Alicia Caldanaro Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

I NEVER HAD MY WISDOM TEETH REMOVED

by Alicia Caldanaro

If now is not part of the past, why does the past often go back and forth in my mind
during present moments? It either hangs over my head like a black cloud or burns like
Jack’s fabulous yellow roman candles. Mouths get canker sores and backs break out in
hives. As the escalator gave my ankles a break from shopping, Santa Claus looked up
at me, smiled, and waved. Raindrops became a shower. Gene Kelly gave me his umbrella
and I started dancing. My dance was not as cool as the dance Jenna Ortega choreographed
and performed herself on Wednesday. However, she wears black, I wear gray, and my
piano teacher told me I was one of her few students who did not need a metronome. What
is it with my veterinarian who explained to me, after she removed forty percent of my cat’s
teeth, that they were rotten because of his poor genetics? She left his front canines and
incisors, but was that supposed to soothe him and me? I named my cat Aslan (“The Great
Lion”) because he processioned between my two rows of orange cosmoses where I counted
twenty-nine aggressive bumblebees pollinating in the hot afternoon. A week after Aslan’s teeth
were yanked out, an abscess developed under his chin and it burst when I was on my way out
the door. I padded his open sore till it stopped bleeding, left him in the house, raced to hear
a poet give a reading, and the day improved. It took a month to not see Aslan’s sore mouth
of red inflamed gums. The only item I ever buy in gas stations is pink bubble gum because
I cannot find it at most grocery stores. My two-year-old niece will repeatedly watch me
blow bubble gum bubbles. One time Grandma Agnes started at the crown of my head and
ran her hand gently down the back of my hair while Aunt Ann handed me a chocolate chip
cookie. Masking tape would not hold up my poster of Mulder and Scully so Mom gave me
duct tape. When I was in second grade, Grandma Rosie gave me my first poetry book,
Marigold Garden by Kate Greenaway. Aslan left a dead bird on my front step today. No one
knows what will happen.

THIS ISN’T AN ALL-NIGHT DINER

I am as mad as Yosemite Sam!
When my feet move forward, the
orchestra gives each stomp a strong
staccato. Take the keys and lock up
my fair lady. You didn’t say UNO!
Lonely preparation
and unmelodious response.
See a penny? pick it up!
Too many choices: Pink Lady, Fuji, McIntosh,
Jonagold, Jazz, Golden Delicious,
Honeycrisp, and Granny Smith.
Grandma always said:
better than sliced bread.
Vegetable knife in my right hand.
Band-Aid on my left thumb. Singed
skin from cookie sheets turns into blisters
that change to small, white, and
unerasable marks. Forthcoming book…
still in progress. Distasteful raw carrots were
inaudibly spat out by a rabbit.
Yosemite Sam strained Mel Blanc’s voice the most.
I make a mean carrot cake despite it all—

HAUNTED NEON LIGHTS

I knew it was over. I folded the red construction paper
in half, drew half a heart on the fold, and the scissors
were too dull to cut the heart out. Time to move on
because…what were we going to do? Hang out? No.
It was time for the sovereign remedies—
I relied on Matt Foley who shouted, “La Dee Frickin’ Da!”
in his “van down by the river,” and who fell a million
different ways then exclaimed, “Whoops-A-Daisy!”
to cheer me up. I laughed along with Elaine when Jerry
put the Tweety Bird Pez dispenser on top of her purse. I
wanted Kramer to put up a screen door and spray potted
azaleas, and afterwards we’d sit on old lawn chairs from
the 1970s: woven straps of green and white stripes held
together with Phillips screws in the aluminum chair frames.
I wanted to grill hamburgers and roast marshmallows
over charcoal. I could not wait to devour the toasted-to-a-light-
brown (on the outside) and the semi-melted, glossy-sweet
fluff (on the inside) of the marshmallows. You knew I was
better when you did not see me crying during most of the Little
House on the Prairie reruns I binged.You were proud of me
when at the midst of a table d’hôte, I did not yodel back to the
lonely goatherd. You laughed when I asked three friends to join
me and we copied the overlapping-legs-walk from the Monkees.
You knew I’d recovered when we watched the flowers growing
by the lamppost that told me it had rhymes for me.

BIO

Alicia Caldanaro was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1968 and graduated from Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, in 1990. She studied at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she earned her Master of Library Science degree and “Specialization in Special Collections” certificate in 1999, which included working on the manuscripts of Athol Fugard. Her past work experience includes being a librarian at academic libraries. Alicia has several published poems, and she took Advanced Poetry Writing courses at Indiana University South Bend in 2023, taught by Professor David Dodd Lee, which encouraged her lifelong love of writing poetry. Her poems have appeared in Plath Profiles, Abandoned Mine, North Dakota Quarterly, Caesura, Analecta, and Laurel Review. Forthcoming: Willow Review. Forthcoming: Alicia will have a book of her poems published by Finishing Line Press entitled, The Needle Has Landed.

