Moonshine Sundays Bulls on charge Meet with red, bullseye
3.
Met with gloom Decided against the wall Dreams arranging dates with nightmares
4.
Ice cream cones licked By adults that Can’t relive their childhood
“saying goodbye”
Was this a different love song The kind you only heard in your head
Unmade beds, removed pillows spread across the room Far to the left I find you in spirits I thought you were tired of being accustomed to
You locked on tight like a crab on the shore to an idea that did not include a saga Where I was a character foreshadowing great things that in the end you wanted
But was something you couldn’t go after A new chapter for you to outline a new mattress For us to spring off of
Which did not matter what part we couldn’t get pass in our past couldn’t be hidden Our love did not spring after winter in season long after to hear the birds sing outside
Our disturbed windows with the type of crust similar to ones found in the pockets of your eyes That I looked into a hundred times wanting
to believe you, believe this believe us We were just blind and needed to see pass what it was really worth and giving something more than
Another try because this was a different love song the one where you forget to cry because you can’t Accept saying hello or most importantly knowing when to say goodbye
“trail of blood”
Outside her belly is the distant north That outweigh risks. She clutches her tummy Like a check-up to see if it’s there watching above
Life caught in the air She breathes two breathes Two come out. One inhale They make it Hard to stand Can’t keep the pace No one is alerted They walk on too painful to make a plea to stop
A trail of blood lies behind her Paired with the outline of her shoes She can’t find a heartbeat For her or her baby She grabs her belly once more She walks to freedom alone With a problem with her god Soiled in the loss of life Now hollow, she sees the border As not a place to live life but to lose one
BIO
Uzomah Ugwu is a poet/writer, curator, editor, and multi-disciplined artist. Her poetry, writing, and art have been featured internationally in various publications, galleries, art spaces, and museums. She is a political, social, and cultural activist. Her core focus is on human rights, mental health, animal rights, and the rights of LGBTQIA persons. She is also the managing editor and founder of Arte Realizzata.
When the warm day dies And the cool night sets in, Then I’ll be there, beside You my love, feeling the Heat of a beating heart, My arms wrapped round Your empty shoulders as I whisper silent words of Love and longing in your Lonely, unadorned ear….
THE TIME OF NOSTALGIA
We went to visit our old neighbor after they moved her to a nursing home, an old English lady of ninety-one, still with that accent of east-end London and the sweet pleasantness of the kind.
She was too old, too alone to live alone. She would forget to turn off the gas range or how to turn on the thermostat or TV, She had trouble following a simple talk, but remembered the Blitz, 75 years past, as if the Nazi bastards were still at the door, and London was in turmoil: as though Hell had crashed through the gates of Heaven.
So her family moved her, leaving empty the house next door, empty of our friend of 30 some years, empty of her lilting English accent and her sharp sense of good old fashioned English humor… and it seemed like someone had died.
After a few weeks we went to visit her, my wife and I, taking some sweets and a small plant—oh yes, and our sadness too—though we made sure to leave it outside, unattended to for the moment.
We entered a very large and rambling sort of building, with pleasant lawns and locked doors and intercoms for some voice to decide if you can enter. It was like sort of a prison, you think, but a very nice and very clean prison. Our neighbor was in a special wing, called rather romantically, ‘Cedar Cove’ and as we entered through yet another set of stout doors, we greeted her and she smiled back, but very much as one might greet a total stranger….
ON EATING AN ORANGE AND SEEING GOD
I miss the big navels when they are not in season, but almost any orange will do when I really want to see God.
But it must be done right, this seeing, this apprehension of the Lord of the Universe, Lord of All the Worlds, both seen and unseen….
First I feel how firm the orange is, rolling it in my hands, the hands of an artist, the hands of a poet, and now the stiff and cracked hands of an old man— then I slice it in half and look at its flesh, its brightness, its moistness, its color— if the insides beckon, urging my mouth to bite, I first cut each half into half and then slowly, carefully— as all rituals demand—I put one of the cut pieces between my longing lips and gradually, with a sort of grace, bite into the flesh of the sacrificial fruit.
I feel the juice flow down my throat and recall the taste of every orange I ever had, even in my childhood—or so it seems, with this little miracle of eating an orange.
As I finish absorbing, still slowly and gracefully, its flesh, the last bit of what had been one of the myriad wonders of the world, I look at the ragged pieces of orange peel and I see poetry—or God—it’s really the same thing, isn’t it?
BIO
Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.j. Carber, 77, became a published poet in his 8th decade in over 190 literary journals in 15 counties on 4 continents. A retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia], he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and thrice for Best of the Net. Cyberwit.net has published 3 collections: The Enormity of Existence (2020); Of Ether and Earth (2021); and Soul Songs (2022). These titles reflect the awareness he gained when he had an NDE whilst nearly drowning in a Vermont river: That he has—IS—a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets since Plato have called the soul.
My daughters are scared of the bees haunt the woodshed, float unpredictable like so much bad luck. They are my payment for the eighties, when we killed the fireflies with our baseball bats just to see their pure light smeared uncontained neon. This time is one of murder hornets. not one of accidental light.
I am afraid of the storms, how they are beyond words, rage like old Gods, how the ferocious rain makes fast rivers in the garage. The lightning will find the ancient tree every time, make it dance until it drops. The soft rain with gentle hands is gone, how it never forgot a name or a face.
We are all afraid of the darkness – the basement is made of scrape and claw, murmuring pipe. Our old dog sits at the top of the stairs head cocked tail low, afraid but waiting nonetheless. The deep corners of the yard hold that night of screaming when I could not find the animal in the trap.
It is what we get for messy life, endless reminder that we are circles to close. A day is long enough to remember twice everything you tried to forget.
Newark Danced with Me Tonight
Newark danced with me tonight, Miles Davis on the radio and I floated over the Clay Street Bridge, hit the ramp to 280 and was flying, adding my lights to the thousand, trying to put stars in starless sky.
Newark danced with me tonight and I was safe behind my wheel because my brother was not and that is a cost already paid and I am suddenly 48 and the girls are no longer girls, but it is okay.
Newark danced with me tonight. We had Freddie Freeloader on the radio and we fell into place, every second window blazing with life. The moon behind the church was every God we needed.
Newark danced with me tonight. Even though I am still such loosely contained grief and I count my steps even and my watch is telling me to breathe and in the morning I will have to do this in the awful reverse.
Newark danced with me tonight, with me in my invisible middle age. Even gone, Miles Davis played his golden trumpet empty and I understood how the world works for the eternity of exit 13 to exit 5B.
