Issue 4 February 2017
Barbra Nightingale, Editor
Poets in this issue: Terese Svoboda Quinn Neubert Stan Marcus David Colodney Christine Jackson Akor Emmanuel Oche Sarah Frances Moran Josh Fernandez Brendan Walsh Patricia Lieb Alan Catlin George Held Peter Schmitt J. Tarwood Jean Monahan Richard Kostelentz Judith Berke Ian Ganassi John Childrey Indran Amirthanaygam Miriam Levine Gregg Shapiro Jospeh Dante Laurie Byro Vicki Iorio Linda Nemec Foster Ananny Dasgupta Ryn Holmes Nicholas Finch Daniel Edward Moore Dick Allen Stephen Reilly Doug Rampseck Veronica Schuder
Seated Nude, color markers on reclaimed paper by Ray Neubert
Terese Svoboda 2 poems
You're Not Happy
But who said the big H could be embraced,
like some panda in a tree. Claws and teeth,
the animal No that women resort to,
groin-kicks and screams. I saw my mother
puff up to protest her own cruelty: twice
human or twice less? I was not a predator like her
but tied, leashed in knots to the maternal.
Consanguinity, there is beauty in that,
but it's all made of blood. On a branch
clearly visible in a leafless season sits Happiness,
so high you get dizzy in your worship,
then you never look up, and Mom wins.
But who said the big H could be embraced,
like some panda in a tree. Claws and teeth,
the animal No that women resort to,
groin-kicks and screams. I saw my mother
puff up to protest her own cruelty: twice
human or twice less? I was not a predator like her
but tied, leashed in knots to the maternal.
Consanguinity, there is beauty in that,
but it's all made of blood. On a branch
clearly visible in a leafless season sits Happiness,
so high you get dizzy in your worship,
then you never look up, and Mom wins.
Bespoke Rumpus
A bird, yes it is, assaults spring
with its thorax. You can see it:
a quarrel of muscle, a whistle-fog
of cold air, the twitter of body
a bug or a frog foolishly answers
with personalized yearning:
green, green, waxing as if they
owned sex but advertising
themselves as breakfast.
The bird stops, nervous about whatever's
being danced two lawns over:
faux stroll or pounce?
The competitive staccato,
all info like Bach, streaks
the sun-blinded sky, cheers
the creature about to be eaten.
A recent Guggenheim fellow, TERESE SVOBODA’S seventh book of poetry, Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, was published by Eyewear (UK) in October. Her biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, was published last February.
A bird, yes it is, assaults spring
with its thorax. You can see it:
a quarrel of muscle, a whistle-fog
of cold air, the twitter of body
a bug or a frog foolishly answers
with personalized yearning:
green, green, waxing as if they
owned sex but advertising
themselves as breakfast.
The bird stops, nervous about whatever's
being danced two lawns over:
faux stroll or pounce?
The competitive staccato,
all info like Bach, streaks
the sun-blinded sky, cheers
the creature about to be eaten.
A recent Guggenheim fellow, TERESE SVOBODA’S seventh book of poetry, Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, was published by Eyewear (UK) in October. Her biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, was published last February.
Quinn Neubert 2 poems
Brave
I wish I could be brave like the sun,
paving a path across the sky,
shedding brilliance to all below.
But I am not.
I follow like the moon,
Like a child seeing how small my slippered feet are compared to the footsteps
you left in the snow.
I wish I was brave like the rain,
crashing and falling,
exploding on the ground in a grand crescendo,
only to do it again.
I suppose I am like the rain,
but in the sense that I am the cloud’s pocket change,
dropped and forgotten only to sulk back soon.
I wish I could be brave like you,
like a firm handshake and a witty phrase.
Instead my hands are tied behind my back, and I repeat my words for hours
on end,
why are you so stupid, stupid, stupid?
If I was brave like you I would be cruel and subtle,
bitter honey and sweet sarcasm
I would be loud and unforgettable.
But I am not brave like you,
not brave like the sun or the rain.
I am brave like me,
like quirk and flounce and cinnamon scones,
like subtle references,
like sheepish, blushing, long-coming truths.
I am brave because I am quiet,
because I am silk and satire,
because I am the syrup left at the bottom of your teacup.
The sugar you never did enjoy.
I wish I could be brave like the sun,
paving a path across the sky,
shedding brilliance to all below.
But I am not.
I follow like the moon,
Like a child seeing how small my slippered feet are compared to the footsteps
you left in the snow.
I wish I was brave like the rain,
crashing and falling,
exploding on the ground in a grand crescendo,
only to do it again.
I suppose I am like the rain,
but in the sense that I am the cloud’s pocket change,
dropped and forgotten only to sulk back soon.
I wish I could be brave like you,
like a firm handshake and a witty phrase.
Instead my hands are tied behind my back, and I repeat my words for hours
on end,
why are you so stupid, stupid, stupid?
If I was brave like you I would be cruel and subtle,
bitter honey and sweet sarcasm
I would be loud and unforgettable.
But I am not brave like you,
not brave like the sun or the rain.
I am brave like me,
like quirk and flounce and cinnamon scones,
like subtle references,
like sheepish, blushing, long-coming truths.
I am brave because I am quiet,
because I am silk and satire,
because I am the syrup left at the bottom of your teacup.
The sugar you never did enjoy.
Thunder and Rain
She talks like thunder,
and sings like rain.
Like dripping from faucets,
spilling over dirtied bath rims
pooling on the floor and staining shirtsleeves.
Like melancholy, sleepy and sweet like syrup.
She makes me as honest as the sun shines,
and as eager as the moon follows behind.
She is cold to the touch and warm to the taste.
Sugar and saffron, mandarin and musk.
She slips through your fingers like water,
seemingly blue and clear, but her depths hide wonders yet to explore.
Her fingers are long, fine-boned and elegant like a sparrow’s,
and her clean crescent fingernails tap the empty space between the spilt in her
lips.
Her cupid’s bow
has
struck
me
through my chest to my heart,
which is bleeding red but still beating.
I have sealed my heart in an envelope with her address,
and I don’t care if she never opens her mailbox,
or leaves me on her counter, bleeding and raw,
as long as I’m with her.
The girl who talks like thunder,
and sings like rain
is the one to whom I belong.
QUINN NEUBERT is 14 years old and lives in Los Angeles, California. She is in the ninth grade at the Westridge School for Girls. She has had her work recognized at YALLWEST, where she won first place in the Teen Writing Competition for her short story "Burn".
She talks like thunder,
and sings like rain.
Like dripping from faucets,
spilling over dirtied bath rims
pooling on the floor and staining shirtsleeves.
Like melancholy, sleepy and sweet like syrup.
She makes me as honest as the sun shines,
and as eager as the moon follows behind.
She is cold to the touch and warm to the taste.
Sugar and saffron, mandarin and musk.
She slips through your fingers like water,
seemingly blue and clear, but her depths hide wonders yet to explore.
Her fingers are long, fine-boned and elegant like a sparrow’s,
and her clean crescent fingernails tap the empty space between the spilt in her
lips.
Her cupid’s bow
has
struck
me
through my chest to my heart,
which is bleeding red but still beating.
I have sealed my heart in an envelope with her address,
and I don’t care if she never opens her mailbox,
or leaves me on her counter, bleeding and raw,
as long as I’m with her.
The girl who talks like thunder,
and sings like rain
is the one to whom I belong.
QUINN NEUBERT is 14 years old and lives in Los Angeles, California. She is in the ninth grade at the Westridge School for Girls. She has had her work recognized at YALLWEST, where she won first place in the Teen Writing Competition for her short story "Burn".
Stan Marcus
The Devastation of Premises
It’s a pretext for saying something about my history--
like the bird bric-a-brac that was shattered
and glued together by my stepbrother who assumed
it had something to do with me. There were
many such items that were swallowed up by the
hole under our house, and some nights
when the car horns penetrate through
the symbols, I can hear the mud sucking
like a child with a lollipop and my stepbrother
creeping up behind me. He was a gatherer
of pieces, a decent person who returned
the spirit of the object but not the object itself.
Nothing was mine because I declared nothing.
I headed west over the border, not the border
of territories but the border of the possessor
where something as skintight as a childhood
can be stripped clean. The bones under the night table
that clacked when the floor adjusted its position
I left for others to clean up, never considering
that what was stationary for so long was discardable.
I returned on a cold winter morning, quilted
and wrapped up in nylon with a satchel
stuffed with coordinates. I sought out a tree,
a wall, the lineaments of an impulse. The
bald-headed figure I shadowed across the alley
left a trail of glass. I stepped over the reflections,
the glare passing me like a breeze, as if I were
impervious to light. It led to a garage where
I remembered one morning when we kids
investigated the bird organs of a girl.
“This is my life,” I say. I’ve waited for
the squirrels to intercede, but they were not
interested. The gray-haired balloons
that my stepbrother found uncollectible
have a way of responding but not bursting.
They float obstinately through my dreams
and become trite figures I have to ignore.
The stacks of provisions he collected
I never considered until I stood among them.
Somewhere there were fragments, like moon stones,
I shared spaces with. I have to negotiate
an intimacy with them because they reflect
nothing. The regimens of my earlier days when
the world was finger-counted and I could identify
the lilac bush in my backyard as a demarcation
not to be violated might not have existed. Now,
there is only this foreign country where
the residents speak a language I can understand.
STAN MARCUS’S poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Stand, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, College English, Poetry East, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, North Dakota Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Permafrost, GW Review, Grasslimb, Ironwood and Mona Van Duyn’s Perspective, The Pedestal Magazine and New Verse News. Two of his poems were anthologized in For a Living: The Poetry of Work. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
It’s a pretext for saying something about my history--
like the bird bric-a-brac that was shattered
and glued together by my stepbrother who assumed
it had something to do with me. There were
many such items that were swallowed up by the
hole under our house, and some nights
when the car horns penetrate through
the symbols, I can hear the mud sucking
like a child with a lollipop and my stepbrother
creeping up behind me. He was a gatherer
of pieces, a decent person who returned
the spirit of the object but not the object itself.
Nothing was mine because I declared nothing.
I headed west over the border, not the border
of territories but the border of the possessor
where something as skintight as a childhood
can be stripped clean. The bones under the night table
that clacked when the floor adjusted its position
I left for others to clean up, never considering
that what was stationary for so long was discardable.
I returned on a cold winter morning, quilted
and wrapped up in nylon with a satchel
stuffed with coordinates. I sought out a tree,
a wall, the lineaments of an impulse. The
bald-headed figure I shadowed across the alley
left a trail of glass. I stepped over the reflections,
the glare passing me like a breeze, as if I were
impervious to light. It led to a garage where
I remembered one morning when we kids
investigated the bird organs of a girl.
“This is my life,” I say. I’ve waited for
the squirrels to intercede, but they were not
interested. The gray-haired balloons
that my stepbrother found uncollectible
have a way of responding but not bursting.
They float obstinately through my dreams
and become trite figures I have to ignore.
The stacks of provisions he collected
I never considered until I stood among them.
Somewhere there were fragments, like moon stones,
I shared spaces with. I have to negotiate
an intimacy with them because they reflect
nothing. The regimens of my earlier days when
the world was finger-counted and I could identify
the lilac bush in my backyard as a demarcation
not to be violated might not have existed. Now,
there is only this foreign country where
the residents speak a language I can understand.
