2015

 

 

 

MARCH ARCHIVE

 

 

Joyce S. Brown, James Brush, Seth Crook, Grace Curtis, Eleanor Holland, Kamikawa, Laura M. Kaminski, Rebecca Kylie Law, Patrick Lodge, Debra McQueen, Todd Mercer, Thomas O’Connell, Edward O’Dwyer, Kenneth Pobo, Julie Sampson.

 

 

 

 

JOYCE S. BROWN

 

Scraps

 

It’s hard to be interested

in someone else’s dream.

But if the dream is yours,

you awake wondering why

those wet wooden steps

were steep and uneven, why

the bearded man had such

delicate feet crossed next to

a pair of orange and black

lacquered shoes, and why

the movie tickets were non-

refundable, when the bus

wasn’t even running. You

wonder how anyone dares

to interpret dreams, to make

a whole, recognizable dress

from scraps –except that

here you are, making

an honest-to-God life

out of that grab bag.

 

Nursery Redux

 

I am the girl who pinched the dog.

 

I am the woman who spanked

the  girl who pinched the dog.

 

I am the woman who disapproves

of the woman who spanked the girl.

I am the girl who stole from her sister

and the woman who scorns the thief.

 

I’m the girl caught by the cops

for tossing snowballs at passing cars;

I am the girl who didn’t cry

when her parents died and isn’t sure why.

 

I am the girl attached to none

except a dog with a watchful eye.

 

 

Joyce S. Brown is a poet who lives in Baltimore. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, First Things, Yankee, Smartish Pace, Passager, The Tennessee Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, The American Scholar, The Journal Of Medical Humanities, Commonweal, The Maryland Poetry Review, Potomac Review, and other journals.For 10 years she was a teacher of fiction and poetry writing in the Johns Hopkins Writing seminars

 

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JAMES BRUSH

 

Three Scenes from the Road

 

1. Since Lonesome Dove

 

Between prairie fire, buffalo and wind

few trees could live here, but some

survived, tall oaken islands over grass.

And when I drive up 183 toward Abilene

some old oak might catch my eye, a tree

hundreds of years old. Settlers might have

known such a tree, Comanches too.

And ever since I read Lonesome Dove,

I can’t help but wonder at the hard miles

I cross in eyeblink time, and what horse

rustlers may once have hanged

from those branches, legs twitching

in the terrible and lonely space above

the springtime blooming wildflowers.

 

2. Albuquerque

 

Walking low streets, I breathe mountains, morning

air steals into my lungs like piñon smoke.

Soon desert warmth will rule the day. Fiery

storm clouds burn balloons navigating highways

in the sky. I walk conquistador paths,

missionary streets wind past adobe

homes, pueblo bungalows. I imagine

living here. This walk starts an audition,

a yearlong romance with this desert town

made perfect by the fact it isn’t home.

Between the Sandias and the desert,

the river and the roads, a place to stop.

Breakfast in a warm welcoming diner:

bagel and cream cheese with fresh green chilies.

 

3. The Wonder

 

Against northern Arizona’s canyon sky,

we stare down at the world below.

Toothpick trees cling to canyon sides;

a hawk screeches out its call.

Sunlight catches the Colorado—

a momentary thread of fire as the

lights of Bright Angel ignite,

a beckoning starlight on the farther shore.

If I hold my breath and hold your hand

and the clouded sky grows gears to slow

the hours into eons, we could pause

erosion and hold the moment grinning

through all the changes and the years,

the road to Flagstaff, Vegas, L.A., home.

 

James Brush is the author of Birds Nobody Loves and A Place Without a Postcard. He lives in Austin, TX and posts things online at Coyote Mercury where he keeps a full list of publications. He also edits the new online literary journal Gnarled Oak.

 

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SETH CROOK

 

Tiree Woman

How the fisherman 
loved her toes
warmed by the sun.

Wiggling, they seemed 
a gesture 
from before, 

a casual welcoming
into
into what was allowed.

 

Iona

 

A bee
amongst
the rowan blossom.

 

The ferry
against
the concrete jetty.

 

The abbey bell
across
Iona Sound.

 

A cuckoo
in the bluebells.

 

Waiting.

