Samuel Wood

The Nightly Statue Carving

Rumpled and mousy portrait,
what do you sing for me? 
Is it rain? No, never water
 
lollygagging the pond beneath the moon,
too cruel for the sparking
air at balsam dusk, hushed in gold.
 
Buzzing hair clippers like cicada melody
fold over this body like an ivory comb
shouting vetiver and mahogany. Is it the sea
 
sickness? Blushing like sprouting gardenia,
repulsed at its whiteness. Another day of bargaining
my mindfulness towards craft and little
 
dying. Oh, is this all that I’m doing?
Lost within my little rooms,
wandering through a wreckage sonnet.
 
Another trial, another run begins
another fruit sliding down my chin. Hands
meander and wander, waning at the touch
 
of clean skin, new skin emerging
from beneath the blister. This episode
in indulgence is unkind and far
 
from modest, but the only stutter
of the endless day. I’m writing my
own future, an edict in poem.
 
The garden trees hear me, they flush
in rapture and point forwards in the wind,
mottling this portrait of pining.

---

Samuel Wood (he/him) is currently completing his final year of undergraduate study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying English Literature and Spanish. He is the current poetry editor for the campus literary journal, The Madison Review, as well as the editor-in-chief for the university's undergraduate humanities and fine arts magazine, Illumination Journal.

Brenna Womer

alien(us)

i hold you until sweat 
rolls down my back, at least 
an hour; though, mostly you 
are asleep, your twitching feet 
like my dog’s when she dreams, 
and your eyes rolling back 
like hers too, little beasts, 
but i keep this to myself.

your eyes are gray or blue 
or maybe green—no one is 
sure yet, but you’ll be the last 
to know—and for a moment, 
i think i love you, but it’s just 
that you’re new and meant to fit 
in the crook of everyone’s arm, 
your head in the bend of an elbow.  

when you won’t latch, 
i hold you while your mother 
heats a bottle, and you cry 
at the emptiness of me, ask why 
i have nothing to offer but arms 
like the rest, why i don’t proffer 
my breasts, incidental flesh, excess 
beneath my turtleneck sweater.

---

Brenna Womer is an experimental prose writer and poet in flux. She's a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University and the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and two chapbooks, Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018) and cost of living (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Story Magazine and Faculty Advisor for New Delta Review.

Ginger Harris

Crash Positions

We used to beat it to death:
watch for deer     belabored
at the close 
of every gathering,
 
badgering each other 
to heed yellow diamonds 
jumping with deer silhouettes—please 
spare us 
the doe-eyed destruction 
of a loss. 
 
At dusk we'd gather 
by the door
one family at a time—each its own storm 
 
of finding and tying shoes
they’re out there, so watch out
it's that time 
of day

of course
accidents happen,

even to us, we who impart 
lukewarm caution 
at night's end 
like a Tupperware of leftover pie—
 
my grandma's SUV,
totaled by a stock-still 
straggler,
 
is proof our favorite way to say goodbye 
is to avoid the unavoidable. 
 
My dad would periodically yell: 
crash positions! and
my brother and I 
would fold our arms in front of us, tucking 
our heads behind them, backs straight and
feet flush 
to the floor, the motion coalescing 

into muscle memory, etched like 
zinc, scratched until picturesque
and all we see: our bones smashing 

under setting sun, family
in black and bereft 
of us, we see this deadly dusk 

for what it is and there is 
hope: we are watching, 
we are watching, 
we are watching

---

Ginger Harris is an emerging writer who lives in Denver. She has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she also studied creative writing. Her work is forthcoming in The Rising Phoenix Review. 

Noa Saunders

JOCKEY

Please dare the bell strike.

The leaps it will take for so little—like a crack in a church door 

or some silly ideas from within. 

As if Buster Keaton’s answer to the calling of a girl
were a manifestation of ricochets: 

himself, himself, and himself, in his full Sunday best, sprinting like a bird flies.

It is not love we’ve fallen into, it’s something else.

What was it that we knew, 
passing each other like the shine at night of the trolley lamp 

bouncing off the rails, which we cannot see, 
then off the cable track above us, 

which we can?

