ISSUE 20 February 2021
Gary Kay, Editor
Gary Kay, Editor
If you are poet, prophet, peace loving artist, tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between; if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl; if you value the humane treatment of every creature and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo seeks your best work.
Poetry & Flash
Chris Abbate Sayan Aich Bwomik Susan Aizenberg Cynthia Atkins Wandajune Bishop-Towle Emma Bolden Ian Cappelli Jackie Craven Kate Cruz
Yasha de la Luna Sharon Duron Beth Gordon Peter Grandbois Ken Holland Stellasue Lee Jude Marr Laura McCullough Francine Montemurro
Zack Murphy Margaret Ohrn Maureen Seaton Betsy Sholl Jody Stewart Charles Harper Webb Yvonne Zipter
Yasha de la Luna Sharon Duron Beth Gordon Peter Grandbois Ken Holland Stellasue Lee Jude Marr Laura McCullough Francine Montemurro
Zack Murphy Margaret Ohrn Maureen Seaton Betsy Sholl Jody Stewart Charles Harper Webb Yvonne Zipter
Chris Abbate Holly Springs, NC
Tourists
We stop at a roadside pottery store
for a piece of Jamaica to take back
to our cruise ship in the bay.
The potter smiles behind his wheel,
pumps the pedal, binds soft earth.
He says making pottery is like giving birth
and holds up a newborn piece for our cameras.
Outside, someone points to a nude beach
in the distance dotted with thatched cabanas.
We step closer to the edge of a cleft
to gaze at the fleshy figures floating across sand,
mirages perhaps, though we know well
the tone of bare skin, the contour
of the body like so many vases and mugs.
I imagine the potter having coffee with his wife tonight.
He will describe the tourists with a word like nudity,
while we carry bittersweet souvenirs
beneath a warm moon
amid the buoyancy of a cruise.
We will crave beautiful things we can’t buy.
The potter’s hands.
The shape of air between them.
Chris Abbate’s poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Chagrin River Review, and Comstock Review, among other journals. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award and has received awards in the Nazim Hikmet and North Carolina Poetry Society poetry contests. His first book of poetry, Talk About God, was published by Main Street Rag. His second book, Words for Flying, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.
We stop at a roadside pottery store
for a piece of Jamaica to take back
to our cruise ship in the bay.
The potter smiles behind his wheel,
pumps the pedal, binds soft earth.
He says making pottery is like giving birth
and holds up a newborn piece for our cameras.
Outside, someone points to a nude beach
in the distance dotted with thatched cabanas.
We step closer to the edge of a cleft
to gaze at the fleshy figures floating across sand,
mirages perhaps, though we know well
the tone of bare skin, the contour
of the body like so many vases and mugs.
I imagine the potter having coffee with his wife tonight.
He will describe the tourists with a word like nudity,
while we carry bittersweet souvenirs
beneath a warm moon
amid the buoyancy of a cruise.
We will crave beautiful things we can’t buy.
The potter’s hands.
The shape of air between them.
Chris Abbate’s poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Chagrin River Review, and Comstock Review, among other journals. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award and has received awards in the Nazim Hikmet and North Carolina Poetry Society poetry contests. His first book of poetry, Talk About God, was published by Main Street Rag. His second book, Words for Flying, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.
Sayan Aich Bkowmik Kolkata, India 3 poems
Vial
My grandmother often told me
That when they ran the spectacle
Of slicing the country and women
Into pieces
She'd keep dreaming of pirates
Trapped on an island
So remote
That even the genie in a bottle
Worked overtime to get there.
Letters, written to people
Who had fallen out of favour
With maps and compasses
Were rescued by boatmen
Who, no matter how hard they tried
Could not get lost in the ocean.
Her best friend Syeda
Was dragged out by men
And was lost without much fanfare.
My grandmother wrote little notes to her
Distilled in homeopathic solution
Knives, instead of words
So sharp, it would scratch the
Surface of the moon.
My grandmother often told me
That when they ran the spectacle
Of slicing the country and women
Into pieces
She'd keep dreaming of pirates
Trapped on an island
So remote
That even the genie in a bottle
Worked overtime to get there.
Letters, written to people
Who had fallen out of favour
With maps and compasses
Were rescued by boatmen
Who, no matter how hard they tried
Could not get lost in the ocean.
Her best friend Syeda
Was dragged out by men
And was lost without much fanfare.
My grandmother wrote little notes to her
Distilled in homeopathic solution
Knives, instead of words
So sharp, it would scratch the
Surface of the moon.
Of Wounds and Scars
It only occurred to me,
Upon attending the funeral
Of a really long poem
That most of the mourners
Were street fighters of sorts.
Every evening, these words and forms
Abandoned, discarded and scratched out
Met in an alley
More sinister than politicians,
And sparred without gloves or headgear
Til one found a place
On a page like this.
The ones who did not make the cut
Sat, sharing the tables with patrons
Who could furnish no documents
To prove that they love someone else.
When the bars downed the shutters
They gathered on the roof of the night
Tending to their rejection
Under the dripping stars
The scarred looking after the wounded.
It only occurred to me,
Upon attending the funeral
Of a really long poem
That most of the mourners
Were street fighters of sorts.
Every evening, these words and forms
Abandoned, discarded and scratched out
Met in an alley
More sinister than politicians,
And sparred without gloves or headgear
Til one found a place
On a page like this.
The ones who did not make the cut
Sat, sharing the tables with patrons
Who could furnish no documents
To prove that they love someone else.
When the bars downed the shutters
They gathered on the roof of the night
Tending to their rejection
Under the dripping stars
The scarred looking after the wounded.
Of Beginnings and Ends
Some journeys always
Begin on the ledge,
With dangling feet from your reflection
In the mirror
Or from the 45th floor
And even in the opening of a bottle
With an entire beach
Of sleeping pills.
Just a start,
Turning on the gas
Shutting the windows
Because it is always the first draft
That needs the most corrections.
People don't sit with death
Over a cup of tea anymore.
Everything always begins
With stopping a cab,
And hoping you are never asked
To get off.
Sayan Aich Bhowmik is currently Assistant Professor in the department of English in Shirakole College which is under the aegis of the University of Calcutta. He is also the co-editor of the semi academic blog Plato's Caves Online.
Some journeys always
Begin on the ledge,
With dangling feet from your reflection
In the mirror
Or from the 45th floor
And even in the opening of a bottle
With an entire beach
Of sleeping pills.
Just a start,
Turning on the gas
Shutting the windows
Because it is always the first draft
That needs the most corrections.
People don't sit with death
Over a cup of tea anymore.
Everything always begins
With stopping a cab,
And hoping you are never asked
To get off.
Sayan Aich Bhowmik is currently Assistant Professor in the department of English in Shirakole College which is under the aegis of the University of Calcutta. He is also the co-editor of the semi academic blog Plato's Caves Online.
Susan Aizenberg Iowa City, IA 2 poems
1/15/15
--from Florida Diaries
Mom cries out in the morning, tells me she felt
herself crash, couldn’t speak--something might be wrong,
she says. Has she forgotten that she’s dying?
I feed her Glucerna mixed with thickener
through a syringe—less chance of aspiration,
the nurse says. She drifts again. I hold my phone
close to her ear, play Vivaldi. She startles,
then smiles, one finger tracing the notes rising
in the dimmed air. The medical supply guy
picks up what she no longer needs: one bedside
commode, one lift chair, one companion wheelchair
with matching hang bag and six small canisters
of air, for outings in the sun—we never
did make it past the catwalk outside her door,
never did get her down to sit by the pool
she loves—each change now a harbinger of death’s
approach. She mostly sleeps and when she wakes
stares at what only she can see, her voice faint
when she wants water, or cries she has to go,
has to go! says sorry when she wets the bed.
Sometimes she’s lucid, but then asks for her dead
husband or tries to yank out her oxygen
tube--how am I supposed to walk with this thing?
You don’t have to walk now, Ma, I say. But they’re
telling me I have to get out of the chair,
they’re sending me messages. It’s okay,
Ma, I say, just rest. I can’t keep lying here
she says, I’m tired of this. Where’s J? she asks, smiles
when I joke she’s still keeping track--you better
know it—flicker of her old self here and gone.
--from Florida Diaries
Mom cries out in the morning, tells me she felt
herself crash, couldn’t speak--something might be wrong,
she says. Has she forgotten that she’s dying?
I feed her Glucerna mixed with thickener
through a syringe—less chance of aspiration,
the nurse says. She drifts again. I hold my phone
close to her ear, play Vivaldi. She startles,
then smiles, one finger tracing the notes rising
in the dimmed air. The medical supply guy
picks up what she no longer needs: one bedside
commode, one lift chair, one companion wheelchair
with matching hang bag and six small canisters
of air, for outings in the sun—we never
did make it past the catwalk outside her door,
never did get her down to sit by the pool
she loves—each change now a harbinger of death’s
approach. She mostly sleeps and when she wakes
stares at what only she can see, her voice faint
when she wants water, or cries she has to go,
has to go! says sorry when she wets the bed.
Sometimes she’s lucid, but then asks for her dead
husband or tries to yank out her oxygen
tube--how am I supposed to walk with this thing?
You don’t have to walk now, Ma, I say. But they’re
telling me I have to get out of the chair,
they’re sending me messages. It’s okay,
Ma, I say, just rest. I can’t keep lying here
she says, I’m tired of this. Where’s J? she asks, smiles
when I joke she’s still keeping track--you better
know it—flicker of her old self here and gone.
Dream Poem Beginning with Three Lines from Dunn
Often a sweetness
has come and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
but not last night,
when once again Nurse B.
came to me. Even in my dream
I knew she wasn’t really the Angel
of Death, just a poorly paid hospice temp
who liked to scare me— Birds carry disease girl,
you’d better take care. Your cold could be that flu
come up from Haiti, paralyze you to stone--
and finish the chocolate kisses
that were Mom’s last pleasure,
flirt with M. Just bad luck
it was her on first shift
that last morning. I can smell the death
from her mouth, she said to me,
I hate that smell of death. Still, could it be,
after all, some kind of sweetness
that she returns to me in my sleep,
that finally I can confess
I blamed her, knowing so little
of her life, for her rush to leave once
they’d carried Mom’s body
away, covered, on a stretcher?
Does she come back so I can forgive
her for asking me, as I stood,
stunned with grief in my mother’s kitchen,
if she could have Mom’s car?
