Eunoia Review

Imagine this: dreams smeared across the wall, we run back home where our hands lie in piles of shit, defeated by the appeal of belonging. How easily we’re fooled into thinking what’s familiar is safe, aligning the trajectory of a wife’s beaten skull back into orbit with her husband’s fist, or how whenever bad days hit we crawl our 200-pound belly back into the kitchen. How a nicotine patch gets…

Her affection drafted in shade, read with a flash— scarce words of love and nothing falling deep into his chest. He answers in grey. They wait, each for the other. Louise Pocock is Vice President, Client, at BoardOutlook, where she works at the intersection of board performance, strategy and technology. Her poetry has been published in Australian and international journals, and her children’s…

Afternoons are for dragonflies. They loop overhead, back and forth above my tiny plastic pond. Four children are found alive after a plane crash. How did they survive? Some combination of love and emergency propelled them, looping back and forth from the small pile of wreckage, their mother’s body, grandmother’s voice calling and calling. The dragonflies hover, reflected on the surface of the…

I wake to a swirl of politics. The air is bitter the way chocolate is bitter. I think of my childhood, where it’s always October, and my father is telling me to stand in the doorway. Instead, I dive under the bed. I ask my father, Can the earth really swallow a whole city? On the other side of the mountains, a hurricane assembles itself. The streets of my town crumble like coffeecake. A fruit…

When sleeping bags are rolled out and parents are in bed, we flock to the bathroom and huddle in the dark. Even with a flashlight, the problem is reversed from the talking board, not Who speaks from the otherside? but Who speaks for us? Some say it’s seven times, others are sweet on three though I’ve never fingered the Rosary, we held Mario for hours and after the console was fried the music…

Some chords are forced into paean-ode with rests and clefs from a requiem chant. The choir tries but the tempo is the tell, it’s just a stilted beat that mines a staccato promise out of a legato wail. K. V. Balady is a writer and editor from Bergen County, New Jersey.

We trespass when we enter and cut when we leave, all of us, we scatter our tiny lives onto other tiny lives sown along pavement and grass, patches that become whole realms to some and little shortcuts to others, and we don’t know when we’re stepping on dirt or on jewels or on ashes. I used Charles St. yesterday for a whole block with no plan to breathe even a ghost back into it and there was a…

The sun knocks on my door, he comes uninvited, and I hide under blankets of sorrow, but the sun breaks in, like he owns the place, like he knows no barriers, no borders, he claims he’s been here since forever, and he claims the house and me, as the walls start to yawn like weary accordions stretching their bellows into long ribbons that wrap around my ankles and pull me gently into a river of…

The ghost of my dead boyfriend comes and goes like he owns the place. I’d rather see Dad but Dad won’t come yet. I wonder if my dead boyfriend has come as an ambassador. He never visited before Dad left, but he loved Dad and Dad loved him and once drove me to see him. Dad drove all day and all night, he drove a thousand miles so that I could see him for an hour, back when they were both alive,…

The flowers are buried under the frozen earth along with the residents on cemetery hill. My ancestors are there. They were dead before my birth. Like the flowers in October, this snow destroys my will. As my roof groans, with the wind’s lethal blows, I’m snowbound. My fingers feel too cold to write, but the moon glides like a youthful skater, across a glass-like night, and so I have to wonder if…

When we return, there will be no tomorrow. The tinge of time on a loop burns like smoke of roasted dreams. Tomorrow I’ll don a corset with whalebones and throw out our nets, wishing to catch a giant octopus. Gutted and belly-up, I flop turning around in sleepless nights. Resisting the pull of your tide. Dolphins have a lot of teeth, their cackle is a menace, but all I want is salt burning hot on…

molten iron dripping like sweat swearing when hot metal touches my skin I’m marked, now you play smith add a blow to my myth you forge me add a blow to my cheek and I’m bent to your will Eva Lantsoght is a multilingual poet from Belgium, who lives in the Netherlands and Ecuador. Her work has appeared in Katern, Museum de Mindere, De Optimist, Hesiodos Flow Fest and has been awarded with the…

There will come a day when your name is spoken for the last time. It could be a distant relative rolling out a family tree, or a librarian culling their collection. It could be a stranger reading a gravestone the day before a tornado. Maybe this utterance will hang in the air. Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His work has appeared in Bending Genres, Emerge Literary Journal, Maudlin…

I find a PBR in my basement’s drop ceiling, warm and unopened. I remove more tiles, uncovering a lock of hair taped to a “first haircut” certificate, and an endangered species poster with hand-drawn birds, one with a bright blue body, another with a rainbow back. After a second cup of tea, I put it all back in the ceiling for someone else to find. Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His…

Here, take my hand. I am offering you a kindness – a warm mug of tea and a vanilla scone. Do you even like vanilla? No matter, here we are. Try to be kinder to yourself. Your father’s fists no longer exist. At least, I can make it so. Here, in a small apartment, cozy and comforting, I will try to fix your life. We need no fuel for that. Only the heart and all that it can give. Louisa Schnaithmann…

My eyes are slowly getting worse as well. You should know that. But here, the moss grows correctly, lush and verdant. How can I correct your death? I step so carefully over beds and beds of flowers. I try not to crush the bluebells and daffodils in my grandmother’s front yard. They won’t spoil, instead blooming and then fading for the tulips and eventually, roses. I see your life so fuzzily, as…

The leaves are being consumed – a wretched worm, munching along each vein, each stem. I’m wondering how much you knew of your own end – were you expecting it? Did the tree silhouetted against the clear blue sky tell you anything special? What about the moss? Was it whispering to you all along? What about a good day in spring? Was that ever an option? Louisa Schnaithmann is the author of Plague…