Magazine
Rose Mary Boehm: “Boil them”
Rebecca Clifford: “Climatic Divinations”
Sam Hendrian: “Magazine Ads”
Paul Ilechko: “A Clock Is Ticking”
Tricia Knoll: “Next Time You Interview a Unicorn Prepare Better Questions”
H.K.G. Lowery: “Villa Diodati”
Samuel Prestridge: “Why I’ve Not Cut Down The Yes Ma’am Bush”
Tamarah Rockwood: “Persephone’s first day out”
Jason Ryberg: “No Great Hurry”
Matthew Ussia: “Home Improvement Advice for Anyone Owning a House More Than One Hundred Years Old”
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke Reviews
Alone in the Burning
by Wendy McVicker
Wendy McVicker’s work is often known for its meticulous attention to the miraculous details of everyday life. We see this aspect of her work in earlier poems such as “Into the Dark,” which appeared in The Journal of Mythic Arts in 2008 and thrills us with lines such as “Summer evenings on the terrace / as the risen dark / flowed in, phosphorescence / of fireflies, and heat / lightning startling / the horizon” and “the tall shapes / of the thunder gods /tramping through the dark.” But there was always something lurking there in her work, something not quite said. McVicker’s latest collection, the chapbook Alone in the Burning from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, gives readers a glimpse into those quiet secrets that have been beneath all of her previous work.
Still firmly rooted in the domestic, McVicker utilizes a haunting tone as she allows her poems to imitate the slippery and hazy nature of traumatic memories while sharing childhood stories of family dysfunction. Even the titles of the poems reinforce this, as many of them are titled “When I was alone.” Because of this echoing, the reader is caught up in the way traumatic memories repeat themselves and begin to blur into one another. Lines from the poem on page 27, such as “I felt that forked fire// all the way/ through my body” and those from the one on page 10, such as “leaves in the trees/ breathed/ through my dreams” could be from the same poem, so cohesive and unified is this collection.
My favorite poem in Alone in the Burning is the “When I was alone” from page 13 which beautifully renders primal instincts. Lines such as “I knew how to wait: / one way to be safe // Running is another: / not my way” and “In the story the doe / broke and ran / across the clearing // That’s when the gun / found her // That’s how I learned to be still” remind the reader that there is more than just the fight or flight response to danger, there is also freeze.
But the collection also offers an answer to how we break that freeze, how we find ourselves again: language and imagination. In the first piece in the book, the modified haibun “Lost,” McVicker establishes the important (and sometimes dangerous and elusive) role language will play in the work:
The alphabet a rope
slipping through my hands
each word a knot, burning
The penultimate piece in the book is also a modified haibun and counters the earlier “Lost” with “Found.” “This is a story about a girl who learned to live in books,” it begins. Its ending brings us into that life in books:
Language held the key
Long strings of letters flying
off the page took her with them
We are never alone, the collection seems to say, so long as we have books, so long as we have writing. In this way, Alone in the Burning begins to serve as an ars poetica of sorts. It presents tight and clever turns of phrase reminiscent of Diane di Prima while wrapping them in a meditative confrontation of the domestic similar to the later work of Sharon Olds. I have long been a fan of McVicker’s work and this slim volume makes me excited to see where else her poems will go. As she says in the final “When I was alone,” “This has been / a long journey” and I, for one, am grateful she has brought the reader along on it with her.
Alone in the Burning
by Wendy McVicker
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024
ISBN: 9781962405072
$14.00
About the Author: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. She is a winner of a Sheila-Na-Gig Fiction Award and her poetry collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, is now available from Kelsay Book. Her poetry collection centered on her experiences with ovarian cancer, Little Stone, Little Stone, is forthcoming in 2026 from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She can be found on YouTube as Meter&Mayhem.
