Andrew Furst

1

the mingled scent of plain donuts

and coffee

is the flavor of traveling.

my grandparents would take me to towns

like boylston and shrewsbury.

names carried here from far away places.

plaid thermoses

poured into paper cups

rested on the bench seat between them;

we combed musty hordes

of treasure and trash.

spinning wheels, arrowheads,

and blue willow

2

so much has changed since then.

eyes have closed, and new ones opened.

the green station wagon

and the chicken coop full of copper boilers

faded to rust and razed.

but much is the same.

the smell of crusty donuts

and milky coffee still reminds me of the old chevelle.

and those names that have settled on to these places,

like the sun’s rays onto our children’s brows.

 is a poet, artist, author, photographer, musician, and a technologist.  His poetry has appeared in The Chaffin Journal, Superpresent magazine, Dime Show Review, and Levee Magazine, amongst others. His art has been featured in the Emerson Review and Mud Season Review. More about Andrew at www.andrewfurst.net.

I forgive him for the little lies. The little fibs that slip away and the broken promises that go

unkept. He always tells the same lies, and sometimes I believe him because the story paints itself like a vivid oil portrait; first, the figures are painted, then the background, then the corners, edges, contours, and finally, it becomes as if it were a real scene on the canvas of life, but only the immensity of human imagination has made what could never be real. It tells me what I most desire, so I reach for it with all my heart, stretching out my soul's arms to preserve all his lips whisper and hold it within me for eternity. I love him with all my heart, but when my reality is keen-eyed, it sometimes smells like the scratch of jagged-edged infidelities in the dawning light or the wistful night. The cold realization slips into bed beside me or touches me as I walk.

Today we take it into our heads to walk around the riverbank. We get caught in the cool

January breeze, and he starts coughing. I take off my thin pink cotton scarf and wrap it

around his neck with careful movements. He gives me a weak half-smile and walks on. My

chest gets hot, even though my whole body is shivering from the winter's minus temperatures.

Sometimes we stop. We look at the broken-legged seagulls on the slippery waterfront stones, the sloppy sidewalk ahead, and the footprints of giddy pedestrians. He rubs his hand as we spy on one of the old buildings covered in melted snow. His fingertips are almost purple, so I tug off my black fabric gloves and slip them on his frosty palms. He thanks me quietly. His silent words creep into my consciousness like angelically soft notes, wrapping my trembling body in a gentle embrace.

Barely perceptible, the milky-white sky opens, and it drizzles, but we are unperturbed. We sit on a stinging bench and stare silently at the glistening toes of our wet boots as they tread the snowy ground before us. Somewhere in the distance, expensive hand-painted plates clink, light pages of newspapers crinkle in the city breeze, the iron bells of a dilapidated church jingle, and a delicious golden-skinned duck in a warm oven is being prepared. I feel him move beside me, and I put my head down. He sways back and forth with folded arms while tiny particles of dripping snow fall on his knitted flame-red Angora sweater. I slip my thin arms out of my expensive loden-lined coat and place them on his back. He looks me in the eye. My tongue curls and confesses at seeing his delicately delineated perfect face. It humbly admits the truth it has admitted so many times before and hopes. It hopes that, for once, its love's answer will not be a lie. But once again, he replies, I love you too. I-love-you. He utters this gracious lie delicately. The first syllable is trust, the second is passion, and the third is loyalty. He feels none of these, yet he testifies to them. He savours the shape of the voice. First bitter, then sour, then finally swallowed. After all, it's only one word. But for me, it's so much more: I put myself in his hands.

Maybe that's not how it all happened. I've been sick for a while now; my lungs are weak from the January freeze. Every time I close my eyes, I try to remember our last story. Embellish it, add to it, rearrange it, change it. Maybe one day I'll grind it to perfection, and that word won't ring so false. Or the memory will turn yellow, like old letterhead, and no longer matter. Or maybe ‘‘I love you’’ will become just another fluffy word to be whispered in the harsh winter, bored, picked up by the wind, carried far away, across the world, to where it means nothing.

Far from the eager, greedy arms of my soul.

is an eighteen-year-old writer from Budapest, Hungary. She has a never-ending love for creating and an ever-lasting passion for learning. She has won several national competitions and has been an editor-in-chief of her high school’s prestigious newspaper, Eötvös Diák. Today, she is not throwing away her shot.

When I was young,

we called birds down from the trees.

They flew in zigzag patterns

to land in our brown paper bags.

I never saw one, only felt

the weight as it dropped in

and felt the hand of my counselor

wrapping the top tight

to make sure the snipe didn’t escape.

