Issue 2 August 2016
Elisa Albo, Editor
Elisa Albo, Editor
Poets in this issue: Melissa Carl Michael Hettich Silvia Curbelo Linda M. Fischer David Chorlton Lola Haskins Julie Marie Wade Bruce Sager Emily Strauss David Russomano Grace Pasco Michael Martin Marianne Szlyk John Davis Jr. Jen Karetnick Michael Cleary Patricia Whiting L. Ward Abel Martin H. Levinson Kate Sontag Charles Rammelkamp Janet Bohac Alan Catlin Bruce Weber Steve Klepetar George Wallace David B. Axelrod Linda B. Avila Peter Hargitai Geoffrey Philp Mark Mann Carol Alexander Mike James Carl Boon Lynne Viti Leah Kloss Michael H. Brownstein Corey Mesler Alec Solomita Neil Creighton Grey Held Melissa Fite Johnson
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Melissa Carl 3 poems
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Postcard from Self-Storage
Dear M.,
Tell me where to put it all: the strained vow
and the wild dependence, the thickly folded edge of night.
I need those speckled leaves. I need this water
in the washed glass to hold some dirty flowers.
Let me have the splintered wind, whichever way it goes.
Do you understand? The cornsilk, the empty chair,
the occasional fishhook, the weight of what we lose?
Then bring me fever---all its hungry wild-haired fires,
the ways I touched a man like that.
Yes, we might have to take a door from its hinges.
Dear M.,
Tell me where to put it all: the strained vow
and the wild dependence, the thickly folded edge of night.
I need those speckled leaves. I need this water
in the washed glass to hold some dirty flowers.
Let me have the splintered wind, whichever way it goes.
Do you understand? The cornsilk, the empty chair,
the occasional fishhook, the weight of what we lose?
Then bring me fever---all its hungry wild-haired fires,
the ways I touched a man like that.
Yes, we might have to take a door from its hinges.
Postcard with Something Fragile
Dear M.,
The empty birdbath gets to me, all pathos and stone.
Let’s me have the groups of birds that are chains, and wisps, charms and wrecks.
I’ll permit your shocking declarations of love and experimental antidotes,
but still become the girl who tears off scabs when you are not looking.
I once had a better self, and she buried spoons under the peach tree
hoping what her lips had touched would grow a kiss or two.
Instead wasps’ nests flowered along the wooden porch,
papery fevers ruled by moody queens. I’m equally precarious.
Guess which sort of “never” best describes me---the I will never rule out using
nuclear weapons, or the I will never tell?
Dear M.,
The empty birdbath gets to me, all pathos and stone.
Let’s me have the groups of birds that are chains, and wisps, charms and wrecks.
I’ll permit your shocking declarations of love and experimental antidotes,
but still become the girl who tears off scabs when you are not looking.
I once had a better self, and she buried spoons under the peach tree
hoping what her lips had touched would grow a kiss or two.
Instead wasps’ nests flowered along the wooden porch,
papery fevers ruled by moody queens. I’m equally precarious.
Guess which sort of “never” best describes me---the I will never rule out using
nuclear weapons, or the I will never tell?
Huge Heat in a Small Room
The bed remains unmade all day.
We lie down like a childhood summer counted out
one pale sea shell at a time.
It is never not summer in the part of me that’s you.
Impossible to sleep, the truth of your hair
a gleam of heat and spill,
your hands the opposite of lullaby.
MELISSA CARL has published her work in a variety of publications including Amoskeag, And Love (anth.), The Broken Plate Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Cellpoems, CircleShow, The Copperfield Review, Curio Poetry, The Freshwater Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, In Posse Review, Off the Coast Magazine, Poets Against War (anth.)Toad the Journal, and Waiting Room Reader II (anth). In April 2013 she was one of 85 participants in the Found Poetry Review’s National Poetry Month Pulitzer Remix Project. She published her most recent full length collection, Whatever Form, in 2014. She lives and teaches in York, PA and Oak Island, NC with her husband, son, and dingo
The bed remains unmade all day.
We lie down like a childhood summer counted out
one pale sea shell at a time.
It is never not summer in the part of me that’s you.
Impossible to sleep, the truth of your hair
a gleam of heat and spill,
your hands the opposite of lullaby.
MELISSA CARL has published her work in a variety of publications including Amoskeag, And Love (anth.), The Broken Plate Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Cellpoems, CircleShow, The Copperfield Review, Curio Poetry, The Freshwater Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, In Posse Review, Off the Coast Magazine, Poets Against War (anth.)Toad the Journal, and Waiting Room Reader II (anth). In April 2013 she was one of 85 participants in the Found Poetry Review’s National Poetry Month Pulitzer Remix Project. She published her most recent full length collection, Whatever Form, in 2014. She lives and teaches in York, PA and Oak Island, NC with her husband, son, and dingo
Michael Hettich 3 poems
The Ghosts
My best friend discovered he could dream if he sat
with closed eyes and talked without thinking, so he spent
that summer in the basement, sitting on the damp floor,
tape recorder running, telling stories.
Sometimes after work I’d slip down to listen
while his parents lumbered above us in the kitchen
and his sister strummed her guitar on the front porch.
I’d watch her tanned legs through the basement window
as I listened to my friend ramble on about walking
naked through the woods with a bucket of worms,
or waking on a beach towel, covered in hair,
beside a crater that used to be the sea.
Evenings after work I strolled with my father
to the neighborhood pool for a swim.
Bats scribbled the sky as we walked home, and when
we passed my friend’s house, his sister would pause
in her singing to call out Good Evening!
By then my dad would have finished the cocktail
he’d carried to the pool; he’d drape a cool arm
around my shoulder and start to tell me
a story. But I knew his stories by heart,
or most of them, so I walked along beside him
like a ghost in the dusk-light, happy to tune out
his voice, which I loved, and listen instead
to the singing inside me, as I shivered a little
in the chilly evening air. And when we were lucky,
fireflies rose to meet the fresh darkness
and we stood quietly, watching.
My best friend discovered he could dream if he sat
with closed eyes and talked without thinking, so he spent
that summer in the basement, sitting on the damp floor,
tape recorder running, telling stories.
Sometimes after work I’d slip down to listen
while his parents lumbered above us in the kitchen
and his sister strummed her guitar on the front porch.
I’d watch her tanned legs through the basement window
as I listened to my friend ramble on about walking
naked through the woods with a bucket of worms,
or waking on a beach towel, covered in hair,
beside a crater that used to be the sea.
Evenings after work I strolled with my father
to the neighborhood pool for a swim.
Bats scribbled the sky as we walked home, and when
we passed my friend’s house, his sister would pause
in her singing to call out Good Evening!
By then my dad would have finished the cocktail
he’d carried to the pool; he’d drape a cool arm
around my shoulder and start to tell me
a story. But I knew his stories by heart,
or most of them, so I walked along beside him
like a ghost in the dusk-light, happy to tune out
his voice, which I loved, and listen instead
to the singing inside me, as I shivered a little
in the chilly evening air. And when we were lucky,
fireflies rose to meet the fresh darkness
and we stood quietly, watching.
The Summer Retreat
I was living that summer in a cabin by a lake
teeming with fish that had grown too large
to fit comfortably in that small body of water,
so they thrashed around frantically. Some even tried
to flip-flop out of the water, though of course
they slid back in before they’d gotten far.
So it goes without saying that I did very little swimming
that summer, which wasn’t a bad thing, all
in all, since I’d come to that cabin to work
on a book--the less distraction the better.
When my wife came, on weekends, we’d sit by the lake
with a glass of wine and watch those huge fish
struggle as we talked about the chapter I’d been working on.
Sometimes, in the mornings, she’d fish, just for fun,
though she didn’t have the proper equipment, to say nothing
of the fact that neither of us could have gutted
such a creature had she caught one, the size of a man.
The casting and reeling in calmed her, she said.
Nights, when we lay on the sleeping porch listening
to those huge fish thrash and groan, we’d thrash
and groan, ourselves, in response. By the time
she left on Sunday evenings, I was
reeling from exhaustion. So I pulled the shutters closed,
hid in the back room, and threw myself into
my work as I imagined her wending her way home
along those narrow roads, while I got nowhere
with my book. Eventually I gave up completely
and spent my days sitting by the lake, watching
those fish grow steadily larger, while
my wife stayed put in the city. She bought
goldfish in little bowls she lined up along her windowsill.
She fed them and fed them in hopes they’d grow fat
and she gave them all names. And before I returned
in the fall with my unwritten manuscript, she flushed them
down the toilet, one after the other.
She said it made her cry to watch them swim around
as though they’d found a whole new world, just before she flushed.
I was living that summer in a cabin by a lake
teeming with fish that had grown too large
to fit comfortably in that small body of water,
so they thrashed around frantically. Some even tried
to flip-flop out of the water, though of course
they slid back in before they’d gotten far.
So it goes without saying that I did very little swimming
that summer, which wasn’t a bad thing, all
in all, since I’d come to that cabin to work
on a book--the less distraction the better.
When my wife came, on weekends, we’d sit by the lake
with a glass of wine and watch those huge fish
struggle as we talked about the chapter I’d been working on.
Sometimes, in the mornings, she’d fish, just for fun,
though she didn’t have the proper equipment, to say nothing
of the fact that neither of us could have gutted
such a creature had she caught one, the size of a man.
The casting and reeling in calmed her, she said.
Nights, when we lay on the sleeping porch listening
to those huge fish thrash and groan, we’d thrash
and groan, ourselves, in response. By the time
she left on Sunday evenings, I was
reeling from exhaustion. So I pulled the shutters closed,
hid in the back room, and threw myself into
my work as I imagined her wending her way home
along those narrow roads, while I got nowhere
with my book. Eventually I gave up completely
and spent my days sitting by the lake, watching
those fish grow steadily larger, while
my wife stayed put in the city. She bought
goldfish in little bowls she lined up along her windowsill.
She fed them and fed them in hopes they’d grow fat
and she gave them all names. And before I returned
in the fall with my unwritten manuscript, she flushed them
down the toilet, one after the other.
She said it made her cry to watch them swim around
as though they’d found a whole new world, just before she flushed.
Wash the Fur Away
For some reason, deer were slipping into the city
while the city was sleeping, moving along
the sidewalks, into alleys, even
down into the subways, though some of them had trouble
with stairs, just as some of them caught
their hooves in the grating, in which case they all stopped
and waited patiently while the caught-one jiggled
her hoof free. They seemed to be looking for something,
according to the hunters who tracked them but wouldn’t
shoot them out of season--and besides that they were skinny,
too skinny for those hunters to want to shoot them anywhere.
So instead they blasted trees and hid behind parked cars,
and squawked-out their bird-calls while their wives took showers
to wash their fur away. Then the wives drank coffee
and wondered what the hell they were doing with their lives,
the only lives they had, after all. They were still
beautiful, they thought, as they leaned into their mirrors
and tried not to listen to the squawking from the street,
and tried to look into their own eyes and see
blue sky, and flinched at the sound of the guns
as they waited for their husbands to come home with whatever
they’d killed, mostly birds, which they dropped on the counter
like a dog might then sat down, panting to be served.
MICHAEL HETTICH’S most recent books of poetry are Systems of Vanishing (2014), The Animals Beyond Us (2011) and Like Happiness (2010). His work has appeared in many journals, including Orion, Poetry East, Ploughshares, Hubbub and Prairie Schooner. He lives with his family in Miami.
For some reason, deer were slipping into the city
while the city was sleeping, moving along
the sidewalks, into alleys, even
down into the subways, though some of them had trouble
with stairs, just as some of them caught
their hooves in the grating, in which case they all stopped
and waited patiently while the caught-one jiggled
her hoof free. They seemed to be looking for something,
according to the hunters who tracked them but wouldn’t
shoot them out of season--and besides that they were skinny,
too skinny for those hunters to want to shoot them anywhere.
So instead they blasted trees and hid behind parked cars,
and squawked-out their bird-calls while their wives took showers
to wash their fur away. Then the wives drank coffee
and wondered what the hell they were doing with their lives,
the only lives they had, after all. They were still
beautiful, they thought, as they leaned into their mirrors
and tried not to listen to the squawking from the street,
and tried to look into their own eyes and see
blue sky, and flinched at the sound of the guns
as they waited for their husbands to come home with whatever
they’d killed, mostly birds, which they dropped on the counter
like a dog might then sat down, panting to be served.
MICHAEL HETTICH’S most recent books of poetry are Systems of Vanishing (2014), The Animals Beyond Us (2011) and Like Happiness (2010). His work has appeared in many journals, including Orion, Poetry East, Ploughshares, Hubbub and Prairie Schooner. He lives with his family in Miami.
Silvia Curbelo 2 poems
Questions
Is it the way the light moves
that makes the fields catch fire?
Have you been here before?
Will the road end before
we reach the coast?
Do you hear music?
Is it the angel or the angle
that mesmerizes?
Do you know my best side?
Do the waves frighten you?
Do you dream in color,
in French, in rhyme?
Is it lay or lie, and are
the two mutually exclusive?
Do you believe in karma?
Is it the wildcard or carte
blanche that sustains you?
Is your shadow larger
than your stance?
And what about the rain,
so sentimental, a flaw
in the wind, concealing
the real sky? Have you heard
the one about the traveling
salesman and the pea?
How many milkmaids does it take
to screw in the proverbial
light bulb? How many raven-
haired princesses?
How many doves?
And if two trains should leave
Chicago at four in the afternoon
traveling in opposite directions,
is there really true north?
Will you still want me
before we reach the sea?
Is it the way the light moves
that makes the fields catch fire?
Have you been here before?
Will the road end before
we reach the coast?
Do you hear music?
Is it the angel or the angle
that mesmerizes?
Do you know my best side?
Do the waves frighten you?
Do you dream in color,
in French, in rhyme?
Is it lay or lie, and are
the two mutually exclusive?
Do you believe in karma?
Is it the wildcard or carte
blanche that sustains you?
Is your shadow larger
than your stance?
And what about the rain,
so sentimental, a flaw
in the wind, concealing
the real sky? Have you heard
the one about the traveling
salesman and the pea?
How many milkmaids does it take
to screw in the proverbial
light bulb? How many raven-
haired princesses?
How many doves?
And if two trains should leave
Chicago at four in the afternoon
traveling in opposite directions,
is there really true north?