Sue Blaustein: “A Song for Centipedes”
Felicia Clark: “Chrome Cheers”
john compton: “[we play scrabble—]”
Sam Culotta: “Voices in the Other Room”
Jenna K Funkhouser: “The House at the End of the Road”
Ken Gierke: “After the Rain”
Julia Hatch: “A Thoughtless Moment of Zen”
James Croal Jackson: “Drymouth”
Daniel Edward Moore: “From the Castle of Resentment”
Jimmy Pappas: “The Ineffable”
Jason Baldinger: “a time capsule of dust”
Stephen Barile: “Cedar Crest Cove”
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella: “Quilted Rainbows”
Lorraine Caputo: “And That Wind Twirls”
Rick Christiansen: “Borrowed Blood”
John Dorsey: “Jerry Garcia & German Root Beer”
Howie Good: “Uketopia”
John Grey: “Flower People”
Judy Lorenzen: “Anyway”
Tim Peeler: “Untitled”
LB Sedlacek: “Art vs Life (Dream 09/19/15)”
Nadia Arioli: “Sam Insists Only Oak”
Jon Bennet: “Petty Dreams”
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozábal: “Thoughts”
Sarah Carleton: “No, I would not like to ride”
Bart Edelman: “What Happens Here”
Marc Janssen: “Dog Days”
Linda Lerner: “Twenty-Four Hour Non-Stop News”
Anita Lerek: “Song for Blood Vibrato”
Jim Murdoch: “The Great Ledger in the Sky”
Timothy Tarkelly: “Long Night”
Robin Wright: “Nesting”
A Review of
Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim an Empty Moment
By Caroline Reddy
In Caroline Reddy’s Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim an Empty Moment she emerges from the skull of modern warfare and violence a fully grown Athena, in her “steampunk space suit / underneath the human skin” wielding her weapons of language: “I release my daggers / after years of betrayal / molting into a warrior.” Being of Iranian and Ghanaian heritage, she brings the power and songs of her elders as a way to unify the world’s discord: “My ancestors / who protected mountains, / climb on opposite / sides of the world / to bring me harmony.” Through her poignant and powerful verse, Reddy triumphs in her goal to preserve the holiness: “After our last dokusan / when I told you about / how music had been murdered / you requested / that I keep the legacy / of the world alive.”
She has been through terror herself, in Tehran: “Hold still child / to the fuzzy blanket / until the siren stops” and she knows the fear of the children in current conflicts, Ukraine, Gaza, and how to somehow heal and transmute these atrocities into song of spirit: “We have learned that harsh moments / can be alchemized into particles of light / that unfurl from Indra’s net / to help us on our ascension.”
In this way, her book becomes timely and crucial to somehow processing our present grief and anger at the continued killing of innocents on this earth. Reddy, in assuming the role of poetic warrior and magician, allows us to ride the brightness of her robe, the glint of her spear, the clarity of her words. We feel this with her because we have been there: “but i had been beaten / and belittled by so many / that i didn’t believe / in my own myth.” But this is an intimate battle done in the darkest places, and this is what makes it even more transformative once the light is found:
I closed my eyes and let the tears drip
and dreamt of the quartz crystals to pour,
for the light of Earendil appeared
and the planets smiled
as I began to widen:
beyond the shadows
beyond the bitter wind.
She transforms ashes into fire, necrotic tissue into stem cells, violence into compassion and unity. As she states:
Songs rise from the ashes as Qoqnoos burns away debris of thistles and last bits of sterile soil from the chambers of my heart. The spring Equinox brings Nowruz as I tumble through tombs and burst from beneath the snow like a lustrous tulip. In this collection, Reddy takes in all of the rancor and cruelty she has faced, and others continue to suffer, and reanimates them as feathered things which guide us also to emerge from this torment as changed beings. She becomes a mother of birds, of hope: “I dream of a womb / where the ashes of a wondered bird / do not spoil.” With much of the poetry written being one of victimhood and being caged within a sadness or a trauma, Reddy’s work elevates to a level of one who has walked the desert for forty days and forty nights and who has come back with these ethereal and thunderous truths, this glowing body and this glowing sword. This is a wonderous book. Reddy invites us to all to once again believe our own myths.
