2014
APRIL CONTRIBUTORS
Gale Acuff, Steve Bertolino, Karen Jane Cannon, William Ford, Jan Harris,
Mary Ann Honaker, Rebecca Kylie Law, Karen Loeb, Michael Mark, Joseph Mills,
Lisa Mullenneaux, Emily Strauss, Angela Topping, Rodney Wood.
GALE ACUFF
Crush
Miss Hooker's old, 25 to my 10.
She's my Sunday School teacher. I love her
and want to marry her one day when I'm
old enough. Of course, she'll be older, too,
but I hope I don't care about that then
like I don't care about it now, that is,
if she can wait and I can wait and God
will make her fall in love with me. I pray
about that every night. I'm sincere
and even if God says no to me, no
such miracle, I might not have her but
I'll still have something, a consolation
prize, meaning that I'll get into Heaven,
which is better than nothing if I can't
have Miss Hooker to make things Heavenly
for me down here on earth. That's blasphemy
I guess, and maybe she would say so, too,
but between God and me we know it for
truth. In Sunday School this morning I stayed
after to help her stack the hymnals and
would've clapped the erasers but she likes
a felt board and little figures better,
Jesus and sheep and a donkey and some
chickens and two angels and three shepherds
and a manger and Mary and Joseph.
Then I walked her to her Buick Skylark,
it's green like her eyes, or one of her eyes,
her right eye's a lazy eye and when it
wanders to the far side it looks yellow,
and opened her door for her and she scooted
in and I shut it without looking at
her legs, much, and she turned to me and said
Goodbye, Gale, although I didn't hear her
because her window was still rolled up so
I guess she mouthed it, her goodbye I mean,
and I read her lips just like I was deaf.
So I said, I love you, Miss Hooker, and
then she rolled down her window and said, and
I'm quoting, Pardon me? and then I was
sore afraid and said, Goodbye, Miss Hooker
is what I said. Which was a downright lie,
it's true. Goodbye again, she called, and drove
away. I'll see her in seven more days,
or is it eight. Anyway, in a week.
I guess when you can't have the thing you love
you love it anyway, or you have love
and just love that, invisible like God
it is, maybe because it's everywhere.
Still, I don't need the forest, just one tree.
If it can't be Miss Hooker I suppose
it's Jesus, Who died on one. Man, that hurts.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Adirondack Review, Concho River Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Arkansas Review, Carolina Quarterly, Poem, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank
STEVE BERTOLINO
Broadcast
It’s comforting to watch the radio tower blink
out there, across the valley, on the mountain.
I’m still here, it seems to say, and so are you.
We are steady in our blinking.
We broadcast at 810 kHz, in the medium wave.
Even better are the nights it’s cold enough
to see the trails of my breath
in its continual retreat from my body.
In a sky of stars deep and black
and stretching for miles, I get that creaky
pain at the back of my neck,
looking up to watch the airplane I can’t hear,
far away in a thinner cold.
The lights on the wings blip.
The light on the tail will flash
in three-quarter rhythm, and I calculate
the gentle curves, sine and cosine.
I triangulate between the wings
and the tail and me, until I know
the timing between their illuminations
and my heartbeat.
Steve Bertolino lives in Middlebury, Vermont, where he works as an academic librarian and serves on the executive committee for the New England Young Writers Conference. His recent and forthcoming publications include poems in Right Hand Pointing, Big River Poetry Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, Red River Review, Bone Parade, Bohemia, Written River, and Third Wednesday.
KAREN JANE CANNON
The Baby Snatchers
You— womb-wet bundle, snatched,
sterilized, not still born, just born still. Deft
fingers tap Morse signals through stolen bone, I lay
surplus, conjure your double,
a panicked placenta,
your baby shaped wrapper. This life
too early to exist, cord split—
my unfinished embryo, filched
foetus, thumb sucking ultrasound.
Whilst time waits I gaze
at white ceilings, lights, miss
your presence, my hands rest
on nothing.
Don’t show me a dead baby—
a contraband bag of failed organs, a doll
with glass eyes.
But death-defying, your mouth gapes, hollow
chest heaves, skin black—
there is no pink here, you look old
not new.
Your face, waxed, little voodoo.
They prick your heels, wire your energy
to my replacement, veins held open, tubes
breathe amniotic air.
I watch empty behind plastic
whilst you cry in a dry womb.
Karen Jane Cannon's poetry has been published in Orbis, Acumen, Deep Water and upcoming in Ink, Sweat & Tears. She has had a novel published by Orion and has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.
WILLIAM FORD
Death by Water
The lookouts lean back stoned.
You hear the klaxon clang
and see your legs sink deep,
the tower hatch closing.
A nurse works through reeds
and pulls the I.V. out.
A doctor sizes up
the zig-zag journey’s chart.
A cross comes to your mouth
shiny from others, nameless.
Words trickle back to sounds
you made up as a boy
listening to your father
the coach shout insults
the whole half time long
at his bruised and listless team.
Not good enough later
to play yourself you cried
impishly, like the heaven
of Seattle winters,
no matter the conflict
or occasional woman
or the hoped-for account
of ultimate faith.
Now you watch reef buoys
rolling up and down,
their calls so faint
only crabs may hear them.
Mime
Of Yass Hakoshima
You enter a world of board
and air unfolding in off-white
a face slanting into us
from a fairy tale egg.
For a while, only skin
and bone may speak
as you become a fisherman
pulling a net stroke
on stroke for a minnow;
an eagle on mountain crag,
claws stepping uncertain where
wing tips flap out of sight;
a woman alone at her mirror
touching her sex like an idol
then looking around
for the one looking back
she wants to be there;
a man in a room defined
by hand and foot--walls
and ceiling solid then closing
ever so firmly in to
the nothing that’s left
but the fetal position;
a nurse suckling a child,
her body swaying to smiles
of the many she has rocked
until you break it all up
with the soundless clap
of porcelain hands.
William Ford has published two books of poems, The Graveyard Picnic (Mid-America, 2002) and Past Present Imperfect (Turning Point, 2006), four chapbooks (two with Pudding House), and, most recently work in Brilliant Corners, Hamilton Stone Review, Lascaux Review, Monarch Review, Nashville Review, Southern Humanities Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and elsewhere. Retired now from teaching and editing, he lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
JAN HARRIS
Leaf, Unsigned
Leaf, carried by hillside stream
to rest against a boulder,
cuticle torn by beetles,
epidermis so worn by wind and rain
its name deliquesces in the mouth.
Just veins and brittle weft hold
the shape, a heart
the slender stalk, a wrist
and the deft hand that gathers
late summer pears, yellow-skinned
and slippery on the tongue.
Held to the light the skeleton
suggests colours;
a hint of saffron to the east
gloss of soft green ripening
though without a name
the corymb of white buds can never flower
and those lips, rich with juice,
remain familiar, yet out of reach.
The Collier
made more than human, or less,
by his labour in a tunnel just shoulder-broad,
coal, part of his being -
blackened lungs,
hands criss-crossed with scars
where flesh has healed over grime -
reveals a blue forget-me-not,
birthed in the rock
where neither air nor light could reach,
petals wide as sky in its small space,
sun at its heart, the miner’s breath
loud as the ocean in a shell,
the wind through ancient forests,
now turned to dust that rims his eyes.
Jan Harris’s poetry has appeared in 14 Magazine; The French Literary Review; Nth Position; Popshot; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Abridged Online; Ribbons, the Journal of the Tanka Society of America; and other places.
MARY ANN HONAKER
She'll Fall In Love (1)
It will happen like this: one day,
she'll fall in love with a painting.
The painting will be a single red leaf
detached from its tree, falling
through the strips and shreds
of summer, all done in watercolor,
as if warmth were a dream
and the leaf is waking to coldness
at last, falling out of forgetting
all that is plainly seen:
the bare tree, with its immobile
and clacking fingers, unable to gesture
properly for its stiffness, it's solidity.
Look at that tree. All winter
it will stand there doing nothing,
rimed and glistening, making a pretty
fretwork of it. Clacking, clacking.
It can't make a whisper-music
without leaves, can't drink sunlight
although sunlight is its only food.
What is it without me? The leaf
says, realizing, changing hues.
The price is high but she will pay it,
because she knows linger is a lovely word
that has nothing at all to do with life.
