Month: September 2024

Ode to My Spine by Valerie Bacharach

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Ode to My Spine

Vertebrae, pale as winter sun, fixed in place
by screws tiny as a newborn’s fingernail.
Trace its path on the x-ray—
a trail alive with reconnecting protons and electrons.
When I sit in silence, I can hear
the swift flow of blood,
ligaments with their quiet song.
Nerves freed from compression flare
down my leg like last night’s lightning.
Muscles speak again in the body’s code—
contract and release, release and contract.
My spine’s aging column holds me
erect as one foot steps forward,
hovers in space above sidewalk,
breath held tight in lungs, my future a tenuous thing.

*

Valerie Bacharach is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her book, Last Glimpse, will be published by Broadstone Books. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her poem Birthday Portrait, Son, published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and one Best of the Net.

The Giveaway by Gloria Heffernan

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The Giveaway

Some people call it downsizing.
Barbara simply calls it the next step
as she lightens the load she will carry
to the assisted living community
down the road from her home of thirty years.

She extends an invitation to loved ones
to come and choose items
from the living gallery she has curated
throughout her eighty-three years.

She gives me a quilt she made by hand.
To her daughter, the collection
of blown glass paperweights collected
with Charlie during their three-decade marriage.
To her brother, all the tools and gardening supplies
used for a lifetime of spring plantings,
and their mom’s mixing bowl that he cherishes
even though he never bakes.

Every gift comes wrapped in a story,
and as they are carried out to various cars,
she smiles and nods approval,
each item a liberation.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in 2025. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Two Poems by Michael J. LaFrancis

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Assisted Living

Nan’s mother told her
she would not die from rust;

rather, she will pass away
when her life is all used up.

Her mother would live on
in her own home until she fell

out of it at ninety-three,
more than twenty years later.

Nan always said advice has to fit
the stage of life you are living in. Now

a nonagenarian herself, these words
are inspiring her. Nan has taken up

oil painting, bead making, praying on
rosary beads, calling neighbors by name.

After her husband of sixty-two years
gave up his spirit, she went to the cafeteria

at breakfast; the whole room came over
to extend condolences. Her heart heard

God’s promise—my house has many rooms,
I will prepare a place for you.

*

Cathedrals

We are centered,
in an ancient ecosystem,
of towering columns and spires
that seem to open heaven’s gate.

They are wearing a course red bark,
that can be one to two feet thick,
protecting their heartwood from fire,
Lucifer’s or anyone else’s.

They are fulfilling their promise,
with a quiet reverence, like apostles.
Their dark green and white ceilings
filter light, like stained glass windows.

Their parish is a connected community,
families surrounding proud parents;
some that have passed away.
Each is a resurrection from ashes and soot.

*

Michael J. LaFrancis is a trusted advisor, advocate, author and connector supporting individuals, groups and organizations aligning purpose and capabilities in service of their highest ideals. Writing poetry is a contemplative practice providing him with insight and inspiration for living a creative life. His poems are appearing in The City Key, Mocking Owl and Amethyst Review in the coming months.

LaFrancis’ hobbies include landscape gardening, nature walks, collecting fine art and writing. He and his partner Sharon are co-authors of their autobiography: Our Wonderful Life. They have two sons and have recently been promoted to being grandparents.

@michaeljlafrancis on Instagram

Two Poems by Magda Andrews-Hoke

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Fig

Life is a crystal fig
dropped
from a great height.

It’s not
that it might break,
but will.

Inevitably,
it glitters
in the plummeting.

* 

At the Walnut Lane Bridge

Over the bridge, the sun set
in a peach perfume.
Standing by the railing,
I peered into the creek below
and watched the dark
increase by small stitches
of indigo. What I hoped
to find there, I did not find.
And in that searching,
I was blind
to what was there. But
peace, but patience, waiting
stillness, have brought silence
to this qualm. And in its place
a subtle hymn, of softer colors
than the scene.

*

Magda Andrews-Hoke lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she works at the Kelly Writers House. She studied Linguistics and English at Yale University and was a 2019 recipient of the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship for poetry. Her poems can be found in Commonweal Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Talking to Fake Keith Richards on Facebook Messenger

First off, he called me Pretty Face, which most of us,
even grown women with PhD’s and adult acne (neither
of which I have, by the way) want to hear. I mean, I
knew it wasn’t him and possibly even a teenage girl

in Russia or China, but I went along with it because
I liked imagining that I, out of millions of slavering
Stones fans, somehow got Keith Richards’ attention
on social media, so much so that he (sticking to male

pronouns) wanted me to switch to a more private app,
which was a red flag, for sure, and I wasn’t about to
do it. Still, he kept the ruse going, often addressing me

as Dear like an elderly lady chatting with her favorite
nephew—not as enticing as Pretty Face, I have to say.
If I were his partner in conning women on the internet,
I’d tell him to drop the Dear and keep going with the

Pretty Face stuff or similar words of seduction. I spent
maybe ten minutes on this exchange, enough to know
it was a real person, at least, who asked questions like
Why did you become a poet? and not the numbers of

my bank account or my favorite position, and I don’t
mean politically. It ended with him saying he couldn’t
take a chance on talking to people with fake profiles
which is why he wanted to shift to a more confidential

way to communicate. So, I said Thanks for making such
great music as if he were Keith Richards and not some
unreasonable facsimile and signed off, at which point

he disappeared like a stone tossed into a river—on to
a more vulnerable mark, I guess. Then my handsome
ex-rockstar husband, a drummer (to whom a fan once
asked, between sets, to squeeze sweat from his t-shirt

into a jar) and I went to bed sort of laughing about the
whole fake Keith Richards episode. But we were sad,
too, for other pretty faces out there who would fall for
it because even I, who knew better, wanted to believe.

*

Dish Towel

One of my parents’ dish towels
hangs on the handle of our stove.

It is aqua-blue, covered with red
and yellow poppies. How many of

their dishes this towel must have
buffed, plus silverware, glasses,

cookpots and pans. For decades
Mom washed them and Dad did

the drying. But after he died, she
stood alone at their sink, letting

the water grow cold—soap suds
like glaciers slipping into the sea.

Six months a widow and she, too,
was gone, leaving a lone bowl in

the drainer, a single spoon, a fresh
dish towel draped just so on a ring.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for poetry in the International Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, Sport Literate, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

An Anniversary Poem from Far Away by Keith Taylor

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An Anniversary Poem from Far Away

I know people who ache
to be away from home,
gone to far places, who
feel alive only if climbing
the walls at Rhodes
or watching puffins fly
off the islands in Maine.

But you, my love, have given
life a flavor that stays
with me when I travel
to Greece or Maine, that makes
me long for our kitchen
where I could make coffee
or wash yesterday’s dishes.

*

Keith Taylor has published poems in such places as Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, and many others. He published two books in 2024: All the Time You Want: Selected Poems with Dzanc Books; and What Can the Matter Be with Wayne State University Press.

Three Poems by Derek Thomas Dew

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The Promise of Variety

This is the hour when nothing makes us happy.
Some of us are weightless, some of us are struggling
with forms of debt, some are sure that they’ll crumple
into a ball on the ground if they leave the restaurant
and face the day, others are in the alley collecting cans.
Everyone seems to be going about in their own way,
but there’s a pebble in every shoe, a clanging tension
the neck shares with the hands, a sense of missing the mark,
a feeling that the white plastic patio chair would shatter
if one of us tried to sit down in it, but that the shattering
would reveal nothing to us, except maybe that the promise
of variety was a lie. Is this really part of a day? Any day?
This is the hour when the prospect of rescue sets us
against each other, as there’s always been an unachievable balance,
a symmetry we can’t join, some ideal born when we close our eyes
and listen patiently for the whisper that never finds us,
the one which we would have no idea
how to answer anyway.

