Month: December 2022

Pop Culture Writer Calls Taylor Swift’s song Anti-Hero Self Loathing by Jaime Jacques

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Pop Culture Writer Calls Taylor Swift’s song Anti-Hero Self Loathing

and I wonder why. I mean —
has she never drank herself so blind
that she threw up into her own lap?

Haven’t we all skipped a few meals
to fit into the dress?
Left somebody on read?

She says the song is dark,
and I wonder why to be
real is to be considered ruinous?

Just kidding.
I know why.
If they can’t keep us begging for Botox
they better call us the problem.

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
and I’m a monster on the hill.

The writer says these lyrics are confounding
and I wonder why.
Has she never been highjacked by hormones,
held hostage by her own blood?

Maybe she’s numb to herself, or
under the thumb of the paper that pays her.
In that case I believe the label
of self-loathing might be misplaced.

Thousands will read her column this week,
regurgitate the ideas on social media feeds,
dismiss the song as music for teenaged girls.

And the rest of us
we carry Taylor’s chorus like an inverted prayer
while looking at airbrushed models in underwear
reading the news about roe v wade
being cat called on the street
headphones on as we repeat

It’s me,
Hi.

I’m the problem, it’s me.

*

Jaime Jacques is an itinerant writer who currently calls the east coast of Canada home. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Cagibi, Anti-Heroin Chic, Brazos River Review and others. She is the author of Moon El Salvador and her reporting and travel writing can be found in Salon, NPR, Narratively, and Roads and Kingdoms among others. Find her on Instagram @calamity__jaime.

More by Donna Hilbert

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More

I want more pages in my day planner
with its tidy squares and room on the side
for “to dos” to be checked off, and I want
that list to never end. I want one page
after another and another to appear
in unending supply, the way peanut
butter jars appear in the cupboard and I’m
aghast at their number, and know you’ve
been to that big box store once again,
so, it takes me forever to find the tiny
jar of saffron stuck in the back.
I want more dreams of falling
for the joyful relief at awakening
from the chasm of sleep to consult
my day planner and tick off tasks
that annoy me. I want more days
to gripe in my mind about tiny hillocks
of crumbs, you’ve left on the counter
while slicing bread from Gusto’s
on Fourth Street, bought in such quantity
and stuffed in the freezer, that I can’t find
my tiny pint of mint chip ice cream.
Then the drip drop of red wine, the drip drop
of tomato from the salad you made
for me last night—I want more of that
on the counter. I want more mornings
when your heavy breathing wakens
me from sleep, when your five-pillow chateau
threatens to topple and smother me,
and I get up with the sun and head
out for my walk when the glorious
unfolding of the day is waiting.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is 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

I Was Diane DiPrima in Another Life by Susan Cossette

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I Was Diane DiPrima in Another Life

I was one of the boys.
I dropped acid with Timothy Leary.
Ginsberg hit me up for weed,
Kerouac for wine and typing paper.

I sewed stars in my hair,
spoke golden truths from other planets.
Buddhist monks chanted my poems like sacred wisdom.

I wanted every electric experience,
the eternal wisdom of peyote and Shiva,
my words to churn and blaze.
Goddess of destruction, purveyor of mercy.

I am really a middle-aged refugee from New York,
living semi-anonymously in the Midwest.
I have a mortgage, a day job, and landscapers.
Two cats, two dogs, and boxes of old memories
packed high in the garage, after the divorce.

Diane, all I have for you tonight
is Muskrat Love on the Legion Hall jukebox,
Christmas music in October,
and monolithic credit card debt.

My brain a thick concrete brick,
dank mud-filled swamp.
Paralysis by analysis.

The letters and syllables buried with old tires,
rusty license plates, plastic six pack rings,
and visions of what I could have been
had I been born thirty years earlier.

It’s not too late, Diane, right?

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Everything’s Rosy by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Everything’s Rosy

               Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Her preferred lipstick color was “Everything’s Rosy”
by Revlon, her favorite makeup brand. Polio weakened
her body at age six. At eighteen she was a passenger on
a bus that collided with an electric trolley car in Mexico City:
an iron handrail impaled her pelvis “the way a sword pierces
a bull.” She sustained a punctured uterus and thirty broken bones.
A fellow passenger was traveling to the National Theater
carrying pure gold leaf; the impact of the collision scattered
flecks of gold all over Frida’s devastated body. Nothing was rosy.
She said, “I now live on a painful planet, transparent as ice.”
Frida adorned herself with traditional dresses and regal coiffures
from a matriarchal Oaxaca society. A lone vision in her own Eden,
she dreamed and consumed fiery alcohol and painkillers to excess
while spider monkeys and vines climbed her gold-flecked soul.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an American Academy of Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is the author of four books. She is writing a new book of poems in the form of biographical sonnets.

Coyote Bush by Penelope Moffet

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Coyote Bush

In the field also known as lawn
in front of the suburban house
I grew all manner of things
to the neighbors’ dismay –
cilantro near the curb, sage
and buckwheat and woolly blue curls
in the planter near the house,
creeping boobialla on the main lawn.
Near the sidewalk a coyote bush
formed a rising mound
about the length and shape
of a human grave.

The house was worn,
wood peeling from the front door.
A Mountain Ash
clung to the foundation,
threatened to fall over,
but the front yard glowed in spring:
lavender’s purple fingers,
woolly blue curls,
a volunteer wild rose,
creamy buckwheat flowers,
white whirls of black sage.

Indoors we moved like ghosts
through dim coolness.
I was more and more outside.
Whose body nourished
the coyote bush, what
dream was buried there?

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have been published in One Art, Natural Bridge, Permafrost, One by Jacar Press, Gleam, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Gyroscope and other literary journals. She has been the recipient of fellowships at Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge, The Helen R. Whiteley Center and Alderworks Alaska. She lives in Southern California.