 

Further out from Mull

Dark clouds above Iona
seem, for an hour,
like a range of peaks,
all behind it, further out; 

as real as Coll or Tiree

or Islay, a new,
atlantic, island home of 

unknown Brigadoons.
 

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before deciding to move to the Hebrides. He does not like cod philosophy in poetry, but likes cod, philosophy and poetry. His poems have most recently appeared in Envoi, Magma, Gutter, Southlight, Poetry Scotland, The Poetry Bus, The Journal, Prole, New Writing Scotland and on-line at Antiphon, Snakeskin, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Streetcake and The Lake.

 

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GRACE CURTIS

 

Sound Travel

 

The inscription was located

in the "takeout grooves",

an area of the record between

the label and playable surface.

 

Whether Mother's fall

was first, or her heart, whether

one followed in order, or both

like stones, were thrown

by two different children, thrown

on two different shores, worlds

apart, who knows. To the makers of music

 

 – all worlds, all times is hand-inscribed

on the Voyagers'

Golden Records. What sound

resounds into space

from small hallways on earth

painted the color of blue dusk,

and who will hear it

and for how long? A clerk

 

at the grocery has Lomberg's man

and hand-waving woman etched

onto his forearm—a reminder

of what we assembled, of what

sound plays last and wide

and of all things we must

ink into something soft

to recall, the small

 

cries in the night, whimpers,

or gasps, or the Brandenburg

Concerto, Aboriginal songs,

Peruvian panpipes and drums,

or the sound of a room

growing dimmer, dim. Sounds

recorded and sent - kiss,

 

baby, mother, dog,   

frog, cricket, wind,    

laughter. Sagan calculated

the odds of extraterrestrials

finding the golden record, 

 

remote, but the volumes

spoken in favor of hope,

immense. Sound both pushes

and pulls. A mother’s final breath

detrudes past the exosphere

toward interstellar space

and never stops

 

Grace Curtis’, The Shape of a Box,  is available from Dos Madres Press. Her chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was selected the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage chapbook contest. Her work can be found in Naugatuck Review, Sou’wester, Red River Review, The Baltimore Review, Waccamaw Literary Journal, and Scythe. She works for The Antioch Review. www.gracecurtispoetry.com

 

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ELEANOR HOLLAND

 

Black Bananas

 

You showed me letters

heaving their forms across paper.

I showed you how my breasts looked in the bath.

 

I imagined your arteries were

scar-tissue hard and numbed

and we ate mini-eggs out of a cavity in your chest

and watched film where a man wore an octopus for a face.

 

You were embedded in me from day one

like the glass crouched in my sole.

I met you in a garden,

a woollen hat and the taste of premier estates wine.

You smothered me with the smell of bonfire

and traced my vulnerability with your tongue.

 

You were Carlsberg and chinese teapots filled with coppers.

You were the shining polyester of a Liverpool shirt and a Belfast drawl and

the smell of Amber Leaf roll-ups and old clothes.

I thought I could taste bi-polar in your mouth.

You were Maryland Cookies and Pulp Fiction and Jim Bean.

A bent-backed bush-baby with shrimp-round brown eyes.

I rent the hole in your chest

and you looked me up in the DSM-IV and made spiders in my bath

strung out like an IV.

I wore your disease like perfume, little Freud.

 

Eleanor Holland is based in Manchester. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Moth and The North. 

 

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KAMIKAWA

 

Swapping Kaia

 

Fly-bitten buttocks quiver in the shantytown shit shack,

all the kaia men from up and down the street crouch

ham sandwich fisted round Rihanna news clippings, cowering from percussive

bullet fire rattling with the name of the murdered President.

Durban, the elder, says “cum it dry, boys… cum it dry… save your good stuff

for your wives and times beyond these killing nights.”

 

Some boys sneak round to watch the neighbouring women’s wetroom,

drooling over washed thighs that drip with suds and sweat,

shining through the windows. Tonight the men are swapping kaia

before the soldiers come, before they’re forced guns raised to split,

to fuck their mothers, their daughters, their sons, in exchange for their lives.

House to house, blade to flesh, all old hatreds burned and confessed.

