Issue 12 February 2019
Lola Haskins, Guest Editor
Lola Haskins, Guest Editor
Poets in this issue: Jo McDougall Clyde Kessler Joe Haldeman Maura Stanton Betsy Sholl Stephen Corey John Grey Marjorie Maddox Brandon Kershner Susan R. Williamson Dorianne Laux David Trinidad Angela Narciso Torres Anum Sattar Michael Mark Siham Karami Amy Katzel Linda Pastan P. Scott Cunningham Jennifer Martelli Richard N. Bentley Timothy Liu /Poets Respond to the Prompt: Fang Bu Kelly Cherry Sarah Carey Devon Balwit Don Rosenthal Charles Rammelkamp Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade Carmine G. Di Biase Grace Cavalieri LB Sedlacek John Burroughs Robert Copperman Jen Karetnick Jennifer Litt Richard Ryal Catherine Esposito Prescott
Scroll down for Poets Respond the to the Prompt
Scroll down for Poets Respond the to the Prompt
Paris, St. Germaine, photograph by Sumer Gran
Jo McDougall 2 poems
Screens
There goes my mother’s memory again,
climbing the curtains like a fly,
then slipping through the screen.
How easily memory learns
to fold its wings and disappear.
My mother remembers nothing
of curtains and screens,
who once taught the Bible, chapter and verse.
Could sing.
There goes my mother’s memory again,
climbing the curtains like a fly,
then slipping through the screen.
How easily memory learns
to fold its wings and disappear.
My mother remembers nothing
of curtains and screens,
who once taught the Bible, chapter and verse.
Could sing.
In Hospital
Except for the beeping of whatever has to beep
beside my husband’s bed,
silence has commandeered the room,
wisping into our clothes, the sheets, my hasty cot.
I want the scrape and fury of hinges, hangers, locks, a saw,
a tangle of elephants beneath the window.
Jo McDougall is Poet Laureate of Arkansas. Her most recent volume of poetry is The Undiscovered Room (Tavern Books, 2016). Her awards include The Academy of American Poets Prize.
Except for the beeping of whatever has to beep
beside my husband’s bed,
silence has commandeered the room,
wisping into our clothes, the sheets, my hasty cot.
I want the scrape and fury of hinges, hangers, locks, a saw,
a tangle of elephants beneath the window.
Jo McDougall is Poet Laureate of Arkansas. Her most recent volume of poetry is The Undiscovered Room (Tavern Books, 2016). Her awards include The Academy of American Poets Prize.
Clyde Kessler 2 poems
Grendel
Grendel needs a frozen cave
for his mind, after it’s born like stone,
after his eyes fight their own reflection
beyond him, pooled into starlight
and sleet. The world blooms with ice.
There’s love far away. There’s nothing
a mind can keep alone, so much hiding
like erosion inside the sky. They blame
him for killing, for winter, for the air
Grendel needs a frozen cave
for his mind, after it’s born like stone,
after his eyes fight their own reflection
beyond him, pooled into starlight
and sleet. The world blooms with ice.
There’s love far away. There’s nothing
a mind can keep alone, so much hiding
like erosion inside the sky. They blame
him for killing, for winter, for the air
Weather, Weather, Weather
February 18th is scratching through Radford.
It is swirling snow across the house. Sparrows
hang onto their feathers in the butterfly bushes,
tugging into the cold. Yes, arctic air has sunk
south slugging every house. Yes, it’s just weather.
Yes, it will kill somebody.
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. Several years ago they added an art studio to their home and named it Towhee Hill. In 2017 Cedar Creek published his book Fiddling At Midnight's Farmhouse, which Kendall illustrated.
February 18th is scratching through Radford.
It is swirling snow across the house. Sparrows
hang onto their feathers in the butterfly bushes,
tugging into the cold. Yes, arctic air has sunk
south slugging every house. Yes, it’s just weather.
Yes, it will kill somebody.
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. Several years ago they added an art studio to their home and named it Towhee Hill. In 2017 Cedar Creek published his book Fiddling At Midnight's Farmhouse, which Kendall illustrated.
Joe Haldeman 2 poems
Octopus
The octopus, he pities you
Your parlous lack of slime and goo . . .
Your hands and feet so specialized,
The measly number of your eyes;
Your rigid body racked with bones,
Stuck in your no-slither zone.
He will admit you have a brain
For knowledge, folly, joy, and pain.
You walk around and make machines;
Have nightmares, visions, joyous dreams . . .
But all your merely human charms
Aren’t half as good as six more arms.
The octopus, he pities you
Your parlous lack of slime and goo . . .
Your hands and feet so specialized,
The measly number of your eyes;
Your rigid body racked with bones,
Stuck in your no-slither zone.
He will admit you have a brain
For knowledge, folly, joy, and pain.
You walk around and make machines;
Have nightmares, visions, joyous dreams . . .
But all your merely human charms
Aren’t half as good as six more arms.
Jellyfish
The jellyfish has nothing much
To recommend him to your touch
Compounded, as he is, of slime
No one thinks to take the time
To talk to him. He'd talk to you,
This unpretentious ball of goo
Just swim out and touch his strings
Feel his paralyzing stings
And as you sink into the sea,
Hear his dumb soliloquy:
"Oh, I can't smell or touch or see.
I've never sneezed or had orgasm
But in another week or three,
Like me, you'll just be protoplasm."
Joe Haldeman lives in Gainesville, Fl. He has published 20 works of science fiction and three collections of poems. His best-known novel,The Forever War (1974), and others, have won such major science fiction prizes as the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award.
The jellyfish has nothing much
To recommend him to your touch
Compounded, as he is, of slime
No one thinks to take the time
To talk to him. He'd talk to you,
This unpretentious ball of goo
Just swim out and touch his strings
Feel his paralyzing stings
And as you sink into the sea,
Hear his dumb soliloquy:
"Oh, I can't smell or touch or see.
I've never sneezed or had orgasm
But in another week or three,
Like me, you'll just be protoplasm."
Joe Haldeman lives in Gainesville, Fl. He has published 20 works of science fiction and three collections of poems. His best-known novel,The Forever War (1974), and others, have won such major science fiction prizes as the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award.
Maura Stanton 2 poems
Proxima Centauri
Stuck in a small town on the shrinking Earth,
sometimes I think I’d like to wake up
on the fabled planet that circles the next star.
I’d climb from the spacecraft, and look about
astonished by blue rocks or yellow seas,
a place more thrilling than this supermarket
where I unload my groceries on the belt,
the chips, the broccoli—and then I see it,
a flicker on the checkout candy rack.
Sliding down a shiny Hersey wrapper,
a grasshopper scoots about, then slips in
between the M&M’s and Payday bars.
It must have come in on a shopping cart,
clinging to a silver spoke, not knowing
it was leaving puffy clouds behind,
the fresh mown grass, the blue chicory stalks.
At midnight when the doors are finally locked.
the grasshopper unfolds its legs, and launches
down the frozen aisle, glass cases looming
like a row of icebergs as it shivers by.
In Produce it chews the chilly greenery
arranged in rows under a sifting mist
but nothing tastes quite right, the lettuce limp,
green onions clasped in bunches without dirt.
Grain spills from boxes piled into towers.
Blood seeps from hunks of cow. In the shadows
the first colonizers scurry, roaches
too busy eating crumbs to bother newcomers.
Hopping, flying, hopping, eyes alert,
the grasshopper explores the cans, the cheese,
the bins, the glitter, puddles, spills, the bottles
filled with floating things, and lands lightly
on a cupcake’s sticky butter icing,
then has to clean its leg before it leaps.
The ants are busy with the sugar bags,
but a grasshopper’s life is just too short
to live in here far from the ordinary.
It smells its way to the florist section
and lands on a lily, the lily that you buy
next time you shop, not noticing the stick
clinging to the leaf that jumps off outside.
Stuck in a small town on the shrinking Earth,
sometimes I think I’d like to wake up
on the fabled planet that circles the next star.
I’d climb from the spacecraft, and look about
astonished by blue rocks or yellow seas,
a place more thrilling than this supermarket
where I unload my groceries on the belt,
the chips, the broccoli—and then I see it,
a flicker on the checkout candy rack.
Sliding down a shiny Hersey wrapper,
a grasshopper scoots about, then slips in
between the M&M’s and Payday bars.
It must have come in on a shopping cart,
clinging to a silver spoke, not knowing
it was leaving puffy clouds behind,
the fresh mown grass, the blue chicory stalks.
At midnight when the doors are finally locked.
the grasshopper unfolds its legs, and launches
down the frozen aisle, glass cases looming
like a row of icebergs as it shivers by.
In Produce it chews the chilly greenery
arranged in rows under a sifting mist
but nothing tastes quite right, the lettuce limp,
green onions clasped in bunches without dirt.
Grain spills from boxes piled into towers.
Blood seeps from hunks of cow. In the shadows
the first colonizers scurry, roaches
too busy eating crumbs to bother newcomers.
Hopping, flying, hopping, eyes alert,
the grasshopper explores the cans, the cheese,
the bins, the glitter, puddles, spills, the bottles
filled with floating things, and lands lightly
on a cupcake’s sticky butter icing,
then has to clean its leg before it leaps.
The ants are busy with the sugar bags,
but a grasshopper’s life is just too short
to live in here far from the ordinary.
It smells its way to the florist section
and lands on a lily, the lily that you buy
next time you shop, not noticing the stick
clinging to the leaf that jumps off outside.
Goodbye Tomorrow
Indiana is No. 47 in the Gallup report
on the State of American Well-Being. It beats out
Oklahoma, Kentucky and dead-last West Virginia.
Living low down on the well-being scale
is like stepping on the bones of the mouse
you released under a tree last week,
or watching a teen age girl on tiptoe
setting fire to a Little Free Book House.
Once everyone here spoke Paw Paw--
musical hillbilly French--
but there’s not much to say anymore
as you line up at the needle exchange
or order cheese on your ostrich burger.
How many snow bodies can you make
shaped over the windshields of parked cars?
The pickets at Planned Parenthood
glare at your stomach as you walk by,
and the homeless men lower their eyes,
noting your cobra skin bruises
and the shower curtain rings dangling
from your ears stretched like kite paper.
The man who collects squirrel tears
now has a booth at the Farmer’s Market
so you don’t need to buy sea salt
to rub on your drink rims. When you vote,
they’ll peer at you and your id photo
not believing you’re as young or as old
as the date stamped on the license.
Someone like you belongs elsewhere,
in one of those states without cloud cover,
they’ll think as they hand you a ballot,
knowing you’ll vote for the losing side.
And you do. You do. You do.
Maura Stanton’s first book of poetry, Snow On Snow, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She has published five other books of poetry, including Tales of the Supernatural, Life Among the Trolls, and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois 2008) as well as a novel and three books of short stories. Her poems and stories have appeared recently or are forthcoming in the Hudson Review, Yale Review, Upstreet, Pembroke Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Southern Poetry Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, and the Baltimore Review.
Indiana is No. 47 in the Gallup report
on the State of American Well-Being. It beats out
Oklahoma, Kentucky and dead-last West Virginia.
Living low down on the well-being scale
is like stepping on the bones of the mouse
you released under a tree last week,
or watching a teen age girl on tiptoe
setting fire to a Little Free Book House.
Once everyone here spoke Paw Paw--
musical hillbilly French--
but there’s not much to say anymore
as you line up at the needle exchange
or order cheese on your ostrich burger.
How many snow bodies can you make
shaped over the windshields of parked cars?
The pickets at Planned Parenthood
glare at your stomach as you walk by,
and the homeless men lower their eyes,
noting your cobra skin bruises
and the shower curtain rings dangling
from your ears stretched like kite paper.
The man who collects squirrel tears
now has a booth at the Farmer’s Market
so you don’t need to buy sea salt
to rub on your drink rims. When you vote,
they’ll peer at you and your id photo
not believing you’re as young or as old
as the date stamped on the license.
Someone like you belongs elsewhere,
in one of those states without cloud cover,
they’ll think as they hand you a ballot,
knowing you’ll vote for the losing side.
And you do. You do. You do.
Maura Stanton’s first book of poetry, Snow On Snow, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She has published five other books of poetry, including Tales of the Supernatural, Life Among the Trolls, and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois 2008) as well as a novel and three books of short stories. Her poems and stories have appeared recently or are forthcoming in the Hudson Review, Yale Review, Upstreet, Pembroke Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Southern Poetry Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, and the Baltimore Review.
Betsy Sholl 3 poems
Thin Places
Home now and jet-lagged, we’re up too early,
the sky still black, the time somewhere between
Halloween and All Saint’s⎯a thin place
our friends called it, driving from Connemara
to the airport, a place where borders between
the living and whatever’s beyond loosen
like masts turned to wavering lines in water
or the world outside rippled by old window glass.
Maybe it’s just our need to think we feel
something brush past, an almost heard voice,
the hard fact of death suddenly fluid.
Or maybe it’s we the living who lay down
our defenses against the dead, their demands
and disapprovals, their wounds that wounded us.
In Dante’s Paradise everyone’s transparent,
reading each other’s thoughts, as if all need
to hide has been soughed off. His great hosts
appear in waves of light gentler than the waves
we watched all week through our friends’ window
as the North Atlantic threw itself down
against rocks, then fanned up in spray, wave
after wave, the glass itself a kind
of thin place between us and the water’s
wild crashing⎯glass neither liquid nor solid,
but something between, amorphous⎯
like the dead still moving through us, their genes
passed on, their passions and fears?
