Matthew Byrne

I commissioned my artist friend to paint
a starlit evening on our nursery ceiling.
He struggled at first, pacing the room,
obsessively scaling his ladder. The job
was beneath him, but he needed the money.
Something had to be done, so I burned
his obscure punk cds into my computer,
so he could listen to his music randomly
shuffling and without interruption.
He finished the very next day, but instead
of the tranquil twilight I envisioned, I got
a maelstrom brewing around a moon more
menacing than an axe-wielding lunatic.
I paid up, made the nursery our bedroom,
and my wife and I have never slept better.

MATTHEW BYRNE‘s poems have been published in known and obscure journals. He won the Sow’s Ear Chapbook award in 2013 and was included in the Heather-McHugh-edited 2007 Best American Poetry anthology. He sells insurance for a living in Chicago, Illinois.

Daniel Galef

Is something — off? The captain scoffs: ‘Pizzazz!’
That’s not it, but I don’t dare say he’s wrong.
I heard the butler whisper that she has
A tooth or two too many, or too long.
I’ve seen her prick her ears up like a cat,
Which gave me a peculiar hunted feeling.
She smiled and said ‘Why, any can do that,’
And then returned to dusting off the ceiling.
She walks the moorlands: Cold and arid climes
Are where she says her noble line arose.
She’s strangely secretive at other times,
When asked, say, why she hasn’t got a nose.
But love erases flaws, and hides all scars:
To err is human — Who’s to say, on Mars?

DANIEL GALEF is an undergraduate student of classical philosophy and classical literature at McGill University in Montreal. His poems have appeared in The Lyric, Measure, and Light Quarterly, and his genre poetry in particular in Sein und Werden, the Surreal Grotesque, and Child of Words Fantasy & Science Fiction. He also writes musicals and won the Krivy Award for Excellence in Playwriting at the 2016 McGill Drama Festival.