3/26/2023 1 Comment Poetry By Susan Vespoli Matteo Paciotti CC
My son as hummingbird hovering lantana, dipping his beak into purple cups, tiny fluorescent helicopter he, watches me: a giant toddler screaming FUCK. After all my 12-step meetings, meditation, YouTube yoga, giving up dessert, grief therapy, communing with dogs and sunsets, I still melt down like a two-year old dropping computer bag, laptop smacked on asphalt, papers and postage stamps carried off by the wind. Already late, sleep deprived. Alone. My street empty except for him flittering above flowers, nodding, waiting till I see him. Hi, Mom. It’s me. I’m here. I stop. Adam as hummingbird watches me watch him his wings so quick he disappears. Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, Arizona. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Rattle, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and others. Her poetry collection about addiction in her family, Blame It on the Serpent, is available from Finishing Line Press. All proceeds are donated to addiction support and recovery organizations. https://susanvespoli.com/
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3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By Jane Ann Fuller Dave Cowley CC
DEAR YOUNG WOMAN-SELF I made pork chops again tonight chocolate pudding and picked rosemary right now a wolf moon rubs against the window listen if I had known winter comes insidious as rust in the body’s undercarriage stalled on the hills of good-bye-ing maybe I wouldn't confuse you with my daughter wouldn’t be asking who are you now it’s too late to erase who you will become finally I bought myself a high-tech telescope I think I see three-billion-year-old icecaps on the moon’s craters maybe it’s an omen how things blur inches two-hundred-thousand miles eleven light years from here how time finger-locks with regret until there's nothing but a taste for pork and chocolate I DRAW THE TAME NEGATIVE THINKING CARD FROM THE EMPATH ORACLE DECK DURING THE MINDFULNESS RETREAT AND FORGET TO PUT IT BACK I never was in love with Negative Thinking, it was more a series of one night stands, working late in the dimly lit conference rooms of my brain, sharing a cigarette in the parking lot, coffee and a cruller in the basement of Christ The King, darkness for darkness in the locker room showers at the community center natatorium—her face painted like a bird, eyes chalked in warrior white, hair wild as wings at her shoulders, décolletage shimmering with purple rocailles and silver, the whole of her wincing in ecstasy or cinematic pain, I stuffed her inadvertently into my lap top case after a class on Ayurveda and the perfectionist mind, how not to judge what we've become, free with who we are regardless I had no idea I lack testosterone or that peppermint oil will relax spasms in my neck but only enteric coated capsules work. Otherwise I might get GERD. I love these workshops-- how the women bring books to trade, Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. Tolle’s The New Earth, Gilbert’s Big Magic. And clothes to swap, scarves and sweaters worn like lovers long past their best but willing to keep us warm, or wear us out on the street to prove how generous our friends, our retro taste. Teacher reminds us not to compare our insides with others’outsides, which is good advice since this morning’s frost sticks to everything like bad luck. Jane Ann Fuller's Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2021) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. Her poems appear On the Seawall, in One Art, Main Street Rag, Women Speak, Atticus Review, Shenandoah, B O D Y, All We Know of Pleasure: Erotic Poetry by Women, Project Hope (Center for Victims of Torture) and elsewhere, and work is forthcoming in Calyx and Blue Earth Review. 3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By Pamela Gemme Franck Michel CC
Runaway Paper is pith wet pummeled rolled out pulp, frayed layers there on the screen conveyor I quit the Weyerhaeuser factory skipped down Route 2A naysaying danger now you see me, now you don’t, feckless wayfaring unbridled, little outlaw school-skipper, longing double solid lines, past glades of silver swale, knock me over guard rails No caution signs. No speed limit rain soaked, fun stoked, all-points bulletin Makes no matter if the paper, is wide ruled, cellulose bonds, makes scrap, makes scratch, I don’t care about what comes, I’m freedom I don’t worry, I’m honeycomb thumbing- Pamela Gemme was born to working class parents and grew up in Gardner, Massachusetts. She went to state universities, is a poet, artist, political activist, and a child protection social work consultant for Massachusetts’s DCF. Recent or forthcoming publications include The American Journal of Poetry, Haiku Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Heliotrope Anthology, SoFloPoJo, Ibbetson Street Magazine and many others. Pamela co-edited Essential Voices: A Covid-19 Anthology forthcoming from WVU Press in July, 2023. 3/26/2023 2 Comments Poetry By Margaret Anne Kean Sunghwan Yoon CC
