2023

 

 

MAY

 

Kevin Carey, Mike Dillon, Ted Jean, James King, Norman Minnick, A. N. Other,

 Jane Pearn, Fiona Sinclair, J. R. Solonche.

 

 

 

 

 

 

KEVIN CAREY

 

The poem I forgot to write

 

is in my back pocket

scribbled on a matchbook,

or a bar napkin, or etched

into the wall of a bathroom stall.

 

The poem I forgot to write

comes clean, tells the truth

doesn’t disguise itself

in shrewd language, shoots straight.

 

The poem I forgot to write

has never been written

by a guy like me, a scared

little poet in a tired body.

 

The poem I forgot to write

sings with joy and redemption,

let’s itself off the hook,

doesn’t try too hard to be liked.

 

The poem I forgot to write

is waiting:

for a chance

for a break

for a road sign that reads:

entering nowhere you’ve ever been.

 

Kevin Carey lives north of Boston where he teaches, writes and makes movies.

kevincareywriter.com

 

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MIKE DILLON

 

Estuary

 

After the path crosses three fields

(Keep the blooming apple orchard to your left) 

you’ll leave the safety of old knowledge 

for an estuary of silence 

where the slightest breeze ticks the sedge.

 

A great blue heron keeps a lonely vigil there.

A kingfisher will chitter and dive

and kittiwakes make calligraphy in the mud

where a beached salmon skull stares skyward,

its eye socket empty as death.

 

Maybe you’ll feel it: that prickly sense

of being watched from the alders.

“We are,” a tribal elder once told me.

In that liminal place where fresh and saltwater mix

those tiny fish that Adam forgot to name

will drift like bits of seaweed.

  

Theorem

 

Old hoot owl mounts the dark.

Wisdom outfitted with talons.

 

Wee mouse will come to know

the down-swoop of truth is never fair.

 

As old-hoot-owl knows, back on its branch,

what’s fair cannot be true.

 

Proof lies in the furry pellet touched by sunrise,

those white bits of bone mixed in.

 

 Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. He is the author of six books of poetry. His chapbook, Close Enough, will be published by Finishing Line Press in August.

 

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TED JEAN

 

two rivers

 

what the backhoe operator refers to as round rock,

and the mason calls aggregate, is actually

ancient gravel, burnished by the action of water

over a million years, buried in the silt of eroded

volcanic extrusions, and stripped raw by the river

to accommodate my sitting in its warmth, feet planted

in its cool grasp six inches deeper

a blood red rock

lies beside a blue rock, shot with a white line of mica.

Aside from varied minerality, they are precise copies,

lying in their billions in a bar a quarter mile long,

flowing imperceptibly, roughly parallel to the river,

to descend beneath the field where the fence tips

over the undermined blackberries, one post

bobbing in and out of the current like a drinking bird

 

Robinson Creek

 

skinny kid dislodges forty pound stone

from the Pleistocene conglomerate

where after centuries of tumbling to

become smooth and oblate like a Neolithic

nude it lay embedded in the gravel

stream a million years until that winter’s

swollen creek exposed it to the grasp

of the skinny kid who dumps it as

the keystone into his rudimentary dam

 

creek and kid, in kind, create

inconsequential disturbances that

are quickly erased and ultimately buried

but the pool is cool while it lasts and

the sculpted stone is shown to the world

 

A carpenter by trade, Ted writes, paints, plays tennis with Amy Lee. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, and twice for the Pushcart Prize, his work appears in the Beloit Poetry Journal, PANK, DIAGRAM, North American Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, dozens of other publications.

 

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JAMES KING

 

Dancing Virgin

 

She said she wasn’t looking for commitment.

She assured me: absolutely no strings.

Less than a minute into it, she gasped.

She refused to believe this was my first time.

 

Questions arrived in exclamation points

as she leveraged her not inconsiderable

girth to fling me about the mirrored studio

like a napkin being snapped of its crumbs.

 

Was I sure I had never taken lessons? Hadn’t

anyone ever told me how good I really was?

Keep your hand there, she instructed. Lower.

That’s how you hold a woman.

 

Bosom forward, fingertips pressed against

the small of my back. So smooth! she cooed.

Such natural rhythm! My wife was lucky.

Girlfriend, then.  No? It was all beyond belief.

 

How quickly I picked up the box step! Surely

someone had told me I was a natural? Back

straight. Arms up. What, her winking mascara

wanted to know, were my dancing goals?

 

No matter! I was to give it careful thought.

In the meantime, Ballroom Basics would do

for now: a little foxtrot, a little cha-cha,

some samba for spice. And, of course, disco!

 

The Bee Gees ruled then; she paid homage

with a full-bodied shimmy that confused

her cleavage and evoked unpleasant

memories of my podgy Dutch grandmother.

 

I was not to talk of fees. Vinny handled money;

she, artistry. Furious flipping through blank

calendar pages revealed that I was in luck:

She could squeeze me in next week.

 

James King’s poetry has appeared in The Dillyduon Review, The Thieving Magpie, OpenDoor Poetry Magazine, Oddville Press, Big City Lit, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and is forthcoming in Crowstep Poetry Journal and BarBar. He is also the author of the award-winning novel, Bill Warrington’s Last Chance. He lives in Wilton, Connecticut, USA.

 

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NORMAN MINNICK

 

Witness

 

Anything I write on this page can do nothing

for the woman sitting on a bench opposite me.

 

If I were to share with her, she would continue to weep.

Sometimes there are no answers –– even in verse.

 

Sometimes one cannot look away.

Many dearly departed poets have taught us this.

 

Sometimes you simply must weep

put your face in your hands and weep.

 

As this woman opposite me, shoulders trembling,

shoes placed obediently beside her.

 

Cur

 

I am all stomach and appetite. I devour

shit, peat moss, a litter of rabbits, 

all varieties of weeds and grass, a cast-out bone.

 

I vomit and I eat that, too.

Every day a cute redhead skips by

and I forget my sudden attachment to the leash.

 

I keep waiting and waiting, waiting for the day

the backdoor opens and a voice calls out.

They never gave me a name.

 

Norman Minnick is the author of three collections of poetry and editor of several anthologies. Most recently, he is the editor of The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight, which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems and essays have been published in The Georgia Review, The Sun, World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Oxford American, and New World Writing, among others. Visit www.buzzminnick.com for more information.

 

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A. N. OTHER

 

Clouds

 

He followed the trail back. It wasn’t easy, what with the showers rain and the mud. He tried to remember what they said to him. How he saw the little red dots floating in from the side of his vision as he registered their words.  She should have known better. That’s what friends are for. He slipped and grabbed at a hawthorn bush to stop from falling. Rain ran down the back of his neck. He looked up at the charcoal clouds, how the setting sun turned their edges purple and pink. He stared at the orange horizon free of clouds. A mist began to descend in his mind. He clenched his fist and continued walking through the mud.  He decided to return tomorrow in the dark, just to check, just to make sure. He hefted the spade to his shoulder, like a rifle.

 

A. N. Other writes stuff.

 

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JANE PEARN

 

Red

Tuol Sleng, Khmer Rouge interrogation centre, once a school.

Many of the guards were very young.

 

Quiet. Heavy, still, remembering air.

Subdued footsteps on cracked floors.

Red tiles.

 

No school now, but we have come to learn,

at the place of the poison tree.

Petals drift pink and white.

 

Hints of horror.

Rusted pincers for the sudden

red flowering of fingernails.

 

A list of rules on a board, translated for tourists.

When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

 

Rough brick kennels in a classroom. Chains and bolts.

A stain, once red, on the wall.

Hearing the scented air bright with screams.

 

Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders.

The harsh voices of dead-eyed barbaric children.

 

If there is no order, keep quiet.

 

Shadows

In the garden, digging the warming earth.

 

Unquiet graves.

 

Robin perches close enough to touch, watches me

tear up roots, dispose unwanted lives.

 

Mariupol.

 

Sparrows chatter, an intricate mesh

of sound, building this year’s homes.

 

Gaping houses. Rubble. A shoe in the road.

 

Blackbird on chimney offers his song, oblivious.

Over the wall, children’s voices in the playground.

 

Children’s voices.

 

The sky is painted gold and blue and white.

Dandelions dazzle like small suns.

 

In the sky, an unseasonal mushroom.

 

Bright-eyed robin tilts inquiring head. Well?

 

I do not have an answer.

 

Jane Pearn's poems and short stories have appeared in several print and online magazines, including Brittle Star, Under the Radar, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She has been twice long-listed in the National Poetry Competition and has two published collections. Jane lives in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders.

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR.

 

Manly Hugs 

 

Lunchtime, builders swarm

the supermarket snack counter,

loud and brash as starlings,

their livery, high vis jackets, dusty overalls,

grimy fingers grasping pies and energy drinks, 

ambidextrously handing over cash

whilst chatting up the cashier.

One is snagged by a civilian chum

needy for blokey catch up, separating,

they hug ‘Nice to see you mate ‘.

I think of my dad, working on the farm,

habitually shod in wellies, jumpers like gouda cheese,

whose pals from school, cricket, farming,

packed the pews at his memorial.

Men ranked above mum and me

rarely treated to a peck or pat.

Friends who would have dodged a manly

hug like a punch, preferring the comfortable

distance of a handshake’s space.

 

Fiona Sinclair lives in Kent. Her new collection Second Wind is published by Dempsey and Windle press

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

On The Passing Of A Neighbor At 98

 

The hospice nurse gave you 12 hours

to 2 days. You chose 12 hours. After

98 years, 9 months, you got your

wish for peace, peace from your body,

peace from your body of Parkinson’s

disease, peace from your body of heart

failure, peace from your body of manic

blood pressure, peace from your body

of pills, peace from your body of swollen

feet, peace from your body of splitting skin,

peace from your body of bed sores, peace

from your body of breaking teeth, peace

from your body of dimming eyes, peace

from your body of narrowing ears, peace

from your damned body your mind damned

to hell from the hell of leaving your mind in

one piece so giving it no peace to know your

body. Peace unto you, Eva Amir, Eva One

Who Lived a Long and Prosperous Life. Amen.

 

Watching The War

 

After a while, your mind stops.

Your mind stops watching the war.

Your mind stops watching the war

and leaves the body on its own.

The parts of the body are left on

their own, each one watching

the war on its own, each one

reacting separately to what it sees.

So your eyes see the bodies, then

close, then turn away, then open

on the window or the door. So

your head sees the bodies, then

shakes, then says silently over

and over, "No." So your chest sees

the bodies, then heaves heavily.

So your shoulders see the bodies,

then tighten, stiffen as in death.

So your legs see the bodies, then

sag under the weight of your body.

So your hands see the bodies, then

rise upward, palms upward and open,

open to what you most hate about it,

the only answer it will ever have to

the only question you will ever have:

What is the difference between one

man and another man, the difference

between one woman and another woman,

the difference between one child and another?

 

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.

 

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