After supper with my parents I go
next door from the buffeteria to
the drug store to look at the comic books.
It’s 1965. They’re twelve cents each.
Georgia sales tax is four cents on the buck
so I can buy two books for a quarter,
which is my weekly allowance. I want
the Justice League of America and
the Legion of Super-Heroes because
I get more costumed crimefighters for my
money. My father’s money, I should say.
I’ll meet my folks in front of the Rich’s
department store, by the fountain, facing
the parking lot. Our car’s out there somewhere,
waiting like a loyal beast of burden
to take us home, a few miles away, to

Marietta. When we arrive I jump
out from the back seat, open the garage
door, stand to one side, and watch my parents
roll in. Father closes the door and we
go into the house–we never lock up–
and then he takes off his suit and tie and
dress shoes–he’s a principal and looks sharp
when he’s out in public. Mother
reads, or watches TV, while Father tunes
the radio to the Braves baseball game
and sits on the porch, studying traffic. 
I wait until he settles. Turn it up,
Son, he says. Sometimes he says, Turn it down.
When it’s just the way he wants it, I leave
for my bedroom, in the attic. It’s my

Fortress of Solitude, my parents too
tired, usually, to walk the thirteen
steps up to it–when they want me, they shout
from the bottom of the stairway. Tonight,
however–Friday night–they don’t need me,
only each other. Saturday nights, too.

Father might ask me to fine-tune the Braves.
Mother might ask me to turn the channel
or clean her glasses or bring her a snack.
I’m a good boy and I’m eager to please.
I do what they ask and they let me be.
Then I go upstairs again and read how

good defeats evil, which it always does,
just in different ways from month to month.
I’m too young to know that evil wins, too,
at least its share and probably more–that’s
for grownups to worry about. Good wins
as I look at the pictures and read and

turn a page, then the next. Not that good
doesn’t take its lumps from evil. Not that
evil doesn’t make a contest of it
–that’s what makes life interesting, and church
on Sunday a necessity: to thank
God for what we have though we don’t have it

but always pray we do. Well, some of it
we have. But others don’t–poor folks, for one,
and if they don’t have it, we don’t, either.
Food enough, I mean, and heat in Winter.
Steady jobs and good clothes. Enough money
for Christmas. We have all of these but if

someone else doesn’t then neither do we.
If I were the Flash I’d be quick enough
to run around the world, our neighborhood,
at least, and count all the people in need.
If I were Superboy I’d see them all
with my X-ray vision. But I’m just me

so I fight evil the usual way,
by putting coins in the collection plate
(but not my comics-money–I get some
special from my parents for charity) and going to Sunday School and praying.
But all those people praying all those prayers
hasn’t ended poverty and sadness

–perhaps they don’t pray hard enough. As I
walk home from church I’m feeling older. Guess

I’ll have to wait for Jesus to return
before life’s perfect. Still, I’d like to think
that we do what we can. In this issue

of my life there’s a happy ending but
not so happy that my life’s been cancelled
like a magazine that doesn’t sell well.
There’s just enough unhappiness so that
I want to keep up with the adventure
in this comic book which God wrote and drew
from start to finish and Doom reads every day.

---

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in fourteen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine. Gale now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

“Is it worse to be someplace awful when you’re by yourself,
or someplace really nice that you can’t share with anyone?”

This is where Theseus ditched Ariadne.
Jump-cut to sweating slabs of feta, to squids
dangling on clotheslines. His lanky frame in
bleached-out blue jeans

practically draining into the horizon.
Rakı going milky in a tall glass of
melting ice. In one version of the story
Ariadne marries

Dionysus—her wine-dark loneliness lit
up with a single sip. Olives green as eyes,
dry bougainvillea flowers like fingernails
over cobblestones.

Others say that no one ever came and she
hung herself. Cue the tomatoes, a gliding
knife: golden hour gilding the scene as Tony
shakes oil from a glass

bottle, preparing a feast as if someone
else might enter the frame. As if it doesn’t
end with him eating alone on a terrace
staring out to sea.

