Issue 13 May 2019
David Colodney, Editor
David Colodney, Editor
Poets in this issue: Cornelius Eady Sarah Jefferis Patrick Erickson Jenny Molberg Bruce Bond Susan Deer Cloud Bruce Snider Rebecca Schumejda Kristine Snodgrass Thylias Moss & Bob Holman Kelly O'Rouke James Wyshynski Jonathan K. Rice January Pearson Jeff Hardin Steve Kronen Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton Denise Duhamel Gregg Shapiro John Dorroh Danny Fitzpatrick Alan Catlin Joseph Chaney Jonathan Rose Suchoon Mo Holly Jaffee Darren Demeree Doug Ramspeck Hiram Larew /Poets Respond to the Prompt: Iris Jamahl Dunkle Ryn Holmes Jeff Santosuosso Carmine G. Di Biase Jim Daniels
The World is Watching Digital Photography by James E. Lewis
Scroll down for Poets Respond to the Prompt
Cornelius Eady
Perhaps The Greatest Error
This guy makes is getting in Buzz Alden’s
Face, or perhaps it’s that he wants Buzz
To admit, to cry, to repent that it’s all been
A joke, a hoax, that Moon stuff, just something
Home made with lights and mirrors; remember
Playing “Space”, your cardboard box lifting off
The living room carpet, and there you go,
The ceiling, the roof, the falling off of the streets
Though the scissored window, away, away,
Then the corrugated darkness, and stars.
But it’s a cardboard box, and the gravity
Of your parents house, where a kid, as we know
Has to snap out of it, sooner or later, or they
Begin to worry about where you’ll land.
So down from the beautiful, silent orbit,
That slow brake called reasonable, the weight
Of the world dragging your arms. Come on,
The man insists, like your father’s hand ruffling
Your pillow with a quarter, caught, when all
He wanted was for you to believe, just for a bit
Longer, that that baby tooth of yours called
Beings invisible to your bed, stop lying
And tell us the truth. O, intangible worlds,
An astronaut tightens his hand, and his fist
Is launched to the chin of the idiot moon.
Poet/Playwright/Songwriter Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, where he is also Poetry Editor of the Southampton Review. He is the author of several poetry collections: Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don't Miss Your Water; The Autobiography of a Jukebox; and Brutal Imagination. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation, and was, before returning to Stony Brook, The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
This guy makes is getting in Buzz Alden’s
Face, or perhaps it’s that he wants Buzz
To admit, to cry, to repent that it’s all been
A joke, a hoax, that Moon stuff, just something
Home made with lights and mirrors; remember
Playing “Space”, your cardboard box lifting off
The living room carpet, and there you go,
The ceiling, the roof, the falling off of the streets
Though the scissored window, away, away,
Then the corrugated darkness, and stars.
But it’s a cardboard box, and the gravity
Of your parents house, where a kid, as we know
Has to snap out of it, sooner or later, or they
Begin to worry about where you’ll land.
So down from the beautiful, silent orbit,
That slow brake called reasonable, the weight
Of the world dragging your arms. Come on,
The man insists, like your father’s hand ruffling
Your pillow with a quarter, caught, when all
He wanted was for you to believe, just for a bit
Longer, that that baby tooth of yours called
Beings invisible to your bed, stop lying
And tell us the truth. O, intangible worlds,
An astronaut tightens his hand, and his fist
Is launched to the chin of the idiot moon.
Poet/Playwright/Songwriter Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, where he is also Poetry Editor of the Southampton Review. He is the author of several poetry collections: Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don't Miss Your Water; The Autobiography of a Jukebox; and Brutal Imagination. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation, and was, before returning to Stony Brook, The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
Sarah Jefferis 3 poems
New Year’s Ash
In these first days of the New Year
I want to toss on my boots, zip
up my jacket and begin the ascent
over the hill and between the two willows.
I would do this for you even though I hate nature.
I want to yank the grass up
kill all the worms and dig and dig.
I am tired of being brave.
I want to stand together in the grave because even when
we were married you ran from me.
I want to stomp your casket
boot print your fat face
and beat the living shit out of your skeleton.
Beat your skull.
Pummel ash.
And I want to spit on your last few bones in my hand
for leaving me with two girls
for leaving two girls without ever apologizing.
And holding what is left of you
in my left hand I want to whisper
thank you thank you thank you.
In these first days of the New Year
I want to toss on my boots, zip
up my jacket and begin the ascent
over the hill and between the two willows.
I would do this for you even though I hate nature.
I want to yank the grass up
kill all the worms and dig and dig.
I am tired of being brave.
I want to stand together in the grave because even when
we were married you ran from me.
I want to stomp your casket
boot print your fat face
and beat the living shit out of your skeleton.
Beat your skull.
Pummel ash.
And I want to spit on your last few bones in my hand
for leaving me with two girls
for leaving two girls without ever apologizing.
And holding what is left of you
in my left hand I want to whisper
thank you thank you thank you.
At This Hour
I am not one who goes easily to knees.
Not one whose mouth opens first.
Have never had a cock that did not all fit.
Up for the challenge. Or down for it.
You have no idea what I can handle.
Something about you makes me feel
like only one of us is going to break.
You tell me to touch toes, speak in a tone
I would not stand for outside this room.
The room we left as it was.
Not supposed to like girls on TV. But we both do.
I come first and last. A captain of sorts.
You are a poet, you say, you can get anything you want at this hour.
Want you to moan my name.
Want you to spoon.
Want breakfast kiss and dinner and breakfast again.
Want to know if the tongue gym exists.
With my blood on your fist,
I call out for you to cease.
I have seen lots of blood, you say.
Your story is not what you spit.
You only have half of mine.
I was the all tongue girl waiting
beneath pew to be anointed.
Wafer wanting.
But in your living room with clips and paddle,
your crated golden pit-bull
is our only witness to ass up.
All of us dogs in our own light.
I am not one who goes easily to knees.
Not one whose mouth opens first.
Have never had a cock that did not all fit.
Up for the challenge. Or down for it.
You have no idea what I can handle.
Something about you makes me feel
like only one of us is going to break.
You tell me to touch toes, speak in a tone
I would not stand for outside this room.
The room we left as it was.
Not supposed to like girls on TV. But we both do.
I come first and last. A captain of sorts.
You are a poet, you say, you can get anything you want at this hour.
Want you to moan my name.
Want you to spoon.
Want breakfast kiss and dinner and breakfast again.
Want to know if the tongue gym exists.
With my blood on your fist,
I call out for you to cease.
I have seen lots of blood, you say.
Your story is not what you spit.
You only have half of mine.
I was the all tongue girl waiting
beneath pew to be anointed.
Wafer wanting.
But in your living room with clips and paddle,
your crated golden pit-bull
is our only witness to ass up.
All of us dogs in our own light.
Learning to speak again after divorce
I am training my tongue to drive. It is slow to learn.
Tongue not brief. The floor of my mouth does not have a margin
for error. Does not have a sign for break.
Tongue cannot swing properly inside my lips
to produce sound. Or even a clear note.
I am sticky and mistuned—mis tongued.
I cannot fit together in a groove. I cannot even capture
the half beautiful or half ugly winged male prey who lay themselves down for me.
Tongue mutters in the garden but it is still the tree of life.
Exiled, it soothes and calls Cleopatra
craves all the ophidians to see whose river will taste like home.
Sarah Jefferis is an author, editor, and mentor. Through her consultant business, Write. Now., Sarah serves as a 1:1 writing coach for graduate students working on dissertations and for writers who need assistance with brainstorming, revision, editing, organization, query letters and the like. She designs and leads generative workshops on the creative process and the necessity of vulnerability, as well as subject-specific writing workshops that empower mothers and children to honor their artistic spirit and develop confident voices. She offers poetry readings on surviving trauma, and on trusting the writing process as a tool to speak out and effect change.
I am training my tongue to drive. It is slow to learn.
Tongue not brief. The floor of my mouth does not have a margin
for error. Does not have a sign for break.
Tongue cannot swing properly inside my lips
to produce sound. Or even a clear note.
I am sticky and mistuned—mis tongued.
I cannot fit together in a groove. I cannot even capture
the half beautiful or half ugly winged male prey who lay themselves down for me.
Tongue mutters in the garden but it is still the tree of life.
Exiled, it soothes and calls Cleopatra
craves all the ophidians to see whose river will taste like home.
Sarah Jefferis is an author, editor, and mentor. Through her consultant business, Write. Now., Sarah serves as a 1:1 writing coach for graduate students working on dissertations and for writers who need assistance with brainstorming, revision, editing, organization, query letters and the like. She designs and leads generative workshops on the creative process and the necessity of vulnerability, as well as subject-specific writing workshops that empower mothers and children to honor their artistic spirit and develop confident voices. She offers poetry readings on surviving trauma, and on trusting the writing process as a tool to speak out and effect change.
Patrick Erickson
Easter Eve
Broom and dustpan in hand
into the dustbin
this culture of steel springing shut
this iron age like a steel trap
steel collars for the party bosses
iron leggings for those who call the shots
for those in the know neck irons
and thumbscrews
Steel shavings and iron filings withal
the lathe of time, the rasp of fleeting moments
we forged the chains ourselves.
Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, and The Main Street Rag, among other publications, and more recently in The Oddville Press, Vox Poetica, Adelaide Literary Magazine and Futures Trading.
Broom and dustpan in hand
into the dustbin
this culture of steel springing shut
this iron age like a steel trap
steel collars for the party bosses
iron leggings for those who call the shots
for those in the know neck irons
and thumbscrews
Steel shavings and iron filings withal
the lathe of time, the rasp of fleeting moments
we forged the chains ourselves.
Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, and The Main Street Rag, among other publications, and more recently in The Oddville Press, Vox Poetica, Adelaide Literary Magazine and Futures Trading.
Jenny Molberg 2 poems
Blues in Kansas City
How good / to tell him “no” when I feel like it, and “yes” and “maybe”...
—Vievee Francis, “Husband Fair”
for C. S.
And when I followed me through a humid night
thick with cherry wood smoke apple wood smoke
I entered an alleyway as though there were a magnet
in my shoes but there was no magnet just
the heat the red floral dress that clutched my thighs
the night of my wedding anniversary two years
after I’d left home and the overhead crackling
of raining multicolor stars my rum buzz
the city’s small and t-shirted gods proud of the offerings
they made their country racks of cow ribs on smokers
black cats littering the streets I followed the sounds
of what felt like my mood ordered a drink
wiped the sweat from my head looked around as one does
in their loneliness not for anyone but to make sure
I was still alone and a low brass growl filled my lungs
it was unlike all my other hungers it was not mine
what I could not know was that there
was a hole in the trumpeter’s heart but I could hear it
in the dark timbre the tall glissandos he muffled
the horn then released all the sound in the room
what I did not know was that once we shared
another city where he bugled in uniform folded flags
descending into rows of white stones that go on forever
a graveyard abacus counting backwards this country’s
years of someone’s dead children
what I cannot know is that we might have looked
right past each other in that city wearing its carpets
of pink blossoms walking on the arms of someone else
it is hard to believe that someone could love me
and I was thinking as I often do of Brigit Pegeen Kelly
the heart dies of this sweetness a headless song
rising out of violence and the many bruised years
I followed some man into dark streets
but how this time I’d been alone and the only reason
we go on living is that maybe it will be different
and what I cannot know but think I believe is that it could
I followed a single note out of a black night
lit with fire and it seems important now
that I try not to be afraid.
How good / to tell him “no” when I feel like it, and “yes” and “maybe”...
—Vievee Francis, “Husband Fair”
for C. S.
And when I followed me through a humid night
thick with cherry wood smoke apple wood smoke
I entered an alleyway as though there were a magnet
in my shoes but there was no magnet just
the heat the red floral dress that clutched my thighs
the night of my wedding anniversary two years
after I’d left home and the overhead crackling
of raining multicolor stars my rum buzz
the city’s small and t-shirted gods proud of the offerings
they made their country racks of cow ribs on smokers
black cats littering the streets I followed the sounds
of what felt like my mood ordered a drink
wiped the sweat from my head looked around as one does
in their loneliness not for anyone but to make sure
I was still alone and a low brass growl filled my lungs
it was unlike all my other hungers it was not mine
what I could not know was that there
was a hole in the trumpeter’s heart but I could hear it
in the dark timbre the tall glissandos he muffled
the horn then released all the sound in the room
what I did not know was that once we shared
another city where he bugled in uniform folded flags
descending into rows of white stones that go on forever
a graveyard abacus counting backwards this country’s
years of someone’s dead children
what I cannot know is that we might have looked
right past each other in that city wearing its carpets
of pink blossoms walking on the arms of someone else
it is hard to believe that someone could love me
and I was thinking as I often do of Brigit Pegeen Kelly
the heart dies of this sweetness a headless song
rising out of violence and the many bruised years
I followed some man into dark streets
but how this time I’d been alone and the only reason
we go on living is that maybe it will be different
and what I cannot know but think I believe is that it could
I followed a single note out of a black night
lit with fire and it seems important now
that I try not to be afraid.
The Museum of Who We Used to Be
Jenny, I gave you that unhappy / Book that nobody knows but you /and me…
—James Wright, “The Idea of the Good”
to D.K.
It’s too painful to look at the boy’s splayed heart
at the mummy exhibit, so you walk out
to the gift shop with your hands in your pockets.
But I can’t stop looking at the open ribs,
the boy-heart, a ruby in a white tree,
thinking of a city night long ago,
so cold, you opened
your leather jacket for me, and then
I was wearing something of yours,
my beating chest singing down the street.
I am not the person I used to be.
And yet, you are someone I used to know,
someone I still know.
Jenny light, Jenny darkness. You misremember
a line of our old favorite poem,
and a scalpel of light goes in through my ribs.
The poet invented Jenny,
I once read, after waking alone in the dark.
Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (forthcoming, LSU Press). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, and Boulevard. She is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the CD Wright conference. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, and edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
Jenny, I gave you that unhappy / Book that nobody knows but you /and me…
—James Wright, “The Idea of the Good”
to D.K.
It’s too painful to look at the boy’s splayed heart
at the mummy exhibit, so you walk out
to the gift shop with your hands in your pockets.
But I can’t stop looking at the open ribs,
the boy-heart, a ruby in a white tree,
thinking of a city night long ago,
so cold, you opened
your leather jacket for me, and then
I was wearing something of yours,
my beating chest singing down the street.
I am not the person I used to be.
And yet, you are someone I used to know,
someone I still know.
Jenny light, Jenny darkness. You misremember
a line of our old favorite poem,
and a scalpel of light goes in through my ribs.
The poet invented Jenny,
I once read, after waking alone in the dark.
Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (forthcoming, LSU Press). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, and Boulevard. She is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the CD Wright conference. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, and edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
Bruce Bond 3 poems
Angels
If I could talk to an angel I could trust,
I would say, I think you know my friend
who had no stomach for the talking cure.
If I exorcize my demons, so go my angels,
he said. Call it a mere figure of speech,
and you break the glass of figurines
songs are made of. It is a figure. There.
I confess. I grow weary of these songs
that tear the heart from its closet and wing it
out so far from earth each singer is alone.
If I could talk to my friend who had his
demons, I would. If I could raise the tremor
of our cups. (Are you free for breakfast, I
cannot sleep.) If I knew how serious it was.
*
A song is not a flock, however much
each solo has a little of the plural,
a lot of none, a touch of the body
immersed in the common element,
as the faithful are in a local river,
at one with the father and yet no god.
If you are lost, you are not alone.
Music walks the waters of the world
in search of those who are already here.
One lies down with the lion of each
and sighs as lovers do and heavy objects.
Nights lie down in rivers that are restless
as grief we cannot talk about right now.
So fierce the pins of stars against the water.
*
If I ever fly alone, I talk with strangers
or not at all. Stranger still is how
it matters, more than I know, what it is
I grant, in some unmeasured fashion,
the note of kind regard or condescension,
passing, as music does, into a general
pattern of which I am a part. I tell
myself our paths will never cross again,
and so I board the plane, undistracted
by the sound of friends and the familiar
names, prone to disappear, as folks do
into the general pattern I call the world,
the one that does not know me, by name,
or where the stranger takes me when she goes.
If I could talk to an angel I could trust,
I would say, I think you know my friend
who had no stomach for the talking cure.
If I exorcize my demons, so go my angels,
he said. Call it a mere figure of speech,
and you break the glass of figurines
songs are made of. It is a figure. There.
I confess. I grow weary of these songs
that tear the heart from its closet and wing it
out so far from earth each singer is alone.
If I could talk to my friend who had his
demons, I would. If I could raise the tremor
of our cups. (Are you free for breakfast, I
cannot sleep.) If I knew how serious it was.
*
A song is not a flock, however much
each solo has a little of the plural,
a lot of none, a touch of the body
immersed in the common element,
as the faithful are in a local river,
at one with the father and yet no god.
If you are lost, you are not alone.
Music walks the waters of the world
in search of those who are already here.
One lies down with the lion of each
and sighs as lovers do and heavy objects.
Nights lie down in rivers that are restless
as grief we cannot talk about right now.
So fierce the pins of stars against the water.
*
If I ever fly alone, I talk with strangers
or not at all. Stranger still is how
it matters, more than I know, what it is
I grant, in some unmeasured fashion,
the note of kind regard or condescension,
passing, as music does, into a general
pattern of which I am a part. I tell
myself our paths will never cross again,
and so I board the plane, undistracted
by the sound of friends and the familiar
names, prone to disappear, as folks do
into the general pattern I call the world,
the one that does not know me, by name,
or where the stranger takes me when she goes.
The Party
About now the conversation has turned
political, which makes even the most
egregious bore at the party feel a little
anxious, a slave to the glass he empties
and fills, because there is just so much
room for error and smoke and cruel
behavior behind the curtain, and the fire
that is the subject of our conference panel
has people in it and therefore silence,
and therefore, the politics of the room
bespeaks a more generalized concern,
more plagued than reported, more full
of emptiness as water is to those who
plunge, hand in hand, and cannot hear a word.
*
To every temple, its panoply of idols
where spirits go to die. I said this to a flag
once with a coffin beneath the shadow
flag below. It was time. I was told.
It was not personal. I dipped my head
in silent grace and looked up, drenched.
To every stately office, a pride of columns.
I loved my country with my good hand
across my heart. Under God, I said,
because I was told. It was time. After
all, I too feared death, and loved earth
movers and gods of similar proportions.
I was small in the sky, as flags are small
in the pointless wind that makes them fly.
*
When the speeches end and music begins
to frame a better argument for listening,
balloons fall out of the convention hall
ceiling, and the candidate and family
hold up their hands, so audible the cheer,
no one can hear the lyrics, let alone
one’s own strange voice inside the voices.
Here beneath the happy spheres of air
bouncing on our heads, hope surrenders
what it can to the gala that never parts
a curtain, the throb of the lower registers
more felt than heard, more willfully suppressed,
crushed, as fury is inside the earth,
beneath the smoke and thunder of the crowd.
About now the conversation has turned
political, which makes even the most
egregious bore at the party feel a little
anxious, a slave to the glass he empties
and fills, because there is just so much
room for error and smoke and cruel
behavior behind the curtain, and the fire
that is the subject of our conference panel
has people in it and therefore silence,
and therefore, the politics of the room
bespeaks a more generalized concern,
more plagued than reported, more full
of emptiness as water is to those who
plunge, hand in hand, and cannot hear a word.
*
To every temple, its panoply of idols
where spirits go to die. I said this to a flag
once with a coffin beneath the shadow
flag below. It was time. I was told.
It was not personal. I dipped my head
in silent grace and looked up, drenched.
To every stately office, a pride of columns.
I loved my country with my good hand
across my heart. Under God, I said,
because I was told. It was time. After
all, I too feared death, and loved earth
movers and gods of similar proportions.
I was small in the sky, as flags are small
in the pointless wind that makes them fly.
*
When the speeches end and music begins
to frame a better argument for listening,
balloons fall out of the convention hall
ceiling, and the candidate and family
hold up their hands, so audible the cheer,
no one can hear the lyrics, let alone
one’s own strange voice inside the voices.
Here beneath the happy spheres of air
bouncing on our heads, hope surrenders
what it can to the gala that never parts
a curtain, the throb of the lower registers
more felt than heard, more willfully suppressed,
crushed, as fury is inside the earth,
beneath the smoke and thunder of the crowd.
Wilderness
To you, if you are listening,
I am no one
and so hear things that no one hears.
If a deer leaps from nowhere
to the road, what it leaves
of the many bleeds into one.
And for a moment I hear less,
as no one hears. Minus one.
But know the river is a road
we walk together. We must.
It crackles with a good star
that burns the name we give it.
If I come upon your body
in my path, know I will not, cannot,
leave. Although I travel on.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018). Five books are forthcoming including Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
To you, if you are listening,
I am no one
and so hear things that no one hears.
If a deer leaps from nowhere
to the road, what it leaves
of the many bleeds into one.
And for a moment I hear less,
as no one hears. Minus one.
But know the river is a road
we walk together. We must.
It crackles with a good star
that burns the name we give it.
If I come upon your body
in my path, know I will not, cannot,
leave. Although I travel on.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018). Five books are forthcoming including Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
Susan Deer Cloud 3 poems
Oda a los Copos de Nieve (Ode to the Snowflake)
Santiago, Chile, streets ….
jacaranda trees freeing their petals
in December light which must be
the light people sing about
after near death experiences
when they fly through their skins
in an astonishment of wings lifting
them above snow-capped Andes,
gaze with condor eyes down
on their breathless bodies and everybody,
love soaring enough to pick hatred
clean. Streets where Pablo Neruda
swayed like a big-bellied boat, in Bellavista
clambering hill house he dream-built
for Mathilde of the red hair which refused
to behave. In this city of seven million
flaming towards summer solstice
I wander with my own lover
whose hair refuses servitude
to the taming comb. Hugging
sidewalk shadows whenever we can,
we embrace each other in places
purpled by fallen jacaranda flowers,
overhead green parrots squawking
the poetry of lost trees. And what if
I died in the Catskill Mountains last May
when I was diagnosed with breast cancer?
Could Santiago, Chile, be my after life?
Is this light the Milky Way’s star road
watched over by llama eyes, this flashing
out of my skin not my usual fleeting rapture
when solstice flares in? Back home
on Facebook Timelines friends share
photographs of America’s first snows.
But others post right-wing meme lynchings
hoping to strangle the gentle with taunts ….
“You’re too sensitive. Bunch of snowflakes.
Stop whining.” Si, maybe I died up north,
but surely not from the tortures of crass words
administered by the pseudo-clever.
On this iridescent day Santiago is my heaven
in which Chilean poet-ghosts amble with my lover
and me. I sing the names of Gabriela Mistral,
Nicanor and Violeta Parra, Pablo Neruda
and Mathilde whose wild hair made him
wilder, and many others. I praise all
the sensitive ones, including the Indians
in this land shaped like a dagger.
Undefeated we smile at snow
like fire opal necklaces encircling
mountain peaks, liberating our eyes
from the old existence in which politics
seemed important, freeing us from
the mean-spirited who politicize
even snowflakes, whose only religion
is to condemn anyone who defies
the god of fast food clichés. I laugh
“Salud!” to the rebels of extravagant heart
who sparkle unique as each snowflake.
I sing those crystals that gather
into shape-shifting clouds until
they descend in countless soft silences
of the people who have never been heard,
a wordless music of snow covering
the hard land. In this Chilean heat
I praise the snowflakes that seem
so delicate, so transient, but possess
the power of nor’easters and when
they melt become powerful rivers
flowing into the seas, water growing
forests and crops. In this city of sun
and shadow and forgotten secrets
I remember when my lover and I
fell to Mother Earth and snowflakes
like tiny birds shivered on our lips,
how our arms turned to wings
and we made snow angels in a new world.
Santiago, Chile, streets ….
jacaranda trees freeing their petals
in December light which must be
the light people sing about
after near death experiences
when they fly through their skins
in an astonishment of wings lifting
them above snow-capped Andes,
gaze with condor eyes down
on their breathless bodies and everybody,
love soaring enough to pick hatred
clean. Streets where Pablo Neruda
swayed like a big-bellied boat, in Bellavista
clambering hill house he dream-built
for Mathilde of the red hair which refused
to behave. In this city of seven million
flaming towards summer solstice
I wander with my own lover
whose hair refuses servitude
to the taming comb. Hugging
sidewalk shadows whenever we can,
we embrace each other in places
purpled by fallen jacaranda flowers,
overhead green parrots squawking
the poetry of lost trees. And what if
I died in the Catskill Mountains last May
when I was diagnosed with breast cancer?
Could Santiago, Chile, be my after life?
Is this light the Milky Way’s star road
watched over by llama eyes, this flashing
out of my skin not my usual fleeting rapture
when solstice flares in? Back home
on Facebook Timelines friends share
photographs of America’s first snows.
But others post right-wing meme lynchings
hoping to strangle the gentle with taunts ….
“You’re too sensitive. Bunch of snowflakes.
Stop whining.” Si, maybe I died up north,
but surely not from the tortures of crass words
administered by the pseudo-clever.
On this iridescent day Santiago is my heaven
in which Chilean poet-ghosts amble with my lover
and me. I sing the names of Gabriela Mistral,
Nicanor and Violeta Parra, Pablo Neruda
and Mathilde whose wild hair made him
wilder, and many others. I praise all
the sensitive ones, including the Indians
in this land shaped like a dagger.
Undefeated we smile at snow
like fire opal necklaces encircling
mountain peaks, liberating our eyes
from the old existence in which politics
seemed important, freeing us from
the mean-spirited who politicize
even snowflakes, whose only religion
is to condemn anyone who defies
the god of fast food clichés. I laugh
“Salud!” to the rebels of extravagant heart
who sparkle unique as each snowflake.
I sing those crystals that gather
into shape-shifting clouds until
they descend in countless soft silences
of the people who have never been heard,
a wordless music of snow covering
the hard land. In this Chilean heat
I praise the snowflakes that seem
so delicate, so transient, but possess
the power of nor’easters and when
they melt become powerful rivers
flowing into the seas, water growing
forests and crops. In this city of sun
and shadow and forgotten secrets
I remember when my lover and I
fell to Mother Earth and snowflakes
like tiny birds shivered on our lips,
how our arms turned to wings
and we made snow angels in a new world.
Wild Donkeys of Chile's Atacoma Desert
Wild donkeys of Chile's Atacoma Desert, I dreamed you
before I knew you existed. Since my Indian grandpa
took me one midsummer's night to watch donkey baseball
on 1950s small town ball field, this electric-lit dream
of donkeys inhabited the girl I was, poor girl enraptured
by a whirl of donkey bodies kicking up mirages of fairy dust.
Shy donkeys grazing not far from shimmering Pacific,
ever since that amazed child wished you had no riders
but could wander free as I roamed in forests and fields,
I dreamed that someday I would meet the donkeys
of no saddles or reins. Yes, a donkey would appear
as a pony did one August midnight outside our back door,
sidle over to me beneath the falling stars
until my face would fall softly against its soft face,
twinned eyes glowing as though we had just been born.
Ungrammatical donkeys of Atacoma, in eighth grade
my English teacher gave me Jimenez's Platero and I.
After reading it, more than before I yearned to rove
with my own donkey soul mate for making memoir,
companion stubborn and sensitive as the poet
I had already become. Si, a wind-touseled amigo
who I would not burden with packs of nada, nor whip
or tie down. Brown eyed donkeys of Pacha Mama's desert,
your eyes evoke the dark pools in my Catskill woods,
hidden places only dreamers like me can find.
How magical the donkeys of Atacoma! If only I had
wildflowers to feed you and braid into crowns encircling
your long listening ears. Oh, silver donkey, turning
your face to me while you get a sly hard on, let us go now
to the blue sea of black rocks Neruda loved.
Wild donkeys of Chile's Atacoma Desert, I dreamed you
before I knew you existed. Since my Indian grandpa
took me one midsummer's night to watch donkey baseball
on 1950s small town ball field, this electric-lit dream
of donkeys inhabited the girl I was, poor girl enraptured
by a whirl of donkey bodies kicking up mirages of fairy dust.
Shy donkeys grazing not far from shimmering Pacific,
ever since that amazed child wished you had no riders
but could wander free as I roamed in forests and fields,
I dreamed that someday I would meet the donkeys
of no saddles or reins. Yes, a donkey would appear
as a pony did one August midnight outside our back door,
sidle over to me beneath the falling stars
until my face would fall softly against its soft face,
twinned eyes glowing as though we had just been born.
Ungrammatical donkeys of Atacoma, in eighth grade
my English teacher gave me Jimenez's Platero and I.
After reading it, more than before I yearned to rove
with my own donkey soul mate for making memoir,
companion stubborn and sensitive as the poet
I had already become. Si, a wind-touseled amigo
who I would not burden with packs of nada, nor whip
or tie down. Brown eyed donkeys of Pacha Mama's desert,
your eyes evoke the dark pools in my Catskill woods,
hidden places only dreamers like me can find.
How magical the donkeys of Atacoma! If only I had
wildflowers to feed you and braid into crowns encircling
your long listening ears. Oh, silver donkey, turning
your face to me while you get a sly hard on, let us go now
to the blue sea of black rocks Neruda loved.
Heathcliff's Moor
This late summer mist floats me
back to that December I was fourteen,
to Christmas Eve day when my parents
were still alive and they and my brothers
and little sister and I traipsed up
a back mountain road in winter fog.
How like silvery wraiths my family,
glimmering the way tinsel glowed
on our Christmas tree. I loved them so.
I had just devoured Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights. The Catskills' ghostly air
evoked the South Pennines' high wild moor
where Catherine and Heathcliff loved ....
“He's more myself than I am. Whatever
our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
How I wanted such love, a dark boy others scoffed
was a "Gypsy," more myself than I. But any
passerby would have merely glimpsed
a virgin in holly-green dress and coat
nearly invisible in the mute fog
made musical with laughing voices. Unseen
I dreamed of flying to the moorland
where Heathcliff and Catherine roved.
This late summer mist transports me
back to four springs ago when my lover
took me to that very place, when sun
rose to 10 AM yet still couldn't pierce
mists shrouding fields and paths,
lambs and shaggy cattle ambling curious
to fences, and then the faded wood sign
pointing to Brontë Falls. All hilly moss,
lichen-painted rocks and long emerald grass
it shone beside the unbridled stream, and we
tramped along the creek until we reached
the waterfall. To think our soaked hiking shoes
inhabited the phantom footsteps of the three sisters,
of those Brontë girls whose holy fire blazed
like that May sun dispelling the fairy mist at last.
On to Top Withens' farmhouse connected
with Wuthering Heights, its cresting moor,
a red grouse, the land dreamlike fanning forth.
"Heathcliff!" In silence I cried my broken life's desire.
“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free ....
Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I
once among the heather on those hills.”
Susan Deer Cloud, a mixed lineage Catskill Indian, is an alumna of Goddard College (MFA) and
Binghamton University (B.A. and M.A.). She has taught Creative Writing, Rhetoric and Literature at Binghamton University and Broome Community College. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Her books include Before Language and Hunger Moon (Shabda Press); Fox Mountain, The Last Ceremony and Car Stealer (FootHills Publishing); and Braiding Starlight (Split Oak Press).
This late summer mist floats me
back to that December I was fourteen,
to Christmas Eve day when my parents
were still alive and they and my brothers
and little sister and I traipsed up
a back mountain road in winter fog.
How like silvery wraiths my family,
glimmering the way tinsel glowed
on our Christmas tree. I loved them so.
I had just devoured Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights. The Catskills' ghostly air
evoked the South Pennines' high wild moor
where Catherine and Heathcliff loved ....
“He's more myself than I am. Whatever
our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
How I wanted such love, a dark boy others scoffed
was a "Gypsy," more myself than I. But any
passerby would have merely glimpsed
a virgin in holly-green dress and coat
nearly invisible in the mute fog
made musical with laughing voices. Unseen
I dreamed of flying to the moorland
where Heathcliff and Catherine roved.
This late summer mist transports me
back to four springs ago when my lover
took me to that very place, when sun
rose to 10 AM yet still couldn't pierce
mists shrouding fields and paths,
lambs and shaggy cattle ambling curious
to fences, and then the faded wood sign
pointing to Brontë Falls. All hilly moss,
lichen-painted rocks and long emerald grass
it shone beside the unbridled stream, and we
tramped along the creek until we reached
the waterfall. To think our soaked hiking shoes
inhabited the phantom footsteps of the three sisters,
of those Brontë girls whose holy fire blazed
like that May sun dispelling the fairy mist at last.
On to Top Withens' farmhouse connected
with Wuthering Heights, its cresting moor,
a red grouse, the land dreamlike fanning forth.
