26 poets in this issue: Peter Ewer, Ace Boggess, Emma Lee, Sam Smith, Dotty LeMieux, Rob Schackne, Denise O’Hagan, Philip O’Neil, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Maureen Butler, Alec Solomita, Michael A. Griffith, Francine Witt, Josh Medsker, Lorraine Caputo, Carol Hamilton, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Christine Collins, Robert Wilson, David Dephy, Nicole Horowitz, Anna Teresa Slater, Judith Borenin, Kate LaDew, Kirsty Niven, Xe M. Sánchez
POETiCA REViEW 2 Summer 2019
Peter Ewer 1 poem
White nectarines
They’re good this year:
Not the tasteless cannonballs of flour
Masquerading as fruit
You get too often,
these days.
No:
Proper fruit for sure this summer
Sweet and yielding,
Miraculous really
Given the industrial apparatus
Clanking fumes and pesticide
That got them to my table
But perhaps it should be said
Not for so much longer
Because they’re dying, you know
The bees on which the trees rely
No-one quite knows why:
Exhausted by mechanical pretence,
I shouldn’t wonder
Whatever (an exclamation for the age, if ever one was apposite)
I bought them for your breakfast
The one that never came:
We expired
Not failed
But ran our natural course
Between the retail act,
And the moment in the morning
When I might wash and quarter
A lustrous scarlet globe
And offer it
Votive
On a white china plate
With a cup of tea
Upon the bedside table
Strange
The tasteless fruit
A silent hive
Of all the barren years ahead
Might have been more in keeping
With the temper of that day
And the solitude of morning
Peter Ewer lives in Melbourne, Australia. He has published four books of Australian history, and his articles appear in academic journals in Australia, the UK and the US. He holds a doctorate from RMIT University, Melbourne, and this is his second work of poetry, having previously been published by Outlaw Poetry in February 2018. He thinks we better start taking an interest in the condition of the world, because the planet is dying.
Ace Boggess 1 poem
Prison of Memory
departing anywhere ignites
the oil & pitch that introspection is
why want now what I didn’t then?
I go back in time to walls & razor wire
I’m haunted by the box of bricks
built to contain inescapable longing
I would not go back though I do
that part of me trapped in silence never leaves
Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His writing appears in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
Emma Lee 3 poems
I'm here, wherever that is
It took two years to get here.
I couldn't find it on a map.
It's not London. It's damp.
I was given thirty-five pounds,
and have to skip meals
when I pay for English lessons.
I'd sit and stare at walls
until I found the library.
There's no time limit.
I hear foreign tongues
in the next room: neither
English nor my language.
I said "Hi" to someone
without averting my eyes today.
She said "How are you?"
I know to say "Fine," now.
The grey lifted, momentarily.
I saw a map. I still don't know
where here is, but I now know
it’s two letters from home.
Maligne River
Windows 10 asked if I liked this picture:
Maligne River, blue against the ubiquitous rocks
and pines with a backdrop of mountains in Alberta.
My fingers clicked yes before my brain registered.
Was it familiarity? I'd been there.
Was it the story of how it got its name?
I close my eyes: the first image is the water.
It forms a line separating mountains, allowing
grasses to grow between rocks, goats to graze
and sun to reach pines watered by the subterranean
seeping of the river that reinforces the boundary.
It would take more than a human lifetime to erode
the grey rock that fails to react to the drama
of weather and nature around it.
The river surface is calm, hiding undercurrents
fed by underground springs. A rider
named the river after his horse was spooked.
Easier to name something malevolent
than consider why. Easier to blame the horse
than think there's something not quite natural
here. Under the grace of a swan, observers
don't see the paddling feet, the push against
competing directions below the surface,
which reflects the sky back, the liquid
giving it a shine, a skim of glitter
to detract from the dark pool below.
This river is a map of my childhood.
The two-dimensional image offers a choice:
focus and understand the hidden third dimension
or look at the pretty gloss and move on.
The Stigma of being Incomplete
Engineers built the best version of a specific human being:
a robotic replica with heart, lungs and face to show
use of robotic limbs, neural implants, hampered only
by the inability to feel the objects they can manipulate.
The original subject found the pulley and harness to control a hook,
to replace his left hand which he'd been born without, chafed.
He rejected it in favour of a myoelectric prosthesis, an i-limb
which gives him twenty-four grip patterns controlled
by an iPhone app. He could only dream of things he can now do:
wheel a suitcase whilst talking on his phone or write left-handed.
He jerked in shock when he first met his replica.
It could behave like him, it virtually looked like him,
but skin warmed by electronics does not yet compensate
for the absence of blood. Lifelike, but not yet life.
Emma Lee’s recent collection is “Ghosts in the Desert” (IDP, UK 2015). “The Significance of a Dress” is forthcoming from Arachne (UK). She co-edited “Over Land, Over Sea,” (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), reviews for The Blue Nib, High Window Journal, The Journal, London Grip, Sabotage Reviews and blogs at .
Sam Smith 2 poems
Aphorisms for the Unkind
How to die
Behold the 5 stages of dying:- Denial (Can’t be: I am too alive. Too now.)
Anger (Why me? Bastards.)
Bargaining (Not just yet. Let me…)
Depression/Suicidal (Might as well be me ends it.)
Acceptance (So be it.)
