Eyes of the Night

🌚 Eyes of the Night

They’re everywhere but we can’t see them. Too small to exist on one plane. Here they’ve floated up from the blacktop, dissolved at our feet in a morning rain. No, they aren’t stars, birds, or airplanes. They’re the dreams we don’t remember, the thoughts that whir through our minds before sleep.

đŸšȘ Eyes of a Door

They’re peeking through the grain of the wood. They try to stay open, watching who comes and goes. They see more than we do: a rush of ghosts, a spider crawling, a memory sneaking through. Like cats they hate the door to be closed. But sometimes sleep overtakes them. They wake regretting all they missed.

đŸ™ŒđŸŒ Eyes of a Hand

One on every fingertip. They like music, dance with the fingers, see the shapes of sound. They are shy, recede before touch. They are too delicate to love but like many things: pea-pods, velvet, sunrise. Try to get up early so they can enjoy it.

☁ Eyes of a Cloud

They are lost, in the delirium after surgery, in the moon that came and went one night. I saw them when the clouds covered and uncovered the moon, and I imagined them in rowboats, rocking upon the night in the waters of the fairy tales I heard as a child. Here is the moon; now it is gone completely. Do they navigate for the clouds? Do they want to reach the moon?

Judith Serin is a creative writing and literature professor at California College of the Arts, and her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. Serin’s recent fiction collection, Gravity, debuted in May 2022 from Eye Wear Publishing. Her collection of poetry, Hiding in the World, was published by Diane di Prima’s Eidolon Editions.

Late Night Metaphysics

Look up, draw water
from the deep sky-well

slowly, learning

the ways of shadow. Then,
after centuries of this,

begin to become the stars,

more quietly than their
echoing light,

as they burn towards

their death—Become their
mind, through their great age

of waiting, always waiting

to become something
else, to be, at last

you becoming them.

 

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Scissors and Spackle, Ink Sac, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of, God Said Fire, and the forthcoming, Snowfire and Home.

SECOND SKIN

[According to the wisdom of my dream, "The body is like a rubber-band for the soul." Except in my dream, I could slip out of my body at will, leave it hanging in the closet while I wore someone else's skin. It was by turns grisly and fascinating. The body fit perfectly, became painful to remove after a few days. I kept my original, but wanted more. There was one premise to be operated under: a body could be Given, but never Taken. But one night I became aware that there were certain others who did not follow this rule, that goodness did not govern everyone else as it did me, and that anyone could steal & wear your skin. That no one was necessarily who they appeared to be, and that a body was a tool, not a home, for some.]

 

Carella Keil is a Canadian writer and digital artist in the first year of her publishing journey. Her surreal art has appeared in various magazines and on the covers of Glassworks Magazine, Colors: The Magazine, The Frost Meadow Review and Straylight (forthcoming). Her writing is featured in Columbia Journal, Truthtellers: Best of 2022, MONO, DASH, Intangible Magazine and The Awakenings Review, among others. You can find Carella on Instagram @catalogue.of.dreams.

Self-Portrait Between Two Ghost Stories

I do not look like the moon’s reflection atop a river.

But one night
walking along Minnesota’s piece of the Mississippi
I watched that worn image for a while, a long
while, closing my eyes, opening my eyes,
closing my eyes until I saw a pearl
from my grandmother’s burial necklace

just sort of dangling there.

My mother, 
who shares the same birth name as her mother,
mentioned only once
that she can’t seem to bring herself
to visit her anymore.
It is strange, she said, It is strange
seeing etched across a gravestone
your own name

just sort of dangling there.

 

Nathan D. Metz (he/his) is a writer living in the Bay Area of California. His work has been featured in The Racket, Hawaii Pacific Review, Zaum and other great journals. He has received scholarships/fellowships from the Elk River Writers Workshop, Canterbury Program, and the AHA.

Our teeming sea

This sea brims with galaxies in ecstatic destructive union.
How does its bed hold supermassive black holes,
active nuclei with their jets, voids where nothing goes?
It must be governed by love, the field unploughed by science,
the one way we know to make new intelligences.
Love’s from the writhing sea, shines from its restless heart.
Each star is only plankton, plumply spinning round,
and the deep spaces spill over in benthic spasm.

Come, let us take our rest beside the burgeoning fullness,
surrender to everything titanic, cling to innocence
the way we’ve been created. Superclusters
are sweet, spilling out fragrant relic essence.
When the vacuum surf burns out will I see 
ten million trillion dawns bed down in your bones.

 

Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He wrangles computers as a day job but imagines a time when life might center around other things. His work has appeared at Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Sein und Werden, Call Me [Brackets], Bewildering Stories, and Contemporary Haibun Review. His website is at zeroatthebone.us.

Emily Rankin

inborn

inborn

engulfed

engulfed

Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended university in Texas, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangles of human emotion and understanding, the intuitive messages of dreaming and subconsious exploration. Her work has appeared in such publications as Gasher, Wild Roof Journal, Alien Magazine, Landlocked, Hey I’m Alive, and Rattle. She is currently based in New Mexico. Her website is www.eerankinart.com.

The Pantheistic Preschool of Painting the Painter into the Paintings Paintings Paint

Especially in watercolor. Or acrylics on canvas, pen & ink. Frequencies traverse the trans-optic nerve, shift back into that kinship decryption light. Consciousness in physical form. Time, a dream to a photon, reflects a velocity, and I am complete in my self. I will die, have died, am dying back into the awareness of the Great Jellyfish Universe, my impervious galaxy given by the silence allowing me. More than the star stuff we think, beyond particle, wave, word. I am that I am.  Translucent blurs of conversion, words a thin emulsion, a disclosure of weather, a flute's hover inside a faraway tune, flowers returning to the sun. The alarm clock of my breathing viscera shows me the decompression possible at awakening, like sweet soft thunder breaking a reverie. Like how when our credentials expire, our involvement shrinks, and our bio gets smaller. The Lost & Found pours out its butterscotch giraffes when empty enough starts meaning the world as I've only just imagined it. Home-free, held aloft by Earth's thinning mineral crust. My sacred departure indeed! How long 'til the winds of perhaps switch places with the pouring out of everything I know until now. Unscrambling this sudden decompression would be like going to the museum and liberating the craniums of all the people in all the paintings, finding their spark of thought, paintings painting paintings in miniscule splinters of light. Which is all it takes. All there is, in the end.

 

Bobby Parrott’s poems appear or are forthcoming in RHINO, Tilted House, Whale Road Review, Diphthong, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. In his own words, “The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder.” Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, this writer dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado.

Elevator 

In the elevator dream, numbers have no meaning, and names,
instead of illuminating live beings, stand in boxes,
colorless. People waiting for the elevator fade into echoes.
Revealed, this vestibule opens to nothing, unrooted,
airless, without bud. When its doors close,
the elevator is moved by an alien purpose, god or monster,
and the rider is a puppet on its steel ropes.
I press a cryptic button, the floor presses against my sleeping feet
in uncontrolled acceleration—I wonder if the elevator will stop
before it lifts through the roof and hangs swaying
on its leafless frame, as it open its doors into wind,
impossible to escape. Breathless, I exert my dreaming will.
The elevator slows, and opens into a safe darkness.
In sleep’s last twilight the wind waits over the porous roof.
 

Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She has studied poetry at the Joiner Institute in UMass, Boston. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in And There Will Be Singing, An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019 as well. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, J-Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Soundings East, and Barrow Street.

String Theory

“String theory is an attempt to unite the two pillars of 20th century physics—quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity—with an overarching framework that can explain all of physical reality.”
— Live Science, Adam Mann

My love—a pulsing gravity
pulling your body back down
to mine on the ground.

Do not be afraid.
I have had practice.
I know how to braid

myself together with others,
their names and faces
the wax-coated thread

keeping me from going
too far over the licking
ridge of Lake Michigan,

where I last refused
to surrender.
Your ill-advised exposure

to my reverberating inoculations,
my thinly veiled promises
of answered questions

is more so what you should fear.
There are no revelations
for you here. I am the ellipsis.

I perpetually contrast and expand,
casting wave after wave out across
the long and convulted verse.

Rarely , am I giving
simple answers,
my love

 

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer, artivist, and cultural strategist. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the debut memoir about their carceral experiences A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). A voting member of the Recording Academy, Hicks is the recipient of grants, residencies, and fellowships from the Art for Justice Fund, the Texas After Violence Project, Black Mountain Institute, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Right of Return USA, and Tin House, among others. The winner of the 2020 Sappho Award from Palette Poetry, their poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Longreads, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Scalawag, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.

Cosmic Dawn

“[Q]uantum mechanics allows two or more particles to exist in
an entangled state. What happens to one of the particles in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other particle, even if they are far apart.”
— Press Release for the Nobel Prize in Physics,

Cotton Candy, Original Photography (2017)

Frequencies rush along the obscure stretch of my pliant continent. A bursting gamma-ray gone torrent,; in my hands it is a beginning. Once, I, the dawn, evaded foraging. My infinite bodies unsiphoned by the curiosities of mxn. The unsatiated desire of my species to possess my secrets—left split and spinning out in the density of the known verse; kept close the blued caulk rim of my wet purse, a shimmering dust sore to shine loose.

But I am, we are, the unwieldly remnants of stars. We sprang from this compact planet feral. Radically free. Naturally called into the watery beds of our known histories to fuse together our fragile bodies until we knocked nuclear.

I touch myself now and sense century after century of solar adaptations flickering through my cold and boundless night. Fashioned by fire, I know we could have been anything instead of obsessed with breaking down and splitting. So selfish, how often we give in to ourselves, succumb to the hunger of our own enigmatic flares, knowing we can never truly distance ourselves from The Other: the strange & unfamiliar.

We are all tethered. Why, on Earth, would we ever cede to borders? In our blood, the helix spins. Same as the planet spins. All around us the wheel, it turns. And still, we turn away from our mirrors? Our bodies, like other celestial bodies, rotate endlessly from sxn to soil to sun.

To forget our entangled lives is to make each of us unreal, realities unrecognized, thus unrepaired. So desperately, I reach into the glowing swell of my own waist—an unmeasurable absence warping the days and distances of our collective evolution—lose myself in my own inescapable gravity. Wade the mutable circumstances of my bright blackness, migrate its stretches of dark energy grown hefty, wide, and endless in the sphere of this jaundiced kiln, inside myself—our self—to find some alternate version of healed.

I know that if I can come, we can come together.

 

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer, artivist, and cultural strategist. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the debut memoir about their carceral experiences A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). A voting member of the Recording Academy, Hicks is the recipient of grants, residencies, and fellowships from the Art for Justice Fund, the Texas After Violence Project, Black Mountain Institute, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Right of Return USA, and Tin House, among others. The winner of the 2020 Sappho Award from Palette Poetry, their poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Longreads, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Scalawag, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.