"Heathcliff!" In silence I cried my broken life's desire.
“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free ....
Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I
once among the heather on those hills.”
Susan Deer Cloud, a mixed lineage Catskill Indian, is an alumna of Goddard College (MFA) and
Binghamton University (B.A. and M.A.). She has taught Creative Writing, Rhetoric and Literature at Binghamton University and Broome Community College. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Her books include Before Language and Hunger Moon (Shabda Press); Fox Mountain, The Last Ceremony and Car Stealer (FootHills Publishing); and Braiding Starlight (Split Oak Press).
Bruce Snider 3 poems
Childless
in Rome
In the Vatican, we pause at a goddess of fertility who wears the marble testicles of bulls. Behind us: children of tourists, a fury of hands. In painting after painting, another infant cherub, another baby Jesus stares from Mary’s lap. At the hotel, I lay beside you with this body that can never make a child with your body. We make love, talk about the statues of Hadrian and Antinous, how our guide described excavated brothels, young men who sold themselves to Roman soldiers. By morning, we wake refreshed. June sun glints off old stonework in the villa below, a tobacco tin, oranges in the trees. Later, in our rental car outside the city, we hold hands, passing acres of trellised vines, grapes ripening along the highway, arguing for wine.
in Rome
In the Vatican, we pause at a goddess of fertility who wears the marble testicles of bulls. Behind us: children of tourists, a fury of hands. In painting after painting, another infant cherub, another baby Jesus stares from Mary’s lap. At the hotel, I lay beside you with this body that can never make a child with your body. We make love, talk about the statues of Hadrian and Antinous, how our guide described excavated brothels, young men who sold themselves to Roman soldiers. By morning, we wake refreshed. June sun glints off old stonework in the villa below, a tobacco tin, oranges in the trees. Later, in our rental car outside the city, we hold hands, passing acres of trellised vines, grapes ripening along the highway, arguing for wine.
Childless
Just the two of us, some days I love you without interruption. Each evening I say your name. Forgive me this rough June sky. Forgive me this constant quarrel. I want huckleberries and endless speed. I want to watch your night sky, your harsh sparks flaring. The whole world teems with banks and libraries, so many swallows in the courthouse bells. The moon rises. A false egg waits in the weasel’s nest. Everywhere there are stories of pain and worry. There is you, and butter on my toast.
Just the two of us, some days I love you without interruption. Each evening I say your name. Forgive me this rough June sky. Forgive me this constant quarrel. I want huckleberries and endless speed. I want to watch your night sky, your harsh sparks flaring. The whole world teems with banks and libraries, so many swallows in the courthouse bells. The moon rises. A false egg waits in the weasel’s nest. Everywhere there are stories of pain and worry. There is you, and butter on my toast.
Creation Myth
When I think of your millions of sperm
extinguished inside me, I remember
reading that the ancient Pythagoreans
believed semen was liquefied brain, a drop
of pure human thought making
its way out of one body into another.
And for a moment I feel myself
filled with your thinking—fragments
of Green Lantern comic books and
old Spanish quizzes, our first awkward kiss.
I teem with your fears and hopes
released from their spigot of yearning
until I am what you are thinking,
and I unfold like your final thought,
your last hypothesis with legs and a face
and arms that even now reach over
and over, in the darkness, to be proved.
Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit (forthcoming Spring 2020), Paradise, Indiana, and The Year We Studied Women. He is co-editor with the poet Shara Lessley of The Poem’s Country: Place And Poetic Practice. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco.
When I think of your millions of sperm
extinguished inside me, I remember
reading that the ancient Pythagoreans
believed semen was liquefied brain, a drop
of pure human thought making
its way out of one body into another.
And for a moment I feel myself
filled with your thinking—fragments
of Green Lantern comic books and
old Spanish quizzes, our first awkward kiss.
I teem with your fears and hopes
released from their spigot of yearning
until I am what you are thinking,
and I unfold like your final thought,
your last hypothesis with legs and a face
and arms that even now reach over
and over, in the darkness, to be proved.
Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit (forthcoming Spring 2020), Paradise, Indiana, and The Year We Studied Women. He is co-editor with the poet Shara Lessley of The Poem’s Country: Place And Poetic Practice. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco.
Rebecca Schumejda
Holding On
Mom saves for when you are released from prison:
a cribbage set, duck calls, dad’s ashtray, a glass
from your high school prom, a silver pocket watch,
boxes and boxes of toy trucks, Legos, tools, her
disgust and hand-carved decoys. What use will
these be to you in twenty-something years?
I have been thinking about how dad swore by both
Hammurabi’s Code and the idiom: blood is thicker
than water. Dad was not here to witness this irony
I have inherited. All the things he saved, he saved
for a different son and a different daughter,
not the ones we became because of what you did.
There are things mom let me get rid of after
years of pleading: your clothes, a clam rake,
fishing poles, your hunting gear, waders, her
hope, a giant lobster claw and a jar of sand.
Remember I promised I would always love you?
There are things I got rid of without asking,
things that our dad couldn’t take with him
and things our mom forgot in old cardboard
boxes that the mice tunneled through,
made their homes and had their own families
when no one was paying attention.
Rebecca Schumejda is the author of several full-length collections including Falling Forward (sunnyoutside press), Cadillac Men (NYQ Books), Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog Press) and most recently Our One-Way Street (NYQ Books). She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Spartan Press. She is the co-editor at Trailer Park Quarterly. She received her MA in Poetics from San Francisco State University and her BA from SUNY New Paltz. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
Mom saves for when you are released from prison:
a cribbage set, duck calls, dad’s ashtray, a glass
from your high school prom, a silver pocket watch,
boxes and boxes of toy trucks, Legos, tools, her
disgust and hand-carved decoys. What use will
these be to you in twenty-something years?
I have been thinking about how dad swore by both
Hammurabi’s Code and the idiom: blood is thicker
than water. Dad was not here to witness this irony
I have inherited. All the things he saved, he saved
for a different son and a different daughter,
not the ones we became because of what you did.
There are things mom let me get rid of after
years of pleading: your clothes, a clam rake,
fishing poles, your hunting gear, waders, her
hope, a giant lobster claw and a jar of sand.
Remember I promised I would always love you?
There are things I got rid of without asking,
things that our dad couldn’t take with him
and things our mom forgot in old cardboard
boxes that the mice tunneled through,
made their homes and had their own families
when no one was paying attention.
Rebecca Schumejda is the author of several full-length collections including Falling Forward (sunnyoutside press), Cadillac Men (NYQ Books), Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog Press) and most recently Our One-Way Street (NYQ Books). She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Spartan Press. She is the co-editor at Trailer Park Quarterly. She received her MA in Poetics from San Francisco State University and her BA from SUNY New Paltz. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
Kristine Snodgrass 2 poems
These Burning Fields
My ritual will
occur on the ground,
not the air for I
have just left the air.
l
For my ritual
I can either throw
a stone at the sun-
set or walk through a
tree.
l
In your absence
I am alone --
My sorrow — I
could not awak-
en.
l
When the tree fell
the house shook up
years of sorrow,
we cut it up.
l
A girl wrote like
keys to gardens
or damaged lakes --
only one who knew.
l
I called the other trees,
another broken branch
blooms of jasmine
all tallied and counted
day
turns.
l
For my ritual I can
cut down the flowers
with a lawn mower,
I can set fire to
paintings
like these burning fields.
l
Selfies save roots and cores,
lavender or opal in my
pocket. I handle the rock
with my hand until
it is warm, no hot.
l
I make tags that own me
relatable, retractable
language
machining and casting
on my arm.
l
When you painted my body
round and oval in the center
outlined by what looks like bamboo
there my pussy, my love.
l
Chalk it all out
the shape of the flowers.
Which ones? The ones that
are not dead. Chalk it all
out, box next to box.
l
I have begun
a ritual and there
is not separation
no threads worn neat-
ly
nothing ever matches.
l
I throw the rock
and nothing happens,
then.
There is no tree
that remains upright.
l
In my mind I walk over
the sea, the sand,
there are rocks and a dead
poet loves me.
A lie.
l
When you try to summarize
the sand or even the shells,
candidates are dismissed
into the air. I am leaving the
air. I have left
the air.
l
And I am waiting
for the Autumn Wind
of forgiveness.
Note: Italics are from Poe’s poem “Alone”
My ritual will
occur on the ground,
not the air for I
have just left the air.
l
For my ritual
I can either throw
a stone at the sun-
set or walk through a
tree.
l
In your absence
I am alone --
My sorrow — I
could not awak-
en.
l
When the tree fell
the house shook up
years of sorrow,
we cut it up.
l
A girl wrote like
keys to gardens
or damaged lakes --
only one who knew.
l
I called the other trees,
another broken branch
blooms of jasmine
all tallied and counted
day
turns.
l
For my ritual I can
cut down the flowers
with a lawn mower,
I can set fire to
paintings
like these burning fields.
l
Selfies save roots and cores,
lavender or opal in my
pocket. I handle the rock
with my hand until
it is warm, no hot.
l
I make tags that own me
relatable, retractable
language
machining and casting
on my arm.
l
When you painted my body
round and oval in the center
outlined by what looks like bamboo
there my pussy, my love.
l
Chalk it all out
the shape of the flowers.
Which ones? The ones that
are not dead. Chalk it all
out, box next to box.
l
I have begun
a ritual and there
is not separation
no threads worn neat-
ly
nothing ever matches.
l
I throw the rock
and nothing happens,
then.
There is no tree
that remains upright.
l
In my mind I walk over
the sea, the sand,
there are rocks and a dead
poet loves me.
A lie.
l
When you try to summarize
the sand or even the shells,
candidates are dismissed
into the air. I am leaving the
air. I have left
the air.
l
And I am waiting
for the Autumn Wind
of forgiveness.
Note: Italics are from Poe’s poem “Alone”
There are spaces
between the sky and the fill of your wrist, as you write
my left side erases, my skin opens-up like a hoard of rain.
You use rain in the present tense. The ocean of sheets
in your folly and cradled pen are value.
What it means to me: a sick obsession, a desire that I will not
know, and how it is to be left, left- sided in this hole.
Powder of a house that you don’t like; a sanctimony that drives
you away. Did you touch her? What are your hands doing now --
drawing an erotic smile?
I am here like something for feet,
my shoes will
never fill any clouded sky.
This is the poem you asked for, diluted
hate — masturbating to a low song
such birds, very, very bird. But I am not
the first to love birds, or trees.
They are crimes now. Like a fast moving
ocean, its tides and silt and such and such leaving destruction,
decay. It is meaning, it is not meaning, it is
not against meaning. What is the cry
we can all hear, but you?
Sit, sit. I will stay for hours, and days,
and probably months and never know
what you shared with a nymph. What
ecstasy, elegy, jealousy
will turn and when I come back
with such revenge, only the sun-charted
will never feel it. Will never release
and the sky will drown
in apathy.
Kristine Snodgrass is a professor, publisher, poet, art lover, and mom. She takes a lot of selfies and reads poetry every day. Kristine lives in Tallahassee with her partner, the artist and poet, Jay Snodgrass. You can find Kristine on Facebook.
between the sky and the fill of your wrist, as you write
my left side erases, my skin opens-up like a hoard of rain.
You use rain in the present tense. The ocean of sheets
in your folly and cradled pen are value.
What it means to me: a sick obsession, a desire that I will not
know, and how it is to be left, left- sided in this hole.
Powder of a house that you don’t like; a sanctimony that drives
you away. Did you touch her? What are your hands doing now --
drawing an erotic smile?
I am here like something for feet,
my shoes will
never fill any clouded sky.
This is the poem you asked for, diluted
hate — masturbating to a low song
such birds, very, very bird. But I am not
the first to love birds, or trees.
They are crimes now. Like a fast moving
ocean, its tides and silt and such and such leaving destruction,
decay. It is meaning, it is not meaning, it is
not against meaning. What is the cry
we can all hear, but you?
Sit, sit. I will stay for hours, and days,
and probably months and never know
what you shared with a nymph. What
ecstasy, elegy, jealousy
will turn and when I come back
with such revenge, only the sun-charted
will never feel it. Will never release
and the sky will drown
in apathy.
Kristine Snodgrass is a professor, publisher, poet, art lover, and mom. She takes a lot of selfies and reads poetry every day. Kristine lives in Tallahassee with her partner, the artist and poet, Jay Snodgrass. You can find Kristine on Facebook.
Thylias Moss & Bob Holman
Ready to be Rocked (in Shawsheen)
I am always ready to be rocked, always prepared
and have been ready, at least, since my mother was pregnant and
I rocked with each step she took, movement
of amniotic fluid my first
swimming lessons
And then my father walked with me the moment I was born, Mt. Sinai corridors and the sound of
his footsteps, rhythms of that
recognized first time I heard Michael Jackson's Rock with Me, so I did
and I am still dancing and
prepared to rock with his music and you
those Rock'em Sock-em robots rocking each other, rock a bye Dream Baby, rock
a by bye bye but that dawn chorus waking me to your existence, all night in your arms
for the rest of my life, that last dance with you is rocking its way
and I am prepared to shimmy my way permanently
into your life where you are ready to welcome me with open arms as they always are don't forget
I know rocking you quite well
While you are with me
while I become that earthquake I was in 1993,
preparing then for what I wanted to be: new kind of earthquake rocking the world of you, the
whole earth of you, my baby in a cradle you all the while naming me: your rescuer and lover
your Dream Baby; I am prepared to be rocked like that, my whole world as long as I rock with
you. Don't you
worry 'bout a thing’
in this downing Love Supreme
most certainly I am prepared, just as all of my ancestors are
leading to me rocking with you
even our shadows rock, their sleek gray presence emblazoned on every world still standing and
that falling rocks build themselves into monuments of me rocking with you, on repeat, repeating
eternity
—such sustenance—
even those falling rock zones all the way to Cowan, Tennessee. Sometimes
we had to pull over, unless we were to be pummeled by what fell from the sky
with concerns to what any of us dreamed. I didn't live in Tennessee,
but some of my ancestors did, some born there but one of my paternal ancestors immigrated
from many locations, rocking from Uttar Pradesh, rocks fell all the time, eruptions you know,
restless
center of the earth: centering with you, rocking all the way
some locations unknown to build those railroads that rocked train cars on their way to and from
Saskatchewan, rocking the cargo until it had to catch its dream of breath those babies that hung
from the ceiling you often are for me; I am as ready to rock with you as I have been for years.
dancing into daylight,
prepared for all of this
right now.
Rock on this first draft of many more days of rocking
with you under covers, baby dreams becoming all they can.
I will not
leave you, H; you will not rock
alone.
Thylias Moss is 65, has had 14 books published and has won some significant awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant and two nominations for The National Book Critics Circle award, but she is most proud of Falling in Love with the man, a Spoken Word Artist, Mr. Bob Holman, who the poem is about. Love is not just for the young. Forthcoming is a collection of Poetry Shawsheen Memorial Broom Society in which Mr. Bob Holman, is the Primary Collaborator, and other collaborators are her son and her stuffed animal mammoth.
Bob Holman’s poetry has traversed genres, styles, and media since the 1970’s, when he began Directing Poets Theater Productions by Mayakovsky, Artaud, O’Hara and Others at St. Marks Church. He is 71 and has published 16 books including Sing This One Back to Me. Catch him at his Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. He is also a primary Collaborator in the collection of poetry, Shawsheen Memorial Broom Society by Thylias Moss, a collection that perhaps this promoter will also promote.
