Month: March 2023

I Head to the Bathroom in a Plane Accompanied by a Migraine by KHD

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I Head to the Bathroom in a Plane Accompanied by a Migraine

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
         —Bertolt Brech

AI claimed my arm rest.
The kid behind me plays

soccer with my seat. There is
a pounding in my head and on

and on it drums; the sum of loud
rhymes. AI gave me gum then spit out

that art is dead. Instead consider time,
I said. It beats, yes, but that beat’s

a sign, a pulse, a wave. A blue-water
flush. When two mirrors reflect

each other, where does that wind
up? Smash the glass with a hammer

and write with all the dust.

*

KHD’s love of poetry first bloomed as a child. She memorized Robert Frost sitting on a tree stump and bathed in Edgar Allan Poe as an adolescent. While studying words at Florida State University, she played with chips and became a professional poker player. She’s passionate about the immense potential NFTs present for poetry, and enjoys helping onboard traditional poets primarily through Twitter (@Katie_Dozier). Her poetry has recently been published by Rattle, Frontier, and The Tickle. She maintains TheNFTPoetryGallery.com as a vehicle for showing the potential of CryptoPoetry, regularly speaks at NFT NYC conferences, and hosts “ThePoetrySpace_” weekly on Twitter.

Texas Hold-Em by Susan Shaw Sailer

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Texas Hold-Em

Middle-aged, dealt hands of busted
marriages between them, who’d have
guessed by betting on their messy
lives, they’d thrive? She’d forgotten
how to trust, folded men quicker
than she’d hold ‘em. He’d lost
the chair, one chip left. Antes high,
hard to make the call. And yet…
three decades later they still spoon
to warm each other’s flesh, feast
on shared ideas, make meals together
in the kitchen. A once in a lifetime
hand, that royal flush.

*

Susan Shaw Sailer has published three collections of poems—The Distance Beyond Sight, The God of Roundabouts, Ship of Light, and two chapbooks—COAL and Bulletins from a War Zone. Sailer lives in Morgantown, WV, and is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic program at Carlow University, Pittsburgh.

Interview with a Sculpture by Nina Lindsay

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Interview with a Sculpture

It was the last
last day of summer last summer.

I don’t remember well since then.
Something’s stilled my appetite

for the clear light of autumn,
though not my taste for it. It just doesn’t fill me.

Before she took the chisel to me I was liquid—
solid—liquid—

like that physicist’s cat that’s both dead and alive
and you can’t know, until it is or it isn’t.

I knew what I was
and nobody else needed to.

Now, it’s okay, you can take a look,
I can let myself be an utter wreck for a minute.

Gold and iron, stone and leaf,
wind, dust, flame, tissue.

I think that you are supposed to come away filled,
as in autumn,

when the sky steps back and disrobes
and the gorgeous distant cold forces us to spin off light.

Like finding the low note in the song. Way down there.
You give it up—

it fills you.
Don’t be embarrassed

by the empty space,
the eventual silence.

She had to decide when to put the chisel down.
Shard, form, spine.

At some point I will collect myself and move on.

*

Nina Lindsay is the author of two collections of poetry, “Because” and “Today’s Special Dish.” Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and other journals.

Letter to a Dead Husband by Penelope Moffet

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Letter to a Dead Husband

You made me laugh
and you still do,
rising through my dreams
with salty one-liners,
your face tanned and ruddy
from whatever you’ve been doing
in the afterlife, there
with your strong hands
kneading bread or pasta
which you now make from scratch,
just as when I knew you
you’d spend whole days
simmering spaghetti sauce,
lentils suffused with ham hocks,
perfecting pesto
fit to serve with copious wine.

For you heaven would be
John Mayall and MC-5
amped up to eleven,
electric guitars and drums
blasting the whole neighborhood,
sweet as a room clogged
with the billowing scent of weed,
no one asking you to turn it down,
no one thinking you should shower,
drink some coffee, catch the bus to work,
restrain your scruffy beard, your wild hair-wisp,
your blue eyes beaming satire
at a too-straight world.

A medium summons up your presence
with exactitude, your manchild
dancing self who won’t shut up,
keeps elbowing back onto the stage
of K’s closed eyes.
My middle name is More.
Heaven is a place where
nothing ever happens,
she says you say.
This isn’t where I thought
I’d end up. I still exist.
I’m with everybody,
the cockroach
that ate Cincinnati
in the shitbox in the sky
with two cats, one meowing
like a human babe.

Prankster tiptoeing away
and sneaking back,
the way you left our marriage
bit by self-subtracted bit.
You moved to Ketchikan
for endless summer days
and winter nights
until your heart blew up,
destroyed by years of drink and fat
delectable to last bite and last drop.

You could live
on Cabernet and comic books,
vodka in the freezer,
bookcases full of Russian history,
pulling mussels from a shell,
telling me I’m lovely
just the way I look tonight,
blue eyes dancing
the better to seduce me with,
incorrigible and selfish
but then all men are selfish
K says you say
before you change into a hippo
twirling in a tutu, telling me
one day there’ll be another man
to cook with in a warm companionable nest.

I think it’s just a dream
the medium relates,
memories and feelings
flickering like electric lights.
And yet that scampering dervish she called up
resembles you, speaks as you would,
sings your songs.

