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1 / Poems

Stacked Books
Byron Beynon

Byron Beynon

​Beethoven’s Tuning Fork


A memory within music,
a ripening
with vineyards overgrown,
and your mind's ear in tune;
alert with days
you look through a small window
at strangers,
the relentless wave-pulse,
uncorked knowledge
on a journey
through a territory
where time gathers
shards of meaning.
A frustration of the heart's
burning sound,
your quiet breath of power
blurring with the grey rain.

Byron Beynon lives in Wales. His work has appeared in several publications including Chiron Review, The London Magazine, California Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Wales, San Pedro River Review and the human rights anthology In Protest (University of London and Keats House Poets). Collections include The Echoing Coastline (Agenda) and Where Shadows Stir (The Seventh Quarry Press).

Brooking Caldwell

Brooking Caldwell

Tankas on Love’s Double

​

1.    

These pale perky breasts
every day in the mirror,  
this slow-falling tree
far from forest.  Once more, I 
clothe myself for the city. 

​

2.    

Ripening grapes hang
upon receding waters. 
Tantalus stands – still
I long to long like he does,
growing drunk on such clean need. 

​

3.    

Why sew lace to veils
when spiderwebs in morning
give us grief for free?
And briefer. Sticky face, yes,
but softer time, hands. 

 

​

Waiting at the Well

​

Watching   the   movement  of  the
moss-slicked    rope  as   the    song 
of  liquid  kinship   sprays her ears,
she tunes to a topography of depth
and     darkness,    tracking    tinny
splashes.  as   the   bucket  ascends,
mapping  the health of a sprawling

watershed  with  primal awareness

unlocked  by  attention  and  need.

Time    dries     with    each     turn

of   the   wet  wooden  crank.   But

then  –  in  a  soon only rising from

the    depths     of    absorption    –

the   bucket   arrives.    Ripe   with

quenching.   She    wastes  no time.

         She drinks.                                                      

Brooking Caldwell works across the US as an impact coach and facilitator and hosts interactive salons, walks, installations, courses and retreats exploring language as a way of inhabiting communal experience. She has a Tedx Talk on listening like a poet, some contest-winning pieces, and more to come.  Connect at www.brookingcaldwell.com

John Philip Drury

John Philip Drury

To Nuclear Winter


Season of foraging for all we loved:
oranges we plucked through open kitchen windows, 
song-sparrow jazz, The Tempest performed outdoors,
marjoram, coriander, basil, sage,
taking off glasses to watch the full moon throb,
slow turns below a dome, mornings on porches,
canals with boats of party-goers drunk
and singing to their health, a night of spice.

​

We drank it all. The roses in the snow 
startled our mouths into hilarity.
We lounged beneath a tree, pecans in baskets, 
and by the highway raspberry bushes glowed
like harbors after sunset, speckled with lights. 
Seasons of change were seasoning enough.
We smelled their bloom and crushed them on our palates 
and rehearsed hymns with every gulp of breath.

​

            Looking was pleasure in itself, 
not work, not raking cinders from a twisted root,
      not harvesting ice, not hacking tainted meat.
            Here, air’s a mockery of wind, 
thick scum that floats and sticks, then stings and penetrates. 
      Here, liquids burn, so harsh they make us shiver
      in the sub-zero world of our subsistence.
            The shadow from a broken derrick
mottles the graying earth. And all of us make do, 
      rubbing the flakes of ashes like rose petals.
 

​​

​Olympian Ode 11

​

                (after Pindar, ca. 518-438 BCE)

 

Sometimes, people welcome gusts and gales,
and sometimes dousings, drenchings by clouds.
But for those advanced by hard training,
odes provide both lure and reward. They’re the basis
     of fame, sole witnesses
of bouts and knockouts thrilling the crowd.

​

Riches you earn by winning are paid
through song, the praise that reverberates
forever and de-fangs envy’s bite.
Here, Hagesidamas, prodigy of boxing,
     son of Archestratus,
take your olive crown for fisticuffs:

​

my poem. Sweet manly boy, whose punches
     honor West Locrians,
     let the muses chime in, 
triumph be trumpeted. Your people
     welcome any strangers,
their hospitality freely shared
with stranded travelers, wise but poised
     for war, since nature’s fixed
in fox that’s red and lion that roars.


