|
2024
MARCH
Arvilla Fee, George Franklin, Lorraine Gibson, Donald Illich, J. D. Isip, Matthew Johnson, Tom Kelly, Craig Kirchner, Ted McCarthy, Marian Kaplun Shapiro, J. R. Solonche.
ARVILLA FEE
Oh, Emily A tribute to Emily Dickinson
up in your room wearing white, pacing the floor with pen and paper, curling letters out of iron bars, rhymes slanted like April rain, tucking death beneath the floorboards, I’m sorry, Em; I don’t get it— all that beauty brought to bloom posthumously! (thanks to your treacherous sister). Not me, love! I’m flinging ink (the confetti of my soul) for all the world to see long before Death ‘kindly stops for me.’
Emerging
the tilt of an axis, each day lengthening, golden light lingering, the long-awaited serotonin seeping into our pores, leaving us with silly grins; we have survived yet another winter; we have emerged with the daffodils have stretched and yawned and cleared away the cobwebs; we find a robin’s song perched on the edge of our whistling lips.
Arvilla Fee teaches English Composition for Clark State College and is the managing editor for the San Antonio Review. She has published poetry, photography, and short stories in numerous presses, including Calliope, North of Oxford, Rat’s Ass Review, Mudlark, and many others. Her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life, are available on Amazon. For Arvilla, writing produces the greatest joy when it connects us to each other.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
GEORGE FRANKLIN
She Puts Down Her Book
She puts down her book and looks out The window at snow filling the street and Sidewalk, filaments of ice joining one twig To the next, wind curling around the house And the shed. Even though it’s morning, Night piles up in the corners. She is here At the window, but her eyes see other places As well, staring past wiper blades at highways In the rain, her fingers touching the stratified Wall of a canyon, her thumbnail rough Against the ridges of a seashell. Each tree Contains all trees: the live oak, the pear, The coconut palm, the sequoia, the elm that Turned yellow and died, the small lignum vitae Once used to treat syphilis, make life preservers For clipper ships, the seed of each, the root, The bark, the leaf—each a catalog of all the rest, Each stone is all stones, each sky all skies, Each already present in memory and what’s Not yet memory, the square of a European city Filled with cars and motorcycles, the exhaust Of buses, a side street turned into a market, Displays of apples and skinned rabbits Hung by their hind feet from metal hooks, Bright scarves sold at a booth, knit gloves and hats, Brown mushrooms in boxes next to the potatoes. Each sky is all skies. In this one, clouds like milky Cataracts filter the sunlight. The cathedral barely Casts a shadow, even though it’s still morning, And a gray-white glare barrels across The terracotta roof tiles. She is here At the window, but there also. Wrapped In a wool coat, she sits on the cold iron Of a café chair. The coffee is sweet. The rolls taste of grain and butter.
George Franklin’s most recent books are Remote Cities (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) and a collection in collaboration with Ximena Gómez, Conversaciones sobre agua/Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores). He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez's Último día/Last Day. His website: https://gsfranklin.com/
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
LORRAINE GIBSON
Today at the Museum of Hubris
Go wild inside an interactive hologram of ‘Extinct Ice Floes’ and biota in The Atrium today. For history buffs. Touch images of sunlight, green colours, and drowned archipelagos today.
Why wait until conscripted? Over 50s can now volunteer to be part of our cryogenic diorama. Pick up your ‘Freeze me so you don’t have to feed me’ application form before you go today.
We are rejoicing at the hearty response to the ‘Advanced systems of cancellation’ exhibition. Doyens who entered the ‘Vats of Offence’ series will share their practice in our studio today.
Our homo-sapiens-sapiens procreation monitor witnessed a horrendous soundless street! Great Wars and the virtues of economies of scale will be honoured in a fitting tableau today.
Place your bets for ‘Russian Roulette’ in the weapons collection. Need Help? Don’t call us! A dearth of specimens means redundancies! Wednesday’s taxidermist was full of woe today.
The ‘Everyone Equal’ board has refused Mars a seat on the ‘Water for Life’ committee. Colonies with unpaid debts will now be placed in drought. Can’t pay? Borrow more today!
OPEN DAY will begin with a reenactment of Demosthenes being struck during the Dionysia. The sale of rocks is limited to platinum-level classes wishing to recreate the final blow today.
*Breaking! Rebellion by lower-homo-sapiens-sapiens against Platinums’ was not quelled . ‘Grow Lives of Kindness’ unions were managed when spruiking their fanciful credo today.
