Issue #24.1 A Poem by Joshua Zeitler
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Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They received an MFA in poetry from Alma College, and their work has appeared in Cutthroat, Black Fox, Aquila Review, Transients, and others.
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Issue #24.2 A Poem by Henry Gould
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Henry Gould returned to his hometown of Minneapolis in 2015, after 45 years in Providence, RI. His poems and essays have appeared in Mudlark, DiVersos (Portugal), Poetry, Jacket, Critical Flame, and elsewhere. His most recent books are : Continental Shelf : shorter poems, 1968-2020 (Dos Madres Press), and Holy Fool : a Memoir (Lulu.com). The complete Green Radius, a book-length poem, is forthcoming in 2024 from Contubernales Press.
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Issue #24.3 End of Summer Double Issue: Mary Elliot & D.A. Nicholls
A Poem by Mary Elliot
Home
The trees are budding and the seeds are scattered. My sister calls for me. My pockets are nearly empty. Nothing left under the mattress. More than three-thousand miles stretch between us.
In my bag are two packs of cigarettes and a dirty magazine. The essentials. Checking off three miles, I reach the corner store. The sun hasn’t broken through the horizon.
A trucker will travel from Alaska to Tennessee, and he has an open seat.
We sit in the repose of empty roads. Two packs last us the morning. Coffee and gas sustain us. Evening comes. The stars cleave to their positions, immovable fires of motion.
In the morning we arrive; the azaleas unfold.
My sister stands on the porch. Old age has cracked its floorboards and wrinkled its paint. She steps down, hands shielding her from the sun, eyes slits, grin deepening.
She has always looked like this. Every year the sparrows surprised her with their return.
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Mary Elliot holds a M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College. Her writing has been published in Macrina Magazine, The Peabody Journal of Education, and Academy Journal, among others.
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Two Poems by D.A. Nicholls
colic
there is a little lever that clicks to the one side or the other when your baby cries.
though, if unoiled, the lever will stick to the side it last did—though maybe you rise
anyway. you diaper her quick anyway. you check to see she seems alright,
even though the open lever admits thick rivulets of what else a cry could mean: just the sight
of the world is enough to intuit the most of what’s amiss; and it may be she, already wise,
is pulling down the switch on her own minute machine, and telling us it tonight.
discovery, or exaltation
i against every naysayer whom i love uphold the right of the cusperating chirracious noise-bartering cicada outside our windows and somehow gotten in the car rattling its body off
for surely if i do not hold the line here he will have nothing to say when my very own well ordered friends do muffle and shush me down from the shaggy leaves of our backyard trees
and when isn't it someone's sometime or another’s to perch upon the porch stoop and bust out of chiton and then not shut up about that either for a good long while
and anyway my beloveds just a little patience if you’ll tuck any exception under tongue your expectations far away all this percussive revelating takes the sap straight from a man or dare i say and i dare say from a clear-winged homely hunchfly and its hundredkin or more
it’s just a moment or a moment’s moment on then we alike will rest again among the roots conducting rods of an autumn god tipped up in summer for a song asleep within a song resounding with a song marked out in coming blooms
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D.A. Nicholls is a writer based in the American southwest whose poetry has been featured in Agenda, The Honest Ulsterman, CHEAP POP, The Pierian, and elsewhere. His debut chapbook is titled The Sky Today, and his website is danicholls.com.
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Issue #24.4 A Double Issue: Jacqueline Berger & Rebecca Moon Ruark
A Poem by Jacqueline Berger
I Wake Up at 2AM to a Girl
She and her friends, but her voice rising above the rest, wake me, laughing. Happy, or drunk, and from the displacement of dream it’s me in the street so late, so early, my life has barely begun.
I hold a grudge against myself, the missing bounty of my thoughtless years, missing, the sheer joy of being a body, keeping it up all night, why did I think I needed so much sleep? My death-bed self will likely look back with similar regret on me.
The girls have moved on, buoyant, sloppy, holding each other to steady. When I wake again it’s morning and my heart is heavy as an heirloom lugged from place to place.
Dear Future, I begin the letter I’ve been meaning to write, Do you call yourself old at 80? Are you still alive, still tending the storeroom of memory? Distance flattens the contours, so let me remind you that nothing was simple, why it took me so long to decide about Jeff, why I didn’t have an affair with A.
The girl is forty years behind me. Her future self will forget this morning’s pounding head and sour stomach, recall only, as it should, the reckless entitlement of joy.
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Jacqueline Berger is the author of five books of poetry, including Left at the Ruin, recently published by Terrapin Books, The Day You Miss Your Exit, published by Broadstone Books in 2018, and The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Selected poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. She is a professor emerita of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and lives in the California Central Coast.
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A Poem by Rebecca Moon Ruark
Satie Sestina: YouTube Comments on Gymnopedies
For forty years, my husband played Satie’s Gymnopedies and Fugue when we made love. He passed away in twenty-three and now his birthday finds me listening again. The rests, the breath are loud enough to hear and wonder that the world is groping still.
From sweating, wild horses they fall still, my second-graders, listening to Satie. They write of sun and sky, not what they hear, know not of chords and keys but much of love. Transfigured by the sound, they call, “Again,” and play the part of earthly angels now.
Been listening since the 60s, god, an’ how this song is helping me recover still! The Wawa, working nights, the fugue again, and some things don’t resolve: past loss, Satie. The ravers and the metalheads, they love the flights of sanity that we sell here.
Could play this on a loop for hours and hear it new. The Velvet Gentleman, gone now— “nude dances” robed in distance, time, and love dance on. His monocle—a seer still. Where velvet and a bowler for Satie, stripped down to bones, our song begins again.
A miracle of mother-love, a gain: my nursing baby, like a nestling, hears the song that makes her wide eyes call, Satie! Devouring sound, we breathe in time, and now we rise like singing, flying full but still like feathers. Love is love is love is love.
This song was one of Father’s favorites, Love, our Christmas morning present, and again, a miracle of melancholy still plays loud enough, beyond the grave, to hear. At eighty-eight and happy—gone for now. So too the muse, the scrabbling Satie.
The rest’s not death but love held fast, and here again, we widowed orphaned donkeys now turn fledgling and resplendent. Still Satie.
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Rebecca Moon Ruark draws on her experience as a performing artist for much of her writing across genres. For this poem she combined the relatively new medium for performance and critique—YouTube—with the very old form of the sestina. Newer to poetry, her poems have been featured in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and in DASH Literary Journal, which nominated her prose poem, “Six Places I Have Slept,” for a Pushcart. When she’s not working as a higher education writer, she’s busy running her blog, Rust Belt Girl, where she hypes the writers of her native region. Today, Rebecca lives in Maryland with her family. Right now, she’s probably still obsessing over Erik Satie and most things French.
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