(unsplash.com)
Issue 160
the wind turns
CL Bledsoe
Tom Busillo
William Cullen, Jr.
Merrill Oliver Douglas
Robbie Gamble
Howie Good
Camilia J.
Judy Kronenfeld
Dara Laine
Lorette C. Luzajic
Corey Mesler
Catherine Rockwood
Brad Rose
Sarp Sozdinler
Lynn Strongin
Kristina Warlen
R.K. West
Hugh Wilhelm
Sonya Wohletz
Anastasia Xiao
Please use the pointing right hand icons to move through the issue. It's just a thing we have.
The Note
Dear Readers,
Right Hand Pointing (RHP) has been on vacation. Just a few days. "Right Hand Pointing" is my nickname for my childhood-through-present friend—and, of course, also the name of this journal. Longtime readers will recall that RHP, once a successful pediatric dentist, lost it all after a long stretch of… well, let’s just say problems.
“Just got back from a few days at a beach in California,” she said, calling from another burner phone.
“So, this kid on the beach—maybe seven, big eyes—is crying and bleeding from the mouth. His mother didn’t see him fall, and he’s crying so hard he can’t talk to her. The mom’s in a panic. I asked if she wanted me to take a look. Told her I was a dentist. I didn’t lie. I said was. I don’t think she noticed the was.”
“Wow,” I said when she paused for a beat. “Big step for you. Getting back in somebody’s mouth.”
“Yeah. But I’ll tell you—this is gonna make you think I’m crazy…”
“Too late for that, R.”
“Right. But as soon as I looked in his mouth, I couldn’t smell the surf anymore. Instead, I smelled antiseptic. A touch of fluoride. Latex.”
“Could you hear the drill? ‘Cause I hate the drill.”
“No. But I could smell it. You know—the friction. The burning. Anyway, bloody as hell, but no big deal—just a split lip. I told him so and the boy calms down a bit and says he fell and hit his mouth on a deck chair. I was looking for sea glass, he tells me. I found a green piece. But then I tripped.
“Sea glass,” I said.
“Sea glass,” Right Hand Pointing echoed, and I heard something catch in her throat.
“R, it's a coincidence,” I offered, with a tone that suggested I knew better.
“Not. Not a coincidence.”
“I know. That was the name of your and Frank’s old band. Sea Glass.”
Silence.
“The band wasn’t the cause of your trouble, R. If it hadn’t been that scene, it would’ve been something else.”
Then one of the long pauses in our conversation. I don't mind them and neither does she. I am soothed by comfortable silences, which come from the depth of a relationship. The length. The depth.
“So, I told him my daughter used to love looking for sea glass. His eyes lit up and—get this—the bleeding stopped. He asks me, what colors did she find? And I said, blues and greens mostly, but a big red piece one time. And the boy says, that’s super rare!"
Another deep friendship pause, I said softly, “I know you miss them, R.”
"Yeah. Later, man."
Thanks to all who contributed to this issue!
My thanks to F. John Sharp, F. J. Bergmann, Steve Klepetar, Bill McCloud, Annie Stenzel, and Ina Roy-Faderman.
This issue is the last for which editor Steve Klepetar will serve. He's been a trusted editor and reliable judge of good work. We thank Steve for his service. We will all miss him.
We welcome two new members of the staff: Amanda Weir-Gertzog
Sharon Suzuki-Martinez. They volunteered! More on them later.
Love,
Dale
Tom Busillo
Philadelphia, Museum of Art (After Yu Xiang)
under a glass case
a black crow blossoming needles
endlessly reads the spotlight’s glare
a ten-year-old boy passes by,
off to see the armor
and an old lady
fingering pearls
thinks of her first violin
hanging at her side as she
received her first kiss.
Brad Rose
Live Wires
On the other hand, when you’re dead, you’ve got to wear something. Preferably, the perfect blend of comfort and performance. Of course, there’s something very special about continuing to receive your paychecks, but maybe I’m just looking on the bright side. You know me, I’m someone who embraces my shortcomings by buying a pair of fun-colored stilts. Hey, where do you think all those red wires lead? Really? I was under the impression that in Hell, even the eels had grown tired of electrocuting themselves.
Lorette C. Luzajic
The Mask
Suspended from its eye hole on a bent rusty nail, the waxy old mask dangled like a dead chicken over a graveyard of half-read classics. Flimsy and flaccid, tattered by the years, with a matted postiche, garish and grimacing. I hated that thing.
