Month: January 2022

Photographs from 1950 by Eric Pak

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Photographs from 1950

When I was just a boy, before the first bullets flew at Osan
and children waded through rubble to school, my father
always told me stories of how recruits metamorphosed
into iron soldiers. How they bore chests embellished by
medals and wore boots that gleamed under the moon. He
told me he knew a private who was just seventeen, a young
man with wide shoulders and a fire in his eyes. His parents
shipped him off to Osan to honor the family name. After four
weeks, the boy returned with sunken cheeks and cracked lips,
fingers corroded by ice. His parents showered him with Poppies
and spooned him ginseng until he’s bereft of small joys.
Months later, father and the boy would fight in the Battle of Seoul
where the boy’s corpse would return in a coffin of threads.
Sewn shut as the wood peeled away under December frost.
For a year, the village mourned with shards of ginseng.
The other parents drank themselves dry,
before sending in their sons.

*

Eric Pak is a 17-year-old Korean-American living in Thailand. He has lived in diverse countries around the world and aims to share his experiences through his writing. His works have previously been published in K’in Literary Journal, The Paper Crane Journal and The Cathartic Literary Magazine. In his free time, he likes running and eating enchiladas.

Stereotyping at the Animal Shelter by Anna M. Evans

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Stereotyping at the Animal Shelter

Another cage, another pit bull mix,
another trusting face with wide set eyes.
These are the shelter dogs that no one picks,
because of what their heritage implies.
They’re an aggressive breed, detractors say,
owned by men who set up fights to bet.
A pit bull kills somebody every day.
Why would you want a pit bull for a pet?
And here is “Tyson,” aged nine, calm and sweet.
He’s good with cats, I read, and doesn’t bite.
I think of walking him along our street—
would people cross the road from me in fright?
He wags his tail. In our society
we don’t see past the things we’re told to see.

*

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014).

Girl with a Red Ribbon by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Girl with a Red Ribbon

Inspired by “The Red Ribbon,” by artist Abby Warman

This is not so much a girl standing on a sandy
beach, but the impression of a girl—

one who wears a white dress that is more
like a canvas upon which the rising sun paints

its roseate glow, its pale reflections of blue
water. She is carrying a straw hat and striped

towel. Tied in her hair is a bow the color of ripe
strawberries. Pausing in a pool of purple

meant to be her shadow, she is surrounded
by streaks of light as bright as an ivory gull’s

feathers. Yet, it is the rich, red ribbon that calls
to women who remember well the pull

and tug of tying, our mother’s hands as soft
as satin against the nape of our necks—how we,

impatient to be gone, barely felt them—would
give almost anything to feel them now.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of six collections of poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest (Press 53), winner of the 2021 International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Healing the Divide, How to Love the World, Poet’s Market, The Christian Century, The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2019, The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many more. Awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Nautilus Silver Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.

Topanga Table by Wendy Drexler

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TOPANGA TABLE

When she takes off her backpack, I can see
that the back of her coat is torn. She sets
her pack down on a barstool, unzips it
as our waiter passes her cans of tomatoes,
soup stock—five times she places
each can in her pack, no words, the one giving,
the one taking, casual yet practiced,
then zips up her pack, slings it over her.

I’ve been staring. I return to my locally sourced,
organic, sustainable cashew nut smoothie,
so thick I have to eat it with a spoon, arugula salad,
watermelon radish, a pickled egg shredded
over the top like confetti—and I snatch

another glance at the woman whose face
is a featureless plain, I now see, as she turns
to leave, retying her head scarf, straightening
the knot, overdressed for the California weather—
heavy coat, a scarf, rubber boots caked
with mud, though it’s not raining.

*

Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in numerous anthologies. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.

Smuggled Images by Anne Whitehouse

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SMUGGLED IMAGES

                          I

Sister Three was on the phone,
and she was outraged. Sister Two
had told her about the photos
I had taken that afternoon
of our mother lying dead
in the open casket
in the viewing room
of the funeral home.

Sister Three scolded me
for my lack of respect
and demanded I delete the pictures.
She said Sisters One and Two
agreed with her.

We each have our own ways
of grieving, I wanted to say,
but I was too spent to argue.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
One by one, I deleted the pictures,
while my daughter, sitting next to me
on the bed in the hotel room,
confirmed it to my sister.
“Okay,” she replied, mollified.
I could see she’d been prepared
for an argument I hadn’t given her.

As soon as she hung up,
I reinstalled the photos.
“It’s none of her business,”
I told my daughter.
“These photos are precious to me.”

                          II

Nearly ten years after my mother’s death,
I stare at these last images of her.
She died soon after her cancer diagnosis.
She had no time to waste away.

In my pictures she is lying tranquilly
against the white silk lining
of the casket. Her eyes are closed,
her face is made up, and her hair arranged.
She looks like herself, and yet not
like herself. She is wearing a dress
of navy-blue velvet, and her hands are folded.
On her left wrist is a silver link
bracelet made by Sister One.

I recall the mortician wringing his hands,
speaking softly with the right note of sadness,
yet clearly proud of his handiwork
and eager for us to see what he had done.

An impulse made me take the photos
after he left the room. Even though I knew
I never could solve the mystery of my mother,
I knew I would want to keep these images
close to my heart.

*

Anne Whitehouse’s most recent poetry collection is Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), and her most recent chapbook is Escaping Lee Miller (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2021). She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love, and has recently published several essays about Edgar Allan Poe. www.annewhitehouse.com

Four Poems by Donna Spruijt-Metz

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Sarah Returns to Me as Kirkland Culinary Parchment Paper

I’ve got Adele blasting on repeat, my earbuds in,
even in my own studio. They seem better at blocking,
better than surround sound at drowning

it out, drowning out your absence. But it’s no use. It’s the fifth month
of noise. By now I know the signs, yet it always catches me
off guard. My peripheral vision

shimmers slightly right before you

show up. Tonight, you take the form
of the jumbo box of parchment paper
you once bought for us. I touch the box, you

brush my shoulder. That’s how it goes. I shock to stillness,
vision vibrating on infrared, feeling the warmth
of your slight body,

As if you were unhung. As if the scaffolding
were undone. As if magic, like the way that roll
of parchment doesn’t ever seem

to run out, oh restless ghost, the way
you did.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be unkind. I am just

howling into your vanishing point,
which has so expertly given the illusion
of death.

*

Sarah Returns to Me as a 100% Organic Cotton Round
                            “Touch, as a form of collision;”
                                                —Carl Phillips

You once asked if I needed them. I didn’t think I did.
But you, in that way of yours—being so unsure of the needs
of love, or friendship, or even a conversation—yet confident
in your knowledge of the objects that people needed—comfort
by vegetable, by rice, by small porcelain bowls of great
simplicity and thus great beauty, by mobile phone stands—I stand
before the mirror tonight, cotton round in hand, and I hear
‘cotton round’—in a voice that is undeniably yours—your accent—you,
giving all the ‘o’s their due, their roundness.
—I’m a little spooked, yet glad of the visit—thinking how it might
have been for you—towards the end—unmedicated, hearing voice
after voice after voice—or maybe ‘after’ is the wrong word—’so many’
you once told me—and some worse than others.
But what do I know? You asked me if I needed ‘cotton rounds’
Yes. I learned to need them.

*

Sarah Returns to Us as a Dwindling Supply of Active Dry Yeast

I carry my laptop from desk to kitchen. I paw through the refrigerator,
looking for what we might need—which would, of course, not be there, so
I am looking for what is absent. I return to my screen. What am I missing?
‘Baking supplies,’ the shopping bot suggests. ‘Baking supplies,’ I murmur.
My husband says he has everything he needs, except soon he will need yeast
for the first time in almost two years. At the beginning of the pandemic,
everyone decided to bake their own bread. There was no yeast to be found
anywhere—no yeast to make our breads rise. Sarah found a bulk package
of yeast for sale at a bakery. She was brilliant that way, in her finding. We
divided it up, bagged it and froze it. Little bags of ascension, islands of clear
speech, just waiting for us to reach into where things are frozen, and retrieve
them.

*

Sarah Returns to Us as an Eviscerated Dog Plushie

saturated with saliva—the pups worry it, fight
over it, pull each other across the floor with it—jaws
clenched down hard on it. It’s the effigy of a doctor—a gift
from Sarah—the idea being that since our daughter
is a doctor—I don’t need to finish that thought—or maybe
I can’t. Who could understand her multitude twisty path-
ways to kindness? This particular destroyed toy had escaped
the rubbish bin—hidden itself behind the couch,
and tonight, it was miraculously (if you are a dog)
fished out—but what do we know of destroyed?
The dogs are ecstatic over this foul shell of a thing
—as if it somehow brings her back—
even though they had long ago pulled out
the stuffing—disemboweled the squeaky part.

