[[bpstrwcotob]]

Roy Bentley 7/2/25 Roy Bentley 7/2/25

Scooch

The lower I scooch, the better the reception.
Like the signal’s intensity is what it is except
around me. We’re watching The Rockford Files
in my father-in-law’s recreational vehicle in a
private drive in Ft. Lauderdale, James Garner /
Jim Rockford handing out uber-macho lectures.
It’s 1980. I’m a new dad and reading Faulkner
for a class. I catch the politics of calling women
Honey. The woman in tennis whites has framed
Rockford for felony murder. Her navel, an innie,
packs loads of social import before its vanishing.
Arthur Dixon, my kind father-in-law, stands. He
steps to the antenna. Now he’s motioning Scooch,
Jim Rockford smart-mouthing his way to triumph,
the rest of our family inside the house or at church.
This evening, Arthur loves his battery-powered TV,
asks if I like Florida. I say, Positively, as Rockford
calls up William Faulkner in a ’74 Firebird Esprit,
skillfully spinning a steering wheel—like America
is okay just fine but you need to be willing to, well,
scooch down so you catch sight of the road ahead.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Justin Lowe 7/2/25 Justin Lowe 7/2/25

On the Death of a Queen

there is laughter like the ripples
when something dark breaks the water,
the laughter of children colliding
with the inert thigh of their mother
stood hollering,

there is the laughter of that discovery
of looking up at the mother's face softening
and learning fear is a thing
you grow into
not out of,

there is the laughter of wind filling a sail
and two lovers’ hands on the tiller,
peacocks pluming and the dogs’ mistress returning
to a forest of tails around the hearse,
there is

the laughter of doors opened slowly by lovers
with a bottle in one hand and a lie in the other,
then the dark laughter of the same door closing some hours later,
the laughter of disbelief and crumbs in the bed,
there is

the laughter of the town crier drunk in the night
swaying under a lit window
where
the pert whisper of a curtain being drawn
seems louder than the tolling bells.

Jed Myers 7/2/25 Jed Myers 7/2/25

Still Wondering if You Made It

We're proud to feature this poem from Jed Myers’ chapbook Our Use of the Stars, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

I’ve been able to miss you, without knowing
if your silence began at the grille of a truck
on a state route at dusk, or with a secret
decision, or in sudden sickness I’d never learn
the first thing about, but about the first thing
you told me—you were already in love
with the bristlecone pines. Their twisted praise
clawing the sky, agonized and ecstatic
in their spare clusters and pairs, catatonic
manics in wait for the rapture they look like
they’re in. You’d need to go stand among them
you said. And though it took tearing your roots
from the sea-level riverbanks where we lived—
though it meant never seeing your wish
for us to wrinkle up slow into faithful twin
writhings on our slope of years—you did,
on one forgettable argument’s thrust, set out
for Utah I guess, to walk up the ridge
where you hoped you’d find them, bare ancient
wood warped and gouged and goldened
in the late light, alive. They’d stand by you,
silent but for wind brushing their skin—
presences surer than this one who misses you
and still imagines the horn-blast, the brights

Maya Williams 7/2/25 Maya Williams 7/2/25

My Therapist Shows Me How to Write in the Affirmative or An Alternative to Writing “Don’t Kill Yourself”

We're proud to feature this poem from Maya William’s chapbook Feminine Morbidity, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as the winner of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

stay kin stay kin stay kin stay kin
stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive
I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to
stay alive stay kind stay be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kind be alive I want to be kind I want to be
alive I want to be kinder I want to be alive I want to be alive be kinder
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay
alive be alive stay kind be alive be kind stay alive
be kinder to my self be kinder to my self be kind be alive
I want to be kind I want to be kind I want to be kind I want be kind I
want to be alive be kind be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kinder to my self stay kinder to my self be kinder to my self stay
kinder to my self
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay
alive be alive stay kind be a live be kind stay a live
stay a live be a live stay a live be a live stay a live be a live stay
a live. be a live stay a live be a live stay a live be
a live stay a live be
a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life

M. Ezra Zhang 7/2/25 M. Ezra Zhang 7/2/25

Ars Poetica with Amateur Tarot

We’re proud to feature this poem from M. Ezra Zhang’s chapbook Self-Portrait with LSD and Mirror, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

While my lover the tarot reader is comatose
in the bedroom after a night of talking to a god
I could not taste or touch, I scatter
the cards across the living
room like spores
into darkness. Yesterday
under the domination of that god, my face
thrummed in my hands as if
I were wielding a bucket of light. Recoiling from its glare
I was disgusted to find that it followed
me everywhere.

