Issue 17 May 2020
Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Guest Editor
Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Guest Editor
Poets in this issue: Caron Andregg, Judith Berke, Richard Blanco,
Flose Boursiquot, Marisa P. Clark, Jennifer Coon, Ken Craft, Jessica Cuello, Iris Jamahl Dunkle,
Jason Gallagher, Zan Gay, Stephen Gibson, D.R. James, Bosch Jones, Jen Karetnick,
Lorette C. Luzajic, Marjorie Maddox, Ann Manov, Mary Meriam, George Moore,
Laura Mullen, Cynthia Neeley, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Laura Sobbott Ross,
Virgil Suarez, Emma Trelles, Bruce Weber, Beth Weinstock, Cynthia White
Flose Boursiquot, Marisa P. Clark, Jennifer Coon, Ken Craft, Jessica Cuello, Iris Jamahl Dunkle,
Jason Gallagher, Zan Gay, Stephen Gibson, D.R. James, Bosch Jones, Jen Karetnick,
Lorette C. Luzajic, Marjorie Maddox, Ann Manov, Mary Meriam, George Moore,
Laura Mullen, Cynthia Neeley, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Laura Sobbott Ross,
Virgil Suarez, Emma Trelles, Bruce Weber, Beth Weinstock, Cynthia White
Caron Andregg 2 poems
Despite You, Spring Still Comes
Outside my window, hummingbirds drown in fanfares of honeysuckle.
Last year's ducks break out anemometers, the north wind sluicing their wings.
Drifts of foreign bulbs conspire underground, plotting spring's green consequence
as the sun grows more truant each evening, its slant-light breasting the door.
The tools in their trays are rubbing their heads together, itching for action,
resenting the box, nursing the memory of hands; they consider adultery.
My mirror abhors redundancy; each morning it has less to say.
The green cane chair alone in the backyard waits for no one at all.
This piece is a Block Haiku, a form of my own invention. Each line is its own three-pulse haiku, most of them self-contained- Caron Andregg
Outside my window, hummingbirds drown in fanfares of honeysuckle.
Last year's ducks break out anemometers, the north wind sluicing their wings.
Drifts of foreign bulbs conspire underground, plotting spring's green consequence
as the sun grows more truant each evening, its slant-light breasting the door.
The tools in their trays are rubbing their heads together, itching for action,
resenting the box, nursing the memory of hands; they consider adultery.
My mirror abhors redundancy; each morning it has less to say.
The green cane chair alone in the backyard waits for no one at all.
This piece is a Block Haiku, a form of my own invention. Each line is its own three-pulse haiku, most of them self-contained- Caron Andregg
To My Father, Written in the Eye of an Eight Ball
Case grins like a marlin as I stalk
around the room where balls bright enough
to burn retinal ghosts, spin into constellations
on green baize. He's less interested in winning
than in the body's concentrated motion: content
just to enjoy my arm's smooth stroke, the way
my fingers curl around the cue's slim shaft.
He knows nothing of the butt-end's leaded weight
you used to batter in my door the year I stole
my mother from you, the year I knew for sure
you'd only kill her if she tried to stick it out.
You introduced me to the mystery of english,
and I learned to love its physics —part science,
part divination —the green plane intersected
by predictable lines, a highway map
of angles made manifest by trajectory.
I learned to calculate the bank by the dark
wood's inlaid diamonds, mastered the elegant
and wondrous massé and the short hard down—
stroke that makes the cue ball jump.
You taught me the stop-shot—how to strike
the cue ball hard under the center line to make it
freeze and stick, while it's energy bores
on, rocketing the contact ball into the open pocket.
You taught me to draw and follow, feather
perpendicular angles, and the nerveless kiss
off the rail, the mere brush of a dandelion puff.
My mother has a picture of you teaching me
to play—4 years old on the stool I used so I
could climb up high enough to see. Now I stand
flat-footed on the floor, hook my hips over the rail
and stretch my torso flat along the same
straight line from cue to cue ball, contact ball to pocket.
Sometimes, in concentration, I can feel your
features molded in the bones of my face.
In over 15 years, Case never asked to meet you.
That fleeting shark-eyed stare is all he needs to know
of our hereditary gift for violence and trigonometry.
Caron Andregg holds an MS in Television/Radio/Film from The Newhouse School (Syracuse University) and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University, and has taught literature, writing, and rhetoric at Penn State and San Diego State. Her poems have appeared in Spillway, Rattle, Poetry International, Solo and elsewhere, and in the anthology Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (2002) published by Southern Illinois University Press. She is a consultant for nonprofit arts organizations in Southern California, and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief for Cider Press Review.
Case grins like a marlin as I stalk
around the room where balls bright enough
to burn retinal ghosts, spin into constellations
on green baize. He's less interested in winning
than in the body's concentrated motion: content
just to enjoy my arm's smooth stroke, the way
my fingers curl around the cue's slim shaft.
He knows nothing of the butt-end's leaded weight
you used to batter in my door the year I stole
my mother from you, the year I knew for sure
you'd only kill her if she tried to stick it out.
You introduced me to the mystery of english,
and I learned to love its physics —part science,
part divination —the green plane intersected
by predictable lines, a highway map
of angles made manifest by trajectory.
I learned to calculate the bank by the dark
wood's inlaid diamonds, mastered the elegant
and wondrous massé and the short hard down—
stroke that makes the cue ball jump.
You taught me the stop-shot—how to strike
the cue ball hard under the center line to make it
freeze and stick, while it's energy bores
on, rocketing the contact ball into the open pocket.
You taught me to draw and follow, feather
perpendicular angles, and the nerveless kiss
off the rail, the mere brush of a dandelion puff.
My mother has a picture of you teaching me
to play—4 years old on the stool I used so I
could climb up high enough to see. Now I stand
flat-footed on the floor, hook my hips over the rail
and stretch my torso flat along the same
straight line from cue to cue ball, contact ball to pocket.
Sometimes, in concentration, I can feel your
features molded in the bones of my face.
In over 15 years, Case never asked to meet you.
That fleeting shark-eyed stare is all he needs to know
of our hereditary gift for violence and trigonometry.
Caron Andregg holds an MS in Television/Radio/Film from The Newhouse School (Syracuse University) and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University, and has taught literature, writing, and rhetoric at Penn State and San Diego State. Her poems have appeared in Spillway, Rattle, Poetry International, Solo and elsewhere, and in the anthology Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (2002) published by Southern Illinois University Press. She is a consultant for nonprofit arts organizations in Southern California, and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief for Cider Press Review.
Judith Berke 1931-2013
Completely Open
from White Morning, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Reprinted with permission.
John dries himself off
after the shower, lies
on the bed, on his back
with his knees up, and I understand
he is the baby now
just for a few minutes, I
am to powder him. Later
I let him cut my hair
a little and then
cut his, just on the sides
where it's ragged.
When my breathing gets tight
he walks on my back,
holding onto the headboard
so as to not be too heavy.
All day in the sunlight
we polish each other,
bare our throats to each other.
Who can understand it?
We sit in the middle
of all this symbology
in a sort of stupid wonder,
as if we had gone into a forest
and eaten all the mushrooms
and none of them had been poison.
We make small barking noises.
Even when we don’t touch,
the sounds we make
are not exactly human.
Judith Berke was a South Florida poet, dancer, artist and actor. She attended Smith College and studied painting at l’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. She studied acting with Lee Strasberg, designed puppets and was a puppeteer. She sang with the Opera Guild of Greater Miami. Her poetry appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, and other literary magazines.
from White Morning, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Reprinted with permission.
John dries himself off
after the shower, lies
on the bed, on his back
with his knees up, and I understand
he is the baby now
just for a few minutes, I
am to powder him. Later
I let him cut my hair
a little and then
cut his, just on the sides
where it's ragged.
When my breathing gets tight
he walks on my back,
holding onto the headboard
so as to not be too heavy.
All day in the sunlight
we polish each other,
bare our throats to each other.
Who can understand it?
We sit in the middle
of all this symbology
in a sort of stupid wonder,
as if we had gone into a forest
and eaten all the mushrooms
and none of them had been poison.
We make small barking noises.
Even when we don’t touch,
the sounds we make
are not exactly human.
Judith Berke was a South Florida poet, dancer, artist and actor. She attended Smith College and studied painting at l’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. She studied acting with Lee Strasberg, designed puppets and was a puppeteer. She sang with the Opera Guild of Greater Miami. Her poetry appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, and other literary magazines.
Richard Blanco
A Rose as Question
for John Bailly, in response to his gallery exhibition, The Roses of Fibonacci.
Richard Blanco reads in the video here: https://vimeo.com/370238553
for John Bailly, in response to his gallery exhibition, The Roses of Fibonacci.
Richard Blanco reads in the video here: https://vimeo.com/370238553
|
Cultivo una rosa blanca,
En julio como en enero, Para el amigo sincero Que me da su mano franca. Y para el cruel que me arranca El corazón con que vivo, Cardo ni oruga cultivo: Cultivo la rosa blanca. |
I have a white rose to tend
In July as in January; I give it to the true friend Who offers his frank hand to me. And for the cruel one whose blows Break the heart by which I live, Thistle nor thorn do I give: For him, too, I have a white rose. |
José Martí, Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses
A rose for the rose of your voice that greets and embraces me at your studio door as mon
frère. A rose for our brotherhood and the cafecito you brew for me, mi hermano. A rose
for the royal palms of my Havana’s malecón that in our minds also sway along the
Champs-Élysées of your Paris: one city, one country, one geography, one heart.
A rose for the velvet ripples of the waves that serenaded us into marrying Miami as natives.
A rose for the bay’s salty-perfume breezing through your window and inhaled by the
colors of your paintings. A rose for your paintbrushes arranged like bouquets in rusty-
can vases, for the sunlight abloom as we settle into wobbly lawn chairs, trying to steady
ourselves in one another’s art of words in images, and images in words, as we’ve done
for a lifetime.
A rose for the memories of our budding youth, seated at dinner parties or bar stools, our full-
bodied talk as tender as the tears of wine in our glasses, toasting not to the answers that
good art gives us, but to the questions that great art asks us to ask. Now, our souls again
flower in the roses of each other’s eyes gazing at your imagination that’s exploded a rose
into petals of paint, strewed over your canvas, and spiraled back into a fresh rose to
rewind history, question all its crude beauty, its chance fate, its calculated chaos, its clear
blur.
A rose to ask the coil of serpents why they killed Laocoön’s sons that bore our fear of Greeks
bearing gifts. A rose to question Jesus’s crown of thorns and the reign of his sexless
apostles that still rule us with the divine sin of sex. A rose to rethink what was old about
the New World, and what was new about the Old World, the difference and sameness of
colonists and natives, conquerors and explorers, priests and murderers, slaves and
saints, soldiers and traitors. A rose to challenge who deserves roses laid at their tombs
or bronze statues praised in our parks.
A rose to ponder the ignorance of our two continents, not named by Columbus, not named
Aztecia, or Tainoca, or Mayaland, or Seminolia; but named “the Americans,” after the
Florentine nickname of Amerigo Vespucci, like a father we never knew christened us. A
rose to question why a rose by any other name is—or is not—the same. A rose for the
songs of native tribes dancing with their ancestors’ ghosts, and ask them if their empires
would—or would not be—free of greed, war, genocide. A rose to doubt the lying lines of
maps with their tentacles of named streets, rivers, and borders, unlike the gnarled roots
of our mangroves that claim nothing but the worthless marsh of anonymous seawater.
A rose to admire anew the elusive beauty of the rose you redrew, rebloomed, recalculated
with the elegance of equations and proportion of sacred numbers. A rose for you, mon
frère. A rose for me, your hermano, as I step out of your studio, drenched by an impossible
rain of petals from a cloudless sky, and gladly I blossom suddenly, and again, and forever
into a gorgeous question.
Richard Blanco is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet. Blanco’s first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, was published in 1998 to critical acclaim, winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Directions to the Beach of the Dead, published in 2005, won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. In 2012, Blanco's third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel, was published; received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award. To help heal the emotional wounds of the Boston Marathon bombings, he wrote “Boston Strong,” a poem he performed at the TD Boston Garden Benefit Concert and at a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park. In 2015, the Academy of American Poets chose Blanco to serve as its first Education Ambassador. He has been named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College and the University of Rhode Island. He has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, as well as major media from around the world, including CNN, Telemundo, AC360, BBC, Univision, and PBS. Blanco’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Huffington Post, and Condé Nast Traveler. He is co-creator of the blog Bridges to/from Cuba: Lifting the Emotional Embargo, which provides a cultural and artistic platform for sharing the real lives and complex emotional histories of thousands of Cubans across the globe.
