If you’ve ever helped someone find their way through a maze,
If you’ve ever been out of place or time,
If you’ve ever lost someone and made unusual choices,
If you’ve ever desperately wanted to be haunted,
If you’ve ever felt trapped,
If you’ve ever worked the night shift for minimum wage,
If you’ve ever been stuck in a wall . . .
This one’s for you.
Sarp Sozdinler
We take turns reading to it.
Mostly cookbooks.
Or the instruction manual
for a dehumidifier.
It prefers
the parts in italics.
At night, it dreams
of a smaller labyrinth—
just a single hallway,
with no decisions.
Sometimes it calls out
for Ariadne.
Sometimes Ikea.
We do not correct it.
A Turkish writer & poet, SARP SOZDINLER has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Hobart, HAD, JMWW, and Normal School, among other journals. Their work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently working on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
John Repp
Eric wears a retro-1950s pompadour & shares
a fraught lunch with the guy who will be
The New Guy till a newer guy arrives. The maple
agrees as any tree must: slowly. The book
illustrates a bewildering bevy of warblers,
but the yellow one glimpsed just now
is, of course, idiosyncratic. The sun sits
atop a horizon of tree limbs, all the dusk-drawn
insects rising from the marsh. Back home,
a king snake reluctantly uncoils from the stoop.
JOHN REPP grew up along the Blackwater Branch of the Maurice River in the Pine Barrens region of southern New Jersey. In 2024, Seven Kitchens Press published his latest collection of poetry, Star Shine in the Pines.