I writhe in the bed alone clutching a million imaginary illnesses that become real as I brood on them. Wrap one cloth around me and try to breathe
When that pain wracks my bones In between shuddering waves I sigh in pleasure Yes. Give me more.
Push the threshold until it dissolves pain bleeds over into ecstasy Yes give me more.
Angels straddle the line. That’s why shepherds cower when they appear. That’s why their music is death.
Van Gogh. Poe. Marat/Sade. Even their names sound like moans.
When two opposite sides of the coin melt together into mercury unbearable nirvana
Jenn Zuko (she/they) received their MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University back in 2001, and has been teaching at the college level ever since. Some highlights of their published work include: Stage Combat with Allworth Press (2006), “I Do My Own Stunts” in the Fight Master (2014), and two series of cultural commentary articles, titled Problematic Badass Female Tropes and Problematic Toxic Masculinity Tropes, found on Writers’ HQ and A Wandering Road websites, respectively (2018-2020). Her Substack newsletter is called Zuko’s Musings, with regular original work posted three times a week. She has been professionally involved in live theatre since the ‘90s, and is active today as a fight director and intimacy coordinator. She also co-produces and performs in an old-school, ribald variety show called Blue Dime Cabaret. Her Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts are all named Jenn Zuko. Her Twitter is @Bonzuko.
Hugging the hurt: without water by Lawrence Mack A review by Chris Bullock
“bravery is hugging the hurt you know will come”
Lawrence Mack
Several lines stood out to me while reading without water by Lawrence Mack, but this seemed to encapsulate not only the poetry but the whole approach to writing and living. Lawrence’s poetry is not only hugging the hurt, but anticipating the hurt, welcoming the hurt, and dancing with the hurt, finally making the hurt feel at home as a guest or part of the family, with some tea set out on the table. It is a book of poetry both deeply personal on an emotional level, but also as approachable and light as two strangers making small talk in the bar.
I had known Lawrence mostly through dance, as a frequent guest to several events around town, as someone who may study dance but still also enjoys dance. I had no idea he was a poet, but some of the best poets out there have developed lives which in turn inform their writing, like a written mirror held to life, and without water is not only a mirror, but a moving mirror, as if the surface of the bay, on which we float, until we wash ashore at the end.
These poems have a very casual air, recommended for any aficionado of Frank o’Hara and the New York School. Frank narrated his day with minor inconveniences and pleasures until learning that Billie Holiday had died, writing about the small everyday things in a way that underlines both their simplicity and importance. Tributes to friendships and relationships as important elements of life, with the brevity and wit of social interactions, wherein we let slip a penetrating insight between remarks about the weather.
Small talk hints at bigger things, or small talk avoids bigger things, but why do we need to address bigger things? Agnostics believe that the mind of man could not possibly comprehend the mind of God, so why try? Live how you are, who you are, when you are, with others or alone. It is what it is. We construct an independent image in the mirror, but we are also our past, with or without a family environment. The made could not possibly comprehend the maker, so don’t worry about it.
Probably the one that stuck in my mind after reading was “at least there are snacks”, picking up as a casket is lowered, and ending with the little things hinting at the big things “Pops says don’t forget the sandwiches in the trunk / Mom curses—she wouldn’t have bought so many / if she’d known so few / would show up”
This book really is a dance in stepping from pain to redemption to dry wit to exhaustion to joy within a single page, but also with the sense it was no big deal, just a dance, so lighten up if you can. Part of the environment is a newfound sobriety and understanding that sobriety can be the ultimate high, and taking please in noticing everything with a clear mind, and making the conscious choice to welcome the hurt that underlies any addiction. The hurt re emerges, the hurt approaches you, the hurt seems frightening, but it is also part of you, it is you. Once you accept it, you hug the hurt, dance with it, even welcome it into your life. And after any big welcome, there is small talk, topic to topic, and without water is a book of small talk which not only welcomes you and makes you comfortable, but also honors the struggle we may have endured to reach such nonchalant comfort.
How do you get a copy of a book if the poet is always out dancing awake and asleep? I would try an email to lawrencewritespoems@gmail.com and he will get to it when the music stops.
About the Reviewer
Tall City (Chris Bullock) was born and got bigger on Long Island, New York. He did a few things then moved to Colorado Springs after trying to study in Paris. He did a few things there too, then moved to Denver, where he went back to school for foreign language. A couple of years on scholarship in China, and he is back in Denver.
