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  SoFloPoJo

Issue 7      November 2017
Denise Duhamel, Guest Editor

​



Poets in this issue:   Samantha Rice   Michael Minassian   Brandi George   Dante Di Stefano   Regina Marie   Erik Campbell   Judith Skillman   Max Lemuz   Ashley Mabbitt      Patricia Whiting   Lynne Jensen Lampe   Chris Connolly   Zack Rogow   George Held   John Stupp   David Axelrod   Elizabeth Gold   Chuck Culhane  Michael Hettich   Caridad Moro-Gronlier   Jen Karetnick   Sally Naylor   Michael Trammell

Hippo #2, photograph with enhancements by Jim Zola
Picture

Samantha Rice   2 poems
​
Renewal


After taking me out for lunch,
we waited for the valet to get your car
you standing far from me, but next to me
the air slightly brushing both of our cheeks.
I began studying the lines on your face,
how they were drawn out long and straight
near the corners of your eyes, how
someone had taken careful precision in making you.
Your ex-wife with her black hair and golden eyes
lifts you and bathes your white skin
telling you this: the worst is over. 
You can become your own man now.
The valet walks straight ahead barely looking at us
while we enter the car with the cool rays of the sun
washing whatever has been given to us.
 
​
My Mother Answering the Phone Around Dinner Time


While I eat a hot dog that my mother has burned
my uncle calls from jail. 
Holly, Holly. And the phone goes dead.
When my rabbit died years ago, there wasn’t enough
air to pass through his tired lungs, he had been suffering
for so long that when his eyes finally glossed over, 
his tiny body was somehow made full. My mother
watched him pass from this life into the next, and when
I came home late one October night, she was still holding him
in our living room with the lights off
when she asked me, Do you think he’s really gone, and although
I’ve never watched anything come into this world and leave it,
I imagine it will be the same with my uncle. He will breathe once
and the whole earth will move with him.
​


Samantha Rice’s poems have appeared in Graffiti and Touchstone. She has been awarded the 2016 Robert O’Clair Poetry Award, among other honors.  She resides in Connecticut.
​
Michael Minassian
​
The Drowning
 

As I watched her take a bath
she sank down
until only her knees
and the top of her head
showed above the surface
 
“Call me, Ophelia,” she said.
 
“Call me, Ishmael,” I replied
unscrewing my wooden leg.
 
You know how it ends:
all drowned
 
shipwrecked
and poisoned
 
whale bones
on the Danish shore
 
dead princes
and a suicide note
 
the ghost of a chance.



MICHAEL MINASSIAN’s poems have appeared recently in The Broken Plate, Comstock Review, Evansville Review, Main Street Rag, and Third Wednesday. He is also a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. Amsterdam Press published a chapbook of his poems entitled The Arboriculturist in 2010.
​
Brandi George  3 poems
Ghost Brother


Every night Mother searches     for ghost brother    
   umbilical-choked     violet     sky-watcher     
while our alien ancestors search from on high
for my blue magic cape     it’s real magic
     like clouds from endangered trees
like clouds released from the nostrils of March fawns
like ultraviolet black daisies calling     lover
to bees     the obvious invitation    sigh
     of crickets between stringing & sparked steel
ringing from the garage          & up close fireflies
     ugly crushable but fairy on the lawn
 
Where live you brother brother grown under gone
​

Some People Can Barely Stay in This World   
  

They lift like smoke or clouds    in the womb 
I ate only eggs           then was born riddled with starlings
        & my soul is a feather     & my arms snakes’ golden
         fuck you    bass shakes the house     fields my honor floods
        giant fuck you        is a zirconia sparkle
    & white trash middle finger         fuck is a swoon
            of starlings after    
third shift at the factory cracks
my father’s ears   at sunrise        he stares down    


    an infinite hallway     mornings stands in a cold
    deer blind & hums the soybean fields     as red as blood
​

He Said There Was One Door


He said there was one door      I couldn’t open
a test     so in the cornfield castle-maze Chris said
“you can look” when he turned around to pee
     I did & ever after         fingers stained
with red blooms     tiny bitten hearts     cedar roots 
blood warning     Ladies    O curiosity
thou mortal bane         Fairy key or egg stained
red with the guts of curious women
& red with their severed throats     still questioning
why am I dead     why I am dead & the moon
doesn’t give a fuck         silver dirtbag       no she
won’t sweep the field      find our limbs     rearrange
our bones breathe      into us       so we are whole again