Winter Remains by Mary Simmons

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Winter Remains

When waking, the dream
is lost. When opening a door,

winter peals: is there warmth enough
to flood these ghosts?

Numbness changes color
in a kitchen with the oven cracked.

Ice thaws in eyelashes, through hair,
on lips that failed to catch snowflakes

between them, on coats, turning to pearls.
In artificial light, a body transforms

back into a body, and the lost no longer
look through us. I seek shelter

in the spaces where even I cannot find
anonymity and those footfalls belonging to—

what? I am drawing circles around us, creating
our private universes and naming them

friend to all and she who wants to
understand too much.

I open a window to invite winter in
in branches only, in those arms

that may have loved us once.
The window open all night, I dream

snow, drifting down the hall,
and never grow cold.

*

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she also serves as an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from Exist Otherwise, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Shore, and The Santa Clara Review.

Two Poems by Barbara Eknoian

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Gift

He sits on the edge
of the couch
hoping his niece
will like the gift
purchased
at the thrift store.
She smiles,
makes a fuss
over the watercolors
in tarnished frames,
showing houses
on a street strewn
with orange leaves.
At the bottom
of the Christmas tree,
she props the prints up
to rest against gifts
bought with Visa
and Mastercard,
and the lovely shades
of autumn outshine
the tinsel and lights.

*

Sentimental

In a lucid moment,
I wonder why I keep
the black steamer trunk
in the corner of my room
crammed with letters
from girl scout camp
and high school friends,
who have forgotten me
like an old sneaker
hanging from a wire,
along with every letter
from former neighbors,
who meant a lot to me.
I revere the correspondence
as though they’re prayers,
but realize I’m too sentimental
valuing the friendships
for more than what they were.
I contemplate a huge bonfire
and see the letters burning up,
yet I need to hold on to them
like artifacts in a museum
to prove that I was here,
and we were once.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, Cadence Collective, Redshift, and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. Her recent collection of short stories published by Amazon is Romance is Not Too Far From Here. She lives in La Mirada, CA with daughter, grandson, one cat and a kitten. The kitten is full of mischief and keeps the whole family on their toes.

Maeve by William Palmer

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Maeve

She is wrapped
in a blanket with a blue glow
under her

to reduce her jaundice,
backlit like a small bough
on a Christmas tree.

My son changes her,
then lays her tenderly
in the curve of my arm.

She wears only a diaper,
her cord above it
hardened dark.

As I speak to her, her eyes move
on me, her tiny lips pushing out
in perfect circles, as if kissing air.

I touch her ruddy feet,
skim the soft skin
of her chest and cheeks.

I have forgotten
how my son felt newborn,
as if that part of me had fallen off.

Just a year ago,
my darkness black,
I thought of leaving.

And here, now,
I am holding Maeve,
her name Irish for joy.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Braided Way, Innisfree, JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Westchester Review. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Lost Cove Wildfire by Beth Copeland

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Lost Cove Wildfire

After weeks without rain in the Blue Ridge,
a fire spreads on Christmas Eve, then smolders
under snow but snags and smoke remain

as firefighters in California find ghost trees
on the forest floor, scorched imprints
of fallen trunks, branches, and twigs.

Meanwhile, my sister builds a fire in her house,
tosses kindling on logs and, in lieu of a bellows,
blows on the blue blaze to keep it burning.

How thin is the wire between the flaring flame
in the hearth —the heat, the heart!—and the wildfire
that starts with a single spark?

*

Beth Copeland is the author of Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. Her chapbook Selfie with Cherry is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. She owns Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Great Lady Descending by Carol Boston

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Great Lady Descending

Three weeks before our son tells us she is our daughter
I have this dream:
I am standing at the bottom of a staircase and bowing like a court herald.
From that position I gesture with a flourish and announce:
The Great Lady is descending.
And there, at the top of the stairs, she pauses:
A woman dressed in white with a holly sprig tucked into her red sash.

Before that, I woke one morning, as I sometimes do, with a whole sentence in my head:
If you don’t know what she sounds like, don’t just say anything–
listen to the sound of her voice.

Now it strikes me that that those words, that image
Were sent from the future to the present to help me
So I could recognize the new woman who had already entered the room
So I could call her by the name she had already picked out.

*

Carol Boston works in higher education and holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She grew up in the rural Midwest and now lives with her husband and aged cat in Silver Spring, Maryland. This is her first appearance in a poetry journal.

Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel by Howie Good

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Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel

After 30 minutes of Christmas music, the high school choir broke into the Hanukkah song “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” at the holiday concert. The person seated beside me began to complain under her breath. Jesus Fucking Christ! I thought. I examined her out of the corner of my eye. She wasn’t an obvious Nazi. Somewhere in her fifties, she was trying hard to look younger, a frosted blonde with the sharp features of the obsessive dieter. I didn’t say anything, though I might have let out a sigh. The song changed to something Christmassy. I focused on my daughter up on stage. She was heedlessly singing, her face all alight.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.

Papa the Drunken Master, Me the Karate Kid by Jonel Abellanosa

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Papa the Drunken Master, Me the Karate Kid

I waited for rum to pull his eyelids
down, when “no” vanished from his

vocabulary. Noticing the intoxicated
shimmer in his eyes, I handed him

my assignment notebook so he could
accomplish my homework. Almost

smiling, my arm on his shoulder,
I worked my eight-year-old wonder

to spare myself of more studies at home
so I could be Bruce Lee, Kareem Abdul

Jabbar or Chuck Norris, shadowboxing.
He wrote my report on Atlantis, from

his memory of Plato, his penmanship
like a groggy duckling. One afternoon

he, little bro and I walked home because
he said he didn’t have enough money

for jeepney fare. Expecting him swerve
and zigzag, his breaths smelling of rum

as we neared the bookstore, I grabbed
his wrist, pulling him by hand past

the glass door. “No” had exited his
outer spaces. That was decades ago.

