2016

 

 

 

FEBRUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

LeeAnn Bjerken, Tim J. Brennan, Lucia Cherciu, Kitty Coles, Richard Fein,

George Freek, Michael Lee Johnson, Michael Lauchland, Todd Mercer, Tom Montag,

 Kenneth Pobo, Marjorie Saiser.

 

 

 

 

LEEANN BJERKEN

 

Short Lines

 

You both keep little scraps folded

in pants pockets

coats

left shirtfronts

everywhere they shouldn’t be

 

I compare your chicken scratch

to my father’s curving scrawl

remembering fragments I used to find

amid the laundry

in the drawer beside the scissors

or dropping out of his wallet

but now only see lighting up my birthday cards    

                                                                                       

The two of you are alike in this scribbling of reminders

doodles on receipts

lead traced out in yellow tablets

notes stuck against the refrigerator

jotted musings that fall out of pant legs

and walk their way to corners

 

You are the men

that hide between the lines

of even my most mundane descriptions

the secret moments that evolve into stories

 

and I can’t crumple up my musings

let them age to perfection on the floor

forget the shape of my intentions

 

My short lines spring up like paper flowers

vying for the light

needing to be read

 

 

LeAnn Bjerken is a recent graduate of Eastern Washington University with an MFA in Poetry. Originally from Minnesota, she now lives in Spokane Washington  along with her husband Steve and their cat Tikki. She currently works as a reporter for a local business journal.

 

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TIM J. BRENNAN

 

Migrations

 

Chrysanthemums outside my kitchen

window turn red and yellow behind white

blinds. If I were a painter, I would paint

only windows.

I also think about the mallards beyond

the chrysanthemums, why the drakes are

always in front of the hens, the changes

in the weather, but mostly I think

about the woman at the convenience store

the other day, how she cursed the Hispanic boys,

and how their mother hissed at them to be silent.

Once, I watched a neighbor down the street

hew a tree. It fell the wrong way and crushed

his Ford pickup. I learned many new words

that afternoon. Two weeks later, Raymond

left for Viet Nam. He never came home

 

 

Tim J Brennan lives, writes, and lives retired in southern Minnesota. He is a

Talking Stick poetry winner and his works can be found in many fine publications

including The Lake (U.K.), Green Blade, KAXE’s The Beat, and Sleet

 

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LUCIA CHERCIU

 

Tell Me Again

 

Tell me again the story you always tell me, Mother,

the story with basil and sage.

Softened by grace, your hands.

Softened by kindness, your hair.

Softened by self-denial, the arch of your back.

The story with chamomile and rosemary,

rose hips and elderberry:

the insidious shades of remembering and forgetting

the chronic state of waiting

the strained work of forgiving.

 

Tell me again the story you always tell me, Mother,

what happened to the apple trees in front of our house,

the house we sold fifteen years ago,

which I want to buy back

but you say that I shouldn’t.

I live in a different country now,

like millions of young people who left.

Even you can’t afford to go back to that house now,

only three hours away from you.

 

The distance between the house we grew up in

and the simple state of wanting to get on the bus

and return, the way we did when we were kids.

No indoor plumbing? No worries

about pipes freezing. No heating?

The stove calls us with the rich song

of potatoes roasted on embers.

 

In London and Rome, Tokyo and New York,

someone is counting her pennies

to buy back the old home. 

 

 

Everything She Said

 

What if right now is the happiest time in our lives

and we don’t even know it? When we were there

 

we wanted to be elsewhere. I spent my life walking

from one room to another turning off the lights,

 

listening to her steps so I could open the door.

I interrupted my mother because I had to go

 

to work. When she was staying here

I steeled myself against the time when she left.

 

I drifted away while she was still talking,

my eyelids fluttering half asleep. If I took off

 

my glasses, there were no words. Elsewhere:

everything happened elsewhere, both good

 

and bad. Everything she said I did myself;

everything I did she had already done. 

 

 

Lucia Cherciu was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1995. She teaches English at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY and her latest book of poetry is Edible Flowers (Main Street Rag, 2015). Her poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. Her web page is www.luciacherciu.webs.com

 

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KITTY COLES

 

There Are Words That Make You Speak Them

 

They rise in the mind at night and break

its surface, displaying their fins. They chew

on the belly's algae,

growing fat and firm in the fronds.

Their scales shine in the halflight.

 

Too cramped, they surge upwards.

They jump to the mouth

from the depths and flail against the lips,

an importunate boiling.

 

When they fall out, you feel

the loss of their weight and the heart

falls after them

as if tied on with something.

They leave a scrape in the throat,

dark space, dark matter.

 

 

Kitty Coles lives in Surrey and has been writing since she was a child.  Her poems have appeared in magazines including Mslexia, Iota, South, Obsessed With Pipework, The Interpreter's House, The Frogmore Papers and Brittle Star.

 

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RICHARD FEIN

 

Around the Block

 

If you've been around the block then you've gone nowhere,

except back to your starting point.

And when you've come 'round again kick yourself in the ass,

kick that you in front of you who just went 'round the block then came back again

to where you're standing now.

Do this a few times and you'll know every building on the entire block

along with every window every door, every lamppost.

Your whole world will consist of familiar landmarks.

Damn, you'll even know where every garbage can is,

so don't litter lest you confront your own mess over and over.

And you will have said hi to every denizen on the block including yourself.

You'll become the world's greatest authority on every detail of that block,

just as a prisoner in a Supermax jail knows every scratch on his cell wall.

But look, there's another block across the street, a new world on the city grid,

so kick your ass in that direction.

Walk around it but only once instead of going nowhere a thousand times.

Do this block by block and you'll wind up with a sore butt,

but with a passing yet useful acquaintance of every city block

with no need to kick your ass any further to go farther.

And by then you'll have taken in all you need to know about the city you inhabit.

And when you finally drop dead,

you will surely be at some unknown starting point leading

to that shadowy block out there beyond the city limits.

 

 

Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as  Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic,  Foliate Oak, Morpo Review, Ken*Again, Oregon East, Southern Humanities Review, Windsor Review, Maverick, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Compass Rose, Whiskey Island Review, Oregon East, The Kentucky Review  And Many Others.

 

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GEORGE FREEK

 

When Death Comes (After Mei Yao Chen)

 

Winter’s grip is relentless.

An icy wind cracks the frozen trees.

Buried under a foot of snow,

are their once colorful leaves.

Everything speaks of solitude

and loneliness. For centuries,

men have felt the way I do now,

but knowing that doesn’t help.

With a sharp, surgical blade,

my guts have been removed.

I can feel the hole it made.

I take no interest in combing my hair,

or tying my worn out shoes.

Is there nowhere I can find rest?

I gaze at the moon and the stars.

In their far off world,

they look safe and secure.

But they, too, are fragile at best.

 

 

I Watch And Wait (After Tu Fu)

 

Over and above rhetoric,

and the order of poetry,

there is time and the wind,

bouncing off the trees

like notes from a piccolo.

A leaf withers and dies

its slow death. A sparrow

disappears. Vines

like unstrung violin strings

hang from the trees,

and an old flannel shirt,

torn and muddied,

rots among the fallen leaves.

 

 

In December (After Su Tung Po)

 

Leaves fall from the trees.

The sky is a white blank.

As I walk the lake’s edge,

nasty weather is coming.

The dead leaves smell rank.

The sun has gone to sleep.

The lake is dark and deep.

Across it, I watch

a small boat, barely afloat,

battling the heaving waves.

The men are miles from shore.

I can pray for them.

Will a god hear my prayer?

I can do nothing more.

 

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, IL. His poetry has recently appeared in The Missing Slate, The Stillwater Review, The Tower Journal, The Foliate Oak, and The Burningword Literary Journal. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; and Lazy Bee Scripts (UK).

 

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MICHARL LEE JOHNSON

 

Crossing the Border Divide

 

Crossing that Canadian line on a visitor pass,

that stretch across the border divide,

that makes a torn war wound, torn man free.

It made my feet new away from cinder on fresh grass.

Back home the sirens of war keep sounding off.

All us wearing the new/old bloodstains,

poetry images of erections of WW2, a real war.

Dirty hands your memories, red white and blue justifications, hell.

Who does not have memories, habits 1 or at least 2-

bad cinder charcoal in the dark flame.

September is early in Canada in October.

Leaves fall early swirling in the North,

October but at least the bullets cease.

Cast a poem you likely died in Vietnam come back wounded.

Come back home, alive and you likely live life, die wounded.

Here comes again the thunder, the rain, lightning,

war bore.

Crossing a border divide.

 

 

Arctic Chill North 

 

Alberta arctic chill freezes my life in exile.

North Saskatchewan River crystallizes froze thick.

My life entomb 10 years here, prairie path, those thorns,

a hundred threats US government, border checks run further north.

I stand still in exile, live my life in mixture of colors, lone wolf, tangerine moons,

hang nail in this corner of my bachelor suite sleep for years.

I close down curtains on this chapter with an amnesty agreement, a pledge.

I close down this sunspace, northern lights,

files I never burn draft card I never toss away.

Thieves, dawn passion, pack up start home tonight.

This hell hangs on my head passes to a hallo, child, dream, and murders.

Let this flicker between notes and years die ignore spaces and pass.

Radio sounds, in my car, my ears, and blast old tunes

on my way back home, Indiana 1,728 miles away.

 

 

Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. He is a Canadian and USA citizen. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, small business owner in Itasca, Illinois.  He has been published in more than 880 small press magazines in 27 countries, and he edits 10 poetry sites. http://poetryman.mysite.com/  

 

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MICHAEL LAUCHLAN

 

Aphasia

 

When the words vanish, I sit

among kids and their questions,

unguarded by answers, dumb

as a severed hand curled up

on the floor. When the word

for Moses’ wicker craft won’t

animate my lips, when

a woman’s name no longer leaps

to my mouth and I pause

in the midst of stale speech,

what will remain of the self

who wades into loud brawls

or digs away at some obscure

grammatical row as though

using a rake to clear a drain

in a flooded street? I may

wildly point with a cane,

fearing I’ll be misunderstood,

fearing underneath (where all lies

unhidden) that every grip slips,

that my leaky phonemes ferry

nothing to a another shore.

 

 

Painting the Garage

 

We rarely do just what we do.

We fry eggs and worry. We paint

the garage and grieve a friend

who went too soon (though, gaunt

and radiant, she waited on the end).

I grieve when I’ve forgotten grief

and paint a line on window glass,

then go looking for masking tape

and return to worrying. Demagogues

from my parents’ worst nightmares

are live on cable. I yank the plug

but a voice follows me outside.

Paint slides from fluent bristles

stroke by stroke to the dry, chipped

siding. So much is going away

that seemed once the round world.

My wife is pulling out bikes

and starting to clean brushes.

With their songs and their bounce,

grandchildren are coming over. They’ll

ask about the half-painted walls.

 

Michael Lauchland’s poems have landed in many publications including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, English Journal, The Dark Horse, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, Southword, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and The Cortland Review. They have also been included in anthologies from WSU Press and Oxford University Press. He was awarded the Consequence Prize in Poetry and recently featured in The Writer’s Almanac. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from Wayne State University Press.

 

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TODD MERCER

 

A Note on Where the Years Went

Every year we deferred the visit back east.

We never went home. The work was constant.

When finally the time allowed leeway

our people were passed on. Or gone off to manifest

their destinies in other sections of the country,

like we did in a wagon, over rivers Susannah

drilled the children on the names of. Each fall

we said next summer. Now I’m here alone,

too frail to tolerate a train. I’d only have myself

to tell the story of the trip to, back at our prairie farm.

There’s a window, but we missed it. Instead we labored,

satisfied in the process of our projects. Been rooted,

uprooted, re-routed, transplanted, re-rooted.

Susannah’s buried on this property. She’s with me,

as if listening from the other room—all the company I need

through these last few summers, winters.

We brought home with us, then bloomed.

We didn’t make the train.

  

 

Sparse-lands Memoir Sutra

 

They’d make a few miles then build a camp-fire while the old man

told his two boys parabolic stories that bent more than twisted.

Hobo dinners sealed in tin foil: hamburg over carrots,

onions, potatoes. Jimmy liked his on the cusp of burned.

They trust meat not to spoil for three days from when

they walk to small-town groceries for the fundamentals.

 

Who else walks a month, not from war displacement,

or economic motivations? In search of what’s worth learning

in the sparse-lands. This family. All the fire chief’s vacation days

taken together. So the kids will remember, that’s why else.

 

On the transverse cut-through of the swamp belt,

Jimmy learns quicksand. To his waist, then out, a scare enough

to make his heart race. Concrete lessons like these, and a lost shoe

a long way from stores. Jimmy’s brother taking to it, a naturalist

in the making. Once grown he’d never hold an indoor job.

 

The old man told of fires that surrounded him. Panic then means death.

You strive to be collected, memorize the egress routes,

at least one door and a window. A window of opportunity,

this memory-maker hike-athon in nowhere sand flats. Scrub study.

These pine barrens. This long march curving around hazards.

 

If you only remember one thing I teach you, is what he means to say.

Listen to a man who knows the insides of fires, or for short,

listen more. There’s steam piping out the seams of tinfoil packets

in the camp’s coals, dinner in a few minutes. The old man

and his hundred different instances of if you only

hold one notion. The love of life and most everything in it.

 

 

Todd Mercer won the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts Flash Fiction Award for 2015. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance appeared at Right Hand Pointing. Mercer’s recent poetry and fiction appear in: Bartleby Snopes, Cheap Pop, Dunes Review, Eunoia Review, Gravel, Kentucky Review, The Lake, Literary Orphans, Main Street Rag Anthologies and Misty Mountain Review.

 

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TOM MONTAG

 

The Old House

 

inhabited by wind

and what the wind lets in.

 

All night, the stars, more than

you have ever seen.

 

Dew on the morning grass

just as the sun comes up.

 

There is some place we all

want to be, but no one

 

wants to walk that far.

The wind is already tired

 

waiting for your story.

 

 

The Leaf

 

does not

wonder

 

of wind

but flies

 

and falls,

becomes

 

the earth.

The stars

 

do not

wonder

 

of night

but take

 

the leaf,

as they

 

take all

things -- earth,

 

wind, fire,

and us.

 

 

Tom Montag is recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. In 2015 he was Featured Poet at Atticus Review (April) a Contemporary American Voices (August). At year's end he received Pushcart Prize nominations from Provo Canyon Review and Blue Heron Review. Other poems are found in various little magazines.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

The Mystique of Fingernails

 

In trying to decipher the mystique of fingernails,

                   I found

nothing to back up any claims, such as vitamins

                   for

a long life, or tracking regeneration, and, so,

                   I suppose

 

I was discouraged, since mine, even at my age,

                   seem

to be growing faster than I can remember,

                   but, hey,

there's too much clogging my memory bank

                   for me

 

to claim anything definitive, on any subject,

                   except

what it's like to enter a room, not knowing

                   why,

but knowing, yes, there is a reason, and, yes,

                   again,

 

it will come to me after circumventing most

                   known

synapses, a gift of recalcitrant genes, like a judge

                   passing

sentence and trying very hard to remember why

                   and for what,

 

just as our fingernails still continue to mystify

                   the specialists

of our bodily conundrums, while some insist

                   in fashioning,

painting, and, while able, displaying the lure

                   of their nails.

 

 

Ronald Moran lives in Simpsonville, South Carolina. His poems have been published in Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Emrys Journal, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and in twelve books/chapbooks of poetry.  His most recent book is The Tree in the Mind, published by Clemson University Press (2014). Eye of the World will be published in early spring, 2016.

 

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KENNETH POBO

 

Abrupt

 

While getting the mail

I notice a dead strawflower.

Some call these plants

everlastings.

Little is everlasting.  Even

our blue planet will be

a sun snack.  Green bits

 

hung on for a month or so,

but the plant has gone

kaput.   No angel moved

to pluck him up

so I said a few words,

nothing bright—

 

in one swift move,

I tossed him into

a trash can’s green depths. 

Just two months ago,

a yellow necklace

around the sun

that abandoned him, left

 

for sleet to torture

what remained.

 

 

There He is Again

 

Marc Bolan plays guitar

in my garage.  Neighbors

may whine when the first notes

to “Ride A White Swan”

crash past windowboxes holding

six Winston Churchill fuchsias

 

in full bloom.  Maybe they’ll relax

and tell a hummingbird

that it is loved.  Marc

isn’t Santa.  He doesn’t visit

everybody and doesn’t care

if you’ve been good or not.

 

Watch now

he’s gonna slide

into your dreams,

turn them into songs

to play in eternity’s deepest

forest.  Wind-soaked leaves,

castanets above

a sleepy cinnamon fern.

 

 

Kenneth Pobo had two books out in 2015: Bend of Quiet from Blue Light Press and Booking Rooms in the Kuiper Belt from Urban Farmhouse Press.  In addition to The Lake, his work has appeared in: Orbis, Windsor Review, Hawaii Review, Caesura, and elsewhere.

 

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MARJORIE SAISER

 

Retina

 

My life

moves on the retina

upside down,

 

this night in spring,

Arcturus a pinpoint

on the curve of a small black curtain.

 

If I were anywhere

instead of here on the driveway,

running once more away from home—

 

if I were at the river,

cranes would land

in the small theater of the retina,

 

flap in the near-dark,

and find a place to settle.

But here is the image of my mother,

 

inverted, diminished,

windows of her house behind her,

her shoulders round,

 

arms hanging,

mouth awry,

cheeks wet.

 

What will I make of this,

of anything?

The fine black lines

 

of the feet of the cranes

dance upside down

in the globe of the eye.

 

She recedes, student of broken things.

For me: the windshield and the dash,

my oncoming implacable road.

 

 

Take, Eat; This Is My Body

 

Take, eat; this is my body,

now when you are forming

cell by cell,

 

small crusts,

the fine chain of your spine.

Lashes, eyelid, brow.

 

Fingers curling. You,

my small flower.

Take, eat.

 

This is a way I love you,

unseen earwig, growing. I will be

blue-white milk at your mouth.

 

I will be a shadow on a wall,

the low sun casting a shape

behind me as I go on.

 

Marjorie Saiser’s poems can be found at Rattle.com, The Writer’s Almanac, and PoetryMagazine.com. Her fourth book of poems, I Have Nothing To Say About Fire, will be published by The Backwaters Press in 2016. Saiser’s website is www.poetmarge.com. “Retina” and “Take, Eat; This is My Body” first published in Beside You at the Stoplight, The Backwaters Press, 2010.

 

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