STAN MARCUS’S poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Stand, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, College English, Poetry East, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, North Dakota Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Permafrost, GW Review, Grasslimb, Ironwood and Mona Van Duyn’s Perspective, The Pedestal Magazine and New Verse News. Two of his poems were anthologized in For a Living: The Poetry of Work. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
David Colodney
Waters Part Us
(for Jose Fernandez, 1992-2016)
You were given a book of the story of your life
but you read the end first. You believed the world
a stage but one not big enough for you, so you exited
before the first act was over. You knew
how it would end, Jose. You knew some people
aren’t meant to be with us long, so every “Jose Day”
at the ballpark turned into a celebration of your life
but also a countdown in reverse. One day we
might see that certain circularity of your life,
how you fled Cuba on a makeshift raft
drifting days through those ocean waters,
diving in to save your mother when she slipped,
always one with the waves, like the one that carried
you away. Maybe as we grow old and you stay
young, we’ll find the missing piece
of your pitcher’s mound, where the chunks
of brown clay lifted off as if they had wings
blown along by mourning sea breezes to remain
part of you. Maybe we’ll understand you had to read
the end first. You couldn’t wait to see how your story would play out.
DAVID COLODNEY holds an MFA from Converse College, where he served as poetry editor of South85, the literary journal of the Converse MFA program. His poetry has appeared or will appear in St. Petersburg Review, California Quarterly, the New York School and Diaspora issue of Valley Voices, and Gyroscope Review. He lives in Boynton Beach, Florida with his wife, three sons, and golden retriever.
(for Jose Fernandez, 1992-2016)
You were given a book of the story of your life
but you read the end first. You believed the world
a stage but one not big enough for you, so you exited
before the first act was over. You knew
how it would end, Jose. You knew some people
aren’t meant to be with us long, so every “Jose Day”
at the ballpark turned into a celebration of your life
but also a countdown in reverse. One day we
might see that certain circularity of your life,
how you fled Cuba on a makeshift raft
drifting days through those ocean waters,
diving in to save your mother when she slipped,
always one with the waves, like the one that carried
you away. Maybe as we grow old and you stay
young, we’ll find the missing piece
of your pitcher’s mound, where the chunks
of brown clay lifted off as if they had wings
blown along by mourning sea breezes to remain
part of you. Maybe we’ll understand you had to read
the end first. You couldn’t wait to see how your story would play out.
DAVID COLODNEY holds an MFA from Converse College, where he served as poetry editor of South85, the literary journal of the Converse MFA program. His poetry has appeared or will appear in St. Petersburg Review, California Quarterly, the New York School and Diaspora issue of Valley Voices, and Gyroscope Review. He lives in Boynton Beach, Florida with his wife, three sons, and golden retriever.
Christine Jackson
Seven Thousand Miles
A dark river flows through a crumbling
New England town
on its way to the mountains.
A shuttered textile mill stands on bank.
Once powered by white water,
dammed and controlled,
the brick buildings are now jammed shut.
Blind, boarded windows
hold in rats and mold,
controlled by no one.
There in the mill’s broken shadow,
Father ends our seven thousand mile search
for freedom and builds his halaal restaurant.
At first,
only a few stop
for soft pita with spicy hummus.
Our cash flow is dry
as red desert dust.
By the end of summer,
word of us spreads like wind-whipped dunes.
Most nights we fill every table.
Locals and Somalis chat
over kababs and shawarma.
My sister and I serve stacks
of Mother’s savory squash pudding.
We add hand-decorated headscarves
and phone cards good for Somalia
to racks by the register.
On aching feet,
we climb the hill to our crammed apartment,
proud and fulfilled,
paying little mind to
midnight sirens
pulsing through the night.
This morning our restaurant
lies in smoking ruins.
Shoulders slumped,
Father nudges a blackened beam
with the toe of his Nike trainer.
Seven thousand miles
and still no escape
from the nightmare of Mogadishu.
Rajiv!
A man yells at my father, and we cringe.
Along the street next to the river
in the shadow of the broken mill,
a line of citizens marches toward us.
The men brandish weapons,
boards and shovels, shouldering picks.
Then more men appear, and still more,
wearing tool belts, pulling wagons
loaded with paint cans and brushes,
rolling trash barrels,
more men and women, waving,
tugging their children,
hauling coolers
and baskets of food.
A silver river flows through a crumbling
New England town
on its way to the mountains.
CHRISTINE JACKSON teaches literature and creative writing at a South Florida University. She also works with the Mystery Writers of America, Florida Chapter, planning SleuthFest, a mystery writing conference. Her poetry has been published in print and online publications, including The Sandy River Review, Slag Review, The Phoenix Soul, and Verse-Virtual. Jackson lives with her husband in Fort Lauderdale. Visit her at http://cahss.nova.edu/faculty/christine_jackson.html
A dark river flows through a crumbling
New England town
on its way to the mountains.
A shuttered textile mill stands on bank.
Once powered by white water,
dammed and controlled,
the brick buildings are now jammed shut.
Blind, boarded windows
hold in rats and mold,
controlled by no one.
There in the mill’s broken shadow,
Father ends our seven thousand mile search
for freedom and builds his halaal restaurant.
At first,
only a few stop
for soft pita with spicy hummus.
Our cash flow is dry
as red desert dust.
By the end of summer,
word of us spreads like wind-whipped dunes.
Most nights we fill every table.
Locals and Somalis chat
over kababs and shawarma.
My sister and I serve stacks
of Mother’s savory squash pudding.
We add hand-decorated headscarves
and phone cards good for Somalia
to racks by the register.
On aching feet,
we climb the hill to our crammed apartment,
proud and fulfilled,
paying little mind to
midnight sirens
pulsing through the night.
This morning our restaurant
lies in smoking ruins.
Shoulders slumped,
Father nudges a blackened beam
with the toe of his Nike trainer.
Seven thousand miles
and still no escape
from the nightmare of Mogadishu.
Rajiv!
A man yells at my father, and we cringe.
Along the street next to the river
in the shadow of the broken mill,
a line of citizens marches toward us.
The men brandish weapons,
boards and shovels, shouldering picks.
Then more men appear, and still more,
wearing tool belts, pulling wagons
loaded with paint cans and brushes,
rolling trash barrels,
more men and women, waving,
tugging their children,
hauling coolers
and baskets of food.
A silver river flows through a crumbling
New England town
on its way to the mountains.
CHRISTINE JACKSON teaches literature and creative writing at a South Florida University. She also works with the Mystery Writers of America, Florida Chapter, planning SleuthFest, a mystery writing conference. Her poetry has been published in print and online publications, including The Sandy River Review, Slag Review, The Phoenix Soul, and Verse-Virtual. Jackson lives with her husband in Fort Lauderdale. Visit her at http://cahss.nova.edu/faculty/christine_jackson.html
Akor Emmanuel Oche
Scars, Cicatrix, Sorrow
Of these stories written on your
eyelids, I may never get to read
their finished lines; how you
master the touch of burning
fingers that trace scars on your
cheeks, how you learn
to forgive the palms
that batter you.
I may never get to play the
chords of your vulnerability;
how you pluck each key and
a note of wails is heard, how
each diameter of your breast
understands this routine
mastered from constant
practice; grab the baby, cover
him with your body and let
him rain down his blows on
you. I may never get to recite
the full lyrics of struggles
before sex each night, how you
fight your man to let go, then
break into a surrender until
what is left is the dirge of
crackling bed sounds, how you
still live with hades and say
heaven is close by, few
kilometers away.
AKOR EMMANUEL OCHE is a Nigerian poet, critic and essayist. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Ann Arbor Review, Pyrokinection, Mamba Journal for Africa Haiku, Synchronized Chaos
Magazine Grey Sparrow Press, Poetic Diversity, Pengician, Tuck Magazine, Praxis Magazine, Savage Review and Expound Magazine AFAS Review. One of his poems won third place in the Quality Poets poetry competition. He is an editor and book agent at Royal Lite Publishers, East Africa.
Of these stories written on your
eyelids, I may never get to read
their finished lines; how you
master the touch of burning
fingers that trace scars on your
cheeks, how you learn
to forgive the palms
that batter you.
I may never get to play the
chords of your vulnerability;
how you pluck each key and
a note of wails is heard, how
each diameter of your breast
understands this routine
mastered from constant
practice; grab the baby, cover
him with your body and let
him rain down his blows on
you. I may never get to recite
the full lyrics of struggles
before sex each night, how you
fight your man to let go, then
break into a surrender until
what is left is the dirge of
crackling bed sounds, how you
still live with hades and say
heaven is close by, few
kilometers away.
AKOR EMMANUEL OCHE is a Nigerian poet, critic and essayist. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Ann Arbor Review, Pyrokinection, Mamba Journal for Africa Haiku, Synchronized Chaos
Magazine Grey Sparrow Press, Poetic Diversity, Pengician, Tuck Magazine, Praxis Magazine, Savage Review and Expound Magazine AFAS Review. One of his poems won third place in the Quality Poets poetry competition. He is an editor and book agent at Royal Lite Publishers, East Africa.
Sarah Frances Moran
How Whiskey Keeps You Silent...
One two three…one two three, drink…
Because I haven’t learned how to hide the rage inside
I continue to allow the tentacles of it to trace the grooves of
my spine,
I break.
Or contemplate hibernation.
The silence is dark and the silence drips
rhythmic like a lullaby
like a soft ocean-wave crashing
like a scream you were anticipating
like how a cave bear sleeps.
My chart reads Scoliosis but it doesn’t say: bent
My bottle says take daily for Anxiety but it doesn’t say: abused
One two three…one two three, drink
and it’s a game where I’m surrounded by silences inside dark places
that are so much louder than the voices I need to hear.
We forget how we used to dance like seahorses.
We sit our children down and say, we have bad news.
We know.
I found you in the forest where our ancestors seeped into the soil.
They whispered how whiskey was stronger than water.
How well it could pool and quench.
How everything is made to be broken.
Because a handshake is like an earthquake,
I’m quiet.
Because the word hello is bigger than the ocean’s swells,
I’m drowning.
I’m just holding on for the night,
And we’re all holding on for dear life.
It’s inside that grasp that my longing lives.
The one where you all have the voices of the lions.
We weren’t meant to be sheared.
SARAH FRANCES MORAN is a queer latinx poet living in Texas. She’s navigating the terrain of her ancestors hoping to learn their songs. Her chapbook, Evergreen, was released from Weasel Press this summer and her full-length collection, Pocha, is set for release in 2017 from ELJ Publications. Visit her at www.sarahfrancesmoran.com
One two three…one two three, drink…
Because I haven’t learned how to hide the rage inside
I continue to allow the tentacles of it to trace the grooves of
my spine,
I break.
Or contemplate hibernation.
The silence is dark and the silence drips
rhythmic like a lullaby
like a soft ocean-wave crashing
like a scream you were anticipating
like how a cave bear sleeps.
My chart reads Scoliosis but it doesn’t say: bent
My bottle says take daily for Anxiety but it doesn’t say: abused
One two three…one two three, drink
and it’s a game where I’m surrounded by silences inside dark places
that are so much louder than the voices I need to hear.
We forget how we used to dance like seahorses.
We sit our children down and say, we have bad news.
We know.
I found you in the forest where our ancestors seeped into the soil.
They whispered how whiskey was stronger than water.
How well it could pool and quench.
How everything is made to be broken.
Because a handshake is like an earthquake,
I’m quiet.
Because the word hello is bigger than the ocean’s swells,
I’m drowning.
I’m just holding on for the night,
And we’re all holding on for dear life.
It’s inside that grasp that my longing lives.
The one where you all have the voices of the lions.
We weren’t meant to be sheared.
SARAH FRANCES MORAN is a queer latinx poet living in Texas. She’s navigating the terrain of her ancestors hoping to learn their songs. Her chapbook, Evergreen, was released from Weasel Press this summer and her full-length collection, Pocha, is set for release in 2017 from ELJ Publications. Visit her at www.sarahfrancesmoran.com
Josh Fernandez 2 poems
Oh God, Are We Perfect? Please Say No
I remember when I was a woman.
