Issue 3 November 2016
Don Burns, Editor
Don Burns, Editor
Poets in this issue: Lily Starr Dorianne Laux Denise Duhamel & Haya Pomrenze Christine Jackson Wendy Drexler Allan Peterson Steve Klepetar Lyn Lifshin Lynne Viti Michael Trammell Kristen Clanton Patricia Whiting Sandra M. Castillo Devon Balwit John L. Stanizzi Susan Nisenbaum Becker C.S. Fuqua Joseph Lisowski Neil Ellman Judtih Berke Francine Witte Sharon A. Foley Maureen Seaton & Mia Leonin Maureen Seaton & Jaswinder Bolina Robert Knox Gareth Culshaw Cindy King David Owen Miller Gloria g. Murray Linda M. Fischer Michael Minassian Linda Lerner Laurie Byro Caridad Moro-Gronlier Sarah White Joyce S. Brown Alexander Sergeyevich Pushin and Arseny Tarkovsky tr.by Larissa Shmailo, Alexander Ulanov tr.by Alex Cigale, Sonia Greenfield Shiva Bhusal
Lily Starr 3 poems
Portrait of Boy Dancing
The poem begins
when he puts on the dress.
He dances, I admit
I am in awe.
He has lightness.
This is to say, he is light
and lightened.
I don’t know where
the glitter comes from,
but it’s there.
He is Ginger Rogers in Swing Time,
miming Fred Astaire,
one hand on imaginary shoulder,
one clutching sharpened air.
He is a pageant queen
practicing her speech:
Miss, how will you change the world?
The poem begins
when he puts on the dress.
He dances, I admit
I am in awe.
He has lightness.
This is to say, he is light
and lightened.
I don’t know where
the glitter comes from,
but it’s there.
He is Ginger Rogers in Swing Time,
miming Fred Astaire,
one hand on imaginary shoulder,
one clutching sharpened air.
He is a pageant queen
practicing her speech:
Miss, how will you change the world?
Portrait of Boy in Body
Tonight, my lover untoothed
each of my vertebrae, slid
a hanger through my shoulders
and admired the dress of my skin.
I love your breasts, he said,
I wish I had them.
He flexed a hand down
the sleeve of my arm,
his thick fingers in
mine. My muscle,
the satin of an evening glove,
the hairs on my arms
its velvet outer.
He stood before the mirror,
pinned every curve of me to him
to see what needed taking in,
what needed letting out.
He touched my breasts,
which were his breasts,
my stomach,
which was his stomach,
the hyphens of my collarbones,
which were his collarbones.
He asked me how he looked,
but I could not answer,
my mouth was his mouth.
Ours is a silence quilted
of many small silences.
He found, again,
that I did not suit him.
I am the wrong size,
not enough hip
and too much shoulder,
too boyish for the occasion.
He stepped out,
left the rumpled
girl-dress of me
on the bed,
an empty gown
still holding its shape.
Tonight, my lover untoothed
each of my vertebrae, slid
a hanger through my shoulders
and admired the dress of my skin.
I love your breasts, he said,
I wish I had them.
He flexed a hand down
the sleeve of my arm,
his thick fingers in
mine. My muscle,
the satin of an evening glove,
the hairs on my arms
its velvet outer.
He stood before the mirror,
pinned every curve of me to him
to see what needed taking in,
what needed letting out.
He touched my breasts,
which were his breasts,
my stomach,
which was his stomach,
the hyphens of my collarbones,
which were his collarbones.
He asked me how he looked,
but I could not answer,
my mouth was his mouth.
Ours is a silence quilted
of many small silences.
He found, again,
that I did not suit him.
I am the wrong size,
not enough hip
and too much shoulder,
too boyish for the occasion.
He stepped out,
left the rumpled
girl-dress of me
on the bed,
an empty gown
still holding its shape.
Dramatic Exit
tonight he is dressed / as Princess Diana /
we have been doing this / for days /
costumes himself / as a woman
/ about to die / kills them
/ First Grace / Jackie / Marilyn / Aaliyah
/ now Diana. I help him / find the car
/ the pills / the plane
/ anything / he needs / for the reenactment
/ he kills a different woman every night
/ himself / a hundred times
/ we have been at this for days /
I know he will kill / these dress-ups
until he kills the inside / girl
LILY STARR is currently working on her undergraduate degree in English at Washington College on the eastern shore of Maryland. She is an eager student of poetry and creative nonfiction. She plans to pursue an MFA in Poetry after her graduation in 2017.
Dorianne Laux 2 poems
Men
Re-printed with permission from the author. This poem appeared in her book, Dark Charms.
It's tough being a guy, having to be gruff
and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh
it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff
and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough
loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if
not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof
when you love something or someone, scuffing
a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler
pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff
used in casual conversation—wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy
Lube—gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It's rough,
yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs
too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self
isn't an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof
of something difficult to define or defend. Chief or chef,
thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof.
Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different
from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.
It's tough being a guy, having to be gruff
and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh
it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff
and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough
loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if
not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof
when you love something or someone, scuffing
a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler
pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff
used in casual conversation—wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy
Lube—gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It's rough,
yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs
too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self
isn't an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof
of something difficult to define or defend. Chief or chef,
thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof.
Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different
from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.
Re-printed with permission from the author. This poem appeared in her book, Superman.
Again the insomnia of August,
a night sky buffed by the heat,
the air so still a ringing phone
three blocks away sings
through the fan’s slow moving blades.
The sleeping cat at the foot of the bed
twitches in a pool of dusty sheets,
her fur malt-colored, electric.
Time to rub the shoulder’s tight knots out
with a thumb, flip on the TV, watch a man
douse a white blouse with ink before dipping
that sad sleeve into a clear bucket.
What cup of love poured him into this world?
Did his mother touch her lips
to his womb-battered crown
and inhale his scent?
Did his new father lift him and name him?
He was fed, clothed, taught to talk.
Someone must have picked him up
each time he wobbled and fell.
There might have been a desk, a history book,
pencils in a box, a succession
of wheeled toys.
By what back road did he travel
to this late-night station?
By what imperceptible set of circumstances
does he arrive in my bedroom on a summer night,
pinching a shirt collar between his fingers,
his own invention locked in a blue box,
a rainbow slashed across it?
Somewhere in the universe is a palace
where each of us is imprinted with a map,
the one path seared into the circuits of our brains.
It signals us to turn left at the green light,
right at the dead tree.
We know nothing of how it all works,
how we end up in one bed or another,
speak one language instead of the others,
what heat draws us to our life’s work
or keeps us from a dream until it’s nothing
but a blister we scratch in our sleep.
His voice is soothing, his teeth crooked,
his arms strong and smooth below rolled-up cuffs.
I have the power to make him disappear
with one touch, though if I do the darkness
will swallow me, drown me.
Time to settle back against the pillows
and gaze deeply into the excitement
welling in his eyes. It’s a miracle, he whispers
as the burnt moon slips across the sky.
Then he dumps the grainy crystals in
and stirs the water with a wooden spoon.
DORIANNE LAUX’S most recent collections are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moonwinner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.
Again the insomnia of August,
a night sky buffed by the heat,
the air so still a ringing phone
three blocks away sings
through the fan’s slow moving blades.
The sleeping cat at the foot of the bed
twitches in a pool of dusty sheets,
her fur malt-colored, electric.
Time to rub the shoulder’s tight knots out
with a thumb, flip on the TV, watch a man
douse a white blouse with ink before dipping
that sad sleeve into a clear bucket.
What cup of love poured him into this world?
Did his mother touch her lips
to his womb-battered crown
and inhale his scent?
Did his new father lift him and name him?
He was fed, clothed, taught to talk.
Someone must have picked him up
each time he wobbled and fell.
There might have been a desk, a history book,
pencils in a box, a succession
of wheeled toys.
By what back road did he travel
to this late-night station?
By what imperceptible set of circumstances
does he arrive in my bedroom on a summer night,
pinching a shirt collar between his fingers,
his own invention locked in a blue box,
a rainbow slashed across it?
Somewhere in the universe is a palace
where each of us is imprinted with a map,
the one path seared into the circuits of our brains.
It signals us to turn left at the green light,
right at the dead tree.
We know nothing of how it all works,
how we end up in one bed or another,
speak one language instead of the others,
what heat draws us to our life’s work
or keeps us from a dream until it’s nothing
but a blister we scratch in our sleep.
His voice is soothing, his teeth crooked,
his arms strong and smooth below rolled-up cuffs.
I have the power to make him disappear
with one touch, though if I do the darkness
will swallow me, drown me.
Time to settle back against the pillows
and gaze deeply into the excitement
welling in his eyes. It’s a miracle, he whispers
as the burnt moon slips across the sky.
Then he dumps the grainy crystals in
and stirs the water with a wooden spoon.
DORIANNE LAUX’S most recent collections are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moonwinner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.
Denise Duhamel and Haya Pomrenze a collaboration 2 poems
If You Want to Lose Your Husband/If You Want to Lose Your Wife
If You Want to Lose Your Husband,
eat lots of chocolate cake instead
of having sex. While you're in bed together
play Solitaire instead of fore-play.
Become a high scorer on Angry Birds.
Wear faded pink nightgowns while reading
Fifty Shades of Gray. Don't dye your hair
or wax. Your legs will feel like sand paper
and your vagina will look like a terrarium.
Sign up for pole dancing classes but don't ever
practice at home. Go to book club in black
spandex or lace. Model new clothes for your gay friend Tish
who is the only one to see you naked in daylight.
If you want to lose your husband
think of him as a parenthesis. Before
you know it, some out-of-nowhere woman
will think of him as an exclamation
point. She'll moan about her fibromyalgia
or the brother who stole her audiologist fund
to buy a Lexus and pretty soon
the whore will be making him, your husband,
ceviche and have the nerve
to borrow the family Costco card as well as your husband.
At the holiday party you'll be surprised that it's not
the chesty blonde from human resources but
a sallow Peruvian in a pilled reindeer sweater
fiddling with a refurbished hearing aide.
So you’re the wife, she says. And at that moment
you say, he hates raw fish.
If You Want to Lose Your Wife,
eat her last piece of chocolate
and tell her she should lose a few anyway.
In bed, snore as loud as you can
to send her fleeing to the couch.
Wear cologne that makes her sneeze
and hide her Fifty Shades of Gray. Don't die--
the very fact that you are breathing
will drive her bananas. Eat the last plum
but leave the pit rotting in the bowl
without a William Carlos Williams apology.
If she’s managed to domesticate you,
revert to peeing on the seat.
If you want to lose your wife
think of her as a mom or maid. Before
you know it, some right under-your-nose man
will convince her she’s a queen.
He’ll buy her flowers from Publix and indulge her
stories in which you are the bad guy.
He’ll be about your size and pretty soon
he’ll be wearing your Tommy Bahamas
and Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses. He’ll have the nerve
to borrow your electric drill as he screws your wife.
At the condo BBQ you'll be surprised that it's not
her boss with whom she constantly texts
but the maintenance man who affixed
a new toilet seat because you’d been too lazy.
Hola, he says. By losing you win. You
slurp your daiquiri so sweet and so cold.
If You Want to Lose Your Husband,
eat lots of chocolate cake instead
of having sex. While you're in bed together
play Solitaire instead of fore-play.
Become a high scorer on Angry Birds.
Wear faded pink nightgowns while reading
Fifty Shades of Gray. Don't dye your hair
or wax. Your legs will feel like sand paper
and your vagina will look like a terrarium.
Sign up for pole dancing classes but don't ever
practice at home. Go to book club in black
spandex or lace. Model new clothes for your gay friend Tish
who is the only one to see you naked in daylight.
If you want to lose your husband
think of him as a parenthesis. Before
you know it, some out-of-nowhere woman
will think of him as an exclamation
point. She'll moan about her fibromyalgia
or the brother who stole her audiologist fund
to buy a Lexus and pretty soon
the whore will be making him, your husband,
ceviche and have the nerve
to borrow the family Costco card as well as your husband.
At the holiday party you'll be surprised that it's not
the chesty blonde from human resources but
a sallow Peruvian in a pilled reindeer sweater
fiddling with a refurbished hearing aide.
So you’re the wife, she says. And at that moment
you say, he hates raw fish.
If You Want to Lose Your Wife,
eat her last piece of chocolate
and tell her she should lose a few anyway.
In bed, snore as loud as you can
to send her fleeing to the couch.
Wear cologne that makes her sneeze
and hide her Fifty Shades of Gray. Don't die--
the very fact that you are breathing
will drive her bananas. Eat the last plum
but leave the pit rotting in the bowl
without a William Carlos Williams apology.
If she’s managed to domesticate you,
revert to peeing on the seat.
If you want to lose your wife
think of her as a mom or maid. Before
you know it, some right under-your-nose man
will convince her she’s a queen.
He’ll buy her flowers from Publix and indulge her
stories in which you are the bad guy.
He’ll be about your size and pretty soon
he’ll be wearing your Tommy Bahamas
and Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses. He’ll have the nerve
to borrow your electric drill as he screws your wife.
At the condo BBQ you'll be surprised that it's not
her boss with whom she constantly texts
but the maintenance man who affixed
a new toilet seat because you’d been too lazy.
Hola, he says. By losing you win. You
slurp your daiquiri so sweet and so cold.
A Prose Poem is Like a Child Who’s Been
Left to Roam Without a Curfew
My parents never waited up for me, so I became a drunk poem and cursed like Baudelaire. My spittle turned to drops of foam. I wore evil flowers in my hair and wiped my mouth with poisoned stems. If we understood each other, we would never agree that pain is my muse and joy is a weakness. The only way to forget about time is to live from thorn to thorn from flight to fight with the grass and the dandelions, a labyrinth without beginning or end.