Mom’s Last CT Scan I. Everything is backwards, horizontal slices flipped: on the right monitor her left lung fills with lesions that show white, airways, black. Liquid, like two grey half-moons inside each lung, invades soft darkness. There is nothing soft about severing – as her results filled the screen threads to our future were cut. II. Her darkness shrinks each month, white expands against her chest wall, close to the rib, where I once rested: newly tied to her breathing, the strong beat of her heart. III. Today a film seems to cover the sun, Our two bodies submerged in shadow. Today, it seems we must speak in gentle voices, talk of death on familiar terms, like someone who suddenly finds alarms irrelevant, has no need to scrub the sink. IV. I need to shout about living – the roses on her patio and the stories she has yet to tell; about her home where she will die, the vacancies opening in my life, about the months of Saturdays at her table, paying her bills. V. My eyes paid the darkness last night, tears pooling on cheek bones, saturating skin: that thin membrane that once separated me from her raw bone and blood, from the hollow inside, where I want to hide again. But the light inside her is pushing me out. Hospice If I place my feet on the floor I will walk into this day. If I open my eyes I will see her hands: gravity sucking water out of skin, collapsing cancer-riddled bones. I wish I were night leaning down to touch her eyes closed: in her bedroom I smell loneliness on father’s frayed wool bathrobe: the one she’s worn since his fall. Margaret Anne Kean received her BA in British/American Literature from Scripps College and her MFA from Antioch University/Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in poems.for.all.com, Eunoia Review, Drizzle Review, EcoTheo Review and Tupelo Quarterly. She is collaborating with a Portland, Oregon composer to set a tanka series. Kean lives in Pasadena, California. 3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By Fred Gerhard Sunghwan Yoon CC
Going On Reality is snow in your collar Stinging of something you know but forgot was going on. I’m going on. Are you? On the other side of snow, beyond the prickling sky, across the road. Or like so many friends quiet as snow, have you fallen for the cold? Here then is my small warmth — Just as real. Fred Gerhard led poetry therapy groups at Community Healthlink in Worcester for many years. His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Asylum Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Friends Journal, Pif Magazine, POETiCA REViEW, Sylvia Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies. He lives in rural New England with his wife, son, and ducks. 3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By Cynthia Atkins Ben Seidelman CC
LOSS One of these days, one of us is going to be left. Don’t hedge your bets, my inner biker is camped in a demolished parking lot. There is no me without you anymore. Who can go home to the coat on a hook, arms and shoulders still holding the sag and shape of your loved one. Absence, unholy as a tooth ache. When the margins hold a shadow with no form. A cologne. A particular voice. You feel a thousand bee stings and that’s just a cake-walk into hell. Thin veil of wind, stumbling into the kitchen for the first sip of coffee. Indented empty chair. We are orphans, we are widows, we are half-filled glasses. A hollow so voluminous it could start a fire. The unopened mail. Once, wrapped tight around the hips of a lover, breath and vigor, a slap of cold air. It’s the last page of the notebook-- No better time for the wound to find its way home. My Mama’s Mama Swung in trees to write notes on a branch, carved her name into the cleft where the bark Y’s into a myriad of decisions. She wrote in the margins between the crumbs and the broom. While she was pickling cucumbers, with the juice and the seeds with what remorse takes from us. She wrote with a stick, the ink of fudge from a wooden spoon. Her apron pockets gathered into a behemoth of her secrets. She spoke into the gefilte fish, and prayed with the yeast, as shadows folded into the chiaroscuro of night. I tell you, no one must ever know that my mama’s mama wrote to hide her wounds. Slapped silly for speaking out of turn? —She wrote into the feces on the diapers, into the bold stink of life. My mama’s mama wrote to be invisible, to disappear. Like that lady at the circus cast inside the magician’s black box. She wrote to travel in time, this dinner table where her name is scratched into wood, and I serve my family soup on a snowy day, her print legible everywhere. Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), and Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Anti- Heroin Chic, Barzakh, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. Formerly, Atkins worked as the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College. She is an Interviews Editor for American Micro Reviews and Interviews. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist, Phillip Welch and their family. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com 3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By Lila Waterfield Sunghwan Yoon CC