It was like yesterday
because it was yesterday.
I crouched in a corner
to watch men pass
that strut they had
that puffed chest illusion doubling
their size
little hearts shriveling like slugs left
in the sun.
I was born in a park that went on
forever. Pops said the swath
of grass was a runway
that if you go fast enough
you take flight
and land in a foreign
place of your choosing.
I chose the island
where nobody spoke
English and men wore dresses
and painted their lips
black as cobras
and I never saw Pops again.
Since we’re being honest
I don’t remember when
I was a man
or at least the kind
you see in movies
who rip their shirts and grab the necks
of other men like spiders
latching onto other spiders
and you can’t tell
if they’re making love
or poisoning the life
out of each other.
I remember when I was something else
neither man nor woman
gay nor straight.
I remember because it’s now
sitting on the edge
half on the concrete
and the other half on the wet
grass and I’m getting the sense
there’s another half somewhere
maybe thousands of them
that math as we know it is wrong
that we have always been more
than whole
a series of fucked up halves
a perfect infinity
yet the world keeps
dividing us otherwise.
I remember when I was a woman.
It was like yesterday
because it was yesterday.
I crouched in a corner
to watch men pass
that strut they had
that puffed chest illusion doubling
their size
little hearts shriveling like slugs left
in the sun.
I was born in a park that went on
forever. Pops said the swath
of grass was a runway
that if you go fast enough
you take flight
and land in a foreign
place of your choosing.
I chose the island
where nobody spoke
English and men wore dresses
and painted their lips
black as cobras
and I never saw Pops again.
Since we’re being honest
I don’t remember when
I was a man
or at least the kind
you see in movies
who rip their shirts and grab the necks
of other men like spiders
latching onto other spiders
and you can’t tell
if they’re making love
or poisoning the life
out of each other.
I remember when I was something else
neither man nor woman
gay nor straight.
I remember because it’s now
sitting on the edge
half on the concrete
and the other half on the wet
grass and I’m getting the sense
there’s another half somewhere
maybe thousands of them
that math as we know it is wrong
that we have always been more
than whole
a series of fucked up halves
a perfect infinity
yet the world keeps
dividing us otherwise.
Henry Rollins
When I was sixteen I wore a bomber jacket and combat boots because everything was a fucking war. My dumb hairstyle pointed toward the sky like a nuclear weapon. My sour tongue was a faulty grenade. That year I fucked for the first time in the corner of a dirty broom closet.
Everyone said it was supposed to be fun, but I was scared shitless. Her name was Brandy and her eyes shot like missiles at my awkward body. I unlaced my boots in the dark and prayed to god while I fumbled with her bra. “Dear Lord,” I said. “Please help me last longer.” I saw spiders when I closed my eyes and I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there.
That year, my sister lived in a hospital. The machine breathed in and out in place of her lungs, her fingers purple as raindrops. She was only two. The doctor asked if I was ready and I said “Fuck no. No fucking way. Don’t pull that goddamn plug.” But he pulled it anyway and the machine stopped beeping and the room flickered white. When my mother cried it sucked all the air out of the room until there was nothing left but white light on the white walls and the white doctor in his white lab coat, his eyes darting around the room looking for an exit. My grandma said, “Death is a black cat, purring at our ankles” and I fucking hated her for that. When she died, she left a five-thousand-dollar hospital bill, a purse full of melted candy and a boyfriend named Angel, who wandered around Los Angeles looking for a bathroom.
My favorite student was a baseball player. He was gentle and kind and always sleepy, the way humans were designed to be. Once, he left me a note that said, “Thanks.” Once, he fell asleep and missed a week of school. His mother wrote an email that said, “Please take care of my boy,” and I forgot to respond. Once, he fell asleep leaning on his steering wheel, a semi-truck sailing toward him like a meteor in the early morning. He was 19-years-old when he flew through the windshield of his tiny car, his body stamped on the street like an exclamation point.
The newspaper spelled his name wrong. Underneath his obituary was an ad for mattresses.
The moon is the brightest it’s ever been tonight, particles of light marching through the wall of clouds like soldiers with tiny flashlights. I close the blinds and it doesn’t help. I tell my family to go away. The cat curls around my leg, desperate for pleasure. A snapped pen bleeds its ink onto my leg. I am wearing my combat boots and a stupid jacket, but I am too old for this now. The last thing I need is another war.
JOSH FERNANDEZ’S arts and culture articles have appeared in Spin Magazine, The Sacramento Bee, The Sacramento News & Review and several other publications. His poems, essays and short stories have been published in journals big and small. Fernandez currently teaches English at Folsom Lake College and writes for the music satire site, The Hard Times. He is from Sacramento, CA., and heard about SoFloPoJo from Facebook.
When I was sixteen I wore a bomber jacket and combat boots because everything was a fucking war. My dumb hairstyle pointed toward the sky like a nuclear weapon. My sour tongue was a faulty grenade. That year I fucked for the first time in the corner of a dirty broom closet.
Everyone said it was supposed to be fun, but I was scared shitless. Her name was Brandy and her eyes shot like missiles at my awkward body. I unlaced my boots in the dark and prayed to god while I fumbled with her bra. “Dear Lord,” I said. “Please help me last longer.” I saw spiders when I closed my eyes and I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there.
That year, my sister lived in a hospital. The machine breathed in and out in place of her lungs, her fingers purple as raindrops. She was only two. The doctor asked if I was ready and I said “Fuck no. No fucking way. Don’t pull that goddamn plug.” But he pulled it anyway and the machine stopped beeping and the room flickered white. When my mother cried it sucked all the air out of the room until there was nothing left but white light on the white walls and the white doctor in his white lab coat, his eyes darting around the room looking for an exit. My grandma said, “Death is a black cat, purring at our ankles” and I fucking hated her for that. When she died, she left a five-thousand-dollar hospital bill, a purse full of melted candy and a boyfriend named Angel, who wandered around Los Angeles looking for a bathroom.
My favorite student was a baseball player. He was gentle and kind and always sleepy, the way humans were designed to be. Once, he left me a note that said, “Thanks.” Once, he fell asleep and missed a week of school. His mother wrote an email that said, “Please take care of my boy,” and I forgot to respond. Once, he fell asleep leaning on his steering wheel, a semi-truck sailing toward him like a meteor in the early morning. He was 19-years-old when he flew through the windshield of his tiny car, his body stamped on the street like an exclamation point.
The newspaper spelled his name wrong. Underneath his obituary was an ad for mattresses.
The moon is the brightest it’s ever been tonight, particles of light marching through the wall of clouds like soldiers with tiny flashlights. I close the blinds and it doesn’t help. I tell my family to go away. The cat curls around my leg, desperate for pleasure. A snapped pen bleeds its ink onto my leg. I am wearing my combat boots and a stupid jacket, but I am too old for this now. The last thing I need is another war.
JOSH FERNANDEZ’S arts and culture articles have appeared in Spin Magazine, The Sacramento Bee, The Sacramento News & Review and several other publications. His poems, essays and short stories have been published in journals big and small. Fernandez currently teaches English at Folsom Lake College and writes for the music satire site, The Hard Times. He is from Sacramento, CA., and heard about SoFloPoJo from Facebook.
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Brendan Walsh
your skin drinks the widening night
4 Mukethe
dressing in halfdark
wholemoon shine
& the kitchen light
cupping your back
I wonder how
a body holds so much
person
how you focus
on its failures while
your skin drinks
the widening night
BRENDAN WALSH’S first poetry collection, Make Anything Whole, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015, his second collection, Go, was published by Aldrich Press in 2016. Walsh has been a featured reader at The New American Writing Festival, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival’s Connecticut Young Poets Day, and the Poetry Institute New Haven. His poems have appeared in Off the Coast, Connecticut Review, Mason’s Road, Anak Sastra, Lines+Stars and Wisconsin Review. He can be found online at brendanwalshpoetry.com.
dressing in halfdark
wholemoon shine
& the kitchen light
cupping your back
I wonder how
a body holds so much
person
how you focus
on its failures while
your skin drinks
the widening night
BRENDAN WALSH’S first poetry collection, Make Anything Whole, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015, his second collection, Go, was published by Aldrich Press in 2016. Walsh has been a featured reader at The New American Writing Festival, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival’s Connecticut Young Poets Day, and the Poetry Institute New Haven. His poems have appeared in Off the Coast, Connecticut Review, Mason’s Road, Anak Sastra, Lines+Stars and Wisconsin Review. He can be found online at brendanwalshpoetry.com.
Patricia Lieb
The Photographer’s Final Shot
(December 18, 1981)
Desperate and hungry, outdoor photographer
Carl McCunn waved his fist in triumph
as the search plane flew over his campsite
in the obstinate Alaskan wilderness.
The silver wings tipped goodbye;
then he realized he had given the wrong signal.
Already, he had shot the greens of summer,
the oranges of autumn;
and he had journalized his experiences in the wild.
Now, his supplies nearly exhausted,
he ate squirrel meat with bones.
Frozen and starved
with dizzy-spells and chills
he could not go on.
Frostbite chewed at his fingers and toes; he
could barely pour the last drops of oil
into his heater; could barely lift the last spoonful
of beans and rice to his mouth; could barely
write the words:
“They say it doesn’t hurt.”
Could barely move his fingers…
First, the rifle barrel touched his head,
then the bullet.
PATRICIA LIEB’S recent poetry books include Saying I Love you, Sundown and Among My Souvenir’s. In the 1980s she was co-publisher of the literary magazine Pteranodon and in the 1990s co-editor-publisher of the online Write On Magazine. Lieb has published widely in journals. She, along with publishing partner Carol Schott Martino, presented work-shops for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies while Publishing Pteranodon.
(December 18, 1981)
Desperate and hungry, outdoor photographer
Carl McCunn waved his fist in triumph
as the search plane flew over his campsite
in the obstinate Alaskan wilderness.
The silver wings tipped goodbye;
then he realized he had given the wrong signal.
Already, he had shot the greens of summer,
the oranges of autumn;
and he had journalized his experiences in the wild.
Now, his supplies nearly exhausted,
he ate squirrel meat with bones.
Frozen and starved
with dizzy-spells and chills
he could not go on.
Frostbite chewed at his fingers and toes; he
could barely pour the last drops of oil
into his heater; could barely lift the last spoonful
of beans and rice to his mouth; could barely
write the words:
“They say it doesn’t hurt.”
Could barely move his fingers…
First, the rifle barrel touched his head,
then the bullet.
PATRICIA LIEB’S recent poetry books include Saying I Love you, Sundown and Among My Souvenir’s. In the 1980s she was co-publisher of the literary magazine Pteranodon and in the 1990s co-editor-publisher of the online Write On Magazine. Lieb has published widely in journals. She, along with publishing partner Carol Schott Martino, presented work-shops for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies while Publishing Pteranodon.
Alan Catlin
In the End
“I met distantly related survivors, frail and remote,
grave as ghosts. One showed me a cross she kept
in her purse for when the Nazis came back.”
Howard Kogan, “In the End”
In the end, where the dead live,
all the clock’s hands have melted
and turned into icy blades of
frozen glass that reflect the dark
that emanates from moons that rise
in the West and set in the East.
Time has no meaning when all
the clocks have stopped, traffic is
just the way bodies collide when
they walk sightless, as moles, above
ground, tunneling through concrete.
Breathing is a labor when all you
can exhale is methane gas, Zyclon B
and Cyanide. Seeing is limited by all
the residues left behind after heat
lightning has rent all the ozone, making
layers of bodies out of skin and bones.
In the end, a clock without hands is
like the cross at the head of a grave
that holds no body.
