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​What is an Epoem? Read this before you submit

Lenny DellaRocca, Editor

This page is best viewed on desktop computer or laptop. Due to webpage constraints not all formatting can be adjusted as per original on Word or other document.     We  publish only 10 Epoems per issue. Witchery  appears online occasionally.

ISSUE 3 Summer 2023

Witness

Someone else’s weather had entered our house, and we couldn’t decide
how to dress, what
to expect of the day, 
or the week, what blankets
to put on the bed. 
They must have been hearty
souls, these strangers 
whose cold rain pelted 
our bodies, whose freezing 
wind slipped in  
to make us dream 
we were lost in the uncharted
far north somewhere. 
So we turned to each other 
and tried to keep warm 
by burning the books 
we’d never been able 
to read without feeling
confused and alone.  
When our shelves were bare, 
I walked out to feel the morning, and saw a large bird—a crow--
burning as it flew. 
When it fell, I ran over 
to smother the flames 
but I couldn’t even touch it-- 
I didn’t have the courage--
and it was dead anyway
when it landed. So I covered it 
with dirt, and tried 
to ignore all the other 
burning birds flying 
through the sky, singing 
and starting small fires 
when they hit 
the ground or landed 
in the trees. 
All we could do now 
was watch them burn
and hope that those small fires 
wouldn’t start spreading:
Our neighbors had long since moved away. There was nobody coming to save us.

​
The Lie


I woke in a bedroom filled with dogs shuffling against each other 
as though 
they were blind. 
Through the open 
window I could 
hear someone talking 
on the phone. 
The dogs 
smelled wet. 
I sat up 
and looked out; 
she was sitting 
in a lawn chair, 
her back 
turned to me
like my wife 
turns her back, 
sometimes. When I
got up to walk out, the dogs started growling. I thought when she saw
me the dogs would fall 
away, and our love 
might restore us. 
She turned to me now
with a face I didn’t 
recognize, got up 
and moved off into 
the garden, singing 
an old Joni Mitchell 
song. She seemed 
herself again. 
So I took her hand 
and led her into 
our bedroom whose floor 
was covered with fur, 
which we swept up together, 
and tossed into the compost,
without saying anything about it. In fact, we never spoke of it at all.

Michael Hettich

​Michael Hettich holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from University of Miami, an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Denver, and a BA in English from Hobart College. Hettich’s first book of poetry, Lathe, was published in 1987 by Pygmy Forest Press. Since then, he has published numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. A new book of poems, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022, will be published by Press 53 in May 2023. His work has appeared in such journals as Orion, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Poetry East, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, The Literary Review, and many other journals, and his poetry reviews have appeared widely. His writing has also appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently Visiting Bob: 100 Poems for Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press, 2018). Most of Hettich’s teaching career was spent at Miami Dade College, where he served as Professor of English and Creative Writing and Lead Professor in the Honors College, as well as co-adviser of the student literary magazine. Among his honors at Miami Dade was the Mac Smith Endowed Teaching Chair in Environmental Ethics. He retired from MDC in 2018. Hettich has won a number of honors for his writing, including three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships; a Florida Book Award; The Tampa Review Prize; The David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize; The Swan Scythe Prize; The Tales Prize; The 2020 Lena M. Shull Book Award, and the Yellowjacket Press Prize for Florida Poets.

Potpourri

n.   A bowl of dry flowers and herbs to scent a room

Tight-curled buds relax
leaf by leaf
petal by petal
until opened,
they are
as lovely
as roses or
sky or sun
and as unconscious of
their youth
as any girl
hurrying
across
the quad.
So long ago,
My love, and
yet your beauty’s not gone.

Lola Haskins

Ms. Haskins’ most recent collection,  Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (Pitt, 2019)  was featured in The New York Times Sunday magazine.  Previous to that was How Small, Confronting Morning (Jacar, 2016) , set in the woods and waters of North central Floride. The two before that, The Grace to Leave (Anhinga, 2012), and Still, the Mountain (Paper Kite, 2010), won Florida Book Awards.  Her in-print books of poems are Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2004), Extranjera (Story Line, 1998), and  The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001). The books before these,  Hunger (University of Iowa Press, 1993– winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida, 1990), Castings (Countryman Press, 1984), and Planting the Children, (University Press of Florida, 1983), are out of print but can be ordered from this web site. Across Her Broad Lap Something Wonderful (State Street) and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook) are unavailable.

