2017

 

 

 

JULY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Siegfried Baber, Nels Hanson, William Ogden Haynes, Alison Jones, Julia Knobloch,

 Gary Leising, Beth McDonough, Maren O. Mitchell, Ronald Moran, John L. Stanizzi,

Grant Tarbard, Judith Taylor, Laynie Tzena.

 

 

 

 

 

SIEGFRIED BABER

 

Einstein's Second Letter to Freud From America

 

After Springsteen's No Nukes gig at Madison Square Garden

I went down to the reservoir with a nasty little redhead

from the Institute for Advanced Study and drank

moonshine under the stars. She said she'd always had a thing

for smart guys like you and me, then smiled,

slipped some ice into her mouth. Time and relativity in space,

Mozart's Sonata in B Flat and the starting five

from the LA Lakers' 1982 Championship-winning season

spilled out of me like silverfish into that dark, glittering water.

A week later, we met in the Rainbow Bar on Sunset Strip

and split half a gram of Hollywood's smoothest.

Later, only when she was shooting pool with a gang

of theoretical physicists did I notice those three handkerchiefs

dangling from her back pocket, red and white and blue.

 

 

The Fire-Spotter on Desolation Peak

 

You stayed up all night, every night,

through that slow summer

of fifty-six, chewing on strips of benzedrine

above the dense green tree-line

of Washington's North Cascade Range,

reading The Daring Young Man

on The Flying Trapeze and War and Peace

seventy miles from interstate fifteen

and the Canadian border.

Ginsberg was still in San Francisco; Burroughs

back on the junk in Morocco;

Corso in Cambridge; and in Greystone Park

Carl Solomon had four hundred volts

crashing between his ears.

 

For the first time in years, you were alone.

No mother, money or holy typewriter

to keep you company. No Lakewood or Denver.

Only the silent ranger's radio

and distant grizzlies scooping salmon,

fresh and pink and wriggling, from the water

of Lightning Creek. A broken Buddha,

you waited days to glimpse those great bears

upright amongst the mountains.

And when you eventually agreed to sleep

sometime in early Autumn,

you dreamed of that small wooden hut

on Desolation Peak, when your scattered friends

wore the long shadows of beatified men.

 

 

Siegfried Baber was born in Barnstaple, Devon in 1989 and his poetry has featured in a variety of publications including Under The Radar, The Interpreter’s House, Butcher’s Dog Magazine, online with The Compass Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and as part of the Bath Festival. Siegfried's debut pamphlet When Love Came To The Cartoon Kid is published by Telltale Press, with its title poem nominated for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Follow Siegfried on Twitter: @SiegfriedBaber

 

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NELS HANSON

 

Requiem

 

Batman just died, Superman

many years before. Black cape,

red, black boots, crimson, one

 

with mask, other wearing thick

bifocals, both incognito, secret

until now . . . The Bat Cave is

 

sealed, the Fortress of Solitude

locked in ice. Robin, Lois Lane,

the X-Men mourn, Spidey, Hulk,

 

Captain America too. I imagined

heroes like angels lived forever,

would never leave us to ourselves

 

unguarded. Their roles are open

and auditions imminent for two

true hearts without great powers

 

who don the costume with scarlet

“S”, bat wings heavy as a cross,

as lead immune to X-ray vision.

 

 

Contrast and Compare

 

I’ve slept with more women than

you have. I imagine so. I’m taller

 

by a full two inches. Yes, at least.

I have more money than you know.

 

That’s true, much more. I’ve been

all around the world, each country.

 

I never left home. I’m much smarter

than you are. Probably. I’m famous.

 

That’s right, very. There’s something

wrong with you. It’s possible. Why

 

do I talk to you? You’d have to ask

yourself. You’re not a mind reader,

 

huh? No, just now and then I have

a hunch when things feel different.

 

What’s that mean? Once I saw doves

fly from a limb until a big oak fell.

 

 

Nels Hanson’s fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.

 

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WILLIAM OGDEN HAYNES

 

How the Revelation Comes

 

My days are in the yellow leaf;

the flowers and fruits of love are gone.  Lord Byron

 

It’s not the axe, but the paring knife that whittles away at your life,

one small shaving at a time until thought is unreliable and memory erased.

 

It’s not an explosion, but a slow leak in a bicycle tire that creates

shortness of breath and increases your number of prescriptions.