*

Donna Spruijt-Metz is psychology professor, poet, and recent MacDowell Fellow. Her poetry appears in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are ‘Slippery Surfaces’ and ‘And Haunt the World’ (with Flower Conroy). Her full length ‘General Release from the Beginning of the World’ is forthcoming (2022, Free Verse Editions). Her website is https://www.donnasmetz.com/

My Father’s Voice by Melody Wilson

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My Father’s Voice

My face was always dirty. I blamed it on the wind
or my invisible friend. Mama stretched over the seat,

licked her thumb, scrubbed at my grubby cheeks.
Facing front again, she lurched into song, usually

How Much is that Doggie in the Window. My sisters
would plead for our father to sing—his smile

in the rear view, straight teeth, black mustache,
his turn at last. He sang like the best part of the sun—

like the Santa Anas that flowed in over his arm resting
on the door. As I walked out on the streets of Laredo…

four bare-legged girls lined up on the back seat—suddenly silent.
The primer-red Caddy sailed over the ribbon of asphalt

that held down the sand …as I walked out in Laredo one day….
Somewhere there’s a layer of time where leather still smells

like gasoline, where the Mojave rolls absently by, the song
just now falling, weaving itself into wind.

*

Melody Wilson’s recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, The Shore, Whale Road Review, Timberline Review, SWWIM, and Tar River Poetry. She received the 2021 Kay Snow Award, Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award, and finalist in the 2021 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award.

Love in the Time of Sunnydale by Michael J Carter

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Love in the Time of Sunnydale
                                                      -for Steven

My love for you is like Buffy dusting
another vampire with her favorite stake,
Mr. Pointy. Or it’s like Buffy beheading
one more demon, sword slicing some evil
lackey with a relentless arc, stopping
or at least stalling the nefarious dealings
meant undo her. That’s love in action:
sharpening sticks for battle, frying the undead
with holy water all while punning
and finishing first year psychology
late into the night. Taking down a secret
government op with its brilliant leader
and Frankenstein creation who is only undone
by a combination of magic and guile conjured
under less than ideal the circumstances—
a hostile take-over of the whole world
by demons. This is one difficult life: apocalypse,
apocalypse, apocalypse. My love for you eats
them for breakfast all while wearing stylish
but affordable boots while battling the Bringers,
harbingers of the first evil, acolytes of the worst
of the worst with their eyes stitched shut,
two crisscrossed x’s like kisses.

*

Michael J Carter is a poet and clinical social worker. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College he holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MSW from Smith. Poems of his have appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Ploughshares, MomEgg Review, Western Humanities Review, among many others. He spends his time walking his hounds and knitting.

Unrequited Love by Ruth Hoberman

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Unrequited Love

I used to shun unrequited love.
Better to wait for someone
who could love me back.

But now the rocks ignore me;
the cedars, ruddy and disheveled,
lean away; the goldfinches flee

as I approach. Should I pretend
indifference? I study the robin’s
chirrup chirroo, the chickadee’s

yoo hoo, yoo hoo: the party-guest
no one wants to talk to, too dim
to understand the conversation,

much less join in. Still my silly skin
aches to love them all. This world
lays waste to reticence, upends

my glass, spills my wits,
my dignity, hangs my heart bare
as the binoculars splayed on my chest.

So, nothing returns my call.
At seventy I’ve given up
keeping score—willing

myself (at last) to love
what turns away.

*

For thirty years, Ruth Hoberman taught English at Eastern Illinois University. Since her 2015 retirement, her poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Smartish Pace, RHINO, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares.

Three Poems by Lois Perch Villemaire

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Because You’re a Leo
           After Donika Kelly

You’re supposed to be confident,
happy to be the center of attention.
Not that you are that creature
knowing all too well
those waves of uneasiness
starting in your stomach
expanding to your shoulders and arms
worries over the crush of failure
moments of rejection
not being good enough
Are you a fraud?
Pretending to be something?

Don’t be so hard on yourself,
It’s a brand new season
relish those victories
those validations
summon up every shred
of positivity you can,
shape it into a mountain
of atomic strength,
acceptance of yourself
build on those affirmations
embrace the credit you deserve.

*

Dad Collected Penguins

Because he was a collector
of all sorts of things
from art to zebras
at one time he fell in love
with penguins
*
He told us penguins fly
through the water not the sky
diving deep into the world
of dreams— huddled together
—no wonder he held us close
calling us his chicks
*
we searched for penguin gifts
on holidays and his birthday:
mugs
pottery
framed artwork
sculpture
books
sweaters
*
until the day came when
Dad requested we stop
giving him penguins
we wondered why
but he laughed and said
his collection was complete
*
although he asked us
to cease gifting them
I will always associate
flightless seabirds with him
displaying mine like lucky stars
because at one time
he fell in love with penguins.

*

Who Lived on South 5th Street?