John A. deSouza Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

Small World

by John deSouza

Just neighborhood stuff around my in-laws’ house that has changed over the many years.
An afternoon with my wife, her old Tato, and her sister, who disarms everyone with passion
and kindness, with an endless sort of generous, contagious, merriment. We are adaptable
and try to find the best in people, learn something, or find something to connect us in the
neighborhood, which is gritty but colorful like the strings of bright yellow, green, pink, orange,
black, red of the woven reed baskets in the Ethiopian store’s window.

The tree is fenced around,
the little metal plaque says Linda’s Shoes, 1974
on the tree’s enclosure.

But more recently Linda’s
has been replaced by Yohana Convenience Store.
(ዮሐና (yoḥānisi) is my prenom in Amharic.)

The world gets smaller to us
in some ways, in others grows in all the new detail.
There are 109 languages spoken

in Ethiopia. Some spill over,
cross into Somalia, are from before borders.
Tigrinya is a little different,

a Semitic language
that dates back 4,000 plus years. Tigray spills
its blood into Eritrea to the North.

The people on Bloor St., here, are tired
of differences and wars, of violence. They miss home,
gather to joke and roast coffee,

attract others from elsewhere
with the rush of caffeine and untraceable sacredness
of Frankincense and popcorn.

The owner tells me of a 6^th century church,
high on a northern mountain that Orthodox Christians
climb as needed to pray.

The rock-hewn space is beyond our yearnings
for reward and recognition. The ascent is treacherous,
from which no one has ever fallen.

In the Woods

These Connecticut streams
resist arrangement. Doubt
splits attention. Will grapples
rocks. A forced overlay
of wakefulness. No lull.

Here is the stream. In
time’s measure softened.
Blur of capture. Softest
as the light dims. Alone
again, practicing intention.

You and this other,
uncompromised. Flirt
that twists through rustled
leaves. This voice also,
torn sky in treetops.

Thought, a violet clarity,
settles throughout, absorbs
retreat. No path follows.
Moon-time and no-time,
darkness, another return.

Dream here at home,
a living expanse stretched,
the unmeasurable years
alternate, emptied, filled again,
lead back, trickle inward.

Altar/Vivtar/Вівтар

But what do I know of famine and war?
Only the pain or thrill of listening to the reports,
images and videos of other people’s suffering.

Unless kitchen talk, around a Ukrainian table,
like a boisterous altar to a benevolent god,
clever people who were there, who survived.

My wife’s family, five generations
of stories that go back centuries—
What to do, listening to Twitter Spaces,

while I fight slow domestic battles over
what’s for dinner, and my politicians
can’t decide how much not to help.

Letterpress Landscape

Something unspeakable.
Say it. Scraggy trees, a stream, snow.
The way the water
flows across the white card
conveys everything.

The experience of black
streams under white snow,
alive but remembered.
Am I the way there?

While the politicians dither,
good and bad people die.
The reporters putting out bait
for the hate-hunters.

Like those hungry ghosts I animate,
thin necks and bloated bellies.
So many questions, and I,
no longer young.

In the Winter scene there is
less suffering. Describe
what isn’t there is another way.

An invisible stream flowing
between me and you reading this,
a printed landscape.

And in the snow, blood, dead
soldiers strewn like straw.

BIO

John A. deSouza’s poetry has been published by WayWords, Apricity Press, The Orchards, All Existing Literary Review, Half Eaten Mouth, David Cope’s Big Scream Magazine, and has been translated in China in New World Poetry. The poems ‘Altar’ and ‘Letterpress Landscape’ are from his recent collection concerning the war in Ukraine, titled Unimaginable Hardship/Zero Line. The first part of this collection, Unimaginable Hardship was recently short-listed for the Letter Review Prize. John’s wife’s family is Ukrainian.

Ron Riekki Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

I can’t eat cold chicken.

by Ron Riekki

It comes from the war where
we’d get fed cold chicken
every night. I’d ask, Isn’t cold
chicken dangerous? There’d be
no reply. Maybe they were
thinking, War is dangerous.
I don’t know. We didn’t speak
much. It was safer that way.
The worry was that bombs
would get dropped on us,
because we were dropping
bombs on them, and the worry
was that they’d attack us,
storm the building, so that,
when I was security and I’d
look into the jungle I could see
scythes of eyes staring back at me,
and, worse, the real worry, I’ll be honest,
was us, the them of us, how there was this
secret hazing that was occurring, said to
try to keep us on our toes, where they,
we, any of us, could come up behind you,
grab you, duct tape your mouth shut,
your hands to your chair, and then
they’d raise you, haul you through
the hall outside where there was
a fence waiting for what they, we,
they called ‘crucifixion,’ where they
would wrap your wrists to the chain
link and then they could do anything
they wanted to you. It was just ‘hazing.’
That’s all. They’d leave you there
for hours, the insects coming out,
and no ability to swat them,
and, this habit, this tradition,
this stupidity, where they’d take
old food left behind the building
in buckets just for this occasion, slop,
rotted, and pour it over your head,
into your mouth, which, I’d warn,
could cause aspiration, but nobody
listened, and it was too loud to speak
what with the B52 engines owning
the sky and I never participated, and
they came for me one night, but I ran,
into the jungle, escaped.

