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SoFloPoJo stands with Ukraine
ISSUE 24 February 2022
Judy Ireland, Meryl Stratford, Michael Mackin O'Mara, Lenny DellaRocca, editors
Judy Ireland, Meryl Stratford, Michael Mackin O'Mara, Lenny DellaRocca, editors
If you are poet, prophet, peace loving artist, tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between; if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl; if you value the humane treatment of every creature and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo seeks your best work.
Poets in this issue
DEE ALLEN. CLAIRE BATEMAN. KRISTIN BOCK. DESPY BOUTRIS. RICK CAMPBELL. SUSAN MICHELE CORONEL. WILLIAM DeGENARO. ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI. JALEN EUTSEY. MAURA FAULISE. SCOTT FERRY. LINDA NEMEC FOSTER. EMILY FRANKLIN. PETER GRANDBOIS. BECCA ROSE HALL. LARA HENNEMAN. JOYCE HIDA. RUTH HOBERMAN. PAUL HOSTOVSKY. HALSEY HYER. JUDY KABER. JEFFREY LETTERLY. LORRAINE HENRIE LINS. EMI LOHMAN. ANNIE MARHEFKA. CATHERINE MAZODIER. ABHISHEK MEHTA. SALLY NAYLOR. JEFF NEWBERRY. ALLAN PETERSON. henry 7. reneau, jr. BRUCE ROBINSON. RICHARD RYAL. MICHAEL SALCMAN. BETSY SHOLL. KATE STRONG STADT. DONNA VORREYER. CAROL YOUNG.
Dee Allen. Oakland, CA
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Greenwood Avenue
Whistle blew long At 5:08am, High-volume Encouragement For a full civilian Army of hate to cross Frisco train tracks to the North Side, Object of their shared spite, Machine-guns Mounted on rooftops, Bi-planes Prowled the sky, Ill-gotten guns Toted on the ground. It rained kerosene That early morning hour, Drenched everything From emptied cans. Lit torches From racists did the rest. Doomsday came As immense flame June 1, 1921 To Greenwood Avenue, Thirty-five square blocks Of Black prosperity-- Acme Brick Company, Little Rose Beauty Parlor, Booker T. Washington High School, Mount Zion Baptist Church, Dreamland Theatre, Williams’ Confectionary, Liberty Café, The Tulsa Star, The Oklahoma Sun, Dunbar Grade School, Stradford, Little Pullman, Graysonia Hotels, Caver’s Cleaners, Blue Front Furniture, S.D. Hooker & Company Clothing, Mann’s Drug Shoppe, Knights Of Pythias, Odd Fellows, Masonic Lodges, Hospitals, surgeons, dentists, Barbers, jewellers, barristers, Pool halls, speakeasies that sold “Choc beer”, which bore a pale yellow Grapefruit juice colour and less expensive Than the usual homemade bathtub Rotgut in South Side places, Days of drinking to Blues, Dancing to Jazz, Showing off brand new Satin dresses, strings of pearls, Bowler hats, three-piece suits, Fancy cars, solid red brick Stately two-storey houses Belonging to the affluent, Self-reliant, self-made City within a city Gone in a day, Thirty-five square blocks Gone in a day, Three-hundred upscale intelligent Black lives gone in a day. Why? “Negro insurrection”—Rumours. “White woman assaulted in an elevator”—Rumours. Whites in Tulsa saw An affront to their ways: Blacks Had nicer cars, nicer homes, Nicer trinkets, nicer clothes, Better businesses and careers Than they. Middle-class, upper-class Prosperity “they’re not supposed to have”-- Doomsday came As immense flame June 1, 1921. Envy destroys lived dreams. _________________________________ W: Nat Turner Rebellion Anniversary 2021 (Inspired by the book The Burning by Tim Madigan). Dee Allen. is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on creative writing & Spoken Word since the early 1990s. Author of 7 books--Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black (all from POOR Press), \Elohi Unitsi (Conviction 2 Change Publishing) and coming in February 2022, Rusty Gallows Vagabond Books) and Plans (Nomadic Press)—and 43 anthology appearances under his figurative belt so far. |
Claire Bateman
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Difficult Work
1. When expunging a wave, you mustn’t interfere with the concavity between trough and crest, or the suspended, churning furrows between peaks, nor may you displace those intervals where the luminous glass spheres lining the wave’s underbelly strike each other, emitting the chime-tones required for circular propulsion, the illusion of forward movement, for it isn’t water that advances, but the disturbance itself as it sculpts the surge, and then abandons it to be lifted again. Since a wave is almost nothing but disappearance transposed as light, you don’t want to end up with a scrunched or pleated surface-- we already have nearly a continent’s worth of shadows from all the smeary attempts at erasure. 2. The problem with trying to consume time is that you can never get outside it, and even if you did manage to slice a serving’s worth, you wouldn’t eat it raw; you’d need to roast or fry it, but it’s made up of varying consistencies, some parts too sticky to burn, others too frail to ignite. Also, there are places where its flow seems to self-reverse, so that even if you could set it on fire, the flames would meet each other in mutual extinguishment. More likely, after long effort, you’d get only a sullen smoldering, not the desired blaze. And you can't even tell whether you move through time, parting it so that it closes up behind you, or instead, occupy a bubble that repels, bumps into, or temporarily fuses with your neighbors’ bubbles. Either way, to inhabit time is to find yourself forever ravenous in the middle. 3. It’s true that refreshment arises from attention to the face, and that you can’t sketch your worst enemy without falling a little in love. The face is the freshest wound, intersecting time as a wave traverses space. Identifiable primarily by its shyness, the face suffers permanent arrival shock just over the threshold between nonexistence and being, always permeable, nearly weightless, flickering between sheerness and opacity, lit by its own apprehension as it splits the inner from the outer turbulence. Nevertheless, every aficionado knows that as well as the angel who troubles the face’s surface, and the after-angel who smoothes it over again, there’s also the angel of the other side, presiding over expressions that flow in darkness behind the bone mask. So when is it least impossible to try to capture the face? When it believes itself to be unobserved; when it’s half-clad or all uncovered: in weathers, passions, pains, in children, sleepers, secret singers, the dying and the dead. But even then, the hand stammers against its dimensional horizon, and must start all over again, straining to render what streams from that luminous tissue, that corporeal frame. 4. Attempting to recite from the transparent book is like laboring to decode a swarm of bees, the spaces between the words always sinking and rising in agitated spirals. The due date was so long ago, you must be a library outlaw by now, and a clumsy one, at that, because look, the transparent book has fallen open on the lawn, indistinguishable from what it rests on-- grass, topsoil, substrate-- which it renders transparent, too. Isn't it time to abandon your project of reading to the dead? Isn’t it time to trust that they can take in the story for themselves, and disassemble its subtexts on their own? |
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Inventory
So they decided to attire the ocean, not out of any sense of prudery, but because they’d long ago appareled the cities with their hanging gardens as well as the mountains and plains; experts were reportedly drawing up projections regarding the moon and other celestial bodies in anticipation of an aeronautical future. Also, everyone felt that the ocean resembled an enormous eye never allowed to close; after all it had done for them, didn’t it deserve some respite? They chose silk lined with crepe-de-chine and organza in eggshell, platinum, swan, fleece, snow, chalk, and pearl—a masterwork of exquisite understatement—and laid it out upon the waters like the long-lost white map of foldable space. Released from the work of glaring at its nemesis the sky, the ocean asked itself, What am I inside this gown? Though new to soul-searching, the ocean intuited that nothing could be learned in an overwrought condition, so it labored to make itself still as possible despite having long ago become habituated to its own agitation. Yet gradually, over centuries, the tides and currents released their tension and embraced each other horizontally while the waves flattened themselves into a slow float. As the ocean began to palpate its plants and creatures, its embedded caverns and mountain ranges, its running crevices and iterative turns, it was darkly revealed to itself as the lapidary marvel it had always been. I am voltaic blue, it murmured; I am incarnadine gold, diaphanous green. Meanwhile, on land, the other coverings gradually frayed, unraveled, disintegrated, and were dispersed on the wind. Since nudity of all kinds was coming back into vogue, no one replaced them. Only the ocean’s garb remained, though after so many generations, the people couldn’t imagine that there was anything other than some kind of wasteland beneath—they’d forgotten all about the great waters. Eventually, in keeping with the new aesthetic honoring exposure, they decided to take off the covering. The removal crew went down to the shoreline with long hooks and pulled back the silk, rolling it up on the beach like a giant scroll. There it was: the briny deep. It’s a beast! A monster! some shouted, and indeed, it did seem to writhe and slaver. It’s the underworld risen! cried others, and indeed, it did seem to exude a peculiar light. The rest of the people said nothing, but only gazed, until one worker, near enough to be splashed, said, No, it’s just water. The freshly disclosed ocean found itself surprised to be in happy colloquy with the sky as waves and clouds wondered together, Are we depth all the way up or surface all the way down? The people, however, were so startled that it didn’t occur to them to wax philosophical; neither did they ponder such questions later, as they were busy re-inventing ships, navigation, and equipment with which to excavate sunken treasure. As for the white fabric, it turned out to be too finely stitched to disintegrate, and too vast and bulky to burn. It occupied miles and miles of beach, calling into question the new hypothesis that the amount of nakedness in the world was a supreme constant which could be reconfigured and reapportioned but never expanded or diminished. |
Claire Bateman is the author of Wonders of the Invisible World, forthcoming from 42 Miles Books, and eight other collections of poetry, prose poetry, and flash fiction, most recently, Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose, Kalamazoo). She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission, and has received the New Millennium Writing Award (twice) and two Pushcart Prizes. She has taught at the Greenville Fine Arts Center, Clemson University, and various conferences, including Bread Loaf and the Bloch Island Poetry Festival. She is also a visual artist.
