Tag Archives: poetry

Janu-weary but doing our best

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person standing in the glow of a streetlamp at night with falling snow

This can be a tough time of year for many of us; the icy winds slap our chapped faces while the trees dance their sad skeleton dances in the thin winter sun. And that’s not even getting
into the particular problems of our current era, which are distressing and multitudinous.

But against this bleak backdrop, the story and poems of issue 127 gleam like a handful of polished stones, each distinct in shape and color yet creating a pleasing effect together. From the imaginations of Laura Daniels, Corbin Hirschhorn, Jessica Fordham Kidd, Tony Kitt, and Kenton K. Yee, visions of beauty, danger, and magic pulse and swirl in soothing currents, offering a plethora of small treasures to cache in the mind’s secret drawers. Plus quietly lovely cover art from Natalia Lavrinenko.

Prepare to engage all your senses, because the imagery power is set to stun. Shovel it on the website or defrost the .pdf.

Skywatch

Kenton K. Yee

My eyes that once searched for saucers now stare at the big sky tulip. There are more, of course—all beyond reach or so it seems. I am of you, it says. The tulip doesn’t actually speak but it’s what I hear. Luminosity misleads. Twinkles are beyond reach. Why bother? I’m not athletic, I can’t fly, I’m not witty—all doubts I’ve indulged in.

      the pond sloshes
      with frog
      legs

So what keeps drawing my eyes back to the tulip? Where are its stems? Soil? Roots? Photosynthesis was happening three billion years before our ancestors could see. Stars shine brightest when they explode. The purple nebulae are mostly hot air.

      on hold, I nap
      wake up—
      same song

 

KENTON K. YEE’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, LIGEIA Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rattle, and many others. A theoretical physicist, Kenton writes from Northern California.

Lughnasa

Tony Kitt

Flame tigers float
across the moonlit mystery.

Be your greenest self,
be the star harvest.
Unzip your inner zoo.

We remember primordial light.
We remember nothing.
Lend us fireflies, so we avoid
ripples of time.

By the well, mud with the mind of a madman,
its sticky embrace.
Lava candles, beastly amulets,
the wish-book of wash.

Fir-tree antennas vibrate with Braille;
windows are pregnant
with other rooms.
Houses become whispers.

 

TONY KITT is from Dublin, Ireland. He has been working as a creative writing tutor and a magazine editor. His poetry titles include Endurable Infinity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and The Magic Phlute (SurVision Books, Dublin, Ireland, 2019). A new collection, Sky Sailing, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in spring 2025. His poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies, including Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, The North, Cyphers, The Cafe Review, Plume, Matter, Posit, The Fortnightly Review, Under the Radar, etc. He edited the Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry anthology (SurVision Books, 2023) and the anthology entitled Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War (SurVision Books, 2022).