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.
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
Ode to my one weirdly long arm hair
that I cut you with surgical scissors, the ones
I use to split the lidded eye
that I know you
as an invisible blonde, though in my aging I grow
darker by in blight.
becoming, in sheepish sense,
father to a talisman, that I spoke thread and now
I glean this wheat
of me, my fields a pair of fore-veins,
fallow plough works kept clutter null in gold.
I would, if you were
still with me, give you as a gift
to some storied hero deprived of golden boon
who must loose his heavy
halyard and sail to meet his imprisoned
lover in a donjon across the sea.
Sooner, I could let
you grow, and warp so long you poke
out every needle’s eye, string them all together
into chimes of cuspate sheer,
tie hooks and pinch with leaden sinkers
to cast, and fish, and never again fear hunger.
And if I did not kill you,
you would be with me in those hours
when loathing struts and claps its fulcrum bell
along my streets, the cure
it sells, a miracle, and I can attest:
‘it’s true,’ I tell myselves, ‘if I can grow an arm
hair as long as this, it’s all true!’
You are with me
even if a nub, even if your root be plucked,
or scraped in some dragging from my seat
to dance, even if
in oil you escape, be it popped from
frying pan or pyre, be it vivacious, sebaceous, supreme.
You may leave,
but don’t ask me. You don’t need my
permission. I am not my arm. You are not a guest.
James Cole is a poet, author, filmmaker, and scientist based out of Charlottesville, VA. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Virginia. His writings have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetica Review, Artemis Journal, and Carolina Muse, among others. In 2019, he released his first collection, Crow, come home, through VerbalEyze Press. James also servse as an editor for The Rumen Literary Journal.
to be human is not an act of desecration
to live humanly is not anathema to nature.
I do not apologize for my humanness.
-----------------------------------------------*
I do not apologize for the flower I picked
and carried in my hand to the mountaintop.
I spoke to the flower like an old friend
then loosed her on the wind
watching petals and stamen soar
across the river rich valley below.
I do not apologize for this.
-----------------------------------------------*
I do not apologize for the shade I stand in
cast by brick and mortar and bitumen.
I do not apologize for the steel faucet I turn
loosing earth-cooled water from buried pipes,
filling my mouth with metallic-tinged life
crystal and blooming, pouring down my chin,
splashing crisp against my bare feet.
I do not apologize for this seasonal waterfall.
------------------------------------------------*
I do not apologize for trails followed through grass and wood,
for the dent in the forest floor where I sat
and shared lunch with a kingfisher:
----------He, a silver-green fish, snared fresh
----------I, clementine, grown far from this alpine stream.
------------------------------------------------*
To be human is not an act of desecration.
I am nature as trees
nature as salmon spawned in rivers far from the sea
nature as lichen on scree
nature as lion, as leopard
----------as beaver, as bison
nature as wildfire, as hurricane
as water lifted as mist, as water dropped in flakes
as daisies carpeting desert sands.
I am nature as the curious cat–
slow stalking intrigue
delight of game, of pounce
of crunch, of blood
glutted and full of mouse.
I am humanness.
I am holiness.
I am a masterpiece.
Laura Leigh Cissell (she/they) is an autistic, queer Texan expat residing in the Colorado foothills. They are the head of data analytics for a tech startup, an MFA candidate at Regis University, a spouse, parent, and occasionally a poet. Laura’s greatest sadness is that all the sea turtles of the world will never know how much she loves them.
to confuse the devil. She put on her armor, opened the bible, and pounded the pages flat with her feverish brow.
In the small morning hours, she called Jesus from the cross, the sun just rising beyond the orange tree. She fought Satan all through the night behind the locked bedroom door. I heard the dreadful cries. I begged her to come out, step into the light.
I tempted her with Body of Christ chips. I offered a goblet of consecrated wine. But she remained hostage within the walls of her own madness. “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust”, she screamed, pounding her head on that fucking bible.
She couldn’t catch hold of reality, so I tossed a net into the river of no edges, no bottom. She gave herself to the water, wings folded against her beaten body. My bloody hands of rebirth drew her into the womb of my arms.
Eyes dark in their sockets, I held a mother’s heart close to mine. We rocked until her spirit washed clean. We rocked until she found peace in the end of the world. We rocked until she saw the face of her weeping daughter.
