Poetry

The Comedian
Letheredge, known as “that idiot,”
announces with his usual cheery
puerility that he wants to
“make something of his life.”
That fall the Club receives
a tinted photo from some ghastly
river town. (“Is that a crocodile?”)
Rotting docks, ragged somnolent people,
an X incised at the edge.
That’s where I sit. The local rum
has a toxic charm I should not be able
to resist if I tried. Supplies, I think,
are sorting themselves out, and we may be
off by All Souls’. Thus Letheredge

in his crabbed, childish hand;
the rest concerns his invaluable
man Gómez. Then, for a year,
nothing. At times we discuss
alerting some consul (“where?”)
or his family (“had he any?”).
Recollections of his follies become
fond but remain unspoken;
one senses we are saving them
for when he is known to be gone.

He returns one afternoon,
having lost several stone,
quite brown; he looks, not drawn so much
as having lately recovered.
The silliness
remains, but it’s hard,
in that hale frame, to tell if it’s less
or more. “Gómez got me
out of that hole. He carried me,
you know. I was damned lucky
to avoid gangrene. I gave him
enough money to set the family up
as local gentry!” But what, we ask,
were you doing there?

“I fell in. The undergrowth had rotted.
I was knocked out a moment,
and then, of course, I couldn’t stand.
Enough light filtered through that I could see
the murals. It’s apparently quite a find –
I’ll be written up! There’s a chieftain,
a king. He’s very red, sitting cross-legged
on a cushion, his hair is in
a top-knot, his index finger raised
as if he’s teaching;
his mouth is open. The people below him,
captives I guess, look quite
miserable. One especially – he’s staring
at his hand, something terrible
has been done to the nails, they’re dripping
widely separated drops of blood;
his mouth is open like the king’s.
And I thought – I was in pain, you know,
not thinking well – that they looked much alike,
except the king was fatter;
and that I resembled both of them,
though I couldn’t say which one more.”
Ode to Cereals
By the grace of hallowed dead,
unquestioning work, and our planes
and agents ever on watch, I will never –
to quote an old oath – be hungry again. Any
bike-ride under sketchy trees
in the new suburb is a drive in a new
car. Unexpected grace
descends, though the reassuring humdrum
remains, and there appear FROSTED FLAKES.

COUNT CHOCULA has the ahistorical,
timeless appeal of horror.
The brown of ancient stains, sublimed
by fresh arterial violet, spreads
as swiftly as electronics
from vaguely cellular platforms, bringing
adepts where they wish to go:
adolescence, the trans-parental realm;
and is the true milk of childhood.

Then, after the crazed mini-vampire
and all-accepting working-class
tiger, select spirits rally
to a pirate shorn of violence and the terror
of age: CAP’N CRUNCH. In his eyes
the glint of gold, the greed for it, are shared,
are generous. Gold is the special tang
in the taste, the spiky texture,
the dust at the bottom of the box.

Let there be no animadversions
about poison. With or without
blueberries, banana, satisfaction
follows the last or the last extra, “heaping,”
spoonful, clicks like a tab;
it’s a matter of digestion, of pacing,
and I lift my eyes to the clock.
About the Poet

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press), and a collection, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press). Another collection, Landscape with Mutant, was published in 2018 by Smokestack Books (UK). Many other poems in print and online journals.

 

 

In the Land of Opaque Realities
Pondering in the land of opaque realities
Where facts are fictionalized
And the aberrant notion of post-truth
Emerges with despicable pomp
Asking the difference between
Fantasy conspiracy and utopia
incessantly on an increasingly
Silent confused bewildered crowd

To distribute due blame and shame
Distinctions among the three shout urgency
Urgent emergency potency now
Distinguish us, they unabashedly shout
Whipping each other to keep each discrete apart
Now, distinguish us to keep salutary distance from
The incipient catastrophe of language meaning
Everything and nothing all at once. One breath.

Strained drained now lethargic mind
Must be summoned this autumn night
When most sleep and some weep and few plot
Mind, distant and cool, leveled and constant
In an multiplying territory of transcending lies

Mind, wake now
From slumber dormant rhythm
of numbing requiems
Heed the towering voices of Brahms’s chorus
In his building German requiem otherwise
Follow the sharps and flats to draw the labyrinthine outside
From

Slumber distraction soul-slashing sameness
Where both the aesthete and philistine perish
Both in the name of unclassified art
Wake mind, emerge from phantom state
Rise susceptible to emanating gradations of
Warm icy lights generating placating
shrill sounds
Inhabiting the raspy silky blankets of skin
Grown parched and sullen gradually
Suddenly
Upon the nocturnal bright concealment
Of truth running frightened away from lies

 

 

Excess
Times of a putrid self-inflicted inability to say
.                                                        no
enough no more
.                       have alas arrived. Where has the preference
for just balance scampered to?

