Month: April 2022

In Other News by Molly Fisk

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In Other News

I am not walking along a shore,
hands in pockets and buttoned
up to the neck against this bright
November, thinking of everything
everyone I love has taught me:
how not to change lanes into
another car’s blind spot and linger,
the best way to conjure fire —
gradation of twigs, faster- and slower-
burning sorts of wood and it really
does have to be dry: smoldering
keeps no one warm. I can easily find
the edges now between anger, rage,
and disappointment by what’s running
underneath and stop before I lash out.
I don’t hurt myself or anyone else
on purpose. Cast iron gets wiped
with kosher salt and paper towels
so it will last a few more generations.
To swim across cold lakes, you walk in
up to your waist — no point getting out
if your suit’s already wet. I’m childless,
I have no one to teach this to,
it’s up to you. Use half a potato to twist
the broken light bulb from its socket.
If your gas pedal jams while accelerating,
the hand brake won’t last: turn off the engine.
Add a little pasta water to the sauce.
Don’t worry about dilution,
it will coat the noodles perfectly.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets when she was Poet Laureate of Nevada County, CA. She’s also won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her most recent poetry collection is The More Difficult Beauty; her latest book of radio commentary is Naming Your Teeth. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills. mollyfisk.com

in a pandemic year by Robin Chapman

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in a pandemic year

two rabbits chase each other’s shadows
in moonlit snow under the black branches
of the yew I’ve lived with for fifty years.

In the Arboretum prairie, the Jackson Oak
I first saw in full leaf has decayed to a single trunk
and branch–hawk perch, owl stand, but all around

its offspring raise their young green arms.

*

Robin Chapman’s most recent book is The Only Home We Know (Tebot Bach), recipient of an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and honors from the Council for Wisconsin Writing. Her poems have appeared recently in Poem-a-Day, The Hudson Review and Appalachia. She is recipient of the Helen Howe Poetry Award.

Winter Solstice 2020 by Bunkong Tuon

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Winter Solstice 2020

My wife takes the kids to see her parents.
I have great plans for the weekend.

I scrub dishes, forks, knives, and place
them in the strainer. I clean the sink,

use stainless steel pad to remove
grease on the sides of the oven.

I windex the glass window.
Darkness lasts forever

Nowadays. The dirt is cold, hard.
Cold rain washes away January snow.

The soil is frozen, bare and dark.
The sky is dark, lonely.

Has it always been like this?
My wife’s yiayia passed away

the same week Toni Morrison did.
My Lok-Yeay passed away

in another state while I was going up
for tenure. My hands and feet are cold.

My uncle said that on her last night
Lok-Yeay opened her eyes and spoke

to people she hadn’t seen in forty years.
She was back in her village.

I sweep the floor, organize mail, scrub the toilet.
I sweep, scrub, scrub, and weep.

*

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel, And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (Yes Poetry). His prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Lowell Review, Massachusetts Review, The American Journal of Poetry, carte blanche, Diode Poetry Journal, Paterson Literary Review, The Mekong Review, Consequence, among others. He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, NY.

Burial at Sea by DeWitt Clinton

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Burial at Sea

We’re sailing now, a sunset sail, friends
who knew all three, as we’ve brought
what’s left of our very dear ones, one
a husband, another a mother with a
daughter aboard, and a wife, with a
husband aboard, and as soon as the
sun is about to set, we will start opening
bags of bone and ash, and begin to say
prayers, perhaps an Our Father, perhaps
a solo, and a Kaddish for the wife, so all
can finally come to rest not in old graveyards,
but somewhere in the deep cold waters,
somewhere where we’ll probably never
be able to plot ourselves back for others,
careful to note the direction of the evening
wind, who’s already lifting shot glasses, all
a bit tipsy, careful not to join our departed,
then a repast for all, and by nightfall, we’ll
scatter back to our lonely homes, remembering
this beautiful summer night where we all cried
goodbyes, remembering where we were that
lovely summer evening sailing out into the bay.

*

DeWitt Clinton taught English, Creative Writing, and World of Ideas courses for over 30 years at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater. His earlier collections of poetry include The Conquistador Dog Texts, The Coyot. Inca Texts, (New Rivers Press), At the End of the War (Kelsay Books, 2018), By A Lake Near A Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters (Is A Rose Press, 2020), and Hello There (Word Tech Communications, 2021). He is a student of Iyengar Yoga, and occasionally substitutes as a yoga instructor for seniors in The Village of Shorewood, Wisconsin.

Contronym by Jacqueline Jules

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Contronym

As a noun, “rock” is a stationary stone.
As a verb, it unsettles or shakes.

“Trip” can be a journey or a stumble.

“Finished” could mean
completed or destroyed.

If a word can contradict itself,
it’s not so odd to pray.

To thank a Source of blessing
and not blame a Source of grief.

After all, the word “cleave,”
could be clinging or cutting.

“Sanction” is approval or boycott.

And prayer changes me,
not the world.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including ONE ART, The Sunlight Press, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Imitation Fruit. Visit her online www.jacquelinejules.com

Atrocities by Carolynn Kingyens

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Atrocities

Hell, he said,
was not a caliente inferno
for demons and lost souls,
but the act
of being completely alone —
Thoreau-style solitude,
in the wilderness
of our own minds
and past lives;
again and again
we are forced to watch
as if held down
by the hand of God,
our atrocities animated
against loved ones.