 

It’s not a bucket of water on this campfire that puts it out, but a slow dying

of flames as the wood turns to ash and extra logs are nowhere to be found.

 

It’s not falling out of love, but a creeping complacency where a passionate kiss becomes

a peck on the cheek and the need for sleep becomes stronger than the drive for sex.

 

It’s not that you wake up one morning with a hearing loss and clouded vision,

but a failure to notice a barely perceptible dimming of the senses over decades.

 

It’s not a single accident that impairs your movement, but the insidious loss of muscle

tone and increasing stiffness in your joints that becomes more noticeable each year.

 

And then after all the decades of denial, one day you look in the mirror and suddenly

realize you’re old and invisible and there’s nothing more you can do about it.

 

You’ve moved beyond the hair dyes, vitamins and facial creams. You don’t care

anymore if your hearing aid is visible or if you have a line in the lens of your bifocals.

 

It’s a day when your house abruptly disappears into a massive sinkhole, in a

neighborhood where everyone has always known, that fracking was going on nearby.

 

 

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

 

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ALISON JONES

 

Cardboard and String

 

One day you will venture out further than you’ve ever been,

wearing cardboard and string, past the end of the line,

where you thought there would be dragons.

 

It will start with a walk to school, then crocodile into the bus,

holding hands with Ada, so proud of the little tag,

your own personal luggage label. The little box too.

 

You’ll feel glad that Mrs Entwhistle pinned it through the seam,

because appearing with holes in your Sunday best

is probably not good for first impressions. Out then

to the train, all fire and wonder, alchemy in action,

you know that trains are really magical beasts in disguise.

 

Watch it unfold, branches, nests, beautiful things, animals,

harvests growing, it may be a shock when you realise

that carrots don’t really come from tins, but are born

out here in mud and sunlight. It will be a long way,

excitement will fade as the quilted fields unfold

and you think of the arms of your mother, hands

empty, curling close, holding air and silence.

 

The thread embroiders far from the knot.

 

Later, the touching of strangers; choosing lines

in a damp village hall, all things pass beneath

judgemental eyes that admire, but cannot love

 

 

Ali Jones is a teacher and writer. She is a mother of three. Her work has appeared in Fire, Poetry Rivals, Strange Poetry, Ink Sweat and Tears, Snakeskin Poetry, Atrium, Mother’s Milk Books., Breastfeeding Matters, Breastfeeding Today and Green Parent magazine. She writes a regular column for Breastfeeding Matters Magazine.  She was the winner of the Green Parent Writing Prize in 2016 and has also written for The Guardian. 

 

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JULIA KNOBLOCH

 

The Emigrant

 

When I think of Portugal across the sea,

I feel sunburnt terrace tiles under naked feet

and cool Atlantic air,

 

I hear distant voices call my name,

tender, loving laughter

hovering in the breeze of time,

dog paws clicking on inlaid hardwood floors;

 

I think of a darkened house with

precious rugs and squeaky stairs,

with art on the walls, and a

rotary dial phone in one corner.

 

When her son called from the land of peaches,

the painter sat on a green velour chair by the window

and conjured up the day that he would win an Oscar.

Fondling the panting dog, she’d call me when

she was ready to pass on the receiver.

 

The light from the monastery filled the sky,

heat and river fog paralyzed the city.

The painter’s daughter took cold baths at night;

they freshened up her creamy olive summer skin.

How pretty she was in purple dresses,

with long, dark curls and self-made jewelry,

and a warm, sad smile that runs in the family.

 

The dog yawned.

 

Out at the open coast, near the cape,

the reed grass waves and the waves break

as always, until they swallow the beach.

What remains?

Maybe salt crystals on sundrenched faces—and longing,

so much longing, unfulfilled and self-sustained.

 

The preposition ‘lá’ defines a place that is undefined.

 

The sky over the monastery is still the same.

Shadows waft across bare walls in empty rooms,

silhouettes of lovers, long departed.

A green light fights its way through orange darkness.

A train whistles like so many years ago.

 

Stop. Listen. Watch.

Talk to me.

 

 

Julia Knobloch is a journalist turned translator, project manager, and emerging poet. She was awarded the 2016 Poem of the Year prize from Brooklyn Poets for her poem “Daylight Saving Time”. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Yes, Poetry Magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, ReformJudaism.org, in between hangovers, and Your One Phone Call. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow for the 2017 summer semester. “The Emigrant” featured on Brooklyn Poets social media in June 2016.

 

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GARY LEISING

 

Meditation on a Line from Rilke

 

So the poet, renting a flat in Paris, writing

letters to his wife between labors on a line

of poetry, then another, another, until the poem

seemed finished, listened to his own steps

clack the wide boards.  Through one busted

knothole, he could tell when the downstairs man

put out his light to sleep.  How often he thought

of putting his lips to that hole and crying out—

he knew not what to say; he only wanted

to be heard by someone near.  Rodin still

seemed strange, his wife still far off, still

pulled his affection toward her the way

a puppeteer jerked strings to make the marionette

dance, a wooden clown twirling and tripping

to please a city square crowd.  “Whoever has

no house now, will never have one,” he wrote,

then walked to the other table, a letter upon it.

How difficult, yet necessary, to tell Clara

she could not live with him in Paris.

Yet next month she must be in Paris. 

He wrote one draft then another, each time

hating to write the word “Paris.”  That hard city,

alien, hostile, its gallery of people all saying

its name in different languages, it seemed.

“Listen,” he wrote her, “I have not enough money

for regular meals.  When I walk, I find

everywhere little doors in alleys and sidestreets.

You cannot tell but you know they go secretly

into hospitals.  It starts to rain but you will

not go in those doors, knowing where they lead.

You go home instead and share a bed

with someone you detest.  This city

awaits you.”  He will not send this letter,

will not even save it.  Back to the poem:

“Whoever is alone now.”  He will burn

that letter in a candle’s flame.  Its edges

darken to ash that dances in the drafts.

Soon he will find the words to tell her,

Come to this despicable city; do not come to me.

 

 

Gary Leising is the author of the book, The Alp at the End of My Street, from Brick Road Poetry Press (2014).  He has also published three poetry chapbooks:  The Girl with the JAKE Tattoo (Two of Cups Press, 2015), Temple of Bones (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and Fastened to a Dying Animal (Pudding House, 2010).  He lives in Clinton, New York, with his wife and two sons, where he teaches creative writing and poetry as a professor of English.

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

A plum sapling

 

arms out, crackles in new hot
April. Leaf-naked limbs twig thin
festooned in white tiny blooms.
Van Gogh glorious on blue.

This year fruit should form
even fill and ripen.  Not for
fat pigeons or wasp drills.
For compote. For comfort. For stretched
sticky hands. For chins which will itch.

But today, you can only nose
very close, right where frost-brilliant skies
disappear.

 

 

Reclaiming

 

In this day’s grim glottal stop, nothing
patterns to remember rainbows. Here’s

        a wave crimp wind on the Tay.
        Conspiring with this firth’s ebb, I’m
        washing downstream, swimming
        through clear with that blind sun’s
        surprise warming my back. After

turns playtimes of acrobat dolphins
past a red mizzen. Hands
mumble shared mugs, then
a laughter drive on, by the fiddling
optician’s where a myopic mouse
ceilidhed right up his left trouser leg.

Summer will come.

 

 

Parrot fashion

 

Out there! A green parrot
Christmas fairys our apple tree
branches off where autumn fat pigeons
debated, berated, pecked
top-notch fruit. Now

exotica squat, spring bright
unlikely as sexed-up leprechauns
gardening  all Advent’s frost.

Perhaps he’ll never return. They’ll muse
how I dreamed him, slipped
something impossible into this rime.
I mimic his image. Sing.

 

 

Beth McDonough’s poetry appears in Agenda, Gyroscope Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and elsewhere; she reviews in DURA.  Handfast (2016, with Ruth Aylett) explores family experiences – Aylett’s of dementia and McDonough’s of autism. She swims in the Tay and forages obsessively nearby.

 

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MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

Outside In

to Claude Monet and his Giverny dining room

 

Over and over, from love of light and sky and water,

you stroked colors to canvas; needing yet more,

 

you flooded and lit your dining room, slathered walls

and cupboards with yellow, windowed crockery

 

and napkins with blue, where, I’m sure, every morning

you partook of sacrament, warm buttery croissants,

 

juicy purple plums; these two colors I reflect

in my steadfast breakfast of bananas, hansa yellow

 

before peeling, full-fat cream when naked, mixed with

indigo blueberries against a background of ivory yogurt;

 

they also ricochet in our house with yolk linens,

walk-on-water carpet and see-through walls, but all

 

the while—from before you, past me, beyond the lifespan

of your work—our sun, earth’s waters and sky, back

 

and forth, carouse with each other, bask in themselves,

in yellowness, in blueness, over and over.

 

 

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in Poetry East, Tar River Poetry, Slant: A Journal of Poetry, POEM, The Lake (UK), The Pedestal Magazine, Still: The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Chiron Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Town Creek Poetry, The South Carolina Review, Skive (AU) and Southern Humanities Review. Poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction is Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press, 2012). She lives with her husband in the mountains of north Georgia, US.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

The Poetry of Chardonnay

 

After one glass of Chardonnay, I am

pretty good, so, during the next glass,

I begin a draft, rough, of course, but

at times not too bad, as if the wisdom

of the grapes fueled the antioxidants

of my aging lapses, like the heroine

in a French novelette comes out as an

early bud, ends up ruling her province.

 

Then I write, without pausing, just as

a NASCAR racer leading in points with

only eight laps to go, and the one threat

to his victory is either him or his car;

and, while I try to stay the course, I slip,

go to the fridge and add ice to my glass.

 

 

 

Twilight and My Mother

 

                   I

 

A short time after my father died abruptly,

                   my mother

moved into an apartment in our new house,

                   where

she told me of the Sisters at the Catholic

                   schools

rapping her knuckles hard and often in class

                   when she

misbehaved––she being far too open, quick,

                   and

free in her behavior for the old Sisters ever

                   to accept.               

She ascribed her gnarled fingers and her

                   later

diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis to their

                   rulers.

 

                    II

 

Although my parents argued habitually from

                   the time

I was eight, one accusing the other, the other

                   denying,

always denying what happened––if, indeed,

                   it did––

after my father was dead for over a year, she

                   locked her door,

lay in bed, still, arms folded across her chest,

                   missing him.           

                       

 

Ronald Moran has poems in current or forthcoming issues of Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry.  His most recent poetry collection is Eye of the World (Clemson University Press, 2016).  

 

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JOHN L. STANIZZI

 

Box

 

for James Walter Sincere (November 15, 1949 – November 22, 1968)

Quang Nam, Viet Nam

East Hartford, Connecticut

 

I found a box that seemed just the right size

to fit both of your blue button down shirts,

and your battered old copy of Thomas’

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,

stolen inexplicably from the school

library at East Hartford High.  I think

it had to do with your presumption that

Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas had some

cosmic connection that included you.

I also sent you Blond on Blond that day.

I mailed the box at 10 a.m. and by

3 Suzanne had told me that you were dead.

And for years and years I’ve wondered who got

your box and did they love the stuff inside?

 

 

Awakened

           

November 22, 1963

East Hartford High School

2.02 p.m.

 

Ninth grade English, and just out of Catholic,

school, I was not yet adjusted to the

outrageous idea of a public school –

no uniforms, and teachers who were men,

men in street clothes, not dressed in black with stiff

white collars and faces of gravity,

and women teachers with hair on their heads

that we could see, and dresses like our moms,

and liberty to fall asleep in class.

I was sleeping when I heard the static

of the PA thirteen minutes before

the end of school.  The speaker squawked a cough,

and then Mrs. Wilson tried to say through

tears that President Kennedy was dead.

 

 

John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallalujah Time!, and High Tide – Ebb Tide.  Besides The Lake, John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, and many others. His work has been translated into Italian by Angela D’Ambra and been in El Ghibli, Journal of Italian Translations Bonafinni, and Poetarium Silva. www.johnlstanizzi.com

 

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GRANT TARBARD

 

Pretty Boy

 

Capturing the present seemed inconceivable 

when young as a babe that was never meant to be.

 

As a child without veins I faded the skies,

forever I rose in my hospital green best 

 

humming the waltzed melody of witches

and the scrupulous language of doctors.

 

In between conditions I lived in deletions, 

down a supine close lay my father's brute hands  

 

abrading my skin with cut price soap.

And I, cushion belied, was a disappointment,

 

a shivering choreography of breadth 

regurgitated out of mother's umbilical sewing box.

 

Youth was an entanglement of clenches, 

pinned down in confused toilets, sex in his unwanted breath.

 

Youth was a flushed kiss on a gymnasium mat 

stretching those nervous fabrics, full of God.

 

The sailing hazel branches of her wet hair

exposing Aphrodite brown nipples through chlorine,

 

her slit visible as she attempted star jumps in the pool

with me as her brace. I kissed my cracked lips to her elfin name. 

