"I Have Half a Mind" by April Salzano

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

April Salzano is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow, and Rattle. Her first chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is forthcoming in spring 2015 from Dancing Girl Press. The author serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press.

the Poem: 

There is so much distance packed into this short poem. The speaker is a wife and (presumably) mother but she describes her children as if they were strange wildlife. She uses the word “husband” but insists it’s just a name. And who among us hasn’t had that disorienting “how did I get HERE?!” moment or wondered if it might be best to scrap everything and start over? The poet moves deftly through the rhythm of these moments: how our estrangement from ourselves first shows in our estrangement from those we love; how we feel out of sync with the rhythms of life (“Does anyone iron anymore?”) when in fact we’ve lost sight of what makes life worth living (I had no intention of laughing/ so little”). Closure in moments of unhappiness and indecision seems like it will never come. In this poem, it never does.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Garamond bold 

Body: 14pt Garamond roman

The speaker has only just begun to organize her thoughts, so the design is arranged loosely to convey a similar series of shrugs and turns, first this way, then that, spiraling on itself. While this circular pattern suggests a hurricane, an actual storm possesses a clearly defined eye at its center. The speaker here has no such clarity, so the form needed to remain a little scattered. The typeface for such an unusual shape had to be extremely regular and legible—the last line is almost upside down—and Garamond fit the bill perfectly.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Called to the Water" by Moriah Cohen

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hoot: A Mini Literary Magazine on a Postcard, Baltimore Review, and Narrative. She lives in New Jersey with her two sons.

the Poem: 

Paddling away into the sunset seems like a simple teenage escape fantasy, but no matter how fast the current or how wide the body of water, there is no erasing the horizon. Not unless the current pulls you under. Is suicide what “should have happened” instead of survival? Does she wish she’d succeeded? That’s one possible reading. The other: Persephone under the sway of pomegranate seeds, called across the river to the underworld, the summer grass already growing stale in anticipation of her departure. Either way our speaker is weary with experience and what she most wishes to convey—what has remained true among the falsehoods, is the desire to escape.

the Design: 

Title: 36pt Courier bold 

Name: 24pt Courier roman 

Body: 12pt Gill Sans roman & italic

The lightness of floating down a river needed to be reflected by the body’s typeface; Gill Sans is so uniformly thin it seems to skim the page. The title is stretched out to echo the river’s pull on the girl and boldface to show the strength of that pull. Courier’s serifs provide a more rooted feel, perfect for the river’s solid bank.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Green Lake, Michigan" by Preston Craig

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Preston Craig was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has previously appeared in Glitterwolf and Wilderness House Literary Review, among others. He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, as a classical guitar major and is currently a junior at Harvard University, where he studies English.

the Poem: 

This is intimate terrain, a map of the speaker’s memory. On it, we find the body of the beloved as if he were Green Lake itself, his neck like “the mouth of a river” that “opens out into his shoulders.” Since this is actually a poem, though, we also have what is “unwritten on maps”: the associated emotion. It’s in the cracked chair that settles unevenly, the silverfish that scatter, but most of all in that crescent of hair “rotting beneath the heavy soil.” Whatever the reason for the beloved’s departure, Green Lake is abandoned, like the speaker.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Phosphorus 

Body: 12pt Futura Condensed Medium

Futura is heavy on the page so that each stanza resembles a clipped lock of dark hair, their collective arrangement in a “black half-moon” like the hair on the ground in the third stanza. Phosphorus’s descenders have a scythe-like quality that could alternately be crescent moons; its contrast between thick and thin strokes on the bowls of the letterforms create more crescents.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Ghost Dog" by Lindsay Ahl

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Lindsay Ahl’s chapbook, The Abyssians, was a finalist for the 2013 National Poetry Chapbook Award. Her poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, RHINO, Vellum, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and many others. Her fiction includes a novel, Desire, out with Coffee House Press, and stories in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Fiction magazine, and others. She publishes Shadowgraph, an arts & culture journal.

the Poem: 

“You see that meadow over there?” An innocent enough question quickly takes on a life of its own. The hiker’s memory of the dog, long buried, brings a shade of her into the physical world. The dog is an echo of the question, “You see the meadow?” created as the memory of the dog and this place intertwine in both hikers’ minds. This is how memory propagates. One person’s direct experience becomes an echo in the mind of a person hearing of that experience. Both the echoing story and the original experience are real memories.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Phosphorus Oxide 

Body: 14pt Roman Antique italic

These two typefaces represent different forms of decay: Phosphorus Oxide disappears from the inside out and Roman Antique dissolves inward from the outside. Neither maintains complete spatial integrity against the white of the paper, perfect for a poem about the thin places between memory and the present moment.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Where do you get your ideas?" by Michael Bazzett

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for his first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014).

the Poem: 

The writing process can be mysterious—sometimes even to writers—so is it any surprise to find a tall tale filling in for a satisfying answer? It’s certainly more entertaining than the truth that lurks beneath the fanciful elements of this poem: creativity isn’t passive at all. There’s no muse to hand you something beautiful and fully realized. You’ve got to get out there, dodge the bad ideas and run the good ones down. And when you find them—the truly creative ideas—you won’t be sure what to make of them at first. Only then can you be still, or try to be still in the presence of something wild, something with the means to hurt you, something that will very likely mark you with its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Euphorigenic 

Body: 14pt Phosphorus Bromide

Without a satisfying explanation of their origins, ideas become fantastical creatures, surfacing from our subconscious like the Loch Ness Monster. The typeface for this poem had to capture that unbounded outlandishness while remaining legible through increasingly intense curvature. Phosphorus Bromide does just that, and Euphorigenic provides a complimentary whimsy. After all, the teeth aren’t real, but the idea of teeth.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Get Ready for Edition 8!

Edition 8 Gets Born

on Friday, March 20
at the Tavern of Fine Arts
313 Belt Ave, StL 63112

Reading starts at 7pm


This Edition has poems from:

Lindsay Ahl  |  Michael Bazzett 

Polly Brown  |  Moriah Cohen

Preston Craig  |  Edward Dougherty

Jennifer Goldring  |  Heather Lang

Tom Montag  |  April Salzano


The Tavern will have a jazz duo (piano/voice) later in the evening for those who'd like to linger.

"Troubleshooting Your Advanced Degree" by Michael Jones

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Michael Jones teaches at Oakland High School in Oakland, CA. His work appears in Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places.

the Poem: 

The lexicon of the library-dwelling graduate student is perfect for this poem. It serves simultaneously as an expression of frustration and a description of the source. What’s best, though, is the title: as if graduate study is a piece of equipment like a printer, where most problems can be solved by checking cables and restarting the power. Imagine being able to do that with the archived papers of a famous writer: restart to find all the misfiled pieces back in their proper place. Or to upgrade your brain’s software when a new piece of writing refuses to take shape. Alas, some things remain stubbornly analog. 

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando 

Body: 18pt Kubasta by Kai Kubasta

Everything old is new again, or more accurately, the humanities departments of any given university will have the most outdated technology on campus. Perfect DOS VGA and Kubasta both recreate the dot matrix printing you still might see on a bulletin board here and there. Who knows? Maybe the printers have been upgraded, but this notice, still true, hangs on.

online ISSN: 2651-3801