2020

 

 

JUNE CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Sheila Bender, Phillip Henry Christopher, Robert Eccleston, Edilson Ferreira,

Mercedes Lawry, Bruce Morton, David Olson, Carolyn Oulton, J. R. Solonche,

Hana Yun-Stevens, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, Tanner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHEILA BENDER

 

Pantoum from Northern Jutland

for Emily and Vijay, who took me there

 

At the top of Jutland, where two seas meet,

my daughter and her family and I stand

with one of our feet in each of the seas

to see which of the two is the coldest.

 

My daughter and her family and I

take our time before we put in our votes

about which of the two is the coldest;

we know it is a very close match.

 

We take our time before we put in our votes;

my oldest grandson leans toward the Baltic.

Though the two are a very close match,

more sun seems to shine on the North Sea's ripples.

 

My oldest grandson sticks with the Baltic;

as a baby he flinched in slight breezes.

The sun warms the shallower ripples.

I vote just as he does.

 

As a baby he flinched in breezes by windows;

I look at the smile made by the swirls of the waves

and I vote now as he does,

awed by his height, how he's taller than I am.

 

I look at the smile of the swirls of the waves.

How the two seas seem a slit in a skirt

and my grandson is taller than I am,

my daughter says not a slit, but a zipper.

 

I see the two seas as a slit in a skirt

while I stand in the sand in the small space between.

My daughter says not a parting, a zipper,

three generations fastened by waves in the water.

 

While I stand in the sand in the small space between,

my daughter proclaims not a parting, a zipper.

Three generations fastened by waves and by water.

And I stand in the sand smiling among them.

 

Sheila Bender is a poet and memoirist who has devoted her teaching career to helping those who write from personal experience. Her latest poetry collection is Behind Us the Way Grows Wider from Imago Press, which also published her prose memoir Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief. You can learn more about her at http://writingitreal.com.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

PHILLIP HENRY CHRISTOPHER

 

Yuletide Whiskey Joint

 

It’s a melancholy holly

Christmas time,

an’ a dude

on a copper-colored horn

blows mellow be-bop,

kinda blue,

pale snow flakes dancin’

down outta’

smoke sky gray

like cigarette haze

in this

yuletide whiskey joint.

 

Wind blows hard as

that damn horn

howlin’ hot,

not be-ing

so much as

bop-ping

like his blues

got the news.

 

It’s a melancholy holly

Christmas time,

an’ a cool carol calls out

from the crowded stage

to Carla

at the bar,

who takes a long,

slow drag on

a skinny cigarette,

blows a thin

trail of smoke

from between

clenched teeth

an’ goes green

like pale holly,

holds her swollen belly

with one hand,

clutches the

beat old bar

with the other,

an’ Dale with the wobbly leg

whispers,

“Darlin’, I wrote you a poem,

sorta’ a Christmas thang...

In my poem

you have your own

baby Jesus,

but your kid’s cool,

ya know,

blows dope and all...

an’ all his Chrisssmasss songs

are ‘bout blunts an’ shit!”

 

It’s a melancholy holly

Christmas time,

an’ Carla pats old Dale’s

wobbly leg,

says,

“Wouldn’t that be the shit!

me, the Mother of God...

Probly have a

devil child

instead”

an’ the saxophone chokes

a tortured Silent Night

for pale snow flakes dancin’

down outta’

smoke sky gray

like the cigarette haze

in this

yuletide whiskey joint,

but it’s a melancholy holly

Christmas time

for Dale,

who takes one last

longing look

at Carla,

then twists around on

the chrome an’

butt-worn barstool

to stare

way past the band an’

out the grimy picture window

at the Ghost of Christmas Past

standin’ outside,

lookin’ sorta thin,

suckin’ on a doobie,

smoke risin’ from its

neon glowin’ tip

that shines like

blood red holly berries

in the

smoke gray night,

snowflakes dance ‘round

Christmas Past

an’ his stoner’s beatified grin

as the old phantom nods

at Dale

peering through

cigarette haze

in this

yuletide whiskey joint,

an’ it’s a melancholy holly

Christmas time,

an’ a dude

on a copper-colored horn

blows mellow be-bop,

kinda blue,

pale snow flakes dancin’

down outta’

smoke sky gray

like cigarette haze

in this

yuletide whiskey joint.