I was not yet past my tenth year, when
I manipulated a poor drunkard to buy me

books. I had mastered the verbal chops,
dance steps, sways with words, tones

of making my beloved opponent empty
his pockets for my reading obsessions.

*

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. Nominated for the Pushcart, Dwarf Stars and Best of the Net awards, his poetry and fiction have appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, including The McNeese Review, Agape Review, The Lyric, Poetry Salzburg Review, Anglican Theological Review, The Cape Rock, Chiron Review and Invisible City. His poetry collections include, “Songs from My Mind’s Tree” and “Multiverse” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), “50 Acrostic Poems,” (Cyberwit, India), “In the Donald’s Time” (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and “Pan’s Saxophone” (Weasel Press, Texas), “Instrumentals” (Lemures Digital Editions). His first novel, “Healers,” is forthcoming from Penguin Random House. He is a nature lover and an advocate for the environment and animal rights and comforts. He has three companion dogs.

My Criminal Mind by Elizabeth Burk

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My Criminal Mind

Our tranquil backyard, by day a scenic swamp
       replete with lily pads, cypress knees, goes darkly sinister

at night. Rain thuds onto our wooden deck,
       deep-throated croaks, shrieks, moans erupt

from our pond. A sudden thunderous splash—
       something has jumped into—or worse—is emerging

from the dark waters. Wind slaps limbs against windows,
       small animals whip through brush, sounds that rattle me,

city girl, living deep in Louisiana countryside, land
       of voodoo and vampires, fifolets and rougarous.

My husband laughs at my nightly terror, cannot comprehend
       why I’m afraid to remain alone in our cavernous living room

with its vaulted ceiling, wide picture window, no shades
       nor bars, no cozy corners to hide in.

Who would come way back here? he asks,
       tuning in to his favorite crime show where a woman

standing alone at her kitchen window freezes
       as floorboards creak and the camera shifts

to something or someone creeping across her deck.
       It’s only a TV show, my husband says, noting my alarm

as if this world is nothing but a safe container
       for everyone’s violent fantasies.

*

Elizabeth Burk is a psychologist who divides her time between her native New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. She is the author of three collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase and Duet—Poet & Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband. Her work has apeared in various journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Calyx, Southern Poetry Anthology, About Place, Naugatuck River Review, Louisiana Literature, Pithead Chapel, Pank and elsewhere.

Mortal Lessons by Jane Edna Mohler

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Mortal Lessons

Back in the garden, I coo
for everyone in my best mother

voice. I’m sorry you all must grow
here. The best light is tight

up to the road where exhaust
and honking would stunt

lesser beings.
You are brave

while rodents gnaw
your reedy wood, run

roughshod over your home.
Scent of blood,

the tin musk of tomato limbs.
Here salvation smells

like a delivery room
in a war zone.

Caterpillars creep
up your legs

even as parasites drain
their green jelly.

Garden, you fight
despite my neglect

and the laws that force
one life to steal for another.

*

Jane Edna Mohler is a Bucks County Poet Laureate Emeritus (Pennsylvania) and a two-time Pushcart nominee. Kelsay Books published her collection Broken Umbrellas (2019.) Recent publications include Gargoyle, American Journal of Poetry, and Quartet. Jane is Co-Editor of Poetry for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. She has been on faculty of the Bay to Ocean and Caesura conferences for multiple years.

To Light the Whole of the World by Dick Westheimer

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To Light the Whole of the World

Tonight we set
the menorah
in the window
facing the world.

I light the first candle
which flickers feebly
against the whole of darkness.
I look from the flame

and see reflected
in the glass
my hand holding
the glowing shamash,

the helper that will light
two candles tomorrow.

*

Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Rattle, Paterson Review, Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, poems prompted by Russia’s War on Ukraine, is forthcoming from Sheila Na Gig Books.
Website: dickwestheimer.com

Two Poems by Marjorie Maddox

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Marvel Comics artists make Anthony Smith, 5, an honorary Avenger
                                            -CNN, Updated February 26, 2013

Better than any honorary Ph.D,
this degree comes complete

with scrolled poster, anti-stigmatism kit,
and a real-time visit from Iron Man,

who, both Marvel-protected
and metal-enhanced,

bam-slams bullies far beyond
Daredevil’s “Know No Fear” blindness,

Xavier’s speedy wheelchair,
The Thing’s Mirror-averse face,

and even the Titanium Titan’s own heart’s
fragile disabilities.

O Anthony of the Blue Ear,
your strong heart opens ours

to hearing the human
we’ve tried redrawing

too many times in the dark
of our own image.

With your five-year-old glee,
we, too, might heed

Lee’s credo of responsibility.
as we don ordinary clothes for our

pale frame of graphic reality
splashed now with Living Color

by the otherworldly Flash
of your super, but-still-prone-

to-cavities, little-boy grin.

*

To a Penny from an Oncoming Train

Copper damsel in distress,
circle of the single cent,
abandoned and lonely,
who sacrificed you,
fastened you to the shine of my rails
with gum or spit?

You are a small
gleam in my dimmed headlights,
a swirl in my steam,
a spot to be swatted,
ironed out with my iron and steel.

Disguised as Lincoln,
you are no president
and cannot flee underground
until afterwards,
in a boy’s pocket, you lay flat,
hidden, a survivor,
amidst lint, and marbles,
and three kicking tree toads.

*

Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 13 collections of poetry—most recently Begin with a Question (Paraclete, International Book Award Winner) and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts), an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); 4 children’s and YA books. In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, based on her daughter’s paintings (www.hafer.work) is forthcoming in 2023 (Shanti Arts). www.marjoriemaddox.com

Two Poems [trans.] by Marc Alan Di Martino

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Blackbird

Black as coal,
night swallows it whole.
Drowning in darkness, its beak
(a fleck of light) pecks at the sky: tin,
tin. It opens. The sun comes roaring in.