Note:

Pindar’s “Olympian Ode 11” celebrates the winner of the boys’ boxing match in 476 B.C.E. Hagesidamas hailed from Western Locri, which was located on the toe of the boot of Italy. My version of this ode is really an imitation in the spirit of Robert Lowell, and my “licenses have been many.” I have, however, retained the same number of lines that appear in each stanza of the original Greek text and have matched lines syllabically in the strophe and antistrophe, the first two stanzas in the AAB structure used by Pindar in most of his odes; they are followed by the epode, which contains a different number of lines and/or different line-lengths. One translation of those Greek terms is “Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand,” which many of us first encountered in Theodore Roethke’s poem beginning “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.” My primary source was the Loeb Classical Library edition of Pindar’s odes, first published by Harvard University Press in 1915, with original Greek texts followed by the prose translations of Sir John Sandys.

John Philip Drury is the author of two books published in 2024: The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies (from Able Muse Press) and Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers (from Finishing Line Press). After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.

Thames Joseph Ellis

Thames Joseph Ellis

Citizenry

 

– after Campbell McGrath​

 

   My  sprawling  bedroom  wall  washed  in  a  kind  of   blue,

   an  intentional  précis, the  sky  donned  in  twilight, a state

   of   becoming,   my   African-American   Writers   calendar,

   my   Black   American  Art    calendar,   its   stars  in    their

   expanse,  coiled-hair  beings  spinning  in  their  space,  full-

   lipped    beings   stirring   excellence,    complex     creatives

   measured   by   their   creations   in   12 x 12  inches,  August 

   Wilson’s   century   in   cycle,   the   fractured   whole  of    a

    culture   woven   like  stripes,  the  impact  on  my  youthful

    mind,   gifts:                   a   wooden   entertainment   center,

the hue of light honey, a beautiful-sweet coffer for a venerated music collection, for masterpieces  in their evolution  of   configurations, for  vinyl  in  its sacred  cracking,  for  cassettes fizzing in  pulses, for CDs slicking into dawn’s light, 12 hallowed notes in their progression of sounds, all five Clark Sisters in their squall of holiness, their luminous growl on reverb, euphony on my youthful mind,  gifts:

a one-shelf bookcase, a trove of epic epochs: a high school poet riffing on geometric 

postulates. Mr. Ossie sinking slowly into the slip of memory. an airplane dropping 

    down, roaring, crack-splitting the seam of a community. noise. two teenage friends,

    Marvin and Martel, just days apart, get hooked on crack.  such noise.  celebratory

 

   clapping for 45-year-old nurse Ms. Lucille in cap and gown, her grandbaby

   teething. a small family with no electricity has only potted meat for meals.

 

       communion at midnight revival – of Spirit, sweat, wooden floors –  and        

       Princess – who carries in her small purse the last letter she’ll every receive

 

                from her daddy who served in Vietnam – catches the Holy Ghost.

                such wondrous noise. the hero’s body echoes defending his daughter

           from the hands of an abuser. Pastor Watkins preaching “to live,

          dying to the flesh is necessary.” RIPs abound: the two addicts

      die in the span of 3 years. a whole megillah of machismo

      combusts at the center of the b-ball court. the poet inks his

 

        18-year-old name for Selective Services. a sustaining litany                                       

        on why I am too, America.  the  climax  thundering in  the 

 

                   mind of a black youth, gifts: photostat forms flash

                   on Jacob Lawrence’s landscapes, the migrant folks,

 

     hope  and grief,  slanted lives in procession, parasols

                        and derbies, yellows and maroons, suitcases full of

 

            weight, the weight of years, rusted and robust figures

            shimmering, shadows in photomontage, oil fleshed

 

       pigments: a thought: those two might be my

                          great-grandparents, humans, acrylic faces and

 

textured draping of the African Diasporas,

Romare Bearden’s polylithic tales,

      the resolute self to be witnessed, art as

      my mirror, I am beautiful and blessed,

      the rumbling rhymes of Run’s House,

      my black boom box, the

 

soundtrack of senior year                                                     mornings, I Want Jesus to

