2014

 

 

JANUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

Tim J. Brennan, Holly Burnside, Kanchan Chatterjee,

Chloe N. Clark, Nicola Daly, Bayleigh Fraser, R. W. Haynes,

M. J. Iuppa, Patrick Lodge, Joan McNerney, Todd Mercer,

Dayna Patterson, Bekah Steimel, Kate Venables, Sarah White.

 

 

 

TIM J. BRENNAN

 

1951

 

This is a poem

about missing

*

about arms needing to reach

out to brush grass from your back,

telling you everything you will ever

need is here, will always be here

and green & budding like spring

and you not quite believing this

*

about a voice, a throat pink

and smooth, speaking of Betty,

the dancer, clicking her heels

at Bar Harbor to Rosemary Clooney's

"Beautiful Brown Eyes"

or Jonny Ray's "Cry"

about eyes picturing a ripe summer,

telling her she is beautiful without

speaking, thinking of a rose,

instead offering a white daisy

"love," you say, "is all about opportunity"

*

about words so far apart they are

more like fireflies, blinking messages

and you saying after the music stops,

"let's go lean against my car and look

at the stars until we both go blind"

*

about tongues and red liquorice

and how they sweet and curl

and how you still liked both,

even after forty-seven years

of marriage

*

This is a poem

about missing

all these things

  

 

Tim J Brennan's poems can be found at Whispering Shade, The Original Van Gogh's Anthology, Handful of Dust, Talking Stick, Unshod Quills, and other nice places. Brennan's one act plays have been produced in Bethesda MA, Chicago, San Diego, Rochester MN, and most recently in Bloomington, ILL.

 

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HOLLY BURNSIDE

 

 

My River is a Woman

 



My river is a woman, dancing glory gray, under

twilight risen, winged, above her. The sweetened air

loves her, kisses her with industrial dust, lips like steel.

The birds stand at her edges, pecking tenderly, rooting

for clams and crayfish. River fish want her caress,

leaves bend to touch her, the bank weighs heavy against her,

girding twisted roots that reach into her to drink.

 

My river is a woman bent damp beneath her burdens,

serpentine, back-tracking, but moving earth, moving stones,

these rounded curves overcoming, buoying, under the press

of freighters' hard hulls. The power to chew out their

bellies is her weapon, her protection. She is a nation

of abandoned tires, a forest for fish, a leader treading

lonely to drop like diamonds into the open wombs of lakes.

 

This river is a dream, another woman's secret trembling hope,

she is the way that marks promise beyond dust, beyond fields

of corn, beyond factories. She is the way out, and what we remember,

our shoes on her drought rocks, crisp crunching beneath the white-hot

summer sky, what we see in sheets of January ice, and we are the leaves

moved along her skin, the toes that mud her willing bed.

 

  

Holly Burnside is a poet and photographer from Toledo, Ohio. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Harpur Palate, Country Dog Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Toledo Free Press Star and Pirene's Fountain. She is also co-editor of Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and has worked as the creative writing workshop facilitator at Aurora House, a local transitional home that serves women who are working to overcome substance abuse problems, homelessness, and domestic violence.

 

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KANCHAN CHATTERJEE

 

 

Grandpa stories



The knife blade gleamed

In the dim light

 

He didn't say a thing

 

Just shook

His head, twice,

Smiled

 

Started his story

About those British officers

 

Who camped

On the banks of Kosi

 

The rails were coming up fast, here

 

Sometime in 1939

 

He said. . .

 

 

Madhepura



Soft sun rays peek through the mango
tree leaves

The grass beneath

Has turned yellow, there's a small path

Leading to the well

Not much water in it these days

 

The house

At the edge

Is still there

 

Baijnath will not

Hold my hand

And take me to the small boat

 

He's almost eighty now

He only smiles

 

At me these days

Asks for some money or a

Cigarette. . .

 

  

This time he was not happy about the bus

 

He was nagging -- about everything, about

The dark outside the window,

'No moon'

He said.

 

He swore at

The fast pace of the Volvo and

The confident driver.

 

He didn't even drink this time

Though I'd offered him

Some of my Whiskey.

 

He wasn't really feeling happy

Going home

This time. . .

 

 

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CHLOE N. CLARK

 

Other Heights

 

You know those climbers on Everest?

The ones who never came down?

I hear that they're still intact; perfect sculptures of who they once were.

