Issue 15 November 2019
Sarah Kersey, Editor
Sarah Kersey, Editor
Poets in this issue: Kamal E. Kimball, Lukpata Lomba Joseph, Linda Pastan, Mela Blust, Alisa Veilja, Bruce Bond, Lyn Lifshin, Catherine Mazodier, Tim Kahl, Kushal Poddar, Laura Ohlmann, Keith Ratzlaff, Paul Dickey, Mark DeCarteret, Daniel Edmond Moore, Kevin Gidusko
DVS1 Collage by De Villo Sloan
SoFloPoJo Rejected Poem Project
For the November 2019 issue, we asked poets to send one poem that had been rejected by at least one other literary magazine. We chose only one poem from those we received. The poem we selected is Kamal E. Kimbal's "No Gods, No Masters."
The idea to publish a rejected poem is not original on our part. Redheaded Stepchild publishes only poems that have been rejected by other journals. It's a great idea.
The idea to publish a rejected poem is not original on our part. Redheaded Stepchild publishes only poems that have been rejected by other journals. It's a great idea.
Kamal E. Kimball
No Gods, No Masters
She feels like a dog. She needs to eat.
She has learned how to gnaw, can sense
who deserves it, can scent the lime
stench of their fear, thin as cologne.
She loves to say loin until her lips film
with oil and she feels like a lion, her teeth
too huge for her jaw. She thrusts
her hands into fire. She feeds it undug bones.
It takes all night. There are many
graves to piss on. There is little time.
The fire grows. She grows. They burn
down her daddy’s trailer, ash his name.
She is very tired and fond of her cage,
only when she lets herself
clench and then unglove. She is feral
to be seen. She loves it best
when she gets very nude in rooms
of eyes and fog. Most rooms are
mostly empty. Most things when you look
for a bottom. In them, she wore
her chains like a cramp of pearls.
She coined new words for how
she preferred to be hurt.
But she knows how to open
the doors now. She is not afraid
to sleep in the snow.
Rejected by Radar
Kamal E. Kimball is a poet and teacher based in Columbus, Ohio. A production editor for The Journal and reader for Muzzle Magazine, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Phoebe, Hobart, Juked, Tahoma Literary Review, Sundog Lit, Bone Parade, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere. More at kamalkimball.com
She feels like a dog. She needs to eat.
She has learned how to gnaw, can sense
who deserves it, can scent the lime
stench of their fear, thin as cologne.
She loves to say loin until her lips film
with oil and she feels like a lion, her teeth
too huge for her jaw. She thrusts
her hands into fire. She feeds it undug bones.
It takes all night. There are many
graves to piss on. There is little time.
The fire grows. She grows. They burn
down her daddy’s trailer, ash his name.
She is very tired and fond of her cage,
only when she lets herself
clench and then unglove. She is feral
to be seen. She loves it best
when she gets very nude in rooms
of eyes and fog. Most rooms are
mostly empty. Most things when you look
for a bottom. In them, she wore
her chains like a cramp of pearls.
She coined new words for how
she preferred to be hurt.
But she knows how to open
the doors now. She is not afraid
to sleep in the snow.
Rejected by Radar
Kamal E. Kimball is a poet and teacher based in Columbus, Ohio. A production editor for The Journal and reader for Muzzle Magazine, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Phoebe, Hobart, Juked, Tahoma Literary Review, Sundog Lit, Bone Parade, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere. More at kamalkimball.com
November poems
Lukpata Lomba Joseph 2 poems
A Story on Fire
(For Nigeria)
I wanted to write a condensed
story on fire,
and it was easy to see
a hat of thorns
a man hammered to a bar
and a three-days' sojourn
all in a free flow.
Then, this left scrappy
shapes on page,
skeletons of dead religious tropes
and too many unmeaning things.
My professor who grew up in Rome
would scream disgraziata
and I know it shouldn't be
about a man or a bar,
but yellow sand and yellow sky,
wrecks of broken history and culture
heaped to form gods thirsty for tears.
In the north, a white dove
was caught and caged,
the very last of its species.
Its bones have been milled
to form yellow dust
(we must salaam
to dust
whose bare skin
we will all embrace)
And we must learn
the act of selfless love,
we must love for love.
We must search for love by death
and death by love.
And we must learn
the act of selfless love.
We must love guns, contraband, death.
I wanted to write a
story on fire and my professor
said it must start with broken pieces,
caged dove and gods of tears.
Its plot must be linear
—just a land of fire, guns and death;
a dovetail of uneven fitting,
and a staggering flag
lurching to serve a new god.
Note: The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “salaam” as “an obeisance performed by bowing very low.”
In my poem, I used the verb form of the same word which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary also defines as “to greet or pay homage to with a salaam.”
I like to think of this word as having derived its meaning from Islamic tradition, their pattern of greeting which is more like kowtowing but not exactly.
Of course, a close look at the word reveals that it originated from Arabic “salam” (literally “peace”) which in a deeper sense has connection with the Islamic tradition.
To further answer your question, I used that word after I had talked of a white dove that was caught and caged, (Lack of peace in the northern part of Nigeria is the backdrop to this symbolic usage, where I used “a dove” to symbolize peace).
Of course, the absence of peace in the north is as a result of the activities of the Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram. They are against Western Education (at least this is the knowledge we hold at the moment).
We must bow to dust just like the white dove has been milled to dust already. And of course, we will surely bow to dust from their suicide bombings and attacks in public places.
My choice of the word “salaam” over “bow” was informed by my desire to create a connection, what I like to call “a coded imagery”.
(For Nigeria)
I wanted to write a condensed
story on fire,
and it was easy to see
a hat of thorns
a man hammered to a bar
and a three-days' sojourn
all in a free flow.
Then, this left scrappy
shapes on page,
skeletons of dead religious tropes
and too many unmeaning things.
My professor who grew up in Rome
would scream disgraziata
and I know it shouldn't be
about a man or a bar,
but yellow sand and yellow sky,
wrecks of broken history and culture
heaped to form gods thirsty for tears.
In the north, a white dove
was caught and caged,
the very last of its species.
Its bones have been milled
to form yellow dust
(we must salaam
to dust
whose bare skin
we will all embrace)
And we must learn
the act of selfless love,
we must love for love.
We must search for love by death
and death by love.
And we must learn
the act of selfless love.
We must love guns, contraband, death.
I wanted to write a
story on fire and my professor
said it must start with broken pieces,
caged dove and gods of tears.
Its plot must be linear
—just a land of fire, guns and death;
a dovetail of uneven fitting,
and a staggering flag
lurching to serve a new god.
Note: The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “salaam” as “an obeisance performed by bowing very low.”
In my poem, I used the verb form of the same word which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary also defines as “to greet or pay homage to with a salaam.”
I like to think of this word as having derived its meaning from Islamic tradition, their pattern of greeting which is more like kowtowing but not exactly.
Of course, a close look at the word reveals that it originated from Arabic “salam” (literally “peace”) which in a deeper sense has connection with the Islamic tradition.
To further answer your question, I used that word after I had talked of a white dove that was caught and caged, (Lack of peace in the northern part of Nigeria is the backdrop to this symbolic usage, where I used “a dove” to symbolize peace).
Of course, the absence of peace in the north is as a result of the activities of the Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram. They are against Western Education (at least this is the knowledge we hold at the moment).
We must bow to dust just like the white dove has been milled to dust already. And of course, we will surely bow to dust from their suicide bombings and attacks in public places.
My choice of the word “salaam” over “bow” was informed by my desire to create a connection, what I like to call “a coded imagery”.
A Letter to a Horse Rider
‘Death forgive me-
For making jokes about you being
The elder brother of sleep.
Sleep is where dreams live.
You kill dreams.
You and sleep are not related.’—Moyosore.
I want to write a song
for you, the last enemy.
I was just three; I didn’t know you
and I had to ask about dad.
They said the rider of a pale horse visited.
Why do you like blank spaces?
You are no small thing,
you are the only one of your breed
and there’s only one way you can go--
through fresh bones, leaving shafts.
How do you eat your meat?
You are powerful,
the greatest thaumaturge.
But you are not a good listener,
you didn’t hear that she just got married.
The horse rider has no hope of improving
his timing by listening,
he is not a good listener.
You filter through unfettered,
and you savour the short
and labored breathing, glow of despair
as you send away all 21 grams on exile.
But you don’t value courtesy,
you don’t know your worth,
don’t even know when you aren’t welcome.
You should have a lot to fuss about:
the schemes you’ve truncated, the lack of cronies
and your pale horse—you may as well want
to hollow through its bones.
You give fame. At your kiss, everyone will hear us.
But you don’t know how to earn fame,
you can only earn curses
because you are not a good listener.
Author’s Note:
Lukpata Lomba Joseph lives in Nigeria. He is a contributing writer to an online weekly magazine, Joshua’s Truth. Many of his poems explore the concept of internal noise in diverse forms. His work has appeared in Poetry North Ireland’s FourXFour Journal, Caustic Frolic Literary Journal, Still Point Magazine, Vox Poetica and elsewhere. Recently, he has fallen in love with satirical writing with a deliberate focus on morality. He likes reading Aesop’s fables. You can find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/lukpata.joseph.9.
‘Death forgive me-
For making jokes about you being
The elder brother of sleep.
Sleep is where dreams live.
You kill dreams.
You and sleep are not related.’—Moyosore.
I want to write a song
for you, the last enemy.
I was just three; I didn’t know you
and I had to ask about dad.
They said the rider of a pale horse visited.
Why do you like blank spaces?
You are no small thing,
you are the only one of your breed
and there’s only one way you can go--
through fresh bones, leaving shafts.
How do you eat your meat?
You are powerful,
the greatest thaumaturge.
But you are not a good listener,
you didn’t hear that she just got married.
The horse rider has no hope of improving
his timing by listening,
he is not a good listener.
You filter through unfettered,
and you savour the short
and labored breathing, glow of despair
as you send away all 21 grams on exile.
But you don’t value courtesy,
you don’t know your worth,
don’t even know when you aren’t welcome.
You should have a lot to fuss about:
the schemes you’ve truncated, the lack of cronies
and your pale horse—you may as well want
to hollow through its bones.
You give fame. At your kiss, everyone will hear us.
But you don’t know how to earn fame,
you can only earn curses
because you are not a good listener.
Author’s Note:
- The pale horse rider is an allusion to Revelation 6:8, where death was described as the rider of a pale horse with hades following him.
- The concept of the human soul weighing 21 grams was popularized by Duncan MacDougall, a U.S. physician. In 1907, he attempted to measure the weight of the human soul by measuring the weight lost by patients after death. Although, his experiment was widely described as unscientific, it gave birth to the concept of the human soul weighing 21 grams.
Lukpata Lomba Joseph lives in Nigeria. He is a contributing writer to an online weekly magazine, Joshua’s Truth. Many of his poems explore the concept of internal noise in diverse forms. His work has appeared in Poetry North Ireland’s FourXFour Journal, Caustic Frolic Literary Journal, Still Point Magazine, Vox Poetica and elsewhere. Recently, he has fallen in love with satirical writing with a deliberate focus on morality. He likes reading Aesop’s fables. You can find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/lukpata.joseph.9.
Linda Pastan
tulips in a glass vase
their huge, tear-shaped
petals fall
all over the rug
these tulips
in the last throes
of life
weeping
their colors—flame,
purple, creamy white--
while outside
spring
in all its ornamental
mania
blossoms on
and on without them
Linda Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Her many awards include the Dylan Thomas award and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of more than 15 books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006), Traveling Light (2011), Insomnia (2015), and A Dog Runs Through It (2018). She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
their huge, tear-shaped
petals fall
all over the rug
these tulips
in the last throes
of life
weeping
their colors—flame,
purple, creamy white--
while outside
spring
in all its ornamental
mania
blossoms on
and on without them
Linda Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Her many awards include the Dylan Thomas award and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of more than 15 books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006), Traveling Light (2011), Insomnia (2015), and A Dog Runs Through It (2018). She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Mela Blust 4 poems
autumn
i waited by the shadow of your mouth
buried under a deep, pensive blanket
but you were a petal already fallen
from a flower i could not name
your language of unfinished breath
a scythe rusting in the field
the somehow echo of us
a pull-cord broken at the light
i waited by the shadow of your mouth
buried under a deep, pensive blanket
but you were a petal already fallen
from a flower i could not name
your language of unfinished breath
a scythe rusting in the field
the somehow echo of us
a pull-cord broken at the light
motherhood
crumpled and matted before me,
an offering no one
ever asks for
melding with the road, wet
and wetter as
my tears fall
how silent it can be even with
cars rushing by
casting wariness aside for compassion
as i tenderly scoop the only days old fawn
from the pavement
its crushed limbs dangling across
my motherly arms
and i put someone's angel
delicately into
the soft meadow grass
as though it never left.
crumpled and matted before me,
an offering no one
ever asks for
melding with the road, wet
and wetter as
my tears fall
how silent it can be even with
cars rushing by
casting wariness aside for compassion
as i tenderly scoop the only days old fawn
from the pavement
its crushed limbs dangling across
my motherly arms
and i put someone's angel
delicately into
the soft meadow grass
as though it never left.
no child
i was kissed by the music of war
while praying for man
as useless as tar stuck to the hands
as useless as hands in the shape of a gun
rounds like the seconds of a grandfather clock ticking away
a stomach
some raven perched on the hairs of my neck;
a blood canticle for selfish comfort
later, a sigh
anymore
no child has a song of honey
no language, a thirst for god.
i was kissed by the music of war
while praying for man
as useless as tar stuck to the hands
as useless as hands in the shape of a gun
rounds like the seconds of a grandfather clock ticking away
a stomach
some raven perched on the hairs of my neck;
a blood canticle for selfish comfort
later, a sigh
anymore
no child has a song of honey
no language, a thirst for god.
lies we tell ourselves
you tried to make me so small
stitched me into the tightest of blankets
Hiding my curves behind
angles and light
crow's wing hair,
bee stung lips
Ashamed of hunger, hungry for joy
denying me so much
denying me sustenance
shiny curls hiding hollowed out cheekbones
later, my throat swallows itself
I'd say it's killing me but
I've been dead for years, hiding inside my stomach
scissor cut and scissor tongue -
lies we tell ourselves about being too much
You couldn't love me because there was so much of me.
So you carved fault lines, breathed white lines
told little white lies.
separated me from god,
made me someone else.
Mela Blust's work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, YesPoetry, Isacoustic, Rust+Moth, Anti Heroin Chic, Califragile, Tilde Journal, Setu Magazine, Rhythm & Bones Lit, The Nassau Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, The Stray Branch, more. Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, is forthcoming with Apep Publications in 2019. She is Head Publicist and Social Media Manager for Animal Heart Press, a contributing editor for Barren Magazine, and a poetry reader for The Rise Up Review. She can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.
you tried to make me so small
stitched me into the tightest of blankets
Hiding my curves behind
angles and light
crow's wing hair,
bee stung lips
Ashamed of hunger, hungry for joy
denying me so much
denying me sustenance
shiny curls hiding hollowed out cheekbones
later, my throat swallows itself
I'd say it's killing me but
I've been dead for years, hiding inside my stomach
scissor cut and scissor tongue -
lies we tell ourselves about being too much
You couldn't love me because there was so much of me.
So you carved fault lines, breathed white lines
told little white lies.
separated me from god,
made me someone else.
Mela Blust's work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, YesPoetry, Isacoustic, Rust+Moth, Anti Heroin Chic, Califragile, Tilde Journal, Setu Magazine, Rhythm & Bones Lit, The Nassau Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, The Stray Branch, more. Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, is forthcoming with Apep Publications in 2019. She is Head Publicist and Social Media Manager for Animal Heart Press, a contributing editor for Barren Magazine, and a poetry reader for The Rise Up Review. She can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.
Alisa Veilja
Visions of a Storm Petrel
I don't know whence I am coming.
I proclaim the dead creator to be my enemy
from tomorrow onward.
The storm calls me;
the wave soars to the height of my flight,
and then reconverts to plain sea!
Space after space and beyond, the wild storm kicks me off my rocker.
Cradle and grave, grave and light
on the horizon of a wave graph.
The boats on the sandy shore once shattered
my insane love for symmetry.
I've had no time to brood
on whatever could or should come through!
Before and after the storm
the sea is mere water, not mighty wave.
The wave is us,
at the height of our own self.
Translated from Albanian: ARBEN P. LATIFI
Born in 1982 in Albania, Alisa Velaj’s poems have been published in Erbacce, The Curlew, Culture Cult Magazine, Stag Hill Literary Journal, The Quarterly Review, Orbis, The Linnet's Wings, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She earned an Artist-in-Residence Scholarship, and attended the AIR Litteratur Västra Götaland Program in Villa Martinson, Jonsered, Sweden.
I don't know whence I am coming.
I proclaim the dead creator to be my enemy
from tomorrow onward.
The storm calls me;
the wave soars to the height of my flight,
and then reconverts to plain sea!
