Monthly Archives: November 2020

Morsel by Jeff Burt

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Forgive me, but as I type this to you in the early hours
I cannot help but desire the cinnamon-sugar sweetness
of the toast to slip from my unwashed fingertips
onto the keys and into them, into their concussive shapes
that mapped electronically now appear before you,
I don’t want just the comfort of sweetness, or the butter
in the bread that has been transferred to the keys
that gives a satiation for having risen out of bed
to a day that will be marked by more violence and injustice
and the crooked making off with the honest person’s dollar,
I want to send the stolen pleasure of it, the giddiness
that comes from having oatmeal and plain toast day after day
and then suddenly this sweetness, this lightness
that no longer accompanies dawn but actually pulls
light over darkness, as you have done for me
so many countless days for so many countless years.
You see only words. But let your fingertips linger.

—

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County California, home of redwoods, fire, fog, and ocean. He has contributed to Rabid Oak, Williwaw Journal, Willows Wept, and Red Wolf Journal.

Living in Opryland by Javy Awan

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Living in Opryland—the twang of guitars
lulls through the night, from nigh and afar,
sifting caterwauls of rhymes that plait
poignant, live plaints cataloging
mishaps, heartbreaks, pangs, turmoils,
and setbacks—the spangled world is adverse,
but we plug in and plug on like traveling
showmen, setting up tents from town
to town in Grand Ole Opryland—a downhome
expanse, where ailments vary—each citizen’s
is unique, stunning, terrifying, misericordious,
striking notes all understand and sympathize.
We sync and chime to the moves, the dances,
the choruses, the improvised instruments,
the stanzas of grief and vibrance, our tribal
tribulations—always falling in love stumblebum
with the next gorgeous person impervious
to our pleas or merits till the tell-all song
reaches double platinum—the roving sights by then
are set on a starrier mate—hair more bouffant,
figure more robust, skirts pantingly shorter—
who can pen a lyric and tonsil a tune, pick a banjo,
or bow a fiddle faster than the notes can be writ.
Living in Opryland, we’re pursuing the grand
scheme of harmonies that guide us by heart.

—

Javy Awan’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Solstice, Ghost City Review, Potomac Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review; two of his poems were selected for reading at locations on the Improbable Places Poetry Tour in 2019. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Sheets of Rain Yelling Over the Thunderous Music by Michael H. Brownstein

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An anger within a calm
thunder clouds against the sidewall
and when the rain came

a frenzy of hyenas
a lightning strike of jackals
the race of gazelles

we breathed the rain through our skin
gulped it down from our hair
sloshed in it until our feet were swimming

house wrens found shelter behind bricks
jaybirds scattered into thick leaves
rock pigeons danced against wind

you can only eat so much
let your arms fall like deadwood
along the flood gates

—

Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volumes of poetry, A Slipknot to Somewhere Else (2018) and How Do We Create Love? (2019), were recently released (Cholla Needles Press). He has a Sunday poetry column in Moristotle.

Every Day Has Something in It by Nancy K. Jentsch

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Every Day Has Something in It 
(Title from “Everything That Was Broken” by Mary Oliver) 
 
not just the first glow of hope in the east 
 golden sky becoming a canvas of stone-washed blue 
not just birds who busy the sky 
 mindful only of the task at hand 
 
not just the sheep, the turtle, the tulip in azure sky 
 sun pausing as noon’s keystone 
not just meadows garlanded with daisy and vetch 
 fitted with thistle and cricket 
 
not just the creek bank seeded with mink and crawdads 
 and hill’s dead ash tree the flicker covets 
not just fresh-laid eggs that warm chilled hands 
 the scent of sweet clover spilling into lungs 
 
not just the sun descending through frescoed clouds 
 toward dusk’s invitation to lightning bugs 
not just platoons of bats heralding night 
 while Venus wakes under indigo sheets 

Nancy K. Jentsch’s poetry appears in Eclectica, EcoTheo Review, Soul-Lit and numerous anthologies. In 2020, she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her chapbook, Authorized Visitors, was published in 2017 and her writer’s page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/NancyJentschPoet/ 

Ode to the Republic by Crystal Foretia

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How strange is it?
That I’ve known you all my life,
and yet I’ve never met you—

A world so foreign, yet so close to my own

because I see you,
when my eyes spot
green, red, and yellow stripes dangling 
    off the Toyota’s rearview
black warrior masks across 
    from my grandfather in grayscale.