On the gale-battered hillside are the root starbursts of fallen trees. At the rear of an empty shop, and in the puddled bottom of a dented skip, 5 bald models, arms and legs awkwardly over and under each other as in a Belsen mass grave. Death walks in step with us. We become used to His presence, His offer of finality. We who know this however live among the self-blinded and the made-deaf, have to edge cautiously between those who require the world’s truth in a single phrase.
How to live
Not on watershined roads, and in among cars that are sold on their carefree image, anxious people driving before and behind. Nor must you arrive seeking a master. Maybe you will manage to avoid Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. If not you may still, hating yourself, assiduously follow a Four-fold Path. And, if fortunate – and Chance like Death definitely exists – you will possibly – in this world at this time – cultivate the cold unsentimental eye of childhood; and, for a while, you may yet bleakly survive.
Sam Smith is editor of The Journal magazine and publisher of Original Plus books. Author of several novels and collections of poetry, he presently lives in Blaengarw, South Wales. https://sites.google.com/site/samsmiththejournal/
Dotty LeMieux 3 poems
Elaine
No one has to tell her Henry Miller makes better reading
than the Boston Globe
No one has to tell her she was born too late
for beatnik desires
These things we learned together
calling it “identity crisis”
Born under the same sign,
we are twenty-two years old
Friends
When I’m not feeling well
she reads me Ferlinghetti over the phone
buys me coffee without sugar
And sometimes at bus stops in winter
we hug each other like victorious Russians
In spring we go to the river
We go there to be disappointed
and disappointed we come home
Elaine makes tea and omelets
and we read poetry to jazz records from the library
Sometimes there’s wine
Then we dress up in turtleneck sweaters -
Elaine closes the curtains to shut out the traffic
And we dance
There are no calendars in Elaine’s house
and no five o’clock man to stop us.
For a Poet I Once Loved
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” T.S. Eliot; The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1920
Sorry that I took your words
for mine; but I did leave
your silk purse with the rainy day
fund; and I refrained from drinking the new wine
you were saving for inspiration
and the coveted red cowboy boots which were tempting
and so much more practical than ruby slippers
I could have taken those abstractions of yours
that pay the rent
and keep the lights on
and the gas flowing
the common household necessities
that fuel the body and the mind
and keep the blah blah blah dripping
from your oh-so-ripe-for-the-plucking
tongue.
Stealing the Souls of Strangers a Haibun
We are strangers in this diner, 1971 Alabama, a group of Northern journalists on vacation. With my borrowed camera, I have been charged to “document the trip.” But maybe those words were not to be taken seriously? The South is a timeless place of fog and moss and molasses rivers, bathrooms in filling stations reading “white” and “colored.” The journalists try to fit in, smile sweetly, politely praise the canned cherry pie, accept more coffee. Everyone in this place is white, it goes without saying, even us.
The waitress’ name is Crystal, embroidered on her cap. She holds a bottomless pot of coffee. Men she knows, big rig men, ranch hands, hangers on, call out—Hey Crystal”—or —Hey hon! or just grunt and incline their heads toward their empty cups.
time ticks or is stopped
faces blank and pale gaze within,
feign obedience
I ‘m not sure you should—starts one of the journalists, as I click, shoot the dark haired man at the counter under the sign reading “Grade A Everything.” And click, at Crystal, who doesn’t notice or doesn’t care or doesn’t want to antagonize. And click, at the other man I think looks like Woody Guthrie if Woody Guthrie was still alive and out of work, and out of luck. The journalists worry, but no one shows anger or pleasure or even surprise.
alligators with eyes closed
look like logs, submerged, still,
waiting
We leave, not hurrying, as we pile back into the red van. The journalists will take notes tonight in their tent, camped someplace safe, if such a place exists. If not - and how can you possibly know? - they will find a motel or drive through the night to New Orleans, where the streets are crowded and no one is from there. My film waits, safely tucked in its black box, until we reach the Berkeley darkroom where I will unspool and release the souls of all the strangers locked inside.
birds like small airplanes
lift from the murk, ascend toward branches
of trees that are not there
Dotty LeMieux's work has appeared or is forthcoming in in Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, The Poeming Pigeon, Ekphrastic Review, Gyroscope, Solo Novo and the anthology After/Ashes, among others. I have had three chapbooks published and edited the eclectic the Turkey Buzzard Review, in Bolinas California in the 1970’s and 80’s. I studied with poets Joanne Kyger, Edith Jenkins and Thomas Centolella. My passion is running political campaigns for progressive candidates, mainly women, and I live in Northern California with my husband and two dogs.
Rob Schackne 1 poem
“Sunlight through”
Sunlight through
a white bird's wings
where I am right now
the sun is setting
the radio has news
torture & indifference
my heart must shift
to make some pasta
drink the wine alone
the poems in my head
black pepper & salami
are you a little hungry
all switch the station
it's almost ready
Rob Schackne was born in New York, Rob lived in many countries until Australia finally took him in. He worked for many years as a Foreign Expert EFL teacher in the People's Republic of China. Recently returned, he is living in country Victoria, Australia, where he enjoys the fresh air and the birds. There were some extreme sports once; now he plays (mostly) respectable chess and pool. He listens to the Grateful Dead. He claims he can read Shakespeare in the original. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao.
Denise O’Hagan 1 poem
A gift for the taking
Hunched on the edge of her bed
Fingernail curling into the blanket
She felt the slow wings of panic
Closing in around her
Beating her thoughts out of her
Squeezing her breath thread-thin.