*

Paid For

One day the idea of ourselves came through the faded gold
pollen dotting the pines, through the empty french fry boxes
and crumpled up burger wrappers on the floor of the parked cars,
it came over the tar shingled roofs and into the barrel fires
at the bicycle chop shop deep down the alley, and finally, it hit us.
We could no longer remain in our story, in its victorious coming from
and going to emptiness, so now in its wake we have a cheek resting
against a hand, sun on the face, and we try to make it work, make it enough,
but instead of what might have been—enough to pay rent, enough
for a bus pass—we have the idea of ourselves, which only seems
to suggest that endurance is a haunting, one without sensation;
we’re prompted to search for a building in the center of the buildings
which look so close to rotting they’ve become a miracle of presence,
indivisible in mood and resolve, and we try to model our faces
that way in the windows, now in a twitch in vain, scared, tired,
and we stare at the outside, sit and stare, as though everything,
everything out there were already bought and paid for.

*

The Seven-Year-Old

Nobody else was there
Dark under summer palm
Streetlight slanting in
The window spread me
Far across the room
Sirens in the distance
My hands began to slip
Down along the curtains
Just to part the yellow
Then to prop it open
With an old ashtray
So I could see the street
Denying the wind
I wandered to the room
Where a cardboard dresser
Shouldered a small tv
Faux-wood & thick glass
With a twist of the knob
Shocked into high bronze
Twitched up channel ninety
The screen just mixed colors
But the moans came through
Just fine they overlapped
Bright then split again
I stopped on that channel
& I knew that sound
How it retreated fast
Into itself from the walls
But had I seen the image
Assembled on the screen
Seen who was doing what
I would have known
What had happened to me
I would have guessed
My place in the picture
I am the one enacting
My own definition
Halfway to becoming
Everybody else

*

Derek Thomas Dew (he/she/they) is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently earning an MFA in poetry. Derek’s debut poetry collection “Riddle Field” received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from the Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada. Derek’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and have been published in a variety of journals, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press.

Four Poems by J.R. Solonche

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PIN OAK

The tree man came to do tree work.
You should cut down that dead pin oak, he said.
Why? I said.
It’s dead. It could fall in the first big storm, he said.
How long has it been dead? I said.
Hard to say. When did it leaf out last? he said.
I’m not sure. Two or three years ago maybe, I said.
You should get rid of it, he said.
What’s the proper period of mourning for a dead pin oak? I said.
I never heard of a proper period of mourning for a tree, he said.
Me neither, but I’m starting it. Four years for a pin oak, I said.

*

MIRROR

I saw an old mirror
at the side of the road
to be picked up with
the trash. I stopped to
look at myself in it,
but it was very old and
cracked and missing
most of the silver backing,
so it was more of a window
than a mirror, a window
looking out at a wall
looking back at me.
I should have taken it home.
It’s the perfect mirror for
me, old man that I am.

*

CANCER

My friend, Yvonne, is a poet.
She has cancer, so she’s been
writing “cancer poems.” They
are very, very good poems.
They have been published in
The Hudson Review and JAMA.
Congratulations, I said. Please
don’t say that. I wish I didn’t
have to write them, she said.
I understand, but you do, and
you did because you must,
I said. Still, I wish it weren’t such
a must when there is so much
else to write about, she said.
You do write about so much else,
I said. Yes, but it all smells of chemo,
she said. Even the roses, even them.

*

BARREN ROAD

I have a friend who lives
on Barren Road. It’s a
shame he’s not a poet.
“It’s a shame you’re not
a poet,” I said. “Why’s
that?” he said. “Because
you live on Barren Road,”
I said. “So that’s why it’s
a shame I’m not a poet?”
he said. “Yeah. Consider
the irony,” I said. “I do.
I’ve been considering it
all the time since it really
was barren,” he said. “I’m
surprised at you. This is
the first time you said it’s
a shame I’m not a poet.
Well, I think it’s a shame
you are. A damn shame.
What a waste of a mind,”
he said. I understand.
He’s a sociologist.

*

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 38 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Three Poems by Cam McGlynn

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My Universe Runs out of Stars

This Equation Shows That the Universe Will Run out of Stars
         (Scientific American, July 11, 2024)

We sit in the middle
of a cosmic afternoon,
red clouds headed
towards evening.
One day soon, you
will let the neighbors’ dog
out to play and forget
to put her away. We’ll walk
the neighborhood, hand
in hand, as you try
to call her home,
without remembering
her name.
Here, in the red-shifted past,
can we predict
which future day
will be the last one
a star was formed?
What formula will show
the day
your last star shone?

*

Total Obscuring of One Celestial Body by Another

         to my daughter

I wouldn’t write poems about the eclipse.
What can I say that hasn’t been said?
My hand’s curled around your small fingertips?

“Biblically awesome” might come from my lips
but only defined like “I’m trembling in dread.”
I shouldn’t write poems about the eclipse.

The dusk broke too fast. I couldn’t come to grips
to the graying of day and the colors all bled.
My hands couldn’t feel their own fingertips.

Our ancestors read omens of apocalypse.
I wondered if soon I’ll be one of those dead.
I’ll never write poems about the eclipse.

In the darkening day, when the sun, my star, slipped
behind the small globe of the moon’s crowning head,
your hands curled around my large fingertip.

Darkness was there, but there too was the glimpse
of how sun rays are birthed and daybreak is spread.
I’ll try to write poems about the eclipse.
Curl the pen in my hand with your fingertips.

*

Yellowstone

elk bugle
bison bellow
geysers gasp and groan

fractured faults
rumble heat
out of fumaroles

microbial mats
of thermophiles
grow out green and gold

belching mudpots
stink the hides
of steaming buffalo

bear cubs learn
from mother bear
how to grub and gobble

whortleberries raked
from their stems
burst by the mouthful

rhyolite chunks
of old, cold crust
grind to granite and gravel

tell me, please
what faults of mine
could also be this bountiful
*

Cam McGlynn is a writer and researcher living outside of Frederick, Maryland. Her work has appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Helios Quarterly, Cicada, Quatrain Fish, and Bewildering Stories. She likes made-up words, Erlenmeyer flasks, dog-eared notebooks, and excel spreadsheets.

Two Poems by Rachel Marie Patterson

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Stonetown Road

Sunday, black coffee and
rectangles of dishwasher soap.
We get the call at 10:30—
my mother-in-law fell hard
on the kitchen floor.
So we race two hours north
to find her in a mechanical bed,
two staples in her head,
asking every nurse to take her
for a cigarette. When I ask,
she can’t remember whether
she chewed the aspirin.
Outside the security glass,
a hawk surveys the embankment.
The night we met, I howled
with laughter as she gripped
my sleeve with a gauzy, manicured
hand. Her eyes were as clear
as the lake behind us. How
my husband gushed and beamed.
His mother used to write cards
and keep appointments, before
her pretty cursive looped away
to oblivion. In the ICU, he leans
to kiss her bloody forehead.
I know now I will watch him
lose her, slowly. Driving back,
we pass his childhood home–
the natural pool full of snakes.

*

Emergency Vet

When the dog stops blinking, I wrap
her in a towel and swerve the highway,
one palm cupping her distended bowel.
In the cement waiting room, black
coffee in a styrofoam cup. I stare
at the framed canine dental chart
while they thread the catheter and split
her open. Remember how she ate tissues
from the trash because they were mine,
wore circles into my bedroom carpet.
For 13 years, she followed me
from home to home, licking the salt
from my eyes. Now, there is nothing
to do but leave her.

*

Rachel Marie Patterson is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. She holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, The Journal, Thrush, Parcel Magazine, Smartish Pace, and others. The winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her work has also been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her poem “Connemara” was a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. She is the author of Tall Grass With Violence (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

FINESSE by Martha Zweig

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FINESSE

How did your day go? First it twiddled nine
of its knots loose, then tripped off. Hurry
home by midnight or the chimes strike stone-
&-stubborn dead, I said.

