2019

 

 

 

FEBRUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Kitty Coles, Gráinne Daly, Diana Devlin, George Freek, Tony Gloeggler, William Ogden Haynes, Brett Ortler, Bethany W. Pope, Hilary Sideris, J. R. Solonche,

 Daniel James Sundahl, Wendy Thornton.

 

 

 

 

KITTY COLES

 

I Am Bringing You My Heart In A Small Box

 

studded with pins, a voodoo artefact,

hot from the burning hob, the rendered tallow.

 

Here are my fingernails, narrow moon-shavings,

and a slice of yellow hair, like a slice of sun.

 

This is my spit, willingly given to you,

for you to hold my soul in a mesh of air.

 

I will speak my true name at your grove’s unholy centre

and let you use it to bind me, hand over hand.

 

And the flesh, gross marble, inert on its midnight plinth,

cold and cumbrous, a broken column.

 

Kitty Coles’ poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for the Forward Prize and Best of the Net. She was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in 2017. www.kittyrcoles.com

 

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GRÁINNE DALY

 

To Lady and to Tramp

 

You’re in love again,

and it’s your first time,

it should feel natural,

as soon as lips are locked

and bra unclasped

 

but there’s hesitation

as you wrestle with

the question of

which version of yourself you will be

                                                  the lady or the tramp.

 

To lady is to be reserved

in return for respect,

reliable girlfriend,

revered version of his mother

 

To tramp is to bare all,

reveal kinky pockmarks

of a soul that is both 

ease and disease,

empty and full,

like the girls in his dreams

 

Dare to bare the truth

that lies inside

the deep chamber,

only emerging when 

teased out in the inky black

of a curtained room

on the sanctity of a blank sheet

 

Or be the fair maiden

seduced by convention

 acceptable to the timid

if they wish to read the story

 

of man making love

or love making man

or poetry.

 

Gráinne Daly holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCD. Shortlisted for the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize, Maeve Binchy UCD Award and winner of Greywood Arts Prize 2017, her work has been published in a number of publications, including Southword Magazine, Ogham Stone Journal and Bangor Literary Journal.  She has recently completed her debut novel and is working on a collection of poetry and short stories. “To Lady and to Tramp” came 3^rd place in Anthony Cronin Poetry Competition at Wexford Literary Festival Nov 2017  http://wexfordliteraryfestival.com/wexford-literary-festival-2017-winners/ Winner of Greywood Arts Poetry Competition 2017 https://greywoodarts.org/2017/11/

 

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DIANA DEVLIN

 

Snowglobe

 

I see him now:

nonno Raimondo,

bent over constellations of fragments –

gold and silver

cogs and coils,

tweezers tight

in his rough-hewn hand.

 

In this gloomy garret,

nonno Raimondo repairs watches

for the wealthy.

 

He spies me through his jeweller’s loupe,

one gigantic eyeball staring

while the small one twinkles

its snowflake love. Only I

am permitted entry

to this snowglobe world.

The haughty Tuscan sun tuts

at the curtained window,

eager to display its unwanted glory.

 

As he works, I tap out my own time:

I am three hundred and seventy eight million,

four hundred and thirty two thousand seconds

old.

 

In nonno Raimondo’s snowglobe,

time is fixed.

We share the ticking silence while outside

the world grows older.

 

Diana Devlin is a Scottish-Italian poet who worked as a translator, lexicographer and teacher but now writes full time. Her poetry can be found in many publications online and in print. Her home near Loch Lomond is full of music, books and cats, just how she likes it.

 

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GEORGE FREEK

 

At Blue Lake (After Li Shangyin)

 

I walk a mile and a half.
I once did five,

but it’s foolish to think

about the past.  

Young girls run by me,

as if I were a tree.

Half way home, I stop

to regain my wind.

Once, I looked ahead.

My day had just begun.

Finally home I watch

the dying sun.

Leaves are starting to fall.

The flowers have lost

their welcoming bloom.

In a matter of weeks,

they won’t be here at all.

 

 

On Poetry (After Su Tung Po)

 

I watch the wind tear

the leaves from a tree,

stripping it naked.

Lilies are blown like wet paint,

then fall randomly.

My wine glass tips over.

I’m not drunk, but

I’ve had enough.

There’s no fire in the stove.

I can smell flowers,

but in this darkness,

I only see bare trees.

I stare at my empty

glass and ponder

the uselessness of poetry.

 

George Freek's poems have recently appeared in Big Windows Review, The Adelaide Magazine, Green Light, and The Tipton Poetry Journal. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; Lazy Bee Scripts; and Off The Wall Plays. 

