2021

 

 

DECEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Dan Brook, Gavan Duffy, Edilson A. Ferreira, Nels Hanson, Amy Holman, Tom Kelly, Deborah Kennedy, Charles Rammelkamp, Michael Salcman, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Andrew Sheilds, J. R. Solonche, Marjory Woodfield.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DAN BROOK

Holy Ginsberg

 

I am living in an Allen Ginsberg poem

where everything is holy

holy jazz, holy spirit, holy shit

holy everything, everywhere, everyone

light streaming in through cracked windows

while we recycle the trash of inherited shame

one heart can love many hearts

each one beating, growing, dreaming

sometimes hiding, shattering, repairing

always loving with each beat

in its own unique and catastrophic way

yes and no do not really exist

they never did, they never will

yet words themselves are deeds

sacred deeds indeed

creating, preserving, and destroying infinite worlds

as they are spoken, written, and heard

just as with Ginsberg’s poetry

I do not always understand this language

I do not know what it all means

I cannot

even as I am searching the continents

in my peripatetic existence

the world is subjective

my mind is only mine

reality is a durable illusion

and I am living in Ginsberg’s poem

as much as his poem is living in me

 

Dan Brook teaches in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State University, from where he organizes the Hands on Thailand program. His most recent books are Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways To Be Happy (Beacon, 2021), Sweet Nothings (Hekate, 2020), about the nature of haiku and the concept of nothing, and Eating the Earth: The Truth About What We Eat (Smashwords, 2020). 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

GAVAN DUFFY

 

Manhandled                                                     

 

She pinched my arm

to get my attention.

We were in a crowd

I had drifted slightly away.

It was a sharp nip

over before it began.

 

My head snapped back to see

her still looking at the rack of coats,

rubbing the cloth of one between

her thumb and index finger.

A softer type of pinch.

 

The shopkeeper smiled at me.

He was an older man, maybe older

than my grandfather.

Grey sideburns grew in wedge shapes

on his cheeks.

 

His face was flushed, his hair

thick and uncombed.

He sounded breathless.

He looked ready to laugh.

As if he had ran upstairs.

As if he had just lost a pillow fight.

 

It was my turn now.

He backed me into the jacket,

tapped my shoulders in with his palms,

then with a tug of the lapels

pulled me forward and pushed me back.

I hid my hands in my new pockets

and squared up to the mirror.

She was already in there, chewing her lip

and shaking her head.

Another jacket, another colour

hung from her hand.

 

Getting dressed on the big day,

I imagined I could still feel

him folding my collar and knotting my tie.

The blunt chilly fingers,

the tongue on his lip,

like a tail disappearing into a hole.

 

Gavan Duffy writes poetry and short fiction. He is a member of the Scurrilous Salon Writers group and has previously published in Crannóg, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Stony Thursday Book, Bangor Literary Journal, South Bank Poetry Journal, New Irish Writing, North West Words among others. He was the winner of The Francis Ledwidge Award 2020.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

EDILSON AFONSO FERREIRA

 

Fears and Feelings

 

There are certain weekends and holydays

when I feel somewhat insecure.

I worry if walking ghosts have occupied 

the void of empty streets and closed doors,  

looking at me as an intruder or suspicious

on their walks.

I miss hearing the sound of hammers and

hoes, the strident come and go of saw blades, 

the brushing of pens on paper or keyboards 

being typed throwing feelings to the world.  

I love the imprecations of painters and artists

when they can’t find the pure art they look for.

I love children screaming through the sidewalk,

running endless races only they are capable of.

I love the noise of people in the streets and alleys,

corners and places,

as they move to destinies only they are aware of,

struggling hard to make their lives a story.

I love hearing someone making something,

even if it is the buzzing of bees.

 

Edilson Afonso Ferreira, 78 years, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Widely published in international literary journals, he began writing at age 67, after his retirement from a bank. Has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his first book Lonely Sailor, One Hundred Poems, was launched in November of 2018. “Fears and Feelings” was first published in the March/April 2018 issue of Indiana Voice Journal.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

NELS HANSON

 

The Way 

A border guard at Hank Pass from my

tower I made out a dim figure on an ox

far down the mountain’s twisting path

turn slowly to the white-haired man in

roughest gray I knew from the portrait

above my pallet – the Master Lao Tzu.

