Noctua Review Volume XIII
Noctua Review
Vol. XIII 2020
Masthead Eric Ong Editor in Chief Terri Linn Davis Assistant Editor Nancy Manning Poetry Editor
Teresa Montanari Fiction Editor
Princess Zuri’ McCann Poetry Editor
Mike Tenney Fiction Editor
Jessicaa Rawling Poetry Editor
Sarah Thieneman Fiction Editor
Grace Collins-Hovey Fiction Editor
Teresa Twomey Fiction Editor
Michael Hinton Fiction Editor
Gio Valentin Fiction Editor Max Bickley Special Projects
Noctua Review is the annual literary journal produced by the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University. We are staffed solely by MFA students.
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Noctua Review Volume XIII 2020
Southern Connecticut State University
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Table of Contents Poetry Scrutable as Ever by Susan Johnson 6 Work for a Change by Rosalynde Vas Dias
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December by Sudhanshu Chopra 13 Eve on Her Death Bed by Lin Lentine
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When I loved You by Ray Ball 15 To the Martin Boys, Who Taught Me How to Cuss by Kelly R. Samuels Navesink River Sunday by Jeffrey Alfier
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Missoula Northside by Jeffrey Alfier
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Stuttgart Summer Nightfall by Jeffrey Alfier
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True Autumn by Jeffrey MacLachlan
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Being Greeted By A Sad Memory Before Going To Bed by Tyrel Kessinger
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Under the old trestle outside Eastman, Telfair County by Sally Stewart Mohney
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It’s Lepidopterology by Matthew Wallenstein 29 Godzilla Speaks by Erica Bernheim 3
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Chronoscope 105: Non-Euclidian Dogs by Jon Walser
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Glories by Justin Runge 34
Fiction Slaughterhouse Sky by Margaret Erhart 7 You Must Remember This by Patricia Quintana Bidar
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Art Crosses, Tower by Edward Lee
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Bike, Grafitti by Edward Lee 16 Alley, Rubbish by Edward Lee 25
Contributors 35
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Susan Johnson
Scrutable as Ever I knot my hands to keep my thumbs from splitting and still my thumbs split. You said keep in touch and I said I am keeping in touch, just not with the same diagnosis. A lighthouse keeper polishes the Fresnel lens so the beam never stops its sweeping but interpretations vary. One person’s blinking may be another’s blocking any occult signal coming in. Like listening to owls fly into their own silence. We only hear it when we stop to hear something else. The wind winds paths like braids through the woods as braids wind their paths down my back. Each leads to a widow in a window. This trail arrow points to inside a rock so I step inside a rock. Like blood cells we squeak into smaller and smaller veins. Deer elastic and springy leap into roadside brush. Prions are wasting them in forests wasted by emerald ash borer. We see sky when we should see canopy. And the sky sees us, scrutable as ever on this whirl-a-gig planet. Traffic hitting more traffic and still we press on.
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Margaret Erhart
Slaughterhouse Sky After his girls were born he worked in an abattoir in Tipton, Iowa. Abattoir, he said, was a fancy word for slaughterhouse. He was a butcher, a job that covered almost everything in a house of death. Butchers stunned, slit throats, dragged and hung carcasses. They used chainsaws to reduce former life to smaller, more manageable units, sharpened cleavers and knives, hacked and sliced muscle from bone and fat from flesh to create yet smaller, recognizable units. These units were then wrapped in plastic resembling the once useful fascia of these formerly alive beings, and carried on down a conveyor belt and out into the hungry world. From this butchering he developed nightmares. They plagued his sleep and walked with him to work and finally lingered all day, inserting themselves into his body until his hands could no longer take life. He was sent to operate the front-end loader. His girls, two and five, needed food and clothing, needed a roof, needed school and childcare. The youngest was still in diapers. He hadn’t estimated correctly the price of children. The front-end loader did nothing to relieve the nightmares. He uttered prayers to the sick and swollen animals as he scooped and lifted them. He thought he could convince himself he was lifting them to heaven. Then one day in the middle of the week a cow with one white eye refused the manipulations of his machine and from a great height fell in slow motion, cartwheeling to the slaughterhouse floor. She exploded, covering him in rotten flesh and manure. Her foreleg flew past him, missing his head by the span of a hand. Two days later he had a job at the animal shelter in Cedar Rapids. He cleaned cages and walked dogs. He fed and watered then drove home and collected the girls and fed and watered them and read to them and put them to bed. He set up a shoebox altar on the kitchen counter and slept beside it on a cot near the stove. He was a big man, too tall and bulky for a cot but he didn’t want his girls to see him sleeping on the couch in the living room. And the kitchen was warm. He could close the door and not disturb them. Even if he couldn’t recall their details, he knew he still had 7