I was somewhere
between buzzed
and drunk,
sitting inside his
silver sports car
in our parents’ driveway
where we were talking
about hell and damnation
of all things,
not quite sure if I was
making sense.

It felt awkward
to sit next to him,
alone,
without the familiar
distractions
of our loud, big family —
he in-between girlfriends
and I at home
for the weekend
without the company
of my husband,
but with the company
of my dog.

The glowing-red ember
of his cigarette
burned on and on
and on.

*

Carolynn Kingyens is the author of Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound and the newly released Coupling, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble (Brooklyn), McNally Jackson, and Book Culture. In addition to poetry, Kingyens writes essays, book and film reviews, flash fiction and short stories. Her short story “Bye-Bye, Miss American Pie” was one of fifteen stories selected by Across the Margin, a Brooklyn arts and culture webzine, for their Best of Fiction 2021 list. 

All the Hours the Night Has Left by Wendy Drexler

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All the Hours the Night Has Left

What I’ll never have is close to, or nearly equals,
what I’ve had. I find myself at equilibrium,

which may last only a day—the mayfly’s
brief happiness—no way of knowing

if this is happiness or merely the acknowledgment
of where I am, skittering and buzzing and looking

all around, the pond by now thick with my own kind,
the water the halfway shade of tea light and twig—

it no longer matters I can’t see clear
like the elephant god, remover of obstacles.

The first time I heard a concerto, and someone
told me what makes a key minor

is the lowered third, I listened to the sorrow
for myself. At last I can name it:

brokenness, beauty, the way through.

*

Wendy Drexler is a 2022 recipient of an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her 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 has been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books. All the Hours the Night Has Left is the final poem in this collection.

Three Poems by Meg Freer

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Grief Has a Name

A full ten minutes at sunset, hundreds
of crows fly south over the woods.
Moments after the last one,
snow blows in from the north.

I follow sheep trails across the fields,
unwind details I have been avoiding,
mental terrain more suited
for moose than human.

Mom’s two birthday balloons cling
together in her dining room for a day,
before one migrates to the kitchen
and the other moves into her bedroom.

A day later, the bedroom balloon
floats into Dad’s study to stay
just above the books. Dad must be
directing this scene from beyond.

In my dream, he fades into view
in the doorway holding a basketball,
says nothing, watches while I read
on the sofa, then drifts away.

Grief wants me to call it by name,
knows all 360 joints in my body,
tapes their seams to keep itself
from floating into oblivion.

*

All the Sounds of Summer

As gently as he once held a fledgling blue jay,
he cradles his sister’s arm, traces each of the thin,
horizontal lines he never knew were there,
saddened by scars not yet faded to white.

All the sounds of summer vanish
as he enters into her night and wonders at the fluency
of hands that treat the body in such disparate ways.
How to fathom the plight of molecules gone awry?

Ever distressed at the sight of his own blood,
though he understands artery over vein, he can’t
understand pain that calls out for more pain and hopes
his sister will fly, as the fledgling he buried never did.

*

New Mother
        for Mary P. and Minnow

I offer to walk with her on the nearby trail,
get her out of the house for a while.
We greet Archie and Jughead, the goats
with curly horns, as we pass their pen.
I pick up a guinea hen feather to bring home.
She sets a brisk pace as we leave the farm.
It hasn’t hit her yet, this unexpected freedom.

She stops short, as if she’s seen an apparition.
A cow stares at us through the brush.
What are you doing way over here by the fence?
Shouldn’t you be over with the horses?
This moody cow moves around the horse pasture
every day, rarely spends time with the other cows,
sometimes goes off by herself to figure things out.

We leave the cow to her moping, resume walking,
then she stops, looks back down the trail.
Wait. Am I even supposed to leave the farm?
I have babies back there, you know.
I reassure her that it’s fine to take a break,
she nursed her puppies, she needs fresh air.
She catches a whiff of spring and trots off.

The robins and redwing blackbirds are singing,
the stream is flowing, the spring scents
keep enticing, we continue our walk.
A bit further and she stops again, looks back
the way we’ve come, looks up at me.
Are you sure I was supposed to leave?
My puppies might need me, you know.

I try to persuade her to keep walking,
but no luck. We turn back, the cow
is still at the fence, but she doesn’t notice,
she is so excited to return to her seven pups—
lick them all over, move them around
with her paws and nose so they all
get a turn to nurse—be a good mother.

*

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now teaches piano in Kingston, Ontario, where she enjoys the outdoors year-round. Her prose, photos, and poems have won awards in North America and overseas and have been published in journals such as Ruminate, Juniper Poetry, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Arc Poetry, Eastern Iowa Review, and Borrowed Solace.

Two Poems by Bex Hainsworth

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Swan

She was standing on the roof of the old mill building.
Two storeys above us, she was a spectre, her feathers
luminous in the dark. A moon-shadow,
thoroughly confused by her urban landing.

We paused on the pavement below, both blinking
to see if she would disappear, only a shared vision.
Yet she remained, strange shade, exquisite gargoyle.

The street’s silence was stirred by the taxi, humming
on the curb. Driving away, we watched through
the rear window, hoping to see wings unfurl.

At the restaurant, we spoke with others in hushed voices
about friends in Italy, hand soap, and closures.
Eyes flitting, our thoughts prickled with uncertainty.

Later, dropped on the same corner, we walked past
another apparition: a van, large and pale, doors thrown open.
And inside, our swan, curled up in its depths like a pearl.