Bállet (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Translation of a Poem by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää)

“the North chose us”
—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää,
from “I have no beginning, no end”

An Anishinaabe elder told me once how important it is to turn off
the world, the city world, the skyscraping world, with its intense lack of colors
when you consider the multitude of greens in the forests, where the visions
wait for us, and by us I mean the indigenous, and I have spent too much of my life—
and that’s the correct phrase, a sad spending—drowned, when the woods are exquisite
and honest and real and here and now and my Saami ancestors tell us
that we should live like reindeer, become reindeer, and I am trying to become reindeer
and bear and elk and Arctic foxes and trees and rocks and fishes

and birds and birds and peace and more peace and more birds
and, when we were sane, forest-sane, we decided
that we
would marvel

at the night
in the North

the far North, where it is just us,

with the rest of the world so far in the distance, so polluting, and so strained

Sichuan (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Poem by Hussain Ahmed)

“to boil”
—Hussain Ahmed,
from “Love Story”

I was not born
in China but I was born in China. I remember the leafs
when we kissed and I remember the end,
the taxi cab driver with
his off-key karaoke as we both sat in back and neither of us would answer
the other’s questions. We met in the archived
sections of our lives. Soft legs
as thin as my mouth
and we tried to share each other’s history
and sex
but it rained
so hard that all we have left is this water.

Máttar (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Poem by Mario Meléndez)

“‘Get up, you have to come see this’”
—Mario Meléndez, as translated by Eloisa Amezcua
from “Future Memories”

for Bamewawagezhikaquay

I learned at an early
age of my Saami ancestors. My father told me
this:

that the stars
are reindeer. And then this revelation
that every so often one gets away, this thought
of falling stars
as escape, as flight,
him saying that one day I’d run across the sky.

BIO

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to IDLES’ “Danny Nedelko.”

Jordyn Pimental Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

Oh!

by Jordyn Pimental

Oh!
The flora wraps
her tenderly.
Engraved her
in the ground.
Played with hair
and filled her lungs.

Oh!
Rushing and pacing
yet again.
April isn’t meant to be
so hot.
Although my heart did
quicken at the notion.

Oh!
Asked very hushed:
Is it real?
Well-versed
also pretty
enough to make up for it.
Like a picture
or a doll.

Oh!
Aging and crushing,
I’ll embark on the
patterned sea.
Not there yet
although soon.
I love you.

Doll Face

The ocean was alive and well

Life sprouted from each sea while the sun dripped down golden hair

Fitting as many seashells she could fit into the palm of her pearly hand

Now Celine went by Cel and she had evening shifts

But she didn’t always work

Once she slept amongst deep-water coral

Waking to lounge on a bed of barnacled rocks for hours

Soaking in the Pacific warmth, hours turned to centuries

And blue! It was all so beautifully blue wherever she went

A lavish year-long blue soiree with the other nymph women

They would look like ancient artwork when they danced

Once a goddess in her own right

Cel mastered the art of remembering her days with all that power

Before her shift started at eleven she’d stop by the shore

Reminiscing about her old forever

Then drooping with sorrow she’d shuffle back to the diner

Where the old men called her “doll face”

Night Bugs

As for the winged things up high
and the little worms beneath the earth
Lou hurt somewhere in between; feet planted in the herb garden.

Though none of them know
how to dream like a child.
Remembering made her fangs sprout and fur grow.

The lovage stopped growing
because it thought it was late.
Making so much shade that she attracted the night bugs.

She was a nightmare. A monster.
A female monster,
which is somehow far worse than a regular monster.

BIO

Jordyn Pimental is a college student and Massachusetts resident, often wandering. You can find her poetry and visual art in Sea Change magazine and Front Porch Review. Aside from writing and taking pictures, she enjoys finding feathers on the ground of all different shapes and colors.

Fran O’Farrell Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

Flag Day 1968

by Fran O’Farrell

The city grieves for Robert Kennedy–
city that took his life.
The bear flag flies half-staff,

but children bend like birch and will rebound.
I walk home on Beverly Boulevard,
leaving my school for the last time,

the western sky awash with gelt
at four o’clock. I pass ponies
drowsing in their barn–ponies I

am now too old to ride.
(Blaze, my favorite, is retired.)
Small shops prepare to close.

The fountain at Mount Sinai Hospital sends up
a little plume that drops like tears into
a tiled basin. My neighbor’s Tudor house

greets me as I turn onto our street; the paint flakes
from her hitching post, a man in jockey’s clothes who
lifts his hand to take a horse’s reins.

Why can’t I shift the sadness in my heart?
Weltschmerz is in me now,
a companion for all my days.

Kashmir

for Agha Shahid Ali

The Jhelum River makes paisleys
as it moves through the vale.
The waterway houses display
their saffron-colored shawls

and on a houseboat called
Abode of Love a couple waits
for the greengrocer to bring his
shikara to their door.

Tonight guns have fallen silent
on the Line of Control, and stones
once thrown in anger line
the paths of Shalimar.

If you had human form
you would be here to watch
as geldings with curled ears
graze the Fairy Meadows

and islands on Dal Lake
are towed from place to place
until, from the peak of
Nanga Parbat, they look like stars.

