CONTENTS
# "All Spare Parts are Still Warm" by Kumar Sen
# "Made for the Wide" by Kiminou Knox
# "Swinging Around" by Russ Bickerstaff
# "Errant Minutes" and "Middle of Somewhere" by Sally Lee
# "I Almost Said It" by Lauren Kim
# "Remembering the Names" by Matthew Spence
# "Brown Bear" by Cameron Rife
# "Pinecones" by Bella Melardi
# "Butterfly Isle" by Brenda Mox
# "Colossal" by Lisa Hartsgrove
# "Sharing Shade" by Matt Cilderman
# "Portrait" by Thomas Saunders
# "Requiting Prufrock" by Sajah Francesca
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
Volume 14 has arrived with summer in its veins. This collection is alive with invention, with luminosity and with pure wonder. From page to page this volume scintilates; a teaming biosphere of poetry and prose, a vibrant reef of literature in the great ocean of online content, a space increasingly contaminated with pop-ups, deepfakes, pervasive big corp agenda and great floating garbage patches of AI refuse.
At Spare Parts Literary we are so proud every time we put out a new volume. It is true that it is no small feat to keep an unfinanced independent publication afloat, but this magazine is buoyant with renewed fervour with every new wave of submissions, every dazzling discovery and every completed volume shared with our readers across the world.
It is with giddy anticipation we welcome you to the pages of Spare Parts Literary Volume 14, come dive into this extraordinary treasure trove.
Oak Ayling
Oak Ayling
Vol. 14
ALL SPARE PARTS ARE STILL WARM
by Kumar Sen
We do not accept whole things.
No complete hearts. No intact childhoods. No marriages that still technically function. Only what’s left over. Only what won’t sit right inside you anymore.
Bring us the excess. The malfunction. The almost. Label it if you can. If you can’t, we’ll name it for you.
We’re very good at naming what people have lost.
A man brought in the last ten seconds before his wife said I never loved you.
He wanted them sharpened. “I think there was a warning,” he said. “Something in her mouth, the way it moved. I missed it.”
We played it back for him, slowed it down, frame by frame. Her lips hesitate. Not much. Less than a second.
“See?” he said, leaning in. “There. That’s where it broke.”
He bought those seconds back, cleaned and polished, and left the rest behind. We sold the rest to someone who needed proof that love can end without a sound.
A girl—maybe eight, maybe older, it’s hard to tell with children—brought us a pocket full of laughter.
Not hers.
“It follows me,” she said. “Even when I’m alone.”
We poured it out on the counter. It scattered, bright and sharp.
“Where did you get this?”
She shrugged. “I think it used to belong to my house.”
We kept half for display. The other half we dampened, wrapped, and sent with her. You shouldn’t take everything away from someone at once.
Someone once brought us a name they could no longer respond to.
We tested it—called it from the back room, whispered it into corners, wrote it on paper and held it up to the light.
Nothing.
“No attachment,” my coworker said. “Completely severed.”
The customer watched, expressionless. “Will someone else use it?” they asked.
“Eventually,” I said. “Names like to belong.”
They nodded. “Good.” They did not leave another.
Things don’t sit still here. That’s the first mistake people make when they imagine a place like this.
They think shelves. Boxes. Order.
But spare parts—real ones—shift.
The almost-apology in Drawer 6 has been trying to complete itself for weeks, adding words we didn’t authorize. The unused goodbye near the window fades every afternoon, then comes back stronger at night.
There’s a smell we can’t locate—something like rain hitting hot metal, or the exact second a body decides not to scream. We tried to catalogue it. It refused a number.
We don’t take guilt. Too adhesive. It sticks to everything else, ruins the inventory.
We don’t take first loves. They arrive already mythologized, swollen beyond use.
We don’t take anything still growing.
A boy once tried to leave us his anger. We locked it overnight and came back to find it had doubled in size, pressed against the glass like something breathing. We let it go.
Some things aren’t spare. Some things are engines.
My coworker has been here longer than the system we use now—long enough to remember when people brought in physical things: watches, radios, teeth.
“Cleaner, then,” they say. “You could point to what was broken.”
They don’t bring anything of their own.
I asked once, casually, like it didn’t matter. “Don’t you have spares?”
They smiled. Not kindly. “I learned early that if you start removing pieces, you don’t always notice what goes missing next.”
I didn’t ask again. But sometimes, when they think I’m not looking, they press their fingers to their throat, as if checking whether something had been taken, or if it had always been missing.
You would like her. Everyone does.
She came in with nothing visible, which usually means the worst kind of inventory.
“I think I misplaced something,” she said.
“What kind of something?”
“A future,” she said, like she was trying out the word.
We get that sometimes. People confuse futures with plans, or plans with fantasies.
“Describe it,” I said.
She closed her eyes. “It was small, but it fit. I could carry it without noticing the weight.”
“Where did you last have it?”
She smiled. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
We checked the back. Nothing labelled future. Nothing even close.
“What will you take instead?” I asked.
She thought for a long time. “Something that ends,” she said finally. “Cleanly.”
We showed her our selection. She chose a goodbye that closes doors without slamming them—very popular, rarely used correctly.
Before she left, she paused. “If you find it,” she said, “don’t hold it for me.”
“Why not?”
“Because if it’s really mine,” she said, “I won’t recognize it anymore.”
We keep a list now—things that don’t belong to anyone anymore, but aren’t ready to belong to someone else.
A promise that was never spoken aloud but somehow still broke. A version of a face that only appears in dreams. Three different almost-kisses, none compatible with each other. The exact moment someone realized they were the difficult one.
We don’t display these.
They watch back.
Yesterday, something left without permission.
We’re still not sure what. No broken locks. No forced drawers. Just—absence.
You’d think we’d notice immediately. That’s the job. But it took hours before the air felt wrong—like a sentence missing its verb, like a body standing without balance.
My coworker walked the floor twice, then stopped. “It’s mine,” they said.
I waited.
They didn’t elaborate.
“What was it?” I asked.
They looked at me like the question didn’t make sense. “I don’t know,” they said.
And that was when I understood.
We are adjusting. We always do.
Customers still come. They always will.
Today, someone brought in the sound of their own voice from years ago—higher, unbroken. They want to know if we can make it usable again.
Maybe. Maybe not.
In the back, something keeps almost forming, then stopping.
My coworker hasn’t touched their throat today.
I have started labelling things more carefully—not because it helps, but because I don’t remember if anything here was ever mine.
We are not responsible for what you become after removal.
We are not responsible for what grows in the space left behind.
We are not responsible if you return and find nothing recognizes you.
All transactions are final. All absences are permanent.
All spare parts are still warm. Some of them are still trying to go back.
