buffalojournal

[buffalojournal]

volume four (guest editor: Réka Nyitrai)

Réka Nyitrai is a Romanian-Hungarian poet who discovered her poetic voice at forty-one, mainly through Japanese short forms, but particularly haiku.  Her debut haiku collection While Dreaming Your Dreams won the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2020. Following this, she began to write both prose and lineated poems. She writes in English, her third language. Moon flogged, her full-length debut collection was released in September 2024 by Broken Sleep Books.

[buffalojournal]

Question and Answer Session

What is night? A few dabs of crimson on your lips. And life? Buckets of flesh-colored cream. And love? Lascivious nighttime creatures who knock down gates. And day? Streets and oceans without end. And suicide? Compositions in celestial and interstellar spaces. And hatred? Eyes as big as cracked saucers. And you? Festivities over too soon. And me? The unreal bleeding through the real. And us? The point where functionality meets excess.

🦬 John Grey

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Lemmy Ya'akova

dreamer, you're awake

welcome to hell world, dreamer. I knew you before. no, before this. all of it. this little life had another life, resurfaced in a different shape. born again, as they say. when I told the moon about us she was disappointed. I know you’re not giving up, I know you’ve just had enough my friend, not long lost. never lost. just long, braided into time. I will remember how you cried when I wrote you love poems, drunkenness in your voice. you’d say, you’re gunna be the end of me. dreamer, you’re awake. do what must be done: wash the clothes. rub your lover’s neck. cook the meatballs. take a bath. maybe my mother is right. maybe some small thing will succeed us, precious gem pulled from our core, more of us in this place. we’ll try again in another life when we are both cats.

it's all a moodboard

a dove perched on your finger, blushing / the eye of the goat, a horizon / I have so much love to give because I’ve watched so many people I love die / a child with comically large plastic tweezers picks up a leaf by the stem, / you have to be gentle with it / never before have I been compelled to write about a plant / I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck was up with that hibiscus bush / she was menacing, moaned when I touched her petals / I jumped back, apologized immediately / I think she forgave me, like they say jesus does / I say jesus was trailer trash / manger trash / loved everybody / no matter what coffee shop they lived in / sometimes children know things before we can teach them / sometimes children know things that can’t be taught / & I have to laugh that my job makes me schedule grief

🦬 Lemmy Ya'akova

[buffalojournal]

Three Poems by Shane Kowalski

White Plains

Who wasn’t born in White Plains? I need a perfect other to relate to and eroticize. Or else? Or else my fanaticism wilts. I remember that time we both reached for your fallen umbrella in the rain. I remember wasting oodles and oodles of time doing nothing, parked in snowy parking lots. I have relics—eyeballs in jars, skeletons wearing sunglasses, a single letter of affection from the beautiful hermit of Lake Erie. What do you remember from those days before we could know anything we wanted?

Turnips

I was halfway to Okeechobee when I fell off the turnip truck. In a small town whose name I could never pin down. It was such a small town you ended up knowing everybody. Hell, even if it were a big town you’d know everybody! Would end up finding the love of your life there! What luck! Raising a rascal family! Oh, Beaver! Retiring thirty years later with a gold star and a potluck dinner! Mmm… What happened to the turnips, one can only guess. Perhaps they found their perfect ends, too. Perhaps the truck never stopped. Anything is possible.

What Did We Miss?

