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If you are a poet, prophet, peace-loving artist, if you are 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.
What do we mean when we say "your best work?" Or that we seek well-crafted poems that are thematically complex, emotionally nuanced, or "in your face,"
filled with images that excite wonder, mystery and dread, and challenge the reader to question their assumptions?
We hope you will enjoy reading this issue as much as our editors enjoyed answering that question by selecting these works.
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.
What do we mean when we say "your best work?" Or that we seek well-crafted poems that are thematically complex, emotionally nuanced, or "in your face,"
filled with images that excite wonder, mystery and dread, and challenge the reader to question their assumptions?
We hope you will enjoy reading this issue as much as our editors enjoyed answering that question by selecting these works.
November 2022 Issue # 27 Poetry
Rebekah E. Bartlett * Willy Conley * E. J. Cousins * Phil Goldstein * Lola Haskins * Sara Henning * Jenn Hollmeyer * Paul Hostovsky * David Kirby * Lisa Lewis * Julia Lisella * Ellaraine Lockie * Kristin Marie * Joseph Mills * Juan Pablo Mobili * Tim Moder * Marilyn K. Moody * Mary B. Moore * Bee Morris * Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo * Alexander Pérez * Sarath Reddy * Nicole Santalucia * Lynne Schmidt * Tyler Robert Sheldon * Gail Thomas * Monica Lee Weatherly
Rebekah E. Bartlett
Company Will Replace Map Image Man Says Shows the
Body of His Slain 14-Year-Old Son
Zoom in to the furthest down square on the map
and there he is: white shirt, white sneaks, tan pants.
He lies near a curved track. Four boxcars wait
to the east, on the straight track his was set to meet.
To the south, warehouses and empty lots.
North and west: wasteland and more trains.
Between the tracks, three men in brown and
khaki wait. As far as they can get from it.
Another walks to a dusty cop car
away from the body, which looks
small and flat and casts no shadow.
The legs are poker straight, splayed,
the waist is tilted slightly. You could swear
there's no head, but hope it's the angle.
After all, what can be seen from space?
Not blood surely nor wounds, only this:
A place one might want to know about.
And so this day, this hour, this second, a satellite passing,
merely making a map, clicking a camera, and capturing
a dead boy near tracks, and four long shadows.
Body of His Slain 14-Year-Old Son
Zoom in to the furthest down square on the map
and there he is: white shirt, white sneaks, tan pants.
He lies near a curved track. Four boxcars wait
to the east, on the straight track his was set to meet.
To the south, warehouses and empty lots.
North and west: wasteland and more trains.
Between the tracks, three men in brown and
khaki wait. As far as they can get from it.
Another walks to a dusty cop car
away from the body, which looks
small and flat and casts no shadow.
The legs are poker straight, splayed,
the waist is tilted slightly. You could swear
there's no head, but hope it's the angle.
After all, what can be seen from space?
Not blood surely nor wounds, only this:
A place one might want to know about.
And so this day, this hour, this second, a satellite passing,
merely making a map, clicking a camera, and capturing
a dead boy near tracks, and four long shadows.
Rebekah E. Bartlett is a consulting editor, writer, photographer, and amateur astronomer. She lives near and works in Boston, MA and has a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts.
Willy Conley
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Playing Deaf
(A Translation of Psalms 58:3-5 in ASL Glosses) People speaking poison Same-same serpent spitting venom Akin cobra its ears closed― refuse listen flute player skilled charm-charm basket rise |
Table-Turning
I’m deaf. I’m sorry. Why sorry? You can’t hear. Well, you’re hearing. So? I’m sorry. Why sorry? You can hear. |
Willy Conley's most recent book is The World of White Water. His other books are Visual-Gestural Communication, Listening Through the Bone, The Deaf Heart, and Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays. Conley is a retired professor and chairperson of Theatre and Dance at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Prior to becoming a professor, he was a Registered Biological Photographer for five years at some of the top medical centers in the U.S. For more info about his work, please visit www.willyconley.com.
E. J. Cousins
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MEDITATIONS FROM A CONCEIVED ORDER
after Aurelius I look out the window down past the wing the sometimes order the earthly matters the cows the emperor says: see celebration and mourning I see celebration & mourning he says: see union and separation I see union & separation he says: see harmony I see a mixture of opposites little squares of land divided up like meaning -- He says you have been stung a short life rids us of forever in a little while you will close your eyes the wind scatters leaves upon the earth -- He says tragedy comes to pass in accordance with nature o how suffering pleases you -- He says remember your strings are pulled do not confuse source with flesh you are a vessel your organs tools you are the loom without the weaver |
MEDITATIONS FROM THE UNGOVERNED MIXTURE
after Aurelius He says be amazed how you lose yourself without something wise try not to think -- He says why do you resist gracious chaos pray the storm carries you off -- He says wish for nothing you are parts separated freed from the strained rotation of heaven what happens -- He says you’ve been given such a small part of this darkness smaller than the earth where you creep imagine -- He says the body opens like a womb welcome the hour do not wait my body is a windowless room I fear walking out nothing but light |
E. J. Cousins lives, teaches, and writes in Denver, CO. Their poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Bombay Gin, The Collapsar, and elsewhere.
Phil Goldstein
The Science of Losing
1. Black, sporty prescription sunglasses, left on a Metro train
2. My favorite wool sweater, in some cabin in West Virginia
3. A dying Fitbit, in a hotel room in Seattle
4. My innocence, not technically lost, but stolen
5. My first love, lost to the physical manifestations of my deepest wound
6. At least two wallets in the backseats of cabs, before the days of Uber
7. Mint green prescription sunglasses, in a wave off Maui (you idiot!)
8. Countless phone chargers, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere
9. A matryoshka doll set from my great-grandmother, in a move
10. Ownership of my body & the ability to discover it for myself
11. An elm tree, consumed in an August wildfire
12. A ragdoll cat named Lincoln, taken far too soon as a kitten
13. My brother, the monster of my childhood, who pulled me onto the gray basement floor
14. A bumper sticker that read, The fact that no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist
15. The sense that I knew what would come next, gone like snow one March morning
16. My parents, though still living, distant as Europa
17. A whole chapbook full of poems, discarded but not forgotten
18. My wedding band, in a resort pool, found by an 8-year-old in goggles
19. My desire to be the perfect son, gone forever
20. My sense of shame, buried at sea as the dawn kissed my forehead
1. Black, sporty prescription sunglasses, left on a Metro train
2. My favorite wool sweater, in some cabin in West Virginia
3. A dying Fitbit, in a hotel room in Seattle
4. My innocence, not technically lost, but stolen
5. My first love, lost to the physical manifestations of my deepest wound
6. At least two wallets in the backseats of cabs, before the days of Uber
7. Mint green prescription sunglasses, in a wave off Maui (you idiot!)
8. Countless phone chargers, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere
9. A matryoshka doll set from my great-grandmother, in a move
10. Ownership of my body & the ability to discover it for myself
11. An elm tree, consumed in an August wildfire
12. A ragdoll cat named Lincoln, taken far too soon as a kitten
13. My brother, the monster of my childhood, who pulled me onto the gray basement floor
14. A bumper sticker that read, The fact that no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist
15. The sense that I knew what would come next, gone like snow one March morning
16. My parents, though still living, distant as Europa
17. A whole chapbook full of poems, discarded but not forgotten
18. My wedding band, in a resort pool, found by an 8-year-old in goggles
19. My desire to be the perfect son, gone forever
20. My sense of shame, buried at sea as the dawn kissed my forehead
Phil Goldstein's debut poetry collection, How to Bury a Boy at Sea, which reckons with the trauma of child sexual abuse, was published by Stillhouse Press in April 2022. His poetry has been nominated for a Best of the Net award and has appeared in The Laurel Review, Rust+Moth, Moist Poetry Journal, Two Peach, The Indianapolis Review, Awakened Voices and elsewhere. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Jenny and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.
Lola Haskins
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The Coup
I offered them my chest and told them, go ahead. But even González, who hated me the most, could not. How sweetly habit grows, like mold on shoes in our hot country. I told them their own troops, a prickle of boys, brown hands slippery on their guns, were loyal to me and now I tell them sing, mouths full of dirt or no. And even the ones whose throats I slit, sing. - Panamá |
To Three Frozen Scribbles
You must have crawled out of the earth onto my porch last night and as you died of the cold― the way Silvestre when he suddenly knows he will never reach Gila Bend drops his dry canteen― you left me this message. ―para los que murieron de esperanza Florida and Arizona, USA |
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Those Who Look Alike but are Not
Palm stems vee into their fronds like swords. Palmetto stems are squarely attached. How many battles have rung out between men wielding sharp and blunt instruments? From time to time, the palms and palmettos philosophize about this. And after all, why not? They are not the ones destroying the world. |
1962
The moment at the top of the drive when my first love turned to say again, Come now, returns with the evening star as does the rush of white air that partnered him when he jumped, then exploded every bit of him, khaki shirt and all, when he hit the bay. Who but a fool believes that a poem may be got for nothing? |
Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville. FL. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines. She has published 16 books, 13 of which are poetry. Her most recent collection―Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)―was featured in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America. She serves as Honorary Chancellor of the Florida State Poets Association.
