2015

 

 

 

DECEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Ace Boggess, Judy Brackett, Matthew Burns, Michael Carrino, Bob Eccleston,

 Luisa A. Igloria, Bryanna Licciardi, January Pearson, Tony Press,

 Divya Sachdeva, J. R. Solonche, Pia Taavila-Borsheim,

 Susan Taylor, Tim Taylor.

 

 

 

 

ACE BOGGESS

 

“Have Poets Given Up Their Greatest Power?”

Dan Veach, Facebook post

 

Once, they swung the roundhouse,

ducked, juked, jabbed & uppercut.

Now they dance a two-step in the ring,

guard lowered, begging màs,

wanting many pretty wounds

to replace their porcelain lines.

Look, there goes one running away

from whatever it is he refers to as his heart, &

over there two of them digging

for coins they placed inside a box.

They have forgotten how to spill blood

on paper next to that coffee stain

staring up like a puddle’s mirror

in which one sees one’s pristine self

floating like a flower on the muck.

 

 

The Oops Observance

 

Enchantments rise on glossy porcelain pedestals for an hour.

A man walks under a ladder & bad luck earns its annual flash.

 

I’m sitting here on National Ballpoint Pen Day,

my ballpoint pen in drag across the highways of a page,

 

thinking, Why not have an American Oops Month?

It would cover spilled soda on a new white carpet,

 

car wrecks at 2 a.m., & brief but passionate love affairs,

not to mention bombing the Chinese Embassy by accident

 

or invading the wrong small, sovereign Arab nation.

Yes, Reader, you & I could revel in our festival of flaws.

 

Come raise a glass to that Oops observance

with its varied sighs & grand cache of calamities,

 

its public farts & Y2K glitches in the existential code.

We will boogie in our best funereal suits.

 

 

Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003).  His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

 

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JUDY BRACKETT

 

The Great-grandmother Follows the Sun

 

          The great-grandmother spends her days

seeking the sun, avoiding the sun, spends the days

down like dwindling coins knotted

in a handkerchief

                      In the pink dawn she dries

the dew-damp chair, brushes off the night-dropped

leaves, drags chair from porch to mid lawn and sits,

her face upturned, and dozes till the sun

fills the world

                    After morning chores she pulls

the chair under the arbor and eats rough bread,

soft cheese, a clementine or pear, and feels

the dapples move across the vines, across

her lap

         After nap and garden and thinking about dinner

and perhaps eating something warm, she turns

the chair to the western sky and remembers when

and them, and gulls, sand, wind, and water

                                                                 She waits

for evening pink, for mauve and deep purple, for first

stars, and finally moves the chair back to the porch

and poises it for tomorrow

                                  Some days she hears no voice

except the faraway familiar ones and her own, the one

she used to have

                     She will not enter the night

house until she hears owl or fox, until she smells

the green breeze

 

 

Judy Brackett has taught creative writing and English composition and literature at Sierra College. Born in Nebraska, she’s lived in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills of California for many years. Her stories and poems have appeared in journals and anthologies from About Place to The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets.

 

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MATTHEW BURNS

 

Gray Dress

 

I want her to ask me to pull the zipper

on that one gray dress she bought

 

last summer in a fit of wardrobe formality

after wondering aloud one morning

 

to the hollow maw of the closet

why she has nothing nice to wear. 

 

Now she struggles with that long

white ribbon tied like a lost hair

 

into the pull, the one that exists

for no other reason than to reach

 

over the pale shoulder so a wearer

can wear it even if she is alone,

 

getting ready to go out and thinking

of the night.  But what do I know? 

 

I only want to be asked.  I only want

to feel, in the bones of my hand,

 

that chatter of teeth click together

up the pale road of her spine,

 

because far away there is suffering

I cannot comprehend.

 

Bomb blast and torture unpeel flesh

from ruddy muscle; floods of gray mud

 

fill the mouths of wailing children;

and women are being disappeared

 

into the unloving night, into horror

beyond measure.  And the next day

 

after it all, the fact that someone

must wear some new life like a skin,

 

too tight now, always, is crippling;

and this happens, too. 