After the hunt, we dumped only rocks,

not birds, out of our bags

as the counselors laughed.

When I was young,

I zigzagged to my classroom,

dodging imagined bullets from real guns.

They were shooting kids from a white van.

Turns out we were wrong

—about the van, that is—

but the shots were right,

right between the ribs.

When I was young,

I didn’t know that snipes,

pencil-billed and feathered-brown,

were birds of the marsh and reeds.

They would never be caught perching in trees,

nor caught by the songs of tie-dyed kids.

Only the hunters with keenest eye

and the steadiest hand can shoot

a snipe in zig-zag flight.

Now when my daughter is young,

they teach her the zig-zag run.

Not to rely on camouflage, only flight.

Everyday, I pack her pencils

and brown paper bag lunch.

When I brush

the feathered hair from her eyes,

I wish I could give

her wings.

is a writer and scientific researcher living outside of Frederick, Maryland. Her work has

appeared or is forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, JAKE, The Shore, ONE ART, and Open Minds Quarterly among others. She likes made-up words, Erlenmeyer flasks, dog-eared notebooks, and excel spreadsheets.

The ladder scatters the wasps

rising from the tops of a splatter of felled fruit.

Skin crawls as they buzz from fuzz on old roots rotting.

Figures next door, figuring how to reach more

breach the highest tree limbs. They reconfigure

buckets to branches, like chess figurines

stacked back-to-back, head-to-toe. Rook-to-pawn.

Spawn fresh tart dreams on tongue. Summer songs once sung.

They're grasping figments of Newton's imagination,

crumbs of his gravity to ground their machinations.

As each fig falls to pail, they spot another.

swat the flies, improvise new heights

all with mother's old recipe, necessity's invention

to recreate that plate she set before them.

The time she spent for them, cutting each fig in two.

Figs became pairs. Became full chairs and laughter.

That's what they're after. Full stomachs, full hearts,

tarts full of the figgy taste of home, of hope, of her.

spends mornings in her garden weeding, because just like poetry, flowers grow

best with space to breathe. She has judged poetry for San Diego Writer’s Festival for the past three years. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies, been set to music by opera composers, and performed on NPR. She is the 2024 Kay Yoder Scholarship for American History recipient. Her full-length novel works are represented by Leslie Zampetti of Open Book Literary. You can find recent poetry from her in Full Mood Magazine, The Zinnia Journal (forthcoming), Boats Against the Current (forthcoming), The Creekside Magazine (forthcoming), and Frazzled Lit (forthcoming).

& these gravel trails wind around my heart

                        like thorny vines. Lightning veins through fog

above the lake, shuddered pines in thunder

                         snaking in pampas grass full of cicada trill

& dust, mud-spangled, yet I, over a hundred

                      miles from home for a job that won’t last,

am taking this walk through wind, hoping

                       to treat this village of coal mines & backyard

fireworks as my own as lightning reflections

                      take wing off the lake’s cataracts.

Across your balcony, Grandma, mid-autumn light

                        roosts in swinging pots of pansies

above blood-red canopies billowing in wind.

                       We recline in blue Adirondack chairs

with mugs of hot chocolate, gazing at Dubuque,

                       whose brick buildings & stone spires

knuckle the horizon’s blackjack oaks that seem

                        to float on Mississippi River mist

edged in cicada trill & loon cry. Bundled in a polyester

                        blanket, you clutch your mug as if it were

a campfire steaming in your palms. We don’t talk

                        about the moving boxes scattered throughout

your apartment. We don’t even talk about hospice,

                        your move-in date next week. I offer to switch

out the pink baseball cap on your bald head for a warm hat,

                       but you refuse, your eyes trained on the sky,

that gold prairie of purple thunderheads. We hear

                       no thunderclaps, just a breeze screeching

like a baby heron, wing-shot yet determined, tailing

                       our blanched breaths into night.

is a three-time Pushcart Prize- and one-time Best of the Net-nominatedauthor. Jacob's creative works have been published in many journals, including the Colorado Review, The Hollins Critic, The MacGuffin, Lunch Ticket, and Into the Void.

After a massacre, items, bloodstained, are taken,

& it does a soul good, as they say, to know they are

held—no matter how improperly—in dark boxes

to remember proud nations that no longer dance.