Brandi George is the author of Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), which won the gold medal in the Florida Book Awards Poetry Category, and the play in verse, Faun (Play Inverse, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have recently appeared in Fence, Forklift, Ohio, Gulf Coast, and Columbia Poetry Review, also winning first place in the Dana Awards and the Zone 3 Poetry Awards.
​
Dante Di Stefano      2 poems
​
Self-Portrait Illuminating the Initial ‘D’


I am typing inside the distended 
belly of this dear consonant, typing
hoof-prints on the snowy field of this page:
D is for drone strike, D is for deadbeat,
is for dead-to-rights, for dead presidents. 
D is for debutante in a novel
by Dostoyevsky I  will forever
dream myself into—D is for David
fucking Bathsheba, Uriah dying
at his king’s command. D is for deathbed
confession—D for departed, for dread,
for the demons Christ cast into the swine 
he drove over a cliff. D is for dead
father, for debilitating illness, 
for disease, for the dirty underwear
one must don to attend the end of one’s life,
for the son who changes the underwear,
for the dirge that can be dug in the wind,
for the dithyramb in the dachshund’s growl.
D is for daughter, dovetail, divine, dreck.
Dub me Denzel in Training Day. Dub me 
Don Juan. Dub me Djimon, Dean, Dequan,
Diane, Daniella. Delete my name from
the digital ether. Design my face
on the flipside of a lost gold doubloon.
Then, heads-or-tails me. Decide my future.
D is a dreidel whirling on a map 
of the Holy Land. D is for dirt nap,
for dinosaur, for DNA, for duck
and cover. D is for duende, for dill
pickles, for Dr. King, for Django Reinhardt 
strumming je t’aime somewhere beyond the sea.
D is for dolphin and dauphin, for dukes
of Hazzard and Earl. D is for D cups
and dittos and dungarees and John Donne.  
D is for dram, distill, denude, demure--
“Shall we dance?” I ask my dog. Then we do. 
D is for discrimination, D-Day,
death before dishonor, deliberate:
D is for deity, for diagrams
of a doo-wop group singing “da da da,” 
for decapitation, defense, debut,
debate, deride, defile, defund, denote--
do not deny, always keep a diamond 
in your mind, D: defy, defy, defy.


An Iceberg the Size of Delaware 


Hey, you hear the President crayoned fire
on the whitest white wall of the west wing

yesterday, even though he was supposed
to be in Poland? He used the reddest  

red you can imagine, just like his hats.
His drawing style is exquisite. Meanwhile,

the Vice President put on a sweater 
of wasps to celebrate the day after

the day after the day after the fourth.
And somewhere in America some guy 

made an American flag from plastic 
army men. That kind of thing warms the heart.

It’s the only way to support our troops,
besides restaging Antietam, complete

with mounds of dead confederate soldiers
and polar bear corpses pinned with Silver Stars.
 
In local news, the ghost of your grandma
has been sighted inhabiting the blue

plumage of the bluebird pecking the seed
from the birdfeeders on display outside

of Home Depot. Someone ought to shoot her, 
really. Speaking of civic mindedness,

did you hear how they’re starting a space corps
to maintain child slave colonies on Mars?

Putin is riding shirtless on horseback
through all of our heartlands. An iceberg 

the size of Delaware is breaking off
from Antarctica. Something the size of

Antarctica is about to break off 
in me, in you, in us. Can you feel it?



Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He is the poetry editor for DIALOGIST and a correspondent for The Best American Poetry Blog. Along with Maria Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books in 2018.
​
Regina Marie
Re: Birth of a Nation


Put down your swastikas, your tiki torches, your beige fists, sinning.
Give up. You are surrounded. Outshined by our natural light.
With no thirst for your blood or to beat you, ever more we win.


We are married to brown-and black-skinned others; high-sighted
our babes have pink tongues and queer mouths that click freedom.
Give up. You are surrounded, outshined by our natural light.


We believe in atoms and the unarmed truth. Black bodies thrown
overboard, middle passage. The ash of Jewish bodies greyed Warsaw.
Our babes have pink tongues and queer mouths that click freedom,


breathe into our nation’s paper dreams, lace wounds with spit and law,
speak from the crossing and crosses of the ones who bore before:
overboard; middle passage; the ash of Jewish bodies; greyed Warsaw.


Toss one, two, more of us in the air, and we rise tenfold. A brassy horde
with eyes allied and backs brazed to bridges. American metal angels, we
speak from the crossing and crosses of the ones who bore before,
​

give up your white, the ugly absence in you. Let our gem-toned flowers be.
Put down your swastikas, your tiki torches, your beige fists, sinning.
With eyes allied and backs brazed to bridges, American metal angels, we
with no thirst for your blood or to beat you, evermore, evermore we win.



I am a nearly-60-Catholic-Hindu-Geeky-Lesbian poet living in Salt Lake City with my Jewish wife. This poem was written after attending an allied rally of more than 2,000 people in Salt Lake City, two days after the domestic terrorism perpetrated by white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dr. King gave the poet the words “unarmed truth” when he said “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality…I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
​
Erik Campbell
​ 
What Some Kids Could Use Today
Is to See Dracula in Broad Daylight at Age Four



When I tell the story I say that no, my mother 
wasn’t with me, but mostly because it was the ‘70s,

the golden age of benign neglect in sepia tones, 
and she would have laughed in any tone or case. 

My memory consists of me, prohibited by height, 
age, and fiat to enter the haunted house; this explains 

why I was slouching in that alley in Kansas City, 
Missouri, while my family was inside, and besides 

it was the ‘70s, and I already had Dracula and 
Bride memorized, and was already resigned to 

and conversant in the adult world’s genius for 
child marginalization. And then Dracula appeared 

out of a side door in full makeup, opera-finery, 
and fangs. “Hey, kid,” he rasped to me, his face 

too bright and wrong with sunlight, “Mind if I 
have a quick smoke?” And, like in Joyce, my plaid 

pants became warm and then cold. Dracula noted this 
and said: “Tough break, kid,” and tapped his cigarette 

in staccato fashion on the bricks, disappearing into 
darkness and character, leaving me there motherless 

and underscored, a bad case of dissonance in piss-
soaked plaid, thinking if only he’d appeared properly 

at night, accompanied by Tchaikovsky and fog, I’d 
have been pleased, well-prepared with my myths and 

dry pants, gracious to him with my neck and dreams. 
And this, goddammit, is a rotten way to learn about context. 

It makes for those sorts of kids who want to throw apples 
at Isaac Newton and never take their monsters seriously.



Erik Campbell’s poems and essays have appeared in New Letters, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. His first poetry collection, Arguments for Stillness (Curbstone Press), was named by Book Sense as one of the “Top Ten Poetry Collections for 2007.” His second collection, The Corpse Pose (Red Hen Press), was named by Entropy Magazine as one of the “Best Poetry Books and Collections of 2016.” You’d like him.
​
Judith Skillman        2 poems
​
The Biters


They come from corners,
those younger sisters
who envy the older one
& plant their marks
on inner arms--
half circles almost breaking skin. 
The savagery of sisterhood,
its secret rites and rituals.
The bitten one, the one
who bites. Which comes first--
kinship or jealousy?
What form does rage take
in those not yet civilized
whose anger flares & digs
its insignias in the softest parts--
flesh & memory.
What of the erotic zones
sisters share, when they tickle
one another, or seem to take
one under the other’s wing?
​
Nabokov, Upstate New York


Walking through tall grasses and thistles
    he happened upon the blue, iridescent
        one, lapis lazuli, then indigo

and, as the sun shone bright past noon, his shirt
    already unbuttoned, tats of ragweed, spits
        of pollen on the coarse undershirt

he wore in every season, there seemed
    no reason not to pursue the Nabokovia--
        as it would be called—housed at Harvard

years later, after Lolita, after storied 
    butterfly genitalia had been placed
       in small vials, the better to perceive

what it was these creatures did in the short
    hours between birth and death. 
        Fame came late, its metamorphosis

hardly important.  Walking with his net
   held tight, its mesh delicate and fine
       as those scales and hairs seen through a lens--

there the white field of delight would come
   alive, the almost awkward, watery
      flight end for good with a straight pin.