Sara Henning
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A Brief History of Fathers
When she speaks of her father, slurs burn my other aunt’s throat. Anger corrodes her chest: Crazy Sam, before he was father who left in the night. Husband home late from the rails, his body so slapped through with coal and sweat his wife took a broom to the bedsheets. He glimmered, dark diamond, when the moon flooded their bed. This was before the babies came, seven of them, like honeysuckle in every corner of the yard, or the booze, leggy women who’d do anything for whiskey or nickels to slip into the jukebox. When he stopped coming home, my grandmother put stones in the soup, hunted ditch weed, prayed the Nicene Creed. She waited for Mary to call to her through cracks in her kitchen ceiling. Once the eviction notices came, she gave her children back to God. My father learned to slip through the windows of Saint Vincent’s, away from the Sisters, curl on his mother’s porch to sleep. After the death certificate―heart attack, male, fifty-four―my father hitched in the night, never found a grave. He died there, the boy my father was, hounding ghosts. My brother and me, we rooted hard, pearled slick and deep as his other scars: nose cut through by a shovel, the bullet he took in Vietnam. Ship fires blazing through dream rivers, Cong firing shots. LSD chased with one-night stands. St. Augustine said we are united by the common object of our love. I read of Pablo Picasso, Gjon Mili, how aperture seizes light. How a man sears his story into the dark. When my father died―Nickels in the jukebox. Honeysuckle in the yard. Flash. Blaze. Like his father, he’s dead man, dead beat, gone. |
Good Kissing
After Jorie Graham’s “Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt” The moon, river shimmering its glitz and burn―I wanted to marry it all. Mosquitoes circling nests of eggs, dragonflies lax in the dusk-blurred water. Why did no one teach me that behind every miracle is a God breaching everything it wants? I’d trace my finger over the picture book drawing of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, savor the stories of women. Proverbs―Eve, the apple radiant as her sin-kissed skin. Genesis― Lot’s wife turning to salt, her body no Sodom scorched by prayer. Salome. Delilah. Potiphar’s wife. Jezebel. But when Robert, my aunt’s boyfriend, bomber jacket hugging his biceps, gripped my aunt against the sink as she sliced tomatoes, kissed her with an open mouth? I had never seen a man touch a woman like that― his throat flushing, her bleached Farrah Fawcett cut catching in his mouth. She gasped, laughed, begged him to stop. Because I believed he was killing her, I ran at him, fists raised. A humid afternoon in Georgia, 1987. Even now, I want to erase Robert’s hands from her body― his touch proving I was stupid to love’s hunger. Good kissing, my aunt said, is what a man and woman do to make a baby. Weeks later, she’s pregnant when they go to dinner, hostess seating them in their favorite dark wood booth. The walls a montage of Elvis EPs― Love Me Tender, Rock-A-Hula. Photos of the King sealed under the table’s scratched history of lacquer. For women in my family, every Miracle begins with a man, an origin story. When she told him, he threw down twenties, walked straight into night’s throat. No longer body but shadow of court hearings, custody payments, he was the hole her daughter would learn to call father. |
Sara Henning is the author of View from True North, cowinner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. Her latest collection of poems, Terra Incognita, won the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was released by Ohio University Press in March 2022. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.
Jenn Hollmeyer
AMERICAN MOTHERHOOD
I tell the kids we’re not going to the fireworks
because of the storm, but really it’s because the
fire might come from guns and nothing
works in this country anymore.
Lightning looks like muzzle flash,
wind feels like downwash,
shaking fledgling doves from their nest.
One lands dead on its back, neck cracked,
the other drops unscathed like a river stone.
The mother tends both until the flies get bad
and now she sits over her only
in clear view of predators,
her mournful eyes
wide, wary, weary.
I tell the kids we’re not going to the fireworks
because of the storm, but really it’s because the
fire might come from guns and nothing
works in this country anymore.
Lightning looks like muzzle flash,
wind feels like downwash,
shaking fledgling doves from their nest.
One lands dead on its back, neck cracked,
the other drops unscathed like a river stone.
The mother tends both until the flies get bad
and now she sits over her only
in clear view of predators,
her mournful eyes
wide, wary, weary.
Jenn Hollmeyer writes and paints in the Chicago area. She won the 2019 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for her story collection, Orders of Protection (University of North Texas Press) and won second place in the 2021 Hal Prize competition, judged by Lan Samantha Chang. Jenn’s writing has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah, West Branch Wired, Juked, and many other journals. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Read more at jennhollmeyer.com.
Paul Hostovsky
His Last Poem
It was just a tiny thing,
a handful of unrhymed couplets
about the warm tears
of old men,
tears that bless everything,
help nothing, no one–
each line like an empty clothesline
with a few orphan clothespins,
no clothes, no colors flapping
in the breeze, just the sagging
line with its suggestion of a house
on one side, a tree on the other,
or two trees and no house–
then the clothespins flying away.
It was just a tiny thing,
a handful of unrhymed couplets
about the warm tears
of old men,
tears that bless everything,
help nothing, no one–
each line like an empty clothesline
with a few orphan clothespins,
no clothes, no colors flapping
in the breeze, just the sagging
line with its suggestion of a house
on one side, a tree on the other,
or two trees and no house–
then the clothespins flying away.
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
David Kirby
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So What About Elias Canetti
When someone at a party says “So what about Elias Canetti?” to you, what do you say in return? Safe bets include “What about him?” and “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom,” which gives you the opportunity to look him up on your phone, which is when you discover that Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which fact is now one more pebble for you to toss into that great abyss of ignorance that begins at the outer reaches of your frontal lobe and stretches all the way to the occipital and across both cerebral hemispheres and has slowly filled over time, even though the space that remains appears to be so vast as to discourage you from imagining that you could ever possibly fill it before the hour at which you disappear from the sight of others and become a fact yourself. Don’t be upset, though. I have that same abyss in my brain. We all do. It’s not what you don’t know that counts or even what you do know but what you do with it. Elias Canetti may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but so did Herta Müller, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, and Verner von Heidenstam. In 1974, Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene and Saul Bellow were all nominated, though the prize that year went to Eyvind Johnson and Harry E. Martinson, “Swedish writers regarded as literary giants in their own country but virtually unknown abroad,” according to The New York Times, and both of whom just happened to be Nobel Prize judges. Nice work, Eyvind. Way to go, Harry. As for you other judges, pee-yew! Your decision stinks like a shipment of salmon someone left on a dock in Stockholm or Gothenburg or Halmstad on a sunny day and that someone else forgot to pick up. Oh, well. We all make mistakes. In addition to being ignorant, we all make mistakes. Why, often your day consists more of mistakes than of anything else, starting with you putting on your t-shirt backwards and figuring it’s too much trouble to change it around, but then your wife says “you put on your t-shirt backwards,” so you fix it and pour yourself a bowl of cereal and turn on the television and it’s the show of which you’ve only seen part of one episode yet it’s the same episode and the same part: the wife reaching for the container that says FLOUR but picking up the one clearly labeled ROACH POISON instead, the detective driving away from the suspect’s hilltop house and realizing he can’t stop his car because someone cut his brake lines. You pop your vitamins into your mouth, but you think maybe you missed one, so you spit them out into your hand, and they’re all there, so you pop them back into your mouth, but you drop one. It’s lunch time now, so you make your sandwich and get the newspaper because you certainly don’t want to turn on the stupid TV and see the same stupid episode of the same stupid show again, and you start to read about all the people in the world who are in the paper because they did something stupid, and that’s when you realize you’re holding your sandwich upside down in the hand that doesn’t have the newspaper in it, which is kind of like you putting on your t-shirt backwards, only your wife isn’t watching you eat your sandwich, thank god, and you figure you don’t really have to turn it right side up, it’s all going to the same place anyway, but there’s just something wrong about biting down through the tuna salad and into the lettuce and then the tomato slice when it should be the other way around, so you put the newspaper down and use the hand that was holding it to turn your sandwich over, though when you do, the top piece of bread slides off and lands on the paper and leaves a big mayonnaise-y splotch right where the world news used to be. The headline says “Health Officials Say It’s Not Safe to Travel To” but the rest is blotted out, so you don’t know whether it’s okay to go to that country or not. In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Elias Canetti was said to have had a pronounced sadistic streak. He also had a wife named Veza who only had one arm, and someone suggested that Canetti himself had bitten his wife’s arm off. I’ve done a lot of silly things in my day, but I’ve never bitten my wife’s arm off. I’ve never even bitten my wife’s arm or bitten my wife. The silliest thing I’ve ever done was when I bought that motorcycle. Motorcycles are fun! Breeze in your face, the open road before you, pretty girl with her arms around your waist: what’s not to like? But I was too much of a daydreamer to ride safely. There are plenty of smart bikers out there, but it probably helps to be one of the dumb ones and think "Gotta get to that White Pride rally” and “Gotta smash that fucker who's bird-dogging my old lady” and “Sure could use a cold PBR about now” instead of pondering your stamp collection or subatomic physics: “Sure would like to get ahold of that British Guiana 1-Cent Magenta,” you think, just as you might say “Wow, beryllium really does emit an electrically neutral radiation when bombarded with alpha particles”—CRASH! The next thing you know, you’re in the emergency room, or the next thing you don’t know, you’re in the morgue, and your significant other is saying “I’ll never be happy again!” or “Can’t you do something about his face?” or “You stupid fuck.” Was it a vision or a waking dream. On my motorcycle, I never could tell, so I sold it. Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James never won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and neither did Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Leo Tolstoy. Big deal. Forget about the free trip to Stockholm, the handshake with the king and queen, the medal, the diploma, the banquet afterwards at City Hall. Think of them filling their pens and putting a blank sheet of paper on the desk just so. Think how they loved to write. It Just Gets Better
I’m grateful for coffee, naps, red wine, true-crime books, oysters, for escalators because when they break they become stairs, for fruit, long walks, yoga. I am grateful when there is nothing to be grateful for. Scientists say when there is nothing to be grateful for, you should look for something, anything. Did you know that the search for gratitude produces serotonin, the neurotransmitter that maintains mood balance and prevents depression? Scientists say you don’t even have to find anything, you just have to search. Right now I am grateful for those stupid birds squawking outside my window. I am grateful for grates, which keep me from falling into drains, sewers, and manholes. I am grateful for graters, which keep me from eating a whole block of cheese at one time. My new year’s resolution next year will be to be grateful. I’m going to be as grateful as all get-out next year. I’m going to be aerobically grateful, tackle-and-wrap-up grateful, somebody-call-911 grateful. I’ll be grateful beyond compare, beyond measure, beyond all bounds. Next year my plan is to be singularly, uncommonly, unusually, notably, signally, strikingly, pointedly, famously, egregiously, prominently, and glaringly grateful. I will be grateful for dissatisfaction, for that blessed unrest that makes me feel more alive than anything else, and as I am a poet, I’ll be grateful as I watch for the erosion of my body and spirit by time as if I were in a corner watching a thief twirling the knobs of a safe, knowing that it is empty, my treasure being elsewhere. I am grateful for babies, for while others may turn away from me, babies are prepared to smile at anything even roughly in human form. I am grateful for Chuck Berry, for judges' wives, district attorneys, for a brown-eyed handsome man, deserts, Bombay, history, a beautiful daughter who can’t make up her mind between a doctor and a lawyer man, for Milo Venus and wrestling matches and baseball and two-three counts and high flies into the stand. I am grateful when those I love leave town and even more grateful when they die and think how lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. I am grateful for tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth. I like the way people say “sherbert” instead of “sherbet,” and I like as well “sorbet,” the word from which both are derived, though not as much as I like “sherbert” and “sherbet.” I like mispronunciations of every kind, including the word “mispronounciation.” I like phrases like “pick-me-up,” which is something to brighten your day or give you an energy boost, especially useful when you can't spare time for a lunch break during a long work session. Also, chemical mood enhancers such as alcoholic beverages. “Let's go for coffee, I could sure use a pick-me-up.” I like expressions for déclassé or outmoded structures: dive bar, motor lodge, gas station trading post, abandoned amusement park. I like collective nouns: a smack of jellyfish, an ostentation of peacocks, an incredulity of cuckolds, an altcommandcontrolshift of techies, a rave of DJs, a hedge of investment bankers, a ring of opera goers, a pan of critics. I like expressions that mean something other than what they seem to, like finger sandwiches and baby oil. If corn oil is made of corn and olive oil is made of olives, what is baby oil made of? I am grateful for arias in languages I cannot understand, for I figure the singers are singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in my language, and that makes my heart hurt. I am grateful for epiphanies because they are always just below the surface, waiting for the right conditions to reveal them. I am grateful for stories, to my friend who said he was sitting next to a nun on a plane who says she’s nervous because she’d never flown before, so he says he always finds that a couple of scotches calm his nerves, so she orders a scotch, but then the plane encounters some turbulence, and the frightened nun grabs my friend’s hand and orders another scotch, and for the rest of the flight, anybody who uses the forward lavatory comes out to see my friend holding hands with a nun who’s throwing down drinks like there’s no tomorrow. I am grateful to Allen Garganus, who said “Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” I am grateful to Ernest Shackleton, because when the Endurance became trapped in Antarctic pack ice, he orders his men to take no more than two pounds of personal items each as they abandon ship, though he makes exceptions for photographer Frank Hurley’s photographic plates and crew member Leonard Hussey’s banjo. Just you wait: next year my gratitude will be Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan. Next year I’m going to be so grateful it’ll be bad for me. Right now I’m grateful for a newspaper you can still hold in your hand, for stories like this one that has a Fernandina Beach dateline and reads in its entirety: “Authorities say a man and a woman who were stopped for drunken bicycling in a Florida beach town had sex in a deputy’s patrol car before one of them fled naked.” Which one, I wonder. When I read this to my wife, she says “Which one?” and then “That sentence just gets better and better.” Legend of the True Cross
Ever been to the church of Santa Croce in Florence? For a cultural attraction, it’s way up there: five stars, top drawer, two thumbs up, the bee’s pajamas, the cat’s knees. Why? Because it contains the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli. It’s hard to find, though, whereas everybody knows where the Duomo is because you can see it sticking up over all the other buildings—Brunelleschi designed it to do just that back in 1418. And the Duomo is a lot more beautiful than Santa Croce, but its interior is no great shakes. The Duomo is all about its outsides rather than its insides—kind of like a lot of people, you might say. Ha, ha! Anyway, that’s why you see a lot of tourists in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence twisting their maps this way and that or tapping the screen of their smart phone and then giving it the finger as they try to find their way to the church, which is also why, if I’m in that part of that city and I see such a person, often I volunteer to point the way to them, which can mean I end up struggling with a language I don’t really speak, since I’m not a hyperpolyglot. I mean, who is. A hyperpolyglot is someone who speaks eleven or more languages, which leaves me out, though I can speak passable French and Italian and can get up German or Spanish if I’m going to Germany or Spain, though I tend to forget them as soon as I’m home again. Its name notwithstanding, the one thing the church of Santa Croce does not have is a fragment of the true cross, a relic of Our Savior’s suffering that is quite the popular feature of many another European church, one so popular, as a matter of fact, that no less an authority than John Calvin said “there is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.” Yeah, but look who that man was, John Calvin! It’d be awesome to speak eleven or more languages, wouldn’t it? Not only could you go to more places and talk to the natives, but you’d be setting a great example for the rest of us. After all, if ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes can run three hundred and fifty miles without sleep, that means I can at least jog around the block. And if the hyperpolyglot Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia can speak twenty-two languages, maybe you can crank up your bat-mitzvah Hebrew―Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu, y’all!— or learn enough of your grandma’s Mandarin to understand her stories. I was raised Catholic but gave it up when I discovered girls and vice versa. Still, a killjoy like John Calvin always comes across as “a big sack of shit,” to use Frank O’Hara’s favorite term of opprobrium. True, Our Redeemer was a skinny little Palestinian guy and not exactly the strapping Malibu Jesus you see in all those MGM movies, but still. The counterargument to Calvin’s was offered by one Charles Rohault de Fleury, who drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross in 1870, showing that, in spite of what Calvin claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not amount to one-third of your normal cross, which was maybe three or four meters high and two wide. Then again, what’s normal? Most of the PhDs I know speak just one language, whereas a taxi driver from Ghana with little more than a middle-school education might converse in Hausa with his Nigerian father; Twi, a dialect of Akan, with his mom; Ga, a Kwa language, with one set of friends and Ewe, a Niger-Congo language, with a second set; and English with everyone else. Then again, if the people on our side of the street spoke one language and those on the other a second language and the people a block over a third, we’d all be multilingual. In America, there’s a Holy Cross College, located in Worcester, MA and the alma mater of people as different as progressive newsman Chris Matthews and right-wing Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court, not to mention basketball great Bob Cousy and LSD advocate Timothy Leary, though he left after two years. He had other fish to fry. Then there’s Santa Cruz, California, known for its moderate climate, natural environment, coastline, redwood forests, alternative community lifestyles, and socially liberal leanings. Boring! Sounds like a city that needs a little salsa piccante, if you ask me. Sounds like a city that could use a little intrigue and a couple of stabbings, maybe even a burning or two in the public square, kind of like Florence back in Brunelleschi’s day. Of course, there’s also Las Cruces, NM, but let’s don’t go there. Santa Croce, Holy Cross, Santa Cruz, St. Croix in the Virgin Islands: they all amount to the same thing and no small thing, either, no siree Bob. To find out why the cross is so important to Christians, I looked on some Christian web sites, where I found some of the stupidest crap I’ve ever read anywhere, that is to say, crap at least as stupid as that I’ve seen on any other site, such as the ones that tell you the medical establishment is putting the AIDS virus into cans of Pepsi Cola so people will catch a dread disease and seek costly medical care but die anyway and break the hearts of those who love them. But one Christian commentator said the cross allows God to do all the work. If we could absolve our own sins, he says, we’d brag about it—“Hey, look what I did!” And since we tend to worship what we boast about, we’d become our own god. Boo, hiss! Also, I like the idea of God saving me instead of me saving myself. That sounds like a lot less work for yours truly. Other commentators point out that the cross is important because it doesn’t mean anything but instead means everything: death and life, hate and love, violence and peace, accusation and forgiveness, sin and purity, rupture and wholeness, loss and gain, destruction and restoration, defeat and victory, both a cruel form of execution and a symbol of abundant life. Kind of like poetry! I tell you what doesn’t mean anything, though, and that’s glossalalia. Glossalalia is not a language. Oh, sure, you can shout Orawashia dela sende! or Prisencolinensinainciusol! but that doesn’t mean anything: neuroimaging during glossolalia doesn’t show activity in the language areas of the brain. There’s a good side to glossolalia, though. A study done by the American Journal of Human Biology found that speaking in tongues was associated with a reduction in circulatory cortisol as well as enhancements in alpha-amylase enzyme activity, two common biomarkers of stress reduction that can be measured in saliva. This supports earlier studies that report various social benefits to glossolalia, such as an increase in self-confidence. I mean, if you can get up and run around in front of a crowd and shout didigog, duddagog, duvugog, duthugog and then follow it up with idigexidigampidigle, uddagex-uddagam-puddagle, and uvugex-uvugam-puvugle, you’ve got to think pretty well of yourself. As to the true cross, legend has it that the cross Jesus was crucified on as well as two others were found by St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 326 A.D., when a dying woman was brought to the spot and touched the crosses, one by one. First cross? Nada. Next cross? Nein, nichts, niente, zip, zilch, zero. But the third cross zapped the dying woman so hard that she was cured of her illness and leapt to her feet and did the boogaloo as well as the bop, the stroll, the Susie Q, the hucklebuck, and the peppermint twist. When I ask people if they’d like me to point the way to Santa Croce, I’m just trying to be helpful, though I’ll admit that it does my self-confidence an immense amount of good when the other person says Danke! or Merci! or even Grazie! for just because you’re Italian doesn’t mean you know where you are in Italy. But not everybody wants my help. Sometimes they run away screaming. Why, though? Probably because they think I’m going to rob them. Still, it hurts my feelings. The Bible says, “Forget not to show love unto strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” See? I might be an angel. Those people don’t know who I am. I might be Jesus! So what if I don’t speak Aramaic? Oh, that’s right, look what happened to him—okay, now I’m running and screaming, too. |
I Want to Be Your Person
Not a person, I mean, but a person-person, someone who actually lives as opposed to one who merely breathes. One summer I had a job on a truck delivering appliances all over West Feliciana Parish, and one of our regular stops was the prison at Angola, and every time we did, the inmates asked me for cigarettes: I couldn’t walk ten feet without someone popping out of a bush or calling from the shadows, “Got a smoke, buddy?” or “Hey, man, got a cigarette?” I didn’t, but sometimes I wish I had: think of the conversations I missed! All those opportunities to grow and learn from people whose lives were not mine, pffffft, down the drain. Then again, I heard the overture to The Barber of Seville coming out of a window at the warden’s house once as my co-worker and I dropped off a washer/dryer combo, and ever since, almost nothing has made me happier than to hear that work or simply see the name of Gioachino Rossini, its composer, or just think about him, so much so that at one point I wrote a poem called “Big Meal with Gioachino Rossini,” in which that musical genius and I eat and drink too much and talk about every topic under a cloudy Louisiana sky. Poetry, you make everything possible, even and especially new friendships as well as dinners with others, living or dead, surely one of the greatest pleasures a person might enjoy. Yes, but how do you become someone worthy of a dinner with Rossini or Emily Dickinson or Vincent Van Gogh? Okay, not those last two: Dickinson would be tongue-tied, and Van Gogh might try to evangelize you or make you sit for a portrait, depending on which phase of his life he’s in. Oh, I know: Zora Neale Hurston! Zora Neale said, “Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me.” Ha, ha—you hit the nail on the head there, Zora Neale! I’d have your company any day, not that you’d need it. Zora Neale Hurston was her own BFF, as opposed to, say, the Friedrich Nietzsche who more or less accounted for his own solitary misery when he said, “In the Alps, I am unassailable, especially when I am alone and have no enemy except myself.” My father was a man of few words—pretty much no words, come to think of it― but he was fond of saying that if you are a nice fellow, then nice things will happen to you, a statement the truth of which has been borne out by my personal observations, though it is equally true that not every nice fellow has a shot at the same happy life as others, and here I am thinking of celebrated Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, who lost his mother and favorite sister to tuberculosis when he was a boy and his father and brother not long after; another sister went mad. “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies, consumption and insanity,” said Munch. “Illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle.” Too bad about that, but he did become Edvard Munch― who’s to say who he would have been if his mother had been captain of the Norwegian Olympic Volleyball team and his siblings the very picture of rosy-cheeked health? Then there was Charles Darwin, who left medical school in Edinburgh to turn himself into Charles Darwin. Of course he left—wouldn’t you leave medical school