2016

 

 

 

OCTOBER CONRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Kitty Coles, Holly Day, Howard Richard Debs, Maurice Devitt, Steve Klepetar,

 Ann Manov, Maria C, McCarthy, Michael Minassian, Kenneth Pobo, John L. Stanizzi,

Paul Summers, Grant Tarbard.

 

 

 

 

 

KITTY COLES

 

Rapunzel

 

Dark witch, dark tower,

pale girl with yellow hair and you,

on horseback, endlessly riding to rescue her

across a landscape of mists and brackish water.

You think she waits as still

as a fly in amber

but could she, after all, be keeping going

and writing the end of her story without your help? 

 

Maybe she has grown very tired of everything,

of the silences dripping

from every stone of the place.

Maybe she's gathered her yellow hair into her lap

and woven a rope from it

and stepped into air,

leaving her silence as her last response.

 

Maybe she's broken her window,

let down that rope and lowered herself

to the blanket of the night.

In the darkness, you may have passed her

and never known her, her eyes downcast,

less beautiful than you thought her.

 

Maybe she, unlike you,

is not afraid of the witch. 

Maybe they study together, close as sisters,

and teach themselves

to build something out of nothing

so that, when you come,

they close their ears to your knocking

and draw the curtains and will not answer your call.

 

Maybe she's spent her days in honing

the edge of her comb

to the narrow edge of a blade

which she uses to quietly

part the halves of the witch's heart.

Then she lives alone in the tower,

content in its silence.

She lives alone

and never dreams of your coming.

 

Kitty Coles has been writing since she was five and works for a charity supporting disabled people.  Her poems have appeared in magazines including Mslexia, Iota, Obsessed With Pipework, The Interpreter's House, Frogmore Papers and Ink Sweat and Tears.

 

HOLLY DAY

 

The Very Last Drop

 

on the last day, when the world finally ends, I hope

I’m sitting in my car, driving somewhere nice, thoughts of the day ahead

filling my head with anticipatory joy. I hope my favorite song

is playing on the radio, and I hope that I have just enough time to sing along

all the way to the end of the song.

if the world was to truly end on a perfect note, then I

would have a cup of coffee by my side

hot but not too hot, and just enough to last until the very

 

last second. I don’t really care how it all ends,

 

so long as I don’t know it’s coming, so long as

I don’t have to think about it, have to prepare for it, have to dread it

in any way. I don’t want to live through

global starvation, a prolonged, senseless war, weeks of

television shows featuring children dying somewhere else.

I want the end

 

to be something nobody saw coming but the sandwich-board

prophets, standing crazy on street corners, waving their dirty fists

up at the sky as if at

some god up there

 

was glaring down at the earth, making maniacal plans

 

to destroy everybody and everything we’ve taken so comfortably for granted.

I

want to end up like those mammoths dug out of rock ice in Russia

found completely intact, flash frozen, with food still in their mouths

caught by disaster in mid-chew, mid-thought

completely surprised.

 

 

Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.

 

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HOWARD RICHARD DEBS

 

The New Cat

 

Our old cat died in ’98.

She lived some 20 years

in the house in which our

daughters grew to womanhood.

She left us a month after

my father-in-law died, hearts

gave out for both.

The girls used to put her

in a doll carriage, tied

a bonnet on her head

she let them do that.

It took me all this time

to learn to live with the

fact she was no more.

She’s laid to rest in

the backyard, underneath

a stone birdbath, she would

have liked that I think.

We have a new cat now,

Tiger is his name.

He came our way

just days before

we got the news

my brother-in-law

had died of cancer.

Somebody said at

the funeral, dying

is a part of living.

Which, the easy

or the hard part?

 

 

Howard Richard Debs received a University of Colorado Poetry Prize at age 19. Finalist and recipient 28th Annual 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards, his work appears internationally in numerous publications. His photography will be found in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge" artist and guest editor. His full length work Gallery: a Collection of Pictures and Words is forthcoming January 2017 (Scarlet Leaf Publishing).

 

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MAURICE DEVITT

 

Aleppo is Burning

 

We rise early, pack rucksacks with the skeletons

of our lives, store sleep for later and fold in

with the crowd. A peloton, swarming

for the border, unprepared for the broken mirrors

of angry faces, three-card tricks and the suspended

animation of a new limbo, the bald patch between tufts

of border-posts, where names and nationalities

are easily displaced and our hearts are overtaken

by the rhythm of battered coaches, idling

on the other side of the fence. They will carry us,

blind-folded, through the sticky nights,

lips moistened by cheap perfume, to a port

with shuttered windows and a boatman,

peddling porous promises of freedom.