I’m done ruining my eyes
trying to read a spreadsheet
originated in 1910
to see who lived on South 5th Street,

After spending years
on family research,
spitting into a tube
sending it off to have
my DNA analyzed,

I’m done responding to
third cousins who may be related
but don’t have a family tree
or any helpful information,

I’m done paying Ancestry
several hundred dollars a year
to allow me to keep my research
in their data base,

I’m done running
into roadblocks each time
I try to figure out if Aunt Minnie
really had a son, James
who no one in the family recalls,

I’m done combing through
death notices on Newspapers dot com,
visiting rundown cemeteries
searching for gravestones
that may provide hints
to identify unknown ancestors,

And I’m really done
trying to figure out how
to pass along this information
because no one in my family
seems the least bit interested.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire resides in Annapolis, MD. Her stories, memoir flash, and poetry have been published in such places as Six Sentences, Ekphrastic Review, The RavensPerch, Trouvaille Review, FewerThan500, The Drabble, Pen In Hand, and Flora Fiction. Her poems have been included in anthologies published by Truth Serum Press, Global Insides – the Vaccine, American Writers Review 2021, and Love & the Pandemic by Moonstone Arts Center. She was a finalist in the 2021 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry.

Yellowing by Heidi Seaborn

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Yellowing

The poet wrote yellow plum.
I saw harvest moon,
your globe of limoncello,
the end of our marriage
swirling in liquor the color
of a highlighter underscoring
all that had gone wrong.

I had already known yellow skies,
the pulse of caution lights.
Had driven the hairpin
curve of disappointment.

But this picking the lock
of my ribcage—my body still
milky, still swollen with words
I needed to spill. This leaving me
with the door slam of marriage—
our yawning bed, everything
banking into a snowdrift.

The baby, a bit jaundiced
I thought when the poet
wrote yellow plum.
I held her to my breast,
her lips like a moth.

*

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of PANK Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks. Recent work in Beloit Poetry Journal, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Diode, Financial Times of London, The Missouri Review, The Offing, ONE ART, The Slowdown and the Washington Post. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU and teaches at the Hugo House. heidiseabornpoet.com

Three Poems by Jeffrey Hermann

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Problems in a Canoe

The picture book says there is no magic
in a canoe, only a series of problems to be solved.
You loosen the cedar strips with steam
work them across cutouts and stem molds
to form the hull, the hollow space inside.

We have a fish instead of a dog. He rests
his head on the blue rocks at the bottom of the tank,
drapes his languid body over a plant,
limp, like a man in a hammock.
We press our fingers on the glass, say his name.

My daughter wonders about the Titanic, eerie
down there in the North Atlantic, too deep for fish.
Does it wish to be left alone all these years later
just its skeletons to keep it company?

Does it miss the two little boys who rowed away
in wet wool coats without their father?

When the water gets hazy and muck creeps
up the side of the tank, we get the net and bowl.
I slide my hand easy under the water
and raise him up. He’s still but for his gills waving
little waves in a spoonful of water.

He weighs nothing, wetness inside and out.
We take turns touching him softly, his skin glittery
blue and silver. Then I turn him back to the water,
his passage complete, safe in the little boat of my palm.

*

Lake Trout Notes

I ask these fish if they attach meaning and
emotion to their lives but they just swim off
with the bread I drop over the pier.

I don’t fish anymore. I don’t miss the hooks
or the taking of a life. I miss the holding of it
in my hands. Taught and slippery. The warning

and fight in the spines of its fins. A little river
of red down my palm because one of us has bled.

*

Masters of Fine Art

Because I never went to grad school
my students are confused about office hours
They wander a marble hallway

The essay never assigned on sensory illusion
in the nature poems of Wang Wei
is making them lose sleep and dream up excuses

Passionate sad stories about unreliable cars
or broken hearts

After all, they are unreliable, they are broken

A thousand miles away I’m writing ad copy
fabricating quotes for a chain of cupcake stores

Some days I actually whistle on my way out the door

And when I get into my car I notice
how the reflection
in my side mirror makes it look
as if the mountain
I’m driving away from
is growing closer and closer

*

Jeffrey Hermann’s poetry and prose has appeared in Hobart, Palette Poetry, UCity Review, trampset, The Shore, and other publications. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure. 

Estuary by Valerie Bacharach

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Estuary

Where river currents meet sea’s tide,
where salt and fresh water mingle,
where grief and joy blur edges,
a weaving of what the soul desires.
Plums and apricots, leftover bread,
the sounds of your laugh.

*

Valerie Bacharach received her MFA from Carlow University in poetry and is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Viola, Vox Populi, Whale Road Review, The Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Kosmos Quarterly Journal, Amethyst Review, On the Seawall, Poetica, and Minyon Magazine. Her chapbook, Fireweed, was published in August 2018 by Main Street Rag. Her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2021. Her poem Self-Portrait with Origin Story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Toads and Petroglyphs by Sharon Waller Knutson

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Toads and Petroglyphs

Get up lady, the five-year-old says
as he x-rays me with dark eyes
and rips the sheet off my body.
Groggy on codeine and penicillin
after a yanked molar, I blink.

You’re mean lady, he says
when I snatch the Coca-Cola
and Hershey bar from him
and fix him a glass of milk
and bowl of granola for breakfast.

Catch me if you can, he shrieks
as he runs out the door of the RV
and up the hill behind the house site
where his father and my husband
carry logs and place them on the ceiling.

I give chase and heart valve flopping,
lose my balance, but he pops out
from behind an Ironwood.
Hanging onto the tree, he grabs
my hand and steadies me.

You’re pretty cool lady, he says
as we see Sonoran toads swimming
and serenading us in the Indian Baths.
We walk up to the rocks and he jumps
with joy as he views sketches
of his Native American ancestors.

Can you spare a dollar lady, he says
at twenty-years-old as he stands
on a street corner, arms and neck
tattooed like the petroglyphs,
his dark hair dirty and disheveled.
His eyes muddy as his jeans,
he sucks on an empty Coors bottle
he picks up from the gutter.

Do you remember me? I want to ask
but the woman who points him out
keeps on driving, reminding me
that he was raised on the streets
by drunks and druggies and that’s
all he knows. But the mother in me
still remembers the five-year-old boy
who thought toads and I were cool
and she wants to take him home.

*

A Note from The Author:

Toads and Petroglyphs is a true story about a boy I only spent a few hours with but fell in love with. It saddens me to know he probably doesn’t even remember me and to see him living on the streets but I know I can’t save him.

*

Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published several poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014) and What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021.). Her work has also appeared in Trouvaille, One Art, Mad Swirl, The Drabble, Gleam, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review, The Five-Three and The Song Is…

The Stranger by Steve Sibra

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The Stranger

Second I saw him.
side of the road, I knew.

“I love you”, I said.
As he turned, I struck him,
a mallet breaking excuses.

He folded
                 like a wallet of stars,
my fist a rock inside him –
a punch, a beating,
the call of a second heart.

We lay down together,
side of the road –
brotherhood,
strangest of battles.

*

Steve Sibra grew up in a small farming community in eastern Montana. He is a 1980 graduate of the University of Montana and has been a writer most of his life, first published in 1974. His work has recently appeared in Chiron Review, Dead Skunk Magazine, Flint Hills Review, and others. Steve resides in Seattle.

Bird Watching by Maureen Fielding

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BIRD WATCHING

In my mother’s garden
amid the blue hydrangeas,
begonias and hibiscus blooms,
a red-headed finch sits atop the fence,
nervously eyeing the feeder.

Prodding hungry stomach,
tiny internal debate—
last doubts extinguished,
fears overcome,
he flutters from fence to feeder,
hurriedly, blissfully
guzzles the seed provided with love,
always aware
that his quiet meal
may be jarringly interrupted,
that the same hand that pours the seed
and fills the bath
is the same that flings open the doors
and shatters the moments of silence, safety, sustenance.

For sometimes my mother stands
entranced at the window,
tuned to the finch’s fragile courage.
At other times
her world is devoid of finches.
She tramps loud and heavy
on the hearts of all.

*

Maureen Fielding is an associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State Brandywine. Her work has appeared in Westview, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Marathon Literary Review, WLA, and other journals. She has taught English in South Korea and is currently working on a chapbook based on research conducted in South Korea about Japanese Militarized Sexual Slavery. She has also written a novel inspired by her experiences as a Russian intercept operator in West Berlin during the Cold War.

Later by Cheryl Baldi

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LATER

We speak in whispers,
move in silence
from room to room, listen
to the oxygen’s steady pump,
moisture bubbling through the tubes.
Three days unresponsive. I sit with her
until someone else comes in.
Years from now I will remember
these moments, the counter
scattered with crumbs
from half eaten sandwiches,
the tide low, winds calm,
Cormorants still perched
motionless in a line
along the pilings.
At first they seemed an omen,
messengers from the dead,
but I will wonder later
perhaps they were something other,
mournful attendants,
or angels, their black
wings spread wide
against the late day burn.

*

Cheryl Baldi is the author of The Shapelessness of Water and currently is at work on a new manuscript, In the Golden Hour, Cormorants. A former Bucks County Poet Laureate and a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she was a finalist for the Robert Frasier Award for Poetry and the Francis Locke Memorial Award. She has taught at Bucks County Community College, worked as a free- lance editor, and served as co-facilitator for community-based workshops exploring women’s lives through literature. She lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA and along the coast in New Jersey.

