The place for Epoems

RULES

1. NO PAGE BREAKS unless the poem jumps to a second or third page in which case it must adhere to the rules. 2. NO STANZA BREAKS. 3. There MUST BE 17 LINES ABOVE THE MIDDLE LINE AND 17 LINES BELOW IT.  (DO NOT COUNT THE MIDDLE LINE). 4. DO NOT USE QUOTATION MARKS, QUESTION MARKS OR ITALICS. ​

Lenny DellaRocca, Editor

Witchery is published occasionally throughout the year and accepts only 10 poems per  issue. This page is best viewed on a desktop computer.  

​The Epoem Is a Door

The page becomes a canvas. ​

By Richard Ryal


    When Vikings built boats that could successfully cross the irritable Atlantic and other unruly seas, they made them with no greater technology than effective hand tools. In the age of AI, it’s good to remember the enduring eloquence of simplicity and modest strategies. Very much for writers, very much in poetry. 
    The Epoem, invented and defined by Lenny DellaRocca, is a relatively new and articulate form for poems. Strict yet simple in structure, it’s generous to inventive poets. Its structure promotes tension and release, visual as well as verbal authority, and a chance to expand the options for content. Sounds kinda sexy.
    Another way to say this: Epoems arrive to your eyes not just as words but as events. We see them for what they are before we can read them, which isn’t true of many formal poetic structures. Visually, a sonnet is a block much like many other types of poems. But the Epoem’s visual effect asserts its form over the page and our attention with a level of self-worth free verse struggles to achieve. 
    Its specific design—one long line, 17 shorter lines, a second long line, 17 more shorter lines, and ending with a third long line—sits in its precise space on the page. It doesn’t look like a poem we can drift with. It’s here. Now. It’s always in good shape.
    I’m not strongly drawn to established poetic forms because I’m more inspired by wilderness than well-worn fields and manicured lawns. I want a poem to be a door, not just a window. The Epoem threatens this because it forces its content to fit in a rigorous form yet it cultivates the blank space around it as an inescapable element of composition. The page becomes a canvas. 
    If an Epoem arrives in your field of vision, you’ll read it. If an Epoem orders take out on your credit card, you’ll eat what’s served. 
    The Epoem isn’t messianic but It looks glad to be here and aware it lives in the open spaces of a wider world. Its form is distinct and successful as a simple Nordic longboat but its content can be unruly as the sea under a Viking keel.
    Most poems I find today take place inside the walls of the poet’s skulls. That’s fine if that’s what you want but I’m aware I live on a small planet in an unthinkably huge universe and I love when art implies that too. The Epoem sits on the page in time and space, in a world larger than itself. I find this refreshing. As a poet, I find this honest and productively dangerous in dangerous times. 
    The key to a good Epoem is its required shifts between long and short lines. Many poets can’t find line breaks as persuasive as those the Epoem can provoke.
    The Epoem looks to me like an unlocked gate ready to swing outward away from me. A gate that won’t keep the rest of the world out. A gate that won’t keep me in. 
    

FEBRUARY 2025

Xiaoly Li

The Art of Dis-ease


It dwells within, accompanying, yet attacking. 
I’m not immune to the cells 
that disown me 
yet I am 
in this skin  
jittering.
I’m the discord,
dragging baggage,
disfiguring each cell
with every sigh
every worry,
every apprehension,
every blame,
crushing
the empty spaces
inside and outside 
the cells.
I write poems searching for the shore of easing, 
hoping one will touch 
the farthest hush.
Dis-ease pulls, disperses— 
in my hardest push
over the tide 
of words
that drift
then slip away,
dissolve like mist
disintegrate before 
arriving.
In the silence between thoughts,
in the pause between breaths, 
in spaces we dismiss, 
in echoes that ache,
there lies a moment of escape.
Perhaps poem is the tide itself—rising, easing, disclaiming.


Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry is forthcoming, featured, or anthologized in Crab Orchard Review, Tampa Review, Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, Chautauqua, Rhino, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, three times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net. Her poetry collection manuscript, Between the Sun and the Moon was a finalist in the 2023 Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests and the Word Works' 2024 Washington Prize. Its updated version, Wakening Between Worlds, has been short-listed in 2024 Cinnamon Literature Award Adjudication. Her website: www.xiaolyli.art.

Joan T. Doran    

Flight of Fancy 
    
Enter tomorrow’s rising light expecting nothing but the unexpected:
finding a hidden nest
seeing an aftermath
delving in undergrowth
plucking red radishes
smelling fresh oranges
breathing in spirit worlds
diving for oystershells
finding fresh treasure troves
rafting on waterfalls
touching slick mossy rocks
finding the broken place
searching in cornerstones
sprouting new wishing bones
strengthening back-up bones
climbing with trellis vines
swimming to shore.
But make sure you bring a basket large enough
for bright birds of paradise
green sprouts in crevices
wild-growing strawberries
crunches of spiciness
auras of headiness
whispers of gauziness
baskets of pearls
diamonds of dew
white-water spills
ephemeral masks
something to mend
hidden beginnings
dream-lassoed stars
a ladder of fortitude
strong-clinging tendrils
new worlds at your feet.
What did you expect to happen when you flew free of expectations?

Carla Schwartz

When we get there we’ll turn on the Heat
​
From here, I can only imagine what it's like to ski 
on the
frozen
lake,
crusted
in snow,
the snow-
mobile
tracks
criss-
crossing
the vast
field
of lake
along
with deer
prints
we’ll follow, until we don't,
and step
out to
forge
our own
trail,
follow
the most
direct
route, the
straightest
line
we can,
the sun
shining
down
on us
as we kick and glide our skis to our island home.


Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet and her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. Learn more at  https://carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos. Recent/upcoming curations: Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Great Weather for MEDIA, Contemporary Haibun Online, Door is a Jar, Drifting Sands, Modern Haiku, New Verse Review, North Dakota Quarterly, One Art, Rattle Magazine, Sheila-Na-Gig online, and Spank the Carp. Carla Schwartz received the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.
Based in New England, Schwartz, a retired professor and software technical writer, spends her time outdoors on land and water.

JANUARY 2025

Jimmy Pappas

I am the Messenger of Death for My Mother-in-Law 


I am the messenger of Death for my mother-in-law
when I visit
her only
two weeks
after my
last visit.
She knows
I would not
be there
unless something
was up.
She struggles
in bed
while her
children yell
at her to
calm down.
I slip myself off to the side to avoid eye contact,
but she senses
my presence
and grabs 
the rails 
struggling 
to escape  
and get off
the portable
hospice bed
her children
provided.
Her terror
grows
while she
wonders
if she only
imagined that her son-in-law would ever be such a person. 



Jimmy Pappas won the Rattle Chapbook Contest with Falling off the Empire State Building, won the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story,” and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Rattle for “The Gray Man.” He recently received a Pushcart nomination from Naugatuck River Review and a Touchstone nomination from Shadow Pond Journal. He moderates a weekly, themed Zoom event called “A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends” that encourages audience participation.

---

Witchery 6   May 2024   

Diane Thiel
Arrival in the Inner Ear

When they first spoke to me, I was still small, but somehow already knew 
the language.
It was reassuring 
to know that I 
was not alone.
I was nearly grown 
when they came back 
for me, and I was 
entirely abducted, 
along with all 
my well-formed plans. 
I imagined them 
with gowns, a lyre 
and a scroll 
in their hands. 
Not for them to arrive all at once, along a single line and invisible, residing in the sound.
They hadn’t intended 
to frighten me, but a 
sudden presence 
in the inner ear 
can be alarming. 
Is it abduction if one 
agrees to know?
Years later 
when I had 
almost forgotten 
the language, I watched 
the familiar light 
move across 
the sky, touched 
my ear and listened to the children, who could hear them all the time.




Diane Thiel is the author of twelve books of poetry and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, 
Questions from Outer Space, appeared in 2022 from Red Hen Press and has been awarded the 2023
Independent Press Award. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as two Best American Poetry 
anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2023, The Hudson Review, The Common, The Harvard Review,
Poetry and is reprinted in over 60 major anthologies. Thiel received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from
Brown University. A Regents’ Professor at the University of New Mexico, her awards include PEN, NEA and Fulbright
Awards. Thiel has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia with her young family, working on
​ literary and natural world projects. www.dianethiel.net 

Jen Karetnick
Disregardening

O you punk aphids infesting the Meyer lemon tree,
taking down
the promise
of blooms
to the yellowing
grass sucked dry
by army moths,
where they form one deranged, decaying body of white.
I could read 
this as sign 
language pointing 
the way to poison
but the corpse
tells me: Too late.
​Perfume thieves. Food-stealers. Host-killers. What have you won?


The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024),
Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook What Forges Us Steel:
The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2024). Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry,
Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among
other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wildacres Retreat,
Mother's Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder and
managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah,
​South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.

Mike Jurkovic
The Sideman
They all wanted to fuck me on Jane Street
but didn’t. Such 
was the bane
of the brotherly 
cast. Standing 
witness to women
learning to walk.  
Laura’s verses,
the heart 
of the city.
Carole’s songs,
many trains.
Joni’s voice
black w/worry
and her strange 
open chords.
Dusty, eight weeks 
late. Bonnie, blue. And Linda yearning
yearning for
a guy like me.
But it couldn’t be
a guy like 
me ‘cos who 
else would 
she talk to?
Certainly not
the naked one.
Each kiss
a sweet
thank you.
Each touch
a true sign.
Why complicate 
things? they asked. 
​Heading west with me on Jane Street.