Life is a gift, my father said
She sat there
A husk of her former sixteen-year old self
So light she could blow away
It would be a relief, really.
It’s a gift I never asked for, I replied
But what would it be like
To not be?
No one asked, he responded
Hugging her thin t-shirt tighter
She frowned at the ink stain on her sleeve
And shivered on the edge
Of a perilous moment.
It’s still a gift for the taking.
So she clutched at his words
Mantra-like, embossing them
On the walls of her mind
Shielding herself
From herself
And from what lay outside.
Denise O’Hagan is an editor by trade. Born in Italy, she lived in the UK before emigrating to Australia. She holds an MA in Bibliography and Textual Criticism and works in publishing. Her poetry is published in various literary journals including New Reader Magazine, Other Terrain Journal, Pink Cover Zine, Literary Yard, Backstory, Other Terrain Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, Poet’s Corner/InDaily and The Blue Nib. She was commended in the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize (2018), shortlisted for the Robert Graves Poetry Prize (2018), and received a special mention in the Pangolin Poetry Prize (2018).Website: https://blackquillpress.com/
Phillip O’Neil 3 poems
IN MEMORIAM
(Sarajevo)
She fades against a sky of stars
a trapeze artist trembling inside her own shadow
on the canvas of a traveling circus
transfigured to the mother of La Pieta
outside the Bislaliko Sepulchri
beside a wall pockmarked by shrapnel
fragments of a war
torn among burned books by live rounds
trembling again the shy girl,
whose war I fear, I loved above
the girl that came before into a life
who shied away the blood
bloodier than the belly of a hit and run
knew death only from a freak accident
a suicide away in the next tower block
Oh! soar to her day and night
Brittled by my own haphazard events
while I enfeebled to inaction when she nears
she breezed into my cracked circle
a train spilling its guts like a dissected worm.
ROOM FLAW
Here’s the nightclub of contradiction,
whiskies and wallets by the roulette spin
under a two-legged knot
of a pretzelling major
lap dancing for tuition and sprees.
‘Dance for me
Why won’t you dance for me?’
These are the hard-graft hours
of the banishing
in our nightclub of the soul,
the lock-in in this odd inn
you stepped in unawares
tickled by fat bouncers’ fingers
‘breaking or starting up a fight’.
Liked then loved, craved then addicted,
a revolutionary and his bloody flag
you also want to leave
but it’s never quite the right time.
‘Dance for me,
please dance for me!’
Remember the daily diary entries
hallmarked with apoplexy and mild conceit
too numb armed at drowning the pickaxe of a past?
Your baby-stare through fish-eyes
delicate for contacts,
watching the stomach of a brain
churned by sour fairies
in the velvet room’s mirrorball
above the stink of last night’s discotheque,
the butt ‘n’ spirited end
of a long and cheap night out ...
my sexless, hexed, anorexic dancers split
over broken brandy glasses
blood and ash tables
dead clients face down
in an inherited rot.
‘Dance with me,
Won’t you please dance with me?’
THE FOUNTAIN OF TEARS
(for Gabriel Garcia Lorca)
The hike leads us to a spring in an olive grove
buzzing trees dry as the chafing cicadas
tiny castanets in the gnarls and branches offering
no shade on the old road cracked as a map.
Yet, still, somehow they step out
from no possible hiding-place,
men of leather, torn uniforms and gun metal,
sick, souless eyes with the cataracts of death
spewing keen barbs into every vessel
hooks and claws in every valve
like a hundred fly-fishing accidents
flicking blinding hooks into eyes
We’re whitebait ripped by sharks
that know the common flesh but tear
just the same.
My words want to barter
assassin thongs
for the filaments of angels
mindgame a way out
in this place of dead roads
begging and pleading the gangster goons
crying mercy against the gloves
cocking rusting guns.
Lined up by a trench
we wait for the captain (who hangs
scalps where others wear medals)
to step from the old man body of the tree
all stubble, tobacco and spit.
The Fountain of Tears
where men lie stacked playing cards,
food for the groves, siesta country
where peasants dose as civil bullets fly
the poet sent to an unmarked grave
by the fathers of children
who’ll build theatres for his words.
Philip O’Neil is an English writer living in Prague who worked as a journalist for over two decades in various parts of the globe. His poetry has been published in Ygdrasil, Wilderness House Literary Review, Suisun Valley Review, Mad Swirl among others. His first novel ‘Mental Shrapnel' is due to be published later this year.
Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal 2 poems
Red Apples
When she tells me
someone is going to kill her,
that she’s sweating in fear,
I ask her to be calm.
She said a man offers her apples
laced with something
that would put her to sleep.
She said the man is so cruel
for words because
she cannot resist the red apples
he brings to her door.
She said the man is a gentleman,
who has split personalities,
like Jekyll and Hyde.
I ask her if she has been taking her medicine.
She responds, What does that have
to do with anything?
She asks me to leave and remarks,
I would rather have the apple.
Certain Words
Certain words have their place.
It is the silence they crave.
The unreliable narrator is not
accounted for sometimes.
He speaks, she speaks and
the words come out of the bottle
as the genie sleeps. Words are
free to roam, though some rake
up heavy debts and emotion
does not give way to common
sense or reason. Certain words
will lead you to an early grave.
There they will find silence.
Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, born in Mexico, lives in Southern California, and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His first book of poems, Raw Materials, was published by Pygmy Forest Press. His other poetry books, broadsides, and chapbooks, have been published by Alternating Current Press, Deadbeat Press, Kendra Steiner Editions, New American Imagist, New Polish Beat, Poet's Democracy, and Ten Pages Press (e-book).
Maureen Butler 1 poem
When You Die
When you die
You only know part of that day
You won’t feel fingers on the pulse
No longer there
You won’t know that snow fell an hour later
That the temperature plummeted
You won’t hear the crunch of tires on the ice
As a car pulls into your driveway
The thrum of the furnace
The cough in the Hall
The grandfather clock never again
Measuring your time
The click before amber light
Banishes gloom
But not now, not for you
You won’t see the table being laid
For mourners
Your faded gravy stain from last Christmas
That you hid under a serving bowl
Or your husband’s grimace as he
Stays glued together with every shallow breath
Breath that you will never breathe again
Your blouse on the floor
That you will never retrieve
The dishes half done
The unfulfilled apology
The hollow sound of grief
echoing behind you.
Maureen Butrler has been a professional actor/director most of her life and currently lives in Maine. She lived in Galway, Ireland for a year where she studied poetry with Kevin Higgins, and rediscovered her passion for this form of expression. She is married and lives with her husband and two enormous dogs.
Alec Solomita 1 poem
Neighbors
I know they think but I don’t know what.
They know I drink but they don’t know why
(neither do I).
A rat lives under their basement sink.
Alec Solomita has published fiction in the Southword Journal, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, and The Adirondack Review, among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal, and named a finalist by the Noctua Review. His poetry has appeared in Algebra of Owls, The Galway Review, MockingHeart Review, Driftwood Press, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. He lives in Massachusetts.
Michael A. Griffith 1 poem
Mitosis
When nuclear war was the realists’ fear,
before AIDS, Ebola, Ebonics, Ebay...
we split, divided before these things evolved.
Live Aid was our Woodstock,
nouveau hippies, pseudo cools,
so in love on smoke-hazed weekends.
Your cells traveled so far,
while mine stayed, comfortable in the
petri dish gel
as we both expanded apart.
I wish we could join together,
form a temporary tissue,
relive our past as cameras can,
if even just for some hours
to feel the haze once more,
smoke leading to fire to see ourselves
once more as we were,
with membranes of what we've become
not mutations of what we might have been.
Michael A. Griffith began writing g poetry after a disability-causing accident. His chapbooks Bloodline (The Blue Nib Imprint) and Exposed (Soma Publishing and Hidden Constellation Press) were released in fall 2018. Mike was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry in October 2018. He lives near Princeton, NJ and teaches at Raritan Valley Community College. He is Poetry Editor (US/Canada) for The Blue Nib.
Francine Witte 1 poem
When you come back, maybe then I can leave
-
A house is a. It is not a verb. If you never heard the word out loud, you’d say it wrong. (See love.) A house is taller than you. It has walls that are thicker than you. At night, it gets darker than you. (See doubt.)
-
A house is a. It is not a noun. It is a container inside other containers, and it holds containers, too. It holds people with bodies and hearts. (See eggshell.) It’s inside a neighborhood, a town, a world. (See inside and inside and inside.)
-
A house is a. I thought you were one. I thought love was one. I was going to buy a shelf. I was going to buy a dinner plate. (See trying to plant a dolphin.)
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks, two flash fiction chapbooks, and the full-length poetry collections Café Crazy (Kelsay Books) and the forthcoming The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) Her play, Love is a Bad Neighborhood, was produced in NYC this past December. She lives in NYC.
Josh Medsker 2 poems
Planctus for My Youth
(After Elizabeth Bishop)
I still think of you, in dark times
and light.
The skins I have shed, bold
and fragile alike, trail behind me
ribbons of memory—
Shorter now, having been hooked on
this pain or that, torn away, leaving
ragged edges, but still there.
Song
Used to be that a song could
set everything right side up
with a chord
change or word
Oh me
Please let me be that free again.
Josh Medsker's writing has appeared in many publications, including: Contemporary American Voices, The Brooklyn Rail, The Review Review, Haiku Journal, and Red Savina Review. For a complete list of Mr. Medsker's publications, please visit his website. (www.joshmedsker.com)
Lorraine Caputo 2 poems
PALE FRAGRANCE
When the sun dips beyond
that western volcano
its rays whitening the sky
gathered clouds changing
to gilded magenta
before fading in the dusk
swells the perfume of a lily
I found abandoned
on the stone steps
of an ancient church
one of its pale yellow
petals ripped away …
& one night
I awaken to this just
eclipsing moon peering
though my window
its light shining upon my bed
& whitening the sky, broken
clouds
before slipping beyond
that western volcano, eclipsing
eclipsing …
& the perfume of that yellow
lily of on torn petal
drifts in this room
CIVILIZED
(a poem for two voices)
1889—This building is 100 years old—1989
“The civilized peoples are those that show
respect for the symbols of their past.”
