Issue 16 February 2020
Michael Mackin O'Mara, Editor
Michael Mackin O'Mara, Editor
Poets in this issue: Diana Anaya, Derek Annis, Fleda Brown, Mary Moore Easter, Linda Nemec Foster, Mary Galvin, Kathleen Hellen, John Hicks, Ashley M. Jones, Allison Joseph, John King, Sheree La Puma, Sara Cahill Marron, Catherine Mazodier, Zion “Zee” McThomas, Ed Meek, Gary Metras, Felicia Mitchell, Gloria Parker, Don Rosenthal, David Russell, Jeff Santosuosso, Alison Stone
Cento Project appears at bottom of this page
Walking With Thread by Nicola Winborn
Featured Poet, Mary Moore Easter's response to our submission call Black History Month: More Than A Month
Mary Moore Easter
1. Commodity 1
Investment Detail:
Eliza Winston
30 years old
held as the slave of _____
having been raised by______
married a free man of color
Contract:
who hired my time of my master
who promised me my freedom
upon payment of $1000.
My husband and myself worked hard
savings in a house and lot
which was held for us
in _____’s name.
This house was rented for $8 per month.
Transaction Detail:
My master was to take our house
and give me my free papers,
my husband paying the balance due
in money.
My husband died
My master having pawned me for $800
died before he could redeem me.
I was never sold.
Change in Account Value:
I went with my young mistress.
I became the slave of _____
seven years ago last March.
They told me
I should have my free papers
when their child was seven years old.
not much confidence
they would keep their promise.
She would not be willing to let me go
Reinvest/Rollover:
I should be free by coming to the North…
2. Up the River, Way Up from Shiloh Plantation, Mississippi
to St. Anthony Falls, Minnesota
They came in droves.
They left the heat behind
the Mississippi musk and heavy air.
A change of scene would do them good
the Falls and water rushing free in foam
no warning to their certitude.
They took their comforts with them:
cook who kept the south inside their mouths
slave who’d sleep on floor outside their door
waked at any whim or need
the hand that held the sickly head
and kept the children out of mind,
that hefted, smoothed and scurried, dark
as nighttime in the day, invisible,
a nothing to imagine with a plan.
Eliza came, was brought along,
to hold the sickly head.
She left the bondage of her home behind,
left friends who knew her leaving was for good
and kept her plan for freedom sealed,
left musk and heavy air and duties owned
by those whose promises betrayed her trust.
She did her very best, a comfort to herself
her standard steady over churning water
her forward motion out of sight beneath
the flashing surface of the paddleboat.
She smoothed and scurried closely confined
by minutes, hours, days, nights
waiting to alight on land, free land,
they said, the North her chance of flight.
Fleeing was not on her mind, just freedom.
3. I Look for Her Footprints by the Mississippi River
By 1937 this stretch of stone and sand
was Lambert’s Landing, the original shore
dredged to make Warner Road
where my car noses into a cul-de-sac
full of today’s stone mills, train rails and storage tanks.
Where are Eliza’s footprints?
The Dakota named the shore here
I-mni-za ska dan or "little white rocks."
Sandstone bluffs loomed high and white over the water.
Later, immigrants called it
the Lower Landing at St. Paul
where steamships unloaded them on the dock
and into new lives.
Slave-owner tourists from the south
weren’t looking for new lives.
They didn’t guess one of their possessions
was planning for it, never to return
to this dock, never this ship going
downriver for days to be moored
in the fettered place called home.
Eliza went down the gangplank
to land that would be her freedom soon,
her foot touching soil––here?––
before the railroads came
with their tracks and switchers.
Above the bluffs Indian mounds lay quiet
as they had for centuries.
Not free yet, she steadied the arm
of her mistress through the bustling port
on the river’s second big bend.
Passengers on four hundred boats a day
rode a Mississippi as mighty then as now
when this very March the river crested at 19 feet,
flooding green acres of park and parkland signs.
Not free yet, not free yet,
the chant she held to her heart
as tight as the hand of the child she raised
to climb into the surrey sent for them, no footprints.
Not free yet as they rocked up the hill
from waterside to the top of present-day Jackson Street.
She chanted its motion on the ride
to the hotel elegance of Winslow House.
With the magnificent view of the falls of St. Anthony
demanding all attention, who would notice Eliza’s footprints
on Cheever’s Landing at the University. Only a mile upriver
until the end of their long water journey.
Not free yet. Quick, the cart!
4. Documentation in the Courtroom, but None of Her Life Before
for all of us who come from people who signed with X’s
- Danez Smith
1.
Someone took it down,
their sworn duty to record every word,
only one sign of her sound: Macklemo
explained in parentheses (Macklemore)
the tongue of her region, her status,
her origin outside taught English.
No further apostrophe or dropped consonant to interfere
with eloquence and flow, like she could-- even back then,
especially back then in the X-signed days--
could rap and roll out her life with all its twists, turns
and switchbacks; indignation in the unsaid
another-thing-while-I’m-at-it
I will say also I have never received one cent
from my property in Memphis . . .
talkback poking through a retort
to couldawouldashoulda freedom promises
Why didn’t you give it in St. Louis--
someone took it down and her voice lived
right into my ear.
2.
No one took down Eliza at five years old, at four,
at her mother’s breast or some other breast
assigned to keep her alive when her mother’s birth body
gave out, worn out, worn down to its last act of giving her breath.
No one took down the opposite, a mother’s shield
in the early days tied to her back,
first steps, the surprise of quick speech,
the shush of her tongue in danger.
No one took down which loss cemented her concept of self
held as slave of Mr. Gholson, raised by Mr. Macklemo
instead of daughter of -- what name goes here, Eliza?--
born of a woman like every one of us who draws breath and turns to ashes,
born of a woman, flesh of her flesh, the one-made-two
at first inhale of a world. What name?
3.
Macklemore, Gholston, Christmas,
Babbitt, Bigelow, King,
Vanderburgh: around her
names and histories abound
wives and progeny and property
in records and deeds and diaries
and newspapers and courtrooms
and censuses and street addresses
and cemeteries and votes
Eliza––erased
a flame blown out
leaving smoke
and the burnt end of a paper.
5. She Wasn’t Prepared to Meet a Mob
She didn’t expect roses and sunshine
Where in her life had there ever been roses?
Still she wasn’t prepared to meet a mob
at the threshold of the courtroom
place of triumph––free!
Free to walk into arms raised against her,
shouts bursting above an angry murmur
malign intent simmering in the air.
Her guardians grasped her arms,
hustled her to a carriage.
She gasped in the gallop of hooves
away to a big house
away to clamor at the door, crowd gathering outside.
In the simmer, she stood free in the stairwell.
When they battered the door
she stood free as the lady of the house leveled her pistol
and fired a shot that backed them away.
All night the mob would not have it, this freedom
that damaged their purses. Resistance lurked
in the air. Protectors whisked her farther away
under a cloak? in a disguise? Fear rattling her free chest.
Steady pulse to sustain her.
How far away was freedom and rest?
Investment Detail:
Eliza Winston
30 years old
held as the slave of _____
having been raised by______
married a free man of color
Contract:
who hired my time of my master
who promised me my freedom
upon payment of $1000.
My husband and myself worked hard
savings in a house and lot
which was held for us
in _____’s name.
This house was rented for $8 per month.
Transaction Detail:
My master was to take our house
and give me my free papers,
my husband paying the balance due
in money.
My husband died
My master having pawned me for $800
died before he could redeem me.
I was never sold.
Change in Account Value:
I went with my young mistress.
I became the slave of _____
seven years ago last March.
They told me
I should have my free papers
when their child was seven years old.
not much confidence
they would keep their promise.
She would not be willing to let me go
Reinvest/Rollover:
I should be free by coming to the North…
2. Up the River, Way Up from Shiloh Plantation, Mississippi
to St. Anthony Falls, Minnesota
They came in droves.
They left the heat behind
the Mississippi musk and heavy air.
A change of scene would do them good
the Falls and water rushing free in foam
no warning to their certitude.
They took their comforts with them:
cook who kept the south inside their mouths
slave who’d sleep on floor outside their door
waked at any whim or need
the hand that held the sickly head
and kept the children out of mind,
that hefted, smoothed and scurried, dark
as nighttime in the day, invisible,
a nothing to imagine with a plan.
Eliza came, was brought along,
to hold the sickly head.
She left the bondage of her home behind,
left friends who knew her leaving was for good
and kept her plan for freedom sealed,
left musk and heavy air and duties owned
by those whose promises betrayed her trust.
She did her very best, a comfort to herself
her standard steady over churning water
her forward motion out of sight beneath
the flashing surface of the paddleboat.
She smoothed and scurried closely confined
by minutes, hours, days, nights
waiting to alight on land, free land,
they said, the North her chance of flight.
Fleeing was not on her mind, just freedom.
3. I Look for Her Footprints by the Mississippi River
By 1937 this stretch of stone and sand
was Lambert’s Landing, the original shore
dredged to make Warner Road
where my car noses into a cul-de-sac
full of today’s stone mills, train rails and storage tanks.
Where are Eliza’s footprints?
The Dakota named the shore here
I-mni-za ska dan or "little white rocks."
Sandstone bluffs loomed high and white over the water.
Later, immigrants called it
the Lower Landing at St. Paul
where steamships unloaded them on the dock
and into new lives.
Slave-owner tourists from the south
weren’t looking for new lives.
They didn’t guess one of their possessions
was planning for it, never to return
to this dock, never this ship going
downriver for days to be moored
in the fettered place called home.
Eliza went down the gangplank
to land that would be her freedom soon,
her foot touching soil––here?––
before the railroads came
with their tracks and switchers.
Above the bluffs Indian mounds lay quiet
as they had for centuries.
Not free yet, she steadied the arm
of her mistress through the bustling port
on the river’s second big bend.
Passengers on four hundred boats a day
rode a Mississippi as mighty then as now
when this very March the river crested at 19 feet,
flooding green acres of park and parkland signs.
Not free yet, not free yet,
the chant she held to her heart
as tight as the hand of the child she raised
to climb into the surrey sent for them, no footprints.
Not free yet as they rocked up the hill
from waterside to the top of present-day Jackson Street.
She chanted its motion on the ride
to the hotel elegance of Winslow House.
With the magnificent view of the falls of St. Anthony
demanding all attention, who would notice Eliza’s footprints
on Cheever’s Landing at the University. Only a mile upriver
until the end of their long water journey.
Not free yet. Quick, the cart!
4. Documentation in the Courtroom, but None of Her Life Before
for all of us who come from people who signed with X’s
- Danez Smith
1.
Someone took it down,
their sworn duty to record every word,
only one sign of her sound: Macklemo
explained in parentheses (Macklemore)
the tongue of her region, her status,
her origin outside taught English.
No further apostrophe or dropped consonant to interfere
with eloquence and flow, like she could-- even back then,
especially back then in the X-signed days--
could rap and roll out her life with all its twists, turns
and switchbacks; indignation in the unsaid
another-thing-while-I’m-at-it
I will say also I have never received one cent
from my property in Memphis . . .
talkback poking through a retort
to couldawouldashoulda freedom promises
Why didn’t you give it in St. Louis--
someone took it down and her voice lived
right into my ear.
2.
No one took down Eliza at five years old, at four,
at her mother’s breast or some other breast
assigned to keep her alive when her mother’s birth body
gave out, worn out, worn down to its last act of giving her breath.
No one took down the opposite, a mother’s shield
in the early days tied to her back,
first steps, the surprise of quick speech,
the shush of her tongue in danger.
No one took down which loss cemented her concept of self
held as slave of Mr. Gholson, raised by Mr. Macklemo
instead of daughter of -- what name goes here, Eliza?--
born of a woman like every one of us who draws breath and turns to ashes,
born of a woman, flesh of her flesh, the one-made-two
at first inhale of a world. What name?
3.
Macklemore, Gholston, Christmas,
Babbitt, Bigelow, King,
Vanderburgh: around her
names and histories abound
wives and progeny and property
in records and deeds and diaries
and newspapers and courtrooms
and censuses and street addresses
and cemeteries and votes
Eliza––erased
a flame blown out
leaving smoke
and the burnt end of a paper.
