2014

 

 

SEPTEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Magdalena Ball, Gram Joel Davies, Robert Ferns, Barbara Harroun, John De Herra,

 Laura M. Kaminski, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Jared Pearce, Tony Press, Bruce Taylor, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Sarah White, Mariah H. Wilson, Thomas Zimmerman

 

 

 

 

MAGDALENA BALL

 

Dream Sonnet

 

It’s an edgy boxcar, dreaming through falling leaves

fingers in the pocket of memory

bad sonnets scribbled in lipstick, test the limits of form

unrhymed promises unbroken: submerged.

 

Submerged here where my divided self

finally gives in to sleep, my body lost

and something else found, a piece of skin dug

from earthy matter, battered and cold, not fallen: lifted.

 

Lifted where nothing is the same at this hour, in this place

shadows longer than light, eyes tight

seeing through perception, the filmy corridors I slide along

ready for a new patina, an edge: this fresh pain.

 

In the morning my hands are bloody, echo of the ghost

who entered,  played each curve:  an opening big enough to charge into.

 

Somewhere Else

Banana trees sway, neglected against
pampered flora in the greenhouse
heavy fruit hanging, provocative
out of reach.

It’s a cold winter morning
here, on the other side of the world,
nostalgia moving uselessly through my veins
I can hear it pumping – thrum thrum
as I pour a second cup of coffee.
 
Wind lifts the eucalypts and I put down my cup
go outside, walk
walk and walk
the way my grandmother walked when she had
something to ponder
forever moving towards an elusive goal
it eludes me too

lost at home
finding home in my loss
on a normal winter day
at the end of summer
somewhere else.

 

Magdalena Ball is the author of the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Sublime Planet, Deeper Into the Pond, Blooming Red, Cherished Pulse, She Wore Emerald Then, and Imagining the Future. She also runs a radio show, The Compulsive Reader Talks. Find out more about Magdalena at www.magdalenaball.com.

 

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GRAM JOEL DAVIES

 

Plans

 

When old and rich, my love, let’s spend
our last on cliffs, above the copper sea.

A whitewash house with windy slats and slates
that shake, its iron gutters rusted through.

Where you can plant us blue hydrangeas
that conduct the sky into the chalk,

and we might count away the teatimes
by the tussocks tumbling down to surf

as saltwind mouths away the lawn,
until our driftwood porch has gandered out,

a jawbone, jutting over circled gulls.
And this is when the night will plughole ‘round

the crosshatch glow, beneath the highest eave,
and lightning sound the flintcrest heave and ho;

while you and I, my love, at four a.m.,
thunder with the bedstead on the wall.

A bolt will plunge the flower bed,
the headland bitten like a scone,

and we’ll crescendo to the ocean floor --

ride the rocksled through a whooping storm.

 

 

Flume

 

She leaves him tasting of tarragon,

olive oil, black pepper.

He does not rinse his beard.

He wants to wear it

 

into the warm street like a lit flume.

People gull around his wake,

scenting his beard

comb the line of hers.

 

A man with rolled sleeves

sniffs and wants to plunge

his tongue,

but through a window a cab driver

 

draws breath, tasting

how he waited on

her nipple.

In the foyer, a clerk’s hand

 

floats over keys,

watching lift-numbers

kiss up her ribs, back down.

The lift fills with pepper

 

and tarragon. He parts the way,

his beard glowing her olive

glow, he licks spiced lips

and remembers: goes in.

 

Gram Joel Davies lives in Somerset, England. He is a member of Juncture 25 poets, and has written regularly for The Centrifugal Eye. His work has appeared in several other webzines besides. He believes poetry is about community, not pedestals, and likes to read aloud. He tweets @poplarist.

 

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JOHN DE HERRERA

 

Eventually

 

I liked it how

you said

God sits

on the tip

of my tongue,

 

and how God

has always been seen

as all the light

and all the dark,

joined;

 

and how what came

out of my mouth

could nurture or kill,

and the decision was

no one’s but mine.

 

And I liked it how you said

following my heart was a lot like

reading books you have to work

to understand:

 

how it’s tough at first,

but in sticking with it,

it gets easier to do;

 

and how eventually—eventually—

doing such sets your being

on a course to becoming a star,

 

a numinous orb

blazing away in the galaxy

of your choosing.

 

John De Herrera is a writer/artist who lives and works in Santa Barbara, California. He is author of the novel The Kingsnake in the Sun, and Hamlet/Macbeth: Translations. He is currently working on his second novel.

 

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ROBERT FERNS

 

The Two Shepherds

 

My Grandad spoke of the Golden Eagle,

High in its nest on the hill.

If you rose early enough, he’d say,

The world had such lovely things on show:

The first light of day, a lamb’s first breath in snow

And the Golden Eagle with its family on Beinn Ratha.

