2017

 

 

 

MARCH CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Lana Bella, David Butler, Anders Carlson-Wee, Sylvia Freeman, Cal Freeman,

Chris Hardy, Ronald Moran, Roney Oenophile, Drew Pisarra, Jeff Santosuosso,

 Sam Smith, J. R. Solonche, Mark Young.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LANA BELLA

 

Existence is a Pool of Mercury on Feathered Hope

 

Outside. The chill stood still

like a field mouse felled dead

by the circuit of time, electric,

ribboned in energy both illicit

and hostile. Inside, the clock

stroke noon. The woman sat 

mute, walled in her marriage

bed, clad in pale cradle of skin, 

scaling back in time and space

while catches of rain watered

down the monsoon wind, grey

as silt long trundled to earth.

But when her grief reigned as

Queen and shadows shaped by

the aches needled to her ribs,

with spindrift care, she learned 

to traverse into tides, treacled,

until she became the unclaimed

vibration in the room, contrails

in the expanse of purifying salt.

 

 

A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Lana Bella is an author of three chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016) has had poetry and fiction featured with over 350 journals, 2River, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Journal, Grey Sparrow, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Pedro River Review, The Ilanot Review, and Westwind, among others. Lana resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever frolicsome imps. 

 

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DAVID BUTLER

 

Shaving Mirror

 

The illusion, in its concave retina, is

virtual, magnified and upright,

which shows the treachery of words.

Rather say the image exaggerates

with the precision of satire.

It is a theatre of parallax;

a moving circle, centred on the eye;

a mercurial portrait, to which

time, a third-rate artist

who can’t leave well-enough alone,

returns, morning after morning,

to rework line and hatching

with ever coarser charcoals,

until the figure is botched, once for all,

to caricature.

 

 

David Butler’s second poetry collection All the Barbaric Glass is due for publication from Doire Press in March.

 

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ANDERS CARLSON-WEE

 

Dynamite

 

My brother hits me hard with a stick

so I whip a choke-chain

 

across his face. We're playing

a game called Dynamite

 

where everything you throw

is a stick of dynamite,

 

unless it's pine. Pine sticks

are rifles and pinecones are grenades,

 

but everything else is dynamite.

I run down the driveway

 

and back behind the garage

where we keep the leopard frogs

 

in buckets of water

with logs and rock islands.

 

When he comes around the corner

the blood is pouring

 

out of his nose and down his neck

and he has a hammer in his hand.

 

I pick up his favorite frog

and say If you come any closer

 

I'll squeeze. He tells me I won't.

He starts coming closer.

 

I say a hammer isn't dynamite.

He reminds me that everything is dynamite.

 

 

Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work appears in Ploughshares, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is a 2016-17 McKnight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. “Dynamite” was Published in Ninth Letter (Fall/Winter 2014), reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015 and Poetry Daily

 

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SYLVIA FREEMAN

 

Advice

 

When cousin Doris came back to town

swathed in mink,

cigarette dangling from her vermillion lips,

eyebrows plucked and perfectly drawn,

platinum hair to her shoulders,

she was on the verge of leaving her fourth husband.

She swept into our small living room,

perched on the arm of the worn beige sofa

as if afraid of sitting on the soft cushion

might drag her down, swallow her

back into a life of mediocrity she’d struggled to leave.

It was the eve of my wedding.

Her eyes moved over my girl body appraising me from head to toe

as I stood there in my plain white silk and told her about my fiancée.

She took a long drag from her Lucky Strike,

blew a perfect circle of smoke into the air,

Well, daling. You’re young, but I suppose you have to start somewhere.

She flicked ashes on the floor,

crushed them with the toe of her high heeled shoe,

It might as well be with him.

 

 

Sylvia Freeman's poems have been published by When Women Waken, Jacar Press, and Carolina Woman,  her fiction by Conclave: a Journal of Character. She is also a singer/songwriter for fleur de lisa, an acapella women's quartet who uses poetry for lyrics, and a prize winning photographer. She recently won best in show in Fusion Art for a digital photo.

 

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CAL FREEMAN

 

Fear

 

Kevin Matthews, wanted

for petty larceny, off his clozapine

 

the December day he fled

the night-blue figure

 

who had been redacting

all his thoughts.  The mayor says

 

he had a good relationship

with the officer who killed him.

 

The police knew where he lived

and this particular cop had driven him

 

home a few times when he was found

staggering through

 

the strip mall announcing Christ’s

dominion.  For a threatening gesture,

 

for fighting back, he is

irremediably gone.  Trash barrels

 

and cruisers repeat the platitudes

of city fathers.  Keep Dearborn Clean.

