• Poems

    Alex Stolis: Self-Portrait of ICE Agent

    Alex Stolis

    Self-Portrait of ICE Agent

    Mom & Dad were high school sweethearts,
    he served in ‘Nam, she waited in church,

    our family tree khaki & blue. I grew up
    uniformed; altar boy, scout, deer-hunter

    camoed, All-State tackle. Took my girlfriend
    to the prom, listened to Springsteen.

    Saturday nights making out at the reservoir
    Sunday morning services

    praying for Jesus to surf back on a wave of fire & brimstone.

    No way out, didn’t want to work at the plant,
    ended up on the line anyway.

    The only escape, to put on another costume
    then huff & puff & blow the world down.

    Now, this guy’s in my face, I see red
    white & blue; fire once, twice

    lose count. My brothers huddle around
    slap my helmet & pat me on the back,

    my brother is bleeding out on the sidewalk.

    Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in Hudson Valley of New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.

  • Poems

    Wendy Schaffer: “Senseless”

    Wendy Schaffer

    Senseless

    That it was cold
    & snowy on the ground,
    the patient waited,
    sedated, unconscious
    to the immigration
    status of the nurse
    tied up elsewhere.
    It was warm
    & cozy in the ICU,
    machines, well-cared
    for, a back-up
    generator, to weather
    the I.C.E, the storm.
    Secretions collected,
    neglected, oxygen
    dropped. The breaths,
    the ventilator
    provided, the bag of
    nourishment
    depleted, the IV
    pump beeped, fluids
    backed up, in the tubing,
    a kink in the system.
    Veins became
    flaccid, a TV
    reported, people
    were running,
    the breathing tube
    whistled.

    Wendy Schaffer has a PhD from Columbia University and an MD from Cornell University. She mends broken hearts as a cardiologist in New York City and writes poems under the editorial eye of a cat named Kafka.

  • Poems

    J.I. Kleinberg: “The Verb”

    J.I. Kleinberg

    The Verb

    They piled into the back seat,
    the two of them with all their
    testosterone, we in the front
    more like parents, with all that
    history, that family closeness

    that I wasn’t really part of,
    and stories of this one and that,
    the sheriff and the windmill,
    the bar and the re-interment,
    all those stories of the trading post

    and who had money and whose
    money would go where sooner
    or later. And I can’t remember
    who asked the question or what
    it was about, but when he said

    Jew as a verb my body went prickly,
    my arms and legs, my ears ringing,
    and I said nothing. Did not know
    how to say what I needed to say,
    what I had to say, what they had

    to understand, to know, what had
    to change. I said nothing, afraid
    of what might become of me, of us,
    if I spoke, and in everything I do
    I see that silent version of myself,

    tongue-tied, failure, disappointment.
    And we just kept driving until we got
    wherever we were going, the four
    of us, the three plus one of us,
    I alone, silent.

    J.I. Kleinberg is the author of The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap, 2023) and Sleeping Lessons (Milk & Cake, 2025) as well as four collections of visual poems, including All of We (Anhinga Press, 2026). She lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. We at AMBIDEXTROUS BLOODHOUND are grateful to Judy, who is one of our faithful regulars.

  • Poems

    Cheryl Wilder: 2 poems

    Cheryl Wilder

    right /rīt

    verb. restore to a normal correct condition or situation: As in, there is no way to right the crash.
    Nothing to turn back over. We didn’t capsize as much as we shattered. I want to right my life,
    meaning, I want to hug my friend until we fall over, jump in his car on the way to lunch shifts
    overlooking the ocean, be inside the weightlessness of a twenty-year-old body. But there is only a
    new normal, a new correct condition: My worth an open wound on the body of the masses.

     

    Slipped

    I
    We drank
                                          and danced
                            in dive bars.

    As we walked to the car
                                         humidity glistened toxic
                           and you threw me the keys,
    I threw them back,
                                          you threw them to me,
                            those rigid teeth

    in-between my fingers. You slipped
                                          in the passenger seat
                            and I took the wheel.

    I took the wheel and you put on California Dreamin’.
                                          We sang.
                            I swayed my shoulders
    and you shimmied your feet
                                          to the pop harmony
                            until the rain-slick curve

    took the car                                     
                                          took the wheel
                            and we slipped

    until laughter was slapped
                                          from our bodies.

    II

    Air entered and left my nose.
                                          Opening my eyes, I recognized
                            the steering wheel, the dashboard
    my hands, my legs, the quiet stereo
                                          and draped over the center console
                            a limp body.

    Curly hair bunched around a collared button-up
                                          still sweaty from dancing.
                            I held my breath

    leaned close to the side of your face
                                          closed my eyes as if
                            I could disappear

    pleaded, with wet words
                                          as tears dripped onto my tongue,
                            Get up, get out of the car.

    Please get up.
                                          Pleeeaaase wake up,
                            your current of breath my only answer.

    I wanted to run. I had to get help.
                                          I entered the June air and froze
                            under yellow streetlights

    that beat
                                          on
                            and off.

    III

    I stood in the middle
                                          of the street, the car wrapped
                           around a pole, you still

    inside. I heard sirens grow
                                          close, thought of my sheets, how
                           cool they are in the humid hot

    summer, and wanted to lie down
                                          between them as I lost the last moment
                           of a person that was me.
    I was taken
                                          from the scene, you were lifted
                           carefully, I’m sure. They checked
    my breath, gave me an orange
                                          jumpsuit, bustled around my purpose
                           my meaning and I didn’t

    mean to, I didn’t mean to,
                                          I didn’t—
                           but what does that change?

    I wouldn’t struggle against handcuffs
                                          never challenged the paperwork process
                           could only hear blood

    curdling in the background.

     

    “right /rīt” was first published in the author’s book, Singing Riptide (Press 53)
    “Slipped” was first published in the author’s book,     Anything That Happens (Press 53)

    Cheryl Wilder’s decades-long reckoning with the decision to drive drunk, which left her friend and passenger severely and permanently injured, taught her that self-forgiveness must lead to genuine moral repair. As a poet, Cheryl uses the personal lyric to “translate” her reckoning into language, an active taking-hold of her emotional life. Her collection, Anything That Happens (Press 53), is an acute examination of shame in the aftermath of the crash. Its companion collection, Singing Riptide (Press 53), supported by the North Caroling Arts Council, is her journey from all-consuming shame to self-realization and belonging.  Cheryl is an arts and culture leader in the community-led initiative For Alamance, inspiring her to “translate” collective crises into language that explores moral injury and the need for mass forgiveness.

  • Poems

    Courtney Hitson: “Bioethics and a Sestina: On a 19th Century Body Snatcher”

    Courtney Hitson

    Bioethics and a Sestina: On a 19th Century Body Snatcher

    that trespasses a family plot to steal
    a corpse from her grave and bring the body
    to a medical school. There, a teaching surgeon will seize
    his scalpel down the sternum to part her mottled curtains of skin,
    unfurl her shutters of lungs, and birth her glistening heart
    into a dusty heaven of eyes,

    whose sightlines enwrap her torso. But what if her eyes
    opened to see this? Would she allow these students to steal
    memories of her stomach and bones and heart?
    Who, exactly, inhabits an abandoned body
    once a self evaporates from beneath the skin?
    Because if her father knew, he’d seize

    his daughter’s corpse, despite the procedure a student sees.
    And despite the eventual stare of his son’s cancelled eyes,
    as he fingers the boy’s cold skin
    a final time, once a tumor comes to steal
    his smirk and gallop. Why? Because nobody
    knew how to extract a tumor from a heart.

    Could surgical instruction be a pastiche art?
    Consider: with varying intentions researchers seize
    a knowledge, disembody
    it from the dead, and realize
    it back to being within the osteal
    lodgings of a future patient’s skin.

    We cannot negate the risk in
    resurrecting purpose into an unbeating heart.
    What is to come of knowledge that we steal,
    like a virus plundering know-how from the seas
    of our cells? What if we can’t help wanting to eye
    a corpse and scorch the earth of her body

    for cures? There is no antibody
    for ambition. Picture the body snatcher: Skin
    of his fingers sweaty, his opportunistic eyes,
    busy as the surgeon’s hands grasping that heart
    with a pride similar to the father’s upon seizing
    his loving son—a boy he couldn’t fathom ever steal.

    Not yet, anyways. But look at his unfinished heart
    in his unfinished body and know it will eye risk in what he sees:
    Especially in the unused shovel, all gleam and steel.

     

    Courtney Hitson teaches creative writing and literature at Georgia College & State University. Her poems have recently appeared in Pinch, The Potomac Review, Wisconsin Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, DMQ Review and others. She has a sestina (over the history of neonatal care) forthcoming in The Mid-Atlantic Review. Collectively, her poetry has received five Pushcart nominations. Outside of writing, she enjoys scuba-diving, unicycling, and philosophy.

