ISSUE 22 August 2021
Judy Ireland, Editor
Judy Ireland, 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.
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Purchase South Florida Poetry Journal's first print anthology here: Voices
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Poetry
Jeffrey Alfier Hannah Keziah Agustin Estelle Bajou Joe Baumann Laurel Benjamin Ace Boggess T. Clear John Cullen Zachary Dankert Satya Dash Adam Day Amanda Dettmann Stuart Dischell Tamiko Dooley Wendy Drexler Linda Nemec Foster George Franklin Suzanne Frischkorn Elizabeth Cranford Garcia Tarek Ghaddar Stephen Gibson Bryan Edward Helton Hesper Karen Hildebrand Alicia Hoffman
Miriam Moore-Keish Helga Kidder Casey Killingsworth Rebecca Audra Kukstas. Olivia Lawrence
Miriam Moore-Keish Helga Kidder Casey Killingsworth Rebecca Audra Kukstas. Olivia Lawrence
Click here for Poetry Page 2
Samantha Madway Patrick Maynard John McDonough Bruce McRae Megan Merchant Ana Michalowsky Tim Moder Daniel Edward Moore Shareen K. Murayama Bill Neumire Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo B.M. Owens Ann Pedone Bonnie Proudfoot Radoslav Rochallyi Samantha Samakande Alfonso Sito Sasieta James Scruton Tufik Shayeb Hilary Sideris Jim Simpson Sarah Jeanine Smith Kory Vance Brendan Walsh Kelly Weber Stephen Scott Whitaker Sarah Renee Wollstonecraft Ellen June Wright
Samantha Madway Patrick Maynard John McDonough Bruce McRae Megan Merchant Ana Michalowsky Tim Moder Daniel Edward Moore Shareen K. Murayama Bill Neumire Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo B.M. Owens Ann Pedone Bonnie Proudfoot Radoslav Rochallyi Samantha Samakande Alfonso Sito Sasieta James Scruton Tufik Shayeb Hilary Sideris Jim Simpson Sarah Jeanine Smith Kory Vance Brendan Walsh Kelly Weber Stephen Scott Whitaker Sarah Renee Wollstonecraft Ellen June Wright
Jeffrey Alfier Torrance, CA
DeSoto County Postcard
The green world engages the long memory
of summer. Sun climbs into everything.
Sky is a still canvas — no wind, as if the day
holds its breath or arrives half-awake.
Farm roads, biblical with dust,
jackknife along treelines that front the fields.
In the middle distance,
the illusive ash of a single crow.
Signposts sink into switchgrass
and the dark mouths of wild blackberries.
On a playground, a boy turns
and shouts at a girl for following him.
Someone walks a boat
out of a tributary’s thin tide.
A hitchhiker shields his eyes,
a hand sweeping light from the sun.
The green world engages the long memory
of summer. Sun climbs into everything.
Sky is a still canvas — no wind, as if the day
holds its breath or arrives half-awake.
Farm roads, biblical with dust,
jackknife along treelines that front the fields.
In the middle distance,
the illusive ash of a single crow.
Signposts sink into switchgrass
and the dark mouths of wild blackberries.
On a playground, a boy turns
and shouts at a girl for following him.
Someone walks a boat
out of a tributary’s thin tide.
A hitchhiker shields his eyes,
a hand sweeping light from the sun.
Phillips County: A Witness
Crows search roadways for what something else has killed.
My church shoes drown in dust that hangs in droughted fields.
Bull pines bend their tracings against low scudding clouds.
There’s a drowsy tempo to summer heat. Neighbors sit outside
in the silence of shaded zones. So quiet and self-absorbed
they could be travelers on a ghost ship. Doors are thrown open.
Screen latches follow, sounding like cocked hammers.
Our postman’s at a solemn pace, as if setting flowers
on headstones in the graveyard where squirrels gather acorns.
Night now, and streetlight falls over lives underway
in lamplight shadows behind picture windows.
The moon climbs to assume its rightful place like an owl
in a treeline. Darkened storefronts are smudged with handprints
as if brushed by phantoms. Forbidden to enter, a boy stands outside
the poolhall glaring through the doorway. They say his momma
grows wolfbane and belladonna God help us.
A drifter, who claims no knowledge of anyone in town,
sleeps with his motel window up just to hear footsteps pass by.
My woman’s eyes have swept our bed for strands of foreign hair.
Wrong love will eat you alive, she warns. Her young son
was crippled by a hunter’s stray bullet. After that, she doesn’t think much
of the hand of the Lord. The boy loves old maps.
He scribbles over them the names of towns that don’t exist.
Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Journal & Press (2020). His lit journal credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Hotel Amerika, James Dickey Review, New York Quarterly, and Vassar Review. He is co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.
Crows search roadways for what something else has killed.
My church shoes drown in dust that hangs in droughted fields.
Bull pines bend their tracings against low scudding clouds.
There’s a drowsy tempo to summer heat. Neighbors sit outside
in the silence of shaded zones. So quiet and self-absorbed
they could be travelers on a ghost ship. Doors are thrown open.
Screen latches follow, sounding like cocked hammers.
Our postman’s at a solemn pace, as if setting flowers
on headstones in the graveyard where squirrels gather acorns.
Night now, and streetlight falls over lives underway
in lamplight shadows behind picture windows.
The moon climbs to assume its rightful place like an owl
in a treeline. Darkened storefronts are smudged with handprints
as if brushed by phantoms. Forbidden to enter, a boy stands outside
the poolhall glaring through the doorway. They say his momma
grows wolfbane and belladonna God help us.
A drifter, who claims no knowledge of anyone in town,
sleeps with his motel window up just to hear footsteps pass by.
My woman’s eyes have swept our bed for strands of foreign hair.
Wrong love will eat you alive, she warns. Her young son
was crippled by a hunter’s stray bullet. After that, she doesn’t think much
of the hand of the Lord. The boy loves old maps.
He scribbles over them the names of towns that don’t exist.
Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Journal & Press (2020). His lit journal credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Hotel Amerika, James Dickey Review, New York Quarterly, and Vassar Review. He is co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.
Hannah Keziah Agustin Manila, Phillipines
Love as the Manananggal
In the evening I will leave you when the sunlight
tilts our common shadow toward the ground
gently when the heat is almost soft enough
to part us our skin ending in the early ink
of its connection ending in the bright
ceramic openings of bowls
set in waning windows in want
That half my body there might break apart
above the fields and spread cleaving
the tender leather of labyrinthine wings
my liver leaking in the after-
evanescent tricks of early stars to start again
within a younger form of hunger
For you I’ll feast upon the viscera
the fetus limbs and slip my tongue between
the infant slats of teeth and suck the tender
violet hollow of their lungs Here
my innards drip like silky crimson ribbons
ripening the dirt and here
is how I pray: another’s heart between my hands
a throbbing ruby of hurt
and here is what I ask: that you will wait for me
to enmesh myself with the living
and their garlic and their salt That no one finds you sleeping
Hannah Keziah Agustin is a writer and artist from Manila, Philippines. Her work is found and forthcoming in Guernica, AAWW's The Margins, and The Minnesota Review. She currently resides in Wisconsin, where she studies film and English.
In the evening I will leave you when the sunlight
tilts our common shadow toward the ground
gently when the heat is almost soft enough
to part us our skin ending in the early ink
of its connection ending in the bright
ceramic openings of bowls
set in waning windows in want
That half my body there might break apart
above the fields and spread cleaving
the tender leather of labyrinthine wings
my liver leaking in the after-
evanescent tricks of early stars to start again
within a younger form of hunger
For you I’ll feast upon the viscera
the fetus limbs and slip my tongue between
the infant slats of teeth and suck the tender
violet hollow of their lungs Here
my innards drip like silky crimson ribbons
ripening the dirt and here
is how I pray: another’s heart between my hands
a throbbing ruby of hurt
and here is what I ask: that you will wait for me
to enmesh myself with the living
and their garlic and their salt That no one finds you sleeping
Hannah Keziah Agustin is a writer and artist from Manila, Philippines. Her work is found and forthcoming in Guernica, AAWW's The Margins, and The Minnesota Review. She currently resides in Wisconsin, where she studies film and English.
Estelle Bajou New York, NY
Liang Chen
It’s too hot to sleep. There’s too much light at night. Brains are gumming up because they can’t shut down and get clean. Windows melt in their frames.
I’m in a strange Toyota van driven by a man I have never met. The GPS is in: Korean? Algonquin? Mandarin? We drive down into the growling belly of a hungry beast carrying my most valuable material possessions.
I can’t remember the last time I shut my eyes and saw the music.
Liang says a kind English word then nothing at all. I imagine us under two miles of glacial ice. Quiet. Thoughtful. Still.
I can remember the last time I said: Please.
I can remember the last time someone needed me to say: I’m not going to leave you.
I try to ask Liang a question regarding his childhood, but my voice is spinning with the front axle.
My eyes fall in love with a cloth house under a bridge, a garbage heap, a small dog.
My fingers move across my own limbs as though they might wake up, singing in sympathy.
Oh, Liang Chen. If this is the last thing we ever do,
Let me hold myself up so that you may see my face in the rearview mirror and know that I will never leave you.
We will only die as bees succumbing to the fragrance of a flower.
I see that you have been beautiful, cut your hair short, pressed your clothes, driven miles and miles and miles between the stones.
Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, About Place Journal, Abstract Elephant, Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. She’s also a critically praised, award-winning actor and composer, a visual and interdisciplinary artist, and a carpenter. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.
Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, About Place Journal, Abstract Elephant, Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. She’s also a critically praised, award-winning actor and composer, a visual and interdisciplinary artist, and a carpenter. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.
It’s too hot to sleep. There’s too much light at night. Brains are gumming up because they can’t shut down and get clean. Windows melt in their frames.
I’m in a strange Toyota van driven by a man I have never met. The GPS is in: Korean? Algonquin? Mandarin? We drive down into the growling belly of a hungry beast carrying my most valuable material possessions.
I can’t remember the last time I shut my eyes and saw the music.
Liang says a kind English word then nothing at all. I imagine us under two miles of glacial ice. Quiet. Thoughtful. Still.
I can remember the last time I said: Please.