What if when they finally made it to Mars (after many failed attempts), all they found was a completely different timeline of what could’ve happened on Earth? But the timeline isn’t actively happening on Mars, but only displayed on a 10" monitor? So when the first lifeforms to visit from Earth arrive, they will be so entranced by what could’ve been, they won’t even stop to think if they should even be on Mars? They will lose all sense of time and place Eventually, perhaps, they will watch a particular scene or event in the timeline that will wake them up, but only temporarily, from the stupor of ambiguous nostalgic transfixion? But they will be so overcome with a sense of “something,” that they will feel compelled to just think about how they could make the ongoing alternate timeline a reality? Would they need to start again? is what they would think? But how can one possibly start again, from the very beginning, as if nothing, none of it, had ever happened? Should they go back to Earth? is another thought that might pass through them? And what if the answers to their questions are so clouded they just sit on the one lonely chair that’s been there the whole time? And they’ll feel so consumed with desire to watch more of the timeline (what have they missed?), they won’t even bother to question why a single chair is there in the first place? They surely didn’t bring it with them? It was already there? Someone has built this chair? Perhaps not to sit in? Perhaps to do something else with? But what could one possibly do with a chair, except to sit in it? Why are we calling it a chair even? Who says what’s there in the first place? Who’s even out there?

🦬 Shane Kowalski

[buffalojournal]

I Am Aging into My Mother's Body

I am aging into my mother’s body as most of us do but somehow the transmutation into her, the molding of the clay by the gentle fingertips of time, comes as a surprise. Perhaps it’s because she had highlighted our differences when I was a child despite my Gilmore-girls resemblance to her. I have dark eyes where hers are green. My hair is long and reddish. I did not develop breasts too early, was skinny in the right way while her body was put through a Ninja Warrior course of abuse and sexualization and degradation, obstacles to self acceptance that she knew to bulldoze for me rather than repackage them as loathing and re-gift, still I am aging into my mother’s body although I do not carry her scars. I am unmarred by any c-section incisions. I do not miss a chunk of flesh from her vintage 70s smallpox vaccinations. She believed strongly in sunscreen, like like an offering to a sun god, so I never developed a melanoma to remove. Nevertheless, the flesh starts to loosen around the muscles on my upper arms. There are small, dark stretch marks on my stomach. Lines deepen in the corners of my eyes where I inherited her laughter. She was not one to ever push me away from facial expression, embraced a resting bitch face despite the inroads of emotion leaving wrinkles, but I am aging into my mother’s body and while I was mostly inoculated from self doubt sometimes I have an errant thought like a mosquito that I should lose weight. The skincare subreddit advises me to look into Botox and fillers. But the truth is my body has carried me through hardship like a camel in the desert as my mother’s body has her. I remind myself I have always found her beautiful. I never understood her aversion to tank tops or shorts, never thought she should liquefy her shape to pour it into an uncomfortable vessel. So, mostly, I am honored for the opportunity to age into my mother’s body.

🦬 Hillary Steinberg

[buffalojournal]

the poem is a threat

one man’s flute is another man’s fumble. i am sick to death of listening. every road here needs changing, outrageous names, how quick we are to call a woman what she is to a pervert, a process, an empire. don’t ever call me mother, ma’am, i am not yours. i belong to love, ever hear of it over the leaf blower? ever hear of a broom? do you even feed birds?—nevermind the shit of it, the pre-dawn racket. you were dreaming nonsense anyway, can you name a feeling, or just four native grasses? call me manmade again.

🦬 Kristin Lueke

[buffalojournal]

The End

And when they opened the dead bird they found it full of old screws. Lego heads, wheels, dolls, the like. The end was told as a scrolled fable in a bone in the beak.

🦬 Benjamin Niespodziany

[buffalojournal]

Search

forty-eight years I’ve searched for my voice a whisper cracked hoarse one moment fluid another then silent. I shape words which fall off my tongue and lie in puddles on the floor. I step in them slipping regaining perilous toehold. I scream strangled thoughts dreams are forgotten the night laughs, she touches my forehead with her lips I welcome the silence of sleep.

🦬 Louis Faber

[buffalojournal]

Love Hurts

A Midwest poet, a guy less than half my age, lost an eye to cancer during the winter. I might have been on night patrol in no man’s land at the time or engaged in a duel over my wife with a handsome French cavalry officer in the czar’s service. Love is the woo-wee, woo-wee of sirens, many thousands of them; the thick suds of brainwashing; a skyful of UFOs. It’s the farmer’s insistence that the cows in the field where assorted human body parts were found are extremely easygoing.

