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      April 30, 2025David KirbyThe Queen of Quirk Says Goodbye to Her Not-Me

      You need some mothballs so you hurry down to the Dollar Tree
      even though it’s about to close, and there’s just one register
      open, and you’re the last person in a long line, and there’s a guy
      sitting at a window waiting for the cashier to end her shift,
      and just then your phone goes ba-ding and it says Shelley
       
      Duvall just died—oh, no! The same Shelley Duvall whom
      The New York Times called the Queen of Quirk
      for her offbeat looks and even more offbeat performances
      in some of the best movies ever made in the seventies
      and eighties without ever having taken a single acting lesson
       
      and in that way serve as a hero to everybody who
      ever wanted fame and fortune without having to put in
      all that hard work we were told is essential by our parents
      and teachers as we proceeded from one stage in life
      to the next, which group of people includes everybody,
       
      and as you get to the register and put your mothballs
      on the counter along with a couple of other things
      you didn’t need but bought anyway, the guy catches
      your eye, and he looks exhausted, like maybe his helper
      didn’t show up and he had to unload his truck by himself,
       
      so you ask him how he’s doing, and he shakes his head
      and says It’s another day and when you say you hear
      there’s one scheduled for tomorrow as well he says
      Hope not. Shelley Duvall is best known for her performance
      in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in which she plays
       
      the wife of the Jack Nicholson character who slowly becomes
      unhinged and eventually tries to kill her and particularly
      for the scene where Kubrick did 127 takes of Shelley Duvall
      backing up some stairs and swinging a baseball bat
      at Jack Nicholson. Your body does not differentiate
       
      between a perceived threat and an actual threat
      said Shelley Duvall at the time, so while Mental Shelley
      knew that Jack was just playing, Corporeal Shelley was sure
      he was going to bash her brains out. Emerson called
      the mind the Me and the body the Not-Me in that
       
      the one knows what to do and how to do it while
      the other can barely get itself out of bed in the morning
      and may do something splendid that day but is just as likely
      to be lazy and stupid and will fail us in the end by becoming
      slow and forgetful and maybe even incontinent and certainly
       
      dead, as is now the case with Shelley Duvall. Why can’t we
      be more like honeybees? you think. When a honeybee
      colony needs to find a new hive, it sends out waves of scouts
      to search for a new site, and when they return, they dance
      for the other bees, each scout’s dance signaling a possible
       
      location, and as new waves of scouts go out and return,
      the new scouts align themselves with one old scout or another
      until a single dance becomes the most popular, and there
      you have it: follow those bees to the perfect oak or elm
      and you’re all set, whereas we have to think it through,
       
      work it out, frame it up, break it down, start again.
      Later, Shelley Duvall said she realized Kubrick
      was trying to bring out the complexities in her character,
      and you wonder if she believed that or was just trying to make
      herself feel better. Either way, it worked. You guess.
       
      On your way home you remember you forgot to do
      your pushups that day, so you go to the park even
      though it’s dark now, but the Little League field is all lit up,
      yet when you get to the spot where you always do
      your pushups, there’s a man and a woman about to
       
      go at it, but you figure what the hell, it’s your spot,
      so even though the man is saying You done so-and-so
      and the woman says I ain’t done shit you get down
      and start knocking them out: twenty-three, twenty-four,
      twenty-five, and the man says Hold on, how old are you
       
      and you tell him and he says Damn! and You doing good
      and you say I can’t turn back the hand of time but I figure
      I can slow it down and the man points to his mind and says
      I’ma keep that in my mind but at least he and the woman
      aren’t fighting any more and as you head for home
       
      you think about how when you said Have a good evening
      to the guy who was waiting for the cashier he smiled
      but didn’t say anything and you said Have a good evening
      to the cashier and she said Have a good evening, sir
      and Be careful out there and then Enjoy your mothballs.
       

      David Kirby

      “Man, some days it’s hard to get it together, isn’t it? That’s true whether you’re a movie star or a guy whose helper didn’t show, so he had to do all the work himself. But that’s not how this poem started. It started when the cashier said, ‘Enjoy your mothballs.’ I realized that casual comment was the perfect ending for a poem that not only hadn’t been written yet but should probably be colossal in scope. How to live your life has been the one big question from Aristotle to this day. And then I read that Shelley Duvall had died. And then I ran into the quarrelsome couple at the park. And that’s when I figured that the one big question doesn’t have one big answer. It has a million little answers, most of which come down to some version of ‘life is hard, so be kind to others and be grateful for what you have.’ As the cashier said, enjoy your mothballs.”

