2015

 

 

NOVEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Barbara Siegel Carlson, Diane Kendig, Bryanna Licciardi, Lyn Lifshin, Katherine Lo,

 Beth McDonough, Todd Mercer, Tom Pescatore, J. R. Solonche, Daniel James Sundahl, Grant Tarbard, Petra Vergunst.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BARBARA SEIGEL CARLSON

 

 

To A Speck

 

The black sand of Iceland reflects the lit night

of summer. Through the airplane porthole I am invisible

to you down there, speck moving across the sand.

Where did you come from? What are you thinking?

 

Below is rough as above, our bodies buried

in a swarming current. There aren’t any buildings

or signs. Do you walk on ashes or skulls long crushed?

How many times have you been in love?

 

I’m going home to care for a sick father.

We’re roaring too fast to hear anything.

 

My breath will outlast my lungs, my heart.

My name will have no throat. No one will say it

and know who I am. Soon my father will die.

He is reaching for a sign.

 

There are no places to hide

in this steel cage. My country has no language

for a soul that knows nothing material

blazing as yours with the night sun. 

 

This blindness is a perpetual conversation.

My soul needs what my heart must give up.

 

 

 

On The Day My Father Died

 

a nun crossed the street carrying a white bouquet.

The blossoming tree next door got caught in a windstorm

and magenta petals flew to the sidewalk

and lay down like separated wings, or bruises.

How blushed were the tips of the red oak leaves, lush and uneven

the New Jersey grass. I heard the delicate clink of windchimes

from a neighbor tree. Tasted the afternoon light in a lemon drop

and stood still as the falling light entered the lichen

on one of the trunks like a pale bell rung into the bark.

Back in the darkening living room,

my father’s familiar fingers resting in his lap

began to whiten and blue at the tips. His chest and breastbone

of the thinnest rose-colored sheen rising slightly

between pauses. On the evening of my father’s death

the air grew still. There was no fly, nor whiteness

of the rising soul. I touched his lips that remained parted.

 

 

 

 

Carving The Silence

In memory of my father     

 

By the door stands the wooden figure of a man

hunched over his walking stick.

The figure can’t see the alabaster polar bear

glide by on skates. Nor the stone squirrel staring

into the gray silence past the whale

on the glass shelf. One day in early spring

a boy made a boat in the garden from the cold

moist clods and lay down inside. Overhead

clouds transformed into creatures and countries

he could almost grasp. Later he lugged

stones from quarries and beaches

loving how with hammer and chisel he could draw out 

each animal face. Or wading into the creek

behind his house, he would stir the bloodsuckers

buried in the silt and pick them off his legs, fascinated

by the trickles of blood. And sometimes he 

inserted straws into the anuses of frogs

blowing into them like balloons

to watch the frogs float downstream. What is

the weight of stone compared to the lightness

of clouds that you cannot make clear ?

This morning a cloud has descended

and the masts of trees stand without sails

before houses lost on a white sea of stillness.

Somewhere far off the coast one whale is calling

to another across a vast open space.

Of what does each sing--? This fog that hovers over

a few patches of moss on the roof?

Some nest barely visible high in the leafless sycamore

where a few acorns are stashed? Maybe you remember

the blunt tread of your own heavy shoes

heading down steep basement stairs late at night

to behold a piece of rock

or some chilly bright Sunday afternoon

sailing a boat made of earth, looking up

at the incomprehensible blue.

 

 

Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of a poetry collection Fire Road (Dream Horse Press, 2013) and co-translator with Ana Jelnikar of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel  (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).    http://barbarasiegelcarlson.com/

 

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DIANE KENDIG

 

“And time slips by like a field mouse not shaking the grass”—Ezra Pound

 

The years do anyhow.

The minutes used not to. Think

of all those clocks in school rooms

of all those clocks in hospital halls:

big round white faces wiped the seconds,

large numbers spaced with five pk nails

and the long wider black hand

that would tick backwards for a second

before leaping ahead the full minute.

 

Well these are gone, or not many left,

not even on the body. “I use my cell phone.”