Julie Murphy
Ode to My Left Hand   
My nothing special hand, like everybody else’s hand. 
Must rely 
on the other hand hand. 
No crooked pinky hand 
unlike my mother’s 
and my sister’s. 
My slender fingered, 
callous-tipped hand 
whose little finger 
 struggles to press 
ukulele strings.
My nose picking, 
finger tapping, 
head scratching, 
non-violent, 
non-smoking, stick 
in my pocket hand.
Hand that holds things steady for the knife clenched 
other hand. 
Hand I take 
for granted.
Hand that curls into a fist 
under my chin. 
Hand that wears wedding
band, eight citron-
colored seeds. 
My hand for holding, hail-able, 
available, not busy 
doing something 
else hand. Hand that 
reaches for 
the bedside lamp.
Hand that tucks
between my 
​thighs. Holds the covers close hand. My devil’s hand. 


Julie Murphy’s poems appear in The River Heron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review,
Atlanta Review, Massachusetts Review, CALYX, Catamaran, SWWIM, and How to Love the
World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, among other journals. A psychotherapist and educator,
she developed Embodied Writing™, a mindful approach to creative writing, and taught at Salinas
Valley State Prison. Julie is a member of the Community of Writers as well as The Hive Poetry Collective,
which presents a weekly radio show on KSQD, archived as podcasts, and hosts local readings and
​poetry-related events. Julie lives in Santa Cruz County, CA. Find her website here.

Lenny DellaRocca
For Medicinal Purposes

If we hadn’t been out there doing the mini-search for aesthetics 
nobody would have known about it, the expansion,
all over the horizon 
trying to make something of itself. 
The rain came in as proposed 
and the variety 
troupe practiced stumbling in 
and out of 
the afternoon. The rest of us 
kept our wits 
in our hands in case someone 
needed them later 
at the hanging. The boat poets 
arrived with a pause, 
which some felt was instinctive. 
What was known 
about trifles 
and mechanical things, underground music for example, was scraped 
away with a map. The big clouds 
seemed to sense 
something. Roger took off his funny hat 
and the children 
laughed. The card game went 
on with guests 
slapping their pounds 
and lire with flair. Still, the circumference 
was there. But however 
grateful the gang was for the lemonade 
and French lessons, 
the facts, such as they 
were about the enlarged world, kept us
in our chairs 
waiting for the gendarme. 
On the back acre of the lawn Roger’s
goat chased the parrots into hysteria. It was quite the thing to see.


Lenny DellaRocca is Editor of Witchery, a place for Epoems.

Naomi Bindman
gifts
If no one strangles me in my sleep, if rain does not blind me on a windy road,
if my cracked old furnace 
doesn’t explode, if I’m not 
bit by a spider, hit by a truck, 
don’t trip on a tree root, 
if I am not struck
again, by lightning, don’t 
smash into a cliff, crash 
down a flight of stairs, 
impale myself on a post, 
step on a hoe, don’t choke 
on a cherry, suffocate in 
smoke, drown in a deluge
or desiccate in drought,
if I am not poisoned 
by the air I breathe, 
the food I eat, a jilted 
lover potioning my tea, 
if I am not gunned down teaching in my classroom or marching for our lives,
if wildfire does not ravage 
my home, if disease doesn’t
devastate my body, if 
new Nazis do not knock 
down my door, if nuclear 
war does not annihilate 
us all, if my brain does 
not wither and decay, 
looping thoughts 
like scored vinyl 
rewinding my mind 
to renewed wonder, if my 
broken heart continues 
its relentless rhythm 
refusing to completely 
shatter, I could have
a good thirty years left.
How shall I spend those unearned tokens, those resplendent gems of time?



Naomi Bindman’s articles, essays, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies
and journals including Mothering, So to Speak, Friends Journal, Consilience, Import Sky, Honeyguide, 
First Literary Review—East and Lightwood Magazine. She was a finalist in the 2023 Stephen A. DiBiase
Poetry Contest, and won the 2023 Creative Nonfiction Award from Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.
Naomi has received grants from the Vermont Arts Council, taught memoir-writing workshops funded by the
Vermont Humanities Council, and is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges. Her memoir, You're the Words I Sing, 
​tells the story of Naomi's journey back to life performing the songs of her daughter, Ellen, whose life ended in a car crash at seventeen. 

Ivan Saltz
Bicyclotaur

The earphones straddle my head; my legs straddle the seat of the sleek, 
silver racing bicycle, that glides
like the fingers 
over that guitar
playing on my earbuds.
Warming to the rhythm,
my thumb moves, 
the Shimono shifters
take me to the faster pace
of the music pumping my ears.
My eyes are focused
for any hazard far ahead,
like some eagle, seeking,
rushing into the wind,
I no longer hear the cars,
but feel them on my back 
as they approach.
Do you recall the times we cried, break on through to the other side?
The wind wipes the sweat 
from my brow.
My thighs dance 
and blur like wheel spokes.
The sole of my foot, 
cranking, emerges 
through the sneaker 
and melds into the 
shiny metatarsels
of the bicycle pedal.
Bent arms, plastic palms,
fuse with bone handle bar.    
Hunched over, my body is 
a hollow tube frame.
There is no longer rider.
There is no longer bicycle.
Only road, and Jim Morrison: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ivan Saltz was once upon a time, a South Florida poet. For the last 10 years,
​ though, he has been a complete nomad, roaming the earth without a fixed home. 

Jennifer Greenberg
November First
It's light out now, so the neighbor can cut down his rubber limbs 
from the rafters, cradling the dismembered feet, 
many artificial fibulas of plastic meat. 
I imagine his basement packed full 
of bodies, nameless acquaintances, 
siblings and old lovers hung
from hooks, picked apart and strung
to the light posts with sick pleasure. 
I am still blood thirsty after 
the holiday melts to a pool of red 
sugar on the front lawn, too many spells 
cast over my flesh to forget
how I spent a night in the bed
of a man who feeds on adrenaline;
armed with a bottle of wine, a length of rope.
All crimes can seem innocent
in the early makings. A firm hold 
to the skull, a few light strokes and soon you’re ooze in the palm, 
verdant green in the neon morning. 
On a window sill were many heads 
of tools pointed like steeples, 
silicone barrels dark as rifles in the sun.
I knew he would use them on both of us, 
make holes where one forgets there are
any, stretch me lip to lip with devices. 
My screams were part laughter, 
part relief. Fingers followed a stream 
of dew to the web of his mouth and I 
wanted to believe in the illusion of love, 
my favorite version of hell, letting go
of the ropes and walking home 
to see my neighbor’s decorations
falling like rotten fruit on the lawn. 
He shakes a bloody stump at me 
​but I can’t scream. All I have left in my mouth are teeth.

Joan Leotta
Wondering About Winter
As I child, and even now, I often wonder about winter.
Why, when all
Nature sees winter as
an ending
time to take to bed,
to shed, to prune,
to blanket itself
with snow and sleep.
We try to defy
darkness of shorter days
with holidays
that string candles
along celebratory
tables full of foods
that keep up our
calories as an aid to
our bodies fighting cold,
why we do not see it so?
I wondered then and even now why we split this season
across two years.
Why is winter both and
end and a start of a year
when nature clearly
marks it as an end?
Nature starts her cycle
not with Janus looking
both back at times past
and smiling bravely
at what is to come.
Nature starts her year
with a slow, measured
awakening of all that’s
slept through the cold,
sending forth greenery,
panoply of colors, active
only when sun is truly warm.
So, I wonder, why do we not start the year in spring?

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage telling of food, family, and strong women.
She’s internationally published with essays, poems, short stories, and novels. She's been twice
​ nominated for Pushcart Awards and Best of the Net. In her told as a performer Joan Leotta presents
​folk and CB personal tales and has a new one woman show that brings Louisa May Alcott to audiences.

Sally Naylor
Existential Cento

But I was a philosophy major then, a half-empty twenty
pushing beyond 
feathered ontologies
to where finally,
I thought, if it catches fire, 
it’s real. 
That’s how 
it is with pain.
So why study 
the architecture 
of those who 
make bridges 
out of crippled words?
My lover 
wants to build 
a nest out of my
bones, but you 
live there in dreams of animal rescue.
In your throat.
We could drive 
towards each other 
all night 
& never cross
the distance 
of missing years.
If love had not smiled 
we would never 
have grieved
or lived 
to rise again
nor left our frail shapes 
to die in each 
other’s arms.
Still, on a rainy day
​just knowing you are in the next room saves my life.


Thanks to Rainer Marie Rilke, Campbell McGrath. Paul Zimmer. Galway Kinnell,
Richard Brautigan, Maxine Kumin, Jim Daniels and Tony Hoagland

Witchery 5   January 2024   

Binod Dawadi
बोक्सी

उनी भयानक र डरलाग्दो छिन् उनीसँग जादू छ,
ऊ टाढा बस्छे,
ऊ खतरनाक छे,
साथै भयभीत,
उसको बदल्छ,
सधैं अनुहार,
उनी जस्तै छिन्,
एउटा छाया जो,
साथै आउँछ,
जान्छ ऊ जहाँ आउँछे,
रातमा पनि शिकार,
ऊ सपनामा जान्छे,
ऊ शिकार गर्न आउँदैछे,
तिम्रो रगत पिएर हत्या,
तिमी उसलाई जित्न सक्दैनौ,
शत्रु बन्न तयार
कता जाने डर लाग्छ,
साथै अवचेतनमा उनी भित्र आउँदैछिन्,
राती मन बनाउछ,
कसरी शिकार गर्ने योजना,
साथै कसरी गर्ने,
कष्ट दिने,
अरुलाई,
उनी अदृश्य छिन्,
उसले तिमीलाई चिन्छे,
बनाउदै छिन्,
योजनाको मस्यौदा,
तिमीलाई डराउन,
सक्रिय हुनछे सचेत रहु
होस् गर,
सचेत रहनु,
अँध्यारोमा ऊ उठ्छे,
घाम जस्तै,
तिमीलाई पर्खिरहेकी छिन्,
उसले एक एक गरेर मार्दै छे हामी एक दिन मर्न सक्छौं।


 विनोद दवाडी


Binod Dwadi has work in Poetry Soup, ILS Magazine, Poets for Peace Anthology, Fusion 2 and others.