Er merlo (Blackbird)

Nero come er carbone
la notte se l’ignotte in un boccone.
A mollo ar nero fino ar collo, er becco
(un petalo de sole) bussa ar celo:
er celo s’apre – e sorte un sole intero.

*

The Illiterate Fish

Someone dropped a book
in an aquarium. The fish,
illiterate, darted away
from m and b, zig-
zagged around h and p
but in the end z
snagged it on a hook.

Er pesce anarfabbeta (The Illiterate Fish)

Er silabbario casca ne l’acquario.
Er pesce anarfabbeta
sfugge all’emme e a la bi,
schiva l’acca e la pi:
ma resta preso all’amo de la zeta.

*

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. Marc’s full-length collection of Mario dell-Arco translations is forthcoming from World Poetry Books (2024).

Mario dell’Arco is the pen name of Mario Fagiolo (Rome, 1905-1996). Dell’Arco wrote in romanesco, the dialect of the Roman people, and was perhaps the last great poet in a lineage that includes Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Trilussa and Crescenzo Del Monte. Dell’Arco’s poetry is epigrammatic in style, intensely personal and abounding in rhyme and wit. His work, translated into many languages, has been largely unavailable in English.

Two Poems by Mara Jebsen

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Grabbing the Lamp by the Neck

New idea occurs to me:
never be a person; never become
one person; forget the dream
of Coherence; allow the messy
selves to take their turns.
My room, my brain, glow
tungsten wire, the shapes now
arbitrary, form a finite
fact in an infinite sky; the lamp
smug in illusive position, for now
says time like a cartoon villain, what
peace! To be orange buoy
bobbing in choppy
verdigris sea; un-photographable,
mind on the move, snow-
bank blown apart into roses, white roses.

*

Reading While Female

It was as I played hooky from the whole
of my life; stole an hour and quarter in a hotel bar,
alone, mind you, to read, that I saw
how the fluted amber of the tea-light arced
the cream of my page, the valley
of the spine, and I was reminded of the candle
I’d lit that morning; the one that says Alchemy
And Venus III, the one with the sputtering wick,
sprigs of lavender; the one you must
absolutely remember to blow out; and I
could not remember if I’d blown it out, I
could not picture myself blowing it out;
and I tried to bring myself to text my husband
to see if he was home, or if I’d burnt
our whole home down. Long story short, I had not.
But I wondered then and there at the hotel bar
if I’d read too many books about women who are punished.

*

Mara Jebsen teaches at New York University. She received her MFA from NYU and BA from Duke University. Mara holds a New York Foundation for the Arts award in poetry and her book, ‘The White Year’ was a finalist for the Jake Adam York prize with Milkweed Editions. Mara’s work can be found in the American Poetry Review, Hanging Loose Press, jubilat, Sixth Finch and in other journals. She was raised in Lome and in Philadelphia.

Wintering by Keri Withington

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Wintering

Cover the winter crops, bok choy, cabbage,
and kale. Let the other beds fall fallow.

Burn fires. Hold out your fingers to the warmth.
Watch the logs crackle, the flames change colors.

Spread ash over soil. Spread birdseed on lawn.
Watch the robins return, peck through pond ice.

Savor soup and bread. Sleep when it is dark.
Spring will come, but for now, let yourself rest.

*

Keri Withington is a poet, educator, and aspiring homesteader. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, recently including anthologies from White Stag Publishing. She has published two chapbooks: Constellations of Freckles (Dancing Girl Press) and Beckoning from the Waves (Plan B Press). Withington lives with her husband, three children, and four fur babies in the Appalachian foothills. You can find her teaching Zoom classes for Pellissippi State, planting in her yard, or on FB (@KeriWithingtonWriter).

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

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In Sight

How many times have I seen you—just so—
brow furrowed, walking centered
down a tiled aisle
bordered with a world
full of choices, undeterred
or distracted, your path
straight ahead, holding your own
hand, close, neatly
tucked in, a perfect home
inside your head,
something up your sleeve.

*

Cruising Altitude

A bright wedge between two darknesses—
land below, sky above— at dusk
as seen from my airplane window,
clouds stretch on the horizon,
a blanket for the coming night,
a hedge against despair.

*

Madrigal

In the other part of someone else’s house
conversation flows—
a concerto— weaving in and out,
rising and falling, comfortable
silences, and then
resumption

as the cello tones resound,
a tremolo of laughter,
harpsichord adding notes
of harmony, shared history.

No words reach me
where I lie for now
on a borrowed mattress,
an outsider, listening in,
reveling in the music,

afraid to interrupt the flow,
I hesitate, await the coda.

*

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.

Knowing the Score by Robin Wright

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Knowing the Score

My friend planned to meet me tonight,
but instead, she sits on a barstool
at the Peephole, chatting
with a sixty-something bank exec.

He told her she smells like vanilla,
that her long, straight, auburn hair
is that of a goddess, and he’d like
to take her home. He added
his wife died two years ago,
hasn’t touched a woman since.

She tells me all this over the phone
after she kicked back a shot of vodka
and accepted his invitation.
When I ask if she’s okay, she laughs,
says if desire were measured in yards,
she and this guy would be football fields.

I think about how fields come alive
during a game, players running, catching,
crashing into each other, but how empty
the gridirons are between games, how my friend
drifts from relationship to relationship,
how she might tell me she’s not worried
if she wins or loses
as long as there are more games ahead.

*

Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in One Art, As it Ought to Be, The Drabble, The New Verse News, Bombfire Lit, Young Ravens Literary Review, Spank the Carp, Rat’s Ass Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Sanctuary, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in October of 2020.

Two Poems by Ace Boggess

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“What Does Living Do to Any of Us?”

