5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Dawn Leas Jason Riedy CC
How long will it take you to learn that life doesn’t wait? for Marge Soon the sunflowers will bow and you’ll weep at the beauty of nothingness. You’ll run fast and hard through the field. You’ll kick off your shoes and feel the love of summer dirt. That’s right – let it bathe your feet, find its way under your toe nails. The angels will applaud. The wind will push your hair away from your eyes, trail it behind your body. You’ll feel the energy the closer you get to nowhere. The moon’s gone on vacation, but you’ll find your way through tall, green stalks speaking what you can not hear. Keep going. Straight to the center of the Earth. You’ll find your broken heart there. It’s patient, waiting for you to pick up the sea glass buried where you never expected – cradled in mountains kissing sky far inland from salt water. The river will turn its eyes on you. You’ll stand at its edge barefoot, never forget the depths of its cold. You always assumed everyone would be there when you returned. Dawn Leas is the author of two chapbooks, A Person Worth Knowing (Foothills Publishing), and I Know When to Keep Quiet, (Finishing Line Press) as well as a full-length poetry collection, Take Something When You Go, (Winter Goose Publishing). Her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, The Paterson Literary Review, Literary Mama, The Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, Cumberland River Review, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She’s a poet, writing coach, manuscript consultant, and arts educator. She’s also a proud back-of-the pack runner, newbie hiker, salt-water lover, and mom of two grown sons.
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5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Samuel Burt Christopher Sessums CC
Lighting a Bonfire After Casting His Ashes Cold air sucks the meat from our knuckles, and threads of sparks spit above the backyard of our parent’s home, where a flag thumps against wind sound. Grief, terminal, is contagious. I cry beside family and nothing tastes clean. The fire takes of our breath, full soft, with its bare palms hot across our faces, while the night begins its rites, clawing dry leaves from the mud. We, and all the earth’s hands, are restless. The dead, less so; they pass, with the breeze, through our fingers, as if knowing where they are bound. The heroes of our time have already moved to the cities they’ll die in. Before parting, we make promises, extending ourselves toward something as endless as the way we love—are loved, us travelers through the loose grip of future tense. After Rain The evening shivers like a fist of water, walnut trees dropping pins of light through the darkening sky. Steeped in the swell of crickets, starlight, and porch wine, I thread grass through my bare toes in the middle of the back lawn. And the scent of near fire gestures toward autumn, as I watch its thrum of a glow hem the bark of the thinning trees. I demand nothing more from this life. The faith of smoke and echo. The air is as thick as the oil dripping onto charcoal across the alley, where laughter splashes over the trees like gold. I hold it like a pinch of skin that is real, and the moments that will outlive this begin to take shape the way the edge of a cloud becomes possible in the moon’s grip. Graduation We forget what we mean to say. On this street, in houses of full sinks and spent cans, we built temples together with glass nails. We drank blessed rain. Tasted the salt of tired faces. We sharpened tongues on liquor and numbed our throats with the shouts of gratitude we found in song, and who here isn’t sad? That our names, so many now, will soon fall strangely from our lips. And here, through any door, don’t eyes turn toward us, aflame with recognition? We will never be hungrier nor fuller than this, and when the ones we have loved find homes in the cities we hear of, who will be left to pull us from ourselves into days beyond a day’s measure- back to a place of easy faith, of idle communion—to the street where sunlight turned the rain into smoke on our skin. Samuel Burt is a poet and artist from Iowa, currently pursuing his poetry MFA at Bowling Green State University. A 2022 winner of the AWP's Intro Journals Project, Sam's work has been featured in a number of online and print journals, including Indigo, Salt Hill, FEED, and The Journal. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Brian Harman Doc Searls CC Dust My mother told me, almost forty years later, the song that played in the background of desertion-- I was four years old on a brown vinyl couch as I watched my father walk out the door on us. No memory of the song that played, but I do have the memory of feeling responsible, and over time, I held on to that transference of pain, a buried hurt always tender. My mother, I can see her abandoned wound still there along with other emotional burdens collected in age, she is in my mirrored reflection, my father is in my mirrored reflection, he left the song in my mother’s heart that became the sung cremation; his dust in the wind my mother and I poured into the ocean, as we cried for our own reasons, husband/wife failure, father/son unfulfillment, yet somehow over time it’s accepted, somewhat understood beyond forgiveness, the window opening with recollections of a closing door, for all we can do is remember the re-creation of love and sorrow, until all we are is scattered remains. BRIAN HARMAN is a poet living in Southern California. He received his MFA in creative writing from Cal State University, Long Beach. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Misfit Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Suddenly, All Hell Broke Loose!!! through Picture Show Press. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Julia Cunningham Bill Tyne CC Refill, Please Scattered brain, look! an unremarkable stain Big ole mess walking fast towards nowhere Or home, it’s really all the same When you’re alone like a hamster On a stationary wheel. Running On two modes: busy or idle That’s the losing battle straddled By a consciousness barely tethered To an exquisite corpse my body Who by the way is working on borrowed time Or was it Father Time? With his big hands and Certainty, I surely need a man like that in my life Wait no I take it back. I’m a feminist goddamn It is so easy for men like him To show up one day and tell you You’re special I swear those boys could Sell you the shirt off your own back and somehow Make you feel luckier than a four leafed clover Until one day they dip And you end up covered in shit Then it really doesn’t matter how many leaves You got. To hold onto sanity Is little more than a vanity project these days But I guess it’s worth a shot Of what? I don’t know Probably vodka or hope Either way it won’t go down easy If you’re doing it right Julia Cunningham is a queer, disabled writer and student at the University of California, Berkeley where she studies English and Disability Studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Matchbox Magazine and the Berkeley Poetry Review. The only thing she loves more than writing is her biological and chosen family (but most especially her dog). 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Paul Barron Christopher Sessums CC
A Truer Home No one can know what brought us here or how the promise of peace entered with official papers to point out our signature. Life quickens in spirals, and a fumbled word within an hour portions it to extinction. Senselessness takes the quick way down. What if this moment is not a door but a place we return from a mirror, crystalline, a facet for every swelling heartbeat in the palm of our hand in the handle of a knife, a transfusion of feet upon the earth a dream we woke from laughing though we dreamed our deepest sleep in the tunnel of a gun. What if we made this moment a destination from which we returned, a truer home lit by flat ground rays of night, by gravity's daring shale, by the tread of blood deliberate pacing out its chamber. Paul Barron received an MFA in fiction some time ago, and had to let all the wrong reasons to write expose themselves before starting a truer journey and writing poems. The most recent work has appeared in Littoral Magazine and is forthcoming in Kosmos. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Candice Kelsey Christopher Sessums CC
Mesothelioma She was eight years old when she sat under the kitchen table petting her cousin’s Irish setter, listening to her aunts worry. Summer meant a long drive to see family. It also meant stories— uncensored and transformative. She inhaled the fibers of their talk while her head rested on the dog’s belly, marveling at the juxtaposition of its calm warmth and her aunts’ frenetic chill. How could these two worlds exist separated only by a rectangular plane of pinewood, six glasses of iced tea, and a song of cigarette smoke. Like asbestos, these six sisters seemed resistant to the heat, electricity, and corrosion of life. The lining between childhood and adolescence is a thin pleura easily breached by things like words. The girl felt her DNA shift with the latest story: Aunt Audrey and Uncle Dick were fighting again. He told her she’d eat shit before he’d ever let her divorce him. Aunt Debbie’s voice deepened as she exhaled and my hand to God Audrey woke up the next day with the taste of shit on her tongue. Forty years later and she still can’t trust men. Audrey died of skin cancer— Dick also lost his lungs. He had spent decades supporting his family by installing asbestos. While the houses of rural Rhode Island were now well insulated from the elements, her uncle’s lungs were not. Nor were her ears, repeatedly permeated with such tales told by six sisters each summer. When she sees advertisements to join mesothelioma class action suits, she wants to call and ask if it were the cancer meds that caused the terrible taste in her aunt’s mouth. Instead, she sings the melted ice in six glasses on a summer table, a decaying dog under the earth’s pinewood, her two marriages gone to shit. She just changes the channel. CANDICE KELSEY is an educator and poet living in Georgia. She serves as a creative writing mentor with PEN America's Prison & Justice Writing Program; her work appears in Grub Street, Poet Lore, Lumiere Review, Hawai'i Pacific Review, and Poetry South among other journals. She is the author of Still I am Pushing (2020) and won the Two Sisters Micro Fiction Contest (2021). Recently, she was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Find her @candicekelsey1 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Jessie Epstein Christopher Sessums CC
Why I Write I recently listened to Karl Ove Knausgard’s answer to this question with a guy I’ve loved for like eight years on hour seven of a ten hour drive. I don’t know why I started that way. What I meant to say was Karl O talked about what’s “inherently inexpressible,” what can never really be understood in any of us by someone outside of us. Our chorus of groans at recognition precluded us from saying anything too revealing. What could we say that we don’t already know? A lot, actually. Almost nothing between us is clear. After Karl O finishes reading, and because I want to know, I ask him, “What do you think about when you’re alone?” “Music,” he replies, without hesitation. That’s not what I meant. “Ah. You mean alone.” We spend the next three hours eating Frosties (one spoon), fielding calls from friends concerned that we haven’t arrived. We are taking the long way. I’m not his answer. I am his answer. He says we didn’t need to listen to Karl, that I said it better the other day in the kitchen: We are all walking around trying to write what we don’t know how to say. Well, yeah. That’s why I wrote it down. It being this, I mean. Jessie Epstein is an actor and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has previously appeared in Ekstasis, Illinois’ Best Emerging Poets, and zines she has made for her friends’ birthdays. For more of her work, visit www.jessiegepstein.com, or find her on Instagram: @fabtablets. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Kay Kestner Christopher Sessums CC
The Watch We have not heard back from her. The lines are down. She's under the glacier. Her mother's lighting candles after mass on Wednesday afternoons, praying her girl will make it through the winter, make it to where the ice melts. Her brother's a cracked record of how blue's her favorite color. He's always had some sick defiance of the truth. As for her father, pick a Father: God, McKinley, or the man her mother married. It doesn't matter. We're getting only silence from that trinity. This could just be the beginning. We've set a watch at the edge of the ice. We'll keep calling for her. We'll tell you when we get word, if we get word. until then, we'll keep calling for her. Keep calling for her. This Couple I. In the glass a girl liquid wanting to be the sea so that the sky would take her salt by salt so high. II. On the dry side of the mountain his crops need life-support and still, with that, the prognosis would be bad. A graying sky suggests the medics are on the way. But only a sprinkle comes, nothing but a little tease falling on a future desert. Kay Kestner’s work has appeared in journals since the early 1990s. She is a screenwriter, poetry, and prose writer. Her work is an unapologetic combination of gentle grace and raw reality. She is the founder and former editor of Poetry Breakfast and has led writing workshops through the Ministry of Artistic Intent and at The NJ Poetry and Arts Barn. You can find more information about her work at KayKestner.com. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Glenn Marchand Christopher Sessums CC
Phantom Mania Brains you arose unannounced. like pain on a Sunday morning, a church-house in pieces. rawness! visceral rawness! a phantom in a person. we were intimate. you still linger. i wonder about absence. days looking for you, absorbed by pieces of you, conversing damages at privies you left flying. others watch to sponge, problems are evaluated. no one unless privy understands empty skies. flowers are elegant, people are suspicious, it’s similar to something criminal. a dear complex, a rawer emotion, as asserting what normality looks like. you speak in vibes like silence, like agonies. mere quintessence, more acquisition, as more acquiescing. i wrestle your offshoots, your incantations, your analyses of communion. by more i learn, by more i bury, as more suspicious i become. they call it energy. by mind is by heart as both are consumed by it. an unusual woman, a different person, we have nothing for each other. a gifted woman, an angel/monster woman, as appointed to be more than a woman. i would meander inside, searching countryside, sitting/leaping, filled with pain. a person becomes intimate, learns balance, a semblance thereof; a calm sufferer, smiling like grace, you’re behind my eyes. a phantom, pushing boundaries, with each visit unlocking divinity; those compartments, those elusive cabinets, a climate subsumes. most extremeness baffles me. i call it pure energy. it seems to have intelligence. too curious to simmer, too righteous to listen, its passing pain is palpable. Glenn Marchand has an M.A. in Theology from Loyola Marymount University, and recently finished his requirements in the MFA Creative Writing program at Mount Saint Mary’s University. Marchand is an African American poet, focused on writing about existential truths, topics seeming apparent, or better, life’s aphorisms. Marchand believes in connectivity, a mystic universe, and the beauty in communicating through energy. Attached are a set of poems for consideration. 5/30/2022 1 Comment Poetry by Hadley Dion Peter Corbett CC
Coffee Milk Lounge in pink petal pajamas, sleepy, soft bedtime rebels. Giggling at secrets shared in blush cover of slumber party night. Anya’s dad cooks pancakes with blueberry smiles. While batter mixes, he offers us coffee milk. A Sunday morning delicacy. Cream drowns the bitter that I am so eager to embrace. I want to drink up being a woman, no matter how sour. I don’t know my cotton shorts will soon be stained, my mother will teach me to scrub away my shedding horizon. I don’t know that Anya and I will suck in our candied pot bellies, begging the mirror to take away our undesired flesh. I don’t know that I will debut shaved legs to Anya’s dismay. On playground bench, she will tell me hair grows back coarse. Warn me once you start, you can’t turn back. Hadley Dion is a writer, audio editor, and filmmaker from Los Angeles. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Witches Mag and Bandit Fiction. She is fond of self-help books, lapel pins, cats, and ghosts. |
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