B.M. Owens
A Picture of Another Life Where I Can Make Things Happen
“In this house, we have chocolate cake for breakfast, and never bother with silly little things like bedtimes or brushing our teeth.” – Aunts Jet and Frances Owens, Practical Magic

Sometimes I pretend to control the wind--
I raise my hands 
as air lifts through 
my hair to dance 
with palm trees. 
I spin, my fingers
flailing like I am 
puppeteering 
the clouds.
In another life, 
I can change 
the weather
with a clap 
of my palms. 
In another life, 
I have a green 
thumb—vines unfurl
at my feet and lavender 
blossoms with my touch. 
In another life, 2 old Owens sisters raise me
as one of their own. We 
dance naked under the full 
moon. Drink midnight 
margaritas. Hex
the townsfolk. Chant.
Light candles 
with whispers.
Eat chocolate
cake for breakfast--
fudge like lipstick 
on our mouths, 
while we read 
from our family 
grimoire. In another
life, my aunt tucks 
my hand into hers,
guiding me back
to the house, my
little witch, let’s go inside and do some spells. 


B.M. Owens received her MFA in poetry from Florida International University.
Her work has been published or forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Salamander,
Silk Road Review, among others. Owens has been nominated for Best New Poets
and the Pushcart Prize. Her forthcoming chapbook, “Don’t Be Another Girl,”
was a semi-finalist in the 2022 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition
​and will be published through Finishing Line Press in 2024.

Steve Kronen
The Red and Green Wheelbarrow

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
glazed
with rain 
water
with the 
hundred
thousand
dollars in
side it.
Besides,
the white chickens
are peckish
today, are cross
ing the rhod
odendrons,
each following
each,
and will not lay
down
their lives for a greater economy than
themselves. O,
they
hunger. They
hunger.
They
hunger and
this
will not
stand. They
will not stand
still and this
will not
fly. They
will not
fly. But first,
things 
must come
first. Or
maybe it’s ideas. Surely, one must follow the other.


Steve Kronen's collections are Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer (Eyewear), Splendor (BOA),
and Empirical Evidence (University of Georgia). Most recent and forthcoming work is in Salmagundi,
Plume, Guest House, and Commonweal. His website is www.stevekronen.com . Steve lives in South Miami
​with his wife novelist Ivonne Lamazares.

Susana H. Case
Sfumato Smile

Leonardo reached beyond the picture plane,
studied in a morgue 
to perfect 
the veiled smile,
Bell’s palsy smile,
lying smile, 
of the Mona Lisa, 
de-fleshing 
cadavers 
to analyze
every facial 
movement. 
He wanted his live 
model happy, 
paid musicians 
to play and sing, hired jesters to entertain. 
What did the silk 
merchant's wife 
contemplate
those long portrait 
hours when Leonardo
laid down twenty,
thirty, forty layers
of paint? Perhaps 
the difficulty
of happiness, 
or impossibility--
our musculature 
such that we 
never pucker 
the upper lip without complicity of the lower.


SUSANA H. CASE has authored nine books of poetry, most recently 
If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, 2023. She has won several Pinnacle Book
Achievement Awards, an IPPY, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite award,
and she was a Finalist twice and an Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award,
as well as Finalist for the American Book Fest Awards, and the International Book Awards.
The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an
English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and an English-Ukrainian
edition is forthcoming in January, 2024. Case co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology 
I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. Case currently
​ is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. http://www.susanahcase.com

Anjanette Delgado 
Leaving Oz 

The minute she divorced the Tin Man, Dorothy knew: she couldn't keep living 
in the digitally-colorized state of Florida, 
which, if she was honest, had never felt 
like home. This place where she lacked 
friends, which are  what you need after a Florida 
divorce leaves you with only a pair of red
Mary Janes she now clicks to go to Alice, 
who, fed up with Wonderland's mirrored grass-
smoking orgies, had long before bought an apartment 
over Gotham's subway tracks, a place to hide 
from all of Hell's holes, never again to fall 
down an animal's wet dream. That night,
Dorothy and Alice watch on MSNBC: Martha, 
whisked to jail, guilty of being a huge bitch and
lacking an expression of defeat on her placidly 
aging model's face, Smart Pundit Barbie saying
the fair-minded jury of celebrity-obsessed people
traumatized by the media that raised them, 
would never have convicted a man. “But Dottie, surely, this Martha of yours is a man," 
Alice said and Dorothy nodded, told her Martha was 
once the Madonna of Oz, her imperfection-
killing remedies and recipes routinely shuffled
between badass-witch bungalows in her old 
Florida neighborhood. They’re so shaken, there 
and then they decide never to end up like Martha.
To be done with the one-dimensional lives 
written for them by the possibly pedophilic, 
oddly prone to pairing virgins-as-sexy-child stars 
with feebly pathetic older male villains. 
“Sod it," says Dorothy, dumping her gingham-
Gangnam style of fiery Mary Janes in the trash. 
From now on, she and Alice would live 
urban hip hop lives have heaps of triple X sex, 
never again attend castings for fictional females. 
Instead, they’d zoom through life like those real gals,
Thelma and Louise—who’d proven more powerful 
than a man—fearless, capable, and brave enough to drive over a canyon, if needed.


Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican author who has received recognition for her novels 
The Heartbreak Pill  (Atria Books, 2009) and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (Kensington Books
and Penguin Random House, 2014). Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in the 
New York Times' "Modern Love" column and opinion sections, Vogue, NPR, HBO, Kenyon Review,
Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, CUNY's Hostos Review, The Rumpus, and the Boston Review. As an editor,
Anjanette curated the anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness 
(University of Florida Press, 2021), which earned her a gold medal at the International Latino Book
Awards and was recognized as one of three notable anthologies by Poets & Writers in 2021. She holds
​an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and currently resides in Miami, Florida.

Alexis Rhone Fancher
Chance Encounter (Poem for Peter L.)
I unpack your memory and press “Rewind.” Not all the time, 
but when I’m horny, 
feeling lonely.
Or bored. Let myself wonder 
how we could have played out. 
We were young. I, imperfect.  
Still, I felt a tug, a connection, 
that if you’d pursued me, 
I would have been caught. 
You were easy on the eyes.
The sex was good. And you 
were kind to me. 
But you were kind to everyone. 
I didn’t know how to feel.
Those were the days when I 
gave myself away for the asking, tried
not to think of myself as damaged goods. Made my limp exotic. 
Wore Ray-Bans. Turned vegetarian.
Stopped reading the New Yorker.
Stopped dyeing my hair.
I thought I sussed what you wanted.
Covered myself in cashmere. 
Hid from the light. Still, when 
you grew silent I was not surprised. 
Nothing surprised me anymore. 
I no longer trusted you.
I sensed the ambiguity in your gaze.
I knew you pitied me, my sad body.
I was helpless to change it.
Sloppy seconds from the broken girl
who expected less. As if everyone 
was shallow. Cruel. I took it in. 
Let it wound me. And now, a lifetime later, you cross my path. 


Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle,Verse Daily, 
The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry
collections, most recently EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and DUETS
(Small Harbor Press) an ekphrastic chapbook written with Virginia poet, Cynthia Atkins. 
BRAZEN , an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to EROTIC, published in 2023,
again from NYQ. A coffee table book of  Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets
will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband,
​Fancher. They have an incredible view.

Naomi Bindman
soaring

I remember what it felt like to canter: the rhythm of flying, 
whoosh of wind, scent 
of warm horseness, my 
legs wrapped around 
her sides as if being one. 
Sometimes skiing was 
like that. Gliding, 
trusting, leaning into 
the speed, frozen world 
blurring past, unaware 
of numb fingers, yet 
feeling everything. And, 
I remember waiting 
poised in left field for 
the instant of connection, 
tracing the arc 
in my mind, racing to that perfect spot, lunging airborne, 
outstretched, the weight 
of a small white ball 
tucking into webbing 
of my glove held aloft, 
the only thing in the world 
that mattered. Occasionally, 
that elusive peace alights 
in the woods, at my desk, 
digging in soil, that unfettered 
focus settles on my shoulder, 
or floats for an instant--
until noticed. Then, like 
water through cupped 
fingers, slips away again
like a dream. 
Like a lifetime. And that soaring. Is that what dying feels like?


Naomi Bindman’s articles, essays, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in
anthologies and journals including Mothering, So to Speak, Friends Journal, Consilience,
Import Sky, Honeyguide, Synchroniciti, First Literary Review—East, South Florida Poetry Journal, 
and Lightwood Magazine. She was a finalist in the 2023 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest, and won
 the 2023 Creative Nonfiction Award from Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. Naomi has
received grants from the Vermont Arts Council, taught memoir-writing workshops funded by the
​Vermont Humanities Council, and is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges.

