ISSUE 23 November 2021
Judy Ireland, Meryl Stratford, Michael Mackin O'Mara, Lenny DellaRocca, editors
Judy Ireland, Meryl Stratford, Michael Mackin O'Mara, Lenny DellaRocca, editors
If you are poet, prophet, peace loving artist, tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between; if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl; if you value the humane treatment of every creature and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo seeks your best work.
Purchase our first print anthology comprising poets from the first 10 issues here: Voices
Poetry
Elvis Alves Tuhin Bhowal CL Bledsoe George Briggs Brian Builta Corey D. Cook Lois Roma-Deeley Marc Alan Di Martino George Freek Steve Gerson Rich Glinnen Robin Gow Samuel Green AE Hines Carolina Hospital Matthew Johnson Michael Lee Johnson Natasha King Kara Knickerbocker Sven Kretzschmar Virginia Laurie Jenifer Browne Lawrence Ernesto Livorni Katherine Lo Emma McCoy Joseph Mills Michael Minassian Claudia Monpere Bonnie Proudfoot Doug Ramspeck Louise Robertson Mel Ruth Esther Sadoff Sean Sexton Martha Silano Annette Sisson Meghan Sterling Jacqueline Allen Trimble Maryfrances Wagner George Wallace Alexander Wolff
Elvis Alves New York, NY 2 poems
|
Congo Square
Her eyes are set on the Square. Some people say she waits the return of her husband who left for a war long done. Is it faith that is keeping her or is she keeping faith? Whatever it is, something holds her gaze. She knows the watchful eyes of the law and tries to see when it is creeping from nowhere to latch on to lives—taking them down. Down to the gutters. To the prison not too far from the Square. The drums keep her awake, keep speaking to her in a language that is fading from her memory. But she holds to what is here, what is written in blood and is without name. The women gather. And dance. Children come too. She stays behind her door, not pondering how to escape. Simply being more than what seeks to destroy. |
Bus
We ride the bus through the city. Avenues and boulevards become bones traversed by people and vehicles. We talk loud so that everyone can hear the tales we share to fill the void. Cities grow mouths that swallow every- thing in sight. We beg to see stars-- bodies that remind us of lives outside of what we witness and know. We are strangers onboard for the ride. Misunderstood intellectuals, we pontificate over cheap coffee at artisanal cafes in gentrified hoods. We ride the bus for change of scenery. Our conversations stay the same. We want to liberate the people by telling the truth. History is riddled with lies, we say and ride into the night, ideas floating in our heads. The driver tells us to leave. We get off where we started and wonder how to begin again. |
Elvis Alves's latest book is Black/White: We are not panic (pandemic) free (Mahaicony Books, 2020). He lives in New York City.
Tuhin Bhowal Bangalore, India
Triptych of Desire, then Withdrawal
“If I want to want you, isn’t that enough? No. Way too much.” —Ben Lerner
Somehow, I am still here, long after typewriter keys
—my quaint Remington stadium of cleft people
with black seats, long after my father’s collection
of Bengali novels which made atheists think of
fractured gods, long after transistor radios & their
superimposed waves interfering like sleep. I now
understand I was not supposed to dream so little.
My hobbies now include meeting you underwater,
fainting inside a lake. But we never took to dancing.
I ode through the snow. Even when there is no snow.
/
If our whole lives were alleged on a Cartesian plane,
the dimensions of its origin would be mapped to our
collective sadness. In other words, wanting to master the
art of your impossible body was catching a fish darting
against surface tension. The flesh real but slipping away.
Ramanujan insisted that he wrote with everything he learnt;
I prattle of the Homeric simile to fetishize your full feet & their
long-bared legs—one ricocheting the other like a hatched plan.
How many years have passed since I aimed at eloquence?
How many have piled since I last let your laughter occur to me.
/
I breathe the obscene south Bangalore air squinting past bus
terminals, missionary hospitals, & pristine mosques, the scent
of fish & fritters fizzing, while your enargeia advanced across
the apparatus of this machinery: Our bodies never baroque at
memory, like those roads I could not keep travelling with you
or without. Nothing remains but their basilica of bones—& the
years, they continue to occur. A lot of them used to make me happy.
Among all things, I am allergic to chicken now. Even though,
you say. When I suggest, Let us be open to revision, what I am
hinting at is you hardly hear me through all this rain, & thunder—
“If I want to want you, isn’t that enough? No. Way too much.” —Ben Lerner
Somehow, I am still here, long after typewriter keys
—my quaint Remington stadium of cleft people
with black seats, long after my father’s collection
of Bengali novels which made atheists think of
fractured gods, long after transistor radios & their
superimposed waves interfering like sleep. I now
understand I was not supposed to dream so little.
My hobbies now include meeting you underwater,
fainting inside a lake. But we never took to dancing.
I ode through the snow. Even when there is no snow.
/
If our whole lives were alleged on a Cartesian plane,
the dimensions of its origin would be mapped to our
collective sadness. In other words, wanting to master the
art of your impossible body was catching a fish darting
against surface tension. The flesh real but slipping away.
Ramanujan insisted that he wrote with everything he learnt;
I prattle of the Homeric simile to fetishize your full feet & their
long-bared legs—one ricocheting the other like a hatched plan.
How many years have passed since I aimed at eloquence?
How many have piled since I last let your laughter occur to me.
/
I breathe the obscene south Bangalore air squinting past bus
terminals, missionary hospitals, & pristine mosques, the scent
of fish & fritters fizzing, while your enargeia advanced across
the apparatus of this machinery: Our bodies never baroque at
memory, like those roads I could not keep travelling with you
or without. Nothing remains but their basilica of bones—& the
years, they continue to occur. A lot of them used to make me happy.
Among all things, I am allergic to chicken now. Even though,
you say. When I suggest, Let us be open to revision, what I am
hinting at is you hardly hear me through all this rain, & thunder—
Tuhin Bhowal’s poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in adda, Parentheses Journal, Poetry City USA, The Night Heron Barks, Bacopa Literary Review, nether Quarterly, RIC Journal, Rigorous, mutiny! and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Editor at Bengaluru Review, Sonic Boom Journal, and Yavanika Press. Based out of Bangalore (India), Tuhin tweets @secondhandsins.
CL Bledsoe Northern Virginia 3 poems
|
Fairly Young Heave-Hos and Shrifts of Indeterminate Length
The idea that life would just give away lemons. That God would think to close a door or open a window rather than let the bugs in and the heat out. If only damns and wide berths. If only a doubt, or any benefits. No one wants a used arm or either side of a hand, no matter how well you know them. Maybe to hold, to be held. But at what cost? They may loan an ax, but they expect the ropes back. The same is true of boots, and tickets out of here are nontransferable. If you want a rest, or a chance, you have to take it. The bank owns every inch, and they give away nothing. And what you give, it never comes back. August 20, 1934 I’ve been confusing flowers with hummingbirds, the way each flutters in the breeze, the quick wings and the quick wearing down of the body. I don’t know either’s name, but I’m glad to see the dart of color drowning out the neighbors’ stereos. There is so little to say about light, and yet so much has been said. It’s more about the feeling than the describing. The same is true of anything with wings. This isn’t the morning you made, the flowers you wanted to plant in the pasture, the birds crying beyond the yard. It’s the imperfections in a thing that make it valuable, loss that makes love. None of this is a way of saying I miss you, because light, it’s more about surrounding than bearing up. |
Koans
Death arrives on time when traffic is light. A way of seeing that isn’t dependent on corporate sponsorship. The best way to absorb a map is from below. It takes two feet working at cross purposes to understand infinity. Wave your hand in the air like your heartrate isn’t an issue. Starved for love is a good solution for high cholesterol Everything in its place is the funeral director’s creed. Dirt doesn’t speak the way we’d like to hear. A certain kind of shame perched high on the shoulder. A half-remembered name that would’ve echoed through the night. Something big is finally landing outside. Learn the night’s name so your letters won’t be returned to sender. The dragon that eats the sun always has eyes bigger than its stomach. This is why the Earth always survives until dawn. It isn’t so much the weight of air as the cost of hair gel. If you dance like no one’s watching they can still hear. A campaign of slow attrition of the heart takes too long to bear. If you don’t stop smoking I’ll set you on fire. To be humbled by truth is another way of bowing. As if gravity weren’t humbling enough. |
Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than 20 books, including the poetry collections Riceland, Trashcans in Love, Grief Bacon, and his newest, Driving Around, Looking in Other People's Windows, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and The Saviors. Bledsoe co-writes the humor blog How to Even, with Michael Gushue located here: https://medium.com/@howtoeven Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.
George Briggs Providence, Rhode Island
Where do we keep secrets?
In the back of the closet,
she never said where she got it
reminding him of deer season back home
when a sad carcass would be strung up
in somebody’s yard
blood-drained trophy or taboo
god or totem. And he never saw her slip
it on. The old pelt faded and certainly
not alive. It just hung there
at the back of the closet
against a gray forest of J. Crew cardigans and
thrift store sun dresses. When she was working
late at the place over on St. Mark’s and Vanderbilt
he’d creep in and finger
the luxurious collar press his face into the sleeve
where the fur was worn away to breathe
in the exotic scent of -
what? In the little inside pocket he found a letter
addressed to Isabel Rockefeller
a birthday card from Fannie
He put it back as if it were a memory
that might unravel the coat one stitch at a time.
Would she notice, he wondered, if I put it on?
stood on the sidewalk and felt the weight of an
animal on my shoulders?
Often, he would think it that it wasn’t real
an imaginary trick of the darkness, but there it was
when he’d sneak in again.
Alone 13 years after
they’d broken up, eating a nondescript pizza
in Charlotte, North Carolina during a vendor expo
he chokes on his Cherry Coke and recalls
the silver light from the bedroom
falling on the fur coat as he cracked the closet door open
and, taking a deep breath, wonders
where in god’s name that coat had come from in the first place.
In the back of the closet,
she never said where she got it
reminding him of deer season back home
when a sad carcass would be strung up
in somebody’s yard
blood-drained trophy or taboo
god or totem. And he never saw her slip
it on. The old pelt faded and certainly
not alive. It just hung there
at the back of the closet
against a gray forest of J. Crew cardigans and
thrift store sun dresses. When she was working
late at the place over on St. Mark’s and Vanderbilt
he’d creep in and finger
the luxurious collar press his face into the sleeve
where the fur was worn away to breathe
in the exotic scent of -
what? In the little inside pocket he found a letter
addressed to Isabel Rockefeller
a birthday card from Fannie
He put it back as if it were a memory
that might unravel the coat one stitch at a time.
Would she notice, he wondered, if I put it on?
stood on the sidewalk and felt the weight of an
animal on my shoulders?
Often, he would think it that it wasn’t real
an imaginary trick of the darkness, but there it was
when he’d sneak in again.
Alone 13 years after
they’d broken up, eating a nondescript pizza
in Charlotte, North Carolina during a vendor expo
he chokes on his Cherry Coke and recalls
the silver light from the bedroom
falling on the fur coat as he cracked the closet door open
and, taking a deep breath, wonders
where in god’s name that coat had come from in the first place.
George Briggs (he.him.his) is a high school teacher from Rhode Island. His work has appeared in Door is a Jar, Ghost City Review, Turnpike Magazine, and elsewhere.
Brian Builta Arlington, TX
How to Clean a Fish
First find a frail wooden dock
off the shore of a body, gulls
flying low under the waning
pinks and blues, the body of Christ
in your cranium under the fishing
hat pierced with lures. Dab dry
the fish and take a dull butter knife
your wife is now missing and scrape
against the grain of the scales
until smooth. Scissor off all fins
and remove the bitter gills.
Insert a sharp knife into the anus
just above the sports section
covering the slowly rusting table
and slide headward to the base
of the gills. Take a spoon
formerly used for Cream of Wheat
and scoop out all organs, minding
the messy bits that will splatter
toward news of Roger Federer
vanquishing a foe then wash
and dry fish thoroughly. Cut off
the head and toss it from the dock
into the body where it will float,
then sink, then settle, then lodge
between stones, eyes staring up
at a shimmering light that might
be mistaken for home.
First find a frail wooden dock
off the shore of a body, gulls
flying low under the waning
pinks and blues, the body of Christ
in your cranium under the fishing
hat pierced with lures. Dab dry
the fish and take a dull butter knife
your wife is now missing and scrape
against the grain of the scales
until smooth. Scissor off all fins
and remove the bitter gills.
Insert a sharp knife into the anus
just above the sports section
covering the slowly rusting table
and slide headward to the base
of the gills. Take a spoon
formerly used for Cream of Wheat
and scoop out all organs, minding
the messy bits that will splatter
toward news of Roger Federer
vanquishing a foe then wash
and dry fish thoroughly. Cut off
the head and toss it from the dock
into the body where it will float,
then sink, then settle, then lodge
between stones, eyes staring up
at a shimmering light that might
be mistaken for home.
Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University.
Corey D. Cook East Thetford, VT. 3 poems
|
Sitting at the Window Not Writing a Poem
about Gratitude Staring out at the tidy lawn instead, freshly raked. Flowers rising from rumpled beds, their showy displays and fragrant exhalations still coming attractions. A tree starting to leaf in, its canopy a haze of grey-green, branches bearing songbirds, their high-pitched refrains, each a revelation. Blue sky above, the few scant clouds the first brushstrokes of a painting. As our children chase each other with the hose. As you take the shorts we wore yesterday off the clothesline, dry and warm as if we just stepped out of them on our way to bed, where we will soon fall asleep to a chorus of Spring peepers, soft rain on shingles. Green Nylon Coat I wear it to muck out the horse stalls, use a pitchfork for the knobs of manure, a flat-edged shovel for the urine-soaked shavings. Back inside, I send it through the quick cycle. Now it hangs in the window like an x-ray waiting to be read. Dark clumps of goose down floating inside the stitched panels like sinister clouds as you sit on the couch and cough, bring another lit cigarette to your thin lips, take a long drag, hold it in. |
Depression
If I had any say, you would have arrived like the robin, spooked from its perch at 11:00 o’clock at night, wild-eyed outside our window, outstretched wings striking the pane of glass, feet holding fast to the peeling sill, chest an ember burning to get in. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so ill- prepared, would have been able to fend you off instead of being taken by surprise, knocked off my feet, pinned down, your weight immobilizing, unrelenting. Now there are regular therapy sessions, bottles of antidepressants crowding the bathroom counter, a gratitude journal filled with things to live for, things like the smell of sun-warmed pine needles, a child’s sleeping face, the first bite of blue- berry pie, or an unexpected and much needed dream. Like finding myself on a soccer field, wearing my high school uniform, still the color of defeat, scanning the grass for the ball, spotting it a few meters away and charging ahead as a voice I haven’t heard in twenty-six years calls out from the sideline, my grandmother’s voice, still robust, not yet weakened by cancer, rising above the clapping, the hooting, keep going, don’t give up now. |
Corey D. Cook's sixth chapbook, Junk Drawer, will be published by Finishing Line Press in February 2022. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in As It Ought To Be, Boston Literary Magazine, Freshwater Literary Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Nixes Mate Review. He works at a hospital in New Hampshire and lives in East Thetford, Vermont.