BIO
Josh Humphrey’s poetry has appeared in some other places, including Lullwater Review, Paterson Literary Review,Lips, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Soundings East, Naugatuck River Review, Streetlight and Oberon. It is forthcoming in Twin Bill and the Aeolian Harp Anthology. Currently, he works as a Library Director in his hometown of Kearny, New Jersey, a job that inspires much writing. He is a lover of books, records and chocolates.
The keyhole maws like a cave opening until the spelunker’s key wiggles, jiggles, slides backside down into the gap dodging stalactites jutting into jigsaw-puzzle-like jags until fit tightens at extremity; the key rotates to free its form-fitting grip, and a tunnel opens into a cavern unlocking a room to wander treasures until exploration halts, and the key reverses, shimmies out leaving a keyhole gaping again.
STONE NEST
Beside the river the stone’s footprint betrays its passing to the hunter who kneels and presses his hand into the imprint letting his fingertips trace how long ago it had passed, how much it weighed, how long this had been home.
He searches the trail ahead for tossed skid marks or broken shards, but only this sole indenture pocks the nearest horizon.
The river’s runoff rumbles over sisters, brothers, cousins perhaps this stone itself holding its breath until the shore carves farther east around the bend, and dry land welcomes the stone into its nest again.
CLOCK TICKS
Like a clock in silence – tick, tick, tick. Waiting for the alarm to go off; waiting for the alarm not to go off.
Wanting the clock to stop ticking! But what if it does? Listening to tick, tick, tick.
STORY PROBLEM
At the same time two crows leap from the same branch of the same dead tree.
One flies east; one flies west. One flies at 12 miles per hour; one flies at 15 miles per hour. One flies into a head wind blowing at 20 miles per hour; one flies with the tail wind of 20 miles per hour. In 31 minutes how far will each crow be from the other?
Who cares? One crow spots a deer carcass alongside the road and swoops down for a snack. One crow dips its wing and spirals into the sky then dives down to land lightly on a fence post. It faces the wind and pretends to fly like a dog poking its head out a car window.
WARY EDGES
Feral cats like homeless people slink around the edges.
Wary of eye-to-eye contact they lie low in you-don’t-really- see-me mode.
Comfortable only in their own clowders of tents, cardboard boxes, sleeping bags coiled together like curled up cats lying in cinnamon roll buns ready for the baking when the sun rises.
BIO
Diane Webster‘s work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Verdad and other literary magazines. She had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023 and 2024. One of Diane’s poems was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022. Diane retired in 2022 after 40 years in the newspaper industry.
The poems in Lola Haskins’ newest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), are equally elegant and eloquent in their graceful blend of theme, imagery, and language. Elegant in their refined, fluent use of words and eloquent in their visions and messages, these are luminous poems. While some poems are nearly haiku-short, others contain many stanzas, yet all resonate with beguiling, stirring words from a poet with a close connection to the natural world and an intense perceptiveness. There’s a spiritual quality to many of the poems, even a metaphysical element to some as in “The Discovery” where “time is as / random as the patterns the sun makes on / any given day…” As Haskins travels between accessible and elusive, the personal and the observational, Homelight offers a stunning collection of well-crafted, evocative poems which flow with a natural rhythm.
Organized into seven named sections, these 63 poems are diverse in their topics. In part one, titled “On the Shoulders of Giants,” Haskins writes in the style of such renowned poets as William Blake, W. S. Merwin and Mary Oliver. In part two, “Wings,” she celebrates wild birds, often a topic of hers in prior collections. Other named sections include: “And They Are Gone,” “(In)humanity,” “Corona,” “The Slapped Girl,” and “Rehearsing.”
Haskins’ talent for the poetry of nature is well established with her prior books and her poems of the natural world stands out superbly in Homelights too. As a long-time environmentalist and outdoors enthusiast, she occasionally tilts these poems toward a world-weary awareness of what we are damaging and seeing slipping away. In “Dominion,” she questions when we will understand how “the tips of our fingers / are like yellow butterflies? Reach for them and they are gone.” In “Those Who Look Alike but Are Not,” she ends the poem with “They are not the ones destroying the world.” Yet, the poems usually lend themselves to hopefulness and celebration of what we still have as she finds a yin and yang equilibrium. For example, in “The Hundred and One Names of the Wind,” Haskins rejoices in the wind for “its voices / have taught us song, / and its swaying dance.” Yet, she also recognizes “for any day / of the world it may crush us under / our houses.” In the end, she wonders “be we wise or foolish do we / understand what we have done.”
Haskins’ vivid use of metaphors, simile, and precise, unique descriptions is so powerful that images lifted from the natural world become so much more—which of course is the alchemy in truly good poems. In “The Salt Marsh,” for example, “At dusk the water turns melted pearl” and in, “Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,” readers find “The earth is a kind chair. When I have stopped breathing she will not tell me / I must get up.” In “At the Park,” robins “drab as dead leaves” nonetheless rise “like children swinging / lanterns, stars among the darkened trees.” And the bird in “The Woodpecker” will “hammer at the tree / like a resolute / toddler / pounding pegs.”
Among the nature and personal poems, a few are also topical. The pandemic appears in the section titled “Corona, 2019-2021” where in a poem entitled “Woods,” Haskins observes sharply that “Home and here are / the only places / I’m allowed / now the world is sick.” Yet, even in that narrowed space, she finds beauty—“A tiny violet moth / has fallen in love / with my socks.”
Other topical poems include “Aleppo,” where a Syria father “speaks of his six month old boy, born here / who has never seen the sky.” In “Bear,” referencing Ukraine, she writes:
If a group of bears attacks your village, lie still. If they are not fooled, fight back with everything they are trying to rip out. If this means you have to set fire to your country, do it.
The most deeply personal poems are those in “The Slapped Girl” and in “Rehearsing.” One of the poems in those sections is a bittersweet, haunting love poem entitled “Though We Can Never Be Together.” In only twelve sublime lines, the poem captures both a story and a feeling, beginning with this line: “I live with you / in the interstice between breath and breath / in the cool damp hollows tides leave in the sand” and ending with these words:
And I wear you the way a Sikh wears his cord under his clothes in token of the ineffable beauty of the world.
All in all, these are rich, layered poems of beauty and transcendence which once more establishes Lola Haskins as a poet worthy of her many accolades and worthy of reading, re-reading, and cherishing.
Lola Haskins’ poems have been broadcast over the BBC and her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and others. Her body of work also includes thirteen previous collections of poetry, a beginner’s guide to the poetry life, and a non-fiction book about Florida cemeteries. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she has been honored with three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and many others.