Because I touch you,
when my fingers graze
the dashikis my brother wore
    before T’Challa made them cool
a crimson gele my mother designed
    to crown herself queen, before the photographer.

Because I taste you,
when my tongue melts under
fufu and eru soup
soft as mashed potatoes on the Thanksgiving table
plantains and puff puff
childhood fried to golden brown.

Because I hear you,
when my ears catch
AfroBeats played at graduation parties
    now featuring Akon and Beyoncé
Pidgin that Grandma whispers,
    from the corner of Nigeria and Chad.

Between lost plans and sepia-tone stories
I wonder how it would feel

to hug family I never knew,

to cross villages I only dreamt of,

to reach a home away from home

to bridge the gulf between 

“African”       and       “American”

Crystal Foretia is a sophomore studying Political Science and History at Columbia University and daughter of Cameroonian immigrants. Her poetry was first published in Surgam, the literary magazine of Columbia’s Philolexian Society. Ms. Foretia serves as Online Editor for Columbia Undergraduate Law Review and Lead Activist for Columbia University Democrats.

A Corrective for Anxious Times

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A Book Review of Carol Alena Aronoff’s “The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation”
Homestead Lighthouse Press, August 2020
110 pages
$16.95

By Devon Balwit

          Some days ago—162 to be exact—my HMO offered me a free download of Calm, a meditation app. An acerbic, opinionated Jew, I almost trashed the email without a second thought. I had tried meditation many times and decided it wasn’t for me. I told myself I actually preferred my busy monkey mind, preferred letting it ramble like what poet Carol Aronoff calls one of the “mice in the attic / of old news and yellowed paper…” And yet—something made me pause—a global pandemic, perhaps, with its concomitant upheavals of every aspect of life—and I downloaded it and began to use it every morning.

It took me weeks to tolerate the voice on the app, which I initially felt too cloying, too upbeat, too mobile—but gradually, gradually, I started to look beyond its timbre to the words being said, which I came to find strangely calming and helpful. Was I, as Carol Alena Aronoff writes in her collection The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation, starting to “Imagine life / without complaint / no matter what arises,” moving towards be able to say “…Whatever arises, I will / think, just so. I will not even want to not want…”? Such a shift was shocking to me, for whom to want is, immediately, to act!

Aronoff’s poems aren’t written in my usual go-to voice. I tend to gravitate towards poets who are urbane, wry, and dark, and towards works which reference other works. But, as with the meditation app, when I slowed down and read the poems with attention, I found them tidy koans that rewarded contemplation. Why not admit that it is helpful to reflect that “Sky has no past. / It doesn’t recall the clouds / from yesterday…”? Why not consider “…The thin shell / between us … where we hide what’s / most precious. Where we break.” Why not rest a moment “Beyond judgments / of good and bad, / right and wrong. / Free of all concepts…” These are useful practices, especially in an election year, in a pandemic year, in a year of forest fires and bleaching ocean coral. Aronoff’s poems remind us that there is value in slowing down, in breathing, in allowing.

Locked down at home, I, who have loathed the repetition of weeding and tending, have suddenly become a chicken farmer and urban gardener. Always appreciative of the outdoors, now that it is my sole arena, I find that I am looking at it with much greater attentiveness. Confronted by the scent and blush of dahlias and heirloom tomatoes, estranchia and clerodendron, like Aronoff, I am prepared to say: “Nature once again / has brought me / to my knees…” and to ask: “Where will my thoughts go when I give them the garden?” Aranoff’s poems reference the landscape in the American Southwest and in Hawaii—cottonwoods mingle with Kukui leaves and moonflower, geckos with peacocks. Referencing her daily practice, she teaches us, in the words of Emerson to “Adopt the pace of nature, [whose] secret is patience.”

For a long while, although certain of the upsurge of joy I was feeling during this pandemic, I downplayed my happiness and contentment when speaking to others, not wanting to minimize the very real suffering of those less fortunate. In a similar way, I initially hesitated to allow these gentle poems to work on and for me. But what do I gain by such resistance? Why not yield and repeat with the poet:

Without the need to label
anything
mind’s endless conversation
is a flower …
No need for misgivings
or even for dream.
Everything is
just as it is.

When not teaching, Devon Balwit sets her hand to the plough and chases chickens in the Pacific Northwest. For more regarding her individual poems, collections and reviews, please visit her website at: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet