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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
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      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025

Joey Kingsley

On 33 West


The likelihood of transforming matter into energy is something akin
to shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds.
                                                                                                                                 —Einstein


In the left lane: two men in the cab of a jacked-up truck
speed. The thin sliver of their side mirror tilts
& I see an orange hat bobbing like a dented apple,
five-o’clock shadow, the edge of a jaw, one cheek drooped
like a hound’s. We’ve been following them for a mile
when I notice the deer’s coarse hair ruffled in the whoosh
like grass matted in a wet yard, & the hooves hooked,

like the elegant ankles of a bride scooped up at the threshold,
over the handles of the mud-splattered four-wheeler in tow.


The buck is closer than he appears. Limp, the slender body
caves, a kind of surrender without surrender. How often
have I longed to be ferried through cold that shears
like the revolving barrel of the tractor’s blades in hay season?
Last week, skidding on wet leaves, I flew off my bike

into a parked car. The thing about bodies
is that they break, in time, night pressing in: the mirror
severed from the car’s door before the upper lip even registers
concrete or its nerves drive the brain to adrenaline.


It’s a fact that starlight bends around the sun like a ring
around a finger, a mountain’s switchback, the onyx icing
the eyes of the deer. November: more blue, less bark. Distances
are greater. The truck veers toward the exit, a golf ball sailing
over the freeway, and we lose them, the dead animal gone
into a blind spot behind a curve in the trees. They want
freezer bags of meat, a rough coat, the antlers’ glazed rivers,
the deer that won’t run into a clearing, a perfect shot, & later,
even upside down, strung from a tree with its split hooves
tied like a body bag, or a bag of corn meal, or a brown sack
of red potatoes, will swing a dead weight. The radio
blares a pop song. There are so many ways to pray.
We can gaze into gray into blue into purple
approaching the red-stained hill, the horizon vaster & smaller,
our lives shrunk down to the exact. At some point,

we get to leave. There is big space. We kill
& are killed, our stupid mouths half-open.
The tongue is a clause. It stops.




Early Arrival to a Beheading


Before me, a book of Flemish art: Samson, heroic & asleep,
             & his lover, her breasts shattering into stars above him,


                          two moons snoring through Eternity
                                            on a chaise, two armed guards at the bedroom door
as she cradles his head.
                                            As if he were a swan instead of a man,


                          for a purse of coins, bluish silver, Delilah sharpened
             the blade of the servant who, blended in shadows

                                            & the signatures of rain, filed a dirk

             into his hair like a slide, seven microscopic strokes,
one for each lock razored loose,

                                            the hand’s desire to render him Baroque
             too strong for the brush that held it back,

                                                                        speaking to the scissors in Light.

                                                                              *


Sweep it up: yesterday a stack of records slid across the table
                          into a blue, dahlia-patterned bowl that torpedoed

into the floor, a lake of green tea glittering crystal
                          on the red Coca-Cola cup that had just held it,

                                                                        the day fallen & steaming.

But here, our severance gathers, in nests,
                                            under chairs, & into a field of splinters
that the apprentice brushes into an anthill of kindling.


                          It was the charm of a gesture drowning
in the charmlessness of the body
, Kundera says, where I sit
             in the salon anticipating my summons.


                                            Four months ago, sweaty & tired, I stepped
from the brittle light into this bright interior of mirrors—

                                                        gilt faces, swivel seats & wash basins,
             the black holes where people lose their heads.


                                                                              *
Absolute freedom: the body charmed out of its skin & moonlight
             filtering in through the ribs of the dark,
                                       a lofty guide toward some kind of subjectivity.


In kindergarten: my father drove us to pick up
             my mother from her work at The Paper. A bullet’s clawed

scratching worried the wall of the passenger-side door,

                          the trunk duck-taped for the ride to the newsroom
where ice cream’s éclairs, frozen shavings,

             fell out of plastic wrappers like death threats opened
over the sink, licked shut by the crooked              fingers
                                                                                       that load the traps.

                                                                              *


But in the old myths, a batch of poison calls for the fat of a redhead
             & only mistletoe cut with a golden sickle & caught

                                          in a white cloak saves the afflicted from death.
             Combing my hair this morning, the hydrogen bonds


knotted like a fence & denied all entrance,
                              the alpha helices in a single strand twisted like roped ladders

in each thin elastic body, a fibrous cortex,
                              roofing mathematical braids over skin.