​Valentine

Two slightly mushy heart balloons still float above the iron wood stove, 
left over from Happy
Birthday. The star has 
long since dropped 
to join gnawed tennis balls 
in the dog’s toy box. 
L’Eternel féminin leaps
like a fox from Vixen 
and les Filles du feu. 
When Merwin translated 
from French, he must
have run into Nerval.
The hardest thing 
about aging might 
turn out to be the loss 
of looks even for one 
who claims to be above 
all that. A life of being 
looked at, hating the gaze but accustomed. That day when she first saw it not 
in the mirror but in eyes 
of strangers, then 
its drooping mouth, 
crepey eyes peered 
back from the glass. 
Courtly love and Courtney 
Love. $100 in Zelle 
from Dick Sweet. She 
didn’t know Dick though 
she did know a Peter 
Love back in college. 
This sweet dick or love
peter sent her a Valentine 
gift, a joke? And could 
Courtney Love be Peter’s 
child? Did courtly love 
of Courtney inspire song-- 
Heart-shaped Box, I’ll Stick Around, Hollaback Girl, Sad and Damned, Courtney?

Holly York

Holly York’s poems can be found in recent issues of Crosswinds, Sixfold, Oberon, and in online journals in the U.S. and U.K. Her chapbooks are: “Backwards Through the Rekroy Wen,” “Picture This,” and “Postcard Poems.” Her current project is a collection titled Black Box, inspired by her experiences as a Pan Am stewardess in the 1970s. Senior Lecturer Emerita of French at Emory University, blackbelt in karate, and grandmother of five, she lives in Atlanta with her two Dobermans.
​

Paper, Fire, Mirror

Scrubbable Sanitas vinyl wallpaper hung for four Decades
oh-so-French French Poodles
in matched black chic berets
French-manicured  paw tips
Mademoiselle  &  Monsieur
rendezvous @ Le Club Chien
along sloped attic wallboards
illegal   second-floor  add-on
built-in-the-wall electric heater coils  always hinting of Fire
the flimsy metal shower stall
with crystalline plastic knobs
an eight-year-old once stood
tippy toed to see Sears mirror
to tape cockeyed bangs down
then  in high heels  twists hair
in ringlets for prom night then
stoops  to dust eyelids matte powder blue  for first Nuptials

                               Two-Timed

In the armoire, draped            In the armoire, draped
over                                              over
satin                                             satin    
hangers                                       hangers 
while                                           while
lying over spilt silk                   lying over spilt silk
Nightie                                       Nightie
pouts,                                          pouts,
who                                             who
put                                               put 
the noir in my peignoir?        the noir in my peignoir?

Mary Louise Kiernan

Mary Louise Kiernan’s poetry appears in the Metropolitan Diary in The New York Times, Broad River Review, Common Ground Review, The Delmarva Review, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, Chronogram, Mightier—Poets for Social Justice, and elsewhere. A member of Calling All Poets and the Woodstock Poetry Society, she was awarded the 2015 Poetry Prize by Tempe Public Library partnered with Arizona State University. Her debut poetry collection is titled "The Gift of Glossophobia" [Kelsay Books]. Please visit marylouisekiernan.com for more poetry.

Mediations on Rain at the Fuime Arno in Firenze

Clouds are clouds everywhere, but the angles of these angels slice 
the sky held 
by the Torre 
San Niccoló      
up. In the east 
a blue brooding 
weighs on the air, 
seemingly a mile 
near this very 
small bridge. The 
traffic is another 
boisterous knife. 
I’m scaling the 
tower to hide. 
At the bank, I’m 
splitting the difference on this river. I’m outrunning the rain to the 
waterfall at the 
pescaia. You are 
in your green 
cups at the Arno 
where the river-
wine has turned brown
from rain, but soon
will turn green again,
and you will be as 
drunk as a Florentine 
after Mass or football. 
Ponte San Niccoló                          
is witness to your 
baptism beneath 
the brown current. You go in slowly, saving up for the longest drink. 

Michael Trammell

Michael Trammell’s new novel is Rad Sick Record, published by Hysterical Books Press. He grew up in South Florida and currently lives in the Florida panhandle. His poetry collection is Our Keen Blue House; other work has appeared in New Letters, The Chattahoochee Review, Pleiades, and the G.W. Review. He’s a Senior Lecturer at Florida State University and an associate editor for the Apalachee Review (started in 1973). In the summers he frequently teaches abroad for F.S.U. in either London, Florence, or Valencia, Spain. 