Moses

Once you threw your
wand in the sea
and made
a water road

leading us back
to rocky hills
where we made wine
from prickly pears.

You polished with long sleeves
sapphire tablets
until they showed
asterism

and let us rest
in law.

Sylvia at Stonehenge

West through Wiltshire
the monument appeared
and disappeared
as the road rose and fell.

She did not yet know
her world would sink
off Cornwall’s coast
like Lyonnesse.

She should have stayed
in the ring of sarsens
and slept among
the ancient stones.

A Water Burial

his brown eyes turned
to river-polished stones

his high, clear voice
became brook sounds

he came to me that night
with streaming hair

and said he’d swum the Wolf
as far as Loosahatchie Bar

before the current carried him
to God

BIO

Fran O’Farrell is a graduate of UCLA and of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fran’s work has appeared in California journals. Fran has worked as a librarian and magazine editor but is now retired and living in Los Angeles.

Paul Rabinowitz Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

My Ever-Changing Muse

by Paul Rabinowitz

As the morning sun brushes my face
I remember watching you on stage
white bandana woven through dark hair
swollen eyes behind spotted glasses

struggling with the measured cadence
you shade your eyes from the light
then just before the big reveal
a paralysis sets into your jaw

as the audience hangs on for the finish
an unbearable silence sets in
the DJ quickly spins Amy Winehouse
as you duck under the spotlight

you join us poets who preceded you at the bar
I ask if you’d like something special
as you untie the bandana open my book
feel your hair brush my cheek and whisper

Your work moved me

and thought how Amy must have felt
alone on stage under the spotlight
endlessly interrogated by her fans
as she floated away on scattered debris

cheating herself someone might throw a lifeline
instead they screamed for another song
about arrows piercing her heart
bloodstains on the bathroom floor

especially the endings

so when the sun on my face becomes too much
I set last night’s images in order for my next poem
head to the kitchen to make coffee
and find a scribbled note to wake you early

this one’s my favorite

and like I’ve been doing since the beginning
I heat the milk and blend the sugar
that special way you’ve always liked
sweetness inevitably rising to the top

Trapped

This morning
after a week of torrential rains
sitting alone in the garden
watching hundreds of perennials
burst into glimmering clusters
of pink and orange
I trap a memory

walking the perimeter
of a desert crater
I come across
a single flower
pushing through
clay and sandstone

when a small bird
lands on the arm
of my Adirondack chair
its head twitching
as if curious
about why a lost memory
from a distant land
without context
or association
suddenly appears

Yet every detail
of the single desert flower
is clear
like my reflection
in the puddle
at the edge of my feet

and without warning
a spectacular bolt of lighting
charges across the sky

your face appears
crying for help
as I run
down the escarpment
tumbling over
smoldering rocks

the small bird
tilts its head
flies to another perch
under a verdant canopy
protected from predators
as I let go
to find you there

BIO

Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Burningword, The Montreal Review and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020, Mud Season Review in 2022, Apricity in 2023, Rappahannock Review in 2024 and Woven Take Press, 2025. He is the author of 5 books including his latest book of short stories called Syncopated Rhythms due out in 2025. Rabinowitz’s poems and fiction are the inspiration for 8 award winning experimental films, including Best Experimental Short at Cannes, Venice Shorts Film Festival, Oregon Short Film Festival and The Paris Film Festival.

For more about Paul: paulrabinowitz.com

Todd Sformo Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

A Fine Line

by Todd Sformo

Smooth wings of a plane lift: lift’s in the corrugated, dragonfly wing-stroke. Strange, that order of thought—the former manufactured, the latter evolution, the first precise, the second chaotic. Yet, their maneuverings! Under the skin, airplane wings hold regularly spaced spars running the length, and perpendicular ribs give rise to airfoil. A broken wing in a junkyard, without other clues, is distinct enough to say Cessna (genus?) 152 (species?). The veins in wings in dragonflies are windows to species, too, but are given such stolid, architecturally stiff names, “arculus,” “nodus,” “antenodal,” seemingly at odds with an emerald’s metallic patrol over ponds, its vapory phosphorescent eyes leading the charge and leaving behind sparks from thoracic stripes, like little lightning strikes, chimes in a distant wind.

As a mechanic learns stringers and struts, I studied wing venation, back and forth between textbook and specimen, memorizing veins from leading to trailing edge: costa and sub-costa, radius, media, cubitus, and anal. Not Melville-exciting, but then the “rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous” lie in shape veins make as they fork and branch into discoidal fields: polygons arch into hexagons, square into pentagons, propagating constellations; rectangles cross into kite, as tattered wings dangle into Mondrian edge-off triangles. And among its venous tracery, cellophane chitin spans this cathedral’s stained glass—devoid of color—except for the smoky pterostigmata.