Walk with Me rotates my

ceiling fan, the tonal mastery

of Coltrane’s Giant Steeps, that

groove in the pocket, it hits,

boom and boomed, my                                                                  

rhythm has beauty, the

 

     Psalms, an ancestral

     legacy, first voices

     cast in ink and prayer,

     a revelation –  a multi-       

syllable existence, Toni

Morrison’s multi-verse,                                                  

  the wondrous whirling,

  the spine breaking                                                                             

   open, the elements of

   thousands of words, a                                                                           

      meteor shower in the                                                                                            

      blue-black, my                                                                                                            

 

nape, my hair                                                                                                                               

rising, this pul-

      sating in my                                                                                                                  

      chest, this

flush of heat                                                                                                

just below

       my face skin,                                                                                                                          

    these

recep-

    tors’

       passions,

              the clai-

      ming,

   the

       

   liber-

   ating of

       

     my

           

   imag-

           

     ination,

 

   me.​

Picture1_edited.png

Thames Joseph Ellis is a poet from Kinloch, Missouri—Missouri’s first all-Black city—where history lingers even as the community has diminished. A recipient of the Hurston/Wright Fellowship and a current MFA candidate at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, his work has appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. His poetry currently centers on Kinloch, capturing its layered heritage and resilient spirit as part of the larger story of Black life in American history.

Kimberly Green

Kimberly Green

like sky

 

when he rolls over in his sleep

and lands

heavily on her

his weight so dense

and oddly        motive

she feels like something

in the way                a door

he is trying to open

she forgives him

dreams

are like that

 

anyway she’s

awake now

could shimmy herself out

from under     but

she’s curious    

 

will a part of his brain     

his inner ear

—something?—

sense her slim body           probably

not

 

the notion of being a door
amuses her        

        okay        she’s that

but beyond the door’s

an element        clear     and blue

like sky

 

if he could just get
through

 

she’s that too

​

​

Due Date

​

Waiting’s a weirding

a mist a shroud    

muddle of forest

hut and tower

fairyscape of bargains

starless and scheming

 

a fear, a fury so

gut-strung and sear

it gnaws in the brain

—let my daughter and her babe alone—

nightlong chant

like a rivet in the bone

 

God of crumbs

coins in my pocket

I’ve a hatchet strapped

to my leg are you listening?

Lead us away from the rat

river no last-minute riddles           

 

Turn back the goat the wolf

the raven and bear

make the bridge safe the giant

slow and the ladder at last

too rickety—

 

in this story the children

are not yours, Terrifier,

they’re mine 

 

 

Riddle

 

I began as impression

shallow basin

for what in time

poured into me

deep-gullying rush and ice-bite

both kinds of touch

scoop and hollow

for deeper fullness—

then a surge of years

skidded past

 

Below my wind-riffled surface 

grew chara, wild celery

long-necked lilies

necklaced in oxygen strings

and farther down in darkness

the mud-tucked eggs

 

Your face came later

hovering

seeing and not seeing

I spied the smallest

version of myself

in your eye—thing

—lake, mirror—

 

Who are you, brother, who fishes

and fishes for more, sure

every silver flash in me is yours

 

 

Hawk, Crab

 

Not only the startled hawk

rocketing, reeling

up from the wind-whipped water

 

but also the crab, all white,

large as the bird

and tied to the raptor’s body

so tightly they rise

in a whirling blur of beak and claw

carapace, feather

 

a single winged and suffering body

that swerves, jerks, suddenly dives down

then thrusts itself skyward again

 

equal cravings bound in knots

of sea wrack and rope

each straining for its opposite element

 

entanglement even I can feel

watching alone on the old town pier

and pointing, shouting, flapping my arms

at terror in every direction

Kimberly Cloutier Green is the author of The Next Hunger (2013, Bauhan Publishing) and Openings for Light to Pass Through, forthcoming by Bauhan in spring, 2025. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have been published in several literary journals. Her honors include fellowships from MacDowell and Hawthornden. She is a former Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, and the Host-Producer of the Rice Pudding Poetry Podcast and Live Series in her hometown of Kittery, Maine.