Be nice, an alter ego prompts.
Try it, you’d be surprised? Might I entertain
any such actual spook? No. I squirm
along in the leaves to take outwits one
after another each by its own surprise.

Are we over? When did we last care?
Coax me into your plump folds, if you dare.
I’ll purr. I countercalculate every
& each of my moves to end me up exactly there.

*

Martha Zweig’s four full-length poetry collections include GET LOST, DHP Oregon; MONKEY LIGHTNING, Tupelo, and WHAT KIND and VINEGAR BONE, both from Wesleyan University Press. Her chapbooks are POWERS, Stinehour Press, Vermont Council on the Arts, and A SKIRMISH OF HARKS, Jacar e-book. Zweig’s recognitions include Hopwood Awards, a Whiting Award, Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and a Warren Wilson MFA. She lives in Vermont where she worked ten years as an advocate for seniors, after ten years handling garments in a pajama factory where she served a term as ILGWU shop chair.

The God of Late Summer by Melinda Burns

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The God of Late Summer

         after Lorna Crozier

The God of Late Summer
makes no apology as she sweeps up
the last of the long lazy days,
pulls the sun down ever earlier,
tips the top of the maple tree
with a hint of radiance to come

She sprinkles finches on the goldenrod
singing their little flute songs even
as their colour starts to fade
She brings you peaches,
heaped in bowls, sun-blessed
sweetness rising with every bite

She still brings heat but cooler
nights and promise of respite
from barbecues, picnics, family reunions
And downpours to make
you stay inside, looking out
the windows, listening
for the thunder

*

Melinda Burns is a poet in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Her poems have appeared in Fiddlehead, the New Quarterly, and One Art. Melinda is the author of “Homecoming” (forthcoming in 2025, Bookland Press).

Two Haiku by Robert Lowes

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yellow-breasted chat
in my binoculars—
singing for someone else

*

empty basketball court
the sun spots up
at the top of the key

*

Robert Lowes’s second collection of poetry, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books), was published earlier this year. His first collection, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), came out in 2020. His poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, The New Republic, Modern Haiku, and December. He is a retired journalist who lives with his wife Saundra in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Lowes has been playing the guitar—electric and acoustic—since 2017. He rocks out in a band called Pink Street.

some taverns use shotguns for door handles by Kimberly Sailor

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some taverns use shotguns for door handles
For Jessica

you’re a vegetarian, and that’s where things got complicated at the Americana Holiday Spectacular. three dive bars in a tucked-in mining town, shafts sealed up after Nixon, lampposts still burning gas. avant-garde menus with two types of burger: cow or hog, pickles or none. sometimes fried food is just processed cheddar, but it comes from the same spitting oil vat as the animals, and you wouldn’t mix and match. i still don’t know how a bite-sized town budgets fireworks in December, or how the volunteer fire department times the lighting of the tree perfectly with the last big smoky bang, but fragile miracles happen everywhere. like how you married a hunter who makes his own jerky. like the way you lean into me when I say something funny.

*

Kimberly Sailor, from Mount Horeb, WI, is the editor-in-chief of the Recorded A Cappella Review Board and author of the 2024 poetry chapbook “Holy Week in Cave Country” (Finishing Line Press). She has been a finalist for the Wisconsin People & Ideas poetry contest and the Hal Prize for poetry. Sailor serves her community as a volunteer firefighter/EMT. www.kimberlysailor.com

From Personal to Universal: Using Emotion to Craft Deeper Writing — A Workshop with Karen Paul Holmes

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From Personal to Universal: Using Emotion to Craft Deeper Writing
Instructor: Karen Paul Holmes
Thursday, October 3, 7:00-9:00pm (Eastern)
Duration: 2 hours
Price: $25 (payment options)

Workshop Description:
Writing the personal can make your poems more expansive, more capable of striking a true chord in others. In this workshop, we’ll explore ways to “go inward to go outward”— to draw from emotionally resonant personal experiences and observations to find deeper connection with readers. We’ll discuss a range of poems that effectively navigate concepts of joy, anger, grief and other emotional states. Join us for a two-hour session focused on giving you the freedom to express emotions and the tools to craft the poems you want and need to write. You’ll leave with prompts and a healthy dose of inspiration.

About The Instructor:
Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich). Her poems have been widely published in journals such as Plume, Diode, Glass, and Prairie Schooner and have also been featured on The Slowdown and The Writer’s Almanac. After a long career in Corporate America, which included leading workshops as international conferences, Holmes became a freelance writer and has taught creative writing to adults at various conferences and venues.

 

Two Poems by Jeneva Stone

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Entropy

Cats hiss like water spilled on a hot stove. An evaporation of
aggression.

Distracted by my own thoughts, I once heard “poof” and
turned to see the wok flaming, yellow blades igniting then
joining forces in cacophony.

Sometimes energy exerts itself with an inescapable boom—
other times it releases softly. A physicist might intervene and
say something about quantity and molecular structure and
other factors I can’t account for.

There’s an equation for everything. This I know.

But does it matter how your world destabilizes? A stack of
crockery, piled inexpertly, teeters.

You’ve heard that sound—sharpness of the initial strike, softer
cadence following, a dull splitting open, a fear of being caught
in that deluge of rapid-fire noise without shelter or a way
home.

*

Empty Nest

Somewhere there’s a sun that doesn’t sink beneath an
inevitable horizon. Star fire.

I like the way some loves burn yellow-white, small
arms curling and dancing. That band of the color
spectrum blazes steadily. That is, it lasts.

The hottest flames are violet, one letter short of
destruction.

Before 1700, English didn’t differentiate between
“son” and “sun.” Or “sonne” or “sunne.” So many
letters have fallen away, no longer needed.

In the nineteenth century, yellow roses, nested gold
petals, each layer cupping close the next, meant
friendship. Or joy.

One day our sun will grow large, expanding beyond
the invisible limits of those that orbit him. We won’t
burn. We’ll merely cede our place.

*

Jeneva Stone (she/her) is a poet, essayist and advocate. She’s the author of Monster (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016), a mixed-genre meditation on caregiving. Her work has appeared in NER, APR, Waxwing, Scoundrel Time, Cutbank, Posit, and many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and VCCA, and has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize. Her opinion writing has been featured in The Washington Post and CNN Digital. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program.

Jeneva volunteers for multiple health care and disability groups, coalitions, and boards/taskforces at local, state and federal levels. Her leadership roles include: Blog Manager for Little Lobbyists, a family-led organization advocating for health care of children with complex medical needs and disabilities; Maryland Community Ambassador for the Rare Action Network, and governor’s appointee to Maryland’s Rare Disease Advisory Council.

Hysterical by Cindy King

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Hysterical

A happy summer’s day:
cut-offs and gladiator sandals.
Hungry lions, zero.
Heads on pikes, none.
Every person on earth,
regardless of tongue,
appears to be simultaneously laughing
while you go to the gym,
stay for a week on the elliptical.
It is your language.
At times you sit or lie still—
sleep, kombucha, vampires on TV.
But always you come back
to your gym and the elliptical.
This is not an apology,
but will someone tell you they’re sorry?
You wouldn’t ask but like a hen
that never roosts,
because you are a clucky,
cacophonous bird, too full
of spite and eggshells
to sit and brood.
Besides, there is the perpetual laughter.
Even when the joke is no longer funny.
Even when there isn’t a joke.

*

Cindy King is the author of a book-length poetry collection, Zoonotic (2022), and two poetry chapbooks, Easy Street (2021) and Lesser Birds of Paradise (2022). Her latest poetry manuscript won the C&R Poetry Book Award and will be published in 2024. Her chapbook, OhioChic, will be released by Galileo Press in 2024.