 

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TONY GLOEGGLER

 

When I Walk Through The Door

 

If I line up words

with one or two syllables

and hard consonants

until they become

a boy chasing a ball,

a car driving too fast,

you can nearly hear

the sound a father hears

that makes him turn

his head so he can see

his son’s body twist

across the road, thud

against the curb. If you like,

you could be the father,

watch the car slow down,

the driver look back, see

the red tip of a cigarette

dot the twilight before

the driver turns back

around and keeps going.

You could be a neighbor

opening a door, standing

on front steps as lights

throb against brick houses

and cops ask questions. Or maybe

you could be the man’s wife,

Laura, who moans the boy’s name

and won’t let anyone touch her.

She wants to know why

her husband couldn’t keep

their child safe. He wishes

he could tell her about the girl

next door, sixteen years old,

with her cut off tee shirt,

belly button ring and how

good she looked walking

across the just watered lawn

the moment the car hit

their son. He wants to believe

that saying those words

out loud, telling the truth

now will make him

someday feel better. Me?

I could be the driver, turning

slowly down my block,

pulling into the garage.

I will sit in the car

with the motor running,

playing with the lighter

until I can remember

the kinds of things

I’m supposed to say

to my wife, my daughter

when I walk through the door.

 

 

First Bite

 

The week before

Grandma stopped

speaking English

and started to wet

herself

                       she spread

a white bed sheet

in the backyard, sharpened

her black pocket knife

on the leather strap

hanging in the garage,

picked the reddest

apple from the tree.

peeled the skin off

in one long curlicue.

dug out the seeds.

the core. And balanced

the fruit in her open

palm.

             I tucked my knees

under me, leaned over

took the first bite

and licked the juice

off her fingertips.

 

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of New York City and has managed group homes for the mentally challenged in Brooklyn for over 35 years. His work has appeared in numerous journals. His full-length books include One Wish Left (Pavement Saw Press 2002) and Until The Last Light Leaves (NYQ Books 2015). His next book will be published by NYQ Books in 2019. “When I Walk Through the Door” and “First Bite” were first published in The Ledge.

 

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WILLIAM OGDEN HAYNES

 

Asylum

 

The rain tattoos its rhythm on the tin roof of the covered porch

while I watch the storm. Suddenly, a spreading mimosa shudders

out a scribble of sparrows, startled by a distant rifle shot, reminding

 

me that hunting season has begun. In the yard, black-eyed susans,

pampas grass and bottlebrush slowly sway on their stems, waving

fronds and petals, as they dance through the showers. And then,

 

barely visible through the rain, I see a dog limping up the long, dirt

road from the highway. With each step toward the house, I see him

more clearly. He is a Labrador Retriever with no collar, a washboard

 

rack of ribs showing beneath black, stringy fur, and a white muzzle.

Another likely abandonment in the country by city folks ready to

move somewhere, low on money or just tired of owning a pet.

 

With each random gunshot he freezes in his tracks, ears folded

back, warily looking around. Like me, he’s old, alone, afraid,

and at the end of his string, so I call him up to the porch.

 

I put down a bowl of food, and when he’s finished eating, he lies

at my feet as we sit on the porch watching the rain. He looks

up at me with hazel eyes and I stroke his wet fur. The dog stands

 

up and shoves his nose under my hand for more petting as if he had

not been touched with kindness for the longest time. Another shot

rings out startling both of us, and I lift the dog up onto the glider.

 

 

School Dance 1957

 

The girl with the pony tail sits alone in a line of empty chairs on the

periphery of the decorated gymnasium. She is wearing a light gray

cardigan sweater with embroidered red roses, a blue silk neck scarf

tied to the side with a simple knot, and a blue felt circle skirt.

 

She feels like the last chocolate left in a Whitman Sampler, not knowing

if she should lose hope because no one wanted her, or if she should

be optimistic since the competition has been eliminated. The disc

jockey is playing Only You by The Platters, a good song for slow dancing,

 

if only someone would ask. She wonders if her thick glasses and a few

spots of acne are too much for any potential dance partner to overlook.

Her hands are clammy with sweat and she wipes them on the sides

of her skirt as a young man approaches.  He has a black pompadour

 

and is wearing a white t-shirt with slim-fit jeans. She usually doesn’t

care for greasers, but he has horn-rimmed spectacles just like Buddy Holly.

And when he smiles and asks her to dance, the reflections from the spinning

mirrored ball on the ceiling, cause his braces to sparkle like stars.

 

William Ogden Haynes is a poet and author of short fiction from Alabama who was born in Michigan. He has published seven collections of poetry (Points of Interest, Uncommon Pursuits, Remnants, Stories in Stained Glass, Carvings, Going South and Contemplations) and one book of short stories (Youthful Indiscretions) all available on Amazon.com.  Over 175 of his poems and short stories have appeared in literary journals and his work is frequently anthologized. www.williamogdenhaynes.com

 

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BRETT ORTLER

 

What the Dead Tell Us About the Road Back to the Living

 

The truck stops make it manageable,

and the barkers selling bibelots from the great beyond—

inflatable scythes, maps to the homes of the recently deceased,

or the Programs! Programs! for the sideshows:

Sisyphus charging 10 bucks a pop then rolling his boulder uphill,

or Achilles throwing a right at Joe Louis

in a roadside ring.

 

But what’s best is a cool booth for coffee and cake

and getting out of the worst traffic jam ever:

the seven thousand year flood of us,

plus the Neanderthals, the chimps,

and the rest of the family tree,

everyone on a one-way street

to the only place worth going.

 

Those who try to stay behind

find Lot’s wife, still a salt lick

and not much for conversation,

sad old Schopenhauer still contemplating suicide,

even after death. These are the ghost towns of the afterlife,

the dead-end dives with stale beer and bad music.

 

So it’s all about hitting the road and edging ahead in line,

sneaking in front of the people from the Pliocene, none too bright,

or sprinting past a Stegosaurus distracted

by the family of dodos dawdling beneath its feet.

 

It takes a while,

but in between here and there, it’s not all bad,

the sun and moon share the sky,

contrails crisscross like chalk marks

on a blackboard, and the sea,

with all ships sailing,

is a quilt of blue and white.

 

Brett Ortler is a writer and an editor. His work appears widely, including in Rattle, Ascent, Nimrod, as well as online at HuffPost, Salon, Fatherly, among other venues. His first poetry collection, The Lessons of the Dead, is forthcoming from Fomite Press.

 

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BETHANY W. POPE

 

 

 

Convenience

 

She's got a rectangular face, hair cut

in a shoulder-length, sharp-cornered bob

framing a strong jaw. She's got square teeth

and a slack little belly which she covers

with teddy bears that prance on a field

of peppermint velour. Her husband helps

her run the shop. She tells him where to stack

the produce. He's a skinny little guy —

all rope on bones and nothing excess.

Sometimes, late at night, when I come in

to buy my daily crate of soda

I catch them tangled up behind the counter.

He's standing behind her, his hands on that belly,

up under the shirt, and her arms reaching

up, hands cradling his neck, stroking those tendons,

while he kisses the soft hinge of her jaw

again and again and again and again.

 

 

Janitor

 

The little old lady lives under the stairs

in an apartment accessible through

a triangular door. Her apartment

is small, closet-sized, but painted bright yellow,

and decorated with off-colour photographs

taken with a knock-off Polaroid camera.

The little old lady wears a pair

of glittering silver kitten-heels.

She wears a floral bonnet and a plain

orange smock. The little old lady wears

her hair long. It's black, with gray streaks woven

through it. Sometimes, I watch her from behind

as she sweeps. She cleans each step, one by one,

with a neon pink brush. The little old

lady hums something in Mandarin.

She sweeps. Her silver heels click. She hums.

There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

 

Bethany W Pope has won many literary awards and published several novels and collections of poetry. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described Bethany’s latest collection as 'poetry as salvation...’ ‘This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.' She currently lives and works in China.

 

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HILARY SIDERIS

 

North

 

The direction of the north terrestrial pole;

the direction to the left of one facing east.

--Merriam-Webster

 

 

In your country,

as in mine, the ones

 

above look down

on those below, top

 

notch to rock bottom.

North outranks south,

 

though it declines

to mean, depends

 

on what you face.

Rome slams Naples,

 

Milan shuns Rome.

I like how in Italian

 

I can say continuo a

non capire: I continue

 

to not understand.

Earth spins at a tilt,

 

how else? There’s no

upright in space.

 

 

Drone

 

He talks as

she does squats

 

while stacking

plates. He operates

 

a small aircraft

outside their home,

 

she doesn’t mind

the steady hum,

 

her man explaining

how he learned,

 

remotely, to take

off & fly around.

 

Hilary Sideris has recently published poems in Alabama Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Lake, Main Street Rag, Rhino, and Salamander.  She is the author of Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada 2014), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful 2016), and Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay 2019). 

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Abu Nuwas

 

Abu Nuwas!

I drink to you.

I drink to us.

Though that was

a glass of wine

you never had,

cabernet merlot

from the Argentine,

it was dark so

like the gazelle’s eyes

of the maid

who poured for you,

and sang and played

the ‘oud.

Abu Nuwas!

I hear your scorn,

for the wine’s

not aged but newborn.

Nevertheless,

raise up the glass,

Abu Nuwas!

See how blue

the sky is all around

it.  See how the sun

stabs its sword through

it.  Abu Nuwas!

Was it sweeter because

forbidden?

Your drunkenness?

Yet far from hidden,

you reveled

in it, you devil,

you, Abu Nuwas!

I don’t know what

I’m doing, if this is

Khamriyyat or not,

Abu Nuwas!

(How many times

can I go on

with monorhymes?)

Abu Nuwas!

Brother Abu,

may I call you

brother even though

I am a Jew?

Abu Nuwas!

I drink to us!

 

J.R. Solonche is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (chapbook from 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 & Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions),  If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (forthcoming July 2019 from Kelsay Books), and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

 

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DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL

 

Persistence of Memory: a Prodigy, a Maimed One

 

When you consider your age,

The number of times you have shed your skin,

Every seven years, if you remember right,

You wonder if what you remember is warranted,

The details less exact, memories

Tripping and jumping along the nerve gaps,

Pictures composed to hold some grand conception

So arranged that when the gray cat claws the rug

The brain's sun-spoked wheel turns:

 

One cat murdered on your uncle's farm,

Your pump-action twenty-gauge shouldered swiftly,

The cat chugging along in its puffy gray suit,

Dropped in a lazy heap the moment the sun

Hooked behind a cloud.

 

Another stepped on by a cow,

Back and legs skewed sideways,

Jostled aside like any crippled kid,

Hopeful but never growing strong.

 

Another freeze-frames into focus,

Caught in the headlamps of your car.

One more on the lap of a woman

Petting his shag; you remember

A comb slipping through her hair,

Hand and eye motion ageless and pristine.

 

Others are like pockmarks on your heart,

Craters making a sad literature, some of it

"The Shy Praise of Youth," a picture

Of someone's great-grandmother reading,

An old settler now among other old settlers.

 

Easy things to sentimentalize today

When they whisper again in memory,

Stirred by a dripping faucet,

By the smell of soap, the cat lapping milk,

All buried, then finding an opening

Spilling their yolk of color.

 

Envoi

Two boys climb a grain elevator;

A metal ladder carries them bottom to top.

It's winter, dark; they talk and gesture.

No one is there to see or hear.

One mouths obscenities.

A decade later he goes to war;

 

The other will later sit in his home

Remembering much of this from a photograph

Taken from an airplane above a town in Iowa,

The cemetery near the eastern edge of town.

 

The one who will die carries a feed sack, knotted.

They reach the top and crawl to the edge to look

Straight down the white cement sides,

Nerves pulling stomachs and scrotums tight.

 

The one who will die pulls the cat from the bag,

Dangles it over the edge, drops:

Eyes follow the legs opening and spreading

As if to fly, visible until it almost hits the ground

But hits a power line instead and spins

A perfect gymnast's twirl to land then crawl into the weeds.

 

The other, who will live, remembers three months later,

Almost spring and the cat walking into Swenson's Conoco;

His legs and back are bad but in his eyes

A gray-black smoke the other who will live

Will carry with him all those years.

 

Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where he taught for thirty-three years.

 

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WENDY THORNTON

 

Measuring Light

 

The Inuit hide beneath shaggy deer

                             throw rocks at the ripples of fire in the sky

                   trying to disguise their restless fear

          savage discontent with the celestial light show,

                             which rents the dark like a streetwalker’s candle,

                   whose never measured sound reverberates

                             across the ground and shakes

                                                the frozen landscape.

 

          Lately, life has been tough. The animals

                             hide, resisting their duty to become food,

                   relinquishing their lives only under duress

                                      and it seems there are less and less of them

                   to go around.  They are always bound for someplace else.

                                      Colder.

 

                             Men of science suddenly appear

                   frightening away the skittish deer,

                             Set up their gear and begin to tune their dials,

                                      lonely boys on a Saturday night.

                             After a while, they shrug and say

                                                We heard no sound in the sky today.

                                      We’ll try again tomorrow.

 

          The Inuit don’t like the science boys.

                   They fear the wrath of the creator of lights.

                             Who knows what magic their fiddling will bring?

                   An end to the false lights of men.

                                      Those who are sick will get sicker still

                             and the streets will darken in Montreal

                   because these boys and their instruments

                                      never get the station right at all.

 

                   The Inuit rub thumb and forefinger high

                             imagine the lights rising in the sky

                                      away from all those prying eyes

                                                and ears

and in the dark they plainly hear

                                      the sound of the lights,

stockings rubbing

celestial legs.

 

 

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, was published in July 2013. Her mystery, Bear-Trapped: In a Trashy Hollywood Novel, was published in February 2015 and her latest book, Sounding the Depths: Memories with Music, was published in Dec. 2017. She has won many awards for her work.  She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been Editor’s Pick on Salon.com multiple times. She was the organizer and first president of the Writers Alliance (www.writersalliance.org). Her work is published in England, Ireland, Germany, Australia and India.

 

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