Signe Hammer

Signe Hammer

​De Kooning’s Women

 

De Kooning’s Women used to frighten me,

they were too fierce:

steel teeth and iron eyes

blind with rage or madness.

 

Then I saw they were not she but he;

his face, his amazed confusion, all that

fury of brushstroke in the loins, the

slash and gash of sex.

 

Later, naked pinup girls, defanged in their doors,

candy-pink of lip and loin,

so much shimmering jelly, really,

a token of teeth in a trapped face.

 

In between, his Clam Diggers, Rubens-soft and

pouty-lipped (no teeth), tiny eyes intent

and lined with green;

his vertical Odalisques.

 

Woman I withholds, but they,

having nothing left to lose,

offer it freely: in fact, before we got there,

they’d given all of it to him.

Signe Hammer’s poems and short stories have appeared in such publications as Fiction, New England Review, Rapport, On Barcelona, Playgirl and the Doubleday anthologies Pleasures: Women Write Erotica and Erotic Interludes: Tales Told by Women. She has published four nonfiction books: her memoir, By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. She lives in New York City.

Roger W. Hecht

Roger W. Hecht

​The juncos don’t


The juncos don't
grasp the tree bark
the way the sapsuckers do--
they hop between the fencepost
& feeder bar, between
old tires and rolls of wire
fencing stacked & ready
for the dump, between
the seed strewn ground
& the fencepost again,
facing off chickadees, sparrows,
& a single male cardinal,
the only spot of color this
two-tone noon, the ground
& trees & garden detritus,
the sky itself, all well-floured
with a light snow that can't decide
whether to stop or start
a serious storm. The juncos
are well-designed for this place:
snow-white bellies,
backs black as a tree stump
or a rock. if they didn't move
who would ever see them?

Roger W. Hecht's work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Gargoyle, A-Minor, Book of Matches, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. His poetry books include Talking Pictures (Cervena Barva Press) and a chapbook, Witness Report (Finishing Line Press). He teaches at SUNY Oneonta.

Kathleen Hellen

Kathleen Hellen

any decent man

 

he wrapped in cloth

in the manger of a shoebox

the baby robin

hopping falling, caught

between the grapevine

and privet. a fledgling

swaddled in his thoughts

that spring into summer

troubled by the rabid skunk

glassy-eyed and wandering

drunk on sweet green antifreeze.

it had stumbled down the gravel

from the mailbox and he waited

in the house with the wherewithal

of generations, until he finally

took aim from the railing. 

​

 

white bird

 

when i called from the porch at sunset, my right arm soft perch for his landing, the cockatoo returned from deep woods to strut the linoleum kitchen. to prance atop the big iron cage he visited only to sleep. or to feed on seeds and berries i gave him. bananas he loved. brazil nuts he cracked with the force of his great hooked beak. his beak that opened drawers, locks, that might have torn flesh into pieces but instead, head bowed to my cheek, gently picked twigs from my tousle of hair. lint from my shoulder or sleeve. he talked to me in whistles and taps and screeches all that summer into fall. alone on the farm. pregnant. the misty bottom reddening to flames. the sun setting like fire through the dark silhouette of trees. then one frost-nipped day. bringing in sheets, i slipped just a little, the ice thin, invisible. from far off I heard him. like the echo in a dream. then there, beside me. from distant trees, in minutes. white bird on my shoulder, his crown a bright flare. his feathers the touch i missed.

 

 

brief history of an 80-year-old pignose hickory

 

i look out at the empty sky and miss

 

the rings

inside of rings. the crows atop

the highest limbs, arguing direction.

 

miss the little shells like snouts

that littered leaf-fall

until bolt-black

 

down the center, lightening split

until beetles’

evidence in sawdust

 

the yellow claw for hours

gnawing gnawing

grim maw of chipper

 

until what’s coming

willful over naked hill. 

Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, Hellen’s work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Witness, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks.

Ken Holland

Ken Holland

Before the Storm

 

My mortality leans into                       

the hard wind as one   

who is inquisitive;

 

but I am not inquisitive,

I am only saying: Come, look

before I go.  Come pitch your body

 

against mine.  It’s your anger,

its liquid voice, that tells me

I am here.

Ken Holland has had work widely published in such journals as Rattle, Tulane Review, and Southwest Review. He was awarded first place in the 2022 New Ohio Review poetry contest and was a finalist in the 2024 Concrete Wolf chapbook competition. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and lives in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. Find out more by visiting his website: kenhollandpoet.com

Paul Jones

Paul Jones

Overpass


Eddie was proposing another petty crime,
the one that would end with his Army enlistment
and what became a one-way trip to Viet Nam.


As usual, he made things sound easy, fun even.
Just a little paint on concrete, a message clueing
friends to who had done the job. We met at eleven


not far from the overpass. Each of us in dark colors
like ninjas or Seals or someone else daring
to break a few rules. The paint cost a few dollars


so we all chipped in. That plus the beer and doobies
cemented our bonds. Four of us soon were slapping "Fuck You
Klan" above the surges of traffic. A thing of beauty!


Until the blue lights changed the scene and our moods,
we were proud of ourselves. We stood up (in secret).
We showed who we were. We were bad but doing good.


Eddie was in the back seat, but I was in the brush.
The other two? Who knew? More lights but none hit me.
The cops drove Eddie off. I wanted to help. But no rush,


I told myself. But by dawn, Eddie's dad had signed
him out and signed him up to serve. He'd had the papers
all but inked. Before ship-off time came, Eddie was confined.


The next I knew, a postcard came from Sunny Saigon.
Eddie was cheery or so he said. But by the next week,
his folks got the knock no one wants to hear. Eddie was gone.


Five decades later, I drove under that same bridge.
I swear I could still make out our faded smears--ghostly
yet alive. Or a trick of light. Or a mirage.

Paul Jones’ poems landed on the moon in February 2024. In 2021, Jones entered the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame. In 2024, Jones’ poem “Geode” was plagiarized multiple times by the notorious offender, John Kucera. Jones’ books are Something Wonderful (2021) and Something Necessary (2024), both from Redhawk Press. Recent poems have been published in Hudson Review, Salvation South, Southern Poetry Review, New Verse Review, and in Best American Erotic Poems (1800-Present).

Victoria Korth

Victoria Korth

​Yellow Triangle

 

after Ellsworth Kelly,

Glenstone Museum

 

First, shed the shoes.

We are underground

where the guard says

he is never bored.

On the floor,

a massive triangle,

its apices misty

as tears

not fallen.

Next, pace the outer arc.

Walls in the skylit room

slope and straighten.

Try to turn away

but fail—lute song

rises as if from a body

secure in its valley.

And beyond,

at the farthest yellow,

a tremendous cliff.

Let me stay here.

Let my angles too

become obscure

and immoveable.

Beauty, dead-close.

Let me breath

this unscented scent,

yellow mist.

 

 

Shrivelment and Namelessness

​

He spoke of lats and traps across the body we were dissecting,

woman without a uterus or an intact brain. We’d borrowed a brain

 

from a huge cadaver with a football-sized bladder

that had become famous among the tables.

 

Anatomy, week three: he, my soon-to-be boyfriend, erect as a surgeon,

apollonian, insisting I read the manual exactly as it is written.

 

I’d never met anyone like him at my citified college, though I’d hung

with students from other states, commuters in black who whirled whistles to disco.

 

I’d gotten turned around on the D train, eaten cannoli from Arthur Avenue,

while up North on his park-like campus, he made his own granola, read Joyce.

 

Our cadaver shaped first glances of each other, teaching me,

believe your eyes when I saw husband flash over his head in medieval neon

 

as he scraped the facial nerve clean, when I decided—he is mine;

and years later on a lush Caribbean sidewalk, when bride appeared

 

in simple white scroll, right there, above that other woman,

the one with too-few clothes, when I came upon them unexpectedly.

