2024

 

 

FEBRUARY

 

 

Bharti Bansal, Mark Belair, Frances Boyle, Bob Bradshaw, Lynn Hoggard,

Laura Celise Lippman, Niall Machin, Beth McDonough, Ruby Hansen Murray,

Michael Salcman, Alison Stone, Stephen Wing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BHARTI BANSAL

 

Womanhood

 

Women are working in the fields.
Their backs bent to cut corn plants
Remind me of colliding nature of world
The seamless motions of their calloused hands
Have held the sickle like a kitchen knife
The orange of the corn
Melts into the orange of the sun
As I believe in the audacity of this plant
To grow as tall as my desires to be a visible human here
What else does this earth provide anyway
If not a solace for home
It almost resembles my mother's first saree
That I was able to wear
I have no remembrance of how it looked
But I feel the cold of its nostalgic absence on my bare body
When I am not breathing aloud
To prove my existence
Women have collected corn in their baskets
I grow weary for them
To know that a world can converge into a corn
Its revolution around the centre of wild flowers
That feast on soil like parasites
I believe women have a way of finding meaning
In places where sentences diverge after periods
They laugh, loud crackles of laughter
A mirror shattering, bewildered by its infinite image
A river's self acceptance after accusation of flooding villages
Womanhood is a shelter here
I bask in its autonomy
My own back bending to pick up a corn
That left a trace of its orphaned basket

 

Bharti Bansal is a student from India currently residing in Himachal Pradesh. She loves cats, dogs and poetry. She can be reached at her instagram @useless_thought25 

 

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MARK BELAIR

 

Ambulance

 

Its siren recedes,

as if to reflect

 

a life, in it,

receding.

 

Then the sound

dies away,

 

and home sounds

return:

 

moth wings

at a reading lamp,

 

a kitchen kettle

rousing,

 

canned laughter

from a television

 

in a room

far down the hall.

 

Snow Sketch

 

Two days

after heavy snow,

 

a line of it

slips off a tree branch.

 

No movement anticipated it.

No second snow line slips.

 

Its timetable was intrinsic.

One no one could see.

 

And its absence, small as it is,

alters the snow-sketched tree.

 

Though vanished

into the vast snowpack

 

below, it leaves

a slight, evanescent—

 

but its own—

legacy.

 

Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Harvard Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is the author of seven collections of poems and two works of fiction: Stonehaven (Turning Point, 2020) and its sequel, Edgewood (Turning Point, 2022).  Please visit www.markbelair.com

 

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FRANCES BOYLE

 

Moby Doll

 

Don't call me killer, the young whale

whispered to the man who harpooned

 

him. And the world heard the whisper,

watched as his orca family buoyed

 

him on the surface, so he could breathe

as he healed. The whale they dubbed

 

Moby Doll let himself be towed, leash-

led to a harbour pen, and the world saw

 

the killer-lie fall away as he tolerated

touch, took fish from human hands.

 

They saw a laughing mouth, and smiled 

in return. And they mourned as he failed

 

to thrive, and died. Then every aquarium

sought to have their own killer turned clown,

 

for crowds to marvel as orcas leapt, their

smarts on show. I took my own daughters

 

to see Bjossa and Finna soar. Kids, awed

by the black and white giants, the magnificent

 

glides. Me, discomfited to see them circling

in concrete pond, instead of lob-tailing,

 

doing breaches and spyhops out in the straits.

Whispers on waves. Sixty years after first

 

encountering man, Moby Doll phantom-

roams coastal waters with his transient clan

 

Note: Captured in British Columbia in 1964, Moby Doll was the first orca (aka killer whale) to survive in captivity for more than a few days, and one of the first to be displayed in a public aquarium exhibit.

 

Frances Boyle’s most recent book is Openwork and Limestone. Her other books include a short story collection, a novella and two earlier poetry collections. A Canadian author living in Ottawa, Frances’s recent/forthcoming publications include The Honest Ulsterman, The New Quarterly, Ink Sweat & Tears and Freefall. For more: www.francesboyle.com; @francesboyle19.

