2018

 

 

APRIL CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Kitty Coles, Attracta Fahy, George Freek, Alicia Hoffman, Jack Little,

Jayne Marek, Bruach Mhor, Ronald Moran, Chibuihe Obi, Hilary Sideris,

J.R. Solonche, James Walton.

 

 

 

 

 

KITTY COLES

 

The Girl of Water

 

She moves, pliable, over obstacles,

stroking away the rock.  She lifts

small sticks and carries

them along.  She moves

the weeds and fish

that move among them.

 

She lies as still as glass

and just as silent

and lets the birds alight on her and break

her surface with their yellow,

leathery legs.  She holds

things in her deep they can't imagine.

 

The air is full of her:

she's chiffon-soft and grey

and veils the winter trees

from us, so we're unsure

what shadows stumble through them,

what friends of hers.

 

She turns so hard a saw can't find

her centre. 

She's white and falls down,

languid, from black air,

and little birds

are killed under her falling.

 

The ships are toys to her:

she throws them up

and down and tips them over,

takes for herself

their crew and passengers,

and washes them and washes them in tears.

 

 

Kitty Coles's poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies.  She was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in 2017.

 

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ATTRACTA FAHY

 

Each Others Opposite

 

It’s December. And through my glass 
door I see a rare foxglove 
bloom. In erratic times,

 

pink tubular bells dance 
in the shadow of death, 
the last fallen leaves.

 

Trees, naked, relinquish long 
Kali arms, hands into a dull sky, – 
live a surrendered life.

 

I hold on in the grey, between 
dawn and dusk, watch nature 
renounce her family. 

 

You are everywhere, a stranger 
in my house, our discourse silent,
each others ghost opposites.

 

It is snowing and three robins,
centre near the garden
table share one feeder, 

 

without conflict, I call it
Jerusalem. Tears from my eyes,
grief for crushed children.

 

Inside, the heat turned up, a wasp 
moves from under the radiator, 
attempts to crawl a slow measured

 

expiration across the wall. I want
to help, know – it’s not the time, 
–life finds its way.

 

Outside – cold turns ice, a distant bird 
soars into the harsh north sun 
too high, disappears.

 

I gaze at the mirror, holder of shadow,
many faces. We dreamed ourselves 
into these images, the oppositeness of being.

 

I am ready again for the world,
as I think of the surly waiter who smiled, 
full with contraries.

 

 

The Crows Know

 

Icarus falls in the midst

of ordinary life. A helicopter

hovers over the Claddagh.

Few notice, the noise drills

through my head. Others sip

morning coffee in Renzo. I wait

to work with a man who insists:

“I am nobody, I want to die.”

 

He inhabits a world that haunts

his sense of mortality.

I have no answers.

I sit, listen, both worlds are close.

One tries to live, the other vacates.

The crows caw,

signs of rain, a spirit moves

in white wings.

 

The cacophony raids

the room. He asks if another body’s

lost to Galway waters.

Almost a weekly ritual.

The end of the world for someone.

For everyone else, life goes on.

 

 

Attracta Fahy’s background is Nursing/Social Care. She works in private practice as an Integrative/ Humanistic Psychotherapist/Supervisor, also a group Facilitator/Trainer. She is lives in Co. Galway, and completed her MA in Writing NUIG in 2017. She is a mother, supporting three children through college. She always loved reading poetry, and recently began to enjoy writing her own.

 

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GEORGE FREEK

 

November Night

(After Mei Yao Chen)

 

The moon, as always,

is silent. In its dim light,

dead leaves are falling.

I stare at mysteries in the air.

Clouds drift by in pairs.

They might be lovers

going anywhere.

In the darkness I hear

The river flowing,

and I feel a sudden chill.

It will soon be snowing.

Like life and like people,

winters come and go.

I stare at my empty bed.

It has been a year, wife,

you have been dead.

 

 

The Imponderables

(After Mei Yao Chen)

 

In this mountain hideaway,

the sun shines warmly.

A gentle breeze hardly

stirs the river’s water.

Drunk, I stand in the doorway,

and hear the mournful songs of birds,

I watch young squirrels play

in their silly mindless way.

I’ve come here

to escape my cares.

It does no good.

I’ll never understand why

my young wife has died.

It should have been I.

It’s hard to be alone.

I won’t find an answer,

and I’ll never find rest,

as long as I’m flesh and bone.

 

 

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Illinois. His poetry has recently appeared in The Adelaide Review; The Tipton Poetry Jouirnal; Off Course; The Ottawa Review of the Arts; Carcinogenic Poetry; and The Sentinel Literary Quarterly. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; Lazy Bee Scripts; and Off The Wall Plays.

 

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ALICIA HOFFMAN

 

Sparrow

 

*

 

Black arrow, darting.

 

Feather and fulcrum,

crux of wingspan.

 

Upon the white

scaffold of winter,

your negative flares

 

as cameras shutter

and flash.

 

*

 

Black darling, sparrow.

Skeletal map of frailty.

 

Silk-boned roadmap

to a pea-stone heart.

 

Between a newborn

forefinger and thumb

 

you would succumb

to the faintest grip.

 

*

 

And there are no maps

to track this flight.

 

No sketches to trek,

no spots to x.

 

Instinct, then.

Intuition, if we trust it.

 

*

 

Birdbrains, we

 

use so little and

waste so much.

 

You see, we like

to fire into dark.

 

We like to match

points, strike

 

to even scores.

 

Birdbrains, we

are stars

preposterously

blinking.

 

We burn

even though

we’ve gone out.

 

 

Incantation

 

May you be the bat scattering—

misunderstood and repulsed

 

by your own joy. May you cave

too quick, hang your nights

 

to dry in dream cocoons

that grow like stalactites

 

abscessed deep in earth.

May you pocket names,

 

change a bit more

than you should. As this

 

is a blissful city, though, so

may you swoop, so may

 

you swallow any spider

of desire, taste the sweet

 

heat of blood. May

you be found hanging

 

by a thread, confusing

the sonar of a stranger

 

for feast, and when you

become all tangled

 

may you not break, may

you not flail all colorblind

 

with blackness, but breeze

back to hover over what is

 

still your world, spinning

in the glory of its web.

 

Alicia Hoffman’s book, Railroad Phoenix, is reviewed in this month’s issue. “Sparrow” was originally published in Inisfree Poetry Journal and “Incantation” was originally published in The Inflectionist Review.

 

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JACK LITTLE

 

Poem Bird

For L.M.

 

He laughed churlishly at some poem

a friend had written about a fish

before having caught its meaning

like a bear at the precipice of a waterfall.

 

He screwed up his lips and blew a raspberry

two weeks before when I said we would

study poetry, he growled that one minute

of that would be an infinity of prison.

 

Today, as he performed his poem to the class,

all nonsense-fun, I witnessed his mask fall

full-feathered in his smile, his hand movements

and his flying flow of words, all free – made birds.

 

 

Beyond the Cliffs of Achill

 

The lash of salt tears creviced in starboard cracks

rocks us to a crashing sort of sleep, an undecipherable

dream rhythming, with profanities.

 

Stars dance in your deepest black of reflection,

green warp-holes between waves sparkle, you are deathly

a desert-like universe, beyond reach / so close

seductive sea cliffs arched moon-white in your

 

sheer drop. Your basking sharks.

Ocean. Ocean.    America.

 

Jack Little is a British-Mexican poet, editor and translator originally from Northumberland. He now also calls Mexico City home. He is the author of Elsewhere (Eyewear, 2015) and is the founding editor of The Ofi Press: www.ofipress.com  

 

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JAYNE MAREK 

 

Lament, after Duncan

 

This man who could see our troubles

from his distance in the past

and through the hard door of death—he

 

saw from his locked room

the burning, the refugees, the titanic head of stone

usurped by sands

on a disappearing shore—

 

he, Duncan, adept with old wisdom,

listened to the snow-clods thump down

from the eaves,

 

spoke of the weight of all things

at once ancient and contemporary—

the shameful and contemptible

 

heavy on the nations—his poems know

 

if we could but hold to

the magic of open pages,

books perused with love,

 

how far better we would be—

how we could

sing with the bees going about their business

amid silver leaves of borage

and the lips of alyssum—he said

 

where there is a temple

man’s kept from base servitude—

 

Duncan looked through his window

past the beautiful bees, golden, digging their faces

into what the world can be,

saw further, the shadow of a nation gone wrong

spreading deep poison from shore to shore

 

like flood or fire or both together,

the uncaring hearts

he could not fathom nor extinguish:

The great house of our humanity

no longer stands.

 

 

Jayne Marek has published poetry and art photos in The Cortland Review, Amsterdam Review, Bunbury Magazine, Notre Dame Review, Silk Road, Sin Fronteras, Spillway, Camas, and elsewhere.  Her newest collections are The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling (Finishing Line, 2018) and the artist chapbook Why Horses? from Red Mare (2017).

 

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BRUACH MHOR 

 

Such Still Water
 

I see a white house across the bay,

look down,

see an upside down white house:

 

roof to roof symmetry,

red door/red door,

garden paths converging at the shoreline

 

like lovers holding hands:

a perfect match.

Wait for the ripple.

 

Bruach Mhor is a photographer and writer and lives by the shore.

 

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RONALD MORAN 

 

Draft of a Talk to the Literary Society

 

Let me begin by addressing the impulses

                        driving

American poetry, but since no one knows,

                        including

your guest, I will tell you what I found

                        by dredging

the once decipherable beach of poetry:

                        rocks

 

not softened by surf, but raw, ill-shaped,

                        and

tough to crack open (more so than your

                        common

sort, as in a border stonewall marking

                        your land)

unless you had an unbreakable hammer.

                        I did,

 

opened four of them, found each its own

                        text––

splintered lines of poetry, grueling to read,

                        as if

they belonged in a journal where the ideal

                        dream

of a poem is as riven into pieces as we are.

                        Thank you

 

for your kindness in inviting me.  Sorry,

                        no questions.

 

Ronald Moran lives in South Carolina. His poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. In 2017 he was inducted into Clemson University's inaugural AAH Hall of Fame.

 

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CHIBUIHE OBI

 

to clothe the dead child

 

the night jerry died was a ball of dark wool

thick to our eyes    thick on our palms

the clumps of night crawl down our throats

like balls of soaked cotton

 

he was just four and naked to the teeth

nothing lent a glint to our grief   nothing shone  

not the owl moon trapped between a branchless tree

not the lacquered shine of the porcelain showing how the face leaks joy when bruised 

 

we slumped under a cherry tree and  

became one with the late july fruits    sterile and juiceless 

we   hummed amen and amen to the stillness 

amen to the drooping branch   amen to grief

 

they said the dead prance down a corridor thin with ice      naked

weaving for themselves silken drapes from thorns and spider webs

but he's a child    lord     a child   four and naked

 

so we prayed with our mouths stuffed with dark wool

give him something to cover his back and keep the cold away

 

  lord    long frilless stockings          

 

amen 

 

plainly patterned sweater    with a charging reindeer      

 

 amen

 

blue matching up-and-down if there must be pyjamas            

 

 amen

 

and a new body   lord   a new body

full of fruits and mint to keep the bones warm beneath the flesh

                                                                                amen & amen

 

Chibuihe Obi's writings have been published in Brittle Paper, Expound Magazine, Praxis, The Kalahari Review etc. He is the Winner of Brittle Paper Anniversary Award, the Babishai Niwe Haiku Prize. A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, his is currently on the 2018 Gerald Kraak Award shortlist.

 

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HILARY SIDERIS

 

Cell

 

Robert Hooke looked

through his microscope

 

into the rooms

of Christian monks.

 

Malcolm read the dictionary,

aardvark to zygote. 

 

In her bedroom laboratory,

Rita Levi-Montalcini

 

saw how each divides

to form more selves,

 

goes forth and multiplies

legless, propelled by

 

its flagellum through

chaos, while hiding

 

from the Nazis in her

parents’ Turin house. 

 

 

Word

 

Pain began in language,

when I looked at dog

 

and saw god,

and the highway sign

 

for Tulsa as Altus.

Even in the bluebird

 

group I lagged,

slow to tell time,

 

know my right from

my left hand. Teachers

 

scrawled Zaly in red 

on my baby essays.

 

Sometimes I whispered

when I read to hold

 

the letters in my head.

Retard, they said.

 

 

Hilary Sideris is the author of four chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, Most Likely to Die(Poets Wear Prada 2014) and The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful 2016). She lives in Brooklyn and works as a professional developer and curriculum writer for The City University of New York's CUNY Start program. Sideris has a B.A. in English literature from Indiana University and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE 

 

What You Missed While Napping in the Car

                                     For Emily

 

1. 

You missed your father cursing under his breath

the driver of a brand new Cadillac, the color of pewter,

its topaz headlights squinting in the sunlight,

for squandering, for ostentation, for vanity.

 

2.

You missed a gull and a plane flying in such attitude

and altitude and at such distance so that the gull

was superimposed on the plane, perfectly, wing

upon wing, tail upon tail, fuselage upon fuselage,

partners, for a moment, in synchronized flight.

 

3.

You missed clouds passing overhead that resembled

nothing at all, not even clouds.

 

4.

You missed your father cursing under his breath

the wearer of a mink coat, the color of pewter,

her topaz sunglasses squinting in the sunlight,

for squandering, for ostentation, for vanity.

 

5.

You missed a dog carrying a branch in its jaws.

 

6.

You missed two crows in the top of a pine tree

holding a conversation, that went something like this:

Caw cawwwwww, caw cawwwwwww.

Caw caw caw cawwwwwww, caw caw caw cawwwwww.

Caw cawwwwww, caw cawwwwwww.

Caw caw caw cawwwwwww, caw caw caw cawwwwww.

After a few minutes they flew away, and I could see

one had feathers missing from a wing, so maybe

that was what they were talking about, how the one lost

the feathers, but I didn’t hear that part to tell you.

 

7.

You missed a middle-aged woman, overweight

and made up heavily, trying to look younger

by wearing tight fitting jeans. She only made herself

look like a foolish middle-aged woman, overweight

and made up heavily. But I want you to remember her

the next time you want to try to make yourself

look older, which probably will be tomorrow.

 

8.

You missed the sun as a bank of gray clouds passed

in front of it. It looked like the full moon, that instead

of rising in the sky, sank lower. Then, in a gap in

the clouds, it came to incandescent life, the way

an ember, when you blow on it through the grate

in the door of the woodstove, flares to flame, so bright.

 

 

Three Days Before Spring

 

Three days before spring,

and winter falls silent.

 

Morose, it packs up its frost,

and cold, and snow, and icicles,

 

and goes, still wearing its dirty

overalls. I don’t blame it a bit.

 

What should it do, anyway,

stand around and tell the same

 

old stories over and over?

It doesn’t want to be here when

 

spring arrives, that silly crocus in its lapel,

that stupid little robin’s feather in its hat.

  

J.R. Solonche is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (forthcoming in April from Kelsay Books), 110 Poems (forthcoming from Deerbrook Editions), and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

 

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JAMES WALTON

 

Kissing Helen Mirren

 

There was some traffic today

a car came down the Yarragon road

although I waited throughout the drizzle

 

no return occurred

 

wasps strummed navigating the pears

and I thought I heard voices

but it was only the gossip of birds

 

talking of Ray who died of liver failure

 

he made me copies of old LPs

and told of how he kissed Helen Mirren

at a London nightclub in 1969

 

I didn’t go to the funeral

 

perhaps he peaked too soon

but I know the blissful point

of melting ice cream happens

 

and how orange cordial mixed with ice

wound up like an elastic stringed ball

bounces around in your chest

 

 

James Walton is an Australian poet published in newspapers, and many journals, and anthologies. Short listed twice for the ACU National Literature Prize, a double prize winner in the MPU International Poetry Prize, Specially Commended in The Welsh Poetry Competition - his collection ‘The Leviathan’s Apprentice’ was published in 2015.

 

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