2020

 

 

OCTOBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Trevor Conway, Lydia Culp, Andrea Fry, Mathew Lyons, Jennifer A. McGowan,

 Bruce McCrae, Todd Mercer, Matthew Paul, Alice Cempbell Romano,

Delora Sales-Simbajon, William Snyder, J. R. Solonche,

Daniel James Sundahl, Kerry Trautman

 

 

 

 

 

 

TREVOR CONWAY

 

Cottage Pie

 

It begins with Rooster potatoes,

like many an Irish meal,

pealed quick so slender skins

stick to the sink like baby fish.

 

Cut, cube, consign to steam,

and while your beef stock wafts

through a bowl of hot water,

cut your carrot round, and fry

till it shines like a coin from the mint.

 

Now,

you are ready

for the minced beef.

Allow its belly to assume the hue of a rainy cloud,

and rouse the rest to a similar fate.

 

Onions are odd,

have you noticed?

They come clothed, expecting winter,

but you must disrobe yours,

dice

and scatter.

 

Concentrate on tomato purée:

squirt it like a bad signature,

pursued by strokes of Worcestershire sauce,

careful dabs of salt.

Add the stock, and it will simmer

from soggy ground to firmer soil.

 

By now, your potatoes should be soft and sweaty,

a state enhanced by milk and butter.

Use the masher to curl potato onto the meat.

Soon, the oven curates a climate

to fix upon it a sepia crown.

 

Present it to all,

but as you place it under chin,

remember not to misname it:

shepherds mind sheep; they cook with lamb,

not beef.

This is a pie fit for a cottage

and all who gather to share a piece.

 

Trevor Conway writes mainly poems, stories and songs. Subjects he typically writes about include nature, sport, society, creativity and interesting moments. His first collection of poems, Evidence of Freewheeling, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2015, while his second, Breeding Monsters, was self-published via Amazon in 2018. Website: trevorconway.weebly.com.

 

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LYDIA CULP

 

Edinburgh

 

I walk through a maze of sandstone

carved from the ribs

of a dead volcano,

 

as low hedges channel the breeze,

an ancient exhalation,

to a church muted by night.

 

In its center, a window of stained glass

breathes its last jewel-bright embers

into an empty yard —

 

if I were to fall into the inky sky,

I would see a city

erupting in cold light.

 

Under the same sky turned blue

I cling to the volcano’s broken knuckles,

wind tangles my hair and

siphons heat off my face.

 

The gorse clings, too,

tiny yellow flowers shrouded

by thorny evergreen —

a spray of freckles on rocky skin.

 

I climb the volcano’s fingers,

frozen in their attempt to skim the clouds,

and marvel at the green which grows

over millennia-old burnt flesh.

In that moment I am convinced

there is power in dying

 

Lydia Culp is a native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. In 2020 she graduated from Colgate

University with honors in creative writing. “Edinburgh” is from her thesis chapbook, Wandering Songs.

 

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ANDREA L. FRY

 

Moth Balls

 

If we didn’t know you,

 

we might see the innocuous: peppermints,

a dwarf’s snowballs, moon rocks, or marshmallows.

 

Not like the red mushroom that screams its deadliness,

you are wholly without color, a negative white,

 

never to be found in nature or a prism. And with your whiteness,

nothing to interpret, no distinction. You are not soft like cotton,

 

nor sweet like gum, which reveals an inner goodness.

Yet neither has evil appropriated your appearance.

 

Maybe it’s just that—you are nothing, just filler,

weightless Styrofoam pellets. But then again

 

you could be blank brains, psychopaths—a little gang

of white supremacists, a litter of pit bulls hammered senseless,

 

tiny Putin faces with chemical whiskers, white charcoal

briquettes that could burn down the block with one match.

 

Or if we’d forgotten you were there,

 

and we came upon a stray white ball, rolled in dust,

at rest in the corner, a strange marble,

 

out of context, without landmarks, like your 1950s packaging,

fumes dulled and so all the more insidious. 

 

And in not remembering, we’d underestimate your power,

be too casual with you, let you share the drawer

 

with loose change, unknown keys,

lozenges and paper clips. 

 

But naphthalene, what if we never knew you,

 

like a child who believes she’s

found a boring, unwrapped mint,

 

the kind in an old person’s candy dish

that’s stale, that no one takes,

 

but is still the closest thing this moment in her discovery—

to sugar.      

 

So, she raises it to her mouth,

closes her eyes and tilts her head back while her tongue softens,

 

ready for that sweet memory to come again. 

 

Andrea L. Fry’s, Poisons & Antidotes, is scheduled for publication in spring 2021 (Deerbrook Editions). The Bottle Diggers was published in 2017 (Turning Point Press). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Graham House Review, Plainsongs, Sequoia, Stanford Literary Review, and Writers Resist.

 

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MATHEW LYONS

 

Lisa in the garden at Mendocino

 

The bear comes down among the hibiscus,

the cool of the night still fogging the long

grass, the sun already white on the peaks of

the distant pines.

                           She might resist you entirely—

your house, the stick-and-string limit of your land;

small clouds of morning burst from the grass

as she sways towards you. What does anything

matter, you think.

 

A man at the front door leans into the bell—

his arms full of yuccas he picked at the roadside;

his shirt is dusty, blue as slate and wet with dew

and sweat, tanned arms latticed with leaf cuts.

Petals are gathering at his feet, petals still

in the air and falling slowly—the way certainties

come to rest in the mind.

                                         He came across the state-

line last night and leans now on the bell. The flowers

glow, even in shadow, with the vast whiteness of

something he wants you to forget.

 

The bear is closer. Grass seeds clasp to its haunches, small

blisters on the gloss of its hide. She stops

and raises her muzzle; her jaw rotates as if chewing

hard on a thought. A sneeze quakes the length of her body

as if god passed his hands quickly along her flanks,

pressed hard against her greatness and she

resists him too.

                          Watch. Somewhere a doorbell is

ringing. But does she pause before she moves

forwards, and is it you she catches

now—scenting the mountain air—looking

skywards and snuffling again for wonders.

 

Mathew Lyons is the author of three books of non-fiction: Impossible Journeys; The Favourite; and There and Back Again. His poems have been published by Dawn Treader, Visual Verse and Nine Muses. He has also contributed to a wide range of publications, from History Today to The Quietus.

 

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JENNIFER A. MCGOWAN

 

Philadelphia to North Wales

 

Never stop for late-night lights in Philly.

They come for you as you wait, from nowhere.

Run them. Your choice is between one fear and another,

and one is less of a statistic.

 

Death is what happens to women

when they are not protected.

Death or, worse, erasure.

 

I knew she was going to die—

a woman on her own, with one little dog—

a night dark as hell, pushing midnight.

 

So I knew.

I also knew murders weren’t newsworthy.

 

Three or four new friends

held me, kept me at the party, did not

let me run across the Bangor street

to walk the dead woman home.

 

She walked light to light, lamp-post

to lamp-post. She continued to breathe.

The dog did not bark.

 

Soon I, too, came to walk the shore at midnight:

same moon, same ocean. Different tides.

 

Anxious
 

I lost my keys in late March.

Put them somewhere safe.

Promptly forgot.

 

I’ve prowled the halls at random,

trying to trick them into showing themselves;

put bright coins above door lintels;

left out other shiny things that

I didn’t mind going missing,

hoping goblins would exchange.

 

So I continued cooking, eating, doing

laundry, changing my underwear

for the sex no one could give me,

styling my hair for the dark room selfie

I wouldn’t send anyone.

 

And now it’s September. The keys are by the door.

I put them in the keyhole. They do not turn.

Jennifer A. McGowan loves words. She got her first rejection slip from a kids’ magazine aged five, and has just kept going! Winner of the Prole pamphlet competition this year, her next book, Still Lives with Apocalypse, is due out soon.

 

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BRUCE MCRAE

 

Lawyered Up

 

A lawyer

who sued another lawyer

who sued another…

 

Like dogs singing in church.

Like a bone breaking,

healing, then breaking again.

Like an execution of songbirds

or river changing its mind

and running backwards.

 

Lawyers suing lawyers,

pouring void into abyss,

twirling their oily moustaches,

bellies swollen with glee.

A grievance of lawyers

joined at the skull and wallet.

Imperfect harmony

in perfect vacuum.

Sniffers of fingers.

 

Like a loop of noise

feeding back on itself

or stone idols of a fallen empire,

their simile the flea.

Who abandon the corpse

when hearts stop beating

and their blood runs coldest.

 

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,600 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press); Like As If (Pski’s Porch); Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

 

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TODD MERCER

 

The Sexton’s One-Person Reunion

 

The Sexton on the evening of the fiftieth reunion

sat home and suffered a rare instance

of second-guessing his decision. He’d never been

to a class gathering, though he kept in touch

with a handful of Old School mates.

 

At this age it’s natural to check with these peers,

fellow bellwethers of relative health. Are you still

with us, Ole Buddy? Hanging in there, Amiga?

Fine, fine, same old same. But then one won’t answer.

In a few days everyone hears which way they went down.

 

The Sexton drank tea and watched a movie

in which the protagonist had the wherewithal

to adjust events of the past. He could un-die

the deceased and un-break the devastated.

It felt good defeating physics with wish fulfillment.

The mission’s unintended consequences

drove the cast to new heights of despair.

 

At the banquet hall, those assembled classmates

imbibed, they cut the rug. They felt filial

affection, preciousness appreciated

as the ranks have thinned. They had a spare seat

for The Sexton. Several would’ve

been glad to see him, after the decades.

 

He toasted them with tea from inside a yellow circle

of a single overhead light. There was no moon

that night. It was quiet, on the way to quieter.

Maybe he should’ve attended, allowed himself

the hugs and handshakes. Too few years

before a peer calls live-checking

and hears the long Nothing.

 

Todd Mercer was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in Fiction and Poetry in 2019, and the Best of the Net in Poetry in 2018. A three-time Dyer-Ives Prize winner, his collection Ingenue was published in Autumn of 2020 by Celery City Press. Recent work appears in The Museum of Americana, Eunoia Review and Leaves of Ink.

 

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MATTHEW PAUL

 

Old Man of the Woods

Now of all hopeless things to draw, I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus.

– Beatrix Potter, Journal, October 1892

Beatrix unpacks the hamper chock-full of fungi despatched
To West Brompton by Mr Charles McIntosh, newly retired
Postman of Inver, Perthshire: The Blusher, forest-floor fresh;
‘Tremendous specimens’, stems the colour of her flesh.

She watercolour-paints the comeliest, pockmarked like toads;

A fussy but pleasing arrangement, which works rather better

Than faltering attempts with Common Veiled Fairy-cake,
The Deceiver, Old Man of the Woods and Slimy Spike Cap.

*

At Michaelmas, Beatrix, her ‘puerile’ brother Bertie, parents
And the whole extended household entrain at King’s Cross,
By dusk attain Dunkeld, where she takes the reins of a pony-
And-trap and marshals the cavalcade to Dalguise House.

 
Sniffing mushrooms on the mizzled air, Beatrix rises betimes,
To rendezvous, unchaperoned, with Mr McIntosh. Nervous,
Whiskered polymath, he ushers her into Hatchednize Wood,
Questing for the prized sulphur stipes of Herald of Winter.

*

Friendship based on fungal taxonomy grows, withal the chasm 
In age and class. Bertie avers ‘Mr Mac would be some catch’.

Beatrix pays no heed; wields pencils and brushes to illustrate
Her fables of child–rabbits trapped in scrape after scrape.

Out of nowhere, she marries a Cumberland farmer–solicitor,
And puts her prowess to practical use, up Troutbeck Tongue’s

Escarpment: stewarding his Herdwicks, which mutely chomp

On Liberty Cap—and, without fail, resemble Mr McIntosh.

 

Matthew Paul’s first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear Publishing in 2017. Matthew is also the author of two collections of haiku – The Regulars and The Lammas Lands – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. https://matthewpaulpoetry.blog/ 

 

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ALICE CAMPBELL ROMANO

 

C.S. Lewis Said

“…the short but seemingly immemorial ‘always’ of childhood.”

 

And I say, “always” is saturated with sentimentality,

soaked like a Greek honey-cake,

 

and that is good. Everything now—

except childhood—is acrid, brittle…

 

And, dammit, much of childhood

is acrid, brittle. Stays with us too. We

 

blame our bad choices on childhood miseries.

So I say, the kid-times that still taste like

 

the best plum pudding and hard sauce you

ever ate, let those times be drenched in warm

 

exaggeration, call on them when you need

the relief of pre-op diazepam, the float, the

 

vanishment of veins, the pale gold gentleness.

But I mean it. Why shy away

 

from sentiment? That it is a hair’s breadth from

ridiculous can save you. But, strip memory down —

 

there, I used the forbidden word — memory —

strip your memory of every embellishment

 

beyond the earliest streak of sunshine on the kitchen

floor, and the pain is too terrible to hold.

 

Have some baklava. Don’t pull the trigger yet.

 

 

We Spend Our Years As a Tale That is Told

                                                          after Psalm 90

 

Old men who, by reason of strength,

live to eighty or more,

will bend forward when they walk,

and roll their shoulders in

         

so that their arms droop

and the palms of their hands,

the frail, faded palms of the elderly,

face backwards and quaver.

 

Husband, when we are old,

will we brush back

secret sins with tiny

tremors of regret? 

 

While we both are strong, keep tight

my hand in yours, and I will

hold hard to you, so when it is our time

to turn back to dust,

 

the young will say of us that we loved

our days, that we

rejoiced and were glad and made no

          shame to scatter in our wake.

 

Alice Campbell Romano has worked in film and TV in Italy, her native New York and Los Angeles. Her first poetry collection trembles on the brink of completion. Poetry and short stories have appeared in on-line and print journals. Alice translated screenplays; she says polishing dialog is good training for a poet.

 

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DELORA SALES-SIMBAJON

 

Fit for Flying

 

When he didn’t call,

She heard the birds singing.

Surprised,

she staggered

to the door and flung

it wide

 

open. The sun smiled

as the birds hummed

of miles

 

they had swept.

Would you like to fly

with us, the flock asked.

 

She shrugged her shoulders

not knowing they had sprouted wings.

 

Delora Sales-Simbajon writes English and Cebuano poems from Mindanao, Philippines where she resides with her husband Daryl. Her more recent works have appeared/is forthcoming in femi.nest, Kabisdak and As It Ought To Be. She is a Home Life Magazine poetry awardee and looks forward to publishing her poetry collection soon. “Fit for Flying” was originally published in Philippine Graphic Magazine (March 1997, Philippines).

 

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WILLIAM SNYDER

 

Sunflowers                  

Vincent Van Gogh, 1887

 

Toss it, he says, I’m done. Throw

it. Then find me another—if you

would be so kind. But keep

the cloth, wash it. Give it a dash

 

of iron. That flower, the disk

florets, the rays, some perky,

some limp and droopy, webbing

like a huge hazeled eye,

 

and all of it out of round, ragged,

and frayed, resting stiff and dry

on a rumpled blue cloth. I want

blue, he’d said. I need blue.

 

This sunniness requires a blue—

I’ll make it my sky. So I found him

blue, a curtain or cover I dug

from a closet. And he wants

 

more of them—these big, child-

faced flowers, he says, these

golden moons, these pleading disks.

Pile them in a basket, he says. Fill up

 

the room. But, mind you, keep

the stems. Yes, I assured him, I

would keep the stems, those 

umbilicals into his hard deep earth.

 

 

William Snyder has published poems in Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, and Southern Humanities Review among others. He was the co-winner of the 2001 Grolier Poetry Prize; winner of the 2002 Kinloch Rivers Chapbook competition; The CONSEQUENCE Prize in Poetry, 2013; the 2015 Claire Keyes Poetry Prize; Tulip Tree Publishing Stories That Need To Be Told 2019 Merit Prize for Humor; and Encircle Publications 2019 Chapbook Contest. He teaches writing and literature at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Lazarus

 

“Lazarus, arise,” you said.

And I arose.

I walked out of the darkness into the sunlight.

I shielded my eyes with my hand against the sun.

I stood there and waited.

I waited for you to tell me what to do next.

What did you want me to do?

Did you want me to speak of what death was?

Did you want me to go to my family and resume my life?

Did you want me to follow you in your preaching?

To testify on your behalf as a maker of miracles?

I stood there.

I waited.

You never told me what to do.

So when all of you were gone, I took down my hand from my eyes.

I turned and walked into the tomb.

I waited to die again.

I waited to die from thirst.

I waited to die from hunger.

It took a long time.

  

Such Is Fate

 

There’s a lady I meet in

the post office every so often.

She was there this afternoon.

“I got some news,” she said.

“What’s the news?” I said.

“I found out from my cousin

that she and I are descended

from Charlemagne,” she said.

“No kidding. Fascinating.

the Holy Roman Emperor,”

I said. “And not only that,” she

said. “We’re also descended

from the Scottish kings.”

“My goodness. That’s amazing,”

I said. “As well as Scandinavian

royalty, but she doesn’t know

which king,” she said. “Wow.

Incredible,” I said. “Absolutely

incredible. Now as for me,

I’m descended from a long line

of peasants and serfs. That’s fine,

but I guess that means my ancestors

must have slaved for yours.”

“Yeah, that very well could be,”

she said. “Can I borrow twenty?

Sorry to ask. My check is late.”

“Sure,” I said. Such is fate.

  

J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 400 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions),  Heart’s Content (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 and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough  (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions), Enjoy Yourself  (Serving House Books), Piano Music (Serving House Books),  For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (Word Tech Communications), and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

 

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DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL

 

A Romance

 

Clearly a man must get on in the world,

Showing some piety, some unabashed lechery.

Clearly faith and love are at times disappointment,

Unless just rewards are not a joke

And God is not the comedian of dreams.

 

At midnight, or later, when I sit

And try to read, fatigued with longing,

I pray for your face in the doorway,

Knowing it's not easy being a woman.

Fear, I tell you, is a door with no handle;

Romance is music so fine we spin

Within each other's gravity like earth and sky.

 

Meanwhile I ponder changes,

This strangeness I have known before.

But let us suppose, let us suppose

Systems veer apart and then together:

Will another languid age arrive,

A discriminate love of perfect ease,

A kind of courtly chronicle or song

Of warm lilac blooms and night breeze

Flowing around us as we sleep?

Clearly that would be a mighty blessing;

Meanwhile, meanwhile I should get on

With the imagined harmony of this,

The body's prayer, my arm over my face

As though in sleep among the hosts of air.                                                                         

 

 

Winter, You, Transmutation

 

My father in the morning

Has lost his eye in the barrens

Of another winter ice-storm.

 

He calls to me to come to stand

To ask me if this is what I see:

A refraction, a reciprocal inspiration

We both lay eyes on.

 

The word for it is rime;

The sense is cold Platonic light.

 

Dear father, do you see in memory's

Stasis we have become time-crossed,

How things familiar long-back

Have changed and make me think

Of what it is I want to be?

 

The word for it is moon-frost;

The sense is in our two hearts' homely deep.

 

 

Entelechy: Interjection X

 

Back from his funeral,

We talked about what good it was

To bury a man

With his watch still on his wrist,

Overgrown as he soon would be

By the sealing of his coffin,

Never to busy himself again

Like a man at a bus-stop

Shucking his sleeve to look

At the hands glowing

Under the light of street lamps,

Incessantly astonished at how

He's let time pass without a word,

Without pausing to ask even in prayer

The meaning of, or as she said

Almost the meaning of....  I wonder if

A sudden gleam from heaven will transfigure him,

Shucking his sleeve to look at the hands,

Confronting in memory the beat of his own heart,

Between each beat the meaning of the word eternity,

Like the widow who puts her embroidery down

To listen to birds in the early evening,

Each song an earning of the word comprehension,

The judgments we live under, but yet unaware,

She says to herself, in our sorrow and wonder.

 

Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College where he taught for thirty-five years.

 

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KERRY TRAUTMAN

 

As Seen Through a Thin Crust

 

The snow semi-re-froze overnight.

On the way to the bust stop,

the boy’s boots bust

through thin ice crust to

the powder layer.

 

Through the window, the mother knows

the satisfaction of that crackle

under thick soles.

 

On South Main Street

most homes still have

100- or 120-year-old windows,

at least in their attics.

 

The boy thinks he

invented this

particular breakage.

 

The older boy is away at college.

The mother melts her fear with the mantra:

He’s fine, of course, he’s fine.

 

Fragile as it is, really, the window

against which the mother leans her cheek

will last decades without breaking, despite

the boy, the mother with her

propensity toward stomping.

 

The special windows—circular,

leaded, eyebrow, or stained-glass—

are too expensive or

too beautiful to replace.

 

When she’s afraid

for the boys, her skin

muscles clench in attempt at

a sort of shell.

 

The boy’s foot sinks

two inches through soft snow, down

to dormant lawn.

 

The mother has to assume

he is safe while he is gone—

that his default is intact-ness.

She has to assume

the older boy wears the warm boots

she packed in his college boxes.

 

She rubs her cheekprint from

the window glass with the

cuff of her sleeve in soft circles,

just a quarter-inch from the freeze.

 

Kerry Trautman is a poetry editor for Red Fez, and her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals. Her books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) and To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020.)

 

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