If only I could blaze
with faith, believe you
different from the seal remains
I saw once on a northern island’s shore,
translucent rotting flesh
jittered by waves upon a beach,
almost a human shape,
all power gone.

How can anyone feel sure
the spirit slips its skin,
goes on in other form?

In the middle of the bay
a gray head broke the surface,
dark eyes looked toward me,
then it tucked its head,
it rolled, it dived.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in many journals, including The Missouri Review, Columbia, Permafrost, One, ONE ART, Natural Bridge, Gleam, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review and Gyroscope. She has been the recipient of artist residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge, The Helen R. Whiteley Center and Alderworks Alaska. She has published articles in the Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers and elsewhere. She has also worked as a publicist for non-profit organizations, as a legal secretary, and as Senior Editor at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Two Poems by Anne-Adele Wight

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Arctic

and a darkness
we know nothing about
surrounds us with cold
so we try to warm it
like tigers patrolling the hallway
with a call-and-response chant
in far north language
outside a Wedgwood blue dome
but after twelve nights
chanting into this darkness
we know nothing about
the pole shuts off its lights
now the aurora turns in seasick orbit
between Mars and Jupiter
bruised by hurtling asteroids
if you listen you can barely
hear its choking cry

*

Cat Sitting

Schrodinger’s cat rubs my legs
in a perfect circle
never question the means of magic
or a cat’s mastery
of 360 degrees
woven in place I can’t move
inside a circle half bright half dark
but only will the cat
when it stops winding
to come to rest on the bright side
wondering what might happen
if it lay across the center line
erasing itself by halves

*

Anne-Adele Wight is the author of An Internet of Containment, The Age of Greenhouses, Opera House Arterial, and Sidestep Catapult, all from BlazeVOX. Her work has been published internationally in print and online. She lives and writes in Philadelphia.

Love in False Analogies by Frederick Wilbur

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Love in False Analogies

The moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry. . . The great lunacy of most lyric poems is that they attempt to use words to convey what cannot be put into words.

         – Mary Ruefle

Moon, our constant kiss, is the aspirin
for our pale pain, is ballad-wise,
and parable friendly, has a touch of peach.

In lyric diaries heartaches and breaks
are grieved-out: Love’s humoresque
is this broom of language, a-waxing, a-waning.

Love borrows the moon not knowing
its reflective light, the consequence owed,
but like the mother half of invention,

it births all the bliss it can. Moon pleads
like a slightly mocking emoji,
hangs like a paper coaster, slightly wet,

in the periwinkle and pink sky.
(The whole folded makes a fraction.)
Soul, a crutch word, taken to the grave

is not enough to fill it up; Moon dumps
dust like three loads of betrayal;
Love’s sliver snags in the evergreens.

Hope is a lonely word out there in the future.

*

Frederick Wilbur’s collections of poetry are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Dalhousie Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, and Shenandoah among others. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Award by Midwest Quarterly. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.

Potato Peeling by Sarah Mackey Kirby

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Potato Peeling

Let it be known for historical accuracy
but you can never tell my husband,
that when I’m hand-slimed
from potato peeling
on a Wednesday evening,
water boiling on the stove
and he sneaks up behind me,
grabs my waist,
and twirls me in my dog socks,
and I act annoyed because
I’m trying to time things perfectly,
that I am, in fact, not annoyed.

And when he thinks I don’t hear him
creeping toward me because I have
headphones on, I do hear him.
I pretend I don’t. Because the
drives-me-nuts shock
as he snatches me up and laughs
is his favorite part of it.
So if he knew I know
when he is about to do that,
and since my pretending I don’t
is one thing I love most,
then his knowing I know
would ruin those moments
for both of us.

*

Sarah Mackey Kirby grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021). Her poems appear in Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, The New Verse News, ONE ART, Ploughshares, Third Wednesday Magazine, and elsewhere. She taught high school and middle school social studies until a few health surprises changed her path. Sarah is an always-teacher-at-heart and a forever second momma to hundreds of students. She and her husband divide their time between Kentucky and Ohio. https://smkirby.com/

Two Poems by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Meditation

March colors stain
perfumed air—

pink tulip magnolia,
ivory dogwood, fuchsia azalea.

Abundance blossoming
in a dark arch of rain.

Within this wet darkening
cries an unseen blessing.

In every hidden bird singing
dies my every word.

*

Getting Older

I am becoming a dappled thing.
Silver threads my hair,
dark spots dot my body
like a speckled egg.

Floaters cloud my vision,
meandering opaque grey
in the tiny sky of my eyes.
My ears ring with a song of demise.

A great poet (immortal)
once praised this color palette—
mottled, rose-stippled,
time’s upstream beauty of change.

I can seed a pieced field
with one odd word.
I feed on instinct, on dream.
I am spare and strange.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is the author of five books. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is also a nominee for a 2022 Georgia Author of the Year award. KELSAY BOOKS will publish her third chapbook, LIFE OF THE MIND, in 2023. Julia teaches French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

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AFTER LEARNING MY FRIEND HAS DIED

And so it begins,
the tallying backwards
to remember: when was the last
telephone call, the last
text message, last email,
the last time seeing her face, her skin still
lovely smooth in her 69th year–
hearing her buoyant laughter that late
afternoon on her patio, September sun
lighting up the back of her head in the photo
she later joked finally made her
into some form of angelic being.

