2016

 

 

 

APRIL CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Lanette Cadle, Kitty Coles, Robert Cowser, Juleus Ghunta, Erica Goss, Nels Hanson, Jacqueline Jules, Yue Li, Leah Mueller, Wale Owoade, Gus Peterson,

 Beatte Sigriddaughter, Sarah White, PJ Wren.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LANETTE CADLE

 

My Life History as a Series of Flat Tires

 

Glass, a screw, a nail, the sharp edge of stone

makes a flat tire. The miracle is when it doesn’t.

Dirt roads are. Fresh gravel makes fresh bones,

the large rocks bounce to the gully and the shards

 

make a flat tire. The miracle is when it doesn’t

and time is no factor. The parking lot flat owes much

to the large rocks that bounce to the gully and the shard’s

invisible damage. The gentle tick tick of the engine denies

 

time is no factor. The parking lot flat owes much

to time though, and a parking lot juke claims he saw deep

invisible damage. The gentle tick tick of the engine denies it,

and I wait for someone who knows jacks and lug nuts

 

in time, though the parking lot juke claims deep

but gives little but sympathy, no arms for the spare

and I wait for someone who knows jacks and lug nuts

to appear like they always do in a halo of sun and grease,

 

a man who gives more than sympathy. His arms make the spare

rise up like Jesus and the lug nuts hold no fear for him

and drop like they always do, in a halo of sun and grease,

this man I was always meant to end up with but never do.

 

Glass, a screw, a nail, the sharp edge of stone

rattling in the rubber shell on the way to Conoco.

Dirt roads are. Fresh gravel makes fresh bones

for another day. I’ll be due again someday, but not today.

 

 

Lanette Cadle teaches both rhetoric and creative writing at Missouri State University. Her poet site is at http://poet.lanettecadle.com and her academic blog, “Just a Blog,” is at http://lanettecadle.com. She has previously published poetry in Weave, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Menacing Hedge, Yellow Chair Review, and Stirring.

 

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KITTY COLES

 

Third Wife

 

He displays this one's bones in a case, like a dinosaur's.

They are yellow and strong and clean

and chipped and cracked.

 

Her head is shiny and silent, a head of wax.

It floats like a candle flame,

serene, impassive.

 

The second one's heart

is kept in a jar on a sill,

preserved in aspic for posterity.

 

Her tongue, he stores in a reliquary,

with a twist of old hair

as yellow as my own.

 

And I, I feel no fear,

I do not flinch when he guides me in

to look and pinches my flesh,

 

leaving bruises the colour of doves,

the size of petals.

These artefacts of the past do not deter me.

 

He never misses kissing me goodnight.

He tells me only I know how to please him.

He loves me like he never loved the others.

 

 

Kitty Coles lives in Lightwater, Surrey. and works as a senior adviser for a charity supporting disabled people.  She has been writing since she was a child and her poems have appeared in magazines including Mslexia, Obsessed With Pipework, The Interpreter's House, Frogmore Papers and Ink Sweat and Tears.  kittyrcoles@gmail.com

 

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ROBERT COWSER

 

The Little We Can Do

 

As we stood on the front porch

that wintry evening, we saw the red glow

at ground level.  Its ominous beauty held us for a

moment; then my father said,” That’s

Harold Kirby’s house”—not his but one

he rented, one that held the few belongings

he and his wife ever claimed.

Two days later a Model A sedan pulling

a trailer stopped at our house.

The bedsprings atop a few kitchen chairs

and a scarred table kept their jiggle—

a frivolous motion—after the trailer

came to a stop.

 

“They lost ev’rything,” a woman

in the passenger’s seat called out.

My mother pointed to a pair of iron

bed frames leaning against the wall

of the garage.   The man who drove

the car took the frames to the trailer.

Before he finished loading them,

my mother walked toward him

with a pair of feather pillows.

 

 

Robert Cowser teaches English composition in a Tennessee community college.  He has published two chapbooks--Backtrailing: Poems of Old Saltillo and Selected Poems: 1990-2010.  His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Zone 3, The Distillery, English Journal, and Chiron. Essays about his experiences as a teacher in a college program in a Tennessee prison have also been published. 

 

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JULEUS GHUNTA

 

The Way I learned to Ignore

 

            This was a time when
I dared not kill insects in graveyards,
nor wander around dark corners at night,
when shadows roamed
the space between my loneliness

and longing
to be loved.

My grandmother feared ghosts. I mocked her.

Alone, I learned that despair is a graveyard.

Like her, I sprinkled salt after dark
sprinkled Psalms
each verse a charm
for vanquishing
                the kind of ghosts
who, like rain, seep into crack-riddled homes.

On many restless nights I stared at the ceiling
watching my rage hammer dents into zinc
                        catching the rust of weathered nails
                        on my tongue.

At fourteen I craved simple things:
my parents talking tenderly to me,
syllables soft as Q-tips,
                and always with their hands around my neck
                        fingers intertwined
                        like an amulet.

There was a stream in the valley behind my house.
There, I baptised my needs in the shallows
and hummed a sadness stretched and deep.

It was the way I learned
                        to ignore;
                        with a calm so still,
it could have been the eye of a hurricane.

Juleus Ghunta is Jamaican. His poems have appeared in several journals including The Ofi Press; The Missing Slate; The Olduvain Review; Moko; Susumba’s Book Bag; DoveTales and Poui. He was shortlisted for the 2015 Small Axe Poetry Prize. Jamaica’s Poet Laureate, Professor Mervyn Morris, selected his poem, Moving Again, for his ‘From our Poetry Book’ feature, which is published weekly in The Sunday Gleaner (Mar. 2016). “The Way I Learned to Ignore” was previously published in The Missing Slate, June 2015.

 

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ERICA GOSS

 

Photographs of Elderly Poets

 

What strange

old children:

 

the beard-frosted men,

the women

 

in their windy hair –

reprobate elders

 

with parabolic ears

and tunnel-black mouths.

 

Their skulls swell under

stretched and spotted

 

skin: word-eaters, collectors

of small poisons, their days

 

and their poems are numbered.

They gaze past us, odd-eyed,

 

alive in the floating world

even as Death

 

stands behind them,

filling the empty spaces

 

in the photographs

with rawboned light.

 

 

Bowl

 

It’s the emptiness

that seems sad.

All the rolling

and wet hands,

the clay that

lurched from

side to side

then the glaze

the unbearable heat

and it never

once cracked.

Now it’s

like a house

where earthquakes

knock old dust

from shelves

and grass grows

in the kitchen.

Put something

in there: hot soup

or a couple of apples.

There’s just enough

room for a cat

to curl, tail and all.

My hand keeps

reaching to pet

the invisible fur.

 

 

Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA from 2013-2016. She is the author of Wild Place (Finishing Line Press 2012) and Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets (PushPen Press 2014). Her poems, reviews and articles appear widely. Please visit her at: www.ericagoss.com. 

 

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NELS HANSON

 

Messenger

 

Last night a deer watched me

as I slept. At dawn I found its

sharp prints, each hoof paired

arrowheads aiming toward my

window, circle its breath made

in the frozen pane. I don’t know

what I was dreaming as the buck

or doe gazed at my form under

the down quilt, head on a white

pillowcase, maybe of a woman

by the hearth, the orange flames

casting warm light crossing her

cheek. Tonight perhaps I’ll dream

of the unseen deer at the glazed

window. I’ll wake and the deer

won’t be there, only the icy glass

starred with clear diamonds, past

them fallen new white that leads

into dark woods. Or I will dream

the deer is standing there, wake,

for a long moment its black large

eyes staring into mine as if into a

still pool until quickly it turns into

its shadow. I get up to lift the cold

sash and join the night, following

fresh tracks among wordless trees,

trunks tall islands in the ocean of

snow. Barefoot I run faster, on and

on, at last entering this open place

where the deer stops. Dipping its

brown forehead it greets me with

closed eyelids. Together we walk

into the shagged pines and barest

maples, farther and farther toward

a final meadow where steam rises

in thick smoke and in a wide ring

all the night’s animals are waiting.

 

 

Replay

Night my father’s plane over Tokyo

is trapped in converging searchlights

blinding flak shakes his fuselage and

 

a candle wavers, nearly flickers out

in 1962 as I take the mound in Little

League. His father with heavy BAR

 

advances into No Man’s Land toward

German line, mask for chlorine gas,

now Mauser rounds splashing fresh

 

mud across his leggings. Silver B-29

stands still in air, trembles, starts to

disappear, jolts, freezes solid again,

 

continues bombing run. Your breath

stops short, instants slow to centuries,

unspooling reel of settled lives spins

 

in reverse until a single static frame

recaptures fugitives, escaping parents

of the unborn. Olive helicopters spray

 

fire at farmers in pajamas running for

the jungle, three falling, two reaching

the trees where phantom children wait

 

the color of shadow. A lone survivor

limps from scattered airliner in Iowa

cornfield to meet a fiancé who holds

 

seed for half their son. Baby lifted by

twister comes down gently a quarter

mile east on prairie grass. Years later

 

she watches a daughter with pet duck

flash invisible, appear, stroke emerald

iridescent brow, yellow, red, blue. On

 

Wall Street men and women dissolve,

ship striking berg off Newfoundland

as only wood boats prove unsinkable.

 

Dead history a waking Count Dracula

stuns blood to ice, the batter flickering

before the pitch and the plane flies on.

 

 

Nels Hanson has been a farmer, teacher, and editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 12, and 14, and his poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 16 Best of the Net nominations.

 

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JACQUELINE JULES

 

Punctuated Text

 

Sentences can’t go on and on

without a breath.

 

Pauses are required.

 

Our lives, like print,

are most clearly understood,

with punctuation.

 

A simple dot stops the reader,

provides a mental space

between one thought and the next.

 

Complete or fragment.

 

The sentence is still over.

 

Though it doesn’t end the questions,

lists followed by a colon, commas

joining words attempting to explain

why punctuation is so cruel.

 

Why text can’t ramble on forever,

meaningless strings of letters,

no one loves, no one mourns.

 

 

Letter to 30 Year Old Self

 

Time recolors every red moment to pale blue.

 

The colleague who called you “anal”

was correct. The teacher who criticized

your two year old was tactless but on target.

 

A broken car on the day of a big interview

may not be the worst luck you have.

There are bigger monsters under the bed

and when they reach for your neck

with large bony digits you will regret

past grief over stained white pants

and stolen credit cards. 

 

Patience buys more sleep than pills.

 

Answers not yet available

should be tucked beneath the pillow

like a baby tooth for the fairy.

 

Every life is lived on a high wire,

strung over the treetops,

just below the clouds.

 

Don’t expect to feel safe.

 

Put one slippered foot in front of the other

and balance, arms extended,

for as long as you can.

 

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum (Finishing Line Press) and Stronger Than Cleopatra (ELJ Publications). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 journals including  Gargoyle, Inkwell, Potomac Review, Imitation Fruit, and Pirene's Fountain. She is also the author of 30 books for young readers including the Zapato Power series and Never Say a Mean Word Again. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

 

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YUE LI

 

Under an Iris

The blue flashing high
Must not be the stars
Lost by night.

It might be the sea
Boiling a heart at twilight,

Still not cooling down overnight.
It might be a little lamp broken in childhood

Sharp, elegant and sorrowful.
It might be a light whistle of a sailor after a long voyage at sunset,
And a heart beat muffled by dense and warm clouds.

The burning behind

Must not be the sun, and its
Arrogant flame.

It might be lightly covered thoughts

Under chrysanthemum bushes, waiting for love
Conveyed by bees and butterflies in the spring breeze.
It might be a sleepless volcano under deep crags,
Suppressing breathing and surging at the bottom of the earth.
It might be some colorless, silent ashes,
Whose last remnants in the world

Are cleared by winds.

The moon at this moment still
Hangs above.
Half faint blue, half blood red.

But the delicate

And charming flower, is still struggling in the wind,
Still gauntly cold,
And lonely desperate

White!

 

Yue Li, Ph.D., born in P. R. China. Currently, he lives and works in Maryland, USA. Li’s poetry has appeared in many poetry journals including Poetry Sky, Vineyard Poetry, Strait Poet in China, USA and other countries.  

 

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LEAH MUELLER

 

Love, and Mussels Marinara

 

Boarding house steps lead

from a winding backyard stairwell

to an attic room with sloping eaves

and a view of automobile roofs

through scratched, rain-streaked windows.

A hot plate rests on a Formica table,

barren, yet scoured to a dull polish.

The metal coil embedded in its base

glows at the flip of a switch like an angry snake.

My boyfriend and I sleep together

on the floor on a drooping single mattress.

Dreams roll through his brain

in subway train formation: they stop

at one platform and then another

until the two of us arrive together

at our final stop, and fall asleep.

In the morning, he leaves for work,

and the room is quiet. I stare

at the hot plate, and plan dinner.

 

The corner market features garlic bulbs,

tomato sauce in radiant glass jars

with golden lids and flashy labels,

and fresh mussels on ice.

I select the brightest jar, a pound of mussels,

and a plump bundle of garlic, return

to my boyfriend's apartment.

Handling his dull knife carefully,

I chop the garlic into tiny pieces.

The mussel shells gleam in a slimy pile

in the sink, while a hard stream of water

disperses the seaweed. I lift one

of the mussels, hold it to the light

and peer at the wart of the barnacle

which still clings in desperation to its shell.

 

Carefully, I pour sauce into the pan

with the garlic and mussels, turn

the tiny plastic dial to “high”,

and settle back on the mattress to wait

for my boyfriend to return from his job

at the industrial laundromat. He washes

soiled banquet tablecloths and linen napkins

for the rich, while in his own room

unbeknownst to him, a feast awaits.

Two hours later, he opens the door,

and smiles for the first time in many days

as the aroma reaches his nostrils.

I peer at him from my corner of the room.

“It's almost ready” I say.

Conspiracy Theory

 

I don't know anything

about ground control.

I control the air with my brain,

and the clouds

obey me without argument.

The lizard people

pull invisible wires, but

I see right through them.

Their suits barely conceal their scales.

 

Amphibious brains

seed the clouds

and cause the rain to fall

in heavy, motorized clumps

while everybody else sleeps.

I am the appointed one,

and I will shake you, hard,

until you awake from your coma.

Only you and I will know the truth.

 

I own a pile of diagrams

that show where the bombs will hit

and what potions will protect you

while you huddle in the barracks.

For a small fee, I will allow

you to see them, and draw

your own conclusions. Don't forget

that They are always watching,

from your computer screens

and dental fillings. It may

already be too late for salvation,

but I can offer it to you

dirt cheap. I am having

a two-for-one special all month.

Let me heal you from across the room.

 

 

Leah Mueller is an independent writer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of one chapbook, Queen of Dorksville and two books, Allergic to Everything and The Underside of the Snake.  Her work has appeared in Blunderbuss, 2 Leaf Press, Origins Journal, Talking Soup, Silver Birch Press, Cultured Vultures, and many other publications.

 

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WALE OWAODE

 

What Is Home?
         for Laura M Kaminski

Home is war, the women hide the scar
Home is the bomb our love cannot detonate
Home is a bullet, our lovers are the shield
Home is missing, our girls are too

Home is praying behind doors
Home is a podium, death is the finishing line
Home is for curfews, our neighbours are for coffins
Home is every war that happened after the world wars

Home is for bodies breaking up the soil
Home is the soil’s lust after our body, our body’s lust after the soil
Home is beneath the soil
Home is fear, beneath, we cannot see beyond

Home is everything that hurts
Home is the fire we gather children’s tears to douse
Home is writing our joy in future tenses
Home is a dark room, our smile is the light

Home is a city full of blood-water
Home is a dream our nights wants to reject
Home is every gunshot our ears struggle to forget
Home is an alternative to hell

Home is the rust we left behind
Home is the baby in the dumpster
Home is her mother laying cold
Home is the ugly soldier’s face

Home is the fading lyrics of furnace ghosts 
Home is a space we need to fill with absence
Home is a suitcase, our fathers are the suit
Home is just a kitchen, our mothers are the meal

Home is our fears listening to silence that doesn’t flinch 
Home is a song we need to hum with silence
Home is just a sound, our voice is the music
Home is cold, washed, the way gone bodies are

Home is white, our colour is black, our colour is not home
Home is a border, our body is water, our body can travel beyond it
Home is the belly of a shark, the prophesy goes beyond it
Home is just home, no one cries there when we are gone

Wale Owoade's poems appear in Apogee Journal, Radar Poetry, The Bombay Review, ELSEWHERE, Yellow Chair Review, The Lake Poetry Journal, The Kalahari Review, The New Black Magazine and several others. Wale is Managing Editor and Publisher at EXPOUND. He is completing two Poetry manuscripts.

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GUS PETERSON

 

February

 

Now days throw off the blanket

of early morning snow by noon. 

 

Shovels idle against the house,

wide bellied workmen.

 

You read of a famous poet

who, after graduation,

 

dropped everything to study

Buddhism for eight years.

 

It’s too early for gardening,

too late for exposure.

 

You sleep fitfully,

go to movies on the weekend.

 

You think of the Buddha’s wife

and son, crying in the dark.

 

The decaying corpse of absence.

Washing dishes after dinner,

 

you hear for the first time

birds singing.

  

 

Impressionism

 

“It is intoxicating to me, and I want to paint it all –

my head is bursting…” – Claude Monet

 

What a painting

it would make,

 

confetti of mind

burst from

 

the bone balloon

of his skull,

 

final masterpiece

to admire

 

from a distance

in some museum

 

to the dead,

knowing that when

 

you lean in

edges appear,

 

sharp and insistent

as a knife

 

on a table with

still life fruit.

                                                                       

 

A member of the Maine Poets Society, Gus Peterson works and writes alongside the Kennebec River in Maine.  Work has appeared recently in The Aurorean, and online at Clear Poetry and Yellow Chair Review.  A chapbook, When The Poetry's Gone, was released last year by Encircle Publications. 

  

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BEATE SIGRIDDAUGHTER

 

By the Bones of the Fox 

                                                                               

Today at the river I left a red rose

for a fox whose bones, fur, and excellent teeth

I visit since last summer. At first the flesh

was still there, too, but that's all gone now.

I never knew him alive.

 

The stem of the rose was almost as long as the fox.

 

I love foxes, summer or snow.

 

I want to honor the spirit of this one,

and the spirits of all who lived before,

to honor those who are now,

including myself and my yearning.    

 

It is not a secret. If I tell you,

what I did this ordinary Sunday afternoon,

I will perhaps remind you of your own

desire to love and be loved.

 

Love gurgles like the river's water under ice.

Look, I am part of you. I do belong.

 

Let us caress each other for our yearning,

slake our thirsty insignificance. Let us

start with foxes, roses, anything

to give each other courage and applause.

 

Beate Sigriddaughter lives and writes in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. Her work has received four Pushcart Prize nominations and won four poetry awards. In 2015 ELJ Publications published her novel, Audrey: A Book of Love. www.sigriddaughter.com

 

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SARAH WHITE

 

Ventricular   

Young Fanny Mendelssohn, in petticoats and pumps—

        In the lower chambers of the heart

lost every race against her younger brother.

        severe arrhythmia gives rise

In their middle years, they raced again and she awoke

        to a danger of collapse       

at the gates of Death, alone.

 

        Chest compressions may be given

On the day of her burial,

         by anyone, including family members.

   Felix heard anthems in an awkward key, and her voice:

       To restore a normal rhythm 

 “Brother, you’re so pale. There’s not much time.

       (about 100 beats a minute)

 Take these dark hymns and write my elegy

       electric shock must be administered  …

at lightning speed.

 

 

The Ballad of Narayama

 

A man carries his mother on his shoulders

through the brambles. She will no longer

be living in the village.

They’re going up the sacred mountain.

 

He is weary. He doesn’t want to leave her

up the mountain in a clearing

on her prayer mat, knees crossed,

peering through the brambles.

 

She knows she won’t be living

in the village. The man carries

his mother. He is weary.

The snowfall is a blessing.

 

Narayama is a mountain and a ballad

to be sung in any order—

down from the prayer mat

to the village, up to the clearing

 

where he leaves her, cross-legged,

smiling at the snowfall

and the shoulders disappearing

through the brambles.

 

Sarah White's most recent published collections are The Unknowing  Muse (Dos Madres, 2014) and Wars Don't Happen Anymore (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She lives, writes, and paints in New York City.

 

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PJ WREN

 

Eat, Leap, Lie

 

Eat the red holly berries,

and the thick holly leaves, shiny and sharp.

You will be able to swallow them, folded lengthwise, one by one.

As you eat, wave one of your arms around,

to scare the starlings who compete for your feast.

 

Leap from the overpass. 

At nighttime the highway's headlights push

toward you. Don't worry, by 3A.M. traffic will be light.

You wouldn't want to hurt anyone else.

 

Don't eat or leap. Observe the slate sky

between the power lines and the amputated tree limbs.

Does it hang over you, pressing down,

making it hard to lift your feet?

 

Then lie down and dig, though the ground is frozen.

Dig with your fingernails until you reach the loam.

Soon the snow will fall and cover you.

In time the Earth will tilt toward the sun,

and then the worms will carry you home.

 

 

 

When All That Remains Is Ink

 

You try to grab the spoon from her, but she pushes your hand away. She spoons the grey mash into your waiting, open mouth. You take the food into your mouth, you roll it around with your tongue, you swallow it. Some of it slips out between your lips and drips on your chin. She wipes the spill away, because she is one of the kind ones. Again and again you try to take the spoon away, your mouth open, your eyes open. Your shabby robe falls open.

 

She stops.

What's up, old man? Ain’t you hungry no more? You sure look hungry.

 

Under your robe, she sees your discolored skin. Green, blue, yellow, brown, red.  She gently pushes your robe open more.

 

Look at you! She says, smiling, Look at you, Mr. Morris!

 

Long before this gerichair, this beige room, this DVD of puppies played in a loop,

 

You claimed what was yours, and made it yours.

And what could be more yours than your own skin?

 

The snake embraces a heart

The bat dangles from a rose’s thorn

The fleur-de-lis has a dollar bill’s eye

The mother

The lover

The compass rose.

 

 

PJ Wren is a biomedical scientist and writer in Maryland. Her poems can be found on the internet, most recently Lighten Up Online and After the Pause, and her creative non-fiction (philosophy and neuroscience) can be found at www.glasstunnel.blogspot.com

 

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