Tag: prose poem

Four Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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On the Street in Lancaster, Ohio

I like your costume,
the woman said, and I said,
Thank you. Thing was,
I wasn’t wearing a costume.
I was dressed as me,
a middle-aged woman
in tall black boots,
black yoga pants,
a long gray sweater
and my dad’s gray hat.

It wasn’t till after she left
I laughed, delighted
to be called out
for dressing up as myself,
a person I’ve been
trying to be my whole life.

And where, I wondered,
does the costume end?
Does it include my hair?
My skin? My name?
My stories? My resume?
My voice? All of it,
a costume of self
worn by whatever
is most alive inside.

I’m thinking this human frame
is just some get-up the infinite
has slipped into for a time,
even as it slips into other
costumes, including one
that looks exactly like you.
And hey, I like your costume.

*

Fact Checking

When a gator is chasing you,
he said, you run away,
but zig zag. They can scent you,
and they’re fast, but they aren’t
agile enough to turn well. And
this is how I might have become
a gator bite. His advice sounded good,
and it was echoed by others I met,
but fact is, the best bet to survive
a gator attack is to back up slow
with the hands in the air to look big.
If it charges, then run. Fast.
In a straight line. No zagging.
They’re quick, but tire easily on land.
How many other stories do I trust
every day, not thinking to look them up?
How many people have I fed to the gators?
The world has never been swampier.
The need to check what we’re told is great.
Look friend, here comes a gator even now.
Face him. Raise your arms. Back away slow.
Don’t turn your back if you can help it.
They look more like people than you’d think.

*

Today’s Headline

And then one day, while I read
aloud to my husband the news
and felt the widening hole in my heart,
he raised his hand to quiet me.
I followed his gaze out the window
to see in the yard a small fluffy thing
with black and white eyespots on its head.
A northern pygmy owl beside our door,
stout body slightly smaller than my fist.
It turned its neck a full half circle
to look at me with bright yellow eyes.
In an instant, I shifted from disgust
with the world to awe. Awe for this
fierce bespeckled miracle, this wonder
of feather and beak and claw, this
small being in the grass looking back
at me as if to say, Here is also the news.
How surprising the world can be.
How quickly, when I let it, amazement
overwrites my fear and makes
of the hole in my heart a home.

*

When They Asked Me, “What Is Your Current Hyperfixation”

I could have said potato chips. Always true. Plain ones. No flavors. Potato. Oil. Salt. I could have said black licorice from Finland, also always true. Or long flowy pants with no front pockets. That’s new. Tending my eight aloe babies still recovering from their transplant. Counting orchid buds about to bloom. How many grams of protein in a serving of anything. The insane softness of my daughter’s inner arm. How baby swifts can fly ten months without stopping. Imagining Rodin and Rilke watching sunsets together. But I said the only words I could—I am starved for all stories of kindness. The young man delivering diapers to immigrant families in Maine. The woman sending socks to my friend with cancer. The stranger who walked a labyrinth with me. My husband offering me the last egg in the carton. Anyone who smiles and says hello in the grocery store aisles. Anyone who says hello back.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator who co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Washington Post’s Book Club, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Fear of a House Fire by Sara Letourneau

