2017

 

 

 

JUNE CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Gale Acuff, Joe Balaz, Heather M. Browne, Kate Garrett, Kathy Gee,

 William Ogden Haynes, Richard Jones, Michael “Wudz” Ochoke, Bethany Rivers,

Claudia Serea, Fiona Sinclair, J. R. Solonche, Daniel James Sundahl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

GALE ACUFF

Heroism

I'm bored during Math Hour so I doodle
superheroes in my textbook's margins.
I'm no artist, even during Art Hour,
or especially then. I couldn't draw
a crooked line. I'm anticipating

eating out tonight with my parents, when
Father will reach into his pocket and
fish out a quarter--my allowance. May
I be excused, I'll say--not ask. Mother
will be leaning over the table to
light her cigarette off my father's match.
She'll blow the first puff up, then cough. Ask your
father, she'll say. I just did, I'll say. He
just did, he'll say, I didn't hear him say
Father, she'll say. No, come to think of it,
he'll say, neither did I. Oh, come on now,
I'll say. I was talking to both of you.
If I'd said Father, Mother would have been
sore. And if I'd said Mother, then Father

would have gotten sore. I'm darned (I'll almost
say damned and that will be the end of that)
if I do and darned if I don't. Ask us
again, Father says. Do that, Mother says

--we've forgotten the question. She's on her
third whiskey sour. Father's had three Millers.
They laugh and cough and smoke. Go, Father says.
Get out of here, you knucklehead. Wait--here's
fifty cents. Go buy yourself half a brain.
I go next door to the drug store. Fifty
cents will buy me four comic books, at twelve
cents each, plus two cents for Georgia sales tax.
They drink and smoke too much, especially
on Friday evenings. Driving home, Father

gets lost sometimes, or stops a lot to pee.
Mother gets carsick if she drinks too much.
On Saturday morning I watch cartoons
on TV, but with the volume down so
I don't wake them. They need to sleep it off.
And I have four comic books to get me
through the weekend. You don't see Superman

smoking Old Golds or any other brand.
(He's invulnerable, of course, so they
couldn't hurt him). You don't see Batman drunk,
even though he's a millionaire playboy.
They'd be good role models for my parents
but they're too old for comic books. Father
likes Playboy, which he doesn't let me read
because, he says, the girls would frighten me
and I'm only ten. Mother likes wrestling
magazines but I think that means she likes
the men in them. I don't understand that
--she's already got Father. So I hide

in my attic bedroom and read comics
and learn that good's better than evil and
I want to be good and my parents aren't
bad, exactly, but they walk a thin line
but that's what it means to be an adult
unless you have special powers, which they
don't. So they'll never be as strong as I

am and it doesn't help that I'll grow up
to be like they are. Nobody's perfect
and we're all going to die one day so
I guess I'll take up smoking and drinking
like they do and make them proud of me but
only if they don't catch me until I'm
old enough--eighteen, say--then they'll like me
again. I'll take care of them when they're old
because it's good to honor your parents.

During Art Hour I've tried to draw pictures
of them but they always come out like hell.
And when I try to focus during Math
Hour I can't figure the numbers because
my eyes are watering from all the smoke.
 

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Poem, Adirondack Review, Coe Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.

 

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JOE BALAZ

 

Saint Patrick’s Day in Disguise

 

In dis town

it has happened to me before—

 

to be mistaken foa someting else.

 

 

In some areas

on da West Side of Cleveland                                                 

 

da Puerto Ricans and Mexicans

talk to me in Spanish

 

until dey realize

I have no idea wat dey are saying.

 

Dat old adage is so true,                                         

 

“don’t judge a book by its cover.”

 

 

Now dat Saint Patrick’s Day

is coming up again

 

it reminds me of last year

 

wen I watched da festivities

and da parade downtown.

 

 

So many people wuz dressed in green

as dey enjoyed da party atmosphere.

 

Foa wun brief moment

 

I imagined my ancestors

and unknown relatives in Ireland.

 

 

While I wuz watching

wun marching band come up da street

 

wun guy who surely looked

like his forebears came from da Emerald Isle

 

bumped into me by mistake

and quickly apologized.

 

 

He wuz good nurtured

and looked like he just left wun bar

 

wheah he probably had wun beer or two.