 

Tonight the men are swapping kaia for when the soldiers come.

For when the soldiers come...

 

 

Kamikawa (born Tristan Coleshaw, 1984), is a poet, singer/songwriter and blogger. His poetry has been featured in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, his music with pop group WIRED was featured on BBC3’s Upstaged, and his collaboration with the band Intrinzic was released by Changing World Records. Follow him at www.kamikawapoetry.wordpress.com/

 

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LAURA M. KAMINSKI

 

Witness

after reading collage poems from Howie Good’s 
Fugitive Pieces (Right Hand Pointing, 2014)

I fell asleep to music, lute disguised
as ukulele. How did the ancients
fail us, leave no record of the tenth muse,
the one chained to Pandora’s box to serve

as scribe? How can one stand to chronicle
every Trouble that gleefully escapes
the lid? How can eyes remain unblinking
as headlines scab up over tragedies?

Why doesn’t grief form callus on his soul?
I dreamed us, the literati, arrayed
like some last supper, we toyed with sugared
misery, we scribbled on our napkins.

So amateur we seemed there, our laughing
over coffee, our impatient waiting
for betrayal by Godot...pasted as
we were beside the tithe who waits for Hope.
 

Laura M Kaminski grew up in Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. More about her poetry can be found at www.arkofidentity.wordpress.com

 

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REBECCA KYLIE LAW

 

The Hours Stayed

 

It did rain

though our night was silent,

 

lights off in the cathedral

and later, this room –

 

each hour of darkness

described by a new energy

 

of falling water not akin

to sorrows and not not.

 

Two nights later

I saw its place in a sky

so deep, black and honest

 

it too was silent yet its stars

separate and breathing light

 

had a sound of days

after rain, quiet and singing,

 

the mist gone from the highlands,

his arms open –

 

I fell asleep to Ave Maria

and woke to moving clouds,

 

a bird cracking apart yellow fruit

from the trees and from the shower

 

of a garden hose through these trees,

handfuls of white butterflies revealed

 

like the secret to dreams.

 

 

Rebecca Kylie Law is a Sydney based poet, essayist and reviewer. Published by Picaro Press, her poetry collections include Offset, Lilies and Stars and The Arrow & The Lyre. Other publications include thewonderbook of poetry, Notes for The Translators, Poems for the Young Chinese Adult, Best Poem Journal, Virgogray Press, Australian Love Poems 2013, Southerly, Westerly, Rochford Street Review, The Australian, The Euroscientist Ezine, The Lake and Pacific Poetry. She is currently enrolled in a Phd at the UWS and her forthcoming collection of poetry is due 2015 with Interactive Press.

 

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PATRICK LODGE

 

Small Landscapes

 

Sleet falls in sticks 

across Brante field,

sweeping the furrows clean

like a besom working a soul.

Every day the philosopher

at the five-bar gate watches

the black dog labour towards him;

splayed paws levering

up the cinder track,

slow, inevitable,

claiming affinity.

 

At the field edge agriculture

becomes random.

The dialectic of tractor and earth,

the drilled logic of seed lines, fray

into a scripture of switches:

bittersweet, hip, haw, sloe.

Recusant berries stand out 

against winter orthodoxy; 

remnants of buried summer warmings, 

they are non-conformists.

 

He has squandered much time 

seeking acquaintance 

with small landscapes 

that promise all to those 

who diligently scrape and sift;

who collect fancies 

like stones from a riverbed, 

stacking them carefully 

to corbel a dry, dark peace.

 

The dog arrives. The wind

slices across the field like a blade 

cutting down paper. Clouds 

hardly bothering to clear the hill 

unfurl in shrouds over the vale below.

There is a limited outlook;

he holds to the selvedge,

pulls up his collar, 

shrugs and walks on.

 

 

Patrick Lodge retired from an academic career teaching American Studies several years ago and now writes full time. He lives in Yorkshire and is from an Irish/Welsh heritage. His work has been published and anthologised across the world and he has read at several festivals and poetry events. His first collection, An Anniversary of Flight, was published by Valley Press in 2013. His second collection, provisionally titled Shenanigans, is due out in 2015. 