Will you still want me
before we reach the sea?
A Short History of Goodbye
The grass tells nothing.
The sky sits in its simple
cage of days. No sound
like the past blowing through.
Only the wind knows what’s
at stake here, moving into
the scenery, running at the mouth.
Hush, say the daylilies
shaking their heads a bit.
Silence is its own music,
soft as dirt. No one notices
the orphan drift of clouds,
the wingtip scar of the horizon
balanced between nowhere
and this. Hush,
whisper the azaleas.
But nothing’s as wordless
as a young girl standing on the lawn
waving her handkerchief.
Reprinted from Falling Landscape (Anhinga Press, 2015) with author’s permission
SILVIA CURBELO’S latest collection of poems, Falling Landscape, was published by Anhinga Press in 2015. She is the author of a previous full-length collection, The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press), and two chapbooks. Awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer's Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely. A native of Cuba, Silvia lives in Tampa, Florida.
The grass tells nothing.
The sky sits in its simple
cage of days. No sound
like the past blowing through.
Only the wind knows what’s
at stake here, moving into
the scenery, running at the mouth.
Hush, say the daylilies
shaking their heads a bit.
Silence is its own music,
soft as dirt. No one notices
the orphan drift of clouds,
the wingtip scar of the horizon
balanced between nowhere
and this. Hush,
whisper the azaleas.
But nothing’s as wordless
as a young girl standing on the lawn
waving her handkerchief.
Reprinted from Falling Landscape (Anhinga Press, 2015) with author’s permission
SILVIA CURBELO’S latest collection of poems, Falling Landscape, was published by Anhinga Press in 2015. She is the author of a previous full-length collection, The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press), and two chapbooks. Awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer's Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely. A native of Cuba, Silvia lives in Tampa, Florida.
Linda M. Fischer
Soft
I told her it was soft--
how blue-tipped spruce
mirrors the sky, how
sunrise gilds the meadows
Hold care at bay, I said,
and let the day nestle
by your side as if its fealty
were meant for you alone--
soft as a bed of moss
below a sheltering oak--
above, tufts of cloud
cushioning heaven’s
limitless expanse.
Twilight will find us
soon enough. Yield then
to earth’s soft caress
and make of it a lullaby.
LINDA M. FISCHER has poems published or forthcoming in Iodine Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Josephine Quarterly, Muddy River Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual and elsewhere. Find more poetry and details about her chapbooks, Raccoon Afternoons and Glory, at her website: lindamfischer.com
I told her it was soft--
how blue-tipped spruce
mirrors the sky, how
sunrise gilds the meadows
Hold care at bay, I said,
and let the day nestle
by your side as if its fealty
were meant for you alone--
soft as a bed of moss
below a sheltering oak--
above, tufts of cloud
cushioning heaven’s
limitless expanse.
Twilight will find us
soon enough. Yield then
to earth’s soft caress
and make of it a lullaby.
LINDA M. FISCHER has poems published or forthcoming in Iodine Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Josephine Quarterly, Muddy River Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual and elsewhere. Find more poetry and details about her chapbooks, Raccoon Afternoons and Glory, at her website: lindamfischer.com
David Chorlton
Incipient Signs, #2
The sphinx moths lost all sense of time.
Lantana bushes waited,
showing all their colors to the sun
and saving their aroma for the moon.
One year early, one
year late, the moths appeared
and hovered
among the Latin names
that identified the species
of flower after flower. They bore
upon their wings the mark
fate had assigned them:
the streamlined geometry
whose lines connect
behind the head
where purpose and memory
are joined. Neither in the light
nor after dark did they come to settle
on a screen as once they used to do.
All that remained
was to stay awake while all
the night’s dark scents
rose from the earth, and watch
the same comets in the sky
as wolves can see when they stop
to look up from a kill
that tastes to them
of starlight.
DAVID CHORLTON has lived in Phoenix since 1978 when he moved from Vienna, Austria, with his wife. As much as he loves the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, and that city is the setting for his first work of fiction:The Taste of Fog, from Rain Mountain Press. Selected Poems, appeared in 2014 from FutureCycle Press, and his newest collection of poetry is A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson.
The sphinx moths lost all sense of time.
Lantana bushes waited,
showing all their colors to the sun
and saving their aroma for the moon.
One year early, one
year late, the moths appeared
and hovered
among the Latin names
that identified the species
of flower after flower. They bore
upon their wings the mark
fate had assigned them:
the streamlined geometry
whose lines connect
behind the head
where purpose and memory
are joined. Neither in the light
nor after dark did they come to settle
on a screen as once they used to do.
All that remained
was to stay awake while all
the night’s dark scents
rose from the earth, and watch
the same comets in the sky
as wolves can see when they stop
to look up from a kill
that tastes to them
of starlight.
DAVID CHORLTON has lived in Phoenix since 1978 when he moved from Vienna, Austria, with his wife. As much as he loves the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, and that city is the setting for his first work of fiction:The Taste of Fog, from Rain Mountain Press. Selected Poems, appeared in 2014 from FutureCycle Press, and his newest collection of poetry is A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson.
Lola Haskins 2 poems
Sphingid Moth, Thailand
An air engineer
lover of speed and shine
crouches in
the undergrowth
as Rhagastis, sleek
as any jet
in her slender brown sleeves
and pointed skirt
swing-hovers
towards
a nameless orchid's
throat and
suddenly the engineer
understands
that no matter
how many times
the metals he's sketched
may carry him
down a runway,
he will never once
feel this.
An air engineer
lover of speed and shine
crouches in
the undergrowth
as Rhagastis, sleek
as any jet
in her slender brown sleeves
and pointed skirt
swing-hovers
towards
a nameless orchid's
throat and
suddenly the engineer
understands
that no matter
how many times
the metals he's sketched
may carry him
down a runway,
he will never once
feel this.
Solomon, the Two Women, and the Baby
On the way home from school I tell my girls
about Solomon, the two women, and the baby.
From their car seats in the back, they ask to hear
it again, so I start over. Again, they say.
By the third telling, one woman’s raising sheep,
the other horses. By the fifth, the baby’s name
is Aidan, little fire. The sixth adds husbands--
John the Blonde and Sean the Water Carrier--
and the seventh that one family lives on a farm
in the mountains, the other near a river. But
I finish every telling the same: that when
Solomon offers to settle the case by cutting
the baby in two, one of the women screams
Don’t touch my child! and hands him to
the other, which, I explain, is how Solomon
found out whose baby this was, because,
being wise, he knew that no true mother
would ever let anyone hurt her child.
And I think my little ones wanted the story
over and over to make sure I wouldn’t
change the end, no matter how many times
the words came from my mouth. Yes,
I think that was what they waited to hear.
Lola Haskins' most recent collection is How Small, Confronting Morning, poems of inland Florida (Jacar, 2016). Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards,and two NEAs. Visit her any time at lolahaskins.com.
On the way home from school I tell my girls
about Solomon, the two women, and the baby.
From their car seats in the back, they ask to hear
it again, so I start over. Again, they say.
By the third telling, one woman’s raising sheep,
the other horses. By the fifth, the baby’s name
is Aidan, little fire. The sixth adds husbands--
John the Blonde and Sean the Water Carrier--
and the seventh that one family lives on a farm
in the mountains, the other near a river. But
I finish every telling the same: that when
Solomon offers to settle the case by cutting
the baby in two, one of the women screams
Don’t touch my child! and hands him to
the other, which, I explain, is how Solomon
found out whose baby this was, because,
being wise, he knew that no true mother
would ever let anyone hurt her child.
And I think my little ones wanted the story
over and over to make sure I wouldn’t
change the end, no matter how many times
the words came from my mouth. Yes,
I think that was what they waited to hear.
Lola Haskins' most recent collection is How Small, Confronting Morning, poems of inland Florida (Jacar, 2016). Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards,and two NEAs. Visit her any time at lolahaskins.com.
Julie Marie Wade 2 poems
Psalm in the Spirit of Animal Crackers
She always thought blood was thicker
than water until she saw blood in the water.
So pink it surprised her, with its weak little swirl.
Swimming with sharks, he said, is a good way
to end up sleeping with fishes. Of course
she knew this already: If you give a man a fish,
you feed him for a day. But teach a man
to fish, and he’ll never have to kill two birds
with one stone.
Speaking of birds: If one in the hand
is worth two in the bush, how do the values
shift when the bush is burning? Sometimes,
they say, the early bird seizes the worm
the way some people seize the day.
But what if a carp seizes the worm instead?
Surely, fishes make wishes, too.
Some have even been known to fly.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,”
says the senator in the ten-gallon hat.
He once led a horse to water but couldn’t
make him drink unfiltered straight from the tap.
Let’s be honest: He’s always been the type to
beat a dead horse, and she the type to look
a gift horse in the mouth. A match made in heaven?
I think not. Hell in a hand cart, more likely.
One drop of his hat could fracture her toe.
One piece of her cake could close up his throat.
The nuts, you know. But then again,
what are oaks but a couple of nuts
that decided to stand their ground.
She always thought blood was thicker
than water until she saw blood in the water.
So pink it surprised her, with its weak little swirl.
Swimming with sharks, he said, is a good way
to end up sleeping with fishes. Of course
she knew this already: If you give a man a fish,
you feed him for a day. But teach a man
to fish, and he’ll never have to kill two birds
with one stone.
Speaking of birds: If one in the hand
is worth two in the bush, how do the values
shift when the bush is burning? Sometimes,
they say, the early bird seizes the worm
the way some people seize the day.
But what if a carp seizes the worm instead?
Surely, fishes make wishes, too.
Some have even been known to fly.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,”
says the senator in the ten-gallon hat.
He once led a horse to water but couldn’t
make him drink unfiltered straight from the tap.
Let’s be honest: He’s always been the type to
beat a dead horse, and she the type to look
a gift horse in the mouth. A match made in heaven?
I think not. Hell in a hand cart, more likely.
One drop of his hat could fracture her toe.
One piece of her cake could close up his throat.
The nuts, you know. But then again,
what are oaks but a couple of nuts
that decided to stand their ground.
Psalm in the Spirit of an Award Show
All the women have doorknobs for shoulders.
Someone has polished them with Pledge.
I wonder if they are slippery to the touch, if
they are dusted for fingerprints nightly--
perhaps by a concierge at a swank Beverly Hills hotel?
And the clavicles, how beveled they are, bisected
by the sharp edge of sternum. Cleavage is out,
but breastbone is in. Breastbone with two sides
of sheath may be all there is, unless you count the navel--
sequined centerpiece; dark, antediluvian coin.
What would happen if we all reached out in unison
and turned them slowly, counter-clockwise?
Would it be like opening a safe or passing through a portal
to another realm? Would any of us be coiffed enough to enter?--
Or would the red brocade curtains descend, interrupting our regularly scheduled program?
JULIE MARIE WADE is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Bywater Books, 2014; Colgate University Press, 2010), winner of the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), selected for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series; Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature; Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), selected by Bernard Cooper as the winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), selected for the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List; Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016); and SIX: Poems, selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Prize in Poetry.
All the women have doorknobs for shoulders.
Someone has polished them with Pledge.
I wonder if they are slippery to the touch, if
they are dusted for fingerprints nightly--
perhaps by a concierge at a swank Beverly Hills hotel?
And the clavicles, how beveled they are, bisected
by the sharp edge of sternum. Cleavage is out,
but breastbone is in. Breastbone with two sides
of sheath may be all there is, unless you count the navel--
sequined centerpiece; dark, antediluvian coin.
What would happen if we all reached out in unison
and turned them slowly, counter-clockwise?
Would it be like opening a safe or passing through a portal
to another realm? Would any of us be coiffed enough to enter?--
Or would the red brocade curtains descend, interrupting our regularly scheduled program?
JULIE MARIE WADE is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Bywater Books, 2014; Colgate University Press, 2010), winner of the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), selected for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series; Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature; Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), selected by Bernard Cooper as the winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), selected for the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List; Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016); and SIX: Poems, selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Prize in Poetry.
Bruce Sager
What Flowers
A man and a woman sit in two chairs,
facing each other. What was slender once
has grown fat. What was curly and bushy,
straight and thin. It is quiet. Sometimes
they look into each other’s eyes, silent
and unrepenting, but most times they
look past each other, studying the paint
on the bare walls as though the paint
were a text. Or a context. If it is a room
they are sitting in, the air is still. If a stage,
there is no audience, just people drifting
here or there, in and out, for a moment.
Sometimes someone vaults onto the stage
to bestow a kiss on the man or the woman.
And fades away. As a scar fades. Never
fully. As a place where there was wreckage
on a road is marked, sometimes. Flowers.
BRUCE SAGER lives in Westminster, Maryland. His work has won publication through contests judged by Billy Collins, Dick Allen and William Stafford. Several new books are forthcoming in late 2016 (via Hyperborea Publishing and BrickHouse Books).
A man and a woman sit in two chairs,
facing each other. What was slender once
has grown fat. What was curly and bushy,
straight and thin. It is quiet. Sometimes
they look into each other’s eyes, silent
and unrepenting, but most times they
look past each other, studying the paint
on the bare walls as though the paint
were a text. Or a context. If it is a room
they are sitting in, the air is still. If a stage,
there is no audience, just people drifting
here or there, in and out, for a moment.
Sometimes someone vaults onto the stage
to bestow a kiss on the man or the woman.
And fades away. As a scar fades. Never
fully. As a place where there was wreckage
on a road is marked, sometimes. Flowers.
BRUCE SAGER lives in Westminster, Maryland. His work has won publication through contests judged by Billy Collins, Dick Allen and William Stafford. Several new books are forthcoming in late 2016 (via Hyperborea Publishing and BrickHouse Books).
Emily Strauss
Telling the Future
How can we tell
the future from the past
when time is a dove-fletched
arrow from Artemis' bow, made
of moonlight and silver wood
flying only one direction,
time and the universe
moving from order to disorder,
another sock gone missing
a new crack in the floor
and we forget if we've seen
it before this terrible morning?
Since time has always existed
how can we feel movement,
an unraveling of stasis
a disintegration of threads
binding us to left
or right? How do we know
from which direction
the arrow will strike,
turn our heads and flinch
as the soft feathers graze
our brow and we are older
now?
