Dashboard Horus: A Bird's Eye View of the Universe

  A Squint of Spain 2022 I purchased a straw hat and sunglasses, so that I could blend right in with most of the other assholes: unlike a majority of my fellow countrymen, I was absent of a shaved head, a fat gut, a big mouth and bad tattoos and they began drinking pale, watered down beer at 10:30 am: I left out the booze until late evening, I enjoy drinking alone and listening to music of my own choosing: I’d sit on the room’s balcony and gaze across at the 5 storeys, sprawling apartment complex opposite and observed life in all its variety as I drank my wine: any night I would see half-naked young women strutting from room to room, gay men in boxer shorts romantically dancing, cat’s balancing on 3 rd storey windowsills, one guy who would constantly lean out of his 4 th floor window and look up and down the street and then shake his head and disappear for a few minutes and then return: an elderly couple whose faces were lit by a flickering television screen, sometimes, I heard th...

Ann Tweedy's first full-length book, The Body's Alphabet , was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases, White Out , and A Registry of Survival . Her poems have appeared in R attle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review , and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the NetAwards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. Read more about her at www.anntweedy.com. Axis I remember how it was to be strung along a highway that held all my aspirations– for fifteen years rooted at different points in that zooming, crawling, 1,400-mile frenzy, always within an easy drive to the magnificent, unthinkable coast....

  Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician and dancer. She is the author of Other Maidens (BlazeVOX, 2020), An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press, 2020), In Her Terms (Cholla Needles Press, 2021), Pages of a Broken Diary (Psky’s Porch, 2022) and Alter Alter (Elyssar Press, 2022). Commute   Close your eyes, he said. She heard smashing of waves against rock, thumps of hoofs on pavement, intermittent slash of the whip and the coachman clearing his throat at regular intervals, a deep cavernous sound. Pulse, pulse, syncopation. Her own heart, hushed, subdued clandestine, incognito.   Close them tight, he said then he squeezed her hand. She saw flashes of bright  in the dark, phosphorescent like will o’ the wisps in a swamp. All you see he said, will be yours. Their hands nested like Russian dolls her fist wraps a negative shape, a kernel of void. © 2022 Toti O’Brien