               —Tracy K. Smith, “The Searchers”

We define ourselves by thrills, aches, sadnesses, &
laughter. I, too, have listened to Bowie

while looking at the stars & felt the fugue state
of space pulled through stereo speakers;

I’ve hit my head on the ground staring at the firmament.
The hedges offer louder music. Same woods

hide serpents. If we watch each step,
the concert won’t be interrupted by our grief.

*

“What Will You Do When It’s Over?”

             question asked by Mary Carroll-Hackett

Confess: I will lay my vaccinated body
against others, any,
as though I were young,
as though it mattered, any-
thing mattered aside from breathing.
Disaster is the bride of debauchery.
Wars: sex. After the Towers: sex,
also drugs, prayers, ice cream.
Name one catastrophe
that didn’t lead to mindless
desperate groping in dim rooms?
I joke about the post-pandemic orgies,
but in the Middle Ages, didn’t they,
after plague & past the culling?
Think Renaissance, think Enlightenment,
think I don’t want to think any-
more, just breathe & be
with others in whatever origami swans
our skins will fold, our hands
tenderly shaping reassurance.

*

Ace Boggess is the author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

Three Poems by Alison Lubar

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Domestic Sapphic Diptych

          I.           Even when it’s a risk to hold hands at the grocery store,

the kid next door calls, “Miss!”
and peeks over curled-iron railing
at brown-paper rustle, keychain
jostle. My arm locked in hers, we
ask about baseball and what colors
he saw today. Then, it hits: here,
we’re just another couple next door.

          II.           Her Remedy

Kitchen floors are best for messes, tears:
nothing stains, no porous surface. These
two limestone tiles by the heating vent
are the best seat for shaken bones; white
plywood cabinet faces pacify choking
hiccups. She lifts the self I’ve spilled like
a thick quilted paper towel. The good kind.

*

A Good Mix
Suburban PA, 2001

My mother confesses, “Granny says white babies
are like kittens.” I match my parents, at least, for
being so mixed. In AP Biology, the Punnet squares
show I am lucky to be heterozygous for blue eyes.
I am “a good mix,” that blends in enough. I can stay
out of the sun. In Rome, they ask me for directions.
The family curse lives under a wolf, there. Grand-
daughter of the oldest brother. I must be blessed
to live un-usurped except for what might have been.
At sixteen, I read The Bluest Eye and dream of what
I would fix first. That year, we get two kittens from
the store in the mall. I always begged for a puppy
instead. They are from the same litter, but only share
the Platonic Ideal of Cat. The orange one loves me
but the tabby pisses on my bed. It doesn’t matter
who you’re related to, as long as you are lovable.

*

[Quapa] Imposter Syndrome
Cherry Hill NJ, 2014

When they [only]
          bring me
a fork at Ichiban,
          I feel home
leaving my body.

*

Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Their debut chapbook, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, is out now with Thirty West (May 2022); their second, sweet euphemism, is forthcoming with CLASH!, an imprint of Mouthfeel Press, in 2023. You can find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.

October by Tyler Michael Jacobs

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OCTOBER

This sky is sleeping
Except the light on the walls. I want to feel
The way light ribbons across rays
Of New England asters and swaths of goldenrod.
A field of crisp air forgives me for wanting
To drape myself in birdsong. Now,
I want to feel something, anything.
If every slender wrist has felt a thumb
Slip back and forth, to love like autumn
Cruels a room
Only feels like enough.
How tender this falling:
A leaf feels it has been falling headfirst
Its entire life. The trees hold the wind
While there is still time.
Had I been this joy,
Maybe I could have loved myself too.
A bee keeps returning in full sun
as if to share in something so sweet, and I let it
Rest on the rim of my beer glass.

*

Tyler Michael Jacobs is the author of Building Brownville (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His words have appeared in Pidgeonholes, Sierra Nevada Review, Thin Air Magazine, White Wall Review, Funicular Magazine, and elsewhere. His poems have also been featured on Nebraska Public Media’s Friday LIVE! He is a first-year poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University.

Payette Lake by Natalie Eleanor Patterson

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Payette Lake

Invasive species in the water I stayed out of, head cold,
bleeding in the usual ways, watching a wasp drown in the shallows,
cold, wet children on the shore, tuna salad, blue tent in the sun,
tissues piled in the corner, dry horizon, another state I’ve never been to
without you, naming the pines each by each, ponderosa, lodgepole
on fire, Douglas fir, needles in bright clusters or in the shape
of flowers, no moon hanging whitely in the summer sky, no right
to your beauty, I’m trying to remember, trying, four-door hatchback,
my red witness, a crush of symptoms like a murder of crows, food
we bought but never ate, your anger so graceful I could hardly see it move,
groves of aspen pale against the dark, the only way out
is up, beyond the water line, I think you would have killed me someday,
sweaty forehead to sweaty forehead, loving hand on loving neck,
just for someone to float alongside you, however briefly—

*

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a half-Cuban femme lesbian poet and editor from suburban Georgia with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Salem College. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, and more. She has received the 2018 and 2021 Katherine B. Rondthaler Award in Poetry from Salem College, a Best of the Net 2018-2019 nomination, and a 2020 Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the assistant editor of Jacar Press, a reader for One, and a consulting editor with Sable Books. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University. Find her on Twitter @natalieepatt or visit her website, poetnatalie.com.

The Jolt by Julie Weiss

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The Jolt

X.

We pore over each painting, fantasizing
ourselves into the corner of a 19th century

basement studio. My breasts exposed
for the sake of your masterpiece, swelling

under your artist´s stroke. Pretense
after pretense, falling. Your marriage

a sham. You can´t touch me like that
in a museum, but I could very well plunge

over the edge of my imagination. Later
will be all glaze and splash. Wordless.

XII.

Listen, our lives are not our own.
The afternoon could, while we´re making

love, explode into a billion yesterdays.
I´ve never seen the strings of human

existence dangle so flamboyantly from
the fingers of madmen. How many tombs

of ruthlessness must we bury our poems in?
Hear my scream, more terror than climax.