Lois Roma-Deeley Scottsdale, AZ
Quick Enough
Tonight I’m driving Famous Guy
from my college to Sky Harbor airport.
This late no one’s on the road but the two of us
and the echo of the day
when in every class at every hour he talked
and talked about empty book shelves and lazy readers,
about how time moves, why people don’t change.
Now I roll the window down, wishing it would finally rain.
Then suddenly, as if it’s a pop quiz, I’m stopped short
by a red light and he asks
Do you know the difference between quick and fast?
His head’s bobbing from side to side
like that plastic bulldog, tiny spiked collar and all,
stuck on the dashboard of my neighbor’s car.
When the light snaps green, I step, hard, on the gas.
His glassy blue eyes look away.
But I’m a magician now
tapping the top of the steering wheel
like it’s a silk hat and— presto, change-o--
pulling out of the dark
with a flash and puff of white smoke, it’s
now I see you, now I don’t.
Tonight I’m driving Famous Guy
from my college to Sky Harbor airport.
This late no one’s on the road but the two of us
and the echo of the day
when in every class at every hour he talked
and talked about empty book shelves and lazy readers,
about how time moves, why people don’t change.
Now I roll the window down, wishing it would finally rain.
Then suddenly, as if it’s a pop quiz, I’m stopped short
by a red light and he asks
Do you know the difference between quick and fast?
His head’s bobbing from side to side
like that plastic bulldog, tiny spiked collar and all,
stuck on the dashboard of my neighbor’s car.
When the light snaps green, I step, hard, on the gas.
His glassy blue eyes look away.
But I’m a magician now
tapping the top of the steering wheel
like it’s a silk hat and— presto, change-o--
pulling out of the dark
with a flash and puff of white smoke, it’s
now I see you, now I don’t.
Lois Roma-Deeley grew up on Long Island, New York, however, she’s lived in Arizona for a few decades. Her fourth poetry collection is The Short List of Certainties, winner of the Jacopone da Todi Book Prize (2017). Her previous collections are: Rules of Hunger (2004), northSight (2006) and High Notes (2010)--a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her work is featured in numerous anthologies and journals. www.loisroma-deeley.com
Marc Alan Di Martino Perugia, Italy
Sugar Factory
Atomic haze obscures the city’s past:
the sugar factory, the tourist traps,
the glass aquarium at water’s edge,
the sleek black Constellation, its long mast
stretching across the harbor to the sea.
My parents stand here in a photograph
snapped when they were younger than I am now.
My mother wears a faux-astrakhan hat,
my father an enormous winter coat
sewn by my mother. Sketches of pale snow
line the sidewalk, as if spray-painted on.
Behind them the neon sign emblazoned
DOMINO Sugars, in stylized letters, looms.
They wear the happy masks of the married
though each of them conceals a trick lover
in their back pocket like a false passport.
Baltimore was a way station on the road
to nowhere. They hated it, my mother
with a passion she reserved for enemies
and foods that caused her migraines. I inherited
that great coat from my father when he died.
I still have it. Years later, a fire broke out
in the refinery ‒ flames licking the skyline
golden tongues lapping up all that sweetness.
Atomic haze obscures the city’s past:
the sugar factory, the tourist traps,
the glass aquarium at water’s edge,
the sleek black Constellation, its long mast
stretching across the harbor to the sea.
My parents stand here in a photograph
snapped when they were younger than I am now.
My mother wears a faux-astrakhan hat,
my father an enormous winter coat
sewn by my mother. Sketches of pale snow
line the sidewalk, as if spray-painted on.
Behind them the neon sign emblazoned
DOMINO Sugars, in stylized letters, looms.
They wear the happy masks of the married
though each of them conceals a trick lover
in their back pocket like a false passport.
Baltimore was a way station on the road
to nowhere. They hated it, my mother
with a passion she reserved for enemies
and foods that caused her migraines. I inherited
that great coat from my father when he died.
I still have it. Years later, a fire broke out
in the refinery ‒ flames licking the skyline
golden tongues lapping up all that sweetness.
Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet, translator and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His work appears in Baltimore Review, Rattle, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Valparaiso Poetry Review and many other journals and anthologies. His second collection, Still Life with City, will be published by Pski's Porch in 2021. He lives in Perugia, Italy.
George Freek Illinois
Complacency
The days pass like petals
falling from a marigold.
The sun replaces the moon,
and stars blink off one-by-one.
A farmer plows his field,
rushing his oxen,
hoping for a bumper yield.
In the kitchen his wife,
with her fish to fry,
thinks of the baby
growing in her womb.
A squirrel gathers pine nuts.
It will be winter soon.
Nearby a dusty road wanders
somewhere. They don’t
care. They will never go there.
The days pass like petals
falling from a marigold.
The sun replaces the moon,
and stars blink off one-by-one.
A farmer plows his field,
rushing his oxen,
hoping for a bumper yield.
In the kitchen his wife,
with her fish to fry,
thinks of the baby
growing in her womb.
A squirrel gathers pine nuts.
It will be winter soon.
Nearby a dusty road wanders
somewhere. They don’t
care. They will never go there.
George Freek, author's note: "Although these poems are inspired by early Chinese poetry, they're my original compositions."
Steve Gerson Midwest USA
Barbed
The barbed wire strung between the pine poles sang
like a guillotine in the November gusts. Cattle lowing,
plaintive, huddled near the fallen post oak, felled
by lightning strikes, the night air still sizzling with
ashen embers and despair. I saw slivers of the moon
behind a black cloud in the black sky, the pale light
leaching like spoiled milk. “Not now, Claire,” he said,
his words pulled like a rusted nail from a dry board.
I thumbed a loose thread around the tear in my worn dress.
“When?” I asked, the cattle still calling in the fields amid
more lightning flashes. He turned and stared. “Not ever,”
as the backdoor slammed, its wire screen shuddering.
Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance and dynamism. He's proud to have published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, Montana Mouthful, the Decadent Review, Indolent, Rainbow Poems, Snapdragon, The Underwood Press, Wingless Dreamer, Gemini Ink, the Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, and more.
The barbed wire strung between the pine poles sang
like a guillotine in the November gusts. Cattle lowing,
plaintive, huddled near the fallen post oak, felled
by lightning strikes, the night air still sizzling with
ashen embers and despair. I saw slivers of the moon
behind a black cloud in the black sky, the pale light
leaching like spoiled milk. “Not now, Claire,” he said,
his words pulled like a rusted nail from a dry board.
I thumbed a loose thread around the tear in my worn dress.
“When?” I asked, the cattle still calling in the fields amid
more lightning flashes. He turned and stared. “Not ever,”
as the backdoor slammed, its wire screen shuddering.
Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance and dynamism. He's proud to have published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, Montana Mouthful, the Decadent Review, Indolent, Rainbow Poems, Snapdragon, The Underwood Press, Wingless Dreamer, Gemini Ink, the Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, and more.
Rich Glinnen Bayside, New York
Wedlock
I was rocking the baby in the bedroom,
Anxious about a looming social event,
When my wife popped her head in
And said she accidentally pulled the door knob
Off the front door, that we were stuck at home,
Which reminded me why I married her.
I was rocking the baby in the bedroom,
Anxious about a looming social event,
When my wife popped her head in
And said she accidentally pulled the door knob
Off the front door, that we were stuck at home,
Which reminded me why I married her.
Best of the Net nominee, Rich Glinnen, enjoys bowling, and eating his daughter’s cheeks at his home in Bayside, NY. His work can be read in various print and online journals, as well as on his Tumblr and Instagram pages. His wife calls him Ho-ho.
Robin Gow Allentown, PA
FIGURE 1. FIGURE 2.
I say I don’t want to be compared to my father but of course I do.
I tuck a picture of him as a young man in the back of my wallet.
If anyone asks—this is my son.
Like father like son by which I mean
the sun is full of holes and soon night will come like a falling ocean.
A cabinet full of spare fins.
Wooden chest where he kept the calcite and the bismuth.
Holding them up to his face—he made new eyes to see me with.
I never wanted to belong to the water.
Bleed myself dry in the bathtub. Only stone left.
Who wants to love a replica?
I put your eyes on the counter for whenever you’re ready.
I blink and the whole forever is gone.
There’s just a buoy off the dock, bobbing back and forth like a metronome.
I say I don’t want to be compared to my father but of course I do.
I tuck a picture of him as a young man in the back of my wallet.
If anyone asks—this is my son.
Like father like son by which I mean
the sun is full of holes and soon night will come like a falling ocean.
A cabinet full of spare fins.
Wooden chest where he kept the calcite and the bismuth.
Holding them up to his face—he made new eyes to see me with.
I never wanted to belong to the water.
Bleed myself dry in the bathtub. Only stone left.
Who wants to love a replica?
I put your eyes on the counter for whenever you’re ready.
I blink and the whole forever is gone.
There’s just a buoy off the dock, bobbing back and forth like a metronome.
Robin Gow is a trans poet and young adult author from Kutztown, Pennsylvania. They are the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press 2019). Their first young adult novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions is forthcoming March 2022 with FSG Books for Young Readers. Gow's poetry has recently been published in POETRY, Southampton Review, and Yemassee. They live in Allentown Pennsylvania and work as a community educator.
Samuel Green Waldron, WA
Golden Anniversary
for Sally, & Fifty Years Together
That maple I felled a few days back for next
winter’s fire was a full foot through. The diary
of its rings spans forty years, twelve inches
of wood measured by sunlight, soil & water,
which means it was one
of the saplings left standing when we cleared
this land. It keeps getting away from us,
time. It’s gone so fast, we say. A butterfly’s
flight around the yard. A hummingbird’s
mating arc. We look at our gray-beard
son, our beautiful granddaughter
just six years younger than you
when first we slept together. So fast,
we say. And yet we’re very like
that maple, each ring a slow recording
of storm & drought but mostly the unsung,
stubborn, ordinary days, almost
unnoticed, the way light pours
at sunset down the trees at the edge
of our garden, sliding like thick, golden
syrup from those high crowns
down the long trunks into half-felt shadow.
for Sally, & Fifty Years Together
That maple I felled a few days back for next
winter’s fire was a full foot through. The diary
of its rings spans forty years, twelve inches
of wood measured by sunlight, soil & water,
which means it was one
of the saplings left standing when we cleared
this land. It keeps getting away from us,
time. It’s gone so fast, we say. A butterfly’s
flight around the yard. A hummingbird’s
mating arc. We look at our gray-beard
son, our beautiful granddaughter
just six years younger than you
when first we slept together. So fast,
we say. And yet we’re very like
that maple, each ring a slow recording
of storm & drought but mostly the unsung,
stubborn, ordinary days, almost
unnoticed, the way light pours
at sunset down the trees at the edge
of our garden, sliding like thick, golden
syrup from those high crowns
down the long trunks into half-felt shadow.
Samuel Green’s most recent collection is Disturbing the Light (Carnegie Mellon University, 2020). With his wife, Sally, he has been co-editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press since 1982. He has been a visiting professor at multiple colleges and universities, and taught as a Poet-in-the-Schools for forty-six years. In 2008 he was selected as the first Poet Laureate of Washington State. Honors include an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, an Artist Trust Fellowship in Literature, a Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Seattle University. From 1966-1970 he was in the U.S. Coast Guard, with service in Vietnam.
AE Hines Portland, OR and Medellín, Colombia
|
On Monogamy
We were six gay men by candlelight discussing fidelity. Monogamy was a fad, someone suggested, gone once there were drugs to keep us alive, tossed with our obsession for raising children, and marriage, which had led to a thriving new industry for queer divorce. Then someone poured out the last of the wine. Someone else proposed firing up the hot tub. A man (not my husband) touched my hand, and another (not me) said honesty and trust were more important than faithfulness. I touched the muscled leg of my husband, which stiffened a little, as if we were dancing closer to a line we couldn’t waltz back across. Then someone said he’d never toss a decades-old relationship over something so frivolous as an affair. My husband cleared his throat, and then the dishes. I followed him into our kitchen, and at the sink wrapped my arms around his chest. The machine beneath our counter was empty, but he turned on the tap, and handed me a towel so I could dry. And as the men undressed and slipped into our jacuzzi, we passed dishes between us the way we still handled each other— gently, each chipped plate as precious as the last. To My Flirtatious Friend Who Made a Pass at My Husband on Facebook You were right to call him beautiful. When I first saw him, I couldn’t stop staring: those soft hazel eyes framed by his thin wire spectacles, the fine toothy scruff of his beard. So yes, horny devil emoji does feel appropriate. When I awoke after our first night, the sun up making love to the room, I was afraid to open my eyes, the way a drunk fears being sober, wants to keep dreaming. When I did, I found no evidence he’d been there at all, the other side of my bed so recently his, now crisp and remade, my sleeping hand reaching like that of the newly widowed into empty space. Did you say, sexy? Oh yes. Yes indeed: one whiff that morning of the coffee brewing downstairs — my god — knowing he was still there, let me tell you my friend, that was sexy. I wanted him then the way the beans long to be ground and pressed, then pummeled by relentless steam. |
My Name is Earl
My father gave it to me. Same middle name as his own, that he too hated. Indicative of every feckless character conceived and made for TV, and leading to the need in my younger life for augmentation, or substitution. “Earl Junior.” Or “Junior.” Most horrid of all, “Little Earl.” My mother called me “Alvis Earl” to differentiate me from her vengeful husband, and when she left him the last time, after circling for years closer and closer to the slow drain of their divorce, my father carved his name into every varnished stick of furniture they owned. “Earl,” on each dresser drawer. A deep capital “E” on the dark pine finials of my mother’s mirror. His full signature: “Alvis Earl Hines,” complete with the “Senior,” across the vast canvas of headboard beneath which they’d slept, side by angry side for twenty years. I stopped in the park this morning, to sit on an old oak bench. Rubbed my finger across the bleached-out planks, etched with hundreds of names. And gazing across the sun-swept grass, my father came back to me. I took out my knife and added my own, and that of my father, penetrating the wood deeply so I knew it would survive. So someone, years from now, might know I’d been sitting right here. |
AE Hines (he/him) is the author of the collection Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021). His poetry has been widely published in anthologies and literary journals including Ninth Letter, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology, I-70 Review, Sycamore Review, Tar River Poetry, Atlanta Review, and others. Originally from North Carolina, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon and Medellín, Colombia. More info at www.aehines.net.