if you, too, had to watch surgeries without anesthesia, many of them on children? Darwin was a diehard fundamentalist when he boarded the Beagle, reading Bible passages to his shipmates and putting up with their mockery when they argued about morality and ethics, but he abandoned all that when at last he saw the forests of Brazil and kissed his holy rollerism goodbye so effortlessly that he didn’t even notice it. Three things about Darwin: first, he never lost his sense of wonder, first at God’s grandeur, and then at nature’s, though his sense of wonder at the latter was greater. Too, he never blamed the authors of the Old Testament for getting it wrong, since they lived in a desert during the late Iron Age and had no way of seeing the complex biosphere that somehow organized itself on its own elsewhere in the world. Finally, in addition to making himself into one of your top-flight international scientists, Darwin also became a writer of the first rank as well. As to writing, in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier it says that a gentleman should be skilled at both verse and prose, “for in addition to the satisfaction this will give him personally, it will enable him to provide constant entertainment for the ladies, who are usually very fond of such things,” as if men and women were separate species, which they very well may be, at least in the sense that I myself have wondered from time to time what it would be like to be female, to be first and foremost the me who wants to spend his Saturdays driving from Lowe’s to Home Depot looking for the best price on a case of 10W40 motor oil as well as the me who’d rather curl up with a good book and a pot of tea and a cat at her feet during that same period of time. Poetry, you make it possible for me to be somebody, and so do you, prose, though you take longer. “It is a delicious thing to write,” as Flaubert says, “to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating,” and here he is surely thinking of Madame Bovary, not only his own chef-d’oeuvre, as the French have it, but also one of the incontestable novelistic masterpieces of any time, his or ours. Flaubert goes on: “Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.” Love-drowned eyes . . . my goodness! Flaubert was not one but two people there and a number of other things as well. Some miles to the north of Flaubert and roughly 150 years later, English soccer team manager Carlo Ancelloti says, “I have to manage people, not players. They are not players. They are people who play soccer. I am not a manager. I am a man who works as a manager.” From Carlo Ancelloti’s standpoint, reader, you are no reader at all but a person who reads, just as I am a person who poetizes. Watch this: poetize, poetize, poetize, poetize. See? Now I’m done poetizing and can simply be whomever I was before, that is, someone who shops for and makes and eats his dinner and smartens up the kitchen and turns on his TV and falls asleep in his easy chair with a cat at his feet. Sounds hard, doesn’t it? Sounds hard to be a person, I mean. And it is! Poet May Sarton says, “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” Back off, May! I’m doing the best I can here. And remember, even those of us who spend our entire lives trying to become a person-person and not succeeding and probably not even coming close have the same rights and obligations as you do. If only I had been a member of Frank O’Hara’s circle. O’Hara’s friend Bill Berkson said, “If you were one of Frank’s friends, you were given a grand permission to be direct and interesting, to be full of ideas and feelings.” That’s okay. I have plenty of people around me who love me and care for me and have my best interests in mind. Who needs Frank O’Hara? Yesterday, for instance, Barbara had me making a brick border in the garden, and after a while she brought me some gloves and said, "Don't hurt your little soft poet hands." That night I said to Barbara, do you think of me as a big dumb idiot or a god among mortals, and she said, “I think of you as a big dumb god among mortals,” which I – yeah, okay, I’ll take it. Bring Me My Arrows of Desire
Barbara tells me that her friend asked her sister― her friend’s sister—what she wanted for Christmas, and the sister told her, the friend, that she wanted some leg warmers, and when I say, “So?” Barbara says, “Isn’t that the kind of thing you buy for yourself?” But what if leg warmers are the thing you want more than anything else, more than love, a roof over your head, a hot meal? Barbara is telling me this as we are having lunch, and just then a beautiful young woman bangs down her tray next to ours, and the beautiful woman is not only beautiful but also dressed to the nines, though she is tearing into her food as though she’s wearing a pair of pajama pants and a faded t-shirt from some band that only recorded one album and succumbed to drug addiction and mismanagement and hasn’t been heard from since, and Barbara says, “There’s something wonderful about watching a pretty woman eat her lunch like a wolf,” which she, the woman, is, just shoveling it in, smearing a bit of mayo off her face or blouse and scowling as she dabs at it. What else does the pretty woman want? Romance, I’m so sure, or at least sex. We all want sex. Old people do. Priests, nuns . . . take a look at Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child, and you’ll probably agree with me that your mom and my mom and Jesus’s mom are not the same mom. No, in this painting there’s a Malibu yumminess to Jesus’s blonde and blue-eyed mammy whose babeliness is totally at odds with what you might assume would be the appearance of your average first-century Nazarene hottie, her teeth dark or missing, her skin tattered by incessant Old Testament insect infestations and scalding desert winds. “That’d be Lucrezia Buti,” says Barbara, “a novice of the order of St. Mary Magdalene whom Filippo abducted and became not only the model for his many madonnas but also a madonna herself, since she was also the mother of Filippo Lippi’s son Filippino Lippi, subsequently a famous painter in his own right,” and I say, “Dang,” and Barbara says, “Well, if you’d had a nun like her in your convent, what would you have done?” Barbara took a lot of art history classes. Anyway, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it—I mean, doesn’t it? For years we wander lonely as a cloud, and then we meet someone we love, and we make all these compromises so we can live with them till death do us part and build a life together, sure, but also have all this fabulous sex with just this one beautiful person instead of poisoning ourselves in these smoky bars and going through one scummy hookup after another and all the emotional chaos that goes with that as well as any number of sexually transmitted diseases, including several the urologists haven’t even heard of, and we now have this one absolutely adorable darling we can have sex with almost any time, it seems, and then the kids start coming along, which means sleeplessness and late-night trips to the ER and early-morning alarms to get to day care on time and then soccer and jiu jitsu and pointillism class and chess camp and extra hours at the office to pay for the college tuition that looms over a bank account that’s going to start spraying dollars like a fire hydrant with the cap unscrewed once Tyler and Hope and Bethany enroll at the private universities their friends are going to instead of the community college whose brochures you’ve left on the dining room table and kitchen counter and front seats of the late-model cars they had to have because their friends have them also, and, well, that’s the way it goes again. Some religions say sex is terrible, just awful, whereas others say it is the highest expression of the divine. The Khajuraho temple climax in India is bedizened with sculptures of women and men having sex that can only be described as gymnastic. The women are broad-hipped and high-breasted, and they twist their generously contoured and bejewelled bodies into the most impossible positions, whereas the men look as though they’re just happy to be there. And you may snicker all you like, but some scholars of Hinduism say a woman and a man in close embrace symbolize a reunion of that which never should have been put asunder in the first place. When B. B. King was a little boy in Itta Bena, Mississippi, he made money by playing the guitar and singing on street corners, and when he sang gospel songs, people gathered around and clapped, but nobody gave him any money, so he kept singing the same songs, but every time he got to the words “my Lord,” he sang “my baby” instead, and from then on, passersby paid him. Another entertainer, Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague, said there’s only a thin line between “I need you, Jesus” and “I need you, baby.” Okay, yeah, but the line’s not even that thin. Astrology for Beginners
I’m talking to this woman I just met at a party that takes place on the last night of the convention I go to every year, and she’s witty and spirited and rather pretty and seems to be taking a genuine interest in the me who is standing a little taller than usual and trying to pull in his stomach without getting that look on his face that suggests he is either having a stroke or trying to pull in his stomach when suddenly she says, “What’s your sign?” and as I fumble for the answer, her face falls, because if it takes that long for me to remember, that means I don’t believe. “Oh, well. Astrology’s not an exact science,” she says, but what is? Nothing is as it seems at first glance: to get to the city where the convention is held, I had to fly from another city two days earlier, and as I wait for my connecting flight in the Atlanta airport, I and the other people in our departure lounge laugh out loud and congratulate ourselves silently because the members of a rock band whose name I won’t mention have set up camp in the departure lounge across the way, and the guys are as drunk as wheelbarrows, and the girls who are with them vie for the guys’ attention by teetering across the backs of the seats like tightrope walkers and lifting their shirts over their heads and whooping like banshees and occasionally falling into the lap of a band member or prosperous-looking businessman or, in one instance, of a young mommy trying to keep her toddler from being flattened and who, when one of these damsels lands on her, cries, “Get off me, you skank!” which results in the others yelling, “Woooo, skank, skank!” and getting even drunker, and that’s when the agent manning the desk in our departure lounge says, “Ladies and gentlemen, Delta flight 837 to Washington is about to board,” at which news the musicians, the roadies, and the groupies, as well as a dozen other hangers-on whose precise roles are unclear yet whose level of intoxication matches and, in some cases, exceeds those of their comrades, rise and exit their departure lounge and stagger over to ours because they’d simply been idling away the afternoon in the other lounge and are now ready to fly to Washington with us. What you see is what you get, except when it isn’t. In 1973, Dr. David Rosenhan trained eight pseudopatients to feign auditory hallucinations and seek entrance to mental hospitals. All were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, but after they were admitted, the pseudopatients told staff that they felt fine and no longer heard voices in their head, and all were eventually discharged, but only after they (1) admitted they were crazy, (2) took the antispsychotic drugs they were given, and (3) remained hospitalized for between seven and 52 days, the average stay being 19. When I get home from my trip, I do laundry and make a mental note to pack better next time and warm a bowl of soup as I prepare the class I’m going to teach the next day, but I feel bad because I had disappointed the woman who’d asked me what my sign was, so I google “astrology” to find out more about it, and the first thing I learn is that there is no unity among the faithful, that there are different types of astrology and that the adherents to one type are as insulted by and opposed to the other types as the Guelphs were to the Ghibellines, the Catholics to the Huguenots, the Capulets to the Montagues, the Hatfields to the McCoys. Western astrology is wrong, say devotees of sidereal, tropical, and vedic astrology, as wrong as sidereal, tropical, and vedic astrology are to the disciples of the western variety and so forth and so on, all the way out to the far reaches of the known galaxy as well as the unknown ones, presuming such galaxies exist. And actually, the second phase of the Rosenhan experiment is even better than the first, because when Dr. Rosenhan published his research, a hospital administrator challenged him to send as many pseudopatients as he liked, confident that his staff could tell the difference between genuinely disturbed people and actors. Rosenhan agreed, and of the 250 patients who presented themselves to this hospital over the next few weeks, the staff identified 41 as pseudopatients. Okay, guess how many pseudopatients Rosenhan had sent. Drum roll, please! That’s right: none. Who knew there were so many astrologies. The one thing that’s certain is that the sun comes up at roughly the same time every morning and sets the same way at night, as it was doing when we boarded Delta flight 837, the band folk and the squares alike, and the band folk ordered all the liquor to which they were entitled and browbeat the flight attendants for more, none of which they actually drank. Instead, they did what you and I do as the terror of liftoff abates, and the plane attains cruising altitude, and the engines thrum soothingly beneath us, and the clouds outside our little window go from white to gray to a moonlit silver, and the stars come out to work their magic on us or not, as the case may be: vocalists and keyboard players and hangers-on alike, they all fell fast asleep. Good night, skank. I’m no skank, you’re the skank. I know you are, but what am I? Good night, everyone. Good night. |
David Kirby’s latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information (LSU Press, 2021) and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them (Flip Learning, 2021). He teaches at Florida State University.