      April 29, 2025Thomas MixonOpposing Easels

      Our hearts were formed before our bones
      supported any kind of weight.
      I listen to the metronome
       
      of the daily news, on my phone
      and get depressed, and can’t create.
      Our hearts were formed before our bones
       
      persuaded us that they alone
      could measure our artistic fate.
      I listen to the metronome
       
      that they pound out as I walk home
      to empty canvases I hate.
      Our hearts were formed before our bones,
       
      but what else do I really know
      about myself? I try to paint.
      I listen to the metronome
       
      of dusk against my brush’s groans.
      The palette’s dry. It’s getting late.
      Our hearts were formed before our bones.
      I listen to the metronome.
       
      Image: “Siblings Under the Skin” by Elizabeth Eve King. “Opposing Easels” was written by Thomas Mixon for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2025, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly

      “One of the elements of Elizabeth Eve King’s artwork that resonates most strongly is the illusionary separation of life and death–that line from the famous 18th century epitaph ringing in my head: ‘As I am now, so you must be.’ The living people in the image are holding death at arm’s length, literally, and yet, at our core, we know how narrow the gap between the two subjects can be. I love the way Mixon’s ‘Opposing Easels’ captures the passage of time with repeated imagery of a metronome, a perfect way to symbolize that life is both relentless (‘the daily news on my phone’) and beautiful (‘dusk against my brush’s groans’). The poet’s refrain about our hearts being formed before our bones hints at a belief that art is our primary purpose, and the speaker’s sense of urgency to fully realize this before time runs out is powerful and inspiring.”

      April 28, 2025Kat LehmannCategory 5

      She named me after the dentist’s daughter
      a name that means purity
      but my name became a hurricane
      in my twenties
      that swallowed a city
      then her world was the hurricane
      that no one would mention
      so I gave a name
      to her storm
      but no one would listen
      as the past
      tense accumulates its
      rain the levee
      weeping
      and
       
      origin story
      my cloud unfolds
      in your lap
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Kat Lehmann

      “When my kids were little, I had a tiny creative nonfiction blog in the corner of the internet that a few devoted readers would visit. I was also exploring the nuances of modern haiku and tanka. When I learned about haibun, it felt like a synergy of these genres, the perfect union of how I like to write. What fun! I continue to love the feeling of being a perpetual beginner as I consider the ways the standard three haibun elements resonate to create a deeper work. Like a structure-function relationship in biochemistry (my original field of training), I have come to conceptualize Structure as haibun’s fourth element because it determines how the other elements function as they resonate (or don’t) across negative space. Haibun provides a larger canvas upon which to stipple images that evoke larger stories about what is wordless.”

      April 27, 2025RazrasenyWhat Is Over Baltimore

      On TV, a child’s shoes lie in the road—
      then a headline: Could be DMS, they say,
      statistically shy of truth
      but mouthing it.
       
      A sky-seeding gas,
      exhaled from the sea’s skin,
      born of sun-stress and salt.
       
      I refresh the NASA archive—twice.
      Scroll spectra.
      Syntax hedges:
      tentative, consistent with,
      a candidate biosignature—
      on Earth.
       
      On Earth,
      it lifts from ocean skin—
      creature-breath cracked open
      by too much sun.
       
      And there,
      on a sub-Neptune
      called K2-18b,
      gravid with remove,
      gravity thick enough
      to cradle eight Earths
      or crush a few denials clean.
      And our breathless hope,
      the signal wavers.
       
      In the habitable zone,
      they say—
      but what does that mean
      on a burning world?
       
      Because here,
      this morning,
      another atmosphere flattens.
      A man—breathing,
      then not,
      under police restraint
      outside Baltimore.
       
      The footage loops.
      No name yet.
      No context,
      says the statement.
       
      But his breath—
      a biosignature,
      saturated,
      unreturned.
       
      And already, the network news
      is rehearsing its vocabulary—
      “incident,”
      “noncompliance,”
      “community trust initiatives.”
       
