Lauren Stanzione

My mother is setting down the blue canister of flour, white bleeding into my sleeve as I sop up the dust I’ve spilled. She is smiling and the light catches her eyes, ones I’ve always wished she gave me: golden rings, flying blue saucers floating in peridot. Enigma eyes.

This is like my mother, who in her own way has no secrets and many. Today I am sitting around the island, our island of skeletons, and I am pulling her strings, opening her so she will tell me about the past, one I promised as a child I would write for her.

She is telling me about the lump on her throat when we were one person. It was like a ghost, methodically pulling at the delicate, thin skin on her neck. It was a ghost, and I summoned it as it lay barren within her. I try not to think of the notes she would be able to sing if I could have derived from some other time and place.

My eyes are pulled to the red exclamation mark that hugs her skin, the specks of crimson against faint hues of tawny. Pain rolls through my esophagus when I think of the incision. I look away.

My mother begins unfolding the story of the bump along her neck; she begins one along the outskirts of her mind. She is telling me about a waiting room, about a placental hemorrhage and a world where we both had fallen into the void, where I would have been a cell or two and she would have left a baby and a man.

Later, when I am lying in the safety of my childhood bed, I write down six words:

I AM MEANT TO BE HERE.

About the author
Lauren Stanzione is a graduate of North Hunterdon High School and a future student at New York University, where she plans to major in journalism and minor in creative writing. She is from Clinton, New Jersey, and has dreamed of being a writer her entire (so far short) life. She hopes to funnel her interest in writing either through a journalistic or creative avenue, depending on where the world takes her!

Lauren Stanzione

In Little Italy
I buy a book: Living Italian
falling through pages,
I search for myself
down the spine.
Matt sends me pictures
cacio e pepe
he uncovers
our blood
plasma in parmesan
the only part
of our world
I see myself in. 

Women on the street:
their hair sways like gentle linguini
eyes water against sicilian shores
skin pale as flour lathered on dough
they are thin, orderly
like the tip of the boot,
foreign mutterings in my canals.
La donna
Our fingertips
dance across the ceiling
The Creation of Adam
I reach out
where is Eve?
did Michelangelo
forget how
to paint?

I breathe in pages,
imploring them to whisper
between the folds of my brain.
grazie ciao prego
words of
zucchero on my tongue
tu sei una ragazza
LEI NON APPARTIENE
the green cover
stains my mela verde tongue
with proper Italianness-
listerine
the english on my breath
untangle
the women I
can’t fit inside
arrivederci Lorena!

I write my grandmother
ama l’ignoto
love the unknown
she tells me
she’s never heard
Italian spun
so beautifully.

As I walk home
I think of my mother
our blood boils
the same 37.777°C
our kitchen
the thermosphere
beyond our walls
the mesosphere,
liquid ice
on earth.
She shivers, telling me
go Lauren Rose!
Go!
Italian girls
need
Italian women.

I fly to the top
of the Vatican
cracking open
a dome
of goldy heaven
collecting fistfuls
of light
between my webs
I watch home&unhome,
dimensions of Lauren
the arches
and ridges
of my architecture
silk
against my palms

I tell myself:

AMA L’IGNOTO
Italian girls
need
you, Lauren.

About the author
Lauren Stanzione is a graduate of North Hunterdon High School and a future student at New York University, where she plans to major in journalism and minor in creative writing. She is from Clinton, New Jersey, and has dreamed of being a writer her entire (so far short) life. She hopes to funnel her interest in writing either through a journalistic or creative avenue, depending on where the world takes her!

Carolyn Phillips

He sits in massive bronze repose
the flowing cape he wore at Yalta
hides the well-kept secret

Eleanor in sensible shoes
her coat collar awry
smiles slightly

Fala watches patiently,
his tousled bangs golden
from persistent petting

Segal’s plaster men
hunched with resignation
slouch toward a soup kitchen

And granite blocks
piled one on one recall his words
as waterfalls plummet into pools.

An old man leans heavily on a cane
and climbs the steps to touch his hand

About the author
Carolyn (CAT) Phillips, a resident of Mercer County, is a retired teacher of English. She has enjoyed publication in several journals, both local and national. She twice won a contest for ekphrastic poems describing sculptures at Grounds for Sculpture in NJ She convenes a group of poetry lovers at a local senior center.

Wanda Praisner

After a bad practice fall,
she’s back on a tightrope,
says on TV she’s a bit nervous,
practices every day with her brother—
they’ve done the Grand Canyon,
Las Vegas—coming up: Times Square.
I like that she wears false eyelashes
for the coverage. Nice.

You’ve got to keep it all going.
I’m up there with her, pole-balancing—
not where I’d like to be,
afraid of heights and all—
but where my love in his dementia is
these last long four years,
as I learn to not lean to either side
too much, the need for patience,

a belief it will get better, one foot
placed carefully in front of the other,
feeling my way, wary of wind—
I, no high-wire artist, no bearer
of a 200 year wire-walk legacy,
who must get to the other side
without getting to the end of my rope.
She broke every bone in her pretty face.