Cindy’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, Callaloo, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, American Literary Review, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She recently served as a featured Festival Poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She has also received fellowships and scholarships from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center, Colgate University, and other organizations.

Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah, where she is an associate professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and editor of The Southern Quill and Route 7 Review. She also serves as an editorial assistant for both Seneca Review and TriQuarterly.

DEAD VIOLETS STAIN THE WHITE PORCH by Camille Newsom

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DEAD VIOLETS STAIN THE WHITE PORCH

I haven’t seen the lady who walks the rural road
in weeks.

Asphalt heat roasts the chickens.
Three deaths this week already.
The guineas abandoned their nest.
Dollars dead, says the farmer.

I, too, want to bask in the moonlight
on the other side of life.
The animals tell me it’s cold and turquoise.

*

Camille Newsom is a livestock farmer in Western Michigan. In her poems she observes our living and dying world through humor, grief, and a sprinkling of spite. Her first chapbook is This Suffering and Scrumptious World (Galileo Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Southword, Terrain.org, Main Street Rag, MAYDAY, and others.

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

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Argyle

Unpacking the box
a year after death
I find the knitting
pattern, the socks
themselves,
gone

*

Ars Parrotica

We squawk, beg for crackers, display
our plumage to the world, soil
the newspaper in the bottom of our cage,
spit out shells, swallow the seed;
if free, we splat on your head.
We’re a nuisance, listening in,
mimicking what we hear,
making what passes for conversation
through the bars of our imprisonment.
We shake a feather, claw. Toothless,
our talons cling to any extended branch.
When we escape we propagate, flock
to the treetops, confuse the populace,
so used to the dismal gray of pigeon frocks.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

What My Family Never Talked About by Sue Ellen Thompson

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What My Family Never Talked About

Why my mother came home from the hospital
with a flat stomach and put the bassinet
back in the attic. When my Aunt Ginna
divorced Uncle Charlie—they showed up together
at family gatherings for decades, so how
would we know? Or the summer my sister
was planning her wedding—what went on
in the spare room so late at night
with our handsome Australian houseguest.
When my nephew first started walking,
he held a coat hanger straight-armed
in front of him, as if he were dowsing
for water. But no one ever mentioned
autism or suggested that his behavior
was anything other than fine.

If I asked my mother—gone 22 years
now—to please explain, she would use
the same gesture employed when a fly
dared to enter the kitchen where she
was preparing our dinner—as if to say Nothing
could be less important. Now please
set the table and call in your brothers to eat.

*

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of six books, most recently SEA NETTLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Grayson Books, 2022) and the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1st ed.). She has won a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda/Nimrod Hardman Award, two individual artist’s grants from the State of CT, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Thompson teaches at The Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C., and received the 2010 Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.

Smells like Middle-Aged Spirit by Katie Kemple

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Smells like Middle-Aged Spirit

I think of Janeane Garofalo when I fold
my teen’s t-shirts. Well, no, Janeane
Garofalo’s character in Reality Bites.
The one who’s a manager at the GAP.
That place Winona Ryder’s character
is too good to work at. We were supposed
to relate to Winona’s character,
her dedication to art and filmmaking.
(And the start of reality TV?) Don’t be
a sellout, the wisdom of a generation.
X marks your spot in it. Profit, the culprit.
We didn’t know X would mark Twitter
would piss over the playground of our
20s. The Internet, a place where you can’t
fold t-shirts for the GAP, abounds
with sell-outs selling out their own
brands. The future cut Ben Stiller’s
character out of the market. He’s surfing
YouTube Shorts and TikTok for clients.
Ethan Hawke’s character didn’t make it big
in time to ride the wave of CD sales,
his music Napstered, Spotified, played
out in 90s cover bands. And a lot of us
are X out of luck. I’ve had so many jobs.
They’ve come and gone like t-shirts.

*

Katie Kemple’s poems have appeared in various pockets of the internet and at katiekemplepoetry.com.

Three Poems by Charlie Brice

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Sky

According to Jim Harrison, when we die
it will be like falling through the sky.

According to Bob Dylan, even the birds
are chained to the skyway.

According to me, the blur of the Milky Way
in the Michigan night-sky is the footprint of infinity.

And in morning, how do clouds decide to float by us,
those jellyfish of the heavens? How long have they spied
on us? Do they congregate, gossip about what they’ve observed?

If enough of them are interested they huddle
together, the easier to hear the juicy parts,
and give us shade that hides their busybody meanderings.

They must hate us for dumping tons of poison
into their sky-home. Still, on those Magritte days,
they parade by us, dispense wonder, offer forgiveness.

*

Dan

Why didn’t you go to Paris, or even Reno?
You liked to gamble. Remember when you
went to the Superbowl with your son and won
back the thousands you spent to get there
on the crap tables in Vegas? Yeah, you could
have gone to Vegas. Instead, you went and died.

Starting a year or so ago my dreams have
been populated by the dead. Last night I
dreamed that I was reminding Rollo May
of the dinner we had with Maurice Freedman
in San Diego in the eighties. They are both
dead—long dead. Do I have to put you
in my dreams now, Dan?

We had such fun at Pirate games before you
decided you didn’t like me anymore. Our
friendship died long before you did. Still,
I miss you, old friend. Maybe I’ll see you
in a dream.

*

Wisdom

I had to admire the effort. My
mother-in-law, who couldn’t
stand me, presented me,
every Christmas and birthday,
with owl figurines—
some crystal,
some wood,
some agate
or sandstone.

After trying to find something
positive about me, she settled
on wisdom. She decided that
I would like it if I thought
that she thought I was wise
and, as we all know,
owls are wise.

Somewhere Freud wrote
that, because there’s
an unconscious,
it’s impossible to really
fool anybody.

*

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Miracles That Keep Me Going (WordTech Editions, 2023). His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere.

After a Quote by Emerson by Howie Good

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After a Quote by Emerson

Want to make
people aware

of the troubles
in the world?

Forget it.

There are finally
just too many.

“Build therefore
your own world.”

And without cities
of bombed buildings

and charred cars,
above which silvery

white clouds drifting
in slo-mo really do

look like angelfish.

*

Howie Good is a writer living on Cape Cod. His newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

Back Before I Was by Gary Glauber

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Back Before I Was

My parents never had kids.
But here I am, a miracle of sorts,
proving everything wrong. Again.
They were young, so young.
Younger than daylight and
totally not up to tasks at hand.
My father hid from war
with a heart disease that
made him timid, not heroic.
Yet he somehow fostered a belief
that he could have been a
starting pitcher for the Cardinals.
My mom was a left-handed woman
plucked from her independence
to a life of artistic pursuits and
cigarettes smoked while speaking French.
It was an eclectic home life.
They were constantly at odds.
Neither had much in the way
of self-confidence and swagger.
Every year was a new experiment.
I lacked a functional mentor.
Even my school guidance counselor
refused to guide me, particularly after
an errant home run of mine accidentally
broke her living room window.
Yet I managed to machete my way
through the jungle morass
toward a path of growth and vision.
Nah, just kidding. I was a hot mess.
I fainted while wearing a lobster bib.
Calculus threw me for a loop.
And even though I had super
impressive quadriceps, it did not
help my football skills in the least.
No one cared that I could use my legs
to lift all that weight – it served no
practical purpose whatsoever.
So I grew the best set of mutated sideburns
a young teen could manage
and joined a band. No one liked
the love song about the Vietnam vet.
Still, I played on.
Went to football camp, where
I honed my standup comedy skills.
I learned that a lifetime
of good stories was helpful
in rationalizing a string of poor crushes
that never worked out well.
I was hopelessly romantic
in a time of more practical ways,
too young for the war
and for Woodstock too,
but at least I had the watch.
And boy did time fly.
Went off to a college
also ill-suited for me,
an engineer’s school
for those rejected
by the Ivies.
I managed a hairline
fracture of my ankle.
While in my cast,
I tried out for the play.
Then I was in two casts.
I played a character
with a limp. Badly.
But it was Shakespeare,
so no one noticed.
I read lots of books
and came home every
weekend to head out
to comedy clubs.
I was not the picture
of happiness,
but who was back then?
Besides, I could grow
decent facial hair,
and that counted for something.
I vowed to spend the next year
away from myself, far far away.
And I did. But I’ll never
forget my humble beginnings
becoming a person
in spite of strong odds against me.

