do hats have feelings, though?
by Alex Simand

what happens to all the championship hats they make for the eventual losing team on the off chance that they become the winning team but don’t? do they smolder, lonely and weeping, in a box tucked in the back of a hostile arena? do they feel the pinch of never having achieved their purpose? it must hurt to be branded a champion and then not, an entire limb of existence lopped off at the point of possibility and shipped off to Africa, where the colonial world sends all its half-made truths. it must sting in the way of gloves forever buried in the snow, forgotten to the seasons, lost among the dog shit that layers the city like an archeology site.

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Panthor Dreams of Meadows
by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

Panthor the purple panther always wished he got a say in the shit that Skeletor was doing, but he never did. Ripped from the wild as a cub, bridled and saddled and fashioned in green, Panthor only knew the service of evil. But at night he imagined green grasses that tasted like honey. In his sleep, he licked the corners of his jaws and smiled at the taste.

Every morning he despaired that his blanket was a course wool stranger instead of the friendly lambs he had befriended in his imagination the night before. 

Obedient to a fault, in another dark morning followed by a dark day, Panthor set off to war with Battle Cat: his exact duplicate. Skeletor had harnessed him too tightly and the saddle chaffed his velvety flocking while his fully articulated master sat a-trot—his shrill voice bellyaching orders for yet another poorly planned He-Man attack.

The ground erupted with bombs of dirt in another round of dispassionate brawls that left Panthor feeling empty while Skeletor shrieked “ONWARD ONWARD.” But these onwards never produced triumphs, and the battle was the same as all the clashes before. Disappointing.
​
Retreating from the battlefield after Skeletor’s failure, Panthor could hear the victorious cries from He-Man and Battle Cat. He wondered why he was left to live in silence while his counterpart could shout with jubilation, it seems only some cats are good enough for speech. The army’s humiliated flight made a drumbeat out of the battlefield and someone shouted, “We’ll get him next time, your Evil Lord of Destruction,” but even that sounded hollow.   

Panthor secretly perched on a ledge in Snake Mountain once he was back home and drew a picture in crayon of the fantasy land from his sleep. Clouds like frosting and golden fields that moved like waves. A small family that looked like they would know how to give a good scratch under the chin, plus some fluffy lamb friends. A tiny cottage with a rug in front of the fire that Panthor knew would be great for midday naps, and pantries filled with cakes—his favorite food, or so he imagined they would be. Panthor looked at his drawing. He picked up a purple crayon and drew himself into the scene, hoping that some of the magic would make his wish to live there come true.

Before lights out, as Skeletor’s court made plans for another fight against He-Man—fighting is the duty of the aristocracy of Eternia and Skeletor’s favorite hobby—Panthor named each of the figures in his drawing, he kissed each one goodnight in lieu of being able to say it to them aloud. He hoped they could feel love through the paper.

On the course wool blanket, Panthor thought of Battle Cat and how he could talk. If Panthor could talk he would say that he didn’t want this life anymore, no war / no more fights with Battle Cat / no Skeletor. But he wondered if he actually could speak, would anyone listen? Counting the friends from his drawings like sheep before bedtime, Panthor knew he was not made for the dark side of Eternia.
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And that night, like all nights since he was a cub, Panthor dreamt of meadows.

a rustling of love letters
by Alex Simand
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I have a shoe box of knickknacks and love letters under my bed. turkey feathers. bandannas with maps printed on them. watercolors of song lyrics. little fossils of affection. they’re growing dust motes like mohawks spurting from their scalps and a bundle of spurned kitten fur and I wonder if I’m a neglectful father or if I should toss them into the trash next to last week’s lasagna. why do we keep these little trinkets of past loves? do we betray our futures by keeping truncated tokens of adoration within arms reach? I don’t know. I don’t know most things, but least of all of all this.

the last time I moved apartments, the box spilled out and I stood agape at the flood at my feet. arms spread with helplessness. I couldn’t scoop it up any more than I could hold a puddle in my palm. what do I do with every feeling I’ve ever had? what does it mean to have collected the sand from a beach for another person? there it was, spilling out of the topless jar that held, seeping into the hardwood, becoming hardwood, fading it, softening it, filling it with rot from the inside out. my skull is as squishy as a newborn’s head. 