One summer long ago, you’d leapt hopefully onto the stage as part of an improv troupe, underlined a now-lost textbook on the characters of commedia del’arte, looking for clues in archetypes. Everything in your place and in mine was a relic of a life stitched up of stops and starts. My shelves were a museum of places I’d never been, intricate lattice cruciform pendants from east Africa; skinny silver tamas embossed with donkeys; a crudely carved jacaranda da Bahia, fist waving at the sky. All apotropaic amulets meant to ward off evil. All miserably failed.
The mask surveys your kingdom of dead ferns, of balled up sweatshirts and filthy workboots. Dank and fusty. Its leering eye follows me to the window. I crank back a sheet rigged as a drape and pull at the window for air. You appear in the doorframe with instant coffee in either paw, awkwardly stuffed into a thrifted suit. Ready for her funeral. For a split second, in the gush of harsh light, you look like her, hard and moody. A mirror. Then you grin to tell me sheepishly there’s no cream or sugar, and the decades fall to rubble and you’re the first boy I loved, padding through the past in the strawberry overalls I’d worn the year before you had. Time flickers again, and returns us to the present, the gravitas of the matters at hand. I wonder for the hundred thousandth time if there had been some way I’d missed all along to protect you from her venom. And now, how we could, if we would, move on, in its looming absence.
You ready? I ask, and you nod. You put your coffee down and follow my attention to the remains of il capitano on the wall. We are only the playthings of the gods, you say cryptically, reaching up to touch him. And you tell me about that summer: how you tried, for awhile, the futile dream of disguise, the chance to become anything, or anyone, else.
R.K. West
Normal
I did what other people did:
I slept at night and worked in the day,
eating culturally appropriate foods
at predictable meal times.
I married a suitable person
and produced an acceptable number of children,
all with their father’s tapered nose
and their mother’s crazy yellow hair.
I paid my bills and brushed my teeth.
I thought about going to Hawaii.
When the doctor said I would not survive, I did not remind him
that nobody survives.
I am just as dead now as I was then.
Judy Kronenfeld
Your Illness Now
is a car plunging us
into a lake, rapidly filling
with water, muskgrass,
bladderwort, swampweed,
and we cannot breathe
or break the glass.
But no. Only you in the car
that has swerved off the road,
and though I dive into the lake
with a heavy branch or a wrench—
terrified to be alone after sixty years—
I cannot bring you
to the surface.
Howie Good
The Egg and I
Sighing like an old man,
I bend down and pick up
a robin’s egg from the grass,
its blue shell unbroken
but the life inside extinguished,
and carry it into the house
and place it on a shelf
where I can regularly see it,
a small jeweled casket
among assorted bric-a-brac
and at my age more a reminder
than a remembrance.
CL Bledsoe
Before the War
You were technically our tired duty.
No one rains like you. On the bus,
where the angry people try not
to make eye contact. On the road,
where everyone is yelling at themselves.
All wet-hatted and battered by the clock.
you were there, not once but enough.
This was before the war, back when
we were locked in the basement
watching the rabbits in the front yard.
We were waiting, for a traffic signal
to change, for the neighbors to stop
banging on the ceiling, until we smile
and wave at each other from hell.
Lynn Strongin
You Can't Cancel Spring
Dark eyes,
low voice
The kiss at the dock,
lit cigarette,
upturned raincoat, the upper lip glistening with rain
an old needle
IV
Skin bruised
An orchid
The emotional footprint running away. You can’t cancel spring.
Corey Mesler
The Rebecca Pidgeon Blues
The movie runs like a rill.
In the darkened theater,
which is your awareness,
she enters smelling like
gardenias. There’s something
in her eyes which makes
you want to come back to
yourself. It’s like suddenly
you can hear your own voice
and it sounds like you.
“Crikey,” she says. The sound
undoes your only personality.
Abetting
The neighborhood stray cat
is lying in the tall grass
under our birdfeeder.
She looks at me with studied
cool. She thinks we’re
in this together.
Like Waves
I am reading a favorite poet.
The lines click sweetly by
like beads on an abacus. Then
I am thinking about what I want
for dinner. I can visualize
different pans, pots, and plates.
I’ve lost the hunger for words
to the hunger for food. Forgive
me, Mr. Strand, I am an old man,
tired, restless, oft unhappy, and
even my hungers overlap like waves.
Camilia J.
To the statue by Rackham building
that taunts me while I’m inexplicably high
Truly, there is cause for the pride you hold / as sure as the hand that erected you / out of marble and stone / and your unseeing gaze that disregards / us lowly, moving mortals / who could imagine such beauty / yet could never emulate / how the sun lends sheen to your ivory / all but impenetrable beneath / like a lover’s embrace / No, none of these bloody, fleshy things / that throb in our useless useless chests / i’m another perishable good / a thing that will too one day die / and we’ll then be in our rightful places / me, within the sweet-smelling earth / you among the sky
Hugh Wilhelm
Dear Earth (XX)
With you I might go to an unfractured place
far from this California light, each dry ray defined
among ooze and thrum in San Francisco. Parking lot car keyed along the driver-side door,
a long jagged line back to the gas tank hatch.