Want, inconsequential. Still, if the earth splits
in two, I´ll cling to you, and it will be enough.

XIII.

This city and all its tragedies.
Every street we cross pinned down,

groaning under the weight of something
that died, unwilling. A dream. An affair.

It´s almost enough to make me guzzle
moonlight from the broken beer bottle

at your feet. But you´re not after a poet´s
despair. You´re pulling me into the afterhours

gay bar, where I´ll discover an intoxication
of city nights under my frenzied hands.

XV.

More bird than human, I´ve crossed
waters to reach a land that didn´t wither

under the gaze of my desires. I revel
in the cliché of your balcony where

I´ve come to perch. Half-naked wine glasses,
morsels of Queso de Tetilla, pun brazenly

intended, the voluptuous Iberian night,
its dance, our hands all over its starry

hips. Even in sleep, you come again and again
to all the places my body has been clipped.

XX.

Dreaming it had gone a different way,
I skid off the rails of sleep, crash into you.

I came to you more wreck than I care to admit.
Bones are like that, marrowed out of letdowns.

Extraordinary, how the planets colluded
to lure us onto the same wrong train. How

you melted the scrap heap of my past
in one sizzling glance. Te quiero, you say,

and mean it. A wail sends us hurtling.
How our children will continue this poem.

*

Author´s Note:

In February of this year, I decided to try my hand at a short poem, longwinded writer that I am, and who better to model it after than my lifelong poetry idol, Adrienne Rich? I´d read her Twenty-One Love Poems many times and decided to write a love poem of my own, echoing hers. I set myself a limit of ten lines or less. After writing the first one, I realized how much I loved the way brevity forces you to scrutinize word choice, to pay attention to the silences between, above, below the lines; what´s left unsaid is perhaps even more urgent than what´s said. Thoroughly hooked, I wrote a second, a third, a fourth, at which point I figured I might as well go for all 21, floater included, which is how my manuscript, The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, was born. With these poems, I hope to celebrate the beauty and resilience of lesbian love, despite the (often harmful) obstacles hurled in our path.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s Editor´s Choice Award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Rust + Moth, The Loch Raven Review, and Rat´s Ass Review, among others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.

Three Poems by Shelly Holder

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Poor Taste

Yes, I did — at a bridal shower in hill-country,
I made a joke about a mosquito proposing.
How could I not? That bite exactly centered
on my ring finger, raised like a solitaire gem
and shiny with reaction. I wanted connection
and in a house of strangers, tried to be funny.

But who had time for more than half-hearted
smiles? One bridesmaid 39 weeks pregnant,
another married and drinking heavily, bride
fighting with her mother about lingerie, me
too self-conscious to swim the undercurrents
of so many strangers and the ripples of living.

*

Exploring You & Me

The very bedrock of you etched with don’t cross here,
unmeasurable gorges, summit-less mountains,

all I know of you are borders. I’ve been map-making
the wheres and hows of not this way,

created a scale of miles to attempts failed. Legend
me something. I’m not asking for a road,

only the gentler angle, less strewn with rocks, placid
and fed wildlife. Show me one thing good

or good enough exists in your landscape so I can
remember up ahead might have what I’m looking for.

*

I Have Sacrificed Years to Questioning

I dressed them all in natural fibers, unbleached
and shapeless, gave them a diet of clover honey
and milk, let their hair grow however it would.

I kept them isolate, to maintain purity of skin
from the sun. I taught them quiet games, small
ways dice might roll in their favor. The windows

were small too, necessarily brief flashes of sky
so none of the years developed a phobia, either
of enclosed spaces or all-encompassing horizon.

They grew, my years, and I built an altar for them,
one of sweet-smelling oils, morning dew, birdsong.
I pressed the grass flat, arranged stones. Wept.

I lead my years to the place of sacrifice. Laid them
down, anointed their brows, their calloused feet.
Whispered last words, a hand cupped to their ears.

Then, I slashed! Cut our every tie. And let them go.

*

Shelly Holder has had poetry accepted by Gyroscope Review in both print and audio format, as well as a video recording on the Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s YouTube page. She has also had flash fiction published in Camden Press and DOGZPLOT. She lives somewhere she likes to call an “outer-outer-outer suburb of Los Angeles”, where she struggles to get an orange tree to fruit.

The Kintsugi Artist by Valerie Bacharach

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The Kintsugi Artist

I’m with Ginny, hiking a trail in the Adirondack mountains,
feet cushioned by pine needles and moss, our husbands far ahead,

everything late-summer green against birch bark and granite boulders,
we’re talking about the importance of crystals and massage,

but really, I just want to be quiet in this space of moss and trees,
simply walk and listen to birds and the creaking of branches.

If I stare hard enough I can imagine Daniel Day-Lewis running through
these woods. Remember, when he played Hawkeye in “The Last of the Mohicans,”

clutching his musket, leaping over undergrowth and rocks, and that line he says
to his love “I will find you,” and Ginny grows silent,

she’s looking at me, a broken vessel webbed with fault lines
and she the Kintsugi artist who will seam me

with tree-sap lacquer and powdered gold, make my fissures beautiful
and I remember ten years ago, when we lived in a small town

and I called her, told her our younger son had died, alone in a sleazy motel room.
Opioid addiction unchecked, his story unique, and not, our grief unique, and not.

