Home Poetry

ALBA

by Robert Hill Long



Begin with a woman in her doorway—
nightgown and loose robe, the spill
of light from her living room. It’s still less day
than night. Fog scrims the hills,

muffles the black surf below. She looks west.
Wherever she touches a hand
to her body—forehead, cheek, breast—
is a wing applied to a wound.

In the doorway’s dim parenthesis
she lets out ghosts, to burn off
like the fog. There’s no kiss
better than the sun’s; it will come soon enough.

And you, why are you watching her? The woman
facing you is a door. Wake up. Go in.



HANA COAST


In rain, the doves don’t call. Let
the Pacific resume its master narrative—
they blink away the details. Around each eye

a lapis ring chains sky
to sea. They utter a rivulet
of distances, yet live

at your feet. After the flood they flew
here because better than
any surviving thing they heard converging

waves of blue upon black upon blue,
moon upon sun upon moon.
They are the perfecting

of that echo. Their wings in the grass
that buoys your feet are rainclouds. Let them pass.



COMPLICITY


Trailing coastal rubbernecks, she descended
into a cave vibrant with the roar
of breakers and sea lions. Her eyes
stung with salt wrack, bodies black

as torpedoes made of fishmeal and bilge-water.
Once it was a sanctuary; marketing sleaze
made it a zoo. The adults avoided eye contact;
pups stared, refugees behind wire. She ended

her part by turning away. But she
had paid her fraction for the upkeep of this
franchise crowded as the bowels of a slave ship
turned amusement ride. She came up to the clean kiss

of sky, stepped into the road and was nearly hit
by a truck hauling the trunk of a redwood tree.



IMPLORE


Kill me in the water or kill me on the sand.
Kill me among the spruces on the cliff.
She was praying in a church without roof
or walls, crying hard. She could not stand.

In the zigzag of dead things at tideline
she sank. Kill me with sky black with rain
or cold blue going black and empty.
But she did not push her way into the sea.

Hard, hard to pierce the perpetual
noise at the edge of the world. The cold ache
in her knees was telling her to break,
break. No, she was not whole or well

but her fingers held one another, aware
that she was asking to live forever.



BIO



Robert Hill Long has published 6 books and won numerous awards, prizes and fellowships—including 2 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Raised in North Carolina, he was founding director of the NC Writers Network, and afterward taught in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

He lives with his wife Linn Van Meter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.







BOOK REVIEW

Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai


Review by Ed Go


The title of the first poem in Sarah Sarai’s new collection Bright-Eyed is a complete sentence and a bold statement: “Things always work out.” It is an assurance and a promise reinforced toward the end of the poem when the speaker assures the reader that “With the East now behind you, / the lush of you spreads” and promises that you, your “lush,” will flip “the pages of religion” and thumb “through in search of / a promised earthly garden / of ethereal delight.” The speaker is offering comfort here, while the poet takes you on this journey in space (toward the West—“the East now behind you”) and time, as the poems in the following pages unfold revealing growth through adolescence to adulthood.

From “a girl, twelve and studying / the ambient inhalation of family” in “Souls in the Penalty of Flesh” to “This thirteen-year-old / Balancing on crabgrass” in “Two-Story Bldg, on Vernon,” the poems in the first half of Bright-Eyed give us insight into the child the speaker once was: “She is young: a fact which proves nothing” she tells us in “The Crooked Road Without Improvement,” before instructing us:

            To offset appetites for urban nostalgia,

            think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinklered

            banks before the house, before as in:

            I trembled before the hanging judge, so

            trembled ivy before the squatting house.

The poet does not want to indulge in nostalgia, nor does her speaker seek such a simplistic ploy at empathy. The flow of the verses here is from not simply how lines break from phrase to phrase; it flows from colon to colon, reinforced by the repetition of “before”—a word steeped in nostalgia but, as a preposition, functions as a means of positioning the reader, situating them in the present only to view the past. The rapid fire use of colons supports this position: a colon is used to introduce a list or expand on an idea, or both: “think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinklered”—expand your nostalgic thoughts to include rats, and expand that to include scurrying, and then to the sprinklered ivy enjambed onto everything that came before. No, this isn’t mere nostalgia—it’s the establishment of how a life is lived.

Sarai’s command and control of the line is what gives these poems their flourish. Both in her use of enjambment, such as “a girl, twelve and studying / the ambient inhalation of family” and in powerful end-stopped lines, exemplified in “Not Me, It Cries”:

            My past doesn’t haunt me.

            I haunt my past.

            In the middle of the night, it jerks ‘wake:

            “Shit. Now what are you gonna blame me for?”

Unlike enjambed verses, the end-stopped line is a matter of fact statement: “My past doesn’t haunt me” has more power as a statement than the image of the girl studying because we don’t know what she’s studying until the next line when we learn she’s not studying at all; she’s lost in a contemplation of family. The speaker now haunts her past, she tells us in another end-stopped line, and she’s not going to be blamed now. She is no longer the girl, she is the woman who, in the second half of the book, looks back at all the girls now grown: “weirdo girl, prom girl, high-IQ girl, / neutral girl” as well as “nerdy girl, abused girl / abused girl, abused girl, pot-dealing / girl, acid-dropping girl” in “No One’s in High School These Days”—girls “who in / seventy years will be not-so-bitter / girl.” Nostalgia is for the weak, the poet reminds us; the “immovable past girl” is the “future girl”—she has come full circle, come into her own self, alluding back to rats and ivy in “Some Mysteries of Youth Unsolved (Where I lived When I was 13)”:

            rats lay low in ivy,

            a wet bank of it,

            the leveling up of a slope

            straining for your house

            wrapped in scrim.

The girl is a woman now looking back, not nostalgically but understanding poetic “reenactment being / a distortion, a cry, and /even now, a question.”

Sarai’s control of poetic structures is not only demonstrated in enjambed and end-stops verses; it is present in the collection’s prose pieces as well. Prose poems remove the necessary distraction of verse’s line breaks and focuses readers on imagery and ideas. Sarai’s prose runs counter to the rhythms of her verse by creating a more flowing cascade of imagery, as exemplified in the title poem which begins with the reminder “The past is over” before immersing us in the images of the past: “The pain center was a tumor crazy for your right ovary”; “It’s malleable, not like ducklings, more like wet clay shivering in anticipation of thumbs”; “Zero in on the bright-eyed and hopping with more.” Each of these images is connected by ideas: “Memory is unreliable”; “Look to your future”; “Unreliable memory is understudy for sublimity.” All of this grounds the reader in a certain stability that is required when reenacting the past in poetry, and it takes a true practitioner of the art and master of the craft to pull together a collection this vibrant and stunning.

Moving without being sentimental, structured while feeling organic, Sarah Sarai’s Bright-Eyed skillfully displays her command of language to focus the experience of the past into a foundation for the present in order to connect the personal to the universal.



BIO



Ed Go is a Chinese-Filipino-Portuguese-English-Scottish-Irish American writer raised in Massachusetts, Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii and Connecticut. His writings have been published in various online and print journals and anthologies, and his chapbook Deleted Scenes from the Autobiography of Ed Go as told by Napoleon Id was published in 2014 by Other Rooms Press, and “new machines,” a sequence of twenty-one prose poems in the anthology Urgent Bards in 2016 by Urbantgarde Press.