*

TO THIS DAY
            for Rosemary

The calendar marks three weeks
to this day your heart
slowed to a crawl,
then stopped.
Three weeks that might be
three hundred years
or none at all–
there are no inbetweens,
no middle grounds
in this land of your leaving.

*

Andrea Potos is author of several poetry collections, including her newest book Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). Others include: Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books), Mothershell (Kelsay Books), A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry), An Ink Like Early Twilight (Salmon Poetry), We Lit the Lamps Ourselves (Salmon Poetry) and Yaya’s Cloth (Iris Press). Her poems can be found widely in print and online, most recently in The Sun, Poetry East, Potomac Review, Braided Way, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (Storey Publishing), and The Path to Kindness (Storey Publishing). Andrea lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she was a longtime bookseller in independent bookstores.

To My Darling, In Flames by Mary Ford Neal

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To My Darling, In Flames

In a random act of evil, someone set fire
to the two of us, and we wander the streets
like torches, separately, scorching things we pass.
Choking heat beats out from us
and people draw back from it,

but I want you to know that yesterday,
when we happened to stumble past one another
on Main Street, scattering the shoppers and sightseers,
you were magnificent, my darling—
resplendent in your flames.

Your oranges and yellows were so vivid I could taste them,
and the way they stroked up your sides reminded me
of your fingers on my ribcage. Yes,
most of the faces wore horror.
But know that at least one
was looking at you with pride.

*

Mary Ford Neal is a poet and academic from the west of Scotland. Her work has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Interpreter’s House, Bad Lilies, One Hand Clapping, Long Poem Magazine, Honest Ulsterman, After…, Ink Sweat and Tears, Dust, and Atrium. She is the author of two recent poetry collections: ‘Dawning’ (Indigo Dreams, 2021) and ‘Relativism’ (Taproot Press, 2022). Her poetry has been Pushcart and BOTN nominated.

NECESSITY by Ken Poyner

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NECESSITY

Everyone notices the bones of a school bus
In an overgrown patch perhaps
A hundred feet behind a family’s
Small house. A bit of wild
Has grown up around the bus
And the farmer lets it go,
Cultivating the land behind and
Beside it. A picture for
Day trippers speeding down the four lane
The farm abuts: bridge over
The drainage ditch, a short
Gravel drive, occasionally mown lawn,
The adequate house – just visible
The patch of wild and its busted school bus.
Even at sixty miles an hour, most people
See it. How odd, a school bus
In an overgrown island in a farmer’s backyard.
No one knows that someone lives there.

*

Ken Poyner has been publishing for 48 years, married for 45 years, retired for seven years. He writes to defeat the numbers. Find his eight available books at www.kpoyner.com or any number of book vending sites. Latest work in “Rune Bear”, “Analog”, “Tiny Molecules”, “Neologism”.

Two Poems by Katherine Riegel

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When I Stopped

I never had to beg
for a pony. The horses just

were—muscled motion,
familiar as milkweed

seeds. My mother
had epilepsy and my father

thought that should make
us all as angry as he was,

poor delicate out of control
tyrant with his fists

clenched tight. We lived
so easily then but no one

knew it, the 1970s full
of fear as any decade.

I knew raspberry thorns
and barn smell, freedom

on bike and horseback
and sneakered foot,

place as solid as ice
in the water buckets come

winter. And then they sold
the horses—I had not known

you could sell family—
and we moved to town.

That must be when I stopped
trusting I would be loved forever.

*

She Wanted to Go to the Sea One Last Time

I have been insensitive to delight,
too busy avoiding stones in the road to notice

Icarus falling from the sky—or before that,
his flying. I have stoppered my ears

to the singing as I worked out some problem
in my head, I have watched others speak

and thought only about what I would say.
Swimming in the ocean I have seen pelicans

coast by on cupped wings and looked over
at my sister, her eyes closed in pleasure,

and in the midst of sun and breeze
and the shifting embrace of salt water

I let my throat close with the knowledge
of her dying—great gods of the otherworld

I almost let her see me weep. I have so much
to be forgiven for. I am alive

still, and the dog resting her chin in my hand
gives me the whole soft weight of her head.

*

Katherine Riegel is the author of Love Songs from the End of the World, the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, One, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and managing editor of Sweet Lit, and teaches independent online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction. Find her at katherineriegel.com.

Family Portrait by Kathi Crawford

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Family Portrait

We stood a crooked line across the porch step—
our father at the mill;
our mother held the camera.

She carefully arranged us for our annual photo session;
dressed me, the only girl, in all-white overalls,
laced-up shoes.

She staged a picture-pattern portrait each year;
light colors for me and dark for my brothers.

The two of us younger kids always clustered
around our second oldest brother knowing
the way he protected the ones he loved.

The oldest always gazed away from the camera—
from my mother’s eye—
detached.

She held these zigzag-cut snapshots
with glue and photo corners
in her motherhood scrapbook—

until the fifth, another boy, was born.

