The Zingara Project

Month: May 2016

  • softly by Carol Alena Aronoff

    sift the soil as if it held the delicate shell
    of your mother

    archaeology of dreams unfulfilled or pending
    astronaut adventurer marathon dancer

    dig up her wishes layered as onion, replant
    where memories of loss, disappointment

    threaten to overrun days in moon’s shadow
    there is no way to know the flowers that bloomed

    for a morning their scent may have lingered
    too faint for recognition

    with life ephemeral as blaze of autumn leafing
    fragile as moth wing in summer light

    take no notice of strident voices or mud wasps
    you know what this jewel is worth

    what facets still face away from sun
    it takes only a hand to turn them

    —

    Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D. is a psychologist/teacher/writer whose poetry has been published in numerous literary journals/anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has five books of poetry: The Nature of Music, Cornsilk, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, Blessings from an Unseen World, Dreaming Earth’s Body. She lives in rural Hawaii.

     

  • We Go, Departing to Dusk by Emily Strauss

    Odd that earlier we existed,
    felt our own substance before
    disappearing to despair,
    sometimes gone by nightfall.
    We may linger awhile but
    the lamp will be snuffed out—

    and unless we steel ourselves
    to loss, our own and more,
    moons will dispel around us
    like a vase of flowers with wilted
    stems sinking into cloudy water—
    then we will lose our grasp.

    Surely, this early today, there
    remain the skins of opaque ghosts
    not yet torn from our ribs
    though we may remember the feel
    of yesterday’s body extinguished
    in our blood, lingering at daylight.

    —

    Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Over 300 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. The natural world is generally her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.

     

  • sleep(less) night by Nicolette Daskalakis

    I woke from a dream I didn’t have
    from a sleep I didn’t fall
    into,
    and I asked you:
    What did you dream of?

    Nothing.

    I dreamt of nothing too.

    So as we laid in the silence
    of an unconscious night,
    I pictured someone
    hovering
    over us in the dark,
    mouth open,
    eating dreams
    we never had.

    —

    Nicolette Daskalakis is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and multi-media artist residing in Los Angeles. She received a BA in film production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a minor in Intermedia Arts from the Roski School of Art & Design. Her first book, “because you’re now banging a French girl,” was published in 2015.

  • Prophylactics by J.T. Whitehead

    The interesting thing about him was that he never used to shared too much of himself.  He made it clear to others who went fishing in him that they could catch nothing but his very chilly cold.  He despised it when they shared too much information.  Then he paid back.  Once, a woman at an office party said she used to take her husband to a cottage down South, but that he was not the first man she took there, only the first that she knew she would be with.  He paid that woman back with: “That’s a wonderful story, Ann.  I lost my virginity at a drive-in theater in a train.”  She never shared anything with him again.  He considered himself liberated from her.  After that happened, we were stuck together on an elevator.  I sensed discomfort.  I asked him, “How are you?”  I didn’t want an answer, really.  But I sort of cared.  He answered, “Terrible.  I’m going through a divorce.”  “That’s terrible,” I said. “Yes,” he said.  “She fucked the Regional Director.”  This time I knew it was the truth.  He wasn’t saying it to keep me away.  He wasn’t making it up.  He wasn’t paying me back.  His wife must have really fucked the Regional Director.  His eyes had been scooped out.  They were melting in some one else’s cone.  It must have been the Regional Director’s.  I had belief.  This was truth.  “Why did you tell me this?” I asked him, as nonchalantly as possible.  “Two reasons.” he said.   “First, if people know that I’m going through a divorce, and I don’t tell them I was the cuckold, they will think that I was the Regional Director, the fucker, in all this.  Second, every time I tell someone, it’s like pulling a feather from a bird . . .”  I said, “How?”  He said, “I’ll have a naked chicken.  Like one of those rubber chickens they used in those old vaudeville acts, to hit someone in the face.”  I asked him, “Did anything come of this?”  He said, “No children.”  I said “Well . . . in a manner of speaking.”  Then he hit me in the face.  With a rubber chicken.  And laughed.
    —
     
    J.T. Whitehead has had over 160 poems accepted for print by over 75 publications.  He is a  Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and a winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. He is the Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.  His first full length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, (The Broadkill River Press, 2015), was nominated for the National Book Award.