Nightfall
Tonight is for forgetting.
Rushing into the black-lit apartment,
closing the door,
missing the light
every time I go
for the switch.
Where could it be?
It was on the side here –
Darkness threatens
to stare me stiff.
I just had it –
the full-length mirror
is a pale angel.
Windows clear.
No noises –
and just when all
feels safe
my hand is swallowed
by night.
*
Samuel Strathman is a poet, author, educator, and the founder/editor-in-chief of Floodlight Editions.
TRYING TO TEACH MY MOTHER TO CROCHET
I wanted something for her hands–
the dusky blue crochet hook I bought for her
and blue acrylic yarn the color
of the Greek sea near the long ago
city of her birth.
She didn’t ask for this lesson.
In her steady kindness, she went along
with me, trying to match her fingers
to the flow of looping yarn.
I worried she wouldn’t continue
when her mind told her
she needed another cigarette,
though the cancer had already set in both lungs
and her treatment begun. I never considered
how she might want to live her last months or years
doing what gave her balm, the familiar comfort
to inhale, taste and release a swirling elegance
of smoke. All I knew was my own need
to halt what had already begun, to keep her
present and seamlessly shawled around us.
*
WIG SHOPPING WITH MOM
Though after five months of chemo, her hair
was only thinned a little,
she had a free wig coming,
the nurse said. We visited the room
of floor-to-ceiling shelves: mannequin
heads, and baskets of scarves and wraps.
Mom settled in; we giggled, comparing
thoughts as she smiled for my cellphone camera:
dark auburn with short curls, layered
brunette waves, medium shaggy, sideways parts;
one wig with streaks of silver like surprise hints of lightning.
In no rush to agree on the one and decide,
we wanted to stay in that brief clearing
of complimentary joy. We never even considered
choosing anything other than hope.
*
CREATING
I think of my Yaya, all those hours
at her Singer sewing machine,
or sitting with her skeins of yarn,
or the thimble on her finger as she
basted and lined
the pleats of the drapes,
the hems of the dresses and skirts and coats,
as she embroidered the doilies and linens,
the pillowcases and sheets.
All I have are my pens, scatterings
of dark blue or black, sometimes purple
or green, depending on the mood,
hoping my hand aligns somehow with hers as
I make small stitches of words across paper
that, sometimes, feels like rough cotton,
sometimes like silk.
*
“Wig Shopping with Mom” and “Creating” are included in Potos’ collection Marrow of Summer forthcoming in Summer 2021.
*
Andrea Potos is author of several poetry collections, most recently Mothershell (Kelsay Books), A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and Arrows of Light (Iris Press). Another collection is forthcoming in summer of 2021 entitled Marrow of Summer. She received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry, and several Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her poems can be found widely in print and online. Both “Wig Shopping with Mom” and “Creating” are included in Potos’ collection Marrow of Summer forthcoming in Summer 2021.
Grief by Donna Hilbert
Three Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon
Self-Care by James Crews
Notice Breath by Ona Gritz
5 poems by Ethel Rackin
Two poems by Barbara Crooker
Two Poems by Anton Yakovlev
Night Talks by Terri Kirby Erickson
5 Poems by Claire Keyes
Gears of the Night
for Jennifer Simpson
The night before Christmas,
people were busy in their lit houses.
The moon kept revolving all the same.
The tide headed out, then returned,
headed out, and returned.
The shoreline breathed the rhythm.
The bugs bored into the trunks
of the trees behind the factory.
Tick, tick, tick went their tiny teeth.
The metal slats across the overpass
clattered each time a car drove past:
clac-clack, clac-clack.
Then, the traffic cleared
and only crickets sang.
Out from the darkness, a pickup sped by
—clac-clack—
and the pigeons under the bridge
lifted in a swirl and swooped away.
There was a snail working
his way up a drainpipe.
He’d stopped and rested some hours,
his slime hardening on the corrugated metal.
With no fanfare at all,
he returned to his journey up the pipe.
The moon noticed but said nothing.
Why would it.
