Tag: Xmas

On Christmas someone mentions Ayn Rand by Bradon Matthews

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On Christmas someone mentions Ayn Rand

dad says I’m a big believer
in personal accountability,

stood on the graveyard of millions of innocents
I question the accountability he’s not
personally experiencing,

wonder how settler colonialism
factors into his self-helpified worldview,

as a child his mom called the help
the N-word,

told us with penitence we didn’t
know better
then, then

we break to say grace
over the vegetable curry
he’s provided

which is spicy and rich
in consideration given I’m the only vegan
cliche in this poem,

I’m trying to hold myself accountable to the animals
though I’m fully aware this repast spares
hardly anyone,

delicious, do I taste
coriander?

says yes, says he
got the recipe from
Chat GPT

which is drinking more water
than all of us at the table and making us
dumb as the wood,

yesterday I used it
to write a three sentence email,

dad’s smiling, dad’s
trying,

aren’t we all trying?

I finish my plate
then they bring out the lamb

*

Bradon Matthews (he/him) is a Philadelphia-based poet and chronic human being. In his free time he enjoys collecting unanswerable questions and looking for the voice in thunderstorms. His work has previously appeared in HAD, Soundings East, TERSE., Eclectica, and elsewhere. You can find him on Instagram @bradonmatthews

Two Poems by Bunkong Tuon

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Driving Home after Christmas with the In-laws

My daughter whimpered in the backseat,
“I’m not feeling well,” and vomited. Tears
and saliva spattered her My Little Pony pants.

The wailing of a world on fire woke up
her little brother, who turned to his right,
opened his mouth and wailed after big sister.

Our car, a moving metal of infant sirens
on the 87. My hands on the 10 and 2 o’clock,
I was calm like a killer before dawn.

My wife turned around in the passenger’s seat,
wiped our daughter’s vomit while singing
Greek lullabies to our son.

I took Rithy out of the car seat, pointed at
the big rigs speeding down the Northway,
made sure no stranger without a mask got close.

I put my hands on his red cheeks,
blew at his hair and face, and
watched his beautiful smile unfurl.

The world didn’t end that day.
Even if it did, I knew what must be done.
Do the work calmly and cleanly

Like those who came before me.
Without a care about anyone but my children,
this calm giving of myself.

*

Year of the Snake

Each day is a new low.
It’s like a noose. You can’t breathe.
You can’t see straight. Your heart’s giving out.
We can’t go on like this.
The darkness everywhere like a plague.
What we need is for things to slow down,
for silence to breathe,
for words to churn and do its magic,
the walls to crumble.
Everything and everywhere
is all here. It’s always been here.
When you look up, you know.
When you look around, you see.
When you turn inward, you feel.
The beginning of all things. This light.

*

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady. His work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, diode poetry, Verse Daily, among others. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily.

Monongahela Christmas by Tom Barlow

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Monongahela Christmas

Comes the snow, drifting across
the wild grasses like the water
that polishes river rocks

of the Blackwater into ornaments.
This is the raw Christmas, pines
tipped with hoarfrost, torpid trout

holding place in their current, while
wild ponies turn their backs
and gather together to endure.

Hunters plod through the valley
for whom the forest opens just wide
enough to allow them to pass before

folding closed again, stealing
the sound of their gunshots for
the wind. Mercy has found little

foothold in the winter mountains
while the whole countryside
attempts to sleep, some until spring,

some never to wake. This is no place
for an infant; only the glare of the sun
off the river ice could be mistaken
for a star that seeks a savior.

*

Tom Barlow is an American writer of novels, short stories and poetry, whose work has appeared in journals including Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See tombarlowauthor.com.

Simple Supper by David B. Prather

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Simple Supper

My mother made mac-n-cheese
without any showy breadcrumbs.
It was simple—boiled pasta
and Velveeta cubed with a paring knife.
I loved to stir the pot,
watch those pale orange chunks
melt to a glossy sheen.

A little margarine made it rich, which
is something we were not.
For a little kick, she threw in a few pinches
of black pepper,
gray powder from a grocery store tin,
none of that snooty
freshly-ground stuff. I once used

a baking dish and panko,
as though I could do it better. A friend
tells me they like diced shallots
in theirs, and paprika. All I want
is that old aluminum pot
on an electric stove’s glowing coil,
and the past coming up to a boil.

*

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

Advent by Chelsea Rathburn

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Advent

My daughter wrote on an index card
Not Trash Do Not Throw Away (Please)
and taped it to the cardboard frame
of her empty advent calendar,
which for three years has sat atop
a bookshelf in her room, its foil-wrapped
chocolates long divided and consumed,

dark for her, milk for me. And though
I plead with her to clean her room
of all its useless stuff, I too
loved peeking into the calendars
my friends received each December
(I never once had my own),
all the tiny windows and doors

opening on so many little gifts.
What possibility! How lucky
they seemed, except the sorry few
whose treasures turned out to be cartoons
or Bible verses instead of candy.
We all want the tangible, chocolates
and toys, but also the anticipation

and then the memory of sweetness.
My daughter’s calendar shows no
angels, no wise men, not even Santa,
just smiling bears and a snowy house
aglow. What I keep, in the hall
beside our family photographs,
is the framed collage she made in school

of our old house on a hill. (The word
hill! is there in her careful print.)
She’s drawn herself in front, pink-haired
and legs in motion, but what I notice
most are all the extra windows –
she put them even in the roof,
so many little openings to joy.

*

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife. Since 2019, she has served as poet laureate of Georgia.

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

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To the Carol Singer at the End of the Anthropocene Mall

A week until Christmas and the mall mostly
ghost town, one Macy’s still struggles
on like a steam engine against new highways.
Even the store manager buys his gifts online.
I stop in the rotunda while my wife browses
past empty boutiques. Teenagers searching
for irony pose for photos with a jaundiced Santa.
On the small stage, a lone singer with piano
pokes through an app for carols she knows,
settles on White Christmas, then slides into
I’ll Be Home… while an audience of three
stare into our phones or Starbucks cups.
We’re all a mess of distraction and regret.
And how can we not be? The season trying hard
to cheer us into a new year. Signs for lease
and loss all around. Trauma so common
it becomes a kind of faith. She sings like she knows
none of this. She sings like an evening campfire,
like snow over a plowed field, like a table
set for the whole family. She sings
as they say, her heart out, which takes
all her strength to carry home.

*

The Last Christmas

Eventually the weather turns
on all of us, and then
you find yourself in a forest
without recognizing the trail.
Every tree older or broken by winter.
Loved ones gone or going
dawn by dawn.

It’s harder now to get back.
Children grown, and the days
imitate water flowing over falls.
We say that creaking in the foundation
is ground settling and not decay
in the heart’s bedrock

breaking apart.

*

Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.

Maeve by William Palmer

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Maeve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel by Howie Good

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Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel

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

*

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

What I Want for Christmas by Luke Stromberg

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What I Want for Christmas

One of those women who jump out of cakes.

She would be scandalously young, preferably—
twenty-one or twenty-two—
And—what the hell—let’s make her a blond,
one that looks good
in a white bikini bottom
and has a flat tummy.
That’d work.

Nah. Not really.

I wouldn’t know what to do with her.
We’d probably end up friends.
She would look up to me.
Later, she’d introduce me to her boyfriend, Kyle.
He’d be a guy in a sleeveless t-shirt
who likes to call me ‘Bro.’
Most likely he’d look up to me, too.

How about a swordfish, then,
or one of those big, goofy moose heads
to mount on the wall above my fireplace?
But I actually don’t have a fireplace—
so one of those, too.
And some logs to burn in my fireplace.
And a velvet jacket and a mug of grog.
And a high-backed leather chair to drink my grog in.

A Model-T Ford.
A scarf, a pair of gloves, some goggles.
A submarine.
A fleet of bicyclists.
A typewriter
possessed by the soul of an alcoholic playwright.

Or someone I could talk to.
(The nights are long and dark this time of year.)

Someone who makes me laugh, who finds
something debonair about a man in glasses.
She could have red hair and smooth skin, too,
the whitest teeth,
a way of sighing to herself
she probably doesn’t even know about.

There’s a good movie playing downtown.
Maybe she’d like to go.

*

Luke Stromberg’s debut poetry collection, The Elephant’s Mouth, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Golidad Review, Think Journal, The Raintown Review, The Dark Horse, Cassandra Voices, and several other venues. He also serves as the Associate Poetry Editor of E-Verse Radio. Luke works as an adjunct professor at Eastern University and La Salle University and lives in Upper Darby, PA.