Letter From The Editor

Dear Readers,

Our first release of 2025 marks our 10th volume of Spare Parts Literary this is a significant milestone for our staff and contributors alike, so in celebration I am writing you another letter.

As I have stated in our correspondence before this publication is a labour of love, one into which our Editors pour themselves, investing time, and money and great heaping measures of spirit - fuel for the flames of literature, a wild spark in the growing dark.

This year has already seen personal aches and losses; triumphs, tears and trials have known us all intimately these last few months. Consequently it is with great pride that I press digits to keys now and sign off on this volume. The fight to keep the lights on at projects like these is not insignificant, and still we stand, still we connect and commune, we cultivate, we curate, we open careful palms to clutch these sacred compositions entrusted to our pages.

Volume 10 burns with the ineffable, with the unspoken reach from spirit to spirit. It is something bright flashing in the dark, it is the secret throbbing of a heartbeat felt beneath the ribcage, it is the collection of glittering shards, tiny pieces of ourselves which we share and give away and bless, pieces we want you to keep and to treasure.

Drawn down to a point all of these works testify to our humanity, they are muddy handprints on the walls of time beckoning you, as you are in all your splendor and imperfection, to stretch your hand into the mark left behind, to feel across the distance your significance and ours - the unique, irreplicable impartation of human creation. These works remind us that to use hands, heart and mind to birth beauty is inherently human, that it is a soul exchange and in its way therefore must be considered in essence... holy.

This holiness of human practice is what this magazine seeks to promote and protect and it is with this in mind that I invite you to explore and celebrate the following contributions, and the hands which made them, in our radiant 10th Volume of Spare Parts Literary.

Warmly,

Oak Ayling

Vol. 10

MEMORY TAKES A TRAIN
BY KUSHAL PODAR

After one birthday you no longer

remember a good thing without

remembering something rotten.

"You can take this bottom bunk."

Said a kind man staring at your leg,

but you cannot forget where the train headed.

The steady rhythm of the wheels asked,

"Do you know where you will go? Do you know?"

We do not. It tricks the anxiety. You said, "Yes,

I do. To a funeral." The kind man snored.

Where we head to is all in our head.

The clamour of a good-memory bridge

shouts in wind and metal. A bad-memory

junction laid a fugue you would look at and be lost.

Kushal Poddar is the author of 'Postmarked Quarantine' and 'How To Burn Memories Using a Pocket Torch' has ten books to his credit. He is a journalist, father of a four-year-old, illustrator, and an editor. His works have been translated into twelve languages and published across the globe.

Twitter

NIGHT VISION
BY CHANGMING YUAN

As the tide surges forward

From the heart of night

A tiny white flower blooms

Against all the dark noises

Rising high along the coast

Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Credits include 16 chapbooks, 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and 2129 other publications across 51 countries. Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022; his novels Detaching and The Tuner are both available at Amazon, his debut short story collection Flashbacks due out shortly.

TWINS
BY FABRICE B. POUSSIN

Poussin’s poetry and photography work has appeared in hundreds of magazines worldwide. Most recently, his collections In Absentia, If I Had a Gun, Half Past Life, and The Temptation of Silence were published in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, by Silver Bow Publishing.