He raised his chin into the silkiness
    of the air, away from the stiff books,
        the papers jotted in sepia margins

with notes over earlier scribbling’s,
   varieties, categories, small parts
       of this other, utterly commendable

kind of exile.  Might there be a theory 
    worth pursuing?  The blue-winged thing
        swooped, swirled lower, close to eye-level

and he, only a bit tired, his dawn spent
    walking toward this field, its reputation
        spread by those he trusted, in the know,

knew the time was opportune, the chance
    to catch a blue spread-winged yet diffident
        to his net, the case in his shirt pocket

bulging with other specimens, its kin, 
   yet not blustery, large and showy.
      He followed its swim toward him, his eyes

that shade of brown not dark as chocolate
   but close to lion, with no green 
     to make them appear tender to a woman.

Swung the net, got the butterfly
    intact. Watched as it came full stop
        in the equivalent of human shock--

survival mechanism for trauma.
   Sat down promptly on the straws bending
      every which way, enamored of this life--

form that woke as if it had been kissed
  after a hundred year sleep, stood
    unsteadily, and felt with its proboscis 

as if to taste whether this fibrous fruit
    was sweet as a promise, or dry
        and hard-welded as the prison

from which he himself had been sprung,
    a decade ago, into the other language--
        English. English, and its strange inhabitants

of a nether world entirely new, full
    of hay, horses, barns, fields, majorettes
        throwing batons, and, on occasion,

the gray-brown fields not yet defiled
    by this desire to author, title, name,
        dissect, label, file, consign to history.



Judith Skillma’s recent book is Kafka’s Shadow (Deerbrook Editions). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, Zyzzyva, FIELD, and elsewhere. Awards include an Eric Mathieu King Fund grant from the Academy of American Poets. She is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. Visit www.judithskillman.com
​
Max Lemuz
Zoo


It was my day off, and Antonia too.  We took Alina to see 
the monkeys.  There was a family behind the glass.  I needed 
a picture, but they were too busy playing, baby on mother, father 
rolling on the ground, kicking up dirt.  I gave the glass a few hard raps, 
and quickly, the father ape stared at me with his deep black eyes.  
He knuckled closer to see me.  He gave me a perfect view, but I couldn’t 
lift my camera.  His nostrils steamed and canines protruded far below 
his bottom lip.  He beat his chest to a pounding step while I stepped back
from the glass.  He pressed his forehead against the glass, flashing
from cameras made me see my opaque reflection 
over his.  I had an indented forehead.  My nostrils sloped 
wide.  Overlapped wrinkles struck like lashes under
my eyes.  My biceps flexed long, my chest puffed stout shoulders
back.  I recoiled.  He returned to playing with his family.



Max Lemuz is a Mexican-American who recently graduated from California State University, San Bernardino with a B.A. in English.  He tutors foster youth full-time and writes poetry in his head all the time.  He spends his weekends with his amazing wife and daughter in San Bernardino. ​
​
Ashley Mabbitt     2 poems  
​ 
Gnaw  


Gnaw, grind, chew, and stare
through the glass, or at
his own reflection.
Orange nose at the end
of a blue snout – wasn’t it?
Orange nose to match
the long, orange electrical
cord leading where
exactly, connected to
what source of power,
what potential harm?
He held on with both hands
while he chewed.
The adults never asked, not one
of them. Only agreeing
it was not
an appropriate spectacle
for us, the children.
Grandma took my hand, shaking
her head, clucking sounds
with her tongue, and we
left the lighted glass box
containing three baboons, one
eating an electrical cord
out of boredom, out of hunger,
out of sensing he was not where
he really ought to be, and not
knowing what else to do about it.
​
Velazquez’ Lost Portraits


There must have been a woman among them,
alone, but with earthenware jugs
reflecting squares of pure white light,
and maybe an orange
on a rough wooden table,
one green leaf still attached.
The fabric of her sleeves, her apron and
the cloth draped over her hair,
deeply creased, peaks and valleys,
and her eyes are set gently but firmly
on some spot beyond the painter’s left shoulder,
some fragrance coming from somewhere, maybe
through an opened window, that reminds her
of a time, an easier time, that she can now only just
feel all the way to its edges.



Ashley Mabbitt lives and works in New York City. She studied poetry at the State University of New York at Binghamton with Ruth Stone and Liz Rosenberg, and has also worked one-on-one and in workshops with Anne Waldman, Cynthia Cruz, Emily Fragos, and Molly Peacock. Her work has been published in Avocet Review.
​
Patricia Whiting
​
What the Prince Said to Sleeping Beauty
 

There was no place
in my mother’s vocabulary
for the words vulva and vagina.
 
The soft mound and
its hidden passageway
were untranslatable idioms
in a foreign language--
 
anonymous body parts--
missing from our dolls,
whose tiny toes and fingers
were carefully defined.
 
So while boys proudly waved
their little penises
like Independence Day flags,
we girls were filled with shame
 
silently waiting for a prince
to whisper in our ears

your vagina is beautiful as a rose.


​
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.
​
Lynne Jensen Lampe   2 poems
​
Just Open the Book


Daddy still has that blanket, the one with the big blue and purple flowers. It’s
the softest thing. Every time we moved we got rid of pets and furniture, but
we always packed the magic blanket. I went to five elementary schools. Mama
went to five hospitals.

We all slept under that blanket, one time or another. We all had times we
couldn’t fall asleep in our own beds, and a snuggle under the magic blanket
was a shut-eye guarantee. I bet it came from Sears, where Mama went to shop
and hope.

That Big Book catalog was a hit with the boys whose daddies didn’t get Play-
boy
, and girls liked it too. Page after page of lace-covered breasts. “One day,
this will be yours.” Hard to believe for those of us starting with the stiff cotton
model, its big black and blue bumblebee announcing through thin blouses
there’s another bra strap in the class to snap.

“She’s a late bloomer,” Mama said. Why are women always explained away
by flowers? We bud, blossom, open. We shrivel, wither, dry up. And it was a
man, not the artist herself, who said Georgia O’Keeffe was painting a vulva
​again and again.
​
Reason


I met Joshua in February and one day saw his scar. I kissed the scar, caressed
it. I asked why it was there, but he wouldn’t tell me, he said, because I was
beautiful. I remember tracing his constellation of a scar with my tongue,
Cassiopeia on a dusty forearm.


Tomorrow I will find Joshua. The laundromat was empty this afternoon, but I
found his note taped to a chair with an old band-aid.


Last night I dreamed of a spiral staircase and running women wearing dresses
bleeding from hands and arms and calves and never healing themselves.


Joshua and I drove to City Park last week. We made love there, even though it
was 4:30 and there were beer cans all around. He entered me and said he
would tell me about the scar. He talked about his sister Ilene who jumped
from the twelfth floor of a small-town hotel. He cut himself on the broken
glass. He told me of the blood gushing from her head, his arm, and I came and
​came and came.



Lynne Jensen Lampe lives in Columbia, MO, where she edits journal articles, political science books, and the occasional superhero novel. At other times in her life she's organized large protests against US intervention in El Salvador, led anger management classes, and taught 3-year-olds who were patients at a psychiatric hospital. Her poetry has appeared in New Letters.
​
Chris Connolly
Sex You Shouldn’t Be Having
​

 
The flowers I painted painstakingly
on my bedroom wall
to brighten it
look in truth like spreading dampness  
or a depressed child’s collage.
I don’t know what I was thinking
not being a painter
but it felt right
at the time;
Like sex you shouldn’t be having
                                       Or too many drinks
                                               Or repeatedly recanting the rosary when you were 

​                                                                     six 
so you wouldn’t go to Hell...
 
I will have to paint over them of course
    these psychotic efflorescences
return      blankness    to the Wall
in a White much like this:
 
 
Teachers and optimists might flinch
at the truth:
but we are each of us good at too few things
and usually it is simply best
                                       not to even
                                                 bother to try.



Chris Connolly's fiction and poetry has appeared in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, Southword, the Galway Review and the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction. Last year he won Best Emerging Fiction at the 2016 Hennessy Literary Awards, the RTÉ Francis McManus award, the Easy Street Magazine Great American Sentence Contest and, most recently, the Over the Edge: New Writer of the Year award.  His website is chrisconnollywriter.com.
​
Zack Rogow     2 poems
​
Psalm Minus One
     In memory of Eva Saulitis

Praise the galaxies those sprinklers of stars
Praise the twine of light we call the sun
Praise the aquarelle canyons and the torn silhouettes of the sierras 
Praise the claws of lightning and the machines of hurricanes
Praise the rivers and their names the Blind River the Rosetta Branch of the Nile the
  Zezë La Lézarde Rivière Lorca’s Guadalquivir that hooks through Seville