After my parents divorced,
the anthology of our family

was found in a dresser drawer;
pictures scattered—

the context and timeline
ripped apart.

*

Kathi Crawford spends her days as a business and career coach and, by night, writes poetry, flash fiction and creative nonfiction. She hopes to create dialogue through her writing for the challenges of our time and as individuals. Her poetry has been featured in Drunk Monkeys. You can find her on Instagram @kathicrawford or visit her blog at https://adventureinbeingcom.wordpress.com/ or website: www.peoplepossibilities.com.

Self-Portrait in a Shard of Glass by Yvonne Zipter

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Self-Portrait in a Shard of Glass
For Sukie

On the ground behind the pet store,
a piece of broken mirror shaped
like a scimitar blade. I bend to look at it.
Only my eyes, nose, and the rind
of my orange knit cap are visible,
my face cut in half, ear to ear,
my head circled by a halo of green
that bleeds down the blade to its tip.
On the heel end, a slice of blue sky,
bleached clear by sunlight. Not since
before they plucked that scrap of uterus
from my gut have I felt whole. Flaws
in the glass scrap like a wall of smoke
between me and the world render my eyes
unseeable, my cheek erased, my mouth
lost at the sharp edge of the shatter—
a semblance of me. But me, nevertheless.

*

Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal, and Like Some Bookie God. Her published poems are currently being sold individually in Chicago in two repurposed toy-vending machines, the proceeds of which are donated to the nonprofit arts organization Arts Alive Chicago. She is also the author of the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet and the Russian historical novel Infraction. She is retired from the University of Chicago Press, where she was a manuscript editor.

Three Poems by Anna Gayle

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landscape with sex and middle school hallways
after Lynn Melnick

mostly men keep singing
and I do not know what to call
the space between my legs
until they tell me—thigh gap
pussy

mostly men keep singing
and I remember the blue-striped
wall of the tiled hallway
and I remember
rows of lockers blurring

mostly men keep singing
and I was a girl
when I learned to run
a song chasing me
in some major key
because there is so much
to be glad about

*

blessed are the meek

the hallways behind the sanctuary kept our secrets tucked under their orange
carpet. the games of giving

birth: we laid our girl bodies on freshly
vacuumed lines and opened our legs and

squeezed a hand. we understood babies needed fathers but did not know how
fathers became themselves.

we did not ask questions: we brought boys to the back of the church to play
house and sometimes

let them kiss our mouths and sometimes
let them tackle us to the ground and sometimes

let our skirts gather at our waists, cotton lifting like halos over our heads.

we knew our shoulders were as secret as our knees; we knew sin began wit
sight and once we were seen

we could be touched, but not forgiven.
we knew Jesus died with his body on display,

so we let the boys undo our buttons and pin our palms to the stucco walls and
we took turns sacrificing.

*

in the beginning

            The man said, “The woman you put here with me—
                        she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Genesis 3:12

truth be told, Adam was the first body
violated in his sleep.

God dipped holy hands
between clay flesh and out of a rib

made permission
for men to do as he did.

the men I know say they are faithless,
but if they did not believe in Adam’s God

they would not know practices
as ancient as these:

entering an unconscious body.
breaking skin to see it bleed.

making soil of a wound
and naming each bloom

(even the weeds, even their seeds)

demanding a body, any body,
warm and thirsty.

molding miracles in cavities
and calling it good.

ending stories with words
like asking for it

and calling it good.

               Note: this poem borrows part of its first line
                           from “Confession” by Leila Chatti

*

Anna Gayle is a poet, educator, and artist whose work explores themes of black womanhood, collective femininity, and chronic illness. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University where she serves as the arts & comics editor for literary magazine 45th Parallel. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Rogue Agent, The Mantle, Thimble Lit Magazine, and Empty House Press. Anna’s work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize.

Distant by Alina Macneal

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Distant

When you don’t come home for dinner
I check the calendar.

Boston. Oh. San Diego. Oh.
Or nothing. I like nothing. I like losing track of you.

I let dishes pile in the sink. Pour a vodka tonic.
Put on Lucinda Williams.

If you opened the door now, jacket over your elbow,
I’d be disappointed.

Did you remember I was going out? I’d say.
And I’d go.

Sometimes we touch along the edges
where our circles overlap,

then spin away, silent
like planets.

*

Alina Macneal is a Philadelphia-based educator, writer, and architect. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Poems for the Writing, The World to Come, Poetry 24, Welcome to the Resistance, and other publications. Born in Poland, she came to the US with her family as a child, growing up bilingual in the mono-lingual suburbs of St. Louis. She lives in University City and has been on the faculty at Drexel University for 30 years.

Ordinary Substance by Laura Grace Weldon

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Ordinary Substance

Our implausibly tough luck
suggests the floor is lava,
the apple is poison,
the underbed monster
is on the loose

yet proves, time after time,

benevolent strangers,
enchanted gardens, and
magic potions are also real
each entirely made of
an ordinary substance—

Gratitude.

Don’t imagine some
sweet scented gauzy thing
held together with whispers.

Her power grows muscled
with use. It can be summoned
instantly, even during the most
wretched trials.
Especially then.

Gratitude’s face may be bittersweet,
but her feet
are on the ground.
Try to knock her down,
she will rise for another round.
She will rise and rise and rise.
You will rise with her.