Last night children dressed as wolves, gorillas,
witches and bandits knocked on doors asking
for sweets, as if it doesn’t take much
to tame our shadows⎯less than a lifetime,
less than an afterlife working off what’s bent
or blocked inside us. Across the street now
houses emerge from the dark like vague hulks,
our windows become transparent again,
no longer glossy like the inside of waves
before they topple. Soon light will fill
every space between limbs, porch rails, trellis⎯
shadow and light, inseparable sea
and shore, living and dead, everything touched,
as if boundaries are thresholds after all,
the way even solid rocks wobble
in the waves, even the hard, shelled creatures
stuck to those rocks, barely alive it seems,
open themselves to the tide and drink.
Home now and jet-lagged, we’re up too early,
the sky still black, the time somewhere between
Halloween and All Saint’s⎯a thin place
our friends called it, driving from Connemara
to the airport, a place where borders between
the living and whatever’s beyond loosen
like masts turned to wavering lines in water
or the world outside rippled by old window glass.
Maybe it’s just our need to think we feel
something brush past, an almost heard voice,
the hard fact of death suddenly fluid.
Or maybe it’s we the living who lay down
our defenses against the dead, their demands
and disapprovals, their wounds that wounded us.
In Dante’s Paradise everyone’s transparent,
reading each other’s thoughts, as if all need
to hide has been soughed off. His great hosts
appear in waves of light gentler than the waves
we watched all week through our friends’ window
as the North Atlantic threw itself down
against rocks, then fanned up in spray, wave
after wave, the glass itself a kind
of thin place between us and the water’s
wild crashing⎯glass neither liquid nor solid,
but something between, amorphous⎯
like the dead still moving through us, their genes
passed on, their passions and fears?
Last night children dressed as wolves, gorillas,
witches and bandits knocked on doors asking
for sweets, as if it doesn’t take much
to tame our shadows⎯less than a lifetime,
less than an afterlife working off what’s bent
or blocked inside us. Across the street now
houses emerge from the dark like vague hulks,
our windows become transparent again,
no longer glossy like the inside of waves
before they topple. Soon light will fill
every space between limbs, porch rails, trellis⎯
shadow and light, inseparable sea
and shore, living and dead, everything touched,
as if boundaries are thresholds after all,
the way even solid rocks wobble
in the waves, even the hard, shelled creatures
stuck to those rocks, barely alive it seems,
open themselves to the tide and drink.
Galway
All day we walked, from Salt Hill along
the wind-whipped bay, in and out of rain and pubs,
Spanish Arch to Nora Barnacle’s blue door,
past a sandstone list of famine ships, and as if
even travel were a test, I worried we might
come and go unchanged, untaught, unawed⎯
throwback to my family’s creed, its endless need
to measure up. The English side, that is.
The Irish were all dead, so couldn’t sass back
asking, to what? A crane, a mound of iron scrap.
Coal tits, hooded crows, swans. A fragment of
medieval wall, beside which toddlers played
on a plastic slide. End of day, a squall
scurried us into St. Nicolas--alcoves
full of headless figures leftover from hatred’s
iron pikes, gargoyles and graves nearly effaced,
stone floors gouged, the locals like to say,
by Cromwell’s stabled horses. There, the Irish
must have risen in my blood, for I saw
too much ruin and wonder for any measure.
A candle then. We tipped ours to the flame
of another burning on its wick, and joined
that little skittish family of light.
Walking back later that night along the bay
against the wind, we were glad to be in gusts
of rain, happy to be soaked and buffeted,
in our yellow slickers flickering.
All day we walked, from Salt Hill along
the wind-whipped bay, in and out of rain and pubs,
Spanish Arch to Nora Barnacle’s blue door,
past a sandstone list of famine ships, and as if
even travel were a test, I worried we might
come and go unchanged, untaught, unawed⎯
throwback to my family’s creed, its endless need
to measure up. The English side, that is.
The Irish were all dead, so couldn’t sass back
asking, to what? A crane, a mound of iron scrap.
Coal tits, hooded crows, swans. A fragment of
medieval wall, beside which toddlers played
on a plastic slide. End of day, a squall
scurried us into St. Nicolas--alcoves
full of headless figures leftover from hatred’s
iron pikes, gargoyles and graves nearly effaced,
stone floors gouged, the locals like to say,
by Cromwell’s stabled horses. There, the Irish
must have risen in my blood, for I saw
too much ruin and wonder for any measure.
A candle then. We tipped ours to the flame
of another burning on its wick, and joined
that little skittish family of light.
Walking back later that night along the bay
against the wind, we were glad to be in gusts
of rain, happy to be soaked and buffeted,
in our yellow slickers flickering.
Flood Tide
The waves crash in and dissolve among kelp,
sea robins, and tangled rope, while I write
myself air notes: Don’t fill your pockets
with shells, don’t look down like a dog
sniffing piss, and miss the blurred blue ruffle
of margin where water’s transcribed into sky,
that distance where mystery’s made. Still,
it’s hard to watch surf rear up and shatter
to foam, as if so much of everything
is nothing. Easier to pocket chips
of quahog, angel wings, broken moon snails,
than gaze at this wild welter, this world womb,
whale oven, shark kiln, this gray-blue beyond,
salty salve, maker and shaker of all.
Betsy Sholl’s eighth collection of poetry is Otherwise Unseeable, winner of the 2015 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. In 2019 the University of Wisconsin Press will publish, House of Sparrows: New & Selected Poems. She was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011, and currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
The waves crash in and dissolve among kelp,
sea robins, and tangled rope, while I write
myself air notes: Don’t fill your pockets
with shells, don’t look down like a dog
sniffing piss, and miss the blurred blue ruffle
of margin where water’s transcribed into sky,
that distance where mystery’s made. Still,
it’s hard to watch surf rear up and shatter
to foam, as if so much of everything
is nothing. Easier to pocket chips
of quahog, angel wings, broken moon snails,
than gaze at this wild welter, this world womb,
whale oven, shark kiln, this gray-blue beyond,
salty salve, maker and shaker of all.
Betsy Sholl’s eighth collection of poetry is Otherwise Unseeable, winner of the 2015 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. In 2019 the University of Wisconsin Press will publish, House of Sparrows: New & Selected Poems. She was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011, and currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Stephen Corey 2 poems
Romeo and Juliet
-for Tom
In Burlington, Vermont, the lovers glide
as dancers on the college green, shadowed
by the chapel and the sugar maples
Shakespeare–to his loss– could never write of.
Duck-duck-goosing around the dips and swirls
the full cast patterns in the dusk, R and J–
aren’t they that familiar to us all?–
seem blithe and desperate at once. No play
here, even, only prologue to a darkness
houselights dimmed would make to mirror darkness
full by then on this grass sprung back, darkness
making ready there inside–as if alive–
to fall on every step a world could take.
We did not enter the then-bright theater,
my cousin, his wife, and I. The offered dance,
suddenly not just the Capulet ball
foreshadowed, but the whole life, seemed enough.
We walked, they not quite thirty, I just past,
through the simpler night the city produced.
I neither saw nor dreamed the single hose
wedged through a back-seat window, heard no voice
failing to rise from a woman alone
in her sweet bitterness of chosen air.
I then heard no one entering the dark
garage to gather in the steeped, wrong flower.
I could not sense the world would offer up
its startling, constant promise quite so soon.
-for Tom
In Burlington, Vermont, the lovers glide
as dancers on the college green, shadowed
by the chapel and the sugar maples
Shakespeare–to his loss– could never write of.
Duck-duck-goosing around the dips and swirls
the full cast patterns in the dusk, R and J–
aren’t they that familiar to us all?–
seem blithe and desperate at once. No play
here, even, only prologue to a darkness
houselights dimmed would make to mirror darkness
full by then on this grass sprung back, darkness
making ready there inside–as if alive–
to fall on every step a world could take.
We did not enter the then-bright theater,
my cousin, his wife, and I. The offered dance,
suddenly not just the Capulet ball
foreshadowed, but the whole life, seemed enough.
We walked, they not quite thirty, I just past,
through the simpler night the city produced.
I neither saw nor dreamed the single hose
wedged through a back-seat window, heard no voice
failing to rise from a woman alone
in her sweet bitterness of chosen air.
I then heard no one entering the dark
garage to gather in the steeped, wrong flower.
I could not sense the world would offer up
its startling, constant promise quite so soon.
Two Gentlemen of Verona
i
What they loved: love.
Whom they failed: lovers.
ii
The dollar bill exhibits the Great Seal,
its floating eye near a pyramid’s peak
seeming always the purest mystery–
child’s terror, adult’s silent question–
its Latin tags top- and bottom-heavy:
always watching, they say, or vigilant?
Oh no, I say, that eye is burning love
never sleeping, loving all it sees,
carried abroad by each woman, each man.
A loves B, C loves D then B. D’s left,
C fights with A while B denounces .
Easy enough, this plotting out of life.
We have, at last, just two things: the constant,
the inconstant. We can each make our lists.
Shakespeare knew this. Ophelia. Gertrude.
He hammered this. Desdemona. Iago.
He laughed at this. Henry the Fifth. Falstaff.
He wept at this. Cordelia. King Lear.
Coin of the realm, this flimsy scrim of love.
So contrary . . . go kindle fire with snow
before you seek to know the one of two,
the two of one that spinning off will go.
Stephen Corey’s nine poetry collections include The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003); his prose volume, Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural, came out from Mercer University Press in 2017. He has been the editor of The Georgia Review since 2006 and has worked with the journal since 1983.
i
What they loved: love.
Whom they failed: lovers.
ii
The dollar bill exhibits the Great Seal,
its floating eye near a pyramid’s peak
seeming always the purest mystery–
child’s terror, adult’s silent question–
its Latin tags top- and bottom-heavy:
always watching, they say, or vigilant?
Oh no, I say, that eye is burning love
never sleeping, loving all it sees,
carried abroad by each woman, each man.
A loves B, C loves D then B. D’s left,
C fights with A while B denounces .
Easy enough, this plotting out of life.
We have, at last, just two things: the constant,
the inconstant. We can each make our lists.
Shakespeare knew this. Ophelia. Gertrude.
He hammered this. Desdemona. Iago.
He laughed at this. Henry the Fifth. Falstaff.
He wept at this. Cordelia. King Lear.
Coin of the realm, this flimsy scrim of love.
So contrary . . . go kindle fire with snow
before you seek to know the one of two,
the two of one that spinning off will go.
Stephen Corey’s nine poetry collections include The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003); his prose volume, Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural, came out from Mercer University Press in 2017. He has been the editor of The Georgia Review since 2006 and has worked with the journal since 1983.
John Grey
The Piano Lesson Tragedy
The day is sweating on my shoulders.
I am at the piano
and one o'clock is behind my left ear,
night smolders near my right.
This hour, it's Bach,
played slowly, crudely,
each note stumbling out of the way of the next,
the melody flitting about like ghosts
while my drab fingers
beat the keys into the ground.
This is religious music,
says my instructor,
so that must be God sitting on my head,
and the devil surely,
waving my lazy feet above the pedals.
The day entered my mouth
and is pulled out through my nose.
How else to describe the pain
of being good at this someday.
The Gestapo is driving nails into my fumbling hands.
They want me to confess,
to blurt out that I don't want to be
a concert pianist.
But Bach has been around for hundreds of years.
What hope have I against that,
all of eleven,
sheet music staring down my eyes,
centuries of Bach players
kicking me in the ribs,
booting my backside.
I've heard there's some kids
take to this instruction
like fish to worms.
So they're hooked.
I know where that leads.
Chopin is next, I've been warned.
I've never met the man
and already he's my sworn enemy.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Harpur Palate and Columbia Review with work upcoming in the Roanoke Review, the Hawaii Review and North Dakota Quarterly.
The day is sweating on my shoulders.
I am at the piano
and one o'clock is behind my left ear,
night smolders near my right.
This hour, it's Bach,
played slowly, crudely,
each note stumbling out of the way of the next,
the melody flitting about like ghosts
while my drab fingers
beat the keys into the ground.
This is religious music,
says my instructor,
so that must be God sitting on my head,
and the devil surely,
waving my lazy feet above the pedals.
The day entered my mouth
and is pulled out through my nose.
How else to describe the pain
of being good at this someday.
The Gestapo is driving nails into my fumbling hands.
They want me to confess,
to blurt out that I don't want to be
a concert pianist.
But Bach has been around for hundreds of years.
What hope have I against that,
all of eleven,
sheet music staring down my eyes,
centuries of Bach players
kicking me in the ribs,
booting my backside.
I've heard there's some kids
take to this instruction
like fish to worms.
So they're hooked.
I know where that leads.
Chopin is next, I've been warned.
I've never met the man
and already he's my sworn enemy.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Harpur Palate and Columbia Review with work upcoming in the Roanoke Review, the Hawaii Review and North Dakota Quarterly.
Marjorie Maddox 2 poems
Tip
of the tongue
not tickling the undiscovered decay;
of the finger, stubbed into silence;
of the #2 pencil, poised and pointed,
suddenly stifled, its nonpoisonous lead
unable to undo any tabula rasa—mine or yours
or my mother’s, who keeps asking with the tongue
and the finger and the blank slate
of her almost ninety-year-old face,
“How old? How old?”
