Issue 6 August 2017
Sally Naylor, Guest Editor
Poets in this issue: Joseph Fasano Laurie Byro Campbell McGrath Benjamin Schmitt Karen An-hwei Lee Devon Balwit Drew Pisarra Meggie Royer Carmine G. Di Biase Linda M. Fischer Marc Frazier Patricia Whiting Alex Clifford Michael Gessner David B. Prather Denise Duhamel Bruce Weber Gale Acuff Joan Colby Rita Maria Martinez Matthew W. Jones Sue Hyon Bae Autumn Barksdale Catherine Esposito Prescott Maureen Daniels Lucia Leao Terence Degnan Simon Perchik M.J.Iuppa Howie Good Grethel Ramos Fiad Jim Boring Inna Dulchevsky Miles Coon
An Artist's Wish, Fabrice Poussin
Joseph Fasano 3 poems
Americana
You say your end will come in fire.
I say you have slipped into your mourning song
the way a boyish horseman sinks his heels into the stirrups
and rides out among the thistle
and the stagger-weed, forever. I say your soul
will keep its silences
like the gray at the temples of a fallen child
soldier, a woman stooping down to touch his collar
in another war.
America, you are just so many children’s
orchestras, the boy who shot his heart out
on delta blues and whiskey, then kicked up his worn boots
on the Northbound
till his family had to barrel-burn all his letters.
Then he lay down in those wolfish woods, in snow.
Somewhere in this city the moon is sewn
into his sheets to lose
his liquor. Somewhere a woman
is blowing incense into a wild child’s singing lips
to cleanse them. When she lies down,
she is all the roads
of her country, buckblood like the new moon
on the switchbacks, and every heartless drifter drifting
through. Sing to her
your darkest song
of morning. You say
your voice can pierce the seasons
like an assassin’s spur as it fumbles
on the bunting, his cowlick slicked
with moonlight in the dark barn. You say
there are days left
for the flames. You want
a story? That winter
my wife curled in her fever,
I couldn’t think of anything
to do for her, so I crawled in
to the machinery where it hummed to her,
where I thought I’d sing her
the final bars of some forgotten song,
combing out the day’s salt from her hair.
It was after. It was darker. It was winter.
And though the music of her ruin
filled my life then, though I listened
and I listened and I listened,
I drove off through the wreckage of that valley
and I lay down over sycamore
and cedar, the feathers of the night birds
on my body--canadensis, common
starling, plover. It was winter. It was
darker. It was after.
And slowly, because nothing comes
to shroud it, now, I hear the dark thing
that her anguish came
to whisper me, that fierce prayer
like the moonlight
in these ruins, moonlight in the soft rage
of its changes: Imagine it--awaking
though no soul is near;
imagine it—having no one left
to hold you, no one
still your own enough
to know you—to shoulder
you, to stroke you
in the turning air--
to stand between the wild
night and your silences,
and with all the fury ripening
inside of you, with all that once
was whole in you,
unbroken, to bring you
through your body’s twisted briar
toward the city made of light
that isn’t there.
You say your end will come in fire.
I say you have slipped into your mourning song
the way a boyish horseman sinks his heels into the stirrups
and rides out among the thistle
and the stagger-weed, forever. I say your soul
will keep its silences
like the gray at the temples of a fallen child
soldier, a woman stooping down to touch his collar
in another war.
America, you are just so many children’s
orchestras, the boy who shot his heart out
on delta blues and whiskey, then kicked up his worn boots
on the Northbound
till his family had to barrel-burn all his letters.
Then he lay down in those wolfish woods, in snow.
Somewhere in this city the moon is sewn
into his sheets to lose
his liquor. Somewhere a woman
is blowing incense into a wild child’s singing lips
to cleanse them. When she lies down,
she is all the roads
of her country, buckblood like the new moon
on the switchbacks, and every heartless drifter drifting
through. Sing to her
your darkest song
of morning. You say
your voice can pierce the seasons
like an assassin’s spur as it fumbles
on the bunting, his cowlick slicked
with moonlight in the dark barn. You say
there are days left
for the flames. You want
a story? That winter
my wife curled in her fever,
I couldn’t think of anything
to do for her, so I crawled in
to the machinery where it hummed to her,
where I thought I’d sing her
the final bars of some forgotten song,
combing out the day’s salt from her hair.
It was after. It was darker. It was winter.
And though the music of her ruin
filled my life then, though I listened
and I listened and I listened,
I drove off through the wreckage of that valley
and I lay down over sycamore
and cedar, the feathers of the night birds
on my body--canadensis, common
starling, plover. It was winter. It was
darker. It was after.
And slowly, because nothing comes
to shroud it, now, I hear the dark thing
that her anguish came
to whisper me, that fierce prayer
like the moonlight
in these ruins, moonlight in the soft rage
of its changes: Imagine it--awaking
though no soul is near;
imagine it—having no one left
to hold you, no one
still your own enough
to know you—to shoulder
you, to stroke you
in the turning air--
to stand between the wild
night and your silences,
and with all the fury ripening
inside of you, with all that once
was whole in you,
unbroken, to bring you
through your body’s twisted briar
toward the city made of light
that isn’t there.
Wild Birds
with Lee Miller’s photograph of a Dead German
Guard in Canal, 1945
I don’t want to tell you about the light
inside the light inside his boyish
face, how even that
is beautiful. It is not. If death
is just a small-town boy with an alto voice
and a glint in his cinnamon
eye, then I think I can be forgiven
the way I have driven all evening
to listen to nothing
but the darkening sea emptying itself
into the vacant frontage of the new
year, emptying itself
of its voices. If the night
can tell the same aged lie
of empire, it is wild birds
I am thinking about, and their color, how
a student I knew filled notebook
after notebook with their
image, their black coats the shimmer
of his childhood’s cassock, where a man’s hand
once lifted it
in darkness, for the tender bread of the body
it had hidden, as if, if he desired
it, he could break it. And he did.
Tonight it is winter
in this city, and when I stare down
at the bitter face of history, it is not
history I am thinking about, but
wild birds, ashes, abandonment,
the particular music of what we do to one another.
I don’t know
how we can gather up each other’s histories
like water. I don’t know
about the end’s incredible syllables
like someone knocking snow
from his heavy, Munich boots
in a threshold, all that’s permitted
to sing in it. I don’t know
about the singing in the singing.
Child, why do I say student
when I mean
you, this rain, the name I will never give away
except to change it, except
to tell the night the night
is cold, the cold
is long, and the student
who shaded bird after bird in the lessening spiral
of his notebook is gone
now, lost in the dark swirl of some river.
Tonight
it is winter
by this harbor, and I would lead you back
from the bridge above that river
and sit with you in that small room
where they left you, and listen
as the night birds shake
the trestles, and watch you sip
the cool soup in its cup. Give me
clarity, and accuracy, and
patience. Give me one more hour
in that dim room
where I turned from you, where
you asked me how the world
I’d loved had done me, your black shirt
splashed with raven, raptor, dove.
Yes, I’d say, it is winter, and we live
again. Yes, there is winter
in this winter
and the fierce face of this kingdom
is surrender’s. Yes, we break
the bitter herds of winter.
Even though your heart was just
these failing birds.
Even though the night has come
like horses, furnished
with the moon’s rust
on their shoulders, slipping
as they quarter us, this dust.
Even though the end will come
like fire, its wild words
like the fire
on the martyrs, that great text
of beginnings
and of endings—sweet
briar, sweet briar, sweet
briar—that fire
the end delivers
in our fingers, singing nothing
to the ones who praise
its greatness,
waking all the blessed
in fire, rising
fire, and the rest
of us, wherever
we have risen,
in our own arms
like a savior’s who won’t come.
with Lee Miller’s photograph of a Dead German
Guard in Canal, 1945
I don’t want to tell you about the light
inside the light inside his boyish
face, how even that
is beautiful. It is not. If death
is just a small-town boy with an alto voice
and a glint in his cinnamon
eye, then I think I can be forgiven
the way I have driven all evening
to listen to nothing
but the darkening sea emptying itself
into the vacant frontage of the new
year, emptying itself
of its voices. If the night
can tell the same aged lie
of empire, it is wild birds
I am thinking about, and their color, how
a student I knew filled notebook
after notebook with their
image, their black coats the shimmer
of his childhood’s cassock, where a man’s hand
once lifted it
in darkness, for the tender bread of the body
it had hidden, as if, if he desired
it, he could break it. And he did.
Tonight it is winter
in this city, and when I stare down
at the bitter face of history, it is not
history I am thinking about, but
wild birds, ashes, abandonment,
the particular music of what we do to one another.
I don’t know
how we can gather up each other’s histories
like water. I don’t know
about the end’s incredible syllables
like someone knocking snow
from his heavy, Munich boots
in a threshold, all that’s permitted
to sing in it. I don’t know
about the singing in the singing.
Child, why do I say student
when I mean
you, this rain, the name I will never give away
except to change it, except
to tell the night the night
is cold, the cold
is long, and the student
who shaded bird after bird in the lessening spiral
of his notebook is gone
now, lost in the dark swirl of some river.
Tonight
it is winter
by this harbor, and I would lead you back
from the bridge above that river
and sit with you in that small room
where they left you, and listen
as the night birds shake
the trestles, and watch you sip
the cool soup in its cup. Give me
clarity, and accuracy, and
patience. Give me one more hour
in that dim room
where I turned from you, where
you asked me how the world
I’d loved had done me, your black shirt
splashed with raven, raptor, dove.
Yes, I’d say, it is winter, and we live
again. Yes, there is winter
in this winter
and the fierce face of this kingdom
is surrender’s. Yes, we break
the bitter herds of winter.
Even though your heart was just
these failing birds.
Even though the night has come
like horses, furnished
with the moon’s rust
on their shoulders, slipping
as they quarter us, this dust.
Even though the end will come
like fire, its wild words
like the fire
on the martyrs, that great text
of beginnings
and of endings—sweet
briar, sweet briar, sweet
briar—that fire
the end delivers
in our fingers, singing nothing
to the ones who praise
its greatness,
waking all the blessed
in fire, rising
fire, and the rest
of us, wherever
we have risen,
in our own arms
like a savior’s who won’t come.
Keats
…Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.
- Jack Gilbert
But maybe the body has no story.
And if the soul is only a nostalgia
for a time that was never
its own, then
yes, imagine the pigeon-toed boy
and the girl with one arm. Imagine
the waitress in the all-night diner
lifting her uniform to show you
the words emblazoned
under her left breast’s heft
means it, means beauty
is truth, because her life has had
a touch too much
of the latter,
because no one in this savage place
will stop her,
and because the truckers’ hands would school you
if you did.
Stranger, tell me a version
of your parting song,
and I will tell you hers: That night, high
on a sister’s lifted
acid, she banked a fire
of her husband’s cash
in her own hands,
and when he stumbled home
to discover it
in ashes, she bowed out to her lover’s car
in the roses, and drove off
from one poverty forever.
And the gunshot woke the deep sleep of the neighbors.
But all this is just America
singing. All this
is just hearsay, and the summer
air. And when you pay the tab
and drift out through the desert
heat, you have miles to go
before the dark sea, with its
riches, the Pacific
with its perfect, wordless promises,
its empty voices
scattering through the canyons--
and when you ride out on the chattering
of the Interstate, you think
of switchbacks, of the swinging
of the winds again,
of the night birds
flying low across the macadam,
vireo and heron scent
and crow.
Beauty, you are
singing, now, in the summer
air, beauty, beauty, beauty. And why
not, why not, you are
thinking—because
your fury is the alms that can’t be
tendered; because these outland hands
are no one’s mortal
blessing; because the dead have left
this drifting for the living.
And because somewhere
before this maddened land
is handed back
to the darkness
and the keening of the sea
again, there is someone
in the maddened dance
of her vanishing
whose departing you
at the wretched end
of your traveling
will be all that you will
ever know of lastingness
and all that you’ll
have needed to have known.
Joseph Fasano is the author of three books of poetry: Vincent (Cider Press, 2015); Inheritance (2014), a James Laughlin Award nominee; and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award and Poets' Prize nominee. His recent writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Measure, Tin House, American Literary Review, The Missouri Review, and RATTLE, which awarded him their RATTLE Poetry Prize for his poem "Mahler in New York." He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.
…Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.
- Jack Gilbert
But maybe the body has no story.
And if the soul is only a nostalgia
for a time that was never
its own, then
yes, imagine the pigeon-toed boy
and the girl with one arm. Imagine
the waitress in the all-night diner
lifting her uniform to show you
the words emblazoned
under her left breast’s heft
means it, means beauty
is truth, because her life has had
a touch too much
of the latter,
because no one in this savage place
will stop her,
and because the truckers’ hands would school you
if you did.
Stranger, tell me a version
of your parting song,
and I will tell you hers: That night, high
on a sister’s lifted
acid, she banked a fire
of her husband’s cash
in her own hands,
and when he stumbled home
to discover it
in ashes, she bowed out to her lover’s car
in the roses, and drove off
from one poverty forever.
And the gunshot woke the deep sleep of the neighbors.
But all this is just America
singing. All this
is just hearsay, and the summer
air. And when you pay the tab
and drift out through the desert
heat, you have miles to go
before the dark sea, with its
riches, the Pacific
with its perfect, wordless promises,
its empty voices
scattering through the canyons--
and when you ride out on the chattering
of the Interstate, you think
of switchbacks, of the swinging
of the winds again,
of the night birds
flying low across the macadam,
vireo and heron scent
and crow.
Beauty, you are
singing, now, in the summer
air, beauty, beauty, beauty. And why
not, why not, you are
thinking—because
your fury is the alms that can’t be
tendered; because these outland hands
are no one’s mortal
blessing; because the dead have left
this drifting for the living.
And because somewhere
before this maddened land
is handed back
to the darkness
and the keening of the sea
again, there is someone
in the maddened dance
of her vanishing
whose departing you
at the wretched end
of your traveling
will be all that you will
ever know of lastingness
and all that you’ll
have needed to have known.