But souls cry out in open fields like a dark box

that cannot hold them. Others write letters & ask

that a baby’s rattle be returned. We all know how

much we are blessed to be here, in the presence

of each other, not w/ handshakes, but w/ voices

reconciling tonight. Whether the toy rattle be

burned, or welcomed, or prayed upon, or healed

w/, or displayed, or carried into our spirits, we

know that the four winds have chosen to shake it.

writes from Michigan. His chapbook Forests of Woundedness is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. Wiezorek’s work has appeared in The London Magazine. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago. His poetry has been awarded by the Poetry Society of Michigan and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Tteokbokki at midnight:

         simmered rice cakes dried up & shriveled against plasticine wrap,

         baked in the microwave for exactly a minute and 33 seconds. Preferably

         held in the poorly-glazed ceramic bowl you painted at summer camp

         eight years ago, best served to <90 pound Asian girls with dried lips,

         greasy hair and self-diagnosed borderline personality disorder.

         It looks as if curdled milk & sickled blood had a baby, bathed & baptized

         in the buttery-yellow refrigerator light. watch reality TV half past 12 and

         turn the volume down to a nice odd number like 15—but make sure it's

         not loud enough for Mom to wake up & get mad. Flicking through channels,

         you realize everything at this hour looks like it crawled out of an

         urban legend. What a picture of indulgence—you should be finishing up your

         calculus homework! But tempted by bite-sized existentialist thoughts,

         absurdist rationales and pragmatic delusions swirling in a bowl of

         gochujang paste—who can refuse? Later, you find yourself up-close

         and personal with the toilet seat, face-down as you push your hair back.

         acid reflux, sticky fingers clenching a towel. The bathroom smells of

         clorox and rotten mangos. Your teeth will inevitably turn yellow

         after a few months of this, so make sure to double-layer your toothpaste,

         smile into the mirror & tell yourself it’ll make a difference.

Murmurs hum in the thick August air like the

beating of a bumblebee's heart, the invisible

orchestra's cadence drawing the final curtain upon

the fox's tail cradling an orange sun.

Mother runs through the auburn fields, coal-colored

braids trailing in the wind. Her weathered hands carry a

tin pot, where she drops moonstones, bluebonnets and

lovebugs in a concoction of sap — "Honeypot tricks," she calls them.

As the sky becomes swatched with indigo hues and

black clouds, I take a wooden spoon and clang it against

Mother's honeypot. The fireflies come to feast upon her offerings

and, in return, show me the path to the city.

Twinkling lights dot the skyline as jazz beyond the bayou

shakes the earth beneath the soles of my feet. Coca-Cola lines

stretch around the curb as ladies in black sequins and

smoky pearls enter golden doors under neon lights. Boys

and girls in summer shorts & pinstripe tees chase the sparks

of orange fireworks.

I follow them but they are lost in cobblestone storefronts. Busboy

caps line the streetlamps as newspaper rags form coats of steel along the

brick walls of alleyways. A man with broken teeth who looks like me

asks, "Got a quarter for me, Missy?" but the fireflies ignore him and fly on.

I sequester myself in a silent theater as a piano crescendo

collides with the rainstorm brewing outside. The movie

begins to play, and I begin to cry for Mother.

is a 17-year-old artist and writer from Long Island, New York. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Chromatic Scars Review. She is a Best of Issue Winner in the National High School Poetry Contest, a multi-time Scholastic Gold/Silver Key recipient, a Top 5 Winner for the NCTE National Writing Award, a 1st Place Winner in the Wildlife Forever Art Contest, and many more. She has been published in The Looking Glass Review, the Blue Marble Review, TeenInk, Firework Stories, and more. When she's not creating, you can find her watching reality TV while eating ramen.

        I.   Prologue

I know I have

           a good poem lodged in me

somewhere.

I opened the hungry mouth of door & the sky

            is changing hands

            between twilight and evening.

Sit down with me, your bones are tired.

                       The voices from the house are like how you want death

           to sound: faraway enough to forget.

A wobble of branches has

          the same wind that turns up the

the dirt from streets of Paris.

The trees wave and throw

            up leaves in applause.

Everything collapses back home.

        II.   [untitled]

The place, you would not know

            until light. June is an

ugly month, but the breeze from

           elsewhere loves me enough to brush

                       my hair, the mosquitos to pick at my flesh.

The incandescent glow from the last

porch light stretched,

           elastic and tender, band-like, to mimic

a smoldering fire.

The clouds that cap us from falling into the atmosphere

            play their final verse (most people mistaken them for crickets).

        III.   Epilogue

This place, you would not believe

            until light. June is a

soft month. The glint of stop sign metal

           in the afterglow of streetlight &

                         the trees throw up their hands again,

this time in ash. The cough of plane engine

overhead, choking on blue sky.