 

Poet, novelist and singer/songwriter Phillip Henry Christopher spent his early years in France, Germany and Greece.  His nomadic family then took him to Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio and Vermont before settling in the steel mill town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in the smokestack shadows of blue collar America.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

ROBERT ECCLESTON

 

Strolling Through Haiku

 

When deep in the dunes

With no human company

I’m never alone

 

The posts mark out routes

If you seek solitude they

Are best avoided

 

Ferns unfurl themselves

Waking from hibernation

To a world reborn

 

Once water-logged paths

Now transmuted to mud as

Ghosts of floods cling on

 

The pond slowly shrinks

Abandoning winter dreams

Of domination

 

The marram grass sways

Building, saving, maintaining

Workhorse of the dunes

 

A kestrel hovers

Its waiting brood dependent

On termination

 

The once blazing gorse

Its winter endeavours done

Settles down to rest

 

Now the broom sweeps in

Its yellow exuberance

Echoing the gorse

 

The casual breeze

Stirs seeded dandelions

Transporting new life

 

The old fallen birch

Brought down by storm or disease

Forecasts our future!

 

Trees now leaf laden

Offering firm foundations

To the questing birds

 

Sun’s higher passage

Summons flowers of summer

To gently emerge

 

Bluebells once joyful

Now losing their battle with

Bramble and nettle

 

Narrow paths twisting

Trees creating dark shadows

Then sunshine breaks through

 

Mayflower trees bloom

A cascade of purity

Soon to fade away

 

Strolling through haiku

Be careful where you’re treading

You may trample truth

 

Robert Eccleston rediscovered a love of poetry when he moved to the North West of England.

His collection Myths, Lies, and Old Age has been published by Beaten Track Publishing.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

EDILSON FERREIRA

 

Friends, Land and Flowers

 

I am guilty of not having many loves

and few people have been my friends.

I am a man of old-fashioned customs,

the one who hopes to be duly introduced

and then exchange a full conversation.

Forgotten refinement of the times of yore,

etiquette learned in the old social rites.

My friends are few, faithful and heartfelt,

not subject to the usual taps on the back,

easy laughs and feigned cuddling.

They are always austere, even stern,  

but never fail when you need them.   

Never accustomed to false praise

and empty words,

but prompt, effective and friendly deeds.

Like the land where I was born and raised,

dry plateaus and arid hills, narrow creeks  

and honest meagre sheaves by the harvest.

Stubborn trees that, unlike the others,

wait for the driest season to bloom,

naked even of leaves, find strength

to bring forth delicate yellow flowers,  

resembling pure and true gold.

 

Edilson Ferreira, 76 years old, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Widely published in international journals in print and online, he began writing at age 67, after retiring as a bank employee. Nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2017, his first Poetry Collection, Lonely Sailor, One Hundred Poems, was launched in London in November of 2018. “Friends, Land and Flowers” was first published in Young Ravens, issue nine, December 2018.  He is always updating his works at www.edilsonmeloferreira.co

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

MERCEDES LAWRY

 

Balm

 

It’s a little book I will write,

short of sentence, taut with verb.

The story is the same. Our lives

roll on, collecting motes of dust,

half moons, jelly jars, poker chips.

 

Would your life fit in a small book?

Is it sweet or sour, knotty or thin

as a sheet of paper? Scribble it

in a rush or inscribe in script,

languid and wavy. Either way.

 

There is only so much time

to choose what will calm

the fettered soul. Just a slender book,

the words vining around

my neck, my wrists, my bony knees.

 

Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner.  She’s published three chapbooks, the latest, In The Early Garden With Reason was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her full manuscript Small Measures is forthcoming from Twelve Winters Press. She’s also published short fiction and stories and poems for children and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize five times.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

BRUCE MORTON

 

Shesplain

 

She explains things to me—repeatedly.

I have come to expect it, count on it.

Is it so obvious, the obvious

Completely escapes my understanding,

Evades the bounds of my observation?

 

She tells me that if I were a woman

I would understand; I would know.

She tells me that if I were a woman

I would see, I would understand, a

Woman would know. A woman just would.

 

She is saying I do not hear her words

Because I am not understanding her.

I hear every word she says every time

She says it is so obvious and that

If I were a woman I would see it.

 

She reminds me of the obvious.

I am not a woman. Testosterone

Does addle the mind, I rationalize.

Yes, I need to feel calm and focused,

As she explains it all to me again.

 

Bruce Morton resides in Montana and Arizona. His volume of poems, Simple Arithmetic and Other Artifices, was published in 2015. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies and magazines including, most recently, Muddy River Poetry Review, Rye Whiskey Review, Adelaide, San Pedro River Review, and Main Street Rag.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

DAVID OLSON

 

New York Movie, 1939

 after Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

 

The slender, long-legged usherette

leans against the wall of the vestibule;

blond hair glows beneath sconce lamps.

Her left hand crosses her midriff,

holds a torch that guides patrons to loges

in the dim auditorium with red plush seats.

Her right hand’s at her cheek in pensive pose.

She’s seen the picture several times,

can recite tiresome dialogue. She’s bored.

With her looks, she’s better than this.

They say there may be war in Europe,

but that’s an ocean away and nothing

to do with us. Her feet hurt.

 

 

Automat, 1927

 after Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

 

A walk-in vending machine.

Out of view are rows and tiers

of small glass-fronted cells

 

displaying snacks and drinks,

sandwiches and desserts,

arrayed along an entire wall.

 

Stylishly attired for the office,

she wears coat and cloche

against the night outside.

 

She has finished a slice of pie

or cake, and contemplates

the coffee in her cup.

 

She’s alone where a New Yorker

might go to escape the loneliness

of home, another empty room.

 

No. No. No. How dare you

presume to know what’s on my mind?

I’m alone because I choose to be.

 

I have to live with a houseful of women,

and sometimes I need to be away from

their squabbling and kitchen mess.

 

Sometimes I just need to be by myself.

 

 David Olsen's Unfolding Origami won the Cinnamon Press Collection Award, and Past Imperfect is also from Cinnamon. After Hopper & Lange is due from Oversteps Books in 2021. Four chapbooks are from US publishers. David holds degrees in chemistry from UC-Berkeley and creative writing from San Francisco State University. www.davidolsenpoetry.net.   

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

CAROLYN OULTON

 

In a Garden, Maybe After a Death

 

A different day in June, years later.

Perhaps a brother, a sister

might be sitting in a garden with

goodness knows how many weeds.

There are roses lolling,

a butterfly cuts in

with jagged strokes.

 

A hen, sunset feathered,

moves across the shade.

The long-handled mower,

ready for anything, is there.

Sky the size of loss, the blue

of the love felt by the dead

when there is no more time.

 

Carolyn Oulton is Professor of Victorian Literature and Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her most recent collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple). “In a Garden, Maybe After a Death” was first published in The Moth, winter 2018.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

J. R. SOLONCHE

 

The Jonah Story

 

I do not like the Jonah story. The Jonah story is all obedience and disobedience, God calling on the wind to frighten the sailors, God calling on the whale to swallow up Jonah and spit him out again on dry land, God calling on the worm to desolate the vine. The Jonah story is all God calling. I do not like the way the Jonah story ends. The Jonah story ends without ending. It ends with God asking Jonah a question, but really asking one of those holy rhetorical questions that God is so fond of, and that is where Jonah is left hanging, on the question mark of God. And I do not like this because I want to know what happens to heroes at the end of stories. What happens to Jonah at the end of his story? What does Jonah do? Does he go home?  Does he stay where he is on the east side of Nineveh where he prepares a field of gourd vines? Does he sleep twenty-four hours through? Does God leave Jonah alone? Does God leave Jonah alone, finally, finally, in the shade of the vine?

 

 

Swans

 

My neighbor Eva likes

to watch the swans

that live on the lake.

She says it’s funny how

they’re so majestic

with their long, graceful

necks in the water while

on land, they waddle

around on those short legs.

She says she’s embarrassed

for them. Listen, Eva, I say,

don’t be silly. Evolution

made them exactly that way

for a reason, for goodness

sake. They’re paddles, which

are perfect for life on a lake.

Well, I don’t like it, she says.

They look stupid. They do,

I say. But only one third

of the time. When flying

and swimming, perfect bird.

Their glass is two-thirds full

and one-third empty. Ours

at best is half and half.

At least, that made her laugh.

 

J.R. Solonche is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (chapbook from Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today & Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions),  If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (forthcoming July 2019 from Kelsay Books), and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

HANA YUN-STEVENS.

 

Grenoble Hospital

 

The hallway angels wipe the rot away from Samsa’s prison box.

Harmoniously, the sisters glide, so do the days, the fluids

swimming like the micro-organisms in river water,

wafting as we had been like nomads across purgatories.

 

I was cocooned and staring, numb and wild,

uniformed voiceless looming gods, foreign,

under a distant yet close to the bone,

urgency.

 

Wafting are the cries through the doors

to meet and knot

the underlying tone you couldn’t know alone,

whether specked like the rest,

clueless, anticipating on a hard seat

or spreading and dissolving into the cot

like butter into bread, water into the sponge.

 

The underlying tone- if they could know

wiping shit from asses, those hands -

Or those hands that never tremble beneath the calmness of muscle memory.