That much we can feel--
we recall another day, more
dirty clothes, dishes in the sink
where before there were none--
this is time's flow
this is the unspooling of a clock
that depicts loss, molecules slowing
the air murky,
this is being in the absence
of time, this is living
not moment by moment
but in one fell swoop.
EMILY STRAUSS has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 350 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
How can we tell
the future from the past
when time is a dove-fletched
arrow from Artemis' bow, made
of moonlight and silver wood
flying only one direction,
time and the universe
moving from order to disorder,
another sock gone missing
a new crack in the floor
and we forget if we've seen
it before this terrible morning?
Since time has always existed
how can we feel movement,
an unraveling of stasis
a disintegration of threads
binding us to left
or right? How do we know
from which direction
the arrow will strike,
turn our heads and flinch
as the soft feathers graze
our brow and we are older
now?
That much we can feel--
we recall another day, more
dirty clothes, dishes in the sink
where before there were none--
this is time's flow
this is the unspooling of a clock
that depicts loss, molecules slowing
the air murky,
this is being in the absence
of time, this is living
not moment by moment
but in one fell swoop.
EMILY STRAUSS has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 350 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
David Russomano
Slow Dance
Evening rain like this
is music for snails,
the droplet rhythm,
irresistible,
an invitation
to leave the shelter
of potted flowers
and gaps in brickwork.
They come, elated
to renew this waltz
in their ballroom – grass,
pavement, windowsills.
They pair off, turning
glacially, eye stalks
swaying with each whirl.
This damp revelry
is spoiled by dawn.
Cinderellas flee,
shouldering their shells
like defunct pumpkins,
nothing left but light
caught on smeared dance steps,
viscous glass slippers.
DAVID RUSSOMANO is an American author and visual artist living beside a horse field on the outskirts of London. He received his MA from Kingston University, where he was awarded the 2014 Faber and Faber Creative Writing MA Prize. In addition to being nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ 2012 Best of the Net Anthology, his poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Poetry Quarterly, Structo, and Elbow Room (forthcoming). You can find out more at https://davidrussomano.wordpress.com/
Evening rain like this
is music for snails,
the droplet rhythm,
irresistible,
an invitation
to leave the shelter
of potted flowers
and gaps in brickwork.
They come, elated
to renew this waltz
in their ballroom – grass,
pavement, windowsills.
They pair off, turning
glacially, eye stalks
swaying with each whirl.
This damp revelry
is spoiled by dawn.
Cinderellas flee,
shouldering their shells
like defunct pumpkins,
nothing left but light
caught on smeared dance steps,
viscous glass slippers.
DAVID RUSSOMANO is an American author and visual artist living beside a horse field on the outskirts of London. He received his MA from Kingston University, where he was awarded the 2014 Faber and Faber Creative Writing MA Prize. In addition to being nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ 2012 Best of the Net Anthology, his poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Poetry Quarterly, Structo, and Elbow Room (forthcoming). You can find out more at https://davidrussomano.wordpress.com/
Grace Pasco
Five Invincible Minutes
A bulldozer could pulverize the bedroom wall
And I
Would be still.
I would be here,
For at least five invincible minutes,
With my head on a four-cornered cloud.
Only light-hearted talking allowed,
Because the room’s still shaking,
Or is it just the bed?
Or is it just my legs?
My eyes are at rest.
I look up at the ceiling fan
And its golden accents
And we breathe.
And it’s in sync.
On the brink of sleep
Or some kind of trance,
I trace the side of his face
With the backs of my knuckles.
Laying down but my knees still buckle,
And shake a bit,
Or really, both legs.
Or is it the bed that trembles?
Chips of cement are
Pushed off from the wall.
I see insulation on the floor.
A bulldozer pulverized the bedroom wall
And I,
With my five invincible minutes
Had to catch the shakes from my veins
And the soft moan of my spine.
The memory foam reminds me, pleased,
About the last sixty minutes and
Whispers why the room shook.
GRACE PASCO is an Asian-American spoken-word poet from Silver Spring, MD. She writes poetry to translate emotions, package experiences, and... to play! Find her on Instagram as ThisGirlGrace.
A bulldozer could pulverize the bedroom wall
And I
Would be still.
I would be here,
For at least five invincible minutes,
With my head on a four-cornered cloud.
Only light-hearted talking allowed,
Because the room’s still shaking,
Or is it just the bed?
Or is it just my legs?
My eyes are at rest.
I look up at the ceiling fan
And its golden accents
And we breathe.
And it’s in sync.
On the brink of sleep
Or some kind of trance,
I trace the side of his face
With the backs of my knuckles.
Laying down but my knees still buckle,
And shake a bit,
Or really, both legs.
Or is it the bed that trembles?
Chips of cement are
Pushed off from the wall.
I see insulation on the floor.
A bulldozer pulverized the bedroom wall
And I,
With my five invincible minutes
Had to catch the shakes from my veins
And the soft moan of my spine.
The memory foam reminds me, pleased,
About the last sixty minutes and
Whispers why the room shook.
GRACE PASCO is an Asian-American spoken-word poet from Silver Spring, MD. She writes poetry to translate emotions, package experiences, and... to play! Find her on Instagram as ThisGirlGrace.
Michael Martin
Charism
Tonight the emptied
scrap metal district rusts
along the Miami River.
In one warehouse,
Pentecostals babble
to palpitating tambourines.
Listen as tinny syllables,
so inventive, no two alike,
ring in the distance.
If only for a song’s length,
believe that what you hear
are the echoes of saved souls
slipping past fold-up chairs,
through the open roll-up
loading dock door,
and into the stacked
half-hollow shipping crates,
where they will wait
stocked for dispatch with
disembodied aluminum
until rapture comes.
Michael Angel Martin is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Florida International University. Poems can be found in Jail Alai Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and forthcoming in The Mondegreen and Saint Katherine Review. He lives in Miami, Fl.
Tonight the emptied
scrap metal district rusts
along the Miami River.
In one warehouse,
Pentecostals babble
to palpitating tambourines.
Listen as tinny syllables,
so inventive, no two alike,
ring in the distance.
If only for a song’s length,
believe that what you hear
are the echoes of saved souls
slipping past fold-up chairs,
through the open roll-up
loading dock door,
and into the stacked
half-hollow shipping crates,
where they will wait
stocked for dispatch with
disembodied aluminum
until rapture comes.
Michael Angel Martin is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Florida International University. Poems can be found in Jail Alai Magazine, Green Mountains Review, and forthcoming in The Mondegreen and Saint Katherine Review. He lives in Miami, Fl.
Marianne Szlyk
Easter 2116
Among the late-afternoon walkers in the square,
I tighten the hood around my pale face
and squint through goggles for
any scrap of sun that squeezes through.
I could be on Bradbury’s Venus on the sweltering day
when the sizzling rain pauses, but I am on Earth.
In the absence of wind, showers, and past birdsong, I hear
my robe swishing. I will myself
not to think about music, my own earworms,
or suggestions sent to me like headaches.
I hear only the buzz of mosquitoes, balked by the heavy cloth.
Shuffling, weighed down, I watch holograms hover
over the soft stones of the square that resist ceaseless rain and wind.
The holograms show skin, unlike the living.
Mosquitoes will not bite them. They have no blood to poison.
Holograms do not talk to me. I am too poor and homely.
They are as silent as the electric cars and aircraft
that swarm the city and beyond.
I walk to the shore of the acid ocean, the beach
lacquered with toxic jellyfish and seaweed.
I smell nothing. I have been walking
here forever in search of something.
A hologram in cargo shorts floats above
like a new-age Jesus going out to Peter’s boat.
I look out to the horizon. The waters cover the cities
where, as children, the holograms wore Easter outfits
and couples sauntered out in the sweetly-scented sun
so many years ago as music played from transistor radios.
The rain will resume. The music will as well.
For now, I enjoy their absence.
MARIANNE SZLYK is the editor of The Song Is... , an associate poetry editor at Potomac Review, and a professor of English at Montgomery College. Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press. Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including Silver Birch Press, Cactifur, Of/with, bird's thumb, and Yellow Chair Review. Her first chapbook is available through Kind of a Hurricane Press. She hopes that you will consider sending work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/
Among the late-afternoon walkers in the square,
I tighten the hood around my pale face
and squint through goggles for
any scrap of sun that squeezes through.
I could be on Bradbury’s Venus on the sweltering day
when the sizzling rain pauses, but I am on Earth.
In the absence of wind, showers, and past birdsong, I hear
my robe swishing. I will myself
not to think about music, my own earworms,
or suggestions sent to me like headaches.
I hear only the buzz of mosquitoes, balked by the heavy cloth.
Shuffling, weighed down, I watch holograms hover
over the soft stones of the square that resist ceaseless rain and wind.
The holograms show skin, unlike the living.
Mosquitoes will not bite them. They have no blood to poison.
Holograms do not talk to me. I am too poor and homely.
They are as silent as the electric cars and aircraft
that swarm the city and beyond.
I walk to the shore of the acid ocean, the beach
lacquered with toxic jellyfish and seaweed.
I smell nothing. I have been walking
here forever in search of something.
A hologram in cargo shorts floats above
like a new-age Jesus going out to Peter’s boat.
I look out to the horizon. The waters cover the cities
where, as children, the holograms wore Easter outfits
and couples sauntered out in the sweetly-scented sun
so many years ago as music played from transistor radios.
The rain will resume. The music will as well.
For now, I enjoy their absence.
MARIANNE SZLYK is the editor of The Song Is... , an associate poetry editor at Potomac Review, and a professor of English at Montgomery College. Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press. Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including Silver Birch Press, Cactifur, Of/with, bird's thumb, and Yellow Chair Review. Her first chapbook is available through Kind of a Hurricane Press. She hopes that you will consider sending work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/
John Davis Jr.
This is an invented form – the onzelle sequence. An onzelle is an 11-line stanza where each line has 11 syllables. I’ve modified that pattern here for effect at the end.
The Farm Poet’s Lament
Here, a thousand spirits no longer know you.
Your hands are those of a sleek urban stranger.
What good are words to this land? They fertilize
nothing, water even less. They are shabby
tributes to love of the few and the gone.
They cannot kill weeds; they cannot resurrect
sun-paled azaleas or hard crippled crops:
Oranges like knotted fists shake in hot wind.
Will these words increase the sugars in our fruit?
How will harvest measure their value and price?
What gain will come to the coffin-like mailbox?
Language must make more meaning than memory.
No verses ever fueled a red tractor.
No meter, except for the rain gauge, matters.
Legends and legacies implore: Do something,
so you fritter away these withering hours
with weak-legged theories and sounds of spoken breath
until the greatest inconsequence arrives.
Oh, laureate – what produce have you produced?
Where is the trailer loaded with goods you’ve done?
Semi-trucks pass on the road outside, but none
of them carries your relevance, minor scribe.
You cannot don the elder’s hat or garments
thinned by real work’s friction – too much and too rough.
Keep scribbling, you lost and shiftless creator.
Know shade, know comfort, know luxury purchased
by ancestors’ passages over and through
these long middles in noonday labor so you,
oh petty and pitiful poet, could then
document their sinews and sweat with your sloth.
Be not arrogant, you dark academic,
for your learning is pathetic amid this
demanding farmland droughted by your letters.
Hear it? It mourns for one whose hands know till
and welcome the blister and ache of making.
Your precious literature is not commerce,
it is not fortune. Its syllables won’t raise
leaves or limbs in silent green hallelujahs.
So why shed these markings like old corn snake skin?
They await small breezes of traveling feet
to blow away their brittle-crisp scales,
return their empty expense to failed soil,
adding some foreign and needless element
that arrives too little, too late anyway.
Rain is coming. Even it works. Falling fills
the grove with renewal while you imitate
its rhythm into words. But everyone knows
its sound – you search for the new in the common!
Lay down your pen, oh fiddler, and go secure
the barn. Make ready the fissure-filled homestead
for the good pounding you could never provide.
A house spider spins its silk in the corner,
dry as your head and paper in this shelter.
Thunder unrolls like cursive through heavy clouds,
and you straighten lightning into proper print.
Dying trees rattle and wag damp finger bones
in brittle points of blame and shame, accusing
as you scratch and plot your finite wonderings.
The rain still falls. The land goes on without you.
Every serif bares a tiny sharp tooth
severing heritage.
JOHN DAVIS JR. is the author of Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014) and two other collections of poetry. His work has been featured in literary journals and venues internationally, with notable appearances in regional publications like Nashville Review, Steel Toe Review, Saw Palm, and Deep South magazine. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and he holds an MFA from University of Tampa.
The Farm Poet’s Lament
Here, a thousand spirits no longer know you.
Your hands are those of a sleek urban stranger.
What good are words to this land? They fertilize
nothing, water even less. They are shabby
tributes to love of the few and the gone.
They cannot kill weeds; they cannot resurrect
sun-paled azaleas or hard crippled crops:
Oranges like knotted fists shake in hot wind.
Will these words increase the sugars in our fruit?
How will harvest measure their value and price?
What gain will come to the coffin-like mailbox?
Language must make more meaning than memory.
No verses ever fueled a red tractor.
No meter, except for the rain gauge, matters.
Legends and legacies implore: Do something,
so you fritter away these withering hours
with weak-legged theories and sounds of spoken breath
until the greatest inconsequence arrives.
Oh, laureate – what produce have you produced?
Where is the trailer loaded with goods you’ve done?
Semi-trucks pass on the road outside, but none
of them carries your relevance, minor scribe.
You cannot don the elder’s hat or garments
thinned by real work’s friction – too much and too rough.
Keep scribbling, you lost and shiftless creator.
Know shade, know comfort, know luxury purchased
by ancestors’ passages over and through
these long middles in noonday labor so you,
oh petty and pitiful poet, could then
document their sinews and sweat with your sloth.
Be not arrogant, you dark academic,
for your learning is pathetic amid this
demanding farmland droughted by your letters.
Hear it? It mourns for one whose hands know till
and welcome the blister and ache of making.
Your precious literature is not commerce,
it is not fortune. Its syllables won’t raise
leaves or limbs in silent green hallelujahs.
So why shed these markings like old corn snake skin?
They await small breezes of traveling feet
to blow away their brittle-crisp scales,
return their empty expense to failed soil,
adding some foreign and needless element
that arrives too little, too late anyway.