All the Way
(inspired by Billie Holiday)

Stiffened smiles lived inside Kodak archives. 
Commands 
of “cheese”
documented 
hidden potholes--
his mom’s parents 
took turns 
at the wheel.
Some pages 
had bent edges,
others retired 
from plastic spirals.
Some photo corners 
MIA, others 
on their last grip.
He touched the photo
of his mom—innocence 
at the age of two.
She grew up to be an outsider, a woman taught
to think 
inside 
perimeters.
She tried
to be 
his redwood--
sawed-off branches
couldn’t 
protect 
her seedling
from trauma.
Last week,
he buried 
his “tallest tree”--
sang a Lady Day tune
near an audience 
of maples and oaks,
and a crow that left a coin by his feet.

Patricia Carragon

Patricia Carragon’s recent publications: Beat Generation Anthology 2022, I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press), Out Loud, an LGBTQA Literary Arts Anthology (Red or Green Books), The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, When Women Speak Poetry Anthology, Vol. 1, et al. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. Her debut novel is Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press). Her books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku and The Cupcake Chronicles. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.

​

To Tallahassee

Canopy roads, a filigreed green screen to sky. Sweet gum, loblolly pine. I careen through
one phase, into another in no particular order,
skirr from childhood past adulting’s border,
miles from a rented room on College Avenue
to FSU, my father’s campus. Mine, too.
Bill’s Bookstore, Westcott, where administration
lived, and Ruby Diamond, where we tipped
cap tassels to the left and counted ourselves graduates.
Williams Building, housing religion, English,
the humanities, before categories ended in blurred
lines, a game of zero sum. Scan my father’s office,
papers stacked in piles for grading on his desk.
His bookcase on the left. Say goodbye, descend
steep steps. Enter the classrooms of my degrees.
Take a break. A shopping spree: Nic’s Toggery
downtown or Rheinauer’s in the mall.
Lunch in style at the Bird Cage. Date nights, drive to Panacea for scallops at Angelo’s.
Rue where the time goes. Stall. Fall in love.
Ferry from Carrabelle to Dog Island, fish for grunt
off a rickety pier. Canoe Lake Bradford
with a friend who died too young. Lean in.
Remain afloat. See her mother in the window
eyes on our boat. We felt safe then. Didn’t you?
After school, hit Kouky Park in Indianhead.
A hidden stream. Refuge. No one is ever there.
Our first house on Lehigh Drive. Ranch, single family,
brick. Remember how the outside storage doors hid
washer-dryer, housed my box full of chicks.
A tree before its branches broke. Perhaps an oak.
That’s how I think of it: My roots. A family split. 
Tallahassee— stare back at me. Hold me fixed
and fractured, long and short on time, within
your silhouette. Lift your veil in the gloaming. Prism light, despite. Map the way home. 

Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Five Points, Sugar House Review, Florida Review, Zone 3, Redivider, River Heron Review, Split Rock Review, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared recently in Salamander, EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and the Los Angeles Review. Sarah's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She grew up in Tallahassee and has lived and worked in Florida most of her life. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.

​Per Aspera ad Astra,

neighs the hobbled mare of my mind and leaps into the sky.
I get it. We’re fed up with our diet
of nettles, no matter how fortifying. 
We shuffle through the house
like Archimboldo’s grotesques,
barely holding in our prickly spinach.
Thistles sprout all over the floor
when we stop to think. This morning, pain
is a blue streak. An angel in disguise
with a shovel. Shoveling. So much peace
has fallen overnight, the city is
unrecognizable ecstasy. On our street
alone, several trucks belonging to god
are wholly entombed in white petals.
Silken mercy! We forget to be
grateful, my hankering mare and I. 
We should wishfully plant some gratitude in a lesser future
nightmare. For now, we’re in debt
to sweet pain. Look how it makes us see
what’s not really there. Like the thirty
camouflaged angels in our driveway.
Some lie on their backs, as good 
angels should, making truthful copies 
of themselves for whomever is watching.
We’re watching, all right? Others
have chosen to bury their ordinary halos
in the trees. See them ravish that poor
dogwood with their massive wings?
A disgrace. Someone should call
the heaven police. What do you think
is our least acknowledged
regret, I ask the only mare I have.
The blank canvas, she answers. Full of potential, like hunger.

