kingsoftrain

Kat Giordano is a poet and crybaby from Pennsylvania. She is one of two co-editors of Philosophical Idiot. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Poet Confronts Bukowski’s Ghost, is currently available through Amazon, and her work has appeared in OCCULUM, CLASH Magazine, Ghost City Review, the Cincinnati Review, and others, as well as a variety of manic, late-night Facebook messages. She tweets @giordkat and shamelessly sells herself at katgiordano.com

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CONSIDERED LOST

I’ve been thinking a lot about the story you told me
about the cat you had growing up, how one day
you let it outside like usual but it never came home
and eventually you had to give up looking.

you said a month or so later, you went exploring
in the woods with your friend and found its body
curled-up next to some kind of animal hole
that looked like it, too, had been abandoned.

you never…

Heather Minette’s “Half-Light” unstrands the ends of experience: the moment, the memory and the space in between. They exist together in her grief that spans the collection of poems and metamorphose into intentionally half-illuminated meditations. Her poems are dewy with privacy, the light before the sun has risen in full. The opening line becomes a metaphor for the poet and reader relationship. She, too, is the kaleidoscope and while reading we believe, “I still see her sometimes / in fragments.”

And if kaleidoscopes distort, her work, too, kaleidoscopes the light of fiction and reality, exposing the true topography of memory. She shows it as “momentary hope,” but also as pain, as absence, as passively omnipresent. With each poem, memory places a different role. Half-new, half what it was before.

While walking in the half-light of her reflections, she instructs readers how to understand her. Her poem, “A Silent Promise,” seems…

isacoustic* volume fourth is now available:

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contributors: Marjorie Thomsen . Robert Knox . Robyn Brooks . G.B. Ryan . Lana Bella . stephanie roberts . Asante Keron Hamid . M. Carmen Lane . Lee Nash . Arushi Singh . Devon Balwit . Grace Marie Grafton . Holly Lyn Walrath . Chris Shorne . Clara Burghelea . Lydia Renfro . Michelle Bermudez . Laura Del Col Brown . Jenny Sadre-Orafai . Susannah Nevison and Molly McCully Brown . Rus Khomutoff . Stephanie L. Harper . Rita Anderson . Rosemarie Dombrowski . Rebecca Ruth Gould . Margarita Serafimova . Nicole Melchionda . Lauren Brazeal . Chella Courington . Natalie Mulford . Carl Boon . Barbara Fant . I.V. Katen . Peter Twal . Dana Alsamsam . Triin Paja . Kerry Trautman . Rax King

Airy Nothings, by R. Keith, Dink Press (2018)

~review by George Salis~

In the beginning of R. Keith’s Airy Nothings, with the opening poem “Dummy Letters,” the reader is ejected into a void of subliminal word associations strung together by velocity and ethereal filaments: “luminescent limb/ logically numb […] womb conscience/ ascend champagne […] chemist techniques/ chlorine hymns […] pneumonia ghost/ whether knot […] psychic columns/ kneel chaos.” The common dark matter here is that which is invisible to the ears, but not to the eyes. As Keith explains in the acknowledgments, the poem contains words with at least one silent letter. It’s a list that would make a hyper-dimensional Italo Calvino drool (while also scratching his head).

“Maxim Shuffles,” as the poem’s title suggests, is a rearrangement of proverbs. There’s a translucence in which the reader wades through a mental estuary of the familiar and the…