 

Up beside the Piggie’s House the marshals

Of the moor stalk their territory wary

Of the other: Grandad with his family

To feed, protected his flock as

Diligently as Abraham; and old Goldy

Twitching to every noise, golden eyes on

Top of the castle sourcing out prey

And thatching the bed for his Faberge eggs.

 

This isn’t to say that each little precious

Doesn’t stray out of turn: the shepherd’s crook

Was Grandad’s tool and your hook nudges and rolls

Our eggs to safety, like our painted faces

We roll down the hill in yearly celebration.

 

By the time the rest of the world has awoken

The derby day rivals have scaled their world

Over: circles over lambs throw shadow and cloud

Over Grandad’s grey bonnet, before a whistle

Draws the ranks by his two favourite soldiers.

Goldy raises his white tail, the surrender

Salute as he flies off into the sun.

A curt nod satisfies both parties to live

And fight another day.

 

In his latter days Grandad retreated to

Craggis Cottage: castle in Reay.

But every day he would cast his mind over

Beinn Ratha and with murmuring whistle

And a pair of Binoculars

He was carried back where his legs no longer roamed.

Grandad had his castle, Goldy his kingdom:

Happy to share in mutual respect

For the love each other protected at home.

 

When I lowered my Grandad into the Earth

The Eagle didn’t fly that day, instead

His ageing but handsome feathers

Swathed the colour of the coffin:

Honey gold and dignified brown, like to like.

And with your un-hatched eggs sprouted my words.     

    

Robert Ferns studied in Edinburgh but now lives in the Highlands. His poetry has previously been published in Ancient Heart Magazine.

 

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BARBARA HARROUN

 

Summer is a Woman of a Certain Age

 

You relearn how to sleep in

sleep something you swim through

 

the way your children cut through

the chlorinated, many paned

window of the pool—shattered by the sun.

 

A mug of coffee palmed, the trees out back

are a sacred text you study as the wrens bathe

in the dry dirt of the garden. The tomatoes

 

wildly escape the confines of their wire,

the heirlooms so heavy they fell themselves

still the bright  green that hums not ready, not ready

 

the plums in the front are the same, plunging

before they are ripe and you are certain

 

you are waiting and forgotten in the same way

that you’ve fallen asunder too soon

 

and refilling your cup of coffee with steady

hand, you shift the necklace of tear drop

prisms in the window, so the sunlight goes unfractured.

 

 

Plum Tree

 

The plum tree, a magician

juggling balls of sunset.

 

The plum tree, a young mother

spreading a shade colored blanket.

 

The birds gather. Two sparrows

screw as below an audience tears

 

bruised flesh from stone. What

remnants remain, the insects

scuttle a complicated choreography

to carry away.

 

I cry out, days later, when I step

on a clean, bleached pit, bare footed.

It draws blood.

 

 

Barbara Harroun is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her work has previously appeared in the Sycamore Review, issues of Another Chicago Magazine, Buffalo Carp, Friends Journal, In Quire, issues of Bird's Thumb, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, Requited Journal,Festival Writer, and Red Wolf Journal. It is forthcoming in i70 Review, Sugared Water,Per Contra, The Riveter Review, Catch and Release, Pea River Journal,Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Mud Season Review, and bioStory. She lives in Macomb,IL with her favorite creative endeavors, Annaleigh and Jack, and her awesome husband, Bill.

 

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LAURA M. KAMINSKI

 

Polishing

 

I was content, at eleven, to be the one selected 
by Miss Schmidt to polish the class bell for fifth-form. 
I took it out to the cool concrete of the porch. 

It was our first year in the only two-story building 
at our Nigerian boarding school, but in the fifth, 
we still did not have any classes on the second floor -- 

Mademoiselle Tibbetts descended from her 
mysterious domain above, taught us French, 
lined us up against great unscreened windows, 
recitation, translation, vocabulary while we 
tried not to watch the crows. 

The building’s one electric bell applied only to higher 
forms, those exotics of the sixth and seventh 
who emerged in chattering groups above us, 
books and math-sets piled high as they migrated 
classroom to classroom. 

There was calm in the polishing, in seeing 
the tarnish surrender. The deeply engraved “5” 
gleamed in its wreath of leaves, ready to ring 
 

 

Influence

 

after reading Kyle Coma-Thompson, Ruben Quesada, and Jose Angel Araguz

 

Ten. We played barefoot

on the sub-Saharan plateau,

made bows strung with fine

twine and tipped the arrows

with found bits of electric

wire stripped of insulation.

Before then, our arrows were

simple, blunt, not lethal,

just straight dried stalks

from guinea corn and millet,

but when they brought

the power in, we were quick

to modernize our weapons,

wax the twine with candle-

stubs. We began to follow

the white ducks, impatient

for them to preen

and leave a feather.