 

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DEBRA MCQUEEN

 

Falling Back

 

One of my students is most likely dead,

I can’t bring myself to check.

His classmates, my very first students,

are old enough to drive now. And shave.

 

Most of their last names and all

of their disabilities are forgotten but

the tattoo of him is needled on my mind:

his stout barrel trunk and blond buzz;

the chubby fists, thick lips, and the wheeze.

 

At five, the size of a cub, but mighty.

A howling linebacker. His powerful bite

lingered in the black black bruise on my arm.

 

He learned all he would ever learn;

the clock of his knowledge fell back,

only autumn the rest of his short little life.

 

His parents cried – the dad more

than the mom. (The offending enzyme

her gift, she didn’t get to be sad.)

 

She fought like a bear reared up on her haunches.

She trusted me, I don’t know why,

I’ve always been good with bears.

 

Maybe I don’t Google his name

in hopes he’s escaped the law

of his rare disease; he’s lived past

his expiration date, he’s driving a beatup

Karmann Ghia, shaking his permanent fist,

roaring at traffic too slow to keep up with him.

 

 

Debra McQueen’s poems have appeared in Red Triangle, The Legendary, Undertow, and NEON.WORK Literary Magazine published one of her many scathing resignation letters. In spite of this, she still has a job teaching special education in Soda City, South Carolina.

 

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TODD MERCER

 

Son of Frankenstein

  

Corn-shuck mattress tonight, straw pillows,

living like the Joads, barn-sleeping,

moving on ‘til automotive breakdowns

select the next temporary roosting post.

The franken-mobile is more patch than

original equipment, the frame though,

holds fast (less a couple of spot welds)

with our worldly goods wedged in,

roped on to the roof, requiring

we keep an eagle eye out for low bridges,

underpasses. My daredevil offspring up there

air-surfing on our last furniture, unclear

on the difference between

eviction and vacation. I raised

an optimist, somehow. Blood

of my blood thinks he’s flying,

thinks we’re twelve feet tall.

 

  

The Bikini Waxer: Depilatory Declaration

 

 It’s late. There have been

a slew of cancellations,

missions built up then called off.

Come on out, we’ll fit you in.

Someone can talk someone down

from the ledges of high-rises

but they cant dance a tango

by themselves. Freezing rain

shellacs the sidewalk.

Take short steps

but come see us to lose

those stray follicles

that grow back

if you try to wax your

own Brazilian situation,

if you rip

a landing strip

from candle-wax

and wax paper.

Pay a professional,

you will look sensational,

not a curl outside the suit

to raise your critics’ eyebrows.

Right the first time,

I’ll be here ‘til nine.

Folks are postponing,

due to the weight

of winter. Fly in,

we’ll smooth it out.

 

 

Todd Mercer won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest. His chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest and his digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, was published by Right Hand Pointing in 2015. Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in journals such as Apocrypha & Abstractions, The Camel Saloon, Camroc Press Review, Cheap Pop, Eunoia Review, The Lake, The Legendary, Midwestern Gothic and theNewer York.

 

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THOMAS O’CONNELL

 

Sleeping Through a Miracle

 

Smoke rises

from my tea mug

 

sitting on the windowsill

next to your cross necklace

 

and my tooth, knocked out

last night on the sidewalk

 

 in front of Johnny’s Grille.

 

 

I watch the street

where so many careless boys

 

have left their toy cars

out in the rain.

 

A man walks from the corner,

with his Sunday Globe folded

 

and tucked under his arm.

 

 

He goes up

on tiptoes

 

at the construction site

to look through the peephole

 

          where he lingers

as if he could

 

see you sleeping.

 

 

A librarian, as well as three time Pushcart Prize nominee, Thomas O’Connell’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Elm Leaves Journal, Caketrain, NANO Fiction, The Broken Plate, and The Los Angeles Review, as well as other print and online journals. He also happens to be the 2015-2016 poet laureate of Beacon, New York.

 

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EDWARD O’DWYER

 

Smoke

 

Just then you paused

and your unfinished sentence held its breath

 

while you lit up a cigarette.

But in a parallel existence

 

you didn’t pause, finished the sentence,

didn’t light up that cigarette.

