Issue #28
Judith Cody
Fields of Roses. Markers. Flags.
Calling your name brought
No answer over the fields
Of roses where wind
Exhaled dense auras
Drowning your voice
Certainly this was the reason
Silence responded
One more time
I whispered your name
As always waiting for the
Familiar word from among
The masses of roses
The ranks of crosses
And again I thought I heard—
Or was it murmurous
falling petals joining
the wind-torn flags?
Dress
Virtual life #7
It’s pretty as sin
it fits a perfect way
but the dress hurts
it’s not tight but just right
You look so lovely
the dress hurts
it gets bigger
grows like a tree
surrounds and smothers
She looks so alive
she looks so lovely
the dress is perfect
the dress hurts
Judith Cody’s poetry is published in over 150 journals, and has won many national awards, including second prize in the national Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. Her poem “The Women’s Year Poem” is in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection, in Spanish and English. Her poems were quarterfinalists in the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry.
Beth Bayley
Sensation Nostalgia
Layered click of the Nikon’s shutter,
soft snap of the film canister lid.
Play, stop, pause on the cassette tape player,
each button with its own resist and give.
The heft of the Walkman in a jacket pocket,
foamy comfort of flat headphones.
Swirl and return of the rotary phone,
decisive and final dial tone.
Dented callus, third finger, right hand,
a pillow for the edge of a pencil or pen.
Eternity in a Sunday. Eternity in an evening.
As the stars wheel over unnoticed again.
Beth Bayley is a writer, yoga instructor, and occasional archivist who divides her time between Massachusetts and Singapore. Her work has appeared in Vox Poetica, Picaroon Poetry, and The Poetry Invitational, among others. Find her at bethbayley.yoga.
E. Martin Pedersen
It
It’s like the spot on the cover of a new paperback book where some of the paper
came off with the price sticker, and every time you take that book into your hands
you’ll see that rough torn spot that starts out white but then gets dirty.
It’s like the tiny split on your gym shoes where the sole is coming unglued
— and they came that way.
It’s like the one broken tile in a bathroom of 400 tiles. Hard to replace.
It’s like the ugly oil refinery in Milazzo Bay
that doesn’t even function since they put in the natural gas pipeline from Algeria.
It’s like the one scratched song on an old vinyl record
that draws the needle like a magnet. If you know what I mean.
It’s like the stomach ache after a hot dog eaten at home alone. Deserved. Earned.
It’s like the one teacher who made a big bitchy scene in front of everybody
and we thought she might get sacked, but she was left alone and never bothered after that.
It’s like saying ‘no’ to kids when they ask for ice cream
and then changing your mind, or
thinking that you would say ‘yes, yes absolutely ice cream, no matter what’,
but by then you’re not with them anymore.
It’s like deciding whether to eat or cut off the brown spot on a banana
that wasn’t visible on the peel.
Sometimes you eat it.
It’s like a lot more I can’t say
today.
E. Martin Pedersen, originally from San Francisco, has lived for over 35 years in eastern Sicily where he teaches English at the local university. His poetry has appeared in The James Dickey Review, Ink in Thirds, Mused, Oddville, Former People, The Bitchin’ Kitsch and others. Martin is an alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
Valerie Griggs
12/22/11
I talked with your daughter this afternoon,
so much by chance I know it wasn’t.
I’d had plans,
I shouldn’t have been home,
so, when the phone rang,
I half decided not to disturb
the unexpected downtime
and ignore the call.
The answering machine picked up her voice
and I heard my life,
from childhood to cemetery,
all our times, all our days;
I counted the years now without you
as I scooped up the phone.
We talked and talked.
She’s like you,
talking and talking,
so much to talk about,
so much to think out loud.
So much.
In 1985, Valerie graduated with an MFA from Brooklyn College where she studied with John Ashbury and William Matthews. She belongs to a vibrant community of poets in Long Island, NY. Currently, she works as a writing consultant and adjunct English Instructor at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, NY. Read more of her in Typishly, Door is a Jar, and Avatar Review
Lynn Hoggard
Spring Mood
Half asleep this morning, the earth
lies heavily green with rain.
Lavender shrubs shake scented blossoms
across the pond.
A small fish rises, quickly is snatched,
swallowed by a blue heron.
Ripples, dappled with sunlight,
open like a memory of the fish.
Spring has yet to shift to summer,
but, as day arches, sun’s hot breath
warns of rigor, dryness—another mood—
as leaves start curling their small fingers.
Lynn has published six books. The most recent, Bushwhacking Home (TCU Press, 2017), has won the 2018 Press Women of Texas award for best book of poetry. She’s published more than 60 poems during the last several years in peer-reviewed journals of poetry.
Ellen Lager
What’s Next
-For Colin
The present pulses while the past ebbs in this gold-tinged season.
Black-eyed Susan, buttercup and sunflower—
Restless clouds pace. Angel wings and dragons, castle towers
billow the sky in wind-shifted arcades of blissful indifference.
Lush thimbleberries exhaust daylight as the early-turning maple leaf
twirls headlong into a trio of lily pads rafting the bay.
Wave ringlets lap the weathered dock.
Bluegills snatch moths snared in the algae-slimed shore.
Mid-lake, the loons’ clear echo, wings spread in a late-summer dance.
Cicadas script the advance of seasons with the shrill disclosure
of the goldenrod’s nod to fall—
Nature spurns inertia though I long to restrain the hourglass—
the dog days of Sirius and the weight of seed heads,
chokecherry jelly sealed in Mason jars tendered in autumn’s storeroom.
Ellen’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Encore (2016, 2018), The MacGuffin, The Talking Stick, The Moccasin (2014-2018), Crossings, the Banfill-Locke Chapbook, and others. She has a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Education degree from the University of Minnesota.
Nathan Dennis
Waltz on the Adriatic
I’m running out of money.
And the money I have, I’m burning on
twelve euro Turkish Coffee.
Sacking Constantinople, cup by cup,
as a Deadbeat Doge
seated outside myself in a composite memory
of marrying The Sea,
in the Drawing Room of Old Europe –
where we turn our sins to museums,
and make most serene our palaces of failure.
My dwindling euro pays for more dwindling daylight,
golden dusk that smudges off the cruelties
of cold accounts: bank or historical.
A sunset censor. A fuzzy shadow blanket.
A halo of streetlights off the Basilica
that washes our decay into the Adriatic.
Venice: I weep the beauty of atonement
as the stars tinker down
a soft waltz on Piazza San Marco
that I shuffle to in a twisting trinity
of errors repeated,
that somehow becomes
more beautiful with each misstep.
Nathan Dennis is a Manhattan based playwright and poet of Floridian extraction. He holds a BFA from Tisch, NYU. He has been published in Punchdrunk Press, The Cabinet of Heed, and The Magnolia Review. His most recent play, Circle of Shit, was produced at Dixon Place in March, 2019.
RC deWinter
First Snow
The first snow glitters in the face of a defiant sun;
today I must shovel the driveway.
I smile grimly, suited up for the assault of winter,
and for a moment I’m lost in the sudden kiss of sorrow.
Today I must shovel the driveway.
I remember a voice from a dream
and for a moment I’m lost in the sudden kiss of sorrow.
But here I am, about to shovel the driveway.
I remember a voice from a dream,
“You’ll never shovel a driveway again.”
But here I am about, to shovel the driveway
despite the words whirling in the wind.
“You’ll never shovel a driveway again.”
I smile grimly, suited up for the assault of winter.
Despite the words whirling in the wind,
the first snow glitters in the face of the defiant sun.
RC deWinter’s poetry is anthologized in Uno (Verian Thomas, 2002), New York City Haiku (NY Times, 2017), Cowboys & Cocktails (Brick Street Poetry, 2019), Havik (Las Positas College, 2019), Castabout Literature (Dantoin/Hilgart, 2019), The Flickering Light (Scars Publications, 2019), and Nature In The Now (Tiny Seed Press, 2019)
John Cullen
Knot
now everything
says not not want
not love not any-
thing I think of
your body a knot
in the hospital
death bed white
pressing sheets against
against head not
want not love not
anything
John Cullen currently teaches at Ferris State University in Michigan. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, won the 2013 Slipstream Chapbook Contest and recent poems have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Raven’s Perch, and Hamilton Stone Review.
Abigail George
Notes on wild honey, notes on grief
(for the Dutch poet Joop Beersee, and mum)
The purple sea’s green eyes watch me with care.
I have to get my soul out of here, the river is here
now swallowing me whole, meta lost in translation.
Then there are the difficulties of being a young
mother, eating liver. I go under the water of the
river, I drown in despair, hardship, tumult, the clay of
romantic earth thinking of truth sounds like. It is lit, cause
or something beautiful, something divine. Leaf
falls and the tall man catches it. The lonely woman
kisses his cheek, but he refuses to be drawn into
her shadow, her inner music, she must look for a
new home, men in suits despise her for her lack of
sexual expertise, women in clothes don’t want to
be her friend. The lonely woman looks bad in a
dress, in a skirt she looks as if she’s trying too hard,
as if she’s making waves, but no one looks at her.
Not the tall man, not the thin man, not the dark
man, and not the sad man. Like a machine, she is
half-formed by the virgin sea, by sex, by dirt, by grace.
The lonely woman is in search of tenderness,
love, a first love, some bright energy that can
heal her pain and suffering, the sorrow in her eyes,
and she thinks of leaves falling, and the tall man
catching those leaves in his hat, with a smile on
his face, a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. The
men don’t care anymore. The men don’t love her
anymore. And now, she must become death, and life,
change perspective, become cultured and love, the
sea creatures that surround her on her educated
island. They have no more conversation for her, the
men, the men, the men dazzle her, but there’s no
room for her in their mansions to grow, to consider,
to laugh, and smile, and play, and all she knows
is running away, and all she knows is to be laughter,
and fragile, and chef. Her voice never sounds like
that with me, declares one man, the fattened ghost
with his multiculturalism quotes, his isms, his museum,
his ephemera. And the clock in the wall is an
animal, and the windows are Rwandan, her poetry
is an elixir, but all the men, all the men do not
care for her, or love her anymore. They have shut
the door on her minority. She is an accident waiting
to be happen, waiting to be kissed. There was
something pure about the day, but when bad mothers
happen, bad mothers happen, and daughters who
have bad mothers do not become lovers, do not
call Romeo, and prose is food for thought, food
for the soul, and the title of her novel is in gold lettering
but she doesn’t care, because the men are like air.
South African Abigail George has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize (“Wash Away My Sins“, 2014) and Best of the Net (“Secrets“, 2019). Recipient of four writing grants, she studied film briefly, blogs, writes novellas, chapbooks, poems, and is a short story writer. She is a contributing writer for African Writer.