ALAN CATLIN has many irons in the poetry fire, online, in print and elsewhere. His most recent full length books of poetry are American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press and Last Man Standing from Lummox Press.
“I met distantly related survivors, frail and remote,
grave as ghosts. One showed me a cross she kept
in her purse for when the Nazis came back.”
Howard Kogan, “In the End”
In the end, where the dead live,
all the clock’s hands have melted
and turned into icy blades of
frozen glass that reflect the dark
that emanates from moons that rise
in the West and set in the East.
Time has no meaning when all
the clocks have stopped, traffic is
just the way bodies collide when
they walk sightless, as moles, above
ground, tunneling through concrete.
Breathing is a labor when all you
can exhale is methane gas, Zyclon B
and Cyanide. Seeing is limited by all
the residues left behind after heat
lightning has rent all the ozone, making
layers of bodies out of skin and bones.
In the end, a clock without hands is
like the cross at the head of a grave
that holds no body.
ALAN CATLIN has many irons in the poetry fire, online, in print and elsewhere. His most recent full length books of poetry are American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press and Last Man Standing from Lummox Press.
George Held
A Posthumous Man
For John A. Williams
I’ve come to this campus for fifty years, forty employed for what’s called an academic career, now ten retired. When I enter the library’s fourth-floor reading area and sit in one of its six lounge chairs, the others occupied by twenty-year-olds, I feel like a ghost, a posthumous man, invisible, as I should be, yet somehow extending a life that’s ended. On this rainy spring morning, through the window I watch students cross the quad, too distant for me to read their faces. They clutch book bags to chest and hunch shoulders against the raindrops. They have no time for rumination, caught in a brutish economy, their energy drained by the pressure to do homework, write papers, work the odd job, and, in some cases, raise a child. In the luxury of my leisure, I look at books on the adjacent shelves and smile to recall all the random learning these stacks have permitted me—books on Estonia in World War Two, the life of Chiang Kai-Shek, investigations in paranormal psychology. On the main floor, the reading desks have now yielded to carrels equipped with computers on which students graze, but few do forage with the sort of serendipity that leads to such odd bits of nourishment as these shelves offer and that even posthumous I, still a reader, can stuff my straw brain with, without ulterior motive, without hope of growing a crop of wisdom at this late date.
GEORGE HELD has recently published in Two Cities Review, Rat's Ass Review, Home Planet News Online, and New Verse News, among other journals. His new chapbook is Phased II (Poets Wear Prada), moon poems.
I’ve come to this campus for fifty years, forty employed for what’s called an academic career, now ten retired. When I enter the library’s fourth-floor reading area and sit in one of its six lounge chairs, the others occupied by twenty-year-olds, I feel like a ghost, a posthumous man, invisible, as I should be, yet somehow extending a life that’s ended. On this rainy spring morning, through the window I watch students cross the quad, too distant for me to read their faces. They clutch book bags to chest and hunch shoulders against the raindrops. They have no time for rumination, caught in a brutish economy, their energy drained by the pressure to do homework, write papers, work the odd job, and, in some cases, raise a child. In the luxury of my leisure, I look at books on the adjacent shelves and smile to recall all the random learning these stacks have permitted me—books on Estonia in World War Two, the life of Chiang Kai-Shek, investigations in paranormal psychology. On the main floor, the reading desks have now yielded to carrels equipped with computers on which students graze, but few do forage with the sort of serendipity that leads to such odd bits of nourishment as these shelves offer and that even posthumous I, still a reader, can stuff my straw brain with, without ulterior motive, without hope of growing a crop of wisdom at this late date.
GEORGE HELD has recently published in Two Cities Review, Rat's Ass Review, Home Planet News Online, and New Verse News, among other journals. His new chapbook is Phased II (Poets Wear Prada), moon poems.
Peter Schmitt 2 poems
Typos
I urge my students to watch for typos:
how do I know that you meant tap dancer
when I’m staring hard at a lap dancer?
And your performing unasked-for lipo
on the great and ancient Chinese poet
is unintentional, I’m sure, but lacks
respect, all the same. Pubic goes public
too often these days—to what do we owe it?--
loins are lions when the mood’s conducive,
and immoral, yes, has proved immortal
since probably time immemorial,
but your paper’s not the place to prove it.
Did old poets write with rhyme and meaner?
Or with a more cheerful misdemeanor?
I urge my students to watch for typos:
how do I know that you meant tap dancer
when I’m staring hard at a lap dancer?
And your performing unasked-for lipo
on the great and ancient Chinese poet
is unintentional, I’m sure, but lacks
respect, all the same. Pubic goes public
too often these days—to what do we owe it?--
loins are lions when the mood’s conducive,
and immoral, yes, has proved immortal
since probably time immemorial,
but your paper’s not the place to prove it.
Did old poets write with rhyme and meaner?
Or with a more cheerful misdemeanor?
Fortune
About her brief, childless, dark first marriage
to a man with a family fortune,
my mother always kept very quiet.
All I knew was that it ended in his threat
to hurl acid in her flawless face, her friends
hustling her out of town early one morning.
No glance back, no contesting the estate.
How she fled to Florida, to start again.
It seemed a long way from the life she shared
for nearly forty years with my father.
And I was long grown when my mother heard
that he had settled just a few miles from us,
the first husband, in retirement, maybe.
But more years passed, my father passed away,
and the ex stayed silent—until one day
word arrived that he too had died, alone,
on a houseboat moored on the Intracoastal,
the body not found for almost a week.
And only then did my mother disclose
other threats made at the time—how he vowed
to track her down (before the Internet,
all you needed was money), and to kill
any children she had. It shadowed her,
over the years, at the mind’s edge, waiting,
and she could never have told my brother
and me. Eventually it would have grown
familiar, less insistent, less probable,
if never quite erased. For my mother,
hearing of his death must have been like a rope
loosening, a boat drifting slowly to sea.
PETER SCHMITT is the author of five books of poems: Renewing the Vows; Hazard Duty and Country Airport. Two chapbooks, To Disappear, and Incident in an Apartment Complex: A Suite of Voices. He has received The Julia Peterkin Award (Converse College); The Lavan Award (Academy of American Poets); The “Discovery”/The Nation Prize; grants from The Florida Arts Council (twice); and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Nation, The Paris Review and Poetry.
About her brief, childless, dark first marriage
to a man with a family fortune,
my mother always kept very quiet.
All I knew was that it ended in his threat
to hurl acid in her flawless face, her friends
hustling her out of town early one morning.
No glance back, no contesting the estate.
How she fled to Florida, to start again.
It seemed a long way from the life she shared
for nearly forty years with my father.
And I was long grown when my mother heard
that he had settled just a few miles from us,
the first husband, in retirement, maybe.
But more years passed, my father passed away,
and the ex stayed silent—until one day
word arrived that he too had died, alone,
on a houseboat moored on the Intracoastal,
the body not found for almost a week.
And only then did my mother disclose
other threats made at the time—how he vowed
to track her down (before the Internet,
all you needed was money), and to kill
any children she had. It shadowed her,
over the years, at the mind’s edge, waiting,
and she could never have told my brother
and me. Eventually it would have grown
familiar, less insistent, less probable,
if never quite erased. For my mother,
hearing of his death must have been like a rope
loosening, a boat drifting slowly to sea.
PETER SCHMITT is the author of five books of poems: Renewing the Vows; Hazard Duty and Country Airport. Two chapbooks, To Disappear, and Incident in an Apartment Complex: A Suite of Voices. He has received The Julia Peterkin Award (Converse College); The Lavan Award (Academy of American Poets); The “Discovery”/The Nation Prize; grants from The Florida Arts Council (twice); and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Nation, The Paris Review and Poetry.
J. Tarwood 2 poems
Together Alone
Among others my life
seems a string
on a mildewed blues guitar,
kept in tune, ready
to snap, lost twang
a glitch a minute fixes.
Alone my life returns
to greet the undertaker,
empty as a flute
waiting on a breath.
Among others my life
seems a string
on a mildewed blues guitar,
kept in tune, ready
to snap, lost twang
a glitch a minute fixes.
Alone my life returns
to greet the undertaker,
empty as a flute
waiting on a breath.
Poets
(After Beltran)
Ants.
Just ants.
Dark circles for eyes.
Insignificant
without a vocation for shadows.
Loving with words
more than kisses.
Sad broken boats of autumn.
Yesterday’s wagons.
Tomorrow’s silly machines.
Ants advancing into the heart of nowhere.
Scars the afterlife of wounds.
Ants without a remedy.
Ants with a memory.
The world’s weight the leaf on their backs.
J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. Much of his life has been spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. He has published three books, And For The Mouth A Flower, Grand Detour and The Cats In Zanzibar.
(After Beltran)
Ants.
Just ants.
Dark circles for eyes.
Insignificant
without a vocation for shadows.
Loving with words
more than kisses.
Sad broken boats of autumn.
Yesterday’s wagons.
Tomorrow’s silly machines.
Ants advancing into the heart of nowhere.
Scars the afterlife of wounds.
Ants without a remedy.
Ants with a memory.
The world’s weight the leaf on their backs.
J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. Much of his life has been spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. He has published three books, And For The Mouth A Flower, Grand Detour and The Cats In Zanzibar.
Jean Monahan 2 poems
The Subject of the Poem is at Large
The door to the earthen safe
blown from its hinges,
rounds
of bright shoots
fired in the getaway:
crocus, snowdrop, violet.
Topaz sap
on broken branches, red-winged blackbirds
above fresh and salt water marshes.
The dogs are out, tracking a lion long
gone. Out like a lamb. Sprung.
November Moth
There’s another way to live,
a different outcome.
Stage a sodden ballet
every night
of the darkening month.
Crawl up out of freezing earth
to spin gray and white
above the wet dead
leaves.
Land pale kisses
on the surface of everything.
Engage in an all-out romance
with porch lights
and windows, asters
and ivy:
all things
living, non-living and dying:
Stash your eggs
in the crevice
of a parallel
world.
JEAN MONAHAN lives in Salem, MA and has published three books of poetry: Hands, chosen by Donald Hall to win the Anhinga Prize, and Believe It or Not and Mauled Illusionist (Orchises Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly and Salamander, and numerous other publications. She is at work on a new collection, Search Party.
Richard Kostelanetz
Longer/Po/ems
In memory of Hugo Ball (1886-441927)
Preface:
What makes these visual poems, to recall a category I still honor, is not just that they represent language visually enhanced but also that they must be seen to be “read”.
As a visual poet aiming to create afterimages, I’d like to think that once you see what I’ve done with some of these words, they will never look so innocent to you again.
My colleague John M. Bennett suggests that declaiming these texts could also make an interesting performance.
Consider them as well another contribution to a continuing project, with over two dozen books so far, of English-centered writing that, for one measure of its integrity, cannot be translated.
–Richard Kostelanetz, FarEastBushWick 1385-5751: Archae, 2017.
In memory of Hugo Ball (1886-441927)
Preface:
What makes these visual poems, to recall a category I still honor, is not just that they represent language visually enhanced but also that they must be seen to be “read”.
As a visual poet aiming to create afterimages, I’d like to think that once you see what I’ve done with some of these words, they will never look so innocent to you again.
My colleague John M. Bennett suggests that declaiming these texts could also make an interesting performance.
Consider them as well another contribution to a continuing project, with over two dozen books so far, of English-centered writing that, for one measure of its integrity, cannot be translated.
–Richard Kostelanetz, FarEastBushWick 1385-5751: Archae, 2017.
click to continue reading Longer/Po/ems
Individual entries on RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’S work appear in Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction,Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, and Britannica.com.
Individual entries on RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’S work appear in Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction,Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, and Britannica.com.
