1 / Poems
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
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
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
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.​
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
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
​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
​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
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
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
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
​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
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
​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
​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
​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
​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 Pavone’s 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
​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
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
​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.