Kumar Sen is a mathematician from India. His writing is drawn to misrecognition, cultural reflection, and the strange logic of ordinary life. He is also a musician, composer, and bibliophile, interested in patterns that appear where they shouldn’t.
CORPUS
By m. e. gamlem
The stench of {old body} was removed when the carpets were pulled up
the cold concealed was released from my concrete base and the nail pops
echoed through my skull as my wooden bones contracted and squeezed
the steel out of the holes where they had been buried by hammers
They took saw and blade and grinder and sander and hammer and driver
and drill and wrench and chisel to every inch of me plastering back into
place the new parts and pieces and did so with haste and now all that is
inside is ill fitting and uncomfortable and I cannot move or shake free
My interior runs crooked, slanted, warped and nothing is appropriately
secured, just jury-rigged parts and pieces overlapping with haphazard
glue and caulking holding every adjacent and bisecting part of my now
weary skeleton in place so that maybe I stand up against the elements
For two years I lay mostly empty with only the occasional soft foot
steps of potential {bodies} who considered becoming the footsteps of
my mind, trampling across the floorboards turning on the faucets open
my mouths and eyes rubbing hands across the organs of marble and wood
Hours and hours would go by where the glow from inside illuminated
the world at all hours but otherwise it was silent inside my mind nothing
stirred or moved about but the occasional rattle of my lungs spinning hot
or cold air through my veins and around the empty space of my rooms
Entrances and exits were made again and again by uncertain {bodies} that
spoke with critical and unsure voices unable to commit to occupation
of what I had to offer but I hoped no one would say yes to filling me with
heavy {objects} to press against the open space of my empty belly
Now there is [feline] and uric acid that seeps up through my plaster skin
when [animal] is dissatisfied and relieves herself in my quiet corners
my bones reek of ammonia which is released by the summer heat yet the
stucco is not porous enough for the scent of waste to escape me
{New body} lays on {objects} for hours at a time, always staring at screens
the glow of lights touches me in places I wish it wouldn’t radiant blue
is all I am able to feel the images fade in the air between the projections
and the foundation what is absorbed by the weight of {objects} is little
{New body} has heavy steps but they do not patter or stamp or skip or
run they trudge on my surfaces tracking the dirt from one space to the
next they press dust and mud and hair and detritus [insect] carcass across
my belly sometimes they suck the infection they bring in on rare occasion
When {new body} opens one of my mouths and leaves I take in precious
breath of the fresh air that surrounds me trying to fill the caverns and cracks
with as much oxygen as is let in sometimes they open a mouth or eye shields
but not as often as they need the stench within lessens its grip and relief sets in
m.e. gamlem is a non-binary queer writer from New Mexico. They are a MFA candidate in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Their work most recently appears or is forthcoming in The Potomac Review, Mouth Full of Salt, ANARKISS, Dogwater, and Screen Door Review.
Instagram: @megamlem
MADE FOR THE WIDE
By Kiminou Knox
I escaped this cage the quiet way,
movie lights asleep, applause held back,
just breath and grit, just knees and nerve.
I slipped out with rust on the tips of my feathers,
metal taste on my tongue,
a fresh scrape on my shoulder,
bars still warm from my hands.
Freedom charges skin first.
It takes a piece of the body
and turns it into proof.
My wings lived folded in apology,
years of hush, years of small,
fear packed tight like a fist in the bone.
I stepped into air and the air felt heavy,
like sunlight held a clipboard,
like the sky had rules for my joy.
The gate stayed open a long time,
and danger stayed active.
The free bird talks breeze and trees,
talks dawn like it arrives on schedule,
smiles at a worm like the world belongs to him.
I am learning what safety feels like,
learning how my shoulders can drop
and stay dropped.
Out here the cages come quiet and slick.
They look like forms that cut your fingers,
paper thin, paper sharp.
They look like a job that wants labor, not names,
a badge that says employee and erases your story.
They look like love that keeps score,
love that turns tenderness into leverage.
They draft the lease and keep the ground,
they praise the sound and swallow the riot.
I fly because my grandmother’s prayers had teeth,
she bit through iron with a whisper,
she buried a blade inside the amen.
My mother built shelter out of thin air
and taught me living takes courage every morning.
I promised the child who learned darkness early,
I would turn every wound into a flying mark.
I sing with my choices, I sing with my yes,
I sing with the doors I close on purpose,
I sing with the places I protect my spirit from.
Some nights my shadow still wakes behind bars,
jumps at a creak, scans the ceiling,
counts footsteps that belong to nobody.
Old songs still sit in my throat,
the same vessel that kept me afloat.
So I sing different now,
for brothers and sisters hungry for air,
for the ones who pace a room like a sentence,
for the ones who learned silence as a language.
Every note I belt, every word I shape,
a rope thrown over the walls of time,
and I pull, and I pull, till the hinges collide.
I was made for the wide.
Kiminou Knox is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. kiminouknox.com
SWINGING AROUND
By Russ Bickerstaff
There's a stumble in a fall. I feel like I'm blinding myself ever and ever more closer to the concrete. The sidewalk. But everything seems to be slowing down as I do so. And this makes perfect sense. I mean, it's always happens when this sort of thing happens, right? It's the adrenaline that's running through your system. Suddenly, your mind slows everything down so that you're able catch everything. And those who are more likely to be able to respond to that sort of thing we're more likely to be able to respond to reproduce. To survive.
And so I'm engaging in that moment. That moment of near death where you're able to see everything. But it's not really deaf, is it? I mean the worst that could happen would be me hitting my face on the sidewalk. And so I'm not really using this sort of thing for its full effect. But I know that there's a chemical that's running through my body as this sidewalk it's ever closer and I get closer to the sidewalk. More and more horizontal as things progress. But I'm not quite there. I'm not quite aware. I'm going to be where I'm falling. And clearly I need to do something.
There's all of this built in survival instincts. And for the most part you're not ever using it. But it's just part of your basic package. Part of your basic programming. The whole bundle that you come with evolutionarily speaking. And I feel kind of weird, just using it to observe my surroundings and not actually survive or whatever. But again, it's not like I'm going to be able to die from that or anything like that. So hitting that concrete isn't really going to do anything for me. I mean, it's not going to do anything other than maybe it caused a slight bruise.
However, if I move my body in just the right way, I'm probably not going to hit it in a way that's necessarily going to cause a bruise or even that much pain. And so maybe I can use this built-in technology to be able to adjust my body in just the right way so that I'll be able to not quite hurt as much when I hit the ground. Of course, there's a whole question of maybe just stumbling and not even falling at all. I think that might actually be something that I would almost be able to do under the circumstances.
My body is moving in various directions that are also very instinctive. I mean, I know that my arms are being thrown out ahead of me. And that's not necessarily me doing that. That's evolution. Or more accurately, my central nervous system under the influence of evolution or whatever. But I mean, the fact that my arms are doing that it's sort of an expression of survival. It's something that has been echoing back since the dawn of time. And so it feels kind of weird. It feels kind of weird being in this position where I'm trying to understand what it is that's going on and I think I am on some level, but I really don't know.