Lisa Lewis
The Governor of Oklahoma Signs SB 612
The women of the panhandle are weaving god’s eyes of fatherless mohair
to dangle above their beanpots. They don’t know a hymn
to sing into them for their unwanted children, and the wagon’s
wheels are broken beneath the wooden box, there is no escape.
I was in an artificial room with women when the governor signed
the document in a real room with men. There were six women
too, I don’t want to look up their names. There were smiles and poses.
There were claims of widespread support. In the artificial room
a woman described a woman’s bitter jokes as “playful.”
It meant she wanted her to stay safe. We were blowing soap bubbles
like accordions, like applause, like the rough skin on our elbows
we try to salve away. I don’t know if the other women had heard
the news because it wasn’t safe to speak of it. Those meetings
might be recorded. What do we think about socks? What do we think
about suicidal fathers? What do we think about where we go next?
Already I have heard myself whirring as if I screamed into fan blades.
I sound like an ostrich, I sound like a dove, I sound like a dead canary.
The woman who says “playful” when she means “cruel” is pregnant,
so she might be safe, and I am old, so I might be safe, and I might be
lying because we don’t know what safety is or we would’ve named it
and fought for it. There isn’t even a sign on a dirt road. There isn’t even
the thinnest of pamphlets, a folded sheet of lined paper. There isn’t
a code scrawled on skin with a ballpoint pen. There is no ink
and there are no ears, just heads shaped like bullets or basketballs.
When I say I am beside myself, I see the unmistakable shape of me
next to me, holding on. We are thinking about how we got here,
to this artificial room in this real country where we do not belong,
the medical procedures, the professionalism, the joy of starting over.
We are afraid to say any words that get too close to the fact of lives
we thought we had. When I ask about dark humor, I get startled looks.
This isn’t funny, this is the last day, all the answers have dried up
under the rocks, and we are the rocks. I want to pack my bags,
but when I open the closet door, they’re already gone, like an odor
and I am suddenly one of the damaged ones, whose brain lost its bulbs
for sensing, and it’s legal now for me to speak of nothing, only
a particular nothing, there long ago when I didn’t want it to be.
The women of the panhandle are weaving god’s eyes of fatherless mohair
to dangle above their beanpots. They don’t know a hymn
to sing into them for their unwanted children, and the wagon’s
wheels are broken beneath the wooden box, there is no escape.
I was in an artificial room with women when the governor signed
the document in a real room with men. There were six women
too, I don’t want to look up their names. There were smiles and poses.
There were claims of widespread support. In the artificial room
a woman described a woman’s bitter jokes as “playful.”
It meant she wanted her to stay safe. We were blowing soap bubbles
like accordions, like applause, like the rough skin on our elbows
we try to salve away. I don’t know if the other women had heard
the news because it wasn’t safe to speak of it. Those meetings
might be recorded. What do we think about socks? What do we think
about suicidal fathers? What do we think about where we go next?
Already I have heard myself whirring as if I screamed into fan blades.
I sound like an ostrich, I sound like a dove, I sound like a dead canary.
The woman who says “playful” when she means “cruel” is pregnant,
so she might be safe, and I am old, so I might be safe, and I might be
lying because we don’t know what safety is or we would’ve named it
and fought for it. There isn’t even a sign on a dirt road. There isn’t even
the thinnest of pamphlets, a folded sheet of lined paper. There isn’t
a code scrawled on skin with a ballpoint pen. There is no ink
and there are no ears, just heads shaped like bullets or basketballs.
When I say I am beside myself, I see the unmistakable shape of me
next to me, holding on. We are thinking about how we got here,
to this artificial room in this real country where we do not belong,
the medical procedures, the professionalism, the joy of starting over.
We are afraid to say any words that get too close to the fact of lives
we thought we had. When I ask about dark humor, I get startled looks.
This isn’t funny, this is the last day, all the answers have dried up
under the rocks, and we are the rocks. I want to pack my bags,
but when I open the closet door, they’re already gone, like an odor
and I am suddenly one of the damaged ones, whose brain lost its bulbs
for sensing, and it’s legal now for me to speak of nothing, only
a particular nothing, there long ago when I didn’t want it to be.
Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (The WordWorks, 2018) and a chapbook titled The Borrowing Days (Emrys Press, 2021). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in New Letters, Florida Review, Isele, Posit, Interim, Diode, Agni Online, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor of the Cimarron Review.
Julia Lisella
What I Didn’t Tell You an elegy for C.R. (1961-2021)
All night a rising where rest and dark should be,
the star is in my throat emitting a wakefulness,
the grit of Lenten ash across my body.
In my shadow hands, the ones I bend toward in dream
I hold the thin pages of your letters that surface
your libertarian rants, your greetings, the love
in the cursive of your teenage fingers. Later
our friendship, I’ll call it love, was locked into long FaceBook messages.
They are there and I can read them if I want,
each comment to a post of mine like a sweet wink,
a laughter. You were right not to recognize
how crazy I was for you at 17, as you knew so well
you could not return it. But in your death now
you’ve taken that girl who could not have been who she was
without knowing you. It’s a weird component of death―
the little death it creates in the living, the pieces
missing or misplaced. You were one person, I think,
who liked to imagine me sitting here, writing.
All night a rising where rest and dark should be,
the star is in my throat emitting a wakefulness,
the grit of Lenten ash across my body.
In my shadow hands, the ones I bend toward in dream
I hold the thin pages of your letters that surface
your libertarian rants, your greetings, the love
in the cursive of your teenage fingers. Later
our friendship, I’ll call it love, was locked into long FaceBook messages.
They are there and I can read them if I want,
each comment to a post of mine like a sweet wink,
a laughter. You were right not to recognize
how crazy I was for you at 17, as you knew so well
you could not return it. But in your death now
you’ve taken that girl who could not have been who she was
without knowing you. It’s a weird component of death―
the little death it creates in the living, the pieces
missing or misplaced. You were one person, I think,
who liked to imagine me sitting here, writing.
Julia Lisella’s most recent collection, Our Lively Kingdom, (Bordighera Press 2022), was named a finalist for the Lauria/Frasca poetry prize. Other books include Always (WordTech, 2014), Terrain (WordTech, 2007), and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized, and have or will soon appear in The Common, Ploughshares and Nimrod.
Ellaraine Lockie
|
What Doesn’t Disappear After He Dies
My husband’s hideout room looms before me like another cold front after a storm In the sorting of his personal property a whirlwind of decisions If he were alive this would be betrayal in the room where newscasts outnumbered everything except the sports channels Never-used buttons for movies don’t even know how to respond when I try to watch one as I work I look at my husband’s portrait on the wall for approval but get none No distractions says the portrait I begin with his books Formula thrillers that offer little but escape Whereas I look for literary Yet keep a few of these envisioning some kind of séance lead by John Grisham or James Patterson Instead I can’t stop reading Harlan Coben’s Missing You until bedtime The portrait smiles, a sun escaping the clouds |
I go to work each day in this room that reads like a diary In every sentence I look for suicide words I won’t find Rather Jimmy Buffet and Linda Ronstadt CDs photo albums, old calendars, greeting cards His recipes with ingredients I don’t like crossed out All my postcards from solitary trips His photos from trips without me Freedoms we always gave one another Until Covid turned into the other woman I find the crumpled list of rules from my doctor that would protect my autoimmune impaired body The rules he resented or wouldn’t abide I question the portrait about the meaning of betrayal Rainclouds gathering in its background But I find fair weather and forgiveness in the closet in the form of an unopened postal package written in my husband’s handwriting EL’s Christmas present |
Ellaraine Lockie’s chapbooks have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England and The Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. Ellaraine serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine LILIPOH. She lives in Sunnyvale, CA.
Kristin Marie
LSAT Logic Problem: Abortion Edition
Four women, C, D, E, and F, seek abortion services. The women live in the United States. F and D live in the same state. C, D, and E have other children. F and D are survivors of sexual assault. All are legal adults.
1. If F drives two states away and has to wait twenty-four hours for an appointment, the following must be true:
A. F lives in Mississippi.
B. F should be charged with murder.
C. F will receive written materials on fetal pain.
D. F’s provider must conduct a fetal ultrasound and describe the image to F.
E. Roe v. Wade has been overturned.
2. If C is threatened and stalked outside the clinic, the following must be true:
A. C is a whore and she deserves it.
B. C’s state does not have a protestor-free buffer zone to allow safe entry into the clinic.
C. The Church forbids abortion.
D. First Amendment rights of protestors are always of supreme importance.
E. It’s an ordinary Tuesday outside an abortion clinic.
3. If D is told that abortions are linked an increased risk of breast cancer, the following must be true:
A. D needs to know the implications of her actions.
B. D’s doctor is board-certified.
C. D’s abortion must be performed in a hospital facility with three doctors present.
D. Texas bans abortions before most women know they are pregnant.
E. D lives in one of eight states that disseminate false medical information about the link between breast cancer and abortion.
4. If E cannot afford an abortion, the following must be true:
A. E is lazy and promiscuous.
B. E’s health insurance does not cover abortion.
C. E lives in a state with a seventy-two hour waiting period.
D. E is first and foremost a vessel.
E. We are all fucked.
Kristin Marie is a writer from New England who currently resides in South Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University and her work has appeared in The Seventh Wave, Saw Palm, and Voices from the Attic.