ROSARY OF THE PHOSPORESCENT
BY RICH BOUCHER

There’s a rosary that glows in the dark hanging from the doorknob in the guest room of my sister’s house. I’ve got no religion, but I’m charmed by that little light. There’s only one place in the world where Winter is real and that’s here in the upper right corner of the country. I can’t remember the last time I slept so deeply that dreams were powerless to visit me, to inhabit the back of my mind. Every time an airliner takes flight; an angel clocks back in from break and lends its wings. Unless that angel is Paul, who’s notoriously grey and parsimonious. The stingy seraph with his arms folded, bad attitude, prepped for the business afoot. In far off Nebraska, which is a good long distance away from anywhere at all, a mirthful breeze feels like the hands of a seventeen-year-old girl, and her fingers are smoothing over purple and blue flowers in a meadow. We could choose to say what sort of flowers these are, what color eyes the girl possesses, we could do that, or we could just be quiet for a few damned minutes and appreciate this moment for what it is and what it is not. Not every thing that happens in living needs an announcement, a description or an invitation. That really should have been lesson one on the first day of school for all of us. You know those gargantuan air cushions the police put on the ground underneath the ledge of a tall building to break the fall of the hysterical jumper? What happens if there’s another jumper several blocks away at the same time in the same part of the city? Someone has to wear the black bowler and coat; someone must choose who’s more important to save. I wouldn’t want that kind of responsibility. Actually, I would love to be the man who does the hard math in times and places like those. Leave it to me. It makes me suddenly breathless, there’s actually some pain in my chest for a few seconds, when I think of myself as actually being important enough to be the one, to be the one whose job it is to report on the arrival of the Sun, to parody the stars so pointedly they have to twinkle harder, to be the designer of the coats of dogs, to name every fish in the lake, to realize I had the power to leave home all along.

CORKSCREWS AND CORKSCREWS ONLY

Every adult is a container for the child they once were. That’s a thing that you think about when you find yourself on a blurry, imprecise overcast Tuesday in a specialty department store that sells corkscrews and corkscrews only. That’s an emotion that assumes command when you glance down the center aisle of the store and see that you’re the only one there; there aren’t even employees here and that ubiquitous and pointless music is gone. You don’t even know how you got here. You weren’t even thinking about childhood, or the strap, or how hard those monkey bars were at dawn in September and then you were. And then you were noticing how little effort it took to remember the high, narrow green-glass windows of the elementary school; the smell of the foil-wrapped hot lunches, the sting of the gravel shards in your knee after you fell. Or were you pushed? Were you pushed? There was a kid somewhere there who became the first friend you ever had. His last name, you think, was Quirk, or something like that. He wasn’t the one who pushed you; this much you know. Suddenly you’re embarrassed at how emotional you’re getting there in the store, so you start imagining nonsensical pictures to snap yourself out of it: a fat, weeping policeman on his knees in a park in Zurich, a sculpture of a tribal goddess grimacing from the pain of irritable bowel syndrome, a three-story gingerbread house where every floor is the basement. And then you hear the PA announcement that the store will be closing in ten minutes and you look out the window. You haven’t made your decision yet. How did it get to be nighttime already?

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy and The Rye Whiskey Review, among others, and he has work forthcoming in The Literary Underground and Cul-de-sac-Of-Blood. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me. Interestingly, he can’t stop looking at the sky.

YOU LEFT
BY J. I. KLEINBERG

I AM

PAST COMBING

J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. An artist, poet, and freelance writer, her poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide. Chapbooks of her visual poems, How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; She needs the river (Poem Atlas) was published in 2024.

HOW TO BECOME
BY JONATHAN CHIBUKE UKAH

I was born in a river

where I left my ashes behind,

not knowing how to swim,

and against all odds,

I learned to fly;

I turn to watch the waves roll

down the mouth of the water,

scattering my ashes over the surface.

The wind is a mist like a cloud over the sky,

over a pile of leaves strewn in the wind.

The pillar of the moon dangles from the sun,

tormenting the ocean.

I shall not return to the river,

not go back to my origin,

which I ridiculed at the beginning

of my journey to nowhere;

which I have outgrown, overcome,

which I have conquered or thought I have.

This dead body, a stranger to my soul,

this phantom awaits the return of my fire,

as if my destiny mingles with the smoke,

like a basket of ash, a piece of sterile cloth.

It is not impossible to come forth,

to begin a journey, a ritual, a rite

and not know your origin;

or separate from your beginnings,

acknowledge but not bonded.

It is possible to recognise your past

without an embrace.

It's of no use using a butcher's knife

to slice the necks of the children;

not after its explosion into a tumour;

A calloused foot was once a glow,

a gloss, the pride of the body,

the citadel of dreams,

of fantasy and excellence.

A roaring fire is the ignition of ash;

I am not afraid of returning to the past,

where I mingle with my shed skin;

It's called confrontation, conquering,

when the things we left behind

become the things that erupt into a flame.

