Issue #32.9 Ruth Bavetta, Bud Sturguess, Ted Lardner, Mykyta Ryzhykh
A Poem by Ruth Bavetta
Taxes, Tenacity, Tigers and Toast
I used to love to jewel in the yard, even when I was taking care of my guitar
and both rabbits, plus recycling the ducklings until they were too wet to tuck in bed,
so when I hired the possum I thought I’d just let him play some
in the pond in the park, but all the picnicking was only nitpicking. Trouble is,
when you’re not at the bakery every day and bad paintings never get to say a word
and gradually things carport up on you. Beefburger, hamburger, cardigan, cantaloupe.
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Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Slant, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, Silver Birch and many other journals and anthologies. Her published books are Fugitive Pigments, What’s Left Over, Embers on the Stairs, Selected Poems, and Flour, Water, Salt. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, prejudice, and sauerkraut.
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A Poem by Bud Sturguess
Worse Than Angler Fish
“Don't do it,” I said to the Creator my eyes wide with indignant virtue “They're going to do awful things down there Rotten, ugly, awful things And they'll put it on the internet to make it never matter.”
The Creator's face hovered over the chaos before we called it that and said, “Let there be light.”
“They'll snuff it out in a week,” I said “They'll write DARKNESS on their walls and will it into being.”
The Creator said, “Let there be a firmament.”
If I didn't know better I'd have thought He was ignoring me But I knew better
Then came the land and the grass The same they're going to use to dig big holes to put their trash and nuclear waste (and call it “nucular” waste) Then the stars and the light and rocks in the sky the ones they'll end up worshiping (Like I told Him, “they'll always prefer creation over Creator.”)
Then came the birds and the creepy-crawlies unnecessary and gross Things like scorpions and angler fish things I think He made from somebody's nightmares
And despite my most vehement, strident, fervent, vocal objections, the Creator made man, the worst of all worse than angler fish The ones who'll put holes in the earth and stain the firmament a sickly yellow “They'll take all those green things You're so proud of,” I said “and use them to lobotomize themselves Then they'll invent lobotomies.
“They're going to bicker about calling themselves man They'll invent the grossest words You've ever heard They're going to kill each other They're going to do whippets And the worst of all suppose someday the sinners are allowed to take their sinnings back.”
Nobody listened to me My two cents weren't fit to buy sparrows The Creator created it all anyway and the heavenly host didn't raise a hand They're just like sheep
Just as I foretold the whippet-loving ghouls set up altars to blobs and oxen They're digging up the places where some of the Creator's best stories were told to find slime and rocks to kill each other and just like I said they would they record every burst with funny captions and Jojo Siwa playing over it to lighten the mood that didn't have to exist
The gaggles of the giggly idiots He allows to wander about paint portraits of not only the smoking craters they live in, but the ones who make them They even give their eyes a sick kind of light And for every Nietzsche there's another like him who up and takes his Nietzsche back
And here on my lofty perch, where I watch doomsday after doomsday the terrible, radiant angels who surround me hear their grumbling and whisper to the biggest grumblers how they should write a billion songs about it
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Bud Sturguess is a writer living in Amarillo, Texas. His work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Ekstasis, and New Pop Lit. He has self-published several books via lulu.com, his latest being the novel Things Blowing Up.
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A Poem by Ted Lardner
Two Bottles of Wine
Two young people split off from the others down there, where the Navarro River empties into Navarro Bay, skirting the tidal flat beyond the campground 500 feet below the Highway 1 bridge. Look at the tents, all the RVs and campers parked side by side. Some of the big RVs have satellite dishes mounted on their roofs and the satellite dishes are all pointed in the same direction, which is towards some clouds or maybe the moon, or something else you can’t see.
The young people are from the group of young people from the store, back up the road at Harvest Market in Mendocino, where you come in the door counting ravens on the church and walk backwards slow and long enough along an aisle of olive oil and crackers until you arrive at a summer when you turned 18. If you could listen as deeply as a satellite dish can, you could probably hear them now, those young people, how expertly they whisper,
twisting, as they speak each other into their futures, the little metal key around, building up on its tip the thin strip, peeled of metal, corner to corner, around the edges of the lids of those navy blue tins of sardines, while all the while, deep offshore, the accompanying movement of those great schools of silver fish swimming.
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Ted Lardner’s (he / him) nonfiction and poetry have recently appeared in Post Road, Light Enters the Grove, The Watershed Journal, and Bristlecone Magazine. He is the author of three chapbooks, Passing By a Home Place (Leaping Mountain Press 1987), Tornado (Wick Poetry Center / Kent State UP 2008), and We Practice for It (Sunken Garden / Tupelo 2014). An avid native-plants gardener and a part-time yoga instructor, Ted lives in northeast Ohio.
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A Poem by Mykyta Ryzhykh
Love
1
to love you like a magnolia
to love you more than a magnolia
to love you instead of a magnolia
2
on both shores only you
but i am not a ship not a sea and
no longer a man
3
yes you are magnolia
float away
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Mykyta Ryzhykh, an author from Ukraine, now lives in Tromsø, Norway. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 and 2024. He’s published in many literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, QLRS, The Crank, Chronogram, The Antonym, Monterey Poetry Review, Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and many others.
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