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  SoFloPoJo
Picture
Issue 5  May 2017  

Lenny DellaRocca & Michael Mackin O'Mara, Issue 5 Editors
Picture
Susannah W. Simpson   Michael Hettich   Steve Klepetar   Tony Gloeggler   Michelle Mitchell-Foust   Molly Peacock   Lauren Coggins   Bruce McRae   Carol Alexander   Lynne Viti   Donald Illich   Paul Hostovsky   Klara Feenstra   Linda Nemec Foster   C.M.. Clark   Blaise Allen   Mary Catherine Harper   Don Hogle   Philp Kobylarz   Ojo Taiye   Marianne Szlyk   Linda B. Avila   Michele Wolf   Maureen Daniels   Joan Leotta
​
Susannah W. Simpson    2 poems
Word Witch


On August nights the words:
summer and heat
evaporate from her sweat while
above her head the words: 
grotto and gallinule 
form a wreath as she sleeps 
and aphrodisiac and Isle of Langerhans 
move over to make room in her bed. 
She pays the woodman with words 
like: thank you and it’s perfect 
to build more shelves for fat volumes 
of words in Italian and French,
for dictionaries—revised, unabridged,  
and annotated and for biographies, 
fables, and fiction. Her lovers
are synonyms and eponyms 
and her walks on the beach
 leave the imprint:
                   foot                   foot
                               foot                       
in the sand.
She spoons sonnets out of her soup
and letters form from her tossed
apple skins.
Tomatoes in the garden 
climb up in red words: 
Hardy Boy and Heirloom and
the columbine, the lupine know 
to speak to her and say: purple or 
yellow blossom,  here        and       here       on my stalk.
The river whispers: water and ripple
and the wind too knows to say: gust or blow. 
In April, the calamondin tree is hung 
with the words: 
       orange globe
                           tart fruit
            bird treat
and in May the frangipani  understands her need to read:
                     fragrant flower 
lettered along its branches.

Literary Lasciviousness

      (Love Sonnet # 57,872) 

First we'd have a cup of T.S. Eliot 
in a London bookshop and I would notice 
your cuff links, your civilized, buffed nails 
and the crisp part in your pantene hair. 
But, I know it would move very swiftly, 
Jonathon. It would disintegrate to me 
slathering you with Shakespeare, measuring 
your Dickinson against my Virginia Woolf, 

then we would be discovered bucking 
under a Bukowski line that will blow 
your mind and I would lick Li Po off 
your lower lip and want to Faulkner you, 
until you are incoherent 
and rambling into the night. 


Susannah W. Simpson’s work has been published in: The North American Review, The Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, and Xavier Review among others. Her book: Geography of Love & Exile was published by Cervena Barva Press (Somerset, MA.) December 2, 2016.​

Michael Hettich   2 poems
Baby Mammals


1.
Many nights for the past few months, an opossum 
has climbed up into our back-door garbage can 
to sleep. I’ve watched him from the sunroom window 
at dusk as he’s shuffled across our back porch 
to leap up and climb in, careful not to tip it over. 


On more than one still-dark morning I’ve startled him 
into a posture of death--eyes glazed, 
tail stiff, legs akimbo—as I’ve thrown something in there, 
on him, without thinking. He’s almost petite--
he’d easily fit into a shoebox—so I think of him 


as an adolescent. And I feel oddly proud 
that he’s chosen our house for a home. What dreams 
shiver his body, nestled there in the garbage, 
while we putter through the house, or dream our own worlds
just a few feet away? And where’s his family?


2.
Sometimes, lately, I remember the feeling
the first time I woke to my parents fighting 
the way they did sometimes when they drank, in voices
I didn’t recognize, slurred and full of spite.
I slipped out of bed, stood at the head
of the stairs and listened, terrified, not
knowing who they were now. Then I slipped back into 
a private kind of silence, waiting for my dreams. 


And I listened for those strange voices even as I slept, 
for years, in that comfy bed alone.
Sometimes I woke up toward morning—just in case--
and listened to the whole house breathing, and listened
to the night creatures moving outside through the dark,
sniffing and scratching for food.
Saturday Morning

All those caterpillars eating up the milkweed 
in the pot on your back porch—you can almost hear them chewing 
even as you play your guitar to the squirrels 
and doves,  to the invisible stars and the oak trees 
that cast their pollen across the scraggle-grass 
that yearns to grow thorns and wildflowers, as you 
sing out-of-tune to the bananas just starting 
to push their fingers into the gloves 
of their skin. Inside the house, your clothes 
are sleeping in their closets, your shoes are dozing 
to the scent of your feet in their cracks and pores
while the ceiling fan flutters some wisps of hair 
that fall across the face of the sleeping woman 
who happens to be dreaming of crows higher up 
in those backyard trees, watching you play  
and laughing into their feathers as a cat 
slinks from the bushes to pounce on a dove
feasting from the feeder the squirrels have knocked
to the ground, then carrying the fluttering bird 
to its own yard, next door, to show the children
who live there its proud accomplishment. 
But you’ve seen the whole thing, so you chase the damn cat, 
guitar cradled gently, and it drops the wounded bird 
to the grass where it flutters, broken but not dead yet, 
and you wonder for a moment if you can turn away,
then decide you’ll have to kill it after all, 
and wonder how to do that, with a shovel or big rock, 
as the woman who was sleeping steps out the back door, 
groggy and still in her nightgown, to tell you 
what she dreamed and to thank you whose singing made her 
feel purely happy for a moment as she woke 
and just lay there in her body beside where you’d lain 
in that bed, as you do every night, and she just wants 
to thank you, she holds out her arms for a hug 
as you cast your eyes around for a safe place to put 
your guitar down so you can return her affection 
before that sweet moment has passed.