The RSPCA officer told us he was heading north,
to Nottingham, for a release by the river.

Twelve days later, we went into lockdown.
I thought of the swan: roof-ghost, phantom, harbinger.

*

North

I stand inside
a wreath of trees.
The hills, cave-coloured,
blue with rain, seem
to sway like kelp.

From somewhere
in the deep
comes the taste
of saltwater, a sharpness
like needles at my feet.
I dream myself back
into sunny colours.
The red cliffs of Mornington,
as warm as one minute
into death. A brick split
open, the blade of time
slipped from throat to tail.

The sky peers down
and sees itself, complicit.
Its soul, black,
shark-shaped, predatory,
stays away from the shallows.

A blood-spot
of reflected cloud
at the heart of it all
retracts like an anemone
as the shadow passes over.

I see these colours
bleeding into each other
as the sun clots on
the blue horizon
of hills and trees.
The cliffs decay
into a kelpish mist.

There is no
escaping the cold.

*

Bex Hainsworth (she/her) is a bisexual poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in Visual Verse, Neologism, Atrium, Acropolis Journal, and Brave Voices Magazine. Find her on Twitter @PoetBex.

Passover by Ann E. Michael

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Passover

The first holiday without,
grief burns like anger.
Irritant. Tough fibers
scraping at skin raise a rash,
sore during celebration.
Empty ritual this year.
Empty place at the table–
bitter, bitter herbs.

*

Ann E. Michael’s upcoming chapbook is Strange Ladies, slated for publication in 2022 (Moonstone Poetry); she is the author of Water-Rites and six other chapbooks. She lives in eastern Pennsylvania and blogs at https://annemichael.blog.

April 6, 2022 by Gary Metras

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April 6, 2022

In dream, I am extracting bodies
from the rubble of bombed buildings.
There are many of us under this
granite sky and charred chunks of concrete.
Here and there, torn lace curtains,
broken teacups, an odd shoe. No one
speaks. We find a body and drag
or carry it to the middle of what
was a street. Bodies lined up.
Others check their pockets for IDs,
photograph them if they have
facial features someone may recognize,
then bag them in plastic so black
light could not shine on the remains
for a thousand years. No one speaks.
After a few days, no one cries,
no one feels. We are as numb as a tree
as we bend and lift and grunt.
In each heart, a hope that there
will be a body, no matter how broken,
that breathes. When another signals me,
I go to help him drag one more body
and he points to its face. I look
at it, then at him standing like a tree
with drooping limbs. There, on the
ground, is a body with my face.

*

Gary Metras is the author of eight books of poetry and thirteen chapbooks. His new book is Vanishing Points (Dos Madres Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in such journals as America, The Common, One Art, Poetry, Poetry East, and Poetry Salzburg Review. A retired educator, he fly fishes his home waters in western Massachusetts as often as possible.

Seventh & Idaho by Nathaniel Gutman

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Seventh & Idaho

Nothing spectacular, what grabbed my attention,
just unusual, because it was genuine,
the thank you smile and nod of the cyclist
who crossed when I stopped at the four-way
Santa Monica intersection.

Seventy, I’d say, white hair, slender, big blue eyes,
a Van Dyck portrait, take off the fur gown, millstone collar,
not the arrogant type, a humble, generous man,
a face to remember.

Wonder what he does for a living, where he lives,
his wife, what is she like, his children, grandchildren.

He looks at the oncoming truck when
he’s thrown off his bike,
falling, limber, down the asphalt,
a pool of dark, thick blood
spreads from under his
still, peaceful face.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

Their World by David Salner

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Their World

In the world of the dead
the sun sets every morning;

the pious pray to shadows
they call light;

the successful live in a prison
of their success;

the rich live long lives
in the comfort of their self-love.

And the Arbiter,
who lives to correct everyone else?

Like a stopped clock,
twice a day he’s correct.

Twice.
At most …

*

David Salner’s debut novel is A Place to Hide (Apprentice House, 2021) and his fourth poetry collection is The Stillness of Certain Valleys (Broadstone Books, 2019). He worked as iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, and now librarian. His writing has appeared in Threepenny Review and Ploughshares. Innisfree Poetry Journal 33 featured a retrospective of 25 poems drawn from his four books. https://www.innisfreepoetry.org/innisfree-33/a-closer-look-david-salner/

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

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The improperly squeezed-out sponge*

I am, a place for harboring
bacteria, cellulose thriving
with writhing mold spores—
in my pores, an abundance
of water. Left on the ledge
too long, I dry out, shrink
to half my usual size, still
full of potential, I wait
to be of use.

*From The Secret House by David Bodanis

*

Thirty Birds

There’s a brightness folded into every bird
but the bird doesn’t know it. – Melissa Studdard

And you, in your darkened hood, fold
in upon yourself, forget your underpinnings,
your bright insides, huddle in the wind.
Oblivious to drafting wings or the fish below
whose flash frenzies this fervent gathering,
your eyes locked on churning surf, scolded
by the feather-fanned air, the squawks that sing,
the waves that level, unfurl softly to the shore.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. She is an assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Poetry publications include Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Sky Island, and Minyan. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Betsy’s photos have been featured in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Spank the Carp, Praxis, and Redheaded Stepchild. She is the author of Alinea and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

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Spiritus

I waken to the sound of breathing
so loud I think it’s you beside me.
But no, love, it’s me. My breath, alone.