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Fear of a House Fire

you never wanted to be acquainted with / its slow slithering / its sulfur stench / the thin molten orange tearing across a room / the existential threat / the destruction of what you hold dear / a neighbor heard the bang / in the apartment below hers / moments later / incessant beeping / do you hear that? she texts you / you do / and you smell it / you know you should not go looking / should not open the locked door / no one answers when you knock / the owner texts you her door lock’s passcode / you wonder whether your neighbors would do this / if they heard your smoke alarm screaming / you open that door / your body tenses / black smoke / tendrils rising down the hall / you wonder whether curiosity and stupidity are cousins / in the boy’s bedroom / flames swallow carpet / later you’ll learn / a battery in a charging nightlight / overheated / exploded / catching the closest stuffed animal / but right now / you turn around / order everyone out / out / out of the building / your fingers flurry / against smartphone screen / 9-1-1 / your mouth moves / tells the operator / there’s a fire / where it is / how you know / as memory engulfs you / you were eleven / at a sleepover / you played Nightmare with your friends / on the VHS tape / the Gatekeeper ordered / what is your greatest fear? / write it now on this slip of paper / thirty years later / your answer is taunting you / licking its lips at you / as you run out of the building / pocketbook and laptop in your arms / phone cradled against your ear / wailing sirens down the street / do not calm you / do not reassure you / that you have saved lives / that you have saved your home / that you are safe

*

Sara Letourneau is the author of Wild Gardens (Kelsay Books, 2024). She is also a book editor and writing coach at Heart of the Story Editorial & Coaching Services; the cofounder and cohost of the Pour Me a Poem open mic in Mansfield, Massachusetts; and the co-editor of the Pour Me a Poem anthology. Her poetry has won the 2023 Beals Prize for Poetry. Her latest work can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, Ibbetson Street, Moss Puppy Magazine, Silver Birch Press, and WAVES: A Confluence of Women’s Voices. Sara is also the author of the Substack column The Wild Garden of Poetry (and Life), which you can read at https://saraheartofthestory.substack.com/. Visit Sara online at her website, on Facebook @heartofthestoryeditorial, on Instagram @sara_heartofthestory, and on LinkedIn @sara-letourneau.

Ghosts of the American East by Jerry Wemple

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Ghosts of the American East

Market Street’s broad and unbothered sidewalks were meant for those who traversed here long ago. Not now. The A&P closed decades back. Jeweler, corner drugstore, and the other drugstore with the soda fountain all absent. And the cobbler man whose skinny storefront window displayed a silver machine with a rotating drum from which he’d dispense hot peanuts in a paper sack. All now spectral presences only some can see. I was a specter back then. I believed only some could see me. Most animals could: The stray dog wandering the alley. Thick-furred winter rabbits scavenging beneath the backyard bird feeder or huddled under the pines along the fence. The guinea pigs, scuttling amongst the wood shavings in their glass containers at the Woolworth store downtown, could see me as I pressed my face close, looked into their dark metallic eyes. I thought the lady who worked in the sewing and notions section could not see me as she shuffled past, but once she said excuse me as she pushed a wobble-wheeled cart down a cramped aisle.

Two dark-eyed brothers, teenagers, were able to see me and did not like it. I was returning from the candy store where the candy store man only saw me when I was with others, usually a cousin or some other kid. When I was by myself, he’d appear from behind the backroom curtain and disappear behind it again, like he was mistaken, the bell above the door hadn’t rung, I wasn’t fixed before the candy case, a coin clasped in anticipation. I knew then I contained ghost magic because I made sound silent, became invisible in lighted rooms. But those brothers saw me, and chunked sharp words and rocks at me. Some of the words I’d not heard before but understood their meanings. The boys’ faces contorted with jeers. They looked like the television news. I gathered a ripe handful of those rocks and put them in my pocket.

Sometimes I saw others who most did not. I saw a shadow man trail the son of the next-door neighbors six months after he’d returned from war. The shadow man followed him as he walked toward downtown, as he walked toward the bridge, as he walked toward the mill employment office. The shadow man said nothing, said to say nothing. Down at the south end of town where the dam goes across the river, the faint image of a boy bobbed about in the choppy current. His body washed up near the Fishers Ferry landing the summer before. An older cousin died in a motorcycle wreck. I saw him only once, thin as mist, walking at the edge of the woods near the state highway, his head twisted as though he was looking for something.