Michael Hettich's new book, The Frozen Harbor, is forthcoming later in 2017. Other books include Systems of Vanishing (2014) and The Animals Beyond Us (2011).

Steve Klepetar
Night Man


Night Man
 
At night, the river flows so near my house
I can feel its translucent skin burning
 
through walls. I breathe, inhaling its rich 
scent of fish and frogs, waterweed and mud.
 
I am a night man clinging to river’s flesh, 
a traveler borne south in its icy winter course.
 
I feed its waters with my dreams, which wind 
downstream filling the darkness with ghosts 
 
who linger in shadowy trees. 
Some nights they gather to whisper, 
 
but when it snows, they circle, and sing. 
In the rain, they dissolve into mist. 
 
Sometimes I write their names on river 
stones, drop them with a small splash 
 
into the passing stream. 
By morning the river has drifted far away 
 
and I lose its chorus in a rush of cars 
speeding above high banks toward the factories 
 
of day, where mechanical limbs work ceaselessly, 
humming programmed tunes on the gleaming floor.




Steve Klepetar lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His work appears in Boston Literary Magazine, Chiron, Deep Water, Expound, Phenomenal Literature, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, and Ygdrasil. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including four in 2016).

Tony Gloeggler
Halloween On The F Train

Re-printed by permission from The Last Lie, NYQ Books, 2010 

I’m trying to read my book
when Little Red Riding Hood
and the Big Bad Wolf take
the seats across from me.
I can’t keep my eyes off
her red low cut blouse,
red fishnet stockings,
the goodies in her basket.
The wolf tugs on his mask,
lifts a beer to his snout
takes a swig and a bit spills
down his chinny chin chin.
 
I haven’t dressed up since
I was eleven, a pirate or Robin
Hood, going door to door filling
a shopping bag with candy,
throwing eggs at kids and cars.
Last year, I was with a woman
who loved Halloween. One time
Drena and her best friend stood
on an uptown corner dressed
as good fairies and blessed
passersby with wands, granting
wishes. Part of me was wishing
I could step into a phone booth,
rip off my clothes, slip out
of my skin, drink and dance
and laugh at an all night party,
bend her over the kitchen
table, fuck her until it hurt
or somehow turn into a guy
she’d want to marry, settle
down and have a kid with
before she turned forty
and had to follow her plan
to do it all on her own.
 
Don’t know why Drena cried
twice the night we ended it.
Once, before we fucked, once
after. We never fit that well,
never fell all the way in love.
I kept as quiet as possible
and left before the sun
came up. She sat on the bed
as I pulled my knapsack straps
snug, leaned over, kissed her
neck and stroked her hair,
hoping she’d open her robe,
pull me back in. She later wrote
she didn’t regret a second
we spent together. I didn’t
either, but I didn’t tell her
I never spent so much time,
seven months, with someone
That added up to so little.
I once called it a string
of good one night stands
and a friend of mine wondered
what was wrong with that.
 
Red gives out goodies to kids,
the wolf growls at grown-ups
while I wish the wolf would huff,
puff, blow Red’s blouse down
and her full young promising tits
would keep me from imagining
what Drena’s wearing tonight,
help me forget how much I miss
watching her undress, stop me
me from wondering why we never
could make each other happy

for more than a weekend.


Tony Gloeggler's work has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Examined Life Journal, Rattle, Mudfish and The Pittsburgh Poetry Review. His books include One Wish Left (Pavement Saw press 2002 and The Last Lie (NYQ Books/2010). Until The Last Light Leaves (NYQ Books 2015) was a finalist in the 2016 Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.

Michelle Mitchell-Foust    2 Poems
Numbers Station

        What is the distance in round meters
        Between the sun and the oranges?
                  - Pablo Neruda


A boy in a ghost costume.
A dog in a forest.

These I lay on the altar
along with the femur/transversal

wide in the dog’s mouth.
Hard to measure the angle, I know,

but picturesque. A treasure map.
A boy with a cast on his arm

in Pythagorean Triangles. A woman
in front of a stained glass window

in Circle Properties. A sky
at night. Twins in one-piece bathing suits

in Symmetry. A horse race.
A mountain.

The charcoal kilns of Wildrose Canyon
in Tessellation. A Dodge Super Charger.

I seed the geometry books with these
old postcard pictures. Tell me

how Japan’s black and white seashell
landed in Golden Ratio,

What one has to do
with the other.

