12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Kelsey Lister cattan2011 CC
Berth When they said the highway might close, I should’ve gone home. The weather doesn’t bother me, but I’m not good when everything changes. This year, the first snow fell on a Sunday. And ever since that flake stuck I’ve been staring down a hole. I sat inside my car until dark, watching Jupiter become plain. Enough to rival the moon; I listened to ‘Berth’ and cried into my hands for an hour. After all the ways I’ve tried to fix myself, I’m still not right. My friends reassure me- it’s normal to be so heavy-hearted. But I don’t tell them that it’s more than what happened in November. This notion always stays and it’s always a shame. All that potential, tied to the beginning of a decade. I know I’ve lived too easy to now become so unglued. But a feeling is that, lasting and familiar. Unhurried- I risk the road, take it slow. Bitter to better until I stick too. Kelsey Lister is an emerging poet residing in Alberta, Canada. She has work appearing or forthcoming in Maudlin House, Selenite Press, Roi Fainéant Press & others.
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12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Erica Anderson-Senter naql CC
IN THE YEAR AFTER YOUR DEATH I DIDN’T LEARN ANYTHING BECAUSE WHAT’S LEFT TO LEARN? There isn’t happiness here—even in that bright shock of sun when evening gives up the ghost. Grief, Papa. I’m talking about grief. I didn’t learn this but somehow called it forth: resurrected the grief-life. I see a road-kill kitten—you; I hear a small bat’s sonar, you. I slept in your bed the other weekend and I am ashamed to say I slept well, but the next morning I laid very still. I let that sunshine in the slats of blinds, thought not about your last day but the one when I showed up, ash smeared on my forehead and longing in my palms. Red-faced I cried so hard for the lover who left and you, you, you tender man, kissed the crown of my head and said, Oh, Little Girl. And here was my shining grief pulsing and you held out your hand, took some of it. You did that well. And now, one year later I am here. I still have it all. What is this time we speak of—this expanse of quick- paced breath—when all I want, just one more time, just one small-footed fox of a minute, is to be lovely in front of you. You, the breathing man who I miss. Erica Anderson-Senter writes from Fort Wayne, IN. Her first full length collection of poetry, A Midwestern Poet's Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, was published by EastOver Press in 2021. Her work has also appeared in Midwest Gothic, Dialogist, and One Art. She has her MFA from Bennington College. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Jem Henderson Helena Burgerhout CC
wet face mouth like a racecar a bugatti type 35 fast talking smooth blue to get you into this crumpled bed & mouth like a soft pink cave uvula a stalactite eerieing into slime mould darkness & teeth like teacups & toilet bowls & mouth like a navvy all hard words & the chink of the beer bottle against them & mouth tongue like a gordian knot with all this im sorry i love you i didn’t mean it im lonely & mouth like forgiveness mouth like whisper mouth telling tales telling myth telling poems that are meant to make up for all this mouth & mouth wet like a shipwreck mouth like a underwater camera showing exactly what i saw dead bloated eyesockets the home of tiny flashing sealife fingers the realm of mussel kings & queens with beautiful barnacle crowns & mouth like sadness at all the thing i forgot to say & all the things i did the cyclical nature of sestina and trauma the course comes out - a small haunch of rabbit, a dumpling with dashi, eel, and smoke. i revel in the flavours, the odd sensations, the drunkenness, the weight of the evening, the addition of tarragon, the dark stone bowl. the preparation for writing my trauma. it’s not easy to do - to write this trauma thinking back to the times i was a frightened rabbit. ink and water incantation, hand waved over a bowl peer through twenty years, through memory smoke. seek out the nuance, reach back to an evening, dry-mouthed, feel this uncomfortable sensation. the fear. how do you write this sensation? the homeless hostel. unpick that trauma. John Peel on the radio, 11pm in the evening. he’s playing a new band, Frightened Rabbit. the single bed where we sit, roll spliffs, smoke ourselves stupid. he packs the bowl. take another hit. this forty year old man is no dish, no beautiful man to fill me with the sensations i want late into the night. met him in the smoking area outside a club. now he’s on my bed. the trauma in writing this moment catches me now. timid rabbit. thinking back to this particular evening. i met him at a psychedelic rave late evening in summer. 