Issue 14 August 2019
Francine Witte, Editor
Francine Witte, Editor
Poets in this issue: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Samuel Ace, Brenda Serrote, Jen Karetnick, Martina Newberry, George Wallace, Kathy Fagan, Danielle Hanson, Cammy Thomas, Alice B. Fogel, Joseph Fasano, Adrian Castro, Jennifer Juneau, Shasi Mantynova tr. by Anna Krushelnitskaya, James Croal Jackson, William May, Bill Ratner, Carol Alexander, Joan Colby, Lin Nelson Benedek, Alan Catlin, Richard Nester, Yuan Changming, Bryan Monte, Holly Iglesias, Ron Stottlemyer, David Lawton, Sue Blaustein, Angie Trudell Vasque, Steve Klepetar, Tony Barnstone, Stuart Dischell
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Story Board 2 a collage poem
Storyboard tells the not totally plotless “story” of our political and social disasters and problematics, with poems (allegories? comments?) on the same page. Eventually it will become a book of collage-poems such as Graphic Novella (Xeoxial Editions, 2015) and NUMBERS (Materialist Press, 2018). It consists now of thirty single-page collages and text. Materials include paper of various kinds and sources and some documents (including in “Papers,” the one published here); the size is 8 x 11 ¼; they exist as unique originals, not created by Photoshop®.
The work looks at soul-challenging historical events taking shape over the twentieth century, into the twenty-first, not necessarily in a short period of time, but with a gradual and shocking unraveling in recent years. It is generally investigative and responsive. Other pages from Storyboard have been published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Tupelo Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and Lute & Drum.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, essayist and collagist, and is the author of the multi-volume long poem "Drafts." Other recent work includes Days and Works from Ahsahta Press, 2017 and Around the Day in 80 Worlds from BlazeVOX, 2018.
The work looks at soul-challenging historical events taking shape over the twentieth century, into the twenty-first, not necessarily in a short period of time, but with a gradual and shocking unraveling in recent years. It is generally investigative and responsive. Other pages from Storyboard have been published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Tupelo Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and Lute & Drum.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, essayist and collagist, and is the author of the multi-volume long poem "Drafts." Other recent work includes Days and Works from Ahsahta Press, 2017 and Around the Day in 80 Worlds from BlazeVOX, 2018.
Samuel Ace 2 poems
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Samuel Ace is a trans and genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, including Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish Books, 2019), Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts, 2019), and Stealth, cowritten with poet Maureen Seaton (Chax Press, 2011).
In Memoriam Brenda Serrote
The Dress
My mother died without me by her side
as I always expected to be.
Just as my flight from Seattle landed
she took her last breath, about nine,
the home attendant said. When I arrived
she was still.
I’d never seen her that quiet,
her mouth an oval empty gasp
begging to be clamp closed.
Hard to believe she’s not yelling at me
for walking in late.
I took her hand, memorized
it’s dots and spots, then cried.
I’d never see that hand again.
When a mother dies your past evaporates.
There are certain events only she remembered
fragments you try to piece together
hoping one day they’ll make some sense.
Like the time I got thrown off the Howdy Doody show
for crying-why did she take it so badly?
You were the prettiest kid in the row,
you shouldn’t have fussed like you did!
Now, I need to know this:
Was I wearing the purple dress she picked out
with the cap sleeves and white lace collar,
or the red-plaid puffed-sleeved number
that I happened to like a lot better?
When a mother dies there’s no more screening
‘It’s-only-me-your-mother’ calls,
no laughing with friends over coffee
about her ridiculous messages.
A mother will say or do anything
for attention. Then, too, there are the calls
I’ll truly miss, like the one the night before she died,
when she told me somewhat mysteriously:
There’s an angel watching over you…
strange talk for her at any time.
Maybe she guessed she was going.
And I took for granted the annual birthday call
reminding: You are my first-born, you know,
and there’s nothing like a first-born…
But she also said, and often,
that I was a terrible crier
at the most inopportune times,
especially the debacle
on Howdy Doody
when they carried me out
of the Peanut Gallery,
hysterical.
Wearing the red plaid
or purple dress,
the year that I was five.
Reprinted with permission from Blue Farm
Brenda Serrote was a South Florida poet active for many years in the local poetry scene.
My mother died without me by her side
as I always expected to be.
Just as my flight from Seattle landed
she took her last breath, about nine,
the home attendant said. When I arrived
she was still.
I’d never seen her that quiet,
her mouth an oval empty gasp
begging to be clamp closed.
Hard to believe she’s not yelling at me
for walking in late.
I took her hand, memorized
it’s dots and spots, then cried.
I’d never see that hand again.
When a mother dies your past evaporates.
There are certain events only she remembered
fragments you try to piece together
hoping one day they’ll make some sense.
Like the time I got thrown off the Howdy Doody show
for crying-why did she take it so badly?
You were the prettiest kid in the row,
you shouldn’t have fussed like you did!
Now, I need to know this:
Was I wearing the purple dress she picked out
with the cap sleeves and white lace collar,
or the red-plaid puffed-sleeved number
that I happened to like a lot better?
When a mother dies there’s no more screening
‘It’s-only-me-your-mother’ calls,
no laughing with friends over coffee
about her ridiculous messages.
A mother will say or do anything
for attention. Then, too, there are the calls
I’ll truly miss, like the one the night before she died,
when she told me somewhat mysteriously:
There’s an angel watching over you…
strange talk for her at any time.
Maybe she guessed she was going.
And I took for granted the annual birthday call
reminding: You are my first-born, you know,
and there’s nothing like a first-born…
But she also said, and often,
that I was a terrible crier
at the most inopportune times,
especially the debacle
on Howdy Doody
when they carried me out
of the Peanut Gallery,
hysterical.
Wearing the red plaid
or purple dress,
the year that I was five.
Reprinted with permission from Blue Farm
Brenda Serrote was a South Florida poet active for many years in the local poetry scene.
Jen Karetnick 2 poems
If X + Y Then Sestina
I urge my students to claim division,
to proselytize geometry proofs--
how really, they read like five-paragraph
essays under the right florescent light--
to know that the function of the domain
is an argument that supports a point.
But they tell me that they see little point.
They embrace the median division,
say the brain’s right side is their true domain.
I want them to show me bisector proof
that they can only think the way a light
bulb is programmed to wattage. Paragraphs
in studies show that even paragraphs
do come from the left: logical, pointed,
linear. As organized as strings of light
around a Scots Pine, making divisions
out of ornamented needles, proof
that holidays are as subject to math’s domain
as their school days. So, too, is the domain
of line and sentence, stanza and paragraph.
They count the words for teachers to approve
what they’ve done; grown, they’ll do the same to point
the way for publishers, mark the divisions
between text and white space, fight for the light
to stand and guide as what it is—light--
both the beginning and end of a domain.
But the box-and-whisper plot is not division;
it is prose built of the paragraphs
that extend like the senses and point
to no outliers, a visual proof
they can also dance, smudge with charcoal, proof
that shadows grow to exist on the light
medium of stage or canvas. The point
being that double angles, in the domain
of definition, identify. The graph
of an inequality will divide
intelligence if the points are used as proof,
but divisions can turn into non-binary lights
with aleph null domains dictated by paragraphs.
I urge my students to claim division,
to proselytize geometry proofs--
how really, they read like five-paragraph
essays under the right florescent light--
to know that the function of the domain
is an argument that supports a point.
But they tell me that they see little point.
They embrace the median division,
say the brain’s right side is their true domain.
I want them to show me bisector proof
that they can only think the way a light
bulb is programmed to wattage. Paragraphs
in studies show that even paragraphs
do come from the left: logical, pointed,
linear. As organized as strings of light
around a Scots Pine, making divisions
out of ornamented needles, proof
that holidays are as subject to math’s domain
as their school days. So, too, is the domain
of line and sentence, stanza and paragraph.
They count the words for teachers to approve
what they’ve done; grown, they’ll do the same to point
the way for publishers, mark the divisions
between text and white space, fight for the light
to stand and guide as what it is—light--
both the beginning and end of a domain.
But the box-and-whisper plot is not division;
it is prose built of the paragraphs
that extend like the senses and point
to no outliers, a visual proof
they can also dance, smudge with charcoal, proof
that shadows grow to exist on the light
medium of stage or canvas. The point
being that double angles, in the domain
of definition, identify. The graph
of an inequality will divide
intelligence if the points are used as proof,
but divisions can turn into non-binary lights
with aleph null domains dictated by paragraphs.
I regret eating freedom for breakfast
It only made me hungrier for lunch
and by dinnertime I had no more
left to serve. The children had to go
without so I sent them to their beds,
telling them they should be grateful
they still had the inarguable rule of sleep.
But they just showed me the snarls
they keep in their thoughts. Through
the circadian restriction of darkness,
I heard them kicking the cardboard
headboards of would-be dreams,
casting rashes of spells against
the bunting that held them close,
ticking off the ingredients to sovereignty
they would begin to gather the next day
in the first of many attempts to outgrow me.
The winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition for The Crossing Over (March 2019), Jen Karetnick is the author of eight other poetry collections, including The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020) and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review, JAMA, Lunch Ticket, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Salamander, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily. She is co-founder/co-editor of the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day. Jen received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. She works as the dining critic for MIAMI Magazine and as a freelance lifestyle journalist and a trade book author. Her fourth cookbook is Ice Cube Tray Recipes (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019). Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.
It only made me hungrier for lunch
and by dinnertime I had no more
left to serve. The children had to go
without so I sent them to their beds,
telling them they should be grateful
they still had the inarguable rule of sleep.
But they just showed me the snarls
they keep in their thoughts. Through
the circadian restriction of darkness,
I heard them kicking the cardboard
headboards of would-be dreams,
casting rashes of spells against
the bunting that held them close,
ticking off the ingredients to sovereignty
they would begin to gather the next day
in the first of many attempts to outgrow me.
The winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition for The Crossing Over (March 2019), Jen Karetnick is the author of eight other poetry collections, including The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020) and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review, JAMA, Lunch Ticket, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Salamander, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily. She is co-founder/co-editor of the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day. Jen received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. She works as the dining critic for MIAMI Magazine and as a freelance lifestyle journalist and a trade book author. Her fourth cookbook is Ice Cube Tray Recipes (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019). Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.
Martina Newberry
Extraterrestrial
When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial.~~Donald Hall
I am not elderly, I’m distilled. The worst
of me has vaporized, the best of me…
we don’t know yet.
I only arrived here to vanish. It’s
true that my conscience is as corroded
as the next woman’s.
I was, after all, a first to flower
as a night-blooming heretic. Breeding
is everything.
My generation was brought forth to be
blow-up dolls–girls with soft, ever-so-slight
ly open lips,
painted-on lashes, snub noses, nary
an argument from our tangerine tongues.
We deflated when we could
and painted our lips with Tabasco Sauce.
But deflated limbs can be forced to hug,
though weakly
and flattened feet can be wrapped around legs,
forced to dance, forced to participate in
discouraging tangos.
So years have brought me back from deflation
and I pick my partners from better stock.
No, not elderly...
a little wiser, more choosy in the
music, and never forced to embrace this
one or that one,
You may request a dance of me, a zouk*
perhaps. Though I am distilled to ghost-dom,
my lips still burn.
*Caribbean disco dance and corresponding type of fast rhythmic music
Martina Reisz Newberry has been writing for over 50 years. Her most recent publications are: Vaulted Skies (Chapbook, Prolific Press, 2019), Take the Long Way Home (Unsolicited Press, September 2017), Never Completely Awake, (May 2017, Deerbrook Editions). She is also the author of Where It Goes (Deerbrook Editions). Learning By Wrote (Deerbrook Editions) and Running Like A Woman With Her Hair On Fire: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press) She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts, Djerassi Colony for the Arts, and at Anderson Center for Disciplinary Arts.
When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial.~~Donald Hall
I am not elderly, I’m distilled. The worst
of me has vaporized, the best of me…
we don’t know yet.
I only arrived here to vanish. It’s
true that my conscience is as corroded
as the next woman’s.
I was, after all, a first to flower
as a night-blooming heretic. Breeding
is everything.
My generation was brought forth to be
blow-up dolls–girls with soft, ever-so-slight
ly open lips,
painted-on lashes, snub noses, nary
an argument from our tangerine tongues.
We deflated when we could
and painted our lips with Tabasco Sauce.
But deflated limbs can be forced to hug,
though weakly
and flattened feet can be wrapped around legs,
forced to dance, forced to participate in
discouraging tangos.
So years have brought me back from deflation
and I pick my partners from better stock.
No, not elderly...
a little wiser, more choosy in the
music, and never forced to embrace this
one or that one,
You may request a dance of me, a zouk*
perhaps. Though I am distilled to ghost-dom,
my lips still burn.
*Caribbean disco dance and corresponding type of fast rhythmic music
Martina Reisz Newberry has been writing for over 50 years. Her most recent publications are: Vaulted Skies (Chapbook, Prolific Press, 2019), Take the Long Way Home (Unsolicited Press, September 2017), Never Completely Awake, (May 2017, Deerbrook Editions). She is also the author of Where It Goes (Deerbrook Editions). Learning By Wrote (Deerbrook Editions) and Running Like A Woman With Her Hair On Fire: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press) She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts, Djerassi Colony for the Arts, and at Anderson Center for Disciplinary Arts.