Joseph Fasano is the author of three books of poetry: Vincent (Cider Press, 2015); Inheritance (2014), a James Laughlin Award nominee; and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award and Poets' Prize nominee. His recent writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Measure, Tin House, American Literary Review, The Missouri Review, and RATTLE, which awarded him their RATTLE Poetry Prize for his poem "Mahler in New York." He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.
Laurie Byro
I grope in the mass of lies, knowing most
of the sources are wholly untrustworthy.
Ezra Pound, a Village Explainer (Gertrude Stein)
Let me go on record, I dislike them. I hate
their dogs, her name is the vessel for crude
brew, and God help them they are unfortunate
in their looks. One is a shadow of the Other,
and needs a good shave. The Other can’t be
pinched into a decent shoe or girdle.
They are niggardly with money. They worship
daft pieces of art, and they don’t spend
on furnishings. Each time I go there,
I break something: everything is paste and faux
wood, their dildos are probably glue and brick.
Yes, they say they are in love. Pah, right down
to their crooked nose hair, their chin whiskers,
even their yappy dogs and frumpy cars are more
feminine, less mannequin hard, with faces like
a handmade pipe, all black scowl and fumes.
Laurie Byro has three books of poetry published in 2015 and 2016, her fourth The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities was published in 2017 by Aldrich Press. Laurie received a 2016 New Jersey Poet's Prize for the first poem in the Stein collection and 2017 Prize for the 2nd poem in the Bloomsberries. She is currently Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library.
of the sources are wholly untrustworthy.
Ezra Pound, a Village Explainer (Gertrude Stein)
Let me go on record, I dislike them. I hate
their dogs, her name is the vessel for crude
brew, and God help them they are unfortunate
in their looks. One is a shadow of the Other,
and needs a good shave. The Other can’t be
pinched into a decent shoe or girdle.
They are niggardly with money. They worship
daft pieces of art, and they don’t spend
on furnishings. Each time I go there,
I break something: everything is paste and faux
wood, their dildos are probably glue and brick.
Yes, they say they are in love. Pah, right down
to their crooked nose hair, their chin whiskers,
even their yappy dogs and frumpy cars are more
feminine, less mannequin hard, with faces like
a handmade pipe, all black scowl and fumes.
Laurie Byro has three books of poetry published in 2015 and 2016, her fourth The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities was published in 2017 by Aldrich Press. Laurie received a 2016 New Jersey Poet's Prize for the first poem in the Stein collection and 2017 Prize for the 2nd poem in the Bloomsberries. She is currently Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library.
Campbell McGrath
The Red Dragonfly: After Shiki
In Memory of David Dubrow, 1992-2013
from New and Selected Poems forthcoming, 2018
1.
The red dragonfly
knows the way to the gravesite--
one-year unveiling.
One-year unveiling,
out past the airport--Tile Works,
Oasis Dream Spa.
Sound of the airplanes
taking wing does not disturb
the red dragonfly.
Yellow butterfly,
late summer in Miami,
no sign of autumn.
No sign of autumn,
the greens and blues of summer
too bright for our eyes.
Too bright for our eyes,
the red dragonfly’s shadow
falls on David’s stone.
2.
The red dragonfly
watching, darting, hovering,
thinking of David.
Thinking of David--
honor the dead by living--
thinking of Shiki.
The mockingbird sings
all day without noticing
tears falling on stone.
Tears falling on stone
as butterflies flutter from
flower to flower.
Flower to flower,
hour to hour and day by day,
thinking of David.
The red dragonfly,
the yellow butterfly, the stone
bearing David’s name.
3.
Little lizard, hide
from the mockingbirds with us,
summer’s survivors.
Yellow butterfly,
honor the dead by living
like grass in sunshine.
Like grass in sunshine--
even by grief, mockingbird,
the soul is nourished.
Summer sun at noon,
and still autumn comes too soon,
even here, too soon.
Too bright for our eyes,
the greens and blues of summer,
tears falling on stone.
O red dragonfly,
hover here, above his grave,
after we have gone.
Campbell McGrath's most recent book is XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Harper Collins, 2016). Other collections include Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares literary journal, and a Pushcart Prize. McGrath teaches at Florida International University.
In Memory of David Dubrow, 1992-2013
from New and Selected Poems forthcoming, 2018
1.
The red dragonfly
knows the way to the gravesite--
one-year unveiling.
One-year unveiling,
out past the airport--Tile Works,
Oasis Dream Spa.
Sound of the airplanes
taking wing does not disturb
the red dragonfly.
Yellow butterfly,
late summer in Miami,
no sign of autumn.
No sign of autumn,
the greens and blues of summer
too bright for our eyes.
Too bright for our eyes,
the red dragonfly’s shadow
falls on David’s stone.
2.
The red dragonfly
watching, darting, hovering,
thinking of David.
Thinking of David--
honor the dead by living--
thinking of Shiki.
The mockingbird sings
all day without noticing
tears falling on stone.
Tears falling on stone
as butterflies flutter from
flower to flower.
Flower to flower,
hour to hour and day by day,
thinking of David.
The red dragonfly,
the yellow butterfly, the stone
bearing David’s name.
3.
Little lizard, hide
from the mockingbirds with us,
summer’s survivors.
Yellow butterfly,
honor the dead by living
like grass in sunshine.
Like grass in sunshine--
even by grief, mockingbird,
the soul is nourished.
Summer sun at noon,
and still autumn comes too soon,
even here, too soon.
Too bright for our eyes,
the greens and blues of summer,
tears falling on stone.
O red dragonfly,
hover here, above his grave,
after we have gone.
Campbell McGrath's most recent book is XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Harper Collins, 2016). Other collections include Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares literary journal, and a Pushcart Prize. McGrath teaches at Florida International University.
Benjamin Schmitt
Track 75
From Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity.
On buses and trains
we become Americans
by fleeing America
The letter D
demanding and driving
us forward to E
that elusive equality
preferable to C
captivity in a criminal conspiracy
The pioneers
were lunatics
who smelled smoke and metal
on the plains
imagined factory sparks lighting the way
through the dark and treacherous trails
of the Dakotas
now their descendants
leave car parts strewn about
worthy monuments rusting
When a national icon dies
we must search the Jim Crow South
and the pockets of John Adams
for our souls again
When the killer enters the club
and revelers show teeth to the armed
he desires to drown
babbling the same blood
as The Declaration
Benjamin Schmitt is the Best Book Award and Pushcart nominated author of two books, Dinner Table Refuge (PunksWritePoemsPress, 2015) and The global conspiracy to get you in bed (Kelsay Books, 2013). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sakura Review, Hobart, Grist, The Columbia Review, Two Thirds North, and elsewhere. You can read his scary stories for kids in the Amazon Rapids app. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle where he also reviews books, curates a reading series, and teaches workshops to people of all ages.
From Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity.
On buses and trains
we become Americans
by fleeing America
The letter D
demanding and driving
us forward to E
that elusive equality
preferable to C
captivity in a criminal conspiracy
The pioneers
were lunatics
who smelled smoke and metal
on the plains
imagined factory sparks lighting the way
through the dark and treacherous trails
of the Dakotas
now their descendants
leave car parts strewn about
worthy monuments rusting
When a national icon dies
we must search the Jim Crow South
and the pockets of John Adams
for our souls again
When the killer enters the club
and revelers show teeth to the armed
he desires to drown
babbling the same blood
as The Declaration
Benjamin Schmitt is the Best Book Award and Pushcart nominated author of two books, Dinner Table Refuge (PunksWritePoemsPress, 2015) and The global conspiracy to get you in bed (Kelsay Books, 2013). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sakura Review, Hobart, Grist, The Columbia Review, Two Thirds North, and elsewhere. You can read his scary stories for kids in the Amazon Rapids app. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle where he also reviews books, curates a reading series, and teaches workshops to people of all ages.
Karen An-hwei Lee 2 poems
In the Last Bookstore in the World
The Last Bookstore is California’s largest used book and records store,
located on Spring Street in Los Angeles.
In the last bookstore in the world –
on the last shelf
in the last aisle,
a volume of poetry –
invisible. No long-nosed flies,
no moth fur,
no silverfish
No underlined word –
sentience
where I put a feather
found on Sunday
by accident or inheritance,
coincidence
or divine appointment.
Only a dollar per used copy,
hold a quill to light.
The Last Bookstore is California’s largest used book and records store,
located on Spring Street in Los Angeles.
In the last bookstore in the world –
on the last shelf
in the last aisle,
a volume of poetry –
invisible. No long-nosed flies,
no moth fur,
no silverfish
No underlined word –
sentience
where I put a feather
found on Sunday
by accident or inheritance,
coincidence
or divine appointment.
Only a dollar per used copy,
hold a quill to light.
The Millennial Year of the Superbloom
In the millennial year of the superbloom, after the ruthless drought
and shortages: cream-colored and goldenrod and black-eyed daises,
ochraceous, flooded over the retro-fitted sea cliffs, bayside and oceanside,
where I spent hours lost on the southern peninsula.
The sky fed blue light into the baleen heart of the surf, reforming
its unsung, broken freedom in a blue guitar of curled azure flame.
Rains revived the sea lettuce and sea fig, bougainvillea, and chaparral
understory. I asked a blind woman how old she would be, twenty years
from this moment, and she whispered with joy, ninety-one
and blooming.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored a novel, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017). She currently lives in San Diego and serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University.
In the millennial year of the superbloom, after the ruthless drought
and shortages: cream-colored and goldenrod and black-eyed daises,
ochraceous, flooded over the retro-fitted sea cliffs, bayside and oceanside,
where I spent hours lost on the southern peninsula.
The sky fed blue light into the baleen heart of the surf, reforming
its unsung, broken freedom in a blue guitar of curled azure flame.
Rains revived the sea lettuce and sea fig, bougainvillea, and chaparral
understory. I asked a blind woman how old she would be, twenty years
from this moment, and she whispered with joy, ninety-one
and blooming.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored a novel, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017). She currently lives in San Diego and serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University.
Devon Balwit 2 poems
I Worked Hard for 25 Years to Be
a small rain cloud that dampens but does
no real damage. It took practice to lift
the conductor’s baton so that no one
was injured, so that no bow tip, no mallet
hit sclera. I learned to cut my life
into frames, wait until the punchline
to move from one to the next, to throw
away nothing before shredding and
tipping it ninety degrees. Someone,
somewhere whispered concatenation.
It became my motto, and me a sister
to the scrap men in pickups searching
for castoffs, the doorless refrigerators,
the water heaters, the three-legged chairs.
I never forget an area code, can tell you
Memphis, Minneapolis, Montezuma.
Forget function and room; I stencil delight
onto packing boxes. It doesn’t matter
what emerges when the flaps open, only
that I stand there ready to work it free.
a small rain cloud that dampens but does
no real damage. It took practice to lift
the conductor’s baton so that no one
was injured, so that no bow tip, no mallet
hit sclera. I learned to cut my life
into frames, wait until the punchline
to move from one to the next, to throw
away nothing before shredding and
tipping it ninety degrees. Someone,
somewhere whispered concatenation.
It became my motto, and me a sister
to the scrap men in pickups searching
for castoffs, the doorless refrigerators,
the water heaters, the three-legged chairs.
I never forget an area code, can tell you
Memphis, Minneapolis, Montezuma.
Forget function and room; I stencil delight
onto packing boxes. It doesn’t matter
what emerges when the flaps open, only
that I stand there ready to work it free.
the perfect day
above and below nothing fearful. the surface
touching the sky as you would dab the injury
of someone you loved. joys strew the river mouth,
each one an agate. beach glass abrades to amulet.
here and there, a major chord flares its struck match.
you lean in to bank the embers that you bear place
to place. content emissaries from root to cloud,
the trees applaud the gloaming, rustling with night
singers. you carry this day back on a bier, proud
beneath its weight. no one’s slave, you chose this.
Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry).
above and below nothing fearful. the surface
touching the sky as you would dab the injury
of someone you loved. joys strew the river mouth,
each one an agate. beach glass abrades to amulet.
here and there, a major chord flares its struck match.
you lean in to bank the embers that you bear place
to place. content emissaries from root to cloud,
the trees applaud the gloaming, rustling with night
singers. you carry this day back on a bier, proud
beneath its weight. no one’s slave, you chose this.
Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry).
Drew Pisarra
Veronika Voss
Inspired by the films of R.W. Fassbinder, German film director and writer, 1945-1982
What do you know about desire, about love, about need, about style, about fame? What do you know about dependence, about illusion, about pleasure, about failure, about pain? What do you know about life, about art, about work, about drugs, about power? What do you know about history and what makes a story a story? What do you know about that and what makes a star a real star? What do you know about money, about the market, about madness? How about something so simple like what it means to be blonde? What do you know about that? What do you know about platinum? What do you, ostensibly a person, what do you, what could you possibly know about life when everything you feel and know is simply what you’ve been told. Do you honestly think that every issue and every emotion can be related in black and white? There is dark. There is light. There is right and there is wrong. Everything else is in between. Gray is the new Technicolor.
Drew Pisarra has been known to stage Gertrude Stein plays, turn Fassbinder movies into poems, and blog weekly about Korean cinema. A current Brooklyn resident, he recently grew a mustache to play Nietzsche in an opera by the Austrian-American composer Gisburg.
Inspired by the films of R.W. Fassbinder, German film director and writer, 1945-1982
What do you know about desire, about love, about need, about style, about fame? What do you know about dependence, about illusion, about pleasure, about failure, about pain? What do you know about life, about art, about work, about drugs, about power? What do you know about history and what makes a story a story? What do you know about that and what makes a star a real star? What do you know about money, about the market, about madness? How about something so simple like what it means to be blonde? What do you know about that? What do you know about platinum? What do you, ostensibly a person, what do you, what could you possibly know about life when everything you feel and know is simply what you’ve been told. Do you honestly think that every issue and every emotion can be related in black and white? There is dark. There is light. There is right and there is wrong. Everything else is in between. Gray is the new Technicolor.