Kristin Bock
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On the Anniversary of your Best Friend's Death
We were lying on the beach, reminiscing about Dave when out of nowhere, a live fish fell from the sky and slapped you hard in the face. We both looked up and saw a seabird sail by. Stunned, immobile, I stared at the gasping body in the sand. But you scooped it up in a flash, without thinking, and delivered the slippery creature back to the sea. I've never seen you run so fast. |
The Barn that Holds
I am a climbing vine that senses a dying branch and stops. You are a sparrow who sings all the way down the dark hallway of a garden snake. We are the barn that holds the watering can and the scythe. |
Kristin Bock’s collection of poetry, CLOISTERS, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and an Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award. Her second collection, Glass Bikini, is forthcoming from Tupelo in December 2021. She has published widely in journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Columbia, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and VERSE. A Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow, she holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches. She lives in Western, MA with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, and together they restore liturgical art.
Despy Boutris California
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Sundown again,
and I’m walking through the woods, orange light slanting between pines, my own shadow hurling itself against a tree trunk. I’m making my way home again, taking the shortcut, the scent of nettles pungent in the August heat. Behind me, the world dissolves: distant memory of the meadow, lying in clover, gnats storming the upending air. I think back to last summer: browning fields, skin flaking off my shoulders like paint, those days I wouldn’t let myself go near the lake, knowing again I’d try to drown. I dodge the poison oak snaking onto the trail, its leaves spun with shine. Far above the treetops, a bird caws, and I ache for its wings, a better view of this quilted land: the pines, the fields of kale, all the barn roofs warped with age. I wonder what it’s like: to be so forgotten, to decay, walls crawling with weeds. Like any girl who values survival, I wonder what it would be like: to lie here for eternity, bruised limbs lost under this waning light, my body nothing among this clutter of trees. Despy Boutris's writing has been published or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in California and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review. |
Rick Campbell Alligator Point, FL
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John Prine’s Band
In the last few months I’ve watched these men I don’t know grow old like family. They’ve gone gray in my living room, some nights aging twenty years as the café empties and the lights go dark. This is how we live an elegy, how the funeral train rolls slowly through town: far from us and always here. Slower than the wind, faster than the moon. Rick Campbell is a poet and essayist living on Alligator Point, Florida. His collection of essays, Sometimes the Light is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press in the spring of 2022. His most recent collection of poems is Provenance (Blue Horse Press.) He’s published six other poetry books as well as poems and essays in journals including The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Fourth River, Kestrel, and the Alabama Literary Review. He teaches in the Sierra Nevada University MFA Program. |
Susan Michele Coronel New York City, NY
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Birds of Eden
We walk in the aviary, willows brushing fringed nerves as we lower umbrellas, remaining alert to millions of purple fire ants who navigate petunias and clover. There is no reason to fear death, as common as birdsong. Herodotus said, In soft regions are born soft men. How much softer, then, are the dove, ibis, and blue-crowned mot mot in the ficus trees, who cannot grasp the concept of falling. Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Spillway 29, The Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, The Night Heron Barks, Prometheus Dreaming, and One Art. This year one of her poems was a first runner-up for the Beacon Street Poetry Prize, and another poem received a Pushcart nomination. Her poetry was also longlisted for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Sappho Award. |
William DeGenaro
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Invention is the First Canon of Rhetoric
Sister Christian wore smart, androgynous pantsuits, didn’t know her namesake rock song, didn’t know whether it was October or November. She told us her favorite moment was the moment after you’ve looked for other cars & gotten up to speed when you close your eyes and merge. We were English majors, our converse all-stars on the accelerators. We thought a class on journaling embraced the ethos and bad rep of our chosen field. We closed our eyes to read from the diaries of Cheever, Didion, Ginsberg, Plath, Woolf. We left the Briggs Building, motoring, clear-eyed, alert, and though we could only glimpse part of the road we steered headlong into traffic. William DeGenaro teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Michigan Dearborn and is a two-time Fulbright Scholar. His poetry has appeared most recently in the Wayne Literary Review and Nixes Mate Review. |
Rosemarie Dombrowski
I consider these poems to be both a lamentation and celebration of disability – physiological, neurological, and intellectual – a journey through the cycles of trauma and resilience that have shaped the lives of my family and my nonverbal, Autistic son.
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from Unfit Mother
Mother/Son I feed him because I’m afraid of what I might find behind the door. Someone once told me that injury is the beginning of love, which is also the end of self-forgiveness. Maybe we all need a little violence, the sweet smell of the aftermath of suffering, like sweat drying on a naked body. Behind the door, he tosses bunches of Poly-fil like a snowstorm in a globe. Maybe we’re all just waiting for the glass to shatter. |
Surrealism/Autism
1. Your head splits open like a dream-- time oozing out of your brain and springs popping from your sockets. You remind me of the boy who wished his neighbor into a cornfield. If given the chance, you’d march us into the sea like a trail of drowning ants. 2. A man-child climbing inside the body of a woman. A bird that will never hatch. When you point a cannon at an apparition, you multiply the pools of grief. 3. You are a sea turtle hovering between the columns. I am the woman being murdered in the next room. Magritte’s mother drowned herself when he was just a child, her dress entangling her face. I realize that countless women have been reviled by men. 4. A man is a green apple. A mother is an egg in a birdcage. A woman is an apparition being painted back to life, a bust with no head, a refrigerator on fire in the desert. |
Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of rinky dink press, and the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates therapeutic poetry workshops. She’s published three collections of poetry including The Book of Emergencies (Five Oaks Press, 2014), a lyrical ethnography of the culture of nonverbal Autism, and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. She’s the recipient of an Arts Hero award, a Great 48 award, a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and others. She teaches courses women’s literature and medical poetry at Arizona State University. www.rdpoet.com
Jalen Eutsey Baltimore, MD
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Rainbow City
Three shirtless boys walk the tightrope of a wall, faces shadowed by a willow. They teeter atop a tightrope, a bed of dew-wet blades beneath. Three shirtless boys dance on the white-trimmed lip, nearing the exactness needed to fly. They trickle along the wall like scurrying blue crabs, love-sick for the sea. Propped atop this ripe peach border, they dangle their legs over the ledge as their sweat-slick skin beams above passing cars. I drive by, blink them miniature. They play lookout for no one. They float above the street thirsting for a quarter water. They talk about chocolate cities and the scent of a beach rarely seen. They kick their heels against a pastel past, no better than the blackened present. Jalen Eutsey is a poet, librarian, and sportswriter from Miami, Florida. He earned a BA in English from the University of Miami and an MFA in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been published in Nashville Review, Harpur Palate, storySouth, Into The Void, and others. |
Maura Faulise
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The Willing
When the officer finds me hiding in the cold dark outside Corrigan Correctional Center, he pulls me from the frosty bushes, shines a Maglite in my face and commands me to leave the premises. I try to explain, My son’s inside. But he won’t listen, so I keep repeating, pleading for a few minutes more under the thin yellow rectangle positioned high in the prison wall: my boy’s window. I know how it looks, I tell him. It’s the only way I feel close. He can’t decide if he should call someone. I don’t speak of the nights I wander the woods, the candles I light in church corners, the Celtic Shaman I see. I know not to mention how I heal my son with herbs, Reiki, protect him with salt, aggravate the moon with my pleas. Instead, I ask if he has children. His eyes wander my wool blanket, pajamas, clunky slippers over sockless feet. Later, I sit in my car with the lights on. A barred owl on a thin branch launches itself into flurried sky. And I think how many of us must be out here. |
What Remains
for Alejandro Before the hut bars and hostels came along and the trucks that now haul in the tourists, we could set our tent in the dunes of Cabo Polonio for days and hardly see a soul. That July we staked down near the dry seagrass, wool ponchos and blankets, bread and cheese. The cold wind whipped across the Atlantic, whistled through the nylon zippers. We drank Tannat, passed your mate gourd and thermos. You read Baudelaire by flashlight, sifting Les Fleurs Du Mal into Spanish, then English when I still couldn’t grasp it— a courtesy I didn’t deserve. But you wanted me to understand. Said we need to know what people are capable of. You spoke that night of the Dirty War so many years before. Disappearances. Tupamaros. Mitrione. Clandestine detention and torture centers. Bodies flung into the sea. My own government’s part. Far from the noise of Montevideo, I wanted to dream. I was young. The winter sky was star-strung. Every white light a portal I thought I could reach. I think now, what have I done with this life? Our last morning: faint fleck of hooves on the distant sand. A horse emerges from the grey cloudscape. Arabian stallion, you say. Ghost rider. Los desaparecidos. Your voice is a hum I summon across the years. I am sorry for my failure. I’m listening now. Is there some small way I can help to raise the dead? |
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Hurricane Preparedness
The hurricane is here and my mother is not whizzing to prepare her lantern, three packs of double-D batteries, water jugs in rows to ride out the storm in her cloud-gray La-Z-Boy angled toward the tv, weekend crush on Jim Cantore in his bright blue slicker. She always hoped to lose the lights— have us convene at her two-room apartment, gather around her wobbly table for marathon Canasta by candlelight, especially after the dark squall of her divorce when she needed us stockpiled like reliable canned goods or a crank radio at the ready. The hurricane is here without my mother’s Dogwood voice, soft and pink over telephone static, reminding us to fill the tub and freeze the loaves of bread. Rain thwacks the siding. Wind yanks the saplings from their roots. And we have only ourselves to ground us now after the downward spiral of her sudden ascent. I imagine her reclined in heaven, an old rotary phone in her lap. When the thunder rumbles, that’s her dialing each of our numbers, wanting to know we’re at home, safe, but too busy taping windows and stacking sandbags to answer. |
Ghost Daughter
Unsteady on the cold concrete under the high ceilings at Walmart, my father stands alone in the bread aisle and weeps, stares at pale loaves wrapped in plastic. It’s clear what a person should do for him, knowing he’s learning to navigate life without his wife. I turn and hide, not wanting him to know I’ve witnessed his soggy face. I was seven when he taught me to ride a bike after work in the fall. As he ran alongside I felt the weight of his hand on the banana seat. Heard the dry leaves crunch under his dress shoes. Breathed the woodsy scent of Old Spice as he sweat. On the night he released his grip he knew I wasn’t ready. I had no center and fell on the rough cement. Every time my tender knee skin split or my bony elbows bled through my jacket, he said, Get up. His voice wasn’t cruel nor saccharine. He said it simply as fact. When I did find my balance, he knew it first. Yelled from behind go-go-go-go-go and I rode on without him, sparkle-streamers flapping from my high-rise handlebars. At the self-checkout I stand behind him watching from a distance, ready to show myself if he starts to fall. |
Maura Faulise’s poetry has appeared in New Ohio Review, San Pedro River Review and Connecticut Literary Anthology. She is Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature at Community College of Rhode Island and Associate Editor of the Ocean State Review. She completed a Master of Arts in Teaching at Brown University and is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Pacific University.
Scott Ferry Renton, WA
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awake at 4 am for no reason i think about
how spices blown on a person’s face or deliberately rubbed silver-fingered through the hair could alter one’s dreams: cacao- the darkness within the body bleeds and clots and sweetens cilantro- the tortillas are burning and the flesh is delicious cinnamon- moab july dust the fire ants dance up the arches clove- the smoke pops alveoli in the alley of the blacklights cumin- the feet have become the earth the arroyo breathes mint- the first frost of october brocades the sage sage- sleeps through winter white shouldered with words salt- scrapes the eyes along the openings of wounds salt- brings the fish to the throat delivers the moon salt- begs to stop crying thyme- falls off and leaves tiny bones in the sky Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. In former lives he taught high school, managed aquatic centers, and practiced acupuncture. He has four books of poetry: The only thing that makes sense is to grow (Moon Tide, 2019), Mr. Rogers kills fruit flies (Main St. Rag, 2020), These Hands of Myrrh (Kelsay Books, 2021), and Sea of Marrow (Ethel Press, 2021). He has two books upcoming in 2022: fishmirror from Alien Buddha Press and Skinless in the Cereal Aisle from Impspired. |
Linda Nemec Foster
The Dead American Poet in Rome
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The dead American poet in my dream still smells of life with his white suit, fashionable cane, and steaming espresso. He sits at an outdoor cafe on the Via Venuto as if he’s waiting to be discovered by Fellini for an engaging Italian sex farce set in the late’60’s. Book awards and Guggenheim Fellowships were never enough, so this dream is his best shot at stardom: thousands of women screaming his name. Once, I wanted to be one of those women--infatuated and hoarse. But that was in the boring realm of reality, not the here and now of the ephemeral dream. Here, he merely amuses me. Now, I walk to his table and show him the latest edition of Il Tempo . At the bottom of the front page, a small blue car balances a large white sign on its roof. It looks like an ad for a pizzeria, but it’s actually an obit. The black letters float in the warm Italian air. The poet’s eyes try to focus on the name. “Guess who?” I ask him in the muted voice of the dream.
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Linda Nemec Foster is the author of 12 collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). Her work appears in The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, and North American Review. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, MI (2003-05), her book The Blue Divide (New Issues Press) was published in 2021 and recently nominated for the National Book Award. Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.
Emily Franklin
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Moonbird
Do you want to be the oldest known member of your kind—the way B95 which sounds like a robot but really is another name for the Moonbird as though we are always two things, both winged and able and also made of numbers, and capable of distance-- imagine flying with your own self from Tierra del Fuego to Delaware of all places, maybe because it’s better than we know or maybe Calidris canutus (its third name—we should all have more) knows its route, understands its DNA at birth, the way it takes us all our years and still then we aren’t sure where we belong and when you are looking at birds, absent- mindedly in the morning holding your mug you might see a robin in your plain yard and imagine it to be something else, Moonbird, B95, similar in size, but far away from where you or the robin are living your ordinary worm-digging lives, looking out the window at birds who happen by because you’ve lured them with black sunflower seed or the earth has churned up new grubs that have nothing to do with you, and the birds know to come back the way you know to hold your daughter, who made herself light as wings. As you stand gawking at the birds or their footprints or at the robin guzzling its morning worm remember this: B95 flies days with no food, without sleep the way my father wandered the dark house listening for sounds I was breathing, light as flight as though my inner robot self caught up with my other name and both of us took flight and survived, over and over again each ragged cycle and this is what I see, the birds coming back, even twenty years later. Don’t say you don’t believe it’s the same bird, each leg is tagged so we have proof, but you would know anyway. Far away as I got I did not tell my father not to search for me and, reclaimed as I am now, my daughter is with B95 somewhere near the arctic circle and this is the way with birds-- always leaving and digging, arriving begging to be seen. |
Equipped for Winter
Women Rescue Great Blue Heron Found Frozen –Herald Tribune For Heather Here we are—the kind of friends who meet for lunch without a note without texting confirmation because we just know how the other likes to walk with one hand pocketed and the other gripping a bagel like a tiny life ring around the pond near our mutually sad brick office buildings where we work for health insurance and walk because we must remind ourselves of the outside world in which we are both married and yet see the other as the other great love of our lives, solid as office block slab concrete and light as our overlapping words, each rising up with stray winter leaves as though we are trapped in a snow globe, just us with—and we are sure we see it now—a fluttering of wings out on the half-frozen pond, icy muck weighing down a great blue heron and we do not speak, we just go light as we can on and though we are only two women on lunch break we know what being trapped looks like so when the bird tries to lift itself but faceplants into the snow, we are swift, flocking to the heron—we wrap a jacket over the heron’s great folded wings, shielding its face from the world; this is what mothers do for their babies and it doesn’t last but here, where we are two women with a bird between us, arms and wings, hands freeing its feet from encrusted ice, and the heron quiet-- too quiet—we thaw its beak, and call for more help because this is our strength, knowing we cannot do it alone and when animal rescue arrives with heat lamps and blankets, reporters come too, they want us to speak-- to open our bird and human mouths to answer as they ask just how equipped are you for situations like this and what can we say? The three of us huddle like creatures no one has identified yet, some far-away species who rescue each other again and again and again. ### |
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Psalm
My religious friend told me to give up the illusion of a problem-free life so I wake this morning with an embrace for the shitty damp leaves leftover from another fall, not from grace but that season and I kick against the clumps so old and now disintegrating they can hardly be called leaves but my dog knows they are something to examine and I believe him—in my newfound giving up which is the embracing of problems like piles of leaves my son never raked and which my neighbors pretend not to mind while tidying their own problem-free lawns or making sure their yards and children are neat while |
I just want mine alive which is not to say I have belief in anything other than their lungs the way they slept as infants with arms overhead as though reaching, tiny fingers that barely understood their use and had no idea of everything being just out of reach or the desperate grasp we have over problems the way leaves hang and I want to tell my friend about the wind knocking each ripened leaf to the ground where it becomes someone’s problem and maybe I want to believe or to gather the leaves—not rake them like a problem but hold them until I’m sure of what they will become. |
Emily Franklin's work has been published in The New York Times, The London Sunday Times, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, River Styx, and The Journal among other places as well as featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut poetry collection Tell Me How You Got Here was published by Terrapin Books in February 2021.
Peter Grandbois Granville, Ohio
Against sunrise
“Now I see, I see bodies of humans falling, falling. As they fall they're starting to glow.
They're glowing like an orange color, like coals. And they're screaming.”
—St. Teresa de Avila (1515-1582)
It’s strange that love should lead us to burning,
not the other way around, says the light.
It takes enormous care to suffer when
we hear no other sound, says the light.
The flash goes off and we go blind as if
only then can we be found, says the light.
Hands grope each other in the dark until
we pull each other down, says the light.
The echo of our heartbreak rises
above us like a crown, says the light.
When we were young we didn’t need the night
to make us feel profound, says the light.
We were born with hungry eyes searching,
always, for the path to renown, says the light.
And when we’ve had enough, Peter, what then?
Take the ash and fill the wound, says the light.
“Now I see, I see bodies of humans falling, falling. As they fall they're starting to glow.
They're glowing like an orange color, like coals. And they're screaming.”
—St. Teresa de Avila (1515-1582)
It’s strange that love should lead us to burning,
not the other way around, says the light.
It takes enormous care to suffer when
we hear no other sound, says the light.
The flash goes off and we go blind as if
only then can we be found, says the light.
Hands grope each other in the dark until
we pull each other down, says the light.
The echo of our heartbreak rises
above us like a crown, says the light.
When we were young we didn’t need the night
to make us feel profound, says the light.
We were born with hungry eyes searching,
always, for the path to renown, says the light.
And when we’ve had enough, Peter, what then?
Take the ash and fill the wound, says the light.
Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which is the Snyder prize-winning, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.
Becca Rose Hall Seattle, Wa
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Consequence of Dust
How am I lonely in this thickness of spring? Rolling towards ourselves, day breaking in the rooftops. Then it was possible to do just one thing at a time. Such as simply to cry. Night, I sat watching as he rolled his tobacco and smoked it, car wheels hissing with rain. Do nothing. Do nothing lightly. The way light fell through my water glass, shatter was just a matter of time. As they say, or leaning. But time is so lonely in its bungalow, its Astroturf doormat, ashtrays of brown glass. And so. A fish, a dark flicker in impossible water. I am earnest about the nature of light in the late afternoon forest. I am mad with air, and the trees make love through it. Being a matter of politeness, he slid his hand down my ass. We do not go walking. I popped Percocet every day in high school. No, he said, that was me. These impenetrable consequences of dusk. Dust. This even. All April, up and down the sidewalks, our wistful misglances. These things we are learning slowly to undo. Whatever I say, I find it is only half the truth. I would never have kept the baby, unborn with salamander arms. I can say towards if I want to say towards. The shorn dog who even now runs through my neighbors’ lawn is never so fast as my bicycle. Vanessa annabella -- finally free and likely to wander -- is sunning her wings on my forehead. A stone as it dries learns of dust. Must I make something of this? You etherized them, you pinned their hearts. Lacy, unnamed. Saturday, glittery with rain and it’s shoe puddles, not piss, on the bathroom floor. A festival of Dan, said Dan. Here again, not sleeping. I have meant to be shaving my legs for some time now. Dear God, we have a love of babies. The seeds, when crushed, a film of oil. I tasted that kiss for a whole box of mints. Alone with a flyswatter and a putrid smell. Get out. Out of the corridor. Now I like him all the more. I covet. I crave. What do you want me to do? And he told me. I think already he told me all I care to know. |
Becca Rose Hall studied writing at Stanford (where she lived in a dorm called Flo Mo) and at the University of Montana. Her work has appeared recently in sPARKLE and bLINK, Orion Magazine, Orion Online, Mutha Magazine, and the Dark Mountain Project. She won the Writers Lighthouse Emerging Fiction Fellowship and the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, and has been a resident at Arts Omi and Zvona i Nari. She writes the Substack newsletter A Few Crooked Words, about helping kids love writing. She lives in Seattle with her daughter.
Lara Henneman Maryland
|
Upon Receiving an Email from Ancestry.com that I Have a New Direct DNA Match, To My Father, Who I’ve Never Met and Who Never Tried to Meet Me
It’s like when an empty metal trash can Falls over suddenly in front of your path Blown by wind of some force It makes a goddawful racket Startles your fight or flight instinct And then rolls away to be someone else’s problem |
Morning Sickness with My Daughter
I change her diaper and run to the bathroom. Kneeling over the toilet, yelping hot yellow strings of bile. She patters in and stands behind me, her small hand on my back. She walks in a slow circle around me, her touch on my back tracing concern and possession. She comes to a stand at my left, looks questioningly into my eyes. I did this with you too baby girl. And now you're standing there, worth it. I can do this. I right myself, eyes watering from the exertion. She points to my face wipes a tear away. |
Lara Henneman writes fiction, essays, and poetry. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Dreamers Magazine, Mom Egg Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Mutha Magazine and more. She is currently working on her first novel. She has a BA from Brown University and an MA from the University of Denver School of International Studies. She lives in Maryland with her growing family. Find her on Twitter @lhenpen or join her reader list at www.larahenneman.com.
Joyce Hida
The Affair; Golden Shovel After “Meditation at Lagunitas”
“Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” -Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
Lust is the affair between children and blackberries,
the purple-lipped night gone gentle into that black
morning, the muted stain of hardwood on bare knees.
She must have been the same to him, an idea inked black
into existence by some thoughtless hand barely
palming desire. We talked about it late last night and the back
of my throat blossomed into briars, burying
the purpled truth — love is elegy to what it signifies. Black
berries empty the bush. But I remember so much; the bare ream
of shadow where he slept, the desire to be lack
born, the things he said that hurt me, the bare ease
with which he swallowed briars. Such carelessness, that black
morning, boxing the fields of us into blackberries.
“Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” -Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
Lust is the affair between children and blackberries,
the purple-lipped night gone gentle into that black
morning, the muted stain of hardwood on bare knees.
She must have been the same to him, an idea inked black
into existence by some thoughtless hand barely
palming desire. We talked about it late last night and the back
of my throat blossomed into briars, burying
the purpled truth — love is elegy to what it signifies. Black
berries empty the bush. But I remember so much; the bare ream
of shadow where he slept, the desire to be lack
born, the things he said that hurt me, the bare ease
with which he swallowed briars. Such carelessness, that black
morning, boxing the fields of us into blackberries.
War Poem Disguised as a Love Poem
after Matthew Olzmann’s “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem”
Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our relationship
might work: Because you never compare gunfire to rainfall. Because
you pin God down in the dirt when you pray, because goddamnit
he has to listen to you this way. Because you fight like a Greek and love
like a Roman. Because you like form so much you joined the military.
Because you probably won’t like this poem, because it’s not in form.
Because your name dreams on my tongue in the months
between us. You don’t have soft hands. Your hands are soft
with me. Because your bookcase is overflowing. Because you still
take up space with me. Because you walk atop trenches and make
bullets decay into smoke. Because you make wine and bread
but still go to church. You bought a flight home.
You bought toothpaste last week. Because you recite war
poetry when you’re nervous. Because you write it down,
so I can have it too. Because you keep a journal on you
at all times. Because you think it will protect
you like War and Peace. Because you always come back
with your shield. Because one morning, one year ago, the song
you sang in the shower wasn’t about winning the war ⸺
it was about coming home.
after Matthew Olzmann’s “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem”
Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our relationship
might work: Because you never compare gunfire to rainfall. Because
you pin God down in the dirt when you pray, because goddamnit
he has to listen to you this way. Because you fight like a Greek and love
like a Roman. Because you like form so much you joined the military.
Because you probably won’t like this poem, because it’s not in form.
Because your name dreams on my tongue in the months
between us. You don’t have soft hands. Your hands are soft
with me. Because your bookcase is overflowing. Because you still
take up space with me. Because you walk atop trenches and make
bullets decay into smoke. Because you make wine and bread
but still go to church. You bought a flight home.
You bought toothpaste last week. Because you recite war
poetry when you’re nervous. Because you write it down,
so I can have it too. Because you keep a journal on you
at all times. Because you think it will protect
you like War and Peace. Because you always come back
with your shield. Because one morning, one year ago, the song
you sang in the shower wasn’t about winning the war ⸺
it was about coming home.
Joyce Hida is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in TYPO Magazine, Empty House Press, Eunoia Review, The Philomathean Society's ERA Magazine, and Vita Brevis Literature. Her poem "On Backlot Supernovas and Leaving Philly" was nominated by Empty House Press for the 2021 Best of the Net Anthology. Follow her on twitter @joycehidapoetry.
Ruth Hoberman
|
Rutabagas
Dig deep enough anywhere and you’ll find rutabagas: plump thumb tips carrying the cold heft of winter— weighty, mushroom brown, their skin a terrain of dips, fine lines, and puckers around the flatland where the stem once was. Truncated, sliced from the stalk, rutabagas gamble on famine. They know those days will come when sweaters and food fail, and the white sky shouts of loss. You’ll want them then. Root-lump, swede, kin to cabbage and turnip: boil their hard white pulp and you can feed an army. Boil their hard white pulp and you can feed the villagers whose fields the army trampled. Underground, safe from boots, they swell, feeding on what's buried. Some people find them—even cooked—too bitter to eat. Ruth Hoberman is a writer living mainly in Chicago, though for the last couple of years she's lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts so as to be near her daughter and grandchildren. She writes poetry and essays, which have been published in such places as RHINO, Calyx, Smartish Pace, Natural Bridge, and Ploughshares. |
Paul Hostovsky
|
Nightmare
You’re attending a reunion of all the people you’ve slept with in your life-- it isn’t a large number, less than legion, more than minyan, a number divisible only by itself and you. It’s a formal gathering in a room with large upholstered chairs and potted weeping figs, a small bar in the corner where two women you don’t recognize are seriously kissing, holding their drinks aloft like tiny sloshing mountain lakes in their slender raised hands. You aren’t dressed for the occasion, you realize as you look down at your ashy underwear and ten poor stubby toes. It seems you’re expected to make a speech which everyone has traveled far through time and space to hear. You’re unprepared. No script. No notes. You haven’t even given it a thought. Now you frantically ask one ex-lover after another for a writing utensil. You actually say “writing utensil” the way your teacher said it in the 3rd grade. No one has a pen. But someone has an eye liner pencil. Now for some paper. You’re holding a damp drink napkin in your hand, shaking it in the air to dry it. If only you could write, you think, maybe you could still make something out of this nightmare, something beautiful and true. Paul Hostovsky's latest book of poems is MOSTLY (FutureCycle Press, 2021). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. Website: paulhostovsky.com |
Halsey Hyer Miami, FL
|
Boy Traces Queerness
1. his Pirates cap turned backwards tufts of his bangs hanging out the ponytail hole the fingers cut off his gloves holes cut in the knees of his jeans because that’s what Ash Ketchum does & Ash was a boy’s boy because Pokémon is for boy-boys & that’s what Boy thinks he wants to be but didn’t know he could want it or be it yet for the knee holes his mother punishes him with scrubbing the floor the tiles with a sponge crevices with a toothbrush he needs to learn how to be a boy’s girl she told him if he wanted holes he’d have to earn them the old-fashioned way hard work 2. TV Guide runs Tila Tequila: Shot at Love late into the night & he watches: girls who look like girls kissing girls boys who look like boys kissing boys boys who look like girls kissing girls girls who look like boys kissing boys Boy wonders if his girl body is a girl body if he wants to be a girl at all 3. Boy & Blake behind the community center at the local park Blake fingers him fills all the parts of Boy he doesn’t know how to Boy doesn’t know if he wants to fuck Blake or be him Boy suspects his body is an object that was born for Blake’s hard-on Blake high-fives Boy when Boy first wears a dress halter style shows his neck & cupping Boy’s breasts lands above the knee his crimped hair past shoulders in the heavy eyeliner of mid-2000’s finally! Blake says relieved as if he sees Boy’s potential to be more than his secret as if Blake believes Boy can be a girl after all Boy has his music class with Blake’s girlfriend cheerleader in uniform blonde acrylic fingertips & high heels Boy & her share the same first name & the same guy but Boy never tells her about Blake’s tongue in his mouth Blake’s fingers in his pussy or how bad Boy wants her too to be her boyfriend & to be with her boyfriend how bad Boy wants her to want him |
Boy Cuts His Underwear Off
in preparation for sex in the Pizza Fiesta bathroom, after standing up to take a piss. He’s wearing his Dr. Martens & doesn’t have enough time to lace them up, again. He takes his keys & saws by the seam—as he frays black thread he can hear what all the men have said to him-- the last time he wore these, the last time they wanted to fuck him, the last time they wanted to fill his void. These are cute. The lights flicker & hum, flashes highlight the bridge of his nose & darken the bags under his eyes. He drags his finger along his heavy lower lip—men look at his body & say, Take it off, take your clothes off. Boy is trapped in his own reflection looking back in the smear of the mirror. He stays steady in his cycle of sex relentless. His hand grazes the back wall he can feel its skin, thick with paint no primer & redone––it’s prime-time with eyes locked & mesmerized by the blank stare he holds, mean while each fuck comes in & out. In & out the men come in & out of his body, in & out of this bathroom. Never makes him cum. Never takes them home. How many more men does he have to fuck before he feels okay in his own body? How much longer should he allow their rotating bodies to visit him? How much longer should he allow them to devour his neck & rail him against the sludge-covered linoleum? How much longer does he have to? |
Halsey Hyer is currently earning their MFA in Poetry from Florida International University where they teach in the Writing & Rhetoric program. They're an Associate Editor of Pittsburgh Poetry Journal and the Virtual Events Assistant at White Whale Bookstore. Their poem, "Boy Wears Bra,” was selected as a finalist for North American Review's 2021 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, Rogue Agent, The Watershed Review, Santa Clara Review, The Blue Nib, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere.
