2019

 

 

MAY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Humphrey “Huck” Astley, Johanna Boal, Michelle Brooks, George Freek, Louis Gallo,

 Zoe Karathanasi, Tim Love, Ronald Moran, Tony Press, Danny Earl Simmons,

J. R. Solonche, Phillip Sterling.

 

 

 

 

HUMPHREY ‘HUCK’ ASTLEY

 

Evening

 

It is my birthday

and I am reading about the life

of Akhmatova

and it has snowed.

 

It never snows

on my birthday,

ides of March, eve of Spring.

 

Now I'm thinking

of Anna's Evening, her first,

and wondering about the grist

of the word –

 

whether the eve- denotes

a nest of beforeness,

the day in utero…

 

Does it matter?

She never even

used that word.

 

Look, my life is not

what I thought it was,

and climactic questions seem

to jostle overhead.

 

This evening,

night falling on snow

will give the lie

to black-and-white,

 

like lights brought down

on sheets thrown over

a set.

 

Humphrey ‘Huck’ Astley is a poet based in Oxford. His works include the pamphlets Reasons Not to Live There (Sabotage Reviews Recommended Release, 2012), The Gallows-Humored Melody (Albion Beatnik Press, 2016) and The One-Sided Coin (Rain over Bouville, 2018). His writing has appeared in Agenda, The London Magazine, Poetry London, and elsewhere. 

 

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JOHANNA BOAL

 

Tribe

 

When at twelve years, at the butchers - legs of lambs,

whole pigs hung, white tiles, counters, shiny stainless steel -

I saw a handsome local lad with long arms,

clear as I could see the blood on a tray of meats;

liver, heart, scrag-ends - rolled up sleeves of his work coat.

 

His coat had coloured bits stuck, clear jelly-like substance

dangled whilst he worked sluicing at a sink,

watching it drop, land in sawdust, suddenly I smelt pine

when the black boots wet-walked it into the ground.

Blotches of green smudge, like he had been rolling in grass.

 

The Dublin Mountains in the background.

He smiled, all the death had gone out of the shop.

I could see his dark hair, eyes and red lips even more. 

He held out his hand and brought me to a bath,

a tap running, filled water and the smell of bleach!

 

Cow’s stomach – cow’s stomach turned white as well, 

grass heaped in the corner, undigested food he said!

Then suddenly all that beauty went out and I left,

and he had a professional title - Tripe Dresser, 

 

‘Dog bones’ someone said, 10p that’s a bit much… 

 

Johanna Boal lives in East Yorkshire. She has been published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Poetry Space, High Windows, Hedgehog Press anthology and many more.

 

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MICHELLE BROOKS

 

The Night Market of Ghosts

 

The ground moves with snakes,

and the sky bleeds red streaks,

as if the night couldn’t leave

without a fight, and all your dreams

are tragedies where no one dies,

but everyone suffers. In your past

life when you woke up hungover, you’d

think, Anything is better than this.

 

You were a confection, a little

dead around the eyes, the kind

of woman people describe as

pretty in a hard way. And you

refuse to go gently into that good

night. And let’s face it. Not all

of them were good ones. You don’t

care. There is nothing you can do

about it now. Gather the pieces

as best you can even if they cut you.

 

 

Don’t Be A Stranger

 

There is nothing to see here,

just memories that aren’t yours,

and days you will never get back,

and the sense you will never escape

yourself, and I remember a girl

in my old neighborhood who shared

my name. The adults said she was

touched, a little slow. That summer,

the Bicentennial, everyone adorned

themselves with flags. Bruce Jenner

won the Decathlon, and women talked

in hushed tones about rumors of affairs,

of husbands who beat their wives.

The world was still a mystery, as was

the day the father of the sweet little

girl who shared my name came home

from repairing air-conditioning units

and shot her and her mother before

killing himself. The house where I grew

up remains the same, iron bars covering

the windows, still protecting everyone

in the house from everything but themselves.