 

 

He smiled wen he told me,

 

“Isn’t this celebration great?

Today everyone is Irish, even you!”

 

 

Human physiology and genetics

is quite fascinating.

 

 

Wit my light brown skin

 

it’s somewat unique

and original to know

 

wat some added Hawaiian blood can do.

 

 

Joe Balaz writes in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole English) and in American-English.

He edited Ho'omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.  Some of his

recent Pidgin writing has appeared in Rattle, Juked, Otoliths, and Hawai'i Review, among others.

Balaz is an avid supporter of Hawaiian Islands Pidgin writing in the expanding context of

World Literature.  He presently lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

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HEATHER M. BROWNE

 

seeing small

 

she drew my name on a grain of rice

not particularly long nor wild

 

painted an entire ocean upon a shell of snail

patiently listening to his chambers

echo and beat

the slippery crash, teal and gray

 

she could see small

 

i held her brush tight

peered fixedly into her colored palette

stroked her fingertips and prayed

 

she laughed, throwing back her head

golden crowns beaming royal

her tongue rolling oceans and laughter

 

“it’s not what i have, but what i see.”

 

she was blessed

in seeing small

 

Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist, recently nominated for the Pushcart Award, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, Electric Windmill, Apeiron, The Lake, Knot, mad swirl.  Red Dashboard released her first collection, Directions of Folding. Follow her: www.thehealedheart.net

 

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KATE GARRETT

 

Beside the Irish Sea

 

Testing folktales

          you push your luck:

 

it is said whistling

off the Welsh coast

brings misfortune

to all on board.

 

But you have no ship,

there is only you

on tiptoes

over pebbles

smooth to touch

but tough to cross;

barefoot where the foam

paints the tide line red

with beached jellyfish

stretched flat and doomed

 

and where she once described

(as she rested in hospital)

as a place she’d found a sign

from the angels:

 

          white feathers dashed

                   and fluttering

                                        across the sand.

 

 

Kierkegaard’s ghost

 

He left her, you know – though he loved her from the first

and loved her still, he said he wasn’t fit for marriage.

He tried to explain, console her. She married another.

 

That was centuries before us, but because of you I wonder:

how did Regine get through it? Maybe the adrenalin rushed

through her chest each time her lover’s words reached out

for the unnamed world to see. Maybe the world is better for it.

Happy in love, Kierkegaard would not have felt the burn under

his own skin. Without the words Søren pulled from anxious flames

 

Albert Camus, years on, would’ve just been a weatherman, and

I would not have read his novels when I was twenty. In turn,

I’d not have overcome my own existence, my mind left unfulfilled

 

without ‘ideas above my station’. I’d not have determined to learn

 long after the end of my reckless youth. Maybe if Søren married

Regine, we wouldn’t have spoken, the chain broken. My path and yours

 

would not have crossed. Think of all the trouble we’d have been saved

if Kierkegaard had let himself love. You take meaning from one thing,

give to another. Don’t blame me if I see these patterns in the way

 

life turns out. Understand my own solar plexus is set alight
hot and cold like the flicker of a star I can’t see. But poor Regine.
She didn’t have the words. Søren had grand thoughts, questions for God.

 

Here is Kierkegaard’s ghost; he tells us of anxiety’s freedom.
Regine is immortal only for being left behind.
It’s a small consolation, but this last will never happen to me.

 

Kate Garrett edits Three Drops from a Cauldron and Picaroon Poetry. Her writing is widely published, and her pamphlet The Density of Salt (Indigo Dreams, 2016) was longlisted in the 2016 Saboteur Awards. Her next pamphlet You’ve never seen a doomsday like it, will be published in 2017. She lives in Sheffield, UK. “Kierkegaard’s ghost” first published in Melancholy Hyperbole in July 2014, and in her pamphlet The names of things unseen in Caboodle, Prolebooks, 2015. “Besides the Irish Sea” first published in the now-defunct Jellyfish Whispers, October 2015.

 

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KATHY GEE

 

Sometimes in Istanbul, it snows      

 

Four flights of stairs to a wooden loft.

She flicks false loving from her paintbrush,

spatters anger over canvas

stretched out on the lime-white floor.

Beneath a frozen sky, she argues,

cuts through dead-end debts and lies,

floods ink blots on his frogspawn heart.