On Christmas Eve,
outside of the busy, lit boxes,
the gears of the night turned onward.
*
“Gears of the Night” is dedicated to Dawn’s dear friend, Jennifer Simpson, devoted writer and literary community member extraordinaire. Jennifer led Dime Stories in Albuquerque, was co-founder of Plume: A Writer’s Companion, volunteered for years at the Children’s Grief Center, and among her many other efforts, she hosted the drop-in writing group, where Dawn wrote this poem one year ago.
On December 12, Jennifer Simpson suddenly passed away. She was a beautiful ally to many people, in countless ways. This piece is shared in tribute to her influence on the writing community. Go to talkstorypublishing.com to learn more about Jenn’s various projects and check out the fine books her press published.
Dawn Sperber’s stories are forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction and Zizzle Literary, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in Bourbon Penn, We’Moon, NANO Fiction, Going Down Swinging, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New Mexico, where she’s a writer and editor. You can find more of Dawn’s work at dawnsperber.com.
Molokini Crater
The way desire could wind around
me like a cat around my legs,
a purr loud enough to drown the no
right out of my mouth, the soft fur of it
scratching, tripping me up.
He never once asked if I was happy,
and when he asked me to become his wife
the NO inside frightened me into a small yes.
And while I lied and the too large ring was floating
towards me over the clear water,
I saw the birds of paradise, stiff and orange,
splayed like flaming wings wide to the sky
above the nearby cliff, and I wished I were braver,
a bird of paradise—alone and arcing,
not this false bride afraid to wrest myself
from the lie of my life, afraid of the backlash.
Which happened, and soon, stripping me nearly down to bone,
but not that day; that day was cool blue ocean,
sharks slow swimming beneath us,
a too-large ring, a terrible fear,
the false smile which confused the photographers,
and that premonition of doom.
*
Meghan Sterling’s work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Rattle, Glass Poetry Journal, Literary Mama, and Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest. She is co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, is Assocate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, Featured Poet of Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 Issue, A Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press in 2016. Her first full-length collection is coming out in 2021 from Terrapin Books. She lives in Portland, Maine with her family.
The Way I Miss You
In daytime when light plays over us
even from this all-gray winter sky,
something else is dancing.
It’s always there, the hidden thing
that makes everything possible.
This is how I miss you.
It isn’t that the moon
slips inside a sleeve of night
and vanishes so that anything I see
is a partial thing defined by darkness.
The universe itself that transmits light
hides in the gravity of darkness.
I don’t miss the light.
I miss the shadow
that was our shadow.
*
The Sea Is A Grief
Listen to the old accordion
making sad music
with bones and pebbles,
countless secrets
like hidden predators.
The sea grieves for its secrets,
which are those of a small boy
watching the waves rise and fall
from a pier where a horse dives
with a star-spangled rider
into the foamy water
and emerges in front of the boy’s own eyes
still carrying the woman in the wet shining cap
who leads it back to plunge again
from the high pier into the sea.
*
Stan Sanvel Rubin has poems recently in 2 River, Sheila-na-gig and Aji and has been previously published in Agni, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, One and others. His four full collections include There. Here (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Book Prize). He lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. He writes essay reviews of poetry for Water-Stone Review.
And the Native Grasses Mourned
The wildflowers long gone,
the native grasses mourned.
Then, cut and laid low,
the sorrowful remnant
was raised from the field,
straw tombstones,
disquieted
for their children
in the earth.
*
Melissa A. Chappell is a writer living in rural South Carolina. She has a BA in Music Theory from Newberry College and a Master of Divinity from the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. Besides writing, she is a classically trained pianist, vocalist, and makes attempts at the Renaissance lute. She also plays the guitar. She shares her life with her family and two mini schnauzers. Her latest publication is Doors Carelessly Left Ajar, published by Alien Buddha Press, 2020.
A Catholic’s Guide to Avoid Going to Hell
Use your manners,
even if the other person doesn’t deserve it.
Smile, a lot, sometimes painfully.
Grit your teeth if you must to really sell it.