Drew Pisarra has been known to stage Gertrude Stein plays, turn Fassbinder movies into poems, and blog weekly about Korean cinema. A current Brooklyn resident, he recently grew a mustache to play Nietzsche in an opera by the Austrian-American composer Gisburg.
Meggie Royer
Aubade for Blackout
Every morning I ask where my body is.
If I left it back in the quiet room, in the sunken background
of a bar, in a backyard, or if it’s still here/with me.
I dream/stumbling/of cicadas in my torso.
Yesterday, a doe churning in the gravel.
A woodpecker buried to its beak in mud.
I am unsure what’s appropriate to ask the men
I’ve stayed with on the nights I disappeared.
Whether I left sleep in the middle of the night
to smoke/whether I said sorry/whether I asked/
to see their faces.
Whether they did anything
that would necessitate forgiveness.
To the left of the house, kingfishers in the reeds.
To the right, my mother’s mouth/opening/closing
like the bartender’s last call.
After I’ve told her
of the way I stood in the road
and asked for the wind to take me.
Meggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who majored in Psychology at Macalester College. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and others. She has won national medals for her poetry and a writing portfolio in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize.
Every morning I ask where my body is.
If I left it back in the quiet room, in the sunken background
of a bar, in a backyard, or if it’s still here/with me.
I dream/stumbling/of cicadas in my torso.
Yesterday, a doe churning in the gravel.
A woodpecker buried to its beak in mud.
I am unsure what’s appropriate to ask the men
I’ve stayed with on the nights I disappeared.
Whether I left sleep in the middle of the night
to smoke/whether I said sorry/whether I asked/
to see their faces.
Whether they did anything
that would necessitate forgiveness.
To the left of the house, kingfishers in the reeds.
To the right, my mother’s mouth/opening/closing
like the bartender’s last call.
After I’ve told her
of the way I stood in the road
and asked for the wind to take me.
Meggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who majored in Psychology at Macalester College. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and others. She has won national medals for her poetry and a writing portfolio in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize.
Carmine G. Di Biase
His Own Wine
The muffled sounds of work came from the shop
Across the alley, where men and machines
Made hard metal parts for other machines.
He knew enough words to ask for the huge
Bolt and the nut with steel rods welded fast
On either side. The rest he’d make himself
Out of wood: now, at last, after the time
Of work, of uncomplaining plodding on –
In fields, on cobbled streets, in the Alpine
Cave where, covered in lice, he shook for days
With fever – now, at last, his hair gone white,
He’d make a press: he wanted his own wine.
***
Long days of work in the rich landlord’s fields,
The graceful bend of the wheat as the wind
Passed gently through it, the pungent manure,
The peaceful drone of bees that never stung,
A hat for the sun, the salt taste of sweat,
And in his brown satchel, the piece of bread,
The piece of cheese, the flask of bitter wine –
All this he remembered – and the long climb
Home at dusk, first the path, the dirt road next,
And then the cobbles at the edge of town.
Even now, in his old mind, he could feel
That last crooked stone, two steps from his door.
***
The harder climb began when Europe cracked.
The boots and leggings, the jacket, the great
Plume in his cap: with that, and a long gun,
He marched up the narrow mountain path, eyes
Fixed on every step. “If your fellow slipped,”
He’d say, “you’d watch him fall and disappear.
Or if, like me, he felt too sick to move,
You went ahead and left him there alone.
So came the fever, those days in the cave,
The Austrian soldiers, the prison camp.”
These things he’d say with a smile, on his porch
Across the alley from the metal shop.
***
He’d proposed to his wife in a blunt note
Tucked, in secret, in her closed parasol.
“Well, yes,” she said. “You’ve come back, after all,
And others haven’t.” So their life began.
With a mouse trap and stale bread she caught birds
And cooked them. She dressed his father’s bed sores
Till the end. Then across the sea they went,
To a world unbroken and strange, where one
Could work and buy a house and grow one’s food,
Where actions mattered more than words: a new
World in the making, much in need of men
Who knew that life was work, that rest came last.
***
The noisy town – the bar, the burger joint,
The metal shop, its lathes humming all day –
Had grown around their house, the only one
Left, the yard all garden, a patch of green,
Of red and gold, maroon and purple-black.
His wife altered the roosters with a pair
Of rusty pliers. She twisted the heads
Off rabbits so quickly they hardly bled.
She wept as she did these things; and she said,
One day, as she pulled the skin from an eel
With a ripping sound, “When I die, do not
Forget that this is what I had to do.”
***
From the kitchen window she watched him tote
The huge bolt home and the nut with two rods
On either side. On these he’d slide a long
Pipe to ease his task. Round and round the press
He went, and down came the current of sweet
Pink juice, into the basin first and then
The oaken barrels, three of them, enough
To last a year, enough to soften all
The years of climbing home. Down came the juice,
Its thin white froth dissolving as it crashed
Against the basin’s edge, like the sea’s foam
Against the rocky firmness of the shore.
Carmine Di Biase was born and raised in Ohio. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he has taught since 1993. He writes mainly about Shakespeare and modern Italian literature. Recently he translated The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo (Troubador Press, 2013). Occasionally he writes for the Times Literary Supplement. He dedicates his free hours to gardening, bicycling and playing and restoring old violins.
The muffled sounds of work came from the shop
Across the alley, where men and machines
Made hard metal parts for other machines.
He knew enough words to ask for the huge
Bolt and the nut with steel rods welded fast
On either side. The rest he’d make himself
Out of wood: now, at last, after the time
Of work, of uncomplaining plodding on –
In fields, on cobbled streets, in the Alpine
Cave where, covered in lice, he shook for days
With fever – now, at last, his hair gone white,
He’d make a press: he wanted his own wine.
***
Long days of work in the rich landlord’s fields,
The graceful bend of the wheat as the wind
Passed gently through it, the pungent manure,
The peaceful drone of bees that never stung,
A hat for the sun, the salt taste of sweat,
And in his brown satchel, the piece of bread,
The piece of cheese, the flask of bitter wine –
All this he remembered – and the long climb
Home at dusk, first the path, the dirt road next,
And then the cobbles at the edge of town.
Even now, in his old mind, he could feel
That last crooked stone, two steps from his door.
***
The harder climb began when Europe cracked.
The boots and leggings, the jacket, the great
Plume in his cap: with that, and a long gun,
He marched up the narrow mountain path, eyes
Fixed on every step. “If your fellow slipped,”
He’d say, “you’d watch him fall and disappear.
Or if, like me, he felt too sick to move,
You went ahead and left him there alone.
So came the fever, those days in the cave,
The Austrian soldiers, the prison camp.”
These things he’d say with a smile, on his porch
Across the alley from the metal shop.
***
He’d proposed to his wife in a blunt note
Tucked, in secret, in her closed parasol.
“Well, yes,” she said. “You’ve come back, after all,
And others haven’t.” So their life began.
With a mouse trap and stale bread she caught birds
And cooked them. She dressed his father’s bed sores
Till the end. Then across the sea they went,
To a world unbroken and strange, where one
Could work and buy a house and grow one’s food,
Where actions mattered more than words: a new
World in the making, much in need of men
Who knew that life was work, that rest came last.
***
The noisy town – the bar, the burger joint,
The metal shop, its lathes humming all day –
Had grown around their house, the only one
Left, the yard all garden, a patch of green,
Of red and gold, maroon and purple-black.
His wife altered the roosters with a pair
Of rusty pliers. She twisted the heads
Off rabbits so quickly they hardly bled.
She wept as she did these things; and she said,
One day, as she pulled the skin from an eel
With a ripping sound, “When I die, do not
Forget that this is what I had to do.”
***
From the kitchen window she watched him tote
The huge bolt home and the nut with two rods
On either side. On these he’d slide a long
Pipe to ease his task. Round and round the press
He went, and down came the current of sweet
Pink juice, into the basin first and then
The oaken barrels, three of them, enough
To last a year, enough to soften all
The years of climbing home. Down came the juice,
Its thin white froth dissolving as it crashed
Against the basin’s edge, like the sea’s foam
Against the rocky firmness of the shore.
Carmine Di Biase was born and raised in Ohio. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he has taught since 1993. He writes mainly about Shakespeare and modern Italian literature. Recently he translated The Diary of Elio Schmitz: Scenes from the World of Italo Svevo (Troubador Press, 2013). Occasionally he writes for the Times Literary Supplement. He dedicates his free hours to gardening, bicycling and playing and restoring old violins.
Linda M. Fischer
Galatea Revisited
It must have been
when I was not myself
or who I had become
later, imperceptibly
taking on your essence:
turns of phrase,
gestures synchronous
with every breath--
our exhalations
suffused across the membranes
of our separate selves,
atom by element,
until they were indistinguishable--
that I found your soft
pelt lying negligently
over the edge of the bed
and slipped it on to see
how it would feel
against the cool surface
of my skin and my one
bald scar…
as if, after the years
I’d curled like a fetus
within the tight
pressure of your arms,
you could deliver me
from the annealing
engine of your loins
wanting in nothing,
a woman perfected--
then I let it
drop to the floor.
LINDA M. FISCHER has poems in the Aurorean, Ibbetson Street, Iodine Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Potomac Review, Roanoke Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual, Wilderness House Literary Review, and others. She has two chapbooks, Raccoon Afternoons and Glory. Visit her at lindamfischer.com
It must have been
when I was not myself
or who I had become
later, imperceptibly
taking on your essence:
turns of phrase,
gestures synchronous
with every breath--
our exhalations
suffused across the membranes
of our separate selves,
atom by element,
until they were indistinguishable--
that I found your soft
pelt lying negligently
over the edge of the bed
and slipped it on to see
how it would feel
against the cool surface
of my skin and my one
bald scar…
as if, after the years
I’d curled like a fetus
within the tight
pressure of your arms,
you could deliver me
from the annealing
engine of your loins
wanting in nothing,
a woman perfected--
then I let it
drop to the floor.
LINDA M. FISCHER has poems in the Aurorean, Ibbetson Street, Iodine Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Potomac Review, Roanoke Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual, Wilderness House Literary Review, and others. She has two chapbooks, Raccoon Afternoons and Glory. Visit her at lindamfischer.com
Marc Frazier
Prayer in Winter
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue- Sylvia Plath
How many times can they put you together:
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
labor over you with their pumps,
and tubes, and catheters and their glue
as we wait in a barren field, cold and uninformed
and guessing what can happen to the body
broken and broken again, the brain refusing not to seize
like a Mexican jumping bean?
We wait, transcribe their messages as best we can
like we could, finally, understand,
but there is too much wildness in the world for that.
This January nothing thaws,
the roots our buried thoughts.
Sparrows rethink their choices: here, there.
Marc Frazier has poetry in The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Good Men Project, f(r)iction, Slant, Permafrost, Plainsongs, and Poet Lore. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry and his book The Way Here and chapbooks are available on Amazon. His website is www.marcfrazier.org
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue- Sylvia Plath
How many times can they put you together:
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
labor over you with their pumps,
and tubes, and catheters and their glue
as we wait in a barren field, cold and uninformed
and guessing what can happen to the body
broken and broken again, the brain refusing not to seize
like a Mexican jumping bean?
We wait, transcribe their messages as best we can
like we could, finally, understand,
but there is too much wildness in the world for that.
This January nothing thaws,
the roots our buried thoughts.
Sparrows rethink their choices: here, there.
Marc Frazier has poetry in The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Good Men Project, f(r)iction, Slant, Permafrost, Plainsongs, and Poet Lore. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry and his book The Way Here and chapbooks are available on Amazon. His website is www.marcfrazier.org
Patricia Whiting 2 poems
Lament
A found poem, lines from newspaper articles. There are three voices: a Palestinian woman, an Israeli woman and a Pakistani woman.
Soldiers in tanks came
and demolished the houses,
heaped furnishings in a pile
with the garbage.
An old man is buried alive
under the rubble.
On the morning of the Sabbath
shadows flickered in the dark.
Windows were shattered,
birds chirped in their cages.
Mattresses were soaked with blood.
They talk about yesterday.
No apparent plans for tomorrow.
She often loses her train of thought
in the middle of a conversation.
Will you be back for lunch?
I’ll buy a chicken.
Weapons are visible throughout the city.
He slept here with me
the night before he left.
The first to die fell around noon.
I waited a long time for him,
but he never came.
They were hunting for someone else.
He fell under the spell of the mullahs.
He just got carried away.
Bodies are rotting under chunks of concrete.
She watched a young man die.
Later she learned it was her son.
Forever didn’t last very long.
A found poem, lines from newspaper articles. There are three voices: a Palestinian woman, an Israeli woman and a Pakistani woman.
Soldiers in tanks came
and demolished the houses,
heaped furnishings in a pile
with the garbage.
An old man is buried alive
under the rubble.
On the morning of the Sabbath
shadows flickered in the dark.
Windows were shattered,
birds chirped in their cages.
Mattresses were soaked with blood.
They talk about yesterday.
No apparent plans for tomorrow.
She often loses her train of thought
in the middle of a conversation.
Will you be back for lunch?
I’ll buy a chicken.
Weapons are visible throughout the city.
He slept here with me
the night before he left.
The first to die fell around noon.
I waited a long time for him,
but he never came.
They were hunting for someone else.
He fell under the spell of the mullahs.
He just got carried away.
Bodies are rotting under chunks of concrete.
She watched a young man die.
Later she learned it was her son.
Forever didn’t last very long.
Cross Street
The houses are lined up
like wallflowers at a dance.
The tenants of our
Italian neighborhood
interlocked like pieces
of a jigsaw puzzle.
Everyone on the block was a spy.
Old folks stayed put
except to go to Mass.
A crone called Wishgon
was said to have the evil eye.
At the end of every month
the Prudential man came
to collect premiums.
Kids swapped empty soda bottles
for candy at the corner store
under the carp-eyed gaze
of Mrs. Cipoletti.
My father-in-law’s father
had a haunted house
on Cross and Main.
He left it to St. Vincent’s.
It’s a Friendly’s Restaurant now.
