Issue 222

Robert L. Giron
2 hours ago
12 min read

Issue 222

This issue features

Photography by

Marcelo Vildosola Garrigo,

Symbiot, and

Poetry by

Rich Murphy, and

Fiction by

Marcelo Vildosola Garrigo

Snowy Majesty of the Villarrica Volcano (near Santiago, Chile)

L. Ward Abel

This Room

And so the year,

its measurements compiled

into a remembered

directional broken reel

of smeared colors—

the boldest being

loss and renewal

expected and surprised

shrouded in clouds

and vivid brights,

walking fields that wait,

flying skies that cannot,

white-capped volcanic chains

and funeral homes in low light—

almost to the point of forgetting.

All of this could not be for me

alone; this room must be larger

than it seems.

About the Author

L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Galway Review, Worcester Review, Main Street Rag, others), and he is the author of four full collections and eleven chapbooks of poetry, including Green Shoulders—New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow, 2023), and The Teller’s Road (Bottlecap, 2025). He is a retired lawyer and teacher of literature, he writes and plays music, and lives in rural Georgia.

Theodore Eisenberg

Unguided Tour

I know there is much to be

said for visiting the Himalayas,

but also for watching the red

cardinal that alights -- each

morning -- upon my feeder,

in the dead of winter. Or

stopping -- each evening –

while Everest bears a fiery

crest westward to my window,

its cloud-peak unconsumed.

About the Author

Theodore Eisenberg retired from the practice of labor law in 2014 to write a poem every day. When words seem too restrictive, he paints. His poems have appeared in The Aurorean, Thema, Rattle, Slipstream Press, Crosswinds Press, Lighthouse Literary Journal, Main Street Rag, Philadelphia Stories, Hamilton Stone Review, Rust & Moth and The Ekphrastic Review among many other journals and anthologies. His chapbook, “This,” was published by Finishing Line Press.

Jimmy Lisotto

The Flame

"We have decided

Not to move forward

With your poem

On this occasion."

Every poet

Has read similar lines

At minimum once,

Likely several times

This missive can sting,

Cutting like a knife

Or casting a pall

Which smothers the flame

Wounds inflicted

Need to be tended.

While scabs are forming,

Embers are smoldering.

Then when healing occurs,

The mantle is lifted;

The flame ignites anew-

Back to creation.

About the Author

Jimmy Lisotto is a poet in New Hampshire. He has previously been published in Agape Review, The International Library of Poetry, Solid Food Press and Faith On Every Corner. He believes that poetry is a medium that can connect people from all walks of life. He can be found on Facebook and Instagram.

Symbiot

Spectacular Orange Sunset Over White Winter Forest

Abigail Michelini

Winter Semester Sunset

The earth rotates just a little bit

faster, birds flinging so far forward

they resemble mosquitos,

like faculty lurching for summer

before even spring, counting

the modules left to prep.

Light flees in columns from flat

plates of snow towards the bent

necks of fawning street lamps,

like students stretching over dim

screens, trading the break for

four weeks of winter work.

A smudge of rainbow races straight,

back snapped to the horizon,

bare faced to the sky,

like grading without a curve,

all of us flatlining while we try

not to keel too early onto our knees,

till the whole bowl of day tips

empty, sun shaken out in dark drops,

leaving us drained and dizzy for sleep.

About the Author

Abigail Michelini is a Pushcart-prize nominee whose work can be found in SWWIM, The Main Street Rag, and Thimble Literary Magazine, among other publications. Her scholarly work has been published in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and Writing Center Journal. She is the author of the chapbook, Brace (Thirty West Publishing House) and teaches writing at Northampton Community College. Visit: www.abigailmichelini.com.

Rich Murphy

Swan Song Lyrics

Love poems begin with the love

letter x and end with the love

letter o or vice versa, because

the adventure always ends with 0.

Eyes meeting eyes to introduce

lips until body members agree

to join the fun at the mug-hub.

But sometimes the peripheral

vision pulls pupils from studies,

so “hello” has to do until later

when a single letter exchanges

easily with “sublime” marking

the spot perhaps to come back to.

Dear John or Dear Jane lines

enjambed monosyllabic saddens.