I have waited my whole life, but for what?
I was fooled by the prosaic—suburban kitchens and gossip—over French-pressed coffee when truth becomes fiction, poems unfolding between the silences, villanelles born from white space. I held each infant in a receiving blanket, relinquished them when they unfurled five fingers from my one. Each cradle, each trike, each roller-skate—stanzas of their timelines. Each scrape, each sprain, each triumphant jump tallied in my journal—block letters.
When I say yours or theirs I mean mine. It is my thumbprint on all these things.
DENISE DUHAMEL’S most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
HAYA POMRENZE’S first collection, Hook, was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Rattle, 5AM, Lake Effect, Lalitamba, MiPOesias and Poetica . Haya collaborates with Denise Duhamel on poems of faith and family. She is an occupational therapist who uses poetry as a healing tool with psychiatric patients. Haya considers herself the founder of the Jewhitsu poetry form. Her second book, How It's Done was published last year.
Left to Roam Without a Curfew
My parents never waited up for me, so I became a drunk poem and cursed like Baudelaire. My spittle turned to drops of foam. I wore evil flowers in my hair and wiped my mouth with poisoned stems. If we understood each other, we would never agree that pain is my muse and joy is a weakness. The only way to forget about time is to live from thorn to thorn from flight to fight with the grass and the dandelions, a labyrinth without beginning or end.
I have waited my whole life, but for what?
I was fooled by the prosaic—suburban kitchens and gossip—over French-pressed coffee when truth becomes fiction, poems unfolding between the silences, villanelles born from white space. I held each infant in a receiving blanket, relinquished them when they unfurled five fingers from my one. Each cradle, each trike, each roller-skate—stanzas of their timelines. Each scrape, each sprain, each triumphant jump tallied in my journal—block letters.
When I say yours or theirs I mean mine. It is my thumbprint on all these things.
DENISE DUHAMEL’S most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
HAYA POMRENZE’S first collection, Hook, was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Rattle, 5AM, Lake Effect, Lalitamba, MiPOesias and Poetica . Haya collaborates with Denise Duhamel on poems of faith and family. She is an occupational therapist who uses poetry as a healing tool with psychiatric patients. Haya considers herself the founder of the Jewhitsu poetry form. Her second book, How It's Done was published last year.
Christine Jackson
Blood Love
After months of wanting you
and stumbling ravenous
through a dead land,
I again drop into
your voodoo city,
different hotel,
same spatters on a dark bedspread.
Pawing, clawing,
teeth clacking together,
we ingest flesh and fluid,
chewing each other’s lips,
toward a famished desire for feeling.
Sprawled across tangled sheets,
you order room service,
paying cash this time.
A door down the hall thuds shut.
Later, in sooty clouds
of stalled traffic,
I draw life from your mouth
one final time.
My hungry stare follows you
into the terminal;
the cab returns me,
unseeing,
to hotel oblivion
Now I lean a bloodshot eye
to a peephole from the past,
watching us walk by,
arm in arm,
muttering in low voices
about love and merlot
and reservations
for dining off each other.
I press a hot forehead against the window.
On the pavement below,
people lurch home through the rain.
A young woman stands on the corner
under an inside-out umbrella;
its metal ribs stick through the fabric
like bones poking through skin.
The river flows wide and slow.
The cold bridge spreads its arch above the docks.
To the west, rosy light bleeds through distant clouds,
marking the death of more than a day.
CHRISTINE JACKSON teaches literature and creative writing at a South Florida university. That is, she is supposed to teach, but she might learn more from her students than they do from her. Her poetry has appeared in many online publications, including Scarlet Leaf Review, Verse-Virtual, and The Ekphrastic Review. Visit her website http://cahss.nova.edu/faculty/christine_jackson.html
Wendy Drexler
Relationship Theory
Each spring, long-legged waders
flock to Florida to nest in trees
above alligator-infested swamps.
Clouds of them, full of industry,
festoon each branch: storks clack
their bills in courtship, an egret
warms her eggs. Grass and twigs
brim from a heron’s bill. Below,
alligators nose the muck, rustle up,
shake the trees to topple nests.
Jaws gobble any chicks that fall out--
and keep other predators away.
Hard to tell, exactly, if protection
always comes at such a price, or if
juggling intimacy with brinksmanship
is love. And what did I know,
when I married young,
perched out on the end of a pliant and precarious branch?
WENDY DREXLER'S new collection, Before There Was Before, will be published in April by Iris Press. Her first full-length book, Western Motel, was published in 2012 by Turning Point. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Barrow Street, Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, Nimrod, Off the Coast, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Hudson Review, The Worcester Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals. Wexler's work has been featured on Verse Daily, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and in the anthologies Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has been a poetry editor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society.
Allan Peterson
Ideals
Gravestone towns all windowless cold white from misunderstanding the
Greeks that became our classical bleached athletes and libraries
How comfortable we are with ignorance
I think of the long story knitted
into the sweater why we call it a yarn
a pin allowing hair to fall loose
white tendons gone the bones of us collapse
ALLAN PETERSON is the author of five books, most recently Precarious, 42 Miles Press 2014, a finalist for The Lascaux Prize; Fragile Acts (McSweeney's Poetry Series), a finalist for both the 2013 National Book Critics Circle and Oregon Book Awards, and multiple chapbooks, including three from Right Hand pointing. Forthcoming from Tupelo Press is Other Than They Seem, winner of the 2014 Snowbound Chapbook Prize. His work has been published in Ireland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Wales. He lives in Gulf Breeze, FL and Ashland, OR. Visit him at www.allanpeterson.net
Gravestone towns all windowless cold white from misunderstanding the
Greeks that became our classical bleached athletes and libraries
How comfortable we are with ignorance
I think of the long story knitted
into the sweater why we call it a yarn
a pin allowing hair to fall loose
white tendons gone the bones of us collapse
ALLAN PETERSON is the author of five books, most recently Precarious, 42 Miles Press 2014, a finalist for The Lascaux Prize; Fragile Acts (McSweeney's Poetry Series), a finalist for both the 2013 National Book Critics Circle and Oregon Book Awards, and multiple chapbooks, including three from Right Hand pointing. Forthcoming from Tupelo Press is Other Than They Seem, winner of the 2014 Snowbound Chapbook Prize. His work has been published in Ireland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Wales. He lives in Gulf Breeze, FL and Ashland, OR. Visit him at www.allanpeterson.net
Steve Klepetar
A Carpenter of Air
I raised nothing but clouds,
I walked only with smoke
-Neruda
And yet, at his desk, he burned
and from his fingers rose smoke
and from his mind, green banks
and a river cold as stone.
He was nothing but breath and fog.
How he wished for a ladder and nails,
for hard things bolted to frames.
Smoke poured from him, swirled
around his mouth, twisting its way
up the sensuous flanks of sky.
He was a carpenter of air, a joiner
of words. His was a lizard’s tongue
calloused and bruised as it flickered
deadly and mute through the gate
of his teeth. All day he traveled
inside himself, past an island of sticks
and reeds, and burning houses wrecked
in grinding brown waves until he was blind.
Then river mud surrounded him and again
he drowned in the flood of his raging song.
STEVE KLEPETAR’S work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Chiron, Deep Water, Expound, Phenomenal Literature, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press. His full-length collection Family Reunion is forthcoming from Big Table Publishing.
Lyn Lifshin
The Mad Girl Dreams of Morocco
of the toucans outside
her window, how she longed
to see the rooms where
Paul Bowles lived, the
desert in the distance, a maid
hanging up clothes, singing
to herself in Spanish. She
remembers the children
being led out of school
throwing stones at the pale
birds past the bodega
under the sun where she
stopped, lured by a carpet of
turquoise and mauve where a
man brought her apple tea
like a ticket to love
LYN LIFSHIN is arguably the most prolific poet of her generation publishing over 130 books and chapbook. Lifshin published her prize winning book about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness. Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially The Lies, Light At the End: The Jesus Poems. NYQ books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. An update to her Gale Research Autobiography is out: Lips, Blues, Blue Lace: On The Outside. Forthcoming: Degas Little Dancer and Winter Poems from Kind of a Hurricane Press, Paintings and Poems, from Tangerine Press . Visit her at :www.lynlifshin.com
of the toucans outside
her window, how she longed
to see the rooms where
Paul Bowles lived, the
desert in the distance, a maid
hanging up clothes, singing
to herself in Spanish. She
remembers the children
being led out of school
throwing stones at the pale
birds past the bodega
under the sun where she
stopped, lured by a carpet of
turquoise and mauve where a
man brought her apple tea
like a ticket to love
LYN LIFSHIN is arguably the most prolific poet of her generation publishing over 130 books and chapbook. Lifshin published her prize winning book about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness. Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially The Lies, Light At the End: The Jesus Poems. NYQ books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. An update to her Gale Research Autobiography is out: Lips, Blues, Blue Lace: On The Outside. Forthcoming: Degas Little Dancer and Winter Poems from Kind of a Hurricane Press, Paintings and Poems, from Tangerine Press . Visit her at :www.lynlifshin.com
Lynne Viti
Eve’s Diary
The garden was there before we were. It was
so easy to tend. We had only to pluck
the ripe fruits, gather flowers--
I loved the red ones best--
to fashion garlands for our hair. Mine
was long, I combed it with my fingers,
pulled it hard to one side, always to the left--
braided it so that the rope of golden hair
grazed my shoulder, fell over my breast.
We sometimes pruned branches
after the deutzia dropped its last white blooms,
tossed the clippings in the corner of our vast
yard, returned to lie under the rose-covered pergola.
We spent our days singing, entwining our limbs,
lying heart to heart. We devised word puzzles,
pausing to drink from a nearby stream.
That was before the gypsy caterpillars stripped
our trees, left their dry brown casings on bare branches.
The crawling things pupated,
emerged as anxious, dust-brown moths.
That was before my misstep, my foolish infatuation,
the thing that at first seemed so innocent--
a little conversation each morning over the
fence with our neighbor.
He was a lithe creature, mysterious,
his reserve eroding each day as we chatted about
the perfect roses, ever-blooming hydrangeas,
sky-blue delphiniums—he, too, was a lover of gardens.
My story was plastered everywhere,
My shame—and my man’s— became a tale you all
told to your children, a moral lesson--
our eviction was a trope, a meme.
None of you forgave, had a shred of empathy.
The landlord—we never met him—sent his constable,
a long-haired fellow with a gun in his boot,
to throw us out. He locked the gates.
Nowadays we live in what some might call a hovel.
I scratch the dry earth with a stick, trying to grow food.
The best I can do is lamb’s quarters, plantain,
bitter greens for salads, or bait to draw fleeting, winged beauties--
a single bee or butterfly.
At least we two stayed together,
huddling together in the long winter nights,
wishing to forget those golden days,
shed the memory of home.
LYNNE VITI is a senior lecture in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, Baltimore Girls, is forthcoming in February, 2017 from Finishing Line Press. She has published most recently in The Little Patuxent Review, Old Frog Pond Farm, Mountain Gazette, BlazeVOX16, The Longleaf Pine, Amuse-Bouche, and The Paterson Review. She blogs at stillinschool.wordpress.com.
Michael Trammell
Thirty-Five Years of Afternoon
Maybe it’s time to squeeze from memory
those hours in this south Florida town
when as a teen I rode my BMX bike
across the railroad tracks near
Swinton Avenue to buy what we called
a Bo-town nickel
to smoke at South Beach Delray
where the waves broke best.
I thought about it yesterday when
I recognized the meat shop with the rusted bars
covering its windows, the shop
I’d roll past in late afternoons
on dry winter days. It’s the only place
I now recognize. The town
has forgotten itself.
My brother said he surfed best
when stoned. He was the one
who bought our nickels and dimes. He was so much braver.
I know he’s braver than I’ll be
facing the dreamlessness. His heart’s
become uneven. Mine’s the tick of locomotives
on those tracks just east of here.
If only I could help him re-board
that wave of endless train cars, or simply
this: tomorrow we will wait happily side by side
on our bicycles and face the tracks
recalling the level, tranquil days,
knowing we are only moments away
from recovered oblivion.
MICHAEL TRAMMELL is editor-in-chief of Apalachee Review and has served as President of Gulf Coast Association of Writing Teachers. His work has appeared in: New Letters and The Chattahoochee Review. Yellow-Jacket Press recently published his book Our Keen Blue House. He and wife, writer Mary Jane Ryals, teach writing, literature, and business for Florida State University's Valencia, Spain and London, England programs.
Maybe it’s time to squeeze from memory
those hours in this south Florida town
when as a teen I rode my BMX bike
across the railroad tracks near
Swinton Avenue to buy what we called
a Bo-town nickel
to smoke at South Beach Delray
where the waves broke best.
I thought about it yesterday when
I recognized the meat shop with the rusted bars
covering its windows, the shop
I’d roll past in late afternoons
on dry winter days. It’s the only place
I now recognize. The town
has forgotten itself.
My brother said he surfed best
when stoned. He was the one
who bought our nickels and dimes. He was so much braver.
I know he’s braver than I’ll be
facing the dreamlessness. His heart’s
become uneven. Mine’s the tick of locomotives
on those tracks just east of here.
If only I could help him re-board
that wave of endless train cars, or simply
this: tomorrow we will wait happily side by side
on our bicycles and face the tracks
recalling the level, tranquil days,
knowing we are only moments away
from recovered oblivion.
MICHAEL TRAMMELL is editor-in-chief of Apalachee Review and has served as President of Gulf Coast Association of Writing Teachers. His work has appeared in: New Letters and The Chattahoochee Review. Yellow-Jacket Press recently published his book Our Keen Blue House. He and wife, writer Mary Jane Ryals, teach writing, literature, and business for Florida State University's Valencia, Spain and London, England programs.
