9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Kim Nuzzo Doug Kerr CC
1. Don’t be cautious. Poems are wild language. Naming things doesn’t compare with a hard, hot wind. So much dying without holy purpose. The god of darkness rides the midnight train. Only listens to trailer park prayers when temps go above 100. I’m talking about grace in a world where nearly everything hurts. This twilight disappearing wind seems more real than any of that. 3. If there is a prayer that moves a person it must be one where we believe what we’re feeling where we watch the abyss of the void dance through the spray of the backyard sprinkler Religion comes limping down the street sideways with a broken leg constricted and choked so dry So silent it clouds the heart But the world pulls no punches like the lightning that dances with fury out of the summer’s cloudless blue sky Kim Nuzzo is a writer/actor in a small town in western Colorado near the Utah border. He and his wife run a small theater company, Zephyr Stage, which specializes in original work. Their original play, Multitudes, about the great gay father of American poetry, Walt Whitman, has traveled around the country and to Scotland for the Festival Fringe. Nuzzo is also a semi-retired addiction counselor who continues to run a group, Men's Issues in Recovery, at Jaywalker Lodge, a leading men's treatment center, in Carbondale, Colorado.
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9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Vic Nogay Jenavieve CC from my mother i watched a child wring a kitten’s neck and smile while she did it. my rage cooled, then reignited when i looked into the face of my own daughter - her brow low, her lips tight, her earnest eyes on me, a pitchy “shut up!” thrown at our barking dogs. i acknowledged heavily for the tenth time this week that all she knows is all she learns from me. once, when i was a child, i found a small frog and kept it in my pocket. it died a linty death. i buried it in shale and cried in hymns. women up the hill lived an old woman. our back yards collided. where the grass should have been, just high, dry weeds. the roof caved above the porch shading unwashed windows shrugging off their shutters. “posted: no trespassing” - posted everywhere. on a day when a bravery possessed me, i climbed the hill. i found a deer skull in a shed and i held it like a kindred spirit. proof of death made life in me, turned bravery to wicked wildness. no, it couldn’t be a woman who lived there. from all the nonfiction my mother buried in performance, i learned women keep up appearances. and all that wildness is a secret. b-side i bought a tape deck today. i want to listen to a new song in an imperfect way the sentimental way things used to be worth everything when they weren’t worth anything. the honest way things went unshared except with you liberty, anonymity, in the meadow rue i’m leaning into the heavy-press keys meditating in the slow turn of play whirring in the yearn of rewind. the tape door snaps (opencloseopenclose) asmr before we called it that. the one old cassette i have is yours your songs - the ones you wrote for me on the back porch while it rained and we didn’t care because no one knew and as long as it rained we could stay here believing our lies could be promises. when i burned your letters i kept the last one and i kept that tape. you wrote my name on the a-side. i added “do not listen.” on the b. Vic is an emerging writer of poetry and flash fiction; her work tends to explore small traumas, misremembrances, and Ohio, where she is from. Her work appears in The Daily Drunk. After earning her English/Creative Writing degree from Denison University in 2010, she discovered a passion for animal welfare working as a humane agent. Her return to writing is a personal reclamation. Twitter: @vicnogay 9/27/2020 1 Comment Poetry by Dion O’Reilly Maria Rantanen CC Democratic Convention 2020 When I think of a mongrel dog like Laika, sent up with Sputnik 2 just a year after my birth, it is difficult for me to believe there is any goodness in people worth voting for. Not even Biden who Old-Guards swear “will restore decency to America” and whom of course I will vote for in an act of duty and desperation. When I think of the hands, strapping that dog into his small capsule, with a shit bag and enough gel dog food to last a few days, snapping the chains that let Laika stand or sit or lie down, when I imagine the dexterity of the human fingers and the intelligence and cruelty, I can hardly stand to look at Biden who was only a football-playing high schooler in 1957 and had nothing to do with Laika. But before Laika was shot toward the sun, a scientist took the dog home to play with his children, and I think of any happy time before death or during great torment as a gift we can give to each other, to anyone, just to do it, for no reason other than the good need to give because we realize we should share whatever sanity or means we have If we are decent human beings, like that scientist who may have calmed the lifted hairs along the dog’s back as he lay in the tight chamber, smelling that weird smell they say rockets have of gun powder, rum, and seared steak. That scientist might have spoken softly to the dog in Russian because he