 

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BOB BRADSHAW

 

Butterfly Weed

 

The petunias flaunt their purple dresses
and their petticoats like can-can girls.
The geraniums on the fire escape
lean out with their bright faces

 

like children along a parade route.
Everywhere I am welcomed.
with festive oranges and yellows.

 

The perfumed ladies in lavender
forgive my mistakes at the office.

 

They are as forgiving as children
on birthdays. Old sins
are not logged. There is no memory
of lost annuals, or plants dug out

 

with leaf mold. Every day I bring
long drinks of water to this garden.
Like the butterfly weed, I long to live

 

only for the moment, my days
diaries of water and sun.

 

The Orchestra

 

We played
for a bit of extra food,
for extra blankets
—thin as scarves—

 

and to lose ourselves,
like lifeboats adrift in mists,
rowing our bows
across our strings.

 

Sometimes we played
when new arrivals
were escorted by guards
to the gas chambers.

 

As I bowed I imagined
the children, mothers, old men
inside, turning, staring—
bewildered
by the shower’s blank walls.

 

What could a prisoner
working inside the crematorium do
afterwards but hook their bodies
with poles,
and drag them to the lift
where they were hoisted
to the furnaces?

 

If they were lucky a stoker
would utter a Kaddish
before pushing them into the flames,
their smudges of ash
dirtying the empty
sky.

 

All while our music played,
not the lively pace
of music dispensed
when work details
marched in and out of camp

 

but songs played as beautifully
as we could muster,
the last sounds they might hear.
At times, despite the risk
a trumpet would erupt
into sobs, a violin
weep.

 

Bob Bradshaw lives in retirement in the Bay Area, south of San Francisco.  He is a fan of the Rolling Stones.  Mick may not be gathering moss, but Bob is.  Bob is still looking for the perfect hammock to spend retirement in.  Some of Bob’s poems can be found at Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, Blue Lake Review, Dodging the Rain, Ekphrastic Review and the Wise Owl. “Butterfly Weed” was first Published October 28, 2021 in Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY

 

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LYNN HOGGARD

 

To Enter a Painting

 

First, look at the painting a long time.

Admire the whole and each of its parts—

the land, the trees, the water, and

especially the sky.

 

Then, notice an invitation, lower left,

where a bit of a path opens up

among the scruffy bushes everywhere.

Take it.

 

You’ll pass through something like a gate.

Continue on to what might be a pond.

Stand awhile beside it, dreaming.

Then, look up:

 

The sky streams boundless above you—

blazing white clouds masking the sun;

other clouds, streaked in rose and gold, 

trailing strips of color into infinite space. 

 

Let yourself be caught up

in this splendid show, this rushing glory—

the sky pouring itself out above you,

for you, across you, through you.

 

And beyond all this, see the blue, blue, blue

of eternity, beckoning.

 

Lynn Hoggard received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Southern California and taught at Midwestern State University, where she was professor of English and French and the coordinator of humanities. In 2003, the Texas Institute of Letters awarded her the Soeurette Diehl Fraser award for best translation. Her books, Bushwhacking Home (TCU Press, 2017), and First Light (Lamar University Press, 2022) won the 2018 and the 2023, respectively, Press Women of Texas awards for best book of poetry.

 

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LAURA CELISE LIPPMAN

 

Poem About My Grandma, Circa 1910

 

For some, it takes too much thinking.

You try to gather your courage

and look down the craw of the law.

 

For some, there’s no choice;

not enough money, not enough food,

no partner, no parents, plenty of poor.

 

Climb onto the kitchen table,

hide the other kids in the closet;

fetch the knitting needle,

 

flame it on the stove;

the turkey baster hot from the pot,

the warm towel from the line.

 

Do the deed,

the white rag packing the wound,

leave a trail of blood—

 

to the outhouse, if you’re lucky,

or hospital with its sulfurous wards—

then the next step may be the grave.

 

For my grandma, it was one, then another,

then another—no birth control allowed.