 

 

Laura M Kaminski is the Associate Editor of Right Hand Pointing, and a reader for The First Day. She grew up in northern Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in Missouri. More information on her poetry is available at arkofidentity.wordpress.com

 

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ELIZABETH MCMUNN-TETANGCO

 

Supercells

 

After the rock came

through the window

 

I stopped watering

the lawn.

 

I leaned in

the doorframe,

until everything

had died

 

and my shoulders

were bruised gray

as supercells.

 

Wreath

 

My eyes are hot –

electric ranges

glowing red –

 

but I bought the bigger

sunglasses

 

on purpose.

 

My eyelids leak

like wounds

I should have covered.

 

The wind, a gut-punched howl,

tilts the wreath,

and it takes two men

 

to catch it.

 

Yellow House

 

My father stopped the car;

the street was full of ice. We looked

out at the yellow house.

 

Our breath against the windows

was like fire, eating the house.

 

It was the house my father lived in,

once, when he was young, dark now

as the inside of a lung.

 

The sky was pale as ash, and

exhaust behind the car trembled like ghosts.

We were the ghosts, worn thin and soft.

Sun against the ice glinted like eyes.

 

 

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley with her husband, son, and a big black dog. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Turk's Head Review, Right Hand Pointing, Paper Nautilus, dislocate, decomP, and others.

 

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JARED PEARCE

 

Education

 

A man and his daughter in the yard, each holding

A flyrod (hers is pink).  They cast out across the dead

Grass and reel-in bits of twigs and last year’s leaves,

Watching the line extend and retrieve, and loving

 

The chance discovery of what it brings.  They do this

So she’ll be ready to go with him across living

Waters where one can’t know what will be

Dragged up when she extends herself into blind depths.

 

His rod (pricey) never dips or tugs at the lawn: his crisp

Movements make it easy when he can go a short way,

When he can find the length of his line.  His mastery

Is an assurance not of adventure or security or success,

 

But that when confronted with the mystery,

If she’s careful, she’ll hook and draw power unto herself.

 

Jared Pearce teaches writing and literature at William Penn University.  His poems are forthcoming from Interdisciplinary Humanities, Paper Nautilus, and The Write Place at the Write Time, and have recently been shared in Dead Flowers, Lines + Stars, Earth's Daughters, Fourteen Hills, and BYU Studies, where he won the 2014 poetry competition.

 

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TONY PRESS

 

November

 

No hiding permitted after Day of the Dead.

November light spares nothing.

Shadow and sun adhere to designated borders.

The air cracks.

 

Across the street

a stooped wife reaches deep into the trunk of a dusty Taurus,

hauling to the sidewalk a silver walker.

Now the husband,

gripping the chilled metal bars,

navigates the thirty steps to the clinic entrance,

his wife straining to brace the weighted glass doors.

 

Yesterday, in my classroom, exuberant Fatima,

fifteen, only four months removed from El Salvador,

play-swooned over my handsome son,

who smiled from a color photo on my wall.

“I see my future.  He is my future.”

 

Turns out, they share birthdays,

though Andy’s had eleven more.

She has a point.

Gleefully again: “He is my future.”

 

From my kitchen, I see the husband disappear.

At my feet, my ancient pug, Elvin,

named for the drummer. His breath rattles.

 

Even Thanksgiving is gone.

Autumn’s clarity takes me by the hand, forces my attention

to the pseudo-Mexican-brick medical building that towers

against the blue Pacific sky, demands my lips echo hers:

He is my future.

 

Tony Press has been published about 50 times, online and in print. He generally writes fiction, believing that facts are valuable but stories invaluable, but he also dares the poetry gods from time to time. Loves include Oaxaca in Mexico, Bristol in England, and closer to home, San Francisco.

 

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BRUCE TAYLOR

 

The Poem In Progress

 

The way an almost autumn morning

comes to south facing houses

on the far side of the river,

slow along a low bank sculpted

by an August afternoon,

 

from a window where you always sit

a view from the second story,

the slightly bigger picture

of the smallness of your life.

 

Time passing not so much

as staying and settling,

the dead float of an old boat

adrift in the leaves, the crawl

 

of the shadow of a hoe aslant

the garage wall, a guilty thing

surprised by the slowness of its shame.

 

 

Another Poem In Progress

 

reminds us that life is short

and the world is filling up

with time. True, you may not

 

step in any stream twice but

every day I watch from my same

place this street at this same

 

time. True yesterday’s Chevy

with a broken tail light’s today’s

Ford with a headlight missing.

 

and maybe the barkeep sweeps or

is sweeping or has already swept

his side walk and then scattered

 

the seed for the sparrows in

the initials of someone he knows

who needs this simple prayer.

 

Of course, yesterday’s girl isn’t

getting any younger but do we old men

sigh less when she crosses our minds?