I am always ready to be rocked, always prepared
and have been ready, at least, since my mother was pregnant and
I rocked with each step she took, movement
of amniotic fluid my first
swimming lessons
And then my father walked with me the moment I was born, Mt. Sinai corridors and the sound of
his footsteps, rhythms of that
recognized first time I heard Michael Jackson's Rock with Me, so I did
and I am still dancing and
prepared to rock with his music and you
those Rock'em Sock-em robots rocking each other, rock a bye Dream Baby, rock
a by bye bye but that dawn chorus waking me to your existence, all night in your arms
for the rest of my life, that last dance with you is rocking its way
and I am prepared to shimmy my way permanently
into your life where you are ready to welcome me with open arms as they always are don't forget
I know rocking you quite well
While you are with me
while I become that earthquake I was in 1993,
preparing then for what I wanted to be: new kind of earthquake rocking the world of you, the
whole earth of you, my baby in a cradle you all the while naming me: your rescuer and lover
your Dream Baby; I am prepared to be rocked like that, my whole world as long as I rock with
you. Don't you
worry 'bout a thing’
in this downing Love Supreme
most certainly I am prepared, just as all of my ancestors are
leading to me rocking with you
even our shadows rock, their sleek gray presence emblazoned on every world still standing and
that falling rocks build themselves into monuments of me rocking with you, on repeat, repeating
eternity
—such sustenance—
even those falling rock zones all the way to Cowan, Tennessee. Sometimes
we had to pull over, unless we were to be pummeled by what fell from the sky
with concerns to what any of us dreamed. I didn't live in Tennessee,
but some of my ancestors did, some born there but one of my paternal ancestors immigrated
from many locations, rocking from Uttar Pradesh, rocks fell all the time, eruptions you know,
restless
center of the earth: centering with you, rocking all the way
some locations unknown to build those railroads that rocked train cars on their way to and from
Saskatchewan, rocking the cargo until it had to catch its dream of breath those babies that hung
from the ceiling you often are for me; I am as ready to rock with you as I have been for years.
dancing into daylight,
prepared for all of this
right now.
Rock on this first draft of many more days of rocking
with you under covers, baby dreams becoming all they can.
I will not
leave you, H; you will not rock
alone.
Thylias Moss is 65, has had 14 books published and has won some significant awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant and two nominations for The National Book Critics Circle award, but she is most proud of Falling in Love with the man, a Spoken Word Artist, Mr. Bob Holman, who the poem is about. Love is not just for the young. Forthcoming is a collection of Poetry Shawsheen Memorial Broom Society in which Mr. Bob Holman, is the Primary Collaborator, and other collaborators are her son and her stuffed animal mammoth.
Bob Holman’s poetry has traversed genres, styles, and media since the 1970’s, when he began Directing Poets Theater Productions by Mayakovsky, Artaud, O’Hara and Others at St. Marks Church. He is 71 and has published 16 books including Sing This One Back to Me. Catch him at his Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. He is also a primary Collaborator in the collection of poetry, Shawsheen Memorial Broom Society by Thylias Moss, a collection that perhaps this promoter will also promote.
Kelly O’Rourke 2 poems
Perennial
In your new life
your parents are married
at your birth
they stay that way
your father remains
in the picture
your mother holds a job
instead of bottles
they fix your teeth
with braces
you model
you graduate
you get a job
better than the one
where you met dad
You do not meet dad
you meet a tall
light-haired man
with green eyes
you have tall, fair babies
whom you raise in the suburbs
when the cancer comes
it’s diagnosed swiftly
you live until 80
instead of 59
In your third life
you come back as a doe
you mate for life
you and your children
stay together
in the fields
you lick your
grandbabies
to sleep
In your fourth life
you come back as a rose
you no longer hate their smell
they do not remind
you of countless funerals
you finally bloom
before you make
your way upstairs
In your new life
your parents are married
at your birth
they stay that way
your father remains
in the picture
your mother holds a job
instead of bottles
they fix your teeth
with braces
you model
you graduate
you get a job
better than the one
where you met dad
You do not meet dad
you meet a tall
light-haired man
with green eyes
you have tall, fair babies
whom you raise in the suburbs
when the cancer comes
it’s diagnosed swiftly
you live until 80
instead of 59
In your third life
you come back as a doe
you mate for life
you and your children
stay together
in the fields
you lick your
grandbabies
to sleep
In your fourth life
you come back as a rose
you no longer hate their smell
they do not remind
you of countless funerals
you finally bloom
before you make
your way upstairs
Route
Madison was my late night go-to
Thirteen blocks of concrete velvet
Lit, side to side, by Dolce, Valentino, Hermes,
Louboutin, though I walked in flip flops
After hours, jewels kissed
Illuminated windows goodnight
Hustling movers shuffled
Mannequins discreetly into place
I had other options
Park, too wide-mouthed and exposed
Lex, too heavy with taxis and trains
Second and Third, polluted and pedestrian
Fifth, along the park, slightly risky after dark
But mild nights, rather than shuttle underground
I walked the quiet length from midtown up
Window shopping in solitude, flanked by elegance
While security cameras rolled, watchful as gods.
Kelly O'Rourke is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry at San Francisco State University, where she is a recipient of the Daniel Langton Poetry Prize. She has published work in HCE Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Hong Kong Review, Slaughterhouse Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Poet's Haven Digest, Snapdragon Journal, Transfer Magazine and others. Born and raised in Boston, she currently calls San Francisco home.
Madison was my late night go-to
Thirteen blocks of concrete velvet
Lit, side to side, by Dolce, Valentino, Hermes,
Louboutin, though I walked in flip flops
After hours, jewels kissed
Illuminated windows goodnight
Hustling movers shuffled
Mannequins discreetly into place
I had other options
Park, too wide-mouthed and exposed
Lex, too heavy with taxis and trains
Second and Third, polluted and pedestrian
Fifth, along the park, slightly risky after dark
But mild nights, rather than shuttle underground
I walked the quiet length from midtown up
Window shopping in solitude, flanked by elegance
While security cameras rolled, watchful as gods.
Kelly O'Rourke is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry at San Francisco State University, where she is a recipient of the Daniel Langton Poetry Prize. She has published work in HCE Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Hong Kong Review, Slaughterhouse Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Poet's Haven Digest, Snapdragon Journal, Transfer Magazine and others. Born and raised in Boston, she currently calls San Francisco home.
James Wyshynski 2 poems
Sitting in a Waffle House, After Seeing Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Chicago Institute of Art
For years I carried an image of that painting
in my head, lit with a light so white it could give
you frost bite, the Formica counter with edges
sharp enough to slit wrists, a coconut cake
shedding flakes under its glass dome as the lone
customer hunched over the brushed chrome
of a napkin holder.
Now, in the after-light
of introducing the Hopper in my head to the Hopper
on the wall, I see I got it all wrong. Not an inch
of Formica, but cherry or oak, the counter edges curved
and kind, and such couples, as if the diner were an ark:
the man and woman at the far end, flanked by
the pair of coffee urns, the salt and pepper sets,
the suited men capped in a duet of fedoras.
And the tercet of coffee mugs! How they sit,
one at each elbow of the three patrons,
a triangle, a communion of Holy Joe.
Sure it’s 2 am, and the ark is sailing a sea
of empty streets, and no one is happy,
but it’s that light
bursting off the far wall that jazzes me most –
the contrast between the counter guy’s white
cap and jacket and the wall’s pale sunrise yellow.
And in the middle of that dawning, a door –
the door you push through
when you leave
what you thought you knew and step into the diner
in the late night of middle age and lean across
the back counter to tell Jimmy he’s got some news
that will change his life for good.
For years I carried an image of that painting
in my head, lit with a light so white it could give
you frost bite, the Formica counter with edges
sharp enough to slit wrists, a coconut cake
shedding flakes under its glass dome as the lone
customer hunched over the brushed chrome
of a napkin holder.
Now, in the after-light
of introducing the Hopper in my head to the Hopper
on the wall, I see I got it all wrong. Not an inch
of Formica, but cherry or oak, the counter edges curved
and kind, and such couples, as if the diner were an ark:
the man and woman at the far end, flanked by
the pair of coffee urns, the salt and pepper sets,
the suited men capped in a duet of fedoras.
And the tercet of coffee mugs! How they sit,
one at each elbow of the three patrons,
a triangle, a communion of Holy Joe.
Sure it’s 2 am, and the ark is sailing a sea
of empty streets, and no one is happy,
but it’s that light
bursting off the far wall that jazzes me most –
the contrast between the counter guy’s white
cap and jacket and the wall’s pale sunrise yellow.
And in the middle of that dawning, a door –
the door you push through
when you leave
what you thought you knew and step into the diner
in the late night of middle age and lean across
the back counter to tell Jimmy he’s got some news
that will change his life for good.
Episode 4994 of Storage Wars
It’s ours now, having paid $213.50 American cash.
Peter and I roll the door up and stand at the threshold before digging in.
We haul out the flat screen TV, then the bulbous computer
monitor and its obsolete desktop, a pre-teen girl’s backpacks,
stuffed with drawings and notebooks of practiced cursives,
her name over and over. Digging deeper, I pull out a hand-stitched
wedding dress, then 18 brand new glass vases, 20 candles,
a brand new ring cushion, faux leather-bound registry,
a garter wrapped in its crinkly package. Peter unearths
a set of blueprints. We peer into the dreamed dimensions.
What have we gotten into? Deeper we go: into a blizzard
of paper, shoe boxes of unopened envelopes that document
the mother’s name and the name of the man who never made it
to the altar, letters from child services, bills from three rehabs,
unfiled taxes, notifications from Veteran’s Services, then
the foot, neck, back massagers, pocketbooks crammed
with amber bottles of Percocet and Xanax. Too deep –
with the framed photos of her in her Navy dress whites;
her and her daughter looking up at us, we looking down,
two races, four faces, an entire history beneath a pane of glass.
When we stumble on the body, O shits roll out our mouths.
The dress manikin is skinned in blue velvet, a headless Martian?
Cheap whimsy, all we have left to cut this dark. Peter finds
the firebox buried under a pile of clothes, and silver eagles
fly out of our heads. I split it open with a screwdriver,
as the headless, blue Pandora smirks over my shoulder.
Empty. The locker is a square of dark, a blank screen,
when did the movie of her life stop and mine begin?
It unspools in the late afternoon light, decades-worth
of wasted vows, broken gifts − it comes back boxed,
labeled and numbered until the locker overflows.
When I look at Peter, I see he is as lost as I am,
and we are done − sweaty, tired, spent − no profit
in this labor. We break even in the end. I take
the unsellable − the photos, letters and tax returns
and leave the green plastic tub with the counter lady,
who doesn’t look up as I close the door behind me.
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Terminus, River Styx, Interim, The Chattahoochee Review, The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, Permafrost and are forthcoming in the Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and others. He currently lives and works in Marietta, Georgia.
It’s ours now, having paid $213.50 American cash.
Peter and I roll the door up and stand at the threshold before digging in.
We haul out the flat screen TV, then the bulbous computer
monitor and its obsolete desktop, a pre-teen girl’s backpacks,
stuffed with drawings and notebooks of practiced cursives,
her name over and over. Digging deeper, I pull out a hand-stitched
wedding dress, then 18 brand new glass vases, 20 candles,
a brand new ring cushion, faux leather-bound registry,
a garter wrapped in its crinkly package. Peter unearths
a set of blueprints. We peer into the dreamed dimensions.
What have we gotten into? Deeper we go: into a blizzard
of paper, shoe boxes of unopened envelopes that document
the mother’s name and the name of the man who never made it
to the altar, letters from child services, bills from three rehabs,
unfiled taxes, notifications from Veteran’s Services, then
the foot, neck, back massagers, pocketbooks crammed
with amber bottles of Percocet and Xanax. Too deep –
with the framed photos of her in her Navy dress whites;
her and her daughter looking up at us, we looking down,
two races, four faces, an entire history beneath a pane of glass.
When we stumble on the body, O shits roll out our mouths.
The dress manikin is skinned in blue velvet, a headless Martian?
Cheap whimsy, all we have left to cut this dark. Peter finds
the firebox buried under a pile of clothes, and silver eagles
fly out of our heads. I split it open with a screwdriver,
as the headless, blue Pandora smirks over my shoulder.
Empty. The locker is a square of dark, a blank screen,
when did the movie of her life stop and mine begin?
It unspools in the late afternoon light, decades-worth
of wasted vows, broken gifts − it comes back boxed,
labeled and numbered until the locker overflows.
When I look at Peter, I see he is as lost as I am,
and we are done − sweaty, tired, spent − no profit
in this labor. We break even in the end. I take
the unsellable − the photos, letters and tax returns
and leave the green plastic tub with the counter lady,
who doesn’t look up as I close the door behind me.
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Terminus, River Styx, Interim, The Chattahoochee Review, The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, Permafrost and are forthcoming in the Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and others. He currently lives and works in Marietta, Georgia.
Jonathan K. Rice
Windows
Mom always taught never to stare,
never to look in other people’s windows
but when I walked through the neighborhood
or rode my bicycle to a friend’s house
there were always open windows
where sometimes people sat and looked out
upon the street, so I would wave
as I passed by and they’d wave back.
Then there were those who would notice
me noticing them and quickly close the drapes,
but peer through a pulled back corner
to make sure I kept on down the street.
Some wanted you to see how spacious
their living rooms looked, how they invoked
the pages of Southern Living, while others
had small enclosed courtyards with wrought-iron gates
and dogs that looked imprisoned waiting for a break,
a chance to roam neighboring yards,
where cats lounged and stalked songbirds and mice.
Then there was the lady down the street, the young divorcée
who left the lights on, the curtains open,
who didn’t wear much and didn’t care who saw her,
the one whose every mom and wife warned about.
But when someone says, Don’t look,
the natural inclination is to look,
and when she looked back, she smiled.
She was happy someone noticed her
until the day she remarried
and closed the blinds for good.
Jonathan K. Rice edited Iodine Poetry Journal for seventeen years. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Killing Time (2015), Ukulele and Other Poems (2006) and a chapbook, Shooting Pool with a Cellist (2003), all published by Main Street Rag Publishing. He is also a visual artist.
Mom always taught never to stare,
never to look in other people’s windows
but when I walked through the neighborhood
or rode my bicycle to a friend’s house
there were always open windows
where sometimes people sat and looked out
upon the street, so I would wave
as I passed by and they’d wave back.
Then there were those who would notice
me noticing them and quickly close the drapes,
but peer through a pulled back corner
to make sure I kept on down the street.
Some wanted you to see how spacious
their living rooms looked, how they invoked
the pages of Southern Living, while others
had small enclosed courtyards with wrought-iron gates
and dogs that looked imprisoned waiting for a break,
a chance to roam neighboring yards,
where cats lounged and stalked songbirds and mice.
Then there was the lady down the street, the young divorcée
who left the lights on, the curtains open,
who didn’t wear much and didn’t care who saw her,
the one whose every mom and wife warned about.
But when someone says, Don’t look,
the natural inclination is to look,
and when she looked back, she smiled.
She was happy someone noticed her
until the day she remarried
and closed the blinds for good.
Jonathan K. Rice edited Iodine Poetry Journal for seventeen years. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Killing Time (2015), Ukulele and Other Poems (2006) and a chapbook, Shooting Pool with a Cellist (2003), all published by Main Street Rag Publishing. He is also a visual artist.
January Pearson
The Specialist Explains My Father’s Disease
As he reads the screen of blue digits,
we hear unknown and untreatable,
all the numbers spaced in neat rows
adding up to no answers, his words vacant
in the scrubbed room of white light and hard
edges. My mother nods but only hears
the hospital room dissolving into a dry
fenceless lawn where her grief wanders
like a lost dog, paws against the grey
paint-peeled doors locked from within,
each direction a dead-end alleyway littered
with broken glass and torn newspaper,
the black telephone wires strung
taut against a distant sky.
January Pearson lives in Southern California with her husband and two daughters. She teaches in the Composition Department at Purdue Global University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications, such as Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Journal of American Poetry, and The Cape Rock Review.
As he reads the screen of blue digits,
we hear unknown and untreatable,
all the numbers spaced in neat rows
adding up to no answers, his words vacant
in the scrubbed room of white light and hard
edges. My mother nods but only hears
the hospital room dissolving into a dry
fenceless lawn where her grief wanders
like a lost dog, paws against the grey
paint-peeled doors locked from within,
each direction a dead-end alleyway littered
with broken glass and torn newspaper,
the black telephone wires strung
taut against a distant sky.
January Pearson lives in Southern California with her husband and two daughters. She teaches in the Composition Department at Purdue Global University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications, such as Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Journal of American Poetry, and The Cape Rock Review.
Jeff Hardin
I Probably Shouldn't Even Mention Soul
It’s rained for three days now,
a slow and steady rain, as rains
should be, not a torrent or a deluge,
but the kind of rain that, if I were
a tulip or azalea, mum or oak, I’d be
languid and drinking it in; and I
suppose on some molecular level
I am—drinking it in, that is—my soul
all slurp and chug-alug and down
the hatch and bombs away
and here’s looking at you, kid,
though it’s also reasonable to imagine
a soul could drown in such excess.
And I just don’t know: I probably
shouldn’t even mention the soul,
it’s not accepted now to do so;
but I love the word, the soft s
and long, deep-drenched o,
the light-footed l. If we didn’t
have one, we would want one,
just to say once in a while, even
if the whole world thinks it’s
corny and saccharine, soul. But
three days of rain will do this
to you, or it has to me—I’m
thinking about this and that,
wondering why this is not that
and vice-versa, how it came to be
that I’m me, the part that’s good,
not the part that boils unendingly
with lust and greed and jealousy,
all of which make for interesting
stories but in the end never satisfy,
and wondering too, don’t ask me
why, about the birds I see each year,
thousands infolding into thousands,
flying over the same narrow river
valley, so many their flight seems
slow motion, a little wayward even,
with some banked to the left
and some not far behind and way
to the right, though even so there’s not
a break and I can take my finger
and point and trace a supple line,
almost pure in form, mathematical,
geometrically moving so that surely
someone who knows more than I
has calculated sine and cosine,
angles this and that, and hypothesized
a theory that could make us weep
for the sheer beauty of undulations
mirrored in the marvelous sequencings
of uracil, cytosine, adenine, thymine
and guanine that make us who we are
and not these beads of rain about to drip
from leaves or the tree itself that stands
solemnified, if such a word exists;
and I just don’t know but I think,
at least, my friend had it right
when he said over coffee in a dingy
diner, I want it all—the good, the bad--
I want it all, and his face was lit
as if divinely touched, and he stuck
his face up flush against the wall
and cried out from a wilderness,
This is all we see of God, this much,
this much, and it’s enough. And I agree,
at least the part of me that likes
the swinging-net feel of belief,
the ripe-apple-picked-and-bitten-into
feel of belief, not the part of me
that laughs at mischief, not the part
of me that ridicules and undercuts
the meanings taking shape within
the world. After three days of rain
I’m surprised my inner thoughts
are comprehensible, if ever they
have been, and maybe they aren’t
after all—I mean, I’ve never really
strived to be all lucid and such,
all gung-ho precise and paranoid
concerning whether sense was being
made by me or anybody else because,
if you ask me, it’s the edges
of what we say that count,
the part that’s apprehensive and not
because it’s lacking confidence
but because it’s willing to allow
there might be more to know
and isn’t willing to claim it knows
the line to cross or not, the part
that wants to nuzzle up to what it
doesn’t know instead of pointing out
the things it does, even if the self
behind the saying others consider weak.
So be it. Anyway, I just don’t know,
but maybe (and I’m not loony
for thinking this) the thoughts we have,
their breadth and tactile reach,
the thoughts somehow direct our paths,
mathematically beautiful too,
so that we get to meet a certain
man or woman among the billions
who exist and mill about, and from this
issues forth a conversation, not the kind
that’s all how you like this weather
we’re having, but the kind that feels
like years are passing and we’re allowed,
if only briefly, a glimpse of time’s
eternalness and fleetingness all bound
together, held like a bead of rain
at the tip end of a twig, a conversation
that maybe has no words at all
but is only a quiet space overhearing
another quiet space, one soul,
for a moment, knitted to another soul.
Jeff Hardin is the author of five collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press Book Award); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); Small Revolution; and No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize). His sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, is forthcoming in 2019. The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.
It’s rained for three days now,
a slow and steady rain, as rains
should be, not a torrent or a deluge,
but the kind of rain that, if I were
a tulip or azalea, mum or oak, I’d be
languid and drinking it in; and I
suppose on some molecular level
I am—drinking it in, that is—my soul
all slurp and chug-alug and down
the hatch and bombs away
and here’s looking at you, kid,
though it’s also reasonable to imagine
a soul could drown in such excess.
And I just don’t know: I probably
shouldn’t even mention the soul,
it’s not accepted now to do so;
but I love the word, the soft s
and long, deep-drenched o,
the light-footed l. If we didn’t
have one, we would want one,
just to say once in a while, even
if the whole world thinks it’s
corny and saccharine, soul. But
three days of rain will do this
to you, or it has to me—I’m
thinking about this and that,
wondering why this is not that
and vice-versa, how it came to be
that I’m me, the part that’s good,
not the part that boils unendingly
with lust and greed and jealousy,
all of which make for interesting
stories but in the end never satisfy,
and wondering too, don’t ask me
why, about the birds I see each year,
thousands infolding into thousands,
flying over the same narrow river
valley, so many their flight seems
slow motion, a little wayward even,
with some banked to the left
and some not far behind and way
to the right, though even so there’s not
a break and I can take my finger
and point and trace a supple line,
almost pure in form, mathematical,
geometrically moving so that surely
someone who knows more than I
has calculated sine and cosine,
angles this and that, and hypothesized
a theory that could make us weep
for the sheer beauty of undulations
mirrored in the marvelous sequencings
of uracil, cytosine, adenine, thymine
and guanine that make us who we are
and not these beads of rain about to drip
from leaves or the tree itself that stands
solemnified, if such a word exists;
and I just don’t know but I think,
at least, my friend had it right
when he said over coffee in a dingy
diner, I want it all—the good, the bad--
I want it all, and his face was lit
as if divinely touched, and he stuck
his face up flush against the wall
and cried out from a wilderness,
This is all we see of God, this much,
this much, and it’s enough. And I agree,
at least the part of me that likes
the swinging-net feel of belief,
the ripe-apple-picked-and-bitten-into
feel of belief, not the part of me
that laughs at mischief, not the part
of me that ridicules and undercuts
the meanings taking shape within
the world. After three days of rain
I’m surprised my inner thoughts
are comprehensible, if ever they
have been, and maybe they aren’t
after all—I mean, I’ve never really
strived to be all lucid and such,
all gung-ho precise and paranoid
concerning whether sense was being
made by me or anybody else because,
if you ask me, it’s the edges
of what we say that count,
the part that’s apprehensive and not
because it’s lacking confidence
but because it’s willing to allow
there might be more to know
and isn’t willing to claim it knows
the line to cross or not, the part
that wants to nuzzle up to what it
doesn’t know instead of pointing out
the things it does, even if the self
behind the saying others consider weak.
So be it. Anyway, I just don’t know,
but maybe (and I’m not loony
for thinking this) the thoughts we have,
their breadth and tactile reach,
the thoughts somehow direct our paths,
mathematically beautiful too,
so that we get to meet a certain
man or woman among the billions
who exist and mill about, and from this
issues forth a conversation, not the kind
that’s all how you like this weather
we’re having, but the kind that feels
like years are passing and we’re allowed,
if only briefly, a glimpse of time’s
eternalness and fleetingness all bound
together, held like a bead of rain
at the tip end of a twig, a conversation
that maybe has no words at all
but is only a quiet space overhearing
another quiet space, one soul,
for a moment, knitted to another soul.
Jeff Hardin is the author of five collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press Book Award); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); Small Revolution; and No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize). His sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, is forthcoming in 2019. The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.
Steve Kronen 2 poems
from "Lip Service -Four Sonnets"
Sonnet for the Ellipse
Zen
cone:
Which first quickens?
Make no bones:
twelve
planes
off the axis --
a dozen
goose
eggs,
ex-
plain-
ing neither Self,
nor chicken.
Sonnet for the Ellipse
Zen
cone:
Which first quickens?
Make no bones:
twelve
planes
off the axis --
a dozen
goose
eggs,
ex-
plain-
ing neither Self,
nor chicken.
Sonnet for My Father’s Umbrella
A bat,
perhaps - asleep
(day its night),
membrane
of the wings
wrapped tight
and the earth-plumbed
brain quickened
again with summer,
gnats
(sonar pings)
thick and
deep
like rain.
Steve Kronen's collections are Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer (Eyewear), Splendor, (BOA) and Empirical Evidence, (University of Georgia Press). His work has appeared in The New Republic, The American Scholar, Poetry, Agni, APR, The Antioch Review, Little Star, Subtropics, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, Image, New Statesman, Plume, and elsewhere in the US and the UK. Awards include an NEA, three Florida Individual Artist fellowships, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the James Boatwright Poetry Prize from Shenandoah, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Steve is a librarian in Miami where he lives with his wife, novelist Ivonne Lamazares.
A bat,
perhaps - asleep
(day its night),
membrane
of the wings
wrapped tight
and the earth-plumbed
brain quickened
again with summer,
gnats
(sonar pings)
thick and
deep
like rain.
Steve Kronen's collections are Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer (Eyewear), Splendor, (BOA) and Empirical Evidence, (University of Georgia Press). His work has appeared in The New Republic, The American Scholar, Poetry, Agni, APR, The Antioch Review, Little Star, Subtropics, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, Image, New Statesman, Plume, and elsewhere in the US and the UK. Awards include an NEA, three Florida Individual Artist fellowships, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the James Boatwright Poetry Prize from Shenandoah, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Steve is a librarian in Miami where he lives with his wife, novelist Ivonne Lamazares.
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton 2 poems
14 Lines about Water
Brooke Shields and a monster hail from lagoons
while Bridget Fonda rows anything but placid on a lake
searching for a croc. In the lead pipes of Flint
water dies in kids' cups and bubbles of stagnant
pre-bedtime routines. A girl who's never seen the sea
gets caught in a rip and curls inside its weedy womb,
its House of Secrets, where the Swamp Thing swamps
and the Goddess of Sunken Ships reveals her briny
anchor. She wears a necklace of shells, a choppy
grin that glows phosphorescent in cans of seltzer.
We never believed there could be so much rain,
but the way the world is drowning at low tide
makes us rash—diving into strangers’ swimming pools,
dumping jugs of H2O as our children cross the desert.
Brooke Shields and a monster hail from lagoons
while Bridget Fonda rows anything but placid on a lake
searching for a croc. In the lead pipes of Flint
water dies in kids' cups and bubbles of stagnant
pre-bedtime routines. A girl who's never seen the sea
gets caught in a rip and curls inside its weedy womb,
its House of Secrets, where the Swamp Thing swamps
and the Goddess of Sunken Ships reveals her briny
anchor. She wears a necklace of shells, a choppy
grin that glows phosphorescent in cans of seltzer.
We never believed there could be so much rain,
but the way the world is drowning at low tide
makes us rash—diving into strangers’ swimming pools,
dumping jugs of H2O as our children cross the desert.
12 Lines about Gender
She told me I was an Alpha Female.
I agreed and told her I was happy as a Male
kangaroo—no pouch or purse. A gender (or Agender),
I said, is the mighty tip of the Androgynous--
think Annie Lenox. Bigender (or bye, gender)
reflux, on the one hand (or the other), can cause Cisgender
reflex, the impulse to label "boy" or "girl." Gender-fluid
is so lovely it loves every living liquid, and Genderqueer
fashion is so fashionable in its sequins. Intersex
stands at a crossroads of Royal Palms, and Transgender
blows a farewell kiss to the past, while Two-Spirits
abide in the everlasting now beside a yet-to-be Gender.
She told me I was an Alpha Female.
I agreed and told her I was happy as a Male
kangaroo—no pouch or purse. A gender (or Agender),
I said, is the mighty tip of the Androgynous--
think Annie Lenox. Bigender (or bye, gender)
reflux, on the one hand (or the other), can cause Cisgender
reflex, the impulse to label "boy" or "girl." Gender-fluid
is so lovely it loves every living liquid, and Genderqueer
fashion is so fashionable in its sequins. Intersex
stands at a crossroads of Royal Palms, and Transgender
blows a farewell kiss to the past, while Two-Spirits
abide in the everlasting now beside a yet-to-be Gender.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, (with Julie Marie Wade). Other books include: Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include: Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
Maureen Seaton has authored twenty poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize and Lambda Literary Award, an NEA fellowship and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (U. of Wisconsin Press), also garnered a Lammy. A new poetry collection, Fisher, is out from Black Lawrence Press and a new anthology, Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos, co-edited with Neil de la Flor, is out from Anhinga Press. Seaton teaches Creative Writing at the University of Miami, Florida.
Maureen Seaton has authored twenty poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize and Lambda Literary Award, an NEA fellowship and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (U. of Wisconsin Press), also garnered a Lammy. A new poetry collection, Fisher, is out from Black Lawrence Press and a new anthology, Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos, co-edited with Neil de la Flor, is out from Anhinga Press. Seaton teaches Creative Writing at the University of Miami, Florida.
Denise Duhamel
The Glorified Kiss of Victory,
by which I mean a cheek peck,
a bounced check, an air kiss,
or air quote around the word
success—Karen Pence turning
away from the newly elected
vice-president, knowing Trump
was a glorified everything.
Oh glory, glory, thought Karen,
calling on her glorified faith
which sounds a lot like hate
to the LGBTQ community.
Karen’s domestic victory--
teaching “art” in a cruel
Christian school so she can get out
of her frumpy housecoat
in which she waters
her dying houseplants
while her husband goes
to his office in the White House.
She initials the “moral purity”
clause on her contract, a glorified
heteronormative victory--
one man, one woman, one
lousy glorified non-kiss,
the glorified vice of her mandate,
her mandatory monogamy.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, (with Julie Marie Wade). Other books include: Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include: Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
by which I mean a cheek peck,
a bounced check, an air kiss,
or air quote around the word
success—Karen Pence turning
away from the newly elected
vice-president, knowing Trump
was a glorified everything.
Oh glory, glory, thought Karen,
calling on her glorified faith
which sounds a lot like hate
to the LGBTQ community.
Karen’s domestic victory--
teaching “art” in a cruel
Christian school so she can get out
of her frumpy housecoat
in which she waters
her dying houseplants
while her husband goes
to his office in the White House.
She initials the “moral purity”
clause on her contract, a glorified
heteronormative victory--
one man, one woman, one
lousy glorified non-kiss,
the glorified vice of her mandate,
her mandatory monogamy.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, (with Julie Marie Wade). Other books include: Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include: Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
Gregg Shapiro 2 poems
The Same Situation
You could say that I'm all talk. Words meshing
like fingers. Fingers on hands gathered into fists.
Hovering over blunt objects and threats of domestic
violence. Reminders of displacement and location.
I was someone else, somewhere else. Miles and time
zones and accents ago. Go to sleep with questions
of direction and wake up a jumble of area codes,
abbreviations and zip codes for answers. Invent
new ways to waste time. Count the shopping days
until Christmas. I put the red dog on the pink leash
and walk towards the lake. Traffic sounds like waves
rushing to the man-made shore, stopping short.
Some trees in the park still have leaves. I drag
my feet through what's fallen, brown and curled
crisp. I often wondered why the allergies that
dogged me as a child disappeared when I moved
away, like a fog clearing over water. Furious
reactions to changes in weather and atmosphere.
Each season, regardless of temperature, triggering
a response as mysterious and unpredictable
as our own personal storms. The way a room
can cloud with accusation and disaster. Heads
spinning like weather vanes. We stay, determined
not to be uprooted. Convinced of our ability
to stand again, even after being knocked down
repeatedly. Like the survivors of earthquakes
and floods, other natural phenomenon who rebuild
in the same place year after year after year.
You could say that I'm all talk. Words meshing
like fingers. Fingers on hands gathered into fists.
Hovering over blunt objects and threats of domestic
violence. Reminders of displacement and location.
I was someone else, somewhere else. Miles and time
zones and accents ago. Go to sleep with questions
of direction and wake up a jumble of area codes,
abbreviations and zip codes for answers. Invent
new ways to waste time. Count the shopping days
until Christmas. I put the red dog on the pink leash
and walk towards the lake. Traffic sounds like waves
rushing to the man-made shore, stopping short.
Some trees in the park still have leaves. I drag
my feet through what's fallen, brown and curled
crisp. I often wondered why the allergies that
dogged me as a child disappeared when I moved
away, like a fog clearing over water. Furious
reactions to changes in weather and atmosphere.
Each season, regardless of temperature, triggering
a response as mysterious and unpredictable
as our own personal storms. The way a room
can cloud with accusation and disaster. Heads
spinning like weather vanes. We stay, determined
not to be uprooted. Convinced of our ability
to stand again, even after being knocked down
repeatedly. Like the survivors of earthquakes
and floods, other natural phenomenon who rebuild
in the same place year after year after year.
Invisible At The Charles River
Walking between water, illuminated by ash-white
neon, mustached men in worn denim, still hover
beneath moon-bright clouds, conquering darkness.
Monuments are erected and torn down in the ticklish,
spidery bushes. There are no snakes in the dew damp
grass, only ducks storing energy for emergency
takeoffs, fancy geometric ballets. Cool silhouettes
stretch, expand and grow to split. July has lit
the fuse. Men shed their skins
Gregg Shapiro’s latest chapbook, More Poems About Buildings and Food (Souvenir Spoon Books) was published in February 2019. His second 2019 chapbook, Sunshine State (NightBallet Press) will be published in August. He is the author of Fifty Degrees (Seven Kitchens, 2016), selected by Ching-In Chen as co-winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. He has work forthcoming in the anthology Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Handtype Press). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in LGBT and mainstream publications, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
Walking between water, illuminated by ash-white
neon, mustached men in worn denim, still hover
beneath moon-bright clouds, conquering darkness.
Monuments are erected and torn down in the ticklish,
spidery bushes. There are no snakes in the dew damp
grass, only ducks storing energy for emergency
takeoffs, fancy geometric ballets. Cool silhouettes
stretch, expand and grow to split. July has lit
the fuse. Men shed their skins
Gregg Shapiro’s latest chapbook, More Poems About Buildings and Food (Souvenir Spoon Books) was published in February 2019. His second 2019 chapbook, Sunshine State (NightBallet Press) will be published in August. He is the author of Fifty Degrees (Seven Kitchens, 2016), selected by Ching-In Chen as co-winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. He has work forthcoming in the anthology Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Handtype Press). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in LGBT and mainstream publications, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
John Dorroh
The Pool
Old men flock in locker rooms, their tattoos stretched beyond
recognition, a 1971 bleeding heart with a broken arrow, now a
flattened marshmallow with sticks protruding out of its sides.
They move slowly these days like molasses, spreading out onto
benches with all their stuff: straps and bands, towels and tubes
of Aspercreme, trails of wet lint sloughing off their thin, shriveled
bodies into musty shower stalls. Their wives walk the lazy river on
the safe side of the pool, pushing against the current, hoping the
Lipitor and eating more beets and kale will do the trick. “Purple
means freedom,” says the chatty lifeguard whose voice echoes
over water, bouncing off the sides of aquamarine walls. It’s the
way she codes her notes, she explains, the way she manages her
time with her candy-apple red iPhone. There are babies being
tossed into the kiddie pool, unafraid to leave their mothers’
waters for a second time, kicking fervently like new tadpoles. They
need to know this to prevent them from drowning. There’s always
a toddler found in some neighbor’s pool, usually around the 4th of
July, when people are more concerned over the potato salad going
bad. The sign says shower before you enter the pool, but I never
do, and none of the lifeguards pull rank; I think they were tossed
into pools as babies, the way they see dead people bobbing in the
water; that it would certainly be their fault. I choose to clean
myself with a body splash in Lane One, lemon yellow flippers at-
tached snugly to my feet, propelling me half way across the pool
in eight strokes. Someone tells me I’m cheating, and I remind
them that it doesn’t matter since we’re all living on borrowed time.
John Dorroh may have taught high school science for a couple of decades; the jury is still out on that. However, he managed to show up every morning at 6:45 with at least two lesson plans and a thermos of high-test coffee. His poetry has appeared in Red Dirt Forum/Press, Dime Show Review, Eunoia Review, Five:Two, Message in a Bottle, North Dakota Quarterly, Picaroon, Tuck, Piker Press, Red Fez, and several others. He also writes short fiction and the occasional rant.
Old men flock in locker rooms, their tattoos stretched beyond
recognition, a 1971 bleeding heart with a broken arrow, now a
flattened marshmallow with sticks protruding out of its sides.
They move slowly these days like molasses, spreading out onto
benches with all their stuff: straps and bands, towels and tubes
of Aspercreme, trails of wet lint sloughing off their thin, shriveled
bodies into musty shower stalls. Their wives walk the lazy river on
the safe side of the pool, pushing against the current, hoping the
Lipitor and eating more beets and kale will do the trick. “Purple
means freedom,” says the chatty lifeguard whose voice echoes
over water, bouncing off the sides of aquamarine walls. It’s the
way she codes her notes, she explains, the way she manages her
time with her candy-apple red iPhone. There are babies being
tossed into the kiddie pool, unafraid to leave their mothers’
waters for a second time, kicking fervently like new tadpoles. They
need to know this to prevent them from drowning. There’s always
a toddler found in some neighbor’s pool, usually around the 4th of
July, when people are more concerned over the potato salad going
bad. The sign says shower before you enter the pool, but I never
do, and none of the lifeguards pull rank; I think they were tossed
into pools as babies, the way they see dead people bobbing in the
water; that it would certainly be their fault. I choose to clean
myself with a body splash in Lane One, lemon yellow flippers at-
tached snugly to my feet, propelling me half way across the pool
in eight strokes. Someone tells me I’m cheating, and I remind
them that it doesn’t matter since we’re all living on borrowed time.
John Dorroh may have taught high school science for a couple of decades; the jury is still out on that. However, he managed to show up every morning at 6:45 with at least two lesson plans and a thermos of high-test coffee. His poetry has appeared in Red Dirt Forum/Press, Dime Show Review, Eunoia Review, Five:Two, Message in a Bottle, North Dakota Quarterly, Picaroon, Tuck, Piker Press, Red Fez, and several others. He also writes short fiction and the occasional rant.
Danny Fitzpatrick
Tangent
On “Tuesday, June 4, 1991”
Reading Billy Collins in a pirogue
Down the back side of Delacroix Island,
I saw, in the corner of my eye, or by the intuition
That reads a page we've never seen
With whispers of correct inflection,
The Thames at the end of a stanza.
Years prior, citing the Picayune in heated conversation,
I'd said it, Thames, phonetically.
Picture my relief, then, at poem's end,
And my pride, when my wife, seated in the bow,
Turned to tell me it's said "Peeps," not "Pepiss,"
Then turned away again to net a pumpkin-colored redfish
Thrashing brackish drops into my lap.
Daniel Fitzpatrick grew up in New Orleans, studied Philosophy at the University of Dallas, and sells Cadillacs in Hot Springs, AR. He and his wife and children enjoy hiking and micro-farming. His poems and essays have appeared in Dappled Things, By & By, Sheepshead Review, and Studia Gilsoniana, among other places. His debut novel, Only the Lover Sings, is forthcoming this summer.
On “Tuesday, June 4, 1991”
Reading Billy Collins in a pirogue
Down the back side of Delacroix Island,
I saw, in the corner of my eye, or by the intuition
That reads a page we've never seen
With whispers of correct inflection,
The Thames at the end of a stanza.
Years prior, citing the Picayune in heated conversation,
I'd said it, Thames, phonetically.
Picture my relief, then, at poem's end,
And my pride, when my wife, seated in the bow,
Turned to tell me it's said "Peeps," not "Pepiss,"
Then turned away again to net a pumpkin-colored redfish
Thrashing brackish drops into my lap.
Daniel Fitzpatrick grew up in New Orleans, studied Philosophy at the University of Dallas, and sells Cadillacs in Hot Springs, AR. He and his wife and children enjoy hiking and micro-farming. His poems and essays have appeared in Dappled Things, By & By, Sheepshead Review, and Studia Gilsoniana, among other places. His debut novel, Only the Lover Sings, is forthcoming this summer.
Alan Catlin
Social Work
After work, every night,
she drinks just enough
to fall asleep watching TV
Sometimes she remembers
to eat, sometimes not
It’s her work as a substance
abuse counselor that wears
her out
“All those tales of woe
brings a body down.”
Every morning she showers,
drinks three cups of coffee,
maybe four, black
Eats some dry toast
Pops a pill
And drives to work
She does not believe
she has a story
of her own
Alan Catlin has been publishing for over five decades and hope to make it six next year. His most recent full-length book is Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press.
After work, every night,
she drinks just enough
to fall asleep watching TV
Sometimes she remembers
to eat, sometimes not
It’s her work as a substance
abuse counselor that wears
her out
“All those tales of woe
brings a body down.”
Every morning she showers,
drinks three cups of coffee,
maybe four, black
Eats some dry toast
Pops a pill
And drives to work
She does not believe
she has a story
of her own
Alan Catlin has been publishing for over five decades and hope to make it six next year. His most recent full-length book is Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press.
Joseph Chaney 3 poems
Manatee at the Matinee
I can’t see the screen, can’t tell what action
the music knifes through as the opening
credits roll. Because of the manatee.
That damned manatee (don’t get me wrong: I
love them!) fills two seats. This is not a film
for manatees! Why’s he even here? That’s
what I don’t get. He stares with fresh popcorn
innocence straight from his seaweed shallows,
more amazed than anything when the girl
sheds her tight blouse or concealed guns flash out--
things that never happened under water
in his slow-motion world. Turning, he smiles
to himself in that manatee way. He
doesn’t know that the killing has started.
I can’t see the screen, can’t tell what action
the music knifes through as the opening
credits roll. Because of the manatee.
That damned manatee (don’t get me wrong: I
love them!) fills two seats. This is not a film
for manatees! Why’s he even here? That’s
what I don’t get. He stares with fresh popcorn
innocence straight from his seaweed shallows,
more amazed than anything when the girl
sheds her tight blouse or concealed guns flash out--
things that never happened under water
in his slow-motion world. Turning, he smiles
to himself in that manatee way. He
doesn’t know that the killing has started.
Diving
In coral shade, by crenulated crags,
a giant green moray eel turns in place,
extending from its balcony, snout raised,
drawing water through the gills. Shark-flat eyes
look through me. I might as well be seaweed.
Floating trash. Bubble-breather sunk below
the surface, I see how the game is played.
Killing’s the rule, masked in brilliant patterns.
We humans are needy, so faithful dogs
give back our hearts, looking us in the eyes.
When we turn away from one another,
saying “so long,” even with every
intention of meeting again, we feel
how lonely death is, the human ending.
In coral shade, by crenulated crags,
a giant green moray eel turns in place,
extending from its balcony, snout raised,
drawing water through the gills. Shark-flat eyes
look through me. I might as well be seaweed.
Floating trash. Bubble-breather sunk below
the surface, I see how the game is played.
Killing’s the rule, masked in brilliant patterns.
We humans are needy, so faithful dogs
give back our hearts, looking us in the eyes.
When we turn away from one another,
saying “so long,” even with every
intention of meeting again, we feel
how lonely death is, the human ending.
The Doves
In heaven they complain about the doves,
all the doves everywhere dimming God’s light
with translucent feathers and, yes, dropping
chalky excrement on people’s tunics.
There are too many. They make a racket
when they take flight all at once, praising God.
More annoying than the doves are those souls
who draw them to the plazas with hands full
of ambrosia. The doves’ soft wings brush
the enthusiasts’ faces. Senselessness
makes it more popular, and everyone
wants to “fly with the doves,” which is really
only standing tiptoe with arms outstretched
leaning into the wind of the doves’ wings.
Joseph Chaney grew up in Tennessee and now lives in Indiana, but he and his wife frequently hike in Florida. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Nation, Yankee, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Dogwood, Mangrove, and Spillway. Some recent work can be accessed online at Off the Coast, The Cresset, The Apple Valley Review, and Shark Reef. Chaney teaches literature and writing at Indiana University South Bend, where he is an editor at Wolfson Press.
In heaven they complain about the doves,
all the doves everywhere dimming God’s light
with translucent feathers and, yes, dropping
chalky excrement on people’s tunics.
There are too many. They make a racket
when they take flight all at once, praising God.
More annoying than the doves are those souls
who draw them to the plazas with hands full
of ambrosia. The doves’ soft wings brush
the enthusiasts’ faces. Senselessness
makes it more popular, and everyone
wants to “fly with the doves,” which is really
only standing tiptoe with arms outstretched
leaning into the wind of the doves’ wings.
Joseph Chaney grew up in Tennessee and now lives in Indiana, but he and his wife frequently hike in Florida. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Nation, Yankee, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Dogwood, Mangrove, and Spillway. Some recent work can be accessed online at Off the Coast, The Cresset, The Apple Valley Review, and Shark Reef. Chaney teaches literature and writing at Indiana University South Bend, where he is an editor at Wolfson Press.
Jonathan Rose
Whisperings
I used to understand
the whisperings of
asparagus and
Brussels sprouts,
back in my early teens
when I was a philosopher
and a vegetarian.
I was one with vegetables.
Not with carrots–
at least not with cooked carrots.
Cooked carrots did not speak to me.
Nor cauliflower,
nor radishes, nor squash.
My friends were green vegetables,
the ones that mothers push,
yet more exotic ones at that:
Brussels sprouts, asparagus, and lima beans
(named for the capital of Peru but
pronounced like the Ohio town).
I still wonder . . .
never a peep from the peas.
And I adored peas.
My mother’s Canadian cousin
made his fortune in Brussels sprouts–
permanent immigrants from fields in Mexico.
I remember travels to Toronto to visit
during the time vegetables were speaking to me.
They were my confidants.
They would whisper poetry in Spanish;
Their favorite poet was Neruda.
Here was my Twilight Zone experience:
the whisperings predated my knowledge
of my mother’s cousin’s farms,
and of Neruda’s poems.
Stranger still, I had only begun learning Spanish,
yet I recall understanding
every whispered word.
Vegetables no longer speak to me,
perhaps because of the chemicals that coat them,
perhaps due to ozone’s porous layer.
All I know is
I strain,
I listen,
yet hear nothing.
No. I strain.
I listen.
I hear
their silence.
Jonathan Rose is a bilingual immigration lawyer, poet, writer, teacher, translator, editor, and cultural activist. He has served as a judge for local, regional, national, and international poetry contests and curates multidisciplinary events centered on poetry. An accomplished poet and writer published internationally, Jonathan has served as President of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation, as Vice President of Lip, Tongue, & Ear Poetry Guild, has translated poetry and presented workshops, has appeared on radio and television, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry.
I used to understand
the whisperings of
asparagus and
Brussels sprouts,
back in my early teens
when I was a philosopher
and a vegetarian.
I was one with vegetables.
Not with carrots–
at least not with cooked carrots.
Cooked carrots did not speak to me.
Nor cauliflower,
nor radishes, nor squash.
My friends were green vegetables,
the ones that mothers push,
yet more exotic ones at that:
Brussels sprouts, asparagus, and lima beans
(named for the capital of Peru but
pronounced like the Ohio town).
I still wonder . . .
never a peep from the peas.
And I adored peas.
My mother’s Canadian cousin
made his fortune in Brussels sprouts–
permanent immigrants from fields in Mexico.
I remember travels to Toronto to visit
during the time vegetables were speaking to me.
They were my confidants.
They would whisper poetry in Spanish;
Their favorite poet was Neruda.
Here was my Twilight Zone experience:
the whisperings predated my knowledge
of my mother’s cousin’s farms,
and of Neruda’s poems.
Stranger still, I had only begun learning Spanish,
yet I recall understanding
every whispered word.
Vegetables no longer speak to me,
perhaps because of the chemicals that coat them,
perhaps due to ozone’s porous layer.
All I know is
I strain,
I listen,
yet hear nothing.
No. I strain.
I listen.
I hear
their silence.
Jonathan Rose is a bilingual immigration lawyer, poet, writer, teacher, translator, editor, and cultural activist. He has served as a judge for local, regional, national, and international poetry contests and curates multidisciplinary events centered on poetry. An accomplished poet and writer published internationally, Jonathan has served as President of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation, as Vice President of Lip, Tongue, & Ear Poetry Guild, has translated poetry and presented workshops, has appeared on radio and television, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry.
Suchoon Mo
Sarah Jane
she had no real face
she had no real voice
I loved her
I knew her
she was Sarah Jane
who had no real name
she had no real voice
I loved her
I knew her
she was Sarah Jane
who had no real name
Suchoon Mo lives in the semiarid part of Colorado where he writes poetry and composes music.
Holly Jaffe
The Spring of 1972
The finches were relentless the spring my father left us.
Our mom became ill in late March and by
early April she had become full blown mad.
My sister and I prayed that it was one bad day
when she left the crusts on our sandwiches
and let the house cats out into the front yard.
She fell asleep at the foot of our beds,
exhausted and dirty from her relentless digging.
She dug up rocks from the woods in the back of our house and
dropped them into a wheelbarrow that
she pushed a half a mile down the road to
the creek, where she would drop them.
She knew she was terminal as she emptied the bird bath
after every rain and damned the accumulation of clouds.
She had visions of the unthinkable.
She saw herself clear as day, bludgeoning us with a rock while
we slept. She would wash her bloody hands in
the bird bath. The finches would come and dip their
beaks into the pale pink, ravenous as turkey vultures.
The finches were relentless the spring my father left us.
Our mom became ill in late March and by
early April she had become full blown mad.
My sister and I prayed that it was one bad day
when she left the crusts on our sandwiches
and let the house cats out into the front yard.
She fell asleep at the foot of our beds,
exhausted and dirty from her relentless digging.
She dug up rocks from the woods in the back of our house and
dropped them into a wheelbarrow that
she pushed a half a mile down the road to
the creek, where she would drop them.
She knew she was terminal as she emptied the bird bath
after every rain and damned the accumulation of clouds.
She had visions of the unthinkable.
She saw herself clear as day, bludgeoning us with a rock while
we slept. She would wash her bloody hands in
the bird bath. The finches would come and dip their
beaks into the pale pink, ravenous as turkey vultures.
Holly Jaffe lives in South Florida with her husband Bruce where she writes in fits and spurts. She led the Palm Beach Poetry Festival sponsored From Plate to Page Writers Workshop at Old School Square. Her poems have appeared in Red Fez, Mad Swirl, Unlikely Stories, Kleft Jaw, Vext Magazine, and Virgogray Press.
Darren Demaree 2 poems
Dutch Apple Pie
for Lauren Gilmore
I am not
always
life-size
& it’s sublime
to avoid
the invasive
nature
of a human
reality,
but there
are times,
times when
I smell
a world
worth
giving up
the privacy
& the small
mouth.
How indelicate
to poke
the top
of the crust
first,
but I do,
I do, I do
& I will again.
for Lauren Gilmore
I am not
always
life-size
& it’s sublime
to avoid
the invasive
nature
of a human
reality,
but there
are times,
times when
I smell
a world
worth
giving up
the privacy
& the small
mouth.
How indelicate
to poke
the top
of the crust
first,
but I do,
I do, I do
& I will again.
Mincemeat Pie
for Tim Duffy
There is no midpoint
between consumption
& the realization
that there were gallons
of fruit left outside
of the crust
& none of it, none of it
could fit inside
the decoration
before you. It just means
there will be more pies.
Pie logic is genuine
& flawless. I have
no worries about pie.
It’s a relief. I open
my mouth
& I do not scream
& I do not question
& I get to fall in love
with every baker
that understands
the spices they choose
are a letter to me.
It’s so simple.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire, which will be published in June of 2019 by Harpoon Books. He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
for Tim Duffy
There is no midpoint
between consumption
& the realization
that there were gallons
of fruit left outside
of the crust
& none of it, none of it
could fit inside
the decoration
before you. It just means
there will be more pies.
Pie logic is genuine
& flawless. I have
no worries about pie.
It’s a relief. I open
my mouth
& I do not scream
& I do not question
& I get to fall in love
with every baker
that understands
the spices they choose
are a letter to me.
It’s so simple.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire, which will be published in June of 2019 by Harpoon Books. He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Doug Ramspeck
The Dead Line
Because they died—13,000 of the 45,000 Union soldiers held at Andersonville Prison in
Georgia during the Civil War—I have walked away and am standing beneath a black
tupelo, which can live for more than 650 years and has leaves that seem elliptical and
dreamlike, and that now, in autumn, have turned such a bright red flame they appear
to sear the sky. And the leaves, this morning, are holding amid them a black crow calling
in the voice of every other crow, the cawcaw seeming to arise from the mud at the bottom
of the first river, which is the original language, or maybe our mother tongue is the way
the wings carve into the sky when the bird takes flight then oars above where fences once
stood and the prisoners had their makeshift tents and the latrine stank to the point that
residents from the distant towns complained. And the men were scarecrows becoming
cadavers, and the rations were sparse to nonexistent, and the ground was frigid in winter,
unbearable in summer, and the men died of dysentery and scurvy and diarrhea and from
being hanged and shot when they ventured too close to the dead line. The black tupelo,
now, is lifting its arms in supplication, reaching for the sky. And I like to imagine that it
feels the heat of sunlight on its body, and it dreams the decades into a kind of raft on
which it rides. And perhaps this same tree after dark tonight will find itself with lovers
spreading a blanket beneath it, just as the moonlight spreads its own pale blanket. And
then the grains of stars will seed the sky with such unreal light that even the tupelo will
begin to doubt it is corporeal. And the men, the ones who died inside the prison, will
dream, in death, of a fluttering of crow wings within their chests, will remember the flies
and worms and rodents they used to catch to eat. And in death they will have their
memories of wives and children and former lives, will remember their devotion to
sunlight, will remember the tupelo spreading its limbs in worship, and will marvel at how
this tree stands in this self-same spot and never moves or breathes or actually dreams,
unless a skittering squirrel is a dream, and the rain falling against leaves is a dream.
Maybe the dead men create the wheel of the planet, this way we twirl out into the greater
forever, and they remember how their bellies shriveled, how the wind trembled grass,
trembled leaves, trembled them who leaned before the stream and drank the fetid water.
And I keep thinking of a story my father often told about his childhood in Escanaba,
during the Depression, about his grandmother, who raised him, sitting on the front porch
of her rooming house, which was their only source of income, and telling him they were
going to starve. And how that winter he watched his uncle slaughter a horse then cut it
into strips of meat, which the family ate. And I think about the prisoners, in falling snow,
rushing toward the dead line, trying hopelessly to get out, and my father telling me once
he had no sympathy for complaints from those who’d hadn’t come by their suffering
honestly. He meant me. And I would watch him aim his .22 toward the squirrels in the
trees around the house, aim as though he hated them, and I would watch them land with a
thump and twitch into death, in the way those men must have convulsed with fever while
the tupelo slipped on its blindfold. Or maybe the tree took the long view, the years no
different than the clouds or the crows or the rain or Captain Henry Wertz, who was
hanged after the war for war crimes. And what of all those prisoners from whom the
Andersonville Raiders, armed with clubs, attacked and stole food from their fellow
inmates? And while my father was shooting squirrels and crows, I spent my time, as a
child, studying the images in his Civil War books, studying the fallen dead, touching my
finger to the page and the imagined blood. My father, I should say, tried to hang himself
as a sophomore in high school, or so my mother told me when I was fifteen, but the rope
broke beneath his body’s weight. And consider the equivalency of things, how a crow is a
black tupelo is a snapped neck is a year is a strip of horse meat is a latrine is a club is a
breath in the lungs is a skull of moon is a dead line is a raft of the decades is a squirrel falling
through the air. And lovers on a blanket are a numerology, as are the dead and the
way the clouds become cadavers or scarecrows. And my father, later in life, kept
forgetting everything, and repeating everything, this recursive way that words come back
on themselves with each new day, one minute to the next, the sun lifting itself above the
same ridge. There was a girl I knew in grade school who died of leukemia but first lived
among us, always sniffling with a cold, always in wool sweaters. Later I thought of her
only as the dead, the dead girl with dark hair, always holding a Kleenex to her nose. We
prayed for her in class, bowed our heads, our words lifting though the ceiling to find their
way to God. And I think of the few prisoners who managed, by some miracle, to escape
past the fence, running. Let’s say one was in his teens. Let’s say from Ohio, with seven
siblings. Let’s say he was thinking of his sisters and of his mother and of his brothers
and of his father and of the ground in motion beneath him. He was running, running, his
hunger a kind of swoon. He was weak with running, his limbs shutting down, and he
stumbled. Let’s say it was dark, with a moon, with eggs of stars. He was running but
couldn’t go on, so he rested. Look at him beneath the black tupelo, gasping. Or say he
pressed his cheek to the furrowed bark. Let’s say the purplish fruit was dropping around
him. Let’s say he feasted. Let’s say he cracked a weakened tooth on a large seed. But
didn’t care. The boy was swallowing air, was leaning against the tree. And they were
coming for him then, and he feared dogs, heard the barks and the voices around him.
And while the soldiers were looking, the tree was his protector. He hugged the bark in the
darkness with the same distraction that my father would later forget his own name. And
the tree, meanwhile, was forgetting, too, and cared nothing for the boy. Maybe the tree
was God, and soon the boy was rising again and running, and the faint moonlight
festered around him, and the boy heard the crickets. And what of the country-rifle bullet,
the first one striking the Ohio boy in the back? And what of two others that followed?
Let’s say the boy’s last thoughts were of the stains of fruit still clutched in his palm, or he
remembered a neighbor girl he loved from a distance and once kissed over a fence while
a horse swished its tail around them. Or say the girl had a runny nose and died so long
ago, and was one of the long dead, the ancient dead. And my father’s father, I should
mention—a man from whom no one in my family had a good word—was shot in the
neck in WWI at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. Later died of kidney disease in Memphis. And
he was the one, who, after my father’s mother died, dropped my father at his own
mother’s rooming house, then left for parts unknown, as they used to say. I visited him
only once that I remember, and I climbed a tree in his backyard and touched my cheek to
the furrowed bark and realized that everything was the space between heartbeats and
between breaths and between stars and between memories and between waves and
between lives and between the flaps of a crow’s wings and between atoms and between
thoughts and between words. Last summer there was a wasps’ nest in a high corner of my
toolshed, and I bought the spray and aimed it but couldn’t spray, so let them have the
space, even after I was stung twice while lifting the sliding door to fetch the lawnmower,
and the pain was like the fire of the tupelo leaves in autumn, suffusing my blood with
pain, and I grew dizzy with it and waited. And maybe I thought about a snake that lived
once beneath our house when I was a child, and I could see it there, curling into the
ouroboros, and the vertical slits of eyes watched me, and I watched back, and the snake
was God until it slipped by mistake beneath the walls of the prison and the prisoners
chased it to kill it for food. And they fought over the corpse, and the snake beneath our
house shucked off its skin as an offering. And the skin was God and the clouds were God
and the dead soldier’s hair blowing in the wind was God. And there was no God as the
boy held the fruit tightly in his palm. Or maybe that was thought of God, some
simulacrum of every God that ever was or wasn’t. And the boy was left there overnight in
the field beside the tupelo, left until morning when the burial detail arrived in new light.
And maybe there was a crow calling from the high limbs of the tupelo while the men held
their shovels and tossed the dark earth over their shoulders.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one collection of short stories. His most recent book, Black Flowers (2018), is published by LSU Press. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review.
Because they died—13,000 of the 45,000 Union soldiers held at Andersonville Prison in
Georgia during the Civil War—I have walked away and am standing beneath a black
tupelo, which can live for more than 650 years and has leaves that seem elliptical and
dreamlike, and that now, in autumn, have turned such a bright red flame they appear
to sear the sky. And the leaves, this morning, are holding amid them a black crow calling
in the voice of every other crow, the cawcaw seeming to arise from the mud at the bottom
of the first river, which is the original language, or maybe our mother tongue is the way
the wings carve into the sky when the bird takes flight then oars above where fences once
stood and the prisoners had their makeshift tents and the latrine stank to the point that
residents from the distant towns complained. And the men were scarecrows becoming
cadavers, and the rations were sparse to nonexistent, and the ground was frigid in winter,
unbearable in summer, and the men died of dysentery and scurvy and diarrhea and from
being hanged and shot when they ventured too close to the dead line. The black tupelo,
now, is lifting its arms in supplication, reaching for the sky. And I like to imagine that it
feels the heat of sunlight on its body, and it dreams the decades into a kind of raft on
which it rides. And perhaps this same tree after dark tonight will find itself with lovers
spreading a blanket beneath it, just as the moonlight spreads its own pale blanket. And
then the grains of stars will seed the sky with such unreal light that even the tupelo will
begin to doubt it is corporeal. And the men, the ones who died inside the prison, will
dream, in death, of a fluttering of crow wings within their chests, will remember the flies
and worms and rodents they used to catch to eat. And in death they will have their
memories of wives and children and former lives, will remember their devotion to
sunlight, will remember the tupelo spreading its limbs in worship, and will marvel at how
this tree stands in this self-same spot and never moves or breathes or actually dreams,
unless a skittering squirrel is a dream, and the rain falling against leaves is a dream.
Maybe the dead men create the wheel of the planet, this way we twirl out into the greater
forever, and they remember how their bellies shriveled, how the wind trembled grass,
trembled leaves, trembled them who leaned before the stream and drank the fetid water.
And I keep thinking of a story my father often told about his childhood in Escanaba,
during the Depression, about his grandmother, who raised him, sitting on the front porch
of her rooming house, which was their only source of income, and telling him they were
going to starve. And how that winter he watched his uncle slaughter a horse then cut it
into strips of meat, which the family ate. And I think about the prisoners, in falling snow,
rushing toward the dead line, trying hopelessly to get out, and my father telling me once
he had no sympathy for complaints from those who’d hadn’t come by their suffering
honestly. He meant me. And I would watch him aim his .22 toward the squirrels in the
trees around the house, aim as though he hated them, and I would watch them land with a
thump and twitch into death, in the way those men must have convulsed with fever while
the tupelo slipped on its blindfold. Or maybe the tree took the long view, the years no
different than the clouds or the crows or the rain or Captain Henry Wertz, who was
hanged after the war for war crimes. And what of all those prisoners from whom the
Andersonville Raiders, armed with clubs, attacked and stole food from their fellow
inmates? And while my father was shooting squirrels and crows, I spent my time, as a
child, studying the images in his Civil War books, studying the fallen dead, touching my
finger to the page and the imagined blood. My father, I should say, tried to hang himself
as a sophomore in high school, or so my mother told me when I was fifteen, but the rope
broke beneath his body’s weight. And consider the equivalency of things, how a crow is a
black tupelo is a snapped neck is a year is a strip of horse meat is a latrine is a club is a
breath in the lungs is a skull of moon is a dead line is a raft of the decades is a squirrel falling
through the air. And lovers on a blanket are a numerology, as are the dead and the
way the clouds become cadavers or scarecrows. And my father, later in life, kept
forgetting everything, and repeating everything, this recursive way that words come back
on themselves with each new day, one minute to the next, the sun lifting itself above the
same ridge. There was a girl I knew in grade school who died of leukemia but first lived
among us, always sniffling with a cold, always in wool sweaters. Later I thought of her
only as the dead, the dead girl with dark hair, always holding a Kleenex to her nose. We
prayed for her in class, bowed our heads, our words lifting though the ceiling to find their
way to God. And I think of the few prisoners who managed, by some miracle, to escape
past the fence, running. Let’s say one was in his teens. Let’s say from Ohio, with seven
siblings. Let’s say he was thinking of his sisters and of his mother and of his brothers
and of his father and of the ground in motion beneath him. He was running, running, his
hunger a kind of swoon. He was weak with running, his limbs shutting down, and he
stumbled. Let’s say it was dark, with a moon, with eggs of stars. He was running but
couldn’t go on, so he rested. Look at him beneath the black tupelo, gasping. Or say he
pressed his cheek to the furrowed bark. Let’s say the purplish fruit was dropping around
him. Let’s say he feasted. Let’s say he cracked a weakened tooth on a large seed. But
didn’t care. The boy was swallowing air, was leaning against the tree. And they were
coming for him then, and he feared dogs, heard the barks and the voices around him.
And while the soldiers were looking, the tree was his protector. He hugged the bark in the
darkness with the same distraction that my father would later forget his own name. And
the tree, meanwhile, was forgetting, too, and cared nothing for the boy. Maybe the tree
was God, and soon the boy was rising again and running, and the faint moonlight
festered around him, and the boy heard the crickets. And what of the country-rifle bullet,
the first one striking the Ohio boy in the back? And what of two others that followed?
Let’s say the boy’s last thoughts were of the stains of fruit still clutched in his palm, or he
remembered a neighbor girl he loved from a distance and once kissed over a fence while
a horse swished its tail around them. Or say the girl had a runny nose and died so long
ago, and was one of the long dead, the ancient dead. And my father’s father, I should
mention—a man from whom no one in my family had a good word—was shot in the
neck in WWI at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. Later died of kidney disease in Memphis. And
he was the one, who, after my father’s mother died, dropped my father at his own
mother’s rooming house, then left for parts unknown, as they used to say. I visited him
only once that I remember, and I climbed a tree in his backyard and touched my cheek to
the furrowed bark and realized that everything was the space between heartbeats and
between breaths and between stars and between memories and between waves and
between lives and between the flaps of a crow’s wings and between atoms and between
thoughts and between words. Last summer there was a wasps’ nest in a high corner of my
toolshed, and I bought the spray and aimed it but couldn’t spray, so let them have the
space, even after I was stung twice while lifting the sliding door to fetch the lawnmower,
and the pain was like the fire of the tupelo leaves in autumn, suffusing my blood with
pain, and I grew dizzy with it and waited. And maybe I thought about a snake that lived
once beneath our house when I was a child, and I could see it there, curling into the
ouroboros, and the vertical slits of eyes watched me, and I watched back, and the snake
was God until it slipped by mistake beneath the walls of the prison and the prisoners
chased it to kill it for food. And they fought over the corpse, and the snake beneath our
house shucked off its skin as an offering. And the skin was God and the clouds were God
and the dead soldier’s hair blowing in the wind was God. And there was no God as the
boy held the fruit tightly in his palm. Or maybe that was thought of God, some
simulacrum of every God that ever was or wasn’t. And the boy was left there overnight in
the field beside the tupelo, left until morning when the burial detail arrived in new light.
And maybe there was a crow calling from the high limbs of the tupelo while the men held
their shovels and tossed the dark earth over their shoulders.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one collection of short stories. His most recent book, Black Flowers (2018), is published by LSU Press. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review.
Hiram Larew
Gathered
Our ancestors deserved to harvest the fullest pumpkins -
As long summer work finally ended
As doors were latched closed against the cold,
As leaves turned from green to yellow to gone
And as their windows’ frost then became snow,
Our ancestors earned every sweet apple that came their way
And all the goldenrod too that a field could muster.
Whenever tales got hummed back then or grinning knees got slapped
Or if some eyes misted over when our long agos gathered,
Their savor was surely for what they had done with abound -
For sweat wiped, for backs bent,
For planks squared, for planks scrubbed,
For better times hearted,
For all the hopes that turned into Fall,
And especially for sacks full
Of the best black walnuts
That were carried as gifts to distant neighbors.
Hiram Larew's work has popped up recently in The Wild Word, Contemporary American Voices, Honest Ulsterman, Amsterdam Quarterly and Viator. His fourth collection, Undone, was released by FootHills Publishing in 2018. Visit him on Facebook at Hiram Larew, Poet.
Our ancestors deserved to harvest the fullest pumpkins -
As long summer work finally ended
As doors were latched closed against the cold,
As leaves turned from green to yellow to gone
And as their windows’ frost then became snow,
Our ancestors earned every sweet apple that came their way
And all the goldenrod too that a field could muster.
Whenever tales got hummed back then or grinning knees got slapped
Or if some eyes misted over when our long agos gathered,
Their savor was surely for what they had done with abound -
For sweat wiped, for backs bent,
For planks squared, for planks scrubbed,
For better times hearted,
For all the hopes that turned into Fall,
And especially for sacks full
Of the best black walnuts
That were carried as gifts to distant neighbors.
Hiram Larew's work has popped up recently in The Wild Word, Contemporary American Voices, Honest Ulsterman, Amsterdam Quarterly and Viator. His fourth collection, Undone, was released by FootHills Publishing in 2018. Visit him on Facebook at Hiram Larew, Poet.
Poets Respond To the Prompt:
The Dream-Time History of America
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The Dream-Time History of America
Is clouded by dust is tin rot mended
fenders and ruts that suck tires. Is heavy
load gone sag. Is hope printed on flyers.
Is a worn map laid out on a warm dash.
Is suitcases stuffed with what’s left. Is chairs
splayed, everything tied on with twine. Is miles
floating slow. Is the desert of mute dry
air. Is steady rise into granite faced
mountains. Is the valley planted to its
brim with crops. Is you may be hungry but
you can’t eat what hangs from the vine. Is barbed
wire rolled out. Is signs screaming GET OUT. Is
finally, a small shack. Is mud puddles
you look into trying to find the sky.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House
Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her work has been published
in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet's Market and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley
College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.
Is clouded by dust is tin rot mended
fenders and ruts that suck tires. Is heavy
load gone sag. Is hope printed on flyers.
Is a worn map laid out on a warm dash.
Is suitcases stuffed with what’s left. Is chairs
splayed, everything tied on with twine. Is miles
floating slow. Is the desert of mute dry
air. Is steady rise into granite faced
mountains. Is the valley planted to its
brim with crops. Is you may be hungry but
you can’t eat what hangs from the vine. Is barbed
wire rolled out. Is signs screaming GET OUT. Is
finally, a small shack. Is mud puddles
you look into trying to find the sky.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House
Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her work has been published
in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet's Market and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley
College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.
Ryn Holmes
The Dream-Time History of America
Haircut and ‘stache trim-ready to go. Florida to Louisiana: seriously monotonous drive
on US 10 to rendezvous with some guy living in a stilted cabin
in a back-water bayou. Youngish, cut, and quite enthusiastic.
Alabama for a day: Different rendezvous and guy.
Killer chemistry during a comfortable afternoon tour,
pride in his being well-known obvious. Left wanting more.
Hwy 98 West. Loads of spaces between very few places.
Natchez, Mississippi: Historic Eola Hotel – both campy Southern queens
down on their luck. Hunky clerk checks me in as I check him out.
Natchez Under the Hill on the Camp Tavern porch. View
a bridge spanning the Mississippi River to Elma Springs, LA.
Cocktail before dinner, bartender winks. I share my key.
Breeze coming off the water barely cuts the heat.
Rowdy bikers drinking next door, we wave.
Hot in those leathers. Rough trade, maybe?
Hwy 61 Mississippi and US 59 Alabama to Scottsboro:
Unclaimed Baggage Center to look for treasure left
by airline travelers. Delivery truck driver shows me his Ram.
On Alabama I-65 heading south. See a huge Confederate flag,
vexed signage beneath. The locals seem riled.
Quick date with a traveler at the rest stop.
Angling across Alabama to Florida to meet up with an offshore worker.
Nothing but cotton and peanut fields. Stopped to dally
with a fisherman along the Chattahoochee River. Nice catch.
Manhole Cover bar late afternoon Florida, only other man
wearing a Team Rainbow tee. Eye contact
and voila! Tryst hatched and bedded.
Perfect day for Gulfport, Mississippi, lunch indiscretion.
I peek at his package, share parking lot kisses to die for.
Life is a banquet – and too short!
Award-winning poet and photographer, Ryn Holmes originated from the bottom and top of California before finding her way to the Gulf Coast of Florida. She is a partner in K & K Writing Services and a co-editor of Panoply ezine. Over the years, her written and art works have appeared in several journals.
Haircut and ‘stache trim-ready to go. Florida to Louisiana: seriously monotonous drive
on US 10 to rendezvous with some guy living in a stilted cabin
in a back-water bayou. Youngish, cut, and quite enthusiastic.
Alabama for a day: Different rendezvous and guy.
Killer chemistry during a comfortable afternoon tour,
pride in his being well-known obvious. Left wanting more.
Hwy 98 West. Loads of spaces between very few places.
Natchez, Mississippi: Historic Eola Hotel – both campy Southern queens
down on their luck. Hunky clerk checks me in as I check him out.
Natchez Under the Hill on the Camp Tavern porch. View
a bridge spanning the Mississippi River to Elma Springs, LA.
Cocktail before dinner, bartender winks. I share my key.
Breeze coming off the water barely cuts the heat.
Rowdy bikers drinking next door, we wave.
Hot in those leathers. Rough trade, maybe?
Hwy 61 Mississippi and US 59 Alabama to Scottsboro:
Unclaimed Baggage Center to look for treasure left
by airline travelers. Delivery truck driver shows me his Ram.
On Alabama I-65 heading south. See a huge Confederate flag,
vexed signage beneath. The locals seem riled.
Quick date with a traveler at the rest stop.
Angling across Alabama to Florida to meet up with an offshore worker.
Nothing but cotton and peanut fields. Stopped to dally
with a fisherman along the Chattahoochee River. Nice catch.
Manhole Cover bar late afternoon Florida, only other man
wearing a Team Rainbow tee. Eye contact
and voila! Tryst hatched and bedded.
Perfect day for Gulfport, Mississippi, lunch indiscretion.
I peek at his package, share parking lot kisses to die for.
Life is a banquet – and too short!
Award-winning poet and photographer, Ryn Holmes originated from the bottom and top of California before finding her way to the Gulf Coast of Florida. She is a partner in K & K Writing Services and a co-editor of Panoply ezine. Over the years, her written and art works have appeared in several journals.
Jeff Santosuosso
The Dream-Time History of America
I was a boy primed for impressions
when Armstrong took that first step, that giant leap
like Bob Beamon’s flight across a Mexican sand pit,
his legs pumping in the thin air
three feet above Earth’s surface,
his arms thrusting back,
his legs and feet extended forward,
a soft landing into history.
No one could jump that far,
but we could jump under our desks
at the siren’s sound, just as the President asked.
I was a boy primed for impressions
when super-suited Armstrong, invisible,
stepped off the ladder, then the pad
and touched a boot sole to a lunar sand pit,
shiny-masked across thousands of miles,
a grainy black and white in our predawn living room,
while a farm-full of pot burned in Vietnam,
inflamed faces smoldering among the Agent Orange
and napalm.
I was a boy primed for impressions
as Armstrong was joined by Aldrin
a year after Smith was joined by Carlos,
their leaders gunned down one by one as if in a sprint,
black-gloved fists raised, one with a left, the other a right,
as the silver Australian stood beside the spectacle,
Michael Collins hovering up there
in the Command Module,
two men so nearby those histories,
heads spinning like planets and moons
as millions watched awestruck,
those two overlooked, forgotten.
I’m a granddad now, been around the block,
as Curiosity says goodbye,
transmissions ceasing on the cold red planet,
far surpassing her mission and duties,
electronic dog, dutiful,
hurtling science to no-longer-imaginary stretches
as Earth burns and freezes,
swings in wild patterns while some make wilder
claims to protect their Earthly possessions.
I’m a granddad now, been around the block,
as unmanned Curiosity rambles into darkness,
an entire staff behind the scenes, remote,
pulling together to make a possibility,
while some sit in their living rooms
TV-struck, remote, colder,
less human than the wheels, tires, and lasers,
pulled apart by studio monsters.
I’m a granddad now, been around the block,
as Curiosity disappears into history,
into collective memory,
motionless, decomposing
slowly in that bitter cold, as metal monument,
windblown, sand-covered, and tattered.
Each news flash passes here, numbers vary,
ages, genders, circumstances differ,
but each riddled with a bullet, some more than one,
some to bleed out,
their red surrounding them like barren soil,
named, then nameless as the next comes too soon,
long before we reach a new star in the night.
Jeff Santosuosso is a business consultant and award-winning poet living in Pensacola, FL. His chap book, Body of Water, is available through Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is Editor-in-Chief of panoplyzine.com, an online journal of poetry and short prose. Jeff’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Mojave Dessert Review, The Lake (UK), Red Fez, First Literary Review-East, Texas Poetry Calendar, Avocet, and other online and print publications.
I was a boy primed for impressions
when Armstrong took that first step, that giant leap
like Bob Beamon’s flight across a Mexican sand pit,
his legs pumping in the thin air
three feet above Earth’s surface,
his arms thrusting back,
his legs and feet extended forward,
a soft landing into history.
No one could jump that far,
but we could jump under our desks
at the siren’s sound, just as the President asked.
I was a boy primed for impressions
when super-suited Armstrong, invisible,
stepped off the ladder, then the pad
and touched a boot sole to a lunar sand pit,
shiny-masked across thousands of miles,
a grainy black and white in our predawn living room,
while a farm-full of pot burned in Vietnam,
inflamed faces smoldering among the Agent Orange
and napalm.
I was a boy primed for impressions
as Armstrong was joined by Aldrin
a year after Smith was joined by Carlos,
their leaders gunned down one by one as if in a sprint,
black-gloved fists raised, one with a left, the other a right,
as the silver Australian stood beside the spectacle,
Michael Collins hovering up there
in the Command Module,
two men so nearby those histories,
heads spinning like planets and moons
as millions watched awestruck,
those two overlooked, forgotten.
I’m a granddad now, been around the block,
as Curiosity says goodbye,
transmissions ceasing on the cold red planet,
far surpassing her mission and duties,
electronic dog, dutiful,
hurtling science to no-longer-imaginary stretches
as Earth burns and freezes,
swings in wild patterns while some make wilder
claims to protect their Earthly possessions.
I’m a granddad now, been around the block,
as unmanned Curiosity rambles into darkness,
an entire staff behind the scenes, remote,
pulling together to make a possibility,
while some sit in their living rooms
TV-struck, remote, colder,
less human than the wheels, tires, and lasers,
pulled apart by studio monsters.
I’m a granddad now, been around the block,
as Curiosity disappears into history,
into collective memory,
motionless, decomposing
slowly in that bitter cold, as metal monument,
windblown, sand-covered, and tattered.
Each news flash passes here, numbers vary,
ages, genders, circumstances differ,
but each riddled with a bullet, some more than one,
some to bleed out,
their red surrounding them like barren soil,
named, then nameless as the next comes too soon,
long before we reach a new star in the night.
Jeff Santosuosso is a business consultant and award-winning poet living in Pensacola, FL. His chap book, Body of Water, is available through Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is Editor-in-Chief of panoplyzine.com, an online journal of poetry and short prose. Jeff’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Mojave Dessert Review, The Lake (UK), Red Fez, First Literary Review-East, Texas Poetry Calendar, Avocet, and other online and print publications.
Carmine G. Di Biase
American Rondeau
I nearly overlooked this arrowhead
Tonight. See how it glows, like Mars, faint red
Under this moon, this piece of silica
That long ago tore through the viscera
Of some poor beast on which the hunter fed.
Suspended in this blackness, all outspread
Against the stars, the quickening homebred
Objects float, a teeming cornucopia
I nearly overlooked:
Top hats, guns, trombones, a child’s painted sled,
Clocks, chrome bumpers, blue jeans with yellow thread,
The gleaming marquee of a cinema –
The dream-time history of America
I nearly overlooked.
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 is currently translating Pinocchio and other works, mainly stories and plays which have never appeared in English, by the same author, Carlo (Lorenzini) Collodi.
I nearly overlooked this arrowhead
Tonight. See how it glows, like Mars, faint red
Under this moon, this piece of silica
That long ago tore through the viscera
Of some poor beast on which the hunter fed.
Suspended in this blackness, all outspread
Against the stars, the quickening homebred
Objects float, a teeming cornucopia
I nearly overlooked:
Top hats, guns, trombones, a child’s painted sled,
Clocks, chrome bumpers, blue jeans with yellow thread,
The gleaming marquee of a cinema –
The dream-time history of America
I nearly overlooked.
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 is currently translating Pinocchio and other works, mainly stories and plays which have never appeared in English, by the same author, Carlo (Lorenzini) Collodi.
Jim Daniels
The Dream-Time History of America
It starts with a flag burning and ends--
well, it never ends. Our feeble coins
face each other in presidential stare-downs
ignored by feet on the street.
George Washington cut his boat to pieces
crossing the Delaware and told
his share of lies, starting the great American
political tradition of deniability
despite getting his ass kicked in a fair
share of battles while accumulating
his hand for liar's poker. My great grand-
father appears on the scene
with his pet monkey on a bar stool
spiking their drinks with cynicism.
I voted for years in a basement down the block
where I had to duck my head
and eat my neighbor's smoky cookies.
The furnace humming down there,
early November, the heat more comfort
than the choices. At least I didn't have to
wear a pair of parentheses around my wrists
like the people whose faces
had been melted down to form the metal
for those coins. Once a year
we drop all of our coins for luck
and call them fireworks.
Jim Daniels' recent books include Rowing Inland and Street Calligraphy, poetry, and The Perp Walk, short fiction. His anthology, R E S P E C T: The Poetry of Detroit Music, co-edited with M.L. Liebler, will to be published later in 2019 by Michigan State University Press.
It starts with a flag burning and ends--
well, it never ends. Our feeble coins
face each other in presidential stare-downs
ignored by feet on the street.
George Washington cut his boat to pieces
crossing the Delaware and told
his share of lies, starting the great American
political tradition of deniability
despite getting his ass kicked in a fair
share of battles while accumulating
his hand for liar's poker. My great grand-
father appears on the scene
with his pet monkey on a bar stool
spiking their drinks with cynicism.
I voted for years in a basement down the block
where I had to duck my head
and eat my neighbor's smoky cookies.
The furnace humming down there,
early November, the heat more comfort
than the choices. At least I didn't have to
wear a pair of parentheses around my wrists
like the people whose faces
had been melted down to form the metal
for those coins. Once a year
we drop all of our coins for luck
and call them fireworks.
Jim Daniels' recent books include Rowing Inland and Street Calligraphy, poetry, and The Perp Walk, short fiction. His anthology, R E S P E C T: The Poetry of Detroit Music, co-edited with M.L. Liebler, will to be published later in 2019 by Michigan State University Press.
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]