I viewed them under the microscope, the wings of Odonata, Anisoptera, and drew their network on rainy days when no insects flew. Veins were in my vision as I walked from lab to home, spotting the hind wings of the four-spotted skimmer Libellula quadrimaculata in the heaving cracks of concrete, a dead-ringer for the map of Italy; outlines in asphalt of a lake darner’s arculus, while checks in slate sketch the nodus-taper in Hudsonia, a boreal whiteface. Pavement fractures are etched with spilled cherry syrup, the latticework of meadowhawks’ reddish wings.

Species of crack, but more crack than kind, and I wondered whether I could discover venation out there as asterisms of a priori wings. My eyes were drawn to cracks as lines that are not things but a lack, de-fining. That a crack does not exist gives rise to absurdity, but we’re saved by tenth grade geometry that comes to life, where line and point delineate a mind’s dot without the flesh of lead. If a crack is not, and a line is no thing, yet has the ability to take sides where none previously existed, is it, itself, creation from nothing?

On the black lab bench, I accidentally brush my elbow against a wing I had previously cut off and lost track of. The veins stick to my clammy skin as I drag it over the edge, watching, almost awfully, the detached wing glide in a slow, monster arc, balanced, horizontal, imperceptibly losing altitude—no struggle, no whirly-gig spasm, no tumble, just doing what a wing is supposed to. Under the complete absence of control

It Does Not Follow

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my drive to work, destination, a point unremarkably fixed, and I, as if on autopilot, wonder after the fact what I saw along the way.

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my first amusement park—Fantasy Island—where I got syrupy legs after eating rock candy then cotton, where masquerade parades without mask in a sudden western town, complete with porch barrel, louvre doors, and a cow, as we watch the lone sheriff draw momentary death, until dead cowboys get up and bow. In an outlandish house because it didn’t have fiendish figures popping up or nozzles flush to the floor spouting an air jet up your pant leg, my voice and hearing got trapped in tiny porous pits in a dining room plush with egg carton walls. By the end of the day, I no longer effortlessly grasped by ineffable thought but slogged on hands and feet the buckling of tidy corridors, straight railings with unsightly twists, giant siblings and shrunken parents. Within easy reach of an exit, on flat floorboards, my knees were the seat of wisdom, telling me I’m walking uphill.

That profile of two faces creating a vase (although this is not a vase and these are not faces) is Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909). A painting’s frame and converging point roughly form a pyramid, with apex tucked inside. A moment’s attention is all that’s required to scan for linear perspective, focusing imperceptibly on a vanishing speck—good ole 3-D (on a 2-D surface, of course). Picasso constructs a contrary, while my mind’s momentum still searches for the Renaissance, reversing converging lines culminating in a new apex outward, toward the viewer, who becomes the vanishing point, drawing attention to what is supposed to be and the wrong that is.

The profile of every thing must be the contour of some thing else? When dusky, or in low light just in bed, eyes not fully adjusted, or looking out from the balcony of a church in winter, when stained glass is black from the lack of sunlight and the illumination by the artificial is too slight, I’ve had moments when light itself changes before my eyes, and no one else notices—no heads turn, no confused faces. It’s not some sign, though, some communication (which would have been nice), but something about me. I made light flicker without light flickering. Staring into a bathroom mirror, I test my pupils and think I can make them move.

My eyes have been in the corner of rooms at intersection of ceiling and walls, an out-of-eye experience, where corneas’ roundness bump into interior’s limits. This trapping room makes me feel big not claustrophobic, but I’ve been in rooms where the mapping is pathologic. With a walker holding her weight, she led and murmured—“microphones”; her finger silence-arcing from lip toward light points on fork and faucet—“phones”; coruscating Vermeer blotches on brassy doorknobs and glassy edges—“bugs,” as we, indubitably, swept through her apartment, shadowing the glare-tropes that pursued us. We were the sun and the flowers.

BIO

Todd Sformo is a biologist in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, working on a variety of Arctic organisms such as fish, bowhead whales, and the freshwater mold Saprolegnia. He has a PhD and MS in biology, an MFA in creative writing, an MA in art history, and a BA in philosophy. Besides publishing scientific papers, he has published prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, and The Ekphrastic Review, and essays in Catamaran, Interalia Magazine, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (Fulbright Arctic Initiative 2018-2019) and Alaska Literary Award (2024) in Creative Nonfiction, Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation.

Sarah McNamara Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

His Shirt Pocket

by Sarah McNamara

I stared at his shirt pocket filled with pens and folded pieces of paper. He looked from me to his pocket and back to me. He smiled and pushed air through his teeth—a laugh, a sigh, maybe both. I could tell you if I looked into his eyes. Everything he doesn’t say is written in his eyes. I wonder why people carry around more than one pen. I’d like to shrink to the size of one and sit in his shirt pocket. He’d chat with me all day. He likes to talk, he’s good at it. Sometimes we just look at each other—our eyes ordinary, our mouths closed. He’s nice to look at, like a forest of deciduous trees, no matter the season.

Instructional Guide for Handling a Crush

Barrel through the train’s cars (he’ll glide out of the way to avoid a collision). Say thank you, but don’t make eye contact (he’ll reply like he knows you). Look at him in disbelief. Resist the urge to grab him and hug him. Say something bright and agreeable. Find an empty seat. Anticipate his face every afternoon. Smile at his enthusiastic quips. When he disappears, anticipate his face and quips for one week (maybe two) before conceding. Invoke him every day. Stand on the trains with your head in a book. Glance at everyone who stands opposite you until he returns.

