Issue 25 | Fall 2021
Thralls
Kevin McIlvoy
Look what we’ve done,
my mother said, her
chill voice barely
emitting sound. We were
lost – lost just two
blocks from home
because our unfit
brains had overbrimmed.
Our migraines synced so often
that by routine we could
find each other in our flares
of pain. I could take in
hand our most dreamlike
enigma. She could do the
same. We could walk
like crystallizing blazes.
We could travel the streets
into darkest space’s
dire coldness, we could weep
together and say nothing.
Could continue walking.
Mother’s grandmother called
them “thralls,” told her that
God sent them. If
you asked her why, she
smiled, explained that
God does not explain. If you
persisted in questioning, she would
say the ten words she and all
her forebears had learned to say:
Why don’t you make a little poem of your self-pity?
Cold helped her and
her daughter cope, so, in
winter thralls they walked
outside lightly clothed, their
bare feet, head, hands exposed
in order to feel relief
from the electrical discharges
subvisible to everyone but them.
One early morning after
a cyclonic snowstorm, the old
woman was found dead,
her hands and arms and
hips embracing the slender
trunk of a red oak ten feet
away from the front
door of her home.
And? And? What happened to her
daughter who went with her? What?
I asked. I knew the chill hand in
mine remembered her mother’s
hand and the hand of
her mother’s mother.
I knew the ten words of censure that would come.
Lightning and lesser lightning, we
walked. Apart. And with each other.
About the Author
Kevin McIlvoy’s novel, One Kind Favor, has just been published by WTAW Press. His newest poems appear in Consequence, Willow Springs, Olney, Barzakh, River Heron Review, LEON, The Georgia Review, Still, Humana Obscura, and other magazines. For twenty-seven years he was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA program in creative writing from 1987 to 2019, and as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA program from 1981 to 2008.
Prose
Bomarzo Cecilia Pavón, translated by Jacob Steinberg
Sister in Basement, Manny Again Elsewhere Robert Lopez
Visitations Caroline Fernelius
Solution Linda Morales Caballero, translated by Marko Miletich, PhD
Auditions for Interference Theory Emilee Prado
Life Stories Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall
Out There Daryll Delgado
The Embassy Khalil AbuSharekh
Shaky From Malnutrition Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
Weatherman Gillian Parrish
The Taco Robbers From Last Week Steve Bargdill
Poetry
Epigenetics Diti Ronen, translated by Joanna Chen
i once was a witch Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
Thralls Kevin McIlvoy
Mine Brian Henry
Catastrophic
marble chunk Shin Yu Pai
shelf life
Rebirth Tamiko Dooley
Before the Jazz Ends Adhimas Prasetyo, translated by Liswindio Apendicaesar
After Jazz Ends
Scent of Wood
Cover Art
Untitled Despy Boutris