Knowing nothing
about divination I pull three cards:
the moon, the tower, the devil.
If you, like me, don’t know the interior of these
cards, I beg you not to look for them.
It will only make things worse. Look at me
instead while I tell you something true:

One night you are moving
under the hot wet animal of the moon.
You coil upwards a couple hundred
spells until the horizon drowns into the earth
and abandons. At the eye of the tower you become the
eye of the tower. The black grass from below
swells heavenward and then you
become that darkness too.

Today on earth, the living
room window transfixes me
for hours but I find no tranquility in the scene
of the people of the world arriving
at where they need to be.

Stevie doCarmo 7/2/25 Stevie doCarmo 7/2/25

Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care. Quietly reveled in it, in fact, since the rusticity, or whatever, sure seemed part and parcel with the thing seizing their lives, lifting their proverbial boats like the wind lifted those bald eagles they watched amazed from the tilted front stoop, soaring over the stubbly cornfields across the road. Her short stories were getting published left and right. So many there was talk she’d need an agent for her first book. Tim’s numbers-theory articles were landing in journals unchaperoned grad students weren’t supposed to be in. Grants and scholarships out the wazoo. Both of them. They kept startling their profs, who, though they taught at really a very good school, didn’t expect to have TAs gunning for their own jobs. And it scared them at first. Not the success, which seemed, in its way, right and proper, if not full-on promised. The farmhouse. With its scabby-red-paint iron roofs. Its turbid-water-vomiting backyard pump. Its creaky, perilously winding staircases. Yet the house had gotten it done. Cockeyed their lives sufficiently to let the success pour in. Country life. The left-field surprise of it. Even if they did still shop at SuperFresh. Even if the old rustbelt city was right there, other side of the “mountain.” Because had anyone told two-years-ago her she’d be planting zucchini. Going to class makeup-less, freckles flying. In threadbare OshKosh overalls from Goodwill. That Tim would grow that scraggly beard, so strange on so gentle and—okay—feminine a soul. And she did know it was obnoxious, maybe, the place’s becoming hangout du jour for both their departments, stealing social thunder from certain untenured faculty, one of them, Rachel O_____, her thesis director, fresh from a program so huge you trembled just hearing its name. Every weekend, by their second spring there, people crowding the yard. Girls (women) lounging in dilapidated lawn chairs under the big elm, under the soulfully glowing Japanese lanterns she’d hung. Boys (boys) strumming guitars, throwing frisbees, arguing Scorsese vs. Kubrick, Chomsky vs. Foucault. People’s dogs romping in the sunflower patch. Everyone drinking. Everyone. All the time. Crashing overnight, as necessary, on the grungy old futon in what it amused them—as it had perhaps amused those getting hammered in it a century before—to call the parlor. Odd interdepartmental hookups. Clouds of patchouli and pheromones drifting over the unmowed, unfenced backyard on summer nights. Scenes seeming, with enough wine, weirdly meaningful, Whitmanesque, every glistening bicep, every un-bra-restrained nipple an expression of the universe’s urge, urge, urge. Cheap shiraz and ice cream made her the teensiest bit chubby and now even girls were hitting on her. Women. Not that she and Farmer Tim weren’t off the proverbial menu. But still. Halcyon. All of it. Until, at least, their third summer there. When their guests, or whatever, suddenly started sitting around staring at those wretched, wretched devices. Caveman-typing with their thumbs. Deploying idiot hieroglyphs to express whichever of three corporate-sanctioned emotions. Morphing themselves, out of some perverse-unto-satanic impulse, into screenbound advertising campaigns for themselves to be consumed by the same people in whose physical company they sat. She could not get her head around it. Couldn’t believe the whole world was poised, at the very moment it was blooming for her, to vanish up its own digital ass. How did she compete with vacation porn, fancy-drinks porn, home-decor porn? Porn porn? How did you write for people craving a nonstop dopamine drip of GIFs and memes? The violence with which her soul, or whatever, rejected it helped