In the Café, a singer’s acoustic guitar
is high-sheen black, I stare at her chin,
each shoulder, her long delicate hand that holds the plastic pick, her foot that taps.
My pencil is audible against this page, I offer this hand to guide.
How do you use the key you hold? Take me
to what it opens.
Robbie Gamble
Liminal
for Peggy Scherer
a murk a moonless balm
settles on the upper pasture
through which shimmery rafts of fireflies
are transcending the American Dream
dissolving our thrusts of greed
with their effervescence
a silent kindness sufficient
for tonight if just barely
and I have known good and generous people
in my life one of them is dying
right now metastases through her brain
a brief but blessed transit
this moment in the dark we hold her
into the stuttering light
Catherine Rockwood
When I see “timeless” used
to describe a piece of writing
I think about how I hoped this poem wouldn’t evaporate
in the ten minutes it took me to unload the dishwasher.
Another February Prayer
Morning. Cold air between you and the trees.
You see them again.
As if someone stabbed a windshield with a poker in three places.
Black fissures of rapturous shock,
spreading beside the roofline
of the upslope neighbor’s house.
Suddenly it’s morning.
There’s the welkin’s tattoo-cuff,
bright blue gold pink.
Why haven’t you told her how much you adore her?
Why haven’t you said, I wish I were your tattoo.
Sonya Wohletz
Goes by Another Name
Girl sits on the roof, sneaks fingers, swirls smokes.
Inside: stepmom’s at the mirror, does her makeup.
Girl scars like highlights, brims just like those fly falsies.
The oven set to 350, gapes: oh, mother, your fires—
Kristina Warlen
Leftover Cake
At 12:47, she checks the time again. The party started at noon.
The balloons are still bright, bobbing lazily in the breeze, tethered to the picnic table like they’re waiting for better guests. The cupcakes are arranged in a spiral, each with a perfect swirl of icing. She used two colors, alternating them, like the blog said. She even bought those little plastic rings for the tops—dinosaurs, because he still likes them, even if he pretends not to at school.
“Maybe they’re just running late,” she says, folding the edge of a napkin again and again until it’s soft
and crumpled.
He shrugs. He hasn’t touched his juice box. He’s sitting on the end of the bench, legs swinging. “It’s okay.”
But it’s not. She knows it’s not.
By 1:15, she sends another text. Just checking! No worries if you can’t make it :) She adds the smiley face like it’s a charm against shame.
She doesn't blame the other moms, not really. Everyone's busy. It's flu season. Soccer. Family things. She should’ve sent reminders. Maybe the invite was too plain. Maybe they don’t like her. Maybe they don’t like him.
“Wanna do presents?” she asks.
He nods, too fast. He’s trying to help her not feel bad, and that’s the worst part. He’s turning seven. He shouldn’t know how to do that yet.
She hands him the wrapped boxes one by one. He rips the paper slowly. New markers. A dinosaur encyclopedia. The remote-control car he pointed to once in a Walgreens aisle.
He smiles real for the first time when he sees it.
“You like it?” she asks.
“Yeah. It’s cool.” He presses the remote, makes the car spin in frantic circles across the pavement.
“Want cake?” she asks.
There’s so much of it. Too much. Chocolate with buttercream, his favorite.
He nods again.
She cuts two slices. Puts a plastic dinosaur ring on each. Hands him one and sits down beside him, her knees cracking slightly as she does.
They eat in silence. Icing sticks to the corners of his mouth. She doesn’t tell him.
Somewhere across the park, other kids are screaming—some kind of soccer game, she thinks. The sound doesn’t reach their table. The sky is too blue for this kind of sadness.
She wants to say something. Anything. But she’s afraid if she does, it’ll sound like an apology. Or worse, a lesson.
So instead, she says:
“Do you want another piece?”
He looks at her, then the cake. “Can I have one with two rings?”
“You can have three,” she says, and smiles like it’s not breaking her heart.
They sit together under the balloon strings, surrounded by gifts unopened by others and too many cupcakes.
And when she finally lets herself cry later, quietly, in the car after he’s fallen asleep, she will still be glad she asked him about the second slice.
Anastasia Xiao
Hedgehog
There you were, small, at the wall,
Curled up in concentrated fear
Under our innocent flashlight.
