MAYDAY

Toast with Existential Dread
by Kamal E. Kimball 

Contributed By:

Empty Glass Bar
Photo by Alexander Popov                                                

Friend, come here and touch my hem.

         You be the wind, I’ll be the hollow thing singing.

 

                 I’m falling in love with every arm hair

         on every rider on this machine.

 

The man in tube socks, ball-capped,

         reminds me of my father. How someday

 

                      I’ll miss the old bastard (who I look

                                    more like each night). Tonight, I’m screwed up

 

         at the line’s end and I crave a better way to say

I’m hopeless. I’m lead at midnight. Tonight, I want

                    

         paper, all the banjo strings in the world.

                     I swing around the rusted

                           bus stop pole. Instead of home, I float

 

         into the pub, alone. She pours me Guinness.

It takes the time it takes. Something in that

 

         bitter darkness reminds me

                 of myself, reminds me of the someday

 

             I no longer want to fear.

Kamal E. Kimball is a Pushcart-nominated poet currently living in central Ohio. On the editorial team for Muzzle Magazine, her work has been published in JuxtaProse, Juked, Rattle, Phoebe, Tahoma Literary Review, Hobart, Sundog Lit, Bone Parade, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Forklift Ohio, and elsewhere. She has served as a guest judge for Writers Digest and taught poetry classes at OSU, University of Cincinnati, Chase Public, and in a variety of community settings. 

She is a member of the Ohio Poetry Association and completed her MFA in Poetry at The Ohio State University in 2021. She works in Communications at a local food pantry and continues to teach English coursework at the college level. 

Contact her via e-mail at kekimba@gmail.com 
Follow her on Twitter @kamalkimball and on IG at kamal_e_kimball

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Five-hundred Sirens by Jay Shearera

That night the moon was the thing, maybe even more than the sirens. It was laughing. That’s what I saw anyway. The same basic premise of the man in the moon, only here he looked like he was cracking up. A vague effect—at least at first—that leapt out at you like a corny cartoon the […]

The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli translated from the Italian by John Taylor,
reviewed by Caroline Maldonado

Italian poet Franca Mancinelli has internalized the landscape she grew up in poetically to express some of her deepest emotions. Beginning from the tremors, earthquakes and mudslides of her life and landscape, the poet develops her riveting ars poetica. “I have often felt that I carry writing in my body,” she writes, “that I have been inscribed in the darkness. (…) We are the imprint of the time that has been, of the life that has passed through us. By writing we bring to light these signs that we contain, as they are, obscure and indecipherable to us. It is like leaning over a threshold that looks into the void. We are between the unknown and nothingness.”