David Colodney
Lina C 
Like diamonds mined from Miami’s pink sidewalks Lina C’s olive skin shimmers in summer:
sweat droplets draping her bare shoulders & school’s out means no more morning stink eye to
some kid seeking
the empty school bus
seat next to mine. 
Lina C boards next
stop & if I time my
slide to the window seat right,
she’ll sit with me on the ride. 
Until September we laugh
a slapdash banter
between kisses on a 
Stillwater Park bench
before each syllable
of our late-night phone
calls lights us up
like flashbulb lightning
outside the jalousies
of our parents’ houses.
Sun sets over Stillwater Park: trees part like a chasm under chunky clouds filled with vinegar.
Lina C pushes me away
babbling something 
about her father killing
her if he found out
I was a Jew.         
Muslims & Jews 
don’t do this.
We cannot be together, 
it’s forbidden, 
her mouth flattened
like slate, 
her eyes 
closed
like minds.
Is she still alive? 
If I squint 
I can still see
Lina C at her bus stop. She never wore a hijab or khimar, just teen jeans & t-shirts, Walkman
​blasting American top 40 as she blew bubble gum bubbles, snapping them like heartbeats.


David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is the author of the chapbook, 
Mimeograph (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and his poetry has or will appear in multiple journals.
A two-time Pushcart nominee, David holds an MFA from Converse College, has written for the 
​Miami Herald and the Tampa Tribune and currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal.

Pamela Sinicrope
Ears

My mother-in-law, a radiant 91-year-old May-queen,
claims her style 
is Ralph Lauren sporty
with heart-etched 
sunglasses
and short bouffant hair 
like Ava Gardener
but much less risqué 
than Ava, who used to stare 
in the mirror buck naked 
and say I’m beautiful,
which is why, at first, 
my mother-in-law shocked me
when she strutted the kitchen
in a Kelly-green bra beneath 
a knotted white chiffon 
shirt, silver hoops peeking 
from the pocket
of her unbuttoned, 
high-waisted jeans, hearing aids bawling from fisted fingers.
She smiled good morning 
with upper case eyes,
a lexicon of looks 
only we understand. 
I answered her 
by pulling each ear down 
to slip in the sound. 
I closed her 501-style buttons,
tugged her sagging lobes again
to thread the earrings through.
Sometimes she thanks me
other times, she grimaces
when I tell her to close 
her shirt or use the walker.
Sometimes I don’t help. 
I leave her without her ears
lonely in her easy
chair. Sometimes she prefers it.
We’re still working out how to stretch the skin to make it all fit.


Pam Sinicrope has an MFA in poetry from Augsburg University and a doctorate in public health.
Some of her work can be found in SWWIM, Spillway, The Night Heron Barks, Aethlon, 
Appalachian Journal, and 3 Elements Review. Pam lives in Rochester, MN,
where she works as a medical writer and is a senior poetry editor for RockPaperPoem.

Carolina Hospital
Abandoned Architecture
after Abraham Lincoln Lewis & MaVynee Osun “The Beach Lady”


Driving along A1A, I collect landscapes like sea glass along the shore. 
The car on the ferry
the St. John’s River 
Little Talbot marshes
Amelia Island live oaks.
At Fort Clinch 
he combs the sand 
for shark teeth,
I visit memories across water
butterflies and wild horses
at Cumberland Island.
On our way back
we search for American Beach 
along streets lined by mansions
until many begin to show signs
of disrepair. Then NaNa’s Dune, 
the tallest in Florida, 
in a field of dune daisies. Sixty feet, it rises across what used to be thriving
a black beach community
summer hotels, sandwich shops, 
Evan’s Ocean Rendezvous. 
Some memories are not mine
to reconstruct, but I can’t help
imagine these empty streets,
once filled with cars and buses,
sand packed with umbrellas, 
Ford Model A’s and Panama hats,
Duke Ellington and Cab Callaway.
After hurricanes and desegregation,
what remains are falling ceilings, 
peeling walls, old pianos, rusty jars,
a moldy Jutte box and a long 
promise of reconstruction. 
MaVynee’s ashes
at the top of the dune she rescued remain a beacon, with a dimming light.


Carolina Hospital is a poet, essayist, and author, writer of several books,
including three poetry collections, Myth America (Anhinga Press), a collaboration
with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina, Key West Nights
and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press), and The Child of Exile: a Poetry Memoir 
(Arte Público Press); the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina
(Warner Books); and No Excuses! A Brief Survival Guide to Freshman Composition
 (Sonoran Desert Books). She edited Los Atrevidos: Cuban American Writers
(Linden Lane Press) and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press).
She also co-translated the poetry collection by Tania Díaz Castro, Everyone will Have to Listen 
(Linden Lane Press), and participated with 13 South Florida authors in the New York Times’
best-selling novel Naked Came the Manatee (G. P. Putnam's Sons). Her work has appeared in
numerous national publications, such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; Raising
Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; Bedford/St. Martin’s Florida Literature,
and Longman’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. 

Witchery 4      Fall 2023

Nicole Tallman
Vinyl

You put a record on for me. Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die. It’s such a Cancer album.
Some say Ultraviolence is better.
I like this one better.
The sound of vinyl makes me see everything in black and white.
I make you an Old Fashioned and myself a Gimlet.
I smoke orange for you and rosemary for me.
I used to smoke Djarums occasionally—for the smell and taste, but never the sensation.
One night when I was drinking,
I asked my date for a cigarette.
She told me her mother died of lung cancer.
When my own mother died years later,
I texted my date from the past. 
She said she was sorry to hear that my mother had died, but to never text her again.



Nicole Tallman is a poet, writer, and editor. Born and raised in Michigan, she lives in Miami
and serves as the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Editor of Redacted Books,
Poetry and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review, and an Associate Editor for 
South Florida Poetry Journal. She is the author of Something Kindred and Poems for the People 
(The Southern Collective Experience (SCE) Press). Her next book, FERSACE, is forthcoming
​in November 2023 from ELJ Editions. Find her on social media @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.

Jude Marr
Picking Through Trash

I am an open book, I say, but what I don’t admit--
those fistfuls of pages 
never cut: text 
scissored out, or 
buried under 
smears of  
ink: margins
chicken-scratched 
with cursive travesties
and family 
photographs defaced 
or placed in opposition
to a twisted
smile, enigmatic
as a traitor’s kiss--
but what does the body say, when forced to leave
the safety of a flashy 
jacket hiding dog-eared
sides? each muscle
screeching as it moves 
to mass around 
a denser bone: each
follicle a conduit
each serifed font
a metaphor? a fist
encased in paper 
may be precious stone
crystal-veined
so that each encoded 
self will last, each note
survive to give the lie to evidence of dust and ash.  

 
Jude Marr (he, they) is a Pushcart-nominated trans poet and freelance editor. His last collection, 
We Know Each Other By Our Wounds, came out from Animal Heart Press in 2020. Jude’s work has
also appeared in many journals in the US and beyond. Two new chapbooks are in the works. ​

Barbra Nightingale
6/6 (Again)

This damned date won’t leave me alone, though I swear I won’t remember.
Each year I banish the memory
only to have it come swarming back
as soon as I sit down to type.
I forget what I ate yesterday,
or what those potato dumplings
are called, though the brand is firmly fixed
with the yellow package and red letters.
I can’t recall a song I like, or the name
of a certain harmonica player I adore.
A guilt I swallowed then tried to spit out, today’s a long mouthful of shame.
“Old-woman-foolishness” some might say,
though I can’t even claim I was old. 
Temporary insanity perhaps.
A leap of misplaced faith.
A lost walk in a fiendish maze.
Too much vodka, not enough heat.
Or not enough vodka, too little warmth.
One man’s truth, another man’s lies. 
No, wait, don’t send me any more songs. 
Whichever version is turning on the spit, it was a story too good to pass up.


Barbra Nightingale’s 10th book of poetry is Spells & Other Ways of Flying (Kelsay Books, 2021). She has seven chapbooks and three full volumes of poetry with small presses. Over 200 of her poems have appeared in National and International Journals and Anthologies. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal, a semi-retired professor, and lives in Hollywood, Florida, with her two and four-legged menagerie.

Federica Santini
Night Swim

The pool is old tiles cracked like eyes:
broken glass
mirror case
the lost face
in the swells
is my own
idle waters
odd swirls
the depths
hide something
unseen—this is where I learn to swim
leaves floating
like eyes
hands of dark
dreams unraveled
swishing of hands
like fire subdued
no reflections
the thoughts
in my head are
unchecked—this is where I learn to swim


Federica Santini lives in Atlanta, GA and teaches at Kennesaw State University.
She holds an MA from the University of Siena, Italy, and a PhD from UCLA. She has
authored or edited four volumes on poetics and her creative work has been published internationally
​in over fifty journals and anthologies. ​

Bruce Weber
Kyoto in Cherry Blossom Time

Walking along the embankment serenaded by 
phosphorescence
of color and light
to the house 
of Mr. Chu
the silent potter
of glazes 
that shimmer
in the night 
like far away stars
I watch
as the crowd move
quietly amidst 
the stir of leaves
Parasols 
opening like fans
among the courtesans
tipping lightly on their feet in the dimming sundown 
eve The poetry 
of Basho
ringing in my ears 
like a child’s 
toy drum
The Kyoto temples
welcome me
with their cooing
their sensual 
blossoms
among birds 
chirping
for peace and rest
in the hard clime
between life and breath
in this peaceful 
eave along the river walk Happy to be who I am

Mike Jurkovic
Impossible Transportation

Like Lucifer and the lost moon sulks behind the sorghum,
You!
and your
impossible
transportation,
Come out
of nowhere
w/the
halothane
vapor 
and envelope
the whole city
in a brume
of nostalgia, 
a fog of
remorse,
a mist
of mishap
no-one implies.
But the evil intent of this poem is, (however thin) 
never lost
to a carnivore
like you  --
eager, engaging --
to dupe
the dupable
masses
into believing
that
this 
faceless adventure
in the wake
of the wheel
was nothing more 
than the
grinding 
and groaning
of contrary men
warring to win a planet, that is dying, as we speak. ​