Spine-haired, you stared at
The leathered sky of our shoes.
Don’t worry, we won’t hurt you
It was just that I’d never seen you before,
Not like this, spring whispering
into blue midnight.
We turned off the light. You paced away
With composure as if nothing
had happened. And we went back to
The night, kissing on the slatted bench
Under the raining locust tree.
April 27,
I still love you. But the mountains fade in the blue mist. The fields are paved with purple flora. Yellow passes before my eyes the way your fingers once covered them like ribs. Golden quietude. Straw hats bending over the seed or memories of shadows. The sky high as a thought. The promised season: warmth means recovery, the relief of long pain. The bones of trees stream backward with their lanky bodies, an arriving city. I tap the scar of the land, it is thick without empathy. Lessons are learned, to become quiet with only temperature. My palm has grown so big, still not enough to hold the moments from falling. It’s season’s business to keep speaking to the ground.
Merrill Oliver Douglas
My Father Was Born Morton Volonovsky
Then somewhere along the way
his parents wrote their names on forms
that made them the Oliver household,
that capital O an egg
scrubbed clean of its gluey consonant,
old world ovsky a kite
with its string snipped, twisting free
above Brooklyn’s flat rooftops,
hung wash, El tracks, the Wonder Wheel,
over the sea.
Sarp Sozdinler
Broke n
I’m good with broken things—
teeth, hearts, promises.
I think I like ‘em better
cracked and chipped.
Whiskey’s like that, too.
The more it burns,
the more it feels like
home.
Famous for Dinner Parties
There’s a pill that,
when placed in mouth,
allows you to talk
to all your dead relatives.
They ask you questions
no one can answer.
Your dead dog throws
you a bone, says:
How does it feel?
Dara Laine
The trees disappeared.
Not all at once—
but slowly.
Like they chose silence.
William Cullen, Jr.
Alter Ego
The wind turns
and turns into
the wind.
Contributors
160
Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland and Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novel If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey. (Dale just ordered a copy because (a) It's Bledsoe and (b) Lord, have mercy, that title!) Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his child.
Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, trampset, The Disappointed Housewife, Heavy Feather Review and elsewhere. He is a Best Short Fictions nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646-word conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.
William Cullen Jr. hopes his epitaph is shorter than his bios.
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Midway Review, Post Road, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont.
Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry books, The Dark and Akimbo, are available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.
Camilia J. is a Southeast Asian biologist turned creative who wants to make things that make people feel things. When not at her day job, she's either writing poetry, illustrating, or getting jalapeno poppers at Texas Chicken.
Judy Kronenfeld’s nine collections of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems was published by Inlandia in 2025.
Dara Laine (she/her) is a poet based in Baltimore, originally from a hay farm in New Jersey. She returned to poetry after the sudden death of her father. Her work explores the sacred ordinary through minimalist forms and symbolic realism. This is her first publication.
Lorette C. Luzajic reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches flash fiction and prose poetry. Her work has been widely nominated, anthologized, taught in writing courses from Tennessee to Egypt, and translated into Urdu and Spanish. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions anthologies.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. His newest book, The World is Neither Stacked for Nor Against You: Selected Short Stories, is from Livingston Press. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.
Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts. Her most recent poetry chapbook, Dogwitch, is available from Bottlecap Press. Two previous poetry chapbooks, Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion, and And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Boston. He is the author of six collections of poetry and flash fiction: WordInEdgeWise, Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. His poetry collection I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly, is forthcoming. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, and Trampset, among other journals. His stories have been selected for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently working on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Lynn Strongin is an American poet currently residing in Canada who has published more than two dozen books. She is a pioneering writer on issues of feminism and disability.
Kristina Warlen is a literary and speculative writer from Missouri whose work explores memory, transformation, and quiet emotional turns.
R.K. West is a former ESL teacher and travel blogger living in the Pacific Northwest, whose recent work has appeared at Six Sentences, Paragraph Planet, and Sudden Flash.
Hugh Wilhelm is a poet from Ithaca, New York. He is a graduate of Cornell University and earned an M.F.A from Syracuse University in 2023. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His poetry has been published in The Progressive, and Notre Dame Review.
Sonya Wohletz is a poet and artist whose work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Cathexis Northwest, Roanoke Review, and others. Her first collection of poetry, One Row After/Bir Sıra Sonra, was published by First Matter Press in 2022.
Anastasia Xiao is an emerging bilingual poet based in Beijing and a graduate student in English Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her creative writing explores the boundaries of form, language, identity and trauma. Her work is forthcoming in Fresh Words: Voices Unbound—An Anthology of International Poetry and Prosetrics.