How old this silence that faces
the poised, the stubbed mother tongue--
yours, mine—blank as any tabula rasa
before words knew how to rise,
or fingers how to point at the poisonous,
the decayed, or merely the undiscovered
hiding behind the stifled face,
ninety #2 pencils unable to answer
such sudden questions.
How to answer what tickles the stubbed mind,
undo the poisonous—yours, mine--
face the tabula rasa without pencil or tongue,
the blank of silence its own discovery of decay,
the pointed “How old? How old?” suddenly stifled,
leading back to the undoing: blank slate
where ninety keeps asking after itself
as the finger points in question, and the poised
tongue raises again its unanswered
Tip
of the tongue
not tickling the undiscovered decay;
of the finger, stubbed into silence;
of the #2 pencil, poised and pointed,
suddenly stifled, its nonpoisonous lead
unable to undo any tabula rasa—mine or yours
or my mother’s, who keeps asking with the tongue
and the finger and the blank slate
of her almost ninety-year-old face,
“How old? How old?”
How old this silence that faces
the poised, the stubbed mother tongue--
yours, mine—blank as any tabula rasa
before words knew how to rise,
or fingers how to point at the poisonous,
the decayed, or merely the undiscovered
hiding behind the stifled face,
ninety #2 pencils unable to answer
such sudden questions.
How to answer what tickles the stubbed mind,
undo the poisonous—yours, mine--
face the tabula rasa without pencil or tongue,
the blank of silence its own discovery of decay,
the pointed “How old? How old?” suddenly stifled,
leading back to the undoing: blank slate
where ninety keeps asking after itself
as the finger points in question, and the poised
tongue raises again its unanswered
Tip
Remnants of Marjorie Maddox
after a sculptural installation by Siobhan Arnold, mid-1990s
Disassembling “props of femininity” from the fifties—shoes,
handbags, dresses—you pull from a pink patent-leather purse
my names but not my place(s), de-construct them
these decades later with vintage store finds re-defined
as “Marjorie’s”: Mary Jane soles carved to sharp points;
fingernails clipped to the likeness of buttons
and arranged artfully in a velvet necklace case;
dismantled black cocktail dress and stripped lining,
through which you’ve projected your vision
of a rusting animal trap—all arranged on the remnants
of plush white carpet in Santa Barbara,
but also as backdrop to your grandmother:
educated career woman, mother of six in the 1950s,
caught in the sharp steel of societal expectations
at the end of that long era on the brink
of 1960s upheaval, just after
I was born half a country away in Ohio,
my name only mine, the coming wars--
both unknown and predicted--
anxious to exhibit their wares.
Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series, Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else ; Wives' Tales; Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 Yellowglen Prize; re-release 2018); Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press); 4 children’s books; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and over 550 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com
after a sculptural installation by Siobhan Arnold, mid-1990s
Disassembling “props of femininity” from the fifties—shoes,
handbags, dresses—you pull from a pink patent-leather purse
my names but not my place(s), de-construct them
these decades later with vintage store finds re-defined
as “Marjorie’s”: Mary Jane soles carved to sharp points;
fingernails clipped to the likeness of buttons
and arranged artfully in a velvet necklace case;
dismantled black cocktail dress and stripped lining,
through which you’ve projected your vision
of a rusting animal trap—all arranged on the remnants
of plush white carpet in Santa Barbara,
but also as backdrop to your grandmother:
educated career woman, mother of six in the 1950s,
caught in the sharp steel of societal expectations
at the end of that long era on the brink
of 1960s upheaval, just after
I was born half a country away in Ohio,
my name only mine, the coming wars--
both unknown and predicted--
anxious to exhibit their wares.
Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series, Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else ; Wives' Tales; Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 Yellowglen Prize; re-release 2018); Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press); 4 children’s books; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and over 550 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com
Brandon Kershner 4 poems
Insomnia With Music
Out the midnight window, rain
hangs in the streetlight’s violet stain.
Taxis in a furtive rush
plough through Baltimore’s packed slush.
Fluorescence oils the hardwood floor,
gleams off my burglar-bolted door,
bathes the Boston ferns, but not
the sad acanthus in its pot.
From the flat across the hall
James Brown is barely audible.
The bass line pulses underground,
barely beyond the realm of sound,
and counterpoints the beat I hear
where the sofa pillow fills my ear.
The couturier in the room below
steps a kind of corantoe
in taps on the linoleum floor
of his efficiency. I pour
a drink to his amphetamine head
and to the stranger in my bed.
Tomorrow is another night.
I cross the room to kill the lights.
Blinds in the window show their stripes,
day comes tapping in the pipes.
Out the midnight window, rain
hangs in the streetlight’s violet stain.
Taxis in a furtive rush
plough through Baltimore’s packed slush.
Fluorescence oils the hardwood floor,
gleams off my burglar-bolted door,
bathes the Boston ferns, but not
the sad acanthus in its pot.
From the flat across the hall
James Brown is barely audible.
The bass line pulses underground,
barely beyond the realm of sound,
and counterpoints the beat I hear
where the sofa pillow fills my ear.
The couturier in the room below
steps a kind of corantoe
in taps on the linoleum floor
of his efficiency. I pour
a drink to his amphetamine head
and to the stranger in my bed.
Tomorrow is another night.
I cross the room to kill the lights.
Blinds in the window show their stripes,
day comes tapping in the pipes.
Funeral
My grandmother’s hair was a silver bonfire.
It staggered across the floor and crept into the lowboy, consuming halftints and pewter-
backed brushes. It strangled the shoulder wrap made of red fox with the real stuffed fox’s
head and amber marble eyes and black tin snaps on the paws.
It licked along the walls and consumed the hollyhocks and daylilies twined in pale violet
patterns.
When my grandmother’s hair had finished, the room no longer smelled of sandalwood and
feathers and peroxide.
The walls of my grandmother’s room had turned to glass. Sea birds dashed themselves
against their reflections.
Where she lay was a gleaming fox. I could see nothing but its bright, pounding throat.
My grandmother meant it when she died.
My grandmother’s hair was a silver bonfire.
It staggered across the floor and crept into the lowboy, consuming halftints and pewter-
backed brushes. It strangled the shoulder wrap made of red fox with the real stuffed fox’s
head and amber marble eyes and black tin snaps on the paws.
It licked along the walls and consumed the hollyhocks and daylilies twined in pale violet
patterns.
When my grandmother’s hair had finished, the room no longer smelled of sandalwood and
feathers and peroxide.
The walls of my grandmother’s room had turned to glass. Sea birds dashed themselves
against their reflections.
Where she lay was a gleaming fox. I could see nothing but its bright, pounding throat.
My grandmother meant it when she died.
Episode
Motel glows in the dry haze.
The interstate to Amarillo
flashes at the overpass,
sketchy in this pointed yellow
light. Motel is sandy stucco.
A Pontiac and two flat-beds
punctuate its asphalt patch,
zinnias droop shaggy heads
in the concrete planter by the office
door. A woman's face appears
at the cretonned office window,
fills with vague alarm, and stares
as if the beige space all around
were backdrop to some act of rage
or passion, or perhaps the scene
of an inconclusive pilgrimage.
Beyond Motel, for miles the light
inscribes a natural history:
candalaria, ocatella,
greasewood, catclaw, Joshua tree.
Motel glows in the dry haze.
The interstate to Amarillo
flashes at the overpass,
sketchy in this pointed yellow
light. Motel is sandy stucco.
A Pontiac and two flat-beds
punctuate its asphalt patch,
zinnias droop shaggy heads
in the concrete planter by the office
door. A woman's face appears
at the cretonned office window,
fills with vague alarm, and stares
as if the beige space all around
were backdrop to some act of rage
or passion, or perhaps the scene
of an inconclusive pilgrimage.
Beyond Motel, for miles the light
inscribes a natural history:
candalaria, ocatella,
greasewood, catclaw, Joshua tree.
Sandhill Cranes
-for Rachel
With a high, whooping burble
a group descends, legs angled forward
for the slow glide down. They glance
off the earth into a stumbling run
until, all shambling pencil-legs and
hairy feathers, they slow to a standstill.
They’ve come from the Black Hills, the U. P.,
Bismarck and Bemidji, drawn a thousand miles
to this place that seems to baffle them
as they cast about in odd, staggering trots,
ululating, unsatisfied by something
you and I will never understand.
My daughter felt her first close death today--
a friend in his teens, mad with what he took
for love. I want to show her what this
southern refuge harbors. How much life,
rich and confused as it is. For now,
we share the prairie with these sandhills--
dusk-colored as evening comes on,
light and sweet in the air, and seasonal.
Brandon Kershner is an internationally known James Joyce scholar. His poetry has appeared in Poetry magazine, Tampa Review and Georgia Review and elsewhere.
-for Rachel
With a high, whooping burble
a group descends, legs angled forward
for the slow glide down. They glance
off the earth into a stumbling run
until, all shambling pencil-legs and
hairy feathers, they slow to a standstill.
They’ve come from the Black Hills, the U. P.,
Bismarck and Bemidji, drawn a thousand miles
to this place that seems to baffle them
as they cast about in odd, staggering trots,
ululating, unsatisfied by something
you and I will never understand.
My daughter felt her first close death today--
a friend in his teens, mad with what he took
for love. I want to show her what this
southern refuge harbors. How much life,
rich and confused as it is. For now,
we share the prairie with these sandhills--
dusk-colored as evening comes on,
light and sweet in the air, and seasonal.
Brandon Kershner is an internationally known James Joyce scholar. His poetry has appeared in Poetry magazine, Tampa Review and Georgia Review and elsewhere.
Susan R. Williamson
Leather There Wherever Not
I saw a leather loveseat in the high speed lane on I-95. Brown and worn,
the wrinkles cracking in the heat of Florida’s winter sun, cushions deep
and lush, seats a bit darker than the edges, though quickly gathering dust.
In the heat, in the traffic of exhaust and rush nobody’s willing to pull over
and sit for a while. It could be Natuzzi, or maybe just private label
from Macy’s or Bloomingdales—maybe the cops stop there at midnight
to eat donuts and watch episodes of House of Cards on an ipad and re-runs
of Starsky & Hutch. Or maybe the workers from that palm tree farm
just over the concrete barrier come out at night to drink beer and play
chicken in oncoming headlights with their feet.
My best guess is that somewhere, Jeanette is still furious at Jim.
She told him to tie off the end. That a bungy cord would never be enough.
By the time he got to their new place, the whole thing was gone.
Nothing left of the leather loveseat but pillows her mother made.
The dark fringe draped across a futon that fills up that empty space.
Susan R. Williamson’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Smartish Pace, and The Virginia Quarterly Review among others. She received an MFA in Poetry from New England College, and holds a BA in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. Her chapbook, Burning After Dark, won the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation’s 25th Anniversary Prize. She is Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
I saw a leather loveseat in the high speed lane on I-95. Brown and worn,
the wrinkles cracking in the heat of Florida’s winter sun, cushions deep
and lush, seats a bit darker than the edges, though quickly gathering dust.
In the heat, in the traffic of exhaust and rush nobody’s willing to pull over
and sit for a while. It could be Natuzzi, or maybe just private label
from Macy’s or Bloomingdales—maybe the cops stop there at midnight
to eat donuts and watch episodes of House of Cards on an ipad and re-runs
of Starsky & Hutch. Or maybe the workers from that palm tree farm
just over the concrete barrier come out at night to drink beer and play
chicken in oncoming headlights with their feet.
My best guess is that somewhere, Jeanette is still furious at Jim.
She told him to tie off the end. That a bungy cord would never be enough.
By the time he got to their new place, the whole thing was gone.
Nothing left of the leather loveseat but pillows her mother made.
The dark fringe draped across a futon that fills up that empty space.
Susan R. Williamson’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Smartish Pace, and The Virginia Quarterly Review among others. She received an MFA in Poetry from New England College, and holds a BA in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. Her chapbook, Burning After Dark, won the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation’s 25th Anniversary Prize. She is Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
Dorianne Laux 2 poems
Wolves
The wolves howled in the snow,
speaking their severed language of dream,
the first ones to travel, like us, in packs,
watching our flame-lit faces as we gathered
around the fire, the meat they ate raw
we skewered on a spit. They moved closer,
leaving the green shadows of the forest
to rest their great heads on their paws
and wait until one of us tossed a scrap
they fought over, following as we headed
west, building our fires again and again,
inching closer, until a young wolf approached
and sniffed at a sleeve, let us reach out
and clutch its scruff, scratch its belly,
and in return it licked our hands
and faces which pleased us, our chins
lifted, glistening with grease.
The wolves howled in the snow,
speaking their severed language of dream,
the first ones to travel, like us, in packs,
watching our flame-lit faces as we gathered
around the fire, the meat they ate raw
we skewered on a spit. They moved closer,
leaving the green shadows of the forest
to rest their great heads on their paws
and wait until one of us tossed a scrap
they fought over, following as we headed
west, building our fires again and again,
inching closer, until a young wolf approached
and sniffed at a sleeve, let us reach out
and clutch its scruff, scratch its belly,
and in return it licked our hands
and faces which pleased us, our chins
lifted, glistening with grease.
Repair
After you fix the broken picture frame
with wood staples and wire, take the glass
rectangle to the kitchen and turn on the tap,
hold it beneath and watch the water slide down
through the dust. Balance that expanse
on the divider between the two sinks, tempting
gravity, while you squirt a blue sponge with soap.
Scrub at the emptiness. Feel how solid it is
against your fingers. Dry the glass
with a paper towel, rub the pane
until it sings, then bring the damp cloth
to your face, cooling your flesh, your blood.
Pick up the little invisible door
and place it back in its frame, press
your dead mother against it which is where
she belongs, under glass like a specimen.
Her eyes forever open, her lies sealed shut.
Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in January, 2019.
Also author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award.
She teaches poetry at North Carolina State and Pacific University.
After you fix the broken picture frame
with wood staples and wire, take the glass
rectangle to the kitchen and turn on the tap,
hold it beneath and watch the water slide down
through the dust. Balance that expanse
on the divider between the two sinks, tempting
gravity, while you squirt a blue sponge with soap.
Scrub at the emptiness. Feel how solid it is
against your fingers. Dry the glass
with a paper towel, rub the pane
until it sings, then bring the damp cloth
to your face, cooling your flesh, your blood.
Pick up the little invisible door
and place it back in its frame, press
your dead mother against it which is where
she belongs, under glass like a specimen.
Her eyes forever open, her lies sealed shut.
Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in January, 2019.
Also author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award.
She teaches poetry at North Carolina State and Pacific University.
David Trinidad
First Death in Sierra Madre
Only I accompanied my mother; I don’t know why the rest of the family didn’t come. July,
1961. I was eight. We attended the viewing, at night, in a small chapel. With my mother’s
aunts, uncles, and cousins, we sat on the creaky wooden pews and prayed, while Great-
grandmother lay in an open casket, brightly lit and immaculately groomed, in a black
dress, behind a partition of glass. But where were her spectacles? She who would give me
pennies from a little dish on her vanity when we visited her in her house on West Montecito
Street. I was asked if I wanted to kiss her—that much I remember. If I did, I’ve blocked it
from my mind. The Mass the next morning is also a blank. But I do remember the foliage
around Uncle Emile and Aunt Madeline’s house: ferns with long thin fronds, leaves with
veins like bleeding red ink, heart-shaped elephant ears. The house, half hidden by plants,
was white. Terracotta tiles on the roof. Built into the bottom of a wall near the front steps:
a tiny grilled door. This is where the milkman would put fresh bottles of milk. There was
an identical door on the inside of the house, so the bottles could be removed without having
to go outdoors. I thought this magical. In Uncle Emile’s den, on a high white shelf: rows of
colorfully painted, cast-iron toy soldiers. Is this the origin of my love of miniatures? Skin
and hair completely white, Aunt Madeline told me not to touch anything. Her living room
full of knickknacks, cut glass, china teacups. And on a table in the center of the room,
under a glass dome, a winter scene. More cast-iron figurines: ice skaters on a mirror-pond,
horse pulling a sleigh, bobsledders gliding down a hill of glittered cotton. The whole family
went out to supper: a long table in a dimly lit restaurant. My mother’s cousin Richard
(who would come out late in life) ordered me a Shirley Temple: a fizzy pink drink with a
maraschino cherry, named after a movie star. That night, on the drive back to Chatsworth,
my mother had me lie down in the back seat of our green Ford Falcon, to sleep. But on
the freeway she kept calling my name, trying to get me to wake. She was afraid a car was
following her, wanted me to sit up. When I did, it immediately veered away.
David Trinidad’s most recent book of poems is Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017). Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, which he edited, is forthcoming from Turtle Point in 2019. Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he teaches at Columbia College.
Angela Narciso Torres
Ode to a Realistic AM/FM Radio at the St. Philip’s Church Rummage Sale
What drew me was the rectangular squat of it,
the hefty boxful of sound you could plant
on a desk or shelf, its walnut veneer of vinyl
nested among cables, chargers and string lights.
Next to me, a man inspecting a pair of headphones
saw me turn the radio over to check the tag
and smiled, more to himself than at me,
and I don’t know why I told him
my dad had a radio just like it and isn’t it cool,
those three silver knobs and lighted tuning scale
so you can see what station you’re looking for?
He picked up a scratched iPod before I could say,
Look—no battery pack or carrying strap! so when
your mother settles down to her talk show,
she’s bound to stay where she is, paying bills
or reading or filing her nails, just like my dad
when he turned on his shiny Panasonic, permanently
set at DZFX contemporary sound of radio in Makati
while he signed papers or typed on the Smith-Corona
as I sprawled on the rug, knowing he’d stay
riveted until Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7,
performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
and conducted by Karl Böhm, reached its grand finale.
For now the first movement was just gaining momentum.
It would be a while before the tsunami of brass and strings
that broke through the staticky silence would end
in applause and we’d stand up to do the routine
things around the house—but not yet--
not while that blue spell of sound held us,
pouring from a silver box rooted to the wall
and my father, leaning back in his chair,
eyes fixed in the middle distance between desk
and darkening window, wasn’t going anywhere,
and the burnt orange shag rug beneath me
wasn’t going anywhere.
Angela Narciso Torres’s poetry collection, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, The Missouri Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Torres has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she serves as the reviews editor for RHINO and an editorial panelist for New England Review.
What drew me was the rectangular squat of it,
the hefty boxful of sound you could plant
on a desk or shelf, its walnut veneer of vinyl
nested among cables, chargers and string lights.
Next to me, a man inspecting a pair of headphones
saw me turn the radio over to check the tag
and smiled, more to himself than at me,
and I don’t know why I told him
my dad had a radio just like it and isn’t it cool,
those three silver knobs and lighted tuning scale
so you can see what station you’re looking for?
He picked up a scratched iPod before I could say,
Look—no battery pack or carrying strap! so when
your mother settles down to her talk show,
she’s bound to stay where she is, paying bills
or reading or filing her nails, just like my dad
when he turned on his shiny Panasonic, permanently
set at DZFX contemporary sound of radio in Makati
while he signed papers or typed on the Smith-Corona
as I sprawled on the rug, knowing he’d stay
riveted until Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7,
performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
and conducted by Karl Böhm, reached its grand finale.
For now the first movement was just gaining momentum.
It would be a while before the tsunami of brass and strings
that broke through the staticky silence would end
in applause and we’d stand up to do the routine
things around the house—but not yet--
not while that blue spell of sound held us,
pouring from a silver box rooted to the wall
and my father, leaning back in his chair,
eyes fixed in the middle distance between desk
and darkening window, wasn’t going anywhere,
and the burnt orange shag rug beneath me
wasn’t going anywhere.
Angela Narciso Torres’s poetry collection, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, The Missouri Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Torres has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she serves as the reviews editor for RHINO and an editorial panelist for New England Review.
Anum Sattar
Purification for the Adhan (اذعان )
Gargling out my strep infected throat
from the taste of your unbrushed tongue
with my cupped hands of unfiltered water
down into our toothpaste stained sink...
Adhan (اذعان ) is a Moslem call to ritual prayer made by a Muezzin (i.e. a spiritual leader) from a minaret, a mosque and now often played from a television, radio and other recordings. Before or at the time of Adhan, Moslems must perform a ritual washing in preparation for prayer and worship.
Anum Sattar is a senior studying English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her poems have been published in the American Journal of Poetry, 50 Haikus, Broadkill Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, HOBART, Coal City Review, Crack the Spine, Taj Mahal Review, and The Florida Review, and others. She won the first Grace Prize in Poetry and third Vonna Hicks Award at Wooster college.
Gargling out my strep infected throat
from the taste of your unbrushed tongue
with my cupped hands of unfiltered water
down into our toothpaste stained sink...
Adhan (اذعان ) is a Moslem call to ritual prayer made by a Muezzin (i.e. a spiritual leader) from a minaret, a mosque and now often played from a television, radio and other recordings. Before or at the time of Adhan, Moslems must perform a ritual washing in preparation for prayer and worship.
Anum Sattar is a senior studying English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her poems have been published in the American Journal of Poetry, 50 Haikus, Broadkill Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, HOBART, Coal City Review, Crack the Spine, Taj Mahal Review, and The Florida Review, and others. She won the first Grace Prize in Poetry and third Vonna Hicks Award at Wooster college.
Michael Mark 2 poems
Couples
The rickety bedroom window converses
all night with my old poems’
incoherent flutter.
The chimney speaks bird scratch
to my bookcase whose lower register
makes me think it’s the Heidegger
I haven't touched since college.
How can I sleep without my wife?
She swears I snore but I never
hear it over the moans
from the moon-lit lovers
above our bed
floating in the watercolor
we bought in Paris.
Proposal
Every appliance is dented or missing a piece. Teeth
broken off the electric knife. The waffle iron’s cord
is splayed, bright tendons spilled.
The toaster’s melted switch drips
like a Dali. Not that long ago we were each other’s
shiny things, wrapped with pierced hearts, purple
and pink nonsense notes, but God they were true.
I made a painting of your breasts. So what if I couldn’t paint?
So what if we used the painting to sop up
a leak from the last cracked glass of the fancy set?
So what if the silver frame hangs blank? Let’s empty
the closets, the cupboards,
fill pails with steaming water. I’m asking you will you
get down on your knees and scrub with me? Let’s start
with these old floors.
Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Lascaux Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Rattle, River Styx, Salt Hill Journal, Spillway, Sugar House Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Verse Daily and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry and other places. Visit him at michaeljmark.com He lives in Queens, New York after having lived in San Diego, CA for 20 years.
Every appliance is dented or missing a piece. Teeth
broken off the electric knife. The waffle iron’s cord
is splayed, bright tendons spilled.
The toaster’s melted switch drips
like a Dali. Not that long ago we were each other’s
shiny things, wrapped with pierced hearts, purple
and pink nonsense notes, but God they were true.
I made a painting of your breasts. So what if I couldn’t paint?
So what if we used the painting to sop up
a leak from the last cracked glass of the fancy set?
So what if the silver frame hangs blank? Let’s empty
the closets, the cupboards,
fill pails with steaming water. I’m asking you will you
get down on your knees and scrub with me? Let’s start
with these old floors.
Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Lascaux Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Rattle, River Styx, Salt Hill Journal, Spillway, Sugar House Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Verse Daily and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry and other places. Visit him at michaeljmark.com He lives in Queens, New York after having lived in San Diego, CA for 20 years.
Siham Karami
The Body’s Hospitality
To let blood downstream its ferrous river,
fetch viable veins in a subcutaneous river.
A den of raging patients, IV hell needs steady hands;
O Daniel, bring your 4 X 4 truck heart, lifeboat arms, a no-fuss river.
Morning corridors squeaking, clacking, droning,
the clinical percussion of a hypersensuous river.
Techno-rays, X and gamma, giant magnets seek
to echo-locate parts in our body's industrious river.
What shuts down, comes here; what comes here, shuts down,
the input/output of this bio-luminous river.
At the heart of earth is molten iron,
our mother-magnet, recharger, precious river.
A table of elements spread in spiral arms,
a flood remix, embrace, a channeled copious river.
For every gauge, a pointer; sacred numbers home our compass.
In counterpoint, we return as vagabonds down compassion's all-of-us river.
Siham Karami is the author of the poetry collection To Love the River (Kelsay Books, 2018). Besides writing, she has rediscovered beauty through a more recent obsession with photography. Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Able Muse, Measure, Off the Coast, Literary Mama, Anti-Heroin Chic, and many others; reviews and essays in The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and more. A multiple-time nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.com.
To let blood downstream its ferrous river,
fetch viable veins in a subcutaneous river.
A den of raging patients, IV hell needs steady hands;
O Daniel, bring your 4 X 4 truck heart, lifeboat arms, a no-fuss river.
Morning corridors squeaking, clacking, droning,
the clinical percussion of a hypersensuous river.
Techno-rays, X and gamma, giant magnets seek
to echo-locate parts in our body's industrious river.
What shuts down, comes here; what comes here, shuts down,
the input/output of this bio-luminous river.
At the heart of earth is molten iron,
our mother-magnet, recharger, precious river.
A table of elements spread in spiral arms,
a flood remix, embrace, a channeled copious river.
For every gauge, a pointer; sacred numbers home our compass.
In counterpoint, we return as vagabonds down compassion's all-of-us river.
Siham Karami is the author of the poetry collection To Love the River (Kelsay Books, 2018). Besides writing, she has rediscovered beauty through a more recent obsession with photography. Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Able Muse, Measure, Off the Coast, Literary Mama, Anti-Heroin Chic, and many others; reviews and essays in The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and more. A multiple-time nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.com.
Amy Katzel
Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague
Twelve deep, piled
like firewood beneath
these jagged teeth.
Their names, letters
float around us, speak
we’re here--
Hot dust in my shut
lips, my hands
at my back. Each time
I imagine their faces,
even the face
of the man who lived
to chisel the names
who is gone, too
now, each time
their murders happen
all over again
but I’m here
to listen, listen--
Watch how I wash
to leave death behind.
See how I’ve wandered
into the stones
to trace my finger
in the sunken spaces.
Amy Katzel is a marketing and communications professional and writer living in Miami. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland.
Twelve deep, piled
like firewood beneath
these jagged teeth.