Dominion
By Lola Haskins, from Homelights and used with permission
We name the birds and think those are their names but our throats are helpless when calling flights pass over and we can’t taste the earth that comes up with the worm in a robin’s beak nor in the worst moments of our lives can we approach the way an owl sobs.
We analyze the sky using charts one phenomenon at a time yet when light pierces the clouds like our visions of God we turn into open mouths and when that light enters us no matter how much we want to keep it because we do not have the tools we can never.
We wade through undergrowth whose leaves and sticks are our words for them but the nodules and stitchings on our ankles will always know more about plants than we do and we have no idea what to call the way trees dwarf us nor when we hold them how to interpret the patterns their barks leave on our cheeks.
We have stories but we cannot parse them so when we step on a seedling struggling through a crack we never think of Cain and Abel nor does the way water cascades towards us from high and ancient rock bring Rapunzel to mind nor when we look at the stars do we remember As it was in the beginning.
When will we understand that all our classifications are only attempted dust? That nothing pinned to a card is true? That sight and hearing and taste and our hearts and our brains and the tips of our fingers are like yellow butterflies? Reach for them and they are gone.
BIO
Claire Hamner Matturro has been a journalist, lawyer, organic blueberry farmer, and college instructor. She is the author of eight novels, including a series published by HarperCollins. Her poetry appears in Slant,Kissing Dynamite, New Verse News, One Art, MuddyRiver Poetry Review, Tiger Moth Review, Lascaux Review, and Glassworks. Her reviews of poetry appear in Southern Literary Review, where she’s an associate editor, and in Slant,Compulsive Reader, and Verse-Virtual.
Gathering amongst my body (camping out in a sense) are images that’ll remain until my flesh, bones, and blues become the compost within the garden of my children’s children.
Steadily able, probably more-than at this moment, daydreaming of the promised life of rejoicing and praising and singing, all while imagining the growth of my children’s children and their garden.
GRAVITATING TOWARD THE MELANCHOLY FONDNESS I ONCE SHARED WITH A STRANGER NAMED GILDA
I got lost. Somewhere between the yippies! and the trees I was awakened to the scent of an hours old cigarette. There, within the night dives, I tried to peek at the fortune of her shimmer. Gilda smiled like I always knew she could. I am found.
THE LAST DRAG FROM 12/18/1978
permeates and bathes the night lungs in a warmth you haven’t felt in what some think of as decades; but you call them years. The momentary respite is long enough to think it’ll keep on and on and on. Your eyes open to nothing but snow; just a man in the cold, waiting for life.
BIO
J. A. Lane is a writer whose short stories, plays, and poems focus on exploring moments in time that often examine the depths of the human condition. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
They make up stories for each other like children, drinking tea and leaning together over the couch. Their laughter crackles through the rooms. Heat fills the midnight windows while each tale bounces and glows. Even the electrical storm beginning outside cannot shock them apart.
ESCAPE
It’s hazardous outside. I’m double locking the door to protect you. I’m your mother and I want to keep you safe. You’re escaping? They’ll eat you alive. Don’t you know they all have knives, guns? They stick up banks and pawn shops. Supermarkets, too. Watch yourself.
Why are you running away? You never had much common sense, never return books on time to the library Do you think you can just leave? Your father and I are so concerned. You can’t just live on the sidewalk or under the trees in the park. You’d be reckless enough to eat a pigeon.
IN THE DEPTHS
In memory of Zach Harris
My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday in the highlands of West Virginia. He dreamed of the Milky Way, that walkway of stars. Biscuits and gravy for breakfast, then work. That afternoon, he fell into a lost mine, cavern of nightmares, stepping on the paper-thin edge of sky. Accident in the coal fields, the news reports announced.
Every song about the coal mines is a dark ballad, a room without windows. The mines take and don’t return. So many think they are secure from the depths of earth. My cousin died in the coal mines on his twenty-seventh birthday, expecting his days to be the same, counting on it in ways he couldn’t, dreams reaching upward, away from the deep that killed him.
BIO
Elizabeth Morse values the quirky, the darkly humorous. She is hard-wired to be a night-owl and writes exclusively after 9 PM. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as Ginosko, Survision, and Kestrel. Her poetry chapbook, “The Color Between the Hours,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in late 2023. She was a finalist in the Blue Light Press full-length poetry collection contest and has her MFA from Brooklyn College. A job in information technology supports her writing.
the white slick of January cold enough for unseen flames
heats the blistering cold, leaping across space like Jack Frost
etching my window silent scratches, making light years
string time — broken chrysalis and webbed wonder
a caravan of long-lashed camels searching for warmth like finding water
in the blazing desert thread the days with a meager
wisp of transformation smell the sweat of winter’s chill
sizeable piles of relaxing snow let old man winter die a dawdling death
Partial Eclipse
Grey-brown creeps over the horizon on its way to sundown, shading the bridges,
ridges of trees and hills and buildings as it gathers the troops of night
for a full-scale assault on the lightness of midday, offering another brand of illumination
that supplies shadow by the bucketful, adds nuances to all the silhouettes
not seen in the brightness and chases the clarity of day away. “I surrender.” I say
in my most mysterious voice. Like a lover, shadows oblige my request embracing daylight and me with it.
We are the penumbra cocooned in the gathered gloaming.
BIO
Annette Gagliardi looks at the dimly, tinted shadows and morphed illusions that becomes life and finds illumination. She sees what others do not and grasps the fruit hiding there, then squeezes all the juice that life has to offer and serves it up as poetry – or jelly, depending on the day. Her work has appeared in many literary journals in Canada, England and the USA. Gagliardi’s first poetry collection, titled: A Short Supply of Viability, and her first historical fiction, titled: Ponderosa Pines: Days of the Deadwood Forest Fire were both published in 2022. Visit her author website at: https://annette-gagliardi.com
You’ve been called in to construct a language. You should feel flattered, perhaps honored, that they chose you despite your amateurism. What worries you is theirs: vital texts are missing from shelves and computer. Meals are slow and cold. The girl assigned to help you is eager when there, but never there. You wonder if she loathes you. With the instincts imparted by age and marginality, you wonder if you were selected simply to get language and/or you out of the way. But that’s upsetting; you immerse yourself in the advantages and disadvantages of agglutinative, fusional … Zamenhof was eurocentric; you want to bring in that Japanese noun for the sound of a pencil rolling across a table, a Warrumungu expression for thirst that brought you to tears, once … What’s worst is they never told you whether they want something ideal or pragmatic, mere trade-talk. Given your nature and the effects of solitude you tend towards the ideal: that harmony Leibniz convinced himself the West would achieve by imitating Mandarin. Your notebooks fill with ideograms, vast melded radiating concepts. All seem based on reddened eyes, a haunted spotted hand.