A church door is only every door 

breaking an afternoon
open—mayflies wash in the air the devastating sun,

the blue sky ever-smell kicking in the mouth,
the it keeping what it can of what’s too soon.

---

Noa Saunders is a PhD Candidate at Boston University, where she teaches classes on poetry, film, and writing. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park. Recent poems and reviews can be found in Ninth Letter, The Shore, Against the Current, and The Bitchin' Kitsch.

Ben Kline

Inflammations // Exaggerations

My PCP insists, Take two  
twice a day for nine weeks 
and we’ll see how you do,  
 
and I swallow nine 
with warm chardonnay 
like any Friday night  
 
strangers bless my sheets. 
They are safe with your PrEP 
and Cosentyx. Rick arrives 
 
with his backward hat, 
big ass and fake name 
around eleven. I strip 
 
my confidence bare 
in lamp light, my t-shirt 
a modest black veil. I gorge 
 
his full naked body. I gale 
into orgasm, pinwheeling 
my arms to disperse 
 
his smoke. Every Rick 
smokes. Keep your mask  
on. But lips are doors 
 
I lick to enter, pretending  
I belong like a pent-up gust  
cursing pulled hair or bad teeth.
 
Quiet as cooled ash,  
Rick douses his cigarette  
with spit on his thumb.  
 
Our ammonia lingers,  
slowness I billow  
and cumili, a white elephant  
 
tiptoeing his underwear,  
socks, the toenails  
I chewed off that afternoon. 
 
Avoid added stress, but you 
know this. Rick gathers  
his clothes like nightfall 
 
rustle and chirps, no mirror  
for his frat boy cosplay, 
tucking his curls back 
 
under his ball cap. 
I can’t see his eyes 
and fumble answers  
 
about my name, the wine, 
nearby Uber pickups. Let me know  
if you experience any problems.  
 
My doctor facts the matter  
of my conditions, advises 
Some people won’t understand 
 
you’re ok. Rick shrivels 
in my hug, his ride calling  
from the corner. “Hey, 

you Dick?”  

---

Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks SAGITTARIUS A* (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) and DEAD UNCLES (Driftwood Press, 2021), Ben was the 2021 recipient of Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry. His work appears in POETRY, Southeast Review, Rejection Letters, The Shore, Thrush, West Trade Review, CutBank, fourteen poems, Limp Wrist and many other publications. You can read more at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/.

John Dorsey

Renting a VCR in 1989

we didn’t have our own
the only copy 
of bill & ted’s excellent adventure 
was always out

& i was still too young 
to alter the course of history

not yet lovesick 
for pale girls 
chanting nirvana anthems
drinking wine coolers 
in the suburban garages 
of my youth

sitting there indian style 
with unsalted popcorn on a paper towel 
on a green shag carpet
that never looked clean
no matter how many times 
you tried to scrub the memories out

i spent my saturday nights
watching cronenberg 
& hal hartley’s
loveletters to long island outsiders 
feeling just as weird & out of place
as i was supposed to 
waiting on the future.

---

John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), and Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

Tucker Cowan

even the stars are dead

I was in my twenties during the final years
the mad and starving walking in the streets
waiting in lines while we sat inside
until it got us too
and even Frank Ocean was digging graves in the cemetery behind the Volvo dealership
while all the others were at JJs oyster bar down the street
wiping cocktail sauce off the tables
and the rest of the stars - they’d been dead for decades.  centuries!
and left us to watch raccoons in the trashcans and neighborhood kids trying to get the cat out of the gutter
and the deer in the streets running around free with the traffic all gone
strange men walking in the forest near the golf course where the caddies all camp - they’re scared of the men too
bunch of dogs with no collars running through the parks
and the newspapers printing Beware the Midnight Dogs!
graffiti on the restaurant windows and forget the nightclubs
and the only flowers left were dried between book pages or tied in grass necklaces hung over door handles 
but no one was too sad
you could still drink beer on the porch under pecan trees
listen to Lee Moses yowl on the radio and eat bar-b-que takeout from a paper bag
ash your cigarette in the pool and look up to watch the moon burning
neighbors next door outside too, lounging in lawn chairs and looking over
to raise a final toast
turn it up! they said
Yow!