nightmares and cried out in his sleep. He woke himself up sometimes with the strained sound of a scream. He brought home a little mutt and Sheila, his older daughter, named it Barbara after their mother. It was a sickly thing, flea-ridden and scrawny with a sharp bark and a terrier’s mane. It seemed to him a cross between a hyena and a brushfire but the girls loved it, wrapped their arms around the poor thing’s mangy neck and hand fed it Oreos and Pop-Tarts. He couldn’t call it Barbara. He called it Pup and over time he watched it fill out and let people touch its paws and for a while the nightmares became long chases through walled alleys, the pup in his arms and a pack of nearwolves bearing down on him. Like the running of the bulls, he thought. He dreamt one night of the white-eyed cow. Years went by. Cassie, the youngest, quit high school at fifteen and ran off to Montana with a boy she liked. She never asked for money. She got work at a racetrack mucking out stalls. She wrote him letters, seldom called on the phone. She was his heart, Cassie. She was him all over. Sheila stayed home, tried a few weeks of junior college then fell into a job in Winslow, Arizona, waiting tables at a fancy resort. He decided to move with her. Pup was thirteen. The nightmares were fewer. The van was packed in an afternoon, the sum of their life possessions and they drove west. South and west. He did the driving, all day and most of the night, his ear tuned to the inevitable mechanical catastrophe that would end their progress and send them back to Iowa. His muscles started to loosen in Denver, the sight of that white wall of mountains. For two days Sheila worked on her nails until he said, Read me something. Dad! I don’t have anything. You’ve got a magazine. She pulled the teenage face he was so familiar with: Right! It’s Glamour. Read it to me. Down Highway 25 past a city called Santa Fe, then a right turn at Albuquerque onto Route 40. He held Pup in his lap and listened to all the ways a woman tries to make herself comfortable in the world. How to pick the right color for the lips, how to soften stretch marks, a makeover, and something called yoga. The secret lairs of the female mind. Where she went to hide and what kind of weapons she carried in places he’d never given thought to before. It made him sorry he hadn’t spent more time asking Sheila and Cassie about themselves. Or Barbara. He had fed and watered 8
and given shelter but never asked about their minds. He knew the dog better than he knew his female kin. They found a house with a slanted porch and rented it by the month. It faced the prison, or the razor wire fence that surrounded the prison. You knew the prison was in there somewhere, like a punchline that didn’t happen. He could have worked at the prison while she went off to carry small-portion plates to tourists and rich people over at the resort. The resort was old with a lot of artwork, death figures and skeletons, things he’d hoped to leave behind in Iowa. He’d walked her over her first day of work, said he wasn’t going to turn her loose without a look at the company she was keeping, make sure they were decent. She protested and rolled her eyes but let him come if he promised to act like he didn’t know her. He sat outside with the dog and watched the trains speed along just beyond the low wall that enclosed the hotel. But he didn’t want prison work, didn’t want the nightmares again. It was too much like butchering. He shimmed the porch, made it level, dug a garden in back. It wasn’t Iowa. Nothing green came in after he cleared a quarter-acre of weeds and goat-heads. But at least Pup could walk around without tearing her feet, could settle in the thin shade of the only tree in the yard, some kind of scrappy looking maple or elm. He knew trees a little, just like he knew the night sky. Out here he could follow the tail of Scorpio clear down to the horizon where the flat land broke away to the west and became a mountain. And in winter he’d follow Orion the huntsman as he chased after rabbits. He too came to rest with his starry knees on the ridge of the mountain like a man or god in prayer. Praying to aim well and bring home food. The Great Bear, the Big Dipper to the north, pouring its abundance to earth and covering the mountain in sheets of snow. Strange how he’d never thought one bit about water until he hauled up here in the desert, on the desert’s rough shore. He’d been all his life a drowning man. The white-eyed cow came one night not in sleep but in waking. It was summer. Sheila was in her own home with a new husband and son. The house with the level porch was his now. He worked for the county, setting wrong things right. He liked to get up when the heat lifted around 4 o’clock and the sky lightened and the Amtrak came by. He took his coffee out and stood under Pup’s tree and talked to Pup who was under the ground now, had been for a couple of years. Are you glad you made the trip? Of course you are. Your tree’s looking good alright. I piss on it every morning. Well, I figure one of us has to keep up the tradition. 9
He walks out into the open yard and looks up at the fading clusters of infinite time and space. That’s how he thinks now. Infinite. Too big a word to mean anything but the way he sees it one of them’s Pup and one of them’s his parents and one of them’s Cassie. And there’s one for every animal he sent to death, every cow that cleared the chute, and one for the shelter dogs that went down howling, protesting, unlovable and doomed. And one of them, he knows, is a seat on the bus waiting for him and he’ll get there. He watches a satellite cross the path of the Eagle and continue on. He sees the Kite come loose from its string and fly away. He watches Polaris, the pole star, the star the whole sky swings around and he wonders if anyone can be that for anyone else, really, and knows they cannot. What they can be is a sworn reminder of life on earth and how it comes and then it goes and you’d better not linger and rot in place as so many have and do. He looks behind him at the shadowed house, then up into the heavens again and he sees her. She comes at opportune times. This time just the white eye. The body has flown apart in the brightening sky and only the winking eye is there, the last star. It is some comfort to him that though he can’t see all the others now as morning comes on, they see him. This sets his mind right.