Romana Iorga

Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, Lake Effect, The Nation, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

ISSUE 2 Spring 2023

Untitled

on a sumptuous, tongue-bellied evening we spoke of icebergs
you said stones
corrupt words
and I strayed
from the point
wondering how to
climb a frozen
mountain
upside down
underwater
and what the view
would be like
once we reached
the top
(or would it be
the bottom)
you said stones corrupt words and I drifted away, securing
my holds
against
the undercurrents
of cold and dark,
of rising night,
carrying us there
to the roof
of the world
(or was it the floor)
and I was thinking
if I dropped us,
would we float
back to light
break the surface of breath
or sink straight down
to the awnings of the sea (or would it be the rough bedrock of earth)

Catherine Mazodier

Catherine Mazodier writes in English, French, or both. Some of her poems have appeared in SoFloPoJo, Chiron Review, and the British poetry journal Agenda. She also published two chapbooks of poems with a DIY publisher in France and a few short stories in a now defunct French literary journal, Minimum Rock n Roll.

Fever Dream

This morning a cricket blew in through the box fan
of Autumn—Forewings eschewing
the loud thrumming of the locusts,
a sound that could be from Hell itself.
There was a rabbi speaking Yiddish 
on the a.m. radio, where the scrolls
are rolled into breakfast bars. 
I smelled bacon in the kitchen 
of the Garden of Eden.  My son
coughs in the next room,
his little boy pajamas of train cars.
The people congregate under 
golden trees, figs to mark the calendar 
for a new year.  There are gatekeepers with white hoods, noisy locusts.  
The creature with 
a compound eye and a simple eye 
sees us with sound.   
The season is upon us to notice 
the trees divesting and rooting 
in our pathos and prayers.
My ancestors are texting silent into clouds.
The forecast is for solitude with a light 
drizzle of rain. I’m in the dark room 
where everyone is talking behind our back.  
Whispers like little stones thrown 
on windows.  These stars are broken teacups. 
The leaves are raked into a pile for my son to jump in--

Cynthia Atkins

Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure  (CW Books),  and Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Anti- Heroin Chic, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. Formerly, Atkins worked as the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College. She is an Interviews Editor for American Micro Reviews and Interviews.  She earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist, Phillip Welch and their family.  More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com

Eden’s Express 

At 11:48 PM she’s still thinking of him in an instant replay, the one where 
he lifts himself 
over her body 
dunking his tongue 
once again into her 
famished throat. 
Like birds feed 
one another worms, 
they tasted salt and silk, 
late afternoon smoking 
in candlelight, their off-
track-beaten tryst which 
keeps them coming 
back for more 
because there’s never 
time to reach 
the sated state 
of conventional couples, 
two unfaithful middle-
aged romantics knowing more than they care to about the psycho-poetic 
dynamic of limerence, 
love’s samba, love’s 
tango, love’s salsa 
cha-cha-cha. 
But music’s all 
they’ve got, 
Eden’s Express-- 
They’ll take the 
subterranean metro 
one-way down 
and may never 
so much as arrive, 
let alone lie 
beneath the pear trees 
of paradise. But hell, 
they’ll walk under 
downpour, survive
turbulence and drought 
face-on into hot red sun, if they have to— and they have to. They really do.

Deborah DeNicola

Deborah DeNicola’s 7th book is The Impossible from Kelsay Press. 2021.Original Human was published by Word Tech in 2010. She edited the anthology Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology 1999, from The University Press of New England. Previous poetry books include Where Divinity Begins 1994 from Alice James Books, Inside Light, 2007, and two other chapbooks, Harmony of the Next 2005 won the Riverstone Chapbook Award and Rainmakers. Her memoir, The Future that Brought Her Here 2009 was published by Nicholas-Hays/Ibis Press 2009 Among other awards Deborah has received a National Endowment Fellowship in poetry. Her web site is: www.intuitivegateways.com.

Mud Dreams  

As a child I sat often in church and wondered
if prayers 
simply battered 
hopelessly against
church ceilings 
or snared themselves 
in clouds, like
the lost feathers
I found this evening 
atop bloodied snow. 
There were portents
of gray light on 
the horizon,
light that dimmed 
into a burning coal,
and I remembered how once a whiteout of snow
appeared before me
on the Interstate,
and I named
those moments 
of blindness
for the space
between stars,
for the seepage 
of cold squeezing 
through a window
jamb, named them
for mud dreams
and for my dead
mother’s tomatoes
growing on vines in summer like malformed hearts.

Doug Ramspeck

Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, one collection of short stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Blur, received the Tenth Gate Prize. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, South Florida Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review. 