—White marble plaque on the building
at Calle Chacabuco No. 917,
Buenos Aires, Argentina
& these “civilized” people
celebrated Roca’s campaigns of
the Conquest of the Desert
They celebrated your
extermination
Now they must come
face to
your face
Emerging
From the polychrome stone
of Humahuaca Canyon
from the burning Chaco
& from the wind-beaten plains
icy bays, snowy mountains
of Patagonia, of Tierra del Fuego
Where your peoples
Kolla, Chiriguano, Tapieta, Chano
are arising
Wichi, Toba, Mocori
celebrating the survival
Mapuche & Tehuelche
of your civilization
Ona & Yanamá
Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 150 journals in Canada, the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa; 12 chapbooks of poetry – including Caribbean Nights (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Notes from the Patagonia (dancing girl press, 2017) and the upcoming On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019). In March 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada chose her verse as poem of the month. Caputo has done over 200 literary readings, from Alaska to the Patagonia. She travels through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
Carol Hamilton 2 poems
Velazquez
Though painted in as himself
at the easel in "Las Meninas,"
what artist is so hidden,
so "not there" in his works?
His subjects are somehow revealed,
yet there are many unknowns
behind the artist's eyes,
so sympathetic but with no taste
for flattery. His works fill
the page, the wall, captivate,
some grand and others tiny.
His hand of creation slips
behind the impasto, modest,
but is thus so present
in the impact of the work itself.
The palette, though dark,
is powered by light.
I see no ego there, but assurance.
As I turn the pages or stand
in the museum, his works pull
me in, over and over, asking ….
what? Perhaps just an invitation
to enter and seek who
we are in his dark eyes.
Manner of Travel to the End of the Trail
"I will fight no more forever."
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Tribe
For some, the trail we march
before we reach the dead end,
the boxed-in corner, the last hope,
is hard. For most the way
is lined with glitter, twinkly
led lights in the trees
that line the paths, new purchases,
filled houses, full garages
and packed-tight driveways,
storage buildings needed.
The Nez Perce struggled
and hoped for a thousand miles.
They did not have a say
in their fate. Our flinty eyes,
filled with wants, go merrily
along the pathway,
dreaming Nirvana.
We devour the trees
and their fruits as we go,
assured of our rights.
A no-exit canyon awaits
us all, the jolly day trippers
and the desperate strugglers,
the one creating, the other suffering
the path leading to the same trap.
Carol Hamilton has recent and upcoming publications in Pinyon, Sandy River Review, The Big Window, Commonweal, Bluestem, Southwestern American Literature, Pour Vida, Adirondack Review, The Maynard, Sanskrit Literary Magazine, U.S.1 Worksheet, Broad River Review, Homestead Review, Shot Glass Journal, Poem, I-70 Review, Louisiana Literature, Haight Ashbury Poetry Journal, The Aurorean, Blue Unicorn, Birmingham Poetry Review, Pigeonholes Review, Oddevill Press and others. She has published 17 books: children's novels, legends and poetry, most recently, SUCH DEATHS from Virtual Arts Cooperative Press Purple Flag Series. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.
Claudia Coutu Radmore 3 poems
the pebble collector
his dawns his evenings his delivering mail
over iced roads flooded roads potholes
camera ever at the ready despite rain sleet mist snow
he snaps what he sees day and night and almost daily records
his lake and invites us into his world invited to join
with him in his enthusiasms and celebrations of his
gulls and his shoreline and his ice and snow and grass
as he records it and the pebbles that catch his eye
smooth or differently coloured and their striations
lucky finds of smoothed or heart-shaped mineral matter
witch stones wish stones hard to resist stones
he worries about their accumulations on shelves
in dishes bowls and plant pots on shelves tables
tucked in corners of the room or between book spines
the way we are inclined to move material things
put them where they best serve one way or another
how their placements are critical though not serious
a pebble’s warmth when held for a while in the palm
not warm in itself but which simply on view gives warmth
the Japanese say that the heart thinks and the mind feels
as what we think or feel is seldom clear to our own selves
not as clear as the sight of a pebble just brought in from rain
possibility warehouse
in the possibility warehouse
poetry tiptoes past caged birds
here the heart thinks and the mind feels
and coffee is the person upon whom one coughs.
lymph is to walk with a lisp
in the possibility warehouse
I have become intent on remaking you.
have you replace the letter w with t
so you will have the answers to what where and when
it is cold here
flocks of birds stretch boundaries
turn into shoals of fishes
swimming in opposite directions
and they are all talking chattering endlessly
in this warehouse
everything is hitched to everything else
and there is more to life than death
your future self is watching you right now
such a tiny pump, the heart
under thin slice of moon
the onion blooms
when I come into the room
you startle me
as tumbled over rim
she would have loved
the mason bee that pulls nails out of walls
and videos of Monty Python’s silly walk
she said of course I know the sun doesn’t rise or set
and of course the stars and sky are not above us
her reasoning not scientific but based on chthonic evidence
we had long acknowledged her mind to be simply different
close to that darker shade of crazy
to put it another way we were used to not paying attention
never saw our mother as new type of mineral
harder and more valuable than diamond
and we thought
we thought
she would last forever
as tumbled over rim…from As kingfishers catch fire, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Claudia Coutu Radmore has published several collections. Accidentals (Apt. 9 Press, Ottawa) won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. On Fogo, poems short-listed for the 2017 Malahat Long Poem Contest, was published by The Alfred Gustav Press, Vancouver, in 2018. A poem from the camera obscura (2019, above ground, Ottawa ) is included in The Best Canadian Poetry of 2019. Including three years training teachers in Vanuatu as a CUSO cooperant, Montreal-born writer Claudia Coutu Radmore has lived, taught and created art in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and China. She writes lyric and Japanese-form poetry. Claudia started catkin press in 2012.