Judy Kaber Belfast, ME
|
After a Long Flight, We Arrive
Caught in traffic, the cars crowd together, inch forward on the tar. My belly says eat, eat, but my pockets hold only lint. In Yelm we drive to your house the way a stranger might, seeking food, looking for rags of comfort to pull close. Our younger son lights a fire with charcoal in the outdoor fire pit. Cobalt night whistles in. We coax heat from coals, abandon the stars. Your voice is thick and full of phlegm. I shuffle through the sounds for meaning. The earth has turned bitter. You’ve lost your laugh. In Yelm we wrap potatoes in foil, throw steaks on the grill, hear fat drip and sizzle. We live in a cave of moments, stark drawings on the walls. You say: Have something to eat, but food becomes clay in my mouth. I swallow each bite, drag my chair away from the smoke. I gaze above your head, afraid of your face-- a door with broken hinges, a lost fight. Moths gather, bombard the porchlight. |
Salvation
Before they settled for a while on the farm in Eastern Washington where he dug holes for fence posts and his palms erupted in blisters, they parked the van on the outskirts of Cheney, counted out the last few coins in their pockets, bought mayo, lettuce, white bread, ate their sandwiches thinking about where to look for work. Someone in line at the temp office told them about the Salvation Army workshop. They drove to the faded blue factory building, went inside for applications and interviews, but the place only hired the handicapped and she wasn’t quick enough to come up with one. He claimed a vision impairment. She marveled at the way he got jobs, lying about what he knew, confident he could learn what he needed if hired. In this case, they gave him new black-framed glasses, set him to fixing small appliances in an ill-lit room. With his first paycheck, she bought a new hairbrush, a can of tuna, abandoned the idea of work as she sat on a bench waiting for a bus that never came. Their whole world hinged on his fingers, the way they sorted screws, found loose connections, breaks in the wires. He hated the Salvation Army, the way they paid him a dollar and a quarter an hour, more than any other worker—men more experienced than him, smarter, harder working—but with off-kilter smiles, shuffling gaits, dragging voices, missing teeth. He loved the men and called the bosses vampires, feeding on the weak, the enraptured, the ones called clients. She listened, but longed to sit outside, the sun hot on bare shoulders. |
Judy Kaber is currently the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, as well as the author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Atlanta Review, december, Crab Orchard Review, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway.
Jeffrey Letterly Syracuse, NY
|
The Pink Parade
There’s a flamingo walking down the middle of Main Street, knees bent backwards in its slow step, neck in a perfect S, eyes beady and confident because it knows where it’s going. Cars slow down and a few honk, as if the flamingo understands the language of automobiles. Families stretch to see, everyone pointing like the situation isn’t obvious. Before sunset, the flamingo finds the perfect spot in the landscaped rocks and bushes of the Waffle House. It raises one leg and curls its head along its back. Across the street a little building with green-and-white-striped awnings grabs at the first bits of sunrise. There’s a dim light inside and under it, a tax accountant surrounded by paper, files, envelopes, cold coffee in Styrofoam cups. The accountant stands to empty shavings from his pencil sharpener, freezes at the tap-tap-tap. It’s the flamingo’s beak against the front door, black tip pecking persistently. Gerald, Gerald, honey, I know you’re in there. Listen, can we talk? Gerald knows exactly what this is about. Shavings feather like snow into the waste basket which holds a sandwich wrapper amongst a dozen crumpled-up apology letters. He walks to the door in a special kind of slow motion, undoes the deadbolt, listens to its questioning click. Jeffrey Letterly is a composer and multi-disciplined performer. He was born and raised in the heartland of the Midwest and now resides in Syracuse, NY. His poetry can be found in Atticus Review, Bird Brained Zine Anthology, Clackamas Literary Review, and The Comstock Review. |
Lorraine Henrie Lins North Carolina
|
Clingstone
I want them in a wood worn bread bowl, palm-smooth from years of use, the sway and raise of grain honoring the very place where the sculptor found its shape want them left on the afternoon counter, as if to say yes to any possibility, the four and one more pyramiding near-round flesh, firm yellow and slightly reddish: my mind questioning my nose, do they truly smell this sweet or do I want them to be? Lorraine Henrie Lins is a Pennsylvania county Poet Laureate and author of four books of poetry. She serves as the Director of New and Emerging Poets with Tekpoet and is a founding member of the “No River Twice” improvisational poetry troupe. Lins’ work appears in wide variety of familiar publications and collections, as well as on a small graffiti poster in New Zealand. The self-professed Jersey Girl now resides along the coast of North Carolina. www.LorraineHenrieLins.com |
Emi Lohman Olympia, WA
|
brutal all night
somehow you got the cops to buy you a motel room when they kicked you out of another vacant lot, so my brown jacket was sagging off the edge of a motel bed this morning while outside on our side of the fence a struggling tattoo artist walked his brown oregonian dog up and down the parking lot, his head shaved, he was looking for work or a smoke to save for later. when we met him he asked if we were rolling and got a cigarette out of us and you told him he could find canvas down by the levee. and i’m not sure, but sometimes i think all this is a bit like loving the electric foxtrot of modern times. what i mean is, i have no good reasons for the things i do. that is to say, it’s hard to love on purpose. but for all that, i can’t help myself if at times i fall back to your groove. i think it’s how you tucked the tag back into my sweater. i think it’s how you took pains to dent the minifridge with a basketball. i think it’s how you held my face and thanked me for bringing you bandages at 4am, and how when we got back first thing after sunrise to find a woman at the flap of your tent mooning us and shouting the most precise and meaningless things to do with hans zimmer and the santa cruz city government you and your lankiest friend introduced me. i think it’s how you shout at cops. i think it’s how you walk through fog. i think it’s how you walked with your longboard, your backpack, your basketball, and your sun hat through the fog. Emi Lohman is a nonbinary street medic and activist born in California and currently living in Olympia, Washington. They’ve spent much of this past year traveling to environmental causes across Turtle Island, taking part in direct action and training new frontline healers as part of the South Sound Street Medics’ Earth and Indigenous Justice campaign. Most recently, Emi’s writing has drawn on their experiences fighting the Line 3 tar sands pipeline and the challenges of pursuing human connection in an inhumane world. |
Annie Marhefka Baltimore, MD
|
The ways we celebrate your birthday after you die
The first birthday after you died we partied as we thought you would have wanted us to, silly paper hats and Mardi gras beads and shots of tequila with limes to chase, bar hopping until our heads filled with fuzz and Pat's words became blurry and Justin had to lean on the bar in order to get through the tale of that time you went to a toga party dressed in a clear plastic shower curtain instead of a sheet. The seventeenth birthday after you died I sit alone at my dining table, sipping on your favorite liqueur, holding that picture of you in your shower curtain toga, the plastic rings a necklace, your toothy grin an aching throb in my gut that I can't share with anyone because it's been too long for me to still be grieving publicly, because what if you can see me and I don't celebrate and you're angry at me, because what if I forget you? |
What Grief Is
My father says that grief, for him, is the riptide current of the prickly ocean, the not knowing when it will lurch at ankles, its swirling funnel leeching onto calves, draining blood and tugging downwards, that sometimes it's a small wave slamming you from behind when your back is turned and your feet were rooted in sand. For me, it is the trudging back from the water to your beach towel, hair dripping with salty brine while sunbathers' eyes plant themselves upon your damp flesh, feet unsteady as you tiptoe over cracked seashells and try to seem as if you've only just been for a swim, and not that you've been submerging yourself with intent, and that you preferred it down there. |
Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland. She delights in traveling, boating on the Chesapeake Bay, and hiking with her toddler. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Coffee + Crumbs, The Phare, Sledgehammer, Capsule Stories, Cauldron Anthology, The Elpis Pages, For Women Who Roar, and The Hallowzine. Annie is working on a memoir about mother/daughter relationships; you can find her writing on Instagram @anniemarhefka, Twitter @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.