How She Thought About Politics:
            
mostly not at all except on election day when she had to 
vote. Nonsense 
clanged her ears 
day and night, 
and she clung 
to the parts
that spoke 
to her pain 
and outrage 
as if following 
a recipe 
for life.
All politicians 
promise any
menu in order
to get elected 
so she always held her nose and opted for the lesser 
evil, in hopes 
they’d leave
1) her alone,
2) her enough 
of her money, 
3) her, her son,
brother, 
husband, 
home and not
send them off to
godforsaken war.
She tried to 
tenderize 
tough meat 
with too much salt on
an angry wound, poured too much vinegar on wilting leaves.

Holly York

Holly York is Senior Lecturer Emerita of French at Emory University. Having spent a career teaching and writing about language and literature, she has recently begun writing her own poems. Some of them can be found in Crosswinds, Oberon, Sixfold, Better Than Starbuck’s, and Womanthology, among others. Her current project is a collection titled Flight Recorder, inspired by her experience as a Pan American World Airways stewardess in the 1970s. A blackbelt in karate and grandmother of five, she lives in Atlanta with her two Dobermans.

Christine Jackson

Christine Jackson has retired from thirty years at a day job teaching literature and creative writing at a South Florida university.  She continues to clock in on her life-long night shift of writing poetry.  Her work has been published in an array of online journals, including The Ekphrastic Journal and Verse-Virtual.

Degenerate

A peeping Tom drills a hole in the girl’s bathroom from outside.
He likes to watch us flirt
with ourselves in the mirror,
lift our tops and suck
in our stomachs.
He thrills as we lift
our skirts, adjust
our panties, hugging
our rounded cheeks.
The surgeon drills a hole in my knee, not with a drill, but with an
18-gauge needle,
and drains the fluid.
Other injuries, other tests
show degeneration in my
hand, my knees, my
neck, my back, even
for godsake, my feet!
Why do I not have holes
to peep through, to see what’s happening, before it fails?

Barbra Nightingale

Barbra Nightingale’s 10th book of poetry is Spells & Other Ways of Flying (Kelsay Books, 2021). She has seven chapbooks and three full volumes of poetry with small presses. Over 200 of her poems have appeared in National and International Journals and Anthologies. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal, a retired professor, and lives in Hollywood, Florida, with her two and four-legged menagerie.

Lullaby

We used to pocket lumps of coal while walking along railroad tracks 
in the field back beyond my grandparents’ 
yard at sundown. In bed, the mantle clock 
chimed Westminster on the hour and train 
whistles dopplered like loons winging 
toward coal docks at Sandusky Bay. 
It was a house to whisper in, as if not to 
trouble the ghosts in the pinch-pleat drapes 
or the dank concrete basement. I would 
sleep in a bed older than my parents, 
wrapped in brown floral wallpaper, lulled 
by train whistles like waves of warm water. 
Now, during bouts of insomnia I envy my childhood self who could 
sleep anywhere—camp tents, road-trip 
car seats buckled or not, friends’ 
sleepover basement floors. When the 
telltale heartbeat of an oppressive 
schedule keeps me awake with agitated 
nerve-tingling, list-making into dark 
pillows, I envision that creaking house 
and its hushed, unrushed train calls. 
I chuck my concerns like hunks of coal
into its open gondolas as it rumbles 
past, let it haul them off to the docks 
to who knows where, but it’s someplace where everyone is sound asleep.
​

Kerry Trautman

Kerry Trautman (she/her) was born and raised in Ohio. Her work has appeared previously in South Florida Poetry Journal as well as various anthologies and journals, including Slippery Elm, Thimble, Limp Wrist, Midwestern Gothic, and Gasconade Review. Her poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020,) Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas (Gutter Snob Books 2022,) and Unknowable Things (Roadside Press 2023.) Her fiction chapbook Irregulars is forthcoming in 2023 from Stanchion Books. 

Ode to the Johnson Street Bandshell
                        
When we packed our bags with ballet slippers and bathing suits
for the flight from Buffalo 
to Fort Lauderdale 
in the winter of 1959
we may have been 
ballerinas 
in our teacher’s 
imagination
but our heads 
were dizzy 
with thoughts of 
boys on the beach
so we danced Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite Number Two, 
bruising 
our toes 
on the unyielding 
cement floor 
of that bandshell,
then waded 
into the ocean, 
each of us 
looking for 
someone 
to kiss— 
someone to dream of as we flew north into a snowstorm.