Susan Aizenberg is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk 2015) and Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry 2002). Her most recent, chapbook-length, collection, First Light, was published this June by Gibraltar Editions in a limited letterpress edition with original linocuts by artist Kevin Bowman. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Blackbird, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, On the Seawall, and Bosque. Her awards include the VCU Levis Reading Prize and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Aizenberg is professor emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University and lives and writes in Iowa City, where she teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
Often a sweetness
has come and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
but not last night,
when once again Nurse B.
came to me. Even in my dream
I knew she wasn’t really the Angel
of Death, just a poorly paid hospice temp
who liked to scare me— Birds carry disease girl,
you’d better take care. Your cold could be that flu
come up from Haiti, paralyze you to stone--
and finish the chocolate kisses
that were Mom’s last pleasure,
flirt with M. Just bad luck
it was her on first shift
that last morning. I can smell the death
from her mouth, she said to me,
I hate that smell of death. Still, could it be,
after all, some kind of sweetness
that she returns to me in my sleep,
that finally I can confess
I blamed her, knowing so little
of her life, for her rush to leave once
they’d carried Mom’s body
away, covered, on a stretcher?
Does she come back so I can forgive
her for asking me, as I stood,
stunned with grief in my mother’s kitchen,
if she could have Mom’s car?
Susan Aizenberg is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk 2015) and Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry 2002). Her most recent, chapbook-length, collection, First Light, was published this June by Gibraltar Editions in a limited letterpress edition with original linocuts by artist Kevin Bowman. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Blackbird, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, On the Seawall, and Bosque. Her awards include the VCU Levis Reading Prize and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Aizenberg is professor emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University and lives and writes in Iowa City, where she teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
Cynthia Atkins Rockbridge County, VA
See SoFloPoJo’s review of Atkin's latest collection, Still Life With God here
See SoFloPoJo’s review of Atkin's latest collection, Still Life With God here
A Goddess in Purple Rain
Behind glass, a lady is lit-up inside the laundro-mat.
She’s folding sheets, pink curlers of baroque
in her hair, singing and creasing
a t-shirt with sequins. Her arms and hips stretch out
to a body of air—the room filling with sound.
And I am humming inside her—inside her body,
burning for shelter from the abyss
of my alone. Rounding a corner
in a car, I am passing by, hearing “Purple Rain”
on the radio—I almost can taste
the sweat on the brow of the boy I danced with
so many years ago—It tasted like dry toast
or the brunt of hurting. Listen to the sky imploring,
Come as you are—Alone to the last concert, to light matches
in a spell-bound crowd—Remorse of loving
a rock star we can never own. And now the lady
in the laundromat is swaying, and I am swaying
with her from my car—Maybe she is dancing with her son,
going off to boot camp, or the ends of the earth.
I’m thinking of my son at three,
standing on the kitchen table in a wet diaper,
banging music from a wooden spoon.
This is that concert, where you lit a match
to your own bag of wounds. You felt like
you belonged, a citizen.
Alive as a hackle of girls at the May prom.
Look at the moon, hanging like a shoe
to throw its heel of light
on the page or an empty field.
We are all in the body of this night, cogent as a judge
who loves the law. The lady in the laundromat
carries the load to her car, unpins her hair.
I don’t want to be alone tonight. The stars allow
me to follow her— we are passing the town,
rooftops are hunkering down to sing
lullabies to the young, and the night
is a stranger touching my sleeve.
Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Diode, Florida Review. She is an Interviews Editor for American Microreviews and Interviews. Atkins earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com
Behind glass, a lady is lit-up inside the laundro-mat.
She’s folding sheets, pink curlers of baroque
in her hair, singing and creasing
a t-shirt with sequins. Her arms and hips stretch out
to a body of air—the room filling with sound.
And I am humming inside her—inside her body,
burning for shelter from the abyss
of my alone. Rounding a corner
in a car, I am passing by, hearing “Purple Rain”
on the radio—I almost can taste
the sweat on the brow of the boy I danced with
so many years ago—It tasted like dry toast
or the brunt of hurting. Listen to the sky imploring,
Come as you are—Alone to the last concert, to light matches
in a spell-bound crowd—Remorse of loving
a rock star we can never own. And now the lady
in the laundromat is swaying, and I am swaying
with her from my car—Maybe she is dancing with her son,
going off to boot camp, or the ends of the earth.
I’m thinking of my son at three,
standing on the kitchen table in a wet diaper,
banging music from a wooden spoon.
This is that concert, where you lit a match
to your own bag of wounds. You felt like
you belonged, a citizen.
Alive as a hackle of girls at the May prom.
Look at the moon, hanging like a shoe
to throw its heel of light
on the page or an empty field.
We are all in the body of this night, cogent as a judge
who loves the law. The lady in the laundromat
carries the load to her car, unpins her hair.
I don’t want to be alone tonight. The stars allow
me to follow her— we are passing the town,
rooftops are hunkering down to sing
lullabies to the young, and the night
is a stranger touching my sleeve.
Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Diode, Florida Review. She is an Interviews Editor for American Microreviews and Interviews. Atkins earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com
Wandajune Bishop-Towle Andover, MA
Cassandravirus
I told you it was too late and it was too late.
While you snorted, I soared crackling exponents
like a giant corporation en route to Mars.
You said I came from sacks of rice, you traced me
like a license plate. I told you not to lie about things.
I told you that masks are for everyone
that this would not be like kicking a field goal
or boiling water for the poor.
It wasn’t me who said the van would come and a nurse with a cape and bleach
blond hair and papers to sign and smudgy scars to show we won.
You held up the Bible as though it were a traffic sign.
I told you my favorite color.
I told you I would not be easy to get close to.
I told you so much about so many things I felt like a Chemistry teacher.
I told you not to pout, it makes your lips look like potatoes.
I tell you, an eclipse is burning.
I tell you, there is just one ball of crimson string prepared for all of us.
Wandajune Bishop-Towle is a poet and a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts. She is the proud stepmother of a young man with autism, who is a frequent subject of her poems. Her work has appeared in Quiddity, PMS poemmemoirstory, and The Comstock Review, and other journals.
I told you it was too late and it was too late.
While you snorted, I soared crackling exponents
like a giant corporation en route to Mars.
You said I came from sacks of rice, you traced me
like a license plate. I told you not to lie about things.
I told you that masks are for everyone
that this would not be like kicking a field goal
or boiling water for the poor.
It wasn’t me who said the van would come and a nurse with a cape and bleach
blond hair and papers to sign and smudgy scars to show we won.
You held up the Bible as though it were a traffic sign.
I told you my favorite color.
I told you I would not be easy to get close to.
I told you so much about so many things I felt like a Chemistry teacher.
I told you not to pout, it makes your lips look like potatoes.
I tell you, an eclipse is burning.
I tell you, there is just one ball of crimson string prepared for all of us.
Wandajune Bishop-Towle is a poet and a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts. She is the proud stepmother of a young man with autism, who is a frequent subject of her poems. Her work has appeared in Quiddity, PMS poemmemoirstory, and The Comstock Review, and other journals.
Emma Bolden Alabaster, AL
Saint Yonder
huddled up and hid beneath
the baseboards, tucked behind the man who loved
to watch her when her back hit the wall. Was uncertain
as a subway. Sparked brighter than a Christmas. Burned
up a bush by the bathroom window while the shower
told her it was safe to cry. Slipped itself into the rain,
became the hush that lulled her into it’s okay, it’s okay
beneath him abed. Turned okay into better into over into
done. Lit every map with her holler up and away.
Furred the grass beneath her feet into a shush
all along the unwatched river. Folded up her steps
like a schoolgirl’s note. Circled no without a thank you.
Cleared the wolf’s scraps out of the clearing, gave
her the glint of its teeth. Let loose the shudder of a god
inside her who said wherever you are, you’re still there, so get
away from his wherever. Gave the night such a cool,
such an air she open-lunged, she breathed as her own,
on her own, in her own. She breathed until she believed.
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, her work has appeared in such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly.
huddled up and hid beneath
the baseboards, tucked behind the man who loved
to watch her when her back hit the wall. Was uncertain
as a subway. Sparked brighter than a Christmas. Burned
up a bush by the bathroom window while the shower
told her it was safe to cry. Slipped itself into the rain,
became the hush that lulled her into it’s okay, it’s okay
beneath him abed. Turned okay into better into over into
done. Lit every map with her holler up and away.
Furred the grass beneath her feet into a shush
all along the unwatched river. Folded up her steps
like a schoolgirl’s note. Circled no without a thank you.
Cleared the wolf’s scraps out of the clearing, gave
her the glint of its teeth. Let loose the shudder of a god
inside her who said wherever you are, you’re still there, so get
away from his wherever. Gave the night such a cool,
such an air she open-lunged, she breathed as her own,
on her own, in her own. She breathed until she believed.
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, her work has appeared in such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly.
Ian Cappelli Fairfax, VA
Ian Cappelli (he, him) authored the chapbook Suburban Hermeneutics (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2019). His work's been twice nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net and has appeared (or is forthcoming) in, Lunch Ticket, Roanoke Review, and the American Journal of Poetry, among others.
Jackie Craven Schenectady, NY, and Cocoa Beach, FL 2 poems
BuzzFuse Lists the World's Most Extraordinary Women
She soars seven feet two and tips the scale
at two pounds seven. Or her legs are long
as telephone poles, thin as paper cuts. She wears
a lavender beard and the beard cascades to her toes
or she has no toes, only steel-capped knees
on which she runs marathons. Her tendons
bend backwards. She opens bottles
with her feet, or she breathes underwater,
or she swallows thirteen swords simultaneously.
When she opens her mouth, her tongue
unfurls like Rapunzel's hair. Boys try to climb it,
but they can't get past the world's longest fingernails
that spiral around her tower. Still, boys die trying
because the world's most extraordinary woman
has two heads and three breasts.
Medical professionals say her spine
will curve beneath the weight
of her exceptionalism.
But what are her options?
She soars seven feet two and tips the scale
at two pounds seven. Or her legs are long
as telephone poles, thin as paper cuts. She wears
a lavender beard and the beard cascades to her toes
or she has no toes, only steel-capped knees
on which she runs marathons. Her tendons
bend backwards. She opens bottles
with her feet, or she breathes underwater,
or she swallows thirteen swords simultaneously.
When she opens her mouth, her tongue
unfurls like Rapunzel's hair. Boys try to climb it,
but they can't get past the world's longest fingernails
that spiral around her tower. Still, boys die trying
because the world's most extraordinary woman
has two heads and three breasts.
Medical professionals say her spine
will curve beneath the weight
of her exceptionalism.
But what are her options?
No One Notices Bubbles Behind the Wallpaper at a Wedding Reception
-1-
Fluids course through copper veins,
drains gurgle, radiators coo.