But it feels like there's something off about the whole situation. Because it really feels like my arms are already beginning to move through space. And they're beginning to move through the sidewalk. And I'm not sure that I feel necessarily very good about that. And I'm not sure that I necessarily feel like that's probably a very good thing under the circumstances. But I just don't know. And so I can feel maybe my upper arms now moving through the concrete. Moving through the sidewalk.
I guess I would assume that if this was happening, it would be wet cement or something like that. But it's as though the space between the atoms in the sidewalk just aren't there. So maybe the space between the atoms in my arm system aren't there. Maybe it's all just a single block. And so if it's all a single block, then there's really no way that the group of them could bounce into each other or anything like that. I don't know.
Maybe I'm just thinking about it too much. Maybe it's all space between the atoms. And I'm just shoving myself through it all. I mean, that would make a little bit more sense, wouldn't it? Of course, none of this makes sense at all. After all, normally I would just hit the sidewalk and not be sliding through the way that I am. But I feel as though my thoughts are a little confused. Because my head is moving through the sidewalk as well. And so there's a lot of concrete moving through the atoms in the synapsis in my brain. And that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense either.
I think it's entirely possible, but the situation is that my mind isn't necessarily making a whole lot of sense because it's being filtered through all of this concrete. And my entire body is swinging through all of the concrete now. I mean, the momentum is continuing. And I feel a little bit strange about that. Because I know now that even as I'm experiencing the world underneath this sidewalk, I am beginning to emerge on the other side. Like there was enough momentum for me to emerge on the other side and I'm beginning to feel like I can steady myself having past through the sidewalk. Spun around and a complete circle on a single axis or whatever. Now I'm standing on the sidewalk. I was tripping before. I was falling into the sidewalk and then I fell through it and came out on the other side. I don't know that anyone else noticed. But I think that's probably for the best. Because I don't think that I'd wanna have to explain what just happened. And I get the feeling people would want me to explain it.
ERRANT MINUTES
By Sally Lee
This morning lasted four seconds—
long enough for light to change its mind,
for the pot to think of boiling,
and forget.
Steam from the mug hadn’t even reached its curve
before light slipped from the table
and onto the wall,
then off again.
Voice folded into the air,
before the phone could ring its tune.
It waited there—
certain, I would need it later.
As light finally held still,
and my reflection—
breathing where I’d left it.
The air stiffened
and across that pause,
something small and weightless unfolded in my hands—
not sound,
but just the quiet after it.
MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE
Vaguely behind every winter of ambition
Their eyes warm, and cookies sleep deeply through problems
Hard-boiled eggs and children stretching
And the days try not to half
Playing football in a science school
You try to fit in a cool shirt, overdressed, overqualified
Youth cooled down while you put your ti—around your neck—red
Spring cheats with a smile where passion left
Spotted beard pretends to know
Wake up to midlife
Crisis baked and served
Problems with morning cereal
Laundry worn too many times
White lies
Small sigh of relief or reminisce
Sally Lee is a student at an international school in Seoul, South Korea. Immersed in a multicultural environment, she draws inspiration from the diverse cultures and experiences around her. She is currently working on her writing portfolio.
I ALMOST SAID IT
By Lauren Kim
The cracks in the paint
on the ceiling
was partially scraped off
Revealing the bare gray concrete
I almost asked for help
My finger dialed a familiar number
That has been lingering in my head
Since the day you disappeared
I hovered above the green button
The room was empty
the disgusting solitary
Reminded the warmth
Once pressed upon the shoulder
by the weight of your head
The walls seemed too white
once shaded
with two orange shadows
at sunset
The water in the glass
remained still and untouched
Subtly reflecting my face
Too colorless to be shown
Lauren Kim is a high school student with a fervent love for both poetry and visual art. Her work delves into the intricacies of identity, the nuances of nature, and the emotional currents of teenage life. Through her poems and mixed media artwork, Lauren seeks to capture and convey the beauty in moments of introspection and everyday experiences. When she's not writing or creating art, she enjoys exploring the outdoors, reading contemporary poetry, and experimenting with new artistic techniques. Lauren's work has been influenced by her diverse cultural background and her deep connection to the natural world. She aspires to continue growing as an artist and a writer, sharing her unique perspective with others.
REMEMBERING THE NAMES
By Matthew Spence
We forget the names of our ancestors.
The ones they had before they came here—before the ships, before Ellis Island or Angel Island, before the ink of a clerk’s pen sliced off syllables too strange for the new world’s tongue. They changed them to “fit in.” We forget that those names had their own gravity, their own cadence and weight, their own history echoing down through centuries of breath and prayer.
We forget that the names meant something once—Son of, Daughter of, Born by the River, Keeper of the Gate. They were poems once, before they became passwords and forms of identification. They were maps of who we were.
But we let them go.
We traded the music of vowels for something more acceptable, something that wouldn’t get us mocked in school or stared at in interviews. The names faded, and with them, a thousand years of meaning.
We forget, and we become homogenized. Bastardized. Blended until there’s nothing left but a dull sameness, an unmarked crowd of Smiths and Johnsons and Millers.
And then something happens—something that makes us remember.
It happens in quiet ways, usually. Not through revelation or prophecy, but through paperwork. A question on a medical form. A conversation at a doctor’s office.
They ask for your family history.
You hesitate, because you don’t know how far back that history goes—or where it begins. You mention your mother’s arthritis, your father’s high blood pressure. You think of grandparents you never met, their portraits lost in boxes or in basements. But then the doctor asks a different question:
“Any history of genetic disorders in your family?”
And you realize you don’t know.
That’s when the old names start to stir.
The genes remember what you do not. They whisper through your blood, reminding you that you came from somewhere older than this place, older than these names. Your body carries the memory your mind discarded. A hint in a blood test, a mutation common to a people whose name you thought was lost.
You go home and start digging.
You search the internet first—records, archives, ancestry databases. You find fragments: a baptismal record written in a script that’s barely legible, a ship’s manifest, a letter addressed to a name that is almost but not quite your own. You realize that your family name wasn’t always what it is. It was something rounder, fuller, filled with the sounds of another language.
You find old daguerreotypes in a box that smells faintly of mildew and cedar. The faces stare back at you—people who share your eyes, your hands, your sorrow. You find diaries in cramped handwriting, pages written by candlelight. They speak of hunger, of leaving home, of changing names so their children might not starve.
You read and read, and the letters blur.
But somewhere in that blur, the lost names begin to return.
You say them out loud at first, haltingly, afraid you’ll mispronounce them. But as you do, they begin to feel familiar—like something long asleep waking up inside your mouth. You can almost hear your ancestors speaking them, the sounds of their laughter and their grief.