            Perhaps this flight is not mine to take, but I will have it

anyway.

has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, The Waltham Forest Poetry Contest, and the Rising Voices Awards, and is published in Blue Marble, Masque and Spectacle, and Lumina Journal. She is an alumnus of the 92Y Young Writers Workshop, and Kenyon Review Workshop, and is on the board of the Incandescent Review and Pen and Quill magazine. She plays violin and piano and loves Rachmaninoff and Sylvia Plath.

        She said the gas station was haunted. That anyone who went in never came out, their

bodies crushed down and made into fuel for the cars that came and went in the night. I said she was full of shit, then pushed her back onto the grass.

        She’d taken us to the ditch opposite the gas station for our first date, back when her Dad was still alive and the idea of ghosts was something abstract. After he died she wanted to visit more often. We sat patiently until someone arrived and watched them disappear behind the grimy gas station windows.

        Usually it would be truckers or hippies in beat up campers popping in for a piss. Once we spotted someone we knew, one of the priests from the church on the other side of town. In the ditch she pulled away from me and pointed to where the gas station door was swinging shut. We watched the back of his balding head making its way through the aisles, stopping every so often and then retreating towards the rear. “He’ll be back.” I said, and so we waited. An hour passed and at some point dusk drew in turning everything cold.

        When the priest failed to reappear, we went back to hers. She waited until her mother had gone to bed and turned all the lights off one by one until there was nothing but darkness. In that uniform void we explored the shape of each other and made love in silence.

        After the funeral I met her outside the gas station. She was closer than usual, standing on the edge of the forecourt where the fluorescent lighting couldn’t quite reach.

        “What do you think happens to them?” She said. She smelt faintly of other people’s

perfume, mourners I imagined queuing up at the funeral to give her a hug, telling her about a better place and eternal peace.

        In return I told her the truth. That I was sorry about her Dad but there was no such thing as ghosts. Whatever happened to the people who went into the gas station would have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

        She asked how I got through life being so sure of everything. Assuming there was an

answer to the world’s mysteries and all we had to do was wait for things to become clear. We watched as a motorbike pulled up and its teenage rider wandered inside. She moved closer and asked what was wrong with wanting to believe in something. I said she was being naive, that death was a fact of life and wasn’t that beautiful enough without the need to bring the supernatural into it?

        Later we made up with the one thing that we knew was real. Our bodies and the love they shared. She took out a pair of blindfolds and earplugs and said she wanted us to put them on. Shut down our senses until there was nothing but physical touch. In the darkness I saw the teenager wandering around behind the gas station windows, getting smaller and smaller until he could have been just another smear on the glass.

        That week she hardly made it into school. We all knew about her Dad so no one brought it up. In the evenings I met her on the forecourt with sandwiches and hot chocolate. Winter was really setting in then and her skin was unhealthily pale. When we did make love it was like handling a dying creature, unsure whether each moment of contact was going to shatter something within.

        She would no longer leave the gas station’s perimeter. When I did manage to get her to sit down she would talk about the people she’d seen, and the way they’d looked before

disappearing.

        “It was him.” She said one night. I was helping her into the coat I had brought and she

was making no move to help. “It was Dad, on the other side of the glass. He was happy.”

        There was no point getting angry. I pulled her into my chest and told her how the brain

deals with grief. I told her all the explanations for hallucinations I’d read online and the way

the cold probably didn’t help. It was like talking to someone who wasn’t there. She nodded

rhythmically, not agreeing with me, just locked into the movement as her eyes stared out at the gas station entrance.

        It was on the news a few days later. Teenager vanished without a trace. A search party

was being set up, a hundred faces without hope. Of course everyone asked me. Accused me of knowing something when all I could tell them was my version of the truth. That there

would be an explanation if we just looked hard enough.

         I went to the only place I could think of, not sure what I hoped to find but knowing it

wasn’t what met me there. Her necklace abandoned on the concrete, the gas station door

propped open. I stood there all night trying to summon the courage to follow her inside.

Telling myself there was nothing to be scared off and praying I was right. In the end, though, I turned and left. Returned to school and the world I could understand.

        Now, when everything feels too predictable, I go down to that ditch where I met my first love. Night after night I stare into the yellow glow from afar and try my hardest to believe in mysteries.

is a British writer focussing on shorter works. He has been published in Vast Literary Press, SoFloPoJo, Passengers Journal, and Artam's The Face Project (forthcoming). He can be found at @roryperkinswriter on X. 

My grandmother tells me this

from the passenger seat

holding a napkin stitched

with four needles for safekeeping.