Space after space and beyond, the wild storm kicks me off my rocker.
Cradle and grave, grave and light
on the horizon of a wave graph.
The boats on the sandy shore once shattered
my insane love for symmetry.
I've had no time to brood
on whatever could or should come through!
Before and after the storm
the sea is mere water, not mighty wave.
The wave is us,
at the height of our own self.
Translated from Albanian: ARBEN P. LATIFI
Born in 1982 in Albania, Alisa Velaj’s poems have been published in Erbacce, The Curlew, Culture Cult Magazine, Stag Hill Literary Journal, The Quarterly Review, Orbis, The Linnet's Wings, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She earned an Artist-in-Residence Scholarship, and attended the AIR Litteratur Västra Götaland Program in Villa Martinson, Jonsered, Sweden.
Bruce Bond
From Narcissus in the Underworld: 26, 28, 31, 32, 33
The creak of boats in swells of the harbor
sounds a warning like hinges of a forest
or failed estate. So difficult to get
news from news, history from history,
by which I mean writing and the written
off. The auguries of smoke and wind
blow dust from the glass of eyes that sting.
Earth keeps spinning the storm surge north,
and mountains sink, and refugees come,
and foreign words for home in the distance.
When a shoreline breaks, it breaks open,
and in flow the pixels too small to see,
stars of neither cruelty nor grace, but
a sorrow so deep its name has not arrived.
*
When a high wind tears down the power
and it’s you and me and the emptiness
that gives us license to move, we do not move.
We gather our cats in the pantry, we listen
we hear in heaven the enormous sigh
of an iron lung exhaling, the storm eye
passing, the terrible burden coming to rest.
One part of every wind is trembling.
The other the stillness the trembling moves aside.
The future, as we know it, is never true.
Never false. It is here in the quiet turn
of every breath, the little death a singer breathes.
One part of each departure is a mirror,
the other the wall to which a mirror turns.
*
The affliction of the heretic is never
to see the world at hand, only a world
to come, and so the circle of the damned
whose every step is the one they are
not taking. I have been that man. I
drove so reckless I could have killed my friends.
I love, I said, and it was not love, but
a world without heresy is not the world
I forgive. Call it innocence or sin,
the volt of desire that could have killed us all.
The affliction of the fetishist is never
to reclaim our disbelief. I have been
that angel doused in gasoline, that eye
of the candle, the blindness of the flame.
*
Back when I rented my books, I saw,
in the ledger pasted to the inner cover,
the signatures of students who carried
them before me. And there inside one
I found the name of a famous assassin,
and it made me feel important, as he too
must have felt, for all the wrong reasons.
I touched the hand that touched the gun that touched
the better nation we might have been.
If I hated the man behind the name,
I did not feel it. I could not yet. I was
a star. Today’s lesson is about the power
of the name, my teacher said. And so,
without warning, he took my book away.
*
The photo of a man turns to the wall,
so weary of the gazing and the gazed.
That spirit of exchange you hear about
in poems, it cannot hear you. Poems go
to die in silence and in dirt. I hate that.
I hate it and honor it, whatever it takes
to pay attention. The greatest poverty,
I know, is idolatrous life. I could have
passed my suicidal friend in the street,
and I did not see him. If I gave a dollar
to my assassin, a there-but-for-the-grace
might have kept me from his eyes. A wind
could sweep the street of cigarettes, and I,
a dollar lighter, would shudder out of view.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018). Five books are forthcoming including Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
The creak of boats in swells of the harbor
sounds a warning like hinges of a forest
or failed estate. So difficult to get
news from news, history from history,
by which I mean writing and the written
off. The auguries of smoke and wind
blow dust from the glass of eyes that sting.
Earth keeps spinning the storm surge north,
and mountains sink, and refugees come,
and foreign words for home in the distance.
When a shoreline breaks, it breaks open,
and in flow the pixels too small to see,
stars of neither cruelty nor grace, but
a sorrow so deep its name has not arrived.
*
When a high wind tears down the power
and it’s you and me and the emptiness
that gives us license to move, we do not move.
We gather our cats in the pantry, we listen
we hear in heaven the enormous sigh
of an iron lung exhaling, the storm eye
passing, the terrible burden coming to rest.
One part of every wind is trembling.
The other the stillness the trembling moves aside.
The future, as we know it, is never true.
Never false. It is here in the quiet turn
of every breath, the little death a singer breathes.
One part of each departure is a mirror,
the other the wall to which a mirror turns.
*
The affliction of the heretic is never
to see the world at hand, only a world
to come, and so the circle of the damned
whose every step is the one they are
not taking. I have been that man. I
drove so reckless I could have killed my friends.
I love, I said, and it was not love, but
a world without heresy is not the world
I forgive. Call it innocence or sin,
the volt of desire that could have killed us all.
The affliction of the fetishist is never
to reclaim our disbelief. I have been
that angel doused in gasoline, that eye
of the candle, the blindness of the flame.
*
Back when I rented my books, I saw,
in the ledger pasted to the inner cover,
the signatures of students who carried
them before me. And there inside one
I found the name of a famous assassin,
and it made me feel important, as he too
must have felt, for all the wrong reasons.
I touched the hand that touched the gun that touched
the better nation we might have been.
If I hated the man behind the name,
I did not feel it. I could not yet. I was
a star. Today’s lesson is about the power
of the name, my teacher said. And so,
without warning, he took my book away.
*
The photo of a man turns to the wall,
so weary of the gazing and the gazed.
That spirit of exchange you hear about
in poems, it cannot hear you. Poems go
to die in silence and in dirt. I hate that.
I hate it and honor it, whatever it takes
to pay attention. The greatest poverty,
I know, is idolatrous life. I could have
passed my suicidal friend in the street,
and I did not see him. If I gave a dollar
to my assassin, a there-but-for-the-grace
might have kept me from his eyes. A wind
could sweep the street of cigarettes, and I,
a dollar lighter, would shudder out of view.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018). Five books are forthcoming including Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
Lyn Lifshin
My Father Tells Us About Leaving Vilnius
On the night we left Vilnius, I had to bring goats
next door in the moon. Since I was not the youngest, I
couldn’t wait pressed under a shawl of coarse cotton
close to Mama’s breast as she whispered “hurry” in Yiddish.
Her ankles were swollen from ten babies. Though she was
only thirty her waist was thick, her lank hair hung in
strings under the babushka she swore she would burn
in New York City. She dreamt others pointed and snickered
near the tenement, that a neighbor borrowed the only bowl
she brought that was her mother’s and broke it. That night
every move had to be secret. In rooms there was no heat in,
no one put on muddy shoes or talked. It was forbidden to leave,
a law we broke like the skin of ice on pails of milk. Years from
then a daughter would write that I didn’t have a word for
America yet, that night of a new moon. Mother pressed my
brother to her, warned everyone even the babies must not make
a sound. Frozen branches creaked. I shivered at men with
guns near straw roofs on fire. It took our old samovar, every
coin to bribe someone to take us to the train. “Pretend to be
sleeping,” father whispered as the conductor moved near. Mother
stuffed cotton in the baby’s mouth. She held the mortar and
pestle wrapped in my quilt of feathers closer, told me I would
sleep in this soft blue in the years ahead. But that night I
was knocked sideways into ribs of the boat so sea sick I
couldn’t swallow the orange someone threw from an upstairs
bunk tho it was bright as sun and smelled of a new country I
could only imagine though never how my mother would become
a stranger to herself there, forget why we risked dogs and guns to come
LYN LIFSHIN is arguably the most prolific poet of her generation publishing over 130 books and chapbook. Lifshin published her prize winning book about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness. Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially The Lies, Light At the End: The Jesus Poems. NYQ books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. An update to her Gale Research Autobiography is out: Lips, Blues, Blue Lace: On The Outside. Forthcoming: Degas Little Dancer and Winter Poems from Kind of a Hurricane Press, Paintings and Poems, from Tangerine Press . Visit her at :www.lynlifshin.com
On the night we left Vilnius, I had to bring goats
next door in the moon. Since I was not the youngest, I
couldn’t wait pressed under a shawl of coarse cotton
close to Mama’s breast as she whispered “hurry” in Yiddish.
