal knowledge, we are ruthlessly honest. Whoever finishes first
takes a seat and watches the other model consider and reconsider.
The other day, a woman I barely know told me how much she loves
my husband, the way he always refers to our life experiences with “we.”
We have decided. We went there. We bought that. She tells me how lucky I am.
When my husband and I leave the store, we clutch shopping bags,
we are satiated. Sometimes we hold hands, if we have one free.

By Marcia LeBeau

When he read it out loud in the small orange basement
on the street lined with old trees that fell
too early in storms, the wind lost its breath,
the molten core of the earth slowed slightly, and someone
poured a Slurpee down at the 7-Eleven. It might have been
just a poem meant for the whole group, who all playfully
fanned themselves and over-swooned after he’d lipped the last word—
but she sat knowing that everything she’d done
had brought her to this beige suede basement couch
to hear, to embody, to take these words
and press them into her—first shaking, but later softly
and with more force. Until they walked, ran, and flew
with her. So when she rose above that suburban town,
its baseball fields and slate-gray schools, on the days
when the screaming and demands and the mac-n-cheese dinners
became too much, they would be with her. He would be with her,
whether she wanted him or not.

By Paula Harris

Featured Art: Light Inside Library by Janko Ferlic

it will be the day after our fifteenth anniversary

we started late, so we were already middle-aged at the start
so after fifteen years we’ll be what others call old

we will have lasted a solid fourteen years, ten months, and most of a day
longer than I expected
and so for fourteen years, ten months, and most of a day
I’ll have been confused by our continuing existence

how will you go through fifteen years and most of a day
without realising what a fuck-up I am?

during that time you’ll have been to more book launches
than you ever expected you would,
and since you never thought you’d ever be at a book launch
your showing up at each of them will be a personal gift;
you loiter at the back of the room with a bottle of whatever
cold beer is your current choice, maybe Heineken that day;
you don’t say much to the other people there,
you sit quietly through the post-launch celebratory dinners
when I’m buzzed and hyper or exhausted and freaked out
and we hold hands under the table;
once we get home we strip down and have sex
and you still look at me like I’m the best thing you’ve ever seen

I won’t watch a single rugby game
but I ask who won and if the All Blacks did alright,
if it was a good game, and you give me your thoughts
in a surprisingly detailed yet concise analysis
because you know this shit bores me
and from time to time I even remember
one of the players’ names and you smile at me
like you would a child trying to show off their knowledge of the alphabet
despite always misplacing the q

we still live in separate houses
because I’m smart enough to have figured out that living with someone
isn’t something I can cope with;
we spend time at each other’s homes
but more at yours, even though your kids hate it
when they drop by unannounced
and we’re naked on the kitchen floor
or I’m sucking you in the living room
or you’re going down on me on the dining table

so your kids always knock on the door, loudly,
then wait fifteen seconds before walking in

we always laugh at this