 

One City, One Mission.

In the story of the state,

 

the unarmed dead

are always reaching for a gun.

 

 

At the Grave of Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

I am not thinking of you here

in Glasnevin Cemetery this afternoon

where the mossed and lichened

headstones lie illegible in disrepair

beneath the grey persistence

of a Dublin sky (nothing in Dublin

makes us think of Dublin, Father)

but of worms, dispersal, reassembly,

the absurd homonyms of mite,

and flesh gone dun as gauze. 

It is better to read of places

and imagine their existences

lest they blear in pointillist drizzle.

As I come to your marker,

I feel less than wrack or wreck,

Christ’s lily and beast, a body

that can’t bear its person very long.

 

 

Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI.  His writing has appeared in many journals including Commonweal, Southword, Berfrois The Poetry Review, The Lake, and Manchester Review.  He is the author of Brother of Leaving (Marick Press) and Heard Among the Windbreak (Eyewear Publishing).  His book, Fight Songs, is forthcoming from Eyewear in October of 2017.

 

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CHRIS HARDY

 

Eden

 

Though I have lived in jungle and savannah

I am not much acquainted with snakes.

 

*

 

Fallen from the roof of the balcony

the dozing nāgā lies upon the shoulder

of a woman dining in the evening air.

 

When a bowl of milk is placed before it

the snake slips onto the table where a bullet

destroys the hamadryad and the table.

 

*

 

Pointing to the pale-beaked sea snake

struggling in grey waves off the esplanade

my father tells me it is poisonous,

 

as all serpents are that live in the sea.

Two brown nerofithi idling by a pond

are looking for frogs not me.

 

*

 

Though I have lived in jungle and savannah

I am not much acquainted with snakes.

Now I live in a northern city where they don’t live.

 

*

I captured a grass snake with a tented book.

Left it to starve when the holidays began.

Returned to rings in a see-through sock.

 

My mother stopped me picking up

a lurid pencil from the ground

by pointing out a dragon on a twig.

 

Resting in a dry storm drain the viper

hears me on the bridge above and slides away.

Its scales scratch concrete like dry leaves.

 

Thick bodied adder looped on a rock,

a golden rope that licks the air

when I come across her in the heather.

                                                                                                                         .                                        

*

Though I have lived in jungle and savannah

I am not much acquainted with snakes.

 

Now I live in a northern city

which edges out into fields

where they don’t live.

 

*

 

My neighbour killed a fira in his bathroom.

Next night its mate was waiting so

he blew cobra and bath to bits with a shotgun.

 

I met him again in Wales in ’76,

and after agreeing the burnt hillsides

smelt of Africa we recognised each other.

 

*

 

A bootlace coiled beneath the doorstep

the spitofithi hisses like a cat

as with a broom I encourage it to leave.

 

In the middle of the road above the port

an old man curses the small whip snake

he is beating to death with a stick.

 

*

 

Though I have lived in jungle and savannah

I am not much acquainted with snakes.

Now I live in a northern city

 

which edges out into fields

which edge out into forest

where they don’t live.

 

 

nāgā – snake (Hindi)

hamadryad – a type of cobra

nerofithi – water snake (Greek)

fira – cobra (Swahili)

spitofithi – house snake (Greek)

 

 

Chris Hardy’s poems have appeared in many magazines, anthologies and websites and have won prizes. His fourth collection is being prepared for publication. Chris is in LiTTLe MACHiNe, performing settings of poems at literary festivals, currently with Roger McGough.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

Responses

 

If I could I would is one of the more

                      vexing replies

in our storehouse of stock responses

                      to such

entreaties as, Do you think you might?

                      or

Would you please? or Will you help?

                      after which

 

you filed it in your cache of non-crucial,

                      or

truly unanswerable. Not so easy, though,

                      since                 

who asked may have meant it as a rock

                      hard plea

at the shallow end of a lake going stagnant,

                      and you were

 

the last resort to add a level of perception,

                      not a mismatch

of bubbles drifting toward a landing without

                      a shoreline––

all so sad, your head and chest tightening

                      like guilt.

 

 

Ronald Moran lives in Simpsonville, SC, USA and has had 13 books of poetry published, the most recent entitled Eye of the World  (Clemson University Press, 2016).  He has received a number of awards and distinctions for his poetry.

 

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RONEY OENOPHILE

 

The Holy Whore

 

I was afraid to sleep

With the Gods

Especially when the God is

Shivji.

I am afraid because

 Lord Brahma failed to reach

The edge of his Phallus

Up in the heaven

And

Lord Vishnu,

Beneath the Hades.