---

Tucker Cowan is an M.F.A Candidate in Fiction at Texas State University.  Previously, he worked as an assistant in Hollywood.  He is from Texas.

Jeremy Casabella

Medusa’s OnlyFans Page

Ancient's warnings 
could only guess what
fathoms her tales would shed.

Oh, they may have thought "snakes!"
Because why not? Everything frightening is a serpent 
waiting to be disturbed 

in the disaster of cavernous ruins 
at night,
but it does a bit remind 

of curious tongues 
tasting at wind 
for tiny thrills and nourishment,

after half the world starves
staring through a screen.

Yet the scales were never hers
and not one body volts to marble.

It is gradual as granules in an
hourglass that rotates.  
Granted she is that amazing.

At one-sight instead 
onlookers freeze from base ambitions 
placid as meat.

Left in the sun they dry paralyzed
to parched thin bone 
beneath hide.

Flesh-flakes like
papier-maché crumble 
away languidly

the ways people must when they crumble 
to study any art into oblivion—

until ashen dirt so dry 
even command of three oceans
could not seize it,
nor wisdom vanquish, self-obliterates.

And in a solstice or so 
we are each one 

ghost 
from summit to abyss,

one leviathan pallid sheet draped 
over many seas in a skin of grit, debris

thick as buoyant deteriorating plastics.
So we appear serpentine

writhing on a head
which is her head.

---

Jeremy Casabella teaches Composition and Literature throughout the San Joaquin Valley and writes poetry, short stories, and pwoermds.  A 2019 Omnidawn Broadside Contest finalist, his poems appear most recently in Vinyl, The American Journal of Poetry, GNU, Right Hand Pointing, and Rabid Oak. His pwoermding is featured in the anthology The Wisdoms of the Universes in a Single String of Letters from Xexoxial Editions, and on Twitter: @JCasabella1

Jake Romm

Hokkaido (Train, Traveling East)

There on the sea wall out from the left 
train window I see two gulls perched
then ten then thirty or fifty 
more with each chug of the track more 
ten more from the window perched like perfect tallies 
counting my moments against me they pile up 
until the sea is just a small blue comma caught
between the gray-white rush of wings turn
out towards the right to see the evergreens the cedar shrubs 
the odd milky birch or two to see them 
huddled together against the bone damp mist to see them 
huddled feigning silent stillness feigning safety but I know 
because I’ve seen them I know that they quiver all the same yes
even in the mist I’ve seen them 
finding no solace
turn back again to the sea wall the gulls have past 
now many tracks behind now 
just wall just sea wall dark blue now ocean 
gurgling against the salt grass and concrete 
then miraculously there beneath the gray 
a raven muddles on against the wind

---

Jake Romm's writing and photography have appeared in The New Inquiry, Humble Arts Foundation, Door Factory (Mikros), MAP6, Ain't Bad, Loosen Art Gallery, Protean Magazine, Yogurt Magazine (Quarantine), Dodho Magazine, Across the Margin, and Reading The Pictures. Jake can be found on twitter @jake_romm and instagram @jakeromm

Clem Flowers

So Many Wasted Nights

Out in the inky heart of fog and sugarcane lonesome
I wandered- 

thick cloud reminders of the inevitable fist of frost- ever so slow to rocket down and crush us with a blanket of dank and wind and endless cooled dawns- like Sephiroth's meteor, soon to inevitably subsume every ounce of love and life as it rams the galaxy like a black ice fender bender- 

and I played pretend I was  a WWI soldier, hollering dying missives as the mustard gas takes hold; some grizzled sea captain, out on the hunt in song godless stretch of murky water hell, embracing whatever Eldritch hell the ceaseless fog beat upon my wobbly port side; or a Kane-meets-Gatsby being of wealth and taste, who's calmly sipping a brisk Manhattan as the walls of my pleasure palace crumble around me, the walls beating back endless into the green glow of the night in a cost no man could say. 