Praise the cities with their lingerie bridges and their glass polyhedra 
Praise our shelters and homes the circular yurts and buttercream chateaus
Praise the wildflower smell of babies’ heads
Praise the children who have feet in order to skip
Praise the customer service representatives the ungroomed heretics the person who
​  locks up the bowling alley after everyone else has driven home in the snow

Praise the lovers and the dead who exist only in their bodies
Praise the artist nearsighted and far
Praise orange peppers purple cabbages and the Fibonacci patterns of Romanesco
Praise the four thousand species of frogs 
Praise the dust motes like the last zizz of a firework
Praise our unicellular cousins in a tiny paperweight of water
Praise all the molecules their infinitesimal mosques
Praise the electrons for their uncertain orbits 

Praise the transuranium elements with their millisecond lives ununpentium      
  ununseptium ununoctium
​
The Bar Mitzvah Boy


His sudden body fits like a suit
two sizes too large.
While he chants the prayer
his voice is a rock
scratched against glass.

Could there be a ritual more awkward
than a thirteen-year-old boy singing
an ancient language
in front of a crowd of people?

Will somebody please let this kid go home
and kill space aliens on a screen?

Then the bar mitzvah boy 
lifts the torah by the rimonim
and nestles the scroll against his shoulder
like a parent carrying a sleeping child.
He tours the parchment around the congregation,
each person touching a fringed tallis
to the coiled words, as if completing 
an electrical circuit. The congregants close
their prayer books with a little kiss 
to the binding, like bidding 
a loved one goodbye. 

The bar mitzvah boy sounds out his parashah
about decorating the first temple:
And thou shalt bring in the candlestick 
and light the lamps thereof 
And thou shalt set the altar of gold for the incense…
and the altar of the burnt offering before the door.


Veheveta et-hamenorah 
Veha’aleyta et-neroteiha
venatata et mizbach hazahav liktoret…
et mizbach ha-olah lifnei petach


And now those musty 
syllables 
coupled together
millennia ago 
seem like skipping stones.



Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. He teaches in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and serves as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. www.zackrogow.com

​
George Held

Straight White Male

 
I accept myself as myself,
Straight and white and male;
It’s the way I am, so I make
What I can of it.
 
Male, I have a penis and testicles,
They work the way they should;
Straight, I feel drawn to a woman
Like a hand to a glove.
 
It’s the way I am. White is a joke,
Because only my scars are white,
The rest of me depends on where –
My face is rash-blotched, my butt
 
Is pale, like a paleface to a Sioux,
And my shins bear 5-inch-long brown
Scars from volcanic parasites embedded
When I fell down a hill on Kaua‘i.

White is ironic, especially compared
To “yellow,” “brown,” or “black” skin.
How I’d love to have hairless bronze
Skin like my Hawaiian friends,
​

 Who call me “Shark Bait” I look
So “white” to them. Like them, I cover
Myself at the beach, they to stay
Light, I to prevent cancer.
 
It’s the way I am. So be it.
I was born straight, white, male,
Just like other folks are born other
Ways. Let there be comity between us.



George Held, a 10-time Pushcart nominee, writes from NYC. He publishes poems, stories, and book reviews in print and online, in journals such as American Book Review, Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society, Two Cities Review, and Narrative Northeast. His latest chapbook is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle: Goldfish Press, 2017).
​
John Stupp       2 poems
​
They Say It’s Wonderful
                for Irving Berlin


It’s wonderful
men working together
the foreman said
on my first day
in the Ford engine foundry
in Cleveland
but it looked dangerous
my clothes
were clean
I was a virgin
I wasn’t broken in yet
I had no fear
still
I was one of thousands
who walked from the parking lot
like sheep
on a June afternoon
in 1968
what did I know
about making car engines
nothing as it turned out
so my foreman noticed
if I wasn’t careful
he said
this foundry will bend you over
and fuck you for better
or worse--
I’ve had a lot of bosses
since then
but no memo was ever delivered
with such insight
and he was right


Disillusionment of Three O’clock
            after James Wright



Took a nap
in my chair
this afternoon
I was still at work
it was like a graveyard outside
I could see February shitting 
the streets
the pavement
the mills 
the empty river
I thought for a minute
of Elvis
roaming the Las Vegas Hilton
every night in the 1970’s
oh guitarless insomniac
oh sleep deprived relic of underwear 
and adoration
hooked on amphetamines
carrying a loaded .357 Magnum
for shooting TV sets
if Robert Goulet was on
oh Elvis
I believed in America back then
so yes
I wasted my life



John Stupp is the author of Advice from the Bed of a Friend by Main Street Rag.  His new book Pawleys Island has been published by Finishing Line Press. Recent poetry has appeared or will appear in The Greensboro Review and Poetry Daily, Poet Lore, The American Poetry Journal and LitMag. His poem “Goat Island” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016 and his poem “No Luck” is a Best of the Net Nomination for 2017. He lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
​
David Axelrod
My Life As An Onion
(Vaksn zolstu vi a tsibele, mitn kop in dr’erd.)