Mostly that has passed. More people can see me now, can hear me. That’s okay. I talk to them and they to me. The world is different these days. Or so it seems and doesn’t seem, oddly both at once. Still my renegade spirit sees more: my great-grandfather, dead over sixty years, waits in a chair on his porch for me to return from the corner store with a paper sack of red licorice whips. He speaks grumbly German to his wife through an open kitchen window, and they both laugh a little. My mother, passed on before my son turned two, makes her way to bingo at Saint Luke’s parish hall remembering aloud that she was one call away from last week’s jackpot. I try to reconcile these disparate worlds: the one we are in and the one we will join. Now and then I talk things over with Dempsey, my great-grandfather times many. Mostly I do it on walks down by the river with one of the dogs. Dempsey navigates a world where his White father gives him freedom yet sells away his Black mother, where he works to buy his wife, a Congo woman, property of a Huguenot planter who factors the loss of offspring into the price which costs Dempsey months, years. Dempsey tells me not to fret. That I know how the story ends. He eventually bought a mill and died in his sleep with credits in his accounts. I should tend to my own time, he tells me. I understand. Some days I reach in my pocket, then chuck a stone into the rolling water, watch the stone and then its ripples disappear. For now, small gestures like this are the best I can do.

*

Jerry Wemple is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Become of You from Broadstone Books. He co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, the poetry anthologies Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry, both from Penn State Press. He also co-edited, with AD Stuart, Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press.

Hunger by Valerie Bacharach

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Hunger

Years ago, shortly after our younger son died, my husband and I, on a trip to D.C., visited the National Gallery. Caravaggio and Monet vied for wall space with Klimt and O’Keefe while other rooms held marble statues and religious icons. We pretended to look, to scan the commentaries,
pretended we set aside sadness, left grief on the hotel’s unmade bed. My eyes wandered to families with bored teenagers, with toddlers sliding on tiled floors, tugging a parent’s hand, standing too close to a painting. Our son was neither toddler nor teenager, but a man of 26. Once upon a time, before we moved into darkness, we brought our sons here, ran after them, bribed them with treats, tried to speak with them about old masterpieces. I stared at those families surrounding us, fencing us in with their happiness, followed them from room to room, hollowed with a hunger so huge it could swallow the heavens.

*

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

The Translucent Mother by Lara Payne

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The Translucent Mother

That night I thought you were dead I didn’t think once about your ghost, or worry you would haunt me. Of all I did not do for you. Of all you did not do for me. The police used the photo I gave them, found you bloody toed and confused. The next day you told me you don’t know how you wandered for 12 hours, never once asking for help. Am I kind to strangers because of you and your illness? Your ease of disappearance. I suckled 6 weeks, you told me once, so you knew you’d never get cancer. I’m used to your magical thinking, and barely argued. To what point? Perhaps I don’t need to imagine your ghost, as your presence has always been a bit translucent. Easily blown by any wind. Your voice changing cadence with each new friend or love. Chameleon. My first love, my first loss. The person I try every day to both love and be nothing like. Mother, half gone. Mother disappeared.

*

Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poems, many of which explore the Chesapeake environment and people, have appeared in a museum, on buses, and in print and online journals. Recent poems have appeared in Gargoyle and online with SWWIM Daily.

Pilgrimage by Sydney Lea

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Pilgrimage

The clematis vine was wrapped so symmetrically around an ancient stump it seemed some human hand had done it. I’ve sat on the stump countless times since I saw it decades ago. The vine’s still there too. I sat on the stump this morning. I tried to stop brooding on the costs of old age. Things are what they are. The sky poked through the canopy in shards. You’d call the place more dark than bright, but you wouldn’t be there. I’ve seen no other human track than mine in all this time. The last visitor probably felled the tree.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Lessons in Walking by Kip Knott

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Lessons in Walking

The day my son was born, I worried whether or not I would be able to teach him how to walk. I knew I would have to hold his hands and lift him off the ground just enough—but not all the way—so that he could still feel the earth beneath his feet. I knew, too, that I would have to let him fall from time to time so he would come to know the joy of getting up on his own. I knew that there would be pain and frustration and anger at me for not always protecting or helping him. And over the decades, he has fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten mad, and gotten up again, all on his own. But today, after he picked me up from another in a series of nasty falls of my own, I’ve begun to worry whether or not I can teach my son the proper way to die.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.