 

 

Yesterday’s Poem

 

regrets everything,

is strangled by circumstance,

mourning and wishing

and wondering why.

 

I used to love yesterday’s

poem, all echo and hindsight,

trailing the little that was

left of not that long ago,

 

a record of the gone beyond,

all I thought said and done,

it seemed to be everything

there was to say, at the time.

 

For instance this cup

of half cold coffee half full

and the shadow of that birch

tossed upon another page

 

the waves of course

and if not that gull

another hovering

just hovering.

 

Bruce Taylor’s  poetry has appeared in such places as Able Muse, The Chicago Review, The Cortland Review, The Nation, The New York Quarterly, Rattle, Rosebud,  Poetry  and Writer’s Almanac. His most recent collection is In Other Words, Upriver Press.

 

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LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA

 

Water & Salt

 

Palestinian detainees began a mass hunger strike in June 2014, subsisting on only water and salt.

 

Behind the walls of your jails we wait

heartbeats audible now

muffled thuds above the current of blood running thin

indigo rivulets pulsing loud beneath parchment skin

 

chaffing and coarse like stone walls that surround us.

we lie side to side,

we hunger for what eating cannot feed,

we carve out a sanctuary

that no beating can tear down,

no interrogation room scars can pierce

this is our ache we decide

how we live and if we die

we decide

who gives and who takes away

we claim the freedom to turn stone into sunlight streaming through your jails

freedom to sip water and salt like sacrament

freedom to own our bodies and the land beneath them

freedom to breath the air on both sides of the wall

freedom to wait and wait

for your checkpoints and your watch towers to be subsumed in a crashing wave

 

of water and salt

you never saw it coming, this cleansing,

how we have become this ocean.

 

 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes poetry and literary translation. She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing borders: cultural, geographic, political, borders between peace and war, the present and the living past. Her work has appeared in the journal Magnolia, Exit 13 magazine, Al-Ahram weekly, Vox Populi and the Seattle Times. Several of her poems are forthcoming in the online journal Human, based in Turkey, and in the print anthology Being Palestinian, to be published by Oxford Press in 2015. She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington, in the United States.

 

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MARIAH E. WILSON

 

Kummerspeck

 

Kummerspeck: (German) – Literally translating to “grief bacon,”

 this delightful word refers to the less-than-delightful

 excess weight you gain from emotional overeating.

 

During reruns of Friends

I ate my weight in M&M’s

so I wouldn’t sob

because you were Ross

and I was Rachel

and no one was ever sure

if they would end up together. 

 

For awhile chocolate cake 

held me together

though I was close

to bursting at the seams

and my jeans were cutting

off circulation to my legs,

or maybe my brain.

 

But I kept eating

because chewing kept my mouth

too busy to miss kissing you

and macaroni went down smoother

than my ache

and when I’m tired of chocolate

I wont feel this pain anymore.

 

 

Retired Jesus

 

Retired Jesus sits

all day long in his lawn chair

fresh out of miracles

but he’ll pass out

buckets full of prayer

don’t forget to toss a tip

into his hat

your generosity 

could be the difference 

between hunger

and happiness

or did you even notice

him sitting there?

 

 

Mariah E. Wilson is a writer from beautiful British Columbia. She has been published in Thin Air Magazine, Every Day Poets, The Kitchen Poet, Literary Orphans and The Corner Club Press, for which she is also now the Poetry Editor. Her first poetry collection, We Walk Alone, was published by Writers AMuse Me Publishing.

 

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THOMAS ZIMMERMAN

 

The Darker Sister

 

A woman sings to you. Believe it. Hear

the pick squeak on the strings, her bracelet scrape

the hollow body she embraces: shape

like hers, a darker sister, wordless seer

you too could wrap your arms around, no fear

because you’re drinking beer right now. Escape

with her, create a darker self to drape

along the curves you’ll learn to hold so dear.

 

So art beats death again. To resurrect

long-held desire in eight rhymed lines is well

beyond a parlor trick. The hardest part

is what you lose in syllables you’ve trekked:

the thing itself, no show but too much tell.

You stop. For now, your thought’s defeated art.

 

The Wheel

 

I walk with Percy, bag his turds, and puff

my breath at streetlights. Season’s changing. Let

it come. And soon I’ll see Orion, rough

with diamonds, come to hunt above the wet

and dripping pines out back. Then I’ll resume

my hunt: for God, who’s hidden . . . in the woods,

the fresh-laid cedar mulch, the twisting plume

that whistles from your kettle. Neighborhood’s

asleep, the stoops and porches dim as wells.

I’m home. I think we’ve played it right, this life.

The panorama is comedic, but

the close-ups can be tragic, pocked with hells.

Accept it: basement mermaids, attic wife.

The wheel still turning, loosening its nut.

 

 

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012. Tom's website: http://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/

 

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