​Mike Jurkovic
Man of Wire

I swore to the high heavens and the depths below that once I got out from under 
the recording studio 
and rock n roll roadie work 
I’d never work wires again. 
But after two years 
of pushing paper 
I returned 
(reluctantly) 
to wire. 
Hundreds of them. 
Thousands of them. 
Color coded. 
Color faded. 
Rat’s nest 
manhole wires. 
Pigeon shit 
squirrel bit wires. 
All to bring dial tone 
(or what passed for it)
to the wanton masses. Then pixels and code through fiber 
(a lot like wire only thinner) 
for twenty-eight years. 
After that I swore again to the
highs and lows 
of good and evil 
but to no avail. 
There I was: 
running wires again. 
This time for non-profits. 
Electrical. 
Audio. 
Video. 
Wires and cables, 
cables and wires. 
Fifty-eight, 
fifty-nine, 
sixty, 
sixty-one plus seven and six months 
raveling wrapping, rolling raveling wrapping rolling, raveling wrapping rolling wires

Bob Biers
Sun, Twice

sun still only a back glow behind the roofs and every-
thing hangs on the last of
the night lizards rest on 
the cool sidewalk rabbits
settled in the grass barely
move away egrets feed in
a ghostly glow on the green 
of the seventh hole only
a large turtle and I make
our way across a street
where a school bus stops
in the distance then starts 
forward until I stand in the middle like a cross-
ing guard arms straight out
so something prehistoric
can crawl unmarred from
sculptured lake to fresh
edged lawn as driver slows
and children wonder at
the man in the road who
has had enough of blood
and crushed shells and rush-
ing days that can wait their
turns like everything else 
retreating before arcing hope that unforgiving clock the sun


Robert Bires writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Venice, Florida.
​He has published most recently in Bright Flash, Centrifictionist, Sky Island, JAKE, and Pegasus.

Dion O’Reilly
Memento

You can’t feel him anymore, scrawny in your bed, 
whet-stone eyes, his stalk, 
unimpressive, but lovely 
because he’d gaze at you 
and move it slow. 
Last time you saw him, 
he was gloating 
on your Zoom screen.
Blotchy, bloated, 
he burped 
more than spoke,
held up his camera 
to take you on tour 
through his fancy house.
Sometimes, what you need is beneath what you seek. 
Maybe it’s buried 
like a dead poet’s 
dead wife. 
Maybe it’s in the dark 
sack of your purse.
Dig, dump the contents: 
dirt, chapstick,
broken pens.
Embarrassing, 
the gimcrack, kept 
and never used,
precious at the time--
those trinkets to help you 
remember a beautiful place where you can’t live.


Dion O’Reilly’s debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was runner-up for The Catamaran Prize and shortlisted for several awards,
including The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book Sadness of the Apex Predator will be published by University of Wisconsin's
Cornerstone Press in February 2024. Her work appears in Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Sun, Rattle, Narrative, and 
​The Slowdown. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

Cara Nusinov
Surrender

As the Iguana nibbles bark off the oak or eats a bug hiding in the bark,
I sit and stare at eternity, 
scribble down thoughts
of what may have been.
We were heading to a 
slow start to heaven. 
I waited to dance 
and banter and have 
new heartfelt tête-à-têtes
Here,  I must stop. Breathe.
It’s all too taxing this time. I make an ice cream run and satiate on what may be 
in my mind’s eye, your favorite
flavor, Maple Mango. All things
fall into orderly lines like
the stripes of the rainbow 
over there in the west sky.
I’ll go for a Kayak run, drift, 
feel wind fingers chill my psyche 
between raindrops and imagine
tenderness and exaltations 
and then let it go, so you can live well, as that is what I really need right now.

Witchery 3      Summer 2023

Witness

Someone else’s weather had entered our house, and we couldn’t decide
how to dress, what
to expect of the day, 
or the week, what blankets
to put on the bed. 
They must have been hearty
souls, these strangers 
whose cold rain pelted 
our bodies, whose freezing 
wind slipped in  
to make us dream 
we were lost in the uncharted
far north somewhere. 
So we turned to each other 
and tried to keep warm 
by burning the books 
we’d never been able 
to read without feeling
confused and alone.  
When our shelves were bare, 
I walked out to feel the morning, and saw a large bird—a crow--
burning as it flew. 
When it fell, I ran over 
to smother the flames 
but I couldn’t even touch it-- 
I didn’t have the courage--
and it was dead anyway
when it landed. So I covered it 
with dirt, and tried 
to ignore all the other 
burning birds flying 
through the sky, singing 
and starting small fires 
when they hit 
the ground or landed 
in the trees. 
All we could do now 
was watch them burn
and hope that those small fires 
wouldn’t start spreading:
Our neighbors had long since moved away. There was nobody coming to save us.

​
The Lie


I woke in a bedroom filled with dogs shuffling against each other 
as though 
they were blind. 
Through the open 
window I could 
hear someone talking 
on the phone. 
The dogs 
smelled wet. 
I sat up 
and looked out; 
she was sitting 
in a lawn chair, 
her back 
turned to me
like my wife 
turns her back, 
sometimes. When I
got up to walk out, the dogs started growling. I thought when she saw
me the dogs would fall 
away, and our love 
might restore us. 
She turned to me now
with a face I didn’t 
recognize, got up 
and moved off into 
the garden, singing 
an old Joni Mitchell 
song. She seemed 
herself again. 
So I took her hand 
and led her into 
our bedroom whose floor 
was covered with fur, 
which we swept up together, 
and tossed into the compost,
without saying anything about it. In fact, we never spoke of it at all.

Michael Hettich

​Michael Hettich holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from University of Miami, an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Denver, and a BA in English from Hobart College. Hettich’s first book of poetry, Lathe, was published in 1987 by Pygmy Forest Press. Since then, he has published numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. A new book of poems, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022, will be published by Press 53 in May 2023. His work has appeared in such journals as Orion, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Poetry East, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, The Literary Review, and many other journals, and his poetry reviews have appeared widely. His writing has also appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently Visiting Bob: 100 Poems for Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press, 2018). Most of Hettich’s teaching career was spent at Miami Dade College, where he served as Professor of English and Creative Writing and Lead Professor in the Honors College, as well as co-adviser of the student literary magazine. Among his honors at Miami Dade was the Mac Smith Endowed Teaching Chair in Environmental Ethics. He retired from MDC in 2018. Hettich has won a number of honors for his writing, including three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships; a Florida Book Award; The Tampa Review Prize; The David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize; The Swan Scythe Prize; The Tales Prize; The 2020 Lena M. Shull Book Award, and the Yellowjacket Press Prize for Florida Poets.

Potpourri

n.   A bowl of dry flowers and herbs to scent a room

Tight-curled buds relax
leaf by leaf
petal by petal
until opened,
they are
as lovely
as roses or
sky or sun
and as unconscious of
their youth
as any girl
hurrying
across
the quad.
So long ago,
My love, and
yet your beauty’s not gone.

Lola Haskins

Ms. Haskins’ most recent collection,  Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (Pitt, 2019)  was featured in The New York Times Sunday magazine.  Previous to that was How Small, Confronting Morning (Jacar, 2016) , set in the woods and waters of North central Floride. The two before that, The Grace to Leave (Anhinga, 2012), and Still, the Mountain (Paper Kite, 2010), won Florida Book Awards.  Her in-print books of poems are Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2004), Extranjera (Story Line, 1998), and  The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001). The books before these,  Hunger (University of Iowa Press, 1993– winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida, 1990), Castings (Countryman Press, 1984), and Planting the Children, (University Press of Florida, 1983), are out of print but can be ordered from this web site. Across Her Broad Lap Something Wonderful (State Street) and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook) are unavailable.

​Valentine

Two slightly mushy heart balloons still float above the iron wood stove, 
left over from Happy
Birthday. The star has 
long since dropped 
to join gnawed tennis balls 
in the dog’s toy box. 
L’Eternel féminin leaps
like a fox from Vixen 
and les Filles du feu. 
When Merwin translated 
from French, he must
have run into Nerval.
The hardest thing 
about aging might 
turn out to be the loss 
of looks even for one 
who claims to be above 
all that. A life of being 
looked at, hating the gaze but accustomed. That day when she first saw it not 
in the mirror but in eyes 
of strangers, then 
its drooping mouth, 
crepey eyes peered 
back from the glass. 
Courtly love and Courtney 
Love. $100 in Zelle 
from Dick Sweet. She 
didn’t know Dick though 
she did know a Peter 
Love back in college. 
This sweet dick or love
peter sent her a Valentine 
gift, a joke? And could 
Courtney Love be Peter’s 
child? Did courtly love 
of Courtney inspire song-- 
Heart-shaped Box, I’ll Stick Around, Hollaback Girl, Sad and Damned, Courtney?

