Issue #23.1 Two Poems by Joshua C. Pipkins
“Rambling for Easter”
The truth is that I didn’t cry when you died. I walked upstairs and watched cartoons until I was told to help take your body down the hill where the house sat, and to the black van that waited for you at the bottom. I don’t know how old I was. I regret that silence.
There was hardly ever any silence. I would watch my mother and her sister cry over you sometimes, wishing that they were old enough to better understand what they’d watched all these years: the fading of your sight to phantom black, and the radio of your history becoming the only sound emitted from your body.
Someday, I’ll be a body, and some young fool will give me silence. Someday, I’ll look at you again through the black of this history, and I’ll cry as I’m watched by some child wishing that they were old
enough to understand that being old means being young again until you die, means being a body trapped inside a body trapped in time. I have watched time forget your radio of history, so that all anyone remembers is silence and the beauty of that imposed silence. This has made me cry more times than I can remember, thinking of your black
skin as anything but wrinkled, and my black thoughts as anything but true. I am old enough to still be scared of forgetting, and to still cry at the idea of death, but not at death itself. Maybe when my body wrinkles, and my radio begins to play, I’ll want people to remember silence. Maybe I’ll want people to remember having watched
something holy and beautiful, rather than having watched something bleak and unsettling. I’ll want my black skin to be remembered as smooth and straight, and my silence as wisdom. I am not old enough to understand anything more than what I have written about your body. I know that someday—because of this—I’ll cry.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry I watched cartoons instead of saying all of this then. I’m sorry I left you in the black of the bedroom shadows, and in all that silence.
“King Child”
After Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
what was it like
to hold a golden scepter
in your hand,
and ride your curly tailed demons,
Maurice?
was it fun?
did your gut bob with laughter
as the wind combed through
your hair?
mine did. mine does.
me and my demons dance
sometimes at night,
making just enough rumpus
to rouse Mom and Dad
from their sleep.
they don’t see the demons,
but I do, Maurice. you taught me how. you taught me
how to be king
of all the mean nasty
things under my bed.
under my bed, there is a book
with a drawing of you on it. I read it
to my demons sometimes. I read it
to remind them that I’m king.
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Joshua C. Pipkins is an African-American poet based in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of A Quiet God Howling Over Hymns, a self-published chapbook made in collaboration with Greek artist Dimitri Vasilakis. Joshua is studying Creative Writing at the University of Memphis.
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Issue #23.2 Three Poems by Philip Jason
the strange history of the shape of the world
The camel I feel has always gotten too much attention for having a hump. I hate the thin relationship between desert and dessert. Every life borrows some of its suffering from the people who made it. Everything I have, I’ve borrowed from God. Show me the way
through the gaggingly sexual smell of the Spring as it rises up off the plants and the crotches of animals. In answer to your question, Yes I long to free life from seeking respite in the fragile shade of the heart, but
you can’t really expect me to believe that for thousands of years people thought the world was flat even though they never knew anyone who threw themselves off it.
Cardinal Points
Some days, I invent conversations with my father to fill the void inside me that is filled with my mother screaming things at me. If I press my ear deep into the flesh of my forearm, I can hear myself running through my bones, throwing paint at the calcium columns. Whenever I try to find evidence that establishes a meaningful relationship between my life and the cosmos, I am chased away by my body.
Once, I watched a bird peck at a glass wall for months, in love and trying to mate with itself. It sounded like off-key tap dancing. No one wants to hear the sound of a heart breaking over and over and over. I wish my mother would find something new to scream about. I wish my father would find a language that delights him. In my dreams, my body is a glass object, a bird drilling at the central breast bone. The wall must’ve chipped at least a little as the beak kissed its reflection. The beak too. I wonder how that bird felt every time it rejected itself. Not hard wondering. Just enough that I feel myself floating, but never so much that I feel like the sky.
Scavengers
When I was younger, the Earth used to howl to me, not an anguish, but the incredible howl of a language that uses every word at once. The heart used to howl to all of us, the same incredible language, screaming at the back side of every retreating love. There used to be fields of salt, wild expansive fields of grinning tooth-colored grains that would hum in concert with the salt inside our bodies. There used to be phases worth repeating: plasma and gas, liquid and solid, eternity and impermanence. There used to be wisdom, knotted trees and blank canvasses of sadness, aching cathartically. There used to be poets and acrobats, sugarminers and candileers, but people, like the Bible, are prone to revision. Prone, like fingers, to dislocation. In the Tao, Lao Tsu offers us a remedy. He says: if you are the flower, love the flower. If you are not the flower, love the flower. Mr. Tsu, I know you are probably right, but have you ever seen a Super Bowl half-time show or heard the sironic melody of a commercial jingle; have you ever watched the world end on television and then watched it continue from the silence in your heart?
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Philip Jason’s stories can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pallette and Indianapolis Review. He is the author of the novel Window Eyes (Unsolicited Press, 2023). He has collections of poetry forthcoming from Unsolicited Press and Shanti Arts Press. For more, please visit philipjason.com.
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Issue #23.3 Two Poems by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
COMMEMORATION DINNER
I cook coq au vin, order red velvet cake, candles, partyware,
say grace, smiling through what would have been your 27th birthday, something different
from last year’s dud balloons, graveside reminisces, shaved-off frost in the January air.
I read from your journal slowed by stilted handwriting,
a crabbed code I still can’t crack
except for where you fret how long it takes
to die, how hard even if you dive deeply and breathe water,
filling lungs quickly, cold comfort, copied over with that
pelting refrain of your shrink’s dare: “People who truly want to kill themselves find a way.”
For your brothers’ sakes I edit as I go along, cough over what can’t be said.
There’s a poem, too, about the rain and a purple umbrella
and the purple sound of an umbrella you must have written a few weeks before.
You begin it again and again, adding And to think all the while I was fast at work
building my ship of death when I should have been building an ark.*
On the table, ash from the blown wish, I clear away the crumb-less clean plates.
*From D.H. Lawrence
SLEEPY HOLLOW
These days, I hibernate like propane caged, highly flammable, at Sunoco, next to the Old Dutch Church Burying Ground, where I could pitch a match. Instead, I lie under sycamores, among brown stones and broken pumpkins strewn toward the Pocantico run, Ichabod clod, Rip lost, schooled fool, who’s a character now? Who are you? Surrounded by epitaphs and effigies of a Hessian and these huisvrouw souls, dunces all, they answer, “I was once what you are, and what I am you will be.” No Katrina courting, no Brom chase; no funny finale, just a ghost story without a ghost. Save your grave, which stays headless like the horseman who once so terrified you, you broke off, running ahead in tears from the town’s Halloween parade one year. Heading back now, a great web, spun from under the train platform streetlight; it weaves into the September night wind, tremors to my closing eyes, the rain-rinsed sky over the reservoir, that reservoir catches Irving’s “remnant of a troubled life.”
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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. It was also chosen as a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award, a 2021 and 2022 semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, and a 2022 semifinalist for the Two Sylvias Press’ Wilder Prize and for the Brick Road Poetry Contest. Appointed the Poet Laureate of Sullivan County for 2022-2024, she lives and teaches in New York. Kennedy-Nolle was awarded a Poet Laureate Fellowship for 2023-2024 from the Academy of American Poets.
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Issue #23.4 A Poem By Erica Goss
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Erica Goss is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.
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Issue #23.5 A Poem By Jack B. Bedell
Swamp Thing Defers the Elemental
One of these days I know I’ll be tired enough of all this and ready to stop my feet, to find stillness like the old trees, content to just be wood. For now, though, I can’t abide this coast being torn away or conglomerates casting oil on the surface of this lake. There’s still too many government plots to foil, ghosts to send to their rest, demons to corral. Too much anger left in me to enjoy being just earth. For now, there’s still so much good and bad, right and wrong, here and there to pull me away. And as long as the vines growing down my back continue to tingle at each cry, I’ve got to answer that call.
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Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, No Contact, Autofocus, WAS, and other journals. He’s also had pieces included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
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Issue #23.6 A Poem By Ann Pedone
from: The Monogamist
The First of Seven Dreams She Had Over a Long Period of Ten Days
Just now a young blond woman was rushed into the ER When they opened her up, they found that she had been carrying a large number of fish scales in her unnaturally small uterus Twelve hours on a stretcher and she still hasn’t calved I sit alone in a tight corner of the room and try to pull up the cement floor. It won’t be until almost a week later that I confuse this with a sudden renewed interest in art for art’s sake
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Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her poetry and non-fiction have recently appeared in ANMLY, Michigan Quarterly Review, Posit, Texas Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. She is the founder and managing editor of αntiphony: a journal & press.
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Issue #23.7 A Poem By Jason Ryberg
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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 #23.8 A Summer Double Issue
Two Poems By Esther Sadoff
Prophecy
When I was little my mother gave me a paper tree. The tree grew snow. Every day
I'd check the tree for a snow that grew like leaves, a snow that grew like mushrooms,
a snow that landed without landing, a snow that was and was and was.
Every day the room grew colder. I knew the snow would never die.
Figurine
I hooked a string around a figurine. I threw it from the school bus window.
I watched it skip and tumble behind the bus. Later I reeled it in.
I asked the figurine what it saw. What it learned. If it saw me watching
from the window. If it remembered me. I never rode the bus. I was the figurine.
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Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She has four forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), Dear Silence (Kelsay Books), and If I Hold My Breath (Bottlecap Press).
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Three Poems By Ron Riekki
Helsinki
I’m from Finland. When people ask where, I say, “Guess.” Then they’ll say, “Helsinki.” I’ll say, “No, guess again,” and I’ve never had a person, ever, be able to guess a second city in Finland. I realized, maybe they think that
the whole entire country is Helsinki. I’ll ask them to name their favorite Finnish writer, their favorite one of all time, so they have all of history to choose from. I’ve never had a person yet respond with the name
of an author, but I did have one person, when I asked their favorite author, say, “Ummm, Helsinki.” I imagine Helsinki being a thousand-kilometer city and a famous author at the same time, an
author the size of a country, her poems the size of skyscrapers, her haiku the size of a truck. I imagine her getting into bed with me at night, cuddling up to me, pregnant, our baby the size of the stars.
The gun owners
I had a cousin once who fired his gun in the air I asked what he was doing. He said that he hated that cloud. Which cloud? That one. He pointed. I looked up at the cloud. It looked like any other cloud. I asked what was wrong with that one. He said it reminded him of something. Like the sky is one giant Rorschach test. The problem is you can’t shoot at Rorschach tests. I told him that bullets come down. He said they come down slowly. I said that, no, they actually come down fast. He told me I don’t understand metaphysics. He told me that if the bullet goes up, it has to eventually get to zero miles per hour, then it stops and he said that it comes back down to earth, but at a slower rate because it’s not being fired from a gun. It’s hard to argue with that kind of thinking. He was twenty-seven. A high school graduate. Good old American high schools. And good old American clouds, innocent as all hell.
An old friend who teaches creative writing calls me when I am in the guard shack and
asks how I’m doing. I stare at the moon. The moon is an Alcatraz. The sky, a prison. I used to work in a prison. Someone got stabbed every day. Every single day. And— strangely enough— the person who did it was usually the in- mate themselves. They’d stab them- selves in order to go to the hospital. Then the prison caught on. They trained staff on how to sew up stomachs. So many of them stabbed them- selves in their stomachs. I would see them with their shirts off. Their guts all scrambled. I don’t say any of this into the phone. I stare up at the moon and think this. If I said any of this, my old friend would steal it, put it in a poem, and get it published. He did that before. He got an award. He teaches at a university. I breathe in car exhaust all day. So many cars come through this gate. I hate this gate. Fate. Big fat fate. The call ends. I was rude. But a silent rude. The moon, too, tonight, is as quiet as the wind that hurts the air.
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Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki's listening to Moddi's "House by the Sea."
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Issue #23.9 A Poem By Mary Ellen Talley
Echolalia
1. They say you waste away one less word revisited in the beyond time past sound waves rolling soaring across a spectral frequency over a field of yellow narcissus.
2. A young girl walks the school hallway holding one long daffodil, flipping it across her body to the right with one footstep and to the left with the next.
3. Listen at the entrance to the dark cave where you hide your face with a single blossom. Hair cells deep inside ears circle sway connect to your cadence.
4. You are a woman planting tulip bulbs in October. Hide with me where the phonograph needle can’t help repeating. We will take turns reaching for the last word spoken.
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Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have been published in journals such as Banshee, Gyroscope, and Ekphrastic Review as well as in anthologies such as Raising Lilly Ledbetter and Sing the Salmon Home. Her poems have received three Pushcart nominations. She has had three chapbooks published, “Postcards from the Lilac City” from Finishing Line Press in 2020, "Taking Leave" from Kelsay Press in 2020, and "Infusion" online from Red Wolf Journal in 2024. Currently residing in Seattle, WA, she formerly worked as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) in Washington State Public Schools.
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Issue #23.10 A Summer Double Issue
A Poem By Evan Clemmons
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Evan graduated from UNO with a masters in poetry. She currently teaches English at Southern University in Baton Rouge. She lives in Covington with her husband, a sassy cat, and a loving dog. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can find her at music festivals and trivia nights!
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Two Poems By David B. Prather
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David B. Prather is the author of We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), and Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and a forthcoming collection of poems, Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2024). He lives in Parkersburg, WV.
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Issue #23.11 A Poem by Darren C. Demaree
Got There: The End
The milkweed is being eaten. The short & tall explanation of it is all of us have mouths & so few of us can comfortably close them. The social confession lives in the throat. We choke for each other?
A body is three songs playing at the same time & an army of crows refusing to listen to any of them, cawing nonsense in return.
Be insistent with me.
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Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-two poetry collections, most recently “blue and blue and blue”, (Fernwood Press, July 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
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