*

Ribollita

I praise the way you save
stale bread left on the shelf too long,
rinds of Parmesan tough to grate,
old greens not crisp enough
for salad, but fine for soup
re-boiled from what’s on hand.
I love the way you salvage
bruised tomato, sprouting onion,
imperfect squash, laying no morsel
to mold, nothing to waste,
filling each space with aroma
of soup, saying supper, manga!
come eat, come safely, come home.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is the just released Threnody, from Moon Tide Press. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. Poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and on Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home, and during residencies at Write On Door County. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com

Distress Signals by Kip Knott

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Distress Signals

                inspired by the artwork of Aron Wiesenfeld

                “There is a lot of darkness that people are confronting
                right now . . . . All people are like prisms, with internal
                characteristics, through which the world is filtered.”
                       —Aron Wiesenfeld

1.

When I was a child I sailed
toy ships in the drainage ditch
beneath the looming overpass
that ran behind our house.

Tires speeding through puddles
overhead channeled crashing waves
that I imagined smashed against the hull
tied to the end of my line.

Breaching eighteen-wheeled
leviathans shook the world around me,
rippling rings of greasy rainbows
from one shore to the next.

Above everything, I heard my parents
shouting, not for me to come in,
but at each other, the way thunder yells
at lightning for flashing too bright.

To this day I still don’t know
if I was the one guiding the ship,
or if an otherworldly stowaway
had thrown a line to me

and I was waiting for someone
to pull me in, to pull me under.

2.

It’s easy enough to step that one step forward and fall
endlessly away from the troubles that trouble the world
around me, around you, around us all.

To take that one step away from the edge and fall
back into all the divisions and ills that plague this world,
that step is the hardest step of all.

Whichever way I choose to move I know that I will fall
upon a high wire stretched between the precipice of a world
I will come to know all in all

and the precipice of a world that every day seems ready to fall.

3.

The sight of my reflection
waving from the cell of a mirrored
windowpane stops me in my tracks
as I walk alone to work.

I wave back. My reflection
motions for me to join him.
Over both our heads, dark clouds
shift and churn in opposite directions.

Before I take another step, I must
decide if the blood that broken glass
will draw from shredded flesh
is worth the chance to learn

who lives on the other side of who I am.

4.

We occupy a liminal space.
One of us stands, the other sits. We exist

together, apart,

not quite shadows, not quite
reflections.

Reflections
exist as both the same and other,

reversed, opposite.

One of us stands, the other sits. We exist
in an endless liminal space.

5.

I have sometimes posed
myself in a final repose
just to know the shape of death.

And now, after years
of loneliness, I am too weak
to lift my head to see

if any pose I ever struck
actually matched the contours
of my body as I slowly

drift away.

*

Kip Knott’s first collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, is available from Alien Buddha Press. His most recent full-length book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his writing at kipknott.com.

*

I would like to offer my thanks to Aron Wiesenfeld for creating the powerful and evocative artwork that inspired this poem. The following five paintings were particularly inspirational:

· “Study” (2020)
· “The Pit” (2019)
· “Morning” (2002)
· “Hallway” (1999)
· “Chris McCandless” (2003)

Blurred Sky by Cathleen Cohen

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Flowering Cherry by Cathleen Cohen

Blurred Sky
       For Peter

Sky swoons
as gray as old slate boards

or stones on graves.
Forsythia flash caution

against massed clouds,
backdrop to mourning.

Our brother evanesced
this day, decades back.

Shouldn’t grief mute?

A weeping cherry jostles
center stage, like a bridesmaid,

intent on the bouquet.
The neighbors planted it

when their daughter was born,
frothy hybrid, always flouncing.

Each year I try and fail
to paint its blooms

against insistent spring light.
Maybe this year

I can bear to see it clearly
against a blurred sky.

*

Author’s Note:

Our brother, Peter Krueger, died of AIDS at age 32 in the early days of the epidemic, in the spring of 1988. A talented man who loved life and art, he was an expert in European furniture at Christie’s auction house. Spurred by love for him, our family worked to build a clinic in his name at Beth Israel Mt Sinai in NYC for those with HIV. Each spring I write poems in his memory. He is always with me.

*

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A poet, painter and teacher, she created the We the Poets program for children (www.theartwell.org.) Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, North of Oxford, One Art Journal, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review, Rogue Agent and Toho Journal. She authored Camera Obscura (Moonstone Press, 2017), Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press, 2021) and Sparks and Disperses (Cornerstone Press, 2021.) Her artwork is on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery (www.ceruleanarts.com) and www.cathleencohenart.com.

Three Poems by Jane Ann Fuller

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At the Corner of Orchard and Second

In 1989, I lived in a duplex, mid-fix, 9 months
pregnant while the man I married drove

206 miles one way twice a week to weld continuous
Rail for CSX. One room was a peninsula of windows

that leaked heat but leveraged light like
a crystal, so I begged him not to board it up. He smelled

of diesel fuel and I could hear his Jetta turn
the corner of our block when he was back

for pork chops, chocolate pie and sex.
When he was home he mostly slept

or plumbed the crooked floors or punched
out horse-hair plaster walls or left

at 2:00 pm for pulled pork sandwiches
and cans of Busch. Sometimes I’d leave

to find him laughing on a bar stool.
Everyone said what a good woman

I was. We believed together
we’d make something better

of the rooms we’d soon rent out.
When you work and ask for nothing

more, you think you’re right. One night
the baby head-butted me on the bridge

of my nose and someone came right out
and asked who threw the punch.