Rain is coming. Even it works. Falling fills
the grove with renewal while you imitate
its rhythm into words. But everyone knows
its sound – you search for the new in the common!
Lay down your pen, oh fiddler, and go secure
the barn. Make ready the fissure-filled homestead
for the good pounding you could never provide.
A house spider spins its silk in the corner,
dry as your head and paper in this shelter.
Thunder unrolls like cursive through heavy clouds,
and you straighten lightning into proper print.
Dying trees rattle and wag damp finger bones
in brittle points of blame and shame, accusing
as you scratch and plot your finite wonderings.
The rain still falls. The land goes on without you.
Every serif bares a tiny sharp tooth
severing heritage.
JOHN DAVIS JR. is the author of Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014) and two other collections of poetry. His work has been featured in literary journals and venues internationally, with notable appearances in regional publications like Nashville Review, Steel Toe Review, Saw Palm, and Deep South magazine. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and he holds an MFA from University of Tampa.
Jen Karetnick
With My Big Brother at Little’s Pond
We were there to gather guppies
and tadpoles in jars empty
of peanut butter and fireflies
to take back for the bowl
that had seen the last annual
floaters from the Kiwanis carnival
arcade games that we'd spent
all of our allowance on to win,
and which always croaked the day
after we dumped them from the knotted
sandwich bags.
At home, he showed me
how to trap anemic mosquitos
alive, offering his arm
for sacrifice, the blood that betrayed
both of us still an enticement,
so that we could drop them into
the pond water, sifting like flour,
and watch our catch feed.
By day’s end, I was a page of Braille
with bites, and he was grounded
for scripting it.
Four decades from then, the township
would be trying to displace
the Canadian geese that had
befouled the banks, wiped
out species after species
with their greedy beaks. Weeds
would clot the tarnished surface.
But that day, we fished under lily pads
where smallmouth bass played hide-
and-seek, and freshwater oysters
opened like hearts.
JEN KARETNICK is the author of three full-length books of poetry, including the forthcoming American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016) and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), as well as four poetry chapbooks. She is the winner of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize for Poetry. Her work has been published recently or is forthcoming in The Atlantic.com, december, Guernica, Negative Capability, Prairie Schooner and Spillway.
We were there to gather guppies
and tadpoles in jars empty
of peanut butter and fireflies
to take back for the bowl
that had seen the last annual
floaters from the Kiwanis carnival
arcade games that we'd spent
all of our allowance on to win,
and which always croaked the day
after we dumped them from the knotted
sandwich bags.
At home, he showed me
how to trap anemic mosquitos
alive, offering his arm
for sacrifice, the blood that betrayed
both of us still an enticement,
so that we could drop them into
the pond water, sifting like flour,
and watch our catch feed.
By day’s end, I was a page of Braille
with bites, and he was grounded
for scripting it.
Four decades from then, the township
would be trying to displace
the Canadian geese that had
befouled the banks, wiped
out species after species
with their greedy beaks. Weeds
would clot the tarnished surface.
But that day, we fished under lily pads
where smallmouth bass played hide-
and-seek, and freshwater oysters
opened like hearts.
JEN KARETNICK is the author of three full-length books of poetry, including the forthcoming American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016) and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), as well as four poetry chapbooks. She is the winner of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize for Poetry. Her work has been published recently or is forthcoming in The Atlantic.com, december, Guernica, Negative Capability, Prairie Schooner and Spillway.
Michael Cleary 2 poems
Salvation Army Duds
In Salvation Army duds
they slouch and shuffle
like circus bears
half untamed,
sniffing potato salad
and wrinkled hot dogs,
prowling poisoned bins
til night:
wizardry of blanket roll
turns tables into bridges
for trolls to curl up under
dreams of hometowns left behind,
the waves a nomad’s welcome
murmuring lunatic lullabies.
Reprinted with permission from Hometown, USA (San Diego Poets Press)
In Salvation Army duds
they slouch and shuffle
like circus bears
half untamed,
sniffing potato salad
and wrinkled hot dogs,
prowling poisoned bins
til night:
wizardry of blanket roll
turns tables into bridges
for trolls to curl up under
dreams of hometowns left behind,
the waves a nomad’s welcome
murmuring lunatic lullabies.
Reprinted with permission from Hometown, USA (San Diego Poets Press)
Stricken Testimony
a lawyer…was killed by lightning when he stood up in a boat during a
storm, raised his hands and proclaimed, “Here I am!”
—Miami Herald
Did God rage or chuckle
as the bolt left his fist?
The matter’s irrelevant.
Case dismissed.
Reprinted with permission from Hometown, USA (San Diego Poets Press)
MICHAEL CLEARY’s poems have earned two Florida Individual Artist Grants in Poetry (1985 and 1999), the American Book Series Award for Hometown, USA (San Diego Poets Press, 1992), and Paumanok Visiting Writers Award (2005). Garrison Keillor’s reading of his work on PBS’ “The Writer’s Almanac” is a hellacious hoot. Bearable Weight (2011) completes his “Points of America Trilogy” - poems exploring life changes through two different places he has called home—New York’s Adirondack Mountains and South Florida’s Atlantic shore. Visit his website: http://www.michaelcleary.com
a lawyer…was killed by lightning when he stood up in a boat during a
storm, raised his hands and proclaimed, “Here I am!”
—Miami Herald
Did God rage or chuckle
as the bolt left his fist?
The matter’s irrelevant.
Case dismissed.
Reprinted with permission from Hometown, USA (San Diego Poets Press)
MICHAEL CLEARY’s poems have earned two Florida Individual Artist Grants in Poetry (1985 and 1999), the American Book Series Award for Hometown, USA (San Diego Poets Press, 1992), and Paumanok Visiting Writers Award (2005). Garrison Keillor’s reading of his work on PBS’ “The Writer’s Almanac” is a hellacious hoot. Bearable Weight (2011) completes his “Points of America Trilogy” - poems exploring life changes through two different places he has called home—New York’s Adirondack Mountains and South Florida’s Atlantic shore. Visit his website: http://www.michaelcleary.com
Patricia Whiting 2 poems
Grant Avenue
We had a yellow kitchen
with hard-to-crank
casement windows,
a weeping willow
in a back yard
that bordered
the railroad tracks.
Few trains passed by
but those that did
bellowed like
wounded beasts.
After a while
we stopped hearing
their cries.
I thought the two of us
were happy there.
We had a yellow kitchen
with hard-to-crank
casement windows,
a weeping willow
in a back yard
that bordered
the railroad tracks.
Few trains passed by
but those that did
bellowed like
wounded beasts.
After a while
we stopped hearing
their cries.
I thought the two of us
were happy there.
Circles & Tangents
The wind comes in gusts, the turbines on the roof spin out of control, threatening to skitter off
like cars on a carnival ride. Every summer there was a carnival at the ball field with rides, games
of chance, cotton candy. Peggy Ann’s father was a carny man. When I swallowed a cherry pit her
mother said a cherry tree would grow. Jean wasn’t allowed to go on rides, her father said they
weren’t safe. She was wearing oxfords when other girls were ruining their feet in ballet slippers.
Across the street lived a man with an arm cut off at the elbow. Whenever I saw him I would
squeeze my eyes shut, but it was always too late. The mutilation haunted my dreams at night. My
grandfather said he came into this world with two legs and intended to leave it with two, but he
died a one-legged man. My father called him long distance every Sunday and we all had to say
hello, but I didn’t know how to make small talk; neither do my grandchildren so we don’t talk on
the phone. My other grandfather gave me ether when I had my appendix out. With a cloth
wrapped around my hair I was ashamed to look like Aunt Jemima. My sister and cousin Bobby
got caught playing show but I didn’t because I was in the hospital. My cousin George told me my
mother was having surgery. I asked her how come he knew and I didn’t. But it was only for
hemorrhoids. I used to say how come instead of why because I stuttered asking questions
beginning with W. The hardest words to say were mister and missus. I knew a man who couldn’t
talk because something ruptured in his brain, except he could say shit and dum-DUM-ta-dum to
the tune of “Here Comes the Bride.” My mother couldn’t talk after her stroke. I went to her and
said this wasn’t supposed to happen because she planned to die of a heart attack. Ray said Tom
taught him how to die, but he only taught him how to die of cancer. When the lights go out,
people say of death. Now the power is out. I’m using a flashlight to read. The woman in my book
is riding a tram and eating cherries.
PATRICIA WHITING’S paintings have been exhibited in New Jersey and in Florida, and her pen and ink drawings have been featured in poetry anthologies. Her poems have been published in the Slipstream; Boca Raton; Thorny Locust; The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and others. Her chapbook, Learning to Read Between the Lines, was first-prize winner in the 2000 Poets of the Palm Beaches chapbook contest. Diary Poems: And Drawings was self-published in 2012 and is available on Amazon.
http://patriciawhiting.com/
The wind comes in gusts, the turbines on the roof spin out of control, threatening to skitter off
like cars on a carnival ride. Every summer there was a carnival at the ball field with rides, games
of chance, cotton candy. Peggy Ann’s father was a carny man. When I swallowed a cherry pit her
mother said a cherry tree would grow. Jean wasn’t allowed to go on rides, her father said they
weren’t safe. She was wearing oxfords when other girls were ruining their feet in ballet slippers.
Across the street lived a man with an arm cut off at the elbow. Whenever I saw him I would
squeeze my eyes shut, but it was always too late. The mutilation haunted my dreams at night. My
grandfather said he came into this world with two legs and intended to leave it with two, but he
died a one-legged man. My father called him long distance every Sunday and we all had to say
hello, but I didn’t know how to make small talk; neither do my grandchildren so we don’t talk on
the phone. My other grandfather gave me ether when I had my appendix out. With a cloth
wrapped around my hair I was ashamed to look like Aunt Jemima. My sister and cousin Bobby
got caught playing show but I didn’t because I was in the hospital. My cousin George told me my
mother was having surgery. I asked her how come he knew and I didn’t. But it was only for
hemorrhoids. I used to say how come instead of why because I stuttered asking questions
beginning with W. The hardest words to say were mister and missus. I knew a man who couldn’t
talk because something ruptured in his brain, except he could say shit and dum-DUM-ta-dum to
the tune of “Here Comes the Bride.” My mother couldn’t talk after her stroke. I went to her and
said this wasn’t supposed to happen because she planned to die of a heart attack. Ray said Tom
taught him how to die, but he only taught him how to die of cancer. When the lights go out,
people say of death. Now the power is out. I’m using a flashlight to read. The woman in my book
is riding a tram and eating cherries.
PATRICIA WHITING’S paintings have been exhibited in New Jersey and in Florida, and her pen and ink drawings have been featured in poetry anthologies. Her poems have been published in the Slipstream; Boca Raton; Thorny Locust; The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and others. Her chapbook, Learning to Read Between the Lines, was first-prize winner in the 2000 Poets of the Palm Beaches chapbook contest. Diary Poems: And Drawings was self-published in 2012 and is available on Amazon.
http://patriciawhiting.com/
L. Ward Abel
Digby Roundabout
They tell me as I move away
the closer I come, that
I can’t stop, only yield.
Circles are like that,
they never leave or arrive.
You can feel it in those
places with so much sky
they feel round like the sea;
here is there except for smalls
that pass for routine when in fact
they are essence.
I had a great uncle who lived
in Memphis and Los Angeles
at different times;
he said that destinations
are impossible to hold, that
departing is really the act of
coming together, of merging
again and again and again.
L. WARD ABEL is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Roseorange (Flutter Press, 2013), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), and the forthcoming Digby Roundabout (Aldrich Press, 2017).
They tell me as I move away
the closer I come, that
I can’t stop, only yield.
Circles are like that,
they never leave or arrive.
You can feel it in those
places with so much sky
they feel round like the sea;
here is there except for smalls
that pass for routine when in fact
they are essence.
I had a great uncle who lived
in Memphis and Los Angeles
at different times;
he said that destinations
are impossible to hold, that
departing is really the act of
coming together, of merging
again and again and again.
L. WARD ABEL is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Roseorange (Flutter Press, 2013), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), and the forthcoming Digby Roundabout (Aldrich Press, 2017).
Martin H. Levinson
In Search of Lost Time
Sipping a Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha
and eating a Greek Yogurt Parfait @ Starbucks
Tammy tweets me at the same time Chandler texts
Mariah Carey strolled by me on the sidewalk where
everyone is taking selfies, checking email, sending
messages and podcasting Adele’s latest hit that
does not include the fact that Freetown is the
capital of Sierra Leone, which I learned from
Phaedra on Facebook who suggested I link-surf Wikipedia,
binge-stream the latest episode of Downton Abbey,
share images on Instagram of last night’s imbroglio
that I snapped using my Galaxy S6, a smartphone
with a gazillion uses that are held together by gravity,
dark matter and a belief that boredom and stagnation
can be beaten by Google and PlayStation while doing
the New York Times crossword puzzle on my MacBook
Air where I am desperately seeking to answer the
question how did people before the digital age live
without YouTube.
MARTIN H. LEVINSON is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.
Sipping a Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha
and eating a Greek Yogurt Parfait @ Starbucks
Tammy tweets me at the same time Chandler texts
Mariah Carey strolled by me on the sidewalk where
everyone is taking selfies, checking email, sending
messages and podcasting Adele’s latest hit that
does not include the fact that Freetown is the
capital of Sierra Leone, which I learned from
Phaedra on Facebook who suggested I link-surf Wikipedia,
binge-stream the latest episode of Downton Abbey,
share images on Instagram of last night’s imbroglio
that I snapped using my Galaxy S6, a smartphone
with a gazillion uses that are held together by gravity,
dark matter and a belief that boredom and stagnation
can be beaten by Google and PlayStation while doing
the New York Times crossword puzzle on my MacBook
Air where I am desperately seeking to answer the
question how did people before the digital age live
without YouTube.
MARTIN H. LEVINSON is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.