Her ankles were swollen from ten babies. Though she was
only thirty her waist was thick, her lank hair hung in
strings under the babushka she swore she would burn
in New York City. She dreamt others pointed and snickered
near the tenement, that a neighbor borrowed the only bowl
she brought that was her mother’s and broke it. That night
every move had to be secret. In rooms there was no heat in,
no one put on muddy shoes or talked. It was forbidden to leave,
a law we broke like the skin of ice on pails of milk. Years from
then a daughter would write that I didn’t have a word for
America yet, that night of a new moon. Mother pressed my
brother to her, warned everyone even the babies must not make
a sound. Frozen branches creaked. I shivered at men with
guns near straw roofs on fire. It took our old samovar, every
coin to bribe someone to take us to the train. “Pretend to be
sleeping,” father whispered as the conductor moved near. Mother
stuffed cotton in the baby’s mouth. She held the mortar and
pestle wrapped in my quilt of feathers closer, told me I would
sleep in this soft blue in the years ahead. But that night I
was knocked sideways into ribs of the boat so sea sick I
couldn’t swallow the orange someone threw from an upstairs
bunk tho it was bright as sun and smelled of a new country I
could only imagine though never how my mother would become
a stranger to herself there, forget why we risked dogs and guns to come
LYN LIFSHIN is arguably the most prolific poet of her generation publishing over 130 books and chapbook. Lifshin published her prize winning book about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness. Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially The Lies, Light At the End: The Jesus Poems. NYQ books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. An update to her Gale Research Autobiography is out: Lips, Blues, Blue Lace: On The Outside. Forthcoming: Degas Little Dancer and Winter Poems from Kind of a Hurricane Press, Paintings and Poems, from Tangerine Press . Visit her at :www.lynlifshin.com
Catherine Mazodier
Listening in
Late April, early morning, cold but bright.
I sit outside in a waterfall of birds.
A stranger, I can only make out the obvious dove drawling away
and the semi-colon of a cuckoo in the distance.
The rest is a stream of intertwining chitchat
my father could easily disentangle,
the way I can tell, in the metro in Paris,
who's warbling in Polish, Farsi or Portuguese
though the actual words escape my grasp.
Late April, early morning, cold but bright.
I sit outside in a waterfall of birds.
A stranger, I can only make out the obvious dove drawling away
and the semi-colon of a cuckoo in the distance.
The rest is a stream of intertwining chitchat
my father could easily disentangle,
the way I can tell, in the metro in Paris,
who's warbling in Polish, Farsi or Portuguese
though the actual words escape my grasp.
vie nocturne
Une chauve-souris est entrée dans la chambre.
Son vol, même dans la panique,
éclabousse de silence la nuit
qui tremble de grillons.
J'éteins la lumière électrique
et elle retrouve la fenêtre.
L'orange amère de Mars, visible à l'oeil nu,
ne cligne pas dans son orbite.
Je regarde le ciel qui s'allume par paliers
du toit au tilleul, des crêtes au peuplier.
La fontaine poursuit son obscur soliloque
insensible au frisson des moustiques.
Une chauve-souris est entrée dans la chambre.
Son vol, même dans la panique,
éclabousse de silence la nuit
qui tremble de grillons.
J'éteins la lumière électrique
et elle retrouve la fenêtre.
L'orange amère de Mars, visible à l'oeil nu,
ne cligne pas dans son orbite.
Je regarde le ciel qui s'allume par paliers
du toit au tilleul, des crêtes au peuplier.
La fontaine poursuit son obscur soliloque
insensible au frisson des moustiques.
Nightlife (translated by Catherine Mazodier)
A bat has flown into the bedroom.
Even in panic, the flutter of wings
splashes the cricket-crackling night
with silence.
I switch off the electric lights
and it finds its way out the window.
You can see Mars with the naked eye,
a bitter orange unblinking in its orbit.
I watch as the sky lights up in stages,
roof to lime tree, ridge to poplar.
The fountain's obscure soliloquy goes on,
unruffled by the sizzle of mosquitoes.
Catherine Mazodier teaches linguistics and translation at the university in Paris. She has had poems published in the online supplement to the British poetry journal Agenda, and also published two chapbooks of poems in French and English with a DIY publisher in France (Studio de l'Anaphore), and a few short stories in a now defunct French literary journal called Minimum Rock n Roll.
Tim Kahl 2 poems
Renunciation
It seems I've planned a rape in my dream.
At first it was innocent; I hired a man to
make love to a disabled woman amid
the fluffy bubbles in her tub. The moans
that arose in her tiled enclosure
made it seem like a public service for
the shut-in. But when I returned to the scene,
I saw the stab wounds. I'd been negligent
in my oversight. It was then I awoke.
I told myself I was the victim of too many
bad movies written by men pressing to pay
the bills. They pour on the drama to make
the sale. I'm left to sleep with the overkill.
The next night I'm responsible for the death
of a child, a shark attack at the aquatic center
right beneath the giant water slide.
I refused to act. The whole scene unfolded
like it was on screen. I wanted to know
Where the hell is the life guard? But it was me.
Damn the headlines and their insinuations,
their crude hints that if I'd been elsewhere
I might have intervened. I might have issued
a sharp warning to the actors to forget their lines,
their part in the play, to let the day wind down
into the forgivable, the merciful, the kind.
But I'm a little so-and-so survivor whose
interests are kept intact in mind instead of
letting tragedy draw near and dig itself in.
My sins of omission originate in my dreams
the way Christ's did when he sleepwalked
through Gethsemane in agony. No one can
tell me he stayed awake that entire night in
the garden. No one can tell me dream isn't
a form of meditation either, but the only reason
I dream is for the moral exercise that I renounce
some point later. I have forsaken the great and
wakeful world in all its splendid danger,
and for that, my punishment shall be to sleep,
the sleep of a contaminated soldier.
Hear Tim Kahl read this poem accompanied by music here: Renunciation
It seems I've planned a rape in my dream.
At first it was innocent; I hired a man to
make love to a disabled woman amid
the fluffy bubbles in her tub. The moans
that arose in her tiled enclosure
made it seem like a public service for
the shut-in. But when I returned to the scene,
I saw the stab wounds. I'd been negligent
in my oversight. It was then I awoke.
I told myself I was the victim of too many
bad movies written by men pressing to pay
the bills. They pour on the drama to make
the sale. I'm left to sleep with the overkill.
The next night I'm responsible for the death
of a child, a shark attack at the aquatic center
right beneath the giant water slide.
I refused to act. The whole scene unfolded
like it was on screen. I wanted to know
Where the hell is the life guard? But it was me.
Damn the headlines and their insinuations,
their crude hints that if I'd been elsewhere
I might have intervened. I might have issued
a sharp warning to the actors to forget their lines,
their part in the play, to let the day wind down
into the forgivable, the merciful, the kind.
But I'm a little so-and-so survivor whose
interests are kept intact in mind instead of
letting tragedy draw near and dig itself in.
My sins of omission originate in my dreams
the way Christ's did when he sleepwalked
through Gethsemane in agony. No one can
tell me he stayed awake that entire night in
the garden. No one can tell me dream isn't
a form of meditation either, but the only reason
I dream is for the moral exercise that I renounce
some point later. I have forsaken the great and
wakeful world in all its splendid danger,
and for that, my punishment shall be to sleep,
the sleep of a contaminated soldier.
Hear Tim Kahl read this poem accompanied by music here: Renunciation
On the Cancellation of As The World Turns
Standing behind the ironing board, sawing on the blouse
she got for Christmas, my mom listened to Aida
walled in with Radames right up to the end.
But at noon the tube came on and the world
according to Procter & Gamble unfolded in neat
one hour segments. Dr. Bob and the Oakdale gang
delivered their version of daytime drama in
sweater vests and sweeping neckline dresses.
My mom educated me on the concepts of ratfink
and schnook, which she assured me could
hold over from several seasons ago.
But we’d disagree on some characters,
especially the ever-tactful Dr. Bob, who seemed
a little dull and stuffy to me, the kind of guy
whose wardrobe you wouldn’t want
even if you won it in a giveaway.
His kids fell in love with all the right people
which wasn’t hard in a town full of
beautiful ones, so beautiful they irritated
the soul more than a little. They got on
with the elite and never took their cars into
the garage with the mechanic who has
no English but for twenty bucks will
recharge your A/C. Their lives were as
clear as the Ivory Snow each episode
was brought to you by. My life was a blend
of chores and minor curiosities
that would make a Sunday crawl
to the point of making you look forward to
some momentous day when one choice
would change your fate forever,
or at least as long as it took the writers
to introduce a new character.
