HEAVEN
Hey! that's my boy in jeans /
by river by the /
lake the water /
the fishes the /
special gas station
Look to the Starfish
The Mexican tetra fish is an anomaly. While some river-dwelling tetras are able to regenerate their heart tissue, cave-dwelling tetras only grow scar tissue over the damage. My heart goes out to the cave-dwelling fish. Some of us can only do our best to survive the damage.
Meditation on Maternal Forgiveness
You had never been taught why you had a belly button. Now you understand that your navel is the physical scar of your expulsion from your mother’s body.
The State of Cinema
There are no more blonde women with red lipstick left to walk slick cobblestones alone. The run in her stocking says that the wars have ended. An old man wipes a soiled handkerchief across his brow, smiles at nothing.
It’s Snowing
It’s snowing and I look at him and he looks so sweet with all the white in his hair. It’s snowing and we almost get into a physical altercation
Teacher who is a Mother who is a Teacher
Teacher who sits through active shooter training in the auditorium and is told to examine her classroom for projectiles to throw at a shooter.
Teacher who practices throwing a stapler in her empty classroom.
Teacher who buys a new stapler because the old one broke after she threw it just one time.
Appointments
Someday, she says, the light of other stars will be too far away to reach us. There won’t be enough time left in the universe. And the Earth will be gone then, long gone, but if it wasn’t you could watch. You could watch as each of those little pinpricks of light went out.
Dreaming in Wine Country
This dream is a teenaged revision of terrestrial bodies /
that do not harm. Our eyelids like foldaway flowers. My heart like a
gosling I follow /
expecting your mouth pulling north.
The Sadness Factory
Still, tomorrow the mud /
will evaporate dust back into the sky & the moon /
will be a pill & catch on the throat of the horizon, /
& this helps no one.
IN THE AUTUMN OF MY SECRECY
The people that loved me /
made me lentils and rice, sat with me /
in the quiet that held space like a /
coat around me.
Northbound Highway 101
The two humans stepped closer to one another. The way it would all unfold from here was a foregone conclusion.
There’s something called time
& I will soon fly to meet you in a city
where the seasons are made lazy
by latitude, meaning we will not yet
know each other’s bodies in winter.
Natural Laws
Now we realize. We’ve spent decades trying to undo our ecological handiwork, our scaling up, but at least we have the silk everything: silk blouse, silk pants, silk gloves, silk scarf, the prized silk slip cut on the bias.
self-portrait as a boy languaging through fragmental spaces
the truth is/ my mother still tongues
your name at night/
but no language can translate you back to life.
Squirrelly Girl
It seems as if you’re the only thing alive for miles.
Growing Pains
When Ma burned herself feeding a needle into an open flame, she cursed in her mother tongue, the language of mountains: a lifeline I would choose to loosen.
Return
"My father is long dead, and I was / faithful to the last. Still, postcolonial / that I am, I have built my own myth / of departure,"
found under mother’s bed
"one end adorned by rhinestone and sparkle. the other open."
7-Eleven
"My mother’s lament: four girls, but the little one will not eat her food."
Cheongsam Woman, Still Trapped in the Forties
"Finders keepers, losers weepers — the cliché was true here."
a sonnet is a lot like that apartment we shared
"because memories get written into corners / and a room has way more corners than a person"
“Waiting in Bed” and “Eternal”
". . . very good."
Lieric
"Why listen to God of Definitions, anyway? It's you and me who have the power here."
Babyland
"Mom says if I’m a dragon I’ve got fire enough in me to make the beaches here warm, so maybe I should share more. I haven’t thought of a good come back yet."
Rituals
"That’s how / it works— / whichever hand / wrecks the largest / bit of bone / wins / the right to wish."
Kathmandu, are we heart broken?
I am angry. You had no right to seize our peace. What right did you have to destroy…
Tree Rings, Gutted
"(I’m trying to apologize to the trees.) (I’m trying not to let the rings be parenthetical to the story.) (The rings make the story.) (I’m here to study the story.)"
The Observer Effect
"One day, much later, I learned that life was just too plain for him. He had to squeeze and shape it like clay, until he felt it was something worth living."
