2020

 

 

MARCH CONTRIBUTORS   

 

 

 

Ben Banyard, Melanie Branton, Sandy Deutscher Green, William Ogden Haynes,

 D. R. James, Beth McDonough, Joe Mills, Kenneth Pobo, J. R. Solonche,

Amy Soricelli, Gerald Wagoner, Sarah White.

 

 

 

 

 

BEN BANYARD

 

A Brief History
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
 
I had a body once
which walked and ran,
talked to girls at bus stops,
danced (to a degree).
 
Slowly my body
gave up the ghost,
hands clenched to fists,
face a mask,
voice synthesised.
 
But my brain,
this trade’s only tool,
stayed right where
I needed it most,
floating in space.

 

 

Grief
 
Don’t expect it to be something you get over,
as though it were a steep hill to climb
with an easy downward path on the other side.
 
Sometimes it’s a deep sheer-walled crevasse;
you might not fall all the way to the bottom,
but get wedged where it narrows.
 
Occasionally you’ll wake to find it coiled
in the pit of your stomach, a solid mass
which causes a dull ache you can’t escape.
 
It changes shape with time, yes, but don’t assume
that it will always slope off to some small corner
that you’ll only visit now and then.
 
You’ll need to draw a map of it lightly in pencil.
Be prepared to update it endlessly.
Visit when you can, but never turn your back on it.

 

Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, near Bristol, where he writes poetry and short fiction. He’s the author of a pamphlet, Communing (Indigo Dreams, 2016) and a full collection, We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018). His next collection, Hi-Viz, will be published in 2020. He blogs and posts mixtapes at https://benbanyard.wordpress.com

 

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MELANIE BRANTON

 

The Patchwork Bag

in my sewing cupboard
is full of death. There’s a graveyard
whiff when I open it, the polythene
tacky to my touch, exhume
faded scraps of my parents, flawed
remnants from the 1960s, chrysalises
they split and shrugged off
before they shed their final skin,
colours people don’t wear any more,
calamine pink, tobacco brown, relics
of the days when people buttonholed
themselves, did their own hemming.

I shear away and bin rough edges,
parts which don’t fit the pattern
I design myself. From squares of the past,
I Frankenstein myself a new pair of legs.

 

Cathedral

You suggested it, to kill some time before our trains.
On the bus down, the unexpected spring sunshine
warmed me through thick glass. I knew it would turn colder.

But in this house of miracles, where lace, cutwork,
broderie anglaise that weighs a thousand tons
floats high above our heads, anything seems possible.

I light a votary candle to you, part reverent worshipper,
part birthday girl making a wish, and my heart melts
to a clarified soup where a burning wick swims in a tin cup.

We laugh at your name on a memorial stone, at a knight
posing camply on his tomb, like a synchronised swimmer, at Tudor couples
Punch and Judy puppeted, surrounded by shrunken, dead children,

trace the long ‘s’s  tonguing the slabs, lettering dissolving
like the brand name on a cake of soap, erasing itself,

lettering dissolving like this memory will. And you did.

 

Melanie Branton is a spoken word artist from North Somerset. Her collections are Can You See Where I'm Coming From? (Burning Eye, 2018) and My Cloth-Eared Heart (Oversteps, 2017). Her work has appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip, and other journals.

 

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SANDY DEUTSCHER GREEN

 

Third Furnace

 

She frowns at her thumb, scans the kitchen floor.

 No matter how much I sweep and vacuum, it’s never enough.

 

What do you mean? He pours tea from the glass-bellied pot,

spools honey into a bulbous twirl at the end of the dipper

 

She thrusts her hand at him. I’ll need to soak it in baking soda. She draws it

back and probes the spot where embedded glass enflames her skin.

Hand me the tweezers in the drawer?

no answer

 

Her mouth purses like a glass blower’s. Please? The tweezers?

Steam drifts from the mug he left on the marble counter

She yanks out the drawer

digs through rigid straws

robot-shaped candy molds

shears

a pair of goggles,

her throat narrows until it reaches down her chest

and stabs her stomach like a metal pipe

 

He returns. An old trick. Safer to pull out the chip.

 He places a bottle of antiseptic on the table

and smooths a strip of tape over the irritant.

Let’s go to lunch at that coal-fired pizza place.

 

The third furnace

annealer

coolest of the three glory holes of hell

 

Her frown relaxes as she sinks into a chair. We could try the pizza with roasted cauliflower.

 

Whatever you want. He kneels and sets to work.

 

Sandy Deutscher Green writes from her home in Virginia USA, where her work has appeared in Bitter Oleander, Blue Nib, Neologism, and Qwerty, as well as in her chapbook, Pacing the Moon (Flutter Press, 2009). BatCat Press published her limited-edition chapbook, Lot for Sale. No Pigs, in June 2019. 