  • Poems

    allison whittenberg: “Instructions”

    allison whittenberg

    Instructions

    if ever you find me
    screaming,
    grabbing for the air,
    failling.

    help,
    …………..if you can,

    if you can’t, turn away
    so that vision
    that version of my dying, doesn’t
    live in your mind

     

    Allison Whittenberg is an award-winning novelist and playwright. Her poetry has appeared in Berlin Lit, Columbia Review, Feminist Studies, J Journal, and New Orleans Review. Whittenberg is a ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee. They Were Horrible Cooks is her collection of poetry.

  • Poems

    Matteo Preabianca: “What the Dashcam Saw”

    Matteo Preabianca

    What the Dashcam Saw

    The light was yellow. Then it was red.
    I was reaching for the coffee in the cup holder,

    A text from my son
    pinged—practice got out early, can you come?

    The other driver’s name was Maria.
    She was thirty-one. She taught kindergarten.
    The hospital room a machine
    that beeped the way a clock ticks
    when you have nowhere else to be.

    I told the officer I didn’t see her.
    I also didn’t look.
    There is a difference the law does not measure.

    Months later, I still stop at green lights.
    I check my mirrors seventeen times per mile.
    My hands remember the wheel’s shape
    but not what they were doing when the world
    folded inward like a letter shoved into the wrong envelope.

    The police report says no charges filed.

    My pastor said God’s forgiveness is infinite.
    But I am the one who reached for the coffee.
    I am the one who heard the ping and thought
    I can answer that at the next light.

    There is no next light.
    There is only the replay, the frame-by-frame:
    hand lifting cup, eyes leaving road, the small
    ordinary betrayal of attention
    that stole a woman’s legs from the waist down.

    She will never run again. Her students
    will never see her chase a soccer ball
    across the field at recess.
    And I will never stand before a judge
    because no law says you should have known better
    in a way the courts can use.

    But something in me has been court-martialed.
    The jury is my own face in the bathroom mirror
    at 3 a.m. The verdict: Guilty of failing
    the duty of care. The sentence:
    to live inside this body that keeps on living
    while knowing what it did.

    And so I have become a stranger to myself.
    The man who used to believe that people
    are mostly good—that man reached for his coffee.
    He heard a ping.

     

    Italian-born Australian Matteo Preabianca, now based in Scotland, is a linguist, lecturer, and translator whose work reflects his extensive travels across several countries. Fluent in Italian and English, he channels his dual cultural identity into a diverse portfolio that includes published English poems, experimental music albums, and novels.

  • Poems

    Greta Scheff: “Sacrificing Tears”

    Greta Scheff

    Sacrificing Tears

    The connection between
    crying and shame seems clear.
    Even when there’s no one else around
    it feels like a performance.
    And who am I trying to entertain?

    It’s been a while since I’ve cried
    more than just a tear or two.
    I place blame on these prescribed daily doses.

    I was nineteen when I started becoming well
    for the third time,
    Mom left me a note,
    one word pasted on each bottle’s cap:

    It’s       nice      to      have      you     back,       Boo.

    And I’ve learned of the dangers without them,
    so, dry as my eyes become,
    I’ll keep taking the pills.


    Constantly inspired by her surroundings in everyday life, Greta Scheff‘s work is a direct reflection and inspection of the world, her relationships, and herself.

  • Poems

    Suzanne Underwood Rhodes: “Beloved Enemies”

    Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

    Beloved Enemies

    (Rohwer Internment Camp, Arkansas, 1942-45)

    Child, you don’t know what you are asking!
    To tell about the camps? Why would I smudge your smile
    with my stories, sully your home here in Virginia
    with the great oak shouldering your swing that lifts you up,
    up, and down to earth again. Your pony, Wind, grazing
    in the sun-dappled field of bluestem and butterflies.
    You are my happiness!

    Should I relive that prison of sorrow and privation,
    I who am old with a foot already in heaven?
    But write this on your heart: we were strong and patient.
    We were gaman, facing our suffering with dignity.
    And you will be gaman too, little bird, when someday
    you fly into a storm.

    You beg and beg! Your dark eyes ask to understand,
    and I think maybe you are older than your small years.
    So, I will tell you a thing or two.

    Once I lived in a world like yours, but our trees dripped lemons
    not acorns, and the air was cool with spray from the sea
    where your Uncle Haruto and I swam and were children at play
    under the sun’s watchful eye. So many pretty shells we gathered!
    We always wondered what creatures had lived inside.

    When the Order came, they made Papa sell his orange groves, his store,
    our house on Adalaide Street, and all for a song. That means for cheap!
    “Get up! Hurry, no time to explain,” he said, shaking us awake.
    Don’t cry!” he commanded. “Get only what fits in your suitcase.”
    “Go without Mei Mei? No, Papa!” But he opened the door
    and out my cat fled into the night, and with it, our lives:
    We would not come again.

    And where, you ask, did we go? Thousands of us, to a race track!
    A horse stall for a house that stank of manure! A cot apiece in each little box.
    “Kimi has fever!” Mother said to Papa, her eyebrows worried, her hand cool
    on my forehead. (I liked when she called me Kimi, not Helen, my school name.)
    The fever raged, forced open the gate of an underworld. I saw the ocean
    rising like a tower, Mei Mei crying for food, a rifle pointing at Papa.

    On a day when the California sky spread sunshine like honey,
    we were rounded up by the hundreds and put on trains—infants
    and elders, youngsters afoot, parents clutching what they could.
    Oh, the tears that mingled with ours in the stuffed car, tears
    silently shed by neighbors and strangers, but none by the aunties
    shrunken with years, their faces frozen as death. In that darkness
    Mother shone the warmth of her smile. “See, I brought a book
    to read you,” and as if pulling a rabbit from a hat, she opened
    a surprise sack with a story and lollipops for the journey.
    Day and night the train raced and screamed, thrusting us toward
    a great unknown. “Will it be a pretty place?” I asked Papa.

    Mother stepped first off the train that gray, muggy morning,
    her shoulders squared proudly, suitcase in hand, and we followed—
    Papa, Haruto, and I, the heat bearing down like a heavy cloak.
    A brisk blonde soldier waved us to our barrack, Block 9, Unit 3.
    “Welcome to Rohwer, Arkansas. You’re lucky. Only four of you.
    We got families of six, seven, eight fitting into these swank hotel rooms.”
    Papa’s face burned from an inner fire but he said nothing.
    Our new home was no more than a prison cell, all of twenty square feet.
    The whole camp was a prison dressed in fancy words like “Relocation Center,”
    everything bound by barbed wire and guarded with guns.

    “Mother, I have to pee,” I said,
    but our room had no toilet or running water.
    Those were outside, shared by all the beloved enemies among us.

    That night Mother unscrewed the single lightbulb in our room
    and in the dark, unfolded from her suitcase the red kimono
    of family weddings, and slipped into its silk her funeral song.

    “I have no more words for you now, little bird, Katori.”


    Suzanne Underwood Rhodes     is the Arkansas Poet Laureate and the author of five poetry collections, including Flying Yellow, a semifinalist in the North American Book Award, and two books of lyrical prose. She has recent poems in Bracken, Dappled Things, Slant, and Bellevue Literary Review. She teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and is an adjunct instructor of English at John Brown University.

  • Poems

    Howie Good: “Away From the Light”

    Howie Good

    Away From the Light

    1
    Every space has light of some kind, and yet we act as if it isn’t there. What an experience, to be in total darkness at one in the afternoon. There’s a lot of screaming and praying to Jesus. We suddenly become archaic remnants of the predigital age. This might be the future. How it’s destroyed. We don’t have anything to stop it. I’ll stand and watch it get dark. Does that surprise you? No one is outside the system. Even when you ride the train, all you see is black forest with nothing in it.

    2
    I come and I go and I come and I go. A woman with whirlpool eyes stopped me on the way. I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Oh, she’s drowning,” because she didn’t look like she was drowning. “Is that Jesus behind the KFC handing out tickets to heaven?” she asked. I arrived too late to wave them goodbye. The next day it’s raining and very muddy. People want to know is it climate change. Some are trembling. There’s no cure or treatment. It’s hard not to see God in that.

    3
    There are rules, presumably, that govern the universe, despite the rise of masked police or the Nazi graffiti defacing Jewish-owned shops. The new regime is already in an advanced state of decay. Am I the only one who hears the explosive warning cries of the seagulls? You might not know this, but Jesus was commonly addressed as “Rabbi.” The thin, ghostlike figure drifting toward me along the shoreline has a yellow Star of David patch on his sleeve and tears in his eyes.

    Howie Good latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

  • Poems

    Khayelihle Benghu: “The Order I Carried Out”

    Khayelihle Benghu

    The Order I Carried Out

    I. The Order I Carried Out

    They said it was necessary

    that word polished like a badge.