You start to dream of them.
They appear in the strange hours of the night—farmers, soldiers, weavers, healers. They say your name, and then theirs, and for a moment, you can tell where one ends and the other begins. You wake with a feeling not of fear, but of recognition.
You begin to write them down—the names, the stories, the fragments. You trace them backward across continents and centuries, until you find the place where your lineage began. It’s not just genealogy—it’s resurrection.
You realize that remembering isn’t just an act of nostalgia. It’s a rebellion against erasure.
Because when you remember the names, you remember the lives attached to them—the voices that spoke, the hands that built, the blood that endured. You remember that you are not only the sum of your parents, but the living continuation of something far older and more resilient than the world that renamed you.
You remember that even when we forget, the body remembers. The cells remember. The bones remember.
And that’s how you remember.
By speaking their names again—
and in doing so, becoming whole.
Matthew was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His work has most recently been published in Crooked Spine.
BROWN BEAR
By Cameron Rife
It wasn’t until my eyelids were
batting the sign—big,
red and I had
no choice but to sit
with the crimson cherry tree—
haste contemplated,
guilt and pleasure known
beneath my hazel eyes.
There I heard the old farmer whistle
from miles away.
We all knew what he was saying.
We all knew what had lived within him,
though he never spoke any words.
That’s when I decided
I would follow suit,
plop my own seed into the earth
to look up amongst
a beige filled plain.
There—
I could finally hear
the sunrise belt,
feel
the deep brown bear
growl back.
Cameron Rife is a poet living in Denver, Colorado. Cameron finds expression from a deeper part of herself through writing and draws inspiration from nature and human experiences less openly discussed. Cameron is also passionate about mental health working in a pediatric psychiatric unit and is currently obtaining her masters degree in counseling. You can find more of her writing in Ink Nest Poetry, Merion West, Roi Faineant Press, Last Leaves Magazine and on her Instagram-@camrifepoetry.
PINECONES
By Bella Melardi
Is it better
to cup the burning,
to wake each morning already ash-tongued,
waiting for the hour your body
dimly constellates itself into ruin,
a graveyard flickering with small, exhausted suns,
or is it better
to carry nothing,
hands rinsed clean of wanting?
I have wanted to etch something into the world
only to watch it leave me.
To love a thing so near
it learns the language of distance.
Tell me,
do pinecones ache in their branches,
dreaming of the ground they cannot yet touch?
Do they call the tight clasp of wood
safety,
or do they feel the shape of a cage forming
around their quiet insistence to fall?
I have built my own enclosure carefully,
fingertip by fingertip,
threaded grief through wire,
dragged my softness across its teeth
and called the breaking
a kind of living.
Look at me,
how I cling,
how I spill open,
how I make a ritual of ache,
listening at the small hollow of your collarbone
for the things you press down into silence.
You call them monstrous.
Still, they lull me,
low and trembling,
into sleep.
So I climb,
into the high, uncertain arms of trees,
where the air thins into something almost holy,
and I shake the branches,
again, again,
until something loosens.
Until I can believe
my touch is not a prison.
That it can be permission.
You asked me
why I hold you
like something already leaving.
I told you,
pinecones are full of longing for gravity,
for the sudden mercy of descent,
for the brief, brutal kindness
of striking earth,
for becoming, at last,
the very thing
we spend our whole lives
Trying not to become
Bella Melardi is a poet and author. She writes about the political and personal. She attends OCADU.
THE BULL
By Ben Fowlkes
Jake LaMotta later said he fought like he didn’t deserve to live.
He didn’t realize that at the time, of course. Or maybe he did
and just didn’t have the words yet. Maybe he mistook pathology
for personal style and sure fine maybe he’s not the only one.
This flat-nosed kid from the Bronx who’d plant himself six inches from your face
and could not be convinced to take a backward step or let you have a single untroubled
breath. There was that time California Jackie Wilson came in as a 3-1 favorite
and went out, LaMotta said, “a sadder but wiser man.” Then that time
he fought Sugar Ray twice in one month and each time it would look
like Ray was running away with it early and some of the greener newspaper
hacks started hammering out their stories before the gin-soaked vets
stopped them and said, What ain’t you guys ever seen a LaMotta fight before?
Those years he spent in Midwestern obscurity because
he wouldn’t play ball with the New York mob until finally he did.
Then later the hours spent bashing his head and his hands against the wall
of a prison cell after he’d finally fucked his life up good enough to stick.
For LaMotta the punishment was always the point. He hated himself
too much to win easy and he never did learn to trust happiness enough
not to stomp on it himself before someone else could take it from him.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere if you can find it and even
if you can’t that doesn’t mean it won’t find you.
Ben Fowlkes works as a sports writer covering the world of professional fighting for Yahoo Sports and Uncrowned. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Glimmer Train, Best American Short Stories, Eunoia Review, Pinhole Poetry, and elsewhere. He's worked as a sports journalist for nearly 20 years, writing for outlets such as The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, USA Today and others. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
HOLES
By Travis Koll
I can barely see Charlie anymore. He’s been digging holes in the backyard for months. Every day. Early on, his spindly arms could barely work more than a few minutes before failing. Now, he spends all day outside shoveling.
And he isn’t alone. Every teenager in the neighborhood does the same. I see them during my morning drive to work: digging up the schoolyard’s dead grass, tearing out their parents’ rose bushes and shoveling beneath them, scratching at the gravel-covered ground on the roadside with bloody fingernails. They remind me of hounds clawing at a spot of empty pavement where roadkill once lay. The smell of a tasty meal lingers, but there’s nothing left of it.
These days, shovels and picks are the nation’s most popular graduation gifts. Three for the price of two down the street! Buckets not included. No returns or refunds. Some parents can only give their kids spades or sharp sticks, and others don’t even get that.
Charlie told me that Angela’s dad gave her an excavator for her birthday, but she still didn’t find anything, so her father hired a crew who showed her how to work the controls. Nothing still. Eric, his friend, begged his mother to dig his latest hole for him, and she took to it with ferocious determination. For a moment last week, they thought they’d finally discovered something, but it turned out to be nothing at all. Fool’s gold.
Back when I was his age, I dug and sweated and clawed, too. So did my parents and their parents and their parents before them: holes deep as ravines, some chiseled through granite and crowded with bodies. And I tell Charlie this often, but he shrugs, insists things now are different, returns to his latest hole, and jumps in. But there’s nothing at the bottom of it. Just more dirt. Enough to swallow him up if he isn’t careful.