“I use my phone.” “Phone,”

everyone says, pulling them out of purses

and pockets rather than flicking their wrists,

that gesture I love. Gestures, that is:

the back of the hand or

palm up, heart pulsing against the case.

 

So a minute slips by now like the mouse

And the years, they glide like tigers

through tall grasses of Africa,

not one blade whispers to another.

 

 “The plain language of the dogs

Who in a few syllables have everything to say”­—Cleopatra Mathis

 

Five a.m. on February third,

four degrees above, I walk out

to check on the dog, not counting

the wind chill factor.

The snow, tough and packed

as a head of iceberg lettuce

breaks and crushes underfoot.

 

He stands, ears up, maybe hears moles

stirring under the cement circles

left after they tore the swingset down,

or maybe neighboring dogs

who sense him and turn in sleep.

I go in, watch from the window. He sits.

 

He has been lonely since his sister died

suddenly, quite young. I had no way

to tell him, and he seems always

looking for diversion after years of first

looking for her. He returns to the door

and mumbles his own high-pitched phrase,

an anxious surrender, enters

and heads for his bed,

having said it all for me.

 

Diane Kendig --poet, writer, translator and teacher for 40 years-- has authored four poetry collections, most recently The Places We Find Ourselves. A recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, she has poems recently in J Journal,     Wordgathering, and Ekphrasis, among others. She’s on the web: dianekendig.com and  http://dianekendig.blogspot.com/

 

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BRYANNA LICCIARDI

 

Pair Bonds

“Among foxes a pair-bond lasts only through the breeding season.”

 Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love

 

 

I imagine this is how it goes:

In the beginning,       they lick and kiss

each other’s face.     He brings home only

the best meat.                   He makes promises for their lives

together until his       hunts grow longer. Distractions,

overnight trips,         coming around less and less,

and, in the end,        never again.

Taken over by          desperate shame,

the female fox         drives away her children.

They have become    a constant reminder.

 

Urban foxes, too,     are like our echoes.

They eat fruit from   our gardens and chickens

from our coups.       People don’t want to see themselves

in any animal,          so they try to kill,

hunting foxes                    down in masses, knowing

it makes no effect    but wanting them dead anyway.

 

I imagine                 dead piles of beautiful, red fur

glinting soft             with blood, and I think

what a profound       accomplishment it is,

to have your death   be beside the point.

 

 

Bryanna Licciardi has received her MFA in poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in Literacy Studies. Her poetry appears in such journals as Poetry Quarterly, Blazevox, Dual Coast, Dos Passos, Euphony, Gingerbread House, and The Underground. Please visit her website www.bryannalicciardi.com to read more about her work.

 

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LYN LIFSHIN

 

I Was Four, In Dotted

 

Swiss summer pajamas,

my face a blotch of

measles in the small

dark room over blue

grapes and rhubarb,

hot stucco cracking.

17 North Seminary.

That July Friday

noon my mother was

rushed in the grey

blimp of a Chevy

north to where my

sister Joy would be

born two months

early. I wasn’t

ready either and

missed my mother’s

cool hands, her

bringing me frosty

glasses of pineapple

juice and cherries

with a glass straw

as Nanny lost her

false teeth, flushed

them down the toilet

then held me so tight

I could smell lavender

and garlic in her

braided hair, held

me as so few ever

have since, as if

not to lose more

 

 

Some Afternoons When Nobody Was Fighting

 

my mother took out

walnuts and chocolate

chips. My sister and

I plunged our fingers

in flour and butter

smoother than clay.

Pale dough oozing

between our fingers

while the house filled

with blond bars rising.