*

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He has five collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), an Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur finalist. He also has two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize.

Eschatology by Kim Addonizio

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Eschatology
No way this ends with everyone rising from the family plot
& rattling toward the celestial courthouse to be judged. Are we all frightened villagers?
Well, yes. Everyone’s cowering from something. Right now, yet another atmospheric river
is dumping stalled container ships of rain on the house, uprooting trees on the hillside
& in the Christ-addled brain of my neighbor, the divine horses are being brushed & saddled,
angels are polishing their instruments, struggling into their armor. It’s true
that things look more accurate, prediction-wise, if your prediction is more flooding & wildfires,
more monstrous bugs scuttling toward the corridors of power. My neighbor believes
she’s pure enough to be resurrected & Hoovered into heaven while the secular infidels moan
about science & get trampled underfoot. If I have to think about resurrection, all I see
is a Netflix series where reanimated jake-legged corpses shuffle through the streets
while the real humans kill them again, & sometimes each other, the compromised world
of the future pretty much already here. But how did we get into this discussion?
Someone brought up the apocalypse at the barbeque last week
over a few grilling chicken thighs. My neighbor, who thinks I’m the Whore of Babylon,
watched me disapprovingly as I refilled my wine glass of abominations
& spoke of God’s people as credulous idiots. She said she would pray for me,
smug in the knowledge of my imminent destruction. Oh, to be that certain.
I almost admired her. But like the Whore of Babylon I was
I told the dirtiest joke I could think of, & watched her grow red-faced & offended,
& there the neighborly visit quickly ended.
*
Kim Addonizio is the author of over a dozen books of prose and poetry. Her latest poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton, September 2024). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. Addonizio’s work has been translated into several languages and honored with fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, and her collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland, CA and teaches poetry workshops on Zoom. kimaddonizio.com

Phone Visit with Jenny by José Chávez

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Phone Visit with Jenny

Approximately 5 percent of people aged 65 to 74 years and 40 percent of people older than 85 have some form of dementia, according to the Merck Manual.

My sister Jenny calls from the facility
where she’s been living for four years
& I move to our living room couch
to get comfortable.

It becomes a three-way conversation
when my older sister joins in
& I ask Jenny how she’s doing.

She says she’s OK
but she’s too warm—
Why is it so hot in here?

We remind her that it’s
January & very cold outside
In Albuquerque.

But she’s still too hot
& there are no lights
on the Christmas tree downstairs.

Maybe they unplugged them
my older sister says
now that the holiday passed.

Jenny says they taped off
the living room by the tree
so you can’t sit there
on that soft blue couch.

We say it’s probably due to
the need for social distance
but she’s adamant—still too warm down there
& she can’t find her son.

He was just here & left she says
he’s at the airport now
maybe it’s due to the virus we say
maybe he had to go back home.

My older sister & I know
he passed ten years ago
& they had been living together.

She pauses . . . wants us to know
that all is well with him
& reveals more of her expansive truth
that percolates often amid a crush of anxiety.

I know it doesn’t seem real
she tells us—
But      He      Was      Here     
I don’t know where he is now.

Her words envelope our hearts
& we pause for a few moments.
My older sister asks if she was able to sign
the Christmas cards with stamps ready
to be mailed out last week.

I don’t know where they are—
Why is it so hot in here?

*

José Chávez dedicates his life to writing. He’s had poetry published in the Multilingual Educator Journal, Acentos Review, and the Inlandia Anthology. José is the author of two bilingual poetry books for children: Little Stars and Cactus and Dancing Fruit, Singing Rivers.

If You Knew by Susan Rich

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If You Knew

this would be the final person
you’d ever kiss; this the last toast-
scented neck you’d lean towards

under an arched earlobe—
then perhaps you’d rest a minute,
more inhaling anarchist curls

casting curtains around your heads.
Even if this were just a penultimate touch:
neckline, lips, scent of apples—

what more could you ask, except
for time to slow—
then stop—as if in a children’s game

of statues, or in the fable, where
couples stumble into an underwater cave
opening outward towards a new country—

similar to the summer you turned twenty
and interlocked fingers with a stranger—
his limbs winged with a bronzed shine.

How this came together escapes
you now. What remains
are the tracks of his hands—

the most intimate touch,
until now—intuited as
in the way a cloud color transforms

in the indigo bowl of sky,
all of itself and another.
The way the sacred world

above the collarbone captures us
pinioned, tucked in, and never
in want of anything more.

*

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor of two prose anthologies. Her most recent books include Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). She co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press) and Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders (Poetry Foundation). Susan’s previous poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World–winner of the PEN USA Award. Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds is forthcoming from Raven Chronicles Press.

Two Poems by Carolyn Chilton Casas

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Storms

It’s hard to grasp.
How one day is innocence
itself, calm waters to the horizon,
broadcloth sails billowing
against a coral sky.
The next, you’re diving
for cover,
canon balls plummeting
all around your boat,
and the comrade you thought
had your back
has left on the only raft,
leaving you wounded and alone,
conjuring easy seas
of the past.

*

A New Day

To hold the day before me
like a rare treasure,
the hours smooth pearls
strung by hand
on a thick thread of longing.
To recognize my heart
connection to the whole
and remember my time here
is but a blip
on the edge of infinity.
To honor the miracle of breath,
organ, muscle, and bone.
Today, I open my child’s eyes
to wonder—how the doe
and the fawn trust me
as they nap on the grass,
how the whirring hummingbird
glistens green then ruby
in the fading sun.

*

Carolyn Chilton Casas is a Reiki master and teacher who often explores ways of healing in the articles she writes for energy and wellness magazines in several countries. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. She lives on the central coast of California where she enjoys nature, hiking, and beach volleyball. More of Carolyn’s work can be found on Facebook or Instagram and in her second collection of poetry Under the Same Sky.

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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Without An Intermission

Following the news
I feel like I’m watching
one of those movies where
the character suffers on and on
through one challenge after another
only to end after three hours
with a cryptic scene I can’t tell
is hopeful or not.

I’ll accept that Happily Ever After
only exists in some parts of Movie Land
but couldn’t we at least have
intermissions, like the old days
when we watched movies in palaces
with red velvet curtains and chandeliers.

Ghandi was the last major film
to have a built-in break
and that ends with the hero’s ashes
scattered over the Ganges.

What does that foretell for me
if I stay tuned in to the headlines
without an intermission?

*

Double Zippers on His Backpack

He asked me this morning,
as I packed his lunch, to pull
the double zippers to the top.
It’s easier for him to open
when he’s hooked to machines.

We are quiet on the drive over,
except for a few pleasantries
about how we hope this session
won’t take as long as the last one,
maybe the nurses won’t be as busy
and there won’t be a lag between
the pre-meds and the chemo.

We don’t discuss how he’s offering
his veins for another eight weeks
to elicit an extension, not a cure.

The words feel double zipped
inside the laden bag
he slings over his thin shoulder
before he waves goodbye.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at jacquelinejules.com

Packing Lunch by Brandice Askin

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Packing Lunch

From clavicle to ribcage – – – 
a ragged zipper scar.
Soon to be reopened.

Your battery heart has wound down.
No one would know it.
Your eyes hold the sunlight of ten worlds,
and you never stop moving.