Yesterday, at a morning sales meeting, I spoke with a coworker who lamented her daughter’s laziness and lack of skill with a shovel. Side-eying us, the presenter droned on about falling sales figures and how we’re way below management’s expectations. Finally, he snapped and scolded us, but he then confessed that his own boy refused to dig anymore. Somebody filled his hole with garbage-sticky soil and buried him. The boy barely dug himself out, and now he’s covered in earth and coughing up mud.
When I got home that evening, I wandered into the backyard and shouted down to Charlie, but he was too deep to hear me. Our elderly neighbors peered over the fence, snickered, and told me to remind my boy that hard work pays off, that they’re proof of it. But I’m starting to worry Charlie won’t find anything down there. Just bottomless dirt and clay.
Travis Koll is an English professor originally from California’s San Joaquin Valley and is the author of books like Better Writing: Beyond Periods and Commas and the Sultan. Besides writing, he enjoys martial arts, cooking, and spending time with his wife and son.
ONE WAY
By Amanda Trout
The blackwhite sign tells you there is nowhere to go but forward. It points to a tree-lined abyss here, its companion road angled at forty-five degrees, leaves dappling the light into pseudo-coin slivers against the pavement. You pass the abyss three times as you walk the Riverside Park Oval, watch as cars diverge from the Oval’s bidirectional lanes into a slow descent, automatic headlights plinking on when the shadows grow too thick then disappearing into the sprawl of the forest. Three times you pass the abyss and its calm wilderness calls, leaves and cliffside juxtaposed to the harsh asphalt under your feet. Three times you pass the abyss as the sun sets. You think of your house on Fifth Street, warmed by the sun probably streaming through the windows all day. You think of your cat basking in the sunbeams and how you wouldn’t mind doing the same if the sills were bigger. You think and the nip of impending cold front against exposed ears scrambles your thoughts as they emerge. You see the blackwhite sign. It tells you there is nowhere to go but forward.
Your feet slip from the Oval onto the One Way, from halogen glow to shadow and dwindling sun. The asphalt slips too, from freshly poured to old and creviced. You trace the cracks with your shoes. You kick loose stones and they roll from you like the prey they are, fleeing to the ditches or tumbling off the cliff face. Below you, the Vertigris River flows towards the water treatment plant, where it will be chemicaled and divided between the ten-thousand citizens that buy their water from the city. You recognize that this includes you, for a moment, but the thought is stolen by birds scattering from the trees above. Their swarming fragments the light more until it dots against bark, asphalt, and fencepost like a Pollock painting.
The road winds and you wind with it. The lack of children screaming from the top of the park’s large jungle gym reminds you why you left home in the first place. There, your body hunched in your leather armchair as your fingers flicked through videos on TikTok. There’d been something on the TV too—Dance Moms maybe? Iron Chef?—but your brain refused to bring any image past your phone into focus. It took one of TikTok’s nagging time-awareness ads and a sudden perception of pain radiating from your compressed hips to rip your gaze away from the screen. Everything else was automatic after that: a coat snugged over sweatshirt and sweatpants, a crouch under the rising garage door and into sunlight, a brisk walk to the park where its Oval could guide your feet as your thoughts wandered. They wander now too, into the woods, the road winding down, down, down. There is nowhere to go but forward.
You go until the One Way forks horizontal. There is Fifth Street, your house a mere two blocks away over the crest of the small hill. Fifth Street runs parallel to the city cemetery, and you’re close enough now that you can read grave names: Miller, Meadows, Madison. These names mean little to you—you weren’t born here, after all, so your own name has no place in small town politics. At most, you remember a Miller and a Meadows from your graduating class and vaguely recall that a man named Madison runs the carpentry store off Penn Avenue. This is all you need to know. This is all you’re expected to know.
Here another blackwhite sign points towards Fifth Street. Some time back a car rammed into the green pole at the sign’s base, so now its directions are erratic. Where it once pointed towards the cemetery, it now angles down Fifth Street in the direction of your house. As your body aligns with the blackwhite sign, the shift of your heels clears your head. You see the arrow, the silent command still ringing, but now it feels more tinnitus than church bell. You see the arrow and no longer want to do what it says. You picture the sun streaming into your vacant house, but this time the warmth is stifling. You picture your cat, but this time his ears are airplanes and his teeth latch into the tender skin of your ankle. Your hip still aches. The blackwhite sign insists on Fifth Street, on home. It cannot stop the spin of your heels, toes pointed upwards and back to the woods. It cannot hold you back, grasp your hand like a concerned lover and pull you away from this. There is nowhere to go, but you take a step.
Fragments. The world is plunged dark then yellowgreen and blue. You buzz with the input of one hundred eyes, all of them looking for spark light mate in the dim light. Your wings propel you forward and your bodies meet and meld in the air. You are fifty. Calls from the upper canopy in a sonic spectrum you used to hear but can’t anymore. You are twenty-five. Twin sparks in the distance, unblinking. You must go. Forward. Forward. Your bodies drag other bodies with you and you meet the light head-on. You are one with glass. You are guts smeared with cold windshield fluid.
Earth returns tetrachromatic, but your thoughts flit and fracture with each twitch of your neck. Your head is bald. Your nostrils are infinite chasms that smell everything—water treatment chemicals, pesticide, fresh squirrel death beneath cloying rubber. This smell has you diving, circling. Your beak rips, then rips again. Your bald head is covered with blood and small intestine. You bask in the revel of successful hunt.
The metal of your spine bends on impact with rushing metal. You are metal. You are not meant to bend this way unless superheated. You leave your mark on the rushing metal too, green paint scraping an expanse of white. Everything is tilting. Your commandments have shifted direction. No. This message is inevitable. There is no way back. Go forward. There is nowhere to go but forward.
Your hand emerges from the dirt under your feet and you scrabble like a creature with opposable thumbs. Your mind is yours again, but it is also firefly vulture blackwhite sign. It is forced omniscience. It is everything and nothing and the chasm in between, all shadow and stalagmite maw. Your teeth puncture blood into your mouth. You are reaching like something will save you, for a helping hand summoned from the night sky, its human fingers calloused and warm against your own human fingers. You crave warmth after century-seconds of life invertebrate. Gone are the warmth of your armchair at your back, overheated phone in your hands, images of sunbeams. Instead, your reach nets you more metal against your fingertips, the blackwhite sign pointing down at you and around you all at once. You can hear the calls of the children from the playground faintly, and the sound is little sparks against your ears. You reach. The road rumbles with cars circling the Oval. You pool the last of your strength into your arm—the mating fervor of the fireflies, the warmth of roadkill against your beak, the steadfastness of the blackwhite sign, the determination of a human who sinned against their universe, who bore punishment, who just wants to go home—and reach.
Twin suns answer. They encapsulate your body, push it into order. You tumble through the dirt and cracked asphalt, shred into bone, skin, and muscle. You return to the junction of the One Way and Fifth Street. You know it will never let you go.
Amanda Trout is a Midwestern US writer with a love for sound and form. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Roots and Words by Iron Oak Editions, Pleiades, NOVUS, and other publications. Her micro-chapbook, Still Life, was published by Yavanika Press in 2024. She currently teaches composition and studies poetry at Oklahoma State University. Find Amanda on Instagram- @atrout2972
BUTTERFLY ISLE
By Brenda Mox
Encased in marble,
the primal rock rose
from the blue water
of a tranquil bay
surrounding Butterfly Isle.
At the foot of
the mountainous island
where monarchs nap,
mermaids gleamed fresh and silvery.
Sea nymphs, gentle
and comforting as sunshine
purled downstream in a
smooth continuous flow.
All taking part in the journey
like waves in an eternal stream.
Always moving towards Mother Ocean
and East to the home of Light.
Brenda Mox is a poet, visual artist, and great grandmother from Virginia. She holds an MFA Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University. Her chapbook, MYTHS, MYSTICS AND METAPHYSICAL MANIACS was published by BOTTLECAP PRESS. She has been published in multiple online and print journals including Wingless Dreamer , Bewildering Stories, Blaze Vox, Edge of Humanity, Poetry Pacific, Poetry for Mental Health journals, Eber Wein and Eastern Sea Bard Anthologies.
COLOSSAL
By Lisa Hartsgrove
I wake up taller than I was yesterday. I know because both my feet hang over the edge of my bed. I know because all my shirts are too short to cover my belly and all my pants leave my ankles exposed. I don’t know if I should feel happy or sad or somewhere in-between.
All I can think of is school on Monday—thank god it’s the weekend. I don’t want Sydney or Ryan to see me this way. I just told both of them that I am in love with them yesterday. And neither have said it back. At least not since the last time I looked at my phone—which, nope, still nothing. I deliberately leave it on the charger in my room so I stop obsessively checking.
I look terrible in my too tight shirt and my high-water pants, so I borrow one of my mother’s boyfriend’s sweatshirts off the back of a kitchen chair to try to hide my colossal body. He isn’t home to object, and my mother doesn’t ask questions. She doesn’t even ask about all the extra me.
She just says, “Can you pick up some milk while you’re out?”
And I nod and slip out the door.
I have to duck my head and adjust the driver’s seat just to get into the car. Everything is too cramped. The steering wheel presses into my knees and the rear-view mirror is facing the back seat. It takes me quite a while to get it right, and even then, it’s still wrong.
I’m tempted to go back inside, but I know there’s nothing for me there. I need new clothes now. I need to adjust. I need to live with my enormous self.
I drive with the windows down. The fresh air helps me forget about my size. The fresh air helps me forget about what his face did when I told him I’m in love with him. The fresh air helps me forget about what her hands did when I told her I’m in love with her. The fresh air helps me forget.
I park in the far corner of the store lot. I hesitate. I feel even bigger than I was when I left. I have to go in, but I wish someone else would do it for me. But there isn’t anyone else.
I take a deep breath and duck out of the car. I drag myself through the revolving doors, and immediately there’s a sales lady in front of me.
“Can I help you?” she sings.
Can anyone? I want to say. But instead I just shake my gigantic head and look for the opposite of petites. I’m certainly not that anymore.
In the Women’s department, I find lots of clothes fit for a grandmother. Nothing I would ever want to wear. No low-waisted jeans, no graphic tees, no bright colors or sheer fabric. It’s all business-casual—slacks and cardigans and gray gray gray.
Why is it that only petites are given the fun clothes? Why do retailers force women to lose our sense of self and freedom and identity as we grow older?
I find black yoga pants and a long-sleeve gray tee and it’s the closest thing to something I might wear that fits me. I buy it and wear it out of the store. For the first time, I’m not upset to almost blend in. If only I weren’t so colossal.
My mother doesn’t notice I changed when I come home, or if she does she doesn’t mention it.
“Did you get the milk?” she asks.
They say milk helps you grow big and healthy. You can be sure I forgot to buy that on purpose. She’s annoyed, but I pretend not to notice. We’ve always been good at not noticing each other. And pretending.
I go to my room and finally look at my phone again. I left it as long as I could. I gave them plenty of time—almost twenty-four hours now. But still, nothing.
My new shirt already feels too tight.
Ryan actually said it first. We were at his house, on his bed, and his hand was up my shirt, under my bra. He pulled his lips away from mine and with his eyes still closed, he said it.
I didn’t say it back, then. I didn’t say it back because his eyes were closed and I knew I loved him, too, but also because I knew I loved her and my eyes were open and so instead I pulled his lips back into mine and pressed my body harder into his hands and he didn’t question it.
But I did.
What am I supposed to do with a love like this? You’re not supposed to be in love with two people at once. There is no fairy tale, no model of what this should look like.
I thought I had to tell her how I felt before I could say it back to him. I had no one to ask but myself, and that’s what I thought I should do. It took me days to do it, but when I did it, I did it all at once.
It was just yesterday that I brought her to the ocean and as we sat in my car and the waves crashed against the shore like we have, I said it, and she pulled her hand out of mine.
It was just yesterday that she left my car and I drove to his house and as the trees swayed into each other like we have, I said it, and his face broke into storm.
Who knew love could hurt so much?
Finally, I check social media. My phone is too hot in my palm.
And there they are, together. There they are, together, laughing. Ryan and Sydney. No missed call. No text. Just a photo of them. Laughing. Not with me. For the world. Not for me.
I’m growing too monstrous for this room. Not just my skin or my muscles but all the way down in my bones. I hurt. The clothes I just bought are ripping at the seams.
My mother knocks on my door to tell me she’s going out to get the milk I forgot and I can’t answer her, I can’t open the door because I’m everywhere including stuck in my own throat. She leaves the house and I snap the beams and break through the sheetrock until everything collapses.
I am a giant, too much for this world. I am naked and huge and hurting and the more I try to hide from myself, the larger I grow.
I look at the photo of Sydney and Ryan again and again. The photo for the world, not for me. They’re laughing. Both of them. Sydney and Ryan. Laughing. It was just the day before, and now I’m a giant, and now they’re laughing.
How did I expect this story to end?
I close my eyes and think.
The truth is, I didn’t expect this story.
And maybe that’s why I’m becoming a giant. Maybe that’s why I can hold Sydney and Ryan in the palm of my hand now, like figurines too small for me, and continue to grow.
My eyes open.
I am not too big. They are just too small.
Lisa Hartsgrove, MFA, is program coordinator for Project Write Now, a literary arts nonprofit transforming individuals, organizations, and communities through the power of writing. Among others, she has been published in Friday Flash Fiction, Honeyguide Literary Magazine, Discretionary Love, and The Pitkin Review. You can read more about her at lisahartsgrove.com.