Kate Sontag
Yoga Pose In Translation
I position myself into Savasana with the rest of the class,
try hard to follow our teacher’s instructions to lie flat
on the mat and make shallow the breath we have been
working so hard to deepen for the last hour, empty our
awareness of all distractions, eyes closed, hands at sides
open, legs loose, face and tongue relaxed, this challenge
I’m refining from scratch. A beginner in every stance
and stretch of sit, stand, fold, lotus to tree to downward
dog, hardest to master is this most elemental of moves
to remain unmoving in corpse pose, this nothing-at-all
mindful attempt to un-body the body, un-mind the mind,
un-breathe every five breaths taken to strengthen
our warriors, side- and twisted triangles, each moving bridge
un-bridged one leapfrog vertebrae at a time, release hips,
sacrum, calves, succumb to calm arms and shoulders
in sun salutation shadow, un-trampoline my bare feet,
ease these bent butterfly and child pose knees from their
chipped glass sensation, resist once we leave this space
prevailing winds of human contamination, prepare
to surrender denial, anger, fear the way my sister and I
assisted our mother. Holding on far more than she could
know, today on the first anniversary of her death, a month
shy of cherry blossoms, I would like to re-enter the world
restored, agile, grateful, see her display double-jointed thumbs,
balletic splits, towel her bathed skin’s milky scrim, feel her
bottle shape fill to the brim within mine, she who gave me
this mouth clenched in the midst of old arguments I am
losing to tendon, muscle, bone, blood flow, salt tears, self-
omission until we slowly reposition to seated, aim for palms,
oms, namastes in unison, rise to toes and find our necessary balance.
KATE SONTAG is co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf) and has published widely in journals and anthologies, including Villanelles (Everyman's Library), Boomer Girls (U of Iowa), Soundings (Caravaggio), Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo), Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Wisconsin, and Verse-Virtual. She has recently retired from Ripon College.
I position myself into Savasana with the rest of the class,
try hard to follow our teacher’s instructions to lie flat
on the mat and make shallow the breath we have been
working so hard to deepen for the last hour, empty our
awareness of all distractions, eyes closed, hands at sides
open, legs loose, face and tongue relaxed, this challenge
I’m refining from scratch. A beginner in every stance
and stretch of sit, stand, fold, lotus to tree to downward
dog, hardest to master is this most elemental of moves
to remain unmoving in corpse pose, this nothing-at-all
mindful attempt to un-body the body, un-mind the mind,
un-breathe every five breaths taken to strengthen
our warriors, side- and twisted triangles, each moving bridge
un-bridged one leapfrog vertebrae at a time, release hips,
sacrum, calves, succumb to calm arms and shoulders
in sun salutation shadow, un-trampoline my bare feet,
ease these bent butterfly and child pose knees from their
chipped glass sensation, resist once we leave this space
prevailing winds of human contamination, prepare
to surrender denial, anger, fear the way my sister and I
assisted our mother. Holding on far more than she could
know, today on the first anniversary of her death, a month
shy of cherry blossoms, I would like to re-enter the world
restored, agile, grateful, see her display double-jointed thumbs,
balletic splits, towel her bathed skin’s milky scrim, feel her
bottle shape fill to the brim within mine, she who gave me
this mouth clenched in the midst of old arguments I am
losing to tendon, muscle, bone, blood flow, salt tears, self-
omission until we slowly reposition to seated, aim for palms,
oms, namastes in unison, rise to toes and find our necessary balance.
KATE SONTAG is co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf) and has published widely in journals and anthologies, including Villanelles (Everyman's Library), Boomer Girls (U of Iowa), Soundings (Caravaggio), Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo), Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Wisconsin, and Verse-Virtual. She has recently retired from Ripon College.
Charles Rammelkamp
Eternity
When the young man in shorts held the elevator door
for them – he must have been in his sixties –
Etta and Blanche rolled past in their wheelchairs
and Etta blurted, "Nice legs."
The man blushed, his forehead pinking
near his gray fringe of hair.
Now, lying in her bed, waiting for sleep,
the restraining bars up so she wouldn’t
break her hip again, she remembered a boy
in her youth admiring her legs at the beach,
how they flirted all afternoon by the shore,
talking until Etta realized her skin was burnt,
the boy – was his name Tommy? –
apologizing for keeping her out in the sun.
Her family’d gone home the next day,
and she never saw Tommy again.
Lying on her back, she could hear his voice
now, “It’s all right,” he’d assured her,
“We have all the time in the world.”
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives, and edits The Potomac, an online literary journal – http://thepotomacjournal.com . His photographs, poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals. His latest book is a collection of poems called Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House, Loyola University), and another poetry collection, American Zeitgeist, is forthcoming from Apprentice House later this year.
When the young man in shorts held the elevator door
for them – he must have been in his sixties –
Etta and Blanche rolled past in their wheelchairs
and Etta blurted, "Nice legs."
The man blushed, his forehead pinking
near his gray fringe of hair.
Now, lying in her bed, waiting for sleep,
the restraining bars up so she wouldn’t
break her hip again, she remembered a boy
in her youth admiring her legs at the beach,
how they flirted all afternoon by the shore,
talking until Etta realized her skin was burnt,
the boy – was his name Tommy? –
apologizing for keeping her out in the sun.
Her family’d gone home the next day,
and she never saw Tommy again.
Lying on her back, she could hear his voice
now, “It’s all right,” he’d assured her,
“We have all the time in the world.”
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives, and edits The Potomac, an online literary journal – http://thepotomacjournal.com . His photographs, poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals. His latest book is a collection of poems called Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House, Loyola University), and another poetry collection, American Zeitgeist, is forthcoming from Apprentice House later this year.
Janet Bohac
A Stop Light in Nashville
A red lozenge
hangs above the intersection.
Curbs curve away.
A white police car inches forward,
a white cop inside
fiddling earwax
with the crescent of his little finger.
To my other side,
Boom! of bass
and a young man, cool
as an ebony key, cocks
his fingers and shoots,
his wish whistling past
my windshield
into the white neck exposed
above a blue collar.
JANET BOHAC is the author of Evidence Of The Outer World (short stories). Her poetry has been included in Bi Any Other Name, Anima, Accent Miami, The South Florida Poetry Review, The Caribbean Writer, and many other literary magazines. She was writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN, and Screenwriting Fellow at AFI in Los Angeles. She lives in Michigan and works in a forest.
A red lozenge
hangs above the intersection.
Curbs curve away.
A white police car inches forward,
a white cop inside
fiddling earwax
with the crescent of his little finger.
To my other side,
Boom! of bass
and a young man, cool
as an ebony key, cocks
his fingers and shoots,
his wish whistling past
my windshield
into the white neck exposed
above a blue collar.
JANET BOHAC is the author of Evidence Of The Outer World (short stories). Her poetry has been included in Bi Any Other Name, Anima, Accent Miami, The South Florida Poetry Review, The Caribbean Writer, and many other literary magazines. She was writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN, and Screenwriting Fellow at AFI in Los Angeles. She lives in Michigan and works in a forest.
Alan Catlin
Fat City
In backwater border town
basements, no window warehouse
training rooms, sagging frayed ropes
and rust stained rings; all the punched
out bags and skip ropes tracks along
unpainted-in-this-lifetime plank
walls, two bit promoters/managers
smoke loco weed and drink white
lightning with a worm from chipped
lip bottles. Arrange matches between
never-was-losers and dead-on-their-
feet hop heads, all nervous and jerky,
jittery for any kind of fix, any kind of
match in no-license-needed, weigh-in
waived, unsanctioned bouts in arenas
that doubled as dog fight pits with
killer cocks on the side. A place
so far out of town everything is
permitted, all wagers accepted,
only one man walks out alive in
winner takes all matches, actual
velvet purses filled with gold pieces
with a cut of the gate kicked in.
Corner men with kit bag supplies like
those of battlefield medics, squeezed
up against make shift platform, wide eyed
and hypo shot as the boxer’s feet dance
on the canvas like hanged men at
the end of a rope.
ALAN CATLIN has many irons in the poetry fire, online, in print and elsewhere. His most recent full length books of poetry are American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press and Last Man Standing from Lummox Press.
In backwater border town
basements, no window warehouse
training rooms, sagging frayed ropes
and rust stained rings; all the punched
out bags and skip ropes tracks along
unpainted-in-this-lifetime plank
walls, two bit promoters/managers
smoke loco weed and drink white
lightning with a worm from chipped
lip bottles. Arrange matches between
never-was-losers and dead-on-their-
feet hop heads, all nervous and jerky,
jittery for any kind of fix, any kind of
match in no-license-needed, weigh-in
waived, unsanctioned bouts in arenas
that doubled as dog fight pits with
killer cocks on the side. A place
so far out of town everything is
permitted, all wagers accepted,
only one man walks out alive in
winner takes all matches, actual
velvet purses filled with gold pieces
with a cut of the gate kicked in.
Corner men with kit bag supplies like
those of battlefield medics, squeezed
up against make shift platform, wide eyed
and hypo shot as the boxer’s feet dance
on the canvas like hanged men at
the end of a rope.
ALAN CATLIN has many irons in the poetry fire, online, in print and elsewhere. His most recent full length books of poetry are American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press and Last Man Standing from Lummox Press.
Bruce Weber 2 poems
Max’s White Rope
Max has this rope
It’s a white rope
It’s long as a rattle snake
It curls and glides
Along the cherry wood floor
Whispering something in Max’s ear
Is there some strange ghost living in the rope?
Is there some miracle hibernating in the throat of the rope?
Is there some amazing chirp making a home in the heart of the rope?
What impels Max to pull this rope
Across the length and breadth of this house
Like it’s some kind of key to a golden door
Max wants to open more than anything
Maybe it’s simpler than a big dream
Maybe it’s quite practical
Maybe Max just likes to jump after the rope
Max likes to scheme after the rope
Max likes to entangle himself like a silly boy in the rope
Crossing the threshold of each day
With a pursuit as pure as an uncut diamond
And coming along behind him always
The white rope
The white rope curled like a serpent
The white rope tugged across exotic continents
Max’s rope
Max’s wonderful white rope
Max has this rope
It’s a white rope
It’s long as a rattle snake
It curls and glides
Along the cherry wood floor
Whispering something in Max’s ear
Is there some strange ghost living in the rope?
Is there some miracle hibernating in the throat of the rope?
Is there some amazing chirp making a home in the heart of the rope?
What impels Max to pull this rope
Across the length and breadth of this house
Like it’s some kind of key to a golden door
Max wants to open more than anything
Maybe it’s simpler than a big dream
Maybe it’s quite practical
Maybe Max just likes to jump after the rope
Max likes to scheme after the rope
Max likes to entangle himself like a silly boy in the rope
Crossing the threshold of each day
With a pursuit as pure as an uncut diamond
And coming along behind him always
The white rope
The white rope curled like a serpent
The white rope tugged across exotic continents
Max’s rope
Max’s wonderful white rope
from Morning Entries
tuesday-
calmed down. found my inner buddha and sat by the
stream and listened for hours to the moving water.
pressed my ear close to truly hear the inner workings
of the universe. the mysterious flow between things
that keeps everything in check. tied together in a
harmonious symphony of chirping birds/barking
dogs barking /and squeaking toys. the farmers
plucking eggs from productive chickens and the
urbanites sipping café au lait and daydreaming
of new fashions. these are the best days of my life
i keep telling myself pressing my ear ever closer
to the heart of it all. the water swiftly moving on.
BRUCE WEBER’S most recent book of poems is The Breakup of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press). He splits his time between houses in New York City and Saugerties, New York.
tuesday-
calmed down. found my inner buddha and sat by the
stream and listened for hours to the moving water.
pressed my ear close to truly hear the inner workings
of the universe. the mysterious flow between things
that keeps everything in check. tied together in a
harmonious symphony of chirping birds/barking
dogs barking /and squeaking toys. the farmers
plucking eggs from productive chickens and the
urbanites sipping café au lait and daydreaming
of new fashions. these are the best days of my life
i keep telling myself pressing my ear ever closer
to the heart of it all. the water swiftly moving on.
BRUCE WEBER’S most recent book of poems is The Breakup of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press). He splits his time between houses in New York City and Saugerties, New York.
Steve Klepetar 2 poems
Illumination
The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into themselves.
—The lamps they carry
Charles Simic
The lamps my parents carried
bred shadows that fell across
hardwood floors and crept
into the kitchen and up the walls.
They thought their hands were
empty, that they had finally arrived
on solid ground after so much
wandering, so much surf and rain.
My father walked and walked
as if his legs might carry him
to the hallway of a thousand bells.
He left his briefcase on the desk,
ambled into a storm spitting
rain through the living room.
My mother was there with her
mirror and her drugs, her doctor’s
arms around her waist. They all
drank martinis and watched the news:
more missiles aimed at our shores,
the National Guard called out
again. Marches, always marches.
Invisible, their lamps flickered
and burned. After dinner they sat
through a film, shadows on the black
and white TV. Then they spat
like feral cats, aroused and worried,
fur bristling, balanced on a midnight fence.
The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into themselves.
—The lamps they carry
Charles Simic
The lamps my parents carried
bred shadows that fell across
hardwood floors and crept
into the kitchen and up the walls.
They thought their hands were
empty, that they had finally arrived
on solid ground after so much
wandering, so much surf and rain.
My father walked and walked
as if his legs might carry him
to the hallway of a thousand bells.
He left his briefcase on the desk,
ambled into a storm spitting
rain through the living room.
My mother was there with her
mirror and her drugs, her doctor’s
arms around her waist. They all
drank martinis and watched the news:
more missiles aimed at our shores,
the National Guard called out
again. Marches, always marches.
Invisible, their lamps flickered
and burned. After dinner they sat
through a film, shadows on the black
and white TV. Then they spat
like feral cats, aroused and worried,
fur bristling, balanced on a midnight fence.
Terror and Grace
The world trembles. A frog at the arboretum
hides in a small green pond. Most of the time
planes arrive safely, cars circle the airport
through rain and falling dark. The burning
he feels, heat swelling on the tarmac,
is a thousand miles away, a hundred years
At this moment, highways wind through suburbs
toward where the city looms, its gray towers
piercing low clouds. He steps from a taxi
with a slight limp, wonders if he will always
be ugly or if the glass might open to reveal
his true face: the kind smile of a man returned
to his native land, an explorer with damp hair,
holding many gifts in scratched and bleeding hands.
STEVE KLEPETAR'S work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Deep Water, Expound, The Muse: India, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press. His full-length collection Family Reunion is forthcoming from Big Table Publishing.
