10/4/2022 Poetry By Emalisa Rose Thomas CC
That strange aunt at the holiday table Her drawings, bizarre, of some obscurity’s etchings. Grandma Jean hung them to make make her feel “special,” The aunt at the table, that the kids felt compulsion to stare at, while holiday prayers were recited. Sporting some facial hair, clodhopper shoes, the spinster like shuffler, with the leopard skin knockoff bag, never came with a “man friend,” though Aunt Renee said, she probably thought best, not to bring one. Losing touch with the family, I hadn’t thought back to those times, till today at Aunt Abigail’s funeral, with the the calling of cousins, paying respect, sharing some latter day thoughts as adults now, admitting we saw parts of ourselves, through the years, that mimicked the aunt we once deemed as “strange.” When not writing, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting and drawing. She volunteers in animal rescue. She walks with a birding group on Sundays. Some of her work has appeared in The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, Anti Heroin Chic and other eclectic places. She can be reached at [email protected] 10/4/2022 Poetry By Melissa Joplin Higley Tim Vrtiska CC
Poems from First Father 2. I believed, for more than 30 years, you were drunk when you died, careless: your tractor trailer careening off the Loma bridge. I was wrong. A minor miscalculation, then a 100-foot drop, a railroad track. I didn’t know you. I barely belonged to you. I believe you held me only once. If I’m wrong, don’t tell me. 3. Your heart survived the fall, at first, held fast within its cracked bone cage. Who felt the final delicate beat? Who measured what was left? How we forget the ways a heart can break-- tender red pear, overwhelmed. 4. she told me last spring / what was left of you forty-three years ago / after us / when you were better / sober / working / larger than life / turns out you were more / you / than before she took my place / I pretend I’m her / the other daughter from the other wife / I pretend / I’m the one you’re teaching / to play piano / sitting next to you / on the bench / the one / feeling your fingers / guiding / to the right keys / mine Melissa Joplin Higley’s poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Feral, The Night Heron Barks, Writer’s Digest, MER, For A Friend anthology (Lucent Dreaming, June 2023), and elsewhere.. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-facilitates the Poetry Craft Collective. She lives in Mamaroneck, NY with her husband and son. Visit her at: melissajoplinhigley.com. 10/4/2022 Poetry By Jim Trainer Tim Vrtiska CC CANADIAN GIRL the night I met you the cops took a mentally ill man to the pavement dogpiling him, each taking an arm with the third one waving cars through at the café a woman in line in front of me videotaped herself telling the staff she was a sovereign being you were the only one in there reading but put your book in your bag and we got out of there, walked round the capitol with armed staties’ talkies crackling with crickets in the dark grass we climbed 7th at the top of the hill slewed club beats and overwrought bass wrecked in the city air at my place you unrolled a giant map from your bag and lay on it looking up at me like you wanted to be kissed I pushed the glass doors wide as the sirens died down and lay with you there feeling the hot migration between us pulling you in and taking me there. SEQUESTRANT every time I left you I found me and now I can’t leave and I’m lost it was perfect poetry—your hair blown like Patti Smith, refineries rising behind you higher than the moon the charm of youth is never knowing what a fool you are and wicked middle-age only the reservation to never be foolish again the cold spring makes me think of you but everything does there’s toms in the high weed wincing at me with no difference between disgust and disregard the fire station’s lit up brighter than the dusk I pass these bougie people like a ghost I make it in put up my own lights slide open the glass doors let the cold in like a welcome pain I’m glad of the past and underwhelmed on the future the present at the desk breaking to smoke and let another night chelate and unspool my lonely weight pry you from me and all love. Jim Trainer is a poet, publisher, writer and performer. He blogs at Going For the Throat, has been a columnist for Into The Void magazine and contributes to Music, Movies&Hoops. As a proponent of personal journalism Trainer reports on the inner life while writing about recovery, mental health and the creative process. Trainer publishes one letterpressed and perfectly bound-by-hand collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, every year through Yellow Lark Press. STRIDE is his 8th. Trainer is the progenitor of Stand Up Tragedy™ and performs regularly throughout the world. 10/3/2022 Poetry By Leah Mueller Tim Vrtiska CC
Creature Feature #2 Eating popcorn in front of a black-and-white television, fingers drenched in melted butter and iodized salt. The Bride of Dracula has made her fatal mistake, while Frankenstein’s monster only wants acceptance from a crowd intent on his eradication. Next week, the Mummy will lumber across my screen, mindless as a drugged cow, and I can stay up as late as I want, at least until the test pattern emerges. I watch everything, the late-late news, the grand finale: a rendition of the Lord’s Prayer in sign language. Turning off the television feels like saying goodbye to an old friend I’m not sure I will ever see again--or if I do, one of us may have changed into a creature no one can recognize. I am already different: my bathroom mirror shows a face that has lived through multiple bouts of terror, and I haven’t even begun. Leah Mueller is the author of ten prose and poetry books. Her new book, "The Destruction of Angels" (Anxiety Press) is forthcoming in October 2022. Leah's work appears in Rattle, NonBinary Review, Midway Journal, Citron Review, The Spectacle, Miracle Monocle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She is a 2022 nominee for Best of the Net. Her flash piece, "Land of Eternal Thirst" will appear in the 2022 edition of Sonder Press' "Best Small Fictions" anthology. Website: www.leahmueller.org. 10/3/2022 Poetry By Kathleen Hellen Tim Vrtiska CC
and if I tell I have to tell it all you said you’d push my stupid pie-face in the toilet—that’s what you said when you were with your friends before you left, before the trick of pillows if our father checked you’d lost your two front teeth to meth your pretty face to filter kings you said you loved him more than anybody else (he said he’d kill you) goodbye, pie-face—that’s what you said once you wrote and said I was your only friend, you wrote it on a postcard from Denver Kathleen Hellen’s collection Meet Me at the Bottom is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Main Street Rag. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, her award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Link to her work at https://www.kathleenhellen.com/ 10/3/2022 Poetry By Katie E. PeckhamI am apocryphal now. not stockphoto silent not trusting not pliant not. I am light now will fight all night now the whitewealthy arch of your eyebrow right now. for I am them now. the blighted who wander. aloneamong those whom you smite now. outside your icy icinged boundary lines. beyond your doublespeak I singlespeak now: release me from your tractorbeamblind your cottoned eyes your straightarrowed bullying bullseye Katie E. Peckham (she/her) writes and wonders in Los Angeles, in between building pillow forts with her kids and failing to keep up with the cilantro turning to slime in her fridge. She is a neurodivergent who has a deep and abiding love for underdogs. She has been published in Running With Water and Quillkeepers Autumn Anthology. 10/3/2022 Poetry By Mia Maisha Vlastimil Koutecký CC
Institutions They think they are hurting me Because they are keeping from me what I need to survive. I have already learned not to want anything too beautiful. It is important to know what you look like. Everyone already thinks I am always asking for too much. If I get what I want, will I still be black? I am uncomfortable at the thought of Discrepancy. I walk around with anything expensive and they think I stole it. When my hair looks good people don’t think it’s mine. I am ashamed because the black movement has come so far and I still can’t picture myself with anything better than what I am given. In the dream where I finally get what I want, it’s not even me. I dream of white people with nice cars, pretty houses, and perfect families. Can I, as a black woman, afford (anything) To have standards? We are not guaranteed that things get better from here. I hold on to whatever white supremacy says is good enough for me. What does it mean to deserve anything? Strong black woman Half of these people think I’m better off dead on the side of the road like a dog. But the negro in me won’t give up. We are always giving white people what they want. I think I should live forever just to spite them. I never feel like I’m going to make it to the next year but then I do. I am always stronger than I think I am. / I am always as strong as they think I am. Which is a problem. I don’t want them to think they can just do anything to me. Mia Maisha is a 20-year-old university student studying law at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa, though she is originally from the D.R.C. Her work mainly centers around the daily struggle black people have to endure in the face of black oppression and discrimination. 10/3/2022 Poetry By Matthew Borczon Andrew Seaman CC
I was on my first medication for PTSD working as a prison nurse when after an inmate extraction someone asked me where I was you know inside my head because they needed me out there and I had just sort of zoned out I explained that I was on a new med and it made me feel off well the other nurse said that I needed to do something about that because you can get killed here if you keep trying to work like this and I was thinking I could have been killed every day back where I was when I started needing shit like this just to get through a day still I did need to do something because now like when I was in Afghanistan I was responsible for other people and now like then I still have no idea who is supposed to be responsible for me. I hate when people put a descriptive word in front of the word war it’s not a bloody war a terrible war a frightening war it is just a war and if you are in one you just are until you are not and until you end up nothing at all. Matthew Borczon recently retired from the United States Navy after serving 20 years. He is a poet and a nurse from Erie Pa who has written 17 books of poetry, his most recent PTSD a Living Will is available through Rust belt press. He is co editor of the Rust Belt Review and publishes widely in the small press. He has a wife and four kids and most of his sanity. 10/3/2022 Poetry By Morgan Hoffman Thomas CC
On Loss There is no pain quite like the kind Which b l o o m s from fertility struggles. It eats at your soul Like spilled ink slowly possesses paper Consumes you on a cellular level And every second is agony. Even being in a room with beholders who understand is lonely because each of our paths Is so completely isolating. It’s the kind of solitude that comes with death. I imagine When we crave to create To hold that power We are walking between worlds. We are entering a place without words; We are beholden to our bodies Something our ancestors understood But has since been sold In exchange For modernity And “civilization” Morgan Hoffman is of mixed heritage where her Philippine ancestral roots are Ilocano from Agoo and Masbateño from Monreal, Ticao. Her German ancestry hails from Baden-Württemberg. She is the great-granddaughter of an Albularyo (i.e Philippine Healer) and as such is working to fulfill what she believes is the legacy of the modern day healer: creating spaces for self healing in order to heal across generations— past, present, and future. 10/3/2022 Poetry By Amanda Rosas Tim Vrtiska CC
Pico de Gallo This is when pico de gallo tastes the way my grandmother intended. This coasting into August summer, and grandma is on my mind because tomatoes finally taste like tomatoes in the glory of their season and the jalapeños almost take flight in their parrot-greenness and the red onion, that is not red at all, but violet-white, all unite on the tongue like a legend or bliss, picante. These colors, these citron, grass and lava smells remind me of my grandmother’s unfiltered ways, of her kitchen where I watched and learned how women command. How her bare hands memorized the landscape slice and dice of simple fruits and hierba and made them taste like the ferment of sun and the craft of harvest. It is summer and the tomatoes are round piñata celebrations bursting off the vine. And grandma is leaning out the screen door of her comino kitchen, dinner is ready, she hymns, come inside and steady your hunger. Come and be yourself. Amanda is a mother, teacher and poet originally from San Antonio. She draws strength and creativity from her Latina roots, and from her husband and three daughters. Her work has been published by The Latino Book Review and The Front Porch Review. She dreams of becoming a full time writer and storyteller. |
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