Judith Berke
Acting Problems: The Subtext
Re-printed from Acting Lessons with permission by the estate of Judith Burke
Tired, I am sick and tired
of this giving, one character says,
growling at the collector
as if he was a bone,
but giving him gold dollars
like dimes, while the other
says, Oh yes, I weep
for the unfortunates, I die--
and sends a look to heaven pure
goodness, and gives
nothing.
The subtext, Stanislavsky
called it. It spilled
into the streets after us, followed us
back to our apartments…
I try
being someone who waters the plant,
knowing only the greens of it,
not all the unapparent life. I become
the plant, breathing softly.
Someone knocks, selling knives
he says are not dangerous.
Upstairs there is a thudding
that could mean anything.
The cat looks up
as a bird flaps at the window.
The smell of the bird is a fire
in the room as she waits,
her one yellow eye, blinking.
The late JUDITH BERKE'S poetry has appeared in 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, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Shenandoah 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.
Re-printed from Acting Lessons with permission by the estate of Judith Burke
Tired, I am sick and tired
of this giving, one character says,
growling at the collector
as if he was a bone,
but giving him gold dollars
like dimes, while the other
says, Oh yes, I weep
for the unfortunates, I die--
and sends a look to heaven pure
goodness, and gives
nothing.
The subtext, Stanislavsky
called it. It spilled
into the streets after us, followed us
back to our apartments…
I try
being someone who waters the plant,
knowing only the greens of it,
not all the unapparent life. I become
the plant, breathing softly.
Someone knocks, selling knives
he says are not dangerous.
Upstairs there is a thudding
that could mean anything.
The cat looks up
as a bird flaps at the window.
The smell of the bird is a fire
in the room as she waits,
her one yellow eye, blinking.
The late JUDITH BERKE'S poetry has appeared in 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, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Shenandoah 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.
Ian Ganassi
Lemon Vertigo
In no hurry to get anywhere, he kept looking at his watch.
Having considered carefully, he insisted on the same mistakes.
She looked on with a perplexed and disapproving stare.
The storm wears on from one day to the next.
Having considered carefully, he kept making the same mistakes,
Taking a long time to come to bad decisions.
The storm wears on from one day to the next.
He had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
Taking a long time to come to bad decisions--
Forgive him Lord for he hasn’t a clue--
He had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
What are they doing upstairs now, fighting again?
Forgive them Lord, for they haven’t a clue.
Hammer and tongs and tooth and nail.
What are they doing upstairs now, fighting again?
Thereby it’s easy to see why the world is cracked.
Hammer and tongs and tooth and nail.
They had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
Thereby it’s easy to see why the world is cracked,
But this is only business as usual in the nuclear family.
They had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
She looked on with a perplexed and disapproving stare--
But this is only business as usual in the nuclear family.
In no hurry to get anywhere, he kept looking at his watch.
IAN GANASSI’S poetry, prose and translations have appeared in more than 100 journals, including, Otoliths, Pif, New American Writing, The Yale Review, The Critical Flame and New England Review. A poetry collection, Mean Numbers was published by China Grove in the Fall.
In no hurry to get anywhere, he kept looking at his watch.
Having considered carefully, he insisted on the same mistakes.
She looked on with a perplexed and disapproving stare.
The storm wears on from one day to the next.
Having considered carefully, he kept making the same mistakes,
Taking a long time to come to bad decisions.
The storm wears on from one day to the next.
He had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
Taking a long time to come to bad decisions--
Forgive him Lord for he hasn’t a clue--
He had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
What are they doing upstairs now, fighting again?
Forgive them Lord, for they haven’t a clue.
Hammer and tongs and tooth and nail.
What are they doing upstairs now, fighting again?
Thereby it’s easy to see why the world is cracked.
Hammer and tongs and tooth and nail.
They had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
Thereby it’s easy to see why the world is cracked,
But this is only business as usual in the nuclear family.
They had a blank check and made it over to the enemy.
She looked on with a perplexed and disapproving stare--
But this is only business as usual in the nuclear family.
In no hurry to get anywhere, he kept looking at his watch.
IAN GANASSI’S poetry, prose and translations have appeared in more than 100 journals, including, Otoliths, Pif, New American Writing, The Yale Review, The Critical Flame and New England Review. A poetry collection, Mean Numbers was published by China Grove in the Fall.
John Childrey
Seeking Papa in Havana
His shadow looms at the corners
And bars across Cuba
A frozen smile of burnished bronze
Not unlike the color of Cubans.
Out of the dim light, his words still
Resonate above the Rumba cadences
Solid Papa in the cacophony and daiquiri
Facing the moment of truth, he does not flinch.
He sleeps in Idaho, a cirque in his hunting home
His soul though seems alive and awake
Among the fishermen, the tourists, Cuban
boys playing baseball at the Finca.
Like others, I sought his ghost in Havana
And found his ghost, not really expecting to.
JOHN CHILDREY, has published Shadow Words. In the 1990s he edited Paradise, a collection of Florida poetry; in 1996 twenty poems of the Battle at the Little Big Horn appeared in a Custer fan-zine, and in 2012 the Coral Springs Museum of Art distributed a collection, from My Mother’s Scrapbook Voices from the Greasy Grass as part of their Chautauqua Series. In 2015, The Angela Thirkell Society of North America published Angela Thirkell’s Birds.
His shadow looms at the corners
And bars across Cuba
A frozen smile of burnished bronze
Not unlike the color of Cubans.
Out of the dim light, his words still
Resonate above the Rumba cadences
Solid Papa in the cacophony and daiquiri
Facing the moment of truth, he does not flinch.
He sleeps in Idaho, a cirque in his hunting home
His soul though seems alive and awake
Among the fishermen, the tourists, Cuban
boys playing baseball at the Finca.
Like others, I sought his ghost in Havana
And found his ghost, not really expecting to.
JOHN CHILDREY, has published Shadow Words. In the 1990s he edited Paradise, a collection of Florida poetry; in 1996 twenty poems of the Battle at the Little Big Horn appeared in a Custer fan-zine, and in 2012 the Coral Springs Museum of Art distributed a collection, from My Mother’s Scrapbook Voices from the Greasy Grass as part of their Chautauqua Series. In 2015, The Angela Thirkell Society of North America published Angela Thirkell’s Birds.
Indran Amirthanayagam 2 poems
By All Means, A Whale
The hump-backed whale has swum from beyond Cape Cod to frolic
with her pup in the warm, cool waters off Samana. The migratory
reach of birds, fish and mammals is the subject of a million doctoral
theses but no one has yet to explain pure chance, coincidence, why
I happened to see this particular mother and child on Saturday morning.
The fact that I bought an excursion on a whale watching tour, that I was
guaranteed a whale, or another tour free of charge, are mere helpers of fate.
The boat could have sprung a leak, the car taking me to port run out of gas.
My imagination might have surprised me moving from observed reality
to dream and fantasy. I did put Moby Dick in my bag just in case.
The hump-backed whale has swum from beyond Cape Cod to frolic
with her pup in the warm, cool waters off Samana. The migratory
reach of birds, fish and mammals is the subject of a million doctoral
theses but no one has yet to explain pure chance, coincidence, why
I happened to see this particular mother and child on Saturday morning.
The fact that I bought an excursion on a whale watching tour, that I was
guaranteed a whale, or another tour free of charge, are mere helpers of fate.
The boat could have sprung a leak, the car taking me to port run out of gas.
My imagination might have surprised me moving from observed reality
to dream and fantasy. I did put Moby Dick in my bag just in case.
On the Other Side
You remember the blue and white cups
bought at Target in which my coffee
is served today in Haiti? I did not
envision attachment then to every
day china, not stone or willow-ware,
or filigreed in gold, but ordinary
made in China coffee cups, chipped,
stained, by five hundred days and
counting of waking up in this house
on a hill, looking over the valley,
airport in the distance, blue sea beyond,
and you on the other side of all the islands.
INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM has published 11 poetry collections, including The Elephants of Reckoning, which won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. A collection of French poems, Aller-Retour au Bord de La Mer, was published by Legs Editions. His latest in English is Uncivil War, and in Spanish, Ventana Azul. His poems and translations have appeared in Grand Street, the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, New England Review and Exquisite Corpse.
Miriam Levine
On the Steps of the Miami Beach Cinematheque
When I left the sad movie feeling happy,
because the movie was perfectly beautiful,
a stranger came up to me and kissed my hands.
I would have run away but he was so graceful,
his acrobat body bent in a bow of homage,
his narrow feet bare in white slippers.
“Do I know you? I asked. He spoke
with more kisses, deft, dry, tongueless.
The stars flashed and faded.
The stoplights were melting roses,
passersby nearly naked—not me,
my hands pale as Christmas paperwhites.
Soon I’d be eighty! My hip ached,
the thumb he kissed bent with arthritis.
His scent was lime, and the nape
of his neck smooth as summer jade.
“We love the ladies,” he called, as he bowed again,
as if to royalty, and flourished his hand in twirls of farewell.
MIRIAM LEVINE’S most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: a memoir, three other poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many others. She lives near Boston and in South Beach, (Miami Beach) FL.
When I left the sad movie feeling happy,
because the movie was perfectly beautiful,
a stranger came up to me and kissed my hands.
I would have run away but he was so graceful,
his acrobat body bent in a bow of homage,
his narrow feet bare in white slippers.
“Do I know you? I asked. He spoke
with more kisses, deft, dry, tongueless.
The stars flashed and faded.
The stoplights were melting roses,
passersby nearly naked—not me,
my hands pale as Christmas paperwhites.
Soon I’d be eighty! My hip ached,
the thumb he kissed bent with arthritis.
His scent was lime, and the nape
of his neck smooth as summer jade.
“We love the ladies,” he called, as he bowed again,
as if to royalty, and flourished his hand in twirls of farewell.
MIRIAM LEVINE’S most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: a memoir, three other poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many others. She lives near Boston and in South Beach, (Miami Beach) FL.
Gregg Shapiro
Sunshine State
Caress the humidity of new words with a frosty
Midwestern tongue. Say gecko. Study their stillness.
Marvel at their stealth and grace. Avoid taking
inventory of the soles of your shoes for any tiny
lizards not practiced in the fine art of velocity
and escape. Wake sweaty nightly from dreams
in which one of the dogs’ jaws clamp gently around
cool, reptilian flesh; the only clue a flicking tail
dueling with whiskers. Speak sawgrass. Ponder how
it’s possible that in a place begging for bare feet,
the lawns are so unforgiving. A virtual carpet of
shards and blades. Sing of egrets and herons. Not
known for your nurturing nature, your desire to
embrace them, milky plumage, pointy beak, skinny
legs and all, lift them off the ground and carry them
to a place you deem safe, far from reckless traffic,
careless pedestrians, borders on obsessive, hysterical.
Small as their brains are, it’s no wonder they eye you
like hawks. That is why they have wings. Murmur
palm trees. Palm fronds have their own dryly discreet
language. Whispering behind your back, like statuesque
gossips, daring you to turn around. Roll heat index
around behind the teeth. It is easier than you imagined
to replace wind chill with humiture. Talk termites,
because it’s the dust they leave behind, in the corners,
piled in random configurations that fascinates and
repulses you the most, causes fluctuations in your body
temperature and pulse rate. How can they be hungry
with so many willing trees at their disposal? The indifferent,
insatiable insects have millions of years of experience,
indiscriminately destroying and devouring, pulling
the floor right out from under any civilization they choose.
Gregg Shapiro is the author of Fifty Degrees, selected by Ching-In Chen as co-winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Other books include the short story collections How to Whistle and Lincoln Avenue, the chapbook GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 (Souvenir Spoon Press, 2012), and the poetry collection Protection (Gival Press, 2008). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBT, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick and their dog k.d.
Midwestern tongue. Say gecko. Study their stillness.
