atmospheric rivers Issue 162
Allison Blevins
Jane Bloomfield
Leah Browning
Cherry Cheesman
Constance Clark
Anne Eyries
Howie Good
Sharon Hoffmann
Elizabeth Jeane
Jennifer Mills Kerr
Judy Kronenfeld
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Tony Press
Michael Riedell
Brad Rose
Chad Rutter
Mark Seidl
Flora Trost
Chelsea Utecht
Tarn Wilson
The Note
I.
“You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature—non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.”
—Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask
I wince when human beings are called nonhuman. It’s a short trip from that to calling people trash or garbage—or, worse, animals or monsters. Then we have to face what dehumanization does in the world: how easily it becomes a lethal permission. From that angle, I disapprove of Mishima’s language. (I’m assuming the translation gets it right.)
And yet: the phrase “incapable of social intercourse” stays with me. It also gives me a blunt tool for teaching about personality disorders. Certainly, it fits the truly schizoid person, who has no desire for social life at all. But personality disorders, taken together, are disorders of relationship—difficulties with genuine human connection.
In antisocial personality, interaction is often exploitation. In borderline personality disorder, the person cannot fully integrate the good and the bad in others, and love collapses into splitting—alternating adoration and demonization. In paranoid personality disorder, one has concluded that people are categorically no damn good. In severe narcissistic personality disorder, the capacity to shift attention to another’s inner world—needs, desires, perspective—fails or, perhaps, never develops.
I’ve taught a seminar on mental disorders to a few hundred people over the years. Once, as I walked through the sad DSM catalog, a student—himself a Bible scholar—grew quiet and pensive. I asked what was on his mind.
He said, “I just keep asking myself why people are so broken.”
This may be the best we can do. Instead of responding to the worst in humanity by denying their humanity, we ask—and keep asking—why are people so broken?
II.
I once spoke to a man who had been a state trooper in Arkansas and left the force after a few years. He took a job at an icehouse in the last year it stayed open, selling big blocks of shockingly clear ice for old iceboxes, picnics, and fishermen—crappie, catfish, bream, bass—thudding into chests on the floor of flat-bottom boats. He handled the blocks with heavy tongs as if the work itself were a kind of relief. The ice really was beautiful.
I asked why he’d quit law enforcement.
Without breaking rhythm, he said, “Number one—the darkness in cars. And number two—porches. You pull over a vehicle on the interstate at night and you can’t see through the windows. You walk up while the driver rolls down the glass and you don’t know whether you’ll meet a nervous face or the barrel of a gun. I got an ulcer.”
“And porches… just a minute.”
He carried a block of ice to a pickup truck and lowered it into the man’s ice chest.
“Porches,” he said when he returned. “I walked up on one too many porches to tell somebody their son or daughter or husband or wife was killed in a car wreck. That gave me something worse than an ulcer.”
III.
As a child I often had bronchial infections with fever. On a few of those nights I had middle-of-the-night experiences—fever dreams, unless they weren’t. (I sometimes believe, without clear evidence, that altered states—deliria, dreams, hallucinations—open onto realities we normally can’t reach.)
The ones I remember share a pattern: I would get out of bed, go to the bedroom window, and see things outside the house.
Once: a white deer, improbably large, with antlers branching in intricate, impossible architectures.
Another night: iridescent carp sliding past the glass, grazing it as they swam.
Once: a stagecoach made of glass, passing a few feet from the window, accompanied by chiming music so beautiful it felt like a summons. I felt a pull to open the window, climb out, and board. Another pull drew me back to bed. And won.
I have wondered ever since whether the stagecoach—had I boarded—would have taken me to heaven.
My thanks to all the contributors to this issue, and to the whole team of volunteer editors here at Ambidextrous Bloodhound. I also want to thank everyone who submitted this round, whether we took your work or not. Please try us again.
Dale
Howie Good
Dawn's Early Light
A stack of books
on the bedside table
you’ve yet to read,
birds waiting silently
in the melting dark
to begin serenading.
Michael Riedell
Only This
I keep thinking of starfish.
I want to say I have five
conclusions, or better yet
five questions about them,
but I have only this:
a slow sense of what
it might be to hug a rock
so fiercely it takes me
a lifetime to let go,
and then I let go.
Cows in Colusa
The cows in Colusa
standing in the rain
don’t know no better—
and we’re the same.
A kid gets used to rags
or the finest clothes
or bullet holes in walls,
if that’s how it goes.
Brad Rose
Overexplain
The lackadaisical buildings bombinate in the noontime breeze. Ahh, to be twenty again, alert and ruthless. Sometimes, I feel as lonely as a monologue. There are so many prizes, you’d think everyone would get one. I’ve hired a low-powered robot attorney (‘AA’ batteries) and paid a bundle for this secret guide to buried urban treasure. Geez, I hope I’m not overexplaining myself, again.
Your First Rhino Rodeo
Sure, the horns. Of course, the horns. But no one expects the deep baritone whispers, the thoughtful, oh-so-tender, caresses, the gentle bath of dust. Not to mention the generous girth of those pudgy love handles. And what about those glorious eyes. My goodness, those lavish, loving eyes. There’s nothing on earth quite like them. So do it now. Get off your high horse. Just this, once. Live a little. Climb aboard. Giddy-up.
Allison Blevins
Portland
We have drunk each other. Warmth
spreads from my throat to spot
my cheeks. We have drunk each other—
spent what we had saved on our wanting
and taking. Some desperation lingers now
on my skin. I know tomorrow
we begin again. We wind back up
like slowly stuttering wristwatches
without words to explain how
you fall out of love each morning.
How to Fall in Love with Living
Accept darkness ahead. You’ll one day lose more
than your legs to illness. For now, learn to bow
with grace. Perfect your dip, right foot tucked snug
behind left. Memorize the sound of your son’s first full-throated
laugh. Call your brother. Catch your mother staring—naked—
into a full-length mirror, see your own body
reflected back. Some madness lives in the beauty
of twin voyeurs. Lick cantaloupe. Remember birth
or your daughter’s hand fisted tight into the neck
of your dress. Accept how Portland will live, after all the years,
in your room some nights—the face on your husband’s body
familiar and wrong as an abstract landscape.
Remember Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!
shrieked as you reached to open the front door. How sometime,
somewhere in the beautiful gloom a person was overcome—
all hot tears and desperation—just to stay by your side.
Sharon Hoffman
Stitches
See those faint scars
on my little finger—
I was eleven, and
those were the first
stitches I ever had.
I had cut my hand,
and all the blood
alarmed my father,
a military man who usually
hid his emotions.
In the ER, when they
started to sew up
the cut, my father
(who had been to war)
had to turn his face away.
Elizabeth Jeane
Destroy the Evidence
Disposal of poem should proceed as follows:
Place gently into the garbage disposal, fish out shredded paper guts, crouch down
in the fire pit in your backyard, set it ablaze, let the flame tickle your fingers
leaving tire-print burn marks, shovel mountains of ashes into your mouth,
and contemplate absolution.
Tarn Wilson
A Good Ribbing
To give someone a good ribbing
should be to nestle a snake skeleton
in their hands and let them gaze
on those delicate ribs, hundreds of them
let them undulate that spirit house
note the graceful miracle of spines
should be to place both your hands
on their sides, feel their breath rise
to gently brush your fingertips
across their ripple of bone as if trying
to coax notes from a xylophone.
Bird-fish
We don’t have storms anymore. We have atmospheric rivers,
which sound like a wild, wonderful, frightening heavenly
river filled with bird-fish and mystery.
I’m reading a book about how
to write poems. It does not
recommend any
poems like
this one.
Spring Cleaning
Collect shadows
in empty bottles.
Feel their strange
dark weight.
The stripped objects
are sun-bleached and floating.
Spring Cleaning
I knew a woman
who arranged her books
by the main characters
she knew would be friends.
Chelsea Utecht
Bone, Blood, and Story
When the light catches them just so, I can see the story that people are made of. They think of self and consider their bone and blood and sinew, those pieces that hold them up, and they celebrate their hearts and minds, those pieces that make them whole. But they don’t see themselves so filled with story that it overflows them, that they must shed the excess like reptilian skin.
Once upon a time I still went outside. I lingered on park benches, feigning disinterest until story oozed from passersby, then pounced and clawed it up, holding it under my fingernails.
Once upon a time I still went to parties. I took a heavy hand with the wine, knowing it made story slippery so it would dribble down chins and into my own glass, so I could drink it up like nectar.
Once upon a time I still went to work. I’d loom around corners where whispered conversations filled the air with story, and I’d breathe it into my starving lungs.
But I don’t do those things now. Instead, I sit with you.
That’s alright, I told myself when my new confines became clear. You are made of all the same things as anyone else; you shared my blood once. I made that bone and sinew week by week. I took the fish oil that made me retch and the iron that turned my guts to cement so you’d have a mind and heart to envy. So surely, I reasoned, you’d be made of story too.
I wait for it to fall from your mouth, but you only coo and babble. I wait for it to ooze from your pores, but I only smell my own sweet milk. I beg for something, anything, but you blink your wide eyes, those that are yours and mine at once, and wait.
So I wrap you against me – let you drink from me, claw at my skin, breathe in my scent – as I begin. “Once upon a time…” I pour story into you so one day you’ll have your own to share.
Anne Eyries
Gifts
The leather jacket you passed on,
not designer brand with faux fur trim
but your riding coat brushed with sweat,
pockets lined with sand;
the butterscotch you shared,
not soft toffee that niggles fillings
but gold-wrapped blocks,
our tongues smoothing the corners;
the recording of warblers you sent
on a USB key, not my flamboyant birds
but songs from home
in trills and quavers;
the lavender wheat bag you gave me
warms in the microwave.
Chad Rutter
Sobriety: Day 30
The body I’m wearing is a newly dry county
in my personal prohibition. A river retreating from
flood stage, leaving permanent high-water stretch marks
and silt deposits in the parking lots of internal organs.
To prior bodies, I was attendant. They were my county-fair
4-H calf, or the white marker board where the class
would write adjectives. One body, the last, I buried alive.
It knew the shape of joy’s absence and this made it fearsome.
Sometimes I’d hear it asking for things to make the dark bearable.
I gave it the fear at the edge of firelight and turned the music up loud.
Cherry Cheesman
Question
I remember
the quatrains
of sea foam
on your thin blouse—
how long it took
to scrub their stains
from the polyester
into the salt-
ridden slipcovers
of our Tennessee couch,
where oil and milkweed and
copperheads and matrimony nest.
Rapture
The sun was so white
it clarified the butter
and stilled the wind chimes.
Flora Trost
The Night of the Hunter
A false river flows south
Through sculpted mountains and 2D valleys.
Bikers with tattoos across their knuckles
Rev engines at girls silhouetted against a stretched sky.
Waiting at the crosswalk, a horse mumbles a half hymn.
The men call out to her as they pass.
She snorts. She’s heard this noise before,
Like paper dolls on the wind,
Like cash in a baby’s head,
Like a life almost lived.
In an expressionist world we are pushed
To a silver and reactive edge.
Tomorrow is a Wall
Today, I fell out of yesterday
Blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back.
The ground smacked my sternum into place.
Brain kissed skull.
I lay there, in the grass, whispering a headache away.
Humming to myself.
Yesterday, I ran full speed at tomorrow,
And hit the wall with a thud.
I picked myself up,
Plucked gravel from my palms,
Bit back tears with a cramped smile.
Tomorrow, I am blinded by impossible light:
rope-burned, crooked, scabbed, and bruised.
Tomorrow, I will take my time.
Jennifer Mills Kerr
A Biographer of Hidden Women
My mother’s song lodged deep
within my throat, I travel centuries
inside libraries’ swampy light,
to break the corset of inherited
silences, digging into hidden
women’s lives—childbirth, funerals,
disease—struggles trapped inside
hefty books, pressed violets that
still hold fragrance.
Leah Browning
Andromeda at the Ocean
The sun burned overhead, baking the wide expanse of sand that lay between the steaming asphalt of the parking lot and the warm froth of the waves. In spite of the heat, or maybe because of it, the beach below was crowded with umbrellas, brightly colored towels, and coolers filled with sandwiches and soft drinks sweating lightly in their beds of ice. As we walked past, a pair of teenage girls in string bikinis turned over like rotisserie chickens, their skin already dark and glossy, both with delicate highlights and gold anklets. You shook out the blanket you kept to cover the frayed upholstery in the back seat of your car and stripped down to your bathing suit. We took turns rubbing each other in every way we could think of, using the sunscreen as an excuse. It might have been the last day we would ever spend together. Who could say? We were young then, too, and grasped at every opportunity as if it were a life preserver, saving us from the mundane world in which we had found ourselves. Later, you would return me to my parents’ basement apartment and go home to your tiny studio with the hot plate and the pull-out couch and the spider plants and the orange tabby cat, drowsing on the windowsill, and in the morning we would both return to our jobs where we got $7.25 an hour and sometimes a loaf of two-day-old bread. But that was tomorrow. I smoothed your hair and lay down at your side, and along the waterline, a man flew a large bird-shaped kite, its tail streaming through the air in front of us.
Jane Bloomfield
Ghetto Life
161
Mark Seidl
Swimming with Dolphins
It happens most times when
you're waiting, engine in park,
something else on your mind—
that click in your right knee,
the splash of grease hardened
on the stove—your son inside
tossing his room to find
the headphones he must have
however short the trip,
and you remember those
weekends, buckled into cars,
your father behind the wheel,
talking, the power lines plunge
and climb between their poles—
vast invisible dolphins
breaching in blue swells of air.
161
Constance Clark
Feeling Sight
Sandpiper hesitates foot raised
head tilted—will it need to flee
the chase of wave? Sand crab
radiates gold atoms of its body.
Sunset skids the ocean. Gulls
wing up white underbellies
wing down night. Through
a great door we turn
from August’s Atlantic.
River stones line up a threshold
tell us light is only an idea.
161
Tony Press
Smoke on the Water
Sleep with the little fat angels,
my mom always said as she tucked me in,
cradling me in the quilt her own mother had made for her.
The quilt is gone now, as is Grandma, as is Mom.
They each liked their cigarettes, and craved those Raleigh coupons.
Shopping each Saturday at the Safeway on Monterey Boulevard.
Lung cancer got one at 63, the other at 55.
I don’t smoke, not even dope, but twice a year,
on their birthdays, I take the ferry to Angel Island
in the middle of San Francisco Bay,
and walk the gorgeous paths,
enjoy a fine cigar,
remember, and rejoice.
natura muerta
with the exception
of the viper on the floor
life was looking good
birdsong filled the Spanish sky
and I was alive
Judy Kronenfield
Home
One morning years ago, my father called
to tell me: Someone yelled out Sammy!
Sammy! Sammy! in the middle of the night.
He searched his house, asking himself
where could he have left her?
Then he woke up the second time alone,
two years after the death of my mother.
That night I dreamt a cindered planet,
my family all miraculously gathered
in a rocket blasting towards
one of Saturn’s moons.
Contributors 162
Allison Blevins (she/her) is the queer disabled author of four collections and six chapbooks. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, she serves as the Publisher at Small Harbor Publishing. allisonblevins.com
Jane Bloomfield lives at the bottom of the South Island, New Zealand. Her poetry is published in many literary magazines including Tarot, Roi Fainéant Press, Does It Have Pockets, Dust Poetry Magazine, Reading Room, Landing Press Potluck Anthology, and forthcoming Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 26.
Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, a pair of flash fiction mini-books published by Silent Station Press. Her work has appeared in Vestal Review, The Citron Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. In addition to writing, Browning has edited the Apple Valley Review since 2005.
Cherry Cheesman is a writer from the Carolinas. Her work has been featured in Beaver Magazine and Bending Genres. She enjoys drinking too much caffeine.
Constance Clark’s poems have appeared in Vita Poetica, Kosmos, Litbreak Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a collection of poems focused on the notice of nature adapted from the concept of Japan’s 72 microseasons. Clark lives and writes in central New Jersey
Anne Eyries has poetry published in various journals, including Amsterdam Quarterly, Consilience, Dust, Emerge Literary Journal, Humana Obscura, London Grip, and Paperboats. She lives in France.
Howie Good is a widely published but little-known poet. (Editor's note: Find a more widely published poet that Howie Good. Go ahead. We dare you.)
Sharon Hoffmann is a writer based in Florida. Publications include The Hooghly Review, New York Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (Harvard Press). Awards include fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs, three Pushcart nominations and a nomination for Best Spiritual Literature.
Elizabeth Jeane is an MFA candidate at Butler University. Her work is forthcoming in MSU Roadrunner Review and The Polk Street Review. She lives in Indianapolis, where she tutors students and is at work crafting her first poetry chapbook. Find her on instagram @elizabethjeanewrites.
Jennifer Mills Kerr lives in Northern California. Her poetry has been recently published in January House, Neologism Poetry Journal, and SWWIM. She hosts art-inspired writing circles online and curates poems on the Poetry-Inspired substack (@JenniferMillsKerr). Read more of poetry at www.jennifermillskerrpoet.com.
Judy Kronenfeld’s nine poetry collections include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025).
Tony Press tries to pay attention, and sometimes does. He enjoys walking, reminiscing, and reminding folks that his story collection Crossing the Lines is available, from the usual places, and directly from him. Oh, he's played catch with Juan Marichal, and tennis with Condy Rice. Fiction? Poetry? Truth?
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad (cover image) is an Indian-Australian artist and poet. She has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations for her work. Her art has been published on the covers and within the pages of numerous literary magazines including the Superstition Review and the Indianapolis Review. She is the 2026 Writer in Residence at Woollahra Libraries.
Michael Riedell is a teacher, poet, and songwriter living in northern California. The author of three books, his work can be found in journals including Blue Unicorn, Canary, I-70 Review, and The Heron’s Nest. In 2024, he was nominated for the Pushcart and was a finalist for Best of the Net for "Porters," a poem published in Right Hand Pointing.
Brad Rose is the author of eight collections of poetry and flash fiction: Or Words to that Effect, I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly, WordInEdgeWise, Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com.
Chad Rutter is an emerging poet originally from Nebraska now residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, both in visual art.
Mark Seidl lives in New York's Hudson Valley, where he works as a rare-books librarian—the best job in the world! His poems have appeared in several online and print journals, including Bicoastal Review, West Trade Review, and Two Hawks Quarterly.
Flora Trost is a 23-year-old barista in rural Pennsylavania. She has not been published in quite some time. Sometimes she feels like a parody of herself.
Chelsea Utecht lives in Sarajevo, Bosnia, with her husband, two sons, and former street dog/current princess. Her work has appeared in Bluestem, Shooter Literary Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, Thirteen Bridges Review, and more.
Tarn Wilson is the author of The Slow Farm, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. She is taking a break from prose and shamelessly flirting with poetry. She has been published in Only Poems, Pedestal, Potomac Review, Rattle, Sweet Lit, and more.