Plein Air
Raying along the short blocks beneath the usual big cloud (like the belly, I think, of a boar), the westering light creates a Wagner-effect that is almost too much. The rubble-slides twinkle from glass; I’ll omit most of that and the rays, but retain, inevitably, the upended, somehow embarrassed vehicles, the crater ponds.
Some trace in the air affects my oils, but this adds an aleatoric kick. And I’m never quite sure what I’m seeing through the mask. At Times Square, all paper posters are torn (they’ve been done), but the looming Black Squares that used to throb with ads lend a focus, can be made to have poignance, as if longing for an image, any image.
Eye of the Denier
The years, high double digit, are a weight, a block – what can you do with that? But the days were many; it’s easy enough to multiply, and then you have such a wealth! You could even obtain a blank set of calendars, from an environmental NGO, spread them over a floor and discover the animals mysteriously linked to your months, some gone now.
And from the little empty squares, like a mole peering out, a bird who nests in earth, a mouse among rocks or a small or large cat, the true protagonist of those days would emerge – you could peer down at him making love and money, successfully striking foes and poses, disdainful of your gaze and the flat white world.
The Harbor Cruise
Half a kilometer past the marina, the boat turns east, and as it parallels the shore, the lights that gild the walls of hotels, casinos, seafront mansions, and those of looming inland office buildings go on more or less at once. Overwhelming tourists aboard with magic: the calm sea calmer, air cooler with dusk, the boat turning, the lights – all for them! While older locals, here to rekindle whatever, applaud a successful expensive effect. The captain, alert to his radar, avoids yachts entering and leaving, heedlessly, the harbor, a cruise ship’s wake. Young guests, mostly rich and native, perceive the lights as a signal for something, though unsure what it is besides drinking.
And as all crowd the bar and table, the distinction between those wearing tuxedos and those in shorts and T-shirts increasingly galls the old, diverts the young who notice. Holding glasses and plates, the groups separate, tourists distinct in each; but in the romantic darkness all are merely shapes, with the lights of the city reaching for them across the water. Seeing bits of the young, the nicer old attempt to forgive their laughter. Seeing them, the young at most recall superiors to get around. Some figures, outfits, and the sea are noted. One of the old remembers lighting a cigarette in darkness; thinks, If I could do that now I would be real.
BIO
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, September 2023). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review,Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com
The ground breeds trees with an itch for air beneath our armor of atmosphere. The sea’s restless swaying so seldom visits land it thinks land’s a beast, a fish so large its scales are windows where my pocket square reflects, flowers on weapons, born to tame, upholding the best of all tides. The soaring thunderheads of smell eclipse rain, snow pebbles, and crunching road under turning tire. We proposed an opera here and built if for the deaf to know the depth of music, to spike frozen notes into rocky ground, to freshen spring of our next year.
NO ONE BOTHERS ME
No one bothers me. I’m not accountable to anyone. I’m forgotten and happy, not centuries dead but alive, today! I pass unnoticed, driving next to you. I stand on your sidewalk admiring your walnut tree, cataloging the pleasures I never miss while enjoying them. I’m nobody’s somebody, loafing in each day’s summer parts, in a coat with binoculars, on an ocean voyage, with wings. I’m unproductive, never make things, march with bands, hurl morning papers, read in a park, everybody’s nobody.
WHEN I TRIED TO SLEEP
When I tried to sleep, I slept for a year. When I tried indolence, I withered to sticks, anxious that I could never return to rigor, knowing my notion of work made me a loafer. I disappeared, no forehead, hands, stomach, or nose, no seat for chairs, elbows for desks, feet for floors. I just clawed the air in silence around you. I am your breeze, bird at your window, your morning temblor.
THAT BERG OF AIR
That berg of air out the train window flies south with all my cares. It’s crosswind you don’t hear until you’re in the next lane. Relinquishment, then a forgotten verb. Choose one. Remembers. Reminds. Reprieves. Restores. R is for red. Roar past emotions like shredded paper that doesn’t cling. No wake wallowing. Wait a few days and you’ll have forgotten.
BIO
Lawrence Bridges’ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). You can find him on IG: @larrybridges
the razor chokes on spider-leg hair, roils cold water, and coughs again, to erase bit by bit her body thicket.
her thighs crack like moth wings cornered and dry for the dustpan (weeping).
Hat Trick
The climbing gym’s closed so we watch the Chicago Bears draft a defensive back from Washington. We pick a scab on our chin clean off. We don’t get sad this time when the frat boys talk about the girl’s deadlifting ass and can still enjoy the same sunshine. What else do we do? We don’t reply to Nana’s text: “I want you to be in heaven with me. Please respond.” She would love to see us come home with one of these hairless men strutting to the door in greasy gym shorts who headline their Instagram profiles with 1# God 2# Family 3# Football. She would clap her hands together and weep, the perv. We stretch out one leg. We forget to stretch the other. We watch the Dolphins pick next. We wonder what to do with Freedom and freedom, if we can get away without seeing another snow and ski on banana leaves until the knees give in then mercury tremors finish us. Papa made lots of money calculating bullet trajectories and cut off his gay son. We don’t know the gay son’s name but we know he rides motorcycles. We love our grandparents, their bone spurs, cancers, and other Freedoms. Nana taught us how to glue anything to anything else and this is our most precious talent. Papa taught us how to wrestle for our life. We pull love out for them like hares from a magic hat. Jeff Goldblum tries to get us to bet on our favorite sports team in an app. The gym closes early on Friday because there are better things to do, like following the trail of frat boys to their drinking games posted in dirt backyards, then waking up in time for church on Sunday.
We will always betray ourselves
moving as fast as we do through embracing arms we go so fast with a force so loud we must wonder if we heard a snap we must wonder if we could have finally been held
Madrigal (as a type of bird)
i am a teenager and wish i could be smart enough to draw as poorly as them the ones with a place threaded through their fingerbones i made my hills rounder than they come because childhood is learning how not to see. i only know how to draw the birds with hands pieced together from graves it’s so dead this me now the bird on its head a deliberate accident but creating is throwing a piece of broccoli over family thanksgiving into the fat laughing mouths of people who set house alarms like violence. creation opposes birds on their feet but the wings disturb God the tears from nana’s eyes
BIO
Charlotte Suttee’s poetry is published in a handful of Colorado magazines and her experimental speculative fiction novel “Weather and Beasts and Growing Things” is available through Lethe Press. She howls, cooks, and explores with her husband in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Something finally showed up after a too long of time, knocking at the door to my mind, a thought, patiently waiting for me to open it up before disappearing, lost and forgotten, like the many before it, but once again, not quick enough.