I can remember the last time someone needed me to say: I’m not going to leave you.
I try to ask Liang a question regarding his childhood, but my voice is spinning with the front axle.
My eyes fall in love with a cloth house under a bridge, a garbage heap, a small dog.
My fingers move across my own limbs as though they might wake up, singing in sympathy.
Oh, Liang Chen. If this is the last thing we ever do,
Let me hold myself up so that you may see my face in the rearview mirror and know that I will never leave you.
We will only die as bees succumbing to the fragrance of a flower.
I see that you have been beautiful, cut your hair short, pressed your clothes, driven miles and miles and miles between the stones.
Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, About Place Journal, Abstract Elephant, Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. She’s also a critically praised, award-winning actor and composer, a visual and interdisciplinary artist, and a carpenter. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.
Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, About Place Journal, Abstract Elephant, Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. She’s also a critically praised, award-winning actor and composer, a visual and interdisciplinary artist, and a carpenter. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.
Joe Baumann St. Peters, MO.
Lafayette, Underneath
Water slices across my calf
a curious place to feel the nibbling of fishes
the tickle of seaweed and cat o’ nine tails.
It seeps across concrete, blurs into gravel.
Across the street a bakery floods. Scones
march out in a bloated parade of blueberry bursts.
A man in tighty whities directs a kayak, banana yellow,
down Johnston Street.
A confession:
this happens in my dreams.
I am not there to see the swell of murky wet
as in infiltrates carports and drowns feral kittens.
I do not see my old apartment complex
the parking lot spinning with water, sucking down
sedans and SUVs and Trump/Pence bumper stickers
toward the sewer grate where
shit is piled in sour clumps.
I ran away three years ago, back to the Midwest,
our own flood, the murderous disaster of ’93, twenty years gone.
When the water level keeps rising
kissing at my belly button, my escape is not
a helicopter or rowboat. I am not trapped
on my roof or stranded above the bayou.
All I must do is rattle awake and the world goes dry
while Cajun French babbles around in between my ears:
the sound of rushing water, nothing more than the noise
of my alarm clock
screeching for me to rise.
Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, Hawai’i Review, Eleven Eleven, and others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and was nominated for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016 and was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
Water slices across my calf
a curious place to feel the nibbling of fishes
the tickle of seaweed and cat o’ nine tails.
It seeps across concrete, blurs into gravel.
Across the street a bakery floods. Scones
march out in a bloated parade of blueberry bursts.
A man in tighty whities directs a kayak, banana yellow,
down Johnston Street.
A confession:
this happens in my dreams.
I am not there to see the swell of murky wet
as in infiltrates carports and drowns feral kittens.
I do not see my old apartment complex
the parking lot spinning with water, sucking down
sedans and SUVs and Trump/Pence bumper stickers
toward the sewer grate where
shit is piled in sour clumps.
I ran away three years ago, back to the Midwest,
our own flood, the murderous disaster of ’93, twenty years gone.
When the water level keeps rising
kissing at my belly button, my escape is not
a helicopter or rowboat. I am not trapped
on my roof or stranded above the bayou.
All I must do is rattle awake and the world goes dry
while Cajun French babbles around in between my ears:
the sound of rushing water, nothing more than the noise
of my alarm clock
screeching for me to rise.
Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, Hawai’i Review, Eleven Eleven, and others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and was nominated for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016 and was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
Laurel Benjamin El Cerrito, CA
Before Night Ends
Let me search for an exit,
to crocus and lilac in the meadow of our marriage.
True, we must act, come out of the whirling
admit an extinct model
a landslide you have to side step
and love, we are caressed
by dark webs—
no, not a couple webbed,
love at the vanishing point
which borrows each other’s shapes
and alters the hum of bees
when the last words of love cannot speak,
taking the trail back home
finding no words to bend
littered with stones the shape of eggs.
Two huge crows watch from an oak
whose leathery leaves begin to speak—
take my hand
remove my hand.
Laurel Benjamin has poetry forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review. Find her work in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, California Quarterly, The Midway Review, Mac Queens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed, and more. She is a finalist for Ekphrastic Review Bird Watching Challenge, an honorable mention in Oregon Poetry Association’s contest, long-listed in Sunspot Literary Journal. She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. She holds an MFA from Mills College and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. More of her work can be found at https://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com
Let me search for an exit,
to crocus and lilac in the meadow of our marriage.
True, we must act, come out of the whirling
admit an extinct model
a landslide you have to side step
and love, we are caressed
by dark webs—
no, not a couple webbed,
love at the vanishing point
which borrows each other’s shapes
and alters the hum of bees
when the last words of love cannot speak,
taking the trail back home
finding no words to bend
littered with stones the shape of eggs.
Two huge crows watch from an oak
whose leathery leaves begin to speak—
take my hand
remove my hand.
Laurel Benjamin has poetry forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review. Find her work in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, California Quarterly, The Midway Review, Mac Queens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed, and more. She is a finalist for Ekphrastic Review Bird Watching Challenge, an honorable mention in Oregon Poetry Association’s contest, long-listed in Sunspot Literary Journal. She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. She holds an MFA from Mills College and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. More of her work can be found at https://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com
Ace Boggess Charleston, WV
Burnt Offering
Her father needs an orifice for the pilot on a wall-
mounted heater—thirty years old at least.
We lurch through the grim grid at rush hour,
heading to a hardware store on the west end of town.
Real mom-&-pop shop from the 70s, mom & pop gone,
their sons having grown the business to compete
with labyrinthine chain stores.
We used to carry that brand, one of the brothers says,
back in the 80s. & anyway, he tells us,
can’t buy the orifice, have to order the entire pilot kit
if they still make it, so we ease back into the line of cars,
bound for home to check online, which we should’ve
first, but her father’s stubborn, & we had to play
the stubborn game by stubborn rules--
a sacrifice to appease old gods
before doing what we wanted all along.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press), Ultra Deep Field, and The Prisoners, plus the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Bellingham Review, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. He lives in Charleston, WV, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
Her father needs an orifice for the pilot on a wall-
mounted heater—thirty years old at least.
We lurch through the grim grid at rush hour,
heading to a hardware store on the west end of town.
Real mom-&-pop shop from the 70s, mom & pop gone,
their sons having grown the business to compete
with labyrinthine chain stores.
We used to carry that brand, one of the brothers says,
back in the 80s. & anyway, he tells us,
can’t buy the orifice, have to order the entire pilot kit
if they still make it, so we ease back into the line of cars,
bound for home to check online, which we should’ve
first, but her father’s stubborn, & we had to play
the stubborn game by stubborn rules--
a sacrifice to appease old gods
before doing what we wanted all along.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press), Ultra Deep Field, and The Prisoners, plus the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Bellingham Review, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. He lives in Charleston, WV, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
T. Clear
Reverse Rejections
Dear Editor,
Thank you for giving me the opportunity
to read this rejection. I am sorry to say
that I am unable to accept it.
I apologize for the form letter,
but I receive thousands of rejections each year
and I'm unable to respond
to each one individually.
Dear Sir,
My reading period is from June 1st, between 3 and 5pm.
Any rejections received outside of that time frame
will be returned unread.
Gentle Editor,
Forgive me for not returning your rejection sooner
and not offering comments or suggestions.
I am able to keep only a fraction
of the rejections I receive. Please do not
interpret this as reflecting negatively
on your attempt to reject my poems.
Dear Editor,
While I enjoyed parts of this rejection,
I'm going to have to say no — again.
Dear Editor,
I am sorry to say that this rejection
doesn't meet my needs at this time.
Please note that I now charge a small fee
for all rejections sent to me.
Please use the link to make payment.
Dear Editor,
As is stated in my policies,
I do not accept simultaneous rejections.
And as I've already received one today,
I am returning this rejection
back to you unread.
Dear Editor,
I regret to inform you that
this rejection has already been rejected,
and cannot be submitted for rejection again.
Dear Editor,
I have received your rejection
and look forward to reading it.
Keep in mind that it can take
up to six months to reach a decision.
You can check the status of your rejection
at any time by logging in to your
Rejectible account.
All Best Wishes,
Poet
T. Clear is a founder of Floating Bridge Press and Easy Speak Seattle. She has been writing and publishing since the late 1970’s, and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Crannog, Poetry Northwest, Sheila-na-Gig Online, The Rise-Up Review, Red Earth Review, Terrain.org, The Moth and Common Ground Review. She is an Associate Editor at Bracken Magazine, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Independent Best American Poetry Award.
Dear Editor,
Thank you for giving me the opportunity
to read this rejection. I am sorry to say
that I am unable to accept it.
I apologize for the form letter,
but I receive thousands of rejections each year
and I'm unable to respond
to each one individually.
Dear Sir,
My reading period is from June 1st, between 3 and 5pm.
Any rejections received outside of that time frame
will be returned unread.
Gentle Editor,
Forgive me for not returning your rejection sooner
and not offering comments or suggestions.
I am able to keep only a fraction
of the rejections I receive. Please do not
interpret this as reflecting negatively
on your attempt to reject my poems.
Dear Editor,
While I enjoyed parts of this rejection,
I'm going to have to say no — again.
Dear Editor,
I am sorry to say that this rejection
doesn't meet my needs at this time.
Please note that I now charge a small fee
for all rejections sent to me.
Please use the link to make payment.
Dear Editor,
As is stated in my policies,
I do not accept simultaneous rejections.
And as I've already received one today,
I am returning this rejection
back to you unread.
Dear Editor,
I regret to inform you that
this rejection has already been rejected,
and cannot be submitted for rejection again.
Dear Editor,
I have received your rejection
and look forward to reading it.
Keep in mind that it can take
up to six months to reach a decision.
You can check the status of your rejection
at any time by logging in to your
Rejectible account.
All Best Wishes,
Poet
T. Clear is a founder of Floating Bridge Press and Easy Speak Seattle. She has been writing and publishing since the late 1970’s, and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Crannog, Poetry Northwest, Sheila-na-Gig Online, The Rise-Up Review, Red Earth Review, Terrain.org, The Moth and Common Ground Review. She is an Associate Editor at Bracken Magazine, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Independent Best American Poetry Award.