I have a rustling shoe box under my bed. from time to time, it slides out as if to say, hey. hey, remember that time you were tender? yes. remember when you were loved so hard they wanted to leave a mark of it? yes. I want the box to push its lid off like a boiling pot. I want to feel it ticking under my sleep. I want it to elect its next president, someone kind, like what a whisper looks like on a page. move over turkey feathers. there’s always room for one more.

[sticker by a Philadelphia sticker graffiti artist] 

post-it notes
by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
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There are days when I’ve loved you like a mirror and I’m hypnotized; you’re my reflection’s self. The other night, laying on the couch opposite-ended like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you took a photo of me with your phone when I wasn’t looking and texted it to me. We were playing time machine, which is when minutes don’t tick by while under a blanket that resembles a Hershey bar. Sometimes boredom and comfort look very similar.

I looked old, and dry, and tired. I didn’t love you like the mirror of me having learned to thank my parts as I stared at the phone. Suffocating and sweating under the burden of the blankets, we became strangers.

I’ve been known to love you like we’re halved. Asymmetrical. Pieced together to make a whole. We’ve replaced letters with texts and the one on my phone with my face yellow in the lamp’s shade filled me with an unrecognizable feeling. The closest emotion to give it is loss. How can looking at me make me feel the loss of you? We aren’t under the blanket anymore. In the days following, sometimes I would look at the texted photo of the strange woman.

​I have piles of post-it notes I’ve written to myself periodically throughout the years scattered all over my home in various rainbows of aging beige. Memories of my moments, and when I read them I can see how I actually look. Or at least how I think I look. In the mountains of fluttered sticky notes, sometimes I see a shadow of our asymmetrical features never quite touching. I need to take the time to read them in order to see this. I don’t do that often.
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Are my love letters filled with truth or lies?
Do they cause highs or cries?
I would surmise, that you agonize over words that jeopardize yet hypnotize.

While you demonize, I attempt to moralize
While I revise, you militarize.
Is it you, or is it me that dramatize and oversize the problems that are pint-size?

I write letters that reprise and justify
But they only terrorize and galvanize
I write to apologize, you say I only finalize and eulogize, not humanize

I try to revitalize and romanticize
But you don’t empathize or recognize,
So, our relationship is an illegitimate enterprise, so I internalize and compartmentalize.

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Rust Queen
Marie Marandola


“It’s called a patina,” the mirror sneered
as she frowned at her tarnished reflection.
“And it’s very dignified.” She absently scratched
at the aged silver-glass, pursed and unpursed her lips, but the skin
around her mouth preferred the pursing.
Like snowmelt—how strange, when in her mind, she remained
as smooth and icy as she’d ever been. A wish, a—                     
Well. Perhaps it was for the best, the not seeing.
The mirror made her sad enough
with his murky new blossoming where once
he’d known to only show her proof of youth. And what good
would vengeance do? Even the daggers in the knife block
had grown rusty, and no amount of scrubbing
(she’d tried—oh, how she’d tried) would shine
them back to what they were. Whose heart
would they pierce now,
save her own?
​

J. Sam Williams

Let us buck the old traditions and bring in the new. Crows, so long associated with the evil one—or one evil—with death, bad luck, and the afterlife should be seen as birds of intelligence, of remembrance, and of consequences.

I read an autobiographical story about a woman who once mistreated a murder of crows and they never forgot it. To the best of my ability, this is how I remember the story:
The murder antagonized her with flybys and much cawing. But this woman tried to make amends. She started to feed the murder. The crows became quiet and still and eventually she would be outside in her backyard and they would fly overhead dropping shiny objects near and around her.