I heard my brother;

In discussion with his college mate

About how the bet was formed

Between the two gods,

About why Shivji cursed lord Brahma that day,

And about his research paper

On Indian Mythology

I was not

Terrified to hear that ephemeral moment

As I was in smooth water

In those adolescent years

Until recent I heard my sister share

Her first-time painful experience

With her friends

About how

Blood was gushing out,

About how

She was emptied of her virginity

And if it really made her cry

I wonder then why

Girls in my neighborhood

Keep fast on Mondays

And why they yearn for

A long virile phallus…

I am in my teeny age

My father said

Now it is my turn to become a Devdasi

Before I am offered

To the goddess Yellama And

Asked to sleep with Ugly old priests,

One calm night

My sister came to my bed

And whispered in my ears

What a holy whore means.

 

 

Roney Oenophile lives in Delhi, India. His oeuvre has been published in several print and online publications across the globe. He is recipient of an award from Hindi Academy. One of his photographs was used as the cover page of a magazine.

 

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DREW PISARRA

 

Sock Shopping on Easter Sunday

 

                                                They hang

                                      in pairs or

                                      pairs of pairs

                                      or six packs:

                                      black, tan,

                                      navy, gray,

          the occasional argyle or polka dot, all gold-toed

          plus some bargain-bin strays with patterns veering

          to juvenile, presumably marketed to men unable to

          relinquish boyhood or too gay to care. And so each

                                      sock set drapes

                                      a small plastic

                                      hanger in a tiny

                                      world in which

                                      hunch-backed dolls

                                      use misshapen towels,

                                      and gerbils with hip

                                      dysplasia sleep in

                                      customized sleeping

                                      bags. The knits are

                                      cheap. The fabrics,

                                      blends. Every sock

                                      fits everyone from

                                      size 9 to 12, more

                                      or less. I pick out

                                      a pair -- egg-yolk

                                      yellow and Xmas

                                      tree green with

                                      small abstracted

                                      things stitched

                                      throughout: bugs

                                      or rocketships or

                                      martini shakers

                                      or bunny rabbits

                                      from planet Mars.

 

 

Public Transit

 

When the disembodied voice

on the subway instructs.

“please stand clear of the closing doors,”

I wonder what she’s talking about.

 

Is she telling me something more important
than “Back off” like “Your train

left this station long ago.
This isn’t your train.
This train is full.”

 

What’s the hurry?
I might as well wait
for all the difference it makes.
What the F!

 

Ding. Dong.
Please stand clear of the closing doors.

 

I swear that she’s talking to me.

I know she is.
And she’s not promising anything better.

She knows that if I stick stuck

out on this platform

I’ll just get hot tunnel-air burped in my face.

 

And why does she say, “stand clear”?

Why “clear”?

What’s she mean by that?
Why isn’t she clearer?

Ding. Dong.

 

There she goes again.

At least, she’s being polite.

At least, she said please.

At least, she’s not telling me to piss off,

pull in my backpack,
my red purse and my winter coat.

 

No one’s blaming me for delays.
No one’s blaming me for delays tonight.

 

Maybe there’s kindness in her request.

Maybe she’s really telling me, “Hurry up!

Come on. Get in you son of a bitch.”

Maybe I’m supposed to stand clear

of the closing doors

from the inside.

Maybe I’m supposed to be packed inside

with the rest of the sardines.

 

Maybe she’s saying, “Hey don’t listen to me.”

 

Please stand clear of the closing doors.

 

Eight years of this.

Work. Home.

Work. Home.

Work. Home.

Work. Home.

 

I’m about as close to the starting gate

as I am to finality’s grave.

 

We’re moving now.

 

Scratched up glass turns

into an underground mirror.

Look at me!

I’ve misbuttoned again.
I forgot to comb my hair.

Oh, well.

 

And then I hear her speak.

 

We are now approaching…

We are now approaching…

We are now approaching…

Nothing.

 

Drew Pisarra worked in the digital sphere on behalf of Mad Men, Rectify, and Breaking Bad. His work has been produced off-Broadwayand appeared in Poydras Review, Thin Air, and St.Petersburg Review among other publications. His collection of short stories, Publick Spanking, was published by Future Tense.

 

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JEFF SANTOSUOSSO

 

Response

 

Call me Father.

          I respond.

 

Call me Mother.

          Ritual brings us metronomic peace,

          the world secure and steady.

 

Call me Brother.

          We reply in unison,

          vocal schooling creatures of the sea,

          great migratory souls chanting in formation.

 

Call me Sister.

          What binds us lifts us.

          Spirits venture out as words from our lips,

          songs of life within us, released for all.

 

Call me Music.