Lorraine Gibson was raised in Glasgow, Scotland, and lives in regional Australia. Her poetry appears in: Meniscus, Eureka Street, The Galway Review, Backstory, Hecate, and others, and is upcoming in Prole, and Quadrant. As a retired social anthropologist, she is a young poet in an (old)er person’s body.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
DONALD ILLICH
Good Haunting
Because I am brave, they put me on the front line, like a dispenser drops sheets of paper. I pick up a mess of bullets, return to the neighborhood
believing I am alive. Hallooed friends, who scramble away. I enter a bar and it empties to the backdoor. I try to speak, but I tell it only
comes out in moans. A war injury, I expect, but I write in the dirt a message. The next day, the townspeople gather around my words; yell,
shiver, flee. A priest pours salt on the ground, crosses himself. The people shout, “ghost!” Only now do I realize that I didn’t make it.
My body lies in No Man’s Land, the skull is used for machine gun practice. I will give the people a good haunting for the rest of the town’s life.
To suddenly appear, show my wounds, to call everyone ‘s indifference a betrayal. My heart beats in my hands. The people want to touch it.
Donald Illich has published poetry recently in The Southern Review, Gargoyle, and The Louisville Review. His book is Chance Bodies (The Word Works, 2018). He lives and works in Maryland.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
J. D. ISIP
Watermarks
These old, tiled ceilings are always blotted with watermarks.
They bring to mind hurricanes and floods, utter destruction,
Susan’s stories, the ex-husband, the old and cruel parents—
They are not the only ones. She was happy once. She
heard others complain
About being lonely, about wanting more from his life, being dissatisfied,
The Vultures Couldn’t Bother
J.D. Isip’s full-length poetry collections include Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His third collection, tentatively titled Reluctant Prophets, will be released by Moon Tide Press in early 2025. J.D. lives in Texas with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
MATTHEW JOHNSON
When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Russia
Dorothy West, being one of 22 children, Never thought that little black girl from Boston Would ever venture to a place colder than the winters of New England.
Claude McKay and Langston met with the artists and writers in the cities, Flirting with Communism and the men of Soviet Russia, Finding the latter far more satisfying than the former.
Du Bois, weary from all-day lectures with students and politicians, Every night, ventured to the memorials and libraries of Pushkin, To see that somewhere beyond Africa and the Caribbean, Black and bronze men are indeed celebrated.
Matthew Johnson is the author of Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books) and Far from New York State (NYQ Press). His work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Maryland Literary Review, and elsewhere. He’s managing editor of Portrait of New England and poetry editor of The Twin Bill. matthewjohnsonpoetry.com
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
TOM KELLY
The day I was born
mam was two months short of her twentieth birthday, Dad ten years older. I know the room where I was born, Grandmother Kelly’s over-crowded house. ‘Germans Have No Claim To Our Sacrifices,’ the headline in the ‘South Shields Gazette’, Germans still mistrusted two years after the war; stones thrown at Doberman Pinchers; windows of German sounding shops broken. We eventually moved to two upstairs rooms, with an outside toilet, no running water. My granddaughter says, ‘Where was your television?’ I still smell damp, hear mice scuttling in our settee; shipyard waking, moaning; exotic foreign sailors in our street; gas mantles puttering. In the corner shadows wore black, unmoving until it was my turn to change the room, when I joined this procession of neighbours and anxious family. Just then, on cue, the doleful shipyard buzzer began screaming with me. Dad clags coins into the gas meter at the foot of the stairs giving us light for a day or few.
Magpiety The poet Thomas Hood (1799-1845) invented the word ‘magpiety’.
A garrulous Gateman at the Mercantile Dry Dock read Thomas Hood, told me, ‘You will find a monument to him in Kensall Cemetery’. He read aloud, ‘Jarvis and Mrs Cope. A deadly serious ballad,’ had me breaking into an unused smile. His wife had died suddenly. Children were never mentioned. He was ‘smart as whip,’ immaculately dressed and lived in the ‘The House of Broken Hearts’ hostel, where he read Thomas Hood and tried to defeat his empty heart by, ‘chattering like a bird’.
Tom Kelly has thirteen books of poetry, short stories and a play published in as many years. His most recent poetry collection This Small Patch, published by Red Squirrel Press was well-received and reprinted. His next collection Walking My Streets, poems and prose, will be published in April by Red Squirrel Press. www.tomkelly.org.uk
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
CRAIG KIRCHNER
After Dinner
It’s tight at our table, unknown parts of the same group, face to face, and she wants to teach me to drink Cognac.
The waiter brings snifters and a bottle, she mulls it over hot tea – sets the pear-shaped bottom on its side - pours like time has stopped slowly, the amber liquid into the heated glass. Small deft hands stroke the aged decanter, as warm zephyrs intoxicate, the narrowing space between us.
