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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). |
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. |
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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 |
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. |
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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. |
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. |
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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. |
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. |
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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. |
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. |
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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. |
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. |
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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. |
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. |
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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/. |
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. |
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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. |
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. |