The world trembles. A frog at the arboretum
hides in a small green pond. Most of the time
planes arrive safely, cars circle the airport
through rain and falling dark. The burning
he feels, heat swelling on the tarmac,
is a thousand miles away, a hundred years
At this moment, highways wind through suburbs
toward where the city looms, its gray towers
piercing low clouds. He steps from a taxi
with a slight limp, wonders if he will always
be ugly or if the glass might open to reveal
his true face: the kind smile of a man returned
to his native land, an explorer with damp hair,
holding many gifts in scratched and bleeding hands.
STEVE KLEPETAR'S work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Deep Water, Expound, The Muse: India, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press. His full-length collection Family Reunion is forthcoming from Big Table Publishing.
George Wallace
Darkness Conveys Awe
it is night, the city is a marvelous place for dislocation, possessions
are presents and there is no coming to our senses, we rip them open
we pour them out, see how they ripen in the setting sun, ripen and
ripen and rot away, there's a rat in the pantry, there's a footstep on
the curb, the love of self is a room full of strangers and a man is a
commodity and there's one now, at the foot of the stairs at the end
of the hall, he is wrestling with the elevator door, he must be crazy
but she is madness too, the fragrance of musk is on her clothes,
her hair is a stairwell her eyes are desire, the way she comes on
to him is a sword in the heart of a lydian god, she plunges and plunges,
desire is a camel getting on with things in the desert heat and the
desert cold, a taxicab is dodging traffic and it is the traffic itself,
nothing can get out of its own way and a man is an oasis and a dead
end, destination is everything and she has seen the present and is
dissatisfied with it, the cut and thrust of her body is a sad delight,
she watches their lovemaking in the ceiling mirror, headlights and
helicopters are what pass for action at three am, neon is nearly perfect
light and the grief which lives in high places is in the low places too
they leave the room separately --
the streets run black with blood
GEORGE WALLACE is author of 29 chapbooks of poetry, writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, and poet laureate of the 2015 National Beat Poetry Festival. Editor of Poetrybay.com and co-editor of Great Weather for Media. He recently accepted an artist in residency grant to do research on Sappho and other ancient Hellenic poets at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C.
it is night, the city is a marvelous place for dislocation, possessions
are presents and there is no coming to our senses, we rip them open
we pour them out, see how they ripen in the setting sun, ripen and
ripen and rot away, there's a rat in the pantry, there's a footstep on
the curb, the love of self is a room full of strangers and a man is a
commodity and there's one now, at the foot of the stairs at the end
of the hall, he is wrestling with the elevator door, he must be crazy
but she is madness too, the fragrance of musk is on her clothes,
her hair is a stairwell her eyes are desire, the way she comes on
to him is a sword in the heart of a lydian god, she plunges and plunges,
desire is a camel getting on with things in the desert heat and the
desert cold, a taxicab is dodging traffic and it is the traffic itself,
nothing can get out of its own way and a man is an oasis and a dead
end, destination is everything and she has seen the present and is
dissatisfied with it, the cut and thrust of her body is a sad delight,
she watches their lovemaking in the ceiling mirror, headlights and
helicopters are what pass for action at three am, neon is nearly perfect
light and the grief which lives in high places is in the low places too
they leave the room separately --
the streets run black with blood
GEORGE WALLACE is author of 29 chapbooks of poetry, writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, and poet laureate of the 2015 National Beat Poetry Festival. Editor of Poetrybay.com and co-editor of Great Weather for Media. He recently accepted an artist in residency grant to do research on Sappho and other ancient Hellenic poets at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C.
David B. Axelrod
Sun Worship
The dermatologist burns a dozen spots
off me with liquid nitrogen. For all I
know, at sixty bucks a pop, he could just be
making this up to pay for his Mercedes.
He tells me the sun is dangerous—wear
a hat, use tons of sunscreen. I’m stupid.
I still love the sun, luxuriating in my
backyard with a book and iced tea.
They tell me it’s a hole in the ozone
or maybe a solar eruption that sends
radiation straight at me. Basal cell
this and squamous that and oh, the dreaded
melanoma. Perspiration streams down
my solar plexus. I’m oiled and browned.
No one can tell me Vitamin D stands for death.
Dr. DAVID B. AXELROD’S 22nd book of poems is All Vows: New & Selected Poems (Nirala Press: New Delhi, fall, 2016). He is co-author and editor of Merlin Stone Remembered (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2014), winner of the Gold Medal for non-fiction in the Florida Book Award competition. A three-time Fulbright Award winner, he served as the first, official Fulbright Poet-in-Residence in the People’s Republic of China. His is Poet Laureate of Volusia County, FL. Visit his website at www.poetrydoctor.org.
The dermatologist burns a dozen spots
off me with liquid nitrogen. For all I
know, at sixty bucks a pop, he could just be
making this up to pay for his Mercedes.
He tells me the sun is dangerous—wear
a hat, use tons of sunscreen. I’m stupid.
I still love the sun, luxuriating in my
backyard with a book and iced tea.
They tell me it’s a hole in the ozone
or maybe a solar eruption that sends
radiation straight at me. Basal cell
this and squamous that and oh, the dreaded
melanoma. Perspiration streams down
my solar plexus. I’m oiled and browned.
No one can tell me Vitamin D stands for death.
Dr. DAVID B. AXELROD’S 22nd book of poems is All Vows: New & Selected Poems (Nirala Press: New Delhi, fall, 2016). He is co-author and editor of Merlin Stone Remembered (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2014), winner of the Gold Medal for non-fiction in the Florida Book Award competition. A three-time Fulbright Award winner, he served as the first, official Fulbright Poet-in-Residence in the People’s Republic of China. His is Poet Laureate of Volusia County, FL. Visit his website at www.poetrydoctor.org.
Linda B. Avila
A 1950 Misadventure
Jeb and I came running around the corner
and spotted a Rhino up the street.
We were surprised as this was a town
too small for a zoo and no circuses came
anywhere near.
The Rhino stood with its prehistoric
head moving back and forth. I’d heard
they have poor eyesight but figured
their other senses keen.
We didn’t need words; our departure
was fast and quiet. It wasn’t the direction
we’d planned to go but we went anyway
and ended up at Cuely creek near the bridge.
It was hot, we scanned the water for large
foreign beasts; all was clear. We went
for a swim and didn’t think about our lack
of bathing suits, as it was Sunday morning
and people were in Church, or were supposed
to be, like Rhinos were supposed to be in Africa.
We stayed too long in the water,
church let out and we were seen naked
from cars crossing the bridge. Some honked,
a few people yelled out to us.
We were gone before the police arrived.
No one reported the Rhino.
LINDA B. AVILA grew up in Northwestern Pennsylvania and graduated from Edinboro State College. She studied poetry at The New School for Social Research with Richard Tayson and Malena Morling and also at various workshops with Sharon Olds, Kevin Young, and Thomas Lux. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, California Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Cape Rock, and Eclectica.
Jeb and I came running around the corner
and spotted a Rhino up the street.
We were surprised as this was a town
too small for a zoo and no circuses came
anywhere near.
The Rhino stood with its prehistoric
head moving back and forth. I’d heard
they have poor eyesight but figured
their other senses keen.
We didn’t need words; our departure
was fast and quiet. It wasn’t the direction
we’d planned to go but we went anyway
and ended up at Cuely creek near the bridge.
It was hot, we scanned the water for large
foreign beasts; all was clear. We went
for a swim and didn’t think about our lack
of bathing suits, as it was Sunday morning
and people were in Church, or were supposed
to be, like Rhinos were supposed to be in Africa.
We stayed too long in the water,
church let out and we were seen naked
from cars crossing the bridge. Some honked,
a few people yelled out to us.
We were gone before the police arrived.
No one reported the Rhino.
LINDA B. AVILA grew up in Northwestern Pennsylvania and graduated from Edinboro State College. She studied poetry at The New School for Social Research with Richard Tayson and Malena Morling and also at various workshops with Sharon Olds, Kevin Young, and Thomas Lux. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, California Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Cape Rock, and Eclectica.
Peter Hargitai
Yo Kolbász at St. Emeric
Our language is the language of the Hungarian sausage,
Yo kolbász, served red and hot and ready to be devoured
In the hot sun. A Sunday picnic in the church parking lot.
Not much of a crowd today: a cadre of senior citizens,
Doughy old men with bowling ball knees in ill-fitting
Boy Scout shorts. Wan veterans, white ghosts, sweating
Bullets in black felt, patriotically-worn Bocskay suits,
A grandmother in folk costume, tiara and bifocals,
Scoffs at the closing of another church in Cleveland,
Laments her husband’s long lingering terminal illness,
Still outdoes everyone else in the church kitchen,
Still the best Yo kolbász, still tasty in broken Hungarian.
PETER HARGITAI, an award-winning translator and retired Senior Lecturer in English, publishes poetry and fiction regularly and independently in Hungarian and English. He is currently Poet Laureate of Gulfport (pop. 13,605).
Our language is the language of the Hungarian sausage,
Yo kolbász, served red and hot and ready to be devoured
In the hot sun. A Sunday picnic in the church parking lot.
Not much of a crowd today: a cadre of senior citizens,
Doughy old men with bowling ball knees in ill-fitting
Boy Scout shorts. Wan veterans, white ghosts, sweating
Bullets in black felt, patriotically-worn Bocskay suits,
A grandmother in folk costume, tiara and bifocals,
Scoffs at the closing of another church in Cleveland,
Laments her husband’s long lingering terminal illness,
Still outdoes everyone else in the church kitchen,
Still the best Yo kolbász, still tasty in broken Hungarian.
PETER HARGITAI, an award-winning translator and retired Senior Lecturer in English, publishes poetry and fiction regularly and independently in Hungarian and English. He is currently Poet Laureate of Gulfport (pop. 13,605).
Geoffrey Philp
Olokun
The first insult was the bodies
of warriors, huddled in the hold
of slavers like the Zong
and the captain, low on fresh water,
led elders to the stern and prodded
them with swords until they plunged
feet first into the froth that held
their arms afloat for a moment
and then swallowed them into the blue,
their bones strewn over the Atlantic,
which every June when the harmattan
stirs clouds over the sea bed, whips
coconut fronds until skies turn as dark
as Eshu’s eyes, pelts tourists, helpless
as starfish stranded on dunes, with hail--
lies of the fathers visited upon their children:
fish swimming along Las Olas Boulevard.
Her anger rises over the sea wall.
Born in Jamaica, GEOFFREY PHILP is the author of the forthcoming novel, Garvey’s Ghost. His work is represented in nearly every anthology of Caribbean literature, and he is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. A graduate of the University of Miami, where he earned an MA in English, Geoffrey teaches creative writing at Miami Dade College. He is currently working on a book of poems, The Orishas of Ives Dairy.
The first insult was the bodies
of warriors, huddled in the hold
of slavers like the Zong
and the captain, low on fresh water,
led elders to the stern and prodded
them with swords until they plunged
feet first into the froth that held
their arms afloat for a moment
and then swallowed them into the blue,
their bones strewn over the Atlantic,
which every June when the harmattan
stirs clouds over the sea bed, whips
coconut fronds until skies turn as dark
as Eshu’s eyes, pelts tourists, helpless
as starfish stranded on dunes, with hail--
lies of the fathers visited upon their children:
fish swimming along Las Olas Boulevard.
Her anger rises over the sea wall.
Born in Jamaica, GEOFFREY PHILP is the author of the forthcoming novel, Garvey’s Ghost. His work is represented in nearly every anthology of Caribbean literature, and he is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. A graduate of the University of Miami, where he earned an MA in English, Geoffrey teaches creative writing at Miami Dade College. He is currently working on a book of poems, The Orishas of Ives Dairy.
Mark Mann
On Schnittke’s ‘Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief’
If I were equal to the things I know,
if all distances collapsed,
I’d be my body, that broken stone,
smooth and marble and whole.
The planet also is fractured and small,
sailing on with her many sorrows,
unlike the solid god as she rolls
and rolls through the emptiness,
the horrible emptiness
His vast vectors pierce.
The space between notes, then,
the space that shapes music,
is the space between us,
the space that shapes us.
It’s like dying alone.
There lies the grief.
MARK MANN lives in Chicago where he works at a bookstore and teaches poetry class at a social service agency for students who suffer from one mental illness. He describes his style of poetry as neo-modernist but only if he must put a label on it. His literary influences are chiefly Yeats, Stevens, and Williams.
If I were equal to the things I know,
if all distances collapsed,
I’d be my body, that broken stone,
smooth and marble and whole.
The planet also is fractured and small,
sailing on with her many sorrows,
unlike the solid god as she rolls
and rolls through the emptiness,
the horrible emptiness
His vast vectors pierce.
The space between notes, then,
the space that shapes music,
is the space between us,
the space that shapes us.
It’s like dying alone.
There lies the grief.
MARK MANN lives in Chicago where he works at a bookstore and teaches poetry class at a social service agency for students who suffer from one mental illness. He describes his style of poetry as neo-modernist but only if he must put a label on it. His literary influences are chiefly Yeats, Stevens, and Williams.
Carol Alexander
Vanishing Species
Say the Great Auk, crushed by a boot, relations crowding the southern coast
for rafts of fish and krill. To kill: a way of anthropomorphising.
The enemy, a caricature, in the servant's perpetual white and black.
Say silvered handmaids of Time, clumped around the bingo table,
integuments of wool in the June heat--
the freckled skin, which fades like acid paper, catching sunlight through plate glass.
Say wolves imported from the hinterlands to roam the woods upstate,
dropping pups in the bracken, fresh from a hasty rout,
labors brief, explicit, wordless: yet expressly female, blood on their coats.
At the sanctuary, prescient eyes on a group of boys remaindered from the streets.
Kinship, kind. They, a rough kith prowling the night.
The moon's arc, and shapely Venus; lamplighters tenderly at their task,
anachronistic, fauns where the alley meets unspooling dark.
Say the bright display of the national debt, numbers rioting--
and the feathers and scales disappearing into mud, never to be reassembled
but in the child's machine-stamped puzzle board.
CAROL ALEXANDER’S poems have been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals, such as Bluestem, Canary, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, Illya's Honey, Mad Hatter's Review, Mobius, Poetrybay, Red River Review, and THEMA. Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press (2013). Recent work appears in Avocet Weekly, Eunoia Review, Big River Poetry Review, Clementine, The New Verse News, Split Rock Review, and Poetry Quarterly. New work is forthcoming in 3 Elements Review and Poetica.