-2-
The dishwasher sings you to sleep.
-3-
Ice dances on the roof.
Rain snickers behind your back.
-4-
A puddle forms by the refrigerator.
-5-
Wetness wicks through Persian carpets.
-6-
You call a roofer and plumber.
-7-
Suspicion burbles up from the cellar.
Tears creep across the bedroom wall.
-8-
You think:
This house weeps for no reason.
-9-
The boiler pops open like an alien seedpod.
-10-
You wonder:
Should you call a psychiatrist or an exorcist?
-11-
You find a hotel receipt in the garbage disposer.
-12-
You spend your anniversary at a karaoke bar.
Your plumber buys you a drink.
Jackie Craven has recent poems in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and River Styx. She's the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016), winner of Omnidawn's Fabulist Fiction Award. She lives in Schenectady, NY, Cocoa Beach, FL, and online at www.JackieCraven.com.
-1-
Fluids course through copper veins,
drains gurgle, radiators coo.
-2-
The dishwasher sings you to sleep.
-3-
Ice dances on the roof.
Rain snickers behind your back.
-4-
A puddle forms by the refrigerator.
-5-
Wetness wicks through Persian carpets.
-6-
You call a roofer and plumber.
-7-
Suspicion burbles up from the cellar.
Tears creep across the bedroom wall.
-8-
You think:
This house weeps for no reason.
-9-
The boiler pops open like an alien seedpod.
-10-
You wonder:
Should you call a psychiatrist or an exorcist?
-11-
You find a hotel receipt in the garbage disposer.
-12-
You spend your anniversary at a karaoke bar.
Your plumber buys you a drink.
Jackie Craven has recent poems in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and River Styx. She's the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016), winner of Omnidawn's Fabulist Fiction Award. She lives in Schenectady, NY, Cocoa Beach, FL, and online at www.JackieCraven.com.
Kate Cruz Miami, FL
Atop the Desert Tower
I meet a woman wearing mother of pearl sunglasses. She tells me about the man she is creating.
Sculpting his body out of clay, stuffing a burlap bag with coffee beans for his head, sewing in
emeralds and rubies for his eyes and lips. I come here to study men, the woman says. To know
what is humane. The only view I have is of the Rub’Al Khali. Nothing seems alive in front of
me. But cymbals are crashing. I can hear them and when I place my hand on the window I feel
their percussions. In our (very wet) prairie you once dared me to stand in front of a bull with
horns that bulged out of his head like curving swords. That beast would be a limestone statue in
this desert. A harbinger of toxic masculinity – you’d say before a cloud disappears you into the sand.
Kate Cruz is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. She lives in Miami, Florida.
I meet a woman wearing mother of pearl sunglasses. She tells me about the man she is creating.
Sculpting his body out of clay, stuffing a burlap bag with coffee beans for his head, sewing in
emeralds and rubies for his eyes and lips. I come here to study men, the woman says. To know
what is humane. The only view I have is of the Rub’Al Khali. Nothing seems alive in front of
me. But cymbals are crashing. I can hear them and when I place my hand on the window I feel
their percussions. In our (very wet) prairie you once dared me to stand in front of a bull with
horns that bulged out of his head like curving swords. That beast would be a limestone statue in
this desert. A harbinger of toxic masculinity – you’d say before a cloud disappears you into the sand.
Kate Cruz is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. She lives in Miami, Florida.
Yasha de la Luna Miami, FL
reminiscent of a stranger
Erasure of Katherine Wong’s PantherNOW article, “Thom Yorke’s ‘Anima’ Reminiscent of Radiohead”
Erasure of Katherine Wong’s PantherNOW article, “Thom Yorke’s ‘Anima’ Reminiscent of Radiohead”
Yasha de la Luna is a poet, artist, worker, student, mother, cousin, actor, director, singer-songwriter, archivist, Pushcart Prize nominee, transgender deity, and guillotine operator. She's a student at FIU. You can find her work in Fjords Review as well as in Miami-Dade College's Urbana Magazine and on Best Buds! Collective. Find out more at www.yasha.gay or follow her on Twitter and Instagram @weirdtwink
Sharon Duron New Orleans, LA
Lehigh Valley Beyond the Curve
I come home again to stand beside a grave.
My childhood friend has passed away
(How featureless this shape of grief
beside orchards bursting with red apples).
There’s nothing more for me,
but a geometry
of land and the unrecognizable
distant cousins born and grown while I was
somewhere else,
surprising as a shove off a familiar road.
But Paul has come in his classic car
for a tour of the country.
We share the intricacies of deep sorrow, Paul and I.
He, eternal fiancé, I, last best friend forever.
(How featureless our shape of grief
beside orchards bursting with red apples).
Deep in the valley of our youth past old country inns
with new purposed menus, fresh paved roads wind
woods & estates, challenging what I once knew.
At the school bus stop I recapture early snow
mornings: Two boys flapping across drifts like
magpies, coats open wide to winter’s drafts,
unlaced boots shedding crystals as they stomp aboard.
Now it’s soybeans and a new Dutch barn startling red
and a bright autumn sun
dancing over the blue mountain
splintering the canopy and dazzling the side of a
field where corn is fed into a wide mouth chopper.
Gold dust swarms over us like bees in a comet’s tail
and Paul who loves each kernel of this land,
stops the car and curses the storm.
Beyond a curve lies a vast green meadow where someone
has planted four wooly llamas, snowy, spotted & dun.
They raise their almond eyes above tall grass,
chew at us with resident privilege.
Their wonder is more expectant than packets of seed
from the farmer’s market—we whistle, clap hands, call out begging them closer
which stirs dry leaves into a flurry bringing forth
the sweet scent of earth and fresh cut hay.
Is it the perfumed air or songbirds singing
in treetops that fills my cup, points me home
through darkness and light and orchards
bursting with red apples?
Sharon Duron has held many occupations from selling coats of arms in Cancun to wholesale lampshades coast to coast in the USA. She has also travelled alone to destinations like Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines. A recipient of a Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation award, Sharon has read her work from Hollywood to West Palm. She resides in New Orleans.
I come home again to stand beside a grave.
My childhood friend has passed away
(How featureless this shape of grief
beside orchards bursting with red apples).
There’s nothing more for me,
but a geometry
of land and the unrecognizable
distant cousins born and grown while I was
somewhere else,
surprising as a shove off a familiar road.
But Paul has come in his classic car
for a tour of the country.
We share the intricacies of deep sorrow, Paul and I.
He, eternal fiancé, I, last best friend forever.
(How featureless our shape of grief
beside orchards bursting with red apples).
Deep in the valley of our youth past old country inns
with new purposed menus, fresh paved roads wind
woods & estates, challenging what I once knew.
At the school bus stop I recapture early snow
mornings: Two boys flapping across drifts like
magpies, coats open wide to winter’s drafts,
unlaced boots shedding crystals as they stomp aboard.
Now it’s soybeans and a new Dutch barn startling red
and a bright autumn sun
dancing over the blue mountain
splintering the canopy and dazzling the side of a
field where corn is fed into a wide mouth chopper.
Gold dust swarms over us like bees in a comet’s tail
and Paul who loves each kernel of this land,
stops the car and curses the storm.
Beyond a curve lies a vast green meadow where someone
has planted four wooly llamas, snowy, spotted & dun.
They raise their almond eyes above tall grass,
chew at us with resident privilege.
Their wonder is more expectant than packets of seed
from the farmer’s market—we whistle, clap hands, call out begging them closer
which stirs dry leaves into a flurry bringing forth
the sweet scent of earth and fresh cut hay.
Is it the perfumed air or songbirds singing
in treetops that fills my cup, points me home
through darkness and light and orchards
bursting with red apples?
Sharon Duron has held many occupations from selling coats of arms in Cancun to wholesale lampshades coast to coast in the USA. She has also travelled alone to destinations like Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines. A recipient of a Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation award, Sharon has read her work from Hollywood to West Palm. She resides in New Orleans.
Beth Gordon Asheville, NC 3 poems
Hydrology (i)
There’s a pilot light in my heart by which I mean I am always flying or burning, always leaving
walls in search of a river. I built a room of acorns & obsidian where I will tell you about the
rabbits who lived in a narrow stripe of honeysuckle bushes all spring & summer eating forsythia.
Burrowed in clover & standing at dusk to taste the orange petals of tiger lily. My neighbor said
spray the leaves with liquid soap but the room disappeared at dawn. Nothing remains but green.
There’s a pilot light in my heart by which I mean I am always flying or burning, always leaving
walls in search of a river. I built a room of acorns & obsidian where I will tell you about the
rabbits who lived in a narrow stripe of honeysuckle bushes all spring & summer eating forsythia.
Burrowed in clover & standing at dusk to taste the orange petals of tiger lily. My neighbor said
spray the leaves with liquid soap but the room disappeared at dawn. Nothing remains but green.
Hydrology (iii)
One month after the first birthday you never had, fourteen new species of dancing frog were
discovered, the tiniest no bigger than a honey bee, as green as last week’s rain. Today a swarm of
dragonflies in a triangle, cerulean blue & buzzing like frogs & I cut a perfect rectangle of cake
while you blew out the candles. Next week or ten years ago & your mother planted marijuana
seeds in the science room terrarium where mud frogs hibernated all winter. I’m older today than I
will be tomorrow, reciting the names of cities & oceans, counting the times I’ve seen your blue
sky face in airports & subway trains, knowing somewhere those frogs are always lost & singing.
One month after the first birthday you never had, fourteen new species of dancing frog were
discovered, the tiniest no bigger than a honey bee, as green as last week’s rain. Today a swarm of
dragonflies in a triangle, cerulean blue & buzzing like frogs & I cut a perfect rectangle of cake
while you blew out the candles. Next week or ten years ago & your mother planted marijuana
seeds in the science room terrarium where mud frogs hibernated all winter. I’m older today than I
will be tomorrow, reciting the names of cities & oceans, counting the times I’ve seen your blue
sky face in airports & subway trains, knowing somewhere those frogs are always lost & singing.
Tennessee Book of Prayer
1. if you are cooking bacon it must be morning
spiders nest between the tires of my car & translucent dragonflies shadow our coffee, now shape,
now dream, counting birdsong, naming each sound, I say broken-hearted raven, you say the eggs
are ready & we are out of salt, drown them in pepper, that’s water I say, down the hill, sighing its
daily prayer, maybe snakes, maybe it will rain before we close the windows, this is where wasps
live in mud or paper or beneath your chair, that buzz is not a wood saw, not a man-made thing
2. this is where wasps live in mud or paper or beneath your chair
one day I forgot that birds can fly, these unsurprising wings, these breathing bodies in the sky,
lost feathers beneath my feet, tucked behind St. Francis, robin with earth worm looks through
my window, she is walking on clover, the new rabbits have never seen her underbelly, they don’t
know what she is capable of, hawk shadow, dog shadow, the scent of human children, all flap-
armed & hungry, still believing when they leap off the roof, the sheet will blossom with angels
3. hawk shadow, dog shadow, the scent of human children
sunday school fingers building God’s eyes from penny yarn & popsicle sticks, yellow as mud,
green without electricity, I say I am learning to live with spiders, their numerous legs crawling
into my dream, fear is a sin, it has no place between rows of tomatoes & wisteria vines, one day
the road opened while I was driving to see you, I fell through asphalt & hot tar & landed in a web
of high-tensile silk, one day I smelled a swarm of hungry locusts & would not leave my home
4. between rows of tomatoes & wisteria vines
tonight I’ll dance, fireflies on my feet, sun-shined & spillway, I’ll dance the small lives of garter
snakes, the last magnolia bloom dropped onto the gravel road, a rooster crows all day & I’ll
dance his restless voice, stones & fool’s gold at the driveway’s edge, tadpoles rising to the light,
& your face across the room, I’ll dance your cold feet swaddled in a white blanket, ceiling fan’s
twirl, I’ll sleep inside my body, & follow a watery prayer down to the banks of Conasauga creek.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous journals including RHINO, Passages North, EcoTheo Review, Into the Void, Yes Poetry, Pretty Owl Poetry and SWWIM. She is the author of two chapbooks: Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press) and Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbird Publishing). She is Managing Editor of Feral, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press and Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.
1. if you are cooking bacon it must be morning
spiders nest between the tires of my car & translucent dragonflies shadow our coffee, now shape,
now dream, counting birdsong, naming each sound, I say broken-hearted raven, you say the eggs
are ready & we are out of salt, drown them in pepper, that’s water I say, down the hill, sighing its
daily prayer, maybe snakes, maybe it will rain before we close the windows, this is where wasps
live in mud or paper or beneath your chair, that buzz is not a wood saw, not a man-made thing
2. this is where wasps live in mud or paper or beneath your chair
one day I forgot that birds can fly, these unsurprising wings, these breathing bodies in the sky,
lost feathers beneath my feet, tucked behind St. Francis, robin with earth worm looks through
my window, she is walking on clover, the new rabbits have never seen her underbelly, they don’t
know what she is capable of, hawk shadow, dog shadow, the scent of human children, all flap-
armed & hungry, still believing when they leap off the roof, the sheet will blossom with angels
3. hawk shadow, dog shadow, the scent of human children
sunday school fingers building God’s eyes from penny yarn & popsicle sticks, yellow as mud,
green without electricity, I say I am learning to live with spiders, their numerous legs crawling
into my dream, fear is a sin, it has no place between rows of tomatoes & wisteria vines, one day
the road opened while I was driving to see you, I fell through asphalt & hot tar & landed in a web
of high-tensile silk, one day I smelled a swarm of hungry locusts & would not leave my home
4. between rows of tomatoes & wisteria vines
tonight I’ll dance, fireflies on my feet, sun-shined & spillway, I’ll dance the small lives of garter
snakes, the last magnolia bloom dropped onto the gravel road, a rooster crows all day & I’ll
dance his restless voice, stones & fool’s gold at the driveway’s edge, tadpoles rising to the light,
& your face across the room, I’ll dance your cold feet swaddled in a white blanket, ceiling fan’s
twirl, I’ll sleep inside my body, & follow a watery prayer down to the banks of Conasauga creek.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous journals including RHINO, Passages North, EcoTheo Review, Into the Void, Yes Poetry, Pretty Owl Poetry and SWWIM. She is the author of two chapbooks: Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press) and Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbird Publishing). She is Managing Editor of Feral, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press and Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.
Peter Grandbois Granville, OH 2 poems
Sometimes I imagine a voice
Calling to me from the circling dark
Other times I see a figure
Out of the corner of my eye
Adrift between dusks
The halved moons shimmer
Between what is and what was
Between the door and what comes through
Between this moment and the last,
And the one before that, you remember,
When your brother threw the tinker toy can
It sliced open the bridge of your nose
All because he wanted to play with you
That’s the way you remember it
There are so many memories
So many versions battering the sides
Crashing over the taffrail
You find yourself swaying for balance
Hand on the tiller as the ghosts multiply
Even as this moment passes
The moment of writing this poem
The moment you thought you were
Chained to, like this boat
Calling to me from the circling dark
Other times I see a figure
Out of the corner of my eye
Adrift between dusks
The halved moons shimmer
Between what is and what was
Between the door and what comes through
Between this moment and the last,
And the one before that, you remember,
When your brother threw the tinker toy can
It sliced open the bridge of your nose
All because he wanted to play with you
That’s the way you remember it
There are so many memories
So many versions battering the sides
Crashing over the taffrail
You find yourself swaying for balance
Hand on the tiller as the ghosts multiply
Even as this moment passes
The moment of writing this poem
The moment you thought you were
Chained to, like this boat
Forget the prayers
you learned in childhood, the “Our Fathers” and “Hail Mary’s” you whispered while crossing
yourself in bed at night, adding at the end how you’d recite ten more if only your teacher would
die, the test postponed. Forget the times you pretended to cry so you wouldn’t have to go to
church. Forget the rabbit’s foot and lucky shirt. Or the ways you folded yourself into a TV corner
to forget the lie of each passing day. Forget sage. Forget amulets, crosses, and ankhs. Four-leaf
clovers and horseshoes. It’s been several nights of crowed sleep, dreams filled with the cloved
breath of ghosts and houses with shuttered windows, scythes swinging before locked and
bleeding rows of doors. And no pillow over your head, no covers pulled to your chin can shield
you from the sight of your tumored life stabbed to the bedroom floor. No shot of whiskey, no
poetry read to fool you into falling line by line into that cold country of cholera and bone can
keep you from the dark laughter that calls like the siren’s wind-blown song to the shadowy figure
crouched in the corner with the knife, a face strangely like your own.
Peter Grandbois is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Everything Has Become Birds (Brighthorse 2020). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.
you learned in childhood, the “Our Fathers” and “Hail Mary’s” you whispered while crossing
yourself in bed at night, adding at the end how you’d recite ten more if only your teacher would
die, the test postponed. Forget the times you pretended to cry so you wouldn’t have to go to
church. Forget the rabbit’s foot and lucky shirt. Or the ways you folded yourself into a TV corner
to forget the lie of each passing day. Forget sage. Forget amulets, crosses, and ankhs. Four-leaf
clovers and horseshoes. It’s been several nights of crowed sleep, dreams filled with the cloved
breath of ghosts and houses with shuttered windows, scythes swinging before locked and
bleeding rows of doors. And no pillow over your head, no covers pulled to your chin can shield
you from the sight of your tumored life stabbed to the bedroom floor. No shot of whiskey, no
poetry read to fool you into falling line by line into that cold country of cholera and bone can
keep you from the dark laughter that calls like the siren’s wind-blown song to the shadowy figure
crouched in the corner with the knife, a face strangely like your own.
Peter Grandbois is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Everything Has Become Birds (Brighthorse 2020). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.
Ken Holland Fishkill, NY
Take a Knee
All I wanted to do was watch
An old black & white film with you,
But the black had been stripped away…
Bogart kissing some woman’s white lips
Cagney stroking his white Tommy gun
Gary Cooper wiping down the white sweat of his white horse
Mae West casting back her sultry look asking Why don’t you white boys come up and see
me sometime?
And all those war movies with their white bombs and white blood and
That last hill the white GIs have got to take from the unseen
Colorless enemy; and it’s the best part, it’s the scene you’ve seen
So many times before and here it comes again, you can’t get
Enough of it, your knuckles gone white, skin gone white, breath gone
White from how long you’ve held that breath, watching war’s white smoke, white
Bullets, white fear; your breath held for nine white minutes as if beneath a
Knee that doesn’t know the scene has ended, though the credits
Have begun to roll, as your heart beats back to red, and the screen fades to black.
Ken Holland is an award-winning poet who’s just been nominated a third time for the Pushcart Prize. His work has been widely published in such journals as Rattle, Southwest Review, The Cortland Review and Poetry East. Recent publication in The Carolina Quarterly, The Chariton Review, and The American Journal of Poetry, with poetry forthcoming in Confrontation. He placed first in the 2019 Stephen DiBiase competition, and third in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review contest. His poems have also been featured in a number of anthologies.
All I wanted to do was watch
An old black & white film with you,
But the black had been stripped away…
Bogart kissing some woman’s white lips
Cagney stroking his white Tommy gun
Gary Cooper wiping down the white sweat of his white horse
Mae West casting back her sultry look asking Why don’t you white boys come up and see
me sometime?
And all those war movies with their white bombs and white blood and
That last hill the white GIs have got to take from the unseen
Colorless enemy; and it’s the best part, it’s the scene you’ve seen
So many times before and here it comes again, you can’t get
Enough of it, your knuckles gone white, skin gone white, breath gone
White from how long you’ve held that breath, watching war’s white smoke, white
Bullets, white fear; your breath held for nine white minutes as if beneath a
Knee that doesn’t know the scene has ended, though the credits
Have begun to roll, as your heart beats back to red, and the screen fades to black.
Ken Holland is an award-winning poet who’s just been nominated a third time for the Pushcart Prize. His work has been widely published in such journals as Rattle, Southwest Review, The Cortland Review and Poetry East. Recent publication in The Carolina Quarterly, The Chariton Review, and The American Journal of Poetry, with poetry forthcoming in Confrontation. He placed first in the 2019 Stephen DiBiase competition, and third in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review contest. His poems have also been featured in a number of anthologies.
Stellasue Lee Knoxville, TN
Harder Than A Trip To A Funeral Home
You’re mopping the floor, you know,
and your right hand decides it’s had it
with mopping, had it with grocery lists,
with hand-written notes, and especially
addressing envelopes. You remember
turning eighty your last birthday
with minimal celebration because of Covid-19,
but what you wanted was a new kitten
to keep the other kitten company.
Now your right hand doesn’t want
to do anything but remind you
to suffer. “What the hell,” you think,
“you’re just living life, and Shazam!
you turn eighty.” Within a couple of months,
you’re told you have cataracts.
The kittens race through the house,
tearing up the floors, and there you are
with a patch over one eye. It’s then you remember
you heard it first from that pesky right hand,
this is just the start. It’s going to get ten thousand
times harder than a trip to the funeral home.