Summer Evening Music

by Daye Phillippo



A breeze sifts the feathery locust leaves
   the way the mind sifts memory, tenderly.

The sun, that old dog, takes its time settling
   behind the train station. On the front steps

the Lafayette Citizens Band is tuning up. Noah
   our sixteen-year-old, will tonight belt out

jazz and Sousa and Mozart, same saxophone
   my father played, same band when I was young.

Lamppost globes wash the evening watercolor.
   Even the train seems to pass, whispering.

Summer evening music as the moon rises
   and children chase, barefoot in grass beneath trees.

Beside me, my pregnant daughter, her unborn son,
   turning in his amniotic sea, must hear

the music, too, watery soundings like whalesong.



Evensong

            to GMH


I saw no kingfisher or “roundy well,”
evening, late summer prayer walk
around the hayfield behind the church,
but heard a killdeer shrill as it swooped
and dove by three crosses on the hill,
white undersides of its wings, and I
saw among the swarming gnats, bright
with setting-sun light, a dragonfly
“catch flame,” and felt the communion
of a like mind, walking with me there.
All over the field, awns of grass flamed,
table of earth, candles lit for evensong.



What Falls Into It


Each morning after dressing,
I lie back on the bed
to put in the eyedrops
the doctor told me to apply
if I hope to keep seeing,
and I watch
as the clear drop
falls from the tiny bottle
into my eye
and think what a vulnerable
thing this is,
to be lying here, eye open
waiting to receive
what falls into it.
They say the fastest speed
a falling raindrop
can hit you
is 18 mph.
Yet what about
all those people in countries
where missiles and debris
and terror
are falling into their eyes
each morning?
How fast do those fall?
Yet here I am, other side
of the same globe,
going about my day—
dressing, dripping in eyedrops,
walking out into the aroma
of damp autumn leaves,
the only sounds falling
into me from the distance,
cattle bawling for breakfast
and from the tangled woods,
the tiny chirps of a wren.



BIO

Daye Phillippo has lived her life backwards, first raising a large family and later earning degrees in creative writing from Purdue University and Warren Wilson MFA for Writers. She taught English at Purdue and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, The Midwest Quarterly, Cider Press Review, One Art, Shenandoah, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead (Slant, 2020) was her debut full-length collection. You may find more of her work on her website: www.dayephillippo.com







Belonging

by Ariel Fábrega


Although we haven’t met,
I dream of the day my heart’s
tired coastline finds your name
washed on the shore
in the foam around scattered shells,

and I will follow the guiding tide
to the great sand dune that
rests between cragged cliffs
I’ve tried to summit on so many
merciless treks.

As salt wind kisses my nose and
my eyelids blink orange in the bright,
I will run into the pillow of sand
to climb my dune,
as open and free as ever I’ve been,

because at long last, I will see you
waiting for me at the top,
shining as sure and sweet
as the sunset over
the western horizon.



For She Who Could Not Speak Enough


I.
For she who was my ancestor,
my great-grandmother’s grandmother,
or her mother before her,
or the daughters who followed –

she who took the plight of men,
to harvest, carry, and accept without a word.

II.
In my wrist’s bouquet of veins,
my blood swells like the rivers she wades to fetch his water.

In the wrinkles of my palms,
is a field where she wields a blade, and sugarcane leaves glisten with beads of sweat raining from her trembling lips.

In the marrow of my elbow bone,
throb vestiges of bruises from when he wrenched
her scorched body to her clean swept floor.

In the lines around my eyes,
she cradles a baby daughter,
their bodies merging like their fate, as one crouched in their tawny shelter.

Rage must have struck her then,
and taut as the pause between lightning and thunder,
my ancestor gasped its echo and shook to withhold it.

Yet she imprinted on her daughter the flash and weight
of unspoken words as bitter bridles of womanhood.

III.
Now when men claim the right to my existence,
I promise to be the last bound daughter and
to raise my voice over their whole world.

A flash of gold flickers in my brown iris.
In me, deeper than the wildest crevasse in the earth’s most hidden valley,
I feel a rumble.

So I cut the bindings of a hundred ancestors
and my lungs fill with their pressure
when I say:
“Enough.”



Unwelcome Miner

I didn’t know my heart locked joy in a stone cavern
until grief spalled it with an iron pickaxe,

and the metallic tapping was so sharp
it throbbed in the nerves beneath my teeth
and caused my spine to buckle.

I wish I’d been a little softer,
open to absorbing memories of my lost one
through my skin until they circulated in my blood,
becoming part of me.

Instead, I hoarded exalted moments
in my heart’s dark cave
as protected crystals,
never to touch or visit.

Then grief came to mine
by tapping,
tapping with the iron blade until my stone cracked into an avalanche,
exposing my treasure for excavation.

The crashing stone keeps ringing in my ears,
I’m still wheezing from the dust.

I’ve crumbled,
yes,
yet also
softened.



Midnight Homage to Wallace Stevens’s Blackbird

I.
Sometimes, I slide into my insulated boots,
and when desert rain mists on my cheeks,
I dream of the Arctic tundra.
There where the sun shines at midnight,
dwell those who know true cold.

II.
I remember
when he said he’d find me
after the bar,
so I’d watch the clock.
If his beer-soaked knocks pounded
too far into the wrong side of midnight,
no one could save my soul
from his splinters.

III.
A hare hops through a street lamp’s ambit,
unaware of coyotes slinking
in the midnight shadows.


IV.
My bloodshot eyes widen.
What have I forgotten?
At midnight,
drops of water from a leaking faucet
flood my ear drums,
and I toss to staunch the din.

V.
Dimes in a wishing fountain
become an unfulfilled galaxy
when the midnight
moon gleams.



BIO



Ariel Fábrega is a writer, poet, and painter based in Arizona. After academic pursuits in medicine, psychology, and finance, she connected to her creative ambition to write poetry and fiction. She is currently working on her debut novel.







Going Places

by Bart Edelman



I thought I was going places;
Then the hammer came down—
Crushing, to say the least.
Oh, I was ready for failure—
Taught it from an early age—
But not, at all, like this.
What’s a body to do, though?
Hurl itself off a bridge?
That’s not my style, I’m afraid.
Far more impact than I need.
Where’s hope in her disguise?
A modicum of positive thought,
If nothing else survives.
Yes, I guess I’m fortunate,
Able to find adequate shelter,
Until a destination is available—
Whether I reach it or not.
Just point me in any direction;
Let the wind spin me around.



BIO

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Publications), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press), The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press), The Geographer’s Wife (Red Hen Press), Whistling to Trick the Wind (Meadowlark Press), and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023 (Meadowlark Press). He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Fountainhead Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.







Curfew

by Geoff White

            -for Tim, Ryan, Garrett, and Joe



Why do we keep looking at the door
like they’ll come home the next minute, late


by a few months? When did we stop?
There was more than one accident, even in this


small town. The one-man tailgate,
the T-bone, the beloved car, curfew breaking


under the weight of what rolled over them.
I’m getting them confused. Did any


transplant their lives, laying on silver tables,
the riches within given away? When did their sister’s


smile come back from twisting into a
howl of unanswered questions? When did


God make himself God and say I could be up
all night but wouldn’t let them


stay out one minute past?



BIO

Geoff White is a husband, father, poet, and dog owner from Lexington, KY. His poetry is an exercise in his sanity. He is introverted, so it is hard for him to reach out and interact with the poetry community as a whole. The words have nowhere else to go but on the page. He has been published by Recently Eclipsed, A Long Story Short, and the Atlantic Pacific Press.







10/1/1978

by Timothy Robbins



I don’t recall when I learned my
man’s DOB, but I am certain it was
the day October became solid.
The first Spanish ships in this
hemisphere are as little on my dry
mind as they are on the soaked
minds of most Americans, the
bank holiday and the impact of
that ancient and controversial find
notwithstanding. My High Holy
Days and my Low Selfish Days

are not partial to the tenth or any
other month. They come and go
as freely as groupies backstage
or up and down hotel halls.
Halloween has never been for me
the proof it is for some gay
boys and girls. The parade is a lump
that crawls, not a baton the Trans
drum majorette hurls at clouds.
Still, I have sliced a mean rug
to the cool Lou Reed hit, staring

at the black-capped biker on the
back of Transformer, at the swipe
of fine raw tan over rough trade
jeans. I saw that the month-long mel-
ancholy was over-welcome to the
melancholy-deficient. Still, for me
it formed a surplus. All the rented
hurt colors reminded me of my high
school living room and the orange
sectional every soul but my young
shade made out on; thin paneling,

light pretending hard to be fire in
a thin plastic hearth. Having arrived
on its first day, you are the month’s
crown prince. Sharing your sight,
I see your loyal subjects, see their
vampire-shaped birthmark; mark
how they soar like witches in a V.
Mowing the stars and trimming my
hedge, they trace our line, our limit,
the link, the brink, the dizzy ledge,
the inseam of a long denim pledge.



Portrait


“Come in drag,” he said.
So I came as Frankenstein.

I know what it’s like to
fight inaccuracies

that lead to new meanings.
I also know what it’s like

to stop fighting. He insists
he was designed like the

glass floor or rather floors
of the Sears or rather

Willis skywalk. He jokes,
“I do my best thinking

(and forgetting) on the john,
my best sleeping, on the

floor.” As a child he was an
expert at losing himself in

placemat mazes waitresses
slipped between the table

and his downturned face
while his dad complained.

His feelings were wobbly
when, twenty years later, his

own son entered the maze
and never came out.



5 Cup Rice Cooker/Warmer


This is our second Tiger JNP.
(The first rests in honor with
its small pink ordinary whites.)
A modest territory around the
cooker’s steam vent gets
polluted with flakes like rice
paper or an aged librarian’s —
a retired mandarin’s skin
skillfully torn from the hand
that commands, barely, the
date stamp and ink brush. Once
a month I apply a warm, damp
cloth to this area, as though
the appliance had my headache
or your tender shoulder.



Extinguished


There was always that one window across
the blacktop, beyond the de facto dog park,

past the lark-less, spark-less crow-streaked
trees; as cavalier about its WE electric bill

as these United States; as loyal to its light
and lies as our two religions combined.

While other parties, crude or refined, petered out,
it partied on. Now it too has gone, not shut but

cut off by the utility company. At last we
are alone. At last even you must admit we

are unseen. A bark-less walk awaits.



BIO

Timothy Robbins is from Indiana. He has a B.A. in French, an M.A. in applied linguistics from Indiana University and has been teaching English as a second language since 1991. He has been publishing poetry since 1980 and has six collections of poetry to his name, the most recent being Florida and Other Waters. He and his husband have been together since 1998. They live in Wisconsin.







The Seagull’s 460th Seguidilla

by Jake Sheff


The sun’s stunt double was hired
For her beautiful
Handwriting. This morning’s drawn
In the Bauhaus style.
Its little staircase
Beckons me. Time has gone a
Little stir-crazy.



The Seagull’s 415th Seguidilla


Drink, my darling, drink again;
A pint of interest
With a hint of bliss-berries.
Oh child, oh doom-kissed
Child; it soothes my brain
To fill what follows death, and
It will soothe your pain.



BIO


Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and veteran of the US Air Force. He’s married with a daughter and a crazy bulldog. Poems and short stories of Jake’s have been published widely. A full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe,” is available from White Violet Press. He also has three chapbooks: “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing), “The Rites of Tires” (SurVision) and “The Seagull’s First One Hundred Seguidillas” (Alien Buddha Press).







KILL RATIO

by Patrick Theron Erickson



A certain kind of horse
is home to a livery stable

when a livery stable
without a horse
is no home at all

A livery stable
that is no home
to a horse

is yet a haven
for rodents

And the woodland owl
knows this

and waits

And we conclude
The owl is wise

because he doesn’t jump the gun
moving in for the kill

whittling away
the rat snake’s rations

raising the kill ratio
by one

one and done.



VACANCY


With inborn dexterity

he came to occupy
and then embody

the disparity between
humble beginnings
and lifetime achievement

without recourse
to a lifetime achievement award
and without rancor

And he never waffled

For the life of me
I cannot say
I do not wish him well
and Godspeed

and fain
would I not
gladly
share his lot

or at least
trade occupations
and inhabit new occupancies.



SLEAZY


A kiss

unless it leads
to a strip search
or a kiss off

is nothing
to write home about

except that you do

and your Facebook friends
misconstrue the kiss
for a kiss off

and the strip search
for a striptease

your home
away from home

So home
is no longer
where the heart is

no, not even
on your homepage.



BIO

Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. Besides a chapbook, Better Late Than Never (The Orchard Street Press, 2022), his work has appeared in the anthology, SHARING THIS DELICATE BREAD: Selections from Sheila-Na-Gig online 2016-2021, in Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among other publications.







I am the sum of nothing

& all  

by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu


               the difference

between silence          
                        & noise

an autumn late or

            the forthcoming
                        spring

the nightingale up
                      in the sky  

 the burnt cathedral
                 in my eye  or

the conclusion of
                being such

a parody
            of space & time




melancholia


Spring comes in waves of joy

            subtract your body

            from time      it will fly

            free of words       sounds

            entangled with the last

            snow    the bird 

                                    on the roof

another day      another open tomb



the rose      supreme


failed to be rose      I touched

the ground with wounded

lips      to say a word

to leave a sign

of rapture—

the fire grew from stone

to stone

there was

            an altar in my heart

                        & people came & went

around



they are coming


             the waves

the hours & the lack of hours digging

your grave   

             who are you & why are you

here        at the beginning of the end

                                    I am full of time unspent

                        unaware    too much of this

            too much of that         heart         heart

                        who dies once dies many times

                   heart pulsing

                                                with love

                        the fire creeping down

                                                             :  ash



BIO

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Romanian-American poet, Ph.D. in French, is the author of many collections of poetry published in the United States, Romania and France. She writes poetry in English, French and Romanian, though she does not translate any of her work between languages. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary magazines in the United States, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Romania. Her last two collections of poetry I Scrape the Window of Nothingness (2018)and Traveling With the Ghosts (2021) were published by Orison Books. A Cry in the Snow, translated from the French (Un cri dans la neige, Editions du Cygne, Paris) was published in 2018 by Seagull Books Press. Radulescu’s French books received several awards, including the Grand Prix de la Francophonie and the Prix Amélie Murat.

