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.
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.
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.
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 Woman Who Grew Gills
Two weeks after the man moved in with the woman, the woman began to grow gills. They hurt coming in, like the pain of an emerging tooth. She hid her neck with scarves at first, partly because she didn’t want the man to see and partly because she didn’t want to.
Cosas del Horno
In the Calle 13 song “Latinoamérica,” Residente says that whoever doesn’t love their country doesn’t love their mother. How does one write about their mother?
Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s, new research finds
You say the earth is mad.
PSYCH402
The only book about a black or brown person and the main character is a black girl whose black friend got shot. I’m not paying $20 for this book centered around a dead black person. I’m spending $32.99 to buy some boxing gloves from Amazon so I can get ready to show these girls what’s good; so I can look my teacher into her bespeckled face with its green eyes and, right before I tell her to put her dukes up to defend herself before I actually start swinging. tell her that I cannot believe that she has the audacity to decide the one book about a person of color will be about death.
GirlGod
My favorite iteration of God is 12-year-old GirlGod —
God of watermelon bubblegum and Dr. Pepper LipSmackers. Of hologram stickers and locked diaries. GirlGod of 1994.
you won’t come back
to that creek with the sluggish / brown water that swells up each / spring and recedes as if sipped / from old bags of toilet wine God / won't find you in the cornfields
Two Dogs
Soaking wet in cotton underwear and an oversized soccer jersey, I am an animal—a 12-year-old in human years—sitting on a flooding wrap-around balcony in eastern Canada. This is where spruce and pine needles stick to the bottoms of your feet. This is where jewelweed grows in creeks.
Ever After This Day
Since my eyes are not blackened I can see so much more. I see the sobbing coming from Bonnie’s classroom. It is coral and curved like an undersea animal blooming in the sand. A thousand colors hidden in the absence of sunlight.
mothman fucks me from behind
sing, the guttural & saccharine / taxonomy of shame: what want demands / the body forgives
Stand Her Ground
his gun // memory of steel bars // the plea // his gun // her self-defense // his reaction // her end // his gun // any being cornered will fight back // & her teeth already dull from repeated use
Even Still
A black bear – not too big, with a golden snout and shiny gold eyes.
Was I that close? Close enough to feel the bear’s hot breath? Something in the shared glance and glare took me close. Closer. If I had wanted to, I could have sidled up and touched the animal.
Dusk Quercus
Later, I dream of running across the street, a transparent green grid over my slow-motion running. Like a target. The car doesn’t make a sound, but the noise of my head hitting the car is still somewhere just across the threshold of awareness. The ears are the last to submerge.
The Bog-Ridden Boy
When the man pulled the body from the bog, it had been flattened like a bear skin rug and carried the consistency of damp glue. Perhaps the fen had done this to the boy, or perhaps it was solely a carrier. They won’t want to see their boy like this, the man thought, and thusly collected the dripping anatomy into his fertilizer bucket.
The Date Farmer
For years after my travels, I’d track stories of women traveling alone, of women murdered, of women who’d made similar choices to the ones I’d made on the road. I followed the story of a young woman who’d been around my age when she’d gone backpacking and then missing in Nepal.
Two Poems by Tomas Moniz
the world works in broken &
imperfect circles like arms hugging a baby’s toothless smile the way a dog spins around & around before sleeping the word moon sung by nick drake the soft & rounded edges of the adobe home
The Loosening Grip
Of course she asks if she can keep it. She usually hoards whatever she finds floating near the stern—empty beer cans, folded tourist maps, shredded bike tires—without asking permission. But this is something else, and she must know it.
All the Better For You
She wrote about the man who sold balloons in the train station, how one of them floated off and got trapped against the ceiling, a balloon that read Congratulations! She told her the outside world was cruel and boring. She signed the letter Your Friend Forever.
Only a Little Bit Less Than I Hate Myself
Knausgård smells like cigarettes and not just like he just smoked but more like he is actually made of ashtrays and then loosely covered with hair and skin. “I’m quitting, I know,” he says and it’s clear he is accustomed to being called charming, but I’m not falling for it.
The Wet Body
Returning the whale was soso still It did not complain when I crawled inside with my one can and my no candle The mouth the humid mouth was like a tunnel of warm sponge I thought A whale is smaller from the inside I thought This is what my heart would look like from the middle
Bear
Once upon a time, no one believed her. Even when Bear stands toe-to-toe with the sheriff, they do not believe her. Even when Bear huffs, or rudely shimmies against the living room wall, marking it with her scent, or crams blueberries into her snout—still, they do not believe her.
maybe even the sea
This run-down, rusted-out trailer park was the first place in years that wasn't someone else’s farm with frozen pipes in the winter, far from everyone including school friends. There were other kids here.
