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Poetry Winter 2021    fiction    all issues

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Andrej Lišakov

Laura Apol
I Take a Realtor through the House
& other poems

Rebekah Wolman
How I Want my Body Taken
& other poems

Devon Bohm
The Word
& other poems

Gillian Freebody
The Right Kind of Woman
& other poems

Anne Marie Wells
Gravestone Flowers
& other poems

Laura Turnbull
Restoration
& other poems

Andre F. Peltier
A Fistful of Ennui
& other poems

Peter Kent
Reflections on the Late Nuclear Attack on Boston
& other poems

Carol Barrett
Canal Poem #8: Hides
& other poems

Alix Lowenthal
Abortion Clinic Waiting Room
& other poems

Latrise P. Johnson
From My Women
& other poems

Brenna Robinson
repurposed
& other poems

may panaguiton
MOON KILLER
& other poems

Elizabeth Farwell
The Life That Scattered
& other poems

Bill Cushing
Two Stairways
& other poems

Richard Baldo
A Note to Prepare You
& other poems

Blake Foster
Aubade from the Coast
& other poems

Bernard Horn
Glamour
& other poems

Harald Edwin Pfeffer
Still stiff with morning cold
& other poems

Nia Feren
Neon Orange Tree Trunks
& other poems

Everett Roberts
A Mourning Performance
& other poems

Alaina Goodrich
The Way I Wander
& other poems

Olivia Dorsey Peacock
the iron maiden and other adornments
& other poems


Everett Roberts

A Mourning Performance; or, Prepared Remarks

If I’m guilty

  of anything,

It’s that I slip easy

  into elegy.

The words incurred,

  the notes I wrote:

Responses ready

When mourning’s heard.


While you devoured

  each breath you stole from death,

Checking borrowed time

  on a broken watch,


I went along. I hummed

  the song, even if I didn’t

  know the words.


I still don’t think there’s time to learn.



Vesper

Did you think you’d leave me

Unmarked?


Or don’t you remember,

Together, in the dark,

The sigh upon your lips

That I devoured?


How you poured yourself

Into me?

Long past sunset;

The fragrant evening, and

night’s descent


Remember how we spun onyx

Into the hours?



Vigil

Did you miss my light?

I waited up for you, hours past

When I should’ve slept.

I spent each minute just like the last

Enveloped in the lambent night,

Lamp light, my promise kept,

The quiet house, my easy breath;

I know the roads and know the route

Your loosened tie, the wrinkled suit

But even in the dream you don’t return.

Even here a candle can’t forever burn.

Silence as the dishwasher’s cycle comes to an end.

My ears don’t strain. I still pretend.

Everett Roberts, 33, is an award-winning poet, polyglot, technical writer, and former sanctions violations investigator living in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Sixfold, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and the Write Launch, and his cleave poem “John the Baptist” won the 2021 Oberon Herbert Poetry Prize.

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