                             *

The freedom that allows us to circle the compound

as often as we like, play football on the beach

and, when the sky darkens to cobalt-blue, watch

the tempting lights of boats in the channel, pinch

the coast of England between our fingers

and stand for hours in the mizzle and mud, tight knots

of silent conversation, for we have forgotten the formula

for sleep and know, that even when we rise,

Calais will still be burning.

 

In 2016 Maurice Devitt was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series and shortlisted for the Listowel Poetry Collection Competition. Winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition in 2015, he has been placed or shortlisted in many competitions including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Over the Edge New Writer Competition, Cuirt New Writing Award and the Doire Press International Chapbook Competition.

 

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STEVE KLEPETAR

 

Slow Parade

 

Here comes a slow parade along the stillborn avenue.

All the ghosts have returned, their faces flattened and damp.

Outside, the rain won’t quit, and the leaves look sodden

and old. The day is overripe. Ever since morning swelled

over a line of trees, it has felt like the inside of a slowly

rotting peach. Children have gone back to school

with their backpacks and pencils made of flame.

Busses gasp along broken streets, roadwork everywhere.

Only you remain immobile on a bed of nails. I long for

metal and wood, a hammer to pound with, a workshop

for turning planks into something worth filling with all

this bric-a-brac: the Chinese horse you cherished,

and the necklace of bronze; the stone plate

the Aztecs made. Sometimes the tiniest sound changes,

or the smell. Sometimes someone enters, and voices swirl,

but mostly the room remains in half-light. Music soaks

into spongy walls. Out in the corridor, an old woman asks

how you are today. I want to point to my wrinkled shirt.

“See here”, I would say, “your question sings like a hundred

birds in a burning tree. For your silence, I would hold out my palms.”

  

Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared widely. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press, and Family Reunion, forthcoming from Big Table Publishing. 

 

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ANN MANOV

 

On Reading L’Étranger
 

It still smells of the dunes where I read it, 

One noon-to-two. Toddlers 

 

In tropical prints dotted the sea like Kandinsky’s 

Bleu de ciel. From a chaise longue, a throaty retiree 

 

Praised her sister who’d turned seventy—

She’d not complained once. That was the season 

 

Of Hurricane Hanna, when a swimmer drowned 

Ten miles south. Any one of the French in straw hats 

 

And linen could have been Meursault, pupils narrow

And aimed at the Arabs who toyed with guns on the pier. 

 

(My brother had seen them once, by the Mexicans 

And their moonlit fishing rods and silvery blue runners.)

 

All day at the mosque-white Meadows Pool, we high-schoolers 

Brushed our tans together, looking away, later leaving 

 

Chlorine-green hairs on half-strangers’ sheets. 

(Like Marie, some asked if I loved them,

 

Never receiving a response.) Aujourd’hui, Maman 

Est morte. I watched mine limp to the driveway 

 

For the Times hot with sun, spread it on the oilcloth,

And spoon canned tuna to her mouth. The kitchen 

 

Was clinical white, fresh-bleached by the Brazilians.

(This was before they were deported.) She and I did

 

Not speak much then. We did not need to.
 

 

Breathless
 

The Soviets evacuated Moscow. My father was born 

On the frozen Izh, future land of AK-47’s 

 

And of Stalin’s Finno-Ugric plot. Two weeks later, Germans 

Came to a conclusion at Wannsee, best beach in Berlin. In five months, 

 

They shot the Jews of Pryluky into the muddy Uda, 

Fresh-melted with May. 

 

***

 

The year they tried Eichmann, the Communists closed 

The last synagogue there, where not-yet-secret rabbis taught

 

My grandpa just before he left, and the Jews spent a last fall. 

Then Yeltsin gave up the fight in Brest. A few escapees flew

 

Back and trembled at funerals for the young. There aren’t coffins. 

The flowers are un-wilting silk. On film, the synagogue is peach. 

 

Three bare black birches obscure it. An old man trails 

Fingers on the fence and speaks words I mistake for German. 

 

I don’t follow.

 

***

 

Summers in Latvia, my father swam, eating scarlet tomatoes

And rationed ham. In his album with the bas-relief of Peter the Great,

 

I see a cat-thin child struggle to keep his head above the water,

A phrase he shrieks to my shiksa mother, shaking wrists weak with stroke.

 

My brother and I sneak out the door, laughing, out of breath.
 

Ann Manov is a graduate of the University of Florida (English, Spanish, and French and Francophone Studies.) She is a current Fulbright fellow in Strasbourg, France. Her work has appeared previously in SAND: Berlin's English Literary Journal; Intersect: The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology, and Society; The Quint: A Literary Journal from the North; Wanderlust; and The Independent Florida Alligator. 