A rose for the rose of your voice that greets and embraces me at your studio door as mon
frère. A rose for our brotherhood and the cafecito you brew for me, mi hermano. A rose
for the royal palms of my Havana’s malecón that in our minds also sway along the
Champs-Élysées of your Paris: one city, one country, one geography, one heart.
A rose for the velvet ripples of the waves that serenaded us into marrying Miami as natives.
A rose for the bay’s salty-perfume breezing through your window and inhaled by the
colors of your paintings. A rose for your paintbrushes arranged like bouquets in rusty-
can vases, for the sunlight abloom as we settle into wobbly lawn chairs, trying to steady
ourselves in one another’s art of words in images, and images in words, as we’ve done
for a lifetime.
A rose for the memories of our budding youth, seated at dinner parties or bar stools, our full-
bodied talk as tender as the tears of wine in our glasses, toasting not to the answers that
good art gives us, but to the questions that great art asks us to ask. Now, our souls again
flower in the roses of each other’s eyes gazing at your imagination that’s exploded a rose
into petals of paint, strewed over your canvas, and spiraled back into a fresh rose to
rewind history, question all its crude beauty, its chance fate, its calculated chaos, its clear
blur.
A rose to ask the coil of serpents why they killed Laocoön’s sons that bore our fear of Greeks
bearing gifts. A rose to question Jesus’s crown of thorns and the reign of his sexless
apostles that still rule us with the divine sin of sex. A rose to rethink what was old about
the New World, and what was new about the Old World, the difference and sameness of
colonists and natives, conquerors and explorers, priests and murderers, slaves and
saints, soldiers and traitors. A rose to challenge who deserves roses laid at their tombs
or bronze statues praised in our parks.
A rose to ponder the ignorance of our two continents, not named by Columbus, not named
Aztecia, or Tainoca, or Mayaland, or Seminolia; but named “the Americans,” after the
Florentine nickname of Amerigo Vespucci, like a father we never knew christened us. A
rose to question why a rose by any other name is—or is not—the same. A rose for the
songs of native tribes dancing with their ancestors’ ghosts, and ask them if their empires
would—or would not be—free of greed, war, genocide. A rose to doubt the lying lines of
maps with their tentacles of named streets, rivers, and borders, unlike the gnarled roots
of our mangroves that claim nothing but the worthless marsh of anonymous seawater.
A rose to admire anew the elusive beauty of the rose you redrew, rebloomed, recalculated
with the elegance of equations and proportion of sacred numbers. A rose for you, mon
frère. A rose for me, your hermano, as I step out of your studio, drenched by an impossible
rain of petals from a cloudless sky, and gladly I blossom suddenly, and again, and forever
into a gorgeous question.
Richard Blanco is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet. Blanco’s first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, was published in 1998 to critical acclaim, winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Directions to the Beach of the Dead, published in 2005, won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. In 2012, Blanco's third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel, was published; received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award. To help heal the emotional wounds of the Boston Marathon bombings, he wrote “Boston Strong,” a poem he performed at the TD Boston Garden Benefit Concert and at a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park. In 2015, the Academy of American Poets chose Blanco to serve as its first Education Ambassador. He has been named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College and the University of Rhode Island. He has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, as well as major media from around the world, including CNN, Telemundo, AC360, BBC, Univision, and PBS. Blanco’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Huffington Post, and Condé Nast Traveler. He is co-creator of the blog Bridges to/from Cuba: Lifting the Emotional Embargo, which provides a cultural and artistic platform for sharing the real lives and complex emotional histories of thousands of Cubans across the globe.
Flose Boursiquot
Small Town Bar
Sitting with my lover
listening to that ol’ bluegrass
Santa-man plucking his banjo
can’t stop thinking about
who’s coming through the door
in this big ol’ America
this small ol’ town
can’t stop fearing
that my white lover
may have to pluck
my brain off this wood floor.
Flose Boursiquot is a Haitian-born poet and writer. Her work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Ghost City Press, South Florida Poetry Journal (interview), Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, HuffPost. In 2017, BET named Flose one of its millennial poets to watch. The Malala Foundation's Assembly Platform featured Flose's story and spoken word poem "March On Sister" in their September 2018 issue. Flose has two collections of self-published poetry: Close Your Eyes, Now Breathe (2017) & loudmouth (2018). She teaches "Find Your Voice," a spoken word workshop, to adults and children.
Sitting with my lover
listening to that ol’ bluegrass
Santa-man plucking his banjo
can’t stop thinking about
who’s coming through the door
in this big ol’ America
this small ol’ town
can’t stop fearing
that my white lover
may have to pluck
my brain off this wood floor.
Flose Boursiquot is a Haitian-born poet and writer. Her work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Ghost City Press, South Florida Poetry Journal (interview), Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, HuffPost. In 2017, BET named Flose one of its millennial poets to watch. The Malala Foundation's Assembly Platform featured Flose's story and spoken word poem "March On Sister" in their September 2018 issue. Flose has two collections of self-published poetry: Close Your Eyes, Now Breathe (2017) & loudmouth (2018). She teaches "Find Your Voice," a spoken word workshop, to adults and children.
Oliver Brantome
For a Friend Without Papers
You once told me about la Difunta Correa,
a saint in Argentina whose baby was found
still suckling on the everlasting breast milk
of his long-deceased mother.
In search of her sick husband, she hiked
miles with the baby at her side until her thirst
and hunger consumed her. Even in death,
her ever-full breast nourished the baby.
He lived for four days off his mother’s milk
alone, which they called a miracle.
A century and a half later, you were born
already tired of breathing, one lung hidden
behind the other. Your father trekked for miles
from Mendoza to San Juan to offer
la Difunta Correa flowers. He placed one
on each of her lungs and lay sobbing
at her side, while in a hospital far
from el campo, the saint nursed you to health
and called you a miracle.
Today la Difunta lays on a bed of flowers, a mattress
of prayers, bosom adorned with gold chalices, feet
blessed by campesinos, those distant cousins of ours.
Her effigy sleeps in Vallecito, her baby at her chest,
a doll made of porcelain and hope, her name
emblazoned – Saint of Travelers.
Years later, you too, travelled from Mendoza
to Miami in search of shelter. I tell you
our Saint of Travelers is a woman made of stone,
housed in New York. Our Mother of Exiles.
You tell me she can’t help you, her spirit’s
been dead for four long years, but still
you pray to the living Difunta Correa,
pray for another miracle to pour from the well
of her breasts, her lamp beside the golden door,
your lungs tired again, still struggling
to breathe free.
Oliver Brantome is a queer Latinx writer from Miami, FL. Their work has been previously published by Apogee Literary Journal and Into the Void Magazine. Oliver is studying English at Florida International University and has passions for anthropology, art history, philosophical anarchism, and possums. IG: @venom_versed
You once told me about la Difunta Correa,
a saint in Argentina whose baby was found
still suckling on the everlasting breast milk
of his long-deceased mother.
In search of her sick husband, she hiked
miles with the baby at her side until her thirst
and hunger consumed her. Even in death,
her ever-full breast nourished the baby.
He lived for four days off his mother’s milk
alone, which they called a miracle.
A century and a half later, you were born
already tired of breathing, one lung hidden
behind the other. Your father trekked for miles
from Mendoza to San Juan to offer
la Difunta Correa flowers. He placed one
on each of her lungs and lay sobbing
at her side, while in a hospital far
from el campo, the saint nursed you to health
and called you a miracle.
Today la Difunta lays on a bed of flowers, a mattress
of prayers, bosom adorned with gold chalices, feet
blessed by campesinos, those distant cousins of ours.
Her effigy sleeps in Vallecito, her baby at her chest,
a doll made of porcelain and hope, her name
emblazoned – Saint of Travelers.
Years later, you too, travelled from Mendoza
to Miami in search of shelter. I tell you
our Saint of Travelers is a woman made of stone,
housed in New York. Our Mother of Exiles.
You tell me she can’t help you, her spirit’s
been dead for four long years, but still
you pray to the living Difunta Correa,
pray for another miracle to pour from the well
of her breasts, her lamp beside the golden door,
your lungs tired again, still struggling
to breathe free.
Oliver Brantome is a queer Latinx writer from Miami, FL. Their work has been previously published by Apogee Literary Journal and Into the Void Magazine. Oliver is studying English at Florida International University and has passions for anthropology, art history, philosophical anarchism, and possums. IG: @venom_versed
Marisa P. Clark
Poem for Three Lost Friends
The breeze still carries the sting
of smoke from wildfires
hundreds of miles distant.
Those with families or better
sense than mine have drawn
their curtains for the night,
but if someone chanced to look
outside, she might see my silhouette
led by a little dog straining
at his leash, ours the only movement
among shadows. Autumn into winter,
the three bright stars of Orion’s belt
stood stacked over the mountains
in the east: a guidepost, a kind
of sky sentinel, companionship
I could count on. Springtime now,
their light has dimmed. They lie
stretched above the horizon
in the west and point north
to a conjunction in Taurus
of Venus and the moon:
Venus a beaming beauty
mark beside the moon’s thin grin
that must not be trusted. They vie
for attention I must not give.
Too soon I will lose sight
of Orion’s belt. The moon will fill,
go dark, and grin again, and it
and Venus will part ways.
But constellations do not move
or lose their light—it’s the earth
that tilts and spins, my point
of view that shifts—and when
stars disappear, I must keep faith.
The little dog draws me back
home. In the morning I will stir
sugar into water, hang
feeders in the garden, and await
the hummingbirds’ return.
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer from the South whose work has appeared in Apalachee Review, Cream City Review, Potomac Review, Epiphany, Foglifter, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, and many others, with work forthcoming in Shenandoah, Nimrod International Journal, Evening Street Review, and elsewhere. She was twice the winner of the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Prizes (in fiction, 1996; in nonfiction, 1997), and Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. She reads fiction for New England Review and makes her home in New Mexico with three parrots and two dogs.
The breeze still carries the sting
of smoke from wildfires
hundreds of miles distant.
Those with families or better
sense than mine have drawn
their curtains for the night,
but if someone chanced to look
outside, she might see my silhouette
led by a little dog straining
at his leash, ours the only movement
among shadows. Autumn into winter,
the three bright stars of Orion’s belt
stood stacked over the mountains
in the east: a guidepost, a kind
of sky sentinel, companionship
I could count on. Springtime now,
their light has dimmed. They lie
stretched above the horizon
in the west and point north
to a conjunction in Taurus
of Venus and the moon:
Venus a beaming beauty
mark beside the moon’s thin grin
that must not be trusted. They vie
for attention I must not give.
Too soon I will lose sight
of Orion’s belt. The moon will fill,
go dark, and grin again, and it
and Venus will part ways.
But constellations do not move
or lose their light—it’s the earth
that tilts and spins, my point
of view that shifts—and when
stars disappear, I must keep faith.
The little dog draws me back
home. In the morning I will stir
sugar into water, hang
feeders in the garden, and await
the hummingbirds’ return.
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer from the South whose work has appeared in Apalachee Review, Cream City Review, Potomac Review, Epiphany, Foglifter, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, and many others, with work forthcoming in Shenandoah, Nimrod International Journal, Evening Street Review, and elsewhere. She was twice the winner of the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Prizes (in fiction, 1996; in nonfiction, 1997), and Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. She reads fiction for New England Review and makes her home in New Mexico with three parrots and two dogs.
Jennifer Coon
Ode to Parentheses
(from the mother of a transgender child)
Without you, I never would have gotten over my divorce
from certainty, and I would have flown apart
without your crescent-moon arms holding me,
yet you never crowded me, never
hemmed me in like a circle (or like your conservative
cousin, the box), and it’s true, no matter how tightly
I pulled you in close or pushed on your arms
(my body held fast between them)
I know you sustained me in your insisting,
yes, your insisting, I hold myself
as I held him in his becoming
(who he already was),
for I believe you inspired the idea that I slip
a photo of her (the her I thought he once
used to be) into all the frames behind the images
of him, which I never told him (that information
is tucked into the envelope of you too),
and I implore you:
protect me from the run-on sentences that can barrel
through me like terror
on the back of a wild horse, like the one that ends in the
bathroom at the end
of a hall where ignorance and aggression have made their
home
in some faceless boys
who wait for my boy and
(stop, you tell me, remind me that’s just
in my imagination, come back to now)
which is his 16th birthday,
today
and he is tanned and happy
(and safe)
I find you reflected in the arc of my ear,
and in the supporting underwire that pinches
when he cries into my chest, I am certain
my imagination tipped you onto your side
when the grief (or fear) would rise and roll
through me, making you a shelter above me
and the curve of a boat underneath.