Today, I run my palm against the grain of velvet
of a doe that stands outside my house. The doe is real.

Its coat, soft as air. I lied about the proximity of hands.

*

Everything’s a Version of You

We thought it might be dead. Remember,
when the bat got in? Trapped
in the shower, it circled the glass, clung
with suction cup thumbs,
dropped like a rag.

I don’t know what we thought.
So, we shut off lights, opened doors.
Through the moonlit kitchen
into the foyer, quick as it entered,
—out it flew.

It’s been twenty years since
you left the house, drove
until first light, found a place
to die on Tick Ridge. You could have been
sleeping in that grove of hickories.

Bats still cloud our streetlamp like
the opening of a cave. Stars slide into
constellations I try to name. Everything,
a version of you here: the bat, little Lazarus
lifts from the floor into a black

sky shot with stars. Once chained,
Andromeda’s a galaxy, freed.
Dead, how brightly, she
courses for a billion years
toward me.

*

The End Of Winter

When I think about the end
of us, I’m chopping onions.
In the distance, a train on the tin horizon
blows across tracks where I could be waiting,
holding my paisley suitcase.

In February, snow knows no boundaries,
blankets us in oblivion. We like it
at first, being tucked in, immobilized
by our lack of control, kick into survival mode.
Portable propane heater. Check.
Coleman lantern, check.
Things seem possible.

When rain begins, ice pelts the ground,
6-8 inches of snow. I’m peppering the roast
when the lights go out and everything powers down.

While we wait for men in cherry pickers to reach us,
we tell stories in the near dark.
I barely conjure the blizzard of ’78,
but you say you’ll never forget
snow stacked so high it reaches the eaves.
You have to tunnel out.

As if what happens, happens twice,
my story of the storm is a white field,
days blown with a random neighbor kid
the winter before the summer
I met the first boy who broke my heart.
I was 14. We both played trumpet in the high school band.
I hear he has twins and isn’t sure he loves his wife.

It’s never the end until you say it is. Darkness holds
us to the heat of love, blankets doubled over like a rug.
In the cold arms of a weigela, a fat cardinal sings.

Scoops of seed, cakes of fat start the frenzy.
Starlings in their midnight feathers, linen finches
flit from suet cage to barren tree, sing their tinny tune of survival.
All they seem to know is survival. Pretty little savages.

*

Jane Ann Fuller’s poems have appeared in such journals as The American Journal of Poetry, Shenandoah, Still: the Journal, The MacGuffin, jmww, Atticus Review, Sugar House Review, Waccamaw, Northern Appalachia Review, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere, and in such anthologies as I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing, All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women, and It Starts With Hope, (The Center for Victims of Torture). Her collection, Half-Life, was published in 2021 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Temporary List of Inquietudes by Nicole Rollender

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Temporary List of Inquietudes

Wild rabbits ravaging our ripening strawberries
Our son asks how long they’ll live: the red berries dripping in sun
& rabbits. We explain there’s a season for all of us
In a month the strawberry stems wilt & brown back into the earth
In a year, the oldest rabbit curls himself into the dirt
His fur & bones wreckage for burial or shoveling away
This way, we open our son’s memories to longing
That day, I was happy
That day, I remember the light warming the top of my head
The world shows its face in the rabbit’s shadow
His tears for not picking the half-eaten strawberry
The teeth marks like the brokenness we all learn
A cloud moving the sun’s face
Our son looks up: Maybe rain’s coming
More strawberries will grow
There’s still time to taste this sunlight in the berries
We wanted to teach him that living’s what we desire
Despite the destruction in the garden & inside our bodies
The rabbits live in the sun such a short time
& the berries & the sound of bells & our sorrows

*

A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Palette Poetry, Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal and Ruminate Magazine. Her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill Journal and West Branch, among many other journals. Nicole is managing editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal, and holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University. She’s also co-founder and CEO of Strand Writing Services. Visit her online: www.nicolemrollender.com.

SLICE OF MORNING by Mary Elder Jacobsen

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SLICE OF MORNING

I’m waking to a sky
dark as chocolate ganache
swirled by the great baker,
her sparkly spatula,
her flourish of icing,
between bright coconut-
fluff layers of snow days
she’s stacked up one by one,
yesterday then today,
and soon I remember
the slice of cake sent home
after last night’s party
and I’m up like the sun,
first to rise out of bed
down the dim-lit stairwell
followed by the dog, star
of our world. How is it
he can beg shamelessly
for more? His bowl is full.
We are not unalike
after all. Let me slice
this last piece of sweet cake
in half and leave the rest.
Let me keep wanting more.

*

Mary Elder Jacobsen’s poetry appears widely in online and print publications, most recently in The Greensboro Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and the anthology The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, edited by James Crews. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, she holds graduate degrees from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and UNC-Greensboro. She lives in Vermont, where she is a freelance editor, a community volunteer, and Coordinator of Words Out Loud, an annual reading series held at a still-unplugged 1823 meetinghouse.

Plates by William Palmer

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Plates

He stands in his garage
beside the pile of plates
he bought at yard sales.

He takes one and flings it
at the steel door:
It was snowing—a whiteout

the boy said
whose car struck his wife
as she opened their mailbox.

The man lifts another plate,
feels its cold shine,
puts it down.

He sweeps the pieces
into a cardboard box
with the other pieces.

