artifice
art·ti·fice // clever or cunning devices or expedients, especially as used to trick or deceive others
The Bridge in Bronze by Eleanor Leone Bennett
contents
Brooklyn Magnitude
by Samantha mackertich
Glitter floods down and suffocates,
heels smear crayon maps on marble,
lights shiver and catch
onto feathers and skirts, church bells toll
to the pulsing music, everyone wants to be
here, but only a handful of feet trip
over each other. Bodies salivate and soak up
eveningwear puddles that ripple across
the floor. They call it the best
night of their lives, but toss back
shots. The make-up and sweat and chlorine
peel away, every layer raw as the last.
They’re not animals, they couldn’t be more
human; skin blue and eyes dripping to the floor.
And you flinched by lizzy sobiesk
When I wake up, I try to remember what you called the moon:
light shredded to confetti, the sun
an alcoholic angel with a halo around its neck.
I wait for the cooled lipstick stain to look like dried blood so that I can pretend
I'm in a fairytale you like—maybe
we can grow old trying to rub the need off of our thumbs.
I want to see you outside;
we can sit under our false sense of lamplight
and safety; it doesn't even have to
be at night for me to be okay (with you, with me)—
we could talk on the trampoline and I can use cough drops to cover my vomit breath,
so your little brothers don't notice how much has changed,
and you can pretend you don't notice either.
I'll make you tea and make fun of you for drinking it (you pretentious asshole, you);
we'll watch a movie and move just close enough
to make me feel conscious of every part of me, every limb,
(my cynical certainty becomes then but a circus freak show)
but I'll never know if you realize how I've stopped breathing.
Your eyes, haunted and fixed, will dig into the television screen.
quay west, salford quays
by eleanor bennett
Photography
when this poem is finished
by jonny wiles
When this poem is finished
it will fold in on itself
until it reaches this tipping
point of the third dimension.
When this poem is finished
it will become a text breasted
robin, or a swan with ampersand
eyes that might never blink,
and certainly it won’t sing or fly
south for the winter. But it’s tame
enough, and on warmer days will sit
comfortably on a branch or palm.
Honeycombed
by claire oleson
In the rivulets of red hair that crescendoed over Lacy’s shoulders, Elaine was entirely lost. She loved how the afternoon light kissed the auburn into an alloy of brass and gold. She liked to think it was music coming out, the glow strumming up inaudible operas along the lengths of red. Lacy’s freckles too, were part of that noise without sound, tiny sun-bruises scattered across milk. She wanted to try to name them all, just because she knew it couldn’t be done. She labeled them quietly when they sat together, giving the coffee-colored points little titles she’d forget five minutes later.
They found a dead bird one day, when they were walking back from their abnormal psychology course, a dead bird in the middle of the sidewalk. Lacy had lapsed into revery, astounded by the stillness of the avian corpse. Elaine was reverent as well, not for the bird, but for what the little death had done to that freckled face. She didn’t remember what species it was, even though once they were back in their room, Lacy had googled it with a fever in her fingers and shouted its name out, a blurred replacement for a memorial. Lacy remembered the name where Elaine only remembered the species of shock that had bloomed in Lacy’s eyes.
There were times when the mess hall was full and loud and leaking with laughter and Elaine wished that it could be empty. All she wanted was a place where she could sit and watch the red-haired girl be without the interruptions of other people’s walking bodies. Sometimes she dreamed that she had no inhibitions, that she could stand up and tell everyone to leave, and that they would understand, because they knew it was worth the evacuation to allow her a better view of Lacy and her hair.
In the pockets of time they did have alone, Elaine was too weighted down by doubt and terror to say anything out of the ordinary. She feared that if she ever did say anything true, really true, those cacophonous locks would just drown her out. One time, she’d looked at Lacy with real eyes, hoping that where her voice fell short of brave, her pupils might pick up the slack. Lacy just giggled and told her she looked a little crazy, not getting how many neurons were sending emotional postage through her head or how much time she’d need to recover from all that looking. It was her own fault, she knew, for being silent and hoping that the potently beautiful compilation of another person’s consciousness would notice her unexpressed affections. But still, this did nothing to ease the ache of wanting to name every freckle.
One night, in late November, Lacy came in with a jar of honey under her arm. Their room was dark but the hall lights were on and the honey took the fluorescent gleam and sung a little yellow hymn through the glass. Elaine had wanted to jump up from her bed and extend a shaking finger to the jar and scream, “There! There, that color, that light, that’s how I feel!” But instead she just turned over in her sheets and feigned sleep. She listened to the tiny crunching of Lacy eating saltines in the dark with miniature honey choirs dappled over them. After Lacy put the box away, Elaine wanted to applaud, to thank her for the music that couldn’t be heard and the soft-crunching performance of ingesting sodium and sucrose. But she just stayed with her back turned to the other bed and tried to hear the fading breaths of the lovely human.