About the author
Wanda Praisner, a resident poet for the state, is the recipient of the Egan Award, Princemere Prize, Kudzu Award, First Prize in Poetry at the College of NJ Writers’ Conference, and the 2017 New Jersey Poets Prize. She appears in Atlanta Review, Lullwater Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her sixth collection is To Illuminate the Way (2018).

Amelia deGuzman

I wrote in those strange first few days
After. Time crystallized and fractured
And her absence poured in, slowly exploding.
It floated like smoke coating everything with
An ash of bone chalky white

I wrote it in that blank space
Those first few days after she died
It was easy to write –
Dates places people left behind.
What little life I tried to put into it
Was gratitude and irreverence:
I was writing to remind her
I was trying to make her laugh

About the author
Amelia deGuzman is a writer and spoken-word poetry performer, as well as a multimedia visual artist. After a decade-long gap in her education, she returned Mercer County Community College in the Spring of 2020, where she is a student of liberal arts, and the founder of Your Stories literary magazine. Her work has been published in MCCC’s The College Voice and featured with Trenton’s JKC Gallery.

Stevie Voss

“All of life happens in 26 lines,” he says, voice matter of fact but still sincere. 

“But that’s so short,” I say, the air in my chest exits like my rib cage is a building on fire.

“Count that too, only 23 left,” he says not to me but to the ceiling. 

“Don’t speak, maybe we can wait it out,” I lay my head on his bare chest and pull him close.

“Everything ends, even the things we don’t start, our electrons are constantly in motion.” Frozen in place, I stare at him in the dark, suddenly aware of his existence in a way I hadn’t been before.

“Go on, say something,” he requests.

“How?” I ask, searching for a line from Austen or Shakespeare about how to love someone that can never truly be yours. Just borrowed. Kind of like an overdue library book. Like the longer I have him, the more it will cost me in the end.

“Maybe if you loved me less, you could talk about it more,” he says to the ceiling again. 

“Now there’s only 14 lines left” I say after a few minutes, unsure of how to say what I really want to.

Of course he knows what I mean and just says, “I love you too.” Pulling the covers up over my head, I turn away from him and wait. Queerly, he wraps his arms around me. Reluctantly, I pretend to hate it because it is easier. Silently, I wish it would never end.

The darkness of the room envelopes me, I decide it’ll be best if I don’t look at him. Usually that’s the worst part of goodbye: the look on someone’s face when they realize it’s truly over. Vanishing from their life, fossilized as the look on your face the last time they see you.

We sit quietly in each other’s arms when the end begins. X marks the spot where I feel his arms loosen around my waist. Yawning, I feel myself begin to drift. Zealously, the air in my chest exits like my rib cage is a building on fire.

About the author
Stevie Voss is an emerging writer from Manchester Township, New Jersey. Previously, they have been published in The Ekphrastic Review and accepted in the Scarlet Leaf Review. Their work explores queer romance with influences from Greek mythology, young adult fiction, and graphic novels. When not writing, Stevie is a student at Mercer County Community College majoring in Education. More information on their writing can be found on their social media, @Justtstevie.

Michael Griffith

we approach the bench, the gate,
that deep end of life. Lady J’s blind.
Lady J’s deaf. Her taste is off.
This stink is hers. It touches
all the way ‘round nooses and needles,
lethal viral vaxxer mask optional
super-size binge-watch blood-splatter
the lyric cop-killer WAP whip. TikTok
tic tic tic tic…

About the author
Michael A. Griffith teaches at Mercer County and Raritan Valley Community Colleges in central NJ. His three chapbooks are New Paths to Eden, Bloodline, and Exposed. Recent works have appeared in Kelsey Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, North of Oxford, Page & Spine, and Haiku Journal.

Michael Griffith

For Kathi Paluscio

Lights off, door locked—
The classroom is so still.
Rows of faceless desks, their
empty seats would absorb no sound.
Only red ambient from the EXIT sign
and the stale carpet’s pale odors remain
in her vacant classroom.

                        .

An echo like lark’s song, a shadow,
then a bustle of colors, that swirl of sound
she was, that gust of energy and joy and
words only echo now, only ripples.
The lessons she shared ripple out,
touch beyond her reach, still. Her
classroom now someone else’s.

                        .

The classroom now alive. Voices
fill its air and new sounds pattern.
A spring, a summer, fall, still.

About the author:
Michael A. Griffith teaches at Mercer County and Raritan Valley Community Colleges in central NJ. His three chapbooks are New Paths to Eden, Bloodline, and Exposed. Recent works have appeared in Kelsey Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, North of Oxford, Page & Spine, and Haiku Journal.

Dave Olson

About the artist

Dave Olson has been a construction worker, a school bus driver, a student, and a teacher. He is in his 22nd year in the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District where he works as a special educator. He is married and has two grown sons, and his family is everything. He has had drawings published in the Kelsey Review.

Dave Olson

About the artist

Dave Olson has been a construction worker, a school bus driver, a student, and a teacher. He is in his 22nd year in the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District where he works as a special educator. He is married and has two grown sons, and his family is everything. He has had drawings published in the Kelsey Review.