These shiny objects represent the crows acceptance and warmth towards this woman. Does that sound like a death omen? Does that sound like the harbinger of evil? No. We should all love the murders flying about more.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella - Rock Gardens

Crows will kill and eat a newborn lamb if given the opportunity, and despite their silky feathers and sharp intelligence, I can’t forgive them for that.

However, I don’t recommend tossing rocks at them either to shoo away from gentle livestock. Leave stones for land barriers in gardens, or collect them for a singular and then communal collection of wannabe flowers for a rock garden – like the one I had in my backyard growing up. Salty mini-boulders collected from the lip of the ocean, a shore filled with primordial pillars, the littlest of who now live in the back of a home almost forgotten somewhere on Long Island.

Save your stones.
 

I wonder if there is a bible passage, or a portion of another religious text, that mentions bird and beast cohabitating in harmony. Crows nesting in the curls of a sheep’s back, golden threads of sunshine turning the coal-feathers into oil slicks of blue. A heavenly place of accord – an illustration in a Little Golden Book.
 

There are no farms, or sheep, no crows where I live - in the middle of a city – I’m removed from pastures; and I am neither friend nor foe to beaked predators (I don’t see them often. But when/if I do are they an omen of murder? Not like how a group of them is called a murder, but on the rare occasion I see a crow I wonder if they are carrying death on their glossy backbones).
 

***


But a squirrel did fall out of a tree last night, a dead branch collapsing right behind me – small-limbed furry buddy body splayed on the pavement, and quaking like an earthquake was moving through its body.

My boyfriend, a hand at the small of my back pushing me forward, said, “that’s it for that squirrel.” But when we got to the front door, I stalled looking for cigarettes. Heard the posse of people who were paces behind us scream, “SQUIRREL!” at what I assumed was its poor lifeless body.

When my boyfriend went inside, I went hunting for its body.
 
As a child, in the same neighborhood with the backyard rock garden, I once found the body of a dead bird in the gutter. For days I would leave the bird leaves from a Linden tree, dried lily of the valley, and the mustard yellow chalky filament that would fall from the tree canopies as gifts. Like the bird and I were ancient Egyptians, I recognized its humanity in death.
 
I wanted to do the same for the squirrel.

But despite my search, the squirrel was gone. I looked under cars and in shrubs, climbed over a parking fence to see if some beast or burden dragged its corpse. No remains, no indication that a hurt ever happened with the exception of a cracked bough still on the sidewalk.

​The squirrel – skirting death. Refuting postmortem gifts. So, I’m saving my rocks – that when lumped together would make a cairn – since no crow warned of a death on a thirsty Thursday night. For this moment, the squirrel is safe while the crow is absent – making plans to befriend lambs in their nurseries.  

My body made of pith
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella  
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I am drunk on my mistakes and my love is a leather helmet. My body is made of pith and at every beginning and end, I supplicate my plant’s interior at the altar of my errors. Loneliness is a clay that has shaped me—fragile and brittle with a hollow inside. I plug my body with the frames of silt silhouettes that I melt into the void of my insides—I can almost see them for who they are. Mesmerized by their outlines, I devour them. Bodies that beg to live within me, I try to hold them to my figure forever.
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Ceramics are breakable and every baked part of me is a splinter that once retained the bits of boys that lived in the gulch of my cavities. I am earthenware shards splayed across the kitchen floor. I am vials holding wet, salty, sand made-up of texts that go unanswered. Grind down the remaining parts of my body until it is gritty soil. Till me until I’m loam. And let the loneliness turn into a field where flowers are farmed.

​‘Course—I'm not even going to bother saying “spoilers” ‘cause the books have been out for over 50 years and the movies for 15 years. The clumsy Gollum takes care of it by showing how that absolute power is self-destructive. The shadow of the future Mordor reign is vanquished. It's a wonderful metaphor for power and a great example of how the use of shadow in narratives can be riveting.