Marvel at their stealth and grace. Avoid taking
inventory of the soles of your shoes for any tiny
lizards not practiced in the fine art of velocity
and escape. Wake sweaty nightly from dreams
in which one of the dogs’ jaws clamp gently around
cool, reptilian flesh; the only clue a flicking tail
dueling with whiskers. Speak sawgrass. Ponder how
it’s possible that in a place begging for bare feet,
the lawns are so unforgiving. A virtual carpet of
shards and blades. Sing of egrets and herons. Not
known for your nurturing nature, your desire to
embrace them, milky plumage, pointy beak, skinny
legs and all, lift them off the ground and carry them
to a place you deem safe, far from reckless traffic,
careless pedestrians, borders on obsessive, hysterical.
Small as their brains are, it’s no wonder they eye you
like hawks. That is why they have wings. Murmur
palm trees. Palm fronds have their own dryly discreet
language. Whispering behind your back, like statuesque
gossips, daring you to turn around. Roll heat index
around behind the teeth. It is easier than you imagined
to replace wind chill with humiture. Talk termites,
because it’s the dust they leave behind, in the corners,
piled in random configurations that fascinates and
repulses you the most, causes fluctuations in your body
temperature and pulse rate. How can they be hungry
with so many willing trees at their disposal? The indifferent,
insatiable insects have millions of years of experience,
indiscriminately destroying and devouring, pulling
the floor right out from under any civilization they choose.
Gregg Shapiro is the author of Fifty Degrees, selected by Ching-In Chen as co-winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Other books include the short story collections How to Whistle and Lincoln Avenue, the chapbook GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 (Souvenir Spoon Press, 2012), and the poetry collection Protection (Gival Press, 2008). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBT, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick and their dog k.d.
Joseph Dante
Sea Bean Journal
1. Hollywood Beach, ‘96
I align myself with breaks:
family globes, ligaments, waves.
When the boys come to swap liquids
later, they won’t find a spigot on me.
My head is my heart. The salivating
only happens when the snow
myths arrive along with the license
plates from other states. The flurry
of jumbled symbols will become my baby sister’s
secondary language. The weather stays a cage, but
the streets are wide and all reaching
towards the same mirage.
Awaiting a kiss,
it is just a wink.
The sun painted on the water tower
soon a carnation of turpentine
and
below:
a stage of sidewalks,
where I can carry on about those scars from stings--
jelly, bee, firecrackers, lightning--
an armor of everything healed over and tender,
like my best friend’s hyphenated name.
2. Sanibel Island, ‘01
I come to see a house on stilts
and imagine Dali’s elephants.
I am told the origins, the how
before the why:
You were made in the tide,
free of closed-in patios
and yard sales, the rush
to donate plasma spun
from the slowest blood.
Reds from signs and lights
are replaced with the mint
and periwinkle trellises,
the halo of bonfire dresses
finding sanctum on the sand.
Break the sand
dollars like a host
and throw the wings
to the gulls who
think them food.
Forget the falcons.
They know better.
Take a pitcher
of strawberry lemonade
outside and imagine
a painter turned
conchologist.
Look at the blonde
girl to try to forget
the blonde boy.
With another warm cut
in your soaking foot,
learn how there’s
always a salt
before the balm.
3. Lake in Another Gated Community, ’05
The hurricane parties have started and ended.
No more dominoes on makeshift tables.
The neighbors have enough fuel.
Rabid, I’m riding around
looking for someone to put my mouth on.
The power is still out but my engine may
be overheating. I’m grinding on the
slickest places I can find, swerving
to stare at the clogged-up artery
in the center of our development--
the littered lake where the pockmarked twins
from two blocks down go to hide in
the night and feed on each other’s hunger
and I watch and want
for them to
give and give
me those
veins.
4. The Flooded Streets of Fort Lauderdale, ‘15
The glass is the only façade that smiles here,
or my reflection in the water if I push
past the pain.
Some are waist deep now. Others must have gills.
The boys at bars are leaking, everything
is leaking and breaking, and for the very first time
in my life I’ve got a chill.
I turn to my sister, who now speaks
more languages than anyone you’d know,
more than I can spit from this forked tongue
I must have inherited from a stranger:
Do you remember the trickle:
that afternoon interlude with music
and macarons, instead of these
chapters as catalog
of water levels?
Of course, she says, but look
at that one—all salamander breath
and sinew you can bite into.
No, I say. His Corvette has ticket citations.
She reminds me:
We’re going to need to learn
how to breathe underwater anyway--
I shrug into my shell:
Is it the heat that will turn us,
that makes us forgo the bright eternal,
that unhooks us of the lantern in our eyes?
We siblings return only for All Hallows’ Eve,
where the disguises barely cover up all
the empty sockets you might find
but never enough looks.
5. An Icier Atlantis, ‘65
Wake with the last lantern in your oyster,
unclasp. Mutual shivering
has outlasted orgasm.
You have gotten far from the books,
sunken where hurricanes freeze.
Tell yourself by the maps:
You’ve got more spine now because
of those early urchins. Don’t assume ink.
Your echo has teeth,
your reflection a buttoned shadow.
You must prepare for a new era
of flowers grown in diving bells.
JOSEPH DANTE is a writer originally from Hollywood, Florida, and now resides in Plantation. He graduated from Florida International University in Miami and served as an editor for several journals, including Hobart, Keyhole Magazine, and Pithead Chapel. Currently he interviews journal editors at The Review Review. His work has previously appeared in Permafrost, Best Gay Stories 2015, The Rumpus, PANK, Pear Noir!, Corium, and elsewhere.
I align myself with breaks:
family globes, ligaments, waves.
When the boys come to swap liquids
later, they won’t find a spigot on me.
My head is my heart. The salivating
only happens when the snow
myths arrive along with the license
plates from other states. The flurry
of jumbled symbols will become my baby sister’s
secondary language. The weather stays a cage, but
the streets are wide and all reaching
towards the same mirage.
Awaiting a kiss,
it is just a wink.
The sun painted on the water tower
soon a carnation of turpentine
and
below:
a stage of sidewalks,
where I can carry on about those scars from stings--
jelly, bee, firecrackers, lightning--
an armor of everything healed over and tender,
like my best friend’s hyphenated name.
2. Sanibel Island, ‘01
I come to see a house on stilts
and imagine Dali’s elephants.
I am told the origins, the how
before the why:
You were made in the tide,
free of closed-in patios
and yard sales, the rush
to donate plasma spun
from the slowest blood.
Reds from signs and lights
are replaced with the mint
and periwinkle trellises,
the halo of bonfire dresses
finding sanctum on the sand.
Break the sand
dollars like a host
and throw the wings
to the gulls who
think them food.
Forget the falcons.
They know better.
Take a pitcher
of strawberry lemonade
outside and imagine
a painter turned
conchologist.
Look at the blonde
girl to try to forget
the blonde boy.
With another warm cut
in your soaking foot,
learn how there’s
always a salt
before the balm.
3. Lake in Another Gated Community, ’05
The hurricane parties have started and ended.
No more dominoes on makeshift tables.
The neighbors have enough fuel.
Rabid, I’m riding around
looking for someone to put my mouth on.
The power is still out but my engine may
be overheating. I’m grinding on the
slickest places I can find, swerving
to stare at the clogged-up artery
in the center of our development--
the littered lake where the pockmarked twins
from two blocks down go to hide in
the night and feed on each other’s hunger
and I watch and want
for them to
give and give
me those
veins.
4. The Flooded Streets of Fort Lauderdale, ‘15
The glass is the only façade that smiles here,
or my reflection in the water if I push
past the pain.
Some are waist deep now. Others must have gills.
The boys at bars are leaking, everything
is leaking and breaking, and for the very first time
in my life I’ve got a chill.
I turn to my sister, who now speaks
more languages than anyone you’d know,
more than I can spit from this forked tongue
I must have inherited from a stranger:
Do you remember the trickle:
that afternoon interlude with music
and macarons, instead of these
chapters as catalog
of water levels?
Of course, she says, but look
at that one—all salamander breath
and sinew you can bite into.
No, I say. His Corvette has ticket citations.
She reminds me:
We’re going to need to learn
how to breathe underwater anyway--
I shrug into my shell:
Is it the heat that will turn us,
that makes us forgo the bright eternal,
that unhooks us of the lantern in our eyes?
We siblings return only for All Hallows’ Eve,
where the disguises barely cover up all
the empty sockets you might find
but never enough looks.
5. An Icier Atlantis, ‘65
Wake with the last lantern in your oyster,
unclasp. Mutual shivering
has outlasted orgasm.
You have gotten far from the books,
sunken where hurricanes freeze.
Tell yourself by the maps:
You’ve got more spine now because
of those early urchins. Don’t assume ink.
Your echo has teeth,
your reflection a buttoned shadow.
You must prepare for a new era
of flowers grown in diving bells.
JOSEPH DANTE is a writer originally from Hollywood, Florida, and now resides in Plantation. He graduated from Florida International University in Miami and served as an editor for several journals, including Hobart, Keyhole Magazine, and Pithead Chapel. Currently he interviews journal editors at The Review Review. His work has previously appeared in Permafrost, Best Gay Stories 2015, The Rumpus, PANK, Pear Noir!, Corium, and elsewhere.
Laurie Byro
What Dorothy Brett Thought
Friendship is as binding, as the marriage vow, as important,
as eternal. - D.H. Lawrence
You’ve seen him at nightfall, right before
sleep, ghost-lover loitering in a hemlock forest,
flirting among old oaks, moss-spirit of your shared
history. You nod at the one whose eyes were first-frost
blueberries, who used to stroke your hair, compare
your legs to the swiftest roe-deer. In the afterlife
of desperate love, summers he was all over you,
lapping your skin like waves. Men and one woman
who once sat by a sticking ocean window. Now,
you can smell the bay of him in pine resin, in-between
lovers falling from grace, straying one last time in your
drowsy other life, leaving you just before you wake. Once,
you wandered hand in hand with him into a black wave,
your hair briny and loosened, sea salt and spit
upon your lips. He dark-drifts as you swim towards
his fading eyes; forgiven, what else is there?
LAURIE BYRO has been published widely and is recently in an anthology: St. Peter's B List. 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. She is currently Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library.
as eternal. - D.H. Lawrence
You’ve seen him at nightfall, right before
sleep, ghost-lover loitering in a hemlock forest,
flirting among old oaks, moss-spirit of your shared
history. You nod at the one whose eyes were first-frost
blueberries, who used to stroke your hair, compare
your legs to the swiftest roe-deer. In the afterlife
of desperate love, summers he was all over you,
lapping your skin like waves. Men and one woman
who once sat by a sticking ocean window. Now,
you can smell the bay of him in pine resin, in-between
lovers falling from grace, straying one last time in your
drowsy other life, leaving you just before you wake. Once,
you wandered hand in hand with him into a black wave,
your hair briny and loosened, sea salt and spit
upon your lips. He dark-drifts as you swim towards
his fading eyes; forgiven, what else is there?
LAURIE BYRO has been published widely and is recently in an anthology: St. Peter's B List. 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. She is currently Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library.
Vicki Iorio
Silhouettes
My Mother holds my hand when we go to CVS.
She needs me for balance. She asks me to help her
pick out adult diapers. She likes Silhouettes
because they are always on sale.
She tells me this is a precautionary purchase.
She has never wet and yet she is afraid
of what might become of her 95 year old bladder
in the arms of sleep even though she never sleeps but
listens to her transistor radio in dead night, holding on to it
like a life jacket in her child’s bed.
She does not have the embarrassment I had when
I bought Tampax.
She asks the other seniors in the incontinence aisle
what brand they recommend. On this damp continent
they talk about absorbency and quilting
waste band elasticity and comfort with the nonchalance
of buying a hat.