Catherine Mazodier Paris, France
|
And also the slow things
1 I watched the kitchen floor dry, the glaze of water, then the wet lace of a Japanese print dissolving, by degrees, till the last blot was swallowed by the dull, clean tile. 2 I sat at the open window with my neighbour's potted plant, rooted, lazy book in my lap. Eyelids flooded with red blossom as sun poured down my face and the water in the saucer receded. 3 Shower: time to condense the self into the boundaries of the body reflect upon the bare necessities and let the naked truth sink in: water runs as I stand still. 4 I peeled an onion, smooth and cold; a vacant eyeball stared back. You won't cry, my daughter says, if you leave the asshole unshorn, stubble and all. It's a hack. I forgot, so I smile through the tears as I chop. 5 Sometimes when the fridge sneezes the coffee machine splutters back. I eavesdrop on their jibber jabber, two old geezers and their creaking joints mulling over time, how it used to ooze, and now it whizzes. Catherine Mazodier's work has appeared or is pending in the South Florida Poetry Journal, Chiron Review and the online supplement to the British poetry journal Agenda. She has also published two chapbooks of poems in English and French with a DIY publisher in France and a few short stories in a now defunct French literary journal, Minimum Rockn' Roll. |
Abhishek Mehta New Delhi, India
Fault lines through the door
|
The slow war
It’s December and the prescription is out again like a lung, it flutters breathless on the hand-made paper the doctor uses, its rough fibres always ready to disintegrate and lose traces of the man they hold. My father usually makes it last for three years before he has to visit again because the pharmacy just won’t refill one more time on an outdated one. The doctor doesn’t even say anything now when he shows up two years too late, as if it took a long and harsh journey to reach there, though it probably did. And for the last ten years, he has been repeating the same meds, the same depression cocktail that keeps its hand on part of my father, while it lets the rest erode into nubs of feeling. |
He tells me when he first started going, there would be many patients, he’d have to wait for three hours sometimes before the doctor saw him. But these days, he feels like it’s just him. As if he’s been failing a class over and over and keeps getting held back while the school crumbles all around him. Below the doctor’s name on the prescription it says Brain Healer, followed by all his degrees with too many dots, like bullet holes. In his school, in his lonely bench as he sits, my father repeats the words written on the blackboard, every day even as the building is under attack, in the middle of an excruciatingly slow war. After a time, the bullet holes in the windows start to seem like air holes, unnecessary but there, staring at the man who got left behind. |
|
Suburban convergence
Two of our neighbours across the street are getting their houses repainted, a sleepless white that answers back to the sun and makes the houses look like tombs of people freshly remembered in the lazily moving consciousness of the world and judged honourable enough still. The painters move with a briskness they can only have around white paint, its coin-sized spots on their clothes, like results of immaculate coin tosses that hold out just enough hope for winning. In the night, it glows slightly, as if sucking significance from the other colours, and the dreams of the people inside start to have more and more staircases in them, retrofitted into buildings from their childhood. In one of the two houses lives a family of five, in the other, a single old man, yet the two decided to paint their houses white at the same time. Maybe that says something about those hazy few minutes just after waking up when each one of us places ourselves in this life and lies a little, puts everything a little to the left. Never seen them talk to each other. The white speaks for them. It tries to explain everything it touches. It approximates itself to the next best thing that moves. |
Homecoming
Despite the heaviness of blood I lift my arm towards the pictures on the wall while the clock behind me chimes a time that has long passed and come around, misled here by casual nods from kind faces. From the sliding glass doors I can make out a silhouette in the tinted window across the street, watching me stuck in the past here like an old show that plays over a muted waiting room TV. The house is not visited by any ghosts, there’s just me and the pictures and that busted valve at the back of my throat which to this day fills my mouth with words like always and never and eventually. But give them to your family and they won’t accept them until everyone has gone to bed. Only then they’ll come out into the living room and without turning on the lights pick them up from the carpeted floor, dust them off and put them at the back of their mouths, spring-loaded like a gun. |
Abhishek Mehta is a marketing professional from India with a discreet passion for putting words together in a way that they may be able to hold his short and sudden glances in their direction every now and then. He aims to make the paler things in life, less apologetically pale.
Sally Naylor
Holy Ontology, Batman
Distracting myself at nineteen from being nineteen, I read
Sartre’s Being & Nothingness, Camus, Heidegger & slate-grey, Russian
winters. Trying to care whether existence precedes essence.
As ennui dons its black beret, I tire of monotony. No more Crime & Punishment
or Anna Karenina. Farewell, artistic, suicidal suffering.
Adieu to Emma Bovary’s nihilism & fraternal orders from the idiot Karamazov’s.
Poor Sartre, alone in his multiple dissections, corpsed before
he dies, a zero-sum, bellows, “I know I’ll never know.”
I want to save him, but how to unzip mind’s sonic memory bank & savor
beaute encore in a joy forever flight of plus pijouns. To Wing it.
How else to phoenix the French, the right, the flaccid, holy or the rigid?
Tiring of initiation stories & coming of age markers –
I avoid the academy’s grey-maze, designer-hells & stray
redemptive woo-woo mantras, hug Whitman’s new-found,
scraggly beard with an unabashed vigor for
A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of stars,
slipping into brash & swinging for it,
I drink the wild air, landing, eventually, atop this outpost
of fuck-you fluencies, in all its ease & light.
Distracting myself at nineteen from being nineteen, I read
Sartre’s Being & Nothingness, Camus, Heidegger & slate-grey, Russian
winters. Trying to care whether existence precedes essence.
As ennui dons its black beret, I tire of monotony. No more Crime & Punishment
or Anna Karenina. Farewell, artistic, suicidal suffering.
Adieu to Emma Bovary’s nihilism & fraternal orders from the idiot Karamazov’s.
Poor Sartre, alone in his multiple dissections, corpsed before
he dies, a zero-sum, bellows, “I know I’ll never know.”
I want to save him, but how to unzip mind’s sonic memory bank & savor
beaute encore in a joy forever flight of plus pijouns. To Wing it.
How else to phoenix the French, the right, the flaccid, holy or the rigid?
Tiring of initiation stories & coming of age markers –
I avoid the academy’s grey-maze, designer-hells & stray
redemptive woo-woo mantras, hug Whitman’s new-found,
scraggly beard with an unabashed vigor for
A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of stars,
slipping into brash & swinging for it,
I drink the wild air, landing, eventually, atop this outpost
of fuck-you fluencies, in all its ease & light.
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Sally Naylor, gadfly & rascal wordsmith, teaches and plays at www.writerscatapult.com This perennial gypsy enjoys exploring the wildlife on her lake in Florida. Poet, counselor, and educator, Sally has written several books of poetry, memoir & a chapbook, Synapse Flies into Startle: The Orgasm Book as well as a variety of curricula. Lately she has enjoyed writing book reviews, conducting interviews and leading an advanced workshop on Writer’s Catapult. Naylor is finishing up Practice & Worship, a new poetry book.
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Jeff Newberry Tifton, GA
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Lady of the Waters
Louisiana Heron by James Audubon (1834) Crooked tree trunks resist the frame’s order. They rise from swamp water like the spindled arms of some chthonic creature pulled from the shadows concealed in the mud of our unconscious. In the foreground, she looks behind, long neck and thin legs rendered in a swept stroke I imagine he drew with studied elegance, resisting a quick flourish. Avian, his hands moved like tiny white birds. No kinetic frenzy on canvas, this life study reveals intent in color, a rendered ancestor of lizards that once tread an earth not so different from the swamped background. Now, a burst of purple and blue, white filigree, feet so light they don’t leave imprints in sand. The colors pull the eyes and resolve the muddy past, where the heron could take flight, were it real, to escape. |
Oysters
Once, shuckers crowded thirteen or more on an ordered dozen, crusted shells packed to the edge of a tray, ice like mineral salts between them, where they lay, splayed, bivalves divers once risked breath to bring to the air. I’ve long heard tales of pearls nestled deep in the gray-white flesh but never felt one, hard and round, on my tongue. My father poured them from the shell into his open throat and swallowed them with drops of Crystal hot sauce and long draughts of bitter beer. We could shuck them ourselves, but raw bars promised tray after tray of Apalachicola’s finest. Now, the beds have shrunk in red tides, the oysters fewer and fewer. The prices make the raw bars stingy. A dozen is just a dozen, as though just now, we’ve gleaned their value, the pearl of their promise. |
Jeff Newberry's most recent book is Cross Country (WordTech Editions), a collaboration with the poet Justin Evans. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of print and online journals, including Connotations, The American Journal of Poetry, North American Review, Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, and Sweet: A Literary Confection.