George Wallace 3 poems
from the forthcoming Sacred Language of Wine and Bread (La Finestra Editrice)
from the forthcoming Sacred Language of Wine and Bread (La Finestra Editrice)
Sunday Morning Rising Between Twin Apartment Towers
Sunday morning rising between the twin apartment towers they built last winter at the long end
of the street leading down to the river, and the dwarfed steeple is smaller by another year, but
still swaddled in first light of summer; gathering up old souls is the business of the season, in
thru the doors go the faithful stragglers, old women without husbands, old men without wives,
dressed in their immigrant shawls or immigrant caps, talking the factory talk (the apparel shop
closed these 50 years, the cardboard factory in Dumbo gone to Etsy HQ), too stubborn to die or
adapt or get out of the way; all of them haunted by the same tattoo—the memory of their own
family's life in the Old Country, the long seavoyage across the Atlantic to this, the streets of
Brooklyn—the triumph and trouble trying to fit into the manners of the Promised Land;
America! too fast, America! too perfect, too much promise
And a few of them are huddled shoulder to shoulder at the intersection, discussing world politics
or the price of bread; others are waffling along one by one (it is a narrow pathway thru the
sunlight, grandfather, it will be hot soon; a narrow pathway, grandmother, the air conditioners
will be cranking, and only a handful of seed to give the dirty little birds at the window sill); and
their lives were threadbare, waxy and vexing, the soot and the street toughs, and the bleak years
of war, but they were all right with that, you could find your way along okay if you stuck to the
traditional ways; god was simple and the rules clear;
But now. To be bundled off at the end of your days like this, no dignity to it, the young techies
calling us prisoners of tradition and irrelevant, laughing behind our backs; there was respect back
then, there was grace among men, simple! now everyone goes about their business and in their
own direction and don't pay the slightest attention (a fish will swim along awhile but what can
you do when the river gives out); therefore Reverend Father, pour the sacramental wine! swing
wide the church house door! lead us in prayer -- the poor old women and the poor old men of
Brooklyn, sticking out like sore thumbs, used up, stone weary and rubbed raw;
For who is anybody to judge anyone anyhow, not you, not me—not even god (an arcane old
fellow, tho reliable—he who stood so tall once among men and women and pointed the way to
heaven).
Sunday morning rising between the twin apartment towers they built last winter at the long end
of the street leading down to the river, and the dwarfed steeple is smaller by another year, but
still swaddled in first light of summer; gathering up old souls is the business of the season, in
thru the doors go the faithful stragglers, old women without husbands, old men without wives,
dressed in their immigrant shawls or immigrant caps, talking the factory talk (the apparel shop
closed these 50 years, the cardboard factory in Dumbo gone to Etsy HQ), too stubborn to die or
adapt or get out of the way; all of them haunted by the same tattoo—the memory of their own
family's life in the Old Country, the long seavoyage across the Atlantic to this, the streets of
Brooklyn—the triumph and trouble trying to fit into the manners of the Promised Land;
America! too fast, America! too perfect, too much promise
And a few of them are huddled shoulder to shoulder at the intersection, discussing world politics
or the price of bread; others are waffling along one by one (it is a narrow pathway thru the
sunlight, grandfather, it will be hot soon; a narrow pathway, grandmother, the air conditioners
will be cranking, and only a handful of seed to give the dirty little birds at the window sill); and
their lives were threadbare, waxy and vexing, the soot and the street toughs, and the bleak years
of war, but they were all right with that, you could find your way along okay if you stuck to the
traditional ways; god was simple and the rules clear;
But now. To be bundled off at the end of your days like this, no dignity to it, the young techies
calling us prisoners of tradition and irrelevant, laughing behind our backs; there was respect back
then, there was grace among men, simple! now everyone goes about their business and in their
own direction and don't pay the slightest attention (a fish will swim along awhile but what can
you do when the river gives out); therefore Reverend Father, pour the sacramental wine! swing
wide the church house door! lead us in prayer -- the poor old women and the poor old men of
Brooklyn, sticking out like sore thumbs, used up, stone weary and rubbed raw;
For who is anybody to judge anyone anyhow, not you, not me—not even god (an arcane old
fellow, tho reliable—he who stood so tall once among men and women and pointed the way to
heaven).
A Bootsole Whitman
Lord let me live and die with an ax in my hand, cutting ax or splitter, equal to the drama of
woodstack and fencepost, a fresh kindling kind of man animated with woodchips flying, true to
the politics of my wild gray hair, stoopbacked or straight, a man with an honest eye glinting into
the light of spring itself and easter coming;
And my lungs afire, not gathering shadows or dust, cobwebs tossed, even the blackwidow spider
brushed aside lovingly, Virginia creeper fisting the ledge where the wood rotted out, a wabi-sabi
kind of brush-hog man greasing the shed door and laughing while the fieldmice scurry, must've
been Robert Burns upsettled the secret nest they made in the engine pan of my old tractor,
No more the rusty hinge nor the floorboard collapsing, the stammering coruscation and spark of
a man on a parcel of land he calls his own, though he knows it is the land that owns him, root
rock and soil he belongs to the land by longlease, even with the limning dream-ax he hangs onto
as he strides across it; for dear life, for love and a living, a contour to shape his view and faculty
to; after a long winter's undoing, i mean, after not enough snow to plow this year, after the pine
uprooted, after the black cherry toppled and a family of jackabbits suffering in the thicket;
The work of my hand, the concept of my eye, operatic; unassuming savant to the maple and the
accompanying ways of the mulberry, the sublime intelligence of the North American continent,
no stranger to my calculations, moderately and true i grasp this shaft of life in the plain palm of
my hand, i offer it my love;
Not only a man of letters or streetlight cafes, more Basho than Bunyan more Abraham than
Astarte but a singlebladed man cutting through air, cutting through oakflesh and walnut, cutting
through applebranch into the sap of life itself, which is my sap, as i am the land's, a bootsole
Whitman dizzy with the truth of outdoor labor;
Lungs filled to bursting, callouses ripening, responsive, admiring, frank, once more chesthigh
into the blackberry bushes! and the gods their ownselves watching, in the defiant, sweat-dazzled
sun.
Lord let me live and die with an ax in my hand, cutting ax or splitter, equal to the drama of
woodstack and fencepost, a fresh kindling kind of man animated with woodchips flying, true to
the politics of my wild gray hair, stoopbacked or straight, a man with an honest eye glinting into
the light of spring itself and easter coming;
And my lungs afire, not gathering shadows or dust, cobwebs tossed, even the blackwidow spider
brushed aside lovingly, Virginia creeper fisting the ledge where the wood rotted out, a wabi-sabi
kind of brush-hog man greasing the shed door and laughing while the fieldmice scurry, must've
been Robert Burns upsettled the secret nest they made in the engine pan of my old tractor,
No more the rusty hinge nor the floorboard collapsing, the stammering coruscation and spark of
a man on a parcel of land he calls his own, though he knows it is the land that owns him, root
rock and soil he belongs to the land by longlease, even with the limning dream-ax he hangs onto
as he strides across it; for dear life, for love and a living, a contour to shape his view and faculty
to; after a long winter's undoing, i mean, after not enough snow to plow this year, after the pine
uprooted, after the black cherry toppled and a family of jackabbits suffering in the thicket;
The work of my hand, the concept of my eye, operatic; unassuming savant to the maple and the
accompanying ways of the mulberry, the sublime intelligence of the North American continent,
no stranger to my calculations, moderately and true i grasp this shaft of life in the plain palm of
my hand, i offer it my love;
Not only a man of letters or streetlight cafes, more Basho than Bunyan more Abraham than
Astarte but a singlebladed man cutting through air, cutting through oakflesh and walnut, cutting
through applebranch into the sap of life itself, which is my sap, as i am the land's, a bootsole
Whitman dizzy with the truth of outdoor labor;
Lungs filled to bursting, callouses ripening, responsive, admiring, frank, once more chesthigh
into the blackberry bushes! and the gods their ownselves watching, in the defiant, sweat-dazzled
sun.
Cherry Blossoms, Bums, and Angels on the Wing
Sitting on the A train last stop in Manhattan listening to Leonard
Cohen I almost forgot to get off it's 7:42 April 9 and I have to cross
the park quick and get to class, a kid next to me is holding a book
in his lap (Coney Island Of The Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) I'm
thinking about Jacob Shuttlesworth played by Denzel Washington
in that Spike Lee movie, everybody in Coney Island trying to hitch-
hike a ride to fame or redemption or paradise on the back of his
son Jesus, including him (how nice it would be to be able to play
basketball or stay on the subway and ride all the way to Coney
easy and cool instead of getting off here);
And the ladder to heaven swings both ways and the walk thru City
Hall Park will be cold and complicated and depressing this morning,
bums will be reading newspapers on the park bench (like Jack London
used to 'til the beat cops run him off), dogwalkers pulled along by pugs
in sweaters, sanitation men muscular and proud and Italian tourists
with their warm accents and hot cups of coffee—still, the cherry
trees will be holding their own with their pink pretty blossoms
in their tight little fists;
And there are times I wish an angel would climb down the ladder
from heaven and touch America and make us beautiful and good again
like it did for Ray Allen in He Got Game instead of ass-fucking us
like that sick little rich kid from Santa Monica California (you know
who you are, the secret vampire genius of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
who thinks it's fun to lock immigrant children up in borderland cages);
And o i hate this government and that terrible man at the top but
I also love spring, and angels don't always fall out of trees or climb
down out of heaven sometimes they jump out from behind rocks
they crawl out of any crack in the universe between the living and
the damned. and some of them love to do mean things and tell us
what to do (it isn't just light that gets through that crack in everything,
Leonard) but not all of them;
And last week Ferlinghetti turned 100 hooray! he's still going strong, I'm
not (I'm 70 and if I make it to 100 i don't know what, but Ferlinghetti
will probably still be alive and kicking crap out of the bastards);
And some people will live forever and do the right thing and that's okay
and makes me glad (other people not so much but hey let's not go there,
you can't always judge things by appearances—cherry blossoms, bums,
or angels on the wing)
George Wallace is writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, editor of Poetrybay and co-editor of Great Weather for Media, and author of 35 books of poetry. A New York-based writer who travels worldwide to perform his work, he is recent recipient of the Orpheus Prize, the Alexander Medal, and the laureateship of the Ditet e Naimit Poetry Festival. The poems in this issue are from the forthcoming collection The Sacred Language of Wine and Bread, scheduled for release through La Finestra Editrice in September 2019.
Sitting on the A train last stop in Manhattan listening to Leonard
Cohen I almost forgot to get off it's 7:42 April 9 and I have to cross
the park quick and get to class, a kid next to me is holding a book
in his lap (Coney Island Of The Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) I'm
thinking about Jacob Shuttlesworth played by Denzel Washington
in that Spike Lee movie, everybody in Coney Island trying to hitch-
hike a ride to fame or redemption or paradise on the back of his
son Jesus, including him (how nice it would be to be able to play
basketball or stay on the subway and ride all the way to Coney
easy and cool instead of getting off here);
And the ladder to heaven swings both ways and the walk thru City
Hall Park will be cold and complicated and depressing this morning,
bums will be reading newspapers on the park bench (like Jack London
used to 'til the beat cops run him off), dogwalkers pulled along by pugs
in sweaters, sanitation men muscular and proud and Italian tourists
with their warm accents and hot cups of coffee—still, the cherry
trees will be holding their own with their pink pretty blossoms
in their tight little fists;
And there are times I wish an angel would climb down the ladder
from heaven and touch America and make us beautiful and good again
like it did for Ray Allen in He Got Game instead of ass-fucking us
like that sick little rich kid from Santa Monica California (you know
who you are, the secret vampire genius of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
who thinks it's fun to lock immigrant children up in borderland cages);
And o i hate this government and that terrible man at the top but
I also love spring, and angels don't always fall out of trees or climb
down out of heaven sometimes they jump out from behind rocks
they crawl out of any crack in the universe between the living and
the damned. and some of them love to do mean things and tell us
what to do (it isn't just light that gets through that crack in everything,
Leonard) but not all of them;
And last week Ferlinghetti turned 100 hooray! he's still going strong, I'm
not (I'm 70 and if I make it to 100 i don't know what, but Ferlinghetti
will probably still be alive and kicking crap out of the bastards);
And some people will live forever and do the right thing and that's okay
and makes me glad (other people not so much but hey let's not go there,
you can't always judge things by appearances—cherry blossoms, bums,
or angels on the wing)
George Wallace is writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, editor of Poetrybay and co-editor of Great Weather for Media, and author of 35 books of poetry. A New York-based writer who travels worldwide to perform his work, he is recent recipient of the Orpheus Prize, the Alexander Medal, and the laureateship of the Ditet e Naimit Poetry Festival. The poems in this issue are from the forthcoming collection The Sacred Language of Wine and Bread, scheduled for release through La Finestra Editrice in September 2019.