A Poetry Reading by Dan Brook

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A Poetry Reading

we met at a poetry event
one person reading Ted Hughes
another Sylvia Plath
in tense conversation
we fell for each other
through those words
make love poetically
like a hummingbird
sipping nectar from a pink flower
getting drunk on it
every single day
quieter in her public life
she’s emotionally volatile in her verbiage
often dazzling
she recently sang to me
putting on her best Carly Simon
sneering and crooning
you’re so vain
you probably think this poem is about you
don’t you?, don’t you?, don’t you?
but it is about me
I know it is
nearly all her poems
since we met
are about her, me, or us
how she was, who I am, what we’ll be
though my poems cover more ground
she’s the finer poet
with more depth, nuance, feeling
wordsmithing like a wizard
and I love her for it
more with each poem
even when she hates herself

*

Dan Brook teaches in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State University, from where he organizes the Hands on Thailand program. His most recent books are Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways To Be Happy (Beacon, 2021), Sweet Nothings (Hekate, 2020), about the nature of haiku and the concept of nothing, and Eating the Earth: The Truth About What We Eat (Smashwords, 2020).

Visitation by Sean Kelbley

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VISITATION

Damon’s day is going great,
by which I mean he wouldn’t join
at carpet for the read-aloud or math

but didn’t bolt the room, throw scissors,
rip up anybody’s work. No one got choked
or punched or kicked at morning recess.

I’m his reward. Me and my sand tray,
fidgets, Thera-Doh. Me with no other kids.
He likes my sound machine—the white noise

best. He likes to poke through all my “Pop Its.”
He doesn’t like to turn my timer to ten minutes
but it’s public school, so he can’t ever get

his own all-day adult. Best I can do is try
to set a clock in him that’s not a bomb.
This be poison hot dog, make you sick

he says. But pulls the ends around, transforms
the fat blue cylinder of putty into circle.
This pill make you better. He raises it

toward my mouth and I pretend to take a bite.
He lifts it higher, just above his head. The vessel
of his body shines and warns: so many things

can happen next. I did a miracle, he says,
and this my Angel Hat. Locks eyes with mine
and waits for me to wrestle, or believe.

*

Sean Kelbley lives with his husband on a former state experimental farm in Appalachian southeastern Ohio, in a house they built together. He works as a primary school counselor. Sean’s poetry has appeared in RATTLE, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Still: The Journal, Sugar House Review, and other wonderful places including anthologies, nature trails, and high school marching band competition shows.

poem by James Penha

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Tomorrow could be the coldest day in three years in America
meteorologically, but it’s the fever of its politics
and the warming of our oceans that chill me to the bone.

*

A native New Yorker, James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha

Four Poems by Anastasia Vassos

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It’s Nobody’s Fault

Night is an old woman snoring
& daybreak yet to be born.

I woke up alone.
I stand on the balcony of our pensione

& watch you stroll Rome’s stradas
lost, at 5am, heart perforated

your body weary & apart

while you think of
another woman & her yellow hair

spread across a pillow
like a river’s tributaries.

I will love you
into my own drowning.

The river inside your eyes
has overflowed its banks

the Colosseum’s arches peer at you
as you stalk twilight.

You’re a book
about to be written.

Learn to forgive everyone
who’s ever hurt you.

Sign your name in dirt
with the toe of your shoe.

*

Cassandra Leaves Troy

princess at the mouth
of Troy whose luck
with Apollo
ran dry, ironically
who saw the noble Greeks
inside the belly of the horse
not believed
let’s call her
a stained copy
another life
that could have been

she’s the tall girl
escaping through her window
backwards her long coltish legs
one then the other
retracting night
her white gown
left on the floor
in a pool of moonlight

*

Icarus As Rust

      after Paul McIntire

In supposed flight, suspended.
You were a hawk
bones made of lace
from the sun’s collar.

Past your archaic time
rusted porous wings
and contrapposto
weightlessness and gravity.

Your chiton strangles you.
Red dust sun curls his lip
blood moon curls
her silver tongue.

*

Late Afternoon

Birds circle:
rich entertainment
and in the middle of it
nature not quite dead.
The sun’s blade makes
one last stab
across my back.

I am leaving you,
October of my grieving—
your gray head
your orange skirt flouncing
round your ankles.
I drive east in low gear
along the unmuscled arm of Ohio
heading toward November.

And as the sun falls behind me
trees huddle to mask
disaster. Darkness, unwelcome
takes over the sky.
I thank the stars for making
a colander of night.

I look up and ahead
through heaven’s perforation.
The landscape shrivels past
I am Orpheus in a dress
and Eurydice blind.
I drive under an overpass.
Lights strain, headlights on the bridge
gleam like the eye
in the head of an oracle.

*

Anastasia Vassos is the author of Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021). Her chapbook The Lesser-Known Riddle of the Sphinx was a finalist for the 2021 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize. She is a reader for Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and is a long-distance cyclist. She lives in Boston.