 

I loved our lifeless body’s secret life: fist-sized heart, cranium filled with aspic,

wispy muscles that could no longer lift a grocery bag

 

or shift a body in a wheelchair, stringy pink and stinking muscles,

holy tissue, untethered, rearranged, and in her presence first loved him,

 

our ragged story startling through her silence, our past

yet still unlived, a primal trio playing her depths.

​

Victoria Korth's poems and reviews have appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Stone Canoe, Ocean State Review, Tar River Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, Leon Literary Review, and widely elsewhere. She is the first-place recipient of the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the third-place recipient of the 2024 Troubadour International Poetry Prize. The author of two chapbooks, Cord Color Finishing Line Press 2015, and Tacking Stitch 2022. She lives in Western New York State where she is practicing psychiatrist.

Peggy Liuzzi

Peggy Liuzzi

Asymmetry

 

I am an old and crooked tree

a slow and smokey fire

I am an empty box

the last slim sliver of the waning moon

like a cottonwood I store

            star seeds in my branches

my fears are cavernous

I am a cat waiting to pounce

a dried out swale

a cobwebbed window

a sky forever falling

I hear birds sing before each dawn

            and answer like a creaky stair

I am a boney relic encased in gold

            in a soaring stone cathedral

I find it hard to dream at night

my conscience is trapped in amber

I am loved more than I deserve

my parts do not match

 

my shadow is twelve feet long

 

​

“at night”

 

                          at night

                  I dream of poetry

                .  a jungle of forms

                 a jumble of sounds

              every poem an animal

              slithery, scaled, furred

            feathered, feral and free 

         flying above the leafy canopy

       or creeping, crawling, skittering

    tangled in dense nests of metaphors

         shedding syllables as they slide

        sleek and cool through tall grass

    trumpeting rhymes at the water hole

       filling the night with sonorous joy

     juicy idioms litter the fertile ground

 images swish softly through swaying grass

   verses scroll down palm trees like vines

falls of leafy stanzas spill from giant cedars

        scattering on the dark soil below

       where newly hatched words push

                 their snub noses out

                      of the ground

                      like daffodils

            their tender green shoots

                breathing air again

                           at last

Peggy Liuzzi lives with her husband in Syracuse, NY. She enjoys walking her beagle Maizie, practices Tai Chi and finds community and inspiration at the local YMCA’s Writers Voice/Downtown Writers Center. Her poems have appeared in Stone Canoe, Nine Mile Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Slippery Elm Journal, Gyroscope Review and other publications.

Raymond Luczak

Raymond Luczak

​My Favorite Hearing Aid


no batteries required


no need to spend an hour
with headphones gripping my skull
just to raise my hand obediently
to every beep and bone-droned tones
each time my hearing got tested


no need to change earmolds
every few years or wrestle with pain
trying to break in new ones


out in the woods where I wander
among the animals who hide
in their distrust of us humans,
a language deeper than time sings


my eyes, nose, tongue, and hands
are fluent in the trees that hum

Raymond Luczak is the Deaf author and editor of 35 books, including 12 full-length poetry collections such as Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss (Unbound Edition Press) and once upon a twin: poems (Gallaudet University Press). The anthologies that he’s edited in 2024 alone are Yooper Poetry: On Experiencing Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Modern History Press), Oh Yeah: A Bear Poetry Anthology (Bearskin Lodge Press), and I’ll Tell You Later: Deaf Survivors of Dinner Table Syndrome (Handtype Press). His work has appeared in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He was recently featured in Meg Day’s Sound/Off program at the Guggenheim Museum. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Richard Lyons

Richard Lyons

​To M. Beckmann Regarding the Apple of the World


We’re living in harm’s way,
chimney mortar collapsing.
Many contraries flex,
and we end up living with them.


We count on benevolences
as placid as the sunlight.
Didn’t we bury the rifles
so men couldn’t dig them up?


I’m reading the war letters
you sent to your wife Minna.
even as you cherished
the solitude to paint.


