Issue #82
Gary Lemco
To the Chaneys
I only rarely ever saw your face,
Which would masquerade itself, a mere trace
Of its humanity and heart, its part
Of hurt and injured pride, of wanton lust;
A fierce mistrust of all desire, plain trust
That benefits from passion’s simple dart.
The creatures that you raise’d in theater’s tricks
And poses wrought wild terrors in our minds,
Sent the villagers panics in their finds,
So they howl’d for revenge with torch and sticks,
While we cheered in secret for the wild ghouls
Who trapped our eyes and made us wizards’ fools.
Our Saturdays belonged to both of you:
We loved the mirror’d monsters whom we knew.
Gary Lemco is a former teacher of AP English and college humanities.He currently resides in San Jose, CA, where he contributes reviews on classical music for Audiophile Audition and hosts a radio program on KZSU-FM, Stanford University.
Jim Stewart
Julie Mehretu vs. Basic Law 5
To really know a city look under its bridges. From the door
it's Looney Tunes bright,
one point perspective. But move in.
The elevator code changes twice a week. Frege's law says,
same buttons, same car.
Hilbert saw scaffolding
everywhere, after it was pulled down, the way
it still shapes the facades. Look behind the smoky swirls,
the primary swoops:
the buildings that remain,
the ones never built, the ones
no longer there. Gentrification,
revolution, Allied bombs.
The stone angels, flags,
sailing ships around the tenth floor
could come down any day in this town.
Federal Hall a copy for tourists.
Bursts of fire
still float before it.
Frege objected,
the background system
can't tell the whole story. Consider
this blizzard of black strokes. Is each
a point?
A pocket watch?
A spectator
in the stadium where the audience falls
to the gladiators? Julius Caesar also
had a successor. Mehretu answers:
you don't have to rip off the ceiling tiles,
trace the bundled cables, climb
the rusting
pile
of oil drums.
Instead look through
the torn netting
on
the construction fences.
Swirling colors
behind these branched
strokes
is a picture you can't reconstruct, because
everything that's finished here
is already dying. Or just take
the construction elevators.
Ride
the stripped pavement in April. Streets die every year,
roads are immortal. There is no mathematics
in Göttingen, says Hilbert. But these lines
over everything,
marched through Ferguson and Tahrir,
outlast your definitions. Something new
is broken every day.
Jim Stewart has been published or has poems forthcoming in In Company, New Mexico Poets after 1970, Liminality, Rattapallax, Passengers Journal, The City Key, Does it Have Pockets, and the Moonstone Arts Center’s Ekphrastic Poetry anthology. He co-edited and designed Saint Elizabeth Street magazine and hinenimagazine.com. He teaches programming and logic in New York.
Kaitlyn Newbery
Construction
If I buy into Derrida’s deconstructionism,
I don’t know what love is.
My “I love you” means everything
and it means nothing.
I don’t know what love is,
but I know the hunch of your shoulders as you walk.
I know the breath that precedes your laugh.
I know the sound of your smile in the dark and
the concave of your single dimple.
I know your next question and your ever-changing hairline.
And when I suddenly regain consciousness
with no memory but this moment,
I know your phone number and the comfort of your voice.
I know to call you when nothing makes sense.
When my world deconstructs and I’m left with pieces
I don’t recognize, something deep within me
knows you can reconstruct it.
I don’t know what love is,
but I know you.
Kaitlyn Newbery is an adjunct English professor at University of the Cumberlands. She enjoys exploring questions about her faith through metaphors and storytelling. Her works have recently been published by Amethyst Review, Calla Press, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, Sunlight Press, and forthcoming in Thimble Magazine.
Jean Anne Feldeisen
Blue sting: a ghazal
|
I'm three, outside in the sandbox. I wriggle rounded lumps of arms and legs into sand, to see the sky parade its cloud shapes. Gaze up, watching blue. I craved a blue the soft of butterfly wings and a partly clouded sky. Off Brigantine A month before my birth my grandfather died, a perpetually unreachable prize. Jealous as mother slips my new sister into the palest blue flannel sacque, a paler silk One Christmas my fair-haired sister wears a golden ballerina costume, and red dresses. I knew the sky blue one was for me. But, You |
Jean Anne Feldeisen lives on a farm in Maine, is a grandmother and psychotherapist. Her poetry has been published in “Thimble,” “The Hopper,” “Spank the Carp“, and “The Ravens Perch.” Her first chapbook, Not All Are Weeping, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in May of 2023.
Rich Murphy
First Place
Composing an internal scorecard
from selected local value bins
and distant principle intimations,
a default mode network self-signals.
A mirror from the hippocampus
flashes to reflect the reminder.
Intuition provides for the effort:
Two cents that carry the day.
A track record for the daily
personal virtue Olympics
pops up a breakfast table
with a private critique and tips
after a bedtime award ceremony.
Socrates and the stoics compete
during lunchtime humble mumble.
Outside the flesh, the social world
plays on for a livelihood in a stadium
accruing cheerleader bonus points.
Regardless that interior design
includes a guidance system.
Rich Murphy’s First Aid was published this summer by Resource Publications at Wipf and Stock, which has also published Meme Measure (2022); Space Craft (2021); and Practitioner Joy (2020). His poetry has won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice (Americana, 2013, and The Left Behind, 2021) and the Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008)
Cecil Morris
The Interviewer Asks Where I See Myself in Five Years, #7
And in my head I hear a Miss America contestant,
indescribably beautiful and as unreachable
as MegaMillions billion dollar prize, all that long hair,
all those long limbs, and she is saying something about a cure
for childhood cancer or world peace and I haven’t even thought
of an answer, haven’t thought at all yet, my mind circling
like a gold fish in the bowl my sister kept on the counter
in the kitchen, Miss Kansas filling it, just the right amount
of curve, suggestion of hips and breasts, and then my first thought:
I hope I’m not opening and closing my mouth like a gold
fish, my eyes wide and blank, incurious and undeserving,
like gold fish 1-3 that floated open-eyed to the top
of the bowl and waited patiently for my net to take them
to the promised land. That’s when I see again the principal
and his two vices, one—a woman—looking uncannily
like a heron at pond’s edge, tallish, slender, slightly hunched,
and intent, and that’s when I answer the question that floats
like a dead gold fish or Miss Alabama, though I do not
remember what I said. But it must have been acceptable
as I did get the job teaching English at the high school
I had not attended in my home town and where the heron
addressed me as Clyde—not my name—for my first three months,
all of which just goes to show that the interview is not
the main thing, or so I tell my teenage daughter, nervous
about the interview for her first job as a lifeguard
at the public pool in our hometown, the very same pool
where I once worked with a brunette who looked so beautiful
in her red Speedo that I called her Miss America.
After 37 years of teaching high school English, Cecil Morris has turned his attention to writing what he taught others to read and (he hopes) enjoy. He has poems appearing in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere.
Hardy Coleman
The Next Thousand Years
She threw a bowl
which I'd first thrown in 1974.
A bowl which,
afforded its normal span of years,
would've outlived our first born
whose own demise (we pray)
will be way beyond our own.
I saw a bowl under bullet-proof glass
at the museum downtown.
It had belonged to the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi of the Ch'ing Dynasty.
Her fingernails were so long
that she had to be hand-fed by a eunuch
whose life was worth less than
the cobalt blue glaze around the edge
made, in part, from the scrotums of living silk worms.
That's all well and good for the bowl, I guess.
But the bowl in the kitchen shattered
unlike our marriage,
which merely crumbled in the downpouring
bills, in-laws, shitty jobs.
When I saw Tzu Hsi's deep dish
I'd been impressed:
It had gotten through more than four generations of acrimonious reunions,
the Boxer Rebellion, the Cultural Revolution, New Years firecrackers.
But is it any wonder
that that Chinese bowl survived?
I mean, it wasn't thrown on a rented wheel on Selby Avenue.
It wasn't used for Cheerios & milk.
It was fired into stone and bowlhood
by a whole village.
You heard right; one big happy family.
I don't remember what we fought over.
I do remember that the crash woke our daughter and she cried
and I swept the shards, dropped them in the trash can
and tried to bury my feelings.
I was already late for work.
I understand that somewhere out east,
Szechwan or Laos or Japan,
potters are occasionally known as 'living treasures.'
This means
that even though every single thing they make
winds up broken or
unused in some stuffy institute,
a shard unearthed by archaeologists
ten, eleven centuries after they've croaked
is worth a lot of money.
We didn't have a lot of money.
I don't believe we even pulled down
all the rent that month.
Chances are, broke is what we fought about.
Could be, our history will be recorded
in a movie or a Broadway musical
a millennium or so after we're dead.
No doubt, a scientist with a space age pick & shovel
will be digging in the municipal dump
and come upon a piece of that bowl I made
and my wife remade
into an art so high
it could pay the bills for a cast of thousands
and shed a little stage light
on what might've been and used to be.
Hardy Coleman began writing (in a serious way) when he landed in a federal prison in 1992 to serve an eighteen month sentence. (Hey, he had the time and was out of excuses.) He’s kept at it since, as it grants him a legal and socially acceptable way of lying through his teeth.