Justice is a component of similar stuff,

the merger between action and reaction,

crime and punishment, departure and return,

and the conflagration of our past into disaster.

It is not moving in a circle but a scourge of justice;

it is smiling while the grass burns, while fire rages.

A SOLACE OF SIGHS

I skip the dam into a longer road,

walk through a trench of tropical trees,

a bevvy of magnolias, a village of roses

and a family of lavenders and hibiscus.

I try to avoid the river in the dark;

everywhere I go, the river follows me,

like my heels leaving a shadow behind me,

and seems to surround the city like a wall.

I return to the dam to mow it down

with my invisible hands, heart thimbles,

I grab an axe and a sledgehammer,

but the dam regrows like a mushroom.

I press it down with my heart and mind,

my spirit claws it away with a solace of sighs.

When I return to check upon my deed,

the dam is dead, and the river buried it.

I fly my feet over the flattened ground

to find the water kindred to the sun

that licks it up, and now it's no more.

GRACE IS A MACHINE

In the meantime,

you watch the bright day turn into grey,

from the green that has become your colour,

or the gold chains lying on your laps;

the battle for your soul has just begun

and you must pick a side or break,

as time disappears from your palms,

and you lose the power to keep them,

everyone makes a ghost of your home;

you stare at the back of your hands

wondering if it was in your stars.

Your soul slides into dust like a falling leaf,

turning beauty into a wasteland, a blur,

while you take the liberty to forget the best

of those things that kept you going

when you turn your back on the world

perched on the edge, lanced with grief

about to plunge in and go the way of the lost,

an invisible hand lifts you and sets you ashore,

you will know that grace is belongs to a lift,

a machine designed for your uplifting,

that hauls your wreck from the slum pile.

When it has done its job like a chore

and you are back to the bosom of your Lord,

where you belong from the beginning,

remember to kneel and give thanks

because grace fills you with cubes of joy,

the inexhaustible factory machine of our time.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a graduate of English and Law living in the UK. Some of his poems have appeared in the Sparrows Trombone, Discretionary Love, Skylight 47 Literary, New Note Poetry, New Reader Magazine, the Sweetycat Press, State of Matter, the Journal of Undiscovered Poets, the Whisky Blot Literary Magazine, the Pierian, Compass Rose Literary, etc. His poems, A Touch of Purple and On-Street Conversation, won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest 2022, and his chapbook manuscript, The Last Anger of Man was Longlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Competition 2022. He is also a winner of the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest 2022.

INHABIT THE FISH
BY BART EDELMAN

Once you inhabit the fish,

Take a deep, long breath,

And learn to relax;

You’re home free.

Nothing more need be done.

Feel how easily each fin

Releases you from the closed space

You’d grown to resent,

When time restricted each stroke

The clock tick-tocked.

Now, swim where it pleases you.

Glide through the waterway—

Flowing silver, green, blue—

River to lake to stream.

Follow a current so calm,

You’re not aware you’re there.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023, forthcoming from Meadowlark Press. He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Fountainhead Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.

2022 (DAY 15 OF UKRAINE INVASION)
BY DUDLEY STONE

“Arm’d year, year of the struggle!

No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year.” – Walt Whitman, “1861.”

Too soon I shook off my armor

and set my warhorse free among the clover.

I was a soldier. For two pestilent years

we all were soldiers.

We huddled alone and apart while blow

after blow rained down upon us.

My love, more than anything I want

to be here now, to soften myself for you,

but our sheets too soon turn to dust

our bodies lie like the dead along civilized streets.

Open my chest, fetch my breastplate,

buckle my greaves, saddle my pale and weary horse.

You will have to wait for me, my love.

My life, you will have to wait

while I again harden my heart. 2022 is pounding

on the door, asking terrible things of me.

INVENTING PHAROH

You cower in brick-and-mortar

charnel houses that look ordinary

from the outside but for the lamb’s blood

around the porch, where Amazon

kindly leaves your pandemic packages.