Jennifer Coon is a child and adult psychologist, working and living in the Boston area. She was inspired into poetry by her father, Miles Coon, who founded the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
(from the mother of a transgender child)
Without you, I never would have gotten over my divorce
from certainty, and I would have flown apart
without your crescent-moon arms holding me,
yet you never crowded me, never
hemmed me in like a circle (or like your conservative
cousin, the box), and it’s true, no matter how tightly
I pulled you in close or pushed on your arms
(my body held fast between them)
I know you sustained me in your insisting,
yes, your insisting, I hold myself
as I held him in his becoming
(who he already was),
for I believe you inspired the idea that I slip
a photo of her (the her I thought he once
used to be) into all the frames behind the images
of him, which I never told him (that information
is tucked into the envelope of you too),
and I implore you:
protect me from the run-on sentences that can barrel
through me like terror
on the back of a wild horse, like the one that ends in the
bathroom at the end
of a hall where ignorance and aggression have made their
home
in some faceless boys
who wait for my boy and
(stop, you tell me, remind me that’s just
in my imagination, come back to now)
which is his 16th birthday,
today
and he is tanned and happy
(and safe)
I find you reflected in the arc of my ear,
and in the supporting underwire that pinches
when he cries into my chest, I am certain
my imagination tipped you onto your side
when the grief (or fear) would rise and roll
through me, making you a shelter above me
and the curve of a boat underneath.
Jennifer Coon is a child and adult psychologist, working and living in the Boston area. She was inspired into poetry by her father, Miles Coon, who founded the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
Ken Craft 2 poems
The Morning After
The kitchen ceiling is a soft cirrus of cigarette smoke,
and the white globe light Mom loves glows like a full
gaseous moon. Below, a table dotted with coin kitties
and napkin-bedded baskets, chips and Chex mix,
onion and clam dips, ashtrays of butts bent 90 degrees,
some ringed with lipstick, some slipped off the edge. Sounds
tinny and thin through the tube of time: radio jazz, Kennedy
halves and quarters sliding like silver pucks across polished
wood. Card-shuffling and ice cubes clinking in highball glasses
while a colorful array of alcohol gurgles through half-gallon
stoppers: rum, whiskey, bourbon, gin, vodka, chased by club
soda, coke, tonic, orange dry, ginger ale, water. In memory,
hours and minutes sprint by, stopping only for Sundays. Talk
and laughter grow louder as we grow little-kid groggier, falling
asleep in our beds up the hall, dreaming of family, friends, and
neighbors who never grow old and never feel pain and never die
of lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver or, God save us, natural
causes. In memory, we eat Trix or Cocoa Puffs or Frosted Flakes as
Mother comes out of her room in her housecoat Sunday morning.
She’s squinting against a sunrise of empties and glasses half-filled
with dead ice, the accordioned remains in ashtrays, the wounded
bottles of liquor, brown and green and clear. She’s turning back
for the refuge of her room, saying: “Boys, could you put the bottles
away for me, please? I can’t stand looking at them in the morning.”
The kitchen ceiling is a soft cirrus of cigarette smoke,
and the white globe light Mom loves glows like a full
gaseous moon. Below, a table dotted with coin kitties
and napkin-bedded baskets, chips and Chex mix,
onion and clam dips, ashtrays of butts bent 90 degrees,
some ringed with lipstick, some slipped off the edge. Sounds
tinny and thin through the tube of time: radio jazz, Kennedy
halves and quarters sliding like silver pucks across polished
wood. Card-shuffling and ice cubes clinking in highball glasses
while a colorful array of alcohol gurgles through half-gallon
stoppers: rum, whiskey, bourbon, gin, vodka, chased by club
soda, coke, tonic, orange dry, ginger ale, water. In memory,
hours and minutes sprint by, stopping only for Sundays. Talk
and laughter grow louder as we grow little-kid groggier, falling
asleep in our beds up the hall, dreaming of family, friends, and
neighbors who never grow old and never feel pain and never die
of lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver or, God save us, natural
causes. In memory, we eat Trix or Cocoa Puffs or Frosted Flakes as
Mother comes out of her room in her housecoat Sunday morning.
She’s squinting against a sunrise of empties and glasses half-filled
with dead ice, the accordioned remains in ashtrays, the wounded
bottles of liquor, brown and green and clear. She’s turning back
for the refuge of her room, saying: “Boys, could you put the bottles
away for me, please? I can’t stand looking at them in the morning.”
Crazy Cat Lady
A friendly neighbor told me first. Crazy Cat Lady, who lived on the hill across the street, died
Monday night. I did not know her, but I knew her garbage. Instead of using receptacles, she
drove down her long driveway to deposit plastic bags of trash. On cue Wednesday
mornings, congregationalist crows tore them open, lobbing litter like dogs digging showers of
dirt: used Kleenex, Amazon-dot-cardboard, crusty Lean Cuisines trays. But especially cat food
tins reeking of salmon, chicken, and Cat Lady indifference.
Tired of picking up wind- and crow-blown refuse, I took to tossing cat food tins back on her
driveway each night. Listening to the tinkling sound gave me Old Testament pleasure. The
euphony of light landings on macadam! That and hearing the wheels of her Ford flattening Fancy
Feast cans into coins of retribution.
And though her death gave me pause, I’d be less than honest if I didn’t acknowledge the
ancillary succor. No more marching around my lawn plucking cans by flashlight! No more
flinging diminutive tin Frisbees across the street!
Only later did I consider her cats. How they might be meowing in dark rooms each night.
Rubbing against empty Cat Lady cardigans hanging from Cat Lady chairs, the cotton still
smelling of Cat Lady cologne. Pressing paws against cool window panes while staring hungrily
across the street at the farmer down below. The one who once harvested cans of cat food by
flashlight.
Ken Craft ‘s poems have appeared in The Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily, Plainsong, Spillway, Slant, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Lost Sherpa of Happiness (Kelsay Books, 2017) and The Indifferent World (Future Cycle Press, 2016).
A friendly neighbor told me first. Crazy Cat Lady, who lived on the hill across the street, died
Monday night. I did not know her, but I knew her garbage. Instead of using receptacles, she
drove down her long driveway to deposit plastic bags of trash. On cue Wednesday
mornings, congregationalist crows tore them open, lobbing litter like dogs digging showers of
dirt: used Kleenex, Amazon-dot-cardboard, crusty Lean Cuisines trays. But especially cat food
tins reeking of salmon, chicken, and Cat Lady indifference.
Tired of picking up wind- and crow-blown refuse, I took to tossing cat food tins back on her
driveway each night. Listening to the tinkling sound gave me Old Testament pleasure. The
euphony of light landings on macadam! That and hearing the wheels of her Ford flattening Fancy
Feast cans into coins of retribution.
And though her death gave me pause, I’d be less than honest if I didn’t acknowledge the
ancillary succor. No more marching around my lawn plucking cans by flashlight! No more
flinging diminutive tin Frisbees across the street!
Only later did I consider her cats. How they might be meowing in dark rooms each night.
Rubbing against empty Cat Lady cardigans hanging from Cat Lady chairs, the cotton still
smelling of Cat Lady cologne. Pressing paws against cool window panes while staring hungrily
across the street at the farmer down below. The one who once harvested cans of cat food by
flashlight.
Ken Craft ‘s poems have appeared in The Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily, Plainsong, Spillway, Slant, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Lost Sherpa of Happiness (Kelsay Books, 2017) and The Indifferent World (Future Cycle Press, 2016).
Jessica Cuello
Ode to Loneliness
You are a room with no door,
the innermost white ash
of the fire, a wool
coat with X’s
sewn on the inside.
You are a liar.
We lie side by side
You shape the ceiling face,
sing from the iron vent,
whisper to the one-armed boy.
When the child wakes
in the empty house, you
are waiting. They say
you live in fields of snow
but you hate starkness.
I breathe your cool skin
You are a gravestone face,
a nursery rhyme in the body,
the old man who played one,
who played knick-knack on my thumb.
When the nurse’s tender fingers
touch your neck, you cry,
your nerves are pale strikes
of lightning across the silent lake.
We touch with just eyes
You read to rid yourself
of invisibility, and at night,
become a lone toll-booth worker
hunched with fluorescent desire.
Jessica Cuello is the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016) and Hunt (The Word Works, 2017). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award (for Pricking), The 2016 Washington Prize (for Hunt), The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and most recently, The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. Her newest poems are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Cave Wall, Bat City Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street. Website: jessicacuello.wordpress.com, Twitter: @JessicaACuello, Instagram: jessacuello.
You are a room with no door,
the innermost white ash
of the fire, a wool
coat with X’s
sewn on the inside.
You are a liar.
We lie side by side
You shape the ceiling face,
sing from the iron vent,
whisper to the one-armed boy.
When the child wakes
in the empty house, you
are waiting. They say
you live in fields of snow
but you hate starkness.
I breathe your cool skin
You are a gravestone face,
a nursery rhyme in the body,
the old man who played one,
who played knick-knack on my thumb.
When the nurse’s tender fingers
touch your neck, you cry,
your nerves are pale strikes
of lightning across the silent lake.
We touch with just eyes
You read to rid yourself
of invisibility, and at night,
become a lone toll-booth worker
hunched with fluorescent desire.
Jessica Cuello is the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016) and Hunt (The Word Works, 2017). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award (for Pricking), The 2016 Washington Prize (for Hunt), The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and most recently, The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. Her newest poems are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Cave Wall, Bat City Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street. Website: jessicacuello.wordpress.com, Twitter: @JessicaACuello, Instagram: jessacuello.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle 2 poems
Under Campestral Skies
When the field
of her brain
was tilled bare
my grandmother
spoke only
in verse.
windows framed
the slow sea.
Her voice
Untethered, rose
a far-off moon:
unrecognizable.
***
Years turn a field,
once thick with rye
fallow and pocked
by gopher holes.
It took less than an hour
for my mother’s mind
to lose its moor,
drift off. Her ravenous
eyes stare from the deep
sea, drifting out. And us,
left standing on shore
under all this sky.
When the field
of her brain
was tilled bare
my grandmother
spoke only
in verse.
windows framed
the slow sea.
Her voice
Untethered, rose
a far-off moon:
unrecognizable.
***
Years turn a field,
once thick with rye
fallow and pocked
by gopher holes.
It took less than an hour
for my mother’s mind
to lose its moor,
drift off. Her ravenous
eyes stare from the deep
sea, drifting out. And us,
left standing on shore
under all this sky.
You, who I could not save, listen to me.
The hills have gone golden, mute with time’s pass.
One month. Two. Plathing. Little death cave dug
out in my heart, crawled into. At night stars
still explode in their furious milky
fire. Say stay. Say look up. Say dig out--
The surgeons say the brain liberated
from the skullcap is beautiful;
Did you bloom in your last hours,
Mother? No one looked under. We only
stood. Vigil. Combing straight hair,
gold as the hills. As you stilled.
Listen to this: I heard your protest.
It dug into me pulling me
apart. The faint scent
of lavender and rosemary
lingers on the fog.
When the hills will green again.
I will try and let you go.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive will be published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers'Conference.
The hills have gone golden, mute with time’s pass.
One month. Two. Plathing. Little death cave dug
out in my heart, crawled into. At night stars
still explode in their furious milky
fire. Say stay. Say look up. Say dig out--
The surgeons say the brain liberated
from the skullcap is beautiful;
Did you bloom in your last hours,
Mother? No one looked under. We only
stood. Vigil. Combing straight hair,
gold as the hills. As you stilled.
Listen to this: I heard your protest.
It dug into me pulling me
apart. The faint scent
of lavender and rosemary
lingers on the fog.
When the hills will green again.
I will try and let you go.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive will be published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers'Conference.
Jason Gallagher
How to Spend Time Alone
Be codependent.
Find yourself obsessing over your ex's
Instagram feed at two in the morning. Tell
Yourself it is not okay to be single. Do not
Do self-care. Don't write in a journal. Call
The girl you met on Tindr last week and
See if she'll marry you. If she says, “No,”
Go on Tindr and find someone who will.
Think about the longest, happiest, relationship
You know of and be envious of that couple.
Listen to Neil Young's “Only Love Can Break
Your Heart” on repeat. Go on eBay and
Purchase the Neil Young record on 45.
Spend three hours trolling eBay for
The things you left at your ex's apartment.
Cry.
Jason Gallagher was a contributing editor at Evergreen Review. He is a member of The Unbearables poetry collective. His poetry has appeared in The Otter, Boog City, and the first issue of POSTblank, as well as in Kind of a Hurricane Press anthologies The Seasons and Storm Cycle. He has published academic work on Native American authors and has also had his reviews published in Sensitive Skin, Gainsayer and The Otter. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works as an adjunct English instructor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Westchester Community College and Brooklyn College. He is currently a student at the University of Tampa, MFA program.
