#9.1 A Poem by Laura Tanenbaum
O’Hare Airport at Midnight
It wasn’t midnight, exactly, but my mother taught me: People who say “548 people’ or “10:38 on the nose” think themselves admirably precise. But really, they’re full of shit.
It wasn’t midnight, exactly, or any time, exactly, when, the day before, I shoveled dirt on the spot where she was and was not, heard intoned Tend to her last physical need
Not really midnight, three delayed flights. I was flat on my back on the carpet, Watching craning necks swoop down, Are you ok, are you ok are you
What to say? How to say: that even now there was freedom in it: being here, motherless, childless: Rather, without the child outside me. The one inside dwelled there. The reason for the craned necks: Seven months in, two to go: too far gone to be here, anywhere. Just lie if you need to, the midwives whispered.
I couldn’t tell them: that when the little girl across the way threw her Uno cards down, twisted her face & vomited at such a perfect angle, the one bit of green not on the already-green carpet Decorated the coveted draw four card at her sister’s feet: That I looked at them like a dowager on a lifeboat: My heart wrenched but motionless. Not one muscle turning one an inch from the boat.
I couldn’t tell them: that I was thinking of my mother pregnant, So much younger than me, Attending to my first need, Whispering it into being. As young then as my students now. Each day less my mother, more my child.
Pregnant women could do anything then: Smoke, eat sushi, hitchhike to Florida. But she didn’t. She just paced around her walk up, typed charts and graphs for draft after draft of his thesis in their crappy grad school apartment, behind the crib she’d taken from the street, watched Nixon’s men squirm on the TV.
I couldn’t tell them: my eyes were closed because it’s worse and worse: places like this one: the dead white lines, the infinite dead plastic, A half-chewed slab of processed meat, the only evidence something other than us once lived. I root for the lost sparrow, for the ants in the bathroom, for anyone & anything that might yet live or die or live.
I couldn’t tell them: And so, I did what I would do months later, When the baby shook through every blanket, every grief and every heaviness, I pulled up, against every call of every cell for rest, stood and pushed the suitcase back and forth on the walkway, Prayed only that I could not be mistaken for a creature in need of comfort.
On the walkway, they played that Gershwin swell The one the airline years ago smashed into a jingle. The newspaper boxes faced inward, announced that order had been restored. The Cubs were losing again. Their scratched plastic faces offering up their clever & desperate consolation: Wait Till Last Year.
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Laura Tanenbaum is a teacher, writer and parent living in Brooklyn, New York. She is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, where she teaches literature, composition and creative writing. She has published poetry and short fiction in venues including Rattle, Aji, Catamaran, Cleaver, and juked. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Jacobin, Entropy, and many other publications. She can be found at lauratanenbaum.org or @lauratanenbaum.
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#9.2 A Poem by John Dorsey
For Paul Who Worshipped Satan & Dungeons & Dragons
i never saw you dismember any animals or play a record backwards to send our young souls to a dimension filled with fire as far as i know you didn’t even have a vinyl collection
all i remember is you being kind to the younger kids walking them up from the bus stop to make sure they got home alright
but it was a crime to be quiet in 1984 maybe if you’d spent less time smoking in the woods behind the trailer park maybe you should’ve combed your hair or not worn a faded black sabbath t-shirt on the bus without regret as you stared out the window
maybe you should’ve gone to church or listened when the news talked about how a fantasy game took lives as if war and suburbia didn’t suck the air out of the room all by themselves
the least you could’ve done is finish high school & hang yourself from a tree in a different neighborhood.
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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), and Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020). 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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#9.3 Two Poems by Raina Zelinski
When the Shark Ate the Children it Wasn’t Even Surprising
for water is a condiment, dazzling the eyes
blue rose of ocean pulses and retracts, a liquid tentacle.
still shivering, the wet sand, suspending rock fruits in their journey reflect an ancient madness: hysterical greens, leaping foam, and seamount milk.
The teary gloaming leaks pink and red a fevered river that distorts the line of land
now, the purple hissing, sting and slap of surf, as if we’d made the sun set, the colors dive, as if we didn’t wish to splash instead of run.
***
Until Tomorrow
Until tomorrow... I sit here masturbating my way to an MFA In aquatic arts and the waning day, where Little black birds dance, Undulate between red metal, Illuminate the dying yellow.
There is the river that leads to my home. There is the lake that drinks from my city. There is the ocean that laps at my state. My cat will go thirsty. My cat will go thirsty.
There is the water there is.
When we walked the wetland trail spotting little wildlife, Commenting on the hint of fall breeze, Smelling Saints season, Watching oily silk patches form shapes old and new atop the water, His southern defeat weighed heavy, “well, no wonder there aren’t any crabs,” said he. “But mama,” cried the little one, squatting haunches at the boardwalk’s very edge, Pointing to a distant patch of particular iridescence, “I see a horsy!” I wondered if the last living creatures down below that smothering muck looked up at the oily transformations as we do nebulous clouds on shiny Sunday early evenings.
The water will come. The water will come.
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Raina Zelinski is a Canadian born, New Orleans raised writer and educator currently teaching Humanities at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. She manages Lucky Bean Poetry, a reading series and small press, with her partner. Recent work can be found in Tilted House and Nurture: A Literary Journal as well as the forthcoming issue of DYNAMIS journal. Her first chapbook diminution was released in 2019.
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#9.4 A Poem by Molly Zhu
Stained
My love, you are an impressionist painter when you eat, and wearing white is your call to action. Any bowl of spicy noodle soup can make my heart stop the tendrils of flour and water like eels in a Martian river dancing between your chopsticks, spraying vermillion on everything pristine. These old stains you leave like scripture, and when we grow old one day I will spin yarns of you and freckle each thread with the hot sauce, grease and marinara that coat your poor linen shirts like a vignette on canvas. When your own materials become too routine for your painter’s touch I know you will use my jackets and skirts as your blank slate, a gentle squeeze of the shoulder leaves a gravy print and sheepish look on your face. I’ve thrown many a tee shirt straight in the wash and bleach is a ritual in the years that I’ve loved you. You come from a line of spillers – I remember the summer after your grandfather had left us for new earth, sitting in his closet weaving and siphoning through his old sweaters feeling the cotton and wool whisper the story of a man who’d been loved so deeply, each sleeve and collar and hem bespeckled with the ghost of a stain left as a token of indelible tenderness.
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Molly Zhu is a new poet and she lives in Brooklyn, New York. For her day job, she is a corporate attorney and in her free time, she loves thinking about words and reading and eating. She has previously been published in the Rising Phoenix Review, the Ghost City Press, and The Bombay Review among others. Her work is forthcoming in Hobart Pulp. You can find her on instagram at: @mlz316.
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#9.5 A Poem by Guillermo Rebollo Gil
A primer on being father to a son
There’s this part in the David Arquette documentary where the Hollywood actor and wannabe pro wrestler gets cut deep in the neck during a death match with Nick Gage. Afterwards, in the rush to leave for the hospital, cameras show fellow celebrity Luke Perry attending to the wound in the parking lot. He was there to watch his son Jack wrestle as Jungle Boy. When Perry died last year, people shared video of him from earlier that night, cheering for his boy from the stands. When I saw the footage, I decided that was the father I wanted to be for my child. In the documentary, Arquette explains his desire to prove something to himself. Hence, the cut and the blood and the rush to the hospital. At 46, he is being ridiculous, and beautiful. He too is a father. This is something I struggle with: how will I prove myself to my boy? I remember, ten years old, watching Sadistic Steve Strong vs. TNT in a barbed wire match on TV. Strong bit the wire. It was like having a character trait as your last name. Back then I didn’t know what sadistic meant. I just knew I wasn’t strong.
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Poets & Wrestlers
When I Googled “The Wrestler Poet,” I got Macho Man Randy Savage’s older brother, Lanny,
a wrestling hall of famer, and author of a book of limericks. When I told my friends the poets
about my wrestling poems, I got their best Macho Man impressions from his old beef jerky
commercials. When I Googled “Wrestling Poems,” I found WWE by Fatimah Asghar. It’s gut-wrenching
in that it’s less about wrestling and more about having to live with the savagery
of men in the family. When I tried to explain, in non-wrestling terms, what poetry means
to me, it sounded like Google’s answer to “can a poem change the world?”
But the gist of it is this: Today, my son fell racing me to the swing, scraped his knee. I did
what old school wrestlers did to inspire fear: tasted the blood, smiled, said it was sweet.
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Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a poet, sociologist and attorney. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fence, Feed, Mandorla, Spry, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Trampset, FreezeRay and Anti-Heroin Chic. His book-length essay Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018), a careful consideration of the potentialities of radical thought and action in contemporary Puerto Rico, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Caribbean Studies Series. He belongs to/with Lucas Imar and Ariadna Michelle. Happily so.
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#9.6 A Poem by Tan Lixin
On the first day of the wake
When my mother became an orphan, I expected grief and it did not come. I wanted a heaviness, to sit and watch it pass, even if slowly. But at the wake,
I realise I am empty, because sadness already settled somewhere else, found its place in a portrait of Ah Ma’s younger self, smiling lightly, lucid, knowing
that she had died 20 years later without her memories. Or that I did not know her name in all my life until it fell from the lips of a chanting Buddhist monk.
Or that her foreign carer is relieved of Ah Ma’s shell but cries as if she knew her in life, unable to join ranks because she is not family. This sadness clings on
to the candles we must keep alight for Ah Ma to find her way, and lingers under the warm laughter of her children. Her firstborn repays her with poor eyes
that guide precise fingers over the clean edges of paper sycee. The others learn, kneading and rolling paper money, earnest, watery-eyed, working to fill 30 bags so
Ah Ma can buy happiness in the afterlife. Her second born toddles to her portrait, pausing, his balding head resting atop a back hunched with age, and I wonder how long it would be
before he sees her again, if there is more time for goodbyes. My own mother does not flinch at the sight of Ah Ma, like the stoic teenager who had gone home to her with a broken heart.
My mother never asks for help, and refuses my help as she lights a new candle, a gentle flame lapping at her hands, wax breaking and dripping, hardening and healing itself.
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Tan Lixin (b. 1993) is a Singaporean writer and the author of three poetry collections including Before We Are Ghosts (2015) and a forthcoming collection, I Arrive as a Bloody Morning, in 2021. Her work is featured on Train River, Prairie Schooner, Eunoia Review and elsewhere, and at various events including The Show Goes On…line by Esplanade. She is also a three-time winner at the Commonwealth Essay Competition. Lixin graduated with a degree in accountancy and works in talent acquisition. She spends the rest of her time rock climbing, watching grisly crime documentaries, and going on adventures with her adopted senior mongrel.
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#9.7 A Poem by Cal Freeman
Listening to “In the Wee Small Hours” While Reading “The Blue Book” in a Minor Earthquake
Everything seems so long ago, and the sped-up infrasonic frequencies will compose ostensive definitions of the earth’s thoughts tomorrow. The anhedonic face reflected in the front window— pollen, streaks of bird shit, dead insects on the marble sill—is a long echo of the self. Because anhedonic sounds better than bored, tired, and lifeless, I refuse to put it plainly. Is it August? If Lyngbya is a hepatotoxin and there are slower ways by which we slow ourselves, what is an acceptable adjective for green? “Sour-patch-kid”? The putative answers tend not to predict the future, striking us as indelicate rather than prophetic those rare times they do. Compound descriptors are ponderous riverboats that inch us closer to the site—Fermi cooling towers hovering above Brest Bay—clogged delta, slicing swifts, phragmites walls. Since I’ve seen the candy wrappers in the sand, I’ll ask, to what degree are we capable of incorporating sadness into a worldview? Candy is constant in its foretelling of a comedown. I’d simply like to know. I’d simply like— I’d simply like to disavow simply without a big, dour explanation. Wittgenstein didn’t believe it was possible to locate thought behind the nose, in the mind, or in a mirror reflecting neural machinations— the way Sinatra could locate the air in the sinus cavities around the nose (he points to his dimples in an interview [this is both a verbal and ostensive definition of singing]) when he knew he was singing right. A cursor boats through a euthrophic bay of white; we see the harsh whiteness of the spinnakers from afar. There must be a pantone wheel that spins in perpetuity like the dog star. Three weeks ago we were at Detroit Beach eating shawarmas in our lawn chairs, today’s seismic event reminds us. I saw the color drain briefly from her face at the initial shock, but beneath the legs of this tall wooden chair, through the subfloor of this little bungalow, I didn’t notice anything.
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Cal Freeman is the author of the book Fight Songs, and his writing has appeared in many journals including Southword, The Moth, Passages North, Hippocampus, Southwest Review, and The Poetry Review. He currently serves as Writer-In-Residence with Inside Out Literary Arts Detroit and teaches at Oakland University.
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Issue #9.8 A Poem by Ramsey Mathews
Hunting Quail under a Harvest Moon
We lug twelve-gauge shotguns across our shoulders the way Hank Aaron totes a bat to the plate. After sipping moonshine, my high school buddies & I meander across a harvested corn field riddled with mangled brown stalks, rattle snake lyrics & the occasional naked cob dirty yellow like tobacco spittle on my friend’s jaw. I collect flint arrowheads hidden under abandoned corn stalks stacked like wicked pick-up sticks or scrawny totem poles dropped willy-nilly to shelter skittery quail low & quiet, until one boot breaks the noisy back of a stalk & startles a bevy. The frenetic birds explode like Fourth of July into the sound & the shotgun fury drops two bodies onto red clay.
When a boy struts into manhood, the world expects a blow job. Pound nails, flip burgers, load trains, crop tobacco & exchange a hunched back for a social security check. A corn field is a refuge from the brewing world.
Thirty years later, beer swill with the buddies is just as terrible as beer three decades ago, but the reefer is nuclear. We laugh at our misfortune & watch the dogs run south over the peanut fields into the scrub pines where our sons hunt.
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Ramsey Mathews was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia. In Hollywood, he performed stand-in and stunt work for Patrick Swayze and Ron Perlman. He earned his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA in Poetry from Cal State University, Long Beach. He lives and writes in Florida.
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Issue #9.9 A Poem by Angela Ball
The Golden Age of Piracy
I hadn’t meant to deceive my colleagues when I said I was spending the weekend with my friend, not adding that the friend was a sixteen-year-old Labrapointer. Mornings when I left for work, Grace O’Malley climbed to the second floor to gaze down from her window seat, chin resting on the sill, gaze following my gray sedan as it pulled onto the street.
Entering the restroom, I heard a conversation between stalls. “Don’t mention it to ____. They might want to come along.” I turned and left. Probably they were going to a bar, the kind where people “hooked up,” a thing inciting terror, not interest. What did interest me was the secret of how people talked to each other, always knowing what to say. What did was pirates and their strict rules. Perhaps their lore held, like buried treasure, the secret of human behavior. I knew not to expect answers for why the grayness of Grace O’Malley’s muzzle was expanding, and the skin inside her lower lip, once black, had turned a jagged pink. The bathroom conversation went on. Are they ‘on the spectrum’? –I don’t know, but that would explain a lot. As Hugh Rawson says in his Pirate’s Dictionary,
1. The meanings of words change considerably, according to who says them, to whom, and in what circumstances. 2. The meanings of words change over time. 3. The way a word is spoken or said also is important in determining its meaning. 4. The power of a word as well as its meaning depends greatly on the setting in which it is used.
If I were on a “spectrum” I would not be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet. I would be a Jolly Roger, saying My Prisoners Will Survive. I am an observer. This made me good at writing report after report defending our unit’s utility to the institution; good at studying pirates; good at taking care of my dog.
One day when I had taken Grace O’Malley to the animal clinic, Brandy called with the dreadful report. “Come around five, she said. “We’ll light a candle.” The great Blackbeard drank rum laced with gunpowder. I wondered how it was mixed, and in what proportion.
I knew that my setting and circumstances were about to change.
I flung open my door, shouted into the hall, “After today I’m leaving. Let the pirates come and fire our cannon.”
Then I went back to work as though nothing had happened.
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Angela Ball is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mississippi Arts commission, and the Sotheby’s International Poetry Competition, among others. Her most recent (sixth) book of poetry is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). She teaches in the Center for Writers, part of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi. With her two dogs, Miss Bishop and Scarlet, she divides her time between Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Covington, Louisiana.
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