I’m a bit put off by the way
you describe yellowish green vapors
wafting above trenches
in northern Ypres


where your artillery lobs shells
containing glass bottles ready to kill.
How does any notion of the beautiful
arrive at the tip of your tongue?


In a film made decades later,
I watch a lieutenant
time two recruits
by how long they take


to affix a gas mask tight to the face.
15 seconds          so you’re dead.
The angle my wife and I
have to this town is a time before time,


houses narrowing to the water.
A sailboat is disappearing
in the haze blocking the sun
like the unreality of an apple being itself juice pulp skin.

Richard Lyons is Professor Emeritus at Mississippi State University. He is a former winner of a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has published four books of poems, the most recent Un Poco Loco from Irisbooks. com; he has published three chapbooks of poems. The two most recent are Heart House, Emrys Press and Sleep on Needles, Finishing Line Press. Recent work appears in Cloudbank, Western Humanities Review, and The Ganga Review.

Leslie Adrienne Miller

Leslie Adrienne Miller

​Chiroptera

 

At 9:30 sharp, they arrow out of the cabin peak
like a squad of jet fighters in formation, each
unfurling with a whoosh as they enter the sheet
of September dark to collect half their weight
in pests. I sit under them with a candle and a lens,
gathering stars, and understand, only after the fact,
those gray wings snapping taut to take the night
are little vectors of madness, mice with no tracks,
subject of opera and children’s tales, fatal
mix of cute and threat that slept all day
in their own shit and then materialized at dark
like gorgeous gloves, pale flags of soft kid
snapped from long hands and cast on a polished bar,
a gold tumbler of moon stationed beside
to prime the instinct’s unbeatable need.

​

​

Shoveling

 

In that long swathe of life when weather
never mattered, the radio went on reporting
what the sky might deliver, and those
who owned ways to the street kept a shovel
by the door. I did not need a shovel.
Not in the tiny apartment across from
the college, not in the studio behind
the antique shop, not in the old woman’s attic,
not even in the little rental house from which
we were summarily evicted. Bad weather
came and went as if by magic until
I married and gave birth. Then weather
carried weight. I had to keep someone
alive. The short marriage had a machine
and a man who enjoyed its noise,
the being out in the blue morning
with other men and machines, filling
the block with exhaust and neat edges.
My son surprises me now by saying
the iced city in which he lives needs
to get its act together. Too young,
I think, to feel a city’s lack his own.
There must have been snow when I
was 20 and living with a man
who drove Corvettes and kept folded packs
of cocaine in our fridge. There must
have been snow when I was 30
and living with a man I’d find
mornings lying in the yard
where he’d fallen drunk the night before.
But no, there was never really snow
until there were just the two of us,
me and the child standing at the curb,
flanked by two walls of snow,
snow I dug and heaped before dawn
to make sure our escape was clean.

 

 

The Damned One

 

I look out at the dark yard one last time
before sleep, rain sucking the light
out of everything green, and there she is,
a cartoon skunk waving the striped plume
of her tail like a 40’s bombshell flipping
feathers of her boa to put a finer point
on some refusal. I realize I don’t know
how skunks are supposed behave
during the day, where I might discover her
among the weeds I’ve let go, screen
against the daily havoc of two boys
who like to shriek, smack, and maim
anything in their path with shovels,
or better yet, heave slabs of broken
concrete at my fence. I’m not keen
on meeting the skunk myself, but smile
at her verve, cast a little of my own
potent darkness into her. Maudite, a word
a man used on me once, more wish
than fact, now the name of a strong
Belgian ale. All she has to keep her safe
are stink and prance, a little more eyelash
than her mate. Unless she’s staggering,
rabid, or God forbid, unexpectedly tame.​

Leslie Adrienne Miller’s collections of poetry include Y, The Resurrection Trade, and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, and Crazyhorse. Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, she holds degrees in creative writing and literature from Stephens College, University of Missouri, Iowa Writers Workshop, and University of Houston.

M. Nasorri Pavone

M. Nasorri Pavone

​Unlicensed Nine-Year-Old Therapist


Local Private Practice

 

The first time I share a bed with my mother, I’m excited

to whisper and snicker like silly sisters, but no.