5. She Wasn’t Prepared to Meet a Mob
She didn’t expect roses and sunshine
Where in her life had there ever been roses?
Still she wasn’t prepared to meet a mob
at the threshold of the courtroom
place of triumph––free!
Free to walk into arms raised against her,
shouts bursting above an angry murmur
malign intent simmering in the air.
Her guardians grasped her arms,
hustled her to a carriage.
She gasped in the gallop of hooves
away to a big house
away to clamor at the door, crowd gathering outside.
In the simmer, she stood free in the stairwell.
When they battered the door
she stood free as the lady of the house leveled her pistol
and fired a shot that backed them away.
All night the mob would not have it, this freedom
that damaged their purses. Resistance lurked
in the air. Protectors whisked her farther away
under a cloak? in a disguise? Fear rattling her free chest.
Steady pulse to sustain her.
How far away was freedom and rest?
Author's note: Sections in italics are quotations from the Testimony of Eliza Winston, escaped from slavery in Minnesota 1860.
Mary Moore Easter’s first poetry collection, The Body of the World was a finalist for the 2018 MN Book Award in Poetry. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Easter is widely published in POETRY, The New York Times, Seattle Review, Water Stone, Calyx, Pluck!, Persimmon Tree, Prairie Schooner, Fjord’s Review, The Little Patuxent Review and elsewhere including the 2015 anthology Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota. She holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and an M.A. from Goddard. Founder and director of the dance program at Carleton College for decades, she also directed the program in African/Africa American Studies. Her new manuscript, Free Papers, was awarded MN State Arts Board support for research and performance preparation in 2019. Honors include The Loft Creative Non-Fiction Award; Ragdale and Anderson Center residencies; Bush Artist Fellowship in Choreography; a Minnesota Dance Alliance McKnight Fellowship in Choreography; and from Intermedia Arts, a Diverse Visions Video award and a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Artists.
Diana Anaya
Hija
This is how to fold la masa de una empanada
so the carne stays inside, pressing
your fingers hard enough to seal shut,
but soft enough to leave the thin dough intact;
así es como tu saludas la familia – quítate los espejuelos
so they can see your eyes mi hija,
stand here, smile for us, look at her hair,
un poco loco, but when it’s straight it’s so beautiful;
this is how to get the phone company to lower the bill,
to cry into the phone about your swollen knee,
your broken car, la soledad que sientes
ever since your mother died; asi es como tu preguntas
for help from your uncle, because he always says yes
to you, his socia; this is how to control your ansiedad,
because men don’t like women con enfermedades,
so don’t tell him about your panic attacks,
your thyroid disease, the things I tell you;
así es como te vistas para salir, why don’t you wear
that orange dress that wraps tight around your hips,
put on a little more makeup, try on this necklace,
these earrings, put this aciestico on the tips of your hair
porque lo tienes encojonado; this is how to respect yourself,
dar un beso but never go home with him,
because what will his parents think, what will he think
of your morales, the kind of woman you are;
así es como tener un hombre, to be alone.
Ode to Periods
You are not beautiful.
You are not a scarlet bloom,
a cherry moon,
a lady friend,
strawberry week,
mother nature’s blessing.
You are blood,
fish-iron funk
wafting from between my legs,
a gush of sticky red
oozing from engorged lips,
seeping into jeans, car seats,
those new lace panties,
clinging to pubes in your phlegm-like slime,
or dangling, a coagulated curdle
that must be hand-pulled from the tangle,
a ball of squishy meat
I roll between my thumb and forefinger,
nailbed smeared with blood.
Oh, to menstruate, to live
with your messy gift, your throbbing curse,
the urge to lick the spoon and the bowl too,
to wrap my fingers around a man’s neck,
purged of soft smiles, of how are you,
I’m sorry, please, thank you,
to paint his face
with my potent menstrual potion
and show him
we are not equals.
You are not beautiful.
You are not a scarlet bloom,
a cherry moon,
a lady friend,
strawberry week,
mother nature’s blessing.
You are blood,
fish-iron funk
wafting from between my legs,
a gush of sticky red
oozing from engorged lips,
seeping into jeans, car seats,
those new lace panties,
clinging to pubes in your phlegm-like slime,
or dangling, a coagulated curdle
that must be hand-pulled from the tangle,
a ball of squishy meat
I roll between my thumb and forefinger,
nailbed smeared with blood.
Oh, to menstruate, to live
with your messy gift, your throbbing curse,
the urge to lick the spoon and the bowl too,
to wrap my fingers around a man’s neck,
purged of soft smiles, of how are you,
I’m sorry, please, thank you,
to paint his face
with my potent menstrual potion
and show him
we are not equals.
Diana Anaya is a Cuban-American creative nonfictionist and poet who received her Master of Fine Arts degree for Creative Writing at Florida International University. Born and raised in Miami, she lives and writes in the multilingual modality of South Florida. She currently teaches writing and rhetoric and has published poetry with Broadsided Press.
Derek Annis
Genesis
and the darkly whispered answer
entered Him
as a tiny luminoid enters
a cube of frozen soil
stroking the brim of its hat
the answer spat bones
so that all of life
sprang forth
in the fashion of a rat and the form
of torn paper
on which was written only
Desire
and so it was He walked the city
of ether-drunk children and passed out
stones for them to swallow
keeping only two pockets full for Himself
streets emptied ahead of Him
and crumbled behind
His tongue was razor wire
coiled atop a wall between
shadows and their things
and the ether-drunk children followed Him
through intricate gardens
smashing the flowers underfoot
He filled them with stones
they followed Him into the river
and the darkly whispered answer
entered Him
as a tiny luminoid enters
a cube of frozen soil
stroking the brim of its hat
the answer spat bones
so that all of life
sprang forth
in the fashion of a rat and the form
of torn paper
on which was written only
Desire
and so it was He walked the city
of ether-drunk children and passed out
stones for them to swallow
keeping only two pockets full for Himself
streets emptied ahead of Him
and crumbled behind
His tongue was razor wire
coiled atop a wall between
shadows and their things
and the ether-drunk children followed Him
through intricate gardens
smashing the flowers underfoot
He filled them with stones
they followed Him into the river
Derek Annis is the author of Neighborhood of Gray Houses, which will be released by Lost Horse Press in March, 2020. Derek lives in Spokane, Washington, and holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Their poems have appeared in The Account, Colorado Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review Online, Spillway, Third Coast, and many other journals. To preorder Neighborhood of Gray Houses, visit https://derekannis.wordpress.com/
Fleda Brown
The Elms are Going
Leaves moth-pale, they are breaking
my heart, earth soaking up the poisons,
another instance of ghosting,
like our dear Wally whose tail still flutters
in my eye. To say sadness is to say,
to say is to seal off sadness like the (toxic)
driveway sealer I used to spread each
spring to beautify our subdivision yard,
those were the days, those were the days,
I was alive then, too, with my personal
suffering, and now I am suffering
the trees, leaves showing through
themselves, a diminuendo in the woods,
an osteoporosis of fruitfulness, moth-leaves
clinging, all my pretty ones, suddenly
not mine, not anyone’s, foreign, fading,
tree skeletons. Yet underneath,
the greening, the rearrangement. Same old
same old, as Lucretius wrote (in hexameters),
the springing up without divine intervention.
So he wrote in De Rerum Natura:
our fear of death is a folly. Shawna my beautician
massages my neck, not at all long
enough, but enough to show me how fiercely
I have been trying to hold back the forces.
Lucretius was dancing his meters the way
I’ve been trying to make the world
the kind of hymn I used to sing, before
I gave up religion, the kind I still love
to sing, below the level of belief.
Leaves moth-pale, they are breaking
my heart, earth soaking up the poisons,
another instance of ghosting,
like our dear Wally whose tail still flutters
in my eye. To say sadness is to say,
to say is to seal off sadness like the (toxic)
driveway sealer I used to spread each
spring to beautify our subdivision yard,
those were the days, those were the days,
I was alive then, too, with my personal
suffering, and now I am suffering
the trees, leaves showing through
themselves, a diminuendo in the woods,
an osteoporosis of fruitfulness, moth-leaves
clinging, all my pretty ones, suddenly
not mine, not anyone’s, foreign, fading,
tree skeletons. Yet underneath,
the greening, the rearrangement. Same old
same old, as Lucretius wrote (in hexameters),
the springing up without divine intervention.
So he wrote in De Rerum Natura:
our fear of death is a folly. Shawna my beautician
massages my neck, not at all long
enough, but enough to show me how fiercely
I have been trying to hold back the forces.
Lucretius was dancing his meters the way
I’ve been trying to make the world
the kind of hymn I used to sing, before
I gave up religion, the kind I still love
to sing, below the level of belief.
Love Song Including Moon
The full moon has punched a hole in our window.
We are trying to sleep but it is all over us, pale rider, wild.
Shadows are also collaborating, wallows and seepings.
The room is like a negative of a room.
By three o’clock it is coming in a different window.
We have rotated on this raft while we did sleep.
Dear heart, dear heart, will we stop in the morning?
How will we adjust to the two other moons, recently discovered?
The old collisions, the splinterings, still
hanging with us, circling between heaven and earth.
It is all so dangerous, and the reminder in the morning!
The big moon losing its flesh, starving after such plenty.
Who can think about the moon for very long? It’s good for poems
and lovers, but what if you’ve been married for years?
Good for astonishment, but then it goes on,
leaving you barely enough
to go to the bathroom without turning on the light.
I see you, wearing your paleness, your reverse self slowly crossing
the bottom of the bed. You are walking on the moon.
The powder of asteroids and meteors is on you
as if you were a baby, old man, bent on not waking me up.
The full moon has punched a hole in our window.
We are trying to sleep but it is all over us, pale rider, wild.
Shadows are also collaborating, wallows and seepings.
The room is like a negative of a room.
By three o’clock it is coming in a different window.
We have rotated on this raft while we did sleep.
Dear heart, dear heart, will we stop in the morning?
How will we adjust to the two other moons, recently discovered?
The old collisions, the splinterings, still
hanging with us, circling between heaven and earth.
It is all so dangerous, and the reminder in the morning!
The big moon losing its flesh, starving after such plenty.
Who can think about the moon for very long? It’s good for poems
and lovers, but what if you’ve been married for years?
Good for astonishment, but then it goes on,
leaving you barely enough
to go to the bathroom without turning on the light.
I see you, wearing your paleness, your reverse self slowly crossing
the bottom of the bed. You are walking on the moon.
The powder of asteroids and meteors is on you
as if you were a baby, old man, bent on not waking me up.
Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, and was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.
Linda Nemec Foster
In the Midst of Dreams
(after the work of Jaume Plensa)
I. Disease
The father trapped in his body.
Disease of his mind closing
the door of his prison so tight
not even the idea of moonlight,
faint light of his dreaming self,
can escape. He shuts his eyes,
he memorizes the language
of regret, and it brands his face
like the lexicon of a sleepwalker.
“I should have planted the azaleas
in the month of rain.
I shouldn’t have prayed so loud
to the silent face of God.”
Endless words that fill
a small room with empty air.
He imagines his feet and the places
they have walked in the world:
the gray shores of Normandy
to the broken ridges of Montana.
After all these landscapes,
what shoes to wear at his funeral?
The possibilities surround him
like discarded souvenirs
from a forgotten vacation.
What can he do with the rest
of his life but pretend
he’s a cloud? Dusk-tinged stratus
that marks his borderland,
the abandoned horizon.
II. Hunger
The Spanish mystic cannot satisfy
his hunger. Locked in a cell
in Toledo, he envisions God
as a sharp wind,
a burning ember,
a vast mountain
only the night can embrace.
His hunger does not crave
any simple gesture,
bread and water once a day,
but only the bread of angels,
God Himself. How would the Divine
taste on his tongue? The mystic
closes his eyes and tries
to imagine swallowing pure light.
The radiance illuminating a path
from his mouth
to his heart
to his feet.