PATRICIA WHITING is a Florida painter-poet. Publications include a chapbook, Learning to Read Between the Lines and Diary Poems: And Drawings. Her poems have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Slipstream, Boca Raton, Thorny Locust, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and others.
The houses are lined up
like wallflowers at a dance.
The tenants of our
Italian neighborhood
interlocked like pieces
of a jigsaw puzzle.
Everyone on the block was a spy.
Old folks stayed put
except to go to Mass.
A crone called Wishgon
was said to have the evil eye.
At the end of every month
the Prudential man came
to collect premiums.
Kids swapped empty soda bottles
for candy at the corner store
under the carp-eyed gaze
of Mrs. Cipoletti.
My father-in-law’s father
had a haunted house
on Cross and Main.
He left it to St. Vincent’s.
It’s a Friendly’s Restaurant now.
PATRICIA WHITING is a Florida painter-poet. Publications include a chapbook, Learning to Read Between the Lines and Diary Poems: And Drawings. Her poems have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Slipstream, Boca Raton, Thorny Locust, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and others.
Alex Clifford
Lorraine Motel, 1968
James lay in the bathtub for hours: oxidation
of man like Earl Grey over stove—watered
down to nothing but flesh. He watched the light bulb burn
out above him, shallow water filled
his head, saturated his thoughts until he couldn’t hear
anything but his fragmented
breaths. He cradled a rifle against his bare chest, sun bled
through the old curtains—stained glass. For a second,
he bathed in gold instead of rust, let bathwater spill
down his throat like wine. He pulled the drain, it dragged
him downwards with the soap and dirt and metal that flaked
from the faucet. He dressed:
shirt stuck to his back—constricted
—he couldn’t breathe. Clawed
at his chest, at his throat, claustrophobic.
Heart throbbed against his ribcage, fracturing
his sternum, his collarbone, breaths caught against the fabric.
He grasped them with his hands and pulled
them from his mouth. Opened
the window and the sound of the freeway crushed
him. James wrapped his finger around the trigger
and balanced the gun on the window sill. Church
bells rang from the chapel down the street, flowed,
a slow-moving river. He shot,
then again (then bells). King was face-down
on the balcony, and James threw himself
into the tub, imagined complete immersion.
Sun doused his body and he wished for it to fill
his head, for his thoughts to drown
in soap. Faucet dripped, a bead of water slid
between his eyes, his flesh stained with hues of rust,
with warmth like his mother’s fingertips and he lay face-
down in the empty tub.
Alex Clifford is a student at School of the Arts in Charleston, SC where she studies multiple styles of writing including several forms of poetry. Her poem “Marilyn Monroe” was published in Rattle’s Young Poet’s Anthology earlier in the year.
James lay in the bathtub for hours: oxidation
of man like Earl Grey over stove—watered
down to nothing but flesh. He watched the light bulb burn
out above him, shallow water filled
his head, saturated his thoughts until he couldn’t hear
anything but his fragmented
breaths. He cradled a rifle against his bare chest, sun bled
through the old curtains—stained glass. For a second,
he bathed in gold instead of rust, let bathwater spill
down his throat like wine. He pulled the drain, it dragged
him downwards with the soap and dirt and metal that flaked
from the faucet. He dressed:
shirt stuck to his back—constricted
—he couldn’t breathe. Clawed
at his chest, at his throat, claustrophobic.
Heart throbbed against his ribcage, fracturing
his sternum, his collarbone, breaths caught against the fabric.
He grasped them with his hands and pulled
them from his mouth. Opened
the window and the sound of the freeway crushed
him. James wrapped his finger around the trigger
and balanced the gun on the window sill. Church
bells rang from the chapel down the street, flowed,
a slow-moving river. He shot,
then again (then bells). King was face-down
on the balcony, and James threw himself
into the tub, imagined complete immersion.
Sun doused his body and he wished for it to fill
his head, for his thoughts to drown
in soap. Faucet dripped, a bead of water slid
between his eyes, his flesh stained with hues of rust,
with warmth like his mother’s fingertips and he lay face-
down in the empty tub.
Alex Clifford is a student at School of the Arts in Charleston, SC where she studies multiple styles of writing including several forms of poetry. Her poem “Marilyn Monroe” was published in Rattle’s Young Poet’s Anthology earlier in the year.
Michael Gessner
Moon Talk
I searched for your room
& when I arrived it was empty.
I went on, room after room,
building after building,
and what I thought was there
was not, and I continued on
nonetheless, like the moon
that hovers above
white and blank, an empty face
pulled room to room.
Michael Gessner's recent publications include Selected Poems. In March, 2017, four poems from this collection were selected by The Poetry Foundation for its archives. His poetry has been described as "Striking" (David Barber, The Atlantic), and "Lively and smart and musical" (Robert Pinsky). He lives in Tucson, AZ.
I searched for your room
& when I arrived it was empty.
I went on, room after room,
building after building,
and what I thought was there
was not, and I continued on
nonetheless, like the moon
that hovers above
white and blank, an empty face
pulled room to room.
Michael Gessner's recent publications include Selected Poems. In March, 2017, four poems from this collection were selected by The Poetry Foundation for its archives. His poetry has been described as "Striking" (David Barber, The Atlantic), and "Lively and smart and musical" (Robert Pinsky). He lives in Tucson, AZ.
David B. Prather
Diurnal
The heavy boots of night walk off.
Like someone not ready to go, must go.
The woman who makes a game
of this leaving, for her children,
for herself, to believe this is not
how it always ends―the drunk man
shouting at an empty house,
breaking anything she might have
left behind, the many things
that change, the aberration
of footstep after footstep
trailing across the lawn.
Perhaps it is the insanity
of a man who loses his son,
his daughter, and his father
to the rain, the hard slaps of flood.
The way he dives into the stream,
the unexpected grab and claw,
the grappling of his shoes.
And the search team, later,
bringing back every body but his,
giving up as though he never existed
and never would.
Or the girl who waits
with covers knotted up to her face,
and the steady tapping of the second hand
on a clock five minutes fast.
Then the rhythm of feet approaching
from down the hall where her mother
fakes sleep. Her father undoes the sheets.
He doesn’t tell her to be quiet anymore.
This has gone on so long.
Some things go simply unsaid.
You forget and you forget.
You tell yourself such fantasies.
You suddenly believe there are gods and goddesses
who chase each other across the sky,
who care for their human progeny
in unhuman ways.
You fall into yourself. Kick your feet
in spirals. Call yourself by secret names.
You find the world beneath you,
sorry that it must be there.
Day is another drapery,
a cloth over the window
saturated with dust. It is the hand
that pulls the curtain aside
so that more can be seen.
It is the release,
and all the loose particles
bright for a moment.
Before evening, the sound of someone
walking. Closer. Then closer.
David B. Prather received his MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. His poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, American Literary Review, Poet Lore, and others. His work was also selected for one of Naomi Shihab Nye's anthologies, what have you lost? Currently, Prather spends his time as an actor and a director at the Actors Guild of Parkersburg in Parkersburg, WV.
The heavy boots of night walk off.
Like someone not ready to go, must go.
The woman who makes a game
of this leaving, for her children,
for herself, to believe this is not
how it always ends―the drunk man
shouting at an empty house,
breaking anything she might have
left behind, the many things
that change, the aberration
of footstep after footstep
trailing across the lawn.
Perhaps it is the insanity
of a man who loses his son,
his daughter, and his father
to the rain, the hard slaps of flood.
The way he dives into the stream,
the unexpected grab and claw,
the grappling of his shoes.
And the search team, later,
bringing back every body but his,
giving up as though he never existed
and never would.
Or the girl who waits
with covers knotted up to her face,
and the steady tapping of the second hand
on a clock five minutes fast.
Then the rhythm of feet approaching
from down the hall where her mother
fakes sleep. Her father undoes the sheets.
He doesn’t tell her to be quiet anymore.
This has gone on so long.
Some things go simply unsaid.
You forget and you forget.
You tell yourself such fantasies.
You suddenly believe there are gods and goddesses
who chase each other across the sky,
who care for their human progeny
in unhuman ways.
You fall into yourself. Kick your feet
in spirals. Call yourself by secret names.
You find the world beneath you,
sorry that it must be there.
Day is another drapery,
a cloth over the window
saturated with dust. It is the hand
that pulls the curtain aside
so that more can be seen.
It is the release,
and all the loose particles
bright for a moment.
Before evening, the sound of someone
walking. Closer. Then closer.
David B. Prather received his MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. His poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, American Literary Review, Poet Lore, and others. His work was also selected for one of Naomi Shihab Nye's anthologies, what have you lost? Currently, Prather spends his time as an actor and a director at the Actors Guild of Parkersburg in Parkersburg, WV.
Denise Duhamel
LOVE POEM #11
I remember the way you rescued turtles, lifting them with two hands by their shells
as their feet and heads retreated inside. It might be too easy to say you were once kind,
taking your cigarette tip to burn off tics from the fur of a lost dog who wandered into
the park.
Before I met you, I gave my crush Gary my canvas tote
since he had purchased so many books on the $1 shelf at The Strand. His arms were full
of William Carlos Williams, early Sharon Olds, and Audre Lorde. His curly black hair
fell into his eyes, which made him a popular performance poet, which made me
susceptible to his charm.
Such tenderness you once brought to
our living—rubbing aloe vera on my sunburned back or taking me on a surprise winter
weekend to Montauk.
Chicken never tasted as good as it did in
Mojacar, Spain, in that small café next door to Restaurante Chino and Club Flamingo, a
bar owned by an English couple who’d misheard “flamenco” as a pink bird, famous
plastic lawn ornament. When they were corrected, they let their mistake stand, logo
and all.
I emptied my tote of my comp students’ bluebooks.
And as Gary disappeared into the subway, it began to pour, the ink of each essay
bleeding into Rorschach blots, the red margins polka dots and flowers, my hands and
shirt stained as I hugged the tests to my chest. I guessed at each grade, then, out of
guilt, added ten points. When I saw Gary next, he had his arm around Jennifer. But
you probably already guessed that.
When did you find
yourself in love with cruelty instead? You retreated like that turtle into your own shell
and crawled out a snake instead, all venom and rattle. As I walked down the aisle, you
stuck out your foot so I would trip. You stepped on my train and laughed as I went
down.
The Chickens at El Pollo twirled in open-air rotisseries,
dozens of gleaming greasy birds, their crispy skins bronze. We were poor then, but we
splurged. We were poor then, always applying for travel grants.
When you threatened suicide, I
thought of Adrienne Rich and Joan Rivers and made lists of the ways I might be like
them. I researched their husbands—economist and TV producer. I tried to talk you
out of it, but by then I also wanted out of the marriage.
Our friends were getting real jobs while we lived in a
one-bedroom dump on Mulberry Street in New York. You smoked on the fire escape
and called it your porch. Our friends were getting pregnant. The mouse had her babies
in my sock drawer.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
I remember the way you rescued turtles, lifting them with two hands by their shells
as their feet and heads retreated inside. It might be too easy to say you were once kind,
taking your cigarette tip to burn off tics from the fur of a lost dog who wandered into
the park.
Before I met you, I gave my crush Gary my canvas tote
since he had purchased so many books on the $1 shelf at The Strand. His arms were full
of William Carlos Williams, early Sharon Olds, and Audre Lorde. His curly black hair
fell into his eyes, which made him a popular performance poet, which made me
susceptible to his charm.
Such tenderness you once brought to
our living—rubbing aloe vera on my sunburned back or taking me on a surprise winter
weekend to Montauk.
Chicken never tasted as good as it did in
Mojacar, Spain, in that small café next door to Restaurante Chino and Club Flamingo, a
bar owned by an English couple who’d misheard “flamenco” as a pink bird, famous
plastic lawn ornament. When they were corrected, they let their mistake stand, logo
and all.
I emptied my tote of my comp students’ bluebooks.
And as Gary disappeared into the subway, it began to pour, the ink of each essay
bleeding into Rorschach blots, the red margins polka dots and flowers, my hands and
shirt stained as I hugged the tests to my chest. I guessed at each grade, then, out of
guilt, added ten points. When I saw Gary next, he had his arm around Jennifer. But
you probably already guessed that.
When did you find
yourself in love with cruelty instead? You retreated like that turtle into your own shell
and crawled out a snake instead, all venom and rattle. As I walked down the aisle, you
stuck out your foot so I would trip. You stepped on my train and laughed as I went
down.
The Chickens at El Pollo twirled in open-air rotisseries,
dozens of gleaming greasy birds, their crispy skins bronze. We were poor then, but we
splurged. We were poor then, always applying for travel grants.
When you threatened suicide, I
thought of Adrienne Rich and Joan Rivers and made lists of the ways I might be like
them. I researched their husbands—economist and TV producer. I tried to talk you
out of it, but by then I also wanted out of the marriage.
Our friends were getting real jobs while we lived in a
one-bedroom dump on Mulberry Street in New York. You smoked on the fire escape
and called it your porch. Our friends were getting pregnant. The mouse had her babies
in my sock drawer.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.
Bruce Weber
She Understood the Peregrinations of the Day
she understood the peregrinations of the day. the way the wind howls in anticipation of thunder. the soft pressing of air against the rain. it had always been this way. when she was a child she could gather the ocean in her mind and create waves as tall as the fables of the brothers grimm. she could spin in circles as fast as falling stars and parade down main street as a sudden storm. when i met her i fell right in. she took my breath away. swallowed my past like judgement day. wiped the sweat from my brow. lingered in my memory like a holy bath. sometimes we’d sit together in the warm rain. allowing it to wash over us like a merciful god. it was at these times the world was one. a peaceful chant cleansed the room of pain. and we fell along in line. singing perfectly in key. removing water from our rusty boots. tempering the threat of a flood with a children’s song. the waters retreated. the clouds simmered down. the sun emerged like a medieval knight. everything was aglow with a fervor settling down like a flock of piano keys in eternal harmony.