🦬 Howie Good

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Kathryn Lasseter

I Tell You What to Do

Don’t self-prescribe a Mandarin regime, please. You know nothing about ancient Chinese remedies. Horns and hooves aren’t enough. Don’t feign; don’t indulge in folly. Surely you are good enough in some other realm, if only you could find that realm lurking at the next bandstand or bus stop, but you don’t ride buses and have never played in a band. Also true that you are fond of everything bagels and your orange jumpsuit. Not a sequence of blatant errors, but a brilliant comedy routine by which you rescue yourself again. Count the fingers you have left, but don’t hand them over.

De Familiar

Don’t instruct me to lay low and fret. I am writing in the dark so my writing will be indecipherable to the open eye. Eyes eschew murkiness, prefer to see swans preening at dawn and ducks quacking with mates in rainwater ponds. Look instead for barred owls with candelabra eyes, swiveling their tufted heads all the way around to see oppositely. Prey surprised!

🦬 Kathryn Lasseter

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by nat raum

journal (take #17)

dear diary, these are extremely sleepy times we live in—i ragdoll my body, pile of limbs, into a memory foam oasis and immediately my knees and ankles ask what took you so long? while my mass sinks deeper into relief, eyes fall heavy into half a slumber i hadn’t planned, but i could be convinced to throw the match against these shuttering eyelids, to-do list be damned. there’s been a change of plans: if you need me, please do not.

journal (take #19)

dear diary, did you know that waxing crescents can tangle sickles of moonlight in patches of summer sky? i ask my lover to hold me spitslicked and sputtering between his lips and when i drip nectar, i bleed crimson sugar onto his sun-dappled chest. we both beg for a specific kind of ruinous: for him to watch me as my fingertips & tongue compete for every fold of skin between his legs. dear diary, if spacerocks had our gangly limbs, i swear you’d see them settle into pairs, coil of spine against glistening sternum, fusing slimes.

🦬 nat raum

[buffalojournal]

volume three

[buffalojournal]

cold dawn on the honor tier

morning that’s still night, opaque in the cells. waking at quarter past four, you beat the birds at their own game. footsteps plod and echo along concrete corridors, passing out provisions: a tray sliding through a turquoise metal slot. the tier rustles to life, there’s a rising din when you collect the empties, scanning leftovers. pocketing a hard boiled egg. bite in, the cooked-through yolk chalks your teeth. you’ll brush them later, when civil twilight wanes. lay down, curl your toes, your ankle joint, caressing a stack of the economist, ten deep, unread, at the foot of your bed.

🦬 Natalye Childress

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Jessie Janeshek

Duck Notice

The yellow in her hair squeaked when she told me to please write down “spiritual seeker,” so I rolled my closed eyes and wrote “build your own pizza.”

Annual Honesty

Boba tea used to be a luxury when I lived where I could walk right onto the beach, with my white puppy, pearly dollar, and/or a sneaky moon.

🦬 Jessie Janeshek

[buffalojournal]

Los Angeles shrugs

🦬 Sarah Nichols

[buffalojournal]

Sleep Deprivation Becomes You

Horror ice cream sauce. Organ suckling. Dissected froth. Cherry eyeball. Sleep deprivation becomes microwave radar. Radiation sounds sizzle and explode. Temporal lobe mass attack. Tenterhooks for eyes.

🦬 Juliet Cook

[buffalojournal]

County Fair

I meet you in a field of unfolded steel

and sagging tents, screeching parts

and deep fryers. You try to kiss me

in a haunted house, a plastic-smelling

fire trap loud with low-budget props

and pressurized air. To be cacophony

with no substance is relatable. To let you

turn me on again is all part of the noise.

We rattle in our seats as you deny everything,

white-knuckling faulty restraint bars

that will leave me bruised for two whole weeks.

🦬 L.M. Camiolo