A legion of babies; half born alive and half made dead.

 

For some, here we go again.

 

Providence Lying-In Hospital For Women And Girls, 1970

 

Girls, we called them girls,  

and they really were girls,

screaming and writhing.

 

Laboring in cage-like cribs,

strapped down by nurses and nuns,

hatted with wimples and caps.

How I remember.

 

I need to check you right now, dearie!

they’d say. Come on, spread your legs—

You can do it, remember you did it before?

You liked it?

 

I could barely watch,

a college senior,

with a med student friend.

 

1970, winter, so long ago.

The cobbled streets

were slick with dirty snow.

 

Some girls screamed

in a twilight of drugs—

Demerol, morphine—

dimming their screams

in the fog of labor.

 

The girls thrashed and howled,

they suffered the muscle burn

of wombs pushing

against the inevitable.

 

Did the nuns relish suffering?

Was it JUST punishment after all?

Onto Jesus for their sins.

 

Inside the crates of their own fears,

the girls were whisked

into the delivery rooms

as their babies crowned.

 

Once inside, octopus limbs of metal

waited to embrace pulsing bodies.

Their arms and legs bound and strapped,

birth portal obscured by sterile drape;

the girls pushed if they could,

babies grasped and pulled by forceps-wielding 

med students, barely over the threshold of manhood.

 

SEE ONE, DO ONE, TEACH ONE was the mantra

one day to be mine.

 

Upstairs on the dimly lit eighth floor,

the wards were deathly quiet,

the air sodden with the sulfurous smell

of rotten eggs

tinged with the mildew scent of failing viscera

of comatose girls, bilious and bloated

after metal hangers pierced

their gravid spaces.

 

Laura Celise Lippman’s work has appeared in Apricity Magazine, Avatar Review, Brief Wilderness,  Pontoon Poetry, Poydras Review, Journal of Family Practice, The Meadow, Neologism Poetry Journal, New English Review, Red Ogre Review, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, Spotlong Review, Synkroniciti, and The Vashon Loop. She is a co-author of the book Writing While Masked, Reflections of 2020 and Beyond. She attended Bryn Mawr College and received her M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania. She practiced medicine for thirty-seven years and raised two children in the Pacific Northwest. 

 

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NIALL MACHIN

 

What my father taught me

 

To fold newspaper sheets diagonally to create origami firelighters

That the man on the ball should have the easiest

Job on the pitch

That making your children happy at any cost

Is ultimately flawed

That having a sense of humour is the most important family attribute

Apart from loyalty

That a ham roll will blow out of a trumpet if blown with sufficient force

That a father’s face entering a hospital ward is like all the planetary suns shining at once

That the phrase ‘lucky at cards, unlucky in love’

Is right only fifty percent of the time over the course of

Two marriages

That a parent’s pain is the cruellest pain

That ultimately love is the most valuable commodity

And can be stored up over the years

To be used in the coldest, most desperate times

When I couldn’t maintain his mantra of everything in moderation

 

The Whin and the Wane

 

Tumbling coastal hillsides

Resplendent with yellow furze

A whiff of the Caribbean

As you squeezed the flower head between

                        finger and thumb

To the sound of flint on flint

No smoke, no danger

No redcoats seeking wreckers below

But stonechats

As sentinels

Observing us dualling about the genealogy

Of petty whin

Still a yaffle broke the deadlock

Laughter coming through the trees

The ghost of a lost bugler

 

You said I had a thing for girls

Who drove VW

Beetles

As we listened again to

                        Cattle and Cane

By the famously unsuccessful Go Betweens

And I wondered about the whereabouts

Of my father’s watch

And why such timepieces

So often function as memorial devices

Freezing time

Capturing time inside a glass shell

That if you put it to you ear

You can detect a faint heartbeat and

I think of him, his even ways

The family spirit level

 