Be a generally good person, by society’s standards-
whatever society you happen to be a part of.
Don’t be the person who breaks a pay-it-forward chain
in the Starbucks drive-thru line.
Keep most of your thoughts to yourself,
(people don’t usually take kindly to them).
Always bless people when they sneeze.
Tell white lies to protect other people’s feelings.
But also never lie, it’s wrong.
Maintain impeccable customer service,
no matter how awful the customer is.
It’s your fault, anyway.
Treat all animals better than humans.
Animals are the closest thing to God
(besides the Pope, of course).
Give your money away-
no matter how hard you work for it.
You don’t deserve it.
*
Valerie Frost is a Garden State native. She lives in Central Kentucky with her twin three-year-olds. Her poems have appeared in the Eastern Iowa Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Thimble Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.
I Still Can’t Read Your Criminal Case
published by your family in hardcover.
It never made the bestseller lists, though
I hear it reads like a potboiler until
the last three pages. Forgive me
for still getting angry at the raccoons
when they snatch the chicken carcasses out
of my garbage, even on the anniversaries
of the night your body was dropped in acid.
*
Her Voice
*
Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry chapbook is Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018), winner of the James Tate Prize. He is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Measure, Posit, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in 2019.
Nebraska
What have we crumpled and tossed
into the trashcan across the blacktop
if not decades of forfeited days
and those broken-feathered
regrets pinned under glass. Groaning,
incapable of elegance, still I long
to be those undulating grains by
the roadside in the great between.
Crows caw out of sight as I pump
gas and watch your hair blowing
in the angled light. Sing me your
favorite birdsong. Whisper the cloud’s
name. Tomorrow we’ll dream in Iowa
of corn that is not just corn, but
the emblem of that junction between
innovation and form, function and all
that blisters under the sun’s unforgiving
eye. I want to infiltrate each kernel,
peer through the veiled yellow-white,
recover sweetness, flatten the curve.
*
Robert Okaji is a displaced Texan seeking work in Indiana. He once owned a bookstore, served as a university administrator, and most recently bagged groceries for a living. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in As Above So Below, Slippery Elm, Atlanta Review, Vox Populi and elsewhere.
Across the Street
We live in the suburbs
and we have a Ring Doorbell
and we have a tiny dog
and there are coyotes
that live in the woods
across the street
I let the dog out
every night before bed
and watch her sniff
the air for dangerous news
blowing from
our coyote neighbors
across the street
I keep an aluminum baseball bat
by the front door
just in case the coyotes
decide to attack her
or try to lure her
back across the street
My imagination has
played out a scenario
where they surround her
and I come thundering
out of the house swinging
the bat left and right
taking out one coyote after another
knocking them here and there
sending them yelping back
to the woods
across the street
I think about the rush
I would get from
posting the Ring-Doorbell video
on Facebook
Every like a micro dose
of adrenaline
*
Jason Fisk lives and writes in the suburbs of Chicago. He has worked in a psychiatric unit, labored in a cabinet factory, and mixed cement for a bricklayer. He was born in Ohio, raised in Minnesota, and has spent the last 25 years in the Chicago area. www.jasonfisk.com
Traveling Back
On our nightly walks, my dog, Traveler,
will crane toward the occasional passing car,
studying each driver’s face, maybe searching
for his first master, the one who might have
taught him to lean full-bodied into love,
who conditioned in him a fierce loyalty.
Perhaps gone astray chasing a chipmunk
in the park or, slipping past a backyard gate,
he found himself irretrievably lost.
Rescued from the street two counties
and six years removed, my cherished companion
may believe, in the instinctive sensory wash
of canine thinking, that his first master
has all this time been driving everywhere,
still looking for him.
I was the family black sheep, declaring to the one
whose life was given over to my care,
I wish you weren’t my mother, with no thought
of my power to bruise. Knowing only the chafe
of that bond, I left with a one-way bus ticket
in my blue jean pocket. In the last years
of my mother’s life, I worked my way back,
fumbling with the intricacies of that knot,
frayed with time and distance, but still holding.