Dreaming of Fish I was told once to be careful what I said, words grow limbs, leave icy tracks as they pace. You can throw salt all day, but it’ll only streak your boots. Instead, I hide them, leave them in the snow if they bare teeth, pray frostbite keeps them quiet. Because if I let them in, under pitch of night they drift back to me, rattling like winter leaves against the drywall, as they come to open my chest, peel back muscle and nestle against the wet throb of my ribs-- I know how easy that is, remember the white belly, the knife I held after fishing that winter. The perch kept to itself though, limbless and cold as it was, silent as roe steamed atop the Sunday paper—a waste. Much later, it crawled to my bed, a trail of briny sleet in its wake. Winter Roosts in my Heart Each sunrise passes through here, solitary and closed tight against winter’s breath. Birds trill along the wire’s length, asking me to join in their song. I am useless with pretty tunes, my throat a croak of frog chorus that belongs to summer though I hate the heat. Whoever claimed envy as green should see the shade of blue I’ve become, opaque and heavy as ice; above me wings beat and brush against each other softly, like the calves of lovers. Lila Waterfield is a freelance editor, journalist, poet, and full-time procrastinator. She received a degree in English from the University of Toledo. Her byline has appeared in the Toledo City Paper and its subsidiaries, and she is the winner of a Touchstone Award. 3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By Tawn Parent Ben Seidelman CC
Unrecognizable Is this my son, this boy who towers over me but who I now outweigh? His solid frame of two months ago has withered. I can feel his ribs when we hug. Is this my son, who ran so fast and jumped so high, but who can now barely climb the stairs? Is this my son with smudgy rings around lashless eyes, which have a faraway look that never goes away? Is this my son whose once-hairy legs are now as smooth as a baby’s? And like a baby, I now tend him around the clock. This teen, with his life of friends, card games, and ultimate Frisbee, cruising toward adulthood, suddenly entered freefall and landed back in my arms. No parties or field trips, no joking around in history class. Just hospital to home and back again, glides this shadow who my son has become. Parent, a resident of Indianapolis, has been a professional writer and editor for 30 years. She has worked primarily for business publications, such as Indianapolis Business Journal, and also served as proofreader for two books. Her poetry has been published in Tipton Poetry Journal. She is working on a collection of poems about her son’s cancer journey. 3/26/2023 3 Comments Poetry By M.A. Riggle Sunghwan Yoon CC
UNTITLED 43 We were there when it happened The cops came to interrogate the clouds and we eyed each other in agreement before drawing in what we could of the innocent It felt like a danger but may only have been a breath — hard to tell It takes so long to learn quiet We come with a gasp and a shriek noise like a birthright sound a demand M.A. Riggle lives in Kentucky in a cottage between two horse farms with her teenage kid, an elderly St. Bernard, and three cats of various mousing abilities. Megan works as a technical editor. In her free time, she can be found gardening or staring at the moon. 3/26/2023 0 Comments Poetry By James Lilliefors Sunghwan Yoon CC
Meeting the Silence The silence asks, What are you doing with yourself? What is it that you really want? And you say, Just a little more time. I know how to use it now. For important things, things that hid for years in plain sight, pretending to be something else. Okay, says the silence, but how exactly will you find these things? And how will you know they’re really what you think they are? You know the answers to these questions, but not all of the words. So you say nothing. And the silence asks a better question: What if you already have what you want? What would you do, then? And again, you say nothing. Knowing: The important thing is not to answer the silence, but to create a silence of your own. And to let this silence become your answer. Everything else depends on that: on how you meet the silence. Without Warning Toss a cliché at God and call it prayer. Or find a way to listen, and learn a separate prayer. The world does not want you to become too wise, it isn’t good for business. But it’s okay to live well, like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And to be silly at times – to giggle like the Dalai Lama or to laugh like Thomas Merton, who lived a good life, on his own terms, until he was electrocuted one morning in Thailand. What are we to make of that? Life does not offer easy answers. But with prayer we might begin to understand what to do with joy and despair when they arrive, as they will, without warning. Inside What people see at first is not the person who lives inside. But a set of clothes, a walk, a hairstyle, a glance. A hesitation. Don’t worry about that. Go inward, and find something good, that belongs to the person who lives there, and bring it out. Let them see that. Surprise them. James Lilliefors is a poet, journalist, and novelist. He has published in Ploughshares, Snake Nation Review, Intangible, Wind, The Washington Post and elsewhere and was a writing fellow at the University of Virginia. |
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