Three Poems by Cameron Morse

Hellraiser

 Scrawny infant squawking daughter
unswaddled for the car seat
in a more winter than spring rain,
welcome to the world, hellraiser.
March is bipolar in Missouri. Welcome
to this corner of the world. Here is
my thumb. You cannot seem to locate
your own. Let’s do something about those
maniacally flapping hands, those 
dagger-length fingernails. What a nuisance
it is to be born. Regurgitated on dry land.
Exposed to the elements. Let’s adjust
the thermostat. Sandwich the breast.
Get some meat on those bones.  

I Live in the Woods

It's the woods. These streets strung above I-70 are no neighborhood: They have no name. The trees out here in the dark are older than toothpick houses. Denser in their darkness than any porch light. Early morning resounds with cricket orchestration, the long intermittent hiss of a cicada. Backtrack to the blubbery soon-to-be extinct spectral motors of the interstate. This is the age of insects, Gould says, so I start a bug collection. I scoop the iridescent dead from our kiddie pool with a Walmart pill bottle: a Japanese beetle. I have to explain to Theo the exoskeleton of the cicada latched onto the A-frame of his swing set is just a shell, it's not alive, and pick it off myself. I find a dead cicada for display and seal it in the orange tube. Peel the label that says Keppra that says Bactrim that says Methylprednisolone that leaves a sticky little residue. 

Tree, House

The reach for love is the branch 
in my apple tree that is barely touching the eaves. 
There is a thin and fragile part 
of my heart that is always barely touching.
 
An apple tree opening endlessly 
unto the house brings its chimneys 
into the shady auspice of leaves
but let the roots rub up against a cracked 
foundation and they chafe. Mostly 

I just settle into the earth and sprout more
cracks, more spider veins for the rain 
to bleed through, I seep into the soil 
the sound sleep of the soil packed around my cracks. 

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His collection of unrhymed sonnets, Sonnetizer, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.

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One Poem by Lannie Stabile

 Just Emailed an Estate Lawyer Regarding My Mother’s Will Using the Subject Line “I Really Don’t Know What to Title This” 

Subject: Deceased Mother

Probate for Deceased Mother

I Need a Probate Lawyer

Help, My Mother Is Dead

I am the estranged and grieving daughter writing on behalf of my manic-depressive mother, who spent 62 years slowly piecing herself out died this past Wednesday evening, alone. She named me executor of her will, and I’m hoping you and I can discuss rates, process, and my abandonment of her expectations. To be honest, I am at a loss on how to proceed with all this guilt the things she left behind: Great-grandchildren, a son, and a daughter who will never again see the crinkle of kind, misguided blue eyes. I understand her assets may be placed in probate to feed the satisfy creditors. After all, my mother had a lot of heart debt. 

As I am currently on overdrive to ignore the pain bereavement for the next five days, meeting this week would be excruciating preferable. Please reply with your availability, and I will shower, brush my hair, and force myself do my best to meet it. 

I appreciate any and all help you can provide during this difficult and confusing torture time.

Lannie Stabile (she/her) is the author of Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, out with Cephalopress. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Contest. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.

Turn It Up by Sarah E. Azizi

My kid reads me the gate code: 9636-hashtag. 
I punch it in, resist the urge to tell her irrelevant bits 
from back in my day, & wonder if I’ll ever shift 

from pound in my own lexicon, having just turned 44. 
Last birthday for 2 years—I’m skipping 45, the age 
at which my father died. I’m like a toddler pretending, 

twirling into a disappearing act with my next 
grand entrance all planned. Cute analogy, sure, but 
it’s not rhetorical, either, & is not the internal sense, 

that steady metronome, the most trustworthy 
logic of all? My daughter retrieves her friend, 
they slide in & slam the car doors. I’m striving 

to be unlike my own parents so I stifle 
the reprimand of not so hard. My kid’s eyes gleam 
when I let her pick the music, those mono-fold 

almonds shaped like my father’s. Hers hazel, 
his were dark as espresso beans, & I wonder 
what he’d think of the hashtags & names, 

or the way we live since Sept of oh-one. Slowly, 
the exit gate deigns to open, we turn onto the main road, 
& some narrative dalliances, I know, are better left 

undeveloped. Some curiosities can’t be fed. 
The kids bounce as I sing along to their nouveau 
pop songs, & though so often I’ve got something 

to say, I quiet my inner hum, let this present moment 
thrum, & tell my passengers: Turn it up. Little faces,
how they beam. The highway sprawls ahead. It’s easy,

today, to leave the rest unsaid.

Sarah E. Azizi (aka Sera Miles) is a queer Iranian-American writer, educator, and activist. Previous and forthcoming publications include: $pread Magazine, 34th Parallel, Blue Mesa Review, Fahmidan Journal, Clean Sheets, red, The Tide Rises, HELD, Wrongdoing Magazine, the winnow, Superpresent, Nine Mile, and Free State Review. She lives in Albuquerque.

Guest Editor, Morgan O.H. McCune is a native Kansan and now lives in Topeka. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis (1991) and a Master of Library Science from Emporia State University (2002). She was a Cataloging Librarian/Professor at Pittsburg State University for 15 years before retiring in 2022.