Comp Lit by Erik Reece

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Comp Lit

My middle school English teacher mounted a long dark paddle,
drilled with holes, over the chalkboard in front of his class.
He called it the Black Death or the Black Mariah, or something
like that. We had thick orange grammar books out of which
we endlessly diagrammed sentences, knowing that a misdirected
participle might mean the application of that heinous paddle to
our hind end. Somehow, I came to love literature anyway. I came
to love words like susurration and Ohio. When I discovered
the poet Anna Ahkmatova, I loved that her name meant daughter
of the oaks, a name she invented because her father didn’t want
a poet in the family. What father does? Mine seemed perplexed,
eternally so, each Sunday morning by the furious rebuttals I wrote
on the church program to our pastor’s innocuous sermons.
Two years later, it was a short drive to a drunk driving charge
after I flailed along to the Fleshtones one night at Café LMNOP.
Friends from the college paper couldn’t go my bail, so I sat
in a cell till morning and said over and over, Anna Ahkmatova,
as if she might come through the walls, as if I was her lost son
shivering in a Russian prison under false arrest. Such, I’m afraid,
was the grandiose self-pity of my youth. It didn’t serve me well.
My passion for John Berryman convinced a Rhodes Scholar
to sleep with me once, after I drank all the liquor in her house,
but it didn’t stop the trimmers when I landed in an unironic rehab
called The Ledge. I quit reading John Berryman. I quit living
like John Berryman. I quit thinking that my father’s suicide
was a door he left open for me. I gave up the long day’s journey
into oblivion and shame. Now I just like to recite Issa’s poem:
The man pulling radishes   /   pointed my way   /   with a radish.
There’s a pretty easy sentence to diagram, and it makes me smile
to think about those pink radishes dangling from a farmer’s hand
as he sent the poet off along the road of his enduring loneliness,
always craving the one thing that might bring an end to craving.

*

Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Outstanding Environmental Writing. His prose and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, The Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Kingfisher Blues, was published this year by the University Press of Kentucky. He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.

A morning with my dead father by Linda Laderman

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A morning with my dead father

                       The morning air is all awash with angels
                                     — Richard Wilbur

This is the morning I’ll spend with you. I’ll have the conversation I’ve been putting off, the way a child sheds the coat her mother insists she wear despite the April sun, warm like the nape of a newborn’s neck. This is the morning I’ll say what it was like to live inside a widow’s weeds, how it tangled my breath, stole my words. This is the morning I’ll think of what’s possible and make space for you to enter. When I hear the leaves rustle I’ll believe you’re listening. I’ll rest on a rock near the lake and throw pebbles in the water and consider each ripple as thoughts that bounce between us. This is the morning I’ll reimagine you as the young man in the snapshot I found—you leaning against a 1938 Dodge sedan, fedora tipped to the side, smiling, with a hint of a swagger, confident that the ground beneath you would hold. I’ll talk like I remember you cradling my baby body, how you called her song of my heart in the love letters you wrote from Kentucky. Who were you then? This is the morning I want to know.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Eclectica, The MacGuffin, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, The Westchester Review, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit. More work and information at lindaladerman.com.

Two Poems by John Amen

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Hide & Seek

I was the golden boy. I bolted for the woods, running through ferns, past the sycamores, hiding behind the well-shed. The birthday song faded, my parents boarded their boat, leaving for a new life across the ocean. When I emerged, I was no longer the golden boy & my friend, who was supposed to be looking for me, had given up, married, he had children, grandchildren, houses scattered across the globe. Our lawn had turned brown, the roof was heavy with moss, our driveway littered with mannequins & car parts. I watched the Uber driver as he hauled the roast into the cul de sac. I stabbed it with my Swiss army knife until it stopped howling. That red juice flowed across the pavement, neighborhood, the county. I waited for the moon to appear, but no one was working the strings, at least that day, & like a train that’s leapt its rails, the night just never arrived.

*

FMJ

It happened again by the diamond highway. A satyr wearing a Budweiser cap put a bullet through a windshield & disappeared into the sunlight. Police arrived, dogs sniffed the tarmac, detectives found a casing with an inscription that read love is salvation. The highway was barricaded, cars & trucks backed up to the Standalone Gulf. Someone said, we’re in a loop here & smiled a terrifying smile. The day of the funeral in Chicago / in Manhattan / in Omaha a million people flooded a Zoom call, chanting until the FBI wrapped a trailer in Musgrove, a kidnapped baby sobbing on the back porch. The satyr in the Budweiser cap sang “Amazing Grace” through a bullhorn, then turned himself in. At the trial, he waved his beautiful hooves, declaring he’d heard voices in the forsythia, his angels ordering him to spread the holy word. An hour later the judge lowered his gavel, a long sigh unrolled through the city. The satyr’s hind legs were chained, his horns pared to a nub. A bailiff dragged him from the courtroom, mane shimmering, teeth bared for the folks back home. Someone said that night & that night only, they could see every star in the universe.

*

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

Artillery Shelling by Laura Daniels

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Artillery Shelling

The Picatinny Arsenal is an American military research and manufacturing facility located on 6,400 acres of land in Morris County, New Jersey, United States.
          —Public Relations Manager for Picatinny Arsenal, U.S. Military

“(the) Picatinny portfolio comprises nearly 90 percent of the Army’s lethality and all conventional ammunition for joint warfighters.” What the hell does this even mean? The website goes on to explain the type of products tested: IED defeat technologies; small, medium, and large caliber conventional ammunition; precision-guided munitions; mortars; fire control systems; small-arms weapon systems; howitzers; gunner protection armor; warheads; fuzes; insensitive munitions. This list of products adds to my confusion. I thought they only tested small ammunition. My home is five miles from Picatinny. My town sends out this email almost daily: Please note that Picatinny Arsenal will be blast testing today from 9 am-3:30 pm. Also note that testing is conducted in 8–10-minute intervals. The testing comes grouped as three blasts at a time: the first shell fires… Boom… then a short pause… the second shell fires… Boom… then a short pause… the third shell fires… Boom… then an 8–10-minute interval until the next testing round begins. Testing—only testing—I remind myself—as the floor vibrates—and the windows rattle.

*

Laura Daniels (she/her) is a multi-genre writer. Founder of the Facebook blog The Fringe 999 and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Curated recently in New Jersey Bards Anthology, Silver Birch Press, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Smarty Pants Magazine for Kids, and featured poet for Poetry for Mental Health. Her poetry collection Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books) is forthcoming in 2025. Her poems grow from a love of wandering and New Jersey, where she lives with her partner in Mt Arlington and works in the community garden. She can be reached at https://lauradanielswriter.wordpress.com and @thefringe999.

Mantis by Howie Good

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Mantis

So there I was, marooned on a remote island, the Academy of Lifelong Learning. I had what the doctors called an “oddball cancer,” one of the 14,000 cases of liposarcoma annually in the U.S. Down in the basement, behind a steel door, is a special X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, that resembles a giant praying mantis poised to devour her sex partner. The radiation burned up the cancer cells, but also healthy tissue. I am mostly empty space on the long car ride home.

*

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

Two Poems by Michael Robins

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Keep Mississippi Beautiful

All the way until the magnolia state to finally see the cows hotfooting
their field & we too were undoubtedly grateful having missed the
accident by minutes, livelihoods & lifetimes bent in the awkward
angles. A hundred miles earlier, the kids wanted to know if driving is
hard. I did my best, which feels like the middle lane when a tree falls
across the interstate, no one waiting around to say, When you next
travel this road your wife of a decade will be dead, your children will
have grown, you’ll mostly leave what you thought you’d love for good.

