Issue #14.1 Two Poems by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
AT THE ZOOS
The first one is crowdless in winter quiet. The grizzlies wallop; the crane whoops, The howler monkeys flea pick, while the rats flaunt their fat. The snow leopard paces from iron door to iron door, While the flamingos retire their color to winter quarters, the butterflies stay dead till spring. The second is Seroquel quiet. The smell of piss in overheated halls. After pilling, tongues loll like those of stressed dogs. The day is hard to swallow. Then, snack-time, Jeopardy!, sleep One inmate can’t keep her pants up. Another can’t keep his dick down. Nothing ever happens of its own contraband accord. Beyond the Xeroxed promise, “Window to Recovery,” gauged off the gnawed corkboards, I sneak you two tangerines: little roared hopes held out, around which you clench your fists.
HOW MUCH COLD?
The first time, November vacation, indoor pool all of us horsing around, chicken fights when you suddenly flipped off your brother’s shoulders, lapped to the ladder, then bolted out the fire exit, running around the resort’s patio, icy flagstone; plush-robed spa guests looking up from their Cosmos out the steamed windows. Preteen high jinks. All we could do was laugh!
Next time was January, home from boarding school. There’d been some argument; Dad had corrected you. The back door slammed as you made for the snowdrifts, shedding your pajamas, dropping to your knees, howling, plunging through the plowed mounds, rolling in your underwear. The slightly parted curtains at the neighbor’s, your frozen brothers, Dad grabbing a blanket, bundling kicking and screaming you.
And the last time, I didn’t know how; the water temp logged at hypothermic 52.
If I light a candle, how hot would it be praying for the kindness of quick, for the mercy of numb?
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A graduate of Vassar College, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop as well as a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa. She also holds MAs from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and New York University. In addition to scholarly publications, her poetry has appeared in many journals. Her chapbook, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook Contest. Chosen as the 2020 Chapbook Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was published in 2021. Kennedy-Nolle was winner of the New Ohio Review’s 2021 creative writing contest. Her full-length manuscript, Black Wick: The Collected Elegies was chosen as a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award and as a 2021 semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes. Recently appointed the Poet Laureate of Sullivan County for 2022-2023, she lives and teaches in New York.
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Issue #14.2 A Poem by Jason Ryberg
The Gift of Fire (or, Kansas City to Raleigh in 24 Hours or Less)
for Will Leathem, Ed Tato and Mark Hennessy
The night is long and in full-effect and there’s nothing but bad radio, stale coffee and a bright, five-battery-flashlight of a moon that’s been keeping a steady pace with us ever since it came out from behind the clouds.
Sometime around 4am we barely miss most of what must have been a buffalo or bear: a meandering trail of animal and automotive viscera visible, here and there, for nearly a mile along the road.
But we keep on keeping-on, anyway, with a suddenly renewed and invigorated sense of purpose, the radio low and everyone in the car suddenly adrenalized, awake and alert for anything else the universe might unexpectedly hurl our way (be it deer, cop, phantom hitch-hiker or 24-hour truck stop).
But, inevitably, we are forced to answer nature’s shrill and relentless call and pull our (clearly ill-advised and poorly planned) cross-country pilgrimage over to the side of the highway (where there surely must be all manner of nightmarish caricatures and creatures lurking just out of reach of the lone, guttering torch of our dome light).
And it would appear that we have officially arrived at that time of night (inversely proportionate to however many miles one is away from home and how many miles one still has left to go)
when the far-off / way-out voices of hell-fire preachers and UFO abductees crackle and whisper, in and out, of the troughs and peaks of static foaming from the car’s stereo speakers, out and out into the great, starry firmament surrounding us,
when the icy breath of the cosmos whispers dirty jokes and grand unifying conspiracies at the backs of our necks,
when unsettling thoughts and inexplicable intuitions of eternal recurrence begin to smolder and smoke inside our minds and we just know, somehow, that we’ve all been here before, right here, on this very spot (or one indistinguishable from it),
same time of dark, eerie, pre-dawn morning, pissing in a ditch by the side of a highway, and everyone of us can’t help but contemplate, however briefly, at least some of the great, existential / metaphysical mysteries and conundrums that have stalked our species ever since that evolutionary leaping-off point of no return
when we discovered that for all its many gifts, fire is still the originator of the long snaky shadows that it casts and causes the dark around us to grow only darker.
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Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
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Issue #14.3 Two Poems by LC Gutierrez
Confluence (Or How Things Somehow Work Out)
Our thoughts can pulse in honest veins, surprised when they cross, unarmed, thus puddling into personality. You, too, have likely cobbled together a raft of reason out of dangling lines. The way a sheet of newspaper folds easily to form a hat or a boat. And the crew is none the wiser until the Captain either sets it on her head or coolly on the lake. And even then it’s all up to the wind, who’s given it no thought. That’s what happens in the city; the planned happenstance of organized chance. Rather, the streets are fixed, but the passersby are turned loose like marbles. Too many colors to keep up with, yet there they are. We are lucky for our faith and the consoling confidence that tells us hourly, or oftener when called upon, that we will end up somewhere: in the shadow of a newly opened restaurant, waiting for some inviting gesture or an off-putting grubby apron to heed us in or out. You may be bidden to face yourself instead, which turns every step into a threshold. There’s nothing dire about these choices. In fact, they are the marrow of our day to day. The blood would dry without them.
The Bay
There is a poem on every corner. This one was checking her watch when I picked her up, just as the light considered settling in her hair. Velvet tongued curls and star whisps. She’d been out shopping for names, and finding none that fit, grabbed a handful in the pharmacy and ran out without paying. “Oakland” she said, and it sounded like Land of Oaks, but it was really Castro, as in Castro Valley. And Castro in Spanish can mean “I castrate,” but this was from the Latin “castrum”: a camp or fortification, and there she’d taken shelter in her art. She’d passed through Tiburon, which means shark, where she’d dabbled in other, more visual, mediums. Then Sausalito, another tree, but only if you wish it to be. Then it branches open, each leaf pinned to a handsome cloud. Something wide and inexpressible, very becoming. “Better even than words,” she whispered. In the same language she used while making love. Under a bridge not golden. A park with no gate. A gate with no hinge. A harbor without pearls. A poem with no rhyme.
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LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the South and the Caribbean, as well as writing and comparative literature programs at Louisiana State and Tulane University. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His poetry and nonfiction are most recently published or forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sweet and Hobart.
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Issue #14.4 A Poem by Harold Bowes
My Novel
A bug lands on a page in the book I am reading, thick like an engorged spider, but not a spider.
Shaking the novel vigorously, I make the bug vanish, dislodge the beast.
All poetic forms can be contained in fiction, and I think I want to be a writer of fiction.
Yet how to achieve this goal? Impossible. I remember a novel is only a list,
of things and events, and unlikely coincidences, a list longer than this one.
Going outside now with a tea drink, My eye is on the green paper square
at the end of the tea bag's cord, a square the size of a leaf but stiff as though the book jacket
on a miniature hardback book, that lifts in the breeze. My memory is weak, my knowledge truncated,
and beyond the deck railing is the massive Sycamore, whose leaves in their thousands murmur,
as though a choir were reading from a list, each murmuration distinct from the next
as the leaves reposition and the angles change.
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Harold Bowes is the author of Detached Palace Garden from Ravenna Press. His most recent publications are in DMQ Review and Thrush Poetry Journal.
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Issue #14.5 A Poem by Charlie Brice
First Day of Mourning
Clocks reset to the time before he died and the eternity thereafter. Your future lodged in the tiny trash can by his desk.
Your streets, foreign and empty, even asphalt stares and mocks. It rains incessantly while the day is sunny and sere.
The grocery is grotesque. Everyone laughs, argues, fingers the vegetables, everything verges on life; nothing lives.
The indentation on his side of the bed, unavoidable as a black hole, all you lived for sucked into its singularity.
Nothing is there, not even light.
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Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His fifth full-length poetry collection is The Ventriloquist (WordTech Editions, 2022). His poetry has been nominated twice for the Best of Net Anthology and three times for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
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Issue #14.6 A Poem by Deborah Bayer
Organic Chemistry
The Friday before the July 4th weekend, I bought some Tokay at the State Store. The wine is named for the region of Hungary
where the grapes are grown. I drank only respectable wines. I’d seen the empties neatly stacked against the walls on the street.
Back then, I watched the sidewalk, always walked with my head down. The empty bottles were mostly beer, but there were
a few bottles of Thunderbird, MD 20/20. The Tokay was thick and sweet. It went down easily, glass after glass.
I was memorizing the reaction steps to synthesize complex hydrocarbons. On the day of my final, the trains ran on
a holiday schedule; they skipped my stop. I walked all the way to 8th and Market, stepping over streamers, wading through
piles of confetti. I recognized the gingko trees from the pictures in my Biology text. They lined up between curb and sidewalk,
scrubbing the air with their two-lobed leaves. Exams should be taken in the same state in which one studies, but I aced my test sober.
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Deborah Bayer is a retired Infectious Diseases doctor whose poems have been published in numerous journals. Her poetry chapbook Rope Made of Bandages is forthcoming in March 2023 from Finishing Line Press. She lives with her husband in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, not far from Atlantic City. You can find her on her website (https://harmonycommllc.com) or on Twitter @dbayerdo.
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Issue #14.7 Three Poems by John Dorsey
Dedicated Creatures
we cannot endure lost devotion an endless dead parade of splendor unfinished tattered beauties of proper struggle poor dead children of the living song.
Chainsaws for Comfort
rivers beg fire expose my whimper hostage to my name more simple than mountain borders ancient fingers practice war softened under moonlight.
The World is Shouting
a bird is real a free song of peace kindness is a house on fire.
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John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
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Issue #14.8 A Poem by Tohm Bakelas
“black wheezing thing”
i stood there at the end of my driveway, staring at the black wheezing thing flailing inside the fox’s mouth, wondering what it could be— bird, cat, opossum, pig, child, something un- holy
i couldn’t tell because the thing, the black wheezing thing, didn’t have a head
the word soul kept flashing through my mind and i thought about religion and sorrow and life and death
and the fox smiled as if it could read my mind
and that’s when the rain started and i turned away
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Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, zines, and online publications. He is the author of 19 chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including “No Destination” (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2021) and “The Ants Crawl In Circles” (Whiskey City Press, 2022). He runs Between Shadows Press.
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Issue #14.9 A Poem by Ricky Salmonhunter
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Ricky Salmonhunter is the poet-persona of Michael Watkins, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Issue #14.10 A Poem by Cecil Morris
The Equinox Before and After
It is spring still—only mid April—the vetch and lupin lush purple enclaves on the hills,
the poppies yellow-gold flags fluttering on the softest breeze like drunken butterflies,
but already things are dying along the trail where I walk our daughter's dog,
the foxtails going gold and popping their tassels into her fur and the filaree's swords
opening and curling into corkscrews that drive their pointed seeds into the dirt
or her ears and undercoat, almost as bad as ticks. So much green gone brown and dry, harbinger
of fires to come or calling card of death. This is the quick flare and finish of new life
in this too sunny clime, the match's explosion and fizzle and exhaustion, born then done,
like our daughter, a month gone, a month past her thirty-ninth birthday, celebrated
with pounds of frozen yogurt rushed melting to her hospital room, no candles or song,
so different from our father's autumnal end, long anticipated, welcomed, without tears.
She passed on this spring's eve, a flower spent, so now I walk her dog through death's parched land,
where she marks her trail with piss and piles of shit.
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Cecil Morris lives in Roseville, California, where he taught high school English for 37 years. In his retirement, he has turned his attention to writing what he once taught students to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has poems appearing in Cobalt Review, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, Midwest Quarterly, Poem, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines. Right now, he might be reading a novel by Louise Erdrich or poetry by Sharon Olds (or David Kirby or Tony Hoagland or Maggie Smith) or giving thanks for his indulgent partner, the mother of their children. He still favors the bright colors he wore to stand out on school field trips.
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