This is a consummate language shaped with remarkable skill, and the voyages these poems take are brilliant excursions into our inner lives, secret things pushed into the subconscious.
—Keith Flynn, author of Colony, Collapse, Disorder







The Lighthouse

By Lisa Sultani


Things I once feared have materialized
often these came about subtly
it is only afterwards I realize
many nightmares are alive and well

Why do I share this with you?
It is my way of being a lighthouse
because I am your mother,
my advice cannot be unilateral

We will remain calm
my wet scalp sculpts your dark bones
We can survive anything
and shall become famous for it.



Lifted


The air is empty or the air is filled
with light: then, the air swells in
darkness. You are also entering
the air. That is why people who
love me say you will be in my heart.

Before your dissolution you
could not be contained. As I split
in two also I think I would try containing
you now. Maybe I already I am and
that’s why I read emails so slowly.
I am no longer efficient, which was
one of your wishes. Beside me,
the air rushes in blue fire.

I leave you messages.
Your phone was disconnected (not with
my permission) but still I call and speak.
A therapist suggested writing a letter, as
if one would be enough.

I go on walks, I drive to the bank, I cook
dinner occasionally. Last night it snowed
a great deal. The air became dense with
an uncountable number of unique and
beautiful snowflakes. I know,
each one of them was you.



The doubting heart


We walked for a long time. I walked
across a mountain. The sediment crumbled
in time with my regret. My house was
constructed using unpaid labor. When I
received this information I visited
the masjed. I did not place money in
the basket passed to me by an elderly
neighbor. Later, I may send a check. I
realize I did not tell you who else was
walking with me at the beginning. It is
no longer important: we parted ways
before breaching any contracts.



BIO

Ms. Sultani earned her MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. After many travels, she now lives with her family outside Atlanta. Her poems are included in Borderless, Delta Poetry Review, JMWW and The Talon Review, among others.







ACCOMPLICE

by Laurier Tiernan


I can take

Risks if

You burn my

Bridges

Every

Chicken

Needs an

Accomplice



WHAT AWAITS


A sunrise or

Sunset like an

Orgasm or death

Stretches a brief hole

Into the veil and

Serves a

Taste of

What awaits



BIO

Laurier Tiernan is a multifaceted queer artist currently based in Tokyo. Their songs have been broadcast by stations around the globe. Their articles are published on three continents. And, their poetry has graced both print and exhibition. They currently host the weekly “Tiernan depuis Tokyo,” on CKRP, in Alberta, Canada, and seek a publisher for their first full manuscript.

https://www.facebook.com/TiernanSongs

http://www.youtube.com/TiernanSongs

http://www.instagram.com/TiernanSongs







Almost Here

by Kenneth Johnson


a flickering flame
desperate
to breathe
in a windstorm

waiting for
a sigh worth
a thousand words
finding none

consumed by
a flickering flame
desperate
to breathe

A touch
hovered above
circling a surface
lingering while

looking to light
hoping to find
solace in those
days and nights

when everything
hovered above
circling a surface
lingering while

lips pressed
against the skin
a polished apple
a summer of skin

lips pressed
against the skin
it’s almost here
it’s almost here



The Weight of Water


His hands formed
a cup as if to hold
a capsized ship

rudderlessly dragging
pushing the limit
of vanishing stability

His fingers tight
attempting to carry
the weight of water

seeking its level
the molecules slowly
loosening their grip

the cruel game
the complacency
the lure of pink noise

the temptation of waves
to swallow the ocean
to resist righting



Not Joined at The Hip


My therapist says we are not
            joined at the hip
my therapist is not my shadow
            but I know it’s a lie
that’s said over and over
            to sound like truth
My therapist says I need to
            get out more
I do so begrudgingly
            just for spite
not for pity but as a way
            to gain control
a way to not lose face
            to not be shamed
At least in some small way
            I must strike back
My therapist says we are not
            joined at the hip
My therapist has great ideas
            but they’re all on paper
stored in file cabinets
            with carbon steel locks
I’m sure on one page I saw
            a drawing of someone
being charged by a dog
            It looked like an attack dog
It was biting at the ankles
            pieces of pants in its teeth
splatters of saliva and blood
            all over the sidewalk
I’ve seen that dog
            I’ve been that dog



I Adopt Myself


I.

The body is weak
the mind a truck

pulling weight
up a hill
in the rain

My name means
nothing —
a response to a
sensation recall
prompt

II.

I remember
the harshness
of my father’s
words as he
berated me for
not wanting to
continue fishing
the creek
as the sun set

It’s autumn
cool again
the wind shakes
the branches
of birch trees

III.

Looking
from above
the landscape
shifts between
desert and city

city and desert

muted trapezoids
of land and stone
blocks of time
on a shelf
willing to be
called up at
a moment’s notice

to live
between worlds

IV.

The lighting perfect
I run my fingers
through my hair
sit just right
pose and smile

The flowers
of the calla lilies
planted after the
last frost are
opening midmorning
the sun converting
water droplets
formed on the lips
of the white spathes
into prisms



BIO

Kenneth Johnson is a poet, visual artist, and art teacher living in Claremont, California. His work has appeared in San Antonio Review, Talking River Review, Poetica Review, The Diaspora/UC Berkeley, and other publications. His chapbook Molten Muse is available at the usual places.

Additional information: kennethjohnsonart.wixsite.com/kennethjohnsonart





Bulk

By Michael Penny


It’s cheaper in bulk
and more than I need

except to accumulate,
the main aim of money.

I bring my own bags
and driven attitude

everything filling in both,
as knowing better

is never enough
when I’m after more.

I will never reach
a final level of full.



What’s Not Said Out Loud


My dentist says
my gums are OK
(for someone my age.)

The banks calculate
I have enough money
(for someone my age.)

The accountant says
I keep good records
(for someone my age.)

My doctor reassures
that I’m reasonably fit
(for someone my age.)

A neighbor on my daily walk
says I cover a fair distance
(for someone my age.)

Even the waste disposal guy
tells me my garbage is tidy
(for someone my age.)

I look up to the stars
still bright and persistent
(for something their age)

as they hold together galaxies
for everything they are
(for someone my age.)



Childish Song


I jammed a star
into a little box
and shook it.

Electrons scattered
helium and heat
as I sang.

At first, the sides
of the cube
held fast and dark

as I gripped it,
but the star shone on
with a light so loud

its bright banging
opened
everything.



Committee of the Whole


I am a meeting
with no set agenda
and participants who disagree.

The discussion
heats up, differences
apparent on the table

where nothing is tabled.
My committee must agree
before I can do anything.

The debate continues
with words said
exceeding facts known.

There is no Chair
for this unbalance
and it goes on

as I go on,
the time unminuted
and conclusions unreached.



About Time


I found my wild oats
in the bottom of the freezer
when spring cleaning got that deep.

The jar of seeds was sealed,
forgotten, but labelled in hope
the time would come.

The ice settled under the glass lid
suggested never, but the domesticity
that kept left-overs has merely delayed

and forty years on I will disturb
the crystal-perfect frost and let
the aging sun thaw and germinate.



BIO

Michael Penny lives on an island near Vancouver, BC. He pursues his interest in sustainable development as chair of the municipality’s Advisory Planning Commission. He has published five books and been in over forty journals.







Her Story told in Brain Fog

by Claudia M. Reder


She couldn’t remember much of the original story
and reached into her memory for clues.

In her story, a bird had something
to do with losing and finding her way.
It was late summer, almost autumn.
Winter would arrive by its end.

Once she had believed in amulets.
Now she believed the loss of them
was the impetus for her journey.

She had to tell how language failed her.
Reading, writing, creating poetry
was the life she had chosen
until the evil witch had canceled her subscription.

The witch who stole language
was spun from fairy tales and miserly notions.
Sadistic spells were her specialty.
She drove me off my land and dropped me in a desert.
I wasn’t used to plains, so there I was, no hills,
no mountains with ice-capped clouds.
as if everything good had been burned.
This drought of words, not just rain.



How Storytelling Found Me


An ombudsman calls to ask,
“Do you know anyone who can help people tell their own stories?
These people are sick of Bingo.”
I jump at the chance to gather for the love of language,
to be present in the moment,
to retrieve a memory, to laugh.
This is how storytelling found me. 

When people asked me what I did, I told them,
“I help people tell their own stories.”
On hearing that statement, one looked me in the eye,
paused, then said, “How do you do that?”
Another ignored me and discussed the weather.
The third said, “You are lucky. You know how. I have stories,
but I don’t know how to tell them.”



Earlier Portraits of my Mother


I used to write about my mother
as a cartoon-like fish, driving a car.
Her husband said she was crazy
and a terrible driver
and she believed him for a long while.

Then I portrayed her as a well-mannered crocodile
who danced on two legs and wore pearls,
stylish in her Miss Sony outfits,
and still didn’t believe in her beauty.

Yet, and yet, she never swallowed those pills
my psychiatrist had said she might.

I thought writing was safe if it stayed in a drawer.
To read these poems aloud would grant them a different life.

She persevered and lived long enough
that we could meet at 30th Street Station,
Philadelphia where I read her my poems.

I lugged a tote filled with writings.
We sat on the brown curved
wooden benches. We talked as adults
about her marriage, the divorce and her life after,
and then she took the train.

It wasn’t by chance that I showed
her these poems at a train station
when I knew she would be leaving.

Our future conversations
were orchestrated like a sonnet:
the theme and variations,
the volta near the ending, calm or tears,
usually over a meal, wielding
our visa cards as swords fighting for power.



BIO

Claudia M. Reder is the author of How to Disappear (Blue Light Press, 2019). Uncertain Earth (Finishing Line Press), and My Father & Miro (Bright Hill Press). How to Disappear was awarded first prize in the Pinnacle and Feathered Quill awards. Main Street Rag is publishing her next book, Dizzying Words. Retired from teaching at California State University Channel Islands, she recently moved to Pittsburgh, PA.







Dark and Windows

by Luke Sawczak


I see the window! shrieks the toddler.
I see the dark, Mommy! Dark dark dark!
I think: Are dark and windows things you see?

The empty train rolls on in falling light,
and I read Lucy Maud Montgomery
on bridges over valleys she walked through,
“all lovely things beloved in days gone by.”
Here and now we ride “an arrow of light
on a ribbon of shadow,”
our lives and voices breath in iron lungs.
The two-year-old trades tunes for tickles:
each time she sings the fates of bitsy spiders
her mom rewards her with “Want to hear a secret?”
and blows a raspberry in her ear, eliciting
such howls of laughter and the incessant plea:
“T’y ’gain! T’y ’gain, Mommy! Tell me my secret!”
She tries again; the same result, and still “T’y ’gain!”

A voice says, “This train will stop at Georgetown,”
and the mom cries: “I need to go to Kitchener!”
The other passenger assures her more trains will come.
She settles down uneasily. Her toddler remarks on me:
“He innit talking!” — No, she’s told, he’s reading.
Then I am talking, like a healed mute.
Where did you go today?

Evening deepens as the toddler tells me her adventures,
all about the cows that scared her on the farm.
“She didn’t want I to leave her,” says her mom,
“she was crying everything would eat her.”
I laugh. At her size I might cry as well.
“She asked if I was going to clean their poop!”

“Tell me my secret!”
Often seeing children I think of those
whose mothers sit alone in rooms, becoming cold,
whose fathers darken, never to look up again
with the same faces. The ones who die
outnumber those whose hands we hold.
Each peal of laughter, each trying repetition’s
evidence of a miracle we’re told but can’t confirm:
that even one He is not willing should be lost is not.

The mother sighs and gazes out the window.
There was a boy of four obediently quiet
The long drive home from church, whose parents
opened the door to a little body breath had left
dressed for long sleep in his Sunday best.
There are those we buried live in Llullay-Yacu,
la doncella drunk on coca, la niña del rayo
burned by lightning, and el niño, seven, tied,
holding objects showing caravans of llamas.
Vomit, signs of struggle in the youngest only.
I draw in my breath, mind on that
native home where the water treatment men
couldn’t dig the plumbing through the yard
because of all the graves of cousins
who had cut off the universe forever.
“Earth shall be riven, and high heaven.”
In each of them the cosmos-fires burned
and were extinguished. Chesterton says:
In every child the world is once more put upon its trial.

The train sombres into the ravine.
He says, From the valleys, alleluia, we look to the hills.
The farmer doesn’t know where life can enter in.
Don’t tell me that I’ll ever understand.
All I know is à chaque jour suffit sa peine
mais aussi ses miracles. A teacher told me
that in classrooms without windows
trees still bud when spring begins.

The voice comes on from centre coach
to tell us that another train’s behind us
forging through the night to Kitchener,
as though God were listening to prayer.

We brake, snow melting on the rails.
The small girl soils her diaper laughing;
she admits it freely to her mother.
Turning from the windows, we get off.
From inside we’d seen the dark
but not these stars. They are quiet
as we disembark.



hard beads of light


Field so dotted with tiny white flowers
it could be dusted with snow or icing sugar.
Chastening rises out of shame,
correction out of chastening.
Baby blue air backdrop for golden leaves
springing red blood along vein network
like map of traffic out of city:
spilled from pump, droplet vans
muster on long motorway escapes.
After arriving we go canoeing, face inwards
to each other, before the shout to turn around.
Then we’re gliding to the island’s sandy landing,
exploring till chased off by a pup.
Campfires built on private property. No way up.
Circuit of fragmentary lake on face of Earth.

Later I go for a walk by myself,
take photos of licheny shield from waist height.
I’ll call these top-down shots my “Aerial Landscapes”:
lake of moss, forest of tiny shrubs, salt pan of long-dead scars
left by ancient flora. When your hand
finds something to do, you do it mightily.
And then, if you want to get well again, repeat.
Feel a little guilt. Come on, it’s fine.
No need to feel guilty about feeling guilty.
No one does it. Walking back on Fire Route Two-Twenty
see a massive wall, a solid arc of dirt
laced with roots of fallen tree.
Examining its base you perceive its mistake:
it built as Jesus recommended, on the rock.
But trees aren’t houses and the wind has peeled it off.
Now see it from beneath, the mouse’s view.
Awe-inspiring spider of snakes as lithe as taffy,
wood watercourses in a muddy flood.

At the cottage a start on stepping outside
after supper: that there is such a thing as black.
Our light goes only so far out and then recedes
and night hides everything I was to see.
Across the lake light fragments like a carnival
shine into the depth: cottage lanterns, moon,
stars in bunches, deck guides dance on agitated water,
rolling as though turning in and turning out of bed,
then against the shore and fading all away.

For a little time there are two of you:
one reading on the couch inside, nose under spectacles
in a book with crimson jacket, cozy now, if older,
and one sitting in the dark just on the other side
of the window. A chill runs through me.
Why are you in so much pain? What about God?
You’re the last person who could deserve this,
even if on occasion you are short with us.
Why didn’t I talk to you about the stars, too?
The last thing I want is for you to think I love less.
It’s true—you become what you think people think of you.

The stars are beautiful, you know, out here.
The moon, bright as a white flower, the awkward
source of all the light pollution at the dock.
Give me infinitesimal marks in the weave
where the thread is torn but no matter how small
the light your eye picks it up sharp and fine.

I need to stay out here until my soul grows calm.
It needs a wicked chastening. Too absorbed
in its own juices, like the basted turkey.
Funny image for a soul. I head down to the dock
with a cushion and no fewer than two blankets.
Dilemma: without shoes your socks get damp,
but then you can draw your feet into your nest.
Shoes on, I pull the deck chair to the water
and bundle up. The more I write, the more
I need the moon that sponges up the stars
from black canvas with unwanted light.

I put down the pen and my mind expands,
then contracts, like the skillful use of the embouchure
of the oboe: wavering when it is strongest,
then receding with the precision of a jet of ink.
The harder I pray, the more stars flicker on
like prayer candles without blood money.
Soon I can see the hosts of which the Lord is lord.
I’m thinking of you in an early wheelchair,
and imagining with all my force, believing, having faith
against this image, till tears arrive at my eyes.
Unfrozen water, like that lapping against the dock.
In the primitive black water I see drops of ichor,
gods’ blood, which it turns out is burning ivory,
like shining milk, fragments of the eternal snow,
tinsel-thick shards of silver from below the earth,
(no human comparison fully satisfies), anyhow ichor.
Flecks of it stream into the sand on the wave
and I watch my own meteor shower.

Is my mind growing calm?
The world is spinning.



BIO

Luke Sawczak is a teacher and writer in Toronto. His writing has appeared in more than 20 publications, including Sojourners, Acta Victoriana, Queen’s Quarterly, the Humber Literary Review, and the Spadina Literary Review. It has been nominated for Best of the Net and included in Best Canadian Poetry. His influences include Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Kenyon. In his spare time he composes for the piano.







MY LIFE BY DISNEY

by Dana Roeser

At twilight
when I was gathering 
         newly sprouted arugula
in the backyard garden, a cardinal
sang to me

from the high limb of 
         an ancient elm. It was a sweet
song
that I tried
         to answer. I apologized again
for Alice killing the robin

because the more I think of it
         the more I think she did
do in Laura. 
         A day after the murder
         I pulled up in my dirt-streaked Toyota

sobbing so hard 
         I soaked a box of Kleenex.
         I could hardly get up the steps.

Alice was inconvenienced, always
having to use the back door. Was she inconvenienced
         by my caring about the robin?

*   *  *

I will not, I cannot, 
         look in the nest 
             high up under the eave
         of my house.
The babes in the woods 
                clinging to each other
in the cushiony bed—frozen with their mouths open—
         their rubbery beaks—
         Or were they still perfect eggs—unhatched—
also frozen—
         b/c the mother left
against her will? 

I’ll never look at Alice the same. And truly I 
         don’t know she was the perpetrator.
The one time that I left her out
         when I pulled away. 
            I knew I’d be back in a couple hours.
I knew the weather was sunny 
            and hospitable.
Alice stared at me
from the end of the driveway

because she likes to go in when I’m out.
   But I was embarrassed
            being already seven minutes
late for Sarah, and I didn’t want
to open my car door,
                              disrupt the bird.

Immaturity is my humility—but that’s for another poem—or no poem.
         (Ask the cardinal.)

The bird calls are a relay, a transference. 
         They know each other
and they all have witnessed it. 
         The father, somewhere, witnessed.
That is the only explanation for the disappearance of
the dogged mother. 
         She sat on that nest, breast puffed, eyes bulging
         and inscrutable,
         her tail jutting out like a stick

through cold rain—she was under the eave, I watched her from
            little arched windows at
the top of the front door. It was ridiculous,
         the weather. 
            We had more than one night
at freezing. (I was busy then covering the
                   baby greens with bed clothes.)
The neighbor cats
            were not clued in, had no
territorial vendetta, though they, especially lithe Horace, may
         have been called in as accomplices.

Tonight. I had come from a twelve-step meeting
                   where people were kind.

I went to one at noon too—I said just who did I think I was?
         Mother-goose? A bird-whisperer? Yet,
         Beach, at Clay Knob Stable today, was also kind, 
            soft, grabbing for apple pieces with
                     his velvety, oversized lips—and disappointed,
I’m sure, that we didn’t get to do our after-
ride ritual (Christy turned him out
            for me) because I had to run

to the car before 4 p.m. to do a financial thing 
         on the phone, the stock market
         had supposedly rallied. 
         My ex-husband told me 
         today was a good day.
I have no income to speak of, as I am old.
         I am spending down the funds that came to me
                   in the divorce. I am almost five years 
         older than my former husband.
                   He still has a job. 
         Income from the part-time job I did have this semester,
according to my accountant,
         actually cost
                  me money. 
         Do the math.
         Weep.

How in the hell 
         did I mislay this man 
                   and my family?
Why can’t I visualize
         my Canadian boyfriend
when he is not here?
My dear Canadian boyfriend who actually said on
            Messenger this week: 
            If we break up (or words
         to that effect), if I have to get a girlfriend 
(online/yoga class/
         coffee shop, etc.) 
         because I can’t wait any longer
for us to be together,
         “I will always interact with you.”

Jesus Christ on a bright purple crutch!!!!

And then on my way home from my circuitous
         “self-care” travels today,
I realized our relationship

         was another victim 
         of my “magical thinking.” As durable 
as Sleeping Beauty 
         or Snow White—their chirping, carefully-colored birds
         and chipmunks—
bursting into song . . .

while Laura is 
         carefully extracting worms
from my little as-yet-untilled strip garden 
         between house 
                   and driveway 
under the nest—

the cat’s 
         going to get her
with lightning speed,

with sharp claws.



