ask again later | Danni Bergen

Image: Irina Iriser

ask again later

IT IS GETTING DARK ON MY BODY AND I CAN NO LONGER SEE MY FINGERTIPS. MY GENDER IS NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK. MY BODY IS AFRAID OF EVERYTHING. MY GENDER ALWAYS CARRIES MACE IN ITS POCKET AND KEYS BETWEEN ITS FINGERS. MY BODY SLEEPS SOMETIMES BUT MY GENDER IS ALWAYS AWAKE. WE EAT TOGETHER, AT THE SAME TABLE, BUT THE FOOD IS DIFFERENT ON EACH PLATE. WE TRY A LITTLE OF EACH OTHER’S MEALS, FEELING WHAT FUELS THE OTHERS FUEL US TOO. I AM DISTRACTED BY MY BODY, MY BODY IS DISTRACTED BY MY GENDER, AND MY GENDER IS DISTRACTED BY LIGHT, AIR, AND THE ENERGY LEFT IN THE ROOM ONCE EVERYONE LEAVES. MY GENDER IS DRY ROSE PETALS, AND WIND, AND THE SPINNING FEELING IN YOUR GUT ONCE WE’VE LOCKED EYES. SUMMER IS GONE BUT WINTER IS JUST AS LONELY. AT LEAST AT NIGHT MY COMFORTER MAKES THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY NEXT TO ME AND WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES I CAN STILL SMELL YOU. OUR GENDERS ARE FRIENDS, IN THE REALM WHERE ONLY GENDERS LIVE, THEY DANCE AND TALK AND SHARE SMOKES OUT OF THEIR BEDROOM WINDOWS, LIGHTING INCENSE TO HIDE THE EVIDENCE. MY GENDER IS THE FLOATING PYRAMID IN THE PURPLE WINDOW OF A MAGIC 8 BALL: SHAKEN, FULL OF ANSWERS, AND SLIGHTLY FROTHY. MY BODY IS JUST AS FROTHY, BUT FILLED WITH QUESTIONS, INSTEAD. EITHER ONE WILL ONLY TELL THE DIVINE TRUTH.

Danni Bergen (they/them) is a poet, photographer, and artist who was born and raised in Denver but has recently relocated to Butte, Montana to try living a little slower on for size. They have an Associate’s of Arts in Theatre from the Community College of Aurora and a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with concentrations in creative writing, visual art, and performance from Naropa University. You can see more of their work on dannithealien.com. @dannithealien on Instagram

Last Fig | Jennifer Browne

Image: John Hayes

Last Fig

A kid outside shouts
“There’s no tomorrow!”
and, I think, he’s right.
And, I think, how must
it feel to be this kid, ten
and skating a paved alley,
bright sunshine in April,
and feel not joy but dread.
The world is burning.
But I have just eaten a fig
that tastes of your mouth
and tastes of my desire
for your mouth, so if
he’s onto something,
and there is no tomorrow,
let me fall into the rubble
with this last wash of your
sweetness on my tongue,
let my desire be the blade
of sprouting green
that cracks the wreckage,
let all the world that comes
after sing out for you.

Jennifer Browne (she/her) falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. Her poems have recently appeared in One Sentence Poems, Right Hand Pointing, Quarto, Trailer Park Quarterly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the tiny wren anthology All Poems are Ghosts

Dislocated | John Kucera

Image: Bruno Guerrero

Dislocated

If you ask me why I left Michigan,
I would tell that you that it wasn’t because
of the weather which left me with a bloated album of waiting
for the blackouts
to skip between the trees. It wasn’t because
the roofs unfurled and the doors retreated to hollows
somewhere in the sky. It wasn’t because
of the shelves of water, inching like new constellations
across an endless night. It was the full circle
of fear, the kind that stays in my mouth
like neon jawbreakers, refusing to surrender, tailor-made
to dislocate words that I try to speak. I dread
colliding against this familiar: when the memory gathers
like burning hands around your throat.

