#7.1 A Poem by ESH Leighton
Toad Hole
when I google image search myself there’s me the me I wish to present to the world
me on a porch swing and me in a cemetery me proffering my book, head cropped out, asking the viewer, “wouldn’t you like to buy this please? it’s full of head and heart and might hurt to read, but I’d like your nine dollars ninety-nine cents to add to my money collection. I feel it’s a fair price for all the fucking pain I had to endure to glue words together with bloodied fingers and assemble them on the page until they made some semblance of sense.”
I have no customers. but that’s not the point.
the point is, why is there a frog? who told them about the toads?
there’s a picture of me and me
and me from ten years ago, my long skinny white arms setting out a tray of food at the bagel place I worked at when I was broke and only ate leftover bagels and wept in my car as I drove to my boyfriend’s work to ask for five dollars because I couldn’t afford tampons. he worked at RadioShack then, when those were still a thing, and this particular one was on the beach. a seaside RadioShack surrounded by palm trees and waves and homeless people because that’s just how Dana Point was, then. I wonder if it’s changed. I heard through the Internet grapevine that the teashop next door closed, and RadioShack went under, but I’m sure that Taco Bell is still there because it may well be the apocalypse, but damn if you can’t pull aside your facemask and still enjoy a cheesy gordita crunch while the world catches on fire.
it’s like somebody told them (and by them, I suppose I mean the world at large? the whole of it; the entirety of the internet), “you’ve got to have an amphibian.
she’ll be a writer, she’s got promise.
she won’t be quite as pretty as they described, but who ever is, eh? she’ll do, but you’ve got to make sure there’s at least one toad, or she won’t understand the meaning of the symbolism.”
there’s my attaboy though I am not a boy or a girl, just a full-grown human who never lost her freckles.
it’s like they’re saying, “when you google yourself, you’ll see this toad amidst the many pale recreations of your face. a frog but really it’s a toad because you’ll know what it means.”
And I do.
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ESH Leighton is a writer and wanderer who has lived in six cities in the past decade and a half (her favorite was Brooklyn). Her debut poetry collection, Backwards Births, was published in 2020. She lives currently in Las Vegas with her husband, a pack of rescue dogs, and a single black cat whom she found wandering near the river in Napa Valley. Find her on social media @eshleighton.
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#7.2 A Poem by Jim Daniels
MOTOWN CHRISTMAS, 1973
My favorite 8th grade teacher skated alone at Farwell Field’s outdoor rink while I, in 11th grade, held hands with my new girlfriend, circling ice
to Motown Christmas, at a distance from him, though distance wasn’t his thing. He’d given us our first shot of blues on the school’s industrial turntable.
He let the Black Panthers blow up our history books. He once packed six of us into his Z-28 Camaro, drove us home in a thunderstorm.
Balding now—was he then?—shy of 30, hatless in brittle cold. He'd copied an article from Playboy and the bunny got him fired.
We revved away into a high school full of blatant centerfolds. Tall, he rose above the cool slump of hooded teenagers and fathers bent over snowsuits skittering
in double-runners. He didn’t live on our map, our fathers double-shifting at the plant and listening to white talk radio, weaving their futures with cigarettes and beer.
He sliced the ice with graceful swoops on long, sharp racing blades to the solitary rhythm in his head, showing off for no one. I bit my lip. For Christmas,
I was going to rock my girl’s jingle bells. His Lightning Hopkins and John Lee Hooker records were foreign language tapes
we failed to memorize, being white and unable to pick up the accent. Ice skating on city rinks, we never worried about falling through.
He’d let us call him Roger— though if I'd shouted it then, how deep the crack? In his classroom, I’d held sweaty hands with Lynn.