Goddess Wept a Daydream into echoes of silence and storm
Sarah danced through green grass across a field, a river and rocky plains gathered water from the well-springs, bathed in starlight infused pools
Morsels of sweet grew on reeds and beds made from its stalks Beside the fresh baskets… Fire spoke with moonlight and sleep behind her eyes
Dreams of quiet leopards in the night Raindrops petal upon thatch-top and stone As light painted gently upon her eyes
Fresh air and dew pooling water in baskets whispers of times yet passed the catch of small fish she washed with root and healed with twig in devotion to spirit and great grass sky
holding hands with the wind
Lee Frankel-Goldwater is a teacher and a poet seeking the sage’s path. He knows it’s about the journey, and yet dreams of the destination. One of peace, one of less fear, or worry, or shame for all. He believes there’s some good in this world worth fighting for, and prays that his every deed is made into this backdrop. Lee writes at the Writer’s Block, dances at Mi Chantli, and plays around Boulder, CO. He’s always ready for a story.
Sun—suppliant. Folded skies, a swallow: mirrored creeks, trailing—drifting, forever a mashing, mashed—fists of bark, scratched and scarred like beaks of melee—like eyes full of mud, stung from powdered stones.
Juxtaposed: craved teeth, snarled brow— a puff and a pout, such were the memories of glass and dew—of patched mounds tied by clasped grass, fingers crossed— a crossing among sticks of light, like hypnotic grazes of skin and bone, a release.
Pebble for pebble—a toss and a skip, a broken roof made way for a charm, floating—bumping—a ray of shadow for tongues to find the path, a path— wayward fallen upon knees, thin and pressed—one leaf or two, feathered like a rooster’s crow—so let it be gone— so let our failures dwindle in our palms as those who stagger and find bits of rope to climb until we look down and see the dirt of our wrists.
Through the Looking Glass
Land-starved and stubborn we pile
windows on top of windows and climb
so high everything looks small and distant.
Birds leap into the sky wide-eyed and unbound
and rocket themselves into cloud and blue-
stained glass stunned like butterflies
in freefall spinning and spiraling through
the wind. I heard the thick thump against
the double-pane and caught a mourning dove
as it fell solid as a blood-warm stone in my hands.
Its feathered imprint a chalk outline of wings
and beak left stamped against the looking glass.
Too often we see what we want to see until
it’s too late. I stick vinyl bird-shaped silhouettes
on the reflective surface like dusted ghosts
and recite them as I rub them flat with a card
sparrow, dove, cardinal, blue jay,
finch, mockingbird, grackle, wren.
My Atomic Pin-Up
Binion’s Horseshoe is a rest stop on death’s highway.
We’re in the hotel’s north-facing room
on a sofa shaped like an old-style riverboat.
Igneous cracked succulents are pinned
like voodoo dolls against the sky.
Miss Atomic Energy
shakes fallout from her dress
and it frissons like a forest of morels
on the glitter gulch carpet.
The Evening Telegraph said she radiated loveliness.
A new part of the soul wakes up
when the desert wind cries on Frenchman’s Flat.
What does it sound like?
Like 16,800 years ago
when Lake Bonneville
bled out into southern Idaho
leaving the salt flats
to homegrown racers and their Gadgets
the speedway a buster-jangle
of roadsters and lakesters
winking like Trinitite on dry white rime.
Me and my atomic pin-up
put on sunglasses and count down from ten.
The sky, Gerboise bleue with teeth like flamethrowers;
our old-style riverboat upshot in a knothole of sand
and scorpion gunwale
And Then, Gone
When we decided to end it, I was stuck thinking of the night
---------with fried rice and blue calcite and all the orange
light over rosé in the only restaurant open in town so late.
-- - ------ - - -- It is the middle of winter in Marfa, and you watch me
- - - - - - - - --- run through downtown in the width of the blue moon
to the car so we can drive to the lookout off Highway 90
- - - ----and watch the Marfa lights flare, bounce
and fall back down beside twitching desert grass.
---------------- - - ------ There’s a couple next to us who has been camping out here,
---------------------------documenting this phenomenon every night for a week.
- - - - -They tell us each light has its own behaviors, own patterns.
---------------- They speak about aliens and energy. The army and angels. You’re not
-----------------convinced by any of them. You whisper human possibilities
-----------------in my ear: maybe they’re cars moving on the highway
------- over the mountain, truck lights, fast food signs…
--------I point to one yellow light pulsating so faint far
------- out in the field, I must convince myself it even exists:
pulsing and fading, fading, and pulsing, and then,
gone. There is a moment when all the lights go,
--------and it is simply dark. Why do we keep watching?
---------------- Goddammit,
--------------------------if we want to know what this is
--------------------------why don’t we just run out and grab them?
But we don’t.
--------------------------The lights reappear again and bounce off each other
---------------- in silence. Melting and glowing.
---------------- We don’t want to know what they are.
The joy is the obsession, the pondering, the pulsing.
And the total darkness. Yes.
---------------- It is also that.
Elaina Edwards (she/her) is a poet from the Texas Hill Country. She has her MFA from Texas State University. She is an ecofeminist poet that loves to dabble in the supernatural. When not reading or writing, she watches way too much X files with her partner, Stephen.