Deborah Ramos, a San Diego artist and poet, is the author of from the earthen drum of my body. Deborah is a graduate of San Diego State University, where she studied art, textiles, costume design and history of theatre. Deborah writes about the sacred feminine, primal desires, roadkill and her cats. Her poetry has appeared in SageWoman, Rattlesnake Press, Dancing Goddess, National Beat Anthology, Border Voices, Fuck Isolation Anthology, Literary Sexts, San Diego’s Writers Ink, and more. Deborah’s creative life includes traveling, writing, exhibiting her art and photography, as well as hosting Poets at the Grove readings in Balboa Park.
We were always gender-fucked Wannabe Lover Bunnies Pink in Gay Bar lighting Drunk on Drinks more expensive than our worth and worthless in our day glow night crawl awe-ness We own nothing But the love we exchange in Instagram photos and photosynthesis which is the product of high heels on wood floors This place once a post office now a dance club now a church I can’t pray anymore though I get tired and horny Like winter-born babies and serotonin thirsty high school drop-outs We are in love with each other. We the chosen family that resembles some cult-like Ghost Club We haunt each other’s hearts Never letting too much in Never letting our feet touch the floor-were always dancing Even in our dreams SZA beats bounce off living room walls But it sounds like church bells Tolling
Jasmine N. Maldonado Dillavou is an okie-Boricua poet and artist based out of Colorado Springs. Her work explores the intricate private-sphere of Latinidad and femininity through large scale installations and written word. She is most passionate about telling stories in vulnerable ways in hopes that it may open the door for others to do so as well.
A City StoryOnce upon a time, our town owned a story — William Stafford
This town once told a story.
It was all about our goodness,
our presbyterian Jesus, embodiment
of meek and mild,
knew just when
to shut his mouth.
We might’ve owned the world,
but we knew we owned this city—
it looked like us, grey-faced, combed-over,
bespectacled,
be-cocked.
Our uniforms—
blue coats,
white coats,
top coats,
coveralls,
badges,
peaked caps,
clipboards
and stethoscopes—
they could have stood up empty,
could have stood up on their own,
so upright were we, so stiff,
so erect with straightness—
the bleach of it burning
our eyes, our throats,
our thoughts—our thoughts
were all about this city,
what it needed,
what we’d give it,
whether it needed it or not:
white-gloved crossing guards
blonde, baton’d majorettes,
a thousand brushcut lunchpails,
a parade of white bread wonder
fed into the factory daily—
while we kept
the wheels turning,
kept the peace
at the business end of the nightstick,
kept the hysterical sedated
with TV and Black Velvet
and small pills
for big-mouthed women—
this town once had a story,
a secret underneath its skirt—
the pressure point of the club handshake,
the sweet grease for the palm-reader—
the future
was ready-to-wear.
We believed it, believed in it, believed we’d
get
what we wanted,
the trophies we paid for,
the money, the manna, the mammon—
we’d get everything
we deserved.
It’s not the dogs,
not the fire hoses
that ended this tale.
It’s the photographs the press took,
how it looked
on the news. Operations interrupted
for awhile as we smiled,
shook our heads, said
what a shame,
we must do better…
and we got better.
At the story.
At the inside jokes. Got degrees
in Women’s Studies, hid
in Diversity Departments.
Learned to murder Black kids,
but phrase it right on resumés,
and get a job as the director
of the Police Accountability Board.
This story keeps on rolling.
This story is a running joke.
This town elects its drug dealers,
pays its whores with plummy titles,
keeps its finger on the pulse,
says we have no DNR,
so the ventilator breathes for us,
the psyche meds think
and dream for us,
the generic Viagra fucks for us,
the Trazodone tucks us in.
In fiction, there are endings,
there is meaning, sometimes lessons,
but this story,
like this city,
has a life of its own.
And who am I to judge it?
To defend it? To defund it?
Who am I to count its blessings?
Or to number all its bones?
This city is American.
This city could be anywhere.
This city never pays for guardrails
if it can vote for guns
This city is my hometown.
This city isn’t getting better.
This city has no place for me.
It’s my hometown,
but it’s not
home.
Jennifer Maloney writes poetry, fiction and plays from her home in Rochester, NY. Find her work in Litro Magazine, Panoply Zine, Ghost City Press, and many other literary magazines and journals. Jennifer is the co-editor of Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021) and the author of Don’t Let God Know You are Singing, Poems and Stories, forthcoming in winter, 2023, from the same fine press. Jennifer is also a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful. For all of it. Every day.
south broadway press 