"Really?"

My therapist is so kind and I smile, delighted to be able to quote The Simpsons in context:

"Well, yes, but then I was a very depressed child."

---

Clem Flowers (They/ Them) is a soft spoken southern transplant living in spitting distance of some mountains in Utah. Maker of a fine omelet, but scrambled egg game needs some fine tuning. Nb & bi, they live in a cozy apartment with their wonderful wife & sweet calico kitty. They can be found on Twitter at @hand_springs777

Cameron Morse

West Virginia

There is shelter in a song. 
Almost heaven, sings Denver, 
and I sing to my children. 
I photograph them crouched 
upon the especially green 
crest of our leaf-shaded yard
in the middle of June. 
There are songs I wish I had 
sung in the coffee house
at Calvin before I lost the power
of my left hand to form chords 
on the fretboard. West Virginia 
makes me wonder where 
my home is. Certainly not here
where I sit in driveway 
riot of ants, the dirt of their 
settlements lining cracks
between the concrete blocks. No, 
and not at Calvin either, where 
I wasn’t Dutch, wasn’t C.R.C.,
wasn’t even comfortable 
in my own raucous skin, my torn 
army jacket. My balding scalp 
itched and now nowhere  
can I locate for myself the sound
of running water emanating 
from a neighbor’s lawn, water 
or wind whisking the pinwheel
glint of foil in their flowerbed. 
Barefoot, I step into the hot street.
Almost to the other side, I stop
at the truckbed piled with kitchen 
trash spiraling flies, the smashed 
storm door, air conditioner 
perched in an open window
wondering about West Virginia. 

---

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). He holds and MFA from the University of Kansas City—Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and (soon, three) children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.   

Julian Day

Twillingate, 3

The last road down to the water
chained and locked, as if expecting
a line of townsfolk to take their cars,
every fear and frustration, and drive
until the windows hit the sea;

and against the salt-split wall
of the fishing shed, three pairs
of seabird wings, still feathered,
neatly nailed in pairs
to face the sun.

Ward or warning? Impossible 
to say for sure who did this, 
just that they walk the same
shale beaches you do, looking
for keepsakes;

and in their absence, makes them
with knife and wire and nails,
watching you each morning
in the coffee shop, learning you
take yours black and his with cream.

---

Julian Day has lived in Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Ottawa; he now lives in Winnipeg. His poems have recently appeared at Juniper and Arc (online), and his reviews at periodicities and Barrelhouse. His debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021).

Zoe Cunniffe

ghost town

i don’t walk       in a straight line.
there’s no need for that now, but 
don’t you miss it—  the car exhaust,
the skidding feet,  truck tires 
leaving tracks    through the autumn leaves?
how laughter echoes    on concrete,
lawnmowers growling     in august heat.
all these stains and signatures draped 
careless       across the summer-slick sidewalk.

now, there are only 
my exhalations,
my blood-pulse pounding, 
my footfalls twirling, 
serpentine,
that hammering of feet on stale cement. 
i weave past the wreckage       of houses 
where i once sank into    threadbare sofas, 
trading oxygen, running my fingers 
      across the spots in the walls.
once, we were statues, posed in each other’s doorways,
pearly and picturesque. now i am a tumbleweed,
    rising in the wind   while you sit hunched 
       in your basement,      parting the curtains, 
          studying the dust. are you hungry enough
to look out the window and bare your teeth?

there’s hardly any sunlight left. this used to be
the beginning—  the jangle of keys, the slam of 
        car doors, the whoosh of air through the sunroof. 
    tonight, i climb the hill by your house and holler
your name, cut my teeth on consonants. it’s a 
heavenly howl—
      windows shatter, and the glass lays scattered
  for weeks.

---

Zoe Cunniffe is a poet and singer-songwriter from Washington, DC. She has previously been published in literary journals such as Blue Marble Review, New Reader Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and Small Leaf Press. Zoe can be found on Instagram at @there.are.stillbeautifulthings.