Joseph Mills
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Giblets
As he began to prepare the holiday meal, our father stuck his hand into the turkey and pulled out a plastic bag like a magic trick. Shocked, we asked, “What are those?” “Giblets,” he said, “Your grandma loved them.” The explanation left us no better informed. “Heart, liver, gizzard, neck.” He recited the parts in a horrifying off-hand manner. What were they doing stuffed up there? “Giblets?” we said, tasting the odd word. What did she do with them? we asked. “Made them into gravy or fried them,” our father explained, “She never wasted anything. She reused tin foil. She saved string. Jesus, string! I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew one thing. I didn’t want to be poor.” He held the bag in his hand as if weighing it. We watched to see what he would do, uneasy; sometimes he made us try new things. There was the scrapple incident. And the liver mush. We were relieved when he pitched the bag in the trash, muttering, “giblets,” and yet for some reason that made us uneasy as well. |
Winter Night, Music Lesson
However the fight started―dirty dishes in the sink, something broken, general truculence―at some point, my father decided I needed to practice my clarinet more, and that I do so right then. “This begins now,” he had yelled, citing the costs, the band classes, the holiday concert he surprisingly knew about, the fact he had never heard me play at home. He insisted I get out the case and sheet music, and when I did, we discovered I didn’t have any reeds. This enraged him. “You’ve been pretending at school!” He began calling other families to see who had a child who played an instrument and might have a reed. Finally he left―I thought to go back to the bar―and I fell asleep. Hours later, he returned, clutching, a box of Vandoren B sharps like a pack of cigarettes. God knows where he had gotten them so late, perhaps he had stumbled from house to house until he found someone with a kid in marching band. He shook me awake, and insisted I play. I did. A few notes from “Flight of the Bumblebee.” That’s all I knew, or ever would. It satisfied him, and we both went to bed. I think often of this moment. It has a lesson in it. For someone. About something. |
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published multiple volumes of poetry, including Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance and This Miraculous Turning, which was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Juan Pablo Mobili
To understand your father's sky,
don’t look upward but bring
your gaze down to the soil
that was disturbed,
the small hill rising over
what my father buried
and covered hastily
because dictatorships
are not ideal times
for gardening, and the books
to which he gave their sepulture
had to be hurried from my shelves,
driven in a taxi to the garden
at his father’s house
where he dug the cold earth
with an old shovel that resisted
and then conceded to be a grave
for the texts of revolutionaries,
only months after I left my country,
his company, and the garden
where once my brother and I played,
and only the magnolia roots
lived under the ground.
don’t look upward but bring
your gaze down to the soil
that was disturbed,
the small hill rising over
what my father buried
and covered hastily
because dictatorships
are not ideal times
for gardening, and the books
to which he gave their sepulture
had to be hurried from my shelves,
driven in a taxi to the garden
at his father’s house
where he dug the cold earth
with an old shovel that resisted
and then conceded to be a grave
for the texts of revolutionaries,
only months after I left my country,
his company, and the garden
where once my brother and I played,
and only the magnolia roots
lived under the ground.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Worcester Review, Otoliths (Australia) Impspired (UK), and Bosphorus Review of Books (Turkey) among others. His work received an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net, in 2020 and 2021. His chapbook, Contraband, was published this year.
Tim Moder
An Entry Is A Door In A Notebook Where Sometimes I Lie To Myself
I didn’t look for you, but I wondered, at first, where you went
when I didn’t see you, but I didn’t look for you in the cupboards
unevenly hung between cracked studs. I took the drop ceiling down,
partially-, I tore most of the rug from the kitchen floor. I didn’t want
to move the gas stove or fridge, although I took all the pictures from
it’s perfect white face, and the magnets of the states I drove through
mostly sober mad grin on the highway just the semi’s and I, owl night.
And of course the alphabet letters that spelled out only “why” in
mismatched colors, those are gone. There’s a lone black magnet in the
center of the sly surface saying what I know I’m thinking, waiting for,
I find it upstairs in a dozen books. It ought to be a law, it ought to be the
declaration of our independence. It says the barns burned down now I
can see the moon. And I saw the moon before. I mean I really saw it,
when I looked, which was seldom. Not never, but hardly at all. I painted
all the hallways blue, and not a blue that would have been a compromise,
a blue that makes me think of Mayans, and the virgin Mary, for all three
coats of paint I used the smallest brush that I could find that I could use to
make it mine. I moved the everything that used to be a place and now that
place is somewhere else. The hardwood floors are all the same. The closets
didn’t want to give up, so I let them be, but then I tricked them into folded
shapes which made them want to play and now they’re all away. At first
I wondered where you were. I wondered but I didn’t ask the dust that
covered all the steps that led down to the street.
I didn’t look for you, but I wondered, at first, where you went
when I didn’t see you, but I didn’t look for you in the cupboards
unevenly hung between cracked studs. I took the drop ceiling down,
partially-, I tore most of the rug from the kitchen floor. I didn’t want
to move the gas stove or fridge, although I took all the pictures from
it’s perfect white face, and the magnets of the states I drove through
mostly sober mad grin on the highway just the semi’s and I, owl night.
And of course the alphabet letters that spelled out only “why” in
mismatched colors, those are gone. There’s a lone black magnet in the
center of the sly surface saying what I know I’m thinking, waiting for,
I find it upstairs in a dozen books. It ought to be a law, it ought to be the
declaration of our independence. It says the barns burned down now I
can see the moon. And I saw the moon before. I mean I really saw it,
when I looked, which was seldom. Not never, but hardly at all. I painted
all the hallways blue, and not a blue that would have been a compromise,
a blue that makes me think of Mayans, and the virgin Mary, for all three
coats of paint I used the smallest brush that I could find that I could use to
make it mine. I moved the everything that used to be a place and now that
place is somewhere else. The hardwood floors are all the same. The closets
didn’t want to give up, so I let them be, but then I tricked them into folded
shapes which made them want to play and now they’re all away. At first
I wondered where you were. I wondered but I didn’t ask the dust that
covered all the steps that led down to the street.
Tim Moder is a member of Lake Superior Writers and The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. His poems have appeared in The Sinking City Review, The Coachella Review, Door Is A Jar Magazine, and others. His chapbook All True Heavens came out with Alien Buddha Press in 2022.
Marilyn K. Moody
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We Are Resting
We have wooden cubby holes where we put our kindergarten resting rugs, my blue resting rug with red ties in the corners, my mother made it, we have cardboard red bricks big enough to build a house if you had enough but we don’t, we have windows looking out on the blacktop playground that skins your knees if you fall, if you have on a skirt, blood, if you have on pants, torn pants, blood, we have short desks in three rows, have to leave plenty of room for resting rugs, we rest a lot especially when the teacher is tired, Mrs. Horn’s desk and chair we are not allowed to touch, she has gum and candy in the drawers but doesn’t share with us, she pops in her mouth when she thinks we are resting and not looking but we are always looking and never resting. |
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We Are Resting: Martha
Martha is on the resting rug next to me. She’s flopped on her stomach and her frilly underpants are showing where her skirt has pulled up. My mother told me to always make sure nobody can see my underpants, but Martha doesn’t care. I hear a sucking kind of noise as she takes out her retainer and plays with it, I didn’t know what a retainer was or why anyone would have a retainer, but Mrs. Horn said nevermind, Martha has a retainer because she is rich, and you don’t have a retainer because you aren’t. Mrs. Horn doesn’t really like Martha and I don’t either because she is bossy, today she is trying to talk to me and I don’t want to talk so I don’t and then Mrs. Horn is standing over Martha with a ping-pong paddle and she spanks her hard on her frilly underpants and tells her maybe next time she will be quiet and let the rest of us rest. I feel a little sorry for Martha, but remember she is rich and doesn’t need me to feel sorry for her. That’s what my dad says about rich people, they don’t feel sorry for us, and we don’t need to feel sorry for them. |
Marilyn K. Moody is a poet from the Denver area. She was selected for the 2021–2022 class of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective. She has published work in Rise: An Anthology of Change, Progenitor Art & Literary Journal, and Chiaroscuro: An Anthology of Virtue & Vice.
Mary B. Moore
Mother Worry
“An infernal angel passed in flight
just now along the avenue
in a crush of thugs....”
—Eugenio Montale, “The Hitler Spring”
Can I exercise-exorcise
mother worry, father doubt
walking the April park?
A mile away, I-64’s
never exhausted tires
whish, thud, whish, bearing goods―
rakes, carburetors, doll-
babies―and whole
families driving, still able
to wish themselves elsewhere.
Thugs shot songbirds in the woods
last week, and torches
marched not long ago―
pitch, spit and tar-hiss,
boot thump, the winged
maple seeds―samara, they’re called―
crunched like bird bone
underfoot. The men carried
the confederacy’s skewed
red-white-blue
and Hitler’s four-winged
god symbol.
We’re thugless today.
The air is bearing a crowd
of pollen, of futures.
Enlarged in photos,
they’re spheres, ovoids,
porous and spiky,
some like miniature
land mines. They’ll explode
into what I don’t know:
my daughter’s bouts of lupus,
my ornery heart tripped up,
torch-light’s jump dance.
Don’t worry, be happy,
says a dead man in my head.
There’s dogwood, the crucify-tree
in the legend, blossoming.
Touch the buds, and they nod,
clutches of green buckshot
centered in the blood-stained
sepals, as if flourish
were all, or kill. Wary
aims forward too,
darker than wish. Portent
flowers everywhere. Aware
is its mother, thud its bad god.
“An infernal angel passed in flight
just now along the avenue
in a crush of thugs....”
—Eugenio Montale, “The Hitler Spring”
Can I exercise-exorcise
mother worry, father doubt
walking the April park?
A mile away, I-64’s
never exhausted tires
whish, thud, whish, bearing goods―
rakes, carburetors, doll-
babies―and whole
families driving, still able
to wish themselves elsewhere.
Thugs shot songbirds in the woods
last week, and torches
marched not long ago―
pitch, spit and tar-hiss,
boot thump, the winged
maple seeds―samara, they’re called―
crunched like bird bone
underfoot. The men carried
the confederacy’s skewed
red-white-blue
and Hitler’s four-winged
god symbol.
We’re thugless today.
The air is bearing a crowd
of pollen, of futures.
Enlarged in photos,
they’re spheres, ovoids,
porous and spiky,
some like miniature
land mines. They’ll explode
into what I don’t know:
my daughter’s bouts of lupus,
my ornery heart tripped up,
torch-light’s jump dance.
Don’t worry, be happy,
says a dead man in my head.
There’s dogwood, the crucify-tree
in the legend, blossoming.
Touch the buds, and they nod,
clutches of green buckshot
centered in the blood-stained
sepals, as if flourish
were all, or kill. Wary
aims forward too,
darker than wish. Portent
flowers everywhere. Aware
is its mother, thud its bad god.
Mary B. Moore is a native Californian who lives in Huntington, WV where she was a professor at Marshall U. Her five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books, 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award; and The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, and the chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Her poems have appeared lately in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, NELLE, Terrain, and more.