was one of the most decent of the scientists, so I would have to vote for him over whoever came up with the idea to shoot Laika into space, or maybe even enjoyed sending him there. When I think of the countdown and the racket, how that dog must have pushed against the chains and whined, I feel a bit strapped in myself, a bit like I am hurtling into something so much bigger, so much outside of the thin circling rim of atmosphere, thin like my own thin skin that could so easily be burned away. I can’t help noticing Biden has strong hands because he was a football player so he probably has those kind of fingers that could pull a pigskin into the gut and run like hell and win. I think he might like to caress and sniff my hair and brilliant the world around him with his teeth and I might lick his hand in the midst of my chaining if he were the one to care for me on my last day. Yes, I might lick his hand because I can smell his decency, and I wish I could change our lives. Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been nominated for several Pushcarts and been shortlisted for a variety of prizes. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events, and she teaches ongoing workshops on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains--now on Zoom. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Phoebe RuschAir Space Tour For Emma Note how time collapses the more years you collect. Folds like gray matter to fit the circumference of your skull. Too much of it all at once would be a terror emptying as an unbroken expanse of sky. My ninety-nine year old friend contained 1919, and 1993, and 1958. All the times inside her, she inhabited at once. You must be strong, so strong, to withstand existing in many elsewheres and also here. At thirty, my mother worked across from the apartment she’d lived in at twenty. Peered in the windows at herself. Her great-uncle had a phrase for such revisitings: air space tours, meaning the way vast tracts of time unfurl behind you like contrails, your life shimmering, each moment of it present and painful and sweet. My mother had me at thirty-one, the age I am now. A palimpsest: my mother and her best friend speeding down Lake Shore Drive at seventeen, radio blasting Laura Nyro. A stoned soul picnic where my mother sits cross-legged, a joint tucked behind her ear. My mother as yet unfettered, my mother free. In Hell After Mikka 1. There are many different words for hell in the bible. For instance, Gehenna: trash heap on Jerusalem’s outskirts, where pharisees’ and colonizers’ detritus burned beside the subaltern’s and dogs gnashed their teeth. 2. Several months I believed I was dead and in hell, my friends and family simulations calibrated for subtle torment. Like on The Good Place. Solipsism is a hell. No windows, no doors. 3. Hell as thermodynamic principle: empire’s excess locking inexorable feedback loop into place. Fire and flood. Hell already upon us. The material reality of hell. 4. Hell by choice: we could mint trillion dollar coins and tax for inflation but our false teachers would sooner privatize oxygen than build God’s kingdom here. 5. Maybe it’s better if we just die now, she jokes on the group chat, not joking. This being alive stuff is too much stress. In my next life, bring me back as a rock. 6. White Americans build tombs for the prophets our ancestors killed and decorate the monuments of the godly people our ancestors destroyed. Then Tweet, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would never have joined them in killing the prophets.” This, too, a feedback loop. 7. Hell as infinite recursion. As wormhole. As 1918 anti-maskers returning to hang governors in effigy. As Sisyphus. Russian Doll. Groundhog Day. 8. Hell as never-ending psy-op. Fireworks for eternity. A forever gaslighting. Scrabbling up a surface with no footholds. Government access to what breaks inside people and goes on breaking. 9. Another incarnation: a robot that parrots you in predictive text, spitting back your most tender and repulsive places. Google’s record of your psyche. Our inexorable porousness: no part of us left unpenetrated by algorithm. 10. Several months I believed a sad-faced statue in my house to be stealing my soul, speaking sinuously upon each instance I had missed the mark. Penetrating my skull with its cruel and intimate laughter. My soul leaching away like blood swirling into water, escaping my body like fingers of smoke. Thus cursed, I could forget everyone’s doom for a time. 11. Solipsism: a comfort for the comfortable. A denial of the material reality of hell. 12. Man-made hell: no retirement savings. An eviction notice. Rationing your Insulin. An overrun ICU fogged by intubated breath. Having no plan. No place on earth to go. Bring me back as a rock, my friend says, because both her countries kill her. 13. Hell: a comfort to the few. An oil derrick mining money. An offshore account. The knowledge that the world will die but you will be okay. Phoebe Rusch's work as a poet, essayist, and fiction writer has appeared in Lambda Literary poetry spotlight, The Rumpus, and Entropy magazine, among other publications. They have an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. More of their writing can be found at www.phoeberusch.com. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Jason Baldinger garann CC
spook the horse the waitress offers a fifty-cent bounty on every fly dropped the cathance river runs in my head a pitbull sits patiently, waits for any lost scrap goose Island covered in halos one fog obscures the ocean words fat, beautiful gray, hang over the sky words like damariscotta skadumpha words that no longer belong to a tongue if I close my eyes I’m lost in a wyeth painting rafters of turkeys cemeteries materialize from nowhere buggies wave along blinn hill vistas I slow down, I don’t want to spook the horse midnight sasquatch nights aren’t meant for sleeping restless three am barefoot walks around town hawaiian shirt fouling up the moon light or shirtless in a straw hat with notebook and pen listen as small towns sleep crickets chirp a town square flaccid flags, oily night sprawled on park bench scribbles under street lamps cop cars passing wave midnight sasquatch ain’t no thing trains pass every night regular as alarm clocks whistle for twinkees as they rattle past the lumber yard midnight sasquatch wonders where those engines disappear to, which place wherever maps are oceans dive in anywhere he gets close to hopping one every now and again never does his feet are stuck maps may be oceans dive in wherever wherever is too far away Jason Baldinger is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvaninia and former Writer in Residence at Osage Arts Community. He has multiple books available including the chapbook Blind Into Leaving (Analog Submission Press) as well as the forthcoming Afterlife is a Hangover (Stubborn Mule Press) & A Threadbare Universe (Kung Fu Treachery). His work has been published widely in print journals and online. You can listen to him read his work on Bandcamp and on lps by the bands Theremonster and The Gotobeds. Travis CC The Campfire we pass the tequila clockwise around the campfire i take a sip and stare into the fire until i am no longer aware of a world outside it and its embers twirling into the sky the fireflies glimmer like fairies they keep their distance their glow fading in and out against the black silhouette of trees in night time passes now each sip punctuates a confession or lack of confession or the decline of a dare now we are out of tequila and we turn to clothes with each dare i am too scared to complete a piece must go my sheer top my black socks my shoes a firefly lands on my knee without thinking i crush it brushing it to the ground it continues to flash its greenish glow fading in and out then out sitting slouched in my bra my dark jeans i say aloud i am lonely i am lonely maybe i was born to be lonely we pass the words clockwise leaning back on our hands we watch the stars through the sparse trees someone lights a cigarette in the campfire’s dying flames and someone else sketches the moment in pen Karla Renée Nemanic is a queer Latinx poet from the Peach State who tragically longs for sub-80 temperatures. Currently, they are pursuing a BA in English at the University of Georgia. Karla’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fem Lit Mag, Marias at Sampaguitas, and ang(st) zine. You can find them on Twitter @jajceglava. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Heidi Miranda ▲brian james CC written on bus 16 I’ve always been very cautious about fruit And every other thing I put in my mouth. A single blemish and it’ll go in the trash instead. I spend most of my time discarding things and People and feelings, always tossing them Out like objects that mean nothing to me, so Now I am barren and alone in this empty room. Does anything pure remain in this realm where Everything is stained or sad or changing or Growing? A lifetime ago I was taught to reject Things that were less than perfect, so I truly Believed that I was perfect. Now I live with That emptiness, and the reassurance is Hard as stone when it speaks to my graveyard Body and says that nothing new will ever Come my way. Now the handrails on the buses Look like little nooses, and I hold on tightly. I hold on tightly to the only thing that remains. a lonely funeral I dip the rose stem into a palette of color / When they closed your funeral casket And laid bouquets on the golden lid There were no roses in the arrangements. / Even death paints a picture of unfairness. / Your family wanted yellow. One of your sons loved yellow. He gave you yellow and gold and the sun And the day you left There was no yellow And he wasn't even there. / When you gave me green tea It tasted like earthquake It smelled like freedom, Like shifting dynamics. You were getting older And in my shame (I'm so sorry) My visits became less frequent. / If I could go back to you I would still be afraid. If I had been there before they Closed the casket I would have been afraid. / The rose stem trembles in my hand. Your death feels like a thorn in my backside; A reminder to urge the world to stay in And stay alive for you. / Your children held a damn party at your funeral. I can only think about it and cry. There was never any respect for you, Even at the end of your life. I'm still, so sorry. Heidi Miranda is a Mexican poet working towards her B.A. in English. She has published poems in both online and in-print journals and is active on Instagram (@weepingblueberry) where she can be found posting landscape photography and quoting from her favorite poets. “Quarantine Journal” These multimedia collages were made from April-July 2020. These were treated like diary entries in a time of confusion about my dance work being on pause. I’m also in a recovery process, and I feel my identity as “dancer” shifting. I don’t know what to call myself, now, and it feels like a relief. Pre-COVID, Mia Martelli made work primarily in dance. Lately, her focus has shifted towards music, television, cooking, and spirituality. Mia feels challenged by the gap that exists between contemporary art and storytelling. She relies on DIY and kitsch aesthetics, expressive sound + movement (in the body and through other materials), and everyday settings to bridge that gap. Mia lives in Brooklyn and believes the theaters were dead and COVID was the nail in the casket. She wants her work to be unpolished, but cared for. She believes, when it comes to process, in doing the best with what you have, paying her collaborators, and remaining rigorously earnest and honest. 9/26/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Carolyn Adams barbara w CC How to Judge the Ripeness of an Apple They’ll slowly turn to rose, I hear. Why did I mistake need for something better? It isn’t what ripens, it’s what doesn’t. Something rustles in the wisteria vines. Tiny finches surf the billows of the pine. The sunlight is turning toward fall, slowly. Had I known, I’d have stayed away. Everything hinges on the proper timing. Somehow, I’ll just let things go. There’s a white moth laying crazy stitches in the roses. Excuse me: the moth is pale green. My judgement, misused, is faulty as ever. Window Strike The casualty crumples in my palm and readies herself for the worst. Her chest is a bellows, lifting millimeters of air. A black bead eye watches, assuming I will wound her and she’ll die. I fit her in cotton snugged in a small bed. A bit of sunlight warms her. She blinks and awaits the strike. Even as I drive to the building where people will lift her and care for her, she doesn’t move. A stone, waiting. Accustomed to being prey she doesn’t know I am saving her, she doesn’t recognize rescue, probably doesn’t even have a word for it. But I do. For me, the word is “friend”, is “worthy”. The word is “love”. Lightening the Load If I knew what was real, I would tell you. Blue lines of sky against boxes we’ve built seem tangible, like titles that flow in the air around us. But what can’t be named is what’s real. Otherwise, I’d have countless words for it. I’d call them out, collect them like stones and silver. In the small shadows of what you know, you dip your fingers in stains, and smear the offenses on windows. You never forget what they are. Nurture your petty tableau, keep it if you want. In the end, it means nothing. I could wonder about you, who you are, why you are, the real of you. But of all my burdens, I don’t choose the weight of you. Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have appeared in Panoply, Amsterdam Quarterly, Visitant, Bryant Literary Review, and Trajectory, among others. Nominated for a Pushcart and for Best of the Net, she is a staff editor for Mojave River Review, and a poetry editor for VoiceCatcher. 9/26/2020 0 Comments Poetry by TAK Erzinger Olly Aston CC Empty Never left behind in the manner of a snail shell abandoned at the lip of a garden lying open, a cavity, exposed. Never left behind in the manner of a plastic bottle adrift, on the hem of a calm, unconcerned sea, the catch of a star fish to an unknown destination. Not in this manner. Left behind little relics comprised of flesh and bone from a marriage, a filling that once kept the foundation in place. Left behind developing souls, vessels half full, wasted, as a thirst is quenched elsewhere. Left behind Leaving a vacuum, an open wound children’s voices, sound unheard, a gaping hole unable to heal. Orphan When your mother decides to leave, do you tell the world? What if everyone thinks it’s your fault? You could pretend it didn’t happen, never talk about it and over-compensate with many things, become an awesome painter share your artwork full of hidden meaning. Maybe people will forget to ask. It will push you to develop in ways you never imagined, maybe ways she would’ve been proud of, if she’d been around. Like how you can really dance, the way she could always dance, the way you followed her steps to the beats of all the albums she bought you, holding hands, she’d swing you around and around, pulling you close and pushing you back, keeping you spinning, you’d hear, I’ll always be there for you. It’s not what she said though. She was only singing. TAK Erzinger is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. Her poetry has been featured in Bien Acompañada from Cornell University, The Muse from McMaster University, River and South Review, Wilkes University and more. Her debut poetry collection entitled, “Found: Between the Trees” was published by Grey Border Books, Canada 2019. Her latest unpublished poetry manuscript “At the Foot of the Mountain” was short-listed by the Eyelands Book Awards and has been accepted for publication by Floricanto Press out of California. |
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