John Cullen Big Rapids, MI
Why You Should Keep Your Fat Clothes
I know you have fat clothes, the ones you bought
after Christmas five years ago, right after your fiftieth
when nothing else fit. And what about those T-shirts?
Large became small and fit like a girdle.
Admit it, I dare you. I know you
bought a pack of underwear labelled Muy Grande,
which just so you know doesn’t translate as “You’re Great!”
Sure, you claim they’re nothing but momentary comfort,
to be worn one week, then donated to a charity.
But let’s face fact. Christmas happens, and birthday
cake improves after two months in the freezer.
Every day is a food fight! We’re all at risk,
and going naked is out of the question.
We need those fat clothes like steel workers need hard hats.
We’ve got to make room for life’s burgers and cakes,
the whole enchilada the world throws our way.
John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, Town Crazy, is available from Slipstream Press.
I know you have fat clothes, the ones you bought
after Christmas five years ago, right after your fiftieth
when nothing else fit. And what about those T-shirts?
Large became small and fit like a girdle.
Admit it, I dare you. I know you
bought a pack of underwear labelled Muy Grande,
which just so you know doesn’t translate as “You’re Great!”
Sure, you claim they’re nothing but momentary comfort,
to be worn one week, then donated to a charity.
But let’s face fact. Christmas happens, and birthday
cake improves after two months in the freezer.
Every day is a food fight! We’re all at risk,
and going naked is out of the question.
We need those fat clothes like steel workers need hard hats.
We’ve got to make room for life’s burgers and cakes,
the whole enchilada the world throws our way.
John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, Town Crazy, is available from Slipstream Press.
Zachary Dankert Cicero, IN
Easter Poem
The crow’s whistle splinters huddled trees
between filigrees of warblers, flicked wreaths
of black-capped chickadees. A Kingfisher
slips downstream towards white-petaled harbingers
of an impatient spring. Curled ferns reach like
embryos to catch our late morning light
in fists that cannot hold so instead
bow to dewgrass, bleeding gold. Discarded
in low ground, skunk cabbage bursts the dark soil.
Nothing will last, the harsh geese or well-oiled
Stares of groundhogs. A question, an answer.
The squirrels always repent disaster
but someone allows the sunlight to die.
Wine deep as night dyes the lake’s pearly eye,
which is punctured by light, starry speartips
arcing over water. White pelicans, lit
prayers of the moon, glide without a sound
and come to rest under the planet’s shroud.
As one they cross the night water-laden
lifting a skin-and-bone Christ to Heaven
Zachary Dankert is a writer who received degrees in Biology and English from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He has been published in Opus and Homespun Sails. His poetry is largely inspired by the innate significance of nature, and in the unhindered potential it allows those who listen and watch patiently. As a naturalist, Zachary Dankert hopes his writing can transfer his own awe and hope for the future of the natural world.
The crow’s whistle splinters huddled trees
between filigrees of warblers, flicked wreaths
of black-capped chickadees. A Kingfisher
slips downstream towards white-petaled harbingers
of an impatient spring. Curled ferns reach like
embryos to catch our late morning light
in fists that cannot hold so instead
bow to dewgrass, bleeding gold. Discarded
in low ground, skunk cabbage bursts the dark soil.
Nothing will last, the harsh geese or well-oiled
Stares of groundhogs. A question, an answer.
The squirrels always repent disaster
but someone allows the sunlight to die.
Wine deep as night dyes the lake’s pearly eye,
which is punctured by light, starry speartips
arcing over water. White pelicans, lit
prayers of the moon, glide without a sound
and come to rest under the planet’s shroud.
As one they cross the night water-laden
lifting a skin-and-bone Christ to Heaven
Zachary Dankert is a writer who received degrees in Biology and English from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He has been published in Opus and Homespun Sails. His poetry is largely inspired by the innate significance of nature, and in the unhindered potential it allows those who listen and watch patiently. As a naturalist, Zachary Dankert hopes his writing can transfer his own awe and hope for the future of the natural world.
Satya Dash Bangalore, India 2 poems
The Cloning
The tank I fell into
was a brain of sorts,
benzoid tubes of thick
thought flinging
memories wall-side
into molten splotches
of charcoal and radioactive
green. The water disappeared
by morning, my body bloated
and unsure of its own name
like a new planet, rivers
running inside me salty fish
and red herb. When sunrays stroked
the metal outside, the entire mesocarp
in me screamed, stung by heat
like a raw wound. My hands lay
gill-less, unendowed to tame
the hush of this inherited cage,
invoking the zodiac
to activate its stars. Once I got used
to the inorganic nature
of dry isolation, I figured I could
experiment boundless
within the sneering perimeter.
In the days that followed,
from my sides I bled
gallons of cells, punctuated
with the occasional chime of thoracic
laughter. And so when the raptors arrived,
my blood-rubied babies were ready,
arms full of atoms, to steal the thunder
at the tank’s inauguration,
their teeth glinting like knives eager
to cut into glass of novel dangers
the shard-boned world had prepared,
waiting for me and now them.
The tank I fell into
was a brain of sorts,
benzoid tubes of thick
thought flinging
memories wall-side
into molten splotches
of charcoal and radioactive
green. The water disappeared
by morning, my body bloated
and unsure of its own name
like a new planet, rivers
running inside me salty fish
and red herb. When sunrays stroked
the metal outside, the entire mesocarp
in me screamed, stung by heat
like a raw wound. My hands lay
gill-less, unendowed to tame
the hush of this inherited cage,
invoking the zodiac
to activate its stars. Once I got used
to the inorganic nature
of dry isolation, I figured I could
experiment boundless
within the sneering perimeter.
In the days that followed,
from my sides I bled
gallons of cells, punctuated
with the occasional chime of thoracic
laughter. And so when the raptors arrived,
my blood-rubied babies were ready,
arms full of atoms, to steal the thunder
at the tank’s inauguration,
their teeth glinting like knives eager
to cut into glass of novel dangers
the shard-boned world had prepared,
waiting for me and now them.
Happy New Year
You had a few theories
why I never had a favorite song or a best
friend or a celebrity I’d most like to have
an affair with before I die. Most of them pointed
to my firm indecision, a penchant
for vacillation. But the truth was—superlatives
scared me. And so did the fate of all things that came second
and third, as if a lack of spotlight shooed them away
to the duskier interiors of the flexible
cerebrum. An achievement deemed secondary looked like
a flaw when seen through a predominantly cynical
lens. You used to reckon, I have a talent for appearing
heartbroken. I mostly enjoyed these concepts of yours.
Like your reasoning for why I chose to become
a poet. To accentuate this performance. Of heart
brokenness. To say, I don’t know any other way to be--
is exactly the sort of sweeping statement I avoid making
these days. Your absence makes me
conscious. After you left, I took my tiny gods
to your door. Offered prayers to pastoralize
the swelling volume of air between us. The real
consecration: your mother feeding me dinner.
I imagined you at the table eating
with me. I imagined you already falling
in love. With new institutions
of pleasure. With new cafes
and new pages. With the exciting convexity
of new mouths.
Satya Dash is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Waxwing, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, Cincinnati Review, Chestnut Review and The Journal, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack, Odisha and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at: @satya043
You had a few theories
why I never had a favorite song or a best
friend or a celebrity I’d most like to have
an affair with before I die. Most of them pointed
to my firm indecision, a penchant
for vacillation. But the truth was—superlatives
scared me. And so did the fate of all things that came second
and third, as if a lack of spotlight shooed them away
to the duskier interiors of the flexible
cerebrum. An achievement deemed secondary looked like
a flaw when seen through a predominantly cynical
lens. You used to reckon, I have a talent for appearing
heartbroken. I mostly enjoyed these concepts of yours.
Like your reasoning for why I chose to become
a poet. To accentuate this performance. Of heart
brokenness. To say, I don’t know any other way to be--
is exactly the sort of sweeping statement I avoid making
these days. Your absence makes me
conscious. After you left, I took my tiny gods
to your door. Offered prayers to pastoralize
the swelling volume of air between us. The real
consecration: your mother feeding me dinner.
I imagined you at the table eating
with me. I imagined you already falling
in love. With new institutions
of pleasure. With new cafes
and new pages. With the exciting convexity
of new mouths.
Satya Dash is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Waxwing, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, Cincinnati Review, Chestnut Review and The Journal, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack, Odisha and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at: @satya043
Adam Day
The Present Fire
Suburban coyotes
caught, legs zip-tied,
dropped into
a dry well. The world
in which she finds
herself and might
define herself
does not exist;
so she does not exist
for that world. The pale
light of insufficient
answer.
Suburban coyotes
caught, legs zip-tied,
dropped into
a dry well. The world
in which she finds
herself and might
define herself
does not exist;
so she does not exist
for that world. The pale
light of insufficient
answer.
Mosaic
A man enters
a tree cavity,
a foot through
the floorboard
of desire, mouth filled
with concrete,
sockets with moss;
rose-colored snakes
to sew the ribs
together. Mind
not striving. Hand
out to feed black
catbirds; transients.
Warm shadow
catching up all that light.
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He publishes the journal of arts and culture, Action, Spectacle.
A man enters
a tree cavity,
a foot through
the floorboard
of desire, mouth filled
with concrete,
sockets with moss;
rose-colored snakes
to sew the ribs
together. Mind
not striving. Hand
out to feed black
catbirds; transients.
Warm shadow
catching up all that light.
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He publishes the journal of arts and culture, Action, Spectacle.
Amanda Dettmann Brooklyn, NY
Dinner Party Coat after Judy Chicago
It’s an ancient thing, to be a girl
who tries on a man’s coat. I zip up
your neck like the nervous crack
of a tadpole’s voice box.
Maybe you are the boyish arms
of a Richard or a David, maybe
you are my grandfather
skinning my dad’s soft heart.
I grow two pockets in your coat:
a good man who loves a good man.
When they turn over in bed to face
each other’s downward dog breath,
two sides of patriarchy play
solitaire. You thought
I would slipper your possible glass ending?
Every coat has a hidden tail.
Even if your coat is a virgin,
you contain my mother’s orchards
& my period is already late
to your sperm afterparty--
525 billion coattails spooning
my bulldozed birthday cake—so
I release my 300 girls to the frying pan,
coax my now
orphan yolks to hang on hot air
before you swim
right through us.
Amanda Dettmann is a poet and performer whose current work can be found in her published poetry book Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises as well as the following literary journals: The Oakland Review (forthcoming), Atlas & Alice (forthcoming), Underwood Press: Black Works (Dark Imagery Issue), The Mosaic, ANGLES, and The National Poetry Quarterly among others. She is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
It’s an ancient thing, to be a girl
who tries on a man’s coat. I zip up
your neck like the nervous crack
of a tadpole’s voice box.
Maybe you are the boyish arms
of a Richard or a David, maybe
you are my grandfather
skinning my dad’s soft heart.
I grow two pockets in your coat:
a good man who loves a good man.
When they turn over in bed to face
each other’s downward dog breath,
two sides of patriarchy play
solitaire. You thought
I would slipper your possible glass ending?
Every coat has a hidden tail.
Even if your coat is a virgin,
you contain my mother’s orchards
& my period is already late
to your sperm afterparty--
525 billion coattails spooning
my bulldozed birthday cake—so
I release my 300 girls to the frying pan,
coax my now
orphan yolks to hang on hot air
before you swim
right through us.
Amanda Dettmann is a poet and performer whose current work can be found in her published poetry book Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises as well as the following literary journals: The Oakland Review (forthcoming), Atlas & Alice (forthcoming), Underwood Press: Black Works (Dark Imagery Issue), The Mosaic, ANGLES, and The National Poetry Quarterly among others. She is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
Stuart Dischell Greensboro, NC
The Work Zone
Between cities
Yellow Caterpillars
And guys in orange
Slickers work
The earth in the rain
While Gus and Dave
Half a mile apart,
Each holds the opposite
Side of a sign
On a pole that says
STOP And SLOW.
Huge concrete
Pipes are being
Lowered in the ditch
Dug deep in order
To run the next flood
Water away from
The shopping center.
Some drivers worry
If there’s an accident
They will be late
For doctor’s appointments
At the medical plaza.
And others listening
To grim news think
Of a mass grave ahead
So large requiring
Bulldozers to load
The corpses. Stalled,
Most people just stare
At their phone screens
Searching for alternate
Routes or deleting
Photos or messages
Archived too long;
No one is patient
In the work zone.
One person looks up
To see beer cans
And diapers scattered,
Wild flowers in patches
Along the shoulder,
And what could possibly
Be a deer’s hind leg
Once on its way
To the pond in the thickets
Where apartments are rising
On newly made streets.
Sally, an old
Quarter horse
In a fenced pasture
By the gas station
Watches the drivers
With Phil the goat.
Near the cemetery,
Comfort for mourners
In fast food. A couple
Hold hands by a grave.
Are they getting married?
Mysterious things
Happen in places
Without zoning,
Honk if you love ugly.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), and Children with Enemies (Chicago), and the forthcoming The Lookout Man (Chicago). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, Pushcart Prize, and Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Between cities
Yellow Caterpillars
And guys in orange
Slickers work
The earth in the rain
While Gus and Dave
Half a mile apart,
Each holds the opposite
Side of a sign
On a pole that says
STOP And SLOW.
Huge concrete
Pipes are being
Lowered in the ditch
Dug deep in order
To run the next flood
Water away from
The shopping center.
Some drivers worry
If there’s an accident
They will be late
For doctor’s appointments
At the medical plaza.
And others listening
To grim news think
Of a mass grave ahead
So large requiring
Bulldozers to load
The corpses. Stalled,
Most people just stare
At their phone screens
Searching for alternate
Routes or deleting
Photos or messages
Archived too long;
No one is patient
In the work zone.
One person looks up
To see beer cans
And diapers scattered,
Wild flowers in patches
Along the shoulder,
And what could possibly
Be a deer’s hind leg
Once on its way
To the pond in the thickets
Where apartments are rising
On newly made streets.
Sally, an old
Quarter horse
In a fenced pasture
By the gas station
Watches the drivers
With Phil the goat.
Near the cemetery,
Comfort for mourners
In fast food. A couple
Hold hands by a grave.
Are they getting married?
Mysterious things
Happen in places
Without zoning,
Honk if you love ugly.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), and Children with Enemies (Chicago), and the forthcoming The Lookout Man (Chicago). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, Pushcart Prize, and Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Tamiko Dooley Kingston Upon Thames, England
Tombo (Dragonflies)
At Myo-onji shrine in Tokyo
The dragonflies dance around my head
We’re here to place Grandad’s ashes into the family burial site
The September breeze rises and falls, and rises again
I hold a photograph in my hand, faded and folded
When they placed Grandad in his coffin
They removed the picture of me from his wallet
So he wouldn’t pull me over to the other side
In the picture, I’m a gap-toothed six-year-old next to Taro the dog
Although if he was still with us, perhaps I’m five
It was a warm late summer day when Grandad took the photograph
We had planned an adventure in the hills of Nagano
To hunt dragonflies and eat our omusubi rice balls by the lake
The tombo swarmed thickly around us
We caught them in our long-necked nets to study them in giant glass jars
At sunset Grandad said it was time to release them
Everything belongs back where it comes from
Taro barked as they flew into the peach-red sky
They mingled with the fireflies, just then beginning to enflame the evening
I hold this picture in my hand
And as the monk pours the grey dust and chants a prayer
The dragonflies dance around my head
Tamiko is a half-Japanese mother of two, born and raised in England. When there's no pandemic, she's hired as a wedding pianist from time to time.
At Myo-onji shrine in Tokyo
The dragonflies dance around my head
We’re here to place Grandad’s ashes into the family burial site
The September breeze rises and falls, and rises again
I hold a photograph in my hand, faded and folded
When they placed Grandad in his coffin
They removed the picture of me from his wallet
So he wouldn’t pull me over to the other side
In the picture, I’m a gap-toothed six-year-old next to Taro the dog
Although if he was still with us, perhaps I’m five
It was a warm late summer day when Grandad took the photograph
We had planned an adventure in the hills of Nagano
To hunt dragonflies and eat our omusubi rice balls by the lake
The tombo swarmed thickly around us
We caught them in our long-necked nets to study them in giant glass jars
At sunset Grandad said it was time to release them
Everything belongs back where it comes from
Taro barked as they flew into the peach-red sky
They mingled with the fireflies, just then beginning to enflame the evening
I hold this picture in my hand
And as the monk pours the grey dust and chants a prayer
The dragonflies dance around my head
Tamiko is a half-Japanese mother of two, born and raised in England. When there's no pandemic, she's hired as a wedding pianist from time to time.
Wendy Drexler Belmont, MA
Thinking About the Octopus
—after the film The Octopus Teacher
I’m thinking about how she opens every one of her three hearts,
and all the brain cells in her eight arms,
how she coils into a ball inside a cloak of shells and stones,
wraps herself in a shawl of kelp so the shark won’t see her,
regenerates the arm the shark tore off,
clothes herself in seconds in lionfish, flounder, sea snake--
then jets away like a rocket to slip inside a crack no larger
than her own eye. I’m trying to understand what made her
uncoil one shy arm to touch the hand of the filmmaker
who’d dived down to her den twenty-six days in a row
in the kelp forest off the coast of South Africa.
And when she spurts through the water, hurls her whole
improbable body onto his chest, entwines her arms around him,
clinging, how can you not call that tenderness?
Don’t you too want to find a way back to what
we once were with each other, millions of years ago--
that common grammar, that syntax of salt and stars?
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before,was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.
—after the film The Octopus Teacher
I’m thinking about how she opens every one of her three hearts,
and all the brain cells in her eight arms,
how she coils into a ball inside a cloak of shells and stones,
wraps herself in a shawl of kelp so the shark won’t see her,
regenerates the arm the shark tore off,
clothes herself in seconds in lionfish, flounder, sea snake--
then jets away like a rocket to slip inside a crack no larger
than her own eye. I’m trying to understand what made her
uncoil one shy arm to touch the hand of the filmmaker
who’d dived down to her den twenty-six days in a row
in the kelp forest off the coast of South Africa.
And when she spurts through the water, hurls her whole
improbable body onto his chest, entwines her arms around him,
clinging, how can you not call that tenderness?
Don’t you too want to find a way back to what
we once were with each other, millions of years ago--
that common grammar, that syntax of salt and stars?
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before,was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.
Linda Nemec Foster Grand Rapids, MI
Painted Toenails in Ukraine
The young girl who gives the American woman a pedicure in the town’s most elite spa, doesn’t know the difference between a foot or a knee. The woman doesn’t want to embarrass the girl and her lack of English vocabulary, so she never corrects her. “Other knee, other knee, other knee,” is the mantra the woman sporadically hears as the right foot and then the left is covered with green kelp from the Black Sea and massaged into her skin’s oblivion. Other than the incorrect word, the girl is silent. A thin gold Orthodox cross dangles from her neck as she daydreams about her lover’s thigh. She paints the woman’s toenails in such a hard, brilliant red that, weeks later, no nail polish solvent can remove it. The woman will have to wait a year—after the nails have totally grown out—before every trace of the color is gone. The girl and her halting mantra, a silent echo.
Linda Nemec Foster has published eleven collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). Foster's work appears in numerous journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North American Review, Verse Daily and South Florida Poetry Journal. Her new book, The Blue Divide, was published by New Issues Press in 2021. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.
The young girl who gives the American woman a pedicure in the town’s most elite spa, doesn’t know the difference between a foot or a knee. The woman doesn’t want to embarrass the girl and her lack of English vocabulary, so she never corrects her. “Other knee, other knee, other knee,” is the mantra the woman sporadically hears as the right foot and then the left is covered with green kelp from the Black Sea and massaged into her skin’s oblivion. Other than the incorrect word, the girl is silent. A thin gold Orthodox cross dangles from her neck as she daydreams about her lover’s thigh. She paints the woman’s toenails in such a hard, brilliant red that, weeks later, no nail polish solvent can remove it. The woman will have to wait a year—after the nails have totally grown out—before every trace of the color is gone. The girl and her halting mantra, a silent echo.