In the morning she saw the jar of honey, the lid half-on and contoured with a few sticky traces of fingerprints. Lacy saw her watching, and thinking she was looking at the honey, told her she could have some.
Virgen de guadeloupe
by noah s. thompson
Photography
Before the redemption
by samantha mackertich
With pastel pumps and parasols
open under cathedral ceilings,
a white dress can dab a bloody lip.
Heels meet cobblestone meet marble.
If she’d known about the rain,
she would’ve worn her trousers.
Men call, but she never turns.
They are her children;
she almost pities them as she sweeps
past and twists the ring ‘round her
finger ‘til it slides loose. How much
does a diamond sell for these days?
Her manicured fingertips scratch
at straps and pull at the corset laces.
Scissors meet braids meet pearls.
She is whole and unrefined
as her skirts slip across her thighs—
vows are empty after a night.
cutout
by jonny wiles
It is cardboard with air
running through at the chest:
oh-two cross-sectioned.
Propped up at the beltline,
a burgeoning half-inch
thick, dolled up in print:
tall walled with a jumper
or skirt. Its hands can only
grow and shrink where its copy
would move if it needed you
or reached out to stop or catch.
Moving from window to window,
breathing as far as it lets air
in, leaving traces of a moment
of space behind it. It does almost
everything. It’s almost enough
to jolt into a purchase or a wither
or a knotted moment of giving
more than it takes: stepping on its
paper toe, and watching it walk.
soak
by eleanor bennett
Photography
I’m seeing jesus in codeine
by lizzy sobiesk
When I'm in the morning limelight, I freeze—
I have no excuses for what I've become.
I'm ballooned, swollen,
I'm sweltering sadness for a camera that I don't want to look into.
And I think about what could be a galaxy or
a black hole that is impossible to understand,
you'll get lost in forever, and I wonder if I’m in hell.
God was a drunkard who made up bad nursery rhymes for kids,
eyes look like small nebulas.
God went to church wearing a coral, cake-shaped derby hat. Snickering
about Sue Anne's pregnant teenage daughter.
God's something sweet—something melancholic and alone—
and the people who watch absentmindedly,
but speak loudly make sour, scrunchy faces at me, at my friends
patting me on the back, at the water tracks on my face
and I understand.
Who's to say if I'm really anyone at all?
mirrored feathers
by noah s. thompson
Photography
mayfly kiss
by samantha mackertich
I lick the mayflies from her lips,
let the wings catch in the crooks
of my teeth and buzz until
my tongue is numb. My palate
shapes the word into a hand-
shake as my name stales—toothpaste
crusted on the sink. I leave her
hanging. She turns on the tap.
She prods the pockets of my throat
with a narrow finger and pinches
my prepared speeches. I beg
her to press harder, snap
the cords, stain my teeth
a rusted, cracked red that bursts
up and out of my veins.
She licks the insects from her lips.
I had thought she would have
waited, I cannot say I will.
I let the wings of her mayflies linger
and dissolve into the cuts in my cheeks.
vitality
by eleanor leone bennett
Photography
the pink hat and its strings attached
by melody barnard
I'll have you know, I trusted him.
Most completely, in utter faith
from the most insolent corners
I straightened out my snark
and leapt with over a hundred percentage
riding in the front seat of my heart
I could have sent letters more pristine
to describe my faith. I would have written everything in ink
and submitted the scratchings before
they even dried, they wouldn't have dared smear, nor drool, nor even
spittle on the most elegant strokes
of my mighty handiwork, for it was
in all ways, in 360 degrees, confident.
...
But there was this hat, you understand? I had never laid eyes upon it before, but from the breeze of fate, it soared and gently settled in
on my thoughts.
It came not from myself, it could not have,
I assure you, not from myself.
But it did slightly hover down on
the causal couchness of my daily ramblings...
And if you had glanced at it,
I'm sure you'd see what I saw!
The threads over and in
and outwards pulling inwards
binding strong now, but loose
and all in a passing straight in its individual place,
yet everywhere else, I confess.
...
I got dizzy in the flur and blur
Oo sense and dimes and dollars
I could have sworn I saw the headwear gleam and glimmer!
It grew slimmer and slimmer
and it turned, folding over itself
with Origami edges, with creases
and eagerly sweaty-palmed even in the most inwards flaps, and under and over
and into
a doubt.
And once there is doubt,
There is nothing left.
The catastrophically confident car had
crashed.
Because of that hat,
and the most singular individual
who owned it.
Blush by Eleanor Leone Bennett
Photography