Allan Peterson Oregon
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Always
A little not-quite-whistle in the last diminishing breath sound of someone saying always. And even softer than that. behind it. a kind of echo. a shadow. real but less substantial. of resignation. meaning they accept and understand the paradox. of the necessity and impossibility of it. It almost moans. to the one who hears them both. both sounds: them saying. them listening. The one who says it to say more than. The one listening to hear as much as. The one hearing the meaning and pretending to believe it to make it last and the little echo or shadow implies that desperate acts are trying to say trust me in the same same pleading blue-green of the tattoo-as-guarantee. He thinks he could mean it more when he touches skin with her name. and her name shines back. accomplished after the blood has been wiped away. We know what happens to always. It will change like the names sprayed over and over on the trestle at 17th and we remember. long before ink when it used to be trees that carried the promising scars up into the branches. |
Allan Peterson’s most recent book is This Luminous, New and Selected Poems, (Panhandler Books) Some other titles include Precarious (42 Miles Press); All the Lavish in Common (U Mass Press); and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives and writes in Oregon. He no longer divides his time. www.allanpeterson.net
henry 7. reneau, jr. Lindsay, CA
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[*trigger warning]
angry Black man is a trigger word in every government building. in the penitentiary, it is the way it has always been. if I write about what has been done to Black folks, by white folks, is a trigger warning to the editors of literary journals to claim solidarity with BIPOC writers, but wish you luck in placing your work elsewhere. trigger is the part of a gun that empowers white folks to decide when Black folks will die. is the trigger word for every negro’s double consciousness. hey nigger! is the trigger word for feets don’t fail me now. is the trigger to get all Stepin Fetchit saucer eyed rabbit-in-the headlights stereotypical. every Black child dead in the street is a trigger for police to act like they ain’t the one who did it. Molotov cocktail is the trigger word for niggers only going to burn the wrong side of the tracks, is a trigger word for once the DOJ leaves it will be business as usual. justice under law & due process are trigger words for Black folk who are suffering from delusions of better than it used to be. blind bitch justice is white & racist, & not to be trusted. if I see that bitch caning her way down the street, I’m gonna push her mandatory minimum ass into traffic!! angry Black man is a trigger word on every daytime talk show, in every university classroom, at the Social Security office, is the trigger word for ban critical race theory, like it’s something that hasn’t been historically proven to have actually happened to us. knowing who we were, who we are, will trigger whom we come to be. trigger word is a warning to guilty cell-soldier racists who know Black folks ain’t forgot shit. angry Black man is a trigger word for chickens come home to roost. Black Lives Matter is a trigger word for radical militant outside agitator, for Panthers packing gats in the Statehouse, is the trigger for Ronnie Raygun better pray his feets don’t fail him now. are guns in Black hands the trigger word for Black folks have a right to defend themselves? what makes you think you will overcome by lawyering with their laws, praying to their God, non-violent protesting by permit, or waiting for due process to set you free? a trigger warning is July 1919 in Chicago, the Tulsa Massacre, the Rosewood Massacre, Trayvon, the Rev. Dr. MLK, Breonna, Michael, Tamir & every nigger lynched in the Red Summer of strange fruit. is a trigger word for Black folk there’s your fucking precedence—is the trigger warning of ballistic perforations. is the *Content warning for explicit language & examples of violence. |
Download the pdf of this poem here:
| trigger.warning.henry_7._reneau_jr..pdf |
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, is the spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press.)
Bruce Robinson Brooklyn, NY
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Olympiad
If this is our national sport, then consistency should be a trophy that we prize like a shooter's three-point shot, a quarterback's rifle arm, a pitcher like a marksman in the zone, the rule of law or an infield fly, the deities consistent with gunshot wounds and flies on blood-filled afternoons: so many of us, so many toys, so many armed and wanton boys. Bruce Robinson's recent poetry and prose appears or is forthcoming in Pangyrus, Spoon River, Maintenant, yolk, Rattle, Zoetic Press, Tar River Poetry, and Mantis. His poem, ”Neighborhood" appears in the November 2021 issue of SoFoPoJo. |
Richard Ryal Plantation, FL
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Meal of Myself
My body lifts its lightning one fork at a time. I’m bent more than you notice, random pains brittle the muscles that wing my joints. Not all of me can relax at the same time. Comfort comes from stretching the time between discomforts. Those times I rise or descend with the laze of honey rolling from a spoon belly until the tapered amber draws too far and snaps to drop and fatten pores of bread. When bitter flashes jag my lethargy, I move again. Let me roar, I tell the drum, I'm empty, like you. When I was nineteen, my surgeon refit the puzzle sloshing the succulence in my thigh so a dozen bone chunks and splinters could vein out to each other and form community so I could walk again with a single femur. I slide my healed thigh across your near hip to lift your farther knee with mine. While your hair clouds my face. I raise shocks for you with the finger that, in winter, sparks against a metal doorknob. The body can be a frightening ally. Let me sing, I tell the bell, I carry hollows but my bones are hard again. Slamming my ribs against thin air on my morning run, I’m inscribed with scars, my joints tempered by old injuries. I smell again the dark flower without touching it, and yes, the daily world is hallelujah enough. The cheap yellow shirt I love aligns its buttons exactly with its buttonholes and inside me, the same: blood washes my tubes, sluices on schedule, splashes my bag of organs that gurgles with talents I can’t see. My guts abut with a tailor’s concision. The genius syrup in the dark of my veins feeds its paths and cleans up after itself, life living in me without me. Blood is my body’s keeper. Let me laugh, I tell the flute, my breath is warm. Richard Ryal, the weird guy in the back at countless South Florida poetry events, is a writer, editor, and professor of writing and narrative studies. Most of all, he's a poet because language dances well at the borders of meaning. |
Michael Salcman
The List
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Deserted by everything but memory,
the old soldier sits in a nursing home making lists of how they sent a teen-ager towards the fires, his painful hands snipping at history like a leaf cutter out on a branch. A different month, a different place, entries in a list of army camps and countries like Algeria and Italy where he might stay safe if captured. Did he not suspect why a president didn’t bomb the tracks or why his first lady hectored him about Iraq? After The Nightingale lands in Oran, months get attached to the places he marches to. Sarge adds a few comments in the margins, “whoopee” next to his sixty-hour leave in Paris and the exact time his Army crosses the Rhine-- “4 PM” on the 31st of March, nineteen forty-five. He recalls every place he was ordered to from induction to training, from boot camp to battle zone. His niece lends me the list her Uncle Max begins at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, Camp Crowder in Neosho and Athens, Georgia, where he’s taught to obey by grunts who never saw a Jew before. Six months of training in Cape Cod and Fort Dix precedes his embarkation in nineteen forty-three when they take him away on the seventh day of February. The Florence Nightingale goes from Fleuris to Chanzy and back to Oran. Max thinks he’ll be as free as the ocean but the list becomes a months-long march. By May he’s in Morocco, readying to invade the Italian provinces of Germany: Paestum and Battapaglia in September, Montella, Avellino, Maddeloni, and Ciazzo in October, Dragoni and Fontegreco in November, marching up and down the spine of a country miraculously shaped like his boot. Then comes the bloody push to Anzio in January of 1944: Frattamagorri, Bagnoli, and Nettuno, their musical names |
attached to ruined vineyards and stained-glass windows
blown out in local churches. Seven historic towns in June alone: Ferriere, Velletri, Ciampino and Rome, mostly by foot, Santa Marinella, Bagnoli and Naples before August, then it’s on to Corsica and the invasion of France. At the one third point I’m too tired to look at the rest of his “itinerary.” None of us will ever see this much of the world this fast nor know it like he does. I’ll spare you August’s six towns, the eleven in September, and Alsace in November, much of it made in trucks. We’re rolling with Max now, from Mannheim to Mosbach, to Ohringen and Welzheim, and five more towns in May, before he enters Garmisch, the site he tells us of the 1936 Winter Olympics, writing “unconditional surrender” in an almost final note as the Sixth Army Group faces down German troops. Austria’s the eightieth tourist-stop on his tour and Dachau the eighty-fifth, which he labels, as if we didn’t know “[the] site of [a] notorious concentration camp.” He doesn’t say what he felt but we all take a breath and decompress as the list unwinds in its jaunty escape to Friedlos, Le Havre and Southampton’s docks, where he ships out to New York on the Queen Elizabeth. Discharged nine days after landfall Max ends the list on the twenty-seventh of September. An ordinary man, in the photos I’ve seen, definitely not a Homeric hero. Born in the Bronx to Russian immigrants, he’s half a head shorter than his wife. In other snaps he rides a pony and wears a natty pocket square like a gentleman. Whether shaking hands, holding a trophy or selling liquor Max smiles at the camera and still looks pretty well at ninety. As I’ve said, you might think he’s just an ordinary man, not that we have many of those anymore. He goes to services now, stumbling over the Hebrew, praying the best he can. And when a place comes back to him, adds it to the list. ### |
The Last Jew in Kabul
When Zebulon Simentov, the last Jew in Afghanistan,
left at sixty-two everyone was glad to be rid of him.
He turned out the lights and closed the door of the last synagogue
where he once lived with Isaak Levi himself, the next to last Jew.
The last Jew in Kabul owned a kebab shop, kept kosher
and prayed in Hebrew. He liked whiskey, kept a pet partridge
and charged reporters exorbitant fees for interviews.
The last Persian Jew was portly and always hated the next to last Jew.
The next to last Jew in Kabul also slept in the synagogue but
when Isaak died at eighty in 2005, Simentov was glad to be rid of him
even if no one was left to speak to. His wife and children had left him
long ago; they fled to Israel, waiting twenty years in hope for a get.
The Taliban, who stole the Torah scrolls from the Ark
in the synagogue and blew up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001,
arrested the last two Jews of Kabul and beat them together
but their endless bickering forced the prison guards to kick them out.
The last Jew in Afghanistan escaped from Kabul on the last bus
three weeks after the Americans left; and out of desperation
twenty-nine neighborhood women and children got on the same bus
as Simentov—the last Jew easier to bear when going or gone.
Most countries have forgotten their own Last Jew.
Tripoli in Libya was one quarter Jewish before the Second World War
and Syria had thousands for thousands of years before it had none.
Cairo’s once large Jewish community predated Islam by six centuries.
All over Europe the locals today tell cute stories about their own last Jews,
welcoming Jewish tourists and Jewish money to places in Germany, Poland,
and the Ukraine, where Jewish names persist on street signs and squares
next to Jewish museums and restored cemeteries in the absence of Jews.
But we have sung the name of the last Jew in Kabul at bar mitzvahs
and weddings forever; Siman tov in Hebrew means may it be a good omen.
left at sixty-two everyone was glad to be rid of him.
He turned out the lights and closed the door of the last synagogue
where he once lived with Isaak Levi himself, the next to last Jew.
The last Jew in Kabul owned a kebab shop, kept kosher
and prayed in Hebrew. He liked whiskey, kept a pet partridge
and charged reporters exorbitant fees for interviews.
The last Persian Jew was portly and always hated the next to last Jew.
The next to last Jew in Kabul also slept in the synagogue but
when Isaak died at eighty in 2005, Simentov was glad to be rid of him
even if no one was left to speak to. His wife and children had left him
long ago; they fled to Israel, waiting twenty years in hope for a get.