 

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MARIA C. MCCARTHY

 

Turning wood

 

He sees an old woman bent in a crook

of a cherry tree in the pub garden.

 

He has a piece of cherry

awaiting the tools

in his workshop;

it has knobbles,

uneven,

like the breasts

of a Picasso,

 

and ever since he’s seen them as breasts

he’s been looking for a woman with breasts

like that, to model it on.

 

It’s the curve of a woman’s back that fascinates,

the way she turns and bends, he sees it in the grain.

 

What others don’t realise,

there’s wood in everything,

and everything is wood. 

 

Maria C. McCarthy writes poems and stories, and is poetry and fiction editor for Cultured Llama Publishing. She was the winner of the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2015. www.medwaymaria.co.uk

 

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MICHAEL MINASSIAN

 

The Restaurant Of Books

 

                    With a wave of my hand,

I invite passersby into my restaurant:

 

“Here,” I say, “have a seat at this table

next to the window. Compose a sonnet

or a short essay in praise of the view.”

 

First, I offer a salad of haiku or tanka

& a glass of quotations

from a vintage year;

 

followed by a meal carefully balanced

with a memoir or novel,  contemporary

American or perhaps a 19th century

French roman a clef in a new translation.

 

Dessert is always a thin volume of poems

with a cup of Chinese calligraphy

& for those desiring a digestif,

a philosophic essay on epicurean excess

or ancient bookbinding may suffice.

“Thank you for coming,” I whisper

as they leave. Then watch them stumble

out into the night with full stomachs

& a parting word chosen at random

from a dictionary or encyclopaedia of verse.

 

 

This Winter Day

눈  (noon)

 

The clouds are piled up

like a train wreck

across the sky,

and tongues of rain freeze

before they hit the ground.

 

Back inside the house,

you stir the soup

and spoon out rice

into the celadon bowls.

 

I see you look up

as I come in the door.

 

You told me once

the word for snow

in Korean is the same

as the word for eye.

 

Outside the world

is turning white;

I imagine being lost

in a blizzard

 

with only the memory

of your glance

to guide me home.

 

Michael Minassian lives in San Antonio, Texas. His poems have appeared  in such journals as The Aurorean, The Broken Plate, Exit 7, The Lake, Third Wednesday, and Verse-Virtual. He is also the writer/producer of the pod cast series Eye On Literature.  Amsterdam Press published a chapbook of poems entitled The Arboriculturist in 2010.  “The Restaurant of Books”  previously published Fall 2010 in Nebo: A Literary Journal.

 

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KENNETH POBO

 

Orange Planet

 

My soul and I visit

an orange planet called

a Mexican sunflower. 

Orange blossoms cover it

like a mumu.  Who knew

that planets can be found

 

in yards?  My soul says

I shoudn’t call it a soul.

It would prefer to be known

as the silence between

a shed and a moon

flower blooming after supper.

I’d prefer a shorter name,

but I’ll get used to it.

 

I won’t, however, get used to

a planet on a stem

that scientists have yet

to explore, buds

dismantling telescopes,

opening just under

the sun’s fingertips. 

 

 

I Like To See My Plants Naked

 

My Show And Tell dahlia

wears the most gorgeous black

cocktail dress made of night. 

A firefly tiara tops off the ensemble. 

 

This morning the garden,

has the Show and Tell showing—

and telling.  Stark naked in bright

lighting.  Perhaps I should

 

close my eyes or turn my back. 

I don’t. If the dahlia’s mellow

while being starkers in a suburb,

why should I care?  I say

“My, your red and yellow

look like a lake at sunrise.”

 

The blossom soon withers. 

Like me.

All gone. 

Only the ground

to take us in.  

 

Kenneth Pobo has a new book forthcoming in 2017 from Circling Rivers Press called Loplop in a Red City.  In addition to The Lake, his work has appeared in: Orbis, The Fiddlehead, Amsterdam Review, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

 

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JOHN L. STANIZZI

 

Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)

for my students at Manchester Community College

 

My student from Nam speaks hardly any

English, and yet here she is trying hard

to comprehend the nonsense of John Donne

attempting to con a girl with some jive

about a flea.  And my boy from Haiti

rolls his eyes with disgust when I bring up

Daddy and Plath and ovens and babies.

I have students from the Dominican,

Ukraine, Puerto Rico, and the good old

U.S. of A, all of them chasing what

they heard was the pot of gold they’d find here.

And I’m sure I see the traces of smiles

when I say that if Jamiaca Kinkaid

can rise up from the ashes, so can you.

 

Framed

…for my father

 

He spent months in the basement

at war against forgetting;

scissors his weapon,

 

he trimmed hundreds

of old photos,

cropping away excess,

 

that which might distract him

from the people

he was desperate

 

to save,

leaving just the essentials,

those faces which inspired someone to say

 

Let’s get a picture.