About the Author: Scott Ferry helps our veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His book Sapphires on the Graves is coming out from Glass Lyre Press in late 2024.
Funereal Geometry: The Evangelical Congregation Concludes the Funeral by Singing “In Christ, There is No East or West / No North or South,” while Outside the Church and Midway Up, a Steeplejack Tests to See the Steeple’s True
If a plumbline’s run from Heaven’s door bell
to the red baize on Satan’s pool table;
and if such a line bisects their steeple;
and if the steeple’s perpendicular—
perpendicular, foursquare, ever true--
to the church’s temporal foundation,
the workman’s spirit level always rules
theology and recalibration.
Lacking such, the skewed will keep on skewing,
will mime secular drift–anathema
to the faith and the faithful, those who cleave
to the steeple's cleft, crowd a receding
circumference, and create a holy
right angle to the vertical axis.
That’s why the steeplejack’s climbed the steeple
even as the funeral rumbles, smacks
around his calibrations. He’s allowed
no room for error in the elders’ view:
the journeyman’s warrant is the last word
in church doctrine. The steeple must be true,
must aim straight up. The soul shoots for a pole
implied by the steeple. Off-plumb slivers
of a bubble, who knows where the launched soul
might end up. Heaven's the point of a pin.
About the Author: Samuel Prestridge lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, Juke Joint, and The Southern Humanities Review.
He is a post-aspirational man whose first book A Dog’s Job of Work is seeking publication. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. His children concede that he is, generally, an adequate father.
Image Credit: John Vachon “Zell, South Dakota. Church buildings” (1942) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
funeral arrangements in the crawlspace
the floor peels
to reveal the plots
where a son’s memories
were buried
& the son
months later
laid himself
to rest.
//
in the dark room
i hear sobbing.
from the corner
of my eye
a mother
on hands & knees
clawing the boards,
trying to dig open
the wood,
trying to dig open
her son.
About the Author: john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024)
Image Credit: “Interior view, looking up toward project west at the heavy timber joists and center beam supporting the wood water tank” Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Wardenclyffe
The present is theirs. The future, for which I really worked, is mine.
-Nicola Tesla
Is what I imagined tangible—
this motor, powered by fireflies,
streamer arc threads of phosphorescent light
discharging from the center coil.
I go from idea to reality,
a star among the stars.
I do not think there is any thrill
like the inventor seeing a creation come to success,
the exhilarating sense of the future.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
If my current can travel distances,
my work is immortal—
resurrecting my vision, broadcasting to Mars.
Thought is electrical energy.
Why can’t we photograph it?
The primary circuits of us all,
high-speed alternators—
many colors, myriad frequencies.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
My tower dream ran out of funds—
demolished to scrap,
the property sold to the highest bidder.
I live on credit at the Waldorf,
along with spark-excited ghosts.
My only friends are pigeons in Bryant Park—
My favorite is a female.
As long as she lives,
There is light in my life.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
About the Author: Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).
Image Credit: “Tesla sits with his “magnifying transmitter” in Colorado Springs in 1899″ Image courtesy of Wikipedia. CC BY 4.0
What We’re Here for
for bart solarczyk & bob phillips
your whole generation
seemed to know
how to swat away a compliment
kind words tossed
into a river
full of mud & rust
born out of houses
with tin roofs & tar paper hearts
by men & women
who knew the weight
of factory gloves
after so many years
their fingers piercing
the very edges of time
even poems are just about
doing the job
like pushing a mop
or wiping sweat
away from your heart
after the loss of a friend or a spouse or your sanity
knowing that’s just what time does
knowing you just have to keep putting the work in
because that’s what we’re here for.
About the Author: John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, and Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Historic house with tin roof in Eutaw, Alabama” (2010) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 