Carolina Hospital Miami and Palm Bay, FL
Mourning for School Girls in Cerulean Headscarves
A car bomb and two other blasts detonate near the school gates,
the first so powerful, and so close, some children cannot be found.
I cannot write about the pelicans on shore flying in V-formation,
nor the buried sunflowers and sea oats on the protected sand dunes,
not today. They disguise fighter jets, land mines, and trenches.
The afternoon shift of high school girls is the target, 85 dead,
another 147 maimed or wounded by shrapnel tearing their bodies.
I cannot write about daughters and granddaughters, safely sheltered,
ringed by myths, fables, and princess coloring books, like the one
strewn on the dusty street next to torn notebooks and bloodied sneakers.
On the arid hilltop near Kabul, hundreds gather to mourn their daughters.
By the dirt graves, they defiantly scribe large white letters: EDUCATION.
I cannot write about college girls in my classes who outnumber the boys
nor about the emails from former students in graduate school. Not today.
Today I can only sob for this loss so distant, of youth, of hope, of God.
A car bomb and two other blasts detonate near the school gates,
the first so powerful, and so close, some children cannot be found.
I cannot write about the pelicans on shore flying in V-formation,
nor the buried sunflowers and sea oats on the protected sand dunes,
not today. They disguise fighter jets, land mines, and trenches.
The afternoon shift of high school girls is the target, 85 dead,
another 147 maimed or wounded by shrapnel tearing their bodies.
I cannot write about daughters and granddaughters, safely sheltered,
ringed by myths, fables, and princess coloring books, like the one
strewn on the dusty street next to torn notebooks and bloodied sneakers.
On the arid hilltop near Kabul, hundreds gather to mourn their daughters.
By the dirt graves, they defiantly scribe large white letters: EDUCATION.
I cannot write about college girls in my classes who outnumber the boys
nor about the emails from former students in graduate school. Not today.
Today I can only sob for this loss so distant, of youth, of hope, of God.
Carolina Hospital’s poetry collections include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press), The Child of Exile (Arte Público Press), and Myth America, a collaboration with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias and Nicole Hospital-Medina (Anhinga Press). She has edited two anthologies of Cuban American literature and her work has appeared in numerous national publications, such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature and Bedford/St. Martin’s Florida Literature. She lives between Miami and Palm Coast, Florida.
Matthew Johnson Greensboro, NC 3 poems
Gin-Soaked Saxophone Solo
I was drinking like a fish,
Trying to blow like Bird,
With my gin-soaked saxophone.
Have you ever drunk
The boogie-woogie brew,
Honey?
I swear I heard the horn was talkin’
After I took a swung from the spirits:
Use me Daddy-O! I heard. Use those lips to hit the right notes…
I swear the radiator was hissing at me too:
More fire! It moaned. Play more fire!
The heat was gassing me up to get more down.
My ears began to exhale smoke as I blowed.
I was playing.
I was wailing and running my slippery fingers,
Sloppily, on my saxophone.
I was sweating chords from the back of my throat.
I was playing, then I became lightheaded.
I was losing balance on the edge of my seat.
I fell over….
It was death by music,
And gin and jazz were heaven 𑁋
I was drinking like a fish,
Trying to blow like Bird,
With my gin-soaked saxophone.
Have you ever drunk
The boogie-woogie brew,
Honey?
I swear I heard the horn was talkin’
After I took a swung from the spirits:
Use me Daddy-O! I heard. Use those lips to hit the right notes…
I swear the radiator was hissing at me too:
More fire! It moaned. Play more fire!
The heat was gassing me up to get more down.
My ears began to exhale smoke as I blowed.
I was playing.
I was wailing and running my slippery fingers,
Sloppily, on my saxophone.
I was sweating chords from the back of my throat.
I was playing, then I became lightheaded.
I was losing balance on the edge of my seat.
I fell over….
It was death by music,
And gin and jazz were heaven 𑁋
On an International Supermarket
The distance and difference between nations
Is whittled down in the fruit aisle, temporarily.
The languages call out, adorning the aisle, like hanging display signs;
They call out for nectarines,
The kind which coos a crying child, whose very sweetness can melt souls,
And where the rind is as smooth and bright and loud as the sun,
And we immediately throw down in the pits of our stomachs,
As if we were human black holes.
Jet Magazine Captures Mamie Till Mourning Her Angel Child
Not even the mortician,
Who barely touched the mutilated child,
After being ordered to lay down their tools by Mamie Till,
To preserve her slayed child for the world that murdered him,
Would’ve had to do as much as the photographer,
David Jackson, framing and adjusting the shutter,
Having to look into the eyes of a heartbroken mother,
Capturing a dignity in despondency,
And searing into the consciousness of those unaware or complicit,
This….this is what is happening in your own nation.
The distance and difference between nations
Is whittled down in the fruit aisle, temporarily.
The languages call out, adorning the aisle, like hanging display signs;
They call out for nectarines,
The kind which coos a crying child, whose very sweetness can melt souls,
And where the rind is as smooth and bright and loud as the sun,
And we immediately throw down in the pits of our stomachs,
As if we were human black holes.
Jet Magazine Captures Mamie Till Mourning Her Angel Child
Not even the mortician,
Who barely touched the mutilated child,
After being ordered to lay down their tools by Mamie Till,
To preserve her slayed child for the world that murdered him,
Would’ve had to do as much as the photographer,
David Jackson, framing and adjusting the shutter,
Having to look into the eyes of a heartbroken mother,
Capturing a dignity in despondency,
And searing into the consciousness of those unaware or complicit,
This….this is what is happening in your own nation.
Matthew Johnson is a MA graduate of UNC-Greensboro. A former sports journalist/editor who wrote for the USA Today College and The Daily Star (Oneonta, NY), he lives in Greensboro now. His poetry has appeared in Maudlin House, The Roanoke Review, the Maryland Literary Review, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. He's a two-time Best of the Net Nominee and his debut collection, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs, (Kelsay Books) was released in 2019. Twitter: @Matt_Johnson_D. Website: https://www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com
Michael Lee Johnson Itasca, IL
Tiny Sparrow Feet (V2)
It's calm.
Cheeky, unexpected.
Too quiet.
My clear plastic bowls
serves as my bird feeder.
I don't hear the distant
scratching, shuffling
of tiny sparrow feet,
the wing dances, fluttering, of a hungry
morning's lack of big band sounds.
I walk tentatively to my patio window,
spy the balcony with my detective's eyes.
I witness three newly hatched
toddler sparrows, curved nails, mounted
deep, in their mother's dead, decaying back.
Their childish beaks bent over elongated,
delicately, into golden chips, and dusted yellow corn.
It's calm.
Cheeky, unexpected.
Too quiet.
My clear plastic bowls
serves as my bird feeder.
I don't hear the distant
scratching, shuffling
of tiny sparrow feet,
the wing dances, fluttering, of a hungry
morning's lack of big band sounds.
I walk tentatively to my patio window,
spy the balcony with my detective's eyes.
I witness three newly hatched
toddler sparrows, curved nails, mounted
deep, in their mother's dead, decaying back.
Their childish beaks bent over elongated,
delicately, into golden chips, and dusted yellow corn.
Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada, Vietnam era. Today a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL. published in 2,013 small press magazines, 42 countries; 233 YouTube poetry videos. He has been nominated in poetry for two Pushcart Prize awards, and five Best of the Net nominations over the years.
Natasha King Charlotte, NC
the gate of seas
in the end, we didn't need to go faster than light,
because what we had thought of as a great
distance was simply next door, and we finally
taught ourselves that all doors are saltwater.
we weren't afraid. passing through the gate of seas
feels too much like a homecoming to
ever evoke fear. didn't we all come out of the
warm salt womb? didn't we all cross
the estuarine threshold, when we came into this world?
in the end, what we finally learned was that
all oceans are one ocean. we ourselves crawled
out of the cold brine, and eons earlier, so did the
universe. one day space will go back into the sea,
one day every star will sink beneath the waves, its own atlantis.
yes: you can wake up in an earthly harbor and
be in neptune's methane tide by dinner,
if you know the currents well enough. the alpha centauri
outpost sends its postcards by water. they wash up
at the mouth of the amazon, stained red with sahara silt.
the passenger bathyspheres go down through
the dark marianas, and in the gliese system
their riders stumble out of the pink waves, shaking
pearls and silicate kelps from their hair. how strange,
we say, mapping the deepwater of a solar system, but it isn't
strange at all. under my ribs, in my veins: the same
salt sea as yours. we crawl in reverse down the berm
to the tideline. the sea is every door. the sea swallows
every galaxy. all things are ever-expanding but the ocean
remains the same. how strange, we say, our hands
pressed to the lintel of the gate of seas. our hearts
pump the same meteor grit. our eyes leak the same silvery
salp chains. we breathed our first air alone, but in the end,
it's hand in hand that we have learned to breathe both water
and stardust. we pass through the doorway again and again.
we teach ourselves that home is the ocean under my ribs,
and under yours. we stop being afraid of the space
between stars and selves. we love every shore. we learn
how to knock. we navigate the gyres of endless nebulae,
we chart the tides holding planets in orbit. we go through
the gate of seas, and we learn that we are always home.
in the end, we didn't need to go faster than light,
because what we had thought of as a great
distance was simply next door, and we finally
taught ourselves that all doors are saltwater.
we weren't afraid. passing through the gate of seas
feels too much like a homecoming to
ever evoke fear. didn't we all come out of the
warm salt womb? didn't we all cross
the estuarine threshold, when we came into this world?
in the end, what we finally learned was that
all oceans are one ocean. we ourselves crawled
out of the cold brine, and eons earlier, so did the
universe. one day space will go back into the sea,
one day every star will sink beneath the waves, its own atlantis.
yes: you can wake up in an earthly harbor and
be in neptune's methane tide by dinner,
if you know the currents well enough. the alpha centauri
outpost sends its postcards by water. they wash up
at the mouth of the amazon, stained red with sahara silt.
the passenger bathyspheres go down through
the dark marianas, and in the gliese system
their riders stumble out of the pink waves, shaking
pearls and silicate kelps from their hair. how strange,
we say, mapping the deepwater of a solar system, but it isn't
strange at all. under my ribs, in my veins: the same
salt sea as yours. we crawl in reverse down the berm
to the tideline. the sea is every door. the sea swallows
every galaxy. all things are ever-expanding but the ocean
remains the same. how strange, we say, our hands
pressed to the lintel of the gate of seas. our hearts
pump the same meteor grit. our eyes leak the same silvery
salp chains. we breathed our first air alone, but in the end,
it's hand in hand that we have learned to breathe both water
and stardust. we pass through the doorway again and again.
we teach ourselves that home is the ocean under my ribs,
and under yours. we stop being afraid of the space
between stars and selves. we love every shore. we learn
how to knock. we navigate the gyres of endless nebulae,
we chart the tides holding planets in orbit. we go through
the gate of seas, and we learn that we are always home.
Natasha King is a Vietnamese American writer and nature enthusiast currently living in North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in Okay Donkey, Ninth Letter, Ghost City Review, and others, and was also featured in the 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. In her spare time, she enjoys writing, prowling, and thinking about the ocean. She can be found on Twitter at @pelagic_natasha.
Kara Knickerbocker Pennsylvania
Kill Your Darlings
before they even know what’s coming for them: / the woman, stunning as she is / dancing into
another stanza / you must stab her in the back before the next line / & do it now / & after, the
moon you should cut/open / sever every glowing piece / swallow it if you must but do it swiftly /
let the beautiful departed face / d e f l a t e / like the last breath of night / & that precious
moment cradling / with the newborn baby cooing / you must suffocate it in your sleep & / after
you dream, (which you must strangle from / the ceiling,) you must / wake up watching a lover’s
hand burst into flames, grabbing toward / the white hot center of you / but you must resist this. /
Let loss choke / on the spiraling smoke / & in fact, let it burn / the whole house down. / You
might think Oh god // but we must bury him too— every creation / just kill all the curious
animals / quick like the darling dove hitting / the glass window, breaking / its neck instantly but
even as you admire / how it splays below / soft feathers & still-plump chest / you must murder /
the next thing / the loving / mother in the kitchen / knock her out cold / with a frying pan / shoot
the father / coming in from the cellar / smash the bottles of alcohol before they can be drunk /
forget / heat of summers / spring’s gentle song you must / wipe out the seasons entirely / along
with the calendar so time is obsolete / pulverize any stars / all that shimmers & I / I will need you
to gut the body / from this poem & all the others especially. / There is no metaphor for fruit / or
trees you must starve / nature until she shrivels up every seed / & at last // put the soul & the
heart in a car & drive it into a ravine / make sure it is good & drowned— // those darlings have a
way of crawling out / from the mud & we must keep this poem spotless / empty of the beautiful
dead.
before they even know what’s coming for them: / the woman, stunning as she is / dancing into
another stanza / you must stab her in the back before the next line / & do it now / & after, the
moon you should cut/open / sever every glowing piece / swallow it if you must but do it swiftly /
let the beautiful departed face / d e f l a t e / like the last breath of night / & that precious
moment cradling / with the newborn baby cooing / you must suffocate it in your sleep & / after
you dream, (which you must strangle from / the ceiling,) you must / wake up watching a lover’s
hand burst into flames, grabbing toward / the white hot center of you / but you must resist this. /
Let loss choke / on the spiraling smoke / & in fact, let it burn / the whole house down. / You
might think Oh god // but we must bury him too— every creation / just kill all the curious
animals / quick like the darling dove hitting / the glass window, breaking / its neck instantly but
even as you admire / how it splays below / soft feathers & still-plump chest / you must murder /
the next thing / the loving / mother in the kitchen / knock her out cold / with a frying pan / shoot
the father / coming in from the cellar / smash the bottles of alcohol before they can be drunk /
forget / heat of summers / spring’s gentle song you must / wipe out the seasons entirely / along
with the calendar so time is obsolete / pulverize any stars / all that shimmers & I / I will need you
to gut the body / from this poem & all the others especially. / There is no metaphor for fruit / or
trees you must starve / nature until she shrivels up every seed / & at last // put the soul & the
heart in a car & drive it into a ravine / make sure it is good & drowned— // those darlings have a
way of crawling out / from the mud & we must keep this poem spotless / empty of the beautiful
dead.
Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, Levee Magazine, Portland Review, and the anthologies Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, Crack the Spine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online at www.karaknickerbocker.com.
Sven Kretzschmar Schwalbach-Saar, Germany
The ploughboy of the western world
There is nothing like a drop of stout
dripping from bottle’s lip into a crown
of yellow cream upon return
to your desk where you can pin down
fulfilling days on patient paper
fully even, like the blade of your spade tossing
into a furrow to the corncrake’s buzzing call. All
your observations, bits and bobs, details of life
and language of starlings – their flying flock becomes
a glittering murmuration of stars on the page
as they whirl above hillocks and harvested fields;
of chestnut trees low with the weight of prickly yield;
of blue tits preening; of vegetable patches, potato
fields you broke up with a laíge; of a merle
wistfully warbling on a fence post toward dwindling
autumn – so much more moving
than summer meadows singing with cicada song;
of nightly dewfall glittering in the morning when
you enter the garden like a stonechat peeping
for winterkill. As you look out now
a cloud fits itself around geese chattering
toward hibernation home, on the edge
of evening when light leaves the room
on route with the birds. Beer foam glitters
down inside your glass like dew, the floor displays
watery, semi-circular stains where a snifter no longer
occupies linoleum; shape of one wing to carry you
elsewhere. Sit steady and dig the other one into air.
There is nothing like a drop of stout
dripping from bottle’s lip into a crown
of yellow cream upon return
to your desk where you can pin down
fulfilling days on patient paper
fully even, like the blade of your spade tossing
into a furrow to the corncrake’s buzzing call. All
your observations, bits and bobs, details of life
and language of starlings – their flying flock becomes
a glittering murmuration of stars on the page
as they whirl above hillocks and harvested fields;
of chestnut trees low with the weight of prickly yield;
of blue tits preening; of vegetable patches, potato
fields you broke up with a laíge; of a merle
wistfully warbling on a fence post toward dwindling
autumn – so much more moving
than summer meadows singing with cicada song;
of nightly dewfall glittering in the morning when
you enter the garden like a stonechat peeping
for winterkill. As you look out now
a cloud fits itself around geese chattering
toward hibernation home, on the edge
of evening when light leaves the room
on route with the birds. Beer foam glitters
down inside your glass like dew, the floor displays
watery, semi-circular stains where a snifter no longer
occupies linoleum; shape of one wing to carry you
elsewhere. Sit steady and dig the other one into air.
Sven Kretzschmar hails from Schwalbach-Saar, Germany. His poetry has been published widely in Europe and overseas, among other outlets with Poetry Jukebox in Belfast, in Writing Home. The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019), Poets Meet Politics (Hungry Hill Writing, 2020) Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020), Voices 2021 (Cold River Press, 2021) and 100 Words of Solitude (Rare Swan Press, 2021), in The Irish Times, Live Encounters, Das Gedicht, Loch Raven Review, Wordpeace, 2 Meter Review and Selcouth Station.
Virginia Laurie Lexington, VA
Hephaestus
I haven’t forgotten the time you flung me to the earth still smarting
from my first taste of oxygen. You were never very patient. But neither
is the sea, and I learned to live with her in steady folds of salt and sting.
My wife is like that too, milky as sea foam on top and broiling underneath.
She never much liked my shriveled foot either or the way I stank after
days spent by a furnace, fashioning something sturdy enough to hold the
weight of a lover’s temper. I was always patient. Patience was all I had.
I waited patiently to survive, then to make, crafting something more sure-
footed than myself, appareling the heroes in need of dying bright. I made
myself useful before I made myself sleep. I was patient, but not forgetful.
I thought of your awful blue eyes sometimes, wondered if they could water
and dreamt up shining gold punishment, sky at the center of the earth.
When the day came, I was not excited. My foot hurt and I slept too much.
I was not there when it happened. I heard stories, friendly words from
unfamiliar voices suddenly jockeying for blood and armor. I threw baubles
to appease them but would not sit in their laps or try their wine. I could
barely look at them or hear them through the faded nautilus of my inner ear.
Some time passed and the sediment rose, the Lemnian earth folded under my
swollen ankles and I decided to pass the time with tan limbs and breeze. The
youngest of the Graces took my sweat in stride. I touched her unblistered skin.
I grew less patient. I held my offspring towards the waves in compromise and
thought about the weak plating of their unmeshed skulls. I thought about
dashing them then and there, but I did not care enough to follow through. It
was not worth the hurt in their mother’s eyes. I myself had no mother.
It was that night when a man came to me with half of my face and eyes peeled
like grapes above red cheeks. He offered me a cup, burnished gold like my memory
of you. I knew my own half-brother. I thought of my daughters and their sun-pinked
skin, fragile as quail egg. I drank willingly and deep, down to the bottom of my stomach.
When the flute started playing, I didn’t flinch, just held onto the mane of my
brother’s mule, sliding back and forth like a fish in a brining barrel, like I was back
on the ocean floor. They paraded me through the halls before I entered your court,
half staggering on my bad foot, unused to the polished marble and altitude.
The last time I’d been there, you held me to your chest long enough the stop my squalling,
then still smiling, plucked my gums from your nipples and dashed my life against the ground,
extra bones breaking and sinking useless into navy death before soft hands pulled
far enough down to pop everything back into place with pressure. They taught me
how to hold an axe, eat food and speak with purpose. You taught me anger and
humility. The humiliation came later, but you were still in on it. My cuckolding a
punishment for surviving in spite of your indifference. My life a loose end.
And now we are back where it all started, braziers and thrones, vines and those
bracelets that curdle around your arm, all the bronze in the world turning chilly
on your skin, warmth leeched out. You don’t look at me, and I don’t look back.
Time has passed, and it has only rotted you more. You are sharper than ever, your
cruelty uninspired and bored of itself. I no longer think it is my job to punish you.
I know how to fix things, but I will not waste my time, a taste of my breath, on you.
I curl my toes and think of sand, face-scorching fires and geysers. The sturdy arms that
pulled me out of death and soft ones that held me to the edge of life. The handiwork
of tenderness and its moving parts, pudgy, mechanical fingers working at my beard.
I take my place here without you. I take my place with a view of the island and an
anvil heart. I do not forgive you. You know that. The universe goes on at our discretion.
I haven’t forgotten the time you flung me to the earth still smarting
from my first taste of oxygen. You were never very patient. But neither
is the sea, and I learned to live with her in steady folds of salt and sting.
My wife is like that too, milky as sea foam on top and broiling underneath.
She never much liked my shriveled foot either or the way I stank after
days spent by a furnace, fashioning something sturdy enough to hold the
weight of a lover’s temper. I was always patient. Patience was all I had.
I waited patiently to survive, then to make, crafting something more sure-
footed than myself, appareling the heroes in need of dying bright. I made
myself useful before I made myself sleep. I was patient, but not forgetful.
I thought of your awful blue eyes sometimes, wondered if they could water
and dreamt up shining gold punishment, sky at the center of the earth.
When the day came, I was not excited. My foot hurt and I slept too much.
I was not there when it happened. I heard stories, friendly words from
unfamiliar voices suddenly jockeying for blood and armor. I threw baubles
to appease them but would not sit in their laps or try their wine. I could
barely look at them or hear them through the faded nautilus of my inner ear.
Some time passed and the sediment rose, the Lemnian earth folded under my
swollen ankles and I decided to pass the time with tan limbs and breeze. The
youngest of the Graces took my sweat in stride. I touched her unblistered skin.
I grew less patient. I held my offspring towards the waves in compromise and
thought about the weak plating of their unmeshed skulls. I thought about
dashing them then and there, but I did not care enough to follow through. It
was not worth the hurt in their mother’s eyes. I myself had no mother.
It was that night when a man came to me with half of my face and eyes peeled
like grapes above red cheeks. He offered me a cup, burnished gold like my memory
of you. I knew my own half-brother. I thought of my daughters and their sun-pinked
skin, fragile as quail egg. I drank willingly and deep, down to the bottom of my stomach.
When the flute started playing, I didn’t flinch, just held onto the mane of my
brother’s mule, sliding back and forth like a fish in a brining barrel, like I was back
on the ocean floor. They paraded me through the halls before I entered your court,
half staggering on my bad foot, unused to the polished marble and altitude.
The last time I’d been there, you held me to your chest long enough the stop my squalling,
then still smiling, plucked my gums from your nipples and dashed my life against the ground,
extra bones breaking and sinking useless into navy death before soft hands pulled
far enough down to pop everything back into place with pressure. They taught me
how to hold an axe, eat food and speak with purpose. You taught me anger and
humility. The humiliation came later, but you were still in on it. My cuckolding a
punishment for surviving in spite of your indifference. My life a loose end.
And now we are back where it all started, braziers and thrones, vines and those
bracelets that curdle around your arm, all the bronze in the world turning chilly
on your skin, warmth leeched out. You don’t look at me, and I don’t look back.
Time has passed, and it has only rotted you more. You are sharper than ever, your
cruelty uninspired and bored of itself. I no longer think it is my job to punish you.
I know how to fix things, but I will not waste my time, a taste of my breath, on you.
I curl my toes and think of sand, face-scorching fires and geysers. The sturdy arms that
pulled me out of death and soft ones that held me to the edge of life. The handiwork
of tenderness and its moving parts, pudgy, mechanical fingers working at my beard.
I take my place here without you. I take my place with a view of the island and an
anvil heart. I do not forgive you. You know that. The universe goes on at our discretion.
Virginia Laurie is a student at Washington and Lee University whose work has been published in Apricity, LandLocked, Panoply, Phantom Kangaroo and Merrimack Review.
Jenifer Browne Lawrence Puget Sound, WA 3 poems
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Chronic Love Poem with Three or Four Birds
Because we compared the diamond skin whorls of our muddy knee prints on back seat leather I have renamed my heart the clown car. Its doors open and shut at the most inopportune times, it holds, always, more than it can hold. You tell me I am one of your favorite sounds, that I smell of sunflowers, tiger balm. Because once I swallowed squirrel pellets to cure bronchitis, you kissed me with a kestrel feather. I began to laugh like a hawk, like a dry gourd shaken. I sacrificed a fundal tumor to keep us benign, and still you can't watch the needle going in. You bring me stones for my pockets, catch and release houseflies, spiders, thoughts pop from your mouth like crows exploding from a spruce tree. You will never not be wanting to be somewhere else, the bus will never not be rolling away from the curb. Slow down, why fly when you can walk, I say, but your arms are already flapping, your perfect feet a foot beyond my reach. Future Imperfect Because you’ll be dead again and I’ll be here, a candle not lit but still burning. You’ll be dead by morning, same as yesterday, and I’ll stir up a froth, split yolk from white. You’ll be dead again and like a carcass overwintered in the field there won’t be much to look at come June. You’ll be rust on the rain barrel, I’ll be the mantle, hissing in the kerosene lantern. A meteor shower offers a thrill, I’m here to see it and you’re still dead. The world’s a brass fountain with a no bathing sign. You’ll be dead in the radiance of spring. Tomorrow will swallow the coins I throw in. |
Blue Nights
(after Mueller) What happened is we blossomed early, drinking all that milk, concocting snow ice cream in winter, so we hitched rides to Pamela’s on the wharf. No ID checks, men twice our age springing for tequila sunrises and Kahlua creams. Even the sister corpse garbed in blue was a reason for fishnets and shared tokes, the night as starred and stoned as any station of the cross and over us, without crying, the sky spilled its endless cup. We glossed our lips with Vaseline, shiny as polished chrome on muscle cars nosed to the curb at the edge of the dock. In boots and denim skirts we took turns dancing on the rough, planked floor so one of us could look out for trouble while the other troubled the waters, and because morning found us bleary and ditch dirt shrugged over us like a shroud, we showered, and slept, and the bracelets we lost to the men we danced with jangled in our dreams. |
Jenifer Browne Lawrence is the author of Grayling (Perugia Press), and One Hundred Steps from Shore (Blue Begonia Press). Awards include the Perugia Press Prize, the Orlando Poetry Prize, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, The Coachella Review, Los Angeles Review, Narrative, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Ernesto Livorni 2 poems Translated from Italian by Carmine di Biase
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Addio, verdi monti
La voce resta solista sul campo di calcio: è l’unica vampa che stride in quest’estate piovorna, pensiero vagulo blandulo nel coro d’arie. La fiamma che sale pare dal bosco venire, eppure è soltanto il fosco patire dell’artificio in natura. Tutti tengono la promessa, suolo straniero diventa il verde dei monti. Ogni anima giovane pur tenace sussurra: “Io pur verrò!” Quale terra, quale mare del confine il destino attende? Ti chiedo ché conoscesti la vanità del mondo: tu non sai, né io rispondo d’un padre all’affetto. |
Good-bye, Green Mountains
On the soccer field a soloist’s voice: a blaze of sound, ringing clear and spreading through the gloom of this summer rain—a sweet, fleeting thought amid a chorus of airs. A tongue of flame rises up from the woods, or so it seems, but no—it’s only some enduring, dark device of nature. All here are full of hope, and all see, in these green mountains, the allure of foreign soil. Every young soul, no matter how strong-willed, will whisper: “I too shall come!” What far off land, what ocean at world’s end lies in wait for destiny? I ask you, since you once saw this world’s vanity. But you don’t know, nor can I, father, now return your love. |
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Due scatti
I Per Graziano Canarino o cardellino in gabbia più non alberga la fotografia sospesa al soffitto in quella prigione da filo posticcio (ragno non v’è che l’ha tessuto?): alito s’agita al vento che dal balcone tra ferri e sportello entra a muoverla. Ed allora s’anima quel bambino, lo sguardo all’obiettivo fisso: volere volare! La lente ch’ora guarda del traguardo la corsa non è, se non nella pur duratura memoria, macchina, ma scatto vivo. II Per Riccardo Non c’è scatto del corpo o della macchina che non gli sia stato da lui instillato che suo malgrado con delega in dono presto gliel’ha lasciato. Così dello scatto gli resta la fotografia: stampa della figura che il tempo ha consunto, che la memoria trattiene matrice. |
Two Shots
I For Graziano No canary, no goldfinch in this cage now, only that photograph, dangling in this little jail by a makeshift thread. Gone too the spider that wove that thread? The wind comes from the balcony, wafts through the bars and open door to move that photograph and bring you, as toddler, back to life, eyes fixed on your goal: the lens that captured you and your unbound will to fly. The lens you train on the finish line of this day’s race is no camera, but the eye’s pictures long endure, and here the shot you take is live. II For Riccardo No spasm of the flesh, no click of the camera that was not first his own, inspired in you by him, bequeathed to you along with his authority to make it yours. So, after the clicks and spasms, his photography lives on in your own, like that print: the image of a figure consumed by time, by memory kept alive. |
Ernesto Livorni is Professor of Italian Language and Literature, Comparative Literature and Religious Studies, at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He has published many scholarly works. He has published articles in Italian and in English on medieval, modern and contemporary Italian literature, English and American literature, Italian-American literature, and comparative literature. Livorni is the founding editor of L’ANELLO che non tiene: Journal of Modern Italian Literature (1988-2000). Livorni has also published three collections of poems. His last collection Onora il Padre e la Madre (Honor Thy Father and Mother).