At the crest I met him with reverence,

bowed head, joined palms, then asked

his destination and he answered softly,

“West, far away from this sad waste of

time and men.” I would have begged

him not to leave us but from his eyes

and disappointment in his face I saw

it was no use. “Please,” I asked, “stay

an hour to write a record of what you’ve

found so we may hold your words like

candles in the darkness.” On one clean

scroll he wrote in black ink 5,000 well-

formed characters, known as The Way

and Its Power. I offered green tea, rice

wine, mare’s milk, egg soup as he set

down his brush but he declined, again

he must be on his way, to Tibet he said.

With his spool of wisdom in my hand

from my lookout’s turret I watched half

a day the man and ox grow small before

one instant they disappeared in evening

mist, man and path, in their departure

The Way rolling closed behind them.  

 

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016, and poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

AMY HOLMAN

 

Matter in the Scatter

 

Why is the sky everywhere, asks the worried boy 

trudging up Carroll past a 3-door black trash bin 

 

taller than him, cartooned knapsack balanced between 

thin backbones. Red brick corners cut with painted 

black iron, splotchy London planes blooming electric 

 

green against that nickel, milk, and delphinium-casted 

cumulus and stratus. Why’s the sky everywhere, 

 

asks his elated dad, turning to greet this newly-voiced 

category of concern before turning the idea inside out: 

 

because the sky is all around us. Walking past, I’m left 

wondering if it is too early for one who can't tie shoelaces 

to grasp the sun's broadcast through thick vapor into blue 

 

and yellow particles? Or even astronomy, held fierce 

as he is by gravity to a tipped slab on some planet 

 

secretly spinning in space. I’m guessing the answer 

is just embrace in place of outer space. We are matter -- 

and we do -- held lightly in the Rayleigh Scatter. 

 

 

Tea Time

 

A Xi’an emperor who’d unburdened his subjects 

of too much tax and upper classes, was —

 

to the ancient-worlders’ delight — buried with his tea 

buds, not just two chariots and the driving horses, 

 

millet from his North, rice from his South, cross-

bows, spears, and knives, ceramic pigs, oxen, 

 

elephants, unicorn, ducks, and unglazed, female 

servants, bowed and peering. As now, too, in 

 

141 BC, a fine floral brew revives the mind at prayers, 

if not the breath, on the clop clop to enlightenment. 

 

Amy Holman is a poet, literary consultant, and artist. She is the author of five poetry books, alas, all out-of-print in the small press. Recent work has been in The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly, The Night Heron Barks, and The Chiron Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

TOM KELLY

 

Ties That Bind              

 

Now I know he was killed in a Hebburn Pit

months after Granda was born, birth and death bed fellows.

DNA research gives this unknown detail.

 

Love ended with a fall of stone; life locked

below ground.

 

Granda takes his grandfather’s name,

‘James Robert Henderson,’ saying it rarely but with pride,

slight puffing of chest, reddening veins

around cheeks: circles of love,

 

I hold his photograph to the light,

see more clearly the ties that bind.

 

 

Eating Ice-Cream at Dunston Staithes

 

A family leave the ‘Rainbow’ seat just in time for us,

a child who had been sitting there, says, ‘They have our seat.’

We had. Three ice-creams are followed by silence,

smiles crack the heavens, bobble across the Tyne,

like a slow ball in a friendly cricket match.

At two, he will not recall this moment.

For us it is emblazoned in our hearts, ready to appear

when something like the worst happens.

 

Tom Kelly is a north-east of England poet, short story writer and playwright. He has had eleven books of poetry, short stories and a play published in as many years. His new collection This Small Patch has been recently published and re-printed by Red Squirrel Press. https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/product-page/this-small-patch-tom-kelly

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

DEBORAH KENNEDY

 

Paper Wings

 

“The fate of animals is…indissolubly connected with the fate of men.” Émile Zola

 

Yesterday, no one watched the river of red-winged blackbirds

flowing southward, the hawks’ spinning on a rising wind 

 

or the arc of an osprey’s wing diving into open water. Tonight

the seven o’clock news tells the story of birds falling from the sky

 

around the globe. The TV screen briefly shows, in black of night,

lolling heads, dirty piles of wet feathers, fished from muddy water

 

by men in vinyl suits. Unpreened feathers hang strangely heavy.

All the result of natural causes, pliant faces repeat again and again

 

as they map contagion’s spread, night by night. They will not

read the acid acronyms PCB, DDT, PBDE. They will not even

 

whisper the cool, round syllables of carbamate, selenium, or mercury.

They will not point to colored diagrams of chemical tracks etched

 

through bones and burnt through bodies’ shields. Wings fold

like crumpled paper, birds plummet from the skies. Men, faces

 

covered with white masks, stuff bodies in plastic sacks stretched tight

and full, heave bags into the back of trucks, heavy tires spray loose gravel.

 

What hole is deep enough to throw away the whole world?

The quiet spreads in wetlands, woodlands, and flyways reaching

 

north and south. Like smoke in still autumn air, the question rises

if the wind of birds is empty, how will the flesh of my flesh take flight?

 

Deborah Kennedy is the author and illustrator of Nature Speaks: Art and Poetry for the Earth (White Cloud Press), winner of six book awards, including the 2017 Silver Nautilus and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Poetry Book awards. An independent reviewer described Nature Speaks as “fascinating, thought-provoking, and soul-stirring.”

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP

 

There she is, your ideal

 

Only seven when Dad left us,

sneaking away in LA

after him and Mom had traveled from Waco,

I got a job in Buck Hogan’s medicine show,

singing, dancing, riding trick ponies, skits,

all through the Depression and into the War,

until Mom took us back to Texas.

 

Back in Tyler, eighteen years old,

I enrolled in secretary school –

typing, shorthand, filing systems –

when Mister Parker asked me

to represent his bank in the East Texas beauty contest.

I almost said no. Who needs that?

 

But then one contest led to another

till I won Miss Texas,

hopped a train to Atlantic City.

“Deep in the Heart of Texas” won it for me,

the newspapers calling me “the Texas Tornado.”

 

But Miss America was as much curse as blessing.

I still remember Groucho Marx saying,

“You’re almost articulate – for a bathing beauty.”

That stubby little runt looked like a rodent.

Who was he to sneer?

 

I was #MeToo before #MeToo.

I got roles in Hollywood and TV,

but I had to fight off more men than I could count,

dragging me to the casting couch,

as if their reward for the roles I got.

 

Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson –

I was on all those shows,

but the high point of my career?

Raising the morale of all those soldiers

when we toured the military bases.

 

At ninety-seven, I’m just glad

I’ve lived long enough to see women

fight against inequality and sexual harassment.

I was a feminist before there was a movement.

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives, and edits The Potomac, an online literary journal. http://thepotomacjournal.com. His photographs, poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals. His latest book is a collection of poems called Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House, Loyola University), and another poetry collection, American Zeitgeist, is forthcoming from Apprentice House

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

MICHAEL SALCMAN

 

I Will Go Down with the Ship

 

Not a metaphor but an argument we are losing,

the haptic touch of poems and the books they sit in,

 

the hidden smell of glue and its slowly turning leaves

from trees reading out our seasons:

 

Turgenev’s sled in snow, a chorale sung in spring,

a pressed summer flower and Cole Porter’s Parisian Fall.

 

I’m wed to the codex, where the living world touches

the page and there’s print I can kiss if have a mind to

 

not some glass coffin behind which a mannequin greets

the pulsating tip of my finger. I eschew the electron

 

and its false promise of ease, writing in a lined journal

(hair growing gray in my nose, nails yellow with dirt)

 

with a reader like you in mind, sitting in a favorite chair

with a drink, the fire lit, and this little speech close at hand.

 

Michael Salcman: retired neurosurgeon and art critic. Poems in Café Review, Harvard Review and Raritan. Books include: The Clock Made of Confetti; A Prague Spring, Before & After, (Sinclair Poetry Prize); the anthology Poetry in Medicine, and Shades & Graces, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

KERRIN P SHARPE 

 

the stone

 

the stone leaves a sound

drowned darkened valley

freezes and cracks shifts

to a sea bed wakes

on the coast blessed over

and over by rising tides

found by a girl

on the lip of a shore

where the sea laid down her silver

the stone carried by the girl

like a temple

to her Easter sand-saucer

garden closing the mouth

of a cave

 

the park

 

last night’s cricket practice

he whacks the ball

higher than ever

wows his team

collapses not kidding

not breathing

his Labrador a circle

of worry the leaves

in an uproar

sirens sirens sirens

early next morning

the park’s a quiet room

we cross

          because we can

 

once moored to me

 

children once moored to me

now breathless in a sea

of face masks float around wharfs

oil rigs container ships

struggle onto beaches

stagger along coastlines

masked beaks and shells

masked eyes fins

masks hooked to wings

my children doing everything

body roll shoulder lift

front crawl to shed them

 

Kerrin P Sharpe has published four collections of poetry (all with Victoria University Press). She has also appeared in Best New Zealand Poems, in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet Press UK) and POETRY (USA). She has also been published several times in Blackbox Manifold. In 2020 she was placed second in the Acumen International Poetry competition and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and in 2021 she was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Summer Residency.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

ANDREW SHIELDS

 

Bushwick

 

There's a row of picnic tables in front of the mural;

we can sit down and remember where we are:

close to the creek, farther from the cemetery,

even farther from the burning rain forest.

 

It's time to decide which side of the mirror

we want to see ourselves reflected in.

The bird watchers see something else

when they turn their binoculars around.

 

And it's time to listen to Lester Young,

whose journey took him from Woodville

to a grave in Brooklyn. Till we shall meet

and never part. He did not burn to death.

 

The unknown ones who did were honored

by a monument with a kneeling woman,

but now their names can finally be said:

Maria, Max, Concetta, Josephine, Dora, Fannie.

 

When the Triangle Shirtwaist fire started,

they could not leave because the doors

were locked. Did Maria call the names

of her sister and her children? Did the lack

 

of the money Max had sent to Palestine

mean his parents also died in the flames?

How long did Concetta's brother recall

her name every 25th of March?

 

How long had Josephine been wearing

the ring on her finger? Did Dora's father

in Russia soon find out why her letters

no longer came every month? Was Fannie

 

still happy to have found the job

so soon after her arrival from Kiev?

Let's hum the melody that Mingus wrote

to honor Prez, and honor them as well.

 

Andrew Shields lives in Basel, Switzerland. His collection of poems Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong was published by Eyewear in June 2015. His band Human Shields released the album "Somebody's Hometown" in 2015 and the EP "Défense de jouer" in 2016.  Twitter: @ShieldsAndrew, https://www.facebook.com/andrewshieldspoems/

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Time

 

Walking on the road on a warm

morning in late December, I came

upon a dead opossum that had been

struck and killed. There was no blood,

there was no crushed skull bone,

there was no trail of intestines.

I passed it by without much thought,

for I was thinking about what I had

heard on the radio, what a physicist

was saying on the subject of time,

that time doesn’t exist, that time

exists only as our thoughts, the future

being only our thoughts about it,

which we call anticipation or plans,

the past being only our thoughts

about it, which we call memories,

that both the future and the past

exist only in the here and now, for

these are merely our thoughts,

which exist only in the here and now.

So walking back the other way,

I picked up a strong stick, and I nudged

the opossum’s carcass off the road

and onto the soft leaves at the apron

of the wood against the rotting trunk

of an old oak tree in case he was right.

Or wrong.

 

J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 400 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is the 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 (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough  (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions), Enjoy Yourself  (Serving House Books), Piano Music (Serving House Books),  For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (Word Tech Communications), and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

MARJORY WOODFIELD

 

Omphalos

(ὀμφᾰλός omphalós, navel)

 

It was in the Delphi Archeological Museum. We’d stopped

earlier, by the Temple of Apollo and Eugenia had pointed,

There, that’s where it stood. Delphi, centre of the universe,

Omphalos, stone marker raised by Zeus.

Here, on steep-sloped Mount Parnassos, Aesop was hurled to his death,

he’d dared to disagree with the Delphic Oracle. Eugenia’s eyes widened

as she told us this, You'd better believe me, they said.

 

When the southerly wind blows along Kā Poupou a Te Rakihouia,

angry waves snarl and hit the gravel shore.

Today’s breath of wind is from the north, sky blue, shreds of pink.

Ancestors no longer construct hinaki here. Today’s children

trail plastic bags. Parents stop and point, See this stone, swirls of gold. Quartzite.

And here, veins of silica in this red jasper. A black-backed gull flies low,

his shadow tracing an ancient path. Terns cluster along the water line,

white-fronted and black-capped. They dip and dive among waves,

return with small fish. The shingle beach holds treasure.

I pick up a stone speckled with pink. It nests,

round and warm in my palm.

 

Marjory Woodfield is a New Zealand teacher and writer. Recent work appears in The Pomeganate London, Orbis and Pennine Platform. Awards include first prize in The New Zealand Robert Burns Competition, and placements in Hippocrates, Yeovil, Ver and John McGivering writing competitions. She is currently working towards her first collection. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE