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a note from dusti
The world seems to get worse every day. Some of us spend our precious little not-working, not-fretting, not-organizing time putting art out into the world. Whether it’s words or pictures or sounds or textures, we’re expressing frustration, anger, worry, and joy like tomorrow might never come. How much of what we experience comes in waves and layers? Climate change brought my town a snowstorm last week, complete with icy roads and several days of school missed – and as I write this, it’s 75 Fahrenheit and sunny, and flowers are blooming. I’m personally not thrilled, but the flowers are doing what they do. We have so many battles to fight for ourselves and for others that I guess I’ll take the flowers whenever they come.
This issue, we’re experimenting with a few different formats. You’ll find our physical media, of course, in our Ko-Fi store, and we ship world-wide. A kind and generous benefactor has provided the ability to ship a limited number of issues absolutely free. We’ll be updating the store soon. While we think that the presence of physical media in the world is important in the movement, we’re still making this zine available online – in two places. We’ve got our Medium site and now we have a Google site. Look – finding a publishing platform when you’re a middle-aged, full-time student in two demanding fields and have little-to-no programming ability is tough. Medium’s format is pretty limiting but we still like it because it’s consistent. Each issue will have to have a different Google sites address. But that’s doable! So check us out wherever you can find us.
We also maintain an active account on BlueSky and are still (for now) running our Instagram account. Due to the company Meta’s philosophies and behaviors, we are working to phase that out by the end of February. We have more than 1,100 followers on BlueSky – mostly other poets, publishers, and zines – while our Instagram account is holding steady at 149 followers. It’s never been a big part of our identity. And this is a small way we can make an impact – not just ending the account (which we did with Twitter/X months ago) but talking about the why behind it.
And now…the poetry.
your friend,
dusti rw levy
editor
Dante and Virgil at the gates of Purgatory, and the Proud carrying heavy stones
Dante and Virgil at the gates of Purgatory, and the Proud carrying heavy stones
Queen of the High Desert
Queen of the High Desert
by Marlaina Larsen Thorslev
Darkling of a dozen revolutions
Child of cacophony and steel-toed boots
to the ribs
Catching hummingbirds in your teeth
You used to visit in my dreams
Now we both have our quiet
Cool earth, mountains between us
Freedom came in one way or another
Fragments of the Great Colossi at the Memnonium.
Fragments of the Great Colossi at the Memnonium.
Stratum
Stratum
by Marlaina Larsen Thorslev
I fear being slain
disremembered
and swallowed by the dark
a figure too still to stand out a mountain range,
presumed still unless you remember plate
tectonics I must choose between
fractured drifting
wild undulations
or the stasis of isotropic force
To Birth
by Marlaina Larsen Thorslev
It is a powerful thing to grow strong beneath
the earth.
Buried deep and forgotten, until one hot
summer day you emerge wet and singing
annealed by the sun
MARLAINA LARSEN THORSLEV is a queer artist and educator in Phoenix, Arizona who writes about identity, community, and science. Their most recent zines were about grief and lichen, respectively. They love making new friends!
Mammal Problems
by J-T Kelly
Like hedgehogs in a bowl my thoughts cannot
get up over the lip of
my mouth.
A Rhyme for Hard Times
by J-T Kelly
Don't worry. Things will get much worse. And you'll be older.
Night will come, but you won't sleep. Death will come for
you, but for your loved ones first.
Archimedes in the Garden
by J-T Kelly
Let -v be the fulcrum,
-e and -e the lever.
Lift and level the world.
Revel in its evenness.
J-T KELLY is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, and a dog.
AH, LOVE
by Michael Hill
The seaweed is loud tonight.
Your bowl is full, the seaweed dry
And salty; your tea is especially rank.
It steeps and steams; and you peer into the air
Vacant and vast, as you chew, crunch, chew.
Let us be true, though dank the afternoon fare!
From the long-simmering wetness of your cup
the masticated bits of green in your teeth.
Listen! you chear the grating champ
Of molars meeting the still dry pieces;
You find and grind, suck and swallow,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
OUTGROWING BUKOWSKI
by Michael Hill
this Bukowski survived for
twenty-five years with nary
a coffee stain, but left alone
on the morning table for just
a moment it is embellished with
fruit loops and yogurt by these
little shits who anyway make
the reading of Bukowski impossible
with their intractable glee
about things like fruit loops
PAPER IN THE ATTIC
by Michael Hill
In our attic is a milk crate filled with notebooks
containing half-poems and other exclamations.
Enough bent wire, yellowed paper, ink scratches
and faded pencil, some over forty years old,
to be a burden to our future scavenging daughter
who in mourning and resentment works her way
through the continuum of her mother’s yarn and
fabrics and her father’s inability to ever throw
a poem away, to see how many empty notebooks
and scrap bundles might be sold at the estate sale,
how many tossed into a fire.
MICHAEL HILL is a father, unionist, teacher. Prior Publications in Dogwood Alchemy, The Quill, The Wayne Literary Review, and a story in a comic about the quarantine called The Things They Did.
The book of how’s that
going to work
by Jordan Davis
Dome on the slushie cup pulls you closer
to a renegotiation
of the sidewalk banana peels
Ecstatic never mind
we’re all a conk away from
Angst of God
Lambfear
JORDAN DAVIS’s third book, Yeah, No, was published in 2023 by MadHat. Recent poems appear in The Pi Review, Oversound, and American Poetry Review.
Before you came
by Andrew Williamson
I am a small boy
carried on the rip
the tide pulling me out waves dragging me down
swim to the edge
you say
swim until
you reach that rocky shore
there, in the space
between our stories
Clearance
by Andrew Williamson
he looks out at the line of cars tailing back down the suburban street
the leaves leaving the trees
make him shudder at the thought of another prairie winter
his mind stretches back
to the small croft
on the side of a hill
where the Atlantic wrestles the shore
a young man, with his dog
brings in the hefted ewes
at the start of an island spring
ANDREW WILLIAMSON is a New Zealand writer and poet now based in the Isle of Skye.
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