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Rosalynde Vas Dias
Work for a Change Sometimes you take the big pen and force it into Small Character’s hand. Why doesn’t he do some work for a change and you can rest, all the burden of determining what happens next lifted off your back for maybe an hour or two. But man, are you surprised when the pack of street dogs sets upon you, tearing the briefcase from your hands, you run toward a policeman, but fall down an open manhole. The sky is his eye, he is watching closely now. What will you do? he wonders. He taps the pen against the desk’s metal edge. He doodles the edge of the paper, thinking. He leans over the page and writes some more. You look over your shoulder, into the sewer. Something moves there, beyond the tube of light you stand in.
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Edward Lee
Crosses, Tower
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Sudhanshu Chopra
December A dog lying on the floor shamelessly absorbs the sun. The owner comes, pets him, and goes. Two squirrels run around an electric pole the way they would around a tree. All the months we reside by fresh water; in this one and the next, we slide on it. Our breath smells of soup placed upon the microwave plate and rotated for tens of seconds. With a towel we wipe our wet bodies, the nap catching our chest hair like the apostrophe in ‘tis, the bathroom mirror’s fog-veiled gaze a chilly evening from which everyone is walking home, their shoulders a bit hunched, humbled as if from great knowledge.
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Lin Lentine
Eve on Her Death Bed I was born of bone, nameless, bare-thighed, thin- skinned like ripe fruit. In the innocence, in the beginning, the only loss I knew was the river bending away under tree-shade, pulling scattered leaves out of sight. I wanted to be river-wide and deep, to follow the current, to make god a thing to be grasped-a full-moon apple, or a seed: held in the mouth like promise, swallowed as consent. My God, my mother eagle, spread your wings down and hover over me. I am water. I am aching to the finger-bones, the concave hips, the rib branches. The tributaries I followed became lines in my too-shameful skin. I cover them as I pray you will cover me in resurrection.
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Ray Ball
When I loved You After Maggie Smith and In Response to Havana’s Museo de Artes Decorativas I was like Midas—except everything I touched turned into lace fans covered with birds instead of gold. Each fan I held to wave away the hot air, heavy in its stillness, whistled while it transformed into a porcelain stork with a flower in its beak. It could not clatter and call to its family far away. They nested high on the roofs of churches. When I loved you, I tried to stop reaching out to hold pears and pens and papers because fans and porcelain birds can’t keep the night from filling its apron with stars. I learned to crack my teeth on their light so that storks did not emerge from my mouth when we kissed. When I loved you, I could eat nothing else birds filled branches and rooftops.
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Edward Lee
Bike, Grafitti
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Kelly R. Samuels
To The Martin Boys, Who Taught Me How to Cuss There were chickens in your kitchen though there was no farm, no barn or pasture with hay rolled in pale golden rolls and left to dry. Fowl and rumors of rats that prompted the razing later. We stood – my mother and I – as she segued from anger to some sort of astonishment at a way of living she had never seen, did not know of. I do not remember your father at all and only that your mother was short and was called Peaches. And that she came down from upstairs and listened to my mother say that you were not to come over anymore ever. For you had foul mouths and had taught me things I should not know. Nor utilize. Not words, though they were just words, but things, is what she said, and which ever after has suggested more to me, something none of us speaks of.