Bee Morris
Citizen Permutation
I am not usually a dizzy man. I have dodged the nights that urge me
not to leave with my life. I am the son of a son and a daughter. I am
awash in some desire of novice appeal. I have noted the solid craft of
my windshield wipers. Retribution snakes around me like a forgone
disease. There is a knot of apricots fraying in my skull. I know that I
am neither normal nor extraordinary. I live on the contrary side of town.
I have smoothed out my body under bossa nova sunlight. I have wandered
down soggy paper trails in the rain. I believe that every border should be
replaced by a big sloppy kiss. My chopped hair is shaped into a monument.
I have aired human sacrifice on television. I have wound a procession of
rope around willing lovers. I have viewed the profile of my body through
the eyes of a satellite self. I have signed my own petition to consider a
new set of primary colors. Spontaneity cannot be overstated, but nothing
is really momentous anymore. My heart is a hidden beach in central
Arkansas. I have ripped away the perforated part of my soul.
I am not usually a dizzy man. I have dodged the nights that urge me
not to leave with my life. I am the son of a son and a daughter. I am
awash in some desire of novice appeal. I have noted the solid craft of
my windshield wipers. Retribution snakes around me like a forgone
disease. There is a knot of apricots fraying in my skull. I know that I
am neither normal nor extraordinary. I live on the contrary side of town.
I have smoothed out my body under bossa nova sunlight. I have wandered
down soggy paper trails in the rain. I believe that every border should be
replaced by a big sloppy kiss. My chopped hair is shaped into a monument.
I have aired human sacrifice on television. I have wound a procession of
rope around willing lovers. I have viewed the profile of my body through
the eyes of a satellite self. I have signed my own petition to consider a
new set of primary colors. Spontaneity cannot be overstated, but nothing
is really momentous anymore. My heart is a hidden beach in central
Arkansas. I have ripped away the perforated part of my soul.
| citizen_permutation.bee_morris.pdf |
Bee Morris is the author of Alive on Planet Earth, released as part of Ghost City Press's 2021 Summer Series. Their recent work appears or is forthcoming in Wax Nine, Poet Lore, Underblong, Hobart, and elsewhere. Bee also runs the newsletter Blackout Fascinations: blackout.substack.com
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo
A Threnody for an Unknown Body by the Sea
You don't know what it means to die in a place not the place of your clothes,
Like Ibadan mortuary, you would only recognize people by their last clothes,
Bodies ragged by putrefiers, eyeballs becoming cloud, slim boys
Becoming a father of obesity, a teacher of mine becomes my nightmare for months,
Bodies without tags, in a tray were the heads of infant boys, boys
Who ran away from chaos to meet their doom in a garbage called mortuary.
At Lampedusa, bodies, torsos bitten by ruin to be examined at a morgue,
No one would come looking for them, the doctors in a theatre of horrors,
Bodies as spring of worms would spoil their rest at night too, tomorrow
Their bodies would be rushed into a kind of unmarked grave,
For record purposes, here is the grave of a hundred and three
Transgressors found with seven dairies, numerous dolls,
Ladies trinkets, plastic bottles, torn life buoys, doorless mouths stocked with languages of silence,
Black roses self-swimming to Europe, dead flotillas, withered hyacinths at the coast of Lampedusa.
You don't know what it means to die in a place not the place of your clothes,
Like Ibadan mortuary, you would only recognize people by their last clothes,
Bodies ragged by putrefiers, eyeballs becoming cloud, slim boys
Becoming a father of obesity, a teacher of mine becomes my nightmare for months,
Bodies without tags, in a tray were the heads of infant boys, boys
Who ran away from chaos to meet their doom in a garbage called mortuary.
At Lampedusa, bodies, torsos bitten by ruin to be examined at a morgue,
No one would come looking for them, the doctors in a theatre of horrors,
Bodies as spring of worms would spoil their rest at night too, tomorrow
Their bodies would be rushed into a kind of unmarked grave,
For record purposes, here is the grave of a hundred and three
Transgressors found with seven dairies, numerous dolls,
Ladies trinkets, plastic bottles, torn life buoys, doorless mouths stocked with languages of silence,
Black roses self-swimming to Europe, dead flotillas, withered hyacinths at the coast of Lampedusa.
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet and the author of a micro-chapbook; Sidiratul Muntaha (Ghost City Press, 2022). His work has been published or forthcoming at Ambit Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Obsidian; Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Oxford Review of Books, Stand Magazine, Roanoke Review, Louisiana Literature, Olongo Africa, The Citron Review, The Night Heron Barks Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Alexander Pérez
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dress-up
maybe lipstick will help. acid green, electric blue, jazzberry jam. not like my mother in her coffin. here i am, spanish, with a big nose, short, thinning black kinky hair. i always leave candy apple red smears on my teeth. i like the taste of wax lips. she did not like her husband’s foul-mouthed kisses. he called her fat and dumb. me I was a sissy boy. there were no fags in his louis l’amour. who choose pale dogwood for my mother’s thin lips? i never caught her in lipstick. she never caught me. i crawled up on the bathroom sink applied carefully with markers cotton candy, flamingo, grapefruit, rosy, sweet, vibrant pink. smacked my lips. then scrubbed. my mother laid out in an open coffin. lips prim, mocking me, mocking her. the stiff body did not fill the untailored funeral gown. a victorian doll on display. i am trying new colors: midnight purple, earthy red. the woman she loved, the woman she was refused to be seen. so i ask why an open casket? her eyes sunk back in her head. see my father looking down on her, leaning in for a kiss? if i were there, i would have turned away. but i did not go. would not go. now what would i choose? charcoal black. |
after the flood
i don’t wish i was an immortal jellyfish. soon we all will be eternal. i rather play dead. what’s the forecast for today? will these summer staypuff clouds soon dissolve into rain? my translucent mother died in the flood. entrapped in a network of blood-blue veins. i waited outside in the rescue boat to see if our house would spit her out. i can only imagine she propelled herself up to the watery surface of heaven. i caught her rise, a cloud-shaped jellyfish. the ramshackle house has been transformed. a nice family lives there now. i walked by with my grief on a leash. a young, spritely girl swung on a tree limb. a boy played hide-and-seek. a man covered in fish scales that sparkled like the spray of the sprinkler keeping fire at bay searched stealthily. the boy hid in the tree. the girl called, “over here!” the boy flew down like a dove. my grief barked. all three figures disappeared into thin air. i think they were the trinity. after that i muzzled my grief. afraid to scare off another miracle. now it can only moan. clouds stockpile lightening for their earth-age war against the persian blue sky. i wait for the rain to see if my mother comes back down a tentacled medusa. |
Alexander Pérez (he/him/his), gay, Hispanic/Latino, in 2022, has published poetry in Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, New Note Poetry Magazine, Variety Pack Literary Magazine, Literary Yard, The Voices Project, and Whiskey Blot.
Sarath Reddy
What Goes Around
I could not keep pace with grandfather’s strides
through ancestral fields that measure seasons crop to crop,
where as a child he whittled sugar cane, scaled mango trees.
Voices from his past, a swarm of mosquitoes.
He makes the circular journey back
to his childhood home, replastered facade gleaming,
an ancient bougainvillea planted two generations ago
ablaze in fuschia.
His white pancha dampened with afternoon,
hem bearing the stains of morning walks
he sits in prayer, cross-legged chanting mantras,
tossing marigolds onto a portrait of Lakshmi,
slowly rotating a silver plate piled high with bananas and guava
over camphor-fueled flames.
Grandmother pours herself into a grinding stone,
rice churned into batter, spices sputtering in oil,
wipes sweat away with her sari’s fray.
Their lives move like wheels of a bullock cart
a slow wobble in the wake of scooters and lorries
all racing nowhere, spewing clouds of exhaust.
They belong to a different time―
mornings music of bleating sheep, lowing of cows.
With nightfall, Bollywood gyrates on a rabbit-eared television.
They fall asleep on jute cots beneath the blur
of fan blades, long for the slow spin of stars.
I could not keep pace with grandfather’s strides
through ancestral fields that measure seasons crop to crop,
where as a child he whittled sugar cane, scaled mango trees.
Voices from his past, a swarm of mosquitoes.
He makes the circular journey back
to his childhood home, replastered facade gleaming,
an ancient bougainvillea planted two generations ago
ablaze in fuschia.
His white pancha dampened with afternoon,
hem bearing the stains of morning walks
he sits in prayer, cross-legged chanting mantras,
tossing marigolds onto a portrait of Lakshmi,
slowly rotating a silver plate piled high with bananas and guava
over camphor-fueled flames.
Grandmother pours herself into a grinding stone,
rice churned into batter, spices sputtering in oil,
wipes sweat away with her sari’s fray.
Their lives move like wheels of a bullock cart
a slow wobble in the wake of scooters and lorries
all racing nowhere, spewing clouds of exhaust.
They belong to a different time―
mornings music of bleating sheep, lowing of cows.
With nightfall, Bollywood gyrates on a rabbit-eared television.
They fall asleep on jute cots beneath the blur
of fan blades, long for the slow spin of stars.
Sarath Reddy enjoys writing poetry which explores the world beneath the superficial layers of experience, searching for deeper meaning in his experiences as an Indian-American, as a physician, and as a father. Sarath's poetry has been published in JAMA, Off the Coast, and Please see Me. His work is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry East, Hunger Mountain, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. enjoys writing poetry which explores the world beneath the superficial layers of experience, searching for deeper meaning in his experiences as an Indian-American, as a physician, and as a father.
Nicole Santalucia
Lesbianism washed over me like a saint
in the last thirty seconds of childhood. I learned how to swallow in the nick of time. I had a lump of alcoholism stuck in my throat. Literacy was a big red dog tied to a fence, a stack of medical records taller than the tomato plants in my backyard, and the fear of pregnancy followed me into the locker room. I never swore in front of my parents, but I did cook ketamine on baking sheets that were passed down to my mother from her mother and from her mother. From her mother. Moral judgement is missing an ear. It needs a mouth, but that’s missing, too.
The subtext of memory has very few words and no hands. When I unload the dishwasher every morning, I use both hands. I also use both hands with my wife. Two hands to water the plants, to drive my car, to deposit money in the bank. I think in terms of tricks and bingo rituals and VHS tapes and the absence of power and books I never read and the kitchen sink and cooking fresh from the garden and what it means to face danger with confidence and how to cut baby heads of cauliflower at the neck and boil them whole. On beautiful days in September, outside my bedroom window, dozens of blow-up clowns deflate in the middle of the street. This is how I’d describe 5th grade, which is when I learned how to read and pull my pants down in school.