Say the Great Auk, crushed by a boot, relations crowding the southern coast
for rafts of fish and krill. To kill: a way of anthropomorphising.
The enemy, a caricature, in the servant's perpetual white and black.
Say silvered handmaids of Time, clumped around the bingo table,
integuments of wool in the June heat--
the freckled skin, which fades like acid paper, catching sunlight through plate glass.
Say wolves imported from the hinterlands to roam the woods upstate,
dropping pups in the bracken, fresh from a hasty rout,
labors brief, explicit, wordless: yet expressly female, blood on their coats.
At the sanctuary, prescient eyes on a group of boys remaindered from the streets.
Kinship, kind. They, a rough kith prowling the night.
The moon's arc, and shapely Venus; lamplighters tenderly at their task,
anachronistic, fauns where the alley meets unspooling dark.
Say the bright display of the national debt, numbers rioting--
and the feathers and scales disappearing into mud, never to be reassembled
but in the child's machine-stamped puzzle board.
CAROL ALEXANDER’S poems have been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals, such as Bluestem, Canary, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, Illya's Honey, Mad Hatter's Review, Mobius, Poetrybay, Red River Review, and THEMA. Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press (2013). Recent work appears in Avocet Weekly, Eunoia Review, Big River Poetry Review, Clementine, The New Verse News, Split Rock Review, and Poetry Quarterly. New work is forthcoming in 3 Elements Review and Poetica.
Mike James 2 poems
Building A Backyard Fire, Late Winter, Thinking Of No One At All
my backyard fire pit hand dug, uneven,
cemented with yard rocks, re-used brick
the only skills my hands know
are ones money’s lack teaches
no snow or frost though still a chill
what better time to build a fire
there’s dried-out pine, scrub bush,
castoff lumber from the vacant lot next door
there’s a box of matches, another of wine,
a chair and a red, wool blanket too
if my neighbor drops by we’ll toast
from my box or her bottle
her last husband gone to somewhere else
since last september
the stars out in a few minutes
as of now, the sky’s still blue
my backyard fire pit hand dug, uneven,
cemented with yard rocks, re-used brick
the only skills my hands know
are ones money’s lack teaches
no snow or frost though still a chill
what better time to build a fire
there’s dried-out pine, scrub bush,
castoff lumber from the vacant lot next door
there’s a box of matches, another of wine,
a chair and a red, wool blanket too
if my neighbor drops by we’ll toast
from my box or her bottle
her last husband gone to somewhere else
since last september
the stars out in a few minutes
as of now, the sky’s still blue
Marriage Suite
i can make nothing
with my hands
have learned
no craft
of wood, needle
or stone
am often wrong on
measurements
all i know of
geometry
comes from studying
the lines
of your face
***
some things i know
only from
you
are true because
you said them
whole world might
say otherwise
***
i watch your hands
in the quiet canyon of your sleep
there are dreams you
follow
again and again
they are the stories you tell
on waking
***
dreams are the second best thing
you always
say
you’ve always said
***
after these many years
memory takes up
more space
once, it used just a closet
now, it demands a whole floor
***
that first, rented house
with barely a bed and table
one neighbor came
with green apples
and water
in a clear, glass jar
she sat with us
told us
how it was
before we came
MIKE JAMES has been widely published in magazines throughout the country. He is the author of eight poetry collections, including Past Due Notices: Poems 1991-2011 and The Year We Let The House Fall Down. He’s recently served as a Visiting Writer-In-Residence at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. Currently, he serves as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review. He lives and works in Chapel Hill, NC with his wife and five kids.
i can make nothing
with my hands
have learned
no craft
of wood, needle
or stone
am often wrong on
measurements
all i know of
geometry
comes from studying
the lines
of your face
***
some things i know
only from
you
are true because
you said them
whole world might
say otherwise
***
i watch your hands
in the quiet canyon of your sleep
there are dreams you
follow
again and again
they are the stories you tell
on waking
***
dreams are the second best thing
you always
say
you’ve always said
***
after these many years
memory takes up
more space
once, it used just a closet
now, it demands a whole floor
***
that first, rented house
with barely a bed and table
one neighbor came
with green apples
and water
in a clear, glass jar
she sat with us
told us
how it was
before we came
MIKE JAMES has been widely published in magazines throughout the country. He is the author of eight poetry collections, including Past Due Notices: Poems 1991-2011 and The Year We Let The House Fall Down. He’s recently served as a Visiting Writer-In-Residence at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. Currently, he serves as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review. He lives and works in Chapel Hill, NC with his wife and five kids.
Carl Boon
Heavy Leaves
The thick, broad leaves
unbeautiful
of the fig trees
collect and hold
in forms we cannot see
the city, night-
weather, the sea beyond
the hills. Fragments
of conversation,
women and men
moving in the dark,
the dust of Ramadan’s
drummer calling us
to eat, dawn is coming.
Those who say they grow
don’t know whispers
of joy and evil,
the happenings
of this street: Friday
Ayşe fell to it, moaning,
because her husband
went away. Last night
a kitten screamed
for food. So I say
they do not grow;
they take upon themselves
what we cannot,
what we hardly feel
in our drinking, sleeping,
dreaming of fruit.
CARL BOON lives and works in Izmir, Turkey. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Two Thirds North, Jet Fuel Review, Blast Furnace, and Sunset Liminal.
The thick, broad leaves
unbeautiful
of the fig trees
collect and hold
in forms we cannot see
the city, night-
weather, the sea beyond
the hills. Fragments
of conversation,
women and men
moving in the dark,
the dust of Ramadan’s
drummer calling us
to eat, dawn is coming.
Those who say they grow
don’t know whispers
of joy and evil,
the happenings
of this street: Friday
Ayşe fell to it, moaning,
because her husband
went away. Last night
a kitten screamed
for food. So I say
they do not grow;
they take upon themselves
what we cannot,
what we hardly feel
in our drinking, sleeping,
dreaming of fruit.
CARL BOON lives and works in Izmir, Turkey. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Two Thirds North, Jet Fuel Review, Blast Furnace, and Sunset Liminal.
Lynne Viti
God’s Thief
God sees me carry the stones from the seashore, smooth
Gray rocks I cradle two at a time, pulling them close
To my belly, carrying them like the physical therapist said to.
If it’s against the law to carry these rocks home
To my garden, well then, I’m God’s thief.
God sees me snap off the forsythia branches, try
To speed up spring, make sunlight, water
push out small green leaves, butter-yellow blooms.
They brighten my Spartan workroom.
God sees me out among the weeds and the damp spring soil
when I should be writing.
God knows the faces of our friends are drawn tight
In those last days before their bodies give out, their souls
Still burning hard and bright in our memories.
If only God weren’t so silent, so distant with us,
If only God would pull up a chair, act like
A parent imparting advice, say, When I was your age,
Rome wasn’t built in a day, keep your friends close--
I’ve gathered so many rocks now, each time wondering
When God will show God’s self, or give me a sign--
Not a miracle exactly, but a perfect rose, then another,
A summer of roses, safe behind a wall of sea-kissed rocks.
LYNNE VITI is a senior lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She has published poetry and fiction in Mountain Gazette, Amuse-Bouche, The Paterson Review, The Little Patuxent Review, Drunk Monkeys, Cultured Vultures, Irish Literary Review, A New Ulster, Mountain Gazette, and Right Hand Pointing. She has also published numerous articles on legal topics, composition theory and media studies. She won an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, and the summer 2015 poetry contest at The Song Is.
God sees me carry the stones from the seashore, smooth
Gray rocks I cradle two at a time, pulling them close
To my belly, carrying them like the physical therapist said to.
If it’s against the law to carry these rocks home
To my garden, well then, I’m God’s thief.
God sees me snap off the forsythia branches, try
To speed up spring, make sunlight, water
push out small green leaves, butter-yellow blooms.
They brighten my Spartan workroom.
God sees me out among the weeds and the damp spring soil
when I should be writing.
God knows the faces of our friends are drawn tight
In those last days before their bodies give out, their souls
Still burning hard and bright in our memories.
If only God weren’t so silent, so distant with us,
If only God would pull up a chair, act like
A parent imparting advice, say, When I was your age,
Rome wasn’t built in a day, keep your friends close--
I’ve gathered so many rocks now, each time wondering
When God will show God’s self, or give me a sign--
Not a miracle exactly, but a perfect rose, then another,
A summer of roses, safe behind a wall of sea-kissed rocks.
LYNNE VITI is a senior lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She has published poetry and fiction in Mountain Gazette, Amuse-Bouche, The Paterson Review, The Little Patuxent Review, Drunk Monkeys, Cultured Vultures, Irish Literary Review, A New Ulster, Mountain Gazette, and Right Hand Pointing. She has also published numerous articles on legal topics, composition theory and media studies. She won an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, and the summer 2015 poetry contest at The Song Is.
Leah Kloss 2 poems
Third House from the Corner
It always looks like no one's home. Mailbox, its support long-rotted, is bound with elastic cord
to the angle-iron post of a Pennysaver box. The cord is bright yellow and looks out of
place. Your own vehicle looks out of place too. Shiny, a little too smooth bumper to bumper
with her car, a mix of weathered maroon and rust, spotted with grey spray-primer. You could get
back in your own car, shift into reverse and head to town in search of coffee. Instead you stand
between open car door and house, looking down into blades of iris, fairy trumpets of
periwinkle. Then up into the wild cousins of cultivated raspberries and roses, both with similar
teeth ranging down reedy canes and lanky stems. And all of it laced with a newcomer to the
property since your summers with the lawnmower: sticky-weed with eye-catching flowerettes
and leaf-clusters that resemble sweet woodruff, tempting and deceitful, ready to cling to pant
cuffs and sear skin. Is that limestone in your chest? A chunk the size of the slab that is the front
step? Dredge up tolerance, conjure forgiveness, open the louvers of your heart. Sing with the
screen door spring as it recognizes you.
It always looks like no one's home. Mailbox, its support long-rotted, is bound with elastic cord
to the angle-iron post of a Pennysaver box. The cord is bright yellow and looks out of
place. Your own vehicle looks out of place too. Shiny, a little too smooth bumper to bumper
with her car, a mix of weathered maroon and rust, spotted with grey spray-primer. You could get
back in your own car, shift into reverse and head to town in search of coffee. Instead you stand
between open car door and house, looking down into blades of iris, fairy trumpets of
periwinkle. Then up into the wild cousins of cultivated raspberries and roses, both with similar
teeth ranging down reedy canes and lanky stems. And all of it laced with a newcomer to the
property since your summers with the lawnmower: sticky-weed with eye-catching flowerettes
and leaf-clusters that resemble sweet woodruff, tempting and deceitful, ready to cling to pant
cuffs and sear skin. Is that limestone in your chest? A chunk the size of the slab that is the front
step? Dredge up tolerance, conjure forgiveness, open the louvers of your heart. Sing with the
screen door spring as it recognizes you.
What I Might Inherit
When you sleep, the final sleep, the big sleep and I am left to clean out your house, I might wish
for an escape of my own. A break from handling, sorting and deciding, scouring, discarding and
distributing. Because there are not just closets and dresser drawers, a cabinet of silver and china
and attic boxes. Not just your clothes. And those of my father, who has been gone five years
now. There are your mother's clothes. Raincoats and winter coats with accordion-pleated rain-
bonnets and tissues in the pockets, jackets for fishing and raking leaves, two dresses for
weddings or church, blouses for every-day and polyester slacks with stitched creases, nylon slips
now yellow and brittle. Thirty years after her death, her slippers still under the dressing table,
prescription bottles in a bedside cupboard, a waxed package from crackers, emptied by mice. All
this might be enough but what I fear most is your bed. Greyed sheets that bloom with spots of
blood and great chrysanthemums of urine. Then, what's beneath the bed. Not just old shoes and
cardboard boxes, dog hair, dust and cobwebs thick as felt. But at last count, sixteen empty half-
gallon vodka bottles. There at the rehab facility, are you able to sleep? Nothing to tether you to
earth with all that empty air, shiny linoleum beneath your bed.
LEAH KLOSS lives and writes in East Aurora, New York, she appeared in the inaugural issue of SoFloPoJo in May 2016.
When you sleep, the final sleep, the big sleep and I am left to clean out your house, I might wish
for an escape of my own. A break from handling, sorting and deciding, scouring, discarding and
distributing. Because there are not just closets and dresser drawers, a cabinet of silver and china
and attic boxes. Not just your clothes. And those of my father, who has been gone five years
now. There are your mother's clothes. Raincoats and winter coats with accordion-pleated rain-
bonnets and tissues in the pockets, jackets for fishing and raking leaves, two dresses for
weddings or church, blouses for every-day and polyester slacks with stitched creases, nylon slips
now yellow and brittle. Thirty years after her death, her slippers still under the dressing table,
prescription bottles in a bedside cupboard, a waxed package from crackers, emptied by mice. All
this might be enough but what I fear most is your bed. Greyed sheets that bloom with spots of
blood and great chrysanthemums of urine. Then, what's beneath the bed. Not just old shoes and
cardboard boxes, dog hair, dust and cobwebs thick as felt. But at last count, sixteen empty half-
gallon vodka bottles. There at the rehab facility, are you able to sleep? Nothing to tether you to
earth with all that empty air, shiny linoleum beneath your bed.
LEAH KLOSS lives and writes in East Aurora, New York, she appeared in the inaugural issue of SoFloPoJo in May 2016.
Michael H. Brownstein 2 poems
I Am Made for Alzheimer’s
practicing forgetting since I was a child.
A pink thread of mist frays into light,
the sky sun ached blue-white
full of calories and miscellaneous detail
and then a great shiver of katydids
blows across a wind at the edge of the yard.
I have to explain everything in color,
the mood swings and the warmth of scars,
a strain above the eyes, a roll of breath
across a shape of lips I am not allowed
to wander across. This is the way to dementia,
the play of remembering
what needs to be forgotten,
what needs to never be remembered,
what needs to settle into the swamplands
near the lake gathering the love chatter
of toads and large mouthed frogs,
letting everything else dissolve
into frames of a black and white
Humphrey Bogart right before
he walks out on Katherine Hepburn.