16 years old. addicted to pot, to speed, to whatever i could. a Duracell bunny always on the go because what if I stopped? no sense at 16. i played with whoever i pleased. the trauma of my mother’s house catching up, burnt out but carrying on, meeting men like twisting fire. the single bed in the hostel. have him over on an evening kiss it. hold it. do it in the dark. hide the trauma. he can’t see the cuts. life in this leaking goldfish bowl - i’m swimming round and round, the sensation spilling, smashing into walls. the man tells me to rub it. Jem Henderson (they/them) is a genderqueer poet from Leeds, winner of a Creative Future award for underrepresented writers. genderfux, their first collaboration came out February 2022. an othered mother, their first pamphlet, is out in October 2022 from Nine Pens. They have a collaborative collection with Chris Cambell, small plates, due in 2023 from Broken Sleep. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Cindy Veach Seth Sawyers CC
Like Water like Vodka The liquor store shelves are a glut of vodka. And I thought all vodka was vodka. Vodka from the Russian word voda: water. Clear, odorless, no wonder my brother preferred vodka. Pegasus, bothered by a gadfly, threw Bellerophon to his death. Hubris runs in my family and thrives on straight vodka. They say anyone can drink like a Russian. It just takes practice. My brother kept his work thermos full of vodka. Within his body was the body of my grandfather and great grandfather-- a deadly gene cocktail: tall, handsome with a love of vodka. My brother’s wife locked the Smirnoff in the freezer. “What can I do?” in Russian means “I’ll find vodka.” The gods granted him beauty and all that is lovely in mankind. In the middle of the night he chain-sawed his way to the vodka. For years I fell for the charming, debonair lie of him. How I wanted to believe it was water not vodka. Cosmonauts celebrated their moon landing with vodka and joy. At forty-five my baby brother died of vodka. So many brands: Ketel, Chopin, Van Gogh, Gray Goose, Absolut. Russians say there’s only good vodka and very good vodka. The line, “The gods granted him beauty and all that is lovely in mankind,” is from The Illiad. The text “lie of him” is from the poem “Steubenville Ghazal,” by Kirun Kapur. Under My Bed Yesterday, I put a photo of my brother on the night stand, but I’m finding it hard to look at him. It’s the last photo. His hair short, his tight curls buzzed off. This is not how I remember him. There’s a yellow dog in the photo. Not his. Whose dog? How do I not know my brother? What happened when I wasn’t looking? His right hand is on the dog’s broad head. The other hand outside the frame. I think it might be best to put him back in the box beneath my bed. I think the dust and spiders might like him back. He was sober three months his sponsor said. Under my bed a monster. Cindy Veach’s most recent book Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) was named a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal. She is also the author of Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, The Journal, and Salamander among others. She is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is co-poetry editor of MER. www.cindyveach.com 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Lara Torea Seth Sawyers CC
things i must say before i leave i. there’s a myriad of hyperboles i keep in this little cardboard box where the rings that turn my fingers green get ready for burial. one night i gathered some of the oldest stars god was selling & flinged them to encrust onto my newly gouged wound. the phonemes in pilgrimage loiter like beheaded phantoms behind ii. the doors you left ajar, their voices my only testimony. my mother’s prayers demand orthodoxy. pluto warps its own orbit. the brain increases in rifts as it leaps into a razorblade for the fifth time today: the latitudes widen: two axis juxtapose in denial. why are you leaving is exodus’ tribal iii. chant, it smolders in your tongue, bleeding gums reign supreme. a grandfather’s chagrin is more than enough. who am i telling? my waste of lineage? a felled pine of relativity? the axe sits in the corridor. iv. it speaks to me in lengthy syllables. I do sometimes wonder about the secret things. Patience and brittleness and the way your fingers linger and then brush off against this fabricated cosmos. A sort of magnetism permeated in vitriol, cerulean as havoc, as suffocation, as drain. All-consuming. I wonder when the empyrean waltzes around this meter and a half, careful, quiet, conquering. I wonder as I watch you spit out each consonant as if burning, as if poison. Lost like a bird in mellifluousness. This, ourselves, swallowed by the sweet, the sly, the searing. And when the sky rifts open like an eggshell and the light hits and abases and defies I cannot help but surrender. I wonder, sometimes, alone at night, celestial dome spreading above me in perpetuity. I wonder at work and back home and when the sun gets red and transcending, foreshadowing, an obvious metaphor. The times you water the flowers in my meadow, I wonder, I wonder when you’re away and building a different life and even when I am not in it I wonder. When death takes me to become one with soil and all those planes are lost and I am nothing but illness to land I will wonder. Transience doing its doing, myself adrift and sedated, I wonder. Lara Torea is always in love with something. She enjoys television about the failed marriage's aftermath, cats, the beach in cold weather, Billy Joel, learning about silly things from space. Her words have been published or are forthcoming in Limelight Review and INKSOUNDS Collective. Otherwise, she tweets @melarancholic. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Kathleen Latham Katie Taylor CC