Christine Collins
THE TRUTH ABOUT LEAVING
So many have asked
when I knew it was over.
They want to know how to
to look for it in their own
near-dead relationships.
They want to hear a foolproof
equation as if I can say:
Look to his skin: Look for
the horsehead mole
that sprouts three hairs.
They don't want to hear
that the only revelation
was a dozen tiny pebbles
in our shoes each time
we tried to move forward.
That we only knew
we couldn't continue.
They don't want to hear
that one significant revelation
never came. That I still look for it.
That I still wonder
if we did our best.
That letting each other go
wasn’t because love had faded
but was instead from loving well –
the cut-throat kind of love
that will injure in order to save.
KINTSUGI
Now that the us that used to be
is over, over and placed aside
like a pressed flower in a bible,
I’m tempted to ask am I better?
But, just as I think the question,
another seismic shift cracks my skin.
A part of me breaks off onto the floor.
Like a split fruit, I will never be whole
again. An object in motion tends to stay
in motion. The science of my body
actuates the laws of physics. I stay
in motion: breaking, willing
the parts back together, carrying
myself in my own arms as one
carries firewood to a furnace.
I carry myself from one fear
or folly to the next. One pill,
one meditation mantra to the next.
Still, I shouldn't have thought to ask
am I better? That’s what you would
ask, even now.
Christine Collins moved to Cardiff, Wales, U.K. in 2017 from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I taught full-time in the English Department at Louisiana State University in addition to working as a remote editorial assistant for Copper Canyon Press. Here in Cardiff, I am a doctorate student in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. As part of my degree program, I also teach creative writing workshops for the university. My critical and creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Entropy, Cold Mountain Review, Chicago Review of Books, Canyon Voices, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry South, Still: The Journal, Wicked Alice, So to Speak, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. My chapbook titled Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014.
Robert Wilson 2 poems
Robin
A nest wedged between the lower limbs
of a Chinese maple,
a kind of fruit well within my reach.
Inside the red shade, penny eggs,
pale turquoise, the same color
as that picture from space
of the one remaining earth.
I move a safe distance away,
count my breath backwards from three,
and a robin appears, sits cross-kneed
inside her mud and grass porch.
I watch the evening light pass through
her body, her dull orange chest
the color of regret.
Cancer: A Love Poem
We waded barefoot along the sandbar,
trespassed up the launch site,
walked the public pier
where we used my fish knife
to carve aliases,
Glow Girl and American Infidel,
in the salt-hardened railing.
We hid in your parents’ bathroom
where I used your mother’s tweezers
to pull urchin spines out of your foot,
anointed the puncture wounds
with hydrogen peroxide.
We lay together in the guest bed
where we came up with the perfect alibi:
the sand in the sheets could have belonged
to anyone.
And when you spoke in broken
chemo brain English, telling me sea foam
is ocean-scented soap in a hurry,
I kissed your eyelashes that you stopped
cutting to grow out in tiny feral sneers,
and thought of the summer seagrass thick along
the flats, sunlight moving through as easily
as forgiveness is bestowed upon all of God’s
stillborn children
Robert Wilson is a teacher and poet living in the Mid-west, my poems have most recently appeared in the Lily Poetry Review and the Pinyon Review.
David Dephy 1 poem
The Interpretation
I am holding out a handful of water. There are endless
rivers deep within my handful of water. I see my smile there,
I hear the voice from deep within: “You can only interpret
yourself given the state of affairs you were thrown into at birth.
Your birth is your interpretation of your future.”
I am holding out a handful of sand. There are the endless
mountains deep within my handful of sand. I see my shadow
on it, I hear the voice from deep within: “You cannot change
the facts, but you can shift the importance of the facts in how
you interpret them.”
I am holding out a handful of breath. There are endless
winds deep within my handful of breath. It’s trembling, I see
myself through this breathe and I am hearing the voice:
“The facts of your history and belief, discover the possible
interpretations available to you,
while you cannot change the facts of your history and belief,
you can shift your interpretation of those facts. Everything is
intimately connected with your personal interpretations.”
I am holding out a handful of ashes, I burned all my sorrows
with my breath and then
this ash became the silence, the silence became
the presentiment of joy and the joy became the
water again on my palms. I am holding out a handful of
words. There is the life-giving force in my handful of words,
these words are endless interpretations
of myself, of my spirit, of all my wishes. I try to tell you
through the language of interpretation how strange
the world is, but I hear the voice: “You think your
language was invented to describe and represent
reality, but language,
reality and all your wishes are intertwined — language
not only shapes our interpretation of reality, but shapes
how the reality itself unfolds,” Let me unfold you my love,
while the language of silence is covering us, while the language
of your beauty is speaking in me.
David Dephy – The trilingual Georgian/American poet, novelist, essayist, multimedia artist. An active participant in the American and international poetry and artistic scenes, such as PEN World Voices, 92Y Poetry Center, Voices of Poetry, Long Island Poetry Listings, New York Public Library, Starr Bar Poetry Series, Columbia University – School of the Arts in the City of New York, Bowery Poetry Club which named him a Literature Luminary. His poetry has been published in USA and all over the world by the many literary magazines. He lives and works in New York City.
