Old Friends

By Charlotte Iannone

᠅

Eyes shut: Earth has unraveled into dreams.

I talk to you in all of them.

I tell the truth.

In the streets at night

I see a thousand twitching nerves like rope

roiling to a needle on the wall.

Then a thousand invisible snakes exploding out

across the continent, into trenches of sea.

My finger meets the needle—it bleeds.

Too many tomes of us—too many inken deeds.

The handwriting—all of a lowly writer—blurs

into mismemory.

Seawater has soaked the pages

(I omit the nights

I found you hovering over the basin,

dunking them. Some nights

it was me).

Perhaps we are beyond saving.

The shame of admitting it:

I will no longer climb

when you call,

if you have ever, like a child in the dark,

called out to me at all.

If it was not always

just a spiderweb of dreams.

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Charlotte Iannone is an emerging writer whose work revolves around her upbringing on Long Island and the complicated nature of families. She just completed her first novel, a family epic centered around a real-life historical family that lived in East Williston, New York. At Bowdoin College, she was the Editor-in-Chief of The Bowdoin Review and Poet Laureate of the Peucinian Society. In her free time, she plays soccer competitively, reads classic novels, and serves her local community as a volunteer firefighter.

You're Named for a Saint

By Nick Hoffman

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The fittingness of it: 

old language, old book

and always found 

on calf skin, pulled and dried

With that name, if anything bloody 

ever happened to you, 

it would mean something 

In the bathtub, they rub off easy

your wick-cut letters

and I’ve cleaned for now 

those etymologies and other daily dusts

The shame of admitting it:

I forget my own mother sometimes

how she made me and thought, “yes,

this one will be a gift-giver 

and bring storms to a whimper”

Eyes closed and my palms upward

I wonder fully, and I pray halfway

thinking of the feast days 

falling between March and harvest

But your name is the spring, 

and the spring is a numb chariot,

bursting forth in its senseless living

Its wheels scatter a planet 

of supplicant flies, thin hands

fingerless and busy, humming

vespers at the watermelon rinds

And I love to watch you

and the seeds swell over days

Ticks stuck in the pink flesh

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Nicholas Hoffman is a medievalist and writer from the Hudson Valley. He lives outside Washington, DC, with his partner and any number of pet rats. His work has appeared in Chronogram, Night Picnic, and Eunoia Review.

Wanting

 By Kate Fetters-Walp

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The world is an endless wheel of prizes
and look at me:
holding hands with my trepidatious mind
to dream of lands across a sea,
new and sparkling
(I'm afraid of water, barely learned to swim).

Sometimes I lay in bed and sing,
voice scratched up and hair a mess,
and in the box of my car, my voice may ring
but I never take the mic at karaoke
(I never do anything).

I wonder fully, and I pray halfway
and though I've seldom been religious,
in my morning haze, there are church bells,
tempting.

I saw it last night, for a moment:
the glimmer of a future
where I live and breathe
the kryptonite of my torment
but my hands weren't made to build bridges,
never were.

For what in the world have I ever done
except sleep and dream
and want
and want some more?

᠅

Kate Fetters-Walp is a high school senior with a passion for poetry and storytelling as a way of connecting to the human experience. She lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and like many creatives, finds that her work flows more smoothly when she's in nature. Kate is excited to continue learning the craft of writing through working on novels and poems. She is also looking forward to submitting to more literary journals in the future.