Linda Nemec Foster has published eleven collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). Foster's work appears in numerous journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North American Review, Verse Daily and South Florida Poetry Journal. Her new book, The Blue Divide, was published by New Issues Press in 2021. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.
George Franklin Kendall, FL 2 poems
Pastiche
Virginia Woolf swore she saw you in green make-up,
A widower whose wife was still alive, like James’s American
Except you were the one sleeping in a church (the basement, or so
I like to imagine), your life turned embarrassment—which doesn’t make
Sense really. The Waste Land had already let the wife out of the bag,
The chess partner who’d slept with Russell for marriage counseling.
You fled to church—who wouldn’t have? Philosophy wasn’t any more
Helpful to you than poetry was to Whitehead when his son died.
The world has so many ways to crush us. We retreat to maintaining
An appearance: a job, a well-tailored suit. It doesn’t ease the hurt,
But fewer people see the wound. We’re never who we wish we were.
Zoroaster met his image in the garden, but nothing changed. Celia
Dead in Kinkanja, lucky to have found a destiny. The rest of us
Don’t have one and are only martyred by rich food, tobacco, or
Whatever there is to drink. You met your own image in magazines
And in the daily papers, a famous pair of glasses, a tall man with
A stoop—no more you than you were you, yourself your own ghost--
Yes, familiar, compound, identity that’s suspiciously
Unreal in the mirror, or staring back from the Thames, oily and dark,
Blackout curtains on the windows, bombs that missed.
We still don’t know what you really believed, how you imagined
Death or heaven, hell or personality. At Princeton, Paul Goodman
Pretended not to recognize you: “Sorry, didn’t catch the name,” he said.
“Eliot,” you replied. “Tom Eliot.”
Virginia Woolf swore she saw you in green make-up,
A widower whose wife was still alive, like James’s American
Except you were the one sleeping in a church (the basement, or so
I like to imagine), your life turned embarrassment—which doesn’t make
Sense really. The Waste Land had already let the wife out of the bag,
The chess partner who’d slept with Russell for marriage counseling.
You fled to church—who wouldn’t have? Philosophy wasn’t any more
Helpful to you than poetry was to Whitehead when his son died.
The world has so many ways to crush us. We retreat to maintaining
An appearance: a job, a well-tailored suit. It doesn’t ease the hurt,
But fewer people see the wound. We’re never who we wish we were.
Zoroaster met his image in the garden, but nothing changed. Celia
Dead in Kinkanja, lucky to have found a destiny. The rest of us
Don’t have one and are only martyred by rich food, tobacco, or
Whatever there is to drink. You met your own image in magazines
And in the daily papers, a famous pair of glasses, a tall man with
A stoop—no more you than you were you, yourself your own ghost--
Yes, familiar, compound, identity that’s suspiciously
Unreal in the mirror, or staring back from the Thames, oily and dark,
Blackout curtains on the windows, bombs that missed.
We still don’t know what you really believed, how you imagined
Death or heaven, hell or personality. At Princeton, Paul Goodman
Pretended not to recognize you: “Sorry, didn’t catch the name,” he said.
“Eliot,” you replied. “Tom Eliot.”
At the Next Table
At the next table, a woman is drinking tea,
A gray sweater over the back of her chair,
Her face turned toward a large mirror behind
The counter, the back and forth of waiters,
The door to the kitchen opening, swinging shut.
For the last twenty minutes, I’ve tried to read
A book I don’t love—it’s won awards, and
Important writers write how important it is.
Each time I reach the end of a page, I stop
And let my eyes drift toward the pipes that
Run across the ceiling. Her head bends forward
A little whenever she lifts her cup. From where
I’m sitting, I can see brown hair touching
Her shoulders. I turn the page—the narrator
Is still narrating, and I’m well into the book.
No one else has made an appearance.
Out on the sidewalk, rain darkens the pavement,
Matching the color of her sweater.
George Franklin is the author of four poetry books: Noise of the World (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018), a dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press). He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez's Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores).
At the next table, a woman is drinking tea,
A gray sweater over the back of her chair,
Her face turned toward a large mirror behind
The counter, the back and forth of waiters,
The door to the kitchen opening, swinging shut.
For the last twenty minutes, I’ve tried to read
A book I don’t love—it’s won awards, and
Important writers write how important it is.
Each time I reach the end of a page, I stop
And let my eyes drift toward the pipes that
Run across the ceiling. Her head bends forward
A little whenever she lifts her cup. From where
I’m sitting, I can see brown hair touching
Her shoulders. I turn the page—the narrator
Is still narrating, and I’m well into the book.
No one else has made an appearance.
Out on the sidewalk, rain darkens the pavement,
Matching the color of her sweater.
George Franklin is the author of four poetry books: Noise of the World (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018), a dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press). He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez's Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores).
Suzanne Frischkorn Redding, CT
Museum Mile, NYC
All the women wear summer dresses
& men play ping-pong in Bryant park.
Sun & sky in harmony.
We stroll & forget it’s all dire.
It’s the day the sex-trafficker pedophile
is found dead in his cell, perhaps that’s why
the city has all its outdoor umbrellas up
& everyone dines outside.
Beauty so bright I wear sunglasses. I wrap
my denim jacket around my waist
& leave my own prison— no service.
All I can do is let sun kiss my skin
& believe every day
on the Upper East Side must be this fine.
Later, when I see a dog sitting across his owner
on the train, I smile. Because who wouldn’t?
Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane, (2008) Girl on a Bridge, (2010) and five chapbooks. She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center for her book Lit Windowpane, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. She is an Editor for $ - Poetry is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org Editorial Board.
All the women wear summer dresses
& men play ping-pong in Bryant park.
Sun & sky in harmony.
We stroll & forget it’s all dire.
It’s the day the sex-trafficker pedophile
is found dead in his cell, perhaps that’s why
the city has all its outdoor umbrellas up
& everyone dines outside.
Beauty so bright I wear sunglasses. I wrap
my denim jacket around my waist
& leave my own prison— no service.
All I can do is let sun kiss my skin
& believe every day
on the Upper East Side must be this fine.
Later, when I see a dog sitting across his owner
on the train, I smile. Because who wouldn’t?
Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane, (2008) Girl on a Bridge, (2010) and five chapbooks. She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center for her book Lit Windowpane, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. She is an Editor for $ - Poetry is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org Editorial Board.
Elizabeth Cranford Garcia Acworth, GA
Sample from Bering Sinkhole
—Kerr County, Texas, 1987
You will know me by my arm bone,
the one they count, the capital I
that says I existed.
Seventy five hundred years
and I am not yet gone.
Near the burned rock middens,
a dead tree marks the ossuary.
Clamber down with your gift.
Comb the cobble, sift the chert
the shatter of flint, the sooty loam.
Set aside the crania
of vole, coyote, broken bear
mandibles. But the bangle
from a badger leg, the beads
made from rabbit bone, end
to end, notice: they were once
strung together, in a pouch.
Here. I was. I am. Count
the Harris lines. Like a tree,
I too have rings, a lexicon
to read: that I ate lechuguilla,
acorns. Not much javelina.
There was drought when I was seven;
prickly pear and opossum fed us.
Once, my father swapped his bear claw,
glossy slice of night, for a turtle carapace
from the Apalachee, carved from it a hair clasp.
Here it is, still cupping my head.
Please, resurrect
more than grave goods,
more than a conclusion: death
creates a hole into which
the social order caves, a new
direction for eternity.
That we had a faith, not
the weight of absolution, but
the wide tent of each other.
Elizabeth Cranford Garcia is the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. Her work has appeared in journals such as Boxcar Poetry Review, 491 Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Psaltery & Lyre, multiple anthologies, and her first chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2015 through Finishing Line Press. She's a SAHM of 3 in Acworth, Georgia. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.
—Kerr County, Texas, 1987
You will know me by my arm bone,
the one they count, the capital I
that says I existed.
Seventy five hundred years
and I am not yet gone.
Near the burned rock middens,
a dead tree marks the ossuary.
Clamber down with your gift.
Comb the cobble, sift the chert
the shatter of flint, the sooty loam.
Set aside the crania
of vole, coyote, broken bear
mandibles. But the bangle
from a badger leg, the beads
made from rabbit bone, end
to end, notice: they were once
strung together, in a pouch.
Here. I was. I am. Count
the Harris lines. Like a tree,
I too have rings, a lexicon
to read: that I ate lechuguilla,
acorns. Not much javelina.
There was drought when I was seven;
prickly pear and opossum fed us.
Once, my father swapped his bear claw,
glossy slice of night, for a turtle carapace
from the Apalachee, carved from it a hair clasp.
Here it is, still cupping my head.
Please, resurrect
more than grave goods,
more than a conclusion: death
creates a hole into which
the social order caves, a new
direction for eternity.
That we had a faith, not
the weight of absolution, but
the wide tent of each other.
Elizabeth Cranford Garcia is the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. Her work has appeared in journals such as Boxcar Poetry Review, 491 Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Psaltery & Lyre, multiple anthologies, and her first chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2015 through Finishing Line Press. She's a SAHM of 3 in Acworth, Georgia. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.
Tarek Ghaddar Boca Raton, FL
Tehta Imm-Hussein’s Deathbed
hospital halls, cousin Hassan is crying,
khalto Ghada recites Qur’an with shaky breath,
I hold my grandmother’s hand.
she whispered Khalo Abed’s name,
I couldn’t make out the rest--
I didn’t know Arabic back then.
my grandmother’s grip weak and sandpapery,
her eyes black and cataractic,
eyes widened ka anni Azrael, Malik
al-Mawt, bas anna ibn Nadine,
not that I could have said any
of that then. I held her hand to pretend
to understand her croaks, whisper what little
Arabic I knew, the Arabic I learned
when mama Nadine held my hand as a child
“inti albi wa ruhhi, bmut fiki,”
something innocently painful
along the lines of “I love you”
hospital halls, cousin Hassan is crying,
khalto Ghada recites Qur’an with shaky breath,
I hold my grandmother’s hand.
she whispered Khalo Abed’s name,
I couldn’t make out the rest--
I didn’t know Arabic back then.
my grandmother’s grip weak and sandpapery,
her eyes black and cataractic,
eyes widened ka anni Azrael, Malik
al-Mawt, bas anna ibn Nadine,
not that I could have said any
of that then. I held her hand to pretend
to understand her croaks, whisper what little
Arabic I knew, the Arabic I learned
when mama Nadine held my hand as a child
“inti albi wa ruhhi, bmut fiki,”
something innocently painful
along the lines of “I love you”
On the Eve of Leaving Beirut
my grandfather’s Beirut is dead,
walls riddled with bullet holes,
buildings leveled, hospitals darkened,
highway lights switched off, cars groan
as they push through darkness,
beggars burn trash for warmth,
black smoke tangles upwards,
coastal water corrupted brown and green,
purplish-gray sheets cover the mountains,
the air is a bit too thick to breathe.