TO THE BONE Sitting at the dinner table, mouths drawn tight, eyes cast downward, the only sound the clink, clink, clink of fork against plate, blade against steel, a surgical accompaniment to the tension which rises and threatens to burst but fails, interminably. I would welcome anger’s cacophony: words thrown and broken, shards of fury hitting the walls, raining down at our feet. —say something —say something —say something But there is my mother on her throne of resentment. And there is my father an oblivious counterweight. And I cannot move, cannot speak, I can barely lift my head, so heavy is the silence. This is our meal. Words picked clean. Bones of emotion sucked of their marrow then left on a plate to be passed from hand to hand. GIVE ME BACK Give me back my innocence. Thumbs in a cootie catcher. Mansion/Apartment/Shack/House. Brick wall, waterfall. Middle school gym transformed into something beautiful. Like me. Give me back my clichés. Windows down, radio on, life-is-coming-for-us clichés. That big sky feeling. Ward off the inevitable crash, the gravel in the knee, the looks that cut and words that scar. The onslaught of cruelty. Give me back my body. The ridge of my hip, curve of my breast, delight of my legs. My heart beating, wanting, pure. Let me tuck it away like a pebble in my pocket to touch, to feel, to ground me in what is real and worth keeping. Or better yet Give me Rage. White hot Justice. Enough with these laugh track Lotharios and cartoon villains. Show the wolf for what he is: teeth, claws, a belly full of bones. Give me the girl who says, Hell No. Who says, I take back what is mine and reject your narrative, your cookie cutter victim/hero dichotomy. I reserve the right to delineate my happiness and my heartbreak. I reclaim that girl. I call her by her name. Our past is ours to do with what we will. Kathleen Latham’s work has appeared in Red Eft Review, 100 Word Story, and Red Wolf Journal, among others. A mother of four grown children, she now lavishes all her attention on her ungrateful cat. She lives in Massachusetts and can be found at @lathamwithapen or online at KathleenLatham.com. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Rebecca Watkins Peter Organisciak CC
That Boy Once the kids at my new school saw I got off the bus on Vine Street everything changed. You can’t step off the bus into a sidewalk of hookers, dealers, and pimps and still expect people to see the you they saw before. Every day on the bus he turned his head to smile at me over the top of green seat backs until eventually he sat beside me. He didn’t care about Vine Street even though he lived in the suburbs. Sandy-haired and blue-eyed he wore jerseys, rode his bike on tree-lined streets, had friends who looked like him. I leaned against the bus window. With each bump my head bounced against the glass. He slipped his baseball mitt under my head, a pillow. He said sleep, I’ll wake you up. It smelled like dirt, leather, him. Possibly Love I forget to grind my teeth as I sleep. Instead I dream that I live underwater, in a room wallpapered with green waves–my blood pumps in time with the tides. At school, the student who threatened to jump, now wears a parachute, his arm tattooed in his mother tongue, a word he swears means night— or maybe anger—or possibly love. Last month brought cyclones, those who we thought were too young to die are gone. I dream sand pours into my ears, but my mouth remains empty. I have no language left for this. When I speak to my father, his voice travels through the phone as if through hallways of loss. I hear the wind buffeting gravestones in a field in Indiana, whistling through valleys in Kentucky. I imagine him and my mother on the porch of their little house. He sips his coffee as he reads the letter I have yet to write, where I tell him about how time shredded my convictions, about the years that were cyclones upending pieces of my life, rearranging them until I named that rubble holy because I was yanked back to truth there. Rebecca Watkins, an educator and writer, earned her M.F.A. in Poetry and her M.S. Ed from the City University of New York. Besides being a public-school teacher, she has created and led poetry workshops for all ages. Rebecca has been published in Sin Fronteras, New Feather’s Anthology, Roanoke Review, The Red Mesa Review, Anderbo, and the SNReview among other literary journals. Her first full-length poetry book Sometimes, in These Places was published by Unsolicited Press in 2017. More of her work can be found at www.rebeccawatkinswriter.com. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Aoife Smith Katie Taylor CC
Sunday Morning (2002) The pines sit like children in pews, vigilantly distracted by all the world is, the rain greeting them not only rain but water imagery spit from the sky with the force of a boy begging. The mornings’ dimness heavy, dragging me damp fisted down with the day. Watching the storm decide on or against its own continuation I pitch to the window, forehead crushing on mesh screen for a taste of what comes and goes. Unsteady, wondering if the swooning clouds hold tightly even a particle of someone I knew, if her spit is thousands of feet high just waiting to be named rain. Again, capable of touch. Aoife Smith (they/them) is a queer first-generation American poet and fiber artist. They are a recent graduate of Smith College and 2022 recipient of The Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize for their first chapbook First Grief. Aoife’s work appears, or is upcoming, in Emulate Magazine, Death Rattle/Oroboro, Bullshit Lit, and others. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Brianna Fay jon oropeza CC
Final Round
Awfulness Dad and I stay up to watch the moon turn red. I resist the urge to wake my mom, To show off to her the changing sky. Two months before my junior year we camped out on the front lawn under the pear tree Erin and I, laying in the cool grass. We were still friends then, sisters. Kaylee was still wagging her black and white tail. The awfulness is just setting in. Before that, on the back deck. We watched the moon turn red From pink saucer chairs. We were children then, No awfulness. Little girls, Craning back our necks To get the best possible view of a disappearing moon. I never used to believe in signs. But now, looking at a moon basked in red like blood, I wonder if it could be a sign. I wonder if the eclipse, Like magic, Could purge the awfulness within me And fill the void that’s left. The Staircase “It’s so beautiful there.” Is the first thing she said to me a month before she passed, My grandmother. Terry, from Parkchester. Two months shy of 90 years. Waving me down to her beside Like a little girl with a secret, She pulled her oxygen mask down to tell me about Heaven, Which she’d seen from the same hospital bed Only two days before. My Grandmother, from Huntington, Has seen Heaven more times than any person I think More times than Jacob saw his staircase, Even more than Ezekiel saw those burning chariots Dancing in the sky. My Grandmother, humbly, knew God better than the prophets. And when she died at 23, The whole of the world hinged on her decision to stay or go And when she died at 53, When she saw herself at the top of a mountain in a room made of glass, She chose to stay. “It’s so beautiful there.” Is what she told me. But what she meant to say was, Even though it’s so beautiful there, It’s beautiful here. Brianna Fay lives in Rochester New York with her rescue puppy, Molly. She is published in several literary journals including Tipping the Scales, Havik, and The Underground. She is also the honorable mention recipient of the Havik: Inside Brilliance award. When not writing, Brianna loves her job as a hostess and enjoys knitting. 12/3/2022 0 Comments Poetry By Laurence Hart jon oropeza CC
Sorrow Is Not My Name after Ross Gay, after Gwendolyn Brooks I will tell you that my favorite season is fall not in the basic white bitch pumpkin spice latte way, but in the everything’s dying and sometimes I wish I were, too, way. Existing is exhausting and I feel myself turning the way an apple does once it’s been cut and forgotten. I will bake my feelings into a pie and eat them like a bear preparing for winter but biologists will not celebrate my fatness. Sometimes I swallow two tablets and pretend I could hibernate, pretend I could stay in bed for three months or more. But I have been mistaken. Fall is not death, it is fertilizer and all of this will feed a future I have not seen, but know I exist in the way I know after the cold when the world thaws tulips and daffodils will claw their way out of the ground and the trees will sprout green. The world will explode color and is that any different than writing poetry? Take that which I thought was death, was end, take what was trauma and grief, and create beauty where there was none. Sorrow is not my name. I am Spring. Laurence Hart (she/they) is a nonbinary bisexual dragon sitting atop a hoard of notebooks in Louisville, KY. When not writing, they are probably playing board games. Her work has appeared in Second Chance Lit, FreezeRay Poetry, Tilted House Review, and Just Femme and Dandy. She is the author of Disorders and Dating Apps (Nanny Goat Press, 2021). |
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