My Father and Pavarotti by Andrea Potos

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My Father and Pavarotti

On my stereo this morning,
just as I lean in to write, Pavarotti
came on, his aria filling the whole room.
I’m not schooled enough to know
which aria, only how my father loved him
and how, leaving his crabbiness aside, my father
would sit watching the Lake Michigan surf
from his living room window while the great man sang
over the speakers that filled the house;
and on the patio of his Southern winter home,
he listened, while the lapis surface of the pool sparkled;
then in the last years of the rehab home where he lived
with his rescued brain, a small carved canyon still visible
where the surgeon had rushed in. Once a week I drove
the eighty miles to sit with him there, his silver hair
still blazing, his eyes closed as we absorbed the pure notes
of the rich tenor who sang to my father still.

*

This poem is forthcoming in Andrea’s collection Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press, fall, 2022).

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books) and Mothershell (Kelsay Books). A new collection entitled Her Joy Becomes is due out from Fernwood Press in the fall of 2022. She has poems forthcoming in The Sun Magazine, Poetry East, Spiritus Journal, and The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy (Storey Publishing, April 2022).

Three Poems by Gloria Heffernan

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It Figures

My favorite figure
skaters are not
the ones who score
a perfect ten.
My favorites are
the ones who fall.

More specifically,
the ones who fall
and get back up.
without even brushing
the powdered ice
from their bruised behinds.
They just clamber
to their feet and go.

They are my heroes.
Why are there no
gold medals for them?
What is three minutes
of perfection compared to
a lifetime of resilience?

*

Geology

The knowing begins
to settle in layers
like the diagrams
in my fourth grade
science book
with its drawings
of the earth
from the crust
down to the core
where the molten center
bubbles quietly
until some seismic shift
causes it to churn,
erupt and obliterate
everything in its path.

*

Regrets

If anyone should ask
what I most regret,
it will be the stories
I didn’t tell.

The story of the dream I had
the night before Jackie died.
The way he stood
at the foot of the steps
bathed in white light.
“I’m all right now,” he said,
after the long months
of suffering and surgeries.
“It’s okay.”

When his mother called
the next morning
to tell us he had died,
I never told her
that I already knew.
Never said,
“Don’t worry. He’s okay.”
Never tried to explain
why I didn’t cry
when I heard the news.

And now she too is gone.

*

Gloria Heffernan is the author of the poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books), and Exploring Poetry of Presence: A Companion Guide for Readers, Writers and Workshop Facilitators (Back Porch Productions). She has written two chapbooks: Hail to the Symptom (Moonstone Press) and Some of Our Parts, (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Chautauqua, Braided Way, Stone Canoe, and Columbia Review.

Portrait of the woman under observation by Annie Stenzel

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Portrait of the woman under observation

In the new place, at dawn the eastern light
finds its way through three tall windows.

At night, a street-lamp mimics the moon,
sneaks in to amend the bedroom’s darkness.

All day, not far away, freight trains take a leisurely
tour of small-town tracks. Clang-clang-clang-clang

as the barriers descend on sundry streets. Traffic
is philosophical. It’s only a matter of time.

En route to one word, another word interposes itself: Why not
say Vespoli when you mean Tivoli? Okay. No harm done.

Already, she finds things put away in the wrong
drawer, or on a shelf too high for easy access.

A labyrinth of boxes and bags dwindles, but
hodgepodged items loom where they were dropped.

Every move from one space to the next previews
that unthinkable portal to the place that is no place at all.

*

Annie Stenzel (she/her) was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., from Ambit to Thimble, with stops at Chestnut Review, Gargoyle, Nixes Mate, On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Stirring, and The Lake, among others. Her second collection was recently shortlisted for the Washington Prize at The Word Works. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.

SHANTUNG TIME by Marnie Bullock Dresser

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SHANTUNG TIME

How will we say we’re less vulnerable
Without being vulnerable? “Oh, we don’t
DO that anymore,” we’ll say, when someone shares
A little too much because all sharing
Has become oversharing, other than strategies
For getting stains out of the shantung
Pillow covers and the shantung pencil skirts
And the shantung drapes, because yes,
We are moving to a time of nubbly silk
And charmeuse and chiffon and brocade,
The 2050s, what we’re longing for,
Not there yet, but it’s coming,
A time when outside the gates there’s chaos
But inside the walls there’s harmony
And quietude and busy, humming bees,
All dearly bought and all we have to lose
To get there is our urge for authenticity.

*

Marnie Bullock Dresser lives in Spring Green, Wisconsin with her husband and son and four cats in a house that, really, isn’t big enough for that many living creatures. She has taught at the tiniest University of Wisconsin campus for the longest time.