Ah, the plenitude of agendas, the passions
ripe enough to split the skin and ooze into
the seat next to you in the living room --
you made me scheme for a secret escape from
the comforts I was given. Oh, life, if only you
had moved at the speed of plot and introduced me
to supercouples with unflagging smiles
and a talent for tossing verbal bonbons to
each other. If only you had rigged
a lingering gaze in perfect silence to explode
into unmanageable kisses. If only you had
engineered a double-cross so diabolical,
it would have brought me to consider a wave
of gunplay. These I had to glean from afternoons
spent with the world turning at an excruciating pace,
with my mother pondering her past in Davenport, Iowa,
a graduate of the high school there and no more,
thinking of the man who ended up a newscaster,
whom she didn’t steal away with into that
forbidden place in the night. Instead, there she was
with me, dusting all the furniture.
Now her program is gone, the one she referred
to as though she alone possessed it.
It has passed into the vapor as has Gregory Peck,
her rock-steady favorite, Mr. Reliable,
the last bastion of fair play and insufferable goodness
seemingly hatched out of a Midwestern town surrounded
by cornfields. Oakdale, Illinois, you were the place
to loiter in my youth when I needed respite from
the metaphysical questions I was battling --
why the universe cannot unstir itself, why
the sun insists on bombarding my retina,
why the moon looks down with its solitary face
as the world turns right next to it. Yes, as the world
is turning, people who watch obsolete shows
will themselves become obsolete. My mother
has flown up into a heaven of reruns to be replaced
by other mothers retooled with their new and
improved purposes, only a few of them staying home
to watch the soaps, slowly walled into their crypts.
So, mom, if you could put down that remote for
a minute and help me Lemon Pledge this desk here
with the dust from some flamboyant star collecting
on it, I’d appreciate it. Already its surface has suffered
too much from a decade’s worth of optical mouse abuse.
Together we could browse your program’s site
and reflect on fifty years of illicit embrace, of firm
clasping in wonderful light, of close-ups on
the great bosomy clutch, and you would be there
once again to tell me the good guys from the schnooks.
From that, my moral barometer would be reset,
ready for service in the wider world of losses
and acquisitions. It is this world that drifts across
my footprints all these years I’ve been traveling
out of my comfort zone. Goodbye, my privileged trips
to see the gorillas. Goodbye, my favorite potato chips,
my hot baths at night, my wishful thinking about
the universe’s decisions. Goodbye, my comfortable
afternoons in Oakdale spent second-guessing the glands
of its beautiful people. Tell me, what is the point of
all this comfort, if it never goes away?
Hear Tim Kahl read this poem accompanied by music here: On the Cancellation of As the World Turns
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) The String of Islands (Dink, 2015) and Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters' Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.
Standing behind the ironing board, sawing on the blouse
she got for Christmas, my mom listened to Aida
walled in with Radames right up to the end.
But at noon the tube came on and the world
according to Procter & Gamble unfolded in neat
one hour segments. Dr. Bob and the Oakdale gang
delivered their version of daytime drama in
sweater vests and sweeping neckline dresses.
My mom educated me on the concepts of ratfink
and schnook, which she assured me could
hold over from several seasons ago.
But we’d disagree on some characters,
especially the ever-tactful Dr. Bob, who seemed
a little dull and stuffy to me, the kind of guy
whose wardrobe you wouldn’t want
even if you won it in a giveaway.
His kids fell in love with all the right people
which wasn’t hard in a town full of
beautiful ones, so beautiful they irritated
the soul more than a little. They got on
with the elite and never took their cars into
the garage with the mechanic who has
no English but for twenty bucks will
recharge your A/C. Their lives were as
clear as the Ivory Snow each episode
was brought to you by. My life was a blend
of chores and minor curiosities
that would make a Sunday crawl
to the point of making you look forward to
some momentous day when one choice
would change your fate forever,
or at least as long as it took the writers
to introduce a new character.
Ah, the plenitude of agendas, the passions
ripe enough to split the skin and ooze into
the seat next to you in the living room --
you made me scheme for a secret escape from
the comforts I was given. Oh, life, if only you
had moved at the speed of plot and introduced me
to supercouples with unflagging smiles
and a talent for tossing verbal bonbons to
each other. If only you had rigged
a lingering gaze in perfect silence to explode
into unmanageable kisses. If only you had
engineered a double-cross so diabolical,
it would have brought me to consider a wave
of gunplay. These I had to glean from afternoons
spent with the world turning at an excruciating pace,
with my mother pondering her past in Davenport, Iowa,
a graduate of the high school there and no more,
thinking of the man who ended up a newscaster,
whom she didn’t steal away with into that
forbidden place in the night. Instead, there she was
with me, dusting all the furniture.
Now her program is gone, the one she referred
to as though she alone possessed it.
It has passed into the vapor as has Gregory Peck,
her rock-steady favorite, Mr. Reliable,
the last bastion of fair play and insufferable goodness
seemingly hatched out of a Midwestern town surrounded
by cornfields. Oakdale, Illinois, you were the place
to loiter in my youth when I needed respite from
the metaphysical questions I was battling --
why the universe cannot unstir itself, why
the sun insists on bombarding my retina,
why the moon looks down with its solitary face
as the world turns right next to it. Yes, as the world
is turning, people who watch obsolete shows
will themselves become obsolete. My mother
has flown up into a heaven of reruns to be replaced
by other mothers retooled with their new and
improved purposes, only a few of them staying home
to watch the soaps, slowly walled into their crypts.
So, mom, if you could put down that remote for
a minute and help me Lemon Pledge this desk here
with the dust from some flamboyant star collecting
on it, I’d appreciate it. Already its surface has suffered
too much from a decade’s worth of optical mouse abuse.
Together we could browse your program’s site
and reflect on fifty years of illicit embrace, of firm
clasping in wonderful light, of close-ups on
the great bosomy clutch, and you would be there
once again to tell me the good guys from the schnooks.
From that, my moral barometer would be reset,
ready for service in the wider world of losses
and acquisitions. It is this world that drifts across
my footprints all these years I’ve been traveling
out of my comfort zone. Goodbye, my privileged trips
to see the gorillas. Goodbye, my favorite potato chips,
my hot baths at night, my wishful thinking about
the universe’s decisions. Goodbye, my comfortable
afternoons in Oakdale spent second-guessing the glands
of its beautiful people. Tell me, what is the point of
all this comfort, if it never goes away?
Hear Tim Kahl read this poem accompanied by music here: On the Cancellation of As the World Turns
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) The String of Islands (Dink, 2015) and Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters' Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.
Kushal Poddar 2 poems
Everyone's Gone to The Moon, Nina Simone
For two inept hours we stretch our love
hurting each other (not what
you think—her head hits mine,
my knee DUIs between her long legs).
Saturday street drapes outside.
Everyone else has gone to the paper moon.
Radio croons a moony uh-la-la-la.
Everyone else has gone. They wrote in
the newspaper—an asteroid will pass this planet.
You comb your hair. I read the rest of the news.
On the porcelain the half eaten cookie gathers a fly.
Everyone else has gone to the moon.
For two inept hours we stretch our love
hurting each other (not what
you think—her head hits mine,
my knee DUIs between her long legs).
Saturday street drapes outside.
Everyone else has gone to the paper moon.
Radio croons a moony uh-la-la-la.
Everyone else has gone. They wrote in
the newspaper—an asteroid will pass this planet.
You comb your hair. I read the rest of the news.
On the porcelain the half eaten cookie gathers a fly.
Everyone else has gone to the moon.
God Complex
My therapist says, she needs my father
on her battered counseling couch
for my therapeutics.
She tells my father after a session
with him, she needs his father
for an analysis.
Father cites, he rests in peace.
Doesn’t matter, insists my therapist,
I just need his id.
Months later, lying on the couch
God reveals his impairments
in the areas of foreseeing.
There, says my therapist,
your cure heals its wound blindly.
Kushal Poddar is author of The Circus Came To My Island, A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood, Scratches Within, Kleptomaniac's Book of Unoriginal Poems, Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems and most recently, Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel (Alien Buddha Press).
My therapist says, she needs my father
on her battered counseling couch
for my therapeutics.
She tells my father after a session
with him, she needs his father
for an analysis.
Father cites, he rests in peace.
Doesn’t matter, insists my therapist,
I just need his id.
Months later, lying on the couch
God reveals his impairments
in the areas of foreseeing.
There, says my therapist,
your cure heals its wound blindly.
Kushal Poddar is author of The Circus Came To My Island, A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood, Scratches Within, Kleptomaniac's Book of Unoriginal Poems, Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems and most recently, Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel (Alien Buddha Press).
Laura Ohlmann 3 poems
For My Father
After Sharon Olds
You were my first child.
I took you in my arms after the first
attempted hanging to your bedpost,
hid the used Home Depot rope
in my closet and covered it like dead prey.
At the hospital I washed your hands
with foamed sanitizer, cleaned
your blood crusted lips with a wet wipe—
your legs cuffed by pressure monitors—too weak
and swollen to lift you anyway.
How did we get to this moment?
I stood with you by Mom’s grave at 12, watched
the curators lower her pine casket towards
the rocking earth—my body bowing towards it--
like in your waterbed that evening,
and I grasped your hand in mine. My child face
saw your softened face and sensed
a splitting chasm there.
You weren’t much of a father—but you loved. You saved
what you could and kept it beside you,
like the paper towel rolls strung together
and pop tabs that gather around the house.
Maybe it’s my fault that you want me in your bed
each night, beside your clumsy breath,
the CPAP soon to follow.
I stayed beside you, a child mannequin, enabler,
companion, daughter-wife,
holding your puttied hand in mine.
After Sharon Olds
You were my first child.
I took you in my arms after the first
attempted hanging to your bedpost,
hid the used Home Depot rope
in my closet and covered it like dead prey.
At the hospital I washed your hands
with foamed sanitizer, cleaned
your blood crusted lips with a wet wipe—
your legs cuffed by pressure monitors—too weak
and swollen to lift you anyway.
How did we get to this moment?
I stood with you by Mom’s grave at 12, watched
the curators lower her pine casket towards
the rocking earth—my body bowing towards it--
like in your waterbed that evening,
and I grasped your hand in mine. My child face
saw your softened face and sensed
a splitting chasm there.
You weren’t much of a father—but you loved. You saved
what you could and kept it beside you,
like the paper towel rolls strung together
and pop tabs that gather around the house.
Maybe it’s my fault that you want me in your bed
each night, beside your clumsy breath,
the CPAP soon to follow.
I stayed beside you, a child mannequin, enabler,
companion, daughter-wife,
holding your puttied hand in mine.
The Altar
An altar of red rock rises before us.
Fremont cottonwoods lay rows
down the slick black gravel
like a bed of white rose petals.
We’ve seen it all before. Even the black
figurine of a bear laying in the sand.
I dust its coat with my fingertips,
now coated in red earth and whisper
a prayer into the fingernail sized muzzle.
Utah Juniper’s decorate the street corners
and I see the bouquet from my dreams-
nucleus of each black center like a fetus’
face rising towards my face, while fetal pine cones
hang like corpses above our heads.
An altar of red rock rises before us.
Fremont cottonwoods lay rows
down the slick black gravel
like a bed of white rose petals.
We’ve seen it all before. Even the black
figurine of a bear laying in the sand.
I dust its coat with my fingertips,
now coated in red earth and whisper
a prayer into the fingernail sized muzzle.
Utah Juniper’s decorate the street corners
and I see the bouquet from my dreams-
nucleus of each black center like a fetus’
face rising towards my face, while fetal pine cones
hang like corpses above our heads.
To Justin
Remember my childhood swing set? Your body spearheading mine,
rocking me back & forth with your hips. What was that feeling?
Was it love that tucked itself, like a hummingbird between my legs?
You leaned in for the first kiss & I imagined being struck by lightning &
foot flying into the air. Too soon, you asked me to your house, where
no one would be home.
I had never kissed a man or
held a hand or
a wrist or
a neck or
soft shoulders & mountaincrest of vertebrae.
You untucked me from your truck and led me to your bedroom, where bottles
of liquor lined your bookshelves. You stripped the cheap bra from the shoulders
and left the collarbones with a slug-trail of sputum. I didn’t want sex--
yet you submerged your fingers between the lips & asked
if you could go in—your penis bobbing from the zipper of your pants,
while I lay in skin & shame before you. No, I told you.
So you kissed the trailbone neck and furry-stream along the baby-fat stomach.
Can I go in? I want you so bad, you told me. I wasn’t used to saying no to men.
Can I slip in the back? Your hand slapped the ass, the body already positioned
over the apex of the bed. You made circles over the asscheeks.
I’ll give you a spanking. Your cockular tip at the anus now, testing the entrance -
no saliva or lube to place it.
Okay, I told you & felt shame slip into the asshole.
When you dropped me off & I submerged the empty birdcage body into the tub,
your fluid leaked from it & bruises gripped the hip bones & I wondered
what it meant for a man to love me.
Laura Ohlmann’s poetry and nonfiction has appeared in Cake, the 2016 Wild Ekphrastic Contest, and Honey & Lime. She was born in Cooper City, Florida and is currently an MFA student at the University of Central Florida. She resides in Orlando with her dog, Lady and her human, Jon.
Remember my childhood swing set? Your body spearheading mine,
rocking me back & forth with your hips. What was that feeling?
Was it love that tucked itself, like a hummingbird between my legs?
You leaned in for the first kiss & I imagined being struck by lightning &
foot flying into the air. Too soon, you asked me to your house, where
no one would be home.
I had never kissed a man or
held a hand or
a wrist or
a neck or
soft shoulders & mountaincrest of vertebrae.
You untucked me from your truck and led me to your bedroom, where bottles
of liquor lined your bookshelves. You stripped the cheap bra from the shoulders
and left the collarbones with a slug-trail of sputum. I didn’t want sex--
yet you submerged your fingers between the lips & asked
if you could go in—your penis bobbing from the zipper of your pants,
while I lay in skin & shame before you. No, I told you.
So you kissed the trailbone neck and furry-stream along the baby-fat stomach.
Can I go in? I want you so bad, you told me. I wasn’t used to saying no to men.
Can I slip in the back? Your hand slapped the ass, the body already positioned
over the apex of the bed. You made circles over the asscheeks.
I’ll give you a spanking. Your cockular tip at the anus now, testing the entrance -
no saliva or lube to place it.
Okay, I told you & felt shame slip into the asshole.
When you dropped me off & I submerged the empty birdcage body into the tub,
your fluid leaked from it & bruises gripped the hip bones & I wondered
what it meant for a man to love me.
Laura Ohlmann’s poetry and nonfiction has appeared in Cake, the 2016 Wild Ekphrastic Contest, and Honey & Lime. She was born in Cooper City, Florida and is currently an MFA student at the University of Central Florida. She resides in Orlando with her dog, Lady and her human, Jon.
Keith Ratzlaff 3 poems
After
Because I’ve let the apples
fall, mowed around their
constellations in the grass.
This year fire blight
kept us from pruning;
last year it was negligence
and forgetting, two sides
of the same ignorance.
So ironically this year,
the trees cascade apples,
and now I have them
in spades and bushels
I’ve carried to the compost bin
as of no worth. And the yard
smells of vinegar and the wasps
are drunk on the cider, and
the apples look better blighted
than the rest of the garden--
beetled, wilted—better than
the waterlogged pine
coughing up a thousand cones
before it flames out. Because
at first, I mowed over the apples,
but their trepanned heads made
the yard some sort of battlefield.
So now instead I let them fall,
make their small zodiacs
in the earth-bound heavens.
Yesterday my horoscope said,
“Leo, endings may be challenging
for you now.” But I don’t need
stars telling me the future:
Next week the last hostas
will raise their lavender antennae;
then blackened coneflowers,
the final sweet peppers. After that,
frost we’ll save the tomatoes from--
only for a night or two—by covering them
with sheets we used to sleep under.
Because I’ve let the apples
fall, mowed around their
constellations in the grass.
This year fire blight
kept us from pruning;
last year it was negligence
and forgetting, two sides
of the same ignorance.
So ironically this year,
the trees cascade apples,
and now I have them
in spades and bushels
I’ve carried to the compost bin
as of no worth. And the yard
smells of vinegar and the wasps
are drunk on the cider, and
the apples look better blighted
than the rest of the garden--
beetled, wilted—better than
the waterlogged pine
coughing up a thousand cones
before it flames out. Because
at first, I mowed over the apples,
but their trepanned heads made
the yard some sort of battlefield.
So now instead I let them fall,
make their small zodiacs
in the earth-bound heavens.
Yesterday my horoscope said,
“Leo, endings may be challenging
for you now.” But I don’t need
stars telling me the future:
Next week the last hostas
will raise their lavender antennae;
then blackened coneflowers,
the final sweet peppers. After that,
frost we’ll save the tomatoes from--
only for a night or two—by covering them
with sheets we used to sleep under.
Sitting Above a Ravine in Lynchburg, Virginia
I’m perched on the edge
because of flowers.
Because the almost
dramatic drop-off
gives me a pleasant vertigo.
And I’m writing a poem
imagining how I’d die
if I flung myself
over the edge,
a martyr for spring.
But I wouldn’t--
die, I mean—not with
the crows’ thick caw,
the rain-softened ground
waiting to catch me.
I’ve got a red magnolia leaf
for company,
and a tiny cedar cone,
and the almost
gray-green of a holly leaf
with its almost dangerous blade.
And March is ruining
the dun-colored
leaves with violets.
Who asked them back?
How can I fling myself
almost to my death in a poem
when there are violets,
and strawberries, a bee
broken from the tomb,
the small blue eyes
of spring beauties at the bottom?
How, with flowers everywhere,
can I concentrate
instead on being
last year’s magnolia leaf--
bruised over half my body,
stippled with white fungus--
with just a little green
to show who I was,
and just a little red
to show how much
I loved the glossy world once?
How can I die
in the plane crash I imagined
last night on the flight
from Charlottesville--
the scuffed turbo-prop
that lurched and bucked
and wanted, I was sure,
to throw itself down now, now,
into some Blue Ridge ravine?
Because what’s the use
if you’re a plane,
old and wheezing,
carrying college students
back from break--
who are not afraid
and can’t imagine dying--
and carrying one old poet
who is and can and who
could name the flowers
they would crash into?
What’s the use
if you’re a plane running
the midnight commute
to Lynchburg again and over,
when all they’ll do someday
is push you into the ravine
like the lawnmower you are?
But we didn’t crash
and everyone’s in class,
and I’m alive and watching
spring resurrect itself
into violets and trout lilies,
watching thunderheads
bunch above Lynchburg
where I landed last night,
so happy and thirsty
for the ground I licked
rain off my windshield
and said thank you.
I’m perched on the edge
because of flowers.
Because the almost
dramatic drop-off
gives me a pleasant vertigo.
And I’m writing a poem
imagining how I’d die
if I flung myself
over the edge,
a martyr for spring.
But I wouldn’t--
die, I mean—not with
the crows’ thick caw,
the rain-softened ground
waiting to catch me.
I’ve got a red magnolia leaf
for company,
and a tiny cedar cone,
and the almost
gray-green of a holly leaf
with its almost dangerous blade.
And March is ruining
the dun-colored
leaves with violets.
Who asked them back?
How can I fling myself
almost to my death in a poem
when there are violets,
and strawberries, a bee
broken from the tomb,
the small blue eyes
of spring beauties at the bottom?
How, with flowers everywhere,
can I concentrate
instead on being
last year’s magnolia leaf--
bruised over half my body,
stippled with white fungus--
with just a little green
to show who I was,
and just a little red
to show how much
I loved the glossy world once?
How can I die
in the plane crash I imagined
last night on the flight
from Charlottesville--
the scuffed turbo-prop
that lurched and bucked
and wanted, I was sure,
to throw itself down now, now,
into some Blue Ridge ravine?
Because what’s the use
if you’re a plane,
old and wheezing,
carrying college students
back from break--
who are not afraid
and can’t imagine dying--
and carrying one old poet
who is and can and who
could name the flowers
they would crash into?
What’s the use
if you’re a plane running
the midnight commute
to Lynchburg again and over,
when all they’ll do someday
is push you into the ravine
like the lawnmower you are?
But we didn’t crash
and everyone’s in class,
and I’m alive and watching
spring resurrect itself
into violets and trout lilies,
watching thunderheads
bunch above Lynchburg
where I landed last night,
so happy and thirsty
for the ground I licked
rain off my windshield
and said thank you.
The Couple in Valentine Costumes
Let’s not talk about them,
the couple we envied
at the party—James and Margaret?--
wearing cupids in their hair,
and big sandwich-sign hearts
draped over their shoulders
like billboards for love.
Valentine hearts resemble
nothing but themselves--
not the pipes and vaults
of any actual organs.
And in valentine hearts
there are no echoes of
the real heart’s iambic la dah,
predictable as polka drumming;
no orchestras there,
or the shush of brushes,
no cymbals, no tom-toms,
no playing around with the offbeat
(though offbeats are what we love--
what James and Margaret loved—
dancing like romantic red paddles,
gawky and spinning to some samba
that would kill a real heart).
Someone has opened a window,
and music is floating
into the streetlights, then up
into the routes the Concorde
used to fly above us before
everything went tragic.
Then the moon, then
the constellations
living their dot to dot lives:
the virgin Pleiades chased
forever by Orion chased
forever by the scorpion;
Cassiopeia stuffed in a basket
and hung upside down
for boasting she was
more beautiful than even the gods.
I don't know
if James and Margaret
were in love or not;
there are no hearts
in the stars, no shapes
there to auger love for them.
Only dogs and ravens,
doves and bears;
only Boötes the plowman
courting the enigmatic Norma,
bent like a carpenter’s square;
only the leftover story
of Andromeda, Cassiopeia’s
truly beautiful daughter
set in the heavens
for being true to Perseus,
who dances with her
forever—contiguously—
the kind of almost touching
that passes for love among stars.
In twenty-five years
we’ve never gone dancing;
probably not tonight, either.
That’s not our story.
Think instead of the night
we parked in a field
east of town to watch the eclipse.
The moon was a peach,
an old pond-glimmerer,
her spin and step so certain
she let the sun—that old dazzler--
put the moves on,
let Earth cut in, then
let the sun win her back
through all her phases--
new, wan, gibbous, full.
Sol and Luna,
the big lights so finely matched
they disappear into each other’s arms.
Or think of us as us—
me the salesman’s mild-mannered son;
you more beautiful than even the stars.
Keith and Treva,
about whom there are stories
too numerous to tell:
Keith Ratzlaff’s most recent books of poetry are Then, A Thousand Crows (Anhinga Press, 2009) and Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee (Anhinga, 2005). His latest book, Who’s Asking?, is forthcoming, also from Anhinga. Poems and reviews have appeared recently in The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Arts and Letters, Colorado Review, and The American Reader. His awards include the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Award, two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2009.
Paul Dickey 2 poems
The Violence Poetry Could Speak of Today in America
A book thief recently stole a signed first-edition copy of Billy Collins'
Nine Horses and blasted it with a .410 shotgun.
– https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2015/05/21/book-thief-vents-rage-laureates-poetry-shotgun/27711589/
If you know anything of Billy’s poetry,
you know how natural it feels a gun
in your hands, how easy it could have been
to forget to pay for it
before taking it from the bookstore
to meet and greet America.
A signed, pristine first edition, though.
So that was a crime, naturally, but nonetheless,
it apparently traveled well--
expressing itself eloquently but accessibly
on the daily issues—how to survive
while sleeping under a motorcycle seat
on the road to Waco,
or in a backpack in Ferguson, Missouri,
hitching a ride in a police car
in the Bronx or Cleveland
with the cache of weapons, but of course,
it is no crime to have weapons in America.
Only the AK-47’s and the sling blades felt awkward,
in the company of Billy’s poetry.
The rifles and ammunition chatted
amicably with the free verse,
and were overheard collaboratively discussing
the glory and thrills of American history.
But the poetry, I must say,
soon had an experience it will not soon forget,
though it still found its way back home
like a Billy Collins poem,
enlightened by the adventure.
The thin volume, more valuable now
for its trouble, returned to its shelf
snug between Bronte and cummings.
A book thief recently stole a signed first-edition copy of Billy Collins'
Nine Horses and blasted it with a .410 shotgun.
– https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2015/05/21/book-thief-vents-rage-laureates-poetry-shotgun/27711589/
If you know anything of Billy’s poetry,
you know how natural it feels a gun
in your hands, how easy it could have been
to forget to pay for it
before taking it from the bookstore
to meet and greet America.
A signed, pristine first edition, though.
So that was a crime, naturally, but nonetheless,
it apparently traveled well--
expressing itself eloquently but accessibly
on the daily issues—how to survive
while sleeping under a motorcycle seat
on the road to Waco,
or in a backpack in Ferguson, Missouri,
hitching a ride in a police car
in the Bronx or Cleveland
with the cache of weapons, but of course,
it is no crime to have weapons in America.
Only the AK-47’s and the sling blades felt awkward,
in the company of Billy’s poetry.
The rifles and ammunition chatted
amicably with the free verse,
and were overheard collaboratively discussing
the glory and thrills of American history.
But the poetry, I must say,
soon had an experience it will not soon forget,
though it still found its way back home
like a Billy Collins poem,
enlightened by the adventure.
The thin volume, more valuable now
for its trouble, returned to its shelf
snug between Bronte and cummings.
Breaking News: Poetry Loose in a California Supermarket
After Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” (1956),
In memory of Franz Wright, 1953-2015
Where are we going, Walt Whitman?