BIO

Sarah McNamara’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Ink In Thirds and 101 Words. Find her at sarahrosemcnamara.blogspot.com

Chris Callard Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

The Fire

by Chris Callard

It all went up in the fire.

The photos, the chairs, the clothes, the loves,

the work, the flirting with greatness.

Tinged memories, ash-fringed heart.

Embers mocking jabberwocky smoke.

Breathing haze for days.

Fly me to the moon, all the earthly glamor hammered,

smudged mud after the hoses were through.

Crackling sound resonates,

a roundabout due for incineration.

It came, it’s gone, all of it, consumed.

Blow the residue from your nose,

sneeze cleansingly.

And so it goes.

Sharing

My dad shared wistfully that he learned French kissing

as a teen from his older sister.

A 1940s vibe.

After an up and down life, stressful, too eventful,

She had her heart attack.

He stopped by for his check-in and found her on the floor.

911 said give mouth to mouth.

He knew she was gone but could not ignore the professional advice.

Useless, of course, unfortunate, as well.

When he told the story later there was no wistful sentimentality.

Just a sense of oddity.

Strange sibling bookends, sad, sweet, earthy, innocent at 70.

A family tale, remembered by few, now shared again.

Snoring

Your skin is so moving, its kindness so full.

You wondered, said hello,

said you liked this snugly.

You knew, though, how

far past due I was.

Still, a lovely gesture to make.

Why do I say goodbye so boorishly

when I adored your snoring?

BIO

Chris Callard lives in Long Beach, CA. His poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, Witcraft, Cadence Collective, and One Sentence Poems. His short fiction has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Witcraft, Ariel Chart, Gemini Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, A Story in 100 Words, and ZZyZxWriterZ. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions.

Daniel Meltz Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

Last Edit Was Seconds Ago

by Daniel Meltz

Used to be a bungee life off a rusted bridge on a paisley
river named a superfund site during the Carter
administration. Used to be bouts of vertigo and
homewrecking and acid trips on the railroad tracks and
la-di-da books about gravedigging and identity

swapping and shoplifting The Bell Jar at the Brentano’s
in the Village that’s now a Duane Reade. But then I
tomahawked the bungee cord and sproinged like a rock
from a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk slingshot onto lower
Second Av where that notorious hotspot the Saint used to

be, marked by a grease stain in the shape of a gunned-
down body. Every part of me was busted but I still had
the high-pitched bizzbuzz of Yessir or Nosir against my
swollen intellect which echoed through a decommissioned
subway station where a corporal played Taps on a plastic

trumpet. If only I had the one word, be it strength or
emergency or anything as big and unmistakable as that
to snap me out of stupendous stupors, but as soon as the
word seemed to fit the situation it escaped through a
nostril so I discontinued talismanic buzzwords and realized

that if I wanted to stick around I’d have to get professional
help and return to the vocabulary at some point. That
some point is now. And though the word was changing
up until yesterday (words like connect and proportion and
father) the forever word is easy now, it’s kindness.

Lost and Found and Lost Again and Again

Sometimes it’s better to have the upper hand and sometimes
it’s not and sometimes there are no hands to be had in the first
place.

Sometimes someone is always apologizing or overdosing on
Lexapro, full of what Gertrude Stein classified as “servant girl
being.”

Sometimes it’s best to spread love like mulch though it nauseates
firmer temperaments but in the long run inhibits crabgrass from
spreading.

Sometimes it’s best for the snarky to dominate so that the nicer learn
to dish it back and polish a sense of independence that lurks within a
dependent nature.

And the ones with no hands to speak of: Invite them over, they mingle
so effortlessly, although they don’t necessarily make good bosses, yet
they’re so perfect for

each other when they marry each other that, even if one of them dies,
they will marry again because their love life never made them feel
inadequate.

I cannot lie that I like it when your personality changes and you look at me
with a dreamy curiosity as if to say Who is the real unknowable you that can
make me feel guilty.

Bogota New Jersey

                      whoever is stable thats the
                      one to go to everyones
                      got a hope and a secret
                      holdover that comes at you
                      like a grumpy rugrat or
                      retreats from you like a
                      nurse with bad breath
                      oh Lizzie of the sacred
                      snow day sledding down
                      through the intersection
                      of hearts sliced thin I was
                      putting myself together with
                      masking tape and an attitude
                      so worried about the
                      marauding carthieves though
                      I dont own a car this
                      barn these hands at 2 and
                      10 wake up resting mommy
                      and renegotiate with the
                      mediator who is sorrier
                      than a cannibal of all
                      that rope on a poopdeck
                      of weather-beaten rigmarole
                      and a holy I don’t know

Israelites Delivered unto Freedom in Two Kinds of Hebrew

By staying with you as long as I did I guess you could say I got left back 38
times meaning I could’ve wound up age 47 and still in fourth grade but
if it had taken that long to learn long division I still would’ve ended up
knowing how to divide and continued on to fractions. I didn’t divide. I

split. I miss you. I will never forget the
lessons you taught me though I was
such a bad patient for so many years,
so resistant to your help, so addicted
to false enthusiasm and reflecting
plastic surfaces, that at one point you
told me A lot of therapists would’ve
dumped you by now, would’ve told
you you’re unworkable, but lucky
for you I am not one of those
therapists. (What a lesson right there,
a lesson in sassy-ass.) Because all

I’d been saying was no, to whatever observations you offered.
Observations that scalded like cast iron skillets with kidneys
and livers still sizzling in the fat. You said I was sneaky and
petty and snooty and vengeful and smirky and smug and
condescending. How did you expect me to respond to all
those switchblade descriptors? But I hung around anyway.