Measuring Memory
"I think it’s a gas, / or a vapor, or the dust / swept up from the front / of a corner store—"
Tender Hoof
"Of course, I knew what was wrong with all of this: the cows were lonely."
So Says the Admiral
"The Lord of that land would give him all he wanted. The Admiral asked for anything as if receiving a great favour."
It Must Have Been
"They trusted us with the money, why not the keys too? There was no one around except the ghosts."
The Canyon
"Showing me the chicken wishbones she carried in her pockets for good luck, breaking them into halves of a full moon to make a wish."
Circadian Rhythm
Image credit: Marius Dzialek
Something to Stand On
1. Your veins show through, the skin softens and puckers, a pink wrinkly bud. Folding in the middle,…
MTV News: A Letter To Jonathan Melvoin
"You had to go and die that summer. You were all MTV could talk about. We didn’t come here for this. "
Assistant to the Magician
"Naked bulbs are strung over the bar. It makes me feel romantic, in the way that only old, broken things can."
Side View of House, Winter
"perhaps his camera sought the places / mine were banal / where hyacinths bloomed / of his hopes or nostalgias"
The Wayback Playlist – Fall 2022
A playlist to accompany our fall 2022 Wayback issue, crafted and curated by issue contributors and Longleaf Review staff.
When I Lived with the Witch
"Sometimes she asked what her name was. Or how we’d gotten to the forest. But she never forgot who I was."
Drink
"My mother would not rest in her grave if she knew I’d soon be drinking what they drink, but I’ve given up so much to move all the way here for a better future."
The Disarticulation of a Fern
“Crowned by the overgrown foliage, heralded by trumpeting rosefinches, I sit. Wait.”
Light Red Over Black
"She was a repressed woman and didn’t cry or laugh or smile. Instead, she possessed a tendency to sigh."
Splendor
"What the Palmers failed to understand is that Splendor isn’t like other neighborhoods — those neighborhoods Out There."
Little Red’s Revenge
"Every path I took, there you were. Beside. Behind. Ahead. You were everywhere."
Sometimes Luck
“‘Haste ye back,’ the children say to day-tripping families on their August holidays while the adults smile, nod and wave. ‘Join us in December for Crab Grab.’”
NIX
“Despite the water’s darkness, they caught glimpses of a strange, shimmering fish’s tail below her waist. ”
Capture/Exposure
"She wouldn’t cook. She had no desire to work. She said there were too many things hunting her."
In Helsingør Cemetery
“Together the gravediggers got down and began to dig deeper. The dirt began to sing.”
Track / Stream
"The jealousy permeating our college quickly morphed into resentment, a simmering stew of indignant glances and stiff smiles, laid thicker than the summer the air conditioning leaked."
On the Market
“Access to attic via hatch and descending wooden ladder. We recommend ignoring this (please, ignore this). . . .”
Wolf Cries
“Father said that a wolf was bad enough, but a wolf witch needed to be set alight in a grave of flames.”
13 Nights of Horror: The Playlist
A playlist to accompany our fall 2022 mini-issue, crafted and curated by issue contributors and Longleaf Review staff. Get spooky!
sunlight falling across a void
"my name / appears like an angel: / speaking in distorted / & lost hymns, too loud to truly hear."
Rancho Las Tinajas
"I’d filmed a western once in the desert, and I see plant after plant I recognize but don’t know the name of."
Soot and Concrete
"naked and tentative, a bridge across the lake. / I submerged down into the water. / until I was floating just above the bottom."
Two Letters To My Uncle, c/o Willowbrook State School
"I wonder which image you would have liked more: a peaceful canopy of ash leaves under the skin, or the marks of a dozen spears."
No One Will Tell Lena
"No one will tell my cousin Lena how her father died."
3 Snellen Charts
"In Too Bright Light"; "What Can You Say"; "Learn to Speak"
The Ablution
"Let the soil and grit dissolve into the saltwater, clouds of milky brown mud dissipating into each swell of the sea."
Object Permanence
"I am old enough now to have seen it happen again, / to know we are always dying / little deaths:"
Sundays with Carolyn
"People were crying more than they used to, but they still needed to go about their lives for the sake of the economy."
Aubade for Eye Doctors
"I / soul-search into corners / that cannot do the / possible ask."