I came for my love, she won’t speak to me,
patterns of cracked street stones draw her face,
I see her tears in water dripping
down rusted construction cranes, I hear her sobs
in the sobbing of widowed mothers,
I smell her anguish in the cigarettes they light,
farewell, Beirut, you broke the heart
of the woman who broke mine,
her orchid perfume clings to my shirt,
the ocean foam waves goodbye.
Tarek Ghaddar grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. He attended the University of Miami for degrees in Biochemistry and English. He continued with a Master's in Public Health at the Miller School of Medicine, and will shortly be attending medical school at Florida Atlantic University. Trauma from war and his sister's cancer led him to pick up a pen. His work has been published in Eclectica Literary Magazine, Mangrove Literary Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, and the Emerson Review. He lives in Boca Raton.
my grandfather’s Beirut is dead,
walls riddled with bullet holes,
buildings leveled, hospitals darkened,
highway lights switched off, cars groan
as they push through darkness,
beggars burn trash for warmth,
black smoke tangles upwards,
coastal water corrupted brown and green,
purplish-gray sheets cover the mountains,
the air is a bit too thick to breathe.
I came for my love, she won’t speak to me,
patterns of cracked street stones draw her face,
I see her tears in water dripping
down rusted construction cranes, I hear her sobs
in the sobbing of widowed mothers,
I smell her anguish in the cigarettes they light,
farewell, Beirut, you broke the heart
of the woman who broke mine,
her orchid perfume clings to my shirt,
the ocean foam waves goodbye.
Tarek Ghaddar grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. He attended the University of Miami for degrees in Biochemistry and English. He continued with a Master's in Public Health at the Miller School of Medicine, and will shortly be attending medical school at Florida Atlantic University. Trauma from war and his sister's cancer led him to pick up a pen. His work has been published in Eclectica Literary Magazine, Mangrove Literary Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, and the Emerson Review. He lives in Boca Raton.
Stephen Gibson West Palm Beach, FL
On a Photograph of a Field of Sunflowers at Art Palm Beach
It’s a numbered Kodachrome print with amazing color.
One bio claims Van Gogh was shot by this stray bullet,
that he didn’t shoot himself in a field outside of Auvers
(the reason no gun’s found in his room: he never hid it).
Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh claim the artist
was tormented by teen brothers who vacationed there--
and whenever the two of them ran into the Dutch misfit
they went out of their way to bully him—his tormentors
said it was impossible for them not to run into each other
(a surviving brother, interviewed in the 1950s, will admit
to destroying brushes as a means of harassing the painter)--
they followed Van Gogh into a wheat field (not sunflowers),
where one brother shot in his direction and didn’t mean it
(when he realized what he had done, gun went in the river).
It’s a numbered Kodachrome print with amazing color.
One bio claims Van Gogh was shot by this stray bullet,
that he didn’t shoot himself in a field outside of Auvers
(the reason no gun’s found in his room: he never hid it).
Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh claim the artist
was tormented by teen brothers who vacationed there--
and whenever the two of them ran into the Dutch misfit
they went out of their way to bully him—his tormentors
said it was impossible for them not to run into each other
(a surviving brother, interviewed in the 1950s, will admit
to destroying brushes as a means of harassing the painter)--
they followed Van Gogh into a wheat field (not sunflowers),
where one brother shot in his direction and didn’t mean it
(when he realized what he had done, gun went in the river).
On a 19th Century Egyptian Cigarette Tin at Art Palm Beach
When Flaubert was in Egypt ogling a belly-dancer
and saw in her teeth what he thought was a seed,
maybe fennel or caraway (turned out to be a cavity--
when she came up close, he got a good look at her),
it was then, Flaubert vowed, he’d only depict reality
as it was and wouldn’t try to write “great literature”:
this tin shows a camel, pyramids, dunes, palm trees
and guy puffing on a balcony, an English character;
beside it is a large trade card for some cough remedy
which claims to soothe teething pain, cure diarrhea,
and let mother sleep—not that her infant might OD.
The accompanying note says it was often a baby killer
containing a ¼ grain of morphine to help baby sleep
(like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup sold in America).
When Flaubert was in Egypt ogling a belly-dancer
and saw in her teeth what he thought was a seed,
maybe fennel or caraway (turned out to be a cavity--
when she came up close, he got a good look at her),
it was then, Flaubert vowed, he’d only depict reality
as it was and wouldn’t try to write “great literature”:
this tin shows a camel, pyramids, dunes, palm trees
and guy puffing on a balcony, an English character;
beside it is a large trade card for some cough remedy
which claims to soothe teething pain, cure diarrhea,
and let mother sleep—not that her infant might OD.
The accompanying note says it was often a baby killer
containing a ¼ grain of morphine to help baby sleep
(like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup sold in America).
On a Victorian England Postmortem Photograph at Art Palm Beach
It’s a photograph of a dead girl with her twin sister--
they’re dressed alike and they sit together in a chair
with the one at left leaning into her twin’s shoulder
who is touching her cheek as she gazes down at her,
who, the note reads, has very likely died of cholera
which was sweeping 1854 London’s SoHo that year:
the contagion was believed to be airborne, a miasma
that was spread through vapors from the city sewers,
which is why the twin at right has a sachet of flowers
hanging around her neck, as also does her dead sister.
A Charles Van Schaick 1890s photo—a photographer
and JP in Black River Falls, Wis.—shows this mother
after finding her child in a pond, the cows around her.
Van Schaick’s pic is in the insane asylum in Mendota.
Stephen Gibson is the author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2020 finalist, Able Muse Press book prize, forthcoming), Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press, forthcoming), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press). His poems have appeared in Able Muse, The American Journal of Poetry, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Gargoyle, The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, Notre Dame Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, Poetry East, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
It’s a photograph of a dead girl with her twin sister--
they’re dressed alike and they sit together in a chair
with the one at left leaning into her twin’s shoulder
who is touching her cheek as she gazes down at her,
who, the note reads, has very likely died of cholera
which was sweeping 1854 London’s SoHo that year:
the contagion was believed to be airborne, a miasma
that was spread through vapors from the city sewers,
which is why the twin at right has a sachet of flowers
hanging around her neck, as also does her dead sister.
A Charles Van Schaick 1890s photo—a photographer
and JP in Black River Falls, Wis.—shows this mother
after finding her child in a pond, the cows around her.
Van Schaick’s pic is in the insane asylum in Mendota.
Stephen Gibson is the author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2020 finalist, Able Muse Press book prize, forthcoming), Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press, forthcoming), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press). His poems have appeared in Able Muse, The American Journal of Poetry, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Gargoyle, The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, Notre Dame Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, Poetry East, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Bryan Edward Helton Newnan, GA
Southerly Wind
where the sun for the dog day?
locked behind barbwire
in a horseless field
but coming out with a bulldog face
trace the lines from the window shade
the story sky leaked
an inland sea
and he
crawls the earth a beast from a book
look up to leaping blue and this new
very new boyish beast
tripping the tall grass
comes into view of the giant’s stone
giant because thrown from mountains
miles and miles away
vivisect the beast born boy and when done
ask no forgiveness it’s only a little one
Bryan Edward Helton is a poet and fiction writer from Georgia, USA. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Night Picnic Journal, Oracle Bone, and The Collidescope. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. He is at work on his first collection of poetry, Manic, and his first novel. A former juvenile delinquent and high school dropout, he has never attended university. He drives a forklift for a logistics corporation.
where the sun for the dog day?
locked behind barbwire
in a horseless field
but coming out with a bulldog face
trace the lines from the window shade
the story sky leaked
an inland sea
and he
crawls the earth a beast from a book
look up to leaping blue and this new
very new boyish beast
tripping the tall grass
comes into view of the giant’s stone
giant because thrown from mountains
miles and miles away
vivisect the beast born boy and when done
ask no forgiveness it’s only a little one
Bryan Edward Helton is a poet and fiction writer from Georgia, USA. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Night Picnic Journal, Oracle Bone, and The Collidescope. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. He is at work on his first collection of poetry, Manic, and his first novel. A former juvenile delinquent and high school dropout, he has never attended university. He drives a forklift for a logistics corporation.
Hesper Fort Myers, FL
The Gift October Gave
This is the month of the veil in tatters:
the year folding up crisp as mourning linens
in the morning after, air and the encroaching night
stained with the sweetness of Fall apples.
Amidst the dark, a consolation of moonlight
cascades silver through dozing oaks,
warning and lantern for a child
clever enough to know where beasts lurk
and lonely enough to seek them out.
I implore them—the spirits, the monsters, the witches;
I offer sacrifices of sugar and masques in their honour,
putting even my young naked soul on the altar
if they will only teach me the knowledge of night,
the secrets of magic, the curses of cold and teeth.
Instead they show me
Orpheus singing so sadly to Hell’s monarchs
that the dead were released to him--
a resurrection drowned in light and logic,
how the sacred was almost won by words,
drawn close enough to kiss his nape,
and lost by the rationality of day,
And even I am not so churlish as to be ungrateful for this.
Hesper is a proudly queer BA graduate of Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, NC. Having served as Editor-in-Chief to the college's lit zine and editorial assistant to Scott Owens' Wild Goose Poetry Magazine, they have also appeared in Spirits' Tincture Magazine and one anthology by the now-defunct Frith Books. The sea, genre fiction, and the weirdly magical are their true loves. May or may not be an actual vampire. When not writing, they enjoy video games and starlit walks.
This is the month of the veil in tatters:
the year folding up crisp as mourning linens
in the morning after, air and the encroaching night
stained with the sweetness of Fall apples.