*

See You Next Time

Whispering to the hours among the corners of grief. Like an animal
curled in the middle of the floor & such symbols everywhere, wishing
but rooms with separate bowls of ice cream, just kids & some six
hundred miles apart, a long shot if we ever met. Early morning
showers, even the fish taking sides by skipping meals. I miss you, &
later these late goodbyes until there’s nothing left to say. A little
hungover, I know, & a single strand of hair. The half-eaten cicadas &
enough. It’s been a rough summer, I think aloud before writing it down.
To be everywhere at rest. To be at once. I mean September flying.

*

Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Bright Invisible (2022) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as editor of The McNeese Review.

HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING by Carlin Katz

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HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING

Accept that you are both falling. Understand neither of you will survive. Spit out the sweetness of your life. Hold his head against your breast. Remember when he was pulled from under your ribs. Recall the gasp—the wide-eyed uncoupling of what was once whole. Feel the cold air strip you of your selfishness. Rotate your body so you will go first. Hold him above your head, your heart. Hold him away from the ground which is coming closer and closer. Preserve him, as long as you can. Now, imagine him without a mother, if even for a split second. Feel the unforgivable lurch of that. Refuse to abandon him. Twist your body again, more difficult this time against so much gravity, so that he lands first. Be willing to endure this loss. Smile at him. Let the last thing he sees be his mother’s face: whole, and beautiful, and his.

*

Carlin Katz (she/her) is an animist, student herbalist and mother living with her family on traditional Chinook land in Washington State. Her non-fiction is forthcoming in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

INSENSATE by Michelle Reale

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INSENSATE

If I wanted to make certain proclamations I’d speak them into empty rooms, on cold nights, devoid of all sound. I would quiver for effect. I would generate my own predictions, but would refuse private readings, even if implored to do so. I can claim knowledge of certainties, but they come from the past, not the future, which feels like cheating, but it isn’t. If I wanted to give advice, that’s another story. Still, it might sound like this: If you have known hardship like a boot on the back of your neck, your solitude will feel like your very own fingers scratching your very own back— dissatisfying. If you have to imagine a space for love, not even a big space, maybe just a small space where emotions might fold up like an envelope and slip under your door, you will practically ensure that those eligible will suit themselves first and then wash their hands of you. No explanations will be forthcoming. A Buddhist will tell you “That’s life.” If when you move forward a bit it feels a lot like what afterward feels like, you have probably rescued yourself one time too many. Sympathetic gestures wear the right clothes, but are fraudulent and you gave up reading minds and murmuring agreement long ago. See this room, devoid of human sound? It is like a vessel that is in perpetual motion. You stand on the deck but cannot tell if what you see or feel is moving away from you or coming closer. Let yourself feel the force of gravitational desolation. The trapped fly knows it well. How it enters a room with such ease, knows it isn’t wanted, then exhausts itself to utter death trying to find an exit.

*

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.

Anthropology 101 by Susana H. Case

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Anthropology 101

Our professor, red-eyed, disheveled, blew her nose, announced to the class that her good friend—lover, I thought—charged with murdering his wife, and without an alibi, had just been found not guilty. The verdict, the professor was adamant, forgotten ethnographic text in hand, restored her confidence in criminal justice. Students nodded, closed their notebooks, looked up again when she admitted her certainty that he’d done it. Something roiling in him, she told us, whenever he talked about his marriage. I believed she was right: he probably did do it, femicide having such an intimate face. She told us it was a good thing a jury had erred on the side of innocence. Then she brushed her hair and applied red lipstick. We opened our books to the Ituri forest people, how these short-statured men climb more than 100 feet into the canopy to collect honey from the bees, the product they most prize.