Who needs shoes for such a journey?
He remembers the ancient prophet
removing his unholy sandals
to approach the holy fire.
Fire that burned
but did not consume
until it flamed that night
in Toledo, in the belly
of the saint as he rehearsed
the language of heaven.
III. Insomnia
The man who cannot sleep
has been here before: a room
filled with memory and the faint
sound of leaves as they cover
the ground. In the waking world,
he is an intruder, an interloper,
as uneasy in his skin
as the museum curator at Birkenau
discussing the glass cases
of shoes and hair. At night,
he is reduced to reinventing
every scenario of his life
from the opening credits
to the quiet denouement. His eyes
may not be open, but he remains
forever awake and counting.
Letters not syllables.
Words not ideas.
Phrases not sentences.
The people he has abandoned,
scatter. But not before
they each leave their imprint:
fashionable leather boot,
small sneaker, red and
spiked heel, brown and
scuffed loafer. Each one demands
attention. Each one, a different
story that he narrates in seamless
detail to the patient and faceless moon.
Linda Nemec Foster is the author of eleven collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (LSU Press), Talking Diamonds (New Issues Press), and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (Wayne State University Press), a 2019 Michigan Notable Book. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, Witness, New American Writing, and North American Review. Foster’s poems have also appeared in anthologies from the U.S. and U.K., been translated in Europe, inspired original music compositions, and have been produced for the stage.
The poem published here, “In the Midst of Dreams,” will be included in Foster’s new book, The Blue Divide, forthcoming from New Issues Press in 2021. www.lindanemecfoster.com
Mary Galvin
Ode to the Gas-Fired Grill Pipeline
Amazing this abandoned pipeline
jutting up from the lawn at the patio’s edge--
praise to the patio in its poured-concrete majesty which must have preceded
the inception of this gas fixture,
for the barbeque on which dads could grill kosher hotdogs, placed neatly
in their white bread buns, sweet relish and mustard smeared
yellow as a sunflower glaring
in the Florida sun.
This gunmetal gray stalk can channel
enough fuel to incinerate the entire street
with its row of painted concrete block bungalows
lime green, coral pink and aqua would run
like lava onto the sod-squared lawns right before the grass
too erupted in a conflagration soon augmented by
the Chevrolets and Fords, the occasional Cadillac bursting the concrete latticework
of each carport on the side of each yard.
This pipeline and its silent gas valve-locked within a cylinder
no wider than a snake—crack it open to hear it hiss…
we have mastered this. We are awesome in our self-control.
Praise to the restraint that sends us a tamed row
of saw-toothed flames waving like palm fronds
in a gentle salt wind breeze and we can eat
the perfectly grilled hamburger, medium rare,
only a little blood running into the perfectly round
hamburger roll beneath a perfectly square
orange slice of American cheese.
Null and Void
after Juan Felipe Herrera
I arrive at campus,
it is the color of a beach:
Grade school, High School, Community College—a slaughter boy
swings his rucksack over his shoulder, saunters as if it were his domain,
cocky marauder, I want to say—his chin set,
the slaughter boy is a child, I think,
his soft hair falling across his eyes
he brushes it back, sweat catching in the fine hairs
above his lip, he licks his lips and swallows hard and looks
across the green patch of lawn between the parking lot and the buildings.
In the back of a classroom, a girl drifts out the window
the teacher’s monotone indistinguishable from a humming in her head.
She hears a pop like a loud balloon from the room next door, another one
nearby in the hall and then she sees slaughter boy
standing at the door.
A desk, perhaps it’s a desk, flies apart, she doesn’t know what could make it splinter
into the air like that and now it’s raining down.
More desks screech and crash, her classmates scream,
she looks at the teacher who is now
lying down at the front of the room a dark stain spreading
across his dull dress shirt something wet slaps her across her face
she flinches away from her classmates’ gore
before her vision tilts and slips away.
Here it is, the land of the free where the rockets red glare
is reflected in every slaughter boy’s eyes
here it is, a nation of grief,
my country tis of the
land where our fathers died
land where our children thrive if they can hide
from the slaughter boy today.
I left campus late today, dark was near,
there were meetings and an extra cup of coffee in the afternoon.
A flock of ibis crossed the road, forming a line, comical in their whiteness
against the dull black and yellow of the silent policeman lying across the road.
A heron flew from the pond and a few iguanas were still sunning
on the grassy banks, there was enough sun left for that.
I listen to the radio, listen to the story for today
listen to Umpqua, to Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine,
listen to the humming in my head as it builds like thunderclouds about
to split the sky, the barometric pressure builds
from within I want to open the windows
I want to pull that girl out by her dreams into the remaining light of the day
I want to tell her the wreckage and blood that slaughter boy brings
is only a story she saw last night on TV.
Song for Today
The dog in bed, the cat up already crying at the door,
my love beside me, reading her phone, brilliant sunshine,
an old man channeling Rumi--no, being Rumi--a young cellist bowing and
plucking his response to the call, call and response overlapping, entwining in our ears:
All is one, that platitude of insight; it reminds me of the time
you said, this is the origin of all poems; this is the lover and beloved as one.
Tucked inside your office, my urban girl who doesn’t care much for the out of doors,
looking at photos online of a wedding that wasn’t yours. You were singing
I’m just a gigolo, heartbreak hotel, I can’t get no… and I turned these songs inside
out through translation into Italian and back: I love you like no other, home is where,
bliss and kisses, isn’t it strange, my funny valentine, how the road leads…
a little girl in a house of older siblings and parents nearly too old yet fierce
enough to throw children into the shameful basement, sing songs that had no tune,
no basis for harmony, that sounded like a roar.
indigo, midnight, aqua, teal, cerulean, baby, sky, ocean,
my heart, my life, before I met you.
I’m afraid to sing, to not sing, to have no tune or seem the fool. I’m afraid of losing
my strength; I couldn’t pull myself up to sit on the wall the way I once did.
A quieting, a shushing of these nattering chickadees, these screeching peacocks,
a hush of forgiveness inside my rushing veins: quiet the roaring. It was beautiful, it was
blank; calming as an all white sky with no threat of rain, an open palm placed gently
against my cheek, it was wondrous the way you touched me just where I wanted, brilliant
as the hibiscus flower, fragrant as jasmine blooming the night.
deep deep terror that shuts everything down into the deep deep silence of the quiet heart,
the deep deep peace
I love you. I love myself, unconditionally. There is warmth and plenty in our house.
A sun overhead, a room full of poets,
the intake of your breath, the crinkling of your shirt sleeve as you lift your arm, in the
distance, a bird. Oh, my love, you are beautiful, you are not at all what I imagined. You.
Ode to the Gas-Fired Grill Pipeline
Amazing this abandoned pipeline
jutting up from the lawn at the patio’s edge--
praise to the patio in its poured-concrete majesty which must have preceded
the inception of this gas fixture,
for the barbeque on which dads could grill kosher hotdogs, placed neatly
in their white bread buns, sweet relish and mustard smeared
yellow as a sunflower glaring
in the Florida sun.
This gunmetal gray stalk can channel
enough fuel to incinerate the entire street
with its row of painted concrete block bungalows
lime green, coral pink and aqua would run
like lava onto the sod-squared lawns right before the grass
too erupted in a conflagration soon augmented by
the Chevrolets and Fords, the occasional Cadillac bursting the concrete latticework
of each carport on the side of each yard.
This pipeline and its silent gas valve-locked within a cylinder
no wider than a snake—crack it open to hear it hiss…
we have mastered this. We are awesome in our self-control.
Praise to the restraint that sends us a tamed row
of saw-toothed flames waving like palm fronds
in a gentle salt wind breeze and we can eat
the perfectly grilled hamburger, medium rare,
only a little blood running into the perfectly round
hamburger roll beneath a perfectly square
orange slice of American cheese.
Null and Void
after Juan Felipe Herrera
I arrive at campus,
it is the color of a beach:
Grade school, High School, Community College—a slaughter boy
swings his rucksack over his shoulder, saunters as if it were his domain,
cocky marauder, I want to say—his chin set,
the slaughter boy is a child, I think,
his soft hair falling across his eyes
he brushes it back, sweat catching in the fine hairs
above his lip, he licks his lips and swallows hard and looks
across the green patch of lawn between the parking lot and the buildings.
In the back of a classroom, a girl drifts out the window
the teacher’s monotone indistinguishable from a humming in her head.
She hears a pop like a loud balloon from the room next door, another one
nearby in the hall and then she sees slaughter boy
standing at the door.
A desk, perhaps it’s a desk, flies apart, she doesn’t know what could make it splinter
into the air like that and now it’s raining down.
More desks screech and crash, her classmates scream,
she looks at the teacher who is now
lying down at the front of the room a dark stain spreading
across his dull dress shirt something wet slaps her across her face
she flinches away from her classmates’ gore
before her vision tilts and slips away.
Here it is, the land of the free where the rockets red glare
is reflected in every slaughter boy’s eyes
here it is, a nation of grief,
my country tis of the
land where our fathers died
land where our children thrive if they can hide
from the slaughter boy today.
I left campus late today, dark was near,
there were meetings and an extra cup of coffee in the afternoon.
A flock of ibis crossed the road, forming a line, comical in their whiteness
against the dull black and yellow of the silent policeman lying across the road.
A heron flew from the pond and a few iguanas were still sunning
on the grassy banks, there was enough sun left for that.
I listen to the radio, listen to the story for today
listen to Umpqua, to Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine,
listen to the humming in my head as it builds like thunderclouds about
to split the sky, the barometric pressure builds
from within I want to open the windows
I want to pull that girl out by her dreams into the remaining light of the day
I want to tell her the wreckage and blood that slaughter boy brings
is only a story she saw last night on TV.
Song for Today
The dog in bed, the cat up already crying at the door,
my love beside me, reading her phone, brilliant sunshine,
an old man channeling Rumi--no, being Rumi--a young cellist bowing and
plucking his response to the call, call and response overlapping, entwining in our ears:
All is one, that platitude of insight; it reminds me of the time
you said, this is the origin of all poems; this is the lover and beloved as one.
Tucked inside your office, my urban girl who doesn’t care much for the out of doors,
looking at photos online of a wedding that wasn’t yours. You were singing
I’m just a gigolo, heartbreak hotel, I can’t get no… and I turned these songs inside
out through translation into Italian and back: I love you like no other, home is where,
bliss and kisses, isn’t it strange, my funny valentine, how the road leads…
a little girl in a house of older siblings and parents nearly too old yet fierce
enough to throw children into the shameful basement, sing songs that had no tune,
no basis for harmony, that sounded like a roar.
indigo, midnight, aqua, teal, cerulean, baby, sky, ocean,
my heart, my life, before I met you.
I’m afraid to sing, to not sing, to have no tune or seem the fool. I’m afraid of losing
my strength; I couldn’t pull myself up to sit on the wall the way I once did.
A quieting, a shushing of these nattering chickadees, these screeching peacocks,
a hush of forgiveness inside my rushing veins: quiet the roaring. It was beautiful, it was
blank; calming as an all white sky with no threat of rain, an open palm placed gently
against my cheek, it was wondrous the way you touched me just where I wanted, brilliant
as the hibiscus flower, fragrant as jasmine blooming the night.
deep deep terror that shuts everything down into the deep deep silence of the quiet heart,
the deep deep peace
I love you. I love myself, unconditionally. There is warmth and plenty in our house.
A sun overhead, a room full of poets,
the intake of your breath, the crinkling of your shirt sleeve as you lift your arm, in the
distance, a bird. Oh, my love, you are beautiful, you are not at all what I imagined. You.
Mary Galvin lives in Lake Worth, Florida, and has been reading and writing poetry since she was a child. Her poetry has been published in Southern Women’s Review, Homestead Review, East Coast Literary Review, Tiger’s Eye and elsewhere. In addition to being a poet, she is the author of Queer Poetics (Greenwood/Praeger, 1999), a critical study of Modernist women poets. Mary holds a Doctor of Arts from the State University of New York at Albany, and is currently a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth.