The Taliban, who stole the Torah scrolls from the Ark
in the synagogue and blew up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001,
arrested the last two Jews of Kabul and beat them together
but their endless bickering forced the prison guards to kick them out.
The last Jew in Afghanistan escaped from Kabul on the last bus
three weeks after the Americans left; and out of desperation
twenty-nine neighborhood women and children got on the same bus
as Simentov—the last Jew easier to bear when going or gone.
Most countries have forgotten their own Last Jew.
Tripoli in Libya was one quarter Jewish before the Second World War
and Syria had thousands for thousands of years before it had none.
Cairo’s once large Jewish community predated Islam by six centuries.
All over Europe the locals today tell cute stories about their own last Jews,
welcoming Jewish tourists and Jewish money to places in Germany, Poland,
and the Ukraine, where Jewish names persist on street signs and squares
next to Jewish museums and restored cemeteries in the absence of Jews.
But we have sung the name of the last Jew in Kabul at bar mitzvahs
and weddings forever; Siman tov in Hebrew means may it be a good omen.
Michael Salcman is a poet and art historian, and former chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Poems in Arts & Letters, Café Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his anthology of poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), "Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil (New York, 2022).
Betsy Sholl Portland, ME
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An Other Life
In my other life my father does not die of a heart attack alone in his office on a snowy day. He stays home, phones in to headquarters to say even a cowboy wouldn’t drive to town in a blizzard. In that other life death does not hang over him, arteries already so clogged, he’s dragging a half-dead leg. On this snowy day we’re in the kitchen, he’s put me in the highchair and sings as flour dust flies and eggs spatter out from the mixer whipping up batter for a cake. “Cupcakes!” he sings over and over, until the word turns into hiccup and I throw back my head and squeal. I will not be chubby, comforting myself with Necco waivers and M & M’s. My mother will not learn to drive, then move us from Cleveland to the Jersey shore, will not cry in the shower, or volunteer with the first aid squad, drive an ambulance to save the hearts of other men, then come home late at night from a shift to find her three daughters huddled in her bed. I won’t walk to school on a country road longing for sidewalks and the wealthy suburb my sisters say we came from, for the father they say made us all laugh, so our mother did not stare out the window lost in thought, her face frightening and slack. In that happy life we only visit our grandparents at the shore in summer, where I watch a sullen teenage girl push a lawn mower through crabgrass and dirt. I might pity her dull life and imagine she has nothing better to do than brood alone over long gloomy Russian novels. Come November, back home, I will not think of her, or the empty windswept beach, glitter of late sun catching in grass heads that could make the girl weep, if the wind hasn’t done it already, weep for the father she barely knew, for the waves that rise and shatter and rise again magnificent before the curl, weep not for the other life she once envied, but for her real life’s stark beauty, the cold making everything crisp, the waves tossing up shells like treasure, each one a broken house some creature has outgrown and left behind. |
Rehearsal
Thursday night. Choir members linger on the church steps before dispersing, each singer with her one voice inside the larger swell, trellis for the soloist’s climb. Even a cracked soprano like me can half-hear Bach’s latticework through May’s open windows and rise a little beyond all that’s riddled, rattled, run down in the world, the dueling newscasts blasting from different houses where minutes ago the choir’s praise out sang us all. Always it seems the Absolute is at work upping the ante on devotion, till nothing can be despised, not greasy dishes in my sink, or the unmuffled bike roaring through streets, not the shriek of headlines, or the plastic bag snagged for weeks in the tree out front. Now in my TV’s flicker, what kind of sacred hovers over the dust of bombed-out buildings, saying in what language, Don’t tune this out? Meanwhile the choristers bid farewell and drift away, each one a strand of the fugue that once existed only in Bach’s head under his powdered wig, never heard until his hands pulled out the stops, his feet danced across the pedals⎯ music carried now by other bodies, other souls passing along this street where my neighbor sweeps not shards from blown-out buildings, but petals the wind spent all day shaking loose, strewing across the walk, so now under the streetlight the concrete glitters like⎯yes, shattered glass. |
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Talk Radio
You’d think the battery would run down as the man, having sanded, now paints my steps, just one side today, so I can come and go, the mailman can deliver. But the voice gets so worked up, it seems about to loosen the hand brake, roll the car into the gutter. It sputters and fumes, feminazi, bitch, as if it sees the woman passing with a sure stride. A Black man out with his dog gets spewed on too, verbal exhaust: 12% of the population⎯ who cares? If I could put a paper bag over that radio, smash it, stuff it with a sock, anything to stop the yammering know-it-all barking from my handyman’s car. This blast-mouth⎯does it believe what it says, or just say what sells, and sell whatever we’re buying? My handyman checks his work, touches it up, his back to the radio cranked so loud the whole block has to hear, even my neighbor’s St. Francis who stands so still real birds land on his head, Francis who said, “Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.” It’s not words my handyman offers, but arms, when I tear up, saying once my husband would have done these chores. So, now I have to wonder in what compartment of himself does this man put the radio’s rage, its audible spit, have to see in myself the part that would tie it up like a sack of kittens and toss it into the river, the other part that waves as the man drives off, stands on my steps half painted, half raw. |
Betsy Sholl's Ninth book is House of Sparrows: New & Selected Poems. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Portland, Maine.
Kate Strong Stadt
Brood-shedder
I am half up to my knees in my mud I can hear them ahead of me, the cicadas, shaking songs
out of their wings They are always here this time of year But I can’t see them But they’re
always here / I am going to catch one and make it teach me about scarcity I am going to
catch one and I am going to learn what it is like to be hungry, brief, and relentless To never be
fed To be eaten To be caught screaming and to always come back / These are not the
ones as big as my pinky, that came for six weeks and kept the neighbors up with their
shrieking so that the new one asked what is that, is that electricity, is that an alarm, why is no
one else talking about it and someone had to tell her / I did catch one of those I have it in
my fridge where it died a cold death with its wings out like it thought it was still flying, missing
half its head from where a bird got it That cicada I will do something with but I don’t know
what I don’t know what I don’t know what, but I have it / But I do know why I am
sinking in this mud instead of skipping along on top like I am frog-hearted It’s the brain meds,
the ones that keep me from having seizures The brain meds make me puffy and stupid and
foggy and forgetful They make me the plainest version of a person who already wore
camouflage But when I am on them I will not drop my daughter when I am going down the
stairs I will not drown in the bath / There is mud around me and where there is not mud
there is singing in a language I can imitate but not understand Maybe I will be like one of
those ghosts that has unfinished business Catching cicadas Weightless Someone I don’t
know will ask about me, shrieking what is that, is that electricity, why is no else talking about
it Someone may tell her I won’t have to I will only catch her breath and breathe it in
Relentless, never hungry Forever
Kate Strong Stadt is a former children’s librarian turned knowledge worker. Recently, her poems have been published in The Collidescope, Sparked Literary Magazine, and swifts & slows. Her latest obsession is blacksmithing.
I am half up to my knees in my mud I can hear them ahead of me, the cicadas, shaking songs
out of their wings They are always here this time of year But I can’t see them But they’re
always here / I am going to catch one and make it teach me about scarcity I am going to
catch one and I am going to learn what it is like to be hungry, brief, and relentless To never be
fed To be eaten To be caught screaming and to always come back / These are not the
ones as big as my pinky, that came for six weeks and kept the neighbors up with their
shrieking so that the new one asked what is that, is that electricity, is that an alarm, why is no
one else talking about it and someone had to tell her / I did catch one of those I have it in
my fridge where it died a cold death with its wings out like it thought it was still flying, missing
half its head from where a bird got it That cicada I will do something with but I don’t know
what I don’t know what I don’t know what, but I have it / But I do know why I am
sinking in this mud instead of skipping along on top like I am frog-hearted It’s the brain meds,
the ones that keep me from having seizures The brain meds make me puffy and stupid and
foggy and forgetful They make me the plainest version of a person who already wore
camouflage But when I am on them I will not drop my daughter when I am going down the
stairs I will not drown in the bath / There is mud around me and where there is not mud
there is singing in a language I can imitate but not understand Maybe I will be like one of
those ghosts that has unfinished business Catching cicadas Weightless Someone I don’t
know will ask about me, shrieking what is that, is that electricity, why is no else talking about
it Someone may tell her I won’t have to I will only catch her breath and breathe it in
Relentless, never hungry Forever
Kate Strong Stadt is a former children’s librarian turned knowledge worker. Recently, her poems have been published in The Collidescope, Sparked Literary Magazine, and swifts & slows. Her latest obsession is blacksmithing.
Donna Vorreyer Chicago,IL
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Gardening after the Funeral
I dig for stems on which to hang the fruit of my breath. Each exhale a ripe reminder that the other choice is death. What they have given me is more than I deserve. This is a knowledge I have earned from the dirt. Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Salamander, Salt Hill, Baltimore Review, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, and other journals. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago and currently serves as an associate editor for Rhino Poetry. |
Carol Young Tampa, Florida
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feminist liturgy for January 21, 2017
services convened on the playground where thousands gathered in marching prayer to lift up hope in footsteps and strangers together aware that isolation is only a true fiction states and religions unwittingly build yet the falsehooded frequent liars are for one sunshined day stilled as the noise erupts over the bay breeze and thousands stand around the world banded ready and willing eternally to fight like a girl Carol Young lives in Tampa, Florida where she fights for criminal justice as a lawyer who tries to makes sense of all that by writing poetry. ______________________________________________ Editor's note regarding: 1/21/2017, "The Women's Marches which took place across the United States to protest XXXXX's inauguration may have been the largest – and most peaceful – day of protest in US history. Somewhere between 3.3 million and 4.6 million marchers made their presence known across the United States..." Independent January 25, 2017 |