The Last Rehersal

The day before they closed the world we danced
The blues across the sunset into night
Because when darkness falls, you take your chance

Amongst the stars, to slide and look askance
At folding dreams and yesterday’s delights.
The day before they closed the world, we danced

To scratchy 45’s, the closed hold stance
Of ninety years ago discharged aright,
Because, when darkness falls, you take your chance

With recreated steps and circumstance,
To say as other generations might,
“The day before they closed the world, we danced,”

And fix yourself amidst astral expanse
Of other “days before” in other nights.
But know, once darkness lifts, you take your chance

That lesser dawns bring lesser happenstance.
We knew but didn’t know. We tripped the light.
We folded dreams. We closed the world. We danced.
We followed as the darkness fell to chance.

By Kimber Rudo

Biography:

Kimber Rudo lives in California, where she writes, photographs, and, until a few months ago, recreated historic social dances with Bay Area ensemble The Academy of Danse Libre, of which she is the artistic director.

Reclining in Chair

When it comes to God, for me,
it’s all up in the air. I mean,
not saying there is one,
or that I believe,
(but if there was,
and I did,)
mine is an overzealous orthodontist asking
about my day over twangs of late-2000s
country radio only to yank my
mouth into neat rows
when I try to speak.
You know how to shut up, He says
and it’s a compliment. And I’m minty alright
just a pound of fresh flesh, a leaf plucked
right off the bush. My breath makes frost.
I sit prim as a rosebud
opening and closing for Him hoping
for travel-sized toothpaste or
a sugar-free lollipop.
He lets me rinse the blood out of my little cemetery.
He gives me floss
says He can’t scrub out
all the grime
says it takes hard work
to keep being clean.

By Shirley Wang

Biography:

Shirley Wang is eighteen years old and a graduated high school senior located in Northern California. She is a 2019 YoungArts winner in Short Story and her work has been featured in Vagabond City and Peach Mag. She believes in being unabashed in learning, creating, and caring.

Bird Prey

I turn off my dating app,
and watch as all the boys start to
slowly disappear, dwindling
text messages fall off slowly,
like letters off a cliff,
and I’m up against this
blank space, the bulletproof chest
of my heart, and I want to cry

for my grandfather,
because Italian families don’t speak
their eyes
go dead
in the millisecond
blunt of a knife,
cutting cake
on grandmom’s birthday

or you think you go dead but really,
love and not-love sit in the socket swabs of your bleeding eyes,
and eat away at your brown paper burning edges

So what do you do? You
become a scarecrow, stuffed with old newspaper
choked all the way up to your throat

All I can say is,
I’m sorry. It took too long to get there and I’ve got too far to go.
Let me sew on my arm doll limbs dangling
at the joints,
crooked knees bent and
hanging over a counter,
sitting at the edge,
eyes plucked out in crooked,
piercing-black,
like the mating gangs of grackles,
screaming in empty parking lots

By Elissa Calamia

Biography:

Elissa Calamia currently lives and works in Austin, TX with her boyfriend and Dalmation. She is grateful of the cities in which she has called home, which continue to shape the lens of her world.

LIVIN’ IT

In the year between high school & city
college, I spent most nights writing
now-unlistenable folk songs and most days
wire-wheeling gunk off radiator tanks
in my father’s truck shop, where I knew men
who could each tell the funniest joke you ever heard
and a moment later say something he didn’t seem to
realize would make you want to cry for him
until all you had left were the words fuck that shit
and an aimless determination to grind
something down to brushed metal. Later, I would
spend a whole semester in a state school library
just to live an hour in the mind of Lacan,
but these men lived their entire lives in the span of a day.
Born every morning with grease in the ruts of their knuckles,
they diagnosed themselves with terminal illnesses
just after lunch, for which the only medications
were oxys, meth, beer, weed, and a pack of smokes.
And each evening, after quitting time, they must’ve gone
home and died. How else could they have stilled themselves
enough to fall into another morning? In winter especially,
when the bone-cold would slap us into the world, they became
men too quickly all over again. We punched our timecards. And,
in the few seconds it takes to cough up a yellow nickel of phlegm,
they went from looking ass-slapped in the arms of their blue
coveralls to pulling the chains on the roll-up doors.

By Erik Wilbur

Biography:

Erik Wilbur teaches writing at Mohave Community College in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. He is also the program director of Real Toads Poetry Society, a literary organization that provides opportunities for residents of rural Arizona communities to learn about, experience, and share works of literary art. His work has recently appeared in The Southampton Review, New Ohio Review Online, and Aquifer. Also, his forthcoming chapbook, What I Can Do, won the 2020 Chestnut Review Chapbook Prize.

One Haiku

The ambulance stopped
wailing, its passenger too
soon a mannequin.

By Tom Ukinski

Biography:

Tom Ukinski has been a dishwasher, doorman, mailman, chimney sweep, copywriter, and factory worker. He did street mime in Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, and stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Chicago, Boston, and LA. In the 1980s, he was convicted of being a lawyer and subsequently served 25 years in state government. He’s written novels, antipoetry, short stories, comedy sketches, musicals, and importunate advertising. His stories run from six words to 290,000. He is old enough to have lived through the betrayed rebellion of the late sixties and early seventies. His path has always demanded sacrifice. His writing and beliefs reflect mystical sensibility and perpetual protest.