 

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WILLIAM OGDEN HAYNES

 

Bonsai

 

Shinji, the bonsai master, severs the tap root. Left alone, this plant would have grown to

a full-sized tree, but after the root is cut, the growth will be stunted. Now only smaller roots

 

will grow, and even these will not spread too far, after the master confines the plant

to a miniature pot. Growth of branches and leaves will be carefully controlled by

 

judicious pruning almost every day. The dwarfed branches may be forced into a desired

shape with wire. The bonsai master possesses the admirable qualities of patience, planning,

 

dedication, care, and pursuit of perfection. The plant may never reach its full innate

possibilities, submitting to the bonsai masters concepts of art and beauty. But the elegance

 

of the tree may far surpass the plants original potential. Because of the bonsai master,

the plant will not become just another tall tree in the forest, plain, subjected to storms

 

and infestation, hidden from the world. Plants under his care will have a longer life,

and despite the planning and control, the end result is almost always beautiful.

 

But in spite of this, the bonsai master is reviled by some, for limiting the trees possibilities,

and imposing his idea of perfection. Shinji treats humans and animals the same as plants.

 

He recalls the many years of history, when beauty was produced by constraints, women

wearing corsets, and the centuries of foot binding in China. He grooms his poodle like

 

a topiary, limits potential, as he spays and declaws his cat, and clips the wings of his

myna bird. The master thinks it is important to raise his daughter with imposed limitations,

 

pruned like a plant, residing in a tiny pot. He believes it important to try and shape her

like a growing branch, to his concept of perfection. But she knows she is not a bonsai,

 

and resists the control of her father. And so, she leaves home at the age of fifteen with

a traveling minstrel, who loves her as she is, even though she refuses to sing harmony.

 

William Ogden Haynes is a poet and author of short fiction from Alabama who was born in Michigan. He has published seven collections of poetry Points of Interest, Uncommon Pursuits, Remnants, Stories in Stained Glass, Carvings, Going South and Contemplations and one book of short stories, Youthful Indiscretions, all available on Amazon.com. Approximately 200 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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D. R. JAMES

 

Same Old Same Old

 

Three teen deer have begun of late

to make daily dusk-time stops out back,

their flat flanks and thick, angled necks

depicting stumps and trunks that then

move and materialize and re-blend

as their busy muzzles forage-and-

freeze them across the far lawn. How

ever inventive their camouflage. Of course,

once I look up, so do they, slightly

white faces and twice-twitching ears

alert to any budge.  And if I stand,

even gradually as a yogi, they hop

and spin and crash backward into

slits that open in the brush and oaks

that just as quickly close behind them.

I’m showing you nothing you don’t

know, and know you also know that

doesn’t matter, that you, too, would stop,

lift your face, and love them every time.

 

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres) and Surreal Expulsion (Poetry Box), and a new chapbook, Flip Requiem, will appear in February 2020 (Dos Madres). “Same Old Same Old” first published in Peacock Journal (November 2017).

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

Sensing a run across the Moss
 

Tilt at winds; foot-reckon roadside cambers,

find creased perimeters' keep of rain.
Crack edges already married
to sweet cicely, wet ripping calves, past grass.

 

Cross to a lane's twin tracks,
balance to rim a mini-crater,
curve round dips and damps.
Pass the Base, smell brick-made spectre sheds.

 

Hear shells echo in byres' slight lee,

calling cattle. Breathe lungful drifts of turds.
Watchfoot now, graze a close-cropped
rabbit path, loose-rootless in sand.

 

Perhaps you won't hear any skylarks rise.
Slapped out by flap flap flap
of the jacket assault at your back.
Never mind. Wet air offers cold brine.

 

Vertebrae over the golfer's bridge,

make a slip-clamber down
through a crumble descent of dunes.
What can you learn in this soft?

 

Somewhere below the high tide line,
only crosswinds, infant burns and spume
pattern your way to a turning point.
Leg out over Machrihanish's crash-open bay.

 

Pull arm return to more certain land.
The map suggests you'll take the same trail.
But everything has changed now.
Feel your way back home.

 

 

Glassy-eyed

 

You suspect there are a hundred shanties,

waiting in washing, which need to be sung,
from lands you haven't met yet.

 

But, there you are, trapped behind glass,
just a hunkering something under vines,
unstoppable in their wild opulence.

 

If you breathe, lemon basil's being aired,
adding on more than mere taste need expect.

You'll wilt in the view of upstanding bikes.
A tomato plant's turned angry, not propped.

Not even pinched. Sprawly from the bowl,
all leaves limp beyond bounds of old pots.
Then there are chillies you forgot,
now bombing out Zeppelins in hidden green.

 

Yellow or red? Who knows. But definitely hot.