Amidst the dark, a consolation of moonlight
cascades silver through dozing oaks,
warning and lantern for a child
clever enough to know where beasts lurk
and lonely enough to seek them out.
I implore them—the spirits, the monsters, the witches;
I offer sacrifices of sugar and masques in their honour,
putting even my young naked soul on the altar
if they will only teach me the knowledge of night,
the secrets of magic, the curses of cold and teeth.
Instead they show me
Orpheus singing so sadly to Hell’s monarchs
that the dead were released to him--
a resurrection drowned in light and logic,
how the sacred was almost won by words,
drawn close enough to kiss his nape,
and lost by the rationality of day,
And even I am not so churlish as to be ungrateful for this.
Hesper is a proudly queer BA graduate of Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, NC. Having served as Editor-in-Chief to the college's lit zine and editorial assistant to Scott Owens' Wild Goose Poetry Magazine, they have also appeared in Spirits' Tincture Magazine and one anthology by the now-defunct Frith Books. The sea, genre fiction, and the weirdly magical are their true loves. May or may not be an actual vampire. When not writing, they enjoy video games and starlit walks.
Karen Hildebrand Brooklyn, NY
Joseph Braithwaite, You Have the Wrong Address
Dear Joseph Braithwaite, everything you order is delivered to me
three times just this week. We can’t find you, they say.
What have you done with the breeze, your unshorn
hair, mailbox big enough for donuts stuffed
with Boston crème? It’s a felony to open other people’s
desire. I tried filing off your name but I can’t un-see
the winding roads, Portuguese seaside stinging my cheek
as I hug the curve of a fierce Ducati. The stench of your cigar
settled in on Tuesday. I‘ve been left alone so long. That too,
intended for you, Joseph Braithwaite? Just now, I answered
when a neighbor hollered hey Joseph, and from a crowd of small
noisy children bounded a golden retriever puppy so gleeful
it peed on the spot. I had no choice but to fall down
and take its full galloping weight.
Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in many journals, including anthologies published by great weather for MEDIA, Maintenant: Dada Journal, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, and What Rough Beast, a poem-a-day series curated by Indolent Books. Her poems were adapted for a play, "The Old In and Out," produced in NYC in 2013.
Dear Joseph Braithwaite, everything you order is delivered to me
three times just this week. We can’t find you, they say.
What have you done with the breeze, your unshorn
hair, mailbox big enough for donuts stuffed
with Boston crème? It’s a felony to open other people’s
desire. I tried filing off your name but I can’t un-see
the winding roads, Portuguese seaside stinging my cheek
as I hug the curve of a fierce Ducati. The stench of your cigar
settled in on Tuesday. I‘ve been left alone so long. That too,
intended for you, Joseph Braithwaite? Just now, I answered
when a neighbor hollered hey Joseph, and from a crowd of small
noisy children bounded a golden retriever puppy so gleeful
it peed on the spot. I had no choice but to fall down
and take its full galloping weight.
Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in many journals, including anthologies published by great weather for MEDIA, Maintenant: Dada Journal, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, and What Rough Beast, a poem-a-day series curated by Indolent Books. Her poems were adapted for a play, "The Old In and Out," produced in NYC in 2013.
Alicia Hoffman Rochester, NY
Legato for Spring
Every year without fail the same slime trail from a fat slug scrolling the lyrics of his name across our sidewalk. Every year without fail the limb’s pop song of pollen and bud, the detritus of winter’s ballad uncovered now and naked as a snail without shell, or the two for one pig crackling’s shiny plastic sleeve blazing its announcement like a rare gem in the blinding sun, smashed remnants of Old Milwaukee fossilizing in the ambered glint of the infant grass and the bunny across the road has made it again through another winter chock full of hazards dangerous as they come with his hippity hop to stretch his behind and arch the furry peace sign of his ridiculous ears before going to town on some clover. All I’m trying to say is I am in awe of the entire world today, as if we are all part of the swell and sway, part of the same river after all, like we only forgot for a hot minute when the cold times came that stream and creek and rivulet come hell and high water through rupture and fissure continue their promise to blend and between you and me I wouldn’t mind expending more time on the implications of that, or this, the old drawerless dresser left out on the curb today, busted like it was in a hurry to get nowhere fast, and the car pulling over to assess the damage and the pedestrians turning their pale faces to the bright god of the spring sun like all of this means something after all.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Her recent poems can be found in a variety of journals, including The Penn Review, Glass Poetry, Radar Poetry, The Shore, Journal Nine, The Watershed Review, A-Minor Magazine, and elsewhere. Her new book, ANIMAL (Futurecycle Press) came out in March. Find out more at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com
Every year without fail the same slime trail from a fat slug scrolling the lyrics of his name across our sidewalk. Every year without fail the limb’s pop song of pollen and bud, the detritus of winter’s ballad uncovered now and naked as a snail without shell, or the two for one pig crackling’s shiny plastic sleeve blazing its announcement like a rare gem in the blinding sun, smashed remnants of Old Milwaukee fossilizing in the ambered glint of the infant grass and the bunny across the road has made it again through another winter chock full of hazards dangerous as they come with his hippity hop to stretch his behind and arch the furry peace sign of his ridiculous ears before going to town on some clover. All I’m trying to say is I am in awe of the entire world today, as if we are all part of the swell and sway, part of the same river after all, like we only forgot for a hot minute when the cold times came that stream and creek and rivulet come hell and high water through rupture and fissure continue their promise to blend and between you and me I wouldn’t mind expending more time on the implications of that, or this, the old drawerless dresser left out on the curb today, busted like it was in a hurry to get nowhere fast, and the car pulling over to assess the damage and the pedestrians turning their pale faces to the bright god of the spring sun like all of this means something after all.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Her recent poems can be found in a variety of journals, including The Penn Review, Glass Poetry, Radar Poetry, The Shore, Journal Nine, The Watershed Review, A-Minor Magazine, and elsewhere. Her new book, ANIMAL (Futurecycle Press) came out in March. Find out more at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com
Miriam Moore-Keish Minneapolis, MN
Pasta Water, Onions
They said it should taste like tears,
then you know it’s good enough.
The chefs I see on the internet assume
their viewers know what tears taste like
and maybe they should––haven’t we all
experienced onions before?
They tell me how to cut onions
to avoid weeping, because onions only
lash out when distressed––I learned this.
I learned how to cradle them,
the cutting board their manger,
and slice in grids: leaving the root in tact
because they cry when they forget
where they came from.
My mother drained pasta in her
great-grandmother’s colander
but I’ve learned to scoop pasta out
of the pot and finish it in the sauce
––you preserve the pasta water this way.
It’s an underrated ingredient, really.
The water keeping us alive,
the starch emulsifying the sauce
and bringing everyone together,
the salt a cycle of breaking:
becoming the rock it came from,
then eroding again and again,
into streams, rivers, and oceans.
All of it down the drain from
my great-great-grandmother’s colander,
rusted from generations
of the same family’s tears,
pasta water falling from our eyes––
or maybe it’s this onion I’m cutting––
both of us forgetting our roots.
Miriam Moore-Keish is a writer and editor originally from Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Macalester College and a master’s degree in Children’s Literature from the University of Cambridge. Miriam explores Southern identity, family, religion, race, and womanhood in work appearing in places such as Poets.org, The Perch, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her chapbook Cherokee Rose is available from Finishing Line Press. Miriam lives in Minneapolis, MN.
They said it should taste like tears,
then you know it’s good enough.
The chefs I see on the internet assume
their viewers know what tears taste like
and maybe they should––haven’t we all
experienced onions before?
They tell me how to cut onions
to avoid weeping, because onions only
lash out when distressed––I learned this.
I learned how to cradle them,
the cutting board their manger,
and slice in grids: leaving the root in tact
because they cry when they forget
where they came from.
My mother drained pasta in her
great-grandmother’s colander
but I’ve learned to scoop pasta out
of the pot and finish it in the sauce
––you preserve the pasta water this way.
It’s an underrated ingredient, really.
The water keeping us alive,
the starch emulsifying the sauce
and bringing everyone together,
the salt a cycle of breaking:
becoming the rock it came from,
then eroding again and again,
into streams, rivers, and oceans.
All of it down the drain from
my great-great-grandmother’s colander,
rusted from generations
of the same family’s tears,
pasta water falling from our eyes––
or maybe it’s this onion I’m cutting––
both of us forgetting our roots.
Miriam Moore-Keish is a writer and editor originally from Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Macalester College and a master’s degree in Children’s Literature from the University of Cambridge. Miriam explores Southern identity, family, religion, race, and womanhood in work appearing in places such as Poets.org, The Perch, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her chapbook Cherokee Rose is available from Finishing Line Press. Miriam lives in Minneapolis, MN.
Helga Kidder Chattanooga, TN
Over There
— for Anneliese Hodapp
It is noon in Oberkirch.
The husband calls to his wife,
but she just lies there,
smiling at the ceiling.
The sun plays with shadows.
Roses blush the garden window.
Soup on the stove burbles
like a brook.
The husband phones
their daughters, their son.
Soft rain soothes the hour.
They are still a family as long
as they hold each other,
until the mortician carries his wife,
their mother, to her shadow.
They will live in her absence
awakening needs,
her laughter puzzling
the tablecloth
forever flowering roses.
Helga Kidder lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She has an MFA from Vermont College and leads a poetry group. Her poems have recently been published in Conestoga Zen, Amethyst Review, Artemis Journal, and others. She has four collections of poetry, Wild Plums, Luckier than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, and Loving the Dead which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020. Her current collection, Learning Curve, is slated for publication this fall by Blue Light Press.
— for Anneliese Hodapp
It is noon in Oberkirch.
The husband calls to his wife,
but she just lies there,
smiling at the ceiling.
The sun plays with shadows.
Roses blush the garden window.
Soup on the stove burbles
like a brook.
The husband phones
their daughters, their son.
Soft rain soothes the hour.
They are still a family as long
as they hold each other,
until the mortician carries his wife,
their mother, to her shadow.
They will live in her absence
awakening needs,
her laughter puzzling
the tablecloth
forever flowering roses.