Kristen Clanton
Weekends in the Forest
When I was small and still prayed
without simple reasons of vulnerability
I dreamt endless weekends
in the sturdy trunk of a live oak,
with a yarn rug on a circle floor
and ladders following the surest of lines
to an eyelet lace bed
and kittens sleeping in warm hollows.
Not the sprawling days at my grandparents’ house
with the red front door like a tongue
pressing towards the forest,
wanting farther than the mouth.
Not weekends in the barn
up a broken ladder Grandpa could not climb,
only crawling down after supper time,
straight into the bedroom that could not lock
the door, hidden under a bed that refused
to hide itself.
KRISTEN CLANTON was born and raised in Tampa, Fl. and graduated from the University of Nebraska, earning an MFA in poetry. Her poetry and short fiction has been published by the Bicycle Review, Birds We Piled Loosely, BlazeVOX, Burlesque Press, Furious Gazelle, Gingerbread House Review, Leopardskin & Limes, Mad Hatter’s Review, Mangrove Review, Midnight Circus, Otis Nebula, Otto Magazine, Outrider Review, Ragazine, and Sugar House Review. She also has work in the forthcoming issues of Paper Nautilus, The After Happy Hour Review, and Midnight Circus. More of her work is available at: www.kristenclanton.com
When I was small and still prayed
without simple reasons of vulnerability
I dreamt endless weekends
in the sturdy trunk of a live oak,
with a yarn rug on a circle floor
and ladders following the surest of lines
to an eyelet lace bed
and kittens sleeping in warm hollows.
Not the sprawling days at my grandparents’ house
with the red front door like a tongue
pressing towards the forest,
wanting farther than the mouth.
Not weekends in the barn
up a broken ladder Grandpa could not climb,
only crawling down after supper time,
straight into the bedroom that could not lock
the door, hidden under a bed that refused
to hide itself.
KRISTEN CLANTON was born and raised in Tampa, Fl. and graduated from the University of Nebraska, earning an MFA in poetry. Her poetry and short fiction has been published by the Bicycle Review, Birds We Piled Loosely, BlazeVOX, Burlesque Press, Furious Gazelle, Gingerbread House Review, Leopardskin & Limes, Mad Hatter’s Review, Mangrove Review, Midnight Circus, Otis Nebula, Otto Magazine, Outrider Review, Ragazine, and Sugar House Review. She also has work in the forthcoming issues of Paper Nautilus, The After Happy Hour Review, and Midnight Circus. More of her work is available at: www.kristenclanton.com
Patricia Whiting
When We Lived in Manila
Scientists say each time we remember
an event from the past, we lose a little of it.
Finally we have only memories of our memories.
Maybe I don’t remember the house in Manila--
the house boy and amah or the pipe-smoking,
toothless woman who washed our clothes.
Maybe the woman with a pipe was in a photograph
in a book about the Philippines. And maybe
I don’t remember General MacArthur’s son
Arthur, born a month before me. Maybe
I just remember Aunt Edith’s stories about
the two of us. And maybe it was Johnny Baker,
not Arthur, who showed me how to pee
sitting backwards on the toilet.
I like to think I remember being that little girl
who might be mistaken for a boy in a dress,
sitting on the veranda with my father,
or peering into a wicker carriage at my baby sister.
The memory of the boat that took us away
from all that was familiar is gone.
The rest is hearsay: MacArthur’s escape to Australia,
Aunt Edith as a rawboned prisoner of war.
PATRICIA WHITING is a Florida painter-poet. Publications include a chapbook, Learning to Read Between the Lines and Diary Poems: And Drawings. Her poems have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Slipstream, Boca Raton, Thorny Locust, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and others.
Scientists say each time we remember
an event from the past, we lose a little of it.
Finally we have only memories of our memories.
Maybe I don’t remember the house in Manila--
the house boy and amah or the pipe-smoking,
toothless woman who washed our clothes.
Maybe the woman with a pipe was in a photograph
in a book about the Philippines. And maybe
I don’t remember General MacArthur’s son
Arthur, born a month before me. Maybe
I just remember Aunt Edith’s stories about
the two of us. And maybe it was Johnny Baker,
not Arthur, who showed me how to pee
sitting backwards on the toilet.
I like to think I remember being that little girl
who might be mistaken for a boy in a dress,
sitting on the veranda with my father,
or peering into a wicker carriage at my baby sister.
The memory of the boat that took us away
from all that was familiar is gone.
The rest is hearsay: MacArthur’s escape to Australia,
Aunt Edith as a rawboned prisoner of war.
PATRICIA WHITING is a Florida painter-poet. Publications include a chapbook, Learning to Read Between the Lines and Diary Poems: And Drawings. Her poems have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Slipstream, Boca Raton, Thorny Locust, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and others.
Sandra M. Castillo 2 poems
Dreaming in Wyoming
1.
Everything is long stretches of green,
trees and flowers I cannot name.
And I think it smells like winter.
2.
You live with an old gentleman
who has his portrait painted
in the same clothes each year,
slight variations of turquoise
because, he says, he likes Indians,
the great Southwest of a life he is sure
he had once.
And he hangs his face across the wall
of the room he shared with his now dead wife,
The room, he says, looks like it did
twenty years before he lived
inside himself.
And you find him
In the cabana-style shower
with the white-wooden walls
and the box seat,
pale, blueing,
in his favorite room
in the house.
3.
But your girlfriend
has blond hair,
oval-shaped sunglasses she is always
losing, and she likes the way you visit,
casual, unexpected
because life, she says,
is like that.
1.
Everything is long stretches of green,
trees and flowers I cannot name.
And I think it smells like winter.
2.
You live with an old gentleman
who has his portrait painted
in the same clothes each year,
slight variations of turquoise
because, he says, he likes Indians,
the great Southwest of a life he is sure
he had once.
And he hangs his face across the wall
of the room he shared with his now dead wife,
The room, he says, looks like it did
twenty years before he lived
inside himself.
And you find him
In the cabana-style shower
with the white-wooden walls
and the box seat,
pale, blueing,
in his favorite room
in the house.
3.
But your girlfriend
has blond hair,
oval-shaped sunglasses she is always
losing, and she likes the way you visit,
casual, unexpected
because life, she says,
is like that.
En Route to a Poetry Reading
I drive over the Julia Tuttle Causeway to the tune of seagulls, a royal blue sky, my hand out the window, feeling the wind of October down Pennsylvania Avenue, South Beach, when an Argentinean woman in a rented vehicle she will abandon on the side of the road fails to stop, to yield, crashes into me, pushing me towards the center of the car, the door so dented, I am suddenly sitting on the passenger side, my arms extended, my elbow locked in place, the car spinning , as if waltzing, as if counting beats: one, two, three, one, two, three, twirling to The Blue Danube, leaving me face oncoming vehicles, unwitting partners in this dance, allowing more time for the poet scheduled to read with me as I wait for the police at a nearby apartment, whose tenants entertain me with an impromptu drag show: red high-heeled boots, alligator skin, flaxen blond wigs, gold lamé, fake eyelashes, shiny yellow, off the shoulder gypsy shirt, ruffles and feathers, the lady with the tutti-frutti hat, singing “Mamá, Mamá, yo quiero una chupeta,” synthetic pink leather, with matching bouffant, sequined platforms moving and shaking to the tune of I Will Survive.
SANDRA M. CASTILLO was born in Havana, Cuba. She received her M.A. from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Puerto del Sol, The Belleview Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, Clackamas Literary Review, as well as various anthologies including Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets, A Century of Cuban-American Writers in Florida, Little Havana Blues, Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance, Cool Salsa: On Growing Up Latino in the U.S., American Diaspora: the poetry of displacement. She was awarded White Pine Press award for her collection entitled My Father Sings to My Embarrassment. Her new collection, Eating Moors and Christians, was published by CavanKerry.
I drive over the Julia Tuttle Causeway to the tune of seagulls, a royal blue sky, my hand out the window, feeling the wind of October down Pennsylvania Avenue, South Beach, when an Argentinean woman in a rented vehicle she will abandon on the side of the road fails to stop, to yield, crashes into me, pushing me towards the center of the car, the door so dented, I am suddenly sitting on the passenger side, my arms extended, my elbow locked in place, the car spinning , as if waltzing, as if counting beats: one, two, three, one, two, three, twirling to The Blue Danube, leaving me face oncoming vehicles, unwitting partners in this dance, allowing more time for the poet scheduled to read with me as I wait for the police at a nearby apartment, whose tenants entertain me with an impromptu drag show: red high-heeled boots, alligator skin, flaxen blond wigs, gold lamé, fake eyelashes, shiny yellow, off the shoulder gypsy shirt, ruffles and feathers, the lady with the tutti-frutti hat, singing “Mamá, Mamá, yo quiero una chupeta,” synthetic pink leather, with matching bouffant, sequined platforms moving and shaking to the tune of I Will Survive.
SANDRA M. CASTILLO was born in Havana, Cuba. She received her M.A. from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Puerto del Sol, The Belleview Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, Clackamas Literary Review, as well as various anthologies including Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets, A Century of Cuban-American Writers in Florida, Little Havana Blues, Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance, Cool Salsa: On Growing Up Latino in the U.S., American Diaspora: the poetry of displacement. She was awarded White Pine Press award for her collection entitled My Father Sings to My Embarrassment. Her new collection, Eating Moors and Christians, was published by CavanKerry.
Devon Balwit
Merciless
Remember high school, where poor
Mrs. Malinowksi used to ready her door
key four classrooms ahead of time,
pinching it between outstretched thumb
and forefinger, face slowly losing
altitude as she approached the invisible
runway level with her keyhole? Behind
her, a line of scamps followed, hunching
in imitation, invisible keys forward and
waggling, acne-pocked faces smirking
at the freakishness of the old, their own
quirks either still dormant or vigilantly
straightjacketed, knowing each merciless
toward weakness, especially one’s own.
DEVON BALWIT is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. Her recent poetry has found many homes, among them: 13 Myna Birds, Anti-Heroin Chic, Dream Fever Magazine, drylandlit, Dying Dahlia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Journal of Applied Poetics, Leveler, Rat's Ass Review, Rattle, Red Paint Hill Publishing, Referential, The Literary Nest, The NewVerse News, The Yellow Chair, Timberline Review, and Vanilla Sex Magazine.
John L. Stanizzi
Chase
Hartford, Connecticut
1957
Four story walk-up made of painted wood,
drippy brown wood without any gutters,
no back door; just a cut out opening.
I’d make it to that opening each time,
a little muzzy, panting heavily,
deciding on the run which way to go —
downstairs to the oily, fusty cellar,
where cells of the private junk of tenants
lined one wall, and the chuffing furnace-beast
sat heavily on the other, its heart
a flaming square of hotter than hot fire,
or upstairs, where my aunt would be on guard
with a pot of boiling water to toss,
raining on the tough boys who chased me home.
JOHN L. STANIZZI is the author of the chapbook, Windows. His full length collections are Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall Antrim House Books, and After the Bell, and Hallelujah Time! Big Table Publishing Company. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Passages North, The Spoon River Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Connecticut River Review, Freshwater, Boston Literary Review, and many other publications. He lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, Connecticut.
Susan Nisenbaum Becker
Under the Umbrella
Silk flutters of my mother’s cover-up.
August’s flat hot hand pressing on
canvas—she changes my bathing suit
under a line-dried towel’s roughness
brushes away pebbly sand, my head against
her warm—I am entering the world of her warm--
sun-oil and coffee scent,
her brown waves over my eyes.
I in a no words place
somewhere between water and clay
growing slowly into available light,
know little but her bottomless touch
whose source is some great ocean of becoming.
I do not notice the gull swallowing
whole a sandwich shred or its skim
over the tippy raft where my brother and cousins
lean, pump, then back-flip and cannon-ball
into the Sound, insistently horizontal.
Susan Nisenbaum Becker’s poetry has appeared in the Harvard Review, Ibbetson Street, Avatar, Phoebe, Salamander, Comstock Review, Poetry East, Wilderness House Literary Review, Consequence, Lumina, Slipstream, Calyx and Talking Writing among others. She is a playwright, actor and arts organizer for which she has received several Local Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants. She has been awarded residencies at the Banff Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. Her first full-length book of poems, Little Architects of Time and Space, was published by WordTech Communications/Word Poetry in 2013.
C.S.Fuqua
Immigration
Fences rise north and south,
volunteers ready to eliminate
the wretched and tired and hungry
before they have the chance to rest.
For years, words have marred walls
along this neighborhood’s streets,
words that caused cheeks to redden,
others to quiver with laughter,
but they never made news
until the words changed languages,
then they were deemed vulgar,
an attack on common decency.
At school, old and new words collide
at lines where fences would serve well.
C.S. FUQUA’S books include White Trash & Southern ~ Collected Poems ~ Vol. I, Big Daddy’s Fast-Past Gadget, Hush, Puppy! A Southern Fried Tale (children’s picture book), Rise Up (short fiction collection), Wolfshadow (with Robert Edward Graham), The Native American Flute: Myth, History, Craft, The Swing: Poems of Fatherhood, Divorced Dads, and Notes to My Becca, among others. His work has appeared in publications such as Boston Poetry Magazine, Main Street Rag, Pudding, Dark Regions, Iodine, Christian Science Monitor, Cemetery Dance, Bogg, Year's Best Horror Stories XIX, XX and XXI, Slipstream, The Old Farmer's Almanac, The Writer, and Honolulu Magazine.
Joseph Lisowski
The Political Way
You tell lies an' call it life.
No matter what the excuse
you want somethin' more,
somethin' you think you oughta have.
Maybe it's a right
or a better job
a new TV or stereo
a good haircut
a great piece of ass, whatever.