Carmine Di Biase’s poems and translations from Italian have appeared in various journals. Recently, his translations of thirteen poems by Cesare Pavese appeared in L’Anello che non tiene: The Journal of Modern Italian Literature. He has edited and translated, from the manuscript, The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo, which was published in 2013. In 2015 he published “Oh! Mio Vecchio William!”: Italo Svevo and His Shakespeare, a study of Shakespeare’s influence on Italy’s most important modern novelist. Di Biase’s translations and reviews appear occasionally in the Times Literary Supplement. Di Biase also serves as dramaturg for The Shakespeare Project. Di Biase is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University. He is retiring this year from that position in order to dedicate himself thoroughly to reading and writing, to restoring old violins and making music with them, and to making life easier for his wife, who teaches music and is principal cellist for the Gadsden Symphony Orchestra.
Carmine Di Biase’s poems and translations from Italian have appeared in various journals. Recently, his translations of thirteen poems by Cesare Pavese appeared in L’Anello che non tiene: The Journal of Modern Italian Literature. He has edited and translated, from the manuscript, The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo, which was published in 2013. In 2015 he published “Oh! Mio Vecchio William!”: Italo Svevo and His Shakespeare, a study of Shakespeare’s influence on Italy’s most important modern novelist. Di Biase’s translations and reviews appear occasionally in the Times Literary Supplement. Di Biase also serves as dramaturg for The Shakespeare Project. Di Biase is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University. He is retiring this year from that position in order to dedicate himself thoroughly to reading and writing, to restoring old violins and making music with them, and to making life easier for his wife, who teaches music and is principal cellist for the Gadsden Symphony Orchestra.
Katherine Lo Anaheim, CA. 2 poems
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Sorrow and I Define the Relationship
I tell her I’m not ready to commit to anything serious, and she points out that everything is serious with her. True, I say. I guess what I mean is nothing long-term. Which surprises her since I take her everywhere-- the grocery store, work, birthday parties, dinners out with my boyfriend (though I ask her to sit quietly in the corner). Not to mention all those long walks at sunset. Mornings I wake to find her lying on my chest like a sack of wet sand, her breath cooling my face, the sheets sopping up her tears. Too close? she asks when I roll over, retreat into sleep. I know I haven’t kept the boundaries clear, but she’s hard to resist, like a sad cat purring in my lap. Don’t you have others you can stay with? I ask, and she tells me she can go anywhere she wants, any time. But you’ve made me so comfortable here. |
Sorrow and I Plan a Vacation
Nowhere tropical, she cautions between moans and little sobby sighs, and I see her point. All that Vitamin D would dry her right up, or even make her strip off all those draped layers of black sackcloth. Maybe some Oregon coast where sea and sky stretch in an expanse of parallel gloom and wind-battered gulls shriek and blow backwards. Where shells broken by the tide lie in wait to cut your bare foot. Better yet, a cabin huddled at the base of ancient redwoods grown so thick and high their greedy leaves keep all the sun’s gold for themselves. Oh, that sounds perfect! she wails, flailing a little on the floor. I agree, don’t tell her about the meadow close by that I might like to visit. While she’s napping, I could slip away, lie in the prickly grass, listen to the hum of beetles and cicadas busy in the brightness. |
Katherine Lo a writer and high school English teacher living in Anaheim, California. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, Spillway, River Styx, and other journals. It has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Emma McCoy Bellingham, WA
I Kept My Camera On When We Talked About This Poem
Last week I was in my room
attending class from my computer.
The screen’s light glowed
and I was, perhaps, lost
in translation. No time for tears,
we were reading Bishop’s villanelle
and I love a good villanelle.
Behind the closed doors of my room
sometimes I cry pandemic tears
and turn off the camera on my computer.
I try to forget what I have lost.
But last week my desk lamp glowed
and my zoom square glowed
when I talked about Bishop’s villanelle.
It was a poem of the lost,
of losing things in closed rooms
away from the eye of the computer.
Then I heard the crack of tears,
(it was a crying poem, one of tears)
and her zoom square glowed.
Top right corner, through the computer,
my classmate said this villanelle
brought her grief out of a closed room.
Sitting outside, she said she had lost
her husband recently. She had lost
her husband recently and her tears
ran through her mask. My room
felt so small. The zoom square glowed
when she said she loved Bishop’s villanelle.
It pulled my grief through the computer
and I mourned the computer
squares, the touch we have lost.
I wish we had read the villanelle
in person so I could thumb tears
away from a mask. My screen glowed
on the four walls of my room
and I held in my hands Bishop’s villanelle.
I felt the invisibility of the lost
and cried my pandemic tears.
Last week I was in my room
attending class from my computer.
The screen’s light glowed
and I was, perhaps, lost
in translation. No time for tears,
we were reading Bishop’s villanelle
and I love a good villanelle.
Behind the closed doors of my room
sometimes I cry pandemic tears
and turn off the camera on my computer.
I try to forget what I have lost.
But last week my desk lamp glowed
and my zoom square glowed
when I talked about Bishop’s villanelle.
It was a poem of the lost,
of losing things in closed rooms
away from the eye of the computer.
Then I heard the crack of tears,
(it was a crying poem, one of tears)
and her zoom square glowed.
Top right corner, through the computer,
my classmate said this villanelle
brought her grief out of a closed room.
Sitting outside, she said she had lost
her husband recently. She had lost
her husband recently and her tears
ran through her mask. My room
felt so small. The zoom square glowed
when she said she loved Bishop’s villanelle.
It pulled my grief through the computer
and I mourned the computer
squares, the touch we have lost.
I wish we had read the villanelle
in person so I could thumb tears
away from a mask. My screen glowed
on the four walls of my room
and I held in my hands Bishop’s villanelle.
I felt the invisibility of the lost
and cried my pandemic tears.
Emma McCoy is a poet based in Bellingham, WA. Her work can be found in places like The Crux, Foreshadow Magazine, and Catfish Creek. She enjoys re-imagining old stories, exploring closed forms, and challenging comfortable places. She spends her free time mountain biking and baking.
Joseph Mills Winston-Salem, NC
Skills
The song is close to the end, and he wonders
if he should dip this woman, but he knows
that can be unsettling. Once he had dipped
his wife, unexpectedly, and Molly had squawked
and smacked him in the eye. They had laughed
about it then and for years. He knows now
about support and how to cradle the neck
the way he would hold their infant daughter.
But, he’s also not as strong as he once was,
and this woman is heavyset. He should bow
or shake hands. There are many ways to end
and walk away, and none of them matter
much anymore. He will move to the next one
and the next, and maybe if someone is small,
he’ll dip her although is that inappropriate?
Sometimes he doesn’t know exactly what
he’s done wrong just that he’s done something,
and no one ever laughs. With these women,
a poke in the eye is just a poke in the eye
He is a good dancer, and Molly used to say
it was because of the shop courses he took
with Mr. Joblonski. Mr. J would emphasize
the importance of firm grips and tight seals.
It didn’t matter what you were making,
or what material you were working with –
wood, metal, cloth, drywall – the key was
attention to the seams and connections.
Mr. J had lost part of a finger at the bandsaw,
and he liked to hold up that hand and say,
“Always know what you’re touching, and
what it could cost you.” Molly had loved
that advice, insisting that it was good
for sex-ed and life skills classes as well.
Holding Molly, he had viscerally understood
those diagrams of closed circuits. They flowed.
This, today, isn’t dancing. It is a way to pass time,
papering over the cracks and voids of a day.
Then he remembers the shelves in the shop
full of shims, patching tapes, colored markers
to disguise scratches. Troy Miller had argued
using those were deceptive, even dishonest,
and Mr. J. had said “Some things get damaged
in ways you can’t fix, but you can still make them
useful and look good.” Life class, indeed.
No, he wouldn’t dip this woman, but he could
end with a roll-out twirl, some flourish, an act
of consideration for her, for Mr. J., for Molly.
The song is close to the end, and he wonders
if he should dip this woman, but he knows
that can be unsettling. Once he had dipped
his wife, unexpectedly, and Molly had squawked
and smacked him in the eye. They had laughed
about it then and for years. He knows now
about support and how to cradle the neck
the way he would hold their infant daughter.
But, he’s also not as strong as he once was,
and this woman is heavyset. He should bow
or shake hands. There are many ways to end
and walk away, and none of them matter
much anymore. He will move to the next one
and the next, and maybe if someone is small,
he’ll dip her although is that inappropriate?
Sometimes he doesn’t know exactly what
he’s done wrong just that he’s done something,
and no one ever laughs. With these women,
a poke in the eye is just a poke in the eye
He is a good dancer, and Molly used to say
it was because of the shop courses he took
with Mr. Joblonski. Mr. J would emphasize
the importance of firm grips and tight seals.
It didn’t matter what you were making,
or what material you were working with –
wood, metal, cloth, drywall – the key was
attention to the seams and connections.
Mr. J had lost part of a finger at the bandsaw,
and he liked to hold up that hand and say,
“Always know what you’re touching, and
what it could cost you.” Molly had loved
that advice, insisting that it was good
for sex-ed and life skills classes as well.
Holding Molly, he had viscerally understood
those diagrams of closed circuits. They flowed.
This, today, isn’t dancing. It is a way to pass time,
papering over the cracks and voids of a day.
Then he remembers the shelves in the shop
full of shims, patching tapes, colored markers
to disguise scratches. Troy Miller had argued
using those were deceptive, even dishonest,
and Mr. J. had said “Some things get damaged
in ways you can’t fix, but you can still make them
useful and look good.” Life class, indeed.
No, he wouldn’t dip this woman, but he could
end with a roll-out twirl, some flourish, an act
of consideration for her, for Mr. J., for Molly.
Joseph Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has published six collections of poetry, including Exit, pursued by a bear which consists of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. Information about his work is available at www.josephrobertmills.com.