*

Laura Grace Weldon lives on a small ramshackle farm where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card each week. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com and on the twits @earnestdrollery.

How to Prep for the Next Apocalypse by Vernita Hall

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How to Prep for the Next Apocalypse
Stockpile toilet paper.
Make amends. Hurry.
Avoid snakes religiously. That apple a day—a banana instead?
Pack a deck of cards. The Cherubim is a fiend for solitaire.
Hoist two flags: Stars and Stripes, Confederate. What the hell.
Pascal’s wager on belief in God? (Three out of four, you win.) Hedge your bet: believe.
Light a candle. Say a prayer. Toss salt over your left shoulder.
Place sugar cubes in your pockets for those pale horses parading past. Couldn’t hurt to
get on their good side.
If you spy moon-eyed, slow-mo marchers slide your way, stiff-armed like sleepwalkers,
don’t shake their hands, don’t offer them candy. They are not trick-or-treaters.
Draft contingency plans. Perhaps reincarnation, as a cockroach or tardigrade.
When you hear the chorus sing, hold your applause until the end.
Should you feel your body rising, yes—do go into the light. You’ll be eternally grateful.
If not, better luck next time.
*
Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color, winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians, winner of the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Barrow Street, The Common, River Styx, The Hopkins Review, Arts & Letters, and Obsidian. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.

four ‘Memory’ poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my mother
with a sponge

and a bucket
of a bleach.

How she’d
weep

while scrubbing
words

from white tile
my mute

sister scrawled
in crayon

and ask
for a melody,

the pitch
of a bird,

to rise
from my lips

and lead
her out,

into the
radiant snow.

*

Memory

of my sister
losing

words
like miniature

combs
and my

mother
behind

her
picking up

pieces.
But never

the right
color

right comb,
always

the wrong
word:

happy instead
of help

wither
instead

of water,
the not

of her
tongue

turned
to know.

*

Memory

of my ear against
the ground
& my mother
above me
begging for answers.
How the nest
began
with a crack
in the concrete
then moved
up the walls,
like fears
in the form
of a question.

*

Memory

of the ghostly
croon of Emmylou

while my mom
clipped mint

and pruned bovine
and collected

peas so sweet
I thought

of the fair
and cold coke

and cotton candy
shared between

my sister’s
hands and mine,

while we circled
sky in summer

and saw nothing
but blue

nothing but birds,
weaving

their blurred
calligraphy.

*

Luke Johnson’s poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Poetry Northwest 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.

johnny got his gun by Marsha Owens

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johnny got his gun*

as leaves fall into brown piles splashed
with red and while the wind romps across
my yard, i drink coffee and read about troops
marching through headlines in Ukraine
leaving behind corpses just like in the U.S.,
but the bodies here are at the mall where she
went shopping and was gunned down,
and at the school where children squirmed
in their desks, not having learned yet they
will never get old because on this day—
pick a day, any day—someone has a gun
bought at the gun show and someone needs
to kill because he’s mad because she, the bitch,
refused to have sex or because baby cried
all night. . .so johnny got his gun, sits now
at the stoplight, pissed and driven to kill
anybody because he can, and not until later
do we see the video surveillance, how he pulled
slowly into the school parking lot, stepped out
of his car, calm, like he was just coming home
from work, something slung over his shoulder,
like it was just his day to take out the trash.

*(Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo)

*

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA,. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Dead Mule, and Streetlight Anthology. She co-edited the poetry anthology, Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook, She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning, is available at Finishing Line Press.

I Started Early, by Carolyn Miller

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I Started Early,

took my dog, the one that has been dead now
for more than sixty years, and I took some Duncan Hines
blueberry muffins tied in a bandanna, and
my TWA bag and the itinerary for my bicycle trip
to Europe in 1961 and the pop-up card that Bill Henry
made to celebrate my trip, and a baby nightgown
that ties at the bottom, a silver bracelet,
my mother’s diamond ring, and my white suitcase
with a lining of blue taffeta, and we set out toward
Big Piney by way of the German village
my great-grandfather escaped from, the one
that is no longer there, and we looked around
at the empty fields and wondered where
my cousins were, the grandchildren
of my grandfather’s brother, but no one came
along the road and no doors were there
to knock on. Then we set out for Ireland,
though I didn’t know how to find the place
Peter and Bridget Kelley fled from, what county,
what low house, what blasted fields they left behind,
so we sat in a green field, my dog and I, and thanked them
for their courage and their desperation, and I sang
a little song to the ocean Emily never saw,
and to the journey and my dog, who even then
was digging in the dirt, still hoping for a groundhog,
and finally I struggled to my feet and started off
for Big Piney Township and the farm, the lost town
and the lost farm, the lost cave and the spring
and the bullfrogs in the spring branch, calling.

*

Carolyn Miller is a poet, painter, and freelance writer/editor living in San Francisco. Her books of poetry are Route 66 and Its Sorrows (Terrapin Books), Light, Moving (Sixteen Rivers Press), and After Cocteau (Sixteen Rivers Press), and her essays have appeared in The Sun and The Missouri Review. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and American Life in Poetry, and have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Georgia Review, among other journals.

The Boy by Karen Friedland

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The Boy

Was 7 or 8 years old,
only wanted to kill the baby, tiny fish
that idyllic summer day—

to gather them in warm runnels,
then throw down armloads of sand,
then stomp them
with all his might.

His mother sat placidly nearby,
reading a book;
his baby sister
dug industriously with a tiny trowel.

I sat feet away,
aghast
at this gleeful mass murder,
but mute.

Because on beautiful summer days,
all the world over,
boys will be boys.

*

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen Friedland’s poems have been published in Constellations, Nixes Mate Review, Vox Populi, and others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 59th Moon Prize from Writing in a Women’s Voice, and had a poem hanging for a year in Boston’s City Hall for a year. Her books are Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace. She lives in West Roxbury, MA and is currently duking it out with incurable ovarian cancer.

Hunger Is the Opposite of the First Dandelions in the Grass by Lisa Zimmerman

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Hunger Is the Opposite of the First Dandelions in the Grass

The rumple of discarded baggage is my exhaustion upon waking.
How can a suitcase carry more darkness when closed?
It is a sad cave left on an empty train platform.

The darkness stands between snowy tree branches,
watching the sparrow who watches the birdfeeder.
Somewhere there is a sparkle. The light
presenting itself just before nightfall is useless,
even with its golden seam, its momentary fanfare.

Darkness is helpful, and not, depending on where
you don’t look, or how you imagine birds and seeds.
Darkness against anyone’s body is so complete,
so quiet, until they’re touched by someone.
Then—where does that bright white singing come from?

*

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner) The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, SWWIM Every Day, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Book of Matches, and many other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

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for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet

There is no new weather here /so close to the well of being
wasp in the lampstand tick in the beard /moon visible day and night
but I’m grateful for azaleas /coming back grateful for muck boots
for folks who fix things/ for hummingbirds’ full feeders
and dead carpenter ants for gardens and hoes and summer
tomatoes above all grateful for /walking the train tracks
with two new pennies/ you and me looking for luck.

*

Wendy Taylor Carlisle was born in Manhattan, raised in Bermuda, Connecticut and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and lives now in the Arkansas Ozarks in a house she built in 1980. She has an MA from The University of Arkansas and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000.) Chapbooks include They Went to the Beach to Play (Locofo Chaps, 2016), Chap Book (Platypus Press, 2016), Persephone on the Metro (MadHat press, 2014), The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press, 2008), and After Happily Ever After (Two River Chapbooks, 2003.) Her work appears in multiple anthologies.

Second Marriage by Daniel Romo

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Second Marriage

Everyone knows sequels are usually worse
than the original and second-guessing isn’t

preferable to simply going with your gut.
I’m all for stars being stuck to the top of

the page noting a child’s best efforts, but
why is gold the standard when silver’s so

much prettier? I have loved and lost and
learned that beating oneself up only ends

in a draw. Gladwell says to become an
expert at something it takes 10,000 hours

of practice, but I wonder how many hours
it takes to become just okay at something

you need simply to get by and if one can
just fake it until they break it. I’m still

learning the value of domesticity—how to
maximize dishwasher space and when to

confess to my wife that my soul feels like
it’s been forgotten in the dryer and keeps

tumbling with each new load. Rocky loses
in the first film but wins in the next because

I imagine he vowed he and Adrian will never
throw in the towel and in the process has

learned how to how do his own laundry,
how to separate the light from the dark,

the pain from the stain.

*

Daniel Romo is the author of Bum Knees and Grieving Sunsets (FlowerSong Press 2023), Moonlighting as an Avalanche (Tebot Bach 2021), Apologies in Reverse (FutureCycle Press 2019), and other books. His writing and photography can be found in The Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and he lives, teaches, and rides his bikes in Long Beach, CA. More at danieljromo.com.

Camera Man by Ethel Rackin

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Camera Man

I had to swim part way there because the land was submerged
or maybe hadn’t been there in the first place, for all I knew.
The stripes of blue and gold were the same for both of us—
gender neutral? Not exactly, but close enough.
You wore your best encampment and I wore the jeans
I had left. I couldn’t help myself
from falling asleep: the waves, the paddling,
the fatigue, treated (not very well) by 30 mg.
It was a miracle but only if you could afford it.
All of the new thinking is like…. Anyway, just as
someone stole the only photo I had left of that
time, a photo simultaneously sad and magical,
I lit a fire under us. You wouldn’t have minded
except now you and everyone you knew
had to get involved, to which I responded
by asking exactly who you were and what
business you had taking my picture after all.

*

Ethel Rackin is the author of three books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016); and Evening (Furniture Press, 2017). Her new teaching text is Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022).