No matter, you don't wanna look
only at what you see in clear light.
So you tell stories an' some of them
are good enough for you to believe
for a while.
JOSEPH LISOWSKI has taught at Duquesne University, Point Park College, The University of the Virgin Islands, J.Sargeant Reynolds CC, Elizabeth City State University, and at the Virginia State Penitentiary. Among his many awards and grants, he received the UNC Board of Governors Teacher of the Year award (2013-2014).
Neil Ellman
Letter Ghost
paste painting by Paul Klee
In an unopened envelope
unread
a ghost of the future
as if it were now
it lives all possibilities
of the eidolic and divine
a message from the past
bills owed coming due
condolences your friend
where have you been
death calls join me
in the darkness
of my translucent skin--
respond if it pleases you
as it pleases me
now
NEIL ELLMAN is a poet from New Jersey. Having been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net, he has published numerous poems, more than 1,000 of which are ekphrastic and written in response to works of modern art, in print and online journals, anthologies and chapbooks throughout the world.
paste painting by Paul Klee
In an unopened envelope
unread
a ghost of the future
as if it were now
it lives all possibilities
of the eidolic and divine
a message from the past
bills owed coming due
condolences your friend
where have you been
death calls join me
in the darkness
of my translucent skin--
respond if it pleases you
as it pleases me
now
NEIL ELLMAN is a poet from New Jersey. Having been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net, he has published numerous poems, more than 1,000 of which are ekphrastic and written in response to works of modern art, in print and online journals, anthologies and chapbooks throughout the world.
Judith Berke 3 poems
Figures of Speech
Wheezing, growling and believe it or not, crackling,
my stuffed-up bronchial tubes
kept me awake.
They even spoke: Ow, they said, How?--
Oh fine, I thought, everybody’s a poet
and wondered what would complain out loud next:
my spine, my tired legs, my feet?
Who says everything in your body is not
speaking, all the time?
What about all those figures of speech
especially about the heart:
“My heart protested,
my heart said yes (or no), my heart sang,”--
can you imagine trying to function
with all that racket?
Let everything be quiet,
I said to my brain
and it was. Except for my brain itself
which never seems to shut up
even if it speaks only in images
I’m supposed to figure out
even without
subtitles, like in a foreign movie.
Wheezing, growling and believe it or not, crackling,
my stuffed-up bronchial tubes
kept me awake.
They even spoke: Ow, they said, How?--
Oh fine, I thought, everybody’s a poet
and wondered what would complain out loud next:
my spine, my tired legs, my feet?
Who says everything in your body is not
speaking, all the time?
What about all those figures of speech
especially about the heart:
“My heart protested,
my heart said yes (or no), my heart sang,”--
can you imagine trying to function
with all that racket?
Let everything be quiet,
I said to my brain
and it was. Except for my brain itself
which never seems to shut up
even if it speaks only in images
I’m supposed to figure out
even without
subtitles, like in a foreign movie.
Traffic
Before I knew it, some wandering wild cells
left my lungs and somehow got into my bones.
Where were the road blocks
to keep them out? The neighboring Crips or Bloods?
“This is not your territory; get outta here,”
they should have said, but no, they,
the bones themselves, let them in. “This is a free country,”
they said, “no closed borders.”
Oh, to be one of those yogis who slow their hearts
and cool their blood and curl up
in a tiny space for days and days, in that state
of suspended animation.
Instead of which I’m as out of touch
with what goes on inside me
as the Senate building is with what goes on inside it--
all those politicians arguing, coming and going--
but then how could I, all by myself,
control those tiny beings
wandering around, doing their damage
inside me, when the earth
can’t control the rumbling and boiling and racking
inside it, when the universe
can’t control the occasional
wayward planet, wobbling, zigzagging, careening out of orbit
or two “white dwarfs,” clocked in a crazy, faster-than-light dance;
or us, it can’t control us,
or all those shooting stars.
Before I knew it, some wandering wild cells
left my lungs and somehow got into my bones.
Where were the road blocks
to keep them out? The neighboring Crips or Bloods?
“This is not your territory; get outta here,”
they should have said, but no, they,
the bones themselves, let them in. “This is a free country,”
they said, “no closed borders.”
Oh, to be one of those yogis who slow their hearts
and cool their blood and curl up
in a tiny space for days and days, in that state
of suspended animation.
Instead of which I’m as out of touch
with what goes on inside me
as the Senate building is with what goes on inside it--
all those politicians arguing, coming and going--
but then how could I, all by myself,
control those tiny beings
wandering around, doing their damage
inside me, when the earth
can’t control the rumbling and boiling and racking
inside it, when the universe
can’t control the occasional
wayward planet, wobbling, zigzagging, careening out of orbit
or two “white dwarfs,” clocked in a crazy, faster-than-light dance;
or us, it can’t control us,
or all those shooting stars.
Sweep
A doctor was reaming out his arteries--
first one, then the other--
the way he reamed out people’s clogged chimneys
all his life (luckily for him
with a vacuum cleaner)
the way the doctors were trying to find a way
to clean out the nodule like a lump of coal
in my lung--
which by rights shouldn’t have been there--
no smoking, good diet, and so on--
which wasn’t fair, wasn’t just,
I thought, just as it wasn’t fair that
the little teenaged sweep in the drawing from 1909
with his top hat and tails, and his broom
was probably dying--
inhaling all that black soot year after year--
and yet how jaunty he looks, how absolutely fine,
as if this was a sketch of his spirit,
of the part of him that said, I am
fine, and whoever believes
in their own death, anyway?
Life isn’t fair, don’t expect justice,
the heart-headed, logical part of your brain says,
but another part—is there a spirit part?--
just doesn’t believe it
and who says the spirit can’t win?
The late Judith Berke's poetry has appeared in many literary magazines including Boston Review, The Antioch Review, The Atlantic, Black Warrior Review, California Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, The Carrell, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, New Letters, New Orleans Review, The New Republic, The Ohio Review, Partisan Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review and Poetry. Burke published two books of poetry, Acting Lessons (Silverfish Press) and White Morning (Wesleyan New Poets, Wesleyan University Press. She was also an actor, dancer and sculptor.
A doctor was reaming out his arteries--
first one, then the other--
the way he reamed out people’s clogged chimneys
all his life (luckily for him
with a vacuum cleaner)
the way the doctors were trying to find a way
to clean out the nodule like a lump of coal
in my lung--
which by rights shouldn’t have been there--
no smoking, good diet, and so on--
which wasn’t fair, wasn’t just,
I thought, just as it wasn’t fair that
the little teenaged sweep in the drawing from 1909
with his top hat and tails, and his broom
was probably dying--
inhaling all that black soot year after year--
and yet how jaunty he looks, how absolutely fine,
as if this was a sketch of his spirit,
of the part of him that said, I am
fine, and whoever believes
in their own death, anyway?
Life isn’t fair, don’t expect justice,
the heart-headed, logical part of your brain says,
but another part—is there a spirit part?--
just doesn’t believe it
and who says the spirit can’t win?
The late Judith Berke's poetry has appeared in many literary magazines including Boston Review, The Antioch Review, The Atlantic, Black Warrior Review, California Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, The Carrell, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, New Letters, New Orleans Review, The New Republic, The Ohio Review, Partisan Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review and Poetry. Burke published two books of poetry, Acting Lessons (Silverfish Press) and White Morning (Wesleyan New Poets, Wesleyan University Press. She was also an actor, dancer and sculptor.
Francine Witte 2 poems
You, Now
and you, years from now, are totally
different people. Now, you are here, fingerprints
on my shoulder, your breath even and sure
as you sleep. At some point, this you
will leave me. Either by death or another
woman, or even from everyday life. Walls
going up around you. Invisible stones. If I could
see them, I would know how to tear them away.
But the truth is, I can’t. You aren’t what
you’ll be to me in the future. Fair enough.
But what do I tell the others? The ones
that will follow behind you. The ones who might
try to love me, but see you written on my face.
See the scars on my fingers from clawing
at invisible stones. What to tell them when
their hands stroke my shoulder and feel you
still there like a freckle, and pretend not to
notice, while I listen to their own stones piling up
around them as they fall into a deep, uneven sleep.
and you, years from now, are totally
different people. Now, you are here, fingerprints
on my shoulder, your breath even and sure
as you sleep. At some point, this you
will leave me. Either by death or another
woman, or even from everyday life. Walls
going up around you. Invisible stones. If I could
see them, I would know how to tear them away.
But the truth is, I can’t. You aren’t what
you’ll be to me in the future. Fair enough.
But what do I tell the others? The ones
that will follow behind you. The ones who might
try to love me, but see you written on my face.
See the scars on my fingers from clawing
at invisible stones. What to tell them when
their hands stroke my shoulder and feel you
still there like a freckle, and pretend not to
notice, while I listen to their own stones piling up
around them as they fall into a deep, uneven sleep.
Sometimes The World
pale and icy as it was
would winterchill us soft-drink style,
freeze us into forgetting about
flight, electricity, breath.
It was as if the sun just stopped,
tired of giving us heat and light.
Find something else to feed you,
it seemed to say. I shine all day,
and you still haven’t cleaned up
after your last silly war.
Meanwhile, gravity pulls at us
needy-child style. Keeps us
from reaching the moon again,
which we could be doing rocketwise
or maybe standing on one another’s
shoulders, human-pyramid style.
FRANCINE WITTE is the author of the poetry chapbooks Only, Not Only (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and First Rain (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), winner of the Pecan Grove Press competition, and the flash fiction chapbooks Cold June (Ropewalk Press), selected by Robert Olen Butler as the winner of the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award, and The Wind Twirl Everything (MuscleHead Press). Her latest poetry chapbook, Not All Fires Burn the Same has just won the Slipstream chapbook contest and will be published in summer, 2016. Her poem “My Dead Florida Mother Meets Gandhi” is the first prize winner of the 2015 Slippery Elm poetry award. She has been nominated seven times for a pushcart prize in poetry and once for fiction. She is an avid iphoneographer. A former English teacher, Francine lives in New York.
pale and icy as it was
would winterchill us soft-drink style,
freeze us into forgetting about
flight, electricity, breath.
It was as if the sun just stopped,
tired of giving us heat and light.
Find something else to feed you,
it seemed to say. I shine all day,
and you still haven’t cleaned up
after your last silly war.
Meanwhile, gravity pulls at us
needy-child style. Keeps us
from reaching the moon again,
which we could be doing rocketwise
or maybe standing on one another’s
shoulders, human-pyramid style.
FRANCINE WITTE is the author of the poetry chapbooks Only, Not Only (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and First Rain (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), winner of the Pecan Grove Press competition, and the flash fiction chapbooks Cold June (Ropewalk Press), selected by Robert Olen Butler as the winner of the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award, and The Wind Twirl Everything (MuscleHead Press). Her latest poetry chapbook, Not All Fires Burn the Same has just won the Slipstream chapbook contest and will be published in summer, 2016. Her poem “My Dead Florida Mother Meets Gandhi” is the first prize winner of the 2015 Slippery Elm poetry award. She has been nominated seven times for a pushcart prize in poetry and once for fiction. She is an avid iphoneographer. A former English teacher, Francine lives in New York.
Sharon A. Foley
The Convent Laundry
We are Sisters masked in pantomime
who shut our lips after the night toll.
Our undergarments dwell in meshed bags,
stacked in the basket on the bathroom floor
ready to be placed in the front loaders
at dawn. All of this I can bear.
But not the slime, slippery as moss,
not the green scum in the sink.
I wash my bra
six basins in a straight row, all of us washing
and six plastic bags
where overnight our bras might grow some mold.
While I’m in bed, the Angel Raphael covers
any thoughts of my singularity. The common
wash is hung to dry by some other angel
in the gated yard. Day’s end,
it’s all returned—the dingy whites,
my striking pink bra.
SHARON FOLEY is a school social worker and a psychotherapist.
She resides in Attleboro, Massachusetts. When she was age 18, she
entered the Sisters of Mercy, a religious order of women and lived as a
nun for twenty-nine years. She left the Mercies in 1994 and is now
writing a book of poems about her early life as a nun. Sharon attends
Poemworks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets led by Barbara
Helfgott-Hyett.
We are Sisters masked in pantomime
who shut our lips after the night toll.
Our undergarments dwell in meshed bags,
stacked in the basket on the bathroom floor
ready to be placed in the front loaders
at dawn. All of this I can bear.
But not the slime, slippery as moss,
not the green scum in the sink.
I wash my bra
six basins in a straight row, all of us washing
and six plastic bags
where overnight our bras might grow some mold.
While I’m in bed, the Angel Raphael covers
any thoughts of my singularity. The common
wash is hung to dry by some other angel
in the gated yard. Day’s end,
it’s all returned—the dingy whites,
my striking pink bra.
SHARON FOLEY is a school social worker and a psychotherapist.
She resides in Attleboro, Massachusetts. When she was age 18, she
entered the Sisters of Mercy, a religious order of women and lived as a
nun for twenty-nine years. She left the Mercies in 1994 and is now
writing a book of poems about her early life as a nun. Sharon attends
Poemworks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets led by Barbara
Helfgott-Hyett.
Maureen Seaton and Mia Leonin a collaboration
The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces
Twelve sisters hoofing it up nightly in the Otherworld:
Who wouldn’t want to be their shoemaker?
Insoles waltzed into a fine gold dust. Twenty-four strappy stilettos
two-stepped to splinters – twelve would-be spinsters limping home.
It’s a fine day when someone tails them, catches
the entire sister act on his cell phone and reports them to Pop.
Royal threads, invisible cloaks, and promises of treasure ensue.