Their names, letters
float around us, speak
we’re here--
Hot dust in my shut
lips, my hands
at my back. Each time
I imagine their faces,
even the face
of the man who lived
to chisel the names
who is gone, too
now, each time
their murders happen
all over again
but I’m here
to listen, listen--
Watch how I wash
to leave death behind.
See how I’ve wandered
into the stones
to trace my finger
in the sunken spaces.
Amy Katzel is a marketing and communications professional and writer living in Miami. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland.
Linda Pastan
Nostalgia
I am an immigrant in this country
of the young,
misunderstanding a language
where cool has nothing
to do with temperature
and man is a form of greeting.
And when I see the inhabitants
walking along gazing
not at storefronts or dog walkers
or even at each other
but at small flat rectangles they hold
in their hands for ballast,
I long to go back home
to the green land
of my childhood, to books
that are heavy with pages,
to radios with their ballgames
and advertising jingles.
But here I am, without papers or passport,
in a place where I don’t understand
what they call music or why
so many people sip elixir from plastic bottles,
carrying their lives on their shoulders
in brightly colored backpacks.
Linda Pastan's many awards include the Dylan Thomas award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of over 15 books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006), Traveling Light (2011), Insomnia (2015), and A Dog Runs Through It (2018). She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
I am an immigrant in this country
of the young,
misunderstanding a language
where cool has nothing
to do with temperature
and man is a form of greeting.
And when I see the inhabitants
walking along gazing
not at storefronts or dog walkers
or even at each other
but at small flat rectangles they hold
in their hands for ballast,
I long to go back home
to the green land
of my childhood, to books
that are heavy with pages,
to radios with their ballgames
and advertising jingles.
But here I am, without papers or passport,
in a place where I don’t understand
what they call music or why
so many people sip elixir from plastic bottles,
carrying their lives on their shoulders
in brightly colored backpacks.
Linda Pastan's many awards include the Dylan Thomas award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of over 15 books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006), Traveling Light (2011), Insomnia (2015), and A Dog Runs Through It (2018). She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
P. Scott Cunningham 2 poems
Ada Has a Fever
The things that wake me are the sound
and the moonlight, the sound
of her crying, and the moonlight in my eyes.
Maybe she is the voice of the moon. Maybe
the moon is the light of her voice.
In the basement, why is there a window
and how is the moon so close?
I think the moon is perhaps a lamppost.
I think the light has been done to me
like a crime. I think my daughter is more
than a voice or a body hiding in the closet.
We put her in the closet for its darkness
and now she is speaking the light.
The sound machine, the machine designed
to erase the sound, churns beneath her
and the light churns beneath the sound.
The earth churns beneath the moon, and she,
my daughter, not the moon, is in distress.
There is always a moment when you hope
the moon is not your problem,
that the moon will take care of itself
just as I hope my daughter will fall back to sleep
before I am needed, even though to be needed
is the only reason to wake up.
What do I do once my feet
are inside the carpet, once her body is inside
my arms and burning
as if a larger object is shining into it?
Her body is a wall against
which the world inflicts its light.
Some part of her always faces out
even as she falls into me, curls into my neck
and makes the sound of the light returning.
The moon has turned past the window.
The earth has moved into a vast pink light.
I’m looking for a place to put my daughter down.
The things that wake me are the sound
and the moonlight, the sound
of her crying, and the moonlight in my eyes.
Maybe she is the voice of the moon. Maybe
the moon is the light of her voice.
In the basement, why is there a window
and how is the moon so close?
I think the moon is perhaps a lamppost.
I think the light has been done to me
like a crime. I think my daughter is more
than a voice or a body hiding in the closet.
We put her in the closet for its darkness
and now she is speaking the light.
The sound machine, the machine designed
to erase the sound, churns beneath her
and the light churns beneath the sound.
The earth churns beneath the moon, and she,
my daughter, not the moon, is in distress.
There is always a moment when you hope
the moon is not your problem,
that the moon will take care of itself
just as I hope my daughter will fall back to sleep
before I am needed, even though to be needed
is the only reason to wake up.
What do I do once my feet
are inside the carpet, once her body is inside
my arms and burning
as if a larger object is shining into it?
Her body is a wall against
which the world inflicts its light.
Some part of her always faces out
even as she falls into me, curls into my neck
and makes the sound of the light returning.
The moon has turned past the window.
The earth has moved into a vast pink light.
I’m looking for a place to put my daughter down.
Something Involving Fire
The thing I burned was a Bryan Adams CD.
It was summer, the last night of the Young
People’s Institute, held on the campus
of Miss Porter’s School For Girls. We were standing
in a circle for the annual Purge and Burn.
The adults had built a bonfire, and into it, we threw
all the feelings we no longer wanted.
Most campers threw crumpled up names of people
who had died or didn’t love them.
I tossed in a Bryan Adams’ CD, a single,
that song from the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves soundtrack.
A counselor told me not to do it.
Because of the fumes. So I hid the CD inside
some newspaper and held it behind my back
before I dropped it. The paper wilted
and there, in the light of the fire,
was Kevin Costner on horseback.
The plastic sparkled and smelled
and the circle widened. All of us
had already been crying, but now
it might have been because of 90s music.
I wish I could say I understood the ways
in which the world made all of us so purge-y.
It felt so good to cry around the fire
for reasons no one said out loud.
I didn’t even know why I was crying.
It certainly had nothing to do with Bryan Adams
or music or girls or the Connecticut countryside
that smelled like water escaping from a cave.
The flames looked like the ones I’d read about
in the Bible. They were speaking in a language
we could understand. They told us
when to do things. They told a boy named Aaron,
one of those boys whose body is so tall
for its age that its growth is like a haunting,
to run at full speed into the woods.
I watched his legs as they hammered
into the hill, his arms as they swung out
of his control. I heard his breathing,
a form of yelling, a kind of fire licking
at the windows of a building. He sounded like
a rider trying to crawl inside his horse.
The trees swallowed him all at once
and I turned to the version of myself
sitting next to me, the one who had nothing
left inside except a perfect inch of light,
and said, That. That’s what I want to do.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Harvard Review, POETRY, The Awl, A Public Space, RHINO, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. He lives in Miami, FL, where he serves as the director of the O, Miami Poetry Festival and the publisher of Jai-Alai Books.
The thing I burned was a Bryan Adams CD.
It was summer, the last night of the Young
People’s Institute, held on the campus
of Miss Porter’s School For Girls. We were standing
in a circle for the annual Purge and Burn.
The adults had built a bonfire, and into it, we threw
all the feelings we no longer wanted.
Most campers threw crumpled up names of people
who had died or didn’t love them.
I tossed in a Bryan Adams’ CD, a single,
that song from the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves soundtrack.
A counselor told me not to do it.
Because of the fumes. So I hid the CD inside
some newspaper and held it behind my back
before I dropped it. The paper wilted
and there, in the light of the fire,
was Kevin Costner on horseback.
The plastic sparkled and smelled
and the circle widened. All of us
had already been crying, but now
it might have been because of 90s music.
I wish I could say I understood the ways
in which the world made all of us so purge-y.
It felt so good to cry around the fire
for reasons no one said out loud.
I didn’t even know why I was crying.
It certainly had nothing to do with Bryan Adams
or music or girls or the Connecticut countryside
that smelled like water escaping from a cave.
The flames looked like the ones I’d read about
in the Bible. They were speaking in a language
we could understand. They told us
when to do things. They told a boy named Aaron,
one of those boys whose body is so tall
for its age that its growth is like a haunting,
to run at full speed into the woods.
I watched his legs as they hammered
into the hill, his arms as they swung out
of his control. I heard his breathing,
a form of yelling, a kind of fire licking
at the windows of a building. He sounded like
a rider trying to crawl inside his horse.
The trees swallowed him all at once
and I turned to the version of myself
sitting next to me, the one who had nothing
left inside except a perfect inch of light,
and said, That. That’s what I want to do.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Harvard Review, POETRY, The Awl, A Public Space, RHINO, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. He lives in Miami, FL, where he serves as the director of the O, Miami Poetry Festival and the publisher of Jai-Alai Books.
Jennifer Martelli 3 poems
Slow Fall
Sometimes, I punish the way my father did,
with silence, imagining you worried,
awake all night, turned to your white wall, the one
with the moon shining through the upper left
pane, imagine you tangled in my absence,
my not-talking hanging off the wire hanger
back of closet, shoulders loose, that damned dress
you can’t fit into any longer. But this is in my head
which has four chambers like my heart and
I sit in each chamber strapped to a chair.
Sometimes, my two black cats lie entwined,
a knot of dark fur and green eyes, then gold: I can’t tell
there’s two until they fight, make triangles
of light between their haunches. Sometimes
when the girl scratches the wool off the couch,
it sounds like bones cracking.
My father knew his cold withdrawal
hurt and it did. The heat won’t abate, won’t
break over the North Shore even this far into
fall. The cosmos wilt on their long stems,
the asters won’t bloom.
Sometimes, I punish the way my father did,
with silence, imagining you worried,
awake all night, turned to your white wall, the one
with the moon shining through the upper left
pane, imagine you tangled in my absence,
my not-talking hanging off the wire hanger
back of closet, shoulders loose, that damned dress
you can’t fit into any longer. But this is in my head
which has four chambers like my heart and
I sit in each chamber strapped to a chair.
Sometimes, my two black cats lie entwined,
a knot of dark fur and green eyes, then gold: I can’t tell
there’s two until they fight, make triangles
of light between their haunches. Sometimes
when the girl scratches the wool off the couch,
it sounds like bones cracking.
My father knew his cold withdrawal
hurt and it did. The heat won’t abate, won’t
break over the North Shore even this far into
fall. The cosmos wilt on their long stems,
the asters won’t bloom.
These are Not Signs Made in the Basement from Love
--Donald J. Trump
I went to my basement to touch the plywood paneled walls.
I went to my basement & had a sleepover, had a séance.
I went to my basement & levitated a woman.
I found the old Ouija board. Found the planchette.
I nailed a tongue to the wall.
I went to my basement & fingered the Funk & Wagnalls.
Went to the Wa to Wo volume. Found the Witch between War & Woman.
I went to my basement & found the booze: VO & Cutty Sark.
I found the Crown Royal bags. Found the bling to hang around the bottle necks.
Dressed my liquor bottle dolls.
I went to my basement & smelled the smoke on my mother’s camel hair coat.
I swallowed her clip-on chunky pearl earring when she bent to kiss me good bye
so she couldn’t leave me ever.
I went to my basement & looked for signs.
I went to the basement, found the country sinking down,
conjured a demon, made signs from love.
--Donald J. Trump
I went to my basement to touch the plywood paneled walls.
I went to my basement & had a sleepover, had a séance.
I went to my basement & levitated a woman.
I found the old Ouija board. Found the planchette.
I nailed a tongue to the wall.
I went to my basement & fingered the Funk & Wagnalls.
Went to the Wa to Wo volume. Found the Witch between War & Woman.
I went to my basement & found the booze: VO & Cutty Sark.
I found the Crown Royal bags. Found the bling to hang around the bottle necks.
Dressed my liquor bottle dolls.
I went to my basement & smelled the smoke on my mother’s camel hair coat.
I swallowed her clip-on chunky pearl earring when she bent to kiss me good bye
so she couldn’t leave me ever.
I went to my basement & looked for signs.
I went to the basement, found the country sinking down,
conjured a demon, made signs from love.
I Don’t Remember as Much as I Would Like To
--Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
I do remember the intersection: Ben’s Drugstore, Sons of Italy, DeSantis’s Aluminum Siding &
Door store, Magee’s Deli.
I remember the red light, the envelope my mother handed me (no, but I figure
there was an envelope because I remember the mailbox). I remember the seconds
we had for me to jump out of the car, mail the letter, before the light turned green.
I assume she was driving the beach wagon, the country squire, or maybe the Ltd.
But I only know we had those cars, back then. I know a letter had to be mailed.
I remember a blue mailbox outside the drugstore. I remember a dog, but I don’t know
what kind. I’m seeing the dog from The Little Rascals: white with a brown circle around one
eye like a target, a bull’s eye. Back then, there were dogs with no leashes, and they
could leave their yards and doghouses at will. I don’t know if this dog was female or male.
(Later, I learned that all dogs like to mount and hump, even if they’re fixed, they have
the memory of how it feels, they can smell things that call and tempt them.) I think
I had on dungarees. I think my legs were covered in pants. I don’t remember the heat
of the dog’s wet belly on my skin. I remember its front paws locked on my thigh, a tight
choke hold. I remember the dog hanging on. Its nails. I remember someone laughed.
And my mother angry at me, through the windshield: her arms like iron hooks,
motioning me to hurry, get in the car, get in the car. Everything else, I might have
imagined, but not my shame and her anger at me.
Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018), as well as the chapbook, After Bird (Grey Book Press, winner of the open reading, 2017). Her work has appeared or will appear in The Sycamore Review, Sugar House, Superstition Review, Thrush, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her prose and artwork have been published in Five-2-One, The Baltimore Review, and Green Mountains Review. Jennifer Martelli has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a poetry editor for The Mom Egg Review.
--Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
I do remember the intersection: Ben’s Drugstore, Sons of Italy, DeSantis’s Aluminum Siding &
Door store, Magee’s Deli.
I remember the red light, the envelope my mother handed me (no, but I figure
there was an envelope because I remember the mailbox). I remember the seconds
we had for me to jump out of the car, mail the letter, before the light turned green.
I assume she was driving the beach wagon, the country squire, or maybe the Ltd.
But I only know we had those cars, back then. I know a letter had to be mailed.
I remember a blue mailbox outside the drugstore. I remember a dog, but I don’t know
what kind. I’m seeing the dog from The Little Rascals: white with a brown circle around one
eye like a target, a bull’s eye. Back then, there were dogs with no leashes, and they
could leave their yards and doghouses at will. I don’t know if this dog was female or male.
(Later, I learned that all dogs like to mount and hump, even if they’re fixed, they have
the memory of how it feels, they can smell things that call and tempt them.) I think
I had on dungarees. I think my legs were covered in pants. I don’t remember the heat
of the dog’s wet belly on my skin. I remember its front paws locked on my thigh, a tight
choke hold. I remember the dog hanging on. Its nails. I remember someone laughed.
And my mother angry at me, through the windshield: her arms like iron hooks,
motioning me to hurry, get in the car, get in the car. Everything else, I might have
imagined, but not my shame and her anger at me.
Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018), as well as the chapbook, After Bird (Grey Book Press, winner of the open reading, 2017). Her work has appeared or will appear in The Sycamore Review, Sugar House, Superstition Review, Thrush, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her prose and artwork have been published in Five-2-One, The Baltimore Review, and Green Mountains Review. Jennifer Martelli has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a poetry editor for The Mom Egg Review.
Richard N. Bentley
Lines Composed upon the Brooklyn Bridge After an All-Nighter
Wind peels waves off the river
and heaps them against the pilings.
Gulls cry and dip low,
then shoot straight up again.
We wonder, why don’t doormen
ever go to sea? Why don’t nuns
pray before the great stone Buddha
up in the Bronx?
“Deliver us from the heavenly
beauty of the sunrise over Queens,”
Our hearts are armored
with booze and grass,
and we ask the prayerful nuns
to intercede,
“Spare them the knowledge
of where they are going
when the bridge they cross
disappears in a thick rain.”
Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon. He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published more than 280 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the U.S., the U.K., France, Canada, and Brazil. He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Visit him at www.dickbentley.com.
Wind peels waves off the river
and heaps them against the pilings.
Gulls cry and dip low,
then shoot straight up again.
We wonder, why don’t doormen
ever go to sea? Why don’t nuns
pray before the great stone Buddha
up in the Bronx?
“Deliver us from the heavenly
beauty of the sunrise over Queens,”
Our hearts are armored
with booze and grass,
and we ask the prayerful nuns
to intercede,
“Spare them the knowledge
of where they are going
when the bridge they cross
disappears in a thick rain.”
Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon. He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published more than 280 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the U.S., the U.K., France, Canada, and Brazil. He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Visit him at www.dickbentley.com.
Timothy Liu 3 poems
Blind Date
I don’t remember where
we were headed in
the dark, only the sound
of a forceful stream
of piss hitting the forest
floor when he stepped
away from me and right
there and then I knew
we had nowhere
to get to—our arrival
sounding all around
in a dark so dark
I couldn’t see my hand
in front of my face
or anything else
put there—only this
insistence, its unimpeded
flow—and it seemed
my ears were made
for this, for I was his
audience and his
alone in that stillness
where even if a tree fell . . .
I don’t remember where
we were headed in
the dark, only the sound
of a forceful stream
of piss hitting the forest
floor when he stepped
away from me and right
there and then I knew
we had nowhere
to get to—our arrival
sounding all around
in a dark so dark
I couldn’t see my hand
in front of my face
or anything else
put there—only this
insistence, its unimpeded
flow—and it seemed
my ears were made
for this, for I was his
audience and his
alone in that stillness
where even if a tree fell . . .
Bromance
Our spouses were not there
to see it—a satellite
crashing into the earth’s
atmosphere. It’s possible
to get entirely wasted
on a can of seltzer at the edge
of a dock where a sign
that said NO SWIMMING
had been taken down--
where a memory
can be trusted more
than the thing itself
(who cares what was
actually said—romance
never required hard
evidence) though I
managed to save the can
our lips touched down upon.
Our spouses were not there
to see it—a satellite
crashing into the earth’s
atmosphere. It’s possible
to get entirely wasted
on a can of seltzer at the edge
of a dock where a sign
that said NO SWIMMING
had been taken down--
where a memory
can be trusted more
than the thing itself
(who cares what was
actually said—romance
never required hard
evidence) though I
managed to save the can
our lips touched down upon.
Love Poem in a Steam Room
Hard to commit
to memory—their knees
brushing up against
my own as we recited
lines no one knew
by heart—our nostrils
singed—burnt scent
of eucalyptus as we got on
with the business
at hand not to be found
in any book of verse.
Timothy Liu’s latest collection is Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain (1992-2017). A reader of occult esoterica, he lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY. Visit him at www.timothyliu.net
Hard to commit
to memory—their knees
brushing up against
my own as we recited
lines no one knew
by heart—our nostrils
singed—burnt scent
of eucalyptus as we got on
with the business
at hand not to be found
in any book of verse.
Timothy Liu’s latest collection is Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain (1992-2017). A reader of occult esoterica, he lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY. Visit him at www.timothyliu.net
Poets Respond to the Prompt:
The Woman With Medicine in Her Voice
The Woman With Medicine in Her Voice
Fang Bu
Salem
I. We. I
stutter and stumble
a monstrous colt
adder tongue and wizened
cypress knee the seat
of my stories. Me too.
Virgin nerd-girl and whore
of the round table
temptress to taunts and the occasional
gas lamp. They try at least:
mistake my hips for conquest
my brain for a song
complaint for compliant
bestowing where I curse.
In the murk you cannot know me.
In smoke I conjure
magnet for their iniquity
repository of scorned flesh
and malediction. The woman
with medicine in her voice
and cyanide in her smile.
When they burn me
I hear the cries
of their God.
Fang is a pediatric pathologist in Columbus, Ohio by day. Some of her previous poems have appeared in 2River View, the Furious Gazelle, and Room.
I. We. I
stutter and stumble
a monstrous colt
adder tongue and wizened
cypress knee the seat
of my stories. Me too.
Virgin nerd-girl and whore
of the round table
temptress to taunts and the occasional
gas lamp. They try at least:
mistake my hips for conquest
my brain for a song
complaint for compliant
bestowing where I curse.
In the murk you cannot know me.
In smoke I conjure
magnet for their iniquity
repository of scorned flesh
and malediction. The woman
with medicine in her voice
and cyanide in her smile.
When they burn me
I hear the cries
of their God.
Fang is a pediatric pathologist in Columbus, Ohio by day. Some of her previous poems have appeared in 2River View, the Furious Gazelle, and Room.
Kelly Cherry
The woman with medicine in her voice
The woman with medicine in her voice
almost strangles in an attempt to clear her voice
Alas, with each, her voice grows darker,
more difficult to translate,
and ragged, as if something
dragged its sound across a slate floor.
Each effort wears her out.
Yet she continues to make the effort.
Lagging behind her, that voice that follows her
everywhere
Kelly Cherry has published a number of books, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She lives in Virginia but off the grid. She was born to a musical family, and that has determined many of her decisions
The woman with medicine in her voice
almost strangles in an attempt to clear her voice
Alas, with each, her voice grows darker,
more difficult to translate,
and ragged, as if something
dragged its sound across a slate floor.
Each effort wears her out.
Yet she continues to make the effort.
Lagging behind her, that voice that follows her
everywhere
Kelly Cherry has published a number of books, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She lives in Virginia but off the grid. She was born to a musical family, and that has determined many of her decisions
Sarah Carey
Personal Cure for Consumption
—after Marshall Parsons (1894-1930)
“Fell out of a 4th floor window while sleepwalking”
the death certificate said, though suicide
and post-traumatic stress were never speculated,
as only war, disease, act of God or accident
was ever discussed. Tragedy struck that family,
my mother said. Marshall’s hardscrabble,
scribbled hardships, personal cure for consumption
were noted in the letters Daisy left, brought home the war
to all of us who look for whys in ancestors
whose ways we might inherit. Great-grandmother Daisy
kept Marshall’s memory green, her only son,
the uncle my mother never knew, in papers
I would later parse for clues, staring down
into his darkness. I, too, drank. Nearly jumped
a time or two. Imagine what we might have been dreaming.
Often I read too much into things
— so seldom is life black and white —
but how can I pretend to not know how he died?
A tragedy, my mother said, and said again
when Marshall’s niece, a newlywed, bled out,
kicked in the gut by a horse. The woman with medicine
in her voice is my mother, offering apothecary tales.
Write down what I tell you, she says:
Daisy outlived losses til they swallowed her,
a bitter pill, and she became them. Mother tells me,
take this history at morning, bedtime or as needed
with a grain of salt. You are more than DNA,
she says, and shakes me free.
Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has appeared recently in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, The Christian Century and elsewhere. She was the recipient of an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. She is the author of one poetry chapbook, The Heart Contracts, published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Carey works for the University of Florida and lives in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.
—after Marshall Parsons (1894-1930)
“Fell out of a 4th floor window while sleepwalking”
the death certificate said, though suicide
and post-traumatic stress were never speculated,
as only war, disease, act of God or accident
was ever discussed. Tragedy struck that family,
my mother said. Marshall’s hardscrabble,
scribbled hardships, personal cure for consumption
were noted in the letters Daisy left, brought home the war
to all of us who look for whys in ancestors
whose ways we might inherit. Great-grandmother Daisy
kept Marshall’s memory green, her only son,
the uncle my mother never knew, in papers
I would later parse for clues, staring down
into his darkness. I, too, drank. Nearly jumped
a time or two. Imagine what we might have been dreaming.
Often I read too much into things
— so seldom is life black and white —
but how can I pretend to not know how he died?
A tragedy, my mother said, and said again
when Marshall’s niece, a newlywed, bled out,
kicked in the gut by a horse. The woman with medicine
in her voice is my mother, offering apothecary tales.
Write down what I tell you, she says:
Daisy outlived losses til they swallowed her,
a bitter pill, and she became them. Mother tells me,
take this history at morning, bedtime or as needed
with a grain of salt. You are more than DNA,
she says, and shakes me free.
Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has appeared recently in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, The Christian Century and elsewhere. She was the recipient of an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. She is the author of one poetry chapbook, The Heart Contracts, published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Carey works for the University of Florida and lives in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.
Devon Balwit
The possibilities are endless
An intravenous line, a capsule, a shot glass,
(the latter also a prescription against pain)
her body orates, eloquent in protest. The main
thing is to carry on, not be an ass
and discomfit everyone. Marcus Aurelius,
in his tent, wrote, The act of dying is one
of the acts of life. Hers has begun.
She knows the blocking but, capricious,
decides to wing it. She will act as if
it weren’t happening, comport herself as if
a model for all others, rant and rage as if
a megalomaniac, swansong as if
it were her final night on earth--her choice--
this woman with medicine in her voice.
Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Apt. Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Grist, Oxidant Engine, and Rattle among others. For more about her books, reviews, interviews, and individual poems, see her website: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet
An intravenous line, a capsule, a shot glass,
(the latter also a prescription against pain)
her body orates, eloquent in protest. The main
thing is to carry on, not be an ass
and discomfit everyone. Marcus Aurelius,
in his tent, wrote, The act of dying is one
of the acts of life. Hers has begun.
She knows the blocking but, capricious,
decides to wing it. She will act as if
it weren’t happening, comport herself as if
a model for all others, rant and rage as if
a megalomaniac, swansong as if
it were her final night on earth--her choice--
this woman with medicine in her voice.
Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Apt. Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Grist, Oxidant Engine, and Rattle among others. For more about her books, reviews, interviews, and individual poems, see her website: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet
Don Rosenthal
Anything Goes
If I were to stand in the shadow of Cole Porter
I wouldn’t lumber in the penumbra
I’d hide in full darkness
mimic a few lines, chords, hum
a few bars
tap dance on stage
with Ethel or Patti
Then if the sun shifted
spotlight on me
I’d pull out a pen and write a poem
called
Anything Goes
Don Rosenthal is a graduate of CCNY as a Creative Writing Major. He recently had his One-Act Play, LUCILLE ZANZIBARZ, appear Off-Broadway in the 29th Annual New York Strawberry One-Act Festival. He writes plays, songs and has several poetry books which he hasn’t published yet.
If I were to stand in the shadow of Cole Porter
I wouldn’t lumber in the penumbra
I’d hide in full darkness
mimic a few lines, chords, hum
a few bars
tap dance on stage
with Ethel or Patti
Then if the sun shifted
spotlight on me
I’d pull out a pen and write a poem
called
Anything Goes
Don Rosenthal is a graduate of CCNY as a Creative Writing Major. He recently had his One-Act Play, LUCILLE ZANZIBARZ, appear Off-Broadway in the 29th Annual New York Strawberry One-Act Festival. He writes plays, songs and has several poetry books which he hasn’t published yet.
Charles Rammelkamp
The Woman with Medicine in Her Voice
“A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.” – The Band, “Up on Cripple Creek”
Her voice worn with scolding,
Bessie calls from the saloon door:
“My man Robbie in there anywhere?”