Jeremiah Moriarty

Camera Roll

I angled the half-moon of my face 
out of frame because 

I wanted to stimulate the imagination
wanted them to need it like they need 

a snack a shot
a second mask with elastic

cleaned our whole apartment on the weekend 
because I couldn’t clean the whole world

met a 5G truther on the Fourth of July 
she said we just don’t know enough

tell yourself a myth if you need to, like
it takes a mere day to replace 

all the body’s cells
those frames within frames

I wish they would hurry up already
I’m afraid they never will 

---

Jeremiah Moriarty is a writer from Minnesota. His work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, Prelude, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hobart, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. He tweets @miahmoriarty.

Juhee Lee

family—armadillidiidae

roly polies are the only crustaceans that have learned to survive on land.

a family on a land rehearses
“i’m doing fine” again and again
until the words fall like wood chips on a 
concrete floor

where are the crustaceans?

a grandmother on another land grinds
spices and grains and foods she hopes will last and
ships it to a family
a family opens the box and cries,
scoops out the mold.

how does the roly poly identify itself? does it remember the salt?

a girl opens her lunch box at school and
the other kids turn away their
faces wilted like a
fist.
girl doesn’t notice, swallows salt whole.

a roly poly’s key defense mechanism is called conglobation. the exoskeleton is hard.

a family works on a land for most of the day
their exoskeletons uncrackable
the joints have stiffened too
the back does not know
straight
a family lives a
rounded
life hiding secrets in their bellies
they move slow
dripping salt from their tongues

a family of roly polies feels a vibration
recoils
tastes salt in the dark.

---

Juhee Lee is a Korean-American writer/human based everywhere and nowhere. Her poetry has been featured on Button Poetry and Wax Nine Journal. She is largely inspired to write when struck by nostalgia, nature, and plenty of coffee.

Pablo Damián

Freudian Slips On Mute

A secret handshake announced 

the end of the bloody feud between

car stereo thieves and single moms


Under the piss-colored halo of the streetlight posts

the smoke machines spewed their

repentant philanderer speech 


And the cavernous voices of the presidential ghosts 

asked in unison:


“When is the next leap year?”

---

Pablo Damián (August 22, 1987) is an Argentine poet and translator currently living in Buenos Aires. 

Alicia Byrne Keane

Today was a bad day for poems,

but otherwise

there are so many buildings I can show you

that look half-woken and horrible,

hydrangeas in front gardens

lit with the rawness of soil. I am  thinking of 

a siren I can’t localize,

at its loudest swell it finds me 

hurried in a smear of glass,

the air like threads waning. 

On the quays I get the idea

you’re walking beside me, we’re 19 or 20

     going to Workmans.

An evening can lengthen into something like

a shopfront or a tousled rose & I’m afraid

of the Centra,

I count all the surfaces that

could harm me. When I was a kid

I went through a phase where I was scared

of almost all objects,

I had got a papercut from a 

book & it’s like I only realised then that hurt

can conceal itself in matte corners, before

picking anything up

  I’d always be asking

          is this sharp

---

Alicia Byrne Keane thinks a lot about coastal wildflowers, the short film medium, and sleep paralysis-induced ghost sightings. Alicia has a first class honours degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University, and is finishing work on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study problematizing ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at TCD. Alicia’s poetry has been published in The Moth, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Banshee, Parentheses Journal, Abridged, and The Honest Ulsterman, among others. Alicia’s poem ‘surface audience’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; the short story ‘Snorkels’ was featured in Marrowbone Books' anthology The Globe and Scales, alongside the work of other Irish writers such as Dermot Bolger, Mia Gallagher, and Louise Nealon; the poem ‘Cloud / land arc’ was nominated for the Orison Anthology. 

Dana Miller

Last Halloween in Hawaii

A wave breaks in a place that is half as deep as the wave is tall.
If the rail is too low, you claw into the curl;
if it’s too high you become the world’s least rad rhino-chaser--straight into the soup.
 
The ultimate middle finger is to leave with your name,
carve it with an ice pick,
jagged as Jagger, across the back of Jeff Beck‘s guitar like Tina Turner did--
because Jeff is cool enough to love that the way any honest man should.
Meanwhile, the sleaze who tried to invent you with said name,
on a continent you gave him no less,
is still running the same tired, back-alley barf-game. (Yeah, okay barno!)
 