Meryl Stratford

Meryl Stratford’s chapbook The Magician’s Daughter won the YellowJacket contest for Florida Poets.  Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Amsterdam Quarterly. She is a senior editor for South Florida Poetry Journal.

Not Even That

Look, I made it all this way she said, but did not mean the streets 
of Prague: 
coffee, cream 
with berry strudel 
at the Cafe 
Louvre. Not 
the Tulum 
ruins 
of Yucatán
where she 
imagined herself 
gazing at a blue 
Caribbean 
from the wall’s 
crumbling 
shadows, tracking 
the sun’s 
movements 
beyond the Temple 
of Frescoes. 
Not even the arpeggio of tranquil days she could finally hopscotch, 
after the fraught 
parenting years 
nearly killed her. 
No, not even that. 
Only this night
and a winter 
moment halted 
at the stoplight’s 
red— corner 
of Wilshire 
and Beverly, 
rain casting 
down, the dark 
sky scattering 
its bouquet 
of asterisk needles 
across the glass 
shield before her, 
a watery slaughter and 
her breath’s sweet collapse under a quiet curtain of the smallest, softest stars.

Michelle Bitting

Michelle Bitting won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2023. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.

ISSUE 1 Winter 2022

---

A Sunday Kind of Room


Tides of meringue & gilt, the grim Palisades smudged
by studio dust. That 
was no weather for the strand
the water wrinkled
high-smelling estuarial lag 
piqued
while light through the struts
froze a green bench. 
The trembling hours begun,
all turned drag & drift.
Someone rolled a cigarette.
On the parapet,
iron rings of life.
I ease a canvas from the frame, such small & loving violence.
The radio is silent
then a thin, pure a cappella 
beads the windowpane.
The river that is not a river 
raises its head 
spits a stone eye back at me. 
A boat like a hospice 
like a graveyard waterlogged 
subsides.
On the wall hangs 
a picture of the last winter,
green bench painted out.
For perspective, the gull sensing snow hovers, a mere mote.

Carol Alexander


Carol Alexander’s most recent collection is Fever and Bone (Dos Madres Press, 2021). Her work has been published in anthologies and journals such as About Place Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, Caesura, The Common, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly, Free State Review, Matter, Mobius, One, Pif,  Potomac Review, Ruminate, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Stonecoast Review, Sweet Tree Review,   Terrain.org, Third Wednesday, Verdad, and The Westchester Review.  New work is forthcoming in Delmarva Review and RHINO. With Stephen Massimilla, Alexander is co-editor of Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022).

Tears before the Abattoir   

(re: eco sister, knuckle bump farms)

“They were completely innocent. They didn’t deserve to die,” 
wailed the headline. The
article was about
chickens lost
to avian flu after
gate-crashing flocks 
of wild geese did what 
live things do. It was the owner? 
caretaker? that was quoted? 
Of course, I’m thinking this setting must then be a “Preserve,” 
where spent layer hens retire 
after a lifetime of
meritorious service, a 
home for domestics 
never meant for compost, 
pet food, or table. & it is.
& still, I try to unpack “completely 
innocent” & “deserve to die”
while among the feathers sit my dead with their Mona Lisa smiles.


Massacre of the Innocents

While among the feathers sit my dead with their Mona Lisa smiles,
grief passes through like
a sudden storm. Who
among us is too 
good for this world? 
As my dead & past 
selves chatter like 
children & grandchildren 
as I imagine their stories & all I can do 
is apologize for whatever comes next as if I don’t know what comes
next. Never have I ever 
awakened into a life 
where a god did not or 
would not, nor a god’s 
handmaiden’s hands not 
linger, nor their saints' eyes
not mirror the catafalque crying: 
“They were completely innocent. 
They didn’t deserve to suffer & die,”  Rubens had to paint it twice.

​

Michael Mackin O'Mara  Michael Mackin O'Mara, (queer, POZ, poet) works at SoFloPoJo (South Florida Poetry Journal) by day and writes by night. Published in a number of online an print anthologies and journals, their work can be found at www.michaelmackinomara.com @minwpb          

Settlement


First, he conceded to her North and South America and 13 horizons
to either side. No one ever
gave her half the world before.
He took Asia and Europe. 
For now. He took the risk
and felt liftoff but never stayed
aloft. Details pulled his feet
flat to sea level. She loved
penguins but gave him Antarctica.
All their ice too. New trays
are always at hand.
The formal dining set was already 
broken so he got that in a box
to be unwrapped later.
Her tears lit his fuel. The more he hated it, the stronger he grew.
This gave him hope for ascent,
a spark up his chimney.
Because he failed to itemize 
the discovery of fire
she never mentioned it
boxed in the back closet, 
tucked in topsoil. 
She wrote the wet check
and he took it into checkmate.
The star charts are nonnegotiable, 
she said, so he demanded 
the sky and sea. She agreed
to give him anything
he can’t grasp, keeping only earth, the place for building.