 

Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia Press). Her poetry collection, Pretty in A Hard Way, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit. 

 

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GEORGE FREEK

 

I Think of My Future (After Tu Fu)

 

Time falls like ash from the stars.

The moon is the face

of a clock counting the hours,

ticking away my time

remaining on this planet.

Life is still a mystery.

I look out the window,

but don’t recognize what I see.

When crickets lie in the grass,

waiting for a wind to blow,

do they speak a language

only God knows?

I’m unhappy with my art.

There’s something I should do,

but I don’t know what.

And it’s too late to start.

                                                                                     

 

November Arrives (After Li Shangyin)

 

As always winter is bleak.

Crows pick at rotting bones.

Skeletons stare eyelessly

at the desolate sky,

searching the distant stars,

where dreams abide.

But they see nothing

in the frozen air.

As the wind swirls around them,

the crows scatter like leaves,

seeking a place to hide.

Leaves fall everywhere.

The stars look down,

but not in prayer.

Life is uncertain

they seem to tell us,

and it is always unfair.

 

George Freek's poems have recently appeared in Big Windows Review, The Adelaide Magazine, Green Light, and The Tipton Poetry Journal. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; Lazy Bee Scripts; and Off The Wall Plays. 

 

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LOUIS GALLO

Lost Biblical Verse

 

And it came to pass in those days,

depending on where you were,

that absolutely nothing happened

and that nothing begat peace

and prosperity and more nothing

and nothing transpired forevermore

until it came to pass once again,

as everything always does,

that nothing grew bored and

heavy laden and slew itself

into something heinous

that begat & begat & begat.

 

Two of Louis Gallo’s full volumes of poetry, Crash and Clearing the Attic, have been accepted for publication by Adelaide Books.  His work has also appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books:  A New Orleans Review.  He was awarded an NEA fellowship for fiction.  He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.

 

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ZOE KARATHANASI

 

The Man Next Door

 

I sat at my usual place in La Guincheuse,

to look at the plane trees and their new sprouts,  

the café’s string of multi-coloured bulbs – felt

the road traffic vibrate in my hands.

 

The man next door sat on the terrace outside

by the other side of the glass. He lives at number 51,

home to the Institut Métapsychique International.

He was wearing an anthracite

 

corduroy jacket, an anthracite scarf. He was sipping

the vert à la menthe from Comptoir Richard, devouring

a book of poetry. Mirrors by Robert Creeley. I could

touch him, If it weren’t for the glass.

 

I wanted to tell him about a cave north of Athens,

on Mount Penteli, a site of stange phenomena.

Would he go down into its most profound depths

and come back? They say

 

there is a clearing and a small lake, where god Pan

was worshipped in ancient times. Would he cling

to the rope and pull me out? It is the time of the year

when we should start our ascent. The plane trees

 

are making new leaves. There are too many of us here.

It’s been too long since I’ve been drowning in a small

underground lake. I’d rather tell him about the sea–

how there was no rope to cling to, how the current

 

drowned my voice, how I floated like debris –

that the difference between drowning and nearly

drowning is imperceptible – that I lost myself somewhere

between the sea and the current and can be anyone.

 

Zoe Karathanasi was born in Greece and lives in Paris with her husband and two daughters. She completed an MA in Poetry with Distinction at the Manchester Metropolitan University.  Her work has been published in The Interpreter's House, Bare Fiction, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Fat Damsel among others. 

 

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TIM LOVE

 

Believing in myself

Tonight before returning to my room
I roam dark streets to soaring iPhone chords.
Old Shostakovich claimed that shrapnel in
his brain rang heaven's spheres when spirits failed,

but all I have's an empty bar where stream-
lined chrome reflects me waiting to be served.
The movement ends; I leave my ear-phones in
and follow the bored barmaid's gaze outside.

"Our dreams are stars", wrote Carl Jung, "always there",
a distant madness which the sane must crave,
though lacking flesh's feedback feelings fade
to thoughts trapped epicycling signs of love.

As pigeons take off, clapping at themselves,
I envy how self-tickling schizoids laugh.

Cars

Coming off the motorway life seems too slow for them.
You see them kerb crawling for free meters,
fluttering their headlamps, or revving at the sight
of a flashing green man. They have all the latest
accessories, dazzling those who make a pass.

Some are lovable, spending their last days
in quiet cul-de-sacs, grumpy in the mornings,
each sheltering a sleeping cat when it rains.
Others queue like dominoes, chain-smoking
until they tumble as the lights change.

They hold no-one captive; they're strapped and locked in
for their own good. They can only make signs
to each other through the windows. The longer
they're trapped, the more they say they're free.
Despite their maps, they'll not escape.

 

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, Unthology, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

Reverie

 

These fast moving cumulonimbus clouds I see

                        through

my palladium window mean the air is cooling,

                        coming

from the northeast, bringing with it a sign

                        that summer

is closing down in upstate South Carolina;

                        and I think

of what else is closing down: sap, AC units,

                        tight shorts,

the baring of tanned flesh of girls and women,

                        untouchable

for older men whose memories easily forget

                        their

own very recent past but who remember when

                        they first

fell in love, whatever the season, and try, if

                        they can,

to recall the one feeling in their lives they hope

                        never to forget.

 

Playmates

 

During a summer in the late 1940s,

a boy eleven pushes a girl a year older

on a swing hanging from a branch

of a massive oak behind the backyards

of their houses. The oak stands on a slow

 

slope leading to a creek. She is Catholic,

he is Episcopalian, and they will never

end up together. She is wearing a white

sleeveless blouse, and as he pushes her,

his hands touch her flesh above the cut

 

of her blouse. He is confused, excited,

wants more of what he does not know

has happened, and when he returns

home, his mother, busy in the kitchen,

offers to make him a tomato sandwich.

 

He says, No, goes to his room, closes

the door, puts on a record, and tries

to understand, this only child who has

no one to talk to about the swing scene,

and if he did, would he know what to say?

 

Ronald Moran lives in South Carolina. His poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. In 2017 he was inducted into Clemson University's inaugural AAH Hall of Fame.

 

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TONY PRESS

 

On the Late Bus

 

ahead of me

on the late bus to Bristol

the woman leaned her head

upon the rain-smeared window

and surrendered herself to sleep

 

I was reading,

no, fighting through

a novel an ex had given me

when grace feathered my hands

 

wisps of a ponytail,

the ends of ten golden inches,

kissed my book-cradling fingers

 

I held pose

as if meditating

 

until her awakening

 

Tony Press tries to pay attention and sometimes he does. His 2016 story collection Crossing the Lines was published by Big Table. Equinox and Solstice, a 2017 e-chapbook of his poems, was presented by Right Hand Pointing. His resume includes two Pushcart nominations, about 25 criminal trials, and 12 years in a single high school classroom. He loves Oaxaca, Mexico; Bristol, England; and Brisbane, California. "On the Late Bus" - published in Right Hand Pointing (online) in December, 2014.

 

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DANNY EARL SIMMONS

 

All Five Flavors 

  

The other day I tasted the whirr of a hummingbird 

for the very first time. It nestled on the tip of my tongue 

the way laughter does when it sails from a park on a Saturday 

afternoon and follows the arc of a doe leaping. 

 

It was a gentler flavor than plowing dry ground black 

with back and blister into something fingers can rake, 

though it was stronger than the sweet blush of cheeks lighting 

like snowflakes on her fluttering lashes. Speaking of her, 

 

she smiled at me once and it tasted like walking home all alone 

from school in May between walnut shadows and the effervescence 

of a sunlight barely able to make it through to my carrying nothing 

away that day. Not too long after, I pursed my lips against the tang 

 

of chasing our old hatchback and shouting from the bottom 

of my throat. Its aftertaste burned just like the bile of running 

barefoot and waving goodbye to my Dad through tailpipe smoke. 

 

Danny Earl Simmons lives in Lebanon, Oregon. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals such asThe Pedestal Magazine, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, IthacaLit, and San Pedro River Review. He is the author of a poetry chapbook entitled The Allness of Everything (Maverick Duck Press) and curates the Galleywinter Poetry Series. “All Five Flavors” first published in Little Patuxent Review (2015).

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Poetry

 

“I like your poem,” I told the student.

“It’s really good.” “Thanks,” she said.

“You should publish more,” I said.

“I don’t have any more right now,”

she said. “I’m very hard on myself.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Being hard on

yourself is the best way to be. It will

make things a lot easier later on.

You’ll see.” I’m such a fucking liar.

Not about the poem. The poem really

was good. About the later on part.

 

  

To My Left Hand

 

Yes, little brother, I see you.

Yes, you want attention.

You’re holding my chin in place.

You’re massaging my nose.

You’re tugging at my left earlobe.

And, no, I will not forget.

You’re the one who jerks me off.

While it’s big brother who jerks

me off the other way.

The public way. This way.

Yes, I hear you, little brother.

You’re the one who snaps

in time to the blues

on the radio. Or slaps my thigh.

You’re the one who drums

on the desk. The one who

wears the ring and reminds me

thereby of my responsibilities.

And, no, I will not forget

my promise that when both

of you are sleeping on

my sleeping chest,

you will be the one on top.

 

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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PHILLIP STERLING

 

The Ordinary Dream

 

You wake from the dream

in which you are standing

in front of the classroom

having just explained how

to use brackets—parentheses

inside parentheses—because

one of the students had asked

and diverted you from your

lecture on the paragraph

and it seemed important

at the time and something

you know about but now

you’ve been brought back

into the night by the muffled

hum of a pump that shouldn’t be

running and you don’t know why

but you know you should get up

and go downstairs and see if

the toilet handle needs jiggling

or if the garden spigot had been

left open inadvertently

though you’d rather get back

to the dream and finish

the lecture on paragraphs

because they are important

something the students need

and besides

you’ve gone over it

so many times before

you could do it in your sleep

and still the sound of the pump 

makes you think you should

get up instead and investigate

but instead you just lie there

in the uncertain dark and let

disappointment carry you

sleepless into morning

 

 

Picture Day

 

I’d like to think the boy

who failed to take his place,

alphabetically, on the day

of Mrs. Orr’s 6^th grade

 

classroom photo and so

does not appear in the 1962

Honorarian among his

scrubbed and be-ribboned

 

classmates, a few of whom

seem to be smiling

at the gawky photographer

(or his corny jokes), a man

 

who will succumb to a rare

darkroom mishap 

the same year “The Twins”

—tallest in the back row

 

and indistinguishable

as the black-and-white photo

blurs their hair ribbons

to a common shade of gray—

 

will graduate with honors

from the county’s consolidated

high school and in their speech

thank Mrs. Orr . . .

 

I’d like to think the boy

had skipped intentionally

and taken himself by way

of the old logging trail

 

to the hill across the road

from where the school bus

had stopped and his brothers

gotten on (and so have been

 

identified properly in

their respective class pictures

of 1962—proof of memory’s

capriciousness)

 

and had climbed among

the beech and maple forest

overlooking Big Platte Lake

to wilderness so compelling

 

that Senator Hart himself

had hoped to include a large

part of it in his proposal

for a National Lakeshore

 

and preserve the woods

and dunes and fields

for future generations of

eleven-year-old boys

 

(and girls!) who might

otherwise have no place

to go when they decide

to skip a day of school

 

—even Picture Day—

and seek alternative

companionship or education.

I’d like to think that I

 

might encounter him today

—fifty-five years later—

roaming these very hills,

absent and happy.

 

Phillip Sterling’s books of poetry include And Then Snow and Mutual Shores. His poems have appeared recently in The Georgia Review, Paterson Literary Review, The Split Rock anthology Waters Deep, and The I-70 Review, among other places.

 

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