Should trust establish footholds

for separate activities, two

margins test for breaths in

and out, caesura, and stretch

metaphor into irony.

The promise to return to a home

comforts with a hug that leans

two swan songs against oblivion.

About the Author

Rich Murphy grew up in Lynn, MA where his drive to become a writer, a poet, began early. He believes that daily practice is Wile E Coyote chasing the Road Runner, and at some point, the practitioner runs alone off a cliff without emerging from the bottom of the canyon. Who knows, some of the products of practice may survive. His latest collections, Elephant by Bass Clef Books, Storage Shed and Inside Stories by Resource Publications and Mind of Europe: A Genealogy to The Fat Man and Susan Constant by Cyberwit were published 2024-2025, following First Aid and Footholds (2023).

Stephanie Suh

The Arrow of Desire

I see the sun’s rays.

The ruthless force of the gaze

bends the arrow of reason

and melts the lead of the tip

into the molten flood of wanting.

In the splendor of the beauty,

dangerous, fearless, defenseless,

my heartbeat skips the rhythm of nights

then pounds the glass of the heart

with a ricochet of shame and ache—

and I fear the feral snarl of reality,

speaking of sense and sensibility.

Just a dream, only an illusion—

a mist of sadness in longing

for no more lonely love

drizzles over the flame,

refusing to die away in fog.

As the cigarette between my lips

is debauched in inhaling desire

and exhaling shame—

burn, burn, burn—

the candle on my desk is glowing.

The quiet hedonism of desire:

iridescent, lambent flame,

till it evanesces like night dews.

About the Author

Stephanie Suh is a poetess based in Los Angeles, California. Her poems have appeared in Anomaly Poetry, The Raven Review, Belladonna’s Garden, EgoPHobia (Romania), Poems Tales & Other English Words (UK), and Poet in Verese Journal (UK).

Cheri Alguire

An Entrance Road Going to Villa Viscaya, Miami, Florida

Jill Bronfman

Maria

—Marisa

Marisa wasn’t old enough to go to college, but she went anyway. She was a sixteen-year-old first year at the University of California at Berkeley, chosen for its distance to Miami. Marisa was a bad girl, according to her mother and grandmother, for wearing skirts that showed the lower half-moons of her buttocks. That’s not a skirt, her grandmother said, that’s a wide belt that goes over a skirt. Her mother had reached over and tried to pull down the skirt, but it was denim, too tight and too stiff to move. Marisa crafted the escape plan from them and the men who whistled at her starting when she was eleven.

“Cariña,” they’d yell. They had other words for her, other gestures, but she never looked. Well, she had looked once. A man twice her age took her for a ride in a white convertible Mercedes with wine-leather seats to cruise down the Miami Beach. He picked her up after her after school job bussing tables at the Fountainbleu. Marisa’s curls bounced in the ocean breeze against the man in a fedora who looked incredibly proud of himself. He called her Cariña, and less often, her actual name. He constantly ran out of condoms and promised her that it didn’t matter anyway because he had plenty of money to “take care of it.”

She held out for condoms. She could guess what happened to her father, a man lost to his family in the early 1990s. Neither her mother nor her grandmother had anything to say about how he had died other than the whispered epitaph, “Cancer.” He was still a young man.

And Marisa knew about her other boy who had died in the water between Cuba and Miami a decade earlier. How her grandmother had held onto him when the raft took on water, how they had found the child face down in the sand on the shore after the rest of the passengers were rescued by the Coast Guard. How her grandmother arrived at the port of Miami alone, clutching a drawstring bag of child’s clothing, having packed nothing for herself.

—Javier

When Marisa met Javier, the only other Cuban student in her dorm at Berkeley, there were fireworks. She hated him. He was handsome enough for everyone else, with his thick black eyebrows that darted around his face when he laughed and his compact, muscled frame. He was clever, and made jokes about his out-of-date clothes, “Miami is one year behind in fashion, three years behind in music, and five hundred years behind in politics.”