Be codependent.
Find yourself obsessing over your ex's
Instagram feed at two in the morning. Tell
Yourself it is not okay to be single. Do not
Do self-care. Don't write in a journal. Call
The girl you met on Tindr last week and
See if she'll marry you. If she says, “No,”
Go on Tindr and find someone who will.
Think about the longest, happiest, relationship
You know of and be envious of that couple.
Listen to Neil Young's “Only Love Can Break
Your Heart” on repeat. Go on eBay and
Purchase the Neil Young record on 45.
Spend three hours trolling eBay for
The things you left at your ex's apartment.
Cry.
Jason Gallagher was a contributing editor at Evergreen Review. He is a member of The Unbearables poetry collective. His poetry has appeared in The Otter, Boog City, and the first issue of POSTblank, as well as in Kind of a Hurricane Press anthologies The Seasons and Storm Cycle. He has published academic work on Native American authors and has also had his reviews published in Sensitive Skin, Gainsayer and The Otter. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works as an adjunct English instructor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Westchester Community College and Brooklyn College. He is currently a student at the University of Tampa, MFA program.
Zan Gay
Prunes
Plums, plump purple, sometimes given
as fruit of the day after dinner.
When dried, prunes.
“How do you say prunes in Yiddish?”
overheard at breakfast
where everyone sits at the same tables
day after day. They wake up
to life’s fragility --
Herman 102 pulled along by his younger wife
who will endure his funeral one day soon--
laying to rest
their extraordinary pasts,
only to succumb
to this moment of sustenance:
toast, eggs, prunes.
“I want six prunes.”
Not one less
nor one more
as if she has already counted out her days.
Zan Gay enjoyed art reference library work for many years. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as South Florida Poetry Review, Feminist Studies, Phoebe, Slant, and Tigertail.
Plums, plump purple, sometimes given
as fruit of the day after dinner.
When dried, prunes.
“How do you say prunes in Yiddish?”
overheard at breakfast
where everyone sits at the same tables
day after day. They wake up
to life’s fragility --
Herman 102 pulled along by his younger wife
who will endure his funeral one day soon--
laying to rest
their extraordinary pasts,
only to succumb
to this moment of sustenance:
toast, eggs, prunes.
“I want six prunes.”
Not one less
nor one more
as if she has already counted out her days.
Zan Gay enjoyed art reference library work for many years. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as South Florida Poetry Review, Feminist Studies, Phoebe, Slant, and Tigertail.
Stephen Gibson
Stephen Gibson judges the Palm Beach Poetry Festival's annual Art Couture Ekphrastic Poetry Contest whose winners appear in this issue's Special Section
American Tanka
I.
He was just a kid, just a junior in high school, just a normal kid—he ran the mile in track; he had friends, not just teammates.
II.
He liked Instagram, sending stupid stuff to friends, and Twitter, Snapchat—girls lip-synching on Tik Tok—never a fan of Facebook.
III.
He packed it for school, a forty-five caliber, in his school backpack, along with his books and lunch, and his tablet for classes.
IV.
The girl was fifteen—she just happened to be there—she was by herself: her mother had dropped her off before she drove off to work.
V.
He shot the boy next—he didn’t know the dead boy—the boy looked at him; after the girl, others ran—the boy didn’t: he just stared.
VI.
Kids said the gun jammed—after he shot three others—then he shot himself; police were there in minutes, said there were no more bullets.
VII.
After “shots fired,” the school went into lockdown: classrooms locked/lights off, all of the hallways empty, just as it had been practiced.
VIII.
After the shooting, during the news conference, the mayor spoke first, followed by the police chief, who took most of the questions.
IX.
It was his birthday—he did it on his birthday—there was no warning, no social media threats, everything appeared normal.
X.
He had a girlfriend, never missed an assignment, never late for class, and always did well on tests: what classmates who knew him said.
Stephen Gibson’s Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror won the 2017 Miller Williams Prize, selected by Billy Collins, University of Arkansas Press. His six previous collections are The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas), Frescoes (Idaho Book Prize, Lost Horse Press), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/Intuit House Book Prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen). His poetry has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, Notre Dame Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
I.
He was just a kid, just a junior in high school, just a normal kid—he ran the mile in track; he had friends, not just teammates.
II.
He liked Instagram, sending stupid stuff to friends, and Twitter, Snapchat—girls lip-synching on Tik Tok—never a fan of Facebook.
III.
He packed it for school, a forty-five caliber, in his school backpack, along with his books and lunch, and his tablet for classes.
IV.
The girl was fifteen—she just happened to be there—she was by herself: her mother had dropped her off before she drove off to work.
V.
He shot the boy next—he didn’t know the dead boy—the boy looked at him; after the girl, others ran—the boy didn’t: he just stared.
VI.
Kids said the gun jammed—after he shot three others—then he shot himself; police were there in minutes, said there were no more bullets.
VII.
After “shots fired,” the school went into lockdown: classrooms locked/lights off, all of the hallways empty, just as it had been practiced.
VIII.
After the shooting, during the news conference, the mayor spoke first, followed by the police chief, who took most of the questions.
IX.
It was his birthday—he did it on his birthday—there was no warning, no social media threats, everything appeared normal.
X.
He had a girlfriend, never missed an assignment, never late for class, and always did well on tests: what classmates who knew him said.
Stephen Gibson’s Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror won the 2017 Miller Williams Prize, selected by Billy Collins, University of Arkansas Press. His six previous collections are The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas), Frescoes (Idaho Book Prize, Lost Horse Press), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/Intuit House Book Prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen). His poetry has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, Notre Dame Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
D. R. James
Falsetto Bellow
We wink at the crooks, our remnant like that
anvil we keep tossing each other, our
residue like saluting. We clutch the
banner of a warrened world whose tunnels,
unsolvable, incarcerate, swelter,
and incinerate us. Observe the birds
who nimbly duck and pitch. I dreamt of an
arrow arced over rooftops. My lens was
contoured to renew, expectant of some
flexing. I lash my spiked pulse to that view.
D. R. James lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His most recent of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is printable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
We wink at the crooks, our remnant like that
anvil we keep tossing each other, our
residue like saluting. We clutch the
banner of a warrened world whose tunnels,
unsolvable, incarcerate, swelter,
and incinerate us. Observe the birds
who nimbly duck and pitch. I dreamt of an
arrow arced over rooftops. My lens was
contoured to renew, expectant of some
flexing. I lash my spiked pulse to that view.
D. R. James lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His most recent of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is printable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
Bosch Jones
Tomorrow’s Parties
call it a win for magic
in thinking the beanpole
got the whole business
right at the tippy top
so let’s go hang there
get handed another hurt
headful of garden variety
gargantuan banana
pathogen positively critical
& perfectly presidential
it’s just as well because
It’s true we could really
use a friend right now
so we’re making you it
suggesting one might
offer a prayer like help
me be a better man you
had better believe it
daily & after that gamble
with a seasoned high roller
considered responsible
as a scarlet devotion
is designed to con-
fuse & will orchestrate
our fugue oblivion
state of Aurora Borealis
euthanasia’s like I wish
I was a little bar of soap
once you realize we have
exhausted every stretch
hanging a bunch of clean
birdhouses in the trees
when a bottom isn’t that
great like on the little guy
there what you do is you
take & put him lowest.
Bosch Jones is a poet, artist, & performer residing in South Florida. Poems will have appeared in Paris Review, La Presa, IMPACT magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Blood and Tears: a collection of poems for Mathew Shepard, and the Grabbed Anthology forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2020.
call it a win for magic
in thinking the beanpole
got the whole business
right at the tippy top
so let’s go hang there
get handed another hurt
headful of garden variety
gargantuan banana
pathogen positively critical
& perfectly presidential
it’s just as well because
It’s true we could really
use a friend right now
so we’re making you it
suggesting one might
offer a prayer like help
me be a better man you
had better believe it
daily & after that gamble
with a seasoned high roller
considered responsible
as a scarlet devotion
is designed to con-
fuse & will orchestrate
our fugue oblivion
state of Aurora Borealis
euthanasia’s like I wish
I was a little bar of soap
once you realize we have
exhausted every stretch
hanging a bunch of clean
birdhouses in the trees
when a bottom isn’t that
great like on the little guy
there what you do is you
take & put him lowest.
Bosch Jones is a poet, artist, & performer residing in South Florida. Poems will have appeared in Paris Review, La Presa, IMPACT magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Blood and Tears: a collection of poems for Mathew Shepard, and the Grabbed Anthology forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2020.
Jen Karetnick 2 poems
How to Play Wet Rag Tag
First, find a bucket. Not the terra cotta planter nurturing your mother’s perennials. Not the
Styrofoam Dallas Cowboys’ cooler where your father nestles bottles of lager into a jigsaw of
slush on game days. Not the sticky plastic pitcher, daisies emblazoned under the beaked lip,
where wasps drop into the lemonade your sister mixes and sells every same summer, though few
cars drive down this street, valleyed between the long, pleading arms of hills.
The Rubbermaid that holds a car chamois and dog shampoo will do. Follow the hose from the
dripping faucet, where it is fixed next to the front door and the husky panting on the stoop, to
where it nestles like a slug, not yet salted to melt in the sun, irrigating the shoots of future salads
you will refuse to eat. Unscrew the sprinkler head. Ignore the stars of rust shooting across your
shorts and drink, challenging the molars that emerge from gums like battery tops in a flashlight.
Fill the bucket and when your sister isn’t looking, crack into it ice from the trays in the freezer.
Forget to return them, reloaded; you’ll be grounded later anyway for something else. Now you
need a rag. Consider the chamois, but even soaked it’s too sweet to the skin to leave a mark.
Settle for the ripped hand towel your sister mushrooms along the furniture, clouding dust that
glitters in the war of air currents.
Collect the neighborhood kids, elect yourself and the other oldest boy captains. Make sure your
sister is never on your side. Think of the wet rag like a pitched baseball, an extension of your
lengthening hand, the material striking like a reprimand. Between the oak and crabapple, peg her
face again and again. Claim bad aim. Say these count and she’s out. Let it be known: No matter
how fast she mashes that grassy sponge, no matter when her fingertips skim the bark, she’ll
never find the safety of home base.
First, find a bucket. Not the terra cotta planter nurturing your mother’s perennials. Not the
Styrofoam Dallas Cowboys’ cooler where your father nestles bottles of lager into a jigsaw of
slush on game days. Not the sticky plastic pitcher, daisies emblazoned under the beaked lip,
where wasps drop into the lemonade your sister mixes and sells every same summer, though few
cars drive down this street, valleyed between the long, pleading arms of hills.
The Rubbermaid that holds a car chamois and dog shampoo will do. Follow the hose from the
dripping faucet, where it is fixed next to the front door and the husky panting on the stoop, to
where it nestles like a slug, not yet salted to melt in the sun, irrigating the shoots of future salads
you will refuse to eat. Unscrew the sprinkler head. Ignore the stars of rust shooting across your
shorts and drink, challenging the molars that emerge from gums like battery tops in a flashlight.
Fill the bucket and when your sister isn’t looking, crack into it ice from the trays in the freezer.
Forget to return them, reloaded; you’ll be grounded later anyway for something else. Now you
need a rag. Consider the chamois, but even soaked it’s too sweet to the skin to leave a mark.
Settle for the ripped hand towel your sister mushrooms along the furniture, clouding dust that
glitters in the war of air currents.
Collect the neighborhood kids, elect yourself and the other oldest boy captains. Make sure your
sister is never on your side. Think of the wet rag like a pitched baseball, an extension of your
lengthening hand, the material striking like a reprimand. Between the oak and crabapple, peg her
face again and again. Claim bad aim. Say these count and she’s out. Let it be known: No matter
how fast she mashes that grassy sponge, no matter when her fingertips skim the bark, she’ll
never find the safety of home base.
Menopause, There Is No Cause to Grieve
So the heat is heat, the kind that blasts your
breasts off. Like when you leave behind that blip
of cool, the chilled confines of the airport
baggage terminal for the smothering whip
of subtropical air, tinged with exhaust.
Then the bones grow cold, and you’re good for soup
these days, big bowls of pho and goulash
and French onion. Sleep, that’s out of the loop,
but it was never really in it unless
the meds were, too. The chemistry here’s been
failed experiments. A genetic excuse.
And face it—your hair has always been thin.
Now this arrives, like nothing else, on time.
Now your body works, excelling at the dim.
Jen Karetnick is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, forthcoming August 2020); and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks. Her poems have been awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.
So the heat is heat, the kind that blasts your
breasts off. Like when you leave behind that blip
of cool, the chilled confines of the airport
baggage terminal for the smothering whip
of subtropical air, tinged with exhaust.