You tell me if it's a death when
dry, the leaf crumbles into the snow-wet
and muddy body of its mother,
to sleep a long season, and dissolved
into rot, into rich, into branchfellows
vein by leafy vein forgot, at last
lifts up in spring its own flowers,
own colors. You tell me
if that is death.
She'll Fall In Love (2)
It will happen like this: one day,
she'll fall in love with a painting.
The painting is of a man
in a blue pinstripe suit,
with impossible cornsilk hair
obscuring his face as he plays
violin. Every crease in the suit
rendered meticulously, the uprolled
white sleeves, the many-hued
spilling hair: butter, sunbeam,
tangerine, dandelion. He's entranced,
furiously focused on what issues from the fiddle,
a sacralized second of frenzied motion.
The green wall he leans against vibrates
with the sound he's channeled himself
into. Oh, he's in and in, he doesn't know
about the wall, or the painter, or whomever
listens: the sound is all, his mistress,
his lover. A few feet away is another
painting that takes her heart too:
A smiling fat man with accordion,
his back to her, to the painter,
a balding man wearing gray-wisp
crown. His mouth is open; perhaps
he sings to the lopsided shops he's facing,
atilt as if dancing, perspective gone all
diagonal. Perhaps he's singing to the birds,
vees of darkness arcing over the roof.
These men are nobody she knows, and
she thinks of Sappho, ungodly famous,
but famous how? In her life she sang
to her own island of Lesbos, as this man
sings to the drunken building now,
and a few nearby isles took notice.
In all, a small audience. Now, we want
our whole nation at least, a grand realm:
a landmass many times larger than Sappho's
whole world, and far more full of faces. Unless
they all listen we count our lovemaking
to sounds and words useless, a failure.
Not these men. The painter listened
and that was enough, the painter
and the dizzy empty street and the mad
looping birds, and himself and himself,
praise-drunk, caroling like robins.
She doesn't even inquire about the price.
She will buy neither young man nor old;
for she is a lover, a wordworker, and poor.
She knows that right now, reading her words
to her few, she is as famous as Sappho
ever was in her short life. As famous
as the violinist and accordionist who have
no names, and isn't that enough?
To sing to whomever is close:
the birds, the sun-struck canopied windows,
the green walls, a painter, herself.
Mary Ann Honaker holds a B.A. in philosophy from West Virginia University and a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. She has previously published poetry in many online and print journals, including The Dudley Review, Euphony, Caveat Lector, and Van Gogh's Ear. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.
REBECCA KYLIE LAW
Nocturne 8.
I had a view
much like outside a room
might be if there was life there
in the light. That yellow
coming from brightness to silken
dissolution in shadows. Lofty
in the cut-away window dividing
one space from another,
my side of a cedar wall to the other
side. Lying on my arms
on my back on a quilted bed
I watched life and listened to shadows.
To Pinocchio on his mahogany chair,
inflexible and unreal in his chequered
shirt, his dark eyes downcast.
Can you hear the wind Pinocch?
I'd say as it gathered strength:
or the rain? Sleeping in
the visitor's room it was that
believable, the sweetness of sorrow.
For some reason dad's bedside
lamp was left on on some occasions
after his death; just a brown braided
stole draped across the arms of a couch-chair.
But this sense of life
night brought back again
and again, perhaps in its moisture,
its dewiness or advent-
time. The little Byzantium paintings
behind calendar windows- it was like that
the weeks after, the waiting
for everyday life, another
night. But, as I said to Pinocch
and some white rabbit beside him
with glass eyes, nothing to it
but the wind and the rain.
A Picture
Swimming in the ocean at low- tide,
an Italian man some way ahead of me
turned back to the shore calling out
"go in, little one, go under, Un-der"
his right hand demonstrating the action
of diving, the smile on his face broadening
as he watched the 'little one', heard her
screeching and laughter. Wanting to see
his companion, I turned my back to the waves
and saw his wife rather than a child
floating on her back near the sand, feet
in the air and head kept elevated by
her hands treading water. Little, she was
not, instead plump; but the laughter
had the glee of great innocence. Neck high
in the ocean, bobbing in surf with her husband
still behind me, still vocal, I found myself
smiling, ducking under the waves with open eyes
to look distantly in see-through turquoise,
hearing each time I surfaced,
the laughter from the plump wife, her
Italian husband still calling out from the deep.