The Year of Minnie
"But there is something particularly adorable about senior dogs. They look sad and tired yet tinged with delight, much like how I feel, tinged with how I always wish I felt."
Dear Casey Kasem. In the decant of Thursday nothing comes early.
"have you ever felt this heavy? like last night was a shore. and you’re seaweed."
Noodle Shop
"You doused your noodles in chili sauce to clear your clogged sinuses, and your ankle was hanging over the edge of the bed, careless and gentle, the tendons relaxed, the soft hollow of skin like stone smoothed out."
Status: Unknown
"the first news report reports the government’s apathy. the second just says 'citizen.'”
Learning to Drive: A Fat Abecedarian
"Prey would be smarter than this. When has a predator ever been dissuaded by a turned back?"
Nondisclosure by J[ ] R[ ]
"I was alone I can’t / tell you [ ] / made me feel I can’t tell you"
Beetlemania!!!
"I closed my eyes and caught a whiff of Aiko’s Dove anti-dandruff shampoo. For a second, the idea that my absence hurt her too filled me with a bestial joy, then faded to pain at the idea of her pain."
chang’e, the liar
"nothing but teardrop comets; tell her i taste her sticky rice, tell her i remember: / her silken-sleeve ribbons, her bamboo biscuits"
Waving, Not Drowning
"This is what also delights: the stripe on the bottom of the pool, the stripes on the side of my suit, the snap of the rubber cap, my spine snapping into the turn, my feet snapping at the wall."
Dalgona 달고나
"With that, the video ends, breaking the spell before I can taste the sugar on my tongue, before I can take a scorching sip of tea."
Counting Stairs
"On the desk pencils are scattered. A laptop rests half open, the current tab on the internet opened to a WikiHow article about resurrection ceremonies. An unopened envelope lays on the desk, addressed to you."
Abecedarian Perplexed by Desire
"So I try / mimicking what my mother did. Endure. Never say / never, I learn."
In the City of Flying Trumpets
I wish I could tell you exactly when they’ll appear. They used to come with the sunrise every morning, shouting their flourish into the skies, a salute like something you’d hear at an Olympic opening ceremony:
After Great Sleep
I (my whole body) am stepping out from behind cracked glasses and welcoming the big box of wheels rolling over the road
Praise
Mahogany board by swelling board
sits still on a hill between
yellow birch. The dogs down the road
sing to each other, while a dead calf
It’s Not Over Until You Leave His Animal Crossing Island
If I took all of them and placed them in a sifter, and shook, then tapped the sides to separate the smallest sources of pain from the largest, I don’t know what would fall and what would remain.
The Motivations of a Hibachi Chef
He flung the hibachi spatula in the air, twirling it, catching it behind his back. Tossed a shrimp tail into my t-shirt pocket. Poor shrimp.
Poem Beginning with a Line from Paige Lewis
And when I walked by / the chicken coop, reader, / the chickens walked me home. / One got loose with her three chicks
Sleepless Night #113, A wineglassful of martyrdom
A wineglassful of martyrdom was duty but wandering, wild, and fiery, was nice cold water,
Determination
Beneath translucent lids, its eyes were purple hull peas. Directly above, the nearest branches were much too high to reach, so we filled the shoebox with grass and twigs.
In Praise of the Moon and Earth As Tidally Locked Bodies in Synchronous Rotation
And you love the sound / a fresh pad makes when you peel / off the wax paper, unwrap it / like a birthday present, the one / you asked for.
transitive erasures
Testosterone Cypionate Injection, USP
name
[an image here of the testosterone cypionate molecule]
available in two,
each
Heat Harvest
The fire, then: orange-red, orange-yellow, orange-blue, just blue. Colors like threadbare sheets pinned to a line, and blowing.
A Girl Just Wants to Have Fun
She understands now. How appealing it is to blow up your life.
10 Wounds in Which I Was Born
I thought I was born blue / the way my hands looked / pressed against the inside / of a blue-glass jar.
Best Intentions
The people that wore the hats didn’t see the birds when they lived. They didn’t know that their bodies never bent that way.
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON ON BALSAM AVENUE.
i am lost in the daze of my grandfather’s friday fish and whipped cream on dessert. i’m not sure he recognizes me most days, but still he clutches my hand and tells me he loves me.
The Vacation
She hasn’t kissed anyone for seven years, and though with Diane she doesn’t feel the same electric desire coursing through her body that she had felt for the men she’d been with romantically in years past, she feels something. Something she didn’t know she could feel. Something she still hasn’t named.
The Joy Playlist – Winter 2022
A playlist to accompany our winter 2022 Joy issue, crafted and curated by issue contributors and Longleaf Review staff.
Nine of Hearts
I always thought she looked best, healthiest, happiest, when she was in a tank top and the
dirty baggy jeans we swapped back and forth until they fell completely apart, a joint in her
mouth and an axe in her hands, splitting firewood for a winter that she probably wouldn’t end up
sticking around for.
House of Cards
you let victory linger / in your mouth until you forget its taste, /remember its shape.
Even This Place Once Had a Mother
Now that the car I was made in is gone, I wonder what will happen to me.
Schedule Snafu at the Cultural Center
We could be your favorite place in the city, a still monument to ground that’s always shifting.
Woman-Body for Patriarchy
Bend down / and reach / through / the dark hole. / You’ve won:
Love Potions
“You’re wrong,” he finally said. “There’s no hell. Today is all we have.” The man blinked twice, then walked away shaking his head, a small man carrying on his shoulder the weight of a world without redemption.
bisect:ual
isn’t it queer being queer / queer in that you search to find one’s / self
Do or Don’t or Do
You take your son home to California with you for visits and one day your son peels you like the tangerines in your parents’ yard and you step out clean and open, nutritious, and your seeds can be planted to make new tangerines.
Sally, or How to Walk a Dog
Something about Sally’s shadowy gait is familiar to the young woman’s dog and it seizes and yelps like a cut wire, emits unsettling dog-screams of deep yearning, runs in large loops to and from the window, my friend my friend it is my friend.
There’s Really No Need to Talk About This
They had told each other they loved one another before, writing it in chicken scratch inside Valentine cards and muttering it before saying goodbye at school. This felt different.
Night Drive
Her dad’s old ‘55 Dodge Lancer sat beside Harold’s truck in the cinder block garage—cracked seats, mouse nests in the vents. It still reeked of unfiltered Camels.
Princess Diaries No. 12: Nancy Jean
that this is how / the dead come back /
to have a chat
The Sheep and the Widow
But don’t you worry about gossip, sugar plum. I have a sense about these things. I can see you’re in love.
A Bride for a Flood
I had no name for what I wanted. Not this. Desire / As sudden as cool milk in the breasts of a virgin.
The Best Water in the World
We drank tap with pride.
Not Bruise, Not Eggplant
wandered into the garden to / find what there was to reap and —
The Hot Pitch Under
She could feel the hot pitch under her feet stretching both ways, boundless, like a solid ocean glowing at two opposing horizons.
The Wolf Within
In the beginning, the pain was a small thing, barely worthy of notice.
Diptych: A Mr. 7 Hands Screwdriver and an Octopus Open Up About Their Relationship
As you can probably imagine, the hardest part was we never knew what to do with that eighth tentacle.
The Mandarins
It’s funny how history repeats itself, right? That feels almost cosmic.
Sacrament
Christ’s body — yes, only bread, but still
this idea of a man in your hands.
Seven Minutes
My cousin got a reputation at school, and she said reputations are like ghosts. Once they decide to haunt you, there’s nothing you can do to get rid of them.
The Young Ones
I’d waited for him to come to my side of the room, had been pretending to admire, for too long, something that looked as though it had once been Apollo and Daphne but was now melting like hot wax.
In the Long Grass
Surreal moment, this: a roo lounging on a road in the middle of the day, a horseshoe of people staring down at him like he’s some sort of a prophet—or an omen.
In a Dream I Speak Perfect Mandarin
vague shape of a person, perhaps made up
of broken seashells : the sound of fractured edges toned
FISH
He hovers over her, like Goldie after Kurt, as she floats and undulates in her half-dreams, me staring out the window, wondering if the fish might be dying rather than giving birth.
Domestic Realism
my mother married a willow tree on a hilltop, sat under its boughs through four decades of rain in a day
Corsage
Sideways glances at others who are doing it better: crisp black ties, polish on their shoes, the right moves.
anti-ode to the heart
cocoons, tent worms eating the world
just to be reborn, inseparable from the smoke
Sugarloaf
Horses and earth are just different shades of each other, and we start to disappear, all of us, into the thickets of leaf and shadow.
The Florida Museum of Natural History
There’s a swing to Jessica’s step that reminds me of nights spent in a cloud of citronella, chasing lizards through my backyard.
The Right Magic
I’ll meet all the fairies, and we’ll have tiny tea parties and I’ll wear tiny dresses and use my tiny wings to fly.
Wishing on the Solid Gold Inamorato
I was probably a maniac beyond salvation. That’s why I needed to meet with the Solid Gold Inamorato.
Clinging
I’ve never encountered these strange invaders, these garden jellyfish that cling to me.
Two Poems
The past is an animal with its teeth bared.
ON WORLDBUILDING
and she’ll never die, and we won’t either.
Your DNA Results Are In & the Researchers Send Their Condolences
you have a mother, but you do not have a mother. / we can see that on the tests.
EARL
Nothing / about my grandfather was soft, // though he planted fruit trees / in improbable climates.
Girl and Her Spiders
I knew what a brown recluse spider looked like before I ever met a queer person my age.
Lord Randall
At first it’s just a low feeling at the base of your tum, a knot being tied, but then it tugs like a rope being pulled at both ends by a pair of black hogs
The Other Mary Owen
She imagines the Other Mary Owen sunning herself on a terrace in Mykonos, reservations purchased with the real Mary’s stolen credit card.
The Bone House
Everyone knows when you build a bone house that you start with the front.
Letter from the Editors
Let this harvest issue be your invitation to trust that seeds are being planted, that violets will—in their soft and fragile nature, yes—break through the rocks.
Ode to an Acorn
We laid atop a wasp nest. I was stung, but thought it was a dream.
Supermarket Horse
Listen to the palpitating of this horse / heart and I will answer in the language // underneath this skin.
Deer Lord / Dear Lord
The boys have never seen him, don’t believe he’s real, but the girls all whisper about the latest boogeyman, the Deer Lord they see outside their bedroom windows at night; the deer who wears a human skull over his own face.
Goldenvein
Every spot she has dug so far has felt lucky, magnetized, like some divine force led her to those coordinates; and each spot has been barren, empty, desolate.
my true self is grocery shopping
I don’t own a cheese grater.
capitalism makes this okay.
The Burial of a Woman Known as China Mary
Once, I offered pieces of myself to every
man—my hands, my coins, my words—
Garbage to Curb
I’m instantly reminded of why I skipped the last few of these—the room is all hot breath and squeezed shoulders, and I have two giants in front of me blocking my view. One wears a blue topcloth with the words Garbage to Curb carefully painted across the back, staring me in the face.
And So Shall the Carrion Call
The paths are unmarked, the trees wary of strangers. But I keep dried fish on hand, honeysuckle, ropes and knives, for the rare occasion of company.
The Last Six Cookies in the Package
For the hole inside you, never filled: a stolen bag of cherries. Spit the pits into your hands and go to sleep with stained palms against your hard, round stomach, pretending you can feel kicking feet.
When the Village Goes Hungry
A sister’s dry palm in my left, a sister’s wet palm in my right, the winter wind there on my throat; we sang the songs only learned at midnight, when the ordinary and the secular slept.
Blow
Imagine her saying, as she settles, “Good God, Ben, my constant pessimist. Give it a rest. I’m not here to fry.” And imagine a pebble loosened from the clifftop, falling. Impacting her skull. There would be damage.
After Eva Hesse’s Tomorrow’s Apples
And, too, the minding of where to step – the one rotten apple
in the shade with the bees feasting.
Ophelia in the Badlands
In my history, I was the prettiest girl
in town who was seduced
by the summer eclipse or the hellion who stole the keys
of Daddy’s 1958 Impala
I Brought You Back an Armadillo
What I can’t quite say to my husband, or to myself: that it is you I am thinking of as I take the armadillo from the shelf.