explain, maybe, why she let an inebriated Rachel O_____ lap at her mouth and feel her up one August night in the shabby Formica kitchen, a half-dozen highly entertained guests in witness. Compelled, finally, to pay attention to something other than their goddamn iPhones. A reassertion, call it, of the primacy of the real. Unsurprisingly, it was the beginning of the end. Rachel O_____ abruptly quit speaking to her—about anything, anyway, other than the thesis. It wounded her out of all proportion. Probably because she’d never had so pedigreed a friend and an Olympus dweller’s rejection augured nothing good where her own heights-scaling ambitions were concerned. Tim, for his part, pitched no mortified-partner fit. Did, however, seize an opportunity to tearfully confess he was hot for an infuriatingly beautiful undergrad boy—a senior, but still, for Christ’s sake—who sang Jeff Buckley songs like some sort of fucking angel and had over a thousand Facebook “friends.” She wanted to tell him this was not who he was, only it was tough arguing with anything as moronically honest as a hard-on. Circa that fall semester’s start, it occurred to her she hadn’t seen an acceptance in months. That her new stories were insipid. That the raves Rachel O_____ kept scrawling on them were disingenuous or mean or both. That her father was right about her “career choice.” Glancing out the farmhouse’s bedroom window one November morning she discovered a different sort of party happening: buzzards feasting on a car-struck deer gone down in the veggie garden, one standing priestly atop the exposed ribcage, wings outstretched. All those soaring eagles were doing was corralling terrified rodents. After she and Tim split up and vacated the farmhouse—a mere rental, for all their fondness—she took a medical-tech-writing job in Chicago. Which moved her, after a few years, to Atlanta. Which moved her, a few years after that, to D.C. She kept waiting to meet the person—dude, chick, whatever—she’d fall for the same way she’d fallen for Tim. In some state park it would happen. At some gallery. At a work friend’s kid’s graduation party. Kept waiting, too, for the not-just-want-but-need to write to come back. Thought she felt, every so often, her old muse tugging her wrist, then found, sitting down with the legal pad, it was just the ghost of Jackie Collins. Such a long road back it would be. To writing. With ever more years passing. Outrageous, time’s breathless gallop. She often thought of Tim. Teaching pure mathematics, whatever that was, at UC Riverside. Still bearded, she saw online. Married to some younger man. She thought, too—usually while staring out her condo’s dining-room window at a sunset mirrored in the twin high-rise’s glassy façade—about the farmhouse. Permitted herself, finally, to hunt for it in Google Maps. Discovered, dropping down to street view, a McMansion enclave on the ancient beanfield where it had stood. That adorable, scary little house. She’d been harboring, she realized, some vague plan to go see it again. To stop the Volvo on the road out front, mount the tilted stoop. Summon, if possible, the courage to knock. That same night she dreamed what she thought, startled awake, was a memory. Was it? Of the time a Jesus Christ-grade racket woke her in the dead of night. Emanating from atop the ceiling atop Tim’s and her bed. Something murdering something. Farmer Tim unrousable. Post-party fumy. For some reason the power was out. She bumbled downstairs, hand on plaster wall so she didn’t slip and break her neck on that insane staircase. Knocked over God knows how many empty beer bottles in the kitchen, groping around the counter for the flashlight. Which, happed upon, actually worked. Sort of. She headed back upstairs, stepping over places she knew jutting nailheads to be. Opened, on the second-floor landing, the creaky door to the attic staircase. “Tim!” she hollered. Got only a rumble of thunder for an answer. That and more slapping, thwacking, screeching racket from up above. She started climbing, free hand on the steep, dusty stairs in front of her. Air getting warmer and closer and warmer. Holy hell, she was brave back then. Heat lightning throbbed in a dormer window. Her head cleared the tops of the floorboards and she twisted in place, naked feet braced on two different steps. Aimed the fast-dimming flashlight beam into the attic’s nether regions. Stood transfixed by the pair of bright red eyes glaring back at her from deep inside all that dark.

