2015

 

 

 

JANUARY ARCHIVE

 

 

Josephine Dickinson, Janée J. Baugher, F. Brett Cox, Nancy Davenport, Deirdre Hines, Alicia Hoffman, Cornelia Hoogland, Desirée Jung,  Laura M. Kaminski, Pippa Little, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Nicky Phillips, Fiona Sinclair, Nicole Yurcaba

 

 

 

JOSEPHINE DICKINSON

 

Tribute to Galway Kinnell

 

 

JANÉE J. BAUGHER

 

I Remember

after Anne Sexton’s poem, “I Remember”

 

 

By the fourth of May

the inevitable breathing began

and that’s been the one constancy

as urgent as quills, and is

no shape – no more than

a goblet is shapely, and

we raised each one again,

clanking since the twenty-third

of June and there were times

we forgot to re-cork the imported

bottle of Cabernet and some nights

we left the mail unopened

and late, and newspapers, too, while

spring rose to our mouths

like ruminating livestock, and

one day I wore a white dress

and raffia hat and you said

that I looked quite like

a lemonade girl, and what

I remember best is that

your desk was always

far from mine.

 

 

Kite Flying

 

My father’s kite flew right for a while

then sprang from my hands, to scoot away

and snarl itself on a telephone wire.

 

All day it danced

in the whirling ocean wind,

tethered by its tangled towline.

 

By early morning, our young kite

gone – that plastic rainbow

now free of its rein.

 

I have been its kind:

a colorful spinnaker of dubious design,

seeking reign from my lead.

 

That mighty wind, and me,

trying desperately to hold on –

my father in the distance:

 

Run, catch it!  It’s flying away!

 

 

Study of a Rock

 

Although it feels like a rock

and I’ve been told it’s a rock,

upon spending time with it

 

I discovered it’s merely petrous –

neither gold nor silver

but a languishing grey.

 

Its bout under water:

struggling years in the marriage

between being buoyant and drowned.

 

I see Mother’s face

chiseled in this rock

flat enough to skip.

 

It had remained virtually negligible

among shinier, plumper rocks.

When I warm it between the balls of my hands,

 

it scratches, itching to be released.

I drop it and it regards me,

content on the distance between us.

 

Janée J. Baugher is the author of two poetry collections, The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010).  Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in The Writer’s Chronicle, Boulevard, Nano Fiction, and Nimrod, among other places.  She teaches in the graduate program at Northeastern University.  www.JaneeJBaugher.wordpress.com

 

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F. BRETT COX

 

Robert Lowell In Gloucester, Massachusetts

 

By the dock beneath our room

The boats lie still in the water.

Your cousins sit with us 

Before we all leave for the concert.

I’ve brought two books for the weekend:

Supernatural Noir

And Lowell’s Selected Poems.

You go in the bathroom to change. 

Kathy rests on the bed by the window

And thumbs through the book of stories.

A decade retired from his business

Jerry picks up the poems,

Sits in the chair by the desk,

Opens the book and reads.

“Listen to this,” he says,

And quotes a couple of lines

I haven’t gotten to yet.

I stand in front of the window

And look at the boats and the water.

A proprietary seagull

Commands the length of the dock.

Behind me Jerry says,

“I like the way he writes.”

 

 

F. Brett Cox's fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, with poetry most recently in Kestrel, Manifest West, Even Cowboys Carry Cell Phones, and forthcoming in IthicaLit. Brett is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, and lives in Vermont with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

 

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NANCY DAVENPORT

 

Power Outage (1)

 

there is a ghost

a symphony

 

in my drapes tonight

 

I can hear a loon’s

silent song

 

along with the beginning strains

of O, What a Lovely War

 

while I read Gatsby

in the dark

 

my dog is back

to fetch

 

his phantom ball

 

the drapes are my mom’s

maxi skirt from 1972

 

when she first

found herself

 

alone in this living room

asking questions

 

and watching the drapes

dance in the wind

 

during a power outage

 

 

Nancy Davenport’s first chapbook, La Brinza , was published in May 2014 by Bookgirl Press, and is being distributed in the United States by Mountains and Rivers Press. She is a contributor to editor Daniel Yaryan’s upcoming Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts anthology and her poems are included in editor Alicia Winski’s erotic anthology Under Cover. Nancy’s poems have appeared in The Burning Grape, The Mountain Gazette, The Bicycle Review, The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Lilliput Review, Blue Fifth Review, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, Full of Crow, MAYDAY and City Lit Rag. Nancy was born and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.mountainsandriverspress.org/BookInfo.aspx

 

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DEIRDRE HINES

 

Wishful Seeing

(a double acrostic)

 

those carved images he craved as proof

hammered likenesses of fishbirds

round moon, pointed stars,fiery comet,

only divine chisel he said could author:

unbelief in memory helio

growth of fossil in stone from rain or sun

hoaxes of a form of wishful seeing

lured Beringer to publish his fib.

each search for truth requires forage

next to simian shadow in boreal

slower than blue snail ambered yogi

every egg shell encased by empire.

scavenging sea glass below the cliff

of certainty to bend light from lines.

 

 

Deirdre Hines' first book of poetry, The Language of Coats, was published by New Island Press in 2012. It included the poems which won the Listowel Poetry Collection in 2011. Some of these can be heard by clicking on the You Tube link on her website www.deirdrehines.com  She lives in Letterkenny, a small vibrant town on the west coast of Ireland.

 

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ALICIA HOFFMAN

 

Fair Game

 

And here is a boy who rustled brush

just past Perkiomen basin bordering

the old stone wall of farmer Johnson’s

Pennsylvania barn.  Poaching pheasants

in the afternoon hours before school

let out its last ringing bell, he heard

a soft clang of brown speck signaling

a flight through the bush as he aimed

a soft pop of bullet through the game. 

He felt fair when he shot them high,

the thigh meat not so soaked with that iron

tang of blood.  He’d stack them fully

feathered in the canvas gunnysack

before his truant trespass home. 

That night, his father could feast

and his brothers could eat too much

and sleep that tryptophannic sleep

that puts to drowse the hungry ghosts

they walked most days like living dead.

And here is a boy who grew up

in the ghost-light of the dead promise

of the sixties, the seventies rearing

like copper buck from the daisies

neat green stems that plugged

the chambers of revolvers, so much

swifter to catch now the fickle fowl

camouflaged in the cloud gray dawn,

the green glistening bill belying

a mercury rich reddening until the day

a man met him on the tracks skirting

Maxatawny township just thirty miles

from Philadelphia, shot him once

to the chest then ran away.  And now here

is a boy who became my father, bleeding

on the railroad ties, an unprotected foul

crying from the failure to save what

is right in a life that is less now like living

and more like surviving in a place where

the weapons are nearly invisible,

where flight is more akin to impossible,

who now understands his winged limbs

will never fly proper again, who now

understands his position is marked

like a target:  he who lies his cheek

on the cold steel rail, he whose eyes

that are my own eyes brim like lakes

of liquid : he who curls into a cradle

of himself, only fifteen.  Too young

to scar the past, too old to alter

the future in a moment of wounding,

in a game whose rules he decided

right then are anything but fair.   

 

Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of Like Stardust in the Peat Moss(Aldrich Press, 2013) her poems have been published widely in journals such as Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Tar River Poetry, SOFTBLOW, Camroc Press Review, A-Minor Magazine, Boston Literary Magazine, decomP, and elsewhere.

 

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CORNELIA HOOGLAND

 

Stand-In For Some Category of Dark

 

A son I’ve never met drops in. Fills

the rattan chaise lounge I’ve never owned.

 

And the setting – my childhood town, Nanaimo,

is also weird. It’s for effect – I get that. Back alley,

that narrow strip between orange cigar-flowers

my father grew and the graveyard.

 

My real-life son acts the elder brother, offers

a beer, asks how are you. Catches up.

 

I’m sitting opposite trying to remember giving birth,

a name – nothing. Talk about socially awkward.

There’s family resemblance – his

bruised cloud eyes – that old bag of tricks.

And my sudden-son seems okay –

as if he’s never expected more or different.

Not being held as a baby, not taken to swimming lessons,

nor his 6th birthday celebrated. Isn’t he pissed off?

 

Apparently not. Apparently your family

doesn’t owe you as much as you think.

A family is more like an

open window. The one the sparrow

in Beowulf flies through into the mead hall,

then out another.

Flash of silver, flap, glide –

the only trace, guano on the

 

rattan. In the tableau trees grow

on the periphery of the setting

exactly where you’d want them.

They stand there growing inner

rings, outer bark, offering birds

shelter from the gathering cloud.

Ah the forecast: rain, cold and rainy.

 

But right now it’s happy hour.

No mosquitoes and nobody

shouting or crying, neither does death

seem eager to be off with any of us,

but sits wearing the pink

evening sky, drinking his beer.

 

Cornelia Hoogland has published 6 books of poetry, the most recent is Woods Wolf Girl,(Wolsak and Wynn, 2011). Woods Wolf Girl was one of five finalists for the Relit Best Book of 2011 National Poetry Award. Cornelia’s most recent chapbook is Sea Level (Baseline Press, 2013), a work that was short-listed for the CBC Nonfiction Literary Awards in 2012. Cornelia lives with her visual artist husband and dog on Hornby Island the most northerly of the Gulf Islands on Canada’s west coast.

 

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DESIRÉE JUNG

 

The Old Fridge

 

The man pushes the orange supermarket cart over the train tracks careful not to trip on the river stones along the way. On that side of the valley, the wind blows dust like golden powder, whirling the leaves into a dancing carousel. The snow would make the scene even more congealed, silenced, but it is not there. The sky is limpid and the oscillating light slows down his movements. The creak is dry and the weeds grow through the cracks of the pavement, intersecting the cement’s into a maze of vegetation. Before he lost everything, he dumped his possessions in places like this, the old fridge, the only equipment he finds in this search, reminding him of the one he had in his old kitchen. It is hard to carry it back to the cart, his memories weighting his body. Far away, in the city, someone is enjoying his old apartment, lying in his bed, capturing the warmth. In the clarity of unseen things, trusting, he pushes the cart and continues his journey.

 

Desirée Jung is a Canadian-Brazilian writer and translator. Her background is in creative writing, literary translation, film and comparative literature. She has received her MFA in Creative Writing and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations, poetry and short stories in Exile, The Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Antigonish Review, The Haro, The Literary Yard, Black Bottom Review, Gravel Magazine, Tree House, Bricolage, Hamilton Stone Review, Ijagun Poetry Journal, Scapegoat Review, Storyacious, The Steel Chisel, Loading Zone, Belleville Park Pages, among others. Her website is www.desireejung.com

 

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LAURA M. KAMINSKI

 

Remembrance

 

after reading “This Robe in the Temple of Apollo” from Abayomi Animashaun’s 

Sailing for Ithaca, Black Lawrence Press, 2014

 

We have no sense of what is sacred --

the clay where we were made was

poor soil, lacked sufficient nutrients

for us to grow so much we found

ourselves with three different

sets of clothes: one for work,

another for faith, a third to stay

too late by the fire at night

with friends -- instead, we have

but one robe, same one to work

and pray and play, it is already

stained so we are not afraid

to break a sweat, we will take

any job that’s offered, we will

share the fire with anyone,

sit wherever we’re invited, eat

what we’re served, be genuinely

grateful. We do not come to prayer,

we are already there before

the muezzin’s awake, have already

swept the courtyard clean. We use

a bristle-broom -- its patterned

trail in the pre-dawn sand is

our Qur’an, we stoop and bow

and kneel -- be we do not say

the words of prayer, instead we

listen -- and when we’ve swept

even evidence of our own steps

away, backed out the doorway

bowing in the darkness, then

we shake the dust from our own

and only garment, kiss its stained hem

and whisper our Amen.

And tomorrow, this again, Amen.

And tomorrow, this Amen, again.

 

 

Laura M Kaminski grew up in Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. She's an Associate Editor at Right Hand Pointing; Visit her poetry blog:  www.arkofidentity.wordpress.com

 

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PIPPA LITTLE

 

Pip

 

There’s a church on the salt marsh

with its handkerchief of cemetery

 

mists most days taste of tin

and the wind has rot of the prison hulks in it

 

but the gravestone’s soft, every letter

deep-edged for comfort of a finger

 

drawn by a small boy over his mother’s name.

Cold, uncared-for child in cloth too thin

 

for this forsaken place, hungry

home. An apron stuck with pins, a sister’s

 

flat hand instead of mercy. Not unhappy,

he keeps company with his dead,

 

more benevolent than the living;

this is all he knows, this floating

 

shifting present, grey, whispering, tidal,

then the world throws its shade

 

down across him, and he turns his head -

 

 

Wind Dog Café and the White Wife

Island of Yell

  

Silver webs my hair,

mist swallows the sea road.

 

Swans pass over,

seamless -

 

one wave,  another,

fold back into the ocean.

 

Sumatran coffee steams the window glass:

each out-breath slips, slides, a pearl

 

ingathering  its path

to shipwreck on the sill.

 

White Wife, what might issue from your mouth!

Air bubbles, or perfect forms

 

lighter than the mind in its occluded house,

outriders for the voyage all of us must go.

 

The ‘White Wife’ is a figurehead from a German boat wrecked in the 1920s.

 

 

Pippa Little was born in East Africa and raised in Scotland. She now lives in Northumberland with her husband, sons and dog. Her first collection, The Spar Box (2006) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her latest collection, Overwintering, (Carcanet) was published in 2012.

 

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ELIZABETH MCMUNN-TETANGCO

 

Hell House

 

You lean

on my arm

while God talks

in the Hell House

at your church on Halloween.

God is pale

and has a scar

on his left wrist

shaped like a lake.

I have seen him at the store.

He says your name first,

and you shiver,

a sick child.

He says you should

have trusted him.

I see you twist

your fingers round

the crucifix

your father left you

when he died.

Sweat glints

on your neck

like a thin chain.

The room is hot

and they have covered

all the windows.

Later on

in the dark car, you tell me that you can’t

remember anything

about your father,

after all.

 

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley with her husband, son, and a big black dog. Her work has appeared previously in The Lake, and also in Word Riot, Hobart, Right Hand Pointing, decomP, and The Curator, among others.

 

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NICKY PHILLIPS

 

On redecorating

 

When stripping papered lath and plaster walls

and tearing back through years of manual toil,

switch off electric tools and think of all

who laboured, warmed by coal and lit by oil.

 

What would they make of faces on a screen;

of voices emanating from a box;

of cylinders to push that help you clean?

Would world wide access be the greatest shock?

 

Imagine, as you pierce the Anaglypta,

you’re cutting out a spyhole on their world;

will they look back and, looking, find they’ve skipped a

hundred years, their futures now unfurled?

 

The ghosts of those who built the little place

peer in, amazed, bemusement on their face.

 

 

 

By Any Other Name

 

Mum surely yearned for a child as strong

as herself when she called me Nicola,

the latinised form of a Greek male name

meaning Victory for the People.

 

Mr Jones would borrow it for

Latin classes: instead of declining

the more usual agricola, we’d chant:

Nicola, Nicola, Nicolam,

Nicolae, Nicolae, Nicola.

Or rather they would, I wouldn’t.

 

Dad disliked it too. He called me Nicksy,

the sound of which still gives me a warm tingle.

I asked him once what he would have chosen.

‘A boy’, he said. ‘Or a television.’

 

 

Nicky Phillips lives in rural Hertfordshire, UK. Her poems have appeared in The Cannon’s Mouth; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Brittle Star; South Bank Poetry; and anthologies, including The Best of Every Day Poets Two (2012), Heart Shoots  (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2013) and The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press, 2014).

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

A Game of Hide and Seek

 

Her last chip, this London hospital,

Clinical records given the slip somewhere in Kent,

A scribbled note from her GP, she sat before this consultant

with a new-born’s medical history.

Lottery numbers excitement as he nodded at her narrative,

Flourish of his fountain pen and she was entombed in an MRI machine,

when her tight lipped body foiled his lines of enquiry

I think we’ll keep an eye on you,

knowing some disorders play a game of hide and seek.

Writing degree essays in the waiting room

gave way to marking kid’s homework

as check-ups routinely reassured her

I don’t think there’s anything to worry about

So for years she didn’t.

 

 

Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry, Ladies Who Lunch was published by Lapwing Press in September, 2014. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

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NICOLE YURCABA

 

Fossil Hunting Along the Susquehanna

 

A small child 
scours the Susquehanna’s shores
searching for Lower Cambrian 
and Permian remnants,

recalling how her father’s professor-friend
once called the trilobites 
in the university collection “tribbles”
like those furry beings from Star Trek,

but the seven-year old prefers
the way the words make love 
to her tongue,
each syllable—savory, biting, deep, ancient:

Tri-
lo-
bite.

Rock chisel and hammer 
clenched in the little girl’s hands,
the little girl wades the shore’s limestone,
slab by slab
rock by rock,
and cries out with a giggle
“TRI-LO-BITE!”
simply to feel prehistory
caress her being.

 

 

Nicole Yurcaba hails from a long line of Ukrainian immigrants, West Virginia mountain folk, academics, artists and writers. She began reading and writing at age three, and that first love of literature and words has propelled her into the arms of numerous publications: VoxPoetica, The Atlanta Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Philomathean, Bluestone Review, Floyd County Moonshine, and many others. In December 2013, Yurcaba graduate from Tiffin University's Masters of Humanities program and also published her first poetry, photography, and short story collection titled Backwoods and Back Words, which is available on Amazon. She serves as English faculty at Eastern WV Community and Technical College.

 

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