4/4/2024 Poetry by Matthew Lippman Timo Newton-Syms CC
THE SORROW OF THE WHOLE DAMN FUCKING STUPID WORLD ….grief sneaks up and smacks you while you are buying eggs because the Key Food loudspeaker is playing Roy Orbison's Crying and you never cried at your Bubbie's funeral, but you are sobbing into the dairy case. – Marisa Schwartz It’s important that you let grief sneak up on you. And when it does, it’s important to let it do its magic on your body. It does not matter if you are in the dairy aisle or the concentration camp or inside the music of Philip Glass like Koyaanisqatsi. What does that mean even? Oh yes, life out of balance. I saw that film once and then I listened to Einstein on the Beach and wept my face off. The point is when you weep your face off you have to remember that it does not matter where you are. It’s always good to do it on the street corner or in the crowded bus or the music festival where early 90s Pearl Jam is the opening act. Because it’s always a surprise and the surprise is an act of generosity. The body giving itself something and so when the grief comes at you in your Brooklyn apartment with Jeff in the kitchen scrambling eggs and Levi in Chicago making magic with the wind you have to let it give you something. You know why Philip Glass called Einstein on the Beach Einstein on the Beach? Because it’s all water and water gives us something that is the intersection between the sensual and the cerebral. Einstein’s mind, the salty beach. Water carries us somewhere whether we know about relativity and the time/space continuum or it’s just Sunday morning clipping coupons watching The Peanuts with the kids and there you are at the little Formica table and you don’t even know why but here it comes and it comes and it’s your personal sorrow and then it’s the sorrow of the whole damn fucking stupid beautiful world. I say: let it flatten you in the dairy aisle. You are good at that, the flattening, the letting it flatten you because you wrote me to say, I can cry at all the nostalgia big expected shatter your heart and crack your soul moments, holding babies, shoveling dirt into a grave, looking at old photos that remind me how sad it is to live dwelling in regret - but most often, I don't. But even when you are not in the dairy aisle, your weeping is a blueness into greenness coming full circle into a daily silent cry. Sometimes when we don’t cry it’s always in the room, a chair, just sitting in the corner being a chair, a chair in balance which is why you have to go sit in it to give the life out of balance some balance. This is why it’s important to let the grief hold your hand in the workplace bathroom or the cab of a crane operator or inside sex when you are having sex and you have to come out the other side of having sex into a nakedness unborn. This how we try and get life into some kind of temporary equilibrium. We let the grief slam us up against the glass doors in the dairy aisle in our unborn nakedness so we can be together in front of everyone being together. LONG SHOT LOVERS ON SCREEN The rom-com cry is the best cry. – Jolene Grgas Last night I saw a movie. Long Shot. Charlize Theron and Seth Rogan are bad asses. He’s a journalist who gets fucked up on beer and Molly and weed and whatever else the sky gives a person to get fucked up on. She’s the Secretary of State of The United States of America. They fall in love. They’re not supposed to fall in love. The optics look bad. Isn’t that the problem with people? Optics. Like crying. I watched Long Shot last night in my bed and cried forever. The rom-com cry that is half meadow of yellow wildflowers, half Brooklyn Navy Yard. I was alone in the ocean of my bed with all the whales, sting rays, and fat politicians of commerce. So, I cried. The rom-com cry. The sentimental cry of a wolf ready to tear apart an elk just the way Charlize says, I love you, and Seth says, I have loved you since I was 12. That really got me in my half-grown guts. It doesn’t matter what the movie is about. It’s all so stupid and I was alone in bed with my feelings I couldn’t stop crying the rom-com cry. Why do we cry the rom-com cry? Nothing is real and everything is pretty, that’s why. Because we cry when our hearts are broken and we don’t know why they are broken. Because dumb movies are the only way to let our bodies know that we can go backwards in our sadness to find our sadness. So, when stupid Seth Rogan and blonde eyed Charlize Theron play long shot lovers on screen it turns me inside out because maybe all I ever wanted to be was nothing and here I am, nothing, and it feels good. Maybe my love can only go so far as rom-com love and then I have no