Mother in her pink dress

with black ballerinas

circling its bottom

turned on the Victrola,

tucked her dress up into

pink nylon bloomer pants,

kicked her legs up in the

air and my sister and I

pranced thru the living

room, a bracelet around

her. She was our Pied

Piper and we were

the children of Hamlin,

circling her as close as the

dancers on her hem

 

 

Sitting In The Brown Chair With Lets Pretend On The Radio

 

I don’t think how the

m and m’s that soothe

only made my fat legs

worse. I’m not thinking

how my mother will

die, of fires that could

gulp a mother up, leave

me like Bambi. I’m not

going over the baby sitter’s

stories of what they did to

young girls in tunnels, of

the ovens and gas or have

nightmares I’ll wake up

screaming for one whole

year wanting someone to

lie near me, hold me as if

from then on no one can get

close enough. I don’t hear

my mother and father yelling,

my mother howling that if

he loved us he’d want to buy

a house, not stay in the apart-

ment he doesn’t even pay

her father rent for but get

a place we wouldn’t be

ashamed to bring friends.

What I can drift and dream

in is more real. I don’t want

to leave the world of golden

apples and silver geese. To

make sure, I close my eyes,

make a wish on the first hay

load of summer then wait

until it disappears

 

 

Lyn Lifshin has published  over 130 books and chapbooks including 3 from Black Sparrow Press: Cold Comfort, Before It's Light and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me. Before Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle, Lifshin published her prize winning book about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and  Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness.  Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially The Lies, Light At the End: The Jesus Poems, Katrina, Mirrors, Persphone, Lost In The Fog, Knife Edge & Absinthe: The Tango Poems. For more information, visit her website www.lynlifshin.com

 

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KATHERINE LO

Walking with Benen

 

He is telling you about the turtles, how there were seven of them, no, actually seven frogs, but lots of turtles too, and a large snapping turtle who was this big, and they caught them and held them, but no, they didn’t keep them, they put them back in the water and none of them were hurt and they were really happy, the frogs and the turtles, of which there were many, tons of them, and the urgent joy in his eyes and his motioning hands and the little skipping walk, as if forward is not enough motion but up and down too, and his hoarse bright voice rising, rising above even the generations-old trees with their low swooshing of leaves, because the turtles and frogs, with their legs and beaks and beady eyes, are the whole world, and you want to take this world and tuck it in your pocket and carry it always, like a bright jewel or a stone smoothed by many waters.

 

What a Poem Is

 

Both wound and consolation

the wound being truth

the consolation also.

Not truth as a scalpel

          cold, precise

but more as a silken net cast wide over the world

and gathered back full

of living things.

 

Worded desire

or a loss unfurled like a towel shaken out

before you lay it to rest on the sand.

 

The rope thrown over the edge of the cliff

and the someone on the other end

to pull you up.

 

The pluck that sets you thrumming.

 

Little torn off corners of eternity you can stuff

in your pocket.

 

The old man inching his way through the evening air,

the metallic plink of his walker marking his steady progress.

 

Katherine Lo is a writer and high school English teacher who lives in Southern California.  Her work has appeared in The Other Journal, Catapult, and Darling Magazine.  She is also author of the young adult novel The Cellar and blogs in fits and starts at www.flawedbutfunctioning.com.

 

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BETH McDONOUGH

 

Nowhere, from Bourg Slip

 

Narrowed by hotel-corridored head, stale
out of airless straits. Unmoor
from sticky-flat carpets . Spill

into mist.

Shoulder-prickle through smirred cool, eel
this longest ebb. Feel each move new
in stranded red granite scapes.

A mile and a half into what unknown
there’s said to be a fort. Unseen, the tide
slacks, set
to gallop in. Ready to curl, reef

uncharted souls, caught
vraic-deep in this place. All sea yawns
hungry for wide-cockled
gone, hardly dared, skulled
by the skim of slow hulls.

 

 

Where we are now

 

As June apple-drops hold on
for wet August, let’s uncover summer dark
hasped to autumn. Breathe
privet rank breezes, pass devil’s bit
scabious, rash nettle-sore legs up
slipback cracked stairs. Fringe aside beech twigs,
sandal on ball-bearing mast, hard in old casing. Spit
unripened cherries, new split on their stems.

In this clasped cave, what’s eaved
in surprises? A rotted orchard with a door
to unlock? Left-over, moused –  written in lichens
or swept out, now boughed  for your knock?

 

 

Beth McDonough finds poems when swimming in the Tay and foraging. Currently Writer in Residence at DCA, she often writes of a maternal experience of disability. Her work is published in Gutter, Interpreter's House, Lighthouse and many other fine places.