Kathy Fagan 2 poems
Feed
When I hear the buzz saw & the chipper
I want to put down that tree myself
I want to put it down like a dog
I want to say Drop It, as to a dog
I want to take it up & quaff it down
limb after limb of me buff as a Popeye
picking roots from his teeth
fruit hocked up from my mama dark crop
until, brown feathered & weightless
I am the bird, not-rapey as in myth
but godlike nonetheless nowhere
to light because all trees inside me my
beak & my berry crossing the sky with fire
When I hear the buzz saw & the chipper
I want to put down that tree myself
I want to put it down like a dog
I want to say Drop It, as to a dog
I want to take it up & quaff it down
limb after limb of me buff as a Popeye
picking roots from his teeth
fruit hocked up from my mama dark crop
until, brown feathered & weightless
I am the bird, not-rapey as in myth
but godlike nonetheless nowhere
to light because all trees inside me my
beak & my berry crossing the sky with fire
Ruminant
As upright on the hillside as trees grow
upright on the hillside,
some pollens and leaves taken by
gravity straight, or not straight,
if a breeze, to the ground,
the ruminants, like metal detectors,
heads to the ground, shit along
the way, call to one another
now and then what sounds like
Clover, Ma, their fine ears parallel
to the pasture like arms on a cross.
Kathy Fagan is the author of five collections, most recently Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize. She directs the MFA Program at Ohio State, where she also co-edits the OSU Press Poetry Prize Series.
As upright on the hillside as trees grow
upright on the hillside,
some pollens and leaves taken by
gravity straight, or not straight,
if a breeze, to the ground,
the ruminants, like metal detectors,
heads to the ground, shit along
the way, call to one another
now and then what sounds like
Clover, Ma, their fine ears parallel
to the pasture like arms on a cross.
Kathy Fagan is the author of five collections, most recently Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize. She directs the MFA Program at Ohio State, where she also co-edits the OSU Press Poetry Prize Series.
Danielle Hanson
A Small Death
She was not a woman, but a world,
the weight of honey,
and when she slipped through our fingers
we turned our sorrow into the soil.
For seven days,
then for another nine, we recited
chants, prayers, curses, and shrunk her down
to a single finger bone.
We wrapped her in the stem
of a growing sunflower and let her carry it
to death with her.
We could hear her in the crunch of the seeds,
broken open by sparrows.
We could hear her in the creek bed.
She is the black stone rolling
in the moving water as a ghost.
Let it be so because I have said it.
Danielle Hanson is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her work won the Vi Gale Award from Hubbub, was Finalist for 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award and was nominated for several Pushcarts and Best of the Nets. She is Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books, and is on the staff of the Atlanta Review. More about her at daniellejhanson.com.
She was not a woman, but a world,
the weight of honey,
and when she slipped through our fingers
we turned our sorrow into the soil.
For seven days,
then for another nine, we recited
chants, prayers, curses, and shrunk her down
to a single finger bone.
We wrapped her in the stem
of a growing sunflower and let her carry it
to death with her.
We could hear her in the crunch of the seeds,
broken open by sparrows.
We could hear her in the creek bed.
She is the black stone rolling
in the moving water as a ghost.
Let it be so because I have said it.
Danielle Hanson is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her work won the Vi Gale Award from Hubbub, was Finalist for 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award and was nominated for several Pushcarts and Best of the Nets. She is Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books, and is on the staff of the Atlanta Review. More about her at daniellejhanson.com.
Cammy Thomas 2 poems
Fish Gods
A combination beach-party death-vigil
took her to Bermuda, and lying
on the sand, she was no longer afraid
of the sun, too late to do her harm.
Giant parrot-fish in the shallows
shed their neon green salvation.
Praying to the sea for a sign
that she wouldn’t die for a while,
she leaned on the rails staring at them
as they rasped their teeth on the coral
that can tear ships to shreds. While
her insides churned and multiplied,
and her blond head leaned over the dock,
the green fish gods swam in schools,
reflecting and staring unharmed,
magnified by the oily waves.
A combination beach-party death-vigil
took her to Bermuda, and lying
on the sand, she was no longer afraid
of the sun, too late to do her harm.
Giant parrot-fish in the shallows
shed their neon green salvation.
Praying to the sea for a sign
that she wouldn’t die for a while,
she leaned on the rails staring at them
as they rasped their teeth on the coral
that can tear ships to shreds. While
her insides churned and multiplied,
and her blond head leaned over the dock,
the green fish gods swam in schools,
reflecting and staring unharmed,
magnified by the oily waves.
To the Lake
Even after dark he knows his way
down the unlit path to the water.
As a boy, he found small stones
with his toes, knew when to veer
around the white flowering
bush, felt the smooth bark
of the willow near the water.
The boy he met from across the lake
once waited for him on this path,
until they almost kissed,
hidden from the house,
so that for years he walked
to the water wishing for something
hot and dangerous he was not to have
for a long time. July,
the sweet, spicy smell
of those white blooms, which
during the day appeared flat
and forceful, but at dusk, glowed
and lost their edges.
Now at the end of the dock,
staring at black and brown
choppy water, he dives
into silky shallows tasting of
dirt and metal, swims out twenty
or thirty yards until the sound
of his own splashing frightens
him, then turns and crawls
to the slimy wooden ladder
that bears him back to himself.
Cammy Thomas has published two collections of poems with Four Way Books: Inscriptions (2014), and Cathedral of Wish (2006). Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Image Journal, Moon City Review, The Summerset Review, The Tampa Review, and The Missouri Review. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Even after dark he knows his way
down the unlit path to the water.
As a boy, he found small stones
with his toes, knew when to veer
around the white flowering
bush, felt the smooth bark
of the willow near the water.
The boy he met from across the lake
once waited for him on this path,
until they almost kissed,
hidden from the house,
so that for years he walked
to the water wishing for something
hot and dangerous he was not to have
for a long time. July,
the sweet, spicy smell
of those white blooms, which
during the day appeared flat
and forceful, but at dusk, glowed
and lost their edges.
Now at the end of the dock,
staring at black and brown
choppy water, he dives
into silky shallows tasting of
dirt and metal, swims out twenty
or thirty yards until the sound
of his own splashing frightens
him, then turns and crawls
to the slimy wooden ladder
that bears him back to himself.
Cammy Thomas has published two collections of poems with Four Way Books: Inscriptions (2014), and Cathedral of Wish (2006). Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Image Journal, Moon City Review, The Summerset Review, The Tampa Review, and The Missouri Review. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Alice B. Fogel 2 poems
Missing
They always say to look away
from the accident & I would if I could find one place
where it isn't happening.
What could bring you back if not song or sails or my say-so
is missing too & now it's too late
to close the cut between what we wanted & what we took
before the taking. I say beside myself
as if the soul were a city, not an island,
its lights gone out around the rim, the body’s summer skin.
I wait all night & the waiting
is another name for sleep, meets sleep
nowhere on the bed. Now
this crooked house is tipping into the horizon, the wishing
waves, windows wide to an empty tide.
Where are you?
This rebuke is different, a silence only followed by more
dark rooms. They fill with salt water,
all the furniture lifted, drifting into walls, all the while love
goes on saying nothing, not saying someday I won't ache.
The Fear
A ghost can only love from a distance
the midday sun. Through no fault
of its own it has like a nautilus a constant bearing,
draws a rhumb line
arcing through the heart & its dissonance.
It doesn't mean to darken or twist
everything in your mind as the nights
wear on without word.
You can't know
the temperature the storm took, the roil & roar
that shook the water to its knees. This ghost
is no boat, makes no promise of harbor, incarnadines
the skies for you, to hint at the dangers
it's seen. You can't reach it but it never leaves, never
leaves you alone.
It haunts the earth's orbit with no
volition of its own but your belief
describes its great circles, its silhouettes of seas. It turns
toward you with the shocking news as yet
undelivered, toward you & out
farther from the shore,
keeps reminding you of how the winds rose, keeps you
from finding your way back home. It crosses
the meridians on a whim, hoards the diamonds that rain
from the whale's spray every time it breaches your sleep.
Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her latest book is A Doubtful House. Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry. Her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller, & she is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Web & ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies.
A ghost can only love from a distance
the midday sun. Through no fault
of its own it has like a nautilus a constant bearing,
draws a rhumb line
arcing through the heart & its dissonance.
It doesn't mean to darken or twist
everything in your mind as the nights
wear on without word.
You can't know
the temperature the storm took, the roil & roar
that shook the water to its knees. This ghost
is no boat, makes no promise of harbor, incarnadines
the skies for you, to hint at the dangers
it's seen. You can't reach it but it never leaves, never
leaves you alone.
It haunts the earth's orbit with no
volition of its own but your belief
describes its great circles, its silhouettes of seas. It turns
toward you with the shocking news as yet
undelivered, toward you & out
farther from the shore,
keeps reminding you of how the winds rose, keeps you
from finding your way back home. It crosses
the meridians on a whim, hoards the diamonds that rain
from the whale's spray every time it breaches your sleep.
Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her latest book is A Doubtful House. Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry. Her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller, & she is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Web & ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies.
Joseph Fasano
Poppies
Max Brod to Kafka—June 4, 1924
All week I’ve sought to write
just one word to name the flavor
of your breath the last time
you gave it to me. Burn them,
you whispered, lifting yourself
to one of my ears, then the other,
until you lay back
to watch the grackles gathering
in the dark pines, your tired eyes clarified
by hunger. No one knows
what I do for you, Franz. No one.
You told me the secret of beauty
is coldness. I know coldness,
Bruder. I know the odor
of the gold on the cold
hands of the dead
when they reach for you
one last time, as though you could know.
Poppies, that’s what you smelled like,
Franz, that’s all: the poppies Marlena gave you.
Why should that word bring me
such comfort, the little weight of it
on my tongue, its scent of every
ending as I tell of it? I lie in your room now
and listen for the jackdaws
in the rafters. No one will know
how you laughed like them
at evening. No one will remember
the last oblivion you asked for.
Poppies. This is the century
of indifference, Franz, and I am a man
lying alone in the dark
thinking of poppies, thinking of you
thinking of fire, thinking of the wind
that sings our lives away
from one another, that carries us away
to be the dark. Easy,
you would have whispered,
say it colder, colder. I am done
with all this coldness, brother.
I am going out to kneel down
in the garden
and bury deep your last seeds
with your good gloves. I am going out
to where the broken loam
has turned.
The heart is not
leopards in the temples, drinking
all the holy vessels empty. A life is not
a chapel all in fire. We
are just the wine, awhile, brother,
lifted to the trembling lips
in darkness, stripped
of every meaning but the flavor.
Lift me in the hunger past all hungers.
Drink me like the last days of the world.
Joseph Fasano is the author of four books of poetry: Fugue for Other Hands (2013), Inheritance (2014), Vincent (2015), and The Crossing (2018). His writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Missouri Review, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, among other publications, and is anthologized in Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams, 2016) and Across The Waves: Contemporary Poetry from Ireland and the United States (Salmon Poetry, 2020). His debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, is forthcoming from Platypus Press in 2020. A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize and the Cider Press Review Book Award, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books and as the Director of the Unamuno Poem Project. He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.
Max Brod to Kafka—June 4, 1924
All week I’ve sought to write
just one word to name the flavor
of your breath the last time
you gave it to me. Burn them,
you whispered, lifting yourself
to one of my ears, then the other,
until you lay back
to watch the grackles gathering
in the dark pines, your tired eyes clarified
by hunger. No one knows
what I do for you, Franz. No one.
You told me the secret of beauty
is coldness. I know coldness,
Bruder. I know the odor
of the gold on the cold
hands of the dead
when they reach for you
one last time, as though you could know.
Poppies, that’s what you smelled like,
Franz, that’s all: the poppies Marlena gave you.
Why should that word bring me
such comfort, the little weight of it
on my tongue, its scent of every
ending as I tell of it? I lie in your room now
and listen for the jackdaws
in the rafters. No one will know
how you laughed like them
at evening. No one will remember
the last oblivion you asked for.
Poppies. This is the century
of indifference, Franz, and I am a man
lying alone in the dark
thinking of poppies, thinking of you
thinking of fire, thinking of the wind
that sings our lives away
from one another, that carries us away
to be the dark. Easy,
you would have whispered,
say it colder, colder. I am done
with all this coldness, brother.
I am going out to kneel down
in the garden
and bury deep your last seeds
with your good gloves. I am going out
to where the broken loam
has turned.
The heart is not
leopards in the temples, drinking
all the holy vessels empty. A life is not
a chapel all in fire. We
are just the wine, awhile, brother,
lifted to the trembling lips
in darkness, stripped
of every meaning but the flavor.
Lift me in the hunger past all hungers.
Drink me like the last days of the world.
Joseph Fasano is the author of four books of poetry: Fugue for Other Hands (2013), Inheritance (2014), Vincent (2015), and The Crossing (2018). His writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Missouri Review, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, among other publications, and is anthologized in Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams, 2016) and Across The Waves: Contemporary Poetry from Ireland and the United States (Salmon Poetry, 2020). His debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, is forthcoming from Platypus Press in 2020. A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize and the Cider Press Review Book Award, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books and as the Director of the Unamuno Poem Project. He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.
Adrian Castro 2 poems
The Threshing Floor
“This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.
Extremes in Nature equal ends produce,
In Man they join to some mysterious use;”
—Alexander Pope
You now know there is more than mere
ritual--
To separate the chaff from the wheat
Ornan the Jebucite declared
a purifying space
then sold it to David
who poured many a blood sacrifice
before his son Solomon
erected a temple with two brass pillars as guards
one pregnant with secrets
The day I stepped on holy ground
my shoes not shod
when light came pouring from the window
as if midnight were noon
No birds no winged trumpeters
just the center of me in Miami
I had myself to make into manna
I washed my hands and quietly ate like it was my last prayer
I poured a libation on the mosaic floor of love and decay
To walk from the outside
where words misstep on the moist surface
tongues waggle with the gossip of chains
To walk into the flood of yourself
your eye slicing again through skin
to separate raiment from rags
knowledge from idols
You wake with the Sun as
picture of God on your wall
You sleep with a picture of
God on your wall as Moon
Thankful of your molten sweat forging
drop by drop brass
wisdom
Thankful you are their child
your legs made of night and day
your body donned with tattered cloth of travelers
“This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.
Extremes in Nature equal ends produce,
In Man they join to some mysterious use;”
—Alexander Pope
You now know there is more than mere
ritual--
To separate the chaff from the wheat
Ornan the Jebucite declared
a purifying space
then sold it to David
who poured many a blood sacrifice
before his son Solomon
erected a temple with two brass pillars as guards
one pregnant with secrets
The day I stepped on holy ground
my shoes not shod
when light came pouring from the window
as if midnight were noon
No birds no winged trumpeters
just the center of me in Miami
I had myself to make into manna
I washed my hands and quietly ate like it was my last prayer
I poured a libation on the mosaic floor of love and decay
To walk from the outside
where words misstep on the moist surface
tongues waggle with the gossip of chains
To walk into the flood of yourself
your eye slicing again through skin
to separate raiment from rags
knowledge from idols
You wake with the Sun as
picture of God on your wall
You sleep with a picture of
God on your wall as Moon
Thankful of your molten sweat forging
drop by drop brass
wisdom
Thankful you are their child
your legs made of night and day
your body donned with tattered cloth of travelers
Work Song: Re: What You Encounter in a Day’s Work
Dr. Williams is sitting in
my waiting room--
Again the treatment rooms are
full with the din
of back-pain those
who also gasp with asthma
An elderly woman brings as payment a large papaya
from her backyard
I cannot wait to ask
Dr. Williams--
Is this why your poems short and skinny
crowding two lifetimes into one
have the pulse of a spring river?
We are in the treatment room
His heart has two beats but he
is happy
about this
I ask to see his tongue
I ask him if to know the breath whereby
understand the word
I ask about his English father
his Puerto Rican mother
Hell’s Kitchen
how language was often dissonant
I ask him if
we can speak like
América
Born in Miami from Caribbean heritage Adrian Castro is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey (Coffee House Press), Wise Fish (Coffee House Press, 2005), Handling Destiny (Coffee House Press 2009) and has been published in several literary anthologies including Conjunctions, Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets, and Little Havana Blues. He is the recipient of a USA Knight Foundation Fellowship, a Cintas Fellowship, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the NALAC Fund for the Arts Individual Fellowship, the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets.
Dr. Williams is sitting in
my waiting room--
Again the treatment rooms are
full with the din
of back-pain those
who also gasp with asthma
An elderly woman brings as payment a large papaya
from her backyard
I cannot wait to ask
Dr. Williams--
Is this why your poems short and skinny
crowding two lifetimes into one
have the pulse of a spring river?
We are in the treatment room
His heart has two beats but he
is happy
about this
I ask to see his tongue
I ask him if to know the breath whereby
understand the word
I ask about his English father
his Puerto Rican mother
Hell’s Kitchen
how language was often dissonant
I ask him if
we can speak like
América
Born in Miami from Caribbean heritage Adrian Castro is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey (Coffee House Press), Wise Fish (Coffee House Press, 2005), Handling Destiny (Coffee House Press 2009) and has been published in several literary anthologies including Conjunctions, Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets, and Little Havana Blues. He is the recipient of a USA Knight Foundation Fellowship, a Cintas Fellowship, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the NALAC Fund for the Arts Individual Fellowship, the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets.
Jennifer Juneau 2 poems
I Bet You Don’t Look at the Skyline Like You Used To
How much change can you spare?
Do you want your windshield washed?
In fact, I’d rather walk
because you don’t own a car.
Why seven-layer cake?
Because no beggar begs for fruit.
Enough of the small talk.
We pour into a bar.
Here comes another shot.
With juice, maybe not, but
I like my vodka straight.
You drink yours straight, too.
The walls go from sodium to blue.
In a tight space the crowd melts away.
We see each other through vodka eyes.
The crowd refills the room. The band does its thing.
I sway to the hypnotic strings of bass.
As if this city never happened,
outside voices fade.
I turn my want of you away
and put it in another time and place.
Big Lee’s
A late night walking my coffee cup,
I headed to buy cough drops close to the theatre.
Instead I found myself in Big Lee’s on 1st Avenue
ordering tequila.
A voice said, Make mine a double.
(I swear I didn’t say it, ask the bartender.)
(Who happened to be blonde and buxom.)
She was putting on lipstick. I was having a bad hair day.
Two men shot pool.
Can I bum a cigarette? I’m getting a divorce.
A man next to me was speaking into his whisky glass.
I asked: Who is Big Lee?
He said: A neon-lit sign, loopy and red.
He said: You lose a bit of god with each sip.
There’s truth in those sips, you just need to know where to look.
The stars are aligned. So what.
I cracked a blanket in half by the river.
I thought I’d find you on train tracks
but you were caught in a blizzard
in the middle of Spring.
Jennifer Juneau is the author of the full-length poetry collection, More Than Moon (Is a Rose Press 2019) and the novel, ÜberChef USA (Spork Press 2019.) Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Journal, Evergreen Review, Pank, Passages North, Seattle Review and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Brooklyn.
A late night walking my coffee cup,
I headed to buy cough drops close to the theatre.
Instead I found myself in Big Lee’s on 1st Avenue
ordering tequila.
A voice said, Make mine a double.
(I swear I didn’t say it, ask the bartender.)
(Who happened to be blonde and buxom.)
She was putting on lipstick. I was having a bad hair day.
Two men shot pool.
Can I bum a cigarette? I’m getting a divorce.
A man next to me was speaking into his whisky glass.
I asked: Who is Big Lee?
He said: A neon-lit sign, loopy and red.
He said: You lose a bit of god with each sip.
There’s truth in those sips, you just need to know where to look.
The stars are aligned. So what.
I cracked a blanket in half by the river.
I thought I’d find you on train tracks
but you were caught in a blizzard
in the middle of Spring.
Jennifer Juneau is the author of the full-length poetry collection, More Than Moon (Is a Rose Press 2019) and the novel, ÜberChef USA (Spork Press 2019.) Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Journal, Evergreen Review, Pank, Passages North, Seattle Review and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Brooklyn.
Shashi Martynova translated from Russian by Anna Krushelnitskaya 3 poems
Behind the Spruce
one person’s main life
was fuss and racket, all kinds of things always
piled in the laundry, who knows what people
toing and froing, all of them talking,
he thought about stuff indiscriminately
even as he slept and his hands, just the two,
grabbed four to eight things at once,
that’s how it all went in a circle, an ellipse, a ball;
time to time, not often, he snuck out
into the neighboring life without knocking,
where there was no one, just spruces,
a railroad platform with its one train per day,
basalt – and no subways – and doves
bleated lovingly amid dewdrops: “you’re a mor-ron,
a mor-ron, a mor-ron”;
but once, from behind a spruce, another person
grabbed him by the trouser leg and enquired
what all this one person was doing in his only life.
this one person felt ashamed of being an uninvited guest
for his own leisure and asked permission, at last.
the other person, neither excited nor sad,
offered a place to stay,
be a roommate, except this time
to go halfsies.
one person’s main life
was fuss and racket, all kinds of things always
piled in the laundry, who knows what people
toing and froing, all of them talking,
he thought about stuff indiscriminately
even as he slept and his hands, just the two,
grabbed four to eight things at once,
that’s how it all went in a circle, an ellipse, a ball;
time to time, not often, he snuck out
into the neighboring life without knocking,
where there was no one, just spruces,
a railroad platform with its one train per day,
basalt – and no subways – and doves
bleated lovingly amid dewdrops: “you’re a mor-ron,
a mor-ron, a mor-ron”;
but once, from behind a spruce, another person
grabbed him by the trouser leg and enquired
what all this one person was doing in his only life.
this one person felt ashamed of being an uninvited guest
for his own leisure and asked permission, at last.
the other person, neither excited nor sad,
offered a place to stay,
be a roommate, except this time
to go halfsies.
To Come
one person fell into a habit
of coming to conclusions.
he kept coming to them for years
for tea, for a sleepover,
for no specific reason, just to hang out on the couch.
conclusions, what with the upbringing they had,
as well as with their general principles,
all those years acted
like gracious hosts,
and then moved without a word
to a nearby town
and left no forwarding address.
the person still came to the house of conclusions,
he sat on the door mat not understanding
why.
he tried to make his own conclusions,
he picked up opinions from dumpsters,
but it did not feel the same,
it felt desolate and uncertain.
with time that person figured out
how to come to the woods,
the train station, the library,
and things got much better, overall,
he was even able to take the photos
of the memorable conclusions
off the dining room table and put them up
in storage.
one person fell into a habit
of coming to conclusions.
he kept coming to them for years
for tea, for a sleepover,
for no specific reason, just to hang out on the couch.
conclusions, what with the upbringing they had,
as well as with their general principles,
all those years acted
like gracious hosts,
and then moved without a word
to a nearby town
and left no forwarding address.
the person still came to the house of conclusions,
he sat on the door mat not understanding
why.
he tried to make his own conclusions,
he picked up opinions from dumpsters,
but it did not feel the same,
it felt desolate and uncertain.
with time that person figured out
how to come to the woods,
the train station, the library,
and things got much better, overall,
he was even able to take the photos
of the memorable conclusions
off the dining room table and put them up
in storage.
The Muses
one person had three guardian muses:
Muse herself and two more, Luze and Zooz.
Muse kept hammering on: you must labor
without resting anything anywhere anytime,
fatigue is a phantom for the lazies,
you’ll regret this a hundred times when you’re dead
because that vacation’s eternal.
Luze, with her degree in Psych,
suggested listening to self,
taking timely little breaks,
meting out the resources, never getting so worn
that you hobble on your ankles and your head runs dry.
Zooz thought, a blissful asshole,
that everything went just as it should,
that the main thing was to be in the epicenter of oneself,
the rest would take care of itself.
the person would get tired of the three
immensely,
and, whenever he was lucky to escape,
he worked like a mule as he practiced self-care,
plucking at his dry callouses unthinkingly,
as he should have, by his own self.
Shashi Martynova is a literary translator and author based in Moscow, Russia. Shashi’s translator’s portfolio holds dozens of titles by authors like Khaled Hosseini, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman and Fannie Flagg, as well as multiple national literary translation awards and nominations. Shashi published three original poetry collections, a novella and a novel. An experienced publishing and book industry professional, Shashi Martynova teachers editing, translation and communications classes, and gives public talks on the history, culture and literature of Ireland.
Anna Krushelnitskaya was born on the Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East. She grew up in the Siberian city of Chita, where she graduated from the Trans-Baikal State University with a degree in Foreign Language Education. Anna taught college in Russia before moving to the US in 2004. In the US, she worked as a teacher, court interpreter, Red Cross instructor, and garden hand. Anna lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband and three children. She enjoys freelance writing, literary translation and blogging on Soviet topics.
one person had three guardian muses:
Muse herself and two more, Luze and Zooz.
Muse kept hammering on: you must labor
without resting anything anywhere anytime,
fatigue is a phantom for the lazies,
you’ll regret this a hundred times when you’re dead
because that vacation’s eternal.
Luze, with her degree in Psych,
suggested listening to self,
taking timely little breaks,
meting out the resources, never getting so worn
that you hobble on your ankles and your head runs dry.
Zooz thought, a blissful asshole,
that everything went just as it should,
that the main thing was to be in the epicenter of oneself,
the rest would take care of itself.
the person would get tired of the three
immensely,
and, whenever he was lucky to escape,
he worked like a mule as he practiced self-care,
plucking at his dry callouses unthinkingly,
as he should have, by his own self.
Shashi Martynova is a literary translator and author based in Moscow, Russia. Shashi’s translator’s portfolio holds dozens of titles by authors like Khaled Hosseini, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman and Fannie Flagg, as well as multiple national literary translation awards and nominations. Shashi published three original poetry collections, a novella and a novel. An experienced publishing and book industry professional, Shashi Martynova teachers editing, translation and communications classes, and gives public talks on the history, culture and literature of Ireland.
Anna Krushelnitskaya was born on the Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East. She grew up in the Siberian city of Chita, where she graduated from the Trans-Baikal State University with a degree in Foreign Language Education. Anna taught college in Russia before moving to the US in 2004. In the US, she worked as a teacher, court interpreter, Red Cross instructor, and garden hand. Anna lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband and three children. She enjoys freelance writing, literary translation and blogging on Soviet topics.
James Croal Jackson
January 20, 2018
a fog this white mess of morning driving out of Ohio
trees dressed for a funeral per the new norm
dilapidated barns redbrown in the green
grass corpsebrown snow an oil stain birds
couldn’t afford flights home this time their muddywater
wings a gunk on the canvas of sky
the countryside is tainted
Abbey Road scores this thread of potholes
we pass a sign Muskingum County initially read as
musking gun
how bulletsmoke
rises from pores of the greendead ground
until all we know is the death encompassing
fog clears at noon
birds ravage a halfdeer
carcass
James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, Reservoir, and indefinite space. He edits The Mantle (themantlepoetry.com). Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. (jimjakk.com)
a fog this white mess of morning driving out of Ohio
trees dressed for a funeral per the new norm
dilapidated barns redbrown in the green
grass corpsebrown snow an oil stain birds
couldn’t afford flights home this time their muddywater
wings a gunk on the canvas of sky
the countryside is tainted
Abbey Road scores this thread of potholes
we pass a sign Muskingum County initially read as
musking gun
how bulletsmoke
rises from pores of the greendead ground
until all we know is the death encompassing
fog clears at noon
birds ravage a halfdeer
carcass
James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, Reservoir, and indefinite space. He edits The Mantle (themantlepoetry.com). Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. (jimjakk.com)
William May
I Heard They Broke Up
It went something like this,
I think: things were great
before they moved in
together, but he had a cat
and she had a dog, and well
they both loved those pets
but those pets didn’t love
each other.
It was like that exactly,
though maybe he had the dog,
and she had two cats. That may
have been it, really, but they were happy
except for the pets not getting along.
Maybe he didn’t have a dog at all,
thinking about it, he might just have
been allergic to the cats, and she might
have had more than two, maybe four?
I am not so certain. I don’t think he did
have a dog, now that I really think about it.
Not even sure she had so many cats. It might have
been just one, but a big one, like a Maine Coon,
big as two or three of the typical domestics.
Well, really, I am not even sure if that is true,
might be that she didn’t have any cats,
because I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a dog,
so, it must have been something else
or a different couple altogether
who I am thinking about.
William May is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and earned his MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro. His play Origins of An Internet Cat, was selected as by Theatre Lab(FAU's resident professional theatre company) to be included as part of their New Play Festival's short play showcase. He has lived in Palm Beach county for the past decade, and currently resides in Boca Raton with his fiance, Melissa Myers, and their cat, Ulysses.
It went something like this,
I think: things were great
before they moved in
together, but he had a cat
and she had a dog, and well
they both loved those pets
but those pets didn’t love
each other.
It was like that exactly,
though maybe he had the dog,
and she had two cats. That may
have been it, really, but they were happy
except for the pets not getting along.
Maybe he didn’t have a dog at all,
thinking about it, he might just have
been allergic to the cats, and she might
have had more than two, maybe four?
I am not so certain. I don’t think he did
have a dog, now that I really think about it.
Not even sure she had so many cats. It might have
been just one, but a big one, like a Maine Coon,
big as two or three of the typical domestics.
Well, really, I am not even sure if that is true,
might be that she didn’t have any cats,
because I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a dog,
so, it must have been something else
or a different couple altogether
who I am thinking about.
William May is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and earned his MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro. His play Origins of An Internet Cat, was selected as by Theatre Lab(FAU's resident professional theatre company) to be included as part of their New Play Festival's short play showcase. He has lived in Palm Beach county for the past decade, and currently resides in Boca Raton with his fiance, Melissa Myers, and their cat, Ulysses.
Bill Ratner
Mr. Death
If I were to draw
back then
right now
it would be a book
of crude black and white
cartoons of skeletons
and narrow faces
little stick figures
scurrying about
smoking cigarettes
eating canapés
making airline reservations.
My father vital
bridling with energy
cleans his briar pipe.
My mother walks slowly
beautiful and sad in yellow cotton.
My brother, distant
oils his catcher’s mitt.
I, in kinetic poses
rush from cookie jar
to Dragnet to Danger Man
to Captain Kangaroo how I hated you.
At their funerals back then
death was
invisible
immutable.
I called it Mr. Death.
It lurked
like a mold
a virus
a recurring weather system
an unseen moon
a dark comic book hero
speaking backwards
counting down
to zero.
Bill Ratner's work is published in The Chiron Review, The Baltimore Review, The Coachella Review, Hobo Pancakes, FeminineCollective.com, Blue Lake Review, Spork Press, Niteblade, Papier Maché Press, The Missouri Review Audio Contest, and Wolfsinger Publications. He is a nine-time winner of The Moth Story Slams. His spoken-word performances are featured on National Public Radio’s Good Food, The Business, and KCRW’s Strangers. He is the author of the National Indie Excellence Award-winning book Parenting for the Digital Age: The Truth About Media’s Effect on Children from Familius Press.
If I were to draw
back then
right now
it would be a book
of crude black and white
cartoons of skeletons
and narrow faces
little stick figures
scurrying about
smoking cigarettes
eating canapés
making airline reservations.
My father vital
bridling with energy
cleans his briar pipe.
My mother walks slowly
beautiful and sad in yellow cotton.
My brother, distant
oils his catcher’s mitt.
I, in kinetic poses
rush from cookie jar
to Dragnet to Danger Man
to Captain Kangaroo how I hated you.
At their funerals back then
death was
invisible
immutable.
I called it Mr. Death.
It lurked
like a mold
a virus
a recurring weather system
an unseen moon
a dark comic book hero
speaking backwards
counting down
to zero.
Bill Ratner's work is published in The Chiron Review, The Baltimore Review, The Coachella Review, Hobo Pancakes, FeminineCollective.com, Blue Lake Review, Spork Press, Niteblade, Papier Maché Press, The Missouri Review Audio Contest, and Wolfsinger Publications. He is a nine-time winner of The Moth Story Slams. His spoken-word performances are featured on National Public Radio’s Good Food, The Business, and KCRW’s Strangers. He is the author of the National Indie Excellence Award-winning book Parenting for the Digital Age: The Truth About Media’s Effect on Children from Familius Press.
Carol Alexander
Interactions
Listen: the drug you took with another drug can be fatal
though at this dose and under the tongue
probably acts more like a fine salt —positive/negative chloride ions--
or the leaching of minerals from a garden during heavy rains.
Delphiniums endure despite their preferences and so might you,
stalky, oft-blue perennial defying rot. These chemical experiments,
your long, warm garden homeostatic with dogged management
exist in some laboratory anterior to the phalanx of white coats.
No longer do they say It's probably nothing when the hooded drinker
stalls a nurse; he ate his last meal once of course he did. A shrug.
From his desiccate flesh delphinium eyes peer out
traveling the corridors for an exit sign. Thousands have given up
hounding him for his foot on the first of the twelve steps.
When I say him, it's a male maybe seventy years old
whose coat turns inside out to leak clandestine ponds of alcohol.
He's the one dogs follow around the Acropolis for a breath of meat.
Against the likelihood of doom, weigh the myriad benefits.
We are all capable of such intricate self-harm.
Carol Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Environments (Dos Madres Press) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press). Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press. Alexander's poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals, most recently Belletrist, Bluestem, Cumberland River Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Matador Review, One, Southern Humanities Review, Stonecoast Review, and Third Wednesday.
Listen: the drug you took with another drug can be fatal
though at this dose and under the tongue
probably acts more like a fine salt —positive/negative chloride ions--
or the leaching of minerals from a garden during heavy rains.
Delphiniums endure despite their preferences and so might you,
stalky, oft-blue perennial defying rot. These chemical experiments,
your long, warm garden homeostatic with dogged management
exist in some laboratory anterior to the phalanx of white coats.
No longer do they say It's probably nothing when the hooded drinker
stalls a nurse; he ate his last meal once of course he did. A shrug.
From his desiccate flesh delphinium eyes peer out
traveling the corridors for an exit sign. Thousands have given up
hounding him for his foot on the first of the twelve steps.
When I say him, it's a male maybe seventy years old
whose coat turns inside out to leak clandestine ponds of alcohol.
He's the one dogs follow around the Acropolis for a breath of meat.
Against the likelihood of doom, weigh the myriad benefits.
We are all capable of such intricate self-harm.
Carol Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Environments (Dos Madres Press) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press). Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press. Alexander's poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals, most recently Belletrist, Bluestem, Cumberland River Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Matador Review, One, Southern Humanities Review, Stonecoast Review, and Third Wednesday.
Joan Colby 2 poems
Once They Were Sixteen
Years later, kids trailing her
She stops to mail the package
With a corrected draft of her latest
Manuscript. The clerk, weary,
Weighs it, calculates the cost
Muttering New York. She
Unsnaps her purse, pulls out a wallet
Bulging with singles. One child
Tugs at her shirt. Let’s go mommy.
Let’s go. She hands over the money,
Takes her receipt. She thinks enjoy
Them now, despite the pestering. Who
Knows what they’ll be up to when
They’re teens. On the way out,
A Wanted Poster. He looks
Dazed or drugged. Much older.
Blonde hair receding. He
Could be armed and dangerous.
The vitals: height, weight. Her
Tattooed name still legible
On his forearm.
Years later, kids trailing her
She stops to mail the package
With a corrected draft of her latest
Manuscript. The clerk, weary,
Weighs it, calculates the cost
Muttering New York. She
Unsnaps her purse, pulls out a wallet
Bulging with singles. One child
Tugs at her shirt. Let’s go mommy.
Let’s go. She hands over the money,
Takes her receipt. She thinks enjoy
Them now, despite the pestering. Who
Knows what they’ll be up to when
They’re teens. On the way out,
A Wanted Poster. He looks
Dazed or drugged. Much older.
Blonde hair receding. He
Could be armed and dangerous.
The vitals: height, weight. Her
Tattooed name still legible
On his forearm.
Haymow
That first cut, green as good sex,
Smells so sweet your mouth
Waters. Only peacemakers, you believe
Must live on legumes or sweet grass.
That first cut can cause colic,
The filly thrashing, biting her flanks.
That first cut so hot it can burn
The barn down, horses screaming
In the blazing stalls.
Spraddle-legged in the loft door
You hook the bales tossed from the wagon,
Throw them to the boys stacking
Castles of gold with narrow gangways
For circulation. A hushed fall
Of a sixty-pounder flattens you
On the wide planked floor. You get up
Sore and hook another. Sometimes in winter
Breaking bales to drop flakes
To the stalls, you find a flattened
Mouse and once the silhouette
Of the little black cat that vanished
Last summer. A moldy bale is
Spurned. The old mare
Rolls on it to show disdain
Or lets go a flush of rank urine.
Your spoiled horses nibble at pockets
For sugar cubes or peppermints.
A good summer can muster four cuttings,
Racks piled high sway down the backroads.
Seeds stick to your sweating flesh,
Itch and heat scratch you raw.
Still, a loft stacked full with
Alfalfa and timothy
Fills you with the love
Of this hard work.
The goddamned goodness of it all.
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her recent books include Carnival from FutureCycle Press, The Seven Heavenly Virtues from Kelsay Books and Her Heartsongs from Presa Press. Her latest book is Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press.
That first cut, green as good sex,
Smells so sweet your mouth
Waters. Only peacemakers, you believe
Must live on legumes or sweet grass.
That first cut can cause colic,
The filly thrashing, biting her flanks.
That first cut so hot it can burn
The barn down, horses screaming
In the blazing stalls.
Spraddle-legged in the loft door
You hook the bales tossed from the wagon,
Throw them to the boys stacking
Castles of gold with narrow gangways
For circulation. A hushed fall
Of a sixty-pounder flattens you
On the wide planked floor. You get up
Sore and hook another. Sometimes in winter
Breaking bales to drop flakes
To the stalls, you find a flattened
Mouse and once the silhouette
Of the little black cat that vanished
Last summer. A moldy bale is
Spurned. The old mare
Rolls on it to show disdain
Or lets go a flush of rank urine.
Your spoiled horses nibble at pockets
For sugar cubes or peppermints.
A good summer can muster four cuttings,
Racks piled high sway down the backroads.
Seeds stick to your sweating flesh,
Itch and heat scratch you raw.
Still, a loft stacked full with
Alfalfa and timothy
Fills you with the love
Of this hard work.
The goddamned goodness of it all.
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her recent books include Carnival from FutureCycle Press, The Seven Heavenly Virtues from Kelsay Books and Her Heartsongs from Presa Press. Her latest book is Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press.
Lin Nelson Benedek
They Named Our Streets for Saints and Angels
My name is Spanish. Lin for Linda for Rosalinda for patron saint of gardens, for living in a little
hut in her garden. For pretty. For beautiful. For not always pretty. For never been pretty. For
Beau like boy, for Belle like girl. For Rosalinda. Beautiful Rose. For the love of roses. Rose
roses. Roses are rose. Violets are violet. Rose roses and violet violets.
L. A. Inventions:
Hula hoop, Egg McMuffin, Barbie, WD-40, California Rolls, Cobb Salad, the French Dip
sandwich, the Shirley Temple, Orange Julius, Nicotine patch
(Note relationship to leisure time, food consumption, cigarettes.)
Good people of Los Angeles, you call yourself City of Angels, but do you know what it takes to
become a saint?***
To become an angel is easy. A lifetime of good deeds and you’re in.
Alternatively, redeem yourself after a fall. It’s not that hard.
Saint Nicholas: Patron saint of prostitutes.
A stranger asks you the way. You say: Take me to the river. Wash me down.
A stranger asks you how to get there. You reply: Take me in your arms and hold me. Do all the
things I told you in the midnight hour....
A traveler doesn’t know which way to turn. You sing: By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat
down, and there we wept, when we remembered Zion.
Tell me. Who’s the patron saint of messengers and postal workers?
Angelenos, when we give someone directions it sounds like a prayer.
Take San Pasqual to San Rafael to San Joaquin to San Anselmo to El Camino Real
They just might get there.
San Pedro, Santa Catalina, San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo,
Santa Clarita
Get off however and whenever you like.
Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things, help me to find myself again.
I know of few roads named for our first dwellers, although they must exist:
Chumash, Hahamogna, Tongva
Because Spain. Because Mexico. We kept the names.
Because the ones with the horse, the purse, the sword.
They held the naming rights. The rest of us shall remain nameless.
El Camino Real, La Ballona, Rincon, La Brea
El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles
But we alone are responsible for our nicknames. We, the people.
Angeltown, Hell A. Lost Angeles. La La Land. Grit in our glitter in this town with a past.
Something for everyone. Geniuses, robots, ATM machines, drive-in churches.
Be an angel. Try for sainthood. Or make this your motto: Better the devil you know.
There’s something for everyone. Forget about the orange blossoms. The ambition.
Jim Morrison bedeviling the night air.
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light or just another lost angel,
City of Night?
Never mind the days so bright, the nights so dark
We’ve got saints. We’ve got angels. L.A. is a Goddamn prayer.
Italicized song lyrics by ( in order of appearance) Al Green, Wilson Pickett and The Melodians
Lin Nelson Benedek earned her M.F.A. in Writing at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She has had poems published in a number of journals and in five anthologies. Her first full-length poetry collection, I Was Going to Be a Cowgirl, was published by Kelsay Books in 2017. Her second poetry collection, When a Peacock Speaks to You in a Dream, was released in 2018 by the same publisher.
My name is Spanish. Lin for Linda for Rosalinda for patron saint of gardens, for living in a little
hut in her garden. For pretty. For beautiful. For not always pretty. For never been pretty. For
Beau like boy, for Belle like girl. For Rosalinda. Beautiful Rose. For the love of roses. Rose
roses. Roses are rose. Violets are violet. Rose roses and violet violets.
L. A. Inventions:
Hula hoop, Egg McMuffin, Barbie, WD-40, California Rolls, Cobb Salad, the French Dip
sandwich, the Shirley Temple, Orange Julius, Nicotine patch
(Note relationship to leisure time, food consumption, cigarettes.)
Good people of Los Angeles, you call yourself City of Angels, but do you know what it takes to
become a saint?***
To become an angel is easy. A lifetime of good deeds and you’re in.
Alternatively, redeem yourself after a fall. It’s not that hard.
Saint Nicholas: Patron saint of prostitutes.
A stranger asks you the way. You say: Take me to the river. Wash me down.
A stranger asks you how to get there. You reply: Take me in your arms and hold me. Do all the
things I told you in the midnight hour....
A traveler doesn’t know which way to turn. You sing: By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat
down, and there we wept, when we remembered Zion.
Tell me. Who’s the patron saint of messengers and postal workers?
Angelenos, when we give someone directions it sounds like a prayer.
Take San Pasqual to San Rafael to San Joaquin to San Anselmo to El Camino Real
They just might get there.
San Pedro, Santa Catalina, San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo,
Santa Clarita
Get off however and whenever you like.
Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things, help me to find myself again.
I know of few roads named for our first dwellers, although they must exist:
Chumash, Hahamogna, Tongva
Because Spain. Because Mexico. We kept the names.
Because the ones with the horse, the purse, the sword.
They held the naming rights. The rest of us shall remain nameless.
El Camino Real, La Ballona, Rincon, La Brea
El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles
But we alone are responsible for our nicknames. We, the people.
Angeltown, Hell A. Lost Angeles. La La Land. Grit in our glitter in this town with a past.
Something for everyone. Geniuses, robots, ATM machines, drive-in churches.
Be an angel. Try for sainthood. Or make this your motto: Better the devil you know.
There’s something for everyone. Forget about the orange blossoms. The ambition.
Jim Morrison bedeviling the night air.
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light or just another lost angel,
City of Night?
Never mind the days so bright, the nights so dark
We’ve got saints. We’ve got angels. L.A. is a Goddamn prayer.
Italicized song lyrics by ( in order of appearance) Al Green, Wilson Pickett and The Melodians
Lin Nelson Benedek earned her M.F.A. in Writing at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She has had poems published in a number of journals and in five anthologies. Her first full-length poetry collection, I Was Going to Be a Cowgirl, was published by Kelsay Books in 2017. Her second poetry collection, When a Peacock Speaks to You in a Dream, was released in 2018 by the same publisher.
Alan Catlin
After Reading What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, by George Looney
Is this how the dead
assemble, by fire light,
on river’s edge near
where the spires give
themselves to the flame?
The night is charred by
all this burning, are smoking
screens that descend from
blackened clouds as secrets
contained by ash. No reason,
to direct water where
total conflagration reigns,
the passion of all this fire
must be spent, consumption
the end of this, of all things
mortal, of all things made
by man, even that, even those
who purport to rule the world.
Alan Catlin has been publishing for five decades. Among his more recent books and chapbooks are Still Life with Lighthouse from Cyberwit, Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Books and Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance from Presa Press. He is the poetry editor of the online magazine Misfit Magazine.
Is this how the dead
assemble, by fire light,
on river’s edge near
where the spires give
themselves to the flame?
The night is charred by
all this burning, are smoking
screens that descend from
blackened clouds as secrets
contained by ash. No reason,
to direct water where
total conflagration reigns,
the passion of all this fire
must be spent, consumption
the end of this, of all things
mortal, of all things made
by man, even that, even those
who purport to rule the world.
Alan Catlin has been publishing for five decades. Among his more recent books and chapbooks are Still Life with Lighthouse from Cyberwit, Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Books and Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance from Presa Press. He is the poetry editor of the online magazine Misfit Magazine.
Richard Nester 2 poems
Eden
Suppose the animals got to sign contracts,
not just for themselves but for their species,
for all time—the original Daddy Rabbit
bunnied up to the table with the Lord Most High,
first car salesman or whatever name he called himself--
what would the deal sound like? First, it’s written
in a language we can’t read. But I’ll translate.
You’re prey, see, and there are predators,
which sounds nasty, but there’ll be sex all the time,
and you can eat as much as you want. No kidding.
Have you ever seen a fat zebra? I didn’t
think so. Okay sign here. Keep the pen.
What got me thinking about this
was an idea Jefferson had that there ought to be
a new Constitution, a new contract, every twenty years--
the length of a generation. He liked fairness and this
seemed fair. No one in bondage to the past.
Madison showed him how it really is--
even in science—no true cohorts, measurable just
by themselves, unto themselves. Rather
everything overlapping, everyone
on everyone else’s toes.
We sign what’s put in front of us
for good or ill and do the best we can
without the gift of a fresh start.
My day and yours and the ever stupid sun.
Suppose the animals got to sign contracts,
not just for themselves but for their species,
for all time—the original Daddy Rabbit
bunnied up to the table with the Lord Most High,
first car salesman or whatever name he called himself--
what would the deal sound like? First, it’s written
in a language we can’t read. But I’ll translate.
You’re prey, see, and there are predators,
which sounds nasty, but there’ll be sex all the time,
and you can eat as much as you want. No kidding.
Have you ever seen a fat zebra? I didn’t
think so. Okay sign here. Keep the pen.
What got me thinking about this
was an idea Jefferson had that there ought to be
a new Constitution, a new contract, every twenty years--
the length of a generation. He liked fairness and this
seemed fair. No one in bondage to the past.
Madison showed him how it really is--
even in science—no true cohorts, measurable just
by themselves, unto themselves. Rather
everything overlapping, everyone
on everyone else’s toes.
We sign what’s put in front of us
for good or ill and do the best we can
without the gift of a fresh start.
My day and yours and the ever stupid sun.
Closure
I saw on PBS how the circle closed,
finally, neatly from its first beginnings
in the Eocene—horse and man.
The two of them were hiding
in the dense growth waiting for the world
to dry, the big-eyed one who could climb trees
and the ground-dwelling one with four toes.
The dinosaurs had all burned up
and the world was suddenly minus masters,
open to climbers and scamperers.
Then it began, earth crafting their romance--
man and horse—like a poem, without knowing,
without intention, merely the line’s desire to taste
itself, to raise its head and look.
What a fine thing I am, the line thinks,
bending this way and that, as if it had a brain.
Maybe it was only how the cells hooked up
but it had power—life’s sexual geometry.
Two social animals walk into a bar
and walk out with each other
into time’s bordello, alley, bedchamber.
Horses can’t breathe during strides
like we can. They risk so much running full out,
like whales diving, surfacing high from being
breathlessly below a long time. Each horse
stride a deep dive into the future.
We were in love so long without knowing--
man and horse. We needed their speed and power.
They wanted our hands.
Richard Nester has twice been a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has published essays on social justice topics in The Catholic Agitator, a publication of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, and poetry in numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and Callaloo and on-line in The Cortland Review, Qarrtsiluni and Inlandia. He has three collections of poetry published by Kelsay Books, Buffalo Laughter, Gunpowder Summers, and Penguin Love. His reviews of poetry have appeared in North of Oxford.
I saw on PBS how the circle closed,
finally, neatly from its first beginnings
in the Eocene—horse and man.
The two of them were hiding
in the dense growth waiting for the world
to dry, the big-eyed one who could climb trees
and the ground-dwelling one with four toes.
The dinosaurs had all burned up
and the world was suddenly minus masters,
open to climbers and scamperers.
Then it began, earth crafting their romance--
man and horse—like a poem, without knowing,
without intention, merely the line’s desire to taste
itself, to raise its head and look.
What a fine thing I am, the line thinks,
bending this way and that, as if it had a brain.
Maybe it was only how the cells hooked up
but it had power—life’s sexual geometry.
Two social animals walk into a bar
and walk out with each other
into time’s bordello, alley, bedchamber.
Horses can’t breathe during strides
like we can. They risk so much running full out,
like whales diving, surfacing high from being
breathlessly below a long time. Each horse
stride a deep dive into the future.
We were in love so long without knowing--
man and horse. We needed their speed and power.
They wanted our hands.
Richard Nester has twice been a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has published essays on social justice topics in The Catholic Agitator, a publication of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, and poetry in numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and Callaloo and on-line in The Cortland Review, Qarrtsiluni and Inlandia. He has three collections of poetry published by Kelsay Books, Buffalo Laughter, Gunpowder Summers, and Penguin Love. His reviews of poetry have appeared in North of Oxford.
Yuan Changming
All in One
If you could
Which English word
Would you become? Which?
I would as lief
Be ‘life’:
I may well turn out a ‘lie’
Without f--, but possessed in this word
My spelling contains many an ‘if’
Yes, to live a life is to
Go through as many an if
As you might wish to wish
Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving his native country. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and publications in 1559 literary outlets across 42 countries.
If you could
Which English word
Would you become? Which?
I would as lief
Be ‘life’:
I may well turn out a ‘lie’
Without f--, but possessed in this word
My spelling contains many an ‘if’
Yes, to live a life is to
Go through as many an if
As you might wish to wish
Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving his native country. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and publications in 1559 literary outlets across 42 countries.
Bryan Monte 2 poems
A World Away From Them
In homage to Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”
It’s lunchtime, the third Sunday in June,
in Amsterdam on the Leidseplein
two hours before the monthly writers’ workshop begins.
I park my wheelchair at my usual table
at the Stadsschouwburg’s Café and Brasserie,
its big windows looking out onto the square,
as blue and white trams clang by
and tourists gather around a sooty-looking,
black-bandana'd fire juggler,
and a guitarist, one foot on his amplifier,
playing “Smoke on the Water,”
pickpockets circling the distracted audience
as I eat my mozzarella, tomato and pesto sandwich,
refreshed by it and that morning’s quiet Quaker meeting.
I look out again and see Apple Store customers
tumble down the glass staircase onto the street
ecstatic, their new iPhone and iPads
already in hand, anxious to share
their holiday thoughts and snaps up in the Cloud.
Across the square, above the cinema, in a neon sign,
two giant white beer glasses magically fill
with yellow lager, then come together in a toast and empty darkly.
“Neon in daylight is (indeed) a / great pleasure,”
Edwin Denby, especially when it’s cold and rainy here,
even in the summer, the tourists, as always, unprepared
in flip flops, shorts and hooded sweatshirts.
Well, at least it’s not raining today, but then
I didn’t come for the flowers, the canal boats or the museums,
nor for the weed, the darkroom sex or the soft drugs,
but somewhere I’d never be the last queen.
First Bobbi died, then Teddy, and a few years later Jerry,
(whom the world knew as Jerome), the same year combination therapy
finally wiped the double pages of obituaries from the gay papers,
two years after I’d emigrated and lost count of my dead friends
so that even with these crowds, the world has never seemed
as full as it was with them. And after I have eaten, I roll
into the theatre and film bookshop, look through books about
Fassbinder, Hitchcock, Sirk and Welles, posters from PSYCHO,
EQUUS, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE,
and I think about the Krasinski retrospective, just in from the Tate,
now at the Stedelijk, how he left his absurd mark in blue tape
through everything hanging in his gallery, at one point three meters,
and in a photo, on a stepladder at the beach, directing the waves.
I drink my third, creamy koffie verkeerd and finish my notes for
the workshop. My heart is in my jacket pocket.
It is Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara.
In homage to Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”
It’s lunchtime, the third Sunday in June,
in Amsterdam on the Leidseplein
two hours before the monthly writers’ workshop begins.
I park my wheelchair at my usual table
at the Stadsschouwburg’s Café and Brasserie,
its big windows looking out onto the square,
as blue and white trams clang by
and tourists gather around a sooty-looking,
black-bandana'd fire juggler,
and a guitarist, one foot on his amplifier,
playing “Smoke on the Water,”
pickpockets circling the distracted audience
as I eat my mozzarella, tomato and pesto sandwich,
refreshed by it and that morning’s quiet Quaker meeting.
I look out again and see Apple Store customers
tumble down the glass staircase onto the street
ecstatic, their new iPhone and iPads
already in hand, anxious to share
their holiday thoughts and snaps up in the Cloud.
Across the square, above the cinema, in a neon sign,
two giant white beer glasses magically fill
with yellow lager, then come together in a toast and empty darkly.
“Neon in daylight is (indeed) a / great pleasure,”
Edwin Denby, especially when it’s cold and rainy here,
even in the summer, the tourists, as always, unprepared
in flip flops, shorts and hooded sweatshirts.
Well, at least it’s not raining today, but then
I didn’t come for the flowers, the canal boats or the museums,
nor for the weed, the darkroom sex or the soft drugs,
but somewhere I’d never be the last queen.
First Bobbi died, then Teddy, and a few years later Jerry,
(whom the world knew as Jerome), the same year combination therapy
finally wiped the double pages of obituaries from the gay papers,
two years after I’d emigrated and lost count of my dead friends
so that even with these crowds, the world has never seemed
as full as it was with them. And after I have eaten, I roll
into the theatre and film bookshop, look through books about
Fassbinder, Hitchcock, Sirk and Welles, posters from PSYCHO,
EQUUS, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE,
and I think about the Krasinski retrospective, just in from the Tate,
now at the Stedelijk, how he left his absurd mark in blue tape
through everything hanging in his gallery, at one point three meters,
and in a photo, on a stepladder at the beach, directing the waves.
I drink my third, creamy koffie verkeerd and finish my notes for
the workshop. My heart is in my jacket pocket.
It is Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara.
Moonfaced Man
Good-bye, rent-controlled
two-storied, fourth and fifth floor flat,
with no lift, overlooking the quiet park.
Good-bye, stepladder, high shelves,
cabinets, counters and sinks.
Good-bye, upstairs bathroom
and downstairs toilet
and the spiral staircase
that connected them both.
Good-bye, high ceilings
and big windows that
always let the light in.
Good-bye, thin man dressed
in your slim shoes and suits.
Hello, lift next to the front door
of a flat €30,000 underwater.
Hello, everything on one floor,
sinks and cabinets at the right height,
wheelchair-wide hallways
and a drive-in shower.
Hello, doctors just around the corner
and decades older, gossipy neighbors.
Hello, low ceilings and heating bills,
smaller windows, darker rooms
and the river rush of ventilators and unseen traffic.
Welcome home, moonfaced man in the mirror,
whose too tight clothes and shoes
finally joined the Salvation Army.
Bryan R. Monte’s poetry has appeared in Bay Windows, Friends Journal, (interview at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPMOKG_nI2E), Irreantum, Poetry Pacific, and Sunstone, and in the anthologies Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Press, 2013), Immigration & Justice For Our Neighbors (Celery City Press, 2017), and Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (SoFloPoJo Press, 2019). His poetry collection: On the Level: Fifty-two Poems about Living with Multiple Sclerosis, is in search of a publisher.
Good-bye, rent-controlled
two-storied, fourth and fifth floor flat,
with no lift, overlooking the quiet park.
Good-bye, stepladder, high shelves,
cabinets, counters and sinks.
Good-bye, upstairs bathroom
and downstairs toilet
and the spiral staircase
that connected them both.
Good-bye, high ceilings
and big windows that
always let the light in.
Good-bye, thin man dressed
in your slim shoes and suits.
Hello, lift next to the front door
of a flat €30,000 underwater.
Hello, everything on one floor,
sinks and cabinets at the right height,
wheelchair-wide hallways
and a drive-in shower.
Hello, doctors just around the corner
and decades older, gossipy neighbors.
Hello, low ceilings and heating bills,
smaller windows, darker rooms
and the river rush of ventilators and unseen traffic.
Welcome home, moonfaced man in the mirror,
whose too tight clothes and shoes
finally joined the Salvation Army.
Bryan R. Monte’s poetry has appeared in Bay Windows, Friends Journal, (interview at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPMOKG_nI2E), Irreantum, Poetry Pacific, and Sunstone, and in the anthologies Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Press, 2013), Immigration & Justice For Our Neighbors (Celery City Press, 2017), and Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (SoFloPoJo Press, 2019). His poetry collection: On the Level: Fifty-two Poems about Living with Multiple Sclerosis, is in search of a publisher.
Holly Iglesias 2 poems
God Loves the Stranger
Expect a Few Disturbances
Holly Iglesias’ work includes three collections of poetry-- Sleeping Things (Press 53), Angles of Approach (White Pine Press) and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press)—and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press). In addition, she has translated the work of Cuban poet Caridad Atencio. Recently her poems have appeared in Sinking City, Westerly, Xavier Review, Poor Yorick and The Collagist. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Ron Stottlemyer 2 poems
Dead to the World
There she is, cheek settled
deep in the pillow, hand lying open,
a glove dropped on the lawn.
Her body's quiet now, resting
like a rowboat on smooth gray water.
What else remains of her
is nearly emptied of time,
breath faint, almost inaudible, seagrass
waving on a ledge of silence.
Down the hall the mantel clock
clicks away, holding back dark chimes.
A breeze sweeps up the failing light.
Turning In
On the empty road outside,
a street lamp buzzes over its puddle of light
like an old man humming to himself.
You turn from the upstairs window,
pass by days numbered on the calendar,
leaving the canoe tethered in its page.
At the end of the hall the woman
who holds a life with you is already adrift
in her sleep, slipping out alone
across a deep mountain lake,
paddle held still above the sparkling water
as she looks into the eye of morning.
When you settle into the darkness
beside her, the moment releases its breath,
night taking back what's left of you.
Ron Stottlemyer lives in Helena, Mt. After a long career of teaching and scholarship at college and universities, he is returning to his love of writing poetry. His work has appeared in Alabama Literary Review, The Sow's Ear, The American Journal of Poetry, Streetlight Magazine, Stirring, West Texas Literary Review, Temenos, South Florida Poetry Journal, Twyckenham Notes, Split Rock Review, Rust and Moth, The Worcester Review, The MockingHeart Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is a recipient of a a Pushcart Prize.
On the empty road outside,
a street lamp buzzes over its puddle of light
like an old man humming to himself.
You turn from the upstairs window,
pass by days numbered on the calendar,
leaving the canoe tethered in its page.
At the end of the hall the woman
who holds a life with you is already adrift
in her sleep, slipping out alone
across a deep mountain lake,
paddle held still above the sparkling water
as she looks into the eye of morning.
When you settle into the darkness
beside her, the moment releases its breath,
night taking back what's left of you.
Ron Stottlemyer lives in Helena, Mt. After a long career of teaching and scholarship at college and universities, he is returning to his love of writing poetry. His work has appeared in Alabama Literary Review, The Sow's Ear, The American Journal of Poetry, Streetlight Magazine, Stirring, West Texas Literary Review, Temenos, South Florida Poetry Journal, Twyckenham Notes, Split Rock Review, Rust and Moth, The Worcester Review, The MockingHeart Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is a recipient of a a Pushcart Prize.
David Lawton
1983
And still sometimes
I think back to
All those years ago
In Boston
In the tree shaded apartment
On Chester Street
We would sprinkle cinnamon
Into the coffee we brewed
In the old electric percolator
Leaving it gently burbling
I would do my stretching
In the darkened front room
While you stayed in bed
As late as you could
Ling’ring in proscenium dreams
And outside the civilians
Scurried about chasing dollars
Stuck in the crosshairs
Of Ronnie Raygun
But we answered to no one
But Herr Bertolt Brecht
Meeting everyone’s glance
With an accusatory stare
And a sly grin sliding sideways
On sacred ground
My kisses made you cry
Tears of joy
Hot, fat and dramatic
To the sight of a vengeful god
So if you needed me to,
I would run around the corner
To the Mini-mart on Brighton Ave
To pick up a pint of half and half
So you could stir the clouds away
And I understood the owners there
Could not possibly know
What legendary lovers we were
What charismatic artists we were becoming
But laughed at what a surprise it would be for them
Flickering across the screen of their miniature TV
Perched between the Slim Jims and the Silly Straws
And when I got back to our Epic Theatre love nest
To wake my Sleeping Beauty with a kiss
Our whole world smelled of
Cinnamon.
David Lawton is the author of the poetry collection Sharp Blue Stream (Three Rooms Press), and an editor with greatweatherforMEDIA. He also collaborates in the poemusic collective Hydrogen Junkbox.
And still sometimes
I think back to
All those years ago
In Boston
In the tree shaded apartment
On Chester Street
We would sprinkle cinnamon
Into the coffee we brewed
In the old electric percolator
Leaving it gently burbling
I would do my stretching
In the darkened front room
While you stayed in bed
As late as you could
Ling’ring in proscenium dreams
And outside the civilians
Scurried about chasing dollars
Stuck in the crosshairs
Of Ronnie Raygun
But we answered to no one
But Herr Bertolt Brecht
Meeting everyone’s glance
With an accusatory stare
And a sly grin sliding sideways
On sacred ground
My kisses made you cry
Tears of joy
Hot, fat and dramatic
To the sight of a vengeful god
So if you needed me to,
I would run around the corner
To the Mini-mart on Brighton Ave
To pick up a pint of half and half
So you could stir the clouds away
And I understood the owners there
Could not possibly know
What legendary lovers we were
What charismatic artists we were becoming
But laughed at what a surprise it would be for them
Flickering across the screen of their miniature TV
Perched between the Slim Jims and the Silly Straws
And when I got back to our Epic Theatre love nest
To wake my Sleeping Beauty with a kiss
Our whole world smelled of
Cinnamon.
David Lawton is the author of the poetry collection Sharp Blue Stream (Three Rooms Press), and an editor with greatweatherforMEDIA. He also collaborates in the poemusic collective Hydrogen Junkbox.
Sue Blaustein
Cold April
The week the first picture
of a Black Hole was published, I passed
a Canada goose on the Beerline Trail.
It stood, planted where the path meets Richards Street.
Alone – looking like someone said
they’d be back in an hour and it’d been two.
You grass-eater I said, You stout-legs – I know.
I know I know. Waiting, wondering
where…? So late, why?
What if? What next?
Sue Blaustein published her first book In the Field, Autobiography of an Inspector in 2018. Her publication credits and bio can be found at www.sueblaustein.com. Blaustein retired from the Milwaukee Health Department in 2016, and is an active volunteer. She blogs for Ex Fabula (“Strengthening Community Bonds Through Storytelling”), serves as an interviewer/writer for the “My Life My Story” program at the Zablocki VA Medical Center, and chases insects at the Milwaukee Urban Ecology Center.
The week the first picture
of a Black Hole was published, I passed
a Canada goose on the Beerline Trail.
It stood, planted where the path meets Richards Street.
Alone – looking like someone said
they’d be back in an hour and it’d been two.
You grass-eater I said, You stout-legs – I know.
I know I know. Waiting, wondering
where…? So late, why?
What if? What next?
Sue Blaustein published her first book In the Field, Autobiography of an Inspector in 2018. Her publication credits and bio can be found at www.sueblaustein.com. Blaustein retired from the Milwaukee Health Department in 2016, and is an active volunteer. She blogs for Ex Fabula (“Strengthening Community Bonds Through Storytelling”), serves as an interviewer/writer for the “My Life My Story” program at the Zablocki VA Medical Center, and chases insects at the Milwaukee Urban Ecology Center.
Angie Trudell Vasquez
What and That
What woman picked the corn
split the husk and molded the seed
that fed the people and opened the world?
What being climbed down the tree
made the savannah a refuge?
Who caught the strike
that lit the bush that started the spark
that became the flame that lit the hearth
and traveled village to village
hallowed horn of smoldering smoke
that started the fire that cooked the kill
that fed the self to grow so big?
What worker birthed the child cut the cord
swaddled it, and kept on going down her row?
What mother walked thousands of miles
with two hands held in those smaller than her own?
What father carried his child over mountain tops
swam through rivers crossed deserts and lakes with one arm?
What prisoner pierced the lock
walked out into the sunshine?
What grandparent let her daughter sleep
while the child rose, bathed its skin
in rose water and lavender sang songs
of one and twos until it cooed back
ohhhhs and ahhhhs blowing bubbles?
What woman picked the corn, split the husk
and spilled the seed that fed the people
and opened our world?
Angie Trudell Vasquez received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. Her work has been published in Taos Journal of Poetry, Yellow Medicine Review, Raven Chronicles, and Cloudthroat. She has poems on the Poetry Foundation’s website, and was a Ruth Lilly fellow as an undergraduate at Drake University. She has new work forthcoming from RED INK: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts & Humanities. She was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series. Her book, In Light, Always Light, was published by Finishing Line Press. She guest edited an edition of the Yellow Medicine Review with Millissa Kingbird.
What woman picked the corn
split the husk and molded the seed
that fed the people and opened the world?
What being climbed down the tree
made the savannah a refuge?
Who caught the strike
that lit the bush that started the spark
that became the flame that lit the hearth
and traveled village to village
hallowed horn of smoldering smoke
that started the fire that cooked the kill
that fed the self to grow so big?
What worker birthed the child cut the cord
swaddled it, and kept on going down her row?
What mother walked thousands of miles
with two hands held in those smaller than her own?
What father carried his child over mountain tops
swam through rivers crossed deserts and lakes with one arm?
What prisoner pierced the lock
walked out into the sunshine?
What grandparent let her daughter sleep
while the child rose, bathed its skin
in rose water and lavender sang songs
of one and twos until it cooed back
ohhhhs and ahhhhs blowing bubbles?
What woman picked the corn, split the husk
and spilled the seed that fed the people
and opened our world?
Angie Trudell Vasquez received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. Her work has been published in Taos Journal of Poetry, Yellow Medicine Review, Raven Chronicles, and Cloudthroat. She has poems on the Poetry Foundation’s website, and was a Ruth Lilly fellow as an undergraduate at Drake University. She has new work forthcoming from RED INK: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts & Humanities. She was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series. Her book, In Light, Always Light, was published by Finishing Line Press. She guest edited an edition of the Yellow Medicine Review with Millissa Kingbird.
Steve Klepetar
Luxury
You deserve luxury the ad in my inbox says,
but it’s not true.
All morning I have done nothing
but walk on the treadmill
and sit here staring at this blank page.
Outside young men are mowing grass,
weeding flowers, fixing broken pavement.
They don’t stop for long or lean on their rakes.
I hear their music in the distance,
like an echo of a beat, but soon
the wind kicks up, mingling with tunes
and birdsong. You are falling asleep
on the couch in the three season porch.
Behind our yard the mountains stand out green
against a sky smeared white with clouds.
We’ve eaten a good lunch
with cherries for dessert, then cappuccino
I brewed in those small black cups you love so much,
your silver hair beautiful, my life filled with luxury.
Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such journals as Chiron, Deep Water, Muddy River Poetry Review, Offcourse, Poppy Road Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Klepetar is the author of fourteen poetry collections and chapbooks, the most recent of which include How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps), Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps), and o filho da bebedora de café (The Coffee Drinker’s Son), translated into Portuguese by Francisco Jose de Carvalho.
You deserve luxury the ad in my inbox says,
but it’s not true.
All morning I have done nothing
but walk on the treadmill
and sit here staring at this blank page.
Outside young men are mowing grass,
weeding flowers, fixing broken pavement.
They don’t stop for long or lean on their rakes.
I hear their music in the distance,
like an echo of a beat, but soon
the wind kicks up, mingling with tunes
and birdsong. You are falling asleep
on the couch in the three season porch.
Behind our yard the mountains stand out green
against a sky smeared white with clouds.
We’ve eaten a good lunch
with cherries for dessert, then cappuccino
I brewed in those small black cups you love so much,
your silver hair beautiful, my life filled with luxury.
Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such journals as Chiron, Deep Water, Muddy River Poetry Review, Offcourse, Poppy Road Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Klepetar is the author of fourteen poetry collections and chapbooks, the most recent of which include How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps), Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps), and o filho da bebedora de café (The Coffee Drinker’s Son), translated into Portuguese by Francisco Jose de Carvalho.
Tony Barnstone 3 poems
Leper Messiah Blues
Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?
--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
I dreamed I saw David Bowie last night.
He had grown a transparent beard.
His lean ethereal face grinned with bad teeth like a white antelope
and hovered above my shoulder a little to the left
as he bent in and tried to steal a kiss.
And even though this man who tried to kiss me was dead,
a ghost in a dream rearranged to a pattern of zeros and ones,
I turned my face into his kiss so we were cheek to cheek
and lifted my iPhone for a selfie with him—after all, it was Bowie!
And then the curtains swelled with soggy dawn,
and the earth cracked its bones,
and the strange toad of consciousness began to croak,
and as happens to beings whose being happens in time,
everything that happened a moment before, from here to Katmandu,
was erased by a finger swiping a black glass screen.
Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?
--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
I dreamed I saw David Bowie last night.
He had grown a transparent beard.
His lean ethereal face grinned with bad teeth like a white antelope
and hovered above my shoulder a little to the left
as he bent in and tried to steal a kiss.
And even though this man who tried to kiss me was dead,
a ghost in a dream rearranged to a pattern of zeros and ones,
I turned my face into his kiss so we were cheek to cheek
and lifted my iPhone for a selfie with him—after all, it was Bowie!
And then the curtains swelled with soggy dawn,
and the earth cracked its bones,
and the strange toad of consciousness began to croak,
and as happens to beings whose being happens in time,
everything that happened a moment before, from here to Katmandu,
was erased by a finger swiping a black glass screen.
Yellow Moon Blues
The moon was arched like a raccoon’s eyebrow and tangled in the long fingerling branches of a
poplar
and I was walking past a 7-11 vibrating with light like a late-night crapshooter’s dream
walking a road darkling as a blues song, though my heart curled up in my chest was a toenail in
too-tight shoes,
thinking, “Yeah, there I am, hanging in the tree, useless, just an infection in the world, like
herpes,
like a squid drying on a line after being pounded against the concrete dock until it is soft.”
Oh, I remember the full moon days when I spilled the mellifluous light of myself recklessly,
lavishly
like all that wild plasma in the sun just fissioning away, naked on the tabletops with a party hat
on, as if there were no such thing as nova or the police.
Down at the pier there is a gypsy fortuneteller machine, a wooden statue behind glass, but it took
my fifty cents and the fortune got stuck in its throat.
And back home, there’s just the erratic clicking of the gas stove burners and a scratching inside
the walls and the chorus of devils inside my head beating me up with cast iron pans.
And so, I end up walking down this darksome road and crooning to myself, “Oh, yellow moon,
yellow moon, yellow moon….”
The moon was arched like a raccoon’s eyebrow and tangled in the long fingerling branches of a
poplar
and I was walking past a 7-11 vibrating with light like a late-night crapshooter’s dream
walking a road darkling as a blues song, though my heart curled up in my chest was a toenail in
too-tight shoes,
thinking, “Yeah, there I am, hanging in the tree, useless, just an infection in the world, like
herpes,
like a squid drying on a line after being pounded against the concrete dock until it is soft.”
Oh, I remember the full moon days when I spilled the mellifluous light of myself recklessly,
lavishly
like all that wild plasma in the sun just fissioning away, naked on the tabletops with a party hat
on, as if there were no such thing as nova or the police.
Down at the pier there is a gypsy fortuneteller machine, a wooden statue behind glass, but it took
my fifty cents and the fortune got stuck in its throat.
And back home, there’s just the erratic clicking of the gas stove burners and a scratching inside
the walls and the chorus of devils inside my head beating me up with cast iron pans.
And so, I end up walking down this darksome road and crooning to myself, “Oh, yellow moon,
yellow moon, yellow moon….”
Rickety Tin Man
In a blue sweater by the lake she rang the bell of laughter.
She laughed and held my hand and took me back to the cabin and rode me until it seemed my
name would have to be something swell, like Saxophone or Apex or Orgasmatron.
But later, with no sweat, no sweet, no laughter ever after, and with my heart hollowed to a Tin
Man clang, a tiny tintillation of that lost laugh mangled each follicle of thought.
I changed my name to something prime like Zero or Hydrogen, something to mute the bat wings
flapping in the inner ear in sad man nocturne.
Oh, iPhone, you sit there like a tiny alien monolith,
no Paris calling, no blue dawn on the lake with water birds rising surprising, just chimes
punctuating time with Dentist, Faculty Meeting, Physical Therapy.
I press your HOME button and ask you questions.
If spacetime happens all at once, can I squeeze through a fold and get back to that lake?
How did everything quicksand underground?
Where is my shimmy and my warble?
Ah, it’s all skunky as stank and soggy onion rings.
I think my name is really Gargle or Snuff or Appendectomy.
Tony Barnstone teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 20 books and a music CD, Tokyo’s Burning: WWII Songs. His poetry books include Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz; and Impure. He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese literature, anthologist, and world literature textbook editor. Among his awards: The Poets Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Contest, Pushcart Prize, John Ciardi Prize, Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the California Arts Council. His website is https://www.whittier.edu/academics/english/barnstone
In a blue sweater by the lake she rang the bell of laughter.
She laughed and held my hand and took me back to the cabin and rode me until it seemed my
name would have to be something swell, like Saxophone or Apex or Orgasmatron.
But later, with no sweat, no sweet, no laughter ever after, and with my heart hollowed to a Tin
Man clang, a tiny tintillation of that lost laugh mangled each follicle of thought.
I changed my name to something prime like Zero or Hydrogen, something to mute the bat wings
flapping in the inner ear in sad man nocturne.
Oh, iPhone, you sit there like a tiny alien monolith,
no Paris calling, no blue dawn on the lake with water birds rising surprising, just chimes
punctuating time with Dentist, Faculty Meeting, Physical Therapy.
I press your HOME button and ask you questions.
If spacetime happens all at once, can I squeeze through a fold and get back to that lake?
How did everything quicksand underground?
Where is my shimmy and my warble?
Ah, it’s all skunky as stank and soggy onion rings.
I think my name is really Gargle or Snuff or Appendectomy.
Tony Barnstone teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 20 books and a music CD, Tokyo’s Burning: WWII Songs. His poetry books include Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz; and Impure. He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese literature, anthologist, and world literature textbook editor. Among his awards: The Poets Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Contest, Pushcart Prize, John Ciardi Prize, Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the California Arts Council. His website is https://www.whittier.edu/academics/english/barnstone
Stuart Dischell 2 poems
Lines Inside the Cemetery
I enjoy meeting the cemetery cats,
Yet I am not sure why they congregate.
Perhaps it’s because little traffic passes,
Except the occasional hearse and mourners--
Or the city gardeners in electric carts.
Maybe it’s because old ladies in black dresses
Feed them sandwich meats and cheeses
And pour capfuls of water from plastic bottles.
Few places in the city stay so green in drought.
Here are also shadows and warm stones
And statuary that might please a cat.
The dead are lucky to have such admirers
Sit on their graves through all seasons.
My family tomb is the wind.
I enjoy meeting the cemetery cats,
Yet I am not sure why they congregate.
Perhaps it’s because little traffic passes,
Except the occasional hearse and mourners--
Or the city gardeners in electric carts.
Maybe it’s because old ladies in black dresses
Feed them sandwich meats and cheeses
And pour capfuls of water from plastic bottles.
Few places in the city stay so green in drought.
Here are also shadows and warm stones
And statuary that might please a cat.
The dead are lucky to have such admirers
Sit on their graves through all seasons.
My family tomb is the wind.
Lines About a Morning Swim
Would you not like to leave your hotel
Room where the window looks at the sea?
Would you not find the bathing suit in your valise,
Stroll down the carpeted hall, ride the elevator
Six floors to the lobby where the staff is busy
Keeping busy, polishing and wiping every surface
Including the leaves of the artificial palms?
Would you not like to hear “good mornings”
And “thank yous” and “my pleasures? Would you not
Answer in the languages you pretend to know
Before passing the eight low backed stools
Empty now except for a newspaper and a foaming
Cup on the bar of someone who must be returning?
The huge ceramic vases stand before the revolving door
Look like the queen’s guard. What is inside them? No one
Has looked in years: cigarette foil, gum wrappers,
Perhaps a watch battery or a wedding ring., something
One might find when the hotel is sold for office space
And the vases are auctioned off and inside is a dead mouse.
Would you not rather think of something else like the person
Who is not your partner you always think of during sex.
Or was it the pomegranate juice served with vodka?
Your mouth is dry and you wish you ate or drank
Again this morning before you left the hotel
In the terry cloth robe you strip and toss on the
Chair along with a towel, a book, and sunscreen,
Flapping your arms as you walk chest-deep into the sea,
Diving into your shadow, surfacing with a fish in your teeth.
Stuart Dischell is the author of 5 books of poetry, most recently Backwards Days (Penguin) and Children with Enemies. (Chicago) He teaches in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. New "Lines" poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, At the Seawall, and Kenyon Review.
Would you not like to leave your hotel
Room where the window looks at the sea?
Would you not find the bathing suit in your valise,
Stroll down the carpeted hall, ride the elevator
Six floors to the lobby where the staff is busy
Keeping busy, polishing and wiping every surface
Including the leaves of the artificial palms?
Would you not like to hear “good mornings”
And “thank yous” and “my pleasures? Would you not
Answer in the languages you pretend to know
Before passing the eight low backed stools
Empty now except for a newspaper and a foaming
Cup on the bar of someone who must be returning?
The huge ceramic vases stand before the revolving door
Look like the queen’s guard. What is inside them? No one
Has looked in years: cigarette foil, gum wrappers,
Perhaps a watch battery or a wedding ring., something
One might find when the hotel is sold for office space
And the vases are auctioned off and inside is a dead mouse.
Would you not rather think of something else like the person
Who is not your partner you always think of during sex.
Or was it the pomegranate juice served with vodka?
Your mouth is dry and you wish you ate or drank
Again this morning before you left the hotel
In the terry cloth robe you strip and toss on the
Chair along with a towel, a book, and sunscreen,
Flapping your arms as you walk chest-deep into the sea,
Diving into your shadow, surfacing with a fish in your teeth.
Stuart Dischell is the author of 5 books of poetry, most recently Backwards Days (Penguin) and Children with Enemies. (Chicago) He teaches in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. New "Lines" poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, At the Seawall, and Kenyon Review.