2018

 

 

MARCH CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Brent Cantwell, Mike Dillon, Nels Hanson, Ted Jean, Laura M. Kaminski,

 Beth McDonough, Jeff Santosuosso, Annie Stenzel, Sarah White,

Rodney Wood, Jeffrey Zable.

 

 

 

 

 

BRENT CANTWELL

 

just more lines – on Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ 

 

to anglers parallel lines don’t make sense 

either side of a wooden boat’s the way 

we cast out our lines of least resistance 

if we are lucky it’ll take all day 

 

a vibration comes on occasion 

a little excitement to be heard right

it whispers like a candle in the dim

din of so much more wasted time - a bite

 

this new thunder on the other hand’s heard  

in a blur of nerves that won't leave the skin  

that’ll scratch lines down the back of some ol’ bird! 

And sure, we’re angling, too, for an indiscretion,

 

Nature, but we don't scare away the fish. 

We don't run your rabbits down: they’ll take more 

than they need, now they get it somewhere quick.... 

How d’ you know what you need, if all you want is more? 

 

Brent Cantwell is a New Zealand writer from Timaru, South Canterbury, who lives with his family in the hinterland of Queensland, Australia. He has recently been published in Sweet Mammalian, Turbine/ Kapohau, Verge, Brief, Blackmail Press, Cordite, Landfall and Plumwood Mountain.

 

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MIKE DILLON

 

Robert Kennedy

Nov. 20, 1925 — June 6, 1968

 

Maybe we’re only as good as we need to be.

That weightless spring he asked for more.

Therefore gravity intervened.

 

We were sickened but not surprised. Nor was he.

And that’s where the true horror

lives in that black and white photograph

 

where all the world can see

him sprawled on a sweaty cement floor,

his face a mask of “so-this-is-it” resignation

 

while a panicked, white-capped sea

of woe flooded the kitchen pantry with its roar.

He was calm: And left behind his dying gaze.

 

 

My Turn for the Death Watch

 

Starved fingers gnaw his blanket.

Aged eyes glaucous as carp swim

the room’s shadows and come to rest

on the small window behind my shoulder.

I turn to see what he sees: the same

blue sky I walked under to come here.

 

The piebald tomcat sleeps on a stack

of fresh laundry in the corner.

The book I brought is boring.

It’s just the tick-tock silence, now,

and my gaze fixed on those eyes

fixed on the rectangle of blue.

 

 

After the Funeral

 

On the way back to our cars

four or five of us were walking

over gravel.

 

One said: “There must have been

three hundred at the very least.”

Said another: “Closer to four.”

 

“Maybe three. Maybe four.

 So it’s a popularity contest?”

laughed another.

 

Silent feet walked.

The first voice spoke.

“Yeah, I guess it still is.”

 

Silence returned then

the way it is when four

or five men walk over gravel.

 

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound. He is the author of four books of poetry and three books of haiku. A book of poetry and prose, Departures, concerning the forced removal of Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island after Pearl Harbor, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in April 2019.

 

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NELS HANSON

 

Wildcat

 

What became of them, mostly

older wifeless men, bachelors or

widowers, who’d arrive with maps,

labeled small tubes of murky liquid,

their divining rods called Doodle Bugs,

a Merlin’s wand from forked peach

or pear branch, or heavy V of rolled

wire, spent bullet or CO₂ cartridge on

the end for weight, to register hidden

target’s pull when dark lake answered,

perhaps inside a drop of motor oil, oil

calling to oil. Hours they’d sit with my

father over coffee examining for faults

wildcatters might drill with a lease –

Bentonite, Sulfur, once oil-bearing sand,

water. A white-haired man named Ace

wore a beautiful hat of whitest woven

straw with a darker pattern through it,

shaped like a French policeman’s flat-

topped kepi. Mr. Burton drove a purple

turtleback ’46 Ford and drank from

my mothers’ fragile tall crystal glass

brimming with Valley afternoon light

iced tea. “Didn’t you get too hot driving

down here?” she asked. “No, I wetted

my head and kept the window down

all the way,” and she answered he’d

catch a cold. No gushers or modest

oozing deposits they ever found. Maybe

many years in heaven they finally hit,

dry well overflowing with blackest gold.

 

 

Checklist for Those in Power

 

I don’t think your fine Italian shoes

that seldom touch sidewalk, only

oak and Berber, never pavement

or the plowed furrow, or your silk

 

suits spun in China from the labor

of the moth’s pallid worm, will save

you. I don’t believe the vaulted gold

nostalgic for its mountain vein, those

 

yellow ingots stamped PURE while

still molten, will spare you. I doubt

100 naked beauties lying ready on

the plush bed while silver wings of

 

your 747 circle your waiting yacht

can lift you. In the end choice food

safe as Hitler’s won’t protect you

or your friends richer than Caesar,

 

not even your special doctor tuning

your heart like best Rolex or Tesla.