No one knew me this morning at the grocery, even the poets with the large debts who were
giving oral readings to themselves in the vegetable aisle.
I feel absurd for them, Walt Whitman. I am lucky on most days. I paid for my vegetables
years ago with cash and the eyes of your tender, soldier boys lying on stretchers,
stocking the shelves.
It is said in the academy my sexual vegetables are wilted, but I say, so will theirs, in mere days.
I saw them, Walt Whitman, refuse to allow me to read my white, dead, male, poems even if
deliciously and joyously gay.
They had read you in the library and recognized the name.
If only they knew our heart.
It is no matter. I love them, all of them, underemployed and lonely, calling themselves poets
still as they read their grocery lists, their diary entries, their prompts, the elliptical
texts.
I did it fifty years ago and you, Walt Whitman, over a century ago when there was no
supermarket for verse.
We shopped for images and we became wonderful and then we became poetry.
The reading closes in half an hour. Will we all then walk past the dead pork chops, the
brilliant stacks of cans, on Rilke’s streets of solitude looking at the full moon?
Friends, can’t poets of every generation in America look for Lorca among the non-gendered
watermelons together?
Or will the new angels of the lost America swipe a cheap banana in the ATM and go home to
a network of safe love?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America do you have when
Franz Wright quit posting his Facebook shit and you watched that boat disappear on
those other black waters of Lethe?
Paul Dickey won the $5,000 2015 Master Poet award from the Nebraska Arts Council. His first full-length poetry manuscript They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in 2011. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Bellevue Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace was published by Pinyon Publishing in October, 2013. (The Nimrod issue of Fall/Winter, 1976.) More info is available at the author's new website: http://pauldickey9.wix.com/paul-dickey
After Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” (1956),
In memory of Franz Wright, 1953-2015
Where are we going, Walt Whitman?
No one knew me this morning at the grocery, even the poets with the large debts who were
giving oral readings to themselves in the vegetable aisle.
I feel absurd for them, Walt Whitman. I am lucky on most days. I paid for my vegetables
years ago with cash and the eyes of your tender, soldier boys lying on stretchers,
stocking the shelves.
It is said in the academy my sexual vegetables are wilted, but I say, so will theirs, in mere days.
I saw them, Walt Whitman, refuse to allow me to read my white, dead, male, poems even if
deliciously and joyously gay.
They had read you in the library and recognized the name.
If only they knew our heart.
It is no matter. I love them, all of them, underemployed and lonely, calling themselves poets
still as they read their grocery lists, their diary entries, their prompts, the elliptical
texts.
I did it fifty years ago and you, Walt Whitman, over a century ago when there was no
supermarket for verse.
We shopped for images and we became wonderful and then we became poetry.
The reading closes in half an hour. Will we all then walk past the dead pork chops, the
brilliant stacks of cans, on Rilke’s streets of solitude looking at the full moon?
Friends, can’t poets of every generation in America look for Lorca among the non-gendered
watermelons together?
Or will the new angels of the lost America swipe a cheap banana in the ATM and go home to
a network of safe love?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America do you have when
Franz Wright quit posting his Facebook shit and you watched that boat disappear on
those other black waters of Lethe?
Paul Dickey won the $5,000 2015 Master Poet award from the Nebraska Arts Council. His first full-length poetry manuscript They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in 2011. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Bellevue Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace was published by Pinyon Publishing in October, 2013. (The Nimrod issue of Fall/Winter, 1976.) More info is available at the author's new website: http://pauldickey9.wix.com/paul-dickey
Mark DeCarteret
The Spread
I was sipping gin in the backyard
paging through flowering shrubs
when a hummingbird motored by,
returning to a mislabeled trumpet vine.
The windows, all muddied-up, tell of a storm.
Their rotted-out trimming, your boredom.
Yes, it’s too late for notes, my insipid pining,
not to mention all those tales of unresolved love,
for doesn’t time swing to and fro like a pendulum
or a hammer, of two minds, in some far away bell
and wasn’t it right there we first heard its wings drum,
each beat so stirred up we thought ourselves perfectly still?
Mark DeCarteret has appeared next to Charles Bukowski in a lo-fi fold out, Pope John Paul II in a hi-test collection of Catholic poetry, Billy Collins in an Italian fashion coffee table book, and Mary Oliver in a 3785 page pirated anthology. His poetry has appeared in 400 literary reviews including The Flagler Review, La Fovea , Mangrove, Sanibel-Captiva Review, Saw Grass, Tampa Review, and White Pelican Review. His sixth book For Lack of a Calling was released last year by Nixes Mate Books. He lives in New Hampshire.
I was sipping gin in the backyard
paging through flowering shrubs
when a hummingbird motored by,
returning to a mislabeled trumpet vine.
The windows, all muddied-up, tell of a storm.
Their rotted-out trimming, your boredom.
Yes, it’s too late for notes, my insipid pining,
not to mention all those tales of unresolved love,
for doesn’t time swing to and fro like a pendulum
or a hammer, of two minds, in some far away bell
and wasn’t it right there we first heard its wings drum,
each beat so stirred up we thought ourselves perfectly still?
Mark DeCarteret has appeared next to Charles Bukowski in a lo-fi fold out, Pope John Paul II in a hi-test collection of Catholic poetry, Billy Collins in an Italian fashion coffee table book, and Mary Oliver in a 3785 page pirated anthology. His poetry has appeared in 400 literary reviews including The Flagler Review, La Fovea , Mangrove, Sanibel-Captiva Review, Saw Grass, Tampa Review, and White Pelican Review. His sixth book For Lack of a Calling was released last year by Nixes Mate Books. He lives in New Hampshire.
Daniel Edward Moore
The god I Serve
With so much damn it in the god I serve
it’s a miracle how a tear breaks free,
a miracle how salt gets made
on the shore of this captive ocean.
Pass the pepper, you subversive thought
in this walled up wailing head of mine
where brick after brick of aversion’s red trust
keeps looking for something white & blue
to hang on my heavenly pole. Oh sky,
with clouds the size of cocaine piled
on my kitchen table, teach me the astrophysics
of faith, the jump in & jump on terror’s
worn trampoline, make me an Olympian of
risk and defeat, in the name of the god I serve,
the father of born to be drowned.
Daniel lives in Washington on Whidbey Island with the poet, Laura Coe Moore. His poems are forthcoming in Weber Review, Slipstream, Levee Magazine,
The Blue Nib Magazine, Cultural Weekly and Tule Review. His chapbook Boys, is forthcoming from Duck Lake Books in December 2019. His first book, Waxing the Dents, was a finalist for the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize and will be released in February 2020. His work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Visit him at Danieledwardmoore.com.
With so much damn it in the god I serve
it’s a miracle how a tear breaks free,
a miracle how salt gets made
on the shore of this captive ocean.
Pass the pepper, you subversive thought
in this walled up wailing head of mine
where brick after brick of aversion’s red trust
keeps looking for something white & blue
to hang on my heavenly pole. Oh sky,
with clouds the size of cocaine piled
on my kitchen table, teach me the astrophysics
of faith, the jump in & jump on terror’s
worn trampoline, make me an Olympian of
risk and defeat, in the name of the god I serve,
the father of born to be drowned.
Daniel lives in Washington on Whidbey Island with the poet, Laura Coe Moore. His poems are forthcoming in Weber Review, Slipstream, Levee Magazine,
The Blue Nib Magazine, Cultural Weekly and Tule Review. His chapbook Boys, is forthcoming from Duck Lake Books in December 2019. His first book, Waxing the Dents, was a finalist for the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize and will be released in February 2020. His work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Visit him at Danieledwardmoore.com.
Kevin Gidusko
The Duplicity of Forever
Nature does not deceive:
Young bud and brittle leaf
Alike submit to subatomic shifts;
We see forever in this kiss,
But even that must stop, you know.
Long as they can, let my roots hold
Your bones.
Let my leaves keep the rain from
Your stone.
Nature does not deceive:
Forever is a flashing particle we share
Before it snakes again through space.
Kevin Gidusko is a lifelong Floridian who has spent most of his professional life as an archaeologist, working in the parts of Florida most people never go.
Nature does not deceive:
Young bud and brittle leaf
Alike submit to subatomic shifts;
We see forever in this kiss,
But even that must stop, you know.
Long as they can, let my roots hold
Your bones.
Let my leaves keep the rain from
Your stone.
Nature does not deceive:
Forever is a flashing particle we share
Before it snakes again through space.
Kevin Gidusko is a lifelong Floridian who has spent most of his professional life as an archaeologist, working in the parts of Florida most people never go.