The Science and the Design
The Sunday after the Great Blizzard of 2013,
the only atheist of Calloway County attended church,
the sun threw a flare between clouds of thunder coloring a diamond strand of paper birch
completely white
the old lady of the wheelchair walked unhesitantly to the front of her fellowship thanking
them for their letters and support,
Bible thumpers of a different sort began the reading of the New Testament backwards,
A. discovered a bag of minneola tangelos padlocked to her front door,
K. discovered a completed research paper in her inbox,
L. savored fifteen minutes of Internet fame.
This was the truth of Wallace and Darwin,
the morning a seven year old sat on a school bus looking out over fields of rain and water
and thought:
God or no God, it’s raining outside and I’m on my way to Sunday school. It will be this
way if I pray or don’t pray.
Rain. Water. This bus ride,
and he knew immediately everything in his long life would always be that ordinary.
MICHAEL H. BROWNSTEIN’S work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch and Poetry Superhighway. He has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988) and A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011) and head administrator of Project Agent Orange http://projectagentorange.com/
practicing forgetting since I was a child.
A pink thread of mist frays into light,
the sky sun ached blue-white
full of calories and miscellaneous detail
and then a great shiver of katydids
blows across a wind at the edge of the yard.
I have to explain everything in color,
the mood swings and the warmth of scars,
a strain above the eyes, a roll of breath
across a shape of lips I am not allowed
to wander across. This is the way to dementia,
the play of remembering
what needs to be forgotten,
what needs to never be remembered,
what needs to settle into the swamplands
near the lake gathering the love chatter
of toads and large mouthed frogs,
letting everything else dissolve
into frames of a black and white
Humphrey Bogart right before
he walks out on Katherine Hepburn.
The Science and the Design
The Sunday after the Great Blizzard of 2013,
the only atheist of Calloway County attended church,
the sun threw a flare between clouds of thunder coloring a diamond strand of paper birch
completely white
the old lady of the wheelchair walked unhesitantly to the front of her fellowship thanking
them for their letters and support,
Bible thumpers of a different sort began the reading of the New Testament backwards,
A. discovered a bag of minneola tangelos padlocked to her front door,
K. discovered a completed research paper in her inbox,
L. savored fifteen minutes of Internet fame.
This was the truth of Wallace and Darwin,
the morning a seven year old sat on a school bus looking out over fields of rain and water
and thought:
God or no God, it’s raining outside and I’m on my way to Sunday school. It will be this
way if I pray or don’t pray.
Rain. Water. This bus ride,
and he knew immediately everything in his long life would always be that ordinary.
MICHAEL H. BROWNSTEIN’S work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch and Poetry Superhighway. He has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988) and A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011) and head administrator of Project Agent Orange http://projectagentorange.com/
Corey Mesler
Kool like Klaus Kinski
The milk train was out of milk.
The flea market of fleas.
We gathered on the docks
to sing the songs of resentment.
Ippy said he’d love a woman
with big HGVs, if she spoke
smooth as Deborah Kerr.
I lit my last cigarette on a
streetlight’s reflection. Janis
said she was leaving me for
a marsupial. I wanted to say I’ll
stay with the boys who know
boy things. I wanted to be the
writer of the group, though no
one read. I wanted to be you,
Jesse James, kool like Klaus Kinski.
COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published eight novels, four short story collections, and five full-length poetry collections. His most recent novel, Memphis Movie, is from Soft Skull Press. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and two of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife he runs a 140 year-old bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.
The milk train was out of milk.
The flea market of fleas.
We gathered on the docks
to sing the songs of resentment.
Ippy said he’d love a woman
with big HGVs, if she spoke
smooth as Deborah Kerr.
I lit my last cigarette on a
streetlight’s reflection. Janis
said she was leaving me for
a marsupial. I wanted to say I’ll
stay with the boys who know
boy things. I wanted to be the
writer of the group, though no
one read. I wanted to be you,
Jesse James, kool like Klaus Kinski.
COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published eight novels, four short story collections, and five full-length poetry collections. His most recent novel, Memphis Movie, is from Soft Skull Press. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and two of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife he runs a 140 year-old bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.
Alec Solomita
Bertha You Are Not
Remember, dear, when you feared
you’d be the woman in the attic?
You turned to me a year ago,
when you were scarce half gone,
“I’m afraid I’ll be Bertha soon, my God.”
But Bertha you are not. You are
a new child drawn to all that glitters,
handing me your rhinestone barrettes
so I can pin them in your burred hair.
You are more afraid and smaller than
you once were. You dance and dance
when the music plays and there is
no way to tell one from the other.
ALEC SOLOMITA is a writer and editor living in Somerville, Mass. He’s published fiction in The Adirondack Review, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in, among other publications, 3Elements Literary Review, Literary Orphans, Silver Birch Press, and, forthcoming, Fulcrum: An International Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics.
Remember, dear, when you feared
you’d be the woman in the attic?
You turned to me a year ago,
when you were scarce half gone,
“I’m afraid I’ll be Bertha soon, my God.”
But Bertha you are not. You are
a new child drawn to all that glitters,
handing me your rhinestone barrettes
so I can pin them in your burred hair.
You are more afraid and smaller than
you once were. You dance and dance
when the music plays and there is
no way to tell one from the other.
ALEC SOLOMITA is a writer and editor living in Somerville, Mass. He’s published fiction in The Adirondack Review, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in, among other publications, 3Elements Literary Review, Literary Orphans, Silver Birch Press, and, forthcoming, Fulcrum: An International Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics.
Grey Held 2 poems
My Wife, the Professor of Costume Design
Her scissors eke out shape and also shape
between the shapes—the mathematics
of a circle skirt. So many jerkins and doublets
and farthingaled frocks poised to be born
in 1570 into Othello, Desdemona and grieving
Emilia. Costumes ready to fit what body
they’re made for, their tragic script stitched
into them. Sometimes I am the mannequin.
Today I am Iago. She slips a few pins between her lips,
kneels down to tuck the crotch on those
herringbone breeches, eases the seam, forearm
pressed against my thigh. I reach my hand down
to her bare shoulder, where her strap slipped down.
Her skin is a scrap of satin and me, burlap
itching for more.
Her scissors eke out shape and also shape
between the shapes—the mathematics
of a circle skirt. So many jerkins and doublets
and farthingaled frocks poised to be born
in 1570 into Othello, Desdemona and grieving
Emilia. Costumes ready to fit what body
they’re made for, their tragic script stitched
into them. Sometimes I am the mannequin.
Today I am Iago. She slips a few pins between her lips,
kneels down to tuck the crotch on those
herringbone breeches, eases the seam, forearm
pressed against my thigh. I reach my hand down
to her bare shoulder, where her strap slipped down.
Her skin is a scrap of satin and me, burlap
itching for more.
Brothers
Some fix cars together,
undent fenders, swap
out shocks. We didn’t,
but we did see a tree
in a spruce-fir forest fall
and span a creek to make
a bridge—the branches, handrails.
Some brothers have never
been resented, never spawned
a juicy sibling feud, but
we have. Once we shot
a film together, enjoyed
the subtleties of multiple
plotlines: the Quest, the Underdog-
Makes-Good, Revenge.
We slept side-by-side
by a wood stove in our parents’
Shenandoah cabin, took turns
when the room went
cold to wake and fan
the embers. We knew
how to feed the flame.
This year he sent me a Golden
State Fruit Basket
for my birthday. When
I called him to say, thanks,
he said, you’re welcome.
GREY HELD is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. He has two books:Two-Star General (Brick Road Poetry Press) and Spilled Milk (Word Press). He works closely with the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs in Newton, MA to direct projects that connect contemporary poets. He also is a visual artist whose drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries nationwide.
Some fix cars together,
undent fenders, swap
out shocks. We didn’t,
but we did see a tree
in a spruce-fir forest fall
and span a creek to make
a bridge—the branches, handrails.
Some brothers have never
been resented, never spawned
a juicy sibling feud, but
we have. Once we shot
a film together, enjoyed
the subtleties of multiple
plotlines: the Quest, the Underdog-
Makes-Good, Revenge.
We slept side-by-side
by a wood stove in our parents’
Shenandoah cabin, took turns
when the room went
cold to wake and fan
the embers. We knew
how to feed the flame.
This year he sent me a Golden
State Fruit Basket
for my birthday. When
I called him to say, thanks,
he said, you’re welcome.
GREY HELD is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. He has two books:Two-Star General (Brick Road Poetry Press) and Spilled Milk (Word Press). He works closely with the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs in Newton, MA to direct projects that connect contemporary poets. He also is a visual artist whose drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries nationwide.
Neil Creighton
Somme Cemetery
A soft grey mist covers the distant ridges,
lies close upon the green folds
and drips off the thousands of white crosses
standing rigidly at parade ground attention,
marked with this sad simplicity:
"A Soldier of the Great War".
Hard to think that in this landscape a century ago
a nightmarish Nationalism
opened its maw and rumbled creaking
over the green folds, quiet woods and farmlands,
venting a reeking stench
of mud, barbed wire, crater holes, shells, gas,
kilometer upon winding kilometer of trenches
and a tangled twist of young lives
stuck in the mud or huddled
beneath the thud of artillery
or emerging into the staccato spray of machine gun.
Yes, it is quiet. The landscape is green.
The guns have gone. The young men are dust.
Gone too are their mothers, or lovers,
their brothers, sisters, family, friends.
Gone too is the mud, the gas, the trenches,
the inconsolable grief and loss,
but a soft grey mist covers the distant ridges,
lies close upon the green folds
and drips off the thousands of white crosses
marked with this sad simplicity:
"A Soldier of the Great War"-
For the day is weeping, quietly weeping,
and must go on weeping still.
NEIL CREIGHTON'S work as a teacher of English and Drama brought him into close contact with thousands of young lives, most happy and triumphant but too many tragically filled with neglect. It also made him intensely aware of how opportunity is so unequally proportioned and his work reflects strong interest in social justice. Since his retirement he has given himself increasingly to poetry, a youthful love which the years have not dimmed. He blogs at "Wind of Flowers. Poems by Neil Creighton".
A soft grey mist covers the distant ridges,
lies close upon the green folds
and drips off the thousands of white crosses
standing rigidly at parade ground attention,
marked with this sad simplicity:
"A Soldier of the Great War".
Hard to think that in this landscape a century ago
a nightmarish Nationalism
opened its maw and rumbled creaking
over the green folds, quiet woods and farmlands,
venting a reeking stench
of mud, barbed wire, crater holes, shells, gas,
kilometer upon winding kilometer of trenches
and a tangled twist of young lives
stuck in the mud or huddled
beneath the thud of artillery
or emerging into the staccato spray of machine gun.
Yes, it is quiet. The landscape is green.
The guns have gone. The young men are dust.
Gone too are their mothers, or lovers,
their brothers, sisters, family, friends.
Gone too is the mud, the gas, the trenches,
the inconsolable grief and loss,
but a soft grey mist covers the distant ridges,
lies close upon the green folds
and drips off the thousands of white crosses
marked with this sad simplicity:
"A Soldier of the Great War"-
For the day is weeping, quietly weeping,
and must go on weeping still.
NEIL CREIGHTON'S work as a teacher of English and Drama brought him into close contact with thousands of young lives, most happy and triumphant but too many tragically filled with neglect. It also made him intensely aware of how opportunity is so unequally proportioned and his work reflects strong interest in social justice. Since his retirement he has given himself increasingly to poetry, a youthful love which the years have not dimmed. He blogs at "Wind of Flowers. Poems by Neil Creighton".
Melissa Fite Johnson
“Sometimes People Are Good”
For Mister Rogers
Fred Rogers died on a Thursday,
karaoke night in my college town. The DJ cracked
a joke, something about pedophilia,
as if a man couldn’t devote his life to kids
without an ulterior motive. Without thinking,
I left my friends bewildered at our table. I walked
out the bar into the back alley,
pulling my coat collar against the cold.
Mister Rogers sang directly to me, age five,
through our box TV. I sat cross-legged as
the show opened—tinkling piano, miniature
plastic wonderland. He traded suit jacket for a sweater
his mother made, held up one loafer for a moment
before slipping into sneakers.
Then a lesson. He’d spread pretzels on a table,
cross his arms to mimic their twist. Or he’d build
castles out of paper cups. He taught me
about death when he found a goldfish
limp on his aquarium bed. He assured me
one day I’d be able to read a newspaper, that
I’d never fit down the bathtub drain.
He put on a grand puppet show.
MELISSA FITE JOHNSON’S first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Broadsided Press, Midwest Quarterly, velvet-tail, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas. Visit her at melissafitejohnson.com.
For Mister Rogers
Fred Rogers died on a Thursday,
karaoke night in my college town. The DJ cracked
a joke, something about pedophilia,
as if a man couldn’t devote his life to kids
without an ulterior motive. Without thinking,
I left my friends bewildered at our table. I walked
out the bar into the back alley,
pulling my coat collar against the cold.
Mister Rogers sang directly to me, age five,
through our box TV. I sat cross-legged as
the show opened—tinkling piano, miniature
plastic wonderland. He traded suit jacket for a sweater
his mother made, held up one loafer for a moment
before slipping into sneakers.
Then a lesson. He’d spread pretzels on a table,
cross his arms to mimic their twist. Or he’d build
castles out of paper cups. He taught me
about death when he found a goldfish
limp on his aquarium bed. He assured me
one day I’d be able to read a newspaper, that
I’d never fit down the bathtub drain.
He put on a grand puppet show.
MELISSA FITE JOHNSON’S first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Broadsided Press, Midwest Quarterly, velvet-tail, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas. Visit her at melissafitejohnson.com.
SoFloPoJo is a labor of love by: Associate Editors: Elisa Albo Don Burns David Colodney Deborah DeNicola Gary Kay Sarah Kersey Stacie M. Kiner Barbra Nightingale Sally Naylor Susannah Simpson Meryl Stratford Patricia Whiting Francine Witte
Reviewers: Freesia McKee and Michael Hettich
Managing Editor & C0-Publisher
Michael Mackin O'Mara
mmomara@soflopojo.com
Founder & Co-Publisher
Lenny DellaRocca
lenny.dellarocca@soflopojo.com
Reviewers: Freesia McKee and Michael Hettich
Managing Editor & C0-Publisher
Michael Mackin O'Mara
mmomara@soflopojo.com
Founder & Co-Publisher
Lenny DellaRocca
lenny.dellarocca@soflopojo.com