 

Waiting, I could only watch

that same parallel existence overtake me,

 

the self that didn’t have to wait split from me;

had heard your point.

 

Watch as it stood up from the chair

in which I was sat,

 

like a hologram,

put on its holographic coat, and left.

 

You were pulling deeply on your cigarette,

blowing it between us,

 

when I faced you again,

seemingly unaware of what happened;

 

of our being left behind;

of the lost moments of our lives.

 

 

Though There Are Musicians

for Michael Coady

 

While some poems may say

though there are torturers in the world

there are also musicians,

 

there are other poems, glass-half-empty poems,

that may take issue.  They’ll say

though there are musicians in the world

there are also torturers.

 

For all the blues that the great blues musicians

can muster in their magician’s fingers

there are greater blues played

in dark cells where men

are having their fingers clipped away.

 

Most of all, though, it is that drunk man

singing on the road they would wish to say this to,

to make understand;

more than the choirs, the orchestras, the operas;

 

shake him out of his spirits-stupor,

scream at him; insist he know

all the way down to the marrow of his intact bones

there are also torturers in the world

where a song may be sung and for no reason.

 

 

Edward O’Dwyer (b. Limerick, Ireland, 1984) has poetry published in magazines and anthologies worldwide. He has been selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and shortlisted for many prizes, including a Hennessy Award and the Desmond O’Grady Prize, and nominated for Pushcart and Forward prizes. His work was included in the Forward Book of Poetry 2015 and a first full collection, The Rain on Cruise’s Street, was published by Salmon Poetry (2014).

 

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KENNETH  POBO

 

Great Journey

 

Paper lanterns

and roasted marshmallows,

our block party. 

Larry, not old or young, 

ages but looks like a kid. 

A neighbor.

 

Minnie from down the street,

always cheerful,

her smile scalds,  told him

about the great journey of life. 

 

As if giving the weather,

Larry said that avoiding suicide

only means you’re lucky.  Life

is tin-can worthless.  After

the party ended, Minnie 

told me he was depressing. 

 

I agreed—

yet even Rosemary Clooney died.

And Genet.  When the sun

 

eats the Earth, our block

won’t even be a memory,

our passion for meaning,

ash.

 

 

Elegy for a Calamondin

 

Unwatered, the leaves,

green snow in a blue pot. 

Seven small fruits

hang on barren branches,

 

angry eyes.  Perhaps I should

apologize to it.  Instead,

I make spaghetti, watch TV. 

The oranges thickened

through summer days,

even in fall.  On Halloween

I took it in, gave it a sunny sill.   

 

My spouse gets the vacuum cleaner,

sucks up leaves.  He’s both

funeral director and gravedigger. 

Carrying it out,

he says nothing.     

 

 

Kenneth Pobo has a new chapbook out called Highway Rain from Poet’s Haven Press.  In addition to The Lake, his work can be read at Broadkill Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Eclectica, Undertow Tanka Review, and elsewhere.

 

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JULIE SAMPSON

 

Room for Folk

 

His flat-pick

strums banjo’s top D, 

membrane’s stretched sound

croons into unsounded corners

in the heady room.

 

Her fingers nimbly

arpeggio  a run

  of watery

accompaniments -

 

she’s walking across open Irish fields.

 

He told her how

last week

he’d hunted for,

 not found,

  the rare -

Lady’s Orchid -

 

how delicate the ivory-key.

 

Song ends -

  his fingers

   thrum

    & throb

the banjo gut.

 

 

I can hear paper ripping

 

yellow words

falling from sky,

 

a sentence forming

its isolated way -

 

red veins

and fingers scratching

commonsense viper-sharp prose.

 

This is from the heart she says

not from the head.

 

Gold is the colour

of sun and shore

and in this mood of light

a poem offers itself

 

dawn seeds

from the orange.

We will hold it still as a sphere.

 

 

Julie Sampson's poems are widely published. She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2009) and her own collection Tessitura (Shearsman) was published in 2013. She's completing a non-fiction book about Devon women writers: papers on the C16 Anne Dowriche have been published as well as an essay about Hilda Doolittle in Devon. Visit Julie's website at Julie Sampson (www.juliesampson.com).

 

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