Stellasue Lee is Editor Emerita at RATTLE. She is host of WordStream on WDVX, Knoxville, TN with Linda Parsons. Two of her books have been entrants for the Pulitzer Prize, Firecracker Red, and Crossing The Double Yellow Line. Her New & Selected Poems, Queen of Jacks, was released in 2020. Dr. Lee was winner of the grand prize of Poetry To Aide Humanity in 2013 by Al Falah in Malaysia. She teaches privately and serves on the board of Tennessee Mountain Writers. Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University.
You’re mopping the floor, you know,
and your right hand decides it’s had it
with mopping, had it with grocery lists,
with hand-written notes, and especially
addressing envelopes. You remember
turning eighty your last birthday
with minimal celebration because of Covid-19,
but what you wanted was a new kitten
to keep the other kitten company.
Now your right hand doesn’t want
to do anything but remind you
to suffer. “What the hell,” you think,
“you’re just living life, and Shazam!
you turn eighty.” Within a couple of months,
you’re told you have cataracts.
The kittens race through the house,
tearing up the floors, and there you are
with a patch over one eye. It’s then you remember
you heard it first from that pesky right hand,
this is just the start. It’s going to get ten thousand
times harder than a trip to the funeral home.
Stellasue Lee is Editor Emerita at RATTLE. She is host of WordStream on WDVX, Knoxville, TN with Linda Parsons. Two of her books have been entrants for the Pulitzer Prize, Firecracker Red, and Crossing The Double Yellow Line. Her New & Selected Poems, Queen of Jacks, was released in 2020. Dr. Lee was winner of the grand prize of Poetry To Aide Humanity in 2013 by Al Falah in Malaysia. She teaches privately and serves on the board of Tennessee Mountain Writers. Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University.
Jude Marr Tallahassee, FL
See SoFloPoJo’s review of their latest collection, We Know Each Other by Our Wounds here-
See SoFloPoJo’s review of their latest collection, We Know Each Other by Our Wounds here-
Jude Marr is a nonbinary poet who writes to survive. Their full-length collection We Know Each Other By Our Wounds came out in 2020 and they also have a chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds, published in 2017. Jude’s work has appeared in many journals, and they were recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Follow them on Twitter @JudeMarr1 and find more of their work at www.judemarr.com
Follow them on Twitter @JudeMarr1 and find more of their work at www.judemarr.com
Laura McCullough Jersey Shore, NJ
Medusa as a Parable of Faith & Resilience
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.
Louise Gluck
Pain is joy when it cries, it's my smile in disguise.
Pusha T
1.
Sometimes mistakes are set
to right; others never are.
Athena never owned up
to her crime against Medusa.
We know what Poseidon did
to her, and how
Medusa was blamed for it.
Athena had daddy issues and competed
with other women,
her projections and rage
transforming Medusa
into a monster as punishment for the ‘crime’
of having been raped.
Even women blame
the victim. I’ve always loved
snakes, those in the grass or on the path,
misunderstood and mis-cast;
they are victims, too.
I’ve heard this joke:
He’d even screw a snake if someone pinned it down.
2.
I’ve been teased
my head is full
of snakes, hair wild,
a thistle brush, rarely pretty, always too much.
Snakes and curls
have a lot in common;
and girls aren’t always your friends;
Poseidon was a bastard, and maybe Athena was
jealous of Medusa,
but the punishing
had its gifts. What is stripped
from you—skin of identity—lets you choose:
accept the shadow and glow,
wet, raw, vulnerable:
if someone steals from you,
what’s left behind is all you own, like Medusa’s blood
became medicine.
Asclepius revived a snake;
it whispered secret knowledge
of healing into his listening ear—the rod of this god
has one snake coiled;
considered divine,
a being wise, its wreathed body
symbol of bringing people back from the dead.
3.
All these gods and goddesses!
Fucking whomever they could
pin down, or fucking someone
up or over, mortal or immortal, kids jumping out of heads
or broken earth, being
raised by snakes or
like the snake,
discovering both their poison and ability to shed skin--
like father wounds,
mother grief—disappointments
and betrayals both flaying
us alive and renewing us. When I say, all my life my hair
was my bane,
my shame,
an accusation and a curse,
I am saying there was pain in the becoming.
4.
You who broke
my heart, I didn’t turn
to stone. Grotesque,
maybe, my course tangled mess, these snakes
are more wondrous
as I age, and my blood
holds both pain and joy.
You remember that, don’t you? Pain is joy? Pusha T
knows poison like
Gluck knows isolation.
Do you de-fang dis?
Or dine off it? No one
can be believed anymore. Not one
of the gods can be pinned down.
My hair gets frizzier by the day.
Like snake skin, the latter shed, mine
gets redder, alternately penny bright and gray.
My head is roiling snake charmed
and only half fro’d out,
just a type 3B or C, curly not coil—
judged by elasticity, variance, and porosity.
5.
I’m going to read Gluck’s
Meadowlands backwards,
and her parable thus:
In pain as in joy.
In the generous heart
I’m going to twist my hair, pinch my snakes, release their poison:
The grief of his lady: his
Yet gladly would the king bear
Or maybe I’ll just pardon the world,
as if it were possible
to do so before I’m dead,
but maybe after, my blood,
one drop damning, the other reviving,
feuding with itself, embodied
by these knots, these Caduceusized matted,
near dreads, still unlocked
either to be cut out or embraced.
I choose neither pain nor joy,
nothing about the night that’s virtuous,
just necessary, no perfect endings,
only endings and endings, and endings
as Gluck said. Shall I feed--
as others fed off me—these snakes
instead of a snake in the grass as Virgil first wrote--
oh herd-boys picking flowers and strawberries, beware
the cold snake lurking in the grass--, or just cut off
their heads
(whose head?) Or shave my own?
Or just follow the map of my hair into the night
of grief
and grievance? Or slough off
even the concepts of truth or justice,
embrace the ouroboros,
the snake eating its own tail,
symbol
of both treachery and renewal,
elasticity a form of resilience.
Laura McCullough’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, Pank, Gulf Coast, The Writer’s Chronicle, Best American Poetry and others. Her most recent book of poems, Women & Other Hostages, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her manuscript The Wild Night Dress was selected by Billy Collins as a winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is author of Panic, which won the Kinereth Genseler Award. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ, where she founded the Creative Writing Program and Visiting Writers Series, and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA in writing. Visit her website: www.lauramccullough.org.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.
Louise Gluck
Pain is joy when it cries, it's my smile in disguise.
Pusha T
1.
Sometimes mistakes are set
to right; others never are.
Athena never owned up
to her crime against Medusa.
We know what Poseidon did
to her, and how
Medusa was blamed for it.
Athena had daddy issues and competed
with other women,
her projections and rage
transforming Medusa
into a monster as punishment for the ‘crime’
of having been raped.
Even women blame
the victim. I’ve always loved
snakes, those in the grass or on the path,
misunderstood and mis-cast;
they are victims, too.
I’ve heard this joke:
He’d even screw a snake if someone pinned it down.
2.
I’ve been teased
my head is full
of snakes, hair wild,
a thistle brush, rarely pretty, always too much.
Snakes and curls
have a lot in common;
and girls aren’t always your friends;
Poseidon was a bastard, and maybe Athena was
jealous of Medusa,
but the punishing
had its gifts. What is stripped
from you—skin of identity—lets you choose:
accept the shadow and glow,
wet, raw, vulnerable:
if someone steals from you,
what’s left behind is all you own, like Medusa’s blood
became medicine.
Asclepius revived a snake;
it whispered secret knowledge
of healing into his listening ear—the rod of this god
has one snake coiled;
considered divine,
a being wise, its wreathed body
symbol of bringing people back from the dead.
3.
All these gods and goddesses!
Fucking whomever they could
pin down, or fucking someone
up or over, mortal or immortal, kids jumping out of heads
or broken earth, being
raised by snakes or
like the snake,
discovering both their poison and ability to shed skin--
like father wounds,
mother grief—disappointments
and betrayals both flaying
us alive and renewing us. When I say, all my life my hair
was my bane,
my shame,
an accusation and a curse,
I am saying there was pain in the becoming.
4.
You who broke
my heart, I didn’t turn
to stone. Grotesque,
maybe, my course tangled mess, these snakes
are more wondrous
as I age, and my blood
holds both pain and joy.
You remember that, don’t you? Pain is joy? Pusha T
knows poison like
Gluck knows isolation.
Do you de-fang dis?
Or dine off it? No one
can be believed anymore. Not one
of the gods can be pinned down.
My hair gets frizzier by the day.
Like snake skin, the latter shed, mine
gets redder, alternately penny bright and gray.
My head is roiling snake charmed
and only half fro’d out,
just a type 3B or C, curly not coil—
judged by elasticity, variance, and porosity.
5.
I’m going to read Gluck’s
Meadowlands backwards,
and her parable thus:
In pain as in joy.
In the generous heart
I’m going to twist my hair, pinch my snakes, release their poison:
The grief of his lady: his
Yet gladly would the king bear
Or maybe I’ll just pardon the world,
as if it were possible
to do so before I’m dead,
but maybe after, my blood,
one drop damning, the other reviving,
feuding with itself, embodied
by these knots, these Caduceusized matted,
near dreads, still unlocked
either to be cut out or embraced.
I choose neither pain nor joy,
nothing about the night that’s virtuous,
just necessary, no perfect endings,
only endings and endings, and endings
as Gluck said. Shall I feed--
as others fed off me—these snakes
instead of a snake in the grass as Virgil first wrote--
oh herd-boys picking flowers and strawberries, beware
the cold snake lurking in the grass--, or just cut off
their heads
(whose head?) Or shave my own?
Or just follow the map of my hair into the night
of grief
and grievance? Or slough off
even the concepts of truth or justice,
embrace the ouroboros,
the snake eating its own tail,
symbol
of both treachery and renewal,
elasticity a form of resilience.
Laura McCullough’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, Pank, Gulf Coast, The Writer’s Chronicle, Best American Poetry and others. Her most recent book of poems, Women & Other Hostages, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her manuscript The Wild Night Dress was selected by Billy Collins as a winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is author of Panic, which won the Kinereth Genseler Award. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ, where she founded the Creative Writing Program and Visiting Writers Series, and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA in writing. Visit her website: www.lauramccullough.org.
Francine Montemurro Boston, MA 2 poems
Pioneers
On Sundays when it rained,
the uncles sat on porches
smoking White Owl cigars,
with feet propped on wrought iron railings,
through to evening when
voices were muted by dampness,
darkness, pounding rain,
while the aunts spied and eavesdropped
from clean, dry kitchens.