    I held it in my mouth

    until it tasted like iron.

    There was a moment

    small as a match head

    where I could have said no.

    But the room was full of ranks,

    and my spine learned obedience

    before my tongue learned truth.

    Even now, I remember

    how precise my hands were,

    how calm the air became afterward

    as if violence, done correctly,

    deserves quiet.

    They thanked me.

    That is the part

    that keeps me awake

    not the act,

    but the applause.

     

    II. Inventory of What Remains

    No blood on my hands

    that would be simpler.

    Instead, I carry fragments

    a voice I ignored,

    a truth I bent,

    a silence I fed.

    Tell me

    which part condemns me most?

    The world moves on easily.

    It forgets with discipline.

    But I have become

    an archive of small betrayals,

    catalogued in bone and breath.

    Sometimes I try to forgive myself

    practice the words

    like a foreign language.

    They don’t stay.

    Because somewhere inside,

    a version of me still stands,

    watching

    and refuses to look away

     

    III. In the Presence of Uniforms

    They wore certainty

    like a second skin.

    Every command

    arrived already justified,

    every action

    pre-approved by power.

    You learn quickly

    how doubt becomes dangerous

    how questions

    sound like disloyalty.

    So I swallowed mine.

    It tasted like metal,

    like something forged

    and forced into shape.

    Even now,

    when no one is watching,

    I feel the ghost of that discipline

    a voice that says,

    obey first,

    understand later.

    I am still unlearning

    the order of things

     

    Khayelihle Benghu is an emerging writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

  • Poems

    Daniel Mask: “Made of glass”

    Daniel Mask

    Made of glass

    Looking up with my head back
    to the steel-blue sky.
    —A voice.
    Mumbling echoes—
    even music now, a circus of strangers
    milling like ants—below.
    Against the wind’s velocity,
    I heard myself speak
    as if someone were listening.
    When I was young, this building was taller,
    or so it seemed.
    Made of glass,
    a few broken windows,
    except the top floor—
    the netting gone.
    For a while this structure stood empty,
    abandoned.
    It felt misplaced in time,
    forgotten before it aged.
    I never thought I would be back up here
    where the ledge still holds weight
    and nothing is asked of me.

    The building’s shadow drifts harsh
    in the open window—
    A voice folded outside, half-heard,
    then heard again differently.
    For a moment I leaned forward.
    I lost my footing. The crowd gasps.
    I was already elsewhere.
    The air tasted like fried oysters—
    the way I remember the beach.
    On the top floor, back when, a barbershop
    with a view of the sunset over the fishing pier.
    From the barber’s chair, I noticed how
    everything paused.
    The voice returns in fixed fragments, caught
    —over my shoulder half-remembered.
    I lean further, not knowing why,
    into the space between us.
    The crowd shifts.
    I smell the salt—the same salt

    from the beach below the barbershop,
    a bull horn blares with a gull’s cry,
    —folding into the evening.

     

    Daniel Mask has poems and a photograph published in Rattle, Gyroscope, Red Cedar Review, Tulane Review and an
    essay in 30 West. He has a Master’s degree from the University of Houston and is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer. His work shares a preoccupation with being a witness to what humans hold sacred—and how that burden, often unrecognized, is processed, concealed or transformed. He finds it does not come from transcendence or resolution but from endurance. 

  • Poems

    Katherine DiBella Seluja: “Because terror”

    Katherine DiBella Seluja

    Because terror

    is frozen in ice in zero-degree weather. Because a woman being of service
    can be killed. Because she might start the day scrambling eggs

    and then leave them cold on the table. Because longing is filled with many types
    of hunger, driving is filled with so many distractions and one of them is carrying a gun.

    Because another name for nurse is terrorist.

    Because, “That’s fine dude” is a simple sort of blessing. Because her children wait
    on the backdoor step watching red squeeze from the sky.

     

    Katherine DiBella Seluja is a nurse practitioner, a poet and a micro fiction writer. Her most recent collection, Point of Entry (UNM Press, 2023) focuses on issues of migration and ancestry. She is a co-author with Tina Carlson and Stella Reed, of the collaborative collection, We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019), winner of the New Mexico- Arizona Book Award and the Southwest Design Book Award. Katherine co-edited with Dale Wisely, an anthology of grief poems, Memento (Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, 2025). Recent work can be found in South 85 Journal, Intima, and Taos Journal of Poetry. Katherine is a poetry editor at Unbroken Journal.