Ecclesiastical
There is a time to think and a time to do
and a time to observe the purple-orange sun
as it introduces itself to the gold-laced clouds of morning
There is a time to lose and a time to find
and a time to sputter away like a balloon struck by a pin
returning to its first flaccid form, only now stuck in a tree
There is a time for victory and a time for forfeit
and a time to wrap yourself in gray matter
as caustic water fills the buckets yoked upon your shoulders
There is a time for peace and a time for war
and a time to set fire to the playing-card kings
who spew bile between bites of pork and cake
There is a time to sing and a time to scream
and a time to conversate in whispers with her
cars and trains crying as they labor outside your window
There is a time to keep and a time to release
and a time to meld with the river rocks
as the frigidity nibbles at your toes
There is a time for all and a time for none
and a time for every time as we waltz and collide
through our kaleidoscope universe
Cole Henson (he/him) is a poet, playwright, and humorist currently residing in Denver, Colorado. He has received numerous accolades for his work, namely from his mother, fiancée, and dog. He can be found on Instagram @cyranowhere
All I Know of Heaven
The magnet holding our photo to the fridge lost its grip
sometime today or yesterday or tomorrow.
In it we are gap-toothed and barefoot, and I can see it in my face
grinning up at you from beneath my kitchen-knifed bangs:
you light the sky above my small world, you are the star
our entire family orbits – all of us reeling through black
since being sucked into the gravity of your supernova
and spat out the other side in the time it took to blink
away the blind spot that camera flash left mirage-ing
in front of my eye. But we were those kids once –
shoulder to shoulder, immortalized in film.
No matter the endless space between us now.
I have been stumbling upon breadcrumbs like these
more and more often, keeping them in my pocket:
a Stealie sticker on the napkin dispenser at my table
in some nowhere-town bar. The brooch I wore at your funeral
popping off my purse strap, the rubber back rolling across the floor
and into oblivion so now its sharp point bites my finger
whenever I reach for my wallet. I call them signs.
Faith, after all, is a choice when the answers to all the questions
that matter are written in code I cannot cipher
at least from this side of the veil. So yes, the dead
hear our thoughts and they send us buttons and pebbles
and spools of thread like little raven’s gifts through a hollow
in the universe’s infinity-ringed trunk
because that is what I choose to believe. The truth?
When I speak your name into the ether there is no answer.
Just a burning in my chest, which could be a symptom of smoking
since I picked it up again. Or the particles still floating around in an outline
of you left behind in this world like a footprint in ash.
Collecting like champagne bubbles around my heart
bobbing in Grief’s chipped crystal flute like a bruised strawberry.
All I know of heaven is there better be one.
Because you have to be there.
You have to be somewhere.
Madison Gill (she/her) is a poet from Montrose, Colorado. She received her BA in English from Colorado State University-Pueblo. She is the author of chapbook, Casualties of Honey(Middle Creek Publishing 2023), and winner of the 2021 Cantor Prize awarded by the Telluride Talking Gourds Poetry Program. Her work appears online or in print with Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Twenty Bellows, Beyond the Veil Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Sledgehammer Lit among others. Madison lives with her fiance and their cat in a tiny home in the Uncompahgre Valley of the San Juan Mountains. Find her on instagram @sweetmint_poet
Hoarse chimes of the clock - - Stars float in slower time All needs of the day, immediate -- The moon a pensive sliver My blood is a to-do list, circling -- Crepuscular stir and watch My bones a calendar, days creaking The cold is a single clear note Paper, then screens, these walls - - The ridge gleams amid the dark Anxious shoulder, spine’s regret - - Light and cold regard one another What is time but lines and curves - And Earth awaits her warmth What is time but a moving whip - The sun breaks, a silent promise Work, a twitch at the mouth -- A billion tiny eyes await Work for whom? Forever whom - -A million tiny bodies, wrapped against cold Where is my soul in all of this? -- They emerge, they trod, they watch the sky One meeting, five meetings, -- A dawning world of hawk and rabbit Will there be a real meeting? -- Deer tails wait to hie, among their quiet steps I know the world is wrong– -- Foxes keep silence like antique monks Then what can I do right? -- The creek is dauntless, indefatigable Let me throw one starfish -- Water cares not for freezing, for warmth nor cold Grace of graces, let me know it -- A day of walking, watching, eating, killing, giving Let me live someway here -- Always parents for their children Where they took away the paths -- Always under a glowing, constant sky.
Jackson Culpepper (he/they) grew up in Georgia and has since lived in Southern Appalachia, the mountain west, and the desert southwest. His debut short story collection, Songs on the Water, is forthcoming in August from Homebound Publications, where he won the Landmark Prize for fiction. He lives and teaches first-year English in the Denver area. You can find him on Instagram @JCCulpepper and online at jacksonculpepper.wordpress.com.
south broadway press 