WAOFTMM
(WHISKEY ALPHA ZERO FOX TROT MIKE MIKE)
We do not talk any more. I do not understand his language. Dots and dashes, dashes and dots. I have no antenna or radio to receive his messages. He speaks in Morse code. He may as well speak the language of the apes.
BIO
Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, NE. He has had poems published in Fine Lines, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of ‘On the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk,’ ‘The Blood Drives: One Pint Down,’ and ‘Conquer the Mountains.’
All flows together, even if so painfully slow. The baptized & the doves tweet in bursts, Johnny got the back of his neck Brazilian waxed, but he ain’t gonna spoil none for Leif & Chris, & I talk too much, so we’re just being cute & innocent ab it.
Then Josh comes by, like “Hey, wanna see a trick?” So he makes Jordan run with Bud Light & turns pebbles into chips. The air went putrid, the poisoned tilapia floating about, but it was then that me & the Messiah turned friends for life & I felt a glowing ribbon emerging from my hair whorl.
1 night, Josh tells me to split myself in 2 to go both beyond the pillars of Hercules & north of Danube. “What the heck man? What is there for me to do? I’m too old to be a rapper, too young to be a millennial!” But before I replied he was already making out with Jude.
When they took him down, I left the town, once sweet like the wine of quarter-term night, now gross like the pukes the morning after. So under this onion-cutting sky of steel it’s just me & a homez of mine, & half of a cig we’ll pass till it gets so short it burns our fingers & just drops on the stony road. Your story ends here. Ours didn’t.
homeric Oregano
FNAP! it’s summertime, it’s Oregano time. purple flowers, torches in the daylight, spades of green, leaves with peach hair. i came to talk, perennial son of the basin. between us the roaring vacuum of time,
the abyss of white peering from between letters, the silence between nondescript syllables. NOOOOOOO! the brightness of the mountain is the sole common waypoint. we will never be lovelier
than we are now. get it offa me! Time! i can’t stand it, i can accept only not too hot summers before i’m old again. YEAH opposite leaves follow the burning, cracking into murmurs i struggle to transcribe into
straw circles. faces carry what’s lost. LE’S GOOO! Yin — there is the heat of Love, irresistible. Yang — the cold lemonade gulped from below, running down soft stones. the beverage is a matchmaker, our bumblebee.
eyes locked, we swerve. though it’s a thing of the past, gone Soon after constant laws like the ice cubes melting, watering down the ambrosia. taste the pain! bless the inflorescence, late but still! cheer before the Ulp!
Baby Car
One newborn car tried to carry me into the air in its bout, for a glimpse at grander perspective, for a fleeting touch of Death, for a cliffhanger, for a moment of uncertainty.
James is gonna save them. I murmured in the dark, teetering on the twin sharp points of solitary orchid scissors. This means they’re frozen until the next episode, screaming in the corner, but safe.
Cats are born blind & deaf, but into mother’s warmth. Cars are born complete, but cast alone into cold superposition dormant volant meant to viciously race each other since infancy.
This driver was mad his brand new ride got scratched. I tried my best not to yell. It was a baby car after all.
Frank O’Hara Eyes on My Wings
I recognized a lamp, started flap after flap, charcoal trace from the trunk to the nose, a thread of a rod to the fresco, like the settling ashes — still warm & nameless. Half-words come thru giggles, a great psalm in this space of interruptions.
I let it drip, the teary sand in some hourglass, even if time & time again I mourn the years gone where what’s real history is a mystery & all the truth drowned the moment a moment is no longer now. Just like this one.
Me? I’m no witness, just a passerby. Don’t you worry, paddle on to the lake’s apple, where the moon likes to swing doubled, where the sand regroups & lovers’ sweet words soften further into the abyss, under the algae powerhouses regime.
Up & down, here I go, no note taken, just a postcard to be eased between unread pages, erroneous navigation due to no fault of mine, a little out-of-character irony to smile at — once by the light.
Hell Parade at Szczeliniec
Backpacks against chests, sponges of sweat, jammed between dried seas. A weekend
trip down the walls that speak but can’t hear. Made in their shape, for our times,
ever so slowly, down that throat, where tomfoolery is mass murder, we tiptoe.
BIO
Michał Zieliński lives in Poland’s Lower Silesia. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Metaworker, Wayward & Upward anthology, The River, and elsewhere.
She tries to forget the discussion of human suffering, the side effect to tongue or to the heart, which can burn too. She listens to NPR to remember her stance (liberal) and the world (screwed).
A sudden orchard comes and goes, its steely branches, barb-wired in winter sun. Months back, the doctors gaped in their white coats as if they’ve heard the wrong joke. The diagnosis is preposterous.
She tries to think of better times, but what are those? The children’s tiny coats and boots, a crazy night in Troy, NY? What do you go back to when you are afraid of dying?
She thinks of all her misplaced conviction, like how she bothers to correct people who use who instead of whom. And now, for God’s sake, a flock of wild turkeys make her lurch.
A dozen or so of them, their red and brown paisley, stocky bodies awkward as suitcases, their branch-thin legs strut their reaching, stiff-necked gait across the road.
Two dozen eyes glare at her with a so what? No pity there, just their tweaking bodies, moving like old comedians in silent movies.
PEONIES AND WINGS
I did not know these were peonies, these heavy-headed, tight, thick blossoms
layers dozens of pink petals, blooming right now on the side of the house.
I have seen them painted in a still-life by Manet, a postcard I thumbtacked to a wall,
two white peonies, lying on a wooden table, picked, doomed, extraordinarily open.
More than once, I have asked myself, how can you not recognize the world?
When I was a child, an aunt and I walked in those same New Hampshire woods.
She bent at nearly every plant and said aloud, skunk cabbage, cinnamon fern, trillium,
virgin bowercreeper, boneset, bunchberry. She called them rough-fruited or common, tall, wild, almost extinct.
It was like a dream language, those words like the shadows of clouds on a moonlit lake.
I dreaded the flash of a fish at the end of a line, silver-belly glint, fanned fins, a parent’s question
What kind of fish is it? Did I make a deal, a decision not to know, or did I think
in time I would come to simply know the way we do with love and loss?
I am leaving sooner than I thought, Though whoever thinks of leaving
once they have arrived, wet and bodied? Today I see a dusty-feather bird, a bit of blue color.
It flies, tight-winged, from my black fence to the sky, then stays on the pitch of the barn.
Its distinct call must be recognizable, but I don’t recognize it, even in the shadows,
where our senses deepen like small tribes, waiting to ambush the unknown.
BIO
Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. Her work has been published in such journals as Bellevue Literary Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, and others. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and originally published in the Tipton Review. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.