                                                                              *

And in my lap now: Samson who razed a temple’s columns,

                                           about to be shorn. The first shadow following trust
is a cuticle of doubt, my name scrawled
                                                                      in The Book of Appointments like a fistful
             of crabgrass persisting between footsteps, all faltering.


Self-Portrait with Phantom Limb & Vintage Revolver


And what is this? On the corner of Laurel & China
             I lift a moth’s rich brown & doily markings

so its feelers, the smooth limbs of a stunned dancer,

suggest an origami fortune catcher where it lies
             in my hand, nine muscles in the hook of my thumb
contracting to maneuver the small puzzle of bones


in my wrist into a cup that offers little more
             than the memory of ghost-flutter. And my life?
I see it as a bullet stuck in the chamber


of a vintage revolver I bargained down
             to a third of the price. How tenuous these hands,
whose whorled patterns the color of parsnips


now ruffle the injured wing--
             a pleated skirt torn like a shadow book,

lit & already yellowing from within—

so it folds back into itself & collapses. They hold
             whatever they can find: even my skull

blooming like a fistful of red berries flung over snow,

a few bright interludes of trumpet between
             talk-radio muffled by running water.

Why must the old faucet continue to drip?

Once, scientists believed that unpredictable pain
             in patients missing limbs was a fabrication of the mind
& for decades no one knew why someone missing


his left hand could feel fingernails digging
             into a palm where none existed. And for years
what was left unresolved grew into an ache


of nerves separated from their endings. And it
             must be that our knowledge of what is missing
beats the body into hearing its own limitations,


a vernacular annunciated by absence so the mouth
             that in telling its secret
, as da Vinci insists,

places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener

like a limb that tries to speak but is lost
             & thus eternally present—a bullet that won’t discharge,
the other end of the line silenced now as a revolver


that houses multiple chambers,
             a series of selves that spins inside
the single cylinder of its hard body without release.



The Weight


Over the pea plants, Mendel guessed that if two
chromosomes touch, one bold strand crosses its leg
over the other. I used to believe that when I grew up,
I’d change back. Standing around a pool table in that old
neighborhood, I remembered the lesson. When I learned
to play, the man said
hold the cue like a friend, not like
you’re trying to own it
. From my dead uncle I learned
so many shots go missing that our inevitable vanishing
seems always to be on the brink of vanishing. In Church Hill,
from the stump of a beheaded crepe myrtle in the front yard
another tree grows—not the same tree, but wildness returned,
crooked life with tender buds. I woke up to the alarm:
the incessant cricketing of a broken smoke detector.


I replaced the battery & from the stump of the lizard’s
tail, exposed muscles braid over bone so that new skin
emerges a different color. There are small scales: sand & grit,
a voice that runs through water, rises from the belly like steam,
the body being so filled with want. Beep, beep: a man’s voice
on the message machine was tight, normal & downstairs
my mother screamed his name before I left for school.
Not because my father swung at her or missed the barn
catching a gulf in flames on a hill, but because His name
is the lonely she loves & my aunt’s husband was dead
on their honeymoon. My aunt also was dead & for years
he was everywhere she was not. In fact, she’s still not
where he is. This is how the soul empties itself & floats.


Listening to Billie Holiday, her voice drags silk over
gravel & glass. Because I want someone to hear me this way,
let’s pretend the soul holds a basket of broken eggs.
Yolks lost, the shells blade-thin are dressed in film that’s
dried on the calcium’s EKG. Across town, a train
howls the edge of a field—the narrowest causeways
of desire, back alleys stamped to death on chicken bones
& cigarettes. Tomorrow, I’ll scrub the walls & sing my mother’s
song, her freckled hands inside mine.
Soft-Scrub bleaches
flecks in those crevices—perfect corners, eggs & sheets fitted

for buoyancy, fight. Once, I lived in a house where downstairs,
a couple made love & in spite of brick walls, I heard them,
shrink to the size of a pea, quiet & light as its green weight
held in the hand, and cross each other over. Mendel, you bred
a hybrid strand of bees so vicious they had to be destroyed.





--
Joey Kingsley is an instructor in the English department at the University of Mary Washington. She received her MFA in creative writing (poetry) from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025