Abecedarian for 2020 by Anna M. Evans

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Abecedarian for 2020

Apocalyptic years begin insidiously—your
best friend discovers she has cancer, and there’s news from
China about a mysterious, highly contagious
disease. One minute, Australia declares a state of
emergency, and you turn on the TV to see
fires raging. The next, there’s a
global pandemic, and everyone’s locked down at
home. You play cards and drink wine. It gets worse:
I can’t breathe, says George Floyd with that cop’s knee at his
jugular. Your best friend—her name was
Kim—dies. You turn 52 at a Black
Lives Matter protest. The internet jokes, Who had
Murder Hornets for May?
Not you, you’re just trying to keep track of the cancellations—
Olympics, Wimbledon, Lollapalooza, Broadway—and
pretending to cope. You teach classes online.
Quarantine follows quarantine and it’s suddenly fall.
Russia is again interfering in the presidential election;
Spotted Lantern Flies are swarming Philadelphia;
Trump claims credit for defeating Covid 19. The word
unprecedented is meta-commentary. Finally, you get the
virus, shut yourself in your bedroom watching MSNBC—
Wisconsin polls look good but Pennsylvania not so much—
experience tells you to trust nothing.
You write a poem, this poem. You hope Hurricane
Zeta will be the last disaster of 2020. It isn’t.

*

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014).

Constancy by Amit Majmudar

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Constancy

The best way to be
alone is to have someone

somewhere in the house.
Which means

for your solitude not to feel lonely, you need
someone else

to be alone, too.
By you, my love, I mean

me,

of course. That goes without
saying, which is to say, you and

me

forgetting each other sometimes
proves how completely

the same empty jam jar
holds us, two fireflies

scooped out of the same evening,
meeting at a knife hole in the lid

to lick the same star.

*

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. The former first Poet Laureate of Ohio, he is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary and Dothead as well as two other poetry collections, four internationally acclaimed novels, an anthology of political poetry, and a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Awarded the Donald Justice Prize and the Pushcart Prize, Majmudar’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best of the Best American Poetry, and the eleventh edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. A memoir, Twin A, is forthcoming in the United States in 2022. Two novels are forthcoming in India in 2022 as well: an historical novel about the 1947 Partition entitled The Map and the Scissors, and a novel for young readers, Heroes the Color of Dust. He is currently co-creating a graphic novel/web comic, The Kali Yuga Chronicles. Visit www.amitmajmudar.com for more details.

[junk food] by Nicole Caruso Garcia

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[junk food]

junk food
in the vending machine tray
a dead mouse

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia is the author of Oxblood (Able Muse Press, 2022), which was named a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award and the Richard Wilbur Award for Poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets 2021, DIAGRAM, Crab Orchard Review, Light, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The Orchards, PANK, Plume, The Raintown Review, Rattle, RHINO, Sonora Review, Spillway, and Tupelo Quarterly. She serves as Associate Poetry Editor at Able Muse and an Advisory Board member at Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Why We Need New Year’s Day and the Passage of Seasons by Daniel Simpson

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Why We Need New Year’s Day and the Passage of Seasons

Because we are iron in a smithy world
which heats and hammers us beyond self-recognition,
leaving us slow to learn renewal,
too grumpy or fogged most mornings
to notice that our hearts still surge blood
to every point along the body’s map,
and that our minds are still what computers emulate.

After all, even monks with no other life
cannot harness themselves to awareness every second.
And yet, a garbage collector I know
carries his life like a diamond,
and an exhausted mother
immersed in four-child babble all day
hitches her mind to a book each night,
if only for five minutes
before she careens into sleep.

Praise, then, to the policeman who paints portraits,
and to the bank teller who keeps a journal.
Praise to the thwarted shop steward who keeps
his standing appointment to play catch with his child.
Praise to the heartbroken social worker who subscribes to the symphony.
Praise to the math teacher who photographs birds,
and to the roofer who, hoping for hope,
believes that, next year, his team will do better.

Praise the toddler and the hospice-dweller
as they stumble in new passages.
Praise all who breathe.
Praise all who once breathed and now nourish the ground.
Praise all whose stories have already been written,
and all those who still have at least one more chance.
(“Seventy time seven,” says Jesus,
are the chances we each should have.)

Let the fireman remember his own life as he chops with the axe.
Let neither the minister neglect his wife,
nor the doctor her husband.
Let none of us simply swallow our lives whole.
But if the minister, the doctor, and we should fail,
let us have new years and fresh seasons.
Let us have seventy times seven chances.

*

In 2017, Daniel Simpson and his wife, Ona Gritz, collaborated on two books, co-authoring Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems and co-editing More Challenges for the Delusional, an anthology of prompts, prose, and poetry. His first collection of poems, School for the Blind came out in 2014. The New York Times and numerous poetry magazines have printed his work. The recipient of a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowship, he tends a blog at www.insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com.