SHARING SHADE
By Matt Cilderman
All the wonder and fear
of an acorn in your arms
with a little, knit cap.
Generations of grandparents
will gather around you,
drop leaves of regret, wisdom,
explain the ambivalence of rain,
and how to stand up straight
against the wind.
Their kind faces, wrinkled maps
of the world, will guide you
till you can share your own shade.
Matt Cilderman is a public school teacher in New Jersey. He has been blessed with an amazing wife and 2 kids. His publication credits include: New Verse News (pen name), Petrichor Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, The Red Wheelbarrow Poet’s Anthology, an anthology by Tuleberg Press, and a forthcoming edition of Masque and Spectacle.
PORTRAIT
ODEFOR XIN ZUI
By Thomas Saunders
I
Her blood congealed like clay, adding to the smooth
pottery of her skin, the slightly pained porcelain
expression that she wears like a layering
on her face. Queen of mummies, mother
of the fops of opulence, wreathed
in tomb upon tomb Matryashka-esque
and set against the wanderings of the world,
what apocalypse do you await,
grimacing as if your body had already been gutted
and gilleted, like an oyster ripped of its treasure?
What cold enigma do you huddle in, housed
in the embryonic fluid of some unknown acid?
Resisting all movings-on she lies in stilted repose.
What sixth element, sixth sense
does she wield to control her laid-out domain?
II
Larger than life icon, goddess of excess,
female Dionysus, her servants dumb as stone
in their worship, or at least before the whip
of air announcing that it is time to crumble.
Why all this waiting? What is she waiting for,
if all it amounts to is open-mouthed gawping?
The meal laid for her enjoyment wasted to oblivion,
whilst the melon seeds still lodged intact
in her insides have long forgotten the feel of water.
Thomas Saunders is a young poet from The United Kingdom. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mindfork, Across the Margin, The Gentian Journal and Lunar Sea Literary, among others, and he has been longlisted for both the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition and the Kingfisher Poetry Prize.
REARVIEW
bY rAJEN gOYAL
Our station wagon sits in the driveway, its fresh maroon coat beaming in the sun. I race out from the house and hop into the wayback seat. Our mission: reach Disney World. I grab the seatbelt, but I wince in pain from the scorching buckle. I wrap my shirt around the buckle and fasten it. The adventure begins—our house on the cul-de-sac shrinking in the distance. THUD! The car jolts from hitting an unseen crack in the road. I grip my belt, jaw clenched. We get on the highway, miles of road blurring together. Hours drift by, and we arrive at our rented villa. It’s massive—broad white walls and beige carpeted floors everywhere. Dad says we can unpack later and head to Disney first. We drop our bags, race back to the car, and head off.
My jaw drops as we enter Magic Kingdom, surrounded by crowds, storybook castles, and color-splashed buildings. I study our map to find our first ride. My eyes dart around, scouring all the choices. “Pick one or we’ll be late for the stunt show!” my sister shouts. Several minutes pass and a sharp flutter arises in my chest. “I don’t know,” I reply. “It doesn’t matter now. The lines at both rides are packed,” Dad says, annoyed. Suddenly, I hear a faint cracking in the ground. I look down and see crevices forming on the asphalt, ripping it apart. I blink and shake my head. The crevices have vanished—the ground flat, solid. Families stroll past me while the screams of riders echo in the sky as roller coasters race by. Dad asks if I’m okay. I nod, uncertain, my insides twisting as I take one last look at the ground before leaving.
That evening, we’re packed among crowds of onlookers staring at Cinderella Castle—the crackling fireworks overhead brightening its warm colors. I stare at the tallest blue spire and dream of climbing to its top. I wrap my arms around Mom, and she puts a gentle, reassuring arm around me. I look up at her, wondering if I should say what I’m about to. “Mom,” I say, pausing momentarily, “I wanna learn piano again. I promise not to quit.” She replies, surprised. “Really? That would be great. Hearing that just made my day.” I swallow, trying to suppress the rising knot in my stomach. Maybe she’ll forget. One sparkler rises in the night sky. It bursts but doesn’t fizzle. It erupts in a brilliant flash, forcing me to look away. I tighten my arms around Mom, but they collapse around me. I look around. She’s vanished. Everyone’s gone, and my surroundings blur into a haze.
The crackles of fireworks linger in my ears. I still feel the warmth of Mom’s arm around my shoulders. The haze clears. I rub my eyes but notice thin-rimmed glasses across my nose. My hands are larger, worn—marked by adulthood. A fissured road stretches beneath me to where Cinderella Castle once stood. The castle and its tallest spire are replaced by a luminous, navy tower. Awestruck, I stroll towards it, hands outstretched. Inches within reach, I pause. A familiar feeling arises within—freezing me where I stand. Should I go near it? The tower holds, as if waiting for me to climb it. I try to reach out, but as soon as I do, it dissipates into the air. The only thing left is the barren road. Beads of icy sweat trickle down my brow. Tall white walls appear, solidifying around me while the road is replaced by carpeted floors.
I’m back in the villa and take a deep breath. The calming breeze through the open window fills my chest. I study myself in the mirror; a scared kid stares back. My face, hands—youthful, small again. Maybe I should tell Mom or Dad? They’ll just laugh it off, so I pretend nothing’s wrong. Mom asks us to help unpack, but I run outside, feeling slightly bad about ignoring her. Hours pass. I run back to the villa only to see my sister, glaring at me through the back door window. “Mom’s pissed. She wanted to check out the grand piano at the rec center, but you disappeared. I covered for you though,” she says, unlocking the door. I rush upstairs, spring into bed, and drift off.
The next day, Dad takes me to one of the arcades. I make a beeline for the closest claw machine. My target—a classic Mickey Mouse at the back. I move the claw towards him, but a giant Goofy in the back snatches my attention. I swing the claw repeatedly between both toys before finally hitting the grab button. But I'm too late. The claw drops down, its jaws grabbing nothing but air. Dad shouts, “Son, we gotta go, looks like your brother got sick!” Frustrated, I run towards Dad. With every step, I hear the gravel cracking behind me. I turn around to look. The arcade’s gone, the road reappearing beneath me. Glasses reappear, almost dangling off my nose. I push them up to see more clearly.
It’s disquietingly silent except for my stuttered breath. My hands are larger once again, fine hairs across the back of them. Clouded images rise from the asphalt cracks and hover above the road. I discern misty hands over a piano in one. A tethered claw materializes in my hands. I swing the claw to latch onto an image, but another appears in front of me. I quickly switch direction. Before the claw can reach either, the images decay into husks. I frantically swing the claw again and again, vacillating between images. Each one hardens into lifeless rock. Frustrated, I stop, and all the images reappear. I focus on the one with the piano. The hands hovering over the C—those hands look like… Mom’s? My breath catches: I never kept my promise. I see another with my sister clutching a phone, trembling. I look at the rest—my chest pounds as my eyes widen in stark recognition… the few who cared, who tried—now gone. Streams of dim light lead to each image. I trace their path until I see—
No, this can’t be right—the beams emanate… from me.