idea. Because life is so hard and love is not that hard, it is just love: all fireworks, fuck-yous, make up sex, and sunsets. This morning when I woke after crying for 3 hours at the ridiculous movie scenes and dialogue I felt the approaching genderless energy of death that had everything do with the rom-com of Charlize and Seth called Long Shot. When they kissed in the movie it looked so real it was real. Earlier in the night I thought I was going to watch Citizen Kane but it wasn’t stupid enough. That’s what I love about feelings, how stupid they are, and that you can cry forever the way stars do even though they’ve never seen a movie about the attraction of opposites. Long Shot is my favorite movie because crying forever, no matter the reason, is making friends with the approaching genderless nature of death and this is how you love yourself into nothingness. Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On (2024), is published by Four Way Books. His previous collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. 4/4/2024 Poetry by Geraldine Connolly Danny Navarro CC
The Great Forest: Max Ernst Beyond the great forest lies a sky the color of bruised doves. Trees like fallen skyscrapers fill the scarred woods. Among exploded bark, lopped trunks twist and pause like massive legs of mahogany draft horses. The tree trunks lean on each other, tilted, askew. In one of them a bird still exists. No leaves or dew. A circular ring floats like a mirage, an eye opening, white and eclipsed, behind the forest’s thick gloom. Now I see it. The bird is lit-- a nightingale which imagines the dream of quiet days when the war has ended. And the small animals who live beneath the underbrush, uncaught and hiding, are ready to be reborn. After My Father’s Funeral I freeze. I walk alone in my skin. Now comes despair that cannot warm, the sharp wind grown keen as a blade. Coat of grief, my second skin, you smell of his pipe, his cologne as I button myself into your form. My heart would wear your armor, to go forth, to face the thorns. In your absence, I wear your coat. Like the forest I wandered as a child. tall oaks sheltered me, I floated the creek. Enclosed and safe, I would not break. Spring in the Sonoran Desert More than warm winds and orange flames flickering from the tips of ocotillo, more than new rabbits and cactus wrens, it’s the shock of the morning sun knifing through the clouds that stuns me. Mesquite and ironwood leaves erupt, lupines and poppies brandish blossoms. The desert, once bare and fragile, once brown with winter’s crust, is suddenly all riotous blooms. It’s possible, I too can change. Spring’s arrived like someone’s kicked off a festival. Carpenter bees buzz around palo verde, newborn lizards scuttle across sandstone. Mourning doves burble and coo. I can leave behind the humdrum of winter, its bruises and disappointments, my failings, the pandemic’s straitjacket. Our yard is filled with the hope of littered seeds. I am ready for the business of beginning anew. Milkweed open their tiny buds as if to say anything is possible. Geraldine Connolly has published a chapbook and four poetry collections including Province of Fire and Aileron. She has taught at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, The Chautauqua Institution and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council, and Breadloaf Writers Conference and her work appears in many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students, A Constellation of Kisses and The Sonoran Desert: A Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is www.geraldineconnolly.com 4/4/2024 Poetry by Elizabeth Agans Heath Cajandig CC
Brooks Comes to the Motel 8 I picked up my old friend at the BART in Berkeley. The club on Gilman had been empty, no punk-rock kids in the plaid pants we used to wear. His bucket list realized, I took him to the Missouri Lounge, my favorite East Bay dive. We laughed when I told him the locals called it The Misery. Ready for something stiffer than beer, we headed to Napa, buying a bottle of Beam before he unpacked the Ziploc of Lorazepam, Lithium, Ambien, Klonopin. His psych had weened him off the others. Our kiss stinging of whiskey, he smelled as if he hadn’t changed soap since high school. In the morning, face-down, I heard the rattle in the motel bathroom before he came out in boxers. Flipping me on my back, he gave me a swig to cut the morning breath. I was drunk midday and crying months later. He never answered the phone. I woke on the couch to a call from a stranger: Ten years clean, and he fucking OD’d. Elegy for Koko Her fingerprints looked as ours do. Wrinkled, black, smooth to tender touch, her malleable hands disciplined to mirror the human condition. She never lost a brother fighting the war on drugs, never knew a true lotus-eater: stumbling to a home no longer his own, dope-veiled, name forgotten. Would she use her hands to sign, You did everything you could? Do gorillas understand “arbitrary”? I’d like to think that my eyes would say, I could really use a hug; and she’d rise, a gargantuan animal Charis, arms ready to receive me, a mother and a sister. O gentle, mute relative, only living child—tell me I’ll survive this. Show me, please, how to love without speaking a word. Sibling Rivalry I could claim it started when the spoons started disappearing—or Mom’s Costco vodka. Siblings make the best scapegoats. I will miss that most. His nicotine patch from the hospital clogged the shower drain. I refused to share the same roof—and chose to wake in a stranger’s room, my underwear by the door, one sock half on. At home, his favorite Vans without shoelaces started molding in the garage. I wish I believed that had I given up the vodka, he could have given up the dope. Instead, I hold our mother—grateful for the flask I stashed beneath the pew before I stood up for the eulogy, taking a swig as if she wouldn’t notice. Elizabeth Agans was born in a small town in Northern Illinois. She moved with her immediate family to Phoenix, Arizona, when she was six years old, and considers herself a child of the desert. She graduated magna cum laude from Arizona State University with Bachelor of Arts degrees in both English (Creative Writing) and Psychology, and received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida. 4/4/2024 Poetry by Jeff Sirkin liebeslakritze CC
THE GAME I don’t know what I’m chasing but there’s a window in front and behind me a screen, and on a patio across town, a blue bird, belly-up on the pavement. There are whistles to keep it all moving, and the commandments outside the courthouse to keep us from scratching at the surface. From home to first and first to etc. Three strikes and you’re out, etc. Underhand, the girl on the mound works her arm. The back swing. The rotation. The final down swing. These are the mechanics of the game, flatted seventh flatted third, the magic of the magnet’s push and pull, the mower blade out past the sidelines spinning against the yellow or white of the dandelion’s persistent pop and growl. There’s the pitch and the swing and a grounder to short—a tricky hop but she gloves it and tosses it hard to the kid at first, who bounces it off the top of his mitt and into the trees, letting two runners home. The coach is on about repetition, about eyes on the ball. The coach says don’t worry, you’ll get ‘em next time. Turn to the sun and spread your glorious mats of blue. Run the bases ‘til you’re out. The other team will take the field. The whistle will blow, and we’ll all go home, fingers resting across the seams. AN HONEST ADMISSION But who needs the sun when we have color, when we have the gentle sway of a cartography that knows no bounds, a house that won’t open its heart to the cold returns of a dirty election. O field of flowering weeds. O city worker with your power sprayer blasting away at the tatty walk by the church. Have you heard? The County Commissioner wants to mix us a drink. The investor wants us to walk his empty lot and breath in the lines of access there. So, we count the native birds of eastern Nebraska lining the shelves on Main Street. We watch the opportunists drink the tears that could spring us from the ditches, wrapped in vines and candied hearts. We follow the brick road past the secretary’s pool, past the tracks out to the battered margins. Let’s throw one back for all these false starts and open wounds, and flush out what remains. THE TELLER’S LAMENT A loopy kick and the ball hops the fence, bouncing into the street. It’s a new week and the kids are on to kickball now, in shorts and hoodies, a cold rain overnight having swept aside the mounting pressure of previous days. A boy in blue and red stripes sneaks through a gap in the chain link, and leaps into the gamble of the intersection, slippery today with silt and mud, the warp and wobble of the familiar brick. And then the whistle sounds and, snap, they’re all gone, back to class. That’s just how it is. Listen and you’ll hear the rattle of an unseen mower. A robin splashing in the middle of the street. You want to tell her there’s a car coming, that it’s missing a wheel cover, that the driver is lost in her dwindling balance, but, not to worry, she’ll beat it to the fence, and beyond. Tired old History, kite strings limping along your soggy circuit. The bank teller showing off in the ballroom of the neglected statehouse up the street. Relevé. Saubresaut. Grand Jeté. Rusty tools and machine parts, solid state radios and uncoupled speedometers, Zippos and twisted eyeglass frames. Flight is the practice of the gentle return. Ask the coach. Ask the groundskeeper. What a meager imagination one must have who looks at the fallow plot and thinks it will forever remain just so. Jeff Sirkin is the author of the poetry collection Travelers Aid Society (Veliz Books) and the micro-chapbook Summer Break (Rinky Dink Press). His work has appeared in Fence; The Literary Review; SplitLevel Journal; Forklift, Ohio; and elsewhere. Co-editor of the online poetry journal A DOZEN NOTHING (www.ADozenNothing.com) he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas El Paso. 4/4/2024 Poetry by Jeannie E. Roberts Heath Cajandig CC
The Salvage Truck Most mornings I hear the clank and rattle of sharp objects the clink and clunk of scrap metal-- copper piping iron railings aluminum siding-- banging and knocking atop a trailer pulled behind a pickup driven by a kind man. When I’m outside I wave. * Most things can be salvaged including relationships. Though the participants must agree to do the work to expose the broken parts place them together let them clank and rattle clink and clunk until they’re smoothed by faith repaired by forgiveness. * A cast iron skillet has fallen off the trailer. I alert the driver retrieve it from the alley and wish the kind man a good day. Jeannie E. Roberts is a Midwesterner with Minnesota and Wisconsin roots. She has authored eight books. Her most recent collection is titled The Ethereal Effect - A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022). She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs and is an Eric Hoffer and a two-time Best of the Net award nominee. 4/4/2024 Poetry by Ann Iverson Dane CC
WHAT I LIKED MOST about the old life is that it was before this happened and after that happened and in between all the happenings that seem to happen. Like the time the dogs dragged in a dead rabbit and how I screamed and threw a blanket over it and hauled it to the back. Or how people paraded past with kids or dogs or babies in strollers or how, if I fell asleep on the old blue couch, I could see the moon floating through the pines and hear the owl’s distant hoot. What I liked most about the old life is that she wasn’t sick and he could still walk and you and you and you were still alive. And still, we haven’t finished saying our goodbyes. What I liked most about the old life is that the phone was attached to the wall. The TV had five channels and I licked a stamp to pay the bills and sewed pillows on the porch. What I liked most about the old life is that I can’t seem to grab it. It’s like one of those games at the State Fair when you try to clutch a prize with a mechanical wench but you only get what you can get. What I liked most about the old life is that it wasn’t old at all but big as a dream, enormous as a wish when you throw pennies in a fountain. You see its reflection across the pools of water and wonder where it went. What I liked most about the old life is when I painted all the garden statues gold, and they shimmered in the sun and the cat sat in the window and the neighbors waved and pointed and I felt as though I was good. Ann Iverson is the author of six poetry collections as well as a collection of CNF. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of both print and electronic publications. As a visual artist she enjoys the interconnection between art and words. 4/4/2024 Poetry by Farah Ali Dane CC
Countdown I drop my daughter at preschool into a sea of adoring faces. I tell her to have a good day, to use the toilet when she needs to go, not to hold it in until the very last second. I do not tell her about Gaza, about what I saw while she ate honey on toast, about the children who look like her, who share so much with her, who are dead or broken or wishing for death because in this world the powerful decide who are worthy of parents and peace of water, nutrition, and four limbs of medicine and anesthesia worthy of hope worthy of life. I tell her I love her, remind her to eat her fruit. I do not tell her about this world where she is less valuable than her little friends, that one day somebody, maybe a stranger, maybe someone she knows, will make her feel ashamed for the color of her skin, for who she is. Instead, I wave goodbye. It will be hours before my daughter is home again. Ghazal: In Diaspora Ancestors forsaken, now wander unknown in diaspora. Enter the labyrinth, face the monster alone in diaspora. On threadbare wings flocks of birds overwinter, Migrants and refuge barely condoned in diaspora. Study maple samaras, the graceful flight from mother. Freedom snags on tangled roots, thorns of bone in diaspora. Desert moon ciphers will be garbled by clumsy tongues. The future is already written, mutters a crone in diaspora. Inheritance swims in black hair’s oil shimmer, dusk’s child, the same hooked nose, seeds cannot be unsown in diaspora. Sea glass can take up to two hundred years to form, Ebb or flood, endure the intertidal zone in diaspora. Calligraphy sweeps right to left, indelible on skin’s pages, Trauma embeds, generational tattoos to disown in diaspora. Ignore the Call to Prayer, flinch from the gaze of an-Nur, Mountains, serpents, rivers of sin to atone in diaspora. Tease flesh from fruit, pomegranate stains blood-red, color of slurs, learn to swallow stones in diaspora. Loss burrows deep, Joy, gold beautifies the darkest cave, so gather your trinkets: each lie gilded, honed in diaspora. Note: an-Nur (The Light/The Illuminator) is one of the 99 names of God in Arabic. Based in the UK, Farah Ali writes fiction and poetry with a particular love for the Japanese short form. She has been published, and has upcoming publications, in a variety of reputable online and print journals including contemporary haibun online, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, Rattle, right hand pointing, The Mainichi, and Tiny Wren Lit. Her supernatural Deerleap Hollow Series is available from Amazon. 4/4/2024 Poetry by David Ross Linklater Dane CC
Potpourri Soul They swallow pills that barely touch the sides. They say it's a lack of sunshine and vitamins, a lack of time to tend the branches that bear them. Birds sing in the explosions of their fingers. Some have come to know the bathroom as an arena where they commit crimes against themselves. Hallowed ground of moonspit. Others take deep breaths in work toilets. Their shoes are away at the heels. Their backs ache. They are hammered by Gods and men who are statues to their frailty. In dreams they always get on stage and cannot do the thing or they are in a queue waiting and their genitals are suddenly everywhere. They don’t have the money for therapy. The waiting lists are long. They know the hold tone by heart. None are without the fear shrinking good shirts to steel. The box into a circle. They are burning in a room they are not the architect of. They wander about the no man's of their kitchens like strangers. Huge areas of their lives belong to others. As night becomes a morning of thin blue, before the ceiling drinks up the pretty morning hells, vexed, they fall at the altar of their own bodies, razed to a cinder. Like potpourri in a bowl they await eternal radio on cream plastic seats. The uprooted citizenry, adorned in the most precious bodies. Just Want to Say It all started that weekend the cat died and the fan belt went. Then, each month it was something that turned into weeks. Cooker burst, the boiler gone, the man with his tools pointing inward. After that it was people going, and more cars. The divorces were en route. The floor was a fine idea. Oh to be foetal on it. To tear down the shed and build another. To gut the loft cause that’s where the soul’s at. There was a smell of smoke up there and really, the place isn’t special. Each box is useless and dumb. It was death by a thousand miles of the same road. Same junction before the same hill sloping to the old conclusion. No one wants to die this many times on their way to work. There was nothing for it but to cove away, the hand reaching for the volume to turn it all down in music. Swear to God there’s some peace in the grooves and not this closing in of horizons. We are used to the land of no language. Of the places we can see but can’t get to. We are not ready for the broken socket, the imperfectly pasted wallpaper. It’s one thing after another forever until the phone is finally lifted and one true self is peeled from the wheel that grinds at it. Do Not Wake From This And just like that there was a great plough turning teals in the sky. It rocked the flowers in their black sleep. It rocked the dream he was in so completely it came apart in fields. In the mirror was a horse. It had just been dressaging along a wall for the sake of mastery, pirouetting by the green-mile water. The moon was so low you could spin it. The tree’s bracelets jangled and there was nothing so brutal, nothing real. Time, as you take it away, do so gently. Make this heart be a thing to bargain with. David Ross Linklater is a poet from Balintore, Easter Ross, in the Highlands of Scotland. He is the author of four pamphlets, most recently Star Muck Bourach (Wish Fulfillment Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Butcher's Dog, Bath Magg, The Dark Horse and New Writing Scotland. He lives and writes in Glasgow. @davidrosslinkla / www.davidlinklaterpoetry.com 4/4/2024 Poetry by Natalie Valentine Timo Newton-Syms CC
An Initiation to the Dead Dad Club or A Wolf, Crying i have been writing poetry my whole life trying to make sense of you, I have been asking questions to the big sky: how do you grieve someone still alive? but now you are not, suddenly - so suddenly, “around seven” last night - part of me thought you would live forever, somehow you were always full of life - terribly so and i still have so many questions i can’t ask when mom told me you were gone, i thought it was a cruel trick - on your part, not hers, a last-ditch effort to get us to speak to you again. a wolf, crying, the way he’s wept my whole life. and for so long, every time, i would approach - gently, quietly, lowvoiced, as you approach wild animals - and get wounded for my efforts, for my softness i learned to give myself stitches in this way this grief is easier - and harder i am crushed under the weight of sorrow and the weight of strange lightness the last day i saw you was my 29th birthday. i’m 34 now. i was struck then by the earth-shattering knowing that i would never see you again - or my grandmother, or uncle, both lost to the veil in such quick succession. i was in miami last year when i was struck with a second knowing of this kind. sitting across from michael - our hands knotted together between us, “i am never going to see him again.” i will miss you. i will miss more the person you could’ve been, before drugs, before drink - before your addiction to rage, the despair you couldn’t name, refused to name “he was supposed to be my daddy.” how are you supposed to tell people your dad died? i guess like this we spoke for six months last year, all on the phone i gave it one more try. one more chance. you seemed so, so - alone you told me, solemnvoiced, you were a changed man, interspersed with screaming at nurses and doctors who only wanted to help you, when taking a break from telling me the many ways i’ve failed “why couldn’t he just be nice to me?” still. i’ll miss you forever. i have loved you the best i could, the way i am told you loved me. i think i will always wish you had read some of my poetry. Natalie (they/them) is a poet, playwright, and maker. They have worked as a writer in theatres across the United States and with the zine Indoorsy. If you're looking for hopeful queer stories with a touch of melancholy, you're in the right place. 4/4/2024 Poetry by Ellen Austin-Li Dane CC
Brother John Austin is fearless, Darryl Leech says from the bleachers one row ahead, Friday night lights blazing over the Red Rams' home field, He’ll tackle anything. Dragged to another of my older brother’s games, his godlike status grew with shoulder pads and helmet, lined up with the other young gladiators for the next play, their breath briefly enshrined in billows of steam in the chill fall air. Brother three years older is a chasm in a family of six born in an eight-year span. My brother was untouchable. My first day at the same high school, his friends christened me “Little Austin.” Then, the cool group of my freshman peers—cheer- leaders and handsome jocks—made overtures, invited me to their parties. That I didn't go spoke more about my fear than his legacy. He must have promoted me, a silent oath of fealty, of brotherly love. The undercurrent I’d never noticed I was swept into—a creek joining a river. The night he was rendered unconscious by a lead pipe as he tried to stop a fight, his best friend carrying him home, I remember the tumult inside when I saw his limp body, the rise of this visceral churn in my belly like when I drive by a deer gutted on the shoulder of the road. After my car crash, as I lay spleenless & concussed in the hospital, one sister said my only relief came when I heard John was hitchhiking home from college to see me. So long ago, the wellspring of our mythology, the kind of love that just was between my brother and me. A lifetime away, that distant field I see. I miss everything. Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary, The Maine Review, Salamander, Rust + Moth, and other places. A Best of the Net nominee, she’s published two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press: Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice Creative Writing Program. Ellen lives with her husband in a newly empty nest in Cincinnati, Ohio. Find her work @ www.ellenaustinli.me. |
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