Some fairy tale logic; but would a kiss be warm enough to melt their lips?

And what would you do in the world where it was?

And I heard they were found by a man who didn't plan on reaching the top. His

summit was them.

And how did they look to him?

Were they statues or ghosts or just men asleep?

He must have stared for awhile; blinking to make sure it wasn't a trick. Some

act of snow blindness.

Did he think for a second about how strange it was?

Or remember the stories like this?

The ones Medusa changed to stone, the woman becoming salt for one last look,

that treacherous

mountain to the water of life and those pebbles are the souls of men and so much

prettier than bones.

When he reached out for them was it in surprise?

Or was it in elation that someone had finally found them?

These young men come to ice.

  

 

Chloe N. Clark is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her work has appeared such places as Rosebud, Prick of the Spindle, Neon, Utter, and more. She is at work on a novel and can be followed on Twitter @pintsandcupcakes. Visit her website here

 

 

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NICOLA DALY

 

 I Allow the Gravity of Memory to Take Me.

 

Desire

They spiked my oxygen with it so I couldn't stand.

Suddenly I was there in the green grass of the photographs.

Back home with the smell of the clothes just off the line.

I could feel the apple, his skin against the palm of my hand.

The fields of stubbly wheat stretched out before me like a red carpet.

I was to walk it. As I did, my lungs began to fill up with yesterday.

Falling

I was feverish and swooning. When I stretched out my hand

I could almost touch the old life, it stood glittering before me.

I wanted the hibiscus champagne, the music bleeding into my skull.

I needed my clumsy feet to miss the steps, to steal his chips.

I had to hear his voice whispering in my ear and dance backwards

through, the city at dawn as if I had conquered.

Take

Suddenly I folded like a leaf. There was no thrashing or need for a brick

to cosh me like a cod just reeled in. I had forgotten about the past

with his lies, split lips and fear. I melted into the arms of memory

as its limbs secured themselves around my girth.

Take me back, I whispered in its ear.

 

 

Nicola Daly's work has been widely published in magazines such as The Rialto, Magma, The Flea, The Red Wheel Barrow, The Shop, Southwords, Myslexia and many more.

 

 

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BAYLEIGH FRASER

 

 

History of Home

 

Inside the world of lightning bugs,

the word off seems inconsequential,

as they flitter, honeyed and small, over

the cobbled wall around my grandfather's house.

The thoraxes protrude and flicker on neon,

then off dark. They gather then disperse,

exulting in themselves, their light bumbling

through the air, as if skipping over molecules.

 

The windows of the house seem opaque,

but they cradle the reflection of the fireflies,

little moons orbiting, chaotic in their way,

elemental things, faceless things, that seem

like souls or bodies, real bodies tapping like wings,

ensnared inside a bulb. If I look hard enough

into the house, I can see its age, each bug lighting up

a wrinkle, uprooting a cancer, discovering bones, a carbon date –

 

and how long have I been watching

and how long has it been off?

I used to be so hungry for the on:

the fever on my blood, the dog on my leash,

the hair on my brows, the sunlight on my machine.

 

The air where the fireflies float

doesn't seem real. Fractured, some fissure

in the wall that holds them inside this place.

If only stillness. If only the ground drew open

its jaws and extricated these motherless moons

as the house pilfered their light and their endlessness,

and then it was morning.

 

 

He Loved Rough Women

 

In my poem, she was a strange home,

examining the intricate tattoos breathing through

 

her skin and wondering if they'd branded

her bone. She was so thin. She practiced being

 

thin, and then practiced being heavy

to even the score. She swore. Her mouth

 

protruded and left behind her body. I never

let her pray, enchant, as she abandoned her flesh

 

in a clover field then a dank downtown bar

and hoped someone else would call it home,

 

would find its spirit rising, or risen, into some old

window. In my draft, she was a window of her own

 

piercing through a bearded man as he looked at her

rat hair and back tattoo, as if the black cracked her

 

delicate glass body, which led her mouth to ask

what was wrong with a little crack every now

 

and again. And again, I wrote her unbelievable,

unbelieving inside her paler skin. She colored her head

 

red, and I wondered how much more of her I could have.

I was too greedy, hiding her brittle bones in the poem,

 

throwing her remnants, her photographs, in a bonfire

that extended like space, like universe, as red as her hair,

 

and lied to the reader, copycatted itself, outwardly

a glass box and inwardly a girl organ. If she was

 

cancer, she was mine, rough and ungodly,

making me old and poisoned, more so

 

than the poison that killed me, and I loved

the swollen, shady page. I loved her with rage.

 

 

Bayleigh Fraser is an American poet currently residing in Canada with her husband and two children. She studied English at Stetson University and plans to continue her education in Canada. Her poetry has appeared in A Bad Penny Review, Motley Press, The Social Poet, and elsewhere. Bayleigh is the editor of Caesura Poetry Magazine, an electronic magazine that publishes new and emerging poets. You can find her online here

 

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R. W. HAYNES

 

The Sun Stands Still over Statenville

 

The Spaniards must have been relieved that day

To think that at this point, where a cool creek

Finds a shady river, they could speak

Of gold as they slapped gnats and flies away.

Lusty hope rekindling on this bluff

Galvanized their murderous energy

And thrust them on toward futility,

Grasping madly for fantastic stuff.

The insects are still here, and the sun

Still burns intensely, and its force

Still mocks ambition's empty course,

As time forgets what conquerors have done,

And Spanish music now dispels its charm

On the long, hot rows of the flatwoods farm.

 

 

The Shrill Small Voice from the Ship of Folios

 

Noun me no verbs, Mrs. Roosevelt,

I meant what I said about your hat: though

That pleased you not, it was how I felt,

And I am delighted to have let you know.

Would you care for leeks? My slave picked these

Last month by the Suwanee, on a misty night;

Brushed with grackle feathers, scented with cheese,

They generate visions of country delight.

It was a gray day when justice died,

And I will never forget the dreadful sound

As fish were scaled and fresh okra fried

And bad jokes fell like burning hail to ground.

Do you have a light? Excellent. Merci.

Poetry, you know, loves company.

  

 

The Year the River Dried

 

If it mattered that no one said anything now,

No doubt someone would say something no one

Would remember, so one conclusion

Would be it doesn't matter anyhow,

As if that were worth that gust of breath

Added to the gusts of this empty place.

But welcome to these empty winds we face,

Say I, and to this echoing valley of death,

Where on the rocks lie endless scattered bones

Awaiting the call to bring from all directions

Dead dry bones and give them live connections,

Flesh and skin and life among these stones.

Here this silent power justifies

Your long absence, and impatience flies.



 

R. W. Haynes battles the slipknot of time and the noose of misfortune with as much dignity as he can collect. History refuses to depart from this struggle, though anticipation may seem to jeer. Poetic escape to nature takes the guise of lyric, and Haynes is there, somewhere, admiring the Delphic Oracle, wishing he could have a glass of wine with Spenser.

 

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M. J. IUPPA

 

 The Company I Keep

 

I waited in winter's twilight, thinking

about the extra minutes of light that candled

pink on the horizon of the frozen lake, wanting

 

to have another hour before the hour of darkness

descended upon the little things that made this

landscape a distant past— one I remembered

 

day after night, after day— the slow decline

of an achy farmhouse. I do not want to die here,

even though I have given my life to turning

 

over the garden's hard earth for the plucked

satisfaction of a basket full of ripe tomatoes

& red peppers. I thought this was the portrait

 

of a good life— something I could share.

When I returned from my walk, I stood

in the kitchen near the woodstove

 

and took off my boots and coat and sat

with the dark that had crept in ahead of me

& made itself at home.

 

 

A Winning Hand

 

This is the weathered atlas unfolded;

This is your forefinger tracing blueline roads to anywhere but home;

This is the brick house in the city where you stood in the shadows waiting;

This is the motel bed you slept in more than once;

This is what I remember, your hands holding my face until I opened my eyes;

This is uncomfortable, knowing my memories will outlive you;

This is us, sharing meals in oily taverns; your smoky voice telling an exhausted story;

This is how it ends, with an air kiss and nod, pulling on a heavy winter coat,

Never turning back.

 

 

M. J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Her most recent poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Chariton Review, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, The Prose Poem Project, and The Centrifugal Eye, among other publications. Her most recent poetry chapbook is As the Crow Flies (Foothills Publishing, 2008), and her second full-length collection is Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collections, 2010). Between Worlds, a prose chapbook, was published by Foothills Publishing in May 2013. She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

 

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PATRICK LODGE

 

C'an Freixa

 

A kingfisher flies out of the trees;

as complete as a telescope

closing in on itself with a snap,

it hits the window hard, drops.

 

In my hand it lies, gaudy,

useless as a lost evening purse.

But it's the bird's absence I feel,

palpable, in the garden where

 

goodbyes hung like condolences,

hugs were straitjacket embraces.

The empty air still holds the drag

of blue light, a rolling bolt of silk

 

like a neon ripple; a memory,

a slick feathering of the lemon

tree leaves, wet with sour rain

that dropped like tears on a pietá.

 

You drove away from C'an Freixa,

maybe looking in your mirrors;

the ones that say, careful, objects

might be nearer than they appear.

 

 

Patrick Lodge was born in Wales, lives in Yorkshire and travels on an Irish passport. His poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies in England, Wales, Ireland, Greece, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. He was a prize winner in the 2009 Envoi International competition. His first collection An Anniversary of Flight was published by Valley Press in October 2013.

 

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JOAN MCNERNEY

  

Winter Watch

 

Tangled...one ragged

leaf clings to the bough.

 

Stopping to see the

shape of a snowflake.

 

Winter storm warning.

Headlights beam at noon.

 

More amazing than

redwood forests...

your ice blue eyes.

 

Came home just in time

for the first dizzy dance

of December flurries.

 

All day my windows

chatter like nervous teeth.

 

Crystals spin together in

joyful pirouette...a cool ballet.



 

Joan McNerney's poetry has been included innumerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Blueline, Spectrum, three Bright Spring Press Anthologies and several Kind of A Hurricane Publications. She has been nominated three times for Best of the Net. Four of her books have been published by fine small literary presses.

 

 

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TODD MERCER

 

In the Lee of Stones

 

I seen them down at Easter Springs,

singing hymns on Sunday; then the Reverend

in his second best suit

stepped into that slow river,

dunked them Saved below the surface.

He said Jesus was there with them,

there to clear the books, to set them free.

 

After they trudged off home, dripping,

I folded my pants and waded in.

Made for a pool in the lee of stones,

called to God, "Where have you been?"

Went under until my heart near burst.

I felt nothing, no presence,

only breath stretched to precious.

 

Back in my room at the livery,

I drip dry, despair my slim wisdom.

Can't believe what can't be seen.

All that's certain is Change and

Everlasting Persistence

and the rules of basic math --

 

take a penny    leave a penny

pack out everything

you carried in.

 

Calendar's Last Page

 

Fever date-stamped Calendar's way off Earth

some time Friday evening.

Everyone was busy then;

he didn't even tell his friends he was under the weather,

or they would've come knocking,

rehashing town-painting days,

leaving him soup (which he doesn't eat),

cancelling their movie plans

and sit-down meals out

and the office midnight oil.

 

The coroner thinks he passed from life

watching sit-coms—at least more dignified than

checking out by auto-erotic misadventure,

but worse than nearly all the other ways.

You try finding the final light home

to a laugh track of captive souls,

as an off-screen producer jabs the playback tabs,

spastic, like Pavlov's brainwashed dog.

 

An omniscient narrator

could zip between the fanned-out friends,

note their entertainments from the fly's eye view,

contrast those diversions to

the last square Calendar marked off.

An omniscient narrator could've been a bigger help,

summoned paramedics, stuck close,

changed the poor man's TV channel,

sang a good Kaddish.

 

So though it changes nothing to know

who was chewing steak at the time,

who weighed a kiss to give or withhold

at the Gone With the Wind revival,

the living can't help but hand-wring, aim blame,

they murmur their half-formed mea culpas,

mortuary if-onlies with an impotent awe.

 

Calendar is off recycling;

no one knew his mercury had spiked.

 

 

Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival's Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes in 2013. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer's poetry appears in Thema, Blue Collar Review, and Black Spring Review; his flash fiction is forthcoming in Dunes Review and Apocrypha and Abstractions.

 

 

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DAYNA PATTERSON

 

Morning

 

sneaks into your bedroom,

gently nudges your arm

long before you're ready to wake up.

 

Muzzy, you follow her outside,

pick a feather from her tousled hair,

her skin cool to the touch.

 

She is abuzz and hardly draws breath,

chatters like an excited bird, a chipper cricket,

tugs on your hand to point out a raven,

the blue-black wings of a butterfly,

the lime-green body of a bug,

a skewed track of giant ants.

 

She is too young to be your protectoress

against bird droppings that fall

from a lamppost, but she'll laugh

as you leaf it off.

 

Enchanted, you watch her light step

along the path, her pale nightgown

turned to gold. Swallow those nettles

of how quickly she grows,

how too soon the hot glare

of her adolescence will burn you both.

You'll be sorry to see her go.

Your dreams are woven in one cloth.

 

Before long, she's gone

with a promise to return and bring

souvenirs of sunlight for everyone.

 

Dayna Patterson's chapbooks, Loose Threads (2010) and Mothering (2011), are available from Flutter Press. She is Poetry Editor for Psaltery & Lyre.

 

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BEKAH STEIMEL

  

I.

 

Write with ego

edit with humility

write wasted

write sober

then combine them

remember your nightmares

forget your parents

strap brass knuckles to your words

and punch

like a heavyweight

stick and move

never stand still long enough

to disappear

come clean

and get filthy

write for an audience

of one

applaud yourself

and ignore your own heckling

invent a language

tongues will be replicating

in years you will never see

do not settle

do not become simply a memory

breathe past your last breath

pulsating on paper

never fear dying

but write like you are

 

II.

 

Nearly every lover

of

nearly every poet

wants

nearly every line

to trace back to them

I have many trickling tributaries

feeding into my stream of ink

and fluid emotion

I am not one character

in one story

in one book

I am a woman

loved

a woman

who loves

without the cuffs of convention

or common sense

a poet

with a knack for disappointing

nearly every lover

  

III.

 

You were never meant to be

anything

but memories

it can be difficult

to claw your way into a heart

too easy to yawn

and slip out

begin prowling again

you made my body smile

a thousand times

in a hundred different ways

now the simple question

of your eye color stumps me

 

Bekah Steimel is an internationally published poet living in St. Louis, MO (USA) and working  on a first collection, chronicling one lesbian's struggles with addiction, fidelity, mental illness, and mortality. You can find her work in publications such as Gutter Eloquence, Sinister Wisdom, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Vayavya and Verity La. Visit her website here

 

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KATE VENABLES

 

My friend and I go on holiday

 

I get ready for the walk

take a photo of the car.

My boots crush leaves

no smell of wild mint.

Bird flies up through leaves

no alarm call.

Path veers round a ruined house

ferns growing in the window gap

from which no ghosts look,

no voices round the corner.

I drive back to the hotel

take a photo of the car.



 

Kate Venables is a new writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Flash and Lighthouse. She works as a physician and is also enrolled in the creative writing programme  at the University of Oxford.

 

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SARAH WHITE

 

The Missouri of Memory

 

I'll never forget it my mother would say

whether or not it had happened.

Then she forgot it.

No wonder. I can't keep facts

straight either. Take the ceremony

aboard the battleship.

 

I thought it was engraved in my mind

forever but got confused about

the date, assuming it was August,

the month we dropped

the bombs. It was September when

they signed the Terms of Surrender.

 

I listened on the first radio I ever had

in my room. I was eight

and listened with bated breath as if

a last-minute hitch might keep

the men from signing and the war

would last for the rest of my life!

 

But they signed! They signed! MacArthur

in his khaki shirt, the Japanese minister

in his silk hat of shame. Because

they signed I thought the world's sorry

state would change at once,

and become a huge ballroom

 

for President Truman clad

in ermine. Citizens would bring

their wronged lives for him to right.

I'd bring my father, so tired and ill

from the War and a bad heart.

But that day he got out of bed.

 

We walked to the village where bells

were pealing. We sang grateful hymns.

It was the second day,

of September, a month I might

remember as happy except

for the tired heart that stopped

 

on the twenty-fourth.

I'm not sure—

it may have been the day before.

 

 

Remembrance, like a young soldier,

 

sifts the dried earth

through a hand-held screen

on a field north of the Rhine

where a fiery plane went down

long before the sifter, or even

his father, was born. He finds

shreds of uniform, a thumb

of the airman's glove,

plus, now and then, a bone.

He thinks: "I'm glad I'm here.

In time, fallen on a strange

field, I'll long for someone

from home to come

and gather the remains."

  

Sarah White lives, writes and paints in Manhattan. She is the author of Alice Ages and Ages (BlazeVox, 2010), a book of variations; Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), a poetry collection; Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses, (Pudding House, 2007), a chapbook. Visit her website here

 

 

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