Monthly Archives: October 2020

Escape by John Short

Leave a reply

Pigeons in the chimney:
dark symphony of trapped souls
or distant death lament

as weather mutters all around
then through its gaps
a spectral chorus on the wind
forces me to move things never moved

the brass-scream across old slate
frees an avalanche of bones,
dust, feathers and a chaos of wings
exploding into daylight –

they circle the room, collide with walls
then settle on the highest shelf.

I ponder the world’s misfortunes,
how we suffer mostly
but how sometimes we escape.

—

John Short lives in Liverpool and studied Creative Writing at Liverpool university. A previous contributor to Zingara Poetry Review, he’s appeared recently in Kissing Dynamite, One Hand Clapping and The Lake. His pamphlet Unknown Territory (Black Light Engine Room) was published in June. He blogs occasionally at Tsarkoverse.

Purple Vest by Peter Mladinic

Leave a reply

I had a job interview with a man with a purple vest
in a city of lakes
a city where in winter
the temperature drops to twenty below
a man who could afford a down jacket
a garage
a man with a moustache
and whose surname of three syllables
is similar to mine
he wore a purple vest
and a tie that at the time
impressed me
I described it in a sentence
in a notebook I lost
while moving from one part of the country
to another, a smaller city
on whose outskirts kudzu
had engulfed tall trees
I left my down jacket
in the city
where I’d sat across from Mr. M
in his purple vest
who asked about my employment record
giving me papers with blank spaces
and a pen to fill those spaces
with details about what I’d done
and might do

—

Peter Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press.  He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.

 

Study of an Orange by Diana Rosen

Leave a reply

The basket of fresh-picked oranges
a nest of hardened pockmarked yolks
buffed to an acceptable smoothness
sits docile, waiting, fragrant with
that sweet acid burst that draws you
to pull off one stubborn leaf-dotted stem.
Its spicy spray tickles your nose, rains.
on your beard, smarts your eyes, still
you keep tearing away the thick skin,
scraping off the soft bitter pith
to expose each plump section
ready for your lips
small expectant lips
hidden under a snowy mustache
wonderful lips
that open slightly,
give me citrus kisses
my happy tongue
licks into a smile.

—

Diana Rosen has published poetry in RATTLE, Existere Journal of Arts & Literature, Poetry Super Highway, As It Ought to be Magazine, among others. Redbird Chapbooks will publish her forthcoming hybrid of poetry and flash, Love & Irony. To read more of her fiction and nonfiction, please visit www.authory.com/dianarosen

Autumn Elegy by Ginger Dehlinger

2 Replies

Sól rises late
on fields scorched sallow,
weeds furred in frost.

October’s metamorphosis
ignites a red-orange wildfire
in the treetops.
It spreads to the undergrowth,
curls the tongues of ferns,
emblazons the carpet.

The season’s gathering rust
sends wild things for cover.
Maples bleed
before winter’s breath
stiffens their bones.

All too soon the leaf piles vanish
in wisps of smoke
from gasping funeral pyres.
A cold shudder of wind
stirs dust in the creek bed
and the sun sets too soon.

—

Ginger Dehlinger writes in multiple genres. Although better known for her novels Brute Heart and Never Done, her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the 2019 Zingara Poetry Review Mother’s Day issue. You can find her in Bend, Oregon or at www.gdehlinger.blogspot.com

Painting Itself Red by Kim Baker

Leave a reply

The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do. 

~Mark Van Doren 

Everything here is red,
adorning scores of farmhouses, barns, and doors.
The Wandering Moose Café and train station.
The post office and Stage Coach Tavern.

I wonder about a town that paints itself red.
Insinuates a crimson theology in an indomitable land
of evergreen groves, gray stone walls, and
the righteous white of every Congregational Church.
Perhaps the inhabitants strayed away 
from shades of specters and blending in 
when Dr. Dean built Red Mill in 1750.
Maybe they needed cerise to rival the Gold family
or hollyhock to stand out up on Cream Hill.
In some towns, maybe red is a fetish,
the iconic covered bridge representing everything.

I compose on one of the many red benches
spread here along the Housatonic River,
perfect places for poets and other lovers,
searching for an unsentimental shade.
The cardinal gone from the maple tree.
The wheelbarrow waiting for spring.
The brick of my heart.

—

When she isn’t writing poetry about big hair and Elvis, Kim Baker works to end hunger and violence against women. A poet, playwright, photographer, and NPR essayist, Kim publishes and edits Word Soup, an online poetry journal (currently on hiatus) that donates 100% of submission fees to food banks. Kim’s chapbook of poetry, Under the Influence:  Musings about Poems and Paintings, is available from Finishing Line Press.      

Eyes Fastened with Poems by Lois Marie Harrod

Leave a reply

Made thing, mad thing
mud and muddied thing—
how hard the poem works

shaping its ship of clay,
what is there to discover?
Sails aghast

but still trying
to suck life
into the little vessel,

shale becomes slate.
Well, take up your chalk
and walk.

—

Lois Marie Harrod’s 17th collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton. Links to her online work www.loismarieharrod.org

 

In Step with Desire by Margaret Randall

1 Reply

I always asked questions of the poem,
sometimes even glimpsed an answer
flying off to nurse its broken wing.

Certainty lived between folds of skin:
bright light, or shadow deep
as a black hole in a distant universe.

I measured distance in layers of color
applied with a heavy brush,
held escape in a tight fist.

But in this, my ninth decade, I choke
on those questions: warm milk
promising what it cannot deliver.

Place is change, cold monuments
stand where love once promised
to conquer all.

Entitlement begs to borrow a harness
made of melting ice
tethered to this broken dawn.

My map dissolves beneath storm clouds
as I run between canyon walls
pressing against my wanting.

Each image struggles to find its way
across a quartered landscape
of memory unbound.

Today’s questions boomerang,
mock my practiced attempts
to pin them to conviction.

Uncertainty moves through my arteries
calling my name in the minor key
of ancestral catch and release.

But not that uncertainty. Not that one.
Some truths never die:
in step, as they are, with desire.

—

Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, translator and performer living in New Mexico. Her most recent poetry collection is Starfish on a Beach: Pandemic Poems, and her memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was released by Duke University Press in March 2020. “In Step with Desire” will be featured in Randall’s forthcoming collection, Out of Violence Into Poetry, to be published by Wings Press in 2021.