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Issue 206

givalpress

Updated: Feb 3

This issue features

 

 

Vyarka Kozareva

 

Sister Theodosia   

 

Too meek and tiny,

She makes people think

She used to dwell a doll house.

She says

Nobody’s born taught

How to remain a stoic

In the vortex of tactlessness

Or how to discern the most promising chance.

Through her eyes

Misfortune looks extravagant

With its long swoopy fringe,

Accordion skirt,                       

And old silver ring.

She plants xanthic flowers

To scale up and down

The importance of pain

In an attempt to respect

The death’s abstract taste for art.

She isn’t afraid

The worms may apply canons

To judge (post factum) her life

In the bubbles of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.

She’s never seen time a social construct

Nor asked herself

Which is the true part

Of the mantra:

The vicious always emerges

From its wrongly presumed latency.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Vyarka Kozareva.

 

 

Gestalt Principles  

 

Pieces of unproved love

Incongruous 

Couples of (un)lucky dice

With sayings of superstition

Somewhere sometimes

Someone 

Juggling with words

States of matter manner and mind

Winds of change

Smoke rings

In the points of inflexion

Dialectical bubbles

Up to using false dilemma

I’m afraid

We’ll become asymmetric

Taking too much of plagiarism

In between 

In return

Illusions 

Can’t prevent altercation

Between large and small molecules

Blooming on the most Lenten days

The Easter flowers won’t object

When we share our fishes and loaves

Without scruples and scrutiny

Unaware

What’s beneath the loincloths

Of the paper heroes

In times of aneuploidy

If you are strong-minded

To throw amber skeletons into fire

I am ready to illuminate my conchoidal fractures.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Vyarka Kozareva.

 

About the Author

Vyarka Kozareva is from Bulgaria. Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Ariel Chart, Poetry Pacific, Basset Hound Press, Bosphorus Review of Books, Mad Swirl, Ann Arbor ReviewFevers Of The Mind, Juste Milieu Lit, Trouvaille Review, Aberration Labyrinth, Triggerfish Critical Review, Sampsonia Way Magazine, Synchronized Chaos Magazine, Toasted Cheese, The Big Windows Review, morphrog, Tipton Poetry Journal,Wildfire Words, Wellspring Literary Journal, and Panoply Zine. 

 

 

Brian Michael Barbeito


Birds on Vessel

 


© by Brian Michael Barbeito.

 

About the Artist

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. He is the creator of the prose poem and photography books, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through (Dark Winter Press, July, 2024), and the forthcoming work, When I Hear the Night (Dark Winter Press, January, 2026)

 

 

Tom Pearson

 

Night Riders

 

If not for the mangroves and dunes, Granny and

her back room, or the creeks and swamps and

marshes, it might have mattered more that we had

been raised on cinder block, stacked two by two

under a single-wide trailer, toddling through a red-

black forest of thick shag, silver-lined, plucking out

curly shavings of aluminum because they laid the

carpet before they cut out the windows.

 

When the trailer pitched in storm, a snare played

by the branches of cypress, we were knocked out by

the assault of cloud cannons, pelting the roof in

rapid-fire—so sound was sleep, so deep our dreams,

and we would ride her into midnight, the trailer

with its hitch pointing forward like a prow—but that

was us too. There. Then. Now.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Tom Pearson

 

Palimpsest 

 

   No wonder.

Clever tactics on a treacherous route

Today the mailman came late. Tomorrow

A younger man will come even later.

The labrador showed his confusion at

The gate when his daily postdate went un-

Rewarded.

 

   Smart tactic.

Trespasser gaslighting the sentinel—

It was the 1980s and we were

Spinning a cold war on a warm globe with

Mutual Assured Destruction, material

Devotion, and a treat for the

Mis-treated.

 

   Or it was

2022 and it was only

The world tour of the same show with different

Players on different stages—same plot though,

Same blocking.

 

   Curious.

The night the younger man came, I made the

Old recipe, and it was winter there

In Russia, a vegetable massacre

Occurring in a famine year and I

Dreamt of a mushroom growing from the top

Of my head, and woke to cancer in the

Late summer.

 

Driving to Providence and listening to

Erasure. Innocents. Overwritten.

 

   Another

Season (the bloody borscht of winter’s past),

Saint Petersburg in rain, through a body

Bag thawing on the counter–all the while

She cauterized vessels, I could smell the

Flesh burning and could feel the four horsemen

Of the Apocalypse pushing the folds

Of my scalp back together. She scooped me

Like the soft insides of boiled beets, but it

Was the stitching back together that was

Her true treachery.

 

It didn’t have to be, but could just be

Nothing.

 

   Another

Postdate in another town, another

State, murder in the park or meltdown on

The river, atrocities unexamined,

Gorky or Chernobyl, that would take us

Another 40 years or more from

Pryp’yat to the mouth of the Kalmius

To notice on the shores of

Mariupol.

 

  Ignorance.

We blamed it on our parents while our own

Complacency bloomed; we once survived

Atomic threat, and so we took smaller deaths for

Victories.

 

   Oiled and naked

Screaming with delight, we would squirm through

Their arms and run free into the sun. Now

We all sit in a waiting room like cartoon

Characters after a bar brawl, a

Bandaged ear, a tourniquet head, a face,

A nose–

 

   Looking at

Each other without looking, something

Passing between us that felt like a concert

Of collective past, I could hear the

Radio from the nurse’s station, Boys Don’t

Cry, The Cure.

 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Tom Pearson.


About the Author

Tom Pearson is a poet, multimedia theater artist, choreographer and co-creator of the long-running off-Broadway hit Then, She Fell (2012-2020). He has been noted for his “exacting, exuberant choreography” and for his “vastly panoramic and deeply personal” poetry. His published works include The Sandpiper’s Spell (Ransom Poet Publishers, 2018), Still, the Sky (Ransom Poet Publishers, 2022) and Eppure, il Cielo (Interno Poesia Editore, 2023). Visit: tompearsonnyc.com

 

Adam Torkelson

 

Breathe

 

Whispers,

pensive whispers,

saturate me with flame,

caught nevermore by unchaste ears,

concealing pride against its usefulness,

to never hate nor lose your scorn,

to hear overhead the

voices that are

whispers.

Copyright © 2025 by Adam Torkelson.

 

 

Deer Rush Illusions

 

Rowing out to

the edge of the pond that night,

birdsong slowly through the solitude

from surrendered oars in the dory’s hull

imparted polyphony athwart your whispering lips,

and jug-o-rums from provincial bullfrogs

floated through firefly-fog.

Alas, as they drifted, they impeded your voice

and breath-to-ear,

each passing word,

had vanished.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Adam Torkelson.

 

About the Author

Adam Torkelson is a poet living in Texas with his two sons. He has degrees in music and accounting.  He works as a staff accountant at a small CPA firm.  His interests include reading, writing, and music.  He writes poetry to express his love of life and nature.

 

 

Brian Michael Barbeito

 

Lake Sun Trees

 

© by Brian Michael Barbeito.

 

About the Artist

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. He is the creator of the prose poem and photography books, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through (Dark Winter Press, July, 2024), and the forthcoming work, When I Hear the Night (Dark Winter Press, January, 2026)

 

 

 


 

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