Richard Ryal A poet, professor, and editor, Richard Ryal has worked in marketing and higher education. He stops for no obvious reason sometimes and no one can talk him out of that. His recent publications include Notre Dame Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The South Florida Poetry Journal, and Amethyst Review.

​Confronting Reality
 
I can imagine how you gnaw it, chew the bone to slivers, 
use them as picks
for your teeth, pins 
in the center of your 
heart, the many locks
you have placed around 
it, keeping in (or out) all 
the hungers. 
You think, it’s all 
her fault, bursting 
your dreams like 
bubbles or balloons 
at the county fair 
on opening night.
Maybe it’s just bad luck that steals your happiness, as you
hold each distorted 
slight, sour event,
festered snubs
and scratchy memories
the texture of sandpaper,
which strips then stains
any hint of truth.
Hard as it seems, change 
scatters in the wind, like 
leaves. Watch them swirling, 
falling, imagine them 
salting the ground,
pulling anguish 
out of the barren hard rock you think is your earth.

Barbra Nightingale  Barbra Nightingale's poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Rattle, Limp Wrist, The Liberal Media Made Me Do It (Anthology), Narrative Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart), Gargoyle, Barrow Street, The Georgetown Review, CRIT Journal, Jet Fuel,The Apalachee Review, Calyx, Kalliope, Many Mountains Moving, Birmingham Review, Chattahoochee Review.  Her most recent books of poetry include: Spells & Other Ways of Flying (Kelsay Books, 2019),Two Voices, One Past, Yellow Jacket Press (runner up in chapbook contest, 2010) and Geometry of Dreams (2009), Word Tech Editions, Ohio. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal.

My Awe Is Not Your Awe

 (overheard” The awe of battle”)

My awe is a sacred space, a bird flying to the feeder, the shade                                                         
of a tree, berries                                                                                                                                    
in the forest                                                                                                                                      
not rockets                                                                                                                                           
of light                                                                                                                                                
My heat                                                                                                                                                
from the sun                                                                                                                               
flames from                                                                                                                                     
memory                                                                                                                             
switchbacked                                                                                                                                       
to experience                                                                                                                                      
the lashing                                                                                                                                             
of cannons                                                                                                                                        
My awe                                                                                                                                                   
is the clear                                                                                                                                      
path of vision,                                                                                                                                        
the razor straight                                                                                                                             
edge of sky, where water is moved by stone how much has been lost:
​History                                                                                                                                       
shattered to pieces                                                                                                                         
that will not                                                                                                                                          
fit together                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
How do we
​gather it in our arms?                                                                                                                      
After my children left                                                                                                                        
there was a space                                                                                                                                    
I could not fill                                                                                                                                 
When cities                                                                                                                                             
are destroyed                                                                                                                                    
there is a space                                                                                                                                   
that will not fill                                                                                                                                
Now children emerge                                                                                                                         
hungry from sleep’s groove.                                                                                                                   
My awe is milk of the moon                                                                                                                   
shining on these words that come from me and will not return empty.

Grace Cavalieri

Italian American writer, poet, and playwright Grace Cavalieri is the host of the radio program The Poet and the Poem, presented by the Library of Congress through National Public Radio. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Greatest Hits, 1975–2000 (2002), Pinecrest Rest Haven (1998), and Poems: New and Selected (1994). Her collection What I Would Do for Love: Poems in the Voice of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004) was awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize; Water on the Sun (2006) won the Bordighera Poetry Prize. Other collections include Sounds Like Something I Would Say (2010) and Anna Nicole: Poems (2008). A selection of Cavalieri’s poems, plays, and interviews, Other Voices, Other Lives, was published in 2017. Cavalieri’s awards include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, the Columbia Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She is a poetry columnist for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her papers are held in the George Washington University Gelman Library Special Collections.

​Cavalieri lives in Annapolis, Maryland. 