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What I recall better is how we three used to play badminton in the north yard, in that empty patch that because of sun dried and crisped by mid-July. The birdie would sail across the net and nothing seemed sweeter than when the base hit the racquet just so and flew just so with no wobble. It seemed as if we could not flail hard enough. Boys, one a year older, one a year younger, muting for only so long the rage you felt when you missed the shot and lost the point. And me preening, smoothing the skirt, waiting to serve, a girl you had taught the word shit and goddammit and fuck. Sometime before I turned thirteen you left for good and the house stood empty and then was torn down. Though five years before, you became nothing more than those Martin Boys I was to have nothing to do with because of an open window and a wind that carried. We did not know the birdie was called a shuttlecock, nor that there were others made of feathers and only from the bird’s left wing at that, nor the weight or the diameter, that distance that mattered. We just played, shredding the cheap plastic cones to nothing of use. See us there, pounding the net’s stakes into the hard clay, pulling it taut, warming up with a stretch and volley. See us into late afternoon, until the sun went down behind the line of trees and we dragged ourselves back to our homes, not really wanting to go, the ache only felt the next morning.
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Jeffrey Alfier
Navesink River Sunday Daybreak, and the thick scent of the soundless river. In slow heavy air, men cast lines and glare outward, holding to the silence between them. Crows drift through elms fading to autumn. From the rail bridge, a train warns an unseen crossroad. But nothing here alters. At home, my aged father, who’d be at ease among these fishermen, struggles with sleep after I lifted him from a midnight fall — his frame as light as a ghost ship. And me, this open water, the footpath at my back inclining toward town, light bending through morning windows that trap someone’s eyes in the sudden radiance.
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Jeffrey Alfier
Missoula Northside for Carly Flint It’s how edges of the city fall to darkness, love: light leaking onto foothills beyond the river, blinds coming down in high windows. The homeless loiter like remaindered men. A woman of indeterminate age begs by a secondhand store. Boxcars shift like hawsers groaning in a storm. The Northern Pacific station is a bar now. I enter through a trace of smoke hanging in the doorway’s broken light. Someone in a corner, recovering from a bender, guzzles bitter, burning coffee. The barmaid slides me a bourbon and a brittle smile. Dismissing her ring, I want so much to say a word to the strawberry-blonde across the vacant stool between us. The scent of her could light an empty room. Her unflinching stare is straight ahead, lips pursed like a rigid scar. I ponder the blind luck that brought me this far, the odds-on bet I’ll fail. Her cell lights up, and after listening without speaking, she gathers herself and leaves. My eyes follow her through the window behind the barmaid. She halts for seconds under a streetlight, as if a step further would drop her, by degrees, into the dark aura of the new moon. 20
Jeffrey Alfier
Stuttgart Summer Nightfall Daylight left before the city knew it. Like a lover’s quiet exit from a room. A chinablue evening over darkened streets now, courtyards webbed in shadows. Thick stands of alders help nightfall darken the earth — gaunt branches the threadbare shadow of an aged uncle. Streetlights illumine what people they can, leaving a soft amber at their heels, like the businessman hurrying into the Jazzclub Lounge to gun a heavy drink, but the barmaid’s so kind he can’t bear to tell her how weak his drink is. Behind the small square of a bathroom’s fogged window a woman glides like a moonbeam in a cloud. Down side streets that leave well-lit boulevards behind, men with raised collars and lowered heads wander a street of brothels with its haze of florid neon like the promise of carnivals. From separate cities, an estranged couple hears the same station play the music they once danced to.
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At a final tram stop an old woman rises, hesitates to exit, as if struck by a vague sense her home’s an exit far behind her. A moth shivers in the nightlight of a child’s room.
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Patricia Quintana Bidar
You Must Remember This You must remember the unsmiling girl in the cheap platform shoes , the polyester top.The victim. She looked so tough in the LAPD file photo and the thought flickered through your mind: This won’t be hard. Before the trial, you stopped before her, touched her arm. Made eye contact and murmured words of concern. Her shoulders relaxed. Today, she learned the gesture was a tactic. The visible expression of sympathy for a rape victim, a tool in the public defender’s belt. It is a way to work the jury. Like having your client wear a pastel shirt, hide his tattoos, call the judge, “sir.” During five hours in 1979, that girl absorbed the difference between wholeness and a lifelong existence as an i mpact crater of woundedness. Her cells retain the lesson: you will never be safe. Hence her panicked message to her daughter, years later: no, you are not safe. The unending alarm the year the girl turned 18. Before she was 18. After. Now. Forty years later, that unsmiling women is still staggered by a slice of shadow in afternoon light like birdwing flutter. She contains a region of spacetime: AKA, a black hole. She tried to consume herself into wholeness with sex and drugs. Alcohol. Packaged sweets. Work.