  • Poems

    Miriam Sagan: “The Old Soldier”

    Miriam Sagan

    The Old Soldier

    was trapped in his label—not his given name, but the name he acquired in the story. He hadn’t always been old, but he had mostly been a soldier. Now he wore the tattered remnants of his uniform and carried an army- issued rucksack. Some things were not visible—the later years as a mercenary—with all the money now spent. The season with guerilla fighters. They’d burned a village to the ground, something he did not want to remember. These days, he liked to just ramble around. The landscape was quotidian northern fairy tale: four seasons, flowering hedges, geese flying in formation. He liked to pick raspberries in season. Pop a red juicy berry in his mouth. Swallow. He’d never been in love. Well, maybe when he was fourteen, with a girl from his own village who had long pigtails. He’d seen her swinging on a gate and he’d felt something in his chest that felt like hunger—something soft, red, pulsing. Something sweet.

     

    Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. SShe founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces.

  • Poems

    Sarah Gokhale: “Britney”

    Sarah Gokhale

    Britney

    I’m on Zoom with my manager, Stephen, at 7 A.M. giving my three weeks notice because my coworker sexually harassed our other coworker and our organization took the harasser’s side, but I’m distracted because Sasha keeps FaceTiming me to tell me that Britney Spears just got arrested for a DUI and I’d so much rather dissect that situation than this one, but I can’t bail so I have to act serious and calm while I explain to Stephen that the disgust he feels in our harasser coworker’s presence is very importantly not the same feeling as the actual fear for my bodily safety and autonomy I feel around him and after my second time trying to explain this to Stephen I hang up and call Sasha about Britney and then I gawk at Twitter pictures of Connor Storrie and Francois Arnaud from the GLAAD awards last night in my car without air conditioning while I wait for my burrito to be ready at the taco truck where a likely undocumented dude backs up straight into my car and we don’t know how to solve the problem because he doesn’t have insurance and I don’t know where my insurance card is, and my Spanish is at its worst when I’m on ketamine, which I only did this early in the morning because I just quit my job because my friend got raped, and those things make me feel stressed, and nobody at the taco truck speaks English, but it’s fine because the dude who ran into me gives me a $100 bill and we fist bump and call it even.

     

    Sarah Gokhale is a producer from Orange County, California. Her favorite condiments are Trader Joe’s jalapeno sauce and burrata. Her Mexican street dog’s favorite condiment is cream cheese. Her favorite soccer player is Rose Lavelle. She thinks Electrolit is better than Gatorade. Her favorite American cities are NYC, Albuquerque, and Philly. https://twobrainsonecell.substack.com/.

  • Poems

    Jimmy Pappas: “What I Learned in Vietnam”

    Jimmy Pappas

    What I Learned in Vietnam

    That it’s always best to avoid hand-to-hand combat.
    That the black market is a great place to go shopping.
    That a flush toilet deserves to be called a throne.
    That tear gas has earned its name.
    That rats can grow to the size of a small dog.
    That some soldiers get their kicks by taking pictures of mutilated bodies.
    That marijuana can be laced with opium to make it addictive.
    That morphine users on the street keep a dog nearby for serum.
    That prostitutes can be just as worthy of love as any other person.
    That it’s always nice to be called Number One.
    That bigotry exists everywhere in the world.
    That you should always accept food from someone who can’t afford to give it to you.
    That chopsticks are used to push rice into your mouth.
    That human beings get swept away by forces beyond their control.
    That we must keep relearning how people are always the same, only their culture is different.
    That, in general, soldiers on all sides try to do their job right.
    That, in general, civilians go to a war zone to make money.
    That cigarette, beer, and weapons manufacturers make a fortune on war.
    That wars must be separated from the soldiers who fight them.
    That men fight in a war because they love it.
    That every father is proud of his son going off to war.
    That soldiers who return home from a war zone suffer from terminal ennui.
    That human beings can live through the most devastating of injuries.
    That saving the life of every soldier wounded in combat may not be the best idea.
    That only a small percentage of personnel involved in a war are combat soldiers.
    That war goes unnoticed without cameras to film it.
    That freedom is an illusion I never want to live without.
    That once you enter a war, it will never leave you.

     

    Jimmy Pappas won the Rattle Chapbook Contest with Falling off the Empire State Building and the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story.” His nominations include two for the Pushcart Prize, one for the Best of the Net, and two for a Touchstone award. He moderates a weekly, themed Zoom event called “A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends.”