 

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TODD MERCER

 

Jimmy

 

Over the transom, under the welcome mat,

inside the planter. Places to find a key.

Entering? Yes. Breaking? Rarely.

Whether it looks weirder to neighbors

if we turn the overheads on, or sweep through            

with dim flashlights. I prefer the day,

when we might pass for remodelers,

or termite sprayers, smiling, waving

if witnesses see us. Homeowners

should know we only earn a dime

on every dollar when we fence

their rings and electronics. We pay

a few bills from their loss, but don’t romp

with call girls on stacks of currency.

What I mean—we work, like they do,

but our risks are much greater.

Our guns are loaded. Pray we never

need to use them. I don’t like it,

but the burglar’s union doesn’t offer

medical, dental. I’m my pension plan.

 

 

 The Sexton Goes to Autopilot

Reduces his life until there only two elements, two modes—

burials and time alone at home. If he’d meant

to avoid the solitary, he could’ve found someone by now.

He used to go out, back in the day, a little nightlife.

He was well-liked. Ask now and he’d have no new news

to share. Eliminate the highs and lows, the level then holds

with less resistance. It’s a sustainable mindset, once one gets there.

Who else can eyeball the correct dimensions of a hole

without measuring it? Not once, every time. Who else’s front lawn

is mowed on diagonals which alternate Wednesdays to Sundays?

No one around here. It’s a minute matter. What advances

for the wider human race have come from what was learned?

Or from self-discipline? That’s the code of solitary people.

The Sexton figures it’s so quiet for so long later,

to transition gradually he befriends silence first.

 

 

Todd Mercer won the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts Flash Fiction Award for 2015 and was runner-up in the Palm Beach Plein Air Poetry Awards. His digital chapbook,Life-wish Maintenance appeared at Right Hand Pointing. Mercer’s recent poetry and fiction appear in: Bartleby Snopes, Dunes Review, Eunoia Review, Kentucky Review, The Lake, Literary Orphans, Lost Coast Review, and Midwestern Gothic.

 

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TOM PESCATORE

 

Brother

 

I’d like to sling that ball through galaxies/
past gulfs of time/
into my brothers gloved hand/
hear that satisfying POW of leather oil n skin/
scuffed with dirt/
off-white ball of displaced memory/
quickened by the long tears/
sadness grown from growing old/
in fields of calm green/
swaying gently in super nova breeze/
a golden star smiling/
film of dirt over mouth eyes/
taste of earth and daring and gods/
I’d like to wait for him to toss it back/
to start all over again.

 

Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia's old Skid Row. He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Watercolor of the Island

 

Afternoon. There is too much to wait for,

not enough to do. Luncheon has been taken.

The wine, one only, has opened the door

to indolence. The heat pushes in, and the sun

keeps it open, a door-stop of solid brass.

The sea is tranquil and blue, smooth as glass.

 

The sharp sails of the skiffs seem the wings

of diving birds, yellow wings, red and white.

Ambition sways, leans dangerously. A breeze brings

the palmettoes to life, but their slapping is slight,

polite applause for a poor piano player.

The pink lighthouse is poised like a diver

 

on the promontory. You have a book

in your linen lap with a broken spine.

The words are birds on the page. You hardly look

down at them. An old, fat island woman

sits under a huge umbrella with green

and white stripes which has the name of a wine

 

from Italy in each white stripe. Her eyes

are forgotten in the ocean. Her dreams

are forgotten in her eyes. No one tries

to do more. The sand shimmers pink and gleams

in the sun. No one tries. The book is dull.

It is heavy in your lap, a dead gull.

 

The sun is a mad drummer someone has sent

to make you mad. The palms are hummingbirds.

They hover. The sun is a monument

to what forever shall not be words:

To hummingbirds, to hibiscus flowers,

to morning-glories, to hours. Hours

 

from now, the sky will hold more color

than you will be able to use. The sky

will spill red, orange, pink onto the water,

purple and three greens. Yes, someone will try,

and you will be as thin birds of the shore,

the birds that hardly know what earth is for.

 

 

J.R. Solonche has been publishing in magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions) and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegel, and nine cats, at least three of whom are poets.

 

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DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL

 

Persistence Of Memory: A Prodigy, A Maimed One

 

When you consider your age,

The number of times you have shed your skin,

Every seven years, if you remember right,

You wonder if what you remember is warranted,

The details less exact, memories

Tripping and jumping along the nerve gaps,

Pictures composed to hold some grand conception

So arranged that when the gray cat claws the rug

The brain's sun-spoked wheel turns:

 

One cat murdered on your uncle's farm,

Your pump-action twenty-gauge shouldered swiftly,

The cat chugging along in its puffy gray suit,

Dropped in a lazy heap the moment the sun

Hooked behind a cloud.

 

Another stepped on by a cow,

Back and legs skewed sideways,

Jostled aside like any crippled kid,

Hopeful but never growing strong.

 

Another freeze-frames into focus,

Caught in the headlamps of your car.

 

One more on the lap of a woman

Petting his shag;  you remember

A comb slipping through her hair,

Hand and eye motion ageless and pristine.

 

Others are like pockmarks on your heart,

Craters making a sad literature, some of it

"The Shy Praise of Youth," a picture

Of someone's great-grandmother reading,

An old settler now among other old settlers.

 

Easy things to sentimentalize today

When they whisper again in memory,

Stirred by a dripping faucet,

By the smell of soap, the cat lapping milk,

All buried, then finding an opening

Spilling their yolk of color.

 

Envoi

 

Two boys climb a grain elevator;

A metal ladder carries them bottom to top.

It's winter, dark;  they talk and gesture.

No one is there to see or hear.

One mouths obscenities.

A decade later he goes to war;

 

The other will later sit in his home

Remembering much of this from a photograph

Taken from an airplane above a town in Iowa,

The cemetery near the eastern edge of town.

 

The one who will die carries a feed sack, knotted.

They reach the top and crawl to the edge to look

Straight down the white cement sides,

Nerves pulling stomachs and scrotums tight.

 

The one who will die pulls the cat from the bag,

Dangles it over the edge, drops:

Eyes follow the legs opening and spreading

As if to fly, visible until it almost hits the ground

But hits a power line instead and spins

A perfect gymnast's twirl to land then crawl into the weeds.

 

The other, who will live, remembers three months later,

Almost spring and the cat walking into Swenson's Conoco;

His legs and back are bad but in his eyes

A gray-black smoke the other who will live

Will carry with him all those years.

 

 

Daniel James Sundahl is Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where he has taught for thirty years.

 

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GRANT TARBARD

 

How to Be the Air

 

I am from nothing, a beak’s whistle of 

cloud, a piece of November intended 

to be oxygen with time’s vehement 

salt white rhythm, insubstantial as blown ash. 

Imagine buoyancy with a flushed cheeked

smoke of a vanishing terrace of spent 

cigarettes, variations of ribbons 

of silk spooning in the ventilation.

The problems arise when one wants to land,

mistrusting finger joints, for how can one 

grab at the aerials on the rooftops 

when one is air about the slain light’s room,

snatching at the tobacco tins of my 

grandfather’s loose nails to fasten me down.

 

 

Grant Tarbard is internationally published. His chapbook Yellow Wolf, published by WK Press, is available now.

 

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PETRA VERGUNST

 

Silent Woods

 

That woodland was sealed by Salomon, semibreves

quivering cream under a crypt of elongated leaves

 

Birds hopped incessantly, inspecting bark

scraping crevices, the need to feed

innate as the tunes they utter

 

It was in the shade of that lime that she played

her cello, grown from the tree's hearts

that drooped in their thousands

 

A blackbird repeated her theme, responded

strings and piccolo conjoined seed heads

 

Her last note dug deep

she bowed

inhaled silence

 

 

Petra Vergunst is a freelance community artist, poet and composer. Her poetry has appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Stare’s Nest, The Open Mouse, Poetry Scotland, Nutshells and Nuggets.

 

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