How is this Shaker grey cloak
made for Mrs. Grover Cleveland

in Reflection. 
A crime scene in Induction.

A pink dress in Translation.
Mozart’s house of many windows

in Parallelograms. 
General Electric 44 Ton Locomotive.

A woman collecting cans,
in the background

of the Doll Museum;
her sagging white bag

is a child limping along,
trying to decide which flowers

to pick in the dark. 
Ski lift. Balaton (Notte a chiara luna).

Couple just married, 
wearing hats.


Prison rooms in the Cabildo at Chartres.
Wall-eyed Pike 

whose flip side reads in tagger scrawl
Ramon smells like fish.

Alcatraz (Dear Fellas--
We are having Beautiful weather thus far--

Joe and Bunny).
Lava Beds. Petroglyphs

in Transformation. Try again. 
Find the Glacier Hotel  

in three dimensional solids,
the Snowball Dining Room

in Proportion and Similarity.
An idiot helicopter herding 

wild horses in Nevada.
A pilot getting off work in Probability,

heading for the casino’s 
off-track betting.

Choose One. 
There are three-hundred 

and sixty syllables
in a horse race

and only one syllable 
coming from the pilot’s mouth.
Verisimilitude

From the words for night breaking night in half,
for the shadow that stays watching, for grinning face, 
for the three holes in the shell that resemble a human face, 
from the words for head and mask and crown and red, 
Cucuy, kidnapper-child-eater, and we got to this ghost 
by traveling the path of insistence, the path of theorem 
and law and definition, when I said describe a myth 
you believed in childhood and tell me why you believed it, 
and they said his face is unseen; he is punishment for not sleeping. 
If you don’t sleep, he will eat you--the conditional statement 
I dragged around the room in a parade of geometric reasoning: 
the if p then q. Nothing has been proven, but my European vacation 
is off; I feel my hot tongue in my head every midnight; 
I am aching at the hip and the knee, the skin on my chest 

smarting from all the teeth marks—and this is not the first time.


Michelle Mitchell-Foust is the author of Circassian Girl (Elixir Press) and Imago Mundi (Elixir Press). She co-edited Dead and Undead Poems and Monster Verse, published by Everyman Press in 2014 and 2015.

​Molly Peacock    2 Poems
Creations

Creations are creatures with lives of their own.
As we ignore the trees we lock our bikes to
(they don’t seem alive, but on loan to us

to use as poles), so creations are alive,
living things loaning us air.
Like a tree on the street, that book is there.  

The drawing in air is there. 
The framed drawing of the tree is there.
Creations are creatures with lives of their own,

ignoring us until we are provoked
by failure or falling in love to yoke
feeling and thought again--

then we look at how our bike locks
scarred the bark 
and that tree is alive comes to us. 

The leaves in books ignore us 
till we ask them to speak
when we’re dying from loneliness 

or mutating cells.
The drawing on the wall always there
is suddenly there,

like a lung, 
breathing for us.
So is the drawing in the air.
​

Putting a Price on Things

Turning a straight-backed chair on its side
so the seat becomes a shield, you can stand
behind (if you are under three feet tall)
might let that shield become a counter,
and that counter might have a ledge—not wide,
but just enough to hold a row of cans
and some coins to make change for your sales,
since now the chair is a store.
You’re the storekeeper.  You’ll make the change.
Is there masking tape?  You could make labels
with prices for chicken noodle soup or
peas.  The world beyond the counter is stranger
than before you came to be in charge. You’re safe.
An hour is large. But with a slight sense of danger.
​


Molly Peacock is the author of The Analyst, a collection of poems that tell the story of a decades-long patient-therapist relationship that reverses and continues to evolve after the analyst’s stroke and reclamation of her life through painting. Her other books include The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems. Molly Peacock also appears in SoFloPoJo's Interview With A Poet.

Lauren Coggins
Mostly Space

Particle physics says I am mostly
space, a great hollowness
parceled innumerably out, atom

by atom, as though my body
were a vending machine packed
with those plastic prize bubbles

we all wanted as children,
that cost far too much
for the cheap nuclei

of stick-on tattoos
and bouncy balls, rings
and phosphorescent goo. 

It’s as much sense as physics
makes to me, so forget space-
time and most of relativity

because what does it matter
to prove or disprove the Higgs-
Boson, or why the universe

races outward? Immensities
of scale don’t inform
my uncertainty in matters

of the heart, massless
and for all my observation,
like electrons:  understood

only as paths taken
or points in time,
never both.


LAUREN COGGINS lives in SC and works in the insurance industry. Her work has appeared online at Charlotte Viewpoint, and in Ruminate magazine and Southern Poetry Review. She has work forthcoming in Crosswinds Poetry Journal and in Reed magazine.