Our 3-Ring Kitchen by Jessica D. Thompson

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Our 3-Ring Kitchen

mother did the laundry
in our eat-in kitchen

like a trained circus animal
the wringer-washer

sat in a corner
waiting to be led

to the arena
linoleum patchwork

of green and white squares
marked with trails

from years of migrations
to a porcelain sink

the rubber hose
a curious trunk

this was the room
where my sister would sit

alone long after
the dishes were done

like a feral girl
refusing to eat

everything on her plate
her bible-black eyes

a flashing stampede
toward the ring leader

who ruled
from the head of our table

*

Jessica D. Thompson’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Appalachian Review, Still: the Journal, the Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and the Southern Review as well as in anthologies such as “Women Speak, Vol. 7,” Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. One of her short poems was nominated for a Rhysling Award in 2007. Her chapbook, “Bullets and Blank Bibles,” (Liquid Paper Press) was published by Nerve Cowboy in 2013. She was a finalist in the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize (Heartland Review) in 2012 and 2022. Her first full length poetry collection, “Daybreak and Deep,” (Kelsay Books, 2022), was a finalist in the American Book Fest Best Books of 2022 for Narrative Poetry. She lives with her husband, Phil, and their rescue dog, Gloria, on 25 acres in Southern Indiana.

The Hummingbird by Kaecey McCormick

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The Hummingbird
            under the umbrella on the back patio, after Rilke

From flying the merry-go-round of umbrella ribs,
she has grown so panicked she cannot see
anything else. It seems to her a shroud
that allows no passage; yet beyond it,
the world awaits her return.

She brushes up against the cloth, again and again,
until the bright flashing of her wings
becomes a zoetrope, telling the same story
over and over; in it, another beautiful creature
becomes caged.

Only when she slows to rest, tiny feet perched
on a wooden spoke, does the ending appear—
to set herself free, all she need do is fly
in a different direction.

*

Kaecey McCormick is a writer and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has found a home in different journals, including SIXFOLD, Red Earth Review, and Clockhouse as well as her chapbooks Sleeping with Demons (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and Pixelated Tears (Prolific Press, 2018). When not writing, you can find her climbing a mountain, painting, or curled up with a book and a mug of hot tea. Connect at kaeceymccormick.com.

Ghost period by Wendy Kagan

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Ghost period

Then the heat vanished
      and she was here again:

my maidenhood, a vestige of her,
      come for one more visit

(six months after
      what I thought was her last)

to leave behind
      her pale pink plush—

barely there, translucent
      as a moth’s wing-print.

Just as the tattered heads
      of asters, on warm

November days, peek out late
      then get snowed over,

she was out of
      step with the order of things

but I flickered up to see her anyway
      as if meeting an old flame

who’d given no end of trouble
      yet still brought stirrings.

She came without throbs
      that some might feel

the pelvis a bowl of fire
      empty as a phantom limb.

No, this body
      declared it was

a kid again, all day
      I felt the old currents

cartwheel through

*

Wendy Kagan lives and writes in a converted barn in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her poems have appeared in The Baffler, Chronogram, and Poetry Distillery. She was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship “Martha Award” in 2022.

numb by Giana Longo

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numb

atta girl is not what the fathers
belt to the daughters in cleats

jogging over poorly cut grass
and avoiding contact.

it’s what they yell to the ones
who brace themselves for impact

hip-checking opponents
falling to the ground with hard bruises

and getting up as if there were not
grass stains, bright green and brown

streak marks like tire treads
from unstopping cars, along their sturdy legs,

outstretched arms and tender sides
pain too real for anything but stifling.

those are the girls who hear the praise
for taking on hell, pretending to feel nothing

*

Giana Longo is a writer of creative nonfiction and poetry from Philadelphia. Her poetry has appeared in Blue Marble Review and Adanna Literary Journal, and her articles have been featured in Philadelphia Magazine. Currently, she is working as a copy editor and freelance writer while completing her MA in Writing Studies at Saint Joseph’s University.

Paper Dolls by Bonnie Proudfoot

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Paper Dolls

I used to sit on the floor of the screened-in porch
with my favorite cousin, ten years older,

watch her cut paper dolls, linked bodies tumbling
out of their paper frame. As soon as I was old enough,

I wanted scissors in my hand. The best ones
were my grandmother’s sewing scissors, so sharp,

I could fold over paper, cut side to side to make a family
of girls holding hands, as I got older, cut head-to-head,

the dolls all joined at the top, made a star, like when
the camera looked down on the June Taylor dancers

on the stage of the Jackie Gleason show. I watched
my cousin’s hands, so careful at cutting on the line,

how she knew how to fold, where to begin and end,
and I wanted to see the outline, the left-over paper,

how the grain of the table or pattern of a skirt
filled the gaps where the dolls used to be. I love how

scissors make a noise a little like chewing, and how
my young sons made chewing faces when they

learned how to snip. I did it too, watching them
twitch their noses, work their jaws and teeth,

and I realize I’m also talking about memory,
not about watching the self tumble into the world,

but about how the mind holds time, moments folded
like paper, linked and tumbling out of their frame.

*

Bonnie Proudfoot has published essays, fiction and poetry. Her first novel, Goshen Road, (Swallow Press, 2020) was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads for 2020 and Long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and in 2022 it won the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2022. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and in her spare time she creates glass art and plays blues harmonica.

Two Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Alive

Walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, a friend says to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” [and] Beckett answers, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”

How far would you go? Odysseus
went as far as one can to find
a different answer: descending
to the underworld he meets
Achilles, who tells him he would
rather be the lowliest living serf
that king of all the dead.

I think of my dead brother’s widow,
who in her anger at the awfulness
of the current state of the world,
announces at one new horror
that she’s happy her husband
isn’t alive, doesn’t have to see
this latest outrage. Is my brother,
somewhere in the kingdom
of the dead, happy to be dead?