Our desks circled around him. Our parents got him fired when we’d only just begun to hate them. So why did we obediently take out our pencils and begin
when the sub told us to write the names and dates we were given? Why did we just stop holding hands, fold them over into quiet fists? He had a beef
with Berry Gordy’s slippery moves. At the rink, an ordinary Saturday session skating in circles, digging in deep anonymous grooves. My girl,
from another school, burned her tongue on hot chocolate. I planned to kiss it later. He might have looked at me and lifted his head
in half-acknowledgment. Crushed ice, weak ankles, three years. Some punks cracking the whip got kicked out by the guard. Speakers crackled, sputtered,
as they had since the beginning of time or my sixteen years. History depends on who’s telling it, he always said. He played a mean air guitar. Across
Outer Drive at Mt. Olivet Cemetery a bulldozer was having its way with the frozen earth. Eighth grade. Ice started to slush under mid-day sun.
A Saturday in December. Circling helpless against the distance between us. I held her hand so I could not wave.
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Jim Daniels’s new book of poems, Gun/Shy will be published by Wayne State University Press in 2021. Other recent books include the short fiction collection, The Perp Walk (2019) and his anthology, R E S P E C T: The Poetry of Detroit Music, co-edited with M. L. Liebler, both published by Michigan State University Pres in 2019 and 2020 respectively. A native of Detroit, Daniels currently lives in Pittsburgh.
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#7.3 A Poem by Nicole Callihan
Woman with Bright Spots
Vlad, my radiologist, assures me I will feel nothing. Only happiness, he says.
Hungry, I stare out the window. He slaps the inside of my elbow, tells me he has rarely seen such beautiful veins.
This pleases me. Even now, I’m a sucker for beauty.
I take a deep breath, look away, feel something, barely. A pinch.
Is this happiness? Pinch me.
The sugar water attached to a radioactive isotope moves through my veins.
Maybe after I’ll get a steak from Smith & Wollensky’s, a wedge salad.
Or, a grilled swiss with bacon and tomato on rye plus Funyon’s from the deli.
I will take picture of your insides, Vlad says. Like Picasso!
I imagine myself Picasso’s Weeping Woman. My blue teeth chattering, red bow, canary yellow ear, the fear.
The machine will read for bright spots.
Cancer being the brightest of spots.
There are stars. All light is information. Or is it the other way around?
Before surgery, I met Zoë and Caitlin at the cabin and Zoë brought us jars of moonwater. You just leave the jar outside on a full moon then drink it up. It’ll make you live forever. Or want to. We drank some of it, saved the rest.
This, too, is a stage of survival.
Hoarder of light and color. Woman in an Armchair. Woman with a Flower. Woman Throwing a Stone. Girl Before Mirror. Interior with Girl. Woman by the Window. Woman at the Mouth of a Machine.
Vlad asks me to lift my arms.
I can’t, I say. Only this high, I say, which is not very high. The scars aren’t even really scars yet, still just wounds.
And so Vlad tucks my hands beneath my hips.
Now, I’m a botched painting, but then, still October, I held the jar of moonwater to my chest and felt the glass vibrate with my heart’s hard pumping.
Was that happiness?
Vlad puts two blankets over my body. A chill I can’t shake. Last week, at home, recovering in bed, I asked Kristin to cover my face with the long cashmere shawl I’ve been sleeping with. This isn’t funny, she said. But did it anyway. And we laughed. Until it hurt.
In the machine, I dream for a minute. I sleep. I panic, breathe, sleep again, startle, breathe. I can feel the weight of the waves on my face, the ripple across my shoulders, my sore sternum. Your warmth.
When I checked in, Sandra, at the desk told me she has known my oncologist for forever. Fifteen years! She said.
Forever. And a day. Forever and ever. Forever, or fifteen years, whichever comes first.
I’m in the machine forever. And then I’m out.
Now, we can start test, Vlad says. But he is joking. He wraps a bright blue cloth around my arm from where the IV went in. It is an exquisite blue, a blue I’ve witnessed only a handful of times, a blue I could count on my fingers.
And then, I am Woman in Changing Room Removing Gown. Woman Not Looking at Mirror. Woman Fastening Surgical Bra. Woman in Sweater, in soft pants, in Elevator. Woman Under Broken Sky Shoving Broken Pretzels from Dented Ziplock Baggie Fished from Bottom of Woman’s Bag in Woman’s Tired Face.