Then the bones grow cold, and you’re good for soup
these days, big bowls of pho and goulash
and French onion. Sleep, that’s out of the loop,
but it was never really in it unless
the meds were, too. The chemistry here’s been
failed experiments. A genetic excuse.
And face it—your hair has always been thin.
Now this arrives, like nothing else, on time.
Now your body works, excelling at the dim.
Jen Karetnick is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, forthcoming August 2020); and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks. Her poems have been awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.
Lorette C. Luzajic 3 poems
see Devon Balwit’s review of Luzajic's book, Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems in Guest Review this issue
Meat Candy
after Ballon Boy, Mark Ryden, 2000
We were still dancing, there, then, at the old house: Dimitri , you were still alive and Louise was reading Catallus and wearing paisley dresses. The professor, in nothing but rubber underwear, trying to mark papers. You were draped in velvet, arm in the air, wiggling fingers in search of the treble clef. Madonna, the Immaculate Collection, turned up to eleven. I was in the sink with the leftover spaghetti. Too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades: by then, they tasted like the gooey strips of maple salmon you always called meat candy. The baby blue stardust you sprinkled on your face whenever you left the house was twinkling a path to the side mirror; I would follow it through the house to find you whenever I came through the door. We were inseparable, even before we knew there was a virus inside of you, eating you alive. When you knew, you tried to turn back time, turned first to vegan smoothies, then to God. Later, I would bring you new Circuit Party CDs, glossy lip pomades for the sores at the side of your mouth. Hold you while you dry heaved and cried. But for then, for those perfect, fleeting moments, dancing after the rave in our own room, we were high and dreaming. The future was voluptuous and warm and glow-lit, sparkling with glitter. We did not hear the calliope whistle, that slow train coming.
after Ballon Boy, Mark Ryden, 2000
We were still dancing, there, then, at the old house: Dimitri , you were still alive and Louise was reading Catallus and wearing paisley dresses. The professor, in nothing but rubber underwear, trying to mark papers. You were draped in velvet, arm in the air, wiggling fingers in search of the treble clef. Madonna, the Immaculate Collection, turned up to eleven. I was in the sink with the leftover spaghetti. Too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades: by then, they tasted like the gooey strips of maple salmon you always called meat candy. The baby blue stardust you sprinkled on your face whenever you left the house was twinkling a path to the side mirror; I would follow it through the house to find you whenever I came through the door. We were inseparable, even before we knew there was a virus inside of you, eating you alive. When you knew, you tried to turn back time, turned first to vegan smoothies, then to God. Later, I would bring you new Circuit Party CDs, glossy lip pomades for the sores at the side of your mouth. Hold you while you dry heaved and cried. But for then, for those perfect, fleeting moments, dancing after the rave in our own room, we were high and dreaming. The future was voluptuous and warm and glow-lit, sparkling with glitter. We did not hear the calliope whistle, that slow train coming.
Taxidermy Girls
after Joel Peter Witkin
1. The pale one, gaunt and green. Just walked out of an Otto Dix painting, but her girlfriend is even uglier. Her Mad Hatter headgear and bruised pupils have their own currency, but her waddle is Humpty Dumpty, or Twiddle Dum Dee. She is doughy and dumpy, rolly and lumpy, with hirsute arms and stubby paws. I like her immediately.
2. Although she looks fifty, I know she is only half my age. When I was her, I tried, too, to be as odious as possible, shaved the sides of my head, and then all of it. Wore a flowing turquoise peasant mumu and combat boots.
3. They are selling fox paw pendants, rings with teeth, and itty bitty exoskeletons of rare insects. I hold up a brooch of claws and copper wire, try it on my lapel, lay it back in its bed of ribbons and stones. An open jaw relic glimmers with skinny silver chains. I picture the pair of them out treasure hunting in the moors, excavating dead things from under roots and boulders, cold graves.
4. The Jack Sprat one has kohl-sunk eyes. Turns them on a new customer. The wife who could eat no lean scoops up a bleached bone, tells me to hold it to my throat. I feel that wild thing ignite behind my thyroid butterfly, that sense of immensity and power that only death can stir.
5. I ask her how she came to be interested in dead things. She wasn’t, she says, until she met her girlfriend. The tall one has a PhD in insect taxidermy. She herself is finishing her masters degree in human neuroscience. I’m impressed. I buy the lynx necklace. It feels like a wishbone in my palm.
6. Most moments you forget, but some you remember. The first kiss with M. The last line of cocaine. Seeing Bobby Martin saunter up the drive the day he died a thousand miles away. And this one: the moment I took a man’s brain out of a Tupperware and held it in my hands. There were thirteen corpses in the medical morgue that afternoon. I was a visitor, a witness to the students’ human dissection. But all the oozing juice and lipid drips could not distract me from the epic hush of that hunk of dense plasticine. All of the dendrites and synapses were silent, the whole of a life was reduced to a putty mass pumped full of Fermaldehyde. Even so, you could tell: this was rare physical contact with someone’s actual engine. My hands were cupping the seat of the soul.
7. My fixation with death started early. I had to make my peace with the mechanics of murder and the reality of temporality. I was a highly sensitive child, noticed it everywhere, in between the electric sparks of living. I couldn’t let it fell me, so I became fascinated instead. A girl I loved was gang raped and strangled at seventeen. A girl I knew had to get away from her father. Tied a tender knot around her neck, slipped from a backyard cherry tree alongside its blossoms. That was just the beginning.
8. It was what Mother was always threatening to do, but never did.
9. I would stand like a shadow in the doorway and try to reach her, listen to her howl and keen like the ducks she felled on our farm, in the seconds before their silence.
7. The flesh grows weary. Barely middle aged, and I’m already old. I repent of all I did, on purpose by mistake, to poison myself, to stop living. God forgave me, but my body won’t.
8. Still, after giving up everything else, I can’t give up the wine. It’s the only thing that feels like blood.
9. In an ancient Maya cemetery, the week of my art exhibition in the Yucatan, Manuel and I took pictures of the rusty tin boxes giving up their ghosts. There were bones everywhere, skulls propped under vines, leaves blooming in their sunken sockets. It was so hot and humid, and so strange, it was as if I was under water.
10. Witkin used the same things as we did at the graveyard, for his photographs, the same things as the taxidermy girls, as the doctors in the laboratory morgue. Dead things, and the living dead, arranged, sutured, assembled. He had to work in Mexico, where the things he needed for his images were not illegal. Heads, limbs, eyeballs. His black and white medleys of scars and sadomasochism, lard and lust, blood and dust are harrowing, and beautiful. I usually detest shock value art, dismiss it for being too easy. But there is something compelling and compulsive in his grim tableaus. Authenticity? Maybe. Something essentially Catholic. Something pure. They are gelatin-filmed, and macabre, but feel close to the truth.
11. The artist says his works are closer to the Beatitudes than to snuff.
12. When he was five, he witnessed a car crash. In the noise and excitement and terror, he found perfect stillness as a rolling stone tumbled through the chrome and steel shards and landed beside his innocence: the eyes of a pretty little girl stared back at him, unblinking. Just her head, shredded asunder from the rest of her. It was one of those defining moments you don’t choose but never forget. Her absolute loneliness.
after Joel Peter Witkin
1. The pale one, gaunt and green. Just walked out of an Otto Dix painting, but her girlfriend is even uglier. Her Mad Hatter headgear and bruised pupils have their own currency, but her waddle is Humpty Dumpty, or Twiddle Dum Dee. She is doughy and dumpy, rolly and lumpy, with hirsute arms and stubby paws. I like her immediately.
2. Although she looks fifty, I know she is only half my age. When I was her, I tried, too, to be as odious as possible, shaved the sides of my head, and then all of it. Wore a flowing turquoise peasant mumu and combat boots.
3. They are selling fox paw pendants, rings with teeth, and itty bitty exoskeletons of rare insects. I hold up a brooch of claws and copper wire, try it on my lapel, lay it back in its bed of ribbons and stones. An open jaw relic glimmers with skinny silver chains. I picture the pair of them out treasure hunting in the moors, excavating dead things from under roots and boulders, cold graves.
4. The Jack Sprat one has kohl-sunk eyes. Turns them on a new customer. The wife who could eat no lean scoops up a bleached bone, tells me to hold it to my throat. I feel that wild thing ignite behind my thyroid butterfly, that sense of immensity and power that only death can stir.
5. I ask her how she came to be interested in dead things. She wasn’t, she says, until she met her girlfriend. The tall one has a PhD in insect taxidermy. She herself is finishing her masters degree in human neuroscience. I’m impressed. I buy the lynx necklace. It feels like a wishbone in my palm.
6. Most moments you forget, but some you remember. The first kiss with M. The last line of cocaine. Seeing Bobby Martin saunter up the drive the day he died a thousand miles away. And this one: the moment I took a man’s brain out of a Tupperware and held it in my hands. There were thirteen corpses in the medical morgue that afternoon. I was a visitor, a witness to the students’ human dissection. But all the oozing juice and lipid drips could not distract me from the epic hush of that hunk of dense plasticine. All of the dendrites and synapses were silent, the whole of a life was reduced to a putty mass pumped full of Fermaldehyde. Even so, you could tell: this was rare physical contact with someone’s actual engine. My hands were cupping the seat of the soul.
7. My fixation with death started early. I had to make my peace with the mechanics of murder and the reality of temporality. I was a highly sensitive child, noticed it everywhere, in between the electric sparks of living. I couldn’t let it fell me, so I became fascinated instead. A girl I loved was gang raped and strangled at seventeen. A girl I knew had to get away from her father. Tied a tender knot around her neck, slipped from a backyard cherry tree alongside its blossoms. That was just the beginning.
8. It was what Mother was always threatening to do, but never did.
9. I would stand like a shadow in the doorway and try to reach her, listen to her howl and keen like the ducks she felled on our farm, in the seconds before their silence.
7. The flesh grows weary. Barely middle aged, and I’m already old. I repent of all I did, on purpose by mistake, to poison myself, to stop living. God forgave me, but my body won’t.
8. Still, after giving up everything else, I can’t give up the wine. It’s the only thing that feels like blood.
9. In an ancient Maya cemetery, the week of my art exhibition in the Yucatan, Manuel and I took pictures of the rusty tin boxes giving up their ghosts. There were bones everywhere, skulls propped under vines, leaves blooming in their sunken sockets. It was so hot and humid, and so strange, it was as if I was under water.
10. Witkin used the same things as we did at the graveyard, for his photographs, the same things as the taxidermy girls, as the doctors in the laboratory morgue. Dead things, and the living dead, arranged, sutured, assembled. He had to work in Mexico, where the things he needed for his images were not illegal. Heads, limbs, eyeballs. His black and white medleys of scars and sadomasochism, lard and lust, blood and dust are harrowing, and beautiful. I usually detest shock value art, dismiss it for being too easy. But there is something compelling and compulsive in his grim tableaus. Authenticity? Maybe. Something essentially Catholic. Something pure. They are gelatin-filmed, and macabre, but feel close to the truth.
11. The artist says his works are closer to the Beatitudes than to snuff.
12. When he was five, he witnessed a car crash. In the noise and excitement and terror, he found perfect stillness as a rolling stone tumbled through the chrome and steel shards and landed beside his innocence: the eyes of a pretty little girl stared back at him, unblinking. Just her head, shredded asunder from the rest of her. It was one of those defining moments you don’t choose but never forget. Her absolute loneliness.
Nobody's Wife
after A Beautiful Woman in Plain Lines, Xue Susu, c. 1600
Paris is burning, you say, we can't go back now. It is where you met your husband, and where he lost you, too. The flames are alive on your armful of silver, and dancing in your earlobe’s tiny rubies. You take out a compact and nervously swipe red across your mouth, replenishing what you've lost to the rim of your glass.You open a book, turn it to show me A Beautiful Woman in Plain Lines. She was an archer, you tell me, and a painter, Xue Susu. She wasn't an artist's student or somebody’s wife. She was a courtesan. It was a world away and long before the Belle Epoch. I study the beautiful woman in plain lines and billowing silk robes. The intricate ink draughtsmanship catches in my throat. Inside me, there is a distracted and fuzzy flash of old-fashioned fancy, you picking up some pale and flimsy garment from the floor. Fastening stockings to garters. I could listen to you for hours, but I know our time is almost up. The bottle is almost empty, and you are not mine, not anyone’s. I pour the last splash, swallow it greedily. Here in this room, on this side of the story, we take what we can get.
Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning mixed media artist whose collage paintings are collected and exhibited internationally. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal dedicated entirely to literature inspired by art. Her poetry has been published in hundreds of online and print journals and anthologies. She has been twice nominated each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
after A Beautiful Woman in Plain Lines, Xue Susu, c. 1600
Paris is burning, you say, we can't go back now. It is where you met your husband, and where he lost you, too. The flames are alive on your armful of silver, and dancing in your earlobe’s tiny rubies. You take out a compact and nervously swipe red across your mouth, replenishing what you've lost to the rim of your glass.You open a book, turn it to show me A Beautiful Woman in Plain Lines. She was an archer, you tell me, and a painter, Xue Susu. She wasn't an artist's student or somebody’s wife. She was a courtesan. It was a world away and long before the Belle Epoch. I study the beautiful woman in plain lines and billowing silk robes. The intricate ink draughtsmanship catches in my throat. Inside me, there is a distracted and fuzzy flash of old-fashioned fancy, you picking up some pale and flimsy garment from the floor. Fastening stockings to garters. I could listen to you for hours, but I know our time is almost up. The bottle is almost empty, and you are not mine, not anyone’s. I pour the last splash, swallow it greedily. Here in this room, on this side of the story, we take what we can get.
Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning mixed media artist whose collage paintings are collected and exhibited internationally. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal dedicated entirely to literature inspired by art. Her poetry has been published in hundreds of online and print journals and anthologies. She has been twice nominated each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
Marjorie Maddox
St. Dymphna
Patron Saint of the Mentally Ill and Victims of Incest
After your mum’s death,
your father’s cracked heart
fractured further his broken
cerebrum that claimed you, holy teen,
as substitute wife after, after, after…
in his grief, his large Irish hands grabbing
what wasn’t his. And you fled
after, after, after, after
across the water, the sands, beyond
the hills to Belgium, where that same
papa who loved your mama, yes, him,
in his deep derangement, raised the arm
that loved the one you both loved--
kind woman who bore you--
and with his tensed muscles
struck down the priest-friend
who came along to guard you and
after, after, after… this daddy, this
husband to your mommy, sliced
the pure skin of your neck
until your prayers owned no mouth
to come from. O headless heroine,
bathed in the blood of your own horror,
and ours, and the obsessed mourning
of a man cut clean from reason,
where will this after, after, after take us?
Where shall we hide from the pain that bore us,
from the damaged selves that keep us dying?
Winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s books, including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and 600+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com
Patron Saint of the Mentally Ill and Victims of Incest
After your mum’s death,
your father’s cracked heart
fractured further his broken
cerebrum that claimed you, holy teen,
as substitute wife after, after, after…
in his grief, his large Irish hands grabbing
what wasn’t his. And you fled
after, after, after, after
across the water, the sands, beyond
the hills to Belgium, where that same
papa who loved your mama, yes, him,
in his deep derangement, raised the arm
that loved the one you both loved--
kind woman who bore you--
and with his tensed muscles
struck down the priest-friend
who came along to guard you and
after, after, after… this daddy, this
husband to your mommy, sliced
the pure skin of your neck
until your prayers owned no mouth
to come from. O headless heroine,
bathed in the blood of your own horror,
and ours, and the obsessed mourning
of a man cut clean from reason,
where will this after, after, after take us?
Where shall we hide from the pain that bore us,
from the damaged selves that keep us dying?
Winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s books, including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and 600+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com
Ann Manov
The Cloud Effect
After Saint Cloud we saw a farm where they promised alligators
But they wore muzzles and looked pissy and superior,
And the shot glasses in the gift shop were boobs
And Bush-Cheney. We sped past blow-dried pines and frozen signs:
Best Life, After Life Memorial Gardens and Leisure Starts
At Your Budget. We had gritty swirl cones and boiled peanuts
From a blood-hot bag and a Waffle House waitress
With nine fingers showed us flip-phone photos of her ex.
Her chip tooth whistled: Sweet pea and pink,
The poor one cannot coordinate. That was our last trip south.
From then on we sat on our porches and watched roosters
Peck at bottles. We ate yogurt and waited to be skinny.
We went to sushi buffets and bought stinking tempeh,
We drank rum and watched TV. We played bongos with a girl
Who’d die and we ran our fingers through her itchy hair.
We said things like a hard man is good to find
And if you can’t take the heat get out of hell and le dérangement des sens.
There were men without eyebrows outside the Kangaroo.
There was a man on 8th who always said:
Just a minute, then I’ll be out of your hair
Like sweet shampoo. When the hobo at last call read my palm,
He said, Lady, you don’t want to know.
The next time I saw you, we had Masters degrees
And sat in Georgetown like heated-over milk.
You had your fetishes on the wall but the lampshades
Were high quality and the floor was clean. By then we both talked like
Résumés and knew we would never not. But that came later,
And we didn’t know it would come, or we thought we did not know,
And it smelled of burning cattail when they cleared the swamp
And the air hung loose, like before or after rain, always,
And we talked of next year, last year, next year.
After Saint Cloud we saw a farm where they promised alligators
But they wore muzzles and looked pissy and superior,
And the shot glasses in the gift shop were boobs
And Bush-Cheney. We sped past blow-dried pines and frozen signs:
Best Life, After Life Memorial Gardens and Leisure Starts
At Your Budget. We had gritty swirl cones and boiled peanuts
From a blood-hot bag and a Waffle House waitress
With nine fingers showed us flip-phone photos of her ex.
Her chip tooth whistled: Sweet pea and pink,
The poor one cannot coordinate. That was our last trip south.
From then on we sat on our porches and watched roosters
Peck at bottles. We ate yogurt and waited to be skinny.
We went to sushi buffets and bought stinking tempeh,
We drank rum and watched TV. We played bongos with a girl
Who’d die and we ran our fingers through her itchy hair.
We said things like a hard man is good to find
And if you can’t take the heat get out of hell and le dérangement des sens.
There were men without eyebrows outside the Kangaroo.
There was a man on 8th who always said:
Just a minute, then I’ll be out of your hair
Like sweet shampoo. When the hobo at last call read my palm,
He said, Lady, you don’t want to know.
The next time I saw you, we had Masters degrees
And sat in Georgetown like heated-over milk.
You had your fetishes on the wall but the lampshades
Were high quality and the floor was clean. By then we both talked like
Résumés and knew we would never not. But that came later,
And we didn’t know it would come, or we thought we did not know,
And it smelled of burning cattail when they cleared the swamp
And the air hung loose, like before or after rain, always,
And we talked of next year, last year, next year.
Ann Manov hails from “the state with the prettiest name,” but lives between New Haven and New York. She attended the University of Florida, earning a B.A. in English, French, and Spanish, before studying and teaching on the western and eastern tips of France. She then earned an M.A. in French literature from Yale, and currently studies law in another building at Yale. Her poems can be found in SAND Journal, The Lake, Elsewhere, and elsewhere.
Mary Meriam
Mother Tree
Knot-knowing tree in all her innocence
stands in her stand (for standing is her way),
mingling her roots with roots, her leaves so dense
in canopy, they almost block the day.
Inside this tree’s green palm, a girl at play
swings on her swing, her bare legs light in air,
the motion soothing her and her dismay,
the kindest time her life has known, and rare.
The tree inside her mind is like a prayer
that says this moment will forever be
remembered. Now the sun sets in a flare,
and sunlight floods her chapel of the tree.
Her swinging stops, the fields’ long shadows grow,
she leaves the leaves who may or may not know.
Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics.
Knot-knowing tree in all her innocence
stands in her stand (for standing is her way),
mingling her roots with roots, her leaves so dense
in canopy, they almost block the day.
Inside this tree’s green palm, a girl at play
swings on her swing, her bare legs light in air,
the motion soothing her and her dismay,
the kindest time her life has known, and rare.
The tree inside her mind is like a prayer
that says this moment will forever be
remembered. Now the sun sets in a flare,
and sunlight floods her chapel of the tree.
Her swinging stops, the fields’ long shadows grow,
she leaves the leaves who may or may not know.
Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics.
George Moore 2 poems
Zona Traffico Limitato
This is the myth of art
at the end of a narrow lane
where cameras capture your eager face
flushed with the stacking of cars
along back alleyways bleeding
into the center of grace.
This is the undriven zone
ground zero at a city’s heart
your last effort to find that statue
or artwork in the press of hordes
of blue-suited students
their dead zone captured on
a thousand phones. Go back,
do not cross, do not enter
an Elysium at town center
only the gladiators know
buried at your feet.
Mona Lisa’s smile returns
as a token for the underground
and the Pope descends
on a wired cloud, as the chorus
in the grotto chimes in.
This is the myth of art
at the end of a narrow lane
where cameras capture your eager face
flushed with the stacking of cars
along back alleyways bleeding
into the center of grace.
This is the undriven zone
ground zero at a city’s heart
your last effort to find that statue
or artwork in the press of hordes
of blue-suited students
their dead zone captured on
a thousand phones. Go back,
do not cross, do not enter
an Elysium at town center
only the gladiators know
buried at your feet.
Mona Lisa’s smile returns
as a token for the underground
and the Pope descends
on a wired cloud, as the chorus
in the grotto chimes in.
Boys on the Road
Thinking of Pablo Neruda
From out of the woods
out of the mouth of the wetland wilderness
a Nova Scotia late autumn sun
halos the boys drudging homeward
alone the dirt road. Coming or going
in a single stride, one with a worn camo cap
and hare hanging limp at his side.
An old trap, a spring snare left unsprung
on some backwoods path
and the body half ridged with frost.
Three lost in the moment of going
and coming, tall in the talk of next things
until they look up and see you
standing alone, lost or wondering.
And their silence a sudden wire
that snares the hour of the day
things and how we can catch them
at that disappearing edge.
George Moore has had poems in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, and recently in Arc, Fiddlehead, Grain and other Canadian journals. He has worked in residencies in Latvia and Greece, Spain, Portugal and Iceland. His most recent collections of poems are Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016) and Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015). Nominated six times for Pushcarts, Moore has recently been shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize, and long listed for the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize and the Gingko Poetry Prize.
Thinking of Pablo Neruda
From out of the woods
out of the mouth of the wetland wilderness
a Nova Scotia late autumn sun
halos the boys drudging homeward
alone the dirt road. Coming or going
in a single stride, one with a worn camo cap
and hare hanging limp at his side.
An old trap, a spring snare left unsprung
on some backwoods path
and the body half ridged with frost.
Three lost in the moment of going
and coming, tall in the talk of next things
until they look up and see you
standing alone, lost or wondering.
And their silence a sudden wire
that snares the hour of the day
things and how we can catch them
at that disappearing edge.
George Moore has had poems in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, and recently in Arc, Fiddlehead, Grain and other Canadian journals. He has worked in residencies in Latvia and Greece, Spain, Portugal and Iceland. His most recent collections of poems are Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016) and Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015). Nominated six times for Pushcarts, Moore has recently been shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize, and long listed for the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize and the Gingko Poetry Prize.
Laura Mullen 2 poems
Becoming the Other Becoming
Everyone as everyone
Could joining the choir could
Be “catching [their / our] death” be
Carrying this virus carrying
Anxious a complaint anxious
To replicate longing to
Communicate
Communicate
Holds community in it holds
Us both all but what is this us
Now as we keep a distance now
I “is an other” self-isolated as I
Afraid of a breath or touch afraid
To be near you but needing to
Speak speak
Everyone as everyone
Could joining the choir could
Be “catching [their / our] death” be
Carrying this virus carrying
Anxious a complaint anxious
To replicate longing to
Communicate
Communicate
Holds community in it holds
Us both all but what is this us
Now as we keep a distance now
I “is an other” self-isolated as I
Afraid of a breath or touch afraid
To be near you but needing to
Speak speak
If I Could Tear
My face off sheer
Perforated veil
And give it to you
To breathe through
I would holding out
My hands say here
Scrub them hard and
Use them to reach
Out to touch those
You tried to keep
From dying if you
Wearing my body
Could stay close an-
Other moment in this
Gloves mask gown I
Am be safe for one
More day be as you
Were the backbone
Of the ER I’d love to
Give you the heart
Beating between
My lungs the lungs
Each deep breath
In and out going
To say your name
Caretaker nurse hero
Larrice Larrice
Larrice
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books and the McElveen Professor of English at LSU. Recognitions for her poetry include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Recent poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Ritual and Capital, and Bettering American Poetry. In 2018 she was the Arons poet at Tulane and affiliate faculty at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Her translation of Veronique Pittolo's Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. She had a Headlands Center Residency for Spring 2020—now she’s sheltering in place.