Sip and swirl, don’t swallow, let it slide down your tongue, ease into your throat. You have to get past the alcohol, and taste the fruit. Great tasters can tell the grape, the region, the exact plot of ground.
My ground is sinking around me, my face and limbs like embers, as the slick silk glides as she has instructed, …. and then she does hers…. the French would be proud.
She circles the rim of the glass, discovers a drop of the nectar, with the slightest of smiles and mink eyes stuck to mine, puts her finger to my lips, and asks me again to taste the fruit.
Craig Kirchner thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. After a writing hiatus he was recently published in Decadent Review, Chiron Review, and several dozen other journals.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
TED MCCARTHY
Portrait of a Girl in a Red Coat
Above all, a portrayal of that time when we shed and grow into ourselves,
when both are equally valid. And because a painting takes longer to complete, it is more authentic than a photograph, capturing as it does the movement – inner, or external but happening so slowly we can’t be aware of it – from one state of being to another, alike but different as identical twins. So too, the girl who posed and she of the completed work: forever a work in progress.
Ted Mc Carthy is a poet, translator and playwright living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding, and Beverly Downs. His work can be found on www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
MARIAN KAPLUN SHAPIRO
From Afar (In Maine)
From afar our cabin door doesn’t creak. That restaurant that closed last year could still be in business. The country market may or may not sell fresh corn. There are no mosquitoes or black flies. Though, if you squint, you can make out a logging truck amidst a string of match-box cars, and a miniature moose galloping between the swaying shoulders of Route 4. Parallel lines almost converge. Faces have been disappeared by distance. Therefore, none
of the invisible has died. Nor has been born. Neither love nor hate disturbs the shore-built homes, infests the fixer- uppers on the hill, the A-frames by the ponds, the hidden hunting lodges. How the library continues to command its sidestreet! But on their porches and their motor boats, who is reading what? The air is full of secrets.Who is crying? Are the loons calling?
I remember driving down the Cross- Bronx Expressway, cannibalized Nash’s rusting out, broken bottles cradled by pock-marked hubcaps on the off-ramp just after I left home, married at 20. 1959. From afar the Projects, and their modern condo cousins stand ramrod equal. Today, in the democracy of distance wait a thousand eyes unblinking, blinds arranged just so. I imagine another me, throwing lifeline after lifeline to the self imagining. She (reading, sleeping, cleaning, watching tv) does not see me, hear me calling her. Old/young woman, still in her stand-up kitchen, we pass, anonymous. Come to me! the loon sings out. Come to me, mail carrier, toll collector, maid, bus driver, woodcutter, baker, sweeper of the city streets. Without you this is no poem at all.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a practicing psychologist in Lexington, Mass., is the author of a professional book, and seven books of poetry. She is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Upbringing, her latest collection of graphic poems, was published by Plain View in January, 2023. “From Afar (In Maine)” was first published in This Hard Wind, 12/03.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
J. R. SOLONCHE
Poem Based on a Line by Donald Revell
I do not have a dog. I never had a dog. What boy never had a dog? What teenager, what young man, never mourned the loss of his best friend in the world? I was that boy. I was that teenager, that young man. I am that old man. I cannot say that “Death calls my dog by the wrong name.” So I am grateful to you, Donald Revell. I thank you for sharing your dog, and I thank you for sharing your dignified disdain for death.
Mrs. Minogue
You spoke of her often. How, when your mother and father were both at work, she minded you and your sister in the Bronx apartment. She was Irish and Catholic and told you stories of bogeymen in closets and stories of leprechauns under the bed to frighten you. But then she laughed because you were frightened. She wanted to console you, so she frightened you. She wanted that because she didn’t have children of her own. She was Irish and Catholic and brought you to church sometimes. Your sister hated church. She hated the priests and the Latin. The smell made her sick. The incense made her dizzy and sick. But you liked it. You liked the priests and the Latin. You loved the smell of the incense. You loved to watch the censer swing to and fro. You loved to follow the smoke arc back and forth. When you smile now, are you thinking of Mrs. Minogue? Are you remembering the arc of a smell?
Nominated for the National Book Award and twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of twenty-six books of poetry and co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley. Back to POETRY ARCHIVE |
It's not easy getting a book or pamphlet accepted for review these days. So in addition to the regular review section, the One Poem Review feature will allow more poets' to reach a wider audience - one poem featured from a new book/pamphlet along with a cover JPG and a link to the publisher's website. Contact the editor if you have released a book/pamphlet in the last twelve months or expect to have one published. Details here
Reviewed in this issue
Share
Print