Rising
I used to be thick like butter
but now I’m thinly spread
my daily bread a grief of
worldly pain sifted with the tiny
seeds of my crunching life. I was
hungry for salt to magnify every
taste. Do you remember the meat
of twenty-something? Sandwiches
shared with friends, music jams,
but now I hardly listen. We sat in each
other’s beds, crumbs and all. A house
of women basking, baked in wine and
smoke. You ate breakfast with me
and then we washed the dishes by hand.
Jessie Zechnowitz Lim is a florist by day and poet by night living in the San Francisco Bay Area (on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land). She holds an MA and BA in Art History with an AA in English from San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and San Diego City College respectively. Her work has been published in Litbreak Magazine, The Bold Italic, and Mother Mag.
Sometimes the living
have a little time.
Never enough to love
all they’d like,
but plenty enough
for insides to break apart.
So tiny a portion of time,
hardly a helping
of heartbeats in a palm,
with great clasped fingers
holding back the heavy,
heavy world.
Waiting
It’s not just a train horn. It’s the rail rumble.
Felt for miles, under foot, in one’s sleep.
The question of whether the dead on the hill
sense the vibratory signals of arrival
through the ground or over the air? You don’t
wonder this? As your car idles at the crossing,
as you fiddle with the radio dial to pass the moment?
Fingers tapping on steering wheel. Kids watching
graffiti flashing by too fast to read. But then
it’s over, the cross bars are going up, things
move for you, out of the way. The day proceeds.
The wind slides through trees until
the next distant horn burst signals anew.
Larry D. Thacker’s poetry and fiction is in over 200 publications including Spillway, Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry South, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The American Journal of Poetry, and Illuminations Literary Magazine. His books include four full poetry collections, two chapbooks, as well as the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia. His two collections of short fiction include Working it Off in Labor County and Labor Days, Labor Nights. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website and catch him on Instagram @thackalachia.
Window
The sea of
your face
injures as it
departs it’s hard
submitting
to a deeply
woven prayer
our bonds are
made of clay
and the cracks
therein a chorus
of fates my
gait I barely
withstand
carrying
me before my
reflection
again and again
I encounter
love’s essence
voluminous
and frayed
at its edges
the truth won’t
stay at bay
following me
even in dreams
reliving feelings
I could hardly
bear the pain
decays like bridges
I stare at them
hoping to be
tenderly pared
J.L. Moultrie is a native Detroiter, poet and fiction writer who communicates his art through the written word. He fell in love with literature after encountering Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Baldwin, Hart Crane, David Foster Wallace, and many others. He considers himself an abstract expressionist living in modernity.
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