*

Riddled

On the fourth day of the first month of the year
2020, first or last of a decade, my granddaughter
hands me a perfectly unused spoon of rhetorical
questions. All of them stump me, I know answers

to none. If I were a stump, I’d show my age in
rings, not by my ignorance when questioned.
All of the rings I wear come down to one. It is
not the ring that triggers the door to all matter.

All that matters is the ring, the spoon, the question.
The child who asks it. No, that is not all. There is
a world elsewhere. A world here and there, here
and here, in each question, each object, answer,

perception. No one can know them all. All
one can do when asked is stump for replies,
replay, repicture the elements which pose
the riddles, demand their one answer.

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music (WordTech) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Illuminations, Tar River Poetry and many others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia.

Two Poems by Michelle Wiegers

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Membership Card

A letter arrives with his name on it,
a request to join the American Legion.
Honey, they want me to be a member,
to honor me for my Naval Service–
only twenty-five dollars, he asks.
An invitation addressed only to him,
twenty-five dollars to once again belong.

He cuts out the sample membership card,
forgetting there is any fee to pay,
like a small child pretending
to be grown up, he tucks it inside his wallet,
an anchor to keep him in this life
even as the ship of his mind
drifts on towards the next.

*

Pressed

There’s a sterile beauty
in this small purple flower
pressed between
two panes of glass,
its yellow center
still holding onto a wisp
of translucent green stem,
illuminated in the sunlight.

His wife, once a wildflower
blowing in the wind,
is a permanent display
in the museum
of his incessant demands.
He’s plucked her over and over,
pressed her between his panes
of perfection and displeasure
until all that is left
is a flattened viola bloom
he hangs, perfectly framed.

*

Michelle Wiegers is a poet, creative writer and mind-body life coach based in Southern Vermont. Her poems are inspired by her mind-body recovery from decades of chronic symptoms, the Vermont landscape and her own backyard. Her work has appeared in How to Love the World, The Path to Kindness, Birchsong and Third Wednesday, among others. In her coaching and teaching work, she is a passionate advocate for helping chronic pain and fatigue sufferers heal. michellewiegers.com

STEADY by Anne Whitehouse

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STEADY

There are ways of being steady—
unmoving, like a rock,
or in an even motion,
like metronome or clock.

Practicing balance, like a tree
rooted and branching.
With intention, I found my place
and held it, trembling.

Another form of steadiness
is simply not to fall.
Be ready to flee or stay.
Change happens to us all.

*

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

Memories are rose petals by Beth Oast Williams

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Memories are rose petals

how they drop like the outline
of angel wings, words mis-spelled
trying to be something
they are not. I close my eyes
and the ping, prod, knock
on the door of my mind
says Wake up. How it’s impossible
to sleep when someone wants
to reach you. What pricks
the skin is thorn, but the way it rubs
the edge of imagination
is often velvet.
Here my mother’s smoke
is nothing but a lung memory,
drowned out by piano.
How her fingers ran laps
around Rhapsody in Blue,
how I lingered to hear
if she stumbled. What it meant
to her, I never learned.
Sometimes I imagine her soul
in an Outer Banks breeze,
how that last month she bundled
up and sat on the sand.
Other times I embrace
the idea of hurricane,
how every way out of this life
is storm. I ask the weather
to hear me and all I get
are fallen leaves.
I realize I do not sleep
on a pea, but something deep
underneath keeps bothering.

*

Beth Oast Williams’s poetry has been accepted for publication in Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, GASHER, Fjords Review, and Rattle’s Poets Respond, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, was published in 2020.

Let’s Go Out for Breakfast, I Say to Myself by Laura Foley

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Let’s Go Out for Breakfast, I Say to Myself

I rush my card for the famous poet’s birthday
to the biggest Post Office at eight on Monday
so it won’t arrive late,
card with a green bamboo jungle,
a panda bear looking content,
which I wrote reminded me of him.
At the hipster café, I order a latte,
but it’s bitter, the bagel too salty to eat.
I spend the morning on a stool,
watching strangers on the street,
March winds buffeting their eyes
with winter dust. At lunch I meet my beloved,
her teaching gig done,
but the cool taco truck’s closed,
Not enough staff, explains the handmade sign.
We make our hungry way home,
in separate cars,
and I stop at the railroad crossing.
Last November, her student backed onto the tracks,
didn’t see the oncoming train.
I pause at the makeshift shrine—
a wooden cross, piles of basketballs,
plastic flowers, teddy bears.
Though the postman told me the card will arrive late,
though the coffee was undrinkable,
the bagel inedible,
the taco place closed,
though everyone has dust in their eyes,
for one moment I saw it:
a single ash leaf lifting upward,
spiraling over the railroad tracks,
brown, but somehow catching the light,
so it gleamed in passing,
spinning out of sight.

*

Laura Foley is the author of eight poetry collections. Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino was released, in winter 2022. It’s This is due out in Spring 2023. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, One Art Poetry, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine (Ireland), DMQ Review, Atlanta Review, Mason Street, JAMA, and many others. Her work has been included in many anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont. http://www.laurafoley.net