Bruce Weber is the author of five books of poetry, including The Break-up of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press). He is also the organizor of the 22 years running Alternative New Year's Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, held at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City.
she understood the peregrinations of the day. the way the wind howls in anticipation of thunder. the soft pressing of air against the rain. it had always been this way. when she was a child she could gather the ocean in her mind and create waves as tall as the fables of the brothers grimm. she could spin in circles as fast as falling stars and parade down main street as a sudden storm. when i met her i fell right in. she took my breath away. swallowed my past like judgement day. wiped the sweat from my brow. lingered in my memory like a holy bath. sometimes we’d sit together in the warm rain. allowing it to wash over us like a merciful god. it was at these times the world was one. a peaceful chant cleansed the room of pain. and we fell along in line. singing perfectly in key. removing water from our rusty boots. tempering the threat of a flood with a children’s song. the waters retreated. the clouds simmered down. the sun emerged like a medieval knight. everything was aglow with a fervor settling down like a flock of piano keys in eternal harmony.
Bruce Weber is the author of five books of poetry, including The Break-up of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press). He is also the organizor of the 22 years running Alternative New Year's Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, held at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City.
Gale Acuff
Mustard
If people didn't die, they wouldn't be
bigger than death. I know how big death is,
I go to Sunday School every Sunday,
that's reasonable, and learn all about
God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, how
They're always keeping an eye on me and
everything else, too, so that when I
die They'll know it and then call me back to
Heaven, for a few moments at least, to
judge me and if I pass mustard, muster
I mean, I get to hang there forever
but if I'm found wanting, lacking that means,
because of too many sins and I stopped
praying for forgiveness of them then I
pretty much have to jump into the Lake
of Everlasting Fire to burn and burn
and burn some more. Miss Hooker's our teacher
and says that I need to get myself saved
before it's too late, even if Jesus
already died for my sins, more sinning
means that I've let Him down and His mercy
didn't take. It's in the Bible somewhere,
someday I'll read it for myself, read it
without moving my lips, really read it
all, eat it up like it was popcorn or
candy or my favorite food, which is
tamales. The kind that Hormel makes. Canned.
Gale Acuff’s poems appear in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Poem, Adirondack Review, Coe Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review and Carolina Quarterly. He has three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008).
If people didn't die, they wouldn't be
bigger than death. I know how big death is,
I go to Sunday School every Sunday,
that's reasonable, and learn all about
God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, how
They're always keeping an eye on me and
everything else, too, so that when I
die They'll know it and then call me back to
Heaven, for a few moments at least, to
judge me and if I pass mustard, muster
I mean, I get to hang there forever
but if I'm found wanting, lacking that means,
because of too many sins and I stopped
praying for forgiveness of them then I
pretty much have to jump into the Lake
of Everlasting Fire to burn and burn
and burn some more. Miss Hooker's our teacher
and says that I need to get myself saved
before it's too late, even if Jesus
already died for my sins, more sinning
means that I've let Him down and His mercy
didn't take. It's in the Bible somewhere,
someday I'll read it for myself, read it
without moving my lips, really read it
all, eat it up like it was popcorn or
candy or my favorite food, which is
tamales. The kind that Hormel makes. Canned.
Gale Acuff’s poems appear in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Poem, Adirondack Review, Coe Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review and Carolina Quarterly. He has three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008).
Joan Colby
Jesus On A Wall
Sad-eyed Jesus hung over the bed,
Heart ripped out and pinned
To his nightshirt. A valentine
Not anatomically correct. This one
Called the Sacred Heart.
Suspended on a gold crucifix
Wearing nothing but a diaper.
Each hand centered with a nail
That secured him to the crosspiece.
The one where he holds a lamb
With a sweetness he didn’t display
At the wedding in Cana, clearly annoyed
When his mother insisted he perform
His magic.
A kid of twelve lecturing the Pharisees
In the temple. Later he led the rabble
And trashed that profaned place.
Raising the dead, driving devils out of pigs.
A sideshow the street people applauded.
How he said the poor would inherit,
How the lowly would be blessed,
How he said not to judge
How he edited his story
To fit the prophecy,
How finally he doubted.
Joan Colby has work in Poetry, Atlanta Review and South Dakota Review. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 18 books including Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press which received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage from Glass Lyre Press which has been awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her newest books are Carnival (FutureCycle Press, 2016) and The Seven Heavenly Virtues (Kelsay Books). Visit her at www.joancolby.com. Facebook: Joan Colby. Twitter: poetjm.
Sad-eyed Jesus hung over the bed,
Heart ripped out and pinned
To his nightshirt. A valentine
Not anatomically correct. This one
Called the Sacred Heart.
Suspended on a gold crucifix
Wearing nothing but a diaper.
Each hand centered with a nail
That secured him to the crosspiece.
The one where he holds a lamb
With a sweetness he didn’t display
At the wedding in Cana, clearly annoyed
When his mother insisted he perform
His magic.
A kid of twelve lecturing the Pharisees
In the temple. Later he led the rabble
And trashed that profaned place.
Raising the dead, driving devils out of pigs.
A sideshow the street people applauded.
How he said the poor would inherit,
How the lowly would be blessed,
How he said not to judge
How he edited his story
To fit the prophecy,
How finally he doubted.
Joan Colby has work in Poetry, Atlanta Review and South Dakota Review. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 18 books including Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press which received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage from Glass Lyre Press which has been awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her newest books are Carnival (FutureCycle Press, 2016) and The Seven Heavenly Virtues (Kelsay Books). Visit her at www.joancolby.com. Facebook: Joan Colby. Twitter: poetjm.
Rita Maria Martinez 2 poems
At Starbucks With Grandfather-in-Law
When it comes to coffee he doesn’t mess around.
On his ninetieth birthday he gathers by the clubhouse counter
with a crew of proud roosters. Salvatore Picardi takes his espresso
with several shots of anisette, the potent fuel akin to liquid
drano. Like the tin man’s oil can, this concoction
lubricates his weathered joints and keeps him animated.
He drinks the espresso in a mug. A demitasse an insult.
When I take him to a Starbucks in Tamarac I forget about portions,
I forget this isn’t la ventana of La Carreta or of any other Cuban dive,
flocks of men ordering and sometimes downing entire coladas.
When I surrender the single shot of espresso,
he grasps Starbuck’s Tall paper cup, pries the lid off
and peers into the abyss, a stricken expression clouding his face
as he realizes souls have lost their lives in this dark chasm,
this existential void, in vain. Sal averts his eyes from the meager
portion pooled at the bottom, contorts his face like
Dirty Harry and says, You’ve gotta be kidding me.
When it comes to coffee he doesn’t mess around.
On his ninetieth birthday he gathers by the clubhouse counter
with a crew of proud roosters. Salvatore Picardi takes his espresso
with several shots of anisette, the potent fuel akin to liquid
drano. Like the tin man’s oil can, this concoction
lubricates his weathered joints and keeps him animated.
He drinks the espresso in a mug. A demitasse an insult.
When I take him to a Starbucks in Tamarac I forget about portions,
I forget this isn’t la ventana of La Carreta or of any other Cuban dive,
flocks of men ordering and sometimes downing entire coladas.
When I surrender the single shot of espresso,
he grasps Starbuck’s Tall paper cup, pries the lid off
and peers into the abyss, a stricken expression clouding his face
as he realizes souls have lost their lives in this dark chasm,
this existential void, in vain. Sal averts his eyes from the meager
portion pooled at the bottom, contorts his face like
Dirty Harry and says, You’ve gotta be kidding me.
Bionic Arm
for Joanna
The cheerleading pyramid crumbles
during finals and my twelve-year-old niece falls
from the top tier like a false oracle
expelled from Mount Olympus. Snapped
in half, her arm looks like a boomerang.
At the hospital they set the protrusion
and insert metal bolts. Soon she’ll forget the tears
and blinding pain, but for now strange pangs
at odd moments remind she is not quite human.
She will raise her arm in Spanish class,
her Sophia Loren tan glowing as she conjugates
pain: Yo duelo, tu dueles, el duele.
She will elbow a pubescent jerk in the groin.
Every so often she’ll recall the descent from greatness,
the elusive apex of perfection growing
fainter as her arm wakes metal detectors,
their shrill roar reminding her to think
twice before offering her hand to another.
Rita Maria Martinez’s collection, The Jane and Bertha in Me, celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, and The Best American Poetry Blog. She is a guest contributor for the Poets & Artists blog and lives in Miami. Visit her at http://comeonhome.org/wordpress_development.
for Joanna
The cheerleading pyramid crumbles
during finals and my twelve-year-old niece falls
from the top tier like a false oracle
expelled from Mount Olympus. Snapped
in half, her arm looks like a boomerang.
At the hospital they set the protrusion
and insert metal bolts. Soon she’ll forget the tears
and blinding pain, but for now strange pangs
at odd moments remind she is not quite human.
She will raise her arm in Spanish class,
her Sophia Loren tan glowing as she conjugates
pain: Yo duelo, tu dueles, el duele.
She will elbow a pubescent jerk in the groin.
Every so often she’ll recall the descent from greatness,
the elusive apex of perfection growing
fainter as her arm wakes metal detectors,
their shrill roar reminding her to think
twice before offering her hand to another.
Rita Maria Martinez’s collection, The Jane and Bertha in Me, celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, and The Best American Poetry Blog. She is a guest contributor for the Poets & Artists blog and lives in Miami. Visit her at http://comeonhome.org/wordpress_development.
Matthew W. Jones 2 poems
Broken Down Old Albion
(A view from the tough side of many a U.K. city)
Mean darkening clouds, scuttling with criminal
intent across a menacing sky. The doom-laden
atmosphere, starkly
accentuated, by the bleached-out
skeletal building. Figures from a Lowry
painting wander aimlessly across
a bleak and loveless terrain.
Rudderless tribes of zombified youth
loiter with smug ambivalence. Amidst
a confusion of half-formed hollowed out
intentions. Causing mindless havoc, on
streets paved in raw cold cynicism. The
only gold to be found, is in their chav-proud
and multitudinous chipped and broken teeth.
Streetscapes mutilated, graffiti screaming,
spewing forth a distorted and dystopian
geometry. As twisted images from the deep
dark-web go zigzagging across the drug-frazzled
minds of the sullen and petulant death-pale youths
who skulk along poisonous sodium-yellow
alleyways and underpasses on their way to crack-houses.
Perpetually fearful of the ever active threat of random acts
of violence and senseless venomous hostility.
Upon these soulless streets, bottle-blonde girls
spit verbal splinters, screeching profane abuse
with razor-sharp stress-hardened voices. All the while
juggling manic-babies, cigarettes, well stoked-spliffs
and the perpetually active mobile phone. Songs of hunger
echoing along life-bruised and scarred domains.
Feral kids diving into disused buildings, eager
to get out of their angry, computer-addled
disconnected minds. Ready to consume any toxins
readily at hand.
Lives being truly read from
the Hobbesian school of hard knocks-
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
As this urban drama plays its self out, with
its cast of derelict, haunted and lost souls.
(A view from the tough side of many a U.K. city)
Mean darkening clouds, scuttling with criminal
intent across a menacing sky. The doom-laden
atmosphere, starkly
accentuated, by the bleached-out
skeletal building. Figures from a Lowry
painting wander aimlessly across
a bleak and loveless terrain.
Rudderless tribes of zombified youth
loiter with smug ambivalence. Amidst
a confusion of half-formed hollowed out
intentions. Causing mindless havoc, on
streets paved in raw cold cynicism. The
only gold to be found, is in their chav-proud
and multitudinous chipped and broken teeth.
Streetscapes mutilated, graffiti screaming,
spewing forth a distorted and dystopian
geometry. As twisted images from the deep
dark-web go zigzagging across the drug-frazzled
minds of the sullen and petulant death-pale youths
who skulk along poisonous sodium-yellow
alleyways and underpasses on their way to crack-houses.
Perpetually fearful of the ever active threat of random acts
of violence and senseless venomous hostility.
Upon these soulless streets, bottle-blonde girls
spit verbal splinters, screeching profane abuse
with razor-sharp stress-hardened voices. All the while
juggling manic-babies, cigarettes, well stoked-spliffs
and the perpetually active mobile phone. Songs of hunger
echoing along life-bruised and scarred domains.
Feral kids diving into disused buildings, eager
to get out of their angry, computer-addled
disconnected minds. Ready to consume any toxins
readily at hand.
Lives being truly read from
the Hobbesian school of hard knocks-
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
As this urban drama plays its self out, with
its cast of derelict, haunted and lost souls.
Hummingbird
A Ruby Throated hummingbird
settles on the Persian rug,
out for an airing, draped over a stone wall.
Sunflowers border the lawn, a framework
of Van Goghian incandescent yellow.
Reclining on a patchwork blanket
soporifically half reading
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
Inhaling the dancing perfumes floating
up from an ocean of vibrantly fecund roses.
In this Eden I drink some chilled Muscatel
from a tall thin coral coloured glass.
Suddenly a darting flash of claret.
My diminutive companion lands on a branch
of a graceful weeping willow, overhanging
an ornate pond covered in large water lilies.
Images from Millais’s painting of the drowned
Ophelia leaps into my consciousness.
And the bearded Monet painting his huge canvases
of water lilies in his garden at Giverny.
Becoming aware of some beautiful music
dancing through this garden of paradise.
Trying to place the polished sounds,
possibly a Chopin piano concerto?
Closing my book…
stretching out upon the warm velvet grass.
Soon transcending the pantheistic nirvana
of my immediate environs.
Drifting into the freeing hands of Morpheus.
Mind travelling into the cosmically
unpredictable world of fairy tales.
What was that I glimpsed from the corner
of my reverie? Looked awfully like
a White Rabbit holding a pocket watch.
Matthew Jones lives in Brighton, a bohemian city on the south coast of England. He grew up living on narrow-boats [canal barges] on the rivers deep in the wilds of rural Herefordshire on the English/Welsh border, he has Irish and Welsh ancestry. He works for Amnesty International. He has work in Poetry Today, Forward Press and Indigo dreams.
A Ruby Throated hummingbird
settles on the Persian rug,
out for an airing, draped over a stone wall.
Sunflowers border the lawn, a framework
of Van Goghian incandescent yellow.
Reclining on a patchwork blanket
soporifically half reading
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
Inhaling the dancing perfumes floating
up from an ocean of vibrantly fecund roses.
In this Eden I drink some chilled Muscatel
from a tall thin coral coloured glass.
Suddenly a darting flash of claret.
My diminutive companion lands on a branch
of a graceful weeping willow, overhanging
an ornate pond covered in large water lilies.
Images from Millais’s painting of the drowned
Ophelia leaps into my consciousness.
And the bearded Monet painting his huge canvases
of water lilies in his garden at Giverny.
Becoming aware of some beautiful music
dancing through this garden of paradise.
Trying to place the polished sounds,
possibly a Chopin piano concerto?
Closing my book…
stretching out upon the warm velvet grass.
Soon transcending the pantheistic nirvana
of my immediate environs.
Drifting into the freeing hands of Morpheus.
Mind travelling into the cosmically
unpredictable world of fairy tales.
What was that I glimpsed from the corner
of my reverie? Looked awfully like
a White Rabbit holding a pocket watch.
Matthew Jones lives in Brighton, a bohemian city on the south coast of England. He grew up living on narrow-boats [canal barges] on the rivers deep in the wilds of rural Herefordshire on the English/Welsh border, he has Irish and Welsh ancestry. He works for Amnesty International. He has work in Poetry Today, Forward Press and Indigo dreams.
Sue Hyon Bae 2 poems
Good English
1
When I am complimented
on my English,
I do not feel complimented.
When a classmate marvels that my vocabulary
includes special words like putrefaction,
it is not a compliment.
When the receptionist at the dentist tells me
You don’t have an accent
because she doesn’t know we both have
accents, it is not a compliment.
When someone who uses greengrocer’s
apostrophes, doesn’t know
about the existence of the subjunctive
in English, and believes he has the right
to judge what I say and write
because he was born to our language
says Your English is so good
the foreign tongue in my mouth twists:
No. My English is fucking brilliant.
2
The first English sentence
I learned was Who are you?
from a textbook
written by Koreans translating
literally who didn’t know
that’s not how polite English
speakers identify each other.
The first dictionary I memorized
had a pink cover and an example sentence
and illustration for each definition, e.g.
She walks among the flowers
for among accompanied
by a drawing of a woman in a pink dress
floating through tulips.
The first English picture book I read
was about a witch named Meg. The first
English non-picture book I read was
about a mermaid named Belinda. I do not remember
my first dream in English,
my first time blurting Ouch instead of Aya,
the moment my plastic brain flipped the switch.
3
My pronunciation of my mother tongue
is strange. This could be
because English divides sounds
into fewer syllables
and/or because English tongues
live closer to the teeth. In truth,
I am no longer capable of hearing my own strangeness.
4
When I moved to the United States,
I failed the oral English
placement test administered
by my Texas school district
because I could not add up
how much money
the numberless drawings
of American coins
represented
or in what season a holiday
associated with a fat vulture-like bird
is celebrated. I spent one day in ESOL
before a written exam moved me
into a mainstream class
where I was taught to avoid
should of and could of,
phrases I had never known before.
5
In eighth grade, I was obsessed with the American
Civil War and could draw from memory
troop movements on each day
of the Battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes I wish
I had stuck with it so that I could have been
the Asian lady historian who shows up at reenactments
correcting men about their armament. Instead,
I teach white teenagers Aristotle’s means of persuasion,
which I suppose is cognitively dissonant
still for some of them.
6
Your English is so good feels like being complimented
on how well I breathe
feels like being catcalled
feels like being handed
a plastic cup when everyone else
has champagne flutes. Every time I toast
with champagne, I want to clink my flute
against someone else’s so hard they both
shatter into spangles on our feet. Every time
someone begins Your English
my tongue melts
in my mouth like rancid butter.
1
When I am complimented
on my English,
I do not feel complimented.
When a classmate marvels that my vocabulary
includes special words like putrefaction,
it is not a compliment.
When the receptionist at the dentist tells me
You don’t have an accent
because she doesn’t know we both have
accents, it is not a compliment.
When someone who uses greengrocer’s
apostrophes, doesn’t know
about the existence of the subjunctive
in English, and believes he has the right
to judge what I say and write
because he was born to our language
says Your English is so good
the foreign tongue in my mouth twists:
No. My English is fucking brilliant.
2
The first English sentence
I learned was Who are you?
from a textbook
written by Koreans translating
literally who didn’t know
that’s not how polite English
speakers identify each other.
The first dictionary I memorized
had a pink cover and an example sentence
and illustration for each definition, e.g.
She walks among the flowers
for among accompanied
by a drawing of a woman in a pink dress
floating through tulips.
The first English picture book I read
was about a witch named Meg. The first
English non-picture book I read was
about a mermaid named Belinda. I do not remember
my first dream in English,
my first time blurting Ouch instead of Aya,
the moment my plastic brain flipped the switch.
3
My pronunciation of my mother tongue
is strange. This could be
because English divides sounds
into fewer syllables
and/or because English tongues
live closer to the teeth. In truth,
I am no longer capable of hearing my own strangeness.
4
When I moved to the United States,
I failed the oral English
placement test administered
by my Texas school district
because I could not add up
how much money
the numberless drawings
of American coins
represented
or in what season a holiday
associated with a fat vulture-like bird
is celebrated. I spent one day in ESOL
before a written exam moved me
into a mainstream class
where I was taught to avoid
should of and could of,
phrases I had never known before.
5
In eighth grade, I was obsessed with the American
Civil War and could draw from memory
troop movements on each day
of the Battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes I wish
I had stuck with it so that I could have been
the Asian lady historian who shows up at reenactments
correcting men about their armament. Instead,
I teach white teenagers Aristotle’s means of persuasion,
which I suppose is cognitively dissonant
still for some of them.
6
Your English is so good feels like being complimented
on how well I breathe
feels like being catcalled
feels like being handed
a plastic cup when everyone else
has champagne flutes. Every time I toast
with champagne, I want to clink my flute
against someone else’s so hard they both
shatter into spangles on our feet. Every time
someone begins Your English
my tongue melts
in my mouth like rancid butter.
The Time of Surplus
America said There's a cheese surplus
If you're a god-fearing patriot eat more cheese
July said There's surplus summer
Go forth and exercise your freedoms
You said Want to see a picture of me
in drag? I said Yes and Omg
ur pretty cute You were amateur
and sweet America said
Gas is cheap Get a car
Get two cars The diner said
An entire potato's worth of home fries
with every meal The politicians said
We're winning this thing The philosopher said
Every aesthetic choice is an ethical one
America said There's all this
ownerless property Come take yours
We woke every morning saying Yes
Sue Hyon Bae was raised in South Korea, Malaysia, and Texas. She received her MFA from Arizona State University and lives in Sacramento. Her co-translation of Kim Hyesoon’s A Cup of Red Mirror will be published by Action Books in 2018.
America said There's a cheese surplus
If you're a god-fearing patriot eat more cheese
July said There's surplus summer
Go forth and exercise your freedoms
You said Want to see a picture of me
in drag? I said Yes and Omg
ur pretty cute You were amateur
and sweet America said
Gas is cheap Get a car
Get two cars The diner said
An entire potato's worth of home fries
with every meal The politicians said
We're winning this thing The philosopher said
Every aesthetic choice is an ethical one
America said There's all this
ownerless property Come take yours
We woke every morning saying Yes
Sue Hyon Bae was raised in South Korea, Malaysia, and Texas. She received her MFA from Arizona State University and lives in Sacramento. Her co-translation of Kim Hyesoon’s A Cup of Red Mirror will be published by Action Books in 2018.
Autumn Barksdale
Reflections Past Midnight
It is 12:48, the sky is a yellowing chorus of street lights stammering nervous pick-up lines to the all too graceful dark. I hear them buzzing awkwardly, struggling to attract the attention of any one more lustful than a moth, and I am 5 whiskeys in to another night of lying in my panties, smoking a poorly rolled joint amongst the comfort of my California King, and stubborn tabby cat.
Sometimes, I praise the dark, the way she consumes me, well chewed, like the last morsel of a fine meal. The way she holds my almost naked body, a tight mothering embrace that whispers sweet reminders of safety, into my liquored ear.
It is often that I inherit her hunger. I long for the taste of flesh swelling in my throat. I collect bodies to press tight against mine, the embrace less loving, more a ritual, a baptism in reverse, the soiling of a good, clean, American boy. The whiskey, moaning softly in my head.
The streetlights, singing.
Autumn Rose Barksdale is a trans woman, writer, poet, and public speaker based out of Lake Worth, Florida. Her poetry has been featured in The Offing, The Jabbercat, Crab Fat, and in an upcoming issue of THEM, as well as various places online.
It is 12:48, the sky is a yellowing chorus of street lights stammering nervous pick-up lines to the all too graceful dark. I hear them buzzing awkwardly, struggling to attract the attention of any one more lustful than a moth, and I am 5 whiskeys in to another night of lying in my panties, smoking a poorly rolled joint amongst the comfort of my California King, and stubborn tabby cat.
Sometimes, I praise the dark, the way she consumes me, well chewed, like the last morsel of a fine meal. The way she holds my almost naked body, a tight mothering embrace that whispers sweet reminders of safety, into my liquored ear.
It is often that I inherit her hunger. I long for the taste of flesh swelling in my throat. I collect bodies to press tight against mine, the embrace less loving, more a ritual, a baptism in reverse, the soiling of a good, clean, American boy. The whiskey, moaning softly in my head.
The streetlights, singing.
Autumn Rose Barksdale is a trans woman, writer, poet, and public speaker based out of Lake Worth, Florida. Her poetry has been featured in The Offing, The Jabbercat, Crab Fat, and in an upcoming issue of THEM, as well as various places online.
Catherine Esposito Prescott
Restless
I first saw bougainvillea on the outskirts
of Florence climbing archways,
spreading their bright paper-thin
flowers and heart-shaped leaves,
like flames. Left alone, its branches
turn to thick wood. It stakes
a future where planted, and it’ll bloom
without rest. In its star-center,
you can hear the sun’s echo, the bees’
chants, and the murmurs of all possible
futures. If you bend closer,
thorns scrape warnings against skin,
but you’ll forgive even its cuts,
you’ll forgive your ignorance,
you’ll forgive the things you cannot know,
you’ll forgive missed
premonitions, unkept dates,
forgotten resolutions, unpenned
love letters and half-written stories.
In Grenada, where wild, hot-pink blooms
lounge over stark-white walls,
women learn to call men with stomp
and plumage -- a ritual of summon and turn,
of flirt and retreat, of desire and disgust.
The final steps of a flamenco dancer
bloom like this: an uproar of brilliant
petals bursting toward the sun,
for a man, for no man, for the future,
for the past, despite what you believe,
for life’s restless blooming.
Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press). Recent poems have appeared in Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry East and MiPOesias.
I first saw bougainvillea on the outskirts
of Florence climbing archways,
spreading their bright paper-thin
flowers and heart-shaped leaves,
like flames. Left alone, its branches
turn to thick wood. It stakes
a future where planted, and it’ll bloom
without rest. In its star-center,
you can hear the sun’s echo, the bees’
chants, and the murmurs of all possible
futures. If you bend closer,
thorns scrape warnings against skin,
but you’ll forgive even its cuts,
you’ll forgive your ignorance,
you’ll forgive the things you cannot know,
you’ll forgive missed
premonitions, unkept dates,
forgotten resolutions, unpenned
love letters and half-written stories.
In Grenada, where wild, hot-pink blooms
lounge over stark-white walls,
women learn to call men with stomp
and plumage -- a ritual of summon and turn,
of flirt and retreat, of desire and disgust.
The final steps of a flamenco dancer
bloom like this: an uproar of brilliant
petals bursting toward the sun,
for a man, for no man, for the future,
for the past, despite what you believe,
for life’s restless blooming.
Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press). Recent poems have appeared in Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry East and MiPOesias.
Maureen Daniels
Windless City
You were the lover I didn’t expect
to love. At first I hated your soft
butch, your Yankees gear, but
your blues seduced me, the rides
in the back seat of your driver’s car,
the city streaming outside
tinted windows, your thigh
pressed against my thigh. I ignored
your wife, your bipolarities
during the Subway Series
when the solid whap of bat meeting ball
shocked me from the comfort of you
on the folding blue seats in the beer
breath air. I wanted to ask you
to marry me on the Pepsi Fan Marquee,
wanted to smoke your sonnets, sing
on the roof in the rain over every
avenue of loss, but when your wife
threatened you, when the temperature
outside dropped below Christmas,
you said it was like slitting your throat
when you let me go, but you
pushed me away, saved that marriage,
never looked back.
Maureen Daniels grew up in England and Northern California. She 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, The Audre Lorde Award and others. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications such as Lambda Literary, Global City Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Scapegoat Review. She is currently a Ph.D student studying poetry at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
You were the lover I didn’t expect
to love. At first I hated your soft
butch, your Yankees gear, but
your blues seduced me, the rides
in the back seat of your driver’s car,
the city streaming outside
tinted windows, your thigh
pressed against my thigh. I ignored
your wife, your bipolarities
during the Subway Series
when the solid whap of bat meeting ball
shocked me from the comfort of you
on the folding blue seats in the beer
breath air. I wanted to ask you
to marry me on the Pepsi Fan Marquee,
wanted to smoke your sonnets, sing
on the roof in the rain over every
avenue of loss, but when your wife
threatened you, when the temperature
outside dropped below Christmas,
you said it was like slitting your throat
when you let me go, but you
pushed me away, saved that marriage,
never looked back.
Maureen Daniels grew up in England and Northern California. She 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, The Audre Lorde Award and others. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications such as Lambda Literary, Global City Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Scapegoat Review. She is currently a Ph.D student studying poetry at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Lucia Leao
Because I Was Thirsty When I Met You
I saw only water.
It wasn't a shipwreck or a drowning,
but I missed your island.