The rooms are full of televisions

and snaking cables that slow down time.

You watch the world explode in one room,

then rush down the hall just in time

to catch history repeating itself.

There are plants on the windowsill

you water faithfully because every home

should have at least one living thing in it.

Dudley Stone’s poetry has recently appeared in Ars Sententia, Corvus, and Wilderness House Literary Review. In addition, his writing for the stage has been seen in theatres from California to Connecticut, and he is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. He has a B.A. in Theatre from the University of Kentucky and studied playwriting at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Mr. Stone lives in Lexington, KY.

THIN PLACE AT SLIM POINT
BY JEAN JANICKE

A spirited wind blows everything sideways,

snaps hair across your eyes so it

scratches, like the wool army

blanket we spread over the sand.

This house with a red roof and no walls

stands on a bony finger of land

pointed at the opposite shore,

marks a turning point where

you no longer battle the waves.

White paper birches lean in conspiracy

over that patch of grass, my grandmother

still stands there, pulls pilfered

cereal from her purse, stolen

at breakfast from the staff cafeteria.

Garbage bag ghosts billow

from a creaky bin where cousins anchored

makeshift sleeping bags with young bones

soft with burnt marshmallows, spooked

by flashlight-red glow under chins,

wide awake until the wind slept at dawn.

Jean Janicke lives in Washington, DC. She has a very Washington day job and finds her creative outlet through poetry and dance. Her work has appeared in Passionfruit, engine)idling, and Feral.

BRIDGE
NUALA MCEVOY

Nuala McEvoy is an English/Irish artist and writer. She draws on her memory and uses acrylics and marker pen on canvas to create her scenes. Nuala has had her work published in many reviews and her paintings have been selected as cover art for several magazines. She has also exhibited her art in Germany. She is currently preparing for an exhibition in London.

A SPIRAL ARRANGEMENT
BY KATIE KENNEY

The monkey puzzle trees

of once verdant lands, of

floral kingdoms in bloom

with piney arms reaching

up to skies where warmth

no longer waits in northwest

mist seen on Plymouth and

Pacific road adapting in

small pots of our yellow rooms

spiny leaves to bud brilliantly

for the grazing have gone

in that icy blaze, we watch

it grow inch by inch

as time swallows up

one thousand years

Katie Kenney is a writer from Northern California. She studied publishing at University of Denver's Publishing Institute and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University. Her poems have appeared in Grub Street Literary Magazine, Merion West, Beneath the Garden Magazine among others. She lives in New England with her cat Mabel.

IN RETIREMENT SUNLIGHT FALLS / BLACKBIRDS HANG
BY JOHN K. KRUSCHKE

In retirement, sunlight falls
like cherry blossom petals, floating
into drifts of pastel luminescence,
soft’ning corners in curvaceous glow,
and when I raise my arms,
corollas swarm
to form angelic wings.

Heaven’s merfolk spout
celestial dew
that trickles, gently off
my glass umbrella,
tickles near my sandaled feet.
My silken robes are lined
with thousand
puckered lips in secret

kissing and caressing
ev’ry moment of my smoothly satin skin,
and when I part my lips
to speak, emerges only
laughter, chuckles, chortles,
pausing, raptured, to inhale
sweet redolent gardenias.
Mouth forever fed with honey,
leaves of mint protrude, perennial grin.

The fruit trees overhead are flocked
with starry galaxies
rotating, each one singing
like Tibetan bowls.
Before me flows a tiding ocean
of chinchillas,
parting as I stroll
and nuzzling both my ankles
with their zephyr surf of fur.

And in my wake,
sequoias sprout
from russet loam
through sylvan mist
to cirrus sky.

II.

In retirement, blackbirds hang
like fruit rot, upside down,
inscrutable and hollow,
watching me with beady onyx eyes,
their charcoal feathers molting

onto root-entangled railroad tracks
on which I tread. I flounder past
a stalled commuter train,
its doors ajar and windows parted;
inside hang stalactites
pinning down
stalagmite-crusted passengers,
the hapless few who stayed

my friends.
Tornadic bats swarm overhead,
my shadow flickers, phantom, blurs;
my feet|feet catch on creosote crossties.
Rails conclude at wasteland’s end,
the lighthouse, toppled now,
a scree of headstones marking
vertebrae of spiral staircase
climbing up chiropteran sky.