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She does not know what she likes.
You must remember this: She faced the hearings, the trial, alone. The deputy DA drove her downtown, pressed the elevator button, led her to the wood paneled courtroom. You were a high achiever, a young woman in pearl earrings and your first suit. The arm-touch. The eye contact; the murmured words in the wood paneled courtroom. Her cells retain the memory of your action. She was so young, and so was your client: the accused. On the precipice of the world. For five hours, their bodies and consciousness intersected. So small a fraction of a lifetime. There as the before and the after. A lifetime of present days of moments where any time the sidewalk can crack open under her feet without warning. You patted her arm. Murmured those tool-belt words. She knows better, but forty years later, she guards them inside. She counts on them. They comfort her, still.
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Edward Lee
Alley, Rubbish
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Jeffrey MacLachlan
True Autumn Leaves, having their summer run, now prepare for wrath of a high whistle. For days, wind rocks fragrant, crimson Northern Spy apples and sprays them gray. A sudden bolt of yellow jacket drones strike empty beer cans camouflaged by the first frost. A shambling gale nudges a forgotten basketball forward to a field of cold corn hulls long left for dead.
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Sally Stewart Mohney
Under the old trestle outside Eastman, Telfair County Corroded swing-bridge— warren & truss. Rust-colored beech trees. Lone banked raft. No boats pass under the tower shed. I happen upon you— & you turn to look at me as if you are the last man on earth, and you are— poised on the brink but can’t bear to stay—still that blue cotton shirttail, faded denims. Your pale feet in our forgotten river bed.
There are too many sudden bright bulbs that surge up every March. For seventeen years, why have you hidden?
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My stillborn sentience: alone by the water is where you belong. You aren’t the only one who can turn into ether—
now it’s my turn to haunt you
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Tyrel Kessinger
Being Greeted By A Sad Memory Before Going To Bed A wistful air rattles loose a memory which burns, not unlike newborn fire: steeped in buried sadness. Here in the heart of this house, a breath before midnight, sleep calls me. And how does one bargain with something immutable? One does not. Tooth and nail, I go. Nightly now, my dreams try and come to life. Though they have small power here, no threadbare kingdom youth to hide behind. They have forgotten my reality: I have grown old.
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Matthew Wallenstein
It’s Lepidopterology In one way or another, to think of you in front of the computer opened to a photo— a child on the beach of Sinaloa. you exit. The blue light forms gullies in your ribs where exhaustion and memory have eaten, chewed at you in gulps. To distract yourself you review the tenses of your second language, pick through their opacity, their confusing similarities: past continuous, present continuous. You review the words the day has brought you. You mouth them. Your tongue clacks
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like the reverberating thud of your own blood against a shell you placed to your ear in a photo somewhere on the other side of age (which too can be opaque). You tongue the new porcelain of your rebuilt tooth, an object as foreign as rest, though no one notices the difference but you. Ventricles, mouth: Things of plaque and trying
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Erica Bernheim
Godzilla Speaks “Don’t mix up that which is habitual with that which is natural.” -- Marshall B. Rosenberg, Living Nonviolent Communication: Practical Tools to Connect and Communicate Skillfully in Every Situation I might have been any iguana in any city, tunneling through night classes in psych, dreaming of honor rolls and mastering the plastic recorder. What happened after the explosions was what they call anger. In those final swirling sorrows of summer, I will have wasted the weeks celebrating. They try to bomb me. Now I know what malice tastes like when it arrives in brick or bullet form, when it assumes its shrapnel display of force. I was a champion in my youth. I advanced by ricocheting off buildings. I dreamt I had no arms. I could only touch myself with other people’s hands. My eyes were wider than turkeys.’ Each day would not have been my last. I knew the special types of sadness that come from crashing into empty houses that are completely unsuited for you. The dirt in the bathtub was someone else’s joy. Those door handles broke under someone else’s 32
anger. Ancestors of mine moved in secret drainpipes, settled to sleep in Tokyo, woke up outside Kauai with another monster screaming in our flaps. Our road diet lost us nothing but skin. I was sideswiped by my own desire to crush a Mustang instead of drive it. That mattress in the road, must I list it? The bride of a dollar bill and a pat of butter, a confrontation with your nemesis, this time in court. Friends, I was once like you. I would never have left the air conditioning blasting like that. You must believe me. I’d tear down any number of cities to win you back. I can make arrangements. There is no pelican jaunty enough to resist my advances. We can tell people we met on an airplane or beach club. I’m a good swimmer. I have broken so many records. As I mimic the sea around me, I will mouth the words, good luck to my opponent as she lays eggs in the most unlikely of drainpipes. She knows that movement in translation is movement in motion. Like me, she hopes love will find us where we are. We have learned to wait for it while we destroy our chances. 33