Michael Minassian 2 poems
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The Bottom of the Cup
In a proper Greek tragedy, the chorus knows better than to try and outsmart the Gods. The protagonist squeezed between a cruel sun and unheeded warnings, the oracle lying bloated & drunk on some Aegean island or North African desert fort. Circe turning pigs into men or men into sheep, not that she could help herself (it was just her nature)-- the temperature inside clinging to the walls like the dregs of thick Turkish coffee-- Years ago, my mother would read the swirls and eddies at the bottom of the cup, surprising even herself-- friends and neighbors waited in our kitchen for a clue about the future or the past. The woman from across the street stopped calling, too close to the truth, she said, stifling her stuttering verbs and profound curses long before I ever heard the word Tourette’s, embarrassing both her sons: Don and Dave, fraternal twins, one masculine, one feminine-- both of them staying home long after the rest of us left for college or a job in NY. I saw the three of them one day in the parking lot of Palisades Amusement Park just before it closed down, the boys bloody and battered being led into two waiting police cars, their mother letting loose a string of curses longer than the barges sailing down the Hudson-- even the cops’ faces turning bright red. The house across the street boarded up, then sold-- the family dog, Argos, returning alone, months later, howling like an actor left alone too long on stage. The Chorus chiming in at the end: now let the weeping begin. |
On the East Coast of Korea
Checking in late to my hotel on the eastern shore, unable to sleep, I walk out onto the balcony, and stare at the black water lit by a half moon. A breeze lifts leaves on the trees, shadows bend into each other. The sound of the waves carries a thousand years. To touch the moon, a cloud only needs to take the shape of a bird, the feathers of the wind. |
Michael Minassian’s poems and short stories have appeared recently in such journals as, Live Encounters, Lotus Eater, and Chiron Review. He is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist and photography: Around the Bend. His poetry collections, Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing are available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
Claudia Monpere Oakland, CA 3 poems
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Before the Man Walks into Your House
a birdcall swerves in your direction. The usual response – cottonwood’s shiver in morning fog. The flowers are intoxicated here. Delphinium purple, delirium ripple, dragon fruit long past the apple hour. You want to bathe in their petals, graft their color onto your tongue for him. Or tempt him with a dream, the fragile beauty of a woman’s neck. As if motion were a kind of answer. Don’t. Red Horse Eight horses in the velvet green hills in the poppy wild mustard oak tufted hills eight horses unsaddled unbroken unknowing the spine of our longing, that twilight reckoning reminding us which wounds matter, will stay young and open as the sorrel, chestnut, red roan who wander from the herd their long shadows the sound of that stream cutting through bluebunch and wild rye, calling the heartbeats, the lonely and bruised my meridian horse my morse-code horse old horse, ember horse, my red horse never ridden. |
The Logic of Natural Wonders
The women’s words are feathers exhausted by seasons of containment. The man is Arizona earth fissure, swallowing roads, utility lines, cattle. Cutting through mesquite and creosote flats, widening and narrowing, boring canyon deep. How can a box have six sides when everything the women see is flat? The man is Kotumsar Cave, all chambers lined with dripstone, especially his left ventricle. Especially the deep zone, dominated by troglobites. The man Is Mount Nyiragongo in a crown of smoke, his lava lake boiling. Is Band-e Amir Lakes —and the tuffa dams separating the water. No. Wait. Let the women be the lakes. a chain of them. Water seeping out of faults and fractures bringing travertine and gleam to the gray desert mountains. An Afghan snow finch chirps and trills, lines her nest with camel hair, flies over the lakes, shimmering sapphire below. When the women tire of being lakes they recalculate the geometry of a box until it pleases them. They become circle theorems. When is a man always? When is he sometimes? When is he feathers lining the snow finch’s nest? |
Claudia Monpere's poems appear in such journals as New Ohio Review, Plume, The Massachusetts Review, and The Cincinnati Review. She's a recipient of a Hedgebrook residency, lives in Oakland, California and teaches creative writing and first year writing at Santa Clara University.
Bonnie Proudfoot Athens, OH
Playland
I am hiding in the public restroom at Rye Playland
because the world is spinning, is spinning
like a Tilt-a-Whirl, not a Ferris Wheel. The view
from the bathroom is not that elevated. The pattern
on the floor is mostly black and white tiles
in the shape of hexagons, six whites like flower petals
or seats in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup ride revolving
around a little black hexagon. Surrounded.
This pattern should stand still, but instead,
it contracts and expands like the Hall of Mirrors,
or maybe it is my brain, a disco ball right now,
step right up and party down. What am I thinking?
Everything here is sort of familiar and sort of
shady, like a parallel universe where anything
is possible but also not quite what it seems.
Through the hazy cobwebs on the stall window,
the full moon like a mother, sees it all. Most
of my so-called friends are still on the boardwalk
smoking Camels and drinking Schlitz beer,
though soon enough they may send someone
to check on me. And the floor revolves like
dozens of pretty pinwheels, long drags glowing red
at the tip of menthol cigarettes take my breath away,
warm beer from cans tastes like sweat and boys,
bare bulbs and streetlights turn into sparklers as moths
beat the air with their wings. It is almost the end
of summer, return buses are idling in the parking lot. None
of those bus drivers care if I don’t get on.
I am hiding in the public restroom at Rye Playland
because the world is spinning, is spinning
like a Tilt-a-Whirl, not a Ferris Wheel. The view
from the bathroom is not that elevated. The pattern
on the floor is mostly black and white tiles
in the shape of hexagons, six whites like flower petals
or seats in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup ride revolving
around a little black hexagon. Surrounded.
This pattern should stand still, but instead,
it contracts and expands like the Hall of Mirrors,
or maybe it is my brain, a disco ball right now,
step right up and party down. What am I thinking?
Everything here is sort of familiar and sort of
shady, like a parallel universe where anything
is possible but also not quite what it seems.
Through the hazy cobwebs on the stall window,
the full moon like a mother, sees it all. Most
of my so-called friends are still on the boardwalk
smoking Camels and drinking Schlitz beer,
though soon enough they may send someone
to check on me. And the floor revolves like
dozens of pretty pinwheels, long drags glowing red
at the tip of menthol cigarettes take my breath away,
warm beer from cans tastes like sweat and boys,
bare bulbs and streetlights turn into sparklers as moths
beat the air with their wings. It is almost the end
of summer, return buses are idling in the parking lot. None
of those bus drivers care if I don’t get on.
Bonnie Proudfoot has had fiction and poetry published in the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, SoFloPoJo, and other journals. Her first novel, Goshen Road, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020, and was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads for 2020. The novel was also long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway award for debut fiction. She lives in Athens, Ohio.
Doug Ramspeck Black Mountain, North Carolina 3 poems
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green snake reliquary
the brothers found a green snake & slapped it against a shagbark hickory & the snake dreamed of its eternal loosening & the snake thought i have climbed down the ladder of my life into death & the brothers carried the snake into the house and left it beneath their sister’s pillow as a reliquary & the snake curled into the ouroboros & the snake thought i am every messenger of goneness & when their sister screamed that evening the brothers ran into her bedroom & waved the snake in her face & touched the snake to her skin & shook the snake back into seeming life & that night their sister dreamed that the snake was a swollen tongue & a fetid river & a dark unspooling & a noose constricting the world’s neck & later the brothers hid the snake in her closet where it grew ripe & rotted like ancient fruit & the snake said these are my emanations loam rapture the girl who lived down the street of my childhood home died when she was twelve & i was thirteen though usually i picture her when she was younger & rode a stick horse up & down her driveway with such determination it was easy to imagine her dreaming only of pounding hooves & snapping manes & often i watched her from my bike or saw her fleeing from her brothers who one july dragged her resisting toward the pond past my father’s barn & threw her in then held her under until i feared she had drowned which was why i assumed she so often rode that horse in her thoughts into some faraway & imaginary field or up into the sky to oar away with the crows & when i was thirteen i heard the ambulance after her uncle struck her by accident in his truck & i saw the ambulance speeding past my father’s farm & the grass at the roadside swayed like the hooves of an invisible horse were galloping through them |
divination
after she learned she was pregnant she dreamed one night that her sons were crows & slipped free from her body on their black boats & oared across the evening sky & that their wings were oars & they were calling out with a kind of feral faraway & because of the years of miscarriages she woke thinking of bees emerging from a slit in the backyard grass & she imagined that the boys waiting inside her were divinations & she pictured them running beneath a membrane of sky amid the crested yellow heads of soybean fields & pictured that soon her boys would be boy flesh & boy smells & her boys come winter would watch the snow coming down & their breaths would say here is the body’s partition & their breaths would say the snow speaks to us in quiet voices & soon the years would insist on their own silent syncopation & the boys would gaze at the snow & pray & their prayers would say come embrace this land with your body |
Doug Ramspeck is the author of eight poetry collections, one collection of short stories, and a novella. One recent book, Black Flowers, is published by LSU Press and was a finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize. His story collection, The Owl That Carries Us Away, received the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction.
Louise Robertson Columbus, OH 2 poems
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When I Hear a Mother Tell Her Daughters What Kind of Man to Love
Am I supposed to touch the beacon of soft hairs on her forehead and fill my lungs with her demons, carry them out to the forest, and banish them there? Or am I to unfold her hand and trace a gentle path -- “here is a man who loves you like however the hell you want to be loved — honey, friction, blossom, glacier, teeth — whatever you want to take or give.” Even the part about the man is presumptive. I know my daughter: she might take a woman to herself and stitch between them a quilt of life. All those patches, all that tatting. Could I have looked her in the eye and commanded: “Go. Run. Be.” Recall — I can’t tell my child anything — except, here, she is part of the lines on my hand, the result of my body taking in the sea, my threads, my marrow set loose and yet she is still all but deaf to me calling out behind her: Love. |
The Affair
You are the plastic fork tine I broke off with my teeth &, hungry, swallowed. Ever since, I have thought of you, a bright white fang moving along resting, corroding in my stomach, then easing through my intestines. You were supposed to be biodegradable & I have thought—for every stab of conscience or error or need —is that you? Or is it me imagining you becoming part of me? |
Louise Robertson counts among her many publications and honors several jars of homemade pickles she received as thanks for running a monthly workshop. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in New Ohio Review, After the Pause, Crack the Spine, and many other journals. They have also been nominated three times for the Best of the Net and once received a Pushcart nomination.
Mel Ruth Atlanta, GA
re a woman of little consequence: virginia hall
1. they said i have a knack for finding adventure, and i’d say they were right. bird hunting turkish
wilderness cost me my leg but gained me my freedom. i named my prothesis cuthbert, hid secrets within
his hollowed wood. 2. they said i was capricious and cantankerous; i say i once wore a snake coiling my
wrist to school and called it jewelry. in lyon i befriended brothel madams, collected intelligence through
prostitutes, recruited nuns from the convent. 3. i could be four different women in an afternoon, learnt
to paint wrinkles onto my face, ground my teeth to look like a milkmaid. many of my friends were killed
for talking too much but i was no tragic heroine. 4. once i fled to spain. i outran the gestapo, barbie,
walked for fifty miles over three days in heavy snow, the great pyrenees mountains forbidding. 5. i
organized the mauzac escape, denied ceremonies in my honor. i maintained my cover until death.
1. they said i have a knack for finding adventure, and i’d say they were right. bird hunting turkish
wilderness cost me my leg but gained me my freedom. i named my prothesis cuthbert, hid secrets within
his hollowed wood. 2. they said i was capricious and cantankerous; i say i once wore a snake coiling my
wrist to school and called it jewelry. in lyon i befriended brothel madams, collected intelligence through
prostitutes, recruited nuns from the convent. 3. i could be four different women in an afternoon, learnt
to paint wrinkles onto my face, ground my teeth to look like a milkmaid. many of my friends were killed
for talking too much but i was no tragic heroine. 4. once i fled to spain. i outran the gestapo, barbie,
walked for fifty miles over three days in heavy snow, the great pyrenees mountains forbidding. 5. i
organized the mauzac escape, denied ceremonies in my honor. i maintained my cover until death.
Mel Ruth is a poetry PhD student at Georgia State University. Mel has pieces published in Pleiades, New Pages, and more. Mel was a Slice Literary Magazine “Bridging the Gap” Finalist, and their chapbook A Name Among Bone, was a semi-finalist in the 2020 Black River Chapbook Contest. Pronouns are they/them or she/her/hers. Follow them on Twitter @_Mel_Ruth
Esther Sadoff Columbus, OH
Valentine
I stole an icicle for you,
snapped from the neighbor's awning.
They were spilling like silver hair
in the abandoned dark.
Don't give me flowers.
Flowers don't sit easy in a jar.
They settle uncomfortably,
turning to tatters, curling
and fretting in a sullen vase.
We bed the the icicle in the snow,
blanketing it smoothly,
burying and unburying,
testing its persistence.
Next year, give seeds.
Pluck wands of scalding ice.
I'll let the gutters fill
with twigs and leaves,
I'll let them overflow
and drip like wax.
I don't mind
a burn that lasts.
I stole an icicle for you,
snapped from the neighbor's awning.
They were spilling like silver hair
in the abandoned dark.
Don't give me flowers.
Flowers don't sit easy in a jar.
They settle uncomfortably,
turning to tatters, curling
and fretting in a sullen vase.
We bed the the icicle in the snow,
blanketing it smoothly,
burying and unburying,
testing its persistence.
Next year, give seeds.
Pluck wands of scalding ice.
I'll let the gutters fill
with twigs and leaves,
I'll let them overflow
and drip like wax.
I don't mind
a burn that lasts.
Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Wingless Dreamer, Free State Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Passengers Journal, SWWIM, Marathon Literary Review, West Trade Review, River Mouth Review, Penultimate Peanut, as well as other publications.
Sean Sexton Vero Beach, FL
RFK/RIP
Is it enough to say who came?
Marvelous crowds appeared trackside
along the route of the train.
But what are they good for now?
It was complained; as they gathered
in mourning, numb with disbelief,
frozen in despair of fresh evil
joined to the common works of man.
Twenty cars made up the cortege
a thousand aboard in stifling heat
of early June: a disparate mélange
of family, friends...celebrities. Manhattan
to Washington—taking twice as long
as it should: an eight-hour day.
The food ran out, the water ran out,
finally the liquor ran out.
The coffin rode in the last car; chairs
were brought from the dining coach
for a makeshift bier to lift it into view.
And she alone, her veiled head
resting against the casket, rosary
in her fingers. I wasn't ready
to see that, a witness said.
The train carried the remains
of our hope, said another.
I put my hand on my heart,
a woman remembered, saying,
Who would we walk to the edge
of a track and stand there for today?
Two million souls along the way--
arriving early, staying late,
missing at the last minute.
Waving, saluting, kneeling, praying,
paying last respects. Thronged cities,
sparse countrysides, lonely barrens,
all the siding a neighborhood--
two hundred plus miles of them watching,
waiting, expecting, aching, forgoing meetings,
appointments, and schedules to be there.
Some had been shopping,
some left jobs, school, abandoned posts.
Some left home, some left their lives.
Windows flowed along clacking rails
past so many faces as to appear to the riders
they themselves, were frozen, the world
rolling by. Faces of hurt, fear, passion,
and loss, and those present for the novelty
of it, out of curiosity, out of
horror.
They carried flowers, flags and banners.
Homemade signs: RFK/RIP,
So-Long— and We love you-Bobby.
They held handkerchiefs, cameras, umbrellas,
purses, children, and pets. They held each other,
assembled in parking lots, open fields, under
bridges, crowded embankments, road
crossings. drainages, and backyards.
They were dressed up, uniformed, wore robes
and habits, bathing suits, diapers, in high fashion,
and homespun, shirtless and soiled. Firemen,
cops, hairdressers, car-salesmen, and nurses.
A Cub Scout troop, entire baseball team,
marching bands, congregations, strangers,
nuclear families. Young, old, glamorous, destitute,
homely, wealthy, red, yellow, black and white.
New York to Union Station. When they arrived,
the moon hung heavy and full over the Potomac.