Whether they could know, or anyone

how each pain weighs time over different

 

and to me, how time weighed over the boredom,

and to me, the silence collapsed on the cell, collapsed,

Poor Gregor. It wasn’t voices, it was to be unheard

and yet still noise filled and I was sorry and I was wild.

 

How I heard that one time,

the fellow warrior held behind the curtain,

moaning for health or death, in between,

lapses of indifference. Could we agree?

You know the ceiling so well you might as well be it.

 

Could we agree?

The irony of the summer leaves,

the blue skies, the intruding desire

for present forgetfulness of an emergency CT scan,

tubed and noted not even an emergency.

But that’s just me.

 

Another body rolls out like batter

at the feet of the window.

Sometimes, life finishes unfinished.

And that is civilization at everyone’s feet here

 

in Grenoble,

in wars across decades, centuries, nations,

muscles, organs, bones, nerves, new-borns,

attacks, accidents,

the purgatory for those slapped with some fate

and Mani next door won’t walk again.

She will get an ambulance back to Lyon.

 

And when the sobs end for whatever reason you pray for,

whatever can be prayed for is here.

The temple’s sterile conditions,

sink and become the temple.

 

Voices grow dimmer until the bud nipped,

and some dead noises to blossom that garden,

some floral screams nipping the bud,

but that is not here.

 

 A white chemise. Healing,

the smile of the nurses, soon to be gone,

still in pain but better,

but no metaphors can shackle

how unity is stripped.

 

Life here continued, continues

like waking from a dream and never rising,

at any given moment,

whatever my morphine-spun mind

will decide.

 

Hana Yun-Stevens was born in 2002 in Seoul, South Korea. She is currently based in London and will begin a BA at Fine Art at Slade School UCL in October.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

NWUGURU CHIDIEBERE SULLIVAN

 

Familiar gods

 

I know some gods in our home

They said;

    "those who want to live

     should prepare to die

     for true life ends on earth

     and begins from above".

 

I know some gods in our home

They said;

      "men prefer clothed deceits

       to bare truth and beckons

       on life that is a mirage of reality

       instead of death, where reality dines".

 

I know some gods in our home

They said;

         "Africa is an aged youth

         who waits for a foreigner

         to settle his disputes with nature

         of who rightly owns his soul after here".

        

I see familiar gods everywhere;

In the old market where a tree still stands as its head,

In the old home where obi still receives kola and palm wine,

In the old farm where yam still rules as a king,

In the old moon where children still gather at old foot to hear stories,

In the maiden who still wears colourful jígída.

 

Mama said,

   "The truth is that the gods are silent

   coz we sold out their seats to foreign gods

   and walked them out through the windows

   and that we've become nothing behind everything

Coz a foreigner does not know

the local byways to ease our burden". 

 

So until we return to our roots

And reckon on our chi

Who understands why kola is not eaten just as a fruit,

Our prayers and requests

Will continue bouncing back to us

As drafts.

 

 *Obi: central house in an Igbo homestead

 *Jígída: a colourful bead worn around waist

 *Chi: personal god

 

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan is a budding writer from the Ebonyi State of Nigeria. He writes autobiographically about life and about multiple aspects of the ebbing African culture. He is a Medical Laboratory Science student with lots of unpublished works to his credit. His works have been published in Quills, Ace World, Ducor Review, The SprinNG, Trouvaille Review, Journal Nine and several other places. He has also contributed to several anthologies. He was the winner of the 2018 FUNAI Crew Literary Contest.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

TANNER

 

bleach

 

walk past the manager’s office

a box of bleach in your hands

and hear him in there:

‘you can’t wait for me? you mean you won’t!’

go up to the door:

‘it’s not my fault! this is what I do! this is what I do for us!’

lean towards the crack in the door:

‘it’s not like I want to be here! and you’re punishing me for it?’

look at him:

a balloon deflating over his desk:

‘you’re really going to go without me?’

Terry on the frozen department, whose brother

goes out with some girl who’s best mates with the manager’s wife,

he says they’ve been going to swinger’s clubs together.

‘please …’ he’s a puddle across the desk

and you look away

for you are not pleased:

you resent the slave driver’s every rancid breath

but you are not pleased, far from it

for you know very well

there’s nothing worse than a boss who isn’t getting any

and he will hammer home this point

when he comes storming out of that office

wanting to know how many pallets you’ve got through

so you go to aisle 11

and start putting out the bleach

and even over the humming tremors of the dairy chillers,

even from the other end of the shop,

you hear him SLAM

the phone down in there.

 

Tanner’s latest collection Shop Talk: Poems for Shop Workers published by Penniless Press, Winter 2019.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE