Donna Vorreyer is the author of the collections Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2017).
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Crossing State Lines
Insects collect on the windshield, ping as they explode,
death masks splatted in random rows.
Heat lightning blurs the humid air, the glare
of headlights fluttering with their ghosts.
I should sing them all a requiem, herky-jerk
a hallelujah, but I have miles to go. You know.
My own issues. Fever daughter, crater dweller,
creature of the great black hole.
I struggle to name the ache that godzillas its way
through the bright cities of my bones.
Voice tongue-stuck and swollen. Joints locked
in a genuflect. Arriving, I lean against a fender
and stretch, my shadow cast ahead of me
on unfamiliar streets, elongated, erasing the bulk
of…
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his sister, three years away from leaving social media, has a boyfriend whose depression is a feminist. darkness lands again the role of weather. on paper, his cough is somewhere between cricket and cross.
ambush of evening, solstice spilled on stone
without animal blood but other: our true names written
where river runs her blue arms through a velvet meadow
pale one, bending to waters, with a language of seeing &
silent woods, I am obscured by every beauty
you have never belonged
fleshed with the ordinary work of death,
irreducible in otherness
black violets, marsh-lily, open as many mouths in the
open chest of diligence
the day is feasting on the innocent, reeds of sun
bound in their song
familiar world, I do not know you
what does my mad heart dream of? my fingers,
stained with the tithe of violets
a dark sea spread with voyages, shy animals,
a garden where all love is,
far from me
with only dreams to feed the soul on, I go,
through the dark wood, wings waxen
time has no name for you, the words of…
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there was a radio somewhere in the basement and we knew this because it would click on long enough for us to cover our feet and question our savior’s second go at amnesia. if I wasn’t there, I was probably trying out my father’s fastball with a grip he called the ribs of my neighbor’s dog. not long from this I was holding a baby and said what a vague hiatus. also in this order I may have said you look like a ghost and then not my finger but a finger does snap into place when I smoke.
BONE ANTLER STONE
check out this review by Daniel Paul Marshall of former contributor Tim Miller’s new book, Bone Antler Stone, from High Window Press:
check out Bone Antler Stone, here:
also, both Daniel Paul Marshall and Tim Miller have work in isacoustic*, here:
Tim Miller
https://isacoustic.com/2018/01/10/143/
Daniel Paul Marshall
https://isacoustic.com/2018/01/09/person-daniel-paul-marshall-three-poems/
~
THIS BEING DONE
former contributor Stephanie L. Harper has a new book available, This Being Done, from Finishing Line Press:
also, check out Stephanie L. Harper’s work in isacoustic*, here:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/02/person-stephanie-l-harper-two-poems/
~
NEPOTISM
my daughter, Mary Ann Smock, has written several pieces for The Mighty, and this is her latest:
https://themighty.com/2018/06/growing-up-with-a-sibling-disability-vici-syndrome/
~
ELSE
volume fourth of {isacoustic*}, July 2018, is available here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/isacoustic-volume-fourth/paperback/product-23707103.html
also:
review of Heather Minette’s Half Light by George Salis:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/20/a-review-of-heather-minettes-half-light-by-george-salis/
review of Heather…
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the collected bugs created by what haunts them
–
god the boy-dad of the specifically anonymous
–
the chores I had in that factless place
this machine
it counts
for your mother
your father’s
sheep
that’s all it does
but is very
large
(everything
from the year it broke
is remembered
by the dog
that looked
with me
at the mouse
I ate for
Suzanne Edison is the author of The Moth Eaten World, published by Finishing Line Press. Some of her poems can be found in: Persimmon Tree: About Place Journal: Rewilding issue; Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine; JAMA; SWWIM; What Rough Beast; Bombay Gin; The Naugatuck River Review; The Ekphrastic Review; and in the anthologies: Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, ed. Joy Harjo & Brenda Peterson; & The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One. She lives in Seattle with her family and two cats under an ever-changing sky.
~ ~ ~
Sick Girl in the Wilderness
My mother’s evergreen face,
the one she puts on
before entering my room,
is the only God I know.
Let me be enraptured
in her fan-shaped branches,
let them cool my braised skin,
its geysering heat.
Let her outlast the black bear
eating me with its singular purpose,
as if…
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kingsoftrain 