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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
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    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
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      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
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      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
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      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
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      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
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      • 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
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      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
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      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
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    • 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
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      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
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      • 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
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    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
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    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025

​Matthew Ostapchuk

They Built Suburbs on Boot Hill


When I heard that Billy the Kid was dead, had been for some time, I was concerned because last I’d checked he was still kicking, living next door to me. The neighborhood watch wasn’t happy with him. They had noticed the coyotes creeping in at his lawn’s edge. At midday the grass withered to brown; a distant bell tolled. Walking by his ancient stable, one could hear the blooded stallions, a clatter of hooves, could feel humid breath on the back of the neck. Nighttimes I heard gunshots, had complained to the police on more than one occasion. Billy came by the house one night not long ago, pounded on the back door until I stumbled over, just out of bed, groggy from a dream about the ocean. I opened the door; he lunged at me. I thought it was a knife in his hand at first, or a flounder, but realized after he collapsed, sobbing, that it was a tulip. He had been drinking. Confessed to me how terrified he was of becoming a sunset cowboy. When I heard he was dead I went to check. Where I remembered his house there was now a desert. I pricked myself on a cactus; a tumbleweed trailed past; a half-buried skeleton of a bison caught the wind, low-moaned through its eye sockets.
​

My Father: After Lightning


My father liked to tell me about the time he was struck by lightning and his body split into halves down the middle. Finally he saw himself without a mirror, experienced first hand the bent of his lips, the troubled quiver in his hand and eye, laid fingertips gingerly upon his half ’s cheek. He was vulnerable, opened intimate. He could see the cavity where his heart had once rested. He took a pinecone, filled the gaping hole. He began replacing the other organs: a stone for his liver, cicada shells for kidneys. He removed his tear ducts completely. He discarded his finger- and toenails. He discovered a flaking vellum scroll tucked around his spine, upon which all of his truths were written; let the wind breath life back into crumbling paper. He took out his mind, scrubbed it clean of memory in the river—lost hold of it in the flow of the river—sculpted one anew from the river’s loam. He told me how arduous it was to pull himself back together, to seal the wound, because it meant he would never again be able to know himself, always a broken whole.
​

The Boy Made of Mud

                                          
My grandmother told me he had been murdered by his father, a man given to bouts of paranoia, terrified his son was bedeviled because he could read poetry by the time he was six, enjoyed reciting lines of Eliot, how “April is the cruellest month.” The father had drowned his son in the river. My parents told me to disregard the mad ranting of my grandmother, but also to stay away from the boy. I didn’t listen, a child like all children, but instead started bringing the boy books of verse. Sometimes I would see him standing by the river—sometimes he wouldn’t be there. We were friends, or were at least as close as a boy of flesh and a boy of mud could be. I read him parts of Whitman, and he recited Ovid and Langston Hughes from memory, until one day I went down to the river after a spring rain and found only a mud puddle and a soggy page of Keats. My parents told me to stop concerning myself with trivialities; handed me a dense volume of collected instruction manuals and escapist prose.


Ode to a Star-Eyed Beauty


O, cherubic lubadub; you runamuck boy,
framed up by a pale plate-glass dawn, window cut—
all night-tame & rough-tussled; elegant & coy.

Last night, slackjawed by your hips, your halogen joy,
I watched you dance slipstreamed & sideways: sweet-ass strut
of a cherub, a heartthrob, a runamuck boy.

& this sorry sucker so luststruck, fawned (the ploy
of he besot with loinsfire & a wet dream’s rut:
a night-time of tussling rough—elysian, uncoy),

lazyeyed, bought you booze. These punch-drunk hands toyed
at your knuckles, your fingertips—this sauced fool stuck
on you, cherubic lubadub, runamuck boy.

—O sweet desire, you streetweaved back with me, buoyed
on my shoulder, lips dripping syrup notes. I cupped
you: hair all night-tame & rough-tussled, smiling coy.

Snuck upstairs, past sleeping ears & dark, to enjoy
a moment enraptured beneath dusk’s bedclothes, tucked
all night-tame & rough-tussled, elegant & coy,
me & this star-eyed beauty, my runamuck boy.


 

​
--
Matthew Ostapchuk is a graduate of Chester College of New England, and is currently pursuing his MFA at Hollins University. His work has also appeared or is upcoming in Insolent Aardvark, Interrobang!? Magazine, Specter Literary Magazine, and Best New Poets 2010, among others.

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  • Home
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    • Our Story
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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