And today, when it becomes so difficult to talk
about geography, when it is not easy to speak
about our bodies, hourglasses dripping sand,
I can't sit down and watch.
I didn't see you were an island.
My thirst a congregation of now scattered molecules -
a raven, a rave, what is and is not
solid in me,
a haven, a rugged, ragged shore - you.
Lucia Leao is a Brazilian translator and writer who has been living in South Florida for 25 years.
I saw only water.
It wasn't a shipwreck or a drowning,
but I missed your island.
And today, when it becomes so difficult to talk
about geography, when it is not easy to speak
about our bodies, hourglasses dripping sand,
I can't sit down and watch.
I didn't see you were an island.
My thirst a congregation of now scattered molecules -
a raven, a rave, what is and is not
solid in me,
a haven, a rugged, ragged shore - you.
Lucia Leao is a Brazilian translator and writer who has been living in South Florida for 25 years.
Terence Degnan
Cut Yourself A Switch
leave it on the front counter
remind yourself it's never been used
you don't own your molecules
you don't own your cartilage
most of you is passing
most of you wants out
take your father's belt
hang it on a wall like a horseshoe
hang a bouquet
in the gallows of your bedroom
from a time that stole you
from the wilderness
from the spare parts lot
outside of Eden
the place where snakes
can be snakes
open a window
to the atmospheres in chaos
shuffling
like midnight drunks on a stage
your atoms
haven't taken themselves seriously
since they were an octopus
you were octopi
put that on an old calendar
let it yellow in the wings
cut yourself a switch
if it reminds you
of a time when
you beat the plague out of you
Terence Degnan is the author of two poetry collections, The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist's Grave and Still Something Rattles. He co-hosts and curates the poetry series, Poets Settlement, and produces the storytelling series, How to Build a Fire, in Brooklyn, NY. Terence is the poetry editor at Sock Monkey Press.
leave it on the front counter
remind yourself it's never been used
you don't own your molecules
you don't own your cartilage
most of you is passing
most of you wants out
take your father's belt
hang it on a wall like a horseshoe
hang a bouquet
in the gallows of your bedroom
from a time that stole you
from the wilderness
from the spare parts lot
outside of Eden
the place where snakes
can be snakes
open a window
to the atmospheres in chaos
shuffling
like midnight drunks on a stage
your atoms
haven't taken themselves seriously
since they were an octopus
you were octopi
put that on an old calendar
let it yellow in the wings
cut yourself a switch
if it reminds you
of a time when
you beat the plague out of you
Terence Degnan is the author of two poetry collections, The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist's Grave and Still Something Rattles. He co-hosts and curates the poetry series, Poets Settlement, and produces the storytelling series, How to Build a Fire, in Brooklyn, NY. Terence is the poetry editor at Sock Monkey Press.
Simon Perchik 3 poems
*
Even so it’s the darkness, loosened
circling down as the only meal
you dead can swallow –a single gulp
and you are nourished the way the drowned
still cling to a rope that’s not yet an arm
–miners learn this, they train
where there are corners, taught to feel
for an opening in the rock out all alone
that will become the night after night
–you have a chance! your shadow
is already near the surface, draining this mountain
for its ashes once they’re finished, eat
–everything here is evening and you
sinking on and on into the Earth
more than emptiness and fingertips.
Even so it’s the darkness, loosened
circling down as the only meal
you dead can swallow –a single gulp
and you are nourished the way the drowned
still cling to a rope that’s not yet an arm
–miners learn this, they train
where there are corners, taught to feel
for an opening in the rock out all alone
that will become the night after night
–you have a chance! your shadow
is already near the surface, draining this mountain
for its ashes once they’re finished, eat
–everything here is evening and you
sinking on and on into the Earth
more than emptiness and fingertips.
*
The silence on edge in your throat
helps you breathe, warms your neck
the way all gravestones
look their best –you take air in
though it darkens, is filled
with moonlight then salt –what you hear
is your chest no longer pretending
it’s a sky, has room, time
for the slow climbing turn
wider and wider, swallowing the Earth
till every afternoon overflows
with rivers that no longer turn back
–you still listen for pieces
as the sound a sea makes
in rocks coming by to grieve for you.
The silence on edge in your throat
helps you breathe, warms your neck
the way all gravestones
look their best –you take air in
though it darkens, is filled
with moonlight then salt –what you hear
is your chest no longer pretending
it’s a sky, has room, time
for the slow climbing turn
wider and wider, swallowing the Earth
till every afternoon overflows
with rivers that no longer turn back
–you still listen for pieces
as the sound a sea makes
in rocks coming by to grieve for you.
*
No, no, not the ink –it’s when her eyes closed
the page ran black –even without language
there was room in her mouth for melting rock
and lips everywhere following the flood
until it sinks –the words you hold on to
know nothing about a still warm star
once paper, is turning over and over
in the light shedding the color it needs
to see in the dark, carry her along
inside the mountain it takes to die
–you still hide in her mouth to read
word by word till they cover the night
that is too heavy, not yet dirt
for the corner where she is buried
though you point with your finger
the way it still imagines each sound
is looking for her, sacrifices itself
and stone is just another word.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
No, no, not the ink –it’s when her eyes closed
the page ran black –even without language
there was room in her mouth for melting rock
and lips everywhere following the flood
until it sinks –the words you hold on to
know nothing about a still warm star
once paper, is turning over and over
in the light shedding the color it needs
to see in the dark, carry her along
inside the mountain it takes to die
–you still hide in her mouth to read
word by word till they cover the night
that is too heavy, not yet dirt
for the corner where she is buried
though you point with your finger
the way it still imagines each sound
is looking for her, sacrifices itself
and stone is just another word.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
M.J. Iuppa
A Pot-Bound Begonia and Three Pears
Something shiny in summer air, in wind chimes tipped
by the lip of a light puff of air, stirring maple leaves
to press a shade of green against windows, blurring
the sense of green in this kitchen’s weakness that
saves the clutter of a pot-bound begonia sprawling
in the center of the table, overtaking three pears
left in haste. Two lie side by side on a clay plate,
and the other faces away from everything—alone
in its perfect shape. Morning makes its choice known
to those who enter this room, one at a time, searching
for a glass, a cup, a plate, hardly noticing the galaxies
floating in bars of sunlight that stretch from window
to table, but asking if the pears are ripe.
And briefly—there is silence.
M.J. Iuppa is the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program and Lecturer in Creative Writing at St. John Fisher College; and since 2000 to present, is a part time lecturer in Creative Writing at The College at Brockport. She has three full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Worlds Floating (2016) as well as Within Reach (2010) both from Cherry Grove Collections; Night Traveler (Foothills Publishing, 2003); and five chapbooks. She lives on a small farm in Hamlin, NY.
Something shiny in summer air, in wind chimes tipped
by the lip of a light puff of air, stirring maple leaves
to press a shade of green against windows, blurring
the sense of green in this kitchen’s weakness that
saves the clutter of a pot-bound begonia sprawling
in the center of the table, overtaking three pears
left in haste. Two lie side by side on a clay plate,
and the other faces away from everything—alone
in its perfect shape. Morning makes its choice known
to those who enter this room, one at a time, searching
for a glass, a cup, a plate, hardly noticing the galaxies
floating in bars of sunlight that stretch from window
to table, but asking if the pears are ripe.
And briefly—there is silence.
M.J. Iuppa is the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program and Lecturer in Creative Writing at St. John Fisher College; and since 2000 to present, is a part time lecturer in Creative Writing at The College at Brockport. She has three full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Worlds Floating (2016) as well as Within Reach (2010) both from Cherry Grove Collections; Night Traveler (Foothills Publishing, 2003); and five chapbooks. She lives on a small farm in Hamlin, NY.
Howie Good
The Border That Changes Everything
So much is coming at us that we jump, turn clockwise, and cut with the kitchen knife through the beer belly of the Republic. My daughter could be in there bleeding. This place is very dangerous. There are countless dead rabbits. There might be someone with a gun. People send us their children to get healthy but they leave in ambulances and body bags. One accidental martyr screams, “Open that door and let me out! Right now! It’s a travesty! Open that door!” You suddenly become the protagonist of crime scene photos. Why cry about it? We have always lived with fire.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry.
So much is coming at us that we jump, turn clockwise, and cut with the kitchen knife through the beer belly of the Republic. My daughter could be in there bleeding. This place is very dangerous. There are countless dead rabbits. There might be someone with a gun. People send us their children to get healthy but they leave in ambulances and body bags. One accidental martyr screams, “Open that door and let me out! Right now! It’s a travesty! Open that door!” You suddenly become the protagonist of crime scene photos. Why cry about it? We have always lived with fire.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry.
Grethel Ramos Fiad 2 POEMS
Everything You Need to Know About Hearts
Some hearts are fast-paced, fueled by whiskey brownies and happy German beers.
Some hearts survive with muscular Homo-Sapiens endurance a Paleo diet of quinoa and pseudo-grains, one adjustment surgery, 2 million calories of Doritos, funky glucose & opioids that feel like a caged cat.
Some hearts have pink-orange vessels that open and close like eyelashes.
Some hearts can be perfectly captured in black and white pictures like kinetoscope presentations in black and white.
Some hearts lean to the left.
Some hearts are worth their weight in thick gold slabs or the equivalent, which are five thousand turkeys, all of them well-mannered.
Some hearts look shattered as a battered wildflower.
Some hearts are pumping their first heartbeat and it feels soft as pacifiers in babies’ mouths before teeth.
Some hearts overcome 60 years of living.
Some hearts are pumping their last heartbeat, which is a relief from pain and from taking your car to AutoPart because your check engine light doesn’t come on.
Some hearts have visceral layers of tissue that need lubricant or love or both.
Some hearts develop a heart-valve infection as a result of legions of purple spooky Sinaloa drugs from Chino Leys injected at the cashiers of dollar stores.
Some hearts are constrained by breast implants.
Some hearts need a portable oxygen tube, a compact compressor, a nebulizer and a battery charger to function, and that is only to start the day.
Some hearts are cut in two as in a Shakespeare tragedy.
Some hearts are failing in their first year of existence, which feels tragic like religion without eternity.
Some hearts survive a cardiac attack, which is the only thing in the world worse than having a cardiac attack.
Some hearts are enlarged with clay and men cannot notice the difference.
Some hearts cannot confess a crime and Poe is rising eyebrows in his grave, still preoccupied with moral shortcomings.
Some hearts pump blood in a mad pop bustling rhythm.
Some hearts are attached to a pacemaker to perpetuate life with its phony rainbows and espresso shots and wheat and prohibited loves in different latitudes.
Some hearts look like a burrito soaked in red pepper sauce.
Some hearts all of the sudden remind you of mortality. Such a bad prospect in the kingdom of beings and you haven’t gone to Paris or planted a sequoia with branches as comical as arms!
Some hearts have provocative names like Machobottomheart or Lola.
Some hearts’ abnormal contractions cannot be controlled with medicine or Cuban Babalaos with necks full of dead snails.
Some hearts remind you of a vicious wink of a face.
Some hearts set the bar with their magnificent arteries, theatrical ventricles and pericardium of cosmic connotations.
Some hearts drool a stream of blood on the mosaic titles next to a person sobbing and shivering.
Some hearts are full of thick brilliant oxygen as powerful as electricity.
Some hearts’ rates have a mechanical misfit, which creates a music obnoxiously weird but insanely alive.
Some hearts are kept alive at unnecessary cost.
Some hearts are beautifully constructed like cathedral ceilings with tapestries depicting the Life of St. Peter and the Life of St. Paul and Jesus also, who knows how to behave in times of crisis and fits well into the manners of flesh and sky.
Some hearts vibrate at an ethereal gung-ho frequency.
Some hearts can replace the fellow sternum, but it’s a taboo practice and thus not recommended.
Some hearts are going to stop beating in the following hour, and it doesn’t feel sacred to share such an arresting message.
Some hearts beat so fast that every beat is Retweeted one thousand times.
Some hearts resemble the eye sockets of an insomniac Italian vedette in heat.
Some hearts cannot be localized in the chest, but somewhere distant. It’s not the case for Noam Chomsky.
Some hearts don’t develop heart disease but tuberculosis, a very un-heart thing to do.
Some hearts are surrounded by a warm desire and people with different mother tongues get
captivated by this beloved singularity.
Some hearts’ contractions are intermittent and can only be heard during blue nights.
Some hearts’ rates become linear in a computer screen. It was never just a physical disease.
Some hearts are lonely as in McCullers’s lonely town, where everyone is deaf and mute and lonely, and they all look at the lonely pedestrian crossing sign, and groom their private parts, and drink Coca-Cola from the bottle.
Some hearts are fast-paced, fueled by whiskey brownies and happy German beers.
Some hearts survive with muscular Homo-Sapiens endurance a Paleo diet of quinoa and pseudo-grains, one adjustment surgery, 2 million calories of Doritos, funky glucose & opioids that feel like a caged cat.
Some hearts have pink-orange vessels that open and close like eyelashes.
Some hearts can be perfectly captured in black and white pictures like kinetoscope presentations in black and white.
Some hearts lean to the left.
Some hearts are worth their weight in thick gold slabs or the equivalent, which are five thousand turkeys, all of them well-mannered.
Some hearts look shattered as a battered wildflower.
Some hearts are pumping their first heartbeat and it feels soft as pacifiers in babies’ mouths before teeth.
Some hearts overcome 60 years of living.
Some hearts are pumping their last heartbeat, which is a relief from pain and from taking your car to AutoPart because your check engine light doesn’t come on.
Some hearts have visceral layers of tissue that need lubricant or love or both.
Some hearts develop a heart-valve infection as a result of legions of purple spooky Sinaloa drugs from Chino Leys injected at the cashiers of dollar stores.
Some hearts are constrained by breast implants.
Some hearts need a portable oxygen tube, a compact compressor, a nebulizer and a battery charger to function, and that is only to start the day.
Some hearts are cut in two as in a Shakespeare tragedy.
Some hearts are failing in their first year of existence, which feels tragic like religion without eternity.
Some hearts survive a cardiac attack, which is the only thing in the world worse than having a cardiac attack.