“I’m so sorry.”
My words are absorbed by silence, its deafening echo the only reply. The images, the road, bleed, coalescing into a liquid gray mass.
As the sun’s rays pierce the glazed windows, the gray hardens into clarity—ashen individuals in a nursing home lounge. I’m sitting, alone, the old TV droning behind me. The trip that started in the maroon station wagon plays repeatedly in my head. It now nears its end. While pondering this, I notice the catheter bag full of urine down by my leg. “Nurse!” I weakly shout, pressing the call button. No one comes. I don’t want to push it again as it might bother someone. Instead, I do exactly what I’ve done for my entire journey… nothing.
Rajen Goyal is an anatomic pathologist based in Doha, Qatar.
REQUITING PRUFROCK
By Sajah Francesca
After T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”
Le strade vuote / Deserte sempre più,
Leggo il tuo nome / Ovunque intorno a me.
Tornade me, amor, e non sarà / Più vuota la città.
J.,
I have received your chantey cry
over the lurching ocean and black starless sky.
I fear my response is a past century late;
Your corpse has corroded upon the Pacific floor into grains —
Through your spectral song, I admit my pains
and permissively confess, I breathe and exhale your modernist approach.
I flaunt the cynicism on my heart like a tektite brooch,
And though unspoken, your question haunts my mind:
The answer, I regret to inform, sir, we may never find.
You. Do not ask, “What is it?”
The nights too short, the horizons daylit —
Outside, the women pick and throw
the fifteen sunflowers of van Gogh.
A blue luminance amorphized the faces behind window-panes,
A blue luminance has glazed the vacant gazes behind window-panes,
Behind every porch and door, a containment unit
with beds bearing heavy blankets composed of cable chains.
Flakes of polystyrene snow down from ceilings
creating broken-winged angels as the cotton sheet shifts;
December in a bedroom as the Western sun mocks —
The doxepin dissolves, the lights down, the mind drifts.
Yes indeed, there will be time
for the blue idiot box that provides simple pleasure
by casting its light behind the screens in window-panes;
There will be time, there is always time
to prepare with hairbrush, paint on face, and to measure
the waist; There will be time to fabricate
a persona. Time for projects, and time for post,
and the preparation of defenses for obligatory debate;
Time for critiques, and time for medals,
and time yet for hundreds of second-guesses,
and for hundreds of bad impressions
before the burning tequila shot settles.
Inside, women suppress they know
the haunting blues of Picasso.
Indeed, endless amounts of time
to question “Do I dare?” and, “Do I defy?”
Time to slap ambitions down like a pesky fly,
out of the fear of new people and their questions which pry.
(They will say: “They are so unlike their peers.”)
My hair, raggedly cut by a pair of kitchen shears,
can chisel out my face but reveals my dainty ears.
(They still say: “They are so unlike their peers.”)
Do I dare
add to the universe?
In a minute, there is time
for a growth which could be silenced, but can never be reversed.
I have known them all already, those sunrise and sunset:
watched them rotate round without ever getting up,
enjoying new days only through my coffee cup;
The cry of “Good morning” is taken as a threat
from the mouth of trusted kin in the other room.
So, how can I resume?
I have known the eyes already, felt them all —
Eyes that analyze upon a single interaction
and when I am perceived, spectated on a stage
with a forced microphone, they say my words are gall
and only due to age.
But still, I cannot resist my mind or my attraction.
So, how should I resume?
I have known the arms already, I have begged for them —
Arms reluctantly wrapping me in embrace
(Disagreeing, but still offering grace!)
Will rejection of my current state
let me deceive those Fates?
Buried within my body, a soul forced to be condemned:
Should I then resume? Or
can I begin again?
I will say, I have been that stoic face at night
with pocketed hands and gritted yellow teeth
around a cigarette, refusing to say hello...
I’d much rather be a penguin encircled by brethren,
protecting pouched children, with our backs to the cold.
But passing years, incessant time, moves deceitfully!
Slow and quick at once,
Ancient and innocent... it cuddles
up in the bed, here beside you and me.
Should I, after laughs and fights and sex,
turn over with blushed face and ask you, “What comes next?”
I have planned, pleaded, scheduled and cried,
I can see my future distantly bent, as though through a refractor,
But I have no confidence — I am simply an actor.
I can picture myself sagging in a hospital bed
counting laments from my life on my fingers until I am dead.
I cannot overstate, I am terrified.
And will it have been worth it, at the end,
all of the graces, decorums, the smiles,
though my personhood has been put on trial?
Would it have been worth anything
to let him buy the wedding ring,
to avoid these conversations which offend,
to shallowly sip my wine and silently
think, “I am living my life as a Eunuch.
I have the ability to transcend, I should transcend!”
But even my people have deemed me punic —
They say, “That is not what we meant at all,
That is not it, at all.”
Would it have been worth it, after all?
Will it all be worthwhile?
After the nightclubs and surgeries and the tape burns,
After the poems, after the sex X, after the music spills from open doors,
And us, sharing this moment, and still so much more?
The potential of a future! But through my life, they see
phantasmagorias displaying demons inside a nursery:
But, it could be worthwhile
if one person concedes, not regarding me as small,
even if the rest treat me as a sad obscenity:
They say, “That is not what we meant at all,
That is not it, at all.”
I am not you, Prufrock, though I was convinced I’d be;
But they titled me sage, one that could raise
gavel when needed, defiant to gaze,
Advising with grace: I hope, receive it too,
Altruistic, glad to be of use,
Resolute, cordial, and valiant;
Assertive of my creed, but not obtuse.
I’ve lived believing that I “Can’t”---
Turns out, that is not true.
I cannot wait to grow old
And boast the inefficacy of being controlled.
I have left that life behind and have dared inscribe this speech.
I shall strip the shirt off my back and walk along the beach.
I have heard the fairies giggling, each to each.
We fellowship in harmony.
I have seen them nestled in lime carnations
appeased by the rhythmic sway of a stem
when the wind blows for, and not against, them.
And I realize, I’ve been clutching an anther all my life
and these nightmares have withheld me from the sky.
I've awoken.
Prufrock,
Free the air from your chest. Push the water aside.
Sajah Francesca (NB) is a poet and playwright from Long Beach, CA. Sajah has been published in a number of independent zines and literary journals, such as justfemmeanddandy and The Shallot. In 2024, Sajah published their first poetry collection: "Nasty. Unpredictable. Nonsense." with Archway Publishing. Sajah is additionally the Editorial Director of i2i zine, an independent Long Beach magazine founded in 2024 by Ellie Kerns.