Jon Walser
Chronoscope 105: Non-Euclidian Dogs Dogs kennel pace their cement run like beautiful lunatics baying anger and strength and lost wildness at the clothesline flap: at the passing moon: at whatever in its food wandering low moved, stopped like carved wood behind the darkness of the property line at the crow edge of a just after dusk field only to realize that chase didn’t follow threat. They stand against chainlink: they climb themselves and each other: they let out nests of yips like white splashes: like an urgent tide that needs to be released to lap and snort around the woodpile: the bark dry as snakeskin. The geometry of their shadows shifts untamable: the intersection of lines and forms of the three dimensions: elliptic: hyperbolic: jawsnaps and haunches.
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Justin Runge
Glories Remarkable, the rain. How the wind sings. How the campanile rings without swaying. The theater seat, its reflex at my leaving. Sage exploding, gorging on a new radius. Photos of the stray, of every ranch house she blows like an eyelash to me. How the fuel spoils, the filter fattens with dirt. The sounds of children, measuring distance. Learning: Nearly everything is a measurement. Time, a length of twine purpling a finger. A yard sign spelling out another future. How the world’s inventories tug at me. How this poem continues to be the wrong one. How I keep writing it into being.
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Contributors Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book is Gone This Long: Southern Poems (2019). His publication credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Chiron Review, Copper Nickel, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, and Southern Poetry Review. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. Ray Ball grew up in a house full of snakes. She is a history professor, a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated poet, and an editor at Alaska Women Speak. Her chapbook Tithe of Salt came out with Louisiana Literature Press in the spring of 2019, and she has recent publications in descant, Human/ Kind Journal, Rivet, and SWWIM Every Day. You can find her in the classroom, in the archives, or on Twitter @ProfessorBall. Erica Bernheim’s work has appeared recently in DIAGRAM, The Adroit Journal, Denver Quarterly, and Bennington Review. She currently teaches English at Florida Southern College, where she also directs the creative writing program. Patricia Quintana Bidar is a native Californian with roots in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Sou’wester, Wigleaf, Pithead Chapel, Jellyfish Review, Citron Review, Okay Donkey, and JMWW, among other places. Apart from fiction, Patricia writes for progressive nonprofit organizations. Her Twitter handle is @ patriciabidar. Sudhanshu Chopra is a poet, wordsmith and pun-enthusiast. 30 and rootless, he is fascinated by nature and frustrated by its incomprehension. He wishes we had evolved better or not at all. It is the midway that causes Catch 22 situations, which are quite troubling, mentally and otherwise. He blogs at The Bard (http://sudhanshuchopra.worpress.com/) and tweets at @_monkey_life. Most importantly, he is available to be hired immediately. 36
Margaret Erhart’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005. Her commentaries have aired on NPR. She won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was a finalist for an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona. You can find her at www.margareterhart.com Susan Johnson’s poems have recently published in the North American Review, SLAB, and Front Range Review. She teaches writing at UMass Amherst and can be heard commenting on nepr.net. Tyrel Kessinger is a stay-at-home dad of two wild animals. Occasionally, he finds time to write things, some of which can be found at Gargoyle, Akashic Books, Burningword, and forthcoming from Triggerfish, Toasted Cheese, Hinchas de Poesia, and Cease, Cows. He also serves time as Associate Editor for Grey Sparrow and reader for Flash Fiction Online. Lin Lentine is a queer poet whose work has been published in The Fem, Picaroon, Dirty Chai, and elsewhere. She plays roller derby in her spare time, and lives with her partner and two step-kids in Kansas City. Jeffrey MacLachlan Jeffrey H. MacLachlan has recent work in New Ohio Review, the minnesota review, Santa Clara Review, among others. He is a Senior Lecturer of literature at Georgia College & State University. Sally Stewart Mohney is the recipient of the Jesse Rehder Writing Prize from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her collection, Low Country, High Water, won the Texas Review Press Poetry Prize: North Carolina. Other publications include A Piece of Calm (Finishing Line Press) and Pale Blue Mercy (Main Street Rag, Author’s Choice Series). Her work has appeared in the Cortland Review, James Dickey Review, North Carolina Literary Review, POEM, Poetry Daily, San Pedro River Review, Stone/River/Sky Anthology, Verse Daily, WinningWriters.com and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Georgia Writer of the Year Award in Poetry.