---

The guy drinking Seven Tails on the rocks scoops a lemon from his glass and lets the flea live.
What else is mercy but a way of wedging between worlds—the invitational body first
submerged, then lifted and let through, D’Angelo on in the background the whole time singing
Lord knows how far that I and I will fall behind. And Jesus Christ, he says next—not D’Angelo.
Not Jesus (at present he is nowhere to be found). But the guy with the Seven Tails—a nickname
which, when repeated enough, becomes biblical, whips you beastly into, yes the past, but also the
multiverse of all the pain you’ve ever caused. It isn’t saying sorry that’s hard. It’s knowing it
isn’t enough. Jesus Christ, a six-hour flight, says Seven Tails. And I think about Jesus learning
of air travel. How much faster he could’ve got home or at least somewhere he belonged. And I
don’t mean in the footprint of God. It’s not the flea’s salvation either. Poor guy, wings stripped,
slipping aimless now in a desert of marble. Maybe this wasn’t about mercy at all.

---

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen is the author of Light Waves (Terrapin Books). A MacDowell fellow, Chen has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Chapbook Prize, and a semi-finalist for Tomaz Salamun Chapbook Prize by Factory Hollow Press, among others. Her work has twice received Pushcart and best-of-the-net nominations and has been published or is forthcoming in Bear Review, PANK, Hanging Loose, NoDear and elsewhere. She lives in New York. www.kirstenshuyingchen.com 

I would like to have six days back,
one for each decade, as a minimum,
for not having to think about holding
myself inward, moving one leg sideways,
obscuring the steatopygous view,
a few days I could move without thinking,

like before I was six months old,
when my pediatrician said I was too
fat and told my mother to give me only
skimmed milk. Mom could make a meal
for four out of one can of Campbell’s soup
with water; I taught myself to bake

cookies and cakes so that some days
when there was no other consolation
I could have something sweet.
Now what would be sweeter is a day
without clenching, without waiting for
the blow to fall, like when my 90-pound

grandmother tried using a French
word for it, as if someone who sat around
and read so much wouldn’t know
what the word avoirdupois means
or how much scorn can be heaped
on one person before each evening, adding up

to at least six days’ full, no matter how
much yo-yo dieting, how much angling
my shoulders and knees out of the picture,
contracting my thighs and tilting my hips
to squash between armrests, how much
pulling myself together every day.

---

The courtyard, cool, the menu en español
we, a gringa and me, her sullen mate,
both barely awake. The huevos, Oaxacan,
a cold dish my wife begins to eat
with all of her appetites intact
until she sees the bits of chilies
have legs, her plate seems to crawl
with chilies that have legs.

We look to the kitchen, aghast,
and then to the local folks at nearby tables
who eat without reservation. I look back
at the menu and read, chapulines
check my pocket dictionary:
grasshoppers! and I, who’d not
eaten the flesh of an animal
since 1972, take to the plate,
and eat every one. The crunch
satisfies a forty-year craving
for the gnawing of bones,
for the tasting of organ meat, for the rending
of limbs.

Deb leaves hungry and my
lust for flesh is not yet sated.
We wander to the market
and find plates of the critters
in great heaps. I buy two scoops
for a few pesos and find
the hoary hunter in me is roused.

---

so, I’m spinning around the room
circling my kitchen island
like Billy Collins searching for the perfect metaphor
like a shark in quest of cheese
covering my plates with crackers and cocktail onions
marinated mushrooms, their little heads popping up
one eyed olives winking red
prosciutto flopped over like it only just realized
you can’t be in shape with all that fat
smoked salami smirking
at how carefully it’s preserved

grab the glass and take a big swig
company is coming and the mood needs to build
the words need to flow, language like lava
sweeping the entire village in its hot wake
even though you threw a sacrifice of rum
which reminds you of the bottle you dropped last night, red sidling
into all the cracks, it took hours to clean that up
and still you have your doubts
something surely must be lurking in the corners
like a stale cocktail peanut crouching under the stove

the fire goddess said it wasn’t enough, it will never be enough
no matter how high you pile the plates, something always comes up short
carrying the guests down the lazy river
where everyone is laughing and everything is all right
where everyone always comes up cold in the end
shivering in their damp clothes, rushing hard for their cars
leaving you alone in the kitchen
where mountains of plates totter, like Vesuvius on the make

hands red, the victim of a thousand pyroclastic flows
parties that ran just a little bit late
like a bargirl who let her cigarette burn down too low
you scrub at your silverware, wondering
what ever was the point in the first place, why
you throw your heart on the altar, just
to find it tossed back at the end of the night
only picked at, never devoured
so sigh and scrape it into yesterday’s trash
with the rinds and the plastic
all your dirty, broken treats

