2018

 

 

 

MAY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Joe Balaz, Brent Cantwell, Mona Dash, Edilson Afonso Ferreira, Jane Frank,

Deirdre Hines,Norton Hodges, Oksana Maksymchuk, Todd Mercer, Maren O. Mitchell, Kenneth Pobo, Mark Young.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOE BALAZ

 

By Da End Of Da Month

 

If it wuz simply wun mattah

of swimming around in wun fishpond

 

it would be no problem

 

but populating streams

and Great Lakes is anadah story.

 

 

Dats da situation dat Asian carp

wen bring about

 

aftah dey wuz imported and introduced

to da North American continent.

 

 

Some ill-advised officials

felt dat it would be wun good idea

 

to bring in dese foreign fish

 

to help aquaculture and wastewatah facilities

keep retention ponds clean

 

cause dey are voracious eaters

and consume lots of algae and small organisms.

 

 

Somehow dey escaped

and begin to flourish

 

and now dey stay

in many waterways and rivers

 

migrating slowly

up to da Great Lakes.

 

 

Da big fear

is dat dey going take ovah

 

by squeezing out all da local game fish

 

and screwing up da huge recreational

and tourist industry resource.

 

 

Tings might get real eerie

in Lake Erie.

 

 

Wit wun huge disastah looming

 

da authorities

are trying to figgah out wat to do

 

in how to get rid of dem.      

 

 

Maybe da officials

should tink outside of da box.

 

 

Just start and establish wun rumor

 

dat dose wild Asian carp

enhances male sexual performance

 

and dose invaders will be extinct

by da end of da month.

 

 

Joe Balaz writes in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole English) and in American English.  He edited Ho'omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.  Some of his recent Pidgin writing has appeared in  Otoliths, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Angry Old Man, and The Ofi Press Magazine , among others.  Balaz is an avid supporter of Hawaiian Islands Pidgin writing in the expanding context of World Literature.  He presently lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

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BRENT CANTWELL

 

somewhere sestina

           

Still, green and blind we follow the same ol' sun

knowing it’ll follow us, knowing it'll soon

go down on a hotel in town somewhere

on rows of shoulders shrugging off sixteen hour  

shifts, skulking home after a pint babbling  

excited almost-somewhere-almost-accents.

 

Families dragged from Africa drag accents,

skin and blood o’ the land beneath a new sun

where children clutch at yellow skirts babbling,

bulging grey not-my-sky eyes brought far too soon

to the buying of things, ocean-bound bags, hour

on hour, on buses red and heading somewhere.

 

Dark-denomed indian-summer nights somewhere,

men knawing on qat sticks, picking at accents

wanting taxi-cabs at 5am - the hour

of chewed cheeks and plenty o' green in the sun,

in the amber light of…is it morning soon?

should we prepare to stop…? still our babbling

 

surfaces with sleep…in bedsits babbling?

dry pipes ache at slept-through days because somewhere

wives wait for cheques and men - that will send them soon -

yell they is live like squatters here, their accents

thicker, breaking at m' son's back home, the sun

drying the pipes, the ache of another hour…

 

…but there's amnesia in distance and one hour

away dreams shunt us idling down babbling

tracks to disappointing cables and the sun

is forgotten, coverage lost and our somewhere

faces stitch repairs, search the fade for accents  

and connect the topside disconnect with arriving soon:

 

a crowd crumbling together in the smog soon,

alighting in the late light! and such an hour

silhouettes, fades, blurs industry, age, accents,  

pay scales, cell phone towers of babbling,

the calendar in our skin, a delay somewhere

aching down the line still lost ‘cause every sun  

 

will go down soon on the blues, the babbling

hours, the windows of hiss, a hotel somewhere

throwing accents back at the same ol’ sun.

 

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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MONA DASH

 

Not knowing, Migration

 

The Banyan tree and the Oak

know the same language

 

Migration

is not an answer

nor a question

Movement

birds leave and return

 

Passport engraved with a stamp

coloured, dated. I

booked a ticket, landed in a country

closer to the poles from a country

 closer to the equator

 

I didn’t know

I would collect theories and words

on my back

like a feathery creature

feathers firm on the body

plucking one out draws blood

 

Wonder why, how, I became

so many things at once

Emigrant, Immigrant, Migrant, Subaltern

theories to luxuriate, nest in

 

I didn’t know

that I am invisible

when I enter a room

 

I didn’t know

 the philosophers, post-colonists

have labelled behaviour

branded my very soul

Hybridity, Provincialism, Orientalism

my shadows, my silhouettes defined

before I knew

 

Two- headed Janus

looking out, looking in

from where we came

to where we came

 

I didn’t know

I thot i was I

I was i.