If one day some driver should stop, push open
the passenger door, call my dog by a name
that pricks up his ears, makes him shiver and whine
with joy, I wonder if I could release his leash,
let him leap into the car, and then with a resolve
hard as love, close the door behind him.
*
Barbara Sabol’s fourth collection, Imagine a Town, was awarded the 2019 Poetry Manuscript Prize from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals; most recently, Evening Street Review, Northern Appalachia Review, The Comstock Review, and Literary Accents, as well as in numerous anthologies. Her awards include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Barbara lives in Akron, OH with her husband and wonder dogs.
Space
My son planes planks
then checks for splinters.
He’s building a desk with old factory salvage,
boards that once supported
machines, grime, men’s weight
for so long that now
they’re as yellow as egg yolks
flecked with red.
He used to drift through parties
when young, leave the table
to search for carved mantles,
crown moldings, curlicues and corbels.
I’d find him
stroking the grain, the artistry.
Now I bring sandwiches,
sit near the scant warmth
of his plug-in heater
and consider the view:
panorama, a mosaic
of high-rises and rooftops,
windows like tiles reflecting
soft movements of humans.
I used to have
my own studio space.
I’d paint abstracts
and hold day long conversations
with crimson and ultra blue,
make marks with charcoal sticks,
catch lyrics. To paint portraits,
I invite souls in
to sit near the windows
so they could feel a little freer.
*
Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), is forthcoming in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery (www.ceruleanarts.com).
Two Kinds of Dead People
Scientists call
getting lost
in a
book “transport.”
It’s the
same with
death, really.
You’re delivered
like a
FedEx package,
conveyed by
escalator or
moving sidewalk.
You must
get lost
to live.
*
Ralph James Savarese is the author of two collections of poetry, Republican Fathers (Nine Mile Books) and When This Is Over: Pandemic Poems (Ice Cube Press). He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Absence
In this time of needed absence
when distant words are thin soup
and images cannot be grasped,
we offer the lack of ourselves
as a protective prayer for those
we love too much to touch,
and hope that our denial
of those we hold most close
keeps us intact and caring
for a later day.
*
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over two hundred fifty stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.
Ahern on social media:
Tweets by bottomstripper
https://www.facebook.com/EdAhern73/?ref=bookmarks
https://www.instagram.com/edwardahern1860/
From the back porch of a war
I wish I could be like this dandelion —
patient, awaiting rains. Thousands are dying,
and we’ve been told to stay inside our homes
to keep the numbers down. The squirrels aren’t buying
such lousy edicts, rummaging through our garden
for anything to stuff between their gums.
They don’t have bills past due or rent to pay,
patients to tend to, politicians’ lies
to aggravate their fears in these dark times;
oblivious to the shortage of supplies
in hospitals, to a panic that only comes
when having too much (as a luxury)
infects the brain. Here, on this warm March day,
their hoarding means new life is on the way.
*
James Feichthaler is a poet and essayist whose work has most recently appeared in Sortes, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Martin Lake Journal, and the Mad Poets Society’s Local Lyrics series. His new book The Rise of the COVFEFE, a poetical satire of these divided and uncertain times, was recently published by Parnilis Media. He is also the host of an open mic reading in Manayunk, PA called The Dead Bards of Philadelphia.
In the teal of morning
Sun lamping up the sky,
we rub our cloud eyes, rub
the fossil night off and start
the dayburn. Turn on the radio,
same old talk of a planet cracked
and ribbed with fires and flood
and hate, tarred up with sludge,
which, really, could have been
glitter if only we had tried.
*
Sunfizzle
And the drip of daywater
slowing, slowing. Nearby,
burnt rubber from a car
speeding on its way to begin
something, to end something.
Shreds of the day in the sky
going violet with twilight.
The sulk of the sun, its
fizzle coming to a dead
stop, the walkaway of time.
*
Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, Passages North, and many others. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and (The Theory of Flesh.) Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ September, 2021. She lives in NYC.