      And somewhere, a press officer
      workshops the phrasing:
      “an exothermic misunderstanding”
      (their phrase, not mine).
       
      I do not say these are equal.
      Only that
      I studied a transit light curve
      as a city truck sprayed bleach
      along the sidewalk
      where two unhoused men had slept,
      scrubbing biosignatures
      from concrete.
       
      I can’t distinguish
      dimethyl sulfide
      from disulfide
      at this resolution—
      nor what we call discovery
      from what we erase.
       
      Sixteen more hours,
      they say.
      Let the spectrum deepen.
      Let us learn
      if something breathes there
      or only simulates it.
       
      Not quite a sentence.
      Not quite a prayer.
      More like breath,
      held a second too long
      before it forgets
      what it was for.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Razraseny

      “This poem started after I read about NASA detecting dimethyl sulfide, a gas that on Earth only comes from living things, in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet. At the same time, I was thinking about how often we miss signs of life closer to home. The poem came from that contrast; between the signals we chase in space and the ones we overlook on our own streets.”

      April 26, 2025Z. MuellerThe Difference Between String and Spring

      is less obvious between pine trees. You run
      chin-first (like humans run) into a spider web.
      The thing sneezes itself all over you. And on
      the one hand, bless you and fuck that spider.
      On the other, combing your face and neck
      for invisible thread is the one moment today
      not spent obsessing over your father’s cancer,
      how his absence will split you into pieces—
      the pieces you were before the moment of birth—
      his birth—before assuming this conditioned fear
      of depth. Blame some inherent human reaction
      for believing arachnids grotesque for spinning webs
      that double as both home and funeral arrangement.
      It’s like this fucked-up hatred of snakes people have
      for being just body and mouth—unthinking, instinctual,
      and needy. And yet the serpent doesn’t seem so bad
      in Genesis. He’s just there to give you options. You
      see why Milton picked Satan as the Marlon Brando
      of Paradise. And yet, the choices are confounded.
      You’ve been having these nightmares of swimming
      through endless pools of them—all shapes and sizes
      and species—where they collectively swallow you
      for assuming the dream is just practice for lying.
      Maybe it’s because your dad got bit rescuing you
      from a copperhead when you were little. Oh, no—
      your mom says when you’re older—he deserved it.
      He was poking at it with a stick. It was a baby.

      from #44 - Summer 2014

      Z. Mueller

      “A good poem breaks me. Then it mends me back together—more me and more otherwise. Milosz did that to me, writing about avocado. Most recently, poems by Wendy Xu, Sacha Fletcher. My MFA is from South Carolina. I teach creative writing at Franklin College in Indiana where I feel tiny and big, like those gummy animals that grow in the bathtub.”

      April 25, 2025Kat Lehmann[beyond the bed] and Other Haiku

       
       
       
       
       
      beyond the bed
      a lilt of voices live
      my former life
       
       
       
       
       
      gathering dark
      telling the children
      I can’t
       
       
       
       
       
      clinic exam
      the one-fits-all
      of paper pants
       
       
       
       
       
      blood letting each use and disclosure
       
       
       
       
       
      torn vein
      I make a Pollock
      of the sheets
       
       
       
       
       
      pulse oximeter
      the data but also
      the hypothesis
       
       
       
       
       
      blue
      butterfly
      needle
      tip
      of
      the
      scar
      on
      this
      rem
      ain
      ing
      ve
      in
      .
       
       
       
       
       
      river cloud
      the X of this body
      unsolvable
       
       
       
       
       
      left less than a cloudless sulfur adrift in an illness
       
       
       
       
       

      from No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird's Song

      Kat Lehmann

      “I became ill experiencing sudden and severe side effects with nothing to do but hope for time’s restoration. Writing these haiku became a means of journaling, documentation, expression, and healing. The narrative utilizes a range of contemporary haiku sub-genres and structures, including single-line haiku (traditional in Japanese), concrete haiku, tercets, and what I call ‘beautiful monsters’ without name. Some of the poems use seemingly impossible language to convey a real experience. Haiku, as a minimalistic art form, invites the reader to be an active participant in the poem’s unfolding. For those new and not-new to contemporary haiku, I hope you enjoy the collaboration.”