 

A second canvas, white and square,

full-centred like the first, but turned

so every pointed corner meets a wall.

She stretches to the skylight, bends

and bowls fresh paint at what comes next,

The brilliant colours furl and land

just where new stories say they must.

 

The day the sun breaks through, she tries

to sell the pictures of her life

to a dealer from the Grand Bazaar.

Enticed by promises of tea,

he climbs the stairs to her attic room

and buys the snow-white, star-shaped space

she’s left uncovered on the floor.

 

 

Kathy Gee lives in Worcestershire, UK and works in museums and heritage organisations. Widely published online and on paper, her first collection – Book of Bones – was published by V. Press in May 2016. http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.co.uk/p/book-of-bones.html. In the same year, she wrote the spoken word elements for a contemporary choral piece - http://suiteforthefallensoldier.com/ 

 

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WILLIAM OGDEN HAYNES

 

Taking the Train

 

The boy had always been told that his mother died young of cancer

when he was only six years old. He has little recollection of her at all

now that he’s forty. Today he’s cleaning the attic on a winter afternoon,

and in the bottom drawer of a dresser, he finds his mother’s purse.

 

When he opens it, he finds a compact, lipstick, mascara, and

a white cotton handkerchief. As he looks at these things, he

begins to remember their many trips on the train to museums and

art galleries all over the city. He recalls when she opened that purse,

 

how captivated he was by the scent of the powder in her silver

compact. She would draw the puff across her cheek as she looked

into the small mirror. Then she would twist the base of the lipstick

tube pushing up a crimson missile from the golden silo. And staring

 

into the glass she would trace the cupid’s bow of her upper lip

before she pressed her lips firmly together to spread the color.

Finally she would take out a small, bright red rectangular box

of Maybelline and eyes wide, gently brush it on her lashes. She

 

had no tolerance for a boy’s dirty face and would use a white

cotton embroidered handkerchief to clean the corners of his

mouth stained with the remnants of a Snickers bar. She would

put the cloth to her tongue, moisten it and wrap it around her

 

forefinger to clean chocolate spots on his face, her saliva smelling

like an exotic perfume. She always bought them a bottle of soda

for the train ride, Nehi or Dr. Brown’s Crème Soda. Then, she would

watch the other passengers while the boy read his comic books.

 

They say that after someone dies, the day will finally come

when you can’t remember their face without looking at a

photograph. But don’t tell that to the boy sitting in the attic

on a winter afternoon riding the uptown train with his mother.

 

 

Daffodil

 

A young girl of fifteen sat on the front porch swing

in a yellow sundress, a warm breeze stirring her hair

as she swayed back and forth like a pendulum.

A motorcycle ambled up the driveway from

 

Maple Street. The new boy in town was astride

the machine, wearing a leather jacket and no helmet,

his long hair waving behind. He turned off the engine

at the front steps, removed his sunglasses and looked up

 

at the girl with a crooked smile as the hot motor ticked.

He was older, handsome, but had a dangerous, troubled look

about him like a James Dean, Johnny Depp or Marlon Brando.

His voice was one you could have poured over a stack

 

of pancakes as he asked if she would like to go for a ride.

But somehow, it felt wrong, so she told him no, without

understanding the reason why. Suit yourself, he said putting

on his sunglasses. He kick-started his cycle and idled slowly

 

down the driveway waving goodbye, without even looking

back. As she stood there watching him go, his black jacket

became a retreating storm cloud gliding away from an

early-blooming flower who refused to be trampled by a heavy rain.

 

 

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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RICHARD JONES

 

History of Art

 

It is time to say good-bye

to the Abstract Expressionists,

farewell to mad Franz Kline,

adieu to sweet Sam Frances.

Time to say good-bye

to the suicide Rothko,

and swim back in time

through his paintings,

back through the black monoliths

and the blue meditations,

back through the burning red

and the blinding yellow,

back through his death

to his melancholy,

back through his passion

to his innocence.

I’ll watch Pollack’s chaos

resolve itself

into the pure storm

of untouched canvas.

I’ll sail down the long hall

past Van Dongen and Bonnard,

past weird Max Beckman

and delicate Mary Cassatt,

forever washing the feet

of small round children.