Golden teeth through which bolstering lies

jump

like spigots filled with ancient venom

A bewildering taste for
.                            the monstrous aberrant

conditions preserved conserved pickled for a long howl

in mouths palates once inclined for palette shade regularity

many are the names to call this existential, moral

malaise

even the burden to name has ceased to matter

whatever compass worked last year and the many

before doesn’t anymore
.                                             alarm sirens go off
all night and day: every single instant of the regulated
clock and the insensible mind

what is that?, mounting they ask

… thunderous silence strikes

we have lost the ability to name excess as well

doesn’t matter if you its excreting insides inhabit another word
the broken puncturing shell of another word

its greenish yellow with putrefied odor yanks quick allusion

.                       . to itself

 

About the Poet

Eunha Choi is an Adjunct Instructor at Lehman College. Situated where literature, cinema and philosophy meet and fail to meet, her research interrogates realism less as an aesthetic or literary form of representation than as an always in flux theory of the real and a model of critique. Her recent publication appears in Pacific Coast Philology, Confluencia, Ciberletras and Chasqui among others.

Nine Walking Dreams

                                    Uncut Footage
                                      1.
                        He Lets Her In
 
            She said her name was Tracy Evidence
            but I would not believe that. I am called
            Case, Justin Case. Both of us were burdened
            with criminal misnomers. Blond as snow
            her spell dimmed the room. “Now,” she said, “convince
            me you are blood and bone. Stretch out your tall
            shape. Brush my face with your eyes.” So I turned
            my back. Kept silent. Watched a taxi’s slow
            progress through traffic. “No one’s coming, miss,
            if that’s why you’re waiting. Your cool face stalls
            time but clocks keep ticking. Something I learned
            before you were pulled out of air. You know
            my name. I’ve heard yours. Why not just commence
            your tale. Pauses bore me and I might fall
            asleep. Kiss me back to life then and return
            your gun. I smell oil. You don’t need to show
            it off. I’ll do the polite, hear your hints
            and you can trust my form. I’m no Ken doll®
            to play with. I’ll tell you if the words burn
            blue and true. Close those dark eyes. Talk. Now. Go.”
  
                                                      2.
                                    She Spells It Out
 
Her hands draw crisp minarets in the air:
 
                        I pass a fish across the sun.
                        I wait for two days, then wait one.
                        I turn my eyes from what might come
                        And I remember all you’ve done.
 
                        Now watch me scrape scales off the moon
                        Then listen closely. Hear its tune.
                        The light fades out while white sands bloom
                        And your harvest comes with dark at noon.
 
Now look: her fingers fold to sketch a square:
 
                        You’ll chase a trail of white lip gloss
                        Over unsettled, suspect sheets.
                        You will not touch the scar you’ve lost
                        Blazing a trail with white lip gloss
                        That drops from her purse. Your careless toss
                        Leads from mirrored walls to empty streets.
                        You’ll chase your tale. The bright lip gloss
                        Is settled. You’ll suspect her sheets.
 
Palm shadows shape a tree, its branches bare:
 
                        They lean and stretch their lost (slipped?) kisses. Now look—
                        Their skin takes fright and they miss
                        With eye and tongue. What’s at risk
 
                        Is this morning, as a blue evening
                        Closes, broken. Without cues
                        Songs begin for just those two,
 
                        Beyond our ears. They hide their bright silence
                        In half notes fenced by a white
                        Sheet. Over that wall, their night.
                                                        
                                            3.
                                    Elsewhere
 
                        Apostle spoons settle in red velvet.
                        Their case is open. Dust never sleeps. Clocks
                        click, stuck on a minute. A featherweight
                        page sighs, falls back into the leather book.
                        No one is in the is room, so that sunbeam
                        may not exist. A perhaps cat once preened
                        here. Stray hairs give her away. Old smoke—
                        Yesterday’s ghost—hovers. The curtain inflates
                        then drops soft against smudged glass. All the locks
                        are open. This emptiness is at rest.
           
                                                            4.
                                         Around A Corner
 
                                    Two eyes, blank as steel, shift loosely
                                    as lazy toys from a school carnival.
                                    They see nothing. They reflect less. But once,
                                    maybe an hour ago, they were alive
                                    as water, looking through a mirror to see—
                                    What? Here’s a mute witness. Your arrival
                                    is empty. Move along. There’s not a chance
                                    of recall. Some one came. They peeked, then died.
 

About the Poet
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies: Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. He has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). He has written several novels: Knight Prisoner (Vagabondage Press), The Magic War (Loose Leaves Publishing), and A Book of Lost Songs (Wild Child Publishing, forthcoming). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.

On Exoskeletons and Mammals

Every morning before sun washes the porch in pinks and yellows, I let the cat in. Most days he comes from the bushes, bounces off his paws up the steps, a low greeting rolling from the base of his throat like tires on gravel. But this morning he stopped to mew proudly over the lobster shell rotting on the welcome mat. It glowed red in the pre-dawn dark, buzzing with black flies.

I stared at this offering, so far from sea. This skeleton, ripped from the raw back of another, dragged through trash, and deposited at my doorstep. I thought of my own armor, of its softness in some places, of its hardness in others. I thought of the mornings when I push and pull an Emory board across the callouses coating palms and fingers, sanding away epidermis until what remains is just thick enough to keep the blood inside. It doesn’t take a fisherman or a grateful pet to drag me from the sea and lay me bare—only opposable thumbs and good intent.

 

About the Poet
Max Orr is an English teacher living with his cat and his climbing partner in Columbus, Ohio.

They never left

When I dream,
my house spawns new rooms,
piled with belongings not my own.

Second kitchens and secret doors,
bedrooms crammed with unfamiliar furniture,
photographs of strange faces,
all fill me with dread.

But it’s the aquariums,
stocked with healthy fish,
(I’ve never fed them; how do they live?)
that make me wake screaming.

For I know that someone else is here,
and always has been.

And I wander the house waking,
looking for the doors
that aren’t there.

 

Past is Present

A game trail barely visible wends through
the dark woods;
Footsteps erode it over time into
a broader path.

The dirt track became the path to Grandma’s
house in the forest;
deemed too dangerous for younglings, parents
cut down trees, let light in.

This broader path beckoned commerce, settlers;
farmers cleared land and sowed it.
Wagon ruts invited accidents, so
cobbles smoothed the way to market.

The market became a town, the town changed
to a city, and the cobbles were paved;
but the road remembered deer tracks, paw prints,
and refused to move in a straight line.

Sitting there in their cars, the drivers sighed,
inhaling exhaust and cursing curves;
but some thought they could smell green leaves,
or the scent of fresh-cut hay.

And stuck in traffic, dreamed
the road’s memories,
of farms and dark woods.

 

About the Poet
Deborah Davitt grew up in Nevada, but earned her MA in English at Penn State, where she taught college composition. She currently lives in Houston, with her husband and son. Her poetry has garnered her Rhysling and Pushcart nominations, and has been published over twenty venues. Her short story work has appeared in IGMS, Compelling Science Fiction, and other venues. For more about her work, please see www.edda-earth.com/bibliography.

Feathers

Recall that morning
when there were so many feathers
blowing against the window
we weren’t sure for a minute
where we were or what the season was.
At first it seemed like snow,
but no, not in July.

Feathers, we mused. Maybe a firecracker
misfired and scattered a mourning
dove’s nest (dreadful thought).
Feathers, we laughed. Maybe they’d all come loose
from a goose-down pillow hung out to air,
carried away in a gust.

Recall over breakfast of coffee and eggs
it occurred to us that a fox
might have been in the hen house
but then we remembered we no longer
had any chickens in the coop
nor, sadly, children on the swings.
Recall how old we felt.

Recall toward evening we learned the swan
in the pond down the hill was dead.
Whoever aimed had probably not heard
the silver song amid her plummeting wings.
How sadder still than old were
fragile feathers blown against the window.
Why.

 

Dreams
(A villanelle)

One by one the blue cups broke.
She watched them shatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Her reveries evoke
a lively time of children’s patter.
One by one the blue cups broke.

Outside she listened to spring frogs croak
and raindrops splatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Sometimes when she slept she woke
to hear the loud accusing chatter.
One by one the blue cups broke.

When air was thick enough to choke,
she thought she saw the ashes scatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Cold, she donned a heavier cloak
and told herself it didn’t matter.
One by one the blue cups broke
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

 

About the Poet
Marsha Foss returned to her home state of Minnesota after 37 years in Maryland.  She has degrees from the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins University.  She lives in Saint Paul and enjoys being connected to the area’s amazingly vibrant writing community.  She has had pieces accepted by Glass: Facets of Poetry and Down in the Dirt.

 

Ars Poetica

A kettle boils for lemon tea, its scent
remembered like the chalk
dust of grammar lessons
on a thundery afternoon.
Words steep into endless
weeks of punctuation and run-on
sentences left to boil themselves dry.
But tea is less beverage
than act of literate poise
better kept to the ceremonial.
Lemon dresses it. With a twist,
all is solved in the tongue of ritual.
Do not ask whose tongue.
Do not ask whose ritual.
Do not dilute lemon tea with milk.
Add sweetener, if you like.
It remains lemon tea.

 

Transparent Language

When you raise your eyes
To the punctuated sky, you see
Letters of all scripts, scattered
In mock collage.

When you shield your eyes
From the glory of the sun, you see
The random spatter of the words
That matter most on your palm.

When your eyes no longer see
Anything but a mist of light,
The magnifier that should illumine
Sentences will brand your hand.

When you wish you had never
Known sight, you will listen
For transparent clauses
But hear the lonely Braille of “I.”

 

About the Poet
Claudia M. Stanek’s chapbook, Language You Refuse to Learn, was a co-winner of Bright Hill Press’s 2013 annual contest. Her work has appeared in Bitterzoet, Ithaca Lit, Sweet Tree Review, Redactions, and Ruminate, among others. In 2010 Claudia was awarded a Writer’s Residency in Bialystok, Poland, where her work has been translated into Polish. Her poem “Housewife” was selected for a commissioned libretto by Judith Lang Zaimont for the Eastman School of Music’s 2009 Women in Music Festival. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Claudia lives among the birches in East Rochester, NY with her rescued pets.

The Stationary Point
a                                                                                                                         after reading Psalm 23

There needs to be a magic minimum because at both the end and the beginning there’s an infinite accrual and, God-given, it’s continuously differentiable. My enemies will envy me when I have table manners in their one-horse town, with knives and forks galore, what’s this one for, and manna only of my own.

 

Blind Spot

Hats do not just happen. Hats are caused by some one or some thing. The uncorrected full moon is a rosary, the rosary the opposite of entropy, the entropy the car of which the clowns do not come out. The muted trumpet plays a one-night, one-note samba, plays it soft. Some optic nerve you have – on endorsing one conceivable interpretation you’re implicitly dismissing all the others.

 

About the Poet
Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. His poems appear in numerous journals, recently in Spillway and Diagram, he’s the winner of the 2016 Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest, and his first book, Fractal Idyll, will be published by After The Pause Press in Fall 2017.

Pillow Talk

He recalls another clothes-captured primal scene
of dream: he being he and she not she, they shrug
off their skins. For sure it’s what he wants
from others, what each one can’t give being she, he
needing others. For shame. Yet her underclothes read
the same. A clipped hedge like a lipless friend,
shaped in the high beams at driveway’s end, his icy
car sliding home. Tonight he greets the shrub,
pruned over a cavern to mimic fear, a duck,
raccoons rinsing claw-punctured apples, a grackle,
the topiarist gloats. When did she decide
the design of her groin? He crouches inside her
thighs, his prize spouting a tiny message—
preliterate mouse seeks friend, house for moving in.                      
Or through. No object of marvel, abject, half-
larval, he descends the hole toward the oldest place.
What are dreams but seizure, wings batting his craft,
a spaceship placebo, through wood and wormhole, trapped
and shuddering in cumuli of doubt, out
to land beside that same bed-warm human? Still
life. He flips on the mounted light, squints as he reads,
my wife. Garden of my shame, always it is you.

 

In Decision

I love all a little too plenty.
I’m like a plain sandwich fingered by mustard,
such density has me prancing, a geometer’s
cousin, struck by beauty others wrought

at random. It seems I cannot write mother,
who languishes daily in saloons,
her hair put up in cowboy couplets, without
begging for re-birth, a second
son. It seems my song is renowned
among the lowly, fingers crusted with spite
for a grip on the moment. I sing milk crates
lowing in the field, frog ponds spilling

into streams of you. The point of you,
perched in Spanish Influence, that Kingdom
of Kentuck, twenty-three miles and counting
pylons, as though they were planets

 

of the Sun. There is a grammar I cannot
parse, parched lips I suck. I speak
in mowing pitches of well-sown grass,
of waves, the lawn of landless ships.

 

About the Poet

Peter Grimes is an assistant professor of English at Dickinson State University. His fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Narrative, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mississippi Review, and Sycamore Review.