My earliest memory of reading is the same as my earliest memory of lying. The first time I cut my own hair and rebalanced my father’s checkbook and jumped off the curb of every street corner in town and shaved with shaving cream and imitated a rotisserie chicken and held my breath the longest without blinking. It’s easy to remember what it was like to be ten when I had a crush on Mary Tyler Moore and my 5th grade gym teacher and my softball coach and Becky and Mary and the science teacher, Ms. P, and the girl who sat in front of me in English, and when she’d stand to say the pledge of allegiance, use her fingertips to pick her underpants then place her palm on her chest. I wanted to get inside books that deleted women and wave my hands above my head to get her attention.
The refrigerator door in my childhood kitchen didn’t close all the way and the phone cord curled around my torso, tied my hands behind my back and my feet to—My mother, who was always cooking a chicken. I remember. My grandmother’s red lipstick. She drank herself to death. I sucked a dozen beer cans in the back seat of a 1989 Chrysler. We had a picnic in the graveyard. It was a beautiful day. Clouds dappled with pink and orange light. And the breeze just right. And the ragweed in bloom.
I think I think we both have to die, I think. The problem with this sentence is the thinking. And the timing is terribly off. I haven’t even mentioned you. You, my brother. You, shame. You, washing dishes. You, the birds in my backyard. You, the worm. the tomato. the suffering. Your square head and missing teeth are connected to my guilt bone. My guilt bone is connected to my courage bone and tailbone and hip and ribs and shoulder and jaw. And this is my voice stuck in my cheekbone and my nerve. And my whole face is pink fruit fermenting on the stem about to fall.
in the last thirty seconds of childhood. I learned how to swallow in the nick of time. I had a lump of alcoholism stuck in my throat. Literacy was a big red dog tied to a fence, a stack of medical records taller than the tomato plants in my backyard, and the fear of pregnancy followed me into the locker room. I never swore in front of my parents, but I did cook ketamine on baking sheets that were passed down to my mother from her mother and from her mother. From her mother. Moral judgement is missing an ear. It needs a mouth, but that’s missing, too.
The subtext of memory has very few words and no hands. When I unload the dishwasher every morning, I use both hands. I also use both hands with my wife. Two hands to water the plants, to drive my car, to deposit money in the bank. I think in terms of tricks and bingo rituals and VHS tapes and the absence of power and books I never read and the kitchen sink and cooking fresh from the garden and what it means to face danger with confidence and how to cut baby heads of cauliflower at the neck and boil them whole. On beautiful days in September, outside my bedroom window, dozens of blow-up clowns deflate in the middle of the street. This is how I’d describe 5th grade, which is when I learned how to read and pull my pants down in school.
My earliest memory of reading is the same as my earliest memory of lying. The first time I cut my own hair and rebalanced my father’s checkbook and jumped off the curb of every street corner in town and shaved with shaving cream and imitated a rotisserie chicken and held my breath the longest without blinking. It’s easy to remember what it was like to be ten when I had a crush on Mary Tyler Moore and my 5th grade gym teacher and my softball coach and Becky and Mary and the science teacher, Ms. P, and the girl who sat in front of me in English, and when she’d stand to say the pledge of allegiance, use her fingertips to pick her underpants then place her palm on her chest. I wanted to get inside books that deleted women and wave my hands above my head to get her attention.
The refrigerator door in my childhood kitchen didn’t close all the way and the phone cord curled around my torso, tied my hands behind my back and my feet to—My mother, who was always cooking a chicken. I remember. My grandmother’s red lipstick. She drank herself to death. I sucked a dozen beer cans in the back seat of a 1989 Chrysler. We had a picnic in the graveyard. It was a beautiful day. Clouds dappled with pink and orange light. And the breeze just right. And the ragweed in bloom.
I think I think we both have to die, I think. The problem with this sentence is the thinking. And the timing is terribly off. I haven’t even mentioned you. You, my brother. You, shame. You, washing dishes. You, the birds in my backyard. You, the worm. the tomato. the suffering. Your square head and missing teeth are connected to my guilt bone. My guilt bone is connected to my courage bone and tailbone and hip and ribs and shoulder and jaw. And this is my voice stuck in my cheekbone and my nerve. And my whole face is pink fruit fermenting on the stem about to fall.
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Diode, as well as other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
Lynne Schmidt
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My Body As A Gun
If my vagina was the cold metallic barrel, my cervix the muzzle, my uterus the magazine well, ovaries as bullets, would you trust me to know when to pull the trigger? What if I forgot the safety? What if there were only so many bullets? What would it take for you to see me as a responsible gun owner? |
The Paperwork Says Sometimes You Don't Heal
After minutes of searching in a cave to ensure the rockslide has safely closed again, she withdraws her speculum, and gently says, You are not pregnant anymore. I can hear the effort she has taken in the precise delivery of these words the amount of times she has made this statement. Her voice echoes into the abyss of the office. The abyss of my body. In the silence, I am reminded, I am supposed to say something back. But it is the first time in nine weeks salvation doesn’t taste like gun powder. |
Lynne Schmidt was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, the winner of the 2021 TPQ Chapbook Contest, & 2020 New Women's Voices Contest. Lynne is the author of SexyTime (TPQ 2022), Dead Dog Poems (FLP, 2021), Gravity (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2019), and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West, 2020). In 2012 they started the project AbortionChat (@AbortionChat) which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers her pack of dogs and one cat to humans.
Tyler Robert Sheldon
At the Donut Shop
as I wait for breakfast, one cashier side-eyes the other,
tells her that her brother’s coming. The other groans.
He’s coming here? She grabs a bear claw, bags it,
grabs another. No, not here, the first one says,
through gritted teeth. But I can’t let him in my house.
He can just lay his head down somewhere else.
The other cashier rings me up. You have a brother?
No, not anymore, I tell her. Good, she says.
Their talk continues as I leave.
as I wait for breakfast, one cashier side-eyes the other,
tells her that her brother’s coming. The other groans.
He’s coming here? She grabs a bear claw, bags it,
grabs another. No, not here, the first one says,
through gritted teeth. But I can’t let him in my house.
He can just lay his head down somewhere else.
The other cashier rings me up. You have a brother?
No, not anymore, I tell her. Good, she says.
Their talk continues as I leave.
Tyler Robert Sheldon’s six poetry collections include When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He is editor-in-chief of Mocking Heart Review, and his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Sheldon earned his MFA at McNeese State University. He lives in Baton Rouge.
Gail Thomas
Giving Up the Keys
Until
he was almost blind, my father wouldn’t do it.
Driving home at night, he pulled over
for who knows how long, my mother said,
until
he could see. She, who
peppered the house with Post-It notes,
was losing her memory, but she cued
him from the passenger seat
when the light changed.
Until
we haggled for months, he asked
her to drive, his impatient keys
cradled in a glass bowl.
Until
the day in the driveway when she
froze―mascaraed eyes focused
on the strangeness of dials and tiny letters.
She whispered, I don’t remember
how to start the car. He told me
over the phone, It’s all right,
she doesn’t go very far.
That night I dreamt of my young lover
who kept driving her red truck
after brain surgery,
until
a seizure
propelled the truck into a yellow crosswalk.
She killed a man in a blue shirt, and
her dog’s back legs were paralyzed.
From 300 miles away I drove
to ask their doctor to file a report,
avert a tragedy. No luck.
Until
I buried my mother’s keys in my bag.
At home I imagined
how she would scour each room
until
she forgot what she was looking for.
Until
he was almost blind, my father wouldn’t do it.
Driving home at night, he pulled over
for who knows how long, my mother said,
until
he could see. She, who
peppered the house with Post-It notes,
was losing her memory, but she cued
him from the passenger seat
when the light changed.
Until
we haggled for months, he asked
her to drive, his impatient keys
cradled in a glass bowl.
Until
the day in the driveway when she
froze―mascaraed eyes focused
on the strangeness of dials and tiny letters.
She whispered, I don’t remember
how to start the car. He told me
over the phone, It’s all right,
she doesn’t go very far.
That night I dreamt of my young lover
who kept driving her red truck
after brain surgery,
until
a seizure
propelled the truck into a yellow crosswalk.
She killed a man in a blue shirt, and
her dog’s back legs were paralyzed.
From 300 miles away I drove
to ask their doctor to file a report,
avert a tragedy. No luck.
Until
I buried my mother’s keys in my bag.
At home I imagined
how she would scour each room
until
she forgot what she was looking for.
Gail Thomas’ books are Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press, Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read. ”New books forthcoming in the fall are Trail of Roots, the A.V. Christie winner from Seven Kitchens Press and Leaving Paradise from Human Error Publishing.
http://www.gailthomaspoet.com/
http://www.gailthomaspoet.com/
Monica Lee Weatherly
MY DADDY AND THE ABATTOIR
On the side of the river
along the railroad tracks
my daddy worked in a slaughter house
The Bottoms housed
carcasses of hog, and sheep, and cow,
some of which my daddy had cut from
throat to bottom
I was four when my mother took me there
to bring my daddy lunch
He appeared from behind the doors of a concrete building
covered in the blood of the once living
like it was normal to be cloaked in the remains of the dead
I stood in horror at the sight of it all, but
my daddy was immune
probably because he was born in Mississippi in 1941,
the same year as Emmett
He knew what an open casket of youth and flesh
and terror and murder looked like already,
so a hog’s sorrowful face in a packed train
waiting to be unloaded and subject to a violent death
was nothing to gaze upon day in and day out
Bodies on hooks for someone’s pleasure
Liquid pools of life at his feet
The slaughter house was as familiar to my father as
the killings of Freedom Summer
It felt like Mississippi
It felt like home
On the side of the river
along the railroad tracks
my daddy worked in a slaughter house
The Bottoms housed
carcasses of hog, and sheep, and cow,
some of which my daddy had cut from
throat to bottom
I was four when my mother took me there
to bring my daddy lunch
He appeared from behind the doors of a concrete building
covered in the blood of the once living
like it was normal to be cloaked in the remains of the dead
I stood in horror at the sight of it all, but
my daddy was immune
probably because he was born in Mississippi in 1941,
the same year as Emmett
He knew what an open casket of youth and flesh
and terror and murder looked like already,
so a hog’s sorrowful face in a packed train
waiting to be unloaded and subject to a violent death
was nothing to gaze upon day in and day out
Bodies on hooks for someone’s pleasure
Liquid pools of life at his feet
The slaughter house was as familiar to my father as
the killings of Freedom Summer
It felt like Mississippi
It felt like home
Monica Lee Weatherly is a poet, writer, and Professor of English at Georgia State University’s, Perimeter College. She is the 2021 winner of the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Tulane Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Nzuri Journal, Merge Literary Magazine, Obsidian, and Auburn Avenue, a biannual publication showcasing the intellectual and creative voices of people of color. She is a member of the Georgia Writers Association and is listed in the Georgia Writers Registry. Her writing often focuses on the culture and experiences of women of color in the Americas. She lives and writes in Georgia.