I am Woman Not Weeping on Street Corner, Not Weeping in Cold New York Air, Not Weeping the Long Ride Home, Not Weeping Woman.
O woman, don’t weep.
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Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, PEN America, and Copper Nickel. Her latest collection, Elsewhere, a collaboration with Zoe Ryder White, won the 2019 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.
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#7.4 Two Poems by Carol Ellis
Blue Moon Water, 2020
I’d take a glass if I were there, although undrinkable in unmelted ice and moon swill, so nothing to drink at times of incredible thirst and praying.
There’s water here. Earth water. Spiced with bear piss and cocaine. Out in the wild. Closer in I carefully pick up syringes dropped by those seeking a moment’s peace.
And the moon? Once it was a story. There were boats. And idle drumming. When it was full it became an excuse for love for murder for night madness look at the moon.
I’m looking. I am. I. In moonlight. In sunlit grassy areas of the moon where water relies on stone to get by and there is a garden filled with animals.
Morning dew dropped from the moon, moon melt over the quick coming of winter, melt down the climbed mountains, taste the unrepeatable drink of water with those who drank.
Who will drink when magic refuses to leave in spite of another place to land, another grab and go, more landing gear drooping its clutch into glitter.
Bright like fire someone dreams this burning across moon forests underground roots wrapped around the heads of heavy drinkers whose water bottles fill and refill with stars.
***
Cold Moon
First morning of the new year leaves a cold moon to hover over transition happening last night midnight alright although I am tired from last year’s epidemic and the active avoidance of illness, every day harder to breathe in a body leaving and a mind resentful, feel the terror in my crooked skin, the inevitable rising closer with each year erasure erase words into dust as if in a classroom at the end of class the desks empty the homesick silence the leaving of learning every nod of the clock a nod of power and oh help me into the morning that is life and art and nettle tea against allergies too much life to bear, seagulls outside and the sea flinging itself again against rocks and rolling small shells to my feet, I thought I could walk on water, be an exception, but I sunk as though I wanted to feel the moon by knowing water, by refusing to swim, to be saved by the moon and drawn up against its heart that I find out only now, is cold.
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Carol Ellis is a poet living in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. Her latest work is a full length collection of poetry entitled Lost and Local (Beyond Baroque Books, 2019). She is the author of two chapbooks: HELLO (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems and essays are published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015 she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings. Find her online at carolellis.tumblr.com.
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#7.5 Two Poems by Craig Brandis
CAT Scan
(For Jim)
of my skull in the surgeon’s office like a Da Vinci post-mortem a putty of shades smeared by movement in the brrr-ing machine Newly pendulumic about multiple axes as if a friend had sent a funny birthday card with a tilt-a-whirl holographic skull of a chimpanzee front teeth protruding under moon’s hood of bone See, you haven’t changed all that much! lips blown out like someone in a fool’s rage over missed chances now I am bent over under the weight of this bloody hind quarter in a slurry of guilt rain and Glenlivet The elk had run injured had needed two shots the truck still a half mile and a creek crossing away My feet like dead cod my grip I am losing this blood-slick carcass and all the punk stars with long sleeves of lime curd dragging their chains over their mountain homeland and up the long hill
***
First Light
Instead of being a tarantula riding a Ducati with one giant smoking disc brake you and I could be dancing on Venice beach to Dick Dale playing a tarantella on bridge cables Let the old man sit in his kitchen like a bluish radio at the injection site where you get what you paid for but not what you wanted
//
Parasites have the largest influence on evolution Some Colorado Barn swallows carry malaria to get luckier
I hear candlefish are running again in the Cowlitz river Pleasing the way they taste like greasy grits throw off light like oily rags of science
Personal incandescence is a small matter a clamor backstage with hints handkerchiefs designedly dropped So much is felt to be bad when it comes only different in shape You can ask what or why but it always arrives in a crouch pretending to be the shit with bagged hands and feet
//
Thin where it wanders isn’t it that precipitate kin to madness moving far things closer to the bone tines
November rain thwocks against my kitchen skylight a tin can dumping an endless load of pencils
And I’ve been thinking how night sky and Amanita phalloides before first light exaggerate themselves
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Craig Brandis lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon and studies poetry at the Attic Institute for Literary Arts in Portland. His poems and reviews have appeared in Work Literary Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Plume, Alba and elsewhere. A selection of his work was long-listed for the Palette Poetry Emerging Poet prize for 2020. He has been a contributing poet at Breadloaf. He is a volunteer teacher and teaches children online (with an interested parent), about poetry and how to write it. Most days, during this time of distancing, he walks for miles on hilly roads and trails near his home while listening to and occasionally writing poems.
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#7.6 A Poem by Annie Stenzel
Hobson’s Choice
I used to say, nobody got here first, and all I meant by that was, the forest primeval predates us humans. But little did the long array of living creatures know they had no right to their own environment. Silly me, thinking of the rights of sycamore, the rights of moving waters, a thorn bug’s or an osprey’s or an aardvark’s right to live according
to some particular weft and warp of nature. Never mind how it all unfolded, stardust to prokaryote to great ape; isn’t it enough that there once was a time before needless greed? A tern robs a pelican; the Nile crocodile grabs its meal from a hyena, which robbed it from a cheetah which brought the impala down. Oh well.
How long ago did generosity arrive? Prosocial behavior within a species likely came first, but what happened next? How quickly did we get to Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves, fed by woodpecker? We’ll never know the name of the very first swimmer saved by dolphins, or the elephant
who would not drop the log it carried into the trench where a dog was sleeping despite the mahout’s urging. So, over the millennia, perhaps those who flourished were the ones who shared? Perhaps do unto others, including the moth and the mountain tarn worked well for our foreparents. Until it all got muddled.
An old cartoon you’ve surely seen, fish in sizes descending from large to small across the single panel, each fish with its mouth agape except for one who looks over its shoulder at the following flounder with an expression of dismay. Eat or be eaten. Or eat, and then be eaten.
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Annie Stenzel was born in Illinois, but has lived on both coasts of the U.S. and on other continents at various times in her life. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., from Ambit to Willawaw Journal with stops at Chestnut Review, Gargoyle, Negative Capability Press, On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Stirring, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Lake, among others. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives within sight of the San Francisco Bay. For more, see anniestenzel[dot]com.
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#7.7 A Poem by William Doreski
Naked or Abstract
You’re either naked or abstract today, the chill of your presence clouding my weak old eyesight. Horizontals warp around you to conceal your modest secrets. Verticals prop you upright despite the pain that tripped you into the wheelchair folded now and gathering dust in a corner.
This winter has embalmed us both in our lack of fame and fortune. We require a larger, flatter world without the risk of toppling off an edge and into a vacuum. Children easily picture such worlds, but don’t mistake their inventions for the plush of love around them.
Plain digital photos reveal us in forms we hate to occupy but also fear to abandon. I think today you’re naked under your clothes rather than abstract as a proposition in Wittgenstein’s gnarly Tractatus.
In my dream you presided over a congress of naked people legislating a terrible fate. Men and women of pure meat, they lacked some vital dimension and didn’t deserve the power you with a worn old gavel bestowed on their bickering egos.
Yes, I’m fully awake now, ready for whatever mood you impose. More snow is coming. Layer your naked self in wool enough to warm and armor your presence against cranky abstractions like me.
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William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.
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#7.8 A Poem by Will Ivy
Colorized Film
If I remember standing by the sea wearing blue holding out a sand dollar, but you remember me covered in seaweed with gills and fins only the survivor can write the mythology.
You came to visit and we told stories. Working at the market together, rushing to close and go out drinking. You thought I was annoying until the day you heard me singing Lee Hazelwood.
Today I am as old as you were then, in this story painted on a cave wall from another lifetime.
A picture of a city square I’ve never seen is only imaginary. A picture of my hometown is irrefutable, having seen it with my own eyes, is more tangible. Memory substantiates the fountain, the sidewalk, the trees, the people sitting, smiling, and talking.
Apparently we live as long as the last person to remember us.
Maybe it’s selfish to let so many shoeboxes fill up with old photos like this. To end up at antique shops flipped through by some curious digger like me, who never knew what her hair smelled like after it was brushed the jokes he would tell at Thanksgiving.
There was an effort to colorize Citizen Kane Orson Welles said “Don’t let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons”
and died shortly thereafter.
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Will Ivy grew up in suburban Phoenix, Arizona prior to moving to San Francisco in 2006 at the age of 17. While there he played in many bands active in SF’s then-thriving underground music scene until moving to Los Angeles in 2012. Since then he formed a post-punk trio called Flat Worms, of which he is currently the singer, lyricist, and guitarist. He now lives in Malibu Canyon with his wife, two dogs, and a betta fish.
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#7.9 Two Poems by Patty Seyburn
My Regret
I wish I’d worked with Webster on his first dictionary, changing colour to color, center for centre, wagon for waggon, adding skunk and squash – I think we would have got along fine, and perhaps one of my personal favorites – oh, amulet, cruller – would have an extra line or context example. He mortgaged his home to write the second edition – the second edition, that’s how much it mattered to him, American English – he included 12,000 new words. Essentially, the Eve of this continent’s language: you are a pelican, and you are a kumquat.
***
Name Your Asteroid
James Bond or Jabberwocky Bacon or Beer Beowulf, Ganymede Anne Frank
Try not have great expectations for your asteroid but hold it to a high standard
59 Elpis is dark and carbonaceous 59 Elpis takes 4.47 years to orbit the sun 59 Elpis was discovered by Jean Chacornac from Paris in 1860. Urbain Le Verrier, director of the Paris Conservatory, thought asteroids should be named after their discoverers. Edmund Weiss, from the Vienna Conservatory, asked its director to name to sidereal rock. He chose Elpis, Greek for “hope,” which he hoped would reflect the moment’s politics.
Ida is the first to have a moon (The next full moon is the Strawberry Moon so named by the Algonquin for the short harvesting season.)
Tom Hanks or Ron Howard Frank Zappa, Akhmatova Apollo, Apollinaire Mathilda resides between Mars and Jupiter Mathilda has 23 craters with names and eponyms Clackmannan (Scottish coal basin) Teruel (Spanish coal field) And so on.
The naming, the naming, it never ends. Do you name your asteroid or its crater After yourself, for something it resembles, For a meaningful place, or for an aspiration? Does it have the capacity to disappoint you? What if it disappoints you?
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Patty Seyburn has published five collections of poems: Threshold Delivery (Finishing Line Press, 2019), Perfecta (What Books Press, Glass Table Collective, 2014); Hilarity, (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is a professor at California State University, Long Beach.
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“Dublin Skyline” by Emily Ahmed
#7.10 Three Poems by Dana Guth
Hormones
This rain insists I don’t get far walking to the kitchen returning with chips. Days of cold rain on raccooned trashbag, I spill the virgin oil across the stove and sop it up with towels, the rain says don’t ignite. Medusan gray turns my ovaries to stone makes me consider cooking the rabbit. I fantasize a fire I dig a pit. I don’t ignite a sniffling tree. We are falling from a planet with none to water us under the corrugated roof. Holding it in clutching a knee praying for yams on the metal porch and those dumb string lights from last New Year’s or summer these days these months—
***
Metachrosis
We drove 2 hours from town, shut our bodies up inside
with the wild force of Neptune
There was a star-shaped opening in the chain link fence
a mutt in the hospital garden on the rented TV
eating the heads off magnolias and coughing up bile
Crashing noiseless beside you I dreamt
you put a limp eel in
my palm and bowed.
You only believed in materialist
gods extinguished matter
consuming whatever
you revered
and the floor is piled with wrappers
and I am naked in bed
staring out the window.
Somewhere across the fevered black
waves lick the panes
and your half-
moon grin, glint-of-orange
I swear I saw you swimming—
***
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Dana Guth is an artist from Baltimore who is living (for now) in the icy heart of Maine. She enjoys making candles, reading tarot, and staring at the ocean.
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