I’ll say arrivaderci to the Surrealists

with their melting watches

and perfect clouds,

and tearfully kiss

the Impressionists

in case I never see them again.

Then I’ll turn in search

of Rembrandt:

I’ll gaze into his eyes

and explore the darkness

around the glowing face.

I’ll sit at the feet

of Caravaggio’s scholar

writing at his desk

and listen to the scratching

of quill on parchment.

I’ll study the human skull,

the scholar’s memento mori

sitting like a stone by the inkwell.

And I’ll study the head

of the bald scholar,

how his very thought

seems to catch the light

as he bends to his work,

how the world falls away

behind him and his candle,

collapsing into nothingness

of shadows and end of time.

 

Richard Jones is the author of seven books from Copper Canyon Press, including The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning. Editor of Poetry East and its many anthologies, including Paris, Origins, and Bliss, he also edits the free worldwide poetry app, "The Poet's Almanac." A new book, Pilgrim on Earth, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2018.

 

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MICHAEL ‘WUDZ’ OCHOKI

 

A Former Child Soldier’s Remix to a Dream

 

When I was young, I was told as a slave you don’t have a song.

And if you were poor at lullabies, you were sent back home to burning babies.

So you had to learn how to lull the world to sleep. You would dream.

That one day, fathers will unbury their sons and take away their guns.

That these Nuban mountains will fill the cracks in their rocks with a new language: freedom.

Sometimes when I dream of home, I cry fox holes.

I write a poem every night, telling my father to silence the voices in my head.

I tell him his dying at war has found a new resurrection in a weeping book.

I tell him I want to read without one ear, one eye and one foot outside the classroom window

anticipating a rebel commander’s whip.

 

 

Michael ‘Wudz’ Ochoki is a Kenyan poet and memoirist residing in Sudan. He co-founded Eldoret Poets Association – a group of poets from Western Kenya, One-Night Stand Poetry – a monthly performance platform, and he is the editor for EPA’s annual anthology. Winner of KOLA: African Street Writers Awards, his poems have appeared or shortlisted in BN Poetry, StoryMoja, Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review and African Writer. Some of his poems are featured in the upcoming anthology, “Best New African Poets 2016”. http://wudzink.com/

 

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BETHANY RIVERS

 

snowdrops

 

    hang

 under

        a pale

              moon

 

   the dress

        I never

             wore

 

    the gift of silence

 

 

 

hold my hand

 

when you left

for the final time

before

I could say

I love you

my hand went with you /

went with / you / with you / wherever you

/ whenever you / where I always

long to / follow you to / wherever

you go to / dreams trail

like smoke / stars burn without

smoke / my memory is full

of black holes

 

 

Bethany Rivers' pamphlet, Off the wall, was published by Indigo Dreams (2016).  Previous publications include: Envoi, Cinnamon Press, Obsessed with Pipework, The Ofi Press, Clear Poetry, Picaroon Poetry, I am not a silent poet, Bare Fiction.  She teaches and mentors the writing of memoir, novels and poetry: www.writingyourvoice.org.uk

 

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CLAUDIA SEREA 

 

At the Black Sea

 

We stand in front of the sea

as in front of a goddess,

almost ashamed

to undress.

 

The sea doesn’t care.

 

Last night, we hear,

some people slipped by the Coast Guard

who had orders to shoot.

 

They escaped into international waters,

but the sailors from cargo ships

didn’t see them.

 

The Turkish fishermen

didn’t hear them.

 

Only the angels

who work the night shift in the shipyard

held their hands a while.

 

From the deep,

the storm brings up spoils of war

and throws them on the shore:

 

jelly fish, algae,

shells, and small bones

of drowned swimmers.

 

In and out.

In

and out. In and

out. Inandout.

 

Restless.

Rest-

less,

 

the sea doesn’t care.

 

 

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Word Riot, Apple Valley Review, among others. Serea is the author of Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8^th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervena Barva Press, 2015), and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). Serea co-hosts The Williams Readings poetry series in Rutherford, NJ. She is a founding editor of National Translation Month. More at cserea.tumblr.com.

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR  

 

Murmurations

 

Winter skies low wattage is compounded

by black news cast: refugees, economy, terrorism.