 

So when she faces away from me,

the bare closet bulb like an interrogator’s

 

lamp across her shoulder and the mouth

of the zipper wide like a wail,

 

I am here to do the little I can

so she will not be afraid:

 

my lips by her ear, my hand

on the small of her back.

 

Virga

 

I am cutting the sleeves off of every t-shirt I own

and drinking warm wine from a chipped jam jar. 

 

The thunder and heat lightning that breaks over the ridge

is thick June’s gnashing of teeth. This and this and this

 

I point to in the dark is me trying to say we should never

be far away from whatever has grown to be called home. 

 

I am, we are far away from home and lit in intervals

by the orange and blue light from ten thousand feet up. 

 

It stands our fine hairs on end and runs down my arm,

bare shoulder to bare wrist to trembling hand and glass

 

and the air is warm and tastes like concentric spheres

of atmosphere pressed into a pair of ions that sit on my lips

 

like invisible shards of glass, cut that skin, and move

to yours when we kiss and sweat under the ridge

 

suddenly lit and now suddenly dark again.

 

 

Matthew Burns is an Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies at SUNY Cobleskill in New York state. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Graze, Quiddity, Memoir (and), Upstreet, Spoon River Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, North American Review, Lime Hawk, and others.

 

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MICHAEL CARRINO

 

Revision

 

Cut and cut until

words cut from a few sentences

 

in this mystical

twilight turn red and fall as if leaves

 

in Autumn, curl

into jottings with many possibilities –

 

“...once when I feared...”

and “...later when I truly regretted...”

 

One after another

words scatter over pen and book

 

until I rake a bunch

into a fat pile near the silver

 

buddha on my desk –

“...look sharp for eggs...I don't want...”

 

hoping one crisp one

followed by another, one more, might

 

warm a dim lit room

some bitter winter I will never know.

 

Michael Carrino holds an M.F.A.  in Writing from Vermont College. He is a retired English lecturer at the State University College at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was co-editor and poetry editor of the Saranac Review.  His publications include Some Rescues, (New Poets Series, Inc.) Under This Combustible Sky, (Mellen Poetry Press), Café Sonata, (Brown Pepper Press), Autumn’s Return to the Maple Pavilion (Conestoga Press), and By Available Light (Guernica Editions) as well as individual poems in numerous journals and reviews.

 

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BOB ECCLESTON

 

The Way Of A Poet

 

Sitting outside Café Nero.

Sipping my Americano

and reading Brian Patten’s

selected poems. Thinking,

as is the way of a poet,

I could have written these.

Then acknowledging I couldn’t,

other than by copying.

 

So I observed a pigeon

wrestling with a crust and,

as is the way of a poet,

sought to enter a mind

whose only mantra was,

eat, procreate and survive.

Then I realised the mind

was similar to mine.

 

I watched people pass by,

walking, running or wheeling.

In ones, twos or moresomes.

Each one of them a story.

Well there’s a cliché, which,

as is the way of a poet,

I can swiftly cover up,

by claiming intention.

 

There’s an elderly couple,

holding each other’s hand.

For support or through love?

A mother looking anxious,

until two boys arrive breathless.

Like the pigeon, I’m waiting

for a crust I can chew on.

As is the way of a poet

 

Aged 71 Bob Eccleston returned to writing poetry at 70 after a ten year gap

 

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LUISA A. IGLORIA

 

Deposition. Disposition.

 

1. A habitual inclination; a tendency: a disposition to disagree.

 

Tell me, did you all come in that morning through the front door?

Are the side doors habitually closed? Is there a back door?

Who locks the front door? Where is the visitors’ log?

When the buzzer sounds, does someone come to the front door

or does someone from the main office activate the release?

Where are the guest passes located?

 

2. A physical property or tendency: a swelling with a disposition to rupture.

 

How many crossing guards are assigned to this school?

Is the parking lot open to public access?

Is the main driveway blocked off for school bus access only?

How many speed bumps painted yellow are visible on the road?

What are the landmarks around the school, as seen from Google Earth?

 

3. Arrangement, positioning, or distribution: a cheerful disposition of colors and textures; a convoy oriented into a north-south disposition.

 

Did you notice if the classroom windows were festooned with

construction paper drawings?