Four heads bob up from a slump
over a table in the back,
as if summoned by a snake charmer,
one dim lightbulb overhead haloing them.
“He ain’t bought a round yet,”
one of the men complains.
“Shut up,” Bessie cuts him off,
grabs Robbie by the collar,
yanks him stumbling from his chair.
“Come on, you,” she orders.
“We got to go now.”
“She ain’t no Marilyn Monroe,”
one of the men observes,
watching Bessie haul Robbie away.
“But he’s damn lucky she don’t leave him.”
“Tough love,” another agrees. “Strong medicine.”
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, has just been published by FutureCycle Press.
“A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.” – The Band, “Up on Cripple Creek”
Her voice worn with scolding,
Bessie calls from the saloon door:
“My man Robbie in there anywhere?”
Four heads bob up from a slump
over a table in the back,
as if summoned by a snake charmer,
one dim lightbulb overhead haloing them.
“He ain’t bought a round yet,”
one of the men complains.
“Shut up,” Bessie cuts him off,
grabs Robbie by the collar,
yanks him stumbling from his chair.
“Come on, you,” she orders.
“We got to go now.”
“She ain’t no Marilyn Monroe,”
one of the men observes,
watching Bessie haul Robbie away.
“But he’s damn lucky she don’t leave him.”
“Tough love,” another agrees. “Strong medicine.”
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, has just been published by FutureCycle Press.
Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade
Aside
The woman with medicine in her voice weeps for no reason at stoplights. (But there’s always a reason, isn’t there?) The woman with medicine in her voice swallows a spoonful of sugar. (She is no Mary Poppins, bereft of umbrella and carpet bag.) The woman with medicine in her voice sings along to Madonna on the radio. (I made it through the wilderness,/ Somehow I made it through...) The woman with medicine in her voice sucks on Ricola, though she’s never been to Switzerland. (Anything Swiss reminds her of Heidi—that best-selling “Swiss Miss.” Such a sanctimonious story, she thinks, of the orphan with blond braids she always longed to yank...Is this worth mentioning to her therapist?) The woman with medicine in her voice is sick of therapy, sick of doctors, even sick of ER and General Hospital. (If she were the doctor, she’d scribble on her prescription pad: Throw a snow globe through your television; drown your cell phone in the sink; stroke the soft fur of an animal.) The woman with medicine in her voice plays the pain scale on her harmonica. (She used to pull stops for the organist of a benign neighborhood congregation—everything was beige, everyone was beige—but no longer.) The woman with medicine in her voice has some places on her body that are benign, other places that are malignant. (In the dark, but also in the light, it is hard to distinguish between them.)
Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade have published collaborative poems and essays in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review,The Common, Fourth Genre, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Their first co-authored book, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, is forthcoming in February 2019 from Noctuary Press. They both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.
The woman with medicine in her voice weeps for no reason at stoplights. (But there’s always a reason, isn’t there?) The woman with medicine in her voice swallows a spoonful of sugar. (She is no Mary Poppins, bereft of umbrella and carpet bag.) The woman with medicine in her voice sings along to Madonna on the radio. (I made it through the wilderness,/ Somehow I made it through...) The woman with medicine in her voice sucks on Ricola, though she’s never been to Switzerland. (Anything Swiss reminds her of Heidi—that best-selling “Swiss Miss.” Such a sanctimonious story, she thinks, of the orphan with blond braids she always longed to yank...Is this worth mentioning to her therapist?) The woman with medicine in her voice is sick of therapy, sick of doctors, even sick of ER and General Hospital. (If she were the doctor, she’d scribble on her prescription pad: Throw a snow globe through your television; drown your cell phone in the sink; stroke the soft fur of an animal.) The woman with medicine in her voice plays the pain scale on her harmonica. (She used to pull stops for the organist of a benign neighborhood congregation—everything was beige, everyone was beige—but no longer.) The woman with medicine in her voice has some places on her body that are benign, other places that are malignant. (In the dark, but also in the light, it is hard to distinguish between them.)
Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade have published collaborative poems and essays in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review,The Common, Fourth Genre, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Their first co-authored book, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, is forthcoming in February 2019 from Noctuary Press. They both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.
Carmine G. Di Biase
Forewarnings
That half-remembered story from thirty years ago:
Love in a sanatorium,
A beautiful, moribund girl with parchment skin,
A man playing cards at a table raises his voice, coughs out blood
And dies on the spot.
The author, a doctor haunted by what he’d seen, had found
Consolation in the telling.
And yesterday at the grocery,
The woman with medicine in her voice:
She planted her cane between us with both hands,
The veins in her forearms black and dark blue.
She stared at me as she gathered herself,
And gasped—I could smell her chemical breath--
“The cocoa. Where do they keep the cocoa?”
And this cold evening, I take the kettle off the fire and see
The tiny new blotch on my hand: a broken capillary, a harmless
Rupture. It will resolve itself and vanish
Like the ones before it have done.
How courteous, this brief forewarning
That the distinguished thing, as the Master called it,
Plans to visit me as well.
Tomorrow I shall give away these things that have
Outlived their use: the rowboat and the guest bed,
The bicycle for two—all of it must go. There will be an
Hour, tomorrow, to pace about this quiet house and rein in
All these shards of memory. And tomorrow, at my table, a smoking
Cup of chocolate by my side, I shall set them forth
In a proper letter and seal it.
Carmine Di Biase was born and raised in Ohio. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he has taught since 1993. He writes mainly about Shakespeare and modern Italian literature. He has edited and translated The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo (Troubador Press, 2013). Occasionally he writes for the Times Literary Supplement. He dedicates his free hours to gardening, bicycling and playing and restoring old violins.
That half-remembered story from thirty years ago:
Love in a sanatorium,
A beautiful, moribund girl with parchment skin,
A man playing cards at a table raises his voice, coughs out blood
And dies on the spot.
The author, a doctor haunted by what he’d seen, had found
Consolation in the telling.
And yesterday at the grocery,
The woman with medicine in her voice:
She planted her cane between us with both hands,
The veins in her forearms black and dark blue.
She stared at me as she gathered herself,
And gasped—I could smell her chemical breath--
“The cocoa. Where do they keep the cocoa?”
And this cold evening, I take the kettle off the fire and see
The tiny new blotch on my hand: a broken capillary, a harmless
Rupture. It will resolve itself and vanish
Like the ones before it have done.
How courteous, this brief forewarning
That the distinguished thing, as the Master called it,
Plans to visit me as well.
Tomorrow I shall give away these things that have
Outlived their use: the rowboat and the guest bed,
The bicycle for two—all of it must go. There will be an
Hour, tomorrow, to pace about this quiet house and rein in
All these shards of memory. And tomorrow, at my table, a smoking
Cup of chocolate by my side, I shall set them forth
In a proper letter and seal it.
Carmine Di Biase was born and raised in Ohio. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he has taught since 1993. He writes mainly about Shakespeare and modern Italian literature. He has edited and translated The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo (Troubador Press, 2013). Occasionally he writes for the Times Literary Supplement. He dedicates his free hours to gardening, bicycling and playing and restoring old violins.
Grace Cavalieri
Tony Hoagland Is Dead
Grief is the medicine in her mouth
Birds caught in my heart
All night the birds taped inside
Let them go
Pressed against the pane
Beyond the wisteria
Tony is dead
And all the equations in the world
Are blank
Birds, you can be Maria’s laugh in the kitchen
Birds, you can be New Hampshire
Fly, run, leap, row, Birds, while you can.
Grace Cavalieri is the author of 20 books and chapbooks of poetry, the latest (change to) are Other Voices, Other Lives (ASP, 2017;) and a Memoir; Life Upon The Wicked Stage (Nerw Academia/Scarity, 2015.) The Man Who Got Away (new academia/scarith (2014:) The Mandate of Heaven (Bordighera Press 2014:) and (from Casa Menendez Press) Gotta Go Now (2012;) Millie's Sunshine Tiki Villas (2011;) Sounds Like Something I Would Say (2010;) Also, The Poet's Cookbook, in English & Italian (Bordighera Press, 2009;) The Poet's Cookbook, in English & German; (Goethe-Institut;) Anna Nicole: Poems (Goss:183 Casa Menendez, 2008,) Water on the Sun (Bordighera Press, 2006,) What I Would Do For Love (Jacaranda Press, 2003,) Cuffed Frays (Argonne House Press, 2001,) Sit Down Says Love (Argonne House Press, 1999). Pinecrest Rest Haven (The Word Works,1998.) She's also written texts and lyrics performed for opera, television and film.
Grief is the medicine in her mouth
Birds caught in my heart
All night the birds taped inside
Let them go
Pressed against the pane
Beyond the wisteria
Tony is dead
And all the equations in the world
Are blank
Birds, you can be Maria’s laugh in the kitchen
Birds, you can be New Hampshire
Fly, run, leap, row, Birds, while you can.
Grace Cavalieri is the author of 20 books and chapbooks of poetry, the latest (change to) are Other Voices, Other Lives (ASP, 2017;) and a Memoir; Life Upon The Wicked Stage (Nerw Academia/Scarity, 2015.) The Man Who Got Away (new academia/scarith (2014:) The Mandate of Heaven (Bordighera Press 2014:) and (from Casa Menendez Press) Gotta Go Now (2012;) Millie's Sunshine Tiki Villas (2011;) Sounds Like Something I Would Say (2010;) Also, The Poet's Cookbook, in English & Italian (Bordighera Press, 2009;) The Poet's Cookbook, in English & German; (Goethe-Institut;) Anna Nicole: Poems (Goss:183 Casa Menendez, 2008,) Water on the Sun (Bordighera Press, 2006,) What I Would Do For Love (Jacaranda Press, 2003,) Cuffed Frays (Argonne House Press, 2001,) Sit Down Says Love (Argonne House Press, 1999). Pinecrest Rest Haven (The Word Works,1998.) She's also written texts and lyrics performed for opera, television and film.
LB Sedlacek
Mountain Drive Marvels
My best friend
is a Nurse Practitioner
we talk
disease, prevention
and cures
woman with medicine
in her mouth
warns me of
a syndrome you can
get from taking
antibiotics
how it’s better
to take every pill
in a prescription
instead of stopping
when you feel better
told me
not to drink silver
thought to cure
your immune
system told me
there was a man
called Papa Smurf
who drank silver
turned his skin blue
I ask her
advice for our family’s
medical problems
and she asks me about
writing, reading, swimming
and being shy
a mixed bag of
information we barter
like drug dealers
laughing and driving
through the fog
of the Blue Ridge mountains
to see a
play at a theatre
so old folks
traded pigs and chickens
to see the show.
L.B. Sedlacek’s poetry and fiction has appeared in several journals and zines. Her latest poetry book is Words and Bones published by Finishing Line Press. She teaches poetry, publishes a free resource for poets "The Poetry Market Ezine," and was a Poetry Editor for ESC! Magazine. In her free time, LB enjoys swimming, reading, and volunteering for her local humane society.
My best friend
is a Nurse Practitioner
we talk
disease, prevention
and cures
woman with medicine
in her mouth
warns me of
a syndrome you can
get from taking
antibiotics
how it’s better
to take every pill
in a prescription
instead of stopping
when you feel better
told me
not to drink silver
thought to cure
your immune
system told me
there was a man
called Papa Smurf
who drank silver
turned his skin blue
I ask her
advice for our family’s
medical problems
and she asks me about
writing, reading, swimming
and being shy
a mixed bag of
information we barter
like drug dealers
laughing and driving
through the fog
of the Blue Ridge mountains
to see a
play at a theatre
so old folks
traded pigs and chickens
to see the show.
L.B. Sedlacek’s poetry and fiction has appeared in several journals and zines. Her latest poetry book is Words and Bones published by Finishing Line Press. She teaches poetry, publishes a free resource for poets "The Poetry Market Ezine," and was a Poetry Editor for ESC! Magazine. In her free time, LB enjoys swimming, reading, and volunteering for her local humane society.
John Burroughs
Rough Cure
The woman with medicine in her voice
placed her head in my lap like a cat.
I heard her purr over my supercharged engine
as my foot pushed the accelerator deeper,
wanted her to unbuckle my inhibitions
but she wanted to heal me.
However, I am a dog not easily
brought to heel.
John Burroughs is a nationally touring poet from northern Ohio and the author of around a dozen books including, most recently, Loss and Foundering from NightBallet Press. He is also the founding editor of Crisis Chronicles Press, having published over 100 titles by some of the world's best writers. Find him at www.crisischronicles.com.
The woman with medicine in her voice
placed her head in my lap like a cat.
I heard her purr over my supercharged engine
as my foot pushed the accelerator deeper,
wanted her to unbuckle my inhibitions
but she wanted to heal me.
However, I am a dog not easily
brought to heel.
John Burroughs is a nationally touring poet from northern Ohio and the author of around a dozen books including, most recently, Loss and Foundering from NightBallet Press. He is also the founding editor of Crisis Chronicles Press, having published over 100 titles by some of the world's best writers. Find him at www.crisischronicles.com.
Robert Cooperman
The Woman with Medicine in Her Voice
I think of my mother swearing
we’d be okay, when missiles
were massing in Cuba,
her voice aloe and balm.
Or Beth, who murmured to me
as if to a frightened puppy,
before the biopsy that showed
nothing growing inside me
like monsters in a sci-fi lab.