In the kitchen he sits
and closes his eyes:
a small door opens—

he finds a parcel
of light.
He thinks it will not go out.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Cold Mountain Review, J Journal, On the Seawall, and Poetry East. He has published two chapbooks: A String of Blue Lights, and Humble. Retired from teaching English at Alma College, he lives on Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan.

Pink Bunny by Julie Weiss

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Pink Bunny

How to describe history´s grotesque
face, still half-hidden under a mask
of deceit? In some countries, hide

and seek isn´t a game. In some homes,
the bodies curled inside closets no longer
contain enough space for laughter.

I want to nourish my children,
and also, I want them to hear the gnarl
of a not-so-distant hunger as they ravage

their pile of snacks. Tell me, what
greater joy than watching your daughter
blow out her birthday candles? How

the flames are quelled in a single
wish without ever searing her skin.
Don’t think about it, they say. As if

our playgrounds weren´t haunted.
Voices encircled by a battalion
of bloodied dreams. The swings

heavy. The wind pushing them
side to side, shapeless. Just because
we turn off the television doesn´t mean

bombs aren´t falling on schools
and theaters. No matter how dazzlingly
our children dance in their spring concert,

missiles will continue blazing through
the bellies of maternity wards.
A family lies at the foot of the bridge

they almost crossed. Next to their open
suitcases. Next to a bright pink bunny,
squashed beneath the rubble.

Explosion after explosion, and we don´t
turn away. Look, I say. I need them
to know what may come next.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She was a finalist in Alexandria Quarterly´s First Line Poetry Series, has been named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize, and she was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Sheila-Na-Gig, Orange Blossom Review, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, and others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.

Daytona by Holly Day

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Daytona

He opened the car door and told me to get in, quick
it was pouring rain so I wasn’t thinking. I can’t say I came from a small town
where everyone knows each other and it’s no big deal to jump into someone’s car
I came from a city on the beach where people just stopped
and offered you a ride when the weather was shitty
because things were just that way there. I didn’t think
when I jumped into the car with the greasy man with the mullet
didn’t think anything weird when he seemed surprised that I actually was
standing on the corner waiting for a bus in the pouring rain
As the conversation started to turn, I mentioned having a baby
a family, a husband waiting for me at home, somehow
that seemed to turn the greasy guy on even more. I kept him driving as close to my house
as I could get, because now that I’d missed my bus
I wasn’t going to backtrack the half-mile in the rain just to get back to where I’d started.
“How much do you charge to touch?” he finally blurted out
interrupted my menial conversation on my shitty day at work
how degrading temp work could be. “Just with your hand, nothing else?”
“I don’t think my husband would appreciate that,” I said
making my voice calm, I wasn’t going to freak out, he was muscular and hairy
he was so much bigger than me.
“How much would you charge just to watch?” he asked,
then sighed, pulled over, said, “Maybe you should just get out here.”
It was about a mile from my house
it was still raining
but I got out and walked just the same.
*
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Earth’s Daughters, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.

Three Poems by John Minczeski

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In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis

The shovel, striking a root, thunked
all the way down to my moist heart.

An acolyte, I knelt to bury the plant to its neck.
Blame me for trusting coincidence

more than fate. Hold me responsible
for rose thorns. The sloping yard hoards

the memory of past glaciers. Have I searched within
for the gravitational field that holds me here?

Weeds take over the neglected bed next to the house,
sharing the sun with stray snapdragons and tomatoes

that will forget their names by August.
If there’s a faint, high pitched whistle

like a bird stuck in the night,
it could be the call of my own breath.

*

My Hmong Neighbor Butchers Ducks

He sits on a milk crate in front of his garage—
cleaver, chef’s knife, a tub full of steaming offal.
His three-year-olds ride a scooter and tricycle
around the driveway between the pickup and grass.

As I walk through the neighborhood, clusters of shots
from the Maplewood police range. I don’t feel
I’m a target often, only at times a certain look says
no sudden moves, keep my hands in sight.

We are driven by hungers we can barely name—
the knot of family, a muffled turbulence of face masks.
With a language thick in vowels and tonal music,
an older sister corrals the twins.

Such singing to lure them back from the street’s open
invitation, its grin wide and toothless as a slashed tire.

*

The Wellness Check

How many elegies are enough—
the tone, the muffled drums,
heart pressed to dirt.

Leaves, having ridden the grass
so long, lie mulched and
mounded over the beds.

The guy down the block who
hasn’t spoken more than a word
to me in twenty years, said

his brother has pancreatic cancer,
tumors everywhere. Holding out his hand,
he said Parkinson’s. The tremors start

when it gets cold. Gale warnings and snow,
he stands at his mailbox in shorts and t-shirt,
socks, slippers. He’d watched the hearse

carry off the old man across the street.
He guesses he’ll be next.

*

John Minczeski is the author of five poetry collections, most recently A Letter to Serafin (University of Akron Press). His poems have appeared in Tampa Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Cider Press Review, Bear Review and are forthcoming in Twelve Mile Review, Rhino, and The St. Paul Almanac. Minczeski has worked as a poet in the schools, and has taught in colleges around the Twin Cities.

Waking to Winter by Sally Nacker

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Waking to Winter

I wonder whether I woke to heaven:
the wood all clouds. Out my bedroom
window, only two tall black trees
stand clear, the pines mere smears
of soft watercolor green. Am I afloat
in this new, white-veiled world?