Were the hallways painted bright or pastel colors instead of institutional white?

Did the sun shine through the blinds or were they shut tight?

Did any of the teachers keep a fish tank or a terrarium?

Gold stars. Hall passes. Poems.

 

4. A final settlement: disposition of the deceased’s property.

 

Did the contents of the desks spill in the ensuing confusion?

How can we tell if these crayons were hers or if they belonged to another child?

There is a homework assignment due tomorrow, a field trip form unsigned.

Lunch money? What of the lunch money?

A piece of twine. A stick of gum. A water bottle.

 

5. An act of disposing; a bestowal or transfer to another.

 

Flicker of candles everywhere.

Uncertainty in the shape of a new moon.

 

6. The power or liberty to control, direct, or dispose.

 

That age, they say, is the most disarming.

 

7. Management; control.

 

Form a line along the wall.

Shortest to tallest.

Put your hands on the shoulder

of the one in front of you.

This way you’ll know

if you have been separated

from the rest of the group.

 

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection, Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), and other books. www.luisaigloria.com

 

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BRYANNA LICCIARDI

 

Inter

 

Don't tell anyone, but Grandma liked you the best.

She saw something safe in you, something she

didn’t see in my aunts, definitely not Uncle Thom.

 

She liked to teach you what made her happy,

like how to mop the floors, how to fold towels

with sharp corners. But then Grandpa only cared about

keeping up with the good times. When he left her

 

for another woman, disappointment was all she saw.

She drank to fuel her anger for him.

She swore and wore her hurt like a badge.

 

You moved twelve states over, not to get away from her,

you told yourself, though the way Grandma changed couldn’t be

reconciled. Sometimes moving just means moving on.

After she got sick, your sisters took care of her

 

and still you kept away. Being sick only made

her angrier, and more justified in her anger.

Years later, when you heard it was almost over,

 

you flew back to see her at the hospital

—her body so small, she was barely there.

You leaned closer, and she grabbed your shirt,

tearing a seam, lifting herself off the bed. She said,

 

He did this to me, and you saw that she meant it.

You saw what this was. And before you could remove

her desperate grip, before you could flee to the safety

 

of the distance it took years for you to build, before her body

emptied like a stairwell, Grandma promised, I am you.

This is all to say, Dad, that you didn’t run because you were sad,

or overcome, but because you were afraid what part of her she meant.

 

Bryanna Licciardi has received her MFA in poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in Literacy Studies. Her poetry appears in such journals as Poetry Quarterly, Blazevox, Dual Coast, Dos Passos, Euphony, Gingerbread House, and The Underground. Please visit her website www.bryannalicciardi.com to read more about her work.

 

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JANUARY PEARSON

 

The Piano Teacher’s Husband Died

 

Before the first student arrives

she returns to the piano

 

to play a g-major scale,

then arpeggios and chords

 

each note strung

in her mind as it should be

 

her pale fingers, cold on the keys,

remembering.

 

The old pattern

of Fur Elise finds her

 

slow mournful trills

encircle her

 

like the song of the owl

playing through the silence

 

the cool air on her skin

the stars' design unchanged.

 

 

January Pearson lives in Southern California with her husband and two daughters. She teaches English Composition classes at Kaplan University. Her work has appeared inCapstone Literary Journal, Darling Magazine, and Logia Theological Journal.

 

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TONY PRESS

 

And what the mind takes hold of

 

Two tables away, someone mentions Rumi.

I recall his “barrel of wine” lines and rejoice once again.

Rumi. On my shelf right next to Ryokan.

What a pairing: the R’s of clarity and ecstasy.

 

Across the room, in fiction, Stegner and Steinbeck.

And the W’s: Walker and Waugh and Welch and Wolfe and Woolf, and all in between.

Reminds me of Tallulah’s line, something about “There are only two geniuses, and they both start with W: Willy Shakespeare and Willie Mays.

Her movie Lifeboat – such a film! But I can’t remember how it ended.

Was it friend, or foe, in the approaching ship?

 

Now I hear a sneeze.

Wait, did he say Rumi, or rheumy?

 

 

bitter body

 

curfew

the night is closed

stars cry

 

what if the light

does not find me

in the darkness

 

curfew

the innocent moon

sobs alone

 

the breeze before

your final exit

a memory

 

the route north

is no different

a sad road

 

​(and, in Spanish):

  

 cuerpo amargo

 

toque de queda

la noche se cierra

estrellas lloran

 

¿y si la luz

no me puede encontrar

en la oscuridad?

 

toque de queda

la luna inocente

solloza sola

 

la brisa antes

su ultima salida

un recuerdo

 

la ruta al norte

no es diferente

una calle triste

​

 

Tony Press tries to pay attention. His short story collection, Crossing the Lines, will be published in early 2016 by Big Table Publishing. His stories and poems can be found in many fine journals. He lives near San Francisco but has no website.

 

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DIVYA SACHDEVA

I don’t want to clean my closet

 

As a naturalist I dislike
arrangements 
the boxes where our lives stifle.
There are room boxes ,
wardrobe boxes , shoe boxes
everything  is a box here
only measurements differ.
5inch diameter , 5 X 5 or 25 X 25,
circular , square ,rectangular
but always box. My closet
overflows with chaos
unwashed jeans stampede the tanks
hair pins swivel inside the drawers
pumps , stilettos , flips flops
roll over making love  to each other.

I like it this way , the theatrical drama
of pulling out one garment
leads to an embrace from the whole bunch
There is a tenderness
between the handcrafted , diverse and non-breathing clothes
which is not human. 
You ask me each night , holding my hand
under the silver moonlight, for a promise
 to put things in order
All I want to say is
     I don't want to organize my closet
     as putting my life in piles
     would make me of me a box.

 

Divya Sachdeva is a writer, software engineer, and dreamer. Her poems are published in a few print and online journals and anthologies that are The River Journal ,Indus Valley (Indian Edition) and Brush Strokes & Ink Spots and Visual Verse. Divya currently resides in New Delhi, where she works as a Manager in the field of Telecommunications and carves out time for her twin passions of poetry and music.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Jacob and the Angel

 

Afterward in the morning,

already late in the morning,

already near noon,

he awoke,

and no one was about.

His right hand was gripped tightly

on the shin of his leg.

His left arm was under his head

so that the elbow was stiff,

and the forearm was numb

from the weight of his head upon it.

His mouth was dry with the dryness of sand,

and the lips of his mouth were parched as the sand of the desert.

He felt the soreness in his limbs.

He felt the stiffness in the joints of his limbs.

He saw the full light of day illuminating the tent.

The flap of the tent opening was bright with the brightness of daylight.

And even full with soreness in his body,

and even full with stiffness in his limbs,

and even full with a terrible thirst in his mouth, he sprang to his feet,

and he threw himself upon the tent opening,

upon the full light of the tent opening that flapped like white wings in the dry wind.

 

 

The Jonah Story

 

I do not like the Jonah story.

The Jonah story is all

obedience and disobedience,

God calling on the wind

to frighten the sailors,

God calling on the whale

to swallow up Jonah

and spit him out again

on dry land, God

calling on the worm

to desolate the vine.

The Jonah story is all God

calling. I do not like the way

the Jonah story ends.

The Jonah story ends

without ending. It ends

with God asking

Jonah a question,

but really asking one of those

holy rhetorical questions

that God is so fond of,

and that is where Jonah is

left hanging,

on the question mark of God.

And I do not like this because

I want to know what happens

to heroes at the end of stories.

What happens to Jonah

at the end of his story?

What does Jonah do?

Does he go home?

Does he stay where he is

on the east side of Nineveh

where he prepares a field

of gourd vines? Does he

sleep twenty-four hours through?

Does God leave Jonah alone?

Does God leave Jonah alone,

finally, oh finally,

in the shade of the vine?

 

 

J.R. Solonche has been publishing in magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions) and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegel, and nine cats, at least three of whom are poets.

 

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PIA TAAVILA-BORSHEIM

 

From Car to Schwinn and Back Again

 

In that moment, you say yes, you will drive down

that unknown road, a back road, even though

you don’t know where it goes and time is short.

 

You are not instantly rewarded, as the strip

malls and parking lots are slow to give way,

slow to end their hold on consciousness.

 

Soon, the pine groves thicken, the hills roll.

The two-lane curves beneath an old-growth

canopy and you think yourself a child again,

 

bicycling home from the lake, or a ball game,

the sun slanting through to the forest floor ferns.

You keep pedaling, sure that you’re alone, sure

 

that this world exists for only you, each furled frond

lifting its head, its black dots of spore for you alone,

there in your t-shirt and shorts and barefoot, yes, barefoot,

 

your tanned legs lean and muscular, the red rubber lever

ready to ring its bell on the handlebars as your spokes,

shimmering, spin and spin, the red reflector

 

bringing up the rear. Before suburbia interjects,

you stand and balance, let go the frame, tilt

your head so your hair streams like a flag.

 

But it is only a car, after all, and you have a husband

and bills to pay, a dog to walk, and lines to stay

within, yellow lines, solid in your lane.

 

 

Pia Taavila-Borsheim grew up in Walled Lake, Michigan, and lives now in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with her husband, David Borsheim. She received her BA and MA in American Literature from Eastern Michigan University (1977, 1979) and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. (1985) from Michigan State University in English, Sociology, and Philosophy. She is a tenured, full professor and teaches literature and creative writing at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. In 2008, Gallaudet University Press published her collected poems, Moon on the Meadow: Collected Poems 1977-2007; Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Two Winters in 2011. Her poems have appeared in several journals including: The Bear River Review, The Broadkill Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Comstock Review, Barrow Street, Threepenny Review, Wisconsin Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, storySouth, The Asheville Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Measure, Ibbetson Street Review, and The Southern Review. She is a frequent participant at the Bear River, Sewanee and Key West writing conferences.

 

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SUSAN TAYLOR

 

The Art of Repair

for Charlotte Chance

 

If I’m to fly through dreams, fast as I’ve done,

I could do with one of your wish bones

to summon the best of desire

and guide me, sure as a bat out of hell.

 

My skull learns to float naturally

as one you might find in the grass by chance 

and cover in fresh materials cut

in honeycombs the colour of cornflowers.

 

A squadron of arrows heading my way

needs blocking. You hold them 

suspended on this sheet of paper,

shimmering midsummer air.

 

I stand by a patchwork you hung

in the Birdwood Gallery, each segment

a surgical suture and it stops me

dead in my tracks.

 

 

Wolven

 

To howl wolven

we have to howl for joy

and the wonder of being

links of sound

between sky and earth.

 

Why does the wolf

open throat the sky

at dusk

as the pack’s coats

melt the mist?

 

Each pack shelters

within its own sphere

but their calling

reach into the ever

inclusive wild.

 

Wolf howls are precise

gathering grandeur,

wolf energy shifts

ethereal.

through the forest

 

Poets and scientists

attempt to unravel

what happens

when the evening star

rises

 

Only wolf

nails it

in high flying notes

holding

the ashen face of Venus.

 

 

Susan Taylor lives on Dartmoor. Her recent collections are A Small Wave for your Form from Oversteps Books and This Given, just out in a limited edition from Paper Dart Press. She co-edits South West poetry journal, The Broadsheet and runs Café Culture, a monthly cabaret of spoken word and music in Totnes.

 

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TIM TAYLOR

 

The Cloud

 

He carried a cloud with him, so thick

that when we tried to pierce it

with little spears of laughter

they came back blunted, broken.

There was no evading it.

Inside that house

the cloud pervaded everything,

made raindrops on my mother’s cheeks

brought shadows into sunlit space.

We crept around as if through fog,

afraid of what we might stumble into,

or hid in upstairs rooms

that slowly filled with cloudlets of our own.

If he went out, the cloud and I would follow.

There was a hill on which, after a while

you might just see a little sun upon his face.

There is nothing like the wind, for shifting clouds.

 

 

Tim Taylor was born in Staffordshire and now lives in Meltham near Huddersfield with his wife Rosa. He divides his time between academic research (and a little teaching) in philosophy, and creative writing. He has published two novels, Zeus of Ithome and Revolution Day, and a number of poems. http://www.tetaylor.co.uk/

 

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