She has become so small

I almost believe she can fit

through the eyes

of their metal holdings.

I know, though, that it is never

so simple. Somewhere, the thread

always hitching. Picture it:

my mother’s father in the 60s

in a brown wool suit, scouring

the whole of Sheffield for a

plate of rice, my grandmother

with her hair still black and rivering

past her hips, my mother

rollicking deep in her belly. They spent

six hours that day searching

not for rice, my grandmother tells me,

but for an echo

to reach back up from the well, to

take them by the collars, and whisper

You are not the first. You are not alone.

Of course, she doesn’t say this. She says

Ya Allah everyone was so white

and the only rice they did find was

street scattered and for passerby

pigeons so they went back

to their apartment, where my

grandfather would spend the next

six years philosophizing a whiteness

resistant to bleaching. Head bowed

towards the words of men

who in all their loftiness

would also have denied him

no matter his sacrifice, and him

supplicating and

supplicating

is a Bangladeshi American poet from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, phoebe, Furrow Magazine, ONE ART, and elsewhere. She is a digital resident with The Seventh Wave and lives in Boston.

“Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

                                                                                                 —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

It is not yet two o’clock, and I want to say

the instant doesn’t matter: you crouched

behind a rail fence and a furled rebel flag,

waiting for Pickett to signal the advance.

In no future does this damned gamble pay off,

poor mountain boy, even if you win the day.

But Faulkner was right: all is in the balance,

and nothing has happened yet.

                                                                In this instant,

somewhere along the federal line, a Minié ball

with your name on it, wrapped in cheap paper,

waits in a cartridge box for some Billy Yank

to send your way. And I can tell you what happens.

In another instant, you charge across that field,

gripping your musket, a desperate skeleton,

blind with hunger, ready to face the enemy

with one lead ball and no bayonet.

                                                                    Maybe

you reach the wall. Maybe you only get in range.

Either way, that Minié ball whistles a hole

through your hip.

                                     Once upon a time, I wondered

what might have happened if that ball had struck

you square in the gut, somewhere soft and vital

and easy to infect, thus consigning our tomorrows

to a slow, festering death, ten thousand years

in the making. But I was missing the point

of this instant. You are in the balance, not me.

It is not yet two o’clock on this July afternoon.

Nothing has happened, and you can still walk away.

is a poet living in Eagle Mountain, Utah. His work has appeared in Dappled Things, Vita Poetica, The Sandy River Review, Irreantum, Wayfare, The Under Review, and other journals. 

“On April 16, 2014, the Sewol ferry, which was sailing from Incheon to Jeju, sank.

The final death toll reveals a tragedy: 304 of the 476 passengers were killed; five of the bodies were never recovered. Of the 299 deaths, 250 were second-year high school students. Like so many other students, they went on a school trip to Jeju Island, the most beautiful place in South Korea, in the blue spring of April. They failed to return home.” — The Diplomat

The flames saw the hungry

waves lunge at the quivering

railing, cascade over the

blubbering deck, tangled muscles rippling.

Knobby fingers of boiling foam danced

its waltz, peeling people off their beds

on the lower C, kissing the wood off the walls

on the trills, humming the windows from their frames

in merciless shimmies

of its hips.

They all drowned by noon.

The flames smelt

the metal screams,

smelt the scratching doorknobs,

the steaming stained breaths,

the sour sweat that leaked

from bobbing heads.

Smelt the sweet water

crooning its way

with its flirtatious tongue

through limp tangles,

of hair

that swayed

in the syrup.

The flames felt

the slick porcelain

of balloon limbs,

leeched of their vivid color

like wooden chopsticks.

Cold fingernails slump

into the soft flesh

of arms.

The flames heard

the sandy skin

on worn toes

breath a soft sigh

as they sank

into the embrace

of the water. Heard

the jittering bones

thump

a solemn tempo

against the wailing piano,

purple bed rails,

a pair

of oscillating legs.

The smoke skidded over

the hills,

raced

the cold sun,

arrived at the huffing buildings,

knocked on the doors.

whispered into young ears,

words

keen scythes,

cleaving light footsteps,

the babble of the television,

nimble hands frying

snug eggs.

The walls were left heaving,

clumsy tears

stumbling down cracks in ceilings,

into brewing coffee,

hands holding fresh diapers.

is a poet and writer from Seoul, South Korea. Her poems have appeared in Young Writers Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She writes for her school’s literary magazine, Kaleidoscope, and newspaper, The Tiger Times. She has attended writing workshops with Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and Kenyon Young Writers. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading books of all genres, listening to music, and swimming.