O HOLY WEEK, O HOLY SATURDAY


Black Saturday Jesus is in the tomb
            germinating and the people
across the street are rocking out
            to some kind of grinding repetitive
hip hop, interspersed with Bollywood.
            We are college students
We are going to be having a loud
            party this afternoon
and we deserve to enjoy college. So Jesus
            hung in his cocoon while
I burned a fire, opened all the windows,
            felt suicidal and went through
mountains of random bills catalogs manuscripts
            and papers and ultimately
raked through cat litter, took it out with garbage,
            recycling, and compost
all to the grinding neighborhood beat. Kept trying
            to figure out what they could
do to it. Not sex. Not work. Maybe shouting
            at each other at a party, clambering over
each other, dominating
            on their huge wooden oversized chair
in the back yard or in the ever-repeating
            hacky sack or foosball game.

                                    What is really the use of trying
            to win at divorce counseling
when you flunked marriage counseling
            and your ex-husband has a personality
disorder? Patti my beautiful, stoic
            Buddhist AA
sponsor tried to say.
            When you already lost
spectacularly.
            What is your expectation, I believe
she said. Also, maybe implicitly, well
            NVM implicitly. Let’s just say
Patti knows me, has known me. I’m surprised
            she speaks to me.

Jesus was still hatching while this evening I rolled
            my cart through Fresh Thyme. Some appearing-
families, endless sturdy children rolling
            in and out of carts;
the stringy-haired
            tender-looking Goth woman in
the soup aisle, the very thin wan blond
            woman with whom I conferred over the
sushi case. Only California Roll
            remained. She put hers back,
and, later,
            I did mine. Bland tonight
even worse tomorrow and what was I doing
            eating all that white rice. Couple other
random people. Somebody by the Medjool organic
            dates, I think. Maybe a couple near the
remains of the broccoli or bok choy. Produce
            waning. We were all convivial.
We were all flunking Easter.
            At every turn, the handle of my cart
was shocking me.

            After the checker saw the absurdly
expensive “natural,” with-the-shiny-foil
            packaging, Sierra-something,
couture cat food I bought
            and I told her how much better
my cats’ coats were, she and I
            went over her mini-labradoodle
stud’s diet and coat
            supplement. Apparently
his coat is bedraggled. He’s still picked
            up by the breeder twice a month
to do his thing, but it appears that
            it’s wearing him out—all
those different women—or that was
            my guess. I told her I wanted
a dog, which made us both
            happy, me b/c it would
get me out of the man thing.
            The loneliness thing.
All this while a line of people
            formed behind me and random
groceries were plowing
            forward on the belt.

                                                     Driving home
I thought about how sad Beach had seemed
            at the barn yesterday, grounded
in his stall with his hurt foot and the dear
            young person, who must be
home-schooled, far too innocent at age
            seventeen to be attending
any public high school even
            in rural Indiana.
Her fresh face in my face
            asking me all sorts of questions about
Beach, about patient, shark-faced Indy whom
            I’d ridden that day instead of Beach,
about posting the trot,
            and so on. And today
at Fresh Thyme
            the other young person maybe
the same age or a bit older
            going on about the mini-labradoodle
set up. They sort of lease the dog, foster
            him, whatever.

            In all seriousness, I think these
dear earnest young people are what
            Jesus is thinking about there
in the dark. They’re inheriting rampant
            porn, a frying earth, a parent-
and grandparent-killing pandemic. Oh,
            and a brutal war and genocide
on television. & that other thing.

            My raspberries at some point must’ve
gotten loose, were rolling all over the grocery
            bag apparently, because several
dropped into my yard when I got home
            and I just popped them all
in my mouth. All that abundance. All that
            freshness on the young
people’s faces.

            Jesus, think hard. Meditate hard.
As previously stated, I don’t know how
            Patti can stand me, and come to
think of it, I’m not sure she can. We talked
            about meditation. A woman she reads
who writes about Zen and the twelve steps.
            Irish formerly-Catholic Patti said “I hate Easter”
and I must say it was something of a relief.
            I’d neglected to say I’d wanted
to write to my hot convert friend
            up in Toledo
 and say Happy Easter,
            that I missed the big bonfire at my former church
in which we threw
            our palms from the week before;
our little candles lit, blown out,
            and re-lit in the dark sanctuary. The Litany of
the Saints, so beautiful, to which I’d sobbed every year—
            including three years ago—not two hours
before, in our living room, exhausted—
            I’d been to a student event
with my husband before the service—
            and the Vigil had lasted three and a half
hours—when my husband told me he was
            leaving me.

                                    The week after that I went back
            to Mass, not knowing where else
to take my outsized pain—it was packed
            and a woman next to me gave me
her handkerchief
            as my sobbing was getting messy—
and I was convinced it was a message
            from my dead father who always gave
me a hankie and whose clean, folded handkerchiefs
            looked just like hers.

I could hardly get out of the church after
            Mass or through the ensuing
days in which my husband vaguely confessed
            about two other women and precisely
set about organizing his move which happened
            ten days later.

                                    How many times had I stood
in that parking lot before that fire
            with my husband and sometimes one
or the other, or both, of our daughters?
            And then gone
in to stand in the dark sanctuary waiting
            for our little white candles
in the paper cones to be lit hand to
            hand from the priest’s
Pascal candle. Staying standing
            for the long, long reading
of Genesis where
            God divided the light
from the darkness and Exodus, the
            Lord in the pillar of fire
and cloud. Oh how I wish I were there now.

            I heard we are having
yet another hard frost tonight
            —though it is April—
and again I congratulate myself
            for not planting anything yet.
I’m sure it is beautiful there at the garden
            under the dark, pink full moon.
                        Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us.
Saint Michael, pray for us.
            Holy Angels of God . . . .
            The frost drops tonight

like stars.
            Perfect hairy red raspberries tumbling
out of the back door of my car
            and into the yard.



HAPPY DAYS


                        Belle hiding in the narrow brush jump
covered with red faux-brick paper. (Note to both horse and rider:
            the thing will not give.)
                        Her fluffy head
and fat tail coming out of the open top. Frustrated Cohen the
            black pit bull cross
            hanging around her licking her face.

Christy says Let me get a rope for the dog
            so I can rescue the cat
and Roxy can jump the brush jump.

I’m trotting around on Beach. I had to do energy work—
                        my guestimate of Reiki—
            on the horse before I went out there. Seriously.
I didn’t know that that was what I was doing.
            But he lowered his head and let his eyelashes drop
            when I stroked
            the bone behind his right ear.
Also looked at me dreamily
            when I kissed him square on the face.                         

                        Riders don’t always realize that horses
            need reassurance. The day before’s lesson, C. admitted,
“went south.” We were scraping mud
                        off Beach from either side.
 She thought 13-year-old Suzette could handle him,
            but instead he veered right
and broke into a canter down
            the rail—
            maybe she poked him with her heel—

            Suzettte ended up coming off INTO the wall of the indoor
breaking off a tooth—and fracturing her jaw.

                        Still she had the presence of mind,
Christy said, to ask for someone to look for
            her tooth. (Which I did not know
            until today was even
            a “thing.” Those who watch
                        hockey know about it?)
I’m sure the mom was not pleased, but
                        the liability waiver
—which refers to the “inherent risks of equine activities”
            and “death”—is in huge block letters on
            the tack room door.