Bruce McRae    2 Poems
To Whom It May Concern                        

Dear blank space, guide me
​
through the exquisite horrors
unfolding before me like a bloodied rag.
Take me by the trembling hand
on this night of nights,
that I may weep as one without tears.
Help me to clasp the asp of persecution
to my shuddering breast.
Make it so I cannot hear
the screaming skulls in the shrieking pit
as I walk the path of the hurting hand.
O breaker of bones and minds,
lead me beyond the bruises and embarrassments
on this glorious and rosy-fingered dawn,
the sun rising like a wizened eye,
like a wound on the cheek of morning.
​

 What Madness Is This?                 

They’ve arrested the bluebirds
​
for having dared to sing.
There are peacocks in chains.
Parakeets are forgotten about,
down in the cold dungeons
they assure us don’t exist.
Even the doves are not above suspicion.
 
“Tell us what you think you know,”
the Inquisitor demands of a chicken,
the poor dumb cluck
blinking with incomprehension.
Its bloodied feathers ruffled.
​


Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island B.C. is a Pushcart nominee. His work has appeared in Poetry, Rattle and North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets, An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy, and Like As If. His video-and-music poems can be viewed on YouTube’s "BruceMcRaePoetry".

Carol Alexander
Shrike Hunting
      
​  
--after Robert Lowell


A gold fly hangs impaled on a thorn, work of a wintering shrike.
In its provocative way, the butcherbird has struck and passed,
wings pinioned by the wind, drumming out cricket and frog.
It shadows the Commons' stricken pond, whiskered in black ice.
A skitter of sparrows, a scratch and lurch of velvet voles--
once a warden aimed his musket high past carriage horses
while candles burned on hemlocks, and blasted shrikes from the sky.
To the north a stern chill pins the forest to cloud; appetite dulls.
Neither poet nor prophet parse with wire these lame extremities,
nor pack the heart with a substance already stiff and dead.


Carol Alexander's poetry appears in anthologies including Broken Circles, Through a Distant Lens and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 1. Her work appears Bluestem, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, Matter, Poetrybay, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, and forthcoming in The High Window, Southern Humanities Review, and Soundings East. She is the author of the chapbook Bridal Veil Falls (Flutter Press). Habitat Lost, Alexander's first full-length collection of poems, is due in 2017 from Cave Moon Press.

Lynne Viti      2 Poems
Viral
 ​
Woke up thinking a monster grabbed me
by the jaws, one large paw on each side of my
face, squeezing tight. I tried to swallow, my throat
burned. A voice inside me called my mother. She sat
on the edge of my bed, cradled my face,
sighed, touched a cool hand to my cheek.
Mumps. It was cutting a swath through
the second grade room. Mrs. Norman called the roll
each morning, ten or twelve desks sat empty.
Now there was nothing to be done but wait, wait and
take baby aspirin, its tart orangey taste a small pleasure.
My mother lodged a cool washcloth
on my forehead, the thumping in my brain went on.
It was hard to push Campbell’s tomato soup
down my swollen throat. I
whimpered my way through the week. Somebody
in Room 203 must’ve sneezed on me, coughed
the virus my way, it sneaked into my eyes or nose.
We didn’t know the enveloped, single-stranded
rubulavirus sought out only humans for their work, we
didn’t know it replicated, replicated.
I cried when I looked at my swollen face in the
bathroom mirror.  My ears ached.  I dozed, a voice
read fairy tales aloud. Try to sleep.
Back at school, I joined the veterans
of the mumps wars, tough, triumphant,
feeling my old, familiar face when I pressed
my hands hard against my cheeks.
​

Sugar Pumpkins
 
We grew them last summer, in the raised beds, their vines profuse,
the orange fruit scant. Hard to raise cucurbita pepo
In a drought season. Still, the six we found shading themselves
under their companion leaves made us think we might grow
enough to feed ourselves all autumn long. The orange globes
sat on the mantel for months, past Thanksgiving,
when we exiled them to the foyer to make room
for Christmas rosemary and holly branches.
Tonight, we choose the largest sugar pumpkin,
Carve a hole in the top, scrape out the seeds and strings.
In goes the mixture—rice, grapes, walnuts, onion, celery,
enough cumin to give it some heat.
When it’s baked to a turn, we slice it from the center,
So slender arcs of pumpkin fall into a circle, looking
more like a flower than a squash. It tastes of pie
and of curry, redolent of the summer earth.


Lynne Viti is a senior lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. Her poetry chapbook, Baltimore Girls, was published in March 2017 by Finishing Line Press. She has published most recently in Pen in Hand, Light, The South Florida Poetry Journal, Little Patuxent Review, Mountain Gazette, Amuse-Bouche, Paterson Review, and Right Hand Pointing. She blogs at stillinschool.wordpress.com

Donald Illich
Sarsaparilla
 
Why must I sing in the mansion?
The same reason I shoot pistols
at strangers, and miss, why I slap
my money on the bar and ask for
sarsaparilla.  It’s the purpose behind
my butterfly costume, daring collectors
to pin me in their golden boxes,
and the source of my awful behavior
at dinner, throwing the silverware
in a heap, playing with it with magnets.
That song I sing is total nonsense,
each syllable as sweet as a hummingbird’s
tongue, so no one minds the music,
no one hears pain in its sugary notes.
Those bullets don’t desire human flesh,
sarsaparilla only gives a stomachache.
And the last time anyone sees me,
I am floating by the flowers, seeking
nectar in each cup of radiance, red, blue,
yellow, white, drawn to my open mouth,
as if they were magnetized to my lips,
as if they had no choice but to be love.
​

 
Donald Illich has published poetry in journals such as The Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and Cold Mountain Review. He won Honorable Mention in the Washington Prize book contest. He recently published a chapbook, The Art of Dissolving. He lives in Maryland.