The guarded neighborhood of faces

white as frost and emerald courses

 

ghostly buffalo fear to graze, greed

deep as deepest coal mine, high as

Earth’s tallest skyscraper in Dubai,

fail your rescue as you failed those

 

asleep in rain after lunching from

your great city’s dump. What then?

I remember a Mexican-American,

a child placed in the “special” class

 

for “slow learners,” who was drafted

to Vietnam and knifed men to death

in awful combat and returned alive,

tormented by guilt and pain, by sin.

 

He journeyed to Mexico, cathedral

town where in penance he crawled

cobbled street for a mile on knees

and palms with bloody pilgrims to

 

climb stone stairs, slide stone floor,

at the altar cross himself and bow

his head in grief. Maybe that won’t

save your soul but you could try it.

 

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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TED JEAN

 

as a kid Ken killed animals

 

equipped with

a lever action single shot .22

along the fire trails above Ukiah

 

three years later

his 101st Airborne Bastogne dad

accused him of cowardice

and he had to concede

that, yes

his unwillingness to engage

the skinny Nguyen jungle enemy

constituted a species of hypocrisy

 

recalling a solitary stealthy spotted bobcat

shot behind her silken ear

 

the irrigation is in disrepair

 

squatting at the edge

of the muddy excavation

he has dug to discover

the leak, he hatchets the line free

of arm thickness redwood roots

and scrubs the ancient

rust-disfigured iron pipe

with his bleeding hands

to expose the pinhole

spray at the impossible

junction of the main tee

and a half inch nipple

immediately coupled

to a more contemporary

copper hose bib

on a short riser, improbably

buried for who knows

how many years, clearly

the first collapse of

a corrupt galaxy

of galvanized plumbing

that guarantees the eventual engulfment

of the entire fucking property

 

he leans back, sees

the sky in stitches

through the lattice redwood

and laughs till he is helpless

on his back

in the leak bedazzled grass

 

 

big daddy

 

he had arranged that his deisel-soused body

be burned upon a prodigious pile

of the seasoned red alder he favored for barbecue

behind his daughter’s house in the hills

where their five acre brush-cleared plot

was less subject to urban air pollution rules

 

outsize stereo speakers his son-in-law had wired up

lifted Our Father in Russian a capella

into the tent of flame

where he seemed to shimmer, albeit briefly

till the conflagration caused near-panic at its enormity

 

as they evacuated cars and spooked grandkids

to a safer distance, and after wine and dance

past midnight his pyre still blazed like a nuclear eye

 

A carpenter and erstwhile AIG executive, Ted Jean writes, paints, plays tennis with Amy Lee. They live in the Willamette Valley outside Portland. Nominated twice for Best of the Net, and twice for the Pushcart Prize, his work appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, PANK, DIAGRAM, Juked, dozens of other publications. His first chapbook, Desultory Sonnets, won the 2016 Turtle Island Poetry Award.

 

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LAURA M KAMINSKI

 

Oratio Divina 

Today I am setting out to find God.
Today I am going to get a hip replaced.
Today I am going to get my eyes replaced.
Today I am going to get a rib replaced.
These are all ways of saying the same thing:
Today I am going out to meet a dog.

Today I am choosing my religion.
Today I will step into mosques and temples.
Today I will explore Mount Zion and cathedrals.
Today I will meet potential intermediaries.
These are all ways of saying the same thing:
Today I am going to kneel in several cages.

I need an expanded numerology, something beyond
Fight or flight, the catabolic binary breakdown.
(I have been barking and cringing indiscriminately.)
I need anabolic training, time for complex reassembly.
These are all ways of saying the same thing:
I need a dog to train me: Sit and Stay.

How can you love God whom you do not see
If you do not love your neighbour whom you see,
Whom you touch, with whom you live?
Why does embryonic evolution include a gill-slits phase?
These are both ways of asking the same thing:
Without a dog, how do I practice, braille-pray?

 

Italicized lines are from Mother Teresa's Nobel Lecture, 11-December-1979
 

Laura M Kaminski grew up in Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. Her latest collection is The Heretic's Hymnal: 99 New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from Babylon Books / Balkan Press in 2018). More of her poetry can be found at arkofidentity.wordpress.com

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH 

 

Matters

 

This is the discomfort of crumbs,
out-takes from the main event.
Wiped wide in obliterating arcs, 
perhaps with angry small swishes
or brolly-shaken at the sink’s wide jaw.