 

She lies beside me as if in a confessional, listing not

her sins, but all the sins committed against her. I advise

 

we leave my father who throws fits like a threatened ape,

promises to get a knife or a gun and use it. Each night I listen,

 

question, counsel and comfort. Since I’m nine, I feel wise,

special for my ability to not be nine. In school, the kids ask,

 

Why do you talk so fast? I don’t know what to say, but think

about it for years until I realize the speed in which I spoke

 

was to get the words out. Not all of them, but I keep getting

closer. I love to find fallen feathers at my feet, to watch

 

moss spring back after being stamped. Why is there so

little time to be heard? Love always calls for more listening.

M. Nasorri Pavones poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, Rhino, The Citron Review, Innisfree, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review, One Art and others. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and nominated several times for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

Terry Quinn

Terry Quinn

​The Snail on the Stair

 

who halts me with

Italianate geometry—

his lengthening slug-

body bark-textured

and pale along gray

woodgrain—rests.

I fix him a moment

in mind, intending

a later metaphor before

I hasten to the day and

forget him quickly as,

turning for the forgotten

something I’ve since

forgotten again, I feel

through my sole his shell

surrender to my weight,

his softness as well.

And the cry that shocks

in shuddering out of me—

is it his or mine? Some

compressed essence

violently unspiraling up

and through me? or some

recollection of self to

self, my mindless rush

broken, my protective

inattention unraveled?—

somehow, opened at once

to so much pain—my own

and my fellow travelers’.

 

 

And This Morning, a Dead Moth in Our Mailbox

 

Where were you when I needed you

to laugh at me last night—come home

to find on guard at the back door

fifty moths and me with nothing

but a flip-flop and a fool’s rage?

If you had been inside, had come

to the window while I beat them dead,

had been swift at the door when I made my break

and caught me one-sandal-hopping

into the kitchen, I might not have slept

so poorly, not have dreamt

of their soft bodies touching my face

or woken up choking, sure my mouth

was full of them: their fur, their wings,

their eloquent frenzy to escape.

Terry Quinn grew up in Pittsburgh. He studied creative writing as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis and later in the master’s program at Boston University. He currently lives in St. Louis, where he teaches high school English and writes poems while walking the dogs around his old city neighborhood.

Kelly R. Samuels

Kelly R. Samuels

I Am Speaking of a Tree


By the time we returned the crabapple had begun to succumb
to apple scab. The leaves were spotted and dropping


and there was, over only a few days, so much more sky
to be seen. We mourned in ways that allowed us to carry on


with all that was required of us, though at night I found I couldn’t

sleep thinking on its slow demise. I asked anyone who would listen


why it seemed trees didn’t last as they once had: the maple
that had been there, was there, was still there, would be


there rocking in wind, shedding its samara. I used to gather
armfuls of them just to watch their frenetic unified descent.


We read that we are to rake up these diseased leaves
and destroy them. It’s the most we can do—


the only other action difficult and futile.
And when the tree dies, we are not to plant another


of its kind but a more resistant cultivar, though resistance
is relative, we are also told. Even what claims to be hardy


may fall victim: those elms at the farm, the pines
along the road where we saw the black bear foraging.

Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections and four chapbooks—the most recent Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press) and Talking to Alice (Whittle Micro-Press.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Denver Quarterly, december, and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

Matthew Schmidt

Matthew Schmidt

​Oceanside, California, 2007


Away from shore
the idea of waves


transgresses grass;
a company of crickets


hums in the thicket.
To open a locket,


finger the photograph,
imagine sand and hunger


for the past, its dying
images ignited. Slip


hands into garden gloves,
plant rows of tomatoes,


peppers, cilantro. A small wire
fence against encroachment.


You hover around my neck
yet people forget. No next


door to enter, no light
switch to flip or potatoes


cooling atop the stove.
Reeds rustle, birds alight,


normalcy promises your voice
will break through the hedges

Matthew Schmidt’s poems have been published in Pleiades, The Seattle Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review and the Co-Founding Editor of the Iowa-based literary editing and educational nonprofit 1-Week Critique.

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