I had a tiny uncrazy reasonability
in me. It knew your approach was
necessary, fortified, Molotov, en-
dangered. It knew I couldn’t snow
or guilt you. You even warned me
early on that I shouldn’t mistake
you for one of those bleeding-
heart social workers. And besides.

For every thousand or so of my petulant nos, a yes would pop out
of me, freely espoused. And every yes thereof came pressure-
tested, credible, a steel-inforced tulip, in the order of operations,
in the number brought down after subtracting for the remainder.
Yes, I want to suffer. Yes, it’s wrong to cocktease. Yes, I want
to watch you eat dirt. Okay, Mr. Twist-O-Flex. What comes next?

Moving away from you. Learning
to release you. Understanding
how long ago you released me.
Knowing the difference between
repressed bellicosity and catalyst
combos such as independent
thinking, throwing wet clay on a
pottery wheel and (now that we’ve
memorized the poem Moses
sang when he split the Red Sea)
I scratched the table behind my wager.

BIO

Daniel Meltz‘s first book of poems, “It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,” will be published by Trail to Table Press in February 2025. David Sedaris is calling the book “funny, bold and moving.” His first novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State,” will be published by Rattling Good Yarns in April 2025. His individual poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2012, Salamander, upstreet and lots of other journals. He’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist in competitions held by seven independent presses. He’s a retired technical writer and teacher of the deaf, has a BA in English from Columbia (no honors) and lives in Manhattan. https://www.danielmeltz.com/

Kristina Lynn Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

The Collector

by Kristina Lynn

You collect my tears on your palm
like fireflies

and wipe them on your jeans.
The warm moisture smears

into the denim.
I lift my chin and see only

darkness that threatens
to swallow.

There are no stars here,
no cool breeze

playing us for fools
who ditch our jackets.

We are the tall order
that heightens enemy ground,

that escalates wind
into a cyclone;

we are not the Centennial,
glass eyes still shining—

You no longer wish
to lob dice

at the swimming pool.
And still,

I fill my pockets
with stale pennies.

Bottom Feeder

When you jammed your tongue down my throat,
                      When you pried the gaping hole open
and peered,
                      I could barely suppress my elation,
watching the way you mechanically pushed
                      yourself forward,
your Roman nose jutting into my nostrils,
                      your fish lips puckered to suck
in—between fascination and revulsion, I counted
                      your array of spidery lashes, I
counted the constellation of indentations
                      in your skin, I counted on
the precipice of euphoria preparing
                      its heart to eulogize me—Will
the neck turn? When the impact landed,
                      When you nudged me onto my side
and smashed my face into the walls
                      of our one-way aquarium,
I could barely suppress my admiration,
                      feeling for the way
you clumsily pitched yourself forward,
                      your crude fingers
pawing for the lever by my earlobe,
                      your flat ventrals hoisted in midair to flop
in—between reflections of your sleek celestial body,
                      I counted the pitching blackness, I
counted the galaxies swimming
                      in your nebular eyes, I counted
on this far-extending silence to divulge
                      the breadth of the cosmos—
The neck turns;
                      Will it feed when the body sinks?

We Regroup in the Kitchen

Your green eyes play too much—
or are they blue?

Your long legs wide-step
over to me,

you dart around the question
like a minnow.

In the kitchen, I cut
celery and try to peel

my eyes back so I can
really see you—

I make the wet, open holes like a dartboard;
hit them with a double ring

and I’ll abhor you.
You can never land on

what you really want.
My brother says

you’re looking for an ocean
in a landlock,

and I’m the bathwater
you’ll slowly cling to—

is there a door
for us,

Is there a door?
I’ll forget that I can swim

if you can swear
you won’t be the millstone.

Up to my neck
I’ll immerse,

refuse to square up—
you linger; 6 days

and counting

Until It’s Over

I imagine you
standing on the ceiling

when he says
Never once

for you
were always fond of fixtures,

the bleeding heart
still faithfully churning

dead air. He
lets loose the screen door behind him

and I throw my neck out
for the swift swing

still lands
though there’s no one to see it.

See this:
the inch that spares no detail

four thick thighs
on the outdoor swing.

We breathed in time
with the swaying,

and he turned his neck to whisper
when he was through

with shouting. I imagine
you are the fingers

scraping this hollowed-out,
protruded-gut feeling,

if I sit, silent
maybe he’ll hear me

and the ceiling will begin
to unfold

like a daydream. Still
the sun bears down on us

and I bend my left leg
to feel

closer; Tap my shin
until it’s over.