Wide eyed clifftop cottages omniscient

As we laboured the treacherous

Switchback path system

Whilst discussing the merits of

                        wattle and daub

To you the former was a turkey neck    

A sign of ageing

Yet we concluded

A jowl was somehow

More befitting in terms of

Facial architecture

You brought up Cher

And just left her up there

On the hillside

Hanging

Like Dorian Gray

 

When things go hideously wrong

 

When things go hideously wrong

You will find me snorkelling in Discovery Bay

James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies close at hand

Seemingly endless red stripe

And the odd ray floating past

 

When the roof looks like it’s about to cave in

You will find me opening a decrepit wooden gate

Into the Ocoa Valley high up in the Andes

An oasis of wine palms in the clouds

Marvelling at Des Mur’s wiretails and searching for the rare crag chilia

 

When the shitstorm hits town

You will find me basking in late autumn sunlight

On Porthellick Beach, Isles of Scilly

In vintage store pastel blue crewneck and my girlfriend’s

50s brown plastic sunglasses

 

When the world finally goes to hell in a hand basket

You will find me stood on the side of a single-track road

Amid a vast U-shaped valley on mainland Shetland

Dropped off by a slowly disappearing farm truck

And waiting, in glorious technicolour silence, for the next thing to come along.

 

Niall Machin has had poems featured in Bath Magg, Atrium Poetry, 192 Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Anthropocene Poetry. He lives in Wiltshire, UK, working as an ecologist mostly watching the skies and bothering moths.

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Gellért

 

Well, we've all bubbled up in worse places,
come through a bit of grit, have we not?
Yes, we've often left hard situations

effervescing strange expectations.
You rise, make the best of your lot.
 

I'd not suggest my cult started with Celts,

but it had clarified certain aims

when the Turks came, waist-deep in warm silt.
Any number of unnamed grim Pagans.

Magical medicinals. Flexi claims.

Not my business to dismiss or try to prove.

They topped me with a hospital. Then this

grand hotel, with their chosen Saint's name,
borrowed shades of a local hill martyrdom.
I simply needed to exist.  Do the biz.

Of course those Soviets had to chip away
all traces of faith. But I really fizzed,
did my thing. So they let me charm on,
rush through my own Secessionist temple.
Trust me; no-one named this palace for him.

 

Watch that woman, now slipping through me.
She films mind-dreams, reels columned light
in air, stone and glass' veneration.
All of them, every last one of them, comes here
to worship me. A gas. Oh yes, I've done alright.
 

Buddon Ness lighthouses

 

Cluttered by accompanying cottages,
the paired leviathans are stranded in ling,
collapsing, and gated behind razor wire rings.

Rabbit-gnawed scrub chews into wild thyme,

pink through cracked tarmac, now oranged with moths.
Sometimes a parked van shies behind locks.
 

Sailors once charted paths by their coupled glare
over the Bar. Where the Tay fights the sea,
they trusted their counsel, to enter or leave.

Now only those wandering land seek their news,
as long sandbanks shift more in the Firth.
Sea's exchanges with land are no longer fixed.
 

Beth McDonough reviews for DURA and elsewhere, and co-hosts Platform Sessions in Fife. Her first solo pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. She was Makar of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2022, Currently she's working on a hybrid project on outdoor swimming, and a jointly-authored collection.

 

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RUBY HANSEN MURRAY

 

Alders

 

Yesterday we walked the refuge. Geese strung high to the east. A man with a grizzled beard down his neck, a crushed hat, an open plaid shirt, held a log splitter. A fir in pieces at his feet. He stood near the rangers’ house, their fan of drift wood, the virgin’s palms open to us all.

 

On the dike, two eagles called.

 

In the years I’ve watched, the alders have become ragged trunks, holey.

The road is bare of the blackberries, salmonberries, snow berries that sheltered birds. A snake flattened, a smear of red blood, black skin edged by a light underside. A coverlet unfolded too quickly across the sky.

 

We live with ghosts, too full of ourselves to see.

Salmon, too, in ghost runs, sea lions barking beyond.

 

Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News. She’s a MacDowell fellow with work in Cascadia: A Field Guide (Tupelo Press), Ecotone, Pleiades, The Hopkins Review, River Mouth Review, Under the Sun, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives along the Columbia River.

 

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MICHAEL SALCMAN

 

Searching

 

These are the Middle Ages

We are half way there

 

And back—

Listen to the keening voices

The cries of infants 

Searching for their bodies

 

Asking their executioners 

To stop waving axes like flags

As if any spirits might listen

To prayers woven in hate.

 

These are the Middle Ages

Before the printing press arrives

And electricity

Before antibiotics and sanitation

When the Devil ruled with torches

 

And nothing like humility had been invented

By the young and crawling—

No science or enlightenment 

No means of communication 

No perspective drawn in the dark.

 

We are still young and crawling.

 

Michael Salcman: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical subjects, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022.

 

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ALISON STONE

 

Lilith’s Daughter on a Date

 

Boiled to angelic iridescence, the trout

on your plate shines.

 

Fish are souls not bound

by mammal skin,

 

the burdens of cow or Jew. 

Bloodless, they evade

 

the Law. I am

a wave chained to the moon.

 

Punish me for its brightness,

but I will not

 

shave my dangerous

hair. Who’s to say that rage

 

cannot be carried on a chromosome,

the second X,

 

the extra cross to carry?

I’m no fool -- if Pharaoh

 

let me choose,

I’d grab the jewels, 

 

my un-singed tongue a serpent

poised to slither down your skin.

 

Above my bed, a golden

calf gleams. Be my chosen one --

 

marked man

with the scarred mouth,

 

peeled sex smooth as fruit.

My legs part like the sea.

 

Alison Stone has published eight full-length collections and three chapbooks, most recently To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023)). She was awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. A licensed psychotherapist, she is also a visual artist and the creator of The Stone Tarot.

 

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STEPHEN WING

 

The Saga of Western Avenue

 

Whenever I hear

“Have a good day, now!” (bus driver)

and “All right now, you

take care!” (departing passenger) I

can’t help leaning a little

into the microscopic

disturbance of molecules we call

language, ecstatic ripple

in the mass of air—

“You have a good one now!” (disembarking

black dude dressed up for Sunday

or Saturday night this

weekday morning) and “Have

the same yourself!” (bus driver, young

and handsome underneath his

mirrored shades) and I can’t help

breathing all I can of that

audible sunshine, light

vibrating down its spectrum

to the human range, dancing

from a human voicebox to human eardrums,

down the thin string to a human brain—

“Y’all have a good day!”

(bus driver, laughing with the girls as men

get off downtown in their

business suits, pale against the heat

and unreciprocal) and

departing myself I can’t help

breathing it all right

back out again:  “You

take care, now!” (swinging down

at the other end of my

crosstown ride, the bypass

behind me) and

“Same to ya—”

 

Junebug

 

A junebug landed on his head, and he could see:

he felt the tiny clasping claws,

the buzz of wings between his eyebrows as

the six legs hugged him, hard,

just above the bridge of his nose—

place known variously as sixth chakra,

center of intellect and will,

or third eye, sensing organ of delight—

 

And not five minutes ago he had edged to the door

with that same junebug on his leg,

or its impostor, but lost it

somewhere on the way: this time, lumbering

crosseyed across the carpet,

he made it out the door and somehow

flung the thing away.

 

But love or loyalty

or hunger, dumb intuition, some old

locust will, vast insect wisdom— Christ,

he thinks, stand gulping down the air:

the junebug, crawling up his forehead to the seventh

or crown chakra, thousand-petaled lotus,

gateway to divinity that completes

the human mass-to-energy equation—

 

The junebug flew from the top of his head

to his raised fingertip:  he regarded it

by starlight, grasped it gently, drew back

and tossed it to the stars.

 

Stephen Wing lives in Atlanta, where he serves on the boards of the Lake Claire Community Land Trust and Nuclear Watch South. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Wild Atlanta, inspired by his “Earth Poetry” workshops exploring the city’s many urban greenspaces. Visit him at StephenWing.com.

 

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