My face off sheer
Perforated veil
And give it to you
To breathe through
I would holding out
My hands say here
Scrub them hard and
Use them to reach
Out to touch those
You tried to keep
From dying if you
Wearing my body
Could stay close an-
Other moment in this
Gloves mask gown I
Am be safe for one
More day be as you
Were the backbone
Of the ER I’d love to
Give you the heart
Beating between
My lungs the lungs
Each deep breath
In and out going
To say your name
Caretaker nurse hero
Larrice Larrice
Larrice
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books and the McElveen Professor of English at LSU. Recognitions for her poetry include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Recent poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Ritual and Capital, and Bettering American Poetry. In 2018 she was the Arons poet at Tulane and affiliate faculty at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Her translation of Veronique Pittolo's Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. She had a Headlands Center Residency for Spring 2020—now she’s sheltering in place.
Cynthia Neely
Not a Finch
My son wants to be
a fish, not a finch,
to dive low, below fogged surfaces,
dark-scaled and glistening.
No matter the color
of the day, its crystal
sky, the water
the color of moss
and memory,
the call I want to hear?
that sound of spring
and gladness? Absent.
The wings that quivered
to feel flight, bound
by too-tight loving,
too late given.
My son wants to be a fish
not a finch. Because, I see
in every bright-winged thing
such promise.
Cynthia Neely is the winner of Bright Hill Press’s chapbook contest for Passing Through Blue Earth (2016) and the winner of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment’s chapbook contest for Broken Water (2011). Her poems appear in numerous journals including Pontoon (2016 Paula Jones Gardiner Memorial Award-Floating Bridge Press), Bellevue Literary Review (runner up for the Jan and Marica Vilcek prize,) Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Terrain.org and in several anthologies. Her full-length book, Flight Path, (2014) was a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. Her chapbook Hopewell Bay, (2017), a single long hybrid poem, is available from Seven Kitchens Press. Her essay and creative non-fiction work appear in The Writers’ Chronicle, Cutthroat Journal (runner up for the Barry Lopez Prize) and Terrain.org. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Pacific University.
My son wants to be
a fish, not a finch,
to dive low, below fogged surfaces,
dark-scaled and glistening.
No matter the color
of the day, its crystal
sky, the water
the color of moss
and memory,
the call I want to hear?
that sound of spring
and gladness? Absent.
The wings that quivered
to feel flight, bound
by too-tight loving,
too late given.
My son wants to be a fish
not a finch. Because, I see
in every bright-winged thing
such promise.
Cynthia Neely is the winner of Bright Hill Press’s chapbook contest for Passing Through Blue Earth (2016) and the winner of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment’s chapbook contest for Broken Water (2011). Her poems appear in numerous journals including Pontoon (2016 Paula Jones Gardiner Memorial Award-Floating Bridge Press), Bellevue Literary Review (runner up for the Jan and Marica Vilcek prize,) Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Terrain.org and in several anthologies. Her full-length book, Flight Path, (2014) was a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. Her chapbook Hopewell Bay, (2017), a single long hybrid poem, is available from Seven Kitchens Press. Her essay and creative non-fiction work appear in The Writers’ Chronicle, Cutthroat Journal (runner up for the Barry Lopez Prize) and Terrain.org. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Pacific University.
Catherine Esposito Prescott
Ordinary Offering
It’s the most beautiful thing we do, she said
which meant carrying a spirit within our bodies,
which could also mean being possessed
by another. When pregnant with my daughter,
I craved chocolate and sex; with one son it was salted
meats and conversation, with the other son, milkshakes
and classical music. Each time their spirit left me
like a fierce wind, blowing the sail of my body
inside and out. For weeks after each birth, I rubbed
my empty torso like an unemployed crystal ball
whose answers were spent. Since then, scientists
have found a newborn’s cells inside her mother,
and a mother’s cells inside her baby.
Their fear is still my fear, their heartache and their joy, mine too.
I used to see quickening toddlers on leashes, one parent
steering the curious humans away from the street.
Every spring the wild peacocks tote a string
of newborn chicks behind them. Furry and dazed,
they follow their mothers like soldiers across
the cut-through street, from meal to meal.
Adolescent, they look like every other peacock,
their initial wobble grown to a tall strut.
Their full-feathered fans open into a many-eyed
sculpture, an ordinary offering to any god.
It’s the most beautiful thing we do, she said
which meant carrying a spirit within our bodies,
which could also mean being possessed
by another. When pregnant with my daughter,
I craved chocolate and sex; with one son it was salted
meats and conversation, with the other son, milkshakes
and classical music. Each time their spirit left me
like a fierce wind, blowing the sail of my body
inside and out. For weeks after each birth, I rubbed
my empty torso like an unemployed crystal ball
whose answers were spent. Since then, scientists
have found a newborn’s cells inside her mother,
and a mother’s cells inside her baby.
Their fear is still my fear, their heartache and their joy, mine too.
I used to see quickening toddlers on leashes, one parent
steering the curious humans away from the street.
Every spring the wild peacocks tote a string
of newborn chicks behind them. Furry and dazed,
they follow their mothers like soldiers across
the cut-through street, from meal to meal.
Adolescent, they look like every other peacock,
their initial wobble grown to a tall strut.
Their full-feathered fans open into a many-eyed
sculpture, an ordinary offering to any god.
Alexandra Lytton Regalado 2 poems
What My Father Taught Me About black Holes
The ghost of my father haunts me
While he is still alive.
Thank you, he tells me, but
I don’t like poetry.
His body beneath the sheet
Spotlit through gap-tooth
Shutters. On the bedskirt yellow
Arcs, wheels of urine,
Marks to say do not go
There. Not like the cat that rubs
Its face to say this is mine.
Our tiny white dog, foxlike, but old &
Tooth-less just a stinking gap
Of mouth, lifts his leg daily
So we have to lock the room
Where my father sleeps.
My father or a pillow beneath
That white sheet. The rays of light
Enter. They have to rest
Somewhere. When my father says
Goodbye, he says instead, take it
Easy. He eases into the bed,
Takes it, the light falling where it wants.
The ghost of my father haunts me
While he is still alive.
Thank you, he tells me, but
I don’t like poetry.
His body beneath the sheet
Spotlit through gap-tooth
Shutters. On the bedskirt yellow
Arcs, wheels of urine,
Marks to say do not go
There. Not like the cat that rubs
Its face to say this is mine.
Our tiny white dog, foxlike, but old &
Tooth-less just a stinking gap
Of mouth, lifts his leg daily
So we have to lock the room
Where my father sleeps.
My father or a pillow beneath
That white sheet. The rays of light
Enter. They have to rest
Somewhere. When my father says
Goodbye, he says instead, take it
Easy. He eases into the bed,
Takes it, the light falling where it wants.
Probably the Most My Father Has Ever Said to Me
After your mother switched off the light I dreamt
little plants grew out of my feet. Not vines, not branches
with leaves, no, it was clover, bright green. It’s the last
thing I remember when the phone rang at 3am,
I picked up, no one was there. In the morning,
still wondering, I walked to the sideyard; the wind
had knocked down the climbing bougainvillea,
yanked down part of the fence; it was all brambles
and thorns and the thick trunk had split, broken
the ceramic pot, ripped its roots from the asphalt.
I’m not sure it can be saved. Each year
your mother lugs the heavy clippers and prunes it back,
gives it shape, always finishes the day with scratches
up her forearms—but she likes to do it; it gives her
pleasure like the way she hoses down the entrance
and sends leaves and berries down little eddies
and into a puddle at the foot of the driveway.
I stood in front of the broken bougainvillea
and looked up at the zigzag of telephone wires
where there was a little brown dove coo-cooing
and I was amazed—the bird turned his head left
and right as it watched two buzzards gliding high
on a thermal and I thought, surely, that brown bird
was looking out for traffic the way a child is taught
to look both ways before crossing a street--
but now on second thought I bet that bird was thinking:
I wish I could do that.
After your mother switched off the light I dreamt
little plants grew out of my feet. Not vines, not branches
with leaves, no, it was clover, bright green. It’s the last
thing I remember when the phone rang at 3am,
I picked up, no one was there. In the morning,
still wondering, I walked to the sideyard; the wind
had knocked down the climbing bougainvillea,
yanked down part of the fence; it was all brambles
and thorns and the thick trunk had split, broken
the ceramic pot, ripped its roots from the asphalt.
I’m not sure it can be saved. Each year
your mother lugs the heavy clippers and prunes it back,
gives it shape, always finishes the day with scratches
up her forearms—but she likes to do it; it gives her
pleasure like the way she hoses down the entrance
and sends leaves and berries down little eddies
and into a puddle at the foot of the driveway.
I stood in front of the broken bougainvillea
and looked up at the zigzag of telephone wires
where there was a little brown dove coo-cooing
and I was amazed—the bird turned his head left
and right as it watched two buzzards gliding high
on a thermal and I thought, surely, that brown bird
was looking out for traffic the way a child is taught
to look both ways before crossing a street--
but now on second thought I bet that bird was thinking:
I wish I could do that.
Laura Sobbott Ross
Were They Skates or Rays?
Were they skates or rays, God, I don’t know.
Both, spineless things, which left
their whole bodies free to undulate as they circled
during the most vicious panic attack I’ve ever had—
chaperoning a first grade field trip to Sea World.
Swarms of people masked in sweaty tourist mode
or was I masked in a surface calm between
the penguins, the slap happy tails of killer whales,
the dolphins grinning like flirty oceanic dogs.
The piped in sound of a tide grounding itself
inside my skull until I’d wanted to run
underwater toward the nearest exit, my lungs,
spent and releasing the core of me at last, broken
bubble-thin, a simple iridescence, please, God,
but I’d held to the rim and watched them instead—
the skates or the rays roiling in their pool
and brushing the hands of the curious reaching in.
A raw-nerved reckoning, I thought from inside
the spinning current and wondered
at the naked smoothness of their dark wings.
Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools in Central Florida and was named as Lake County’s first poet laureate. Her poetry appears in many journals, including Meridian, 32 Poems, and the Florida Review. She was a finalist for the Art & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and two full length poetry books.
Were they skates or rays, God, I don’t know.
Both, spineless things, which left
their whole bodies free to undulate as they circled
during the most vicious panic attack I’ve ever had—
chaperoning a first grade field trip to Sea World.
Swarms of people masked in sweaty tourist mode
or was I masked in a surface calm between
the penguins, the slap happy tails of killer whales,
the dolphins grinning like flirty oceanic dogs.
The piped in sound of a tide grounding itself
inside my skull until I’d wanted to run
underwater toward the nearest exit, my lungs,
spent and releasing the core of me at last, broken
bubble-thin, a simple iridescence, please, God,
but I’d held to the rim and watched them instead—
the skates or the rays roiling in their pool
and brushing the hands of the curious reaching in.
A raw-nerved reckoning, I thought from inside
the spinning current and wondered
at the naked smoothness of their dark wings.
Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools in Central Florida and was named as Lake County’s first poet laureate. Her poetry appears in many journals, including Meridian, 32 Poems, and the Florida Review. She was a finalist for the Art & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and two full length poetry books.
Virgil Suarez 2 poems
Succulent Garden
for Laure-Anne Bosselaar
These are days when song birds
Perch near-by, offer regal plumage
And amorous chirping to invisible
mates gathering moss and twigs
with which to make an early
nest. Melancholia is in the way
the sun casts shadows on the deck.
Tall and skinny, cut and disappeared
Into that place of constant anticipation
of bridging the distance and separation
between the departed. Here now, there,
Where we make sanctuary for ourselves.
All this blushing in the morning sun
of the love taken from us too early.
for Laure-Anne Bosselaar
These are days when song birds
Perch near-by, offer regal plumage
And amorous chirping to invisible
mates gathering moss and twigs
with which to make an early
nest. Melancholia is in the way
the sun casts shadows on the deck.
Tall and skinny, cut and disappeared
Into that place of constant anticipation
of bridging the distance and separation
between the departed. Here now, there,
Where we make sanctuary for ourselves.
All this blushing in the morning sun
of the love taken from us too early.
The Cotton Ball Queen
In 1970, Havana, Cuba, my mother
took it upon herself to inject
B12 on the butt cheeks of as many
neighbors as brought her doses
and paid for her service. My mother
wanted to be a nurse but was not
a nurse, but the house filled with women
waiting for their shots and I, at eight,
watched them lower one side of their
pants or shorts or pull up a dress
to expose their flesh to the needle.
The needle disappeared into the flesh.
My mother swabbed their skin
with a cotton ball drenched in alcohol
after each shot and threw it in a bucket
by the kitchen door. When she was
not looking I reached for a handful
and went outside to look at how
the blood darkened. I wrapped my
toy soldiers in the used cotton.
They were wounded. Cuba
was sending military personnel
to Viet Nam. My mother shot up
more people, “patients,” as she called
them. When my father came home
there was no trace of anyone ever
been over. My mother expected
me to keep her secrets. On the mud
fort I had built in the patio all my
soldiers lay wounded, bloodied
and dying. At night I dreamt
of the house filling with mother’s
pillow cases full of cotton balls.
In the United States, my mother
worked in a factory, sewing zippers
at 10 cents a piece. 25 years.
She never looked up from her machine.
Her fingers became arthritic . . .
Every time I cut myself shaving, I reach
for a cotton ball to soak up the blood.
Blood is a cardinal taking flight
against the darkening of the sky.
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. He is the author of four novels, two memoirs, two collections of stories, and eight volumes of poetry, most recently 90 Miles: Selected and New, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Currently he is putting the finishing touches on his new book of poems, The Painted Bunting Last Molt. When he is not writing, he is riding his Yamaha V-Star 1100 Classic Motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of The South. He lives with his wife in Florida. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vsuarez666
In 1970, Havana, Cuba, my mother
took it upon herself to inject
B12 on the butt cheeks of as many
neighbors as brought her doses
and paid for her service. My mother
wanted to be a nurse but was not
a nurse, but the house filled with women
waiting for their shots and I, at eight,
watched them lower one side of their
pants or shorts or pull up a dress
to expose their flesh to the needle.
The needle disappeared into the flesh.
My mother swabbed their skin
with a cotton ball drenched in alcohol
after each shot and threw it in a bucket
by the kitchen door. When she was
not looking I reached for a handful
and went outside to look at how
the blood darkened. I wrapped my
toy soldiers in the used cotton.
They were wounded. Cuba
was sending military personnel
to Viet Nam. My mother shot up
more people, “patients,” as she called
them. When my father came home
there was no trace of anyone ever
been over. My mother expected
me to keep her secrets. On the mud
fort I had built in the patio all my
soldiers lay wounded, bloodied
and dying. At night I dreamt
of the house filling with mother’s
pillow cases full of cotton balls.
In the United States, my mother
worked in a factory, sewing zippers
at 10 cents a piece. 25 years.
She never looked up from her machine.
Her fingers became arthritic . . .
Every time I cut myself shaving, I reach
for a cotton ball to soak up the blood.
Blood is a cardinal taking flight
against the darkening of the sky.
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. He is the author of four novels, two memoirs, two collections of stories, and eight volumes of poetry, most recently 90 Miles: Selected and New, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Currently he is putting the finishing touches on his new book of poems, The Painted Bunting Last Molt. When he is not writing, he is riding his Yamaha V-Star 1100 Classic Motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of The South. He lives with his wife in Florida. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vsuarez666
Emma Trelles 3 poems
The nearest way
Would I consume what I really wanted
only nothing would be left. I am many pigments
maybe you should figure them out, I’m spent from shining
except when I depart, then my antelope heart sends me
north to the high lands, where I glow unseen among the pines.
Leave the rest to me
Warblers summon me and I respond. I’ve never been
one to ignore a flash in the branches. Even what never returns
makes me keep waiting with my coat sailing in this winter spring
enlightenment, the again months when the country scorns
nearly every unbroken wing. I can’t stop it, but I’ll never stop either.
What’s done
When they take both her breasts she is asleep with her daughter
outside praying to a god she doesn’t know but imagines as a drain and she
measures each word and pause with care like another useless spell can
erase what has happened. No one says amputation. No one warns of the tubes where
nipples once were now suctioning the leftovers. It is more awful than that. Everyone is grateful.
Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, Best of the Net, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Salt, SWWIM, Zócalo Public Square, the Colorado Review, Spillway, and the Miami Rail. A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she lived and worked for many years as an arts journalist in South Florida and now lives with her husband in California, where she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.
Would I consume what I really wanted
only nothing would be left. I am many pigments
maybe you should figure them out, I’m spent from shining
except when I depart, then my antelope heart sends me
north to the high lands, where I glow unseen among the pines.
Leave the rest to me
Warblers summon me and I respond. I’ve never been
one to ignore a flash in the branches. Even what never returns
makes me keep waiting with my coat sailing in this winter spring
enlightenment, the again months when the country scorns
nearly every unbroken wing. I can’t stop it, but I’ll never stop either.
What’s done
When they take both her breasts she is asleep with her daughter
outside praying to a god she doesn’t know but imagines as a drain and she
measures each word and pause with care like another useless spell can
erase what has happened. No one says amputation. No one warns of the tubes where
nipples once were now suctioning the leftovers. It is more awful than that. Everyone is grateful.
Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, Best of the Net, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Salt, SWWIM, Zócalo Public Square, the Colorado Review, Spillway, and the Miami Rail. A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she lived and worked for many years as an arts journalist in South Florida and now lives with her husband in California, where she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.
Bruce Weber
Convalescence
when i was growing up my fingers throbbed from turning so many pages.
the weight of a tale of two cities almost crushed me. the nurses were pleasant.
the doctors made me promise to embrace sleep as an ally but i read under
the cover of night with my flashlight devouring the arabian nights and tales
of the brothers grimm. i danced around the truth till the truth waltzed away
shyly. defending myself from the sheepish questions of lovers by reading
till dawn crept under the door quiet as a lamb. the convalescence was sweet.
a victory for my fingers and my soul. i charted the wonders of every page
like a merchant adding up sous while butterflies sprinted across the garden
like maccabees. playing tag with sparrows. pole vaulting petunias and beebombs.
anticipating the whir of the engine and the tumult of turning gears chomping
on grass. the butterflies disappeared after that summer. a pall was cast over
their beauty that stung. the endless days of pouring rain drowned everything.
even emily dickinson’s poems couldn’t keep the butterflies in tow. the falling
of summer on their delicate skin, breaking the thread of their conversation
with the sun. a sudden thud on the roof of all that happened that summer
while my fingers silently healed.
Bruce Weber is the author of six published books of poetry,There Are Too Many Words in My House (Rogue Scholars Press, 2019) These Poems are Not Pretty (Miami: Palmetto Press, 1992), How the Poem Died (New York: Linear Arts, 1998), Poetic Justice (New York: Ikon Press, 2004), The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot (New York: Venom Press, 2004), and The Break-up of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press). His work has appeared in Up is Up, But So Is Down: Downtown Writings, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers and The Unbearables Big Book of Sex. He has performed regularly in the tri-state area, both alone and for many years with his former performance group, Bruce Weber’s No Chance Ensemble, which produced the CD Let’s Dine Like Jack Johnson Tonight (members.aol/com/ncensemble).
when i was growing up my fingers throbbed from turning so many pages.
the weight of a tale of two cities almost crushed me. the nurses were pleasant.
the doctors made me promise to embrace sleep as an ally but i read under
the cover of night with my flashlight devouring the arabian nights and tales
of the brothers grimm. i danced around the truth till the truth waltzed away
shyly. defending myself from the sheepish questions of lovers by reading
till dawn crept under the door quiet as a lamb. the convalescence was sweet.
a victory for my fingers and my soul. i charted the wonders of every page
like a merchant adding up sous while butterflies sprinted across the garden
like maccabees. playing tag with sparrows. pole vaulting petunias and beebombs.
anticipating the whir of the engine and the tumult of turning gears chomping
on grass. the butterflies disappeared after that summer. a pall was cast over
their beauty that stung. the endless days of pouring rain drowned everything.
even emily dickinson’s poems couldn’t keep the butterflies in tow. the falling
of summer on their delicate skin, breaking the thread of their conversation
with the sun. a sudden thud on the roof of all that happened that summer
while my fingers silently healed.
Bruce Weber is the author of six published books of poetry,There Are Too Many Words in My House (Rogue Scholars Press, 2019) These Poems are Not Pretty (Miami: Palmetto Press, 1992), How the Poem Died (New York: Linear Arts, 1998), Poetic Justice (New York: Ikon Press, 2004), The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot (New York: Venom Press, 2004), and The Break-up of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press). His work has appeared in Up is Up, But So Is Down: Downtown Writings, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers and The Unbearables Big Book of Sex. He has performed regularly in the tri-state area, both alone and for many years with his former performance group, Bruce Weber’s No Chance Ensemble, which produced the CD Let’s Dine Like Jack Johnson Tonight (members.aol/com/ncensemble).
Beth Weinstock
Night Before She Leaves for College
The boy’s hips slice like scissors into the end zone
as we watch side by side from the steel bleachers.
I have seen this film before, in which mother
and daughter are extras in a panoramic film
that tumbles slow-motion around us. The players’
bodies collide above the ground like birds grappling
mid-air, and I am so sorry to let you go
that I cannot speak out loud of this gift, your last
football game, or teach you that one day
memory will feather out like woodsmoke
flirting shyly under your nose and you
will turn your head, not knowing why.
Tonight, collisions feel sharp
below the curve of the lights. Tonight,
the kids migrate back and forth across
the bleachers and I wish I could warn you
of the day when a song or a smell or a chill
will crash through you like a cymbal,
jarring you from the goings-on
of some Tuesday as you rush like an adult
past leaves lying homesick from their branches.
The season’s intention is to partition the parent
and child; we will float away as two. You will not be here
and this again will be coarse small-town turf, just a space
where you sat for a number of hours when you were young.
Early morning, the boys will rise stiff-necked and bruised
to review the game film, and piece together the night.
Beth Weinstock is a previously unpublished poet and physician living in Columbus Ohio. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2019. She works at Equitas Health, serving patients living with HIV and Hepatitis C, and also teaches poetry through the Veterans Arts Initiative.
The boy’s hips slice like scissors into the end zone
as we watch side by side from the steel bleachers.
I have seen this film before, in which mother
and daughter are extras in a panoramic film
that tumbles slow-motion around us. The players’
bodies collide above the ground like birds grappling
mid-air, and I am so sorry to let you go
that I cannot speak out loud of this gift, your last
football game, or teach you that one day
memory will feather out like woodsmoke
flirting shyly under your nose and you
will turn your head, not knowing why.
Tonight, collisions feel sharp
below the curve of the lights. Tonight,
the kids migrate back and forth across
the bleachers and I wish I could warn you
of the day when a song or a smell or a chill
will crash through you like a cymbal,
jarring you from the goings-on
of some Tuesday as you rush like an adult
past leaves lying homesick from their branches.
The season’s intention is to partition the parent
and child; we will float away as two. You will not be here
and this again will be coarse small-town turf, just a space
where you sat for a number of hours when you were young.
Early morning, the boys will rise stiff-necked and bruised
to review the game film, and piece together the night.
Beth Weinstock is a previously unpublished poet and physician living in Columbus Ohio. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2019. She works at Equitas Health, serving patients living with HIV and Hepatitis C, and also teaches poetry through the Veterans Arts Initiative.
Cynthia White
Rerun
It’s the men in my family who love their violence,
their eye-gouging, nose-biting Stooges.
Yet when my sister tells the story of the Halloween
our mother beat her, I’m laughing.
Our mother was drunk, tricked up
like Phyllis Diller in a wig and feathers.
I’m laughing at the whimpers,
the howls, the way my sister mugs,
then shields her head to fend off
the remembered. Think
Buster Keaton, Punch and Judy,
commedia dell’arte. Where the battacio,
or slap stick, was born. Its thin wood slats
make a slapping sound on impact
but little force is transferred.
Thus actors can whack
and whack at will. My sister
grows ridiculous. This is my cue.
To punch our mother.
To knock her down, sit on her chest
like a wrestler. The story hurts
less with each telling.
How intimate harm is. My hands
full of flesh. Smell of vodka and Tabu.
My mother looking at me as I look back at her--
both of us, out of our wits.
Cynthia White’s poems have appeared in Narrative, New Letters, ZYZZYVA, Massachusetts Review and Catamaran among others. She’s been a finalist for both New Letter’s Patricia Cleary Miller Prize and Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and was the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
It’s the men in my family who love their violence,
their eye-gouging, nose-biting Stooges.
Yet when my sister tells the story of the Halloween
our mother beat her, I’m laughing.
Our mother was drunk, tricked up
like Phyllis Diller in a wig and feathers.
I’m laughing at the whimpers,
the howls, the way my sister mugs,
then shields her head to fend off
the remembered. Think
Buster Keaton, Punch and Judy,
commedia dell’arte. Where the battacio,
or slap stick, was born. Its thin wood slats
make a slapping sound on impact
but little force is transferred.
Thus actors can whack
and whack at will. My sister
grows ridiculous. This is my cue.
To punch our mother.
To knock her down, sit on her chest
like a wrestler. The story hurts
less with each telling.
How intimate harm is. My hands
full of flesh. Smell of vodka and Tabu.
My mother looking at me as I look back at her--
both of us, out of our wits.
Cynthia White’s poems have appeared in Narrative, New Letters, ZYZZYVA, Massachusetts Review and Catamaran among others. She’s been a finalist for both New Letter’s Patricia Cleary Miller Prize and Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and was the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.