Jen Dodge 7/2/25 Jen Dodge 7/2/25

Tide Pools

"Draw me a mermaid, Mommy."

“Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

My daughter pulls the bottle away from her mouth with a soft pop. "Draw a shark." My shark is cartoonishly fierce. I am strict about media. No screens, no stories with villains or violence; my daughter has never seen anger depicted.

"Now," she says, "draw the shark eating a mermaid."

My mouth opens to tell her that that would not be a nice picture, but I stop myself. On the one hand, telling her which drawings she should like doesn't align with my feminist parenting agenda; on the other hand, neither does depicting violence against mermaids. While I'm working out this moral paradox, she's staring at my hand holding the pencil, like a dog staring at a hand holding a tennis ball.

Her brother snores gently against my breast in the green and white sling that has become a semi-permanent part of my body. Would I hesitate to draw a shark eating a pirate?

“Draw it, Mommy.”

I draw. The mermaid's mouth is agape, and her hands flail like an old-fashioned damsel in distress. The shark’s teeth are clamped on her tail. Examining my drawing, I can hear the mermaid scream. Does she hear it too? Is she wondering if the shark is angry? Or simply hungry? She’s leaning over the table, her milk-smeared face inspecting my work, as if checking for typos.

She sits back and says, “Draw another one.”

“Another mermaid?”

“Another shark eating the mermaid.”

My heart sinking for the mermaid, I do as my daughter asks and create the same scene. She asks for another, and another. In all, I draw eight versions. And second guess myself with each one.

At last, she says, "Now draw the mermaid eating a shark."

Barely hiding my relief, I produce a fanged and unapologetically vengeful mermaid. This mermaid is decidedly angry and takes no small joy in her revenge on the shark. Her hands claw around its body, and she grins above a semi-circular chunk taken from behind the dorsal fin.

My daughter nods, says nothing, and wanders away. I am left with a pile of pink construction scraps, internal confusion, and a snoring baby.

She had refused to be born, preferring to swim inside me. After ten days, the doctor cut me open and reached in to fish her out of me. She bit him. She has her own names for things. That is a trink. This is my lega. Mommy, do you want a slusher-sludge? When I give her paints, her language transcends words. Pink washes to orange to yellow. Purple blends to blue to green. Bright reds strike against pale blues. She is Technicolor in my gray world.

We drive over the ridge to the fogged-in beach and tote our picnic to the high tide line. She stamps across the sand, like she wants it to know she is there. Her brother’s eyes blink up at me from the shell of his sling. While he is focused on me, she is scanning the beach, the hills, and the horizon.

We head to the tide pools. Mussels and barnacles are everywhere, impossible not to see. We’re looking for anemones and sea stars. I point out things to keep her close, while clutching my son against my body and trying to keep my own balance on the wet rocks. Checking every cranny for an interesting creature to peer at, I feel like I'm looking into other people’s apartments. At last, we find a purple sea star waiting for the tide. She looks at it, then shakes her head and I assume she’s frightened. I squat down awkwardly, take a breath and touch an animal I know nothing about. Running two fingers along the rough arm, I lie, "See, it's not scary."

At the touch of its prickled skin, I realize everything my daughter already seems to know. Its eyes may be at the ends of its arms, but the sea star looks right at me and my desperate-to-be-perfect parenting. These echinoderms creep on their hundreds of tiny tube feet across every inch of every ocean, from tide pools to twenty-thousand feet below, undisturbed by darkness, pressure, or the violence of predation. How many times has this creature lost an arm to a deceptively powerful mantis shrimp only to grow a new one? How often has it stretched its stomach out over a clam or a branch of coral, letting the enzymes slowly dissolve the prey before drawing the sated stomach back up into its body? I glance up at the seagulls circling; gulls who will eat anything with or without legs if they can catch it. I bristle at the meanness of nature. Then she is on the move again, and I have to blunder after her. I leave the sea star and the gulls to their conscience.

I roll up my jeans and push her leggings up over her knees and tell myself this means our clothes won’t get wet. One hand holding my daughter’s, the other resting on the bump that is her brother, we wade in. Splashing and laughing she pulls us farther in. The water rushes away from shore, pulling the sand out from under my feet, giving me the sensation that I'm moving. She wrenches free of me, throws her arms wide, and bursts into her siren song. A wild and joyful ululation.

I reach for her wrist, slippery now, and worry about those sneaker waves the news always warns about. My grip tightens but she gets away from me again, and again sings out, as if fetching her merfolk to come and take all three of us.

The fear seizes me. I see the three of us being sucked under the green water, past the tiny cove and the fishing boats, past the cargo ships. The waves tumble us past the twelve-mile territory sea, past the two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone, and at last we bob into the open ocean that is owned by no one.

Here, where she is at home, she will reach out for my arm. She will want to point things out to her brother. Circling around the axis of our joined hands, she will gaze about with contentment, and I will be frantic, desperate for the safety of my own small pond. Calmly, she will show me the whales singing below us.

A wave hits her at waist height. She is soaked, but still upright. I get a hold of her wrist and with the promise of a snack, lure her back to our heap of belongings. I hand her a peanut butter sandwich and tell her she's frightened me. "The ocean wants to take you from me. Don't let it."

"Oh, Mommy," she scrunches her nose at me, "it's okay if the ocean takes me."

I swallow my terror and say, "How about swim lessons? You can learn to swim like a mermaid."

She ignores me, drops the peanut butter sandwich into the sand, and wanders off to play with a rope of brown kelp.

Days later, she chatters through the house while I tend to a thousand tasks and accomplish nothing. Mermaids are still a favorite. She is wearing her swimsuit, scarves, and beads.

As I answer her—not really listening but wanting her to think I'm listening—I am thinking about dinner and dishes, and if I should buy that sweater or save money, or go back to work even though I hated the job I had before. Through all this noise, I hear a small thing. My daughter's voice, not chattering, but speaking to me. She says, "Mommy, you are the mermaid that eats sharks."

"What did you say?"

She's gone already, dancing down the hallway, with scarves and beads dangling, and dripping milk on the floor. I look down at her brother, whose brown eyes blink back at me. I will never know if I heard her correctly, but the further away I am from that moment, the more I realize it doesn't matter.

A neglected part of my brain has begun to shift, like a waking sea star creeping from twenty-thousand feet below. For a moment, I don't see myself as a tired and gray woman, still so much like a girl, trapped in a small, safe pond.

For a moment, I see myself in Technicolor, fanged, and eating a shark.

Gordan Struić 6/25/25 Gordan Struić 6/25/25

ACCESS_DENIED: heart.exe

> Running diagnostics...

Emotional drive:
fragmented.

Accessing main directory:
/hope/memory/you

Status:
file: touch.exe — missing
file: laugh.wav — corrupted
file: promise.txt — overwritten
folder: trust/ — access denied

Attempting repair...
Error: permission denied.

System prompt:
“Feeling requires vulnerability. Proceed?”

User input:
...
Suggested action:
abort.

Some systems forget
how to open again.

Gordan Struić 6/25/25 Gordan Struić 6/25/25

Shutdown.log

if (soul == None):
log("disconnection detected");
backup("last known version of me");

if (heartbeat.variation < 0.01):
run("old songs");
try:
trigger("feeling");
except:
pass

if (voice == empty):
load("your messages.txt");
loop:
hear("you saying goodbye");

if (system == unstable):
restart();
load("quiet");

if (presence == ghost):
print("I loved you");
shutdown("gently");

Instructions for leaving.
When there’s no one left.