Whose wine is sleepier? Youngest to eldest, the princess dozen,
the lone prince greedy as a mouse at a smorgasbord. Tell me:
how will eleven dance without their sister? Where
three twigs and a goblet can secure a Princess and her kingdom,
eleven rapturous hoofers must resort to contortion, confection, and
cant. When they glide in sequined slippers past sleeping guards
we sweep away their pirouettes, pliés, and glissades.
MAUREEN SEATON’S most recent books are Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations, with Denise Duhamel (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 2013) and Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor, winner of the Sentence Book Award from Firewheel Editions in 2011. Seaton’s books have won the Iowa Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. She teaches at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.
MIA LEONIN is the author of three poetry collections, Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). A fourth collection of poetry, Fable of the Paddle Sack Child will be published by BkMk Press in 2017. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She has written extensively about Spanish-language theater and culture for the Miami Herald, New Times, ArtburstMiami.com, and other publications.
Twelve sisters hoofing it up nightly in the Otherworld:
Who wouldn’t want to be their shoemaker?
Insoles waltzed into a fine gold dust. Twenty-four strappy stilettos
two-stepped to splinters – twelve would-be spinsters limping home.
It’s a fine day when someone tails them, catches
the entire sister act on his cell phone and reports them to Pop.
Royal threads, invisible cloaks, and promises of treasure ensue.
Whose wine is sleepier? Youngest to eldest, the princess dozen,
the lone prince greedy as a mouse at a smorgasbord. Tell me:
how will eleven dance without their sister? Where
three twigs and a goblet can secure a Princess and her kingdom,
eleven rapturous hoofers must resort to contortion, confection, and
cant. When they glide in sequined slippers past sleeping guards
we sweep away their pirouettes, pliés, and glissades.
MAUREEN SEATON’S most recent books are Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations, with Denise Duhamel (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 2013) and Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor, winner of the Sentence Book Award from Firewheel Editions in 2011. Seaton’s books have won the Iowa Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. She teaches at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.
MIA LEONIN is the author of three poetry collections, Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). A fourth collection of poetry, Fable of the Paddle Sack Child will be published by BkMk Press in 2017. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She has written extensively about Spanish-language theater and culture for the Miami Herald, New Times, ArtburstMiami.com, and other publications.
Maureen Seaton and Jaswinder Bolina
Apple in Retrograde
Now, Dolly, my iBoots are leaking as if I'd gone
and stepped on a rivet or a bolt, which I have done.
I've gone and stepped on three tiny rivets and a microbolt,
and my iShorts are bunching, my iGlasses are cracked,
so I walk about the factory as if my actuators
are misbehaving, which they are, for which the shift boss
would have me excommunicated, which isn't the only reason
I called. I wanted to tell you about this and everything,
but the buttons don't work right, the microphone swallows
all I mean to say to you, and I'm increasingly convinced
my obsolescence is inevitable.
Truth is, what used to be intuitive is currently unavailable,
those sincerely-wrought gingersnaps du jour since
gone (or at least appearing so). Help, Dolly, my iPillow
is hard as my iGlock. Do you copy anything
I’m possibly blind to? Shall I unplug again for a frisson
of adrenaline, one jolt of blue juice into my lost
ouija board? Did someone whisper terminator?
I’m still elegant. I’m modern art. Wouldst thou hackest
a da Vinci to make room for a van Gogh?
Meet me in the iSolarium before I’m completely undone,
Dolly. I will limp there if I can at crack of dawn.
MAUREEN SEATON’S most recent books are Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations, with Denise Duhamel (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 2013) and Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor, winner of the Sentence Book Award from Firewheel Editions in 2011. Seaton’s books have won the Iowa Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. She teaches at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
JASWINDER BOLINA is author of Phantom Camera (2013) and Carrier Wave (2007). His recent poems are collected in the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His essays have appeared at The Poetry Foundation dot org and in anthologies including The Norton Reader. He teaches at the University of Miami.
Now, Dolly, my iBoots are leaking as if I'd gone
and stepped on a rivet or a bolt, which I have done.
I've gone and stepped on three tiny rivets and a microbolt,
and my iShorts are bunching, my iGlasses are cracked,
so I walk about the factory as if my actuators
are misbehaving, which they are, for which the shift boss
would have me excommunicated, which isn't the only reason
I called. I wanted to tell you about this and everything,
but the buttons don't work right, the microphone swallows
all I mean to say to you, and I'm increasingly convinced
my obsolescence is inevitable.
Truth is, what used to be intuitive is currently unavailable,
those sincerely-wrought gingersnaps du jour since
gone (or at least appearing so). Help, Dolly, my iPillow
is hard as my iGlock. Do you copy anything
I’m possibly blind to? Shall I unplug again for a frisson
of adrenaline, one jolt of blue juice into my lost
ouija board? Did someone whisper terminator?
I’m still elegant. I’m modern art. Wouldst thou hackest
a da Vinci to make room for a van Gogh?
Meet me in the iSolarium before I’m completely undone,
Dolly. I will limp there if I can at crack of dawn.
MAUREEN SEATON’S most recent books are Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations, with Denise Duhamel (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 2013) and Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor, winner of the Sentence Book Award from Firewheel Editions in 2011. Seaton’s books have won the Iowa Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. She teaches at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
JASWINDER BOLINA is author of Phantom Camera (2013) and Carrier Wave (2007). His recent poems are collected in the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His essays have appeared at The Poetry Foundation dot org and in anthologies including The Norton Reader. He teaches at the University of Miami.
Robert Knox
The Wind Speaks Up
All day so quiet I can hear the pages turning
Rumble of a distant train, till the wind speaks up
The guitars of the mind let the season unwind
Rapture of the sacred heart when the wind speaks up
Defeated by digits, a web of blackouts
I rail at disobedient plastics till the wind speaks up
The gatherings of silence in the greenwood song
The humble bees cling to the blossom, the wind speaks up
I pace the graves of silence where the late birds fledge
The empty nest, the streambed dry till the wind speaks up
ROBERT KNOX is a Boston Globe correspondent, a poet and fiction writer, and the author of a recently published novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Suosso's Lane. A resident of Quincy, Mass., Knox is a contributing editor for the online journal, Verse-Virtual.
Gareth Culshaw
Paddy
Skin ridged, worn away by
His anger. Blood boiled, breath
Steamed. Something deep inside
Constantly burned. He made you
On edge, took your words
And crushed them up in your face.
He was storm loud. Quietness made
Him uneasy, as if the words he
Couldn't say whispered to him.
He was the sort of man who would
Only mention 'love' when eating meat.
Cheekbones sharp as wind blown sails
Knuckles like rolled mountain rubble.
He blew cigarette smoke like there was
A fire inside him. He made everyone
Nervous. Played with our minds
With extra glances and shovel deep stares.
GARETH CULSHAW lives in Wales. He is an aspiring writer who hopes one day to achieve something special with the pen. He has been published in various places across the U.S.A. and U.K.
Skin ridged, worn away by
His anger. Blood boiled, breath
Steamed. Something deep inside
Constantly burned. He made you
On edge, took your words
And crushed them up in your face.
He was storm loud. Quietness made
Him uneasy, as if the words he
Couldn't say whispered to him.
He was the sort of man who would
Only mention 'love' when eating meat.
Cheekbones sharp as wind blown sails
Knuckles like rolled mountain rubble.
He blew cigarette smoke like there was
A fire inside him. He made everyone
Nervous. Played with our minds
With extra glances and shovel deep stares.
GARETH CULSHAW lives in Wales. He is an aspiring writer who hopes one day to achieve something special with the pen. He has been published in various places across the U.S.A. and U.K.
Cindy King 2 poems
Summer’s End
Night walks on its hands,
comes juggling bowling balls
and chainsaws. Night arrives
hissing in a skillet,
smelling of beer and catfish,
has yet to meet the box fan
since its argument with wind.
Night comes when we least expect it,
before crickets and sunsets, before
clean plates, before wine. The
lonely dining room table, night,
heavy with a thought pressed
into the mind. A basin
flecked with rust, as if
the stars gave out.
Not yet June and the perennials
have surrendered. The rosebush,
unpruned, lowers its green fists.
There’s still time to paint
behind the stove, to disinfect
the chandelier, still time to buff
winter from the soles of our feet.
Time to grind grain—no,
grow it. Pulverize, proof,
punch down, rise. Still time
to climb the roof, to raise a glass
to the shingled twin of night.
xmas tree
this is the time
when the lights on the tree
are not enough
too few to cheer the room
too few to keep
hunger in its corner
isnt it time for more sensible magic
though strands of stars
twinkle the needles
stars fade at sunrise
are no more the most heavenly sight
among my godless kin
who have no saviors
but the room is too cold our coats too thin
and isnt it time isnt it time
when the bills are too many
and the dollars too few
isnt it time to light the stove and not the tree
and run hot water for a bath
as we did in our cold cold past
CINDY KING’S work has appeared in Callaloo, North American Review, River Styx, American Literary Review and elsewhere. Her poems can also be heard at weekendamerica.publicradio.org and cortlandreview.com. She has received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Workshop and the Agha Shahid Ali Scholarship in Poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she currently lives in Utah, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Dixie State University.
David Owen Miller
Silence
The silence after: cement brooms between aisles; plastic cups and paper
fans swiffing the tamarind red carpet; a litter of rebuttals in the air.
Silence seems wasteful, a neglect of the rhetoric that marched in right
angles around klieg lights. For what were those questions in their soft
yellow and maroon uniforms marshaled? (When you close your eyes
they linger) (When you close your eyes, they form blue-green bruises
in the darkness)
You core sour apples; you slice them thin as earlobes. They can’t hear
the argument on the tv screen—the hand gestures, the curious mist of
orange hair— you cover the slices in brown sugar and cinnamon,
buttered nutmeg, and drop-spoons of biscuit dough. They form a space
of heat, of precipices, of crags and promontories where logic climbs,
gets lost and drains into the culverts between questions.
The silence before is not an expectation, but a spectacle. A pregame
show where the band dressed in maroon and gold holds its instruments
and performs its formations in place. The audience hears only the
pounding of boots on grass. Do you hear it now? Does it speak to you?
(When you close your eyes, you see Silence at each podium, raising
its fist, shuffling talking points)
The microphone clears its throat; the balloons giggle among the rafters;
issues grab at the edges, ready to be issued.
DAVID OWEN MILLER teaches Latin in South Los Angeles by day and is working toward his M.A. in English/Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University. He lives in Gardena, CA. He has been published in several journals, including Rattle.
Gloria g. Murray 2 poems
Shredding
in a large shopping bag
you have saved expired credit cards
bank statements, mortgages
certificates of marriages, divorces--
all evidence of your existence
until one day you realize
most of it is almost over and why, why
are you holding on…?
so you drag it to the library shredder
and little by little
you shred your life away
with each slice of the blade
gulp of the feeder
you feel yourself disintegrate
certain now your name
is eradicated from all affirmation
once you had a family, a job, a house
a real place in the universe
that might or might not
have mattered
and the machine
is no longer hungry
but well fed, well fed
by all the shredded, irreplaceable
pieces of you
in a large shopping bag
you have saved expired credit cards
bank statements, mortgages
certificates of marriages, divorces--
all evidence of your existence
until one day you realize
most of it is almost over and why, why
are you holding on…?
so you drag it to the library shredder
and little by little
you shred your life away
with each slice of the blade
gulp of the feeder
you feel yourself disintegrate
certain now your name
is eradicated from all affirmation
once you had a family, a job, a house
a real place in the universe
that might or might not
have mattered
and the machine
is no longer hungry
but well fed, well fed
by all the shredded, irreplaceable
pieces of you
What I Want
look,
I will tell you tell you like it really is--
I want to see your eyes go round ‘n’ round
in circles of astonishment
I want to hear you shout: O my lord!
O my god! yes! yes! yes! like a woman
in her moment of surrender
and don’t blame me if I want
to fuck up your head and shake out all
that cotton candy you were fed when you held
your daddy’s hand at that all night carnival
where the brass ring shimmered gold
and the fat lady really sang
and if you never read another poem
I want you to remember
how one, just one, took a gun and blew
out your brains and then, because this poem
is really a decent sort, scrambled about
on its knees, trying to help you put them back
GLORIA g. MURRAY has been writing poetry since age 17 and has been published in various journals and anthologies. One of her poems won First Place in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg award from Poetica Magazine. She is a playwright and two of her one-act plays were performed on Long Island and off-Broadway, one of which was presented in The Art of the One-Act Anthology, New Issues Press, Michigan. She has two self-published poetry books: In My Mother’s House and What I Couldn’t Swallow.
look,
I will tell you tell you like it really is--
I want to see your eyes go round ‘n’ round
in circles of astonishment
I want to hear you shout: O my lord!
O my god! yes! yes! yes! like a woman
in her moment of surrender
and don’t blame me if I want
to fuck up your head and shake out all
that cotton candy you were fed when you held
your daddy’s hand at that all night carnival
where the brass ring shimmered gold
and the fat lady really sang
and if you never read another poem
I want you to remember
how one, just one, took a gun and blew
out your brains and then, because this poem
is really a decent sort, scrambled about
on its knees, trying to help you put them back
GLORIA g. MURRAY has been writing poetry since age 17 and has been published in various journals and anthologies. One of her poems won First Place in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg award from Poetica Magazine. She is a playwright and two of her one-act plays were performed on Long Island and off-Broadway, one of which was presented in The Art of the One-Act Anthology, New Issues Press, Michigan. She has two self-published poetry books: In My Mother’s House and What I Couldn’t Swallow.
Linda M. Fischer 3 poems
Pei Plays the Piano
Her slender hands rest
lightly upon the keyboard--
tuned after years of neglect--
as she dreams of domestic felicity
graced by music of her own making
and labors over an olio
of Americana from “Camptown
Races” to “Jingle Bells.”