*

Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, 2023 and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press, 2022. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and is forthcoming as an English-Ukrainian edition. Case is currently a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. susanahcase.com

Two Poems by Howie Good

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The Sincere Assassin

The world burned without being consumed. Other people were just shadows. I passed a woman on the street I only later realized might have once been somebody. God’s face would appear and then disappear and then reappear among drifting clouds, playing peek-a-boo with the abandoned babies shrieking on the ground. My phone rattled. I thought I was about to learn the secret of how clowns get inside very small cars in very large numbers. The message was that I had cancer.

                                                            &

Outside the entrance to the Cancer Center, a woman with pale, stringy hair and puffy eyes stands morosely contemplating her phone and smoking a cigarette. Inside, the chatter is all about a sincere assassin with a head like a Donatello angel’s. I’m enthralled and terrified when I catch sight of him stepping off the elevator into the main lobby, and while there’s no actual law against his presence, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a kind of crime. Only if you have ever seen for yourself his dark hands sparkle can you truly judge.

                                                            &

It’s hard to remember a time when I haven’t received radiation, lying face down and naked to the waist on a pallet and required to remain as still as a corpse while the massive appendages of a monstrously large and powerful X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, sweep invisible killing beams over me, and there’s nobody I can ask, “Who allowed this to happen? Who’s to blame?” but even if there was, they wouldn’t know, and I would submit to the cold ministrations of the machine anyway, my nothing life, for all its startling inconsequence, worth the anguish of living.

*

Pilgrim’s Progress

At the far end of the street, I found the door I had been told would be there and passed through it. My bones crunched and rattled with each step, and my eyeballs bounced in their sockets. The ground itself began to dance. Gravestones fell over and smashed. The messiah appeared like a parade float overhead. Those who had once waited in expectation of his coming were gone by then, some grown tired and disaffected, but others made into lamp shades.

                                                            &

Deadly new diseases had emerged now that weather operated without regard to the season. Even souls had a kind of leaf blight. The overflow of corpses from funeral homes and cemeteries were stacked on sidewalks. And the dead were all so young. I almost cried out, “I don’t belong here, I don’t!” Special points of interest represented by triangles on tourist maps turned out to actually be just triangles.

                                                            &

When I arrived back home, no one was there, though the radio was playing in the kitchen, tuned to a classical music station, Glenn Gould interviewing Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould. Reminder notes were stuck to walls and doors and tucked in the frames of mirrors. “The weasels are not in the sky” was cryptically written on one. I climbed the stairs, undressed, and fell exhausted into bed. I may have slept or I may have just thought I did, drifting on the treacherous surface of a vast emptiness and everyone everywhere dying by their own hand.

*

Howie Good’s newest book, Frowny Face, a synergistic mix of his prose poetry and handmade collages, is forthcoming from Redhawk Publications.

Two Poems by Jennifer R. Edwards

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Watching Wolverine (Again) with my Second Husband

Only here, I admit I still double-take mildly muscular men in filthy wife-beater tank tops. I’m a sucker for dark, deep sideburns; those coursing creeks into a cool river mouth. Though I love a silver fox or shaved head hiding a historic hairline receding too soon, it’s the random spike that makes me want every angle of light. Cowlicks random & irreverent, the sheen of a day’s exhausting desire. Some consistent curiosity in me, watching, still & oblivious, as if every story loops to some evident ending. Those hands massive & metal glinting so beautifully unbroken. Not every story is chronological, but they’re linked & lovely with loneliness, the entering of an endless forest, a hardened man pushing back the gross overgrowth creeping along a barely visible path. There is something to be said for gravel-voiced men with animal instincts, finding me by impulse alone despite my awkward pains to cover every track. I’m there too, riding shotgun in an old, freezing car on a desolate shit-town road with a man saying you’re finally safe. I’m there asking what I should have, what I still need to know: when the claws come out, does it hurt? I still love him; how he answers like a can coming down, like a phone finding the wall, like the sun punishing the snow, saying every time. Oh, beautiful brawler, I thought there was heroism in desire. I confuse eagerness & appetite. Wanting won’t ever be enough. You don’t know your body is a weapon. Some genetic codes can’t be removed or rewired. Your healing is pure mutation.