Paul Hostovsky      2 Poems
Sucky Poem

Because I suspect 
that I suck.
Because I have suspected it 
all this time.
Because I literally 
sucked my thumb until I was 
thirteen and a half,
shamefully, inexorably, clandestinely,
pretending to my parents 
that I didn’t anymore.
(My mother knew, though. 
She knew.)
Because my bar mitzvah was a fraud, my father
kissing me on the cheek, saying, 
“Now you are a man
in the eyes of God 
and our people.” Because our people
included my cousin Naomi from Brooklyn
with the long black hair and frank 
mischief in her eyes. 
And because it was the right thumb, never the left,
because I tried the left, of course, but it didn’t
satisfy the way the right one did
probably for reasons 
anatomical. And finally,
because my parents are dead now
and I suspect that I suck
figuratively, having pretended
to myself all this time
I was great.
If Only Life Were Like Language

and all the natural resources like words,
then the world would be 
an unambiguously better place.
Because when you use a word 
like apocalypse, say, it doesn’t then follow
that there is one less apocalypse to go around--
there are still an infinite number of apocalypses,
more than enough for everyone. And the more
people who use a language the more
the language grows rich and strong
and resourceful and ramifying 
with new and far-out ways of saying things,
not to mention all the lexical borrowings that go on,
the exotic words and phrases, and the names--
names of flowers and dinosaurs
and racehorses and hurricanes--
and the lists, praise be to God for the lists!
Which is just the opposite of the world,
with its dying rivers and dwindling resources
and endangered species list. 
With words you can make stuff up out of nothing
which is more than you can say
for physics or chemistry or corn. Earth’s
the right place for language. I don’t know where
else you could invent an imaginary escape hatch
up and out of a dying world, 
and take a little of the world with you in your pockets, 
like the jingling coins of a realm, 
or like the crepitating bits and pieces 
of a beautiful intact dead language  
for sprinkling over the smart lunch conversation
in the next.


Paul Hostovsky is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Bad Guys, which won the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize for 2015. He has also won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net 
awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. Visit him at paulhostovsky.com)

Klara Feenstra
Overexposure

The nuance of a forearm

or bridge of the foot

can be preserved with vaseline.

So strip off the parts you want as a souvenir,

do my work for me.

Thank god you’re never satisfied with the hair you tie around your teeth.
​


Instead,

you pray and love low to the ground,

staying under the smoke of the fire.

And through that tunnel of breath,

you look as though you’ve been caught

blinking in a photograph.

For writing this you say I’m not a real girl,

but my love, there is no real world.


Klara Feenstra is a poet from London with upcoming publications in Lighthouse and shufPoetry. Her work is primarily invested with phenomenological concerns, particularly how time and memory is recalled, archived, and how these urgencies manifest themselves in language about the body.

Linda Nemec Foster
The Simple ABCʼs of How to Survive Anything


Always look before you leap: even if thereʼs nothing there.

Be prepared for the inevitable: and you know what Iʼm talking about.

Carefully tie your shoes: the laces may betray you to the sidewalk.

Donʼt do anything: the need to hold still is essential. 

Even if you want to scream, donʼt: you will only upset your lungsʼ definition of work.

Forget about sex: underrated, overrated, it never quite gets its lines right.
 
Go to the nearest oak tree and climb it: ask the sparrows if theyʼll adopt you. 

Have an escape plan: it may not save you but your creative impulse will be forever
grateful. 


Imagine nothing: then crawl into its cave.

Just relax and wait: things will either get better or worse.
 
Know your friends: their smallest gestures, the ways their hearts hold you.

Learn from your enemies: count every tooth in their mouths, even the ones missing. 

Make something youʼve never made before: a black velvet opera cape, a transistor radio, interstellar dust. 

Never underestimate the power of NO: the negative can be positive given the right
conditions. 


Outlive your enemies but none of your friends: think about it, itʼs cool! 

Play a musical composition only your dead father could appreciate: for example,
a fugue for two harmonicas.


Quit being so silent about your life: even the maple tree in the backyard has a louder
voice.


Remember to never forget your feet: donʼt assume theyʼll follow you everywhere.

Sing as if you lived in an alien landscape: your voice as red as Mars, as blue as
Neptune, as opaque as the Horsehead Nebula.


Turn around right now and go in the opposite direction: trust me, it works.
 
Unwrap the one stone thatʼs been sitting in your heart the longest: feel the weight thatʼs
gone. 


Verbalize random words that you can toss like a salad: oscillation, popsicle, sea spray,
wart. 


Walk down to the basement and inspect the damage: if you donʼt have one, start
digging.


X marks the spot: of course, you donʼt know what that means; neither do I.

Yodel a Bavarian tune as you re-imagine the history of the twentieth century: horrific and absurd in one long melody.

Zinc, zenith, zephyr, ziggurat, zen, zodiac, zion, zucchini, zygote, zero. Start all over
​again.




Linda Nemec Foster has 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). 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. Her new chapbook, The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte, will be published in 2017 by Cervena Barva Press. ​

C.M. Clark     2 Poems
The Undertaking of Alice Lin
 
My father says remember the ace of spades. He
called for the burial on a windy morning, the wind
like March gruff along the steppes, the wind
 
before rain and end of drought and frost and stasis. Utter
lethargy that crimps the eyebrow hairs to curl.
The crimp and cramp of organ and tissue
 
unused to adapt any longer. The blood
readings showed no catastrophe, but pain
oh pain said otherwise. The spade
 
was handled often and well, nicks in the wood,
dents in the metal curvature, hungry
for dirt for more for
 
earth. The tradition of this tribe, these nomads who
knew little of earth, just sand, called
for the upside first signaling
 
reluctance. No, no one
no one wants to heap earth on the plain
pine wood, but
 
we must we must turn
turn and shift the shovel
rightside, deep hungry and concave
 
side up. And this earth is the flip
side of reluctance – this
we must. And flowers
 
flowers to soften the absolute
purity of earth, the frail color and
softness saying
 
we must.
The Undertaker
 
I put things in earth, ground
level and worm-deep I put
the loved arms and faces that knew
 
me where water will run where
the summer thunder will drench
the lank hair where dry earth
 
becomes dust becomes
slick becomes rising sea and level and
beneath her steps. I put
 
things I love to air in flame,
cauterize the silken whisker the whispered purr. I put
those things I held and nursed
 
those things I put to white blue heat
I put them from wick to callow to light to air
to gone. It was mine to do.
 
Mine
 

C.M. Clark's poetry has appeared nationally in a variety of publications including Metonym Literary Journal, the Lindenwood Review, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Her most recent collection, Dragonfly, was released by Solution Hole Press in 2016. Clark lives in Palmetto Bay, Florida.

Blaise Allen     2 poems
Last Call

Each night, just before sleep, Death visits,
taunts: What if I took your mother
tonight, you didn’t call her did you?
And, how about your sister, the leggy blonde?
No one would suspect I’d grab her so young
and beautiful. What if I took your husband for no good
reason? Reminder, one little ant bite and he’s a goner!
And, what about you? I’ve been at your side since birth,
reminding you to stay awake. Aren’t you afraid?
Remember that chest pain you thought was from
eating spicy foods? That lump you try to ignore?
The lack of sleep and nightly drinks?  Ever wonder
where your silver, crystal, and china will end up?
Who wants your beloved signed books of poetry?
You thought I was going to say husband. Oh,
no worries, he is going to be well taken care of.
He’ll start smoking again and will live to be one–hundred.
He will even take Viagra for his new lady friends. The jewels,
art, the hundred Buddha’s you put in the will--no one wants.
It’s a curse to collect anything these days. They’ll sell
your perfectly renovated home for cold hard cash. Forget
the hot tub view of the lake, sunsets behind palm trees.
I wonder, when I seduce, why do you resist? You have
no children, no reason to hang on. When you inevitably
recognize me, I don’t expect much fanfare; perhaps a toast,
a little gasp will do.
The Rapture
 
This red goes down easy, too easy.
I’m on my second glass.
My husband pours, Say when,
and fills my glass to the rim.
I tell him, we need bigger glasses. 

This is the kind of wine you can chew:
grapes, plums, chocolate covered cherries. 
So soft, so luscious, cells swagger your brain, 
a distinct heat flushes your skin. 

And, upon taking another sip of these miraculous 
molecules--I imagine the same particles Jesus turned 
water into wine. The same blood you take with the body 
in communion after blessings from the priest 
as he places one desiccated wafer of forgiveness 
upon your tongue.
 
When you drink this wine you believe 
the Holy Spirit has visited upon your house. 
And you know how climactic it must feel to be saved, 
to speak in tongues and to rise up in glory 
when the choir sings, How Great Thou Art.



"The Rapture" is forthcoming in World Enough Writers Beer, Wine, & Spirits Anthology Winter/2018

Blaise Allen, Ph.D., Licensed Clinical Social Worker, is Director of Community Outreach for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have been widely published in literary anthologies and journals. She bridges her passion of social welfare and the arts through community engagement, and project management.