Melodies follow me throughout
the house, resonating with the days
they emanated from the upright my father
towed down the Northeast Extension
to bestow upon my children, replaced
in time by the baby grand
that has lain in state until now.
Were Pei my mother’s daughter,
she would be fed the recommended
dose of lessons by the age
of twelve. She would dodge daily
practicing by slinking off
for a game of baseball or riding
her two-wheeler up the street.
She would eschew the middle-class
desideratum of American mothers
to equip their daughters with the social
graces they deemed indispensable.
But the wren has vacated her nest-
bereft of piano—and flitted
from the outskirts of Bangkok to my domicile
where she can make the music she was denied
and begin to reconcile the eternal
differences between mothers and daughters.
Grandson
Finishing his after-school snack he reaches
for his books, and while I busy myself at the sink
withdraws into a knot of concentration, calculus
blotting out the world—a plenitude of calm
sandwiched between the jostle of classrooms
and family intrusions. His quiet presence here,
even as a stillness borne of deep immersion,
breaks into the shape silence takes as my days,
circumscribed by an isolating winter, stretch
to late afternoons unrelieved by a human voice
until he pushes through the front door.
Companionably, we share a common ground
within the oasis of my kitchen, the genetic threads
that bind us as eloquent as language. I still hold
a piece of his heart, as much as he would concede
upon deciding, when very young, that his primary
allegiance should be to his mother rather than
a matriarchal rival—our dual roles conflicting
with his precocious need for hierarchical order.
He leans forward, shoulders hunched over
the table, grappling with the logic of equations,
divining a sequence of steps that will ultimately
yield a solution, an elegant truth—a new order.
Once satisfied, the assignment complete, he tips
back in his chair and stretches, ready to head
for home. In mere months, he leaves for college,
the final stop between childhood and his adult life.
Dutifully carrying plates to the sink, he collects
his things and zippers them into a backpack,
then slips into his coat as he offers me his cheek
for a perfunctory goodbye kiss. I think ahead
to our farewells come fall, his entering a world
of relative peril after sheltering within the cocoon
of a sleepy suburban village—a somewhat shy,
diffident child accustomed to familiar routines.
How did I see my children off without this surge
of anxiety? I watch him as he walks toward
the sidewalk, each step taking him further away.
Let's Talk Turkey
For reasons that are immaterial, this year’s Thanksgiving
will be the first in decades I won’t have to grapple
with a 20-pound bird and all the trimmings. I intend
to confer the prerogative upon my capable daughter
who will clean, pluck, and truss it in her more than
adequate kitchen while I, except for making pies,
will feel like I’m closing in on retirement—but not,
she insists, before she can see how I do the stuffing:
trying to explain it to her, impossible—the recipe
my mother left behind no more than a list of ingredients,
its origins arcane, the proportions a matter of divination.
Although I take the liberty of substituting sour dough
for the loaf of Italian she used, any further deviation
would, for my daughter, be tantamount to heresy.
She importunes me for a dry run well before her debut,
a demonstration of my presumed method—one I can only call
a masterpiece of imprecision. I start by sautéing an onion
while to the bread, somewhat staled and cubed, I toss in a few
handfuls of dry oatmeal, crushed cornflakes, and a small
grated raw potato. We natter amiably as I mix the brew
and hazard another dash of salt and poultry seasoning.
As it happens, one of my sisters has sent me her version
of the maternal recipe, detailing how the three of us
have modified it—emblematic, I surmise, of an evolutionary
process not unlike that of Darwin’s finches adapting to varying
tastes and conditions—incremental changes to the hallowed
family recipe reduced to a mare’s nest of obfuscation,
destined to become unrecognizable in another generation.
LINDA M. FISCHER has poems published or forthcoming in the Aurorean, Ibbetson Street, Iodine Poetry Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Roanoke Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verse-Virtual. Find more poetry and about her chapbooks, Raccoon Afternoons and Glory, on her website: lindamfischer.com.
Michael Minassian 2 poems
Raising Pigeons
My uncle trained racing pigeons,
keeping them in a wooden cage
in the backyard of his Point Pleasant home.
Talking to them softly every morning,
his voice sounded like round cooing
that the birds answered back
in their New Jersey accents,
complaining about the food and cold
and having to fly around in the rain.
But my uncle never got angry
or raised his voice and never
cried in front of the birds, not even
when his wife died of cancer and he took
her body to the cemetery, telling me
in a whisper she would find her way home.
The Knocking at the Gate
This day seems like any other,
watching the hummingbirds
through the kitchen window;
hard work, I imagine,
flapping wings so fast,
they seem to stand mid-air,
hunting for food, spiders and insects,
and the occasional sweet snack.
They hover and dart from plant
to plant, flower to flower,
while I fill my coffee cup
a second time, adding sugar
and cream, dreaming
of gardens on earth
and angels beating
their wings, descending
to deliver a message.
No wonder the women
look so frightened
in the old paintings--
nothing good ever came
from a knock on the door
in the middle of the night,
or the sound of rushing
wings, hovering just above
your bed, time standing
as still as an unwanted caress.
MICHAEL MINASSIAN lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is a contributing editor for
Verse-Virtual, an online journal. His poems have appeared recently in such journals as
The Broken Plate, Exit 7, The Meadow, and Third Wednesday. Amsterdam Press
published a chapbook of his poems entitled The Arboriculturist in 2010.
Linda Lerner
The Same Age
a woman struck by the sight of a badly bruised
mud faced child on The New York Times’ front page
before me, didn’t say anything right away,
a kid who looked like he might have been
in a bad accident, maybe bullied, or abused,
heard stories about this sort of thing happening
all the time, a child who didn’t fit in like
someone she once knew from her school days
a boy pushed face down into the ground
his eye swollen beneath which dried blood
rorschached trauma…what’s in the news sometimes
gets tangled up with what happened in one’s own life,
what one sees and doesn’t do anything about
went unlanguaged in her mind which I heard by
how she stared at his picture, and then
somewhat embarrassed as though she’d been caught
said that she didn’t have her glasses with her and
asked me if it was about….
I read the caption to her: “a five year-old
rescued after an airstrike in Aleppo Syria” without waiting to hear
what she was going to say; the where & what didn’t
seem to matter, said she hoped he’d be all right
that someone would help him; my son is
the same age, she added, five, and
held him closer as she left the coffee shop
LINDA LERNER’S collection, Yes, the Ducks Were Real, was published by NYQ Books (Feb. 2015) as was her previous full-length collection, Takes Guts and Years Sometimes. A chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes, illustrated by Donna Kerness, Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well was published by Lummox Press, Feb. 2014.) She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. In 1995 she and Andrew Gettler began Poets on the Line, (http://www.echony.com/~poets) the first poetry anthology on the Net for which She received two grants for the Nam Vet Poets issue. She lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Laurie Byro 2 poems
Noon Witches
To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself.- Macbeth
I am a crone, my girls know it’s true. We are the witches from Macbeth
I am the ancient who mutters gutturals, they are young enough to hum
labials. I try to explain to them, who are unaware of death, that
in the end, my father was my son. I fill the car with tears for
my absent father. On the sidewalk, heat rises from white cement
and I quote “round about the cauldron go”. My borrowed children
look at me strangely while poking through the bargains on
the table in front of each store. Nothing is perfect, there are flowered
bowls with chips, dog-eared journals. There are lovely paper angels
whose wings have lost some glitter. I point out the velvet masks
from New Orleans, one has a rhinestone owl. I try to talk them
into something that will last, not a latte or salt water taffy.
The summer after my father dies, I have the day on a leash.
The heat and light swirl over me, catching me pink. I am a moth caught
inside a nautilus shell. Ghosts have trapped me in a shankha in their garden.
The Rival
October has done its mischief here already. I own
her bloody handkerchief, stuffed deep in my pocket. I burnish
silver and gold threads to compete with the sun and moon.
Evil lasts forever, this is the month to prove my point.
I arrange the backyard in the pattern of feathers, not suitable
for a goose. Chickadees, sometimes finches--
I’ve shooed the hummingbirds back to Mexico to darn round
poppies of light. Here there is only room for dark flowers.
You already know how this will end. Pine needles blanket
dead mice. Skunks feed off the compost pile, I’ve forbidden
all animals with any grace. Paw prints show how the night
survives. With the right light and makeup, I have convinced
the fools that I am pure, that all princesses are created equal.
LAURIE BYRO has been facilitating Circle of Voices poetry discussion in New Jersey libraries for more than 16 years. She is published widely in University presses in the United States and is recently in an anthology: St. Peter's B List. Byro has garnered more IBPC awards (InterBoard Poetry Community) than any other poet, currently 48. Two books of poetry were published in 2015 Luna by Aldrich Press and Gertrude Stein's Salon and Other Legends by Blue Horse Press. A third collection was published in 2016 Wonder by Little Lantern press out of Wales. She received a 2016 New Jersey Poet's Prize for the first poem in the Stein book and is currently Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library where Circle of Voices continues to meet.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier 3 poems
What You Learn at the Track
Come early.
There will be flamingos.
Befriend the stablehand.
Yes, he is mud mottled,
without silks. No cobalt
or chartreuse allowed in the barn,
but you will learn about gradations--
carob, umber, gingerbread, stone,
you will learn a horse
is so much more than brown.
Reside in his silence at the rail.
He will take note of your face,
wave you onto the backstretch,
let you watch a three-year-old
go all out on a blowout, a filly
certain to break maiden
as soon as she’s sprung
from the gate. Later,
he won’t lay odds, but hands.
Watch him run his fingers
along the braille of her
vellumed skin, decode crinkle
of snip and stripe, flare of star,
ripple and swell of tail, of flank,
stroke the silken pennants of her ears.
Pause at that window, minutes
before the race. Put it on her,
even though nothing is certain
at the track—no handicap,
no program palm slap, no prayer
or chant, no shake up,
no whip or scrub will coax
a front-runner who just won’t run.
Nothing is certain
except the promenade home.
Washout or winner,
no matter,
the stable is fragrant
with oats and molasses,
feed sweet enough to overpower
the stink of the hot shoe,
the stink of hair singe
that clings to the rafters.
Come early.
There will be flamingos.
Befriend the stablehand.
Yes, he is mud mottled,
without silks. No cobalt
or chartreuse allowed in the barn,
but you will learn about gradations--
carob, umber, gingerbread, stone,
you will learn a horse
is so much more than brown.
Reside in his silence at the rail.
He will take note of your face,
wave you onto the backstretch,
let you watch a three-year-old
go all out on a blowout, a filly
certain to break maiden
as soon as she’s sprung
from the gate. Later,
he won’t lay odds, but hands.
Watch him run his fingers
along the braille of her
vellumed skin, decode crinkle
of snip and stripe, flare of star,
ripple and swell of tail, of flank,
stroke the silken pennants of her ears.
Pause at that window, minutes
before the race. Put it on her,
even though nothing is certain
at the track—no handicap,
no program palm slap, no prayer
or chant, no shake up,
no whip or scrub will coax
a front-runner who just won’t run.
Nothing is certain
except the promenade home.
Washout or winner,
no matter,
the stable is fragrant
with oats and molasses,
feed sweet enough to overpower
the stink of the hot shoe,
the stink of hair singe
that clings to the rafters.
Topography
After Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas, 1980
You have come to make sense
of this land, to lie within a canyon
of want and stake a spot of stone
with the weight of your bones.
You have come to plant
your body in this cracked earth,
parched streambed that survives
on the memory of water.
You have come as if this place
could sustain you, retain the whole
of you, the stamp and edge of you,
but Iowa will never be home.
You have come to leave
your impression in the ground,
a reminder of all that remains after
the stripping away of root and seed and soil--
cavern, chronicle, chasm.
After Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas, 1980
You have come to make sense
of this land, to lie within a canyon
of want and stake a spot of stone
with the weight of your bones.
You have come to plant
your body in this cracked earth,
parched streambed that survives
on the memory of water.
You have come as if this place
could sustain you, retain the whole
of you, the stamp and edge of you,
but Iowa will never be home.
You have come to leave
your impression in the ground,
a reminder of all that remains after
the stripping away of root and seed and soil--
cavern, chronicle, chasm.
Solving the Crossword
For Elizabeth
We are new to one another, new to being us
yet old enough to know it always starts like this--
delicious to the point of delirium.
Still, we are more than that
and I’m surprised at all the ways
we fit, even when we don’t,
each difference a study in alchemy, in balance,
in working through instead of out.
On our first flight together I can’t help but remember
airplane rides before you, crosswords
I attempted alone, each puzzle unsolved,
abandoned to the next traveler.
We work on solutions together--
mine our collective, break down
words to fill the emptiness within
rigid black boxes
with the precise mark
of your perfect, graphite script.
CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER is the award winning author of Visionware published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared in the Pintura/Palabra Project-Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, Bridges To/From Cuba, The Antioch Review, The Tishman Review, The Cossack Review, Moon City Review, The Damfino Review, The Collapsar, The Notre Dame Review, The Comstock Review, This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching, The Lavender Review, and others. In 2016 she was awarded a Unity Coalition Educator Leadership Award and was also named a 2017 Francisco R. Walker Teacher of the Year Award nominee. She is a dual-enrollment English instructor for Miami Dade Public Schools, an English professor for Miami Dade College and the Editor-In-Chief of The Orange Island Review. She resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son.
For Elizabeth
We are new to one another, new to being us
yet old enough to know it always starts like this--
delicious to the point of delirium.
Still, we are more than that
and I’m surprised at all the ways
we fit, even when we don’t,
each difference a study in alchemy, in balance,
in working through instead of out.
On our first flight together I can’t help but remember
airplane rides before you, crosswords
I attempted alone, each puzzle unsolved,
abandoned to the next traveler.
