"Skipping Steps" by Jeremy Michael Reed

Skipping Steps 

after Jean Valentine 

I climb into our bed 
covering myself in a sheet 
like I wish to do in deep water 
covering feet from whatever 
lies beneath sleep     beneath 
where I cannot see      and you 
lay beside me   already breathing 
more slowly   than before   already 
unconcerned   with what’s below 
like you’d skipped    the step prior 
to snorkeling      where you take 
a deep breath    look    and breathe 

ξ

“Skipping Steps" was first published in Zone 3 (Spring 2019).

Jeremy Michael Reed is an assistant professor of English at Westminster College. His poems and essays are published in Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Columbia, Missouri with his wife and daughter.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"Artist Talk #15" by Merridawn Duckler

Artist Talk #15

I have no idea what you are doing here
or how to use this mic.

Someday I’m going to die
and God said, look get that commission.

I usually start with a shape — maybe that one —
in the form of either a baby or a table.

If it’s table, we’ve got a still life,
if a baby, then we are in chaos.

Either way, there’s a whole cosmology,
abstraction is meant to make order from.

Is that too deep? How about this blue — too deep for you?
My technique is to reach an absolute limit, and then add more.

ξ

“Artist Talk #15” was first published in Women's Review of Books, Jan/Feb 2021

Merridawn Duckler is a writer and visual artist from Oregon, author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press), IDIOM (Harbor Review), and MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press). Beulah Rose poetry prize from Smartish Pace, non-fiction prize from Invisible City, judged by Heather Christle, Elizabeth Sloane Tyler Memorial Award from Woven Tale Press, judged by Ann Beattie, Drama prize from Arts and Letters in Georgia. Publications: Painted Bride Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Western Humanities Review, Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, Plume. She’s an associate editor at Narrative and the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics. 

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"Latin class" by Saturn Browne

Latin class

Amaberis, you will
Be loved. Feelings
Conjugated
Down to one word of linguistic
Essence without
Fail. Syllables slip
Gently through my teeth and I
Hope that
I do not mess up and make a
Joke of myself.
Kill me, I think, as I
Leave a trail of words tumbling behind me,
Mumbling foreign tongues with record speed,
Not wanting to recite another table
Or translate another
Passage in which I would have more
Questions than perhaps answers.
Recitals finally end and I
Sit down in my chair—still shaking, still
Thinking over every mistake, but
Ultimately we both know it will not matter.
Vale, you tell us, goodbye, and
We whisper the word back to you, your
Xenia has been appreciated, but we move on. I see
You counting the number of seats left as we leave, light slowly leaving your eyes until you finally reach
Zero, and your eyes have no light left in them at all.

ξ

“Latin class” was first published in Kenyon Review Young Writers Anthology — the Upside Down Tree.

Saturn Browne (she/they) is an Asian writer. She reads a little too much. Her work appears in Beaver Mag, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Eunoia Review. Their website can be found at saturnbrowne.carrd.co

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"Today is a sonnet" by Jodie Dalgleish

Today is a sonnet

Our joint history falls into the long loose ribbons of a day’s
cumulus and a riverbank’s trees laid over water, the doubling
of summer’s arrival in all of its sky and limbs, cast out and longways
into reflections, the flow of time freighted glass-like and carrying
years across the water’s surface, in the bindings of its meniscus:
our days floating themselves in the stream of its silken settling—
when a river’s span of down feathers comes right by us, upturned as
white-tufted, small-cupped boats, taking us downriver, pointing onwards
with their light calamus prows of barbule-fluff, from upriver where perhaps
the waterfowl have been gathering for the year’s one-time ‘big moult’
of their body’s closest covering they drop first, soft and spectacular;
towards what arrives soon enough with this new season. Optimistically,
I stand and look out at everything we have seen and done together
as it sails with this afternoon’s event, in a plumulaceous flotilla.

ξ

“Today is a Sonnet” was first published in Poetry Salzburg Review, No. 36, Winter 2020.

Jodie Dalgleish is a writer, curator and sound artist based in Luxembourg. After a decade of exhibition making for public art galleries in New Zealand, she writes to explore ways in which sensorial experience might be embodied by language. Her poetry has been published in Landfall and Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook (NZ); Shearsman and Long Poem Magazine (UK); Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria); Azure (USA) and Les Cahiers Luxembourgeois (Luxembourg). She holds a Master of Creative Writing from AUT University (NZ).

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"林" by Mylo Lam

林
 

I go into the forest
to meet the spirits of my ancestors


They look at the trees
instead of me

They face the gnarled bark
moving their hands as
if to smooth the knots

I too approach a faded snag
moving my hands
into the dying tree
that absorbs me gla–
cial-
ly
My arms
spindly branches
Visage withered
evergreen wind

I gasp loud
choked-up sobs
Open my hollow eyes
to see

Ancestors before me
On the soft dirt
fruits and steamed baos

They break
off my arms
to pick up the food
Stuff my tree-mouth
to stop the cry

A trio surrounds my trunk
Chitea
escaped before the Rouge
salutes with hallowed eyes
Anh trai
did not last full moon
grazes for lunar sky
Pa
stench of the living
gorges on food of mine

ξ

“林" was first published in Barrelhouse, Issue 19.

Mylo Lam (he/him) was born in Vietnam and currently lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, The Margins, MĀNOA Journal, GASHER, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry won Blood Orange Review's Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook “AND NOT/AND YET” was the Editors' Choice by Quarterly West and will be published in Spring 2023.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.