John Kucera was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, The Sandy River Review, Utopia Science Fiction, Slant, Connections Magazine and Friends Journal. He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he writes and teaches.

A Winter Evening With Chili Bajjis | Sreekanth Kopuri

The green chilis wait
to warm the winter’ silence,

smile on its bleak face
reflecting on our drowsy stillness

dropping our moist clucks
of winter appetite that craves

for the sweet burn on our cold
-dry tongues. A handful, as my

mother makes a cut along each,
the mouths open as babies’. She

stuffs the ajwain, while dipping
each in the soft besan batter, and

drops those saffron-hued bodies,
in the boiling dance of groundnut oil

they drift with sizzling joy, and
the aroma being wafted unsettles to

resettle us with craving gulps of
eagerness to warm our frozen taste

buds. My daughter hops and struts
around, cooing off the moments into

those succulent brown, hardened
chili bajjis my mother serves warming

our frozen taste buds
with each mouthful that

deliciously burns us afloat
into the wrapping cold of winter.

Note: Bajji is an Indian delicacy from the state of Andhra Pradesh

Sreekanth Kopuri Ph.D. is an Indian poet, Current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He recited his poetry at Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, and many other universities. His poems appeared in Arkansan Review, Christian Century, A Honest Ulsterman, Chicago Memory House, Two Thirds North, Heartland Review, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, Contrapuntos IX, Vayavya, to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of the Golden Book of the year 2022. He lives in his hometown Machilipatnam with his mother.

Our Habits Beginning Again | Ralph Salisbury

Image: Manikandan Annamalai

Our Habits Beginning Again

My oldest living brother a farmer; a writer, me;
my sister a banker; my youngest brother a nuclear bomber pilot;
our other two brothers long where
our parents have gone, we stare
at the dew-starred earth
we’ll soon become
and, though grown, wonder,
like errant planets or wandering asteroids
how much more mischief we dare.

Ralph Salisbury (1926-2017) grew up hunting and trapping, for meat and pelts, and laboring on a family farm which had no electricity or running water.  He attended university on the GI Bill after WWII and retired as Professor Emeritus from the University of Oregon, Eugene, where he taught for 43 years. His prizewinning memoir, So Far, So Good (recipient of the 2012 Riverteeth Literary Non-Fiction Book Prize), his three books of fiction, and his eleven books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. Poems from his twelfth book, seeking a publisher, have appeared in Northwest Review, About Place, and elsewhere.

Book Review | Another Death Bed by Jasmine Maldonado Dillavou

Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou
A review by Chris Bullock

“a moment of pause with things that matter” 

Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou

Another Death Bed (but this one is more comfortable, and the sheets just came out of the dryer)

During my time “studying” in China, I learned to see art not as much a hustle and grind, but rather as way of being. While taking an introductory Mandarin class, most classmates said they were pursuing business and politics, which only elicited a nod from the teacher, a middle-aged guy from Shanghai. When I said I enjoyed art, he gave a pause and a grin, then said an artist is blessed because an artist is never bored. From others there I got the same impression, a few said they wanted to be friends with an artist because an artist thinks differently than most, offering refreshing if unpredictable conversation. I had a local Chinese musician buddy who offered me drugs, guns, and often spoke his mind. When I said I was studying education, he interrupted me to say “Chris, you are not teacher. You a fucking artist.”

Artists, poets, and other rabble often share with us the process of discovering themselves and the world, and Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou, or Jasmine, offers that insight of a sitting in her brain as life unfolds. She rummages through the closet for an old stackable chair and offers us a seat in her mind, and she points out things which are as new to her as to you. You might expect to read a few pieces and set the book down, but time has suddenly passed and you have finished the book and wondering if there is something you missed. These are notes in the head of a creative, and as she puts it “a moment of pause with things that matter.”