The uncles talked and watched clouds of
cigar smoke hang and drift until they
drifted too, back to stories of the Old Country,
of soil too parched to till
of families, large, close and shielding
of ocean crossings -- alone and in steerage,
of stillborn babies buried in potters fields,
of red wine, pressed in basements,
of hope for the children of
the Pioneers of San Mauro Forte.
The uncles sat on porches.
The aunts spied from dry kitchens.
The smoke drifted in dampness.
And I watched the tips of the White Owls
glow and fade, glow and fade, and I
wondered if you could see those tiny embers
all the way down to the Yonkers city line.
edit.
On Sundays when it rained,
the uncles sat on porches
smoking White Owl cigars,
with feet propped on wrought iron railings,
through to evening when
voices were muted by dampness,
darkness, pounding rain,
while the aunts spied and eavesdropped
from clean, dry kitchens.
The uncles talked and watched clouds of
cigar smoke hang and drift until they
drifted too, back to stories of the Old Country,
of soil too parched to till
of families, large, close and shielding
of ocean crossings -- alone and in steerage,
of stillborn babies buried in potters fields,
of red wine, pressed in basements,
of hope for the children of
the Pioneers of San Mauro Forte.
The uncles sat on porches.
The aunts spied from dry kitchens.
The smoke drifted in dampness.
And I watched the tips of the White Owls
glow and fade, glow and fade, and I
wondered if you could see those tiny embers
all the way down to the Yonkers city line.
edit.
Annuals
My husband walked off in the fall.
He didn’t come back in the spring.
The house is empty, now.
The plot that was my garden
is overgrown, dense with weeds.
I quit my home and with it my
cream coreopsis, baby-blue hollyhocks,
champagne foxglove, and everything
that came up, year after year no matter
how cold the winter.
My new flat has enough space for
annuals. I give them soil, sunlight,
a single season to flower, set seed, and die.
I line the windowsill with clay pots,
cram them with sage, thyme, and cilantro.
I fill a single bowl with catnip
for feral cats in the back alley.
The summer breeze sends a wave of
mismatched fragrance through the screen.
I set ten-gallon urns on my tiny back terrace.
By August, they overflow with crimson begonias,
red-torch geraniums, scarlet salvia.
No pastels in my potted garden.
Everything in shades of rage.
Sizzling harlot colors,
screaming for attention.
Francine Montemurro’s long-forgotten love of poetry was reignited in 2007 after attending her very first poetry reading: Maria Mazziotti Gillan, reading from All that Lies Between Us. Francine lives in Boston with her amazing husband who often critiques her poems. Her work has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review.
My husband walked off in the fall.
He didn’t come back in the spring.
The house is empty, now.
The plot that was my garden
is overgrown, dense with weeds.
I quit my home and with it my
cream coreopsis, baby-blue hollyhocks,
champagne foxglove, and everything
that came up, year after year no matter
how cold the winter.
My new flat has enough space for
annuals. I give them soil, sunlight,
a single season to flower, set seed, and die.
I line the windowsill with clay pots,
cram them with sage, thyme, and cilantro.
I fill a single bowl with catnip
for feral cats in the back alley.
The summer breeze sends a wave of
mismatched fragrance through the screen.
I set ten-gallon urns on my tiny back terrace.
By August, they overflow with crimson begonias,
red-torch geraniums, scarlet salvia.
No pastels in my potted garden.
Everything in shades of rage.
Sizzling harlot colors,
screaming for attention.
Francine Montemurro’s long-forgotten love of poetry was reignited in 2007 after attending her very first poetry reading: Maria Mazziotti Gillan, reading from All that Lies Between Us. Francine lives in Boston with her amazing husband who often critiques her poems. Her work has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review.
Zack Murphy St. Paul, MN
437 Wilton Street (A Brick Story)
Charlie’s heart tingles as he pulls up to 437 Wilton Street, his childhood apartment building.
Everything is gone except the skeleton of a structure and the echoe of memories. You can board
up the windows, but you can’t cross out the souls that once occupied the walls.
Every Saturday night, the entire block would light up with a Fourth of July jubilance. Dueling
music speakers battled to steal the humid air at full volume. The Ramones shouted to the rooftop.
Bruce Springsteen crooned to the moon. And Sam Cooke sang to the heavens.
Rich used to show off his candy red Mustang. He thought he was a lot cooler than he actually
was. His hair grease looked like a mixture of egg yolks and Vasoline. Charlie hasn’t forgotten the
time that Rich revved up his ride in front of the whole neighborhood, only to blow the engine.
Rich’s face blushed redder than his broken car as everybody laughed.
Shawn was the tallest person that Charlie had ever seen. He dribbled the basketball on the
bubblegum-stained concrete like he had the world in his hands. He never did make it to the pros.
But he did become a pro of another kind. Charlie hadn’t heard about Shawn in years until the day
a familiar voice spoke through the television. It was a commercial for a landscaping business --
aptly named Shawn’s Professional Landscaping.
Charlie wished that he were older. Maybe he might’ve gotten noticed by his first crush,
Henrietta. He’d daydream about her curly hair, sparkly lip gloss, and mysterious eyes.
Sometimes when Charlie passed by her door, he’d hear loud yelling and harsh bangs.
TJ always treated Charlie like a little brother. He’d even give him cash for snacks every week.
Charlie always admired TJ’s bright red Nike shoes. One day, TJ got arrested by the cops in front
of Charlie’s very own eyes. TJ was selling a certain kind of product, and it wasn’t chocolates.
Charlie’s grandma cooked the most delicious spaghetti. It smelled like love. The sauce was made
from tomatoes that she grew on the roof. Charlie still thinks of her smile with the missing front
tooth, and the big, dark moles on her cheeks. The cancer eventually got to her. When she was put
to rest, Charlie was forced to go into a new home. But it wasn’t really a home.
After snapping out of his trance, Charlie picks up a an old brown brick from the building and sets
it on the passenger side floor of his pristine Cadillac. When he arrives back at his quaint house in
a quiet neighborhood, he places the brick in the soil of his tomato garden.
Zack Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Coachella Review, Mystery Tribune, Yellow Medicine Review, Ellipsis Zine, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. His forthcoming chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press) is due out in Spring 2021. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Charlie’s heart tingles as he pulls up to 437 Wilton Street, his childhood apartment building.
Everything is gone except the skeleton of a structure and the echoe of memories. You can board
up the windows, but you can’t cross out the souls that once occupied the walls.
Every Saturday night, the entire block would light up with a Fourth of July jubilance. Dueling
music speakers battled to steal the humid air at full volume. The Ramones shouted to the rooftop.
Bruce Springsteen crooned to the moon. And Sam Cooke sang to the heavens.
Rich used to show off his candy red Mustang. He thought he was a lot cooler than he actually
was. His hair grease looked like a mixture of egg yolks and Vasoline. Charlie hasn’t forgotten the
time that Rich revved up his ride in front of the whole neighborhood, only to blow the engine.
Rich’s face blushed redder than his broken car as everybody laughed.
Shawn was the tallest person that Charlie had ever seen. He dribbled the basketball on the
bubblegum-stained concrete like he had the world in his hands. He never did make it to the pros.
But he did become a pro of another kind. Charlie hadn’t heard about Shawn in years until the day
a familiar voice spoke through the television. It was a commercial for a landscaping business --
aptly named Shawn’s Professional Landscaping.
Charlie wished that he were older. Maybe he might’ve gotten noticed by his first crush,
Henrietta. He’d daydream about her curly hair, sparkly lip gloss, and mysterious eyes.
Sometimes when Charlie passed by her door, he’d hear loud yelling and harsh bangs.
TJ always treated Charlie like a little brother. He’d even give him cash for snacks every week.
Charlie always admired TJ’s bright red Nike shoes. One day, TJ got arrested by the cops in front
of Charlie’s very own eyes. TJ was selling a certain kind of product, and it wasn’t chocolates.
Charlie’s grandma cooked the most delicious spaghetti. It smelled like love. The sauce was made
from tomatoes that she grew on the roof. Charlie still thinks of her smile with the missing front
tooth, and the big, dark moles on her cheeks. The cancer eventually got to her. When she was put
to rest, Charlie was forced to go into a new home. But it wasn’t really a home.
After snapping out of his trance, Charlie picks up a an old brown brick from the building and sets
it on the passenger side floor of his pristine Cadillac. When he arrives back at his quaint house in
a quiet neighborhood, he places the brick in the soil of his tomato garden.
Zack Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Coachella Review, Mystery Tribune, Yellow Medicine Review, Ellipsis Zine, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. His forthcoming chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press) is due out in Spring 2021. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Margaret Ohrn Newburyport, MA
Summer’s End
Although we lived there, we missed being tourists.
Before the season ended and our bones began to feel
chills of autumn lurking, we filled our dwindling
days visiting markets, picking up trinkets we did not
even want and, like notes on napkins, would surely
forget. Of course they disappeared, into the old
green dresser or to the closet by the chipped
heater which needed to be serviced after the last
ice storm. Little wooden whales for the mantel,
jellyfish watercolors, compass rose coasters,
keychains with our town’s name in bold plaid
letters, as if we didn’t know where we lived.
Maybe we had forgotten. Can that happen?
Not remembering to smell the salt air
of our coastal village, we no longer paused while walking,
praising the slant of an antique cottage, or to admire
quaint red brick streets that, over time, became dangerously
rough and uneven. I remember the night I lost my step,
simply walking home, the bricks indifferent to my fall,
the twist of my ankle. You carried me home, both of us laughing
under the influence of margaritas with salted rims. But now it's
very cold in the morning, the sun is rising later. I sleep,
wishing I could go back to tourist season, banter with
xenial shopkeepers and generous bartenders, say
yes to bike rides, and finally find the misplaced vase for the pink
zinnias you grew that summer, and smell them.
Margaret Ohrn’s poems have been published in The Anthology of New England Writers as well as in the collection, Blackberry Picking, Lyrical Voices from Vermont. She lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Although we lived there, we missed being tourists.
Before the season ended and our bones began to feel
chills of autumn lurking, we filled our dwindling
days visiting markets, picking up trinkets we did not
even want and, like notes on napkins, would surely
forget. Of course they disappeared, into the old
green dresser or to the closet by the chipped
heater which needed to be serviced after the last
ice storm. Little wooden whales for the mantel,
jellyfish watercolors, compass rose coasters,
keychains with our town’s name in bold plaid
letters, as if we didn’t know where we lived.
Maybe we had forgotten. Can that happen?