BIO

Kristina Lynn is a writer originally from the Garden State. She recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and has had work published in Eunoia Review and Bulb Culture Collective. She has work forthcoming in Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

Alan Brayne Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

ON MY BALCONY, NOVEMBER

by Alan Brayne

The moon hangs heavy tonight,
A ball of thickened yellow
Dripping treacle onto the sea.
It’s not a night
For fairy wings, or things
That are lighter than air,
Butterflies and feathers of mythical birds,
Thoughts that may take flight.

A cruise ship glitters vulgar
On the horizon, two strips of lights
Slice starkly through the darkness
With blatant bonhomie; I imagine
Boozy faces, balloons and party hats,
Tunes smooth as maple syrup,
A clumsy, groping dance.

And here am I, alone.
Yet, truth to tell, I cannot say
I’m lonely, there’s a loneliness
Greater than this: a feeling that faces
Are masks, that bodies may edge close
But must not touch, an intimacy
Of distance.

The lazy moon floats higher
In the sky, but as its colour pales,
Strangely it glows warm. The cruise ship
Has moved on. The sky is wild with stars
And, foolish as it may be,
I let my lips catch butterflies
Which my eyes only see

NEU!

It’s new! It’s new!
But by tomorrow the shine
Will have dulled, and grizzled old men
Will explain what it all means.
Bright young things, meanwhile,
Will pose in peacock chairs
In virtual nightclubs,
The newest, glossiest peacocks on the scene.

Everything’s preserved now, so
Everything is swallowed
In obscurity, history held hostage
In a cage with intangible bars.
Old-time music plays
On an endless loop, an endless loop
With a beat that repeats and repeats,
But nobody hears.

Everything’s preserved now, so
History conjures from its cage
A range of ancient new toys,
And a raga or a Javanese gamelan
Floats drowsy like opium poppies
Over yesterday’s strawberry fields.
So rest in peace, my bright young things,
Amid your newest noise.

THE SKIN OF VIRGINS

The doctor has a glass eye
And a needle. “Inoculation time,”
He announces, with a grin, “All the feckless poor
Must take the serum.”

The wedding cake stands ten tiers high.
Delicate fingers slice into it,
Delicate mouths peck nimbly
At strawberry icing.

Tuxedos and awards, flashbulbs,
Pats on backs, loud celebration. The boffins
Who mixed this latest elixir of youth
Are allowed to watch from the door.

The Countess bathes in blood
To smooth her wrinkles; she can smell
The skin of virgins on her skin. How dare
They have been so young?

The poor will always be with us,
We say; we never mention
The rich. I guess we’re scared
Of the needle.

EUROPE 2023

Hush now, little dolls,
Don’t make even a peep:
Daddy’s polishing his medals
And mustn’t be disturbed.

And everyone loves Daddy,
Tin soldier in his uniform,
Whose punishments
Are just a form of love.

Mommy’s busy gossiping
Over the fence: she eyes the gem
Around her neighbour’s neck,
The neighbour she’ll later betray.

Fear or love.

Fear or love,
It’s all the same
In these games
Of heroes and villains.

The dolls gather at their windows:
Daddy mounts his horse
And strides the street,
Mommy flashes her jewels.

Six million slabs of meat
And we’ve learned nothing.

THE NORMAL FOLK

It’s the normal folk we have to worry about,
The alarm clocks that go off at six,
The prissy little lawns, the spice jars
In a row.

The people too genteel
To brandish pitchforks, yet
In their nightly hallucinations
Jackals howl, bodies get dismembered,
Their lawns seep blood.

And when the voice on the radio
Tells them to be watchful
Because under the cloak of darkness
Shadows are stealing their spice jars,
They check their fence.

It’s the normal folk we have to worry about,
Decency dressed in Sunday best,
The doorbell playing Mozart, the photos
In the hall.

And when the voice on the radio
Tells them to stand firm
Because otherwise the shadows
Will disconnect their doorbell,
They stand up, they salute,
And they obey.

It’s only normal.

BIO

Alan Brayne is a retired teacher and lecturer from England now living in Malta. He recently self-published a book of poems, fiction and essays, Digging for Water. The author of three novels set in Indonesia: Jakarta Shadows, Kuta Bubbles, and Lombok Flames. Interests include art, film noir, the I Ching, philosophy, and walking. Just recovered from working out how to set up my website: alanbrayne.com

*all poems appear in Digging for Water

Robert Hill Long Poetry

09/19/2024

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

09/19/2024

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.

Daye Phillippo Poetry

Poetry

09/19/2024

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

Ariel Fábrega Poetry

Poetry

09/19/2024

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.

Bart Edelman Poetry

Poetry

09/19/2024

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.

Geoff White Poetry

Poetry

09/19/2024

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.

Timothy Robbins Poetry

Poetry

09/19/2024

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.

Jake Sheff Poetry

Poetry

09/19/2024

The Seagull’s 460^th 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 415^th 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).