2016

 

 

 

AUGUST CONTRIBUTORS

 

Michelle Brooks, Natalie Crick, Mark Hollhan, Kassandra Larsen, Linda Lerner,

Patrick Lodge, Gretchen Meixner, Todd Mercer, Miriam Sagan, Akiva J. Savett,

Anindita Sengupta, Fiona Sinclair, Wendy Thornton.

 

 

 

 

MICHELLE BROOKS

 

Esoterica

 

My mother’s friend cut open

snakes to read the future,

an ancient divination ritual,

haruspicy. Everyone tells

me I’ve seen some weird shit. I

don’t disagree. After she sliced

open the snake, the friend smiled

and asked, What have we here?

before launching into a prophesy

of rocky love affairs, secrets concealed

so long only the body remembers.

I never learned to read the entrails,

but I know what the inside of a snake

looks like, a dead one, the kind some

people call the only good one.

 

 

Possum Kingdom Lake

 

I’d play in the water while the adults drank

and talked about the veil between the worlds,

the ones to whom they’d said their goodbyes.

Now I see them only in dreams, the dead,

the vanished, and nobody remembers those days,

the distant shore and turning from it, the lost

kingdom of adults. These days, nobody carries

me to the backseat where I once feigned sleep,

dreaming of other lives, a luxury I had when someone

else, no matter how unsteady, was at the wheel.

 

 

Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia Press). A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, her favorite city. 

 

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NATALIE CRICK

 

Sunday School

Madeline loves it
And sits as Mother would.
The priest is like her Father
Dressed all in grey,

Palms fluttering with
Paper clowns,
Legs and arms spinning anti-clockwise
Like the priest's eyes slide

From side to side.
We are his for an hour
But he cannot touch us,
For we are jewels to be watched,

And, one day taken.
Nobody has ever held his hand
But Grandmother, with rings like
Little girl's warnings.

This is my house of God,
Rain thundering as
Unanswered questions.
Their faces are taut and chilled with frost.

He is the bee of androgyny
Thrusting candelabras as tusks.
This drone of activity,
It is all too much for me.

 Faces dumb as naked dolls.
He strips them, licking them with stars
Like potential girlfriends
Or meats to be weighed.

 

 

Natalie Crick has found delight in writing all of her life and first began writing when she was a very young girl. Her poetry is influenced by melancholic confessional Women's poetry. Her poetry has been published in a range of journals and magazines including Cannons Mouth, Cyphers, Ariadne's Thread, Carillon and National Poetry Anthology 2013. 

 

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MARK HOLIHAN

 

Two poems from There Are No Foreign Lands

 

Things you can keep

 

It’s the small things you can keep:

a piece of soapstone carved like a peaceful mountain,

a jade rooster, a tiny dish of a thousand faces –

articles of loss from your mother’s home.

A sandalwood dragon-boat from your father,

old photos of places only half known in the bottom of a drawer.

These things are pieces of memories from a place where your

face and voice aren’t foreign.

But even there you would be alien.

You are the stranger on all sides.

Your friend is the seawater that caresses the

rough edges off all of the continents.

 

Your wife complains that she can only speak

her mother’s language like a child, and her child

doesn’t know it at all, would rather you

kept quiet in public.

And it has been a long time since you gave

a true opinion to a friend, wasn’t confused by a country that

holds not only your past, but the bones of your grandparents:

the very earth is ground from your aunties and uncles.

The faces smiling in those photos are the soil under new

highways, shopping malls, cities that are

stranger to you than this island with its seas washing away at

stony beaches you can walk, or perhaps call home.

 

Today you find a dead butterfly on the windowsill,

more fragile than paper or old silk,

too perfect to ignore, so

you lift it with an envelope and a feather,

slide it in where those few small things are kept –

the glass-fronted cabinet in the corner.

For a moment you are afraid to open it

as though it holds the very air of the past that will dissipate

with the smell of jasmine and sandalwood.

A block of Kwan Yin’s breath incense still sits undisturbed

in a teakwood box where your mother put it.

That’s where this small, bright English butterfly comes to rest.

 

Broadstairs, UK, 11/11/08

 

America has a new president and this morning

three men were tied to posts and shot in Indonesia.

My brother once shot the fridge while explaining a deer hunt.

The bullet ripped through steel, aluminium, frost, ice and

then into plasterboard in the wall above my stepmom’s head.

 

My hands are cold and seem to be my father’s.

I’m sure at 11am I was silent for much longer than two minutes.

I have a flag folded neatly on a cabinet in the bedroom

by a remote control, some scattered cufflinks

and an old carving from Kenya,

the country of the new president’s father,

my wife’s father, and memories that taste of mangoes.

 

There are mangoes in the kitchen, and down the hall

my daughter is searching eBay for shoes.

From this window I see the tide receding beyond the tall, chalk cliffs.

The sea itself is the colour of grave-jade,

it falls in frothy lines on the flints of Stone Bay.

 

We have no guns in this house.

I hear my son playing guitar with his door closed.

He sings songs to his friends – not to me. Not yet.

But on his floor I find sheets of lyrics scattered and curled,

like scribbled treasure maps, rumpled, torn

and as surprising as the sudden wind off the North Sea.

 

Mark Holihan, a writer and graphic designer, is a former Californian who has spent much of his life travelling and is now settled in Kent. He is an alumnus of San José State University where he studied graphic design, creative writing and anthropology. A winner of the Phalen award for both poetry and short fiction, he has also been shortlisted for the Bridport prize, and is published in various anthologies and magazine. “Things you can keep” and “Broadstairs, UK, 11/11/08” are from There Are No Foreign Lands, reviewed in this month’s issue.

 

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KASANDRA LARSEN

 

Sleepless, Gazing At The Moon

 

The sweet old lady with the oxygen

tubes up her nose still shows up at Cumbie’s

for work every day, nine dollars an hour,

chats with me about the weather, thankful

snow’s held back its fury, smiling as she

drops my future cancer into plastic.

We all want to be worth more. The handful

of dollars, the lump become a tumor,

planets for worries to circle. We are

satellites, orbiting, ever shifting,

not just one planet, also dark matter,

exploding stars hoping for explorers

to land with gratitude, naming our scars:

Mare Cognitum, Mare Nectarus.

 

 

Self-Portrait While Judging Poetry

 

Is she doing something nobody else does, is that possible. Creating

new vocabulary for a shifted rhythm of breath, attending to each line

whether or not there’s a marlin hooked deep under the green. Why

is she sitting on her hands. Can’t she read, do the verbs she scrapes

from under her fingernails name a culprit, even a dented weapon.

The refrigerator hums every answer to her in its inner bright language

but she is wearing sunglasses in the bathroom, looking into the mirror

sideways, trying to see only the shape of her dark profile, an outline.

 

 

I Dream Of Stealing A Bag For My Mother

 

Too fancy for pocketbook, purse: a handbag

with golden handles hammered into the shape

of bamboo, large clamshell halves a glossy jade,

texture of smooth ceramic. When I open it

inside the hushed store where my motorcycle

boots sink into cream carpet, the chandeliers

wink at me. There are tiny dancers inside, tinkly

music, twinkly lights in teal, a winter scene,

women with shopping bags, children ice skating,

a popcorn trolley with a patient horse waiting

in snow. I can’t see where you’d put money

or I.D., but no matter, it’s glamorous and I know

I can’t afford it. So I walk out the door with it

dangling from my left hand, head high, make it

into the mall corridor. No one comes after me.

I wake holding a small world in my clenched fist

under the pillow, an anxious swarm of bees beating

against the honeycombed hive of my chest.

 

 

Kasandra Larsen is a poet in Providence, Rhode Island, who recently relocated "home" to New England after 15 years in New Orleans. Her manuscript Construction has made it to the finalist stage in a first book contest. Her work has been published in Best New Poets 2012 (chosen by Matthew Dickman), and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook Stellar Telegram won the 2009 Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Competition. She works as a CPA.

 

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LINDA LERNER

 

A kind of Lonely

 

I think across three billion miles

to locate Pluto bring it down to earth

to figure out what all the hype is about 

but cannot get around its icy mountain air

with its flat desert like surface that

makes me think of someplace out west

where people once got lost and died,

searching for gold, coexisting,

then there’s Charon, that underworld ferryman

circling it whom I cannot get away from

and shudder…. no place

I want to be…

I try to send it back where it belongs

but that nagging business of

its improbable journey to be defined

throws it right back here on earth

with all those called other coming out

of whatever place they’ve

been hiding in, who’ve

crossed lines, whom nobody could

figure out if they’re this or that

then you’re nothing my mother once said

on hearing that I don’t follow

my birth religion, believe in its god:

someone or nothing

mad person or genius,

planet or no planet

so it goes, around & around…

 

 

Seen From Afar

 

I watch him as from a planetary distance

this man I care for, quarrel with and

sometimes there’s the word love, bumpy

like a street after a hard winter

 

he is looking down, slowly putting one foot

after another, people whiz by young

enough to be walking on the flat earth myth

he can’t entirely let go of by using a cane

 

they do not see what I see, a man teetering

on its edge, that the edge is all there is now

 

a car whizzes by, feels like it is falling

out of the sky toward him  grabs hold of

a young couple to steady himself…

 

“I’m ok now” he says, thanking them,

and stands up straight to show them

what he can’t show me

 

 

Linda Lerner’s collection, Yes, the Ducks Were Real, was published by NYQ Books (Feb. 2015) as was her previous full-length collection, Takes Guts and Years Sometimes. A chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes, illustrated by Donna Kerness, Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well was published by Lummox Press, Feb. 2014. She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. In 1995 she and Andrew Gettler began Poets  on the Line, (http://www.echony.com/~poets) the first poetry anthology on the Net for which she received two grants. In Spring, 2015 she read six poems on WBAI for arts express

 

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PATRICK LODGE

 

Two poems from Shenanigans

 

 

New Year Hikers

 

From a mile high the cloister ruins are

a hand gathering up, shaking out

a shroud of barren fields

 

where New Year hikers meditate on maps,

floundering in the origami world

unfolding at their boots.

 

The hills around defy ordnance survey;

they rear and slip as if a serpent

had shed skin, slid on

 

to bow a slow march over the landscape.

The wind whistles contours,

sings bin-bag shreds

 

stalled on barbed wire like a choir

of salutary crows. Buttresses

lay shadow fingers

 

on the hikers standing still as notes

on a stave. Pulling up hoods,

they process downhill;

 

each sole-print in the snow only a guess

as to when they might arrive at the land

that loves silence,

 

all folds and dints, winter dead.

 

 

Ergo Sum

 

These JYA girls pulse like shining

platelets, through backstreet San Polo;

scouring calle or canal, clumping

 

in churches and galleries, eager to

ensure everything sticks. Voices trill

like burnished castrati, fluting up

 

columns and altars in search

of the awesome; the point, click, flash

epiphany of being there.

 

Maybe more opera buffa than serious

work; though, at sunset, as a vaporetto

sluices past San Marco, elevating iPads

 

and iPhones, the girls become as numinous

as Tintoretto cherubs, concelebrants

of the mystery of the eternal digital now.

 

 

Patrick Lodge retired from an academic career some years ago and now writes and reviews poetry full time. He lives in Yorkshire and is from an Irish/Welsh heritage. His work has been published, anthologised and translated in many countries and has been successful in poetry competitions such as the Envoi International and the Poetry Space International. He is the winner of the 2015 Blackwater International Poetry Competition. His first collection, An Anniversary of Flight, was published in 2013. “New Year Hikers” and “Ergo Sum” are from his latest collection, Shenanigans.

 

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GRETCHEN MEIXNER

 

Frida and the Spine

 

Crooked back but yet

Hear it march!

In its crooked way

Down the avenue

Of poets.

 

Does anyone hear you sing?

Metals in your lungs

Sparking

Drab specks along

The lumbar train.

 

Frida and the bee,

Bulbous and stingy

Bobbling around her head

Settling on her eyebrow.

He flits in and flits out

Chicago to New York

 

Paint for el maestro

Though he sits languidly

On his tuffet

Stuffing down curds without

A breath in between

And thinking of the next

Woman to be his whey

 

Phantom pains clutch your

Unmasked foot

As it floats down

To the green weeds

Curling around the bed

 

In a dream

Taken by the wolf

Monkeys fled

Cat scratch hollow

 

Frida and the cast

Decorated in flapping wings

Ready to lift plaster

And swing towards the door

 

Honey for Diego

His finger caught in the pot

Twitch, tumble,

Belly jiggling.

 

A self-portrait for all the

Mothers and fathers

We may have known

All the lovers with stingers

And every spine that

Has prematurely crumbled.   

 

 

Gretchen Meixner grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and has been constantly reading and writing since she learned how. She has a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Emmanuel College. Her job involves business and technical writing, and she writes fiction and poetry on the side. She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.   

 

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TODD MERCER

 

The Sexton Buries a Secret

  

and snap, like that another citizen ceases operations,

so the Sexton excavates a standard rectangle.

That’s his workday, somber yet routine business,

aside from the disorienting impact of the name

on today’s cemetery program. He’s queasy

to see it’s a familiar midnight caller,

a sometime-accidental lover who wouldn’t date

in public, who’d summon late then send him home

before morning, from concern for what gossips might say.

A crutch, not much more, an awkward friend-plus,

fallback listener. She’d call often, then she’d not call.

He had had to let it go. It felt unhealthy, lonely.

Now he’ll hear her graveside service, process the words,

then leave their tenuous connection atop her concrete vault,

but beneath the feet of fill dirt. He’ll tamp it firm,

re-lay sod to where no one looking would guess

the earth was broken open. To where it seems

nothing happened, precisely as she would prefer it,

appearances being so important. And snap, like that.

 

 

Todd Mercer won the Dyer-Ives Kent County Prize for Poetry in 2016 and the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts Flash Fiction Award in 2015. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, appeared at Right Hand Pointing.  Mercer's recent poetry and fiction appear in Eunoia Review, Flash Frontier M

 

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MIRIAM SAGAN

 

Plain Sight

When the clouds clear
and Mt. Heckla appears

classic  volcanic shape
at the south end of the lake

and the silver statue of Thor
is turned up by the plow

and a standing man strides forth
intaglio on the earth

when water is captured as an inland sea
and you turn inward, looking for a word

and by the waterfall
seven paving stones

are set in constellation
of the Big Dipper’s stars

then you realize that your job
is not just to put things together

but to remember
they were always there

after all, we saw the volcano
that first day we were here


Two Tourist Stops in Iceland

1. Gullfoss

ancient Japanese couple
cling to their daughter,
wt moss
in the spray
of the great waterfall

it’s hard to describe
all this euphoria
of water falling
crashing like a vertical sea
without horizon

I want to compare it
to the mind
although its half dozen cascades
overwhelm
my native language


2. Geysir

crystalline pool
of milky turquoise
shakes as if in earthquake
and azure hemisphere
breaks surface,
a sapphire dome
bursting into skyward steam

this is what we came to see
with our cameras, standing in a ring
but it is hard to know
what is the souvenir--
maybe the image of the blonde
hitchhiking girl from Holland we picked up
and the bad photo
she snapped of us
and promised to send
but of course did not

or a still pool
of indescribable god’s eye blue
or the underwater cavern
encrusted with silica
too small
to dive into
except in a dream.


Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon, 2016). She founded and heads the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. Her blog Miriam’s Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com) has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

 

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AKIVA J. SAVETT

 

in seven quick cuts the world was created

 

it takes seven quick cuts

for a Korean fisherman to undress

a shark. the fins go in an ice bucket,

for soup.

it takes six hard shoves

to plunge the stripped shark overboard,

where unable to steer,

it slips into the sea’s black glove.

 

I cut the umbilical cords

from my son

and my daughter

and push them off

the world

always fathers send children off to war

with darkness without rudder or spear

a mouth full of teeth

all the way back to cutting

the umbilicus of Eden

from Adam and even before

as God decided to decide Himself

into being cut the fins from his silence.

sloppily separating light from dark,

land from sea,

look at the infant with her mother’s walk,

already inside her

every egg she’ll bleed or bloom

in the clouds of her ovaries,

or the moon lingering in daylight

before growing in the belly of the sky tonight.

 

 

Akiva J. Savett’s poetry has been published in a chapbook entitled Preservation.

His work has also appeared in Gobbet, The Orange Room Review, Spry, Burningword Journal, Page & Spine, Poetry Quarterly, Kerem, Circa, The Red River Review, In Parentheses, and Four And Twenty among others.

 

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ANINDITA SENGUPTA

 

Water Hyacinth

 

The lagoon blistered with blooms and I saw silhouettes—six men

against an Alleppey dusk, oaring through with poles

twice their size. Their bodies roared sweat. Their musk rose
in the darkening sky like kites. They leaned into each rift of leaves,

each opening, each camouflaged eye of water, and spiralled
against the current to strike earth, to glide through

the sweltering pour. Leaving you after a decade, I fix movement
in inches, not miles. Meals, vitamins, time spent asleep

or boring through. In the kitchen, constant spills

Each day, I remind myself it was Kalari in slow-mo. It was dance.

In Myanmar, they craft doilies from coils of hyacinth stems,
chairs for people to rest on. Forfeit fury. Remember to hum.

 

Each night, you open your eyes in the middle of my dream.
Full and violet.

 

Turn

 

The road glistens like fine silk,
an old saree drying on that familiar line:
my insatiable need for elsewhere.

 

Since you left, I’ve been off kilter,

a jug perched on the edge, teetering
heavily, always half awake. Even at night.

 

Our dog with singular eyebrows
and frantic paws is not over you.
He whines at closed doors
with the aggression of those
who perpetually wait.

 

I called the plumber again the other day

but I think he dislikes women who live alone
and wear their pajamas post noon.

 

Also, I haven't changed the bedclothes.

 

But here, on the road, nothing matters.
I have escaped the things that made, tied, frayed.

I squint at water,
slide grief and hope back and forth
across a smoky windshield.

 

There are no collisions--
only this faint drone against rain:
dislodge us from where we lie
between pages, a misplaced

bookmark.

 

Turn. Return a thread
of open road, glass-shimmer,
a hand that still covets skin.

 

 

Anindita Sengupta is the author of City of Water (Sahitya Akademi, 2010). Her work has appeared in journals such as One, Ouroboros Review, Mascara Literary Review, Eclectica, Nth Position, Pix Quarterly and Asian Cha and in several anthologies including The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (Harper Collins, 2012), and The Yellow Nib Modern English Poetry by Indians (Queen’s University Belfast, 2012). She has read at national and international poetry festivals and been writer-in-residence at University of Kent on the Charles Wallace Fellowship. Her next book will be published by Paperwall in 2016.

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Banker

 

Drowning in dress choice, she wants no

Marilyn Look at me entrance , rather

something to carry her through dry mouthed solo arrival.

Pulls out sale dregs number that on her

lives up to its designer label promise,

but flashbacks ; blown out by friend last minute,

folk night that anesthetised her rock and roll soul.

restraining yawns like Tourette’s outbursts at dull dinner.

Strokes with little girl longing new strapless

but time saved up from work added to son sleep over windfall,

cannot be gambled on untried garment.

Ponders impulse buy plain Jane shift

then relives ; shoes kicked off dancing until all hours,

gold strike of finding new friends at a 50th

child’s fizzy laughter uncorked in a comedy club,

so slips on the dress that promises an evening well spent…

   

 

Staying Alive

 

Occasional exploratory in wardrobe

for casual jacket or formal two piece

disturbs the once white now ghost grey suit

like a memory at the back of the mind.

 

Catching disco fever in his 30s,

dance classes to learn the moves,

Burtons to buy the Travolta suit,

Saturday nights hitting Canterbury’s own Studio 54,

bumping, pointing, strutting into early hours.

 

Easing into his 60s in chinos and crew neck,

he takes night classes in local history

but still a glitter-ball glint in his eye

when hand Freudian slips dial from radio 4 to 2,

and as Bee Gees sound sashays out,

his toes twitch inside Clarks’ slip-ons .

  

 Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry, Ladies Who Lunch was published by Lapwing Press in September, 2014. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

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WENDY THORNTON

 

The Physics of an Empty Room

 

doesn't imply that no one was ever there.

     Sentenced forever to an empty room, where he could write his heart,

Galileo created his greatest theory as a work of art.

     No one gave him credit for being humble and right,

For not being the center of the Universe like those who sentenced him.

     Newton never married, never took a wife, inhabited empty rooms

all through his life.  Yet he communed with tides and time, calculus and light.

    Max Planck could have been a musician, so talented his harmonic gift

and yet his academic ancestors pushed him into physics, secret shift,

     hanging out in an empty room,  whispering in the dark

You can lift us from this blackened gloom, make the atoms spark.

     Just because you're not here doesn't mean I can't hear you,

            doesn't mean I can't feel you listening, waiting, encouraging.

Just because I can't see you doesn't mean you're not there.

 

Wendy Thornton is a freelance writer and editor who has been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. Her memoir, Dear Oprah Or How I Beat Cancer and Learned to Love Daytime TV, Amazon, was published in July 2013. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been Editor’s Pick on Salon.com multiple times. Her work is published in England, Scotland, Australia and India.

 

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