Holly York

Holly York’s poems can be found in recent issues of Crosswinds, Sixfold, Oberon, and in online journals in the U.S. and U.K. Her chapbooks are: “Backwards Through the Rekroy Wen,” “Picture This,” and “Postcard Poems.” Her current project is a collection titled Black Box, inspired by her experiences as a Pan Am stewardess in the 1970s. Senior Lecturer Emerita of French at Emory University, blackbelt in karate, and grandmother of five, she lives in Atlanta with her two Dobermans.
​

Paper, Fire, Mirror

Scrubbable Sanitas vinyl wallpaper hung for four Decades
oh-so-French French Poodles
in matched black chic berets
French-manicured  paw tips
Mademoiselle  &  Monsieur
rendezvous @ Le Club Chien
along sloped attic wallboards
illegal   second-floor  add-on
built-in-the-wall electric heater coils  always hinting of Fire
the flimsy metal shower stall
with crystalline plastic knobs
an eight-year-old once stood
tippy toed to see Sears mirror
to tape cockeyed bangs down
then  in high heels  twists hair
in ringlets for prom night then
stoops  to dust eyelids matte powder blue  for first Nuptials

                               Two-Timed

In the armoire, draped            In the armoire, draped
over                                              over
satin                                             satin    
hangers                                       hangers 
while                                           while
lying over spilt silk                   lying over spilt silk
Nightie                                       Nightie
pouts,                                          pouts,
who                                             who
put                                               put 
the noir in my peignoir?        the noir in my peignoir?

Mary Louise Kiernan

Mary Louise Kiernan’s poetry appears in the Metropolitan Diary in The New York Times, Broad River Review, Common Ground Review, The Delmarva Review, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, Chronogram, Mightier—Poets for Social Justice, and elsewhere. A member of Calling All Poets and the Woodstock Poetry Society, she was awarded the 2015 Poetry Prize by Tempe Public Library partnered with Arizona State University. Her debut poetry collection is titled "The Gift of Glossophobia" [Kelsay Books]. Please visit marylouisekiernan.com for more poetry.

Mediations on Rain at the Fuime Arno in Firenze

Clouds are clouds everywhere, but the angles of these angels slice 
the sky held 
by the Torre 
San Niccoló      
up. In the east 
a blue brooding 
weighs on the air, 
seemingly a mile 
near this very 
small bridge. The 
traffic is another 
boisterous knife. 
I’m scaling the 
tower to hide. 
At the bank, I’m 
splitting the difference on this river. I’m outrunning the rain to the 
waterfall at the 
pescaia. You are 
in your green 
cups at the Arno 
where the river-
wine has turned brown
from rain, but soon
will turn green again,
and you will be as 
drunk as a Florentine 
after Mass or football. 
Ponte San Niccoló                          
is witness to your 
baptism beneath 
the brown current. You go in slowly, saving up for the longest drink. 

Michael Trammell

Michael Trammell’s new novel is Rad Sick Record, published by Hysterical Books Press. He grew up in South Florida and currently lives in the Florida panhandle. His poetry collection is Our Keen Blue House; other work has appeared in New Letters, The Chattahoochee Review, Pleiades, and the G.W. Review. He’s a Senior Lecturer at Florida State University and an associate editor for the Apalachee Review (started in 1973). In the summers he frequently teaches abroad for F.S.U. in either London, Florence, or Valencia, Spain. 

All the Way
(inspired by Billie Holiday)

Stiffened smiles lived inside Kodak archives. 
Commands 
of “cheese”
documented 
hidden potholes--
his mom’s parents 
took turns 
at the wheel.
Some pages 
had bent edges,
others retired 
from plastic spirals.
Some photo corners 
MIA, others 
on their last grip.
He touched the photo
of his mom—innocence 
at the age of two.
She grew up to be an outsider, a woman taught
to think 
inside 
perimeters.
She tried
to be 
his redwood--
sawed-off branches
couldn’t 
protect 
her seedling
from trauma.
Last week,
he buried 
his “tallest tree”--
sang a Lady Day tune
near an audience 
of maples and oaks,
and a crow that left a coin by his feet.

Patricia Carragon

Patricia Carragon’s recent publications: Beat Generation Anthology 2022, I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press), Out Loud, an LGBTQA Literary Arts Anthology (Red or Green Books), The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, When Women Speak Poetry Anthology, Vol. 1, et al. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. Her debut novel is Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press). Her books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku and The Cupcake Chronicles. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.

​

To Tallahassee

Canopy roads, a filigreed green screen to sky. Sweet gum, loblolly pine. I careen through
one phase, into another in no particular order,
skirr from childhood past adulting’s border,
miles from a rented room on College Avenue
to FSU, my father’s campus. Mine, too.
Bill’s Bookstore, Westcott, where administration
lived, and Ruby Diamond, where we tipped
cap tassels to the left and counted ourselves graduates.
Williams Building, housing religion, English,
the humanities, before categories ended in blurred
lines, a game of zero sum. Scan my father’s office,
papers stacked in piles for grading on his desk.
His bookcase on the left. Say goodbye, descend
steep steps. Enter the classrooms of my degrees.
Take a break. A shopping spree: Nic’s Toggery
downtown or Rheinauer’s in the mall.
Lunch in style at the Bird Cage. Date nights, drive to Panacea for scallops at Angelo’s.
Rue where the time goes. Stall. Fall in love.
Ferry from Carrabelle to Dog Island, fish for grunt
off a rickety pier. Canoe Lake Bradford
with a friend who died too young. Lean in.
Remain afloat. See her mother in the window
eyes on our boat. We felt safe then. Didn’t you?
After school, hit Koucky Park in Indianhead.
A hidden stream. Refuge. No one is ever there.
Our first house on Lehigh Drive. Ranch, single family,
brick. Remember how the outside storage doors hid
washer-dryer, housed my box full of chicks.
A tree before its branches broke. Perhaps an oak.
That’s how I think of it: My roots. A family split. 
Tallahassee— stare back at me. Hold me fixed
and fractured, long and short on time, within
your silhouette. Lift your veil in the gloaming. Prism light, despite. Map the way home. 

Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Five Points, Sugar House Review, Florida Review, Zone 3, Redivider, River Heron Review, Split Rock Review, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared recently in Salamander, EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and the Los Angeles Review. Sarah's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She grew up in Tallahassee and has lived and worked in Florida most of her life. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.

​Per Aspera ad Astra,

neighs the hobbled mare of my mind and leaps into the sky.
I get it. We’re fed up with our diet
of nettles, no matter how fortifying. 
We shuffle through the house
like Archimboldo’s grotesques,
barely holding in our prickly spinach.
Thistles sprout all over the floor
when we stop to think. This morning, pain
is a blue streak. An angel in disguise
with a shovel. Shoveling. So much peace
has fallen overnight, the city is
unrecognizable ecstasy. On our street
alone, several trucks belonging to god
are wholly entombed in white petals.
Silken mercy! We forget to be
grateful, my hankering mare and I. 
We should wishfully plant some gratitude in a lesser future
nightmare. For now, we’re in debt
to sweet pain. Look how it makes us see
what’s not really there. Like the thirty
camouflaged angels in our driveway.
Some lie on their backs, as good 
angels should, making truthful copies 
of themselves for whomever is watching.
We’re watching, all right? Others
have chosen to bury their ordinary halos
in the trees. See them ravish that poor
dogwood with their massive wings?
A disgrace. Someone should call
the heaven police. What do you think
is our least acknowledged
regret, I ask the only mare I have.
The blank canvas, she answers. Full of potential, like hunger.

Romana Iorga

Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, Lake Effect, The Nation, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

Witchery 2      Spring 2023

Untitled

on a sumptuous, tongue-bellied evening we spoke of icebergs
you said stones
corrupt words
and I strayed
from the point
wondering how to
climb a frozen
mountain
upside down
underwater
and what the view
would be like
once we reached
the top
(or would it be
the bottom)
you said stones corrupt words and I drifted away, securing
my holds
against
the undercurrents
of cold and dark,
of rising night,
carrying us there
to the roof
of the world
(or was it the floor)
and I was thinking
if I dropped us,
would we float
back to light
break the surface of breath
or sink straight down
to the awnings of the sea (or would it be the rough bedrock of earth)

Catherine Mazodier

Catherine Mazodier writes in English, French, or both. Some of her poems have appeared in SoFloPoJo, Chiron Review, and the British poetry journal Agenda. She also published two chapbooks of poems with a DIY publisher in France and a few short stories in a now defunct French literary journal, Minimum Rock n Roll.

Fever Dream

This morning a cricket blew in through the box fan
of Autumn—Forewings eschewing
the loud thrumming of the locusts,
a sound that could be from Hell itself.
There was a rabbi speaking Yiddish 
on the a.m. radio, where the scrolls
are rolled into breakfast bars. 
I smelled bacon in the kitchen 
of the Garden of Eden.  My son
coughs in the next room,
his little boy pajamas of train cars.
The people congregate under 
golden trees, figs to mark the calendar 
for a new year.  There are gatekeepers with white hoods, noisy locusts.  
The creature with 
a compound eye and a simple eye 
sees us with sound.   
The season is upon us to notice 
the trees divesting and rooting 
in our pathos and prayers.
My ancestors are texting silent into clouds.
The forecast is for solitude with a light 
drizzle of rain. I’m in the dark room 
where everyone is talking behind our back.  
Whispers like little stones thrown 
on windows.  These stars are broken teacups. 
The leaves are raked into a pile for my son to jump in--

Cynthia Atkins

Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure  (CW Books),  and Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Anti- Heroin Chic, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. Formerly, Atkins worked as the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College. She is an Interviews Editor for American Micro Reviews and Interviews.  She earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist, Phillip Welch and their family.  More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com

Eden’s Express 

At 11:48 PM she’s still thinking of him in an instant replay, the one where 
he lifts himself 
over her body 
dunking his tongue 
once again into her 
famished throat. 
Like birds feed 
one another worms, 
they tasted salt and silk, 
late afternoon smoking 
in candlelight, their off-
track-beaten tryst which 
keeps them coming 
back for more 
because there’s never 
time to reach 
the sated state 
of conventional couples, 
two unfaithful middle-
aged romantics knowing more than they care to about the psycho-poetic 
dynamic of limerence, 
love’s samba, love’s 
tango, love’s salsa 
cha-cha-cha. 
But music’s all 
they’ve got, 
Eden’s Express-- 
They’ll take the 
subterranean metro 
one-way down 
and may never 
so much as arrive, 
let alone lie 
beneath the pear trees 
of paradise. But hell, 
they’ll walk under 
downpour, survive
turbulence and drought 
face-on into hot red sun, if they have to— and they have to. They really do.