Phillip O’Neil
THE FOUNTAIN OF TEARS
(for Federico Garcia Lorca)
The hike leads us to a spring in an olive grove
buzzing trees dry as the chafing cicadas
tiny castanets in the gnarls and branches offering
no shade on the old road cracked as a map.
Yet, still, somehow they step out
from no possible hiding-place,
men of leather, torn uniforms and gun metal,
sick, souless eyes with the cataracts of death
spewing keen barbs into every vessel
hooks and claws in every valve
like a hundred fly-fishing accidents
flicking blinding hooks into eyes
We’re whitebait ripped by sharks
that know the common flesh but tear
just the same.
My words want to barter
assassin thongs
for the filaments of angels
mind game a way out
in this place of dead roads
begging and pleading the gangster goons
crying mercy against the gloves
cocking rusting guns.
Lined up by a trench
we wait for the captain (who hangs
scalps where others wear medals)
to step from the old man body of the tree
all stubble, tobacco and spit.
The Fountain of Tears
where men lie stacked like playing cards,
food for the groves, siesta country
where peasants dose as civil bullets fly
the poet sent to an unmarked grave
by the fathers of children
who’ll build theatres for his words.
IN MEMORIAM
She fades against a sky of stars
a trapeze artist trembling inside her own shadow
on the canvas of a traveling circus
transfigured to the mother of La Pieta
outside the Bislaliko Sepulchri
beside a wall pockmarked by shrapnel
fragments of a war
torn among burned books by live rounds
trembling again the shy girl,
whose war I fear, I loved above
the girl that came before into a life
who shied away the blood
bloodier than the belly of a hit and run
knew death only from a freak accident
a suicide away in the next tower block
Soar to her day and night
Brittled by my own haphazard events
while I enfeebled to inaction when she nears
she breezed into my cracked circle
a train spilling its guts like a dissected worm.
Phillip O’Neil is an English writer living in Prague who worked as a journalist for over two decades in various parts of the globe. His poetry has been published in Ygdrasil, Wilderness House Literary Review, Suisun Valley Review, Mad Swirl among others. His first novel ‘Mental Shrapnel' is due to be published later this year.
Nicole Horowitz 1 poem
Apple Pie
Somewhere deep
In former South Vietnam
I visited some tunnels
Where fleeing villagers used to live
underground.
Where B52s used to explode
cratering the land.
Until it was
A moon made of jungle.
What strikes me most today
Is not the pockmarked land
Or the wrecked American tank
Overgrown with wild vines.
But the muffled scream
of my Scottish friend
Upon hearing a gunshot ring
from the nearby shooting range.
I didn’t flinch.
Why would I?
I am, after all
American.
A gunshot to me
Is like Apple Pie
A thick poison
Of homegrown flavor.
Does poison taste the same
In Vietnam? Does it still reek
Of Napalm,
American gunpowder,
And all the
messes we’ve made?
Nicole Horowitz is a creative writer and graduate currently attending Oregon State University's school of Writing, Literature and Film. She is a founding member of @Teakneezine, and a strong believer that writing should cross boundaries; whether in medium, genre, or politics.
Anna Teresa Slater 2 poems
Secret
4 a.m. is my church. A secret kept
until I chanced upon it. Awakened
by a choir of crowing, much like a calling
to open a good book or to breathe in
the coppery silk air. When I am there I live in-between. Alone
and in union with all the citizens of the world
who dream. As coffee brews I sit in communion
with my chair, the open window, my nakedness. A spirit
of stillness --stolen and holy cocooned-- wafts through
this hour, returns me to womb
or to that sacred brink before bud
becomes flower. Silence
the only worship for this space bestowed
upon the chosen few. When I miss God,
the gods, something more, myself
I visit this candle-lit time, where I know I must leave
my shoes at the door, where there is something beyond
yes and no, up and down, birth and death,
this. Even more. Even so
I accept that my watch does not know wait, so before the end
of the hush, before first light creeps in, before rush
of ritual and real, I bow my head then
with reverential high, I whisper goodbye, ready
for new day to begin.
Collaboration
There is an untethered white horse saddled inside my chest
creating by its very presence a kind of art with its upright
crest, cascading mane, its tail waving behind in weaving flight,
its starred muzzle steering forward, guided
by ancient contemplation.
When my heart is trampled, spirit stifled and withered
Warmblood gallops in a blaze, unfazed, barreling on ahead
till by my will and its prudence, rest. I rein it in and it tames the flare
in my breast. Then we ride as one in trochaic hum
into unpainted sunsets and further on into bare, unwritten dawns.
Anna Teresa Slater is a high school literature and drama teacher from a small town in the Philippines. She is a postgraduate student in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Panay News, Poetika Anthology 2018, and Better Than Starbucks. Recurring themes in her writing include feminism, protest, and nature. She lives on a farm with her husband, dog, and cat.
Judith Borenin 2 poems
Beneath A Sea Tightly Wrapped
Bottle green low tide. Kelp
and seaweed curl wide rusty
tendrils around shipwrecked
piling stumps. They undulate -
impaled in place - arranging
themselves into changing shapes
of wild finned fish swimming
beside half buried sarcophagi –
cracked sides split – spilling
limbs and loose strands of
streaming hair in the singing
current as it gently shifts with
little ripples towards the sun.
Carapace almost camouflaged –
a crab clings to a barnacle poxed
piling – its stained ivory pincer
blindly taps its way an inch
above the water line as it climbs
then disappears. In the slight breeze
a whiff of sliced watermelon washes
in with the incoming tide. A blue
cellophane sheen sheets the glistening
sea obscuring the unravelings below
where schools of illusions glide.
Slow Turns On A Shaft
How mutely they fly – shrieks
astonished in their throats - silenced
by the splayed wind’s hand pressed
over unblinking eyes.
Some drift like wet clothes pinned
to wind limbs – wings hinged –
hung out to dry.
Some - wings opal blades - levitate
and twirl parsing
the rind of grey sky.
Veins still whistling with grief -
astonished as I watch –
how these slow seamless turnings
sculpted with graceful
strokes carve out dimensions of loss.
Judith Borenin has been published in The Raven Chronicles:Last Call, The Floating Bridge Press Review IV, Ethel Zine 3 among other journals and have a mini-poetry book coming this summer. I have been writing poetry since being thrust upon a convent in Australia when I was in the fourth grade. I survived the Great Alaska Quake of '64. I've moved so many times I have a continual ringing in my ears.
Kate LaDew 3 poems
I remind myself you aren't like that
and it's not your fault you don't understand
but I am so tired of not being understood
existing for a million years, used, killed or accused,
you don't run with one earbud out, a knife in your pocket
mace on your keys, hands ready to claw and gouge,
you don't wonder if the noise is there to rape or murder or both
no one calls you silly when you're scared
or pats you anywhere they can reach while you freeze
no one says I didn't mean anything by it
as their eyes rove up and down you like hands
good girl is different than good guy but both are lies
I remind myself you aren't like that
and it's not your fault you don't understand
but after all the words I've spent telling you, all the breath I've lost, isn't it?
as the fingers squeeze and
I feel something crack more than I hear it,
fireworks rope and dance and skitter along the backs of my eyelids
please, I think, if I'm going to die, please let him leave me somewhere I am found
please do not let my mother be left with a great unknowing
I am certain of her in a way I am certain of nothing else
she would look for me till the end of the world
your mom dies and
relief flows
like the settling of snow
after pulling your car
to the side of a jagged road
but the guilt,
the guilt is electric
Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Arts. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.
Kirsty Niven 2 poems
Swan Maiden
His smile birthed a sort of unearthly glow,
outshining the moon and the streetlight,
radiating a snake-charming power.
Its illumination transformed everything;
a stone wall into a sky high turret,
an ugly duckling girl into a swan princess,
the trees surrounding them a wall of thorns.
The world paused in a rare moment of hush,
silence hung in the chilled night air
before the moon continued its orbit –
castles crumbling, fairytale feelings fucked.
Reality rushed back in, utterly unwanted.
Her ball gown vanished, her tiara gone;
still hypnotised, words caw from her swollen lips
not knowing that the moment was dead.
A Note From The Difficult One
I am ready if you are, to talk that is.
I am sorry that I fail to communicate,
that my words get lost in translation.
Exaggerations cloud what I mean,
turns of phrase tangled up in feeling.
In the past I have found it simple
to write essays, poems or even stories;
but speaking was never my forte,
reciting so far out of my comfort zone,
a mere regurgitation of the dictionary.
I’ve practiced in front of the mirror,
watching my face twist and contort along
as the words pour from my lips.
I’ve drafted and redrafted all night long,
as the rain trickles down the window.
I am ready if you are, to say what I mean.
The semantics are seeping forth,
a storm brewing, ready to be unleashed.
I promise there will be no argument,
and it will always end in I love you.
Kirsty A. Niven lives in Dundee, Scotland. Her writing has appeared in anthologies such as Landfall, A Prince Tribute and Of Burgers and Barrooms. She has also featured in several journals and magazines, including The Dawntreader, Cicada Magazine, Dundee Writes and Word Fountain. Kirsty's work can also be found online on sites such as Cultured Vultures, Atrium Poetry and Nine Muses Poetry."
Xe M. Sánchez 1 poem
EL PASÁU YE’L FUTURU
Dellos entá camienten
que nun esisten les pantasmes.
Les pantasmes somos nos
cuandu naguamos
por facer aportar el pasáu
al presente con pallabres.
El pasáu namái ye eso,
pallabres que caltienen
el mesmu soníu
con un significáu estremáu.
El pasáu namai ye’l futuru
de los que nun tienen futuru.
THE PAST IS THE FUTURE
Some still think
that ghosts do not exist.
We are the ghosts
when we want to bring
the past to the present
with words.
The past is only that,
words which preserve
the same sound
with a different meaning.
The past is only the future
of those who have no future.
Xe M. Sánchez was born in 1970 in Grau (Asturies, Spain). He received his Ph.D in History from the University of Oviedo in 2016, he is anthropologist, and he also studied Tourism and three masters. He has published in Asturian language Escorzobeyos (2002), Les fueyes tresmanaes d’Enol Xivares (2003), Toponimia de la parroquia de Sobrefoz. Ponga (2006), Llue, esi mundu paralelu (2007), Les Erbíes del Diañu (E-book: 2013, Paperback: 2015), Cróniques de la Gandaya (E-book, 2013), El Cuadernu Prietu (2015), and several publications in journals and reviews in Asturies, USA, Portugal, France, Sweden, Scotland, Australia, South Africa, India, Italy, England, Canada, Reunion Island, China and Belgium.