Aunty Beeb attempts to cheer with item on starling murmuration,

nature’s free show in this post-Christmas reckoning.

 

In Brighton, starlings are pearly king and queen day trippers

who stayed on, now ancestrally roost amongst pier’s rusty legs.

In Lake District, they perform epic aerial displays amidst Romantic

lakes and mountains, stamping ground of awe and sublime junkies.

 

My own spotted from car caught in first stirrings of rush hour,

peek- a- boo above buildings and hoardings; I drive and peer

reckless as texting at wheel. Eventually pull onto garage forecourt

where in gap between pizza place and sales room,

 

I gain unrestricted view as they shape shift like Northern Lights

but with twittering, whirring soundtrack;

20 minutes, then as darkness begins to cataract creep,

the spectacle strategically shifts over their roost,

 

working outside in, ranks of birds peel off, plummet into trees,

the reduced formation still displaying until the final section

drops into row of evergreens squeezed between industrial units. 

As their chatter cold ends, silence. The ear retunes to City’s racket.

 

BBC briefly turns teacher, asks talking heads for the science

behind the phenomenon but experts shrug We don’t know.

I smile, You go girl as nature in this Higgs Bosun world,

still manages to remain tight lipped about some things.

 

 

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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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

After Reading Chekhov I Go for a Walk in Town

 

Knowing almost all, I put the book

in the pocket of my jacket. I feel

them slap, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories

against my thigh and hip as I walk

 

in the light. I feel light of heart.

I feel light-headed as if just given

a clean bill of health by my physician.

I pass the men and women in the street

 

who stop to look in the glass

of shop windows, the men and women

who stop at corners for the light to change,

while the men and women with business

 

more urgent than mine pass me.

They walk with haste, go secretly to meet

their lovers in dark, airless restaurants.

I recognize them now, yet I still need to see

 

the terrible denial of the known

in the clearest of eyes before I pause

to look in the mirror of the bookshop window,

to look at failure in the face, before I walk on.

  

 

Gaugin’s Armchair by Van Gogh

  

It is alive, as is the carpet,

and the candle on the seat instead of Gaugin,

and the gas jet on the wall instead of the sun.

All are alive.

 

Of course.

Everything he painted is alive.

Just look at the eyes of the self-portraits.

Death is alive in them.

Just look at The Mairie at Auvers.

 

It was painted thirteen days before he shot himself in the chest.

The house is alive.

The house is so alive it writhes in pain.

 

It howls.

 

J. R. Solonche is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Invisible (Five Oaks Press) and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegal and several cats, at least two of whom are poets.

 

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DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL

 

Pueblos

 

Something happens when the pinon nuts are crushed,

When the smell rises up

Like toes curling in the mud.

She says the pinon brings forth faith, bravery.

She gathers them along the gully,

East where the elf owl burrows,

Where the quail drink with soft contented noises.

Sometimes she raises the brown wing of her hand.

She remembers her father's circle of stones,

His water sign pointing as the crow flies,

There, to the north, to the black mesa.

A hawk soars, its shadow flashing on the canyon wall.

She smiles from her chair, her soul

Sighing its way through long-leafed pines.

 

 

Fragment from a Mennonite Journal

 

There's low ground fog in the hayfields;

Pheasants scratch for colored insects

This fine morning in September.

 

Last night an old woman saw an end to her suffering;

She'd been staring out her window for a week.

Her eyes grew large then bright then gave out.

Today she waits in her coffin;

Tomorrow her kin will gather.

We will talk about sleep and rest,

Winter's dark, the harvest, the love

That binds the weary bearing

Another body back to earth.

 

My neighbor replaces clapboards on his barn.

He stands on one leg on one rung of his ladder,

Leaning out, hammering, holding on, tentative,

Held at the waist by a rope.

I am giddy at such heights.

 

Today my wife brought home a load of honey.

The hives are hidden deep in the grove of sycamores,

Not far from the clover in the hayfields;

Its color is the color of sunrise.

 

Tonight she will sit beside me in a cane chair.

She will note how the morning glories are thick along the fence;

Tomorrow, after the burial, she will launder,

Sheets draped to dry on the lines.

 

She sleeps beside me, ending each day

With what we have, sharing the work,

Faithful to the ways that bring us together

 

 

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

 

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