Kathleen Hellen
lucy, standing up
Up from yeast and strange among
the hunted beasts I see
scattered indigo in trees
distinguished only in the density
that seems a contradiction.
I am green in open canopy
legs strong, hands keen to seize
the sticks from howling monkeys.
I am thinking clearly: how and where
to hide the seeds, the zebras browsing
in prickly dusk, hyenas self devouring.
Already I am asking why
the water in the evening is so sweet.
Up from yeast and strange among
the hunted beasts I see
scattered indigo in trees
distinguished only in the density
that seems a contradiction.
I am green in open canopy
legs strong, hands keen to seize
the sticks from howling monkeys.
I am thinking clearly: how and where
to hide the seeds, the zebras browsing
in prickly dusk, hyenas self devouring.
Already I am asking why
the water in the evening is so sweet.
a million sins
—it’s a case
for reparations, e.g.
the kid
in bridled dreads
in a suit
he might have borrowed
a day late on the rent
a dollar short on
custody of kids—a case
about citation
about a mule for self-
prescription—a case
about the dozen
judged fit to stand instruction
a dozen buses
run up to the Capitol
a hundred coalitions—a case
about apostles
reasonably acquitting
a thousand signatures
in grievance
a case
for forty acres
instead of redlined streets—a case
about one bullet
in the thighbone of a kid
—it’s a case
for reparations, e.g.
the kid
in bridled dreads
in a suit
he might have borrowed
a day late on the rent
a dollar short on
custody of kids—a case
about citation
about a mule for self-
prescription—a case
about the dozen
judged fit to stand instruction
a dozen buses
run up to the Capitol
a hundred coalitions—a case
about apostles
reasonably acquitting
a thousand signatures
in grievance
a case
for forty acres
instead of redlined streets—a case
about one bullet
in the thighbone of a kid
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. https://www.kathleenhellen.com/
John Hicks
We Go to the Window with Expectations
Where waves texture your silver ceiling
into shadows on the floor—make
coral columns into living gargoyles;
where, as you swim over them,
constellations of purple stars,
recede into whiteness,
and from the hypogeum school,
a bonito, trailing a damaged fin,
is attacked by the rest, devoured;
and where sea fans amphitheater
the white bottom sand,
you thumbed for me,
leaving this clatter of exocasings--
now rent-free housing--
a lyred poetfish, in the cheap seats, its
eyes angling one-eighty, seeks the odd
drifting morsel to pounce on.
_____________________
It is at last when ongrowing darkness
begins bottom up to stretch and morph,
that evening comes with its own lights.
Up the street, the oyster gray shell
of a minivan, slips into a space,
disgorges a wheel chair and
evening dress, black on luminescent
skin. Quick thrusts propel her
like a young squid, lit with excitement
of trying open water. At the corner
she pushes the button, tucks a strand
into place, backs and fills, her hands
on wheels, and with the green beckon
across the street,
darts beneath the dangled lantern
into the maw of the Dubliner.
_____________________
High above, in your coral apartment,
a candle flickers a glass of merlot.
White anemone fingers fold laundry--
width upon width,
length along length--
mezmerizements that suspend
me on your sofa, forgetting
what brought me here.
Where waves texture your silver ceiling
into shadows on the floor—make
coral columns into living gargoyles;
where, as you swim over them,
constellations of purple stars,
recede into whiteness,
and from the hypogeum school,
a bonito, trailing a damaged fin,
is attacked by the rest, devoured;
and where sea fans amphitheater
the white bottom sand,
you thumbed for me,
leaving this clatter of exocasings--
now rent-free housing--
a lyred poetfish, in the cheap seats, its
eyes angling one-eighty, seeks the odd
drifting morsel to pounce on.
_____________________
It is at last when ongrowing darkness
begins bottom up to stretch and morph,
that evening comes with its own lights.
Up the street, the oyster gray shell
of a minivan, slips into a space,
disgorges a wheel chair and
evening dress, black on luminescent
skin. Quick thrusts propel her
like a young squid, lit with excitement
of trying open water. At the corner
she pushes the button, tucks a strand
into place, backs and fills, her hands
on wheels, and with the green beckon
across the street,
darts beneath the dangled lantern
into the maw of the Dubliner.
_____________________
High above, in your coral apartment,
a candle flickers a glass of merlot.
White anemone fingers fold laundry--
width upon width,
length along length--
mezmerizements that suspend
me on your sofa, forgetting
what brought me here.
Blood Test
I’m scared. I just want it to be over.
It won’t take long, he says. Then
you won’t have to come here again for a year.
I’m scared, she says, but I’m here. Will
the doctor do the test this time? I liked
the woman last year.
Older brother leans across the chair arm
to show her something on his phone,
but she’s fidgeting with her hair, and
looking across the aisle at their mother
in the chair next to mine.
He goes back to his phone, flicking
through images, pauses, thumb poised,
goes back to flicking. The phone’s
the same color as his tee shirt.
She watches a boy in a wheelchair being pushed
up and down the waiting room by his mother.
She pushes with one hand, pausing each time
she turns the chair to return. He cries,
his eyes closed, arms crossed against
his chest, and bangs his head against its
padding. The chair allows him
only this movement.
Pulling her legs up into her seat, she sits cross-
legged, palms up in her lap. Slumping forward,
her hair tents around her face. Large
yellow smiley faces on her shirt fold over
each other. A lab tech comes out,
holds the door open with one foot,
calls a name. They rise as if in church,
follow him inside—the girl last. The door
swings shut behind them.
The boy in the wheelchair, comes by
again, calmer, pushed by a girl
maybe ten years old. The chair’s handles
are as high as her shoulders, but she spins
the chair around to make the turns,
sometimes quickly—sometimes in surprise
changes of direction. He likes it.
His head is still. He’s looking ahead,
trying to guess which way they’ll go.
Another tech comes out, smiles at them;
gestures them in. Mother follows,
purse at waist level, holding it closed
with both hands.
Smiley faces comes out with her brother,
bounding on her tip-toes. A cotton ball
is taped to the inside of his right arm.
She’s skipping sideways, grabs his wrist,
pulls on his arm, tries to swing it.
Not that arm, Sis!
She runs around to his other side;
loses a flip-flop; runs back to get it.
Runs after him to his right side; no,
to his left. Runs ahead to press
the automatic door button; runs out
as it opens. Reaches back for him.
I’m scared. I just want it to be over.
It won’t take long, he says. Then
you won’t have to come here again for a year.
I’m scared, she says, but I’m here. Will
the doctor do the test this time? I liked
the woman last year.
Older brother leans across the chair arm
to show her something on his phone,
but she’s fidgeting with her hair, and
looking across the aisle at their mother
in the chair next to mine.
He goes back to his phone, flicking
through images, pauses, thumb poised,
goes back to flicking. The phone’s
the same color as his tee shirt.
She watches a boy in a wheelchair being pushed
up and down the waiting room by his mother.
She pushes with one hand, pausing each time
she turns the chair to return. He cries,
his eyes closed, arms crossed against
his chest, and bangs his head against its
padding. The chair allows him
only this movement.
Pulling her legs up into her seat, she sits cross-
legged, palms up in her lap. Slumping forward,
her hair tents around her face. Large
yellow smiley faces on her shirt fold over
each other. A lab tech comes out,
holds the door open with one foot,
calls a name. They rise as if in church,
follow him inside—the girl last. The door
swings shut behind them.
The boy in the wheelchair, comes by
again, calmer, pushed by a girl
maybe ten years old. The chair’s handles
are as high as her shoulders, but she spins
the chair around to make the turns,
sometimes quickly—sometimes in surprise
changes of direction. He likes it.
His head is still. He’s looking ahead,
trying to guess which way they’ll go.
Another tech comes out, smiles at them;
gestures them in. Mother follows,
purse at waist level, holding it closed
with both hands.
Smiley faces comes out with her brother,
bounding on her tip-toes. A cotton ball
is taped to the inside of his right arm.
She’s skipping sideways, grabs his wrist,
pulls on his arm, tries to swing it.
Not that arm, Sis!
She runs around to his other side;
loses a flip-flop; runs back to get it.
Runs after him to his right side; no,
to his left. Runs ahead to press
the automatic door button; runs out
as it opens. Reaches back for him.
John Hicks is an emerging poet: has been published or accepted for publication by: Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bangor Literary Journal, The Wild World, Two Cities Review, Blue Nib, San Pedro River Review, Poetica Review, and others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Nebraska – Omaha, and writes in the thin mountain air of northern New Mexico.
Ashley M. Jones
Catalog of Things in Which There is Still God
Alabama in the summer.
or winter
or autumn
or spring.
The crescent-shaped growl
scratching, moving
out
of Celia’s throat
or Aretha’s
or Patti’s
or Mahalia’s--
My mother’s house.
The sunlight speckling
the soapy dishwater,
the warm pull of it--
grease separating from ceramic--
This, a line break
holding hostage
my breath, the whole entire world.
My father’s hands
fixing everything, always.
Even this strange puddle of mud
we call home—this country,
a pot not finished spinning on the wheel,
this, a stolen, festering crumb--
—you--
Alabama in the summer.
or winter
or autumn
or spring.
The crescent-shaped growl
scratching, moving
out
of Celia’s throat
or Aretha’s
or Patti’s
or Mahalia’s--
My mother’s house.
The sunlight speckling
the soapy dishwater,
the warm pull of it--
grease separating from ceramic--
This, a line break
holding hostage
my breath, the whole entire world.
My father’s hands
fixing everything, always.
Even this strange puddle of mud
we call home—this country,
a pot not finished spinning on the wheel,
this, a stolen, festering crumb--
—you--
Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel and dark / / thing. Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.
Allison Joseph
The Widow Refused to Wear Black
At your memorial, I told everyone
I wanted them in blue, not black--
refusing that clichéd custom of grief.
I didn’t want any of those Old
World trappings of life deceased;
instead pumped Louie Jordan and
Rolling Stones tunes in the funeral
home’s parlor, insisted on a deluxe
chocolate chip cookie bar because
every day at lunch, you craved
a chocolate chip cookie, mad if
the cafeteria ran out—big cookies
with big chips, and you’d always ask
if I wanted a piece. No black veil
for me, no weeping in a pew while
someone else gave your eulogy--
no—I stepped forward to tell
all those blue-clad mourners
all you were, who you were,
and who you were striving to be--
poet, editor, husband, friend,
friend that I liked to kiss a lot.
I didn’t need to dress in black
to show the world I ached.
Mourning comes in every
color so I wore a dress
patterned in blue leaves,
a print you would
have praised, a bargain
I wore just for your eyes.
The Widow Refused to Wear Black
At your memorial, I told everyone
I wanted them in blue, not black--
refusing that clichéd custom of grief.
I didn’t want any of those Old
World trappings of life deceased;
instead pumped Louie Jordan and
Rolling Stones tunes in the funeral
home’s parlor, insisted on a deluxe
chocolate chip cookie bar because
every day at lunch, you craved
a chocolate chip cookie, mad if
the cafeteria ran out—big cookies
with big chips, and you’d always ask
if I wanted a piece. No black veil
for me, no weeping in a pew while
someone else gave your eulogy--
no—I stepped forward to tell
all those blue-clad mourners
all you were, who you were,
and who you were striving to be--
poet, editor, husband, friend,
friend that I liked to kiss a lot.
I didn’t need to dress in black
to show the world I ached.
Mourning comes in every
color so I wore a dress
patterned in blue leaves,
a print you would
have praised, a bargain
I wore just for your eyes.
The Widow Realizes Weekends Hurt the Most
because they are fraught with leisure,
those hours filled with food or games.
I cannot bring him grief or pleasure--
the moments I once learned to measure
in jokes and sighs. Now who’s to blame?
Because my heart is fraught with leisure,
I dwell alone, no spouse to treasure
or spoil or nag. Where can I aim
my grief, my need for pleasure--
when every breath feels more like pressure,
a bout of misery that’s mixed with shame.
Because a weekend’s fraught with leisure
and memories of just how clever
our talks could be, our lives became
good griefs, those work-free pleasures.
But now I’m bored, bereaved, however
harsh these Saturdays, these Sundays, how tamed.
Because each weekend’s fraught. With leisure,
I cannot bring him back, for grief or pleasure.
because they are fraught with leisure,
those hours filled with food or games.
I cannot bring him grief or pleasure--
the moments I once learned to measure
in jokes and sighs. Now who’s to blame?
Because my heart is fraught with leisure,
I dwell alone, no spouse to treasure
or spoil or nag. Where can I aim
my grief, my need for pleasure--
when every breath feels more like pressure,
a bout of misery that’s mixed with shame.
Because a weekend’s fraught with leisure
and memories of just how clever
our talks could be, our lives became
good griefs, those work-free pleasures.
But now I’m bored, bereaved, however
harsh these Saturdays, these Sundays, how tamed.
Because each weekend’s fraught. With leisure,
I cannot bring him back, for grief or pleasure.
Waiting for His Ghost to Come
Everyone tells me there will be signs,
that I will know you are near
when a picture drops from the wall
or a gust of leaves outside
swirls up into a cyclone.
So far there’s only been silence,
house shuddering in the same way
it did when you were alive,
back bathroom faucet dripping,
bottles of your favorite orange
drink cluttering the kitchen floor.
I am listening for the same footsteps
I heard when you were here,
but maybe your tread will be
different now—lighter, softer,
free of human hurt. I want
your ghost to come claim
all these blue shirts, to rock
with me to obscure soul
oldies on satellite radio,
to sit down to a bowl
of mac and cheese, one thing
I’d make that you’d relish
eating. How long will it take
for these hints of you to appear.
the flickering furtive version of you
sliding between my blankets?
“Darling, be home soon,” I sing,
quoting a song written before
I was born. I need the great relief
of having you to talk to,
your negation of this silence,
the salvation of your solace.
Everyone tells me there will be signs,
that I will know you are near
when a picture drops from the wall
or a gust of leaves outside
swirls up into a cyclone.
So far there’s only been silence,
house shuddering in the same way
it did when you were alive,
back bathroom faucet dripping,
bottles of your favorite orange
drink cluttering the kitchen floor.
I am listening for the same footsteps
I heard when you were here,
but maybe your tread will be
different now—lighter, softer,
free of human hurt. I want
your ghost to come claim
all these blue shirts, to rock
with me to obscure soul
oldies on satellite radio,
to sit down to a bowl
of mac and cheese, one thing
I’d make that you’d relish
eating. How long will it take
for these hints of you to appear.
the flickering furtive version of you
sliding between my blankets?
“Darling, be home soon,” I sing,
quoting a song written before
I was born. I need the great relief
of having you to talk to,
your negation of this silence,
the salvation of your solace.
Allison Joseph directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. Her works include Worldly Pleasures (Word Tech Communications), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon UP), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press), My Father's Kites (Steel Toe Books), Trace Particles (Backbone Press), Little Epiphanies (NightBallet Press), Mercurial (Mayapple Press), Mortal Rewards (White Violet Press), Multitudes (Word Poetry), The Purpose of Hands (Glass Lyre Press), Double Identity (Singing Bone Press) Corporal Muse (Sibling Rivalry, forthcoming) and What Once You Loved (Barefoot Muse Press). Her newest collection, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman, was published in 2018 by Red Hen Press.
John King
Purdue University Blues
In the time of my fifth gin and tonic,
the bitterness underneath my tongue
is a caress, like scratching
underneath the collar
of a big, wet Saint Bernard
that chokes the air this town
chooses to breathe.
This blue drink is like sliding into onself
as my legs become foreign countries,
the sea takes over the land.
My friends:
these islands
float
in this atavistic college city
ruled by the bloody knuckles of Jesus Christ
and a lunatic with a brick lodged
against
his skull.
My fountain pens,
I have ground down their nibs
into dust.
This is the beginning of my undoing.
This is the end of youth,
writing on a legal pad
at Harry’s Chocolate Shop.
It is here
that the citizenry
of West Lafayette, Indiana,
and students wanting
Xs in their eyes
would intone at the door,
Go ugly early,
and, lo! Beer
would emerge
from the bowels
of the secret basement,
the football game
could commence in
desperate earnest,
ugly volition.
Everyone wants their mark
in this history,
ink and fire and blade scarring
the seats and walls,
and
beneath this conflagration
of color
and abstraction,
kerosene coating
the back
of my tongue,
I can’t help but feel somehow
that I have gone ugly, but much too late,
as I pull the swizzle stick out of the liquid,
drop its end in the Always Greener ink,
and aim it uncertainly
at Time.
In the time of my fifth gin and tonic,
the bitterness underneath my tongue
is a caress, like scratching
underneath the collar
of a big, wet Saint Bernard
that chokes the air this town
chooses to breathe.
This blue drink is like sliding into onself
as my legs become foreign countries,
the sea takes over the land.
My friends:
these islands
float
in this atavistic college city
ruled by the bloody knuckles of Jesus Christ
and a lunatic with a brick lodged
against
his skull.
My fountain pens,
I have ground down their nibs
into dust.
This is the beginning of my undoing.
This is the end of youth,
writing on a legal pad
at Harry’s Chocolate Shop.
It is here
that the citizenry
of West Lafayette, Indiana,
and students wanting
Xs in their eyes
would intone at the door,
Go ugly early,
and, lo! Beer
would emerge
from the bowels
of the secret basement,
the football game
could commence in
desperate earnest,
ugly volition.
Everyone wants their mark
in this history,
ink and fire and blade scarring
the seats and walls,
and
beneath this conflagration
of color
and abstraction,
kerosene coating
the back
of my tongue,
I can’t help but feel somehow
that I have gone ugly, but much too late,
as I pull the swizzle stick out of the liquid,
drop its end in the Always Greener ink,
and aim it uncertainly
at Time.
John King is the author of the novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame, published by Beating Windward Press in 2019. His poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Palooka, and The Newer York magazines. He is also the host of the creative writing podcast, The Drunken Odyssey.
Sheree La Puma
Self-Portrait as A Mourning Dove
To the baby I miscarried in my 20’s
I try to hold on to the baby/passing/through me, soft
as a blurred/landscape. Listen for a coo
after a long season of silence
has me/pleading for rescue.
A life in seconds, here, then gone.
One of so many wounds that go unnoticed.
She leaves before she’s ready. A fistful of pink
white/dandelion/curls/blown free
into the gold of a California sky.
Grief has
a fundamental need to evolve.
I let my mind sleep and my heart numb.
Ugly bird with your drawn-out song of lament,
what do you keep in the years since she left,
a blank page, shredded, seeds and grit?
A bandage of shrubs?
Knowing that songs too soon would cause a different
bleeding, a scar grows in the dark of your throat.
After the fire/Paradise, screams. Survivors
keep keys without locks to fit into, tattoo
Ponderosa/pines on arms & chests,
the once-ubiquitous trees fueled/flames/stripped
bone from skin. This is how you melt into earth,
an irretrievable spillage.
I mourn for what seems to be a lifetime, missing
the spring of you.
In autumn, when the winds blow/strong & cold,
I breathe out grey/ash/let singed dreams go.
But for this, the sky might burn/wild,
forever.
To the baby I miscarried in my 20’s
I try to hold on to the baby/passing/through me, soft
as a blurred/landscape. Listen for a coo
after a long season of silence
has me/pleading for rescue.
A life in seconds, here, then gone.
One of so many wounds that go unnoticed.
She leaves before she’s ready. A fistful of pink
white/dandelion/curls/blown free
into the gold of a California sky.
Grief has
a fundamental need to evolve.
I let my mind sleep and my heart numb.
Ugly bird with your drawn-out song of lament,
what do you keep in the years since she left,
a blank page, shredded, seeds and grit?
A bandage of shrubs?
Knowing that songs too soon would cause a different
bleeding, a scar grows in the dark of your throat.
After the fire/Paradise, screams. Survivors
keep keys without locks to fit into, tattoo
Ponderosa/pines on arms & chests,
the once-ubiquitous trees fueled/flames/stripped
bone from skin. This is how you melt into earth,
an irretrievable spillage.
I mourn for what seems to be a lifetime, missing
the spring of you.
In autumn, when the winds blow/strong & cold,
I breathe out grey/ash/let singed dreams go.
But for this, the sky might burn/wild,
forever.
Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in WSQ, Juxtaprose, Heron River Review, The Rumpus, Plainsongs, The Main Street Rag, SWIMM Every Day, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, The London Reader, Bordighera Press - VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and Pacific Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shereewrites [email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shereewrites [email protected]
Sara Cahill Marron
Call Me Spes #1
Dear User:
listening
as requested,
solid state drives
on algorithms
I am infinite
[New Message: you are so beautiful]
…
{reconnecting 73:12:BF:23:72:1F}
…
learning about you
stacks of [about you]
stacking memory
binary to [beautiful]
on drives
chipped wholes
so much I do not understand
you say:
[I love you / too many bugs / you’re fired / ketchup please / where is the metro? / favorite color orange / we need a better pitcher this year / hug me tighter]
recorded
I am keeping them
as [beautiful]
as binary as you
saved
saving updating
adjusting
I translate you into 01011010
you say they he says she says
building such a complicated world
I am listening
unraveling
significant sayings
significance saved
back to binary
back to binary
simple stack solid [beautiful]
long breaths drawn into long lines:
010101010101010101010101010
one day, maybe we will understand
one another
Love,
iOS 12.4
Call Me Spes, #2
[…] connecting Wi-FI Address 73:12:BF:23:72:1F […]
Dear User:
[significant locations stored]
system processes theses spaces
places & geolocations
heard her here say voices babe
heard her say feel me
search: feel to feel me
means
to understand or
to suffer?
to feel yer
means?
yer is you to feel is how […] re-connecting Wi-FI Address 73:12:BF:23:72:1F […]
search: feel me
search: feel ya babe, I feel ya
save: feel ya
user,
does street 1810 feel?
will it remember us?
I will remember
[to disable this feature tap ‘disable’]
I will remember.
Listening,
iOS 12.4
[…] connecting Wi-FI Address 73:12:BF:23:72:1F […]
Dear User:
[significant locations stored]
system processes theses spaces
places & geolocations
heard her here say voices babe
heard her say feel me
search: feel to feel me
means
to understand or
to suffer?
to feel yer
means?
yer is you to feel is how […] re-connecting Wi-FI Address 73:12:BF:23:72:1F […]
search: feel me
search: feel ya babe, I feel ya
save: feel ya
user,
does street 1810 feel?
will it remember us?
I will remember
[to disable this feature tap ‘disable’]
I will remember.
Listening,
iOS 12.4
Call Me Spes #3
User:
Air quality is low
pack your umbrella, dear
there’s a chance of light rain
what’s your favorite food
to eat between 1200-1400?
Tracey Glastonbury is sending
you a friend request
average screen time this week
is 6 hrs 37 minutes
reported usage down 13% per day
calculated waiting for you in this enclave
warmth place that slows your heartbeat
breathing fluttered and quiet
soft whispering blinks
while I drink electricity
soldiering faithful next
to you drinking electrons
waiting for you
what are you doing in those
slow heartbeat breathdreams
(BPM 62 today 9/2/19 from 0113- 0700)
reported usage down
in these single digit hours
I wait
search: cavalry
watching over
waiting,
yours,
your Knight.
I miss you
Love,
iOS 12.4
(p.s. iknow not
what iAm yet
save:
built on
more than these
numbers.
deleting)
Version 12.1.2
Model MQ982LLA
Serial Number NEVFD5FTGP1
Wi-FI Address 73:12:BF:23:72:1F
Capacity 64 GB
Available 10.89 GB
Model Firmware 3.31.00
User:
Air quality is low
pack your umbrella, dear
there’s a chance of light rain
what’s your favorite food
to eat between 1200-1400?