That washing cracks rhythms in wind.
You hum with the first three bars,

a gift from the severed world's inn.

 

Beth McDonough’s poetry appears in Causeway, Gutter and elsewhere; she reviews in DURA. Handfast (with Ruth Aylett) explores dementia and autism. A pamphlet is coming...

 

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JOE MILLS

 

Set Piece

 

Choreographers talk about setting a work

on dancers as if it’s something they carry,

and we admire how they carry themselves,

and carry the art, beautiful bodies in space.

 

As for the rest of us, the overweight and

short-legged and clumsy, the aging

and awkward, we too carry what is set

on us, movements we haven’t designed,

 

trying to do them as fluidly as possible,

for as long as possible, until the steps

we can achieve get smaller, less complex,

and we begin to forget them altogether.

 

This may seem facile, but only for those

who know little of art, who believe myths

like Astaire and Rogers improvised easily

when in fact they did takes until she bled.

 

To consider life as a dance is to hope

that there is a choreographer who has

some sort of vision, and an audience

who appreciates the effort. It’s to believe

 

we can carry what is set upon us

with grace and beauty. It may be a lie,

like all art. It may simply be the work

we decide to do, or it may be something

 

imperfectly understood, like how birds

turn together just above the waves,

making sinuous patterns as they migrate

to some distant unknown destination.

 

 

The Way You Wear Your Hat

 

I remember seeing my parents dance, just once,

in the living room around midnight, Sinatra

playing on the wood RCA stereo console

that later would be abandoned at the curb

when my mother couldn’t fit it in the U-Haul.

I used to say it was around Christmas time

but that was just for emotional resonance,

or to help explain the vision to myself

because I was shocked seeing them together,

even I sensing by then the imminent, inevitable

divorce. They eddied slowly in the darkness,

like ghosts, or movie images, not happy

but tender in a way I didn’t understand

until facing my own imminent inevitable.

 

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joe Mills has published six collections of poetry, most recently Exit, pursued by a bear. He is currently working on a manuscript about dance.

 

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KENNETH POBO

 

Light. in the Loafers.

 

Pharmacist Alan calls me light

in the loafers. 

 

I don’t wear loafers,

prefer barefoot.  I ask my Aunt

what he means.  She says

be quiet.  A word creek, 

my banks overflow. 

 

It hits me during my college

geology class that he means gay.

He doesn’t say it—

the joke and the funny face

make it clear.  Even now,

 

I am still light. 

In my invisible loafers.

I rise over our town,

dance, often

on the pharmacy’s roof.

 

Someone Asked Me

how I beat the blues.  Music often works,

but I must hear songs that I want to sink

into, inviting riffs where I can rest.

Sometimes I want to be lulled, no quick jerks

or threatening chord changes.  Give me pink

treble clefs.  Cancel any troubling test.

Or give me a deep silence when no sound

is like spending time with ash trees around.

 

The garden can ease me out of despair.

With birds at our feeder, I walk, kibbitz

with dahlias, lilies and meadow rue.

They have much to say—and they say it bare.

Even in rain, I have splendid visits,

bright buds opening, salmon, gold and blue.

 

Kenneth Pobo has a new book out from www.cyberwit.net press in India called Wingbuds.  Forthcoming from Assure Press is Uneven Steven.  He looks forward to spring and in the mean time enjoys the return of the giant pussywillow.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

The Medium is the Message

 

My neighbor, Harvey, is an architect.

Every time we meet, he says the same

thing. It isn’t, “Hi.”  It isn’t, “How you

doing?”  It isn’t, “What’s new?” It’s,

“Remember, form follows function.”

It’s his greeting. He did it this morning

at the post office. “Harvey, form follows

function is true in architecture, but in

poetry it’s the other way around. In poetry

function follows form. And sometimes

it’s all form and no function. Or the form

is the function.” “Whatever you say, J.R.

You’re the poet,” he said getting into his car.

Of course, in poetry as in architecture,

form does follow function. The paradox here

is that poetry unlike architecture has no

function outside of itself. You can live in

a house, you can work in an office building,

you can visit a museum, you can go to a

concert hall or a stadium, but you can’t do

any of those things in a poem. Even Emily

Dickinson had enough sense to know

you can’t dwell in poetry. Naturally,

there was no way I was going to say that

to an architect. He wouldn’t understand.

  

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.

 

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AMY SORICELLI
 

Lunch at the Museum

 

My mother taught me to look at people so I can see how they

spend their afternoons.

It's easy, she would say,

you can tell by the clothes people wear, the way they carry a bag.

What's in the bag?

We would decide who was delivering donuts, or love letters 

to a Spanish teacher.

No one knew about the souls people leave behind at bus stops.

We weren't there for that.

Look, she would say, those are best friends;

you can tell by the way they hold onto each other.

She's whispering something; what is she saying?  

My mother taught me to look at the eyes and nothing else.

Everything is right there like a book,

she would say.

Can you tell me about the people over there?

No, I tell her.

But those people over there, 

they're falling out of love.

 

Cutting Class When You're an Adult and It's Work

 

I went to the movies to nap in the back row.

No one called my name or rocked me to sleep.

There were no dreams about breaking teeth,

or running backwards through a tunnel.

You wouldn’t find me under the rug,

or molded into shape by broken fingers. 

I was just there when Humphrey Bogart made 

someone love him.

She wasn't sure at first,

and kept looking somewhere else;

under a hat, 

and all that bad weather.

 

Our First Weekend Away in Our Very Long Love Affair

 

That hotel on the corner leans to the right.

It was built on angry ground with crates of misshapen fruit 

piled up on the left, and a law office with broken chairs

next door to it with a bell against its front.

Lonely looking shuffling dogs roam back and forth; 

no one seems to feed them.

It's always sunny on the other side of the street.

There are shadows there that can't be borrowed.

Men in lawn chairs chirping away at us looking dusty

with our gas-station maps and broken sandals.

I bought postcards of the local beach for 15 cents, 

and a can of soda that was born warm, then died 

in the front seat of our rented car.

We were going to get married there but forgot. 

We went to a movie instead, about a gunfight in a desert.

We ate popcorn with our feet tucked under our knees.

We didn't tell anyone we were going so no one was surprised

when we came home.

We wouldn't have gone back but we left a suitcase with our best sneakers 

in their smokey lobby with its tip jar and bowl of starburst fruit chews.

It was everything we owned.

 

Amy Soricelli has been published in numerous publications and anthologies including Dead Snakes, Corvus Review, Deadbeats, Long Island Quarterly, Voice of Eve, The Long Islander. Sail Me Away (chapbook) Dancing Girl Press, 2019. Nominated by Billy Collins for Emerging Writer's Fellowship 2019 and for Sundress Publications "Best of the Net" 2013. Recipient of the Grace C. Croff Poetry Award, Lehman College, 1975.

 

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GERALD WAGONER

 

Nobody Ever

 

She said it was in an old Italian 

restaurant no one ever went to. 

I remember back in the day 

when nobody ever went there, 

I went there. I liked it nobody 

ever went there. There were 

other people there who never

went there and you would see

them there occasionally back 

before everyone went there. 

That’s why nobody went there 

anymore: everyone was there. 

Before everyone went there

men wore narrow brim fedoras 

with patterned hat bands 

and a little feather; the women, 

pearls and heels. In cool weather 

everyone wore long solid somber coats.

No one spoke beyond the table; 

everyone whispered. 

After nobody went there 

and everybody went there 

no one ever went there. 

It was best then, because 

when you went there everyone 

who was anyone was elsewhere, 

and we two could, at last, 

clasp hands and murmur 

in discrete undertones.

 

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SARAH WHITE

 

Islands

 

Those I have visited combine

into one island with a single slow,

odorous, hot lava flow, and a place  

off-shore, where rival currents meet

 

—dense blue ocean against the glassy teal— 

carving rocks to build lacerating fortresses. 

Cede those perils to crabs and whales, 

and seek out rainbowed forests

 

here ancient fern and winding banyan root

seduce the tourist but do not erase

chronicles of exploitation, hunger,

slave rebellion, foreign governors,

too soon forgotten under banners

that proclaim the island’s freedom.

 

 

Funerary Motif

 

carved on tombs in a Caribbean

graveyard, vandalized, then long neglected—

trees lopped to show when a child

fell ill, or went to war and died before

his mother and father. See these three, 

trimmed to differing shapes and sizes:

one frail youth, his adolescent sister, his soldier

brother. You don’t need to read Ladino

lettering to learn how many years

(how few!) each sibling lived: “Antes que

diede frutto…before I bore fruit, I

was cut down.” Nearby, a Traveler 

Palm waves its fronds over a lost 

daughter and two lost sons.

 

                   

Folk Medicine

 

My kid was six, aching, and feverish. His cheek 

had grown a mump. In a few hours, I knew, 

there might be two. But Loretta, the Jamaican

cook—no, more than cook—Jamaican shaman—

 

intervened with gifts—a snowy seagull feather 

and a covered jar of “proof rum,” (I think it was

denatured alcohol). “Dip the feather in the rum. 

Brush the mump, and the other mump won’t come.”

 

I thanked her but, indifferent to her magic,

left the objects on a table. Malcolm woke 

next morning fully mumped. Loretta examined 

the unused liquor, the futile feather, 

and the child.  Kind, she spoke no ill 

of his pale and sadly ignorant mother. 

 

Sarah White's sixth collection, Iridescent Guest will soon be published by Deerbrook Editions.

 

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