Once a week, when my mother gives me her sheets to wash,
She says, See, bone dry.
I never tell her about my sweat dreams, my drinking accidents
that slap me awake in a cold sea.
Still, she wears the smallest size protective underwear under polka
dot flannels in anticipation of her certain future.
VICKI IORIO is the author of the poetry collection, Poems from the Dirty Couch and the chapbook, Send Me a Letter. You can read Iorio in Hell strung and Crooked, The San Pedro Review, The Mom Egg, Crack the Spine, Rattle, Home Planet News, Painted Bride Quarterly and The Fem Lit Magazine.
My Mother holds my hand when we go to CVS.
She needs me for balance. She asks me to help her
pick out adult diapers. She likes Silhouettes
because they are always on sale.
She tells me this is a precautionary purchase.
She has never wet and yet she is afraid
of what might become of her 95 year old bladder
in the arms of sleep even though she never sleeps but
listens to her transistor radio in dead night, holding on to it
like a life jacket in her child’s bed.
She does not have the embarrassment I had when
I bought Tampax.
She asks the other seniors in the incontinence aisle
what brand they recommend. On this damp continent
they talk about absorbency and quilting
waste band elasticity and comfort with the nonchalance
of buying a hat.
Once a week, when my mother gives me her sheets to wash,
She says, See, bone dry.
I never tell her about my sweat dreams, my drinking accidents
that slap me awake in a cold sea.
Still, she wears the smallest size protective underwear under polka
dot flannels in anticipation of her certain future.
VICKI IORIO is the author of the poetry collection, Poems from the Dirty Couch and the chapbook, Send Me a Letter. You can read Iorio in Hell strung and Crooked, The San Pedro Review, The Mom Egg, Crack the Spine, Rattle, Home Planet News, Painted Bride Quarterly and The Fem Lit Magazine.
Linda Nemec Foster
The Daughter Draws the Pines of Rome
The daughter who rarely talks to her mother sits in the Coliseum, surrounded by the silence of the past. She likes the indifference of history, the cool reticence of the ancient marble that has witnessed so much pageantry and spectacle, so much pain and blood, but still maintains its distance. A distance she doesnʼt have to bridge. From her vantage point, she can see a grove of Roman pines across from the amphitheater. One particular tree is perfectly framed in the archway. As if the monumentʼs anonymous architect placed his building at this intersection of stone and air just to capture the tree for this woman in the distant 21st century. In turn, she tries to capture it on the empty page of her notebook. The pale white coming alive with her pen and ink sketch: the thin trunk, the symmetrical umbrella of dense branches. She draws the tree as an answer to the question she knows her mother will ask back home.
LINDA NEMEC FOSTER has published nine collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry) and Talking Diamonds (finalist for ForeWord Magazineʼs Book of the Year). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received awards from the Academy of American Poets. Her chapbook, Contemplating the Heavens, was the inspiration for jazz pianist Steve Talagaʼs original composition which was nominated for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
LINDA NEMEC FOSTER has published nine collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry) and Talking Diamonds (finalist for ForeWord Magazineʼs Book of the Year). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received awards from the Academy of American Poets. Her chapbook, Contemplating the Heavens, was the inspiration for jazz pianist Steve Talagaʼs original composition which was nominated for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Anannya Dasgupta
Two Women Drinking Tea
After Mrinal Pande’s "Two Women Knitting”
Should I pour you some
tea? I ask her. She says,
yes. I tilt the porcelain
teapot into tea cups. First
I let the tea pour into her
cup and then mine, like I
have done so many times
before. Our glasses fog up
in steam when we raise
the cup to our mouths.
She blows on her tea, and
drinks a sip, same as me.
The curtains are playing to
the breeze and a whiff of
the flowering champa in the
balcony sweetens our tea.
We hold ourselves carefully
in our tea cups, aware and
brittle. We let the curtains
fill the room with talking.
ANANNYA DASGUPTA is the author of a book of poems Between Sure Places (2015). She teaches literatures of the British renaissance and writing at Shiv Nadar University in India.
After Mrinal Pande’s "Two Women Knitting”
Should I pour you some
tea? I ask her. She says,
yes. I tilt the porcelain
teapot into tea cups. First
I let the tea pour into her
cup and then mine, like I
have done so many times
before. Our glasses fog up
in steam when we raise
the cup to our mouths.
She blows on her tea, and
drinks a sip, same as me.
The curtains are playing to
the breeze and a whiff of
the flowering champa in the
balcony sweetens our tea.
We hold ourselves carefully
in our tea cups, aware and
brittle. We let the curtains
fill the room with talking.
ANANNYA DASGUPTA is the author of a book of poems Between Sure Places (2015). She teaches literatures of the British renaissance and writing at Shiv Nadar University in India.
Ryn Holmes
Prosody
Ah, such music.
The twang of your song
trills with destination,
flows in and out of my ears,
soft ears deftly teased
by the bop-de-wop
of a warm breath, the hum
of moist secrets riding and sliding
on the tip of your tongue,
of dark hands strumming chords
from memory
on the backs of my knees,
fingertips touching all the keys
as lips trumpet on drum-tight skin
all the way down the spine bass-line,
fiddling around….
Award-winning poet and photographer, RYN HOLMES originated from California (Southern and Northern) and now resides along the Gulf Coast of Florida as a partner in K & K Manuscript Editing, co-editor of Panoply online literary zine, and writer with works appearing in the Emerald Coast Review, Syzygy Poetry Journal, Four and Twenty zine, Indiana Voice Journal, as well as Longleaf Pine Magazine and others.
The twang of your song
trills with destination,
flows in and out of my ears,
soft ears deftly teased
by the bop-de-wop
of a warm breath, the hum
of moist secrets riding and sliding
on the tip of your tongue,
of dark hands strumming chords
from memory
on the backs of my knees,
fingertips touching all the keys
as lips trumpet on drum-tight skin
all the way down the spine bass-line,
fiddling around….
Award-winning poet and photographer, RYN HOLMES originated from California (Southern and Northern) and now resides along the Gulf Coast of Florida as a partner in K & K Manuscript Editing, co-editor of Panoply online literary zine, and writer with works appearing in the Emerald Coast Review, Syzygy Poetry Journal, Four and Twenty zine, Indiana Voice Journal, as well as Longleaf Pine Magazine and others.
Nicholas Finch
Bones as Hard as Eggs
There’s blood on my bed but I say I’m well.
The girl’s scared for me. She shouldn’t be here.
Some people break like things do, says Michelle.
Am I broken? My head is an egg shell--
cracks spread like webs. Red spills out my ear.
There’s blood on my bed but I say I’m well.
I’d write about it, but my eyes soon swell
around a pen that has become a spear.
Some people break like things do, says Michelle.
I hide the bloodied pens beneath pastel
sheets: a good place for things to disappear.
There’s blood on my bed but I say I’m well.
She runs her hands through my hair. “Do not dwell
on things.” Before I fall asleep I hear,
“Some people break like things do,” says Michelle.
A piece of my skull comes undone. The smell
of rot fills the room. Please, don’t leave me here.
There’s red on the bed but I say, “I’m well.”
“Some people break like things do,” says Michelle.
NICHOLAS FINCH has recently joined University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Former assistant editor of Neon Literary Journal, Finch was born and raised in England and South Africa before moving to Florida. He has work published or forthcoming in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Molotov Cocktail, Avis Magazine, Fields, The Florida Review and elsewhere. Visit his website finchandcrown.com.
There’s blood on my bed but I say I’m well.
The girl’s scared for me. She shouldn’t be here.
Some people break like things do, says Michelle.
Am I broken? My head is an egg shell--
cracks spread like webs. Red spills out my ear.
There’s blood on my bed but I say I’m well.
I’d write about it, but my eyes soon swell
around a pen that has become a spear.
Some people break like things do, says Michelle.
I hide the bloodied pens beneath pastel
sheets: a good place for things to disappear.
There’s blood on my bed but I say I’m well.
She runs her hands through my hair. “Do not dwell
on things.” Before I fall asleep I hear,
“Some people break like things do,” says Michelle.
A piece of my skull comes undone. The smell
of rot fills the room. Please, don’t leave me here.
There’s red on the bed but I say, “I’m well.”
“Some people break like things do,” says Michelle.
NICHOLAS FINCH has recently joined University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Former assistant editor of Neon Literary Journal, Finch was born and raised in England and South Africa before moving to Florida. He has work published or forthcoming in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Molotov Cocktail, Avis Magazine, Fields, The Florida Review and elsewhere. Visit his website finchandcrown.com.
Daniel Edward Moore
Snake Handler’s Eve
Dining on air, followed by a dessert of organic beef broth,
thin and brown as the sewage inside soon to be plunged
by a Super prep song, loud enough to make the dogs run and hide.
At 6:15 in the morning, a snake the size of Eden’s curse
will be released on the streets of my city, free to poke
and police the foreign and suspicious. Especially in the
darker parts of town, where Polyps wearing hoodies
with a big red C stretched across front and back and any other
visitors taking refuge in a land beyond the borders of their breath
will be questioned and tested to make sure I am safe.
Dr. Miller’s electric arm will travel as far as the room’s
cold light will support the eye on the serpent’s head.
Forty minutes later, I’ll wake to a world, cleaner and emptier
than a Pentecostal church after the men of faith with fangs
have driven their gospel girls home.
Daniel Edward Moore’s poems have been published in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Assaracus Review, Columbia Journal Of Arts and Literature. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his poems are currently at Permafrost Magazine, Compose Literary Journal, Glint Literary Journal, Steel Toe Review, The American Journal Of Poetry, Coal Magazine, Gravel Magazine and Lullwater Review. His book, Confessions Of A Pentecostal Buddhist was just released on Amazon. Visit Daniel at Danieledwardmoore.com
Dining on air, followed by a dessert of organic beef broth,
thin and brown as the sewage inside soon to be plunged
by a Super prep song, loud enough to make the dogs run and hide.
At 6:15 in the morning, a snake the size of Eden’s curse
will be released on the streets of my city, free to poke
and police the foreign and suspicious. Especially in the
darker parts of town, where Polyps wearing hoodies
with a big red C stretched across front and back and any other
visitors taking refuge in a land beyond the borders of their breath
will be questioned and tested to make sure I am safe.
Dr. Miller’s electric arm will travel as far as the room’s
cold light will support the eye on the serpent’s head.
Forty minutes later, I’ll wake to a world, cleaner and emptier
than a Pentecostal church after the men of faith with fangs
have driven their gospel girls home.
Daniel Edward Moore’s poems have been published in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Assaracus Review, Columbia Journal Of Arts and Literature. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his poems are currently at Permafrost Magazine, Compose Literary Journal, Glint Literary Journal, Steel Toe Review, The American Journal Of Poetry, Coal Magazine, Gravel Magazine and Lullwater Review. His book, Confessions Of A Pentecostal Buddhist was just released on Amazon. Visit Daniel at Danieledwardmoore.com
Dick Allen
After the War
There was a lilac bush and an ancient cellar hole
half filled in. For some reason not known to children
we always went there at dusk, our parked car
a 1941 dull blue Dodge with running boards
on which my brother and I played Elliot Ness and Al Capone
while our discharged father sat a little ways off
on a stone fence, in the posture I know now is
the posture of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” As it grew dark,
our eyes seemed to swell, the scent of lilacs
grew deeper, more purple. Almost everything
turned into shapes that didn’t or only scarcely
moved, like the shape of our father
standing up and heading for the car. He’d fumble,
then start the engine, flicking the headlights on highbeams.
that signaled us into the back seat. We always left empty
the front passenger side seat where our mother wasn’t
smoking Camels or Lucky Strikes or crumpling
or carefully smoothing out a package of Old Golds,
whispering to him things we weren’t to hear.
DICK ALLEN’S poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Verse Virtual, Tricycle, American Poetry Journal (formerly Margie), among other periodicals.
There was a lilac bush and an ancient cellar hole
half filled in. For some reason not known to children
we always went there at dusk, our parked car
a 1941 dull blue Dodge with running boards
on which my brother and I played Elliot Ness and Al Capone
while our discharged father sat a little ways off
on a stone fence, in the posture I know now is
the posture of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” As it grew dark,
our eyes seemed to swell, the scent of lilacs
grew deeper, more purple. Almost everything
turned into shapes that didn’t or only scarcely
moved, like the shape of our father
standing up and heading for the car. He’d fumble,
then start the engine, flicking the headlights on highbeams.
that signaled us into the back seat. We always left empty
the front passenger side seat where our mother wasn’t
smoking Camels or Lucky Strikes or crumpling
or carefully smoothing out a package of Old Golds,
whispering to him things we weren’t to hear.
DICK ALLEN’S poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Verse Virtual, Tricycle, American Poetry Journal (formerly Margie), among other periodicals.
Stephen Reilly
Housebound
His day begins like all days: a shower and shave, the job and its load of work, a stop at the grocery for the real bread and butter, the ride home.
But when he gets home, the house whispers to itself. Some rooms stay out of his reach, ignore him, while others crowd him, look over his shoulder, or slap his back and call him a friend.
He walks in slow-motion, mechanically moving with each room. The entire house is impressed with his style and finesse. Even the cellar comes up to him to say how much it admires the way he carries himself.
“But somehow,” he says to himself in a very low voice so as not to disturb anything. “This just doesn’t seem quite right.”
He keeps moving his joints from room to room. The living room closely eyes his progress. He catches himself hearing the telephone not ring, the silence loud as cathedral bells. A hallway suggests he should relax, find himself a sympathetic chair, but he’s already twisted his ears elsewhere.
He stays with the phone for hours. He coddles it, strokes it, gently talks to it, anything to break into conversation. He calls out to himself. By calling himself back, he thinks the phone might learn by his example. The living room shakes its head.
He sits rearranging his limbs to look hopeless. This is too much for the bedroom to bear, and it comes to him, wrapping its warm arms around him for comfort. It doesn’t help, no matter how hard he tries to say yes. He keeps bending his bones into new patterns.
He begins to smell himself moldy as month old bread. He lets the shower run all over him. The bathroom, helpless, wants to move slowly away from him as far as it can. When he steps out of the shower, he thanks it and says he’s now ready to be a fillet and served up on a platter.
The kitchen sets the table.
STEPHEN REILLY’S poems appeared in Mudfish 19, Wraparound South, Main Street Rag, Broad River Review, Cape Rock, Poetry South, and other publications. One of his poems appears in the anthology Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination (edited by Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O’Sullivan, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Fla. 1995). He works as a staff writer for the Englewood Sun, a daily Florida newspaper with circulation in south Sarasota County, Charlotte and DeSoto counties.
His day begins like all days: a shower and shave, the job and its load of work, a stop at the grocery for the real bread and butter, the ride home.
But when he gets home, the house whispers to itself. Some rooms stay out of his reach, ignore him, while others crowd him, look over his shoulder, or slap his back and call him a friend.
He walks in slow-motion, mechanically moving with each room. The entire house is impressed with his style and finesse. Even the cellar comes up to him to say how much it admires the way he carries himself.
“But somehow,” he says to himself in a very low voice so as not to disturb anything. “This just doesn’t seem quite right.”
He keeps moving his joints from room to room. The living room closely eyes his progress. He catches himself hearing the telephone not ring, the silence loud as cathedral bells. A hallway suggests he should relax, find himself a sympathetic chair, but he’s already twisted his ears elsewhere.
He stays with the phone for hours. He coddles it, strokes it, gently talks to it, anything to break into conversation. He calls out to himself. By calling himself back, he thinks the phone might learn by his example. The living room shakes its head.
He sits rearranging his limbs to look hopeless. This is too much for the bedroom to bear, and it comes to him, wrapping its warm arms around him for comfort. It doesn’t help, no matter how hard he tries to say yes. He keeps bending his bones into new patterns.
He begins to smell himself moldy as month old bread. He lets the shower run all over him. The bathroom, helpless, wants to move slowly away from him as far as it can. When he steps out of the shower, he thanks it and says he’s now ready to be a fillet and served up on a platter.
The kitchen sets the table.
STEPHEN REILLY’S poems appeared in Mudfish 19, Wraparound South, Main Street Rag, Broad River Review, Cape Rock, Poetry South, and other publications. One of his poems appears in the anthology Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination (edited by Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O’Sullivan, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Fla. 1995). He works as a staff writer for the Englewood Sun, a daily Florida newspaper with circulation in south Sarasota County, Charlotte and DeSoto counties.
Doug Ramspeck 3 poems
Winter Sky
Or then the chalk of snow beside the river.
The wind offering its attention to the drifts,
lifting white, carrying white.
This is how we learn of the other side.
And of course the wind shimmers
across the water, becomes a vision.
And the current—after dark--
is a black tongue. And there is always
someone speaking, the snow falling
from the old skull of sky. It must be
primitive, winter. Something cries out
and makes us listen. The cold sidles close.
And above the yellow grass
clings a gravity of snow.
The wind offering its attention to the drifts,
lifting white, carrying white.
This is how we learn of the other side.
And of course the wind shimmers
across the water, becomes a vision.
And the current—after dark--
is a black tongue. And there is always
someone speaking, the snow falling
from the old skull of sky. It must be
primitive, winter. Something cries out
and makes us listen. The cold sidles close.
And above the yellow grass
clings a gravity of snow.
A Stone in the Pond
“There is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing.”
-Hegel
The first words are rising from the prairie grass
in suffused light: prayer, water, reliquary.
What is this, then, but an abattoir of longing?
And when the shadows ripple outward
and the concentric undulations distort
the reflections of the clouds, this must be
the body’s body, a syntax of gravity and breath,
a grammar of lips and tongues and skin,
a torch of sunlight at play atop the water lilies.
Glossolalia
The days keep assembling and reassembling,
the dream of light in the tall grass
giving way to a turning moon, arching
its pale back. And if all fields are a cemetery,
if the bones of mice and deer and possum
and voles are a shrine, then what is beneath
a thought except another thought, and what is
beneath a word except a tongue? My mother
took me as a child to a church along the river.
There was a certain writhing of the limbs,
a murmuring. There was an epileptic stammering.
The girls, I remember, sat beside the pews
and wept words. And all is palimpsest,
it seems, the sparrows dying and returning,
the starlings gathering then giving way,
the crows oaring their wings above snow
or dust or green. And now the birds.
are calling out above my head, such squawking
to tear a fabric in the sky, and under
the sound is every other sound, and under
each thought wait the dead, and under
the dead are the dead before them,
and God speaks to us in tongues.
DOUG RAMSPECK is the author of five poetry collections and one collection of short stories. His most recent poetry book, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Three other books have also received awards: The Owl That Carries Us Away (G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction), Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize), and Black Tupelo Country (John Ciardi Prize for Poetry). He is a a two-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
Veronica Schuder 3 poems
A Divided Line
1.
I want to fill the blank
space on the form
handed over the counter
at the county clerk’s office
with your name,
put on a dress white
as impulse, its waves
breaking over our bodies
as we dash through the rain
to a long black car
with its tail of cans
waiting predictably
at the curb,
shut my eyes and see
an empty beach fringed
with palms.
2.
That’s a counterfeit
reality, a dialogue
whispered underwater
like flies on mangoes
in cups of newspaper
at the Tamarindo Feria.
You tap your lip with a tooth,
to show me very slowly
the limits of imagination.
Isn’t it through the senses
that clarity occurs.
Isn’t it by your thumb
under my skirt
that I will learn the secrets
of religion and through your tongue
we will be wed?
I want to fill the blank
space on the form
handed over the counter
at the county clerk’s office
with your name,
put on a dress white
as impulse, its waves
breaking over our bodies
as we dash through the rain
to a long black car
with its tail of cans
waiting predictably
at the curb,
shut my eyes and see
an empty beach fringed
with palms.
2.
That’s a counterfeit
reality, a dialogue
whispered underwater
like flies on mangoes
in cups of newspaper
at the Tamarindo Feria.
You tap your lip with a tooth,
to show me very slowly
the limits of imagination.
Isn’t it through the senses
that clarity occurs.
Isn’t it by your thumb
under my skirt
that I will learn the secrets
of religion and through your tongue
we will be wed?
The Way Our Hearts Will Break
Like a shamefaced dog
that breaks daily through the fence
because it can’t stop running away
you keep leaving.
There’s a green space
in the alley. Choking vines
and feral cats growl there at night
and he stirs, my dog, woofs,
pushes the back door open to a dark
only he can see,
chases a shadow maybe
the neighbor’s bitch,
a percussive smell of rats--
his idioms for joy.
I don’t sit up and beg,
tilt my head to one side,
lift an ear only to be left,
but I can recognize you
by smell, by my palsied knees
and the wet scent under my skirt.
I hope by noon to have forgotten
you’ve left, to remember just
the joyful pursuit and doubt
tender as a paw.
that breaks daily through the fence
because it can’t stop running away
you keep leaving.
There’s a green space
in the alley. Choking vines
and feral cats growl there at night
and he stirs, my dog, woofs,
pushes the back door open to a dark
only he can see,
chases a shadow maybe
the neighbor’s bitch,
a percussive smell of rats--
his idioms for joy.
I don’t sit up and beg,
tilt my head to one side,
lift an ear only to be left,
but I can recognize you
by smell, by my palsied knees
and the wet scent under my skirt.
I hope by noon to have forgotten
you’ve left, to remember just
the joyful pursuit and doubt
tender as a paw.
Lovely, Dark, Deep
This will have birds in it
because they come after
being young ends.
When you start thinking
it’s time to teach the heart
to be moderate maybe
a goldfinch starts singing
somewhere invisible.
The sound the wind
makes through bamboo.
All that hollowness.
The vibrations breath
makes of it. We go
around surrendering
to the dark the body makes.
I am learning how
love works, how it looks
down into the woods
and sees what’s hidden
in the bark’s dark seams,
then starts massaging
my obdurate heart.
When our son was born,
Bun said to me,
“What kind of bird is that?”
“Which one?” I said,
looking up in the trees.
“The one that sounds
like the baby crying.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I said, “I don’t hear anything.”
That was a lie. I heard it all.
VERONICA SCHUDER received her MFA from University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in 2000 and has been teaching composition and creative writing at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La ever since. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Dry Creek, Cream City, Poet Lore, Black Dirt, The Florida Review and The Laurel Review.
This will have birds in it
because they come after
being young ends.
When you start thinking
it’s time to teach the heart
to be moderate maybe
a goldfinch starts singing
somewhere invisible.
The sound the wind
makes through bamboo.
All that hollowness.
The vibrations breath
makes of it. We go
around surrendering
to the dark the body makes.
I am learning how
love works, how it looks
down into the woods
and sees what’s hidden
in the bark’s dark seams,
then starts massaging
my obdurate heart.
When our son was born,
Bun said to me,
“What kind of bird is that?”
“Which one?” I said,
looking up in the trees.
“The one that sounds
like the baby crying.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I said, “I don’t hear anything.”
That was a lie. I heard it all.
VERONICA SCHUDER received her MFA from University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in 2000 and has been teaching composition and creative writing at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La ever since. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Dry Creek, Cream City, Poet Lore, Black Dirt, The Florida Review and The Laurel Review.
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]