Some hearts are enlarged with clay and men cannot notice the difference.
Some hearts cannot confess a crime and Poe is rising eyebrows in his grave, still preoccupied with moral shortcomings.
Some hearts pump blood in a mad pop bustling rhythm.
Some hearts are attached to a pacemaker to perpetuate life with its phony rainbows and espresso shots and wheat and prohibited loves in different latitudes.
Some hearts look like a burrito soaked in red pepper sauce.
Some hearts all of the sudden remind you of mortality. Such a bad prospect in the kingdom of beings and you haven’t gone to Paris or planted a sequoia with branches as comical as arms!
Some hearts have provocative names like Machobottomheart or Lola.
Some hearts’ abnormal contractions cannot be controlled with medicine or Cuban Babalaos with necks full of dead snails.
Some hearts remind you of a vicious wink of a face.
Some hearts set the bar with their magnificent arteries, theatrical ventricles and pericardium of cosmic connotations.
Some hearts drool a stream of blood on the mosaic titles next to a person sobbing and shivering.
Some hearts are full of thick brilliant oxygen as powerful as electricity.
Some hearts’ rates have a mechanical misfit, which creates a music obnoxiously weird but insanely alive.
Some hearts are kept alive at unnecessary cost.
Some hearts are beautifully constructed like cathedral ceilings with tapestries depicting the Life of St. Peter and the Life of St. Paul and Jesus also, who knows how to behave in times of crisis and fits well into the manners of flesh and sky.
Some hearts vibrate at an ethereal gung-ho frequency.
Some hearts can replace the fellow sternum, but it’s a taboo practice and thus not recommended.
Some hearts are going to stop beating in the following hour, and it doesn’t feel sacred to share such an arresting message.
Some hearts beat so fast that every beat is Retweeted one thousand times.
Some hearts resemble the eye sockets of an insomniac Italian vedette in heat.
Some hearts cannot be localized in the chest, but somewhere distant. It’s not the case for Noam Chomsky.
Some hearts don’t develop heart disease but tuberculosis, a very un-heart thing to do.
Some hearts are surrounded by a warm desire and people with different mother tongues get
captivated by this beloved singularity.
Some hearts’ contractions are intermittent and can only be heard during blue nights.
Some hearts’ rates become linear in a computer screen. It was never just a physical disease.
Some hearts are lonely as in McCullers’s lonely town, where everyone is deaf and mute and lonely, and they all look at the lonely pedestrian crossing sign, and groom their private parts, and drink Coca-Cola from the bottle.
The Chanel Girl
The Chanel girl’s sizzling seraph
is seen better when she lays in bed
covered by brutal petals.
Her body is metal and asparagus is her hair,
which I pull roughly as I offer her
one of my many tongues,
not exactly the longest but the silliest.
A theme for a duet of a viola and a cricket,
a guitar and a parakeet, slinky
as the wandering eyes of a cat in the dark.
I fill out the city with clandestine pamphlets.
I eat raw fish. I mop the floor.
I dance hula hoop
on top of toilets at the memorable parties.
The Chanel girl, on the other hand,
moisturizes, serves iced nectar
with Christofle chopsticks, never lies
unless it’s about the futility of life.
She retouches her mascara at picnics and weddings
as we talk about blue starts and Jesus Christ’s skin color
under an oily fog infatuated with a fat skyline,
her miniskirt flipped by a wind so hot that cracks rocks.
In the back of bars, the Chanel girl provides
low-fat, indulgent make-out sessions
with silky ultra-fine gloss
that last longer than love. A mischievous classic.
Anything but regular. Soft as cologne.
Contours of lips are stamped all over
glasses of cognac. There are two women
on the dance floor. One is sucking a lime.
Later on, under the tunes of Shakira’s album She Wolf,
she will bend over to put a Band-Aid
between the skin and the stiletto.
A splash of senses as virginal as puppet shows,
as dark as nickels in empty avenues.
Right now, I believe in reincarnation and Parcheesi,
good-hearted clowns and insomnia,
adagio and jelly beans,
the disengaged leg in a croisé and tea.
Let’s get out of here. Let’s drop into seclusion
this winter season to sketch faces
in the Portuguese hostel that goes by the name
Trouble in Heaven.
The Chanel girl knows how to order food in French,
wears fuchsia dresses
as universal as sand in a child’s palate.
I finger the back pocket of her leather pants
between the fragrance and the intimate aisles
and for a moment
it doesn’t matter that much that we are all disposable dust.
A devil-may-care delicatessen. An expressway to gardens
of worn-out fluorescent snakes. More like a sitcom rusty vision.
Sneaky and unpredictable like a yellow monkey.
Kindness is relative but style is forever.
When I see black lipstick on her teeth,
I think that we will grow apart some day
and none of us will be missed.
But now we are taking the suspenders home.
There is no better way to close the evening.
We are getting the cashmere Bordelle one, babe,
which is 35 percent off and shapes the silhouette.
Not even liqueur yields such a desire.
Grethel Ramos Fiad is a candidate for the MFA in Writing at the University of Texas. Her work is marked by lofty humor, an anger at social oppression, a loyalty to the beauty of English sounds and a taste for the universality of feelings.
The Chanel girl’s sizzling seraph
is seen better when she lays in bed
covered by brutal petals.
Her body is metal and asparagus is her hair,
which I pull roughly as I offer her
one of my many tongues,
not exactly the longest but the silliest.
A theme for a duet of a viola and a cricket,
a guitar and a parakeet, slinky
as the wandering eyes of a cat in the dark.
I fill out the city with clandestine pamphlets.
I eat raw fish. I mop the floor.
I dance hula hoop
on top of toilets at the memorable parties.
The Chanel girl, on the other hand,
moisturizes, serves iced nectar
with Christofle chopsticks, never lies
unless it’s about the futility of life.
She retouches her mascara at picnics and weddings
as we talk about blue starts and Jesus Christ’s skin color
under an oily fog infatuated with a fat skyline,
her miniskirt flipped by a wind so hot that cracks rocks.
In the back of bars, the Chanel girl provides
low-fat, indulgent make-out sessions
with silky ultra-fine gloss
that last longer than love. A mischievous classic.
Anything but regular. Soft as cologne.
Contours of lips are stamped all over
glasses of cognac. There are two women
on the dance floor. One is sucking a lime.
Later on, under the tunes of Shakira’s album She Wolf,
she will bend over to put a Band-Aid
between the skin and the stiletto.
A splash of senses as virginal as puppet shows,
as dark as nickels in empty avenues.
Right now, I believe in reincarnation and Parcheesi,
good-hearted clowns and insomnia,
adagio and jelly beans,
the disengaged leg in a croisé and tea.
Let’s get out of here. Let’s drop into seclusion
this winter season to sketch faces
in the Portuguese hostel that goes by the name
Trouble in Heaven.
The Chanel girl knows how to order food in French,
wears fuchsia dresses
as universal as sand in a child’s palate.
I finger the back pocket of her leather pants
between the fragrance and the intimate aisles
and for a moment
it doesn’t matter that much that we are all disposable dust.
A devil-may-care delicatessen. An expressway to gardens
of worn-out fluorescent snakes. More like a sitcom rusty vision.
Sneaky and unpredictable like a yellow monkey.
Kindness is relative but style is forever.
When I see black lipstick on her teeth,
I think that we will grow apart some day
and none of us will be missed.
But now we are taking the suspenders home.
There is no better way to close the evening.
We are getting the cashmere Bordelle one, babe,
which is 35 percent off and shapes the silhouette.
Not even liqueur yields such a desire.
Grethel Ramos Fiad is a candidate for the MFA in Writing at the University of Texas. Her work is marked by lofty humor, an anger at social oppression, a loyalty to the beauty of English sounds and a taste for the universality of feelings.
Jim Boring 2 poems
Abide, Abide
“Connie was here” was scrawled
in the grime on the hood of the car
that hit her. And someone made off
with her bike. In the alley Mrs. Gruber
Quieted her boy, her lumbering boy,
by smashing his head against a garage
oblivious to damage she was doing
his brain and the ideal of motherhood.
Eddie Tenace slept in empty cars
in unlocked garages rather than sleep
at home, no one needed to ask why.
From the bridge the river was lovely,
Closer you saw the human waste.
“Connie was here” was scrawled
in the grime on the hood of the car
that hit her. And someone made off
with her bike. In the alley Mrs. Gruber
Quieted her boy, her lumbering boy,
by smashing his head against a garage
oblivious to damage she was doing
his brain and the ideal of motherhood.
Eddie Tenace slept in empty cars
in unlocked garages rather than sleep
at home, no one needed to ask why.
From the bridge the river was lovely,
Closer you saw the human waste.
- What I Expect from Death
- Nothing like Alphonse Jackson all
- 350 pounds of him hanging upside
- down in the garage behind Casa
- Madrid while his torturers amused
- themselves with a cattle prod.
-
- Nothing like my wife
- submitting with courage and grit
- to the benefits of modern medicine
- doled out in calculated regularity
- until her will was broken.
-
- Nothing like my father whose love
- affair with Camel cigarettes super-
- seded his love for everything else
- and watched that everything else
- go up in seductive aromatic smoke.
-
- Nothing like Leon Schagrin’s father
- standing ignominiously naked under
- a pipe pumping carbon monoxide
- while his wife and children and baby
- clung to him, bewildered and doomed.
-
- Let me go like my mother, simply,
- with enough time to say goodbye,
- enough time to exhibit the style
- that enabled her to limit her com-
- plaint to, “Just when I was . . .”
-
- And then to brush it aside, unfinished,
- with a wave of her hand and a dis-
- missive – “Ach.”
- Jim Boring is co-author of The Horse Adjutant, the story of a young man’s journey through the Holocaust. His book-length poem, Condo, published by Lit Pot Press, examines the lives of elderly condo residents in South Florida. He is a memoirist and biographer, poet, copywriter and a content developer. His poetry has appeared in anthologies and numerous literary journals. His most recent work is a novel in manuscript about the lives of Chicago policemen and their unorthodox friends.
Inna Dulchevsky
flowers to ashes
one day
I’ll live among
the flowers
down the tulip avenue
and iris avenue
I’ll take my lonely strolls
but won’t intrude
the ground
with my foot prints
in all my journeys
I’ll be ethereal
over the tips of grass
rose petals
on birch avenue
rose petals
on rose avenue
near the roots of
magnolia trees
falling beauty
I’ll fall
with the voice
of a canary
I’ll hide my presence
under sun shower
I’ll cloak myself with a
mimosa’s silk
to lighten up ash lane
and I’ll cover forgotten
dandelions’ faces
Inna Dulchevsky spent her early school years in Belarus. She was awarded First Prize in the 2014 David B. Silver Poetry Competition. Her work appears in New Poetry, Calliope Magazine, LUMMOX Poetry Anthology, KNOT Magazine, Spark, Antheon, and is forthcoming in Poetry Pacific.
one day
I’ll live among
the flowers
down the tulip avenue
and iris avenue
I’ll take my lonely strolls
but won’t intrude
the ground
with my foot prints
in all my journeys
I’ll be ethereal
over the tips of grass
rose petals
on birch avenue
rose petals
on rose avenue
near the roots of
magnolia trees
falling beauty
I’ll fall
with the voice
of a canary
I’ll hide my presence
under sun shower
I’ll cloak myself with a
mimosa’s silk
to lighten up ash lane
and I’ll cover forgotten
dandelions’ faces
Inna Dulchevsky spent her early school years in Belarus. She was awarded First Prize in the 2014 David B. Silver Poetry Competition. Her work appears in New Poetry, Calliope Magazine, LUMMOX Poetry Anthology, KNOT Magazine, Spark, Antheon, and is forthcoming in Poetry Pacific.
Miles Coon
The Donald Sacrifices Ivanka
After Aeschylus, Agamemnon
The Donald felt the wind at his back
Still, and still
He persisted, as Elizabeth Warren
Persisted, after having been warned
Only by men,
Although the turtle McConnell
Spoke from his shell
As a majority leader.
And then the Donald flourished
His felt-tip signature,
His sheaves of papyrus
Banning belief in other gods,
And he spoke as if he were
Zeus, but Zeus
Noted his tiny hands--
And the tragic married the comic
As he railed as a bird, tweeting
Before the sun reluctantly rose.
My daughter always pushes me
To do the right thing
And then he threatened Nordstrom
And Neiman-Marcus
With both thumbs.
Ivanka, his daughter,
A beauty born of a beast,
Herself became a pariah
As the White House pushed Ivanka-Wear
Inflaming the Gods
Her lines vanishing from the shelves
Like poems, written on water.
Miles Coon, President, Chairman and Founder of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival resides in Palm Beach, FL with Mimi, his wife of 54 years. He received an M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, '62 and the University of Virginia. His chapbook, Homeland Security, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions, 2005. Miles Coon is a self-described “workshop junkie.” He founded the festival in 2005.
After Aeschylus, Agamemnon
The Donald felt the wind at his back
Still, and still
He persisted, as Elizabeth Warren
Persisted, after having been warned
Only by men,
Although the turtle McConnell
Spoke from his shell
As a majority leader.
And then the Donald flourished
His felt-tip signature,
His sheaves of papyrus
Banning belief in other gods,
And he spoke as if he were
Zeus, but Zeus
Noted his tiny hands--
And the tragic married the comic
As he railed as a bird, tweeting
Before the sun reluctantly rose.
My daughter always pushes me
To do the right thing
And then he threatened Nordstrom
And Neiman-Marcus
With both thumbs.
Ivanka, his daughter,
A beauty born of a beast,
Herself became a pariah
As the White House pushed Ivanka-Wear
Inflaming the Gods
Her lines vanishing from the shelves
Like poems, written on water.
Miles Coon, President, Chairman and Founder of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival resides in Palm Beach, FL with Mimi, his wife of 54 years. He received an M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, '62 and the University of Virginia. His chapbook, Homeland Security, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions, 2005. Miles Coon is a self-described “workshop junkie.” He founded the festival in 2005.