          I’m a Temptation, a Pip,

          a Spinner, a Supreme, an O’Jay.

          I sing for Aretha, Ray, Otis, and Jackie,

          for Joe Cocker and Van Morrison.

 

Call me Spirit.

          My refrain

          replies time and again

          as you

 

call me farther.

 

 

Jeff Santosuosso lives Pensacola, F, USA.  A member of the Florida State Poets Society, he is edits of panoplyzine.com, dedicated to poetry and short prose.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appearing in San Pedro River Review, Red Fez, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, Avocet, and others.

 

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SAM SMITH

 

Doubt, Certitude, and Cumbrian Old Age

 

When the winter-scouring of this rock-lumped land

                                           is complete

when

above the lake’s ink-dark depths

conifer’s ranks have new silvered growth

then

the growling croak and heavy beak

                 of the iron-brained raven

will come seek me out

 

Daily surprised at having survived

                                         myself

and while I may still

                   and will always be

a stranger in strange places

I know

these gnarled feet will yet take me

                              joints creaking

to plant myself breathless

atop one more hill

 

I may even live long enough to see

solar particles curtaining these cold skies

 

For sure what I do know is that

                          like the wren

who hiding has yet to sing out her own truth

                          I will again

put pen to paper

and at winter’s end

                 maybe

the flower will at long last

unfold from the bud

 

 

Lives Incomplete

 

Landscape speaks another language here,

has different accents, the Lord’s Prayer

rumbling along the cold stone floor

between pairs of damp shoes.

          On the sodden hillsides

around the low brick-dark church

swathes of copper-coloured bracken

          undertones of gold.

              Within is the song-said

delivery of a one-book man. His piece

eventually A-menned comes the groan

of an organ, rattle and creak of an oaken

door, and the steps of coffin-bearers soft

as leaf-fall.

 

In the valley woodland beyond the cemetery wall

are undergrowth glimpses of bleached-out bracken.

 

A back-and-forth jay busily collects acorns.

 

     And here they come,

     crouched over their tears,

     the left-behind-beloved,

     as usual uncomforted by ritual.

 

Sam Smith is a freelance novelist/poet and editor/publisher of The Journal (once 'of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry') and of Original Plus books. He has recently moved from Cumbria to a South Wales valley.  http://thesamsmith.webs.com/

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Music Ghazal

 

The philosopher Schopenhauer said many things.

One of the best was that all art aspires to be music.

 

I do not want a funeral when I die.

If I did, I would want New Orleans marching funeral music.

 

The ancients referred to the music of the spheres.

Scientists now speak of a universal hum, a lesser music.

 

Of the one-thousand-seven-hundred-seventy-five poems

by Emily Dickinson, nine contain the word music.

 

When we do something wrong, we must suffer the consequences.

I don’t understand why that is called facing the music.

 

My daughter tells me a joke about a singing cow.

She says that this is the way the cow makes “moosic.”

 

                So,  Solonche, why do you write this stuff anyway?

                I write this stuff because I cannot write music.

 

 

Rodin’s Adam

 

He is not molded and formed from the clay.

He is wrenched out of it.

He is heaved up by the nape of the neck.

 

He is turned and twisted, a rusted screw.

He is standing but not fully.

He is conscious but only barely.

 

He is standing enough to know it is not for him.

He is conscious enough to know it is not for him.

The index finger of his right hand points downward.

 

It is the tongue of his body.

It says: Let me fall, let me sleep again.

It says: Let me return to the earth before it is too late.

 

 

J. R. Solonche has been publishing in magazines, journals and anthologies since the early 70s. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deermark Editions), the chaphook Hearts Content (Five Oaks Press) and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegel, and nine cats, at least three of whom are poets. His latest book is Won’t Be Long (Deerbook Editions) which is reviewed in the December issue.

 

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MARK YOUNG

 

A line from Loretta Lynn

 

Acid rain accelerates the

decay of some of my

favorite foods—pizza, ice

cream, even potato salad.

 

That's why I no longer eat

outside; but I do remember

what it was like, why I

started out to write a song

 

about the dead leaves, the de-

stroyed landscape that I saw

out there. Prévert's was a

sorrowful song, but also full

 

of color. My song is shades

of gray, & the only thing that

drifts by the window is coal

dust, heading for the lungs.

 

 

Enjambment

 

It's an an-

ticipation, like leaning into

a corner before

the bike gets

to it. Striking

a balance, so you can

take it at speed.

 

 

Mark Young's most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore & Ley Lines, both from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago. A new collection, some more strange meteorites, is due out from Meritage & i.e. Press, California / New York, in early 2017.

 

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