 

Mona Dash has two collections of poetry Dawn- Drops (Writer’s Workshop, 2001) A certain way (Skylark Publications, UK 2016). Untamed Heart (Tara India Research Press, 2016) is her first novel. She lives in London.

 

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EDILSON AFONSO FERREIRA

 

Inward Nobility

 

I cannot accept the sacred and solemn

as private of the Popes and Bishops,

Kings and Judges.

On the various facets of daily life,

in the streets, avenues and alleys,

houses and hovels, by 

    hugging a friend long not seen,

    returning an unexpected smile,

    giving a hand to the child and

    listening to an elderly,  

    stopping to hear the birds 

    and the buzzing of the bees,

    admiring the beauty of the horizons

    and the flowers of the gardens, and,

    for the exasperation of all the demons, 

    making love, not war;  

there is genuine a solemnity,

also grandeur and nobility, as

at the cathedrals, palaces and courts.

And so we go easily moving

heavy and hard wheels of time,

towards uncertain and unknown days.

 

A Brazilian poet, Edilson Afonso Ferreira, 74, lives in a small town with his wife, three sons and a granddaughter and writes in English rather than Portuguese. Largely published in literary journals in print and online, he began writing after his retirement from a Bank. His first Poetry Book, Lonely Sailor, one hundred poems - will be published in 2018. “Inward Nobility” first published in Red Wolf Journal, August 10, 2016.

 

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JANE FRANK

 

Rhythms

 

There’s always a buzz

or drone or whimper of music

yet the world has a silent heart

if you sit cross-legged, head in hands –

absorb the strangeness,

 

steps always on the edges –

the beach, the loch, the train station

at the end of the line,

footprints on a folded map.

 

A friend sent a link to 17 songs

written fifty years ago

and listening to them reminded me

that there are days when rhythms are thick,

memories curl like notes –

some mutually locked into each other

for good despite divergent roads –

 

the vibrations of a great love

and then the hesitation of the universe,

it’s quiet acknowledgment.

 

 

 

The Emptying of a Paint Box

  

Gutters run a rainbow

               scooped seedpods viridean

and manganese blue pivot, lurch

               hot-tempered through

aureolin leaves flecked vivid gold

               and the corpses of bauhinia

flowers that exhaled last breaths

               on dry late winter days –

rich harmonies, alizarin splashes

              from churning rubber

on asphalt – slick, magenta – edges 

               violet where they meet

porphyry beneath, and always constant

               indentations – rain dashing

cerulean on the torrent beyond the blobs 

               of Venetian red petals falling 

on the mossy olive path, a meeting place 

               for kaleidoscopic birds

 

And when it reappears the sun is 

                                            titanium white

throws weak ivory strings onto 

                                           grieving trunks –

ebony and paynes grey, warmth gone 

                                            from bark

veinless

                no pulse 

                           a last whisper of sienna

disappearing

                       over                       

                                    palms

  

Jane Frank’s poems have most recently been published in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Frogmore Papers, London Grip, Popshot and Pressure Gauge. Jane’s chapbook Milky Way of Words was published by Ginninderra Press in 2016. She teaches in Humanities at Griffith University in south east Queensland, Australia.

 

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DEIRDRE HINES

 

The Ash Tree's Daughter.

 

It is true

they have hidden the real story for years

in the cartoon colours of cinemascope-

What really happened was this:

She was left off at the foot of an old ash tree

in honour of Shame as offering and test of our old forest gods.

 

From medieval dying rooms like these few have ever returned.

 

Was it the hush in the falling snow

gathering like blanket over her tiny form

that woke the three destiny keepers, they call the Norn

high in the Ash tree crown

from indifference to time?

 

and three drips of sap from the teat of the trunk

and three drops of blood from the throat of snared rabbit

and three dribbles of blackberry juice from the thicket

are gifts of white, red and black from the beyond all Here and Now.

 

Like every changeling child sentenced to rescue

no poetic line could save her from the tedium

of misunderstanding, the banality of evil,

and as her days turned to years and years

in servitude to stepmother, and stepsisters worshipping

at the altars of the Malls, the celebrity magazines and net curtains

only the company of a robin, a blackbird and an invisible phoenix

carried her far above all worm’s eye views

growing her own bird's eyes...

 

and on the night of that infamous ball a passing snowy owl

drew her eyes upward to one full and rolling moon

drew her back to the Ash tree, where around

its silvering girth she tied the ribbons from her hair;

one rabbitvelvet red, one blackberrydyed, one milky white,

and throwing off his glass shoes

she danced back up into the Ash tree crown,

where those three destiny keepers, that they call the Norn

were waiting with their ash keys for the girl to grow some wisdom

so that they could bless her by naming her

The Ash Tree's Daughter.

 

 

Deirdre Hines is an award-winning playwright and poet. Her play Howling Moons, Silent Sons won

The Stewart Parker Award for Best New Play. She has had plays produced by some of the leading Dublin

Theatre companies and has also written for schools. Her first book of poems The Language of Coats

includes the poems which won The Listowel Poetry Collection 2011 and was published by New Island

Books. She has been shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2010. She is on the organisational

Committee of North West Words, and is their competition judge for the annual Children’s Fiction and

Poetry Competition. She reviews regularly for Sabotage. New poems have appeared in journals, and

Ezines in Ireland, the UK, India and America.

 

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NORTON HODGES

 

Mariana

Millais

 

Over the years they painted one figure

again and again; a woman alone in a room,

with a mirror behind her, different but always the same,

just as you were every woman in my dreams.

 

For this was our story too,

about distance and secret longing,

the woman in the room aching for her lover

and a face trapped in a mirror, looking back.

 

 

What’s Left

 

The boxes in the loft are rarely looked at:

yellowed cuttings from local papers, old photos,

certificates of birth and death, someone’s school prizes;

guilty perhaps, we eventually forget what’s there.

 

Yet when someone dies we climb the loft ladder

and it’s from those fragments we recreate our history,

a tale to tell again and again to help us grieve

until life and self-preservation return to the fore.

 

What will the archives of our children be

as they backpack through a boundless world,

creating memories to go with iPad and smartphone?

 

For the old, it’s still paper and ink, unsealing the past

on a wet afternoon to see how much can be retrieved

before the rain outside bears everything away.

 

Norton Hodges is a poet, translator and editor. He has been widely published in UK magazines and anthologies. His new collection Bare Bones (The High Window Press) represents 20 years work. He lives in Lincoln.

 

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OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK

 

Active Shooter Drill at My Son’s Elementary School

 

You exist

because one afternoon

your grandpa went down to the cellar

to sort potatoes.

 

He heard shots, shouts.

Frightened, he hid till nightfall.

When he came back up

he found no one.

 

It was March.

The cherry trees in the dark garden

stood at attention.

He had just turned seven.

 

I know, says my six year old.

That’s why at my school

we have drills. When the bell rings

our teacher locks the classroom door.

 

We hide behind our desks.

We don’t move, don’t talk.

Play dead, says our teacher. So I practice.

We all practice

 

being dead.

 

 

Nativity Scene Under the Chicken Coop

 

My grandparents built this house

after the war, on the plot

that used to be their neighbors’.

 

The well was deeper here, the water clearer.

Weren’t the dead angry, I asked.

The dead weep for the living.

 

The day that the village was encircled

the family hid in the cellar

under the chicken coop.

 

The six year old listened to the shots

and the shrieks, confused. He’d never heard

anything like that before.

 

But the cries of the hens –

he understood.

His dad had killed a hen when mom was in labor.

 

They hid in the sacks, coiling

limbs like roots, their dozen eyes

going blind. 

 

Baby Nadya at her mother’s tit

floated in the dark

like a large peeled potato.

 

No animals kept them warm.

No star lit up for them.

No help came from the East.

 

 

A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Woman

 

This is how

I grow old, she says

I don’t smile, yet this line

keeps on running from 

the corner of my mouth to

the wing of my nose

 

He says

Your nose doesn’t have wings

Your mouth doesn’t have corners

This line doesn’t run

It stays put

It’s there

 

The nose folds

into the cheeks, ear pressed to ear

eye to eye

Creases stiffen, out of the papery cocoon

emerges a form

and glides

 

A human face

with wings

 

Oksana Maksymchuk writes and translates poetry. Her writing appeared in Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Cimarron Review, The Common, and elsewhere. She won first place in the 2004 Richmond Lattimore and in 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions. Most recently, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, a NEH-funded anthology. Maksymchuk teaches philosophy at the University of Arkansas.

 

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TODD MERCER 

 

Compound Eye

 

Bumblebee says he hasn’t seen any open flowers

in his day’s ramble, comes home with pollen

all around his ankles, a petal stuck to his wing.

Singing the innocence song, next best substitute

for real innocence. The mate of Bumblebee

has been alive for several months. She’s a seasoned

realist, not a fool who thinks that clover pollinates itself.

She may call bullshit on his bullshit, but what then?

Serve him with his flying papers? There’s been salacious

buzz between hive busybodies. Bumblebee might spin out

but he’d bounce back, luck into a cushy orange grove gig

where there’s hardly any winter. She foresees ol’ Bumblebee’s

declining months, growing fatter, slower, pulling his stripes

up to his armpits. The mate decides she doesn’t notice

evidence that’s actionable. Willfully. It’s easier to take that stinger.

Honeymakers don’t default toward acidic or astringent options

without souring their hives’ walls. Which is where they live.

Bumblebee, oblivious to his mate’s decision process

tracks the rug up with his sin’s sign, cracks open a mead.

 

Todd mercer won the Dyer-Ives Kent County Prize for Poetry, the National Writers Series Poetry Prize and the Grand Rapids Festival Flash Fiction Award. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, appeared at Right Hand Pointing. Recent work appears in 100 Word Story, Defenestration, Literary Orphans, Praxis and The Magnolia Review.

 

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MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

What matters is that I

 

taste a blueberry as complete;

impartially move a storm-chilled

bee into sunlight, whether or not it lives long,

 

or I am stung; hear mourning doves

as not in mourning—but, when I need,

to receive their sounds as empathy;

 

see wind through trees, through me,

as light turned to liquid;

fall equally in love with each origin

 

of a forest’s bouquet;

be enveloped by an ocean at least once,

and ever remember the multi-glazed pull,

 

the stinging caresses;

hear and care when someone cries out

and understand that to care

 

I don’t have to understand the cause;

and that I wake each day as though

all is possible,

 

yet saturated to the roots

of my longer-living hair

with the gift of gratitude for my haves.

 

What matters is that everything

matters and nothing matters,

and that I acquiesce to this conundrum.

 

 

What doesn’t matter to me

 

is house dust, a delicate mixture of spider stilt leg segments,

virile pollen without a cause, meteorite particles, space tease,

 

unless the dust obscures too many letters of a favorite word

I want to read: inexorable, moonlightish, irreplaceable;

 

and the shorter days that weaken will, that lengthen, lower

light angle, the hardening of winter, but only if I hold

 

to irreplaceable memories of spring light, spring green,

warm air touching skin, moving my hair to allow

 

birdsong to intertwine or pass through; and, also sneaky

greed, unless it is my own, leeching the color of life

 

from my red corpuscles; but, mainly what doesn’t matter

is the inexorable tick-tock, because the faster time narrows

 

into a straight vortex, pulling sunsets in afterwards,

leaving behind sleep craving, the faster I slow to my choice

 

of speed, use leg songs of insects to hypnotize me

from daybreak into full sun falling into shadowed moonlightish

 

night, connected concertos—drawing out 24 hours into

the months and years when I didn’t know what I know now.

 

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in The Comstock Review, Town Creek Poetry, The Lake, The Pedestal Magazine, Still: The Journal, POEM, Slant, Poetry East, Hotel Amerika, Tar River Poetry, Appalachian Heritage, Chiron Review, The South Carolina Review and Southern Humanities Review. Two poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Pushcart contributing editors. Work is forthcoming in Poetry East,POEM and Hotel Amerika. She lives with her husband in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia.

 

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KENNETH POBO

 

I’ve Never Written a Poem

 

about Bette Davis.  I’ve written twice

about Tatyana, a sour woman

who wore stained floppy hats. 

After I moved she ended up

on the cutting

room floor of my poems.

 

Maybe Bette will appear in

a dream.  I’ll keep her in

the isolation ward of a poem

and see how she does.  Bette

might charm like Griefswald, Germany,

yellow canola blooms along

the riverbank.  Or maybe

I could text her among goddesses.

 

Tonight if I hear her above my bed,

like a squirrel in the attic,

I’ll make her tea, listen

to her stories that might make

a fork and knife blush.  

 

 

Lovable Moptops

 

I saw them first on Ed Sullivan,

The boys in fourth grade wanted

long hair.  Dad, deadest against it,

slathered on Brylcreme,

kept me crewcutted—

It mattered how you voted on

who is your favorite Beatle.  George,

always George.   

 

When they got psychedelic, I pondered

“All You Need Is Love.”  Half a century later,

love is a dying deer along a road. 

Or something quaint taken down

from the attic.  We serve hate

bottled water at dinner. 

 

I program in “Piggies,” the oinking

too loud through most

any window.  Expensive clothing

keeps us hidden.   

 

It’s been a hard day’s night

on a planet where daybreak

didn’t hear the alarm.

 

Kenneth Pobo has a new book of prose poems forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Press called The Antlantis Hit Parade.  In addition to The Lake, recent work has appeared in Bangor Poetry Journal, New Ulster Review, Crannog, and elsewhere.

 

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MARK YOUNG

 

Stuck inside of Mobile

 

I want too much, &

often take the same.

 

Economists tell me

this is the wrong

 

thing to do, for

wants are unlimited

 

but resources scarce.

& so my prolifigacy

 

will cause prices to rise,

babies to starve, atolls

 

in the South Pacific to

submerge as temper-

 

atures increase in anger

at my actions. I turn away,

 

want not to know what

my wants might lead to.

 

Mark Young is the author of over forty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are random salamanders, a Wanton Text Production, & Circus economies, from gradient books of Finland.

 

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