 
The tectonics of my childhood
were a collision between ethnic
differences and sibling rivalry.
My father’s side, Lithuanians,
loved garlic. My mother, Russian,
loved onions. Their kids were
the pot roast steeping between
the two. My brother, born three
years before me, was the first
grandson among the Litvaks,
over whom they kvelled. He
proved himself precocious,
walking and talking in full
sentences at nine months--
a brilliant cook. My later
arrival woke neither clan,
leaving me to grow like an
onion with my head in
the dirt, where my brother
took pleasure in pushing it.



Dr. David B. Axelrod is Poet Laureate of Volusia County, Florida. 2018 will be the 50th anniversary of his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshops and publication of his first book, Stills from a Cinema (Despa Press). His 23rd and newest book is All Vows: New & Selected Poems (Nirala Press, 2017).  He lives in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he is founder and director of the Creative Happiness Institute, Inc. (www.creativehappiness.org).
​
Elizabeth Gold    2 poems
Slivovitz
                        for E. Bajrovic



Under the trees in the country
that no longer exists
he was drinking ether

of crushed plums from a footless
glass. This is not so long ago
he can't remember

how the weight of his haunches,
hands, the table, the crowd
of men he had known

all his life began to evaporate,
even the trees were slipping,
till shade seemed to be

what he was swallowing, or
was swallowing him.
They put him to bed,

and when he woke, not
for the first time, or the last, 
he had no idea where he was
​

Sometimes the Day Writes the Poem


There is a rose branch that grows
cross the path, scratching the bare legs
of the unsuspecting. This is not
a metaphor, lesson plan on the nature
of a rose, doling out sweets and hurts
in the dark. There is a rose, and here 
are the welts to prove it. And over
in Brooklyn, on a day in July, lightning
struck the Paradise Mattress Factory, burning
the beds to ash. I’m not making this up,
you know. Read the papers. All summer long
I’ve been thinking of those dreams
going up in smoke, each spring coiled
redhot like a hair on a pillow.
Nothing to say, except sometimes the day
writes the poem, slaps you upside the head
with a rose, a scratch, a bed alight,
out of the blue heat accidental
and inevitable as lightning
​


Elizabeth Gold is the author of the memoir, Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity (Tarcher/Penguin). Her poems and essays have been published in Field, Gettysburg Review,  Willow Springs, Dark Wood, Guernica, and other journals, as well as on Poetry Daily.

​
Chuck Culhane
Mama, I Have Lost My Poems


They are lost in the piles, hidden disks
Abandoned files, boxes, freightcars
Broken hearts, lazy bones, indulgent nights
Poor excuses, little abuses adding up to crimes
Against words, Mama, they are lost, my poems are lost
In computers, in space, emptiness
They are walking down supermarket aisles
Crying in churches while the rains
Pour over ancient stones.
 
Mama, the poems have gone unwritten
And the written ones I keep losing
They are slipping out of folders
Left among trash cans
Orphans of the alphabet
Their Bronx accent tracing old streets
Rousing the peculiar voices of melted years
The booming Italian argument and laughter
The Jewish twang, the tears of mothers
The little European enclave of our street
The missing Blacks
The white gangs fighting the Spanish gangs
In the shadows of school yards and factories
Boys clutching girls in hot hallways
Vendors pushing old wooden wagons
The tired horse of the fruit and vegetable man
They are gone, Mama, like my poems
Like my lost poems, scattered in time
Little bastards of praise



Chuck Culhane first went to prison when he was 19. He held up a taxi with a toy gun, netted $10 and a 0-to-5-year prison sentence. He served 26 months. He came across Day on Fire, a fictional biography of Arthur Rimbaud. He became engrossed with the events and rhythms of his work and life. Rimbaud stopped writing when he was 19, so it is said. Culhane says he has been blessed with coming to consciousness and finding wonder and wonderful human beings everywhere.
​
Michael Hettich Caridad Moro-Gronlier Jen Karetnick Sally Naylor Michael Trammell
​
Little Pockets of Ease
    a Kaleidofugue


Michael Hettich

a portrait of unfulfilled
quiet distills


the red in the cheek
of the dusty portrait


in a room


filled
with bereavement
that blanches


the walls
and touches
everyone until


when
becomes and
becomes I.