I had first made her acquaintance upon returning from China to Colorado Springs, and attending a monthly discussion salon put on by Non Book Club Book Club. I had lived in the Springs and never found it repressive or backwards, rather I had come upon the same inspiration that has made it attractive to artists since the Broadmoor School. It was a bohemian life, piecing together rent how I could, playing concerts, going on tour, attending poetry readings, wandering art galleries and alley ways. In contrast to Denver, where quite a few were on hustle and grind mode and unwilling to open up for fear you might plagiarize and profit, in the Springs I found a tight knit and relaxed misfit milieu wherein just seeing differently made you different. Similar to my time in China. Fucking artists. 

A few things had changed since my time away, however. All these creative students and faculty from UCCS were not only putting on events, but also inviting you out to see it. Living downtown, meeting up just to chat about what we are up to. Trying out unusual ideas, without even a business plan or a merchandise table. It is true what Denver diehards might say, the Springs could be boring, but it also encouraged you to do something to fill the boredom, even if as in her case, “riding a Lime Scooter the wrong way down Bijou Street with a big black hat on.”

This collection is the writer discovering her mind as it emerges, and sharing it with you. An invitation to sit in her head on an extra chair pulled from the storage closet, a place which is rough around the edges and unaccustomed to guests, but will make do if you show up. A peek into Tejon Street bars, rubbing elbows with the most normal people imaginable, as an artist with other oddballs making things happen in warehouses, restaurants, bookstores, parking lots, on the street, wherever there is an emptiness screaming to be borrowed and occupied temporarily. Art for art’s sake, after which the observer can’t point out any details but just feels like something invisible has changed. 

One moment it is “the girl whose thighs don’t touch leaves the bathroom in front of me at the punk show” and the next is finding graffiti in the bar that says “I want to be dead with my dad”. One moment it is living your Boricua being and all the cultural weight and expectations, the next you are really just an artist and you are your “own greatest fear,” writing down your mind as you uncover it. Even after the tour is done, I am still in the chair on a dusty studio floor, and one of the legs of the chair is off-balance. But instead of complaining about it, I just rock a little, for art’s sake.

To grab a seat of your own, you can pick up the book in Colorado Springs at True North Art Gallery, Garfield Gallery, or Westside Stories. Or you can contact her on IG @jasminrunswithscissors or Jasminedillavou.com and if you are feeling extra boring, try Amazon.

About the Reviewer

Tall City (Chris Bullock) was born and got bigger on Long Island, New York. He did a few things then moved to Colorado Springs after trying to study in Paris. He did a few things there too, then moved to Denver, where he went back to school for foreign language. A couple of years on scholarship in China, and he is back in Denver. 

The Meeting | Jim Landwehr

Image: nikohoshi

The Meeting

Everyone around the table was
navigating through the meeting
casting noncommitments around freely
evading work with vagueness and excuses
nodding to the boss with their
personal variations of the boss nod.
The meeting was a formulaic soul killer
serving no measurable purpose
except to do what meetings do best
which is to generate more meetings.
Attendees took notes at times
but those who wished they
weren’t there in that meeting
did not take a single note.
I did not take notes.
The meeting dragged on and on.
Its leader, clearly new to meeting leading,
stopped caring himself halfway through.
I actually saw his spirit leave his body
as it yawned itself toward the ceiling.
And once everyone had their shot
at dropping a few buzzwords
leveraging the platform
empowering the Tiger team
using synergy to increase market share
while ensuring ROI for Q3 on the R2D2
They eventually called the meeting done
in part because of the realization that
it could have been an email, but
mostly because it had become
that wet log you try to burn
in your campfire
but it just won’t start.

Jim Landwehr has four published memoirs, At the Lake, Cretin BoyDirty Shirt and The Portland House. He  also has five poetry collections, Thoughts from a Line at the DMVGenetically SpeakingReciting from MemoryWritten Life and On a Road. His nonfiction and poetry has been featured in numerous magazines and journals. Jim lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin and was the 2018-2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin.