Deborah DeNicola

Deborah DeNicola’s 7th book is The Impossible from Kelsay Press. 2021.Original Human was published by Word Tech in 2010. She edited the anthology Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology 1999, from The University Press of New England. Previous poetry books include Where Divinity Begins 1994 from Alice James Books, Inside Light, 2007, and two other chapbooks, Harmony of the Next 2005 won the Riverstone Chapbook Award and Rainmakers. Her memoir, The Future that Brought Her Here 2009 was published by Nicholas-Hays/Ibis Press 2009 Among other awards Deborah has received a National Endowment Fellowship in poetry. Her web site is: www.intuitivegateways.com.

Mud Dreams  

As a child I sat often in church and wondered
if prayers 
simply battered 
hopelessly against
church ceilings 
or snared themselves 
in clouds, like
the lost feathers
I found this evening 
atop bloodied snow. 
There were portents
of gray light on 
the horizon,
light that dimmed 
into a burning coal,
and I remembered how once a whiteout of snow
appeared before me
on the Interstate,
and I named
those moments 
of blindness
for the space
between stars,
for the seepage 
of cold squeezing 
through a window
jamb, named them
for mud dreams
and for my dead
mother’s tomatoes
growing on vines in summer like malformed hearts.

Doug Ramspeck

Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, one collection of short stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Blur, received the Tenth Gate Prize. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, South Florida Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review. 

How She Thought About Politics:
            
mostly not at all except on election day when she had to 
vote. Nonsense 
clanged her ears 
day and night, 
and she clung 
to the parts
that spoke 
to her pain 
and outrage 
as if following 
a recipe 
for life.
All politicians 
promise any
menu in order
to get elected 
so she always held her nose and opted for the lesser 
evil, in hopes 
they’d leave
1) her alone,
2) her enough 
of her money, 
3) her, her son,
brother, 
husband, 
home and not
send them off to
godforsaken war.
She tried to 
tenderize 
tough meat 
with too much salt on
an angry wound, poured too much vinegar on wilting leaves.

Holly York

Holly York is Senior Lecturer Emerita of French at Emory University. Having spent a career teaching and writing about language and literature, she has recently begun writing her own poems. Some of them can be found in Crosswinds, Oberon, Sixfold, Better Than Starbuck’s, and Womanthology, among others. Her current project is a collection titled Flight Recorder, inspired by her experience as a Pan American World Airways stewardess in the 1970s. A blackbelt in karate and grandmother of five, she lives in Atlanta with her two Dobermans.

Christine Jackson

Christine Jackson has retired from thirty years at a day job teaching literature and creative writing at a South Florida university.  She continues to clock in on her life-long night shift of writing poetry.  Her work has been published in an array of online journals, including The Ekphrastic Journal and Verse-Virtual.

Degenerate

A peeping Tom drills a hole in the girl’s bathroom from outside.
He likes to watch us flirt
with ourselves in the mirror,
lift our tops and suck
in our stomachs.
He thrills as we lift
our skirts, adjust
our panties, hugging
our rounded cheeks.
The surgeon drills a hole in my knee, not with a drill, but with an
18-gauge needle,
and drains the fluid.
Other injuries, other tests
show degeneration in my
hand, my knees, my
neck, my back, even
for godsake, my feet!
Why do I not have holes
to peep through, to see what’s happening, before it fails?

Barbra Nightingale

Barbra Nightingale’s 10th book of poetry is Spells & Other Ways of Flying (Kelsay Books, 2021). She has seven chapbooks and three full volumes of poetry with small presses. Over 200 of her poems have appeared in National and International Journals and Anthologies. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal, a retired professor, and lives in Hollywood, Florida, with her two and four-legged menagerie.

Lullaby

We used to pocket lumps of coal while walking along railroad tracks 
in the field back beyond my grandparents’ 
yard at sundown. In bed, the mantle clock 
chimed Westminster on the hour and train 
whistles dopplered like loons winging 
toward coal docks at Sandusky Bay. 
It was a house to whisper in, as if not to 
trouble the ghosts in the pinch-pleat drapes 
or the dank concrete basement. I would 
sleep in a bed older than my parents, 
wrapped in brown floral wallpaper, lulled 
by train whistles like waves of warm water. 
Now, during bouts of insomnia I envy my childhood self who could 
sleep anywhere—camp tents, road-trip 
car seats buckled or not, friends’ 
sleepover basement floors. When the 
telltale heartbeat of an oppressive 
schedule keeps me awake with agitated 
nerve-tingling, list-making into dark 
pillows, I envision that creaking house 
and its hushed, unrushed train calls. 
I chuck my concerns like hunks of coal
into its open gondolas as it rumbles 
past, let it haul them off to the docks 
to who knows where, but it’s someplace where everyone is sound asleep.
​

Kerry Trautman

Kerry Trautman (she/her) was born and raised in Ohio. Her work has appeared previously in South Florida Poetry Journal as well as various anthologies and journals, including Slippery Elm, Thimble, Limp Wrist, Midwestern Gothic, and Gasconade Review. Her poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020,) Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas (Gutter Snob Books 2022,) and Unknowable Things (Roadside Press 2023.) Her fiction chapbook Irregulars is forthcoming in 2023 from Stanchion Books. 

Ode to the Johnson Street Bandshell
                        
When we packed our bags with ballet slippers and bathing suits
for the flight from Buffalo 
to Fort Lauderdale 
in the winter of 1959
we may have been 
ballerinas 
in our teacher’s 
imagination
but our heads 
were dizzy 
with thoughts of 
boys on the beach
so we danced Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite Number Two, 
bruising 
our toes 
on the unyielding 
cement floor 
of that bandshell,
then waded 
into the ocean, 
each of us 
looking for 
someone 
to kiss— 
someone to dream of as we flew north into a snowstorm.

Meryl Stratford

Meryl Stratford’s chapbook The Magician’s Daughter won the YellowJacket contest for Florida Poets.  Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Amsterdam Quarterly. She is a senior editor for South Florida Poetry Journal.

Not Even That

Look, I made it all this way she said, but did not mean the streets 
of Prague: 
coffee, cream 
with berry strudel 
at the Cafe 
Louvre. Not 
the Tulum 
ruins 
of Yucatán
where she 
imagined herself 
gazing at a blue 
Caribbean 
from the wall’s 
crumbling 
shadows, tracking 
the sun’s 
movements 
beyond the Temple 
of Frescoes. 
Not even the arpeggio of tranquil days she could finally hopscotch, 
after the fraught 
parenting years 
nearly killed her. 
No, not even that. 
Only this night
and a winter 
moment halted 
at the stoplight’s 
red— corner 
of Wilshire 
and Beverly, 
rain casting 
down, the dark 
sky scattering 
its bouquet 
of asterisk needles 
across the glass 
shield before her, 
a watery slaughter and 
her breath’s sweet collapse under a quiet curtain of the smallest, softest stars.

Michelle Bitting

Michelle Bitting won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2023. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Witchery 1      Winter 2022

---

A Sunday Kind of Room


Tides of meringue & gilt, the grim Palisades smudged
by studio dust. That 
was no weather for the strand
the water wrinkled
high-smelling estuarial lag 
piqued
while light through the struts
froze a green bench. 
The trembling hours begun,
all turned drag & drift.
Someone rolled a cigarette.
On the parapet,
iron rings of life.
I ease a canvas from the frame, such small & loving violence.
The radio is silent
then a thin, pure a cappella 
beads the windowpane.
The river that is not a river 
raises its head 
spits a stone eye back at me. 
A boat like a hospice 
like a graveyard waterlogged 
subsides.
On the wall hangs 
a picture of the last winter,
green bench painted out.
For perspective, the gull sensing snow hovers, a mere mote.

Carol Alexander


Carol Alexander’s most recent collection is Fever and Bone (Dos Madres Press, 2021). Her work has been published in anthologies and journals such as About Place Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, Caesura, The Common, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly, Free State Review, Matter, Mobius, One, Pif,  Potomac Review, Ruminate, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Stonecoast Review, Sweet Tree Review,   Terrain.org, Third Wednesday, Verdad, and The Westchester Review.  New work is forthcoming in Delmarva Review and RHINO. With Stephen Massimilla, Alexander is co-editor of Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022).

Tears before the Abattoir   

(re: eco sister, knuckle bump farms)

“They were completely innocent. They didn’t deserve to die,” 
wailed the headline. The
article was about
chickens lost
to avian flu after
gate-crashing flocks 
of wild geese did what 
live things do. It was the owner? 
caretaker? that was quoted? 
Of course, I’m thinking this setting must then be a “Preserve,” 
where spent layer hens retire 
after a lifetime of
meritorious service, a 
home for domestics 
never meant for compost, 
pet food, or table. & it is.
& still, I try to unpack “completely 
innocent” & “deserve to die”
while among the feathers sit my dead with their Mona Lisa smiles.


Massacre of the Innocents

While among the feathers sit my dead with their Mona Lisa smiles,
grief passes through like
a sudden storm. Who
among us is too 
good for this world? 
As my dead & past 
selves chatter like 
children & grandchildren 
as I imagine their stories & all I can do 
is apologize for whatever comes next as if I don’t know what comes
next. Never have I ever 
awakened into a life 
where a god did not or 
would not, nor a god’s 
handmaiden’s hands not 
linger, nor their saints' eyes
not mirror the catafalque crying: 
“They were completely innocent. 
They didn’t deserve to suffer & die,”  Rubens had to paint it twice.