 

Capturing the present seems so serious now,

the dust grows thick between gnawed ribs.

 

 

Grant Tarbard is an editorial assistant for Three Drops From A Cauldron and a reviewer. His new collection Rosary of Ghosts (Indigo Dreams) will be released soon.

 

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JUDITH TAYLOR

 

Photograph  

[Gr phos, photos, light, graphein, to write]

 

Light

writes you

in a sclim of chemicals

on paper, or in noughts and ones    

decoding themselves across a screen.

 

And light inscribes your limits:

your colours bleeding or

screeched out, the details

noise, breaking up

where you press on them too heavily.

 

You're proverbial   

for comprehensive memory, but there is so much         

unsaved in you        

whereof the light

cannot speak.

 

The sting of windblown sand

across that grey beach.

The agility of the cat

recorded fast asleep on a seed-tray. The cries of birds

we didn't see:

 

we are the ones who bring all this

when we read you.

And outside your frame

the whole world

you were cut away from.

 

We assigned you monuments

as a subject

over the bored and boring family, seen

every day and

faded now.

 

You can tell

no more than we asked, then: a page

torn from book

and we preserve you

superstitiously

 

the light's abracadabras in a locket.

We want your power

to open up the caves

stored with our belongings

amid the shadows: open, memory.

Open, heart.

 

 

Judith Taylor lives and works in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines, and in two pamphlet collections - Earthlight (2006) and Local Colour (2010). Her first full-length collection, Not in Nightingale Country, will be published in Autumn 2017 by Red Squirrel Press.  http://sometimesjudy.co.uk/

 

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LAYNIE TZENA

 

O

 

I think if I had ever learned

to whistle, I would have stopped

there, my mouth in an O,

still as a river remembered.

My mouth wouldn’t hold

or my lips wouldn’t float right,

I don’t recall,

but the only way

I could get sound out

was to open wide and sing.

My brother could whistle

any old thing,

but you couldn’t name the tune.

He was always off-key.

My sister kept tune and tone,

but she had a smaller repertoire:

religious songs, show tunes, hits

on the radio—those polka dots,

flashes in the pan,

here one minute

and gone the next.  My mother

couldn’t whistle, either, but

it didn’t bother her, she said;

too many things to keep track of

as it was:  radio phone television

vacuum doorbell.  Between the lawn

mower and yammer of our house

mascot, Snafu, there was barely

time to draw a breath, let alone

turn it around.  Still my father,

home from the office

his paper under his arm, seems to be

whistling as the garage door

folds into the ground. His songs

are old, and he won’t name them;

angry, he says he can’t,

and would I leave him the hell alone?

But now he hears himself.  His mouth softens

and falls, his blue eyes lighten

to water—like the wheels

that follow a tossed stone.

Or like the wavy circle

over the Miss

he writes before my name.

 

 

Fingers McGee

 

Fingers found after the operation

he was tired more often.  Maybe

the new foods.  Maybe the girl

next door.  She was just under

his height, and he liked the way

they looked when they walked together.

But Sam!  He couldn’t abide

Sam.  And he could tell, from his

window catty-corner to hers, that Sam was

a fixture for Sarah.  Sam was part of her

theme song. Fingers fretted.  Fingers

plotted.  But when Sam fell for Dolores

Fingers was surprised to

miss him.  Sam had been

part of the morning.  Fingers hummed to Sam

right along with Sarah.  Fingers tried

to take an interest in the movies

Sarah rented, but he found too much

reminded him of Sam, and Dolores

didn’t care for double dates

she said.  Fingers got a security job

and didn’t spend much time with Sarah

though he loved her the way

blue loves green, loved her like the first

bend of evening.  Something about

the shadow of another man

had captured his attention. 

Fingers thought of studying

himself in therapy, but knew

he was far too literal. He said, “Sarah,

I need a challenge.”  And she said,

“Hold me tight, Fingers, I’m gonna

fly away.”  Fingers hopped to.

“That Sarah’s electric,” said Fingers,

“You never know what she’ll do.”

 

 

Laynie Tzena is a writer, performer, and visual artist based in San Francisco. Publications include Bayou, Event, Sonora Review, and Zone 3, among others; she received an Avery Hopwood Award in Poetry. Tzena has been featured at the Austin International Poetry Festival and on Michigan Public Radio.

 

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