Here is the discomfort of crumbs,
textured pocks brailled through cloth.
Surfeit of mousefeast, of rubbish
of fragmented flapjacks, spent oats,
swirlpooling plugs for sewers’ grinned maws.

 

Note this discomfort of crumbs
their uneasing break-off – from what?
Whatever matters, what misses inspection
introspection, what’s not worth keeping
has to go somewhere, and must be consumed.

  

 

From cliffheight 

there’s scant evidence 
of the right-angle breakwater’s forearm
or any elbowed Atlantic attack.

From the shore, odd jags of black bones
rock from surf, but beyond that
whatever hope of a barrier line

which normally offer a saving pool
only indicates a minor change.
Under rolls of moons and spring tide waves

a planet remains unmoved.

 

Beth McDonough has a background in visual art and teaching. Recently Writer in Residence at Dundee Contemporary Arts, her poems may be read in Agenda, Poetry Salzburg Review and Northwords Now. Handfast (with Ruth Aylett) exploring the effect of dementia and autism in a family setting is published by Mother’s Milk Books.

 

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JEFF SANTOSUOSSO

 

Honey

This cold winter

creeps indoors, hardens my honey.

I try to pour a brick, swallow a brick –

collateral damage.

 

The chicory in my coffee bitters

as the steam warms my nostrils.

 

Warm to the hand, warm to the tongue,

burning to the throat

 

amid this Plath-death winter.

 

I want to hammer the potted honey,

set a blowtorch to its contents,

 

drink it down, warm and thick and soothing,

coating my scratches.

 

The bees have gone underground.

Must be deep,

 

for the snowless surface still crunches

beneath my feet, brown and dull.

 

Wake up, bees, harvest for me.

Wake up, Earth, bring me spring.

 

Wake up, spirit, be sweet,

sweet spirit,

 

cold and hardened

there on the bare countertop.

 

Jeff Santosuosso is a business consultant and award-winning poet living in Pensacola, FL.   He is Editor-in-Chief of panoplyzine.com, an online journal dedicated to poetry and short prose.   His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in San Pedro River Review, The Lake (UK), Red Fez, Stories of Music, Vol. 2, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, Avocet, First Literary Review – East, and other online and print publications.

 

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ANNIE STENZEL

 

Greed

 

Through a moment’s grace I am allowed to see

a streak of star light hasten past the window:

shallow arc inscribed briefly in the indigo.

 

Instantly my heart demands:  another

shooting star to send it soaring, and if my wish

were granted, I would want, still, another.

 

The hard-edged cage of desire is a tricky one

when the walls close in.  Can you tell me, sans

perjury, you have ever passed a day without

 

the words “I want” trembling in your mouth?

 

 

Moratorium

What are we waiting for?  A woman?  Two trees?

(Andre Breton)

 

Waiting for two trees to become ten trees;

to become a forest.  Or waiting for two trees

to become one tree, obliged to press together

bark and bark, until their edges merge

with barely a scar.

 

Waiting for the tree beneath which little girls

in summer dresses lay and piped our careless

song—will not that tree return

in our great age, sheltering the same halcyon day

beneath its branches? 

 

Waiting for the ancient tree that has been leaning,

gently leaning, its shallow roots defiant

for one thousand years, disobedient of the usual

rules, to be brought finally, suddenly

into compliance with immutable law

 

and thus to fall, heard or unheard, and close

the door to its life as a vertical being;

begin its long death, its metamorphosis

to an infinity of dust, when Sempervirens

has offered all it had in the service of its habitat

and now has nothing more to do.

 

Annie Stenzel‘s poems have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Ambit, Kestrel, Whale Road, Eclectica, Quiddity, and The Lake, among many others.  Her debut collection, The First Home Air After Absence, was published in October 2017 by Big Table.  By day, she works at a law firm in San Francisco.

 

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SARAH WHITE

                                                                                 

It Must Have Been Scarlatti

 

Was I eleven or thirteen?

Was it a garden party or an evening musicale?

Was tea served by kind Mrs. Jesse Huyck, or punch by creepy Mrs. Laura Huyck?

There’s no one left to tell me. I remember almost nothing, only

 

that it must have been Scarlatti.

 

The dark-haired guest who played, was she Maria or Maricella?  Di Stefano

or Delle Angeli?  She knew how to tune the delicate machinery with pretty wrenches. Those mechanisms need adjustment frequently. From where did the instrument appear so suddenly? Had she traveled with it or did someone truck it in?  I don’t remember, maybe never knew, except that what she played

 

 must have been Scarlatti.

 

I’d never heard such sounds before… plucked strings, not ringing like a bell but tamping

down the reverb to allow the next string and the next to render an uncanny melody.