Mary Catherine Harper      2 Poems
Things That Bite or Drag You Underground            
 
giant ants or spiders in post-apocalyptic movies
a swarm of bees in your dreams
dragons, the real ones on the island of Komodo
dragonflies, if they are large enough
 
the hair of Medusa
Persephone, if you’re lucky
Hades, if you’re unlucky
or is it the other way around
 
spiders that crawl into your bed
bedbugs that make their home there
beds in houses constructed on faultlines
the planet, after its bowels have been fracked
 
the sound of a window breaking in the basement
the sound of one hand clapping over your mouth
the sound of a tree falling in the forest you fled to
 
words collapsing into vacuous questions like this
collapse into angels on the head of a pin
 
you, after you’ve demanded one-too-many miracles
me, after I’ve drunk too much consecrated wine
 
us, after we’ve eaten all the loaves and fishes
and buried the crumbs and bones under a myth
 
Castor and Pollux, after they agree to disband Gemini
the solar system, after its star collapses into a black hole
the metaphor that a black hole always becomes
Sonic Booms

Some families attach name tags
to every conversation,
every pause in conversation,
every tone shift,
every hand gesture,
as if naming could make it
easier to control each other’s
sound from the outside in.
 
Some families expel verbs
and clusters of verbs, 
omitting as many as possible
because verbs cause so much
touch among the world’s objects,
because verbs require so much
breath to blow them over.
 
Some families are by nature,
by breeding or both, enervated
by the whisper that bodies make
tiptoeing through rooms,
as if any elliptical paths crossing
would result in collision, as if
any touch would produce sonic booms.


Mary Catherine Harper has poems in The Comstock Review, Cold Mountain Review, Old Northwest Review, Pudding Magazine, SLAB, and MidAmerica. her poem “Muddy World” won the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She has a chapbook, Some Gods Don’t Need Saints. More information can be found at www.mcharper.faculty.defiance.edu

Don Hogle
Paper Route, Palm Beach
  
1.  Two in the morning. Dressing
in the dark, listening for bundles
of papers to thump on the drive.
 
In the dark at two in the morning,
dressing, listening: on the drive,
bundles of papers thump.
 
Folding the papers, headlines
blacking my hands. Snapping
a rubber band around each one.
 
Papers folded. A rubber band
snapped around each one. Black,
my hands, with the headlines. 
 
2.  The sprinklers tick-tick-tick
in circles. Bougainvillea dangles
over stuccoed walls. Terra cotta
 
tiles the roofs of the Spanish
mansions. A gated drive disappears
behind a blind of sea grapes.

The Spanish mansions: on the roofs,
terra cotta tiles and bougainvillea
dangling over stuccoed walls.
 
Behind a blind of sea grapes,
sprinklers tick-tick-tick in circles.
The drive is gated, disappears. 
 
3.  And the sea crashing over and over
under a sky streaked purple-red
with dawn.
 
And the sea crashing
over and over under a sky streaked
purple, red with dawn.
 
And the sea
crashing over and over under a sky
streaked purple, red, with dawn.


Don Hogle was the winner of the 2016 Hayden’s Ferry Review poetry contest as selected by Alberto Rios; a finalist in the 2015 Northern Colorado Writers and Aesthetica Creative Writing contests; as well as a winner of the 2016 Lascaux Poetry Prize. Raised in West Palm Beach, he now lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com

Philip Kobylarz     3 Poems
departure

When the garbage trucks come, no praise
is offered, no one waves goodbye, nothing
is missed, the men are anonymous in their
soiled jumpsuits. We part with the things 
we once loved. The noise is expected.
arrival
​

She keeps with her countless souvenirs
of Lourdes, medallions, candles, coffee cups,
playing cards, stacks of old, empty shoe boxes.
Not knowing she will die one day and that
these are, waiting in the wings, coffins.
Luberon

Bird of unknown origin. Castles
were built so we could walk their 
ruins. In the mysterious hills, grapes
are free. Surprised by an accumulation
of stones, we find a cemetery for two,
the plot of every happy story.


PHILIP KOBYLARZ’S  work has appeared in Paris Review, Epoch, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. His two books are rues and Now Leaving Nowheresville. He has two books forthcoming.

Ojo Taiye
Marianne Szlyk
​I Want to Ask

i want to ask why you left the shadow

of your hair in the back pocket of my old raincoat

whose tongue holds no memories


sometimes i mix up or forget

i must have the wrong girl then


like vines in a wall growing upwards

from its roots

what have i become? a gnarled thing

approximating man


i am thrash & was

never told

why


Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with the society. He loves books and Anime in that order.
Memories of a Minor Character

After Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone
 
She remembers standing in the yard
of white pebbles, without shade.
The glare made her cry,
just like on the day
her grandmother locked her out,
also for crying.  Over what--
she does not remember.

 
This day she had to scrub
her new white dress
with stiff ruffles, the same day
she had spilled punch on it.
Greedy for the gritty red drink,
she had overfilled her doll’s cup.

 
She was no doll. 
 
Her skirt was splashed with red
as if an artery had been cut.
It shrank a little
as she pounded, as she scrubbed,
as she bore down in the hot sun
that made her wince,
that made her cry.


On the day of the exam,
she freezes up, expecting
to be put out
into the blinding, white courtyard
of her childhood, not the
deep shade of late adolescence.
She expects to cry.



Marianne Szlyk is an associate poetry editor at Potomac Review. Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press. Her poems have appeared The San Pedro River and South Florida Poetry Journal. She hopes that you will consider sending work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/ 

Linda B. Avila
My Last Husband

He stood tall as you can see, that’s him beside me   
in this photograph. Yes, he was handsome.
His smile bright and full of teeth. Charming, too.
He fed on looks of admiration, it was better
than champagne for him. Of course, he loved
good food, but, even more, he loved expensive wine.
He felt best in a dinner jacket or tuxedo and at parties
was always ready to dance. When I tired, he easily
found a willing partner. As time went on I learned
to lie more quickly. We traveled often by ship
and he, not trusting to the safety of planes or ships,
always carried a suitcase with a rubber life raft
packed inside. It fit into the overhead or underneath
our bed. He was social, I was not. He loved to talk
but I no longer wanted to listen to what he said.
He found others to talk to and talk he did, until
they excused themselves and fled. He’d go looking
for a woman too pleased at his attention to question
what he said. He had more women friends than I did.
I didn’t object. He was good in bed, but that too
palled without the stimulus of conversation. His
hearing went, but then he didn’t hear me anyway.
We were on a small cruise ship that sank
last year off Madagascar. He got out his raft,
I went to the raft designated for our cabin
that waited for him as long as safety allowed.
I don’t know how he launched his raft,
or where he ended up. He’d been carrying
that raft for years. Life rafts age. I guess
he failed to hear me when I mentioned it.


Linda Baldwin Avila’s poetry has appeared in Cave Rock, The Clackamas Literary Review, The South Carolina Review and The California Quarterly and in Slay Your Darlings, an anthology of poetry. Her work has been published on-line in Eclectica, and in the South Florida Poetry Journal.

Michele Wolf
The Miramar House 

All summer a solo cardinal flitted to the weighted
Tree in the yard, each of its mangos a ripening
Sunset waiting its turn to thump to the grass. 
Out front, the mass of gardenias—a creamy hover
Field for insects—framed the doorway, blossoms
Wafting their spicy mist. The elephant’s ear fanned 
The carport, leaves extending a yard across.
I was in paradise, relocated mid-winter
To my grandparents’ house brimming with seashells,
Removed from the world of wool and ice for good.


My father was dead, but somehow this year had become 
The happiest of my life. The age of the interloper, official 
The moment I donned my poufy, lilac flower girl dress--
My grandmother having rolled and sprayed my kinky 
Hair, its ridges so much like my father’s, into submission--
Was still unknown. On our quiet street, my grandfather 
Ran alongside me, his hand grazing my back
As I pedaled in the dank breeze, knowing his voice, 
Steady, raspy, would cushion any damage
If I were to fall. I kept on pedaling, hearing his
Applause as I headed forward, rounding the corner.


Michele Wolf is the author of Immersion; Conversations During Sleep, winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry; and the chapbook The Keeper of Light. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, and The North American Review. Visit her website at http://michelewolf.com.
Maureen Daniels      2 Poems

The Last of Us

I am reciting promises into your ear;
thick yarn pulled from my lips:

Tangles whenever I open 
my mouth. When you go back 
to your wife, the snake of losing you 
will wait years before it releases me 

and then a new woman will stretch 
herself onto my futon in the place 
you thought you belonged, confident 
as an unbroken filly. It is as if you have 

planned this unraveling from the moment 
you watched me shower in Archer City 
without looking away, a woman craving 
my breasts, the parts of me I will lose.

When the thread of us has been severed, 
I will remember you as you were on that flight 
to Texas, letting me clutch your wrist long 
after takeoff, my fingers sneaking 

into your hand in a world where this is never 
allowed or encouraged, the flush that colors 
our bodies, the way our eyes turn 

toffee as we are forced to look away. ​

The Vegas Road Trip


I wake beside the highway,
say your name into the last 
empty jar. My breath stains 

the glass temporarily. Your fingers 
fondle the depressions.You punk 
bastard. You’re cute as fat, 

brandishing a stolen guitar, but 
I’ve seen you still as ruins, your arms 
blemished by gorgeous rituals. 

This too belongs to me, the awkward
way you tilt your hair and your 
slumped shoulder in torn cashmere. 

Tell me you love this, the sour taste 
on the surface of our bodies, the way 
our legs shiver as if we are stood 

in frozen water. I have memorized
every room we have slept in, each 
mistaken wrong turn. But now you will 

always be the sound of sirens while 
I am milk spoiling on the side of the road.

My desires have become so small.


Maureen Daniels has a B.A. from CUNY Hunter College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from CUNY City College. She is the winner of The Doris Lipmann Prize, The Stark Short Fiction Award and The Audre Lorde Award. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Lambda Literary, Global City Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Scapegoat Review.

Joan Leotta
Cascade

A cascade
of words
rushes over
my mind's edge.
As the water
swirls by,
words spill
into a pool
of thought
where my pen
fishes out just
enough of them
to make a poem.


Joan Leotta’s poetry and essays appear in Gnarled Oak, Red Wolf, A Quiet Courage, the A-3 Review, Hobart Literary Review and Silver Birch. Her first poetry chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, was published in March 2017 from Finishing Line. Visit her at www.joanleotta.wordpress.com