Rebecca Kylie Law is a Sydney based poet, essayist and reviewer. Published by Picaro Press, her poetry collections include Offset, Lilies and Stars and The Arrow & The Lyre. Other publications include thewonderbook of poetry, Notes for The Translators, Best Poem Journal, Virgogray Press, Australian Love Poems 2013, Southerly and Westerly. She holds a Masters Degree in Poetry from Melbourne University.
KAREN LOEB
My House As Theater
When the man climbed
onto our high-pitched roof
to rip off shingles and put on new
the elderly woman who
rented a room in the house
across the street gathered
her cronies on the porch to
sit and watch the show as he ambled
and gamboled up and down
all at a terrifying slant.
They watched him for a week,
while they drank their morning
coffee, and he did a hundred year
tear-off. Shingles and wood
created or grown in the 1890s
rained down upon our yard
as our neighbor poured refills
and the roofer’s nail gun
rat-tat-tatted. “It takes a
special person who can
climb about like that,” she
told me later. The day he finished,
descended for the last time,
the women stood up on
their porch and applauded.
Karen Loeb has lived in Asia, often writes about China/adoption issues. Recent writing: Thema, Hanging Loose, Main Street Rag and elsewhere. Poems forthcoming: Nerve Cowboy, Wisconsin Poets Calendar. Online writing in Crania, Otis Nebula, Boston Literary Magazine.
MICHAEL MARK
Betrayal
I suppose if the Mona Lisa
had been thrown down the garbage chute
and 35 years later the savage art critics blogged
their confession
it would have caused a global outrage.
But it was only my purple turtleneck sweater,
a gift my parents brought back from Italy,
that you slipped down the dormitory garbage chute
while I was in a post coital coma following
your delicious lovemaking.
You decided to break the news
on your celebrated blog to your loyal readers,
our friends, my parents, our children and me,
to win a contest
I wonder what the prize is - maybe something I can describe
the way you described my sweater
I believe it was, “Ew.”
Tonight, having discussed the matter as people do
who have weathered 32 years of marriage better than most,
I expect will be as it has been.
We will get into bed and go to sleep.
Or read then sleep or have sex then sleep - all leading me to dream
of loving you - just as I was doing when you did what you did.
Only this night it will be with a heart
that takes the shape of a full moon
perhaps painted by the Master Leonardo da Vinci
to light the path
for my arm to reach
all the way down that long chute.
Michael Mark is the author of two books of fiction, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). His poetry has appeared and is scheduled to appear in The NY Times, UPAYA, Awakening Consciousness Magazine, Sleet, Empty Mirror, OutsideIn Magazine, Elephant Journal, Everyday Poets, Forge, Angle, and other places. Please follow him @michaelgrow
JOSEPH MILLS
Spring Is Icumen In
So spring has come again,
again the buds and birds,
again the breeze that makes
it seem so much is possible.
Again this miraculous turning
outside and in, the greening
and growth, outside and in,
again this desire to write
a poem, yet another one
about spring, and the heart
hatching in a nest of bones,
the cracking open of ground
and ribs, the same poem written
last year and the year before,
the one that’s been written
each spring for centuries,
this one, again and again.
Landscaping
After the next door neighbor dies,
the house’s new owner hires a crew
to fill in the concrete backyard pool
that’s been empty for several decades.
Before they do, they throw in pipes,
metal porch furniture, screens, rags,
boxes of mason jars, paint cans, tools,
trash from a shed, then the shed itself,
tires, tiles, azalea bushes she grew
with cuttings from her father’s grave,
then they bulldoze the yard level
and roll out sod. All afternoon
my children stand silent at the fence,
watching, fascinated and apprehensive.
Joseph Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has published four collections of poetry with Press 53. His fifth, This Miraculous Turning, will appear in September 2014.
LISA MULLENNEAUX
Migrations
We were always leaving
one thing and another—
lecherous bosses, greedy landlords,
jealous “uncles” named Mick or Solly.
Soon it was disconnection notices,
cigarette boats in endless coffee mugs
and selling the chintz sofa for a ’74 Impala
with Saint Christopher for good luck,
Smith & Wesson for protection.
You always kept the windows closed
so neighbors couldn’t see until
we were prisoners of the interstate
and this time, you said,
it would be different.
I Am the Only Anglo
at the Harlem Food Stamp Office.
I don’t read the New York Times
I wear sweat pants and a denim jacket.
I make a joke in Spanish: the woman
next to me shrugs, looks away.
Beneath the No Eating, Drinking, Radios,
Smoking sign a man in a Yankees cap
sips from a paper bag.
I am white as the fluorescent ceiling lights,
white as the painted walls,
white as the printed form in my lap.
A bulletin board courtesy of my city lists
3 Keys to Employment Success.
Number 1: create a professional resume
Number 2: search and apply for jobs online
Number 3: practice interviewing skills.
Elbow to elbow,
we are workforce flops
we have no career goals worth pursuing
our best work has lead us to a waiting room
we are still waiting
Manhattan poet Lisa Mullenneaux has published the collection Painters and Poets (2012) and maintains the ekphrastic art blog www.paintersandpoets.com. Her practice of poetry connects her with the happiest people on the planet. Who could ask for more?
EMILY STRAUSS
Funeral in Macao
I disturbed the inhabitants
Crossing the cemetery
Down the slope to the lower
Gate, noticed a cracked vase
Lying on its side, wind blown
Plastic roses unseen by the dead
Eyes in faded photographs, all
Resting now except the latest:
Father is digging with a hoe
Pitching hard clay into the grave
A monk packs his yellow
Cloak and bundles of incense
Into his bag, two sons sweat
In their dark suits, only the mother
Stands in white mourning robes—
Head down I walk past quickly.
When I return the mound is smooth
Bare earth covered in pink and white
Paper wreaths already wind-ragged,
The gardener is sweeping the walk
New picture is pasted up, now
I can look— Mrs. Lau just gone
Please ignore me as I pass.
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry. Over 150 of her poems appear in dozens of online venues and in anthologies. The natural world is generally her framework; she often focuses on the tension between nature and humanity, using concrete images to illuminate the loss of meaning between them. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
ANGELA TOPPING
Waking
Not the eyes
nor the tongue: its chatter
stopped in gluey mouth.
Not the body, still
knotted in sleep,
hands folded.
The white quilt and pillow
still spread for the voyage,
the sailing of my night
is not yet docked.
The ears wake first.
I hear
the floorboards ache.
Your question tingles.
I struggle
cannot frame an answer
from my dark and
dream-filled sleep.
Angela Topping has published seven full collections and three chapbooks, all with reputable publishers. In 2013.She held a writer’s residency at Gladstone's Library and won first prize in the Buzzwords competition judged by David Morley. Her poems have appeared in over 50 anthologies and many magazines such as Poetry Review and London Magazine.
RODNEY WOOD
The Earth Remembers
echoes bounce off a leaf and it's indigo
the nightingale sings echoes bounce off a leaf
the nightingale sings and it's indigo
for I mean nothing to them even so I’ll listen
the praises are not to me for I mean nothing to them
the praises are not to me even so I’ll listen
I leave the poem and I'll follow them
they fly off I leave the poem
they fly off and I'll follow them
What To Do Before You Die
please clear away the clutter on the plastic tray provided
everything that matters to you please clear away the clutter
everything that matters to you on the plastic tray provided
the words the people you've loved your promises dreams and betrayals
everything that matters to you the words the people you've loved
everything that matters to you your promises, dreams and betrayals
I want everything neatly tied up all your affairs should be in order
everything that matters to you want everything neatly tied up
everything that matters to you all your affairs should be in order
Rodney Wood was born and lives near Aldershot in Hampshire, UK. He retired early and spends his time with his wife of 40 years, looking after granddaughters, volunteering at the Westy Arts centre and writing. He's been published in many magazines and anthologies.
Unfortunately I have just spent the last seven days in hospital
after an injury, and haven't been able to process the September issue and will have to move it back to October. Sorry about this. I may not respond to your emails in the usual time as I am on strong meds.
It's not easy getting a book or pamphlet accepted for review these days. So in addition to the regular review section, the One Poem Review feature will allow more poets' to reach a wider audience - one poem featured from a new book/pamphlet along with a cover JPG and a link to the publisher's website. Contact the editor if you have released a book/pamphlet in the last twelve months or expect to have one published. Details here
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