At the Lincoln Memorial, they all sang
The Battle Hymn of the Republic; then
across the bridge into Arlington. A light rain
had stopped. Old friends, weary pallbearers,
trusted aides, and family champions stumbled up
the hill to the knoll to lay him beside his brother.
Only a marvelous country would have
dared to have him, taken his promise
to make us a little better than we were.
His mettle—not strong, not weak:
somewhere between a blade of grass,
and finely-honed...steel.
His mild and magnificent eyes,
now accustomed to the dark.
Is it enough to say who came?
Marvelous crowds appeared trackside
along the route of the train.
But what are they good for now?
It was complained; as they gathered
in mourning, numb with disbelief,
frozen in despair of fresh evil
joined to the common works of man.
Twenty cars made up the cortege
a thousand aboard in stifling heat
of early June: a disparate mélange
of family, friends...celebrities. Manhattan
to Washington—taking twice as long
as it should: an eight-hour day.
The food ran out, the water ran out,
finally the liquor ran out.
The coffin rode in the last car; chairs
were brought from the dining coach
for a makeshift bier to lift it into view.
And she alone, her veiled head
resting against the casket, rosary
in her fingers. I wasn't ready
to see that, a witness said.
The train carried the remains
of our hope, said another.
I put my hand on my heart,
a woman remembered, saying,
Who would we walk to the edge
of a track and stand there for today?
Two million souls along the way--
arriving early, staying late,
missing at the last minute.
Waving, saluting, kneeling, praying,
paying last respects. Thronged cities,
sparse countrysides, lonely barrens,
all the siding a neighborhood--
two hundred plus miles of them watching,
waiting, expecting, aching, forgoing meetings,
appointments, and schedules to be there.
Some had been shopping,
some left jobs, school, abandoned posts.
Some left home, some left their lives.
Windows flowed along clacking rails
past so many faces as to appear to the riders
they themselves, were frozen, the world
rolling by. Faces of hurt, fear, passion,
and loss, and those present for the novelty
of it, out of curiosity, out of
horror.
They carried flowers, flags and banners.
Homemade signs: RFK/RIP,
So-Long— and We love you-Bobby.
They held handkerchiefs, cameras, umbrellas,
purses, children, and pets. They held each other,
assembled in parking lots, open fields, under
bridges, crowded embankments, road
crossings. drainages, and backyards.
They were dressed up, uniformed, wore robes
and habits, bathing suits, diapers, in high fashion,
and homespun, shirtless and soiled. Firemen,
cops, hairdressers, car-salesmen, and nurses.
A Cub Scout troop, entire baseball team,
marching bands, congregations, strangers,
nuclear families. Young, old, glamorous, destitute,
homely, wealthy, red, yellow, black and white.
New York to Union Station. When they arrived,
the moon hung heavy and full over the Potomac.
At the Lincoln Memorial, they all sang
The Battle Hymn of the Republic; then
across the bridge into Arlington. A light rain
had stopped. Old friends, weary pallbearers,
trusted aides, and family champions stumbled up
the hill to the knoll to lay him beside his brother.
Only a marvelous country would have
dared to have him, taken his promise
to make us a little better than we were.
His mettle—not strong, not weak:
somewhere between a blade of grass,
and finely-honed...steel.
His mild and magnificent eyes,
now accustomed to the dark.
Sean Sexton is author of Blood Writing, Poems, Anhinga Press, 2009, The Empty Tomb, University of Alabama Slash Pine Press, 2014, Descent, Yellow Jacket Press, 2018. and May Darkness Restore, Poems, Press 53, 2019. He has performed at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, Miami Book Fair International, Other Words Literary Conference in Tampa, FL and the High Road Poetry and Short Fiction Festival, in Winston Salem, NC. He is nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received a FL Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. He is a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation (Lauraridingjackson.org) and founding event chair of the Annual Poetry and Barbecue held each April, now in its tenth year. He also co-founded Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, FL (ccovb.org) featuring nine concerts annually attracting poets from all over the US. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.
Author's note by Sean Sexton on "RFK/RIP"
Sixteen Years ago, I dropped my wife and Mother-in Law at the Kravits Center in West Palm Beach on a Sunday afternoon to attend the Opera, Carmen and went to the Norton Museum of Art to spend the next three hours revisiting their fabulous collection. In one of the Galleries, I came upon an exhibition of photographs taken by Look Magazine staff photographer, Paul Fusco, from windows of the cars of Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral train on June 8, 1968, three days after he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after he'd won the California Presidential Primary and was giving his acceptance speech.
The photographs were novel in that Fusco trained his camera on many of the up to two million people along the 225 mile journey standing trackside where they seemed to appear from all walks of life, perhaps motivated by sadness and grief, curiosity, and the desire to pay their last respects. Words in quotation (italicized) came from essays by Norman Mailer, Evan Thomas, and Senator Edward Kennedy's eulogy delivered at his brother’s service. Other quotes derived as well from Arthur Schlesinger, and Kenny O’ Donnell, all included in a book RFK Funeral Train published in 2000 by Magnum Photos Inc., featuring a selection of the photographs. More quotations arose from testimonials recorded on video footage from televised coverage, featured in news programs on the anniversary of the Train’s passage.
The Photography exhibition was so captivating that afternoon it was difficult for me to leave the gallery as I felt I'd walked into a time-capsule. So many memories came flooding back to me from my childhood. I went to the Museum Cafe' for a coffee and began drafting this poem which I only recently finished, strangely enough in early June of 2020, on almost the 52nd anniversary of the train journey to Robert Kennedy's final resting place. Paul Fusco has since passed away July 15, 2020.
Author's note by Sean Sexton on "RFK/RIP"
Sixteen Years ago, I dropped my wife and Mother-in Law at the Kravits Center in West Palm Beach on a Sunday afternoon to attend the Opera, Carmen and went to the Norton Museum of Art to spend the next three hours revisiting their fabulous collection. In one of the Galleries, I came upon an exhibition of photographs taken by Look Magazine staff photographer, Paul Fusco, from windows of the cars of Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral train on June 8, 1968, three days after he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after he'd won the California Presidential Primary and was giving his acceptance speech.
The photographs were novel in that Fusco trained his camera on many of the up to two million people along the 225 mile journey standing trackside where they seemed to appear from all walks of life, perhaps motivated by sadness and grief, curiosity, and the desire to pay their last respects. Words in quotation (italicized) came from essays by Norman Mailer, Evan Thomas, and Senator Edward Kennedy's eulogy delivered at his brother’s service. Other quotes derived as well from Arthur Schlesinger, and Kenny O’ Donnell, all included in a book RFK Funeral Train published in 2000 by Magnum Photos Inc., featuring a selection of the photographs. More quotations arose from testimonials recorded on video footage from televised coverage, featured in news programs on the anniversary of the Train’s passage.
The Photography exhibition was so captivating that afternoon it was difficult for me to leave the gallery as I felt I'd walked into a time-capsule. So many memories came flooding back to me from my childhood. I went to the Museum Cafe' for a coffee and began drafting this poem which I only recently finished, strangely enough in early June of 2020, on almost the 52nd anniversary of the train journey to Robert Kennedy's final resting place. Paul Fusco has since passed away July 15, 2020.
Martha Silano Seattle, WA 3 poems
|
For Days I Stirred the Past
The pipe that cracked. The car in flames, licking the tall pines in the neighbor’s yard. My brain yoked to an ox, so I can’t see the paradisiac for the flawed, the defect for the perfectly furled, where everything’s cloudy like the broth I’ve been boiling for days because bones and collagen make the best soup, the bits and pieces that were the chicken’s life. Making food from garbage, sort of like my father’s need to accrete. I never watched Hoarders because I grew up with one, a man who filled filing cabinets with clippings from Quanta, Cell, Lancet, who would never, in several lifetimes, read them all. I wouldn’t say I walked on eggshells all those years, more like the ashes of saints and martyrs, the remnants of wafers from long-ago masses. How fitting to grow up with a dogwood, tree of the crucifix. A plant God blessed and cursed. Stirring, sipping, I consider the earthworms that littered the sidewalks every time it poured, fat and red, hoping for what-- the robins to return? My yellow-booted foot? Delicious, I say to no one but myself, just the right amount of salt, while the dying mountain laurel continues to die, while a roadkill possum glistens in the rain. It Could Be November If just for today I let the goose have its way. If I didn’t care about mellifluous. If I walked on a lark to the lake—walking, walking, if I didn’t stop walking, like Virginia Wolfe at 59. My age! How many poems want to cry out with the same news, the same stones. Disguised with rhyme. Disguised with swallows and lilacs, where the undiscussed flutters and rests, flutters and rests. Where sleeping dogs snore, and blossoms curl, flop, brown. The sun we say is trying to break out from behind the clouds—another kind of lie. This is what’s beneath the music. What a famous poet called dizzying. What’s left when I stop the dithering? It’s cold and April is cruel but so is May, so are June and July. August is not august, and don’t get me started on September. It could be any month, could be November. Pink petals or Christmas lights, the two intertwined. An interview with a leaf gets me nowhere. My high, my low, my get by, my bullshit, my annoy, though I can’t tell the foyer for the trellis, the raindrop for the supersoaker storm, the one with the 250-plus lightning strikes. The yeti for the sprightly raccoon. Bishop wrote (Write it!) but not before that m-dash Lizzy pointed out in class—I hadn’t noticed. Between the whoa whoa wow, all that blah blah blah, what’s held inside what’s not thrown, like a cockatiel, to the wind. |
She Cooked with a Pan of Silence,
denial for a lid. One of her oven mitts told me supper would involve nothing to do with cacophony. When it came to adding garrulous, she vouched for the lonesome garlic press, though I’ve read it’s always much better to mince with a knife, though I’ve heard the words of basil and parsley should be torn, never chopped. Back then, when silence was uncomfortable, a pair of polyester undies, a bra that chafed. Silent or belting out show tunes-- I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair-- her version of I’d prefer not to because we couldn’t lean into the feathers of feeling, could we? Because that would mean her children asking why did you choose him over us? One day she loaded up all our toys, Miss Cookie’s Moon Kitchen Colorforms, a giant stuffed parrot, took them to our Aunt Helen’s, who would donate them to a church. I didn’t have anything against Aunt Helen or St. Mary’s, knew it was the right thing to do, but to find our toys in her garage, my mother suddenly mute. Remember when silence was sometimes loud, sometimes pianissimo, remember when we needed explanations most (Mom, what’s a tampon?) we were suddenly in a room with a silent animal, a rabbit or snail. Remembering, I’m never sure whether to fill the cookie jar with quietude or the loudest possible truth. |
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books 2019). She is co-author, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Martha’s poems are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College.
Annette Sisson Nashville, TN 2 poems
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Seduction of Telephone Poles
in response to Edward Hopper’s “Road and Trees” At the edge of a road to Keene, New Hampshire, or Lancaster, Pennsylvania, three tree trunks step into bright afternoon. Against a scrim of dark foliage, these featured dancers pose, arms in a vee, fingers entwined in loose-plaited hair lime-colored in sunlight. The pavement’s shoulder lures. They hop the platform road, riff a quick lick, bow. From the canopy, parental roots brood, crow mythologies of doom. The trees are like hoofers. They slough off tangled mockingbird memories, dream of a city of gimlets and pomegranates, lifts and spins, brush and heel dig. They scuffle and stomp on asphalt-- the taps of their saddle shoes slide and click as they shuffle to the hum of telephone poles, travel the crackle of wire. |
After He Reads Her Journal
in response to Edward Hopper’s “Excursion into Philosophy” Caught in this angular room, he is seized by the precision of louvered shutters. Dead center yet almost cornered, he slumps on a sharp purple bed, a scarecrow in polished brown shoes, her open journal beside him. Green hills roll in sunlight outside the window block. He does not notice their curves, nor turn to see the arc of her naked hip, her slim oval buttocks, rounded calves below tilted thighs—unable to grasp the swerve of time, the crisis of her pale bare skin. Under the windowsill, the wall recesses like a shirt box. The left toe of his shoe penetrates the sun-drenched casket of light on hardwood. Hands hang between knees, death-masked face white as his socks. He neither stands nor withdraws his half-caged foot. |
Annette Sisson has poems in many literary journals including Nashville Review, Typishly, One, The West Review, and HeartWood Literary Magazine. Her first full-length book, Small Fish in High Branches, is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press (2022); her chapbook, A Casting Off, was published by Finishing Line in 2019. She was named a 2021 Mark Strand Poetry Scholar for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a 2020 BOAAT Writing Fellow, and winner of The Porch Writers' Collective’s 2019 Poetry Prize. http://annettesisson.com
Meghan Sterling Portland, ME 2 poems
|
Panacea
My daughter rises as if lit by fire, as if there is no bridge between sleep and wake. Immediately, she wants stories and I pull them out of my bleary mouth. She wants songs. She moves in, stares deep into my sheet-creased face and wants to lick my nose. She is everything I was before, and she is more because she is her and is all that is silver with light-- the surface of a pond at night, full of moon, the first enamel sky of spring high as a spire. I have lost myself in love for her and it is good. I wanted to be better than I was, and it took a girl, a mountain, Maine, this constant bright attention and soft hands to shove me into gladness, that bossy high-pitched voice ordering me into joy. How I open my sleep shut mouth into song because she demands it. How I lick the tip of her nose before coffee because it makes her laugh. To give all. How the wet sand pushed away just fills more deeply with grains and wave. Who knew? All this time I’ve been a stretch of beach needing to be pummeled by the tide to broach goodness. I was a buried treasure, and she my pirate. How much of myself I needed to pitch overboard to learn who I was, how much I would discover to love once I focused my heart on her. |
Ghost Forest
Here is the entrance, the boardwalk a labyrinth that makes its way through mangrove swamp, the smell of rot, black ooze hermit crabs scuttle across with their slim-penny weight. I’m remembering the way sadness catches in a mother’s voice, vacations that were haunted by untaken photographs, my parents far behind as I moved through the forest, roots like arms reaching up as though desperate for a different life, for someone to bend down and lift them out of the muck. The air is close. So much has died here, the water brine increasing, salt on the lips, the tongue. Who thought to turn this place into a park? It is a celebration of all that has died, is dying, the all of us following the path through dense tangle: live oaks, plumbago, myrtle, cypress. The trees are octopuses with their long arms sheltering birds busy with mating and babies and seasons and gathering bugs. I can hear them hidden in bracken, in nests far from the wooden slats slapped together, the roughhewn walkway for people and their families and quarrels and litter. I see where someone has left a crumpled bag of potato chips, where the crabs scurry over and under the bag on the thick surface of the swamp. Eventually it will sink, decorate the bottom, along with the cast off shells and lost sunglasses and newspapers and layers of mud that rise to the boardwalk when it floods, staining the sides a starless black. |
Meghan Sterling lives and teaches workshops in Portland, Maine with her family. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The Night Heron Barks, Pirene's Fountain, Menacing Hedge, Sky Island Journal, and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, winner of Sweet Literary's 2021 annual poetry contest, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident. Her collection These Few Seeds was published in April 2021 from Terrapin Books. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
Jacqueline Allen Trimble Montgomery, AL. 4 poems
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Sonnet for Where We Are Now
My neighbor is stockpiling Tiki torches and shovels. He waves like a salesman. Suspicious and friendly. I wave back but do not smile. My son is sick and uninsured. His cough is as deep as a sinkhole. My mother once entertained a bomb shelter salesman. She bought a Cadillac instead. Drove it to California. Drank lemonade under a lemon tree. I spend sixty dollars at Whole Foods. Quinoa was food for the poor elsewhere. My neighbor is keen on the wall. Hoards should be allowed nowhere. Jesus has not been to our church since January. Strange. My husband complains about no milk in the house. I am deranged by the cost of everything. A sinkhole opens in my backyard. My neighbor has never smiled so hard before. Today he unloads more shovels. And rope. Maybe we will get that pool we hoped for. The First Shall Be Last Once, Mississippi was one of the richest places on Earth, built on cotton and backs, black bridges over all waters, the fields of white gold traversed with railroads and gentility laid waste by Sherman who lit it all up like the finger of God dragging a path of purification across the South’s fat belly, and though that Baptism by fire did not take, the rivers too occupied by black bodies plucked from trees or shot in driveways to truck with salvation, and though I would not dare, like Milton, explain God’s inscrutable point, I do know Mississippi is now one of the poorest places on Earth. My Daughter Says I Need Xanax: A Parable A dog is chained in a yard. A ring on her collar stakes her to a length of metal welded to a thick rod driven deep into the earth. The long chain makes her world wide until it’s not, until reality snaps and says it’s narrow. The dog is surrounded by a chain link fence. Through it passersby taunt her, sure of her limits. And though she is strong from years of vigorous resistance and her teeth have been sharpened to razors, and her voice has grown husky and full, they think she is just a dog full of bark and tether. But you must remember, Beloved, chains are meant for snapping, and the day always comes when even metal rusts and wearies. What will this dog be in the world then? An avenging angel? An obedient servant? The tongue of a free woman? |
Gunfight at the Neighborhood Market
on Government Street Public Safety Director James Barber told NBC 15 the shooting stemmed from an altercation between two men inside the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Government Blvd. From “MPD Release Identities of Two Killed in Mobile Walmart Shooting,” Lindsey Bullard, NBC 15 News, Feb. 12, 2020 This was a story of small reckonings, a ballad for the local news. Everybody wants to know why, as if why could tell the tale any better than those two dead men. Might as well say, it was a cattle farmer who did not want sheep grazing on his land, a no name claim jumper called out. Somebody stole the love of somebody’s life without one sorry or pardon me. Does it matter? What we know is the one who drew first was in a wheelchair. One of them repented before he died. The rest is just the B-line from a Bonanza episode. Every week those Cartwrights held class on good and evil. No matter how bad the bad guy was, how fast a draw, if Pa Ben fell down a mountain or Little Joe was pinned by outlaws, when everything was hopeless and impossible and lost, goodness brought them safely back to the Ponderosa, and Hoss, that toothy giant, tipped his big white hat, as if to say, class is dismissed until next week. Simple. The bad guys, playing dead, got up. Kinfolk dried their eyes. Everything was smiles and let me buy you a drink. Who wouldn’t want to be those boys? We should have asked more questions—Why were all the mothers of Ben’s sons dead? How did Chinese people feel about Hop Sing? Why are people armed and dangerous in the grocery story? Truth is shooters still exist in the world. And Ben and the boys and those men at Walmart are dead. I hope they are riding together in heaven. All over a wild territory. Busting through a burning map, those wagon spokes replaced by a wheelchair rim. I hope the boys can see their mamas now, that the Walmart men are telling them they were too old to be living with their Pa. Maybe pointing out how Hop Sing should have been treated better. Got himself a spouse. His own piece of land. A gun and a horse too. Maybe they are telling them what only the dead can tell. Nothing, not even killing and dying, will ever be as simple as it’s told. |
Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. In addition to her academic work, her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Her next collection is due out from NewSouth Books in spring of 2022. Trimble is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.
Maryfrances Wagner Independence, MO. 2 poems
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Children Should Be Seen And Not Heard
We learned to fold our hands in our laps like small cabbages, sit up straight, and look intent. Adults thought we listened well, but we blinked and imagined ourselves aloft on a Ferris wheel. Sometimes our heads took us home to the toy chest with a box of Lucky Charms or in the neighbor’s yard picking the ripest cherries. Of course, we returned for slices of pound cake or ice cream with chocolate sauce. If they told us to play outside, we never screamed and knew how to stay clean even if we played tag or smeared lightning bugs on our arms. We heard about Aunt Sylvia stuck in an elevator, Uncle Ray’s bout with a bottle of gin, Aunt Josie’s black eye. We kept silent and recited “Jabberwocky” in our heads or calculated how many times we’d have to rake leaves or fold laundry to buy a hermit crab. When our fathers gathered their gloves and our mothers their purses, we stacked our puzzles, zipped our backpack, and gave everyone a stiff hug, our eyes crossed and holding our breath while smashed into them, then carried ourselves quietly out the door. |
Women Talk of Men They’ve Known
Women in this room are listening to one of us tell about the man who asked to stroke her knees but wanted nothing more. Another remembers sexy phone chats with a boy who never asked her to dance, never took her to Big Boy for chocolate malts. He told her she did not live up to his future. One remembered the stiff shove of the screen lifting, the long legs of a man scraping, waggling over the ledge, until the police coaxed him back into a squad car. The next week he straddled his Harley below her window even though police told him to move on. He said it wasn’t illegal to sit, to watch stars, to take in night air. A stranger opened my car door the night I waited in the church lot for a friend. She was late from being with the man she didn’t marry, and we had to go home together. Moonlight caught the blade the stranger flashed as I slipped out the other door and ran across a field. In the room where we tell these secrets, I wonder if the silent ones are holding back, their fingers circling a thumbnail of memory, too deep, too immovable for speech. |
Maryfrances Wagner’s newest books are The Silence of Red Glass and The Immigrants’ New Camera. She co-edits I-70 Review and served as 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year. She is Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. She serves on The Writers Place Board of Directions. Poems have appeared in magazines including in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry.
George Wallace Northport, NY 3 poems
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Jimmy
sometimes when I'm lying here in bed, too tired to sleep and feeling all alone, I walk out past the tract houses and the old white farmhouse where the crazy woman with the shotgun lived, and the row of old maples that haunts the sky; before the moon goes down i mean, before it's too dark to see, and out beyond the cornfield to where the wilderness isn't quite dead yet but only hiding, down to the frogpond where Jimmy and the gang gathered, three or four of us with our big appetite for trouble, fifteen years old and not yet tired of living, too smart for this town, the old frog pond, where we smoked pilfered cigarettes and tossed firecrackers, and ran an old shopping cart into the mud, crazy wheels spinning and spinning out of control, like an air force jet shot out of the sky, impossible to land; and we bragged about condoms and girls and beer; and we listened to the sound of the big empty looking down on us; and watched the fish rise up with their ugly snouts and prehistoric eyes and give us all the once over before sinking back into the dark; and the cottonmouths slithering off the muddy bank at the sound of our footfall, quiet-like and sneaky, back into the water where they glide like devils on the prowl for sinners and the freshly fallen, lost souls wandering around in the church of the woods; and the low country wind cuts through those trees like a calypso, the wind cuts through your clothes, moans in your ear like the souls of the damned; (and there's cats in those woods, gone feral and mean) (and there's coons in those woods, with green lantern eyes and guts like carburetors) and crawfish with jaws like alligators; and above all the bullfrogs, with their eyes like asylum windows in a hospital for the insane; they can't hurt you none, said Jimmy, look -- they just latch onto the fat of your thumb like this and hang on, like a snake with no teeth, only gums; but I've seen big men brought down to their knees in those woods, and so had Jimmy; and I've seen women not from our town run out of those woods with torn dresses and blood in their eyes; and something keeps calling me back to that place; and sometimes at night when I open my eyes and night is dark as cottonwood, and I'm still high from something someone brought over to smoke and we huffed it up, something like a fury comes over me, and I have to go back down to that place in the dying woods; the place where Jimmy kissed me, under a big yellow moon, he got me alone and he got on top of me; and his lips like mud and brine, and his face so hungry so fierce against mine I thought he could suck a dead man right out of his shoes Talking With the Dead i have swung from the arms of maple trees with the dead; run barefoot in the grass when the september sky disappears into everlasting blue; i have picked blackberries bathed in summer sun; sat cool w/ the dead in autumn shade by apple orchards, & watched the red fruit ripen; how thin the veil that separates us, how eye-perfect the dead, if i could reach out to stroke their hair i would do so shamelessly & return their kind gazes, they forgive earth its imperfections, therefore i forgive them, and myself, & am glad of their company; yes, i talk to the dead, as i go along, the elderly w/ their regrets & the young ones especially, still dizzy with life, snatched from the living too soon (the teeter totter in the playground just went up and up & never came back down); i talk to the dead, this world is just full with them, not yet ready to let go, they are so hungry for it, running into the arms of the living for one last taste of it, & how can i refuse them, i kiss their lips, i kiss their lips, still fragrant with passing, & how eagerly they kiss me back. |
Maybe It’s Love
maybe it's a streetlamp maybe it's the summer moon maybe it's an unforgiving city across the east river that eats its young or a young girl's heart that beats way too fast for ordinary people or a broken dream that slips away between brownstones maybe it's raindrops maybe it's mick jagger singing wild horses on the radio -- or maybe it's just brooklyn sleeping in the arms of some strange familiar shadow that only brooklyn understands -- but there are just some girls with comets in their eyes & little glass hearts that keeps breaking & breaking & then filling right back up again who can't stop believing in the city of lights & all the pretty boys still twinkling across the east river in the hallway of dreams |
George Wallace is writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, editor of Poetrybay, author of 38 chapbooks of poetry, and an adjunct professor of English at Pace University in NYC. A regular performer on the NYC poetry scene, he travels internationally to share his work.
Alexander Lazarus Wolff Williamsburg, VA. 2 poems
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The Temple in the Jungle
for (and after) Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951-2016) The viper is mine, the pit viper with the scales speckled by black, and I am the boy in the ochre robes contemplating as intently as any monk in any monastery has ever contemplated, but I have no insights, nor have I tamed my viper. Now, there are only the lotuses and the koi clustering together to be fed, and the luster of the beige floorboards on which postulants congregate to chant, on which the light of a setting sun shimmers like the polished amber in a pendant. I have thought enough of death, of entering the black tunnel, of shedding this body and swimming in the circumfluent darkness where all is stasis and where time slows to a standing chill. Let us unfetter ourselves and allow our mind to be like a mother-of-pearl dish, as radiant as the disk of the full moon whose luminescence ripples across the surface of the reflecting pool. And though my robes are too loose, and though the nightingales will never stop dropping their calls, there is only Goodnight in all this, and Life is suffering. I have learned tolerance, learned to take the blade from my wrist and hoard whatever shrapnel of pleasure the day tosses at me. Now my mind coasts alongside the chanting, my fellow monks opening their mouths in perfect halos of sound, the pitch undulates, rising and diving like a plane attempting to correct itself. And my mind does the same, though it can no longer sink into the sounds they sing. That goodfellow Siddhartha Gautama. Oh, have faith, force your desires away. Meditate. Meditate. The laity do not know I am a product of fantasy. I am the illusion that you can jettison the sufferings that make a life a life, jettison it just as I have done to these robes. I have still not touched the tip of peace unless it is in the scales of my pit viper who is as still as a weathered stone. And though there is no nirvana, no insight or mind of white silk brocade, there is also no reason to blame myself — no reason to desire to end desires. |
The Sorcerer’s Wife
I have a proclivity toward things that are not good for me. That’s what my father told me when I first met the Sorcerer. He cast spells and that was bad, and he did things that should not have been done, all the while, next to us, cars volleyed down the street, but I, stunned by shame, allowed the man to thread a piece of string through my lips. I didn’t care. As soon as I was near him, a thousand serpents erupted from underneath his cape, and he ushered me back to his shack. And in there were the pendants dangling from rusted hooks on his wall. They were so beautiful. I wanted to grab one. But he hit my hand with a whittled rod, so I gazed upon the alabaster crystals, spangled by the late afternoon’s sun, refracting daggers of light throughout the hut; and the rows of staffs that resembled arthritic arms, and then his orb in which I saw the rising and falling of the oceans, the orbit of Earth and its moon revolving around the sun as if it were a carousel. I stared into the orb, but it was not by choice. Still, what is the difference since the action occurred? It transfixed my eyes -- the way that golden ring transfixed me earlier in the day when I passed Francesca’s Boutique— and you can’t forget when you gazed on the solar system as if it were all in your grasp, you can’t forget how you so easily allowed him to hypnotize you. That is why I stayed with him, I think. To fool myself into believing I transcended the mundane. |
Alexander Lazarus Wolff is a student at the College of William & Mary. Currently, he lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, but he was a previous resident of Tallahassee, Florida. His work has been published or is forthcoming in "Best American Poetry," "Black Fox Literary Magazine," "Main Street Rag," "Serotonin," "The Citron Review," and elsewhere. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/wolffalex108/ and on Instagram @wolffalex108