On the dock of doldrum ocean,
mammoth pace clock faces outward to the sea;
converge the ashen swimmers, darkly goggled,
turn our backs against the shore,
and crawl-stroking away through fetid kelp,
we drag behind, each one of us,
a tow-float swim-buoy
made of block of ice,
once finely sculpted, melting now,
dissolving figures
of our dogs
or cats
or lovers.

John K. Kruschke has poems published or accepted in Blue Unicorn, The Tipton Poetry Journal, The Lake, Flying Island Literary Journal, Pine Hills Review, Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Stickman Review, Discretionary Love, Grand Little Things, and Sage Magazine (x 4), along with 25 quatrains as chapter epigraphs. He has also published numerous articles in scientific journals on topics ranging across moral psychology, learning theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is Provost Professor Emeritus at Indiana University in Bloomington. johnkruschke.com/poems.html

BLACK DOTS
MYKYTA RYZHYKH

***

Black dots grow on the body

•••

The cemetery chooses a rainy name

○○○

The iron water of the sky falls on the skull

Ull ull ull

Dots are torn to pieces of people killed in the back of the head

×××

What can world poetry tell about?

^^^

Sugar birds of letters are flying on paper

~~~

Black dots grow on the body of mankind

***

A drawing of rain on the pavement is trying to make out the child

Mushrooms grow after rain

The pathology of happiness is universal for all

Nuclear bomb rain over the future corpse of Hiroshima

***

trees are washed only by tears

the madness of the summer sun bites the back of the head

but the cemetery is still cold

Mykyta Ryzhykh is the winner of the international competition Art Against Drugs and ukrainian contests Vytoky, Shoduarivska Altanka, Khortytsky dzvony; laureate of the literary competition named after Tyutyunnik, Lyceum, Twelve, named after Dragomoshchenko. Nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Literature Factory, Literary Chernihiv, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals Litсenter, Ice Floe Press

IN OUT OF THE RAIN
BY JOHN GREY

Around Murk Mountain,

clouds romp together,

gray and murky,

rivers collide a mere splash from the bay.

Rough rain strafes rock and footpath alike.

Lightning snaps a bough.

Windows shake like death row inmates.

Thunder terrorizes the rooftop nails.

The elms believe we are at war.

I’m trying to make it home

from a night at the bar,

lean into the weather

as wind does its best to scatter me.

Should have stayed where I was

but I’d run out of excuses.

Should have kept myself

dryer on the outside, wetter within.

But guilt doesn’t know from blustering,

from that rivet gun of drops

blasting into the asphalt.

She’ll be at the window,

patient and poised.

Her hair won’t be blowing like mine is.

She’ll be warm from the fireplace,

even if her gaze is out there in the night,

shifting wildly like sails,

splitting into rivulets

or ganging up in puddles.

I’m almost within eyesight,

a bedraggled figure

softened up like an overmatched fighter.

At least my look will beg for forgiveness

even before I get a word out.

She’ll be calm.

I’ll be why calm still has work to do.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.

WEARIED AND WORRIED
BY BOB CARLTON

They (the trees,

the metal roofs,

rain itself,

color of air

and sky, all

shades of gray)

fill my mind

with thoughts of

your absence,

the silence

that could be

indifference, or maybe

something worse.

Gray upon gray,

the parking lot

and the cars

of all colors

coming and going,

all gray

moving in the

gray wind.

Chilled green grass

under

the gray ice

through the gray glass

all throughout

this strange

blue day.

...CLUTCH AT SOMETHING

clutch at something

in the night

no matter

what it is

these late days

nothing is there

and no harm comes

from grasping

that

I HAVE BEEN FORCED...

I have been forced

to use

these second

hand devices

the doctor’s office

strips me

of certainty

the knowledge

of my own body

finally unknowable