Tell me about tomorrow or the next. How it reaches into your belly, reminds us we are going extinct. I try to caulk over gaps and the heat, too hot actually. Try to adjust to sickness or death. Not me yet but of course it could be. Those others die without any visual knowledge of me knowing them. The heat is oppressive and the weather dry like a toad’s back.
The wives’ tale about not rubbing it’s back is still a memory. What else can reach as far down as sad moments allow? My hand warts up as a reminder that I once believed. I smother the lump with clear fingernail polish, a treatment handed down from generations, as if heat, and the unbreathing skin will choke all viruses, cure that which rocks out of kilter.
I Almost Sent You This Postcard
Have you seen a sting-ray skeleton? The bones fan out like a geisha’s accoutrement, cooling her painted skin, but here, it moves through film of liquid atmosphere.
The skeleton splays out, too beautiful to sting, but that is the deception of beauty, isn’t it? The bruise after the violent, full-lipped kiss.
The Visit
I’m visiting the sister with such bad luck: bad husband, bad job, kids that were not easy.
Slender and neat, she chatters about San Diego, her daughter, granddaughter, the granddaughter’s husband, how large cities are difficult. Asks questions but the space for answering grows shorter and shorter.
I’m visiting my sister, the beauty queen whom photographers begged for a pose for their portfolios, the sister who convinced me I was privileged to polish her shoes when I was 10.
The sister who had her younger sister screen the men at the door, to see if she was available.
Still, she is lovely, even now, even when she has given up hennaing her hair, gone to a softer pale red, or maybe not, maybe giving up the tremendous work of it, letting those thick natural curls go entirely to what they want to be.
I’m visiting and I’m giving her advice between the breaths that are mistaken for short pauses: Try riding the bus to get to know the city; see if the library has part-time work.
Me, the kid, who begged to try on her crinoline skirts, suggesting a plan of action and thinking of all those boys turned away.
Fall, Falling
If I knew it was the right time, I would find fall beckoning, the bark course against my hand stroke. I watch time ticking in circles. I mind the waiting for the coming season.
Knots tick past me. I am a currach, moored in an inlet, watching. Write, please write. Crows fall from the sky. I know it’s food they are after, my stomach knots.
Names hang onto sharp, thorned roses. Even still, the boat, my mind, drifts up and down with each leave- taking, the bed between us a crumpled leaf. I can’t make it right. From shore, you wave.
I think it’s goodbye. Roses dry in the vase you gave me, dry strokes against my hand. It is too late to face the fall. I hear the crows caw from my bed.
I cannot rise. Under the nightstand a damselfly is dying.
BIO
Cynthia Pratt is one of the founding members of the Olympia Poetry Network’s board which has been in existence for over 30 years. Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Bellingham Review, Quill & Parchment, Feminist Theology Poetry, The Raven’s Perch and other publications, and in the anthologies, Tattoos on Cedar (2006), Godiva Speaks (2011), two anthologies by the Fusion Collective, Dancing on the Edges (2017) and Garden of the Covid Museum (2021), Hidden in Childhood anthology and the anthology by Washington Humanities and Empty Bowl Press, I Sing the Salmon Home (2023). Her manuscript, Celestial Drift¸ was published in 2017. She is a former Fish and Wildlife biologist having graduated from Humboldt State University in Science and The Evergreen State University in the Master’s of Environmental Studies program. She was a former Lacey Councilmember and the Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey for the last 12 years, with her term ending in December 2021. She is the first Poet Laureate of Lacey as of 2022.
I have a feeling that each of us lives in their favorite scene the backdrop the default setting of our lives Me, I sit at an arched window my first night in the magic I look over the moon-pathed lake (who cares if it’s spotlight over backyard pool) I stroke snowy owl beside me who is actually Albee our cat and I’m home your son (but mine too) and his girlfriend upstairs your mom (my bestie) watching late Red Sox from Oracle Park, across the breezeway your sister and her husband in barn renovated against all ill winds and you who moves through every picture every scene opening all the doors password “Kiss me good night” I just did they’re all my house-mates but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow you teach me flight.
until finally
I don’t know where the manna comes from I don’t know how the quail appear I thought it was just a story but here here here they are every morning every day I should have starved by now throat closed like a cockroach prayer but the water is as sweet and everywhere as air fresh air the freshest air and the eagles came for frodo and harry woke up in the arms of giant and I, I shall not want. Oh Hero of the Realm! Lumos yourself like sunflower at night prayer, shema shema shema until ears unpop depressurize, wrestle yourself through the dark gate that opens enfin on today’s dunkies with cream that you sip beside the tree-lily yellow pink and real as lore repeating itself until we get it right
BIO
Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, is an educator, poet, writer, shaman, sage, and Gryffindor. An adoptee and former Franciscan seminarian, his adoption search led to the discovery and embrace of his Jewishness. Wayne-Daniel is a Peace Chaplain, an interfaith clergy person and former college chaplain. He is the author of 12 published books, including Little Ghosts on Castle Floors, Poems Informed by the Potterverse (Kelsay Books 2022). He lives in Mansfield, MA, with his wife, The Lovely Christine and their cats, Harry and Albus.
Old English sang, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch zang and German Sang. Male hedonistic pleasures are summarized as wine, women, and song.
Speaking of pleasures, in my time I’ve heard many a siren song. I’ll write a song and dance ghazal next, but in this one I have to say “a dance and a song.”
I can’t think of anything I’ve bought or sold for a song. Rolling Stone Magazine ranks Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” the #1 song.
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is ranked the #1 pop song. W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blue” is the greatest blues song.
“Hoochie Coochie Man” by Muddy Waters is the greatest blues song. B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” is the greatest blues song.
“I’d Rather Go Blind” by Etta James is the greatest blues song. Howlin Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” is the greatest blues song.
So, Solonche, you do know that you need one more song? Yes, I do know I need one more song, so here is my swan song.
DANCE
Middle English: from Old French dancer (verb), dance (noun), of unknown origin. Terpsichore (the most beautiful of the nine) is the Greek muse of dance.
As I promised, now I can quote the correct idiom of a song and a dance. I never went to my high school prom because I didn’t know how to dance.
One of the biggest hit songs (The Bee Gees) is “You Should Be Dancing.” The debut (2008) single (Grammy nominated 2009) by Lady Gaga was “Just Dance.”
The samba of Brazil is the world’s most popular folk dance. Baladi is a form of Egyptian belly dance, a truly hypnotic dance.
The hora is a popular Israeli circle dance. Popular in South Africa is the gumboot (they wear Wellingtons) dance.
Clogging is the official Kentucky and North Carolina state dance. Minnesota is the only state that has no official state dance.
So, Solonche, will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? Oh, someday, one day, maybe Sunday, I may, I mean, I might join the dance.
HOLY
Old English hālig, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch and German heilig. William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well: “Love is holy.”
In the first season (1966) of Batman, Robin said 356 phrases with holy. The room in a synagogue where only the rabbi may enter is the holy of holies.
The exclamation used by Captain Marvel to mean Wow! is Holy Moley! The trademark expression of Yankee broadcaster Phil Rizzuto (1917-2007) was Holy cow!
In the New Testament, “set apart” is the definition of holiness. In the Old Testament, connection to God’s perfection was holiness.
Sapta (seven) Puri (town) are the seven cities in India considered the most holy. In Buddhism, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha attained Enlightenment) is the holiest.
In the Shinto religion of Japan, The Grand Shrine of Ise is considered the most holy. Of the sacred sites for Muslims, The Ka’ba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is the most holy.
So, Solonche, you atheist, what, if anything, do you consider holy? Like the other atheist above said, “Love is holy.”
BIO
Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Orange, J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 500 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s, including The New Criterion, TheNew York Times, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Progressive, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, The Literary Review, The Sun, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Poetry East, The Hampden-SydneyPoetry Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Free Verse. His poems have been read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and other radio shows and have been translated into Portuguese, Italian, German, and Korean. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions , 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book), Enjoy Yourself (Serving House Books), Piano Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Serving House Books), For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (Word Tech Communications), Years Later (Adelaide Books), The Dust (Dos Madres Press), Selected Poems 2002-2021 (nominated for the National Book Award by Serving House Books), Life-Size (Kelsay Books), The Five Notebooks of ZhaoLi (Adelaide Books), Coming To (Word Tech Communications/David Robert Books), The Lost Notebook of Zhao Li (Dos Madres Press, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Around Here (Kelsay Books), It’s About Time (Deerbrook Editions), The Book of a Small Fisherman (Shanti Arts Publishing), Leda (Dos Madres Press), The Dreams ofthe Gods (Kelsay Books), Alone (David Robert Books), The Eglantine (Shanti Arts Publishing), and coauthor with his wife Joan I. Siegel of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.
No safe place to land—only distractions from the inevitable Everything most sacred thrown to the fire I was careless, selfish I failed Ignorance was bliss That belief that I was invincible I was wrong but I felt so safe So impenetrable Now just vulnerable Unheard Undervalued It doesn’t matter But she does We are reclaiming the forgotten We are writing ourselves into our own history We are bodies with bodies performing Disorientation of loss Once we go into Mourning We never come out We are never ready for death Even when it’s a relief Our art Our craft Our life’s blood and beat Destabilizing Exploring Return to the mundane Return to tradition The massage of the message Literary Speak Reframe pains, betrayals Transformation
the pebble
it started with a pebble she took it as a favor no problem on her shoulders she just wanted to offer help and others learned she was willing to shoulder a pebble word spread quickly they formed lines requesting she take another pebble pebbles became rocks then a little bigger then boulders requests became statements demands then people just silently dumped their burdens she knew this was on her no complaints allowed the baggage had piled up so gradually she expected nothing to change
Waiting
Full speed ahead. Always. Do something productive. Don’t just spin wheels. Make progress forward. We were ready to go. We had been ready for months. Finally ready to tell those closest to us. Tight lipped, but selecting our important people to know. Then they told everyone. Everyone we know was the way they explained it. And we had to take it back. Stop mid race. Undo. Stop planning. Cancel orders. Call everyone. We know to announce the feet. It’s empty. It’s isolating. It’s no longer. Must remember, it’s no tragedy. The baby didn’t die. Nothing bad happened to the mother. She just made a different choice. A choice that no longer includes us. “Don’t worry, Mommy,” my six-year-old says. There are lots of babies. There’s a birth mommy who will need us someone will pick us.”
BIO
CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit. She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, as well as flash and poetry pieces in several literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Magical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.
The rain here splashes air into nothing— Maggie said this to me once, that maybe when we die there is a nothing like the black nothing before we were born. A tiny egg of time in a vast and tiding black ocean.
A glance out of the window tonight leaves everything this dark: black as black darkness in the bottom cave, the quilted black, bobbing in the endless seas between galaxies. The black when we close our eyes in front of a casket.
She said her father died, and now he was nowhere, and not being that close to death it struck me as kind of odd. My grandfather died before I was born, and I see this black in my father— stares across the Christmas dinner table to an empty seat, conversing over bills with the air by the fireplace. The time he packed me in the car on a moist August day and cried at the gravestone, in front of his restless son.
She asked me, How do we exist in this black? I think we bury our dead alive.
Divorce, September 4, 1985
Two cantaloupes lay outside, tipped up on the patio between the deck and lawn. A giant crescent cut out of the larger one exposes the rich orange of melon and as I walk closer to the bay window, ants scurry along the lacerated fruit like chocolate sprinkles on ice cream. One ant is alone, confused. He is running around the melon like an equator. He hasn’t learned he cannot burrow under the thick corded shell, that this is what it’s for— so the ant zips away without a snip of melon, just the cordage of the melon-skin rasp on his legs. I swing around to the woman on the stairs— sleek hair and shoes shrugged off, looking plainly to the wall behind me, over my shoulder like a suspension bridge. As I leave out the front door, I am no better than the smallest ant engaging for the first time, a pulpy mass who hides its fruit like a rind.
Planting Trees on an Easel
Touch the rough cord of the canvas. Run fingertips across it like you would a lover’s chin: from corner to corner, a hand tickles doughy flesh.
The palette is freckled with fat splotches to rinse the surface with sable hair, or knife. Berries thick—black, red hybrids squinched off oil branches drying like blood on concrete.
Watch as a tree’s roots web inside the soil of canvas. When there are too many trees, build a cabin of wood. If a cold lake gleams a motionless, porcelain dish— the ripples of water over a jetty of rocks. Place a foot in the happy grass, comb your toes through the scalp of grain.
When I walk to class, after mornings of planting trees on an easel, the grind and mash of gravel beneath my feet, I sometimes think of anti-matter, inter-stellar clouds, life coming down from a hasp of space, rinses a fallow field, lichen spreads like the green oxidation of copper. The lifeblood lines along the throat— Much like a carefree stroke of brush, a sifting of paint on the canvas.
BIO
James Iovino was educated at St. Andrews and Oxford and has master’s degrees in medieval history, international relations, and theology. He enjoys training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, traditional American and Japanese tattoo art, horology, and cutlery. His poetry has appeared in the Mankato Poetry Review. Originally from Long Island, New York, and still in possession of a considerable accent, he lives with his wife and six kids in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
Incandescent crimson tips of dawn-sauntering icebergs make drift afar in the foreseeing eye of the airborne creature shards of soothingness. Sublime swans take flight in song.
O sea-dunes, with your fading grandeur, godly bearers of tightened moisture, ancient store of ephemeral flakes, flotillas of our shame, echoes of a sleepwalk towards a mutual grave, stir spirits in our disparate souls, prod the snoring, sorry beast wallowing in its own dirt to awake, arise, emerge!
At Beach
… sighing, sated, the sea’s foam-rimmed drape slips down, revealing dark lugworm adventure in squirming pores on flushing sand panting with life’s echoes and ancient trinkets scattered overspread with sadness after flight’s rapture, till the mind finds clear fresh air; calm, still, eerie, eerie, till
lifting muscular curl, stretch upward thrust, gathering protean brawn-heave, mustering dense shard-army of proud and godly might raised, rising colossal strain to euphoric renovation swell of ephemeral hope peak. Then, it curves, stoops, the fine line of its own ecstatic masochistic blade tumbles in sorrow-furrow with bang of phoenix water-fire shatter, slashes, bites skinless self, exploding suicidal gargling laughter, as words-bones-shells-stones grind in throat-thunder glee; sea-veins slit open and burst forth salty froth flow; splash, climactic spittle, shower suds wink and, hiss; silk slides back tired down slope; while burrowing squiggles grope, to meaning in dark hope, ground-bound through smooth, naked sand- hide stripped again of sky-shimmer, in sand blush; littered with sea-debris at peace easy easy till …
Three Sounds, Six Colours
I. A Bell
Through munificent air the magnetic clang, the bang of iron thunder draws me closer: it swings this way. That way. Slow. Sway. Its song smithereens into a chaos choral throng of mini-sounds. You can glimpse its deafening mercury stagger, swirl, now juddering, now sluggishly: the wavy potion of clamour swishes round the inside of the caldron’s bulk. You feel a world emerging from overflowing liquid; something carried, like the young, firm green of a fragrant branch clinched in a white courier’s beak, over the misty passageways between noise and music.
II. Land and Sky
Like the dying man’s arid throat the baked, dusty mountains round Almería distort the shriek-thudding of metal on metal.
By the time it reaches your ears the greedy mountains have hammered out on it their stamps of sound and private sense, so you’re not sure whether you have dreamed the beating arms of distant workmen or whether, after all, the gods were here where the savage, ruddy land serration cuts clean across the pure blue sheet.
III. The Invisible Jazz Drummer
Without noticing, he’s been lifted from the moment. as the washing machine spins, the buttons of a beige shirt tap a tempo on the inner chrome drum.
He listens to the rhythm-rattle till it effaces its beginning and its end and accomplishes transition:
his stretching out of memory, beyond the miserly air of a musty laundrette, to a better hour brings ease; the musing of a musical moment, when he was being in completion.
Still the buttons keep rap-tapping tacked onto the rock’s up-rolling to the very peak of paradise, tied to the spinning whoosh way, way down again to new and hard beginnings.
If I told you what the spring evening said
If I told you what the spring evening said, Through the warm window Of aches, hopes, and tiptopoloftical chatter, You would thrust into my hand the visa to that place Where marsh creatures slink reptilian and bronze Trapped inside a sweltering stupa and the high grass wails Because it doesn’t understand ‘The circuitry of sympathy.’
Transitions that require you to fully be there Require your pain for their accomplishment.
Behold the gambler clambering on the plinth; Its whitewashed bricks of calculated pleasure! They once hid behind the trellis As the craftsmen were hung to dry. Despair kneaded by events to A forgotten password that gets lost inside Ice hanging forests with winds sending off a girl To fetch autumn fruits scattered among the willows.
BIO
Scott Waller is a teacher in the Paris area where he participates in literary writing groups and public performances. He has published articles and poems, including a collection of prose poems entitled Starlays (2020). His novel, Dystopian Triptych, was published in 2020.
so tall that children point at me in supermarkets and their super-mothers tell them in super-language that it’s not polite to do that,
so tall that it’s my turn to attack the village, so I march across the forest crunching trees with every step and when I get there they have all their pitchforks ready and their torches aflame and they wait for me to make the next move so I tell them to please look, to please do the research and you’ll find that all those people killed by police
were tall and, yes, I know they’re minorities too, but they’re
also tall. All of them. I know. I always look up their height after I find out someone was murdered by the police and over and over again they’re guilty of having a large body, one that must be stopped by any means necessary even if they are just peacefully walking through a park.
I Have the Same Birthday as L. Frank Baum
and I look like the Scarecrow too, walk like a scarecrow with my 50% disabled veteran body, my tremors where I shake
like it’s the cusp of the tornado and I write too, except I’m unknown, stuffed with straw,
hanging there for all the world to discover me, take me down, take me to the castle
where all of my dreams will be given to me only to discover that they were always right there, stuffed inside my straw-hearted chest.
I Listen to Blonde Redhead’s “Silently” for the Tenth Time in a Row
and when Kazu dances it makes me remember when I could dance and when Kazu dances it makes me remember when I could walk and when Kazu dances it makes me remember when I was loved and it was good, like a song, that love, how she kissed me at the sink and we fell to the floor, my hands all wet, her laughing carmine lips, her intense love of God, and how she left me, a year later, because, she said, I didn’t love God enough, and I remember all the hollowness that came after she was gone and this revelation: now.
So simple: Now.
Now.
Now.
Chronic Pain
I look at the abandoned building. It looks like it just got out of prison, like the building had just spent its tenth year inside another building. Its glass-shattered front window with a couple of remaining hanging shards that look like teeth and the window moves, the building speaking to me, asking if I have a chimney, if I have a spare chimney it could have, but I tell it I gave up smoking years ago,
and inside I can see its carpet looking so thirsty. I don’t know what to do. So I stand there and talk to the building. We talk about our pain, how bad our lungs and living rooms hurt and the heat that radiates in my head and in its kitchen
and the window yawns because it’s getting late, and I walk away and it hurts to walk, but I’m thankful for my legs and it’s thankful for its roof and we’re blessed with gratitude.
She Said We Shouldn’t Have to Say ‘I Love You’ (for Amélie)
so she didn’t. She said it was in our actions. So I tried to see her love when she turned off the lamp at night and I tried to see her love in the strange way that she would fall asleep with her cell phone in her hand, the light glowing like it was coming from her angelic center.
BIO
Ron Riekki’s books include Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press, poetry), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, hybrid), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, nonfiction), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press, fiction). Right now, Riekki’s listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”
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