Perhaps at Sundown


Daybreak comes and I climb up to the end of this bending limb,
wide-eyed, unafraid,
see below me cuts
of meat, blood pressed tight
against plastic wrap, 
women narrow hipped
and broad, sashaying,
men grinning, teeth sharp
and lurid yellow,
all the judges fat,
snoring fast asleep
at noon, careless of the world, dreaming of girls and sugar plums,
while across the sea
madmen drop their bombs
on young brides in white
and children at play,
confounding cries of
joy with cries of grief,
and silent, unseen
poisons gather strength
in all the waters,
soil and air, even
in this limb, which will hold me till it cracks, perhaps at sundown.

Carmine Di Biase Carmine Di Biase’s chapbook, American Rondeau, has recently been published by Finishing Line Press. His have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken, La Piccioletta Barca, Italian Americana, The Vincent Brothers Review, Scapegoat Review and other journals. His reviews and translations appear occasionally in the Times Literary Supplement. Di Biase is Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.

What I Found in Translation


To capture the sound of beauty in a language not your own,
would you choose
the word mariposa, papillon,
or schmetterling for a butterfly?
And what is the matter
with schmetterling, the German
asks the Spaniard & the Frenchman,
the emphatic, guttural punchline
to this translation joke.
Butterfly prosody is a Romance language, syllable timed.
Loneliness is no joke,
but my dreamy secret lover
kisses me & I kiss him back.
His deep kisses replenish my
bodily humors after long drought.
For prosody of kisses, see butterfly
above, but note the term for my
cure is Germanic, all stress timed. 
Nachküssen: kisses that compensate for all the kissing that’s been lost.

Jennifer Litt Jennifer Litt is the author of Strictly from Hunger (Accents Publishing, 2022) and Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra Press, 2016). Jennifer’s poems have been published in Blue Earth Review, ellipsis…literature & art, Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Naugatuck River Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in Fort Lauderdale. 

Seeing the Low of 12 Degrees on Thursday Reminds Me That December is Coming


As much as I’d love to be a mountain man dressed in the skins
of brothers I’ve hunted,
sparking heat against
the friction of my own
sinews and sweat glands,
walking into the world,
my soundless steps doubling
as prayers of thanksgiving, I am a housewife wearing a poly-fil jacket
on top of a second-hand
sweater, turning up the 
house heater, tying scarves 
around children, salting
the porch steps, marching 
my hairy legs in secret protest
up and down the same creaking stairs all day, my arms full of toys, cleaning.

Amanda Russell Amanda Russell is a poet living in New Hampshire. Her chapbook, Barren Years, was published by Finishing Line Press (2019). Her poems have appeared in First Literary Review- East, EcoTheo Review and the anthology Mightier: poets for social justice. To learn more about her poetry, please visit https://poetrussell.wordpress.com/.
 

Father               


There’s a host of other things I could do in NYC nine a.m. Sunday 
rather than mass with my parents-in-law. 
A walk on the highline, and egg-and-cheese 
and coffee at a half-rusted iron table outside 
my Holiday Inn. Sleeping in. You’ve been 
dead ten years today. Three of my five 
children won’t remember you at all. 
I mumble along with more words than 
I realized I recalled. My in-laws are here, 
alive. Fathering still, and mothering even 
as my husband and I guide them through 
Central Park and past Washington Square 
Park protesters, spotting subway rail rats 
for them to photograph and remember 
when we’re back to tidy Ohio yards. 
The organ starts up. Pews creak like any 
others I’ve ever sat on. These stained-glass stories are all the same.
I doubt it meant much to you—shifting 
from Lutheran to Catholic to marry mom 
like her father demanded, trading one 
white judgement for another. What would 
you have liked if we amateur-tour-guided 
you here? A midnight show at the Comedy 
Cellar? Pastrami on rye? I don’t think you 
could have resisted tossing a buck or two 
at subway sax or bucket-drum buskers. 
Mass would never have crossed you mind. 
Rosary beads clink the pew back, dangling 
from an old woman’s folded hands. The 
organ starts up again. I don’t want to join
 hands with any of these people, though 
I do nod them peace. The host tastes 
the exact same way it did the first time I ever opened my mouth to be saved. 

Kerry Trautman Kerry Trautman (she/her) was born and raised in Ohio. Her work has appeared previously in South Florida Poetry Journal as well as various anthologies and journals, including Slippery Elm, Thimble, Limp Wrist, Midwestern Gothic, and Gasconade Review. Her poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020,) and Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas (Gutter Snob Books 2022.) Her next book is forthcoming from Roadside Press.