Caridad Moro-Gronlier

The ghost 
of your cheek
still cleaves to
the blanched wall


where it hung 
for months 
survivor of what 
we could not
live through


      your portrait 
      a flutter 
      of hands
      face blur 
      of grey
      unencumbered 
      by color


laughter distills 
to quiet
in the room 
I emptied of you


with a scatter 
of fingerprints
stamped
across the glass


frame 
I put away
before the dust
took hold.



Jen Karetnick
​
A painting dissolves from
the blanched, egg-hued wall

 
during a band of tropical storm.
It is a testament to wind, how

 
it drives inches of rain into
the corner of the roof above it


where things don’t quite match up.
I bear witness to the frame


diving into the swamp of dissatisfied
grief, the quiet its own shattering


afterward, the slivered glass delineating
the Italian tile floor into an invisible trap.


Struck like mannequins, we tiptoe
our eyes through curdles of thunder


and candlelight until I map a path,
glancing your cheek with the plastic tip


of the broom, allowing lightning
to become just another dusty tool.



Sally Naylor
 
Savor the way portraits fade
on a blanched afternoon wall
during the winter solstice. 


As lines dissipate, lacquered
faces release their profiles
in layered cells
of unfulfilled bereavement. 


The quiet is soft, distills a kind of lavender
as I touch your cheek
and it too drifts into dusty memory.



Michael Trammell
 
The way the photo portrait
of my father sitting on a rocker
hangs now on a blanched wall in his condo

 
is a tunnel to tears.
I’m here to help best I can
while he’s intubated in the ICU,

 
a long tube bending into his throat.
This morning, I remembered when                                                                                         
that black bentwood rocker

 
in the pale living room
broke and left us 
with something

 
unfulfilled.
The quiet is true in the photo,
and the morning sunlight in the sliding glass door

 
he stares through
distills
the forgotten splinters

 
we witnessed
from the breaking
birch bentwood rocker.

 
Everyone in the room
stood
in the corner

 
just before the photographer’s
click and whir.
My heel clipped a scuba tank

 
stashed beside a cabinet;
his favorite escape was to snag
lobsters, just in season

 
on the local reefs,
with his bare hands.
He’d missed the morning’s

 
hunt to please us all.
He sat for photos, instead of slipping
into

 
a hidden narrow cave
on Red Rock reef.
Father, I touch your cheek, but I only smudge

 
the dusty glass. You spent hours gluing
both armrests
with smears of beige epoxy

 
and a silence louder
than your labored breathing
on this softly hissing machine.



Michael Hettich has published more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, his most recent book, Frozen Harbor, won the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the award winning author of Visionware published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. She resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son.

Jen Karetnick is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Treasures That Prevail, finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. Winner of the 2017 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2016 Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize and the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, she is co-founder/co-curator of Supporting Women Writers In Miami (SWWIM). SWWIM.ORG 

Poet, therapist and teacher, Sally Naylor taught and wrote curricula for gifted, peer counseling and AIDS education classes. Her first collection, Firebird (PP Books) is available on Amazon, as are her memoir, Rogue Nirvana (Lioncrest Press) Heresies &  Sweet Basil and Riffs (PP Books).  
​
Michael Trammell is the chief editor of the Apalachee Review. His work has appeared New Letters, The Chattahoochee Review, Pleiades, G.W. Review, Poet Lore, and other journals. YellowJacket Press published his poetry collection Our Keen Blue House in 2008.


A Kaleidofugue uses a template prompt by at minimum four poets.  Poets use some or all of the words and/or phrases in the template to write their section.

Template


The way a portrait _____________
on a blanched wall


during __________
is a ______________    ______________.



I ___________ when ________   __________
in the __________ do I understand our unfulfilled bereavement.



The quiet is _________
and ___________ distills
the _________      ___________.



Everyone in the room
is ______ until I _________.



I touch your cheek with a _______
and ___________  becomes a dusty ____________.