Javier painted a romantic and yet decrepit vision of Miami for his California friends. He would describe Viscaya, the faux-Renaissance mansion in Miami, where he and his buddies would peel crumbling rocks off the walls and throw them at the ducks in the lake. He would bemoan the lack of Cuban bread in California, a chain of loaves with a whole clove of garlic roasted in each round link. “Ropa vieja means old clothes but it’s my favorite food,” he’d explain, putting his arms around a girl on each side of him. “My favorite.”

For Marisa, his charm slanted sideways. He just looked like her older boyfriend. And like her old boyfriend in Miami, this guy, too, probably told everyone he was an artist, but actually sold cocaine or whatever drug was popular here.

Javier told everyone at school he was an artist. Not studying to be an artist, or an art student, like most everyone else in their dorm, but already an artist. He came home from class every day and tacked a new painting on the wall of his dorm room that he shared with Barney. Javier used robin’s egg-blue poster putty to hang the canvases above his bed, and eventually, with Barney’s permission, above Barney’s bed, in the hallway, in the group bathroom, on the ceiling. The colors were enormous, bigger than Barney had expected them to be, and bigger than the colors Barney had words for.

—Barney

“I mean, that’s yellow, I get it,” Barney told Javier.

“Meyer Lemon. Sunshine. Plantain. Demented Sunflower.” Javier laughed, pointing at his painting on the wall that used all of the colors he was naming.

Barney planned to be a doctor. The drawings in his textbook were black and white.

Barney took all of the pre-med classes he could spackle into his schedule, filling in two-unit classes in between labs for the four-unit big hitters like Physics, Bio, O-Chem. Friday morning at eight a.m., BioChem for Everyone. Barney scoffed at the horrific science classes for non-majors, but this one was special, even before he saw Marisa sitting in the front row of ancient wooden desks attached to metal chairs.

BioChem for Everyone, not its official name, was offered to meet the science requirement for non-science majors, along with Rocks for Jocks, Physical Anthro, and Human Sexuality. Rocks for Jocks, in the Geology department, wasn’t as easy as its nickname suggested. Physical Anthro was good times, if you liked human evolution and the egregiously racist professor. Human Sexuality was completely off the table, although Barney would have loved to take the class. Absolutely impacted every semester.

So, Barney met Marisa, the art history major, in BioChem for Everyone. She had signed up for one of the two science requirements. She had also aced Physical Anthro due to her excellent representations of the femur development from primate to neanderthal to homo erectus on a rainbow continuum. Barney watched her take notes in BioChem for Everyone for weeks, looking over her shoulder at her detailed drawings executing the levels of x-ray radiation in Chernobyl.

He tagged her as an artsy type on the first day, with her half-head of curls shaved on one side, her low-rise jeans, and her thick boots. So, she was dragged into the class by the science requirement for sure.

Chernobyl, this prof knew every detail. And the reason he knew is that he had been tapped to go there shortly after the meltdown. Here was a world-renowned expert in nuclear radiation teaching a class for disinterested undergraduates. Once every ten years, he was required to teach in the classroom, as opposed to the research every academic seemed to prefer. Every bio prof that Barney had seemed to slog through the basic species list like they were being asked to execute endangered species for the class’s entertainment. Even in the upper-division classes, with the students gunning for med school or lab jobs, the professors seemed to be holding on by the threads of the tassels attached to their academic regalia. But not this guy. The professor for BioChem for Everyone was interested and enthusiastic. “Let me tell you what happened to the cows,” he began.

Barney was interested, too. Marisa’s hair rolled down her back in black sine and cosine waves. If he stretched his long arm out in front of him, he could touch her hair and move it around, so the waves did what they were supposed to do.

Barney did not touch Marisa. Or anyone. His roommate, Javier, came home several nights a week with a girl in tow and stuck a sock on the door. Barney slept in the student lounge those nights.

“Marisa,” Barney thought, her. On the day that introductions went around in their small seminar classroom, she had said “Mareeeesa.” Barney heard more vowels than a name needed, but Marisa could have all the vowels she wanted. “It has one ‘S’” Marisa explained. “Like Lisa. With Marisa, it’s an ‘E’ sound.” It sounded to Barney like she had to fight this battle before.

Barney said her name correctly, but the professor never did.