Not remembering to smell the salt air
of our coastal village, we no longer paused while walking,
praising the slant of an antique cottage, or to admire
quaint red brick streets that, over time, became dangerously
rough and uneven. I remember the night I lost my step,
simply walking home, the bricks indifferent to my fall,
the twist of my ankle. You carried me home, both of us laughing
under the influence of margaritas with salted rims. But now it's
very cold in the morning, the sun is rising later. I sleep,
wishing I could go back to tourist season, banter with
xenial shopkeepers and generous bartenders, say
yes to bike rides, and finally find the misplaced vase for the pink
zinnias you grew that summer, and smell them.
Margaret Ohrn’s poems have been published in The Anthology of New England Writers as well as in the collection, Blackberry Picking, Lyrical Voices from Vermont. She lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Maureen Seaton Longmont, CO
Praying in a Foreign Language
When I was six I died and came back to life as seven. At first I was disappointed, but then I
realized I would be eight in October and a gypsy after that and I began to think in another
language entirely.
Lingua mulieribus.
If I had known when I was in college that calculus meant small stone I might have embraced the
infinitesimal and tuned in to sacred equations. Still, I grew spirally with a soft shell around me,
alive to the sea. Like a logarithm.
r=aeθ cot b
The reason I was “non-forcibly” raped at thirty-three wasn’t only because my children were
asleep down the hall. “I’m that woman,” I thought, “the one in six, oh shit shit shit.” So I played
dead as if he were a grizzly.
Una palabra es una elegía.
Translations:
The language of women, from the Latin
The golden spiral, from the language of calculus
A word is an elegy, from the Spanish (with thanks to R. Hass)
When I was six I died and came back to life as seven. At first I was disappointed, but then I
realized I would be eight in October and a gypsy after that and I began to think in another
language entirely.
Lingua mulieribus.
If I had known when I was in college that calculus meant small stone I might have embraced the
infinitesimal and tuned in to sacred equations. Still, I grew spirally with a soft shell around me,
alive to the sea. Like a logarithm.
r=aeθ cot b
The reason I was “non-forcibly” raped at thirty-three wasn’t only because my children were
asleep down the hall. “I’m that woman,” I thought, “the one in six, oh shit shit shit.” So I played
dead as if he were a grizzly.
Una palabra es una elegía.
Translations:
The language of women, from the Latin
The golden spiral, from the language of calculus
A word is an elegy, from the Spanish (with thanks to R. Hass)
I Write Because I’m Scared of Writing
--Gloria E. Anzaldúa
(A Cento)
Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest
Our skins sing in complementary keys
Sing with splinters in your tongue
Once I was asked to write down all the ways to use a stone
The word flies away...and does not come back
It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud
But I'm more scared of not writing
Staccato heels hammering the skin of the floor
God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God
Rearrange the Caribbean. Turn off the television
To know the body from the inside
Write with a feather, on a strip of azure parchment
Heresy was dangerous but silence worse
From time to time, she hauled herself ashore to shed scales
Quoted writers, in order of appearance: Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Jennifer L. Knox, Rachel Bennet, Dulce María Loynaz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Brenda Cárdenas, Annie Dillard, Nicole Hospital-Medina, Kimiko Hahn, Lynda Hull, Holly Iglesias, Carolina Hospital
--Gloria E. Anzaldúa
(A Cento)
Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest
Our skins sing in complementary keys
Sing with splinters in your tongue
Once I was asked to write down all the ways to use a stone
The word flies away...and does not come back
It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud
But I'm more scared of not writing
Staccato heels hammering the skin of the floor
God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God
Rearrange the Caribbean. Turn off the television
To know the body from the inside
Write with a feather, on a strip of azure parchment
Heresy was dangerous but silence worse
From time to time, she hauled herself ashore to shed scales
Quoted writers, in order of appearance: Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Jennifer L. Knox, Rachel Bennet, Dulce María Loynaz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Brenda Cárdenas, Annie Dillard, Nicole Hospital-Medina, Kimiko Hahn, Lynda Hull, Holly Iglesias, Carolina Hospital
I prefer to remain unforgiven.
—Nicole Hospital-Medina
It’s been a few days since I lived anything to be forgiven
or wrote something for which someone might forgive me.
Maybe all this poking around in my brain isn’t healthy.
I heard recently that in some cultures the brain is simply
residue, that the heart is where intelligence lies and makes
the invisible visible. I wonder what the fuck that means
but I’m willing to forego my brain for my heart. Go ahead,
feel the heat over my fourth chakra. Now put your hands
on my head—nothing, right? Locked down in the middle
of Colorado with cancer during Covid hasn’t been the carnival
it’s cracked up to be. Neither has it all been hell. Still, I pre-
fer to remain unforgiven if it means I get to smash things
or drive my car off a cliff (without me in it, of course). Sure,
you can worry about me a little, but don’t not order curbside
on my account or hide my car keys. To the men in charge:
don’t you dare try to forgive me. I’ve barely begun to die.
—Nicole Hospital-Medina
It’s been a few days since I lived anything to be forgiven
or wrote something for which someone might forgive me.
Maybe all this poking around in my brain isn’t healthy.
I heard recently that in some cultures the brain is simply
residue, that the heart is where intelligence lies and makes
the invisible visible. I wonder what the fuck that means
but I’m willing to forego my brain for my heart. Go ahead,
feel the heat over my fourth chakra. Now put your hands
on my head—nothing, right? Locked down in the middle
of Colorado with cancer during Covid hasn’t been the carnival
it’s cracked up to be. Neither has it all been hell. Still, I pre-
fer to remain unforgiven if it means I get to smash things
or drive my car off a cliff (without me in it, of course). Sure,
you can worry about me a little, but don’t not order curbside
on my account or hide my car keys. To the men in charge:
don’t you dare try to forgive me. I’ve barely begun to die.
Muddled Blackberries
Poets love picking blackberries and tucking them into their poems.
blackberries big as thumbs...shining/in the shade (Mary Oliver)
I’d say it’s the Chosen Fruit of the Collective Unconscious rather than
a disregard for other berries or the fact I am unpoetically allergic to all
blackberries, scratching my way on the L.I.R.R. to midtown Manhattan
to work as a mail girl my 18th summer. I knew little of poetry then,
although my grandmother would recite terrifying lines by Anonymous
whenever I begged her. She was an Irishwoman trying for American
in Elizabethport, New Jersey. Lace Curtain; Old Sod; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
~
Grandson (age 7): “How did your grandmother get here from Ireland? Airplane?”
Me (age 70): “Uh, no.”
Grandson: “Catapult?”
Irish Blackberry Cobbler Cocktail
Ingredients for two cocktails
16 ripe blackberries
3 oz or 90ml Irish whiskey
3 oz or 90ml simple syrup Ground cinnamon or nutmeg Crushed ice for two glasses
Method
Divide the blackberries between two short cocktail glasses and muddle until you have a lovely
mush of blackberries and juice at the bottom. Add crushed ice to fill both glasses, right on top of
the muddled berries. Shake vigorously in a cocktail shaker. Pour over crushed ice. Mix well.
Poets love picking blackberries and tucking them into their poems.
blackberries big as thumbs...shining/in the shade (Mary Oliver)
I’d say it’s the Chosen Fruit of the Collective Unconscious rather than
a disregard for other berries or the fact I am unpoetically allergic to all
blackberries, scratching my way on the L.I.R.R. to midtown Manhattan
to work as a mail girl my 18th summer. I knew little of poetry then,
although my grandmother would recite terrifying lines by Anonymous
whenever I begged her. She was an Irishwoman trying for American
in Elizabethport, New Jersey. Lace Curtain; Old Sod; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
~
Grandson (age 7): “How did your grandmother get here from Ireland? Airplane?”
Me (age 70): “Uh, no.”
Grandson: “Catapult?”
Irish Blackberry Cobbler Cocktail
Ingredients for two cocktails
16 ripe blackberries
3 oz or 90ml Irish whiskey
3 oz or 90ml simple syrup Ground cinnamon or nutmeg Crushed ice for two glasses
Method
Divide the blackberries between two short cocktail glasses and muddle until you have a lovely
mush of blackberries and juice at the bottom. Add crushed ice to fill both glasses, right on top of
the muddled berries. Shake vigorously in a cocktail shaker. Pour over crushed ice. Mix well.
Frances Angela Bradley Seaton
Beautiful
Once there was a poem called “Beautiful.” But before I could think of anything
beautiful I had to confess what it was that gleamed along my bones, radioactive
and redolent of snow, the way it fills the nose with the perfume of cold, my
spine a length of rope or a branch of dead leaves or a fountain of blood. Cancer
has crept to the place below my vertebrae, the place that looks like a saddle,
the sacrum, where the body is...beautiful. There. Did I mention I have three angels?
All two-spirit, non-binary. When I was on the operating table, they were beside me,
guarding me, accompanying me. They whispered: You know this procedure’s not
going to work. Do you still want to go through with it? Yes, I said. I said yes.
Maureen Seaton has authored twenty-one poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019), winner of the Florida Book Award for Poetry, and the chapbook, Myth America (Anhinga, 2020), a collaboration with three Florida poets (Holly Iglesias, Carolina Hospital, and Nicole Hospital-Medina). Other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, Audre Lorde Award, the NEA, and two Pushcarts. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many fine literary journals and anthologies. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin, 2008, 2018), also garnered a “Lammy.” Seaton is Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
Once there was a poem called “Beautiful.” But before I could think of anything
beautiful I had to confess what it was that gleamed along my bones, radioactive
and redolent of snow, the way it fills the nose with the perfume of cold, my
spine a length of rope or a branch of dead leaves or a fountain of blood. Cancer
has crept to the place below my vertebrae, the place that looks like a saddle,
the sacrum, where the body is...beautiful. There. Did I mention I have three angels?
All two-spirit, non-binary. When I was on the operating table, they were beside me,
guarding me, accompanying me. They whispered: You know this procedure’s not
going to work. Do you still want to go through with it? Yes, I said. I said yes.
Maureen Seaton has authored twenty-one poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019), winner of the Florida Book Award for Poetry, and the chapbook, Myth America (Anhinga, 2020), a collaboration with three Florida poets (Holly Iglesias, Carolina Hospital, and Nicole Hospital-Medina). Other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, Audre Lorde Award, the NEA, and two Pushcarts. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many fine literary journals and anthologies. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin, 2008, 2018), also garnered a “Lammy.” Seaton is Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
Betsy Sholl Portland, ME
Crossing: Casco Bay
He is not here to walk this bridge with me,
to pause midway at the rail and gaze
at the water’s dull glitter, the many islands,
and between them passage to open sea,
not here for me to quote Whitman saying
to ferry crowds, “Just as you feel… I felt,”
or to tell about my childhood ferry
leaving Camden to cross the Delaware.
We’d be coming or going from funerals
for great uncles and aunts, there’d be talk
of the dead sailing toward an endless horizon
no one in this life can reach,
that distance where the light is so brilliant
it hides whatever’s behind it.
“Distance,” Whitman says, “it avails not,”
imagining himself gone, crossed over,
and still reaching out. After the bridge,
there’s a causeway propped by landfill
and boulders, studded with shells dropped
in the night by gulls. Goldenrod, asters,
sumac, lichen, some kind of netting to hold
the rocks in place. How often we walked here
holding hands, and now in his absence
I want to believe distance avails not,
as if a soul really could sail out and cross back.
“You furnish your parts toward eternity,”
Whitman says. But what do the living know
of those currents and tides, that light,
the gleaming road I watched from the ferry rail
making a path straight to me
and saw still when I stepped to another spot,
so knew it was there for anyone who looked⎯
the far side of the horizon, vast reach of open sea⎯
there, and yet I fathom it not.
Betsy Sholl’s ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019), winner of the Four Lakes Prize. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.
He is not here to walk this bridge with me,
to pause midway at the rail and gaze
at the water’s dull glitter, the many islands,
and between them passage to open sea,
not here for me to quote Whitman saying
to ferry crowds, “Just as you feel… I felt,”
or to tell about my childhood ferry
leaving Camden to cross the Delaware.
We’d be coming or going from funerals
for great uncles and aunts, there’d be talk
of the dead sailing toward an endless horizon
no one in this life can reach,
that distance where the light is so brilliant
it hides whatever’s behind it.
“Distance,” Whitman says, “it avails not,”
imagining himself gone, crossed over,
and still reaching out. After the bridge,
there’s a causeway propped by landfill
and boulders, studded with shells dropped
in the night by gulls. Goldenrod, asters,
sumac, lichen, some kind of netting to hold
the rocks in place. How often we walked here
holding hands, and now in his absence
I want to believe distance avails not,
as if a soul really could sail out and cross back.
“You furnish your parts toward eternity,”
Whitman says. But what do the living know
of those currents and tides, that light,
the gleaming road I watched from the ferry rail
making a path straight to me
and saw still when I stepped to another spot,
so knew it was there for anyone who looked⎯
the far side of the horizon, vast reach of open sea⎯
there, and yet I fathom it not.
Betsy Sholl’s ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019), winner of the Four Lakes Prize. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.
Jody Stewart Hawley, MA
The Role of the Blue Dress in the Western Movies
Our lady in a checkered apron bends at the hearth, leans in
and stirs. If her skirt begins to burn, she leaps back.
She’s a good girl, wastes nothing, is kind. Sky blue,
Mama blue, dark silks for dancing, she lifts her long skirts
when she squats to pee behind the chicken shed.
A worn blue dress sets the table, ladles stew, baskets up
the biscuits, churns cream to yellow, dusts off
then hangs her man’s coat up. But in this movie, she must beware
that other woman decked in red or pink, the one who flirts
across the kitchen to sniff what’s baking. Still,
the figure in her powder blue Sunday dress
always takes a stand. She sides with the guys, fights
against that boundary of twisted wire.
Even in a black and white movie on an old TV, it’s clear
which dress is blue. Without a cowboy she has no plot,
no kissing moon, no babies or new yardage to sew.
Her blue dress tells the child sprawling on the floor
who to trust and all daughters grow up knowing
if they lean too far to poke the coals
a hem may blaze to flames. Now the audience must guess
whether that woman in glossy red, or our excellent girl
will snatch the toddler up before a rattler strikes.
Who will the cowboy want to kiss? There was a time
when a cap pistol with its holster of plastic jewels, boxed high
on a garage shelf, could tell the story of good girls, bad girls,
tomboys and rogues. As the woman in her long blue skirt
drops a chicken in the turbulent pot, she hears
the latch click and smiles.
While credits crawl up the screen, a worn-out
handsome man enters to complete the room.
Pamela Stewart (known as Jody) received a BA from Goddard’s ADP Program and an MFA (sort of) from University of Iowa. In 1982 she received a Guggenheim and traveled to Cornwall in the UK. Her work appears a number of magazines. Stewart received three Pushcart publications, and is the author of six full-length books of poems: The St. Vlas Elegies (L’Epervier press, 1977), Cascades (L’Epervier Press, 1979), Nightblind (Ion Books, 1985), Infrequent Mysteries (Alice James Books, 1991), The Red Window (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), and Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010.)
Our lady in a checkered apron bends at the hearth, leans in
and stirs. If her skirt begins to burn, she leaps back.
She’s a good girl, wastes nothing, is kind. Sky blue,
Mama blue, dark silks for dancing, she lifts her long skirts
when she squats to pee behind the chicken shed.
A worn blue dress sets the table, ladles stew, baskets up
the biscuits, churns cream to yellow, dusts off
then hangs her man’s coat up. But in this movie, she must beware
that other woman decked in red or pink, the one who flirts
across the kitchen to sniff what’s baking. Still,
the figure in her powder blue Sunday dress
always takes a stand. She sides with the guys, fights
against that boundary of twisted wire.
Even in a black and white movie on an old TV, it’s clear
which dress is blue. Without a cowboy she has no plot,
no kissing moon, no babies or new yardage to sew.
Her blue dress tells the child sprawling on the floor
who to trust and all daughters grow up knowing
if they lean too far to poke the coals
a hem may blaze to flames. Now the audience must guess
whether that woman in glossy red, or our excellent girl
will snatch the toddler up before a rattler strikes.
Who will the cowboy want to kiss? There was a time
when a cap pistol with its holster of plastic jewels, boxed high
on a garage shelf, could tell the story of good girls, bad girls,
tomboys and rogues. As the woman in her long blue skirt
drops a chicken in the turbulent pot, she hears
the latch click and smiles.
While credits crawl up the screen, a worn-out
handsome man enters to complete the room.
Pamela Stewart (known as Jody) received a BA from Goddard’s ADP Program and an MFA (sort of) from University of Iowa. In 1982 she received a Guggenheim and traveled to Cornwall in the UK. Her work appears a number of magazines. Stewart received three Pushcart publications, and is the author of six full-length books of poems: The St. Vlas Elegies (L’Epervier press, 1977), Cascades (L’Epervier Press, 1979), Nightblind (Ion Books, 1985), Infrequent Mysteries (Alice James Books, 1991), The Red Window (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), and Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010.)
Charles Harper Webb Glendale, CA
The Elevator Would Not Stop Going Down
Just before the steel door
rumbled shut and trapped me,
I dreamed that I was reading
a book whose author died
the instant that he typed
THE END. The last pages
described the hospital, his kids
in tears, his wife planning
to marry her lover. Maybe
I dreamed the elevator
to escape from that last page.
As floors flew by, each
signaled by a Ping, I prayed
the building had a deep garage.
But when the pings stopped,
and the coffin-cramped room
kept going down, I shut
my eyes and braced for doom
just as, back in wide-awake land,
my phone rang and a man
announced that my first book,
which I'd given up for dead,
would be in print within a year.
It was like that when I met you:
my eyes squeezed shut,
despair’s kraken dragging me
down and down and down
when, without warning,
you yanked me up and out
into a better world.
Charles Harper Webb's latest collection of poems, Sidebend World, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough, a collection of Webb’s essays on contemporary American poetry, was published in 2016 by Red Hen Press, which will publish his first novel, Ursula Lake, in 2022. Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Webb teaches Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach.
Just before the steel door
rumbled shut and trapped me,
I dreamed that I was reading
a book whose author died
the instant that he typed
THE END. The last pages
described the hospital, his kids
in tears, his wife planning
to marry her lover. Maybe
I dreamed the elevator
to escape from that last page.
As floors flew by, each
signaled by a Ping, I prayed
the building had a deep garage.
But when the pings stopped,
and the coffin-cramped room
kept going down, I shut
my eyes and braced for doom
just as, back in wide-awake land,
my phone rang and a man
announced that my first book,
which I'd given up for dead,
would be in print within a year.
It was like that when I met you:
my eyes squeezed shut,
despair’s kraken dragging me
down and down and down
when, without warning,
you yanked me up and out
into a better world.
Charles Harper Webb's latest collection of poems, Sidebend World, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough, a collection of Webb’s essays on contemporary American poetry, was published in 2016 by Red Hen Press, which will publish his first novel, Ursula Lake, in 2022. Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Webb teaches Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach.
Yvonne Zipter Chicago, IL
Valedictory for My Womb
Four months since the surgeon zinged
his shiny blade from bone to bone,
and only just now have I thought
about my uterus, though to be fair,
that’s as much as I thought about it
in the 66 years that rag of flesh hung
in the lightless courtyard of my abdomen.
A younger woman might mourn its loss.
But we never had any use for each other,
that empty pocket and I, that pennant,
that kerchief, that funnel of love.
If only it had left more quietly,
without all the fuss, the fanfare
of nurses and needles and stitches
and staples. Perhaps I could have
forgiven it. But what can you expect
from an organ shaped like a sail?
One day, when the breeze takes it,
it’s bound to move on, oblivious
to your dark and briny depths.
Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals over the years, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Metronome of Aptekarsky Ostrov (Russia), and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her published poems are currently being sold in two poetry-vending machines in Chicago, from which the proceeds are donated to a nonprofit arts organization called Arts Alive Chicago. In addition, she provided some narration for the documentary A Secret Love. She worked as a manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press until her retirement in 2018.
Four months since the surgeon zinged
his shiny blade from bone to bone,
and only just now have I thought
about my uterus, though to be fair,
that’s as much as I thought about it
in the 66 years that rag of flesh hung
in the lightless courtyard of my abdomen.
A younger woman might mourn its loss.
But we never had any use for each other,
that empty pocket and I, that pennant,
that kerchief, that funnel of love.
If only it had left more quietly,
without all the fuss, the fanfare
of nurses and needles and stitches
and staples. Perhaps I could have
forgiven it. But what can you expect
from an organ shaped like a sail?
One day, when the breeze takes it,
it’s bound to move on, oblivious
to your dark and briny depths.
Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals over the years, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Metronome of Aptekarsky Ostrov (Russia), and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her published poems are currently being sold in two poetry-vending machines in Chicago, from which the proceeds are donated to a nonprofit arts organization called Arts Alive Chicago. In addition, she provided some narration for the documentary A Secret Love. She worked as a manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press until her retirement in 2018.