Quilt | TAK Erzinger

Image: Victor Grabarczyk

Quilt

Yes, there is a finish

life, it twists, frayed
at the edges, its seams
expose where dreams and disappointment touch

the day’s reach, slenderest blue
heaven, heaviest cloud, longest hour
past youth’s back door, what we experience

how many twists can be endured,
split, cross section after cross section
each thread pulled through the eye of a needle

it appears misshapen but every block creates a pattern
mistakes, landscapes of torn cloth create a thing of beauty
as each fabric, stitch and multi-layered piece
completes the bed we can finally take shelter in.

TAK Erzinger is an award-winning poet. Her collection At the Foot of the Mountain (Floricanto Press California, 2021) won the University of Indianapolis Etching Press, Whirling Prize 2021 for best nature poetry book. It was also a finalist at The International Book Awards 2022, Willow Run Book Awards and Eyelands Book Awards. Erzinger’s forthcoming poetry collection Tourist (Sea Crow Press, Massachusetts) is due out in April 2023. Erzinger is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. She lives in a tiny hamlet in Switzerland with her husband and two cats.

The Birth and Death of a Homegrown Star | James Callan

Image: Scott Webb

The Birth and Death of a Homegrown Star

—–I found a head in my garden. Not a lettuce head, but among the lettuce heads –an actual head. A human head. It was wide eyed and alluring, a bit like Jeff Goldblum. At second glance, a lot like Jeff Goldblum. This head, it was Jeff Goldblum’s, or if not, an exact replica, nothing to distinguish it from the real thing. It wasn’t severed off, the remains of an act of violence or some horrific accident. Instead, it had smooth, unbroken skin under the chin where a neck should have been. No scars. The head was always a head, not a head that had been removed from a body.
—–A bit disturbed, I buried it. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t need a bodiless head in my life. So I dug among the lettuce heads and deposited the actual head –the human head– into the earth. I watered the spot, thinking of Jeff Goldblum down there in the dark under my feet, thirsty maybe, even if he had no stomach to store the water. I patted the soil, got sentimental, and fertilized the patch with liquid seaweed. With luck, the head would take root and grow. Into what? A full embodied star.
—–Then I waited. But nothing came. In a way, I was relieved, though a larger part of me felt the weight of disappointment. I tried to ignore it: the pang of loneliness that came with a world free of your own, personal Jeff Goldblum. But in the end, that small seed of desire grew larger than a prize-winning cabbage head. It grew to fill me entirely, the height and weight of a man.
—–Weeks later, when it was time to harvest the lettuce heads, I decided to unearth the actual head –the human head. When I dug down, I grazed two elastic ears to hit the broad foundations of a wide set of shoulders. I kicked aside the lettuces, no longer caring about the sauerkraut I had planned to make. I dug, and dug some more, six feet or maybe six-foot-three, because that’s how tall he is, that’s how tall the fully-formed body had grown beneath the ground among the writhing earthworms and teeming microbes.
—–“Can you speak?” I asked him.
—–Then, with the bedazzling charm and charisma one might expect from Jeff Goldblum, he spoke in rich, honeyed, tones –all confidence– his words streaming in profusion in that Jeff Goldblum way, a way in which one’s dialogue fails to keep up with a mind that is churning ideas faster than a cocaine-amped cheetah with its ass on fire, yet still flows from a set of delicious lips with adequate eloquence and a unique, amusing delivery. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said, but it left me weak at the knees. The one thing I do recall from that sermon of silver-tongued soliloquy was the comment and question that came at the end.
—–“That’s a whole heck of a lot of cabbages there, my friend,” Jeff Goldblum said with jovial wonder. “Say, how would you like to gather those big boys up and make a tremendously large batch of sauerkraut, maybe some kimchi? That is, of course, if you’re a spice kind of person, and you strike me as a spicy kind of person, if you know what I mean.” His wink and smile was so Jeff Goldblum. I wasn’t about to say no to making sauerkraut with this wonderful man. So we gathered the cabbages and went inside.
—–In the kitchen, we lay out the purple and green brassicas, each one like a furrowing rosebud the size of a human head. I fetched the great ceramic crocks that would house the fermenting cabbage while Jeff got busy with the grater. He was very lively, energetic, and like a newly-opened jar of pickled vegetables, was fizzing with enthusiasm for the task at hand. And it was his hand, in fact, that he nicked, somewhat careless, which took his graceful finger clean off his immaculate hand.
—–“Whoops,” Jeff casually remarked, offering a comic, oops-a-daisy face and shrug, before placing his severed finger into the crock along with the shredded cabbage. I nearly dropped the cabbages bundled in my arms, such was my shock at seeing the layers of vegetable fibers on display across his open wound, no blood or bone to speak of.
—–I set down the large vegetables and gathered my calm, finding both my voice and my courage, before asking a man who by all appearances seemed to be Jeff Goldblum, yet grown from the soil, apparently made entirely of cabbage, “Are you the real Jeff Goldblum?”
—–“Of course,” he said, and smiled with the same knit eyebrows and are-you-crazy? expression that I had seen on the face of a beloved actor so many times in so many wonderful films over the decades. But then he sneezed and his forehead flapped open, a crisp and fresh green cabbage head.
—–I asked for the grater, which the cabbage man yielded up, but not without a winning smile that nearly left me paralytic. I waded through his uncanny charm, his insanely weird sex appeal, and with effort, took up the grater. I looked at a man-shaped cabbage who was the spitting image of Jeff Goldblum and decided I couldn’t trust a brassica that had more charisma than me. With difficulty, I reasoned that I didn’t need a heartthrob vegetable in my life.
—–So I took up the grater and shredded Jeff Goldblum into ten thousand tallies of anemic green. I stuffed every bit of him, every scrap of cabbage confetti, into one of the great ceramic crocks and entombed the Jeff jigsaw with the placement of its heavy lid.
—–Weeks later, lonely yet again, I opened the lid in anticipation for I knew not what. A gentle fizz aerated with seductive song from underneath the cabbage leaf seal, which I peeled back and discarded like the clothes from a lover who was ready to be ravaged. I smelled its pungent odor, its astringent tang.
—–I took a bite, shoveling a sample in my mouth with my bare hands, and gasped in a pleasure accentuated by the purest of pain. It was hot, like a flame, like kimchi on steroids. I thought of Jeff’s words, his assumption about what sort of person I am, how I struck him as a spice kind of person.
—–I swooned and hit the floor. He was absolutely right.