He’ll only ever be remembered as the Bucks Fizz version of “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”
The gross kind of hot-dogger. Never a wave-slider.
One who had to pull leashes to win.
And these are the comments of his friends.
 
Over here, I am shimmying down the stages he didn’t have the crest to ever set foot on.
We always knew I had the sand, didn’t we?
 
Telling them to keep the current under me,
I keep the pulse in my pocket.
I’m just about ready to get more than compliments for all of this, 
about to cash in on every single thing you missed.
 
I’ve studied hard and I’ve learned
even tame impalas have to run fast to catch their connections.
Kevin Parker said:
“there are definitely things that have disappeared that would have been great.”
The greatest of all is that I know you’re not one of them.
The second is wavelengths like him made me know it wasn’t too late.

---

Dana Miller is a wicked wordsmith, giggling provocateuse, and mega-melomaniac from Atlanta, Georgia. Her poetic syllables like to trundle in the wilds—usually in search of a smackerel or two. On their way, they have found themselves featured in Postscript Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, Fairy Piece, Sledgehammer Lit, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Small Leaf Press, and Nauseated Drive. When not wielding a lethal pen, Dana adores surf culture, Australian grunge rockers, muscle cars, Epiphone guitars, glitter, Doc Martens, and medieval-looking draft horses with feathered feet. Oxford, England is her spirit-home and Radiohead is holding the last shard of her girlhood heart. 

Margaret Wagner

THE MAN NAMED BLUE

He kept me waiting and waiting.
Then grizzled up from nowhere at midnight
in a yellow rig with three scarlet A’s and a shiny black trailer.
This was my second tow truck driver—the first didn’t have the right equipment.

This one offered his hand…a firm bear paw
without visible claws. His was the kind of hand I wanted to shake
at least five more times. A hand
I’d let lead me blindfolded from a cave.

Despite his well-trimmed ginger beard,
he said his name was Blue.
Was that true blue, or you’ll make me blue…
boo-hoo, boo-hoo?

Blue was twelve hours in on a 24-hour shift,
his second in three days.
He harnessed my Subaru to his trailer
with a clang and a click, click, click.

He called his buddy, with a “wassssup,” to find me
the best Subaru mechanic in the nearest town.
As we drove off, he told me he watched the 49ers.
That was his football team. He paid good money to see them three times a year.

Blue delivered wood to estates
at the tops of mountains.
He liked their views.
He liked their tips.

Blue wanted a five-star rating on Yelp.
Not the puppy-dog yelp, not a coyote-call yelp,
but a stars-and-stripes exploding into the blue, blue yonder yelp.
He had a kind of hustle, but he did go above and beyond.

Then the wood-hauling tow truck driver named Blue
didn’t want to leave me in the mechanic’s empty parking lot.
Blue would have preferred to deposit me safely in the well-lit Burger King.
He told me to lock my car while waiting for the cab.

Blue printed his cell phone number
on the back of the tow card
as precisely as he must have stacked wood
behind the estates with the mountain views.

I tipped Blue a $20. A $20 with a handshake.
Blue downshifted back into the night.
He left me wondering.
Should I call to thank him?

---

Margaret Wagner is a writer, dancer, and artist who has written articles for World Screen and won three Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing. She has studied with Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Jericho Brown, and Julia Cameron, in addition to conscious dance pioneers 
Gabrielle Roth and Anna Halprin. Margaret is the founder of WRITE IN THE BEATTM, workshops that pair mindful movement with written poetry and visual art. She graduated with a B.A. in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and attended the public sessions of Dominican University of California’s MFA creative writing courses and the AWP Conference 2019 (Portland, OR). She has served as visiting faculty at the Omega Institute, Kripalu, and Mount Holyoke College and is a certified Open Floor and 5Rhythms® dance teacher. Her work has been published in Cacti Fur, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Perceptions Magazine, I-70 Review, Raw Journal of the Arts and Steam Ticket.