 

He cut away

trees, cars, houses,

encroaching shadows,

 

and what was left behind

he fashioned into collages,

bringing generations together

 

in black and white,

in faded color,

gathering what he recognized

 

as family,

their rough, curled edges

held together with tape,

 

a congregation of the living

and their ghost kin,

a crowd of his own design

 

of faces remembered,

resurrected joy,

and the imperative to stay close

 

lest they get separated, lost.

He rubbed against

the corners of longing,

 

leaving a vaguely translatable remnant,

the wake of his affection,

the stain of his demands,

 

that which he was thinking,

memories he marshalled

and tried to hold.

 

John L. Stanizzi, author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, and Hallelujah Time!  His poems have appeared in American Life In Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rust + Moth, The New York Quarterly, Rattle, and others.  He teaches literature at Manchester Community College. www.johnlstanizzi.com

 

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PAUL SUMMERS

 

cadenza

 

wherever we cry

it is far from home

anne michaels (ice house)

 

 

i. mesothelioma

 

quite a gobful

for untrained

tongues; each

syllable reluctant,

left hanging on

your fragile lips.

a lawless throng

of clustered cells

now mustered from

an epoch’s sleep.

 

i fix on endings:

a bauble of breath,

a flake of heart;

impervious to flame.

 

 

ii. 9 o’clock news

 

tonight the stars

exert their force

 

a thousand tonnes

of pressure per lumen

 

each stacked like hands

on the crown of my head

 

i dread these calls   each

bulletin of hopeless news

 

her death decanted

into drip-fed despatches

 

the moon is weak

a blueness dissolving

 

like the rhythms

of his voice.

 

 

iii. the hypocrisy of prayer

 

you will be smiling & in your sleep

mid-way through a super 8 re-run

of your wedding day (edited of drizzle

& the gnaw of cold) all of us are there;

the living & the dead. all chronology

abandoned. our faces flawless & re-cast.

an endless honour-guard from the church

to the car. grinning like idiots & hurling rice.

& you are resplendent & ripe with hope,

glowing with the aura of a mass-card virgin

 

no resemblance whatsoever

to a desiccated corpse

strewn in some contortion

in the birkenau clay

 

 

iv. hall of souls

 

& the rain will fall

in smoke-blue clouts

 

fix grey to grey

our sea & sky

 

rough-shod

but inseparable

 

we bear the pall

your glass-eyed boys

 

fragile & cack-handed

there is no weight to it

 

an ossuary of swan-

bones & familiar skin

 

the pull of its vacuum

sucking in our cheeks

 

v. cadenza

 

dad is reworked

in blanc de chine

 

his features buckled

like land-bound waves

 

the sky is gaunt

the crows look on

 

they skirt our grief

as if contagious

 

the fire steals

another feast

 

a whistle of steam

escaping her bones

 

a single shrill note

hanging in its orbit

 

Paul Summers is a widely published Northumbrian poet. Recent publications include union (new & selected) & primitive cartography. His latest collection straya is forthcoming in 2017.

 

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GRANT TARBARD

 

The Scenery Built Around Silence

 

The baby fusses for its mother’s sour teat

turned to salt in this balmy April

afternoon, in the theatre bar where I now

rest. She re-enacts the phantom movements,

 

an exhausted mime migrating 

her raw chalk breast to the beckoning babes 

unplucked lips, new as a grass shoot. 

Hush is on tick, drifting as fog. 

 

The powdered lull, as lyrical as a waxen flower.

You’re a lucky one the mother intones 

look at that man there, 

the one with the belly of a gull, grizzled straws 

 

of hair, pallid man, he doesn’t have a dahlia

hidden in his pocket I can tell you.

The old man, with a face like an unmade bed

just curled the edge of his newspaper.

 

 

The Conceit of Me

 

There's no dignity in me, I'm laid bare, 

stripped carcass pummelled with needles, small cock 

wrapped in cottonwool like a tooth for the

fairies. Take out my stomach, expel it

from the sour of the morning, my red raw

splayed carrion tutting in my bowels. 

I was a shoplifter, whooshing rugs out 

of supermarkets, that beautiful me 

has been an act of philanthropy, these

loose boards are stuffed with stolen mice to feed 

us through the fainting linen midwinter,

conceited me that bloats our hamlet's tat.

And me is bare skinned, me is a sealed box,

me feet have changed shape to sow my stubble.

 

Grant Tarbard is the author of the newly released Loneliness is the Machine that Drives this World (Platypus Press). Follow him on Twitter at @GrantTarbard. 

 

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