---

how bright my face shines

I keep my body
hungry to test

pain’s proximity
oranges remind me

of dried bitters
in whiskey not you

a little bit of magic exists
everyday think of the blue

liquid that turns dull clothes
whiter and brighter

a chemical romance
I wonder about absorption

love has unblinded me
to the many ways holding

brings joy how I prefer
a cigarette over a vape

your mouth held many
silences so that you didn’t

have to become a liar
there are many ways to kill

a cat has nine lives
I want to see a pink flamingo

for real not the décor lighting
before I die let me tell you

there is no substitute
for experience except

experience and even god
cannot stop time

from turning so I teach
myself to mimic the rain

relish the pain
repurpose like Marie Kondo

I get the flu from eating an orange
is just another memory now

of where we met so I peel it
dry it grind it mix it

with milk into a glow mask

January

Sifting through grey days in a shoebox
room overlooking the Hudson
and helicopters flying to and fro over it
carrying people obsessed with aerial view
some days it’s the delicious call of pork tacos
on 42^nd street, and on others it’s the 99 cent
pizza slices down at 9^th street that pull me out
of my bed and winter misery.

Turning the page of The Crying Book and disembarking
at 14^th street only to find that I have layered all  wrong
again     find myself walking to 16^th and 5^th to my favorite café
creamy spinach quiches and potato burekas on display
outside               hats flying, dead leaves dancing in circles
levitating            marrying the smoke from kebabs sizzling
in halal carts at street corners

hands become ice from collecting the 8 PM rain                craving
for the warmth of a mocha cappuccino from the little patisserie
in East Village   the familiar attendant at the register smiles puts in a free
chocolate glazed donut in my bag            Enjoy! And I start to
think of the promise of summer as I bite into this kindness.

---

Out of temper, stirred
to a mantra of degrees
I repeat to keep myself
awake in the kitchen, where
I might be blistering
tomatoes or toasting bread
in the rich kind of fat
for a midnight snack,
chocolate reaches a point
where I can only feel
the weight of it on my lip.
Sometimes your body
against mine passes through
this moment, stirred
down and sprawling.

---

I usually just eat it like this. Kiwis with their skin on             seeds in spices turned black the squash
splitting its hairs from inside out just right there on the plate in its skin I usually eat it like that.
Usually the skin and all I’ll just eat it like that when we wake up. Raw franks             the real snappy
ones or the Vermont beef ones             the beef in Vermont ones like that with the skin on too. I liked
when you ate things just like that after we’d fallen asleep and woken up because you weren’t
afraid             dirty hairy sweet potato skins or morning acids acrid on shriveled green
whatever’s pink and gone sour             deadened legumes             lime halves in quiet disarray
whatever’s separated from that which lies underneath it             whatever’s separated from that
which cooks right there next to it

anything that grows the way grass does             that floats down brooks.

Ginger with its skin on downstairs             ginger with its skin on raw             the cooked the rotten. I
usually just eat it like that in a little fur coat that is             there’s no need to undress yet             I just
eat that on top of some rice             I just eat that with rice. Everything’s been left dirty enough to
eat             passed round the city like this on hands wheels laps crates pillows             been left clean
enough to lack             in tins of oil or tight plastic

I just eat it with my hands in front of the fridge light like that like a bear by a river or at a cafe for
sixteen fifty downtown like that like a girl.

Who am I my tail is melting in a sour broth             my morning stomach on two tortillas. You fried
me up with two eggs             flu eggs             you wanted to mix my oil and mustard at the lunch
counter             get me on hot salad at the sandwich shop             my ribs floated above your noodles
my shoulders have caught your snot by the open kitchen. I’m for the people in bits inside a
one-way street             or tied up in strings for not the people             I’m good for more than a buck
thirty don’t you think             you liked each other because you liked me.

---