​

Michael Mackin O'Mara  Michael Mackin O'Mara, (queer, POZ, poet) works at SoFloPoJo (South Florida Poetry Journal) by day and writes by night. Published in a number of online an print anthologies and journals, their work can be found at www.michaelmackinomara.com @minwpb          

Settlement


First, he conceded to her North and South America and 13 horizons
to either side. No one ever
gave her half the world before.
He took Asia and Europe. 
For now. He took the risk
and felt liftoff but never stayed
aloft. Details pulled his feet
flat to sea level. She loved
penguins but gave him Antarctica.
All their ice too. New trays
are always at hand.
The formal dining set was already 
broken so he got that in a box
to be unwrapped later.
Her tears lit his fuel. The more he hated it, the stronger he grew.
This gave him hope for ascent,
a spark up his chimney.
Because he failed to itemize 
the discovery of fire
she never mentioned it
boxed in the back closet, 
tucked in topsoil. 
She wrote the wet check
and he took it into checkmate.
The star charts are nonnegotiable, 
she said, so he demanded 
the sky and sea. She agreed
to give him anything
he can’t grasp, keeping only earth, the place for building.

Richard Ryal A poet, professor, and editor, Richard Ryal has worked in marketing and higher education. He stops for no obvious reason sometimes and no one can talk him out of that. His recent publications include Notre Dame Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The South Florida Poetry Journal, and Amethyst Review.

​Confronting Reality
 
I can imagine how you gnaw it, chew the bone to slivers, 
use them as picks
for your teeth, pins 
in the center of your 
heart, the many locks
you have placed around 
it, keeping in (or out) all 
the hungers. 
You think, it’s all 
her fault, bursting 
your dreams like 
bubbles or balloons 
at the county fair 
on opening night.
Maybe it’s just bad luck that steals your happiness, as you
hold each distorted 
slight, sour event,
festered snubs
and scratchy memories
the texture of sandpaper,
which strips then stains
any hint of truth.
Hard as it seems, change 
scatters in the wind, like 
leaves. Watch them swirling, 
falling, imagine them 
salting the ground,
pulling anguish 
out of the barren hard rock you think is your earth.

Barbra Nightingale  Barbra Nightingale's poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Rattle, Limp Wrist, The Liberal Media Made Me Do It (Anthology), Narrative Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart), Gargoyle, Barrow Street, The Georgetown Review, CRIT Journal, Jet Fuel,The Apalachee Review, Calyx, Kalliope, Many Mountains Moving, Birmingham Review, Chattahoochee Review.  Her most recent books of poetry include: Spells & Other Ways of Flying (Kelsay Books, 2019),Two Voices, One Past, Yellow Jacket Press (runner up in chapbook contest, 2010) and Geometry of Dreams (2009), Word Tech Editions, Ohio. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal.

My Awe Is Not Your Awe

 (overheard” The awe of battle”)

My awe is a sacred space, a bird flying to the feeder, the shade                                                         
of a tree, berries                                                                                                                                    
in the forest                                                                                                                                      
not rockets                                                                                                                                           
of light                                                                                                                                                
My heat                                                                                                                                                
from the sun                                                                                                                               
flames from                                                                                                                                     
memory                                                                                                                             
switchbacked                                                                                                                                       
to experience                                                                                                                                      
the lashing                                                                                                                                             
of cannons                                                                                                                                        
My awe                                                                                                                                                   
is the clear                                                                                                                                      
path of vision,                                                                                                                                        
the razor straight                                                                                                                             
edge of sky, where water is moved by stone how much has been lost:
​History                                                                                                                                       
shattered to pieces                                                                                                                         
that will not                                                                                                                                          
fit together                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
How do we
​gather it in our arms?                                                                                                                      
After my children left                                                                                                                        
there was a space                                                                                                                                    
I could not fill                                                                                                                                 
When cities                                                                                                                                             
are destroyed                                                                                                                                    
there is a space                                                                                                                                   
that will not fill                                                                                                                                
Now children emerge                                                                                                                         
hungry from sleep’s groove.                                                                                                                   
My awe is milk of the moon                                                                                                                   
shining on these words that come from me and will not return empty.

Grace Cavalieri

Italian American writer, poet, and playwright Grace Cavalieri is the host of the radio program The Poet and the Poem, presented by the Library of Congress through National Public Radio. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Greatest Hits, 1975–2000 (2002), Pinecrest Rest Haven (1998), and Poems: New and Selected (1994). Her collection What I Would Do for Love: Poems in the Voice of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004) was awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize; Water on the Sun (2006) won the Bordighera Poetry Prize. Other collections include Sounds Like Something I Would Say (2010) and Anna Nicole: Poems (2008). A selection of Cavalieri’s poems, plays, and interviews, Other Voices, Other Lives, was published in 2017. Cavalieri’s awards include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, the Columbia Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She is a poetry columnist for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her papers are held in the George Washington University Gelman Library Special Collections.

​Cavalieri lives in Annapolis, Maryland. 

Perhaps at Sundown


Daybreak comes and I climb up to the end of this bending limb,
wide-eyed, unafraid,
see below me cuts
of meat, blood pressed tight
against plastic wrap, 
women narrow hipped
and broad, sashaying,
men grinning, teeth sharp
and lurid yellow,
all the judges fat,
snoring fast asleep
at noon, careless of the world, dreaming of girls and sugar plums,
while across the sea
madmen drop their bombs
on young brides in white
and children at play,
confounding cries of
joy with cries of grief,
and silent, unseen
poisons gather strength
in all the waters,
soil and air, even
in this limb, which will hold me till it cracks, perhaps at sundown.

Carmine Di Biase Carmine Di Biase’s chapbook, American Rondeau, has recently been published by Finishing Line Press. His have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken, La Piccioletta Barca, Italian Americana, The Vincent Brothers Review, Scapegoat Review and other journals. His reviews and translations appear occasionally in the Times Literary Supplement. Di Biase is Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.

What I Found in Translation


To capture the sound of beauty in a language not your own,
would you choose
the word mariposa, papillon,
or schmetterling for a butterfly?
And what is the matter
with schmetterling, the German
asks the Spaniard & the Frenchman,
the emphatic, guttural punchline
to this translation joke.
Butterfly prosody is a Romance language, syllable timed.
Loneliness is no joke,
but my dreamy secret lover
kisses me & I kiss him back.
His deep kisses replenish my
bodily humors after long drought.
For prosody of kisses, see butterfly
above, but note the term for my
cure is Germanic, all stress timed. 
Nachküssen: kisses that compensate for all the kissing that’s been lost.

Jennifer Litt Jennifer Litt is the author of Strictly from Hunger (Accents Publishing, 2022) and Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra Press, 2016). Jennifer’s poems have been published in Blue Earth Review, ellipsis…literature & art, Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Naugatuck River Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in Fort Lauderdale. 

Seeing the Low of 12 Degrees on Thursday Reminds Me That December is Coming


As much as I’d love to be a mountain man dressed in the skins
of brothers I’ve hunted,
sparking heat against
the friction of my own
sinews and sweat glands,
walking into the world,
my soundless steps doubling
as prayers of thanksgiving, I am a housewife wearing a poly-fil jacket
on top of a second-hand
sweater, turning up the 
house heater, tying scarves 
around children, salting
the porch steps, marching 
my hairy legs in secret protest
up and down the same creaking stairs all day, my arms full of toys, cleaning.

Amanda Russell Amanda Russell is a poet living in New Hampshire. Her chapbook, Barren Years, was published by Finishing Line Press (2019). Her poems have appeared in First Literary Review- East, EcoTheo Review and the anthology Mightier: poets for social justice. To learn more about her poetry, please visit https://poetrussell.wordpress.com/.
 

Father               


There’s a host of other things I could do in NYC nine a.m. Sunday 
rather than mass with my parents-in-law. 
A walk on the highline, and egg-and-cheese 
and coffee at a half-rusted iron table outside 
my Holiday Inn. Sleeping in. You’ve been 
dead ten years today. Three of my five 
children won’t remember you at all. 
I mumble along with more words than 
I realized I recalled. My in-laws are here, 
alive. Fathering still, and mothering even 
as my husband and I guide them through 
Central Park and past Washington Square 
Park protesters, spotting subway rail rats 
for them to photograph and remember 
when we’re back to tidy Ohio yards. 
The organ starts up. Pews creak like any 
others I’ve ever sat on. These stained-glass stories are all the same.
I doubt it meant much to you—shifting 
from Lutheran to Catholic to marry mom 
like her father demanded, trading one 
white judgement for another. What would 
you have liked if we amateur-tour-guided 
you here? A midnight show at the Comedy 
Cellar? Pastrami on rye? I don’t think you 
could have resisted tossing a buck or two 
at subway sax or bucket-drum buskers. 
Mass would never have crossed you mind. 
Rosary beads clink the pew back, dangling 
from an old woman’s folded hands. The 
organ starts up again. I don’t want to join
 hands with any of these people, though 
I do nod them peace. The host tastes 
the exact same way it did the first time I ever opened my mouth to be saved. 

Kerry Trautman Kerry Trautman (she/her) was born and raised in Ohio. Her work has appeared previously in South Florida Poetry Journal as well as various anthologies and journals, including Slippery Elm, Thimble, Limp Wrist, Midwestern Gothic, and Gasconade Review. Her poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020,) and Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas (Gutter Snob Books 2022.) Her next book is forthcoming from Roadside Press.