Hannan Khan 6/24/25 Hannan Khan 6/24/25

final sale: no returns

shelf life
expiration date
say you love me before the price tag peels off
[aisle 13, fluorescence flickering—]
you reach for the last dented can of chickpeas & so do i & so we do
& suddenly our delicate hands are tangled like a broken barcode…
like an error in the quick scanner—like a misprint on the receipt of fate.
(does fate even issue refunds?)

the can rolls & gravity takes its tax—bottoms out—bottoms out—out. out. out. we both bend
down, the linoleum yawns. an abyss in the waxy white tiles. (buy one get one free. but
who is one and who is free?) a voice on the loudspeaker crackles: attention shoppers,
all prices are final. but my knees are on clearance—your laughter is marked
down—our shoulders gently brush & suddenly, the barcode of your
wrist is scanning my pulse. i’m full of expired metaphors. you’re
full of unspoken coupons.
(fine print: offers valid while supplies last)

the manager’s voice rustles overhead, a plastic bag in the wind. the fluorescent lights glitch.
the can rolls towards the underworld of the shelves. disappears. the lowest shelf. (where
forgotten things go. where we’re going. where we—) you giggle—you giggle—
you peel the last digit off a price tag and whisper it into my ear like a
prophecy. i mishear it as love. and then all markdowns,
we disappear in the bustling crowd.
(reduced for quick sale)

but then—
i wake up in aisle 13 again. again. again. the same can waiting. you reach. so do i. the scanner
beeps. the loop begins again. (does fate even offer exchanges?) the can rolls—but this time
it doesn’t stop. it keeps rolling, past the lowest shelf, past the waxed linoleum, past
the storeroom door left ajar. down. down into the supermarket catacombs
where carts with rusted wheels hum lullabies and lost items mutters
fainted names. (who is lost? the can? us?) you follow it. i
follow you. a door abruptly closes behind us. the
intercom gives a ding: attention shoppers,
this store is now closed.

and when we returned around—there is no aisle 13…13…13…
no fluorescent light—no way back. only shelves stacked
high with things we do not remember losing. And
shadowy price tags that bear our names.
this item is no longer available.
(final sale. no returns.)

Dudley Stone 6/23/25 Dudley Stone 6/23/25

Love Song Intended to Stave Off Discontinuation of Relations (Unsuccessful)

Say you want me
And I’ll be your boy toy

If you want me hard to get
I’ll be your coy boy toy

If you want me Scottish
I’ll be your Rob Roy boy toy

If you want me to swell and sway with the crowd
I’ll be your hoi polloi boy toy

If you want me strong like copper and steel
I’ll be your smelted alloy boy toy

If you’re Jewish and I’m not
I’ll be your goy boy toy

If you want me saucy like Szechuan beef
I’ll be your Kikkoman-smothered bok choy boy toy

If you want me After the Thin Man
I’ll be your William Powell and Myrna Loy boy toy

Or, if you want something that melts in your mouth
Slavic and sweet (and you don’t mind
sharing the bed with crumbs)
I’ll be your Bolshoi Ballet/Chips Ahoy! boy toy

Michael Rerick 6/16/25 Michael Rerick 6/16/25

[a go phone shivers something important past outdoor seating pints and appetizers]

a go phone shivers something important past outdoor seating pints and appetizers
while the quiet trumpet flower springs bright jazz with a deep throated calico reach
like schoolyard entropy with a slow universe heat death blasted from lily depths
I manage curb horse rings with small plastic horses tethered to a rediscovered history
where there is witness to a dead cigar butt still available to cartoon tramps
we recognize faces as human just as squirrel recognizes squirrel scampering away
in the wet purple dawn berries begin the hard work of turning color
with a quick sweet peep across car tops we question the Palm Springs of Washington
to jokingly shit on a small town we drive through buried in a fruit tree basin
not the airport locker return in a new city hauling clothes books and sleeping bag
avoiding gnat clouds and mosquito gatherings with continuous movement
a momentary raspberry can be plucked crushed and rolled for the juice pockets
reminding a thick blanket nap symbol across couch cushions
and a morning pigeon litany praying for seed and air in both cloud and sun
as the flowers stream brighter with a particular court conviction
celebrated with a book warehouse sale rush to add to shelves and stacks
saying

the act of writing about writing is the act of writing