Helga Kidder lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She has an MFA from Vermont College and leads a poetry group. Her poems have recently been published in Conestoga Zen, Amethyst Review, Artemis Journal, and others. She has four collections of poetry, Wild Plums, Luckier than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, and Loving the Dead which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020. Her current collection, Learning Curve, is slated for publication this fall by Blue Light Press.
Casey Killingsworth Stevenson, WA 2 poems
Something about the why
When I was eight I lost my ability to bring birds back to life.
Like Jesus with Lazarus, at one time I could pick a wounded bird
after it hit the window and nurture it back with just my touch.
They say we begin life as the intuitive fabric of nature; we don’t yet
know about the walls that separate us from the birds or the dead.
There’s a name for it but I don’t remember.
This might explain why I didn’t hear Andy’s brother set out from
the mainland in his kayak last year, at midnight, towards the island,
towards where I was camped, or why I had no sense he never planned
to return from that black bay. I’m not saying I could have saved him,
but if I had been young enough his pain paddling towards me would have
stung me like icy water, would have let me know something about the why,
might have hearkened the sad stroke of the boat just before it stopped.
I might have sat and grieved. or simply nodded my understanding, but instead
I sat behind my fire and listened and watched but did not hear or see. I wanted
to tell Andy I was on the island that night, wanted to tell him how close his
brother must have been to me out there, maybe even made up some
final words to console him. I really just wanted to tell him that
I used to know how to bring birds back to life.
When I was eight I lost my ability to bring birds back to life.
Like Jesus with Lazarus, at one time I could pick a wounded bird
after it hit the window and nurture it back with just my touch.
They say we begin life as the intuitive fabric of nature; we don’t yet
know about the walls that separate us from the birds or the dead.
There’s a name for it but I don’t remember.
This might explain why I didn’t hear Andy’s brother set out from
the mainland in his kayak last year, at midnight, towards the island,
towards where I was camped, or why I had no sense he never planned
to return from that black bay. I’m not saying I could have saved him,
but if I had been young enough his pain paddling towards me would have
stung me like icy water, would have let me know something about the why,
might have hearkened the sad stroke of the boat just before it stopped.
I might have sat and grieved. or simply nodded my understanding, but instead
I sat behind my fire and listened and watched but did not hear or see. I wanted
to tell Andy I was on the island that night, wanted to tell him how close his
brother must have been to me out there, maybe even made up some
final words to console him. I really just wanted to tell him that
I used to know how to bring birds back to life.
Julie Brown
Some time ago in a gymnasium a young woman’s memorial was held, banners stapled to rafters to remember her death but mainly to prevent other young women from ever believing that kind of ending was worth it, or acceptable, to keep them looking forward to a next moment in time. Her parents didn’t cry to show how important all of this was.
And then there was another one, another young woman who had evidently missed the lesson in the gymnasium. But by then our community had moved on, one breath of emotion had been extinguished; we didn’t care as much, is what I’m trying to tell you. So there were no gatherings in the gymnasium, no wristbands, no long impassioned pleas or even a moment of silence at the basketball game.
And I felt a little sorrier for the second one (why or how she might care I have no idea) because somehow her great sacrifice didn’t amount to a symbol or lesson. So I’d like to tell you this: live your life and make it a good one and try not to expect much from the rest of us.
Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His book of poems, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995 and a new book, A nest blew down, is due in July 2021 from Kelsay Books. Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College.
Some time ago in a gymnasium a young woman’s memorial was held, banners stapled to rafters to remember her death but mainly to prevent other young women from ever believing that kind of ending was worth it, or acceptable, to keep them looking forward to a next moment in time. Her parents didn’t cry to show how important all of this was.
And then there was another one, another young woman who had evidently missed the lesson in the gymnasium. But by then our community had moved on, one breath of emotion had been extinguished; we didn’t care as much, is what I’m trying to tell you. So there were no gatherings in the gymnasium, no wristbands, no long impassioned pleas or even a moment of silence at the basketball game.
And I felt a little sorrier for the second one (why or how she might care I have no idea) because somehow her great sacrifice didn’t amount to a symbol or lesson. So I’d like to tell you this: live your life and make it a good one and try not to expect much from the rest of us.
Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His book of poems, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995 and a new book, A nest blew down, is due in July 2021 from Kelsay Books. Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College.
Rebecca Audra Kukstas Brighton, England
Butch
the week I loved you hard the world hated you harder
three times that week men touched you stopped you shouted
your breasts became strangers to you when he twitched up
pushed them against your body like they were proof
your t-shirt tent no protection your sunglasses no shade
that’s how it went when you stepped out
and people couldn’t clock your gender
from the pack we’re dealt they flipped you over
thorough and slow as grating cheddar then
arriving at your eyes they stared you out
on the bus the boys spat at your feet like wine tasters
spitting into chalices they don’t deem to swallow from
I think they loved you too and couldn’t know it
or did and shamed themselves their skulls shining like bulbs
Rebecca Audra Kukstas (she/her) is a queer feminist poet hailing from Manchester living in Brighton. She writes intimate, domestic space poetry and is co-author of Lustful Feminist Killjoys published by Flapjack Press. Her poetry is featured in: Before Passing: Great Weather for Media, Deranged: Picaroon Poetry, and Vector III: Vector Press.
the week I loved you hard the world hated you harder
three times that week men touched you stopped you shouted
your breasts became strangers to you when he twitched up
pushed them against your body like they were proof
your t-shirt tent no protection your sunglasses no shade
that’s how it went when you stepped out
and people couldn’t clock your gender
from the pack we’re dealt they flipped you over
thorough and slow as grating cheddar then
arriving at your eyes they stared you out
on the bus the boys spat at your feet like wine tasters
spitting into chalices they don’t deem to swallow from
I think they loved you too and couldn’t know it
or did and shamed themselves their skulls shining like bulbs
Rebecca Audra Kukstas (she/her) is a queer feminist poet hailing from Manchester living in Brighton. She writes intimate, domestic space poetry and is co-author of Lustful Feminist Killjoys published by Flapjack Press. Her poetry is featured in: Before Passing: Great Weather for Media, Deranged: Picaroon Poetry, and Vector III: Vector Press.
Olivia Lawrance
Sun Dog
In the middle of nowhere North Dakota there is a town
Called Hazen. This is your name and your daughter’s and
Your mother’s and hers before.
In the summer when you first see it it is a vision
the sign appears between golden and green
And soft rolling hills full of grass.
By October the world
Has died
And her body is windswept and naked.
The sky is lower there
It sinks to meet the ground.
You have been looking for the sky for a hundred years,
Smothered in the carcasses of dead trees.
The name runs along your bloodline like an illness
It remembers the men who came and named
The swamps of Massachusetts who had homes
On main street where they hung the women.
I wonder if they remembered the day
They came into port. if they stood with handfuls of soil
Brought it to their mouths and smelled blood.
I wonder if they woke up in January after months
Of slate grey and saw that the sky was unfurling itself
And the sun was ringed with another sun and
Everything shone as if coated in crystal
And they shook off winter like a diamond
Freed from the coal
not knowing the ways the world could fool them.
There are things that nobody tells you
About the woods and about land
How your ancestors can come
Cradled in the sea and spread death from one shore to another
How you have been building roads for one thousand years
How nobody can ever own anything and yet
Your blood knows when it returns home
You know the road before it lays itself before you
The place, Hazen, used to be an ocean
Or, more precisely, an inland sea.
This explains the feeling it gives you when you stand
At the town’s edge and watch as salt water is shot into the earth
As the gasses are burned off
As the land vomits oil.
You have given the earth a daughter
Her face like craters on the moon
Your body still rippled with
Aftershocks of her.
You have given your daughter this name,
Hazen.
You have given her the names of the road-builders
And the women-hangers. Birthed her here as and offering--
As if to give a wordless apology.
Her knees and yours, they sink to meet the ground
The sky is also there.
Olivia Lawrance currently resides in New Hampshire where she teaches and tutors and writes. She earned her MFA in poetry from Wichita State University in 2016. Her work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Salon Magazine by Honeybee Press, Impressions, Mikrokosmos, Ethel, and North Dakota Quarterly. She spends her time watching too many horror movies, raising a tiny human, and writing poetry.
In the middle of nowhere North Dakota there is a town
Called Hazen. This is your name and your daughter’s and
Your mother’s and hers before.
In the summer when you first see it it is a vision
the sign appears between golden and green
And soft rolling hills full of grass.
By October the world
Has died
And her body is windswept and naked.
The sky is lower there
It sinks to meet the ground.
You have been looking for the sky for a hundred years,
Smothered in the carcasses of dead trees.
The name runs along your bloodline like an illness
It remembers the men who came and named
The swamps of Massachusetts who had homes
On main street where they hung the women.
I wonder if they remembered the day
They came into port. if they stood with handfuls of soil
Brought it to their mouths and smelled blood.
I wonder if they woke up in January after months
Of slate grey and saw that the sky was unfurling itself
And the sun was ringed with another sun and
Everything shone as if coated in crystal
And they shook off winter like a diamond
Freed from the coal
not knowing the ways the world could fool them.
There are things that nobody tells you
About the woods and about land
How your ancestors can come
Cradled in the sea and spread death from one shore to another
How you have been building roads for one thousand years
How nobody can ever own anything and yet
Your blood knows when it returns home
You know the road before it lays itself before you
The place, Hazen, used to be an ocean
Or, more precisely, an inland sea.
This explains the feeling it gives you when you stand
At the town’s edge and watch as salt water is shot into the earth
As the gasses are burned off
As the land vomits oil.
You have given the earth a daughter
Her face like craters on the moon
Your body still rippled with
Aftershocks of her.
You have given your daughter this name,
Hazen.
You have given her the names of the road-builders
And the women-hangers. Birthed her here as and offering--
As if to give a wordless apology.
Her knees and yours, they sink to meet the ground
The sky is also there.
Olivia Lawrance currently resides in New Hampshire where she teaches and tutors and writes. She earned her MFA in poetry from Wichita State University in 2016. Her work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Salon Magazine by Honeybee Press, Impressions, Mikrokosmos, Ethel, and North Dakota Quarterly. She spends her time watching too many horror movies, raising a tiny human, and writing poetry.