Bob Carlton (@bobcarlton3.bsky.social) lives and works in Leander, TX.

MOONLIGHT AT NOON (AFTERLIFE)
BY ROBERT OKAJI

My strength wanes even as the moon

looms larger. I wish this were metaphor.

I wish a vocabulary consisting of twigs

and opioid threads existed in this context,

with a lexicon of tender fingers to unravel

the strain. Two weeks ago the tumor

cattle-prodded a nerve, rendering me incapable

of clearing my throat, of speech.

How much time do I have?

This lung mass is a black hole, a neglected

folly. A knot in a string of promises

left unspoken. Last night Stephanie knuckled

the rigid muscle along my spine, searching for a way

in. Today I turn to the birds for insight, for clarity.

Why holds no meaning to victims of the inevitable.

Again, we watch the male cardinal feed a juvenile

cowbird without hint of reprobation, no thought

of political morality. It simply is. Like

gravity and time. Like love and hope. Like

my impending death and what comes after.

Robert Okaji has late stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. He lives, for the time being, in Indianapolis with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper— stepson, cat and dog. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, was released by 3: A Taos Press in January 2025. His poetry may be found in Shō Poetry Journal, Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Vox Populi and other venues, including his blog, O at the Edges.

HERE AND THERE
BY MARY PATERSON

Delicious sky this morning - pink

as a cat’s tongue, but you can’t see it

from here; here, the view is silver,

damp later, contrails bisecting dusk

from day. Foxes crack chicken

bones against their jaws. Police cars

wail. If I had a different kind of body

I would let it fall

from the fifth floor, fall

and let the brisk wind catch me, stretch

my edges into the cold, find myself

alive

at the steeple of the empty tree

and there - there,

beak bright with good news,

I would shriek the sunrise.

FIRST WORD

was doctor, and it meant

‘I need help’ and ‘I need something

to change.’ It remained

the only word for ages.

(Our forebears were simple creatures.

‘Doctor!’ they said, as their fingers pulsed with puncture wounds.

‘Doctor!’’ they said, as a twig snapped in the twilight.

‘Doctor, doctor!’ they said, as they ground wheat with two stones.

And so the first joke, naturally, arose.

‘Doctor, doctor!’ they said, their laughter filled with teeth, glinting.

‘Doctor, doctor!’, until the sounds carried no meaning,

the embers of the fire sucked in the last of the ancient souls.

The next day there came the second word

(whose identity is as yet undiscovered), then

a flood of the things:

this way, that way, yadda yadda,

some words dead some words kept

alive, tapped from palm to palm, life

leaching from their broken hearts.

Stronger words ate the weaker words,

belched out some more.

You should have heard the canopy of the forest screech,

and the laughter.

And the sobbing.

You know the rest: gossip,

books, the printing press, the internet,

compound words like letterpress

and bootycall and fancy words like

hazardous and etiquette in a tumble

until you get to me, holding

a child who is awake too late.

He says, ‘tobacco’, in a fragile voice.

It is his favourite sound. ‘Tobacco,

Tobacco.’ I know precisely what he means. I will sing

this poison till he sleeps.) We long

for wordless dreams.

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London. She makes art with communities in public spaces, and is currently Head of Arts for a series of London hospitals. She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Cutbow Quarterly.

CONTENTS

Letter From The Editor

Vol. 10

MEMORY TAKES A TRAIN BY KUSHAL PODAR

NIGHT VISION BY CHANGMING YUAN

TWINS BY FABRICE B. POUSSIN

ROSARY OF THE PHOSPORESCENT BY RICH BOUCHER

CORKSCREWS AND CORKSCREWS ONLY

YOU LEFT BY J. I. KLEINBERG

I AM

PAST COMBING

HOW TO BECOME BY JONATHAN CHIBUKE UKAH

A SOLACE OF SIGHS

GRACE IS A MACHINE

INHABIT THE FISH BY BART EDELMAN

2022 (DAY 15 OF UKRAINE INVASION) BY DUDLEY STONE