Lauren Tivey

Central Hospital, Port-au-Prince, 1937

It lurches into the sun-bleached yard
on dusty, cracked feet, yellow-clawed,
drab linen shift over a bony frame, limbs
reckless, akimbo, a terrifying ragdoll,
blank black face with empty eyes, floating
nightmare head on a stick of a neck. Zora
views this wreckage of a once-woman, this
animated corpse pitching before her, hears
dreadful guttural emissions from its throat,
and—ever the pro—grasps her Kodak tighter,
fingerprints smearing the Bakelite case,
chides herself for courage in the name
of anthropology. The only thing to do
in the face of the fiend: get the shot
and run, practically pissing herself,
toward safety. Later, in the darkroom,
a blotch blooming in the acid bath,
saturated paper floating, undulant
shadows. And then, black hellebore
face emerging, an ink smudge, devoid.
Zora lights a cigarette; slow exhale
through the nostrils, sly smile curling
at the edge of her scarlet lips.

Note: Author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti to study folklore and voodoo in the 1930s; while there, she learned of the case of real-life “zombie,” Felicia Felix Mentor, and photographed her. The photo appeared in LIFE Magazine in December, 1937.

LAUREN TIVEY is a Pushcart nominated poet of three chapbooks, most recently The Breakdown Atlas & Other Poems. Her work has appeared in Connotation Press, The Coachella Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among dozens of other publications in the U.S. and U.K. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Flagler College, in St. Augustine, Florida.

John L. Stanizzi

4.08 p.m.

30 degrees

Pushed east to west, the only open water purls against the ice,
orange-light of winter-dusk infuses late afternoon with a
nocturne melancholy – the open water is black and silky,
dark settles in to itself as one final chickadee clicks in the half-light.

JOHN L. STANIZZI is author of – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits – Fifty 50-Word Pieces, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Blue Mountain Review, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, and many others. Stanizzi has been translated into Italian and appeared in many Italian journals. He has read at venues all over New England. Stanizzi teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT, and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.

Margarita Serafimova

I was a salamander endemic to the sea,
its silver I was turning into gold, and myself —
into light, to the point of disappearance.

MARGARITA SERAFIMOVA was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, Summer Literary Seminars Contest, University Centre Grimsby Literary Prize; long-listed for the Christopher Smart (Eyewear Publishing) Prize, Erbacce Press Poetry Prize, Red Wheelbarrow Prize; nominated for Best of the Net. She has work appears in Agenda Poetry, London Grip, Waxwing, Trafika Europe, European Literature Network, A-Minor, Poetry South, Great Weather for Media, Orbis, Nixes Mate, StepAway, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Mookychick, HeadStuff, Minor Literatures, Writing Disorder, Birds We Piled Loosely, Orbis, Chronogram, Noble/ Gas, Origins, Journal, miller’s pond, Obra/ Artifact, Central and Eastern European London Review, TAYO, Guttural, etc. Visit: facebook.com/MargaritaISerafimova.