James Callan is a dual citizen of the US and NZ. He grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota and lives on the Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand. His wife and son are human, but the remainder of his family are an assortment of animals, including cats, a dog, pigs, cows, goats, and chickens. His writing has appeared in Bridge Eight, White Wall Review, Maudlin House, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His novel, A Transcendental Habit, is available with Queer Space.

tassili n’ajjer (cave in algeria) | Dan Fijolek

Image: Azzedine Rouichi

tassili n’ajjer (cave in algeria)

when the earliest shamans
emerged from the primordial mist
adorned in skins and skulls
with fists full of mushrooms

the dimensions flowed freely
like rivers cutting through the rock
after the younger dryas impact

our spines and chakras were aligned
to receive those dimensional outputs
magnetic bands of frequencies
flowering from the gravitational center of the universe
like a fractal mandala

shiva and shakti
creating and destroying everything all at once
bringing balance and purpose to the whole

but we became too focused
on the physical environment
overly busy avoiding predators
while hunting and gathering food

our powerful thoughts
became consumed with fear
bending our spines
and misaligning our chakras
filtering out the higher dimensions
hardening the density of physical 3d space
replacing balance with chaos
adjusting our bandwidth
away from the meridians
of the universal body
trapping us in the concrete filaments
of our devolving human minds

Dan Fijolek is a writer and poet from Longmont, Colorado. He has previously been published in Boulder Weekly & Jasper’s Folly Vol. 1