She and Brian were in the Adirondacks, they got in their car and drove
ten hours to us. Her face is the one I saw in my frenzied brain

as I spoke at his funeral, her eyes locked on mine, words forced
from my mouth. But now we’re on this trail, the air feels like a living thing,

winds ring through leaves, the sky a pattern of blue and clouds and we arrive
at an overlook, our husbands waiting in a wide open space, mountains arrayed

before us, a dawn of creation. And isn’t time a bitch, the way it slogs along
or races too fast like my mother’s heart right before she died,

wild beats pounding below fragile skin and weakened bones,
body collapsing like a deflated balloon. It’s been two years but she haunts me

like a crazed Jewish mother (which she was, even though she’d shredded her faith
years earlier), and now my leg begins to ache, the right one, sciatica sending

a fist gripping thigh muscles, foot numb. My dad had sciatica,
retreated to his couch, then his bed, high on 40 years of hydrocodone,

and I wish I knew more about genetics, did I doom my boy before he drew his first breath?
My ghosts are with me everywhere, even here in this northern corner of New York,

and all around are cairns, piles of rocks built by other hikers, mementos of loss.
My husband talks to Ginny and Brian, they all take photos.

I am intent on gathering the right stones to build my own monument.
The wind pulses a foreshadow of autumn.

*

Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Populi, Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Ilanot Review, Minyon Magazine, and One Art, among others. Her chapbook Fireweed was published by Main Street Rag. Her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Passage at Nineteen by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Passage at Nineteen

Newborn, firstborn,
I hold you to my breast
for the slow ride home
through falling snow.

Flesh of my flesh,
I am reborn, dancing
in terror and joy
balanced on the eyelash
of a blinking god.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is 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

Alone in Verona by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Alone in Verona

I love you but did not invite you here.
I chose to come here alone
with only impressions of us,
inner pictures that win out
over the star-crossed real.
In my mind are unseen frescoes,
emotion ground fine
into the plaster of thought—
burnt umber, blue, ochre of rose.

I love you but did not invite you here.
Why do I insist on this dizzying dream?
This lonely dizzying dream—
footpaths made of pink marble
scents of espresso & leather
the ancient ringing of bells
the iron lantern of exile
robed statues watching the dead
the dead cut out into little stars
speaking to everyone everywhere here

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton MFA PhD is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College, where she also teaches creative writing. The author of five books, she is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She regularly publishes her poems in journals such as thimble, One Art, and Rust & Moth. One of her poems will be publicly installed outdoors in 2022 as a part of the GA Poetry in the Parks project.

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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The Opening

Open them up and they’re never the same,
the neurosurgeon said that afternoon
I watched him suction bloodclot from a skull.
A forty-three-year-old swan dove head first
into a barfight. I remember thinking
about trepanning, Neolithic skulls
with round skylights—nobody knows if those were cut
to let depression out or visions in.
The Druids tapped themselves like trees for syrup
and wore their own bone-coins as charms. All newborns
have soft spots where the skull has not iced over,
a fishing-hole ancestral spirits sit around,
ghostgusts of breath that swirl clockwise, down,
and in. I’m forty-three years old as I
am writing this. I’m still swan diving head first
into a love that opens like a coin-sized
locket of bone that holds my mind inside it.
Emily Dickinson knew poetry
by how the top of her head felt taken off—
poet as neurosurgeon, bone saw kissing
a crisp horizon just above the eyebrows,
pale recluse squinting up at cold white light.
Everyone has a pond inside that’s frozen
bone white, and love’s the only way to swan dive
heart first into the future. Through that hole
the spirits swirl down and in to help
unlock the waterfalls. You melt to slake them.
The pond becomes a lake becomes a sea, adrift
on its breathing, open in every direction.

*

Matriarchy

I like my religions founderless,
theologianless, commandmentless.
The fewer men in flowing robes, the better.
Best would be grandmothers, lighting incense
in front of the trees their grandmothers planted
and timing their fasts to the moon.
Turmeric on everything from food
to flesh wounds. Smudges of kohl
on baby’s cheek to divert the evil eye.
That gives me sacred awe, the mystery
mastered by knobby-fingered knowhow
that aches when it rains. All the inexplicables
stay unexplained, but all the rites
stay right. The wisdom of the forest
gave way to the wisdom of the desert,
but the wisdom of the kitchen
butters the loaves and fries up the fishes
and makes sure everyone takes seconds.
There is no talk of hell or holy war,
just grandmothers circulating like blood cells
through the capillaries of the cosmos
assuring everyone there’s more, there’s more.

*

State of Being

Between O and O
is a lowercase high,
a quick hello.
Our lives here jump
out of a manhole
into a manhole
on a street with no street
signs. I have spooned
the local honey
and failed to taste a difference.
I have rummaged
among the blotchy fruits
at farmer’s markets.
Forgive me, Ohio,
but apples genespliced in Wisconsin
trucked in from Michigan
glisteny with wax and pesticide
in artificial light
have always pleased me more.
I have never really lived here
after living here
my whole life.
In Rootstown mine was not the root.
In Mayfield mine was not the flower.
My hole of a life, Ohio,
has emptied through you.
I have been places
I would never want to live
and lived
in a place I never wanted to be.
I have never been
a place I did not want
to leave.
I do not want to leave
a place
I never loved.

*

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children.

Majmudar’s poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now.

Majmudar’s forthcoming collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, April 2023). Twin A: A Life (Slant Books, May 2023) is the title of his forthcoming memoir, in prose and verse, about his infant son’s congenital heart disease. The first volume of his epic retelling, The Mahabharata Trilogy, is entitled The Book of Vows (Penguin India, September 2023). His work as a translator includes Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018).

Two Poems by Laurel Benjamin

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To the Man Who Photographed Nothing But His Wife

You switch to ravens, wings developing
extra vision. You see beyond mundane feathers,

and in the apartment, overcome the dusty stacks
of prints and slides, towers knocked over at night,

plaid robe torn from stumbles into the table
holding five Nikons. Dead on snow,

you position one bird like your wife
when you told her, outstretch your arms,

open your mouth as in sleep. She grew no feathers
to form a V shaped tail, but you tried. When she left

for good you lied to anyone who would listen,
though we all knew how many times

you freeze-framed her. And now, beak steering
outwards, you study the inkwell, black

upon black, winter dotted until you double-vision
the living into the dead. Day not enough,

at night you find their beaks, effervescent,
and their bodies, outlines of women.

