Issue #15.1 Three Poems by Daniel Coudriet
EN EL CAMPO TODO ES POSIBLE
I was a priest in a film & in love with you. The town is proud of the river, I can see it, there, from the back of the bike. Our friends here are nurses. A cat was born in the drain. They built the highway only until here. The spaces where I’d feel emptiest are rented. It isn’t a big town but there are motels, mostly for the truckers. Restaurants on the route open always. I care. It is hard to work late. It is hard to wash the sky.
ON A DAY LIKE TODAY
The children haven’t eaten me if that’s what you are asking. Somebody dropped five eggs around the schools. We are wandering as if we are bikes. Perhaps I’m a phone. I’m struggling. She’s making it take longer. I think she’s scared the children are going to paint her in exactly three colors & call her a painted lady. It might’ve been the turkeys. We should be OK taking on one but what about a swarm? Will the food arrive in time for the train to the coast? Escape has many meanings.
NONE OF IT WAS SMOKE
The room has very little control over the air that enters it. The water is always hotter. She’s forgotten her meeting in the lobby. I know my son will find the hills we walk later. A train less necessary than a car. Or a poem. The landscape could’ve been farmed, except for craggy cliffs & libraries & the tower. What happens when libraries migrate to each other? Love each other? I’m tired. She wants transparency for her backpack. Or a son dragging his father up staircases to the laboratories. The fences, a better view of the theater, the nearness of the city, its fog, its bridges. I’m not sure what to say. The room wants us to leave it always. Don’t be preoccupied with what part of the sea might have evaporated & landed here. I cannot explain it. There’s coffee, a pencil sharpener & buildings with backs we can tour. Trees, paths, cedar shake siding. She finds a rooftop she loves. A city, its fog. A son. Stairs to walk up.
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Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son in Richmond, Virginia, and in Carcarañá, Argentina. He is the author of Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and a chapbook, Parade (Blue Hour Press, 2012), which can be read here. His poems and translations have made recent appearances in Colorado Review, Conjunctions Online, Green Mountains Review, jubilat, Oversound, Prelude, the tiny, Transom, and elsewhere.
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Issue #15.2 Two Poems by Rodrigo Toscano
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Rodrigo Toscano is a poet and dialogist based in New Orleans. He is the author of ten books of poetry. His latest book is The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2022). His Collapsible Poetics Theater was a National Poetry Series selection. His poetry has appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX). Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He won the Edwin Markham 2019 prize for poetry. rodrigotoscano.com @Toscano200
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Issue #15.3 Two Poems by Megan McDermott
The Third Wife
From A Series of Poems in Which I Imagine I’m A Sister Wife After Watching Too Much of TLC’s Sister Wives, Meant with No Disrespect to The Actual Sister Wives And Only The Same Disrespect to Their Fundamentalist Mormon Theology That I Would Give To All Religious Forms Of Patriarchy
Entering third
is a strategic maneuver:
you won’t be used
to more attention,
so it truly will feel
like you’ve gained
a husband rather
than lost a husband’s
time, unless he’s so
bold to think he could
satisfy four – and what
are the chances of that?
And rumor has it, the
other wives might like
you better – having
just spent however
long battling each other.
For everyone, you are
fresh. Fresh voice,
distraction, kiss. All relationships
a mix of love and
strategy, whether
one wife or three.
All womanhood,
as far as I know it,
a striving to still
seem new.
Dear Ruth, Written On Halloween While Watching Teen Wolf
You never had TV, but nevertheless
you had stories. What did the children
of Moab learn? What stories were told
in the dark? Still told into adulthood,
in the midst of working, infusing
doldrum with wonder or maybe
horror? Did you ever know you’d become
a story? You must’ve told your story
sometimes, to child, grandchild, neighbor.
How you came to your town a devoted
stranger. How you found your husband
and new life, managed to bring your
ex-mother-in-law along into new joys.
A story with everything: death, friendship,
romance, even almost-scandal,
at least, if you’d gotten caught.
How has it changed from the first
telling to the way it’s been summed up?
In those early tellings, I wonder if you
highlighted the fear. A new place,
a lack of resources. Not knowing
who you might meet in the fields,
and later, who Boaz might be towards
a woman nestling his feet in the dark.
Also the pain and terror of birth.
Does your story lose something
when so many know the ending —
that the risk of your covenantal
love will not lead you astray?
The ending you foresaw
was simply this: regardless of what
would come, only death
would separate you.
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Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of two chapbooks, Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating (Ethel Micro-Press) and Woman as Communion (Game Over Books), and a forthcoming full-length collection Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems. Connect with her more at meganmcdermottpoet.com or on Twitter @megmcdermott92.
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Issue #15.4 A Poem by Andrew Cox
Capo
I have clamped a capo on this poem I need the right pitch to remember my mother in her white nurse’s uniform To see my father and how he always saw the black flowers blossom in the sky no matter where he looked How my mother’s soundless walk on those gleaming floors brought the unexpected in the pediatric ICU ward And how my father’s quiet desperation drove the car I need the right key to sing who they were To hear them as if they were a British techno song To hear them as if they sent me a blues song that only I can hear To hear the bobcat at night To hear the telephone ring and know it’s time to get on a plane To hear the bees’ collective buzz To not forget that the last thing my mother said to me was You’re here I must be dying To not forget my father could not speak except with his eyes And they said do not let them hook me up to that machine again I clamped a capo on this poem for the pitch For the right key For help to say this
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Andrew Cox is the author of The Equation That Explains Everything, (BlazeVOX [Books] 2010), the chapbooks, This False Compare (2River View, 2020) and Fortune Cookies (2River View, 2009) and the hypertext chapbook, Company X (Word Virtual, 2000). He edits UCity Review.
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Issue #15.5 A Poem by Rhienna Renée Guedry
Homebinding
Day 124
During the year of too much horror I send postcards weekly, but sometimes I cannot remember which designs went to whom, a mundane nightmare that will never matter, though it perverts a wholesome gesture, confuses the point My friends who are dating fashion this time as Victorian: correspondence first, then a distanced gloved stroll, an ankle-touch an ambition but the underbelly: it’s all Portland roses, a blushing basket of plums until you’re the one pissing in a bucket in your minivan since you can’t trust the air in a public toilet
Day 127
I am the dumb, permed, bored one-block-radius pre-teen posted up over suburban summer listening for flood warnings and I am also the dumb adult recalling summertime freckles and being punished outside both times an invisible storm of homebinding—a postage stamp, a footprint we pretend to own—this time, it ravages I miss the way Doppler radar told us heavy things were coming in oranges and reds, those looming detectable blips: we’d know when and where to put sandbags but no guarantees about the safety of the air
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Rhienna Renée Guedry (she/they) is a writer, illustrator, and producer whose favorite geographic locations all have something to do with their proximity to water. Her work has appeared in Muzzle, Gigantic Sequins, Empty Mirror, HAD, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere. Rhienna is currently working on her first novel. Find out more about her projects at rhienna.com
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Issue #15.6 Three Poems by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
LITTLE MUM MAN
nicknamed for making the rounds, righting the school’s wind-tipped pots after every gust, many autumns now then taking the broken-stemmed, sticking them in the plastic Dixie cup, add water, these bruised gold and mauve blooms now bound for our kitchen table. The principal thinks you do it out of civic pride, keeping up school appearances, you, an efficiency expert already at 15, so determined to maintain control you eat breakfast zipped sweating in your parka “because it’s faster that way” to get out the door; keeping your medications city-clustered in a cookie tin you call “Pill Hill.” I know your need to save something as you shoulder the family shame: your elder brothers’ breakdowns, one now dead, one hospitalized just 6 weeks into college That leaves you spooked, targeted, redemptive my little florist Atlas, straightening up the fallen world.
“A ONE AND A TWO” SIPS
One Sunday night I sat on the floor in front of the Formica countertop and avocado kitchen sink, mixing up the Mop & Glo, and Formula 409, angel-dusting Comet into Palmolive.
At age 6, I stirred a mean highball glass with an ice cream spoon, Easy-Off on top, a sweet burn potion of cloudy, clean green I raised in toast, yelling I would swallow. Nobody even turned their heads. “You’ll be sorry!”
It was the finale of The Lawrence Welk Show. Joe Feeney was singing, smiling Welk conducting with his jackstraw baton, Arthur Duncan tapped away the lie of some happy-raced Morse message.
“Okay, just don’t spill it on the new linoleum.”
From under the den’s swag lamp, a wired hell of wrapped plastic orange the size of Saturn my parents’ blue-lit faces lift off two recliners lost in space…
None of this matters now, except that you, my son, would do the real deal, go under, high on a better lethal tonic.
Still swaying, I cling to the bubble and accordion sign-off fluff the Champagne Lady, the lovely peroxidized Norma Zimmer, who made it seem so easy, waving, serenading, “Good night, sleep tight, and pleasant dreams to you…”
I’m hanging on, just hanging on like the sorry swag.
THOSE ARE PEARLS
You ran around one July night with a serrated knife, slivers of silver glimpsed in the flashlight, chasing your father through neighbors’ yards, stumbling over courtesy fences, roaring curses at him because he had thrown seven-year-old you against a Corsican hotel wall, nosebleed, bruises for some minor vacation infraction I can’t recall. Therapy for all didn’t stop the fury of your flashback,
“What kind of father does that to his kid?”
Not wanting the police, I tried to calm, corral you indoors where you groped around the basement, a snorkeler seasick in the crawl spaces looking for more hidden liquor crying under the stairs that you would save me, as I loosely held your coral-cut hands.
That August you drove my car over a young pear tree and into the house because I balked at the thought of you behind the wheel, —the scattered jewels of a macadam madness— Then, you climbed the trellis to your room sleeping it off like a memoryless baby.
Two years later your room just as it was the night we picked the clothes you’d be laid out in became your father’s study at a price above rubies. Fired at 51, wearing sunglasses, he focuses on the blinking cursor, believing you took on the sins of the family. I, unable to suffer the sea-change, avoid the threshold.
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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 #15.7 A Poem by Sister Lou Ella Hickman
my short conversation with elizabeth bishop
i
i have discovered you are a puzzle words piecing together what you lost who you loved
ii
yes, every poem every drawing a puzzle where odd pieces fit more a puzzle even to myself i suppose
iii
every poem each poem this poem in front of me i try to tease apart a restless riddle like the sea or a map with few numbers i ask a litany in my efforts what are you saying to me what are you saying to me what are you saying to me
iv
look until you see
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Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and new verse news as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Global Sisters Report has published six of her articles. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53.) Five poems from her book, she: robed and words, set to music by James Lee III were performed on May 11, 2021. The soloist was the opera singer Susanna Phillips, principal clarinetist Anthony McGill of the New York Philharmonic and Grammy® nominated pianist Mayra Huang. The arrangement was part of a concert held at Y92 in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.”
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Issue #15.8 A Poem by Angie Starcevic
You, Car Sales Lots, and Cell Phones
I caught sight of a car sales lot late last night whilst my mother was driving us. Was there a late night mall next to the highway, open late? Or a bar, every patron remarkably Honda-Civic-centric. Yellow street lights, buzzing and fluttering all around, knowing and hopeless like aged wallpaper. An aluminum fairy wand, grimey haze on the cars below, the black sky above. Untouchable sky, black that we know is blue. Car salesmen skitter around the petticoats of maiden yellow, and turn it beer bottle green, washed up on the seashore. A sea of cars and light and no people at all. Disappointing history. Disappointing highway. It is yellow but not yellow, it is half yellow and all that we see and remember, until something snaps and the cup is emptied for us again. Your face, behind the glow of a cell phone. Your face, in a mirror under the sun. If you stare right enough, if the light is bright enough, it just might appear real.
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Angie Starcevic is a 17 year old high-school student who loves cats and reading, horseback riding, and drinking way too much Diet Coke. She speaks Serbian and English, and she's very much ready to move out of North Carolina for college.
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Issue #15.9 Two Poems by Sanjeev Sethi
Process
Thoughtlessness has its curvature. Brindled logic chases other loops. Clarity is the call: in verse and verities.
In heliotropic environs parlance cruises at a pace arduous to actualize: the page with its saintlike arms accepts it in toto.
Weird for one, veridical to another: the retainers of dialectics run amuck on the evasive argot of poesy.
There is an itch to unload the truisms you lug. These must extend to spaces of alterity: for feelings to flourish.
Cantilation
Haziness urges me to underwrite the bumfluff phase and its gawkiness with a eulogy on its integrity.
On my drive, the cloverleaf of images bears its imprint. It’s often on the crow’s-nest on the crossroad of slumber.
As with alphabets of a language one is accustomed to; silence and suspicion drop by; without annotations, as the spine livens up.
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Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His last two: Strokes of Solace (CLASSIX, an imprint of Hawakal, Delhi, July 2022) and Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He is published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He is the recipient of the Ethos Literary Award 2022. He is joint-winner of Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. He lives in Mumbai, India.
Twitter @sanjeevpoems3
Instagram sanjeevsethipoems
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Issue #15.10 A Poem by Shane Schick
A Life Jacket
A life jacket in another sense, still worn on or near the water sometimes but purpose-built to protect you from sinking too far into the depths of yourself, buoying you back up instead until you gasp at all the clean air circulated through centuries of ancestors, feeling the firmness of the material next to your chest over a heart whose beating is a habit it will break. You can unfasten the snaps without fear, because this was never designed to save. Rather to let your consciousness drift in a lake filled with everything for which such a saving would be welcomed.
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Shane Schick is a freelance writer whose work spans the worlds of technology, marketing and fashion. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Full Mood Mag, Amethyst Review and South Florida Poetry Journal, among other publications. He lives with his wife and three children in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com/Poetry. Twitter: @shaneschick
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Issue #15.11 A Poem by Jake Sheff
Creosote Covenant
The fire truck is not the frotteurism dismantled by parents to replicate on a rhizome-and-blues disc, is not the satellite of Seattle's intended nor a combination of gruesome celerity and menarche without monocle or manacle, but the implements are in place to rectify what- ever, like some incorrect celery, comes our way.
None of this is writ on the to-do list of my cat or any other legitimately enzymat- ic grown up. It isn't carved, like some accusation, in a heart with an arrow on some sturgeon or fir. But whenever my wife's unheralded look of You turn on me, you turn me on appears, it dwarfs all fires.
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Jake Sheff is a pediatrician in Oregon and veteran of the US Air Force. He's married with a daughter and a bulldog. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and a Laureate's Choice prize in the 2019 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Past poems and short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. He’s also published translations of poetry and reviews of translated poetry collections. His chapbook is “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing). A full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe,” is available from White Violet Press. His chapbook, “The Rites of Tires,” is due to be published later this year by SurVision in their international “New Poetics” series.
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