I feel my own breath now, and
the winter dawn on me,
understand that snow, not clouds,
swirls through the wood. Head
on my pillow, I study the squall, lost
in wonder, feeling I woke to heaven.

*

After Soft Pines, watercolor by Holly Hawthorn

*

Sally Nacker was awarded the Edwin Way Teale writer’s residency in 2020 where she enjoyed a week of solitude on 168 acres of nature. Since then she has moved to a small house in the woods. Publishing credits include The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, One Art, Mezzo Cammin, Quill and Parchment, and The Sunlight Press. “Waking to Winter”—in a slightly different version– will be part of the 2022 BRAG Ekphrasis VI exhibit at the Fairfield University Bookstore in downtown Fairfield, CT in April. Kindness in Winter is Sally’s new collection. Visit her website at http://www.sallynacker.com.

Two Poems by Sandra Fees

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Alone
— after Jane Kenyon

Sometimes an ear is a tiny canyon.

Sometimes winter goes on and
on. Sleet hisses against the shutters.

Sometimes the sink is full of dishes
and I can remember
the roses you brought me.

They stood upright in time.

*

Prescription

When you grow tired of a marriage
place the smooth placebo moon against the tongue.

When you grow tired of appeasing
swallow the moon. Let your expectations
fall. Let the tides of endorphins rise.

You didn’t just imagine it.

The slender moon visible in the western
sky just after sunset can make you believe
anything, can make you believe you too
can arouse oceans & circle planets,

that your body too will soon wax
imperturbable & full.

*

Sandra Fees has been published in SWWIM, River Heron Review, Harbor Review, and other journals. The author of The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2017), she lives in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Nonno by Clint Bowman

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Nonno
For my grandfather

Graveside poinsettias
wilt in winter frost—

I walk by them
in yesterday’s clothes,
solemn as a silent film.

My memory holds on
to everything
like a shallow grave
in a flood plain.

The slightest sound
of certain songs,
and smell of old cologne,
resurrect you
to my consciousness.

I’m unable
to decompose the past
with your hand-me-downs
wrapped around my waist
and draped across my shoulders.

So you remain
a plastic bouquet
always in bloom
next to the graves
of others I never knew.

Hopefully one day
I’ll join you
in the flower shop
of heaven,
where we’ll pick out
my arrangement
through the hands
of our descendants.

*

Clint Bowman is a writer from Black Mountain, North Carolina. During the day, Clint works as Recreation Coordinator leading hikes and other outdoor programs. In the evening, Clint co-facilitates the Dark City Poets Society- a free poetry group offered through the local library. More of Clint’s work can be found in the California Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Plum Tree Tavern, and Main Street Rag.

Rain by Marc Alan Di Martino

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Rain

It rained for the first time all summer
today. Rills of atmospheric runoff
filled the roof gutters, sloshed down the sides
of our house. The car glowed like a glazed
donut, or a dog freshly praised
by its owner. I read once how
in the youthful days of Earth
when all was barren and alien
it rained for 200,000 years straight
swelling the oceans, prepping land for life.
You have a debt to rain. You owe it this much: listen.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet, translator and author of the collections Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His work appears in Palette Poetry, Rattle, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Valparaiso Poetry Review and many other journals and anthologies. Currently a poetry reader for the Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Fractured Pastoral by Michelle Reale

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Fractured Pastoral

I

Lacrimal

We sat defiant in the garden of red flags for years. On a good day we might call such signs devotion. On bad days, science, or something like it, gone rogue. I couldn’t interest a single person in the luxury of memory, such as what it was like to weigh our words with care, as we used to on Sundays. Everything became a surrogate for experience. What I knew was that the first tear that comes rolling from the right eye would signal happiness; the left eye, pain. Out of both, frustration. My mother, forever the tectonic node between an imperative and a wish, told me to give it up for world peace. It didn’t sound like love. It sounded like advice with the rough and frilly edge of caution. A lip bit until it bleeds.

ll

Oracular

We watch misery from a distance. On which day and at which hour can we still enjoy a pure moment? The shell game of existence goes like this: Here, no here, not now.

And sometimes: never, not ever, not in our lifetime.

lll

Granular

There are some women who will still wear a red dress as they dust the strategically placed sacred images that adorn their tenuous house of cards. It would be hard not to admire such alacrity. In fact, I do. When reality makes its cameo appearance, we should know enough to greet it with caution. Ready the coffee pot, cover the fig tree, and apply one more coat of lipstick. Wait for its inevitable return and a longer stay. It will be important to focus our wayward attention on one beautiful thing per day. It will be obligatory to try to understand, when memory deserts us, that we still have the sun, in our shared and beleaguered skies, even though it is sometimes as pale as a lemon that knows its inevitable and inexorable fate.

*

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press, 2021) and Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily (Cervena Barva Press, 2022). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review.

The Last Light by Vikram Masson

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The Last Light

He’d had enough of the kitchen table carping,
of the kids coming home from fights all bruised up,

of the telegrams for money from poor cousins,
of the stereotypically ailing mother.

There is nothing to pack. He’ll just pass through
the stairwell always stinking of coriander

and fried vegetables and head out onto the road.
He’ll pass the dosa restaurant where he worked many years

and imagine the white batter flecked on his beard
as he scraped the hot grill, pass the shopfront

temple where Krishna the flutist consorts
with Radha in the window, pass the stall where an

old man sells paan — betel leaf and areca nut laced with tobacco,
and the stand where earlier they wrested fresh

sugarcane juice from plump stalks in the pulsing summer heat.
No one would have recognized him when he crosses

the road where the Jersey City shopfronts give way
to nondescript row houses and empty parking lots.

He’ll walk toward routes 1&9, his body flaking away —
fractals of gold dust rising to merge with the evening sun

on a street where no one will notice or remember.
And when they frantically look for him, they will not find

a body or clothes or money or pictures,
just this empty street reddening in the last light.

*

Vikram Masson writes at the intersection of faith, identity and culture. His work has been featured or are forthcoming in Gone Lawn, The American Journal of Poetry, Glass, Juked, Prometheus Dreaming, Lost Balloon, Rust + Moth and Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith (NYQ Books).

Two Poems by Dan Butler

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Let Me Lay One On You

That’s dad’s signal that he’s about to tell a joke,
usually something racist, though my sister and I
have told him a million times we wish he wouldn’t.
“Two black guys fishing in a boat – ” and we’re off!
I look to Richard, who pastes a smile on his face.
I warned him this might happen. We’re standing
in the parking lot at Cracker Barrel, dad’s choice
for breakfast. And we’d almost made it to the car.
“- and one of them gets bit on his penis by a rattlesnake.”
Every part of that sentence defies logic, but I let it go.
I know the joke – the unbit fisherman races to a doctor,
explains the situation, omitting the specific location of
the bite, and the doctor tells him to make an “X” on the
fang marks and suck out the poison. And I wonder why
on earth dad chose this joke to tell his gay son and his
son’s partner at their introductory breakfast? Is he really
that unaware? Or maybe he’s just nervous and this is his
way of coping with it. Or – could this be dad’s attempt to
say it’s okay that I love another man, that this is my life,
and why can’t the three of us share a little laugh together
to mark the moment? And whether that’s true or not,
I realize that it still matters that this man – who I have often
made a joke – accepts me. And dad says “So the guy gets
back to the boat, his friend says ‘So what’d the doctor say?!’
And he says “He said you’re gonna DIE!” And dad gives us each
a clap on the back and saunters off, jingling his car keys happily
in his hand. And we climb into our rental car and just sit there,
staring straight ahead. Then we turn to one another and say,
“And why were they black?”

*

Breathless

It’s the quarry beach and the air is all
Coppertone and the top 20 countdown
blasting over the snack bar speakers;
there are corn dogs and sno-cones
and the jabber and squeeze of people
sunning on every side of us.

I’ve never seen Michael with his shirt off.
He always seemed so student council
and swing choir, but there he is stretched
out on one elbow with his squinty smile
and his Submariner stomach and all I can
do is keep cracking jokes.

And then we’re holding hands
and everything feels like church.
Everyone on shore stands looking at us,
a chain of us, walking slowly through
the shallows toward the bobbing buoys,
searching for the drowning boy, the only sound
the steady dribble coming off the end of the big slide.
And as the water inches up my chest, I shiver
thinking of brushing up against something
beneath the surface.

Later, on land, we watch them bring him
to shore like they’re teaching him to walk.
He’s skinny, in bright floral trunks, eyes shut,
not a boy like I’d imagined, but hovering
somewhere between boy and man – hovering
there forever now – for when they lower him
to the wet, foot-printed sand, his limbs go
every which way like a puppet cut loose.
And I feel Michael wrap his towel around
his girlfriend from behind. And I watch
the lifeguard kneel to kiss the young man’s lips.
And all I can do is keep cracking jokes.

*

Dan Butler is known primarily as an actor whose credits include major roles On and Off Broadway, on television, and film where he has also written, directed, and produced. In 2011, Dan adapted and directed a screen version of Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s verse poem “Pearl” starring Francis Sternhagen and himself which had a great life on the film festival circuit.

That’s What You Say by Laurie Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

That’s What You Say

My mother died
in a shared room
at a nursing home,

while aides sat in the illuminated pod
their white canvas shoes resting
on the cold tile floors.

Time of death was 4:38 A.M.
Death appears in a stormy river,
or on a placid lake shore.

Hours and minutes do not matter,

for death sets no alarm,
hurries no nurse to gently
palm a wrist and look for a pulse.
 
 
When we came to collect her clothes
that smelled of mold and brittle bones,
and gather her meager belongings:

a half filled bottle of ballet pink nail polish,
one earring, a hair clip, and a velvet box,
which once held a gold charm bracelet,
 
 
I imagine her calling for one of us
to pluck the coarse grey hairs
that protruded from her chin like thorns.

Lost in reveries of tasks and memories
when my sister’s tears broke,
the frail woman in the neighboring bed insisted

She went peacefully,

but how could she know?
What possible revelation
comes to witness at 4:38 in the morning?

*

Laurie Kuntz is a widely published and award winning poet. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net prize. She has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Her 5th poetry collection, Talking Me off the Roof, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in late 2022. Many of her poems are a direct result of working with refugees in refugee camps soon after the Vietnam War years. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com

Omen by Charles K. Carter

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Omen

A framed photograph
from our first anniversary celebration
fell off the wall.

I put it back up
but it fell again,
this time on your precious head.

The frame was held up
both times by overpriced Velcro strips
that promised no damage.

They vowed
to hold this weight.

*

Charles K. Carter (he/him) is a queer poet and educator from Iowa. He holds an MFA from Lindenwood University. His poems have appeared in several literary journals. He is the author of Read My Lips (David Robert Books, November 2022) and several chapbooks. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @CKCpoetry.