“Oh man,” Marisa said to Barney, sidling up to him after class. “He’s a fucking genius, but no, no Spanish, no effort. Claro que si!”

Barney looked at her blankly.

“No Spanish?”

“None, well, I mean, hola, mas cerveza, por favor.”

“That’s not even right, dude. So, you’re not Hispanic, or Latino, or anything.”

“Black and Chinese, hapa halfsies.”

“Ok, then,” Marisa walked around Barney, looking up at him. He outdistanced her in height by at least a foot.

“Am I out, then?”

“Out of what?” Marisa smiled. “I need coffee.”

Barney realized she meant they were going somewhere together. Like a date or something. He wasn’t a player, but he also wasn’t stupid.

They walked up Bancroft, the street that lined the populous south side of campus, to Cafe Roma. They ordered the strong stuff and sat at a concrete outdoor table and popped out their laptops. Maybe not a date, he thought, just a mutual parallel coffee purchase and study time.

But then Barney caught Marisa looking at him, sideways and cautiously.

“You’re straight, right?”

He felt like it was the most important question he had ever been asked, like the answer would turn his life at right angles. Barney smiled. “Mostly.”

“I see you’re hedging your bets. Am I trying to set you up with my friend or asking for myself?”

“I mean you’re really hot, and I’m…” Barney closed his laptop and pushed his backpack between his feet. He might need to make a quick exit. He couldn’t believe he called her hot. He had put another weight on her side of the scale.

“You’re beautiful, Barney.”

—Javier and Barney

“Holy shit, Barney, who was that?” Javier rolled over in bed, alone for a change, but suffering greatly from a night out.

Barney smiled and ran for the shower.

“Ugh, Barn, I really need to get in, Dr. Chen. Or shall I call you the Doctor from now on? Because you’re operating like a player now?”

“Her name is Marisa!” Barney called from the shower.

“She. Is. Not.” Javier said slowly, rising from the bed with some difficulty. “I’ve seen her around campus, our dorm, even. She’s a bitch. A home girl, yes, but nasty as hell.”

Barney came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around him. “You didn’t, you know. Please tell me you didn’t.”

“She knows she’s hot, first of all.” Javier watched Barney’s face fall loose. He realized he needed to be generous. “Wait, I’m sorry, man. You know, be happy with her or whatever.”

“Trying.”

Javier was already in the shower when Barney said, “I think I love her.”

—Barney and Marisa

“Babe,” she whispered to him, “I’m so excited for the summer! We’re going to hit every club in Spain. Do you know Ibiza?”

Barney’s mother smiled at Marisa. “I’m sure you’re proud of him for making it into Cornell’s biomedical research program early.”

Marisa unwound her arm from Barney’s lower back and looked up. He wasn’t meeting her eyes.

“So, Barney, tell me again how we’re going to be together forever.”

“I was going to tell you as soon as the grant came in, but then my parents were coming for graduation. I love you, Marisa. It’s always going to be you and me; that’s the only version of this story that makes sense…”

Marisa backed away from Barney until her back hit one of the gnarled trees in the faculty glade. “Ouch,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. And then she was gone.

—Javier and Marisa

Javier was surprised to enter his dorm room and find Marisa standing in her lime green lace bra top and combat boots on top of his bed. She seemed to be midway through removing her panties.

Her arms were folded across her chest, and she said, “I bet you knew, too.”

Javier had no idea what she was talking about. He fucked her anyway.

When Marisa and Javier got married, Barney came. They didn’t expect him. They didn’t expect to see him happy for them. But Barney had a generous nature, and he saw that Marisa and Javier were as happy as he would allow them to be.

About the Author

Jill Bronfman writes about the future of humanity. Her novel Thanks for Meeting Me Here was the winner of the 2026 Keepers of the Fire Prize for Fiction from Raven Chronicles Press and was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Award. Among other awards for her fiction, essays, and poetry, Bronfman was one of 12 Aspiring Novelists Selected for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2025, and she was a Barnes & Noble National Essay Contest Grand Prize Winner. Her poetry chapbook, “Second Cities,” will be published in 2026. Her work has been accepted for publication in five collections and over thirty literary journals. Visit: www.jillbronfman.com