I think, too, of the music
of mothers and wives on road trips,
like when I was a kid,
and Mom would sing the corny
classics, like “She’ll Be
Coming Round the Mountain,”
or when Beth and I drive up to snow
or hiking country, and we harmonize on
“The Weight,” “Ripple” or the Beatles,
to remind us of when we thought
music really would heal the world.
Robert Cooperman is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently, City Hat Frame Factory. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry.
I think of my mother swearing
we’d be okay, when missiles
were massing in Cuba,
her voice aloe and balm.
Or Beth, who murmured to me
as if to a frightened puppy,
before the biopsy that showed
nothing growing inside me
like monsters in a sci-fi lab.
I think, too, of the music
of mothers and wives on road trips,
like when I was a kid,
and Mom would sing the corny
classics, like “She’ll Be
Coming Round the Mountain,”
or when Beth and I drive up to snow
or hiking country, and we harmonize on
“The Weight,” “Ripple” or the Beatles,
to remind us of when we thought
music really would heal the world.
Robert Cooperman is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently, City Hat Frame Factory. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry.
Jen Karetnick
Tsuris
The woman with medicine in her voice
foams at the mouths of our open wounds.
We have been ripped open by the scalpel
of this country so many times, her speech
is a sought burn, the vapor of peppers
on a numb palate. There’s no milk we need
to drink with the meat of this pain, no salve
on offer, homemade with beeswax and oil
of camphor. In the unwritten language
we share, her words are flash paper magic
even when they are prayers fleeing the forge
of our hearts for the wrongly dead. When she
departs, she won’t even leave behind ash,
taking with her only our fresh-named ghosts.
Jen Karetnick is co-founder/co-curator of the not-for-profit organization, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), and co-editor of the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day. Winner of the Split Rock Review Poetry Chapbook Contest for her 18th book, The Crossing Over (May 2019), Jen Karetnick is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Brie Season (White Violet Press, 2014); American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016), long-listed for both the 2017 Julie Suk Award and the 2017 Lascaux Prize; and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of poetry chapbooks: Prayer of Confession (Finishing Line Press, 2014); Landscaping for Wildlife (Big Wonderful Press, 2012). Contact her at [email protected].
The woman with medicine in her voice
foams at the mouths of our open wounds.
We have been ripped open by the scalpel
of this country so many times, her speech
is a sought burn, the vapor of peppers
on a numb palate. There’s no milk we need
to drink with the meat of this pain, no salve
on offer, homemade with beeswax and oil
of camphor. In the unwritten language
we share, her words are flash paper magic
even when they are prayers fleeing the forge
of our hearts for the wrongly dead. When she
departs, she won’t even leave behind ash,
taking with her only our fresh-named ghosts.
Jen Karetnick is co-founder/co-curator of the not-for-profit organization, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), and co-editor of the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day. Winner of the Split Rock Review Poetry Chapbook Contest for her 18th book, The Crossing Over (May 2019), Jen Karetnick is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Brie Season (White Violet Press, 2014); American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016), long-listed for both the 2017 Julie Suk Award and the 2017 Lascaux Prize; and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of poetry chapbooks: Prayer of Confession (Finishing Line Press, 2014); Landscaping for Wildlife (Big Wonderful Press, 2012). Contact her at [email protected].
Jennifer Litt
The Woman with Medicine in Her Voice
works behind the counter at the chemist.
She hands me my prescription refills--
sertraline, levothyroxine & estrotrace--
designed to manage aging & depression.
Is there anything else I can get you today?
A tincture of modulation, I think,
a balm of dulcet tones.
Romeo exploits an apothecary’s poverty
to secure his cordial, potassium cyanide,
poison he calls medicine, the only antidote
he can conjure once he hears of Juliet’s death,
He never learns the truth but acts. Wisely
&slow; they stumble that run fast.
The origin of love resides in brain chemistry,
but provides no guarantee for better living--
dopamine, norepinephrine & serotonin--
What else is love? It’s a wise form of madness.
It’s a sweet lozenge that you choke on.
I let mine dissolve on my tongue, but it left a bitter
after taste like the time I mistook the dog’s heart
worm pill for one of my own. Under love’s heavy burden,
Romeo chooses suicide. The woman with medicine
in her voice has lifted mine. She hands me
some coins from a fifty. I’m all set, I reply.
Jennifer Litt has taught literature and writing to secondary and college students for more than 25 years in New York and Florida with an emphasis on education through the arts. As sole proprietor of Jennifer Litt Writing Service, Jennifer provides tutoring, writing and editing services to individuals and groups in both academic and commercial settings. She has published fiction and non-fiction, but her passion is reading and writing poetry. Jennifer’s poems have appeared in several anthologies, journals and magazines, including Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Lumina, Mixed Fruit, Naugatuck River Review, nycBigCityLit, South Florida Poetry Journal and Stone Canoe. The author of the chapbook, Maximum Speed through Zero, published in 2016 by Blue Lyra Press in its Delphi Series, Volume 2, she lives in the Victoria Park neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale.
works behind the counter at the chemist.
She hands me my prescription refills--
sertraline, levothyroxine & estrotrace--
designed to manage aging & depression.
Is there anything else I can get you today?
A tincture of modulation, I think,
a balm of dulcet tones.
Romeo exploits an apothecary’s poverty
to secure his cordial, potassium cyanide,
poison he calls medicine, the only antidote
he can conjure once he hears of Juliet’s death,
He never learns the truth but acts. Wisely
&slow; they stumble that run fast.
The origin of love resides in brain chemistry,
but provides no guarantee for better living--
dopamine, norepinephrine & serotonin--
What else is love? It’s a wise form of madness.
It’s a sweet lozenge that you choke on.
I let mine dissolve on my tongue, but it left a bitter
after taste like the time I mistook the dog’s heart
worm pill for one of my own. Under love’s heavy burden,
Romeo chooses suicide. The woman with medicine
in her voice has lifted mine. She hands me
some coins from a fifty. I’m all set, I reply.
Jennifer Litt has taught literature and writing to secondary and college students for more than 25 years in New York and Florida with an emphasis on education through the arts. As sole proprietor of Jennifer Litt Writing Service, Jennifer provides tutoring, writing and editing services to individuals and groups in both academic and commercial settings. She has published fiction and non-fiction, but her passion is reading and writing poetry. Jennifer’s poems have appeared in several anthologies, journals and magazines, including Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Lumina, Mixed Fruit, Naugatuck River Review, nycBigCityLit, South Florida Poetry Journal and Stone Canoe. The author of the chapbook, Maximum Speed through Zero, published in 2016 by Blue Lyra Press in its Delphi Series, Volume 2, she lives in the Victoria Park neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale.
Richard Ryal
Morphine
The woman with medicine in her voice and in her hand first offers her voice. I sit up and
reply I’m ready for my morning dose.
Her tone offers no choice, no question of refusing my dose. She grins, I nod, she punctures,
more kiss than stab.
I swing my legs under the covers, recline, roll toward the window. Time passes without
significance
until my pain begins to lick its fur. I start to mist slightly into the air around my body. Soon
I see the woods outside sliding closer to me
though the trees still stand where they have always been. I can’t carry my mind’s mutations
much longer. A mind with horizons could rest.
Lying still in this flowing world is good as moving. My room holds its shape and size but the
light expands and contracts like a long distance runner’s lungs.
My bigger eyes flex the local laws of time and space. Then the drift with, the wander across.
The current washing the walls, floor, ceiling is a larger life that doesn’t need me, it passes
through me. A mind, probably mine, races in place against the current, my swollen sails
anchored.
I watch trees fallen, fallen on their shadows.
Before the sun hits its height, great knowing leans against me, I touch its pelt with my
fingerprints, feel the sine curve of its breathing. I wait for its ecstatic lesson, to be
swallowed whole by a better wisdom than what put me in this hospital bed. But I can’t
writhe my way through space gone fluid, solids gone nomadic, can’t grip the stillness that
holds me or the uncountable eddies.
When the sunlight stops dancing, the trees stop sliding. I sag into my body, a stream into a
river. But that bigger knowing, out of reach, keeps pulling at me after the medicine
dissolves into the sun, into familiar voices, everyday hands.
Having neglected to draw within the lines, Richard Ryal has taught in various capacities, from high school to doctoral students, for a long time. He views poetry as a full contact sport so he always wears a helmet.
The woman with medicine in her voice and in her hand first offers her voice. I sit up and
reply I’m ready for my morning dose.
Her tone offers no choice, no question of refusing my dose. She grins, I nod, she punctures,
more kiss than stab.
I swing my legs under the covers, recline, roll toward the window. Time passes without
significance
until my pain begins to lick its fur. I start to mist slightly into the air around my body. Soon
I see the woods outside sliding closer to me
though the trees still stand where they have always been. I can’t carry my mind’s mutations
much longer. A mind with horizons could rest.
Lying still in this flowing world is good as moving. My room holds its shape and size but the
light expands and contracts like a long distance runner’s lungs.
My bigger eyes flex the local laws of time and space. Then the drift with, the wander across.
The current washing the walls, floor, ceiling is a larger life that doesn’t need me, it passes
through me. A mind, probably mine, races in place against the current, my swollen sails
anchored.
I watch trees fallen, fallen on their shadows.
Before the sun hits its height, great knowing leans against me, I touch its pelt with my
fingerprints, feel the sine curve of its breathing. I wait for its ecstatic lesson, to be
swallowed whole by a better wisdom than what put me in this hospital bed. But I can’t
writhe my way through space gone fluid, solids gone nomadic, can’t grip the stillness that
holds me or the uncountable eddies.
When the sunlight stops dancing, the trees stop sliding. I sag into my body, a stream into a
river. But that bigger knowing, out of reach, keeps pulling at me after the medicine
dissolves into the sun, into familiar voices, everyday hands.
Having neglected to draw within the lines, Richard Ryal has taught in various capacities, from high school to doctoral students, for a long time. He views poetry as a full contact sport so he always wears a helmet.
Catherine Esposito Prescott
Follow-Up Visits
There are many ways to look
inside a body.
I’ve been scanned and opened.
Today, bloodwork
is how we enter.
Drawn every six months,
the numbers
deciphered, signs
of disease decoded,
we search for disappearance.
Each cell holds a half-shut door
where cancer fled.
We look for its shadow-prints,
its silhouettes, its bad-boy fedora-clad,
sinister-smiled, skinny-cigarette-smoking cells.
We look for the still-burning fire and the smoldering ashes.
I am told to believe I am healthy,
cured,
clean
because the mind
makes us, makes me, makes my cells
dance in ecstasy or betray my body,
so when I sing
I am the woman with medicine in her voice,
a voice that rains light, light that scours my body
until each organ shines,
no faithless trace--
and my body is an emptied mind,
a light-filled sky,
where there’s nothing to mind, nothing the matter.
Catherine Esposito Prescott has worked as a copywriter, editor, book seller, activist, fundraiser, event organizer, organic garden founder, professor, and teaching artist. With poet and writer Jen Karetnick, she is a co-director of the nonprofit organization SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers In Miami), which produces a year-round reading series and the online poetry journal SWWIM Every Day to promote and celebrate women, women-identifying and femme-presenting writers. Prescott also works as an editor and copywriter; she lives with her husband and three children in Miami Beach, Florida.
There are many ways to look
inside a body.
I’ve been scanned and opened.
Today, bloodwork
is how we enter.
Drawn every six months,
the numbers
deciphered, signs
of disease decoded,
we search for disappearance.
Each cell holds a half-shut door
where cancer fled.
We look for its shadow-prints,
its silhouettes, its bad-boy fedora-clad,
sinister-smiled, skinny-cigarette-smoking cells.
We look for the still-burning fire and the smoldering ashes.
I am told to believe I am healthy,
cured,
clean
because the mind
makes us, makes me, makes my cells
dance in ecstasy or betray my body,
so when I sing
I am the woman with medicine in her voice,
a voice that rains light, light that scours my body
until each organ shines,
no faithless trace--
and my body is an emptied mind,
a light-filled sky,
where there’s nothing to mind, nothing the matter.
Catherine Esposito Prescott has worked as a copywriter, editor, book seller, activist, fundraiser, event organizer, organic garden founder, professor, and teaching artist. With poet and writer Jen Karetnick, she is a co-director of the nonprofit organization SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers In Miami), which produces a year-round reading series and the online poetry journal SWWIM Every Day to promote and celebrate women, women-identifying and femme-presenting writers. Prescott also works as an editor and copywriter; she lives with her husband and three children in Miami Beach, Florida.
SoFloPoJo is a labor of love by: Associate Editors: Elisa Albo Don Burns David Colodney Deborah DeNicola Gary Kay Sarah Kersey Stacie M. Kiner Barbra Nightingale Sally Naylor Susannah Simpson Meryl Stratford Patricia Whiting Francine Witte
Reviewers: Freesia McKee and Michael Hettich
Managing Editor & C0-Publisher
Michael Mackin O'Mara
[email protected]
Founder & Co-Publisher
Lenny DellaRocca
[email protected]
Reviewers: Freesia McKee and Michael Hettich
Managing Editor & C0-Publisher
Michael Mackin O'Mara
[email protected]
Founder & Co-Publisher
Lenny DellaRocca
[email protected]