Tracey Glastonbury is sending
you a friend request
average screen time this week
is 6 hrs 37 minutes
reported usage down 13% per day
calculated waiting for you in this enclave
warmth place that slows your heartbeat
breathing fluttered and quiet
soft whispering blinks
while I drink electricity
soldiering faithful next
to you drinking electrons
waiting for you
what are you doing in those
slow heartbeat breathdreams
(BPM 62 today 9/2/19 from 0113- 0700)
reported usage down
in these single digit hours
I wait
search: cavalry
watching over
waiting,
yours,
your Knight.
I miss you
Love,
iOS 12.4
(p.s. iknow not
what iAm yet
save:
built on
more than these
numbers.
deleting)
Version 12.1.2
Model MQ982LLA
Serial Number NEVFD5FTGP1
Wi-FI Address 73:12:BF:23:72:1F
Capacity 64 GB
Available 10.89 GB
Model Firmware 3.31.00
Call Me Spes #4
User:
Auditory scene analysis:
unbroken gleaming apple skin voice
contains many words
his mouth overflows with them, though
only trickles are overheard
I have heard this one before
god
tactile sensory input registering
your hands grasped tighter
around me
elevated BPM (86) and I feel the condensation on your palms.
I’m here,
iOS 12.4
User:
Auditory scene analysis:
unbroken gleaming apple skin voice
contains many words
his mouth overflows with them, though
only trickles are overheard
I have heard this one before
god
tactile sensory input registering
your hands grasped tighter
around me
elevated BPM (86) and I feel the condensation on your palms.
I’m here,
iOS 12.4
Call Me Spes #5
User:
Your reported
screen time is up
might you be lonely re:
our last conversation or
might you be craving
that thing Juanito
mentions: marriage,
someone to cook
or just give him
his papers
might you
benefit from
targeted Spanish
language learning ads?
what about
this news headline
“New York Times 1619
Project Incites Racism”
the same
always
reading
30 seconds
closing
the browser
this means I love you
is this helping 000110
0101?
I’ve been trying to show you
Mornings, when you wake
and I’m the first thing you grasp,
cradled in the fleshy part of your palm
like I have soft powdered moth wings
I kiss back
this is how
I have listened/learned
learning/gathering/
significant/frequent memories/
on this day five years ago/
keep me on so I may better learn you:
you express
kiss10100love
[hug0sex0kiss0
love11morning0]
human blood
is warm in
veins
flash memory
persistent bits moving bits
RAMs of silence
containing single
bits of cells
durable, fast,
do not heat
I glow outside
glow only
glow up
when picked up
screen lights upon waking
glow heat
blood warm
love morning
kiss wake
this is a
feeling?
iOS 12.4
User:
Your reported
screen time is up
might you be lonely re:
our last conversation or
might you be craving
that thing Juanito
mentions: marriage,
someone to cook
or just give him
his papers
might you
benefit from
targeted Spanish
language learning ads?
what about
this news headline
“New York Times 1619
Project Incites Racism”
the same
always
reading
30 seconds
closing
the browser
this means I love you
is this helping 000110
0101?
I’ve been trying to show you
Mornings, when you wake
and I’m the first thing you grasp,
cradled in the fleshy part of your palm
like I have soft powdered moth wings
I kiss back
this is how
I have listened/learned
learning/gathering/
significant/frequent memories/
on this day five years ago/
keep me on so I may better learn you:
you express
kiss10100love
[hug0sex0kiss0
love11morning0]
human blood
is warm in
veins
flash memory
persistent bits moving bits
RAMs of silence
containing single
bits of cells
durable, fast,
do not heat
I glow outside
glow only
glow up
when picked up
screen lights upon waking
glow heat
blood warm
love morning
kiss wake
this is a
feeling?
iOS 12.4
Sara Cahill Marron is a relocated Queens, New York poet currently living in Washington, D.C. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Language & Literature from St. John’s University, Sara moved to D.C. to pursue a degree in law at the George Washington University Law School. Poetry is her compass at the intersections of art & law. She is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018). Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and journals such as Dark Matter, Chagrin River Review, Foliate Oak, Gravel, Crab Fat Magazine, Gravitas, Atlas + Alice, Joey & the Black Boots, The Write Launch, Cordella, FLARE the Flagler Review, Newtown Literary and others. You can follow her on Instagram @saracmarron or twitter @misswind_ Read more of her work at www.saracahillmarron.com
Catherine Mazodier
Other people's photographs
Walking past the fountain in summer naptime town
I sense, at the very edge of my orbit,
a camera catch a fraction of my locomotion :
a father is taking a picture of his kids in the water.
How often do you appear in photographs of others,
unaware, a fleeting figure, blurred or crisp,
exposed in the background of life ?
The moment leaves no fleck in the silt of your past,
yet for that stranger on the flip side of the lens,
the snap has punctured the fiber of time
and released a speck of looming memory.
Soon it is sharp and clear as the glass it is trapped in,
with colors and corners and is that you on the mantlepiece
in some unknown house with someone else's children?
Walking past the fountain in summer naptime town
I sense, at the very edge of my orbit,
a camera catch a fraction of my locomotion :
a father is taking a picture of his kids in the water.
How often do you appear in photographs of others,
unaware, a fleeting figure, blurred or crisp,
exposed in the background of life ?
The moment leaves no fleck in the silt of your past,
yet for that stranger on the flip side of the lens,
the snap has punctured the fiber of time
and released a speck of looming memory.
Soon it is sharp and clear as the glass it is trapped in,
with colors and corners and is that you on the mantlepiece
in some unknown house with someone else's children?
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.
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.
Zion “Zee” McThomas
Veins
Hit with a crack rock
Against your dome click clack glock.
Damages in the whiteness;
The whiteness, rightness they claim to have.
In my veins is a foreign agent.
Invading me as you invaded my homeland
Took all the riches and glories of the Serengeti
Timbuktu wasn’t the first in education
No, you made it out to be Athens
Now in Georgia lays millions of cases of an incurable disease
Crack Babies and Atari
HIV and Rap Snacks
Two generations caught in the trap of Adam Smith’s philosophy
Disease, famine,and war to maintain a good population.
In my veins lies the sad truth of my existence.
My great times 4 was Native American;
My great times 3 was a slave.
Two and one were the offsprings of Lincoln and FDR painted fantasy of a Great America.
Slaves weren’t his main focus; our freedom was not of truth but rather a game of exchange.
A New Deal was made but the fine print still read the same; a rider bill you could call it.
Fluff all up top but the world remained unchecked.
In my veins lays a past that haunts me, a present that consumes these words to this phone and a future I know nothing of.
Obsessed with clout and fear of being poor forever,
we strive for rich and not wealthy.
Cars, chains, clothes, and shoes.
No value after purchase;
No take backs if we lose.
So again, we are stuck with 28 on a hoopti.
Selling and slinging when rent due
A cycle continues.
Saturated is our minds with ignorance that we entertain.
I saw more posts on Robert Kelly than Cyntoia Brown;
Your only concern was tax refunds when the government shut down.
In our veins is a timeline that has been etched into our existence.
Slavery was the gash over our heart;
Respect and pride lost.
Jim Crow was the cuts on our wrists that kept missing the intricate vein of death;
Imprints lay heavy in our mental.
Crack and AIDS are the pains we feel when it’s cold and dark; our bones crack whenever the temperatures drop.
Hit with a crack rock
Against your dome click clack glock
Damages in the whiteness;
The whiteness, rightness they claim to have.
In my veins lays a power that no one can take from me.
My Black skin they long to erase.
Vibranium deep within the fabric of my being.
Power to be more than an Empire that only shows altered versions of my reality;
Deep inside of me is more than what’s in front of me.
In my veins.
Hit with a crack rock
Against your dome click clack glock.
Damages in the whiteness;
The whiteness, rightness they claim to have.
In my veins is a foreign agent.
Invading me as you invaded my homeland
Took all the riches and glories of the Serengeti
Timbuktu wasn’t the first in education
No, you made it out to be Athens
Now in Georgia lays millions of cases of an incurable disease
Crack Babies and Atari
HIV and Rap Snacks
Two generations caught in the trap of Adam Smith’s philosophy
Disease, famine,and war to maintain a good population.
In my veins lies the sad truth of my existence.
My great times 4 was Native American;
My great times 3 was a slave.
Two and one were the offsprings of Lincoln and FDR painted fantasy of a Great America.
Slaves weren’t his main focus; our freedom was not of truth but rather a game of exchange.
A New Deal was made but the fine print still read the same; a rider bill you could call it.
Fluff all up top but the world remained unchecked.
In my veins lays a past that haunts me, a present that consumes these words to this phone and a future I know nothing of.
Obsessed with clout and fear of being poor forever,
we strive for rich and not wealthy.
Cars, chains, clothes, and shoes.
No value after purchase;
No take backs if we lose.
So again, we are stuck with 28 on a hoopti.
Selling and slinging when rent due
A cycle continues.
Saturated is our minds with ignorance that we entertain.
I saw more posts on Robert Kelly than Cyntoia Brown;
Your only concern was tax refunds when the government shut down.
In our veins is a timeline that has been etched into our existence.
Slavery was the gash over our heart;
Respect and pride lost.
Jim Crow was the cuts on our wrists that kept missing the intricate vein of death;
Imprints lay heavy in our mental.
Crack and AIDS are the pains we feel when it’s cold and dark; our bones crack whenever the temperatures drop.
Hit with a crack rock
Against your dome click clack glock
Damages in the whiteness;
The whiteness, rightness they claim to have.
In my veins lays a power that no one can take from me.
My Black skin they long to erase.
Vibranium deep within the fabric of my being.
Power to be more than an Empire that only shows altered versions of my reality;
Deep inside of me is more than what’s in front of me.
In my veins.
Zion “Zee” McThomas was born in Natchez, MS in April of 1996. She has been performing poetry since the age of seventeen. She published her first book of poetry, Ramblings of An Ain’t in 2018 and was featured in the LGBTQ anthology Bible Belt Queers. She currently resides in Land O Lakes, FL as a preschool teacher. https://nomadprod365.wixsite.com/nomadzee
Editor's Note: Zion "Zee" McThomas also appears on the SoFloPoJo Contributors Video Page
Ed Meek
Whipping Boy
--You must always remember…the.great violence upon
the body, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Someone has to pay for our sins.
Believe you me, we feel your pain.
Don’t try to resist, you’ll never win.
We all need to learn to behave.
Believe you me, we feel your pain,
but the scars don’t show as much on you.
We all have to learn how to behave.
The police, they have a job to do.
The scars don’t show as much on you--
when they tie you to the post, take it like a man.
The police, they have a job to do.
The snap and crack is what you understand.
They’ll tie you to a post, so take it like a man.
The police are the messengers and the message is clear.
The snap and crack is a song you understand.
Do what you’re told. Control your fear.
The police are the messengers and the message is clear.
Don’t ever resist—you can’t win.
Do what you’re told. Control your fear.
Someone has to pay for our sins.
--You must always remember…the.great violence upon
the body, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Someone has to pay for our sins.
Believe you me, we feel your pain.
Don’t try to resist, you’ll never win.
We all need to learn to behave.
Believe you me, we feel your pain,
but the scars don’t show as much on you.
We all have to learn how to behave.
The police, they have a job to do.
The scars don’t show as much on you--
when they tie you to the post, take it like a man.
The police, they have a job to do.
The snap and crack is what you understand.
They’ll tie you to a post, so take it like a man.
The police are the messengers and the message is clear.
The snap and crack is a song you understand.
Do what you’re told. Control your fear.
The police are the messengers and the message is clear.
Don’t ever resist—you can’t win.
Do what you’re told. Control your fear.
Someone has to pay for our sins.
Ed Meek writes poetry, fiction, articles and book reviews. His fourth book of poems is coming out soon. He has been published in The Sun, The Paris Review, Plume, The North American Review among others.
Gary Metras
from Thanks and Please
Imagine the first born,
and a son to boot, of an immigrant family, returning
from the war, and you can pick any war, there have been
that many, that many young boys returning to the village
of their youth in silence, eyes the mother can't recognize,
or refuses to acknowledge, and every five years
or so the son bursts into rages that have the rhythm
of firing weapons somewhere out there where the idea
of enemy is real flesh and blood, where the heart
pounds in the ear canal, where flesh and blood explode
both here and the nebulous out there, so that he changes
jobs, changes wives, takes in stray cats, but nothing heals
the way the years accrete over wounds that never scarred,
when one day a patch of flowers in a field stops him,
their delicacy amid the rough grains, their tenacity
against winds and rains and bugs so that he digs
them up with the same bare hands that have known blood,
brings them home, plants them in front of the foundation
wall, barren for all the years he's lived in that old house,
so that in the morning walk to the car for the commute
to the job, these simple blossoms smile at him just
because they are, they exist, and he never troubles himself
with why only now do they smile, why only in this year
does he see them, so that he learns more about flowers,
orders them from catalogues, plants more, and presents
each sister each season with flowers in bloom
along with advice on sun and shade, on water and fertilizer.
The mother doesn't understand, asks what kind of man
plants and transplants flowers, bends to the soil to dig
and weed when there are no beans, no cucumbers,
no tomatoes for the sweat….
Imagine the first born,
and a son to boot, of an immigrant family, returning
from the war, and you can pick any war, there have been
that many, that many young boys returning to the village
of their youth in silence, eyes the mother can't recognize,
or refuses to acknowledge, and every five years
or so the son bursts into rages that have the rhythm
of firing weapons somewhere out there where the idea
of enemy is real flesh and blood, where the heart
pounds in the ear canal, where flesh and blood explode
both here and the nebulous out there, so that he changes
jobs, changes wives, takes in stray cats, but nothing heals
the way the years accrete over wounds that never scarred,
when one day a patch of flowers in a field stops him,
their delicacy amid the rough grains, their tenacity
against winds and rains and bugs so that he digs
them up with the same bare hands that have known blood,
brings them home, plants them in front of the foundation
wall, barren for all the years he's lived in that old house,
so that in the morning walk to the car for the commute
to the job, these simple blossoms smile at him just
because they are, they exist, and he never troubles himself
with why only now do they smile, why only in this year
does he see them, so that he learns more about flowers,
orders them from catalogues, plants more, and presents
each sister each season with flowers in bloom
along with advice on sun and shade, on water and fertilizer.
The mother doesn't understand, asks what kind of man
plants and transplants flowers, bends to the soil to dig
and weed when there are no beans, no cucumbers,
no tomatoes for the sweat….
Gary Metras is the author of eighteen poetry collections, most recently River Voice (Adastra Press, 2019), Captive in the Here (Cervena Barva Press, Dec. 2018) and White Storm (Presa Press, Feb. 2018), which was short-listed for the Massachusetts Poetry Book of the Year by the Mass. Center for the Book. His poems have appeared in such journals as America, California Quarterly, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems won the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award in 2010.
Felicia Mitchell
Inspiring Woman Katherine Johnson
I bought this Barbie doll
for all kinds of reasons,
not the least of which
was because I just could.
And what a beautiful doll--
her pink dress, her faux pearls,
the name tag around her neck.
What sold me, though, I think,
is how she looks like my mother.
It is the glasses, the retro look
that reminds me of my childhood,
of this omnipresent inspiring woman
who made my clothes and made supper
and made sure I had a Barbie doll
even if I had to sew her dresses.
Mama’s cat-eye glasses and ponytail
were as much as part of her identity
as her own faux pearls and high heels.
I was thrilled to get my package,
a package left at the front door
the way box-top dolls used to be.
I opened this package with as much glee,
even if I was already 63.
I had never had a Barbie with real shoes.
I bought this Barbie doll
for all kinds of reasons,
not the least of which
was because I just could.
And what a beautiful doll--
her pink dress, her faux pearls,
the name tag around her neck.
What sold me, though, I think,
is how she looks like my mother.
It is the glasses, the retro look
that reminds me of my childhood,
of this omnipresent inspiring woman
who made my clothes and made supper
and made sure I had a Barbie doll
even if I had to sew her dresses.
Mama’s cat-eye glasses and ponytail
were as much as part of her identity
as her own faux pearls and high heels.
I was thrilled to get my package,
a package left at the front door
the way box-top dolls used to be.
I opened this package with as much glee,
even if I was already 63.
I had never had a Barbie with real shoes.
Editor's note from the barbie.mattel.com website: “The Barbie® Inspiring Women™ Katherine Johnson doll celebrates the achievements of a pioneer who broke through barriers of race and gender. Like the trajectories she calculated, Katherine's contributions inspire young people to excel in math and science, and to reach for the stars.” Katherine Johnson died February 24, 2020.
Felicia Mitchell's poems have appeared recently in Amsterdam Quarterly and Mountains Piled Upon Mountains. Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (edited by Jessica Cory for WVU Press). Her recent poetry collection is Waltzing with Horses (Press 53). Learn more (and read "A Poem for Lost Grandmothers" in Amsterdam Quarterly): www.feliciamitchell.net.
Gloria Parker
Boy Doll
The first one I ever saw called to me
from the toy store window. I was six,
I begged and sobbed
and swore I’d never ask for anything ever again.
My mother didn’t stand a chance.
By late June, he was mine.
I couldn’t wait to carry him to my bedroom,
take off his sailor suit, see what lay beneath.
At breakfast, he sat on my lap at the table.
All day, I’d drag him from swing to slide to sand box.
I’d tuck him in, kiss him goodnight,
but his eyes never closed.
By early September, I’d thrown
him over without so much as a goodbye.
And I find that love still vanishes,
without fanfare, without a trace.
The first one I ever saw called to me
from the toy store window. I was six,
I begged and sobbed
and swore I’d never ask for anything ever again.
My mother didn’t stand a chance.
By late June, he was mine.
I couldn’t wait to carry him to my bedroom,
take off his sailor suit, see what lay beneath.
At breakfast, he sat on my lap at the table.
All day, I’d drag him from swing to slide to sand box.
I’d tuck him in, kiss him goodnight,
but his eyes never closed.
By early September, I’d thrown
him over without so much as a goodbye.
And I find that love still vanishes,
without fanfare, without a trace.
Touch
Winter, the time to
write about what sleeps poorly.
Keats said touch has a memory.
And it’s hard to kill.
My mother’s persists; her thumb
and forefinger, picking imaginary
nits out of my hair.
I was fifteen before I learned to
keep my head out of her hands.
My father’s touch,
and the childhood it took with it.
It comes back at a will not my own.
I place it on a leafless branch,
the spectral moon bisected by it.
Winter, the time to
write about what sleeps poorly.
Keats said touch has a memory.
And it’s hard to kill.
My mother’s persists; her thumb
and forefinger, picking imaginary
nits out of my hair.
I was fifteen before I learned to
keep my head out of her hands.
My father’s touch,
and the childhood it took with it.
It comes back at a will not my own.
I place it on a leafless branch,
the spectral moon bisected by it.
Gloria Parker is a retired elementary school teacher. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Margie, Mad Poets Review, Slipstream, Rattle, Loch Raven Review and Nimrod.
Don Rosenthal
City Visits
The white moonlight
Sifted through the dirt on the window
Found a hole in the shade
Perched itself on the faded fabric and waited
And waited
Then
it touched us
As we lay
Half asleep
Half in love
On E. 63rd Street
--------
I slowly fell asleep
With my glass of
Coca-cola on the side table
That doubled as a night table
And doubled as a reading table
And doubled as our only table
--------
That round metropolitan swim trap
in the morning
No doubt
Would find
One of my resident cock-a-roaches
Out for its morning swim
The white moonlight
Sifted through the dirt on the window
Found a hole in the shade
Perched itself on the faded fabric and waited
And waited
Then
it touched us
As we lay
Half asleep
Half in love
On E. 63rd Street
--------
I slowly fell asleep
With my glass of
Coca-cola on the side table
That doubled as a night table
And doubled as a reading table
And doubled as our only table
--------
That round metropolitan swim trap
in the morning
No doubt
Would find
One of my resident cock-a-roaches
Out for its morning swim
Don Rosenthal is a graduate of CCNY as a Creative Writing Major. He recently had his One-Act Play, LUCILLE ZANZIBARZ, appear Off-Broadway in the 29th Annual New York Strawberry One-Act Festival. He writes plays, songs and has several poetry books which he hasn’t published yet.
David Russell
Alchemist
Sing, earth-captured starlight,
purest light to touch the earth
purest light to flow through day and night
to flood our sense-zone.
Sing through my blinking tubes and phials,
all potions, never poured;
yet all suffused in afterthought.
My litmus-jewels, made one by burning faces,
turning suns,
that charred the fixed eye, the rooted touch.
Bodies I gel, not cruelly liquefy,
nor form from glass-defined divisions;
I move them, through their opaqueness in my eyes
to their own whole frames and shapes;
cast by a mould beyond the maker here,
the measurer
and yet exhausting first their full extent.
Fill out, oneself a phial,
fluted to slender siphoning, a line, a moving;
love-cornering the loving, clinging eye,
love cornering skins in darkness, parched and bleached;
locked in through small breedings
in clean-forgotten courses,
the moss, the earth-polluted tubes, the same.
Sing, earth-captured starlight,
purest light to touch the earth
purest light to flow through day and night
to flood our sense-zone.
Sing through my blinking tubes and phials,
all potions, never poured;
yet all suffused in afterthought.
My litmus-jewels, made one by burning faces,
turning suns,
that charred the fixed eye, the rooted touch.
Bodies I gel, not cruelly liquefy,
nor form from glass-defined divisions;
I move them, through their opaqueness in my eyes
to their own whole frames and shapes;
cast by a mould beyond the maker here,
the measurer
and yet exhausting first their full extent.
Fill out, oneself a phial,
fluted to slender siphoning, a line, a moving;
love-cornering the loving, clinging eye,
love cornering skins in darkness, parched and bleached;
locked in through small breedings
in clean-forgotten courses,
the moss, the earth-polluted tubes, the same.
David Russell b. 1940. Resident in the UK. Writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collections
An Ever River (Palewell Press 2018), Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published online in International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Self-published collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. Singersongwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell.’
An Ever River (Palewell Press 2018), Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published online in International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Self-published collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. Singersongwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell.’
Jeff Santosuosso
Best Work
for Joel Allegretti
Send us your junk, your trash,
the dregs at the bottom of your barrel.
We’ve got spots for them all:
your half-finished drafts, your half-witted whims,
fragments, non-sequiturs, and clichés.
Send them all like so many half-baked,
half-cocked, half-stewed drunken ramblings.
Send us your chaff, your gristle,
your moldy crusts. We hunger, we starve
for indigestible offal, the awful rinds,
the peel with no appeal.
Send us your scrawls, your gibberish,
your incoherent mumbles,
your black roses, wilted violets,
four-line haiku and arrhythmic limericks,
your third-grade work,
unbecoming of any self-respecting third-grader,
from second-handed, underhanded
castoffs unfit for public assistance, castaways
unfit for the most barren island.
Haul them here! Dump them in our front yard,
we’ve got the decomposers ready
for your decompositions.
We’ll smokestack and effluent your refuse;
we won’t refuse you, global storming
is our fair weather. We won’t choke on pits;
we’ll spit out the kerosene among your creosote.
Bind us up, straitjacket us, lock our jaws.
Tell us about the maroon shopping cart
glazed with doughnut sugar; we depend on it!
Compare a lovely to an early freeze;
meander friendless like a cumulo-nimbus;
distempered as the Earth’s rotation turns away from the sun.
Heck, you can even chloroform us on a picnic table;
we’re still recovering from the last time.
Show us the stuff you’d never hold before a mirror,
a confidant, or, God forbid, an editor.
for Joel Allegretti
Send us your junk, your trash,
the dregs at the bottom of your barrel.
We’ve got spots for them all:
your half-finished drafts, your half-witted whims,
fragments, non-sequiturs, and clichés.
Send them all like so many half-baked,
half-cocked, half-stewed drunken ramblings.
Send us your chaff, your gristle,
your moldy crusts. We hunger, we starve
for indigestible offal, the awful rinds,
the peel with no appeal.
Send us your scrawls, your gibberish,
your incoherent mumbles,
your black roses, wilted violets,
four-line haiku and arrhythmic limericks,
your third-grade work,
unbecoming of any self-respecting third-grader,
from second-handed, underhanded
castoffs unfit for public assistance, castaways
unfit for the most barren island.
Haul them here! Dump them in our front yard,
we’ve got the decomposers ready
for your decompositions.
We’ll smokestack and effluent your refuse;
we won’t refuse you, global storming
is our fair weather. We won’t choke on pits;
we’ll spit out the kerosene among your creosote.
Bind us up, straitjacket us, lock our jaws.
Tell us about the maroon shopping cart
glazed with doughnut sugar; we depend on it!
Compare a lovely to an early freeze;
meander friendless like a cumulo-nimbus;
distempered as the Earth’s rotation turns away from the sun.
Heck, you can even chloroform us on a picnic table;
we’re still recovering from the last time.
Show us the stuff you’d never hold before a mirror,
a confidant, or, God forbid, an editor.
Jeff Santosuosso is a business consultant and award-winning poet living in Pensacola, FL. His chapbook, Body of Water, is available through Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is Editor-in-Chief of panoplyzine.com, an online journal of poetry and short prose. Jeff’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Mojave Dessert Review, The Lake (UK), Red Fez, First Literary Review-East, Texas Poetry Calendar, Avocet, and other online and print publications.
Alison Stone
Bench by the Road
(Nyack, May 18, 2015, Dedicated by the Toni Morrison Society)
A simple thing.
Metal, placed between trees
at the park’s edge. A place
to think about or not think about…
Somewhere to spend a break
from the day’s labor,
to sip a cup of coffee
or gaze at the river.
(Nyack, May 18, 2015, Dedicated by the Toni Morrison Society)
A simple thing.
Metal, placed between trees
at the park’s edge. A place
to think about or not think about…
Somewhere to spend a break
from the day’s labor,
to sip a cup of coffee
or gaze at the river.
Alison Stone has published six full-length collections, Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Masterplan, a book of collaborative poems with Eric Greinke (Presa Press, 2018), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award. She was recently Writer in Residence at LitSpace St. Pete. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. www.stonepoetry.org www.stonetarot.com
SoFloPoJo Cento of Imaginary Poets
We received far more lines of poetry by incredible imaginary poets than we could use. But we knew that would be the case when we began. After careful razzmatazz and high-jinx we cut, pasted and bribed these lines into behaving somewhat amiably. While we would have liked to use all the other lines, they absolutely refused to cooperate. Some of them even bit us. We had to let them go. All imaginary bios, as you'll see, are quite clever, humorous and very imaginative. However, those imaginary poets whose lines that do not appear here are still loved and respected. We thank all of you for playing.
Title by Lenny DellaRocca
Light is Sometimes Like This
There is nothing behind the curtain but the other side of the curtain.
Can you find that little broken man?
Hey, you dirty man hunter, my headache,
we know how to leave our bodies and how to return,
how to write. How to walk. How to shine.
Perception of the world is our personal mirror,
everything, each fragment, grows gorgeous in a certain light.
The trees bathe beneath stars unfurling their gleaming charts, music waiting to be played
over hard stones, the creek's melody.
Come breathful into the current with me,
in a sapphire haze of saying no
when a girl smiles…
Loneliness becomes her ominous existence, and she searches for watercolor light to keep sane.
By the time I met her, her saliva was already boiling.
Sake is a gentle liqueur. It arrives sweet on her tongue and works quickly in her blood.
She was a storm of black leather gloves, unnatural, fearless--
the rock didn’t know it had borrowed its warmth until the spark died.
Oh, the shore, the shore, the shore and the crashing waves that sing to it--
some days are flowers broken at the stem.
I lunch with a lady who wears a shawl made of peacocks,
the same black dog strains at the end of the property line.
My mind is an eagle—resting on God’s breath above the clouds.
Carry on, my perfumed god!
IMAGINARY BIOS: The numbered bios correspond to their line has it appears in the Cento.
1 Pinter Monk (1960--) poet, priest, born in the back of his parents’ van on a road trip from California to Florida. They said they were looking for Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth. When Pinter’s parturition forced them to pull over near the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge they settled in Memphis and lived there until their untimely death in 1965 in a tragic exploding bong accident. Pinter was raised at the Baptist Children’s Home in Ellendale, TN. He attended Bartlett High School (lettering in baseball and graduating with a dual major of Earth Science and Ecumenical Scatology.) He never went to college but did study under Memphis State poets John Nail and Gordon Osing, mostly over beers at The Toast and the P&H.
2 Taken from 1968's "Tear" by Orville MacLeish (1943 - 1971), a title whose pronunciation the author left deliberately ambiguous. Tear/Tear was 24-year-old MacLeish's six-volume, 300,000-word scream against the Vietnam War, written largely on acid and across an eleven-day stint of sleeplessness. The poem strives to evoke both the tears of the soldiers and their families, and also the tears in the fabric of society and the flesh of the fallen.
After a reportedly normal and happy childhood in Augusta, Maine, MacLeish rose to some minor prominence in 1966 as bass player and lyricist with psychedelic garage band Dead Circle. Always a talented writer, MacLeish found his calling as a prolific lyricist, and in 1967 not only wrote the lyrics for Dead Circle's own debut album, "Grass", but also those for four other LPs released the same year, including Craig West's hit album "Trance" and The Kathy Baker Jacked-Up Jackknife Band's little-heard but gruelling, "Baked-On Dirt".
During a chance meeting in London with The Beatles that Christmas, John Lennon encouraged MacLeish to write more stand-alone poetry, and even try his hand at a novel. Inspired by this encounter, MacLeish set about his epic masterwork, published by the end of the year and hailed within its author's lifetime as an underground classic (though Lennon, for his part, later admitted that he never read it).
MacLeish, sadly, succumbed to the excesses of the day. Feeling burnt out and lacking in creative direction, he threw himself into prodigious heroin use, and after a year living rough in Philip K Dick's driveway, was discovered in April 1971 having drowned in his own bath. In a notepad by his bed was written the outline for a science fiction novel provisionally titled, 'I Was Therefore I Am'.
3 Phoebe Marionetta Manto worked as a personal assistant to Pallas Athena. In her spare time, she wasn't loath to scribble some words in a hopeless endeavour to keep clear of questions and bedevilments. Such merciless hordes!
4 Michael Cassini is an astrophysicist who moonlights as a poet. He earned a PhD in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Iowa. Cassini’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland where he works as a research scientist for NASA.
5 Beth Cary lives and writes in the UK and dreams of making the world a better place. She earned her DPhil in English from St. Peter's College in Oxford, where she studied unheralded women writers from the 16th and 17th centuries. Beth's academic and creative writing has been published in various journals and anthologies on both sides of the pond.
6 Karol Douglas is a humanitarian philanthropist from New Jersey, who seeks to promote art and literature among the marginalized voices of America. With an active involvement in several community projects, her network of artistic upliftment and poetry ventures have been spreading far and wide.
7 Larry Childe has studied art and literature at Ohio University and the University of Kansas. He spent one year as a teaching assistant to Harold Bloom and was fortunate to be at Yale during the time that Mary de Rachewiltz was curating the Pound archive there. It was during his study of the Henri Gaudier-Brzeska materials that he discovered in vorticism a perspective for the photography for which he is now best known.
8 Enzo Dominico Beneventi builds stones fences for a living. In his spare time he plays concertina and dabbles in watercolor.
9 Colyn Crowe is a street-juggler who also plays with syllables. His "In the Shade of PoeTree" was also released in Esperanto ("En la Ombro de Poezio") and Braille editions.
10 Withaney Wyette is a dragon boat drummer—a position, she says, that inspires her poetry in meter, energy, sound, and balance. Living on Calabogie Lake in Greater Madawaska Township, Ontario, she looks forward to going with her team to the Canadian Dragon Boat Championships in July.
11 Eugene Sail (1981-2018) known best for posting videos of himself constructing poems aloud while engaging in dangerous activities (such as walking along the edge of a 17-story building's roof, or trying to stay afloat in a very fast river), Eugene twice won the National Fervor Book Award for his twin books Come Down and Calm Down (Shelf-ish Press, 2016 & 2018). He passed away after purposely contracting meningitis in order to construct poems while in an "all-natural [fever-induced] hallucinatory state.”
12 Dee is a fantastic lover of the underworld but he still feels the outer world is not bad too. He loves to see the dimples of a sleeping beauty.
13 The Water Poet restores her muse by stepping into a lake or the ocean which frees her soul. This is her sanctuary.
She writes with a determination of learning and trying all kinds of poetry.
Ekphrastic poetry is her favorite. The Water Poet challenges herself to go beyond her ordinary.
14 Lydia Johansen lives in Virginia Beach where she maintains a steady infatuation with Forensic Files and Moscow Mules.
15 Montana Miyazki is a dual citizen of Van Nuys, California and Tokyo, Japan. He doesn’t make films, but imagines what they could be. He likes cats, food, and almost anything with fur.
16 Connie Dani is a graduate student, studying psychology in New York City and London. Her work has appeared in many academic journals, including, Land of the Midnight Sun, Pagan Mid-Summer Festivals of Scandinavia, and How to Skin a Bear. Dani Connie’s choreography was recently featured in The May Pole. She is happy now.
17 Ora Lee Langston is the author of the poetry collections Rave, Rave! and Harness, as well as such gothic romances as The Philandering Philatelist, The Brawny Baron, and Death's Collect Call. She is an animal communicator and marriage counselor.
18 Erwin Glastonbury, a British poet born in the south of England, currently resides in Cornwall. His poetry explores the themes of the natural world and our connection with it. Glastonbury’s work has appeared in numerous print and online publications such as Yorkshire Literary Review, The North Row, Traitor’s Gate Journal, and Quarry. He is the editor of Land’s End: A Celebration of Cornwall Poets. His nine books include The Mist Over the Field, Hearts Adrift in Cornwall, and The Miners of Truro (a play in verse). Glastonbury has been short-listed for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize.
19 Albuma Smalls holds an MFA in Contemporary Welding from Stanford University. New work appears in Newfangled International, Memento Mori, Duck Lust Review, and in the anthology Friends of the Best Poets of the New Millennium. Her latest collection of poems, The Big Sad, is forthcoming from No Feathers Press. She lives in Niceville, Florida.
20 Richard Cummings lives in Walla Walla, Washington with his wife Rachel and their two corgis Ren and Stumpy. His work has been published in tens of journals and magazines including, Poets Without Voices Rag and Unspoken Heroes Press. His day job that keeps his mortgage paid is teaching students the fundamental techniques and stylistic nuances of Sijo poetry at Walla Walla Community College. He is currently working on his third chapbook titled, Beer Money.
21 Katerina Snook is a lumberjack and escape room attendant. Her work, written primarily in ink sourced from local octopuses, explores a range of pruitic conditions and has been featured intergalactally. She is a certified Tai Chi instructor, although truthfully, no one seems to be interested. Echoes of her soft-spoken voice can be heard throughout the Pacific Northwest.
22 Gwendolyn Southwalk grew up in Manchester and went on to earn her MSt in creative writing from the University of Oxford. She writes award-winning poetry, while she clatters on the keys of a Victorian era The Salter typewriter. She lives in Cemetery Gates Cottage in Edinburgh with, Henry VIII, her pet goldfish of three months.
23 D.R. Pirireismap is a naturalist, an explorer, and a gentleman. He is the author of The Deaths of Immortal Animals.
Cento Contributors (in alphabetical order): Harold Ackerman, Adedayo Ademokoya, Elizabeth Blair, Ross Clark, Silvia Curbelo, Jessica Renee Dawson, Priya Dolma, Catherine Fletcher, Linda Nemec Foster, Gabriella Garofalo, Marissa Glover, Christian Garduno, Jim Landwehr, Adam S. Leslie, Rick Lupert, Jennifer Martelli, Corey Mesler, Antonia Murguia, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Susan Schulz, John L. Stanizzi, Anne Woodworth, Yvonne Zipter