*

The Well-Published Writer Doing My Tarot Reading Says It’s Harvest Time
         For C.J. Hauser and my Colgate crew

What grows best is what lets me baby it. It’s true, I’m not good at pruning or reducing. Lately, I’m deducing it’s OK things leave me. I love what lets me clip & hover & rearrange & putter. I admit, I have favorites but it’s every individual person & plant & animal at some point. How is it something or someone knows you? The proof: three iconic pictures of wheat & judgment & a man with a wand & world on his back. She tells me to be kinder to myself & my work is in fruition though there’s more ahead. The third card is different & it’s true my attention wanes & maybe that’s the whole point. I don’t really get it. She can’t exactly summarize. The bountiful sun is limited but still full for its dwindling time. Lately, I wonder what won’t survive me; clipping plants two nodes up from the end because it helps the roots. Growth is always starting & startling. Anyone who says they don’t have favorites is lying. I was lying when I started this, thinking things grow because of what I give. It might always find its own simple stretch toward light.

*

Jennifer R. Edwards (Unsymmetrical Body, Finishing Line Press, 2022) won the 2022 New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize. Her poems have received Pushcart nomination, support from Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Colgate Writers Conference, and appear in many anthologies and literary magazines recently including Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope Review, Passengers Journal, Terrain, Literary Mama, and Snapdragon. She’s a speech-language pathologist in Concord, NH, residing with her family and pug. Twitter @Jennife00420145, Instagram Jenedwards8 https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards

Two Prose Poems by Howie Good

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The Visitation

I heard a massive thump. Alarmed, I went to the sliding glass door and looked out, expecting to see a seagull lying there dead after crashing into the glass. Instead, a juvenile sand shark was flailing on the back deck. I couldn’t have been more astonished if I’d been visited by an angel clothed in light or a neighbor wearing no clothes at all. The shark was just a foot long and battleship gray. As it thrashed about, I called to my wife, “Barbara, quick, bring a bucket!” I half-filled the bucket from the hose. Then Barbara, using a gardening trowel, managed to drop the shark into the bucket. This is the world. Whatever the hour, there’s always a rendezvous going on.

*

Murderers on Holiday

I was born with holes in me. “These things happen,” the doctor told my mom with a resigned smile. I can’t visualize the love of our fellow man that the Bible preaches with the detail that I can baseball on the radio. If there were actually angels, would they fly in a V-formation like geese, you think? Crows can hold a grudge for a year or more against someone who has mistreated them. No one should feel particularly safe. I love cats, but even a cat, when it’s starving, could eat a person.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.

ESP by Ed Nichols

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My friend said, “You need to be a believer in extrasensory
perception. I know things before they happen.” I cried into my
phone. “I don’t want to know the future. Or something that
happens on the other side of the world.”

I dozed off in my lawn chair. Not needing to know things
yet to happen. Blue sky lay over the farm. Cows munched
grass…dogs napped. Life was beautiful. Why question? Worry not
about such happenings…things to be determined tomorrow, or
next week, or next year, or never?

Smell of cornbread drifted over me. Understanding what I
am…what I believe, brought a tear to my one good eye. Always
best to not know when a terrible thing will occur.
*
*
*

Ed Nichols lives on Lake Oconee, Georgia. He is a journalism graduate from the University of Georgia, and is an award-winning writer from Southeastern Writer’s Association. He has had many short stories published, online and in print. In 2020 he started publishing his prose poems. He is currently working on a collection of his southern short stories.