*

The Department Store

If you curve around the counters
you can return to your department store—
doors beveled glass, dark metal framed,

gloves folded inside cases, shaped wool hats
on stands. Mothers and daughters hushed
between curtains. You are the one

trying on dresses with your mother.
Hers a velveteen bodice, and yours, you trace
the raised lines of red & green plaid.

Across the aisle a curtain moves aside, folds
of a woman changing her skin,
different than your mother’s pink roses.

A yellow skirt falls onto the floor revealing
lace panties. Who owns it all,
belts tethered to tightened waists.

And your mother. She’s a librarian
who memorizes the plans of your family
as picture books. You’re in her stomach,

then you’re born into these tile-floored rooms
where counter after counter, where
rustled silk, sear sucker.

I have wrung my eyes trying to bring back
the store, wishing I had her metal-tight memory,
yet all I see is how I pushed her aside

then pulled her back from beyond
like we were in a lost world, just the two of us.
Everyone sees me as a hero, and I tried,

but I failed. Thought I could keep her,
could keep myself from submitting to
off-key songs, taking singing classes,

learning Leider because I couldn’t contain
her opera. Maybe that killed her, my not believing
in the heavy voices, the thick velvet.

*

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work published in Lily Poetry Review, Burningword, Eunoia, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fourth River, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. She was nominated for Best of the Net by Flapper Press in fall 2022.

Six Poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my nana
rocking

with an afghan
on her lap

and asking
if I see the boy,

the one she lost,
standing

by her bed
and begging

for water,
Sinatra

quietly singing.

*

Memory

of my sister
swinging

both her arms
in summer air

and squeezing
sunlight

like an orange
in her teeth,

the bees
still busy then,

flowers.

*

Memory

of the rotted oak
I’d climb inside

to calm on days
when daddy

found his rifle’s
acoustics

pleasing,
how I’d fall asleep

to flies vibrations
and wake

at night
to my name

being called—
my mother

flicking a match.

*

Memory

is a pill my
mother lost

in the drain
and her

desperate
for more.

A blue kite
blurred

into yellow—

*

Memory

of a bag of quails
dragged through gravel

and my dad
above them smiling

as he plucked
the feathers

then slit
each belly open

so the heart
could splash

inside a bucket
and darken

as the hours
fell like aphids

from the apple blossoms
and gathered

around my feet.

*

Memory

of my dad
too sick

to stand
on New Year’s Eve,

how he
reached

to find
my fingers

and asked,
if ever, I

think of cardinals
thrown

through
a window

in the dark,
a deep whistle

torn
through sky.

*

Luke Johnson lives on the California coast with his wife and three kids. His poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Nimrod, Thrush and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.

Two Poems by Rachel Rinehart

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Uncle Herbert’s Bat Mill

It’s gone now, of course, ceded to blackberry canes
and stinging nettles, the sour scent
of sawdust subsumed by evening primrose
bubbling a doublewide’s new skirt.

The white ash trees, too, begin to hollow out
and soften in the jaws of jeweled beetles,
though the saw’s long sold or lying
vine-snagged in some defunct junkyard.

Who knows what Uncle Herbert heard
in the crack of Mazeroski’s bat that fall,
laid up drunk in the logs clutching his transistor,
dreaming of diamond dust and mink oil,
the hot sun on leather.

Perhaps he mustered an afternoon
lingering under the trees of his courtship,
lush and light dappled, his hand snug
between bark and the lithe arch of Grace’s back,
groping for the smooth, wood-singing spark
of a Hank Aaron two-run dinger.

These boozy hallucinations
Aunt Grace endured at a distance—
down the road in her kitchen apron
with a washcloth and a cup of cool water,
the Maytag ready to wring the salt crust
and whiskey from Uncle Herbert’s flannels.

All this, it’s been years.
The benders and the trees sacrificed
for The Series, the mill saw screeching
like radio static as it carved up slats
to send to Louisville for sluggers,
billets beveled and hewed to the grips
for Mickey Mantle and the Say Hey Kid.

Somehow, yet, old trees beget both bats
and record books, bedfellows, these,
on the long march down the West Kentucky hills,
logged to pay a few months on the mortgage,
or for a last-ditch round of chemotherapy.

Checks folks cash with a long look back
to that other time where Aunt Grace, still waiting,
puts up the last of her preserves and closes
her cupboard on the season.

*

Old Breaks

Your wrist gives way with late December,
bone shards like snowburst along an old fissure.

When you call, I am stumbling between boxes,
moving again—back to the city
and its pharmaceutical haze, needles glinting
in the grass like sparks woven through tapestry.

“At my age,” you say, “there will be no surgery,”
and as you laugh, I can hear you
nonchalantly toeing that galactic chasm
across which there is little use for wrists.

Between us harried angels dodge cell signals
that carry our voices to each other.
The connection spits and fizzes
like singed feathers.

Out home, the new year heals over quietly,
as plowed furrows under snow.
The Earth roars on in its old treads.

Tomorrow, I know, you will pull your coat on
with your teeth and shake food into a bowl
for cats that coalesce like vapors out of barn stalls,
rangy familiars mute and unblinking.

You tell me you knew a man once
who roused his family just before midnight
and led them all in their night clothes
out the back door and round through the front,
frost stinging the little ones’ ankles.

Later, in the cold, early hours
I hear the neighbor woman settle on her stoop
in the false dawn of the street light
to sing, of all things, The Hallelujah Chorus,
like some old-time mystic or prophetess.

When it is over, how graciously
we fall back in our tousled beds
snug in the ebbing heat of the old year.

*

Rachel Rinehart’s poetry collection The Church in the Plains was selected by Peter Everwine as the winner of the 2016 Philip Levine Poetry Prize and was published by Anhinga Press in January 2018.