Shadow
They say you can’t compare people’s suffering, but Rhiannon’s personal apocalypse is objectively stupid. Which somehow makes it more devastating. That someone with enough money and a nice fiancé and a flamingo shirt could be sad enough to turn herself inside out like this.
Sacred Heart Aflame at Your Cousin Cassidy’s Wedding
The statue of Mary extends a hand from her alcove by the altar, as if she’ll swap her cloister, her blue robes, and her thin stone lip for your chartreuse, corset-back gown and an hour pass to Cassidy’s reception in the church basement. It’s a tempting offer.
The Second Coming of Mary
The body is gone. / But the shape of gravity is known. We carry her, /
like a folded jacket of spirit, laying in our arms.
My Sister Grandma
My little sister DeeDee drowned but they brought her back and now she is my dead grandmother. On the first day back to school, she accidentally bumped into Stanley, that fifth grader who looks like a seventh grader, and said, oh, cheese and rice.
Five Untitled Poems
You learned to spill by breathing out /
make room for the warm marrow /
that gives this pot its power
When Mono Was Part of the Equation
I'm in the back of the band room, sipping vodka from a dented Sprite bottle, trying to avoid Christopher Mackley and his overly earnest attempts to get me to buy something for the FFA fundraiser.
Calculus of Nightmares and Nieces
Am I the missing girl, my perfect niece? Am I her devastated mother, staggering towards us? Am I her devastated grandmother, crying into her fist? Her devastated grandfather, immobile at the table? Am I the silent Uber driver? Am I the men, grinning with their axes?
And the Leaves, the Flowers
She was the only person who left me a note about what type of tree she is—which by the way is a magnolia. (Ask her why.)
Perceptor Weekly
I write that down and think of Tony perceiving all this. Will he wonder why we went outside to watch a string be cut in two? Will he understand the symbolism? Will his report to whomever convey a sense of community and perseverance? Will he understand why the drinks aren’t included?
Cautionary Distances
She said that she’d like to go out to the lake in the afternoon and she pouted her lips and blew Richard a kiss and he pretended to follow it slow and long across the room and watched it fall into his cupped hands and when he looked up Elaine was just shutting the door.
Self-Portrait as Yurico Eating a Strawberry
Red-faced and enraged, I bite into /
red strawberries, my face blooming /
red. I read red words in a book my father /
read. All of the pages are red. All of the words a- /
re distractingly read.
The Mime-Artist is a Little Drunk But That’s Okay
The bottle she carries is real, each sip she takes is real, her heart beating invisibly in her chest is real—but she knows that nothing is really real until you have mimed it.
i just think it’s (kinda) funny how
the priest speaks of my parents
in many ways; though the undertaker
speaks in one.
In the New World
I imagined that necklace in a museum someday, the history of a world that had burned away etched on each bead with a safety pin. I wondered if the people in the new world would know the word museum.
We Are Lions
The line to get into the club is down the block. That’s how you know it’s poppin’. At least that’s what Tripp says, rubbing his hands together so quickly I’m afraid he may start a fire.
Clarendon
The two of you have matching tattoos and yet she does not know the plunging depths of your self-doubt. You cannot let her know. You cannot let her know because she envies you—your witty captions, your nonchalance.
After Leaving My Father at the Hospital on Christmas Day,
everywhere I look, I see eruption. A startle /
of ice cracks off a branch above my head. /
A local dog goes from saunter to sprint /
at the sight of a squirrel.
Your Sons and Daughters Are Beyond
These kids make you want to vomit. Not the hair: that could be got rid of with a good fine pair of shears and the good fine hands of buddies to hold them down while you do what’s needed. It’s the way they aren’t afraid, and you were promised fear.
Subject to Dust
After our discussion of childhood traumas, once /
we’ve revisited a town in this valley named / Yettem (Armenian for Eden), you press your back against my chest.
Good Fox
When I talk on the landline these days, I can hear that telltale clicking my Russian friends warned me about. Someone’s listening in. Someone thinks I’m worth listening to.
Beautiful Dreamers
Her mouth folds down, that puppet face of hers, eyes sad and pleading, yet she raises the empty point of gun to his chest. You know, she says, but I have such an incredible urge to shoot you.
I’ll Love You Until the End of the World
The telephone is ringing and the dead on Everest answer:
“I am so cold—please
don’t cry. Everything will be fine.”