Tomorrow, a fancier version,
with remote boosting powers
plugged into your pacemaker.
Finally ready to keep the beat
for the slumber party
of nerf guns and cotton candy
you always wanted.

You peer inside the Totoro lunchbox.
Crusts cut. No mayo. Oreos. Even Takis.
Your smile is a beam.
Snap the lid tight; zip lunch box closed,
my kitchen gloves paler than surgical blue
as I do what only a mother can:
make your mouth tingle
your stomach full with forgetfulness.

*

Brandice Askin writes poetry and fiction to help her sleep at night. A cat can often be found obstructing her keyboard. Her poetry is published in Cool Beans Lit and Moonstone Arts. She is a past winner of the Suncoast Writers Conference Short Fiction Contest. She currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, but has also called Oregon and California home. Find her at brandiceaskin.com.

Three Poems by Linda Blaskey

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Scarf

I’m driving home pleased with the gift I’ve purchased
for a friend when I see cedar waxwings lying so near
the edge of the road I am forced to steer toward the centerline.

They are drunk on the fermented berries of Fall,
some staggering about still.

My first husband, on the last day of his life—
we, divorced ten years—drunk-walked in the road

and was hit by a drunk driver, the two a better match
than we ever were.

The weave I have chosen is variegated colors of three
of a year’s seasons, because sometimes that is all we have.

*

Fox Skull by the Side of the Road

It’s bleached to a purity we don’t often see.
Teeth Hollywood white, the color we all strive for.

It has been here, by the mailbox, for months,
first intact then the slow disintegration, joint-sutures giving up their grip.

It’s all here, picked clean, scattered – parietal bone,
maxilla and mandible with canines and incisors fixed tight.

Despite the loss of interest by carrion eaters, despite deterioration,
there is something that rests uneasy, like the days
my skin doesn’t fit quite right.

I could gather the shards, toss them, but there’s vibration in such beauty
that tells me it, eyeless, wants to see this through to the end.

*

Paying for Lunch at the Arby’s Drive-Thru

The man is tall, with a tat below the sleeve of his tee.
When he leans his face close to the window to tell me
seven fifty-five, a lizard moves behind his eyes.
The small silver cross that adorns his ear hypnotizes
as he offers his change. I can feel it already—
the quarter, the dime, two nickels— the burn beginning,
the bite in the palm of my hand.

*

Linda Blaskey is editor at Quartet, an online poetry journal featuring the work of women fifty and over; poetry/interview editor emerita of Broadkill Review, and past coordinator of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2014, and numerous journals and anthologies. She is the author of the prize-winning chapbook, Farm, the poetry collection, White Horses, and co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards, and Season of Harvest. She is the recipient of three Fellowship Grants from DDOA, including the 2022 Masters in Literature: Poetry. She currently lives in Delaware.

Two Poems by Elizabeth S. Wolf

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Shattered

Coming home from college,
crouched down on the kitchen floor,
she wouldn’t couldn’t look me in the eye
she wouldn’t couldn’t tell me why
her blanket was a tangled bundle stained with vomit
but I knew, a woman knows, a mother doesn’t want to
so I asked, did someone try to hurt you and then
said what I really meant, did someone try to rape you
and she nodded, head averted looking down
         he was choking me
                  but it stopped when I threw up
and she whispered no one believed and Andi
blamed me for ruining her goodbye party and I
guess I had it coming since I was just starting to
feel kind of good about myself and I felt pretty
and I was having fun and I guess I went too far
and a mother’s heart sinks
bile rising up your throat
because this shouldn’t still be happening
and I know that late-teen type of cocky
that heady joy of looking good
that tastes almost like tossing back
a shot of pure verve— that rush
of coming into your own self—
a righteous confidence that
never comes back the same
once the spell is broken.

* 

At Seventeen

I borrowed my mother’s car, a cherry red Buick Skylark
circa 1971. It was the first anniversary of my father’s death
but instead of demurely lighting a Yahrzeit candle I took off
to see a boy, a hot boy, a rad boy, a bit-of-a-dangerous
bad boy, who was staying with friends; we had all scattered
when the halfway house for troubled teens suddenly totally
closed. We met up and headed out into a steamy summer night.
He broke into a stacked rack of mailboxes, looking for checks;
broke into a holy Catholic church, seeking silver and gold;
broke into me, brusque with lust; recklessly ran a red light
and smashed the car, high-style bumper and driver-side doors
dented and scratched, stolid white upholstery stained by
splotches of blood. I waited for sunrise to return the keys;
my mother rolled over in her empty bed and asked me to
leave. Later the doctor stitching me up would laugh:
Tell your boyfriend to be more careful next time.
For years after I lit a commemorative candle, a tall taper
stuck in the graceful green neck of an empty bottle, dripping
wax melting and merging, colors converging, layers emerging
year after year like the rings of a tree, latewood circling
spring growth, rising high above riddles of sealing or healing.

*

Elizabeth S. Wolf has published 5 books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a Rattle prizewinner. Rattle Summer 2022 featured her project with Prisoner Express. In 2023 Elizabeth taped readings at the White House, Supreme Court, and US Capitol with The Scheherazade Project. In 2024 her work landed on the moon with the Lunar Codex. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/author/esw

When You Get Bad News by David Salner

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

When You Get Bad News

Take a deep breath. Then,
imagine a view of the Bay spread out before you
in wide ripples of color ranging from azure to blue liquor.

In the foreground, the beached hull of an antique vessel and,
behind that, a sky full of masts, yachts at rest in their slips.
You’re coaxing all nature to hold its breath.

Water and sky are perfect, as if painted on glass.
No news of a storm. From here to the horizon,
no squalls, no spouts catch your eye.

It’s a vista untroubled by news of any kind.
News you’ve been given just now.

*

Of David Salner’s sixth poetry collection, John Skoyles, Ploughshares poetry editor, said: “The Green Vault Heist is not only a beautiful book, it is great company.” Summer Words: New and Selected Poems also appeared in 2023. More writing appears in Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, North American Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He’s worked as iron ore miner, steelworker, librarian, baseball usher.

How I Lost My First Magen David by Liz Marlow

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

How I Lost My First Magen David

It had been my Bubbe’s,
about the size of the tip
of my pinky, nothing
to notice except that it
was my sun—mornings,
it could guide me home.
Though on birthdays,
friends had given me glass
bead or plastic charm necklaces
and bracelets, this was too dainty
to be costume. Its chain
had been free
with a golden heart locket—
a throwaway placeholder
in the gray felt jewelry store box—
meant to be changed out
for something fancier, thicker.
My mom didn’t think this star
pendant needed a sturdy chain—
after all, thicker gold chains cost more—
I was just a child. As if belief
were enough to keep the chain
from breaking, during swim practice
at the JCC, diving into the pool,
engulfed in splash, it would float
to bump my chin, nudging,
הנני—here I am.

*

Liz Marlow is the author of They Become Stars (Slapering Hol Press 2020). Additionally, her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best Small Fictions, The Greensboro Review, The Idaho Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Minyan Magazine and a coeditor of Slapering Hol Press.

Down the Shore by Robbi Nester

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Down the Shore

Every summer when our un-airconditioned house
grew too hot to bear, when we stuck to the sofa’s
plastic cover and wanted to avoid the city pool
packed with adolescents acting stupid on the diving
board, we headed down the shore to dawdle
on the Boardwalk, play Pachuco, eat fish and chips
and hotdogs on a stick. We’d lie prone on sand
studded with used hypodermics and plastic waste,
and watch the white horse prodded up the rump
jump off Steel Pier into gray waves. Sometimes
we’d pile into a wicker rolling car and pedal to
the Planters Peanut Stand, grab a bag of freshly
roasted nuts. Evenings, we’d watch the phosphorescent
waves roll in, then catch a tiny purple jitney to the
boarding house, windows wide open to the ocean breeze.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at RobbiNester.net

Three Poems by Michelle Meyer

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We Were Just Getting to Know Each Other

And then you died.
It was September. When I saw you
in April we put on your dresses,
adorned our bare necks
with your handmade scarves
and drove, windows down,
to a concert.
Before we left
I took your picture.
You were seated
in the dining room
looking out the window,
face turned, legs crossed,
the sun, a halo
circling your body.
There was one photo that you liked
best. In it, your image was blurred,
hazy around the edges, faint
as your ghost.

*

The Way It Is

I’m running. It’s the anniversary
of my mother’s death
and I’m a few miles out when I stop
to take in the view.
Somewhere I hear a rooster crowing
and somewhere else a siren
is wailing.

My Grandma used to smoke Marlboro’s,
drink Manhattan’s and say,
That’s the way it is. A lazy answer
to her bruises, the world’s bruises,
but then again, she could only bear to live
in the moment and in those moments
she wasn’t wrong.

I run further, see a purple morning glory
blooming near a discarded styrofoam cup,
an overstory of green shimmering
above an understory of brown.
There is a visible line
where the chemicals end, where life hovers
above death.

Everything is straddling some kind of line.

Mom is dead. Grandma is dead.
The tiny, nearly translucent spider
that I squashed with the tip of my thumb
is dead.
I had no right.
I am full of shame
but that’s the way it is.

* 

The Question of Whether or Not We Should Sell Our House

One day it feels like we should
and the next day it feels like we shouldn’t.
We speak of the pros and cons,
but logic has never lived here.
This is a place of romance and charm
say all of the eager realtors
whose calls we never return.
My dark-haired ambition has gone gray.
I’ve lost control
of two out of the five flower gardens.
It’s your prairie, says a friend,
and I remember how the goldenrod bloomed
at our wedding. My anxiety wilts.
I’m the only one who can see it
turning to seed, drifting away,
replanting itself in a daydream.
The one where I am sitting by a lake,
reading a book and all the sailboats
are unmoored.

*

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (2024, Cornerstone Press) and The Book of She (2021), a collection of persona poems devoted to women. Recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Humana Obscura, Remington Review, Under Her Eye: A Blackspot Books Anthology, and Welter among others. She is one of those people who loves kale.

Three Poems by George Franklin

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Dog Years

Tomorrow, I’ll get up early to drive
The dog to the vet. He’s having the rest
Of his teeth removed. They’re decayed,
And he gets gum infections. He bleeds
From his mouth, and his breath smells like
Something that’s been dead for a while.
There’s a hernia too—none of it’s good.
Ximena asked what he’ll eat afterwards.
I told her “The same food. Dogs don’t
Really chew; they mostly swallow.”
This one, named after Joseph Brodsky, is
Nine years old, which for a collie is getting
Up there. The collie who slept in my
Room when I was growing up—or slept in
My parents’ room—only lived to be twelve.
I was away at a high-school debate workshop
When they called me to say they’d had him
“Put down.” I was speaking from a wooden
Phone booth at a college in Texas, and I
Remember the grain of the wood. We have
Lots of euphemisms about killing dogs. I
Think I hate every one of them. When the vet
Gave my doberman an injection that stopped
His heart, I was still young enough not to
Imagine myself like him, unable to walk,
A cancer growing down my spine. Now, it’s
All too easy to picture: the cold metal of
A raised examination table, the professionally
Sad look of the veterinarian as her syringe
Empties into my vein, maybe the distant
Sound of somebody crying, a receptionist
Mumbling under her breath, something
About the “rainbow bridge.”

*

Barcelona

Down the street, a dog is barking, and pigeons
Coo in reply, a low trill that celebrates the end
Of daylight, mares’ tails floating in from
The Mediterranean. Perhaps, in Mallorca,
A different set of pigeons are making the same
Sound, and a different dog is barking to be let inside.
Perhaps, the mares’ tails have floated there as well.
The courtyard is quiet this evening. A few voices,

But no one has started cooking dinner. I told
Ximena that we travel in the hope it will make us
Different, but I’m a bad tourist. Our friend Eduard
Showed us all the markets, the Hebrew inscription
In the Gothic Quarter, the recycled blocks of stone
From the Jewish graves on Montjuïc, the Roman walls
Of the old city, stone fountains empty from the drought.
In a narrow walkway in Raval, we passed

Bored prostitutes and junkies sniffing powder
Off the back of their hands. My feet and knees hurt
From walking, but I haven’t changed. We saw
The square that was bombed by Mussolini’s air force,
The shrapnel-torn walls, and the walls where
The ones who weren’t fascists stood to be shot.
Some of the bullet holes were too high, and
I wondered if one of the executioners had

A bad conscience and fired above the skulls
Of his targets. I want to think so, but I’m not
Sentimental enough to believe it. In one of
The apartments, an air conditioner or a washing
Machine has stopped, and it’s even quieter
Than before. Somewhere, water is draining
Down a pipe. Eduard also showed us the spot
On Rambla del Raval where a terrorist

Rammed his rented van into a crowd.
The van stopped on top of a Miró mosaic.
A few meters away, there’s a Botero sculpture
Of a cat. Still, I’m a bad tourist. I don’t know
What to make of what I see. The same dog
Continues to bark, and someone has put on
Some music I can barely hear. The sun has
Slipped behind the mountains.

*

There Was a Pine Tree

If I have faith, it’s that the world is sayable,
That I can find words for what I didn’t think could be said.
The weight of a stone fountain filled with clear water,
The sunlight that plunges through vacant clouds,
Thoughts that are just images, faces, words spoken
Without meaning, the way one room in a dream becomes
Another, how it resembles the room I slept in at my
Grandfather’s house, the deep red of the bricks,
The solidity of the white front door. There was a pine tree
In the front yard, and the sap thickened and dried
Between the shapeless tiles of bark, the smell of resin
That was left on my fingers, the infinity of acorns from
The live oak, the trunk that was older than anyone living
Who was not a tree. When my grandfather died, I didn’t
Know what to believe. When my parents died
Thirty years later, it wasn’t much different. I don’t have
The talent for belief. Their voices only come to me
In snippets, in crumbling pieces of tree bark, in the odor
Of pine or the feel of acorns rolling in my hand.

*

George Franklin is the author of seven poetry collections, including What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused, forthcoming this month from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Individual poems have been published in SoFloPoJo, Another Chicago Magazine, Rattle, The Banyan Review, New York Quarterly, and Cultural Daily. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry workshops in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day. In 2023, he was the first prize winner of the W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize. His website: gsfranklin.com.

The Bird in Concourse A by Caitlin O’Halloran

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Bird in Concourse A

The bird in Concourse A has been here so long,
it scarcely remembers the outside world.
A security guard tried many times
to capture it with a net,
but every time it flew away,
seemingly happy with the lot it was given.

Here, it lives among weary travelers
who drag their suitcases behind them,
carry neck pillows purchased at newsstands,
and sit by the gate for flights that are always delayed.

It likes to drink from the dregs
of a McDonald’s soda machine,
bathe in the drinking fountains,
and watch the conveyor belt
where baggage spills onto a silver riverbed,
like water cascading over rocks.

*

Caitlin O’Halloran is a biracial Filipino-American writer living in Rochester, New York. Her poetry has been published in literary magazines, including Third Wednesday, Vast Chasm Magazine, The Basilisk Tree, Apricity Magazine, and Remington Review. caitlinohalloran.com

The Solidarity of Landing by Leslie Dianne

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Solidarity of Landing

There is always
an awakening
when the flight
reaches New York
no one wants to miss
the descent
the street lamps
flickering in defiance
the earth rising
in concrete joy,
the bridges connecting
dusk to dawn, the wing
tilted just enough
to make the turn sexy
we lean into the abyss
and hold on tight
our bones realign
then we sit up straight
focus on the runway
and with our hundreds of
eyes, help the pilot
guide our plane
to the ground
hands flick open seatbelts
and we abandon
our common victory
and our short-lived
solidarity as the city
divides us and
welcomes us home

*

Leslie Dianne is a playwright, poet, novelist, screenwriter and performer whose work has been acclaimed internationally at the Harrogate Fringe Festival in Great Britain, The International Arts Festival in Tuscany, Italy, The Teatro Lirico in Milan, Italy and at La Mama, ETC in NYC. Her stage plays have been produced in NYC at The American Theater of Actors, The Raw Space, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and The Lamb’s Theater, and at Theater Festivals in Texas and Indiana. She holds a BA in French Literature from CUNY and her poetry appears in The Wild Word, Sparks of Calliope, The Elevation Review, Quaranzine, The Dillydoun Review, Line Rider Press, Flashes and elsewhere. Her writing was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

THE DAY THE ANTS GOT IN by Linda Parsons

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

THE DAY THE ANTS GOT IN

You were packing or he was packing,
throwing in willy-nilly the bits of a life
departed. You were barefoot, a sleeveless
sheath, doors and windows flung open
in the heat. They poured over the sill, the walls,
the sink, moving as one black tide faster than
you could sponge them away, returning
a hundredfold. So long ago, the leaving
that changed night to day—now every day
an arrival. And when the ants get in
for the ripe fruit or sticky counter, you let
the flood come, some penance or karma
that sets aright the world’s sour and sweet,
until they’re sated and leave on their own.

*

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Two Poems by Olga Dugan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Effort

        (for Nicky)

he has to go, take care of his other kids
she throws his jacket at him, ushers
back into the dining room her baby-girl
my great niece in creams, peats, pumpkins
little leafy-gold shoes—an ode to autumn

the Thanksgiving crowd swallows up
the two-year old while she stands apart
watching, burnt-orange and sienna wig
situated neatly, squiggles down her neck
the effort to look pretty exudes
from the doll-baby top that v’s in black
cotton down white see-through seersucker
a proper stop where an under blouse
covers her cleavage

blue, red, yellow, pink-painted horizons
stylize tattered jeans, but hardly swath
tears and rips I see
when congratulations!
for everything to everyone else
move into the living room away from her
and the turkey she’s made with such skill, care
when she looks in the mirror for competence
confidence I know are there
but—eyes lowering, regret aging her face
shoulders heaving, going limp—I know
she has, once more, missed…

still, her effort to look again so not to stymie
all hope, inspires, and mustering up
a compatriot’s faith in her battle of beating
failure with a try, I savor the moment
by looking again, too

*

An Ode of Modern Martyrs

today, our polyphonic voices still
hum Amazing Grace, Alleluia
shout Be Outraged, Pay Attention!
we still stand against what makes
the word “evil” flesh
still sow seeds so love grows
strong enough to drown out hydras
spewing from many heads many heads
hate, mendacity, myth—some grafted
in this law, that praxis, some raised
in monuments of concrete, bronze—

because the legacy of centuries slain
every defender of peace
every “strange fruit” in age, creed
color of martyr has been and is
to bet on our very precious lives
that humanity is more than its troubled history
that the angels of our better natures can discern
tares from wheat, tares even greater angels
will one day gather for burning
that truth, though sometimes hidden
too often slowed to a grind
will nonetheless reign and remain
the arc ever bent toward the good and just

*

Olga Dugan is a Cave Canem poet. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, her award-winning poems appear in many literary journals and anthologies including The Write Launch, The Sunlight Press, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Ekstasis, The Windhover, The Agape Review, Grand Little Things, Kweli, Emerge, ONE ART, Channel (Ireland), E-Verse Radio, evolution: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, and the Munster Literature Centre’s Poems from Pandemia – An Anthology.

Three Poems by Le Hinton

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Requiem for a Friend
After Max Richter and Danielle Rose
Dear Mercy,
Where have you been since the lockdown?
I used to love your lightness and charm.
Your optimism and hope. Where is my invitation to tea,
my respite from grief. You always listened
to my stillness, at least for a while.
You missed my son’s last steps.
He couldn’t walk any farther
on a bad heart, falling short
of a bed just out of reach. A finish line at 35.
Where were you, dear one?
I think of Zawinul calling your name
three times on a Sunday morning, the choir
hoping for forgiveness after Saturday night
secrets. Their world will be all right
come Monday. I hear only silence.
This is dead Wednesday morning, coffeeing
months after Mom and covid reached an agreement
at her bedside. No witnesses. No documents
to sign. No one to hold her hand. Mom loved
your reassuring voice. Where have you gone?
I stare through my window searching for you,
but I see nothing. No you. No light. No kids
playing games. I whisper, “Please.” A surrender,
a loss, a ghost for a sister. There are mercy rules
in baseball and carved bats made in woodshop.
They don’t get used much anymore.
Leukemia is ruthless. Dialysis never ends.
Monsters crouch in the corners of intensive
care and wait for weakened prey.
I wanted to show you Pat’s pastels,
her use of color a revelation.
We should have listened to Lawrence together.
His tone a cross between Bird and Desmond,
but you weren’t around. Now it’s too late.
There are rumors that you moved to Paris
for the brie and Bordeaux, staying out all night
and never getting up ’til noon.
That doesn’t sound like the person I know. A friend
of a friend thinks you’ve gone to Tibet to spend
your days in meditation. A Bodhisattva
in the making. I don’t know. I don’t know much anymore.
So, I’ll sit here and listen to Richter a while
before I head off to the hospital again. I miss you,
old friend. I just hope you don’t have cancer, too.
*
Roots of Gratitude
How did this thankfulness
become a loss — a hopeful acorn falling
through the night sky? Tell your long-dead
mother that you always told the truth
on Sundays but never any other day.
But that’s a lie, too.
When you pinch the cheeks of your curly-headed
nephew, the caramel-skinned one-year-old,
whisper to him that he needs to have his diaper
changed just like you. We don’t stay potty trained forever.
Tell the family ghosts, the lonely ones,
there isn’t anything new on the topside of this dirt.
The leaves mirror the roots. The roots envy the leaves.
I’ve confessed to more than one tree.
How like my mother to sit under this birch
and look down. How like my son
to rise and peel the bark.
How human of me to wish for more.
*
2700 George Street
This is a charming Cape Cod built in 1920. A thousand square feet
with 2 bedrooms, large enough for mom, dad, 2 tiny girls, and 3 active
boys. All the children no older than 10. There is space enough for dreams.
There are no bathrooms in the home, but an outhouse, pumped, cleaned
and newly painted, is situated near the back of the property
and equipped with generous ventilation.
The eat-in kitchen is large enough for a galvanized tub
and Saturday night baths. The oven can accommodate
dozens of homemade rolls on Sundays and biscuits during the week.
Imagine a cozy living space, place where a 5-year-old
hugs his mommy after her day of diapers, a wringer washer,
and a yard full of clothes hung on lines in the sun.
This could be your life and the beginning of someone else’s.
*
Poet and publisher, Le Hinton, is the author of seven collections including, most recently, Elegies for an Empire (2023) and Sing Silence (2018), both from Iris G. Press. His work has been widely published and can be found in The Best American Poetry 2014, the Baltimore Review, the Skinny Poetry Journal, the Progressive Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, the Summerset Review, and elsewhere. His poems have received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and have been nominated for Best of the Net. His poem, “Epidemic,” won the Baltimore Review’s 2013 Winter Writers Contest. In 2014 it was honored by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and in 2021 it was featured on the WPSU program, “Poetry Moment.” His poem, “Our Ballpark,” can be found outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, incorporated into Derek Parker’s sculpture Common Thread.