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Kelly R. Samuels is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited Press) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in Salt Hill, DMQ Review, Cold Mountain Review, RHINO, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest. Matthew Wallenstein is the author of the Poetry collection Tiny Alms from Parmanent Sleep Press and the novel Buckteeth. His work has previously been published by the University of Chicago, the Albany Poets Society, the University of Maine Farmington, among others. Jon Walser is a professor of English at Marian University of Fond du Lac. I hold a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Barrow Street, Nimrod, december magazine, Spillway, Lumina, the Pinch, Dressing Room Poetry Review, Yemassee, Iron Horse and Lunch Ticket, as well as the anthology New Poetry from the Midwest 2017. A three-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and a Pushcart nominee, he is the recipient of the 2015 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers. Rosalynde Vas Dias’s work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, West Branch, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her first book, Only Blue Body, was awarded the 2011 Robert Dana Prize by Anhinga Press.
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Noctua Review
Southern Connecticut State University The Noctua Review is the annual art and literary magazine produced by the Southern Connecticut State University MFA program. It was the brain child of graduate student (now professor) Lois Lake Church and launched its inaugural issue in 2008. We’re always looking for narratives with strong characters, memorable imagery, and maybe a touch of lyricism; for poetry that embraces the economy of language and expresses that which is unexpressable. The staff is solely comprised of MFA students and the lineup changes each fall semester. Issues are available both in print and digitally. We will be open again for submissions for Issue XIII in the fall of 2020. Past contributors must wait one year before submitting again. Visit us at www.noctuareview.com.
MFA in Creative Writing
Southern Connecticut State University The MFA in Creative Writing at Southern Connecticut State University is a flexible full-residency, terminal-degree program that prepares students for careers as publishing writers, teachers, editors, and professionals in the publishing world. We work with students who attend full-time and students who attend part-time, and we are committed to working with the student’s needs in mind. Our curriculum focuses on the development of the writer through experiences in the writing workshops and the creative thesis, but writers also need to be readers and study literature, so our students study literature from ancient world lit to contemporary lit with experts in each field. Other courses focus on literary theory, composition and rhetoric, and teaching collegiate-level writing. In some cases, MFA students may also teach their own courses. Our MFA Program in Creative Writing is designed for graduate fiction writers and poets who -have the skills and experience to become publishing writers; -have the experience and depth of knowledge to become university instructors of creative and expository writing; -have a comprehensive foundation in intensive literary study, literary analysis, literary theory, and critical writing; -become versatile critical thinkers and perceptive, able communicators, prepared for the post-graduate job market, in positions such as freelance writers, editors, grant writers, teachers, technical writers, proofreaders, copyeditors, publicists, media and marketing associates, freelance reporters, and administrators in arts organizations. In addition to publishing poems and stories in national literary journals, our students have published novels, collections of stories, memoirs, and collections of poems. We celebrate these writers by bringing them back to campus for a public reading of their work.
The M.F.A. Program’s visiting writers’ and editors’ series brings nationally-renowned writers to campus to read from their work. Recent and upcoming writers include Xhenet Aliu, Steve Almond, Elise Blackwell, Andrew Hudgins, Randall Horton, Brock Clarke, Marilyn Nelson, Stewart Onan, Tom Perrotta, Alan Michael Parker, Michelle Richmond, Allison Joseph, and January O’Neill. For more information on Southern’s MFA program, please visit: www.southernct.edu/program/english-mfa-creative-writing.
Alfier
Kessinger
Ball Lentine Bernheim
MacLachlan
Quintana Bidar
Stewart Mohney
Chopra Samuels Erhart Johnson
Wallenstein Walser
Vas Dias