We work on solutions together--
mine our collective, break down
words to fill the emptiness within
rigid black boxes
with the precise mark
of your perfect, graphite script.
CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER is the award winning author of Visionware published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared in the Pintura/Palabra Project-Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, Bridges To/From Cuba, The Antioch Review, The Tishman Review, The Cossack Review, Moon City Review, The Damfino Review, The Collapsar, The Notre Dame Review, The Comstock Review, This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching, The Lavender Review, and others. In 2016 she was awarded a Unity Coalition Educator Leadership Award and was also named a 2017 Francisco R. Walker Teacher of the Year Award nominee. She is a dual-enrollment English instructor for Miami Dade Public Schools, an English professor for Miami Dade College and the Editor-In-Chief of The Orange Island Review. She resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son.
Sarah White 2 poems
Mrs. Pegamin
Not her face. Just her name
remains as I wake, and the place--
an upstate New York attic where
secretly I let someone
into my hideout—the husband
of Sadie the maid. I was ten.
Where was the widow,
my mother? I don’t know.
The man and I spoke in code
of what we did—none of it
violent, all of it mild, as these
things go—though it marked me.
It wasn’t him I met last night
but Mrs. Pegamin, who said
I should not write this down
in my native tongue. Nor should
I set the poem close to home.
Not her face. Just her name
remains as I wake, and the place--
an upstate New York attic where
secretly I let someone
into my hideout—the husband
of Sadie the maid. I was ten.
Where was the widow,
my mother? I don’t know.
The man and I spoke in code
of what we did—none of it
violent, all of it mild, as these
things go—though it marked me.
It wasn’t him I met last night
but Mrs. Pegamin, who said
I should not write this down
in my native tongue. Nor should
I set the poem close to home.
What the Sleeper Told Me In the Morning
He said he’d been riding a horse
that bucked--
mane swishing, neck twitching,
defying its harness. Yet he,
the rider, had proven strong,
able to hold the animal
in check. The more I heard,
the better I knew
this man—a teacher,
husband, father
of two bright daughters--
and knew the dream
had fixed an iron bit
in the soft flesh of his mouth.
SARAH WHITE’S most recent poetry collections are The Unknowing Muse (Dos Madres, 2014) and Wars Don’t Happen Anymore (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). A Bend In Time is forthcoming, also from Deerbrook, in 2017. She lives in New York City.
Joyce S. Brown
Goodbye to the Rental House
and to the ugly brick school
across the street with its
beautiful children who
make nests of rust-colored
pine needles, who decorate
the playground bleachers
with ivy, who laugh and shriek
at recess – all but the one boy
who stands by himself and hits
the ground with a stick.
And goodbye to the wall-eyed
crossing guard, to the little
baseball field where fathers
play catch with sons, and men
with no children play croquet.
Goodbye to the tree with
carbuncles like an old man’s
nose, and to the stream where
a pair of mallard float.
Goodbye to dog-walkers,
skate-boarders, cyclists, and to
the trash from the corner store
which sells fast food to lawn
workers who toss the remains
out the windows of their trucks.
And to Billy, the neighbor who
looks like a serial killer, but
plants flowers and vegetables
in his back yard with a lantern
after dark, and to this house
with steep stairs the dog has
fallen down more than once,
and to a year of not cleaning
or caring too much or having
guests, or minding if
the rabbits eat the tulips.
JOYCE S. BROWN lives in Baltimore. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Yankee, Smartish Pace, The Tennessee Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, Passager, The American Scholar, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Commonweal, Off Course, The Maryland Poetry Rreview, The Potomac, and other journals. For 10 years she taught fiction and poetry in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
and to the ugly brick school
across the street with its
beautiful children who
make nests of rust-colored
pine needles, who decorate
the playground bleachers
with ivy, who laugh and shriek
at recess – all but the one boy
who stands by himself and hits
the ground with a stick.
And goodbye to the wall-eyed
crossing guard, to the little
baseball field where fathers
play catch with sons, and men
with no children play croquet.
Goodbye to the tree with
carbuncles like an old man’s
nose, and to the stream where
a pair of mallard float.
Goodbye to dog-walkers,
skate-boarders, cyclists, and to
the trash from the corner store
which sells fast food to lawn
workers who toss the remains
out the windows of their trucks.
And to Billy, the neighbor who
looks like a serial killer, but
plants flowers and vegetables
in his back yard with a lantern
after dark, and to this house
with steep stairs the dog has
fallen down more than once,
and to a year of not cleaning
or caring too much or having
guests, or minding if
the rabbits eat the tulips.
JOYCE S. BROWN lives in Baltimore. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Yankee, Smartish Pace, The Tennessee Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, Passager, The American Scholar, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Commonweal, Off Course, The Maryland Poetry Rreview, The Potomac, and other journals. For 10 years she taught fiction and poetry in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Larissa Shmailo 4 Russian translations
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,
Is not extinguished fully in my soul;
But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:
To trouble you is not my wish at all.
I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,
Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.
I loved you once so gently and sincerely:
God grant another love you thus once more
Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.
I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,
Is not extinguished fully in my soul;
But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:
To trouble you is not my wish at all.
I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,
Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.
I loved you once so gently and sincerely:
God grant another love you thus once more
Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.
June 25, 1939
Arseny Tarkovsky
It's frightening to die, and such a shame to leave
This captivating riffraff that enchants me,
The stuff so dear to poets, so very lovely,
I never celebrated; it somehow wasn't to be.
I loved to come back home at the break of dawn
And shift my things around in half an hour.
I loved the white windowsill, and also the flower,
The carved faceted glass, and also the water,
And the heavens, greenish-azure in their color--
And that I was a poet and a wicked man.
And when every June came with my birthday again
I'd idolize that holiday, bustling
With verses by friends and congratulations from women,
With crystal laughter, and gay glasses clinking
And the lock of that hair, unique, individual
And that kiss, so entirely inevitable.
But now at home it’s all set up differently;
It's June and I no longer have that homesickness.
In this way, life is teaching me patience,
And turbid, my blood now is stirring this birthday,
And a secret anxiety is tormenting me--
What have I done with my great destiny,
Oh my God, what have I done with me!
25 июня 1939 года
Арсений Тарковский
И страшно умереть, и жаль оставить
Всю шушеру пленительную эту,
Всю чепуху, столь милую поэту,
Которую не удалось прославить
Я так любил домой прийти к рассвету,
И в полчаса все вещи переставить,
Еще любил я белый подоконник,
Цветок и воду, и стакан граненый,
И небосвод голубизны зеленой,
И то, что я — поэт и беззаконник.
А если был июнь и день рожденья
Боготворил я праздник суетливый,
Стихи друзей и женщин поздравленья,
Хрустальный смех и звон стекла счастливый,
И завиток волос неповторимый,
И этот поцелуй неотвратимый
Расставлено все в доме по-другому,
Июнь пришел, я не томлюсь по дому,
В котором жизнь меня терпенью учит
И кровь моя мутится в день рожденья,
И тайная меня тревога мучит,--
Что сделал я с высокою судьбою,
О боже мой, что сделал я с собою!
Arseny Tarkovsky
It's frightening to die, and such a shame to leave
This captivating riffraff that enchants me,
The stuff so dear to poets, so very lovely,
I never celebrated; it somehow wasn't to be.
I loved to come back home at the break of dawn
And shift my things around in half an hour.
I loved the white windowsill, and also the flower,
The carved faceted glass, and also the water,
And the heavens, greenish-azure in their color--
And that I was a poet and a wicked man.
And when every June came with my birthday again
I'd idolize that holiday, bustling
With verses by friends and congratulations from women,
With crystal laughter, and gay glasses clinking
And the lock of that hair, unique, individual
And that kiss, so entirely inevitable.
But now at home it’s all set up differently;
It's June and I no longer have that homesickness.
In this way, life is teaching me patience,
And turbid, my blood now is stirring this birthday,
And a secret anxiety is tormenting me--
What have I done with my great destiny,
Oh my God, what have I done with me!
25 июня 1939 года
Арсений Тарковский
И страшно умереть, и жаль оставить
Всю шушеру пленительную эту,
Всю чепуху, столь милую поэту,
Которую не удалось прославить
Я так любил домой прийти к рассвету,
И в полчаса все вещи переставить,
Еще любил я белый подоконник,
Цветок и воду, и стакан граненый,
И небосвод голубизны зеленой,
И то, что я — поэт и беззаконник.
А если был июнь и день рожденья
Боготворил я праздник суетливый,
Стихи друзей и женщин поздравленья,
Хрустальный смех и звон стекла счастливый,
И завиток волос неповторимый,
И этот поцелуй неотвратимый
Расставлено все в доме по-другому,
Июнь пришел, я не томлюсь по дому,
В котором жизнь меня терпенью учит
И кровь моя мутится в день рожденья,
И тайная меня тревога мучит,--
Что сделал я с высокою судьбою,
О боже мой, что сделал я с собою!
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Last Poem
Vladimir Mayakovsky's (July 19,1893 – April 14, 1930) final poem before his suicide. The Oka mentioned is a tributary of the Volga.
It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep.
The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.
I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is cloved.
Love's little boat has crashed on daily life.
We're even, you and I. No need to account
For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.
Уже второй. Должно быть, ты легла.
В ночи Млечпуть серебряной Окою.
Я не спешу, и молниями телеграмм
мне незачем тебя будить и беспокоить.
Как говорят, инцидент исперчен.
Любовная лодка разбилась о быт.
С тобой мы в расчете. И не к чему перечень
взаимных болей, бед и обид.
Ты посмотри, какая в мире тишь.
Ночь обложила небо звездной данью.
В такие вот часы встаешь и говоришь
векам, истории и мирозданью
Vladimir Mayakovsky's (July 19,1893 – April 14, 1930) final poem before his suicide. The Oka mentioned is a tributary of the Volga.
It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep.
The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.
I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is cloved.
Love's little boat has crashed on daily life.
We're even, you and I. No need to account
For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.
Уже второй. Должно быть, ты легла.
В ночи Млечпуть серебряной Окою.
Я не спешу, и молниями телеграмм
мне незачем тебя будить и беспокоить.
Как говорят, инцидент исперчен.
Любовная лодка разбилась о быт.
С тобой мы в расчете. И не к чему перечень
взаимных болей, бед и обид.
Ты посмотри, какая в мире тишь.
Ночь обложила небо звездной данью.
В такие вот часы встаешь и говоришь
векам, истории и мирозданью
Acrostic poem on the name of Nikolai Gumilev’s wife, Anna Akhmatova. Translation received honorable mention in the Compass Award competition on Gumilyev, 2011.
Acrostic
Addis Ababa, city of roses.
Near the bank of transparent streams,
No earthly devas brought you here,
A diamond, amidst gloomy gorges.
Armidin garden … There a pilgrim
Keeps his oath of obscure love
(Mind, we all bow before him),
And the roses cloy, the roses red.
There, full of deceit and venom,
Ogles some gaze into the soul,
Via forests of tall sycamores,
And alleyways of dusky planes.
Акростих
Аддис-Абеба, город роз.
На берегу ручьёв прозрачных,
Небесный див тебя принес,
Алмазной, средь ущелий мрачных.
Армидин сад… Там пилигрим
Хранит обет любви неясной
(Мы все склоняемся пред ним),
А розы душны, розы красны.
Там смотрит в душу чей-то взор,
Отравы полный и обманов,
В садах высоких сикомор,
Аллеях сумрачных платанов.
LARISSA SHMAILO’S work appears in Measure for Measure (Everyman's Library / Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Perigee / Penguin Putnam), and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press). Her poetry collections are #Medusa’s Country (forthcoming from MadHat Press), #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), and the chapbooks A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press) and Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks). Her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew); tracks are available from Spotify, iTunes, Muze, and Amazon. Larissa edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and translated Victory over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's celebrated reconstruction of the first Futurist opera; the libretto has been used for productions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian, and the Garage Museum of Moscow. Shmailo has also been a translator on the Russian Bible for the American Bible Society. Her novel, Patient Women, is now available from Amazon, BN.com, and BlazeVOX [books]. Visit her website at www.larissashmailo.com
Acrostic
Addis Ababa, city of roses.
Near the bank of transparent streams,
No earthly devas brought you here,
A diamond, amidst gloomy gorges.
Armidin garden … There a pilgrim
Keeps his oath of obscure love
(Mind, we all bow before him),
And the roses cloy, the roses red.
There, full of deceit and venom,
Ogles some gaze into the soul,
Via forests of tall sycamores,
And alleyways of dusky planes.
Акростих
Аддис-Абеба, город роз.
На берегу ручьёв прозрачных,
Небесный див тебя принес,
Алмазной, средь ущелий мрачных.
Армидин сад… Там пилигрим
Хранит обет любви неясной
(Мы все склоняемся пред ним),
А розы душны, розы красны.
Там смотрит в душу чей-то взор,
Отравы полный и обманов,
В садах высоких сикомор,
Аллеях сумрачных платанов.
LARISSA SHMAILO’S work appears in Measure for Measure (Everyman's Library / Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Perigee / Penguin Putnam), and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press). Her poetry collections are #Medusa’s Country (forthcoming from MadHat Press), #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), and the chapbooks A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press) and Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks). Her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew); tracks are available from Spotify, iTunes, Muze, and Amazon. Larissa edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and translated Victory over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's celebrated reconstruction of the first Futurist opera; the libretto has been used for productions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian, and the Garage Museum of Moscow. Shmailo has also been a translator on the Russian Bible for the American Bible Society. Her novel, Patient Women, is now available from Amazon, BN.com, and BlazeVOX [books]. Visit her website at www.larissashmailo.com
Alexander Ulanov translated by Alex Cigale
3 poems translated from Russian
Smoke with its odor of mandarins and of frozen honey. The sunset lies hidden at the boundaries of autumn. The rain refuses to bow down and kneel, and so stays behind in the road, which sticks to your feet, the way windows stick to your eyes. Don’t be afraid to linger, don’t be afraid to break bread.
Why, is it halftime already? Weeping never departs with the person. Past the crows, into the book’s suburbs, like flames leaping from the fire, shake the fish off yourself, let them think they exist, those flakes of silence.
The centaur shoots an arrow, but in hitting the target lies its failure. And Taurus contains the infinitude of the ribs of ebony Cancer, at its center, the wrist’s pulsar.
Greetings – some hail the darkness, others the fire. Each who arrives remains here, often unaware of it. He is not addressed with questions, but listened to. He remains and dissolves in the air, open to all sides, toward the ocean, which does not require a name, toward all that inhabit the forest path, toward the roots of the candle on the shore of the wild rose bush, toward the snow that is wandering at the evening windows. And a gaze is more patient than the grasses, and at night, through the moon and the sea within the eyes, the sun’s rays are reflected.
Waiting has no boss and no owner; these are simultaneous windows.
****
Why, is it halftime already? Weeping never departs with the person. Past the crows, into the book’s suburbs, like flames leaping from the fire, shake the fish off yourself, let them think they exist, those flakes of silence.
The centaur shoots an arrow, but in hitting the target lies its failure. And Taurus contains the infinitude of the ribs of ebony Cancer, at its center, the wrist’s pulsar.
Greetings – some hail the darkness, others the fire. Each who arrives remains here, often unaware of it. He is not addressed with questions, but listened to. He remains and dissolves in the air, open to all sides, toward the ocean, which does not require a name, toward all that inhabit the forest path, toward the roots of the candle on the shore of the wild rose bush, toward the snow that is wandering at the evening windows. And a gaze is more patient than the grasses, and at night, through the moon and the sea within the eyes, the sun’s rays are reflected.
Waiting has no boss and no owner; these are simultaneous windows.
****
Expectation – at rest and in motion. At rest – into the vibrating vortex, the black star, between the desiccated specks of tea leaves. In motion – in a field of dust and snow, into the city of transparent houses, into the white-streaked sky. Leaning upon, supporting, emitting. Gathering, pushing off, revolving. Of two sides that are similar, how is it possible to tell which side is the other? It is thus that a branch becomes your own. And through the slow coursing of the air, in the wide above, the southern stars come into view.
****
Perhaps you will do this tomorrow without me? Yes, certainly.
The voice shakes itself off over the wire. A leaf that had become a
target for a heavy raindrop. A garter snake that had been approached nearer
than its body length. The voice is extinguished. A simple thing to offer
freedom, and a difficult thing to grant it. One must learn to clench and
unclench the fingers without remembering. To depart there where freedom
itself grants it.
The first movement – coming towards you. To learn how to make a full
stop, that is also a movement. To leave freedom is to grant freedom. To depart
there, where freedom grants.
Otherwise – everything is repeated. A pendulum, gradually halted by
friction. There is but one way toward, and a very many paths not away from,
that simply go someplace else. A period is almost a probable death sentence.
Toward – away from – toward – away from – life, but of a pendulum. One
cannot depart from the straight and narrow, only toggle it from side to side,
gazing with melancholy past the edges. There are – triangles, fractured,
parabolas, various hypocycloids. Linea – a line, is also a line of text.
The mussel attaches itself to a rock, a crocodile can only run in a
straight line, the dolphin’s expanse is formed of water.
ALEXANDER ULANOV (1963) lives in Samara and works at Samara State Aerospace University. His books of poetry are Wind Direction (1990), Dry Light (1993), Waves and Ladders (1997), Displacements + (2007), Methods of Seeing (2012), and the book of prose Between We (2006). He has written more than 350 articles and book reviews about contemporary literature. He received the Andrey Bely prize for his criticism (2009) and was short-listed in the prose category in 2007, the same year he was a CEC ArtsLink Fellow at the IWP in Iowa. He is also himself a translator, of contemporary American poets, Dylan Thomas, and Paul Valery. Alex Cigale’s other translations of Ulanov’s prose poems have appeared in Bat City Review, Big Bridge, Fourteen Hills, The Manhattan Review, Plume, Southeast Review, Talisman, and Washington Square Review.
ALEX CIGALE’S own English-language poems have appeared in Colorado Review, The Common Online, Review, and The Literary Review, and his translations in Kenyon Review Online, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, PEN America, Plume, TriQuarterly, Two Lines, and World Literature Today. From 2011 until 2013, he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and is currently a Lecturer in Russian Literature at CUNY-Queens College. A 2015 NEA Literary Translation Fellow for his work on the poet Mikhail Eremin of the St. Petersburg “philological school”. He edited the Spring 2015 Russia Issue of Atlanta Poetry, blogging about it on Best American Poetry. His Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings is forthcoming in Northwestern University Press’s World Classics series in February 2017. "2015 NEA" link to https://www.arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/alex-cigale, for "Russian Absurd" link to http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/russian-absurd
The voice shakes itself off over the wire. A leaf that had become a
target for a heavy raindrop. A garter snake that had been approached nearer
than its body length. The voice is extinguished. A simple thing to offer
freedom, and a difficult thing to grant it. One must learn to clench and
unclench the fingers without remembering. To depart there where freedom
itself grants it.
The first movement – coming towards you. To learn how to make a full
stop, that is also a movement. To leave freedom is to grant freedom. To depart
there, where freedom grants.
Otherwise – everything is repeated. A pendulum, gradually halted by
friction. There is but one way toward, and a very many paths not away from,
that simply go someplace else. A period is almost a probable death sentence.
Toward – away from – toward – away from – life, but of a pendulum. One
cannot depart from the straight and narrow, only toggle it from side to side,
gazing with melancholy past the edges. There are – triangles, fractured,
parabolas, various hypocycloids. Linea – a line, is also a line of text.
The mussel attaches itself to a rock, a crocodile can only run in a
straight line, the dolphin’s expanse is formed of water.
ALEXANDER ULANOV (1963) lives in Samara and works at Samara State Aerospace University. His books of poetry are Wind Direction (1990), Dry Light (1993), Waves and Ladders (1997), Displacements + (2007), Methods of Seeing (2012), and the book of prose Between We (2006). He has written more than 350 articles and book reviews about contemporary literature. He received the Andrey Bely prize for his criticism (2009) and was short-listed in the prose category in 2007, the same year he was a CEC ArtsLink Fellow at the IWP in Iowa. He is also himself a translator, of contemporary American poets, Dylan Thomas, and Paul Valery. Alex Cigale’s other translations of Ulanov’s prose poems have appeared in Bat City Review, Big Bridge, Fourteen Hills, The Manhattan Review, Plume, Southeast Review, Talisman, and Washington Square Review.
ALEX CIGALE’S own English-language poems have appeared in Colorado Review, The Common Online, Review, and The Literary Review, and his translations in Kenyon Review Online, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, PEN America, Plume, TriQuarterly, Two Lines, and World Literature Today. From 2011 until 2013, he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and is currently a Lecturer in Russian Literature at CUNY-Queens College. A 2015 NEA Literary Translation Fellow for his work on the poet Mikhail Eremin of the St. Petersburg “philological school”. He edited the Spring 2015 Russia Issue of Atlanta Poetry, blogging about it on Best American Poetry. His Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings is forthcoming in Northwestern University Press’s World Classics series in February 2017. "2015 NEA" link to https://www.arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/alex-cigale, for "Russian Absurd" link to http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/russian-absurd
Sonia Greenfield 4 poems
Museum of Love
Things were different
before The War, I guess.
An exhibit had photos
of something called kissing,
and the interactive center
let you experience what they
called an embrace. I tried it
with a docent who smelled
of shampoo, though I did not
understand which way to turn
my head. It must have been
hard work back then. I admit
I got a little sad in the gallery
of drawings done by children
for their mothers. Those
crudely scrawled hearts
in shades of pink and scarlet
made my eyes smart. One
room held books filled
with love poems, with lines
like love is the shadow self
of fear/though infused with light
its paradox the ache/that makes
us hold the word ‘heart’/ in our
mouths sometimes/afraid to swallow.
I didn’t get it since so much
poetry, a dead art anyway,
depended on historical context.
When I left, they were debuting
the marriage wing, and I heard
a peel of bells so sweet they
made my teeth ache, a sound
that hung in my ears
for hours afterwards.
Things were different
before The War, I guess.
An exhibit had photos
of something called kissing,
and the interactive center
let you experience what they
called an embrace. I tried it
with a docent who smelled
of shampoo, though I did not
understand which way to turn
my head. It must have been
hard work back then. I admit
I got a little sad in the gallery
of drawings done by children
for their mothers. Those
crudely scrawled hearts
in shades of pink and scarlet
made my eyes smart. One
room held books filled
with love poems, with lines
like love is the shadow self
of fear/though infused with light
its paradox the ache/that makes
us hold the word ‘heart’/ in our
mouths sometimes/afraid to swallow.
I didn’t get it since so much
poetry, a dead art anyway,
depended on historical context.
When I left, they were debuting
the marriage wing, and I heard
a peel of bells so sweet they
made my teeth ache, a sound
that hung in my ears
for hours afterwards.
The Miami Beach Museum of Water
I’m sure if we had poets, they’d be writing about the swallowing of Miami Beach
by the sea. – Bruce Mowry
Volunteers say take a laminated map. Depending
on the moon’s pull, you can canoe along canals
or go under. The canals run through former hotel
lobbies, walls striped with shifting water lines or past
second-floor condo windows where rats float
in the middle of foam mattresses, but you’re limited
by what’s seeable on the surface. I take a tank and mask
then descend with light and fins to minnow through
the old bikini shop where suits on hangars are thick
with algae, and mob-faced groupers make change
at the register. You can slip past a graveyard
of drowned palm trees moping like the ghosts
of surfers. At the Cuban restaurant abandoned
mid-marriage of beans and rice, salt-corroded iron
frying pans stick to their burners, but I spend time
in the parking lot rifling glove boxes like that Escalade
encrusted by small colonies of corral. Nothing much
there but registration, two lipsticks, small revolver
and an empty tube of sunscreen.
Museum of the Elephant
Thousands of figurines, donated
from China, as small and white
as thumb bones, carved from
thousands of tusks, carved from
the faces of creatures carved
from the thigh meat of God and set
on land where the taking began.
They're all that is left, and slim
cigarette holders, elaborate hair
combs, and chopsticks inscribed
with Chinese figures for wealth
and fecundity. All in well-lit cases
lining a long hall. Martha lives
in her own climate-controlled room
named, as she is, after the last
passenger pigeon pinned to a perch
in the Smithsonian. It must be
hard to be the last of anything.
Her gray skin is a parchment telling
the story of falling, trunk curled
up with armature. The man
who made Martha’s eyes is a master.
It's like they swallow the light
and hand it back to you, wholly new,
something in her stare reflecting
how years pass, which is amazing
since they're only made
of glass.
Museum of the Rapture
Some galleries were just rooms
reproduced to demonstrate how the leaving
happened half-way through tea or doing
taxes. Here and there a chair
overturned, the crib a rectangle
of held breath, the front door swung
open and left that way though they say
this abandonment is a happier occasion
for the disappeared. For most of us
the museum is like Tuol Sleng in Phnom Phenh
where photos of the dead line the walls, but here
it is photos of our living, some even show
the moment of ascension, the uplift
so fast we see the top halves of our children
gone from the frame, their blurred legs
the only parts dangling into view.
Still, we come and wear the gloss away
from prints when our fingers reach to touch
what we— the left behind and already
dead— have lost.
SONIA GREENFIELD was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and earned an MFA from the University of Washington and an MPW from the University of Southern California. Author of poetry chapbook Circus Gravitas (2014) and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared widely, including in 2010 Best American Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, The Massachusetts Review, Meridian, and Rattle. Her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, California, where she teaches writing at USC and directs the Southern California Poetry Festival. Vita, tidbits, and more on her website: soniagreenfield.com.
Shiva Bhusal
A Promise, Broken
Looking at the stars above our head and
touching the sea with our hands,
we had promised to sail across together.
You took our promise as a child’s act and
left me alone on the seashore.
These days, I look at the white ships
bidding me goodbye, until they disappear
from my sight. I stare at the moon and
wait for the turn of the tides.
SHIVA BHUSAL is a Nepali writer and translator. His works have been published in the Kathmandu, the New Asian Writings, Soul-lit, Writer's Asylum and the South-lit. He currently lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Looking at the stars above our head and
touching the sea with our hands,
we had promised to sail across together.
You took our promise as a child’s act and
left me alone on the seashore.
These days, I look at the white ships
bidding me goodbye, until they disappear
from my sight. I stare at the moon and
wait for the turn of the tides.
SHIVA BHUSAL is a Nepali writer and translator. His works have been published in the Kathmandu, the New Asian Writings, Soul-lit, Writer's Asylum and the South-lit. He currently lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
SoFloPoJo is a labor of love by: Associate Editors: Elisa Albo Don Burns David Colodney Deborah DeNicola Gary Kay Sarah Kersey Stacie M. Kiner Barbra Nightingale Sally Naylor Susannah Simpson Meryl Stratford Patricia Whiting Francine Witte
Reviewers: Freesia McKee and Michael Hettich
Managing Editor & C0-Publisher
Michael Mackin O'Mara
[email protected]
Founder & Co-Publisher
Lenny DellaRocca
[email protected]
Reviewers: Freesia McKee and Michael Hettich
Managing Editor & C0-Publisher
Michael Mackin O'Mara
[email protected]
Founder & Co-Publisher
Lenny DellaRocca
[email protected]