She crossed her left hand over her right elbow to play grace notes—appogiaturas—though I didn’t know the term. I know the work was a sonata whose composer

 

            must have been Scarlatti.

 

I went stumbling home, dazed by all the plucking, and it didn’t take me long to find that

I could spread the New York Times over the strings of the family baby grand, dampening its resonance to play “The Happy Farmer” as if it had been written for a harpsichord

 

            though it was Schumann, not Scarlatti.

 

Someone in the family swiped the Times from off those inside strings. Too bad. I had

unwittingly discovered what is called “prepared piano” and maybe should have

interrupted sixth or seventh grade to study composition but I didn’t know.

I still don’t know. I only know 

 

it must have been Scarlatti.    

 

 

The Art of Casting a Shadow

                       

                        I saw

that only in front of me the earth was darkened.

            Dante, Purgatory, III, 20-21, trans. W. S. Merwin

 

Souls in Purgatory greet speak

weep want regret and plead to be remembered

by the living those are things they do

but one they cannot do 

is cast a shadow

 

they are shadows themselves they see

the visitor’s shadow on the ground 

the souls have never seen a shadow here

on the mountain they’re amazed

 

I am on Earth I tread the grass and ask what

I might do to be remembered

 

but with the light behind me

I stare down and find ahead of me

one amazing thing I’ve already done.

 

 

Sarah White's most recent published collections are The Unknowing Muse (Dos Madres, 2014) and Wars Don't Happen Anymore (Deerbrook Editions, 2015) and to one who bends my time (Deerbrook Editions, 2017). She lives, writes, and paints in New York City.

 

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RODNEY WOOD

 

Good Enough to Bury

 

the white fluid of compressed vertebrae / strain / & grow / glow with the effort

outstretched arms heavy with tears / the white fluid of compressed vertebrae

outstretched arms heavy with tears / strain / & grow / glow with the effort

 

they take root / monument to the living / in a world of appearances / my dust deserves to go

I push toes deep into mud / they take root / monument to the living /

I push toes deep into mud / in a world of appearances / my dust deserves to go

 

I’ll be turned into fertiliser soon enough / surprise the antique blossoms / roses / shoots

where I am / love doesn't reside / I’ll be turned into fertiliser soon enough

where I am / love doesn't reside / surprise the antique blossoms / roses / shoots

 

life goes too fast to look inside / to make a list of the agonies I found

I’ve messed everything up / life goes too fast to look inside

I’ve messed everything up / to make a list of the agonies I found

 

 

Bewildered

 

I walk up & down Woodbridge Road / & take a blue tranquilliser

before I navigate rivers of sleep / I walk up & down Woodbridge Road

before I navigate rivers of sleep / & take a blue tranquilliser

 

I’m knocked out dreaming / & it’s either prophetic or pathetic

when my head touches the ground / I’m knocked out dreaming

when my head touches the ground / & it’s either prophetic or pathetic

 

I’ve just caught the meaning of life / when I bump into a scaffolding pole

it’s profound / as if the dead were clapping / I’ve just caught the meaning of life

it’s profound / as if the dead were clapping / when I bump into a scaffolding pole

 

nothing / a voice says something important / become a cloud / forks of lightning

the bus turns down an unknown road / nothing / a voice says something important

the bus turns down an unknown road / become a cloud / forks of lightning

 

Rodney Wood lives in Farnborough, UK is retired and runs monthly music/poetry nights in Aldershot. He has recently been published in Magma, Amaryllis, Morphrog and Envoi. Last year he published a pamphlet, Dante Called You Beatrice, which The Journal described as "simple artistry: a remarkable achievement".

 

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JEFFREY ZABLE

 

 

Fetishism

 

Fetishism is a pathological disorder characterized by

a peeping creep stealing your panties from the drier

while you were down the block at the café sipping

a cappuccino and talking to a neighbor about how hard

it is to meet straight men in the city. The fetishist usually

holds the desired object and licks, rubs, or smells it,

which reminds him of lonely vacations as a teenager

in which he’d put his arms around trees and fantasized

high heels pressing into his back while his first grade

teacher pulled out his little jigger and displayed it to the

class saying he would never grow into the type of man

that anyone would want. Nearly all fetishists are male

though sometimes women will cross-dress and imagine

their vaginas being licked by bears, wolverines, and

sometimes even lions depending upon their relationship

with their fathers who also were fetishists married to

women who were soccer moms during the day and

devoted churchgoers on Sunday.

 

 

Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer who plays Afro Cuban Folkloric music for dance classes and Rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in well over 1,000 literary magazines and anthologies over a 40-year period.  In 2017 he was nominated for both The Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. “Fetishism” first published in Weirderary, 2015.

 

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