And everybody signs a copy.

            My job today was to calm Beach down
enough to get him to go over the small jumps
                        without running out. (Or, God forbid,
into one of the hayfields stretching in
            every direction.)
Lily, another beginner, had helped him to realize
            that running out might be an attractive option.

                        The cat hiding in the brush jump, with the dog sniffing her face
            reminded me of how John, about age 12, used to hold
Douglas, age 10, down on the floor and I would slap him.

Then when Mother appeared, John and I would lie.

I am getting ready to confront my ex-husband
            in divorce counseling, to let him know
how much he hurt me. Is that not the most laughable
                        thing you ever heard? Like a person who
                                    pursued two
people while holding my hand
                        in “marriage therapy,” as he called it,
                        would suddenly
be capable of compassion?

Ha ha ha.

The cat’s head rotating around above the box reminded
            me of the woman’s head in Happy Days
the Beckett play my boyfriend lent me.
            Honestly, the grief over our uncertain future
                        is tormenting each of us
            in different ways. He can’t get across the Canadian/U.S. border
and I am a basket case about going up there.

My love bleeds and I go very blank. If I’m going to
            have excision surgery I need to prepare for it.

I need energy work. On myself. Courage to                
            get dipped in acid
            again.
I DO NOT visualize myself as Winnie in                                           
            Happy Days, the tiny circuit of toothbrush,
toothpaste, and comb—
buried to her waist in an earthen mound
            beneath a “trompe-l’oeil backcloth” of
                        “unbroken plain and sky.” A black bag and
parasol beside her. When will “Willie,”
lying asleep
somewhere behind her, speak?
                        Brush and comb
            the hair if it has not
been done or trim the nails

if they are in need of trimming. . . .
            This is going to be another happy day!



REVOLVING DOOR OF SPRING: CHECK ON ME


Trina T. has gone back out.
           It was all over WLFI.

Two OWIs in twenty-four hours.
           First she got hung up on 

a snow drift, drunk, then motored off
           from the officer

who tried to help her. Then she
           had an accident. “You should

have seen her mug shot,” Emily said,
           “and people were

saying things like ‘Lafayette’s finest’
           in the comment

section. Brandi and I had to
           defend her.”
                                 March 11th, apparently,

is the day my father will be released from
           the hospital. On his 93rd

birthday, his blood pressure was 69
           over 40.
                      “I always think

March 11th is the day we start
           to ride outside,” Christy says.

“We could probably ride in the outdoor
           today but we wouldn’t

be able to get there. All the snow is
           melting—the ground

is soaked.” March 11th is three days from
           today. No one knows if Trina has

been bailed out.
           Her husband had just gotten

out of prison which “could
           have been a factor.”
                                               That train accident

was by my rather obvious
           deduction a suicide. The train

was coming from the west
           and Rachel just rolled

her truck slowly onto the track.
           Three-column obituary. An engineer

who traveled the world, rode
           and showed a horse

named Orion, loved guinea pigs, pottery
           (which she made), sunflowers.

In other words, who lived eighty
           lives to my one. Christy

and Josie knew her. I heard about it
           at the barn when I was

having my lesson. Walking and trotting,
           always getting yelled at,

always waiting for the chance
           to jump (when I was young, it was “hunt”).

A hanger-on at the barn—with ten-year-old
           cohorts, college girl

stable helpers. “She, the witness, observed
           and heard the train

coming from the west
           and saw the pickup truck

slowly edge up onto the tracks,” said the
           Chief Deputy.
                                    When Doug heard

about Dad, via my voice mail, yesterday,
           it took eight hours for

him to get back to me. He was
           talking really slow. I wondered

how much he’d been
           drinking. I could tell

he didn’t feel up to calling Thea and sorting
           out the visiting rotation.
                                                  When they

told me Tammy died, I had
           to look up her obituary picture

to remember who she was.  Emily,
           recently relapsed and on the run

from CPS (having been caught driving drunk
           with her child), was the one

who found her. When you endanger
           children as much as she has, Child

Protection Services becomes CPS. Emily had tried
           to call Tammy to check on her

but she didn’t pick up. When
           Emily went over to check on her, she

found her naked on the
           bed, fresh—or not—from the

shower. Emily flashed back to her mother’s
           suicide by alcohol overdose,

replete with note, on her ninth birthday,
           and then tried to kill herself two and

a half weeks later. It was Tammy’s sister
           who called to check

and upon hearing Emily’s garbled voice
           called 911. She had been very, very

thorough in her overdose, though I can’t
           remember right now what

combination of drugs and alcohol she told
           me she used.
                                Arlene at the nursing home

was perfectly cheerful about
           my father last night, said she

only wished they’d caught it sooner
           so he could have avoided going

to the hospital.
                              He sounds
           like he is trying

to speak from a deep
           well. Thea said on the phone

that when she arrived she found
           him “unresponsive,” deploying

a medical default/buzz word. I knew
           it would be okay, though, because

the night nurse “Jackie” last night
           on the phone said she was right

outside his door, had just checked on him, and
           that he was “adorable.”                           
                                                             A man in the my

home meeting about
           whom I’ve been nursing

some kind of an obsession asked me
            for my phone number and I nearly

died. I kept thinking, Is this a date? I gave
           him my number and my last

name and he gave me his. I know what it was
           really for. I know we had

more important things to do
            in that room than

have a Valentine’s dance. I think about him,
           how raw and in pain he seemed a

month or two ago, how I was worried
           he’d go back out

(but he didn’t and that was all
           that mattered).
                                       When Andy refused

to watch Lola, and Mia was paranoid,
           I told her to ask

the reason. She ended up
           sobbing to him on the phone. Then

someone she knew from Lola’s school
           saw Mia in Target in the hour

before the meeting and offered to take her so Mia
           could have some peace.

Andy said it was just work that
           was bothering him. Mia’s friend

texted a photo of Lola at Tractor Supply—
           or was it Rural King?

I didn’t ask the man why he wanted
           my number. I did not want

to end up sobbing.
                             Doug,
           it’s Daylight Savings

Time, drag yourself up out of that
           hole you’re in. Dad is not dead.

Let’s work on his obituary while there’s
           still time. I’ll tell you

when it’s otherwise. Slim, in your
           gold shoes, carry on,

keep deploying your charm. Mia,
           tell the truth to Andy. Emily, one day

at a time, keep coming back. I’ll call you,
           Doug, and tell you when to

enter the hole for good. Meanwhile, pick up
           your phone once every

thousand years. Let me check on you.



BIO

Dana Roeser’s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in September 2019. Her previous books won the Juniper Prize and the Samuel French Morse Prize (twice). She was a recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and several other awards and residencies. Recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Poem-a-Day, The Glacier, North American Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Guesthouse, Barrow Street, Laurel Review, and others. For more information, please see www.danaroeser.com.

“dates”

by Uzomah Ugwu


1.

Dark shots
Passed out moons
Arise for the night

2.

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

By Nolo Segundo


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.






The Bees, the Rain and the Dark

by Josh Humphrey

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.










KEYHOLE MAW

by Diane Webster


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.







Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro


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, Muddy River 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.





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